"Alright!" Naruto cheered on himself. "I should keep guessing more letters from my own name, you know!"

"Please don't…" Kiyomi sighed. "I couldn't stand any more of that horrid buzzing."

"Fun fact for our audience, the detestable wrong answer jingle is an actual sound encountered in the real world! It is a mating call of the Sokukochu insect used by the Aburame clan." Musha smiled for the audience with a lovely wink. The jounin allowed the role of the host of this faux quiz show to fully take her over.

"Great… Now it makes me want to never leave my house." Meiko groaned.

"Hmmm… When I guess the letter, my team wants me to pick the correct one, but I don't know what the correct letter is, so I guess the letter F?" Faeras shrugged.

"Holy… Was that a compost-complex sentence?" Meiko turned at Kiyomi with surprise.

"I think so…" the Yamanaka nodded.

And so both the participants and the unwilling audience of the quiz show had to sit through another second, stretching out for eternity, of the Sokukochu mating call. This time it seemed like it was beginning to wear down on the host as well as Musha hunched over while the flamboyant strand of hair that stood proud as a morning rooster collapsed over her face as well.

"This letter is not in the word though… Could you stop gambling with it, please?" she muttered.

"This is a complex problem, I suggest you let me and Rosanna handle it, Faeras." Bennow turned his black goggles to the board and, as the gleam of the stage reflected off of them, it began to seem like he was focusing hard on it.

"-in-an-... What word can it even be, you know?" Naruto scratched his chin.

"Who knows? My head hurts too much!" Kiyomi whined out. "If we could just guess a few more letters right… Even a couple…"

"A couple…" Meiko muttered. "Yeah, I'm sure a couple is all we need. Are there any vowels we still haven't checked?"

"No way!" Naruto objected. "At this point, there would be too many. I say we stop focusing on vowels already."

"Could you then focus on something?" Musha flicked her wrist as if tapping on a wristwatch except for the fact she was not wearing one and was just tapping at her exposed sleeve.

"When I think of manly letters, my team would usually groan, but I think that manliest letters are what we need, which is why I am guessing the letter R!" Naruto locked his arms over his chest, in his head his blind guess must have looked quite daring though the mating call of the Sokukochu insects soon turned that bravado into mulch.

"Well… It was a guess, I suppose…" Kiyomi let the soothing that befell her when the dreadful noise cleared the air leave her lungs together with the pain that accumulated there.

"Even if we have guessed most vowels, there is still a vowel we haven't guessed, but we will guess it now and it is the letter U!" Rosanna pointed her finger toward the board, hoping to see at least one letter pop up in the jumped mess of a word but nothing of the sort took place.

"Don't worry, you guys, in around twenty more guesses they'll run out of letters…" Musha shrugged with an apologetic look on her face, reflecting the hatred she felt for the fumbling contestants onto the audience as well.

"Twenty!? You cheeky...! We just need a pair more, you know!" Naruto shook a fist that emphasized his frustration at Musha's direction.

"A pair…" Meiko mumbled to herself again.

"What's the matter, Meiko?" Kiyomi turned to her teammate.

"Yeah, you've been mumbling that "pair" stuff pretty often now, what gives, you know?" Naruto locked his arms over his chest while addressing Meiko's odd behavior as well.

"I… It's nothing. I just… I just wondered that maybe we don't really need many more letters than a pair." Meiko explained with moderate awkwardness leading the expression of her killer idea.

"Yeah, genius, that's what we've been trying to translate this whole time!" Naruto squinted. "Is she an idiot, you know?" he turned to Kiyomi.

"I see…" Kiyomi rubbed her forehead and then her tired eyes. "You mean that there might not be three more hidden letters but two?"

"Huh? Hey, lots-a-fun, how many letters are hidden in the word? You gotta answer, you know!" Naruto pressed on the host who leaned back in a defensive notion and shook her head a pair of times.

