Ooo Chapter 7: Phantoms ooO

Naruto blinked, almost positive he was still dreaming. "What?"

Jiraiya beckoned aggressively. "I said, 'get the hell up, kid! We're leaving!'"

"Right now?"

"Yes, right now! What, did you think I actually get up this early because I'm a morning person?" The big man's snarled hair and gummy eyes were a testament to how true that was.

"But I haven't seen you in… And I thought I still had a whole week? And what are you sitting…?" Naruto trailed off as he poked his head out the window. A monstrous eye peered back at him, and he promptly choked and hit his head on the window frame at the same time. "What the HELL?"

Jiraiya looked grumpy. "I'm the toad hermit. It's a toad."

Naruto had scrambled across his room, to the far door, clutching his blanket and waving a hand around. "It's three stories tall!"

"Yep," Jiraiya said, patting the slimy head affectionately. "He's almost as old as I am."

"Don't patronize me, boss," croaked the toad in what could only be described as a thoroughly grating and obnoxious voice.

"It TALKS!" Naruto cried, clawing at his face and wilting to the floor.

"Stop being so dramatic, brat," Jiraiya grumbled. "Hop on. We've got places to be."

"Don't I need to get packed?"

The big man gave him a cock-eyed looked. "Aren't you already?"

Ooo

An hour later, a distinctly cranky looking Jiraiya and a disheveled but well packed Naruto showed up in front of the massive city gates. As it turned out, Jiraiya had misinformed the Hokage as far as dates and travel time were concerned, and if they'd left a week later, they would have missed the opening exams. Naruto was in the dark as to why this mattered, exactly, but he was eight and apparently not considered among the 'need to know' crowd. So there they were. Along with his overstuffed pack, Naruto was hauling along his nearly repaired kite, much to Jiraiya's dismay.

"What the hell is that supposed to be?" the big man had asked.

Naruto, feeling less than charitable toward him, only stuck out his tongue and maneuvered the kite away so that the big shinobi couldn't get a good look at it.

"Children," the man had muttered.

They waited for several minutes before Naruto finally asked, "What are we waiting for, sensei?"

Jiraiya gave him a strange look before answering, "Your teammates, of course. You can't just waltz into Iwa by yourself. It would look too suspicious."

Naruto thought about this, and opened his mouth to point out the obvious problem—that he was eight, and it would look suspicious anyway—when a burst of wind announced the arrival of two people.

They were two of the three genin from his original trio of bodyguards—the red haired boy with the black stripe across his eyes, and—"Hana!" he managed to say, feeling his stomach squirm with unease as he remembered the events of the previous night. Did she know about the wolves' offer?

"Yo, Naruto," she said in a subdued voice. He tried not to read too much into it; maybe she was just tired.

Naruto's eyes darted away from her and landed on the older boy. He opened his mouth, wondering if he'd ever known the boy's name, and the other boy lifted a hand in greeting, obviously about to offer it.

A thought occurred to him, and he abruptly turned to Jiraiya. "What the hell, sensei? Nobody's gonna believe I'm on a team with these guys!"

Jiraiya chuckled in that careless way of his. "We'll figure something out. Yosh! Let's get on the road!"

The two gate guards sighed in relief as the group walked by, obviously envisioning a long vacation from Naruto-induced public disturbances. Naruto himself gave them a long parting look, silently promising double the 'disturbances' when he returned, and saw one of them swallow nervously.

They had just set foot on the dirt road—the road that would take them, eventually, to the land of mountains called Iwa—when a sharp voice called out. "Jiraiya!"

All four of them turned to see the Hokage standing in the middle of the gates, clothed in his robes of office, sans the hat. "I know you have a penchant for stealing away without telling anybody, dear student," the old man said in an irritated tone. "But kindly don't force your habits onto my boy." And he looked at Naruto.

He hadn't said goodbye. In the next instant Naruto had dropped all of his things in the road and sprinted back to the gates, catching the old man in a fierce hug. An idea came to him. "Come with us, Ojiisan!"

"I can't, Naruto," the Hokage laughed, patting him on the back before releasing him at arm's length. "One of the drawbacks of being a leader, I'm afraid. But I'll tell you what. I will be there for the third test."

"There's three?" Naruto gaped. No wonder the Exams took so long.

