"Can I have that zero-mass regulator? I asked for it like fifteen minutes ago and Kenta is working on the singularity field generator so, unless we have a zero-mass regulator in place to stabilize the mass of the singularity–we're all going to collapse the Moon, the Earth, and the whole solar system into a supermassive black hole…" a burly man of a brick-shaped, flat facial features and raggedy clothes, reminding of a fisher from his outfit scratched his scarred, bald head.
"Well, which one of these is a zero-mass regulator?" a woman in rags started losing her cool while staring at an entire drawer that spanned for an entire city's length all filled with identical-looking scrolls. "They store every goddamn thing in those stupid scrolls!"
"We didn't even know what a zero-mass regulator was before those aliens kidnapped us," Kenta, a plain, middle-aged man sighed while sizing up a subtle tube spreading a mysterious, shadowy shroud from inside while luminescent, colorful particles danced inside of it to the hammer that he held in his right hand.
"Are you sure trying to mallet the singularity field generator into place is a good idea?" an old woman with grey hair and one eye that had a gash that kept it closed forever loomed over Kenta with her arms crossed.
"This was a good week to quit drinking. You'd have killed us all," the burly fisher type ran his palm over his face while approaching his fellow engineer and picking the singularity field generator from Kenta's hands. The man turned the tube of hardened glass and plastic around and pointed at tiny holes on the bottom and top of the lids. "You're supposed to fit wires into those. That's how they connect to the larger systems. You don't just hammer them into place…"
"Which brings us back to this goddamn situation over here…" the woman with red hair spread her arms out, pointing at the endless storage supplies of identical-looking scrolls. "How do we tell the wires from the zero-mass regulator?"
"What's… What's going on…?"
"Huh? What do you mean what's going on, Hige?" the red-haired woman turned around, facing the grey-haired and one-eyed woman who just flipped the stub of rye in her mouth, shifting it around over her tongue.
"I didn't say anything. All this silence must have you hearing things," the grey-haired woman shrugged and shook her head. "Told ya an engineer should work in heaps of noise. All this silence in space is so unnatural."
"Dammit, this shouldn't be… So difficult…"
"It really isn't, Kenta. You just find the wires that are the right size and then you slot one end of them into the singularity field generator and the other one into the system you're connecting it to. It's actually really easy when you ignore what you're working on here," the towering engineer said to his colleague.
"That wasn't me, I said nothing, man." Kenta shook his head. "I can connect a few damn wires, thank you very much, it's just that I need to find them first."
"Argh! Stop patronizing me! I'm doing the best I can, it's not like these come with instructions or notes, all of those glyphs are in some stupid moon-people language!" the red-haired woman pulled on her luscious locks while growling at the seemingly infinite storage of scrolls, each containing a different kind of nuts and bolts that it took to complete the project they were working on.
"Calm down… Just focus…"
"I'm trying to!" the red-haired engineer growled out. "You telling me to calm down isn't helping!"
"Hmm… I wonder… Is it just me or do any of you also hear some strange voice?" the scarred engineer rubbed his bald head, looking around while he browsed his workshop for something suspicious.
"Yeah, it's weird, it's like… We all hear it, right?" Kenta put the singularity field generator down and turned around to face his much larger colleague. The seated engineer picked himself up and dusted his hands off before placing them on his hips and looking around his workshop. "Do you think aliens have ghosts? Like… Alien ghosts?"
"Ghosts!?" the haunting voice that initially merely confused the engineers but now sent chills down their spine made the engineers jump up as they all turned around to the unmistakable source of the voice. It came from a young woman with tanned skin and messy, long hair. The woman wore a formal attire of a magician's uniform, complete with a white bowtie and a top hat.
"Huh… And here I thought that after being kidnapped by aliens, nothing would surprise me anymore…" the burly engineer whistled out.
"You don't look like one of those aliens. No horns and your eyes aren't one of those ninja pair of eyes either," Kenta pointed at the surprising manifestation inside of their golden orb that floated deep underneath the surface of the Moon.
"Come to think of it, you don't look like an engineer either, just look at your girly fingernails…" the grey-haired woman spat out her stub of rye and approached the unexpected visitor to take a whiff of her. "This begs the question–who the heck are ya? It don't make too many people that can just hop into the center of the Moon out of nowhere that aren't one of them Moon people…"
"My name is Nakotsumi Mana, I'm an Allied Ninja." Mana introduced herself to the bunch of engineers after blowing her cheeks out in light spite of the fact neither of these workers knew who she was, based on her reputation on stage. Even if all of them were foreigners, Mana had expected her work on the stage to have reached at least one of these engineers to where they could recognize her on sight. "Also, you've no idea how much trouble we had to make it to this Moon, so I'd very much prefer you didn't put it as "hopping" onto here."
"Well, missy, you can go right back home the same way you came. These guys laid waste to you Allied Ninja types, and we weren't the biggest of fans, to begin with," the bald engineer crossed his arms.
