The rest of the day and night went as smoothly as can be imagined, for a given level of 'smoothly'. Sakura's parents were perfectly happy to drag me around the house, show me where things were, guide me to my room, and point out various bits and bobs, talking about how I'd spent my free time.

The strangest thing was how familiar it felt. It wasn't until I was alone in the room going over the bookshelf, running my fingers over the titles on the spines, that I started to get an idea why.

We're similar after all, aren't we? Even the way the bookshelf was organised felt familiar to me; novels toward the top, heavier reading and nonfiction in the middle, textbooks on the bottom. And there were a lot of textbooks. I picked up a book titled Chakra: Form & Function and paged through; it was a pretty standard introductory medical text. Usually, girls around this age weren't interested in this kind of thing; I should know. Was she interested in bio-med too?

I stretched out on the bed on my stomach, looking at the diagrams with half-focus. I didn't know very much about her or anything about this place. Mostly just what I picked up from my little brother watching episodes in the background while I studied, or from the pure osmosis of pop culture one obtains from an internet connection.

I knew that they were ninja– mercenaries– who went out on various missions for Konoha. The story revolved around Naruto: the loud-mouthed and kind-hearted star of the show with some sort of special magic power, Sasuke: the emo boy who took everything too seriously and had magic eyeball powers, and Sakura: some whiny girl who yelled at Naruto a lot and had a crush on the grumpy one. She didn't seem to have any other purpose to the story, from what I'd seen.

No wonder I hadn't liked her much, if she was really me.

Hopefully, she was way cooler than my memory of her made me think, but if we were that similar, maybe not.

"Nah, screw that kind of thinking!" I said. Sulking wasn't going to help me; I needed to figure out as much as I could about this place and the new life I was in. I pushed myself up and looked again at the bookshelf. Maybe by studying, she knew a lot of jutsus. Was that a thing you studied, or a thing you just learned from someone and practised?

I walked over to the bookshelf and replaced my medical book with a few others. 101 Chakra Control Exercises, From Hara to Hand-Seals, and Katas for the Modern Kunoichi seemed promising, but I couldn't find any books that sounded like they'd explain how to do jutsus or throw weapons, or anything useful in combat.

The jutsus I could understand. That might just be something I'd have to ask Sensei about. But nothing on fighting? At all? Even I owned a couple of books on archery; my sister and brother were fanatics and tried to drag me out to shoot with them constantly. I was starting to wish I'd agreed more, now.

With a feeling rather like stepping off a small cliff, I opened to the first chapter of Katas for the Modern Kunoichi.

Two hours later, Mebuki opened the door. "Sakura-chan, lunch is ready… Sakura-chan?"

I was standing with one leg in the air, a heavy textbook on top of my leg, and trying to keep myself balanced while I was bent sideways with a palm on the ground. "Seriously?" I asked through gritted teeth. My leg started to shake. "We're supposed to learn fighting stances through yoga?"

Mebuki plucked the book off my leg and set it on my bed. "After lunch, you can. That does look an awful lot like how you kicked your poor teammate," she mused.

I carefully folded myself down to the floor, trying not to bend the wrong way, breathing deeply. "I'm not sure I deserve this."

"No woman ever does, darling." She clucked her tongue and left the room.

And so it went for the rest of the day, right up until bed. I ached all over, and I hadn't even done any real training yet. Overall, though...

At least my body hurts for an actual reason, this time. Seriously, it was hard to complain given that. And my mind felt so clear the whole day; any time I'd picked up a book to read through, focus came easily, no matter the subject.

Could it be the chakra thing? Didn't that doctor say I'd have an easier time with mental tasks? But that didn't explain physical tasks being doable in the first place for me. Maybe this body was just built better than mine. As much as I'd judged Sakura for not being much of a fighter, it was obvious she was in better condition than I was. Even the stances had felt vaguely familiar; there was some sort of muscle memory involved, something that didn't come from me.

I rolled onto my side in bed, nuzzling my face into the pillow. I felt my body slowly relax, the ache fading away to something barely noticeable. We'll just have to see how I hold up compared to the others, tomorrow.

And so there was evening and morning, my first day.

When I woke up, it was six in the morning; my alarm wasn't set to go off for another hour. I shut it off and stumbled into the bathroom, washing up for the day. It didn't take long for me to wake up; my body still felt great and I was buzzing with energy.