"Now, Naruto," the Hokage said, growing sober. "You're going to be in enemy—well, technically they aren't our enemies, but practically speaking—you'll be in hostile territory, and that means that you won't have to work very hard to give people a reason to try to hurt or even kill you." Not that they need much of a reason now, Naruto thought, but he remained silent as the old man continued. "Stay close to your teammates, don't try to handle anything on your own, and… I don't know how to put this best, but… don't do anything scandalous, Naruto. Try to act conservatively at all times. Don't do anything to make yourself stand out."

Naruto frowned harder the longer the old man talked. This was going to be… difficult. Excruciating, even, to use a word that Dog had defined for him last week (they'd been discussing sealing and what could happen to your face if you triggered one the wrong way). But he nodded anyway, just to see the worry lines on Oji-san's face smooth away.

"You're a good kid," the Hokage said affectionately, ruffling his yellow hair and standing up to look at the rest of the group. "Send regular reports, even after you meet up with the other Konoha teams. Be smart. Be safe." He smiled down at Naruto. "And that goes for you most of all, squirt."

Naruto gave him a cheeky salute, and then they were well and truly off.

The day was sunny, but just a little on the cool side, and the breeze was blowing at their backs, kicking up dust on its way by. The big old trees encroaching on the road sighed, flashing the undersides of their leaves and tossing them into the road like a crowd throwing flowers to a war party. It was a perfect day for walking.

Naruto hated walking.

He held his tongue for several miles, looking anxiously up at each member of his team, hoping for some sign that soon they would start hopping through trees, or sprinting, or at least taking up a light jog. But they all moseyed along as if they had never heard of the word 'haste', and Naruto finally brought it up himself.

"We should race!"

His two 'team-mates' glanced back at him incredulously, while Jiraiya just snorted. "Kid, we've got a long way to go today, and a long way to go tomorrow. You need to conserve energy if you want to get anywhere."

Naruto frowned. "Then let's just run, and get a long long way in one day. We'll get there twice as fast!"

"I don't think you understand how far it is from here to Iwa, gaki."

"I understand that if you want to get somewhere, it helps to move."

A vein began to throb in Jiraiya's temple. "Pipe down and enjoy the journey, kid! Look around, it's beautiful!" The angry tone in which he said it made the words ironic rather than inspiring.

Sighing to himself, Naruto decided to get some work in while they walked. For the next several miles, he strode out ahead of the group, taking running jumps with his kite and lifting off with bursts of chakra. Then he would circle back and coast in behind them before running forward to start all over again.

It was not unlike a dog who runs circles around a sedately walking master, getting in several times the mileage in the same trip.

The two genin watched him at this with rising and ebbing levels of amusement, cheering when he made a good takeoff or lifting particularly high, and laughing when he hit the dirt several yards behind them or landed in unusually placed shrubbery.

Jiraiya, looking skyward as if praying to the gods for patience, growled, "Naruto, every time you do that, every shinobi within in a five mile radius of us jumps and chokes on his sandwich. Do you have any idea how much chakra you're using?"

Naruto just grunted as he pelted by again. "Yep. It's a problem."

Jiraiya looked even more exasperated. "Then why are you doing it? Whatever it is you're trying to do, it's not even working!"

Naruto soared by overhead, cackling. "Seems like it's working to me!" Of course, Jiraiya hadn't seen Naruto's earlier accomplishment—jumping from the waterfall and flying all the way back to the village—and had no idea that Naruto wasn't trying for sustained flight at the moment. He was trying out different techniques for moving through the air, and with each attempt—each failure—he was that much closer to coming to his answer.

But Jiraiya just saw a kid wasting energy. "Look, unless you want a full patrol unit swooping down on us and possibly trying to retain us for questioning, you might want to not spit out chakra like a god-dammed strobe light, don't you think?"

Naruto skidded in behind them again, cursing as he stumbled over a rough patch. "It's obvious we're from Konoha, isn't it? Do they investigate every time other ninjas use chakra?"

"Other ninjas don't mold chakra with that kind of intensity or regularity unless there's a battle going on, which is what makes it so unnerving and worthy of investigation in the first place. So quit!"

Naruto's whiskered face took on a surly expression. "Well, what am I supposed to do, then? We're not running, and you guys aren't talking."

Hana, who seemed to be the most willing to humor the high-strung kid, asked, "What would you like to talk about, Naruto-sama?"

