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Chapter Text

Nara Shikako, leader of the Fifth Division of the Allied Shinobi forces (after the death of Mifune), was close to the last person she would put in charge of a large military unit. Her personal brand of self sacrifice was hardly appropriate for the cold calculus of war. What's worse was that it was infectious. Case in point: when the Ten Tails emerged on the field and decimated the allied shinobi army with its first attack, Shikako asked for volunteers for a potentially suicidal technique to split the damn thing back into the nine tailed beasts. She needed a minimum of a thousand volunteers.

She got almost ten thousand.

On the plus side, her ability to survive insane, self sacrificing techniques was also infectious. On the minus side, so was the tendency for weird side effects and wacky hijinks.

Okisuke 1

"Well, we lived," said Ino, standing gingerly.

"I'm not sure that's a good thing," Okisuke commented from his knees, then spat to the side. It did nothing to get rid of the foul taste in his mouth. Looking around at the vast expanse of sand surrounding them, he realized that it may have been a tactical mistake to shed water like that.

"Where are we even?" asked Kiba, who managed to leverage himself up to one elbow, but otherwise didn't seem inclined to get up. "Wind country?"

"I think even in Wind country we'd see mountains somewhere on the horizon," Shikako said. She was standing up and seemed unfairly unbothered by whatever the heck just happened. There wasn't even an imprint of her body in the sand, meaning she had probably landed on her feet. "First order of business, set up some shelters. Okisuke, draft who you need to. Ino, see to the wounded. Kiba, inventory any supplies."

"Aww, man."

"Actually, Akamaru looks like he needs some TLC. Hana, can you handle supplies?"

Kiba grumbled half-heartedly at that, though Okisuke couldn't make out the words, only the tone.

"Shino, grab some guys and scout the perimeter."

Shino also looked unfairly unfazed by their ordeal, but that could just be Aburame stoicism at work. "Hai."

It didn't take that long for some basic shelters to get set up. This was partly earth jutsus and partly because the Konoha ninjas all seemed to have an absurd number of storage scrolls. When the scouts got back, it seemed like a good time for a quick meeting.

Seeing as the majority of the remaining members of the Fifth Division were samurai, Okisuke had briefly considered trying to take command of the unit now that they were out of combat. However, Shikako's distribution of what she called air conditioning seals meant that even some of his own men would revolt if he tried undercutting her now. The frustrating part was that Okisuke had no idea if she was just looking out for the people under her command or if it was a deliberate ploy to maintain control over the men.

On one hand, she looked as innocent as a fawn and there was Konoha's reputation as wide eyed tree huggers to consider on top of that, but on the other hand, she had also come up with a scheme to split the Ten Tails and managed it with minimal casualties.

"Only about five percent of the men are missing," reported Ino. "We assume they didn't survive activating the seal formation." Considering they didn't think any of them would survive it, those were amazing survival numbers. "On the downside, about half of the men are out from severe chakra exhaustion. Almost all of them will be up and running in a week, if we have supplies to last that long."

"We do," Hana replied. "For some reason the commander carries a warehouse's worth of food and water with her as a matter of course. We've got enough to last ten days with rationing."

They all turned to stare at the Nara. "What? You never know when supplies will come in handy."

Ino sighed and shook her head. "We need to do something about your packrat tendencies."

"So you're saying you don't want any of the chocolate I have with me?"

Ino straightened up. "Of course, it's hard to argue that it's maladaptive in this situation."

Shikako rolled her eyes. "Scouts?"

Shino adjusted his sunglasses with one finger. "We aren't in Wind Country. The men from Suna I talked to said that the sand is wrong for that."

"Seriously?" asked Kiba, though they all ignored him (even if Okisuke agreed with the sentiment).

"Furthermore, the geography is wrong. Even in the most remote parts of the desert, there should be mountains somewhere on the horizon."

Ino pointed outside. "There's also the matter that there are three moons."

Shino adjusted his glasses again. "Having known Shikako for most of my life, I was unwilling to discard the possibility that she had gotten bored."

"Point."

"Hey!" Shikako shook her head. "Well, from what the people working on the shelters dug up, we're probably in a region that suffered massive desertification, possibly on a planetary scale."

"Wazzat?" asked Kiba.

"Basically destroying the soil quality by bad agricultural practices causes it to literally blow away and turns fertile land into a desert. But at least we have a breathable atmosphere!"

"Is that what happened to Suna?" asked Ino.

Shikako shook her head. "Nah, that's a consequence of geography. But if you look in parts of Earth country, it looks like it might happen there. They're getting close to the danger zone with increased monocrops and clearing trees."

"Were you studying this to help or hurt?" asked an Iwa shinobi. Okisuke thought he was named Haruka, but wasn't that a girl's name?

Shikako shrugged. "The information is purpose neutral. The place that could benefit the most from help is also the place that is most vulnerable to attack." She clapped her hands together. "Anyway! Did the scouts find anything else?"

"Nothing of importance. No water, animals larger than an insect or even any significant rock formations."

"Okay. Then plan to stay here for a week while we rest and recover. The natural energy where we are is pretty weak, so it'll take about five to six weeks to charge a seal to get us home. We don't have the supplies to last us that long. Instead it'll take a week to charge a seal to open a portal to a random nearby dimension with a higher natural energy level where we can hopefully resupply or at least charge a new portal faster."

"You already have a seal for this?" asked Okisuke. He also wondered why she didn't mention that she thought they were in a different dimension earlier, but considering the three moons, she probably thought it was obvious.

"Not for ten thousand people, but something close, yeah. Just don't ask why," Shikako replied. "So minimal activity and conserve supplies. Use enough so that everyone is up and running in that week, but otherwise I want people using as little as they can get away with and still be able to fight at the end of the week."

"You think we'll need to fight?" asked Shino.

Kiba snorted. "With our luck?"

"You have a point."

Shikako cleared her throat. "And full disclosure: we have an unexpected guest," she said as she brandished a scroll.

Tony 1

As was his new habit, Tony was up at three in the morning, working on more Iron Man suits. The problem, as always, was anticipation. Churchill had said that generals were always prepared to fight the last war and for the Merchant of Death that wasn't a problem. Multiple iterations of hardware with small, incremental upgrades meant more money for him, but did they have time for incremental upgrades? Tony could definitely make a suit that could handle any conventional forces, any copycats that the competitors put together and the Chitauri. He'd argue that he already had. But what was necessary for the next enemy?

He couldn't even do market research or industrial espionage to figure out what the competition was doing because the competition could come from outer space. Should he be converting to mass production? Should he be concentrating on creating the absolute toughest, most powerful suit possible to handle singular powerful enemies? The answer was probably somewhere in between the two extremes, but where?

Tony's introspection was interrupted by Jarvis's voice. "Sir, a portal has opened in Toledo."

"Ohio? Don't tell me they're going to attack the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame."

"That's Cleveland, sir."

Any retort was stopped by Jarvis bringing up an image showing, yes, a glowing portal opened in what looked like the middle of an airport runway, big enough for fifteen, sixteen people abreast to come through. He knew this because out of the portal came a constant stream of what could only be soldiers. The vast majority of them were in what looked like honest to goodness samurai armor, while the rest were considerably less uniform in their uniforms. They all seemed to be wearing an old school flak vest of some sort, with a number of different designs, as well as most of them having some sort of metal plate with a Chinese character on their foreheads.

Every few seconds another row came through the portal and somehow they didn't get tangled up in each other's ways or forced to bunch up because the guys in front of them blocked things off. The fact that they didn't trip over each other's feet was sign enough that this was a trained army. Coming through that quickly? This might be the most disciplined fighting force Tony had even heard of.

"A signal to all the Realms that we're ready for a higher form of war, huh?"

On screen a number of men on foot shot at the invaders with rifles.

"It seems that the 180th Fighter Wing has already engaged them in combat."

"On foot?" he scoffed as he moved to suit up.

"They're based out of Eugene Kranz Airport, sir."

The rifles had nothing but a nuisance effect on the invaders. He could see one of the guys actually parrying bullets with a sword. "Those are enhanced or something like it," he said as his suit began to form around him.

The invaders weren't even slowing down to handle it. "How fast are they coming through?"

"About one hundred and forty men every minute, sir."

"J, if I left now, how many would have come through by the time I got there?"

"Approximately forty six hundred, sir."

"Shit." Better link up with Shield then. Dammit, he gave the rest of the Avengers rooms in the tower for a reason. Why couldn't any of them be there?

He was only ten minutes into his flight to the helicarrier when Jarvis said, "Sir, according to the Shield computers, the president has authorized a nuclear strike on the invasion site."

For a moment Tony focused on the fact that they still had access to the Shield computer systems. He wondered if it was deliberate or they just hadn't found the taps. Then he shook it off and concentrated on the fact that another moron decided to drop a nuke on American soil. "I knew there was a reason why I didn't vote for him."

Shikako 1

Shikako had once hid in a small village in Earth Country where the primary local industry was pottery. She had been mildly alarmed when she realized that she could sense the glaze they were using on some of the bowls, because she realized that they must be uranium based glazes, and thus slightly radioactive.

