"Hello, Mr. Oliver! You're a little late today", The young, smiling nurse greeted loudly.
"Hello, Miss Betty", Returned her loss to her young black-haired doctor in a white apron. "Traffic. What can one do about it?"
In one of London's leading hospitals, the day shift's workday was just beginning. The night staff had already turned in their shift and were now halfway home. Some of the lucky people who lived just around the corner had long since begun to sleep it off.
A young surgeon, who had finished his internship a year ago, was walking leisurely down the wide snow-white corridors to his workplace.
But when the young doctor reached his office, the slight smile that did not leave his face the whole way, slowly slid down, leaving behind a frowning, focused expression.
After the doctor locked his office door, it suddenly exploded with white smoke, leaving behind a small figure.
As the smoke cleared, in the doctor's place was suddenly a little ten-year-old boy with the same black but slightly longer hair. Instead of gray eyes, the boy was the bearer of a rarer green pigmentation. The most notable features were the slit-shaped serpentine pupils, and the white, almost paper-colored skin.
He walked over to a rather wide cabinet with thick folders of various colors, and Orochimaru, who had opened it, began to rummage through it vigorously, going through folder after folder.
It took him only ten seconds to find the folder he was looking for, and as he opened it, he quickly whispered to himself:
"Two hundred and three, two hundred and four, one hundred and five. Didn't lie", Orochimaru grinned, putting the folder back on the shelf.
As he walked over to his desk, Orochimaru opened the lowest drawer, taking from it a sheaf of only two keys.
"I'll have to improvise a little". He frowned, thinking as he put the young surgeon's henge back on.
After standing by the wide iron door for a while, Orochimaru finally waited for an orderly with a large cart to start to leisurely go through the bunch of keys.
After waiting for him to open the door, Orochimaru picked a moment when no one was looking at him, and began very quickly folding three one-handed seals with his right hand, holding the concentration seal with his left.
"Combination technique: hiding an illusory clone", Said Orochimaru in his head, instantly becoming invisible. But while the technique was being applied, Orochimaru just as quickly bounced to the side, and his perfect illusory clone appeared where he had been just a moment before.
All of this manipulation didn't even take a second, so the next moment, when attention was drawn to him again, no one noticed anything.
Sneaking behind the orderly, Orochimaru created a thread of chakra and instantly picked up the key that the orderly had so carelessly tucked into his back pocket, instead of putting it back into the rather massive keychain that was locked with a code lock, as the instructions required.
Orochimaru immediately hid behind a shelf full of boxes, removing a rather chakra-consuming cloaking technique.
Taking out a small vial of ink and dropping it on the key, Orochimaru took the two paper tissues he had picked up at the front desk.
After taking a print of the key on both sides, Orochimaru carefully wiped away the remaining traces of ink with the second napkin.
"Though I doubt there won't be a lock replacement after my walk, it's better to be safe than sorry."
After waiting for the attendant to finish his business and head for the exit, Orochimaru tossed the key back in with the same chakra thread.
And then, as the door slammed shut, Orochimaru emerged from the shadows of the tall stacks with a sly grin, pulling a massive book of spatial seals from behind his belt.
"Ku-ku-ku-ku-ku...", Orochimaru laughed happily, before beginning the most massive theft in the history of this hospital.
"Y-you're going to let me go, aren't you?", Stammered the tortured man in stone shackles that had his hands chained to the wall.
"Of cours-se... - Orochimaru smiled as he began to fold a long series of hand seals, finally raising his right hand with an outstretched index finger.
Suddenly a dim blue light flashed on the tip of his finger, which began to take the shape of a strange hieroglyph.
Horrified at the creepy boy who had been his executioner and captor for two days, the man shrank back against the wall with his whole body.
"Y-You promised!", the black-haired man shouted, beginning to shake his whole body vigorously.
"And I don't intend to break my promises," Orochi grinned, pressing a finger to the man's forehead in a swift motion.
The man immediately froze with a blank stare, and the seals began to spill over his forehead.
After a few seconds, the symbols glowed crimson, instantly gathering into a single kanji "意", which translates to "memory," but even that disappeared after a second.
