Mari-sensei leaned forward. "Well, Hazō might be done but I'm not," she said. "Kagome, are you seriously telling me that Sarutobi Hiruzen, Hokage of Leaf, God of Shinobi, is actually the Sage of Six Paths?"

Kagome-sensei nodded without bothering to remove the chopsticks from his mouth. "Mm-hm. This is good cake."

"Thanks," Mari-sensei said distractedly. "Okay, so let's assume you're right—"

"I am right!" Kagome-sensei said, hurt. "You don't believe me?"

"It's not that I don't believe you, it's that I'm thinking out loud as I work through the implications. Anyway, the Hokage is the Sage. Do you think Jiraiya knows?"

Kagome shrugged, not looking up from his cake. "Iunno."

Mari-sensei paused, her mind clearly racing. "This could be very good news for us if we play it right," she said slowly. "From what you're saying the Sage has spent a thousand years trying to promote peace. We have the same goal. The question is whether he would prefer to have us as allies or as slaves. If he used this kill-and-revive tactic on us—"

"If?" Kagome snorted through a large bite of cake.

"It can't be a trivial technique," Mari-sensei argued. "It can't be quick to cut someone's brain out, make delicate changes to it so as to change the person's fundamental beliefs without impairing them in any other way, and then put it back. There's thirty thousand people in Leaf, they can't all have been enslaved like that. That means that every time he does it there's a chance of being caught."

"At which point he kills the person and revives them," Kagome-sensei said smugly.

Mari-sensei rolled her eyes. "That just pushes the problem back one level. One of the first things you learn doing infiltration is that mission success is inversely correlated with number of times you have to break character. If his character is grandfatherly Sarutobi Hiruzen, a benevolent ruler who cares about his people, then he can't afford to act outside that character too often. Killing people and reviving them would definitely count. Also, every time you turn an asset while embedded you're risking yourself. Someone who has been turned is, by definition, someone who isn't behaving the same way they were before and they can betray you without meaning to."

She paused, seeing the uncomprehending looks on the faces of her audience. "Okay, look, one time I infiltrated a noble court, playing the part of a courtesan. I convinced the noble in question to install me in the house. I located the information I'd been sent to steal but didn't have a good opportunity to get to it, so I convinced a maid to steal it for me. The noble and I were having lunch, the maid came in the room to do her normal rounds. The noble got mad at the maid for interrupting and started yelling at her. The maid instinctively looked to me for reassurance. The noble caught it and somehow jumped straight to the idea that the maid and I were sleeping together...which, granted, was exactly right since that was how I'd turned her in the first place. Point is, my whole mission went up in smoke because of one glance from an asset. The Sage can't be turning large numbers of people and still keeping it secret that something hinky is going on."

"Would it matter?" Hazō asked. "What are they going to do? He's the Sage, and the Hokage. And who would believe them?"

Mari-sensei shook her head. "Don't grant too much. If they catch him in the middle of a mind-control resurrection ritual they aren't going to immediately jump to 'Sage of Six Paths', they're going to go with 'spy' or at least 'traitor'. Maybe he can talk them down, maybe he can't. He can't do it every time, though. Sooner or later the word would get out that something weird was happening. All the villages spy on each other, and I cannot believe that something like this could be happening frequently over the course of generations without a whiff of it getting out to the Mist intelligence circles. It makes much more sense if it's something that he does only very occasionally." The look she shot Hazō said without words, Or doesn't do at all because it's not real and Kagome is deluded.

"Sensei," Hazō said, "you mentioned that the Sage destroyed records. Is it possible that he planted false ones?"

Kagome-sensei set his chopsticks down and pinned Hazō beneath his gaze. "You mean is it possible that he planted disinformation and I missed it, so I'm wrong about the whole thing?"

"Um...well, not the whole thing...?"

Kagome held his apprentice's eyes for a moment longer, then shrugged and went back to flicking chocolate bits out of the bowl and into his mouth with his chopsticks. "Yeah, he did, and so did his people. Disinformation stands out though. It's what you do in crypto and analysis—break codes, study patterns, figure out which patterns fit and which don't. Disinformation can only hold up so long. Too many ways for lies to fall apart. Forget a detail, don't create it in the first place, don't have an answer ready, have a maid glance at you at the wrong time. I discarded all the disinformation." He looked up, pointing his chopsticks at Hazō like a weapon, eyes filled with hawkish intensity and the effect ruined by the mouthful of chocolate chips that he was busy masticating.

