Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky. ~ Pink Floyd
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I sat, drawing up explosive notes as I thought. They were standard Konoha design, not the most efficient, not the biggest or the most intense, but I was giving these away and no ninja wanted to use an explosive note they didn't trust. So standard Konoha design it was.
I'd made these so many times that the motions were as familiar as breathing, the calligraphy brush steady between my fingers. There was something infinitely graceful about the slide of the ink over paper and I wondered if this was why some people spent years mastering the art in order to write that one perfect Kanji.
But mostly, I wondered about seals.
How to transcribe my thoughts without first converting them to words. How to convey impressions and feelings and intent and will.
Seals could do anything, conventional wisdom said. The trouble was in getting them to do it.
People only think in so many different ways, kid.
Except… thoughts were shaped by society and beliefs and values and all kinds of things. My complete and utter failure to see the point had just highlighted the fact that, while I was integrated in this land, sometimes I was still other.
Not just that, but sometimes… more often now, after starting to meddle with our spirit energy, sometimes I had the disquieting feeling that all my thoughts had a shadow. An intangible mirror copy just out of reach.
None of the sealing styles had ever really made intuitive sense to me. That's the whole reason I had tried to puzzle them out by decoding them. I was starting to see why.
But… it was one thing to say 'create your own seal array' it was another to actually try and do it. How could I possibly create something like that? Everything else I had ever learnt had been learnt by rote. This technique does this. Do this and that will happen.
It was kinda intimidating.
I started by pulling out all of the pieces I had used before and seeing which ones made intuitive sense to me. Which techniques worked the best. There was a lot of crossover in the sealing arts, a lot of 'generally accepted' ways of doing things.
I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, after all. I just had to find the bits that worked for me.
Actually, now that I thought about it, sealing reminded me a little of studying electricity in physics class. You had to draw a complete circuit, regardless of what you included in it - input, output, measurement, resistors, capacitors… the concepts were remarkably similar.
It had been a loooong time since I'd done physics.
Alright, maybe I should start with something simple. My own explosive tag seals - I already knew the theory behind the combustion and I'd studied every variation on them that I could find. And being able to set explosives with a touch would be beyond handy.
I nodded to myself and finished the tag I was drawing. Then stared at the huge pile that had materialised while I had been thinking.
"Got a little carried away?" Shikamaru asked dryly.
"Don't be silly," I said airily. "There's no such thing as too much explosives." Granted, explosive tags were usually fairly expensive and most ninja never used more than one or two per fight. But since I made my own, that didn't matter to me.
"Just what are you planning to blow up?" he asked. "Because I need to know when to make sure I have an alibi."
I scoffed and picked a fifth of them off top the pile. "Here," I said, handing them to him. "I'm making sure everyone is restocked. You need any specific tags?"
Shikamaru 'hmm'ed thoughtfully. "I'll let you know."
I shrugged. "I think I'm going to make some water storage scrolls, later. You want some?"
"Could come in handy," Shikamaru agreed.
"That's what I thought." Against Gaara, against Shino… Naruto could use them for his Hidden in the Mist and in combination with his lightning jutsu. I couldn't help my friends fight, but that didn't mean I couldn't give them the tools they needed.
Storage scrolls, a personalised explosive seal, some kind of training resistance seal… I was building myself quite a list of things that needed to be done.
I sighed, and pulled out a new notebook. I sorted them according to what they contained, which meant I had a fair few half finished notebooks floating around, but it was a better system than putting everything in one book which would mean having notes of medical jutsu next to an analysis of chakra recomposition next to a seal array.
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"Hey, Naruto!" I called, sliding into Ichiraku when I caught sight of the familiar orange jacket. I hadn't intended to come here, but, hey, whatever. "How's training?"
He jerked. "Ehehe, Shikako! I didn't see you there." He shrugged. "Its going okay. I mean, the toads are cool and all but the pervy sage just keeps wanting me to draw on - I mean, use more chakra and stuff. And Ebisu-sensei is boring, but I can kinda tell I'm improving." He grinned foxily. "And boy was he surprised when I asked for more chakra control techniques."I laughed. "I bet he was. So this is the real you? Not a clone?"
