This somehow turned into another giant chapter, and I am suffering for it. The warning for human experimentation is still in effect; it gets hit harder in this chapter (and Tori participates) and there's some body horror/gore. Yup. Typical Orochimaru.
xXx
Setting off an explosion a foot away from your face was not something Tori recommended.
There was a sliver of a second between when she realized what was happening and when her world collapsed into pain. In that briefest of moments, Tori's very eloquent last thought was: Oh, fuck.
There was a lot of searing pain, a lot of confusion and muddy thoughts and some more pain, and then she she was in the dark weighed down by the pull of gravity on her own body, listening to muffled voices. A woman was talking, she thought, with occasional input from a man. She could hear them perfectly well, but her brain was having a hard time interpreting their words.
"I want to ask her something," the man was saying.
"Why?" said the woman. "I talk to her all the time; she never says anything interesting…"
Were they talking about her? With massive effort, Tori opened her eyes. The light was bright and it took her a moment to adjust. Karin and Sasuke came into focus.
"Why're you here?" Tori croaked out.
She was in the infirmary, tucked into one of the cots in the back. She felt heavy and sluggish, but probably a lot better than she should feel, given… whatever had happened. Her memories were confused. She'd been working. Her face had been in mortal peril. With great effort, she reached up and patted her cheek. Her face was tender but still there. Excellent.
Karin's stool was scooted right up next to Sasuke's. She crossed her legs so that one foot slid against Sasuke's leg and glared at Tori.
"Did you make fun of Kabuto's data collection to Orochimaru-sama?" Karin said. "Idiot, you shouldn't have done that. Orochimaru-sama loves teasing him."
Tori had no idea what she was talking about. "What?"
"I'm supposed to observe you," Sasuke said.
"What," Tori repeated. What did Sasuke have to do with her? She hadn't seen him since she arrived.
"You're wasting Sasuke-kun's time," Karin sniffed. Then in a much sweeter voice, she said to Sasuke, "You should be resting your arm, Sasuke-kun."
Sasuke's arm was bandaged from his wrist upwards. He was holding a pen and clipboard. His eyes were red. Karin leaned over him and pointed to something on the clipboard.
It was too weird. Tori didn't want to think about it. She pulled the scratchy infirmary blanket over her head and went back to sleep.
xXx
Tori jerked awake to pressure on her face. A tingly sensation started at her temples and spread across her scalp. She tried to sit.
Kabuto pressed her back down, hands gentle but firm. "Calm down, I'm just doing a final assessment."
Kabuto dubbed her fit to return to work. "Your skin will be sensitive for a few days, but that will fade with time. Unfortunately, I can't regrow hair."
Tori had a moment of panic– she'd spent years growing out her hair and was proud of it– but no, she obviously still had a full head of hair. There were some shorter strands around her face, singed off with weird ends that needed to be trimmed now, but nothing some creative layering couldn't fix.
Not that she'd be able to consult a stylist in Oto.
"We can go now," Karin said in the background, tugging at Sasuke's good hand. "Let's go raid the kitchen and–"
"I want to talk to her," Sasuke repeated, and appeared behind Kabuto, eyes dark and intense.
"Ah, Sasuke-kun, thank you for helping with observation," Kabuto said, easily avoiding what Sasuke had actually said. "Your notes are rather bare-bones, though…"
Tori sat up as Kabuto kept going on about… data collection. Sasuke had been using his sharingan to collect real-time, qualitative data on her. Sasuke didn't look like he cared one bit if his notes were useful to Kabuto's experiment or not.
Karin was right: that was a massive waste of everyone's time.
"Tell me if you need me again," Sasuke said eventually, and left.
"You know if you need a sensor to monitor chakra, I can do it," Karin said snippily, crossing her arms over her chest.
"Ah," Kabuto said, tilting his head and smiling politely at her. "Orochimaru-sama wants to keep him happy. Don't you like running interference?"
Karin turned red, then muttered an excuse about something she needed to do. "Sasuke-kun, wait for me…!"
Tori was sent to lunch with the rest of her cohort of new recruits. Upon sitting down at their usual table, Haruka the samurai girl looked up and promptly burst into uncontrolled laughter. The rest of the new recruits joined suit.
"Trying to make a fashion statement, Onibaba?" Haruka asked through her tears of mirth.
During their after-lunch bathroom break, Tori looked in the mirror to discover her face bright pink and shiny, devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes. It made her look alien and weird, two dark eyes peering out from a pink, featureless face.
"Oh no," she gasped.
The girl at the sink next to her burst into a fit of mean giggles.
It was actually amazing that Tori could blow her face off one evening and then go back to work the next afternoon. Even if people in this world were all on the brink of dying from a measles outbreak, at least ninja magic bullshit medicine was effective.
(She hoped she was carrying measles, and that everyone here in this terrible hellhole caught it and died–)
Tori focused on how amazing medical ninjutsu was and tried not to think too much about murder or how much she desperately wanted to look up how long it took eyelashes to regrow. Ninja should hurry up and invent Google.
Keizo had left a note on her bench with a safe range of blood-to-ink ratios and a helpful note that said, "Don't fuck up."
Tori was hesitant to try the cooling seal again, for obvious reasons. The thawing seal– to bring frozen things up to 4ºC– was also simple, but seemed even more likely to explode since it was adding energy into the system.
She pulled some old lab notebooks and flipped through them, trying to find another easy seal to practice.
There was a lot of weird shit in those notebooks. There was an entire book dedicated to experiments to keep organs alive once they'd been removed, complete with photos of people's torsos pinned open, revealing all their precious internal organs decorated with ink. There was another notebook that was split between adding random organs into a person without their body rejecting it, and an experiment that had something to do with nature chakra that Tori didn't really understand but than caused people's limbs to fold in on themselves grotesquely and turned all the subjects a sickly gray. Some of the really old notebooks were all rushed, frantic notes on things like 'chakra flow reversal' and 'cellular fusion.'
The pictures were horrifying. Tori stared at them in morbid fascination for several minutes, the way one might stare at old crime scene scene photos in a documentary.
Eventually, she found a series of experiments involving gene splicing, which seemed immediately applicable to her project, and she read through the pages very intently. While drawing up some seals to transfer genetic material sounded a lot simpler than real world science, whoever had made this notebook was having a lot of the same problems real world scientists might worry about. Genes were transferred to only a few cells; genes were spliced into the wrong part of the genome; subjects died or grew tumors and the researcher didn't understand why.
There were pages and pages of photos and sketches of experiments gone wrong. This was why people in Tori's world didn't just skip ahead to human experimentation. Tori chewed on her bottom lip and with her finger traced a sketch of how the chambers of someone's heart had collapsed under experimental conditions.
"That's a nice face," someone purred near her ear.
Tori screamed and nearly fell out of her chair.
