“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”

― Plato

My first realisation that I was in the world of Naruto came on a bright summer’s day, during one of a series of games of shogi between papa and I. He always won these games within three moves but despite this, he always insisted that we played at least once a day. He had just won his third game in a row, despite my best efforts, and was about to go for his three o’clock cloud gaze/ nap, when he turned around, looked at me for what seemed to me to be half a minute, before saying

‘Ah, what the hell, I really should ask, or she’ll beat me up…’

This intrigued me, as normally, papa was not a man of many words due to his normal method of communication being a series of grunts, a language all of its own that only my mother was able to translate. Despite the inability for anyone around being unable to understand his speech, he was not an unintelligent man, in fact, it was quite the opposite, he was one of the most intelligent men I knew, both in my relatively short time in my new life and the time in my old one. Unfortunately for me, most of the time my mother was out of the house, and therefore unable to act as an interpreter, working on business trips which ranged in length from a day to months at a time. So, when papa decided to initiate a conversation with me, I was quick to respond.

‘Who will papa?’

‘ymthr’ he grumbled back to me, dashing my hopes for a semblance of a normal conversation.

‘who?’ I responded, despite having already moved on mentally to whether or not Arata, one of the deer from the forest,and my favorite(Don't tell the others) would visit today. What he said next though, brought my attention completely back to the conversation.

‘Shinjiro, d’you wanna be a shinobi when you grow up?’

‘Do you mean like in the books papa?’ I didn’t understand what he was getting on about, how could I be a ninja, when all the last ninja probably died 300 years ago or something, only now seen in movies and books.

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‘yah’

‘why?’

‘Don’tcha wanna be like ya parents Shinjiro?’

…

Now I was really paying attention. ‘What are you talking about?’

He sat back down at the board and looked me in the eyes. ‘We’re a shinobi clan, so, n’future, you’ll probbly be one too, like ymother an me.’

Over the next half hour, he explained to me, in his semi-incomprehensible drawl, that my mother was a chunin in the military forces of Konohagakure, the village hidden in the leaves a village comprised of ninja who went on missions for the Hokage of the village, missions that my father had also done, until his forcible retirement by way of amputation of the leg, replacing it with a prosthetic made of wood that left him limping the rest of his life. After the mission that had taken not only his leg but the rest of his team, he divided his time between tending the deer in the forest and the village hospital, where he used our clan’s knowledge and his own experience to help the doctors treat diseases that were too difficult for them to treat by themselves.

That was when it started to sneak up on me. The niggling voice inside my head that told me something was up.

The realisation took two full days of hard contemplation before the answer revealed itself to me.

How the hell had I come to the world of Naruto?

I could remember from my previous life being dragged in front of a TV and being forced to watch it, perhaps by a little brother? I could not tell. All that I knew was that I had to up my game, and fast. From what little that I could recall about the world of Naruto, there were a lot of powerful beings who were hell-bent on destroying the world. I turned to my father, slouching on the other side of the table and asked him ‘Will you teach me?’

He turned to face me, looked me directly in my eyes and got up from the table. He started wandering over to the side door, which led to the forest, opened it, and turned back, as if he had only just realised something. ‘ycomin?’ he asked me, as if it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

Eager to seize the opportunity, I got up and followed him outside the house to discover his prone form, lying on the ground, looking at the clouds, with a sleepy-looking Arata lying beside him on the grass. The traitor.

‘I thought we were going to be training?’ I asked, suspicious of what was going on. Maybe this was some kind of test?

He sighed and turned to me ‘Son, ‘fore learnin ta be a shinobi, ya have to learn ta be a Nara’ with that, he went back to the clouds, with one hand petting Arata. This couldn’t be right, I mean, even if there was the trope of sweeping the floors or washing the windows, at least those are physical tasks, and not just daydreaming and looking at clouds?

Not seeing much choice, I went and joined him on the grass and started looking at the clouds.