When Naruto returned from his three year training trip with Jiraiya, there had been a reason that he hadn't been a Superninja who excelled in Seals and just about anything and everything else under the sun the way a student of a Sannin should, the way his father had despite not receiving nearly as much individualized training from the man. That reason for that had been because most of that three years that Naruto had spent away from Konoha hadn't actually been spent in Jiraiya's company. Most of that three years that had been earmarked for the training trip Jiraiya had been planning since Naruto was in diapers had in fact been spent somewhere else, somewhere where Naruto had been forced to learn how to survive without the ability to use his Chakra and the Ninjutsu that came with it.

Jiraiya had indeed taught Naruto how to draw out several tails of the Kyuubi's power as he had claimed, but that had been both early in the boy's training, and near the end of it after Naruto had been recovered by a mightily relieved Jiraiya who had been afraid that he might never see the boy again. Naruto had already used two tails of the Kyuubi's power by the time they had left Konoha, and rather rapidly learned to use more, much the way he had learned to use skills that usually took other ninja days, weeks, months and years to learn, in a much shorter amount of time, the Kage Bunshin, and the Rasengan being prime examples of this.

After Naruto had returned, he and Jiraiya had done a good job of covering up the fact that Naruto had spent five months training with him at the most, but from time to time after he returned people would look at him in askance over the fact that he hadn't learned more while he was away. Fortunately for their attempts at covering up Naruto's disappearance, most people had pinned Naruto's lack of skill and knowledge either on Jiraiya's supposed irresponsibility, or Naruto's supposed denseness and inability to pay attention for more than five minutes at a time.

The thing was, Naruto, who was a quick study when given the opportunity to learn in the manner he did best, which was by doing, had indeed learned a great deal while he was away. Unfortunately however, most of what he'd learned was useless in his own world. What use was English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russian in a world that spoke none of those? What use had he of skills with handling firearms in a world where there were few or none? What use was knowing how to drive a car or fly a helicopter in a world that didn't have any for a variety of reasons including the fact that the local Daimyo who had been in power when the automobile had been invented or perhaps re-invented if the old legends were true had not wanted the countryside to be despoiled by a network of paved roads and highways and the other Daimyo across the continent had followed his lead?

Where was Naruto you ask?

In another world where he had met and eventually joined a group of people he found to be somewhat like minded to himself. A group of people who, much like him, fought for the oppressed against those who would take everything away from them just because they could either because they were stronger or better funded or merely greedy enough to have the balls to try. A group of mercenaries who still had hearts and principles, and weren't entirely motivated by money. A group who, much like him, tended to be so lucky when it came to escaping from trouble and not getting themselves killed that Luck could almost be listed as their super-power.

How did he get there you ask?

Well, shortly after the four tails incident, Jiraiya, who was still recovering and therefore unable to do anything that was too physical lest he overexert himself and aggravate his healing injuries, had decided to teach Naruto the Sealing arts, believing that, since the boy was an Uzumaki, he would be a natural at it. The boy who thought so far outside of the box that one would need a telescope to find the darn thing took to creating Seals a little too well, so well in fact that Jiraiya had forbidden him from attempting to make any again after he had managed to retrieve the boy after a couple of years of near constant effort, after the boy's first and only Sealing mistake.

The day Naruto had made his trip to another world had been pretty much business as usual for the group he would end up living with for two years and change. The unsuspecting team with whom Naruto would soon be staying had figured that they had gone far enough for the time being, and had stopped in a rest area just over the Oregon border in order to rest, eat, use the restroom, and monitor the news on a radio that Face had scammed from someone while they recovered from the day's events which had included a number of exceedingly narrow escapes from death. They'd collectively decided that they would make their way South and back to the van which had been left abandoned when Hannibal, Face, B.A., and Amy had been captured by the forces of the "Reverend" Martin James after they had rescued Sheila Rodgers from his clutches when they were reasonably certain that the National Guard had left the area.

