There was no warning whatsoever before all my senses decided to scream at once in the most shrill, annoying, dissonant way. It was almost an art how awful it was.

I was so in awe at this disturbing shriek that I didn't even notice that I was being more literal that I realized.

I awkwardly attempted to quiet my screaming, without much success. Through my panic, I tried to take a look at my surroundings.

It was loud, bright, and cold. It looked like I was inside a white blur, with some other, smaller blurs in the area. I closed my eyes and nodded internally. I see. Actually, I couldn't, but it was the thought that counted. And that thought was: Aw crap. This better not be an isekai.

I was stuck in some baby's body. The absolute second that I realized this, the standard questions that would follow from such a revelation started flooding through my brain.

Since I'm now apparently a portal fantasy protag, what special powers do I get?

Is there a prophecy?

Why did it have to be reincarnation? Why couldn't I just be dropped in my normal body?

Maybe this is my normal body and I'm just in some ground hog day type thing?

What the heck am I supposed to do now, in this immobile meat bag? Wait for years before I can actually use it?

I stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts in some useful way and tried to start from the beginning. All I knew was that I was somehow sensing through a newborn. That was the only real evidence I had. I couldn't remember what I had been doing before that. Now that I thought about it, that fact was also probably significant. Unfortunately, it was also a common sign of being an isekai protagonist. I inhaled one of my first breaths in this body, before trying to remember what I had been doing last. Please don't have been hit by a truck. Please don't have been hit by a truck. Please don't have been hit by a truck.

Damn it. I remembered now.

I was hit by a bike. A nonmotor bike. I was leaving the parking lot at my university, when the local bicycle thief was pedaling by on the side of the road, at 2 miles an hour, another bike in tow on the wagon attached to the stolen two-wheeler he was riding. I guess some police officer's heart decided to grow two sizes that day because they finally cared enough to chase him down. The guy kicked it into high gear, accelerating to 4 miles an hour and swerved into me, and both bicycles managed to hit me. This was some serious Konosuba bs.

Well. Back to my current predicament, it appears it was my new mother's turn to hold the toothless, bald creature. I couldn't see her too well, even when she brought her face up close. But I could tell her hair was both brown and a law-abiding citizen of physics. That was a good sign.

Unfortunately, the Japanese words that promptly emitted from her mouth were telling me otherwise.

Ok, so I guess I was in some sort of anime/manga/light novel world. I didn't speak Japanese, but I had picked up a thing or two in the past from watching anime. However, there wasn't enough from context to tell what kind of world I was in. The mother was human, but humans are standard in portal fantasy worlds. The room was white and there was a nurse. So, that meant we were in some kind of modern hospital. That probably meant that at the very least, I wasn't stuck in the Medieval Ages. Ok, that was some progress. Now, I needed to catch whatever flavor of uncreative 'world building' would set this world so far apart from Earth.

Oops. I guess I unintentionally did something to get the mom concerned. Maybe this is the point where they discover I'm the chosen one. She said something, and the two other people in the room got closer. One of them was a man, based off the voice. My new father I suppose. Honestly, I'd thought I'd already done my duty and cried. I was pretty sure that was the only job I really had after just being born. I didn't know what they were expecting from me now. I was passed onto the man, and I got a good look at him. Blond hair in a ponytail. He talked at me in Japanese, his face really close. Blue eyes, a cloth around his forehead. A headband. And I doubted there were many blue eyed, blond haired Japanese people. Maybe he just spoke Japanese? The cloth was concerning though. Maybe he was a weeb? I had a faint suspicion that I knew where this was going though.

That was when I heard the fated words. "Ino-chan." It was at that moment that I concluded that I was finally gonna get me some ninja magic.

For a long time, there wasn't much to do but think.

I had only ever watched the original series with twelve-year-old Naruto and gang, and even then, I had been in middle school at most. I would have to rely on my fanfic knowledge to prepare for this. I wouldn't say I was a huge Naruto fan, just that it's the most popular fandom, so I was likelier to find good content just because there's so much of it out there that some people had to have written something worth reading. I would have to work from cross referencing them with one another to find common patterns, and hope that I wasn't just mistaking common fanfic tropes for cannon.

I was kind of miffed that I wasn't even worth enough to get an original series to be isekaied in though. But I suppose I would have to at least start out Japanese to be given that privilege. Unfortunately, as an American, being in a fanfic was the best I could hope for. Or I suppose, since it's the Naruto universe we're talking about, the worst I could hope for. Of course it couldn't just be a slice of life anime. Given that I could recall an entire, detailed, previous life, I doubted I was just an OC. My only other real option was that I was a self-insert. Or I suppose I could be in a simulation. Or Kishimoto actually secretly wanted to enlighten us all with his previous life's ninja wizard adventures from before being isekaied to Earth. I was going to get to the bottom of this, but I needed to prioritize first.