Naruto blinked at her teasing, hoping it meant she wasn't mad about the wolf situation. That thought led him to notice something else. "Hana, where's your puppy?"

"Haimaru?" She asked, a wistful expression crossing her face. "I had to leave him home. The 'Wolf Clan' of Konoha is too well recognized, and the Hokage thought it would be a bad idea to call attention to ourselves that way in Iwa. Especially since Haimaru is so little still."

Naruto scratched his cheek, considering this. "But… your face tattoos…don't those give you away too?"

She nodded appreciatively. "Good question. But lots of clans that have special contracts with beast clans have them. Not all of the tattoos in my family are the same, I'm sure you've noticed. Some families even have them for other reasons."

The red haired boy spoke up, pointing at the stripe over his eyes. "My family does it, and we don't have a beast contract."

Naruto opened his mouth, realizing he still didn't know the boy's name, when Jiraiya spoke. "My family has had a pretty tight association with the toads for a long time—not the same as the Inuzuka by any means, but different from the average contract. Hence our stripes."

"What do they mean?" Naruto asked, curious. He had often wondered where the whisker-like markings on his own face had come from. Maybe his family—whoever they had been—were a beast clan?

"Different things," Hana said. "Mine simply mark me as an adult of the clan. If you joined the clan, for example," she added, carefully not looking at him, "you would probably receive the dot over each eye signifying you were an honorary or adopted member."

Jiraiya glanced between them, noting her odd tone and Naruto's painfully neutral expression. The old man knew enough about the kid to know that Naruto's face was never neutral. But if the moment stretched longer than was comfortable, no one commented.

The conversation lapsed, and soon Naruto was getting fidgety again. He fiddled with the massive kite; he walked on his hands for a respectable distance and even conned the red-haired boy into joining him; he threw every rock in the road as high into the sky as he could. He had just begun hopping up and trying to mold chakra out his feet—to mixed results—when Jiraiya finally snapped. "For gods' sakes, you hopped-up crack-ball of psychedelic-orange colored crazy! Take a break, would ya?!"

Naruto scowled at the big man. "Well what am I supposed to do?"

"I don't know!" the Sannin said, flailing his arms. "Figure it out! Find some way to entertain yourself!"

"That's what I was—"

"Hey Naruto," interrupted Hana, heading the confrontation off. "I'll tell you about the plants we pass on the road, if you want." Naruto gave her a dubious glance before she explained. "I can tell you which ones are really useful, which ones are poisonous, which ones you can eat…"

Looking slightly more interested despite himself, Naruto tilted his head. "Okay…"

Jiraiya shook his head, relieved and exasperated. His pounding headache from the night before surely wasn't helping, and it might have just been the hangover, but he had a pit of dread in his stomach that was only growing. He used to be so cute, the Sannin lamented. He used to hang on every word I said! What happened? All he knew was that this trip was, more and more, exactly not what he'd signed up for. Damn you, Sarutobi.

Ooo

"Damn you, Sarutobi!" growled the old woman. Koharu, his one-time teammate. He watched the spit fly from her mouth—so furious was she—and all he could think was that once, long long ago, he had loved this woman. She had been a real beauty, full of spirit and integrity.

But she'd changed. Or maybe he'd changed her. He sometimes wondered if he was cursed—so many people had died around him. But the worst for him were the ones who never went away—they just twisted and faded in spirit. Orochimaru. Jiraiya and Tsunade. Homura. Koharu. She had been shining and incorruptible, and now she was screaming at him, demanding the death of a child.

Perhaps he had pushed her away, like he'd pushed away his wife, and Asuma, his oldest son. Perhaps he had lived too long, to see his mistakes come full circle as they had. He gave a weary sigh. "I am tired of having this discussion with you two. You have made your opinions quite clear—they have been duly noted...and discarded."

She straightened as if he'd slapped her, and Homura stiffened in the dimness behind her. Koharu's response was a hiss. "You… arrogant bastard. You would let the demon traipse its poor sham of a puppet all over the earth, doing as it pleases…and Konoha will burn. You will be the end of this village, you senile old man."

"You and I are the same age, Koharu. And I am not the one who wants to spill innocent blood."

"Innocent!" she spat. "Innocent! It resides behind a thin shell, and though the child may be innocent, his life was forfeit the very moment your gods-praised Yondaime made of him the abomination he is today. We are not Suna. We are not Iwa. We are not Kumo. We do not create and shelter monsters!"

