Hello World!

This is my first story. I hope you enjoy.


"Hah!" I smirked to myself. "My diabolical plan is complete!"

My brother looked at me and raised an eyebrow. He scanned the room, where random chunks of cardboard, clearly scientific diagrams, cheese crackers, and polyethylene terephthalate were scattered about haphazardly. Then he looked back to the center, where I had drawn a very complicated design involving velociraptors, Abraham Lincoln, and semi-automatic weapons. Truly, this was the greatest feat of science anyone had ever managed to accomplish in the history of the universe.

"…What are you doing again?" he asked.

"A mere mortal like you would never be able to understand!" I crowed. "This here is my secret to conquering the world! Mua ha ha ha ha!"

He paused again. "Your what?"

"My secret to conquering the world!"

"…Your secret to conquering the world is a drawing of a duck in chalk in the middle of the floor?" he asked skeptically.

"It's not a duck!" I protested hotly. "It's a complex seal designed to bend time and space, to bridge the gap between parallel universes!"

"Riiight," he nodded gravely. "And I suppose this magical…thing of yours is going to save you when Mom and Dad come home and realize you've trashed the new tile floor which they just got cleaned?"

"Ummm…" I hemmed and hawed. "Ahhh…"

"Bet you didn't think of that, did you?" he asked drily.

Rats! Foiled again! There was only one thing I could do at this point.

"SELF-INSERT OC NO JUTSU!" I yelled, clapping my hands together as I activated my masterful seal.

The last thing I heard before the giant flash of light consumed me was my brother's bewildered, "What the hell?"


I opened my eyes. I was inside a traditional-looking Japanese home, with wooden floorboards and sliding doors and everything like that. Outside, a bunch of anachronistic ninjas wearing flak jackets with an unreasonably obvious red swirly target sign on the back were jumping from building to building, alongside equally anachronistic telephone poles. Some of them were even equipped with radios and other objects based on the utilization of electromagnetic waves and possibly integrated circuits, inventions which in reality came hundreds of years after gunpowder, which was oddly lacking in this world.

"SUCCESS!" I crowed to no one in particular. "I AM TRIUMPHANT!"

Now that I was sure that my flawless jutsu had worked, I looked down at myself, trying to figure out who I was. I also skipped that entire time period of "freak out oh my god my family is gone I want to go back to earth blah blah blah" that normal people would do for the sake of exposition. Because no one wants to read about that, right?

Okay, I admit it. My jutsu wasn't that flawless yet. I couldn't exactly control who I would end up as in this world. But I would get their powers and memories and stuff. I bet I was someone awesome! Oh, gods, I hoped it was Kakashi-sensei. Kakashi-sensei is awesome! (I actually don't know why I like him so much…I just…do. In the most heterosexual way, of course.) Well, maybe not Kakashi, because if I took over Kakashi's brain, then I wouldn't get to know him in person. Hmmm…

I mean, Naruto's cool too, I guess, and Sasuke before he became all bitchy was okay, but man, they were just so OP that it was ridiculous. Did you guys even read the last few manga chapters? There were like, meteors and shit flying down from the sky. I was all, WTF, Kishimoto? (Then again, it's anime. Making sense isn't part of the deal.)

And I guess Shino would be pretty cool, too, even if having bugs living inside of me was kind of creepy. Or maybe Neji, because even though he started out like a bitch he got better after being subjected to the Therapy no Jutsu. Lee was awesome, too, but the green jumpsuits were a bit meh. Shikamaru was cool, too, but it's like impossible for me to be that lazy because I'm the type of person who's constantly on pure glucose solution, and I was afraid I'd give everyone a heart attack if I actually tried taking stuff seriously.

I also liked Gaara, but this looked like Konoha, so that was unfortunate. Oh, well. You can't have everything. I don't like the desert, anyway. There is nothing more annoying than getting sand in your shoes. Or in your sandals. Maybe that's why they're called sand-als.

Anyway, who am I?

I tried peeking through the person's memories, but didn't come up with much. The problem with this jutsu was that it basically overruled all personality, meaning I wouldn't get anything about myself – just what I knew about others, so I wouldn't be suspicious. I figured I could always deduce who I was based on what I hadn't seen.

Hmmm…

Well, based on knowledge alone, this person didn't know much apart from basic Academy stuff, so that unfortunately ruled out Kakashi-sensei. Damn.

That also ruled out the clan heirs…so strike them out.

