Sage

Ch.22

"Agghhh! This is impossible!" Naruto sat dejectedly in his favourite training ground, his hands clasped in the ram seal which was supposed to aid the drawing out and subconscious moulding of Chakra. Fuu sat to one side, calmly reading through a scroll on the basic fundamentals of Chakra. Naruto had found she was the type who always reverted to studying the basics when she was stuck on what to do. Without any access to Jutsu scrolls or Taijutsu techniques and without Naruto being willing to spar she didn't have much else to do.

"Then are you going to look for another way?" Naruto just shot Fuu and pointed look that clearly said he wasn't.

"Of course not, I'm going to find a way to turn invisible if it's the last thing I do!" Fuu just tilted her head in that same cutely innocent way that just spoke of how little she had been taught when she was younger.

"But didn't you just say it was impossible?" Naruto sighed slightly, leaning back on his hands and catching himself before he ran a hand through his hair; that was becoming somewhat of a habit lately.

"It's just the frustration talking. I know it's possible, that old pervert back in Yu no Kuni could do it. That's part of where I got the idea from in the first place." Fuu quirked an eyebrow but didn't say anything else, preferring to return to her scroll. She took solace in her reading; in fact most days they spent in Kumo now she would devote at least a few hours in the public library. To her it didn't particularly matter what she read, as long as it allowed her to escape her world and memories for just a few hours. She had particularly taken to fantasy novels, enjoying the action and otherworldly adventure the protagonists got up to.

In a way she could sometimes relate her own life to some of the stories; the lonely maiden in a destitute and unfair life, whisked away by the cavalier prince on a mystical adventure. Of course she didn't quite understand many of the aspects in these stories; the romance in particular both confounded and intrigued her. She didn't understand why people skirted around issues such as love or attraction. Then again, having never particularly felt those emotions, at least to her knowledge, she found she couldn't relate all that well.

She had a lot of time to read lately what with Naruto taking upon himself the crusade of becoming invisible. It was something he had been trying and finding only partial success in for the past two weeks. It was sometimes both amusing and incredible what the boy would come up with in attempt to circumvent vision. More so as his ideas become more and more ludicrous with each passing, and failing, attempt.

His first answer had obviously been Genjutsu; unfortunately there already existed many countermeasures to such methods. He had the Chakra control for it, as well as the imagination; however he just simply wasn't skilled enough to fool anybody above Chuunin level. It wasn't a fault of his own but the skill took a lot of time and dedication to master, time he didn't really have and couldn't replicate with shadow clones fast enough.

His next attempt had been slightly more basic, an adapted version of the henge that could literally change as he moved. It worked to an extent, he simply henged every part of his body into an image of what was behind him. Surprisingly the problem did not lie in the Chakra control, although it was extraordinarily high, it was the fact he could just simply not think quickly enough to compensate for the changing image. Therefore there was slight lag in the technique; it wasn't noticeable if he was moving slowly but it would give him away at even a normal walk.

Fuu had been interested in it however, even though she lacked the immense control required to use it, likening it to how a chameleon worked. That was when the blonde's next bout of inspiration hit, quickly summoning a chameleon to study only to be surprised to find they too had a summoning contract. Interestingly though their boss summon had not been seen in quite some time and their last summoner had died meaning the contract scroll itself was lost to them. Most had long since believed they would never be summoned again, prompting them to be quite accepting of the young monk.