"Apparently we do," Sarutobi replied, staring at her.

She would have struck him then, he was sure, if Homura hadn't stepped forward and placed a hand on her shoulder. "It's not worth it," he murmured.

Sarutobi's heart ached. It wasn't worth trying to see the other side of the picture. It wasn't worth trying to see the life of a boy above the demise of a demon. It wasn't worth all the years they had laughed and bled and cried for each other. They had been a team once—just they three against the rest of the world. It hurt to stand against them. But he would not waver or stumble. If he didn't stand up for Naruto, then who would?

No one. Against the unbridled will of the council, he would be a babe in a storm.

As his two oldest friends walked silently away, he said nothing. He didn't try to convince them. He had tried it before, and all he could say was 'he is not' to their 'he is', and neither side had any proof one way or the other. He could go on about what a truly good, strong, noble person Naruto was until he was red in the face, and it would mean nothing to them without hard proof, and hard proof did not exist. He could not bend for them. So he let them go.

Ooo

The first night they spent in an outpost was an educational experience for Naruto. It was a lot like it sounded—an unmanned little building, back from the road a ways and marked by a stack of stones with the Konoha leaf painted in red. The trail leading to it was densely overgrown with summer grass and paintbrush flowers and creeping maples. If it weren't for the stone 'cairn', as Jiraiya called it, Naruto might never have noticed the path at all.

The outpost itself was built up high in the canopy of pines, supported between a pair of them, and though the silvered wood marked the building's age, it stood just as sturdily as the day it was built.

They scaled the trees just as the sun was setting, and found the door a bit rusty. But the interior was clean, the six bunks were fresh, and a faint smoky scent hung in the air. There was even a fireplace, snugged up against the trunk of the big tree and insulated with a stone chimney, and a stack of fresh tinder next to it. The windows were narrow—easily defendable, Jiraiya said—but they were pointed east and west to let in the maximum light.

"Boy, we're roughing it now," the red-haired boy muttered, rolling out his sleeping bag on one of the bunks.

Naruto was too busy looking around with delight to make a point of asking for the kid's name. This was better than his apartment, and for most of the year, nobody used it!

"Hate this stretch of road," Jiraiya was muttering to himself, unpacking the dinner utensils. "Not a brothel or bathhouse in living memory…"

Naruto frowned at that, wondering what a brothel was and why the big shinobi needed a bath after only one day on the road. However, he was quickly consumed with the problem of propping up his kite in the tiny quarters, and running out of ideas. Even collapsed as it was, it took up an awkward amount of space.

"Kid," Jiraiya warned, after Naruto smacked him on the head for a second time.

"Sorry, it's just big," Naruto said unnecessarily. He turned to the Sannin with a bright look, accidentally whacking him again. "Neh, Jiraiya-sensei. You should teach me something tonight!"

"I—agh!—I have a good idea what it'll be, too. Just hand me the rice from your pack and—gah—put that thing outside for now, will ya?"

Naruto enthusiastically complied with both requests, brimming with excitement over what awesome secrets the big shinobi might impart.

They all pitched in to make the simple dinner of fried rice and vegetables with gusto. And though it was made with egg mix and dehydrated veggies, after a long day of travel and a surprising level of chakra depletion, it was one of the best meals Naruto had ever eaten.

After they had cleared and scraped their plates, to be washed in the nearest stream tomorrow morning, Jiraiya pulled out ink and scrolls and began to tell the three about Fuinjutsu.

To Naruto's surprise, this was something that Hana and the red-haired kid knew almost nothing about—from his own talks with Dog, he was just a smidge ahead of them. So it happened that Jiraiya found an audience of three who happened to be both attentive and ignorant: his favorite combination.

The big shinobi sat cross-legged in front of a blank scroll, sleeves rolled up and inked brush poised. He looked up at them, expression grave, and spoke in a voice dripping with portent. "Before we begin, I'd like you three—yes, all three—to know that Fuinjutsu is a highly sought after art, and there are very few who could call themselves versed, let alone masters, of the discipline. Even the meanest ounce of knowledge is precious, and there are not many who would pass on their knowledge lightly. So consider yourselves deeply fortunate that I have deigned—Naruto, stop yawning, dammit!"

Naruto clapped his jaw shut.

