Cosmos Quest (Naruto/Lupin III)

[Selias]

[X] ... hm. Something about the way he says 'thirteen years' makes you think he wants to hear the story in more depth. Well, let it never be said you deny an audience what they crave...

 

[Guile]

[X] Having fun, mostly. I got lucky in a lot of ways, you know? Konoha's a pretty cool place. Love my folks, dad knows about the head guys even if he has weird ideas about what Lupin can make me do. I have two brothers from other mothers, got lots of friends. I might not be teacher's favorite, but he's a pretty cool guy too; got me my first pack of smokes. You guys' guns are better than ours, sorry to say. Kiba's gotta be pissed, but making the little fiddly bits are hard! Ninja haven't even heard of machining.
[X] Guess I've been coasting. Corrupting the youth, building up my stash of swag, stole my first kiss the other month. Learning stuff, being awesome. Living, you know how it is. Well, there was that jackass with the cheap-ass Super Sharingan (any attempted murder more than a month old is fodder for jokes, you know that) and stuff, but mostly it's been smooth sailing.
[X] What about you? What's Suna like? Am I gonna have to stage a daring daylight robbery of the Kazekage's kids and kick off an international incident, or what?

 

[iamnuff]

Hmm. Well seeing as Jigen is here, could Jigen help us make a Super!Jigen construct?

Wouldn't be autonomous like Lupin, but it's also probably the next best thing. Like having a pen pal! Sorta. Plus more back-up in our head.

Maybe another perspective would help us flesh out the rest of the contructs too.

Click to shrink...

you want to ask him "help me make a mind-clone of you"?

sure, why not.

 

[luckybreak91]

Hello Furiko.

I have returned from my self imposed exile and have caught up. I shall never disappear again.


[X] ... hm. Something about the way he says 'thirteen years' makes you think he wants to hear the story in more depth. Well, let it never be said you deny an audience what they crave...

 

[Guile]

you want to ask him "help me make a mind-clone of you"?

sure, why not.

Click to shrink...

I prefer the term 'brain-buddies.' 'Psi pals'? 'Mindfriends'?

I like brain-buddies.

 

[Unclouded]

[X] Having fun, mostly. I got lucky in a lot of ways, you know? Konoha's a pretty cool place. Love my folks, dad knows about the head guys even if he has weird ideas about what Lupin can make me do. I have two brothers from other mothers, got lots of friends. I might not be teacher's favorite, but he's a pretty cool guy too; got me my first pack of smokes. You guys' guns are better than ours, sorry to say. Kiba's gotta be pissed, but making the little fiddly bits are hard! Ninja haven't even heard of machining.
[X] Guess I've been coasting. Corrupting the youth, building up my stash of swag, stole my first kiss the other month. Learning stuff, being awesome. Living, you know how it is. Well, there was that jackass with the cheap-ass Super Sharingan (any attempted murder more than a month old is fodder for jokes, you know that) and stuff, but mostly it's been smooth sailing.
[X] What about you? What's Suna like? Am I gonna have to stage a daring daylight robbery of the Kazekage's kids and kick off an international incident, or what?

 

[FurikoMaru]

[X] Manhattan Joke

You are Kankuro. You don't have a clan, you don't have a bijuu sealed inside you like your little brother, you don't have a natural talent for Wind jutsu like your older sister, and a lot of the time, it's debatable whether you could even be said to have a dad.

What you do have are your dreams.

"Who're we helping?"

"The girl!"

"Figures." 8)

Suna is brown and yellow and orange and red and grey.

Your dreams are whatever colour they want to be.

=

The Suna Ninja Academy is a breeding ground for bullies. Upperclassmen are actively encouraged to 'teach the small fry their place'.

-WHACK!-

"AUGH! By dose! He broke by dose!"

"Who do you think you're fucking with, you little shit!"

For someone who was allowed to start early on the basis of being a genius, you're a remarkably slow learner.

"If you're going to pick a fight, pick one you can win!" Temari scolds as she cleans up your wounds. "You're embarrassing the family carrying on like this!"

You know she's only saying these things because you're at school. If you were at home she'd admit she's worried about you - and she'd probably hug you if you couldn't get away quick enough.

It still hurts.

"I'm not afraid of them."

Jigen wouldn't be afraid. Goemon wouldn't be afraid. Lupin wouldn't be afraid (even though he fuckin' should be, as often as he gets his silly ass shot). So you won't be afraid either.

You aren't the strongest kid in your class, but by the end of your first year you earn a rep as the scariest. The one who doesn't stay down when he should.

