A/N: The following chapter does not accurately describe my local library at all. Not in a single detail. I do not know where the bathrooms are in that place.

I hope you all love this chapter as much as I do. See you in the end notes.

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Yahiko

It was the peak of the afternoon, and a warm day. That was probably why there was only one person resting on the rocks. Yahiko didn't recognize him as one of the snakes he had met before. The man lay on his back, draped over a gently rounded rock. His eyes were closed. He could have been sleeping, except that Yahiko found it hard to imagine that any creature could fall asleep in conditions where it could die of overheating if it did. As they approached from the river, the man stirred. His head turned until he could barely see them. He flicked one drowsy eye open. "Hm?"

"Hello," Konan greeted him.

"Mm."

"We're some of Kisame's friends," Yahiko said. "He told us about the plan to make rocks for rolling hoops down. Kakuzu here can make stone. We're here to do it."

"Oh. I'd forgotten about that." The man turned his head the other way. "Before we forgot, we decided there would be a good place." He pointed towards a piece of ground currently occupied by bushes. "Just need to clear it." He yawned and closed his eyes again. "Wake me when it's cleared."

Yahiko had so many questions. After the clearing was done, when Kakuzu was the only one of them who had to do anything, he planned to ask the man how he could sleep on top of a rock under full blazing sunlight. But for now, there was work to be done. He joined Konan and Kakuzu as they surveyed the workload.

"They look like tangly fuckers," Kakuzu muttered. "It'll take a lot of work to rip them out."

"I could use my paper to shred them where they stand," Konan offered.

Yahiko scratched the back of his head. "Um, can I try to talk to them first?"

Kakuzu glanced at him. "Can you persuade them to pull up their roots and walk away?" he asked sarcastically.

"I'd at least like to explain what's going to happen and why. It seems wrong to not at least comfort them first."

"Go ahead," Konan said.

I have permission. That's good. Now I just need to figure out what to do. Yahiko muttered, "I haven't really practiced this much," as he knelt down in front of a bush. He took a deep breath. He looked at the bush closely, like he had the first time he successfully communicated with a plant, and tried not to think about himself.

The bush had several stems, each about an inch wide and a pale tannish-grey. On closer inspection, it seemed to be mostly stem. It didn't have enough leaves to hide anything. Is that normal for wild bushes? Its leaves spread out on long horizontal stems, growing alternately. They were still small. There was no sign either on the plant or the soil around it of any flowers. The bush seemed to be surviving, but not really thriving.

Yahiko reached out and touched one of its stems. "The place where you're growing isn't a good one," he told it. "People want to use this place for our own purposes. We're going to have to remove you. I'm sorry."

No hint of a breeze stirred Yahiko's hair, but the thin leaf stems of all of the bushes rose and lowered. Yahiko suddenly thought they looked sad. None of them were really thriving. It would be fine if their souls were released from this location. He was right; it was not a good place for them.

"They're perfectly happy with it," he said as he rose to his feet.

"I will have to ask you what you just did later," Konan told him.

Kakuzu cracked his knuckles. "Let's get to work." Yahiko stepped back. Konan summoned a paper blizzard, and in no time at all the bushes were released. Shreds of leaf and wood littered the ground. Kakuzu dug down and ripped out their stumps, and while he did that Yahiko asked Konan to show him the signs for that wave jutsu Kisame had done once. He summoned a wave from the river and washed everything away.

The man on the rock yawned and sat up. "Okay, here's the design we thought of." He came over and started sketching in the air. "Something at an angle here would be good. Make it close to, but not touching this rock. We like to hang our arms over the sides. And something else here, at this shallower angle, where it can roll across the dirt that way. And if you could get a small one over there, pointing toward the other one so it'll crash, that would be awesome."

Kakuzu nodded. "Three new rocks. Should be doable. You might want to get out of the way."

"The sunlight was getting too direct anyway." The man left the basking area, apparently trusting these three total strangers not to damage a thing. It struck Yahiko as odd. Of course they intended to be helpful, but how did he know they wouldn't make a mistake or need additional instructions?

