Vivere, Unum Oportet Primum Superesse
She woke up with a start, the world blurring around her as she shot upwards like a bullet, crashing down onto a lower platform. She wretched and lurched, acid spitting out of her mouth like flames would a dragon as her abdomen rejected any remains of whatever was left in there. She gagged as sticky, slimy saliva oozed down her mouth as she coughed out her burning, flaming throat.
Is all I'm doing throwing up!?
She hacked once more, nothing but spit and mucus spewed onto the ground. She breathed raggedly, groaning as she cradled her throat with her right hand, hoping to cease the passionate burning in her diaphragm. Calm down, calm down, calm down... she repeated to herself, the hammering of her chest slowing down as her blurred vision slowly cleared. She moaned as a wave of fatigue and dizziness washed over her, sending her head whirring and nausea threaten to rear its ugly head once more. Long, shuddering pants came from her as she slowly looked around in the new environment.
Where am I?
The forest around her was unfamiliar, tall, looming fir trees cast their eerie, dark shadows on the damp, army green moss that blanketed the forest floor. Creeping foliage and clovers coated the soft dirt that she clenched in her left hand, the grainy, muddy texture slipping through her fingers and staining her skin a dark brown. The dull, partially clouded sunlight peeked through the conifer and camphor trees, sparsely touching the undergrowth. The weather was thick with humidity and the scent of rain, a hazy lull encompassing the solitary forest. She shivered as a chilling, ominous wave crawled up her spine before panic seeped into her again. Where was she? She looked around feverishly, dilated eyes soaking in the scarce sunlight. Her memories slowly came back to her in snailish, lagging pieces as she took in her situation.
Okay, okay, think, Where were you, where are you, and why are you here?
She willfully slowed her breathing, fearful, ragged gulps, though her heart still pounded in rapid succession and adrenaline pumped in her veins. Her muscles were taut and twitching with every wisp of wind and shifting of twigs, her mind reeling as she tried to calm down and asses her situation.
The last she remembered was taking a walk in the woods. She was taking a break from dealing with her loud sisters in the house, and ventured farther than usual. The next thing she knew, she fell into a dark hole that came out of nowhere.
She smiled lightly and sighed in relief through the queasiness in her stomach. The answer came simply to her. She had fallen down a hill and probably blacked out for a minute or so after hitting her head. It was the clearest answer, after all, from the way her brain was slamming against her cranium furiously.
Simply put, she was lost. How lost? She didn't quite know. She knew almost the entire forest near her house like the back of her hand, but never in her life had she seen camphor trees in the woods. Oaks, pines, ginko, sycamore, you name it. Hell, even cacti grew in the dryer areas by the courtesy of a few foreigner neighbors that had neglected to contain their backyard cactus patch, but camphor trees were alien to her.
She moved to stand to inspect her surroundings, but staggered painfully when her legs turned to jelly beneath her. She sucked in a quiet gasp, crumpling back down to the forest floor as her limbs shivered beneath her. Her eyebrows twitched together lightly in moderate expression (she'd always had a poker face, never avidly showing expression ) in annoyance at the weakness of her arms. Oh God.
Her arms.
The panic hit her again full-throttle, the memory of the defabrication and remolding of her body sending hysteric attacks wreaking her body as she struggled to control her hyperventilating breath. Slowly, tensely, she lowered her eyes to see what her arms looked like now- if they even looked like arms. Images flashed in her head of rotting flesh stuck on melting bone, frozen tendons barely functioning to keep her upright, but she shook them off immediately. She had trained herself in (albeit very crude and unprofessional ) field stitches and burn wounds. Blacking out didn't cause one to simultaneously combust from the inside out and rot flesh. The most dangerous injury she could've gotten was a deep gash that could easily and harmlessly be mended by a needle and some fishing wire.
Not counting the fact she had neither, anyways.
She bit down on her lip as her vision lowered despite her mind screaming at her not to look, flinching when she clamped down a bit too harshly as a coppery substance stained her mouth. Her horrors were put to a halt when her eyes met the black, brittle ink characters that were encrusted on her limbs. Confusion outweighed worry, the strokes of the characters like a hypnotic transmission that hit a dull thud as her brain failed to process what they meant.
Kanji? Hiragana? Mandarin or some sort of Vietnamese I don't know?
