Disillusioned

Chapter 3: A questionable reality

E/N: Longer chapter this time. The panic scenario is remembered in vivid detail, you see.

Please excuse the language; it wasn't exactly my idea to write it, but I want to portray her personality as closely as possible.

"Are you fucking kidding me?!"

I grab the Geiger counter out of his hand and hold it to my skin, and it clicks happily away. I sort of turn off, staring at it as the little digital display pumps numbers at me, the clicking far too rapid.

I've no idea how much is too much radiation, but I could guess I had way too much.

"I'm going to need some figures, and then we'll investigate this closer. You might be okay."

"I damn well better be!" I tug a little more on my hair, and there goes some more, my beautifully-maintained locks falling apart thanks to Idiot-faced Idiot. I pause. "Wait, shouldn't I like, call the hospital?"

Trench Idiot-faced Idiot scowls at me, unimpressed by the suggestion. "No point. We're nowhere near a nuclear power station; no one will believe you've got gamma poisoning, and if they did, they probably won't have the medicine or machinery to treat you. Plus, there's only 50% chance at best even with all of that. If you want to spend your time doing that, go ahead."

I nearly throw the Geiger counter at him, but he might need it. "IT'S YOUR FUCKING FAULT!"

"Right." He doesn't deny it, just looks at me with the same unimpressed flat expression, like there's something obvious I'm missing. "I'll show you what the error is and why Silver here turned up in your bedroom. Come with me, I'll sort this all out."

"Wait… You can actually sort this out?" I look at him, even my radiation-addled brain calling bullshit. No one can cure radiation. It's not a virus.

He rolls his eyes. "I can pull someone out of a fantasy world into your bedroom, and create enough radiation to kill you as a mere side effect. Why can't I get rid of that radiation?"

"It's not physically possible to remove radiation. It's not an infection that a pill can deal with, it's not an infection, it's a mutation," I insist, breathing speeding up as I pull another clump of hair out. My carefully-conditioned, carefully-maintained hair is falling apart. It's one of the things I was proud of, and…

"Amy, calm down," he grabs me, spinning me around and pushing me onto the bed.

One Scarf Man looks on, looking alert and highly confused. I scowl at Trench Coated Idiot. "Don't tell me that. Can you stick my hair back on?"

"Yes, maybe, just come with me before you do any more damage," he says sighing. "Come on, we don't have much time."

I sit up, scowling. "Fine, but if I lose more hair, I'm going to…"

"Before you threaten me, figure out if it's my fault first." Trench Coat Idiot starts pocketing his devices, still waving around the Geiger counter carefully.

I hadn't noticed him taking it out of my hand. He has weird sets of abilities. Or my brain is too irradiated to be observant.

"Now, I'm going to fix all of this," he says, confidently. "You just get ready to go on a trip."

"Wait… a trip where?" I ask him suspiciously.

He grins, carefree as always. "To my place, and then, to the world of Naruto."

My reaction to that was first disbelief, then analysis; if Cosplayer was no cosplayer, and was pulled from Naruto into reality, then it served that Trench could send someone back.

Then I started to pack. Forget food and drink; clothing, mobile phone, chargers, all into a rucksack I hadn't used since I was little. While I was packing, Trench started running a device all over, looking like he was taking a 3D map of the room, judging from how he was shoving it into the corners and around every edge in sight.

I grabbed all the stuff I thought I would need – suntan lotion (in case I Suna'd), my laptop, external hard drive with all my anime downloads on it – in my head, I started working out everything I would need, starting from head downwards to shoes, and I was pretty much ready.

"Good to go?"

"Ready!" I grinned, then realised what was still happening. "Wait, why will sending me to Naruto fix things?"

He explains simply, yet it comes off as such an intriguing answer. "There's no nuclear radiation in the world of Naruto. Remember, the creator was born in Japan, a country that has suffered the affects. If he added it in, there'd be a severe detriment to sales and public opinion. So, there's no such thing as nuclear radiation in Naruto."

I hummed thoughtfully. "Besides that… I guess nuclear radiation is kind of pointless as a jutsu."

He nods, tucking away his counter. "Yeah. It's essentially the same as a slow poison, maybe a contagious disease, but ultimately it's too slow to use in battle, and too hard to obtain and infect if you're going for a covert kill."