"Hmm." Kakuzu studied the ground. "On second thought, this may take more time than I expected. Stonemaker Jutsu only turns dirt to stone. How the hell do I raise it up and shape it?"

"There are jutsus that do it, but I do not know them," Konan said.

"Practice?" Yahiko suggested. Kakuzu shrugged. To them, that was a perfectly reasonable idea. He was just going to have to try configurations of chakra until he got the desired result. Konan briefly looked at them like they had gone insane.

Kakuzu made the signs for Stonemaker Jutsu but did not use it. He concentrated on the feeling. "Show me that stream thing you did," he told Yahiko.

"Uh… Oh! That." Kisame had demonstrated water style jutsu using a wave. Yahiko had done it with a stream. He remembered the signs and performed it again. "It feels like it goes forward, then pulls back and up, then stiffens and turns into a pump…"

"Hmm." Kakuzu considered this. "Let me try…" He performed Stonemaker Jutsu, but squinted and clenched his muscles as well. As the dirt turned to liquid, it lifted up into a small wave. It solidified while still in that shape.

"That looks like what he asked for!" Yahiko exclaimed. "It just needs to be wider."

Kakuzu hardened his right arm and punched the small spike of rock, shattering it. He and Yahiko picked up the chunks of stone and tossed them into the river. Then Kakuzu tried again. His next try was wider, but entirely too large. There wouldn't be enough space for all the rocks requested if he left it in place.

"Wait," Yahiko said. "Konan, can you slice off this part?" She used a rotating sawblade of paper to do so. "And Kakuzu, use regular Stonemaker Jutsu while it's tilted back to give it a good base. Maybe Konan can hold it up…" Two minutes later, the large wave of rock had been split. A third of it, tilted back and planted in a part of the ground that faced open dirt, made a very nice shallow ramp. Now they just needed a third rock facing one of the other two. Kakuzu used an intermediate amount of chakra, which worked nicely. Konan even used a ball of whirling paper to polish away the sharpest edges.

"It would never have occurred to me to borrow from a water style technique," she said while doing so.

"Why not? It is liquid for a moment."

"Yes, but that kind of creativity is not encouraged."

"Why the fuck not? Don't you need to be adaptable?"

Konan's brow furrowed. "That is true… Yet… Hmm. Perhaps it was just a consequence of my own education. He was only one man, and only with us for three years."

They moved on to other matters. "I wish that guy had stayed," Yahiko said. "This would have been a good thing to get permission for."

Behind the first and largest of the rocks, which formed a convenient barrier blocking view of the sunning area, Kakuzu finished using regular Stonemaker Jutsu to form a table. "Eh. It's not like you're doing much of anything."

"This is their spot though."

"It may be possible that the library has scrolls used in practicing medical jutsu," Konan said. "Is everything else to your satisfaction?"

Yahiko sighed. He had a table. The river was several feet away. He could probably learn to use his water jutsu for fishing. "Yeah. Let's go."

Kakuzu stretched. "My job is done. I'm off to relax with a nice book." He crossed the river and headed back toward their base. Yahiko and Konan walked back down the river the way they had come. They walked in silence. Now that there was no work to be done, it was difficult to speak.

"I thought… It seemed like… But I didn't want to think…"

"That I was not fully in control of my actions? That you were, indeed, in danger?"

"I thought you were just so angry with me that you had to get all scary. But I didn't want to believe you would be willing to…"

"It was not a show," Konan murmured. "If I had not stopped just in time, I would have harmed or killed you."

"Who did you think you were attacking?"

"I don't recall thinking that I was attacking anyone. At the moment of your death - your original's death - I was bound and helpless. I felt as if I was that way again. I remember wanting badly to move, straining against it. While I imagined I was fighting restraint, my body was capable of moving freely." She swallowed. "My instincts must have guided it, as if I was dreaming. Sleepwalking."

