Can Pokemon into Naruto? 5 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Anthony Maxwell

Can Pokemon into Naruto?

Chapter 5

-VB-

I knelt down and stared at the not yet fruiting results of my experimentation which was still a fruit of my work. 

Oran berry… grew fast, apparently. 

Because in less than six months, the little saplings went from being barely two inches tall after two weeks to being a full … one meter tall. 

Yeah.

Metric.

Fuck. Why were the rando villagers out in in sub-tropical jungle within a ninja verse using some French shit? They should be going full Japanese with … with … 

You know what? I didn’t know what kind of measurement system they used before metric and imperial came knocking on their doors. Huh. 

‘I guess I don’t know much about Japan as I thought I did,’ I hummed mentally as I looked over the oran berry trees. 

And I could finally see what made an oran berry so great. 

See, six months was a lot of time, and for a farmer-to-be whose only job after planting was weeding and experimenting, I managed to slightly improve on my pokemon aura.

Yeah! I was the latest aura master!

… Syke. 

I just learned how to feel aura and barely see it, and even despite that lacking ability, I was able to see the aura concentrating within the oran berry sapling(?). It wasn’t like I saw an aura or anything like that. It was much more… subtle? Yeah, it was subtle. Like a slightly sharper image laid over a normal picture. 

You can tell that there was something wrong with the picture. Like how it didn’t fit in. But the difference that I was seeing was the difference between a 10 pixel wide brushstroke made completely out of 100% opacity pixels and the same brushstroke with the pixels at the edge being 95% opacity. 

What was I talking about? 

Oh, right. The oran berry sapling. 

With that much aura packed in there, I could guess what the oran tree did. The tree sucked in aura (or made it?) and held it. Could be a evolutionary trait. Could be a design by Lord Alpaca. Whatever the case was, I assumed that the tree eventually concentrated the aura it stored up into the berries to protect them… and entice pokemon to eat them.

I think the oran berry was a lot like an apple in that regard. 

See, an apple didn’t have all of that “meat” around its seeds because it helped the seeds. Those seeds needed animal stomach acid to soften up the shell that protected the seed. And the warm, squishy, and fertile shit of the animal whose guts the seed went through.

The “meat” of the apple? 

That was bait. 

That’s right. 

The goddamn plants were TRICKING us! We weren’t using them; they were using US!

‘For brainless, immobile shits, they’re better at tricking animals than most humans are,’ I thought as I pulled out my latest work: a scissors. 

Yeah, I got into blacksmithing.

---

“So there’s no iron around here,” I asked Yoichi.

Yoichi snorted. “Iron? We’re lucky if we get regular bronze shipment. No one can afford to use iron around here. If you believe the elder, then we lost half of the iron we had after the ninjas passed through here last time.”

“Bastards.”

“Exactly.”

I hummed. 

I needed iron. 

I really needed iron. I needed it to make the most basic tools I would need to make … other tools … which would make more tools.

I knew of a few ways to gain iron myself…

I turned to look at baltoy. 

Baltoy looked up at me. 

I sniffed. 

“You know how to dig, right?”

My question made him wither with disappointment. 

I didn’t know why. He just didn’t like doing regular stuff that everyone did. He liked training, though. 

“Cheer up, man! We’ll train today after we get what we need. Come on, let’s get to the river.”

---

The first method: river black sand. This here was where I could get the easiest source of iron in the form of iron sand. However, it was also very labor intensive because I couldn’t just grab sand and smelt it down. I needed to whittle down the sand to as much black sand by weight as possible, because black sand was iron. 

And to do that…

I sat by the river and panned.

Yeah, gold panning! 

Except it was for iron sand. Each pan took about ten minutes. Each pan got me less than a handful. To get enough iron to make any kind of tool, I would need at least my own body’s weight worth of raw black sand. That would be … a whole day of just sitting and working. For the chance to have enough raw black sand to start processing.

The second method: iron-rich orange mud. This was possible because iron bacterias lived, which were real bacterias that used iron and magnesium to get their energy. This, of course, meant that I needed to find iron-rich orange mud, scoop it out of the river, pond, stream, or wherever I found them, let them dry, and then bake/smelt/cook from there. It was the “easiest” form of getting iron with the least amount of prep work but it also required a lot of starting volume. 

The third and final method: iron-rich veins. This method was useless because -.

“Bel!” 

I stopped and looked at baltoy. He had just popped out of the ground, all dirty and smudged… but he had a dark and heavy rock between his arms. 

My jaws dropped.

“Oh my God, you actually found some.”

-VB-

Of course, I had to build the smithy of my own.

But at the end of it, I had this!

A crude scissors. 

Just as I was about to prune the sapling in front of me, baltoy floated over to me.

I looked at him. “Hmm? What’s up, buddy?”

He stared at me. He stared at the scissors.

Then he turned to the sapling and sniffed off the branch I wanted gone with a flicker of his arm.

He slowly turned back to stare at me.

I stared at him.

He shook his head and left.

“... Bruh.”

I did all of that work for nothing?

(It didn’t turn out to be for nothing because I gave the scissors to the village’s best weaver but it didn’t make me feel less like an idiot than before!)

-VB-

“... What the hell is that?” 

“Oh, that? That’s … a living … clay … doll. Yeah. It’s a living clay doll.”

“... What? It has to be a ninja.”

“It and its creator doesn’t do ninja things. They farm.”

“They farm?”

“They love farming.”

“... What? I am so confused. Why would its creator farm?”

“Doesn’t like ninjas or something. Why else would they be out here?”

“... Good point. Anyways, that’s 150 ryo for the whole thing.”

“Aw, come’n, man! You’ve been peddling here for years! Give me some discount!”

“That is the discount, idiot! If I went to a city, I would be getting 300 ryo for the entire thing!”

-VB-

“A living clay doll, you say?”

“Hai, Sumire-sama. It seems that a missing nin might be living at the edge of your territory… though they seem like they really don’t want to deal with ninjas in general.”

“Hmm… There’s really only one village that uses dolls of any kind, and that’s Sunagakure, yes?”

“It is! I am astounded by your memory!”

“Stop bootlicking. That’s disgusting.”

“Hai.”

“... Well, Sunagakure is also Konohagakure’s ally, right? So it’s only right that we notify Konohagakure about the missing nin so that they can tell their ally about him.”