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The road back to Suna was about as peaceful as the away trip, except for a short dispute with a few young and inexperienced highwaymen whom we easily disposed of. Once again, we were reminded of how different the shinobi life was from the rest of the world. The robbers had been easy work – they weren't particularly skilled in any sort of combat – but had we not been there, they could very well have been lethal to Mr. Gyoza, even if he had hired regular, non-shinobi bodyguards. Things we took for granted, like someone of Ino's size sending a fully-grown man flying backwards ten meters with nothing but a well-placed kick between the legs, were pretty horrifying to both our clients and victims.

Our main problem, rather, came when we finally got to the front gate. Evidently, the central administration in Suna had learned from the last two times Kakashi-sensei had duped their gate guards, because the people manning the shift this time were a bunch of kids like us, only more miserable-looking. The older two just looked like they thought everyone younger than them were dirt, but the smallest one, especially, seemed rather unstable – but not in the same way Kakashi-sensei was. Kakashi-sensei just caused trouble; this guy looked like he wouldn't hesitate to kill you if you looked at him wrong. Even without the dark rings around his eyes, he looked perpetually angry.

Not that it bothered Kakashi-sensei. "Hello there!"

They responded with a glare. "Entrance fee?" the girl demanded.

Kakashi-sensei whistled and gave her a once-over. "Wow. What do they put in the water in Suna?" I raised my eyebrow at him, not that he bothered to notice. Still, this was a bit far, even for his standards. The girl was barely older than we were. And Kakashi-sensei…he was twenty-six, wasn't he? He was a lot of things, including a pervert, judging by his reading material, but he wasn't a criminal.

…Was he?

(He was, after all, a Jonin and former ANBU. Things that happened in ANBU stayed in ANBU, Ino's father had said. On second thought, maybe that line wasn't as off-limits to our sensei as we initially thought it was, either. Did this guy even have any boundaries?)

Clearly, the girl was not as romantically inclined as the last one, because she took a moment to glance around dubiously at the clearly water-less sand dunes around us before she finally understood what he was implying. "Entrance. Fee," she ground out, reaching for the massive metal fan on her back.

"Is that real?" Kakashi-sensei suddenly asked the murderous-looking one, drawing circles in the air around his eye with his finger. He didn't respond.

The girl stared at him like he was suicidal. Granted, he probably was, though of course I hadn't known it then. She quickly looked back and forth between Kakashi-sensei and the youngest kid, and I realized that she was actually scared of him. Meanwhile, the middle child – a boy who seemed to be slightly older than us, though it was hard to tell with all that purple face paint – cleared his throat.

"Is he...okay?" he asked us, gesturing at our sensei with his chin. He had lost his arrogant attitude, too morbidly fascinated by the mental anomaly dancing before him to bother with keeping up his mask.

"Yeah, no," I answered. "Look, Sensei, Gyoza-san just wants to go home, so if you could – "

Kakashi-sensei ignored me, and proceeded to produce a tray of fresh sushi. Faster than the eye could follow, one of them disappeared from the plate, and we could see him chewing underneath his mask. He held the tray up to the three Suna gate guards. "Want one?" he asked, mouth full.

"Is that fresh sushi?" Ino asked.

"Mm-hmm!" he nodded, and swallowed. Then another piece of sushi vanished. We hadn't even seen him pull down his mask.

"Where'd out get that?" the boy in the middle asked, baffled. "Suna's a landlocked nation. There's no running water for miles…we're too far inland for fresh fish…"

Kakashi-sensei finished his second piece. "From the ponds out in the desert."

We all turned to look. As expected, there were no ponds.

"…what ponds?" the girl with the fan asked.

"Those ones! Can't you see them? No?"

We shook our heads.

"It's actually a very special brand of sushi. This fish is only caught from those ponds," Kakashi-sensei explained, one visible eye growing wide and gesturing wildly with his free hand. "You see, these ponds move further away from you every time you take a step closer, and it's only by running faster than the speed of light that you can get to catch up to them. I forgot what they're supposed to be called, though."

"You mean the mirages?" the boy with the makeup asked.

"Yep! Those," Kakashi-sensei grinned, snapping his fingers. Another piece of sushi vanished. "But going back to what I was asking before, what do they put in the water in Suna?"

"Sir, I am seventeen," the girl with the fan said. "Entrance. Fee. Now."

"Wow! Me, too!" Kakashi-sensei grinned.

"Liar," Ino muttered.

"And you're already Jonin?" she asked skeptically. "Has Konoha really lowered its standards so far that they'll let people like you become Jonin?"

"Actually, they raised the bar quite recently," Kakashi-sensei told her. "When they tossed me this rank, I was thirteen."

She blinked, once, twice, and then jumped back with a look of shock, drawing her fan. "You're Kakashi no Sharingan!" she hissed. "What do you want? What are you doing here?"

"Did Kakashi-sensei really become Jonin at thirteen," Naruto hissed out of the corner of his mouth, "or is he just messing with us all again?"

"I think it's actually true…" Ino whispered back. "I got to sneak a peek at my dad's copy of his psych evaluation once, and it included all of his ranking information…"

Naruto shook his head. "No wonder he's so messed up."

"I'm taking my cute little students on their first C-rank," Kakashi-sensei said, jerking a thumb at the three of us and Gyoza-san. "I'm certainly not here as a ruse to come into Suna to spy on the esteemed Kazekage. I'm also certainly not here to steal any important kinjutsu scrolls, or assassinate any important Suna officials, or sabotage any negotiations you might be having with the Daimyo of the Land of Wind, or kidnap any jinchuuriki – "

The three of them tensed.

"GUARDS!" the girl suddenly yelled. Immediately, a swarm of masked Suna ANBU jumped down from the tops of the walls and seized Kakashi-sensei, the three of us, Gyoza-san, and all his luggage and goods.

"Sensei, what are you doing?!" Ino screamed. "This is a client!"

"Um, ANBU-san," Naruto whispered, "that guy right there is a Suna merchant, so, uhhh…look, our sensei's kinda crazy, so, uh…"

"Gyoza-san?" One of the Suna ANBU asked. Gyoza-san nodded, terrified out of his wits. The ANBU made some hand signs to his teammates. "Take the merchant and his bags back to his home. You four, Konoha nin, get out and stay out!"

"Okay!" Kakashi-sensei said cheerfully, somehow managing to give a lazy salute even with a scimitar against his throat. "Let's go, my cute students."

The ANBU released us and stalked back inside, all the while sending us nasty glares over their shoulders. We backed away slowly and then turned and started running.

"WHAT WAS THAT FOR, SENSEI?!" Ino screeched as soon as we had cleared the Suna guards' hearing range.

"Maa, maa, no need to panic like that," he said. "Gyoza-san is now safe and sound back in his home with all his money and goods, we didn't have to carry anything, the mission is complete, we're completely unharmed, and, to top it all off, we didn't even need to pay the entrance fee!"

The three of us groaned.

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