To kill time while waiting for her contact to show up, she played with seals and created an anti-ICBM kunai: something that would home in on the signature of a large mass of radioactive material moving at speed and then seal it away. It was obviously untested and unfortunately, not amenable to targeting anything other than rapidly moving radioactives. She tried something similar for chakra signatures and they tended to converge on the nearest tree. She wasn't even sure if it would work on anything other than uranium like plutonium bombs.

This being very much a "help, I'm going crazy with boredom" project, she only had three of the resulting kunai on her.

Good thing she only sensed two bombs.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck," she chanted as the bombs were sealed in a flash of light.

"What the hell were those?" Ino cried.

Right, she wasn't the only sensor in the group. "They're like man made Bijuu-damas… except bigger than a Ten tails' and leave poison behind." She shook her head. "Okisuke! We're now officially in hostile territory. Keep the civilian casualties down, but spread out and hold ground. Destroy any cameras in the area, and get some air cover going! Ino, Shino, you're with me."

With that, Shikako bounded towards what looked like the office portion of the airport terminal. Someone was bound to have left their computer unlocked, right?

"So much for hoping for peaceful contact," Ino said.

Crashing through the window, Shikako was lucky enough that the first computer she saw was open… and unlucky enough that it was running Windows XP. Corporate bastards. But - yes! - Google was a thing.

"What the hell, Kako," Ino muttered as Shikako worked the computer. Right, Ino couldn't read English. Hopefully she'd chalk it up to the Nara intellect again.

A few clicks and Shikako printed off a map of the area in various scales, with and without satellite view. She walked over to the nearest printer making noises, and unsealed a marker. As the maps came out she circled points of interest.

"Okay guys. This is our local area. These should be large civilian food stores. This map is regional and these should be the military bases that aren't classified and known to the civilians around here. Now, no government willing to use weapons of mass destruction on their own populations can be trusted. All we want to do is sit tight until the seals charge so we can get home, but if the enemy figures that out they might figure out some way to make our lives difficult. So we need to find a decoy objective. Shino, I want you to take some scouts and see if you can find signs of unethical experimentation in the area. You know, anything that reminds you of Orochimaru."

Ino flipped her hair. "If they were really willing to Bijuu-dama their own civilians to get rid of us, it shouldn't be hard."

"Go and deliver these to Okisuke. Don't make it obvious we're going for food. Hit decoy buildings and disguise looting as fortifying buildings for defense or something. He'll know what to do. I'll be here trying to pull what I can from their information networks. Get me if anything serious attacks us. Oh, and see if anyone can retrieve those kunai I threw. Those bombs were only sealed, not destroyed."

"Yes, ma'am!" Ino shouted enthusiastically. Shikako wasn't sure if she was messing with her or not.

Well, first things first. Shikako was going to look up some local landmarks… and try not to get hopelessly distracted by her first wiki walk in fifteen years.

Wait. Iron Man? Stark Industries? Shit. They were in Marvel. She wasn't really familiar with most of the Marvel timelines, but one thing they had in common was that the governments were all sufficiently shitty that a nuclear welcome was not a surprise at all. Events were matching up from what little she remembered of the MCU, though.

Crap. Not only were they in a comic book universe, they were in a crossover event. Yeah, talking was never going to be an option. There was always going to be a hero on hero battle. Not that Shikako was a hero, but she was on their side.

But wait…. What if the talking was the battle?

Steve

Steve was going to get a complex about this conference room. The Shield agents probably had normal boring meetings in it about budgets or training schedules or, you know, other normal stuff. The only time Steve got dragged in it is if the end of the world was in sight. This time, out of the Avengers, it was just him, Clint and Natasha. Tony was on his way. Thor was still in Asgard and they had no way to call him, and Bruce had actually been in a bookstore when this started and they had just gotten ahold of him.

On top of the Avengers, there was Fury, sitting at the table glowering at the images and Hill, who was doing most of the talking.

"-and just after the nukes were launched, we lost surveillance of the portal," said Hill. "Any security cameras with line of sight have been destroyed as have any drones that get line of sight."

"What about satellites?" asked Clint.

"Some sort of dense black cloud appeared over the area." Hill shifted slightly. "It seems to be a combination of thermal smoke and… insects."

"Insects…. Like a biblical plague?" Clint's tone was light, but Steve could see the tension in his neck and shoulders.

"Apparently so," Hill admitted. "The gamma ray detectors we had going to track the Tesseract detected a sharp fall in emissions about ten minutes ago, so it's likely the portal is closed or in a reduced energy state."

"Do we have an estimate about how many men came through?" asked Steve.

"Assuming the same force composition and rate of egress, we place the upper bound at eleven thousand men. That drops sharply if they brought through any heavy weapons or vehicles."

Clint snorted. "But then we're dealing with heavy weapons or tanks."

Fury growled. "Assuming they bother with them. They took out the nukes with what looked like throwing knives."

Steve wondered if the enemy had learned from the previous invasion or if that was something they could just do. It felt rather unfair either way.

"Thor and his friends stuck with what look like medieval weapons," Hill noted.

"That doesn't change the fact that we have an army sitting on American soil," Natasha said.

"That isn't an army," Tony said as he strode into the conference room.

"Then clearly I must not understand what that word means," ground out Fury.

"You know, I've done a lot of thinking about what the Avengers might look like a year from now, five years from now. One of those ideas was to support each Avenger with four or five suits of armor. We aren't each one man armies, but each squad would be close. That-" Tony jabbed a finger at the image of men as they came out of the portal. "-looks like one enhanced supported by eight or nine guys in armor. The guys not in armor are barely uniform. A vest and a plate of metal. I bet the rest of their outfits are customized to support whatever abilities they have. So that's not an army. That's fourteen armies arriving every minute. Someone took the idea of the Avengers and scaled it up to battalion strength."

Steve rubbed his eyes. "Current estimates are a division, Tony."

"Wonderful."

A note chimed from the speaker on the table. "Director, we've got news. The invaders have sent a squad to the channel twenty-four television station."

Clint snorted. "So, literal news."

Kiba

Of all the impressive bullshit Kiba had witnessed from Shikako, he thought he found a new high mark for scarily badass intelligence: somehow she had learned the crazy language people were using here in less than an hour. It didn't actually change much about Kiba's opinion of her. (Look, there was a reason Kiba fell for it for just a moment that time when Naruto tried to convince him that Shikako had traveled in time and was actually Kiba's dad. The fact that she was capable of moving an entire army across dimensions, twice, should be proof enough that time travel wasn't so far fetched.)

Sure, Ino had also picked up the language sometime in the last fifteen minutes, but she was a literal mind reader. There was apparently an actual jutsu for it. Not that Kiba understood why because everyone back home spoke the same language, but according to Ino, that wasn't the case a few generations back. Why did the Yamanaka even learn this jutsu? Tradition?

Kiba? As far as he was concerned the people around here could be speaking cat.

"What were we doing again?" he asked.

"Psychological warfare," Shikako replied.

"Okay, why are you bringing me then?" You know, seeing as he couldn't speak the language.

"Well, actually, I want Akamaru, but I wouldn't separate you two when we're in hostile territory."

"I feel like I should be offended."

"Akamaru's cute. He's cute in a way that transcends cultural boundaries."

Akamaru whined a bit at that. Kiba knew it was because his partner felt like he had outgrown cute a while ago.

"Don't be like that," Shikako said. "I want your best happy puppy impression."

Akamaru fell forward and covered his eyes with his paws.

"Fine, I'll owe you some doggy treats when we get back. Four? Five."

Kiba's shameless partner let out a happy yip of agreement. Kiba shook his head at how happy he was at such a pitiful bribe. Maybe his mom had a point about Shikako fitting in well with the clan. He just wished she would choose anyone else as a potential spouse/sacrifice to the Shikabane-hime. Hana was single.

"Good boy! You're going to look great on television. But… uh, let's get you some barrier seals."

Now Kiba wasn't as smart as Shikako (no one was), but he was still a ninja and could put two and two together. "So the idea is for us to come across as sympathetic and inoffensive and provoke the enemy into attacking us?"

"Yup."

"So, if we're going for inoffensive, then why are you bringing Ino?"

"Hey!"

"I'm sort of limited on the number of people who can speak English here."

Ino huffed. "No respect."

Shikako looked Ino over. "Actually, can you go for 'girl next door' and not 'sexy bombshell?'"

Ino sighed and then her body language shifted. "Better?"

Kiba shivered. "That is so creepy."

Shikako gave Ino a thumbs up (which after meeting Lee and Gai was just as creepy). "Perfect. Let's go. I'll brief you as we move."

Tony 2

Because people who worked in television weren't really human, they had decided that a visit by an invading army wasn't a reason not to go through the usual song and dance for interviewing local celebrities, which included pre-interview social media posts. Consequently, Tony's first good look at any of the invaders were a bunch of publicity stills, which was disconcerting because they all looked young enough to be kids, late teens at the oldest. Oh, and there was a dog too. He wondered how the kids managed to convince the TV station that they were who they said they were, even if they were wearing the vests.

