Whirlpool Sky

by Skysaber

Self-Insert characters have potential to be enormously powerful because they enter the situation already knowing of the important secrets, events and people. But what if someone were to insert into a ninja world gone massively AU where NONE of that was true?

3. Chapter 3

Whirlpool Sky
by Skysaber

Chapter Three

OoOoO

A kunoichi ran desperately across the surface of the water of a rice patty, panting heavily as she clutched the bleeding wound in her side. She had no idea how they'd discovered her through her disguise, but that wasn't important now.

Getting away was.

The kunoichi paused, peering into the darkness of the woodlands, sensing movement, before darting off at an even greater pace than before. She'd shed parts of her peasant disguise. When infiltrating Konoha no chakra technique would suffice for a disguise, so she'd taken this peasant clothing from off a clothes line, leaving coin to pay for it in its stead. But those parts that hindered movement she'd now cast away.

Everything now was speed, outpacing her enemies in a race for life.

She darted up a cliff, hoping to buy time and delay her enemies, only they came into view bounding from rock to rock using leaps to counteract the advantage she got from being able to run straight up the rock face.

That was their mistake. Fighting on a vertical surface was an Uzumaki specialty. She at once changed course and began charging to the left, cutting across their leaps while flinging kunai bearing explosive tags where they must inevitably land. Once you've committed to a leap you've got no options, you are going to land at a certain place and time.

Explosions went off and enemy ninja perished. She resumed her course.

Konoha was notoriously difficult to infiltrate, and she had no idea how the Military Police had found her disguised as one peasant among many. But none of that mattered now. The only thing left was getting away.

Getting away and reporting to Whirlpool Village that she'd felt an Uzumaki chakra signature using Uzumaki techniques inside the enemy village of Konoha. She'd tried to investigate, hoping that she could free whichever of her kinsmen had been captured there, but that had failed. The only thing left was to let her family know.

But her escape route had been predicted, and the Uzumaki kunoichi came down from one of her own leaps to find an Uchiha standing before her, one with a Magnekyo Sharingan.

"Tsukuyomi."

OoOoO

After spending most of that night up and reading, Jared slept most of the following day and as far as further research he was only able to get a glance at a map before his family left to go to their own home, carrying him along in a bundle of blankets.

~Ok, there is a BAY where Rain and River countries ought to be, and Wave simply isn't there.~ The superspy thought in surprise. ~Not to mention the coasts and mountain ranges are all messed up. I guess that when Konoha used the Tailed Beasts in battle, they weren't kidding that those critters could rearrange the landscape. Islands are missing and new land thrown up out of the sea, and the borders don't look anything like what I remember.~

A moment's more thought provided a further, chilling, realization.

~Oh boy! I don't know where ANYTHING is anymore!~

On the plus side, once his parents got him home they decided to play a new game with Jared, and that game was called, "Is there anything our clever little boy can't learn?"

And Jared was happy to answer, "No."

His mother almost immediately started to read to him out of children's storybooks, and it had something of the opposite of the usual effect. When most children's parents read to them the child following along learns to read. Instead, Jared started associating the known kanji for the unintelligible noises she'd been making and started to associate meaning with those sounds, starting to decode their otherwise incomprehensible dialect from that.

The Nara girl who'd been the spy in his room was there, in fact she moved in to their house on a more or less permanent basis as Jared's full-time minder and instructor, apparently on the basis of her success in getting him to hit the mark on a bullseye in return for some candy because she brought a small stack of books and scrolls and candy with her.

And what was on those books and scrolls? To Jared's delight it was all of the basic stuff every ninja had to know, but that never got described in the show. Things like sharpening your senses against enemy ambushes, or tracking very rapid attacks, increasing a body's development of muscle and dexterity, and retaining it longer so you didn't have to devote all day, every day, to training to achieve what they considered basic fitness.

Because let's face it, no Olympic athlete performs at anything close to the level of even the genin seen in the Naruto series, and Olympic training represents pretty much the best that real world fitness types have figured out how to do to a body.

For ninja to achieve more, they had to have more understanding or resources.

In this case it was both, and it amused Jared when he got to those scrolls himself and read through their contents to discover that these were all Senju-created techniques, shared with the village as part of the whole enticement package Hashirama used to tempt clans to form a ninja village in the first place.

