Sakura spent two days in the hospital connected to an IV. Apparently, spending hours in a state of extreme chakra exhaustion followed by not seeking medical attention and then driving herself to chakra exhaustion again within only a few days was a bit Not Good. She spent a solid two hours after she woke up being lectured by a stern Hyuuga woman.
According to the medic, she came very close to doing permanent damage to her chakra coils, and it was a miracle that she didn't use that last little bit of chakra that would do so. Sakura didn't think the woman would like being told that it wasn't luck, but her phenomenal chakra control. At least now she knew she could do it again with no permanent damage so long as she left that two percent behind.
(She didn't mention this newfound knowledge to the Hyuuga either, somehow she thought it would be classed as a bit Very Not Good.)
The hospital was nice, she spent a lot of time in other people's rooms and exploring. Most of the rookie nine showed up with regularity; considering that her, the Uchiha and Hinata were in the hospital (even if she was the only one awake) and they all had interesting stories to tell from the second exam. Neither Uzumaki nor Hatake appeared, but the jōnin had left a note filled with cryptic statements about the road of life that basically boiled down to Hatake being busy making sure the village didn't collapse and the Uchiha didn't die, Uzumaki being palmed off to another teacher, and her having been "requested" by someone who would "contact her".
She was suspicious but, frankly, she felt like she deserved the rest and resolved not to think about it until after she'd been discharged.
When she was jumped by a pair of ANBU on her way home, quickly and efficiently knocked out to wake up strapped to a chair in a cell, she considered that maybe that had been a mistake.
The walls of the cell were a stark white, a metal table and a basic metal chair before her. The door was an outline in the wall without a handle on the inside. There were metal straps around her wrists and ankles and she'd been stripped of all of her weaponry.
There were bobby pins in her hair. Latches on the straps that could be jimmied open if she really tried.
She frowned. Considered her options. Stopped considering her options.
Realised she was done with the entire scenario.
Bent over until she could wiggle a bobby pin out of her hair. Jimmied the latches open. Walked over to the door. It was a seal-based lock, set to a series of different chakra signatures. Theoretically, only the people calibrated into the seal could open the lock.
Or, someone who had obsessively trained themselves to mimic other people's signatures.
She concentrated, did her best to remember the feeling of Morino's signature, and felt it slide into place like a slightly too well worn key. It fit the general shape but too many of the notches had worn down to actually turn it. A few headache-inducing minutes of 'jiggling' with her signature and the door clicked open and swung inwards.
She pulled her signature down to nothing, henged into the solid white of the ceiling's paint colouring, and crawled her way down the hall upside down. She passed rows and rows of white doors before the building became more personal. A poster on the walls here, an opened door leading to a cluttered office there. It wasn't until she passed a break room that she paused.
There was a banner on one wall that said 'welcome to hell', a table with an overwhelming array of alcohol bottles and a single bowl of chips on it, two grey uniform clad shinobi playing a game of shoji in the middle of the room and around thirty shinobi on various chairs and couches around the pair, hands exchanging money and all extremely, unnaturally focused on the match. Sakura recognised a number of said shinobi.
She wished she didn't.
Feeling bold, she crawled into the room and across the ceiling, pausing just above an empty space on a giant, red, velvet couch. A number of members of the room- including the two on either side of the space- jumped violently as she let her feet dangle, only her hands sticking to the ceiling, for a moment to position them and then dropping. Landing deftly with her legs crossed on the couch and undoing her henge and the hold on her chakra.
"Good…" Sakura paused here, realising she had no idea if it was morning or night or the apocalypse or anything. "…day senpai's! What brings you here?" She asked, an innocent smile on her face as she looked between Hagane and Kamizuki.
"Well if it isn't our cute little kohai!" Said Hagane, a beaming smile on his face. Something in Sakura relaxed, knowing she hadn't misread the situation and wasn't being arrested and tried with treason. "I know this is your party, but you're a little early!"
"How are you here? We left the chair nice and easy for you but that cell was locked with a level six seal." Asked Kamizuki. Sakura blinked at him.
"Oh yeah, I can open those." She offered, very unhelpfully.
