In short order the gate was roughly pushed open, as Jiraiya walked out, flanked by Agent Black on one side and a wolf-masked ANBU on the other. Agent Black gave the team a brief smile. The Toad Sage did not.
"Black oak and cedar," came the curt secondary confirmation code from Jiraiya.
"White ash and elm. Hello, sir," Mari-sensei acknowledged, bowing her head deferentially. The genin all bowed more deeply.
Jiraiya nodded with decidedly less deference, and waved the team’s escorts away. "What’s this about? The runner who fetched me said you used your Priority Orange passphrase, and I can’t help but notice that none of you are injured. Unless you’re hiding it under the henges?” he asked. Mari-sensei shook her head minutely, and dispelled her disguise. The rest of the team followed suit. “No? Well, then. This had better be good. Out with it."
"By all means," Mari-sensei said warmly. “Thing number one: Keiko?”
Keiko stepped forward. “Summoning Technique: Pandour!”
A lithe pangolin emerged from the violet smoke, holding a wood-covered clay tablet. “In the name of the Polemarch and the Pantokrator, I, Courier Pandour, bring a message for the summoner of the mighty and esteemed Toad clan,” it -- he? -- said very formally. It looked up at Jiraiya. “Sir, I assume that would be you, sir?”
“Indeed. Thank you, Courier,” Jiraiya responded, taking the tablet and breaking it open. His eyes scanned it rapidly. “Interesting. Bad news, obviously, but definitely an opportunity,” he mused. “Courier Pandour, please inform your superiors that your summoner and I will coordinate to act on this information with due haste and force.”
Pandour saluted. “By your leave, summoner?” he asked, turning to Keiko, who nodded after only a brief moment of being startled at being addressed. In a puff of purple smoke, Pandour was gone.
Jiraiya turned back to Mari-sensei. “You called that ‘thing one’. I presume that means there are more?”
“You presume correctly. We have another innovation to sell. You called the last one the Sealing innovation of the year - I'll eat my sandals if this one isn't at least the ninjutsu innovation of the decade. Quite possibly the century."
Agent Black quirked an eyebrow. "Come on now, don't sell yourself short. Humility doesn't look good on you."
“I have to agree, I’ll believe it when I see it,” Jiraiya concurred gruffly.
Mari-sensei smiled and began a frankly absurd sequence of handseals, ending with no less than seven Horse seals. “Pretty Pink Pony no Jutsu!” she cried out dramatically, and then took a step backward and upward. And another. And another, until she was standing upside down. She spun around to face Jiraiya, her head now level with his, and performed a midair curtsey that the girls in the Fire Daimyo’s court would have killed to be able to duplicate.
Jiraiya’s jaw had gone slack somewhere around the second step. It remained there for several long seconds, an occasional blink the only sign that he had not, in fact, been turned into a statue. Eventually he remembered he had to breathe, and the action seemed to knock him out of his stupor.
Jiraiya rubbed his eyes. He dispelled. He pinched himself. He had the wolf-masked ANBU smack him. Inoue Mari kept right on floating in front of him, with a grin to put foxes everywhere to shame.
"Young lady!" he exclaimed eventually. "You get down and explain yourself this instant! I categorically refuse to believe that was a jutsu."
Her smile now resembling nothing so much as a megalodon that had just spotted a crippled whale, Mari-sensei flipped down onto her feet. “I don’t get what’s so hard to understand, Mister Toad Sage sir,” she said, putting a contemplative finger to her cheek, voice full of faux-innocence. "You're right, it's not a jutsu, though. It’s just a seal that gives any ninja freeform three-dimensional maneuverability with minimal prep. Lets you do unimpressive things like running up to skytower platforms, traveling tracelessly over borders, escaping disadvantageous combat instantly, observing enemies from afar, dropping arbitrarily sized payloads on military targets with a fraction of the setup of skytowers, making your footsteps practically noiseless…."
“That’s not a fucking explanation, Inoue!”
Hazou had to fight not to flinch, and caught everybody else doing so. Mari-sensei knew best, of course, but he worried her strategy of getting Jiraiya off-guard ahead of negotiations might be working a little too well.
"You’re right, it’s not,” Mari responded, her saccharine demeanor cutting out instantly, “and you’re not getting one until we have a couple of promises from you, Jiraiya. You’re paying for this one in full. None of that petty cash nonsense like last time."
