Naruto Story Snippets

MIND-BODY MERGE

"It worked!" "I can't believe it worked!" The bodies of Yamanaka Ino and Uzumaki Naruto stared at each other in disbelief in the front room of the Yamanaka Flower Shop.

Some feet away, Yamanaka Inoichi frowned. "I hope you hold more confidence in our clan's techniques than that, daughter."

"Well, sure, I saw the test reports--and the last subject, right before he was retired," the two young people said in eerie synchrony, "but it's just so different, to feel yourself in another human body! It's not completely like the disembodiment of Mind-Body Switch--but it's still kind of--"

"Be quiet and concentrate," Inoichi snapped. "Remember, you've got to put up a flawless persona for Naruto's body. Your proficiency in simultaneously handling the Onbaa's body and your own bodes well, but it'll all fall apart if you're found out, and that temporary, traceable version of the technique has certain subtle differences from this permanent, traceless one. Now, meditate, sift through his memories, and think on how you'll take on his mannerisms."

"Oh, that's easy!" laughed Naruto. "Just add 'ttebayo' to every other sentence, gobble down a few bowls of ramen every other day--"

"Speaking of which, should I tone that down, father?" Ino interjected, while Naruto kept talking.

"--gaze longingly at 'Sa-ku-ra-cha~an', mouth off at 'Grandpa'--"

"I guess you probably want the container of the Nine-Tailed Fox to eat healthy."

"--maybe tussle with Kiba and watch clouds with Shikamaru, and I'm all set!"

"Or should I change something else in his habits, instead?"

Inoichi's frown deepened. "Watch out--you don't want to slip into the habit of finishing both trains of thought at once, if both bodies are speaking at the same time and in the same place. In reference to your suggestions--for now, just settle into your role, and I'll be the judge of when you're ready to improve the sacrifice's way of life."

"Understood, father!" "Well, okay--bye, Yamanaka-san! Bye, Ino-chan!" "Don't call me -chan, dead-last!" The girl in purple retreated to her room in high dudgeon, and the boy in orange waved goodbye as he ran out the door without closing it behind him. Inoichi walked to the door, closed it, and locked it.

"Is the operation a success?" A dark figure emerged from the shadows under the counter.

Inoichi glared. "You, of all people, should know that it's too early to tell, Shikaku."

The figure shrugged. "You, of all people, should be best able to gauge Ino's mental stability."

The Yamanaka clenched and unclenched his fist agitatedly. "She's always been flighty--there are too many ways this could go wrong. Maybe she talks to the Uchiha--maybe the Hokage notices some subtle missing tic that she forgets to copy--maybe Haruno sees some change in either one, and thinks something's up. Tell me again, Shikaku--"

"I've told you and Ino and Chouza and Chouji and my own son a dozen times already."

"Yes, I know, but tell me again--you're absolutely sure that this is the right thing to do?"

The figure, made of semi-solid darkness, perceptibly hardened, and spoke in a firm voice. "I am absolutely sure, Yamanaka Inoichi, that this is the right thing to do."

Inoichi didn't look convinced. "Well, I trust you--and that should be enough for me. I'm sorry for doubting you so often. I'll see you tomorrow."

"No offense taken." The shadows flowed back to their proper place under the counter.

The head of the Yamanaka Clan gave a long, deep sigh.

---

A NINJA'S MIND IS HER CASTLE

“Well, what are we doing today, Kurenai-sensei?” Kiba grinned as Team Eight stood in a training ground. “Learning some ninjutsu or genjutsu, or just training some old stuff?”

“Actually, Kiba,” Kurenai replied, “I was considering a counter to genjutsu that might be of some use to all of you.”

“A genjutsu counter?” Kiba scratched his head, as his teammates looked on silently. “Why would we need that? I mean, we’re all basically immune to genjutsu already, aren’t we, with Hinata’s eyes, Shino’s bugs, and Akamaru ’n’ me’s nose?” Akamaru yipped in enthusiastic assent.

“Well,” Kurenai admonished, “it’s always good to have multiple layers of protection. You never know when some wily enemy will think to include smell in his illusion, and there are always rumors of genjutsu that can foil even the White Eyes… But, even beyond that, a lot of genjutsu counters are good practice even outside of combat.”

“Oh, no! Mental exercises?” Kiba groaned.

