"Apartment Manager" background files
Feb. 11th, 2006 02:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThis is the background file for "The Way of the Apartment Manager," which I used while writing that story. I thought I'd post it as an example of how I put together characters and stories. Not all writers work this way (honestly, I don't always work this way -- sometimes I use much more detailed outlines and background files, and sometimes I hardly use any at all), but I always like seeing the process behind other people's stories, so I thought I'd be egotistical and explain some of my processes.
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Chapter Outlines
Anythingcrossed out I took out of that chapter. Anything in red I added later. As you can see, I planned a seven chapter story. What I ended up writing was, shall we say, a bit longer than that.
Chapter 1: the basic introduction -- set up Yukiko as a character, introduce her to Naruto and Sarutobi, and get Naruto into the apartment. Then start developing a mentoring relationship between Yukiko and Naruto, as well as a tentative connection between Yukiko and Sarutobi.
Chapter 2: the plot begins -- Naruto asks Yukiko why she doesn't go on missions, and Yukiko remembers her personal history (dead parents, dead teammates, etc.). Yukiko discusses Naruto with Sarutobi, who also tells her she's a better ninja than she thinks. Yukiko meets Iruka, who's looking for partners in the chuunin exam. Sarutobi asks Yukiko to be Iruka's third partner; she initially refuses, but Naruto's shock and disillusionment shame her into accepting.
Chapter 3: introduction of subplots -- Yukiko meets her new partners and they train together for the week before the exam. Irukaand Naga meets Naruto. At first Iruka reacts violently and negatively -- which Naruto, though hurt, shrugs off -- but he comes around and takes Naruto out for ramen. Naga is somewhat standoffish and Iruka is self-effacing, so Yukiko ends up as the default leader of their team.
Chapters 4 & 5: the first test -- sneaking past traps to steal a scroll. (I will have to plan this out.)Naga is insulted by some other Konoha genin, and her family history is revealed. Sarutobi has no idea how to find a superintendent, so Yukiko asks her family for help. Family tensions with her uncle, Ayakawa Yutaro, come up. Hatake Kakashi administers the test, and Iruka makes a plan to cheat so Naga can pass. Yukiko and Naga elect Iruka as team leader.
Chapters 6, 7, & 8: the second test -- escorting a 'client'through the Forest of Death to the neighboring village of Kashiwa. The team is attacked by chuunin administering the exam, and by another team, but they win through. (I will have to plan the battles.) Move Naga's family history to this chapter. Maito Gai administers the test, and Kakashi is their client. They fight some bandits, a solitary assassin, a group of assassins, and a group of bandits; this last gets them tangled up with Akaro's team, who are escorting Mitarashi Anko.
Chapters 9 & 10: the month between the second and third tests -- Yukiko, Iruka, and Naga rest and train. Naruto hangs around admiring and encouraging them. The superintendent possibly causes trouble, or possibly is just massively indifferent to Naruto and can't understand why Yukiko is giving up her job to be a ninja.
Chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 16: the third test -- Yukiko's fight with Akaro is detailed below. Her second fight would be against Iruka; she forfeits since he needs to be a chuunin more than she does. Ironically, this is why she becomes a chuunin.
Chapters 17 & epilogue: the aftermath -- Yukiko, Iruka, and Naga have passed the exam and become chuunin. They go their separate ways -- Iruka as a teacher, Naga as a courier, and Yukiko as ageneral Konoha shinobi spy, of sorts. Yukiko thanks Naruto for his help and inspiration, and tells him that she doesn't know if he'll be Hokage or not, but never to give up on his dream.
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Characters
I tend to create a lot more background information than I ever use in the finished story. Still, even if it never shows up overtly, I know it's there, and it informs my treatment of various characters, their reactions, and their interactions. Yes, I did profiles for both original characters and canon characters. And yes, I can be even more exhaustive about family backgrounds in some other stories. You should see the files I have on the Rumluck cousins and Xanthe Delaflor, for "Secrets"! (Actually, you shouldn't. They're scary.)
Ayakawa Yukiko
--Yukiko is 23 years old. Her parents owned and managed an apartment building; she was the first ninja in her family. She failed the chuunin exam four times before her parents died in an accident, after which she largely quit being a shinobi in order to take over the building she'd inherited. Her former teammates, Fuuma Ame and Ichihara Kasumi, died a year later while fighting the Kyuubi. (Her jounin-sensei, Mokume Hoshi, also died.)
Yukiko only has basic taijutsu and weapon skills and she's incompetent at ninjutsu, but she's a genjutsu expert. She's also a decent strategist if pushed, but prefers to follow someone else's lead. She has no confidence in herself as a ninja, but Naruto inspires her to regain her dream; she agrees to join Iruka and Naga's team for the chuunin exam.
Yukiko's relations with her remaining family are somewhat strained. Ayakawa Yutaro, her uncle, is the head of the clan; his wife, Sorata Hanako, died in the Kyuubi's attack. Yutaro has five children: Yuichiro (22), Yura (19), Yume (16), Yusuke (15), and Yui (11). Yukiko's mother, Ayakawa Yukina, was Yutaro's older sister. She married Aoi, a war orphan of unknown family, which didn't please Yutaro despite Aoi's business acumen.
Although the Ayakawa are not a ninja clan, most residents of Konoha had a limited life expectancy during the generations-long wars that the Fourth Hokage ended. This is why Yukiko has no living grandparents. Her great-uncle Morino Gohei, the brother of her grandmother Morino Nanami, was a chuunin-level shinobi, but spent most of his life doing administrative work for the Second and Third Hokage. Yutaro blames Gohei for feeding Yukiko's childhood dreams of being a ninja and distracting her from business affairs.
Yukiko is short to average height, slender and not very curvy. Her hair is blue-green (all the Ayakawa have blue hair to some degree), and she wears it just past shoulder-length. She usually dresses in black pants and a white shirt with a sky-blue windbreaker, but switches to a green shirt and brown jacket for the chuunin exam. Her eyes are hazel. (Note, 2/11/2006: I seem to not have mentioned Yukiko's eye color in the story -- it simply wasn't relevant. Fanart opinion makes them blue. *shrug* I don't really care one way or the other.)
