Her reception was rather different at the next set of islands the cruise ship released Anko onto. She squinted suspiciously at the civilians who pointed their little black boxes at her. “You better watch it,” she warned. Anko ruffled her trench coat dangerously, a reminder that she had a lot of weapons underneath it.
Lights flashed.
Hhmph.
Anko decided not to kill them this time, but she made a threatening “I’m watching you” gesture before she stalked up to the resort’s help desk.
They were waiting for her. Anko opened her mouth to request a snake and was surprised to see the middle-aged lady shoot her a mischievous grin and slide over a pamphlet with a map of the island.
She looked at the woman. She looked at the map, unfolded across 6 pieces of paper. Areas had been circled. Photos of snakes had been appended to mark who lived where. There were 110 different snakes living in the beautiful, highly superior islands called the Philippines. She clearly had her work cut out for her if she was going to get at least one of each.
“You, I like,” Anko emphasized. She flung herself over the counter to hug the woman.
“Gibberish?”
She turned to see one of the civilians with black boxes pleading for her attention. Anko raised an eyebrow with maximum condescension. The civilian was undeterred.
“Alright then.” She gestured for the girl to come closer. “The hell do you want?”
The girl showed Anko the screen of her box. It had gibberish at the top but at the bottom was a clear question in plain Continental. Oh. Translation tool? That was awesome.
“Where am I going?” Anko read aloud. She shrugged. “The cruise ship stops in, uh, Florida? Florida and then goes back.”
Several people said Florida very loudly. Anko glared at them on habit.
“Florida gibberish,” said the girl. She seemed delighted about it. She pointed at Anko and repeated it.
“Oh, did you give me a name?” Anko asked. Amused, she memorized the new syllables. Fine, whatever. She repeated it back. The girl nodded. Then she added more gibberish before the words. Anko memorized it. She repeated it. The lobby went nuts with applause. Anko bowed gallantly on her way out. She even let a few civilians use their black boxes to take photos with her.
With her handy dandy map, Anko went tits and knives out on a race to kidnap her new friends before the cruise ship departed from the Philippines. Everywhere she went, people gasped and pointed at her. They often declared a portion of the phrase she had been taught at the tourist center. So, like, of course she shouted it back at them conversationally.
Anko probably should have checked the meaning in her dictionaries before she repeated it. But hell if it didn’t get an awesome reaction every time! So she flung her jacket open to show off the snakes wound around her shoulders and waist, put her hands on her hips, and proudly declared her memorized punch line.
That photo made it onto a newspaper that a nice couple of old farts from Tea Country showed her back on the ship.
“Shinobi-san,” called the old man. His wife smiled and doddled pleasantly as Anko glared across the distance. “Is this you?”
Oh. She zipped over. “Yeah, it is.” Ha, she looked hot. Awesome. Anko snatched the foreign language paper away to examine it. The photo of her had a phrase in Roman characters above in huge print. She and the old people flicked through her dictionary to translate it.
“Huh,” Anko said, leaning back to think. “I’m not a man. Do you think they didn’t see my tits?”
“They saw them, don’t worry.” The old lady patted Anko’s hand for reassurance. “Perhaps it is some sort of title.”
Well, Anko certainly deserved more titles. She took the paper to send back to Tsunade, as ordered, and shrugged it off. If the civilians of the outer countries wanted to worship her as some sort of avatar of Florida, well, who was she to stop them? Maybe she was some sort of destined hero for them. If that whiny Uzumaki kid could end up getting a bridge named for him on his first shitty jaunt out of the country, Anko didn’t see why she shouldn’t become a national hero for a country she hadn’t been to yet.
“I am the Florida Man,” she mused, back in her cabin. She let a hand hang off of her bed to scritch at the writhing carpet of friendlier snakes. “Fuck yeah I am.”
Once Anko agreed that it wasn’t a bomb, she hit the ground running with the new technology. “This is a translator, and this is secured end to end messaging.” She confirmed, indicating one icon at a time. The mystified ship worker nodded along as she scrolled through all the languages she could translate to. “There’s hundreds of local languages on this land mass but the government language–” she squinted at listings and took a guess. “The locals on this island speak- American English?”
“Close enough,” he said, “it sounds basically the same.”
Anko hummed acknowledgment. “Am En it is.” She picked the setting and began downloading keyboards. “And the civilian who wants to contact me?”
“He claims to be popularly known as the snake master. He wishes to inquire as to your mission with the hopes of advising you.”
Her whole face twitched.
“His name is-” the man checked a note. “Hay Roser.”
“Right,” Anko said, wrestling down extremely normal feelings about serpentine mentorship. “So, how would I do a little bit of background checking on this guy before I meet him?”
The answer turned out to be that you could just search his name and there was information publicly available. Fascinated and aghast, Anko tried searching famous people back home to see what kind of leak they had. There was very little… What existed was almost exclusively the work of some fisherman who had gotten blown far off course and wound up stranded in the outer countries. He had been from Kumo and he had shared, frankly, an unpatriotic amount of information. Anko mentally tallied up what Kumo would pay to have this man dead and congratulated herself on her new garden shed. She kicked her feet and giggled a little bit with glee as she figured out where the ship would dock closest to him.
‘I can get him on the way back, maybe put him in my luggage so I can waive him around Kumo’s face and threaten to release him back where I got his ass if they don’t pay up. Ho ho ho, I’m going to get an in-ground pond.’
Oh, right. The whole reason she had started using the fiery fox was to look at the snake man, Hay. She searched him up. It was nothing like Yamamoto-san’s Tanglr blog of national secrets, strange posts about bone-stealing-witches, and tastefully homoerotic images of bearded pirates. Hay’s online presence was obviously meant as a sort of resume.