Then he saw the picture that had a boy standing on the surface of the wall like it was solid ground.

"J, catch me up on what the television broadcast is showing."

Jarvis obligingly played the broadcast at triple speed with captions. Tony could read faster, but he assumed that Jarvis was matching the runtime with his projected arrival time to maximize the information he could get from body language.

In front of Tony's eyes a stereotypical talk show setup appeared with a lady behind a desk and a girl sitting on an armchair next to the desk. There was a sturdy coffee table that appeared in the long shot. The only odd part was that the dog was with the girl, a big fluffy white dog complete with stupid doggy grin and wagging tail. The lady behind the desk was labelled Laura Waters.

The girl was labeled "Shikako Nara, Cmdr Fifth Division Allied Shinobi Forces."

Wonderful. At least four more of them.

"First question: shinobi? Like ninja?"

"Ah. That's a bit of a language issue. Our language and Japanese appear to be very closely related but some subtle details are off. There are a couple of ways to interpret the word, but here the focus seems to be the meaning 'one who hides' while we focus more on 'one who endures.' It's like in English how the word bolt can mean either run away or it can mean to secure something."

"How old are you?" Seriously, lady? You don't have anything better to ask? Granted, the girl did look rather young to be leading an army division or discussing comparative etymology.

"I'm not sure that the answer is meaningful. As far as we can tell our years are roughly equivalent, but our people aren't." What looked like a photo album appeared out of nowhere and the girl flipped through it. Taking out a picture she said, "Ah. This photo, can you get it on camera? This is the military leader of our nation. She just turned fifty-five."

The woman in the picture did not look fifty-five. Mid thirties at the oldest. Great tits though.

"So you age slower than us?"

"It's not one to one. We also mature faster. I graduated from military academy at the age of twelve and was considered a full adult then."

"You send your kids to military academies?"

"It's not that uncommon even in America. Ricky on Silver Spoons went to a military academy."

"Silver Spoons?"

"The sitcom?" She covered her eyes. "Stop. You're making me feel old. No, seriously, it wasn't that long ago, was it?"

Waters put her hand to her ear. "My producer is saying nineteen eight-two to eighty-six."

"That's not that long ago."

"Just thirty years."

The girl put her hands over her ears. "I'm not listening." The captions had a musical note, so she must have sung it. The dog looked up from her lap and gave her a reproachful look. The whole exchange seemed surreal to Tony since his eyes were telling him that the dialogue should be reversed.

If Tony wasn't flying in his suit he would have face palmed. "This is the leader of an invading army?"

"Okay, then why are you people here?" Ms. Waters seemed very nervous to ask that, which was the only reason Tony didn't say something like "Finally!"

In response, the girl commander stood up. The dog seemed a bit annoyed about being moved out of her lap. With a flash of light a bomb appeared on the coffee table.

"This is a B61 nuclear bomb, revision twelve, a four hundred kiloton strategic nuclear weapon. This is one of two that your government fired on us about ten, fifteen minutes after we first arrived. If it had gone off, everyone in this building would be dead, and people as far away as Sandusky would be having a really bad day."

That wasn't entirely fair. The B61 had a variable yield that may not have been set to the maximum. But even with the minimum yield, she was probably right about no one in that building surviving if it was set for an air burst.

"Call that about half a million dead or wishing they were, something that your own government decided was acceptable. Of course, that ignores the fact that it was launched against a portal. I won't go into the physics of it because some moron in your government might decide to weaponize it, but the worst case scenario if someone had dumped a bunch of radiation into our portal - well, it involves Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan all becoming one big inland sea. Oh, and since Toronto would be underwater, you'd be at war with Canada."

The girl sat back. "So why are we here? To show to the American people just how much danger you are in from your own government."

"You couldn't have just sent a note?"

"Do you realize that no one from the government at any level has tried talking to us? They started with rifle fire and went directly to nukes. What good would a note have done?"

Waters winced. "I guess not a lot."

"Ever since 9/11 people on both the left and the right have been warning the public about how the government keeps taking more power for itself and weaseling out of oversight. Death panels sound familiar? How about 'the government has a bullet with my name on it?' Well, I'd say that today that this bomb had your name on it, but…." She turned it around and there in black and white was the Stark Industries logo.

"Sonovabitch. J, tell Pepp that we need to get a statement out that this is exactly why Stark Industries got out of the weapons business. Did we even manufacture B61s?"

"Not from scratch, sir. Stark Industries did, however, take a contract to refurbish older weapons to the new specifications."

"Find out whoever decided to put my name on a nuclear bomb and fire them."

"That would be your father, sir."

"Of course. I have no words."

On screen the girl continued, "The other interesting thing is, again, we had only been here for fifteen minutes tops before nukes were sent against us. That means that someone had two planes ready to launch nuclear missiles somewhere within a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty miles of us. That more or less means the Air Force base in Dayton. Why would your government have nukes ready to launch from Dayton unless they were meant to be used against the US or Canada?"

Well Tony could think of a few answers. Unfortunately, the likely answer was in case the country was invaded by aliens via portal again, which meant that they were ready to to strike domestic targets. Though if it was the Air Force, there would be people screaming about Posse Comitatus soon, even though it didn't apply to foreign invaders.

"There was a line from a movie. It went something like 'People should not be afraid of their government. The government should be afraid of their people.'"

And that's a reference to V for Vendetta on top of a reference to an eighties sitcom. Her knowledge of pop culture was implying very bad things about their ability to visit Earth undetected.

There was more back and forth, but it basically boiled down to Americans ignoring all the warning signs less serious than the federal government nuking one of its own cities and a government willing to nuke their own citizens being too untrustworthy to talk to.

Honestly? Tony had a hard time arguing with that. Oh sure, if there had been days of fighting and Mechagodzilla was coming through a portal then he'd argue a nuke was a reasonable response, but Miss Older-Than-She-Looks had a point about the nuke being authorized basically right away.

Ino

There were days that Ino could tell herself that Shikako wasn't that much smarter than her. Definitely smarter, there was no use in denying that. The part where Shikako absorbed all that information in just an hour? That wasn't threatening to Ino, that was just the normal Nara bullshit, except turned up to eleven because Shikako wasn't lazy like the rest of her clan, but Ino didn't think that Shikako was so much smarter than her that she could out class Ino in her chosen specialties.

Okay, Shikako was definitely in the lead in the race for Sasuke's heart, but Ino honestly wasn't that interested any more and as far as anyone could tell it was completely inadvertent on Shikako's part. It was just a natural result of overcoming life threatening situations together every time they left the village. At some point you just had to acknowledge that the universe shipped them… or wanted to kill them. Or wanted to kill them because it shipped them and they wouldn't get with the program.

So outside what seemed to be actual divine intervention, Ino thought that she could hold her own in the areas where she cared to put in the effort. Shikako herself thought that Ino was better with people and Ino agreed with that assessment, even if she didn't agree with Shikako's self assessment of being bad with people. Ino was just better. Until today, Ino thought that included psychological manipulation, deception and undercover work.

Then Shikako got in front of the camera and lied; she lied with her whole self. Ino had known Shikako essentially for both their entire lives and yet so many of the things that Ino's brain knew were false rang with absolute truth. If Ino didn't know better she would swear that Shikako was at least twice her actual age and had been visiting this planet for decades. Okay, that would have explained a few things, but she didn't see how Shikako would have had the time. Or could have resisted bringing toys back with her.

Eventually the interviewer, who had apparently not been chosen for her brains, but instead because her colleagues were too scared to talk to the leader of an invading army, started repeating herself. Thankfully, the response team that Shikako had been expecting arrived before the broadcast got too repetitive and boring.

Taking point was a guy in an outfit that was only less embarrassing than Gai's because it covered his face - just substitute blue for green and add red and white accents. Interestingly, he had the most chakra of anyone Ino had encountered here so far. He was followed closely by a figure in red and gold armor and Ino could sense two more trying to get into overwatch positions.

"Lady, maybe you have a point, but there has to be a better way-"

"Ah, Captain Rogers, the American Nazi Party must be happy to have you sign up with them." Contrary to popular belief, Shikako did have a sense of shame. Ino was one of the few people who could tell when it kicked in, because Shikako didn't let anything as little as shame stop her from doing what she thought was necessary. Though, Shikako quickly shed it and instead started leaking deliberate aggressive intent. It was subtle; if Ino hadn't known it was part of the plan, she wouldn't have noticed it at all.

Interestingly, blue boy seemed extra sensitive to it, because he stopped in his tracks as soon as Shikako started. "Wait. What?"

Shikako started ramping up her intent. "After all, you support a government that has no issues with killing its own citizens by the hundreds of thousands. Sound familiar?"

"That doesn't make me a Nazi. I'm here to protect lives!"

"Do you know what they call people who joined the Wehrmacht just to protect the Fatherland? Nazis."

"Lady, I'm just here to stop an invasion!"

"Invasion or liberation? What did they call it when America hit Normandy beach?" At this point the aggressive intent was at the point Ino felt on the edge of throwing a kunai. It had accumulated so smoothly that she was still affected despite knowing it was external. She was unwillingly impressed that the opposing team kept their heads.

