Sorry guys for changing the chapters so much... I'm just trying to explain as much as I can about Yura and her past as well as what happens next :) I'll revise the second chapter as well so that the story flows more smoothly! Sorry for so many changes and please be patient with me. I'm trying to smooth out my storyline as well and fast as I can between my tight schedule (which is tighter now that it's summer due to all my stupid extra curricular activities). Thanks for reading my story!

- Kaerelie Cecilia

Chapter 1: Gone

Yura Onoko woke up with a start as her alarm went off. She quickly got ready for her school and got out her umbrella after noticing the murky sky and heavy rainfall. She changed into a gothic suit of tight black tank top, a plain black miniskirt with a slit at the side, black netted knee-length tights, and black netted fingerless elbow-length gloves. She put on her black jade dangling earrings and a matching necklace.

Yura sighed at her reflection in the mirror and thought 'Seriously, I look ugly. Why am I even looking in the mirror?'

Yura wasn't exactly the best looking girl despite her long Spanish brown and blue gray eyes. Her brown hair was mashed up of different shades of brown and her blue gray eyes were a shade too gray. Her eyes were just the color of the sky when thunderstorm was about to hit. She was a little too skinny with lean but lanky legs and her well muscled body was a bit off from what those delicate pretty girls should have. Her features were delicately placed but her skin was too pale. Her stormy colored eyes weren't exactly most pretty and looking at her long skinny legs sticking out of her body looking out of place, Yura sighed to herself. She walked away from the mirror towards the window where rain was hitting against mercilessly. The sky were just the color of her eyes, rain pouring from ugly gray clouds.

"I didn't know there was a thunderstorm." She muttered to herself as she looked out the window.

The angry sky seemed to be echoing the way she was feeling right now. She felt depressed and thought about even skipping school. She hated her school, she hated her family, and she hated her life. At her school, she was always bullied by those popular girls and she was a loner. As an antisocial girl, she had no friends in her middle school. She was an average twelve-year-old with nothing much special about her. She didn't really like her school, at least not ever since her foster mother died.

She tended to be withdrawn and the girls in her school just made her confused and completely freaked out. The only thing the girls actually cared was how they could catch the eyes of boys and how many boyfriends they had so far. Seriously, Yura couldn't care less if she or others had any boyfriends or not. Actually, she would care if she had a boyfriend because she never ever wanted to have a boyfriend. Boys freaked her out more than the hormonal preteen/young teenage girls could ever possibly do.

'Urgh, I still have to endure six more months of school.' Yura thought as she looked at the calender. It was January 10th, only half way through school.

Yura always felt awkward around people and especially when they were all being overly friendly. Actually, the overly friendly people freaked her out. It caused her to be tense when she was around people and she eventually became a social outcast. No one wanted to talk to her or be with her and she didn't care. She was relieved that she didn't have to put up with putting up a facade just to please people. She was just never a very sociable person and was really bad at human interaction. Yura knew it was one of her more serious problems but she didn't really care. It wasn't as though she was up to torturing herself.

She was even hated by her teachers as well. Yura thought it was probably because she was antisocial with them as well and she wasn't exactly the model student. It really wasn't her fault she was so antisocial with them. Yura just liked to have her personal space and her teachers always seemed to want to invade her privacy by either asking her about her life outside of school or asking her if something's wrong at home whenever Yura seemed a bit distracted or something. Sometimes, they were so annoying that Yura wanted to hurt them or something and it took all self-control she had to calm herself down.

She knew she could get straight A+s if she wanted to but she didn't see the reason to try. All her reasons flew away when her mother died in a car accident and her father got a new wife. Actually, she was adopted by her mother and father when she was four. She didn't remember her life before she was four and she always wondered about her real parents. The orphanage she was left at was small but kind. In the December 10th of nine years ago, the orphanage director found her wrapped up in a warm blanket along with a locked chest and a letter. The letter read:

Dear Orphanage Director,

Hello, I apologize for troubling you with my daughter but I'm in no condition to care for her.
She is four years old and going to turn five on December 17th.
She has no relatives and families so she needs someone to take good care of her.
Her name is Yura Onoko and the chest that I left with her contains the heirlooms of her parents.
Please take care of her and tell her that I love her.

Thank you.

Yura was adopted few months after she arrived at orphanage due to having enchanted the couple that came to visit the orphanage with her charms and beauty. Both her parents were nice to her but her mother especially was really kind and loving. She would take Yura to places and play with her. She protected Yura from mean kids and told bedtime stories. Yura's happy fairy tale world came crashing down when her mother died in a car crash in the summer of her eighth year and her father remarried three months afterwards. After his remarriage, her father didn't care about her and actually wished she never existed because he believed that she would only get in the way between him and his new wife. She was only a mere eight-year-old then but she understood her situations well.

Yura endured all the sarcastic and mean comments thrown at her by her father and her stepmother for the next three years with great difficulty. She always had short temper and it took a lot of self-control to calm down. When she was young, she could barely contain her anger but she learned to suppress it. However, she snapped after she saw her father cracking her mother's favorite china plate without a care. She screamed at her father and threw the first thing that she felt which happened to be her eraser. She ran out of her home, cursing the worst curses she could think of at her father and step mother. That day, she signed herself as emancipated minor and lived in a small apartment with a police lady checking on her once a week.