I slip my bag onto my shoulders, considering my response – missing parts of a fictional universe simply because the author never imagined it. Deep stuff. "Yeah, I guess…" A thought struck me as I grab my house key and I stare at it for a moment. "Wait, what's going to happen to my father?"

I look up at him to see his response. He doesn't look guilty, just thoughtful. "Your father? Oh, your parents, yes, chances are we won't have to tell anyone. If I send you to the Narutoverse, the radiation will vanish, and I just transfer you back.

"Then all that's left is to send your room there… if I can get the equipment set up in time. All the stuff in your room is probably radioactive, after all," he waves his hands, gesturing somewhat erratically to make his points, "but it's only a metastable nuclear state, not an active leak of gamma radiation, so I would expect anyone else to be fine. It'd be a significantly above a background dosage for your neighbours, but they wouldn't have reached a deadly stage as quickly as you did what with two walls and several metres of air in the way. Their exposure is far smaller, so it'll be a problem for them in a far greater period of time. That said," he looks thoughtful, "we do obviously need to get them to clean this area."

"You tend to ramble."

"I overthink things. Well, I say overthink, I analyse things very heavily."

"But I will be fine, right?" I ask him,

"Don't worry," he assures me, smiling. "I'd be doing the exact same thing for me in your position. And it's far quicker than going to the doctor. Plus, I have backup plans."

"Right." I nod at him, turning away as a worried frown forms. He didn't say yes, but he's doing the best he can. Am I comfortable with that?

I roll my eyes. Well… what other options are there?

He grins. "Let's go, then."

His house is as normal as they come on the outside, same as every other house in the street, until you get closer. The front door doesn't have a lock. Or a handle.

As soon as we get close, it unlocks, almost like a car.

"The Bluetooth on my phone unlocks the door," he explains, stepping inside and pressing some buttons on a little number pad. Around the number pad is scuffed-off paint marks where he cut at the wall to install it, and he hasn't bothered painting around it. I guess he's focused on the job more than his environment.

"Okay, we're good. The machine that brought this guy here is in the room on the left."

I look inside that room and frown. Curtains closed, inside is what looked like a computer setup with a few pieces of gym equipment and slightly off-kilter shelves hurriedly put in to accommodate things. Wires are everywhere, but tucked out of the way, and in the centre of the room, there's this huge rack of black boxes and wires on wheels. "What's that?"

He's pulling off his coat and shoes, gesturing in for Silver. "It's a home-made Tesla Powerwall. Basically, a giant battery for your house. On the off chance I blow up something, this'll keep everything running."

"Do you blow up things often?" I ask, and I will deny my eyes lit up at the idea. I'm not exactly fond of explosions… at least, not the ones at close range.

"No one plans for a war. They plan to restore peace."

That… doesn't answer my question, Spikey Hair. It sounds all wise and shit, but there's really nothing there that actually helps. I think he's just muddling through all of this.

"Now, see this screen here?"

It was a picture of Silver, with Japanese all around it, looks like a profile with history and stuff (can't read any of it though), and on the left was a black window with lines of text, words coloured in a weird fashion.

He's tapping on the multi-coloured part.

"If x equals float dot infinite…" It's computer code, so I hastily abandon my attempts to read it.

He's still tapping at a certain part, though. I humour him and try to read it. "So, x equals that big function there. Okay."

"Put simply, that x was equal to this, here."

He pulls up a console window. "This is what I expected, and what I got."

"Activation successful. Subject acquired at level 1 (t = 5, q = 21.2). EMG shutdown process in five seconds," I read, looking highly puzzled, but expecting there to be a point to all this. "Reported destination is x=524125.3500002, y=2444632.7310000…"

"That x setting was off. It should have been 524125.35. Without the 2 at the end," he tells me flatly. "There was a rounding error."

I look at him with as much disdain as I can muster. "You are kidding me. I'm dying of radiation poisoning because you rounded a number wrong?"

He rolls his eyes. "No, I rounded up fine, the computer rounded up wrong. It's like, divide 1 by 9, you get 0.1 recursive. Multiply that by 9, you get 0.9 recursive, not 1.0. It's a really tiny error, but makes a big difference. Well, this error was a bit larger than that example, but…"

I'm still not sure how to handle this idiocy. "So a millionth of a number was off by two and he appeared next to me?"

He nods, slowly. "And if it makes you feel better, I wasn't impressed either. In fact all I wasn't even… eh, never mind. Let's get you set up."

"You're not going to spawn me inside a bush or something are you?"

