A/N: I've had a lot going on this past week. Yet another new story idea. Plans for a birthday party that was cancelled a day beforehand. Two chapters being due at roughly the same time. Result: this chapter contains as little planning and/or research as possible. No detailed references to past chapters that I would have had to actually look up, only one quick Google search, half the chapter is based off of my own life, stream of thought writing style. Lazy, I know. I'll try to get more grounded next chapter.

There will probably be copious end notes for all the references to my own life.

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Kakuzu

Kakuzu smirked. I get to surprise him for once.

Hidan landed clumsily. "What are you doing here?"

Itachi spread his arms. "How do you like it?"

Kakuzu looked him up and down. He remembered something Konan had said at the funeral. She'd said that Itachi's original seemed subtly out of place in the group, that they watched him for signs of being a spy. Itachi looked like that now. The cloak fit him well, but something about it… Something…

"You look a little strange," he told Itachi.

"I think he looks great," Yahiko said.

"I think I look like a bird hiding among its feathers."

"Exactly," Kakuzu said with a nod. "Like you're hiding."

"Want to join us for lunch?" Yahiko asked. "We can talk more there."

Over lunch, Kakuzu told them what he had remembered. Itachi nodded and agreed with it. Hidan thumped a fist down on the table and said, "That matches my idea! Remember how I said his original was recast from a bad guy to a good guy or vice versa? This is exactly that. He wouldn't look right in any role because of the change."

"Itachi's been a good guy this whole time," Yahiko said.

"But this uniform is what Konan came into this world wearing. So it was invented by the previous author, so he still wouldn't look right in it."

"That makes sense, I guess," Yahiko said. "What else did she say back then that we can explain now?"

They all thought their hardest. "Other Me and Other Dei once started and ended a war at once because we were both so bloodthirsty," Hidan recalled.

"Kisame was made my partner to spy on me," Itachi said. "In case I turned out to be a traitor."

Yahiko held up a hand. "Wait. If that's the kind of relationship your originals had, how are you so friendly? Wouldn't something rooted in distrust and paranoia still have those roots?"

Itachi shrugged. "I doubt she knew personal, private details. We might have gotten along quite well."

"She said Other Dei and Other Sasori always fought," Hidan said. "Something about energy levels, about having partners of different energy levels."

"Like you and me," Kakuzu remarked.

"Haha, yeah! But at least you and me have similar interests. Other Dei and Other Sasori? Fuck, they would have been a disaster." Hidan grinned.

"I feel like we're forgetting something," Itachi said.

They all thought as hard as they could, but nobody could remember what it was. "I'm sure we'll get it eventually," Yahiko said.

General

By that night, they still hadn't remembered, so Yahiko got the brilliant idea to ask Konan about it. After the macaroni and cheese was served, he ate some and then said, "Hey, Konan, there was something we were wondering about earlier after we got Itachi's cloak."

Konan was sitting in the chair in one corner of the sunroom, leaning back into it in a very relaxed way. She took tiny spoonfuls of her food and nibbled at them delicately. "What was it?"

"We thought about the funeral you held for our originals. We couldn't understand a lot of the things you said. But now, we can. We were wondering, what did you say back then that we wouldn't have understood? It's hard to remember."

Sasori put his spoon down. "I remember that my original and Dei's fought. Because my original was a fucking puppet."

"And mine was crazy, yeah," Deidara added.

"Yeah, yeah, we got all of that," Hidan said. "But it felt like there was something we were missing."

Konan put her spoon in her mouth and drew it out slowly. "It is still painful to remember that event."

"If you'd rather not, we don't have to talk about it," Yahiko offered.

"I would rather not, yes."

Samehada looked around and made questioning sounds. "You weren't even here for that, were you?" Kisame asked. "Basically, she just told us what our originals were like. That's how we know they were a bunch of assholes."

"So, Kisame," Nagato said while putting his empty bowl down. "How is your new work friend?"

"Turns out there's a lot of stuff I haven't been hearing about," Kisame replied. "Thanks entirely to her, I got a chance to say goodbye to one of my favorite vets before she leaves. I had no idea she was planning to leave. It was announced weeks ago, but I never heard."

Konan nodded. "It is good to have a contact embedded in such an important organization."

"The aquarium's an important organization?" Deidara asked.

"A three part event in which it was one of the parts was an important plot point, so yes," Sasori replied. "By that logic, it would also be good to have a contact at the dog shelter."

"She's not exactly someone I can text at any time the way a friend would be, but Marsha will tell me if anything important is going on," Nagato said.

"Who's Marsha?"

