A Lewd New World

Chapter 15. A Little Freak Out

I do not own this story. It originally belongs to EvilFuzzy9 which was republished by Fpsroxas.

Naruto Shippuden belongs to Masashi Kishimoto

(^)(^)(^)(^)(^)

Preparing the specialty of Ichiraku Ramen was a tricky thing. Because ramen tended to be served hot enough to burn most people, it took very special conditioning for the waitresses to be able to handle to procedure. Endurance to high temperatures had to be built up gradually, but most wait-staff would not stay on at the average restaurant long enough to develop that kind of ability.

It was, in all honesty, a harsh, grueling process that weeded out all but the best and the most fit among Ichiraku's waitresses. Out of the fifty or sixty waitresses who worked full time at the restaurant, only a handful were certified to do this, and there were only a few more if you counted the hundred-plus part time employees. Those of the waitresses who were now or at one time had been kunoichi often likened the selection process to the chuunin exams – intensely competitive, and with a very high chance of hospitalization.

And indeed, being able to endure the near-boiling temperatures of the ramen was very much an ability that you'd be more likely to find in a kunoichi than a random civilian. Ayame was one of the few non-shinobi employees certified to act as a human ramen topping, and that could mostly be attributed to training for it from a young age.

She was one of the most popular items on the menu, too, thanks to her part time job at the Playful Fox. Her work as a stripper was in no small way a form of advertising for herself at Ichiraku, and this regular publicity did much to run her price sky high. Because a waitress could only be in one human ramen at a time, and Ichiraku's was a very popular restaurant, ordering one was often done more like an auction than anything else – the highest bidder would get to have the waitress in her ramen, and everyone else would either have to try and get someone else or settle for regular ramen.

Some critics of the restaurant considered this a degrading and objectifying process, but most of the waitresses who did it (who were usually among the biggest proponents of this) would simply point to the extraordinarily high commission they got. Even the least demanded ones would earn as much as twenty-five percent of the final bid plus any gratuity, and the ones at the top of the boards were usually sitting pretty with as much as sixty percent of the final price, which was usually several times the stated asking price.

Because of how specialized a job this was, and how much training it took for someone to be able to handle the heat, Ichiraku rarely took custom requests without having participants sign thorough liability waivers which placed any and all responsibility for possible resultant injury squarely on the heads of the customers.

Even Tenten, using a shadow clone, while accompanying Naruto, had to sign such a waiver.

It was just company policy. The only reason Naruto himself didn't need to fill out such a form was because he had himself been fully certified for this – he actually volunteered for free at the restaurant just to show his support, and when he did the bidding would reach absolute fever pitch. Such events were usually announced weeks in advance, with plenty of publicity throughout the Land of Fire and its neighboring countries, and usually the proceeds went either to charity, the village, or once in a blue moon even Ichiraku Ramen itself.

The last person to order a bowl of Naruto ramen had been the daimyo of the Land of Spring (formerly yuki no kuni), and the final bid had been equal to the price of around thirty S-rank missions. The cause then had been to find a cure for a very rare kind of degenerative disease peculiar to pure-blooded members of the Kaguya clan.