Hinata chuckled faintly at her teammate’s frustration. “I’m sure it can’t be too tiresome, Kiba-kun…”

“That’s the spirit, Hinata!” Kurenai smiled warmly. “Really, this procedure is so simple that civilians were the ones who developed its foundation, and some of them still use a version of it today. It’s called basho no houhou—the method of places. Basically, you just organize organize your mind as if it were your own personal house or palace or castle, with every item in a place that makes sense for it to be in, near other related items. You might have a whole wing for information on the Village, and just a single room dedicated to your taijutsu knowledge. To recall something, you visualize moving to the relevant room and finding the object that contains the memory.”

“It seems to me,” observed Shino, “that such organization would only make it simpler for an enemy to find something in my mind.”

“Well, it depends on the type of attack,” Kurenai explained. “True, an enemy with lots of time, who’s already broken your outer defenses, will find it easy to rifle through everything you’ve got on Leaf if you’re using this counter—but this method is meant to strengthen your outer defenses at the cost of your inner ones, for the most part. While a civilian can only set up his rooms and corridors, a ninja can bind a little of his chakra within his mind to create locked and armored dors, or hidden passages. Some legends,” she added, “say that the greatest masters of this art could create elaborate traps and alter spatial relationships within their minds, and even transfer copies of their knowledge to subordinate entities for long-term safekeeping.”

“There are legends about some obscure genjutsu counter?” Kiba sounded skeptical.

“Well, as I said,” continued Kurenai, “this method has other uses beyond defense against genjutsu, even if the legends are discounted. Keeping your mind organized in a logical manner improves your speed of thinking and recalling, though it can make you a little less prone to leaps of intuition. It can also be used to lock certain memories away for a time—to undo the mental trauma of an experience, for example, or to become a spy who doesn’t even know she’s a spy.”

“If it’s so useful, then,” Hinata inquired, “why isn’t it more common?”

“The civilian version is actually fairly well-known in some circles. Unfortunately, the chakra-reinforced version of the exercise can be dangerous,” Kurenai conceded. “There are several recorded instances where spies who’d locked away large parts of their memories lost those experiences permanently—they accidentally lost the key to the door behind which they’d hidden those memories. There are some medical techniques that can reverse this process, and the Yamanaka probably could do the same, given enough time—but it’s tricky to pull off. Other times, the locked memories were unlocked accidentally at inopportune moments due to sloppy application of the technique, resulting in temporary—or permanent—confusion.

“Still—” Kurenai smiled widely— “it’s really an incredibly useful procedure, when applied with caution. It could even be considered fun, since you get the opportunity to take stock of nearly everything you know, and arrange it like furniture in your mind!”

At this, Kiba gave a slight shudder. “Moving furniture… ugh.”

Kurenai paid him no mind. “So, let’s get started. We’ll just be meditating without chakra for now, until you’ve gotten the hang of it—and then, if you’d like, you can try locking something away, and I’ll try to worm it out of you…”

---

Kiba moaned and groaned but eventually managed to wrench his mind into something vaguely resembling a kennel, with dogs representing items—though this only increased the difficulty of locking them away. Shino took to the technique like a duck to water: his mind took the form of a maze of tunnels and chambers, and his mental image was a hive of ants, which could collapse tunnels in an eye-blink, and used a multi-key system to remember the locations of those blocked passageways. Hinata took some time to wrap her head around the idea of building a structure out of her mind, and struggled with her first attempt—a replica of the Hyuuga compound—but eventually settled on the Academy to be her “memory palace”.

“It’s very interesting to see the different ways in which you’ve organized your minds,” Kurenai observed, when, after several meditation sessions, her students had explained their methods. “I’ve been using this method for some time, but I never even imagined making thoughts into dogs! It gives Kiba an interesting second layer of protection, I think—even after the invader penetrates his outer defenses, the location keys that he steals won’t be as valid as they’d be for a standard mindscape, since the items of memory can run away of their own accord.

“However—” her voice grew stern— “Kiba, be very careful not to put much chakra into your ‘thought dogs’. I get the distinct impression that, if given too free a rein, they’d overwhelm and splinter your mind. The strength of the dogs’ enclosures depends on a comparison of your willpower with the power of the dogs’ primitive sub-minds—so, if you put too much chakra into them, they’ll break out, run rampant and fight among each other, leading to a scrambled mind for you.” Kiba blanched and nodded.

“Shino’s method is, I think, a little safer, but also dangerous in a very different way,” Kurenai continued her assessment. “Normally, when the invader breaks through your outer defenses, that process is represented as his interrogating your mental image for the locations of, and keys to, all your memories. Shino, however, has given himself a sort of distributed self-image—so he’s effectively impossible to interrogate mentally unless he surrenders willingly, and no items can ever be taken from behind locked doors (or, in Shino’s case, caved-in passages), since the invader can’t find out where those locked doors even are without the information from that interrogation.

