Prologue
I've always had this fascination for ninja. Why, you ask? Well, it started back when I was five or six, watching late night cartoons. The station happened to be airing an anime about a ninja-girl fighting some seriously scary demons. She was fast, strong, and beautiful… pretty much everything I wanted to be back then. Now, before you come to any conclusions, I should tell you that I'm male and perfectly happy with my current sexual orientation (straight in case you were still wondering).
Anyways, about the anime I was watching. The fact is that, to this day, I still don't know what it was called. All I remember was that right before the good part, where the monster attacked the bouncy-chested and attractive ninja-girl with its many tentacles, Mom had turned off the TV and started screaming at me for watching grown-up cartoons. I never understood the difference between grown-up and kid cartoons back then.
In any case, that was how it started. From then on, I wanted to be a ninja, like that girl. I wanted to run around really fast, throwing shuriken and slicing up demons with a sword. I wanted to explode into smoke and disappear into the shadows while stealthily stalking my targets. And I also wanted breasts. Not my own pair, mind you, but I… well… you probably understand.
So I bet you'll also understand my disappointment when I grew up and wised up enough to finally realize that my dream of becoming a ninja was impossible. I was in junior high when I figured it out. Sure, ninja might have been real at some point in history. But now they're just as fictional as the aliens, time-travelers, ghosts, monsters, evil organizations, and espers that I also believed existed when I was a kid. The whole thing was a depressing revelation really, because those were the only interesting things in my life at the time. It felt like a part of me died back then; a complete disappointment, just like the rest of my boring prepubescent life. So much for having an awesome adventurous lifestyle like those boys in shonen manga.
In the end, once junior high was up, I had completely grown out of my fantasy world. I'll admit that a small part of me still dreamed that things like ninja could really exist in today's world. But there was never really any proof of anything out of the ordinary. Not even a tiny hint. In fact, my entire senior year of junior high passed by without notice. I was practically normal incarnate.
So with this overwhelming proof of nothing, I finally gave in to the pedestrian thoughts in my mind and accepted my life as a carefree, normal, senior high student. That is until I suddenly found myself enrolled to some academy at some place called Konoha.