I've always been able to remember. For the most part anyways, my first two births are a bit hazy as those were millions of years ago. Isn't that a funny thought, technically I'm eons older than everyone I meet in each of my lives but in reality my spirit isn't the only one going through this cycle. We all go through the cycle, from birth to death than a few hundred years of sleep to birth again. During the few hundred years of sleep we are supposed to forget for when we go through birth again we aren't supposed to remember.

I don't know why I could always remember, I just couldn't seem to forget.

My first life I lived in fear, lived with out fire, lived my life knowing that the light was safe and the cave was safety. When dark came, if we weren't in the cave then we died. There was no surviving a night outside of the cave. I don't really remember much more than that about it, it had been too long for me to be able to remember.

The first time I realized I could still remember was after my second birth. There really wasn't much difference to my first one, besides the fire and the traveling. I guess I could label the family I had then as Nomads.

Frankly I wish I could forget and just be ignorant. Knowledge from past lives can be useful but in others it kills. I can still remember starving as I waited for my trials at Salem. They had condemned me to be filled with Satan, something that needed to be killed before it spread much like a plague. They had kept me in a dark root cellar with little to no light, a piece of bread and a little water to keep me alive long enough for the trials. The trials didn't last long though. I didn't get much say in defending my self and a man preposterously claimed that I had the power to inflict pain on him from mere glance and showed off a rather nasty burn across his forearm.

I can still remember the feeling of the rope around my neck. I wish that it would simply just vanish from my memory but alas wishes don't come true.

Between each cycle I slept for about three hundred years give or take ten years. It wasn't a deep sleep, it was light and thoughtful, at times I could even open my eyes see what was happening for a moment or two. Nothing could keep me awake for very long though, they were just mere glimpses.

I had about a hundred more years to sleep when I felt a strange pull on my consciousness. It was odd and much like what happened to me before another cycle could continue but that wasn't right, not at all. I wasn't going to be called upon for another hundred years, I wasn't ready. My soul was still tired, but the pulling got stronger and then I could feel the contractions.

It always hurt being squeezed out of a hole, no matter how many times it has happened to me-I couldn't help but scream when I was finally released. The world was still a blurry white with spots of brown and black mixing in with hues of gray. This information was odd to my senses because hospitals in these later years where always white with blue blurs and way too bight for a new born's eyes.

From my vantage point, I could hear mutterings and cooing in a language quite foreign than any of the other dialects I had come accustom with in my other lives. It was strangely like the modernized Japanese mixed with an ancient part of their dialect, it reminded me of when Japan used to house samurai. Back before America forced it out of isolation.

Out of everything I heard through out my first year of terrifyingly dark blindness I caught onto my name. Chiyoko, child of a thousand generations. It was always spoken to me by a sliver tongue. Not that the tongue was actually silver, more like the tone was soft and slipped easily from the persons mouth to my ears. This was one of the things I could pick out from my limited knowledge of Japanese, both ancient and modern. Even being reborn so many times I had managed to be every different kind of race besides Japanese.

Through my second year I began to realize some things and pick up on others. One I could see it just really was that dark in this place, two I could move on my own but I had a limited amount of space to move around in, three a very pale man with long greasy black hair would stick me with needles and talk to me, four I had some sort of something humming in my veins and when I tried to 'feel' it, it left burns on my skin, five I was female, and six I wasn't alone.

There was another baby with me, it was quiet most of the time though and only bothered to cry when it needed something. About half way through the second year I figured out that the baby was male and the pale man would call him Tenzou. It was odd I guess. I never had a sibling that survived the age of six months before, they had usually gotten sick and never made it past that age point.

In my third year the pale man had stopped sticking me with needles but he would watch me closely. I would have called him Father had he not reprimanded me the first time I had made that mistake. Tenzou still got the needles though, he had turned two and in his brown hair I would always find leaves despite being under ground. This was also the year that I realized that we didn't really look alike. He had brown hair while I had black, he had brown eyes while I had green.

About three quarters of the way through my third year Tenzou and I got a sibling. The baby was strange, perhaps even stranger than I was. White tuffs of hair and bleached red eyes that looked more fuchsia than anything. The pale man called her Nozomi. By this time I had learned how to talk in short easy sentences as I still tripped on other words and Tenzou was just beginning to experiment with his words, we had both taken to calling her Zo-chan.

Closer to the end of my third year but before the beginning of my fourth year the pale man had told me what the strange humming was in my body. It was chakra. It worked essentially like magic or chi in my past life. It was a form of my will made manifested. Then he told me that because of who my mother was I was unique and could do something no one else could. I could switch genders by use of my chakra. When he had told me that I think I just stared at him for a while. Who would want to just randomly switch their gender at any given time?

The pale man then proceeded to teach me how to activate this bloodline. It took me a full six months before I could change. By then I was four and Tenzou was three, little Zo-chan was two. I felt weird after the change. My whole body structure had bulked up slightly from the density of my bones to the width of my shoulders. Both Tenzou and Zo-chan didn't like it when I was a boy.

By the time Umeko came into our odd family I had gotten the hang of switching from female to male then back. I still didn't get why this was important but the pale man would insist that I learned it. Tenzou had begun his training with, well, wood. He could make beams of solid wood that wasn't really any type of tree I could name. It might have been cherry, walnut, or birch. I wouldn't have known considering he wouldn't use it around myself or the other two girls.

Umeko was as normal a child as ever. She cried a lot. She had black hair like me but her eyes were a stunning black.