"Yeah, a massive rainbow-beam came down from the sky and beamed down this dragon-looking alien guy, then the beam came down again and obliterated every ninja while scooping us alongside that alien fellow all the way here," Kenta explained with hilariously exaggerated hand gestures as he hammered his fist with open palm strikes to demonstrate the intensity of the rainbow sky beams.
"We thought we'd be goners for sure… Turns out those alien-types just want us to build them a spaceship that they could use to get the heck off the Moon and out into the universe," the grey-haired woman slipped a cigarette out from the back pocket of her suspender jeans and lit it up using the jet flame of a welding tool. Mana suspected it was recklessness like this that cost the woman her eye, to begin with.
"A spaceship…?" Mana rubbed her chin as questions began popping up one by one. "And what stage is this spaceship in currently?" she wondered.
"It's vaguely spaceship-shaped…" the bald engineer shrugged. "It ain't easy working on instructions left behind by a race that doesn't do physical labor and calls do-hickeys many weird names. We'll send you a smoke signal or something when it's got at least an elementary engine to work with."
"Yeah, we've only been at it for a few days. Don't push us around like that, Allied Ninja missy…" Kenta shrugged. "We're glad to be proceeding at any rate at all."
"We're lucky that they aren't pushy with when they want the spaceship built. From what I could gather, they're all a bunch of old-timers, so years are like seconds to them or something. Yep, their understandin' of time's wonky alright," the grey-haired engineer woman nodded after blowing out a mouthful of black tar from her chest.
"Heck, I ain't even an engineer. I'm an architect for fuck's sake!" the red-haired woman kept rubbing her handfuls of hair like she was mashing cookie dough, all the while grinding her teeth. "Not much use out of an architect when designing a spaceship, is there?"
"Are you all that's left out of the engineers and architects the Allied Ninja hired?" Mana wondered.
"Not even close, but we're all working on one massive ship. We're just building separate parts of it in separate dimensions," the burly engineer replied.
"That's how they call 'em–dimensions, even though I've seen them and they're not really that. They're all just miniature worlds floating inside the hollow Moon. Just large, decorated, hollow, golden balls, almost like the Moon's got a system of worlds of its own inside it," Kenta said.
"Say, ain't it dangerous for you to be here, missy? Won't the aliens find you and splatter you too?" the grey-haired smoker wondered after blowing out another mouthful of smoke.
"Unlikely, they're currently occupied with some "Chaser" figure that's giving them trouble," Mana shook her head. "I can sense an odd source of chakra further to the south-east. That's likely this "Chaser" they're talking about. His chakra's all black so he's bad news alright, but its size is nothing impressive. I'm shocked he's giving them this much trouble somehow."
"The Chaser? Oh yeah, they're afraid of him like the plague…" the bald engineer explained. "Apparently, he's from our world, which is just nuts. How did we not know that a guy like that existed? Someone strong enough to rip through whole worlds of guys like those aliens should have become a renowned ninja, right?"
"If he's a ninja at all…" Mana turned in the direction in which the golden orb the Sky Clan kept the Chaser confined in was. "One of you mentioned that their perception of time is difficult. Perhaps this "Chaser" had always been here, ever since Yosuke sealed the World Tree into the Ten-Tails? Maybe someone from the Earth Clan stayed stranded on the Moon and, because of their old age, the Sky Clan mistook him for an unknown visitor?"
"Well, whatever it is, they wanna get away from it. That's what this spaceship's all about–to find them a new home far away in the universe and leave this Chaser stranded on the Moon. With any luck, they figure, maybe that monster is just going to jump back to Earth and stop harassing the Moon," Kenta said.
"If this spaceship's no-good, you'll need to use the sky beam that they're using to travel to Earth and back. Do you know if it's a jutsu of some sort or a device that does it?" Mana asked.
"A device, for sure. But I think one of them needs to operate it, so it probably takes a bunch of power to run it," the bald-headed engineer replied.
"Do any of you know which "dimension" this device is in?" Mana inquired.
"Yeah, it's on the surface. One of those craters opens up, and a thing comes out, and the sky beam shoots out from it," Kenta explained. "Someone with enough power and intelligence to operate the device would need to stay behind and turn it off. I think it just keeps on blastin', so unless you turn it off exactly when it smacks the surface of the Earth–it'd just drill right through and make a donut out of the world."
"Okay… Avoid that, I guess," Mana tucked her chin, stacking yet another problem on top of an already overwhelming array. First, this whole place had been teeming with over a hundred of fearsome, self-proclaimed ninja-gods, the weakest of whom by far tore through her entire squad in seconds. Then she'd need a reliable way to traverse between these golden dimension orbs and the surface, not to mention she'd need to learn to activate, power, and operate the sky beam device. Also, Mana didn't feel like leaving the Moon without her squad back from disarray.
If Mana could come back by reassembling her body out of primal building blocks, so could they all. Mana just had her entire lifetime of meditation and extreme self-awareness to work with while the rest did not. It would probably take an entire lifetime to even convince Endo to sit down in a meditative position since he'd see it as "extremely unmanly". Still, even if he was an asshole, he was her asshole. If Stars were to come back to Earth, all of them would do so.