Without having anything really to look forward to, all she did was her homework, study, devour mangas, and draw. Actually, she did have something to look forward to: her martial arts that she has for three hours everyday. She at first started martial arts as way of coping with her stress and anger but as she did martial arts, she started to love it. She probably would have ended her life long time ago if it hadn't been for the martial arts. It really helped with her short temper for she got to get rid of all the suppressed anger through martial arts. Even though she knew putting out her anger by means of martial arts wasn't exactly the healthiest way to cope with anger, she didn't really care. She loved the feeling of adrenaline rushing through her veins and pumping the anger out of her system.

Everyday, right after school, she went to a gym near her apartment and worked out with the equipments for an hour or two. Then she would run for an hour or two again and at the evening, she went to her martial arts class for three hours. She was easily the top of her class and she even won the national karate championship couple times.

Then, she saw the elegantly carved chest left with her that was said to be containing the heirlooms of her parents. A small but delicately carved chest sat next to her earrings rack looking like a mini treasure box and Yura ran her long fingers over it's ornate carvings. Her fingers traced the symbol that was carved on the lid just like all the other times when Yura traced it. Yura didn't know what the symbol meant but she always had a feeling it was something special. The chest made her feel as if her parents were watching her somehow and comforting her. She felt closer to her parents with it and whenever she traced the carvings, she felt calming sensation in her mind.

The symbol was perfectly symmetrical, a long horizontal line that thinned as it reached the end with a short vertical line in the exact center, a small 'C' like looking carving marked the right quarter of the line, the tips of the 'C' reaching to the end of the horizontal line, and the exact mirror image at the left quarter of the line. A larger 'C' like carving encased the small 'C', taking its place right of the vertical line in the middle between the short vertical line and the point where the small 'C' met the line. It's end also reached out to the end of the horizontal line and the same mirror image took place at the left side of the vertical line as well.

Another symbol was carved on the bottom section of the chest, this time it wasn't much of a symbol. It looked like a fan, a big crescent looked like a moon that was somewhere in between its half moon shape and full moon shape with its tips pointing to the ground and a smaller shape with a small space between it and the crescent moon completed the circle. The circle was outlined by a carving that had a carving of stick attached to it right below the smaller shape, completing the image of a fan.

She looked at the clock and realized it was time to go to school. She started packing the bag when she had weird feeling in her mind. The feeling told her to instead of packing her bag with all the meaningless garbage, she should pack as if she was going away somewhere. She had no idea why but she followed her feelings. She dumped all her garbage from her bag and put her chest in the very bottom of her bag. She then put in some extra set of clothing, her make-up bag with her jewelries inside, and her first-aid kit along with her purse. She put some of her necessary school things and finished packing her bag.

After putting on her black Greek-like sandals, Yura walked to her high school, dreading the day. The school was just like any other days, the cheerleaders bullied her, she snapped back at them and got laughed at even more, mean notes were slipped into her locker, every once in a while a guy would give a rude gesture and she would cuss at them a little, etc. Yura flinched whenever a guy tried to touch her, remembering Ken Okamoto. Last time a guy asked her out, she literally screamed no and ran away. That was when she was a freshman. Now, no one asked her out and she was fine with it. She was a sophomore now but was only age 12. She really wasn't interested in dating anyone, should it be a cutest guy in a football team or some kind of celebrities, not that any of them will ever ask her out.

It was right after lunch when a huge thunderstorm finally got into its climax with deafening sounds and lightnings everywhere. Yura was walking through the hallway trying to find her way to her boring and nerve-wrecking math class without getting completely soaked, which she later on found out - a little to late that - to be next to impossible. All of the sudden, there was a zapping sound and the lights went off. The overhead speaker then crackled alive saying, "The thunderstorm is currently interfering with the lightings and all students are asked to go inside the nearest classroom until the lights are back."

'Great.' she thought sarcastically. 'Now, I'm alone in a dark corridor and there is no one currently in this wing of the school as far as I know."

Yura went inside the nearby classroom and took out a flashlight from her bag. She was glad she packed her necessities even if it was out of some out of blue impulse. She mused over her impulse in the morning and when she couldn't think of anything that might have triggered her feelings, she stopped her musing and took out a manga that she always kept in her backpack should she get bored at school. With her flashlight, she started reading the manga.

It was Naruto and she started on her favorite chapter where Itachi has Kakashi under his Mangekyo Sharingan. Itachi was just visiting Konoha with Kisame and Kakashi was trying to protect his comrades by fighting Itachi. Her favorite character in the manga was Itachi and her second favorite was Kakashi. She was a huge fan of Akatsuki and aside from Itachi, Konan and Nagato were her favorite Akatsuki members. She hated Madara Uchiha for some reason that she didn't understand but Madara Uchiha's face always made her feel as though she has met him before. Now that she was thinking about it, whenever she saw Itachi and Sasuke, she had a feeling she saw them before as well.

'What are you thinking? Are you going insane?' she told herself. 'They are only manga characters. They don't exist.' Yura laughed at her stupidity and continued reading the manga intently when the there was a blinding light and a deafening roar was in her ears.

'What the hell?' she thought. 'Wait, is that the lightning? My skin feels as though it got scorched!.' Her skin felt like it was caught in fire and there was pain everywhere. Her consciousness slipped away as she drowned in the sea of pain.

Post some reviews! I want to know what you think about my story so far and I will really appreciate constructive criticisms! Thanks for reading my stories and give me some feedback please!

- Kaerelie Cecilia