Her thoughts were pulled into a loop by the hieroglyphic markings that traveled up and down her arms, legs, hands, and feet. She was dumbstruck as to why they were on her. Her sister hadn't tried painting on her recently, and she was pretty sure that there was no religion in her area that required weird voodoo Asian characters to partake in a ritual out in the forest. They were a bit old from the way the ink had yet to fully dry on her skin. Looking downwards, her eyes halted on a trail of ink markings that she'd landed on, leading up to a large, oddly perfectly round rock that she assumed she'd fallen from in the first place. Confused and shaken, she hazardously stumbled to stand, her wobbly ink-splattered legs trembling with exhaustion even though she did not recall running to push herself that badly.
Then she saw them.
Seven, horribly red, mangled bodies. Sickness was thrown back into her mind like a festering, bubbling cauldron at the sight of the corpses. Their faces were twisted into agony and horror, bloody blisters and buboes like warts upon their blistered and boiled skin flaking off into the wind, revealing the pink, fleshy remains underneath. The familiar black markings trailed their tale of death to right in front of the corpses, connecting themselves to where she guessed their hands had once been. She retched at the once-were people, the scent of decay and fire debris hitting her full-force as somewhat of an awakening call that told her she needed to get out of there. Now.
With as much grace as that of an emu had, she scrambled clumsily away from the sight of death, her inflamed legs finding their bones once more as she fled.
Seven weeks. It felt like seven weeks as she trudged along. She'd broken- or dislocated, she couldn't tell through the numbness anymore- her right and dominant arm, now slinging uselessly by her side. It couldn't have been seven weeks since she'd gotten lost, but it was all the same in her weary mind. She was broken and tired from stumbling along in the ever-growing masses of muddy roads, her brown sandals and feet coated seven shades darker by the mud and bark splinters on her feet. Seven seems to be the lucky- favored number. She spitefully thought, Seven bodies, seven weeks, about seven actual hours of hell. Seventy minutes of this heaven-forsaken rain. A sense of direction she had not. A sense of time, however, was something she prided herself on. She loved the rain as it cooled down her steaming head, not minding the freezing sogginess that it brought to her clothes. It helped her think. Thinking lead to realization, and realization, in her case, lead to feelings of dread. She'd been wandering aimlessly for seven hours. And despite however small the forest was for- well, a forest, she most certainly knew that it was not big enough to make her meander for seven hours without finding a single sign of human life besides the horribly managed and downtrodden dirt road that she most certainly did not recognize. The possibilities were limited, but all of them were not bringing any semblance of ease to her mind. She could only come up with two somewhat plausible explanations for the why and how she had ended up in, what she concluded, was foreign land.
The first part of the initial story was the most plausible. She lived in the northern DMV area, a well-known hotpot for human trafficking. It was likely that a trader had spotted her in the woods and took her down with ease- much to her chagrin- and she'd been transported in some discreet way in what she would guess was a foreign plane, since the camphor trees she'd noticed weren't a popular garden tree and weren't indigenous to north America. The second part was a bit more odd. Somewhere along the way, their plane was probably shot out of the sky in some way by engine failure or the like, and she'd landed in some uncivilized part of the world where the inhabitants decided she'd make a nice offering- if the voodoo improbability was to be believe. And, by some idiocy or unaccountable failure, they wound up dying in the end.
That, or she was transported to another world for reasons unknown.
Yeah, not likely.
She almost scoffed at the preposterous notion and swatted it away with a mental slap! That was the stuff of legends and fan-fictions, not reality. Yet, she amused the idea in her head, either to distract her from the throbbing pain in her body or of slow mania taking hold in the back of her mind, she didn't care anymore. She prayed, that, if, she was ever to warp into an alternate world, it'd be one like 'Sukitte Ii na yo.'
It would be better than this lonely wasteland, that was for sure. Her vision throbbed, black burning in and out of her already flat tunnel-vision. She groaned weakly as her blood left her head, succumbing to fatigue as she passed.
"Kanojo wa sugu ni mewosamasudesho. Watashitachi ga konojo ni teikyo shita kea notame ni nagaku tsuzdzuku koto wa arimasen."
