A Scottishverse (Drabble)

He was no one. Just of many nameless Konoha shinobi recruited by the god of their world for some vital task. There were a hundred of them, the force composed of shinobi recruited from all ranks, reassured that this was a mission of the highest priority.

They stood together as one. The air here was strange, as was the architecture. Whatever world that Daiki had guided them to was an unfamiliar one. He had stood ahead of them, grinning, Tenten and Anko at his side, and torn a rift between worlds with some divine twist of chakra.

Time had stood still. Space bent, diffracting light into a thousand different angles and warping their own flesh. He had thought to scream then, but it was over as soon as it began.

At the end, there was no great flash of light or rush of wind. A thousand shinobi (plus Daiki and his… companions?) stood arrayed in what he dimly recognized as a neighborhood, albeit an empty one. The sky was grey and the air was frigid, tinged with the thick mire of humidity. The rain was coming.

“Finally!” Daiki stretched his arms to wrap around Tenten and Anko, cackling madly as his scheme came together. “We actually made it. Good shit, boys and girls.” Of course, they weren’t the only ones here.

Different groups appeared from thin air. Some were small, made up of only a single confused teenager with knuckle dusters, or composed of another man surrounded by various women. He caught sight of a grinning teenager with a row of red-and-white balls on his belt and a dark-haired girl beside him, alongside a… was that a fucking dragon?

All the men who led these groups - and there was a certain peculiar similarity between them all, more in the way that they carried themselves than their physical appearance, that led him to think they might all be related somehow - trained their eyes on the giant orange beast and its flame-tipped tail hungrily, as though they might devour the enormous monster whole.

More and more flickered into existence: a man with a deck of cards, another with some kind of weird stick who was accompanied by a girl with frizzy brown hair and two others, a massive guy with an orange gi, biceps the size of his head, and wild black hair, another of the new arrivals converted into a giant crocodile man… all the shinobi began to share confused looks.

Only a few rivaled the vast shinobi army dispatched by Konoha, but he held the sneaking suspicion that not all of them needed it.

The air was empty of chakra, but power had already begun to radiate from all the men leading their separate groups. A dozen more manifested and the neighborhood was essentially choked with people, strangled by the vast number of incomers flooding in by the second. Soon he could barely make head or tails of the situation - as a shinobi, such a crowd gnawed at his instincts and left him eager to escape. Who knew who might slip a kunai between his ribs while he gawked stupidly at the army that had begun to come together?

Some of the men came together and spoke in hushed whispers. Many seemed suspicious at first, but it only took a few minutes before they were laughing and (in the case of several) openly brawling with all manner of supernatural powers. One of them was accompanied by a human ray of sunshine with brown hair and kind grey eyes who happily cheered her particular incarnation on as he punched great gouts of fire at the great orange dragon. A dozen of them had come around to marvel at the creature as it dashed across the grey sky and spat billowing streams of flame at its foe.

All in all, it was complete chaos. Despite his initial reservations about following Daiki into whatever strange realm he quested for, he found himself adjusting to the bizarre reality that they’d invaded.

“It’s about fucking time you guys showed up. Welcome to Scotland, bitches!”

Those simple words put a stop to everything. The neighborhood they’d hijacked seemed to freeze. Men, women, giant orange dragons, and everything in between turned to stare at the man who’d just shattered the friendly brawls with ease.

A thousand eyes landed upon the burly man who strode . He stared back fearlessly, although most of his attention seemed to be consumed by the enormous orange dragon… he thought that he’d heard someone call it a ‘Charred Lizard’ or something like that? Weird name for a dragon, but who was he to judge?

“It’s Jord… it’s really him! He’s real!” That and a hundred other muttered proclamations from the small army of men filled the air like the buzz of flies. The crowd was restless. A tension filled them as they hung onto the man’s every word like children watching their father.

He soaked up the attention for a moment before waving it all aside. “Anyone wondering why I called you here?”

A few hands shot up.

“Good. First things first. Charizard. Get over here. You’re mine now.”

The Charizard (that sounded much better than what he’d originally thought it was called) obediently flew over to sit by his side, cowed like a dog.

Its original master leaned over to the brown-haired girl beside him (Hilda, he thought) and whispered into her ear. “I knew he was going to do that. That’s just a decoy Charizard. Real one’s right here,” he tapped one of the strange spheres bolted to his belt.

The main man stole the show once again.

“See, I didn’t make you minions to just sit around, kick ass, and bang chicks. I’m a kind and generous god, but not that kind. I didn’t come up with you for fun. I made it to make fat stacks… and more importantly, for this!”

He pointed at a rather shitty house with peeling paint, faded bricks with all sorts of inventive interpretations of the word ‘genitalia’ painted on, and a general sense of disappointment that hung about it like a miasma of failure. Its lawn was overgrown, the metal cart in its paved concrete driveway was a bucket of rust, and most of the windows were cracked and broken to allow the cold and wet Scotland air through. Black mold caked its exterior, and suspiciously brown streaks clumped to the walls like mud… although he had the sneaking suspicion that it was something much worse.

It even smelled terrible! He nearly gagged as a musty scent of failed dreams and Mountain Dew (he didn’t know what on earth that was, but something deep inside of him seemed to think it was an accurate description)

To be honest, he had no clue who actually lived there. All he knew was that anyone who made their home in such a place must be the lowest of the low, a filthy degenerate with fingers stained with Cheeto dust and WAY too much time on his hands. He could only imagine a wretched little goblin that really needed to get a life and expose itself to the sun after far too many years of living a reclusive life in the basement.

The universe had failed this individual, but he suspected the person who lived here was dreadful enough that it became a sort of chicken and the egg situation.

“See, not everyone’s as handsome, charming, and creative as me - us.” Jord flexed his bicep and waggled his eyebrows at the crowd to cheers. “Some people aren’t even good enough to be minions. Not everyone appreciates our talents!”

Jord jabbed his thumb at the crumbling facade of the house. “One of them lives here, some prick that won’t shut the fuck up and leave me alone. You won’t believe the shit he spews. He’s my own personal stalker, kind of the opposite of a guardian Angel. Little did he know that he was messing with an interdimensional creative god!”

“I’ve given all of you awesome lives. You owe it all to me, yeah?” He laid a hand on Charizard’s neck. It leaned happily into his touch and its tail flame blazed hotter and brighter until it burned away the Scottish chill. “I’ve incarnated myself again and again in a thousand different worlds for this moment. Charizard, Flamethrower!”

The giant orange beast obediently turned to the miserable excuse of a house and did it a favor by spitting a great stream of flame to consume it. A strange, misshapen blob of a creature (it took several minutes for him to realize that it was human, if barely) came scurrying out, shrieking, and scooted away across the road, unable to support its own great mass with its flabby muscles. Eventually it gave up on scooting, and instead rolled away to safety away from Jord’s mighty interdimensional army.

Jord cackled. “Burn! Burn!” He hopped onto Charizard’s back (carefully avoiding its tail flame) and grasped its neck as the great dragon took off in a blur. “First anonymous internet stalkers, and then the world! Let’s go, minions. Buckingham Palace needs a renovation!”

And with that, the mighty Jord took off to go conquer the world with his interdimensional hordes, fund a Charizard cloning/breeding program with all the loot he plundered, and make a certain weirdo internet stalker's life a living hell.

It was a good 2023.

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This was a gift written for me for Christmas by a good friend and pretty prolific fanfic writer himself that I bet most of you know. Though he asked me to leave his name out of it.