Akiyama Kyo stood in the middle of his usual training ground, covered in a sheen of sweat, and face scrunched up in concentration. He had made jonin four months ago, and he had finally been permitted to learn the b-rank jutsu. With his eyes shut tight, he raised his hands in the hand seal…
When he heard the pop of the jutsu's activation, he opened to eyes to see if he managed to make it work this time… and could not see a clone. Damn, he thought, this is the fiftieth time it hasn't worked in the three hours I have been practising… Will I ever get it right?
And with that thought, Kyo turned around to go take a break outside the training ground… and saw probably the strangest thing he had ever seen in his twenty-one years. His shadow, which was usually flat against whatever surface he had managed to be standing in front, was now rising up into different sized cones.
Kyo could only stand there, wide-eyed and shocked, for a good ten minutes or so. He did eventually realise that the jutsu was still pulling on his chakra, so he cut it off, and his shadow returned to normal.
If anyone were to look at him now, they would just see him with his eyes pointing at the ground, unfocused and rapidly blinking. He was really just trying to get over the strangeness of what had just happened. He understood what he had done wrong, and he probably could do it against, but it was quite possibly the most useless variation of a jutsu that had ever even been thought of.
A/N: This is a short story inspired by that time I was trying to explain kage bunshin (and jutsu in general) to my non-anime-watching friends. One of them misheard me; they thought I said cones instead of clones. We couldn't stop laughing for a good half an hour, whilst trying to figure out where it would be used (we really couldn't, by the way). It has been a running gag ever since, and I decided to write and post a story about it.