"It's just too much," Hotaru said as he opened the door to Sakura's office. He was holding a paper storage seal—which even from her desk Sakura could tell was one of the larger ones, with more capacity than average—and glaring at her.
"What's too much?"
"The suggestions!"
Ah, the suggestions. Now that the Hokage's major reformation plan was under way, each Department was supposed to take suggestions from both their employees and anyone who regularly interacted with them about how to improve.
Most of the suggestions so far had been… not well thought out.
"How bad is it this week?"
Hotaru took a seat, slumping over as he placed the storage seal on her desk. He didn't really have an office—liked to move around, oversee things in person—so her desk also functioned as his for when he needed to deal with things that prying eyes shouldn't get a look at. "Not as bad as the hospital, at least. Tsunade's kid gave them forty-two scrolls of suggestions! Forty-two! Who even has the time—" Hotaru stopped.
Noticed that Sakura was not reaching for the latest batch of suggestions, even though she'd taken the lead on each of the previous deliveries.
He narrowed her eyes at her.
Sakura leaned back. "I've been called away. I'll be leaving tomorrow."
"And you can't explain why." It wasn't a question, just a statement. An acknowledgement.
"Your mission is going to take a long time, isn't it?"
"Yes," Sakura said, and now that the cat was out of the bag—"I need you to oversee the review of the orphan fostering system—the data should start coming in next week. Also, the Akimichi-Aburame agricultural revolution program has had its most successful year yet, so you need to make the report to the other Departments that we officially have two years of food built up. Oh, and I need you to look at the new—"
"How about a list?" Hotaru interjected. "Because I doubt you'll finish thinking of things until I leave?"
"In a person-locked seal?" Sakura said. Person-locked seals were a relatively novel but long-awaited invention—for the first three hours after they were created, people could put chakra into them, and then for the next thirty years those people would be the only people who could access them. During Sakura's biweekly meeting with the Hokage, he would put his chakra into all the new seals, and then ANBU would race the seals around to other Heads so that every possible arrangement was accounted for.
They had become insanely popular, and Sakura had tripled production after what had happened with Hiashi.
(Interestingly, these biweekly meetings were not the scheduled ones for the Research Department; instead, Sakura, Minato, and Kushina would talk jinchuuriki, seals, and safety; while she didn't yet have proof, Sakura was almost certain that those discussions had instigated her basically immediate A-rank mission in Water.
(She supposed she'd have proof soon enough.)
"Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Let's talk logistics before you go to check on the train modifications, though—I really don't know when I'll be back."
Hotaru grunted his typical Uchiha grunt, leaned forward, and the two of them began making plans.
.
Sizuki Ruma, teacher at Konoha's Shinobi Academy, flashed a quick sign at one of his fellow teachers.
She nodded acknowledgement and shifted position to look out over a larger portion of the field where half of the Academy's four hundred first-year students were laughing and playing—recess, because first-year students had the focus of squirrels.
Assured that the rest of his kids would be overseen, Ruma turned to one girl in particular.
He remembered getting the notes on the incoming class, the page about her—
How after the byoki attack, some of the body searchers had sensed her, had stormed into her house—
Found her in the closet.
Found the closet door locked.
Found the girl, starved, beaten.
Her parents had died during the attack.
Good riddance.
She—
She was still so shy, so wary, and he knelt carefully by her side.
She'd frozen when he approached, stayed frozen as he settled.
"It looks like you found a little maple sapling," he said, brushing over one of the sapling's leaves carefully. "Do you like playing with the winged seeds?"
"They spin," Kumiko said.
"They do," Ruma agreed. "This one is a bit late, though. It is so small that it probably won't survive the winter."
Kumiko frowned. "Really?"
"Yes," Ruma said, "that's why, after the seeds drop this season, they usually stay buried until the spring, when they sprout and grow."
"Oh."
"Do you like plants?"
"Trees are my favorite," Kumiko said. "They're strong."
"They are," Ruma said, "but trees need help too." And, as he kept his eyes moving, as he deliberately didn't look straight at the little sapling—
He watched it grow.
Just as he'd seen the sapling come to life in the first place.
"Recess will be over in five minutes, Kumiko," Ruma told her. "I'll see you back in class."
Kumiko hummed absently.