"You're not a forest lover?" He quips. "You don't like to eat your greens?"

"Oi." I scowl at his humour, flipping off my rucksack. I'm not in the mood – my headache has gotten worse and I'm starting to feel really cold. "Just hurry up, I'm starting to get that fever you were talking about."

"Okay. Just sit… anywhere but here, and I'll work on it."

Silver doesn't look confused anymore. He looks like he's gotten so lost that he no longer cares about what's transpiring at all, and he's just patiently waiting to wake up. Just like me, I guess. I flop down onto a nearby sofa. Surprisingly comfortable.

Two minutes pass, and I grow bored of watching him frantically typing more coloured text in. "Do you have wifi?"

"No, it interferes with the equipment. Hold on, I'll see if I can activate it."

"How long are you going to be doing this?"

"No idea." He runs his hand through his hair, looking tired. "An hour? Five hours? I'm reverting a process that didn't exactly go right when I thought it would. I'm going to have to change the entire floating point model to something more precise, and I have to switch the entire universe around."

"And that's big?" I look over the Powerwall. It's like a metre cubed in distance, looks like it really could power a house. Looks like a lot of laptop batteries, actually.

Oddly, there's not much by way of unrecognised Big Machinery. There's no visible Gateway to Alternate Reality, and no sign of Loki's Tesseract or pentagrams scrawled in blood. I expected something more dramatic to rip a hole in reality – not a single guy with his home computers and a bit of flair.

Well, he hadn't exactly set up any portal equipment in my house either. Maybe the entrance required just as little. Made sense.

"Yes, it's kinda big." He pauses for thought, and then waves his hand dismissively. "Well, not big as in, nothing like some things I've done, but as far as potential error and the catastrophes that it would cause… yes, it's big." He exhales deeply, clicking the mouse with a swish of his hand. "Okay, wifi's up, the password is… eh, just gimme your phone."

I hand it to him, still thinking things over while absently watching him tap away. As long as he doesn't get on my tumblr, he shouldn't think I'm weird.

"You're weird."

God damn it.

He's sitting there. I just realised that the tapping had stopped a while ago. He's just looking at things, slowly scrolling, and my breath hitches as I realise in every single line, a single character out would mean I could be put in the wrong place. And this is the moment he checks his work.

A few times up until now, he's offered me tea and made himself some – yes, like the British we were – but he's never really moved otherwise, just sitting there typing.

Silver has actually gone to sleep in the other couch, as bored as I was, but apparently not confident enough to disturb either of us for chitchat. I find it odd that he did. He's not Kakashi, he's not strong or has a personality like him, but no one else in the Naruto world looks like him.

Is it Kakashi's son? Did he have a son? I use the wifi to check, but there's no sign of it. Not even that woman with the eye-mind… mind eye… thing… she never turned up later.

Maybe he was going to have a kid? If that was the case, then this couldn't be the Naruto creator's world. The guy who created Naruto… what's his name, Kishimoto? He's already finished thinking about his universe, if I was following Trench's reasoning.

Actually, he wasn't wearing a trench coat any more. Under the trench coat he apparently was just wearing a spiral-blue tie-dye t-shirt and jogging bottoms. He wasn't even that old, he looked to be in his twenties. Not exactly muscular, but then, computer guys don't tend to be, but he wasn't overweight.

Kinda liked the t-shirt, to be honest, but I wanted a lab coat. Damn you, conform to my expectations!

Now looking at Silver, taking into account my easy over-powering earlier and his mask within easy reaching distance, it was tempting to reveal his face… wait a minute. Maybe because chakra didn't exist in our universe, (at least, not like Narutoverse's chakra), that was why he was underpowered? He appeared here with no chakra?

It seemed that way, but there was that technique he did overnight. Was it some sort of illusion? No… there was no chakra in my brain for him to trick, plus I had walked out of the room while he was doing it, and he didn't exactly follow me.

It had gone, though. The smell had faded, from what my poor hangover/irradiated/dumbass brain could remember. So what had he done?

I don't suppose I could ask him. I didn't want to lose the opportunity to pull off the mask by waking him up, plus my Japanese was… yeah.

I've never seen Kakashi wear a scarf around his head, though. What happened to his forehead protector? When he was too young to have a forehead protector, he was also too young to have the Sharingan, so there'd be no point covering it with such ferocity.