Your only friends are in your head.

=

You don't think of it as 'switching places' before you get interested in puppetry; up until then, as far as you were concerned, there was no you-and-Jigen, there was just you when you remembered and you when you didn't. Sometimes the you who remembers is the one who gets to talk and run and jump, and sometimes it's the you who still has to learn.

You aren't talking to a long dead gunslinger, you're talking to yourself. Only crazy people hear voices, after all.

The puppets were Gaara's idea.

"Well, your hands move a lot quicker than the rest of ya. And I need someone to practice with that I don't have to worry about hurting; the advisers are freaking out waaaay too much for the geezer to let me fight the other kids. C'mon, you just have to prop them up with your chakra, it's not like it's a big undertaking."

It really is a big undertaking, as it turns out. Battle puppets are intricate pieces of machinery that require constant upkeep, and Gaara blows through them like Kleenex. You quickly learn to send only the cheapest and simplest of them against him, relying on your own reaction times and chakra control to keep pace with the jinchuuriki.

The others you hoard to yourself.

What began as a favour to your little brother quickly becomes a way to claim to be 'training' while spending time on something other than ninja bullshit for five fucking minutes.

Temari tells you you're never going to make any friends if you keep this up, but it's not like that's a big loss. You like the quiet.

You enjoy the deceptive delicacy of the mechanisms, and making little improvements of your own now and then to keep them running smoothly. Soon, you reach the point where you can strip the largest of your puppets in under sixty seconds and put it back together in another sixty, just like you used to do with a sniper rifle.

But it's not enough.

You're proud of how well you can take care of your 'partners' and how well you can make them dance, but it doesn't feel right, always sending them out to handle the danger while you hang back.

It makes you feel tied down, ironically enough - trapped.

You used to fly the same way they do.

So one day, you switch things up. You jump out yourself, and send your chakra threads back to one of the puppets behind you.

It doesn't work. You get tangled almost from the first step, and the puppet falls over face first trying to follow your instructions.

Undaunted, you try again. Again, the puppet falls over.

You know it isn't a control issue - your chakra control is the envy of every aspiring medic in your class - which means it must be a lack of power.

So a final time, you gather everything you've got and practically hurl your chakra into the puppet.

When you come to, your body is kneeling over you with a panicky expression on its face.

"Kid, I swear to god..."

"Hello, me," you say, dreamily amused. You try to blink, but to your great confusion you have no eyelids. Sitting up slightly, you look down at your wooden limbs in amazement.

"Oh."

"'Zat all you have to say? 'Oh'?" Other-you shakes your head. "Christ almighty. Even in dreams Lupin's a terrible influence."

=

"This failure is unacceptable, Kankuro. I expect better from you."

Your father is not a kind man.

He would probably call himself 'tough but fair'. Your sister certainly does. But Temari is a good girl who loves her father and doesn't know any better than to think all this is normal. You have over fifty years of memories of various employers and clients to draw upon for reference, and the Yondaime Kazekage is neither fair nor especially tough. He's just an asshole.

"Murdering children is unacceptable, sir," you say bluntly. "That grade is ink on a piece of paper."

The slap hurts, but you know if you'd tried to block it the follow up would have been worse.

"You aren't in the nursery anymore, you brat," he says coldly. "This is the real world. If you can't even 'kill' a target made of wood, you might as well be dead already."

It had a face.

It was an old doll (everything in Suna is old) standing at about three-quarters your height. The body was scored deeply with cuts from a hundred students before you. The arms were missing.

It was one of a set of equally-battered dummies, distributed amongst your classmates from the storeroom. Yours was actually in better shape than most - the boy beside you had one with a bucket taped to its knee in place of a lower leg, and one of the girls in the row behind you had to lay hers on the desk because it couldn't stand up at all with its caved-in chest.

Which made the realization that every single doll in that room had a freshly-painted, smiling face strike home with sickening force.

Some sick bastard - no, not even a sick bastard. Some normal person went out of their way to make sure each copy of My First Victim had a realistic face with child proportions.

This is the world you live in. Children have to be taught the best way to stab other children, so that they don't get stabbed first.

The lecture goes on for a while, and you keep your mouth shut through all of it even though you want nothing more than to show him exactly how willing you are to kill a target with a pulse who deserves it.

Because a voice inside your heart is telling you that assholes like this come and go, but your career can last forever if you get good enough. You just have to hang on, and endure, until you're old enough. And strong enough. And when you get there, you can go anywhere.

