Namikaze Naruto had always been a rather superb shinobi. He wasn't a truly great one however, much to the disappointment of the people of Konoha. Naruto's father was the Yondaime Hokage, and the first individual to gain a flee-on-sight warning in the Bingo Book. His mother was sort of wild, fun, and one of the best mothers you could ask for. He had joined the Academy with his age group and graduated the Academy at the average age of twelve much to the disappointment of his instructors who seemed to believe that he would have tied with Uchiha Itachi's record if he'd only applied himself, since he'd been entered into the Academy far too late to tie with or beat Kakashi's "Youngest Academy Graduate Ever" record.

Fortunately, he had someone he could go to with his issues over the villager's expectations. Sarutobi Asuma who was the son of the Sandaime had gone through the same situation before he was born. When things became too much for him to handle alone, Asuma had always provided a sympathetic ear. He never supplied cigarettes after what his mother had done to him the one time he'd made the mistake of doing so.

While Naruto's record was somewhere in the range of the better end of average, he excelled in one area. He was skilled at creating new Jutsu. He would often spend months carefully plotting them out, often neglecting his meals and training.

Now, he was working on an improvement to his father's Hiraishin. His father was standing nearby in case of possible mishaps. If he got the seal array right, his father would be able to do dozens of jumps in one go without being slowed down by the split second it took to concentrate on the next target, as the jumps could be plotted out beforehand in a certain pattern that could be changed at any time as needed.

He believed that he'd gotten the seal array right, and was ready to test it.

After setting up the modified kunai in the field in which the experiment was to take place, he activated the array and made the first jump himself, as his father had taught him the Hiraishin when he had made Chunin.

There was a brief pull that didn't feel anything like the Hiraishin, and he found himself standing in an unfamiliar place. Based on the fact that the Hokage monument was almost directly in the forefront of his field of vision, he believed that he was in Konoha. He wasn't sure though since there was a massive crater instead of a village.

Oh god, he hadn't!

No, he hadn't. The Hokage monument only had four faces. This one had five for some strange reason, and one of them looked to be the Head of the Medical Corps, Tsunade.

Just what the hell had he done?

&!&!&!&

Namikaze Minato frowned in confusion as his son just stood there instead of jumping to the first of the marked kunai so he could compare the time of the boy's "improvement" against his best time and see if there was an appreciable difference. He didn't know what the problem was. Everything seemed fine, and if he thought that there was a problem with the seal he would not have allowed his son to conduct the experiment.

Oh god, what if there was a problem with the seal that had slipped past him?

As he watched his son stand there, the boy shrank a couple inches. When his son had stopped shrinking, he looked exactly how he had when he was sixteen, albiet with a different hairstyle and an outfit he wouldn't have been caught dead in at that age.

For some strange reason, Jiraiya's toad summoning scroll was strapped to his son's back despite the fact that Jiraiya would never let that thing out of his sight.

"Huh? Where am I?" his son asked as he took in his surroundings.

No, wait. While it looked like his son, it wasn't necessarily his child. For all he knew, the seal had screwed up so badly that it had called a shape shifting monster from another dimension to take his place.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Uzumaki Naruto." the thing that had his son's face replied. "Who are y-...Y-Yondaime! No wait, you aren't the Yondaime! The Yondaime wasn't anywhere near as old as you when he died!"

"If you think wearing his face will cause me to spare you from the beating you apparently deserve for kidnapping me, you've got another think coming!" the boy - if that was what it was - yelled as he powered up a Rasengan.

"Kidnapping you?" he yelled as he dodged the blow. In the years that he'd tried to teach him, his son had not had the motivation or the inclination to learn the Rasengan, which was further proof that the boy who was dressed in orange and black was an impostor. "You're the one who took and replaced my son!"

Moments later, the fight was over. It would not have lasted so long if he hadn't wanted to keep his opponent alive to hand over to the T&I department for interrogation.

The next morning, an ANBU from the T&I department came in with a report that he spat his coffee on after he finally processed what he'd just skimmed through.

"...Genetically identical to Namikaze Naruto...claims that Senju Tsunade is the Hokage...found an unusual seal that on closer inspection turned out to contain a Biju...Kyuubi no Kitsune..."

When he finished choking and actually managed to draw a few lungfuls of air, he made his way down to the T&I department to see things for himself.