The living room was in full pandemonium, a dozen children running around wildly, screaming at the top of their lungs, two of them playing tag as they jumped over the furniture, three in the corner shooting marbles, while another two fought over a toy next to the older children busy mock-fighting a teenager whom was doing a terrible job evading capture under the amused watch of a man smiling at the antics.
Had I not needed to be carried down a flight of stairs before reaching the common area, I might have just given up on the place, turned back and moved back into my room right there and then.
Despite my grumblings, however, it hadn't taken me long to notice I was clearly the youngest person in the room and that I had been abandoned to do as I wished in the jungle, which for now was to quickly move out of the way and towards a less frequented corner of the room in order to avoid being trampled by the distracted tag-playing duo of children as one jumped to the side to evade his opponent.
It might have been understandable due to my young age, but I still had to forcibly swallow my sense of shame and inadequacy upon realizing I was the only person in the room to only be wearing a diaper to hide my modesty, whilst everyone else had the privilege of having at the very least a shirt and pants to wear, with the exception of the man and teenager duo whom were garbed in full gear with three different kunai and shuriken pouches, as if they were going on the battlefield.
Full-kit wankers I believe the scientific term was.
It did not take a genius to understand the man and the boy were both part of a newly promoted team of Genin and their instructor working on a D-rank mission, probably to entertain the children in the orphanage and lighten the load of the actual custodians, a simple glance at their forehead protectors was enough to confirm the fact.
Which had immediately made me curious about the whereabout of the other two members of the team, as unless they had transformed and disguised themselves into children to play with the orphans, they were clearly not in the room, though a quick glance at the walls and ceiling had been necessary to confirm that no chakra exercise was taking place in the orphanage.
I had been ready to accept the fact they were probably taking care of feeding or cleaning the younger children in the rooms on the upper floors, or running some errands on behalf of the establishment when a little girl, barely older than me, entered the room behind me and went immediately towards a closed door I hadn't noticed to my left, knocking on it as she was clearly still too short to open it on her own.
I had observed in bemused curiosity and quickly followed after her when an older teenage girl had opened the door and waved her in with a kind smile, unwittingly solving for me the mystery of the two missing Genin.
What greeted me on the other side was a fascinating sight and something I was disappointed in myself for never having considered before as another dozen of children were obediently sitting in a tight circle, attentively watching whom I assumed to be the third teammate, as she stood still, a look of heavy concentration on her face and doing quick hand signs before she exploded into a puff of smoke, leaving behind a cat, while her teammate, back next to her, started clapping and saying a word, before all the children shouted it back in unison.
This particular course of events repeated two more times, with the girl alternating between both a dog and a rabbit form, when I finally understood what I was looking at and felt like I could have slapped myself for not realizing the purpose of the exercise sooner.
The children were being taught some vocabulary words by their elders, through visualization, while the Genin were offered an opportunity to practice their academy techniques in creative ways.
It was a clever idea, I had to admit, lowering the cost of schooling personnel, but also maximizing the chance that the logic defiant feats achieved by the teenagers instilled a sense of awe in our easily impressed young minds and resulted into an additional interest among the orphans into the career of Shinobi.
Like a said, a brilliant plan, hitting three birds with one stone.
My interest piqued, I sat down on the edge of the circle, and paid closer attention to the events happening in front of me, committing to memory the words even as both girls alternated changing their forms in turn, showcasing a horse, a lion, an owl, a bear and a wolf for our viewing pleasure.
Halfway through, however, the spectacle came to an end, and the instructors pulled out colored balls from a pouch, presumably to teach us about colors, though it was evident to see that transforming into that many different animals of such varied sizes had taken a toll on their reserves, and the change of material was due to necessity rather than pedagogical need, as both girls were very visibly panting and sweating from exertion.
Still happy to learn, even in a less engaging manner, I mentally cataloged every word I had been shown with the associated color, discovering in the process that the pleasantly light shade was pronounced "Blue", while the lighter more aggressive color was known as "Red".