Orochimaru straightened from leaning over her and laughed his soft, rasping laugh. On the other side of the lab, Keizo whipped to attention and hurried over to greet Orochimaru as Tori clutched at her chest. It was unclear if Orochimaru had been teasing her about her lack of eyebrows or her expression, but either way he'd scared her half to death.
"I brought you this," Orochimaru said, and then set a jar down on her bench. It was filled with a bluish liquid and contained a human hand.
Well. Okay, then.
"Observe it while you practice your sealing," Orochimaru said vaguely and then walked off with Keizo to talk shop.
Tori did not have any idea what sort of observations she might make about a disembodied hand, but she obediently set up a log sheet and then rolled out a new sheet of paper to practice the stupid cooling seal.
She listened to Orochimaru and Keizo's conversation with half an ear while she mixed blood and ink in various ratios. Keizo had been working on a project to improve human regenerative processes.
Tori tried four more seals, the last one of which got down to ten degrees before her beaker started warminging back up to room temperature. Periodically, she'd been writing "no change" in her log sheet for the floating hand, but when she glanced over at it this time, it was gone.
"Umm," she said.
Tori looked around nervously. Had she… lost the hand, somehow…? Where could it have gone?
The two men ignored her, fiddling around at their own benches.
"UMMM," she tried again, louder this time.
They continued to ignore her. She wrote down "disappeared?" in the log and redrew her stupid seal. Just sticking something in the fridge or doing the work on ice was much more efficient than this bullshit.
Orochimaru left a few hours later, picking up the jar and log sheet without even glancing at Tori or mentioning the missing hand. He'd left behind sheets and sheets of seals for Keizo, who was rushing around his side of the lab with calligraphy materials and flasks of clear liquids.
Tori was summoned for lunch, and when she came back Keizo shoved a plastic smock at her and told her to assist him.
There was a body on one of the surgical tables. It was thin and topless, with its face covered by a piece of sealing paper.
"I'm not really…" Tori started to say. She didn't know what exactly she was protesting, but she was positive she couldn't do it.
She held tools for Keizo as he peeled back the person's skin and muscles poked around in the organs and then spent hours drawing complicated patterns in ink with a single-bristle brush. Tori focused on the person's abdomen. She'd watched surgeries before, on TV and on youtube, and by guest lecturers who came into the pre-med club at university. This was fine. It was fine.
"Fuck," Keizo said and tossed his brush across the lab.
The person had died.
xXx
When Tori came into lab the next morning, Orochimaru was already there, dissecting the body. She very pointedly did not look in that direction as she set up her calligraphy kit and mixed ink.
She resisted for about an hour before she ended up boggling at Orochimaru and the body across the lab. He frowned and poked and prodded and every once in a while he pulled something out and handed it to Keizo to weigh.
Tori had cooled a beaker of 200mL water to four degrees three times in a row now, so she should probably try cooling something else, or adding the component of the seal to maintain temperature, or try the thawing seal…
Orochimaru sighed deeply and then looked her dead in the eyes.
Tori whipped back around, grabbing her brush. Seals. Yes. She was practicing that. Working hard, all day long.
To her horror, Orochimaru came over and asked how her progress was.
"Where did you get this ink?" he asked when she was done with her floundering explanation, picking up one of the ink sticks with his bare hands. The color rubbed off on the tips of his bone-white fingers.
"They were there when I got here," she said immediately. This, at least, she knew the answer to.
"And you've been adding blood?" he asked, rolling the stick between his thumb and pointer finger.
"It's what the book said to do," she said slowly. It was more specifically what Keizo had told her to do, but she wasn't going to throw the trained assassin she worked alone with under the bus.
"This is already chakra infused," he said, and dropped the stick carelessly onto her bench. "No wonder your seal exploded. You're lucky it didn't kill you."
He said all this as if it were an amusing anecdote to tell to a child. Tori felt her jaw tense but kept her face carefully still.
"I've theorized people without elemental affinities have more stable chakra," Orochimaru continued, casually leafing through Tori's pile of saved seals. "Maybe we should use your blood for all our research."
Tori could not tell if that was a threat or not.
"Do you really not use seals at all in your world?" he asked eventually, holding up one of her first attempts. It looked like a child had drawn it. "How do you get anything done?"
Orochimaru actually listened to what Tori had to say, and what she had to say was a rambling description of various laboratory techniques. She started awkwardly, halting and stammering and double-checking that he wasn't getting annoyed or bored. He watched her intently, though, occasionally asking clarifying questions or prodding her ramble in a new direction, and Tori picked up speed and fluidity in her speech.
It felt so good to talk to someone who actually wanted to hear what she had to say, after weeks of being insulted and ignored. She thought that maybe she shouldn't tell Orochimaru so much about her life, but what was he going to do with her shakey knowledge of Western blots? What was he going to do with a description of a DNA extraction kit?
The answer was, of course, that Orochimaru wandered to the back of the lab, grabbed a few chemicals, and attempted to replicate the DNA extraction kit she'd described.
"Here," he called and waved Tori over. She approached cautiously, and as soon as she was within arms distance of him, Orochimaru reach over and ripped several hairs out of her head.
"Ow," Tori yelped.
"Tissue sample," Orochimaru said vaguely and then picked up a pipet.
Tori didn't see why he had to test it on her when he had his own head of perfectly good hair, which he obviously washed with actual shampoo and conditioner, not the shampoo-soap combination gel she was using. Between that and burning some of it off, Tori's hair could use a break, thank you very much.
It took very little prompting to get Orochimaru to explain the "classical" ninja technique of DNA extraction. Basically, you chemically cleaned your sample of impurities, and then tossed it onto a seal. You could even configure the seal to pull certain genes of interest without knowing anything about the genomic sequence.
"How convenient," Tori said blandly, by which she meant, That's the most infuriating thing I've ever heard. "How do people who aren't ninja do science?"
"Monks have some knowledge of chakra," Orochimaru answered, free-hand pouring ethanol into his test tube like some sort of maniac. That still didn't explain how anyone who couldn't make fancy ninja seals got anything done, unless all medical and scientific research was done by ninja and monks.
"What about, you know, scholars…?" Tori tried, watching Orochimaru slowly swirl his tube.
"Fascinating," Orochimaru breathed out as a white precipitate formed in his tube, completely ignoring her question. "You said you knew how to purify this?"
"Um–" said Tori, before she was left alone to figure out if the lab even had the reagents to do the next steps.
Tori couldn't believe she had been summoned to another dimension to do a phenol-chloroform DNA purification. She couldn't believe Orochimaru had reversed engineered DNA extraction from tissue in less than an hour and then gotten it on the first try. What the hell.
The chemical storeroom was a large closet around the corner from her bench, and after a long search, Tori was dismayed to realized she'd have to make phenol-chloroform herself. While she's done the purification enough times that she wouldn't have to consult a protocol, her lab had always had the reagents already made.
