Over To Us.

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7

The people chose to call Thunderclash to get a sense of his mental state.

 [CONTENT WARNING:  This installment deals with a character experiencing voices other people can’t hear, and an open question about whether the voices are real.]

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“Ultra Magnus is right,” you say, trying to ignore Skids shooting you a startled - and hurt - look.  “Before we decide anything else, let’s hail the Vis Vitalis.  We should at least find out where we stand.”

You silently hope Skids will understand.  You want to help Gleeerboo, and hopefully you can - but you’re not going to be of any help if you charge in without gathering all the information first.  You still don’t know what’s happening with the planet, or with Thunderclash, or how (or even whether) they’re connected.  And if you insist on just going to the planet without even checking on Thunderclash, odds are that Ultra Magnus or Perceptor will have a lot of questions for you.

Besides, Thunderclash is your patient, and that has to take priority.

Ultra Magnus hails the ship, and you wait.  And wait.

After a much longer pause than you’d normally expect, an image finally flickers to life on the main screen… but it isn’t Thunderclash.  Instead, you recognise the softly rounded features of one of Thunderclash’s subordinates.  You seem to remember that this was the Vis Vitalis’s second lieutenant - he came aboard the Lost Light when you last encountered Thunderclash.  You recall that he was a bit quiet, but then, it was probably easy for him to get lost in the flood of adoration directed at his commander, and then the high drama of then-first officer Paddox’s betrayal.

You wince slightly, still remembering the full-body ache after Swerve swung your alt mode into Paddox so hard that he shattered into his component beings.

“This is Ultra Magnus of the Lost Light to speak to Captain -”  Magnus is cut off.

“Oh, thank you, Primus!”  The young officer peers anxiously at you all.  “Please - we need your help.”

Magnus looks less than impressed.  “State your designation.”

The officer straightens up, although his expression still betrays his worry.  “Second Lieutenant Sparker, sir.  Please, I - I formally request assistance.  Captain Thunderclash is behaving extremely strangely, and I’m afraid he may be in danger, sir.”

“We are aware of the situation.  I am accompanied by Rung, one of the Autobots’ leading psychiatrists.”  You give a solemn nod when Magnus gestures in your direction, and you school yourself not to smile in greeting; in situations like this, many people prefer a serious expert to a friendly one.  “Captain Thunderclash himself contacted us, so if you could simply connect -”

“I can’t, sir!”  Sparker bursts out.  “The captain locked himself in the shuttle bay ten minutes ago, and he won’t answer his comm!”

Turning away from the screen, Skids murmurs, “Do we think he’s planning to -”

At that moment, a siren sounds on the Vis Vitalis.  You can hear a muffled voice in the background shouting, “Unauthorised launch!”  Sparker mouths a curse, and then disappears from view.

“We do,” Perceptor answers Skids coolly, and puts the view of the Vis Vitalis in space up on a split screen with the still-open comm link to the ship’s chaotic bridge.  He zeroes in on an even tinier dot that’s moving away from the Vis Vitalis at speed.  “I surmise that this shuttle contains Captain Thunderclash, and, further, that his trajectory is towards the planet.”

“Hail the shuttle.”  Magnus turns to you.  “Rung, you may be best suited to talk to him.”

You’re prepared for the hail to go ignored, but to your surprise, Thunderclash responds.  He looks haggard, hunched over the controls of a small shuttle.  There’s a grey tint to his facial metal, and his colours seem muted - a sign of stressed systems.  His optics, though, are blindingly, worryingly bright.

“Thunderclash here,” he says.  He isn’t looking at the screen, and he sounds distracted as his fingers fly over the controls.  As you watch, Thunderclash suddenly winces and clutches his head.  A second later, he seems to shake it off.

In our latest flashback, Naruto is on a mission with an old man known in the Leaf Village as the Eternal Genin, which... is a title I had the vague impression was used for Guy's dad? Maybe it's both.