No Great Fireball Jutsu or Shadow Clone, either…

Damn, who was I? I could have sworn I set the parameters to "main characters"!

Well, at this point in time…

No.

No.

Oh, gods. No, no, no, no, no.

Getting teased about a forehead that wasn't even that big, making friends with Ino, then getting in a bitch fight with Ino just because of a stupidguy, and then –

I looked down again and nearly smacked myself for not being able to see it before.

Red dress. Pink hair.

"NOOOOOOO!" I screamed.

I'm SAKURA!


Sheesh. Of all the characters, it had to be a girl. And of all the girls, it had to be Sakura?

Okay, that didn't come out right. To all the Sakura fans out there (because this is fanfiction, after all) I am sorry. I'm not a hater or whatever. But man, she was useless at this point in time. Sure, she got pretty badass later on, I guess, but as of right now she was literally the most useless character of the Rookie Nine. Even Hinata had a pretty good chance against her in a fair fight. Even with her crippling shyness she'd probably be able to beat Sakura to the ground.

And I'm not miso - misogyn - woman-hater-istic, either. But, put yourself in my shoes, just for a sec. I don't know about you (hey, there are some people out there who are like that), but getting unintentional instantaneous transgender surgery isn't exactly on the top of my to-do list.

So.

I'm a girl.

WTF.

What? No! I'm not doing that. What is up with you, internet? That's gross! She's like, twelve!

So, because this is fiction, and I actually don't know what it feels like to suddenly turn into a girl, and I'm just writing myself into a transgender role for laughs (no offense to people out there who are really transgender – that's totally cool), I am just going to skip over that portion, too. Yeah...

Imagine me freaking out for a few seconds. Are we done? Okay. Now, we are going to move on and pretend that all *this* never happened.

My main problem was that Sakura was pretty much civilian. Everyone else in Naruto's year was some sort of clan heir or whatever, right? Ino-Shika-Cho…clan heirs. Hinata Hyuga, Shino Aburame, and Kiba Inuzaka. Also clan heirs. Sasuke was an Uchiha. And Naruto had an effing Hokage as his dad (plus he was part of the Uzumaki clan, which was also pretty damn badass, even if he didn't know any of that yet, but he had a freaking bijuu locked up inside of him, too, so, you know. Free heal FTW.)

And then…Sakura.

I suppose she did well enough for herself, seeing where she started out, but man. I don't even get some cool eye shit.

Well, screw you too! I mentally berated this world, big fat anime tears rolling down my eyes. The Sharingan's so ridiculously OP anyway!

Well, I guess things couldn't be too bad. At least Sakura's smart. And she has good chakara control. I'm pretty sure she could have been awesome earlier on if she actually had taken things seriously instead of running after Sasuke. Speaking of whom…he was probably in full-on emo mode by now, wasn't he? Although I remember he wasn't a bitch yet. That was after the Forest of Death and Orochimaru and all that jazz.

People tend to forget that during Kakashi's test, he was the first one to offer Naruto food. So he was just a moody depressed kid who was decent on the inside. He was actually making friends and all that. Then it all went to hell when Orochimaru showed up. And then I don't know how it devolved after that (Kishimoto just went a bit wacko with this kid…I was like, okay, man, overreacting much?). But yeah. Maybe if we prevented that one push that was a snake pedo hickey – I mean, a very powerful jutsu called the Cursed Seal that just happens to involve a bite on the neck-shoulder junction and creepy old men possessing the bodies of young attractive boys – we could prevent that entire massive cliff that he just sort of dove off after that.

Sasuke's not my favorite character, but I think he got a bit of a raw deal in the shonen manga roles world.

(Not as much as Kakashi, though. I mean, Obito, then Rin, then unknowingly releasing sensitive info to your best friend turned evil that you thought was dead…and the worst part was, he actually had good intentions throughout the whole thing. Plus dead mom, dead dad, dead team, dead teacher, dead everything, and after that a student who just upped and ran away on a quest of betrayal and revenge. Talk about a shitty life. Sasuke's angsty angstiness ain't got nothin' on Kakashi-sensei.)

Too bad I can't change that, since that's the past, and in the rules of anti-Mary Sue you can't go back in time to make the life of your favorite character better!

Meh, I suppose I'll just stick to making sure Sasuke stays relatively sane.

OH, and I remember a little now. Naruto also used to be a massive idiot. Well, more of one than he was now. Naruto after the time-skip was an idiot, but at least he had massive OP skills to back himself up. Naruto pre-Shippuden was floored by a simple snare trap.

