In contrast with the pain and suffering that her teammates had been inflicted with upon being assigned this mission, Naruko was enjoying herself quite a bit. Both of her teammates, much to her displeasure, had refused to wear the maid uniform that the waitresses had been made to wear. It was a pity, because Naruko was sure both of them would've looked quite nice in them.
Plus, the scenery in the upper decks was quite nice, if she did say so herself. That kind of beauty is not something you see every day, and she understood why the rich people would spend so much money on such frivolity. It was a very nice frivolity!
The maid outfit Naruko was wearing had been designed to look brief and skimpy on the much older serving girls around her, which meant that on Naruko, it was about her size, and had been fashioned into a workable dress with just a little adjustment from her teacher.
Who knew Kakashi could sew? Let alone so well!
Naruko had learned just how nice it was to have an apron, as well. And she had decided she would have to buy one the moment she got home. It didn't have the main problem she had with longer skirts and pants, namely that she found them uncomfortable whenever she did try to wear some, and it protected her from having something spilled on her clothes.
Given how few outfits she possessed, having a way to stop her cooking accidents from ruining them would be quite nice. Either that, or getting Satsuki to let her borrow clothes to cook in. Satsuki had plenty of clothes she never used, apparently birthday gifts people threw her way.
Maybe Sakura could help her get an apron? She seemed like a girl who would know where to find such a thing.
Ignoring her newfound love of standard cookwear, Naruko returned to her duties with the same bright smile that she always wore. It had, apparently, helped her become quite popular with the nobility that was paying for her services. And she was getting plenty of tips!
While using her ninja training to play tricks to entertain the nobility wasn't what she thought she'd be doing in her first real mission, Naruko didn't really mind it in the least. Though she had really strained her abilities when she had walked on the side of the ship using her chakra to maintain her tray perfectly in place while keeping all of the contents undisturbed. It took like three hours for Kakashi to get her to do that without screwing up, but it'd been totally worth it. If Mizuki and Iruka hadn't drilled her so thoroughly on her chakra control, it might have very well been impossible for her until much later.
Parlor tricks though they might have been, they served her well. From something as simple as being able to carry a tray on one single finger, she had earned quite a few coins, and from other things, such as walking on top of the pool to offer a man the drink he had asked for, she had earned even more.
Three other genin shared the uppermost deck with her, two boys and one girl, as well as her teacher on occasion, as well as the two other jounin that the teams with her belonged to. The cloud genin was an uptight bitch, there was no other way to call her, and her teammate clearly didn't give enough of a crap to put up with her, which meant she was usually hounding Naruko about how improper her use of her ninja training was, how she so brazenly walked around, flashing her underwear to everyone and how she was shaming Ninja everywhere.
The other boy, a genin from the mist, was clearly uncomfortable around any of them. Naruko assumed he must have been weak and reeling from the sheer awesomeness that she was.
To her credit, Naruko did try to befriend all three of them as best as she could, but she would've needed more time to make headway, given how much the cloud kunoichi disliked her and how much the two boys ignored her.
Unfortunately, on the third day she realized that she wouldn't have the time to befriend them properly. Of course, something had to go wrong.
Naruko blinked, as she noticed that there was suddenly a commotion around her.
She noticed that something was going on when one of the adult waiters had suddenly made a grab for her, and she reacted the way kunoichi classes had taught her to react… She punched him in the face, making him stagger back, and then she grabbed his outstretched arm and threw him to the pool. Simple enough, to her. The classes said she had to stab him, too, but she had neglected to follow her teacher's recommendation to keep kunai hidden beneath the skirt of her maid outfit.
Mostly because she was moving around so energetically that everyone would've been able to see she had knives on her, which the clients usually didn't like to see. The man organizing the waiters and waitresses, as well as other servants, had told her it was better to go unarmed. After all, what enemy would get past the eight jounin on duty?