Nagato turned red. "I was told her name when I first joined, but I forgot it. I don't want to ask at this point. I'll probably forget it again anyway, because I just took one look at her and imagined what kind of dog she would be and I thought Marsha would be the perfect name for that dog. It's just… It's just stuck in my head now."

"His boss," Yahiko said.

"Right. Right. Yes, that's the actual answer to your question. Sorry."

Hidan snickered. "I don't think I've ever seen you stumbling over your words." He tousled Nagato's hair.

"It's a sore point for me," Nagato protested.

"Does your boss know you have a made-up name for her?" Kisame asked.

"No."

Kakuzu chuckled. "I agree with Hidan. It is oddly entertaining to see you of all people getting incoherent."

"I've always gotten easily flustered," Nagato whispered.

"Okay, we're going too far," Hidan said. "Anyone got another topic?"

"How does it feel, yeah?" Deidara asked Itachi.

Itachi was still wearing his cloak. "Warm."

"...Yeah, but -"

"Literally or figuratively?" Kisame asked.

"Both. I feel warm and fuzzy as a result of wearing the official group uniform."

"Dude, you could have said so, hm!" Deidara pouted.

Itachi smiled. "Why would I give a clear answer when this is so much more entertaining?"

"Hold up, hold up." Hidan circled around and put a hand on Itachi's shoulder. He closed his eyes. "Oh yeah. Definitely the warm and fuzzies. Not as much as I would've thought, though."

"After reading, hearing and witnessing other people experiencing their feelings, I've come to the conclusion that I don't experience them as directly as other people experience theirs."

"If you were a volcano, what kind would you be?" Deidara asked.

"The kind where the lava empties out of a vent on the side," Itachi replied.

"Hmm…" Deidara put on a detective face and looked all around. "Hidan, what kind of volcano would you be, yeah?"

"Straightforward out the top eruption with no prior rumbling," Hidan said. "Short and frequent, too."

"Seething magma chamber, not a good idea to explore or poke at, but no actual eruption," Kakuzu said.

"Quiet undersea volcano, detectable only by the small islands it creates," Sasori said.

"Looks and reads like a peaceful mountain," Yahiko chirped. "Snow cap, green forested sides, birds nesting, appears on postcards, everything."

"Uh…" Nagato had to think. "I would be… Underground… Probably hot springs. Like Yellowstone."

Sasori coughed. "Yellowstone? The supervolcano? The one that could cover an entire continent in ash and set off global volcanic winter if it ever went off?"

"That's a big if, yeah," Deidara said, disappointed. "It would be awesome to see a blast that big, yeah, but everything I've heard indicates that it's not going to blow for a long long time, if ever. It might never go."

"So you're a tourist attraction that delights visitors and provides warmth on cold winter days, but absolutely should not be fucked with under any circumstances," Kisame summarized. "Yeah, sounds about right."

"And Konan's like Mauna Loa. The big Hawaiian volcano? Biggest shield volcano in the world?" Deidara was grinning from ear to ear.

"What are you?" Sasori asked him.

Deidara's face went blank. "Uh…"

"Mauna Loa is Hawaiian for Long Mountain," Hidan said. "And Google says it's the world's largest active volcano. It doesn't say if it's the largest shield volcano. It's associated with the fire goddess Pele."

"Pele is so cool," Deidara said. "Um… I would be… I don't know. Just a regular volcano, I guess."

"You are so selling yourself short," Sasori told him.

"When are we going to hold our training battles?" Nagato said. "And where? Several more battles might be too much for the neighborhood."

"No!" objected a voice from the ceiling. They looked up. It was the demon boy. "Not even a little!"

"You want us to hold several more battles on or near your grounds?" Kisame asked.

"Yeah! The best place!"

"If you insist."

"This weekend?" Nagato asked. "Since we've all got our weapons. No reason to wait."

"Next weekend," Konan said.

They all turned to look at her. "Is there a reason to wait?" Nagato asked.

She put one last spoonful in her mouth and drew it out slowly. "There may be."

Hidan looked up. The demon boy was cracking under the strain of holding a poker face. "I'm not telling!" he yelped before vanishing.

Several seconds passed. "He told," Kakuzu said.

"No, not necessarily. He might have been resisting the temptation to tell her something else," Hidan said. "A hint or a tease of some kind. He'll never tell you straight up what's going to happen in the future. He always has to hint at it. I fucking hate that."

"Is he afraid something bad would happen if he told?" Yahiko asked.

"No idea. Little jerk."

"Has anyone read any good books lately?" Kakuzu asked.

"I have to return my library books!" Yahiko yelped. "Oh man."

"The loan was probably auto-extended," Nagato reassured.