"Oh, I assure you, we've encrypted all of the symbols, there are three hidden symbols on the board right now, I am not lying!" Musha replied with a smirk that was as apologetic as it was polite and genuine.

"That's exactly what a liar would say, you know!" Naruto growled, rolling back his right sleeve.

"No, I think she's right…" Kiyomi smirked.

"Oh… I knew it was a long shot…" Meiko looked down and away into a singular point of the floor, looking defeated.

"No, you were right all along, Meiko." Kiyomi took a pair of lazy steps in front, taking the time to feel up her tired body while she faced her teammates. "Think about it and listen to what Musha-san said, what she said exactly!"

"She said there were three hidden symbols…" Naruto squinted at Kiyomi. "There's only that much you can hide behind so few letters, you know."

"Oh, but you still missed it, no matter how thin the wall obstructing the truth – Musha-san said symbols, not letters!" Kiyomi gesticulated her point with livelihood unbefitting someone of her head-splitting condition. "That means that one of those hyphens is a hyphen!"

"I see… Well played, Team Hokage…" Bennow sighed underneath all of his cloth.

"Man… After all this fumbling…" Rosanna leaned forward in defeat as well. Her face suggested that she took the defeat with a semblance of fun though.

"Am I the only one still stumped?" Naruto scratched his head. "Of course the hyphen is a hyphen, you know…"

Kiyomi turned to Meiko who looked similarly baffled. Kiyomi sighed and turned toward Musha. "The word that is on the board is "Yin-Yang" because the hyphen is concealing a hyphen, but nobody could get underneath this underneath, not single one of us, just Team Hokage together."

The board shuffled, mad with the bonkers flow of letters until the hidden word emerged as "Yin-Yang".

"Huh!? So the tux-lady really did lie!" Naruto pointed an accusatory finger at Musha. "The hyphen in the middle didn't change, meaning we only needed to guess two more letters!"

"No, Naruto, you're wrong, don't you still get it? The hyphen was hiding a hyphen underneath. All the letters were encrypted by hyphens and the center of the word we had to guess had a hyphen. What we needed really was only a pair of letters but there were three concealed letters on the board." Meiko explained after her own face brightened up with enlightenment of the situation becoming clearer.

"That's so shady, you know!" Naruto pointed his finger at Musha again, his eyes were whited out and his mouth quivered in fury almost to the point of foaming.

"Well, it appears that Team Hokage won the first round of our quiz show!" Musha declared, shoving away Naruto's accusatory glares and his pointy fingers aimed at her general direction. "You know what that means, it's time for the next round – the Skedaddle!"

"We're not going to like the Skedaddle, are we, you know?" Naruto turned to Meiko and Kiyomi who shook their heads in unison.

"We are in the lead though. All we need is one more win!" Meiko clenched her fists and looked on ahead with crystal-clear eyes, eyes focused on victory.

"In this round, you will be confronted by experts who will give you each questions from their fields. One select participant of each team will be asked a series of questions and the team with the most total points will win the round." Musha explained. Her hand went into the inner pocket of her tuxedo and came out with a key as large as a book that went into the stage floor. The floor rippled and let the key in, even if it looked like no other interactable that functioned in synchrony with the cube. "The expert will go on to the next team and tally up your total points when you answer a question wrong."

The key prompted something within the cube. A stage not unlike the one from the legal rap-battle challenge earlier rose from underneath the ground, a stage of branching out rods of obsidian-black or snow-white. Each one of them housed a person as miscellaneous as picking a random person out of the entire village.

"Let's see… Will the first expert proceed with your inquiry?" Musha looked at the towering stage and one obsidian branch of the tower lit up, revealing a roughed up chuunin wearing a torn flak jacket and a face that had streaks of bandage wrapped over it in places.

"My name is Umino Shiru. I am the handler of many animals located in the Konohagakure Zoo and I also work as the guard and manager of the Konoha Aviary. Those who use the Aviary and uphold the proper messenger bird management protocol would know that…" Shiru turned to Meiko who pulled on her tracksuit collar with a sweating face of a mild and faked grin.