I was greatly pleased and proud of myself at the ease at which I remembered the name of each pair, recalling everything after only hearing it once, which was making me wonder whether my eighteen years old brain was helping me with an increase in cognitive ability or if the fox's chakra constantly healing my body was to thank for my presumed increase in neurological elasticity.
Much earlier than I had preferred, the lesson came to a close and the Genin team left the orphanage, leaving me once again alone with the screaming children while the matron supervised playing time.
It was frankly a bummer to be stranded with nothing to do so soon after having found something interesting, but at least that meant I had some free time to practice walking, exploring the ground floor, which consisted of a kitchen, a living room and two playing rooms in addition to the study room where words were being taught.
That day, I had the pleasure to experience a meal for the first time in my life, and while I did a bit of a mess by smearing mashed potatoes all over my face, it was much less than the others my age, which wasn't a great consolation, but I was desperate enough for positives to not look too much into it.
In the afternoon, another team of Genin was hired to watch over the children, and I quickly made my way into the study to see if another impromptu lesson would be taking place, but one look at the new trio made it clear to me they were very much not interested in humoring a bunch of orphans, let alone teaching them anything.
The team stupidly stood there, silently watching and only intervening when it looked like a fight was brewing or if an injury was on the precipice of occurring, not even communicating between each other, their teamwork being truly abysmal, though I believed their teacher was more worthy of blame for that one as he did not even attempt to correct their behavior, spending the two hours they were there glaring at anything that moved, and I could have sworn his already cold eyes hardened upon landing on me for the first time.
Disappointed by the lack of learning happening, I decided to not waste my time by standing there and instead used the day to try working on my vocal cords and attempting to pronounce the words I had learned during the morning lesson myself, rather than be satisfied with simply memorizing everything.
Despite my enthusiasm and the best of my efforts, I was only able over the next few hours to utter unintelligible blabber, frustrating me greatly as even while knowing exactly what sound I was hoping to produce and how it sounded, it simply refused to come out correctly.
Realizing the limitations of my body and the futility of repeatedly walking head first into a wall, I changed my strategy and looked for the easiest word I could try and enunciate with my limited speech pattern and small vocabulary repertoire, settling quickly on the word "Black", courtesy of my ease with the sound "a".
As I had hoped, it only took a minimum amount of effort from my part to see meaningful progress, first with two separate syllables; a pathetic sounding "Bak" and a disappointing "Lak" sound, that I had progressively turned over the course of an hour into a more acceptable "Be-Lak", though the correct pronunciation still eluded me.
Not discouraged, I kept diligently practicing my words as much as I could, to the point where I was starting to marvel at how I had not yet earned myself the very first sore throat of my life, but in the end, it had all been worth it when the results of my labors started progressively showing over a few hours and a new wave of pride swept over me as the sounds escaping my mouth were sounding somewhat coherent.
I was still practicing, earning another surprised raised eyebrow from my custodians even as I was put back into bed that evening, though it was clear it would take some time before I could have a full range at my disposition.
The next day, I had quietly eaten my share of the food, having apparently fully graduated into grown-up meals for all my food intake in the eyes of my caretakers. The other children were not particularly hostile or aware of me or the different treatment the adults subjected me to, but I wouldn't have been bothered either way if they had been. As children, they were little shits anyways, and unless I knew for a fact they would become an important in the future, I held no desire to try to speak with a bunch of three years old, if only because I was pretty confident they would not keep long term memories of any relationship I managed to cultivate at this tender age before even entering the academy, while simultaneously being very aware that our respective career choices would separate us in a few short years.
Still, I spent every awake hour observing my surroundings, listening to the conversations that the slightly more developed children had among themselves, as well as following the caretakers around, on top of making sure to be part of every single lesson offered to the children whenever a team of non-lazy Genin were saddled with the D-rank mission of taking care of us, unruly orphans.
It didn't take long for me to completely master the full rainbow of common colors, and moving onto more complex concepts, starting with the common features of the human body, courtesy of a mousy Genin teen whom had taken their job seriously and arrived to the lesson prepared with a small puppet, pointing out different parts on the body of the toy, slowly naming them, before moving on to the next one, allowing me the chance over the next few minutes to learn the words 'Nose', 'Mouth', 'Eye', 'Ear', 'Chin', 'Cheek', 'Forehead' and 'Hair'.
