The doors to the ER slammed open as Tsunade and Shizune rushed in. Three girls lay unconscious on three operating tables. Sakura was focused intently on healing the worst of the three. Tsunade and Shizune each approached a different girl and began examining the damage.
"What happened to them, Sakura," Tsunade looked down at the girl on her table. She was not as young as the other two girls; she may have been in her early twenties. Her body was unclean and covered in bruises. She was definitely not a shinobi. She had womanly curves but nearly no muscle and held more weight than the average shinobi or civilian.
"They were the only ones alive…" Sakura said. "Barely. Out of all those girls…."
"Shishou." Shizune called out. "This ones suffering from massive internal bleeding!"
Tsunade glanced down at her patient again to see if she could move on to help Shizune. She was met with the cold stare of dark blue, seemingly endless eyes.
"Help that one." Her speech was rough, as if it pained her to speak.
"We will help all three of you." Tsunade stared back using her chakra to search out injuries in the girl's body. She attempted to remove part of the girl shirt to get a better look at the possible damage done to her torso. A Light blue, swirly circular tattoo on her midriff caught Tsunade's eye before the girls hand had grabbed her wrist.
"Those two have been repeatedly abused. Roughly…. Tortured." The girl's breath was laboriously trying to enunciate each syllable. "They never touched … me that way. Just the experiments." Her eyes bored into Tsunades trying to make her understand.
Tsunade nodded. "What's your name?"
"Nicole…" she slowly let out as her eyes closed. Tsunade had barely a moment to register the foreign name before she was barking orders at medic-nin and moving to stabilize Shizune's patient.
The first thing that Nicole registered was the sound of low voices off in the distance. Her body ached all over. This all seemed like some nightmare she couldn't wake up from. She had been on her way to work when her whole mind just went fuzzy and blank. Next thing she knew she was waking up in a dank underground facility with tubes, needles and faceless men prodding her with instruments. She had seen how the others girls were handled. Even some males were being experimented on down there. Days had just melded into each other.
Some of her fellow experiments had started to die off. She really had no idea how many were left. One day there was a lot of noise, and screaming. She only had fleeting images of someone, whose face she couldn't see, lifting her up and carrying her out of where ever she was. Brief glimpses of trees and the smell of the outside is all she could remember before the image of the strong, blonde woman in the hospital room. She hoped that this would all be over now, that she could go home.
Nicole sighed. Don't think about any of that, she told herself. Just get through this. She opened her eyes and was faced with a plain hospital room. She could see out the window. The city beyond was not one she recognized.
Nicole was alone in the hospital room. There were no flowers or any indication of visitors. This only solidified her fear of the fact that it didn't seem like she was anywhere near her hometown.
The voices in the hallway got closer to the door. The door opened as the blonde woman from before came in followed by a young girl with pink hair, and another with dark brown hair.
"Ah, you're awake." The Blonde woman said with a small smile. "Do you mind if we take a look at your wounds?"
Nicole just nodded.
Tsunade came up to the side of the bed and helped Nicole into a sitting position. Nicole winced with the effort. Tsunades hands started glowing with chakra as she searched the girls back for the presence of her wounds. Nicole looked around to watch Tsunades hands curiously. She had no idea how the woman was doing that, but chose not to ask anything.
"Good news is, your injuries were mostly superficial. You were severely dehydrated and malnourished but we've stabilized you and the other girls as well as two males that our shinobi managed to save from that facility."
Tsunade stepped back and looked down at Nicole. "This is Sakura-chan, she was with the group we sent to infiltrate that facility. And this is Shizune-chan, they are both my apprentices."
Nicole just stared at all of them silently. Shizune and Sakura just continued to smile down at their patient.
The silence lingered as the three shinobi stared down at Nicole. She awkwardly shifted in her hospital bed and sighed. "I really don't have any idea what all of that meant. What Country are we in because this doesn't look like a city in North America."
Tsunade looked back to Sakura and Shizune with a contemplative expression.
"What I am about to say to you is going to be hard to understand at first. But we have double-checked our sources, and searched the minds of those we rescued for details. So we are certain about what I am going to tell you. You were a prisoner in a facility that was, at first, just experimenting with, what we thought, were forbidden time jump jutsu. They ended up discovering a lot more than what we originally assumed. Specifically they were able to jump to other dimensional time-planes. They began abducting people and performing infused chakra experiments on them. Approximately 300 corpses were found in that underground facility. Only the five that are in this hospital, one of these being you, are alive."
Tsunade, Sakura and Shizune all stared down at Nicole with sympathetic expressions. Seemingly waiting for the break-down that they were sure was going to follow. As it had so happened with the other two female patients.
Nicole just stared out at the room in silent thought. Her chest was beginning to feel tight as she felt the anxiety start to kick in. She fiddled with her hands in her lap as she tried to get her head around what she was just told. Another world. Okay….she thought to herself. "So, where am I?"
Tsunade looked a touch surprised at the calmness in the girls voice. It was a few seconds before Sakura spoke up, as Tsunade was just staring down at the girl searching for panic. "Konoha, the village hidden in the leaves. In the fire country."
Nicole looked up at the girl with pink hair who had spoke. "Could I see a map, or something?" Sakura, Tsunade and Shizune all shared a look.
"We are telling you the truth, girl."Tsunade said irritated. It was typical that the last patient was going to be the toughest to deal with. The other girls had all cried and broken down with the news, the two males had stoically accepted. This girl was barely reacting.
At least that is what it appeared on the outside. Nicole was filling her head with a mantra of "don't freak out, it's just a panic attack, don't freak out, you don't know these people, don't freak out." She didn't even know why she asked for a map, maybe to just see that she wasn't in her world. Have tangible proof, if their glowing hands weren't enough, she laughed inwardly.
"Are you okay," the one called Shizune asked her, slowly approaching her.
Nicole faked a sarcastic smile, "As fine as anyone with that news would be. Is there a plan to return us?" she asked, finally her brain had found something useful to say.
Tsunade looked down at Nicole painfully. She sighed, "We are incapable of doing that."
"What?" Nicole looked back at the blonde woman, the full meaning of that sentence sinking in. The panic now showing on her face. "If someone brought us here then you can send us back the same way!" she demanded.
Sakura looked at her shishou, half expecting the woman to barrel down angrily at the girl. But Tsunade just stared down sympathetically. Finally the girl had shown some healthy emotion. "We destroyed the technology and all the information that pertained to it. That power is too dangerous."
Nicole just stared back into those giant brown eyes. She felt her body tighten up, felt the fear fully set in, and the anger at those words. She felt a welling inside her body, and felt, more than heard, a slight electrical buzzing.
"Shishou," Sakura moved in between the girl and the Hokage.
"It's alright Sakura," Tsunade attempted to push the girl to her side. The room was full of chakra buzzing from the girl in the bed.
"Why would you do that before sending us back!"
Tsunade sighed. "Calm down! The team was sent the facility to destroy all that, and you were all found after. There is nothing we can do."
One of the windows cracked and shattered. Tsunade and Shizune moved in to forcibly knock out the girl when it all stopped. The girl slumped back down in the bed and let out a soft sob.
"This is so fucked up."
Sakura stifled a giggle at the girls fowl language, Shizune raised an eyebrow and Tsunade just smiled. "Don't worry too much, girl. We'll fill you in…"