Uzumaki Naruto
--Naruto is the child in whom the Fourth Hokage sealed the Kyuubi -- a nine-tailed fox demon that attacked Konoha. At the beginning of this story, he leaves his foster home and, at the Third Hokage's request, moves into Yukiko's apartment building. He is 6 years old.
Naruto is loud, brash, and a practical joker. However, while a lot of his enthusiasm is natural, a fair amount of it is a defense against the hatred and neglect of the villagers, who treat him as if he himself is the Kyuubi, and an attempt to make people pay attention to him instead of pretending he doesn't exist. Yukiko is one of the first people to treat him fairly, even if she's distant in her affection. She also starts teaching him a little bit about being a ninja, which he takes to very enthusiastically.
Naruto is short and round-faced. On each cheek he has three whisker-like marks, which are one of the two visible signs of the Kyuubi -- the other is a large spiral seal on his stomach that appears when he draws chakra. His hair is blond and spiky, and his eyes are clear blue. He is unnaturally fond of ramen and the color orange. :-)
Umino Iruka
--Iruka lost his parents when the Kyuubi attacked. He's 17 years old, and while he's lost a lot of his anger at the world, he's still not completely comfortable in his own skin or in his life choices. He failed the chuunin exam three times, at which point he took a couple years off to be an assistant teacher at the ninja academy. In order to become a full teacher -- which he's decided is his life goal -- he needs to be a chuunin. He has basic but solid ninjutsu and genjutsu skills, is good with taijutsu and weapons, and is also a clever strategist and a good leader. He's very modest about his skills.
Iruka is wary and resentful of Naruto at first, but warms to him when he realizes that Naruto's just a boy with no family, just like Iruka was. He starts a tradition of taking Naruto out for ramen, which drives Yukiko nuts; she'd prefer the kid ate more healthy meals.
Iruka has an open, friendly face with a long scar across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. He pulls his dark hair into a high, ragged ponytail -- almost a topknot. He wears black pants and a black shirt. His eyes are brown.
I believe Iruka didn't have much by way of family other than his parents, and was shipped off to live with an elderly great-aunt and uncle. His parents were shinobi, and may in fact have been students of Sarutobi, or relatives of his old genin teammates, which would explain the interest Sarutobi shows in Iruka and the way he lets Iruka get away with things in canon.
Note, 7/9/2005: Iruka lives with his great-aunt, Umino Sadako, a retired ninja who has a bad leg (a broken and torn knee that never healed properly), enjoys cooking, and apparently doubled as Iruka's babysitter when he was very young, since both his parents were shinobi and therefore often away on missions. Also, Iruka's maternal grandfather was Sarutobi's teammate about 50 years ago. Iruka doesn't maintain much contact with his own genin teammates, Pazu and Rei, nor with his jounin-sensei, Iinuzuka Kaoru.
Tonoike Naga
--Naga is 13, and has no team with which to take the chuunin exam; one teammate passed the previous year and the other quit being a ninja. She is the daughter of Orochimaru's younger cousin and shares the serpentine bloodline limit of the Sasayaki: prehensile tongue, ability to extend her neck, and ability to make her body act boneless. She wants desperately to prove that her family still has honor despite Orochimaru's murder spree and betrayal of the Leaf.
Naga is a taijutsu specialist; she avoided ninjutsu in an effort to be unlike Orochimaru. However, where Iruka is particularly good with weapons, Naga specializes in an unarmed style that makes full use of her bloodline limit and her consequent ability to move in ways opponents don't expect. She's also a summoner; she's learning to call ravens.
The Sasayaki were originally from Hidden Grass but they left for reasons relating to prejudice against bloodline limits. Konoha was one of the only places open to such ninja, so the clan moved there. Orochimaru remembers that journey, but Naga was born in Konoha.
Naga is skinny and just starting to develop a figure; she's slightly embarrassed about her body and tends to use abrupt body language and gestures. She talks abruptly as well, avoiding feminine speech patterns. She disguises her discomfort by being excruciatingly blunt about sex and thus making other people uncomfortable instead. Naga wears dark pants, a fishnet shirt, and a purple vest; she wraps her pant cuffs with tape -- starting at her ankles and finishing halfway up her calves -- to keep them from flapping. Her hair is black and cropped short, like a pixie-cap, her skin is deathly pale, and her eyes are gold. Her one concession to feminine dress is a pair of mother-of-pearl earrings, sort of short, dangling strings of shell, three strands in each ear.
Naga's father, Tonoike Bashoto, is an Anbu specializing in taijutsu and guard missions; he and Naga are very close, and he trained her a lot in addition to her academy classes. Her mother, Sasayaki Taizen, was a jounin-level infiltrator and spy, but she turned in her forehead protector the day Orochimaru fled Konoha. She now owns and runs a teahouse and uses her skills only for sleight-of-hand, origami, card tricks, and the like. Naga loves her mother, but resents Taizen for being so traditionally feminine, for turning her back on the clan tradition of being ninja, and for never using her bloodline limit.
Sarutobi, the Third Hokage
--He retired in favor of the Fourth Hokage, but took back his old job when the Fourth died to seal the Kyuubi in Naruto. He keeps an eye on the boy, but can't do too much in public or else the village will lose their trust in him. He also has a soft spot for Naga, since he was Orochimaru's jounin-sensei and feels guilty for feeding his student's obsession with learning every jutsu in the world.
Sarutobi is a genially manipulative man who keeps tabs on anything he finds interesting and isn't above playing favorites. He projects the impression of a kindly and slightly perverted grandfather, but he's quite shrewd underneath that, and when the chips are down he's still a hell of a fighter. He's about 60-65 years old during "Apartment Manager."
