There. A spaceship shot hurtling from a planet which was in the process of exploding. Green rocks hurled along its wake. This was the right set of universes.
Now it was merely a matter of finding one where the child had not survived the problems of the journey. Which was not hard - as in a good number of those universes those glowing green rocks got close enough for their radiation to penetrate the shielding. Here was one where one of the rocks smashed into the spaceship hard enough that the hull was penetrated.
"What are you doing?" asked Kushina Uzumaki as the cat revealed a form she couldn't look at. It wasn't horrible or mind-shatteringly ugly. It was the way it seemed to extend at right angles that didn't exist and shrink and stretch and contort in ways the eye tried to follow - and couldn't.
"He wanted to be a superninja," said Toltiir. "So he's getting that. In another set of universes entirely, there was a baby sent off by his scientist father and architect/artist mother to another world as their own world was about to be destroyed."
"An entire planet destroyed?" asked Kushina, her mind boggling at the concept even as images began to appear in midair to illustrate the point.
"Yes," said Toltiir. "That child, in many universes, grew up to become a great hero. With powers and abilities beyond human limitations. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Stuff like that."
Kushina wasn't the only one boggling at the images of the man in the blue costume with the red cape.
"I'm altering the past a bit to make this come about," said Toltiir. "I'm taking this version of baby Kal-El who lay dying when his ship crashing interrupted the fight between Minato and Madara. The Naruto whom Madara plunged a kunai into during the fight."
"He tried but didn't succeed," said Minato.
"Altered past, remember?" asked Toltiir. "You were able to use the newly arrived child and Naruto to save each others life by merging them together using a special sealing."
"So I can do..." Naruto began making gestures at the screens showing scenes of Superman's normal exploits.
"Mind you, one of Superman's traditional weaknesses was against magic, which is ninjutsu and genjutsu," said Toltiir. "Not that it affected him any more than a normal human - it's just that his invulnerability didn't offer him any special resistance."
Naruto's eyes were wide and shiny as he considered what it would be like to be able to bounce kunai off his chest. Or pluck them from the air and crush them into a little metal ball.
"The question," said Toltiir, "is whether to make everything retroactive or simply the sealing. In the former case, Naruto grew up with those abilities slowly manifesting. In the latter, he simply leaves here with some measure of the strength and invulnerability and slowly begins gaining more of those abilities as time and exposure to the sun merits."
"The sun?" asked Kushina.
"Oh yes, Kryptonian abilities largely derive from exposure to solar radiation," said Toltiir, idly popping up the cellular and overdimension patterns dealing with the phenomena.
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(Posted Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:16)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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