Juniper - Deleted Chapter

I know that it has now been nearly a year since I last updated Juniper. I do sincerely apologize for the long wait, but sometimes, life happens and I can't manage to keep up with a hobby no matter how much I want to.
If you have been reading Juniper for a long while, then I thank you very much for continuing to do so. If you're new to it, then I thank you for picking it up and hope that you enjoy it enough to stick with me until I finish.
For some of you who have been with it for a while, you may be confused by the story line right now for a lot of reasons, one of those reasons is the reason for this post. This past June/July I deleted the most recent chapter of Juniper. It would have been listed as Chapter 18 (Snakes II). The reasons were many. Among those was the fact that I thought it ended up being more confusing than it was supposed to be. It included several flashbacks that weren't integrated very well. I tried to hint at several things that you guys were supposed to pick up on, but that wasn't done well either and I've decided that some of them just need to be spelled out.
Trying to work forward from that chapter proved impossible when I was already facing difficulty with the story and with writer's block, so I decided to just delete it and work forward from a better point, namely the ending of Snakes I.

This note might confuse you a bit more and I'm sorry about that but for those of you who remember Snakes II shouldn't be left in the dark about the changes that will come up in the future. The events in the exam itself are being completely rewritten so I'll deal with them when that chapter comes out. The events in those flashbacks, are being changed a bit as well and I can deal with them now.

Here are the big changes:

Snakes II revealed in a flashback that the fishnet the trio was wearing had a jutsu on it to act as a weight training device. That still stands; however, in the current rewrite, the trio doesn't know this. They'll learn it a bit later. Also, the rules of that have changed a bit as well, so I'll make sure to spell it out in a later chapter for you.

Also, Houkou will not be going into the Forest with them. It still stands that Kakashi had Houkou with him before the exam, but he did not send the dog in with them. Houkou just doesn't have the training for it and Kakashi felt the dog would be a distraction.

The Amarante code is going to be explained more before we catch up with Team 7. I'm going to explain it in one of the upcoming interludes in more detail because it was too confusing to just drop it in the way I did.

Lastly, Kyuubi. I'm going to explain this in more detail as well. Some people caught on that Naruto seemed to communicating with it. Some didn't. So I'm going to use an interlude for that as well.
Since I'm sure I'm forgetting something or just didn't think to touch on something you guys were confused by, feel free to ask any questions you want. Just please do it here in the comments so that I can make sure I get back to you.
Thanks again,
Agent Spielplatz