~Makes sense, I suppose. People don't do things without reason, and offering these to other clans would have been a powerful incentive.~ Jared sucked on his foot, while reading over the scrolls, before he shook with the force of a powerful insight. ~And since these had all been Senju-ONLY techniques prior to the formation of villages, it makes more sense now why every time someone needed to fight the Uchiha, they'd called in the Senju clan to do it. If the Senju were moving at ninja-velocity while the Uchiha and everyone else was restricted to normal person speed, that would enable them to fight on much more equal terms against the predictive nature of the Sharingan.~

A moment's more thought revealed, ~One of the limits once imposed on the Sharingan was that they couldn't copy a jutsu without seeing the handseals - and these are all seal-less techniques, so the Uchiha wouldn't have been able to copy them.~

That would have made these Senju created techniques that allowed them to jump very far, run very fast, and fall for improbable distances without harm very frustrating for anyone who had to fight them without those advantages. ESPECIALLY the Uchiha, who took affront at anyone using techniques they couldn't copy.

Jared sat on his diapered bottom pondering that, and concluded, ~Yeah, getting offered to learn techniques that had always been able to defeat you and that you couldn't copy would have been a powerful incentive to the Uchiha to join a village.~

From reading this, Hashirama had obviously planned for the ninja villages to be essentially massive clans where people shared their techniques and skills with each other, and to start the whole thing off he had been happy to generously offer his own clan's secrets to anyone who joined with him in creating Konoha.

And it had worked. Other clans had joined and offered up some of their own trademark skills and abilities. From the Sarutobi clan had come what every student ninja in the series learns at the Academy: the basic clone, the Replacement technique, and the Disguise jutsu. From the Yamanaka and Nara clans came memory techniques they'd worked out together for absorbing and retaining large blocks of information easily - a priceless skill considering how many codes and passwords and things most ninja had to memorize, sometimes on a daily basis as they got reassigned or codes got broken during wartime.

The Yamanaka had also contributed a self-hypnosis technique for enabling the mind to completely forget certain blocks of information while enduring torture, so one could never be forced to give up certain knowledge, like how to perform clan techniques. One could not block away everything that way, but it was very helpful.

Akamichi had contributed food pills, concentrated rations that could keep a ninja active for three days.

The Nara, while using their shadows, had actually worked out some of the basic principles of the chakra string more or less by accident, and when they'd shared that knowledge with the Sarutobi some of those ninja had invented the Replacement technique - which on this world at least worked by sending out a chakra string to grab onto a loose object of approximately equal mass, then switching places with it.

The baby lay back and breathed out a very impressed breath of air at that remarkable feat before squirming around again to lay on his belly and read more of the scrolls.

Having sole access to this shared collection of village secrets would have been a massive advantage that could well have done as much as the Tailed Beasts to put Konoha in charge of the world for a time. But reading further, he discovered to his disappointment that part of the concessions forced out of the village when they'd lost the First Shinobi War was that virtually every other village had plundered Konoha's secrets and gotten access to them.

So now all of these tricks were basic knowledge, common across all of the Elemental Countries. Still, Jared eagerly absorbed them all, soaking them up like a sponge and happy to have them.

A baby was born as a digestive tract with eyes, everything else had to be developed, and he was still working on standing without aid as one of his current, major challenges. But while his body took months to improve, and could only grow so fast, there did not seem to be any such limit on his chakra.

Where to most young kids spending hours of dedicated practice to master a simple but boring chakra exercise was a drag and took time away from hanging out with friends or other things they'd rather be doing, as an infant the spy literally had no distractions - and where an hour of work before he got any results might be a painful price to a mature ninja, or even a teen, who had to fit that into a schedule already filled with other things, to Jared it was a joy and a relief from the prison that was his currently incapable body.

It was something to do.

For the time being chakra practice came pretty darn close to being his reason for living, as it was the one aspect of his life where his own efforts got rewarded by results at a meaningful pace. Rather than wait months until his legs were improved to where he was strong enough to walk, doing something like sending a chakra-charged wire or an intangible string to get an object after only a few hours was an idea that left him feeling positively giddy!

Konoha had never truly put all that much effort into fully developing the potential of chakra strings. However, Jared had seen the series, and knew of the kind of amazing things Suna had gotten up to with their puppet techniques. The full extent of that was almost certainly well beyond his current abilities without an expert puppet master to act as an instructor, which he didn't and probably would never have. Still, the idea of sending out chakra strings to act as magical prosthetics to serve in place of his currently incapable body sounded pretty good, as there was so much his tiny, infant body just could not do.

So he made place on his practice schedule for work on forming strings.

