"Excuse me a moment, would you?" Tsunade drawled, neatly flicking open the blue wax seal on her newest missive with a fingernail.
The brat who had brought it didn't look pleased at the idea of waiting in her office, but he didn't do more than give a faint sneer, lifting half of his upper lip to showcase those freakish teeth that Mist seemed to have in spades.
'He's a cute kid until he smiles. It's like Mist has a monopoly on creepy people. Is everyone in Mist this disturbing-looking?'
She took a moment to imagine walking down a street full of people who looked like that. Tsunade shuddered.
'I could probably end their village in a generation if I mailed them bright lightbulbs and some condoms. The problem would pretty well solve itself.'
That was an idea to shelve for later. Right now they were on good terms with Mist. If in future they needed to use 'Plan Turn On the Lights', well. She had a few spares in the utility closet ready to be boxed up.
Tsunade unfolded the paper and leaned back in her chair to scan it, knowing perfectly well that the hidden ANBU guard lurking awkwardly in the hidden alcove by her bookcase would be making sure the Mist boy didn't twitch. She ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth as she read and settled down, breathing slowly through her nose. That positioning saved her from making an involuntary wheeze of amusement when she got to the line that indicated that Terumi Mei had a much better sense of humor than had been readily apparent.
'Holy…'
She sneakily glanced up to observe the light-haired boy in her office. Apparently, Terumi had reason to believe that the sneaky bastard who'd slunk into her village some time ago and pled for reinstatement had come into contact with one of Konoha's teams after escaping from Sound. It hadn't been phrased in exactly that way, but Mei didn't want to waste resources equipping and training the boy up if she was going to find out a month later that he'd offended Konoha enough that he would be the source of a diplomatic incident.
So she'd sent him with a missive she'd intended to get to Konoha anyway and added the postscript that Konoha could kill him if they wanted, but if not, then they should send him back with her response, thanks in advance for sending a speedy reply, with love from the Mizukage.
"Pft."
Suigetsu jumped a little, giving her a downright unnerved look. Apparently, he found her amusement more frightening than she did his teeth.
It was a nice thought. She intentionally gave a drawn-out giggle for good measure, watching the way he shivered from under her eyelashes. Ah. It was nice to put fear into the hearts of men. Being relegated to an office had made that experience so much harder to come by. The middle-aged secretary didn't even respect her anymore, much less find her intimidating.
"Shizune." Her voice was intentionally raised enough to summon her first apprentice from the next room over. "Take our guest to his quarters, please. Thank you for your hasty delivery. I will meet with you again when I have composed a reply. Feel free to explore the village."
As the slightly wild-eyed Mist nin followed Shizune out, Tsunade critically examined him. The way that he walked, the impression he'd given her… Well. She wouldn't be surprised if Terumi was correct. It wasn't hard to imagine that this 'Suigetsu' had managed to clash with Hatake's team. Hatake had a foot-long stick up his rectum about certain triggers and the Mist brat was exactly the type of idiot who would grate on his nerves.
Terumi was better at this game than Tsunade had given her credit for. She lost nothing with this move: if she was correct, then Mist had demonstrated transparency and loyalty to their new allies. If Suigetsu hadn't committed criminal action against Konoha, then Terumi had significant proof of his loyalty in that he'd been trustworthy enough to take a message giving Konoha permission to kill him. If the boy had been a spy or disloyal for whatever reason and indulged his curiosity, then he wouldn't have anything more than rumors to try to sell about Mist when he'd inevitably abandon the mission.
Since he hadn't jumped ship, the boy was either an absolute lunatic or reasonably trustworthy, meaning that Terumi could begin to capitalize on his worth as an actual trained successor of one of the Seven Swordsmen. Hell, maybe she'd give him Zabuza's sword. It was probably just sitting in a storage closet somewhere.
Actually… she didn't remember the name off-hand, but it had seemed like she did remember some sort of unresolved incident in the report from team Kakashi's border assignment a while back. Tsunade trailed off in thought, abruptly getting up and leaving her office to shuffle through the chakra-sealed file drawer (also secured with gravity seals that made the ability to casually assert thousands of pounds of force to open the drawer a must. Ah, it was good to be as brilliant as she was strong) with old A-class mission reports. Hatake's team had been deployed on the same C to B class mission as several younger teams, but they'd been also working as diplomatic liaisons, so they really should have been filed…
"Ahah!," she huffed under the breath, pulling the papers out and tugging off the yellow paperclip with enough force to accidentally tear the top sheet.
