"Welcome, audience members that happened to stumble onto this challenge and were forced to sit it through as bewildered crowd, but also – our first team of contestants, the Team Hokage!" Musha roared out into the microphone as if she was a stage diva tearing her heart out in the most passionate part of her solo performance.
"Do you think this is the real Musha or is she more like Princess Ibiki kind?" Meiko leaned up to Kiyomi with a whisper. The Yamanaka couldn't do much more than shrug. Her head was still killing her from the last challenge, the idea of performing in a quiz show alone made her nauseous.
Naruto, however, appeared to be absorbing the spotlight. The young man had a rich grin on his face the whole time and flexed as well as posed for the crowd that appeared to be mostly perplexed by what they were seeing although a clapping and cheering track as boisterous as it was fake boomed from somewhere in the background while neon lights flickered to obscure the daze in the audience's expressions.
"How does it feel to stumble here as part of your fifth challenge, which made you eligible to compete?" Musha extended the microphone that reminded more of a fuzzy, pink mace up in Meiko's face.
"I'm not the leader of the team, I don't feel comfortable commenting on that…" Meiko fumbled through words as if she was a disgraced politician caught with her skirt down on live television.
"Let's hope Team Hokage doesn't rely on this one for answers!" Musha soured and twisted her face and turned to the audience but the while the bystanders appeared to be slow to catch on to the joke, the malicious grasshopper track didn't do the overall awkwardness of the joke's delivery any favors either.
"You, what's your deal?" Musha turned her hairy mallet for a recording gadget all the way into Naruto's face.
"Ummm… I'm Naruto Uzumaki, I'm not good with quiz shows but I will do my very best, you know!" Naruto spoke with the reservation that did not befit his obnoxious personality. Could it have been that the loudest person in most rooms had a case of camera fright?
"Excellent, what's your favorite food?" Musha pushed the microphone up in Kiyomi's face.
"Okonomiyaki, though I prefer it seasoned with garden spices and using goat cheese milk instead of meat," Kiyomi replied, in this particular case she figured that cooperation would make the entire pill swallow faster. Given how the giant cube they were in played with time and space, it was more than likely that Musha had complete control over when their opponents in this challenge would appear.
"Very snobbish, and what's your blood type? You look like a real A-Type to me…" Musha turned her attention back to Meiko.
"No, I'm a B-Type, actually…" Meiko answered before something snapped in her head post-time. "Hey… You meant A-Type personality, not A-Type blood, didn't you?"
"You're a gem, young lady, never change…" Musha smiled at the audience whom she did, in all honesty, manage to extract a few chuckles out of. Just as Kiyomi predicted, a white light emanated from the other end of the room, washing out the eye-scratching neon shades playing on the stage.
"Ah, and there come your opponents, Team Cephei from Hoshigakure!" Musha turned toward the source of light and gestured with her hand at the emerging team that looked about as befuddled as Team Hokage was upon entering the quiz show challenge. "Please, walk onto the stage and introduce yourselves to the audience!"
"But you didn't intro…" Meiko was about to raise a valid point but Kiyomi silenced her friend by placing her own hand over Meiko's and shaking her head.
"None of the questions you asked us even make any sense, you know…" Naruto hummed with about as much volume as it needed to be heard by his team and himself. "I mean, if you're gonna just ask those guys other questions, what's the point, you know? You can't even compare us that way, almost like you're wasting time, you know…"
Team Cephei walked the walk of flummox. A girl in a bodysuit and a raspberry dogi as well as flowing, chocolate-shade hair walked with a healthy blush to her cheeks as the only interest that the audience which was forced to sit there took from their walk was what they could pick up for the possible future encounters about the trio's fighting styles.
The one in the middle, a tall and fully clothed individual donning black and grey cloth all over his body with belts that restrained and shaped the wild stacks of cloth and googles that left something for his eyes being the only standout features of this genin appeared by far the least flustered by the entire encounter.
The third one was the spirit of the team, he was flexing and showing off to the crowd, even going as far as pulling out a large scroll from his back and drawing blood from his thumb to drag a dirty line on it and summon a massive hunk of steel, gear, and belts from it.
"Hey, how you doin', I've got a chainsaw…" he kept repeating to everybody he managed to trade glares at, seldom switching the order of sentences up or changing a word or two out for synonyms.
"Hey, it's the chainsaw sword guy from the other Chuunin Exams!" Meiko yelled out, overpowering every other noise in the area.
"You heard it here first, unwilling members of the audience, what we got here is some good-old contestant past rivalry!" Musha declared at a perfect spot to dispel any thoughts of awkwardness after Meiko's interruption setting in.
"I am…" the chainsaw-sword member of Team Cephei nodded with a confident look, "I see my reputation precedes me!"
The raggedy genin covered up his face and shook his head. The members of Team Cephei took it to the stage and lined up on the side of Musha opposing the position of Team Hokage, almost as if prompted to do so. Musha extended her vastly oversized microphone at the flustered, brown-haired girl.
