Twisted Pinwheel

You grab him and pull him in, your own stomach grumbling loudly.

"Come on, time to eat up!" you say, boisterously. "You need energy to train, right? Two all you can eat combination platters, and keep 'em coming! This guy is paying."

Kabuto lets out a distressed noise somewhere deep in his throat. You don't know what they pay him as a hospital intern, but it's probably nowhere near enough.

Well, it'll all work out. For you.

He looks like he's almost ready to start crying as the first load of thinly sliced delicious beef and vegetables come out, ready to be grilled at your table. The look on his face is almost as delicious as the food.

"So anyway." you say, munching a mouthful of grilled beef, onion, and carrot. "I know a bunch of casual jutsu, but if you're actually a genin you don't need my help with that. They're all open to academy students and up." you say, and swallow. "I can teach you the Shunshin, though."

"You are picking up a little bit of infamy over that. Something about how you were assigned to the hospital in the first place, I believe?" Kabuto says, polite mask fixed over grit teeth as he says it, then pops a piece of meat in and slowly chews and chews and chews it away to nothing.

"Well, I don't mean to brag, but I'm sort of a genius." you brag.

"A genius who has yet to graduate the academy." Kabuto half-agrees, half calling you out.

"Aw, you serious? But if I graduated early I would, like, have to go and do actual work." you say, deliberately putting your tone of voice into the stereotypical Nara drawl.

Everyone knows those guys are all sandbagging it unless they have no other choice. Kabuto sighs at the little joke.

You chuckle to yourself, then demonstrate the stolen hand-signs.

"Just push the chakra out and want yourself to be there, instead of here. Well, that's the basics of it anyway. I stole it, so I never got any formal instruction or anything." you admit. "Just be careful the fIrst couple of times, because it gets harder the further you jump, and if you run out of juice midway between two roofs it's gonna reaaaally hurt. You need to build up chakra reserves."

"About that..." Kabuto says, something in his eyes flashing before he fixes on a pleasant smile. "... I'll admit, I'm not much of a sensor myself, but medical training does have you pick up how to gauge if someone has a lot of chakra to recover with or if they're dangerously low... and if I can say so, you don't seem to have much more chakra than your average academy student. With that in mind, the Shunshin by your own admission being a comparatively chakra intensive technique... might you have developed some kind of alteration to the technique that makes it more economical for combat use? I believe even Shunshin no Shisui can only make as much use of the technique as he does in combat because of his own high levels of chakra..."

Oooooh, you found what he actually wants to know!

And hey, wait, you might be getting a little more famous than you thought, thinking about that.

"Yep, more or less." you say. "But you don't think I'm just going to tell you how I do that, right? You're going to have to do a lot more than buy me dinner to get those tricks out of me..."

For shits and giggles, you salaciously waggle your eyebrows. Kabuto looks extremely uncomfortable.

"But we're doing a whoooole lot of talking about me. And it's not that I don't enjoy it, but I think it's time for your end of things." you say.

Instantly, Kabuto's giving off this air of an abashed young man ready to be scolded for skipping out on chores.

"Well, my specialty really is medical jutsu." he says. "So, well... I'm not sure how interested you're going to be in the Mystical Palm jutsu..."

"Oh, just go ahead and whip it out already." you say, beaning a bit of carrot off his forehead.

"I... would truly prefer you didn't phrase it in that way." Kabuto says uncomfortably, as a couple of other patrons give your table strange looks before returning to their food. "In any case, much like your shunshin relies on great reserves of chakra to make proper use of it... usually... the Mystical Palm requires exceptional control of that chakra. Or else... well, better to demonstrate."

Kabuto pulls a live mouse from his pocket, and does he just walk around with that all the time? Then he makes a careful demonstration of activating the jutsu, leaving a little green energy floating around his hand and holds it above the mouse.

One side bulges out. Another withers away to nearly nothing. The creature gives a pained shriek, and thrashes. Then it dies, and Kabuto carefully nudges it down into the coals before anyone notices that he brought a demonstration animal in.

"It's like that." he says. "Medical chakra is difficult to keep a grip on, so to speak. It has almost a will of its own, in some ways, like it wants to be used. But while it can be very useful, there's an alarming array of potential side effects or results from flawed usage. Cancers, accidental death, 'healing' the nostrils of a broken nose shut... in order to make effective use of the technique, it generally takes a lot of training time. Which is why once your specialty is obviously medical jutsu, you're a little boxed in..." Kabuto says, seeming a little wistful. "It's particularly dangerous to try and heal yourself, too, unfortunately."

Well, this has been a fantastic exchange. You've given him a jutsu that he can't use without a lot of work that he doesn't have the time to do in order to get an emergency medical jutsu that might kill you if you try to use it when you really need it, without proper training that will get you labeled as a side-line support character and upset a lot of people.

Been fun, though, and at least you got dinner out of it.

"Well, it's about time for me to bounce along out, then. Two more platters of beef for my buddy boy here, he's going to need the energy for training!" you call to the kitchen.

"Please don't, I can't afford that!" he instantly yells back there, in distress.

You laugh as you walk out, into the last fading rays of sunset, and take off at an easy stroll.

Then two roads down, you get plucked off the street and find yourself looking into a strange mask worn by a figure with long, shaggy hair.

"Hi there." the mystery man in the swirling orange mask says, voice peppy and upbeat.

---

[No voting. To be continued.]