Just like every effort prior, I had proved myself perfectly capable of identifying everything after only being shown it once, much faster than the other children, tipping me for the first time that I might actually be smarter than infants which while to be expected, still made me feel happier about myself.
Similarly, the boy had shown the word 'Bed' to us, requesting of us to repeat it a few times before being satisfied with our collective performance and moving onto 'Door', which had been surprisingly difficult to reproduce for me, my underdeveloped body being clearly convinced it was pronounced 'Do', though the hurdle was personally overcome before we moved onto more interesting words such as 'Curtain', 'Pillow', 'Wall' and 'Ceiling', while 'Book' was similarly quickly re-baptized as 'Bo' according to my vocal cords.
Over time, I was growing my vocabulary at a steady rate, having even started reaching a point where I was swiftly becoming more and more confident in myself, as even the Genin lessons were becoming a waste of my time, the teenagers having to cater to a full class of not-so-brilliant kids requiring repetition and only seldom showing creativity or introducing us children to anything new anymore.
During those times, I occupied myself with walking all over the floors, trying to improve my stamina in preparation for my next great quest and the next challenge climbing or descending the stairs would show itself to be.
I hadn't yet achieved my goal when everything changed for me, for the better, with the introduction into my life of Genin team number four, composed entirely of orphans, from the Jonin to the last Genin. As a consequence of this fact, each one of them had to go through a similar experience as I was so far, having to rely on the kindness of others to learn anything worthwhile.
Not having forgotten their root, this team, more than any other, always came prepared for our lessons, heavily invested emotionally into our well-being, which for me, translated into an increase in their diligence and the amount of things I was going to learn from them.
It had been a complete surprise, though a welcome one for me when the boy running the lesson that day had brought a white board with him and drawn us a squiggly symbol in the shape of an open-ended triangle with a line cutting it horizontally in half and slowly pronounced the syllable "A".
This time, I was much quicker on the uptake and it didn't take me longer than a blink of the eyes to understand we were being shown our letters and I felt an immense sense of gratitude towards those angelic barely eleven years old, and all the good they were doing in the world, even at their very young age.
I quickly assimilated the knowledge of the new letter, but unfortunately still had to wait for the other students to catch up, which was slowing down my learning rate too much for me to feel fully satisfied.
Despite that, progress was still being made and we slowly carved our way through the whole twenty six letters of the alphabet in this strange language, before going back at random over to previous letters, which like before, I had seemed to recall exactly every time.
Over the next few weeks and despite it only taking me barely twenty six seconds to completely master the lesson, the boy had made it a routine for him to appear every morning in the orphanage to show those interested their alphabet, sometimes even coming on his own and making me wonder whether he was doing it even in his free time without being assigned a mission, which earned him even more of my respect as I made it a point to never miss a single one of his lectures, hoping he would slip up and show us something new.
My strategy paid off when one day, I had inadvertently gained his attention through my perfect recall for each letter, enough for him to put me to the test and try something new, writing two letters at once and making a sound which I promptly repeated until he was satisfied. Erasing the board, he had filled it back with a few different combinations, teaching them and quizzing me on their pronunciation, even trying to trick me by going back to previous ones and remaining silent, daring me to give the correct answer, and promptly being shocked when I perfectly did so, every single time.
From that day onward, any time they arrived as a team, the boy had let his teammate run the lesson for the whole class while he concentrated his efforts solely on me, having apparently chosen me as a project of sorts, clearly recognizing my higher level of cognition, and making me go through hundreds of combinations of syllables, starting from 'Ab', 'Ac', 'Ad', and going all the way down to 'Zy'.