"Wa fime, Wimb—" He paused, gulping down the chocolate. "One time, about five years before I left, Wind broke one of our codes and found out the location of one of our secret R&D facilities and details on some of the projects that were being worked on. They didn't want to let on that they had cracked Steel Tree, so they needed a way to justify having gotten the intelligence. They snuck over the border and set up a sentry post overlooking the site. Tried to make it look like they'd been there for a year, watching the whole time."

He laughed. "Really thorough too. They built a concealed shelter and marched back and forth from there to the lookout point hundreds of times so that there would be a path worn into the grass. A long-term output would typically bring seed for a small garden to reduce logistical demands. Wind must have brought in some grown vegetable plants to make it look like the garden had been there all along. They even shipped in a couple big barrels of crap so they could fill a latrine with a year's worth." His grin was positively vulpine. "Guess what they forgot?"

Mari-sensei shrugged. "What?"

Kagome-sensei leaned in, eyes sparking with manic glee. "It was a two-man outpost but there were two hundred and seven different people's crap in the latrine." He sat up, nodding in satisfaction. "I spotted that one. Passed it on to Higher, they figured out that Steel Tree was broken. We used it to send disinformation back on the stinkers. Kept 'em dancing to our tune for six months before we became sure they'd sussed it."

"How did you figure out that there were two hundred different people's crap there?"

"Two hundred and seven." Kagome shrugged. "Color. Texture. Smell. Inclusions." He chewed and swallowed some honey-covered chocolates. "Not my most fun assignment ever, but it got me promoted to Black Two."

"Is that when you got sent to the doom fortress?" Hazō asked.

Kagome twitched. "No. Years later. The fortress, I mean. The fortress was later." He grabbed a handful of the chocolate chips and flung them into his mouth. "Years later. Had to work in Black Two for a while before. Wouldn't let you go out to risk having your head blown off by traps or your eyeballs slurped out or your skin peeled off or your brain turned into acid so that it melts out through your lower jaw in a little stream like rain off a roof and splashes on the floor so little drops hit your team's feet. Oh no, can't be letting that happen to people who aren't completely reliable! Much better to use those you trust!"

"Uh..." said Hazō.

"Speaking of trust," said Mari-sensei, "Jiraiya mentioned that he's been looking for a clan compound to buy and he's got a couple of candidates for us to look over. What sort of criteria would you want our home to have?"

Kagome's cheeks were bulging out around the double handful of chocolate chips that he was furiously chomping on, but his jaws stopped moving when Mari-sensei used the word 'home'.

"Up-bup-bup." Upraised delicately-manicured finger of silencing doom. "No talking with your mouth full. Swallow, then you can answer."

Kagome blushed and hurriedly gulped down the chocolate. Given how much there was, it took a couple of swallows.

"We'd need—" He cut himself off as an eyebrow-arched Mari-sensei handed him a dampened cloth, with which he grumpily swiped at his face. "Better?" he growled.

"Missed a bit," Mari-sensei said, pointing to a spot on her left cheek that corresponded to a completely clean region of Kagome-sensei's face. The sealmaster scowled and scrubbed furiously with the cloth for a few seconds. "Now?" At Mari-sensei's nod he threw the cloth down and leaned forward on his elbows. "We'd want an outer wall with two layers of full-coverage shaped charges rigged to chakra tripwires. Plaster goes over the innermost layer; the stinkers who want to sneak in will disable the outer layer and get surprised by the inner. Then we put Force Wall seals just inside the wall so anyone stupid enough to jump over it slams into the Wall when they think it's free space. Of course, that will drop them through a tripwire and into a killing field of shaped charges. Inside the wall we'll need at least a thousand feet of open sightlines before you get to the house. No kawarimi targets, and we'll put Force Wall seals all over the place so that stinkers trying to run across it will get cut to ribbons. Then we'll want some dogs. We'll—"

"Sensei, wouldn't the dogs be at risk if they wandered around among the Force Walls?"

"Not for guarding, dummy. For petting. Now, we'll also want some spikes—"

o-o-o-o​

"Hey, Noburi," Hazō said, settling down beside his teammate with a bowl of Mari-sensei's irritatingly competent soup. "Just wanted to remind you that I'm still on the hook for a research project when you figure out what you want to do. Any ideas? I'm pretty excited about getting our mad science on."

"Basic concept but nothing specific yet," Noburi said, snagging one of the leftover gyoza. "Yesterday I was talking to Jiraiya about the Swamp of Death and how it had so many more chakra beasts and plants than most places we've been. He said that there's a lot of nature chakra there and it's making changes in living things. It makes me wonder if there's a way to de-chakra a beast. It would be one way to make civilians safer—we can't just kill all the animals in the world, but if we could take away their special powers the civilians around them would be a lot safer."