Hatake Kakashi
--a Leaf jounin, administrator of the first test. Ironically the same age as Yukiko, but he was a genius from a ninja family and therefore graduated from the academy when they were six, while Yukiko entered the academy when they were seven. He also acts as the client for Yukiko's team during the second test and offers training advice during the month before the third test, since the team doesn't have an official jounin-sensei.
Kakashi seems lazy, careless, and obsessed with perverted books. However, he's really quite tightly-wrapped and almost never lets people get a glimpse of his real self. He has massive guilt issues over the death of his old teammate Uchiha Obito, who bequeathed him a Sharingan to replace Kakashi's destroyed left eye. He also has issues about his father's suicide and the death of the Fourth Hokage, who was his jounin-sensei.
Maito Gai
--a Leaf jounin, administrator of the second test. Gai considers himself Kakashi's eternal rival, though Kakashi's opinion of this rivalry is unknown. He's a taijutsu expert who has raised unarmed fighting to new heights of skill and mastered the Lotus technique to release extra power from his body. He's also a complete nut who runs around in a green bodysuit and orange legwarmers, proclaiming the power of youth. He has a good heart, though, and a good mind underneath the oddness.
Mitarashi Anko
--a Leaf jounin. Anko was Orochimaru's student before he fled Konoha. He left her a curse seal and the distrust of the villagers as parting gifts. Anko is a heavy drinker, very bitter and cynical, with a somewhat disconcerting taste for blood and violence. She plays up those qualities since she enjoys shocking the people who look down on her. She acts as the client for Akaro, Kuroko, and Shiro during the second test.
Uchiha Akaro
--a participant in the chuunin exam. Yukiko fights him in the third test, and defeats him through aural genjutsu and clever strategy. After the fight, Uchiha Itachi calls him weak and declares that his clan is going downhill. (Ooh, canon foreshadowing!) Akaro is loud, arrogant, and a rash fighter, confident that his Sharingan will reveal whatever his opponents try and his speed will allow him to counter attacks. Like most Uchiha, he specializes in fire jutsu. His team comes in 1st in the first test and 3rd in the second.
Hyuuga Shiro
--Akaro's teammate, has mastered the Byakugan. Shiro is a member of the Branch House, but low-ranked and largely excluded from Hyuuga family politics. He can use the basics of the Gentle Fist style, but supplements this with kunai since he hasn't mastered the sixty-four hands strike or the heavenly shield. Shiro is touchy and prone to taking offense at Akaro's loud arrogance. He and Akaro consider themselves rivals; Akaro is stronger and more technically skilled, but Shiro is more practical and usually has better judgment.
Aburame Kuroko
--Akaro's other teammate, controls insects. Kuroko is quiet and aloof; the Aburame normally remain calm to avoid startling the insects that live in their bodies, but she takes this to extreme levels. She knows a few wind and temperature jutsu, and also uses smoke bombs to conceal the movement of her insects. Despite her intense asocial tendencies, Kuroko is the de facto leader of her team, mostly because Shiro and Akaro refuse to obey each other and Shiro's good judgment goes out the window when Akaro is involved.
Aishou, Shinkan, and Mouten Junichi
--three Mist-nin. Their team comes in 2nd in the first test and 1st in the second. Aishou attacks with clouds of superheated steam or freezing mist, and enhances the temperature effects by hitting pressure points with senbon. Shinkan is a taijutsu and weapons specialist, like Iruka, but with a preference for the katana and wakizashi (unusual for a ninja). She uses loose, oddly patterned clothing to disguise her exact reach and confuse enemies into thinking they've hit her when they haven't, or haven't hit her when they have. She will also resort to a shroud of mist and blind-fighting, or minor disorientation genjutsu, when she encounters trouble. Junichi uses a family jutsu that requires him to close his eyes -- instead of sight, he can then sense the outlines of solid objects in a perfect sphere around himself. He supplements this with razor-edged wires, which he uses to trap or slice his opponents.
Hino Suisen, Nagoyaka Kafunnokaze, and Makiba Kohaku
--three Grass-nin. They came in 6th in the first test, but 2nd in the second one; they're better at fighting than stealth and spying. Suisen uses family jutsu to redirect light and blind her opponents; she can also concentrate it to burn things. She wears mirrors strapped to her wrists, forehead, and ankles, and likes to attack from a distance with a glittering rain of shuriken. Kafunnokaze uses herbal mixtures, perfumes, and smoke to drug and poison his opponents, and can control minor wind jutsu to spread them. He wears a long black coat with multiple pockets, a belt with pouches of dry powder, and a black bandana over his lower face that doubles as a gas-mask. Kohaku specializes in soft earth jutsu, mostly turning earth to quicksand and traveling underground to attack from unexpected directions. He doesn't usually use weapons, and is fond of trapping opponents up to their necks in earth, or smothering them into submission.
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The Chuunin Exam
The following description of Yukiko and Akaro's fight is completely outdated -- I wrote this long before I got to the actual chapter, at which point the 'real' events overwrote this version. I try to avoid writing ahead of myself for this very reason -- scenes almost always change by the time I get to them, and I hate having to redo my work.
The chuunin exam consists of three tests. The first is usually a test of sneakiness, improvisation, and intelligence. In this case, each person must pass a series of traps in order to steal a scroll, preferably without alerting the 'guard' to her presence. This is an individual test, but at the end the teams must show their determination by not abandoning their members who did less well.
The second test is an 'escort mission,' in which each team travels through an Anbu training ground while guarding a 'client' against assassination attempts. Teams are allowed to 'kill' each others' clients if they run across each other, but that can leave their own client vulnerable. It's a trade-off.
The third test is the standard tournament.
This is how Yukiko's fight goes: she realizes that he's a lot faster than she is, and knows a lot more ninjutsu (particularly the fire jutsu the Uchiha clan specializes in). Also, because he has the Sharingan, he can see through her genjutsu. The only way she can win is to outthink him.
