Konoha Squad two consists of Kaoru Sarutobi, Saburo Azama, and Yoko Hideyoshi. Jonin leader is Shikumaru Nara.
Konoha Squad five consists of Jet Huuchi, Tsukiko Inuzuka, and Shiro Azama. Jonin leader is Rock Lee.
Konoha Squad nine consists of Izumi Tonomo, Hideki Jubei, and Dai Haruno. Jonin Leader is Hanabi Hyuga.
"Hey Ino," Choji peaked into the Yamanaka flower shop. Ino looked up and smiled seeing her old friends Choji and Shikamaru. "You coming?"
"Ha ha," she got up from behind the counter. "See you later, uncle Toshiro. I'm going out on break. Your in charge."
"I was always in charge, Ino. Don't forget I'm your elder."
"Later Toshiro," Shikamaru waved goodbye at the old man in a flower apron.
"Its been too long since we all got together," Ino walked in between Choji and Shikamaru, holding their arms.
^.^ ^.^ ^.^
"So basically, ever since my mom went into the hospital I've had to come back and help out at the flower shop again. And whenever I'm not there I'm always either on missions or working at the interrogation room." Ino talked to her friends over some barbecue at their favorite restaurant. "So how's it going with you guys?"
"Well this is my first day off from those brat genin in weeks," Shikamaru yawned.
"Shouldn't you be training them even harder since the chunin exams are coming up?" Choji forced the words out through bites of barbeque.
"Yeah, they did enter the contest right?" Ino asked.
"Kaoru is training with Kurenai to prepare for the chunin exams. I bet she's teaching him some genjutsu or something. Yoko is in medical ninjutsu class at the hospital right now. Don't ask me what Saburo is up to," Shikamaru took a bite of short rib. "Man, I never knew that agreeing to train Asuma's kid would be such a drag." They all paused at the mention of their old master's name. Even Choji stopped eating. He quickly decided to lighten the mood.
"Ha, well things are going great with me and Etsuko. I'm actually thinking about asking her to marry me."
"Oh, that's wonderful, Choji," Ino clapped her hands in excitement. "But slow down. Remember our agreement."
"What?" Shikamaru complained. "You're actually taking that drag of an agreement seriously? Trust me, it won't work out. Its..."
"Of course I'm taking it seriously! Because its more than an agreement, its the tradition that has kept the synergy of our clans alive for so many years. It is the kindling of the Ino-Shika-Cho flame." Ino's eyes burned with pride for her clan. "We have to all have our first born children in the same year. That's what our parents did, and their parents, and their parents, and.."
"Alright, we get it," Shikamaru cut her off. "Right Choj...Choji?" Choji had stopped listening and had managed to eat all his meat. Now licking the barbecue sauce off his fingers.
"Hey, Ino," he spoke with a full mouth. "You gonna eat that?" His teammates just stared at him. They were all used to Choji eating a lot. It was just the realization of how long its been since they had been together as a group that got to them. They all started laughing like old times.
"We have got to do this more often," Ino decided.
"Agreed," Shikamaru and Choji said in unison.
^_^ ('o') ^_^
"Are you ready, Kaoru?" Kurenai said to the boy who looked like a younger form of the late Asuma Sarutobi except with the hair of the Yuhi clan. Kaoru wore a red shirt and a black jacket with the Sarutobi clan crest on the back. "Try it again."
"Alright, alright... This is such a drag." Kaoru wove a pattern of hand signs "Demonic Illusion: Tree-Binding Death!" Kurenai looked at the illusion around her. She couldn't move due to the tree branches wrapped around her. She smiled with pride and released the genjutsu.
"Now lets see if you can successfully cast illusions on targets that aren't letting you do it."
"What? This is to much work." Kaoru fell face first to the ground and mumbled through the dirt, "what a drag." Kurenai didn't appreciate the laziness Shikamaru passed on to her son, but he has trained him well. He's been the closest thing to a father Kaoru ever knew.
