217. Cheating, blatant cheating and Tomoka
Ignoring the fox currently clawing at the seams of her mind, Tomoka decided to continue with the tour.
“Ahem, now that we are here we might as well get other stuff done. For starters, full body scans to check for any health issues.” Yeah, ignoring the glares from her girls was hard but currently she still had stuff to do. She would give them what they want later, in a more private setting.
“We also need to discuss a few things while we are at it. For example, I already talked with Gaara about this, but I have already delivered clones to take your respective places. As I offered Gaara, you can keep a connection to them or you can just let me deal with it.” After hearing that everyone's jaws dropped except for Gaara's, her girl’s and Orochi who just raised an eyebrow.
“Do you mean to say there is a copy of all of us running around pretending to be us!?” Naruko looked both angry and confused.
“Yup yup, there are a few events that I want to happen in certain ways for convenience sake.” Afterall, if the whole fourth shinobi war doesn’t happen she won’t get her hands on an Otsutsuki.
“As I have said, if you want I can hook you up with a connection to your respective clones. With that being said, Gaara if you would please sit over there.” Tomoka was currently pointing towards a normal looking chair.
“It will be very disorienting at first so I do recommend you sit down.” After sitting down Tomoka got to work. This time she wasn’t just going to shove a phantom in and be done with it. Though Gaara did have a phantom inside him, that had been a momentary thing.
Unlike Nozomi and Hinata, who had spent so much time with Tomoka and her phantoms that their body didn’t fight their intrusion anymore, Gaara’s body and chakra continued to fight the phantom’s presence. Not only that but the connection would place strain on Gaara’s brain and mind.
Taking her time Tomoka lit her fingers with chakra as she began to inscrime micro seals on Gaara’s scalpel despite his hair still being there. A few minutes later she activated the seal connecting it to her phantom. Instantly Gaara felt dizzy as all his senses split in two. One group was of his original body while another group was that of the clones.
“Alright the connection has been set. The seal I applied is so you can better handle the sensory input as well as any output you want to do. It will also let you cut any group of senses whenever you wish to do so with just a thought.”
After explaining that Gaara shook his head lightly as he just cut off the sensory input from the clone. What Tomoka hadn’t said was that Gaara also got a new set of memories, those of his clone. From the looks of it the clone would also transfer memories to Gaara as well as review his if he allowed it.
“This… is very disorienting.” That was all Gaara said as he stood up, opening and closing the sensory input to try and get used to it.
“Yeah, it is and somehow Tomoka can do that with thousands of clones at a time… well phantoms but same difference.” Responded Nozomi as she looked around the lab. Both her and Hinata had been practicing Tomoka’s phantom clone jutsu. Unfortunately they could at most make two phantoms despite their enhanced brains. They couldn’t comprehend how Tomoka did it.
“Bah, I’m just built differently. Talking about that…” Tomoka had been curious about her biological make up. She was more than sure that by now she was something else in the shape of a human than an actual human. Unfortunately she couldn’t do a proper scan unless she either went to konoha’s hospital, big no no there, or came here.
“It’s high time I do a full scan of myself.” After saying that Tomoka got comfortable in a special machine. This machine would do a full body scan with as many methods as possible. X-rays, electrograms and whatever else you can think of. Once the doors of the chamber closed on her a phantom walked into the lab.
“What, I still need to manage the machine?” The phantom looked exactly like Tomoka just with a lab coat on. After saying that she got to work pressing this and that on the machine until it began taking as many and clear reads on Tomoka as it could. Moments later a holographic screen opened up showing Tomoka’s information.
“My job here is done.” Not bothering to look at the information the phantom turned around and left as her shape changed into that of a completely different person. Moments later Tomoka came out of the chamber to review the information.
“Am I the only one that found that a bit creepy?” Kankuro shuddered as he thought of both how a second Tomoka just waltzed in after the first entered the chamber and how the second changed shape mid stride as it left.
““You get used to it”” Both Hinata and Nozomi said at the same time with a bit of a blank stare.
“What the fuck? No, really what the actual fuck?” Hearing Tomoka curse everyone turned around to see her fiddling with the hologram holding her information.
“Is something wrong?” Hinata instantly moved besides Tomoka looking at the information as if now she could understand its secrets, she couldn’t.
“Yes? No? Maybe? This is just… where to start from.” Tomoka taped the screen more and more as she scanned and remembered the information.
“Let’s start with my brain… It looks to be completely different from a normal brain. Its composition is completely different now made from a silicate gold compound material. It is a super efficient conductor. Not to mention that my neural pathways now have more in common with fiber optic than actual nerves.
And that wasn’t just her brain. Her entire nervous system was the same. While electric impulses are fast, they aren’t lightspeed fast. Her brain and nervous system now uses actual light for information transfer. She now has literally light fast reflexes, not that it matters much when the speed force is involved but even so.
The presence of gold also explains her electrical immunity. From the readings she would need to be struck with the equivalent of a thousand natural lighting strikes at the same time to overwhelm her nervous system. The rest of her body is pretty much perfectly insulated and that is another can of worms.
Her bones are now composed of an unknown metal… Unknown fucking metal! From the readings it is extremely dense and heavy, Atomic number two hundred and seventy eight… What the fuck!
“How did Lee manage to break this thing… no, he broke my left arm before the serum. Damn is my body something else altogether.” Tomoka muttered as she continued to review the information while explaining what she could to those present.
Her musculature was also composed of polymers made from unknown compounds with atomic numbers way out the known elemental table. She was already salivating at the possibilities. Somehow all of these elements were stable yet, from the readings there is no cosmic event that could possibly create them. Tomoka decided to call these groups of elements synthetic elements.