"You don't liberate people by killing them!" snapped the guy in the armor. Well, mostly kept their heads.

"Maybe you should tell that to the person in the White House. The Fifth Division has yet to cause any civilian deaths. Of course, I shouldn't expect much from a man who works with an organization that poisoned Peggy Carter into dementia when her old fashioned morality got in the way of what-"

At that the red, white and blue man roared and threw a punch at Shikako. Ino wondered what this Peggy Carter woman meant to the soldier if this was what broke his composure, when the increasing levels of intent from Shikako hadn't moved him. In any case, it was a solid Chunin level attack, but Kako sparred against Lee more often than anyone sane would consider, and she caught it. "Ah yes, violence was the first response Nazis had to criticism as well."

Shikako pulsed her chakra. At the signal, Ino used a genjutsu on the guy in the armor. It made him think that Akamaru was in one of his more vicious moods and leaping at him, complete with beast transformation. Thankfully Akamaru activated his barrier on signal as well because the man blasted the ninken through the wall.

"The hell!? Did you just use an anti-tank weapon on a dog!?" Shikako shouted. That was followed by another pulse. Kiba apparently got the signal because there were a series of explosions and the lights went out. The explosions should have knocked out not just the power mains, but also the backup generators and the broadcast antenna. Since Shikako was the one to supply the bombs, Ino had zero doubt that everything that needed to be destroyed was, along with a few things that didn't.

Ino used the darkness and confusion to escape and make her way to the rendezvous point. That meant leaving Shikako behind, but if Shikako couldn't manage a clean exfiltration in the dark then they were so beyond screwed that it wasn't worth thinking about.

Shikako not only managed it, but beat Ino to the rendezvous point. They were joined by Akamaru and then Kiba.

"Did everything actually go according to plan?" Ino said with more than a bit of disbelief.

Akamaru dropped to the ground and whimpered.

"Fine, I'll give you twice as many treats when we get back," Shikako said.

Kiba shook his head. "He's fine. He's just playing it up."

Shikako looked him straight in the eye. "If he doesn't extort a bribe out of me that means that everything went completely according to plan with no complications."

Kiba paled at that. "Right. Akamaru, extort away."

Ino was a bit worried that they had collectively become so superstitious but it was better than taunting Team Seven's luck. Though... their leader looked a bit more tense than mere superstition would allow.

"Hey, Shikako. Are you okay?" she asked.

Shikako shrugged. "I just feel bad. Captain America didn't deserve most of the things I was accusing him of. Even with messing with their emotions, the only reason it worked was because it was so crazy he didn't know where to start. It was basically like accusing my dad for being no better than Danzo just because he's Jounin Commander and wasn't omniscient enough to stop Root."

Kiba winced. "Yeah, low blow."

It probably hurt Shikako more because she had figured out what Danzo was doing while the rest of Konoha was clueless. Not that she had outright stated as much, but looking back, Ino could see signs that Shikako had been working against the old bastard for years.

"You know you can ask for help now, right?"

"Thank you for volunteering for more work," Shikako chirped brightly. The worst part was that Ino could tell Shikako had caught what she was really saying, but wasn't ready to deal with emotional stuff yet.

Ino sighed and let it slide, because priorities. "I asked for that."

"You really did." Kiba snickered. "Hey, what was up with the Nazi dude?"

Shikako looked pained. "Again, really unfair. But what do you mean what was up with him?"

"We could actually smell some chakra on him."

Shikako hummed thoughtfully. "Captain America is the result of taking some sort of Super Serum and being dosed with Vita Rays. I think Vita Rays are some sort of artificial chakra."

Kiba grimaced. "Have the words artificial and chakra ever gone together in a sentence without something bad happening?"

"Captain America is fairly unique because nothing bad happened when he was created."

"I'm hearing a 'but,'" Ino said.

"But a lot of things went wrong when lesser scientists tried to replicate his success."

Ino sighed. "Great. A planet full of Orochimarus."

"It's not that bad. It's just that there are seven billion people on the planet. If even one in a million is like that…."

"Ugh. No wonder you thought Shino could find something with evil scientist vibes."

"And he's awesome."

Kiba nodded. "Plus we're under her command right now, that means we've got her luck."

"Yeah- Hey!"

Chapter Text

Clint

"What the fuck, Tony!?" Clint exploded as they were in the air again.

"I just got tricked into using an anti-tank weapon against a dog on national television. A big friendly dog. PR disaster doesn't even begin to cover it. I could have sworn that it turned into this canine rage monster-"

"I think I would have noticed if there was a doggie version of the Hulk in the room," Steve said, though it seemed more out of habit than anything. Accusing Shield of giving Peggy Carter dementia and by extension accusing Steve of approving of it definitely pushed the old man's buttons. He looked like he needed to punch someone, clenching and unclenching a fist, but realized that no one in the Quinjet was a reasonable target. It reminded Clint of all those punching bags Steve had been going through not so long ago. He decided that holding back on the quips would be in his best interest right now.

"-but I pulled the logs on my suit and the only sign I can see is that my heart rate spiked right before I took the shot. Wait. Son of a bitch. I had screwy P3 brain wave readings as soon as we entered."

"English?" asked Steve.

"I think someone was trying to induce feelings of hostility." Tony did a hand motion that looked like slapping an imaginary surface in the air. "Which is a bitch to work out a detection routine for in a combat suit."

Steve perked up at that. "So I wasn't provoked into punching what looked like a teenage girl?"

Tony shook his head. "No, you were, but there were-" He waved a hand. "-extenuating circumstances."

"There were three people reported," Nat chimed in. "What do you want to bet that one of them was an illusionist like Loki?"

Clint made a mental note to check to make sure they hadn't stolen Loki's fucking scepter. At least if it was stolen, Fury might listen to the idea of destroying the damn thing this time.

Tony leaned back. "No bet. That was my conclusion too."

"What happened with the girl anyway?" Clint shook his head. "The lights go off and the next thing I know I'm hit by a giant chunk of mahogany."

"I worry that you've been hit by enough wooden objects that you can tell what kind of wood it was by the impact," Nat said.

Tony ignored her comment and said "Beats the fuck out of me. On thermal she just sort of melted away. I think we need to give some serious thought to the possibility that this is an army of ninjas. Is that the right plural for ninja?"

Clint sighed. "Great. More ninjas."

"Wait. Are you telling me that ninjas are actually a thing?"

"There are at least two major ninja organizations that I know of," Nat said.

Tony sighed. "Fuck my life."

"And several groups that claim to be ninjas that I think just like black pajamas," added Clint.

"How old do you think she was?" Steve asked. "I mean it looked like she should just be starting high school." It was going to look all sorts of wrong when the clip of Steve trying to punch her face goes viral (and it would).

"Fourteen to sixteen in terms of physical appearance," Nat said promptly. "But she seemed very genuine about her dated pop culture reference making her feel old. Someone that age could fake it, but I think it would require rather extreme training." Great, so a potential Red Room graduate.

"On the other hand she played us for idiots on live television," Tony pointed out. "And they don't make teenagers the equivalent of major generals."

"That's assuming she was telling the truth about being the commander," Nat replied.

Clint shrugged. "It works too much against what they're trying to do for them to lie."

Nat gave him a dry look. "That's assuming that they're telling the truth about what they're here for."

"Then it would cause their decoy operation to fall apart too quickly to lie."

Nat inclined her head. "Point. Assuming she's the age she's presenting as, I would estimate the equivalent of our mid-thirties."

"A little young for the position, but not impossible," Steve commented. "More likely back in my time though."

There was a moment of silence before Tony said, "You know, she was wrong. You didn't have to be a Nazi to serve in the Wehrmacht."

"Tony, I was there. Even if you weren't a card carrying member of the Nazi party, if you were a member of the German army you still kept your mouth shut as they committed atrocities. Does it really matter if you weren't on the official lists?"

For a man who thought he was going to die to stop weapons of mass destruction being dropped on Americans, being accused of collaborating with the same thing probably stung more than a little. Clint himself hadn't been happy when the WSC had ordered New York nuked and only the knowledge that Fury had violently disagreed with the order had stopped Clint from doing something drastic.

"Trouble," called out Koenig, their pilot and one of the Koenig brothers. (Clint could tell them apart but enjoyed pretending that he couldn't.) "The National Guard has engaged the Allied Shinobi forces. It's not going well."

"How bad?" asked Steve.

"Uh, biblically."

"I was joking about that," Clint muttered to himself.

Okisuke 2

Shikako didn't have a lot of time to brief them on the capabilities of the natives before she went on her misdirection mission, but she took the time to mention that they natives didn't have chakra and only one in a million had access to abilities beyond that of a normal civilian. Their soldiers were well trained, but ultimately dependent on their equipment.

As such, she had full confidence that they could massacre the enemy if they came in force, but that might just encourage them to attack in numbers that couldn't be ignored during a critical time when they retreated to the elemental nations. The order of the day was the thorough destruction of machinery while leaving the soldiers themselves alive.