"Sleepkilling."

"Yes."

They made it all the way back to town without another word spoken. Yahiko spoke only to indicate he knew where the library was. They went there. He asked a woman at the front desk if there were any healing scrolls in their collection.

The woman typed some things into her computer. "They are in our Reference collection. Everything in that collection incurs five times the fines if it is not returned promptly, and certain items cannot be borrowed at all. The scrolls you're looking for are available for borrowing. Do you know where the Reference room is?"

"I can find it on my own," Yahiko told her. "Thanks." They followed signs placed high on the walls. The signs led them past the two Children's rooms to one that was not very visible from the hall. It was, in fact, across from the bathrooms. Yahiko and Konan went in and stopped. What. On. Earth?

The room was filled top to bottom with things that ranged from cousins to relatives so distant there was no word for them of books. Only a fifth of the collection was made of paper or any similar substance. The lowest shelf of one of the bookcases was filled with rocks. One of the cases hurt to look at; it seemed to not fully exist. Yahiko guessed that it was one of the reference items which couldn't be checked out. He looked back at the bookcase with the rocks. The shelf above the rocks contained terrariums, and the shelf above that appeared to be empty. Uh…

"What the fuck happened to create this room?" Konan asked.

"I have no idea, but it's fascinating." Yahiko went over to the terrariums and bent down for a closer look. Next to each terrarium, there was a little mechanical device. "This must have come from a sci-fi universe where they write messages in DNA."

Konan tentatively reached a hand out to the barely existent shelf. It stabilized under her touch, though its outlines continued to seem wispy. Only then was she able to read any of the normal-looking books thereon. "This bookshelf appears to be a ghost."

Yahiko looked at the rocks, but found no associated devices. The rocks did not have writing on them, so he could only guess that, as with the shelf above, the writing was somehow encoded inside. Is this like that one xkcd comic where the guy had the power to see what elements any object had in it? He could read rocks at a glance.

"This case contains phone numbers for people," Konan said in disbelief. "Does it come from a world where there is no distinction made between verbal and written information?"

"That's not weird. I talked to a bush earlier. There are lots of distinctions that don't exist."

"Well, yes, but in that case why do they have libraries?"

"Maybe they use libraries as building-sized phone books." Yahiko tilted his head. "Hey, wait a second. That would be really useful in this world! The world population is so large that it's hard to know who's an expert on what. If you want information from a person, you would have to google 'experts on' and research all the results to see if they're the kind of expert you want, and it would be hard. A library that only had phone numbers organized by field of study and subspecialty and university or something would be awesome. Do scientific institutions have some place like that? They can't be operating blindly off who happened to go with school with who. They must, right?"

Konan, too, looked struck. "That does sound useful. But it could only work in this world, where communication technology is very common and easy to use."

"I wonder what the people in that world did before they had good technology? Maybe they just never lived in places larger than a small town. But technology like we have requires a lot of people just to run it… Maybe they were at a tribal level and then got gifted advanced technology and just used it to enhance their tribal way of life? Who gifted it? An alien race, or another world? Someone from our world? How common is the invention of phones and phone numbers?"

"We will be trapped here for eons if we don't get healing scrolls and get out quickly." Most of the paper/parchment/skin reference material was in the center of the room, in carts, presumably because it was the most commonly referenced. Konan darted over to the paper cart and snatched up several scrolls. She looked at them to make sure they were the correct sort, then took Yahiko's hand and dragged him from the room.

They checked out the scrolls at the front desk, thanked the woman, and left. "It's a good thing we're moving so quickly," Yahiko said. "If I have to return these in three days, then I'm gonna have to copy them. I'm glad Deidara got extra ink bottles. Oh, that reminds me!" He stopped short. "I was looking up spells yesterday. I found one that might be usable in a seal. I sent an image of it to myself." He handed the scrolls to Konan, pulled out his phone and fumbled with it. He showed Konan an image of a circle of unreadable pixelated arcane text, in the center of which was a picture of an item. "It looked kinda like the storage seals you have."