She sets up a genjutsu illusion of Naruto for herself to guard. When Akaro laughs, she tells him the illusion is to increase her motivation by reminding herself of her reason for being a ninja -- protecting her friends and her village. Then she starts manipulating the aural genjutsu she set up along with the visual one (the visual one was a cover).
She whispers into Akaro's mind that the woman is pathetic, that from the way she's standing she's bought into her own illusion and is treating the boy as real, and that he can use that to predict her movements. He rushes forward... and Yukiko steps back into the illusory 'Naruto,' throwing off his stride, and gets a kunai to his throat. He struggles to escape, counting on his greater speed and strength to break her grip, and almost succeeds in getting a knife of his own into play, but Yukiko increases the volume on her genjutsu and essentially screams into his mind, knocking him off-balance enough for her to dislocate his shoulder and break his foot by stomping on it.
The Sharingan can see through visual illusions, but an eye can't hear, she says. Even if you realize you're not hearing with your ears, all I need is a few seconds to disable you. You lose.
The Tournament
The details of several fights changed in the finished story. I don't mind those changes as much as I mind Yukiko and Akaro's fight, because I hadn't really put thought into these quick sketches.
Round 1: Yukiko vs. Akaro, Yukiko wins. Iruka vs. Suisen, Iruka wins by calculating the angles of her light attacks and shattering her mirrors. Shinkan vs. Shiro, Shinkan wins, barely, mostly by hitting Shiro harder than he hits her and blocking his attacks with her wakizashi. Naga vs. Kohaku, Naga wins, with difficulty -- it's a battle of reach and mobility. Kafunnokaze vs. Kuroko, Kafunnokaze wins by using smoke to sedate Kuroko's kikkai insects. Junichi vs. Aishou, Aishou wins by heating and freezing Junichi's wires so he can't touch them.
Round 2: Shinkan vs. Aishou, Shinkan wins by dodging Aishou's senbon and using his own mist clouds as cover for a close attack. Naga vs. Kafunnokaze, Kafunnokaze wins by drugging Naga, though she manages to create a partially effective gas mask from her vest soaked in water left from Aishou and Junichi's fight, and nearly knocks him out before she succumbs to the drug. Yukiko vs. Iruka, Iruka wins by default.
Round 3: Iruka vs. Shinkan, Iruka wins, because he's slightly better on close defense and his aim with distance weapons is better than hers. Kafunnokaze gets a bye since his fight was harder than Shinkan's and Iruka didn't actually fight in Round 2.
Round 4: Iruka vs. Kafunnokaze, Iruka wins. He makes a gas mask at the start of the fight, and then uses a fire jutsu to ignite Kafunnokaze's powders and drugs while they're still in his coat. The Grass-nin has to dispose of his main arsenal, and resorts to drug-coated shuriken and poisoned kunai, but Iruka can easily deal with weapons. Yay Iruka!
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Conclusion
I do some of my rough story planning in the form of roughed-out scenes, generally written in a format without dialogue quotation marks. This scene didn't make it into the finished version, though the idea behind it was one of the driving themes of the story.
At the end of the story, all three of Yukiko's team have made chuunin: Yukiko for her upset victory over Akaro and refusal to harm her teammate, Naga for her tenacity and creative fighting against opponents who struck at her weaknesses, and Iruka for winning the tournament and keeping a cool head through his fights. Shinkan and Kafunnokaze also pass; this was a good bunch of genin, the examiners say. (Note, 9/25/2005: Aishou also passes, for diplomatic reasons.) Iruka gets his job at the ninja academy, Naga thanks her teammates for their help and starts throwing herself into missions, and Yukiko takes a break to reacquaint herself with her apartment building and figure out what she wants to do now.
Naruto tells her to go and be a ninja.
But if she's always away on missions, she'll have to hire Yusuke as a permanent superintendent and she won't get to see Naruto very often.
That's okay, Naruto says. Someday I'll be a ninja too -- then we can have missions together! And if you're not here, you can't make me eat yucky vegetables.
There is that, Yukiko says. Iruka will look after you, I guess, and I just know you'll talk him into buying you way too much ramen.
Naruto laughs guiltily.
You know, kid, Yukiko says, I wouldn't have made it if it weren't for you. I wouldn't even have tried to take the exam again. So thanks. And you know something else? Maybe you'll be Hokage someday, and maybe you won't, but Konoha could do a lot worse than having you looking out for us. You keep chasing that dream. Promise me that.
I promise, Naruto says, and I won't give up and I won't go back on my word. That's gonna be my nindo!
Yukiko is startled to hear him choose the same nindo she did, back when she was starting at the academy.
It's a good nindo, kid, she says, a hard nindo, but a good one. Sometimes it hurts to keep fighting and keep your word, and sometimes it's hard, but I think you can do it. Maybe you really will be Hokage.
Naruto beams.
Good luck, kid, Yukiko says, and she goes off to her first mission as a chuunin.
Epilogue
This is a prime example of the flailing I do when my stories get away from me... and they almost always get away from me at some point. I kind of like it when they do -- that shows they're alive -- but it's still massively irritating.
As I've been working on this story, it's started to get away from me, to the point where I think I need to write two epilogues. In one, Yukiko and Naga die on a mission, and Iruka breaks the news to Naruto. Yukiko hadn't gotten around to changing her will, so Yusuke inherits the apartment building and Naruto is left with only Iruka as a family-figure. In the other, Yukiko lives and I write an altered version of the first manga chapters, in which her presence changes Naruto's experiences and reactions, and she's kept in touch with Kakashi, Iruka, and Naga.
I have to do this, because given the way Yukiko's come to care for Naruto, her presence would change the manga since he's adopted her as a sort of surrogate sister/mother. Also, I think if she lived, Iruka and Kakashi might know each other a bit more than they do in canon.
Argh. Why do my stories always get away from me???
