"Naruto, open the door!" Sakura yelled as she hammered on his hotel room door the following morning. "I need to speak with you!"
After a few seconds, a bleary-eyed Naruto wearing his walrus nightcap answered the door. "Sakura?" he mumbled sleepily, rubbing his eyes. "It's so early, ya know…"
After her encounter with Orochimaru the previous evening, Sakura had gone straight to the telegraph office, slipping inside just before it closed its doors for the ten o'clock curfew. After flashing her shinobi ID card at the clerk, who was extremely annoyed at having to serve a customer so near closing time, she had sent a telegram to Lady Tsunade, informing her of all she had learnt and asking for further instructions, before returning to the hotel with Fū for a fitful night's sleep.
"Did Pervy Sage tell you where he was staying before we left?" Sakura asked urgently. "There's no way he'd miss something like this, right?"
Even as a Jōnin, Sakura did not have the authority to initiate a manhunt in the capital, where the Hokage's influence was painfully limited. The capital was densely inhabited, so the decision to pick a fight with the Akatsuki, and possibly Orochimaru as well, was not one to be taken lightly. Until Tsunade sent back a return telegram, Sakura's hands were tied.
"I dunno," Naruto said, scratching his backside. "Prolly some dodgy place as usual, ya know? Why'd you want to see the Pervy Sage, anyway?"
Sakura quickly explained the situation.
If all went well, she would be able to kill three birds with one stone, but if matters took a turn for the worse, merely being able to call herself the Hokage's number one disciple wouldn't save her from the aftermath. That being said, Sakura had no intention of stalking up and down the capital's pleasure district, visiting every tea house, bathhouse, and brothel in search of Jiraiya, so the plan of asking the white-haired Sannin to take care of his old friend went straight out of the window.
"Ehhh?" Naruto exclaimed in dismay. "The Akatsuki's here!?"
"Shhh!" Sakura hissed. "Not so loud!"
…
After the timeskip, Naruto returns as a fifteen-year-old, arriving in Konoha in early autumn, just before his sixteenth birthday. Yet following the Tenshi Bridge Arc, another substantial gap occurs, skipping the winter months entirely, with the main story resuming in late winter or early spring for the Twelve Guardian Ninja Arc and the Akatsuki Suppression Mission.
Canonically, Sakura knew nothing about this blank period, since not even filler content covered this stretch of time. But in this timeline, it appeared as though Orochimaru had decided to challenge Nagato after losing his tail (Team Guy) in Amegakure.
In Sakura's personal opinion, Orochimaru had probably done so to capture the Akatsuki's leader as a test subject to see what made him tick, since he himself couldn't make Urashiki's Rinnegan revert from plain old Byakugan.
Not to mention obtaining a second pair of the legendary Sage's Eyes.
Unfortunately for him, Orochimaru had obviously lost in a spectacular fashion, forcing him to flee for his life from the Akatsuki for a second time, the first being when he had betrayed the organisation by attacking its newest member, Itachi, in his greed to obtain the boy's body.
…
"Soo… they're not here for me, ya know?" Naruto asked tentatively. "They're after Orochimaru? But that's a good thing for us, isn't it?"
"Normally, yes!" Sakura said in dismay. "But not if they end up fighting in the middle of the capital! Think of the collateral damage!"
To make matters worse, many visitors from afar had come to the capital for the festival, which would take place in the evening. The curfew had been especially extended until two o'clock in the morning for the festivities.
"Telegram for Miss Manyū Sakura!"
Sakura turned around. It was the receptionist from the previous evening, holding a slip of paper; Sakura had instructed the telegraph office to forward any response urgently to her hotel room, so this was undoubtedly the Hokage's reply. She quickly accepted the telegram and tore open the envelope and read the letter's contents:
From the Hokage's desk:
HAVE CONTACTED JIRAIYA AND APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES (STOP) WAIT FOR REINFORCEMENTS (STOP) DO NOT ENGAGE UNLESS SEVERE LOSS OF LIFE PREVENTABLE (STOP) PROCEED WITH THE FESTIVITIES AND GUARD DAIMYŌ AT ALL COSTS (STOP) DON'T LET NARUTO DO ANYTHING STUPID (STOP)
-SENJU TSUNADE
"Oi, I haven't even done anything yet!" Naruto complained. "Why's Granny Tsunade always on my case, ya know!?"
…
As the hours passed and the time for the Rinne Festival's beauty pageant in the evening drew near, Sakura found herself lamenting her utter unpreparedness for a fight. If she somehow made it back to the village in one piece, she told herself, she would tattoo a jutsu formula on her forearm, allowing her to summon her sword at a moment's notice. But for the time being, she would have to rely solely on her body and her looks, for all she was armed with was a dress and a pair of heels.
And so, after changing into her dress, Sakura joined the other women (and a Transformed Naruto) in the hotel's lobby, while they waited to be taken to the Daimyō's palace in the heart of the inner district, where the pageant would take place.
"Hahaha!" Anko laughed uproariously as she watched Sakura stumble about.
While the evening gown Sakura had bought for the occasion was very glamorous and easy to move in— a little black dress that pushed her cleavage together, hugged her curvaceous figure, and revealed generous amounts of leg— the high-heeled sandals that went with it proved far less accommodating.
At 159 cm (5 ft. 2 in.) tall, Sakura was very short and entirely unaccustomed to walking in heels, making her feel like a newborn deer finding its legs as she spent her final moments of freedom practising walking in a straight line in the lobby without tripping over her own feet.
"You shouldn't laugh at Sakura-chan, Anko-senpai," Akimichi Chobi chided her. "It's not so easy for us bigger gals to see our own feet, you know?"
"Bigger gals!?" Sakura spluttered in protest.
"The only thing stopping you from seeing your toes is that enormous gut of yours, girl!" Anko chortled. She stalked over and grabbed a handful of Chobi's belly fat folds and shook them, sneering. "And you're not even wearing heels! Maybe, if you shed some of this fat, we could find you some heels sturdy enough to bear all that mass!"
The two women glowered at each other, Anko's sizeable E-cups getting completely swallowed up into Chobi's H-cup cleavage as they pressed their chests together in a confrontational clash.
"I'm not fat, I'm simply big-boned, you washboard!"
"Washboard? You ought to be embarrassed, weighing five times as much as Sakura, yet your breasts are still so tiny compared to hers!"
"Stop fighting, the carriage's here," Yurika suddenly announced. "It's time to go, ladies."