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“Oh yeah, what did you guys do before joining the detective agency?” Nakajima asks, and Shikako turns to look at the rest of the table in the silence that follows. Nakajima, when she glances back at him, looks just a little confused about the silence, before Dazai breaks it.
“What do you think? It’s tradition to have newcomers guess their senior’s former jobs.”
“Both of us?” Shikako cuts in, tilting her head to the side a little. “Together or individually?”
“Individually!” Dazai says, clapping his hands together. “Once you’ve both guessed we’ll let you know whether or not you’re right!”
“Hmm… then… the Tanizakis are students?” Nakajima says.
Shikako sees no reason to change the guess, especially seeing as how Junichiro’s face at Nakajima’s guess made it obvious that he had guessed correctly. “I bet that Naomi’s still a student, judging by her uniform. Tanizaki-kun the elder is probably a recent graduate.”
“Boo, it’s no fun if you both guess the same thing!” Dazai says, his flair for dramatics alive and well.
“They’re right though,” Junichiro says. “We were both students prior to joining the agency. Guessing correctly is kind of the point of the guessing game.”
Dazai seems to immediately forget his pouting, instead gesturing to the man sitting next to him. “What about Kunikida?”
“Stop. My former job-” Kunikida starts before Nakajima interrupts him.
“A government official?” He guesses.
Shikako nods in solidarity, her mind flashing to the most stressed out people she knows. The Hokage, the Medic-Nin, her Father, and Inoichi. Pretty much all of those are either government officials or medical workers, and for all Kunikida’s enthusiasm regarding living well he doesn’t seem to have much actual medical knowledge, so government worker makes the most sense.
“Don’t guess the same thing!” Dazai says, pointing at Shikako. “Guess something new!”
“Then… a flower shop owner?” She didn’t think the flower shop contributed much to Inoichi’s stress levels, but there weren’t many other ideas she had.
“Ahh, pity. He was a math teacher at his old school.” Dazai fills them in.
“Really?” Nakajima sounds very surprised about that, but Shikako thinks it makes perfect sense. Iruka-sensei was also regularly stressed out. Perhaps she should have guessed that he was a teacher.
“It’s in the past, I don’t want to remember it.” Kunikida says, pushing up his glasses. Shikako nods sympathetically at him, but her sympathy goes entirely unnoticed.
“How about me then?” Dazai asks, pointing to himself with a smile.
“Dazai-san was…” Nakajima trails off. Shikako doesn’t bother to fill the silence, simply watching him squint at Dazai with a furrowed brow.
“It’s no use, kid. His former job is one of the seven wonders of the armed Detective agency.” Kunikida says.
“Wasn’t there a prize for the first person to guess that?” Junichiro adds.
“That’s right. Since no one has guessed it yet, the prize has been piling up.” Dazai says.
“I guessed that he was a type of criminal, but he said I was wrong.” Kunikida sighs a little. “But since criminals are hardworking, that was impossible anyway.”
“By the way, how much is the prize?” Nakajima asks, entirely failing to hide exactly how interested he is in the answer.
“You want to participate? Right now, it’s 700,000 yen.”
Shikako glanced to her right in surprise. Was that killing intent? No, there was no killing in that intent, but still, Nakajima is the first person she’s felt exuding intent in this dimension at all, and she’d thought he could only do that as a tiger.
“If you guess right, you get it? Really?”
“A suicide advocate never goes back on his word.”
“Salaryman.”
“No.”
“Researcher.”
“No.”
“Factory Worker.”
“No.”
“Writer.”
“No.”
“Actor.”
“No, but an actor would be embarrassing.”
Shikako snorts into her tea. “Especially considering nobody has any idea what you did before working at the agency, so if you had been an actor you couldn’t have been a very good one.”
Dazai’s laugh in response to her remark is interrupted by Kunikida’s voice. “So you really were either jobless or a homeless person?”
“No.” Dazai stands up, turning his attention toward Shikako. “Any guesses from you?”
She looks at him and his eager expression for a moment, before her eyes catch on the beautiful waitress he had wanted to have strangle him to death earlier and an idea comes to her.
“Did you work for a Suicide Hotline?”
“I still think you guys didn’t have to laugh quite that hard at my guess for Dazai’s job,” Shikako pouts. She isn’t actually upset at all, but Nakajima clearly needs someone to distract him as they make their way to watch for smugglers near the new client’s office building, and Shikako has always believed that worrying over others is the easiest way to stop worrying over yourself.
“It’s just… very on the nose.” Junichiro says, looking very apologetic.