Because somewhere out there, there's a thief in a yellow car who needs a trigger-man.

=

"I heard you wouldn't stab the doll."

You're never sure exactly how to be an older brother to Gaara. He's already pretty savvy, so he doesn't need looking out for, he's stronger than several adults you know, so you don't have to protect him, and he has more friends than you have kids in your class whose names you remember. When he wants affection he goes to Temari; when he wants to ask advice he's got Uncle Yashamaru; and when he wants to butt heads with authority, he's more than happy to take the fight directly to your old man.

Really, the only time the two of you talk is when he wants to speak with you, specifically.

"You heard right."

He throws a leg over the bench you're on and takes a seat, hunched over with his elbows on his knees. "And I'm guessing there's a reason you didn't. Care to share?"

You wonder if you should tell him the attempted badass effect of that posture is cancelled out completely by his swinging, kicking feet on either side of the bench.

"I'm not going to kill women or kids," you say. There's a note of pride in your voice when you say it, and that makes you a little ashamed of yourself. You aren't supposed to be proud that you show mercy to children; it's just what you do, if you aren't a psychopath.

"I see." His next question isn't 'and how the hell do you expect to arrange that', but it might as well be. "Is that your 'nindo'?"

"Fuck nindo," you say with as much venom as you can inject into your voice. "I'm not spending the rest of my life as a thug in some freaky deathcult who murders on the grand high poo-bah's say-so, and neither should you or 'Mari. You're better than that."

Suna is not Whispering Mist, where such a comment would immediately be put through forty different forms of analysis by the surveillance teams following the kage's children and then reported upon to the public at large. Suna is not Heartless Rock, where Gaara would have been obligated to hamstring you on the spot and only then call in the possibility that you might be thinking about defecting. Suna shinobi are not the Voyeurs Hidden In The Leaves, who would sic some 'kind', 'sympathetic' jounin on you to make sure you don't learn any jutsu higher than C-rank until they're certain you aren't going to stray from their precious happy-sunshine Will of Fire.

Suna is brown and yellow and orange and red and grey. And when it comes to privacy, grey outweighs the other colours. No one gives a shit what you say and no one wants you to give a shit about what they say. It's all talk until you actually do something.

Gaara smirks.

"So. What's the thing you miss most about home?"

"My friends," you snap. "Got a problem with that?"

Then you realize what he just said.

Your brother obviously doesn't know what to do with your reply. Hilariously, he almost looks like he expects to get punched if he says anything else. As if anyone's ever landed a punch on Gaara.

'What do you miss about home'. I'm guessing somebody could, back in the day.

Finally, he sighs.

"... shit. Now I feel shallow for missing the way girls dressed."

"Or the way they'd sometimes just smile for no reason on the street," you say, remembering.

"Or that stuff they used on their hair, whatever the hell it was, that made it smell like that."

"Conditioner," you tell him. "She would add it to the shopping list without actually telling me what brand she used and then complain when I got it wrong. Used to drive me nuts." You frown, or maybe Jigen does. Frédéric Fekkai... something something. Hell, she'll probably expect me to remember when I get out of here, too.

"Pizza," Gaara says. "Please tell me you remember pizza."

"Deep dish or the real thing?"

"YES!"

Holy... he wasn't this excited on his last birthday. Kid must seriously love his pie.

"Do you know how to make it?" he asks breathlessly.

"Well, yeah," you say, taken aback, "it's not really that hard."

And just like that, Gaara is grabbing you by the wrist and dragging you off to some bakery across town, laughing and babbling something about ancient wisdom from beyond the world's end.

Why am I always the one who gets dragged into things?

Relax, kid. Enjoy the ride.

So you do.

=

Temari sighs. "Well, it makes about as much sense as anything else about you two."

You can't help but smile. Good ol' sensible-as-salt Temari.

"So you won't tell the old man?" Gaara asks.

In retrospect, it does seem a little strange that Gaara has never once referred to the Kazekage as his father; not even when he was first learning to talk.

"At this point, I don't think it's really any of his concern," she replies. "Dad's job is to protect the village. My job is to protect you two."

And that's when you know, if you ever get out of here, you're taking Temari with you. You always kind of knew you would have to - she's your sister, after all - but this clinches it. You're not leaving her behind to take the fall for letting you escape.

"There isn't anything else, is there?" she asks.

"Oh," Gaara says, "forgot to mention, I'm half Devil. That's why I always win at hide-and-seek."

Temari stares.

