NOTE: Since we have moved to Sound, there is predictably human experimentation that I must list as a warning, including experiments involving drug use.
Tori woke up sprawled across a cement floor. There was a rusted drain next to her face.
Feeling woozy, she sat up. She was alone in a closet-sized room that smelled strongly of bleach. There no windows, and the only light came from a bare bulb overhead. It was a very yellow light that gave her a headache.
Or maybe the headache was from being drugged. It was difficult to say.
She patted herself down. There was a patch of gauze on the inside of her left elbow, taped on right over her fishnet sleeve. When she peeled it off, there was a small puncture wound underneath. Had they taken a blood sample? Given her more drugs? There was no way to know.
The skin around the puncture wound had obviously been cleaned. Other than that, there was no evidence her person had been altered in anyway. She was still covered in grime and smelled rank. She found a candy wrapper in her pocket.
She had no memory of putting that there, but she highly doubted this world had Werther's Originals. It might have been there since before the last time she washed her pants.
Her Nalgene bottle was gone. Now the only thing she had left of her world were her clothes and this wrapper, and she felt strangely attached to it. She very carefully smoothed it out, folded it up, and slipped it back into her pocket.
Standing up gave her a wave of nausea and she leaned against the wall. The room was less than ten feet deep, and narrow enough that if she stood in the center, her finger tips would brush against both walls.
The only object in the room was an off-white lump shoved into a corner. Upon inspection, it turned out to be a folded futon with matching blanket. The futon was was splotched with yellow-brown water stains.
Was this… her cell?
Is this how she was meant to live from now on?
She wondered if she should cry. Crying now seemed like a good idea. If she got it all out in private, she was less likely to do it with someone watching.
She didn't have the energy to cry. Instead, she rolled out the futon, laid down on it, and willed her headache and nausea to go away.
Tori was dozing when someone banged open the door and yelled at her to get up.
Tori removed her arm from her face and squinted up at the person looming over her. It was a teenaged girl, standing with both fist on her hips. Her bright red hair haloed in the artificial light.
"Karin?" Tori croaked and carefully rolled over and got to her feet. She still felt weird, but the nausea had mostly faded.
Karin was small in stature, but she gave off the definite air of someone who got her way or else. A heavy ring of keys jingled at her hip.
"Learn to follow orders faster," Karin snapped. "Follow me."
She turned on her heel and matched out of the room, not checking to make sure Tori followed. Tori briefly considered staying in her little room; she didn't like following orders just because she was meant to. She quickly disregarded this thought, though. Karin was deceptively scrawny and shockingly young-looking in person, but she was also a ninja and not a particularly nice person. Tori hurried after her.
The hallway outside was also devoid of windows and illuminated with the same yellow light. The door to Tori's… cell, or whatever it was, had "E7" painted on it in faded red. She passed doors E6 through E1 shuffling after Karin.
Tori feet hurt, the soles throbbing from walking too far and the skin of her heels and toes screaming from blisters, but she dared not lag too far behind.
The heavy door at the end of the hall required a key to open, which Karin produced from her ring. Outside was a wider passageway, still windowless but with softer lighting. Tori stared around her, wide-eyed, as Karin led her through several hallways and locked doors. There was very little to see– Oto was not a place for welcoming decoration, it seemed. They only passed one other person, a very tired looking woman pushing a cart.
Finally, Karin stopped at a large room housing laundry facilities.
"First, you need a uniform," she said. "What's your shoe size?"
Karin pulled over a large canvas bin on wheels, filled with black open-toed shoes.
"Six," Tori answered obediently, and Karin gave her a very odd look. Tori was not sure how she'd gotten her own shoe size wrong, but apparently she had. "Thirty-five?" She tried next, since she had a pair of sandals from Peru that said that. Karin continued to look at her as if she were an idiot. "I think… my world has a different sizing system."
"Kabuto said you'd be difficult," Karin muttered. "Look, just find a pair that fits, and I'll grab your clothes."
Karin wandered further into the laundry room and Tori peered into the bin. Someone had tied the shoes together into pairs with twine, so at least there would be no issue finding a matching set. She hoped that someone had also sterilized the obviously pre-worn shoes.
