--()--

Intermission

7 of the final month

The snows are thick outside my window, nearly four feet, I should think. Yesterday, as I was walking about, I lost my footing and plummeted into snow bank. Neji and Naruto had great fun at my expense at this, but of course, Naruto helped me out.

For the past few months, Naruto's progressed immensely. Despite the distinct lack of the Byakugan, he's managed to hone his chakra control. It's nowhere near even my level, but it is fine enough for his purposes. Essentially, he has had to memorize each chakra nexus and its approximate position and relation to each other in a body. With that, he's able to somewhat block, or at least hinder, chakra control in an opponent's body. However, he's blending our style with his own absolutely reckless and willy-nilly fighting style, which is more like an abandonment of sense and needs an enormous amount of luck, something which he, fortunately, has. He also implements whatever The Arm has taught him, which appears to be body manipulation and summoning. Unfortunately, he has no talent for either, but has managed progress through repeated practice.

Ah, I almost forgot. The Winter Festival is nearly upon us. It seems as if our father, whom has become more and more stressed, will allow Naruto to go along with Hanabi and me, simply because he'd rather not listen to Naruto's incessant whining for a little free time outside the House. I don't blame either of them, but I wish they would cease being openly hostile to each other.

10 of the final month

I've been dreaming lately. Of carnage, and blood, and desolate wastelands as far as the eye can see. There is one dream in particular that still lingers now, giving me chills.

I stand in the middle of nowhere, a desert with dry, cracked yellow-red earth beneath my bare feet. There is nothing in the distance, nothing near, and the ochre sky is almost indistinguishable from the horizon. There are no clouds, there is no sun. Suddenly, a storm sweeps from the south, tearing through the desert like a living thing. It comes far too fast to be a storm, however, and sounds as if the very earth itself is tearing itself apart. Billowing clouds sweep and grind the earth to nothing, and everything is suddenly charred. It sweeps past me like a thousand trains, then recedes, and I am safe, the only part of the wasteland un-charred being a small circle around my feet.

Slowly, the crisp, burnt earth cracks, and disgorges thousands of millions of billions of bodies, twisted, broken, their faces frozen in infinite screams, their eyes bubbling, their flesh falling from their bones, their blood a flood, an ocean. As one, they moan, then scream, then shriek, until it sounds exactly like the storm, then it is louder, and my ears are bleeding.

A familiar voice speaks over the noise in a whisper, and I can't quite pinpoint where I've heard it before. "Behold, the world of man, my audience of one." There is a laugh, and two molten eyes. "Do you like this vision? Do you like this world? For this is my desert and my existence. And this is just a taste."

Then I wake.

2 of the first month

Naruto and I have been training more often together, as Neji has begun to train in earnest. There has been a great amount of violence in the City, Royal Guards clashing with Akatsuki. Whole sections of the City have been evacuated, and then promptly destroyed in monstrously powerful fights. Sometimes, late at night, I lie awake and listen to the distant eruptions echoing off the Wall behind the House. Naruto sometimes stares over at the City from the oak tree, watching explosions reflected off the dome. He is angry and worried, but tries not to show it, giving me a big grin every time we meet to spar.

Today, we tried an endurance training exercise, and we stood on the pond water for as long as possible. Naruto is frighteningly powerful and fast, but he still struggles with such simple things as water walking. They simply don't come easy to him. We stayed out late into the frigid night at his behest. I can still remember how he stood perfectly still, balancing on the ice-cold water, occasionally sinking in. At one point, he looked down and grinned. All he said was "Stars" and then promptly sank. He came back up, sputtering as he crawled over his own waves and sat bobbing up and down, smiling at me. The stars were indeed being reflected all around him, moving up and down with the ripples. I giggled (like a fool) and nodded. "You're sitting in stars, Naruto."

Then, dripping wet and freezing as he was, he laughed. "Someone said that if you reach for the stars, all you'll get is handfuls of mud." Shaking water out of his shaggy hair, he smirked. "I say, bring them down to earth and then grab 'em here." Standing, he stared at me for a moment. "Work smart, not hard."

I nodded and we stared at each other from across the pond. But I doubt he saw me.

Does he ever really see me?