Plus, he became Chuunin at six or something, and this kid was about my age. The troublesome age of thirteen, definitely a traumatic experience – the age where you get ripped from your universe and shoved into another universe, one where everyone speaks some weird language.

Come to think of it, he spoke Japanese – I'd be going somewhere everyone spoke Japanese too. Same boat as him, everyone speaking gibberish.

I had better return here quickly, or I'll have shinobi on my butt demanding my name and purpose and I wouldn't have a clue how to answer. Much less what to answer. 'I'm from another universe and you're all fictional' will go down about as well as a helium balloon.

"Okkkkayyy…" Computer Mad Scientist Weirdo Ruining My Life says slowly, "I think I got it."

I need to rework the name for him. Something catchier and more offensive. I eye him suspiciously. "So I'm not gonna appear in a bush?"

"Probably not," he reassures me.

"Probably?" I echo, highly unimpressed.

"It's very, very, very unlikely, but I never call anything impossible."

One of those people, huh. Silver is stirring as I'm talking. "Before I go, who is this person?"

Life Ruiner analyses him. "Oh, this is a character from the Narutoverse, or rather, from a particular branch of it. I originally brought him out the universe to explain something to him and assign a um… mission of sorts. But since you going back is time-critical, you're going first."

"And if it breaks?" I ask him.

He shrugs. "You're already dying slowly. What's the worst that can happen?"

"I die with even more pain than right now?" I didn't feel a lot of pain, surprisingly. Maybe because the damage was mostly internal – gamma radiation was the most penetrating which meant it could pass right through you or get absorbed at any part of your insides. But I didn't like his casual attitude.

"You shouldn't really be in pain," he says concernedly, and then the concern vanishes back to dismissive. "But it's irrelevant since I don't have any painkillers and we're just about ready to go anyway."

"What happens if you get radiation sickness from being in my room?"

He shrugs again. "Don't worry about me, there's plenty of room in my head for that."

I blink at him. First time I've seen someone dismiss their own health like that. This guy seems very… ahead of things. Like he was already done with the issue two seconds after I've raised it; he'd already considered it, analysed it, and finished dwelling on it, way before I even brought it up.

So, the question is, how does his machine work?

In movies they have giant machinery, a huge control panel of levers... He did have like two screens, but...

"How is the transfer going to work?"

"I wire myself up to a neural activity scanner, go to sleep, and the program should access my memory of you, calculate everything needed to pull you into the Naruto world, and transfer you. You shouldn't have to move."

I pause. "Wait, your brain is used as part of this?"

"Not all of it, but yes. To make certain we can communicate I'm going to have to track your neural activity in the sixth dimension."

"What's that mean? The sixth dimension?"

He nods quickly. "Yes, the fifth is more of a connection to the sixth, they're both infinitesimally small. Once I map your identity it'll be no problem for the computer to find you in this world."

"And then?"

"No idea what it looks or feels like to be transferred. You'll have to ask Silver." We both glance over at the snoozing mini-Kakashi. "But time is short. I'll put you to sleep during the transfer as well, should be easy since you're sick. We can talk more about this then."

He reached down under the desk and bought out a metal cage that was vaguely helmet-shaped. Outside it were several wires connected up to points around the brain, and bare cables were everywhere. Frankly, it looked like very shoddy workmanship.

Spikey Hair Life Ruiner hands me the helmet-cage. "I'll wire you up and see what I can do."

I try putting it on, but it slips everywhere and all the points are actually kinda irritating on my scalp... not that the tips are sharp, but it's shaped like an upwards-down T, with flat exposed copper... the polished metal and lack of friction makes my hair feel greasy.

He takes over after a few seconds, forcing the helmet down and making each copper pole painfully tight on my head. I glare and wince with each adjustment. "Ow… And how does it track me?"

Spikey Hair raises an eyebrow. "The explanation to that is fancy, complicated, and I plan to publish my research later, so I'm not saying. Basically, you ever watched The Matrix?"

"Yep." I nod, instantly raising my sceptical level fify points. Who hasn't seen it. It's pretty iconic. Plus, it was based of the anime Ghost in the Shell. But I call BS on whatever he says next…

He grins. "It's like that pill, except you don't have to swallow a mirror."

Then the 'fancy' stuff begins. Besides the helmet, I haven't seen any more equipment, but in reality, there's lots of little black boxes and exposed circuits everywhere around the room, none of them much bigger than a couple of inches. He goes to each one, pressing buttons, plugging the wires in, going back to the computer between each one.