When she'd found a pair that looked her size, Tori pulled off one of her boots to try it on. Her socks had once been white with tiny puffins decorating them; now they were a gross red-brown.
"Those look fine," Karin declared as Tori stared balefully down at her disgusting socks in the stupid toeless shoes. "You get two uniforms and one towel."
Karin launched into an obviously practiced speech about laundry schedules and hygiene standards in Oto, sounding incredibly bored with the whole thing. Then she paused and said, "Usually I make newbies change immediately, but you need, like…. a biohazard decontamination."
She wrinkled her nose as she gave Tori a once-over. It was a fair point.
Karin lead her back to E-corridor and the women's bathroom. It looked shockingly like Tori's dorm bathroom, with mildew-spotted shower curtains and grimy beige tiles.
"Cool-down showers are only five minutes, but I'll give you…" Karin trailed off and looked her up and down again. "You know what. Take as long as you want, just get rid of that smell."
The pile Karin had handed over in the laundry room had consisted of blue plastic bags, labelled in marker. Tori pulled out one labelled WMN UNIFORM and one labelled SHOWER TOWEL (E CORRIDOR). There was another uniform one, and then one WMN UNDERGARMENTS. She peered inside. There were indeed undergarments in there. She pulled out a set and Karin snapped at her to hurry up.
Tori drew the shower curtain closed behind her and started to pull off her ruined clothing. Underneath her gross socks, her feet were a mess of pussy pink and red blisters. She had random bruises all over her body from being manhandled, and her wrists had been rubbed raw by restraints.
The water came out unpleasantly hot. Tori didn't care.
"Okay, listen up," Karin said, voice loud and bossy over the sound of the running shower. "In Oto, you have to earn trust. We get a lot of people from all over and we can't just go around letting them do whatever they want."
There was a dispenser on the wall labelled SOAP - SHAMPOO. Tori used the scentless gel that came out of it to scrub her body and hair down as Karin lectured her on the structure of Oto. She was not to leave her cell without an escort. She would be assigned a job. Meals, bathroom breaks, and sleep were all on a fixed schedule. She belonged to Orochimaru.
Tori watched the now red-brown soap suds swirl around her feet as Karin droned on and on, clearly bored with her own speech. If Tori proved herself, she'd get special privileges the Oto elite enjoyed, like personal belongings.
Personal belongings.
"Can I keep my clothes?" Tori asked, interrupting Karin in the middle of reciting things Tori could get access to if she properly surrendered her body to Oto, like fresh fruit and reading materials.
"What?" Karin answered. "No, I'm going to burn them, because they are disgusting–"
Tori stood under the water for a few minutes while Karin ranted about how indescribably gross she was. She decided Karin would eventually notice the water now ran clear. She turned it off and toweled down.
The Oto uniform was a dark grey shirt and matching pants. The set was stiff from cheap laundry detergent, but the sensation of cleanliness felt practically luxurious.
Toeless shoes were silly, Tori thought as she slid her foot in, but at least they wouldn't aggravate her blisters.
Karin led her back to what appeared to be a storage closet and made a big deal out of pulling out a red biohazard waste bag and shoving Tori's last worldly possessions into it. Tori watched, expressionless, as the last bit of her former life was shoved into a bin marked BURNABLE REFUSE. She'd forgotten to rescue the wrapper from her pocket.
"Right," Karin said, adjusting her glasses. "I was supposed to take you down to the dining hall, but…" Karin sniffed and turned away. "Well, you can wait until dinner. You wasted a lot of my time, anyway."
Karin slammed the door closed on Tori's cell and left her. Tori stood in the middle of the room for a few minutes wondering what to do.
She went with sitting on the floor and raking the tangles out of her damp hair with her fingers. There didn't seem to be much else she could do.
Eventually someone else unlocked her cell. It was a man this time, in his early twenties and skinny with his face permanently screwed up like he had just caught whiff of a foul smell. He briefly introduced himself as the commanding officer for Corridors E and F. Tori decided to call him Snarly-Nin.
