Whirlpool Sky
by Skysaber

Chapter One

OoOoO

It all started with a whisper by a dying Uzumaki who was staring out over his devastated homeland, ruined by yet another rampaging Uchiha.

"I wish my clan had never allied with your village."

On a dimension far beyond mortal reckoning, an observing power answered "DONE!"

And history got rewritten in a single stroke.

OoOoO

The sensation of warmth and floating was a comforting one. Not quite hot enough for a hot bath or sauna, yet it never cooled either, somehow managing to always stay right at that elusive temperature that never got either too much or too little heat, something so relaxing that you felt you could stay in it forever.

~Whoever came up with this could market it for a mint,~ the superspy thought.

Then the squeezing started.

~Then again?!~

OoOoO

Birth gets disorienting for those not prepared for it. The pink light you've always been used to until then grows darker as you pass through the circle of bone that is the standard pelvis, and then suddenly you're out and flopping around because, quite frankly, you've got the worst muscle tone you're ever going to have in your entire life. Period.

As he was swung around in the room, flipped upside down then rightside up in a chamber that seemed to spin around as various grown-ups handled him, Jared Saotome, Interdimensional Superspy Adventurer and currently a naked baby, caught a glimpse of a blonde woman sprawled out on the birthing table, and his first thought in life was, ~So that's my mother.~

A second's consideration followed that with, ~I can live with that.~

OoOoO

The newborn superspy was asleep minutes after first entering this world.

The thing about babies is they sleep, and they sleep a LOT! The adult part of Jared's mind was convinced this was a kindness to the parents, as the experience of giving birth is hard on everybody involved and there needs to be some rest and recuperation afterwards.

That the baby is mostly a sleeping bundle of softness during this immediate period gives the new parents a chance to catch a second wind for a bit. Having been in that job himself he knew it never felt like quite enough rest, but it did make it possible.

Still hard, but possible.

The superspy awoke to find himself eating.

However, he never woke up *quite* enough that time to realize that it wasn't a bottle.

OoOoO

The trip home from the hospital the next morning came in something of a blur, not because his eyes didn't work or something like that. No, Jared could now personally debunk those theories that said babies eyes weren't developed enough to see at first. His eyesight was sharper than ever, leaving him with no choice but to side with some competing studies and scientific research saying that when you are born your senses are as good as they are ever going to get, and that for the rest of your life you will never see, or hear, smell, taste or feel as well as you did just after you were born, that every year after that your senses get subtly diminished capacity to a greater or lesser extent.

Considering how every sight, sound and texture was felt in crystal clarity, almost to the point of hyper-reality, he was left with no choice but to agree with those studies.

Meh, the 'blind babies' theory was funded by the abortion lobby anyway.

Anyway, the diminutive spy got stirred half-awake in his blue-blanketed hospital crib due to the sensation of being picked up gently by giant hands. There was also an itching sensation he had all over that would have concerned him deeply if he weren't so tired that he couldn't focus on anything. But it was that some nurse or other had him that woke him up. ~Hmm, blue hair and glasses. No name tag. Too bad, otherwise it could be fun to freak her out in a few years by seeking her out and remembering her name.~

From the arms of the nurse who'd carried him out of the hospital room with all of the babies in it (Jared counted thirteen evenly split between blue and pink blankets in the brief glimpse he got before all he saw was the nurse's shoulder) he got carried to another room and presented to his blonde-haired mother.

Seeing her in a wheelchair caused a moment of concern for her until he realized that it was a common practice among hospitals, no matter the world, to wheel patients out the front door regardless of how mobile they were. And, come to think of it, his poor mom's hips would be rather sore right now, all things considered.

That concern laid to rest, Jared spent a moment memorizing his mother's features, figuring he might as well get used to her face, as they were going to spend a lot of time together in the coming years as he grew up.

Then he caught sight of her adjusting her top.

Oh dear.

Lunch.

~How embarrassing!~

The newborn would have then learned a whole new lesson on humiliation when he got changed immediately afterward, but he'd already fallen back into a deep sleep.

OoOoO

You don't truly understand weakness until you are a baby. Between the twenty or so hours of sleep you need per day, there is also the sensation of being a wet noodle. Your head feels like it weighs as much as the whole Earth, your constitution is shot, your limbs have all of the strength and coordination of wet snot, and something as simple as drinking your fill exhausts you utterly.

The reason the trip home was a blur was that he slept through most of it. He came awake, really awake, for the first time since being born really the next morning. He could remember being half awake, not-awake and dreaming, but he opened his eyes his first real time in this world to find the early sunlight streaming in between thin white curtains on an open window high over his crib in a room painted soft blue.