That was not to say that Hay-san gave an immediate first impression that conveyed reassurance.
The website was obviously self-promotion and made inexpertly by someone who liked neon. Anko read it judgmentally, and then again with an open mind. It was full of bombastic language and fantastic claims about the long list of people dying for the wisdom of the snake master. It was hard to judge, but there were photos of him handling snakes that added a bit of credibility.
“He says he’s been bitten by lots of venomous snakes,” she told the tank by her bedside. A black-banded sea krate undulated conversationally to show he was listening. Since he was paying attention Anko turned and told him, “He probably knows what he’s doing if he has the most exciting snake shows in the country.” She showed him the screen.
They both looked at a cut-out image of the man himself holding a writhing armful of various snakes. He was wearing a bowling outfit for some reason. There were fake flames behind him and also a cartoon lightning bolt coming from the mouth of a brown snake.
The krate pursed his face up and didn't comment.
Fair enough. Aiko had her own thoughts. For example, what the hell was a snake show? Anko was dying to know.
So she contacted Hay Roser. He must have been waiting for her response, because his replies were instantaneous and about as modest as his website.
“A snake show is an unrivaled spectacle fit for all ages.”
That didn’t really answer what she wanted to know, but it was incredibly intriguing. She asked for clarification.
“Snakes are fit for audiences of all ages! Children especially love snakes.”
Anko felt her eyebrows go up. “Really?” she replied. That lined up with her personal experience being a child, but the chuunin exams had not engendered much surety in the serpentine receptability of children. “Is it younger the better?”
“Yes, before someone teaches them to fear snakes.”
She hummed. That made sense. It was probably a lot easier to love snakes before you were menaced by Orochimaru. You needed a foundation of trust. She needed access to small children, got it.
“I have one tomorrow. Please come. You don’t need a ticket. I want to speak with you in person, about a collaboration. I also want to know what you plan to do about the petition.”
“...The what?” Anko said, to the snakes in her room. A few loose grass snakes lifted their heads to see what she was talking about. “I think I need to find out what he’s talking about.” Who was petitioning her? Or was it a petition about her?
It was time to research herself and see what the locals thought was going on with her, apparently.
She ran into her first bit of trouble when the ship was docking in a place called Australia.
“Miss Shinobi,” said the old man. Kensuke? Yeah, she was pretty sure he was Kensuke. “Are those people holding signs with your face on them?”
“Sure are,” Anko said, and squinted. “And it’s… got a red circle and cross mark over it. What’s that supposed to mean?” Baffled, she tilted her head. Did they not want her there? Why would they not want her there?
Michiko hummed and leaned onto her husband. The cruise ship slowly closed the distance towards the shore, bringing the faint sound of human voices. “Perhaps they don’t want you to take their snakes,” she suggested. “Do you have enough? The writhing is quite audible from inside your large box. Perhaps you could simply relax and go to a nice restaurant with us..”
“Not even close,” Anko said grimly. She hadn’t even filled the first of 3 shipping crates with serpents. None of these snakes even spoke her language yet, so she didn’t know if a single one of them would be an alright partner. She needed infinite snakes. She squinted at the shoreline. The people holding the signs were in some sort of official looking uniform and waving their arms. There was also a group of… well, she was pretty sure that a group of her fans were being held back by a line of police officers. Ha.
Well. She would never disappoint her fans, but she also didn’t want Tsunade to bomb her when she returned. Anko pondered how to balance this.
Australia had like, 170 types of land snakes. She couldn’t pass this opportunity up.
A crew member sidled up and cleared his throat to get their attention. “Honored guests,” he said apologetically. “I believe the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry has strict laws about the import and export of animals. They have reached out to us with their concern that you might not understand these rules and inadvertently break them, by, for example-“
“By taking 2 to 4 hundred snakes, yeah,” Anko agreed. She shrugged. “I do intend to do that.”
The crew member merely bowed. “Of course, honored guest. I am merely conveying the local laws. They are also concerned that, were we to dock, we might release serpents from other islands onto the mainland.”
“That’s stupid.” Anko rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to let them go.”
The old people watched this exchange with open fascination.
“Be that as it may,” said the crew member. “They will not allow us to dock as planned. Other patrons will be ferried to the shore by boat. You are invited to remain on board for the duration of our planned stopover in Australia.”
“That seems unnecessarily harsh,” Kensuke interjected. He held out a hand to indicate Anko. “The girl likes snakes. What could be wrong with that? She has a little collection.”
“It’s sweet,” agreed Michiko. The old lady pursed her lips in disapproval. “And as you have said, she is a paying customer.”
Genuinely touched, Anko put a hand to her heart. “It’s alright,” she promised. Then she looked at the crew member, who was only doing his job. “I’ll stay on the ship while you unload all the other passengers,” she said magnanimously. “I know that you don’t want conflict with the local authorities.”
The crewman accepted this with no small amount of relief and no further questions.
A pleasure crew manned and full of civilians from the Elemental Nations knew perfectly well that a Shinobi could exit a ship on her own. Anko waited patiently for the ship to empty. She waved at her fans. She waved extra hard at the people holding signs with X over her face, just to watch them scowl. She was wondering how, exactly, she would incognito get the snake tracking information that she needed, when a different crew member approached her.
“Mitarashi-san? If I might offer a suggestion.”
She looked at him like an interesting bug.
He twitched. “A local paid for me to have this sent to you.” He held out a little box.
Anko hesitated. “Is it a bomb?” she asked sternly.
“It is not a bomb.”
“If it’s a bomb, you’re going to regret–”
“It is a cell phone!” He opened the box to show one of the little black things that these Outer Country civilians all seemed to have. “As I said, a local has gifted this to you with the hopes that you will contact him.”