Tori supposed that if Orochimaru could make up scientific protocols on the spot, so could she.
When she came out of the storeroom with a glass bottle in each hand, Kabuto was in the lab anesthetizing a patient. Two random people were already passed out on surgical tables, while Orochimaru was examining a very conscious and very nervous cafeteria worker. The woman was shaking so hard Tori could see her trembling from across the lab.
There were only three surgical tables. That woman was going to have to watch whatever the hell they were doing.
Tori focused on her work. Phenol was a really dangerous chemical, after all. What was she supposed to neutralize it if she spilled it, again? Was it glycerol? She should go find glycerol, for safety reasons. She ducked back into the storeroom.
The lab had a hand-crank centrifuge, which was the most absurd piece of lab equipment Tori had ever seen. She thought very hard about how ridiculous it was to have to manually spin down the samples herself. She thought very hard about how ridiculous she must look, this tiny civilian girl with no eyebrows cranking the silly machine as hard as she could. She thought very hard indeed, lest she get distracted thinking about how Orochimaru and Kabuto were literally pulling out organs just a few yards away.
It was all very stressful.
The surgeries did not take very long. By the time Tori had purified the DNA and moved it into ethanol to precipitate again, Orochimaru had left the people in the care of his minions and was washing his hands in the lab sink.
"I'm supposed to leave this at minus 80 degrees," Tori said, and Orochimaru blinked down at her like he'd forgotten she was there.
"I've never cooled something by that much," he said, drying his hands. He hadn't used gloves. "So many new challenges today, Tori."
He sounded pleased. He very casually drew up a beautiful seal and set Tori's capped tube of DNA in it. Ice crystals formed immediately on it as it chilled.
"Wonderful," he said dryly. "I want to show you something."
They'd harvested spleens from three civilian workers and one ninja. Orochimaru drew another gorgeous seal around one of his recently procured organs.
"You're going to help me resurrect a bloodline limit," he purred.
The spleens were to screen splicing techniques. You didn't need a spleen to live, after all, and they were nice, big organs with a generous blood supply– a perfect prelude to a full-body test. All the spleens Tori had dissected had been failed to attempts to splice in a lost bloodline limit.
Kimimaro's bloodline limit, specifically, Tori realized with a jolt. Orochimaru showed her where he kept tube after tube of DNA marked Kaguya Clan. One didn't just die in Oto, it seemed.
Orochimaru helpfully narrated what he was doing for her. This is was a stasis seal to keep the organ alive. This component of the seal isolated DNA from the donor; this one fused it into the new host. He had a book of notes on different variables she could try.
The fusion process itself was marked with a dim glow of blue chakra, and then Orochimaru left Tori to process the spleen. This one was filled with thin, splintering pieces of bone that followed the branching patterns of the blood vessels. It was oddly beautiful.
When she was cleaning up, Snarly-nin appeared to take her to dinner. She'd missed lunch entirely.
The cafeteria staff was down by one and jumpy. One of the woman visibly flinched when a kunoichi in a flak jacket snapped at her for a larger portion of meat.
Tori's cohort was talking about bananas again, and then how one of the boys had been promoted after a week-long mission in Water Country, where he'd probably had access to said bananas. Now he was allowed to take meals and showers whenever he wanted and travel the base unaccompanied.
"It's not fair," Haruka whined. "I've taken on all sorts of missing nin. Why don't I get any missions?"
"Fighting a librarian doesn't count, even if they are rogue ninja," someone sneered back. "You can't even use chakra, right?"
Haruka responded by grabbing the kid by the back of his head and slamming his face into the table. Tori moved down a few seats to the end of the table. And she'd thought public school was bad.
xXx
The following weeks were the most productive of Tori's life. In Oto, you worked all day every day, and you worked hard. She worked her way through all the basic lab seals she could find, managed to assist Keizo in his surgeries without having a nervous breakdown, and kept logs on the disembodied hand.
She grew in at least six eyelashes.
One day Kabuto came in and gave her a disembodied foot instead, and Tori realized where the body parts were coming from.
"It's the Hozuki boy, isn't it?" she said, staring at the foot. "He turns to water, right?"
"So you can recognize him by his foot and not his hand?" Kabuto asked. "Interesting."
Tori's lips thinned. Had they actually wanted her to watch the hand or did they just want to see if her made-up future vision could get anything off a single hand?
She didn't like that. She couldn't fake results if she didn't know tests were happening.
"You need more than half the body for Future Sight to work properly," she said, turning back to the note Orochimaru had left behind about adjustments to the day's experiment. He was very good at explaining things in person but his notes were… less cohesive. "It's just that– who else could it be?"
"Hmm," Kabuto said noncommitly, and left.
One morning Karin woke her before lights on and dragged her down to the infirmary in her pajamas. Sasuke was sitting on the examination table, wincing slightly as Kabuto poked at his side with healing chakra.
"Good morning, Karin, Tori-chan," Kabuto said, leaning back from his work. "Sasuke has some free time, so I thought we'd try another experiment."
"Free time?" Karin scoffed. "He has two cracked ribs–"
The argument was short. Orochimaru had given his blessing, so they were doing this. Sasuke watched them passively while Tori shifted nervously from one foot to another.
"Unfortunately, I didn't plan for this," Kabuto said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. "Why don't we try physical stress. Tori-chan, do some jumping jacks."
Tori looked from Kabuto back to Sasuke. Sasuke's eyes were red, which meant sharingan, which meant he was going to have the sight of her making a fool of herself seared into his brain forever. He already had her scraggly partial eyebrows permanently recorded in there.
Karin hovered behind Sasuke. She raised her own, beautifully sculpted eyebrows at Tori expectantly.
Tori did not want to do jumping jacks. It was dangerous to refuse orders, but also it was very early and Tori was not a morning person. So instead of just doing them, she blinked at Kabuto again and asked:
"What's a jumping jack?"
They stared at her.
"You don't know what a jumping jack is?" Sasuke asked, genuinely baffled.
"Maybe it's a terminology difference between our worlds," Tori suggested with a shrug.
Kabuto gritted his teeth. "Jump, but open your legs and raise your arms above your head."
She jumped, landing with her left leg forward and her right one behind her. She raised her arms straight above her head. Karin had to physically turn around to hide whatever face she made.
"I think we call this a 'sun salutation,'" Tori said brightly.
Kabuto looked furious for about half a second. "Sasuke-kun, demonstrate for Tori-chan."
"Absolutely not."
They decided to try and see how genjutsu affected her future vision instead, and Tori sat across from Sasuke, staring intently into his eyes.
"Use your ability," Sasuke said.
"Um," Tori said. "In a few years, you're going to get into a fight with a missing-nin from Iwa named Deidara."