29 of the first month

It's been nearly a year since Naruto's come to stay with us. And now he's leaving to train again. For a year. My father has long since ceased to care about the politics of the House to care about Naruto's coming and going anymore, and has fairly forgotten he is even living with us. A great deal of other, heavier considerations have weighed on his mind. The Akatsuki pockets found by the Royal Guard are more often than not kamikazes or copycats, or a thousand other things but something significant. Most are not chakra-users, and are simply sycophants hoping to be noticed by the true organization, whom cannot be flushed out no matter what measures are taken.

The Regent has been increasingly more oppressive, starting random searches in private homes and ordering everyone that is even suspected of Akatsuki sympathizing executed without trial and without hesitation. The Council has two empty seats now, having been suspected of plotting with Akatsuki. They were later found to be innocent, but far too late, as they'd been executed for nearly two weeks before that innocence was proven. Lady Tsunade's been run into the ground, having brought Delphi back online, but having to retrain the new city-mind with a great deal of forgotten information and routines. Then the duties of Mediator and a constant barrage of false information on the Akatsuki have caused a great deal of stress. She nearly broke down addressing the public, and has since disappeared into the labs, forsaking all other duties except Delphi.

In this crazy, hectic times, my mind is being ravaged as well. That familiar voice in my dreams, I recognize it. It is the Kyuubi. He has begun to barrage my mind, teasingly knocking on the my psyche's door. And now is when Naruto must leave, right when I need an anchor the most.

3 of the third month

The hole Naruto's departure has left aches. I have lost a great deal of sleep, because now, I am forced to converse with the Kyuubi no Kitsune everytime I sink into an exhausted dream. But...he has promised to reveal something to me. And I am intrigued. He speaks in hushed tones of a lost history. Of Bijuu and their origins. And, I cannot help by wonder. Hidden knowledge, revealed straight from the source.

Aside from that, his presence is taxing. Each night, he visits my dreams, sometimes with lewd images, sometimes with carnage, sometimes with nothingness. I think nothingness is the worst, simply because I feel as if I am trapped in my own mind for a fraction of eternity. Endless nothing, and black. As if only my mind is left in an empty universe...I miss Naruto dearly, and I think the Kyuubi cannot stand this fact.

19 of the third month

I am compelled, no, obligated to record my dreams now. The Kitsune has begun to explain history to me, and it seems as if these stories are simply that, stories. They cannot be true, but I doubt myself even as I say so.

He appeared in my mind as a small fox, sitting curled up in a plush leather chair in the middle of a room with glass walls. There were no furnishings in the room, and outside the room, there was nothing. A chair appeared for me and I sat. And a very compelling story was spun for me.

"I am ancient, Hinata," spoke the fox, opening his eyes wearily, his maw unmoving, his brass eyes unblinking. "I am nearly four million standard years old. Have you any idea what sort of time span that is. Never in all my long existence have I revealed what I reveal now. But since never have I been sealed within a human body, the unprecedented should accompany the unprecedented." The blankness outside the walls bled into black, then bled into black with stars. And slowly, we were floating above a planet, blue and white and green and glinting with a sun's rays just breaking over the world's rim.

"This is Earth," he explained, patiently, as if speaking to a child. "You've never heard of it. This is not a surprise. For millennia, the people within your Wall thought that that was the universe, and nothing was outside it. Of course, now you know better. Which is why the Regent now exists." I asked him what he meant by that, but he waved me away with a paw. "I speak of history, not current events."

Our glass room fell into the planet's atmosphere, dropping, dropping, dropping towards a small mass of land. "That, the island, is the United Kingdom, one of the many principalities of this Earth. At one point in its past, it was important, but has since fallen in its glory." We fell further still, into a city, somewhat more advanced and certainly odd in architecture, with buildings that reached too high and too square. "This is the city of dreaming spires, or Oxford, home of the oldest university in the English speaking world." The term 'English' was lost on me, but I dared not interrupt. "It is here where many achievements in science, law, mathematics, and a plethora of other subjects have advanced considerably."