I listen as he half-explains what he's doing, more like thinking out loud than actually telling me. "Tracker program, run… hmm, sensor miscalibration. Of course, you're not me, it'll need adjustments. I'll have to override all those parameters back to dubious, delete all the temp files… or switch to second profile, but I don't have a profile system yet…"

And back into the code he goes, before fifteen minutes pass while I idly use my phone to check my tumblr, and snort at the phandom and other fanclubs I have been dragged into kicking and screaming… I mean joined.

There is tumblr weirdness, then there is the weirdness of the Hetalia fandom.

"Alright, it does seem to show as non-configured now. Let's see, I'll just profile it Amy, and I'll have to set up a subconscious long-term memory storage for your backstory on a delay timer, backslide the memory access by a few days…"

There he goes again. He starts sounding like he finished something, and then he trails off while going into something else. It's like there's a giant list he's going through and he can only see one at a time.

My ability to understand it is a bit… well, lacking. He jams terms together like Dr Who; one second you're in perfect clarity, everything makes sense, the next it's all two-way biological metacrisis extenuated by a regeneration subreplication, the Doctor's doing something clever again and you just go along with it.

The clicking of the keyboard stops and he sighs. "Okay, ready to go."

"Finally," I sigh back, closing the tabs.

He fixes me with a hard look, but with his explosive hairstyle, much of the stern emphasis is lost. "We're on a tight schedule, Amy. Excluding your apparent death at some point soon, I'm not a hundred percent sure I can get everything set up for you in time." He gestures at the sleeping silver-haired boy. "I always planned for Silver to get here and we'll have all the time in the world to get things explained to him and send him back. Right now, I'm surprised he's sleeping."

"What makes you say that?"

"He just came from the Narutoverse, a variant where Naruto loses."

"He loses?"

"Things develop differently."

"You're not explaining things. In the real Narutoverse, he wins."

"You're not going into the Narutoverse. I mean, not the canon one."

"Where am I going?"

He grins again, that happy 'I'm a genius, and this will confuse you' look. "You're basically going into a world that's within my head. My subconscious runs your entire universe."

I blink at him. "How the hell does that work? A universe can't fit inside your head!"

"No, but imagination is exponential. If you imagine your imagination is stronger, and you believe that right to a subconscious level, it will actually get stronger. I can't consciously retain all of it, of course, but I don't need to.

"Look at it this way: your eyes, both of them, are about six hundred megapixels each. They work at about twenty-four frames per second, or going up to two hundred for some people in the army. That's an absolutely massive amount of data, but you still process it without even thinking about what you're seeing. Your ability to process an environment is mostly subconscious; only new things will require conscious effort."

"I… see?" I don't get it at all, but I'll act like I do. I try to dumb it down to real logic. "So your subconscious is basically super-powerful… mine too? And you basically tell your brain what to think?"

He nods, smiling in that scientist-explaining-breakthrough way. "Pretty much. What happens when you flood your brain with information? Say," he waves his hand vaguely, "you binge on a series."

"I dream a bit of that series…" I'm kinda seeing what he's getting at. "And I wander about in a daze for a while. Sometimes."

He nods again, rapidly. "It's because if you flood your conscious, your subconscious handles it. You can even force things down to a bodily level, like some martial artists do. That's why kung fu has this big 'meditation' thing; if your subconscious is thinking about something else, the kung fu-y thought process can't immerse down further, so you have to clear your mind. The disconnect between reality and fantasy is negated for a good part, which is why you get a daze while your brain recalibrates and gets back on track."

I nod, smiling as I finally understand. It does explain things I had wondered about. "I get it."

He nods a third time, eyes drifting afar. "The subconscious is ridiculously powerful. It's incredibly taxing on a computer to recognise objects in a single image for an eight-megapixel camera, yet your brain processes far more instantly. It's because of the sixth dimension, which contains your reality."

"My reality?" I repeat dubiously.

"Everyone sees people as only parts of who they are. If you go around hugging people while internally hating it, the general opinion is that you are really a touchy-feely person, but it's not true. The only place the truth is within your mind…" he taps his head, "your reality. Insanity comes when your reality doesn't match up enough with other people's; you fall out of sync and can't perform normally. When you overload your brain with an imaginative reality, say bingeing from earlier, the universes overlap and you confuse yourself."