"Never heard of them," Kabuto said from behind Tori.
"Really?" Tori said, keeping eye contact with Sasuke. She'd never been in a genjutsu before, and she was curious to see what it would be like. "He's pretty good. It's a tough fight for you, Sasuke."
Sasuke didn't say anything. Tori continued narrating the fight.
"...and he claims he's trained one eye to be immune to genjutsu, since he has a grudge against your brother–"
Sasuke tensed and sat up straight. Tori had to turn her face to maintain eye contact.
"Does he know where Itachi is?" Sasuke asked. "I would ask him where–"
"Sasuke-kun, you're ruining the experiment," Karin whined loudly, interrupting him. "Tori, why don't you skip ahead to how Sasuke wins?"
Sasuke gave Karin an annoyed look. "The genjutsu hasn't affected her ability at all. She hasn't even noticed."
"What?" Tori said, jumping slightly. He'd already started it? She looked around the lab. Nothing seemed out of place. Sasuke and her were still sitting, Karin leaning casually against the bench next to Sasuke chair. Kabuto was watching them with hands on hips, and Keizo was ignoring him while he–
They weren't in the lab. They were in the infirmary. Tori hadn't even noticed. Huh.
Yep, didn't like that.
Karin sat in Sasuke's lap and pushed his hair back. The lab melted away and back into the infirmary as Sasuke shoved her off and stood.
"This is useless," Sasuke declared. "I'm going back to my room."
He left.
"Look what you did," Karin accused, before running after him. It was unclear if she blamed Kabuto or Tori for… whatever that was.
Later that day, Karin found her again while she was following a line of new recruits to dinner. She pulled her out of line and into a narrow corridor that lead to parts of the hideout Tori had never visited.
"Here," Karin said, and shoved a handful of small plastic items into Tori's hands. "Fix your face. Sasuke keeps staring at it."
She'd given her make-up. It was all obviously used– two tubes of nearly empty lip gloss, powder foundation with a hole all the way through the back of the container, and two pencil eyeliners that had been sharpened down nubs.
"You look ridiculous and I'm sick of looking your dumb face," Karin continued, pointedly not looking Tori in the eyes.
"Thank you?" Tori said. It was– well, it was weirdly thoughtful. Her skin wasn't pink anymore and didn't match the foundation anyway, but she could definitely use the eyeliner, at least, to draw in the rest of eyebrows and highlight her eyes in place of her eyelashes (which she now had a full ten of, thank you very much).
"Shut up," Karin snapped, making it easier for Tori to squash the sudden sense of endearment she had for Karin. "I'm transferring soon, so I have to get rid of old stuff anyway."
Karin turned to go, but Tori hadn't completely managed not to be charmed by the gift, so she said, "Hey, um… I'm not allowed to be alone with Sasuke, right? That's why you're always there, right?"
Or at least, she wasn't allowed to talk to him about certain things without someone to intervene. The 'certain things' definitely included 'how to murder your brother,' judging by their last conversation.
Karin turned, giving her a weary look and neither confirming nor denying Tori's theory. Tori kept going. "So, I mean, next time, if I just left… you'd be alone with Sasuke, right?"
The corners of Karin's lips twitched into something resembling a smile. "I'm not supposed to let you go anywhere alone."
"You're not supposed to give me things either," Tori replied.
"Ah, that's true," Karin said, then made a big show of rolling her eyes and sighing deeply. "I guess it can't be helped, then. Don't get caught with that," she added, sharply, then waltzed off.
Tori shoved her her new possessions into her bra and hurried to catch up with the other new recruits.
xXx
In the bathroom after dinner, when they were allowed extra time to shower, Tori drew on eyebrows. The second one ended up longer and thicker than the first. They made her look like one of the ugly stepsisters from a Cinderella movie.
She attempted to even them out, then got entirely distracted and elongated one eyebrow into a swirl across her temple and burst into giggles.
"What are you doing?" one of the girls asked.
It was a new girl, who was nine years old. Recruiting a nine year to live like this and go out to be a human weapon was disgusting, but the look of pure derision on such a tiny girl's face was hilarious. Tori laughed so hard she had to grip the sides of the sink to stay upright.
"Weirdo," the girl muttered.
"What did you do to your face?" Snarly-nin asked immediately when Tori walked out.
Between peels of laughter, Tori had tried to wash off her make-up experiment, but shinobi make-up proved to be impressively waterproof. She'd only succeeded in smudging it slightly and making her forehead red from rubbing.
"Um," Tori replied. "Lab accident."
"You expect me to believe that?" Snarly-nin asked, towering over her.
"There's lots of ink in the lab," Tori said, taking a step back. "You can ask Orochimaru-sama. He was there."
"Ink…" Snarly-nin started to argue, but she scooted around him to follow the rest of her cohort down the hall to the cells, and he didn't stop her.
Snarly-nin didn't ask Orochimaru, of course, because annoying Orochimaru was a great way to get yourself tapped to be an experimental subject. Other ways to get tapped were to do things like injure yourself too badly on a mission, or question orders, or be one of the civilian workers.
Tori knew this because she'd been graduated to performing actual experiments, and Orochimaru liked to comment on why they chose certain people for the procedures. It wasn't exactly a scientifically sound way of choosing test subjects, but Tori certainly wasn't going to say anything.
"Poor boy," Orochimaru said as Keizo cut into the teenaged shinobi they were operating on today. He sounded deceptively sympathetic.
The boy had come back from his mission missing part of his leg, and Orochimaru had very reassuringly told him they were working on a new surgery that could regrow limbs, not mentioning that every patient so far had died on the table. The boy had agreed enthusiastically.
One of Tori's duties in lab now was to mix ink, and she held it for Orochimaru as he carefully painted seals across the boy's skin and organs. She watched him work, focusing on the paintbrushes instead of the very human shape on the table. She recognized some of the components: stability, stasis, fusion, more stability. When Keizo did these on his own, he'd consult notes; Orochimaru did it all free-hand.
Keizo also used ink Tori had mixed blood into as a chakra source, since feeding a steady flow of your own chakra into the ink as you painted for that long was apparently difficult, even for a former Special Jounin. Orochimaru had never once asked.
An hour and a half into the procedure, Orochimaru stood back and dropped his brush onto the tray Tori was holding out for him.
"Disappointing," he said blandly. The boy's insides were growing tumors at an alarming rate, blooming from his insides and making his torso bloat. It was a problem they'd been having a lot now. "Tori, tell me you have something good to show me."
Orochimaru did not look particularly intimidating– he was very pale, and delicately pretty, and not all that tall– but when he leaned into her space, Tori felt her insides turn cold and she practically ran to her own bench.
