Tumbling out of the magic portal, Naruto splashed down in the pond where a small stream backed up against the roots of a tree, while Haruko continued the spin of her 'diving' motion to land neatly on her feet, knees flexing to take up the impact.
"eeeEEEP!" Casually, the woman sidestepped to avoid being splashed as Hinata followed them out of the hole in the sky, flattening Naruto where he'd started to climb out of the water. An instant later, she took another step to catch the falling bento so it wouldn't smash on the ground of the lightly wooded meadow. She smirked at the kids as they tried to get untangled, while the orange jacket fluttered through the air to land in the bushes off to one side.
"Hmmm, it seems like we have a spy on the special Secret Family Training, Naruto-bozu. Well, we can deal with spies," she said with a toothy grin. Haruko loomed over the small girl and cracked her knuckles ominously.
Finally managing to get his head out of the back of Hinata's long grey coat where the fabric had tangled around him Naruto pushed her to her feet beside him. Unnerved by the way his nominal relative suddenly seemed to become a pitch black silhouette save for a pair of gleaming red eyes and a mouthful of sharklike teeth, he shouted, "Haruko-mom, wait! This is, um, that girl from the back row. She's kind of a shy, dark wierdo but she's never mean to anybody and anyway I think I heard she's part of some big important family or something so she's kind of like a princess and you definitely can't beat her up, even if she is spying on the special Secret Family Training. Except that's probably an accident anyway because I really mean it when I said she's never mean to anybody, not even Sakura-chan when all the other girls used to pick on her or Choji when people say he's fat or even me." His manic babble stopped, and he flashed a quick smile at the girl before giving Haruko a serious look. "Maybe it's just 'cause she was shy, but I think she's probably the only one who was never mean to me, so you definitely can't be mean to her, Haruko-mom." Getting upright at last, he climbed out of the shallow pond before extending a hand to help the young Hyuuga out as well.
Her face was burning (not least because her coat had come off while Naruto was struggling to get up, leaving her in just a mesh top with a lightweight blue tee shirt underneath) and her throat felt like it was in a vice, but by dint of a half dozen tries Hinata finally managed to apologise for intruding, promise to keep any secrets, and almost managed to say she'd come to return the jacket and ask about, that is, bento, candidate...
Thump.
Not liking the size of the fangs on the rabbity-lizard thing hopping around or the speculative look in its eye as it sniffed at the fainted girl, Naruto gave it a good kick which tossed it into the nearby tree, whereupon it let off an unhappy croak and started dissolving into some kind of dark, stinky goo. Unfortunately while he was distracted trying to figure out why she'd passed out a second one grabbed his beloved jacket in its mouth and scurried off.
Haruko had given her ward's classmate an assessing once-over as she stammered out her apologies, then became involved in trying each of the bite sized portions of different foods packed into the bento, having neglected to grab breakfast while planning and preparing for the day's adventure, so she didn't notice either and the bouncing menace vanished with its prize.
"Well... Cooking: Pretty good. Physicial shape: S-rank! Attitude: Needs work. N.O.: moderate. Mouth-to-mouth: No data, but they say it's always the quiet ones," Haruko declared. "I guess she can stay, as long as she agrees to become Bridal Candidate #2. It is /Super/ /Secret/ /Family/ /Training/ after all."
"H... H... H... H..."
"So, do you agree, Princess?"
"H... H... H... Ha..."
"Oi, I can't hear you. Whattaya say?"
Hinata squeezed her eyes shut, clenched her fist, and used the other hand to hit a tenketsu that paralysed her diaphram so she'd stop hyperventilating. She was sure this was absolutely the most important thing she'd ever say, so she gathered all her willpower, reversed the tenketsu strike, took a deep breath, and screamed.
"YES!! I'LL HAPPILY BECOME NARUTO'S BRIDE! PLEASE TREAT ME KINDLY!"
... And then she passed out again, though this time it was with a big goofy grin on her face, even with the beet red blush and her hands clamped (despite being unconscious) over her mouth. Just the agreement would have been enough to do it, but there was also a hefty helping of shock at how much noise she'd made.
Haruko swabbed a pinky around in her ear, blinked a couple times, then looked at Naruto, who was still swirly-eyed from how loudly the usually painfully soft-spoken girl had accepted. "Huh, a little more enthusism than the pink one. Maybe that stuff about the quiet girls is right," she mused.