There was a queue of children in the same gray uniform following behind Snarly-Nin. Tori obediently got in line behind them and followed them to the mess hall, where she was given a plastic tray containing dry rice, a mysterious salty meat, and green mush. It was all lukewarm with pockets of cold, like it hadn't been microwaved long enough.
There were multiple long tables arranged neatly in the hall, and small groups of other ninja sitting at them. Most of them did not wear the grey uniform, but instead clothes closer to what she expected ninja to wear– dark, loose pants and flak jackets. The group Tori had been herded in with all sat together, though, so she followed suit. Even though…. they were all literal children. The oldest one couldn't be more than thirteen.
Oto sure did recruit them young.
Tori poked at her meal with the metal spork she was given. It didn't taste like much, but she was hungry.
"I can't wait to get promoted," the boy sitting next to her lamented. "I heard you get fruit cups then."
Tori ate her food as quickly as she could and hoped her body continued to be too tired for a wailing breakdown.
Tori spent the next three days mostly lying on her futon. Occasionally Snarly-nin would come to shepard her and the other new recruits– and that's what everyone in the ugly gray uniform was, she learned– to the dining hall to eat disappointing food or to the bathroom. She was told when to bathe and reprimanded for spending too long on the toilet and leaving behind gristle from the mystery meat on her plate.
She had no timepiece and didn't know if all this ran on a tight schedule or not. She also didn't know if the lights shutting off correlated with night time in the real world or not.
The first time she experienced lights out, she had no warning. One moment she'd been picking scabs off her blisters, and the next it was pitch black. She waved her hand in front of her face, watching the blue-white shape her mind constructed for her in the pitch blackness.
There was a name for that, she thought. For when your brain gave you an image of something you knew was there but couldn't see.
From their gossip, she knew the other new recruits went to training between their meals. One of the boys bragged about finally getting a mission, and how if it went well he'd be promoted and get to leave them behind. She wondered how she would get promoted, if she couldn't take missions because she wasn't a ninja.
There were older civilians that staffed Oto. They all looked defeated and tired, with slumped bodies. She saw them in the hallways pushing laundry carts and mops. The women who gave her poorly heated trays of food were civilians. She knew they were civilians because the other new recruits mocked them.
Would that be her, years from now?
No, it wouldn't, because Sasuke was probably fourteen or fifteen and so Oto wouldn't exist like this years from now.
Should she, like, tell them that…?
No, she decided, fumbling around in the dark for wherever she'd kicked her blanket. She really didn't think they deserved to know about their on-coming doom.
Being left alone for long stretches of time, Tori thought, was probably some sort of psychological conditioning to wear her down. So was most of what she was being forced into here– it was all a game to force compliance.
The new recruits she ate lunch with didn't like talking to her. She was older, she wasn't a ninja, and she was foreign and weird and didn't know about any of the pop culture they wanted to discuss. Alone at night, she started to wonder if putting her with them was done on purpose to isolate her.
The thing was, though, that just because she could recognize tactics to make her feel alone and miserable, it didn't mean those tactics didn't work. The tactics worked incredibly well. They worked so well that when Karin interrupted her breakfast one morning, Tori beamed at her and greeted her overenthusiastically.
"Uh, okay," said Karin, sniffing and letting one hand rest on a popped hip. "Kabuto wants to see you, weirdo."
Kabuto's office, as it happened, was a cubicle located in the infirmary.
The Oto infirmary, as it happened, was terrifying.
There were several tables with restraining buckles dangled from them, adjacent to metallic trays of surgical tools. There were other instruments, hanging from the walls, that looked like they came straight from an American Civil War field surgeon's kit– bone saws and curved scissors and giant forceps with ridged tips. The medical waste disposal bins were larger than any normal doctor's office. The entire place smelled heavily of rubbing alcohol.
Kabuto's desk, shoved in the corner of the clinic, was startling normal looking, with a few piles of papers and notebooks and even a single decorative figurine of a carved wooden beetle. His desk also had a small digital clock, which read just past 8 o'clock. Tori wondered if that was accurate. It was the first time she'd known the time in days.
"Do you need anything else?" Karin asked, sounding sweeter than Tori had ever heard her.