The absolute worst part was her genetics. The damned machine had to overclock its processing unit to try and keep up with what was going up there. From what the machine could gather unlike normal humans with their twenty three pairs of chromosomes she has twenty four… trios. That's right, she doesn’t have pairs but trios. Worse is that she doesn’t have DNA per se but TNA? Instead of the typical helix pattern of DNA with two strands hers has three! And unlike the typical presence of the ATGC which are the pairs that hold information in DNA hers has a bunch of other unnamed pairs.
All of that makes the amount of information her genetic code can hold exponentially larger. Not to mention that it is in a constant state of flux as her genetics are constantly mutating! And from the readings it is only picking up speed. How quickly can it go? How much can it change? Hell, her body is already somehow synthesizing unknown elements!
“This is just fucking ridiculous… can I even be killed?” The lizard genes in her look to have been working hard. Now, she could with all confidence call herself the hard to kill Tomoka because daum, from the numbers not even a point blank biju-dama could end her now. After explaining everything she received a different reaction.
Orochimaru looked like he was abusing the nut button. Naruko, Satsuki, Temari, and Kankuro looked at her as if she were a biju or worse. Gaara looked like he just gave up on his sanity. Meanwhile Hinata and Nozomi had wry smiles.
“There is cheating, blatant cheating, and then there is you.” Hinata quoted a story she had read on Tomoka’s mindscape.
“Uh… oops?” And really what else was she to say? At this point she was pretty sure she could go full eldritch monster and change her shape whenever she wished to. Not to mention that weird soul tentacle thingy she had pulled inside the mindscape. Thinking about that.
Tomoka concentrated a bit trying to do the same as she had done in the mindscape. It took a moment of effort before she saw it, a sluggish moving piece of black something coming out of her body. Unlike in the mindscape, in real space it felt lazy and hard to move.
Instantly everybody else in the room became tense as the air grew cold. Not the typical cold coming from a drop in temperature but instead a different sort of cold. A cold that would sip into someones being at their last moments, the frigid touch of death.
“T-Tomoka?” Nozomi asked as she looked around the room with her mangekyou actively searching for the threat she couldn’t find.
“Sorry, sorry, just testing something.” Seeing how everybody became uncomfortable she instantly pulled the soul limb, because that is what it felt like, back inside herself. Instantly the chilled air became normal as the other relaxed.
“What was that?” This time Naruko was the one to ask. Her instincts had been screaming contradicting alarms in her head. She felt like she needed to run for her life and get as far away as possible while also feeling like moving, even breathing would end up with her demise.
“To tell you the truth… I am not entirely sure myself.” Things have been ramping up lately. Stranger and stranger things involving herself making everything a bit confusing. Tomoka truly didn’t know what was going on with herself. Her body was changing faster than she could comprehend into something hard to understand. Her soul was even stranger and at this point Tomoka didn’t even know where to start. Then, there was that dream, she had blamed the alcohol back then but something told her it hadn’t been the cause.
“Well, let's just forget that for now. So, do any of you want the connection to your respective clones or nah?” As she expected, after asking Gaara about it all of them decided to go for it. Funnily enough the one that had the least trouble getting used to the double set of senses was Kankuro. Understandable seeing as a puppet master he would need to divide his attention to control multiple puppets.
“Well, with that done, we should continue with the tour, no?” Tomoka really wanted to get the tour over with so she could start experimenting with her soul limbs. Unfortunately this is something she needs to do herself as her phantoms do not possess souls, and even if they did it wouldn’t be her soul.
“I would rather stay here.” As expected Orochi wished to stay and play with the many toys around. You know, dissect a few clones, do some human experimenting, the works.
“Come on Orochi, if you want to play with my toys at least do so with your own body. You will have all the time in the world for your research once you join my group. Now let’s go.” No, Orochi didn’t pout like a little kid who had been denied his favorite treat. He would never admit to it anyway.
“Next stop is Vanaheim.” And so everyone teleported to the next level of Yggdrasil. Once there the first thing everyone noticed was that unlike the other levels who were mostly flat this one had many different protrusions and holes everywhere.
“Vanaheim and Asgard, the last two realms aren't inside the main trunk but instead in the many branches of Yggdrasil. Vanaheim is the food generating level. The many branches provide the other plants up here with the necessary nutrition making them grow faster and stronger. The forests of Vanahem also hold a wide diversity of animals. Yes, it's funny that there is a forest on the branches of a tree.”
Everyone looked around seeing the beautiful combination of nature and technology as people and machines alike worked the fields of grain or the orchards. Some would also rear the different cattle. From their position they could also see a segment of the mentioned forest covered in spider silk.
“Uh, what is that?” Naruko, always the talkative and curious one, asked while pointing at the said segment of forest covered in spiderwebs.
“That is the home of the spider clan. They are my summons. Before moving here they lived in the land of fire but now they live here instead. It is a funny story actually. I just summoned a few here to boast about the place and the next thing I know they pretty much demand I let them live here.”
Tomoka remembered the event fondly. She had been very confused at the time until one of the spiders explained that both the abundance of food and natural energy here appealed to them deeply.
“Thanks to my technology and Yggdrass efforts, anything and I do mean anything can grow over here. We have products from all over the world here. From the cactus fruits of the desserts of Suna to the special peppers from the land of lightning. Hell, I have some products from the other continent as well.”
With that last part said Tomoka began taking them around the place, taking some fruits from the trees here and there and overall having a nice trip.