My fifth year came around and the pale man taught Nozomi. He taught her how to speak to the dead. Sort of, he taught her how to hide it better. Something seemed to worry the pale man, he would always cut our interactions short and he jumped Umeko's training up a year early. She was special. She could touch something and mimic it. If it was metal her body would harden to metal. If it was earth her body would take on earth qualities. We had noticed her little quirks a lot earlier during infancy but he was teaching her how to control it.

He pushed me to learn how to defend myself. He would do the same for Tenzou. Often he would pit us against each other, Tenzou would win most of the time when I was female. As a male I had about a fifty percent chance of winning simply for the difference in strength.

Nozomi began to spar with us after the pale man began to limit his visits with us. Eventually we only saw him twice a week. By this time something was wrong and we all knew it. Umeko wasn't allowed in on the spars just yet as she still didn't have a complete handle on her bloodline quite yet.

All at once the pale man left us to fend for ourselves for a whole month. We had food storage down where ever we were being kept but that had only lasted us so long after rationing it out. At the end of the month men with white masks invaded our home.

It was strange when the masked men told us we were safe, there was no need to worry, and how we would finally be free. Umeko clung to Tenzo and Nozomi would hold my hand while they whispered sweet nothings to us, we were blindfolded though and led out of our home. I didn't understand it, were we not safe back in that room? If we weren't there anymore would we ever see the pale man again? I had so many questions but I bit my tongue and followed silently.

I didn't have a clue where we were going but it felt warmer. In our home it was never really cold but it wasn't necessarily warm either. It was neutral, perfect, I didn't like where we were headed now though. I didn't like that we were leaving our safe haven. It was all that I knew in this world and I was afraid of what would come next.

"Hokage-sama." I heard the masked men whisper in awe around the four of us children. It confused me though, the fire shadow? What did that even mean?

"He's important," Nozomi whispered to me as she tucked herself into my side.

I took her word for it, I couldn't see him through the blindfold. I felt Tenzou reach out to me for safety. I let him curl into my other side, Umeko was more than likely doing the same to Tenzou.

"Wolf, Hawk, report." His raspy old voice filled the air with the slight touch of tobacco.

I tuned out the report because I already knew what happened and what they found. I had been living down there for five years. Nothing down their could have surprised me except maybe-"They had different folders on each of the experiments. These children each have three different ones describing their injection, birth, mutation, and medical stats."

It was silent for a moment and I was straining to understand just what was happening, I could hear rustling of fabric for but a moment before the sound of paper drew my attention.

"I see." The man uttered after a few minutes, silence again met his words.

I don't think I could have ever prepared for this moment though, "Hawk, there is no need for the blindfolds." And the cloth was tugged from my eyes. The room was hazy with smoke from hot boxing the room, but he sat there behind a paper ridden desk with a pipe in his wrinkling hands.

My eyes met his through the grey fog cloud that surrounded him, I held my tongue once again. If I was permitted to answers then and only then would I ask them.

"Do you know who I am?" The old man asked in a defeated voice, I could almost hear how tired he was in just the whisperings of his vocal cords.

"No." I answered truthfully, it wouldn't do us any good to lie in the pit of snakes at the moment. Once I knew what was actually going on the better it would be for my little make shift family.

He was contemplating something, looking over each of us individually, slowly. "I am the Hokage, do you know what that means?"

"No." I knew it stood for the fire shadow but that was the extent of my knowledge.

"It means that I am the protector of my village," He began before clasping his hands in front of him on the desk keeping the pipe in between his two hands, "You four were found in my village, do you know what that means?"

Why was he asking me all these questions, "No." I didn't have the answers he was looking for.

"It means that by law, you are under my protection." He sighed a bit and stood up from behind the desk. "I need to know the name of the person who kept you down there."

I blinked, "I don't know his name." It was the truth, all I knew was that he was pale and didn't like me calling him father.

The man walked around the desk, "I was afraid of that," He took a breath from the pipe. "Rat, how much damage would be caused to them if a Yamanaka were to dig through their memories?"

"That isn't wise," A more feminine voice reached our ears and I turned my head to locate the source of the sound. I couldn't actually tell if she really was a she though, the uniforms made all the body types look exactly the same, no male characteristics and no female characteristics, just white armor over black cloth and a porcelain mask depicting an animal with black, red, and gray painted lines. "The mere presence of the chakra in the minds world would fry nerve endings and stimulate unending reproduction of cells that should not reproduce naturally causing them great pain and lumps in the brain. It would kill them and at such an age their memories are not reliable, too much of it will be muddied and soon forgotten. We could probably find one memory suitable for use but probably not before the child died. The Yamanaka are good but I've never heard of any one being able to read memories from a dead body."

"I see." So did I, and I was worried, after all he did seem to have the power to order the Yamanaka people to invade our brains.

He took another drag on his pipe and turned to a window that was only allowing a tiny sliver of moon light in, his feet guided him automatically to the wall just to the side of the window.

"There are two of them," Nozomi muttered to me, "they like to look over his shoulders."

I didn't answer, I didn't want them to become aware of what she saw even if they must have already known.

"Wolf, take them to base." The blindfolds were replaced, "I'll figure out what to do in the morning. Right now, get them checked up, fed, washed, and rested."

"Hai, Hokage-sama."

Trial? How did you like it? Should I continue it?

I've had this idea in my head for a really long time, just never was able to put it into words as I didn't have the time to actually sit down and focus on it since Sora is trying to take over my life and ALUM just recently grabbed my attention, anyways I simply put this off for far too long.

Please, I'd like your feed back!