The sense of victory quickly fled. She closed one eye, tilted the paper, and even tried putting up so close to her face that it practically brushed her nose. The dust that had somehow accumulated already tickled at her sinuses, making her eyes water. Disgusted, she shoved the report back into place without bothering to clip it together and slammed the drawer shut.
It was no use. Hatake's handwriting was just so appalling that she couldn't pick anything out without a fresh verbal de-briefing to help her look for familiar bits and put things together into an interpretation that made sense. What an ass.
She had no choice. It was time to call on the big guns.
"Keeiiikooooo," she tilted her head back and howled pathetically, pigtails tumbling off her shoulders with the movement.
After a long moment, where her secretary was probably mulling over the life choices that had led her to this low point, she heard the long-suffering, "Hai, Hokage-sama?"
"Have someone bring Hatake here. He needs to be scolded." She paused as if in thought. "I'll need coffee before he gets here". Her shoulders slumped inward. "Hurry on that, we probably only have four hours after he's summoned until that reject actually shows his pointy face," she muttered bitterly under her breath. Cheery. There was nothing like waiting on her own damn peons to put her in a good mood.
She could use the time to contemplate the other information she had to take into consideration. Despite the fact that the reports were garbled, it was generally public knowledge that Konoha had acquired the Hiraishin yet again. (Granted, if she hadn't known it to be true, Tsunade would have called it an idiotic rumor). All the rumors had one thing in common—they made it clear that there was a strong association between the Kazekage and the incident in question.
Even without any real evidence, Terumi Mei had apparently been paranoid and miffed enough to come to the correct conclusion that Sabaku no Gaara had been gifted with a Hiraishin seal… and wanted one herself. Tsunade could practically see the pout behind the carefully selected words tactfully meandering along the line of 'asking but not actually asking because that would weaken Mist's position'.
If the reader was an emotionally incompetent twit like one of Danzo's pets, Terumi's words could be construed as merely remarking on the many amazing potentials for instantaneous information transfer between allied nations and just what a shame it would be for Mist to lose their vulnerable, barely trained jinchuuriki after Konoha had so kindly helped them seal the turtle demon. As a point of professional pride, the seal-master in question would probably be severely put-out at such a turn in events, Terumi wheedled with a deplorable lack of subtlety.
'The miserable hag is right, in a way.' Irritably, Tsunade pursed her lips and blew her bangs out of her face. She didn't care much for Mist, but they were allies. Even if they weren't, few people were taking the Akatsuki threat seriously. They should work with the ones that did. A few days after the attack on Suna, the Kazekage had called for a summit to address the issue.
Tsunade had answered. Terumi had reluctantly answered. Rock hadn't bothered to reply at all. And Cloud's Raikage had gone to the trouble of telling Gaara not to bother the international community with his personal problems and assert that he should come back when his balls had dropped. It had been the badly-spelled diplomatic missive heard around the world. Ouch.
In other words, they should probably give up hope for an international man-hunt. Pity, that. She rather liked the idea of sharing the burden. Annihilating those animals would be much more plausible with equal cooperation. Konoha and their allies couldn't do it on their own.
Despite being the largest alliance, the alliances' enemies in Cloud and Rock were actually currently the strongest individually of the great villages. Mist was recovering from a revolution and a decade best described as 'bloody', Sand had a teenaged Kage and the legacy of twenty-something years of poverty, and Konoha hadn't managed to recover the kind of S-class monstrosities that they had lost in various stupid circumstances—to the Kyuubi, to grief, to suicide, and to their own ambitions—that would have allowed them to carry their allies' weight. Konoha was in the best position by far, but they had to direct resources to internal problems, restructure in the wake of an administration shift, and finish building up the bit of momentum they had finally regained after the Kyuubi's devastation.
If it hadn't been for that moronic invasion… Tsunade scowled, rapping her nails on her desk in poorly hidden irritation.
Terumi was right to worry. She didn't have the strength to protect her child-jinchuuriki when Akatsuki came calling. Putting a Hiraishin seal on the little bastard so that he could be yanked out of hot water would probably end up saving his life.
