Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor am I affiliated in any way with it, other than being a fan. Those rights belong to Masashi Kishimoto. I do own the OC's and any techniques and weapons I add to the story.

A/N: I have now found out that my story is a part of five communities, yay! It seems that I always have something good to say at the beginning of each of my chapters!

This chapter will have the first part of the exams, and some comic relief in the form of me torturing Shikamaru, who has been in Suna to help Temari with the second exam. It's going to be rather troublesome for him to say the least.

Chapter 48: Shika's Troublesome Day

"Alright, the first thing we gotta do is find as many of the people wearing those wristbands we can," Daisuke said and Akari nodded as she bit her thumb.

She cast a few hand signs and shouted, "Summoning Jutsu!" With a poof of smoke, about ten small monkeys were revealed. During her single apprenticeship with Sasuke, Akari had seen him use the Summoning Jutsu and tried it herself before the raven haired boy could stop her. End result: Akari ended up in the Forest of Apes due to the fact that she had not signed a contract and apparently monkeys were the species Akari had the highest affinity for.

Sasuke had a brush with death when Kushina had found out her daughter was missing, and beat the poor boy worse than she beat Jiraiya when she had found out about him using Minato's and her honeymoon. Then she ordered Sasuke to go find Akari, which was downright unreasonable due to the fact that the poor raven haired teen could barely move after the pounding.

Luckily, Akari had gotten on well with Enma, the aging monkey king, and he had given her the Monkey Summoning Contract, and had one of his fastest messenger monkeys get to Konoha, which was fairly close to the forest the apes inhabited, and it Reverse Summoned her. She did not go home right away, because one condition of her signing the contract was that she had to bring it to Konohamaru, since Enma wanted Sarutobi's grandson to have it, but never had the opportunity to go to Konoha just to give the boy the contract.

After that little scare was over, Akari and Konohamaru were both recognized as Monkey Summoners, though last Akari checked, messenger chimps were all Konohamaru could summon, while Akari could bring large gorillas into a fray.

She gave each of the small monkeys some seeds and said, "Alright guys, here's what I- No, don't eat those!" she chided one before continuing, "I want you all to find people wearing one of these and put a seed on them. I got that Yamato fellow Sasuke got acquainted with to teach me how to have those seeds send a signal back to me." The monkeys took the seeds and scattered.

…..

Shikamaru and Temari were walking down the streets of Suna, discussing the second part of the exam that Shikamaru had been in the foreign village to help set up the exams. "How many teams do you think will get to the part I'm in charge of?" Temari asked and Shikamaru shrugged.

"I would probably have a better idea of that if I had stayed awake during the explanation of how the exams would work. Honestly, this diplomatic mission is troublesome."

"You're impossible to motivate, aren't you?" Temari said. "Ah well, at least you are easier to deal with than my two siblings. After all, one is a sexually confused guy who spends a lot of time applying makeup that he calls war paint, and the other is a former insomniac and used to get jolly out of shedding blood, and now just spends all of his time training these days. Good thing he got his seal fixed, else he would likely have driven himself nuts by now, instead of just me."

"Well, at least you have experience with difficult family members. I honestly feel sorry for the poor tykes when you have children," Shikamaru said. And then he was blasted through the wall when Temari struck him with her fan. "Odd, she can have a bit of a temper, but she is usually not that quick to hit me. Unless… oh troublesome, it must be that time of the month!" Shikamaru was thinking as Temari approached him, holding her fan like a baseball bat in both hands.

"Oh, and just what is wrong with my potential maternal ability?" Temari demanded as she stopped right in front of Shikamaru, who paled as he tried to scoot back.

"In order to keep you from killing me, I am going to just refrain from answering that," Shikamaru tried. Swing and a miss.

"Come back here so I can kill you!" Temari shouted as she chased the shadow user, who was running so fast that he almost left his greatest tool behind, which would have been quite a feat for someone who barely finds the energy to get up in the morning.

"Dying is a little troublesome for me today," Shikamaru muttered as he managed to lose her, though he knew she'd still be after him. Girls were so troublesome, particularly when they were PMSing. Frantically, he looked around for a hiding spot, before he finally hid in an alley.

"Where are you, ya lazy ass?" Temari shouted alarmingly close by. Shika paled as he realized that it would not be long before she came upon his position. Getting desperate, he grabbed one civilian with his shadows and yanked him into the alley, and after a quick effort to get the guy tied up, Shikamaru left wearing the guy's hooded sweatshirt, shadowing his face.

"Sorry," he said to the guy after tossing him some ryo to compensate for his assault. "But I kind of panicked there, and I am not good enough at transformation jutsu to fool my PMSing girlfriend who is trying to turn me inside out."

With that, Shikamaru left the alley completely, and managed to pass Temari without drawing her attention. Little did he know that his day was about to get much more troublesome. Because there was a purple wristband attached to the sleeve of the sweatshirt.

….

