Sanity and sense
When Ibiki found out exactly who in the administrative department had been compromised, he was going to make them suffer in direct proportion to the amount of stress this latest development was going to cause him. And it would be a lot, Ibiki wasn’t stupid, he could see the writing on the wall. Someway, somehow, someone had decided it was a good idea to say yes when that class asked to become jounin sensei, and not only that, but to let them take on teams at the same time. Bribery had been involved he was sure, he didn’t know how, since Luce “The Teamaker” had rendered the entire admin structure virtually incorruptible, but there was no way this situation had come up without some kind of deal going down. No-one in their right mind would subject the village to this otherwise. Although, people often forgot that Luce was also a member of that class, maybe this went all the way to the top.
He cursed again the fact that the Nidaime in his infinite wisdom had decided to make T&I responsible for psych evals and counselling. No-one was quite sure what had been going through their might Hokage’s head that day, although there was a certain amount of speculation. Some said he was drunk, others theorised that the head of T&I had just been the slowest to disappear when he was handing out that job. Ibiki personally suspected Tobirama sama had been operating on the principle that if you knew how to break it you could probably figure out how to fix it and vice versa. Which was all very well in theory, but in practice meant that you had a bunch of enthusiastic sadists who were fairly unbalanced in their own right, in charge of making people deal with their issues and feel better about life. Honestly it worked pretty well considering, but it really hadn’t been one of Tobirama sama’s finest decision making moments. There may have been some slight personality conflict, a small case of the blind leading the blind, some unfortunate minor paperwork mixups when the patients were mistaken for the “patients”. Suffice it to say that trying to fix his traumatised comrades was not Ibiki’s favourite part of the job, and he foresaw a sharp and unpleasant spike in the number of patients over the next few years.
He’d thought it was bad when Maito Gai was assigned that genin team he wanted and promptly succeeded in creating a mini me complete with green jumpsuit, he’d thought he’d fallen to new lows when Hatake “I can’t deal with emotions” Kakashi was assigned the most emotionally unstable genin team Ibiki had seen in years, complete with reminders of his past to torment himself with. This though, he wondered if this was what rock bottom felt like. The thought of any of those six on their own with a team of impressionable genin to mould into their minions was horrifying enough, but all of them at once… never mind the genin, the genin were probably a write off at this point, what would it do to any innocent bystanders.
It was bad enough dealing with Lal “The centipede demon” Mirch’s traumatised Anbu trainees. After all, people expected Anbu agents to be a little… off, and as long as she was busy tormenting baby Anbu she was contained away from the general populace. Giving that woman a genin team was tantamount to unleashing her on the village as a whole and the village was not ready. Add in the horrifying escalation that would result from those six trying to show each other up, and he wondered just how much of the village would be left standing. According to his sources there were bets involved.
Worse, the whole affair had given Anko ideas, she wanted a team of minions of her own and at the rate things were going he had a horrible sinking feeling she was going to get one. He’d spent the last several years trying to steer her away from the idea. It looked like his luck had run out. He foresaw genin training trips to the forest of death in the future, he foresaw kids coming out with giant tigers and man eating leeches as pets, he foresaw Anko giving the Talk, complete with diagrams. Maybe he should just consider the village’s collective sanity acceptable losses. After all, some of their best ninja seemed to function perfectly well without any, maybe the whole sanity thing was overrated.
Yes, maybe that was the answer. If you can’t beat them join them. As long as everyone was equally crazy, no-one should notice the difference. He ignored the little voice in his head that said it probably didn’t work like that. He was in charge of psych evals, if he said everything was fine, everything was fucking fine. Besides, if anyone had really cared about sanity they’d have stopped this from happening.
And it might be fun to raise his own team of tiny little sadists. Children had a talent for viciousness that most adults just seemed to have lost somewhere along the way. It would be interesting to see if he could encourage them to hone that instinct. If civilian horror films were anything to go by small smiling children in dark rooms were one of the scariest things there was. He grinned a little at the thought of introducing his hypothetical genin to some of his more stubborn cases. It wasn’t a nice grin.
It was just a shame really that he’d missed out on this graduating class, say what you like about those guys but they knew how to spot talent. There was something about that class, a level of co-ordination and purpose that most genin just lacked. It might have been fun teaching that little Yamanaka Hana how to best terrify enemy ninja into giving up all their secrets with just a meaningful glare. Oh well Lal Mirch had got there first, and he had absolute confidence in her ability to make those kids terrifying in any way they chose. He’d just have to keep an eye out for other promising students.