“He’d have been so bad at it!” Naomi adds cheerfully. “He’d probably ask if he could join them!”
“He’d probably ask them to call back if they failed so he could tally which methods worked best,” Nakajima adds.
“Honestly, he could have been really good at it purely by accident. Some people do snap out of downward spirals if you confuse them enough - not for very long, but it happens.” That was one of the oddest things that she’d learned in her time on Team 7, especially when working with Kakashi. Sometimes the best thing you could do for your friends was to baffle them with your bullshit. It had an odd way of putting the world into perspective.
“This way,” their client says, turning another corner. Nakajima sobers rather quickly at the reminder that they were getting closer to their destination, and therefore closer to what he considered dangerous.
“Mafia… we’re all going to die…”
“It’ll be fine, since I’m going with you!” Junichiro says, being as assuring as he can manage.
“You’re also an ability user?” Nakajima says. “What’s your ability?”
“Ah, don’t expect much since it’s really not for battle,” Junichiro says, rubbing the back of his head. Naomi leans over, but before she can add her own two cents the client’s voice calls their attention to an alleyway.
“We’re here.”
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Junichiro sounds confused. “Smugglers are cowards, so they always have an escape route, but if you come into the alley from the side we did…”
Shikako turns, her attention caught by something wandering into her sensory range. So they did get sent through with me, she thinks . She probably should have spent more time looking rather than simply assuming they’d managed to make it out. None of them had luck that good.
Of course, then their client whips out a pair of guns, and her attention is very effectively diverted back to the present.
The day before, in a warehouse:
“I’m going to hire him!” the man in the brown trench coat declares, to the groans of his coworkers.
“Dazai…” the blonde growls, his glasses reflecting the light of the moon ominously. Shikako thinks this is the perfect time to make her appearance.
“Oh, neat! Do you think you could hire me too? I’m getting a little tired of camping out in random warehouses.”
The entire room startles, several people taking solid, combat-ready stances in response to her sudden appearance – well, sudden to them. Shikako had just stepped around the pile of boxes she’d been sitting behind as she observed the fight between Dazai and the were-tiger kid.
The were-tiger that had exuded killing intent – the first intent she’d felt since landing in this dimension nearly 36 hours ago. Really, she’s not sure what Tsunade expected sending Kakashi, Sasuke, and her out on a mission together, but she’s pretty sure the mission report – once she figures out a way back – is going to be such good payback for sending them on a C-rank of all things. Shikako probably shouldn’t enjoy driving her Hokage to drink, but well, that can probably be chalked up to Kakashi’s influence.
Annoying, then, that she’s trying to reconstruct a seal she only saw for about 30 seconds from memory. Reversing the dimensional transference would be so much simpler if she had a copy of the original to study. A shame that she’d woken up with Kakashi and Sasuke nowhere in sight, and nowhere in her sensory range either. Hopefully they managed to avoid the seal’s effects.
“Who are you?” the blonde man demands, sounding distinctly hostile.
“How long have you been there?” the one in the trench coat – Dazai, if Shikako is remembering the Blonde’s irritation earlier correctly – sounds far less hostile, instead merely befuddled at her appearance.
Deciding to play off that, Shikako adopts her best nothing-to-see-here posture and rubs at the back of her head sheepishly. “I showed up right when you poked him back into human form, or I’d have helped earlier” she offers. “I just sensed killing intent, and figured it was worth checking out.”
“Killing intent?”
“Mmm!” Shikako hums in affirmation, nodding cheerfully. These people displayed powers that she hadn’t seen from anyone else in this dimension, and Dazai’s explanation to the were-tiger kid earlier made it sound like people having superhuman abilities was a known phenomenon and something that would likely give her an in with this group.
It's clear that the blonde doesn’t find her nod to be sufficient explanation, but Dazai is the one who speaks first. “Are you an ability user too?”
“I guess,” Shikako says, shrugging noncommittally. “Nothing as cool as turning into a tiger, but I do keep control of my mental faculties at least.”
The kid on the floor – who had only just had the fact that he turned into a bloodthirsty tiger explained to him – wilted a little at the reminder. Shikako felt a little bad, but not enough to acknowledge it.
Dazai hummed a little, thoughtfully, before grinning widely. “Alright, I’ve decided!” he declares, before pausing dramatically. “We’ll decide tomorrow!”
“DAZAI!” the blonde reaches out and grabs Dazai’s collar, looking like he’s about to throttle the man. Shikako doesn’t bother to interfere, simply watching as Dazai slumps limply in the blonde man’s grasp with a vacantly amused expression.