Blood coated the ground. There were several bodies of the thugs, and many more who were left still alive fled the one who killed the others. He let them go, not interested in petty revenge. Instead, he moved slowly towards the corpse of his one ally in this battle, tears staining his face.

Alex woke with a start and shot into a sitting position, sweat covering his face. "That same dream," he muttered, his forehead in his hand. "Will I never escape the nightmare that is my past?"

He got up and left his guest room, going down for breakfast, when he saw smoke coming from the kitchen. An ashen faced Erika came out, coughing, and she said to Alex, "Breakfast should be ready soon, you might want to wait a bit."

Mathew came out of another room, and he saw Alex make the decision to skip breakfast and move immediately towards the training grounds. "Not going to wait for the most important meal of the day?" Mathew asked, and Alex looked at him.

"From the look of things, breakfast was ready about an hour ago," Alex deadpanned and Mathew burst out laughing.

"I know what you mean. The sad thing is, she's actually getting better at cooking. Here." He tossed Alex an apple.

"Thanks."

"When you grow up with HER to cook for you, you learn to have other sources of food handy."

….

A few minutes later, Alex and Vanessa stood facing each other in the training field with their blades drawn. It turned out that while Alex had trouble dealing with females when it came to casual contact, he actually had no problems fighting them in spars, or life or death situations, due to adrenaline helping him ignore his phobia. Naruto once unknowingly come close to angering the young Chihanshu when he teasingly asked if his fear of women had come from getting dumped at one point. Alex had shortly replied it was nothing like that before he left, leaving Naruto to realize he had mistakenly touched a nerve.

Vanessa glared at Alex before she charged him, and he deftly sidestepped and she quickly followed up with heavy, but skillful strokes. His kenjutsu style was based on the concept of completely avoiding a foe's attacks or deflecting them with as little effort as possible rather than blocking dead on blows, and wait for an opening to get an attack of your own in. He held his body so that the side that had the hand he kept his cutlass in was facing his foe, just like a fencer, so as to present a more narrow target.

And what infuriated Vanessa was that he was exceedingly good at it. She was considered an expert with swords herself, but she could not even touch Alex every time they sparred. Needless to say, this made her as frustrated as hell, when he yet again disarmed her and held his blade to her neck.

"Wow, he's very good," Naruto said as he saw Vanessa storm off the field. He himself had trouble sparring with Vanessa when they only used kenjutsu. "Of course, it could just be that Vanessa's style is a bad matchup with his, but that alone would not be nearly enough to beat her."

"And his Kekkei Genkai is not something that you should ignore either," Hinata said. She herself had sparred once with Alex, and he was able to keep her at a good distance throughout using his clan techniques, which allowed him to endlessly produce his own blood, which left his body via the cuts on his hands, with his chakra and use it in a manner similar to Gaara's sand. The one time Hinata had gotten close enough to attack Alex, he had also shown the ability to pump a good deal of blood into his arm and increase his brute strength to an extent where he easily forced Hinata backwards. Had she had her bow, it would have been more even of a matchup.

He also showed off his summons once, a creature called a hydra. It was a creature similar to a dragon, except it had no elemental breath, and it's body consisted of a single inflexible tail, two legs, a torso, and three heads with very long snakelike necks. Alex had said that if one head was removed, two more would grow in its place, unless the wound was immediately closed somehow. Another thing that could make fighting one of them a pain was the fact that their blood was highly acidic and toxic, to a point where it could dissolve most metals easily.

Naruto mentally sized up their new comrade. It was already evident that he was at least high jonin level, if not low kage. So far, he had only seen Felix beat him, and he was eager to try his hand against Alex himself at some point.

…..

"That was not too difficult," Kin said as she put away a vial she had. Over the past couple of years, she had learned more about certain toxins that she could use for various purposes. She had already coated most of her senbon in venoms that caused the victims to hallucinate, making her genjutsus more effective. She also had some decent truth serum, which helped get honest answers out of people, extremely effective when she added the before mentioned toxins and genjutsu combo. As a result, once they had found a few people with the purple bands, one of them a Suna genin not taking the exams, they had no problems getting answers from them and they did not do any serious harm to anyone who volunteered for this. In fact, they were probably one of the more lenient teams. Team Zabuza had few doubts that some other genin might get a little carried away and at least come close to getting disqualified to get the codeword.

"Hopefully we have the right code phrase," Haku said.

"Please, you're talking to an expert at this sort of thing," Kin boasted. "Even before I had added poison to my repertoire, I learned a thing or two from my time as an Oto nin. If I was being lied to, I would know."

"If the phrase we got gets us disqualified, I will repeat those exact same words to you," Genyumaru said.

Shikamaru sighed with relief. It seemed that he would be escaping Temari's wrath for today. He had actually just had a reminder of just how troublesome a temperamental girlfriend could be when he saw Sakura standing next to a set of legs sticking out of the ground and kicking. It did not take a genius of his level to figure out that the legs belonged to Sasuke and he had done something to make Sakura mad enough to pile drive him with that chakra enhanced strength of hers. Shikamaru shivered as he pictured Temari doing the same thing to him.