"It's consistent now," she said, leafing through pages of her lab notebook. Spleens weren't supposed to grow bone at all, and hers still did, but now the bone came in a consistent shape and mass. If she could splice in Kaguya clan genes and they didn't cause the cells to freak out and start osteogenesis, then that would mean…
Well, that could mean she'd just spliced them in wrong, but it could also mean she did it right and they could try splicing things into a whole person without them spontaneously growing an extra skeleton. It would also theoretically have implications for almost all of Orochimaru's gene editing experiments. "Theoretically" was the key word there, because both gene editing and fuuinjutsu were both weird and finicky and apt to just not work for no obvious reason.
Tori would know. She was rapidly on her way to becoming semi-competent in both.
Consistency wasn't that much of an improvement, though, and the side of Orochimaru's lips tugged down, and Tori heard her own breath hitch.
"You're splicing the right gene in, at least," he allowed after a few moments of frowning minutely at her notes. "We don't even know what Keizo is splicing."
On the other side of the lab, Keizo's shoulders tensed conspicuously, but he kept working. He was processing the body– dissecting and analyzing it before disposal. This was an unpleasant task he had attempted to teach to Tori, which she had gotten out of neatly by feigning a panic attack.
(Kabuto had seen her have lots of weird drug-induced breakdowns. It seemed in-character.)
"We could try validating some of these," Orochimaru said, sounding slightly more interested in the experiment. "I don't think Chikako is doing very much."
In Tori's world, she thought that the first step in "validating" a gene splicing experiment would be some very mundane and routine laboratory techniques like PCR or a Western blot. When she'd brought it up to him, Orochimaru seemed to think this notion was cute. In Oto, they were just going to try and a full-body splicing experiment and see what happened.
Watanabe Chikako was a spleen donor, and Tori had gotten not-horrible results with her spleen, which was enough to pass the dubious screen test. Orochimaru supervised her drawing out a huge seal across the butcher paper on the operating table, then laughed at her efforts and made her redo it five more times.
The actual surgery required more seals, drawn directly on the skin, since humans came with annoying things like their own chakra systems and metabolic reactions and other things to mess up seals. After Chikako had been brought in and sedated, Tori took notes while Orochimaru walked her through the procedure.
Tori didn't see why she had to practice on a person and couldn't try, you know, a pig or a monkey a few times just to make sure she wasn't about to accidentally kill someone.
"Why would you waste time on an animal?" Orochimaru asked when she said as much to him.
"It's the same four nucleotides," Tori answered. "And animals have more children and grow up faster than humans. It's just practical."
She wasn't going to try arguing ethics with anyone here. Pragmatism, though, turned out to be a losing argument too, as Orochimaru pointed out that humans could do useful work while they weren't being experimented on.
"After all, look at you," he said. Tori dropped the subject.
On the bright side, the sealing array Tori drew successfully spliced Kaguya clan genes into Chikako. Unfortunately, the woman spasmed, grew extra bones that burst through her skin, and died, leaving behind a body that looked more like a bloody collapsed tent than a human.
Tori did not vomit. She did, however, suddenly find herself unable to breathe and clutching at the nearest lab bench for support.
"That's going to take a while to process," Orochimaru said dryly. He didn't sound upset, which was good. "I'm interested to see what degree of penetrance we got."
He did, however, sound mildly excited, which might turn out to be worse.
"Maybe you can get Tori help you with processing this time," Orochimaru continued, and Keizo threw her a dirty look.
Orochimaru wished her good luck on the way out and patted her shoulder. Tori's knees wobbled.
Keizo fetched them some buckets to sort the woman's dissected parts into.
xXx
Tori was really and truly freaked out about the idea of mangling a person's body with magic ninja gene editing and then playing butcher with the body. She had, however, gotten very good at panicking with a perfectly serene face, and so weeping and crying and hiding in a corner to get out of specimen processing involved a lot of acting.
It had worked when Keizo was just chopping out tumors from his own experiments. No one wanted to have to deal with a gross-faced crying woman, after all. It worked less well when the test subjects were for her own experiment. On body number four, Keizo dragged her back from the chemical storeroom and told her she'd have to workor else.
Theor else was never made explicitly clear to Tori, but she knew other civilians did laundry and cleaned for them with pieces of their bodies missing or added, so she insisted Keizo walk her through it while she took notes for bodies five through seven.
"That's very cute of you," Kabuto said when he nosily flipped through her notes. Orochimaru had mysteriously disappeared for the week and sent Kabuto to check in. "If you're not going to work, find something useful to do."
The or else was unspoken.
Tori did not want to learn how to use a bone saw on a formerly human nightmare-inducing mass. She pulled out old books and notes on fuuinjutsu to practice. There was a lot she could possibly be learning; seals were incredibly versatile. She'd never be a master, of course, because that required precise chakra control and she could only add blood, but…
But she could definitely do something useful to make up for ignoring all the people screaming and dying and then getting thrown in the trash.
She decided to fix up the hand-crank centrifuge. It was basically a wheel one could load test tubes in, clamped to a bench. She couldn't build an automatic one like they had in her world, obviously, but she had found a lot of motion-related seals and figured she could try making a seal that made the centrifuge crank itself. It would save her from sore arms, everyone else from having to stand at the centrifuge when they could be doing other things, and it would allow for standardized speeds.
The motion seals were mostly meant for setting traps, but every handbook on fuuinjutsu she'd gone through had a very long introduction about how fuuinjutsu was the most adaptable of the ninja arts.
Tori spent a few days designing the seal around her own specimen processing. There was a drawer at her bench filled with sticky tags, and when she was ready, she copied her first original seal onto a tag and slapped it onto the centrifuge.
The seal had what was called a 'trip-wire' component, which meant it activated with applied force, such as an enemy walking across it. In this case, all Tori had to do was grab the centrifuge crank handle and push.
She did, and the centrifuge spun right off its clamp, flew across the room, and smashed into the shelves of glass labware with a terrible nose.
"What the FUCK," Keizo screamed. The centrifuge continued spinning, digging further into the shelves and broken beakers and flasks, spitting out ground up glass and splinters.
Keizo stared at it in fury for a few moments. Tori attempted to think of an explanation and failed. Keizo reached forward to grab the centrifuge wheel, but released it immediately. Not even a ninja was going to stop that with their bare hands.
Tori opened her mouth to suggest he try snatching the tag off. She got as for as "you could try–" before he backhanded her across the face with enough force to knock her over.
"Idiot," he growled at her.
Tori rubbed her face. It hurt, but she was more surprised than scared. Then Keizo grabbed her by the hair, lifted her up, and backhanded her again.
He shook her a few times, screaming at her that she was lazy and useless and stupid, until she broke down into tears. He dropped her then, and stomped out of the lab.
Tori took a few shaking breathes to steady herself. Keizo was almost definitely going to report her to some sort authority– like Kabuto or Orochimaru– and they were both capable of doing worse things to her than slapping her in the face. Now she was scared.