We’ll decide tomorrow, huh?
There isn’t enough time to reach her shadow out to the woman – the guns are already aimed directly for Junichiro, and Naomi is already throwing her arms out as though to become a shield for the man herself. Seeing no other option, Shikako shunshins directly toward the woman – putting herself in the path of the bullets in the process. She’s sure she’s been hit – the blood staining the client’s business attire is proof enough of that – but the pain hasn’t hit yet, so Shikako is able to reach out normally and smack a knockout tag on the woman’s forehead, stopping the gunfire in its tracks. She turns back to the other three in the alley, glancing over them to assess the damage.
Huh, how fortunate. None of them seem to have been hit at all. She must have taken a lot of bullets to the chest, with the rate those guns are firing.
Shikako drops into shadow state for just a moment – just long enough to heal herself, stop actively bleeding out – and then turns to pick up the guns the woman had dropped.
“Well that was exciting!” she declares casually.
“Shikako…” Nakajima looks horrified. Shikako glances down, and at the vivid redness of her vest remembers that her wounds may be healed but her associates likely don’t know that.
“Don’t worry about it!” she says, waving a hand. Nakajima flinches violently, and Shikako sheepishly points the hand – and the gun it’s holding – back at the floor. “I’m fine, really. Is everyone else OK?”
“We have to get out of here,” Junichiro says, looking very pale for someone who didn’t just take a bullet. Shikako squints at him a little, attempting to see any blood she might have missed. “She called for Akutagawa.”
Nakajima let out a little squeak at the name, and Shikako places it as the name of the guy Kidokawa had told them to look out for just this morning. Supposedly the most dangerous member of the Port Mafia. “Hm…” she said, consideringly. “Well, you all should definitely get going then.”
“What about you?” Nakajima asks, still looking very concerned for her safety – or perhaps her sanity, it’s hard to tell.
“Ah, I’m going to meet up with an old friend!” Shikako declares casually. It’s only when Nakajima and Junichiro get somehow, impossibly, paler that she realizes what that sounds like, and starts to laugh a little. “Not Akutagawa!” she assures them, wishing she weren’t holding a gun in each hand so she could wave the idea away. “I’ve never met him. Just my old teammates from my last job – they’re in town, apparently, and I want to say hello.”
“Aw, you do care!” Kakashi’s voice rings out from behind Shikako, and she turns with a grin to the entrance of the alley. “I was wondering how long it'd take to track you down, but this is faster than even I was expecting!”
“You know her?” The voice that pops up is unfamiliar, but the face is recognizable even if Shikako had only seen it in a photo this morning.
Shikako blinks at Kakashi, Akutagawa, and Sasuke – her teammates flanking the Port Mafia member as he approaches the Armed Detective Agency members - and has a realization. “Did you two join the Mafia? It’s only been, like, two days!”
Sasuke’s face says he’s laughing at her internally – not that anyone would see through that professional façade without knowing him nearly as well as Shikako does. Kakashi, meanwhile, pulls out a familiar orange book, flipping it open to a dog eared page and holding it up in front of his face.
“We figured you’d likely land yourself in the most dangerous situation you could manage within a week, and the Mafia seemed like a good guess. Plus, would you look at that!” he says, widening his eyes over the top of the book and darting them across the alley. “We were right!”
Shikako rolls her eyes at them. “I’ll have you know that I didn’t join a violent criminal enterprise on my second day in a new location.” She says as smugly as she can manage, turning her nose up to really sell the bit. “Unlike some people.”
“First day, technically” Sasuke corrects. Kakashi just looks pointedly down at the blood-spattered form of their fake client lying on the ground just behind where the Port Mafia members now stand.
“She’s only unconscious!” Shikako protests when Kakashi’s gaze shifts back to her with his visible eyebrow raised skeptically. Sasuke, meanwhile, is glaring at her.
“So the blood is yours?” he says, sounding very concerned, in that Uchiha way that means he really just sounds pissed off. “Rule one, Kako. You’re the one who implemented it in the first place, I don’t know why you’re so bad at following it.”
“What’s rule one?” Akutagawa asks, seeming casually interested in their conversation, as though this little diversion doesn’t affect him in the least. Who knows, maybe it doesn’t.
Kakashi and Sasuke don’t answer him, despite Akutagawa turning to look at them both, instead both staring at Shikako until she sighs dramatically. “No dying,” she says. “Rule one is No Dying. And I didn’t break it!” she insists. “See? Very much not dead!”
Kakashi’s eyebrows raise while Sasuke’s drop even further into a glare.
