Disclaimer: I own nothing except the obvious.
A/N: Originally started as a joke between a friend of mine and me, the story was planned to be no more than five pages long. Now, spanning across three notebooks and quite a few looseleaf papers, it's become an epic in and of itself. The characters are loosely-and i mean very loosely-on ourselves and friends of ours. Scattered throughout this monster are also references to various movies, tv shows, and books. The person who can identify the most in each chapter gets a shoutout.
So, continue on, those of you who actually read this.
Chapter 1
In Which Our Heroes Die,
Meet a Toad, and Live Once Again
"Hey, do you guys have any money?" A fifteen-year-old girl, wearing a cranberry red, cherub t-shirt and jean short shorts, glanced at her two friends expectantly. They shook their heads.
The three children had paused in front of a vending machine on the way to the beach. None of them looked to even remotely matched the Japanese native that occasionally walked by.
Even in America however, they would've mad a strange spectacle. Andrea, size five foot one (and a half sometimes), with her naturally loud and hyper temperament, bright blonde hair, and blue-gray eyes framed in purple, green, and blue glasses would've stuck out anywhere. Even in her home state of California. Jennifer loomed over her louder friend by nine (sometimes eight and a half) inches, with waist length chocolate brown hair normally pulled back in a braid, and a rather sarcastic and morbid since of humor. She spent a lot of time looming over her friends, Andrea specifically. Austin, was only two inches shorter than Jennifer, however, so she couldn't quite pull it off with him. He didn't really have anything to make him stick out (unless you counted the brown hair with one thick blonde swirl in it) until he opened his mouth. Then you got an overload of just how girly a guy could get. Really, the only thing that they all had in common was that they were considered freaks, were fifteen-years-old, and thought that Naruto was the best ninja show ever created.
"Maybe you could give me some food from the basket," Andrea asked slyly.
"No, Andrea," Jen said patiently. "You just ate three jelly-filled donuts not even ten minutes ago. You are not getting any more food."
"But I'm hungry."
"I don't care if you're the Fullmetal Alchemist's long lost sister." The tone in Jen's voice spoke of how often this conversation was repeated between the two. "You can wait until we get to the beach to eat."
"I will melt in a pool of hungry mush long before then, and then where will you be? You'll go to my funeral, and be all like 'I should've given her some food! But I didn't, and now she's dead!' and then you'll be all depressed and commit suicide-"
"That is quite enough," Jen interrupted, rolling her eyes at her friend's over-dramatic nature. "Where you got the idea that I even remotely cared about whether or not you're alive-"
"Yes you do." Andrea grinned at the taller girl, eyes turning into upside down u's. "'Cause if I died, than you wouldn't have any stories to read."
"Hurry up," Austin yelled over his shoulder, already thirty feet ahead of the girls. "We're gonna miss it!"
"Don't get your panties in a twist," Jen yelled back, starting towards him. "The fishermen won't run off without you."
The two were almost at the end of the road before Andrea realized they had left. Starting to run, she started to wave spastically, yelling, "Wait up!"
The other two slowed down, so much so that she over-judged her speed. So when she caught up, she didn't realize they had stopped at the corner of the street, and bumped into their backs. All three of them went sprawling into the streets, right in front of a speeding car.
White. That's all they could see in every direction. Flat "land", spreading out as far as you could see. It wasn't even really land, in the strictest sense. Not as far as they could tell, at least, since it was impossible to tell if they were standing on something, or just floating. Even after Andrea had taken of her shoes and jumped up and down, the ground was barely able to be felt.
"I think we fell into the matrix," Andrea remarked, voice dry.
"Now all we need is some bald black guy to jump out from nowhere and tell us to choose between the blue pill or the red pill." Jen's voice was even drier. "I can see it now. He'll be sitting on a raggedy, old, red armchair and-"
Suddenly, in front of them was a floating toad. A big, bright yellow one. He was wearing an Arabian-ish blue and purple vest and smoking a pipe while sitting cross-legged on a velvet cushion.
"AHHHHH!!" Andrea screamed, jumping behind Austin and hiding. "Don't eat me! He tastes much better." She shoved Austin from behind, making him stumble forward a few steps.
"I'm not going to eat you," the toad told them patiently, a disgruntled expression on his face. "The only reason I'm even here is because of you."
"Me?" Andrea raised her eyebrows in skepticism and shook her head. "I'm certainly flattered and all, but-and don't take this the wrong way-there's no way in hell I'm marrying you."
The toad blinked at them, confused, as all three of the teens started to cackle evilly.
"Okay, okay." Jen wiped the tears from her eyes and the smile from her face. "Inside joke. So what do you really want-"
Andrea and Austin once again burst out in gawfs. Jen threw them an annoyed look, and they stopped. "We'll be serious now," Andrea said, the corner of her lips twitching.
Jen rolled her eyes and turned back to the toad. "Now, as I was saying," She paused as if to give her two friends a moment to interject their comments, before continuing lightly, "why do you want Andrea?"
The toad had a strangely embarrassed look when he mumbled back, "Well, um, she kinda, wasn't supposed to die for another eight years."
"I'm…dead?" Andrea asked, face an adorable mask of confusion.
"Knew I should've expected this," the toad muttered, before simultaneously raising and gentling his voice. "Yeah. The car hit you, killing you almost immediately."
There was absolute silence in the blank white space for a few seconds while Andrea processed the information. Jen and Austin both eyed the girl carefully, not quite sure what her reaction would be, but sure that it wouldn't be pretty. They didn't have to wait long.