The genin around her hadn't been as lucky as she was with an incompetent attacker, and they were struggling with opponents that had actually tried to attack them. The guy who tried to grab Naruko probably thought she was an inoffensive little girl rather than the trained genin she was.
"Bummer. I was really enjoying my time here," she said, pouting, before leaping to the aid of the cloud kunoichi that had insulted her, landing with a kick to the back of her attacker's head, which knocked the man out.
The two then, in an odd moment of synchronization, jumped to the boys's aid and the four genin easily dispatched the attacking waiters.
Now, though, what was left was the rest of the staff, which had turned to them from the nobles they had been threatening upon seeing their comrades dispatched. Problem was, while before there had been one to one odds, now there were thrice as many staff as there were genin, and none of them were too confident on their chances…
…Until a dark skinned mountain of muscle popped out of nowhere. "I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee! I'm the Killer Bee, oh yeah, fools ya fools!"
Naruko blinked. "…The voice is feminine. But it looks like a man. I am… confused…"
"I'm a woman, ya fool! I'm just this cool!" Killer Bee stated, gesturing towards… her? body.
The blond girl was used to Konoha's kunoichi. Konoha kunoichi set a rather high bar in terms of traditionally feminine beauty. Most of them were only lightly muscled and rarely ever showed it, and they usually wore revealing clothing. Konoha had been the first Shinobi Village, and they'd had the most trouble parting from old customs thanks to old and traditionalist clans like the Hyuuga and Uchiha.
By contrast, Killer Bee, whose headband (on her right bicep) indicated was from Kumo, was extremely different. Instead of a lean and soft-looking physique, she sported obvious, bulging muscle. The dreadlocks that were her hair were nonindicative of gender, either. She was also heavily tanned on top of being naturally dark skinned, which meant she further threw Naruko for a loop, given that Konoha's standard skin tones looked positively pale compared to standard Kumo skin tones. Even Naruko's tan paled in comparison to this woman's.
Though the outfit was enough to tell Naruko that this woman was a jounin. The flak jacket that was similar to Konoha's was only lightly armored and clearly designed to look cool, rather than be functional. Meant to make jounin look impressive. Well, Killer Bee would've looked impressive and scary on a pink tutu, but still…
There were a lot of thoughts running through Naruko's head at the time. But she settled on rushing them all to the conclusion she thought logical.
All in all, Naruko thought she looked awesome.
"Bee-sama!" the Cloud Kunoichi cried, as the twelve people who had been readying to attack the genin suddenly turned to eliminate the bigger threat first.
They didn't last two seconds, though, since Bee just unsheathed a pair of swords that for some reason she had and tore through them like a devil possessed by a bigger devil. Naruko's eyes lit up. "So cooool!" she squealed, when Bee was done.
"Mess with the best, fall like the rest!" Bee spoke, striking a cool pose as she sheathed both swords in one fluid movement. "Anyway, I would stop to sing you a rap, but I've got a lot more goons to kill, and that's a bunch of crap. Anyway, kiddies, move along, don't be still!" she declared, falling into a strange sort of rhythm.
Cool or not when fighting, Naruko decided that Killer Bee just could not sing. At all. Naruko would be surprised if the woman could carry a tune in a bucket.
"Oi!" one of the nobles called. "You! Stay here and protect us!" a fat woman yelled.
Her much thinner daughter, who was clearly self conscious about her mother, sighed nervously. "Um… jounin-sama, do what needs to be done to stop this, please!" she spoke, bowing.
"Indeed! I will pay you if you stay around to protect us!" another person, a man this time, yelled.
"No can do! Gotta find my kids," the tall woman said. "Tsunako, your team is in your rooms. Meet up with them. Yugito will be there in a minute. You'll have to do the clean up with her."
Naruko sighed. "I've gotta find my team too! Satchan's probably doing something very dumb right now, without me to tell her she's doing something stupid!" Naruko suddenly cried, realizing she had left her teammates alone in a crisis like this. She feared Satsuki would do something stupid, like charging into a whole dozen of these guys. She lacked self preservation instincts like the ones that would prevent her from doing that.