"Seals have words written in their centers, not images."

"After what we just saw, do you really believe it wouldn't work?"

Konan sighed. "We can try it. What spell is that?"

"...I have no idea. I kinda fell down an Internet rabbit hole."

"What do rabbits have to do with… Never mind. I have asked too many questions today. Let's copy these scrolls." Konan was so busy shaking her head in exasperation that it took her a full minute to realize, "Wait. What will we copy them onto? We do not have blank scrolls."

Yahiko took one of the scrolls from her and opened it. He looked at the design. "This looks just like any other seal. We could copy it onto paper."

"Good." As Konan resumed walking, Yahiko thought he heard her mutter, "I have seen enough secrets hidden inside ordinary buildings." He frowned as he followed her. He didn't really understand what her complaint was. Everything makes sense, and it's all cool stuff. Isn't it?

Nagato

"Hey, Itachi." Nagato took off his long-sleeved shirt. Even outside, he was overheating. "How is the music coming?"

"The fingering for one piece is unintuitive to me. I may need to bring the sheet music for it." Itachi sat next to Nagato on the hood of Nagato's car. "I take it your day has been busy?"

"Yeah. She kept me with the dogs yesterday doing business as usual, but now that the event's tomorrow, even I'm being asked to assist. A lot of volunteers were called in to get everything ready to deploy. Hopefully the work we're doing today makes tomorrow quick and easy."

"I haven't asked Kisame what his part in this is. I should."

Nagato leaned back and closed his eyes to enjoy the breeze. While he was doing that, his drifting mind came up with a new idea. His eyes flew open. "Oh, crap."

"What?"

"The vampires. Something is going to go down soon. What do you want to bet it's on the same night that so many of us are busy at the community outreach event?"

Itachi was silent for several seconds. "It may not matter," he said. "The vampires have their own territory. They will settle it among themselves."

"Knowing this story, I am not going to put my faith in that," Nagato said. "Violent vampires in the middle of a battle landing in the parking lot and crashing the event would be great drama."

"No," Itachi said. "I am quite sure that there will be separation. This story is marked by division between things that would otherwise be messily entangled. The author doesn't seem to like accounting for all the complexities of real life. So the vampires hopefully will not crash anything."

Nagato wasn't so sure. Still, that would be the best source of drama. Who can resist drama?

"Wait." Itachi pulled out his phone. "The only plot this story can be said to have is the plot of us all resolving our personal issues. It may be a good source of drama, but our author would never crash a crucial plot point." He called Kisame. The shark man said something, and Itachi replied, "No, nothing of the sort. I merely wished to know how crucial the community outreach event tomorrow night is to your character development." A pause. "That's what I thought. Thank you." He ended the call. To Nagato, he said, "The event is critical for Kisame's character arc. It is guaranteed not to be crashed."

Nagato let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "Oh, thank the gods. That's one less thing to worry about."

"The entire purpose of this world is to assist in our character development. There is no reason to fear anything that happens here."

"Yeah, but even so…"

When he got no response, Nagato looked over. "Itachi? Earth to Itachi."

"What if that is the purpose of all existence everywhere?" Itachi asked. "Think about it. Is not the one thing you aim for every second of every day, the one goal that all others are unconsciously dedicated toward, to be the best version of yourself you can manage to be? People may have different definitions of best - most wealthy, most fun, most popular. But all strive toward that ideal. Everyone wants to be the perfect person. That is the point of existence. What if all worlds exist to aid in character development? Can all people be considered characters? That would make sense; I have thought of others that way my whole life."

"Itachi?"

"Yes?"

"Why are you pondering the nature of existence at three in the afternoon?"

Itachi looked puzzled. "Why wouldn't I? It is one of my favorite topics."

"Pondering the nature of existence is a hobby of yours?"

"Yes. Isn't it everyone's, on some level?"

Nagato shrugged. "All I wanted to know is whether I should wear my scarf tomorrow night."