'Of course, it also means putting more on Aiko's plate,' Tsunade mused, considering her options. On one hand, the child had gotten herself into that mess by giving a seal to the Kazekage. Refusing to do the same for the Mizukage could result in diplomatic strain, and she certainly didn't intend to let a teenager be the impetus for another pain-in-the-ass meeting when she had other things to be doing.
She also had the odd feeling that Terumi had come to the right conclusion about the seal master in question for all the wrong reasons—the missive had indicated that the Mizukage definitely did not believe the prevalent rumor that Yamato was the one with the Hiraishin. Of course, if Tsunade hadn't lied to the other woman about Aiko's fuinjutsu training and exaggerated her experiences just sliiiiightly when she was trying to accommodate their unilateral refusal to have Jiraiya in their country even when begging Konoha for aid, Terumi would probably have taken that rumor at face value. Her choice of messenger said she hadn't—it was almost certainly not a coincidence that she'd sent a hunky, slightly older boy to escort Konoha's sealing expert to Mist if Tsunade was agreeable to giving Terumi a seal.
'I suppose that grumpy, one-eyed fuck she uses as a bodyguard was just too busy fora mission like this,' Tsunade mocked internally.
No. Terumi was probably hoping to capitalize on the real power of youth: hormones and inexperience. If Tsunade didn't have him taken into custody, this 'Suigetsu' would probably do his level best to flirt Aiko's pants off and convince her that she wanted to stay in Mist. Terumi was doubtlessly waiting with champagne and a party hat, ready to offer one gullible teenager anything she wanted if she would only defect to Mist (technically not a crime while they were allied, if the girl thought to give an official resignation). Aiko might even be enough of a chump to fall for it: manipulating using attraction was a cliché because the ploy was effective. She hadn't had either the experience or training in honey-pot type missions that would prepare her to spot and avoid the gambit.
'I should get her into sex-specific training soon, but that will have to come after this mission is over. Luckily, I do know the very best party-pooper. I really would like to see romance bloom in the air with that stick in the mud hanging around.'
"Hokage-sama? Your appointment is here."
"I was just thinking about you," she sweetly informed Hatake when he deigned to meander in. He gave her a suspicious, one-eyed glare that implied he wasn't optimistic enough to think that she'd been thinking about giving him a bonus and sending him on vacation. "Tell me, does the name 'Suigetsu' ring any bells, and do you think I should kill him?"
The twitch in his fingers was getting worse. Suigetsu scowled at a passing woman. Her brown eyes widened, and she scooped up her daughter into the crook of her elbow and hustled away with an awkward clop of delicate heels on the rock path.
'I could follow her home and open that bitch up from ribs to hips. Spill her blood all over her prissy carpeted floor, I bet.'
The thought was tantalizing. Sure, civilians weren't the same kind of thrill to cut apart as a shinobi who could actually fight for their lives, but they screamed so much better. He shuddered just remembering the pleasurable thrill. Killing was as good as fucking.
Suigetsu licked his lips, feeling thirsty. He hadn't killed anyone in days. Mist wasn't the way he'd remembered at all: the first time he'd killed someone on the training fields just to see him bleed, he'd been brought in for a fucking disciplinary hearing. And it was definitely looking like there wouldn't be a good chance to wet his blade in Konoha either. Pity.
'I'm so sick of waiting.'
With a grunt, he pushed his way into the crowd, intentionally jarring anyone who looked at him funny with his shoulders. He really couldn't kill anyone here, but they couldn't kill him or do jack to him either. Diplomatic immunity and all that shit. That did give him a certain amount of leeway to try to take out his aggression in other ways.
A bell jingled with irritating cheer as the door opened on—was that really a sweet shop? In a shinobi village? Suigetsu gaped in disbelief, barely collecting himself in time to bare his teeth and send the children who'd just poured out into the street flinching away from him.
'What a fucking joke. Kids that age should be learning to kill, not stuffing their fat fucking faces with candy. Are they serious? There's something very wrong with this place.'
A girl who looked to be about eight grabbed a smaller girl's hand and steered away from him, giving a surprisingly pissy glare at a nin three times her size. Suigetsu snorted in approval, casually kicking his foot out to trip one of her companions. He didn't turn his head to see the brat start to yowl and snuffle.