Jiraiya gave a growling sigh. "Yes, deeply fortunate that I… that I… Ah, the hell with it. What kinds of seals are you all familiar with?"

"Warding seals," Hana volunteered. "Medical seals, and concealment ones."

"Exploding tags," the red-haired kid spoke up with understandable enthusiasm.

Naruto tapped his chin, thinking about Dog. "Summoning seals. Containment seals. Pocket-dimension seals. Open and closed cycle seals… multipliers, siphons, element manipulators, flash and timed triggers, grounders, self-sustaining—"

"Whoah, whoah, whoah," Jiraiya interrupted, waving his hands while the other two laughed in surprise and incredulity. "That's getting a little ahead of things. You're getting into classes and components there, turbo. Let's stick with the basics for now."

"You're a weird little kid, Naruto," said Hana, still laughing.

Naruto sat back and crossed his arms, embarrassed and pleased at the same time.

Jiraiya gave him a bemused glance before clearing his throat and setting brush to parchment. "The base of every seal is a circle. Even if you can't see it, it forms the structure upon which everything else is built…"

Ooo

Sarutobi made his way to the top of the Hokage Monument that evening, his breathing slow and steady, for a chance to clear his head and remember why he was doing all this. He found his favorite rock and eased himself down to sit. It was just above the stone visage of his own face, which, ironically enough, happened to be the highest face of the four. He laughed bitterly at that.

The highest of the four? He was the one who'd been left behind. The old steward, sweeping up the fractured remains of the great and terrible deeds of the others. He shook his head. I become much too morbid without my idiot student or the kid around.

It was difficult not to. He was being pressured from all sides with demands and questions from the other Kages, and even several Daimyos. The Beast Realm was fragmenting. Not in a literal sense, as far as he could tell, but in a very similar way to the Shinobi Nations. And the beasts were not lining up with their ninja counterparts. The apes weren't talking, the toads weren't talking, and the wolves of Konoha had forsaken the Beast Realm long ago. Contracts were expiring and, if trends continued, they would slip from shinobi hands all together.

And that was just the start of it. Demons… reports of minor demons were springing up everywhere. A minor demon was a tricky thing to identify on the best of days—impossible for most people. Sarutobi himself had never seen one, and wouldn't know a demon from a teapot unless it told him. But the sheer number of reports… it had to mean something. Gods, it was frustrating.

And everyone seemed to think that he was the go-to man for information. As if he didn't have enough work running the presumed 'most powerful' hidden village in all the shinobi nations, he had every other political and military leader banging down his door to find out what the hell was going on. And why should he know? Because he was 'The Professor?'

He'd never studied summoning to the same extent as, well… any of his students, and even their students. But with that second generation mostly a smudge in the history books, and his own students MIA, he was the only resort. The one they should have been haranguing was Orochimaru. If anyone knew about the Beast Realm and demons both major and minor, it was him.

Orochimaru. His greatest student. His greatest mistake.

A chill wind blew from the north, shivering across his shoulder blades, and a crunching step made him turn.

As if the mere thought had summoned him, the familiar shape loomed in the dusk. Long and tangled black hair whipping in the wind across a ghostly-white face, with that cruel smile and those glinting snake eyes... "You're getting sloppy, Sarutobi-sensei," purred the oily voice.

"I may be old, but I'm still more than a match for you, Orochimaru-chan. I can tell you're a damned mud-clone."

"I have to keep checking, don't I?" the sneering face rejoined. "One of these days you'll slip, and I'll have you, old man."

Sarutobi smiled, but the expression was tight on his face. "Kindly return to the cesspool that you crawled out of, creature."

A flash of malice glinted in those snake eyes. "How's Minato's brat doing these days, sensei? Had any more misadventures down in the Uchiha tunnels?"

Sarutobi's jaw tightened. With a flash, a kunai buried itself in the clone's throat. It gave a last burbling laugh, sputtering through the hole in its throat, before slowly falling apart into a slop of mud.

Sarutobi gritted his teeth against the tremble in his hand as he stooped to retrieve his knife. Wiping it off stoically on his sleeve, he returned it to its holster and took his seat once more.

Orochimaru. He visited in this fashion almost monthly. And Sarutobi put him down the same way every time. He hadn't told the council. He hadn't told his advisors. He hadn't even told Jiraiya, the man who likely deserved to know more than anyone. Sarutobi could handle it.

Until the day he couldn't.