“Really!” Shikako says, putting on her best innocent expression. “I only got shot a few dozen times, and I’m already better, see?” She twirls around striking a pose when she stops. “Totally fine!”
Akutagawa apparently decides he’s had enough of this conversation, and that Shikako isn’t a threat, because he looks around at the other occupants of the alley. Eventually his gaze lands on Nakajima. “So, you’re the were-tiger.” Nakajima looks utterly terrified to have been singled out by the man he had been explicitly told to avoid, and Junichiro isn’t having any of it. He stands up and moves into Akutagawa’s line of sight, standing between him and Nakajima.
“What of it?”
Akutagawa looks at him dismissively, and then his form starts to shift. Shikako is fascinated by the display of power - it’s not Chakra, not really, but it’s similar enough that she can sort of sense it anyway.
What’s more interesting is that Akutagawa is the second person in this dimension she’s felt exuding any sort of intent, and his is definitely killing intent. Junichiro is in his way, and Akutagawa very clearly intends to kill him for the inconvenience.
Of course, Shikako would feel kind of guilty for letting Junichiro get killed - she may have only known the guy for a few hours, really, but he seems nice enough. So she figures intervening is the best thing to do.
Her shadow catches Akutagawa, but the monstrous power erupting out of him doesn’t slow down in the slightest. Naomi jumps between the monster and Junichiro, receiving a chunk clawed out of her back for her efforts and collapsing.
“Naomi!” Junichiro looks horrified, catching his sister’s blood-soaked body, but his gaze quickly shifts to hatred for Akutagawa. He almost seems to have forgotten his fear in his anger.
Akutagawa, meanwhile, has noticed that he can’t move his physical body any longer, and has turned his attention to Shikako - at least, as much as he can, without being able to turn his head.
“You intend to stop me?” He asks, casually. He doesn’t sound very bothered by the fact - but his killing intent has broadened its scope to include her as well.
“Do you intend to kill me for getting in your way?” Her question is casual, but her posture is ready, and it’s clear Sasuke and Kakashi have noticed. Shikako pulls a knockout tag from hammerspace, wrapping it around a kunai with Akutagawa caught in shadow possession. He watches his hands – which are mimicking hers - with a furrowed brow, unable to see what she’s holding while she keeps their heads facing the direction she has them at.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t you know it’s rude to answer a question with a question?”
“Technically,” Kakashi cuts in, “You answered a question with a question before he did.”
Shikako tilts her head up in exasperation, casually flicking the Kunai over to the ground between Kakashi’s feet as she moves to fold her arms, disguising the motion. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yes… whose side are you on?” Akutagawa sounds far more thoughtful with that question that Shikako had intended, but it doesn’t matter. She’s gotten the knockout tag over to Kakashi sensei, and she knows the answer well enough.
“Maa…” Kakashi hums as though he has to think about the answer. “Well, those who abandon their comrades are worse than trash…”
“Comrades?” Junichiro demands, only for his shoulders to drop from their hostile position moments later as Akutagawa slumps to the ground unconscious, the paper of the knockout tag fluttering from where it’s attached to the back of his head. Kakashi smiles with his visible eye, tilting his head in his usual friendly I’m-definitely-messing-with-you expression.
“So I couldn’t very well betray my cute little student, now could I?” Kakashi finishes his thought, hands tucked casually into his pockets.
Shikako walks over to inspect the unconscious Akutagawa. “Huh. He didn’t even sense you coming.”
“Not everyone has your abilities, Kako,” Sasuke says, rolling his eyes.
“Kakashi was speaking, Sasuke, it was obvious that he was approaching.”
“And he was in Shadow Possession, so he couldn’t have dodged even if he sensed Kakashi approaching.”
“He could have tried,” Shikako says, because it hadn’t even felt like Akutagawa was resisting the shadow possession. She doesn’t push the point any further than that though, instead walking toward Junichiro and the injured Naomi. “Can I see her injury?”
Junichiro looks at her suspiciously, apparently no longer sure whether she could be trusted with his sister after seeing her fraternizing with apparent Port Mafia members, but when Shikako pulls a roll of bandages from hammerspace he relents. “What even is your ability?”
Shikako laughs unconvincingly. “Oh, y’know, this and that.” She pushes the tattered back of Naomi’s shirt out of the way enough to reveal the extent of the wound, flying through the hand signs for the mystic palm jutsu and directing her focus to the injury instead of the people around her. The hardest part of that was ignoring how tense Junichiro got when her hands started glowing green, but as Naomi’s wound started healing under her ministrations he relaxed by fractions and became easier to ignore.
