Disclaimer: If I owned Naruto, Sasuke would have drowned in a tragic bathing incident at the tender age of two, and the story would all be about Naruto. So no, I do not own. At all. Any.

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Oops, Wrong World

Chapter Two: In Which Jiraiya Is Perplexed

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Jiraiya was dreaming, and it was a pleasant dream. It involved a pleasantly compliant Tsunade and sake, which, as far as Jiraiya was concerned, were the two best things in the world. Maybe in the universe. Maybe in a lot of universes.

So he was note entirely happy to be awakened from his dream by a deluge of ice-cold water. Scratch that, he was entirely unhappy. No, scratch that, too - he was furious. He jumped to his feet with a roar of rage.

"NARUTO!"

He followed the first roar with a second, in which he explained exactly was he was going to do to Naruto, how long it was going to take, and how many medic-nin they'd need to piece him back together when he was done. Then he explained, still in a roar, what kinds of tortures he would add to the already impressive list if Naruto didn't get his little orange butt out of hiding and back to Jiraiya right then.

Then he waited. Water dripped off the end of his nose. In the distance, a single cricket chirped once in a faint, shell-shocked sort of way. A few million leaves rustled, unalarmed by his threats.

Naruto made no sound.

That was when Jiraiya began to feel that something was wrong. He couldn't hear Naruto. He could always hear Naruto. The kid had a voice like a boy-shaped orange bullhorn, and though he could be surprisingly stealthy (well, surprisingly stealthy for the most flamboyant ninja in Konoha), to Jiraiya's senses, Naruto at his most devious had all the stealthiness of a bull elephant on a rampage.

And yet Jiraiya could not hear him at all.

Jiraiya sneezed, and decided, hopefully, that Naruto must have wandered out of hearing range. Well, he'd soon find him: the traces he'd left when he'd set up his annoying (if ingenious) water-trap were visible from where he stood. Wringing out his sopping sleeves, Jiraiya considered the tracks with a practiced eye. The kid had apparently performed some kind of war-dance around Jiraiya's bedding, gone off into the forest, come back, set up his trap, and left again, going in a slightly different direction than the first time. These last tracks were the ones Jiraiya followed, almost crawling to make sure he didn't miss anything. (Naruto might be inexperienced, but he was a shinobi, and shinobi didn't leave tracks. He didn't want to lose his way because the boy had suddenly remembered not to leave a trail of destruction in his wake.)

As he tracked, he plotted Naruto's painful death. Except that he couldn't actually kill or maim him, so painful training exercises would have to do. No, he'd go a step further: he'd make the exercises boring. Jiraiya repressed an evil cackle with some difficulty.

Five minutes later, crouched at the edge of a smallish clearing, he was feeling much less devious and much more annoyed. And confused. In his lifetime he'd seen many things that most (well, most civilians, anyway) would consider strange: he associated with talking toads on a regular basis, one of his teammates could demolish entire buildings with a single chakra-enhanced flick of her finger, while the other was in a fair way to gaining the immortality he coveted, and his student occasionally grew a fox-shaped exoskeloton made of solid chakra. The point is, Jiraiya of the Sannin was not easily fazed.

The hole in the air was giving him pause, however.

It was a few feet from the edge of the clearing, away to his left: a ragged black patch of - nothing. It was nothing wide and nothing tall and nothing deep, and it was giving Jiraiya cognitive dissonance on top of his hangover as his eyes and his brain attempted to tell him, simultaneously, that it was there and that it wasn't, and it was very annoying.

It could have been a genjutsu, except that a low-level genjutsu would have been dispelled with a simple "Kai!" and, well, he was fairly sure that he would have noticed being put under a high-level genjutsu. The few shinobi experienced and fast enough to get the drop on Jiraiya of the Sannin were not (fortunately) the sort of people who blended in well with trees and dirt. Those Uchiha eyes stood out from pretty much everything (except blood).

