He Tries to Figure Out if Anything Changed

Well, time to figure out if the second earring did anything to interfere with the power of the first earring.

Maybe the first earring made people ignore him or whatever while the second earring could let someone else notice what he was doing if he gave it to them? If so, he could NOT give them to anyone. Especially ninjas.

It would be all over at that point if they managed to report him while he didn't have the earring that let people ignore him.

Deciding to check if people still did their weird ignoring thing, he looked around.

Sure enough, the people on the street were not looking at him, glaring at him, nor whispering negative things about him.

If only he had this artifact permanently connected to him before, he would have been able to excuse his family for just how much they had ignored him in life.

It was his birthday today, and yet it was not being celebrated.

He supposed it was true. Love was a falsely created idea in this world by the weak to provide them with the hope that no matter how weak they were, no matter now useless they were, someone would be out there to cherish them. If not at that time than surely some point in the future.

If Kushina, a member of the Uzumaki clan that seemed to pride themselves on familial love, was willing to ignore him for his siblings since he was the weak one, then Naruto was willing to believe the concept of love was false.

It was a mask for the concept of owing.

They provided so much to people of power or people that would become so much more powerful in the hopes that they would repay them for it all some day or over time.

They wouldn't stay powerful or young forever. They NEEDED the next generation or their 'beloved' friends to stay in power. So they sweetened it all up with the word "love" being thrown everywhere.

To Naruto, love was a concept he had been heavily considering as fake for many years.

Romantic love was simply lust along with the biological need to continue one's bloodline.

Now this didn't mean he searched for some method of immortality to stop his bloodline from dying without having to have it continue through the means of children. This also didn't mean he searched for ways to somehow have children with a jutsu or have them with any other method revolving around not having to love another individual.

For one, he wasn't Orochimaru: a genius in TWO fields, science and ninja-arts.

He was Naruto, the failure child of the Fourth Hokage and the last PURE Uzumaki of Konoha.

His most advanced techniques were C-Rank.

Was that last part his fault? He was beginning to believe it was.

Except he never had a proper teacher to learn from nor had he ever been trusted with a jutsu scroll. He had had to figure out most of his C-Ranks from seeing ninjas use them and then memorize the hand signs so he could recreate the technique later. He had no idea if that was impressive or not as he had no one to compare to.

Also, just because he rationally believed love was something he didn't want didn't mean he didn't yearn for it in his more emotional moments. He was only human, after all.

He began walking down the street.

Lips twitching, he held a middle finger at a random person only to not even get a reaction. Emboldened by this, he raised both arms and walked down the street while flipping the bird at everything.

Well, that confirmed that the first earring still worked.

Should he take off the first one just to see if the second one did the same thing?

"No."

He told himself to figure out the voice later. Maybe it was the instructions manual the earrings came with? The nearest person to them would just hear instructions on how to use them if they just asked the right questions from the voice?

Sounded plausible to him.

If giant toads could talk—and he had seen some of his siblings summon several—then why not magical earrings?

If the earrings were alive—or one of them were anyway—then would him tapping them repeatedly be annoying to the voice that randomly spoke to him?

Something told Naruto he was going about it the wrong way.

Suddenly he saw hot springs.

He realized he may finally make his godfather proud for once in his life.

About to go there, he realized it was closed.

'Dang!' Hormones were strong. He had hoped to finally go to the esteemed ladies' section. He guessed it was probably closed because the owner wished to celebrate the anniversary of the defeat of the Kyūbi 18 years ago.

He could imagine what Jiraiya would have done with the first earring.

A hand touched the second earring. 'But what do you do?'

Surely it did something. Suddenly something occurred to him. What if all this wasn't because of the earrings? What if just being near that space-time crack had done this and he was looking at it all wrongly?

"I have seen similar things to what these earrings do, before, boy, and I can assure you that you do not reek of the source of the power."

"Okay, now you are starting to annoy me. If you are the instructions of the earrings, then why not just tell me everything straight instead of hinting at it?"

"Because I am not related to them, boy." The last word said in a tone that sounded particularly insulting. "And I do not know the answers that you seek as well. I, too, am trying to figure them out."

"Alright, well, at least tell me who you are."

"I cannot."

"And why not!?"

"I would tell you to speak inside your head instead of yelling your responses for all to hear, but I suppose that first earring would make such a warning moot. As for why I cannot tell, you of all people should know that your head has been tampered with. You are INCAPABLE of some realisations because of it. You are incapable of some emotions in some situations because of it. You are incapable of some thoughts. In this case, you are incapable of knowing who I am from me. You are incapable of figuring it out. You must SEE me to KNOW who I am, to know what I am. Anything less and the many seals and techniques used on your fragile mind will be triggered. And the seals do not allow you to figure out how to remove them, despite your advances in that field over time."

What did Naruto get out of this?

"Do you even breath? No way you said all of that without breathing."

A deep, disappointed sigh was heard in response as the voice grew silent.

"Wait, you still there?"

Nothing responded.

"Hello?"

Still nothing.

He never did like being ignored...