"Yes, of course. It is such a simple, light form of armor. There's no reason not to."

How did he switch tracks so easily to keep up with me just now? He's as agile as a cheetah. Nagato elbowed Itachi. "Itachi, you're cool. Never change."

"I will change as much as I want," Itachi said in a mock-offended tone.

Nagato laughed. "Just don't become a different person, okay? I like you."

"Thank you. That's one of the best compliments I have ever heard."

Nagato stood up and stretched. "Well, I've taken a long enough break. Gotta get back to my share of the work. See you later."

"I promise not to have changed too much." Itachi said this with a smile on his face. Nagato chuckled and shook his head as he walked back into the shelter. My friends are so weird, and that's just how I like them.

Kisame

Kisame climbed the ladder to feed the sharks, as usual. He found Samehada waiting for him at the top. The shark warbled and trilled happily before latching onto his arm and chewing on his chakra contentedly. Kisame patted his snout. "I missed you, too. I have a lot of news to tell you on the drive home."

The female leopard shark was still behaving strangely. She stayed close to the feeding platform, forcing Kisame to throw the fish out farther. Kisame checked her as she swam by, but as usual, there was no injury. Samehada growled. Kisame wondered if the thermostat was set higher than usual as he finished the feeding. He was relieved to ask Samehada to get on his back and climb down the ladder.

As they got in the car, he tried to find anything else to think about. "So, uh… Right. I need a sword. We're probably going to have to measure you. And, uh… Right. News." He spent the rest of the drive telling Samehada all about the plan he and the nice lady who looked after the stingrays had concocted.

Judging by how nuts Samehada went as soon as he got out of the car and had space to flop around in all conceivable directions, the shark loved this plan. Kisame grinned. That made him feel a lot more confident in its success. Deidara came out of the building to meet him. Kisame waved. Samehada skipped over and threw himself against Deidara's legs, making sounds suitable to a group of excited ten year old girls.

"I just told him about something good that's going to happen to me soon," Kisame explained.

Deidara reached down to pat Samehada's snout. "Ready to order a sword, yeah?" he asked Kisame. Kisame nodded. They went inside.

Kakuzu sat at the lobby's desk with a laptop computer open in front of him. Sasori leaned against a wall nearby to supervise. Samehada cheered to find many of his favorite people gathered in the same space. "Today's a happy day for him," Kisame explained. He went around the desk to look over Kakuzu's shoulder. "So what have they got?"

"A very nice collection. They're organized by style, and if you go to a specific sword's page it has the length, weight, and material listed."

"Anyone got measuring tape?"

Deidara held up a coil of flexible measuring tape. He immediately began to measure Samehada, who straightened and held still. Wow. The kid's really taking this plan seriously. Come to think of it, it seemed like the armour was his idea. Did he and Itachi plan together?

Deidara read off Samehada's length. Kakuzu wrote it down on a scrap of paper he kept next to him. "And his weight?"

"Does anyone have a scale?" Sasori asked. There was silence. A quick look around the room confirmed that nobody there had a scale. Sasori sighed. "Wonderful."

Deidara ran off to get Konan, who turned out to be on her way there to get a progress report. "Do you know if anybody around here has a scale, yeah? We need to weigh Sammy."

Konan got an odd, distant look on her face. "I believe there is one located nearby. Do any of you have a penny?"

.

"Seriously?"

"My grandmother had one of these," Sasori said with a smile. "It was the family scale. This reminds me of my childhood."

"I had no idea any of these things survived."