The group sorely needed the rest they were getting at that moment, as the day had been a rather eventful one as was often the case when the A-Team had a mission. If it hadn't been for that former Hippie who'd decided to make a living as a farmer in order to support his hobby of making sculptures out of random junk, they would've most likely been dead by now rather than munching on hamburgers while they waited for it to be safe to retrieve the van and make their way back to Los Angeles. Well, all of them aside from Murdock, who had flown in to their rescue and been forced to leave the chopper he'd borrowed behind as they made their escape in one of Reverend James' Jeeps, that was. Actually, Hannibal, B.A., Face, and Amy would have been dead before Lunch if Reverend James hadn't herded them out of the gates of his compound and given them a symbolic and mostly useless head start before sending the Jeeps full of armed followers out after them rather than killing them on the spot. The head start which the team had been able to take advantage of through skill, planning, and a near impossible amount of extraordinarily good luck, and turn around on James and his followers whom they had subsequently defeated.

Hannibal almost felt sorry for the Reverend who had a rough road ahead of him. The man had kicked his habit and become clean, but had done so far too late to undo the damage he had caused while in the grip of his drug of choice. He would now be forced to live with the knowledge of the lives he'd destroyed, and pay for the choices he had made in madness while in the clutches of something that may yet prove more powerful than he. He had seen a number of men lose the battle against addiction over his lifetime, including an old friend, brother and former rival in love of his who had lost the battle with the bottle over the years since the woman they had both loved had died, and continued losing ground to it every day.

The group which consisted of a unit who, aside from Murdock, had been on the run together since Vietnam, and a young reporter who had recently joined them and proven to be more of an asset than a hinderance so far had been seated around a rest stop picnic table and in the middle of a meal that had consisted of the fast food that Murdock had purchased along with a ridiculous hat with antlers which he'd given to Amy when something truly bizarre happened. The air around the five of them started to swirl around in what almost seemed like a localized tornado, except for the fact that the funnel of said tornado which was picking up dust and their food wrappers was swirling upward from the ground rather than downward from the still clear sky, with the narrow end of the funnel stopping maybe thirty feet above their heads. As the group looked up into the previously perfectly clear sky in confusion, they saw a strange circular drawing that looked to have been made of red light appear and start rapidly spinning until it blurred to the point that it appeared to be a glowing red disc which then rose until it abruptly vanished altogether, leaving behind a dark tunnel in the sky above their table. Oddly enough, the bit of sky that could be seen through the end of the tunnel that had formed from nothingness above them was an unnatural shade of orange that almost looked like the sky at sunset but not.

As the group which had previously been frozen in shock and awe prepared to flee from this bizarre phenomenon before something bad happened, a face that was undoubtedly human peered down through the other end of the hole in the sky, looking down at them in confusion. The confusion turned to surprise and terror as the person to whom the face belonged apparently lost their balance and fell into the hole. About a second later, a teenage boy who couldn't have been older than thirteen or fourteen and may have been as young as eleven or twelve based on his height landed on the picnic table that the group had gotten up from and had been in the process of backing away from. An instant after the child who had turned his fall into something more controlled on the way down had landed, the mysterious magical portal that the boy had fallen through vanished as if it had never existed. The only evidence of it having not been a hallucination being the young blond boy dressed in orange and blue that had fallen through it who was yelling up at the sky in a foreign language.

It took a while, but the group eventually got over their shock when it became clear that there would be nothing else happening aside from more yelling from the boy who had not yet registered their presence, and Hannibal - who had picked up some Japanese during his tours in Korea and Vietnam - was almost overcome with the urge to grab a bar of soap when he finally processed what the boy who had fallen from the sky and landed on their lunch was saying.

"Well," Murdock said, breaking the group's silence before biting into the burger he'd snatched up from the table before he'd backed away from it. "You don't see that every day."

Edited 8/4/12.