Poopsicles. My teammates are an emo and an idiot. Luckily for Kakashi-sensei-sama-senpai-san-sama-kun, there was the flawless me to cancel their deficiencies out. Clearly.

And in no way am I maintaining any delusions of self-grandeur.

And in no way do I have a massive crush on Kakashi-sensei.

…Okay, maybe a little. But that's beside the point!

That meant I had tomorrow – the day Naruto painted the Hokage monument – the day after – the graduation test and Naruto stealing the forbidden jutsu scroll – and one more day – actual team assignments – before Kakashi's bell test.

Now, I knew that if I just fed Naruto the damn food like I was supposed to, we'd pass, but all the same, the way Kakashi took out Sakura in episode four or five or whatever was downright embarrassing. Like, he didn't even do anything to her. One genjutsu. One academy-level genjutsu, to be precise. That was all it took. He didn't even have to make any bodily contact like he did with Naruto and Sasuke. She supposedly was smart and had good chakra control, but damn if I never saw her use it until after Shippuden. All things considered, she had lost to the dead last in the class. The dead last jinchuuriki, but still, a dead last.

Damn you, Kishimoto, and your useless female characters. You know you screwed something up when even a self-insert OC is more loveable than the actual Sakura. (Darkpetal16, if you're reading this, then I said hi. But you probably don't know me. Anyway…)

Anyway, from today, Sakura – or me-in-Sakura's-body like the stereotypical self-insert this was – was going to go through hell. Self-induced hell, but still, hell.

Step one: lose the dress.

Which was actually harder than it sounded, because that was just about the only thing she owned. It took me at least fifteen minutes of digging in the back of her closet to find actual pants and a regular shirt. The pants were green, which was okay, but the shirt was pink. Better than nothing, though, since Tenten wore the same colors. I made a note: buy new clothes. Even if this was anime, where orange jumpsuits seemed to have absolutely no affect on someone's ninja skills, I didn't want to take any chances whatsoever.

Plus I don't like pink. I have a little cousin who is obsessed with it. That, and Disney princesses. Literally, everything she owns has pink on it somewhere, and god, she hurts my eyes. Also, she is very young and therefore very annoying. And she always comes over like every week and my brother and I used to babysit her together, except that he recently left for college and somehow managed to trick our parents into thinking that it was a reasonable reason to ditch his familial responsibilities, so now I have to deal with her alone. So maybe I have learned to associate pink with a very traumatizing adolescent experience.

I think I'll chop off the hair, too. Screw you, Sakura. I can do whatever the heck I want. Starting now, you are getting a hilarious transgender transformation. MUAHAHAHA!

Well, maybe not. I can't suddenly chop off all my hair because then Ino will probably do something to and I really have no idea how to deal with someone like Ino. So yeah. I think I'll wait until after Kakashi-sensei becomes my teacher -

*fanboy moment*

- ahem. After Kakashi-sensei becomes my teacher, I'll be able to pin my extreme makeover on him. Ha.

But doing a bit of personal reorganization won't show up physically.

I started out easy by trying out the basic academy jutsu (Henge, Kawarimi, and the useless version of the Clone). This, at least, I managed to do perfectly, thanks to Sakura's good chakra control, so I knew I had nothing to worry about. I also started a little early on wall-walking, and Sakura got it down pat, so I guess that was another tiny bonus for being stuck in Sakura's body compared to all the other characters. I added practice water walking tomorrow, since it was already a bit late today, to my mental to-do list.

She also had decent aim, though whether it was because of her or my leftover muscle memory was a different matter. Same for martial arts forms. Now, back at home, my super-Asian parents enrolled me in an ass ton of different martial arts because, apparently, a 5.0 GPA and 2400 SAT and 5's on 40 AP exams just aren't enough to get you into college anymore. Also, because I was a huge pain in the ass as a little kid and kept running around and breaking shit so they enrolled me under the most brutal guy in the history of the world to control my hyperactive tendencies and hopefully teach me some discipline.

All right, I'm exaggerating. My sensei was actually a pretty nice guy. And I learned a lot under him. I'm nowhere near master status, but I can hold my own in a fight. Anyway, that was where I was now. I went outside and sparred with a tree for a bit, just to get used to being, like, an entire foot shorter, while simultaneously practicing packing chakra into my fists just like they did in the anime (that part was actually cool, if a bit flashy). Sakura didn't have that much chakra, but she still managed to put dents in trees and cracks in rocks.