Baby blue. He'd come to see a lot of that color over the next few years.

Awake enough to really begin analyzing his situation, the baby took in the new room and his white-painted new crib with colored toys dangling overhead in one of those... he forgot the name for it. Diorama?

But other than that and the bare white ceiling, there wasn't a lot in his field of view - and it would be days before he was strong enough to lift his own head to find out more.

Back when Jared had been taking Early Childhood Development courses in university, the experts there had been saying, "You will never again work as hard as you did during your first year of life."

And a quick examination proved that to be true. He had a LOT of work ahead of him.

Nothing worked, as far as moving his body anyway. The muscles just did not exist to do much of anything yet. The bare bones of a healthy system were there, but to avoid his mom suffering like she was giving birth to a whale, nothing not absolutely essential to the baby being alive was present in a functional condition while being born.

A newborn was a human pared down to the most essential elements. Everything else he had to develop from there. Self-Guided Physical Therapy on a scale that would have made grown men weep lay before him.

All of that was normal. The scary thing was not that his body would barely respond to him or that he was in an unfamiliar world, but that he had an unbearable itching sensation inside of him, filling his whole body.

~Cancer doesn't feel like this,~ he thought in concern, making the comparison from his own experience and crossing over from uncomfortable to worried.

Worse, the air was thick and heavy, like he was in the American South with their legendary humidity, except humidity didn't itch like this did. Even his clothes and sheets itched in a maddening way, making him wonder if he was allergic to something in the air that had wound up settling out onto just about every surface he touched.

Except that could not explain why the *inside* of his body itched!

Pain was the body's signal that something was not right, and itching and pain were related. So to have that sensation all over was deeply concerning - to the point where he earnestly wondered if he'd been born with some kind of fatal condition.

Well, whether he had or not, the only thing to do was go forward as best he was able.

After a few minutes spent lying on his back waving his arms and legs in the air to hopefully build up muscle control and coordination had exhausted his rather feeble strength, he caught sight of something he'd been ignoring while focused on this strenuous workout.

A plush toy kunai lay in his crib with him.

~Oh, boy. I'm in a shinobi world!~

OoOoO

It took him very little time at all to confirm that the very heaviness of the air, to the itching of his body and blankets was chakra.

Chakra was developing inside his body, nature chakra being present in the air and every other thing... never having felt chakra before it was as obvious as lightning. Only he was not used to sensing it, so in confusion his brain interpreted that sense as itching.

That brought Jared to a choice. He could either try to ignore that unpleasant sensation and learn to live with it that way, or... well, it really wasn't much of a choice at all. Chakra control and capacity came through exercising it. Also chakra was pure power on any ninja world, and through power came survival, so the sooner he mastered his, the better off he'd be.

So that left him only one choice for dealing with it - to focus in on it until he'd mastered it, gaining enough familiarity with it so the brain no longer interpreted that sense as foreign.

In a way it was going to be just like his planned physical therapy to learn how to use fingers and toes again. So the superspy just added attaining that mastery to his list and began to cast his eyes around, looking for something to practice the leaf floating exercise on.

Minutes later he was struggling to try and float his plush toy kunai over his head.

Jared knew most of the training exercises from the show, and chakra was supposed to be a combination of both mental and physical energies. Well, he had the fully developed mind of an adult, and anyone who thinks kids don't have lots of physical energy has never had to chase one of the giggling scoundrels down. Anyone who has ever babysat knows that kids can run rings around their parents and exhaust any adult with ease... which, come to think of it, tapping into that supply of youthful energy was almost certainly why the show had the villages start training their ninja so young.

Well THAT explained something, at any rate!

It had never made any sense to him before why children started the ninja academy at age six and graduated at twelve. If they'd waited for them to grow up to eighteen or so, like modern armies, the ninja cadets would have their full adult strength and a lot more mental development backing their performance. But if the adults were aiming for ninja cadets with maximum chakra capacity, yeah, get them to start training as young as possible when their bodies are still full to the brim with the energy of growing.

Most things in the ninja world came back to chakra, so sacrificing adult strength and mental development to get more chakra for your ninja actually made sense in that context. Sending out a force of pre-pubescent warriors did not sound sane from any other perspective, but if it gave them a huge boost of extra chakra development, then yeah, it did. In fact you'd *have* to tap into puberty and those wonderful wells of physical energy that came from starting young if you wanted to aim for maximum potential chakra development.

Heh, so maybe Gai had something to those 'power of YOUTH!' speeches after all?

In fact, logically speaking, six was probably as early as they could get most kids to comprehend the basic academy lessons. Back home children that age would be in first grade, still learning their numbers and letters, just barely beginning to write.

