Blossoming Splendidly (Naruto AU Quest)

Prologue

Orochimaru was not a man easily surprised. Nor was surprising him an easy way to catch him off guard. One did not gain such reputation and renown as the legendary Sanin had by being easy to surprise or defeat.

And so it was that as he heard the lab's outer defenses breached he was only a little surprised. He mused to himself as he continued the experiment that he had underestimated his sensei, again. The old man was not known as the God of Shinobi and greatest ninja of the Leaf for nothing, so Orochimaru couldn't help but chastise himself for his habit of underestimating the old man. It was unbefitting of both his station and his ambitions. Emotionally, the man may be weak, but in ability, Orochimaru was forced to admit he would be pleased by his level of growth if he was as strong as Sarutobi was now by the time he was his age. At least in skills, if not physique.

As the door fell, blown from its hinges by no secret technique, merely raw force of arm, Orochimaru spoke. "Here to stop me, Sarutobi-Sensei? I knew you of all people were too weak to approve of my experiments."

Sarutobi Hiruzen was a man of fearsome anger, a fact that Orochimaru often allowed himself to forget as the man rarely turned such anger on his allies and subordinates. But after this day, he would not forget again. "Such unethical experiments?!? Of course I disapprove! I'm disappointed, Orochimaru! I thought I taught you better than this."

Some small part of the Sanin wilted under his teacher's disappointment. He ignored it, and pretended it didn't exist, just like his fear of death, which coincidentally was also getting a workout at that moment.

He simply turned to face his sensei, and with all the appearance of calmness that he did not truly feel said "I see. Then, kill me- if you can."

He made to move past the legendary Shinobi...

Thirteen Years Later

You're Sakura Haruno! You like Sasuke, books, ninjutsu, books, learning, libraries, books, training, and being praised by the teachers! What you most like right now is graduating! Which you just did.

Your mother is a retired Genin, and your father a civilian, and today, you're a Genin yourself! Or at least you will be one officially as soon as you have a teacher.

You may be young, but with all the books, manuals, guides, scrolls, and other written materials you've read, you're absolutely certain you're the second most prepared Ninja in your class, after the limitlessly talented Sasuke Uchiha, your crush and top student of the year for five years straight.

You thought you were prepared for everything today would throw at you, but you were not prepared for the legendary Fifth Hokage, the Sanin Jiraiya to show up to give a speech to your graduating class.

"Today, you are all ninja of Konoha. Our village is not the oldest, nor the most feared, but it is ours, and we protect the Land of Fire from all enemies. The life of a ninja is a life of trials, pain, and difficulty... But if you keep the Will of Fire bright inside you, and hold to the teachings of your elders, you too will be splendid ninja. Your new sensei will be here as their respective duties allow. I'll let your old teachers announce the teams, now, and get out of you kids hair." A pause, as he nodded to each teacher. "Iruka, Mizuki, excuse this old man."

And with that, the Hokage left. This is not the first time you have seen the Hokage, but it is the first time he has spoken to you. Even if you were merely part of a group he addressed. Most of the class looks as awed as you feel, with exceptions here and there.

You turn eager eyes and ears on Mizuki-sensei announcing the teams, hoping you get a good team for your first few years as a ninja...

[][Team] "-Team Seven A will be Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha, and Sakura Haruno." You are torn between cheering as you realize you're on the same team as THE Sasuke Uchiha and despairing as you realize you're also on the same team as annoying and persistent Naruto.

[][Team] "-Team Seven A will be Kiba Inuzuka, Shino Aburame, and Sakura Haruno." You frown, unhappy with being on the same team as the loud, attention grabbing Inuzuka boy. Then again, he is at least not Naruto. You should have known you'd not be on the same team as Sasuke, though. You can barely remember interacting with the Aburame...

[][Team] "-Team Seven A will be Kenji Hyuuga, Yusuke Tendo, and Sakura Haruno." Kenji, of course, is soft spoken as any Hyuuga, but you can't recall a favorable impression of the trouble making civilian boy who is your other teammate.

[][Team] "-Team Seven A will be Kuwabara Sarutobi, Rukia Hatake, and Sakura Haruno." Kuwabara is loud, proud, and of course of the famed Sarutobi clan, while you have interacted with Rukia less, but know the girl is occasionally outspoken, and a third or fourth generation ninja, neither civilian nor from any recognizable clan.