They won't lose anyone anymore. That Mana settled on as a promise to herself and to little Tomi.
The ninja magician bit into the pillow of her thumb and rocked her head to roll her hat down her shoulder and arm. She caught it and then stuffed her bleeding thumb with a hole in her white glove where Mana bit through it inside and pulled a fit rabbit with bright chestnut fur out of it.
"Mana-san!" Usubane shrieked out. "It's been ages!"
"Bane-chan…" Mana muttered before the taijutsu expert rabbit dashed right at her and wrapped her arms around Mana, swinging the confused magician around in mid-air as Usubane had to finish her adoration session with her idol before putting Mana back down and carefully tending to her wrinkled uniform.
"Sorry, Mana-san, I got too carried away with excitement!" Usubane bowed repeatedly, inching closer and closer to the cold steel floor as she wondered how close was close enough for Mana to accept her apology.
"Never mind that. I'm sorry I haven't seen you guys in a while. Things have been quite wild. I haven't been taking the aftermath of our battle with the Four-Tails very well and I didn't want to look sulky or hurt your feelings. Right now still isn't the right time for that, Bane-chan, I need to ask you something," Mana excused herself before streamlining it back to business as while she had some time to operate with impunity, that time would be limited as either the Chaser would plow through the would-be ninja-gods, or they'd contain him again and it was more likely that it would happen sooner rather than later.
"Right, right…!" Usubane nodded with burning enthusiasm.
"Did this waitress lady say the Four-Tails?" Kenta pointed at Mana while turning to his towering mountain of a man, equally stunned colleague.
"Can you summon these people here back to the Rabbit Caves as you can reverse-summon me?" Mana grilled.
"Sorry, they'd all have to sign the Summoning Contract for that to happen, Mana-san," Usubane poked her two fingers together, looking heartbroken that she had to disappoint her idol by being truthful like that.
"I see… So, we've got no other choice then," Mana sighed heavily. If Meiko was here, she'd likely cook up a seal on the spot that could allow the rabbits to reverse-summon Mana to the Rabbit Caves, then Mana could reverse-summon everyone holding the sealing glyph. She had more chakra than it would have taken to accomplish such a colossal task, but… What she lacked was an adequate sealing master. "Plan A it is, I suppose."
Usubane dispersed into a puff of smoke as the last thing Mana wanted was for the Sky Clan to hurt her rabbit partners in an uneven fight. The ninja magician checked on her supplies, ran through the slotted and steel-tipped cards, and cracked her hands and knuckles to keep her fingers ready to weave some seals if needed.
"I need you guys to gather everyone and get to the sky beam device safely. I'm leaving it up to you," Mana weaved a clone jutsu hand seal and split off a doppelganger to assist the engineers and an architect if they needed it. The clone was just a fraction of Mana's combat potential and Mana, even at full power, wouldn't have made much of an opponent to these ninja, still, it was better to have a willing sacrificial lamb rather than not to have one.
"What are you going to do?" Kenta wondered.
"I'm going to have to treat with those wanna-be ninja-gods. First, they owe me my team back, then they'll need to help you guys get back home," Mana replied without looking back.
"How are you going to make them do that?" the red-haired architect lady asked in a confused voice. She had more than a fair reason to be confused, given how her well-being depended on this plan.
"That is the question, isn't it?" Mana smirked. Without elaborating, the ninja magician disappeared, leaving only a ring of concentrated air pressure and an expanding cloud of dust behind her while the civilians behind her covered themselves up to avoid getting any space dust in their eyes.
"You know, if those aliens catch us trying to run away, they'll probably punish us," the grey-haired woman said what everyone was thinking.
"They can't afford to impede your productiveness," Mana's clone rejected that idea.
"Yeah, but they can make our work conditions so much worse. Right now, they're treating us almost as esteemed guests, and they promised to beam us back when we build them their spaceship they can use to leave the Moon and search the universe for a new, better home. If we try to escape, they might start treating us as slaves," Kenta elaborated on the idea.
"They can do far worse than that, boy. I've seen a few of them toy with the very sanctity of human life. They can make a foot stick out from your asshole and you'd have absolutely no way of objecting against it. They can make your arms grow out from your forehead and your feet dangle by your nose while you live the rest of your life seeing nothing but your calves and smelling nothing but your own two, sweaty feet," the bald-headed, scarred engineer explained.
"Either way, it's way easier to beat the shit out of a clone of some snobby brat than it is to fight against those creepy, half-dragon aliens," the red-haired architect turned to Mana's doppelganger before the bald-headed engineer caught her arm in the middle of a half-assed swing. When the architect looked at the lumbering man, the man shook his scarred face with disapproval.
"Really? You're on board with this woman's plan?" Kenta beamed a smile at his superior's face. "You were the most vocal objector to this whole thing when the Allied Ninja were escorting us to their HQ."
"That young woman… There's something different about her compared to those guys that were escorting us. I… I want to trust her, a bit…" the engineer replied and gestured for the clone to lead the way.