This story is meant for entertainment purposes, I otherwise would not put a disclaimer here for Naruto and Warcraft... (Sniffs) I kind of wish I owned the latter though.

Path of a monk

Chapter 1: To tell a beginning...

Unknown beach

"Bleh! Pfft!"

A drenched boy in waterlogged street urchin clothes spat out sand that became lodged in his mouth when he woke up with a start. He summoned up all the spit he could muster to flush out the grainy menace in his mouth and expelled what he could, but the taste as well as the grains of sand were persistently stuck to various locations of his mouth. With the dull roar of a collapsing wave, his attention on his current discomfort was momentarily forgotten in favor of observing his surroundings.

A dense jungle to his front, a non-descriptive beach all around him, and the sea behind his prone form. How did he get here? Where was here? Those questions as well as several others ran through the boys' mind... until the familiar taste of his predicament reared its ugly head.

"Pffth!"

He spat out another dirty wad of saliva and crawled towards the ocean. Cupping his hands together, he dove them into a oncoming splash of a diminutive wave lapping the shore and brought the salt water to his lips as a improvised mouthwash. For a brief moment, he actually compared which tasted worse: sand or salt water from the sea? Both were expelled with partial prejudice.

Retreating back to the more dry portion of the beach, he sat down, lied down and stared up at the sky as he tried to trace his steps to how he ended up to... wherever 'here' was.

He ran a hair through his dirtied blackened hair. He grimaced as he literally felt the grime that coated his hair to a different hair color. A reminder of where he had been...

Konoha, shinobi village of the Land of Fire. Home of heroes... and bigotry en masse. He never knew why they hated them, and why it was more or less a accepted part of life for most of them. Save for a couple of faces to break the mold, he would not hesitate to say the village was intolerant of him. For reasons unknown they only reserve hatred for him where a complete stranger was welcomed with open arms. A fact he spied on multiple times from the corners of buildings and the shadows of the urban jungle.

Every now and then, and especially around his birthday, he would be chased through the formerly quiet streets. He grinned a little. The last time very well looked like that, the very last time he would endure that.

He managed to get two blocks ahead through the mentally mapped out twists and turns that served him well ever since he could remember when he dove into a barrel. He grabbed the lid of it and his hiding spot and sealed himself in it as tight as he could. A fact he would've regretted later if he hadn't found the contents inside was apples.

He snickered as he heard the horde of people pass by being none the wiser to his hiding spot. But unfortunately he found that he locked himself inside the barrel when he tried to escape. Before he could cry, complain, or anything to indicate distress, he heard another set of voices approuching the barrel.

He panicked thinking that the mob returned. He palmed the walls of the barrel in fear when the barrel was hoisted with audible grunts and complaints about the barrel being heavy, but what confused him was the fact that they continued to trek across the unseen world instead of checking its contents. Was it not the mob chasing him?

Whatever the case was they settled the barrel on something mobile, a cart perhaps judging from the indication of smooth movement with the occasional stop.

He knew not how long he had been inside the barrel, just that the cart never seemed to stop for long periods of time save for once. Then the voices came back and he, or rather the barrel, was carried to something much larger. Whatever it was, there was a near constant dull roar that dully filtered through the barrel's wooden barrier in a matter of hours later. Until recently, or what at least what he remembered last, the tempo that became the norm changed without warning. Being caught in a storm wasn't a new experience for him. Being tossed around with a mix of devoured apples and whole apples was new however.

Now he was here. Staring up at a cloudless sky with the ocean gently reminding him it was there. The repetition of the waves was interrupted as another familiar sound and feeling made itself known.

The growl of a hungering stomach.

With a grunt, he seated himself upright with half hearted hopes that maybe some of the apples that he journeyed with. No such luck.

He grimaced once again as he looked behind him at the shadowy jungle behind him. Centuries of human instinct told him to stay away, it was a place of danger, he was safe where he was. But at the same time, it told him that if he was to find an ample chance, he needed to brave its depths... hypocrite.