"The most useful Yamanaka technique I took from the root", Orochimaru thought happily, admiring the result of his work.
At first Orochimaru didn't want to leave him alive, but he changed his mind on the way to the hospital, realizing that it would only cause unnecessary noise, and it would be better to simply block this piece of memory with a special fuinjutsu technique.
In addition, putting the memory blocking seal on this man would help him open easy access to obtaining medication, as it allows not only blocking, but also substituting small portions of memory.
Folding the concentration seal, Orochimaru removed the stone shackles from his prisoner, causing him to slowly slide backwards onto the floor.
Taking out and unfolding a huge scroll that was meant to hold living bodies, which he had drawn on a simple roll of white wallpaper, Orochimaru dragged the man's unconscious body onto it with little effort, and infusing chakra into a certain area, sealed it in the makeshift scroll.
"This is going to be a long...", He sighed, putting the strap on the scroll, and heading for the exit of the dungeons.
"Did everyone understand the instructions?", He asked Orochimaru, looking at his two shadow clones in their surgical uniforms.
Seeing them nod approvingly, Orochimaru threw off his hospital gown, finding himself completely naked beneath it.
He had been out in the world for a month now, and in this body in particular. At first he had absolutely no faith that this body could withstand his power, giving him a period of two weeks at most. As the days passed, but the body was in no hurry to self-destruct.
Finding no mention of any chakra users in all this time, Orochimaru had two thoughts: either they were completely absent here, or they were hiding very well. Orochimaru himself was leaning toward the second theory, since the first one broke down completely due to the recent incident with the cursed seal.
So he decided to stay in this body for the time being, since there wasn't much of a choice anyway. So he decided to make a full body modification, through a long operation, for which he decided to rob one of the leading hospitals in the capital of the country where he happened to find himself.
After setting up his new operating room to an acceptable level, Orochimaru created two shadow clones, spending an hour filling them with his chakra. He only finished when he felt that the chakra in the seal was slowly running out.
When Orochimaru lay down on the metal couch and one of the clones began to prepare the Iryonjutsu for general anesthesia, the operation finally began.
"...os!"
Weakness, complete disorientation, and someone's insistent voice, as if from far away.
"I've been operated on", Orochi guessed at once, which was then confirmed by a sudden burst of memory. ""I'll never get used to this"", He complained.
"Boss!", Finally he heard it clearly.
Waking up on the soft bed, and opening his slumbering eyes, which were struggling to close again, Orochimaru stared silently, a washed out look at the only clone that was looking at him with a concerned expression
"Running out of chakra?", He thought, and didn't fail to duplicate his question aloud.
"Yes, boss. The operation went a lot harder than we expected."
"What's supposed to be so hard? I've done it more than once, and rehearsed it in the field!"
"Look at your hands."
Orochimaru did so immediately, expecting to see the disfigured fingers that always greeted him after this operation.
"What the...", He thought, looking at his perfectly clean hands with surprise.
The drowsiness was instantly gone, and Orochimaru immediately rushed to look at the rest of his body.
Pulling back the white blanket that covered him up to his neck, Orochimaru stared in a daze at the skin as if it hadn't been touched by a scalpel.
He rushed to check the mobility of his joints, and when he moved his fingers, he saw that they flexed freely in all directions. As, in principle, they should.
"The operation was successful, but took five times as long as it should have."
"What was the reason?", He asked the question.
"During the operation, all the incisions that were made with the scalpel slowly but surely healed. Because of this, the rhythm of the operation itself was disrupted, and we often had to start all over again. The reasons for the anomaly are unknown. It is possible that this is the very peculiarity that caused the boy who used to occupy this body to be branded."
Frowning, Orochimaru leaned back loosely on the bed, and tried to gather his thoughts.
"I'm running out of chakra, so I'll have to scatter pretty soon. Should I do something before then?"
After thinking for a while, Orochimaru answered:
"Bring a scroll of food and water for two days and you can scatter," He sighed, slowly closing his eyes from fatigue.
"Accepted."