Work Text:
“I don’t understand,” Sasuke said. “If the Fourth and Second Hokages could both make teleportation seals, why did yours do this? Your explosive seals are normal.”
“Sealing is individual, remember? None of the Second’s students were seal masters, and Jiraiya had to reinvent everything he did to get the same results. Then the Fourth Hokage had to do the same, even though h—” She cut herself off. “Uzumaki Mito was a sealing master too, in the Uzushio tradition, which apparently was a tradition, but I don’t really know how it worked. Or works.” She paused, looking at her chewed-up stump of a pencil. “I’d kind of like to stay here a little longer to see if we could find out more about it, actually, but that’s not necessarily a good idea.”
The wind turned, blowing the pillar of smoke behind them away from the Hokage Monument, where Uzumaki Mito’s face was carved between those of her brother-in-law and granddaughter.
“Not necessarily,” Sasuke said dryly.
Shikako’s spare pencil had rolled away from both of them. Idly, she formed a Shadow Hand to toss it back to her, then whirled her shadow into a circle around them. A trap. Just in case they needed it.
“Anyway,” she said, scribbling a new note, “explosions are simple. There’s a natural phenomenon there to imitate. Teleportation doesn’t exist outside of jutsu, and if you didn’t already have one of those to compare it to—real teleportation, not shunshin—you’d be replying on your imagination. And like Jiraiya said, everyone thinks differently. We’re influenced by our teachers, but neither of us is Kakashi, right? And if you look at the Fourth’s hiraishin, like on that kunai I have, and the Second’s, they’re completely different. I actually tried to hybridize them, but—well.” She shrugged in the vague direction of the smoke. “It could be worse. At least this is actually a different dimension—I’d be a lot more worried about making changes if we’d gone back in time instead.”
“So you’re saying that you invented dimension travel by trying to reverse engineer teleportation, and next time it might be time travel?” Sasuke shook his head and laughed. “Shikako, you really are a genius.”