OoOoO

Fugaku Uchiha, Head of the Uchiha clan and Fifth Hokage (those two jobs had always been linked since the foundation of Konoha) lounged with his trademark perpetual scowl on his face as a blonde-haired kunoichi was brought in before his golden throne and laid upon the semi-precious mosaic tiled floor of his office.

"What is this interruption?" the Fifth Hokage gave a petulant growl, picking up a sweetened fish roll from off a tray of same and munching upon it noisily.

"Lord Hokage," the lead of the two Military Police officers bowed. Fugaku knew this one, one of the rare few Uchiha who had activated a Magnekyo Sharingan but not yet gone blind from the curse of bearing it.

Never mind. He would soon enough.

The officer continued speaking from his bow, not sensing his superior's thoughts, "You ordered that at first opportunity, an Uzumaki seal master to be brought before you. We have captured this kunoichi on her attempting to infiltrate Konoha, and she is an Uzumaki."

This was actually good enough to interrupt Fugaku's dinner. He waved aside the tray of expensive delicacies and wiped his hands on the sleeves of his robes, irreparably staining fabric that was worth more than most ninja saw in their lives. "Well," his scowl lightened somewhat, though nothing, not even the private company of his wife or sons, could remove it entirely. "That is interesting."

The Hokage rose, long robes sweeping the floor, immaculately polished by servants but scattered with debris from his dinner, behind him. Once, then twice the scowling man circled the unconscious Uzumaki, marking her face and that she still wore part of the dress of a peasant.

Bending low, Fugaku stroked a finger slowly along the helpless kunoichi's skin above her throat, the nails of his fingers over a foot long and curled. "Do you hold the secrets that we seek, little Uzumaki? Never mind, we shall know soon enough."

Fugaku reared back and laughed, filling that chamber with the highly unpleasant sound.

OoOoO

Over the next few days, now that he'd been mind-walked and pronounced clear of foreign influences, Jared spent a fair chunk of time attending other children's birthday parties.

The clans were HUGE!

It turned out, without chakra control training, only about twelve percent of any given ninja clan had enough innate control of their chakra to serve as the type of ninja seen in the series - the high power ones flinging jutsu around. Rather than fewer ninja, however, this just made for larger clans, as they had more children hoping to make up the numbers of ninja needed.

As for the rest? As Jared's father would later put it, "They still provide valuable service."

Some practiced pure martial arts and weapon techniques and became soldiers, mostly guards and stuff. The rest just filled out what support roles they could as nurses, farmers, tailors and blacksmiths, whatever jobs they could find.

And that was the case among the ninja families. Jared was told the numbers were even worse among the general populace, to the point where anyone born with sufficient chakra control to use jutsu stood out as unusual.

Jared was honestly surprised to find most doctors and nurses came from the ranks of those who had insufficient chakra control to become ninja. But medical chakra required perfect control, which almost no one had naturally, and since until he came along no one outside of the Uzumaki knew how to develop better control, medical ninja outside of that clan were nearly as scarce as sages were in the mainline. And even then the only really good ones were Uzumaki, because only they had the seal knowledge to perform so many of the advanced medical procedures.

Since the Village of Hidden Whirlpool, where the Uzumaki lived, did not loan out their medical ninja to other countries, what few non-Uzumaki medical ninja existed were treated like kings, almost. Only the wealthy could afford them and they had waiting lists miles long.

For everyone else that left ordinary medicine, drugs and surgery, as the best available - only without modern technology this was pre-industrial revolution medicine. So amputations and poison and leeches and all sorts of other harebrained stuff as likely to kill you as not.

And wasn't that disturbing?

~Actually,~ Jared considered as he sucked down his lunch at one of those parties. ~Maybe that is not entirely negative, as some of the worst villains of the show were deeply into medicine. Orochimaru without his experiments would be a very different creature, and Kabuto would hardly exist as the show described him. While creatures like Danzo might not have survived his wounds, so died young instead of lingering like a cancer on this world.~

A couple of screaming children ran past, while Jared was having lunch.

~Although, speaking of medicine reminds me of specialties that does bring up the question: What am I going to do with myself?~ here the spy snorted, almost getting milk up his nose. ~Actually, that's the wrong question. I should not be thinking 'what ninja specialty would I like?' The main character of this show *wanted* to be throwing powerful ninjutsu around, and had the chakra reserves to be incredible at it, yet despite years of wanting, was still left as a taijutsu specialist - at which he sucked. So my wants very well might not enter into things.~

~So what abilities have I got, or could get for myself?~

And the answer for that was more than a little depressing, as the only training he could be certain of getting was stuff he'd seen on the show, and could thus give himself. But that just wasn't very much. It touched on a whole lot of subjects briefly, but not in any detail.