Around here they'd be training to control a mystic energy that could affect the world.

Actually, come to think of it, Jared did not envy the academy instructors who had to cram an education about chakra into kids who'd barely obtained enough mental presence to attend - although he didn't doubt for a minute that clans would try to start their children earlier, using dedicated tutors to gain advantage, as this line of thought made it obvious that the earlier you started chakra development the more of an edge you'd have over everyone else in developing it - which also explained why everyone got so excited by a child prodigy.

Ten minutes of frustration trying and failing to float the toy kunai later, and the superspy was already exhausted and had fallen deeply back to sleep.

OoOoO

Although he did not mean for it to be, raising Jared that first week turned out to be a terrible burden upon his poor mother.

As it was, babies were already hard to keep up with. Struggling to take care of their needs was daunting during the best of times, as parenting was hard work. Every parent breathes a sigh of relief the first time their child sleeps all of the way through a night. Between feeding them every two hours, diapers, baths, and everything else, sleep deprivation for parents was the norm.

Only Jared was worse than most, as his chakra practice burned extra calories, so he drained his poor mother dry trying to fill his large appetite. That meant he ate even more often than normal for the first little while until her milk production rose to compensate. So very often she would just fall asleep in the middle of a feeding as her need for rest caught up with her.

Thankfully, just as mothers adjust to having to feed twins, soon she was producing enough milk to satisfy his hunger at one feeding and things slowed down to a more normal pace.

He tried not to pay too much attention to where his all-milk diet was coming from, but figured by the end of that week if they hadn't produced a bottle then he was stuck with the source nature had provided - and so long as he never said anything and did his best to forget any details, nobody had any cause to be embarrassed. Besides, mother's milk was said to do all sorts of good things for a child's immune system.

And he just kept telling himself that while he tried not to die of embarrassment as he ate.

But it was adapt or starve, so he adapted. And as if that wasn't bad enough, eating enough for twins caused him to need an equal increase in the number of diaper changes, and that was just pure humiliation.

Not to mention disgusting until it got taken care of.

Laying on his back with yet another dirty diaper, the redhaired boy knew he was going to get a rash unless that got taken care of. Only his poor parents had just barely gone to sleep after yet another feeding, and the adult part of his brain knew how ragged they'd been run taking care of his needs, so felt guilty over waking them up again so soon.

Distracted as he was, the toy kunai plushie once again shot out of his hands, ricoccheted off the wall and ceiling to land outside of his crib. ~And now there goes my favorite toy,~ the adult trapped in an infant's body sighed to himself. Being a baby was BORING! It was all hard work, sure, but it was all dull, repetetive stuff too. His every waking moment was dull as all he could do was lie still, exercise and eat.

Training his chakra control was the only intellectually stimulating thing he had to do. So, oddly, he was making great progress as he showed unusual drive and focus on it.

Still, nice as his parents had been about always returning that toy kunai to his crib ~and they must think I hate it, given how often they find it tossed out of the crib~ there was nothing he could do to retrieve it for himself. So that left only other options.

~Training as a chakra sensor is boring, but at least it's something I can do.~

Chakra sensing was not very challenging because frankly it was hard NOT to sense it! The energy still felt weird and foreign, making it stand out. The only difficulty he had lay in learning to interpret all of the signals he was receiving. Still, it was one good way to get back to sleep, as he'd inevitably slip off at some point during his meditations on it.

~As always, start small,~ quickly the boy attuned his attention to his chakra sense, starting with his own body, which had all of the familiar signals he'd learned to recognize over his first week of life, and which he took to mean he was healthy.

Next was to extend his awareness to sense his crib and all that lay within it. After that if he followed the normal schedual he would sense his parents' room, then he could go back to working on sensing the entire house, which was the next and incomplete stage of development of his meager chakra senses.

However, immediately upon expanding his awareness to the crib he encountered his first oddity, as his dirty diaper held an extra chakra entity. The moment he'd figured out what that had to be, the boy blushed in embarrassment, and nearly cried aloud to alert his parents so he could get his diaper changed. Only the fact that he'd brutally abused his poor parents through his frequent demands already, never out of malice, just needing that extra care, let him keep his peace and let them continue to gain badly needed sleep.

~Still, why is THAT sensing like MY chakra?!~

Actually, a moment's observation revealed that while the brown lump in his diaper was infused with his chakra, that energy was steadily dissipating from it. Then it hit him in a surge of realization what was going on.