(Later, there would be much finger pointing and recriminations about why two infantry companies, approximately four hundred men strong, decided to attack a force of nine thousand men, even if they appeared to be armed with only swords and knives. Basically it boiled down to the fact that the Headquarters Company and Company A of the 148th Infantry Regiment were based out of Walbridge, Ohio, which was within spitting distance of where the portal opened. In the unlikely, but actually happening event that an invasion force appeared near them, training and doctrine told them to hold off the enemy until larger elements of the US Military could engage them.)

Unfortunately for them, the easiest way that Fifth Division had for disabling four hundred men without killing them was to unleash the Aburame. They didn't make up a large fraction of the Fifth Division to begin with and Shino had pulled off about half of that for his scouting mission, but there were enough left to easily handle two companies of chakra-less soldiers. Many of the men of the 148th would later state that they would have preferred death, and Okisuke really couldn't blame them.

That left the Fifth Division with a lot of prisoners and military hardware to police. Fortunately Shikako had gotten back in time to help them figure out how to use the computers to identify military hardware, and just as importantly, how to dispose of it safely. As Shikako walked them through it, Okisuke couldn't help but ask one question: "Why do we still have access to their information networks?" He didn't like it when he didn't understand why the enemy was doing what they were doing, especially when it benefited him. The chances of a trap were too large.

Shikako paused in demonstrating how Google Translate worked. "Most probable answer? They don't realize that we still have access. Most pieces of the Internet are actually administered by private companies domestically and it hasn't occurred to the government that shutting us down is something they can do. Once they realize they can, chances are they'll still leave us with access because they can't tell the difference between what we're doing and what private citizens are doing behind our lines. Since we theoretically only have access to declassified information via the civilian networks and they think we've done a lot more intelligence gathering than we actually have, the intelligence they can gain from the civilians providing it would theoretically outweigh the intelligence we can get."

Ah. He had thought that Shikako's order to handle the civilians with just a curfew in their controlled area was just a bit of Konoha soft heartedness. Then she had identified the military's access to artillery, and now civilians loosely distributed through their territory meant that the enemy couldn't indiscriminately saturate the area with explosions without making their morale problem from the nuclear bombs even worse. That there were additional layers to her policy was a reminder not to underestimate a Nara.

He wondered if the people in charge knew just how much they could figure out about things like troop movements just from tracking the so-called social media. On one hand it was obvious. On the other hand, you had to sort through a lot of porn and cat pictures to extract that intel.

Okisuke made a note to have some ninja not doing anything more productive to wander around with henges to confuse the intel being generated by the civilians inside their lines.

Shikako had just returned to her lecture when Shino arrived. "I've found a suitable location."

She looked like she wanted to hit the area herself, but before Okisuke could remind her that she would be better utilized with the main force she said, "Shino, take Ino and hit that place hard and fast. Make noise. Take as many people as you can while still being able to pull out fast."

"Affirmative."

"Ino: live stream the attack. I'm sure there's some civilian in our area of control who's annoyed about almost being nuked that will help you get set up."

"Seriously?"

"If you can figure out how to put a three minute delay on it, then do it, otherwise just make sure you hit fast."

Ino turned to Shino. "She trusts your judgment a lot! No pressure."

Natasha

Natasha hated being on standby. You couldn't really relax and you couldn't do anything productive. So despite the fact that it probably meant that the shit had hit the fan, getting an alert was welcome.

"They've hit a Shield facility," Fury declared. "The North Institute."

"The North Institute?" Natasha shook her head. "It was destroyed in ninety-five." She would know; she helped do it.

"It was rebuilt, though it's mostly been used for storage. Among other things, there's a stockpile of iridium there."

Clint rubbed his eyes. "I'm getting flashbacks here. They might need it for more portals."

"Sir! They're live streaming the attack," Hill shouted.

"Can we shut it down?" asked Rogers.

"They're going through a server in Russia. They're not going to pass up a chance to embarrass Americans!"

Natasha would have been tempted to protest this broad strokes characterization of her native country, except that watching Americans embarrass themselves really was something of a national pastime.

Bruce shook his head. "Getting the other guy on camera is the last thing we need if they're trying for PR points." Natasha didn't think it would be that bad, but that probably wasn't his real reason. It was far more likely that he didn't mind the dirty laundry of the US being aired after what the army pulled. "Well, I'll wait in the jet if you guys need backup."

"Right. Get in there and keep them from taking anything out, whether it's iridium or a box of pogs."

"Well someone just dated themselves," Tony muttered.

Fury shot him a dirty look for wasting time on banter and they hustled out of there.

As they traveled to the facility, Natasha watched the broadcast. She could tell a few things. One, this was definitely a professional force, but at the same time it was an ad hoc unit. They moved to keep out of each others' ways and obviously followed a set of standard operating procedures (which amusingly didn't seem to account for being live streamed during an operation) but didn't work tightly enough together to indicate time spent training specifically with the others on the attack.

Two, this wasn't a target of opportunity. The invaders knew exactly where they were going. Worryingly, this included knowing exactly where the security forces were at all times. It could mean anything from having subverted the security systems to an entire team with enhanced senses.

Three, the invaders were at least pretending to be good guys and took down the security team non lethally. How exactly that worked was unclear, because they mostly seemed to press pieces of paper to their targets and that knocked them out.

Four, each and every one of them was at least as strong and as fast as Steve. What's more, they all had more skill than Steve probably ever would simply because he lacked training partners that could push him appropriately unless Thor ever dragged him to Asgard for a training trip.

And five, they didn't show any signs of advanced technology, unless it was like Asgardian technology: so advanced it was indistinguishable from magic. Honestly they didn't seem to need it. There didn't seem to be much appeal to a rifle when you could throw a knife further and more accurately. They were also somehow coordinating without anything like radios.

"I swear they're using ninja magic," Clint said, poking at the screen. "Look at that hand… stuff."

"Eloquent as always," Natasha replied. "This could be a disinformation campaign."

"You don't think that. They're moving too habitually."

"Do you think it can be interrupted?" asked Steve. "You know, hit them while they're doing the hand thing and it'll stop the attack?"

"It's possible that the hand motions are just an interface for technology. In that case, it'd be like stopping someone from hitting enter to run a computer command," said Bruce. "Well, unless you knocked their hands into a new valid hand motion, I suppose. Hopefully there are safety features…. Though if it is magic, who knows?"

"You think that it is?" asked Clint.

"The hand motions are remarkably similar to mudra from Tantric and Buddhist traditions. That can't be a coincidence." Bruce rubbed his head sheepishly. "I studied a bit of everything related to anger management."

"What does that have to do with anger management?" asked Steve.

Bruce didn't get a chance to respond before they felt the plane touch down. "Explain later!" Natasha shouted over the noise as the rear door lowered. "Where are they?"

"They're hitting the sub-basement," Bruce called out. At least he was participating enough to keep an eye on the stream.

"What sub-basement?" asked Steve. "We have the Shield plans for the building. There shouldn't be a sub-basement."

That meant that the building was being used for something other than storage. Given that Fury didn't think anything important was going on here, that meant someone was keeping secrets from him.

Clint apparently came to the same conclusion. "This is going to be ugly."

The invaders didn't seem to be interested in being subtle. It was fairly easy to follow their path through the building largely because their room clearing technique of choice seemed to involve blowing holes through walls.

Bruce's voice crackled to life in their comms. "Guys, they've found a vivisection room."

"How do they know it's not a normal surgery room?" asked Clint.

"The autopsy equipment is a giveaway. Oh God. This girl, who looks all of fifteen, is critiquing the setup and the quality of the surgical equipment. And she just pointed out that the collection of saws in the room mean that they're probably interested in brain surgery."

"You can tell that by the saws?" squawked Clint.

"Yeah, there are different bone saws for different parts of the body depending on how thick the bones are, what angles you need to reach at…. Okay, the point is I have a PhD in biomedical engineering and that's why I know this stuff. Why does she?"

"Well, that's another point for them being older than they look," said Steve, sounding a bit relieved. He was probably feeling guilty for throwing a punch at what looked like a fifteen year old girl. Given what Natasha was capable of at fifteen, that wasn't a particularly rational thought, but Steve didn't have the right background to process that.

"Guys, they know you're here," called Bruce. "She's left the vivisection room and- There's a room with brains in jars right next door." It was probably too much to ask that they were donated for science in people's wills.

The Avengers reached the sub-basement just in time to see the girl walk into another doorway and they piled in after her. Despite knowing that the event was being live streamed, it was still somewhat jarring to see a blonde teenager walking around the room with a cell phone on a stabilizing mount. It was a rather large room built around a chair with ominous equipment attached to it.

"How are you even getting a signal down here?" asked Clint, as if that was the most important thing here.

"Stark Industries Virtual Private Networking promises a seamless transition from cellular to wifi networks and back!" chirped the girl. Oddly, she had a Southern California accent.

Tony groaned. "Of course." Natasha knew enough about business to see that the saying "There's no such thing as bad publicity" did not apply to what had happened in the last twenty four hours. His board of directors was going to be loud, despite the fact that this was civilian technology that anyone could download.