Jiraiya blew out a long breath. "Yeah, fine, I promise, now for the love of all that is good, what did you just do?!"
Mari-sensei shook her head solemnly. “Deal details, then explanation.”
Jiraiya’s face twisted into a mask of rage for a split second before he visibly forced himself to take a deep breath, then two. “Fine. My office. Now.”
o-o-o-o
“Your side of the deal first then,” Jiraiya said, sitting down behind his desk. “What are the specs?”
Mari-sensei nodded at Hazou, who began enumerating. “Each set of seals has a total activation time that varies between fourteen and nineteen minutes. On the move, that comes out to between twenty eight and thirty eight minutes of running before needing to change out seals, since each foot is only active half the time. Improving the duration and reliability is an ongoing project, as is coming up with a fast-swapping mechanism and finding a way to protect the seals from condensation when running through clouds--”
Jiraiya stopped him with an upraised finger. “Clouds?” he asked incredulously.
Hazou nodded and continued along a different part of his script, grateful that the conversation was staying roughly within the bounds the team had anticipated. “We have not observed a maximum height and have successfully used the seals, in conjunction with skytowers for campsites, to cross the elemental nations from Snow to Sea without ever touching the ground or, as far as we can tell, being detected.”
Jiraiya's eye twitched, and he glanced briefly at Agent Black, who simply nodded and kept looking at the party.
“That sounds like a hell of a field test,” Jiraiya commented glibly. “Okay, so Leaf gets some admittedly fairly intriguing seals. You want what?” he asked, leaning back to take a sip of tea that someone -- Hazou suspected the ANBU that he could no longer see -- had placed on his desk.
“Your hand in marriage,” Mari-sensei, causing Jiraiya to choke on his drink.
“Dammit woman, do you exist to make me suffer?” the Toad Sage sputtered.
She shrugged, grinning. “I hear that’s what married couples are supposed to do. I hadn’t really seen the appeal of it before I met you.”
Jiraiya settled back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose with a deep sigh. “Why…?”
“We want clan status on top of Leaf citizenship,” she said. “Along with all the rights and privileges that those entail, to protect our innovations and ourselves from political maneuvering. The existing clans won’t let a bunch of unrelated nobodies become a clan. We don’t want to marry into an existing one, so we need to create a new one. You need an heir, and marrying anyone from an established clan upsets the local balance of power too much. Marrying a clanless nobody is disadvantageous, since your kid will get stuck in the middle of the forest of spiderwebs that I’m sure is Leaf clan politics as soon as you’re gone. So, start your own clan. Adopt the kids, have some with me. Become famous as the patriarch of the world’s greatest Sealing and scientific innovation clan. Leaf gets three new bloodlines, the Pangolin summoner, and easy access to whatever a pair of sealmasters who have collaborated on two world-shattering innovations in a matter of months come up with next.
“Of course, the five of us will hide our identities until Leaf rolls Mist in the upcoming war using the innovations we’ve already produced. What do you expect that to take, with skywalkers? A week, maybe? Hopefully at that point Leaf will be so powerful relative to the rest of the Elemental Nations that it won’t matter if anyone knows who we are. If not, we’ll see what we can do to fix that.”
Jiraiya held up a hand to pause her, and leaned forward with his hands folded in front of his face. He was silent for a long minute. Hazou hardly dared to breathe.
Eventually Jiraiya spoke. “I want to state, for the record that this entire idea is completely ludicrous. Set-your-face-on-fire stupid, as I believe my esteemed colleague Kagome would put it. But supposing, hypothetically, that this were to be in any way possible, is that all you want? It sounds like you’re planning on offering a lot more than these ‘skywalkers’, after all.”
Hazou suppressed the urge to dispel. That sounded entirely too sarcastic, which would imply that his entire world was about to be turned even further onto its head than he'd expected when he decided to become a Leaf nin.
Mari-sensei simply nodded. “Extraction from Mist for Hazou’s mother, who we mentioned to you last time we were here. This should be significantly easier using skywalkers.”
“Hmmm. Potentially doable, especially since it adds a jounin to our side, though tricky with tensions as high as they are. It almost certainly needs to wait for the actual declaration of war - which might be less of an obstacle than it sounds like, since we’re seeing some signs that Mist is very nearly ready to make the first move. No promises, though. Next.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate, because a promise is exactly what we want. A promise on the part of Leaf’s military leadership that they will make every effort to end the war with a minimum of casualties. The rest of us have friends and family in Mist." A flash of grief broke through her stoic negotiator's exterior. "We would really rather they not die.”