And he feared that day loomed ever closer. The memory of his student standing in the growing night hung over him like a dark pall, and he couldn't stop his hands from trembling.

Ooo

"You goddammed stinkin, cheatin, lying BASTARD!" Naruto shouted, pointing a furious finger at one Gallant Jiraiya of the Sannin.

Despite those fighting words, Jiraiya only snickered from his bedroll. "I only said I'd teach you how to seal it, not unseal it. You're the Fuinjutsu master—you figure it out." And with that, he rolled over, showing Naruto his back.

"Graaaah!" Naruto yelled with impotent rage, flinging down the little scroll.

"Don't damage it," the big shinobi mumbled. "You might not be able to get it out again."

Naruto seethed, ignoring the muttered complaints from his two teammates who were still asleep. In all fairness to them, it was barely the crack of dawn, but that was when Naruto liked to get up, and today he'd had something special in mind. Something special that involved a certain kite which a certain Sannin had helped him seal into a scroll the night before. Naruto had been thrilled—no more lugging around that big, awkward thing when he wasn't using it! The only problem was, Jiraiya hadn't told him how to get it out again, and it didn't appear that he planned on doing so any time soon.

Naruto mightily resisted the urge to kick his sensei—he might need to beg later, after all—and kicked the door open instead, jumping unceremoniously to the forest floor with a heavier (and more satisfying) thud than an eight-year-old should have been capable of.

After pummeling the sap out of a few unsuspecting trees, Naruto plopped down at the base of the outpost's pine and pulled out the scroll. The forest all around was still wreathed in mist, and dew settled fresh over every surface. He could see his breath steaming, and the morning sun lit the air in almost solid bars of light through the trees.

He could figure this out. He just had to calm down and think about it. Didn't help that Jiraiya was such an insufferable old butt-crack, though.

He puzzled over the forms of the seal, recognizing the different arrays that contained the space, located and held the object, connected the space to the scroll, and locked the seal until…What? Did he have to release it somehow? Or was it a summoning seal? He chewed a finger in contemplation, afraid to try anything lest he destroy the whole thing.

A rustling in the brush forced him to look up. There was an old man coming through the trees with a big pack on his back, and… Wait, Naruto thought, squinting. Something was strange about him. Naruto stiffened just as the man looked up and noticed him.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize—"

"Stay back!" Naruto shouted, leaping to his feet and whipping out a pair of kunai. The face he saw was not the face of a kindly old man—it had bulging yellow eyes with weird, horizontal pupils, a freakishly wide mouth and slick green skin with swirling patterns of bold red. The long, trailing mustaches mirrored the human mask, but everything else seemed to defy logic that it would fit underneath those normal features.

The old man—or whatever he was—seemed surprised for a moment, but then understanding flitted across his features. In the next instant it was gone again, replaced by a greater degree of surprise. "How can you—"

"Naruto!" A half-awake Jiraiya landed beside him, looking ready for battle and not too happy about it. "What happened?"

Hana and Red-hair were poking their heads out of the door high above, looking equally confused.

"Sensei—!" Naruto began, pointing at the old man. But then he realized something. Jiraiya and Hana and Red-hair—they had all seen the old man, and passed him by, looking for a threat. They didn't…they couldn't see what he saw. He swallowed. "It's…this old guy just startled me. Sorry," he directed the apology to everyone.

They all sagged, and Jiraiya cuffed him on the back of the head. "Baka. You're too jumpy."

Naruto only eyed the 'old man' while Jiraiya stumbled back up the tree, and wondered what he should do. Before he could make a decision, the bizarre-looking creature gave him a slight bow and a wink before turning and hiking up the path from whence he'd come.

Naruto let himself down with a thump, eyes wide. There was only one explanation. He was going crazy.

Ooo

Five days later they had arrived at the border between Fire Country and Grass Country. Five days and a field-guide worth of plant identification, enough Fuinjutsu to make the young trio dangerous, several disturbing new variations of old techniques courtesy of Naruto (namely, the fire-starting technique, the wood-chopping technique, and the water-purifying technique—Jiraiya had been pressured to teach the kid nothing outside of survivalist basics, but he couldn't be held accountable for Naruto's own permutations), zero bathhouses, and too many rustic camp areas to count.

Needless to say, they were all looking pretty rough and smelling less than rosy, and each was eager to gain entrance to the sprawling border town.