Killer Bee blinked at the sudden declaration, but then she unsheathed a pair of swords and was instantly on guard as an explosion of leaves and smoke disturbed everyone.
"Naruko! You okay?" cried the voice of the grey haired man that had popped out of nowhere. "So you are," he said, upon seeing the corpses all around. "Anyway, I'm just a clone, but I should be enough in case something goes wrong. Let's go find your teammates, now!"
"Okay!" Naruko said, nodding.
"You ain't goin' nowhere, girly!" a rather foul looking man in a traditional pirate captain outfit spoke, dropping onto the scene from above and drawing a short sword from a pristine white sheath. "I'm gonna have you all to myself, and I don't care if I gotta kill y'all to get'er!" he finished, gesturing with his sword towards the gathered crowd. "Get'em, boys!"
Many of the traitor staff appeared on the upper deck, possibly the biggest concentration in the ship, and the fight was on. The genin found themselves quickly overwhelmed by the superior opponents, but by contrast Kakashi and Killer Bee were mowing them down at a very quick rate. That is, until the captain engaged Kakashi's clone.
The clone only managed to score a few nicks before a lucky shot caught it in the chest, dispelling it instantly.
Had Naruko been less busy watching that fight, she might have noticed when the thug she was fighting grabbed the front of her outfit and ripped it off her in an attempt to stop her from backing away from melee range. Fortunately for her, Naruko had taken to wearing a bikini under her outfit like the other maids, given that once the nobles went to sleep for the night she would be given free reign to play around the pool or swim in the ocean if she wanted to, it just saved time.
Killer Bee, meanwhile, wasn't having any trouble engaging in a rather intricate and ridiculously cool sword dance with her opponent, wielding three swords this time, one held in her armpit. Naruko didn't even know where she had gotten the third sword from.
The captain had clearly underestimated his enemy, and had paid for it by getting kicked in the middle of the chest, which sent him to the floor. Bee took the moment to gloat, turning her back on him as if insulting him, when the man threw the sword in his hand with surprising skill. The blade didn't make a long journey before Naruko's hand clamped on it, cutting herself on the edge. She grimaced at the feeling.
Shortly after that, the man was killed by one of the genin, given that he was weaponless and clearly never trained to fight with anything other than the sword he'd thrown at Bee in a last attempt at killing her.
"You shouldn't have done that, ya brat, I had it all under control, like a hat," the woman said, shaking her head.
Naruko blinked. "It's instinct," she said, apologetically. "Satchan and Sakura always turn around when they think their opponent is defeated! Oh no, they must be in danger!"
"Uhm… you might want to… put something on…" one of the boy genin stated, gesturing towards her chest.
Naruko blinked. "I'm surrounded by prudes! It's just a bikini!" she said, rolling her eyes. She really didn't understand why everyone seemed to have a problem with her being comfortable. It really was incredibly annoying. Though she did admit that not having pockets would be ridiculously annoying, she could live with it long enough.
"Besides, where would I get clothes right now? I need something cool…"
And then she looked at the man whose neck was broken. The coat was really cool, even if she didn't like the guy who'd been wearing it. The hat was cool too. And she still had the guy's sword in her hand. So might as well loot the sheath too.
Naruko was surprised when the uptight bitch from Kumo didn't comment on her looting a body.
Later, she learned that it was standard modus operandi in Kumo.
Killer Bee then went to fish out the guy Naruko had thrown into the pool earlier on. A quick jutsu had brought him back from unconsciousness with a shock. "Okay, I got questions and you got answers. I brought two black girls with me on this trip and they're the only two that share my skin color in this boat. So tell me, right now, where the other one is, or I might have to do something unpleasant to you," said Killer Bee, all traces of joviality gone, not even bothering to rap or anything of the sort.
Clearly, seriousness was necessary right now.
Naruko flinched every time the man screamed, and had to look away