I nod, realising what he's getting at. "That's why there's so many weirdoes who try doing Naruto hand seals in public."

"Exactly. They watch too much and traits carry over. But!" He holds up a finger to pause. "We obviously still remember the entire universe. You can see that in any anime 'who versus who' combo; people are certain one can beat the other. It's hard to merge the universe, say One Piece's Haki and Naruto's chakra; could a genjutsu affect someone who had Haki? Etcetera. The realities don't mix well because the core component, the power, the reason behind the story, is inherently different."

I frown. "But One Piece is about finding the one piece."

He shakes his head. "No, it's about getting strong enough to find it. And how do you do that? Haki. Even Lee has to use chakra to become a shinobi, when he's got a damaged chakra system."

"Fair enough." I nod, drinking it in.

"Basically, I have in my head," Tap tap, "several stories and universes. I'm going to insert you into my Naruto world, and then pull you out."

I nod again. "Right, but what if you can't pull me out?"

Mad Hair frowns. "If I can put you in, it stands that I can pull you back out. Frankly, I was expecting the pulling out not to work; it's more difficult. The reason I'm going to track your signal is so I can find you in there; not that I won't know where you're going, but you'll be moving."

"Won't I be a slave to your will? If I'm in your head, I mean."

He gets that explaining-breakthrough passionate look in his eyes again. "No, because it's subconscious, not conscious. The thing that runs my universe, the core element, is the characters themselves – it's character-driven. Unlike plot-driven stories, where the characters are slaves to some higher goal and the environment is developed or altered, along with their personalities, to match the plot, so they have to follow the will of the creator, my one is completely character-driven."

A story that runs itself by the will of the characters? I must have a very funky expression on my face right now. "Then how do you know what's going to happen?"

"I don't," he says simply. "But once you're in there, when I'm asleep and my conscious is offline for the most part, the next logical thing I will see is you appearing in that universe. At that point, it will be difficult to communicate with you, but that shouldn't be necessary. Just stay where you are and I'll see about pulling you back out."

He rolls his eyes. "Obviously, if you move from there, don't worry, it's my universe and I can still track you," he gestures to the helmet, "which is what this is for, so I get your signature, but chances are it won't take long. I pulled Silver out by part of his chakra makeup; his design is to cross dimensions, so while he was doing that, I reached for the shallowest chakra signature."

"Okay."

"Good. Watch this screen, I'll start the tracker program."

I watch, as images show up on the screen, one after the other. It seems entirely random; flowers, icons, pictures, blocks of text… I ignore all that and just look at the pictures.

Pretty pictures.

The urge to say something sarcastic is overwhelming, but then I feel it.

A sort of dull ache… except it's not an ache, it's more like a presence, like a ball of gas that's started pushing onto my side, yet going inside me. Like walking through hot air, and feeling yourself heat up, except it's pushing on the inside.

It's hard to describe, alright!?

The feeling gets stronger, but I try to let it happen, letting it push across. Nothing happens when it crosses my vision or my head; of course, I had a headache, so I wouldn't detect anything subtle anyway… but it's really odd feeling it.

I mostly feel cold from the fever, to be honest, but this presence doesn't really have any heat or cold… it's just there, easily sensed as some foreign thing. It doesn't feel wrong, it just… eh.

I give up on explanations and focus on the pictures, ignoring the growing feeling of intrusion.

"Isolation 98%... Isolation complete." The text shows. "Setting up mental link."

Now that is different. Instead my head feels like it's being run over with a ray; like sunlight on your skin but without the burning factor. My headache begins to wobble all over the place – getting worse, better, suddenly much worse, then suddenly gone…

…and back. This must be what brain surgery feels like.

A new line of text appears. "Brain surgeon (p=60)"

I blink at it. "Wait, this is reading my thoughts?"

"Saying: read book (p=52), emotions: shock (p=32), confusion (p=31)"

Mad Hair nods. "It's tracking your brain's activity, mapping what you think here into the other dimensions."

"Heard (C1 name = Mad (p=12)): Track (p=65), animal activity (p=53), compass (p=25), far away (p=15), emotions: bored (p=50), excited (p=27)"

"What is this p stuff?"

"It's probability, percentage," Spikey explains quickly, running his hand through his hair.

I raise my eyebrow at it. "How long will this take?"

"Saying: Long bake (p=26), emotions: impatience (p=72)"

"No idea, for me it took nearly a week until it could actually read everything properly," he explains, again dismissive.

