"Chihiro, have you eaten?"

"Yes."

"Good. We should be ready, then - Naruto, I know you're anxious, but no more than stretching, alright?"

"You don't need to mother me, you know," Naruto says, as he switches from bouncing to stretching.

Chihiro has no comment, but moves into her own stretching routine, not the same as the one they were taught at the Academy.

She's really not subtle. Given that the last liar who dropped subtlety turned out to be a murderous traitor, Naruto's keeping an eye on her.

Of course, Sasuke has his own stretches and so does Naruto, but there's a lot of weird around Chihiro.

Now to figure out how to befriend her...

Sugira stretches for a little bit, then stops, sits, and gets out a small notebook. He appears to be working on math.

Kakashi still hasn't shown up after an hour. Chihiro has run through her entire set twice.

"...What are you working on?"

"Technique theory."

"What techniques?"

"More advanced versions of the ones I told you about." Even technically true.

"That does not look very much like ninjutsu theory."

"It blows up less if I work the theory like this." Also it's not ninjutsu theory, it's arcana theory. He tries to word a 'I come at techniques sideways' and gives up.

Chihiro's skeptical face is indistinguishable from her normal face.

He shrugs, scribbles an approximation-of-an-arcane-symbol (they won't actually be right without magical inscription, ink can't give them enough depth, but approximations are good if he doesn't want things randomly activating) and goes back to solving equations. Does seem to involve combining these different symbols with little links between them.

Three hours later, Kakashi shows up.

Sugira has gotten a lot of math done.

"You're late!" Naruto half shouts, half whines.

"Ah, sorry about that. There was this black cat, you see. I had to take the long way."

"Why is everyone on this team a bad liar!"

Kakashi shrugs.

"Eh. Birds of a feather, and so forth. Now, where did I put..." He pats the pockets of his flak jacket, and pulls out an alarm clock and a pair of small bells hanging from string. He sets the alarm for noon and places the clock on a nearby stump. "So! This test is very simple. I have two bells here. Your objective is to take the bells from me before the alarm goes off. If you have a bell at that time, you pass! If you don't have a bell, you fail!"

" - But there's two bells and three of us."

"Well spotted! Remember what I said about this test having a sixty-six percent failure rate? This way I'm already guaranteed to be rid of one of you."

"You're an asshole and probably a shitty teacher, can we have Sasuke as a sensei instead."

"Naruto, focus, we're running down the clock. Rules for the test?"

He has zero intention of letting them split up, of course. If Kakashi isn't trying to trick them, Sugira has zero problem with more time to dedicate to arcana studies, so.