He'd already mulled over this mission. Of course it was a sign that Mei-chan was warming up to him: it was stupid to trust one person to get a missive across the continent unless that person was very strong. He was qualified for that, but this diplomatic bullshit? It just wasn't his style. He was much more suited to killing people than to charming them, although he could be charming if it suited his purposes.
Then again, being charming might be his best recourse. This mission did conveniently put him in the same village as that redheaded bitch who'd killed Zabuza, though. If he could find her, he'd pump her for information.
Suigetsu didn't suppress the immature snicker that thought brought up. He cracked himself up sometimes.
He wasn't entirely serious on that. It was always a bad idea to fuck around with enemy kunoichi… then again, Konoha wasn't exactly an enemy right now. They still weren't Mist, he reminded himself. The only people he could really trust were his comrades, and he didn't have those now. That was why he needed to rebuild the swordsmen.
It always came back to that. That was why he was here—or why he hadn't protested this mission, anyway. He hadn't heard so much as a whisper about Zabuza's blade, which meant that the bitch wasn't using it. 'As if she could,' he snorted. It took an extraordinary amount of strength to wield one of the legendary swords. It could be in Konoha's custody, in which case being on good terms with the chump who'd brought it in could only help his case.
His normal modus operandi would be to overpower her and beat the information he needed out of her. But that would pretty well fuck-up the professional attitude he'd been grudgingly portraying. Suigetsu wasn't interested in sabotaging his own work and wasting his time.
So he'd have to be comparatively subtle. Unfortunately, he would also have to rely on luck to an extent. He already had a lie prepared—that he wanted to thank her for saving his life in that Sound mess—but he couldn't actually go and hunt her down. Even if he was familiar with Konoha, he didn't know where the bitch lived. No matter how incompetent these people were, they wouldn't humor a foreign nin asking how to find one of their citizens.
That meant he just had to hope he'd run into her. He could increase his chances of that by spending a lot of time going around Konoha. He definitely wouldn't find her in his assigned quarters or with the big-tittied Hokage.
With some difficulty, Aiko swallowed around her swollen and painful tongue. Breathing was surprisingly difficult under her stupid mask—the porcelain obstructed her nose slightly, and her tongue kept threatening to block off her throat.
She was a little disoriented and faint-feeling. The feeling had been getting a little better since she'd left Danzo, but the seal digging into her being and anchoring her chakra along certain lines was more than a bit distracting.
Perhaps it would have been better if she'd been less aware of her own chakra and how it was being entangled with Danzo's.
'I'm probably doing a shit job of my real task,' she thought, stiffly readjusting her posture. 'If some ambitious lunatic comes soaring in through the window to assassinate Tsunade, I'll probably only notice when she pounds them into the carpet.' Her attention had been wandering in the last few hours since she'd started her shift. Normally she would have been fascinated and been occupied with trying to piece together the threads of intrigue that Tsunade was weaving.
Today was not a normal day. She felt fevered and strange and had barely even remembered when she had replaced ANBU squirrel. Aiko did dully note that Kakashi was in the office, but the conversation was quiet and she didn't strain to listen in. It was all the she could do to maintain consciousness and a minimum level of alertness.
'You would think that Danzo wouldn't want to compromise his own people's abilities,' she thought sourly.
To be fair, the seal may not affect less aware users that way. Aiko had been paying attention while the damn thing went on as best as she could. It was impossible to actually see at the time: it was on her tongue, after all. But she had been able to see the stamp like tools with ink-filled needles that he had jabbed her with and then activated with chakra before jabbing the next 'stamp'. The process had been polished to perfection with the ease of repetition. Frankly, she was impressed.
She was also a little nervous. Her counterseal would definitely not work on this seal. 'Well, it could,' she corrected in the interest of fairness. 'But only if I overpower the hell out of it and don't mind that my tongue is going to end up severely burnt.'
That was definitely last- resort. A good medic-nin could repair that kind of damage, but she'd prefer to have a better seal ready.
Danzo was a paranoid old coot. She had been right about the primary seal at least: the bits that served to actually enslave the sealed agent weren't very complicated at all. He hadn't put a lot of time and love into that seal. She was at least satisfied in her analysis there: if she brute-forced her way through the bars, she could easily pick that apart. The locking mechanism was Danzo's real baby. It had been a massive pain in the ass to use mathematical sealing to pull those bars apart, and now she knew why: they weren't solid bars. She had been running algorithms again and again until she found one that gave an answer that just happened to resonate closely to the real, three-pronged problem's answer.