"How?!" Asked an incredulous shinobi on a opposite armchair. Her brain distantly recognised him as Mibu Shinobu.
"How indeed." A voice like crushed gravel came from the doorway, Morino appearing through it like a spectre. His face was impassive as he looked down at her, but there was a manic gleam in his eyes that she was pretty sure was excitement.
"OI ASSHOLES!" Screamed the surprisingly very modestly clothed Mitsarashi Anko. Sakura had to dodge a thrown dango stick. "SHUT UP OR LEAVE!" With that she turned her full attention back on the shoji match.
"Come on." Said Morino, walking out the door and gesturing to follow. Sakura scrambled to keep up.
"See you in a bit little kohai!" Hagane called after her. As she turned a corner she dimly heard swearing and the thumps of breaking furniture.
"Explain." Demanded Morino, long strides eating up the hallway and causing her to have to run slightly to keep up.
"The seal was keyed to different chakra signatures." She said and he nodded. "I can mimic chakra signatures."
His steps faltered for a second and feverish eyes turned to look at her. "Interesting." The eyes narrowed. "Can anyone else do this or is it unique to you?"
"It's not a Kekkai Genkai, it's just very, very good chakra control. Theoretically everyone could, but realistically I know of only me and Orochimaru." She paused. "Though his attempt wasn't as good as mine, he could probably get into any seal with five or more signatures keyed into it, but nothing higher than that."
"Right." His tone was dour. "Let's hope he hasn't worked that one out yet." He didn't sound optimistic. They rounded another corner to arrive at a lobby, a manned desk to their left, waiting chairs to their right, and a set of glass doors showing off the midday sunlight. "Shizuka!" He barked and the woman behind the desk jumped and turned to look wide-eyed at him. "I want every level four seal and above upgraded to a level nine by the end of the day, code blue."
She paled. "Y-yes Ibiki-san."
Morino continued across the lobby and opened a door, leading to a well organised but extremely full office. He sat behind the desk and gestured to one of the chairs before it. Sakura sat.
"Right, you skipped out on the introduction, but I'll speed through the basics and then we'll get on to the tour." He said before slamming a binder as thick as the width of her palm in front of her. "I own you for the next month. Forget about going home, forget about seeing your friends, forget about even eating what you want. This," He tapped a finger on the cover of the binder. Sakura hesitantly pulled it over to herself and opened it to find a meticulously organised and colour coded schedule. The whole page was one day, with instructions down to every five minutes. It included bowel movements. "Is your life for the next twenty eight days. When you come out of it you will be adequate."
Her head tilted. "For what?"
His smile was jagged. "ANBU training. I know potential when I see it, girly, and I will make you brilliant if I have to break you to do it."
"I look forward to it, Ibiki-sensei." She said, echoing his smile.
"These are the staff bathrooms, I highly recommend you use these ones and only these ones, some of the visitors can get a little messy."
Sakura eyed the room. It may have been white, once, but now it was covered almost entirely in cat posters, down to posters meticulously wrapped around the taps.
Should she ask?
"And the cats?" She had to know. Morino sighed.
"Anko."
"Never enter this room on Thursdays."
The room held nothing but a single, wooden chair. Sakura pursed her lips slightly, for the thousandth time this tour wondering if it would be okay to ask.
"Never. Enter. This room on Thursdays."
Apparently not then.
"Why?" She couldn't help it, she had to know.
The man scratched at a scar- something she was learning was the equivalent of rubbing his temples- and sighed.
"Anko."
"These are all cells we never use for prisoners unless we're really full, so it's pretty common for members of the staff to crash here when they've worked too late. You'll stay in one of them for the duration of month. It is not, however, your space by any means so I'd recommend carrying everything with you, other wise it'll be considered fair game and disappear."
"Turtle print bedsheets." She said, entirely bewildered. One of the rooms had an iron maiden in it, and yet it also had green, cartoon, turtle print bedsheets on the bed. "Anko?"
"Anko."
"You two do realise that I'm only thirteen, right?"
"We're shinobi Sakuuura. Live a little, see the world, become a star, get roaring drunk with your coworkers and fellow denizens of hell."
"What he means is that using any excuse for a party is a time honoured tradition among T&I."
