Apparently my parents had been killed in the Nine-Tails' attack. A couple of mediocre, clanless ninja who just happened to be on duty at the wrong time. It didn't really bother me all that much, seeing as I couldn't remember my 'other' parents either.
The thing that really bothered me was trying to learn the language, gleaned from caretakers and fellow orphans over the next couple years. Sure, immersion is a great way to learn a language quickly but what I really needed was to be taught to read. Always eager to learn and always attentive to the adults, I quickly became seen as quiet, intelligent, and well-behaved from the moment I could walk. And you can bet I taught myself how to walk damn early. And soon after, I was bringing adults books from the small, ragged library of the orphanage so they could read to me.
The other thing that really bothered me was trying to summon chakra. Sure I had read a bit of the manga but I could probably write down everything I knew about Naruto in a few pages. Once I learned to write Japanese, that is. In the future, if anyone tries to read my thoughts, hopefully they get a load of unintelligible English. I sincerely hope that never happens.
You take your spiritual energies and your physical energies and swirl them together to make chakra, right? Well, a baby doesn't normally have much in the way of physical energies. Nor mental energies but I'm pretty sure I'm a special case. I spent most of my first days at the orphanage in meditation, when I wasn't being fed or sleeping.
I looked for my center. I tried to summon my ki. I tried to project psionic energy. I tried to feel the warp and weave of the universe. I even tried to go baby Super Sayian a couple times. I knew I had chakra coils in my body, producing energy to sustain my life force and circulate chakra through all my tissues and limbs. But every time I thought I might feel something, I would just become exhausted and it would slip away. It was like my body just didn't have any extra energy to give up. I would try every day for a year, pulling my yin and yang near my stomach and willing it to spin and combine. It was only by the time that I could walk on my own that I could feel something inside me. I tried to pull on it and draw it into my hands. It was another month before I could get a leaf to stick to my hand before the energy would dissipate.
However little success I had with my pitifully weak baby body, it was the complete opposite with my mental energy. I think that having a soul that's been around the bend at least once probably gave me an unfair advantage. Whereas trying to summon my 'ki' energy was like trying to wring a moist rag, I had no problem summoning my 'soul' energy. When all I had between bottle feedings and diaper changes was time to myself, I was desperate for anything to pass the time. Unable to really start working with chakra, I experimented with the spiritual energy to see if there was anything I could do with it.
I thought I had been left alone. I was not quite to the point of being able to walk. The few men and woman who staffed the orphanage typically left us alone unless there was a reason. Rarely was I ever the only child in a room. Being mature for my age, I was allowed to crawl and interact with other children, although you couldn't really say that we were playing together. The older children ignored us toddlers and the adults ignored everyone as their attention was spread thin enough already. I had crawled out of the playroom and across the hall into another room, an empty bedroom.
Seeing I was alone, I thought it would be a good time to try something I didn't want other people to see. Since I had so much spiritual energy, what would happen if I tried to push it out of my body? Could I make chakra threads with it? Maybe that is how you sense other people's chakra? I sat crosslegged on the floor, my palms on the floor to support my body, and I closed my eyes. And then I pulled on my soul and mind, collecting energy in my core, as much as I could. It wasn't really proper chakra with barely any physical energy, what I referred to internally as 'ki'. But once I gathered as much as I could, I let it expand, the whorling energy gently diffusing like a spiral galaxy, escaping my body and coming into contact with the room around me. And then I heard a scream.
I hadn't closed the door. I couldn't have closed the door. A lady, one of the nicest civilians, was looking at me and screaming. Having opened my eyes, I couldn't really see anything wrong. I was just sitting in the room, an innocent toddler who had wandered off. But she screamed and collapsed on the ground just beyond the door. I panicked and crawled under the nearest bed to hide.
It was deathly quiet for a moment as the entire orphanage, filled with dozens of children and several adults, all held their breath. After a few more agonizingly tense moments of hiding under the bed, a ninja appeared, wearing a vaguely cat-like painted mask. "ANBU? Why are ANBU here?" He checked the pulse of the woman and then turned his head toward me. I kept silent and just stared back from under the bed. In a sudden puff of smoke, he was gone.
The adults never brought it up with me the entire time I was there. Except for that one woman refusing to come anywhere near me, it was like nothing happened.