Ruma created a clone—just a cheap E-rank one, to fool the kids into thinking at least one more set of eyes was on them—then took off.
If the Mokuton was back, the Hokage needed to know.
.
Ibiki stared at a man's back.
He hated being short.
Okay, so maybe objectively he wasn't short—he was actually kind-of tall for his age.
But he was starting his apprenticeship at T&I, and that meant he had to spend time in a prison.
(If he'd been a bit older, Ibiki was sure he would have been sent to a prison where Konoha's enemies were kept. As it was, he was just sent to a 'regular' prison—one for people who committed offenses within Konoha's walls.)
The thing was, Konoha actually had a separate prison for those younger than sixteen, but he hadn't been placed in that one.
He got the adult one.
So now he was staring at some random dude's back while they were frog-marched to their cells.
They'd been cleaned, changed, been made to listen to the prison rules; every man but Ibiki was told the date they'd be let out (Ibiki didn't get to know) and ways in which they might be able to earn early release (work, mostly; also, passing educational programs. Ibiki knew his aunt had started that one up—prisoners could now try to show that they would have options other than crime if they were released, and if they proved it, then they could—depending on the crime—be released on probation).
Then they'd been formed into a line, and made to walk.
This was, Ibiki knew, supposed to teach him what the prisoners he may one day have control over were (at minimum) made to endure: the lack of freedom, the lack of options, the lack of entertainment, and privacy, and even fresh air (here, you were only let outside once a day—and Ibiki was sure in prisons for foreigners, they weren't nearly as lucky).
It was, his uncle Ren said, a good thing to learn.
Something you never wanted to forget, not when you became the guard instead of the prisoner.
And Ibiki—
He understood that.
He got that.
He just wasn't really looking forward to this.
So he'd sort of… taken advantage.
Of the fact that he was so much younger, and usually shinobi were kept in a different prison altogether.
And the fact that the helix of his ear curled inwards so much, provided a nice little cavity to hide things in.
Usually he hid two fireflies—he was learning, now, how to listen to two different streams of information simultaneously, but it was difficult.
Now he was doing something else.
When he'd suggested it, the fireflies had gone a bit mad.
They apparently believed that firefly eggs hatching, living out their larval stages in the human world—that doing so would lead to fireflies with unheard of chakra carrying capacity.
Or kill them.
But the fireflies had relatively little respect for individual lives, and a great respect for chakra capacity, and so now he had a half-dozen eggs hidden in each ear.
Fingers crossed that they would hatch, because that at least would give him something to do.
His cell, at least, was a single-man cell—the only one on the whole block, likely because they weren't about to put a shinobi child in with a civilian adult.
All the better.
He looked at the tatami mat.
The sink.
The toilet.
A bucket, the head of a broom and a dust pan.
Two blankets.
A short table.
The wall to the rest of the block was also not wall—just a series of prison bars, and the door.
Lovely.
He listened to the quiet shuffling as the adults around him repositioned themselves after the guards left.
No one tried to talk to him—he was, in their eyes, clearly a future guard (which… fair. He was pretty sure the only others who would be as young as he was would be genin who were training to be prison guards.)
This was his home for the foreseeable future.
Ibiki had been planning to go T&I for years, so he'd endure, but he hadn't really expected to be bored this quickly.
And the guards said library day wasn't for another four days, so that was…
That was just great.
It seemed a bit more obvious, now, why his aunt had suggested he wait.
.
Minato waited until the teacher was out of his office before he cursed.
Mokuton—
Well, everyone had been waiting for years for that to spring up; there were too many people who had at least a little Senju blood to completely dismiss the possibility.
But as the years passed, and the Senju blood had become more diluted, the expectations had dropped.
And dropped.
And dropped.
And now, especially with Tsunade not intending to ever have a child (not with the love of her life dead, not with her beloved family dead), it had been years since the last time Minato had heard people openly discussing when the next Mokuton user would appear.
And now that there was a user—
It was, objectively, a good thing for Konoha.
A strength, and one with both peacetime and wartime benefits.
But it also—
Well, the timing wasn't great.
He was already writing the missive, though, so he'd just have to cope.
Kushina had warned him he had too many pots on the fire, but he hadn't wanted her to be right.
Mokuton.
A mokuton user.
Finished with the first letter, Minato wrote a second—they'd need to beef up security at the little girl's foster home, and quickly.