It had taken Naruto a day and a half to figure out how to spin the water in the water balloon in order to get the balloon to burst the way Jiraiya had. One of the clones had discovered it almost accidentally. What had happened was that he had tried spinning the water one way, and then tried spinning the water another way. The clone had rapidly switched from one direction to another and noticed a peculiar disruption. When he rapidly switched back and forth again and got the same disruption, he tried rapidly changing directions. Eventually, the balloon burst. Apparently the trick was to either swirl his Chakra about in different directions all at once or to change directions so rapidly that it seemed that he was doing so. He would try both when he did the second step which Jiraiya had described.
It took him nearly a week to master the second step, and during that week, Jiraiya spent his days interviewing several contacts as well as a bunch of random travelers who had come to the town for the two week long festival, and spent his evenings drinking and getting serviced by hookers. He was starting to doubt that Jiraiya had ever been with a woman that he hadn't paid for. Eventually, after hours and hours of hard work, one of his clones had managed to burst the rubber ball that he'd been given. A few hours later, he was able to consistently replicate that feat.
Jiraiya then introduced him to the third phase of the Jutusu, the one that would complete the Rasengan. It would take a great deal of work, but he would get it eventually, and long before the three years it had taken the Yondaime to create the Jutsu had passed. It always took much longer for someone to create a jutsu due to all of the trial and error involved than it did to learn one that had already been created.
All of the pain he had undergone learning this Jutsu, and all of the Kage Bunshin that had been sacrificed would be worth it in the end
&!&!&!&
Jiraiya sighed. While he knew more about the Akatsuki and Oto's current movements thanks to several contacts, he'd gotten absolutely zilch on the Tsunade front. Tsunade had always been good at hiding. The information he'd gained on the Akatsuki was little more than garbage. Apparently all that his contacts knew was that several of the other Hidden Villages had hired the Akatsuki to do the sort of wetwork that Danzo's little organization did for Konoha. On the Orochimaru front, it seemed like his former teammate had holed up in his little village and was licking his wounds.
That was another day wasted. He would get in a few hours of downtime before he wandered off to bed and checked on Naruto's progress again in the morning. That boy truly was his father's child, as well as his mother's. He seemed to be an almost even blend of both of his parents in fact. He had his mother's bone structure and his father's coloring. He had a personality that was a mix of both that of his father and his mother, and possessed his mother's somewhat charming verbal tic, though he sometimes ended his sentences with "-ttebayo." rather than the "-ttebane" his mother had used. Someone had obviously worked with Naruto on that verbal tic since it showed up most often when he wasn't paying attention, or was rather excited.
Teaching Naruto was a somewhat enjoyable experience, and he could see why both little Kakashi and Shimura Tetsuo had been reluctant to let him go. The boy learned a great deal with minimal instruction, had incredible leaps of intuition that left you scratching your head as you raced to keep up, learned at an incredibly fast pace, and would still be at it long after another person would have given up and wandered off to do something else.
He couldn't wait until he was able to instruct Naruto full time rather than split his attention between two tasks.
He would branch out his search to other nearby towns in the morning. Somebody had to know something about where Tsunade was located.
&!&!&!&
Tsunade didn't really care about the money that flowed away like water. She knew she wouldn't win. She never won. Not in life, or in gambling. The times it did seem that she had won at one or the other were just the universe setting her up for an even greater disaster. She'd learned that long ago.
Gambling took her mind off of them. She couldn't think their names. If she did, she would see their faces again, see their faces as they had been both in life and in death. Damn. It was too late. She was remembering them again, but then again, she never forgot. They had hung at the edges of her mind day in and day out for decades.
As far as she was concerned, it was a good thing that Shizune had her mother's hair, unlike her and Dan's cousins. Seeing that blue haired family running about happy and healthy without Dan there had been much too painful. Unlike some of his relatives from his mother's side of the family who had been known to make off with anything that wasn't nailed down, Dan hadn't been all that much of a thief, even though he had stolen her heart. He had then carried it away with him into death the day he had died on that battlefield.
Nawaki, Nawaki had been a surprise that had come long after her parents had lost hope and begun to think that Tsunade would be an only child. Her mother had had a hard time conceiving her, and had come to believe that her inability to have any more children had been related to the fact that she had been born after the Kyuubi had been sealed away within her mother. Her parents had married at a rather young age after meeting and falling in love during a rather difficult mission, and she had been born after almost three years of miscarriages. When her mother had announced that she was pregnant, the whole family had been cautiously optimistic.
The first trimester passed without incident, and they breathed a collective sigh of relief. The second trimester passed, and the child was still there. Then came the third trimester and Nawaki's extremely early arrival. Everyone had said that it had been a miracle that Nawaki had survived. Nawaki had been the family miracle child who had been loved and doted upon by everyone. As he grew, it had become more and more obvious that the boy was more like his Uzumaki cousins rather than his Senju relatives. He had been adventurous, wild, bold, passionate, and determined.
When Nawaki had been placed on a Genin team under her former teammate Orochimaru, she had been certain that her teammate would keep her brother safe. Nawaki's death had marked the beginning of the end for the Sannin. Orochimaru had not been able to deal with death and loss all that well, and he had lost a great deal during the Second Shinobi war as well as the Third. It had more than likely been these losses that had driven Orochimaru to hole himself away in his lab studying things, and start forgetting that people were actually people, not test subjects. After one has been given leave to experiment on the enemy however one pleased, it was only a short jump to experimenting on others, such as fellow villagers. She herself had almost made that leap a few times and could understand what had driven Orochimaru to do so.