She groaned feverishly, the weight of unconsciousness slowly leaving her heavy head, the fever dispersing slowly as she felt her cheeks burning lightly. She tried to breath, but what felt like cobwebs blockaded her throat and she erupting into a fit of smoker's coughs. As she quickly sat herself up and brought a hand to cover her mouth at her hacks, a collection of startled rustles and shocked murmurs chorused in her ears. Despite her lack of vision with her eye closed tightly shut, she felt well enough to be annoyed. Judging by the supreme comfort of the mattress underneath her, she guessed that she was in a hospital. After a moment of silence, someone shuffled over to her side and gently patted the area just under the center of her collarbone- that was much too close to the North Pole, thank you- in a motion that helped her clear most of the clustered mucus in her throat. Before she could recognize the strangeness as to why her arm didn't feel like utter crap due to an IV- they always stick at least one needle into her, what was up with the lack of one?- the image portrayed before her newly opened eyes told her something she'd been denying.
Well, Toto, we aren't in Kansas anymore...Seven- again?- alien faces stared at her. They were distinctly not American. Or particularly normal, for that matter. They dressed in strange garbs that she couldn't properly claim to be the norm for any culture or continent that she knew of -and darn it, geography was so easy. Why didn't she recognize these people?- much less with the stares they were giving her. They were all plain looking, four men and three women. The man beside her had deep, dark black hair and hazel eyes filled with concern and his fair face was contorted into somewhat of a pout on his full lips as he eyed her worriedly. Stupid guy was prettier than even her, unfairly so. The other two were much more intimidating, of larger build and grimmer faces, almost twins in their short-shaved brown hair and frowning mouths. The three women were all huddled around the final man, the one standing in her of him with crossed arms and a scowl to accompany her short, wavy hair and- were her eyes black?- narrowed eyes. The other tow flanked the man in the middle's sides, looking vaguely alike to one in the front beside their lighter shade of hair. The guarded man was smiling- ha- at her, his hair falling flat on a headband splayed across his forehead, white hair staining the ends of his locks and peppering the beard on his chin. She leered at them disbelievingly, eyes settling shakily on the forehead protectors that screamed Naruto. Did she land in Japan? Was the plane she was in headed to some seedy place like Singapore? What part of Japan had she crashed onto? Wait- did she even see an airplane? She was thinking clearly now, and the gears in her head twisted and turned at the sight of the ninja- no, cosplayers,- she reminded herself. Despite the mumbo-jumbo objections spewing from the black-haired girl as the salt and pepper haired man stepped towards her, he merely smiled warmly and progressed forwards, bending down and kneeling in front of the wary girl.
She resisted the urge to push away the pretty boy's hand that was lingering onto her for way too long, as well as puke on the man's face. Such things were often frowned upon, despite her apathy on the matter, and she felt he would answer questions much more willingly without puke on his face. His face was kind and warm as he silently studied her as she mirrored the action.
"Hajimemashite. Watashinonamaeha Hisen, anata wa namae nanidesu ka?" He asked her, brow flinching in professional analysis at the face of utter confusion on her face. She gave a shuddering breath, reeling back all crazed questions to focus on his question because those questions needed answers. Well, if she could understand those answers, anyways. Hajimemashite. It meant 'Nice to meet you,' she knew that much. Watashi and what sounded like 'namae' conjoined together probably meant that 'I am' and then Hisen. She had no clue what that meant. Was it his name? Ah, yep. That makes sense. So his name's Hisen... not a Naruto character I know, at least. Good sign to know that I can at least confirm that I'm slightly crazy for thinking I played universal leap frog and landed in Naruto. She mentally affirmed, nodding slightly and making Hisen twitch lightly, unnoticed by her. He was watching her intently.
Nani meant 'what' and namae was already a known, anata meant 'darling' for what she could remember of it- the heck was he calling her darling for??- and desu. Desu meant something personal, and 'ka' meant a question. Was he asking her who she was? She almost wanted to laugh. She couldn't very well say 'My name's Iza, I'm totally a foreigner lol and I have no idea why you're calling me 'darling'' now, could she? He could , for all she knew, be part of the yakuza with his oddly realistically armored and weapon-wearing comrades. She needed a name. Something that was unusual and a bit unpractical to make him think that she was the daughter of some poor farmer that had no idea of what normal or noble names sounded like. Something as seedy as her situation. Ah! Bingo... "W-watashi wa... Kakonoshi desu." The words stumbled out as clumsily and awkwardly as an introvert being the star role in a big play, but the accent associated with Japanese speech didn't leave her voice. His face didn't change throughout the whole ordeal, unnaturally neutral even though his black-haired subordinate in the back of the room practically burned a hole of hatred in her forehead. Why Kakonoshi? She had no real idea, but it bore some resemblance to Kakashi Hatake from Naruto's name, and the whole cosplay getup was making her head fill uncomfortably with everything Japanese and anime related things. So, why not? "N-nihongo o amari hanasanai." She explained to them as best she could with her narrow vocabulary, hopefully conveying the message that, in simplicity, she had and was going to have no clue what they were going to say to her three fourths of the time they said something to her. This provoked a chain reaction of shock to hostility coming from the black-haired enigma herself. A slew of words flung out of her mouth along with the dramatic waving of arms along with an accusatory finger pointed in her direction. But amidst her babble, one word was thrown around like an old rag doll.