"And they have unsecured wifi here," Clint deadpanned.

"Well, no, but it doesn't help much if you write the wifi password in like fifty places."

"Great. Incompetence on top of corruption." It was amazing that Tony could emote as much exasperation while in his suit.

"I've found that the two often go hand in hand," said the blonde girl. "I mean look at this," she said pointing to a chair-like device in the center of the room. "It's obviously a memory suppression or alteration device-"

"Obviously?" interjected Clint.

She rolled her eyes. "Form follows function. The only other thing it could be is a torture device that happens to have the side effect of messing with memories. And honestly, there are easier and less expensive ways to torture someone. So unless you're trying to argue that your people are even stupider and more corrupt than we thought already, it's some sort of memory device." She flipped her hair giving Natasha the impression of a valley girl mad scientist. "Honestly, it's rather impressive in a starting-fire-with-rocks kind of way."

"It's just a chair with blinking lights," said Clint with a rough undercurrent to his voice. He was still agitated from his time under Loki's control and sensitive to anything vaguely related.

"I don't know the terms in English, but…." The girl began pointing things out on the device in Japanese. It wasn't Natasha's best language but she could usually follow along, even with some technical language. This was not the usual case.

"Right. Cleanse it with fire?" said Tony after the girl had finished.

"You understood that?" asked Clint.

"Yeah. They use different terms for parts of the brain than the actual Japanese, but it isn't hard to figure out the equivalents, and that-" Tony punctuated his statement by jabbing a finger at the chair. "-is an abomination. The only thing this could be good for is brainwashing."

"Speaking of which, what are you doing here?" asked the girl.

"We're here to make sure you don't take anything," replied Steve.

The girl gave the room a long look. "I don't know if I'm more offended that you think we'd want anything so primitive or that we'd want anything so unethical. I mean, honestly, look at this." She turned and pressed a button.

"Well that's double plus ungood," Clint said.

"Am I the only one who can't read Russian here?" asked Steve.

"I can't, but I'm from another planet. What's your excuse?"

Clint shook his head. "It says Memory Suppression Machine on the damn bootup screen."

Natasha had taken her eyes off the blonde girl for just long enough to look at the screen, but when she looked back up the girl was gone. "Where did she go?"

"Fucking ninjas," Clint growled as they all scanned the room.

Steve sighed. "I hate it when my body thinks there's going to be a fight and it doesn't happen. I mean I didn't want to fight a teenager, but-"

Natasha looked around. "Oh there was a fight all right, and I think we lost it."

"Well that isn't at all an ominous statement," said Tony absently as he poked at the screen.

Shino

"Ino, are you okay?" Shino asked.

Ino stood up from where she was dry heaving and wiped her mouth. "Yeah, I just had to give into my weaknesses for a bit to purge the Orochimaru influence." She grimaced. "Delved a little too deep into his memories to navigate that mess." Knowing what Shino did about Orochimaru, embracing weakness did sound like an effective way to get out of his mindset.

Shino shook his head. As a shinobi, Shino had thought he had a fairly nuanced appreciation for truth and lies. There were truth, lies, half truths, lies by telling the truth so badly they don't believe you, and so on. It was all just human nature and psychology. However, missions with Shikako had taught him that it was entirely possible to be so good at lying that the universe itself changed so that your lies became the truth. He had no idea how this worked, and would likely not appreciate the knowledge if he had it, but he couldn't deny the fact that their entirely made up invasion excuse was looking to be very real.

If it was anyone else, Shino would have just chalked it up to coincidence. He didn't believe in coincidences where Shikako was concerned any more.

Ino rolled her shoulders. "You know, one day I'm going to go on a mission with Shikako where everything goes as planned and we don't need to fall back on desperately improvising."

"Did you hit your head? Why? You-"

"Yes, I realize that was a stupid thing to tempt the universe with and it should have never left my mouth. I probably shouldn't think it too loudly."

Shino despaired a little that this superstitious statement actually made quite a bit of sense to him. He missed thinking that the universe was a fundamentally rational place.

It didn't take long to get back to the rest of the division even traveling under stealth, and it didn't surprise Shino that Shikako was waiting for them with words of encouragement.

"Good job, guys, especially you Ino. We've already got riots in five major cities."

"That was fast," Ino said. "Were you helping things along?"

Shino didn't see how she could have, but he also didn't see how interdimensional travel was possible either, but that was within Shikako's abilities.

"Honestly, I think someone else is trying to take advantage of things," Shikako replied. She shook her head. "Though a lot of people are very offended that the government is willing to drop a nuke on their heads if it's convenient. Either way, I'd guess it'll be about a week for all that to settle down. Conveniently, that's how long it will take for the seals to charge to get home."

Shino blinked and added another data point to his list of examples of how the universe ran on narrative logic when Shikako was around. "So we should be prepared for something exciting to happen just as we leave?"

Shikako sighed. "That sounds like my luck, yeah. Well, you guys bought us enough time that Ino and I can do some flower arranging."

"What." That did not seem to be in character for Shikako. Turning flowers into some sort of tentacled guard organism, sure. Sending a passive aggressive message that only someone with specialized training would recognize was also a possibility. Flower arranging for the sake of flower arranging did not compute.

Ino sighed. "It will help with getting rid of the remaining icky feelings from Orochimaru."

"If you really want your mind blown, Hana will be joining us."

"What."

"I know, right?" Shikako cleared her throat. "And our unexpected guest wants to help too."

Ino shook her head. "Well, that'll be interesting."

Bruce

Bruce had been having a stressful yet oddly boring week. Technically they were in the middle of an alien invasion, yet he had very little to do except stare at the readouts for instruments to detect gamma radiation. He didn't even have that many people to talk to.

Of the Avengers, Tony was running damage control from having shot a dog on live television and having his company's logo on a nuke. And Bruce thought he had PR problems after Harlem.

Steve was off trying to keep various military units from doing anything too stupid. It seemed that some general had the bright idea to assemble artillery to strike at the invaders, except there were still a lot of civilians in there and the National Guard, in a moment of paranoia about ninja infiltrators, refused to let the civilians out.

(Bruce wondered if the invaders were actually ninjas or decided to pretend to be ninjas just to provoke that kind of reaction. It certainly let them keep hostages/meat shields without making it seem like they were hiding behind civilians. In fact, from what he could see online, the invaders were coming out as the good guys and protecting the civilians in their territory.)

Clint and Natasha were unavailable doing spy things. One of them was tracking down evidence that the riots were being instigated by a third party, while the other was following leads about how a secret facility had been put in place that Fury didn't know about. Bruce had originally thought that Natasha was tracking down the influence behind the rioters but last he heard Clint was working on it.

Well, no, actually the last last he heard, Clint had found out that Shield had misplaced Loki's mind control stick and was pointedly ignoring orders about anything else.

As for Shield proper, the scientists were hunkering down and not interacting with anyone they didn't know closely in fear that they might be accused of cutting people open for their brains and were therefore avoiding Bruce. Bruce in turn was avoiding the agents because the new discussions about ethics in a secret security agency were giving him headaches. On the plus side, they were almost universally in favor of stricter ethical guidelines. On the minus side, this was mostly because they were worried that unethical behavior would give invaders PR leverage like what was happening now. Security through obscurity was obviously not working.

The invaders were mostly sitting quietly and not doing anything, which sadly made them a very attractive option as compared to the federal government right now. He didn't know how serious they were about it, but people in Ohio were talking about secession, at least online, and inviting the invaders to be the new nation's army. He was absolutely certain that some of those people were just trolling, but he was also certain that was a smaller fraction than he would like.

So, yes, it was a lot of staring at a bunch of readings that kept showing normal amounts of background gamma radiation. Nothing at all like that spike there… or that one. Or….

Bruce slammed on the intercom button. "We've got four portals opening! Four!" Right. This was the Fifth Division. He was hoping that this wasn't First through Fourth coming to visit.

Shikako 2

In order to disguise their need for food, the Fifth Division had fortified an area approximately fifteen miles in diameter. To the north and west there was basically just farmland, so it was a fairly open border, and they were bordered on the east by I-475 and the south by the Maumee River.

They honestly didn't really need that much room and the only reason they had pushed it that far was because there was a Sam's Club next to I-475. Despite the crazy amounts of food in a warehouse store, it wouldn't last a small army of ninja that long. Still, that, plus the other food stores that they captured in their area let them last long enough for the portals to charge in relative comfort. Honestly, no one had thought to cut off their water, so that alone would have been enough to let them survive the week. (Of course, that might be because they had encircled a wastewater treatment plant in their territory and they didn't want that cut off from their network. Maybe. Shikako didn't know how modern water infrastructure worked.)

So they had food. They had shelter. They had water. They had time. The only thing left was a plan to get out. The basic problem was that the Americans had tried dropping a nuke on them before and they really didn't want them trying another one as they were leaving. Yes, they had promised dire consequences if they did, but no one was willing to bet against the stupidity of mankind.

Unfortunately, on the short list of people who could stop a nuke, activate a dimension transfer on her own and escape and evade anything sent at her was Shikako, so guess who got to play distraction/rear guard?

