@Terracosmo & GotWoot Moderator: Alright, point taken. My apologies. I'll try to keep from double posting in the future even if they're separate ideas. It's not like I'm trying to spam the boards here.

@AssertnFailure: You're right. I'd forgotten about that. But seeing how they're back to Konoha, and the 5th's a medic, she may have told some jounins about it and had them search for them. She couldn't send jounins right away because they were away on missions. But since at least a few are back, I'm sure there wouldn't be a problem sending a few out. But since they're behind, they may not catch up to say...Sasuke and Naruto, but there's a chance they'll run into Chouji or Neji since they were pretty far behind the others...assuming this all happens.

So unless I'm missing something else, my idea still kinda works out.

But when it comes down to it, I'm not saying that is what happens. It's just an idea. I just firmly believe they won't kill the characters off. How they get around it, at least to me, is fairly irrelevant.