You could tell when she finally understood what she had been told by her eyes. They widened to easily the size of dinner plates, going unfocused, while her pupils shrunk to the size of pinheads.
"Dray?" Jen asked warily when the minute line was passed, and she still was standing there, eyes unfocused and stone still. "Are you okay?"
That seemed to do the trick. Blinking she came back to herself, eyes refocusing. However, that wasn't exactly a good thing.
"I'm dead?" she said once again, but this time her voice was demanding. "I'm dead?! How could I be dead? I never got to do anything that I wanted to do! I never got to get drunk, or get arrested, or sleep with someone, or get drunk-"
"You said get drunk twice," Jen reminded her, voice bored. She was much less affected by Andrea's abrupt ranting than, say, Austin, who was cowering in fear behind the taller girl.
"It was kinda the top of my priority list," Andrea snapped back. Then the second part of the Toad's sentence hit her, and she jerked around to glare at him. "What do you mean, eight years?"
"You, um," the toad coughed, embarrassed. "You kinda go alcoholic…"
"WOOT!" Andrea yelled abruptly, throwing her hands up in the air and doing a little victory dance. "I become my life long dream! I would like to thank all the little people I've stepped on to get here, and the alcohol companies, and my parents for making my teenage life shit…"
"Anyway," The toad continued, once again gaining their attention. "You can die, and go up to the equivalent of heaven, or I can send you to another reality."
"Really?" Andrea's happiness levels shot through the roof. "Would you send us to the Naruto world?"
"Let me rephrase my previous sentence. I can send you, Andrea Eberhart, to another world. Them…not so much. They were supposed to die anyway."
There was a brief moment of horrified silence, broken by a snarled, "Oh no you don't!" Andrea stalked forward and poked each word to emphasize her point. "You were the one that screwed up my date of death. Not me. So you're gonna do what I damn near tell you to, or I'm gonna shove my foot so far up your ass that the water on my knee's gonna quench your thirst. And right now I'm telling you to send all three of us."
The toad blew out a stream of smoke in an irritated sort of way. "Bipolar much?" he muttered, before continuing grudgingly, "If that's the way it's gonna be…"
Flopping his gigantic body into the air, he disappeared with a poof of smoke and a loud popping noise.
"Want you to marry him," Austin chuckled, randomly and with a touch of hysteria. As if this was a cue, the white blankness began to run down in rivulets, replaced by nothingness.
"Argg…" Andrea moaned, sitting up and clutching her head. "I can certainly empathize with a raw cracked egg right about now."
Two answering moans were heard to her left and right, as Austin and Jen joined the land of the living. Shifting her head so it leaned against the brick/clay-type wall behind them, Jen muttered, "If I ever get near that toad again, I swear to god he's going to wish…he's gonna wish…well, I don't know what he's gonna wish, but it's not going to be good."
"I second that," Andrea agreed, closing her eyes and irritably pulling at the bunched material under her ankles. Gone were her normal blue jeans, t-shirts in an array of colors, and dark blue, velvet hoodie, replaced instead with a calf-length purple skirt and light pink, short-sleeved blouse. "He stole my favorite pair of jeans, not to mention my lucky jacket."
Austin sniggered next to her, thinking, More like vest. That jacket was so worn down that you could see the threads keeping the sleeves on. Thought, not said. Despite what might be thought of him, and his actions later on, Austin is not as idiotic as his appearance makes him seem.
And so the three kids sat, nursing their headaches and, on Andrea's part, mentally taking apart the toad slice by slimy slice. Occasionally one of them would crack an eyelid open and comment on what they said. Other than that, though, their conversation was extremely limited (generally grunts and mumblings, punctuated with a few 'stop squirming's).
Approximately and hour after the last comment on the outside world, Andrea carefully peeled an eyelid up, and looked around. Seeing nothing of interest at ground level, she ran a casual eye over the higher story structure. And, sure enough, hanging from an alcove across the street, was a familiar masked ninja. He reading a familiar looking book, and she was quite pleased to note that his hair was still at the exact same angle it always was.
Smirking, Andrea elbowed Jen in the side, and bonked Austin on the top of his head, bringing each around—albeit with protests. Those were quickly stalled when she jerked her chin towards Kakashi.
"500 dollars say that the book's cover is orange," Andrea murmured to both of them.
"I don't take sucker bets," Jen whispered back dryly.
"Care to see how the content can compare to what we read?" Andrea continued, used to the other girl's sarcasm.
"What you read." Jen, too, was used to her friend's moods and attention span. "And Jeraiya isn't called the Great Perverted Sannin for nothing, so your crap will probably fall quite short. But, before we go off on another of your harebrained schemes, might I mention something? This is Kakashi. The same guy who became a genin at 5, was in the ANBU not so long ago, has the transplanted Sharingan, and could very easily kick you butt all over Konoha."
"And also allowed Naruto's stupid eraser fall on his head," Andrea added, tapping the side of her nose. Jen gave her a level look, so she turned to Austin. "Hey, Austin, you'll do it with me right?"
"Huh?" He looked at her in oblivion, but Andrea had already turned back to Jen.
"He'll do it with me," she told Jen, smirking triumphantly. Jen shook her head slightly before starting to rub her temples.
"I guess I don't really have much of a choice then," she answered a couple seconds later, voice slightly muffled. Andrea grinned.
"Now here's the plan…."