"Huh," you say. "That's a hell of a thing. Not gonna try to conquer humanity and kidnap beautiful women, are ya?"

"Nah, no money in it."

You shrug. "Fine by me, then."

"'Look after your brothers, Temari'," your sister mutters under her breath. "'They're so much younger than you; they need you to watch over them...' Goddamnit, Mom..."

=

You get the impression that either Gaara didn't live long enough to grow up the last time around, or no amount of living is going to cure him of his inability to save his money. Damn near everything he makes that he doesn't spend on rent, repairs for shit he's broken or pizza goes to you guys, sooner or later. Temari gets all the clothes and girl stuff from the capital she never admits to wanting, Uncle Yashamaru's medical team gets that special imported salve from Bear Country that got cut from their budget, and the girls who're at every show the band plays order drinks on his tab.

You, apparently, get a gun.

"Is it close enough?" Gaara asks, sounding unusually nervous by his standards - which is to say, nervous at all. "I had to give the guy the specs myself and I've never really been a revolver kind of guy."

You pick up a handful of nibuban coins in your free hand, throw them into the air, and fire.

All are perforated when they hit the floor.

"It's perfect," you say.

And if your smile has more than a little to do with the dumbfounded look on your brother's face, well... you're just celebrating while you can. You give it maybe two, three seconds tops before he starts grinning like a wolf.

Ah, yep, there is it. No way is he going to be holding back on you anymore.

=

"Are you absolutely sure?" Temari stresses.

"There's no reason anyone would try to pretend to be someone only I remember," you insist. "This is my best friend's handwriting, I'm telling you. And that unmasking? That was pure Lupin."

"Let me guess: Ms Conditioner?" Gaara smirks. "Just bear in mind, big brother, past-life girlfriend or not, I saw her first this time around."

You are unable to keep the grin off your face. "By all means, have at it, kiddo."

Seems like a long way to go to teach him fiscal responsibility.

No it doesn't. 8)

=

"You know her from somewhere. Where?"

You stare. "You really don't beat around the bush, do you, kid?"

"Where?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Nara Shikamaru's 'don't give me that bullshit' look is remarkably advanced for his age. "So you're from her last time around."

You raise an eyebrow. "She told you?"

"She was breaking seals at six months old and running heists by the time we were five. I'd be a complete moron if she had to tell me what she is."

"You'd be surprised what people can rationalize in a ninja village," you say, sighing. "Yeah. We were friends."

He takes a sip of his drink. "Are you going to ask her to defect?"

"Fuck no." If you ever invite Lupin III to Suna, it'll be to bleed your father's savings dry and dye his robes of office pink.

"'s all I needed to hear." He sits back.

You blink. "That's it? How do you know I'm not lying to get a leg up on her in our match?"

He smirks. "If you're really her friend, then you know why. No one gets a permanent leg up on Yamanaka Ino."

"Except a cute brunette with great jugs," you mutter.

Shikamaru flinches. "... well. That explains something I didn't really want explained."

=

You are Kankuro.

You don't have much, but you have a family, and now you might have a friend.

You think. Does it count if past-life circumstances throw you together? You really hope so, because Ino seems like a barrel of laughs.

She's the heir to the Yamanaka clan, and the longer you spend around her the more apparent it is that she has no idea what that name means to people who aren't from Konoha.

Lupin (Lupin! Right there in living breathing pouting-because-you-implied-he-slipped-Goemon-the-meat technicolor!) sees your expression as she chatters on about her dad, and silently pleads with you not to say a word.

Prince fuckin' Charming.

You try to give him a reassuring look, but you think you might've fucked it up - you don't have a lot of practice at this sort of thing.

You hope he knows you understand. Hell, how could you not? Look at her; she's like a little slice of home somehow got preserved in the transition to this world. She hugged you to say hello. No ninja does that to someone they just met. Not to mention she's the first sensor you've ever met who's been able to have a real conversation with Gaara.

But she isn't all Pollyanna.

"You mean at some point you might have to give your life for that sulking pretty-boy?" you ask, livid.

She waves away your anger like an unpleasant odor. "I know, I know, we're working on it. And for the record, he was nice enough to share the revenge pie with me; when we take Itachi out we're going tag-team."

You desperately want to say something like, "Yes you are, and you'd better make room for a third team member." Just something to show you've got her back. This isn't just a nice girl, after all; this is Lupin. He's just as much your brother as Gaara is. That he also currently happens to be petite blonde girl who really does not look like she's ready to take on an S-rank missing nin is just icing on the cake. You want to tell her that even though things are different now, this much hasn't changed; that you're still her triggerman, if she needs one.