So following that trail led to being a Jack of All Trades But Master of None. Only having a broad range of skills all at a very low level was not very conducive to building up the kind of enormous power levels required for survival in a highly competitive environment like this where super ninja smashed mountains. About the best that could be said for it was it would set him up pretty well to receive any further training he got later.

He was getting his 'The Basics of How To Be A Ninja' lessons from his Nara minder, but while necessary that wasn't particularly noteworthy. Everyone he met would know those.

His chakra control and affinities were excellent, but again that merely left him well-placed to receive any further training later.

Luckily, despite the paucity of medical ninja on this world, thanks to the show Jared had seen some of the training for Mystic Palm and could probably figure out the rest himself, to a point. A few exploded fish would just mean sushi for dinner. Well, for the adults, anyway. He was still stuck on his all-milk diet and would be for a while to come yet. But any medical knowledge at all was better than none, and Mystic Palm was supposed to be foundational, a key skill to all medical ninja.

Well, he certainly hoped that was true, as he couldn't think of another medical jutsu he could train himself in. So if that would be all he had, it would be nice if it were useful.

Yamanaka techniques were all but a given, in that he could hardly imagine any circumstance where the clan chose not to teach those to him. It went without saying his clan would want every expert at those they could get, and he was obviously among the few with enough chakra control to handle them.

Speaking of chakra control, Jared's mother had shifted a bit and he was slipping down just a touch, making his lunch harder to reach and interrupting his assessment. However, it was automatic for him by now to try and use wall walking when he wanted to shift his body about somewhere.

But when he tried to stick a hand to his mother - it didn't stick.

Jared spend a long moment hungry and puzzled by that. The first was solved a by a little wail that woke his mother up and got her to shift him within reach of his meal again, but the second bugged him long after.

That was when he suffered another epiphany.

~As near as I've been able to determine, all chakra techniques work by inserting my chakra into something, then using that chakra to control it.~ he restated to himself what he already knew. ~And the easiest place to start a technique is inside of my body where my chakra is strongest.~

He placed a hand filled with chakra onto his mother's face as she held him during his burping and before being put down to nap.

No adhesion at all, he confirmed.

~But in mom's body HER chakra is strongest! And that's probably a general rule. Her body has been infused with chakra all of her life, so is incredibly attuned to her energy and no other,~ he realized. ~So I can't stick to her. My chakra doesn't take hold. Hers rejects it.~

After a further minute of thought and further experimentation, he admitted, ~Even her clothes are hard to get my chakra into. But then that's logical as people's auras naturally stick out a few inches from our bodies, so her clothes would naturally be saturated with her chakra.~

Well, at least that probably explained why ninja didn't go around just causing each other's heads to explode via direct chakra manipulation. If your body was a focus for your own chakra it would have an incredible advantage against any foreign chakra trying to invade it.

So no Vader Death Grips on this world. Burning each other to death would be much easier.

From what he could observe and remember, the standard forms of battle were along the lines of 'I use my chakra to manipulate something, and that something kills you', rather than 'I use my chakra to take control of your body directly and cause it to implode'.

The only people he was aware of who ever made it their business to put their chakra inside others' bodies were the Hyuga, with their Gentle Fist. And that was precision, needle-like strikes of highly concentrated chakra to specific, vulnerable points, and did not use Hyuga chakra to take control so much as disrupt the victim's ability to control their own body.

Nobody else used invasive chakra as a technique, at least not that he could recall.

~Then again, it's not as if I'd read all of the manga,~ the superspy admitted to himself. ~Rae Hino only collected so many, as she didn't particularly care for the characters. And once the beautiful Sailor Mars decided that the techniques shown in the series were of no use in helping her refine her own abilities, she stopped following it.~

The little redheaded superspy grinned. ~Serena was so disappointed. She'd liked reading about the main character almost as much as she loved stealing Rae's manga..~ He sighed. ~There are missions where I really miss my beloved Sailor Scouts - most any mission they aren't on with me, really.~

One thing he really missed was Sailor Moon's ability to heal anything. Which brought him back to the paucity of medicine on this world.

~Okay, so pursuit of a medical specialty will be done, insofar as I can take it. I might never learn anything beyond the simple mystic palm, but even that would be worth it.~ The baby concluded. ~Yeah. I don't know about anyone else, but knowing that I am about to enter a profession where people get injured, and knowing that my family, team and best friends could all get hurt, I'd like to know how to put them back together. I'd like that very much.~

Which brought the young superspy up short, as he made the realization that medical chakra was the one thing that was designed to enter another person's body and yet still function to control that body under the medic's direction.