Sasuke leans over her. “It doesn’t look lethal,” he says casually. Shikako is sure that if she turned around right now, his Sharingan would be active, assessing the wound.
“It isn’t. Could have been if she’d bled out, but with treatment? She’ll be fine.” Shikako had finished with the more complicated parts, healing deeper tissue next to the spine, and could relax a bit now as she worked on more surface-level damage. “I’m just not sure why that Akutagawa guy attacked her in the first place. This whole thing was a setup, right?”
“We were apparently trying to catch a tiger,” Kakashi’s voice drifts over from her right, indicating that he’s been circling around to see what she’s doing.
“Ah,” Shikako says, finishing what she can and wrapping bandages around the wound’s location regardless, to cover the bloody cloth of the damaged shirt without causing alarm on the public streets once they go out there. She has a spare vest in hammer space for herself, once they’re ready to head out, assuming that she, Sasuke, and Kakashi choose to stick around much longer.
“The port mafia is here… because of me?” Nakajima’s voice sounds shaky, but it’s difficult for Shikako to tell whether he’s feeling guilt or fear or some combination of the two. Probably a combination of the two - he’s a nice kid, even if he does seem to jump at his own shadow. Then again, if she frequently turned into a man-eating monster and couldn’t remember anything she did during the time she was that man-eating monster, she might jump at her own shadow too. If she were any less kind of a person, she’d make his shadow move using her jutsu to see if it really does make him jump, but that would just feel like picking on the weak, so she refrains.
“Well, there is a fairly large bounty for catching the man-eating Tiger,” Sasuke says plainly. He’s never been one to sugarcoat much of anything.
Of course, this is when Dazai turns the corner. “I do hope you’re not planning on trying to claim that bounty anytime soon,” he says, and he seems just as friendly as usual. Shikako, having known Kakashi for years, is sure this attitude signifies a threat. Fortunately, she’s not the only person in the area who interacts with Kakashi regularly, and the man himself is well-aware of just how dangerous a friendly attitude can be.
“Maa, I think we can probably skip the bounty if my dear little student treats us to a meal!” he declares, patting Shikako on the head as she dropped what remained of the roll of bandages back into Hammer space.
“A meal?” She asks, casually. “Unfortunately I haven’t been paid yet so our options are limited. I have ration bars, ration bars, more ration bars, or cup ramen.”
“That is not all you have.” Sasuke says, narrowing his eyes at her.
“Prove it,” Shikako shoots back with a grin.
Dazai laughs at them, and it still sounds a little threatening, but significantly more genuine than Shikako had been expecting from him given the circumstances. “How did you take down Akutagawa?” he asks, poking the man with his foot and watching for any response from the unconscious man. When there isn’t any, he reaches down as though to take off the knockout tag, and Shikako quickly jumps over to push his hand away.
“This is a knockout tag,” she says, indicating the slip of paper. “He’ll remain unconscious for as long as it’s attached, but if you remove it he’ll wake up immediately, and I do not want to fight him right now.” Healing takes a lot out of her, and most of her techniques strong enough to take down Akutagawa when his guard is up are likely to involve some collateral damage – even if just to the infrastructure.
“Whose ability is that?” Dazai asks, looking at her searchingly. It’s clear he’s figured out something is up.
“Buy dinner for us and maybe I’ll tell you,” she counters, and Sasuke snorts before resolutely turning his head to the side and pretending he’s never felt mirth in his life.
Dazai stands up, clapping his hands cheerily. “Sure! Let’s just get these two back to the agency first.”
Earlier that morning:
A boy is sitting on the desk across from the room, holding a small remote and grandstanding about his demands. In front of him is a girl in a high-schooler’s uniform who doesn’t look anywhere near frightened enough to be sitting next to a live bomb. She occasionally leans over against the supposed bomber’s leg, displaying a comfort and familiarity that should not be there if they are who they say they are.
Shikako recalls Dazai telling Nakajima about a test this morning, and decides she’d better sit this one out, because she would not be taking it anywhere near as seriously as Dazai clearly expects them to. Nakajima, on the other hand, looks completely terrified.
Kunikida and Dazai play rock paper scissors to determine who has to go face the supposed bomber, and Kunikida – having lost – immediately walks out and makes a show of being cowed in the face of the bomber’s threats. Dazai begins a speech about how it’d just make the situation worse if he went out there, and declares that one of them is going to have to go take care of things.
“You distract him, and I’ll get the detonator away from him,” Shikako says, turning to Nakajima. “I’ve got a plan.”