But you know how this kind of thing goes. It's personal. You'd just get in the way.

"What about you?" she asks eventually, grinning. "Am I gonna have to stage a daring daylight robbery of the Kazekage's kids and kick off an international incident, or what?"

[X] Write-in.

 

[Selias]

Sweet jeebus, Furiko!

 

[FurikoMaru]

XD The sad part is I didn't even have half of that planned out when I started writing it. It just kept coming.

 

[Selias]

XD The sad part is I didn't even have half of that planned out when I started writing it. It just kept coming.

Click to shrink...

Well, I liked getting a look into Kankuro's backstory.

 

[Vindictus]

[X] "Hah! I ain't some damsel in distress- We can handle 'Rescuing' ourselves, when the time comes."

 

[Selias]

[X] "God, yes. Err, I mean... No. I had it right the first time."

 

[mc2rpg]

I don't know anything about Lupin and it has kept me from really getting into this quest, but this last update was really great.

 

[Hymn of Ragnarok]

Once again, going straight for the feels. And Shikamaru already knows who we are.

And to be fair, Shikamaru was about as cognizant as us so maaaaaaaaaaybe we should either be looking into him or he shouldn't have been quite so certain. Still.

Also, and I can't believe I didn't call this out,

You could call my mother a whore right now and I think I'd forgive you."

Click to shrink...

Is this a reference to The Last Days of Foxhound?

 

[FurikoMaru]

Once again, going straight for the feels. And Shikamaru already knows who we are.

And to be fair, Shikamaru was about as cognizant as us so maaaaaaaaaaybe we should either be looking into him or he shouldn't have been quite so certain. Still.

Also, and I can't believe I didn't call this out,

Is this a reference to The Last Days of Foxhound?

Click to shrink...

It is indeed.

Oh, and the jailbreaking from the playpen is a family story. He doesn't actually remember it.

 

[Guile]

I was smiling like mad through that whole update.

Silly Kankuro, Ino doesn't have Lupin's machismo no matter what her accent sounds like. The more the merrier! Having a big set up for an epic ninja battle with Ino-and-Sasuke versus Itachi, then having Itachi get sniped like a chump sounds beautiful.

[X] "Hard to 'steal' people that want to make tracks, kid. We'll work something out."
-[X] You want to look into the Perverts Hidden in the Leaves first, and make sure you don't, in fact, need to steal this girl first.

Edit: I'm not sure my write-in has quite the feeling I was going for. Kankuro wants to beat feet, but Temari and Gaara might feel differently. They have friends in Sand.
[X] We might need to stage a coup instead!

 

[FurikoMaru]

I think my favourite parts of this update are the Gaara-themed implied-feels. I'm proud I managed to get those in there.

 

[luckybreak91]

Huh, so Gaara is Dante.

Groovy.

 

[FurikoMaru]

Huh, so Gaara is Dante.

Groovy.

Click to shrink...

XD Wow, you really have been away a long time.

 

[Hymn of Ragnarok]

It is indeed.

Click to shrink...

1 and 2/3 for me then!

Oh, and the jailbreaking from the playpen is a family story. He doesn't actually remember it.

Click to shrink...

Ah, shame.

 

[MrGazzer]

I think my favourite parts of this update are the Gaara-themed implied-feels. I'm proud I managed to get those in there.

Click to shrink...

All hail FurikoMaru, Mistress of Feels-Fu!

 

[Hymn of Ragnarok]

Well, now we definitely don't need to worry about getting double-crossed by Suna. Not if Kankuro is in the loop, and Gaara is would probably join Kankuro in telling the Kazekage to get bent.

 

[Vindictus]

At this point, I really hope that Suna betrays us.

Really. It'll be nice to introduce people to 'Our buddy the Kazekage'.

 

[iamnuff]

At this point, I really hope that Suna betrays us.

Really. It'll be nice to introduce people to 'Our buddy the Kazekage'.

Click to shrink...

who, Temeri? i don't think Garaa would want the job this time 'round.

 

[Hymn of Ragnarok]

Y'know it'd be pretty funny if all of the next generation of Kage are all second-rate, because all the first-rate ninja don't want the job and are good enough to foist it on some other sap with no repercussions to themselves.

 

[iamnuff]

Y'know it'd be pretty funny if all of the next generation of Kage are all second-rate, because all the first-rate ninja don't want the job and are good enough to foist it on some other sap with no repercussions to themselves.