I'm very fond of this next bit of rationalization... *grin*
Note, 4/23/2005: I don't actually need an epilogue. I can just move the AU split-point earlier -- in canon, see, Yukiko does go to help Ame and Kasumi, and gets squished while she uses genjutsu to shield civilians escaping from the battlefield. Yutaro inherits her building and by the time Naruto wants to leave Tani Midori's foster home, Yusuke is managing the building. Yusuke agrees to rent Naruto a room but shows absolutely no interest in him as a person. Naga never impinges on Naruto's life at all. And Iruka -- who, along with Naga, finds somebody else to partner in the chuunin exam -- meets Naruto as a student at the academy, where he begins to have a soft spot for this troubled, lonely kid who reminds him of himself after his parents died.
There! All nice and logical, and I don't have to kill Yukiko. Yay!
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Chapter Outlines
Anything
Chapter 1: the basic introduction -- set up Yukiko as a character, introduce her to Naruto and Sarutobi, and get Naruto into the apartment. Then start developing a mentoring relationship between Yukiko and Naruto, as well as a tentative connection between Yukiko and Sarutobi.
Chapter 2: the plot begins -- Naruto asks Yukiko why she doesn't go on missions, and Yukiko remembers her personal history (dead parents, dead teammates, etc.). Yukiko discusses Naruto with Sarutobi, who also tells her she's a better ninja than she thinks. Yukiko meets Iruka, who's looking for partners in the chuunin exam. Sarutobi asks Yukiko to be Iruka's third partner; she initially refuses, but Naruto's shock and disillusionment shame her into accepting.
Chapter 3: introduction of subplots -- Yukiko meets her new partners and they train together for the week before the exam. Iruka
Chapters 4 & 5: the first test -- sneaking past traps to steal a scroll. (I will have to plan this out.)
Chapters 6, 7, & 8: the second test -- escorting a 'client'
Chapters 9 & 10: the month between the second and third tests -- Yukiko, Iruka, and Naga rest and train. Naruto hangs around admiring and encouraging them. The superintendent possibly causes trouble, or possibly is just massively indifferent to Naruto and can't understand why Yukiko is giving up her job to be a ninja.
Chapters 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, & 16: the third test -- Yukiko's fight with Akaro is detailed below. Her second fight would be against Iruka; she forfeits since he needs to be a chuunin more than she does. Ironically, this is why she becomes a chuunin.
Chapters 17 & epilogue: the aftermath -- Yukiko, Iruka, and Naga have passed the exam and become chuunin. They go their separate ways -- Iruka as a teacher, Naga as a courier, and Yukiko as a
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Characters
I tend to create a lot more background information than I ever use in the finished story. Still, even if it never shows up overtly, I know it's there, and it informs my treatment of various characters, their reactions, and their interactions. Yes, I did profiles for both original characters and canon characters. And yes, I can be even more exhaustive about family backgrounds in some other stories. You should see the files I have on the Rumluck cousins and Xanthe Delaflor, for "Secrets"! (Actually, you shouldn't. They're scary.)
Ayakawa Yukiko
--Yukiko is 23 years old. Her parents owned and managed an apartment building; she was the first ninja in her family. She failed the chuunin exam four times before her parents died in an accident, after which she largely quit being a shinobi in order to take over the building she'd inherited. Her former teammates, Fuuma Ame and Ichihara Kasumi, died a year later while fighting the Kyuubi. (Her jounin-sensei, Mokume Hoshi, also died.)
Yukiko only has basic taijutsu and weapon skills and she's incompetent at ninjutsu, but she's a genjutsu expert. She's also a decent strategist if pushed, but prefers to follow someone else's lead. She has no confidence in herself as a ninja, but Naruto inspires her to regain her dream; she agrees to join Iruka and Naga's team for the chuunin exam.
Yukiko's relations with her remaining family are somewhat strained. Ayakawa Yutaro, her uncle, is the head of the clan; his wife, Sorata Hanako, died in the Kyuubi's attack. Yutaro has five children: Yuichiro (22), Yura (19), Yume (16), Yusuke (15), and Yui (11). Yukiko's mother, Ayakawa Yukina, was Yutaro's older sister. She married Aoi, a war orphan of unknown family, which didn't please Yutaro despite Aoi's business acumen.
Although the Ayakawa are not a ninja clan, most residents of Konoha had a limited life expectancy during the generations-long wars that the Fourth Hokage ended. This is why Yukiko has no living grandparents. Her great-uncle Morino Gohei, the brother of her grandmother Morino Nanami, was a chuunin-level shinobi, but spent most of his life doing administrative work for the Second and Third Hokage. Yutaro blames Gohei for feeding Yukiko's childhood dreams of being a ninja and distracting her from business affairs.
Yukiko is short to average height, slender and not very curvy. Her hair is blue-green (all the Ayakawa have blue hair to some degree), and she wears it just past shoulder-length. She usually dresses in black pants and a white shirt with a sky-blue windbreaker, but switches to a green shirt and brown jacket for the chuunin exam. Her eyes are hazel. (Note, 2/11/2006: I seem to not have mentioned Yukiko's eye color in the story -- it simply wasn't relevant. Fanart opinion makes them blue. *shrug* I don't really care one way or the other.)
Uzumaki Naruto
--Naruto is the child in whom the Fourth Hokage sealed the Kyuubi -- a nine-tailed fox demon that attacked Konoha. At the beginning of this story, he leaves his foster home and, at the Third Hokage's request, moves into Yukiko's apartment building. He is 6 years old.
Naruto is loud, brash, and a practical joker. However, while a lot of his enthusiasm is natural, a fair amount of it is a defense against the hatred and neglect of the villagers, who treat him as if he himself is the Kyuubi, and an attempt to make people pay attention to him instead of pretending he doesn't exist. Yukiko is one of the first people to treat him fairly, even if she's distant in her affection. She also starts teaching him a little bit about being a ninja, which he takes to very enthusiastically.