Another growl of his stomach was the push needed to get himself up.

XVX

Unknown jungle

The kid kept looking over his shoulder at the mixture of bright and dark atmosphere that resided in the jungle as he devoured what might have been a pear. Overall he hadn't encountered anything more vicious than a mosquito and had no reason to be wary, be he had been wrong before. It was a rather twisted truth to those who have not walked his walk in life- fear was the greatest wisdom one can have. It may not lead to happiness, but it kept one alive when the environment was less than hospitable. He was especially not going to drop his guard now when he had no idea what awaited to be discovered.

"Snap!"

He may not know what Murphy's law was, but he was cursing it the moment he came face to face with a weird monkey-like creature armed with a snarl, and a makeshift club.

He bolted with a howling primate after him on all fours trying to catch up to the boy. Unfortunately for the child, Murphy's law was in full effect when the monkey's family members came in shrieking and armed with other crude weaponry.

If he was in Konoha he would've lost the monkey-things during the first ten minutes of their chase. But between the unfamiliar setting, their seemingly unnatural endurance, and the fact that he was running in a relatively straight line screaming like a loon, nothing was going in his favor.

He turned at a corner of a ruin that came seemingly out of nowhere in the thick jungle, a move that cost his determined pursuers half their group when they failed to account for the sudden change. The kid looked back and guffawed slightly at the pile up of ornery primates despite still being pursued by the remaining portion.

When he brought his attention back to his current course, his face was intimately greeted by... a jug?

Before he even knew it, the dirty haired child landed on his back with full force as his world went black.

XVX

Unidentified Hut

Blue eyes creaked open to a window pouring forth sun light hovering above his blanket covered legs. He blinked. A blanket?

Both of his hands gripped the apparent mattress beneath him. He was in a bed alright. He gave his surroundings a look. It was Spartan, but clean and dry. Everything inside the home was fairly large, as if to accommodate a fairly large man, or woman... it was certainly the size meant for that one set of people who made themselves larger sure liked to eat. Regardless, even the bed he was on was probably meant for whoever lived here.

The sound of dirt being shifted and leaves rustled were emanating from the most obvious portal into the home. Curiosity got the better of the child, and he crawled up to the window.

What he saw was... unusual for the kid. At first he thought it was a man hunched over something with his back to the kid, but the only bits of 'skin' that could be seen on the 'man', namely his shoulders and the back of his hat covered head, was covered in what appeared to be black fur.

The kid would've said it was some kind of animal if it wasn't for the fact the creature was adorned in the clothes of a farmer, and from what he could hear coming from the creature, a song being mumbled to itself.

With a heaving grunt, the creature grabs its own knee and stood up to its full height. It took off its hat to reveal short round black ears as it wiped a hand on its brow. It turned and faced the kid and did a double take as the kid gawked...

A gust of wind blew past between the kid and the apparent black and white bear-man with a braided string of hair running off from his chin.

Silence.

In what seemed like ages, the bear-man slowly waved at the child, unsure of what to do really. It was a mirrored situation and action for the boy peering out of the window.

The boy blinked, hard.

In the back of his mind, he knew the story of his own life, of Naruto Uzumaki, had taken a much odder turn.

A/N: Inspired by the cinematic trailer of World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria that was released the day this was written (8/16/2012).

Had to write this before I lost the urge to.

Spoiler: Yes, I will make Naruto into a monk featured in WoW. Unfortunately since I was not part of the beta, I am sorry to tell you that this story will be postponed till a few days after September 25th, the release date of MoP. I have no real clue how the Monk class is played, let alone the general attitude of the Pandaren race, hence the need to delay writing further till I conduct some research.

For what it's worth, sorry to leave you hanging like this, but it's better to have some kind of base instead of making up things left and right, right? If you're one of the readers of my Warhammer/Naruto story Assassin and try to use that argument against me, I already told you what I was using as a base at the beginning area of chapter three.

Until then, provided that none of the readers of this or my other works kills me...

Monkeybandit2, making off with your attention! No refunds.