No, it was definitely there. Except that it wasn't. Jiraiya stared at it for another five seconds, nonplussed, and then went back to his tracking, fervently hoping that inexplicable nothings had nothing to do with Naruto's silence.

Two minutes later he was more annoyed than ever. Naruto's tracks had meandered around the clearing until they reached a tree uncomfortably close to the nothing, where they suddenly multiplied. (The tree had been decorated with a rough sketch, in the Impressionist style, of something that was either an exploding turtle or an upside-down jellyfish. As Jiraiya was fairly sure that Naruto had never seen a jellyfish, and was clever enough to tell up from down most of the time, he decided that it was a turtle.) The twin tracks then wandered away from the tree until they were near the center of the clearing, in a location that meant that the hole-in-the-air was directly between them and the artistic tree, where one of them vanished and the other went straight at the nothing, wide-spaced and deep, as if Naruto had been running, and - disappeared.

Jiraiya stared at his student's last footprint, and then stared at the unmarked, untouched, undisturbed, and extremely unhelpful ground around it. Then he scoured the clearing, unsuccessfully, for any other traces of Naruto. Then he climbed up ever tree in the near vicinity to check there, in case the boy had suddenly been taken with a fancy to make like a monkey. When his examination of the nearby flora revealed nothing, he clambered back down and paced around the hole-in-the-air.

In his opinion, there was a lot of evidence suggesting that the hole had eaten Naruto.

(There was also a great deal of evidence suggesting that he had gone mad. He decided to ignore it for the time being.)

Jiraiya stared balefully at the shinobivorous hole. Leave it to his idiotic student to perish in this particular way: devoured by a ravening patch of nothingness. If he hadn't been so annoyed, he'd have spared a moment to be proud of Naruto's ... originality. Yeah, "originality" sounded good. Better than "unfathomable depths of stupidity", anyway.

But he was annoyed, so rather than indulging in maudlin sentiment, he glared at the hole.

"Give me back my student," he demanded, in case the nothing was a sentient nothing.

The hole-in-the-air was silent.

"I know you did it," said Jiraiya, releasing a focused wave of killing intent that would have made the most hardened of shinobi go a little green around the gills. "And you can't possibly not recall which of your doubtless numberless victims I'm talking about. He's very loud and very orange. Abotu so high, so wide - you probably ate him 'cause he was boring you with his story about how he's going to become Hokage."

The hole-in-the-air remained unresponsive.

Jiraiya sighed and gave up on threatening. The nothing had eaten Naruto, and yet it wasn't alive. Thoughtfully, he prodded it with one finger. Or at least he tried. Since there was nothing there, naturally his finger just went through it. Or it would have if there'd been anything to go through. Which there wasn't.

Jiraiya sighed again and sat down, narrowing his eyes and setting his jaw in his serious thinking expression. He was wet, he was hungover, and he wanted his breakfast, but he would figure out what the nothing had done to Naruto and rescue him. And then he would make them both pay for ruining his morning. Early afternoon. Whatever. He wasn't sure what an appropriate punishment for a cubic nothing of nothingness was, but as for Naruto, he would train the stupidity right out of the idiotic moron.

He wasted another few minutes composing several more epithets (and epitaphs) for Naruto, and then returned to his detective work. He would get to the bottom of this, even if it killed him.

(Though if it annoyed him much more, he was quitting. This had definitely not been in his contract.)

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A/N: Well that certainly took me long enough. In my defence, I plead (in no particular order) real life, computer troubles, family illnesses many and varied, and common or garden laziness. Right now I'm looking at expanding this another two, maybe three chapters - as someone said, covering the ground I already did in Harry Potter and the Orange Alien would be redundant, so this will be more like a collection of one-shots focusing on moments Harry missed (such as Hermione teaching Naruto English and Ron teaching him profanity) than a story with, you know, a storyline and a plot. So I'll see you later, once I've got the next chapter written. Thanks for all the reviews and favourites!