"Ummm… My name's Rosanna Senju. I'm from Hoshigakure, it's unusual, I know. My parents were assisting Hoshigakure after the war in rebuilding their thick forests and they just kind of stayed there," Rosanna mumbled out. This was odd, from the one time that Kiyomi could recall seeing this girl during the massive bash of the remaining genin teams by the end of the second stage of the last exams, she used to be a lot more active and well-spoken, then again, Kiyomi only saw her brawling…
The raggedy genin did not mutter a word, he just turned his face away from the microphone when Musha moved it to his face like a child refusing to eat what his mother handed to him in a silver spoon.
"This is Bennow Vingcro, he's not much of a talker unless it's barking orders when things get heated. Which is always!" the teammate of the strong and silent type genin wrapped his arm over Bennow's shoulder and tapped on it a couple of times while giving the audience a confident grin. "I'm Faeras Gabscrue, I might not be from a fancy-schmancy clan like Rosanna but I've got a chainsaw-sword."
"So we've heard!" Musha raised her arms up and turned at the audience, measuring out its reaction. What she received was about as passionate as something from a bunch of people forced to watch a quiz show in the middle of an important exam would be. "Now that we know Kiyomi's favorite type of food and what Team Cephei's names are, let's proceed to the main event! You two teams of knuckleheads are going to compete in a quiz challenge!"
The screen above the stage shuffled with white, black and brown cubes while the words "Who Wants to Direct Peril!?" appeared in a starry background and a very in-your-face type font. One that might have looked like graffiti before a research chart forced it to change its style into something blander and smarter to not look nearly as dangerously cutting edge and hip.
"The rules will be simple. There will be three rounds and I'll explain the rules for each particular round before the round begins. The first round will be the Peril Round!" Musha turned to the audience with an index finger threatening to stab at them as if accusing them of inducing said peril. A scream track followed by flashy flame effects on the screen that may have been just a glowing pair of neon boards, shaped like flames, interchanging with one another.
"On the board, you will see a blank screen with a number of concealed letters. Every turn your team will have to either guess a letter or try to guess the word. But remember…" Musha turned the microphone at the stage to allow the audience to finish her sentence, luckily for her, the pre-recorded voices of some randos had mercy on her by completing it for her – "The guess needs to be in the form of a compound-complex sentence!"
"A what?" Meiko dropped her jaw and turned to Kiyomi with a face begging for mercy, "Please repeat that weird part."
"I'd rather not… Just thinking about trying makes me…" Kiyomi rubbed her temples and hurled, just narrowly avoiding barfing something out even though she did belch.
"Alright, the time we've been allotted by the powers that be don't allow me the luxury to care if you're ready or not so…" Musha turned to the screen and raised her hand up to direct everyone's attention to it.
"What a load of bullshit, you know." Naruto squinted his eyes in suspicion, "This cube has infinite amounts of time for her to care if we're ready or not…"
The screen flashed white, only to settle down on starry background with eight gaps for letters to be inserted. There were no clues as to if this was a sentence or just a word. The answer had just the right number of letters comprising it that it could have been either. Could have been a pair of words that together made a proverb or it could have just been one, longer than the standard word.
"The sky in the background is black so Team Hokage will get the first guess. Now, you can either shoot at letters that you think are on the word, or shoot at the word. Guessing the letters might help you get the word or words, but it will also make it easier to do so for the opponent too! Just in case you missed that before the ad break!" Musha explained with a wide-reaching gesture.
"What ad break, you know?" Naruto hunched in the disappointment with his current situation.
"The other assignments were meant to teach us something through a trial by fire, what is this teaching us, exactly?" Meiko sighed.
"Who knows, now will you be making a guess? Let me rephrase that, you will make a guess because you can't pass." Musha pointed her index at Meiko while Kiyomi rubbed her temples.
"Is there a letter-A, you know?" Naruto scratched his temple before a thunderbolt-swift boom of a cicada swarm in full-midsummer-heat mode shut him down. The future Konoha's Orange Hokage covered up his ears and grunted in pain.
"Now, now, didn't I tell you guys that a guess needs to be formed in a compound-complex sentence?" Musha tsked at Naruto while shaking her finger. "Now, let's see if your opponents have gotten the clue, how about it, Team Cephei?"
"When I played a bunch of letter-guessing games, I found out that the easiest way is to pick off the vowels and that is why we pick letter A." Bennow from Team Cephei husked out in a shallow voice. Speaking so many words at once was not something this young man did often though his voice did set into a more natural volume once he raised it higher, suggesting that he did yell a bit more naturally than speak.
The board shuffled about, letters ran up and down the gaps like slots before the final state of the board settled on "-a-".
"One A? That is unusual." Rosanna scratched her chin.