Click to shrink...

now I'm picturing a bunch of Ebisu's and Iruka's sitting around a table at the summit, looking sheepishly at each other while their "bodyguards" (the A-listers) sit around playing cards and messing around.

 

[FurikoMaru]

If anyone's curious, this is the actual song that the title's referencing. I quite like it.

Fun fact, part of the reason the last update was delayed was that I stopped writing to do research on where exactly Jigen grew up for a New Yorker posturing joke that I didn't end up making. I mean, canonically he grew up on the actual island of Manhattan, but I wanted to narrow that down to his proper neighbourhood. So now I know a lot more about the history of NYC than I ever intended to. Interesting stuff.

And if you care, I eventually decided based on his birthdate and socioeconomic background that he grew up in either the Bowery or somewhere in Hell's Kitchen.

I guess I could have just cheated and said he grew up on the Lower East Side, but that's a cop-out answer I could have come up with after a Godfather marathon.

 

[uju32]

[X] Manhattan Joke

Click to shrink...

Yuji Ohno and Friends-Manhattan Joke

-Suna Academy sounds like a Victorian type boarding school, exaggerated for effect; they were the last places where seniors maintained school hierarchy with the tacit approval of the school faculty.
You'll still find this general idea in a fair number of boarding schools in some former British colonies.
In Suna's defence, they do seem to have taken the meritocracy thing pretty seriously if people thought the genius kid of the Kazekage was as much fair game as any other mook.
I am surprised though that anyone thought it a good idea to mess with the brother of a jinch.

-Kankuro seems to have had a pretty miserable childhood.
What happened to Karura his mother?
Maternal mortality? In a village with chakra healers?
"Your only friends are in your head". Ouch.
Good way to foster nukenin.

Any idea which village produces the most nukenin in numbers? What of quality?
Konoha does produce the most S-class nukenin, I believe.

-He brute-forced Shintenshin? And didn't die?
Wow.
The way he did it means the only reason he knocked out the lights against Shika was to downplay his actual abilities.
But no Throne.

-Judging by the fact that they wouldn't let Gaara "play" with the other kids?
Suna isn't crazy. Or even evil.
Just stuck in the Hard Man paradigm, where pain is weakness leaving the body.
Not a good setup for sensitive kids, and the psych profile I have for puppetteers suggests a lot of them would be sensitive kids.

-"Everything in Suna is old."
Way to underline their poverty with just a few words.
And to explain the harshness of the place; poverty tends to ensure that cruelties get overlooked under the guise of necessity.
Very well done Furiko.

-Reference GET:
Thats a hell of a thing - Fred Kwan, Galaxy Quest
That takes me to 2 1/3 Z-slashes.

-Temari is totally gonna be Godaime Kazekage; Jikuro won't want the job, and Gaante won't care.
Given that she's one of the few people with influence on their behavior....
Kinda surprised that they're so open with each other though from the beginning.
Still, our cover's blown.
Assuming we ever had one; I'm beginning to think we have been much more obvious than we assumed.

- Shika makes it incredibly clear just how obvious we've been to those who know us.
I wonder if there's a special note in Konoha's classification files for "Reincarnation"; given Jiraiya's interest, it might be common enough to warrant it's own classification code.
Note Asuma's comments about chakra getting weirder every generation.

-Wait.
How did I not see this before?
We got a jounin who trained in a TEMPLE.
Well played, Furiko, well played; your Konoha impresses me the more I learn about it.
What other surprises are you hiding? Is there anything about Kurenai's background we should know about? Or Gai's?

-Lol at Shika flinching.
Just realised Ino used to be a guy, eh?

-Just how scary is the Yamanaka rep outside Konoha?
Really?
How bad must it be that Lupin is trying to shield Ino from full knowledge yet?

-Kankuro had it bad.
It's gotten better as he got older, but it's never really been joyful.
Ouch.
Kid needs a friend.

More and more, it becomes apparent just how privileged Inopin was to be born where she was.
And no matter what Kankuro says here, Ino is a sensor; she can tell both from what he says, and what he doesn't.
Assuming Jigen doesn't talk to Lupin about it, of course.

 

[uju32]

*snip*

Click to shrink...

Just to assuage my curiosity:
How long were you planning the whole handwriting reveal thing?
From the beginning?
Or did it just come to you mid-update?

 

[iamnuff]

I thought shika was flinching because the discription of Lupin's "type" matches his mom. (who has it going on)