Zenko; Guardian

Welcome to Team 7

Jiraiya groaned; his body a little stiff from entertaining all the beautiful ladies from last night. He sat up in his bed, looking out the window to see that it was noon. He shivered from the biting cold of Shimo despite the heater and scratched his chest, yawning messily as he sought out his travel partner. He snorted in bitter amusement.

Naruto might not like the attention but the women love him either way.

The past few years had been an interesting experience. Jiraiya had never claimed to be good with kids and Naruto can be feral in the oddest moments. His fixated on things when they caught his attention but he would especially fixate on Jiraiya whenever the man left him too many times on his own. Jiraiya said that it was part of the deal, his freedom, but Naruto obviously doesn't buy it. He even created the worst Jutsu to have ever been created in the world; the Shikigami.

It started out as an experiment out of boredom waiting for Jiraiya to finish his job, cutting out papers that the women would hand him into shapes after he grew bored of making origami, and writing simple seals on it. Then he used it to track Jiraiya by sticking one on the back of the man's sleeveless haori. When Jiraiya left him for too long and he grew impatient, he will sent hundreds of Shikigami to annoy the man with paper cuts. The amount of time Jiraiya accidentally revealed himself to the ladies he was 'researching' on only to be laughed at as he swapped helplessly at the papers swarming him like angry hornets was uncountable.

After that, he has this idea to combine his already annoying creation with Kage Bunshin!

Now he could summon thousands of those annoying things to seek out Jiraiya and swarm him until he come back to Naruto! Worse of all, just like Kage Bunshin, Naruto will know where he was when he dispelled one of them! The boy will then head butt him into the nearest body of water (that will always be there whenever he did that for some reason) and watched as Jiraiya did his best not to drown. For some reason, he felt like Kushina was laughing at his misfortune whenever that happened while Minato will look at him with the driest look that he could give Kaze a run for dryness and the place was a sand dune!

But at the same time, Jiraiya admitted that he had a lot of fun with Naruto especially when the boy started opening up to him. It hurt less since the boy wore his Zenko mask that looked like it came from one of the many Inari shrines that they passed through. Jiraiya know that he shouldn't feel glad that he couldn't see his godson's face, but he admitted that he was relieved by the constant mask on his face. Although Naruto claimed to have created a special seal on his latest mask project, Jiraiya never knew the rest of the seal's function other than the masking of his chakra and obscuring Dojutsu like the Byakugan from seeing through the mask's Genjutsu.

He exited the room and went down to the eatery to find some breakfast. He easily found Naruto who was cooed at by the women there. Naruto has built a personality of a story teller as Jiraiya's passed around as an author. His Rakugo style of dressing help sell this cover.

Right now he was entertaining them with the story about the rabbit and the tanuki. It was a horror story but for some reason he managed to make it funny by ending the story with the rabbit, as opposed to most rabbits going to Shangri-La to learn medicine, went to hell to continue punish liars and anyone who behaved like the tanuki who tricked the two kind elderlies that helped raise the rabbit. So now there was a rabbit amongst the Oni of hell punishing sinners. The rabbit will even punish lazy Oni into doing their work.

Jiraiya supposed having a cute fluffy rabbit that scares sinners more than Oni was funny.

After Naruto finished his story, Jiraiya joined him, "What the hell kind of story is that?"

Naruto shrugged as he sipped his tea, "A cautionary tale against trickery?"

Jiraiya snorted, "Then I supposed I'll be meeting this rabbit a lot in the afterlife huh?"