I tied the forehead protector on like a headband and stared at myself in the mirror, frowning. My hair was very long in the front; it kept wanting to fall into my eyes. That would get very inconvenient during missions, wouldn't it? Even during training, I was going to get sweaty; pulling it back in a ponytail wouldn't help much.

Humming, I pulled the headband back off and dug around for a pair of scissors. Hopefully, Sakura's parents weren't the type to get angry over D.I.Y. haircuts. If they were okay with the whole ninja thing, I highly doubted it.

It didn't take long for me to find out.

"Morning, Mebuki-san," I chirped. I was sitting at the kitchen table, munching on an apple and going over my Hand-Seal text. It seemed like they were important for directing chakra in jutsus.

"Sakura! Your hair!"

I looked up. She was in a dressing gown halfway toward the teapot, gaping.

"Oh. Does it bother you?" Oops.

"No, it's just… so short."

"A woman needs hair to match her temper!" Another voice exclaimed. Kizashi had arrived; it looked like he'd been up for some time.

I was spared any further discussion over the hair as they started bickering. I threw the apple core into compost, grabbed my book, and trotted back up the stairs to get ready. Fortunately, I had some idea of what to wear; my little brother had worn a Naruto costume for Halloween the past three years in a row, and somehow I almost always ended up being the one re-tying everything on it to keep from slipping.

Plus, I had the outfit I'd awoken in to give some idea. That helped.

Tights: Check. (Longer ones were available, thankfully.)

Shorts: Check. (Though if I grew another inch I'd be out of options that weren't ridiculously tight.)

Comfortable Shirt: Check. (No way was I wearing a dress.)

Weapon Pouch: Check. (Actual weapons in pouch: Check. Thank goodness.)

Watch: Check. (She hadn't been wearing one before but luckily owned one.)

Forehead-Protector…

I ran back into the bathroom, snatched it up, and paused. Memories of having to re-tie my brother's twenty times in one night made me hesitant to wear it on my forehead. Wearing it as a headband as before wouldn't be a bad plan, but I didn't have hair that needed pulling back anymore. I remembered seeing some shinobi on the street on the way home; not all of them wore them on their head.

Nodding to myself, I wrapped it around my waist. Perfect.

"Okay, I'm off!" I called, opening the door. Stopped. "Actually, do you know where Training Ground 3 is?"

To my relief, the place wasn't difficult to find. What bothered me more was that as I was walking, I found myself spacing out, yet found myself walking the path I needed to. I never turned onto the wrong street. Was this also muscle memory, or..?

I wandered down a path in the training grounds that was leading toward a clearing. It was the same one as before, with the wooden poles planted in the ground.

Someone was already there. I checked my watch; it was barely after seven. I'd expected to be alone; I was going to take this time to think.

As I got close, I found it was the dark-haired guy. Sasuke? That was the grouchy kid Sakura had a big crush on, right? Hopefully, this wouldn't be awkward.

I walked up to where he was leaning against a wooden pole, staring off into the woods.

"Good morning. You are Sasuke-san, right?"

He looked up. Blinked. "… Still can't remember?"

"Nope." I shrugged. "Kakashi didn't tell you?"

He gave me a flat look that I took to mean 'Have you met Kakashi yet?'

I snorted. "Alright, good point." I looked around; there were a ton of trees in the area. I could get some good kunai-throwing practice in before the others arrived.

"Your hair's gone."

I turned back to face him; he wasn't looking at me. "It's not gone, just short. I thought it'd get in the way." I paused. "Why do you keep your hair so long? Won't it be inconvenient?"

"Hn," he grunted.

"Fair," I shrugged. I guessed it wasn't my business. No wonder Sakura liked this guy so much: he was totally emotionally unavailable. "Well, if you're not too busy sitting, can you watch me throw kunai and tell me if I'm completely messing it up?"

It turned out that training was a better way to engage him than small-talk. I couldn't blame him.

He slouched over and we made our way closer to the trees; not very far away from my target, but I had no idea if I'd have the muscle memory for this and wanted to start small. I dug a kunai out of my pouch, and without much thought, threw it toward the centre of the tree.

It spun a few times in the air and flopped onto the ground about two metres in front of me.

"… That was terrible," Sasuke remarked.

"Yeah."

"Why are you throwing it like that?"

"That's the only way I remember how to throw them?"

My sister, upon realising my complete lack of motivation for archery, had tried taking me out for knife throwing on a few occasions. I sucked at it. I was hoping I would suck less at it now, but…

"You never hold a kunai by the blade. You'd just cut your hands open. If you used poisons you'd probably kill yourself."