Naruto is short and round-faced. On each cheek he has three whisker-like marks, which are one of the two visible signs of the Kyuubi -- the other is a large spiral seal on his stomach that appears when he draws chakra. His hair is blond and spiky, and his eyes are clear blue. He is unnaturally fond of ramen and the color orange. :-)
Umino Iruka
--Iruka lost his parents when the Kyuubi attacked. He's 17 years old, and while he's lost a lot of his anger at the world, he's still not completely comfortable in his own skin or in his life choices. He failed the chuunin exam three times, at which point he took a couple years off to be an assistant teacher at the ninja academy. In order to become a full teacher -- which he's decided is his life goal -- he needs to be a chuunin. He has basic but solid ninjutsu and genjutsu skills, is good with taijutsu and weapons, and is also a clever strategist and a good leader. He's very modest about his skills.
Iruka is wary and resentful of Naruto at first, but warms to him when he realizes that Naruto's just a boy with no family, just like Iruka was. He starts a tradition of taking Naruto out for ramen, which drives Yukiko nuts; she'd prefer the kid ate more healthy meals.
Iruka has an open, friendly face with a long scar across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. He pulls his dark hair into a high, ragged ponytail -- almost a topknot. He wears black pants and a black shirt. His eyes are brown.
I believe Iruka didn't have much by way of family other than his parents, and was shipped off to live with an elderly great-aunt and uncle. His parents were shinobi, and may in fact have been students of Sarutobi, or relatives of his old genin teammates, which would explain the interest Sarutobi shows in Iruka and the way he lets Iruka get away with things in canon.
Note, 7/9/2005: Iruka lives with his great-aunt, Umino Sadako, a retired ninja who has a bad leg (a broken and torn knee that never healed properly), enjoys cooking, and apparently doubled as Iruka's babysitter when he was very young, since both his parents were shinobi and therefore often away on missions. Also, Iruka's maternal grandfather was Sarutobi's teammate about 50 years ago. Iruka doesn't maintain much contact with his own genin teammates, Pazu and Rei, nor with his jounin-sensei, Iinuzuka Kaoru.
Tonoike Naga
--Naga is 13, and has no team with which to take the chuunin exam; one teammate passed the previous year and the other quit being a ninja. She is the daughter of Orochimaru's younger cousin and shares the serpentine bloodline limit of the Sasayaki: prehensile tongue, ability to extend her neck, and ability to make her body act boneless. She wants desperately to prove that her family still has honor despite Orochimaru's murder spree and betrayal of the Leaf.
Naga is a taijutsu specialist; she avoided ninjutsu in an effort to be unlike Orochimaru. However, where Iruka is particularly good with weapons, Naga specializes in an unarmed style that makes full use of her bloodline limit and her consequent ability to move in ways opponents don't expect. She's also a summoner; she's learning to call ravens.
The Sasayaki were originally from Hidden Grass but they left for reasons relating to prejudice against bloodline limits. Konoha was one of the only places open to such ninja, so the clan moved there. Orochimaru remembers that journey, but Naga was born in Konoha.
Naga is skinny and just starting to develop a figure; she's slightly embarrassed about her body and tends to use abrupt body language and gestures. She talks abruptly as well, avoiding feminine speech patterns. She disguises her discomfort by being excruciatingly blunt about sex and thus making other people uncomfortable instead. Naga wears dark pants, a fishnet shirt, and a purple vest; she wraps her pant cuffs with tape -- starting at her ankles and finishing halfway up her calves -- to keep them from flapping. Her hair is black and cropped short, like a pixie-cap, her skin is deathly pale, and her eyes are gold. Her one concession to feminine dress is a pair of mother-of-pearl earrings, sort of short, dangling strings of shell, three strands in each ear.
Naga's father, Tonoike Bashoto, is an Anbu specializing in taijutsu and guard missions; he and Naga are very close, and he trained her a lot in addition to her academy classes. Her mother, Sasayaki Taizen, was a jounin-level infiltrator and spy, but she turned in her forehead protector the day Orochimaru fled Konoha. She now owns and runs a teahouse and uses her skills only for sleight-of-hand, origami, card tricks, and the like. Naga loves her mother, but resents Taizen for being so traditionally feminine, for turning her back on the clan tradition of being ninja, and for never using her bloodline limit.
Sarutobi, the Third Hokage
--He retired in favor of the Fourth Hokage, but took back his old job when the Fourth died to seal the Kyuubi in Naruto. He keeps an eye on the boy, but can't do too much in public or else the village will lose their trust in him. He also has a soft spot for Naga, since he was Orochimaru's jounin-sensei and feels guilty for feeding his student's obsession with learning every jutsu in the world.
Sarutobi is a genially manipulative man who keeps tabs on anything he finds interesting and isn't above playing favorites. He projects the impression of a kindly and slightly perverted grandfather, but he's quite shrewd underneath that, and when the chips are down he's still a hell of a fighter. He's about 60-65 years old during "Apartment Manager."
Hatake Kakashi
--a Leaf jounin, administrator of the first test. Ironically the same age as Yukiko, but he was a genius from a ninja family and therefore graduated from the academy when they were six, while Yukiko entered the academy when they were seven. He also acts as the client for Yukiko's team during the second test and offers training advice during the month before the third test, since the team doesn't have an official jounin-sensei.
Kakashi seems lazy, careless, and obsessed with perverted books. However, he's really quite tightly-wrapped and almost never lets people get a glimpse of his real self. He has massive guilt issues over the death of his old teammate Uchiha Obito, who bequeathed him a Sharingan to replace Kakashi's destroyed left eye. He also has issues about his father's suicide and the death of the Fourth Hokage, who was his jounin-sensei.
Maito Gai
--a Leaf jounin, administrator of the second test. Gai considers himself Kakashi's eternal rival, though Kakashi's opinion of this rivalry is unknown. He's a taijutsu expert who has raised unarmed fighting to new heights of skill and mastered the Lotus technique to release extra power from his body. He's also a complete nut who runs around in a green bodysuit and orange legwarmers, proclaiming the power of youth. He has a good heart, though, and a good mind underneath the oddness.