"I've checked out the first few chapters of that love story Yahiko mentioned, where the guy is saved by the power of three different forms of love," Sasori said. "It's a nice story, if you don't mind side adventures and subplots. It's the story equivalent of an open world sandbox game. I'm sure the vast majority of all people would be less charitable with their descriptions, so I'll leave it at that. I've been having a lot of fun with another story I found by the same author, though. It's a shipping fic, with an explicitly romantic premise that promises all kinds of saucy intimate action and drama, and it's entirely about friendship. Still a shipping fic. The whole point of it is for the characters to get together. But friendship. It's fascinating."

Yahiko jabbed his finger at Sasori. "Send me that link!"

Sasori raised his hands. "Okay, okay, no need to get so fierce."

"Any other stories we should know about?" Nagato said. "I'm still totally onboard the idea of Ace Studios if you guys want to make that."

Sasori shrugged. "Dunno if we'll ever get around to it. And yeah, there is one other, but I haven't made time for it yet. Based on the summary, it's about this guy becoming a teen parent to a dragon."

"Holy shit!" Deidara raced onto his phone. "Lemme follow that link for the first story, yeah. Same author? I love dragons, almost as much as I love volcanoes, yeah."

"Ooh!" The demon boy appeared in a poof of black smoke directly next to Sasori. "I love love LOVE cross species adoption!"

"You can read my mind for all the identifying information. Go nuts." The boy poofed away.

"You know what this sounds like?" Nagato said. "It sounds like somebody else already made Ace Studios. Should we team up?"

"These are all fanfictions, not original works," Sasori said. "So not quite. The whole point of Ace Studios was to produce our own original media that challenges heteronormative assumptions about love. The key word being 'original.'"

"Rats. Can we team up anyway?"

"Their username is blank space?" Deidara peered more closely at his phone. "That can't be right. No way any website would allow that, yeah."

"Why not?" Hidan asked. "They'll allow any username once, right? So you couldn't have more than one person with a blank username, but the one guy who did would be really distinctive."

"That's not how computers work," Sasori told him. "To our eyes, it looks the same. But to a computer, the code for space left over because the name you chose is shorter than the character limit is completely different from the code for a space generated by the Space key. If they allowed usernames to be made entirely of spaces, computers would permit users to make a lot of usernames that look distinctive to a computer but identical to human eyes. So no. You can't have a totally blank username. I wondered about that too, and I have concluded that it must be someone our author really doesn't want us contacting. It's easy enough to find other stories by the same blank name, but I can't send a private message."

"The profile's blank too," Deidara murmured. "Huh."

"Damn," Nagato said. "No team ups. How are we going to get Ace Studios off the ground now?"

"We're not remotely close to that," Sasori said, raising a hand. "Down, puppy."

"Sorry. I'm just really invested all of a sudden."

"Oh my goodness, it stars one of my favorite characters!" Yahiko yelped. "That reminds me. I should check to see if the game's real-life store has a plushie out for that character. They didn't last time I checked." Everyone gave him a minute to check. Yahiko screamed. "They do now! I'm ordering a dozen!"

"One for every member of this group," Nagato joked.

Konan coughed. "Are you sure toys are a good use of our money?"

"Yes!" Yahiko and Hidan said simultaneously. "And I'm not just saying that because I'm riding his feelings right now," Hidan added. "I have always believed that things that make you happy are the best things to spend money on. A toy that really connects with you deep down inside, that really makes you happy and isn't ever going to get tossed in the proverbial attic? Fuck yes."

"I connect with this character deep down inside and I think everyone else will too," Yahiko said. "He's super powerful, super unique, half human and half something else, and super super lonely. You'd all love him, I swear, I'm not ordering a dozen of him just for myself although they are super super cute and huggable and I want to toss one in the lake to see if it'll come alive like it did in that one subplot."

Everyone blinked. "I don't think the lake can do that," Deidara said.

"Golem plushie! Plushie golem?" Yahiko was too lost in his own thoughts to hear.

"I support Konan's idea," Sasori said. "Next weekend definitely works better for me than this weekend. Working only on weekends, it'll take me a while to build everything I have planned, but I should have something functional enough by next weekend."

"Gives us all more time for training too," Kakuzu said, nodding.

"Okay, next weekend are the training battles," Nagato said. "Hey, I just got a crazy idea. Should we invite a representative of the vampires to come and watch? So we're not identical to every other group of humans in their eyes?"