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Jiraiya grimaced. “Sweetheart, that’s really cute, but suggesting stuff like that is going to get you branded a traitor and a spy.”
“I’m both of those things,” Mari-sensei pointed out, “but in this case I'm trying to be them for Leaf's benefit. And, as I'm sure Hazou is about to remind me, for the benefit of quite literally the entire world. A prolonged war just pushes civilization closer to the edge. Agent Black can spend as much time in my head as she needs to make damn sure I’m telling the truth. I want Mist to realize the world has just been pulled out from under their feet, and for them to give up as quickly as they possibly can.
“For that, Leaf needs to show how utterly dominant they are," she concluded, licking her lips and looking at him through lidded eyes.
Jiraiya snorted. “Again, cute, but no promises. We might be able to swing that in a way that appeals to the patriots. Anything else?”
“Oh, sure, lots of things.”
“Lots of things? On top of what you’ve already asked for?”
“Jiraiya,” Mari-sensei admonished, “we’re handing Leaf the world on a gilded platter. The least you could do would be to spoil us a little bit. For example, keep the kids off the front line -- their medical, sealing, and logistical talents all lend themselves to the home front -- or at least don’t send them on missions where they might have to kill family members. Oh, and let me retire.”
The team all did some combination of gasping and recoiling. Hazou nearly bit his tongue off to keep himself from jumping in to interrupt.
“Sorry guys,” Mari-sensei said, turning away from Jiraiya to look guiltily at the rest of the team. “I know we didn’t talk about this, but we agreed to add what all the team members want, and that’s mine.”
"You want the one jounin in your group to be taken out of the field? You realize this removes a pretty substantial amount of value from your side of the scales, right?" Jiraiya asked skeptically.
"Normally, yes, but in the context of the other things we're offering it's paltry. Besides, I’m an infiltrator, not a combat spec. Not so great on the front line anyway. At the very least take me off the active duty roster once the war is over. Hard to do field work when you're pregnant, after all."
Jiraiya paused, bit his lip, and looked out the window for a long, calming breath before facing the team again. "Don't think I don't see what you're doing here."
“Of course you do. I haven’t got the blindfold out yet,” Mari-sensei teased.
The remainder of Team Uplift had collectively turned various shades of crimson.
Jiraiya turned to Agent Black, gesticulating with an open palm at Mari-sensei. “What did I do to deserve this?” he asked, exasperated.
The Yamanaka woman raised a single sculpted eyebrow. “Chronologically, or alphabetically?”
“I don’t pay you to snark!”
“Finally,” Mari-sensei continued, grabbing the reins of the conversation once more, “we want wherever we live, as well as Hazou and Kagome’s sealing lab, to be shielded the same way that meeting room was, and for Kagome to be allowed to set up security to his desired specifications. You know, clan secrets and all that.”
Jiraiya chewed his cheek. “To my knowledge clan compounds tend to only have private, inner areas shielded instead of every building, since the seals don’t last all that long, but with three sealmasters around that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Shielded sealing lab would be a little tricky, since the seals need to be far enough to avoid getting caught up in any infusion failures,” he said, looking wryly at Hazou, “but if it turns out to be an issue we can just do our research far enough out into the woods for you to be comfortable, Kagome.”
“WHAT? Who said anything about our research?! What makes you think I would want to do research with the most famous sealmaster in... the world… yeah that sounds fine. When can we start? Wait, no! I don’t believe you, you lying stinker! You’re just trying to lull us into complacency, and then you’re gonna grab everyone and lock us up under the Hokage monument and feed me an’ Hazou pieces of everyone else every day we don’t come up with a new seal!”
“Sensei, sensei, breathe,” Hazou said, placing a firm hand on Kagome’s arm as the older man scrabbled for his empty ring pouches. “Remember what we talked about? How we figured out what Leaf would have to do to convince us they were being honest? It sounds like Jiraiya’s saying they’ll let us live in a building the Hyuuga can’t see through and secure it however you like, which you agreed would prove they really didn’t want to hurt us.”
“But we’re not in that building yet, are we?!” Kagome yelled.
