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Kankurō felt a vein throb on his forehead, which admittedly wasn't an uncommon sensation when standing in Gaara's office.

"Let me get this straight… Kankurō has fangirls?" Shikako said as if asking for the third time would change the answer at all.

Temari sighed. "I know. It boggles the imagination."

Temari's reaction was, okay, it was incredibly insulting, but she was his sister and that was to be expected. Shikako's reaction wasn't insulting only because Kankurō was sure that she wouldn't know what attraction was if you hit her in the face with it. Given some of the things that her Uchiha teammate had tried, that wasn't much of an exaggeration.

Okay, it was still a little bit insulting.

Gaara spoke behind steepled hands at his desk. "Regardless of how unbelievable it is, Kankurō's fans come in two varieties of crazy." This was Gaara, who, while less murderous than he was in the past, still didn't always go in the right direction for water. He did paperwork to relax! So hearing him call Kankurō's fans crazy was sort of a backhanded compliment. "One faction thinks of you as his muse, and as such should be protected."

"Is this about the stories I've told him that he turned into plays?"

"Apparently," Gaara said flatly, causing Kankurō to wince. Fine, maybe that last play was a little bit long, but how could he do Lord of the Rings justice in less than six hours? He didn't really like the idea of splitting it into parts. But he was doing something right if he got fans out of it, right? Right?

"The other faction thinks you need to die," Temari said.

"Um." Shikako blinked a couple times. "What?"

Temari twisted her hands upwards in a gesture of incomprehension. "Beats me. Crazy people, remember?"

Gaara shook his head. "Something about Kankurō possibly being open to someone comforting him if you die."

"I guess I've heard worse from Sasuke's fangirls."

Probably because the damn Uchiha really was in love with her, but good luck convincing Shikako that it wasn't like another brother.

Huh. Actually, if all the people who she heard say that Sasuke was in love with her were nutjobs, maybe Sparky really had a good reason for not believing it.

"Wait. Does that mean all of Kankurō's fans think he's in love with me?"

"Crazy people. Remember?" Temari repeated.

"Thanks," Kankurō muttered. "At least I doubt any of them would actually attack you."

"Oh? Why's that?"

Kankurō exchanged a quick look with his sister. "Out of control rumors about how scary you are," he lied, because for some reason Sparky wouldn't believe she was actually scary, but would believe people were lying about her being scary. His current theory was that it was method acting for seeming harmless, just taken a bit too far.

"So that's basically why we don't want you seen in public around the village right now," Temari concluded.

"I guess that makes sense," Shikako said, though you could tell that she still wasn't entirely convinced that Kankurō actually had fans.

Still this reaction was a lot easier to deal with than the real reason they wanted her to keep out of view: that small cult that had sprung up worshipping the Shikabane-hime. Yes, Gaara's administration wanted friendly relations with the Leaf, but that was going a bit too far past friendly. Quite frankly, they didn't know how Sparky would react to finding out about the cult. Kankurō would put money on blank incomprehension and/or active denial, but "cleanse it with fire" didn't seem out of the question, and they all knew how thorough Shikako could be at anything involving destruction. Knowing her, she wouldn't stop with fire. There'd be fire, lightning, sand storms, rocks from the sky, and she'd probably be able to arrange flooding, even in the desert.

Wait a minute. She probably could. He'd seen her unseal a truly ridiculous amount of water back in Grass. "Sparky, quick question before I forget: what's the most you can fit in a storage scroll?"

"I'm not sure. I could fit Konoha into a storage scroll if I felt like it."

"What if it was just water?"

Temari stiffened as she realized where her brother was going with this.

Shikako shrugged. "I don't know. The scrolls I used in the Chūnin Exam had about a hundred thousand liters." The hell? The most he ever heard a scroll holding before now was about a kiloliter. Useful, and potentially lifesaving, but not really economically viable for importing water since you needed someone ninja trained to operate one (except when things got really bad). One hundred times that and it might be useful to have genin teams run missions to just fetch water. "Now? Probably ten cubic kilometers without too much trouble. Uh, how much would that be in liters…?" Kankurō tried wrapping his head around that much water and failed.

"Unfortunately, we wouldn't have anywhere to store that much water," Gaara said. "The one hundred thousand liter scrolls could be useful to us if we could arrange for a trade."

"Oh, storage isn't a problem. I figured out how to get a seal to dispense water as needed, so it doesn't need to come out all at once. I've got one in my mouth. A bigger problem would be where to get that much water without triggering ecological devastation. I mean if it was salt water it wouldn't be much of a problem."