"It was an experiment to improve lab efficiency," she practiced reciting to a spider that lived on the corner of her bench. "My intentions were to improve work for Orochimaru-sama. I apologize. It will never happen again."
The spider just sat there. She practiced the speech again.
When Keizo came back, Orochimaru was behind him, and the centrifuge wheel was still grinding away at the wall. Orochimaru took one look at it and burst into laughter.
Keizo's face went from vindictively smug to unsure. "Orochimaru-sama, she's barely helped me at all, and now she's broken–"
"You assured me you didn't need assistance with this project," Orochimaru said, an amused smile across his face. That probably meant he was in a good mood.
Keizo squirmed visibly. "She's disrespectful to our work, Orochimaru-sama," Keizo said finally. "In Water Country, a girl like that would be thrown out. In Kiri a civilian that insubordinate would be killed–"
"I forget, Keizo," Orochimaru interrupted. "Are we in Water Country?"
"No, Orochimaru-sama."
"Then get back to work. Tori," Tori straightened to attention as Orochimaru turned to her. Her face stung. "Why don't you watch that until it stops? Then you can go visit Kabuto about your face."
He patted her shoulder on the way out. It was almost reassuring, except that until about three minutes ago she'd been convinced she was going to be vivisected as punishment.
Tori had set the tag for twenty minutes, but she must have made a mistake in the the timing component, because it just spun and spun until it used up the chakra feeding it. The seal she'd based it on was designed to be extremely chakra efficient, and the wheel didn't stop spinning and fall onto its side until after midnight. She missed all her meals and had to wait until morning to have Kabuto fix the swelling of her face.
xXx
"How can you have improved your calligraphy this much but you still can't draw eyebrows evenly?" Orochimaru teased, days later.
It was deeply unfortunate how much Tori liked Orochimaru. He frightened her to her very core, and she knew it was dumb to seek out his attention, but he was the only person in the entire stupid underground village who even pretended to care about a single thing she said.
He nodded along with her when she explained her dumb undergraduate biology project. He asked questions about her personal life back in her own world, let her talk about how her favorite biological phenomena, and answered almost any question she asked about science and culture in this world. He had a very insulted-looking Keizo find her a book on the history of cultivars in the Elemental Nations. He once allowed her to ramble for a half hour about the Jurassic Park series while he prepared tissue samples from their latest failed experiment.
Tori didn't even like Jurassic Park. But Orochimaru seemed to find the story amusing, so she powered through it, and even told him about how she'd secretly watched it as a child, hidden under the dining table while her parents watched it one room over, terrified by it but too fascinated to look away.
"You have dinosaurs in your ancient history too, right?" she said. "Sasuke had a toy one when he was a kid."
"Yes," Orochimaru said, then paused to look at her. "How could you possibly know that about Sasuke-kun?"
Mistake, Tori thought, silently panicking. Sasuke's childhood wasn't a vision of the future.
"He's going to tell Karin once," Tori said vaguely. "And then she's not going to let that go because it's adorable. What's paleontology like here?"
"It's more of a civilian science," Orochimaru said, which meant that he wasn't particularly interested in it. "The fact that DNA lasts that long… that's interesting."
The conversations she had with him weren't even that great, all things considered, but they were definitely better than every conversation she had with everyone else in Oto. Which meant that when Orochimaru suddenly disappeared for several weeks, she suddenly felt lonely.
That was bad. That was really, truly bad, because trying to fill her need for human interaction with Orochimaru was the worst idea she'd ever had. She needed to make a friend.
She only really saw people who weren't related to the lab in the cafeteria. The new recruits were all served their shitty food together, and then they usually spread out over the same table. They weren't really sitting together so much as away from scarier, more experienced ninja.
The people in her cohort were all horrendously young, so Tori's initial reaction was to try and talk to someone else. She picked a girl who looked only a few years younger than her, who had weird yellow spikes coming from her elbows but a nice face.
"Hi, I'm Tori," Tori said, putting her tray down in front of the girl.
"Fuck off," the girl answered.
"Okay," said Tori amiably, picking up her tray and going back over to the new recruit table.
Her subsequent tries had similar results, and one boy even made a half-hearted attempt to stab her with a butter knife.
"You're not going to get anyone to talk to you until you get promoted," Haruka sniffed at her after she'd escaped back to their table. "And you're not going to get promoted because you're not a ninja."
"Neither are you," Tori muttered, poking at the dish of what was either rice with old shrimp or small brown pebbles with large pink rocks.
"Excuse me?" Haruka hissed.
"Um," said Tori, immediately backtracking. "I mean– um– we're similar, you know?"
Haruka continued to look offended, and Tori remembered her striking down another recruit with her naginata. Tori continued to ramble.
"Like, I mean, we're not ninja, so we have to work a little harder for promotion–"
Everyone else in their initial cohort had been promoted by now. Which meant they got to pick their bathroom times and get fresh fruit and vegetables and not hide their make-up in a drawer in the lab.
"Work harder?" Haruka yelled. All the other recruits were watching in silence, excitement in their eyes. "You think I'm not working hard? I've taken tons of very important internal missions!"
"We both–" Tori started.
Haruka threw herself across the table, just as fast as a shinobi, and slammed Tori into the floor. The naginata came down, slicing through the side of Tori's neck and piercing the floor.
"Don't you ever compare me to you, Onibaba," Haruka hissed, kneeling painfully on Tori's stomach as she bore down on her with the blade. "I've killedthree traitors in the village for Orochimaru-sama already. I am a warrior, and you are just a pathetic, civilian old hag."
Really, I'm nineteen, Tori thought distantly even as she panicked. What could she say to Haruka to make her get off? What did she like? Bananas? Should Tori talk about bananas?
The other recruits were jeering at them. No, talking about bananas was a dumb idea. Instead, Tori just laid there pathetically until Haruka spit on her and got off.
"Don't sit with us anymore, Onibaba," Haruka commanded, and went back to her lunch.
Tori shakily stood and grabbed a napkin off the table and held it to her neck. Since she could still breathe and her jaw hadn't gone slack, Tori assumed Haruka hadn't hit anything important, but she was bleeding profusely.
"Where are you going?" Snarly-nin asked as she approached the door.
"To the infirmary?" Tori tried.
"Clinic visits are only permitted after training sessions and missions, or in the case of disease," Snarly-Nin sneered.
"But–"
"Sit."
Tori cleaned the wound diligently when they were allowed the use the bathroom, then fashioned herself a bandage out of some toilet paper and a tampon. Haruka glared at her the entire time.
In the morning she lied to Snarly-nin about helping Kabuto with an experiment and went to the infirmary instead of breakfast. Kabuto clicked his tongue at her and informed her it was infected.
"You should have come to me right away," he said. "Now it's going to scar."