The whole process had proved itself quite boring and frankly mentally exhausting for me, though once it was all said and done, I could not help but feel happy of the progress I was accomplishing, as well as proud at the speed it had been made, even if I now had to confront the fact that nobody alive should ever have been able to memorize such a large volume of information, in a different language in such a short amount of time without having an extremely effective memory at the very least. It was starting to become evident that I was special and I now found it worthwhile to question whether my abnormally potent memorization ability was permanent and whether it had come as a direct result of my tenant's chakra and his interference, though I would have to wait a bit and do some experimenting before accepting this particular conclusion as a fact.
From my lessons, however, I was getting more and more advanced with my knowledge, the helpful boy coming back every day, bringing with him and helping me flip through picture books, teaching me words, their meanings as well as their spelling all at once, starting from the easiest categories, such as animals with words like 'Cat', 'Dog', 'Cow', 'Pig' and 'Fox', before slowly growing my vocabulary as I was being taught to read. I sometimes felt like I was cheating, as I was memorizing the words rather than trying to learn and decipher the text on my own like I normally was supposed to, but seeing at how much faster it was going, it was difficult to justify the thought changing course now.
As time went by and it became increasingly clear that listening to a word once was always enough for me to commit both the sound and the spelling to memory, I had to officially conclude that I had been blessed with the gift of perfect recall, a very welcome surprise to me as that had not been a perk I had had access to in my previous lifetime, nor had Naruto been gifted in such a manner, making me even happier to have Kurama's silent support and positive influence on my biology prior even to my birth.
Speaking of the fox, he was still asleep wherever he was, pumping more and more of his chakra into my constellation, making my orbs quintuple in size since I had first noticed his influence. I had wondered in the past whether my chakra would keep its blue color or be overtaken by Kurama's red, but it seemed neither was happening and my chakra was taking a lilac coloring, similar to the Rasengan Naruto had shown in the Valley of the End, a beautiful fusion between our two colors, which I was somewhat glad for, honestly preferring the shade and its lack of association to the demon fox.
I personally theorized that having him constantly healing every part of me, including my brains and synapses, had allowed them to be much more responsive than they were supposed to be, though I would have to submit to a medical check-up to be certain, which I would not do for a long time yet, if at all.
I had been quite shocked when the boy teaching me to read had shown me how to write his own name, more-so when it appeared to be "Iruka Umino", not having recognized him from his appearance as he lacked both the scar or the ponytail that had made him recognizable as a Chunin, nor were there any subtitles or speech bubbles to give me any hint on whom I was speaking with.
At the discovery, I had thanked my lucky star for Hiruzen's Law having come into effect and prevented anyone from sharing my furry little problem with the younger population, as it meant the boy was still unaware of me and had approached me in good faith from the start, something I doubted he would have done had he been told.
It would probably take until my actual introduction to the wide world and his promotion to Chunin for him to discover the truth, and hopefully, by then I would have already learned enough to keep going on my own should it prove a deal breaker for him.
It also helped that I was purely a teaching project for the boy, rather than a friend, as we never spoke much beyond him immediately cutting to the chase and improving my ability to communicate with my surroundings.
My learning speed was absolutely phenomenal and every day I was growing more knowledgeable of the common language, having finally exhausted the small topics and their related lexicon, having learned lots about fruits, flowers, clothing items, vegetables, tools, emotions and some basic qualifiers such as 'good', 'bad', 'above' and 'under', which meant it had been time for my education to move into a more practical and conversational direction with my teacher reading short books to me with the expectation that my abnormal memory would kick in to help me develop a stronger grasp of the language through building an internal database of sentences, expressions and use-cases of different words and scenarios.
For that reason, it became common for Iruka to bring larger story-driven and dialog heavy books to read for me, though I had immediately realized I was able to read at exactly the same level of proficiency as he did whenever there were words I had been taught before, while being completely lost whenever I encountered a new one. Thinking back on it, it made sense as I still ignored both the meaning and how to pronounce words I hadn't seen yet, making Iruka's idea of co-reading even more genius in my mind.
It had been somewhat jarring at first to encounter strange combinations like 'cha' being pronounced as 'ka' in certain words and 'cha' in others, though I did not waste much time contemplating it, even if I still hadn't been convinced on the importance of duplicate letters such as 'Q' and 'C' when 'K' and 'S' were perfectly capable of doing a perfectly fine job conveying the required sounds...
