Description: When curiosity strikes and never fades, Naruto Uzumaki is thrown into a world of unending questions, a thirst for knowledge, and an unspoken legacy that begs to be honored. But with his two teammates and eccentric sensei by his side, he doesn’t need to worry one bit. Gen/Team 7 bonding/Seals/Rational!Naruto.
("Moore's law" is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years.
This can be generalized by saying that progress is unending; life moves forward, and things do, indeed, improve over time - all with a bit of patience and understanding.)
“Jiji, what is this?”
Hiruzen simply raised an eyebrow as a small brown book was shoved under his nose, disregarding the mound of scrolls and notes that piled high on the man’s desk.
The Third Hokage blinked as the bright, insatiably curious wide eyes of one Naruto Uzumaki stared up at him from the other side of the small, leather-bound relic of the past. They held a look of resigned apprehension in them – almost as if he felt guilty for having to ask such a question.
“It’s a book, Naruto.”
That got the reaction the aged Hokage was looking for. Naruto immediately crossed his arms in front of himself in a huff, a small pout burgeoning across his face.
“Duh, Jiji. I know that.”
Hiruzen just raised an eyebrow, his eye twinkling slightly in barely-restrained mirth. “Oh? My apologies then.”
He then made a display of taking out his inkwell and pen, emphasizing the amount of attention he was putting into the seemingly innocuous pair of items, just waiting-
“Jijiiii!”
Ah, there it was.
“Can I help you further, Naruto?” Hiruzen smiled, looking back up at the now utterly desperate child as he attempted to climb over the desk to beg.
“What is iiiit?”
Hiruzen sighed, before nodding and pulling the boy the rest of the way across the desk, taking decent care in not disturbing his precariously perched mounds of paperwork. With Naruto settled firmly in his lap, he reached back across his desk to the small book, before flipping it open to the first page and reading aloud.
“’Seals and Sealing Theory – an Analysis on the Mysterious Art of Fuinjutsu.’”
Hiruzen couldn’t help but frown a bit at the title as he read. It was almost as if he’d seen it before – and it was most likely he had, considering the boy had found it in his office.
“I couldn’t read some of the words,” Naruto mumbled bashfully, shuffling his feet. “But… but at least the pictures look cool!”
The Third blinked and raised an eyebrow. “Pictures?”
“Yeah!” Naruto exclaimed, eyes wide with excitement. “This one here! It looks like a frog on top of someone’s head.” He giggled as he flipped the pages in Hiruzen’s hand until he reached the photo in question.
“Ah, yes…” Hiruzen chuckled, looking over the seal drawn on the page with a small smile. “The chakra storage seal. And a very basic one at that.”
Naruto frowned down at the book, eyebrow raised in intense concentration. “But… it looks like a frog on a head!”
He had to squint and turn the book around completely to see it, but Hiruzen finally had to admit that the picture did, indeed, look like a frog.
Somewhat.
When the Hokage nodded in agreement, Naruto giggled in delight. “See! I knew it!” He immediately began to wiggle his way off of the old man’s knee, grabbing at the book as gravity pulled him the rest of the way to the floor. “I’m gonna go draw one!”
“Naruto.”
The boy froze in surprise at the serious tone his grandfather figure adorned, and he turned and looked at the man with a confused hint in his eyes. “Yeah, Jiji?”
“Naruto, seals are very dangerous,” Hiruzen chided, his mouth turned downwards slightly in a concerned frown. “You are not to be drawing them without supervision. Do you understand?”
“What’s wrong with them?” Naruto frowned, as he ruffled through the pages of the book until he found the frog seal again. “It’s just a picture!”
He smiled and reached into his pocket, pulling out a wadded up piece of manilla paper. “See? I drew one earlier! Doesn’t it look like a frog, Jiji?”
Hiruzen blinked, eyes wide in surprise. ‘Did he really just…?’
“Naruto, can I see that, please?”
The blond boy beamed, proud of his work. “Sure!” With a skip in his step, he walked back to the old man and handed the paper over.
If there was any remaining doubt in Hiruzen’s mind that Naruto wasn’t the son of the Fourth Hokage, it all but evaporated when he took a closer look at the seal scribbled on the paper with a blunt red crayon.
Save for the occasional stray mark around the symbols themselves, the seal was perfect. Completely and utterly perfect.
The old Sarutobi wasn’t entirely sure he could have done better himself, if he was honest.
“N-Naruto…” he muttered in shock, before looking back up into the pair of wobbling blue eyes that were tracing the tiled floor in apprehension.
“Am I in trouble, Jiji?” the eight year old frowned, worried that he had done something terribly wrong. He’d never seen his grandfather figure so serious before, after all. “I… I didn’t know I wasn’t ‘pposed to draw that-”
“No, Naruto, you’re not in trouble,” Hiruzen stated with a smile, drawing the boy in for a side hug. “I’m… just surprised, is all. You have tremendous talent in the sealing arts, it seems.”