Iruka and Mizuki go around the classroom giving some final words of encouragement and advice to each student. Mizuki, when he gets around to you, praises your greatest strength, aside your sharp memory for written material...

[][Strength] Your Taijutsu skills.

[][Strength] Your Ninjutsu skills

[][Strength] Your Genjutsu skills.

[][Strength] Your Stealth skills.

[][Strength] Your raw strength and endurance.

[][Strength] Your natural speed, grace and precision.

[][Strength] Your Chakra Control and other fundamentals.

[][Strength] Your Chakra Reserves.

Iruka, on the other hand, reminds you to keep working on your weakness of...

[][Weakness] Your Taijutsu skills. (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your Ninjutsu skills (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your Genjutsu skills (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your Stealth skills. (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your weak body and poor health. (Cannot be taken with strength 'your raw strength and endurance')

[][Weakness] Your natural clumsiness and lack of grace. (Cannot be taken with strength 'Your natural speed, grace, and precision')

[][Weakness] Your Chakra Control and other fundamentals. (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your Chakra Reserves. (Cannot be taken with strength in the same)

[][Weakness] Your social skills. Look, talking to people is hard, okay?

And then it's time to meet your sensei, hours and hours later after all the other students have already met theirs.

You had ideas of what your sensei might be like. A ninja, obviously, and so ninja-y. By the time you'd seen briefly the other sensei, your ideas were more general, having seen relatively little obvious common ground between any two, but you had ideas.

But when the man walked into the room containing now only you three and examined you with an amused smirk, those expectations wilted in the light of the truth. "Ah, my apologies, children, for my late arrival. I was reviewing your files, and then my experiments needed some last minute attention. I hope the wait was not too troublesome?"

The words are kindly, the tone feels almost mocking. But more than what he says, what leaves you reeling is the man's identity.

After all, it is very much not every day that one meets two of the Legendary Sanin. One of your new teammates cranes their head and looks around, almost as if expecting the legendary Tsunade to jump in through a window.

(QM Notes: So, after a long time, I finally return to the idea of doing a Naruto quest.

When I started my prior and admittedly more popular than I expected Naruto quest, I admit I didn't have a very clear idea of what I got out of the setting. I knew I disliked the later parts, I could articulate some of the reasons why, but my engagement with understanding was admittedly fairly flailing. I'm not going to pretend I perfectly understand myself now, or anything so profound, but I have put considerably more thought into the topic.

This will be an AU Naruto quest. In general, I will be focusing on the shape of the world as suggested by early canon; while I will not automatically rule as canon any given factoid from early canon, most of the characters, techniques, and events from early canon, up through to about the end of the Chunin exams, will be run with as a rule of thumb. Broadly, I am focused on what I consider to be the themes and style of early canon, which in many key ways later canon directly contradicted.

Anything from later canon may be used, if I consider it appropriately salvageable, but will not be remotely taken as a given. In part, this is admittedly because I think quests work better when people can't take things as a given the character has no way of knowing, but mostly, it's because of the aforementioned problems I have with later canon. Anything from the anime, anime movies, or Boruto is even less likely to be implemented at all, simply from a sheer lack of familiarity with the materials and disinterest in spending the effort to gain familiarity with them.

As to this quest, you could call it an echo of my prior efforts in terms of being a Sakura protagonist quest. That's who you'll be playing, if the perspective wasn't clear enough. She will not be exactly as per canon, but how close she will be obviously depends on what votes win.

The vote itself will be a plan format; votes must be submitted as such;

[] Plan Name
-[][Team]
-[][Strength]
-[][Weakness]

With each field filled out as appropriate, and with the weakness not contradicting the strength. There are no write-ins at this stage.

You may vote for as many plans as you prefer, and the plan with the highest votes wins.

There will be a second step to character creation, and then we will hopefully be off pretty briskly, if I can make this work.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have.)

Ninja Info Cards

Orochimaru-sensei

Taijutsu: Without flaw.
Ninjutsu: All of it.
Genjutsu: Not that you've noticed.
Chakra Reserves: Exemplary.
Chakra Control: Perfect.