We fell further still, towards a cluster of buildings of great age, through the ceiling of the University, and into a large laboratory. Massive machines hummed and blinked, thousands of computations and equations were scrawled on blackboards. A single man sat hunched in front of an odd monitor, tapping away at what I recognized was an analog keyboard, complete with plastic keys and a chipped edge. "It was here, in 2012 Anno Domini, where Chakra was hypothesized by a man named Rudyard Mandrake, a genius on par with someone else you've never heard of, by the name of Einstein." The fox hopped off his chair, onto the old man's bench, and then onto his desk. He stared at the figures scrolling along the monitor, and snorted. "Of course, his figures were somewhat off, and he, of course, did not call it Chakra, but something entirely different. He called it The Great Force." Kyuubi smirked, and wandered back to his chair. "People called him mad and rejected his findings. Something like what he described could not exist. It was preposterous."

The laboratory melted into black. Slowly, out of the black came an odd, sizzling orb, massive and fuzzy. I recognized it immediately. An atom, and I said so. "Correct. An atom, the building blocks of all matter." The atom froze in place, revealing the electrons on their mad journey around the nucleus. Slowly, our glass room sped towards the atom and into it, pushing into a proton, pushing down deep. Slowly, everything grew into black. Pinpoints of something began to form, and I made a tentative guess at subatomic particles. "Quarks, leptons, gluons, the building blocks of protons, neutrons, and electrons, elementary particles. Deeper we go, however."

Slowly, the last vestiges of matter became massive, and we saw the space between...something. "There was once a theory, called the String Theory, that original tried to explain gravity based on the idea that all matter is built on what can best be described as a 'string', or loops of one-dimensional rings oscillating at specific frequencies." The loop described slowly came into view. "The theory was that by explaining this theory, everything would be explained. Space, time, matter, anti-matter, energy, anti-energy, black holes, white holes, wormholes, space curvature. Everything."

"Each string vibrating at a specific frequency represents something, like a quark, a gluon, etc, each having their own oscillation." The fox cleared his throat, and we were suddenly floating over a large cluster of buildings on a plain. Around the buildings stretched a large ring on the earth, as if some great, circular ruin was buried just beneath the surface. "Our dear friend Mandrake hypothesized that there must be a force acting upon these strings, The Great Force, which he described as a 'tangible ability to change'. Essentially, it was force that was literally, in and of itself, the power of change. Now, at the time, change was considered a transition, not a physical thing, and so humans limited their thinking. But Mandrake nearly killed himself by working on his theory and equations. He soon lost his job, his prestige, and finally, his life by his own hands. A shameful waste." We drifted closer to the buildings. They looked far more advanced than the previous city.

"Nearly a century later, this facility was built based on advances in Mandrake's theories. Finally accepted, they sought to find further truth in his theory by building an accelerator. Essentially, this machine was built to smash elementary particles together to try and find evidence of this Great Force." The fox yawned. "It was here where the world changed."

The ring erupted brilliantly in a flash of glaring blue light, like a welder's torch. When my vision readjusted, I found myself staring not at a crater, but at jagged spikes of crystallized matter contained exactly within the ring. One was the color of iron, another looked like a solid, massive ruby. Here and there, billowing gases flooded back and forth. One or two buildings kept their shape, but it seemed as if the entire structure had turned to ice and was slowly melting. Another building had turned into a tree, twisted and leafy. "The power of Change had been discovered, Hinata." The fox grinned, then laughed. "And it was to be unleashed on this unsuspecting Earth. The wholesale harnessing of instantly plucking those invisible strings and converting it into whatever material one deems necessary."

We came out of Earth, and watched it spin slowly, then faster and faster. All over the globe, advances were made, buildings were risen in a flash, land was made from water, and water was made from land. Forests rose, forests fell, iron was grown, rubies were harvested, wind was contained in bottles. Fire was condensed and raised. Soon, the world's geography was entirely different, land masses themselves shifted from their foundations. "Nearly two thousand years passed since Mandrake killed himself in the name of his science, and the world was totally revolutionized. People no longer died so easily, and life was extended from a few decades to a few centuries. There were wars, there was peace, but none of it lived up to just living. The only thing that The Great Force could not do was make life from non-life. Life can only arise from life itself. But there were some who were not content to believe this little bit of truth."

"And now begins my story."

I awoke in my bed, breathing hard.

--

I warned you. Blatantly Sci-Fi. If anyone is curious, there is such a thing as a string-theory, but it's a whole lot more complex than I give it credit.

Next time, The Kyuubi no Kitsune's history. As well as a few others.

-Raz