This is an AU from when Tsunade returns to Leaf. About two years have passed, and the exact happenings will be examined during the story. If you wonder about the base setting, this was originally written way back when.
Hmmm... Authors note? I thought it was up there already... but I have one thing to say: DON'T PANIC!
I apologize for the use of Japanese during this fic, which sucks... both intentionally and unintentionally. But take it as modern art, if you will.
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"Ooh! My nuts! My nuts! My nuts! Ooh! My nutsMy nutsMy nutsnutsmy nutsMy nutsnutsmynuts!"
Naruto watched as a tiny squirrel hopped about lightly, waved its miniature hands around, and further continued to be a general pain in the ass about its nuts. He didn't look very intimidated, even if there was a clear panic situation going on. Naruto stood still on the grassy hillside in a calm, or an almost indifferent manner. The squirrel hopped some more on the spot, squeaking out annoying noises, and waved its furry paws about randomly.
Naruto rubbed his jaw gently with his thumb and index finger, right about where his beard would someday maybe grow (he has done some planning about it already), and started to seriously ponder about squirrels, nuts, and life in general.
"Nuts! Nuts! Nuts! Nuts! Nuts! My-nutty-nuts! Nutty-nutty-nuts!"
Naruto came to a familiar conclusion: His life consisted of nuts and squirrels, and of course pondering about life, which furthermore consisted of more nuts and squirrels. There was nothing else he could remember doing, ever in his life.
"There might be a mystery hidden behind them." Naruto uttered aloud, and repeatedly nodded to himself in a serious manner. He grunted agreeingly to no one in particular.
"Ooh! MY NUTS!11!" the squirrel screamed even more loudly, and triumphantly held a beautiful shining golden nut - with two small green squirrel pins attached to it - towards the skies. "Nutnutnutnutnutnutnuuuuuut-ty!"
"Hey you NUT IDIOT!" Naruto snapped at the squirrel, pointing his finger towards the small creature in a furious manner. "Would you shut up for a second already!"
"Nutnut...?" came the curious reply. The squirrel tilted its tiny head slightly sideways and looked back at Naruto. It still held the shining golden nut "high" above itself, at about knee height compared to the blonde boy.
"Natto no yarou..." He muttered quietly for no kind of sane reason, inaudible to the small animal. Suddenly Naruto's mind fills with images of sweet nuts, beautiful squirrels, tasty and shiny nuts, royally elegant squirrels, and thrillingly mesmerizing nuts. He slowly floated off to somewhere warm and fluffy...
---
"Urrgh. Garurururuu... Rrrr!"
Naruto executed a Reverse German Suplex against his pillow. The beautiful suplex stretched across and over the bed reaching all the way to the floor, where his head made painful contact against the thin carpet and especially the hard floor under it. Naruto banged his eyelids wide open to the shocking impact, still hugging his pillow in a tight death-crush. After the initial lunacy of waking up in a situation like this passed away, Naruto examined the dawn's first sunlight shining upon the upside-down world in slight confusion. His ears perked up as he heard a soft yawn coming across the room.
"Good morning, Naruto. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?"
A pink figure appeared at the upper edge of Naruto's field of vision. He forgot everything about the earlier dreams, and started to dwell on some of the more Important Things In Life, as gently fluttering cherry blossoms flooded the room from nowhere. He wore an exceedingly stupid grin the middle of all this, and squeezed the abused pillow with his tender love.
Yes, Naruto was now days living together with 'his Sakura-chan'. They had their own small house in a village not far from the southern coast of Fire Country. Naruto's days were filled with pure Happiness and Wonder now that his first true love was there to share the ups and downs of life with him.
"Oi, dobe. What's that supposed to be?" A mellow male voice taunted from the doorway.
Naruto crumbled down to the floor together with his rosy pink mental images, as his neck gave way.
"I really didn't want to remember that part..." sobbed Naruto to himself, and caressed his trusty pillow for some much needed comfort.
"Morning." This time it was a lazier, but steady voice. "Wake up, Naruto."
Naruto craned his neck over to look at the people gathered in the room. The beautiful Sakura-chan, the chronically-late sensei, and the bastard-Sasuke were all there. Sakura prepared something on the stove - as usual - while Kakashi read his ever the favourite orange book, and snobby-idiot-Sasuke just tried to look cool and aloof leaning against the wall.
Naruto discarded the pillow for now to the dusty corner, and slowly pulled himself up.
"Hmmmmm?" Naruto looked down at his orange jumpsuit, as if it had just oinked at him accusingly. "...My pyjamas?"
Sasuke turned his head slighly towards Naruto, and replied after a pause, "You collapsed like that yesterday evening. Any attempt to change your clothing and you started calling everyone a nuthead or something, sheesh."
Naruto just looked down in amazement, but turned up with a grin suddenly. "Oh? Sasuke-nuthead suits you pretty well, though!"
Sasuke's eyes sharpened immediately, and a small grunt escaped from his lips.
"Don't start that this early today, thank you." Kakashi muttered from behind the book and the facemask, not bothering to even look up, and flipped a page from his favourite perverted book (volume 135 is out, and still going strong).