I shrugged haplessly. "How do you throw them, then?"

'Invitation to Show Off' was evidently also a good way to energise him. He promptly pulled out three kunai and whipped them into the tree I'd been aiming at. They thunked into the tree in a perfect line.

"Can you do that in like, slow motion?"

He pulled out another kunai, held the handle between two fingers, and whipped out his arm and wrist. The kunai landed perfectly above one of the others.

He folded his arms. "Your turn."

I mimicked him as well as I could, flinging out my arm and wrist and–

Thup!

The kunai very barely nudged itself into the bark at the base of the next tree over.

"Still pretty bad," Sasuke remarked.

Another kunai out of my pouch- thup!

"At least that one was in the right tree. It's supposed to go in by the other end, though."

Argh… Kunai. Swing arm, wrist, thup!

"… How did you manage to throw that kunai behind you? If you're throwing weapons like that on a mission, you're more likely to hit yourself than an enemy." He sighed. "Even in the academy, your throwing wasn't that terrible."

I palmed another kunai, but instead of throwing, practised making the throwing arc with my arm a few times. "What was I like?"

"… Hm. Nothing special for kunai or taijutsu, but not the worst. You usually picked things up fast, though. Iruka-sensei always said it was because you had good chakra-control."

I paused in my attempts. That was… a lot more information than I'd expected. It didn't seem likely Sakura was friends with him during school; which meant he'd probably been keeping tabs on a lot of people. But there was something a lot more important in what he said. "What's chakra got to do with weapons or fighting?"

He paused in inspecting the edge of one of his kunai. "Everything. Obviously. Aren't you supposed to be smart?"

"Don't you know what 'amnesia' means?" I shot back. Clenched my teeth. Exhaled through my nose. "… Sorry. I appreciate you helping me like this."

He shrugged, looking away. "Better than having a liability." He weighed his kunai in his hand for a moment, before flicking it at the tree again. Thump! "There are two types of chakra; spiritual and physical."

"Oh!" Recollection flooded my mind. My brain– and body– produced mental and physical chakra, the doctor had said. He'd said mental tasks would come more easily for me, so I assumed chakra ran on automatic, but... "So chakra… do you have to try to use it on purpose when you're doing a physical task?"

He crossed his arms. "Not usually, but Iruka-sensei said that if you can direct your chakra, it can help. It's supposed to be difficult, but I think that's what you were doing."

Was that a compliment? Not for me, though. For Sakura.

Either way, I'd take it. I frowned and pulled out another kunai. Deep breath in, slow breath out. I directed my chakra until my hand started to grow warm, and flung the kunai outward.

Thunk!

It hit the tree, but barely. Another few centimetres would have been a complete miss.

"Your aim is still terrible, but at least the kunai went in the right tree this time." Sasuke sighed and walked forward to start collecting his kunai. I hung my head and followed.

When I got to the last kunai I'd thrown (the one that'd made it into the same tree as Sasuke's), I was pleased to see it was buried deeper than any of his. I grabbed the handle and tried to yank it out. It wouldn't budge. Frowning, I tried directing chakra into it…

Oh! It's working!

"Wait, what?"

Sasuke paused in removing his kunai, staring at the same thing I was.

As I'd started pulling the kunai from the tree, the hole it had made in the bark slowly began to seal back up. I pulled the kunai out the rest of the way, and we watched as the hole closed up completely.

"That's..." Sasuke began.

My eyelid started to twitch. "That's..."

"Hey, guys! What's going on?"

I almost jumped out of my skin. "Naruto!"

The blonde boy trotted up to us, grinning. "Hey, Sakura-chan! Are you ready for training? Wow! What happened to your hair? And why were you guys glaring at a tree?"

We stared at him. Then each other. Then the tree.

"I just… tried to take a kunai out, and the hole in the tree closed up."

"Only hers. Not mine," Sasuke added. "So it's not the tree. It was her. She just healed the tree with a kunai." He shook his head slowly. "That's..."

I shook my head. "That's just..."

Naruto grinned broadly. "Funky!"

Extra Special Trivia Part 2: I felt like the pacing in this chapter turned out slower than I would like… but it's hard to jump to the action and keep things realistic at the same time. Especially with an introspective character.

Extra Special Trivia Part 3: I kept wondering when people would figure out all the chapters were named after Cha Cha Slide lyrics…