Konan tilted her head. "A worthwhile idea." She pulled out her phone and texted her mysterious probably-Soye contact. My group is planning to hold training battles among our members to test our fighting abilities. One of them has suggested that we invite representatives of allied groups to watch so that our abilities are known. The battles will be held the weekend after this coming one, along our street. She considered adding Consider yourself invited, in case her implication would not be clearly perceived in this world. But no; the vampires seemed to have a similar formalized culture as the one she was used to, a similar way of talking, and Soye personally seemed to have a similar way of thinking. Konan decided to leave it out.

While she was busy with that, Kisame raised a hand. "Hold on. Is that a thing? Can stuff that was formerly not alive be brought to life?"

"Yes!" Yahiko exclaimed. "If our chakra can't do it, there is at least one system of magic around here that can. If we can figure out how to use it. Since there don't seem to be any characters from that universe in town." His face fell.

Itachi shrugged. "If not, I'm sure -"

"Maybe the books can tell me how! They're alive!" The grin was back on Yahiko's face. "Did I tell you guys how they made me move my hand?"

"What books?" Sasori asked.

"Well, not alive, of course not that, because they're ghosts. But…um…that other word."

"Sentient?" Hidan suggested.

"Yeah, that one! The ghost books made me pick out a book with high-level spells in it that told me who their previous owner was," Yahiko explained. "If they have a book on golemancy with them, they could do that again to help me learn how to use it to enchant the plushies!"

"Hey, hey, hey," Kisame barked. "We've already got Deidara's spiders and two randomly appearing children running around. We don't need living dolls."

Samehada loudly disagreed. With loud and expressive body language, he made it clear that he thought more playmates running around would be awesome.

"I have something to say," Nagato called out, raising a hand high into the air and waving it. When he finally had attention, he said, "I've seen this subplot. Yahiko insisted on showing it to me because it was so cute. The golems could use similar kinds of magic as the people they were based off of. Do we really want magically empowered dolls that can use wind, earth, fire, water, and lightning magics running around?"

Konan sat up. "Powerful creatures that require no food, water or shelter, are small and resemble harmless toys, and have the ability to use all five elements? I vote in favor of this."

Nagato called for an official vote. "All in favor of enchanting the plushies, raise your hands." Yahiko, Hidan, Konan, and Itachi all raised their hands. Samehada raised his tail. "All in favor of leaving them the hell alone, raise your hands." Sasori, Kisame, Deidara, and Nagato himself raised their hands.

All eyes turned to Kakuzu. "Kakuzu?" Kisame tilted his head. "If you agree, nothing happens."

"Kakuzuuuu," Hidan said. "If you agree, we get golem plushies."

Nobody knew why Kakuzu had abstained from voting, nor what he was thinking. He hadn't said a single word on the subject of plushies, living or otherwise. Nothing could be gleaned from his body language; he looked bored. "You are all idiots," he grumbled.

Nagato nodded, thinking he agreed that bringing plushies alive was a bad idea, just for different reasons. "Elaborate."

"It's not our decision whether or not friggin' dolls come to life, especially since the power that would do it isn't even ours. I call for a poll. Everyone who thinks bringing dolls to life is a bad idea, express your disagreement."

Deidara and Kisame talked about how annoying and complicated they would make the overall living situation, with Nagato chiming in. Sasori just nodded.

"Everyone who thinks it's a good idea, express yourselves."

Yahiko and Hidan screamed. Samehada threw his body in paroxysms no calcium-boned creature could have withstood, propelling himself all the way across the room and back.

"Looks like a certain someone -" he looked up "- wants us to have living dolls. I'm not going to waste my time disagreeing. Whatever happens happens, and I'd better learn to put up with it."

Kisame growled. "Dammit, Kakuzu, why do you have to be so friggin' practical?"

Kakuzu shrugged. Nobody could think of anything except plushies, so that was the end of the meeting.

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A/N: The love story about the 3 forms of love is, as I have said before, Twospirit. It's an Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfic. I love it. And yes, unless you share my special interest in psychology, Sasori is being very charitable.

The shipping fic that's all about friendship is another one I have planned but am not yet publishing. It will be called The Date. It's a Dragonfable fanfic. I'll announce when I start publishing it.

The story about the guy becoming a teenage dad to a dragon is the new story I've been thinking of for the past two days. No name yet. It will be a Dragonfable/Avatar: The Last Airbender crossover (mainly Dragonfable, with few references to anything from ATLA). With all these story ideas buzzing around my head, it's going to take forever to get out. I've got to shorten up my writing and bring an end to some of my stories already. Either that or change up the schedule, put one story on hiatus so I have time to work on and finish another. Ugh! A problem to have, I've gotta say.

And, uh, yeah. Plushie obsession. I believe I already made a note about that.

So... Same time next week.