Sighing in an attempt to calm down, he walked in some random direction while muttering, "Man, if only the hot spring was normally open right now."

As he walked away, he never did see or hear people walk towards it, talking about going to the hot springs, nor did he see the particular hot spring in front of him open.

He had walked for an unknown amount of time, trying to ponder the mysteries of this power he had. He had no luck.

He really should have done his usual "trial by error" method instead of trying to figure it out just by thinking about it, but he felt cautious about messing with such dangerous forces.

No... He didn't feel cautious about the forces being dangerous. He just didn't want to lose the power somehow. He wanted to keep it and maybe even figure out how the other earring worked, but he was afraid they may work on limited power. What if doing too many weird things in a day would strain the earring, thus making it so people would start acknowledging his existence again instead of ignoring it?

If that scenario actually happened, would the earring recharge overnight? Over decade? Never?

Did he have to do something to recharge it?

So many questions, not enough answers.

'But you are willing to help me out with this, right? You may not seem to like me, but I feel like we both seem equally interested in these earrings?' he mentally asked the voice in his head, remembering its earlier remark about how he could speak to it in his head.

It was silent for a while. Then— "Yes."

He narrowed his eyes. So he may have had a potential ally here. Normally, he would have gone to a Yamanaka—

"Which is precisely why I rarely tried to contact you."

Rarely?

"You can figure it out from context, I am sure."

Just how much of his memories were blocked from him?

"I would advise not thinking about that. It is one of the triggers to the seals on you."

'Why not tell me about all of them?'

"Because once you know something, you are more likely to think about it. I don't need you triggering these seals or the limits put on your mind when you just acquired a power that, if I am right, could be quite unlike any power ever seen before."

Naruto realized that it had a point. While he had always been a fairly curious individual, he tried his best not to have his mind go down the path the voice warned him not to think about.

A flicker or red was seen at the edge of his vision. Blood? His sister or mother?

Looking in the direction of the colour, he saw a redhead woman walking in the opposite direction of him on the other side of the street.

Licking his lips subconsciously, he openly looked at her, knowing—hoping—the earring would do its thing and have her ignore him.

He had a thing for redheads. He never let anyone in his family know.

He followed her.

At first, he followed his training when following her.

He may have been called a disgrace of many things, but his stealth was unmatched among his siblings.

His pranks had helped train him there. Only for him to spit on it by not choosing to take a stealth-based position in teams.

Eventually, he remembered that he didn't need to use his stealth. The earring did that for him, so he just ran towards her and grabbed a shoulder of hers when he got to her.

Instinctively cringing at the screams she would let off once she noticed it was him holding her shoulder, he saw her turn around and view him in the same dismissive way everyone did since he wore the first earring.

"Yes?"

"Um... I didn't think I'd get this far to be honest."

She just looked at him with dead eyes as a response.

Taking his hand off her shoulder, he decided to take a better look at her.

Brown eyes, fair skin, RED(!) hair that appeared to have been straightened with how smoothly it went down her back.

Her outfit consisted of a blue shirt that had a zipper go from above her navel, leaving the bottom half looking unzipped as a result and letting people have a view of her navel, the area where the zipper began was covered by a brown belt that was probably there for fashion reasons. She wore short, dark blue shorts that only covered a fifth of the area down to her knees, and wore long, black, thigh-high stockings with black sandals.

Almost seemed like a sort of imitation of some outfit he had seen some kunoichi wear once, he believed.

While he stood there inspecting her, she apparently took that as her sign to leave as she began walking away.

"Wait!" Naruto impulsively said.

"Why would I do that?" That threw Naruto for a spin. She wouldn't listen to him?

Naruto jogged a bit until he was right next to her and matched her pace, viewing the woman to see if she showed any signs of getting out of his earring's ability.

She showed nothing different than earlier.

"So you won't stop?"

"Yeah, why would I?"

"Um... But what about earlier?"

"What about it?" came the disinterested voice.

"You stopped when I held your shoulder."

Sighing as if she was just asked something EVERYONE knew, she responded, "Well, yeah, because it was normal."

"... What?"

"I said it was normal."

Naruto looked at her to see if she was messing with him, but couldn't find any signs of dishonesty that he could stop.

"So if I hold your shoulder, it's not weird or anything? I can just always do it?"

Still disinterested, she replied, "What? No. That's weird and creepy. Why would you do that?"

"But I did it just a while back!"

"Well, yeah, because that was normal."

Naruto felt very annoyed.

"Normal, huh..."

'Okay, what did you figure out?'

"I believe... the first earring makes what you do appear as normal to everyone?"

'... That sounds lame as fuck, You do know that, right?'

"Trust me. It is a lot more than it appears to be." The voice appeared quite serious as it said that.

Huh... so did that mean the "N" on the second earring stood for "Normal", not "Naruto" like he jokingly thought?

He mentally pouted at it not being his name.

He quickly cheered up as he realized that the redhead appeared to be under his power. Perhaps he could... check her out to see if she had any contraband on her. She did appear to be wearing a non-civilian outfit while having no headband, after all.

He heard a snort in his mind as he felt the voice judge him.