Tori nearly screamed. In the lab, she said to the spider that lived on her bench, "This place is going to drive me insane."
"Hey," Keizo snapped. "Who are you talking to?"
"No one," Tori replied, and opened her lab notebook. To the spider, she whispered, "He's just upset Orochimaru likes me better."
"Hey," Keizo repeated, stomping across the lab to her bench. "We're doing another osteogenesis experiment today, and you're actually going to do the post-op yourself this time."
Then he looked at the spider on her bench, grunted, and squished it with his thumb.
Something inside of Tori snapped. Rage flooded through her body. She was fed up with this place, she was fed up with Haruka, she was fed up with Snarly-nin, she was fed up with Kabuto, and she was really fed up with Keizo.
"Of course," she said with a sweet smile, and did her usual pre-op work. Orochimaru made an appearance for the first time in weeks, and the surgeries went about as well as they usually did.
When all three bodies inevitably had bones erupt form their skin and die, Tori said to Orochimaru, "Maybe we need a better screening method. Don't you think the chances of success might be higher with people more genetically related to the Kaguya clan?"
Orochimaru tilted his head back in interest. "And how would you suggest determining that?"
"Hmm, I wouldn't really know how to set up a genetic test like that here…" Tori said, drumming her fingers on the edge of the surgical table. "But, I suppose, people from the same country are bound to be more similar, right?"
A suggestion like that wouldn't have worked in Tori's home country, where people descended from populations all over the world. Here, though, it was a credible idea. Orochimaru thought on it a few days, and then sent word via Kabuto to preferentially take the spleens of people from Water Country.
Tori felt bad, but then the screening process did go better, so she didn't feel that bad.
Orochimaru did not check in in person again for another week, when they'd removed twelve Water Country spleens and Tori had spliced Kaguya genes into about half of them.
"They look a lot better," Tori said as Orochimaru flipped through her lab notebook.
"I'm glad you're enthusiastic about this," Orochimaru said mildly. "How confident are you?"
"Very," Tori said. "Although the sample size is a bit small. How has Keizo's project been going?"
Orochimaru laughed softly. "So you have a little meanness in you after all."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Tori said as innocently as she could.
"You're not very subtle," Orochimaru said, then patted her shoulder and called Keizo over.
Keizo was a former Kiri nin.
They removed his spleen.
xXx
Keizo disappeared for two weeks while in recovery. Orochimaru also disappeared, and Tori was left alone in the lab. They were the best two weeks of her time in Oto.
She went through the spleens, of course, and earmarked people for the full-body experiment. Keizo's spleen barely had any bone in it at all after treatment, and Tori added a little note next to his name about how she wasn't sure since he was so helpful in lab. She ended it with a smiley face.
She passed the note to Karin, who showed up daily to make sure Tori was actually working.
"I'm sure Orochimaru-sama will be pleased," Karin drawled, folding the note up and pocketing it.
"Where is he?" Tori asked conversationally.
"According to Kabuto, he's 'indisposed,'" Karin said boredly. "Which means he's ill again, if your moronic self hasn't picked up the lingo yet. Convenient for me, though, since they pushed my transfer to the Southern hideout back a week."
"You're chatty today," Tori observed, grinning. "Friendly, almost."
"Of course I am," Karin said, popping a hip and crossing her arms. "Sasuke just got back from a mission and I want you to come up with an experiment you need him for."
Tori decided that Sasuke should come see what chakra looked like in a disembodied spleen, and Karin went to fetch him. Sasuke took one look at the spleen and informed Tori she was an idiot.
"Wow," Tori replied. "I am so offended and outraged. I have to go walk it off."
Then she walked out of the lab while Karin grabbed for Sasuke's arm, and Tori found herself free to roam Oto by herself for the first time. She wandered for several hours, power walking to look like she knew where she was going whenever she passed other people.
A lot of hallways were blocked off and required a key. They were mostly residential, she remembered from the brief tour she'd gotten when she'd been working inventory. She found locker rooms and training areas, refound the laundry facilities, discovered a kitchen where they seemed to be making actual good food, and then found a room full of organs.
It was some sort of storage room for human organs, which of course Oto had. They were all floating in jars of blue liquid, dimly illuminated in a dark room like the world's most morbid aquarium. There were rows and rows of them, organized by organ system.
It was quiet and dark and oddly peaceful. Tori moved through them slowly, examining them one by one. They were all carefully labelled, mostly in Orochimaru's handwriting and a few in Kabuto's, with dates and donor name and any notes of interest. Most of them were from people with bloodline limits, but some were from interesting sounding experiments.
One side of the room had some tables with lab equipment, and then one huge tank filled with liquid. Tori wandered over there, hoping to find a pen and paper to write down some of the experiment names and dates she wanted to look up later. She ignored the big tank, since it appeared to be empty.
When she finally produced a pencil and some scratch paper, there was a loud bang behind her and she squeaked and whirled around. A naked boy was floating in the tank.
"S–Suigetsu?!" Tori cried.
"Who are you?" Suigetsu asked, his voice muffled by the glass, but not as garbled by the water as she would expect.
"Doesn't matter," Tori said. She was trying very hard not to look at his lower region, but she did note he had both hands. "Can you just cut your body parts off and stick them back on?" she asked without thinking.
"Oh, you're the lab girl," Suigetsu groaned. "Are you going to be taking over from that glasses guy? Please say yes. He's boring. And terrible."
"Sorry," Tori said. Suigetsu groaned again and then continued to complain about Kabuto's bedside manner, and Tori wandered away.
There were too many organs to read all of the labels before she had to leave, so she stuck to the longer captions. Some of them where interesting stories about how the specimens were found, and some of them were descriptions of experiments that she jotted down. She mostly ignored the donor names (although there was a set of gills marked Hoshigaki), until she reached the hearts and found her own name.
She stared at it. In Orochimaru's neat print, it had the date of about a month ago, and then:
Tori Mendoza.
Organ cloned from DNA isolated by novel technique described by donor.
Surprising clonal stability. Lack of elemental alignment preventing typical interference between endogenous and exogenous chakra? Or artefact of donor's otherworldly origin?Further testing needed.
What the fuck.
"Hey, Suigetsu," Tori yelled, cutting him off in the middling of the whining session she had absolutely not been paying attention to. "Whatis this place?"
"How do you not know?" Suigetsu said, squinting down at her. "It's Orochimaru's private lab."
Tori went back to her regular work in a daze. When Karin showed up to demand more alone time with Sasuke, Tori asked her about the private lab and Karin's eyebrows shot up.
"How did you– I guess he keyed you in to his privacy seals since you're lab personnel. I would not spend a lot of time in there, Tori."
