She nods.  "I'm gonna take some time and think it over.  But...I do think I'm gonna make that deal.  If I'm gonna prove to him that ninjas aren't entirely incapable of good...I'm gonna need it.  'cause I don't really think a lot of people will like that plan."

"Sensible, always a good idea to think over big decisions even when you think you know the answer. Good luck, kid."

He then ruffles Naruto's hair for a moment, and disappears in a puff of smoke.

...Well, that sure did happen.

What now?

...Writing up an agreement, maybe?

That seems...reasonable.

How do bigger nin usually handle stuff like that?  She'll go...look that up real quick.  The library doesn't lie to her.

...Wow, legal stuff is complicated!

So is medi-nin stuff but that's something she was expecting.

Agreement (Draft) between Kyuubi-no-Kitsune and Uzumaki Naruto

Statement of Purpose: Kyuubi-no-Kitsune desires to be able to experience the world.  Uzumaki Naruto desires the assistance of Kyuubi-no-Kitsune in healing wounds.  The Kyuubi-no-Kitsune has previously expressed a desire to trade access to one of Uzumaki Naruto's senses for the said assistance in healing; Uzumaki Naruto has certain privacy concerns but is amenable to the concept in principle.

Therefore, Uzumaki Naruto proposes the following:

1) Let the terms 'day', 'hour', 'minute', 'second', and 'time' mean their natural language equivalents,

2) Let the terms 'use-day', 'use-hour', 'use-minute', 'use-second', and 'use-time' mean '(exercise of) the right to access one of Uzumaki Naruto's senses for an equivalent period of time',

3) Let 'sense' refer to the following senses, as single units:

  a. Sight,

  b. Hearing,

  c. Smell and Taste,

  d. Touch, Proprioception, and Interoception,

4) Let 'healing' mean 'activities necessary for the care and treatment of wounds, illnesses, maladies, or other conditions detrimental to health, including but not limited to poison and starvation',

5) Let the agreement be as follows:

  a. The Kyuubi-no-Kitsune will grant access to their chakra, and as necessary assist in shaping chakra, to enable Uzumaki Naruto to augment their healing,

  b. Uzumaki Naruto will grant access to their senses to the Kyuubi-no-Kitsune, under the following rules:

    i) Use-time will accrue at a one to one ratio with the passage of time,

    ii) Use-time may be expended to access one sense at a one to one ratio of use-time expended to time spent with access to that sense, and may be expended for multiple senses at a time,

    iii) Should space-time jutsu or perceptual distortion sufficiently obscure the passage of sidereal time as to render the accrual of use-time uncertain, use-time shall accrue according to the passage of time as perceived or measured by best efforts, but upon return to an environment or state in which the passage of time is not affected by said jutsu or distortion, any reserved use-time shall be capped to the amount of sidereal time passed plus twenty-four hours,

    iv.) Uzumaki Naruto reserves the right to bar access to the sense of sight for any duration, and to all senses for no more than an hour per day without additional negotiation.

  c. Uzumaki Naruto may grant exceptions to the above rules at their discretion, including but not limited to unilateral grant of use-time or access to senses without expenditure of use-time.

  d. Kyuubi-no-Kitsune may grant access to their chakra for purposes not outlined above at their discretion.

  e. Kyuubi-no-Kitsune and Uzumaki Naruto may make further agreements trading in use-time.

  f. Uzumaki Naruto may not force the expenditure of use-time by any means.

  g. Uzumaki Naruto may not force Kyuubi-no-Kitsune to access their senses, save as is necessary to perform healing or determine whether healing is necessary.

...There, that should do it.  Now how can she show it to...

...Well, that would be simple.

She attempts to pull the Kyuubi's attention to what she's looking at - the agreement she has in mind.

Unfortunately, he can't see through her eyes without an agreement or being significantly more loose than he already is; it's not that he's completely blind to what's going on around her, but what he experiences doesn't really count as vision, particularly for the purposes of reading text. No matter how she tugs on him, that doesn't change, but anchored as he is if she keeps tugging from the right angle it feels almost like she's pulling herself towards him, like she does when she goes to visit his cage.

...Sure.  She can work with that.

Then once again she will find herself in front of an enormous cage.

"What is it this time? More visitors to bother me with?"

"I, uh, no, and I'm sorry about the surprise last time, and the bothering too really...Um, I was thinking about that offer you made, and I thought it was a good idea but I wanted to make sure I could keep you from - peeking in the bath or something - so I wanted to have some rules and I wanted to make sure we could be on the same page about them and I wanted them to be fair and hopefully ar-bi-tra-ble, so I started looking at how the older people do it, and uh, contracts are complicated?  -- oh no I forgot to do a penalty clause!  For me, not for you, you've got enough problems.  Umm I'll be right back -"

She vanishes from the Kyuubi's cell, and inserts a subclause after c.

    i.) In the event that no negotiation can successfully occur, after the first hour, there shall be an accrual of use-time equal to three times the time spent in breach.  In a situation as described by section 5.b.iii (Space-time jutsu and perceptual distortions), such penalty use-time accrues separately, up to an amount equal to three times the cap calculated in that section.

