Puff Puff Puff!
"That's enough for me for today," Sakura wheezed as she sat down on the folding stool Naruto had prepared for her, grateful for his courtesy. She beamed a tired smile up at him, standing over her nearby, hovering like a mother hen, still radiating his concern for her.
Little nutball had no idea how sweet he was being.
"Still, I've worked up to two laps in only two weeks. That's pretty good!" she reassured him. It didn't help. The boy still took some convincing that getting tired wasn't a sign of her upcoming demise. It was like he couldn't comprehend not being full of energy, although if that was what he was thinking she could at least see where he was coming from. No amount of exercise yet had managed to wind the blond haired bundle of energy. He was still fresh as a daisy - and that was after doing those same laps carrying a pack nearly as big as he was full of supplies ready for helping her!
Things like this chair, and the drink he was now pressing into her hands.
And, sipping her drink of fruit juice with a straw, she had to admit if he was concerned about her dropping dead on him, she could understand why that possibility terrified him so. Without her, he basically had no one. And it wasn't like her efforts to get anyone else to treat him nicer were working.
Especially not with her mom.
While her face and voice kept up an animated, though simple conversation with Naruto, and body sipped juice periodically, in the back of her mind the Kage-level ninja kicked around the problem, examining it from all angles.
Her illusions just weren't working out the way they ought to. Feeding her mom moments of happiness or sympathy regarding Naruto ought to have better results than this. Two weeks solid of nothing but running laps around school was outrageous, even for her (although thankfully her mother did not know her plan had been spoiled by a couple of clones inside).
But Sakura was at a loss for how to do better.
When Kurenai had first been showing her the basic, minor illusions used for manipulating behavior, the jonin had compared it to playing pool. A tiny nudge here or there, carefully calculated, could achieve the result you wanted better than the strongest hammer. But the influence was brief and temporary, at least on the starting level stuff.
As any Yamanaka could tell you, the mind was an amazingly complex thing. Getting progressively more influence was more difficult, but the progression was not linear, it went up by the square. Still, for the simple stuff it was pretty easy: give a guy a pang of hunger just as he looks at a food cart, and he's more likely than not to stop and have a bite to eat... somewhere. Getting him to stop at the cart you wanted was a whole new level of difficult, getting him to order a specific thing was nearly impossible, unless that was already a strong preference to start with, or you peppered him with a string of small urges, one after another, that led him down that path. Hunger to start the idea path, a shot of curiosity as you caught him looking at the booth, then if you were very good, slip in a craving on the tail end of that rapid-fire sequence before his mind took over the idea thread and led it down its own paths.
One or two impulses like that could be fired off close enough together to take part in forming a single thought string by most who considered themselves any good with illusions, three or four if you were a specialist, while a Kage could handle up to a half dozen. And the ability to send multiple 'pings' like that without being noticed was what made someone an illusion specialist, as the whole trick lay in making the person think your conclusion was their idea.
It was subtle, but anything but simple. And unless you loaded a fair amount of force into the commands the person took it as a whim; they could feel it, then act on it or disregard it as they chose.
Loading in the force was where most illusion mistresses got caught.
The trick was to use just enough of everything: the right impulses, in the right order, at the right time, and with just enough force to get those impulses heeded, but without them standing out so the mind you're targeting stops and examines them. And even then some people are just invulnerable to certain thoughts. You aren't going to get some random guy to cross-dress, unless he was already inclined that way anyway.
Overriding a strong preference was extremely difficult. One basically had to crowd out the natural inclination with a small flood of artificial ones, like shoving a bunch of cue balls forward to crowd your target ball into a pocket magnets are repulsing it from.
However, where most people were like playing pool, Sakura had realized influencing her mom was a great deal more like playing pinball. Using more than one 'ping' on her mother was virtually impossible, as after the first one they went careening off into unplanned directions, having run into barriers that weren't there before.
Having her mom get a strong craving for orange marmalade after trying to get her to be nice to Naruto had been proof enough of that.
Her higher ranked genjutsu didn't work at all, and the influence of the low level ones that did lasted only an instant, so Sakura had to nudge her mother's thoughts in just the right way to accomplish the results she wanted. Only it was anything but a level playing field inside the elder Haruno's mind. The ground was sloped toward some things and away from others. And getting anything done in favor of Naruto was like banking a pool shot up part of the table that had a thirty degree slope littered with beer cans.
It was possible, but it was anything but easy. And lately more obstacles and other things were manifesting to protect her very anti-Naruto prejudice. So, where before Sakura had been able to give her mother a pang of sympathy to let her invite the kid in out of the rain, now that just didn't work anymore.