Sitting in the center of the still faintly glowing rune circle, the ragged edges of the scroll and slapdash penmanship of the writing ever so slowly reversed themselves, until it was pristine and easily legible. A thin black miasma of demonic power seeped out of it, carrying away the minus-energy of removed flaws.
While waiting for Hinata to wake up (it had taken a bit because the first few times, when she remembered what had just happened the girl immediately passed out again) Naruto had explored the wooded area they'd arrived in, killing a few more of the lizard rabbit things when they jumped out at him with gnashing fangs, and got highly confused when following the course of the small stream for a few minutes led right back to the clearing.
Haruko, meanwhile, had perched on a fallen log and amused herself noodling around with her guitar, strumming chords and variations and switching back and forth from one neck to the other with abandon. Exactly how she kept the proper tone ringing when her fingers switched to the other neck was unclear, but probably involved yet another of the minor chackra excercises any upper-level ninja made almost constant use of in order to keep their skills sharp, but the effect was that she was effectively playing lead and backup simultaneously in her little impromptu jam session.
Eventually, though, the young girl managed to regain enough composure that while she still had a bright blush there was enough blood flow out of her head and in the rest of her body to maintain consciousness and some semblance of normal activity. Retrieving her still rather damp jacket from the bush it had been hung over to dry out from being dunked in the stream and shrugging on its familiar, shape-concealing protection helped relieve her self-conscious embarrassment considerably, as well.
"AAARGH! IT MAKES NO SENSE! 300 PACES IN A STRAIGHT LINE AND I'M RIGHT BACK HERE!" Naruto shouted, as he crashed out of the underbrush around the clearing again for the dozenth time.
Haruko stood and trapped him under a foot as he pulled at this hair and rolled around on the ground in hysteria. "Oi, settle down, boyo. It's an enclosed imaginary space for a minor item, of course it's pretty small. There's gotta still be one or two Flaws you haven't killed yet even so, or we'd have moved to a deeeper level aready. Fortunately Bridal Candidate #2 here is a Hyuuga, so she should be able to find 'em nice and quick with her bloodline limit."
Hinata had released one of her trademark startled squeaks at being referred to in such a manner, but nodded hesitantly as her ability was mentioned and firmed her resolve, noticing her crush's curious gaze as he looked her over closely. Desperately praying she wouldn't fail and dissappoint him like everyone else, she formed a hand seal to help concentrate and activated the Byakugan, excess chakra escaping her inner coils at the temples making the skin bulge and pulse like a network of blood vessels. Between that, her frown of concentration, and the way she unconsciously knit her brows, the Hyuuga heiress's face changed in an instant from almost painfully cute to the menacing image of a dangerous kunoichi - not that she had any idea, but Naruto backed off a step, wide-eyed, and Haruko revised her mental estimate of the girl's potential with the mask of shy uncertainty stripped back, if only for a moment.
Though unneccessary whith her bloodline fully activated, Hinata's eyes flicked back and forth as she examined their surroundings, only to discover that the entire areas had the characteristic unreality of a genjutsu yet no underlying reality that had been hidden, as if nothing real existed except herself and her two copanions. It was a terrifying thought, and she searched more carefully through the area again, frantic to find something, anything, that had some real existence rather than being an illusion of twisted perception over blank nothingness. There! It was a strange, swirling blot of illegible inked characters on tattered shreds of paper under the image of a sort of scaly rabbit, but it was something real, and it was ripping up something even more solid. "Oh no!" she gasped, recognising the shredded orange fabric as the remains of Naruto's jacket, which she'd bee trying to work up the courage to return in person when his apartment door had burst inward and she'd been sucked into the effect of Haruko's jutsu.
"This way," she called as she released the hand seal, maintaining her dojutsu in the more limited form that gave her extended sight in a normal arc of vision rather than in a nearly complete sphere around herself. Drawing a kunai from her pouch, she hurried toward where she'd spotted the thing, piling hope against hope that Naruto's precious possession could be saved before it was too damaged to repair, in defiance of what her empowered eyes were telling her. 'If ever there was a time for me to be wrong, please let it be now!' she thought.
Alas, it was not to be. The two trainee ninja swerved around a massive tree trunk, their elder moving at a more relaxed pace behind them, only to see shreds of orange canvas spread wide across the ancient tree's roots and a snarling rabbit-lizard-thing, its scales tough and horned and at least twice the size of the ones Naruto had faced before, sporting a wicked gleam in its eye after causing the destruction of a real item. It seemed to be absorbing energy from the shredded jacket as they came into sight, then crouched to attack with a hazy black afterimage following its movements.
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(Posted Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:10)
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