Author's Note: I've decided to take Hektols up on the Stolen Hero challenge that I noticed on his profile. Now here's the story...

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You see a blond boy of about twelve years of age in bright orange dangling from a cliff by a rope. The boy is busy painting graffiti onto the side of said cliff. Ah, you say to yourself, it is Naruto on the day he painted the Hokage monument. The scene pulls back, and your brain breaks, for despite the fact that it is indeed Uzumaki Naruto who was doing the painting, the setting is completely wrong. For one, the friendly, brightly painted buildings of Konoha are nowhere in sight. Nor are the multitude of trees that live in and around the village. Instead, young Naruto is painting on a cliff between two narrow waterfalls in a desolate mountain range. As the scene pulls back even further, you realize that behind the boy is a city of stone towers that look as if they had been carved from the natural rock formations that jut up from the surrounding landscape. Many of these towers rest on cliffs, and are connected to each-other by a network of bridges. The tallest of these is a massive structure with a conical roof.

The entire effect of the city and its surroundings is a rather ominous and foreboding one.

It is at that point that you realize that rather than the familiar tracksuit you've come to know and possibly love, Naruto is wearing something that more closely resembles an orange Karate gi which is tied closed with a black belt. That, and the fact that Naruto's hair is longer and pulled back into a low spiky ponytail rather than in its usual short mess.

It is at this point that you may ask "What is this, and where are we?".

The answer to these questions my friend is that this is an Alternate Universe, and we are standing just outside of the hidden village of Iwagakure which rests in the land of Earth. Thinking about exactly where outside of Iwa we are standing to get this spectacular view would best be avoided, as it probably is best best to ignore the fact that there is several hundred feet of air between us and the nearest piece of solid ground at this point.

If you're ignoring the lack of ground in your surprise at finding Naruto in Iwa when he should be several hundred miles away painting the Hokage Monument in Konoha right about now, the next question you may ask is "How did this come to be?".

That my friend is a long story, a bit over thirteen years long if you must know. I will however give you the short version which contains all of the important highlights.

Shortly before Obito died on the infamous mission to the Kannabi Bridge which had turned the tide of the Third Shinobi War in Konoha's favor, he had managed to accidentally spill the beans on the marriage that Namikaze Minato and Uzumaki Kushina were trying to keep quiet about so neither would be used as leverage against the other, as they both had powerful enemies. With the cat out of the bag, it was obvious to the entire village who the father was when it was noticed that Kushina was pregnant, and the entire village anticipated the birth of the Yondaime Hokage's son much as they had anticipated the birth of the Sandaime's son fifteen years earlier.

On the evening of October 10, Uzumaki Kushina was almost secretly snuck out of Konoha, and you pretty much know what happened at that point as it was the same in the universe we follow in Manga and Anime except for the fact that someone noticed Kushina pausing to talk to Uchiha Mikoto.

It is what happened afterward that was so different. With the village knowing who Naruto's parents were, most of them hailed the boy as a hero as was his father's wish. A small minority of the villagers, mainly those who had lost loved ones in the Kyuubi attack, hated the boy, but the rest of the villagers who didn't hail the boy as a hero were indifferent to his existence and more concerned with rebuilding the village and getting their lives back on track.

Every clan head clamored to adopt the child whose mere existence had saved the village. Every clan head save Uchiha Fugaku that was. Fugaku, who had known what Naruto's mother was despite the fact that it was supposed to be a secret, called for the boy's execution out of fear of what would happen if someone broke the seal that kept the Kyuubi contained again. It was a rather logical fear, since he didn't exactly know what had caused Kushina's seal to break, and, in his view, if they found someone else to seal the Kyuubi in after it was freed, there was good odds that whatever party released the Kyuubi the last time would just do so again and again until they ran out of either village or hosts for the Kyuubi.

Fugaku's call for the boy's execution increased the villagers' suspicions of the Uchiha clan's involvement in the Kyuubi attack, especially when his call for execution of the Yondaime's son was coupled with an eyewitness account of Uzumaki Kushina speaking with his wife shortly before she departed the village for the last time. Things naturally got worse for the Uchiha clan, much worse, especially after what came next.

Sensing a golden opportunity, a spy from Iwagakure who had initially been sent in on a long-term assignment at the end of the Third Shinobi World War spirited Naruto away as he was being brought to his new home in the Nara clan compound and faked his death, killing the guards who were bringing the child to his future home under the cover of darkness as there had been threats made against the infant, leaving no witnesses.

The village was shocked and horrified at the senseless "murder" of the Yondaime's son, and public opinion turned against those who had been against Naruto. Suspicion immediately fell on the Uchiha clan, but since there had been no proof of their involvement in the heinous act, none of them had been arrested for the crime. That didn't stop the village from finding them guilty of both siccing the Kyuubi on the village and murdering the child who had stopped the Kyuubi's rampage and held it back within himself in the court of public opinion, and sentencing them to a very thorough shunning.

While the Uchiha clan were becoming the village pariahs, Naruto was carried to his new home in Iwa. The Tsuchikage was delighted to have the opportunity to raise the son of the infamous Yellow Flash as a loyal Iwa ninja, and had richly rewarded the operative who had brought him.

As the Sandaime Tsuchikage Onoki was making arrangements for the education and indoctrination of the small infant who retained the name Naruto because the Tsuchikage thought it was cute, but hadn't been given a family name, one of the Yondaime's many enemies who had lost three brothers on the battlefield spread the origins of the infant that the Tsuchikage had just taken in to the entire village. Seeing that this could be a problem, especially amongst the generation that Naruto would be growing up to fight alongside, the Tsuchikage made a law that forbade the villagers from revealing Naruto's origins to anyone, including Naruto, on pain of death.

Naruto spent the next twelve years growing up almost completely alone. He did have the Sandaime Tsuchikage who viewed him as an extra grandchild, and Kurotsuchi the Tsuchikage's granddaughter who was fond of him, and Deidara who tolerated his presence, and Han who liked him well enough since they shared similar burdens, and Roshi before he left on a trip around the world, but for the most part, they had their own lives as well and were quite often too busy to spend time with him. This had led to Naruto acting out to get attention from the village as a whole. Positive, negative, at that point, it didn't really matter to him as long as someone noticed him. Most often this attention-seeking behavior was displayed in a series of highly creative pranks. Other times, he would tell all and sundry that he'd become the Tsuchikage when the "Old Man" was finally ready to give up the hat.

Now that the stage is set, I shall put up the invisible fourth wall which we shall hide behind and observe...