----
A couple hours after dawn, after breakfast and other necessary preparations, Team 7 stood before a shop just a few steps away from the marketplace; the centre of the village and the only real stop on the muddy main road going through the village. The shop had a wooden sign nailed above the door, "Taisha Village Detective Office," with thick yellow block letters going up and down in a zig-zagging line. It didn't really stick out, because the whole house was just a dirty wooden box with barely enough space to have a small, one room shop in it.
"Alright. Lets begin working." Kakashi said and stepped towards the door.
Wait a moment. Just how did Team 7 end up in a village like this anyways?
Lets backtrack exactly two years, five months, one week, and four days into the past.
Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, Kakashi, and everyone lived "peacefully" in the post-war Leaf with Tsunade coordinating the rebuilding. Then, all of a sudden, the skies started raining meteors -- Meteors, which completely annihilated the Hidden Leaf village. Later it was discovered that all the hidden ninja villages around the world were utterly and completely wiped out that very moment. Every time anyone tried to build a new hidden ninja village, it was immediately bombarded to ashes by giant meteors falling from the sky, without any kind of reasonable explanation for it.
To find out about the reason for that, we need to backtrack five more minutes, and turn the focus to a certain inn back on the other side of Cloud Country.
A young male, about twenty to twenty-five years old, sat at the counter of a countryside inn's small restaurant, and drank beer with a heavy hand in the middle of the day. He was pretty much wasted already, prattling to the waitresses and mumbling obscenities to the bartender, but still kept on downing the beers steadily.
Some days later he told people, "I was so drunk I thought I was seeing things, so I didn't really care either way. When this stupid looking idiot wearing a propeller hat and lots of smoke foaming around him asked me for what I wished, I just let my anger flow. I yanked at the guy for about five minutes about the unfairness of ninja life and how they didn't let me have my little drinks every now and then, how they kicked me out of the Hidden Cloud village, and then said that all of them ninja villages should just be wiped out, never to return. He looked at me weird and just said 'OK' before disappearing with a pop. Next thing I know an earthquake or something tries to crash the whole damn building down. I mean, sheesh, I spilled my beer and all."
He was promptly burned at the stakes after this admission.
One important question remains from the story of the drunk ninja, now already a common urban legend around the world... Just who was that 'stupid looking idiot in a propeller hat with lots of smoke foaming around him' ?
To this day, almost two and half years later, no one knows. Maybe. Wild guesses and crazy rumours spread like wildfire, modern ghost stories are suddenly a fashion boom like nothing seen before.
Kakashi turned around and stared back at his three students with his uncovered right eye. It was a completely blank, white eye.
Oh yes-- I forgot to mention. Kakashi got a Byakugan eye on his right eye socket, while the left one was still a Sharingan. He had the Byakugan somehow mysteriously plugged into his head at some unknown point during the last two years - most likely worth another corny flashback or two. That's why there's no need to turn his head to look at people anymore, but it's too difficult for others to follow the focus of his attention that way.
"It looks just plain creepy, no way around it. Everyone thinks he's a poor blind man, too." Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura thought in unison, and mentally nodded affirmatives to themselves.
They hadn't lost any of their respect to the sometimes-lazy sensei, but they did build up a new kind of fear towards the all-seeing eye. He kept track of every single thing happening in the house from anywhere, and grudgingly agreed exclude Sakura from his field of vision only after she got repeatedly freaked out from going to the shower or the toilet. His argument was that it wasn't such a big deal anyways, really, since he could just stare through her clothes if he so willed. Naturally he was more interested in his book, no? It wasn't like he was THAT perverted… No, wait. Lets not go there.
Naruto and Sasuke hadn't had the courage to bring up the issue so far.
"How long are you going to just stand there?" Kakashi asked without moving a single muscle from his face. He'd make a master ventriloquist with these feats. The four of them then entered in and opened the jolly office.
"Taisha Village Detective Office: Open and accepting jobs. We Solve Your Troubles!" had been written on the second wooden sign with the same yellow block letters going up and down in varying shapes and sizes. Sakura hanged it on the window, and everything calmed down.
Several hours rolled by quietly.
---
Now, after the ninja villages had been wiped out and new ninja villages always got briefly terminated, all of the shinobi of the world still had to live somewhere. For a few months after the incident normal civilians avoided the shinobi like the plague, but nothing happened even after they entered normal villages. The village was instantly bombarded only after they begun refitting it into a hidden ninja village. The limit had been tested repeatedly, and it went somewhere between a Ninja Academy and the mission office. Afterwards all countries that had ninja villages assigned smaller teams to different villages around the countries and strictly forbade them from opening an academy for teaching skills or a mission office for accepting jobs, and advised them to generally avoid building any ninja facilities at all in the villages.
The Hidden Sand didn't like this idea at all, because their "villages" were mostly mines buried under a mile of sand around the year. Their opinion hadn't progressed noticeably during the past two years.