Hazō's eyebrows shot up. "That is a seriously cool idea."

"Thanks," Noburi said. "I've already seen that draining them isn't enough. When I sucked the chakra out of those rabbits up in Snow they didn't lose their fangs and their fur didn't stop trying to drink my blood. Maybe repeated draining over a long period of time? Seems like there should be something better, though."

"Have you talked to Doctor Yakushi about it?"

Noburi shot him a look. "Not yet, no. Do me a favor and don't talk to him, okay? Or about him, or threaten him, or do anything else stupid that's going to stuff everything up for us. One time having my entire world torn out from under me and being thrown in a killbox was enough."

Hazō raised his hands in surrender. "I promise. Not a word, not a peep. And I'm really sorry about last time."

"My mom used to say, 'Don't be sorry. Be better'," Noburi grumped, turning back to his food.

o-o-o-o​

It was late afternoon by the time Jiraiya managed to get away from his meetings and join Hazō, Mari-sensei, Kagome-sensei, and their minders at Training Area Number Four, aka 'that place near the big oak tree where ninja go to blow everything up for the glory of Leaf...and Science!' The three members of Team Uplift had been on the field since dawn; Kagome had dragged them out far earlier than either of the others would have preferred. They went without too much protest (although Mari-sensei had been grumbling under her breath the entire walk) since they both recognized how important it would be for the sealmaster to have research facilities that he considered adequate.

The field was larger than the one they'd used to demonstrate the skytowers. Wide, mostly flat, with grass that had been trimmed short by the razor-sharp teeth of Leaf's goat herds before being burned off by ninja practicing fire element techniques. Now the place was just a mostly-bare patch of dirt two hundred feet wide surrounded by a tall fence. Mari-sensei had taken one look at it, flopped down on the grass at the base of the fence, and gone back to sleep. Kagome had been working on the field ever since, with Hazō's assistance until recently. The sealmaster had attempted to pressgang their escorts into helping with the surveying, but those worthies refused to have anything to do with it. Hazō wasn't sure whether they just wanted to get out of some work or whether they truly meant their assertion that "We need to stay eyes up so we can detect threats to you, sir", but their response had worked well for Kagome. Hazō had even managed to prevent him from laying too many explosive traps around the field.

Finally, however, Jiraiya had appeared and sent the minders packing. Now he, Mari-sensei, and Hazō were sitting by the fence while Kagome-sensei continued the preparations.

"Sir?" Hazō asked carefully. "I wanted to ask about that Vacuum Step jutsu that Keiko learned last time we were here."

"What about it? You interested in learning Wind Element?"

"No, I just...had this idea about how we could weaponize it?"

Mari-sensei snorted from where she was lounging on the grass by the fence. "Pay up," she said to Jiraiya, stretching out one hand without bothering to open her eyes. The strand of grass in her teeth flicked from side to side like the tail of an overly-pleased cat.

Jiraiya sighed and pulled a small pouch of ryo out of his pocket, plopping it in Mari-sensei's grasping hand without looking. "Seriously kid, you couldn't wait just a little longer? Four more days, was that so much to ask?"

"Ummm...?"

Mari-sensei laughed and rolled on her side so she was propped up on one arm, red lips smirking and green eyes dancing in amusement. She took the grass out of her mouth, twirling it between her fingers as she explained to Hazō. "When we got to Leaf I bet him that you couldn't go two weeks without weaponizing at least one more of the things we learned last time we were here."

"Right," the genin said, not sure how to take that. "Uh, okay. Anyway, I was thinking—"

BOOM!

All three ninja spun towards the sound...and then promptly relaxed when they saw that it was simply Kagome explosively reconnoitering a small, inoffensive, and no-longer-existent shrub.

"All good?" Mari-sensei called.

"Yup!" Kagome-sensei shouted back happily. "Turns out it really was just blackberries!"

Jiraiya sighed. "I liked those blackberries," he grumbled. "Seriously, does he need to flatten the entire training ground?"

Hazō looked at Jiraiya in disbelief. The man was the patriarch of his soon-to-be-formed clan, his adoptive father which was a thing Hazō absolutely was not going to think about, the Toad Sage, one of the Sannin, widely regarded as the greatest sealmaster alive, and apparently dumb as a box of hammers.