The seal that Danzo had put on her himself was actually four interlocked pieces. Not two, as she had hypothesized. Definitely not two pieces. The first piece was the actual enslaving agent, combining various behavioral control concepts. The other three were all locks that combined to form a fourth lock—making the Root tongue seal a five-piece seal written with four seals. That man was as brilliant as he was mad. She wanted to make something as tricky as that one day.
'At least I know why I had such a hard time picking apart those stupid bars covering the primary seal.'
What a drag.
An increase in volume jolted her back to the real world. Aiko bit her lower lip, trying to stay focused, despite the fact that all she could see was Kakashi's stiff back, blocking Tsunade's desk and face. 'I wonder what I missed? Kakashi does not seem happy.' His voice always got low and growly and hard to understand when he was upset. 'Well, that's not strictly true,' she corrected herself. 'When he's really angry… It's more of a cold, detached anger.'
"-end badly."
Tsunade was much easier to understand. Lovely diction and enunciation, that woman had. Aiko appreciated that.
"Unless you're rescinding your earlier judgment that we don't need to kill the brat, then yes. It does have to. At least we know what Terumi is planning, and the two of you can handle him if something happens on the way to Mist. Better the simpleton we know than someone more dangerous that we aren't as familiar with."
Grudgingly came the, "Hai, Hokage-sama," after a long moment where Kakashi seemed to sullenly contemplate throwing his papers to the ground and stomping out.
'Man, I really should have been paying attention. This sounds like it was an interesting conversation.'
Aiko rolled her neck, tilting her head down nearly to touch her shoulder. Oh well. It was too late now.
At least she had the comfort of knowing just how damn good the seals disguising her presence in that alcove were. Kakashi almost certainly knew there was an ANBU guard there, but he didn't seem to have recognized her. She ran her fingertips against the humming seals, taking a moment to pick apart their components. They weren't so complicated. She could replicate these.
'Could they be used on an item like my mask to obscure my chakra signature whenever I put it on? That would be useful for keeping my identity quiet around people who know me and for just plain hiding in general. I can't see why the seal would have to completely surround the user like it does here in order to work. Close contact really should be enough for it to function properly…'
That might be a nice addition to her home security. The way that she could come and go with Hiraishin would be apparent to any strong sensors who paid attention. It would be better if no one knew when she was and wasn't home. It was hardly her biggest problem, of course, but it was one that she could easily address today. It wasn't possible to totally revamp her home security in one day. The more complicated that the protections became, the more difficult and draining it would be to tie in new additions.
As soon as her shift was over and ANBU walrus came to replace her, Aiko settled on her bed with her sealing diary and sketched out the chakra muffling symbols that she had familiarized herself with during her shifts. She sketched out what she remembered seeing of the 'stamps' Danzo had used on her while she was at it. Unfortunately, her memory on the second part of the locking seal was a bit distorted and she'd missed the third altogether. By that time, she'd been woozy with the supremely uncomfortable sensation of the seal digging into her chakra system.
"At least I remember the first part," she muttered, struggling to get down her vague remembrance of the middle section. By simple elimination, she could reconstruct the rest of the seal with a little work.
Aiko couldn't help but notice that this exercise invalidated one of her hypothesis—she was definitely not barred from working on reverse engineering the seal. 'Not that I would know how to make a seal capable of such a thing myself. Maybe it's not even possible for a seal to sense preparation to make a counterseal. If the seal were binding enough to restrict such a thing, it could very well prevent me from learning any number of useful skills that could be used against Root or Danzo.'
She gave an ugly snort, barely lifting her pen in time to prevent a mistake on her design. It had been a large oversight on her part to forget that Danzo couldn't possibly forbid his operatives to learn skills that could be a danger to him when the whole reason he had a secret organization was combat-oriented.
With a squint, she envisioned how the tentative second seal would overlay the first, and what spaces it would leave for the third piece to fill in.
"Well, that can't be right," she said dryly, noting that her current version would have the third part completely failing as a locking mechanism independently. It would be easy to convert to a failed explosive seal, however. How useful. Exploding tongues would be so easy to weaponize.