"Oh yeah, we're working together, solving problems, leaving losers behind!" Faeras pulled his lower eyelid down with his index and poked fun at the opposing team with an offensive facial gesture after showing his tongue.
"You barely even did anything… If anything, you're working as blind here as us…" this time it was Meiko who adopted the suspicious mug.
"You're just jealous we're better at this than you, plus, my contributions to this team are wide and many, though they mainly focus on the specific area of sawing things that are meant to be in one piece into multiple pieces…" Faeras demonstratively examined his fingernails. The young man was a bundle of energy but he was about as poor a winner as, Meiko felt, he was a loser.
"If those things are meant to be in one piece, you're actually making things worse for your team…" Meiko squinted at the cocksure youth.
"Hey, Meiko, if we let Kiyomi rest her headache for a while and just copy their sentences, we can make guesses too, you know!" Naruto clenched his fist while raising it up for a sideways bump. Meiko blinked a pair of times bewildered but then answered the bump with a confident smirk.
"Alright, let's give it a shot!" she nodded. "What did Bennow say again?"
"I-I forgot, you know…" Naruto shriveled up in defeat.
"Unbelievable…" Kiyomi grunted in pain, massaging her temples, every single stimulation of a neuron in her head made resonances of pain that resembled her head being on fire and the pent up heat just cracking up inside due to having nowhere to leave to. She just couldn't even imagine thinking up of a compound-complex sentence without throwing up so she picked the easier excruciating tragedy to handle – recalling what Bennow had said.
"Alright… Let's see… Ummm… When I hear stupid rules of stupid games, I want to be a ballerina and that is why I pick the letter B, you know!" Naruto raised his finger as if he had his own personal eureka moment, except the dreadful cicada mating thunderbolt was quick to crack his skull in shock of its volume again.
"Argh… You buffoons, are you trying to kill us with that?" Bennow hissed at Team Hokage.
"There is no letter B in the word, sadly…" Musha sang it out in a melody that represented the amount of pleasure that the woman felt tormenting the genin participating in her quiz show.
"I think I got it too, Bennow. I think I will take the guess now, but first, I have to make sure I do it right before guessing the letter O." Rosanna said. The dreadful wrong guess signal tormented the two teams once more.
"At least you guessed an actual vowel…" Bennow nodded at his teammate. It was tough to tell anything about what the young man felt by the pile of cloth he wrapped over his face but, judging from his tone, he may have picked this vowel, or other, himself.
"Alright, then!" Naruto grit his teeth, adamant about doing it and doing it right this time. For somebody who passed on intellectual tests, he displayed remarkable flame of passion in tackling this quiz show this way. "I will take the guess again, but first, I have to make sure that I pick a vowel before making the guess of the letter I!"
The screen shuffled like an energized slot machine before settling on the state of "-i-a-"
"Holy shit, you've nailed down a letter!" Meiko smiled with an approving nod.
"Hell yeah! Though I probably made it easier for them too, you know…" Naruto was as quick to cave in as he was to puff his chest out in false bravado. Then again, sometimes it seemed that even if that bravado should have been false as it had nothing blowing it out, it was still the world's most genuine bravado imaginable.
"We will win this round, though it will not come easy since we will win one letter at a time, like the letter E" Bennow took a shot and almost fell on a knee when the brutal wrong answer signal buzzed in. "It is a foul sound," he stated the obvious, "Slices at one's eardrums…"
"This… Cacophony is… Really not helping with my raging migraine!" Kiyomi yelled out.
"You're more than welcome to try and help, you know." Naruto raised his eyebrows as if trying to guilt-trip his teammate.
"Whatever, just start guessing random letters, win or lose, there will be more rounds to catch up with them just… Stop that blasted sound!" Kiyomi growled.
"I know how you're feeling. Try to calm down and shut yourself out. Filter all of this out. That's how Mana taught me when she taught me concentration, I've found it helps to deal with pain." Meiko patted Kiyomi's back and rubber her shoulders, something that appeared to have a profound effect on the team leader as she closed her eyes and eased her breath.
"Alright then," Naruto clenched his fist. "It will be us who will win this round, though it won't be by guessing random letters because that will only make the wrong guess sound torment us more often, as it would if I guessed the letter N."
"Seriously? Why N?" Meiko turned to Naruto.
"It's the first letter of my name, you know…" the goofball smiled with a healthy blush to his cheeks as he laid his head back in his hands' rest.
"That's so…" Bennow smacked his face.
"Wait… Our heads hadn't been split, that means that…" Rosanna pointed at the board that began slotting through letters and picking up speed while doing so.
"You mean that stooge got something right!?" Faeras dropped his jaw as he witnessed the board settle on a rather golden guess position of "-in-an-"
"He got two letters by just shooting off of his own name? How are we supposed to compete with this kind of blind luck?" it was not clear if Bennow was chuckling or sneering underneath all the clothes covering up his face but he was reacting in one of those two ways for certain. Naruto and his antics just sort of had that kind of effect on people.