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Great Hall B, 8:30 a.m.

That's all the card says.

Great Hall B is a big conference room in an administrative building. Hisana knows where it is, simply because she's seen the signs at the day of their arrival. But even if she hadn't known, the droves of ninjas marching towards the same location from all over the village would have certainly given her a hint. She's a little overwhelmed, in all honesty. Konoha is pretty big, and there are constantly all sorts of ninja milling about, but she's never seen so many in one place. That they are mostly from foreign, possibly hostile villages only sends more adrenaline down her limbs.

The boys are a reassuring presence beside her, Haru keeping up with her hurried pace easily on her left, Sora matching his far longer stride to them on her right. They press into the crowded hall, squeezed between gloomy looking pre-teens and truly terrifying looking young adults. The stench of sweat and fear is thick in the air, which reassures her far more than it should. Hisana's hand finds the henohenomoji sewn onto her arm; she feels oddly like the predator right now, rather than the prey, even in the face of ninjas twice her size.

Despite the size of the crowd it is quiet. No chatter echoes through the hall, foot steps are all silenced to nothingness. It's a good thing, or they would have missed a familiar voice croaking, "Chuunin Exam, registration for the first task! Over here please."

There's a creaking noise, a desk scraping over tile, and suddenly the old woman becomes visible above the heads of the assembled genin.

"For team registering, please refer to desk one – for single registering, please refer to desk two."

A confused murmur and a jolt go through the crowd, nearly taking Hisana off her feet.

"I repeat," the old lady rasps, voice dying rapidly, "team registering on desk one – every member of the team needs to sign! For single registering, please refer to desk two. The first task starts in twenty minutes."

"Single registering?" someone questions in the front. "We can do that? B-but what of our team?"

The old lady clears her throat wetly.

"All participants can register as single participants – the remaining members of the team will either have to withdraw from the Exams, or register as single participants."

There's a moment of silence. Then chaos breaks out.

"Single participants?" Hisana wonders out loud, whirling around to her team.

But the boys are gone. She growls. Someone, a Kiri shinobi, very nearly steps onto her foot; she's pushed further into the crowd, disoriented. Great. The boys must have been swept away too.

"Sora? Haru?"

Predictably there's no answer. She squeezes through the crowd, once again rather glad for her height. She can't quite overlook them all, but a good part of the younger ones. In any case it will make her easier to find. Feeling for chakra is as good as impossible in this place – when she tries the backlash of the assembled ninjas sends her into a vicious bout of vertigo and leaves her with a mild headache. A little more carefully she channels a little more chakra into her nose. She shudders. In theory Hisana knows that most shinobi are a bunch of filthy, stinky barbarians; actually smelling it full force is an experience on a whole other level.

Beneath the general stink of fear and sweat there's old blood, unbrushed teeth – and definitely someone who didn't shower today somewhere close to her. She recognizes Haru's scent first. But tracking him through the hall only leads her back to where she started. What the hell is going on? She sniffs again, trying to contain a grimace at the hulking Iwa-nin next to her. Did he roll in manure? Is that a thing Iwa-nin do in their freetime?

Only ten more minutes. The line at the single register is getting longer. Should she - …? No. She hates the idea of doing this on her own, and there's no way the boys would stop looking for her to sign up – she'd be leaving her team to fail for sure.

Haru's scent is clearly somewhere close. But it's coming from a Suna kunoichi armed with a battle axe. She looks at the girl in confusion, trying to take a more inconspicuous sniff.

"Rui?" the girl aks, just as bewildered.

Rui?

"Maki-chan?" someone calls next to her.

"Akiko!"

"Mamorou-kun!"

She blinks, disturbed. Five minutes left; the yelling is getting more desperate, and the Suna girl is still looking her with such a familiar tilt of her head. The mimics are all wrong, the size and the voice too. Hisana's Sharingan flare to life even before she makes the conscious decision to activate them. The kunoichi doesn't even blink, as if she hasn't noticed Hisana squinting at her with red eyes. He probably hasn't.

Spindly nets of chakra are layered all over the hall. There's a young girl with a Kumo hitai-ate next to her, wearing the guise of a Kiri shinobi. Two Ame ninjas are narrowly walking past each other again and again, one disguised as a weedy Konoha kunoichi, the other as a much older Kumo ninja. The suna kunoichi is still staring at her, but this time she can make out Haru's face under the genjutsu.

"Rui?" the girl says again, while her teammate's mouth forms 'Hisana-chan?'

"Kai," she mumbles, careful not to alert any of the others, before reaching out for him.

'Genjutsu'

A second passes, Haru's eyes flickering back and forth between her and the competition, before he too shakes off the illusion.

"Where's Sora?"

They find him standing in line for the team sign up. When they walk up to him he waves at them cheerily.