"Of course! Clones don't need to eat," he said.
"I know," I teased, smirking. "But I wouldn't put it past some of your clones to sneak off to eat ramen."
The way he flushed said I probably wasn't too far off the mark.
"Here," I said handing over an envelope with his share of the explosive notes in it and a copy of my analysis. "These are for your fight. You should probably go over the information with Ebisu-sensei. Just be careful not to lose it. There's stuff on there that you don't want just anybody getting their hands on."
Naruto glanced at it. "Hey, these are like Kabuto's Nin Info Cards!"
I twitched. "It is not! It's a detailed report on your opponents skills, strengths and weaknesses with potential strategies to take advantage of them. It's nothing like-"
"Okay, okay, sorry!" Naruto said, waving his hands back and forth. "It's great. Thanks!"
I sat back, huffing. "And here I was going to tell you about this awesome new idea that I had about your Shadow Clones… I guess you don't want to hear it."
"No, wait! Yes I do! Please tell me!" Naruto begged.
Well. I guess he hadn't meant anything by it. "Oh, alright. Are you free for a bit? Or send a clone with me."
"I'll come. What is it?" He asked eagerly. "Is it a super cool move that'll help me defeat Neji?"
"It might be," I said. "It's just an idea. We'll have to see how it works."
Naruto was very eager to see what I was talking about. I guess describing something as a 'cool idea' was only just slightly below 'cool jutsu' especially since it seemed to use his favourite technique. We headed to one of the simpler training fields which was just basically a kunai range with posts.
"So," I said. "Why your clones are transformed into things, can they still see and hear?"
"Yeah. That's how we used the spiders, right?" Naruto said, frowning a little in confusion.
I hummed. "Yeah, but what if it was something that didn't have eyes and ears? Like, say, a kunai?"
"Well, I don't know," he confessed.
"Let's try it," I suggested. He made some clones, with dutifully turned themselves into kunai and then dispersed.
"Its like…" Naruto wavered. "Kinda like seeing and hearing but not really."
It wasn't a very clear explanation but I thought I got the point. "But you can tell what's going on, right?"
He nodded firmly.
"Good. They are chakra constructs, so I expected something like that. Even when they look like they have eyes and ears they don't really. Okay, so next question. If a clone is transformed into a kunai and then clones himself, do they come out as kunai?"
"That one is easy," Naruto said confidently. "Yup."
"I thought so," I said. "Now its demonstration time. Give me a clone transformed into a kunai and be prepared to duplicate ten times when I yell 'now'."
Naruto frowned, but did as I asked. "I don't really get it," he said. "Where's the cool bit?"
"Watch this," I directed. I threw the kunai straight for the posts and waited. "NOW!" I yelled, a split second before it hit.
Ten kunai thunked into the wood. They held for a second, then dispersed, leaving behind ten holes. Strange that Shadow Clones could be solid enough to do damage but not take it. I suspected it had something to do with the fact that pain disrupted chakra. Which might explain why a focused and expectant clone could take hits better than a surprised one.
"Now imagine if that was a person, expecting one kunai and getting say… ten. Or twenty. Or a hundred," I said. "And then say, even if you missed… your clone kunai could just wait around until Neji - or whoever - stepped near them and turn back and knock them out. Or…"
I glanced at Naruto. His eyes were very round. "But can't the Byakugan see through the Transformation Jutsu?" he asked slowly.
"Maybe," I admitted. "So maybe he'll know there's something off about your kunai. But if you make them before you go into the arena he wont know what. And it's like Lee said to Sasuke, isn't it? It doesn't matter if you can see it if you can't do anything about it."
Oh, Neji would probably be able to deflect hundreds of weapons… but this didn't give him the warning of a flight path when one suddenly doubled into hundreds. He might have Kaiten - the Heavenly Rotation - but that was chakra intensive and I doubted he could use it often.
"You've got to work on the timing, though," I cautioned. "The closer you can get before they replicate, the less time Neji has to react."
"You can count on it!" Naruto said, determination beginning to shine. "I wont rest until I've got this down!"