The boy sniffled and looked up into the aged Hokage’s eyes, surprise etched across his face. “I do?”
“Absolutely,” the Third chuckled, picking up the book again and laying the drawn seal on the opposite page from the reference. “It’s almost spot on, I’d go so far as to say.” He rubbed the boy’s shoulder supportively, moving the book so Naruto could see as well. “If you want to keep drawing them, I would be okay with it. Just be sure to do it in here, so I can keep an eye on you.”
Naruto’s lip twisted up in a pout, and he shook his head quickly. “No, I don’t wanna draw anymore. Frogs’re dumb anyway.”
Hiruzen raised an eyebrow as he smiled down at the blond, who was suddenly refusing to make eye contact. “Naruto…” he started, before picking up the book and flipping through it amicably. “You want to be a ninja one day, am I correct?”
The boy’s eyes lit up like firecrackers, and he spun on his heel, beaming. “You bet! I wanna get super strong and powerful, that way I can take your hat and be the best Hokage ever!”
Hiruzen hmmed in fascination, as if this was the first time he’d heard the boy’s outlandish exclamation. “Is that so?”
He leaned back in his chair again, as he continued to scan through the small, leather-bound book. “Tell me, Naruto. Who would you say is the strongest Hokage ever, out of the four that this village has had over the years?” He gave a pointed nod across the room, to the spot on the wall where four gold-framed portraits of white-cloaked men stared out into the office.
Naruto traced the Third’s line of sight to the photographs, before he jumped up and began to point at the one furthest to the right with a huge grin.
“Duh!! The Fourth Hokage, obviously! He was soooo cool!”
“I’ll try not to take too much offense to that,” Hiruzen winked with a smile, before turning back to the book. “Well then, do you know what the Fourth Hokage’s particular specialty was?”
Naruto blinked in surprise, then scrunched his nose up in deep concentration. “Uhh… ninja tools? Oh, wait, no! I bet he used a bunch of super cool fire jutsu! And… and he could fire them from his toes!”
The boy began to buzz with excitement with all of the possibilities that being the Hokage could yield, when Hiruzen lifted himself from his seat and began to stroll across the room, his white robes dragging across the tiled floor as he went.
“No, Naruto… although, I bet he could have if he wanted to.” He leaned down and patted the boy on the shoulder, smiling into his eyes. “The Fourth Hokage was an expert at one of the most difficult and challenging shinobi arts that there is. He was unparalleled – some say that he had tremendous talent for it even from a young age.”
Naruto’s eyes were saucers, as he looked up and into the eyes of the blond-framed face that was mounted to the wall above them. “He… he did?”
Hiruzen only murmured in affirmation. “Oh, yes. He couldn’t have been any older than eight or nine years old, as a matter of fact.”
The old Hokage couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty at leading the boy on in the manner that he was, but when he saw Naruto’s grin split his face in two, he didn’t much care.
“REALLY?! What was it? What was the Fourth’s cool jutsu?!”
Hiruzen simply chuckled, rising to his full height again, and pulling the book back out from underneath his robes and handing it back to the blond.
“I think you’ll be particularly interested in the very first page,” Hiruzen winked, before he walked to the door and plucked his pointed hat from the rack on the wall. “I’m going on a mid-afternoon stroll. You should probably head home soon, Naruto. You have school in the morning. My assistant will see you out.”
But the boy wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy staring at the two small, compact, neatly-written words placed purposefully at the top left corner of the book’s cover page.
Naruto’s eyes flickered back and forth from the small plaque that was mounted underneath the Fourth’s photo, and he let out an awe-filled breath.
‘Minato Namikaze.’
So there it is! The teaser for the project I talked about here.
I’ve loved (and I mean loved) rational fics for some time now, and after running the well dry, so to speak, I’ve decided to contribute to the genre myself.
Two fics I hold in incredibly high regard are “Naruto: Myoushuu no Fuuin” and “The Waves Arisen” - both stories that focus on teamwork and strong Team 7 bonding moments. “N:MNF” focuses heavily on the science of seals and sealing itself, which I loved, and it also included this incredibly heartwarming bonding between Kakashi and the others in Team 7. “TWA” focuses more on the rational mind of Naruto in a different Team 7, and the crazy, wacky fanon science of clones and their abilities.
Long story short, I’ve been wanting to combine them both for some time now.
This story will have lots of:
* Rationalization/Experimentation
* Seals
* Team 7 bonding
* Divergence from the typical fanon archetype (you know, the typical “Bell test, Wave Arc, Chuunin Exam” formula that gets ridiculously tiring after, I dunno, the first four thousand fics that do the exact same thing over and over again)
If you actually read the whole thing through and got to this point, then please - let me know what you thought! The description (which is still very much a WIP), the title (Which, debatably, isn’t as much a WIP, because of the direction I’ll be taking the story in), and the story so far - all fair game. This is only the first segment of the first chapter, so it’s not all there is - but I figured it’s the best window I have so far into the future of the story.