"You already broke the genjutsu?" she asks in surprise.

It hurts her pride a little that he was apparently faster than her, despite the Sharingan, but the annoyance disappears when she realizes how relaxed he looks; as he never doubted they'd turn up in time.

Sora shrugs.

"I stumbled around for a while, but then I saw someone throw off the illusion. In hindsight, it was pretty obvious, huh? So I got in line already – I knew you'd find both of us quicker than the other way around."

They make it, but barely.

The elderly woman leads them out of the hall, genjtusu still firm in place. They leave behind the other contestants, none of them any the wiser. Hisana isn't sure whether to be surprised or not, that there are in fact a good number of singular ninjas with them. In Konoha this would have been certainly a trick – a way to weed out those incapable of teamwork or selfish enough to leave their comerades behind. But this isn't Konoha, and Suna seems to be just fine with the weird make up of their group.

Hisana counts six complete teams, one of them a Konoha cell with an Inuzuka in the lead, and one of them a Suna team with a familiar blonde. Temari. Hisana elbows both of her teammates, too startled to be inconspicuous. The the Kazekage's daughter catches Hisana's look, just as both boys recognize her. She gives the girl a razor sharp smile that she hopes is convincing enough to cover up her apprehension. To her bewilderment Temari looks at her just as distiurbed as Hisana feels; a quick glance at the boys shows that they are all sporting the exact same creepy expression. Oh.

"Good one, Haru-kun," she whispers, suddenly strangely amused.

"My face hurts," he whispers back, mouth trying to twitch back into something more neutral. "Whatever you're planning with her, I hope this is worth it."

Temari's teammates are indeed, to her relief, not her brothers. Instead they are big, nasty looking ninjas with veiled faces – maybe the Kazekage really does want her to have a taste of defeat before entering the Exams for real. Or maybe he hopes Temari's extra experience will lead Gaara through his own Exam with the fewest causalities possible. Maybe both. Fact is that those two hulks look more like bodyguards than teammates, trying to wall the girl in between them. Much to Temari's annoyance, apparently.

The number of single participants is even higher than the number of teams; Hisana counts nine singular ninjas, most of them predictably from Kiri, but also a good number from Kusa and Iwa. And Hanada. The girl comes bounding over to them, completely unmoved by the tension in the room and the loss of her team.

"Can you believe it?" she drawls, latching onto Sora's arm and completely ignoring the rest of them.

"Konoha would have never let us compete by ourselves. This is so much better. You know, those losers cost me my promotion last time. Good riddance."

"Don't say crap like that," Sora snaps, trying unsuccessfully to extricate himself from her. "I know Arata and Shin. There's nothing wrong with their skills."

This is new information. Hisana shoots Haru an inquiring look, but the boy only shrugs. Never heard of those two either. Hanada makes a dismissive gesture.

"Anyway – they could have signed up too. Not my fault they didn't."

Sora's retort is cut short by the arrival of the first proctor.

Hisana's jaw nearly hits the floor; she's not the only one. The proctor is an elderly man – far over sixty certainly – with a kindly, wrinkled, nut-brown face. Most of his hair is gone, except for a few tufts of white cotton candy. He's huge. She's never seen such a huge person before; the man towers over all of them by at least three heads and his arms look as if he likes to bend steel in his spare time.

"Yes, good morning, yes," he greets them, Suna accent thick and rough in his voice. "There's quite a few of you left, yes."

He scrutinizes them, fingers tugging on a tuft of hair.

"We'll have to change that, yes."

He pulls down a lever behind him and opens a door to the outside. Sunlight bursts into the room, and after only a few seconds the air gets noticeably hotter.

"That's your first task, yes."

A few of them hesitantly step closer. Baking under the sun, walled in by the building itself, is a miniature castle, surrounded by a garden. There are watchtowers, a gate and a building about the size of three regular houses.

"Eh … what?" someone blurts out.

The proctor's laugh is decidedly less benevolent than his appearance.

"This is the castle of Akihiko-dono. Inside there is a fully functional household: Akihiko-dono and his wife, his children, his servants and guards … and a political hostage, yes."

Someone gives an impressed whistle.

"You will infiltrate the castle and and retrieve the hostage, yes. Please, single participants line up here; you will go first. Every participating unit will have two hours, yes."

"That … means camping out here," Haru realizes.

"Food and drink will be provided," the proctor assures them. "But settle in for a long wait, yes."

They are last. Of course they are last. Sweaty, annoyed and in desperate need for alone time team 11 watches most of the single participants flounce out of the castle victoriously and long before the two hour mark.

"See," Hanada chirps, "I told you getting rid of the extra weight can only help things along."

Her glare makes very clear whom she considers the extra weight. After almost 16 hours the sun has long since set even in Suna. They make up for it by shining huge spotlights onto the castle, blazing just as viciously as the desert sun.