"Sir," he said after a long pause. "There is a technique that Keiko and I use sometimes. We call it Clear Communication no Jutsu. We invented it because both of us find social interaction awkward at times. People are inherently unpredictable; they understand words in ways that weren't intended, they react to things in ways that you don't expect, they give mixed signals either deliberately or intentionally, and they don't always share their feelings clearly. I often find myself wishing that there were a standard list of interaction patterns instead of having to—"

"Spit it out, kid," Jiraiya said. "I promise I won't be offended."

Hazō thought about that carefully. "Are we alone, sir?"

Jiraiya raised an eyebrow. "Yes. Why?"

"The last time we were in Leaf I spoke carelessly and caused trouble for all of us, sir. Part of the problem was that there were other people listening so you needed to consider their reactions as well as your own. I'm trying to learn from past mistakes, sir."

Jiraiya chuckled. "Trying to figure out how to insult me without getting in trouble, huh? Yeah, it's fine. We're secure; I wasn't about to let anyone else see our clan-secret seal techniques, after all."

Hazō nodded thoughtfully and glanced to Mari-sensei for reassurance. The redheaded jōnin was back to chewing on the stem of grass; she shook her head in amusement and tossed her chin towards Jiraiya in a 'go on' gesture.

"Sir," Hazō said, studying each word carefully before letting it slip past his teeth, "hearing you disparage Kagome-sensei's precautions concerns and confuses me. You are a very accomplished and widely-reknowned sealmaster—"

"The best sealmaster," Jiraiya said smugly.

"Yes, sir. It is my experience that sealing is—"

BOOM! BOOM! KADA-BA-BOOM!

"—an extremely dangerous and unpredictable art. Kagome-sensei is a skilled practitioner, although perhaps not at your level. More importantly, he's still alive after working with seals for at least two decades. In the short time that I've been practicing sealing I have seen numerous explosions, talking chakra constructs, a rift to the Out, and had my consciousness torn out of my body for what might have been a psychedelic drug trip or an actual plunge through other dimensions. Given all of that I find myself very supportive of Kagome-sensei's preparations. My sense is that you feel he is being overly cautious. This suggests an inaccuracy in some part of my model of the world and I am very nervous about any inaccuracy related in any way to sealing. Could you please help me improve my understanding?"

Jiraiya laughed. "So, translating: you think Kagome's prep is entirely reasonable, you think I'm being too casual about it, and you're desperately trying to find a way to tell me that without actually saying that you think I'm dumb as a box of hammers."

Hazō squirmed. "I wouldn't have put it that way, sir."

Jiraiya laughed and leaned over to ruffle Hazō's hair. "Here's the thing: yeah, most of what Kagome does makes perfect sense...for him. There's a few differences between us, though. First, say a seal misfires and calls up one of those metal blade monsters you mentioned. The two of you need to run from it, throw MEWs around it, and seal it away. I can vaporize it with a Rasengan. Spreading fire-fungus? I drown it with Swamp of the Underworld. Cloud of pain pixies? I skewer them all with a Wild Lion's Mane jutsu. Fountain of acid? Shield myself in Needle Jizō. In the unlikely event that there's something I can't deal with, I toss some sparks in the air and within ninety seconds this whole field is swarming with ANBU, med-nin, and three experienced sealmasters to back me up.

"Furthermore, my seals generally don't go wrong, because I have other sealmasters that I can discuss them with, as well as reams and reams of theory texts that I can check them against before infusing things for the first time. Oh, yeah, and because I was inventing seals when Kagome still had little tiny paranoid-obsessive-compulsive baby teeth."

Only the Iron Nerve prevented Hazō's face from showing the exploding star of rage that burned in his heart at Jiraiya's condescending attitude and casual dismissal of Kagome's worries. The Sannin showed no signs of noticing as he blithely continued on.

"Kagome's preparations are designed for someone working on his own with no backup, no reference material, and without the personal power to get himself out of trouble if it happens. They make perfect sense for him and he's smart for doing them. I mean, some of it's a little excessive even for him, but it's fine. Still, with me here it's just not that critical to ensure that the field is flat to within a one-inch tolerance." He shrugged. "Anyway, don't worry. I'm not going to try to talk him out of his paranoia; I can wait while he fusses." He glanced up at the sun. "Well, for a while. I've got maybe another hour and then I need to get back to work.

"Anyway, what was that idea of yours that so impoverished me and so enriched yon Firehair? Something about Vacuum Step?"

"Right. Um, I was thinking that Keiko could make a clone and have it Vacuum Step into an enemy. Maybe have it carry weights while it did it to increase the impact."

Jiraiya chuckled. "Interesting idea. Won't work, but interesting."