And then she's back.

"There!  Uh.  Hm.  Now that I'm thinking about some of this I'm worried about, like, possession and stuff, and how that might interact with...like, any of this.  Or bloodline thieves, like, I heard the Hyuuga do some weird sealing thing to 'branch family' members so nobody can steal their eyes, and even if we manage to actually successfully disguise me as somebody who doesn't have a fox demon sealed inside her, someday, that might go badly, if they try to figure out what's going on and go try taking 'the part of me that regenerates' for transplanting or...something...  I kind of got sidetracked by the introductory medi-nin textbooks.  ...Where's a seal master when you need him?  I gotta know if you're, stuck to my body or stuck to my soul.  Because this space is really weird with how I feel like I'm different in it, but Jiraiya got in with physical access to me, and I didn't see him collapse, like I heard the Yamanakas do if they do deep dives or whatever with their special mind-viewing thingy, and you don't have an external physical form probably, but there was something about my mom's pregnancy being bad for the last seal and I dunno if that's different with this one?

"...Oh no..."

She seems to be suddenly - grieving?

"Um, Kyuubi-san, is there anything we could do to make being stuck in here more comfortable than...uh, being stuck in a cage?  Like, I can't...  You've been in something like this for so long that...

"Okay I'm not actually sure what I can and can't do in here, or outside, but...I could maybe try and make it not so...

"I don't think we treat enemy nin this bad!  You're just, stuck in a cage in the dark forever!  And it's all metal-y!  Even the torturer cells have gotta have, like, cots and stuff!  Not that that makes them any less, uh...prison cells where you put people you're planning on torturing.  I really don't get why people do that.  It seems...kinda counterproductive.  'cause I know if somebody was threatening me with," she carefully enunciates, "grievous bodily harm, or, even worse, actually hurting me, I'd either want to stab them really hard and therefore not give them anything whatsoever, or just focus on telling them what they want to hear so they'll stop rather than bothering to tell them particularly true things.  It's - I've used the second strategy before, let's put it that way.  I haven't been tortured though.  I think.  I dunno why I thought you might want to know that.  Just...Sometimes people say stupid stuff and the easiest way to get them to shut up is to fake --"

She sighs.

"Konoha isn't very nice when you start looking closer.  It's just nicer than average.  But wrecking Konoha means that the even meaner villages will do more awful things.  I'd like to help you make ninja stop being awful to people, you know?  It's just that...The plan of trying to kill them all is a stupid plan.  Because it won't work.  There's too many of them to take on alone, or even with - your brothers and sisters?  The other Tailed Beasts.  Because even nine of you can't really...

"The hidden villages would just scatter some more - numerous enough that you couldn't chase all of them, powerful enough they'd still pose a threat.  That's how ninja work, really.  Or uh.  The tactics books say that, at least.  Not sure how much the idea works out in practice with all the big stompy household names being big and stompy and also pretty visible.  ...Like you, actually.  Huh.  But like.  Seriously, you can't burn away the line of thought that lead us to Hidden Villages by making ninja need to hide better - that would just...

"Make the survivors more desperate.  More willing to do horrible things, to survive.  'Cause being a horrible thing unto others usually means they'll do horrible things to you and anyone they think might support you, if they think it'll make you stop.  I think.  I'm kinda guessing, and that wasn't quite what I wanted to say.  But ninja don't give up that easy and surely you must know that.  You weren't always sealed like this.  ...And there's already evidence that your plan wouldn't work: missing-nin.  Sneaky ninja that aren't even on a village's leash, even if the Hidden Villages themselves also suck.  How are you proposing to stop that with a destructive rampage?"

"Idiot child, this prison you're seeing is a metaphor, a representation of the seal's restraints upon me. There isn't actually metal grafted to the boundary of your soul. As for your concerns... there isn't any ninja, alive or dead, that can hide from me. For you the villages seem like a permanent fixture, but I was there long before Konoha came about and I'll be there long after they're gone and forgotten - whether by my hands or their own."

"...Well duh.  It still looks like it's more uncomfortable than necessary, though.  And my concern with your plan isn't that you couldn't find one village.  It's that no matter how good you are at finding villages, you can't wreck all of them at once, and you'd need to.  Otherwise you'll never be able to catch all of them, because they'll all scatter if it looks like that's the best plan to survive."

There's a deep rumbling sound almost beyond hearing, like the suggestion of a mocking laugh on an unimaginable scale.

"The rats may flee from me all they wish, but ninja as fast as your fourth are the exception, and I won't make the mistake of letting any Uchiha slip away again. That cursed line will end for good, and everyone else will simply die tired. There is a reason that jinchūriki like you are hailed as strategic assets by your silly villages despite how little of our power you have access to."

"...Why're they cursed?"

"They brought it upon themselves."

"...But how?"

There's a deep rumbling noise of annoyance, and the fox's tails begin to gyrate behind them as Naruto learns what it's like to be subject to the glare of an entity with eyes larger than her entire body. Suddenly it's very clear that for all their evident strength, these bars are the only thing between her and an entity as powerful as her entire village, and that its claims of annoyance might not have been entirely bluster. Either by due to some component of the seal or action of the fox, she can't feel the weight of its presence, but there's nonetheless a feeling buzzing in the back of her teeth; almost like the water line receding before a wave.