"You know, I'd feel better about this if you guys were just a little bit worried about me," she complained.

"Nah, you got this," Kiba said with a hearty slap on her back.

Shino adjusted his glasses. "I find it hard to be concerned about your safety. Why? Because I'm more worried about what you have planned as a distraction."

"Those poor people," Ino whimpered.

Shikako closed her eyes with a sigh. When she opened them again they were glowing. "Isobu knows that these are not the people that killed Haku. Isobu will hold back."

With four portals they could theoretically get out in about sixteen minutes. She was going to try to delay for twenty. Normally she wouldn't need a fudge factor, because she could just sense how many people were left, but her sensory ability had been messed up by becoming a jinchuuriki. It didn't impact her in everyday life, but when drawing on the Bijuu Chakra she lost the ability to sense beyond Isobu's chakra. She thought it was something she'd be able to work around given a few months to practice, but that was time they didn't have.

Their escape was complicated by the fact that without the Iwa shinobi and Aburame on this side of the portals, their trick with the cloud cover wouldn't hold, and they very much wanted to hide the fact that the portals existed lest those idiots dropped another nuke.

Thankfully they had the Maumee River right there and Isobu had a bit of an affinity with water.

Unfortunately for everyone in a fifteen mile radius, Isobu couldn't actually manipulate water on that scale unless he and Shikako synchronized and Shikako had been a jinchuuriki for about two weeks - two weeks that had a distinct lack of opportunities to train. They could, however, force synchronization by sharing an emotional state, and they were both behind on their grieving.

For some reason the National Guard had deployed south of the Maumee River, in particular fortifying the I-475 Maumee River crossing. From the point of view of trying to threaten or contain Fifth Division, it was stupid. It made more sense as a defensive posture if you didn't realize that ninjas could walk on water… or that it would put them at ground zero for Isobu's technique.

Well, it actually wasn't really a technique. He just soaked his chakra into the river, causing it to evaporate into mist and then fog. It expanded above the region Fifth Division was staging in, but kept the ninja out of the effect. Then, in the chakra soaked fog, Isobu mourned. He poured his grief at losing his partner into the fog. He added his frustration at not being good enough to save Haku. That was followed by a current of anger that people would dare do such evil. Underneath it all was a thread of happiness/appreciation/joy at having known such a good man. Like the salt in a sugary dish, it sharpened the impact of the other emotions. It all came together in a soundless scream.

This was my friend.

Anyone else would have been completely incapicitated by being at ground zero of the first chance that Isobu had to grieve for his loss, especially with flashes of Isobu's memory of being extracted flickering in and out. Shikako could cheat. She split herself into a part focused on the mission and a part focused on just feeling. To Isobu's emotions she added the loneliness at losing an entire world, the bitterness and self loathing at letting the Uchiha massacre occur, the rage that the multiverse would deposit her somewhere so close to her old life but yet so far and tied it together with the love of the family and friends of her new life, including that for an entirely too pretty boy who once crowned her with ice.

As their emotions combined, their synchronization improved. As the synchronization improved, Isobu's control expanded. As his control expanded, there were side effects on Shikako's body. A crown of coral grew on her brow influenced by their remembrance. Coral grew down from it, to form a kind of helm, though it covered one eye and coral armor grew around her. Around that grew a steadily increasing corona of Bijuu Chakra, amplifying the emotional storm swirling in the fog. Fifth Division, not being directly in the fog, wouldn't be overwhelmed, though they probably could still feel the emotions. The American soldiers were probably having a worse day.

According to the part of her that was focused on the mission, Isobu and her emotional part had been sharing their grief for seven minutes before the first attack: missiles. Too small to be conventional military hardware, they were probably anti-armor missiles that were fired from the Iron Man suit and were wholly ineffective against a jinchuuriki at the level of three tails. The chakra aura detonated them early and the chakra pressure kept away any shrapnel.

That was followed by lasers. The problem with coherent light attacks was that they didn't stay coherent through the Bijuu Shroud. Iron Man moved into the cloud, probably hoping that his weapons would be more effective closer in. He probably didn't expect that the cloud was the medium for the emotional broadcast because he crashed more or less immediately.

Yeah, this was not the kind of battle that someone with untreated PTSD and a guilt complex should be trying to fight (unless they could shadow split).

Captain America had entered the fog and stood still for a moment. His emotions seemed muddled, but Shikako could recognize the determination that kept him going regardless. There was a moment of confusion then renewed determination. After a moment, Shikako decided that he must have been relying on Tony's sensors to figure out where she was and having lost track of her, decided to check on his teammate.

Her mission half wondered how they could have been tracking her and decided that Chakra must emit gamma or some other sort of detectable exotic radiation, which unfortunately meant they probably had detected the portals going up. Still, it was impressive that his suit contained instruments of sufficient sensitivity to sense her through the Chakra soup of the fog.

Unfortunately, a nuke didn't care about precision targeting, so she sent a wordless nudge to Isobu to expand the cloud cover and thus their detection range. Dropping the fog and relying on her standard sensing might have made more sense, but they couldn't afford the period of blindness that would occur if she transitioned out of Bijuu mode. Thankfully, their Chakra influence had reached Lake Erie, which vastly increased the amount of water they could draw on. It might cause problems when the water falls back out of the sky later, but America was dealing with the tail end of a drought, so it might not be that bad.

Her ruminations were interrupted by a sharp spike of rage. It didn't come from either Isobu or Shikako, but it took them a few moments to realize it. They both tried synchronizing to it before that realization occured. Shikako's mission self spent a moment wondering if that was fortunate or unfortunate, before discarding the evaluation as pointless and started to identify the source. A moment later it came to her: the Hulk.

Well, with that size and anger it might be the Abomination, but given the two other Avengers, she doubted it. Either way, it was someone big and someone very angry. There were a variety of possibilities here. They could play hide and seek. They could just jump in the water and see how the Hulk would react. There were any number of ranged attacks available from coral shards to just throwing rocks. Shikako in a split second decided that this was an educational moment and directed Isobu to engage the Hulk in a fist fight.

Conventional wisdom was that the Bijuu lacked combat skill simply because they so overwhelmed any opponent that they didn't need it. Conventional wisdom forgot that each Bijuu had eight siblings and they were each freer with physical violence than human siblings, since the worse that happened after roughhousing was one of them would need to reform later. So they actually had a lot of practice fighting people the same size as them - or in Isobu's case, being the third of nine children, bigger than them… say about the same scale as Shikako's armored form to the Hulk. It was a good time for Isobu to get used to combat in a new body.

The Hulk's first indication that he knew where they were was a roar as he received a flying kick to the face while crossing the I-475 bridge of the Maumee River. It was the kind of move that Isobu wasn't capable of in his own body, and he wanted to try it out after seeing Lee do a dynamic entry.

The Hulk flew backwards through a sandbag barricade into some sort of armored vehicle, which was pushed backward and only stopped when it collided with another vehicle. It crumpled slightly from the impact, which was made worse when the Hulk pushed off the armor. He pounded the ground and then launched himself at Shikako's body.

He was fast for his body type, but not fast enough for how blatantly he telegraphed his attacks. They slipped underneath his punch, one hand pulled on his wrist, while the other punched upwards into his ribs. A twist of the waist and the Hulk slid off of the rounded back of their armor and smashed head first into one of the bridge's dividing barricades.

Shikako's mission self forgot one small detail: that Isobu and her emotional self were still synchronizing with emotions they felt. Isobu roared with anger that someone would interrupt their mourning, and Shikako's emotional self had more than enough reasons to be angry that she went along with the flow. There was an increasing feeling in her life like she was some cosmic plaything and she was not amused.

So while Shikako's mission self could think of many more tactically intelligent courses of action, she was out voted. They closed range with the Hulk and began, well, beating the crap out of him. They didn't do so unintelligently, however. Shikako's emotional half was actually offended by the Hulk's lack of technique and they made that point rather thoroughly.

Again, physical violence meant something different to Bijuu than humans, and Isobu had kept his promise to hold back. So after a few minutes of what was essentially Bijuu level patty cake, Isobu began leaking feelings of enjoyment, and Shikako was also familiar with enjoying a good spar. It was a very ninja social activity. Incredibly, the Hulk began radiating that feeling as well. If Shikako had to guess, he wasn't used to dealing with anyone on his own level without them seriously wanting to kill him.

That thought led to feelings of understanding and empathy leaking into the cloud. Isobu knew very well what it was like to feel trapped in someone else's skin. Shikako had similar feelings, though it was on a much less literal level as she sometimes felt trapped in the Elemental Nations.

The fist fight slowed and stopped as the three started empathizing over shared loneliness and isolation. They sat next to each other and took comfort that there was someone who understood.

Eventually, Shikako's mission half, who had been keeping track of time, prodded Isobu and her other half. They gave the Hulk a pat on the back and Shikako activated the dimensional transference she had been preparing while her other half and Isobu had been dealing with the Avengers.

(And when Iron Man and Captain America made it to the bridge, they were taken aback by the sight of the Hulk sitting there with tears in his eyes.)