Definitely a topic to pursue later, as not only would more medicine be useful but Kabuto did make great offensive use out of chakra scalpels.

The redhaired infant sighed. ~A great pity I don't know how to train for that technique. Or much of anything about their medicine but the mystic palm, really.~

Oh well, at least he knew if he got the mixture right his chakra would turn green.

~So back on topic. What CAN I train myself in? What techniques can I count on?~

Nothing he hadn't covered before, really. What he could do for himself would make it easy to receive future training, if such got offered, but wouldn't do for a technique base by itself.

~A depressing conclusion. Okay, so that's it for just what I could teach myself without help. Not a lot. Now what kind of a ninja would I be if I could choose to learn anything?~

Medicine was a given, for all of those reasons already stated. Seals also, as they seemed to be able to do anything. But he frankly had to admit that seals and medicine were almost certainty the two things most unlikely for him to have opportunity to learn.

So what else was there?

Most of what he'd seen in the show was high-powered martial arts action, only the superspy had to admit he would have no special advantage there and being mediocre did not appeal. Some would be required, it would be a weakness otherwise, but if he was going to excel as a ninja it was better to pick something he'd have a natural advantage at.

~Really, if I could pick anything, something like Temari's wind specialty sounds *very* attractive.~

Temari had been quite effective. Good enough that martial arts and weapon specialists hardly ever reached her. ~And since I am presently stuck in a ninja world, the idea that I could have a specialty that makes it difficult for other ninja to put knives in me sounds very appealing.~

And while a good martial artist could block weapons aimed towards himself, a master of wind techniques could not only do that, they could also deflect attacks away from their whole team. So if you cared for other people and wanted to protect them, wind was a good specialty to have.

He didn't have Gaara's sand, but wind mastery could be almost as good.

Jared was headed toward the affinity and control to be good at it. So becoming a wind master could serve him well. ~Then again, being honest here, since I have no guarantee of getting access to training in ANYTHING, it's probably best if I continue on as I have been doing and just practice every ninja skill I can.~

After all, look at Naruto's situation. With his ridiculous chakra capacity and wind affinity he was poised to be amazing at wind techniques... and they never let him. They kept him ignorant. First and last, his primary technique arsenal never really grew beyond his starting two: clone himself a bunch of times, and hit things with a big ball of chakra. The only use he ever got out of his wind affinity was to add an element to his Big Ball o' Chakra.

And that caused a realization that brought Jared up short, as that Big Ball o' Chakra aka the Rasengan, or Spiraling Sphere, was the only offensive jutsu he knew whose training all got spelled out in detail by the show - thus the only one he knew all of the training for.

Which meant he would be learning it as soon as he possibly could, of course.

OoOoO

A giant Akamichi with a rake over one shoulder stepped over the wall of the compound and into the back yard, reverting to normal size as he did so.

It was really quite amazing to watch those guys at work. Give one a rake with the proper tines and he goes giant and can plow a field with it in a few strokes. Give one a shovel and he goes giant, then each spadeful turns over so much dirt that in an hour or so you've got an entire irrigation canal or fish pond. Don't like the slope of that hill? Give an Akamichi a hoe and he'll fix it for you in a couple of minutes.

Those guys did most of the farming in town that way. Well, okay, they served as giant farm machinery making the work of the ordinary peasants faster and easier, but the principle was the same - without the Akamichi, Konoha wouldn't eat. Not this Konoha, anyway. They were too small to be self-sufficient, and most of the non-ninja working class had been drafted into servant roles supporting and making fancy things for the Uchiha.

This Konoha had a better silk industry than they did a farm infrastructure for feeding themselves in time of war. But the Uchiha didn't care. They had to have their fancy robes!

Placing aside his rake, the smiling Akamichi grinned and joined the party.

It was five days after Shikamaru's One Month Old party that they were attending Ino's (the clan heads really must have gone to some effort to time their children's births so precisely together, as five days was nothing. They could have, and come to think of it probably were, conceived on the same day - Ewww!).

Jared was in the yard, practicing with bamboo.

Bamboo was amazing in that it could grow six inches per day, no problem. That meant if you wanted to fill plants with chakra and 'listen' to how growth 'sounded', to see if you could get an idea of what plant growth felt like to chakra, bamboo was an excellent choice. Also flowers that closed up every night, and sunflowers that twisted to follow the sun. All of which, by convenient stroke of luck, were in the Yamanaka clan head's gardens.