~That's filled with my chakra because that was inside of, even part of my body! THAT'S why virtually every fire technique you see in the series shows them blowing the fire out their mouths! By taking air inside the body, they can charge it with their chakra more easily! And once it's charged, they can manipulate it more easily! It's a cost saving measure to pull those techniques off! It's got to be!~

~That also explained why so many Earth technique users spat mud out of their mouths, or water. Wind techniques probably too! Starting with stuff that's been inside you and charged with your energy would make those techniques easier to learn and cheaper to use! It HAS to! No way would they all do it that way otherwise!~ the young baby giggled in delight.

~They start the technique off inside of their bodies where presumably their chakra is strongest and easiest to control,~ the redhaired child thought excitedly. ~Only then do they move the effect outside of their bodies to take care of whatever it was supposed to do.~

Really, it was the only thing that made any sense.

But given that burst of insight, the young superspy knew what he had to do, or try to do, anyway. While he could see through his open bedroom door the open door of the bathroom across the hall and the toilet within, that was just too far away. While the changing table where he got fresh diapers applied stood directly next to his crib, and the bucket for used diapers under that.

While it still appeared a daunting distance for a boy who could not even crawl yet, it would have to do.

Silently concentrating his attention, focusing on the way his chakra felt and moving it from one place to another inside of his body, the embarrassed young superspy then transferred that focus to the one lump of his chakra that was no longer inside of his body, and felt a surge of triumph when he got it to move.

One thoroughly embarrassing and humiliating hour later, and he had not only succeeded in getting his pooh down into the used diaper bucket, but he'd also managed to clean up the mess that had resulted from his many accidents and failed attempts getting the little lump of mud to crawl there on its own. He'd even managed to clean up leftover residue, because slimy as it was, all of that muck was still infused with his chakra, thus subject to his control - once he had finally learned what he was doing, that is.

~Of course,~ the exhausted baby yawned widely. ~If anyone ever learns that my first use of a chakra technique was to clean my own diaper, I'm never going to live that down.~

~I'll just have to deny it if anyone asks,~ he thought, drifitng off to a slumber so deep he did not even really wake up during his next feeding.

OoOoO

The next morning came something different. After a week at home helping his wife adjust to her new motherhood and adapting to the new workload that required, the child's father suited up as a ninja, complete with chunin vest and headband, and headed off to work, leaving Jared terrified at the bags under the man's eyes and general exhausted state.

~Ninja is a combat profession,~ the young boy thought, in terror. ~Going off into combat already exhausted and sleep deprived gives your enemy an edge over you and vastly decreases your chance of coming back!~

One glance at his young mother showed that she was not in any better shape, exhausted to the point her health could be in real danger. ~Ok. New rule, I can't afford to simply be a burden on my parents any longer. She's almost dead on her feet, and weak enough she might get sick. So losing either or both of them is a real possibility, and unacceptable.~

Being an orphan on a ninja world was a one-way ticket to pain. ~So that means taking up more slack on my own.~

Jared had been watching his current dad suit up, and the costume matched the Naruto series pretty well, except the clothes were older and frequently patched instead of the well dressed appearance of the characters in the show. Also, while his dad's work outfit matched the standard Konoha shinobi pretty well, his forehead protector had the wrong symbol, a stylized flame instead of the Konoha leaf symbol.

~Ok, so that means alternate universe.~ the boy thought, ~Because only the Land of Fire would use a flame as their ninja symbol, but Fire Country's only ninja village was Hidden Leaf, which used a leaf symbol built out of the Uzumaki spiral. But if that's NOT the case, then what all else has changed?~

Ultimately, he was forced to shelve the issue to take care of more immediate concerns. His parents were already having a hard time taking care of him, and as they got busier with work and other things that would only get harder.

Jared quietly resolved to take care of his diaper on his own as much as possible. He could not feed himself yet, but he could handle cleaning himself thanks to the previous night, and letting his mother, as his primary caregiver now that his father was back to taking missions, sleep more and longer would hopefully aid her recovery.

They were using cloth diapers on him, rather than the modern disposable paper ones, so that meant extra washing duties the more he'd filled, and the back yard was already filled with clothes lines covered in drying diapers.

~Unfortunately,~ Jared thought as he'd contemplated his new self-given responsibilities, ~If I am to keep more diapers clean that means making both kinds of body waste crawl their way to the disposal bin until I can.~

~Which, you do what you got to do.~

Thankfully, his liquid wastes turned out to emerge just as permeated with his chakra as the solid kinds, and thus controllable. He learned to not even leave a residue behind. Having that icky, nasty stuff all over him when he made a mistake proved to be a powerful motivator.

OoOoO

Jared sat on the lawn of his parents' back yard plucking blades of grass. Some he would try and float, most often to see them shoot off into the air. Others he would try and focus his chakra through, trying to achieve splits, burns or crinkling.