Kakashi of course knew of the limit experimentations, and then opened just a small detective office - as his own little experiment, which had so far passed by unnoticed from the destructive meteor showers. They also had been able to train in peace with the four of them for all this time, though they do their team training several meters away from the village welcoming sign. No one was complaining about anything, either.
Anyways.
Team 7 passed time idly. Sakura always read her books; she borrowed them from various people and returned them very quickly because of the large amount of free time they had on their hands. Naruto and Sasuke mostly did various Chakra exercises in and out of the house, and Kakashi read Come Come Paradise. Currently Naruto and Sasuke attempted to complete a Chakra control exercise, which included holding a feather in front of a fan blowing air at full steam, and using Chakra to make the feather stay put for five minutes.
Earlier they quit another control test, where the idea was to sit on a chair, then use Chakra to stick the butt to the chair and the chair to the wall, and then sit on it, facing the floor. for the same five minutes. Training could be done facing upwards too, but that didn't count for passing. Not to mention the Chakra control exercise where they had to build a tiny house from a mountain of ear plugs, using Chakra to keep it from collapsing. Or the one where they had to brush their teeth with a toothbrush made from Chakra, followed by the one where they had to apply Chakra to the stopped fan and use it to blow a pile of papers off from the table, and took neighboring dogs out for a walk with Chakra collars, and opened beer bottles with Chakra bottle openers, and cooked noodles with Chakra fire, and beat their heads against the walls with Chakra cushions, and then they finally used Chakra to pick their nose... well, Sakura naturally completed all excercises on her first try, but the boys were still going at them. Needless to say they had grown infinitely stronger from all this harsh training.
Suddenly the door opened.
"Hellooo..." came a greeting from the door. An old, grey-haired man with little round glasses, some dirty green robes and a pair of sandals stood there leaning on his cane. Sakura glanced up from her book "Combinatorial Chakra Theory".
"Good day, Inmon-san." She greeted him back with a smile, and then turned to her studies.
"Yo. Come on in", quipped Kakashi and waved at a chair.
Naruto and Sasuke were too distracted trying to beat each other in the head with a feather to noticed. The old man took a few slow steps into the wooden box house. He leaned heavily on his walking cane on every step.
"Are youuu.. Busy rite now?" asked the old man, as he made his wobbly way over to the table.
Kakashi raised an eyebrow at the two arguing boys, and answered, "Nope. It's another quiet day with no jobs to do..."
---
In the year 149 of the star system NUT-33Z a great disaster fell upon the local squirrel population. Invaders from outer space came in, and… Well, invaded the planet. The attackers were a race of idiots, and so tiny that the squirrels didn't at first even notice that they had just lost a war (or even been in one).
After the squirrels realized that someone had been attacking them for a while already, they organized a counterattack. The squirrels used the Nuts of the Higher State of Squirrelness, an ancient artifact, which was a seven-piece magical device. When the parts were gathered together, the device summoned the Great Spirit of the Squirrel to grant a single wish.
As the squirrels prepared to wish to drive the idiots away, one of them managed to smuggle himself into the house with the Great Spirit of the Squirrel. What really happened was that the idiot had just gone to sleep inside the hat of a squirrel officer, and now woke up to the great bellowing of "WHAT... IS THY WISH?"
A humongous blurry squirrel wearing only military issue swimwear hovered in the air above them, arms crossed and eyes shut.
As the squirrels debated over the exact wording for the wish, the idiot replied, "I wish that the idiots, who are us and me included, but not the others over there in their furry suits, like those over there in this room, would... Hmm I dunno..."
The squirrels realized what was about to happen right in front of their eyes, and dashed for the hat, flying through the air in slow-motion.
"I have a wish..." The squirrels dived ever so slowly towards him.
"That one day idiots would become..." Dead silence fell to the room. The squirrels tried to fly towards the idiot, but the distance was too much.
"...Very very, very powerful!" the idiot completed the wish.
"YOU... WISH!" the spirit answered.
"Eh?" everyone asked, most of them with their mouths open and a look of disbelief etched on their faces. Something went terribly wrong here. It wasn't supposed to go like this at all...
"I'M... SURE WE CAN FORGE A NICE DEAL OUT OF THIS MESS, D'YA RECKON MATE?"
And thus it eventually happened that the idiots eventually became very very, very powerful. The single idiot beat up all the five ninja squirrels in a flash - And it used to take fifty idiots just to annoy a single squirrel. Thus the tides of war turned around very suddenly and forcibly.
After the wish was granted, the device pieces broke up and transformed into ovens, fridges, chairs, tables, lamps, toasters, and other random furniture for one year, and were immediately magically sent away unnoticed, to be sold in auctions around the world. They would just suddenly turn into magical device pieces one day a year from now, which would undoubtedly piss off everyone who bought these items for daily use.
---
At this point it should be noted, that the 'stupid looking idiot in a propeller hat with lots of smoke foaming around him' in fact wasn't the Great Spirit of the Squirrel, but the Ghost of the Great Squirrel Lord. That's another spirit completely. It's impossible to say why he would wear a propeller hat though. It might also be that the drunkard had imagined this on his own.
Anyways this was the start to a great adventure. Bai bai for now