Hazō frowned "Why won't it work?"

Jiraiya shook his head. "Nuh-uh, you figure it out. Say Keiko wanted to do this. Talk me through the process; what would she do first?"

"Well, she'd create a clone—"

"Using what technique?"

Hazō's stomach dropped as he saw the problem. Every genin knew the basic clone technique, but that was purely an image with no physical reality. Mari-sensei knew a Water Clone technique and Hazō himself knew an Earth Clone technique, both of which produced physical clones and neither of which were of an element that the air-aspected Keiko could use.

"Oh."

"Mm-hm."

"Well, she could learn the Earth Element and then I could teach her my Earth Clone. That would work."

"Okay, so she spends a couple of years learning how to use a second element, and then you teach her the Earth Clone. Then what?"

"Well, any clone that you make can use whatever jutsu you know, so the clone can—"

Hazō cut himself off at Mari-sensei's cough. "Yes, sensei?" he asked.

"Any jutsu?"

"Ye...oh. Any non-elemental jutsu or jutsu of its own element."

"And Vacuum Step is which element?"

"Wind. And there's no such thing as a Wind Clone." Pause. "Is there?"

Jiraiya laughed. "Nope. Also, Vacuum Step is just like Substitution—if you try to pick an invalid path it simply won't activate. 'Deliberately slamming into an object' counts as an invalid path." He took a sip from his canteen, cast a glance to where Kagome was busy filling in a minor depression with a trowel and a bucket of dirt, and then turned back to Hazō. "Okay, if I've learned anything from betting with Firehair over there it's that you, my overly creative lad, never have just one incredibly destructive and alarming idea knocking around in your brain. Your Vacuum Step idea doesn't work. What else you got?"

"Well, um, there's a lot to do with the macerator seal. Smoke bombs, flash bombs, crowd control, flashbangs, fireballs, all in one seal."

Jiraiya nodded. "Handy." He look over at Kagome again; the balding sealmaster had put down his bucket and was pulling out a tape measure. Jiraiya considered that for a moment and then sighed. "Look, Kagome's head would explode if we did any actual infusing before the field was ready, and I suppose as his clan head I have a duty to keep him safe even from self-induced head explosions. Ergo, no actual infusing. Still, we can play with already created seals and talk theory...whiiiich, of course, brings me around to the ink. Got bad news there: doesn't work."

"What do you mean, doesn't work?"

"Can't make chakra ink out of invisible ink. I tried, couldn't do it. You're welcome to give it a shot, though. I brought a supply." He pulled a small flask out of one of the pockets on his flak vest and passed it over to Hazō.

The genin took the ink supply with a frown. Why shouldn't it be possible? The ritual for infusing chakra ink was trivial and he'd used it on multiple types of ink that he'd bought in stores all across the Elemental Nations, as well as ink that he'd made himself. Why would this be different?

"What is this?" he said, opening the cap and peering inside.

"Oak gall," Jiraiya said. "You write your message with it, then the recipient adds a little vitriol to make the writing appear. If you're being really careful you screen it on over a stencil so there aren't even marks on the surface of the paper or cloth or whatever the message is written on."

Hazō sat down crosslegged, pulling out the lump of brass that he used for infusing. As he had done a thousand times over the last year he buffed the lump on the leather of his belt to be sure that it was free of any dirt, meanwhile reciting the short nonsense rhyme that served to clear the chakra pathways. He dipped the brass in the ink and blew gently across the surface, pushing the tiniest pulse of chakra through his fingertips and into the ink...which utterly failed to absorb it.

"What?" He glared at the ink vial as though it were a teammate who had betrayed him.

"Told you," Jiraiya said. "The other invisible ink we use is apple juice—you put it over a lamp to bring the message out. Not as good as oak gall, but it works. I tried it with that and got equally nowhere."

"Damnit," Hazō growled, continuing to glare at the inoffensive vial.

Jiraiya shrugged. "Eh, don't sweat it. It would be nice if we had that advantage, but I'm not too surprised. If this were a doable thing then your cl—the Kurosawa clan would have been doing it for ages. I thought it was worth a shot because maybe you just hadn't heard about it, being as you didn't grow up in the clan. Or maybe they don't do it because it would mean being taken off the line. I'm not too surprised, though." He leaned down to clap Hazō on the shoulder. "Come on, show me some of those macerator ideas you were talking about. You've got some pre-loaded, right?"

Hazō spared the flask one more venomous look, then pushed himself to his feet. "Yes sir. Let me just warn Kagome."