I focused on the hum of the generator. It sounded closer now but I couldn't be sure. I was never a very good judge of distance but I tried my damnedest nonetheless. If I thought about it hard enough I hoped I would forget being in that room and the indescribable horror that washed over me. It was no doubt in vain. I'd probably visit it every night before sleep for the rest of my life. For now the generator would do, being the only lead I had.
I'd even dismissed fear of who or what might be living in this hell hole as I felt nothing could top the blood-soaked room. I was so ready to gather my father and get out of here, never to even look in this direction as long as I lived.
I came to a halt when I arrived toe to toe with a mountain of rock and dirt. The hallway had collapsed here. I could just barely make out the night sky through rebar and roots above. I stood for a moment and enjoyed the little precious fresh air filtering in. It was a small gap and not fit for any human escape route. As I stood in silence I could still hear the generator coming from the same direction. I gathered up the strength to continue, spying a doorway to the right of the hall. I sighed and trekked on. I felt ten years older than when I had started this endeavor and felt I'd somehow began to become cynical of my own cowardice.
Through this door was a large storage room with a door on the other side. The shelves here were only partially robbed. The items remaining were jars and vials, some empty and some full. I had no interest in finding out what any of them contained and hurried to the opposite door. Beyond this was another hallway continuing onward. I felt this was a relief as much as I was going to get in here.
This hallway was crowded with debris. Broken furniture and over turned trunks lined the walls. Most of the rooms were blocked off. The generator was louder. I thought I'd be happy about it but instead the fear of something guarding it crept back. I tiptoed carefully through the splinters and decay. However, I didn't figure decay to be as slippery as I stumbled forward and threw all my weight onto a table obscuring an archway.
The table turned out to be a stainless steel gurney. The kind with wheels, I was informed when it slid out from under me and skimmed down the hall as if of its own volition. It toppled with a loud crash. I toppled with a loud crash and a tapering shout. There came another shout and it took a second to register that it was not me.
I turned about to see a human figure in the doorway. I pulled my knife from my belt, cutting myself in the process, and brandished it at the figure with a shout that came out less intimidating than I'd have liked. The figure nonetheless shouted as well but brandished something at me in return. I nearly recoiled, making peace with my life, before I realized it was only a wax candle. The both of us froze.
The candle threw harsh light onto a harsh face. It was a thin, bedraggled man perhaps just a little older than me. His skin was dusky and his hair was so brick red it was nearly brown. He spoke with a cracked voice through cracked lips.
"Good job slicing yourself with my fine knife, mate."
"It….It's not as easy as they make it seem in the plays." I replied, hesitant to put the knife down. The man squinted at me, drawing shadows into the bags beneath his eyes.
"You ain't no ninja, son." He said as I cautiously rose to my feet. "Well no, I'm…just a rice farmer from the village. You don't look like a ninja." I retorted, motioning to him in his entirety.
The man drew his ragged pants up and hitched a breath in a proud posture. "I sure ain't. But I'm the king o' this base, now. Promoted through open positions, wouldn't you know?" He said with a crooked grin. I gave him an incredulous look.
"You worked here? For the… for the snake?" I found it hard to believe anyone in Lord Orochimaru's service would remain in the place of their imprisonment of their own free will. This man looked to be a native of Suna. Why wouldn't he go home?
"Why…Why on earth would you stay in this place?" I discreetly put a little distance between myself and this man. He didn't seem to be all there. Isolation in this dark horrible hell hole for nearly a decade is more than I could imagine. Even if I couldn't blame him, it didn't ease my worry.
"Oh working for the snake wasn't such a bad gig. Before that slimy codger we was all barely getting by, wherever we been from. Then he comes by, needs some knobs to do some work and presto, we got food, shelter, even a little community for the rest of our miserable lives." He nodded thoughtfully but caught the disbelieving look on my face. He continued, saying, "Sure may not've been that long a life. Th' Snake Lord did occasionally shove of an' kill the help but, you know, only on bad days. Why would ya kill your own help, right?"
"Bad days?" I murmured, not because I didn't think Orochimaru had them but because I assumed that's all there were. I was some morbid kind of fascinated by the rambling of this dirt-encrusted hermit. It was like catching a glimpse of the Devil kicking off his trotters at the end of the day.
"Oh aye, like I said, wasn't such a bad gig. I had this mate and one of the bloke's only jobs was bringing the lord his cuppa tea. He said Th' Snake was polite as all get out but didn't stop 'im from having nightmares. Lucky I was just a maintenance man. Didn't see his Royal Ghostliness in the flesh but for passin' in the hall."
The man paused and squinted at me bemusedly. I must have had a vacant enthralled look on my face. I cleared my throat, embarrassed.
"You came awfully far for some ghost stories, rice farmer." He said. "Not like them kids that come blunderin' down here lookin' for a scare now and then."
I tried to regain a serious composure. "No. I'm looking for my father. We're not looking for any trouble. He just wandered down here a few days ago salvaging, just an old man. Have…have you seen him?" I tried not sound hopeful, thinking perhaps crazy people smell hope like lions smell fear.
They might. The man grinned, a smile not in its best shape. "Ooooh. An old man with a great big trolley was it? Yeah I seen him"
"You have! I'd be very grateful if you would tell me where, if you know a way out even."