He summoned another clone and it transformed even as he reached for it. I stepped back to watch.
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The days drifted away, slowly at first, then faster and faster often with little to show for their passing. I studied. I trained. I spoke to the others. And every three days I packed up lunch and went to make sure Sasuke was still alive.
I struggled with the seals. Oh, I could make explosive seals by the dozens, functional seals, efficient ones, but they still weren't right. Then, one afternoon, I stared down at the paper in my notebook and wondered why it suddenly seemed so obvious.
It was simple. A triskelion - three spirals that joined to form the sides of a triangle - with the kanji for blast in the centre and the details - radius, intensity, timer - scribed out in English with adjustable numerical attributes. It was remarkably simple, yet highly adaptable. Bigger explosions, smaller ones, extreme heat, delayed activation… I could change it all, something that sometimes annoyed me with standard tags.
"Now to make sure it works," I said thoughtfully. It didn't look like any other explosive seal I'd ever seen, apparent from the single central kanji, but that was kinda the point. I drew out a few seals, took them down to the training fields and watch in elation as they blew up.
I wanted to cackle madly. I wanted to run around and show people what I'd done. Naruto! I could show Naruto.
"No, no, wait," I murmured to myself. "First…"
First, I wanted to learn how to apply it. Learn how to use it without having to draw up the ink first.
It's just trappings, Jiraiya's voice echoed. You have to own your seals, mind and soul.
I remembered Naruto, slamming his hand down into the ground, the delicate webbing of black ink spreading from his fingers.
What's the correlation?
I closed my eyes and focused on the pattern of the seal, filling in the numbers I wanted. I slammed my hand down onto the ground, a surge of chakra and a twist of my will be done!
Beneath my hand bloomed the ink of my explosive seal, perfect and lethal.
"Bugger," I said.
I dove to the side.
The explosion sent me tumbling and I rolled across the grass, laughing breathlessly and unharmed. "Didn't quite think that one through. Note to self…"
I was giddy with success. For all that it was such a small thing, almost unnecessary even, it was still progress beyond what I'd hoped for.
"Naruto!" I called excitedly, searching the training field that he'd last occupied with Jiraiya.
Naruto was standing on the head of a giant frog, easily one the size of a small cow. He perked up when he saw me.
"Oh, hey, Shikako! Have you come to talk to the pervy sage again?"
I beamed at him. "No! I wanted to show you something."
"Really?" He jumped down to land beside me, the toad dismissing itself in a puff of smoke. I wondered if they were getting annoyed with him. "Is it another cool technique?"
"It's something I learnt to do," I said. "Oh, just watch!" I stooped down and grabbed a small rock, one just the size of my fist, off the ground. The twist of chakra and will power came easily, again, as if something had just clicked. And because I was showing off, I upped the intensity of the explosion.
Ink webbed across the rock.
I cocked my arm back and threw it high into the air. When it reached the peak of it's flight, it exploded, a muffled 'whump' of fire, burning almost white hot at the centre.
I beamed at Naruto, proud as anything.
"That. Was. Amazing!" Naruto shouted, grabbing me and spinning me around. "It was - you just - then it exploded!"
I laughed. I wasn't entirely sure Naruto understood what I'd just done, but that was the nice thing about Naruto. He'd be excited with you anyway.
"Oi, brat! Quit messing around with explosives! You scared all the ladies off," Jiraiya popped up, aggrieved. "Oh, it's your lady friend. Come to see Jiraiya again, hehehe?" He leered.
"Don't say it like that!" Naruto shouted.
"Jiraiya-sama," I said, bowing a little. "Sorry for disturbing you. I was just showing Naruto what I'd managed to do."
"And here I thought you said you already knew how to make explosive tags," Jiraiya said shrewdly.
"Uh, yes, I do. I mean, that's why I started with them because I already know how…" Hrm, that line of logic seemed better in my head.
"Do it again!" Naruto instructed, shoving a rock into my hand. "Watch this, pervy sage, it's awesome!"
I did so. Naruto's eyes followed the explosion, but Jiraiya's rested on me, heavy and inscrutable.