"...I know it's obvious to you, Kyūbi-sama.  There's a lot of things that are.  But it's really not obvious to me - like the thing with Jiraiya, I still don't know what natural energy is besides 'probably not chakra' - and if you're saying things like 'one of the biggest clans in Konoha is cursed' - I want to take that seriously, but even though I think I actually do trust you, despite the, uh, reasons I shouldn't - I need more information, on - who and how and why, and all the other stuff like that - to actually act on what you're saying is true."

"And I am not just some hapless oracle to answer every question about Indra's folly that strikes your pitiful mind for the joy of your learning. You may be my jailer, for now, but don't make the mistake of overestimating yourself."

"...Of course not, Kyūbi-sama.  I'm sorry for letting my questions run away with me.  I will do better to restrain them in the future."

She seems...a little bit sad, but the shutdown feels like a familiar pain.  One she's used to.  One that she doesn't really notice anymore.  One that positively has a script for how it goes.

(She is just a child.  That she has apparently learned all the politenesses necessary to deliver a formal apology for having too many questions at her age and rendered it rote is...probably bad.)

She also files that little nugget of information about 'Indra' - "responsible for Uchiha being cursed?  It was described as a folly" - that the Kyūbi let slip away in her brain for later.

"I did come here for a reason, and I shouldn't forget it - I've written up a proper contract for what you offered me a little while ago, and I want to let you take a look at it.  And if it's good, we can do it, and if it's bad, we can probably work something out?  I know I'm not supposed to tell you this, it's, like, bad business practice, but I want to give you a chance to see the world.  I'd get really pissed off about being locked up in a cage that doesn't even have any windows too, and I don't wanna hurt people like that.  Not if there's something I can do about it.  And I can do something, so I wanna do something."

...Does she...have that lever?  Surely she must.

"...Iiiii'm just going to figure out how to actually do this real quick.  Eheh."

It takes a bit of doing; what you have with you in a mindscape has a lot more to do with your perceptions than what you look like outside, and Naruto does not have an especially strong self conception of being 'a person who carries this contract with me.' Still, she does remember physically carrying it, which helps. The first few tries that successfully manage a scroll are covered in gibberish rather than words, but if she keeps at it sooner or later she'll find herself with her writing in her hands.

"...Rrright.  There we go.  Uh, I don't know if you can read, actually, but - if you can, here's the agreement I was hoping you'd agree to?  For sharing my senses in exchange for help with healing."

What in the seven realms? Does she think this is a court of law, to slip something past him to her advantage if she decides to word things in a needlessly confusing manner to obfuscate her goals? If so, more fool she; such a trick with the exact letter of the agreement might suffice with a minor spirit, but while the seal will certainly prevent him from taking anything he's offered the only bound to hold up his own end is his pride. He scans over it anyway, in case her purpose becomes clear, but when nothing seems evident he snorts.

"Still spending ten words to do the work of one, I see. How typical of mortals; for creatures with so little time, you certainly have the strangest priorities. Very well; the bargain is struck."

...Well.  Yes, actually, she did think that she could do something like that and be a nigh-inexhaustible medic-nin.  But also she wanted to make the agreement be, feel - sufficiently real to herself, the Kyuubi, and everyone else.

Anyway.  Now she needs to hold up her end.  Seal, do the thing?  Pretty please?

"I am kind of trying to demonstrate to others that you're a person.  Forces of pure destruction don't do contracts."

"You underestimate your kind. They will believe whatever is convenient for them to believe, as they always do."

It's not as though believing him both so intelligent a conservationist to not be permitted speech and a mindless beast produced the slightest cognitive dissonance, nor any of the other prejudices humans loved to cling to in the face of all evidence. When the deal goes through, however, he's distracted from his thoughts by the sensation. It's not freedom, not more than the barest imitation thereof, but between the various seals used to bind him and the hateful eyes he's had precious little of the stuff recently, and even this pale reflection is a relief.

"...I can't say that you're wrong.  They treat me like I'm one of Sand's nin-puppets rather than a person, half the time, and I'm not sure what's worse.  But the thing is, we can change what's convenient for them to believe.  And I'm gonna darn well try when I get bigger.  'm trying now, but like...I'm a kid so it's easy to say I'm wrong because they think I don't know anything.  Which is dumb when I spend most of my time in the library, but I haven't found anything obvious to rub their faces in yet.  If the thing about Danzo-sama turns out, though...  Maybe we'll start getting somewhere."

He hasn't had any optimism about humans in almost a millennium, but he's made his point on that score several times over. As for how she spends her free time... well, part of him wishes she would spend more of it in forests now that he has some access to her senses, but the ones they have in Konoha make a mockery of the idea of wilderness and frankly the reminder of what he can't have might make it more painful anyway. He's certainly not going to stoop to asking for it.

"I suppose there are worse hobbies you could have."

"...Anyway.  Uh.  Anything you want to look at, if I have the chance?  If not, I guess I'll go...do whatever I would otherwise have been doing."