When the maze had become more complex Temari decided to start marking her way. With a kunai she scratched arrows in the tiles every time she turned a corner and was quite pleased with this method, until she ran into a dead end and had to turn back. She discovered that her arrow had been turned around somehow.

"What the hell?!" Temari cried out, "This place sucks ass!"

"That's right!" she heard behind her, "it does suck!"

Temari spun around at two guards roaring with laughter. Each stood in front of a dark wooden door.

When the second had caught his breath, he added "And that's only half of it!", a remark that was apparently equally hilarious, although Temari begged to differ.

"What?!" she said, "This was a dead end just now!"

"No," the right guard - a young guy with spiky black hair and a bandage across his nose – noted, "that's the dead end, behind you!"

His companion, a bloke with a blue bandana and brown hair covering one of his eyes, started laughing again and as Temari turned around once more, his neighbor joined in. They were right: the way she'd just come had been closed off. A feeling of despair once again washed over Temari.

"It keeps changing, what am I supposed to do?!" she uttered, hopelessly.

"Well," bandana replied, "the only way out of here is to try one of these doors."

"One of them leads to the castle at the center of the labyrinth," bandage added, "and the other to…"

"pompompom po~m" lefty quasi ominously interjected

"Certain death…!"

In unison they rounded off their forbidding message with a ghostly "Oo~h."

"Ha! You can't scare me like that," Temari said, but admittedly she did feel kind of uneasy about all this, "Which is which?"

"You can only ask one of us," the left keeper answered.

"Un!" the other agreed, "It's in the rules! And I should warn you: one of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies. That's a rule, too," he added, "He always lies."

"I do not, I tell the truth!"

"Oooh, what a lie!"

"Oo! He's the liar!"

They started sniggering.

While the guards had been bickering, Temari thought of something. She went up to the guard with the emo hair.

"Alright, answer yes or no," she instructed him, "Would he" – she pointed at spike – "tell me this door" – she pointed at the door behind the addressee – "leads to the castle?"

The guard had to think about it for a moment, but finally answered: "Yes?"

"Then… the other door leads to the castle and this door leads to certain death," Temari decided.

"How do you know? He could be telling the truth!" he started debating, while right keeper simply listened.

"But then you wouldn't be," Temari explained, "When you tell me he'd say 'yes', I know the actual answer would be 'no'."

"But I could be telling the truth!" the guard argued.

"But then he would be lying, so the answer would still be 'no'!"

"Wait a minute." The guard looked at his colleague, "Is that right?"

"I don't know!" he answered "I never understood it!"

He burst out in laughter and his partner immediately joined in.

"I know it's right," Temari muttered even though they'd stopped paying attention, "I figured it out."

She walked toward the right door and the guard, hiccupping in the aftermath of his fit of laughter, stepped aside and went quiet altogether. His colleague left his post to join him in intently watching Temari go through the door. She felt their eyes prickling in the back of her neck, but kept walking proudly through the hallway. Suddenly she felt that there was nothing underneath her feet to walk on. In a reflex she managed to get on the ledge of the pit, but that didn't help her much as the door slammed shut and the hallway closed off with a bang. The room went completely dark, apart from a little opening in the center of the high ceiling.

For a moment she considered. Forcing open the door was no option, because she would be back where she started and she knew it was a dead end. She tried attacking the walls with her fan again, but the results were the same as before: not a single scratch was left in the stones.

So down was the only option. The hole was narrow enough for her to let herself slowly descend, but after a while the walls of the pit came to an end. She looked down to see if there was a floor, but all she saw was a gaping black hole.

Temari decided that she had no choice but to let go, even though she had no idea how far down she would fall. Before she let herself drop, she took hold of her fan and during her fall opened it fully and mounted it, in the hope of decreasing speed. The drop only took a second and finally her feet touched the ground.

The darkness had increased until it was absolute. The kind one's eyes don't get used to. Temari started groping the walls of the space in search of a door. She bumped into a whole lot of stuff, but none of them were exits of any kind.

Just as she was about to give in to panic, out of nowhere she felt someone's chakra appear. She recognized it, but just to be certain asked: "Who's there?"

"Me."

A light went on and Temari looked in the ever annoyed looking face of Shikamaru. She couldn't believe how happy she was to see it. She didn't let on, though.

"How did you get in here?" she asked sceptically.

"This place is a piece of cake," Shikamaru said, "You know, I knew you were going to get into trouble, so I've come to give you a hand."

"Well, how?" Temari repeated, "There aren't any doors."

"This is an oubliette. It's a place you put people to forget about them," Shikamaru ignored her question, "So I s'pose you want to get out?"

"You... Don't ask stupid questions."

Shimamaru turned around and picked a broad plank up from the floor that actually turned out to be a door. It had two doorknobs, one on the left and one on the right side. He set it upright against the wall and smirked at Temari, before he turned the doorknob on the right side and revealed a brightly lit passage.

"Amazing..!" Temari sighed and figured that she probably never liked someone as much as she liked this guy now. "Where does the other doorknob lead to?"

"That's a broomcloset."

Temari laughed heartily. It might not have been a joke but anything was great at this point.

"Say, will you help me solve this labyrinth?" she asked him cheerfully.

"No way, that's far too troublesome."

"What?!" Temari's feelings about Shikamaru turned quite around: she was convinced she never disliked someone more.

"I will bring you above ground and from then you're on your own," Shikamaru said.

"Fine!" Temari curtly replied.

"Good," he said impassively and started walking through the passage. Temari quietly followed.