“No, no no no, wait, don’t… I’m not… Um…” Nakajima looks terrified, and Dazai cheerily drops a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“You’ve got this!” he declares with the sort of casual confidence that Shikako associates with having complete information. It makes her even more sure that this whole thing is a setup. She’ll treat it seriously enough to prevent him from fake-detonating the probably-fake-bomb, but she’s not going to resort to serious force against the teenager they’re confronting.
Dazai passes Nakajima a convenient pile of newspapers, and shoves him out into the supposed bomber’s line of sight.
As Nakajima starts hesitantly approaching the boy at the front of the room, Shikako turns toward Dazai. “So how long has the hostage worked for the agency?” she asks.
“Ah, she’s one of our part-time workers,” Dazai says. “She doesn’t have an ability or anything - just helps around the office. So she’s not going to be much help taking him down!”
“I know,” Shikako says. “Especially seeing as how she knows the bomber. How long has he been working for the agency?”
Dazai blinks at her, feigning ignorance fairly convincingly. “Works for the agency?” He asks, instead of answering her question.
“Don’t worry, I’ll still pretend that the situation is real and not an obvious setup,” Shikako assures him. “Just don’t give away my position, ok?”
It’s simple to weave a genjutsu, covering the bomber’s perception of the right hand side of the room. On second thought, she weaves a second genjutsu to cover the hostage’s perception the same way, and then lays the same genjutsu Nakajima’s perception as well because he’s likely to blow her cover if he doesn’t calm down and he doesn’t seem very well equipped to handle high-stress situations.
That done, she simply stands up and walks around the right hand side of the room, everybody’s eyes following her except for Nakajima’s, the supposed bomber’s, and the supposed hostage’s. She manages to get directly behind the bomber as Nakajima reaches out a hand.
“Let’s seek employment together!” he says, sounding desperate and terrified and successfully holding the attention of the bomber and his hostage. Shikako takes that opportunity to reach out and pluck the remote from the bomber’s hand, dropping the bomb into hammerspace with her other hand.
She lets the genjutsu she’d weaved drop as she lays a kunai next to the faux-bomber’s neck. “I suggest you let your hostage go,” she comments casually. Nakajima, seeing things wrapping up without any explosions, drops to the ground in relief ahead of her.
“Oh thank god,” he says.
“So,” Shikako says casually, turning to look at Kunikida and Dazai in turns. “Did we pass?”
The office looks much the same as it had that morning, apart from the two port mafia members lying unconscious and tied up at the side of the room and the takeout on the table. Shikako walks over and sits down, gesturing at the spots to her right and left for Sasuke and Kakashi to sit at, and they waste no time taking them. Dazai and Kunikida sit down across from them, Junichiro and Naomi having begged off to get her back checked at the hospital and obtain a fresh, unbloodied change of clothes.
“So, what are your abilities?” Dazai asks, his expression open the same as always. Shikako is growing increasingly sure that he can’t possibly be that genuinely friendly, especially given how he showed up at the alley after supposedly trusting the job to the younger members of the detective agency. He must have had some sort of surveillance on one of them, and she’s a little disappointed in herself for not managing to figure out which one.
“Dazai,” Kunikida interrupts, sounding as irritated as ever. “ Who are they? ” He gestures toward Sasuke and Kakashi on either side of her. “Tell me you didn’t promise employment to more people without the President’s go-ahead!”
Shikako pulls a scroll, brush, and pot of ink out of her hammerspace seal and passes them over to Sasuke, who pauses in eating to look at it and back up at her with a furrowed brow. Dazai also is watching the interaction, and Kunikida pauses in his berating of their fellow ADA member to look at the paper. “What’s that for?”
“Sasuke has a better memory than I do, and sealing is kind of finicky on a good day, so I prefer to have an example to work from when attempting to recreate or reverse the effects of an unfamiliar seal.”
“Sealing?” Kunikida asks, his attention diverted from Dazai fairly effectively at the mention of something unfamiliar. “Is that your ability, then? You never did say.”
“I’m curious as well,” Dazai says, gaze unwavering despite the friendly expression on his face. “If yours is sealing, how do you sense killing intent, and who has shadow possession? Additionally, how does sealing permit you to heal Naomi?”
Shikako blinked, gaze darting between Dazai and Kunikida for a moment as Sasuke took the hint and started drawing out the seal that had sent them here. “Are you telling me everyone here has only one ability?”
Kakashi, next to her, chuckled - though Icha Icha was out and he was giggling as though at the book, Shikako knew in her bones that he was laughing at her. She elbowed him in the ribs for laughing at her, and he leaned away with the strike, because he was a killjoy.