While he was doing that, the infant superspy was also considering another experiment. Namely, could he teach his chakra control techniques to other kids?

After much contemplation he'd already reached the conclusion that he would be far safer if he shared his exercises around the trio of allied clans, as the more powerful and able his protectors were, the better they would be at keeping him safe.

Also, babies are quick to pick stuff up.

Jared spent all of that day going from child to child, accumulating chakra to his hands and then sticking those hands to his fellow babies out of all three clans. Then he'd crawl up walls, over furniture and down curtains and at the end crawl over those very same babies.

He nearly wept with joy when the first one started sticking to her favorite blanket.

It was Ino, oddly enough.

OoOoO

Having caused the clans another panic attack, it was natural, he supposed, that they be spending the night together, adults on guard with kunai in their hands while babies lay on top of each other in untidy piles in the one available crib.

Piles came to mind mostly because little Ino, the One Month Old girl, had started using her chakra to stick to everything, and exhausted herself badly enough she was so deeply asleep she was not waking up to complain about needing her diaper changed.

And it was a stinker.

Though troubled by the scent, Jared didn't feel he could do anything about it. All of his skill at cleaning his own diapers relied on the fact that as his filth, it was filled with his chakra, and that was something he had control over.

Still, Ino had on a truly nasty gasser, and though the other babies were sleeping through it, Jared couldn't.

The problem was, if he wanted to do something about it, he'd have to send out enough of his chakra to cancel hers just to reach zero. Then he'd have to fill it up with his own all over again so he could have the control needed to dispose of the lump of waste, and frankly that whole procedure sounded like it would be murderously expensive in chakra.

He didn't even know if he had enough to complete her diaper cleaning, and as much as knocking himself out from chakra exhaustion appealed as a way to escape the smell, he didn't want to get halfway through having her waste crawl to the diaper bucket before he passed out, leaving the lump of foulness out in the middle of the crib where some baby would inevitably roll over it, spreading that filthiness around until it got on every baby.

Lightning the gasses on fire granted momentary relief, but only for so long, and did nothing to solve the core problem.

Jared sighed. The problem lay in overcoming her chakra in that muck, as if it was infused with his own it would be easy enough to animate it and get rid of it. His own parents hadn't had to change his diaper in a month.

Actually... the boy blinked. Chakra draining was something seen frequently enough in the show. One of the legendary swords did it, Infinite Armor and both kinds of chakra armor from Snow country all did it. Orochimaru and that guy from the chunin exams whose name no one bothers to remember did it, and if he recalled from one of the databooks well enough, both what Orochimaru did, as well as Mr Nameless did was specifically described as a technique.

Well, if it was a technique, then perhaps Jared could learn it? In fact, he even recalled some details about the spin of someone's chakra being important, and that to absorb it you just had to draw the chakra someone else had molded inside yourself, then reverse the spin, and it would disperse into its separate mental and physical energies and you could then add those to your own.

Oh, and physical contact was required in all cases he could think of.

~Well, [Expletive Deleted]! I'm a baby, I'm not allowed squeamishness!~ Jared rammed his hand down the back of Ino's diaper and began to get to work on assuming control of the chakra infused lump he found there.

~And the odd thing is,~ he thought, trying desperately to distract himself from the depths of embarrassment this activity caused his adult mind. ~This is probably as close to the ideal circumstances to learn chakra draining as you're ever going to get. I mean, how often in life are you going to come across an undefended lump of someone else's chakra just lying around for you to practice on?~

Of course, it went without saying this was another of those activities he was never going to admit to anybody.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Okay, this is probably the last of the extended baby periods and potty humor. I hope, anyway.

Food pills exist in the show that are supposed to grant a ninja energy for three days, and they gobble them like candy every time they need a recharge during a fight, it seems. But the Akamichi clan are all about food, to the point of wearing the symbol for food on their clothing, so if they'd contributed any secret knowledge to the village as they joined it, how to make those pills seemed like a pretty good fit.

Everything got developed by somebody. No matter how common something is, at some point someone had to be the first to create it. So, SOMEBODY invented the Academy techniques in the show, and so on, and it just seemed nice to spread that credit around.

Besides, the Senju clan had to be doing something right if they were the ones everyone called on every time someone had to fight the Uchiha, so having them be the ones to invent the means ninja use to move at impossible speeds seemed entirely appropriate.