"Great," I sigh, lying down awkwardly trying.

"Saying: great (p=94), emotions: heavy sarcasm (p=60), impatience (p=89)"

"No worries; it shouldn't take as long for you." He rolls his eyes again. "It has my data to work off. For me, it was working from scratch, and it didn't recognise anything. Fortunately, our minds are pretty similar."

"How so?" I enquire flatly.

Mad Hair smiles. "We're both heavily sarcastic, we both watch anime… and we're both British."

"So we're good at making tea, queuing and complaining."

He snorts. "Did I mention the sarcasm?"

"You did," I agree, smirking.

He sighs again, looking at me thoughtfully. I felt a bit like a bug under a microscope. "At least you're still coherent. If you had gone vegetable on me, all of this scanning would be pointless, and I would have no way to communicate with you other than ripping random people out of the universe and back here, like with Silver."

"Like a messenger pigeon but with people," I summed up, smirking.

"That'd make me feel important (p=64)."

Shut up, you. I scowl at the screen. Thankfully it wasn't saying it out loud, just displaying it, but still, this is actually pretty invasive technology.

He gestures at the screen, which had lost the pictures and started displaying a block of text. "To speed it up for you, read the screen, and it'll read off a small book to you. The program will display it, and you just read it. It can map easier if it's not guesswork as to what you're seeing and thinking. Once it's mapped the page over, it'll scroll to the next one."

"Repeat ad infinitum," I groaned half-heartedly, getting to work. He just rolled his eyes – again… who was the reckless teenager here exactly?

"I'm getting too tired to carry on reading…" I mumbled, as yet another page appears in front of me. Gradually, the p percentage has gone up, but it's still somewhere around 80% on average.

I lean back and stretch and a jacket nearly falls off my back. Wait, when had he?

Mad Spikey Hair was busy tapping away on his computer and pauses, glancing over at me. "Unfortunately, while I emphasise with you, you're still dying of radiation poisoning. If you fall asleep from tiredness, you may not wake up. It's highly likely you'll fall into a coma. Then, vegetable."

"How necessary is this reading thing? The average is 80%," I offer, trying and failing to keep the slur out of my voice. The fear had retreated into 'not relevant right now, just focus hard on this and forget it', but now the disease is starting to scare me again. "Is 80% enough?"

He shakes his head, turning to face me with a serious look. "No, it's not. Would you like to arrive with 80% of your body?"

I shake my head, but it makes me nauseous. While the room swims a little, I try to put coherent thoughts together, I'm kinda short on breath. "If I arrive after the effects of radiation have already deteriorated me, even if the gamma ceases to exist… I'll still be in no place to carry on living… anyway…"

Mad Hair seems to have thought of that. "You forget you're living in a world with weird restoring medical techniques."

"Techniques that can't work on me, I have no chakra," I point out.

He's apparently thought of that as well. "You're being redefined in a world where everyone has chakra, down to the plants, and no trace of gamma. It'll be created inside you, just like gamma will be removed."

Things are starting to stabilise again in my vision. I made a mental note not to move suddenly. Chakra created inside me? "That's gonna be weird."

I mentally imagined all my cells suddenly rewriting with new chakra capillaries… damn that's gonna be weird.

He puts his hand on my cheek, looking at me concernedly while his tone remains indifferent and matter-of-fact. "Don't think about 'weird'. Think about 'ooh, cool, shiny, I can use chakra and blow up shit'."

I give him a frown, which is hard without moving your head or tensing up too hard. "I'm a girl. I'm not meant to be keen on blowing up stuff."

Mad Hair shrugs. "Fine, blow it up with confetti and flower petals instead of fireballs."

"Can't you transport me there and define me as completely healthy?"

He shakes his head. "It's a physical transfer; it's already specific to you. Only general definitions will work subconsciously," he vaguely explains. "I don't know what it's like to be you, I want to send you as exact as possible."

He analyses at my unimpressed expression and switches tactics. "As a separate point, I would have to control your body to a fine science to modify it. Do you really want an anime fan in control of your body proportions?"

I look down at my miniscule development in the upper area and hum thoughtfully. "Hmm… are you one of the oppai leagues?"

"Nope. Flat is justice. Like what you've got going on there, by the way," he comments offhandedly.

"YOUUU…!" Thankfully I had put on my shoes from earlier to walk over to his house, so I make good use of them.