10 YEARS AGO

Obito.

He couldn't stop staring at the three rogue blips on his monitor that shouldn't be there, flashing on and off tauntingly. He'd been keeping an eye on the in-and-outgoings of the demon realm when they'd suddenly popped up… three unaccountable's just plodding through the centre of where the market should be. He hadn't seen their entry location and couldn't follow a trace back to a point to figure it out. They had literally come out of nowhere.

Sitting back, he glanced at the clock on the screen and frowned. He'd already worked past his usual work hours and as usual nobody had come to stop him. Why would they? Working late meant that you either needed to catch up, wanted the extra pay or were seeking some kind of credit for your efforts. Or maybe you were that desperate to bury your mistakes and hope The Head didn't find out about it. Obito just got distracted, far too engrossed in his work to care about what time it was outside.

And those three blips, well, he couldn't leave those just wandering around unverified, could he? He flagged them on his personal system and gave them names - A, B and C - and then copied them to his portable device. He didn't log it on the main network server because he couldn't track where they'd come in from - and half a story wasn't a full report, so until he knew for sure, he'd satiate his curiosity first.

He closed down the computer, locked everything behind him and held his pass up to the secure doors that the Info-Labs were kept behind. Next, he found the nearest capable person of creating a portal and input his destination - the demon realm - and once his security was cleared via his pass, he was able to step right through unquestioned and without hassle.

The Demon Realm was pretty miserable to those who weren't used to it. The place was filled with all kinds of demon that seemed to suck the air from the spaces they kept - having more than eight demons in a room generally became claustrophobic.

The ones with wings were inescapable and the ones with horns were easily angered. The shadow ones were dangerous because they were everywhere, and if you had a fire demon on your trail, you were as good as barbecued chicken. So he kept to the shadowed walls (and there were plenty of those) and kept his hood drawn as far over his head as he could. It was simple enough to take to the shadows to hide himself, but navigating the streets wasn't easy. Everything looked the same.

Checking his portable device, a little like a mobile phone, A, B and C were moving quickly. He only had a maximum of ten hours before he'd start to feel the pressure that was the permanent atmosphere of the demon world, and while it seemed like enough time it wasn't uncommon for it to pass distortedly. He followed quickly and quietly through the shadowed streets, taught and trained by the best to do the very thing he was a genius at - gathering information. He preferred the technological kind, anything cyber or mechanical - but field work was a change and to have three unidentified blips on his radar just wasn't common-occurrence.

He was closing in on them when A, B and C disappeared in a single flash. One beep and they were on screen, another and they were gone. Most likely gone in the same way they'd appeared. Out of nowhere. Obito was left staring at his device wondering if it had malfunctioned - though he seriously doubted that was the case as it was his device and his things didn't just malfunction.

If A, B and C had used a portal to go somewhere else, their blips would have faded like a dying signal. To have it disappear meant either magical interference or death, but to have all three disappear together like that was just odd. He waited another three hours for them to appear, assuming that if they weren't dead and it was magic that they'd eventually resurface. When the dull headache began to squeeze at his head, signalling his overdue stay, he had to portal back.

He tried to ignore the matter and pass it off as 'unexplained', but he couldn't seem to do it as well as he did with the other things. There were little light dots on everything, the tv monitor, the clock, the doors, everything reminded him of A, B and C. He probably fell asleep staring at the flashing light on the clock, wondering if that would stop too.

Fifteen years old, a full time job, not another care in the world other than three annoying shouldn't-be-there blips.

OOO

The next time it happened, he wasn't so sure it was a coincidence. Again, they'd flagged up on his personal system in the demon realm and he'd stared at them as they'd taken the same path through where the market was. He hadn't put them on the central system as a 'precautionary measure' because he wasn't convinced they were a problem just yet.

This time, he recorded their movements and watched as they vanished once again - he noted the co-ordinates and left the matter alone. He'd figure it out when he had time. The Head was walking around the facility with his son in tow, nothing but a child with a helpful grin and a pure determination to help. He tried to ignore that the boy was only three years younger than him.

