"Sure! We're having ramen, right, ramen's the best - "

"I'll see what I can make."

He gets Naruto a proper meal, convinces the boy to crash on his couch because children should not be home alone, what the fuck, and then there's the bonus of the kid can help him get to the Academy the next day...

Arriving with Naruto causes a bit of a stir. Sasuke is apparently popular with the girls of his class, and they try to socially extricate him from his companion, as best eight year olds can.

What. Ew. No.

He'll tells them they should focus on class and leave him be. He doesn't have the energy for managing this many new people and all their drama.

But Saaasukeeeee~

They back off a little but are still orbiting in his general vicinity when the teacher comes in and makes everyone sit down. The morning lesson today is trigonometry as related to calculating kunai throwing trajectories.

Seems advanced for kids... Also why the fuck are they using weapons as an example for children.

He'll do any work assigned, not so quickly it indicates he already graduated from higher education (even if he didn't specialize in math, trig is in a lot of art), keep half an eye on Naruto... Who seems to be a bit distracted and agitated, but there's not much Sugira can do about that now.

Mostly he keeps his head down. Doesn't raise his hand to be called on.

This seems like usual behavior as far as the teacher's concerned.

At lunchtime the flock of admirers gathers again, each jockeying to be the one to share the extra portion they 'accidentally' brought with him.

No no and no. He's firm and quiet in his refusal. Absolutely not. He won't budge on this, and he won't appreciate it if they keep pushing.

(He hadn't had a fanclub in his world. Sure, he hadn't lacked for potential partners once he was older, but - the teachers and a good number of random adults in the vicinity would've come down like a hurricane on anyone not respecting even an indirect 'no'.)

...Maybe he should invite them to be his friends and create Rules. Children seem to respect Rules. And one of them can be 'no means no.' Teach the hellions some manners. Except for how that sounds utterly exhausting, and likely to take time away from recreating spells. His wife's the social one. He's the one who communicates through meaningful nods at other introverts.

Maybe if he pointedly and not exactly quietly explains to Naruto how persisting when someone says no is rude and disrespectful where they can hear, they'll get the hint.

That gets them to leave him alone, at least for today. Some of the girls look more thoughtful than others as they disperse.

After lunch there's a short quiz on the material they learned yesterday which Sasuke is exempted from, and then it's outside for physical education. This consists of conditioning exercise and martial arts basics.

His body's fit, and he has good control of it. He doesn't know these precise forms but they're not exactly hard to pick up. (The concept of martial arts itself doesn't bother him, a lot of places have traditions they pass on, but these look actually usable, not the half-dance he learned as a kid, and combined with the focus on weapons elsewhere...)

There's also the older kids in the next yard doing unarmed sparring and practicing with blunted weapons on training dummies.

Yeah. Martial culture plus thinking children are adults is not going anywhere promising.

Everyone else is pretty excited to be attending the Academy and learning Real Shinobi Skills. Except for one boy with dark hair up in a topknot who seems to have a talent for knowing exactly how much he has to try before the teacher stops looking at him and he can go back to lazing around.

School ends towards the end of the afternoon.

He's very not excited. This is a horrible culture.

Naruto runs off before Sugira can invite him over again, which, okay, Sugira won't chase him, and he does need to focus on his work...

He spends the next while until any of his body's original stuff is released alternatively working on reconstructing spells (hard), catching up on schoolwork (easy), and wrangling Naruto into eating actual food and attending to basic hygiene (extremely hard).

He hadn't expected to feel the lack of a social life, but he misses the people he knows. His family, obviously, but even his coworkers and classmates and neighbors and the girl at the bar he shares introvert moments with but doesn't know the name of despite having been sporadically sitting next to her three years. (He hates talking, okay.) And he's the focus of too much attention, even indirectly, to just peacefully go and mope in a bar or cafe or something. Maybe a library...

Konoha does have a library. Large portions of it are restricted-access, but there's tables and chairs for studying and a few small reading nooks.

Censorship. Double ugh.

He's probably going to develop a reputation as a bookworm, but a secondary project to rebuilding arcana from semi-scratch is figuring out how the magic works here - clearly they have some, that Anbu was a speedster, but it's not magical ring based... Also what is 'genjutsu,' that was mentioned several times but never explained.

There is a basic primer on chakra available for him to read! 'Chakra' is the basis of magic here, and it is formed by the combination of physical and spiritual energy. There is a helpful diagram. Focusing and using chakra is how shinobi techniques, called ninjutsu, are performed. Things like tree climbing, water walking, strength and speed enhancements are all applications. Genjutsu is described as a branch of ninjutsu focused on mental manipulation. More advanced techniques involve what's called a nature transformation to change your chakra into elemental chakra. There is another helpful diagram. The five elements are wind, lightning, earth, water, and fire.

Weird but not as weirdly arbitrary as the schools of magic or Inanna's taste in superpowers. And also does mean he might be able to disguise some of his spells as ninjutsu.

Not using cantrips to correct his notes when he makes a mistake (like he's been doing in private) is surprisingly hard, but he manages. He marks a few notebooks for chakra, and starts outlining a plan to try learning this. Cautiously, he doesn't have a dedicated teacher yet to tell him if he's doing something dangerous.

Also genjutsu being mental manipulation makes sense for the context it'd been raised in. He'll need to figure out techniques to get around that...

The books are fairly light on any actual details about implementation. They do mention that trying techniques that exceed your chakra capacity can lead to chakra exhaustion which is potentially fatal.

Great. His spells are a bigger priority anyways for now...

A few weeks later, he wakes up to a bundle on his doorstep containing Sasuke's personal effects from the Uchiha Compound and a note saying that other items are being kept in storage in a certain warehouse, which he can access upon request.

He'll do that later. For now: he'll go through Sasuke's things, see what he can learn. Pictures (he recognizes his mom. He kind of recognizes his maybe dad. His 'brother' looks related to him but not much like an existing sibling. He memorizes the face, though.), past homework, books... Nothing much indicative, Sugira has never been one for stuff. Still, he'll keep ahold of all this. He plans to find out what happened to Sasuke some day, after all. He'll want to be able to return things then.

He waits a few days before asking for access to the warehouse.

The warehouse is filled with racks upon racks of scrolls. Storage scrolls, explains the clerk, as they show him the way to the Uchiha section. After everything was sorted through, they sealed each room's contents into a series of scrolls for convenience of storage, sorted by bulk furniture, clothing, knickknacks, paper goods, artwork, and so forth. If he knows where he wants to look at was originally located, they can retrieve the proper scroll and open it up, then re-seal anything he doesn't want to take with him.

Storage scrolls: something to keep in mind. Seem more useful than a bag of holding at least.

He wasn't really familiar with most people's houses, and he's... Not sure he wants his parents' things (which is a convenient fiction for why he doesn't know what they would have had). He's looking for books? If there was anywhere that had a lot...

Most houses had enough that it was worth dedicating a scroll, if he knows whose books he's looking for.