Disclaimer: I do not own Avatar the Last Airbender or Naruto. Let a girl dream.

Toph kept one foot firmly planted on the ground as she sipped from the cup of whatever it was in her hands. It was cool, and she was hot. That was that.

"Your name is Toph Bei Fong, you're fourteen, your parents are traders, and you taught Earthbending to the Avatar. You were fighting some weird spirit, and ended up in the Nara forest." Inoichi ran through everything she had told them. She could almost hear the air quotes.

"Yep," Toph paused for a moment, considering. "I think it was called an 'Onyo' or something.

"An Onryo?" Shikaku asked. He had gotten a scroll out sometime during the conversation and had been rustling with it, though it sounded rather different than any scroll she'd ever heard before.

"That's the one," Toph finished off the glass. "I really should get back. Thanks for the hospitality and all that, but-"

"You can't just leave!" Choza sounded almost insulted. "The Hokage will want to see you!"

Hokage shmokage. Toph stood and stretched. "Too bad for him."

"Hey, Bei Fong," the kid who sounded like Shikaku said. Toph still hadn't gotten his name. "Do you have like, a king or an emperor or a chief back where you come from?"

"Call me Toph," she shot back. "And yeah. A king. Two of them, actually. Why?"

"Well, the Hokage is kind of like a ruler to us. We're kinda required to alert him of your presence here, and besides, you can't really leave Konoha without his permission."

Through the (thankfully) stone tiles of the floor, Toph could feel his heart rate spike. The other four in the room too, but nobody said anything to contradict the boy.

"Why are you lying?" She asked.

There was a sudden stillness throughout the house.

"You said you were blind, right?" Shikamaru asked.

"Yes. I am." Toph pointed at him. "Stop redirecting the conversation."

"If you're blind, though, how are you able to tell where we all are?" Shikamaru gestured to her. "I mean, you seem pretty... NOT blind."

"None of your business, Lazybones." She felt slightly shaken. Everywhere in the Earth Kingdom, almost everyone seemed to look the other way once they learned she was blind. She was essentially reduced to a helpless little girl in their eyes; and while she hadn't exactly enjoyed that, it made enemies underestimate her.

There was certainly none of this detective work.

"Name calling is rather rude, young lady," the only other woman in the room remarked. "And watch what you say about my son."

Shoot. Toph cleared her throat. "So, who says I can't leave, exactly?" She shifted her feet along the ground, feeling the vibrations as they moved.

"The Hokage should probably meet you," Yoshino told her gently. "Could you even find the gate without an escort?"

Toph growled but ceded her the point. If a super powerful, extremely awesome Earthbender showed up in the middle of the village where she was going to be teaching, she'd want to know about it.

As to the gate, though....

Toph stomped the ground. As hard as she could. The tiny ripples of movement showed her the house, the people, the woods and hills and-

No gate.

No wall!

"Just how huge is this place?" She wondered aloud.

The two who she supposed were related had gone still. You could almost hear the cogs in their brains turning as they tried to figure her out.

Ha. Good luck.

"So will you?" Inoichi, though the importance of her actions were not lost on him, asked impatiently.

"So, meeting with this hokage dude will let you let me go so I can find Aang?" Toph turned towards them, weighing her options in her head.

On one hand, this hokage dude sounded very suspicious. She had no guarantee that he'd let her go if she went to meet him. She could remember a few books where leaders offered false peace terms to others and never let them leave once they had them. (One of her least favorites had been a story where one war general lured another enemy general down from their tactical advantage on their hill and had him over for dinner. The food wasn't poisoned- all that much. But as the first general continued to invite the second over, the poison built up more and more until he died. Not very pleasant.)

On the other hand, Toph was confident that she could handle pretty much anything anyone threw at her. She was the first person in the world to invent metal bending, and it was still so new that very many people simply didn't know about it yet. They wouldn't be able to keep her locked up in any metal prison.

But on the third hand, these people were weird! Toph had never encountered a move where someone could just take over your entire body like that and simply not allow you to move. What's to say she wouldn't get caught like that again? She'd had no way to escape, and she'd never even heard-

"Are you a bloodbender?" Toph asked Shikaku.

But no. That didn't fit either. It wasn't night, or a full moon, and from what she remembered of her own experience, it'd hurt. Feeling the life blood in your veins forcing you to do and move as another wanted-...

Let's just say it was not very pleasant.

And besides, he hadn't moved as he'd restrained her. You can't bend without moving.

"No."

She felt Shikaku shake his head, then look her over, goosebumps erupting on her arms.