"I assume you, Sir, are Bennow Vingcro?" the expert turned at Bennow from Team Cephei without warning.

"I am, what of it?" Bennow nodded. His voice was not as rough-edged as the young man's tone was usually.

"I must admit, we may not be familiar but… Your messenger bird etiquette is legendary amongst the ninja working in the Aviary. When we noted how neat and trend-setting Hoshigakure mail was, we snooped around and found out your name as the result of our research. It is such an honor meeting you in person, young man!" the expert very nearly swooned over the mysterious Hoshigakure genin.

"Of course, a true gentleman handles their birds right. Only foul scoundrels hate birds…" Bennow struck a subdued, heroic pose as he nodded in acknowledgment of the compliments that the expert paid him.

"So… Are your injuries a result of bird management? A work hazard, perhaps?" Musha raised her hand, looking a tad dwindled after the control over the quiz show was wrestled away from her.

"By no means! My birds are as soft and kind to me as I am with them. I have, unfortunately, suffered a honey-badger related incident." Shiru replied with his one open eye opened wide as if he was trying to intimidate the audience.

"Ah… At the Konoha Zoo, I presume…" Musha smiled uncomfortably. She would have very much liked for the second round of the quiz show to proceed already.

"No, at the Aviary, in fact. Granted, in a matter of speech, the honey badger incident is related to the Konohagakure Zoo as that is where that ravenous rascal escaped from! It then attacked me and my birds right at the Aviary…" Shiru covered up his face and shook his head, recounting something that sounded like a hilarious slapstick comedy but portrayed it more as a life-altering tragedy.

"Well then… Maybe we can…" Musha politely nudged the direction of the show ahead to its intended direction before she was interrupted again.

"But never fear, for I have devised safeguards that the demonic wretch will not escape from! I have hung beehives all over the grate it usually claws through, for, you see, the beehives will become disrupted by the annoying sound of grate-clawing, prompting an efficient and decisive swarm attack from the bees upon the elusive honey badger!" Shiru kept accentuating certain key words of his plan and gesticulating like a politician that had taken a stand atop of a speaking platform and was explaining his plan of action to his possible electorate.

"A sound plan… Bees are mighty insects" a familiar mumble from the audience, coming from the direction of a younger version of Shino with far wilder hair and a white, slightly less-excessive jacket collar covering his lower jaw. The boy even stood up to be heard all the way on the opposite side of the room where the expert was seated.

"Actually…" Musha fumbled, her face twisted with disbelief in what she was hearing from the expert of animal handling of the entire village. "Bees will have no effect on the honey badger. That's… Its one thing. Its skin is too thick for mere bee stings to work."

"Hmmm… It does have a strangely injection-proof skin… I have originally intended to crush that hammer-handed ruffian over there with impeccable, bird-related trivia," Shiru pointed at Meiko. "But in light of this recent information, I am afraid I must flee…"

"Very well, duty calls, I assume…" Musha very nearly took a plunge straight through the ground after one of her experts demanded a leave.

"By no means! It is a mere coincidence! Nothing at all to do with the fact that I've left an escape-prone, midget rage-beast hidden behind a mere duct-taped grate." Shiru saluted the contestants and then the audience before bolting.

"In this case… May another expert substitute Shiru-san?" Musha groaned before a white light illuminated the stand of an all too familiar young man.

"No way!" Kiyomi covered up her face.

"He's back with vengeance!" Meiko's jaw dropped.

"Who's this guy, you know?" Naruto pouted at the young man scratching his head.

"I am your predecessor, Uzumaki Naruto, the person you kicked out from the backstabbing Team Hokage to take part in this exam!" Gwido declared with an all-judgmental finger of his own.

"Huh? So you're the Mana that Kiyomi and Meiko mention from time to time? Are you an okama, or something, you know?" Naruto beaked his lips.