"Salt water wouldn't be a deal breaker," Temari said, tapping a finger on her arm in thought. "It'd be inconvenient to distill that much water, but we wouldn't need to do it all at once and one thing we have plenty of is heat. Plus salt is a valuable commodity around here."

That was how Kankurō found himself on the weirdest damn mission he'd ever been on a month later, and he was including missions he'd been on with Shikako before in that assessment. Apparently, storing cubic kilometers of water into a seal, while "not that hard" from a storage perspective by Shikako's messed up standards, was rather tricky because the water needed to come from somewhere. If you did it all at once, water would come rushing in to fill the hole and the resulting collision could trigger a tsunami. Kankurō wasn't entirely convinced about that, but Sparky was more experienced with mass destruction than him and it wasn't like he wanted to find out who was right the hard way.

Instead of storing it all at once, she could suck the water into the seal like a hose but if that happened in shallow water, the flow could uproot rocks and form artificial dams that would cut off the area from the ocean, not to mention do bad things to anything living in the shallows. There was also something in there about tides that he didn't quite follow, but didn't ask about.

And don't get him started on the idle comment Shikako had thrown out about how much economic damage she could do by unleashing a salt water flood in the middle of farm country. It turns out that salting the earth was an actual thing and not just a phrase/symbolic gesture. If she ever felt like it, she could just starve out any of the elemental nations with nothing but excessive use of storage scrolls. ("Maybe it would do more damage if it was aerosolized and fell in a saltwater rain?")

It was disturbing to think that she had developed her reputation as a person of mass destruction when being careful and sticking with techniques she knew wouldn't cause continent wide destruction. Heck, the tsunamis and destroying croplands were afterthoughts when she was trying to brainstorm something productive. No, they weren't even afterthoughts. They were failure modes. Kankurō resolved to never say "Oops" or anything similar around Konoha's Jōnin commander. The man probably had PTSD about the phrase from raising Shikako.

He thanked every spirit he could think of that Konoha didn't use her for sabotage missions. Hopefully that was out of choice and not because she never mentioned that she could destroy a nation's agriculture by herself. Temari argued strongly against updating Shikako's threat assessment for these new horrors lest they give people ideas.

This led to him sitting on a boat in the middle of the ocean ("Not the middle of the ocean, Kankurō. We're barely off the continental shelf.") lowering a rock with a seal on ninja wire into the water. As a puppeteer he worked with chakra strings all the time, so was less likely to have issues controlling the seal through the wire. He didn't think Shikako would be much worse at it but… "Tell me the worst case scenario again."

"The seal takes in water too quickly, causing turbulence that snaps the wire. Then it falls to the bottom of the ocean, fills to capacity, but when it hits the ocean floor, the seal unravels, releasing the water all at once, causing a tsunami that we're right on top of," Shikako said cheerfully.

"How are you not stressed out about this?" Though Kankurō suspected the answer was a history of surviving disasters she created herself while growing up.

"That's just the worst case scenario. I did put in safety measures, you know." She clapped her hands together. "Plus I trust you!"

"Now you're just messing with me."

"I might have picked up a few bad habits from Kakashi-sensei."

"Might have," Kankurō muttered.

The rest of the day was simultaneously boring and stressful as he gradually sped up the rate the seal absorbed water. They ended up braiding multiple pieces of ninja wire together to get the seal stone deep enough in the water that the weird currents didn't mess with the boat too badly. Then around noon there was a sharp lurch as something yanked on the line. Even braided and welded, it might have snapped if Kankurō hadn't been reinforcing it with his chakra.

"I think a shark just tried to eat the seal stone." Shikako had the unfocused look he associated with people not really seeing with her eyes. He was guessing whale from what he sensed, but he'd take her word for it since her skills as a sensor were better than his. Plus it made more sense that the line didn't snap, even with him reinforcing it, if it was just a shark.

Then Shikako winced. "And I think it just imploded when the seal kept sucking in water." And that would explain the chakra signature disappearing.

"My missions with you always turn out weird, Sparky."

"You might need to stop or maybe reverse the flow for a bit so the imploded shark bits have a chance to dissipate."

"So very, very weird. That's an example of a sentence that I would never hear except on a mission with you. But I think we should reel it in and inspect the line."

"Sure. In fairness, this mission started out pretty weird. You're trying to get water using a line that you threw from a boat but you're throwing back the fish."

Kankurō looked at the ninja wire that led over the side of the boat and groaned. "I'm fishing for water. I'm literally fishing for water." He shook his head. "You know, when I'm not with you, I get escort missions, deliveries, even a nice mission to clear out bandits every now and then. Normal stuff."