"Unfortunately," Jiraiya said, peering down at them all. "Naruto, you can't go across the border looking like that."

Naruto scowled at him, still sore over his sealed up kite. "What do you mean?"

"You're too…" he made an indistinct gesture. "Midgetty."

"Well you're too old but we don't make a big deal of it!" Naruto shot back sourly.

The other two snickered, but quickly sobered at Jiraiya's expression.

"This is where we start pretending you're a chuunin hopeful, kid," Jiraiya clarified, raising his eyebrows significantly.

Naruto gave him a blank look, apparently satisfied to wait for the answer.

"Henge," Jiraiya supplied.

"Eh?"

Jiraiya nearly fell over. "You've never...? Kid, the gaps in your knowledge are… bizarre, to say the least."

But, despite the fact that they were dirty and tired and crouched at the border like a flock of vultures, Naruto received his first lesson in transformation jutsus right then and there. By the time he had the basics down, the sun was dipping in the sky, but he could do a fair impression of Jiraiya and Red, and a rather suffering impression of Hana.

"Well, you won't be posing as any girls any time soon," Jiraiya muttered.

Naruto was hardly listening to the big shinobi—his head was too cluttered with wicked and brilliant schemes that had not been possible before. Why hadn't anyone told him about this jutsu? Probably, a sensible part of his brain said—the part that wasn't his normal voice or the evil one that spoke up intermittently—they were afraid of everything you're planning right now. He hated to agree with that sensible voice, so he ignored it.

"All right, let's try to create a persona for you," Jiraiya was saying. "Now this might be tricky, since it has to be an invented henge, and it will be one you'll have to recall over and over."

Naruto nodded, focusing once more.

Jiraiya seemed satisfied. "Okay, to start off, let's just try for an older version of yourself. Just imagine what you might look like taller, leaner—not that you've got any skin to spare, you sad little sack of bones..." he trailed off as Naruto cast him a dark glance before concentrating.

With a familiar poof, Naruto tried to reorient himself from his new, taller position in the world. It was a strange feeling—he wasn't truly this tall, but somehow his senses rearranged themselves to fit a bigger frame.

Because of this, it took him a moment to notice the expressions of his companions. Hana and Red were frowning in a detached way—the sort of look a person might wear if they were trying to remember something they could almost grasp.

Jiraiya's face had gone blank at first, and then slowly paled. His eyes went wide in a way that made Naruto's veins run cold. It was the face of someone seeing their worst fear, or a ghost come back to haunt them. It was denial and horror and realization.

The man's mouth finally moved. "Oh gods," he whispered. Then he seemed to remember where he was and who he was looking at. Blinking hard, he swallowed and managed to say. "That's…not good… No. That's very bad." He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, turning away.

Gods, I must really suck at this, was all Naruto could figure. With a 'pop', he released the henge and appeared again as his usual eight-year-old self. "What did I do?" he asked, afraid of the answer.

Jiraiya looked at him, and relief seemed to flood his face. "Naruto! Ah…try it again, but with brown hair and…oh, black eyes. Maybe a bit shorter."

Naruto screwed up his face, trying commit the details to memory. With a nod, he disappeared in a poof of mist. Whatever Jiraiya saw in the new persona, it seemed to satisfy him. He even quirked a bit of a smile.

"Now you look like an Uchiha," Hana commented, grinning wryly.

"Can we go now?" Naruto asked impatiently.

"Voice," Jiraiya reminded him.

Naruto frowned. "Should I just make up one?"

"Use someone you know," Red suggested.

"Okay, let's go. I'm friggin starving," Naruto harped in Uchiha Itachi's voice.

Ooo

Somewhere over the rooftops of Konoha, the real Uchiha Itachi was seized by a debilitating fit of sneezes.

ooo

ooo

ooo

A/N: Well, I hope the plot is keeping you all on the edge of your seats! For those of you wondering where its all going, hopefully there was a chunk in there that helped a bit (see: Hokage's expository chunk of DOOM). And I hope Orochimaru was sufficiently creepy, and the Hokage sufficiently old and sad about life (because that's the way I would imagine he'd be--think about it, he was supposed to retire with his old friends and family a long time ago D: ). Uh, yeah, I'm gonna stop myself there before I end up going back and talking about my thoughts for every little paragraph. Rememba, folks, long, juicy, harsh critiques are goooohohohold. :D