Amy had ended up bringing Naruto to the grocery store with her since she didn't know what else to do with him, as she was afraid he would either get into or cause some sort of trouble if she left him alone in her apartment. Fortunately, the boy had seemed to know what a toilet was when she'd showed him the bathroom, so that was one less thing she had to worry about when it came to the child that Hannibal and the others had foisted off onto her. The way he'd made a face at the shower and refused to step inside the bathroom though showed that there was cultural line somewhere that the room somehow crossed.

She added studying Japanese customs to the list of things she would need to do in the very near future on the off chance that the boy had been raised in a similar culture as well as having been raised using a similar language. She'd heard something about taking one's shoes off upon entering a home being something Japanese people did, and that was something that the boy Had done the instant he'd entered her apartment.

The boy had been rather curious about her car when he'd seen it, and excited about the ride to the store despite the fact that he'd spent more than twelve hours in the van on the way down here. That was probably because the boy had spent most of that van ride sleeping, and had woken up once somewhere outside of Modesto before rather quickly getting bored with the scenery and going back to sleep. Aside from the fact that the boy had bounced in his seat and played around with the power window and power locks on her car the way a small child would, the ride to the grocery store was rather uneventful.

When she got to the store, she did her best to keep an eye on the boy because Murdock had warned her that one of the meanings of the Japanese word "Shinobi" was theft, which was something Ninja did. Naruto however seemed to content himself with running around the clean and highly modern supermarket she shopped at, excitedly examining everything and chattering away in Japanese. If he'd stolen anything, she hadn't seen him do it. As Naruto flitted about like an over-sized hummingbird, making excited comments about anything and everything that had caught his eye, an old Asian man who had been shopping in the store looked at the kid in surprise before he snapped something at the boy which had quieted him down for the roughly two minutes after the man had subsequently snubbed the boy who had tried talking to him, and before the kid had gotten to the canned soup aisle and spotted the instant noodles. What he did when he spotted them was slightly bizarre. After bypassing the Top Ramen packets, he'd examined the exteriors of the Cup 'O Noodles cups as if he were looking for something before picking one of the styrofoam cups up off the shelf and turning it around in his hands several times, after which he lightly sniffed the cup that he'd picked up to examine more closely.

There was a earsplittingly loud cry of "RAMEN!", and before she knew it, the shopping cart into which she'd heaved a ten pound bag of rice and little else since she'd been too busy trying to keep an eye on the boy who'd been racing around the store while simultaneously running her mind over a list of anything she'd heard of having been served in Japan was filled with Cup 'O Noodles cups in all available flavors. She was rather certain that a diet that consisted entirely of instant noodles wasn't healthy, but it looked like it had made the boy who had been torn from all that he knew and flung into an alien world happy, so she scooped about half of the cups out of the cart, and kept the rest. She would have to introduce the boy to healthier foods soon though.

Eventually, the slightly nerve-wracking and somewhat expensive shopping trip was over, and they made their way back to her apartment where the boy shot through the door and started excitedly putting everything away. The instant everything was away in its respective cupboards with a number of Cup 'O Noodles cups that hadn't fit anywhere stacked on the counter, the boy had rather eagerly filled her teakettle with water and set it on the stove which he knew how to work to boil. As the water heated up, the boy frantically searched the kitchen for something before snatching the pair of chopsticks that had come with an order of Chinese food she'd eaten with Murdock after his last escape from the hospital the week before out of her pen cup where Murdock had presumably set them with a victorious cry.

Considering the fact that the boy had completely ignored the utensils in the utensil drawer that he had opened and closed in his search for the chopsticks which he was now cleaning in the sink, she would have to make a note to get more chopsticks later.

Naruto impatiently wiggled in his seat as he waited for his ramen to be ready. He'd always hated the three-minute wait which was apparently the same here as it was back home. This three-minute wait here though was agonizing because there were a number of worries attached. This ramen was from another world and was therefore unfamiliar. Would it be the same as the instant ramen back home? If not, would it even taste okay?

It was better to think about the ramen, and how he had to wait for it to be ready than other things. If he stopped to think, things would become overwhelming. Right now, he had something to focus on other than the subjects that would otherwise drive him mad, which was good. If he focused entirely on the ramen that was sitting on the table before him, that almost insanity inducing feeling of knowing his Chakra was there but that he couldn't use it for much faded into the background. He could feel the Chakra circulating through him as he had learned to do back at the Academy and again during one of the lessons Kakashi-sensei had given Team 7, but so far, he couldn't make it do anything really aside from boosting his reflexes a bit, but not enough to do say a Shunshin for instance, and he could feel it replenishing his stamina to a degree that wasn't quite at his normal level. No matter how hard he tried though, he couldn't do a Jutsu or water or tree walk to save his life, and that was distressing.

Was this how Lee felt?