His thoughts were interrupted when he stepped on some ninja wire set up as a tripwire. With no warning, a bucket of banana sauce was dumped on him. "Now what!?" he asked as he whipped around to see Konohamaru and his corps standing behind him, the former having a few little monkeys on his shoulders.

"Now that we have your attention, you can just tell us what you know about the code phrase that will get us into the second exam," Konohamaru said.

"What makes you think I know anything about the first exam?" Shikamaru asked, though he paled as his genius mind was already connecting some dots. He knew that the first exam was to get some kind of intel from some villagers who where assisting with the exam for a good amount of ryo, but he had fallen asleep before he had heard anything else about the explanation.

But he had noticed that there were several people wearing the same wristband he had in his rather desperate disguise and that one of them seemed to be pestered by a team from Kumo, though Shikamaru did not think anything of those at the moment. He had simply thought that the wristbands were some sort of fashion statement, but now he had the nagging suspicion that they were the markers on who was fair game for the genin teams.

The suspicions were confirmed when Konmhamaru told him, "Don't play dumb, ya wouldn't be wearing that stupid thing if you weren't part of the exam!"

"Look kid, this is all a big mix-up, I am not part of the-,"

"Sic him!" Konohamaru shouted as a bunch more monkeys jumped out of hiding spots in the ambush area and Shikamaru paled, already realizing why banana sauce was what was in the bucket. And with that, about twenty monkeys began to maul him.

….

"The oasis lies in the center of the desert," one of the villagers told a genin team from Kusa. The Grass genin had put a genjutsu on him that made his ears ring endlessly until they chose to break it, basically annoying an answer out of him. They thanked the guy as they left. They did not realize that one of Akari's monkeys had tagged them with one of the seeds, this one working like a bug.

…..

About half an hour later, Akari whooped. The bugged seed had sent all sounds around the Kusa Team directly into Akari's ear for the past half hour, and she had found out what the code was and that it was the right one when the Kusa team was announced to have passed.

"I did not expect them to have the right code," Daisuke said, showing mild surprise. "After all, they did not seem to go to much trouble to confirm it."

"True, but it looks like both of our teams are lucky despite that," Kiyoshi said, before they were interrupted by a certain lazy genius skidding to a halt in their midst, covered in several cuts and bite marks. He was also rather wet and one of his shoulders had been covered in some kind of foul smelling goop. His hood had been torn off by this point.

"Shika, is that you?" Akari asked, a little confused about why the Nara was in such a state.

Shikamaru immediately grabbed her shoulders and shook her, a frenzied look of desperation in his eyes. "Please tell me you have the code phrase Akari, I've been hunted all day by that partner in crime of yours, and I need to get him off of my back!"

"I didn't know you were part of the first exam," Daisuke said as he looked at the band.

"I'm not, I was trying to escape Temari, and I put on the wrong disguise, please help me, I have been caught in more traps than I care to count!"

"Ramen for a week after the exams," Akari said with an evil gleam in her eyes.

"Deal!"

After that, Akari gave him the code and they headed towards the building they were supposed to bring it too. Not a moment too soon too, because once they were gone, Konohamaru and his two teammates skidded around the corner, all of them holding water balloons filled with Tabasco Sauce (A/N: A rather spicy sauce, and I know from experience that you do NOT want that to get in your eyes).

"You ready to talk yet?" Konohamaru said with an evil grin.

"Yes!" Shikamaru said. "The oasis lies in the center of the desert!"

"I dunno, I think you may be giving us a wrong one," Moegi said as the team poised their arms to throw, aiming right at Shika's face.

"It's the truth, I swear! It would be too troublesome to lie!"

"Fine then, but if we're disqualified, we're coming back for you," Konohamaru warned and they dropped the dangerous tools and left. "Wait, was that guy familiar to you?" he asked the corps and they shrugged. "Ah, probably nothing."

Shikamaru sighed with relief. Usually he could have gotten out of a lot of things easier than that, but that kid was nearly as unpredictable as Naruto. It still beat the Nara how he could set so many traps so fast and were he got all those materials on short notice. Did he know how to make a couple Shadow Clones already, or did he just have some help from his monkey summons? Eh, at least he could finally relax…

"There you are," a falsely sweet voice said as its owner stuck her blonde haired head over the line of sight the laid back Nara had. Shikamaru began sweating profusely as he remembered that he lost the hood of his sweatshirt to the little buggers that were Konohamaru and his team. His doom chuckled sadistically as she prepared to beat him to within an inch of his life. "I've been looking for you all day you know…"

Suna's villagers immediately fled from the rather scary shouts of pain that late afternoon once they were heard.

A/N: That chapter ended in a similar way to last one. I hope that was satisfactory for you all, and the final results of the poll on who fights Madara are in! The votes are as follows:

First place: Itachi and Sasuke, with 14 votes.

Second Place: Naruto, with 7 votes.

Last Place: Five Kage, with 0 votes.

Please Read and Review!