"Okay, then," Toph turned her head in his general direction. She could feel Shikamaru coming into the room, but she ignored him for now. "But I want the terms on paper."

If there was one thing the daughter of a merchant knew, (even if she had been born blind) it was contracts.

Quill, parchment, and promises.

Whoo boy. This is going to go SO great.

And yes, that was totally sarcasm.

▪▪▪

Shikamaru gave Bei Fong a sideways glance as she walked by. The chick was one great big puzzle he was determined to figure out.

It was pretty obviously that she couldn't see, and yet she didn't trip or stumble or seem at all scared to move about. It was like she could see, but...

Shikamaru recalled a trip to see his father in the hospital back when he was younger. There had been a few other men on the squad, and most of them had gotten off lightly wounded.

But there had been one whose face had been sprayed with acid.

He had been freaking out a timid looking nurse, holding her by her collar and screaming into her face. He'd been shouting about how he wouldn't be able to carry on with his life; everything he had ever learned how to do hinged on being a ninja, and without his sight-

His scarred face and wide, blank eyes had been burned into his memory, along with the smell of antiseptic. It had been the subject of many nightmares for him for a while, and even now, the scent of those chemicals brought him back to that day.

So, Shikamaru had gathered that being blind was bad.

Yet, here was this girl, this blind chick, who would take on his dad and other clan heads, and not even show fear.

How did she do it?

"I can feel you watching me," she remarked. "If you have something to say, say it. If you don't, can it and stop watching my every move. I don't like it."

Well. Okay.

"Well," Shikamaru considered what to say that wouldn't bug the crap out of her (he like standing above ground, not being buried in it) and still be useful to him. "Who's this kid Aang you keep talking about?"

"The avatar?" She sounded disbelieving. "Are you seriously telling me you don't know who the Avatar is?"

Oooookayyyy, nope. Not that, then. Kami, this was such a drag. "How about the spirit you keep talking about?"

"The On-whatsit?" She shrugged. "It was one of the first spirits I had the misfortune of meeting. Katara told me about this other forest spirit they ran into before picking me up," a tiny grin crept onto her face. "It didn't go so well."

"Define 'not-so-well'" Shikamaru suggested, filing away the odd name in case it turned out to be of any importance.

She actually laughed a little. "A bunch of villagers were getting kidnapped by it, then Aang tried to negotiate, fight it, then follow it, in that order. It got Sokka, then Aang was stuck in the spirit world, and Sugar Queen was left all alone."

"What happened?" Shikamaru asked, fully aware that his father and the other clan heads were listening in.

"Oh, Aang used his air nomad training and convinced it that the forest would grow back again- yeah, that's what it was mad about- and it chilled out, turned into a giant panda, and released all the people before vanishing into nothingness." She was waving her arms as she told the story.

"That sounds...." what was he supposed to say?

"Crazy, right?" She laughed. "Luckily, there weren't any spirits after I joined up. Just wickedly clever, psyciopathic princesses and an assassin who shot explosions from his head."

"Okay, that one I've got to hear." Shikamaru felt himself slowly piecing together the puzzle of Toph Bei Fong. "What happened?"

▪▪▪

She kept talking to him all the way through the village, talking loud as she recounted story after story. Not very many of them made sense, but it helped Shikamaru get a read on her that just looking at her wouldn't.

It also gave him a lot of questions. What was a firebender? An airbender? A badgermole? What or where was Ba Sing Se? Who was she?

How did she get here?

They arrived at the tower and his dad waved aside the guards, Choza leading the way, then Toph and Shikamaru following, Inoichi and his dad trailing them.

Toph had grown quieter as they started climbing the stairs. "How about you?"

"Huh? Me?" Shikamaru was taken by surprise.

"Yeah. You probably have an interesting story or two as well. I shouldn't be the only one sharing." She elbowed him pointedly.

So, despite the staring ANBU guarding the doorways , Shikamaru recounted the latest tale of how he and his team had captured Tora the cat.

She seemed pretty hung up on that.

"A cat?" Toph repeated incredulously. "Not an Owlcat or a Pygmypuma or a Catalanch?"

"Nope," Shikamaru shook his head slightly. "Just a cat."

"A Parrotcat or a Grizzlycat?" She asked.

"No," he repeated. "Just a perfectly normal cat."

"Huh." She seemed almost disbelieving.

"Ahem," Choza interrupted. "We're here."

The pair of ANBU standing on either side of the door opened it and ushered the group inside.

"Miss Bei Fong, this is our Hokage, Lord Third. Hokage-sama, this is the young Miss Toph Bei Fong."