They stood in the abandoned doctor's office in front of the only item the doctors had not taken with them: the large, heavy penny scale. The platform where a person would stand was a thick box. It attached to a vertical length of metal casing that had a mirror on the front. The mirror was only tall enough to reflect a young child, as that wasn't its main purpose. The top of the mirror had raised writing asking What is your weight today? A simple chart listed the recommended weights for men and women of different heights, and children (boys and girls) of different ages. The chart for men capped at 6'2'', and the one for women at 5'11". The children's chart only went up to age 15. At 16, you were an adult according to this scale. At the top was the functional part of the scale: a large, metal display with a bar scale on top. The display promised One cent - honest weight - no springs. It had a slot to drop a penny in and a lever to pull. Once you pulled the lever, you could move weights along two bars until the bars stopped tilting from the pull of your own weight. When they were level, the weight of the bars was equal to your own weight and you could read it off. The weights were inscribed with a name and a phrase that nobody recognized.

"What the fuck is this thing?" Kisame asked.

"A penny scale," Kakuzu told him. "It was a popular way to make money a long time ago. For the price of a penny, you could find out your weight." He bent down to check a slot at the base of the scale. "No pennies here." He straightened. "The fact that it was used by people who wanted to make a few cents is why it says no springs. Disreputable people put springs in the scale to distort the readings."

"Why would anybody use a scale as a fairground attraction?"

Kakuzu shrugged. "Times were different. Not even the most basic computers existed. Standards for entertainment were lower."

"It's easy to use," Sasori said, producing a penny from his pocket. "Same, get on the scale." Samehada did so. In order to fit on the box, he ended up having to stand on his tail. "I'll try to make this quick." Sasori put the penny in and pulled the lever, then began to move the weights. He moved the largest weight notch by notch until the bar fell down, then moved it back to its former position and used the smaller weight. The bar soon evened out. He read off the measurement.

"My mind is blown," Kisame said as they left the office. "I had no idea gigantic extinct relatives of scales existed. Did you have any fucking idea about this, Blondie?"

Deidara, who had been rendered speechless, shook his head. "Sasori's told me his grandmother had this old penny scale, but he never told me what it looked like, yeah."

"That thing is to a modern digital scale what a Brontosaurus is to a parakeet."

"The correct name is Apatosaurus," Kakuzu corrected him, "and birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs. It would be more accurate to use a T-rex."

"My point remains." Kisame shook his head. "Now I know how the first people to discover giant ground sloths and mammoths felt like. Or those really weird elephants with tusks that looked like shovels."

"Hey, digital scales are the ones that are weird," Sasori argued. "I have no friggin' clue how they measure your weight. Do they have springs in that tiny base? Something else? It's a mystery. You're supposed to just take their readings on faith. No thank you."

The party agreed to disagree. They returned to the lobby, checked the sword listings, and found one with very similar measurements. Kisame liked its design. "Simple, but not boring. Yeah. This one." Kakuzu grumbled mightily about having to spend 150 more dollars. But when it was done, it was done. According to the estimate given by the website, expedited shipping would provide Kisame with a sword within 2-3 days.

Kakuzu handed Sasori his laptop back. "And now I have to show you all how to use the punching bags, because I'm the most proficient at them. Come on. Let's get this over with."

.

A/N: Kakuzu is accurate, but not entirely correct. Apatosaurus would be a perfectly fine dinosaur to reference, because Google tells me it is part of the saurischian branch of dinosaurs from which birds evolved. If anyone had tried to reference an ornithschian dinosaur like Ankylosaurus, now that would have been flat out wrong. I've heard that the two branches of dinosaurs are, uh, very different. That is a very serious division, akin to the difference between legged reptiles and snakes. But Apatosaurus is fine.

The scale described is the exact scale that's in the bathroom right now and has been there my whole life. It is awesome. I cannot imagine any other kind of bathroom scale, and like Sasori, I feel uneasy around the digital ones. I don't know much about them - what Kakuzu says is what little I've heard, and I think I did one Google search on them a while ago. EDIT: a new Google search tells me they were not exactly used as fairground attractions, as Kisame thinks. They were stationed in places, like vending machines. At the time, they provided a public service, not just mere entertainment - there was no other way to know how much you weighed unless you went to a doctor. But, yes, they did have all kinds of attached gimmicks to lure people in, and were something of a fairground attraction in execution. Cool!

See you all next chapter!