Mitarashi Anko
--a Leaf jounin. Anko was Orochimaru's student before he fled Konoha. He left her a curse seal and the distrust of the villagers as parting gifts. Anko is a heavy drinker, very bitter and cynical, with a somewhat disconcerting taste for blood and violence. She plays up those qualities since she enjoys shocking the people who look down on her. She acts as the client for Akaro, Kuroko, and Shiro during the second test.
Uchiha Akaro
--a participant in the chuunin exam. Yukiko fights him in the third test, and defeats him through aural genjutsu and clever strategy. After the fight, Uchiha Itachi calls him weak and declares that his clan is going downhill. (Ooh, canon foreshadowing!) Akaro is loud, arrogant, and a rash fighter, confident that his Sharingan will reveal whatever his opponents try and his speed will allow him to counter attacks. Like most Uchiha, he specializes in fire jutsu. His team comes in 1st in the first test and 3rd in the second.
Hyuuga Shiro
--Akaro's teammate, has mastered the Byakugan. Shiro is a member of the Branch House, but low-ranked and largely excluded from Hyuuga family politics. He can use the basics of the Gentle Fist style, but supplements this with kunai since he hasn't mastered the sixty-four hands strike or the heavenly shield. Shiro is touchy and prone to taking offense at Akaro's loud arrogance. He and Akaro consider themselves rivals; Akaro is stronger and more technically skilled, but Shiro is more practical and usually has better judgment.
Aburame Kuroko
--Akaro's other teammate, controls insects. Kuroko is quiet and aloof; the Aburame normally remain calm to avoid startling the insects that live in their bodies, but she takes this to extreme levels. She knows a few wind and temperature jutsu, and also uses smoke bombs to conceal the movement of her insects. Despite her intense asocial tendencies, Kuroko is the de facto leader of her team, mostly because Shiro and Akaro refuse to obey each other and Shiro's good judgment goes out the window when Akaro is involved.
Aishou, Shinkan, and Mouten Junichi
--three Mist-nin. Their team comes in 2nd in the first test and 1st in the second. Aishou attacks with clouds of superheated steam or freezing mist, and enhances the temperature effects by hitting pressure points with senbon. Shinkan is a taijutsu and weapons specialist, like Iruka, but with a preference for the katana and wakizashi (unusual for a ninja). She uses loose, oddly patterned clothing to disguise her exact reach and confuse enemies into thinking they've hit her when they haven't, or haven't hit her when they have. She will also resort to a shroud of mist and blind-fighting, or minor disorientation genjutsu, when she encounters trouble. Junichi uses a family jutsu that requires him to close his eyes -- instead of sight, he can then sense the outlines of solid objects in a perfect sphere around himself. He supplements this with razor-edged wires, which he uses to trap or slice his opponents.
Hino Suisen, Nagoyaka Kafunnokaze, and Makiba Kohaku
--three Grass-nin. They came in 6th in the first test, but 2nd in the second one; they're better at fighting than stealth and spying. Suisen uses family jutsu to redirect light and blind her opponents; she can also concentrate it to burn things. She wears mirrors strapped to her wrists, forehead, and ankles, and likes to attack from a distance with a glittering rain of shuriken. Kafunnokaze uses herbal mixtures, perfumes, and smoke to drug and poison his opponents, and can control minor wind jutsu to spread them. He wears a long black coat with multiple pockets, a belt with pouches of dry powder, and a black bandana over his lower face that doubles as a gas-mask. Kohaku specializes in soft earth jutsu, mostly turning earth to quicksand and traveling underground to attack from unexpected directions. He doesn't usually use weapons, and is fond of trapping opponents up to their necks in earth, or smothering them into submission.
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The Chuunin Exam
The following description of Yukiko and Akaro's fight is completely outdated -- I wrote this long before I got to the actual chapter, at which point the 'real' events overwrote this version. I try to avoid writing ahead of myself for this very reason -- scenes almost always change by the time I get to them, and I hate having to redo my work.
The chuunin exam consists of three tests. The first is usually a test of sneakiness, improvisation, and intelligence. In this case, each person must pass a series of traps in order to steal a scroll, preferably without alerting the 'guard' to her presence. This is an individual test, but at the end the teams must show their determination by not abandoning their members who did less well.
The second test is an 'escort mission,' in which each team travels through an Anbu training ground while guarding a 'client' against assassination attempts. Teams are allowed to 'kill' each others' clients if they run across each other, but that can leave their own client vulnerable. It's a trade-off.
The third test is the standard tournament.
This is how Yukiko's fight goes: she realizes that he's a lot faster than she is, and knows a lot more ninjutsu (particularly the fire jutsu the Uchiha clan specializes in). Also, because he has the Sharingan, he can see through her genjutsu. The only way she can win is to outthink him.
She sets up a genjutsu illusion of Naruto for herself to guard. When Akaro laughs, she tells him the illusion is to increase her motivation by reminding herself of her reason for being a ninja -- protecting her friends and her village. Then she starts manipulating the aural genjutsu she set up along with the visual one (the visual one was a cover).
She whispers into Akaro's mind that the woman is pathetic, that from the way she's standing she's bought into her own illusion and is treating the boy as real, and that he can use that to predict her movements. He rushes forward... and Yukiko steps back into the illusory 'Naruto,' throwing off his stride, and gets a kunai to his throat. He struggles to escape, counting on his greater speed and strength to break her grip, and almost succeeds in getting a knife of his own into play, but Yukiko increases the volume on her genjutsu and essentially screams into his mind, knocking him off-balance enough for her to dislocate his shoulder and break his foot by stomping on it.
The Sharingan can see through visual illusions, but an eye can't hear, she says. Even if you realize you're not hearing with your ears, all I need is a few seconds to disable you. You lose.
The Tournament
The details of several fights changed in the finished story. I don't mind those changes as much as I mind Yukiko and Akaro's fight, because I hadn't really put thought into these quick sketches.