Even then, I knew it would be a waste of my time to spend it mentally arguing against the logic of a new language, choosing instead to delight myself at the thought of how broken my mental ability truly was when I noticed that my brain had started making connections on its own, filling blanks using what I assumed to be my previous life's memories as well as any new information I absorbed.
I couldn't wait until I got my hands on an actual dictionary and never have to worry about ever finding a word I could not understand, I had decided one day, as while I could read on my own, I would always struggle whenever meeting a new word, wondering whether it was a spelling mistake or a new concept I ignored the existence of.
Surprisingly, it had not taken me long to get my hands on such an item as my new teacher and I were apparently thinking on the same wavelength, seeing as only three weeks after having started reading books, he had noticed my stagnation and had brought with him a large dictionary, doubling as a book of synonyms of his own volition in order to read it for me.
I had been excited at the prospect, though quickly changed my mind, cursing my initial foolishness.
As any sane person could have predicted, reading a list of arbitrary words was undoubtedly the most boring and uninteresting material one could subject themselves to, doubly so when unable to understand anything going on, as I had learned the hard way, spending most of my reading time wondering what on earth an 'adverb' was supposed to be. Still, I had truly been blessed with my magical brain and I could almost feel my syntax and word database updating in real time with each new definition we read, until finally reaching the insect known as "Zyzzyva", allowing me to understand I had now absorbed every official word of this new interesting language.
It had taken months, but the results spoke for themselves and I sat there for hours, going over the new information, staring at my ceiling and smiling to myself like a lunatic, even as I thought back on the kindness of my teacher, having wasted so many hours out of his probably busy schedule. I assumed his team must have been preparing for the Chunin exams for some time now, even if I knew he would only be promoted when he was sixteen years of age thanks to my being a nerd and having read his wiki page while still alive.
It was clear to see how the man would grow to become a good teacher and a strong pedagogue, his attentiveness to my progress and the way he had adapted his strategy according to my strengths and needs proving his good instincts, while his relentlessness even in the face of hours and hours of the mind-numbing voluntary reading he had done was a testament to his commitment as well as his willingness to go the extra mile for his charges.
Though I knew he would no longer have the time to visit much over the next few weeks, I had been grateful when he had gifted me with some of the second-hand books he had already overgrown the use of, the most precious and useful to me being a grammar booklet and a conjugation manual, which after the five days it had taken to read from cover to cover had rendered me fully capable of communicating and understanding the common tongue. Or at least I would be as I earned a bit more experience in slang and figurative language, a subject that would unfortunately have to be studied in vivo rather than using the shortcut of books.
I estimated my age to be slightly older than two years old when I first felt confident that I was fully ready to communicate with the outside world, though I did not make use of those skills much by socializing with others around me, not wanting to waste my time around children, as well as no longer gaining any benefit from being present to the lessons of the Genin teams, nor wanting to annoy the orphanage staff, as their preference in avoiding me was made very clear by now.
I had tried learning the names of the other children at first, hoping to find a named character with whom I could bond from a young age, but alas, no Tenten, Sai or Kabuto were anywhere to be found.
Most of my days were spent simply reading through whatever dumb romance or action story Iruka had borrowed and read from the library and let in my possession until he needed to return it. I often wanted to ask him to provide more useful materials, but always managed to keep my tongue to myself, not wanting to be greedy or make him change his mind on helping me grow by seeming ungrateful.
Moreover, I was almost positive the books he was choosing for me were some of his favorites or ones he thought would interest someone of my supposed age, rather than the dull, information heavy materials I would have personally preferred and that meant I was not allowed to criticize them at all.
At first, I had hoped the fact that the orphanage was understaffed and overpopulated, coupled with the caretakers' disdain for me would mean the security would be somewhat lax and I would be allowed to leave the building and explore the village on my own, but I was unfortunately mistaken and no child was ever allowed to leave, not even to the backyard, until they were four years of age and ready to leave on their own while attending the academy.
The next two years were going to be miserable, I knew.