"If you must know, knave, I am Gwido Amaikon, the prime expert of ramen in Konohagakure, called by some – the Ramen Destroyer!" Gwido introduced himself in a kabuki-esque dance. For someone of his like, he was rather graceful as he only nearly fell from his stand four times in total during his introduction.

"Is that a fact, you know?" Naruto straightened his back and allowed his arms to lower beside him while his golden locks obstructed his eyes. With a renewed vigor to engage this challenger to his own rep, Naruto raised his eyes and revealed the burning youth and crystal-clarity in his eyes to anyone in doubt.

"I thought you were cool with us shafting you. You even said something akin to "Worth a shot" when you didn't pass the registration and our team disbanded." Kiyomi still tried to appeal to Gwido's reason but she should have known better than to assume he had any to be appealed to.

"Silence, we shall engage each other in the only battle I am not hopelessly outmatched in against Naruto – a ramen trivia quiz!" Gwido declared, pointing at Naruto in a demeaning manner.

"Don't worry, guys, I got this, you know!" Naruto growled and looked back at his team, the boundless determination in his face turned to a confident smirk as he gave the young women a thumb up.

"Do you know anything about ramen?" Kiyomi pleaded with Naruto's reason this time, begging him with her eyes to now make a mistake and cost her team this round.

"You could say that, you know." Naruto turned back to Gwido as the two matched glares like fencers matched blades.

"Are you saying that!?" Kiyomi was about to shake the young man by his shoulders but her headache set in, forcing her to back down.

"This is… All sorts of wrong but… Somehow, it's not against the rules and, in fact, the only kind of settling of matters you two can have at this moment in time and this place." Musha shrugged. "I'll allow it!"

"Very well, let's start off with a simple one – where does the ramen originate from?" Gwido grimaced at his challenger.

"Easy, the Fire Temple, monks Shina and Shoba manufactured the noodles but they ate them dry, monk Lamia was the one to boil the first ramen soup and combine the two goodies together, you know," Naruto replied with confidence that was usual for the young man's tone but, somehow, this time he sounded calmer.

When Naruto declared that he would confront and defeat Orochimaru and his own comrade he sounded confident as if it was something that would absolutely happen but his voice shook still… When he spoke of ramen, he was just declaring something that was inevitable.

"What is he doing? Our universes are vastly different, there's no way that's…" Kiyomi pulled on her banana-colored hair.

"You are correct, this time…" Gwido admitted. "But can you answer this – what is the name of the largest network of ramen restaurants in the world?"

"Even I know that…" Kiyomi smirked, "It's Ichiraku, right?"

"No, it's the best, or so Naruto would believe, but it only has a single restaurant…" Meiko stroke her chin. She was observing two ramen gods doing battle with their wits, as true masters should have matched up with one another. They were engaging each other on a plane completely unfamiliar to Meiko. A whole different level.

"You kidding me?" Naruto did not as much as tip the edges of his lips. "That's Juuku."

"And how many restaurants does the Juuku network have?" Gwido leaned in, nearly tipping over the stand to the point where he'd plummet and splat after completing his trip downward.

"Nineteen." Naruto barked out without thinking.

"Heh, you are no initiate, at least… A worthy adversary to be sure…" Gwido fixed his collar and then rested at the stand with his elbow for support. "But the true battle begins now!"

"Excuse me but… Those are our points that this imbecile is wasting. He's testing contestant Naruto with easy questions, it seems…" Bennow complained to the host.

"Could you have answered any of them?" Musha wondered.

"Not one…" Bennow admitted. "That's kind of my point. Here they are exchanging questions and answers and, likely, we won't be able to answer one question."

"Cry me a river… Just watch them go…" Musha smirked as in the total time that it took for Bennow's complaint to get resolved Naruto answered four more questions.

"They're… They're going to go here for a whole day, won't they?" Faeras whistled out into the air and looked at his mysterious teammate.