Frustrated, she leaned back into her pillows and flipped to the earlier page, biting her lip. 'May as well make the first addition to my home security while I'm working on seals'. Using her recently scribed copy as a reference, Aiko copied the seal at intervals throughout the apartment, both in blood-tinted ink hidden under rugs with her other seals and invisible chakra webs on the walls that she smudged and wove into the pre-existing sealing network.
The same seal went onto the inside of her mask, beginning what would eventually be a looping structure around the rim. She would probably think of other modifications that she wanted. It would be nice to have any little help that she could while on her most dangerous missions.
'It would probably make sense to strengthen the actual mask before I do anything else, so that all the work I put into modifying it isn't wasted the first time someone thumps me.'
That bracingly logical thought in mind, she scrabbled through her seal diary for the mundane, basic seal that would make a physical object much harder to break. She'd never used it before, but perhaps she should make more regular use of that and seals like it on her equipment… Aiko got together a large pile of her equipment, both ANBU and regular, and went through piece-by-piece adding reinforcing seals. By the fifth piece, she had it mastered well enough to accomplish it with a chakra pulse instead of ink. By the twentieth, it very suddenly became clear that the sealing she had been doing over the last hours had been fighting a war of attrition against her chakra levels while she hadn't been paying attention.
"Ugh, my head." Aiko pressed her eyes shut and her forehead into her palms, bringing her feet up to rest on the bed so she could curl into her knees. "I think I made too many seals at once."
Using the chakra pulse was much faster, but it took much less out of her than using prepared ink did. Of course, it wasn't like the ink had no physical toll—it required her blood, for kami's sake— but that dizziness was generally unconnected from the experience of sealing because she didn't mix the ink at the same time that she used it.
"I'll do the rest of my equipment later." She blinked heavily at the enormous pile of crap that she had grabbed in her ambitious tour around the house for things to seal. It was covering enough of the bed that it would prevent her from laying down. She should really put it away.
"Maybe later." Aiko braced herself with her left palm on the covers and used her right arm to sweep the accumulated pile directly onto the floor with an ugly series of indignant thumps and clatters.
Guiltily, she glanced up at the doorway before remembering that she lived alone now. 'I can act like a barbarian now without anyone judging me.'
Smiling vaguely, she sunk down into the mattress and wiggled awkwardly to tug the blanket out from underneath her body enough to pull it over. Her bed was so warm, and so soft, and she was so very tired.
The next thing that she knew was the discomfort of a hand tightly gripping her wrist.
Aiko gritted her jaw, heart thumping and moved to sweep out the feet of the man in her bedroom—which brought her to the realization that she was standing… with a kunai in the hand being restrained… and that she was fantastically unsuccessful in knocking down the intruder because Kakashi stepped over her leg casually, giving her an unimpressed look all the while.
Her face burnt.
"Ah, sorry!" She drew her arms back the instant that he released her wrist. "Did- did you try to wake me?"
Oh god, how embarrassing. At least she still had lethal reflexes when someone actually approached her, but she really should be able to wake up when someone entered her living space or called out to her.
"Yes." His uncovered eye pointedly wandered over the mess in her room. "You must have been tired."
Aiko met his gaze steadily, refusing to look as shamed as she was tempted to feel. She was an adult. If her own room was a little messy, it was no one's business but her own. "Is something wrong?"
"No, but we have a time sensitive mission." He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned away, instantly looking a hundred times less lethal. "Pack for at least a week. The Mizukage wants a Hiraishin seal, for herself and for her jinchuuriki if you're willing to take on another charge. Lucky you, you get to be the emergency communication system."
She snorted. "Does that increase in clearance come with a bump in pay?" she asked sardonically.
It took a moment to realize that something was wrong when she didn't get a reply. He… he was almost always in the mood to banter, even if it was biting. Awkwardly, Aiko cleared her throat.
Kakashi paused in the doorway. "We're required to travel with a representative from Mist. I don't trust him. Watch your back, and don't share anything remotely sensitive."
"Hai, captain," she reflexively responded to the tone of command. The reply surprised even her—since when did she call him 'captain'?
'It's not like 'sensei' or 'shishou' are really accurate anymore,' she justified internally.
His head twitched as if he was considering turning to bring up the same question, but instead Kakashi strode out into the hallway and closed the door.
"Be at the east gate in ten minutes."