"Any way we can make it in under two hours?" Sora enquires, dark shadows under his eyes despite several naps. Hisana shrugs.

"Depends on how good you are with the henge."

To her it's stupidly, glaringly obvious – though that might admittedly be because she read Naruto religiously for quite a while. The first few volumes are still vivid in her mind, even after all these years. After leaving behind the guilt that profiting from Naruto's ingenuity would have provoked just a few years ago, stealing a part of his Shadow Shuriken technique won't keep her awake for even a single night. Not with her promotion up in the air, and with it a great deal of her future.

She's not sure if that makes her a cheater, or just a ninja.

The boys need thirty minutes to transform into inanimate objects. It's apparently harder than it looks – which makes Naruto's spontaneous mastery of it all the more impressive. Sadly the jutsu does nothing to decrease mass, so they both weight the same. It's a bit of a struggle to cast a genjutsu on herself and then scale one of the wodden watchtowers with them, but she manages. There's a guard at full attention just a few feet abow her, but the genjutsu holds.

From here she has a good view on the gardens and the entrance of the house. There are four patrols, as far as she can see. Their guard patterns aren't particularly sophisticated, but they are fast. There seems to be no one else outside though, so she's pretty confident that she could get at least the boys into the house. The only problem would be that she has no way of knowing what's inside the house.

There could be more guards. It could be a fully fledged trap. They could walk right into Akihiko-dono. This is a Chuunin Exam, so she's pretty sure assassinating the noble is not in the cards – on missions like this they'd cause an international incident.

But judging by the guards all of the house's inhabitants should be civilians, so the boys should be able to sneak past them.

"All right," she hisses, watching the guard above her carefully, "I can get you to the front door. If I'm right you're going to have fifteen seconds to open the damn door and get inside before the next guard comes along. You better be ready."

Hisana carefully loosens her hands from the tower, letting the weight of her entire team drag her body into the horizontal. Two kunais, straight past the guards. She can do that.

The last man vanishes around the corner and …

thunk thunk

It's maybe 50 feet of gardens she has to throw across, but the sheer weight of the kunais is staggering. They hit the grass not far from the veranda, but the impact makes more noise than she anticipated. Sora releases the henge, grabs a hold of the Haru-kunai and slithers into the building. There's no further noise. Hisana allows herself a moment to relax. From here on her team will take care of the hostage.

In the meantime Hisana will have to think of something for the guards. She crawls further up the tower, genjutsu sliding from her body like a whispy cloak, and pokes her head over the railing. The last thing the guard sees are her Sharingan spinning in the dark.

7 things about the Nara household

1. Shiki's homelife is rather idyllic: Unlike Michiko, who rules her family through fear, Sachiko prefers manipulation and the swift, petty retribution that only a mother can give. Her husband is more than fine with that. If a bit of vinegar finds its way into his tea every once in a while, well, he still prefers it to the yelling.

2. Shikarou is generally an authoritarian father who doesn't show much affection physically. Many people think that means he's distant to his family, but that's not true – he's just sort of an awkward duck. People of the Nara clan know how pleased he is actually with his children, because he calls Shiki 'his princess' and Shikano 'his heir'. Outsiders simply don't get the privilege of information about them.

3. Shikano is the cuddly sort of older brother. While he would vehemently deny that in public – and in fact has done so several times – he used to be the one to carry Shiki around on his shoulders, take her places, and generally bow to her every whim. As they got older he started putting on a harassed face, but in truth he still dotes on her.

4. The reason why Shikano is rather interested in Hisana is that she is Shiki's first proper friend. He also wants to meet Shizuha, to which Shiki replied, "She's skittish; you'll scare her away."

5. People are always confused as to why Nara men oftentimes marry strong willed women, as most of them repeatedly express that they only want their peace and quiet, until they actually meet 'the one'.

It reason is, most likely, that as they get older they start remembering something their fathers have been telling them since they were little boys: 'The only woman worth marrying is the one that can put the fear of god in you.' – of course the second part of it is only spoken aloud when the wife is nowhere in hearing range: 'Because that way no one ever messes with your family , and you have your peace and quiet.'

6. While Shiki acts a lot like her mother, she looks just like a Nara. The most notable instance of that is her wiry hair; while mostly wrestled into a severe bun, Sachiko likes to braid it, which makes Shiki look a little like Pipi Longstocking.

7. While the members of the Nara household engage in vicious games of Shogi – complete with betting household chores – they also enjoy Go, Mahjong, Bagh Chal, and Go Fish.

If there's someone you'd like to know more about, please speak up! I'm doing these 'xx things about' mostly about the major characters, but if there's someone else you're interested in, I'd gladly give it a go.