Shinobi.
Now, despite her perceptiveness, Iza had a logical mind. However, that logical mind was not acquitted with the same witty intelligence that the greatest comedians and quoted-froms had, no was she a math wiz who sped through school like it was a walk through the park. No, despite her social awkwardness, her talents did not lie in the impressive feats that made people like Albert Einstein or Thomas Jefferson famous. Her ability was to call out bull, and read the people around her. And her instincts were telling her that they were not from her world. Everything had been pointing in the direction that she didn't want to consider, but now she had to face the facts.
She was in the Naruto world.
And now, from the way their eyes pierced into her warily, and the same girl outwardly voiced her apparent dislike towards her, it was obvious that they thought she was a ninja. An enemy ninja. Her stomach dropped immediately, nervousness running rampant like rats in her abdomen. Enemy ninja were killed more often than not in Naruto, Zabuza and even the innocent Haku's death in the Land of Waves arc in the series.
Was she really going to die so quickly?
Much to Iza's relief, the white-tipped masculine figure stood and gave the girl- kunoichi- a hard look. His voice boomed out in a tone that commanded obedience, but despite his seemingly friendly intentions to Iza, she was sent into a panic attack. Her relationship with fully grown men was never fine and dandy in her life, and issues spiked for her when a man raised his voice. Those issues came in the form of her heart that began racing in place, her blood pounding and sounding loudly through her ears. All thoughts flew out of her head as fear overtook her blank, tired eyes. Her hands began to sweat, her pupils dilate and breath hitch. She staggered backwards, scooching back on the bed till she hit a wall. Her stomach clenched and knotted, her fingers became as stiff as daggers as she hyperventilated, her nails digging angry red crescents onto her calves as she curled upon herself. Images, bad, bad images reared their ugly heads as she choked on air.
A raised hand in the air, the whistle as it roared dow- crying in the night, gross sobs and an uncaring figure walked away. Pain, pain, painpainpainpainpaI- The countertop rattles, bolts are borne as they're uprooted in his rage- huddled together. Crying. Hiding behind a corner. Where's mom? She's there. Yelling, screaming- he's coming. Oh God, he's cominghescominghescominghescomInGnO!
A cry of indignation arose from the shinobi next to her that silenced the warring shouts of the other ninja, a hushed silence impregnating the air as the pretty shinobi carefully ventured close to her. She flinched harshly when his soft hand petted her gently on the head, his warmth encompassing her shriveled frame as he cooed meaningless comforts into her ear. She kept as stiff as a tree even as his words calmed her pounding heart, reminding herself that he was a man, not a friend. Men were the bane of her existence, and she suddenly found herself despising them for it. She felt her sickness rising up in her throats and willed it and the headache away, but bike still stung the back of her throat.
She was so weak.
They conversed with each other in much lower volumes, but the animosity that some of the shinobi and kunoichi felt for her still lingered in their speech. As time passed, she became increasingly embarrassed that she was being cuddled to calmness by a teen not much older than her- perhaps a six year distance. Still, the peppered man who appeared to be in charge made it clear that she was not to be harmed.
She was pretty sure he called her a child at some point, too.
"To Live, One Must Survive First."
To all reading, I am basing most of this book off of what I feel that I would do in these situations, so perhaps, in a way, in this book you get to peek at how my mind works and get to know more personal things about me if you're really perceptive. Interesting, huh?
Also, Hisen is an actual canon character from Naruto. If you search him up, you'll get an early idea of where exactly in the timeline our main character is!
Another note, Hisen didn't call her 'darling' XD it was mistranslated on her part, because it was actually a grammatical statement in questioning her.