Obito couldn't look at him properly - it broke his heart to know that the boy would become a carbon copy of his father, as the eldest son. With a father like Fugaku Uchiha there was no other alternative. So Obito kept to his necessary tasks, not wanting to risk his position over three odd blips that may or may not be a fluke or draw attention to himself because of it. There were more important things to be fussy over.

When he'd officially finished for the day, and the stress had worked its way from his shoulders, he programmed his destination into the portal system and swiped his pass across the pad. A minute later and he was standing in the most obvious place in the demon market square - and it didn't take him long to find some cover.

Following the coordinates he'd written on their Disappearing Point, he ended up outside an entire block that would be pointless to search. It would be a playground to them; he needed more information - something to narrow it down to. Short of waiting for them to come back and follow, he didn't have any other ideas. He couldn't wait forever, either. So then began Phase 2. He needed to know if there was any consistency in their movements.

So he did what he was good at. Watching, waiting and gathering the information and details.

OOO

It took longer than expected for his mini project to draw any conclusions. A year and counting, to be exact.

Work at The Facility with the Uchiha Corps had taken an odd turn and he'd been so inundated with work that he barely spared half an hour to download the day's data on A, B and C and save it to an external drive. Whatever Fugaku was up to had called for an insane increase for data protection and security, not just for the records they were keeping but for the projects they were planning on working on - everything logged on the network had to be recorded, anything that passed through each electronic door had to be authorised. Setting those kinds of systems up took time, and months passed before he got a chance to check up on A, B and C's movements again, let alone study their recordings to draw some kind of conclusion.

Now he was officially sixteen The Head had had him working more hours. While he appreciated the extra finances, it wasn't like he had much time outside of work to do anything with it.

So one evening he managed to find some time - when he wasn't so tired he could collapse onto his bed with a screen-induced headache and exhaustion. He fired up his personal system and ran the tracking programme, downloading its recorded data for the day and inputting it into the external system he'd created to draw the comparisons for him. While that worked, he made himself a hot drink and had a shower, and was warm and comfortable and slightly drowsy by the time he came back to check the results.

Their entry and exit points were still unidentified. There was no real consistency in where they appeared and disappeared, despite almost ten months of constant data. But he had found the general area they aimed for and stayed within - near and close to that apartment block. He still couldn't predict when they'd show up. There was nothing consistent about their visits and while that was slightly worrying, he couldn't find it in his instincts to be concerned. They weren't doing any damage. Besides, he was unnerved to realise that he was far too tired to let his curiosity rule him this time.

OOO

On his days off, he took his portable device and armed himself with a few weapons, staking out the apartment block whenever he could. He kept to himself, away from everyone else so as not to cause a scene. There was now a growing concern about the Uchiha's as a clan - their odd, more-than-human capabilities setting them somewhere in the middle of both the human world and the supernatural one. Their hereditary features weren't much help, either. Too different to be human and not quite odd enough to be supernatural. Their ambitions to supersede everything weren't winning them any favours either, but they argued it was simply 'evolution'. They were walking a fine line, Obito thought, and pushing the demon's back wasn't the way to go about it. Hiding in the shadows and lurking like the stuff of nightmares wasn't going to bring about any kind of peace, and if the demons ever found out half of what was being developed in The Facility, he'd be long gone before they turned his way.

OOO

His eyes locked on his device as soon as the blips reappeared. He was on a roof, his head feeling the dull ache of an oncoming migraine; he'd already been there too long. But the blips were back, A, B and C were here and, if luck would have it, be passing right underneath him in the streets. He held his breath, willing them to hurry up before he physically threw up that days lunch.

But what he saw made his head swim in all kinds of confusion, and he had to stop himself from throwing up regardless.

Kids. They're just kids.

Three of them, small and thin framed were racing and laughing down the street just as he'd predicted they would, heading straight for the apartment block that they always seemed to come and go from.

Kids. Barely in double digits if their frames were anything to go by.

They were gone as soon as they'd come and he'd been too astonished to do anything other than gape at them.

He dreamt that night of harsh lights and the odd rumours that were whispered around The Facility. He saw those kids' shadows, heard their laughter and watched their forms race past him in taunting circles, vanishing into the distance in blips of light.