It was too many kids in too little time. " And the fact he could even mistake Yamato for dead amidst the multitude of corpses meant he'd done the experiments all at once in a very short span of time, before Sarutobi found him.
"Besides, he had to have received his more… atypical training from someone, and I doubt it was Sarutobi Hiruzen. "
Shisui grimaced. He sealed the casserole in a storage seal – on his skin, and took a deep breath.
And he still didn't leave.
Instead, he looked from his arm up to my eyes and very seriously said "Ask me something important. "
Eh?
Shisui ran through hand seals at a speed I could actually track. I could see and feel faint wisps of smoke around the lower half of my face.
"This is the Loose Lips technique, an illusion ninjutsu I cast during our talk on the street, to protect us from lip readers in addition to the wind barrier. "
I gaped at him in disbelief.
"The only ones who know about Kotoamatsukami are the two of us for now. I haven't even told th-"
"Stop!"
Shisui stopped.
Then I sat heavily on my wife's glory box and put my face in my hands. The silence that followed was deep, heavy and earnest.
It pissed me off so fucking much.
"… This is precisely why I didn't say anything before, I know you're sensitive to illusions-"
"I'm sensitive to the threat of mind rape, not light-bending ninjutsu barely one step removed from the basic clone technique that every other kid in this village can use, and that's not the problem!"
Shisui paused in front of my outburst. "I'm only trying to establish mutual leverage.
It's how we ninja show goodwill. "
"Shisui. " I rose back to my feet and very pointedly looked Shisui right in the eyes.
They were still black, but who's to say that wasn't an illusion too? "I get what you're trying to do. But there's one, big, fatal flaw with this plan of yours: I'm not a ninja.
I have no power, no skills, no ability to defend myself or any knowledge from literally anybody of consequence, I can't enforce any leverage. So please, when you think about making me privy to even more sensitive information, do us both a favour and-" Suddenly, my words stopped as my thoughts made a course-correction.
My critical reasoning skills made it past my wall of dismay and fear and replaced everything with just one, sudden, thought-searing flash of absolute misery so deep I couldn't understand what it was for a moment. Then I did, and I couldn't believe I ever thought I was above such feelings.
"This is just another fucking test, isn't it?"
Shisui's expression flickered like-
But no, I just didn't care anymore. "You have my gratitude for volunteering to answer my questions, honourable ninja.
I'm grateful for the Hokage's generosity and have learned all I needed about his dispensations and ancillary matters. I have no more questions.
"
"… Mister Hanzo, I-"
"Beg pardon, sir ninja, but I couldn't imagine imposing on your time any longer. I will resort to the standard channels of communication when I have my answer for the Third.
Thank you for your assistance. "
"… You're welcome, then. "
Finally, Uchiha Shisui quietly, blessedly, left my house.
What proof of good faith do you people still want that you haven't already taken?
I watched him go. I didn't need to see the neighbours to know they were out there being inconspicuously conspicuous.
I recalled that this entire visit began with Shisui's revelation that the Uchiha Clan had followed my advice to begin redressing their optics in the village.
I still almost slammed the door. Almost.
I was going to invite you to watch me create life in a bottle.
Police states suck.
"-. .
-"
Mercifully, I had a true best friend that would always distract me from my woes and who'd never betrayed me – science.
As with most other things in this world, the existence of magic and four world wars in quick succession had made science very unevenly developed, and even more schizophrenic in its application. This world knew about charge neutrality and Debye length, for example, albeit under different names.
But it didn't know about plasma double layers even though they form naturally in any sufficiently complex plasma. Like, oh, lightning, the aurora borealis, literally any form of current-carrying electricity, even neon lights.
In fact, this world didn't even have the term plasma, calling it all lightning or electricity or some variation thereof. Which made sense, plasma was only coined by Irving Langmuir after he noticed its resemblance to living blood cells.
Maybe there's a foreign continent out there with more advanced science, like from that film with the kid with a magic rock for a heart, but I doubted it. Based on the maps of this place, the Elemental Nations added up to roughly the same landmass as the combined continents of my past life.
Also, things like the Kurama Clan, movie theatres and the Land of Snow didn't exist, so that foreign continent probably didn't exist anymore than all the filler stuff. Which was good for me because I never watched any of it.
I already had a hell of a time just fitting chakra into my research paradigm, never mind anything else like, oh, the Ryumiaku for example. Though it certainly would explain where the Shinju found the energy to harvest chakra from.
Or make it.
I was still developing my theories there. Also, I got sidetracked.
Back on the other Earth – or maybe the same one in the past or future, who the hell knows what Pangaea was like way back – a guy called Bohm discovered that putting electrons into plasma made them stop behaving like individuals and instead as if they were a part of a larger and interconnected whole. Even seemingly random movements of individual electrons actually added up to collective, organised effects.
Effects not unlike what you'd see in a biological organism. The plasma behaved like an amoeba, constantly regenerating itself and isolating impurities in a wall, like a unicellular organism might isolate foreign objects in a cyst.
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