"Man, that's some bullshit."
"Boy, you either gon pay one-fiddy or get the 'ell out my shop."
"Man, I bought this ramen from Teuchi's down the road for seventy-five, and you trying to tell me it costs one fifty?"
"Boy, we don't sell no cheap-ass ramen over 'ere. Seventy-five my ass. Only thing seventy-five is that clown shit you is wearing."
"Hey man, don't be hating. Not anybody be making these colors work."
"With your scrawny-looking ass, I don't doubt it. You look like the personification of an orange fucked up by the cat."
"Oh, we got jokes now huh? Well fuck you too."
Naruto Uzumaki walked out of the shop to jeers from the shopkeeper - "that's right boy, keep walking." Should've known better then to cheat on Teuchi's, he thought to himself. Stupid ugly-ass looking bum-ass looking geezer don't know fashion when he see it.
It was a rather cloudy day, with a good breeze going through Konoha. However there are just some places that are so rundown and gray that a cloudy day really brings out the grayness in them. The Rukongai district was such a place, an artistic composition of such shit that critics would give a solid 9.5 on a reverse Da Vinci scale, Naruto mused.
Of course, every heavily-populated had to have a notoriously shady neighborhood, and for Konoha, that was the Rukongai. It wasn't always this way; the Rukongai was once a premier family-raising area. All it took was for the Kyuubi to come moonwalking across Konoha, and voila: a village unofficially divided into four major districts. Naruto snickered. He was indeed a master of wordplay. Should probably drop a mixtape or two.
To Naruto, the Rukongai was home. Sure, it was filled with rather unsavory characters, really rather unsavory characters, but there was a sort of blunt, honest air to it. Sure, Rukongainians weren't exactly the sort of folk you'd associate with, but there were not scum. Scum better described the rich politicians, money-grubbing fatass parasites.
In the Rukongai, the saying went something like: Round these here parts, ya either scrap, or ya tap. Power was the name of the game; you were strong, you were respected. And at the heart of the Rukongai was the Ring, where respect was earned and lost. Now, amidst all the chaos that made Rukongai the Rukongai, order and structure comprised the machinations of the Ring. The samurai had their Ninshu temple as a holy ground, and the Rukongainians bestowed the same amount of sanctity to the Ring, if not even more.
Naruto made his way over to the Ring, having made a pit stop at Teuchi's for some to-go ramen. There was a marquee matchup between Ranks 5 and 7, and it promised to be a thriller. The Ring was a coliseum-like structure, and usually they tended to fill up very fast. It was a full house today, however, Naruto was nothing if not resourceful, and made his way over to a seat where a lookalike of him occupied. Not for the first time, Naruto patted himself on the back for swiping that jutsu scroll a couple of years back (snort). The Shadow Clone jutsu truly was an all-purpose jutsu.
Naruto would have preferred being down there fighting himself, but he was still a couple of months off the age requirement of 16. Ring privileges wasn't the only thing accessible to Naruto once he hit the big one-six. For an orphan like him, he could gain entry into the Konoha Nin Academy and thus his first steps into his career as a ninja. Well, Naruto thought, it gonna suck playing catch-up to those kids who've been to private ninja schools. He reclined on his seat and watched the match get started as the two fighters made their way onto center stage.
