Team Eight stood in front of the Hokage, awaiting their next mission assignment. All three were seething that they had to walk dogs and retrieve cats. These were jobs that should be given to academy students! They had very little practical experience in intelligence gathering yet, and were beginning to wonder if they would ever get a decent mission.
“Alright, Team eight, your next mission will be to…clean up the river! Team seven did it yesterday, so I figured we could give them a break.” Iruka smiled as he assigned his favorite team their next mission. He could see the anger boil behind their eyes. (Except for Shino, damn sunglasses.)
‘Almost there, just a little more…’ He thought and internally grinned.
‘NO WAY! I’ve had it with these stupid missions!” Hinata yelled at her former sensei.
“Now now, these are the missions that all genin have to do before they can be given higher ranking missions.” The Hokage spoke up. This was a complete lie. D-rank missions were used for more than just earning money. They were designed to be as miserable as possible to force the genin to question orders. While a ninja is supposed to obey orders, they must think for themselves and never obey an order that they know to be wrong. This was another test to see if they could be trusted with the higher ranking missions that chuunin and jounin took.
“Forget that! We are supposed to be a reconnaissance squad, but we’ve not done a bit of data gathering! We need a better mission if we’re to become useful to the village!” ‘Naruto’ argued. While everyone present in the room knew he wasn’t the loudmouth blonde, he had to keep the appearance up.
Shino nodded his head while Kurenai was silently proud of her team for passing this important test.
“Well I suppose that is true. We do need to give them some field experience.” The Hokage agreed and reached for a C-rank mission.
“This is a C-Class mission, meaning that you should only encounter bandits and the chances of that happening are minimal. This mission is to do an appraisal of the economy in the villages surrounding the Fire Country. A businessman by the name of Gato has been using force to expand his territory and I have little doubt that sometime in the near future we will receive a mission that will directly interfere with him. What we need to know is to what extent the economy of our neighboring villages might be damaged, should he be killed. The removal of the head of an organization will cause panic and we need to know, to the best of your abilities, is how his subordinates will react to his death. You have a time limit of a month to complete this mission, and I expect updates weekly, if not more often. Take the rest of the morning to prepare and leave by sundown tonight. You are dismissed.” Tossing the scroll to Kurenai, the Hokage smiled and resumed his paperwork.
Team eight split apart to gather their supplies and Haran accompanied his sister as far as he could safely before heading towards his apartment. He packed some emergency rations and a basic first aid kit, as well as some changes of clothes. He was finally able to put the clothes his father had purchased for him to good use. The new outfit consisted of dark brown shorts that had an assortment of pockets for holding supplies, as well as the loops and snaps for kunai holster and utility pouch. He had a number of tee-shirts he took; most of them were lighter in color and much less vibrant than his standard orange affair, mostly white and grey. He had a number of black long sleeve tee-shirts that he wore under the white or grey shirt, and had a light jacket not unlike his sister’s, but no where near as thick. It was the same color, but had hard padding and weights built into the fabric instead of the warmer coat Hinata wore. He changed into a pair of the cargo shorts and a black long sleeve shirt with white stripes going down the arms. The Hyuuga emblem was noticeably absent on all his clothing, but the jacket did have the spiral that is present on all chuunin and jounin vests.
He still had a bit of time before he had to meet his team, so he headed towards the Yamanka flower shop to arrange for a fresh delivery of flowers for his mother. He used a henge and adopted the façade he used when patronizing many different shops.
Ino’s mother recognized him immediately and smiled at the boy who grinned back and looked around the store, though he had it memorized. It was kind of a tradition, he would enter and then spend about ten or fifteen minutes walking around looking at the various arrangements of flowers before buying one pot of white bleeding hearts to take to his mother.
Sure enough, ten and a half minutes later, Haran walked over to the counter with the aforementioned flowers in hand.
“It’s been a while since you’ve come in to buy your flowers instead of having them delivered, hasn’t it, Haran-kun?” The elder Yamanaka asked.
“Hai, although I do miss looking at the arrangements, they always look so nice.” He responded. “I’ve been meaning to ask, how was your daughter’s genin exam? I haven’t heard about it from anyone.”
“Oh, it went as well as could be expected when your third teammate is obsessed with the other one. From what I heard, they passed pretty much on dumb luck, Sakura tried to tackle Sasuke, who leapt out of the way and Sakura ended up accidentally kissing Hatake Kakashi through that mask of his. That gave Ino and Sasuke enough time to make a dash for the bells.”
Haran chuckled at the thought and paid for his purchase. As he was about to leave, he remembered a question he had been meaning to ask.
“Yamanaka-san, would it be possible to arrange for a new pot of flowers for the next three weeks? My team and I are going on a mission and I won’t be here to deliver a new pot.”
“Of course, that’s not a problem at all.” The blonde replied happily as Haran returned to pay.