The team leader says he requested the Eternal Genin specifically for their long-term border patrol, giving us the vague impression that the old guy is going to manifest some hidden powers. Turns out, the real motivation is that this guy is incredible at cooking in the field. :D Which, a) IS a real hidden power and b) is honestly how I would want to spend my ninja career? Like, if I grew up in a ninja community, I could think of worse things than becoming an accomplished chef, and then just doing low-stakes missions, getting the young 'uns to catch fish and game for me while I forage for mushrooms and making my team listen to all my stories while they enjoy my cooking.

(Of course, the guy turns out to actually have some pretty amazing ninja moves, too - each of them telling its own story of the things he's learned from hokages and legendary Leaf ninja over the years, which is fun. I just think the cooking thing deserves a shout-out. :))

We don't get to know the two jounin on this mission very well, but they're cool - one with a scar and a nifty wind-sword jutsu, and the other who can summon a FUCKING. MULTI-BARREL. HARPOON GUN. Too bad that when the mission goes south and a bunch of enemy ninja turn up, they both end up pulling the, "You go on ahead and I'll hold them off!" move. That never ends well unless you've got the meta powers of Kishimoto's editors to save you from death...

Apparently, the reason the Eternal Genin is still a genin is that, fifty years ago, he was so focused on showing off and proving himself worthy to be a chuunin that he fucked up a mission and people died. And when he told the Second Hokage all of this, the Second just kinda went "yeah okay, genin for life it is" because the first rule of being a ninja is that you do not attempt to unpack trauma ever.

(There's also some interesting worldbuilding implications in this. The fact that you could be promoted to chuunin if you performed well enough in the field suggests that the chuunin exams may not have been a thing fifty years ago. I wonder if they were instituted in part to prevent situations exactly like this - ambitious genin putting themselves, their teams, or their missions in danger for the sake of a promotion. You can get around that by letting them demonstrate their skills in an artificial setting where only the promotion is at stake. It would be kind of ironic if the Eternal Genin was indirectly responsible for the chuunin exams, which he presumably never took.)

The Eternal Genin has a prosthetic foot with a fucking SWORD inside, which is the most metal (heh) thing I've ever seen.

Again, we get the Leaf Village positioned here as culturally kinder and less ruthless than the other villages. The Stone Ninja who are the adventure's antagonists dismissively scoff that of course you sacrifice genin in battle - that's what they're for - which is explicitly contrasted here with the Eternal Genin's memories of the Fourth Hokage angrily saying he won't let a comrade give their life for him. Although I wonder - given that the Leaf still contains elements like Danzo and his crew, and given that villages like the Mist have recently turned a corner to become less bloodthirsty - whether it's actually less fair to say "the Leaf are the nice ones" than "the ninja world as a whole gets more brutal in wartime, and better in peacetime, and different communities have different trajectories within that".

The whole Eternal Genin thing just makes me wonder again about whether there's any scope at all in the ninja world for people to just opt out of the - well, ninja grindset, I guess. If you're born into a ninja community, you're expected to be a ninja; it doesn't seem like you can decide to drop out and be a civilian. If you're a ninja, you're supposed to advance within that. Stopping at genin apparently gets you shit for the rest of your life (the Third Hokage gives the Eternal Genin a little "Will of Fire" speech that's pretty galling to listen to - not to mention that the poor guy is CALLED "the Eternal Genin" in the first place!). Stopping at chuunin is more acceptable - but even then, there are a couple of pieces of tie-in material that hint Iruka might actually have hidden his more advanced skills so he could stay a chuunin and a teacher without getting hassled about it. Even Shikamaru's wistful fantasy of just being a perfectly normal, middle-of-the-road ninja is oddly taboo.