“Are you saying you have more than one ability?” Kunikida countered, and Sasuke shoved the now-drawn-out seal toward Shikako before dishing up more of the takeout for himself. The container in front of Kakashi was conspicuously empty already.
“I mean, I guess?” Shikako says, drumming her fingers against the table. “Technically everything gets traced back to chakra, but there are a lot of things you can do with chakra, and most of it is learned techniques.” When Dazai and Kunikida continued to simply look at her blankly, she continued. “Chakra is a sort of energy system, right? Sealing, healing, various other jutsu… they’re just techniques that utilize that energy to cause various effects.”
“How did you learn about this… chakra?” Kunikida asks, pulling out his book. “Can it be used to lengthen someone’s lifespan?”
Sasuke, next to her, snorted. “ More like shorten it, ” he grumbled, though not quietly enough to go unheard. Kunikida was lowering his book disappointedly, and Shikako pretended to cough to cover up her laugh. Shinobi did generally have a lower life expectancy than civilians, but that had a lot less to do with Chakra and a lot more to do with combat.
“It can do a lot of things,” she hedged instead. “Healing is one of them, though there are only a few people who can heal themselves as well as they can heal others with chakra. Sealing is another - seals are like instructions written on paper for the chakra to follow, and different seals have different effects.” She pushes the seal Sasuke drew out for her forward toward the center of the table, letting Dazai and Kunikida look at it as she pulled out another scroll to start copying it over to. “Take this for example. Starting in the center, you have an Uzumaki spiral - even though the Uzumaki have been all but wiped out, their sealing techniques were considered to be the best for so long that you’ll likely find elements of them in just about any sealing language.”
“Wiped out?”
Dazai asked, at the same time as Kunikida cut in with
“Language?”
“Later,” Shikako dismissed them both at once, finishing the uzumaki spiral on her own sheet. “Surrounding that you start to have elements that aren’t native to wave country - I last saw a seal with these in rice country, though they share a lot of similarities with Fire country’s most prevalent sealing styles as well, which says a lot about who made this seal.” Dazai and Kunikida looked confused at that, as she expected, but Sasuke and Kakashi’s glances made it clear that they’d understood what she was saying. Orochimaru made this.
“Anyway, most of those elements are simply related to timing - they dictate that the seal will be passively active, on a sort of standby mode from the initial chakra used to activate it and the nature chakra surrounding it, until a jutsu is used in the area immediately surrounding it. In fact,” she leaned over, inking three lines through the thorny-looking lines of the seal Sasuke had copied down. “Let’s just disable that entirely, shall we?”
Dazai gazed at the paper, looking back at her own where the thorny-looking lines were unmarred. “What?”
“Now if you move outside of that, these elements are distinctly fire country,” Shikako said, moving on to the kanji-like characters inked in even spacing around the edges of the seal.
“What is Fire country?” Kunikida asked, looking up from where he had been taking notes across from her.
“Where we’re from,” Shikako continued. Sasuke hadn’t put down his takeout since passing her the seal, and Kakashi was still pretending to be engrossed by Icha Icha, both of them more than willing to just let her handle this. “Anyway, these sealing elements seem to have been ripped in almost their entirety from the second hokage’s Hiraishin, but these three characters,” she gestured at the ones she meant with her left hand, re-inking her brush with her right. “Are different. In fact, it’s kind of ridiculous how obvious it is what they’re intended to do.”
Dazai and Kunikida squinted at the characters, but didn’t seem to have picked up on exactly what the seal did, and Shikako was more than satisfied to leave it that way. “This one,” she said, striking through one of them with her brush on Sasuke’s copy. “Is intended to kill whoever is in the immediate vicinity of the seal when it goes off.”
Dazai leaned back comically, and Kakashi snickered again, still resolutely pretending that it was Icha Icha that he was giggling at. Shikako rolled her eyes, exasperated at Kakashi and Dazai both. “It’s fine,” she dismissed. “I disabled it. I even managed to locate and disable it the first time we encountered this thing.”
“First time?” Kunikida asked, and Shikako leaned over her paper to ink a character onto her copy of the seal that was intended to keep whomever it transported distinctly alive .
“Of course,” she said. “Why do you think I needed Sasuke’s memory? I’m attempting to make a seal that’ll reverse this one’s effects. Anyway, the next of those three sections -” she points at the second character, which has some extraneous lines on the side to adjust the meaning - “is intended to choose a location, seemingly at random but with a few specific limitations. More specifically, it’s intended to rip a hole in space-time and leave the victims somewhere in the middle.”