More than once Sakura had been tempted to break out the big stuff and use some serious jutsu to get the job done, as more powerful techniques existed that basically froze a mind solid and let you play sculptor. But that took time and privacy and a heck of a lot of work, and even then the more drastic the change the more probable it was for the whole thing to backfire and go horribly wrong.
One of the many complications was that, on that level, it was a little like trying to kidnap someone and perform major surgery on their bodies without them noticing. A person's mind has a level of self-awareness and is more likely than not to notice it has been adjusted, and the more extreme the adjustment the more likely they are to notice; and in those cases when a mind could detect it had been altered by outside influence, but not revert or repair itself, insanity was one probable result. Death another. Both, one after another, was more likely.
More than one psychopath had been let loose on the elemental nations by people playing tricks with minds, trying to make an ideal spy or program loyal agents. And the worst part was the insanity could manifest at any time, even years after the reprogramming had been done, as just about any odd thing could trigger the mind to an awareness that it had been modified that way, leading to a spiral of insanity and death.
Didn't stop people from trying, of course.
But it just wasn't worth taking a big risk of killing her mom to get her to be nice to Naruto.
Once more concluding that better results weren't worth the bigger risks, and that the tiny, barely noticeable nudges were all she would probably ever use on her, Sakura smiled up at her only friend (Ino had dumped her like a bag full of live rats - and using behavioral nudges on someone as experienced with their own minds as a Yamanaka was never advisable) and gave him a hug. "Ok, Naruto. Take me into class. I'll come out again to run with you some more this afternoon."
At least the physical exercise was helping her get into shape.
Inside the classroom Iruka seized on the momentary distraction of two kids entering and one kid leaving to go on more laps for all the pitiful distraction it was worth, before it was over.
Then it was back to wresting, less with the paperwork than with himself. The poor chuunin was doing his best to keep his mind on his papers and not on the feminine curves of the lush tush lurking just on the other side of the desk he was working on. As he was painfully aware of the amount of femininity within arm's reach.
He knew what the psych-types said: After any situation that causes serious reflection on how sudden and unexpected death can come, the natural reaction is to seek comfort in the act of creating life. Or, put the way veteran ninja tend to say about close shaves on missions, he had a bad case of 'scared horny'.
The whole town was dealing with it on one level or another. The Uchiha had been omnipresent, in influence if nothing else. Their power as ninja and their clout as a clan had been felt everywhere, and to suddenly wake up one morning to have that comforting presence gone? Well, more than one person had said it was like losing a teammate. Not quite as close, perhaps, but the impression of comforting strength suddenly absent? Yeah, he could see the comparison.
That, combined with the shock and unrest the town was going through, the unsettled feeling and confusion coming from the civilian council having been decapitated, and he wasn't alone in thinking the academy would have to be expanded in the next few years to get ready for the flood of kids they could expect joining them in another six or so as people dealt with the shock of the Uchiha massacre.
Only Iruka had it worse than most, as Mizuki had been his teaching partner for two years now, so in a literal sense, he had just lost a teammate. And it kind of narrowed the focus a bit that, due to how busy he was at the academy, he had daily contact with exactly one woman - Rozu Haruno, single mother of one of the starting academy girls, and one fine woman who had actually stepped up and helped him out in a difficult situation, taking over teaching duties to cover for their missing staff member.
It didn't help Iruka one bit that she had a nice ass, wore tight, business-style skirts, and was in the habit of shifting around, taking a few steps from one side to the other as she read, keeping it in near-constant motion, filling his field of vision.
And the worst thing was, he couldn't be certain that she wasn't doing it on purpose! She had to be feeling some of the same thing everyone else in town was. She'd personally known half of those council members who'd died. Heck! it was her status as an up-and-coming council member that gave her the roughly-chuunin level security clearances to be working this job, even as a part-time stopgap while the Hokage office was busy dealing with more urgent business. So she might well be as scared horny as he was. But even if it was deliberate, he couldn't think of how he could avoid her teasing. The idea of him working at this desk while she taught was a sound one. That way he'd be on hand should any skills as a ninja be required to quiet the classroom or answer questions. But the paperwork had to get done, and without her help he didn't have the down time he'd normally get to do it.
But less and less paperwork was getting done in these hours. And, facing that, Iruka decided to be a man about this and face the problem head on. As the class dismissed for their morning break he threw the pencil down and dragged Rozu away for a moment of privacy.
Minutes later Ino came shrieking into the classroom, giggling with the gossip of having caught their teachers kissing.
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(Posted Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:26)
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