Tori, of course, went back as soon as Karin let her go so she could bother Sasuke. She went through the lab notes Orochimaru had over there, pulling the one on her cloned heart. Whole organ cloning was a technique he'd had around for a while, it seemed, but it didn't have a great success rate.
Except he had perfect clones of her heart, spleen, and pancreas, and he had outlined ideas for further testing, and he hadn't even mentioned it to her.
Then Suigetsu sneezed and Tori remembered she wasn't supposed to be there and left.
Karin came to her a third time and sighed wistfully about leaving that night. They faked another stupid experiment for Sasuke, and Tori very determinedly went to see if she could find a store of actual food– like bananas or something, since everyone was obsessed with them. She somehow ended up in Orochimaru's private lab instead, flipping through his notebooks.
"What are you doing?" Suigetsu asked. "I'm absolutely going to tell on you."
"If he didn't want me here, I wouldn't be here," she said. These notebooks were better than the ones in the regular lab. The handwriting was all rushed and and excited and harder to read, but she found things like modifications to the Impure World Reincarnation and Orochimaru's old experiments on cloning Senjuu Hashirama.
Tori went back to lab feeling refreshed. Keizo was sitting at his bench, looking haggard.
"Nice to see you're back," Tori greeted cheerfully. "Your spleen processed beautifully. Only two bone slivers, not even that big."
Keizo glared at her, and Tori hummed as she went back to work.
xXx
Things, of course, went terribly wrong immediately after that.
Tori was summoned to the infirmary before breakfast, which wasn't out of the ordinary. Karin and Sasuke were sitting around, which also wasn't strange. Kabuto made them wait while he shuffled through some paperwork, which was typical obnoxious behavior for him.
Karin stood at least ten feet away from Sasuke, shuffling nervously and pulling at her sleeves, which should have clued Tori into something being off. It didn't, though, and she only whined a little bit about Kabuto rolling up her sleeve and injecting her with a clear liquid.
Tori sat on the edge of an examination table, swinging her legs and waiting for the drug to take effect. She was feeling a little light headed, and Sasuke seemed to be so bored he was nodding off in his seat.
It was… cute. Sasuke was what one would call a "handsome young man," and it made for an adorable sleepy face.
Karin was leaning against the edge of another examination table, examining her nails. Tori was just beginning to think Karin must be pretty upset over something to not being cooing at Sasuke, when Kabuto stood up, crossed the room, and then slit Karin's throat.
She was dead before her body hit the floor.
Tori would have thought she'd scream in this situation. She didn't. She was perfectly quiet, and her entire body tensed, her blood suddenly running cold and frantic. She sat perfectly still on her place on the table, hands gripping the edge as hard as she could.
Sasuke let out an annoyed tch.
Kabuto moved over to a sink to wash off his kunai.
"Well, Tori-chan?" he asked. "What does it look like to see someone's future cut off?"
Tori's mind shut down. Had she made specifications about if the future could be changed? Surely she had. What should she say? That all the strings of fate snapped? That they faded? That– that–
Surely Kabuto hadn't just murdered Karin just for this.
Surely Karin was too useful.
Surely Sasuke would be upset and not just mildly disgusted.
Surely Karin had left for the Southern hideout by now. She had no reason to lie about that.
How stupid did Kabuto think Tori was?
Very stupid, maybe– he'd seen her vomit and cry and beg to be let free. He'd listened to her ramble about all sorts of stupid shit, like passion fruits and potatoes and drug-induced nonsense that occasionally came out in Spanish. He thought she didn't understand how to do a jumping jack.
Tori was feeling very overwhelmed and wanted to cry. She could probably stop herself. She didn't, though, and let her voice crack a few times to cover up her delayed response.
"Why did you do that?" she sobbed. "I don't even know who this is. What kind of an experiment is this?"
"It's Karin," Kabuto insisted. "You can see her fate. What does it look like now?"
"No, it's not Karin, because I couldn't see her fate, and I'm definitely not going to see anything now." Tori hiccupped and rubbed tears from her eyes.
Sasuke stood up and told Kabuto that Tori's chakra still hadn't change at all, except in the way chakra usually changes when civilian women panicked.
"If you're not going to let me question her," he concluded, "I'm not participating in these anymore."
Sasuke left. Tori continued to cry uselessly on the examination table until Kabuto kicked her out. He didn't even have the patience to summon someone to escort her.
Tori wandered back to her cell. She was still mildly lightheaded and upset. Given the experiment was to trick her with– with a genjutsu or a bunshin or a henge or something– Kabuto had probably just given her a placebo injection. The lightheaded feeling was just her own nerves.
She didn't like people being killed on her behalf. It filled her with guilt and made her sick to her stomach. At the same time, though, she wasn't going to lose sleep over it. This wasn't the first person who'd died because of her, and it wasn't going to be the last.
She hoped she never became so numb to it she couldn't cry over it anymore. Aside from her own moral integrity, crying on command had become her lifeline here. No one was going to push her too hard if they thought she was already at her breaking point.
By the time she got back to her cell, Tori's limbs felt heavy. She was going to nap until someone realized she'd never shown up for work and made her do something. Yes, that sounded good.
When she got to her cell, she paused at the door. It swung shut behind her with enough force to make her stumble forward step.
Someone had been in her room. Her futon– which she folded up every morning as per the rules enforced by Snarly-nin– was rolled out, and someone had filled it with a curiously morbid sight.
A pair of disembodied eyes stared up at her, on either side a severed ear. A nose and someone's lips sat beneath the eyes on the bed, arranged as a human face. Below them, a heart nestled between two lungs, and below them a liver, a stomach, a pancreas, the spiral of intestines.
It stunk of formaldehyde.
The face looked almost funny. It was certainly silly-looking, like building a face out of emojis.
At least whoever did this was thoughtful enough to do it the day before laundry day. She'd have the sheets cleaned and then… and then…
Her legs wobbled. She leaned against the door and sunk to the floor. What did this mean?
The organs were clearly from the lab. They were too clean to come straight from a person– no blood, and all the fat had been cut away. She was sure there were some organs sitting around in the infirmary, but they wouldn't smell like preservatives.
So, either someone snuck into the lab and stole them for an elaborate prank or…
She forced herself to stand and regarded the almost-person with critical eyes. Stomach, pancreas, liver with the gallbladder, but no spleen.
It wasn't a prank. It was a threat.
xXx
NOTES: Next chapter some SHIT HITS THE FAN and we will meet another Akatsuki member! Maybe even two, depending on how many words it takes me to get there. ;)
The next time a chapter ends up this long I am just going to split it in two– you'll get updates faster and I won't be stuck editing a 30 page document through my own frustrated tears. I didn't do that with this one because I don't actually really want to be writing about Tori in Sound, so I didn't want to end up with five chapters about it. I like worldbuilding Sound, but it's meant to be more like a practice run for navigating an entire organization of S-rank ninja. :P