Hatake Kakashi, the Sixth Hokage, found that he had a problem.
“Well then, what am I to do…”
His quiet murmurs drifted into the empty room, eventually swallowed up by the silence.
As usual, Kakashi was alone in the Hokage’s office, and grappling with a mountain of paperwork.
The pile of documents that sat front of Kakashi had actually reached such a height that they were blocking his line of sight from his seat. It wasn’t just the one pile either. Several piles of similar height were stacked around his left and right. As the village’s leader and Hokage, it was his duty to read through every single one of these documents.
However, that wasn’t Kakashi’s problem. Or rather, it wasn’t a very important problem.
The business of all the documents on his desk could be easily settled by reading through them one at a time and stamping them as necessary. For jobs like that, once you started concentrating, you would be surprised at how quickly it got finished.
Wondering if you could complete the paperwork faster than new work would get piled up in front of you, wondering if you could be quicker, thinking you’d turn it into a match and see- if you concentrated on your work with those kinds of thoughts, then doing paperwork naturally became something that was sort of fun.
As he stamped each document, Kakashi would think to himself ‘if I don’t pick up the pace, people won’t be able to see my face past this mountain of paperwork’, and keep himself entertained with silly thoughts like that as he worked.
However, his current problem wasn’t something to be handled so lightly.
Kakashi let his eyes fall on the Mission Roster document spread out across his desk. His hands started moving.
Or rather, to be more accurate, only his fingertips were moving.
In the silence of his empty office, Kakashi started tapping his fingers against the surface of his desk, their tiny strikes letting out a ‘ton, ton’ sound. Somehow, the rhythm of his fidgeting helped him collect his scattered thoughts.
As the name implied, the Mission Roster was a document that held the details for all the upcoming missions of every single shinobi in the village. What sort of mission they’d be on, how long those missions would take, every possible detail of their schedule was written down.