Aargh, he wasn't going to focus on that. He was going to focus on his ramen, his lovely, tasty, otherworldly ramen which would be ready in two minutes. He wouldn't focus on the Chakra problem, he wouldn't focus on the fact that he may be stuck in this strange world where only Murudaku-san and random old people in markets that refused to talk to him understood him forever. The place where Murudaku-san had said he would stay for a while until either he himself or Ero-senin found a way to get him back home both was and wasn't strange, and it was the not-strangeness that bothered him the most, since it was the not-strangeness that made him almost feel as if if he just found the right direction to run in, he would find Ero-senin impatiently waiting for him, even though that wasn't the case. The Eimi lady's home was clearly an apartment, and much larger than his apartment, and it seemed normal enough, except in one area. In what the Eimi lady said was the "bathroom", what was obviously the bath and the toilet were in the same room which was just gross, and the woman had walked in there without toilet slippers. In fact, there were no toilet slippers. Now that he thought about it, Eimi Aren-san didn't take her shoes off when she came into the apartment either.

Weird.

Weird, and slightly gross.

No time to think about that! It was time for ramen, and his stomach was all grumbly and whatnot. That could either be because he'd missed a couple of meals, or because the Kyuubi had been going nuts since he'd arrived in this world.

He wouldn't think about that either.

He took a hesitant bite of the ramen that was sitting before him on the table. It was okay for instant, but it wasn't the best. He started eagerly chowing down.

"That was good." he said to the woman who had watched him eat in shock, apparently surprised at how fast he could put away ramen, much like a couple of the poor suckers he'd duped into buying him lunch at the Ichiraku Ramen stand had been. Iruka-sensei had learned his lesson the first time, and had never let him get all he could eat on his dime again. He had nothing on Kakashi-sensei when it came to speed-eating though. That man could down an entire super-sized bowl of Ichiraku ramen in the amount of time it took to blink.

Again, he got a look of blank incomprehension in response to what he'd said. According to Murudaku-san, that was to be expected since, in this world, most of the people who spoke his language lived in a small island country that was across the ocean, and almost everyone who lived in the place he'd found himself in spoke something called "Eigo". He did these little tests though, to be sure, just like how he'd pretended to be asleep during most of the trip down to the city in which Murudaku-san and his friends lived to see how they would behave around him if they thought he wasn't aware of what they were doing. When they didn't try to hurt him and had spent most of the trip just sitting there and talking to each-other in that Eigo language while Feisu-san inexpertly toyed with the weapons he'd found in his jacket instead, he'd deemed it safe enough to actually fall asleep for a few hours since he didn't know when he'd get another chance to do so. He'd been taught to always eat when he could and sleep when he could because there were no guarantees that he would be able to later.

There was something a little strange about the group of people he'd found himself with. Aside from Eimi-san who was clearly a civilian, they both were and weren't like civilians. They moved wrong for civilians, but they also clearly didn't know how to properly handle weapons if Feisu-san and Han'nibaru-san's almost careless handling of his weapons was any indication. One of the things that clearly marked Eimi-san's friends as not-civilians despite the fact that they didn't move or act quite like Ninjas or former Ninjas had been how the one who led the group had gotten him to follow one of his orders. The way the man had called him to attention had been in the same authoritative manner that demanded instant obedience that the Instructors back at the Academy used, especially when they wanted to stop a spar that was getting out of hand, and he'd automatically responded the way he would have back at the Academy. It was a good thing that Han'nibaru-san hadn't wanted to hurt him then. If someone tried that trick on him on the battlefield, it could have proven deadly.

After Murudaku-san had been dropped off at the hospital where he'd been grabbed and dragged inside by a couple of burly medics, he had tried holding a conversation with someone else. Eimi-san and Bi-Ei-san had looked at him in incomprehension like Eimi-san was now. Han'nibaru-san and Feisu-san hadn't given him that look, but Feisu-san had asked him to slow down a number of times and given one word replies to his questions. Han'nibaru-san's replies were longer, but it was clear that he didn't understand him all that well either.

When he'd asked where the two men had learned some of his language, they'd given him two different answers. Han'nibaru-san had said Chousen, and Feisu-san had said something he couldn't remember or pronounce that had started with a sound similar to "Bi". Since he didn't have a map of the strange world he'd found himself in, he couldn't tell if they were talking about two different countries that might be near "Japan" as it was called in Eigo or being dishonest about where they had learned what little of his language they knew. Like Murudaku-san, they seemed to be honest, but some of the non-verbal cues weren't there. That could be accounted for by the difference in worlds however.

Eventually, he and Eimi-san had been dropped off at her apartment where he had learned several new words in Eigo, and had been brought to an ultra-modern market where there was old people who understood him and didn't speak to him other than to yell at him for bothering them, and ramen.

At least there was something right in this world. Where there was ramen, there were sure to be other good things. He would just have to find them.

In another world, Uchiha Itachi and Hoshigaki Kisame impatiently rested in trees that were close to a main road which ran North to South through Hot Water Country. They'd been there for hours, and despite the reliable intelligence they'd received which had given them the impression that their target would have passed through here well before now, their target had so far failed to arrive in order to be ambushed.

"How much longer?" an exceedingly bored Kisame who was feeling an increasingly pressing need to take a leak asked, daring to speak because the road was completely empty for miles in either direction, as was usually the case at this point in the afternoon.

"Another day." came the quiet reply from Itachi who was just as bored as Kisame, yet not letting it show. He'd never liked stakeouts.

Meanwhile, several miles away and completely unaware of the trap that had been rather impatiently waiting for him and his student, a rather bleary eyed Jiraiya sat scratching notes on a pad that was usually reserved for "research" as he had done for the last twenty-odd hours, still having made no progress in making heads or tails of his student's experimental seal.

Edited 8/5/12.