Round 1: Yukiko vs. Akaro, Yukiko wins. Iruka vs. Suisen, Iruka wins by calculating the angles of her light attacks and shattering her mirrors. Shinkan vs. Shiro, Shinkan wins, barely, mostly by hitting Shiro harder than he hits her and blocking his attacks with her wakizashi. Naga vs. Kohaku, Naga wins, with difficulty -- it's a battle of reach and mobility. Kafunnokaze vs. Kuroko, Kafunnokaze wins by using smoke to sedate Kuroko's kikkai insects. Junichi vs. Aishou, Aishou wins by heating and freezing Junichi's wires so he can't touch them.
Round 2: Shinkan vs. Aishou, Shinkan wins by dodging Aishou's senbon and using his own mist clouds as cover for a close attack. Naga vs. Kafunnokaze, Kafunnokaze wins by drugging Naga, though she manages to create a partially effective gas mask from her vest soaked in water left from Aishou and Junichi's fight, and nearly knocks him out before she succumbs to the drug. Yukiko vs. Iruka, Iruka wins by default.
Round 3: Iruka vs. Shinkan, Iruka wins, because he's slightly better on close defense and his aim with distance weapons is better than hers. Kafunnokaze gets a bye since his fight was harder than Shinkan's and Iruka didn't actually fight in Round 2.
Round 4: Iruka vs. Kafunnokaze, Iruka wins. He makes a gas mask at the start of the fight, and then uses a fire jutsu to ignite Kafunnokaze's powders and drugs while they're still in his coat. The Grass-nin has to dispose of his main arsenal, and resorts to drug-coated shuriken and poisoned kunai, but Iruka can easily deal with weapons. Yay Iruka!
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Conclusion
I do some of my rough story planning in the form of roughed-out scenes, generally written in a format without dialogue quotation marks. This scene didn't make it into the finished version, though the idea behind it was one of the driving themes of the story.
At the end of the story, all three of Yukiko's team have made chuunin: Yukiko for her upset victory over Akaro and refusal to harm her teammate, Naga for her tenacity and creative fighting against opponents who struck at her weaknesses, and Iruka for winning the tournament and keeping a cool head through his fights. Shinkan and Kafunnokaze also pass; this was a good bunch of genin, the examiners say. (Note, 9/25/2005: Aishou also passes, for diplomatic reasons.) Iruka gets his job at the ninja academy, Naga thanks her teammates for their help and starts throwing herself into missions, and Yukiko takes a break to reacquaint herself with her apartment building and figure out what she wants to do now.
Naruto tells her to go and be a ninja.
But if she's always away on missions, she'll have to hire Yusuke as a permanent superintendent and she won't get to see Naruto very often.
That's okay, Naruto says. Someday I'll be a ninja too -- then we can have missions together! And if you're not here, you can't make me eat yucky vegetables.
There is that, Yukiko says. Iruka will look after you, I guess, and I just know you'll talk him into buying you way too much ramen.
Naruto laughs guiltily.
You know, kid, Yukiko says, I wouldn't have made it if it weren't for you. I wouldn't even have tried to take the exam again. So thanks. And you know something else? Maybe you'll be Hokage someday, and maybe you won't, but Konoha could do a lot worse than having you looking out for us. You keep chasing that dream. Promise me that.
I promise, Naruto says, and I won't give up and I won't go back on my word. That's gonna be my nindo!
Yukiko is startled to hear him choose the same nindo she did, back when she was starting at the academy.
It's a good nindo, kid, she says, a hard nindo, but a good one. Sometimes it hurts to keep fighting and keep your word, and sometimes it's hard, but I think you can do it. Maybe you really will be Hokage.
Naruto beams.
Good luck, kid, Yukiko says, and she goes off to her first mission as a chuunin.
Epilogue
This is a prime example of the flailing I do when my stories get away from me... and they almost always get away from me at some point. I kind of like it when they do -- that shows they're alive -- but it's still massively irritating.
As I've been working on this story, it's started to get away from me, to the point where I think I need to write two epilogues. In one, Yukiko and Naga die on a mission, and Iruka breaks the news to Naruto. Yukiko hadn't gotten around to changing her will, so Yusuke inherits the apartment building and Naruto is left with only Iruka as a family-figure. In the other, Yukiko lives and I write an altered version of the first manga chapters, in which her presence changes Naruto's experiences and reactions, and she's kept in touch with Kakashi, Iruka, and Naga.
I have to do this, because given the way Yukiko's come to care for Naruto, her presence would change the manga since he's adopted her as a sort of surrogate sister/mother. Also, I think if she lived, Iruka and Kakashi might know each other a bit more than they do in canon.
Argh. Why do my stories always get away from me???
I'm very fond of this next bit of rationalization... *grin*
Note, 4/23/2005: I don't actually need an epilogue. I can just move the AU split-point earlier -- in canon, see, Yukiko does go to help Ame and Kasumi, and gets squished while she uses genjutsu to shield civilians escaping from the battlefield. Yutaro inherits her building and by the time Naruto wants to leave Tani Midori's foster home, Yusuke is managing the building. Yusuke agrees to rent Naruto a room but shows absolutely no interest in him as a person. Naga never impinges on Naruto's life at all. And Iruka -- who, along with Naga, finds somebody else to partner in the chuunin exam -- meets Naruto as a student at the academy, where he begins to have a soft spot for this troubled, lonely kid who reminds him of himself after his parents died.
There! All nice and logical, and I don't have to kill Yukiko. Yay!
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![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-11 08:43 am (UTC)It's like there's this vague, plot-shaped thing looming out there in the fog of the back corners of my mind, and I don't know what it actually is until I walk right up and write it...
Fortunately, my subconcious seems to know what it's doing even if I don't, so all is well. Eventually.
Nice to see the insight into one of my favorites, BTW!
Ja, -n
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-11 10:31 am (UTC)As I don't follow Naruto at all and this is all new to me, I was surprised that Kakashi was Yukiko's age. But then, from what I've gathered, canon seems to have very young and very old characters and sod all in the middle. It must be a Japanese thing.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-11 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From: