Toltirr could have left it up in the air as to who got the change, but that left some situations that would have been less amusing.
Sakura wasn't going to need a power upgrade from him and the power upgrade she normally got from Tsunade was plenty amusing enough, though it often seemed like some outer power conspired to make Sakura forget her bad-ass status in the "normal" timeline. Though she'd have a few years of feeling (and being) useless til then.
Hinata was out, the Hyuuga were already a human-variant of significant power. The gorgon bloodline might very well interact poorly with the Hyuuga. Plus they had so far been very anal about the gene pool. He'd had some fun that way already anyway.
Tenten had no significant bloodline or power, but she was very skilled with her chosen specialty. Given how skilled she was with both weaponry and storage seals, she really didn't need that much help. Plus she was less likely to freak out as much and thus provide amusement.
Temari was a bit out of the normal camera view. He'd have to step off away from watching the main story quite a bit to watch what happens with her.
No. When it came down to it, the girl who would be most amusing to see this change awaken in was Ino Yamanaka.
Well, he supposed, he could have plotted to give it to one of the boys and have them turned into a girl...but that was too predictable.
While Naruto was trying to wake up Hinata after the return from Mid-Childa, Ino was humming to herself quietly as she moved through the streets shopping idly while waiting for the team sorting day to come up.
Thirty kids had graduated the academy. If she understood right, most of those wouldn't pass the post-graduation test. At the moment though, she wasn't trying to think about that and instead was looking for something to make her more attractive to a certain eye.
She stopped as she suddenly felt something that just seemed...familiar somehow. Glancing aside she found a small blanket with some old amulets and jewels laid out. The item in question stood out to her almost instantly.
A small amulet of a metal she wasn't quite certain that she could identify but at least reminded her of a dark silver lay in with the other items. The image on the amulet was that of a woman's face wreathed by snakes. It looked, she didn't know how to describe it, more solid, perhaps? than pretty much everything else around.
Blinking the blonde apprentice-telepath walked over and leaned down to look at it.
"What's this?" she asked.
"Oh, that Missy is nothing too interesting, just a bit of something I found discarded," the vendor said. "Now, this little item over here is much more the style of something befitting you."
Ino didn't bother with more than half a glance at the gaudy sapphire the man was trying to show her. What kind of money did he think she had anyway?
"I think I want this one," she said, picking up the silver amulet with the snakes and the woman's head.
The vendor sighed and nodded as he considered that at least he'd get rid of the thing. It looked like old tarnished silver with all those dark marks running through aside the light ones. He was lucky to sell it at all.
Examining it and humming pleasantly to herself, Ino headed home and it was when she next meditated to practice her telepathy techniques that something odd happened.
It was a strange...awareness or sensation, a feeling of being able to reach out and turn on a switch. Without thinking about it, she directed her mind to find out what that was and play with it a little bit. Almost immediately she felt a charge of something move through her body and then came a stream of images and sounds that most certainly came from outside her mind.
She stopped meditating immediately and turned to look for the trail of the psychic contact and found it led....
...to her new amulet.
"Dad!" she called out standing up.
"It's not a focus point for someone else, and lacks a will of its own," her father reassured her. "It seems to be...I'd say an information archive, maybe a teaching tool."
"So I stumbled on some sort of psychic textbook?" Ino asked.
"Possibly, it has definite potential," Inoichi said. "The images I'm getting aren't very clear, and I'm not sure there's an index or table of contents or anything like it. Can you tell me what you saw?"
"I saw a woman with snakes for hair," Ino said. "Well, maybe not real snakes, but it acting like snakes. And she turned people to stone. And there was some kind of army and I didn't recognize any of the flags or see any headbands...."
"It might be older than the Village system," her father noted, frowning.
Apparently, the item was attuned to Ino, he'd have to work with her to see what she could get out of it before he took it to be examined by the rest of the clan and maybe find someway to duplicate it. It was certainly a very clever way to hide material.
"Keep it for now," he said, turning to look at her and frowning a moment as he noticed a sort of discoloration of her sclera around the edges of the visible eye.
"Is something wrong?" Ino asked nervously.
"We might want to get you to the hospital too," he said. "Looks like you picked up a bug or something somewhere."
"I feel fine," Ino noted.
"Just in case," Inoichi said.
When she woke up the next morning with yellow sclera around her blue eyes, Ino was no longer so sure of that fact. And she apparently was starting to get a really bad rash.
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(Posted Thu, 19 May 2011 17:34)
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