Okay WHAT. The Eternal Genin knows that Naruto is Minato's son??? I'd assumed that it was kept a secret, but is this just, like, COMMON KNOWLEDGE? Is it like Naruto being the nine-tails jinchuuriki - all the adults know, none of the kids do - except that no one spilled the beans to Naruto himself until very recently? (Because damn - it's bad enough the village treated him like shit growing up for something that wasn't his fault. The fact that they knew he was the son of their beloved, heroic Fourth Hokage... does that make it worse? I can't decide. It's a bold choice, certainly.)

(I know Gaara's a kage's son, as well, and it didn't save him from the jinchuuriki stigma, but Gaara's father was actually alive and setting an example of how to treat his son. Because Gaara's father was, and I cannot stress this enough, a piece of shit.)

Okay, false alarm, apparently the two jounin who stayed behind to hold the enemy forces off are fine somehow! I fucking give up! :D

Next up we have an episode where Kakashi is assigned to try and weasel information out of a spy from a rival village, and his team mistakenly thinks the two are dating. Naruto does this thing sometimes where, by not even considering queer interpretations except as a joke, it accidentally makes everything way gayer. (This is different from, but not unrelated to, the thing where the show makes everything way gayer by forgetting women exist.) Take Kakashi: notices a woman's looks, like, maybe once? Doesn't react to Naruto's Sexy Jutsu. Flatly rejects his female teammate's declaration of love back when they're kids. And has no apparent romantic life with women (in contrast to his many, deeply fraught and intimate relationships with men), to the point where, here, the very concept that his team would think he was on a date with a woman is treated as an inherently hilarious misunderstanding. I think the show is going for Kakashi being dark and mysterious (and also traumatised and maybe more comfortable with romance novels than flesh and blood), and he is all those things! They just never considered that uh. He also comes across as not interested in women. Just sayin'.

The Leaf Village has an entire clan with a mind-reading kekkei genkai, and yet their default with captured enemy agents is torture first, and mind reading only if the torture doesn't work. Tell me again about how the Leaf is the softer, more merciful ninja community...

It is very funny that (for the benefit of the viewers, obviously) we're getting a flashback to the spymaster of the Lock Village telling one of his spies, who was raised her entire life to be a spy, why spying is important. Then again, it may be that the village has their own equivalent of Naruto, and so they've gotten used to having to actually say these things out loud. :D

We get a nice little glimpse here into how Kakashi began to change after losing Obito. It turns out he once rescued the Lock Village spy when they were kids, and comforted her by telling her to look for shapes in the clouds when she was lonely. We can tell it's post-Obito because Kakashi's eye is covered - but more than that, the Kakashi we know in the present day, the one who bothers to reassure Sakura and tell Naruto when he's doing well, the one who doesn't just treat people like imperfect weapons, is starting to emerge.

Speaking of accidentally making things gayer: it's interesting that it's Naruto and Sakura who gush over the Lock Village spy's beauty and get all giggly when she addresses them, while Sasuke could not care less. :D

The entire plotline with the spy turns out pretty interestingly, as Kakashi accidentally pulls a Naruto - by showing her a moment's kindness for pretty much the first and only time in her life, he wins her over, to the point where she's ready to turn on her own village for his sake and the sake of the Leaf (which she now sees as her real home). Kakashi, however, reacts very differently to Naruto. He tells her coldly that he'd wanted the two of them to properly battle it out as ninja, but that he's not going to kill someone who's "lost her pride as a ninja" by letting her emotions get in the way. He is sparing her, but there's an iciness to it, a rejection of both her and any dangerously un-ninja ideas she might represent. ...Kind of a good thing Kakashi wasn't around when Sai was having his redemption arc, huh?

As a side note, though, it does come across like Kakashi's main expression of admiration/attraction is "let's fight to the death". *glances at Guy and Obito meaningfully*

Hmmm. Taken together with Gaara Hiden: A Sandstorm Mirage, this brings the number of times my favourite Naruto characters have helped women they're romantically linked with fake their own deaths up to two, which - not a lot of money but weird that it's happened twice, etc.