"You're not going to open that, are you?" asked Deidara.
"I was considering it," admitted Sasori.
"You remember what happened the last time," said Deidara. "I hadn't joined at that point, but I heard about it from Kisame."
"I had thought it would be safe to open it from a distance using puppets," admitted Sasori.
"Which is why you're a doll, yeah," pointed out Deidara.
"I'm inhabiting a puppet, it's just that my puppet body became female and so too did most of my puppets at the time, plus Kisame." Sasori frowned at the scroll, teeth worrying her lower lip for a moment.
"And Orochimaru escaped, yeah, just ahead of Kisame," said Deidara. "What did he look like when he was a he, since she's kinda fishy."
"He was always a bit fishy," said Sasori absently, settling her long blonde hair behind her and smoothing petticoats. Really, this was just comfortable and she'd found the "creepy dolls" motif to be one that particularly unsettled victims - and so was running with it as opposed to just switching to a male puppet configuration.
"Yeah, well, I think I'll find somewhere else to be if you open that," said Deidara. "Yeah. Elsewhere."
Sasori smiled as Deidara fled. It appeared that this scroll delivered by messenger hawk had the ability to shut Deidara up and make him head for shelter. That, by itself, had some appeal.
Though Kisame would be also quite agitated at the thought of Orochimaru sending anything their way. She would want to try and figure a way of tracking down Orochimaru's hidden location from the bird, as unlikely as it was that Orochimaru would leave anything so obvious to lead back to him.
Still, that left the question of what this particular scroll did. The only clue he had was that it had a "13/100" on one corner of the outside.
Still, no need to look closer at it right now when it had such a useful feature as "make Deidara run away" just from playing around with it.
The Raikage glared around the room. "Report!"
A girl of about six saluted. "A messenger hawk arrived from Grass carrying a scroll, it appeared to be just a coded message - but when the scroll was unfurled more than halfway - it set off an area effect jutsu."
"Are those... cat ears? Is that a tail?" asked the Raikage A. "Those are real?"
"Ah, yes sir!" said the hapless girl.
The Raikage's rage was obvious on his face, but his voice was quite controlled and even. "So that is why it appears that four genin teams here to collect missions, plus eight members of the cryptology section, plus the three chunin in charge of the messenger hawks are all catgirls?"
"Yes, Raikage-sama."
"The winged ones?" asked the Raikage, pointing to a set of very confused-looking catgirls whose arms were wings.
"Messenger hawks caught in the effect," said the girl.
The Raikage bit back some of the anger. Hardened shinobi under his service who had been ready to die for him and the village at a moment's notice were clearly unnerved and having trouble dealing with what HAD happened to them. "This is that jutsu we've heard about. The one that Orochimaru has been developing. We understand that Konoha has put out a bounty on that snake. Get a high-level team together for a little bounty-hunting."
"Temari?"
"Yes, Kan... Kankuro-chan?" asked Temari.
Kankuro twitched. "You did know you've got a tail and ears now, right?"
"So do you," said Temari, her tail lashing back and forth behind her.
"Yeah, well," said Kankuro. "Did you notice Gaara didn't change?"
"Shut up," said Gaara.
"I didn't mean anything!" quickly put in Kankuro.
"Not you," said Gaara. "Mother seems to be going into hysterics for some reason."
"You know," said the jonin, her Kiri headband drooping down over one eye. "This was a lot more amusing when it happened to those wannabe-ninjas over in Leaf."
"Yeah," said another jonin.
"You know how we've been ignoring the bounty they put on this Orochimaru guy, saying he's a Leaf problem and beneath our notice?" asked a nearby chunin.
There was silence for a few minutes as the Kiri ninja considered that.
"Time for a policy change," said the jonin, her tail switching back and forth behind her. "Still, the guy's an S-Class. We can't go into that kind of fight without better prep."
"I didn't write this," said Orochimaru.
"But it said here to send them out to various villages for experimentation," said the understandably terrified subordinate. "And it's signed!"
"So I see, but that's not my signature," noted Orochimaru. "It's a clear forgery."
"You know, this is why the whole 'do not question my orders or you will die slowly and painfully' policy sometimes doesn't work out," pointed out Kabuto. "You did something like this once before, so naturally nobody questioned you doing it again."
"Well," said Orochimaru. "It's not like I can't use the data I'll get from it anyway. If it works out, I'll use it to make elite versions under my control."
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(Posted Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:08)
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