Good enough for a twelve-year-old kid, I suppose.

I also found that by packing chakra into the right muscles (hey – I do sports and my Asian mummy is making me study anatomy because I'm going to be a doctor in the future, no questions asked, so I know what the latissimus dorsi is) I could increase Sakura's stamina. The nice thing about chakra packing was that it actually did increase internal reserves without actually wasting the chakra itself, meaning I could work out for quite a while without getting completely exhausted.

Doing a thousand pull-ups in a row actually felt kind of badass.

Chakra was actually kind of cool. I mean, even as the physically weakest kid in the class, she was still doing the same amount of push-ups as I was doing in the normal world.

Huh.

That's actually kind of depressing.

Effing ninjas.

When it finally got dark, and my adoptive (though they didn't know it yet) parents called me inside, I was reasonably sore. Not exhausted, but tired enough to know that I was doing a good job. Hey, I was a ninja. With chakra. I'm pretty sure that in a few hours I'll be fine. Versus in the real world, where it takes at least a week to adapt to a new training regime.

As I sat eating dinner and pretending nothing was wrong, I started going through my options in this world. Clearly, decent levels of physical strength was a must, but I also had to specialize in something. I knew that Sakura did medical ninjutsu and power punches, which was cool, but I wanted to see if I couldn't do something else, too. Something that was actually practical. News flash! Pretty much every fight in Naruto is like, full of unnecessary movement.

Taijutsu? Nah, you had to get up close and personal for that. Even though I was decently trained in close combat, I was more of the "stand back and snipe at them from 100 meters away" sort of guy. A good backup study, though.

Genjutsu? A possibility, but with all the stupid Uchihas running around it wouldn't be that useful – at least, against the bad guys that really mattered. Sakura was pretty good at breaking out of genjutsu on her own, anyway. So that was out.

Ninjutsu? I might learn a few techniques. I'd never become a master, though. Even Kakashi, who apparently knew a thousand techniques, still never did anything except spam Raikiri, and, after part two, Kamui.

Stupid OP Sharingan. So unfair! I want a cool jutsu like that! Even if it's OP!

Weapons specialist? Tenten was cool, but I didn't want to steal her specialty, and anyway, a strong enough wind jutsu would make me useless. Also, all that unrolling of sealing scrolls took too much time. Maybe I could get some badass sword or whatever later, if I felt like it.

Speaking of sealing, what about Fuinjutsu? It's useful, but except for the jinchuuriki, explosive tags, and the Flying Thunder God thing that Naruto's dad came up with (Minato Namikaze, by the way, is my second man-crush), also not very applicable to combat situations. It couldn't hurt to learn how to use it, though. Also, summoning.

Decisions, decisions…

Back to medical ninjutsu. It was helpful, but I couldn't use just that. Unless…I figured out how to use medical ninjutsu from a distance, and use it against my enemies? I mean, they always showed the medic-nins healing people, but what if they did it wrong? Like, what if they, I don't know, meant to start healing in one place, but then accidentally induced cell multiplication somewhere else, so that the person got cancer? Or just induce too much healing that the body goes into overdrive? Or just shut down organs altogether?

That would be cool. Creepy, but cool.

God, I'd be a terrible doctor. And you know what? This is the ninja world, where they deal in child soldiers. They'd love me for it.

(Not that I support child slavery and war in real life. But, you know, when things are 2D and colored brightly, it makes even the most serious of global social issues all better.)

Still, I had no idea if it was even possible to do distance healing, meaning that if I wanted to use medical ninjutsu in combat, I'd have to get up close and personal, which was, once again, not my cup of tea.

Finally, I decided that I wouldn't make any choices yet until I figured out just exactly what I was getting in for. Taijutsu I was already decent at, but I could work on speed training, now that I was a ninja. I could pick up some of those weights that Lee used. Breaking out of genjutsu and casting a few simple ones for distraction's sake would also be good. Learning my chakra nature was also a must. Simple sealing, and maybe summoning sometime later – but not slugs (I don't like gastropods, okay?). And I guess some healing wouldn't hurt. It would definitely help for someone that wasn't ridiculously OP *cough* Naruto and Sasuke and basically all the major villains in Part II *cough* such as me.

I reviewed my forms and did another set of push-ups, squats, and sit-ups that would make Gai and Lee proud before I went to bed.

Thus ended day one.