“That’s true, sensei,” Hazou answered calmly. “That makes it kind of difficult to design security for. Maybe we should ask Jiraiya for more details so you can start thinking about how to keep us safe? After all... it sounds like he may be planning on joining us…?”
“May be?” laughed the Toad Sage. “You bet your ass I will be."
Only Mari-sensei managed not to have her jaw drop open.
"What?" Jiraiya asked innocently, folding his hands once more. "Despite the complete lack of romantic sensibility displayed in her proposal, none of the things my lovely fiancee said were factually incorrect. My lack of clan status has been inconvenient, but not enough to justify marrying the first clanless kunoichi who catches my fancy.
"But you lot just offered me a deal in which I not only get to secure Leaf's military dominance in the near future, I also get an adopted son who’s apparently some kind of Sealing prodigy, I get his weird uncle who's actually got some damn respect for the art, I get a hot wife who wants my babies, I get to be responsible for bringing three bloodlines and two summoning scrolls into Leaf, and I get to rub every single ounce of this in the faces of the people who told me this team was a bad investment. That is absolutely worth the trouble of getting married to overcome my oldest political handicap.” He paused and, finger upraised, spun to face Mari-sensei. “I don’t do monogamy.”
"Neither do I," she said with a grin that was illegal in six countries.
"...right." He shook himself and turned back to the others. "Obviously, until this is finalized, we’ll have to hide you for a little while. Hmm. Where would be a good spot for-- no, wait!"
He whirled on Hazou pointing an accusing finger. “You! Skywalking! Explain! Now!”
Hazou hesitated. “Do we have your word that--”
“Yes! You have it! We’re a team! Kami, out with it, kid!”
"Okay,” Hazou acquiesced. “You know the Air Dome?"
"Huh? I would hope so, seeing as I gave you the damn thing," Jiraiya responded testily.
"You know how the dome it creates is fixed in place?"
"Sure. One of the most common ways seals like that operate. One of the banes of my existence, frankly, since it makes it damn useless as a mobile shield. Hell, it's the big reason I never spent much time messing around with Five-Seal… Barrier... oh no."
"Yeah."
"No."
"Yup."
"That doesn't work. That can't possibly work!" Jiraiya practically shouted.
"Breathe, sir," Mari-sensei chided him.
"Flip it over and make a version that activates with chakra adhesion, to stick yourself to the flat parts of the dome," Hazou continued.
"That can't possibly work!" Jiraiya insisted again, gesticulating crazily as he stood up from his desk and began pacing back and forth behind it.
"And yet here we are," Mari pointed out. "Also, breathe."
"You can't just flip over a basic defensive seal and end up with the ability to walk on air! That isn't -- gaaaah!"
"Hey! It was more work than that! It took Kagome-sensei a whole month of work to figure out how to get the seal to respond to chakra adhesion!" Hazou objected.
Jiraiya froze cold, and then his head dropped into his hands very, very slowly. "A month," he mumbled to himself. "A month in the hands of some snot-nosed kid, and suddenly a seal I've had access to for decades is the biggest strategic shift since the fucking Sage of Six Paths."
He raised his head, wearing the face of a broken man. "Huh. Maybe I should try kicking you out of Leaf again and see what you come up with this time."
"With respect, I’d advise against that, sir,” Keiko cut in. “Notably, it risks our dying and being unable to provide Leaf with additional ideas and innovations. Additionally, according to Hazou, he had actually had the idea for skywalkers for quite a while, and the Air Domes just happened to provide an easier way to accomplish it."
Jiraiya stared at her, and then whirled on Wolf. "Make sure their quarters from last time are serviceable, then return and escort them there once Agent Black finishes verifying Miss Inoue’s honesty. Put as many people as you can afford on guarding this team -- if any of them so much as stub a toe, you're losing skin."
He turned back to the team. "My only lodging in the city is a studio apartment, so we’ll make your old quarters work until we can figure out a more permanent solution. Until then, we’re going to have to work hard to keep your presence here a secret. I’ll be by tonight to talk strategy for how we want to approach this with Sarutobi-sensei and the Clan- and Military Councils. Until then, sit tight, and let one of your minders know if you need anything."
His commander’s demeanor slipped a little as he cracked a cocky grin. “Oh, and welcome to Hidden Leaf. I think you’re gonna like it here. I have every intention of making sure of it.”