She had heard the reports that Konoha had been invaded and the Sandaime killed, but as she hadn't listened to the original broadcast, she had taken them with a grain of salt. Rumor had Konoha in every state from entirely intact minus some cosmetic damage to completely destroyed with only a few survivors wandering through the rubble. She'd seen a couple Konoha shinobi out on missions, so she knew that the village hadn't been destroyed, as it was apparently still open for business. The shinobi she'd seen looked rather stressed and somewhat overworked however, meaning that the village was short staffed at the moment. How short staffed however, she couldn't tell.
It wasn't her concern however. She had left Konoha and its problems behind long ago after she had lost everything. She wouldn't let them trail behind her reminding her of her losses wherever she went now. She had more than enough reminders already.
&!&!&!&
Orochimaru hated this. It had nearly been a month since his former Sensei had called upon the Shinigami and sealed his arms away. If it had merely been that he couldn't use his arms, he wouldn't be nearly as frustrated as he was. Along with a lack of mobility in his arms though, there was excruciating pain. He didn't like pain, and he didn't like people seeing him when he was weak. It had been for those two reasons that he'd killed any number of Kabuto's assistants who had been assigned to help him.
The only reason he was putting up with this was because he was waiting for Sasuke. He would have had the boy kidnapped earlier and brought to him, but the child had been attacked by Itachi and by all accounts was laying in a coma, and therefore useless for his purposes. Itachi was yet another thorn in his side. He didn't want to throw this body away just yet if there was a chance that it could be salvaged. Changing bodies was rather difficult and left him weakened for a time.
For probably the first time, he was glad that he'd selected a female body this time as he was still experimenting with the transfer process. If he had been in a male body, going to the bathroom would be far more difficult, and rather unpleasant, especially considering what it would take to go to the bathroom without assistance. He knew this, because when he'd gained his ability to extend his tongue incredible distances, he'd done what anyone would have done with such an ability, and...experimented. He was able to shut out his sense of taste when he had to, considering the fact that he used his tongue to grab a wide variety of objects, including people, but still, doing that was...unhygienic as far as he was concerned.
He was in a particularly bad mood today since the pain was worse than normal, and Kabuto's current assistant was an unrepentant ass-kisser that Kabuto probably sent to get out of the way permanently. He wasn't really in the mood to take the medicine he'd been given however, since it had an awful flavor that he couldn't entirely shut out, a horribly bitter aftertaste that took enough water to leave him feeling bloated to get rid of, and the texture was downright nasty. He had a feeling that Kabuto did this to the medicines he made to prevent malingering, and to keep people from bothering him since they were too afraid to approach him for treatment.
After he'd killed Kabuto's nth assistant, Kabuto finally showed up to check on him and give him the good news. Tsunade had been found. He was going to get his arms fixed. As soon as he got his arms fixed, he could go and get Sasuke fixed. As soon as Sasuke was fixed, he was going to put his curse seal on the boy and prepare him for transfer.
Everything was looking up.
Kabuto helped him dress, tying all of the fiddly bits that he couldn't deal with using his tongue, and they set out from his lair after Kabuto cleaned up the mess that had once been his assistant since he didn't want to come back to find it stinking up the place since his other subordinates were too afraid to enter his room unless ordered, and probably wouldn't do so even if it was to remove a rotting corpse.
All too soon, they were on the road, traveling at an excruciatingly slow pace since he didn't want to trip and land flat on his face. He wasn't in the mood to go licking the ground in order to get up. They would reach Tsunade though. They would reach Tsunade, and he would use his ace in the hole to get his arms fixed. He knew Tsunade's weaknesses, all of them, and he wasn't above using each and every last one to get what he wanted.
&!&!&!&
Jiraiya had been asking around a bar that was the local watering hole for gamblers when he finally struck paydirt. His long stalled search for Tsunade had finally grown hot. The Legendary Sitting Duck had lost bigtime, and headed out of the town he was asking in. Fortunately, one of the other gamblers had heard her intended location.
After thanking the man who really shouldn't be drinking in the mid-afternoon - not that he was really one to talk - he raced out to where he'd left Naruto. The boy was in the clearing he'd left him in destroying trees as he fine-tuned his Rasengan. The boy had almost fully mastered in a single month a jutsu that had taken him more than three months to learn.
"You truly are your fa- er, mother's son." he told the boy as he examined the tree that had just been trashed when he'd entered the clearing. "You'll have to finish working on this on the road. I've found a lead on Tsunade and we have to leave now before she goes on the move and vanishes again."
The somewhat tired looking boy perked up at this, and started looking excited. He could tell that the month of relative inactivity had been wearing on him. Naruto was hyperactive and had a great deal of energy, just like his mother had at that age. It had taken her years to calm down, and even then she hadn't calmed down entirely.
He had considered taking Kushina on as a student at one point as she had reminded him a bit of himself when he was younger, but his sensei had forbidden it. For one, Kushina was the Kyuubi Jinchuriki, and he hadn't wanted her out in the open where she would be vulnerable for another abduction attempt like the one Kumo had made around the time he'd made his request. Two, Kushina was a girl, and he was well known far and wide as a pervert, even then before he'd written his famous Icha Icha novels. Taking her on as a student could seriously damage his reputation even if nothing happened. Considering all of the things that had been said after Orochimaru had run off with Anko, he had to concede that point.
Having Naruto as his student was interesting, it was like having Minato and Kushina all rolled into one package. He found himself wondering exactly what the future would bring, as the boy was as stubborn as his father, as unpredictable as his mother, and as talented as both of them had been at that age.
Now however, he would have to concentrate on what he was going to say to persuade Tsunade to return to a village she had sworn to never return to, and to take a job she never wanted.