Orochimaru is a Ninja of significant fame, being a former teammate of the current Hokage, and apprenticed to the Third Hokage. Rumor even says he was at one point under consideration to be the Fourth Hokage.

As a teacher, the man is skilled, but often seems disinterested in actually attending to the task. He always seems to be carrying around multiple notebooks, and sometimes disappears at seemingly arbitrary times to attend to unseen experiments or for reasons he merely declares to be classified.

As a ninja, Orochimaru seems, at least from your young perspective, to be quite simply omni-competent. Whether it's stealth, Taijutsu, Ninjutsu, knowledge, or any other skill one could possibly need, signs of flaw or weakness are few to none. Then again, you've never really seen him fight, given how obviously outclassed you were during the Bell Test.

Sakura Haruno

Taijutsu: Excellent for a fresh Genin.
Ninjutsu: Top marks in all relevant academy classes.
Genjutsu: Well... every Ninja has a weakness.
Chakra Reserves: Perfectly average for your age.
Chakra Control: Passed all your classes with flying colors.
Stealth: Sufficient for top marks at the Academy.
Throwing Accuracy: Standing bullseyes are the minimum the Academy requires for graduation, so it goes without saying you can do a fair bit better than that.

Booksmart would be your middle name, if Ninja-land had those. Yet integrating into a team increasingly leaves you wondering just how much your books left out, and confused by Konoha's ninja culture, which practically seems a whole other world from the circles your parents run in and your days at the Academy, in spite of the fact that your Mother is a retired Ninja. The rest of your team has expectations and knowledge in common with each other that you're strangely left out of, in spite of mom's support for your Ninja ambitions.

You desire to be a splendid Ninja, the best you can be. While the personal attention of one of the legendary Sanin is certainly a leg up, you're increasingly aware of how far behind you started in some ways, your teammates knowing techniques well outside the Academy curriculum on graduation.

Kuwabara Sarutobi

Taijutsu: Average among your class.
Ninjutsu: Kuwabara boasts of his clan technique practice, though he's so far been cagey on the details. He's certainly competent at Substitution.
Genjutsu: Kuwabara met every academy standard for Transformation and Clone jutsus with little apparent difficulty, unlike you. He's competent enough at the skills of Genjutsu, at least within his limited pool of techniques.
Chakra Reserves: You'd wager he's second of your year, after the endlessly talented Sasuke Uchiha, in Chakra Reserves.
Chakra Control: Just about as good as you, yourself.
Stealth: Surprisingly sneaky for a boy with orange hair.
Throwing Accuracy: You don't know if the Sarutobi clan demands more or if it's just his hobby, but you sometimes question if some of the things he does with Kunai and Shuriken are physically possible. The accuracy to hit a target behind a tree with a ricochet seems just slightly unreal, given he can do it on demand. Not that this helped him cut the bells off Orochimaru-sensei, of course.

Kuwabara Sarutobi is loud and proud most of the time, and nothing if not committed to training. Yet unlike that annoying pest Naruto, the only boy in your team is almost scarily capable of being silent and unseen when the task calls for it.

This is a surprise, given he was the tallest boy in your class and has orange hair.

Kuwabara is surprisingly willing to stick his neck out, in both investment of effort and disclosure of secrets, when it comes to helping you and Rukia, and tends to take charge of the team without any formal discussion of the topic.

Rukia Hatake

Taijutsu: Fairly average among your class.
Ninjutsu: Rukia knows some unspecified number of Water-Style techniques, and has the crispest Substitution technique you've seen... at least out of ninja about your age. Ninjutsu seems like a natural area of strength.
Genjutsu: You can't recall seeing her use any.
Chakra Reserves: Somewhat above average, you think.
Chakra Control: Her technique could certainly use work, but she's not bad at it.
Stealth: Her natural shortness seems to prove an edge, here. Still, she's not exceptionally good for your age...
Throwing Accuracy: She meets all the academy standards, but she doesn't seem to favor the skill.

Rukia often feels like an exercise in contradictions to you. The first to fade into the crowd, and the first to speak up over unfair treatment of classmates. Ordinary and uninteresting, from no big name clan and with plain black hair and her most notable feature being a sheer lack of height, and yet apparently on ANBU watchlists.

Still, you haven't seen any reason to distrust her, and admittedly many of her more controversial opinions are the same as your own, she's just more willing to speak them.