“However, this also has a downside: if Shino doesn’t surrender, the invader will be forced to attempt to beat down the barriers by force, which would make Shino’s original locations and keys near-useless with the distortion, and would leave Shino unable to recall the information afterwards, even if the interrogator found it himself. On the other hand, though, that sort of brute-force invasion of the mind takes much longer than standard methods, which might leave some hope of rescue, depending on the situation.”

Shino gave a solemn nod. “Noted.”

“And Hinata,” Kurenai concluded, “has gone with the standard format, where each memory is an item in a room. No particular strengths or weaknesses—tried and true!”

“What does your memory palace look like, Kurenai-san?” Hinata inquired.

“Well,” the older kunoichi blushed slightly, “I must confess I’ve got a soft sport for those legends I was talking about before. My memories are hidden in a large but plain-looking house at the end of an almost-invisible path in an extremely dense forest. I’ve been experimenting with imitating some the rather amazing feats detailed in the legends—manipulating space, drawing seals on the soul, and so on—but I haven’t had too much success. I have had one or two close calls with putting too much chakra into it, though! Very scary—I actually had to go to the hospital and get a Yamanaka to fix the damage I’d done to myself, once, when I forgot my own address!”

---

After two weeks of meditation and careful probing with genjutsu, Kurenai felt confident enough in her students’ abilities to let them practice unsupervised—though she left them with a stern admonition against locking away memories frivolously. Still, Hinata found herself wondering about certain things as she flopped onto her bed, exhausted after a day of taijutsu training and another two hours of punishment at Neji’s hands. I… wonder…
It was the work of a few seconds to fall into the accustomed meditation. She still hadn’t quite gotten used to the odd way in which she moved through the Academy of her mindscape—quick as thought in normal life, but slow as a drifting ghost during meditation—but only a minute or two passed before she’d found her way to the cramped, out-of-the-way closet where she kept her memories of the Hyuuga in dull gray file cabinets.

“What are my weaknesses?” Hinata spoke quietly to herself, safe in the recesses of her mind. “In the field, I think of my training sessions and recall the margin by which I’ve always been beaten by Father, Sister, and Cousin—and I’m stricken by doubt in my own abilities. But, if I can’t remember those sessions—will I still suffer from that same doubt?”

She opened a cabinet and removed a file labeled “Training Sessions”. “Could I really just… get rid of it?” she wondered aloud. “No—Kurenai-sensei said that removing memories only works when the references are changed, too…” She activated her Byakugan, and gazed at the neatly-labeled chakra strings that linked the “Training Sessions” file to “Gentle Fist”, “Father”, “Sister”, and “Cousin”.

“So erasing things is right out. But what if I just… separate it, a little? Just a door, that could be opened and closed as needed.” She walked out of the Hyuuga closet, still holding the file and trailing chakra strings, and crossed the hall, where a small expenditure of chakra created a chakra-reinforced door. She tossed the file inside, closed the door, and watched the chakra threads that had been attached to the file waver for a moment before disconnecting and dangling patiently in front of the firmly-shut door.

“There. Now, what does it feel like?” She closed her eyes and cast through her memory. “I’m Hyuuga Hinata. My taijutsu style is Gentle Fist, which allows the user to close her opponent’s tenketsu by precise applications of chakra through the hands. I l-learned it from—”

The kunoichi’s heart skipped a beat for a moment as her train of thought abruptly derailed. “There were training sessions—but I can’t remember them? How do I know they happened?” Panicking, she opened her eyes and yanked open the door before her. The file lay on the floor—the chakra threads reattached themselves it, and she breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay—it’s still retrievable. Maybe I need to trust myself more?”

With a thought, a large label was pasted onto the thick door: MEMORY REPOSITORY FOR HURTFUL ITEMS. OPEN ONLY IF RELEVANT. With another thought, a link to “Basho no Houhou” was added directly to the door. “Now, let’s try it again…”

She closed her eyes once more. “My name is Hyuuga Hinata. I’ve used the Gentle Fist style of taijutsu for years. I learned some of it from scrolls, but most of it was—”

She shuddered slightly, and took a deep breath to steady herself as the thread of her thoughts ran into the door. “Okay—I don’t need to know that right now. I sealed those memories away, because I feel better without them, and I don’t need them most of the time.

Hinata opened her eyes, and stared at the foreboding door. “As long as I get used to ignoring that little hiccup, it shouldn’t be a problem! I guess it’ll take some time. Well, then, I’d better start as soon as possible!”

With a small smile on her face, she turned around and headed back into the “Hyuuga Clan” room.