After nearly a month of using chakra to have his bodily wastes crawl into the used diaper bucket and hide themselves inside of already dirty diapers he had developed a surprising proficiency with both earth and water natured chakras, so getting grass leaves to powder or moisten was no problem.

Actually, the boy thought as he looked up at the sun shining overhead, then around at the walled back yard of his parents' compound, things were going pretty good. His parents only had to deal with one diaper in ten anymore (and if he made that any less they might take him to a hospital, figuring something was wrong with him), and with the extra rest they had both made astonishing recoveries.

His parents were laughing and happy now, having guests over as they had Jared's One Month Old party. The child was able to identify no one specifically, although most wore the Konoha ninja garb along with that weird flame crest on their head plates. But despite not being able to identify individuals, he could make out generalities.

There was the blond contingent, which seeing as how that included both of Jared's new parents he figured that had to be his family. And since the other two clans represented were tall and dark haired but excessively lazy, and big boned but jovial types, he guessed that made him a Yamanaka, as the other two were plainly members of the Nara and Akamichi clans, known for their long association with each other and Konoha.

Which meant that weird flame symbol on the headbands was probably the one for Konoha in this alternate universe.

Which led to the question: What happened to the leaf symbol and the Uzumaki spiral?

Jared plucked another blade of grass, not really strong enough to do so but he'd stumbled across the basic principles of enhancing his body using chakra about a week ago now, and was using them on a tentative basis just because it was driving him mad to feel so trapped in an underdeveloped frame.

A chakra enhanced baby was still a baby, but it helped him out with basic mobility. Give it another day or two and he'd be scooting around at a full crawling speed. But today he was placed on a lawn with the other children while the adults held a barbecue.

Attention going from said adults, who were lounging around, laughing at something while the Akamichi roasted some meat, back to the blade of grass in his hand, Jared focused his chakra again and this time the leaf still shot off, just not as fast.

Attention suddenly focused in on the young boy and the adults grew silent as realization spread about what was going on.

Jared didn't even try to hide what he was doing, reaching down with one pudgy hand to yank up another blade of grass. This one he got to spin over his palm for a moment before it went shooting off to the side.

Interesting. Progress. Apparently trying to float that plush kunai, which was almost as long as he was, had been teaching him some bad habits, leading to too much chakra use for this exercise once he'd switched to leaves.

Not his fault. This party was the first time he'd touched leaves in this life.

Scooting over on his diapered bum towards a small patch of bare dirt nearby, Jared siezed up a handful and crammed it in his mouth, moistening it with saliva as well as filling it with his chakra. So far he'd proved unable to do anything with earth techniques unless the target was very much like mud, which moved a lot easier than packed earth did (which also explained why so many earth techniques started out with it).

Once he had his handful of dirt sufficiently moist, Jared removed it from his mouth and began to command the grape-sized lump to change shape. Soon he had a dirt-slug, and he had it inch up his arm and across his scalp.

Seeing the dumbfounded looks on the adults faces made him laugh.

So let them think he was a prodigy! For one part, it was true. He had a tremendous mental advantage over any actual child this age. But for the rest of it? Well, Konoha always prided itself on its 'geniuses', and it gave them extra training and opportunities. If this was going to be anything like the series, the show was going to be starring immensely powerful ninja capable of truly awesome destruction soon enough. Getting a little extra aid and attention spent on his training as they fast tracked him through could go a long way towards having the edge needed to survive those battles.

Frankly, holding back in that context was insane!

What Jared was NOT expecting was to be snatched up by wide-eyed, fearful adults and stashed back inside in his crib in a terrified rush.

No, that didn't make any sense to him at all.

~Ok,~ he thought to himself, sucking on his thumb. His slug and even his latest leaf had both been taken from him by adults that were now having a whispered conversation in another room - all speaking in some butchered dialect of Japanese that he couldn't understand yet. ~What has happened that Konoha has suddenly become fearful of bloodlines or child geniuses?~

OoOoO

Author's Notes

A bit more dry than I'd like. Usually I'd put in a little more humor, if I could. But, eh, it's been a while, and quite frankly I am glad to be able to write anything after this long a hiatus.

It also has always struck me as odd why self-inserts to the Naruto universe always seem to focus in on taijutsu skills, instead of capitalize on the unusual advantages they frequently have with chakra. Or why they are so fearful of being seen as geniuses, when geniuses get all sorts of favorable training opportunities, and the SI character is going to wind up dealing with the same very elite problems either way if the series gets followed at all.

Of course, what this SI was not aware of was how very different a Konoha he wound up in.