"I mean, don't you ever just feel like your outside doesn't ma-hec-atch your insides?"
"I know ExACtlY what you mean my man. Some days I wake up and I think I'm a sixty three year old man, and then I look in the mirror and it's like woAHoAH"
"Totally, totally. Did I ever tell you about the one time I thought I'd turned into a cat?"
"It's two o'clock, time to fill out your profile!"
"Wh-what?"
"Here, here it's tradition, you have to fill one out for everyone you met."
"Blood type? Childhood dream? Most common nightmare? Aren't these a little too weird to know after only talking to a person once?"
"Nothings too weird for T&I, Pinky."
Sakura woke to a splitting headache and the burning desire to learn enough medical jutsu to heal her future hangovers. It took her a minute to realise the pounding sound was not, in fact, her throbbing head but actually the sound of someone walking around the room she'd passed out in.
"Get up." A surprisingly soft voice said before an alarmingly heavy weight dropped onto her stomach.
She rolled over, just barely managed to open her eyes and pushed herself up to standing. Her stomach rolled. In her hands- she'd caught the bundle before it could fall off the bed- was a small bag with a change of basic workout gear, including black pants and a white tank top, as well as a series of body weights. She looked over at the truly depressed looking man standing in the corner of the room, covering his eyes and grimacing. She recognised him as Hamada Kioshi, a tokubetsu jōnin she'd heard was 'disgustingly cheery'. He'd won a significant amount of money from yesterday's shoji match and decided to celebrate. Heavily.
His face was green.
"What time is it?" She asked, already dressing in the provided gear. There was no use in putting off the inevitable and shinobi had no room for modesty.
"Five thirty." He replied.
"And we're doing what, exactly?"
"Taijutsu."
Sakura could only hope the man could manage without throwing up on her.
The man could manage.
Oh god, he could manage.
Her morning was two and a half hours of getting flattened into the dirt. Over and over and over again. No breaks, no holding back, just endless fighting.
The man had hobbled and swayed and threatened to puke all the way to the training ground and then he'd transformed. Into an absolute demon.
She winced as her thigh brushed the edge of a desk, the purple-black bruise flaring wildly with the tiny touch. She'd had enough time to shower before the binder was sending her off to something called 'Archives and Statistics'. It sounded innocent enough, but they were shinobi. Appearances were usually deceiving.
Sakura would know.
She scanned the rest of her schedule, feeling her eyes catch on 'Torture Resistance Training', 'Physical Conditioning' and 'Advanced Physical Conditioning'. Flipping through the booklet she realised that every day started with a taijutsu block, often followed by ninjutsu or kenjutsu training, and ended with physical conditioning. There was also seduction techniques, code breaking, advanced strategy, historical re-education and anatomy.
The most worrying, however, was that every Thursday had a five hour block marked off with various colours of glitter pens and the words 'Being Anko's Minion!' Surrounded by poorly drawn hearts.
She couldn't help but notice the timeline matched up with the warnings about The Room.
She worried.
Oh god, she worried.
Sakura breathed in deeply and carefully, choosing to ignore the binder in her arms for now in favour of entering the crooked door within which she was meant to be starting whatever 'Archives and Statistics' was.
Looking around the barely lit, dusty space and spotting a pair of chūnin hunched over a desk surrounded by person-high stacks of paper, their fevered eyes having snapped up to hers the moment she entered, she didn't think she was going to like it.
(She really, really didn't.)
"…Minion! Go get me dango!…"
"…When a man's penis reaches what we in the business like to call maximum flex…"
"… twelve places on the human body are considered ideal for flaying…"
"…SO HELP ME HARUNO YOU WILL GET UP THAT CLIFF OR I WILL THROW YOU OFF IT MYSELF…"
"…this technique essentially makes you cough completely invisible aside from a slight warping…"
"…anything greater than a two point four percent rise in agricultural production has historically coincided with a subsequent steady decline in harvest yields, leading to the theory of…"
A large hand clapped her shoulder, something that would have sent her stumbling a month ago but now just left her slightly tender.
"Decent job, girly. Take tomorrow to rest." Morino said, a surprising amount of warmth in the gruff man's voice. "That green kid won't know what hit him."
She smiled.