^_~ o ^_~
"Hey sensei!" Yoko came barging into Shikamaru's bedroom window along with Saburo and Kaoru. Yoko was a short blonde girl who kept her hair in a braid that reached her calves. She had big brown eyes and typically wore blue and yellow attire. Yoko's Leaf headband is wrapped backwards around her head. Kids made fun of her height in the ninja Academy so in order to make up for it, she developed a loud and assertive personality. Like the rest of her generation of rookies, she is twelve years old.
"Heh, heh. Good morning Shikamaru sensei." Saburo grinned a giant grin. He had straight orange hair that got in his dark black eyes. He always wore brown and green clothing. Saburo is a somewhat rude person and was one of the students who made fun of Yoko and other children (including his own twin brother) in the Academy. He wears his Leaf headband hanging from his front right belt loop.
"Uh, guys," Kaoru, the smartest of the group due to being trained by the intelligent Shikamaru ever since he could walk, said to his friends, "Its a substitution jutsu." He threw a kunai at his master's sleeping head and it turned into a large pillow.
"Dammit!" Saburo jumped in the room and looked around for their sensei's location. "Where the hell are you? Shikamaru Sensei!" he turned around and pointed at Yoko. "I told you, dammit, we should've just gone straight to the exams instead of coming to see this lazy ass excuse for a master! Your ideas are always nothin' but a big waste of time, shorty!" Yoko shook her fist in anger. Just then Shikamaru peeked in the window along with his two students that didn't already break into his house.
"What did I tell you guys about coming to my house?"
"Shut the hell up!" Suburo yelled at his sensei.
"Well you obviously knew we were coming," Yoko raised her hands in a gesture showing how easy it was to come to this conclusion. "Unless of course you leave a substitution in your bed everytime you leave."
"Were you sleeping on the roof again?" Kaoru knew his sensei the best.
Shikamaru yawned, "You got me. Just trying to catch a few more ounces of sleep before you guys showed up."
"How'd you know we were coming?" Yoko asked.
"Ha. I know you kids be..." Shikamaru yawned again. This was a longer yawn, "...better than you know yourselves."
"Well that's a load of bull." Suburo climbed out of the window to join the rest of squad two. Yoko punched him in the gut, her natural punching height, for his disrespect for their elder.
"We just came so you could wish us luck in the chunin exams," Yoko smiled with her hands behind her head.
"Well good luck," Shikamaru yawned once again. "You guys better get going if you want to make it to the exams on time."
They all laughed and ran off, waving goodbye to their master. Shikamaru smiled as he waved back. When his genin were out of sight he jumped up onto his roof once again and went back to sleep.
O_O O-O O_O
"I can't believe that whole test was actually a paper test," Suburo sat down on the ground outside of the fenced area known as the Forest of Death.
"Not only that, but it was a test to see who could cheat without getting caught." Yoko sat down next to Suburo.
"They were obviously just seeing if we could get answers using ninjutsu," Kaoru added.
"What do you mean?" Yoko was confused.
Kaoru sat down and explained, "Well I figured out that the paper test wasn't gonna be graded pretty quickly, so I just took a nap. But I heard plenty of people getting kicked out for cheating. The guy next to me tried cheating off my paper only to find out I didn't have anything written down. He got kicked out just for using an Academy rate cheating technique. But the guy in front of me, I caught him using ninjutsu. I'm not sure what jutsu he used, but he was obviously cheating. There were eleven jonin in the room doing nothing but watching for cheats. They were grading us on whether or not we used ninjutsu efficiently. Though of course you didn't have to cheat, after all I passed without even trying. So I don't think we were being graded exactly. Maybe we were given bonus points or something for ninjutsu." Kaoru yawned. "I don't really know."
"Oh wow," Yoko was impressed, but Suburo just snorted to hide his jealousy of Kaoru's smarts. "Kaoru, you're so..."
"Hey, guys!" it was Izumi Tonomo along with her teammates Dai Haruno and Hideki Jubei. "Looks like squad two passed the first stage of the exams as well. Ha, squad five passed by the way."
"Yeah," Hideki agreed. "They're right over there."
