Canon Side-Story: Ino's Charm, Tenten's Expertise

And here we go. I ended up playing with my brother for like six hours, that was pretty cool.
Played Palworld, I love Palworld. Such a good game...

Anyway, this was a lot of fun. I love Sakura/Tenten shenanigans, and Sakura/Ino shenanigans are even more fun so this was just all around great..

From now on I'm going to do like a cool roulette kinda thing with the $10 votes. I figure this way every vote will always matter, at least until there's a ton of them and then I'll probably swap over to popular vote but uh... snrk.

Enjoy the side-story!

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“Sakura, this just feels like more of the same.” Tenten stares at Sakura a little awkwardly as the pinkette now blonde practices stabbing forth with a shiny dagger. She’s been smithing practice weapons recently, mostly for experience but also because Kakashi has given her a lot of crap about learning new styles. It only makes sense to try some of them out.

Tenten is of course all for that idea, since she would love for more people to be so varied they’re an expert of nothing at all. It evens the playing field, and makes the world less like a sword fight and more like a complex game of ever changing rock paper scissors. She can kinda get into that. “Well yeah, it’s just another stabbing tool.” Sakura says, “I could probably get this effect by just using a kunai.”

“Yep, so let’s try something a bit different.” The blacksmith says, pointedly handing her another of her practice weapons. A metal staff, it has thick ends and grip points built into it so that she can feel comfortable grabbing it wherever. The idea of a good staff would be to ensure it’s smooth so that you can properly flow with it from movement to movement, but Sakura’s a bit clumsy and at least while getting a feel for it she would like to not accidentally kill someone.

So she made it with grips, and she has no regrets. Feeling it in her palms, it’s natural and weighty and doesn’t feel like it’ll slip and go through a wall or someone’s skull at all. She’s happy with it, and spinning it around at Tenten’s instruction feels good too. Swing it this way, slash it like a sword that way, she finds it only smashes into her hip a little bit which is an improvement on how she figured this would go. “I may need to practice this.”

“That is what we are currently doing.” The weapon mistress says dryly, pulling out her own staff to show off a few practice motions. “Just repeat after me, it should feel natural soon enough.”

“Okay… Can we do the hammer after this? I really liked it during that dungeon but it always felt awkward. I bet with a little bit of instruction it would feel awesome.”

“Yes, Sakura, we can practice with the giant hammer.”

“Yay!”

[Short Blade Moderate]

[Great Hammer Expert]

[Staff Novice]

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“So, I’ve called you here today because I’d like to test out how the charm mechanic actually functions.” Sakura explains, sitting behind a fancy desk she borrowed from Business Naruto and placed in the middle of her room. It allows her to clasp her hands together in front of her face while looking very natural, resting her elbows into the wood feels good too.

“Sakura, you don’t have to call me to your house, we’re friends, you can just say ‘let’s hang out,’ it’s not that significant.” Ino snarks, giggling at her in a way that most would consider rude but Sakura likes the sound so she lets it pass uncontested. Ino should giggle more, it’s pure.

“Yes, well, I have a goal today. I do not just want to ‘hang out’ with you.” Sakura declares, lips twitching upwards and fingers creating air quotes.

“But you do want to hang out.” Ino points out.

“That is besides the point.” Sakura allows, not denying Ino’s words at all. Why wouldn’t she want to hang out? Time spent with her friends is time well spent, especially if she can keep reading or playing a game or just zoning out to the right music while doing so.

True friendship is existing next to someone and finding it okay if you forget to talk for a while, it’s not awkward or strange, it just is. At least, she thinks that's true friendship, others probably find that weird. At least Shikamaru probably agrees with her. She should talk with him more, or maybe not talk with him more, he’d like that.

“It has come to my attention, mostly through recollection, that your charm score is a hundred ten. Mine is twenty three.” Sakura explains.

“Oh, yeah, that would have some implications…” Ino trails, looking away towards the floor as if she has much to say, but no desire to say it. Sakura decides to let that pass. Ino’s tact probably means there’s many things left unsaid in a given day, and it’d be very rude to pressure her about that. It would defeat the purpose entirely, and the least she needs is to accidentally lower Ino’s charm by rubbing off on her somehow.

“I think the best way to figure out the mechanic of Charm is to try and manipulate these two extremes. It’d be better if mine was still in the single digits, but I’ve put a lot of effort in and I’m too happy with the results to start regretting that now.”

“You really have gotten so much better.” Ino admits, sheepishly rubbing her wrist with her other hand. “I haven’t wanted to say anything but it really shows. Like a lot… like every single interaction with you is better.”

“Quite…” Sakura chooses not to say the other things on her mind, she’s learning. Truly.

“So we’re going to have you convince me to do things you don’t think I’d normally want to do. We’ll see how far the difference can push me past my normal will.” Sakura explains, thumping the inside of the desk with her foot. It’s so huge, it takes up like a solid third of her room, getting it in here sucked but it was so worth it for Ino’s giggle, which was probably half because of the giant desk. Why Business Naruto needs something like this, she has no idea.

“Sakura… I don’t think you’ve ever said no to me.” Ino points out, “and I don’t think that’s because of my charm.”

“Well, we’ll be testing that today, now won’t we.”

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“So let’s go over the list.” Ino does not seem very impressed with her, which is odd because she’s done everything Ino’s said, so she should be very happy with her. It’s almost like she’s forgotten something along the way…Oh well, it can’t be too important.

“I have gotten you to delete your saves and start over on several games, including an RPG,” Ino starts, poking a paper with her pencil, “not a great start.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to start fresh.” Sakura shrugs.

“I got you to intentionally make bad food, and then I got you to eat it in front of Haku til he pouted.” Ino cites.

“That was funny, I wish I’d thought of that myself… Pouty Haku would probably be very popular, I should hire someone to make it an emote for his stream.”

“I made you challenge Lee to an exercise-off.”

“That was painful, but nice. He was very happy.” Sakura sighs happily to herself, wiggling her noodly arms. At least they feel noodly, after all that nonsense.

“You flirted with Shikamaru.” Ino says, “notice I didn’t say ‘I made you,’ I didn’t, that was weird.”

“You implied he needed a pick-me-up, I just complimented him a bunch.” Sakura gives her an indignant glance.

“That’s flirting, Sakura.” Ino bites her lip.

“Since when is being nice flirting?”

“... Okay, that’s fair. I need to get you a few books on the subject but I can see why you’d make that mistake. Just uh, future reference, six compliments in twenty seconds is flirting.” Ino holds in a difficult breath.

“Five is okay?”

“... No.” She has to resist laughing, it’s incredibly hard. Sakura is so cute sometimes.

“Well, I think we can conclude that you’re a push-over when it comes to me, but we haven’t figured out if that’s charm related or not… I’m going with not, I can’t make Sasuke do anything and I bet he’s worse than you at this point.”

“Oh yeah, that’s probably true. That means we need to test it with Sasuke next.” Sakura points out.

“No.”