After taking care of that he made his way to his Mother’s room for one last good-bye before he left for a month. He met up with his team and enjoyed the reaction of Kurenai to his new look. He wasn’t able to drop the henge until they were far enough away from the village to ensure he wouldn’t be found out. By the time they set up camp, Uzumaki Naruto had disappeared, only to be replaced by Haran.
They made it to the first town on their list in short order and completed their objective easily. That was the pattern for almost every town and village they went to, save a few. Every once and a while they would encounter some of Gato’s thugs, but they only had to fight once, most of the time their presence was enough to scare their opponents away. Shino would place kikai bugs on any agents of the shipping mogul that they found and would retrieve any information about movements into the fire country. Hinata and Haran would use their byakugan to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious when they were in a town, as well as to watch suspects from far away as both were proficient lip readers.
The state of affairs was pretty good, should Gato be killed or die. His hold hadn’t reached too far into the fire nation and what little he held could easily be suppressed. What worried the team were his holdings in territories farther away. His main ‘force’ was concentrated around the shipping lanes in Wave and some over land routes around Suna, however, due to his penchant for hiring missing ninja, this might prove dangerous if he died and the ninja decided to take their pay directly from the surrounding area. Kurenai’s reports to the Hokage stated as much and she knew that the old leader would take this to heart before assigning any assassination missions.
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While Team eight was off gallivanting, Konoha remained mostly unchanged. Mostly because, Team Ten had finally requested a C-rank mission and were given the task of clearing out a small camp of bandits from a town up north, which they were able to complete in two days.
Team seven was not a lucky, with Sasuke too involved in himself to care, and Sakura too far absorbed to listen. Ino had become annoyed with the ‘missions’ they had been assigned and tried lobbying to get a better mission, only to be rejected by Sakura and Kakashi. He knew that his team wasn’t displaying the teamwork needed to survive harder missions. So she was stuck doing lame missions and then working for her Mom. The one semi-bright spot that she had found was that she was to deliver the flowers that Haran had ordered to the Hospital every week. Instead of dropping the flowers off and returning to the shop like she was supposed to, Ino decided to drop off the flowers and then sneak into the room that they were supposed to be delivered to. She quietly snuck towards the room where Hyuuga Sora lay in slumber, and was about to enter, when Ino heard noises from down the hallway. Quickly hiding herself in an adjoining room, she watched as a nurse entered with the flowers she had just delivered.
‘Of course!’ Ino berated herself ‘I forgot about the flowers, I really should have thought this out more.’
The click of the door shutting snapped the blonde out of her stupor and she made her way across the hall, making sure that no nurses or doctors would interfere. Slowly, the door inched its way open and Ino slipped inside, taking equal care that not a sound be made as the door shut itself. Turning around, she got her first look at the mother of the boy she had fallen for.
‘She’s beautiful.’ Ino lamented as she took in the features of her subject. The dark hair of Haran was obviously from his mother, as well as body size, Sora wasn’t exactly tall, although Ino didn’t know how much of that was atrophy and how much was genetics. Just as she was about to move closer, she heard a noise from the hallway. Thinking it was the nurse; Ino hid behind the door and was relieved to hear the noise pass her. Deciding not to press her luck Ino left, never seeing the name of the women she had been spying on.
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While Ino was poking her nose where it aught not be, Team eight was plodding along, making excellent time on their mission to scout out Gato’s claims in the Land of Fire. For a C-rank mission it had been down right boring, not action. No one minded really, they were beginning to grow disillusioned with the mission, and doubled their effort to finish it soon.
It had been a long two weeks, but they were only one village away from completing their task, and then they could return home. Once more the initial scan went smoothly enough, but as the day progressed, Hinata noticed that an abnormally large number of people were gathering on the road ahead of them.
“Sensei, I think that Gato may have set up a going away party.” She alerted the older women. Kurenai nodded, so they were going to get a bit of action after all.
The group wasn’t too much of a threat, except for the fact that there had to be fifty of them! The initial plan to deal with groups like this was to have Shino’s kikaichu leech of the chakra of the group, hopefully taking a majority of them out. Then Kurenai would cast a wide area illusion and they would just be able to slip away. The plan worked nearly perfectly, a few of the bandits had some shinobi training and were able to cancel the illusion, but they were quickly dispatched by the Hyuuga twins, their jyuken made quick work of the bandits.
For good measure, they searched the bodies of the unconscious people for any kind of information that would help them ascertain Gato’s plans. They lucked out. A poster for a bounty on a bridge builder named Tazuna was found on nearly every body. It made sense, if a bridge was built connecting Wave to solid land, they couldn’t be held hostage by blockades and embargos anymore. Kurenai sent this notice, along with her report and notice that Team Eight would be returning home, to the Sandaime as dusk began to fall.
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