Hideki was a boy with long dark brown hair and eyes of the same color. His Leaf headband was worn in the traditional manor around his forehead. Many say he resembles the first Hokage of the Hidden Leaf, who he claims to be a descendant of. Hideki is respectable child who follows the rules and stays true to the code of ninjutsu. He wears a navy blue large shirt with sleeves longer than his arms.
Izumi has purple shoulder length hair that is longer in the front than the back and has a few strands that fall in her face. Her eyes are blue and she has seven stud earrings on each ear which you can only see when she ties her hair back for careful procedures such as medical work. She wears a gray sleeveless shirt and her Leaf headband is wrapped around her left thigh (the leg that isn't holding her kunai pocket) Izumi has a mixed personality of rebel and responsible. A very unpredictable girl.
Dai is a large kid. He is a gentle giant with pink short hair and green eyes. His older cousin is the head of the hospital and top medical ninja in the village. Dai wears a blue shirt with a simple circle on the back. His Leaf headband is around his wrist like a watch. He doesn't have much of a unique personality but he is smart and kind.
"Listen up, everyone," the woman in charge of the second part of the exams got everyone's attention. "My name is Tenten! Each team needs to line up in an orderly fashion by this shed right here," she pointed to a dark shack sitting on the edge of the fence to the forest. "All team members need to be together when they enter the shed. You will receive either and earth scroll or a heaven scroll. Your goal is to find the teams in the forest who have the scrolls you need. The only rules are not to look in the scrolls and and you need to reach the tower in the middle of the forest with at least one of each scroll within 120 hours. In the forest of death, you'll have to fend for yourselves and survive as a team by any means necessary. Along with a scroll each team will receive a gate number to start at. Now line up!"
The teams all lined up to receive their scrolls. "I suppose this means we're enemies for the next five days," Hideki said to Squad two. "Good luck to you three, but if you get in our way..."
"Give me one good reason," Kaoru began, "as to why we don't make an alliance between our two teams." Everyone in the group looked at each other in dismay.
Then Dai smiled. "I like that idea. We'll have a better chance of surviving and make sure that our friends stay alive."
"Should we also join up with squad five?" Yoko suggested. "I'd hate to see anything happen to them."
"And they're a strong taijutsu based group," Izumi pointed out. "And Tsukiko is a great tracker. She was practically raised in the woods."
"Yeah and she's hot too," Suburo laughed. "But I don't know if we should make a group that big." Suburo looked at squad five about six teams behind them in line and Shiro Azama shot a dirty look back at him.
"Why not?" Yoko punched Suburo in the gut. "You're gonna have to ignore the problems you have with your brother."
"She's right, Suburo," Kaoru backed up Yoko. "An army of nine will have a better chance of surviving against thirteen other teams of three. And other teams will likely have the same idea, especially those teams from foreign nations. And they are already dangerous enough because we don't have any information on them."
"I'll go ask if they want to join us," Izumi jumped back to talk to them. Everyone else watched her trying to form a treaty. Squad five started out smiling, but then after Izumi said something else their smiles disappeared and they started arguing. Izumi then returned disappointed. "They're not interested."
Everyone asked why and complained except for Suburo. "Heh, we're better off without those losers. Jonin go on solo missions all the time. If we need nine people to finish this then we're a bunch wimps who don't even deserve the title of chunin."
"What?!" Yoko punched him in the gut again.
"Dude," Dai put his hands behind his head, "you could've just said something like smaller numbers are stealthier."
"Stealth is for the weak," Suburo said.
This time Kaoru hit him on the head. "You idiot. Stealth is the most powerful weapon of the ninja."
"Yes," Hideki corrected Suburo, "shinobi have been feared for centuries as invisible assassins who can kill a target without them even knowing."
"You guys are up," Kaoru pointed out that that it was squad nine's turn to receive their scroll. "We'll meet up first thing when enter the gates."
They all wished each other good luck and received their scrolls. Team two stood at their gate and they each grabbed their chakra blades out of their weapons pouches. The gates opened. The exams began.
('o') . ('o')