"Oh I know all that. But I can't just go telling you for no nominal fee, now can I? You're going to have to give me something for my troubles if'n you want to know. Otherwise you're welcome to be my new neighbor an' you can fetch me tea." The man seemed much humored by himself. I was significantly less humored.
"Give you something? I… I only came down here with water and a little food. I don't think I even own anything valuable." I argued timidly.
"That won't do, son, I've got enough food 'n water to keep me fat as a cat the rest of my days. You're sure you've got nothing?" He hobbled a short way beyond the arch we were standing beneath, sharing the flame of his candle with more of the same. There was a workbench and a wall in the room beyond, covered in what were just knickknacks and trinkets as far as I could tell. The rest of the room was filthy to include a ramshackle bed that was drowning in dust. Every surface was smothered in odds and ends: jars, quills, scraps of books, items that I could not identify.
"Empty your pockets, than." He barked, startling me from intently squinting at something that may have been a femur. I stammered and mumbled awkwardly. I gave the man his kitchen knife back before turning my thin pockets out. The scrap of silk I pocketed earlier pooled into my palm along with a crumpled piece of stock paper I'd recovered from the bloodbath room. The man from Suna quickly snatched the silk from me with gnarled hands.
"Oho look at this, cerulean silk! Oh yeah, that's nice, quite nice." The man artfully propped the scrap of fabric across a heap of candle holders after rubbing it against his cheek. I definitely didn't want it back now. What would he even do with all of this stuff? He clearly hoarded it because he thought it was valuable but if he never comes out of this crumbling base again…what would be the point? Whatever floats his boat, I suppose.
I fidgeted with the scrap of paper, unfolding it while my would-be bargainer cackled delightedly over the silk. It was about the size of a photograph. A corner was torn and the edges were worn. There was a handwritten date on the top of an otherwise blank slate. The writing was spidery and trailing but far too worn for me to decipher. Figuring it to be the back of the photo, I flipped it over in my hand and just about dropped it.
The picture was faded with age but still clear. It was a picture of three adolescent children lounging under a tree. A hazel-eyed blonde girl was sitting in the grass looking very protective and militant but had her legs elegantly tucked beneath her. In the center was a very boisterous looking boy with a large frame and an explosion of white hair atop his skull, his arms outstretched towards the companions on either side of him. Despite my situation the pure sincerity of the smile on this child's face bade my lips turn upwards momentarily.
The lower right corner of the photo was torn and the remaining edge frayed as if this photograph was always only handled from this side. Small worn scratches did little to mask the identity of the third boy in the picture. Sitting slightly aloof and lounging in the grass was a thin boy with small pointed features in juxtaposition to the broad child in the middle. This third boy's skin was white as a ghost and, most fearfully, his long black hair framed intensely bright serpent eyes.
My lips were trying to work into words. I was trying to tell the collector to take the photo from me. I did not want to stare at it any longer. I did not want to humanize Orochimaru the Tyrant Snake and I did not want his delicate face and happy friends emblazoned in my mind's eye. The dark markings enveloping his eyelids and running to a point down the bridge of his nose only made it more impossible not to be drawn to stare into his eyes. Although the expression the boy wore was unremarkably neutral, maybe even gentle with the faintest hint of a smile through pale parted lips, the inhuman eyes almost physically burned mine.
Suddenly the photo was snatched from me with a loud startling theatric gasp from the second party. He clutched it in his grubby hands and held it an inch from his nose looking marvelously enchanted. It would have been comical under other circumstances.
"Oh my sweet mum's grave, where did you find this!?" I started to answer him but he flew off into an excited rant.
"This! This right here! This is Lord Orochimaru! Only smaller, but blimey he looks much the same. This is his life! The daft snake squeezed all the labor out of me for all my life and now! Oh now, my rice farmer friend, now I've got his! This is the most valuable thing I could ever get, mate."
I was a bit dumbstruck by his enthusiasm. If I had any doubt he'd lost his mind it was gone now.
"My…About my father-." I cleared my throat and spoke over the man berating a photograph nearly half a century old. I was very ready to leave this old magpie with his collection and never see him again. It took him several minutes to calm down.
"Oh right. Your old man is a brave coot, in't he? He gave me some shiny bits and wandered down towards the prisoner labs with a smile on his old face the whole time." He nodded enthusiastically.
"….Prisoner labs?" That sounded like the two most horrible things in this structure combined into the most horrible thing plausible.
The man just nodded again. "Yup! The prisoner labs are where most of the crazy spooky stuff went down. When the snake died and his four-eyed little lap dog left there was a right intense riot between prisoners down there. Which seems kinda silly, don't it? Prisoners turnin' on each other if they're all freed?" He laughed at this. "There's an exit just beyond that, I swears. So the spooks could get in an' out without traversing the whole rest of the base I reckon."
I was so relieved to hear the word "exit" that it almost abolished the preceding story of prison riots.
"Thank you for your…er…help." I stumbled through thanks I scarcely thought he deserved. He didn't notice, as he'd turned back to his collection. I gathered my lantern and began padding down the direction of the prison labs, leaving the king of the base muttering about where to put his new prized possession.
/Stay tuned for the heartfelt conclusion~ -Orochimartyr