"That must be nice." She sounded impressively sincere about that, which took the fun out of complaining, especially since she was right about the fact that this time the weirdness was something that he should have been able to figure out up front.

Though it turned out that periodically reversing the flow to let things settle now and then helped in general, so they were probably dealing with debris other than imploded shark bits.

At least the crew they hired was happy since the way the currents attracted fish meant they were getting a lot more fishing in than they thought would happen.

The next day, having gotten the feel for the task down, he had asked Shikako for another story. She told the story of a race of puppets, so well crafted that they could think for themselves and even build more of their own, but the puppets rose up against their creators. The puppets had originally been built so that they drew power from the sun, but man scorched the sky. So the puppets trapped the minds of men in a shared genjutsu while their bodies were used as chakra batteries to power the puppets.

"I mean it's an interesting idea, but a puppet could never be that good."

"You know that Sasori has basically replaced so much of his body with puppet parts that he's basically an autonomous puppet, right?"

"...No. No, I didn't." The entire story seemed so much more plausible if it was the end result of Sasori trying to reach some twisted pinnacle of puppetry.

"So the first generation of puppets you might need to harvest human parts for, but with the right seals…." The way Shikako trailed off would have been a lot more comforting if she didn't open her sealing notebook and start writing. Well, as disturbing as the parallels between Sasori and Shikako were, at least Kankurō was reasonably certain Shikako would skip human experimentation… if only because she had so many other things on her plate and human experimentation was time consuming. He'd like to rely on the goodness of her heart, but there was more darkness there than he thought before if she came up with the idea of puppets enslaving mankind in a giant genjutsu.

He would deny surreptitiously trying to dispel genjutsus a few times just in case that night. He would also deny that he was glad that his puppets weren't sitting in the cabin because they had been sealed to protect them against the humidity. If he was the slightest bit nervous about the possibility of his puppets being out, it was out of worry that Shikako might take one and start experimenting and not because he was afraid they would come to life and start harvesting the civilians for parts.

"You don't look like you slept well," Shikako commented, perched on the side of the boat with an apple in hand.

"I was trying to think of a way to turn a story where the puppets are the bad guys into an acceptable play for puppet theater." He didn't understand why, but a lot of people found puppets creepy and scary even without thinking they might start to come alive in the night to dissect people for parts or use them as giant chakra batteries.

"Good luck with that."

"Is this because of the weird mission comment? Or is it because of the muse thing?"

Shikako bit into her apple and chewed much more noisily than usual.

Kankurō sighed. "Got anything light hearted without any weird existential questions?"

Then because she was a sadistic troll, she shared the story of two civilians who tried to make money off of a scam where they deliberately produced a bad play, but the play was so bad that people thought it was an entertaining farce, so the scam backfired on them. It was a fun story that only worked for him because he was familiar with how the theater industry operated in some of the wealthier cities.

"You know, Sparky, there are maybe - maybe - twenty people in the entire Land of Wind who would want to see this as a play." Even most of the puppet corps didn't care about puppets as theater.

Shikako smirked. "And you're one of them?"

"Dammit, yes." Only a complete theater nerd could have come up with this kind of story... or someone with a gift for torture who decided to target a theater nerd, and there was a reason that her bingo book entry listed interrogation. Sometimes Kankurō wished that Shikako was the type to just beat the crap out of him for revenge. Pain, after all, was something he was trained to ignore. Trying to figure out how he could get this made was going to come back and haunt him far into the future. "Do you have a story that doesn't have anything to do with puppets or theater?"

"Hmm. Sure."

She spent the rest of the mission and the time traveling back to Suna telling the tale of a boy who found a Shinigami's notebook which could kill people just by writing in it if you knew their name. The boy used his powers liberally and had developed something of a god complex. There was a clever man investigating the killer that the boy couldn't kill because the investigator didn't use his real name. They had gotten to the point in the story where the boy tricked a second Shinigami into killing the investigator just when they got back to Suna. It was an epic "man tricks god through the power of human feelings" feat that would have been a great climax for the story if, you know, it wasn't the bad guy killing the good guy.

"Well, time to get back to work," Shikako said as they passed through the secure (shinobi only) gate into the village.

Kankurō gaped at Shikako's back. She had taken two steps before his brain got back into gear. "You timed this, didn't you?! You knew that we'd be at the point where it looks like the bad guy wins and- Argh!" This wasn't a one more minute or even a one more hour thing. This was at least another plot arc!

She turned and kept walking backwards. "Do you think they got the cistern ready?"

Kankurō threw his head back in a soundless shout and shook his fists at the sky.