“And yet there was a separate clause for death?” Dazai asked. “Someone was expected to survive landing in the middle of a hole in space-time?”
Shikako started outlining her own plan for choosing a destination - more specifically, getting back to the Fire country they’d been thrown out of - on the seal she was making. If she used the residual chakra from them being sent here, she should be able to trace them back where they came. “When I say a hole in space-time,” she said, “That’s a dramatic oversimplification. It’s just really hard to target outside of the dimension you currently exist in, but you can force things away if you sort of metaphorically fold the fabric of the universe to get from point a to point b within your own world, and then drop things off in the middle rather than taking them all the way to their destination. Usually this means they’ll just be dropped into a different dimension, which may or may not be similar to your own, and they may or may not survive the trip without being horrifically mangled.”
This didn’t seem to clear anything up for Dazai, but Shikako was excitedly moving on already, having finished her targeting element. “Anyway, this last seal is taken almost stroke-for-stroke from the second’s Hiraishin,” she says. “It’s intended to transport the target to the destination that the second of those three elements selected - or rather, halfway there. I can almost just use that one as-is, and…” She triumphantly tucked her brush and inkpot back into hammerspace. “Done!”
Sasuke looked over, Sharingan flicking on to memorize her new seal. “That quickly?”
Shikako grabbed a takeout container for herself, leaning back smugly. “I just needed a template to work off of. I only got to look at the original for a few seconds and only just had enough time to disable the instant death clause before the seal activated you know.”
“We know,” Kakashi assured her, his hand reaching over to pat her head. “Good little genin.”
“Not a genin,” Shikako and Sasuke both chorused at the same time.
“Aren’t they adorable?” Kakashi asked Dazai and Kunikida, who both just looked confused by the interaction.
“You’re claiming to be from another dimension?” Kunikida asked, skeptically.
“I’m explaining that we’re from another dimension,” Shikako corrects. “And don’t worry, you don’t have to believe us. We’re going back anyway, and you’ll never see us again, so it doesn’t matter much either way.” She tucked the example seal that Sasuke had inked out into hammerspace, pulling the newer one forward and rolling it up. “We’re just gonna go to the nearest abandoned warehouse, activate this, and be on our way home and out of your hair.”
Dazai blinked at where the example seal had been moments before, head tilting as he attempted to puzzle something out - probably wondering where it had gone. “You’re leaving? Just like that?”
Shikako nods. “The chakra trace from the original seal will get fainter over time, so we can’t really afford to dilly-dally if we want to get back where we came from successfully, so we gotta go. Just remember that when you take the knockout tags off of those two,” she gestured toward the port mafia members restrained at the side of the room, “they’ll wake up immediately, and you can’t reactivate the tags.” She leaves off the fact that the reason they can’t reactivate the tags is because they don’t use chakra the same way Shinobi do, figuring that the end result is the same either way. “Make sure you’re ready to deal with them before you wake them up. Anyway,” she stood up, reaching over to grab Sasuke and Kakashi each by one arm. “We’re heading out!”
“Wait-” Kunikida called, looking up at them as Shikako led the way out the window with a Shunshin. She wasn’t concerned about Sasuke and Kakashi being able to follow, trusting her team, and sure enough they kept pace with her as she lead the way to the abandoned warehouse where she’d met the were-tiger and Armed Detective Agency yesterday night.
“It was really that simple to reconstruct once you had the original to work off of?” Sasuke asked her.
Shikako nodded, waving one of her hands in a kinda gesture. “I’m like, 80% sure that this will successfully bring us back to Konoha without resulting in our untimely and gruesomely painful deaths in an unfamiliar place.”
“I like those odds!” Kakashi declared. “I trust your work.”
Shikako rolled out the seal, tapping one foot to it to activate the uzumaki spiral in the center. “Great.” As the seal powered up, reality began to warp a little around it in a familiar way, she giggled.
“What’s so funny?” Sasuke asked, and Shikako grinned as she grabbed both his and Kakashi’s arms.
“Just looking forward to giving this mission report to the Hokage,” she said, casually. “Do you think she’ll like the guns?”
“You still have those?”
Shikako pulled one of the guns out of her hammerspace. “Of course I do,” she said dismissively, though the attitude was somewhat undermined by the grin still on her face. “Bet she pulls out the sake as soon as we enter the office.”
“Enter the village, you mean,” Kakashi corrects.
“You’re on!”
There is a flash from the seal, and the warehouse sits empty once again.