Tony 3

The worst part about this mess was that by some metrics they had actually won. They wanted the invaders gone and they were gone. Of course, in the process they set off riots in forty-nine of the states. Probably the only reason Alaska didn't have any was because it was too cold for a good riot. Thankfully they were dying down, but Tony suspected that the only reason that the riots in California and Texas were stopping was because they were confused that they were actually agreeing on something for once.

For another win that didn't feel like a win, stock in his company had gone up. Pepper had done a great job with the messaging for "this is why we got out of the weapons business." She probably deserved a raise and a "thanks for putting up with this shit" present.

In a similar vein, the internet as a whole had absolved Tony for shooting the dog on live television. Internet sleuths matched the pre-interview photos to pictures posted from inside the occupied area showing the guy and his dog walking around together totally fine. In fact, in some shots the guy was riding his dog, which somehow according to the internet made the fact that Tony shot the dog in the first place perfectly okay. How were they even sure it was the same dog?

Yeah, while Tony could take advantage of how the public groupmind worked, understanding it was beyond him. In fact, the top tweet trending on Twitter was a video clip of Tony bragging that he had privatized world peace with the line: "A better idea than I thought."

Despite dumping so much on Pepper, things had been hectic, but now things had finally calmed down enough to actually talk about what the hell they went through. Tony was going to get a complex about this conference room or something.

"This is the leading theory by the analysts," Hill began.

"Who should be writing romance novels," growled Fury.

Ignoring him, Hill continued, "It starts with Subject A who traveled to our planet for whatever reason these people have. He was captured by rogue elements and experimented on. After missing a check in, Shikako Nara decided to find her missing boyfriend."

"And brought an army?" asked Clint.

"At this point the analysts believe that the army was there to keep her from going on a rampage while looking for Subject A."

"I can see that."

"Then upon arriving, they were greeted by a nuke. They decided that the government is too untrustworthy to reveal the real reason that they're here and fomented chaos as cover while searching for Subject A. Upon finding him, Nara was so upset that the rest of the army decided to flee the planet and let her have her temper tantrum somewhere where they didn't care if anything got broken."

"I can't blame them," Bruce muttered. The man still didn't have his head in the game, but seeing as that girl had managed to reduce the Hulk to tears it was hard to fault the fact that he didn't seem to feel like anything was real.

"The analysts also decided that if you hadn't been there as a punching bag, the damage could have been much worse."

"That doesn't actually make me feel better."

"Do we know anything about Subject A?"

"Just what we have from the visions: he's probably dead and he probably died in pain."

Tony shook his head at the understatement. He felt like he had been torn apart from the inside out and for some reason he had the impression that it had been worse for the guy. "Do we know who to thank for their hospitality?" Because Tony had a few leftover Jericho missiles that he kept for parts that he never got around to dismantling.

Hill seemed hesitant at this question. Seeing this, Fury stood up. "Hydra. Hydra survived and infiltrated both the US government and Shield."

Steve jumped to his feet. "Fucking hell! Hydra?! The Nazis?! That Hydra? It wasn't an obnoxious hyperbole like everyone seems to be using about their political opponents now?"

"Language?" It popped out of Tony's mouth for some reason he couldn't identify.

"As far as we can tell, a few Hydra plants panicked when Nara started hammering the Nazi button on live television," Hill said. "In the process they outed themselves."

"There are literal Nazis in the American government. No wonder she felt like invading with nine thousand of her closest friends was an actually reasonable course of action." Steve threw his hands in the air and started pacing. "And I can't even be offended she was calling me a Nazi anymore."

"I'm still feeling a little offended," Tony said. To be fair, he had been called that before, but that was for stuff he or his company had actually done.

"Steve." They all stared at Fury's use of his first name. "We found research in North Institute that would allow inducing dementia via poison."

Steve stood up. "Excuse me," he said and turned to walk out the door. As soon as it closed behind him they all heard him scream.

"Hydra was also responsible for the nuke authorization. They're still arguing if it will be more damaging to admit it or pretend that the president okayed it."

Natasha shook her head. "It's attitudes like that that let Hydra take root in the first place."

Sasuke

Shikako leaned back on her heels and looked upwards, enjoying the sun. "Wow. I can't believe everything turned out so well. Maybe my luck is getting better."

Ino bent over laughing at that, while the rest of Team Seven took on various pained looks, even Kakashi behind his mask. Shikako knew better than to taunt their luck. It had ears and was a vindictive bastard.

"Rude."

Still laughing, Ino said. "I bet we just went up against the only people in the multiverse that have worse luck than you."

"Oh. That makes more sense. Oh…. That really does make sense. I feel bad now, like I'm the world's worst bully."

"The multiverse's worst bully."

Sasuke cleared his throat. "I'd just like to get back to the part where you guys decided that the girl with chakra hypersensitivity should become a jinchuuriki."

"It's not that bad! It just gets a little ticklish every now and then."

Sasuke rubbed his forehead. "You know, your life only started making sense to me when I realized that Itachi must have damaged the part of your brain that interprets pain when you took that Tsukiyomi."

"I do not have brain damage."

"Actually the timeline for that fits fairly well," said Kakashi.

Ino nodded. "It would explain so much."

"I don't have brain damage. Anyway, we had to seal Isobu because there wasn't enough natural chakra to sustain him on the desert planet. Choosing me was Isobu's idea. He didn't really trust anyone else in Fifth Division."

Naruto nodded. "Yeah, Shikako actually used his name," he said as if it was something profound. "How did you find out about that anyway?"

Shikako rolled her eyes. "It's not like it's impossible to find with a little light reading."

Naruto shuddered. "I've seen what you consider light reading."

Sasuke shook his head. "I sometimes wonder how much information is buried in the Nara archives that no one knows, not because it's classified but because they're in books you only read because you want something to put you to sleep and the Nara never need sleeping aids."

Shikako shuddered. "A lot. There are journals, Sasuke. I swear I have ancestors that kept journals for no other reason than to document the best napping spots and then - bam! - in the middle you'll find the instructions for a new jutsu."

Ino gave her a look. "And you never considered writing down the good parts?"

"No!" Shikako folded her arms. "Anyone else who wants to know will have to suffer through it themselves."

"Speaking of suffering," Ino said, "You are getting all the therapy."

"What? I don't need therapy."

Sasuke bit back a laugh at that.

"Kako, I could feel how much of that emotional wave was you and how much was Isobu. I don't care that you've somehow managed to weaponize your lack of coping mechanisms. We have a limit for emotional instability for our jounin and that limit is actually somewhere before they reach 'angrier than a Bijuu.'"

"I'm not-" Shikako looked at her stomach. "Isobu, you're not supposed to take her side!"

"What I want to know is when you found time to train with Isobu," said Naruto.

Shikako shuffled sheepishly. "I didn't really. I just sort of gave him control of my body for that fight."

Sasuke stared at her flatly. "You what?" The thing that most jinchuuriki fear and train to avoid - the thing that was supposed to break the seal - Shikako decided was the first thing she'd try. The sad part was that he did actually believe she'd do that. It was a very Shikako reaction to, well, anything.

"I trust him! We're friends! And while he was busy fighting, I prepped the dimensional transference. Teamwork!"

Sasuke shook his head and was about to say something when he heard Naruto say. "Hey, Kurama, want to give that a try?"

Sasuke shuddered. He remembered when Shikako was the good influence. Actually, he wasn't sure he did. At the moment he couldn't think of any examples, but he remembered remembering them. That was almost as good, right?

Right?

Omakes

Non canon omake:

"...Either that or their leader was annoyed that Kishimoto made her a guy in the manga and was looking for an excuse."

Fury turned to look at the analyst who seemed to only just realize that he spoke aloud. "What manga?" he asked slowly.

The analyst gulped. "Naruto? Written by Masahi Kishimoto? Or was it Masashi? Mashi? Look!" He turned and brought up what looked like an anime wiki page on his computer side by side a picture of what seemed like the invader's leadership. "Look, this is Ino Yamanaka, who looks like an anime version of this woman. This is Hana Inuzuka. Kiba Inuzuka. Shino Aburame. And the leader called herself Nara Shikako? Well, this is Shikamaru Nara and Shikako is the female form of Shikamaru."

"Are you saying we were invaded by people from an anime?"

"Or really dedicated cosplayers."

Omake 2:

A crown of coral grew on her brow in remembrance. Coral grew down from it, to form a kind of helm, though it covered one eye and coral armor grew around her.

(During what seemed like the endless wait while the portal seals were charging, it came up that Isobu was a turtle and he just felt more comfortable in a shell. Somehow that led to Ino challenging him to at least create a more fashionable shell. Long story short, after a lot of internet browsing Isobu decided to base his new shell off of anime super robots since it went with Shikako's sword.)

When they felt Iron Man enter the fog, water shot out of the fins on the armor's back, launching the pair into the air. Through the chakra that permeated the fog, Shikako could feel the shock roll off the superhero as he beheld her glowing eye and sword. Iron Man only had time to get out one line before the Sword of the Thunder God lashed out and destroyed his leg repulsors.

"It's a Gundam!"