"Well, it's a good thing you showed up, anyway," Jiraiya said, pulling out a familiar looking notebook. "How long have you been working on this?"
"Uh, since just after graduation." He gave me an incredulous look. "What? We had a mission to do as well," I added defensively. I hadn't had that long to work on it.
"That's not what I… oh, never mind. How many more of these notebooks do you have?" He asked.
"A few. I work on stuff other than sealing as well, you know. The rest are mostly encrypted though."
"I noticed that," Jiraiya said. The look he gave the book said he would very dearly like to work out that code. Whether because he wanted to read what it said, or simply as a professional code breaker I didn't know. "Why isn't this one?"
"I …uh… didn't encrypt that book because its an analysis. I wanted… I wanted to have it put in the clan library later." I looked down. It was pretty arrogant to think I deserved to have anything entered into the clan library, but it wasn't like it was a creation of mine. It was just collating and analysing the work of others. Anyone could have done it. "The rest are in code. And I don't really want to give you a chance to break it."
Some ninja were scary smart. There were people who probably could rediscover an entire language based on whatever clues they could find in my notebooks. And there would be some - seal patterns, diagrams, graphs… there was always something.
And I wasn't even entirely sure no one spoke English anywhere. Certainly, it wasn't a major language of any of the Elemental Nations, but all it took was a small regional town to have their own dialect (or even worse, outside the Elemental Nations) and all of a sudden there would be massive attention focused on me.
"Fair enough, fair enough," Jiraiya said, scratching his chin. "Well, we might as well go over this now. Brat! Get back to work!" He flicked the notebook over, revealing that he'd stuck post-it-notes all throughout the book, covered with cramped handwriting. "Now see here…"
There was a reason that Jiraiya was considered a Seal Master. Possibly The Seal Master, depending on who you asked. I was getting just a very small glimpse of that, with his additions and corrections and embellishments to my analysis. I had thought that I had gone into detail, but there was so much more…
The fact that he was teaching it to me, sharing this knowledge, was so much more than I could have hoped for. I'd basically accepted that tipping my entire perspective upside down was the most that I was going to get out of him. Maybe get him to answer a few more questions.
This was a treasure trove.
It was a good day.
So of course, it couldn't last. Pride comes before the fall and all that. I was still giddy with success when we settled in for our nightly training/meditation. Two weeks of this and nothing to show for it. But Dad cautioned us to expect nothing else and not to get anxious about it.
I don't know what it was. Maybe because I wasn't as calm and bored as usual. Maybe my shift in perspective. Maybe a lot of things.
Because when we settled in, when I started looking into my shadow… I saw it.
Just a tiny spot. A spark of darkness where the shadow was so much greater and deeper than that around it. The shadow was so dark it seemed solid, a grasping, living entity so deep that not even light could escape.
I reached for it.
Then - suddenly - something was pulling me back, dragging me away from the dark emptiness of that deep black.
"Come on, sweetheart," Dad was murmuring, crouched in front of me, hands on my shoulders. I could feel the chakra flowing through them, but it seemed… muted, somehow. "Back up, that's a good girl. Best not to go so fast, eh?"
I blinked slowly. Once, twice, and again. The world seemed … far less bright, less sharp than usual, as though I was looking through fog. It seemed almost… distant, like everything was a long way away. Like I was looking through a tunnel or a telescope.
"Shikako?" Shikamaru asked, voice sharp. I heard it clearly and yet…
"Don't fuss, brother-mine," I said, though my voice sounded bland and lacking inflection, even to me. Vaguely, I was aware that that should have worried me. It didn't.
That should have worried me too.
"What's wrong with her?" Shikamaru demanded.
Dad cast him a look. "She went too far. Now do you see why this is so dangerous?"
Shikamaru swallowed. "But she'll be okay, right?" He looked worried. I felt a small spark of regret, deep inside, at causing him worry.
"I feel very cold," I observed, but it was a distant concern, as though everything was so very far away.
"I think that's enough for tonight," Dad said. "It'll probably take you a few days to … unwind a bit."