"No, thank you," Kabuto said with an equally weirdly-sweet smile. Karin left, and Kabuto turned the smile on Tori. Tori experienced a brief and vivid fantasy of crawling into the giant medical waste bin in the corner, pulling the lid down over her, and hiding there for the rest of her life.
Instead of doing that, Tori said awkwardly, "Good morning."
"Good morning," Kabuto answered. "How have you been adjusting, Tori-chan?"
A lifetime of social conditioning pushed Tori to tell him she was fine, just fine, even if that was a blatant lie. She hesitated though, the dumb friendly smile she'd put on for Karin still stuck on her face. She didn't think Kabuto actually cared either way. What did he want her to say?
"I know it can be difficult," Kabuto said, turning back to his desk and arranging stack of papers. "But I hope with time you'll be able to make friends."
Um… okay?
Kabuto gestured for her to climb onto one of the examination tables. Paper lining had been pulled over it (for bodily fluids, Tori's mind helpfully reminded her), and the buckled restraints dangled ominously from it. Tori stiffened. She'd had time to sit and wallow in all the terrible things they could do to her. She's had time to lie in the dark and try to remember the entire wikipedia article on torture.
She'd read that article in full, once, because torture seemed interesting when you were confident it couldn't happen to you.
All of her muscles tensed. She really, really didn't want to get on that table.
"Well?" Kabuto asked, voice soft and low.
She had no dumb or sassy excuse not to. If she didn't do this under her own power, Kanuto would make her.
Feeling like a prisoner sent to walk the plank, she climbed onto the examination table.
Kabuto proceeded to give her a completely normal physical. He was very professional about it and healed all her leftover blisters and major bruises, his green healing chakra feeling cool and tingly. It wasn't weird at all, aside from the very bizarre feeling of Kabuto touching her feet. The dichotomy between her expectations and reality left Tori dizzy.
When he was done, Kabuto gave her one critical once-over and clicked his tongue.
"I don't know what you're thinking, Tori-san," he chided, "But in Oto we take care of our comrades. Don't be so nervous."
Then in a complete one-eighty from his reassurances, he pulled out a clipboard and announced that Orochimaru wanted him to run a few medical tests.
"Just to understand some things about you, Tori-chan," he said gently.
She wondered if that worked on the younger recruits.
She watched blandly as he tied a tourniquet around her arm and slipped a needle under her skin. She let her legs swing as he filled vial after vial, her fingers slowly losing strength from blood loss.
"What are you even going to do with all of that?" she asked, now feeling lightheaded.
"You know, the usual tests," Kabuto said vaguely. "Your antigen profile, chakra residues…"
"I'm O positive," Tori said. Then because Kabuto tipped his head like she'd said something interesting, she went on: "What's a chakra residue? Do you even use ABO blood groups? Because you don't have the same shoe sizes. In my world, O means no antigen–"
She blabbered. Kabuto leaned in and listened very raptly. Part way through explaining Rh groups, Tori remembered that ABO blood groups were definitely a thing in this world, because there was a scene in the manga where Orochimaru asked Kabuto for his. Japanese culture connected ABO groups to personality types; it was like asking a Westerner if they had horoscopes.
So then what was Kabuto listening to her for, then? Something incriminating? Secrets of the state?
"Oh, but you do know all that, right?" she finished. "Because you're type AB."
Kabuto didn't look surprised, exactly, but something sharpened in his eyes.
Now, if only Tori had memorized the databooks and knew everyone else's blood types. That sure would be a trick to show off.
The next test Kabuto did involved holding wooden plates up to Tori's skin, which really threw her for a loop. The plates were pentagonal, about the size of her hand, and had fancy looking characters painted on them. Kabuto pulled on nitrile gloves before handling them.
"They absorb chakra," he explained when she'd looked confused. He had rolled up her sleeve to the shoulder and was pressing plate after plate against her upper arm. "The seals will change over time to give information."
"Huh," she said. Then she decided to go out on a limb and asked, "What is chakra, anyway?"
"Energy, basically," he said dryly.
She narrowed her eyes at him. Her vision was swimming from the loss of blood and chakra. "Is that like ATP hydrolysis?"
Kabuto didn't know what that was. Tori hadn't thought about it properly in a while, and her brain was so fuzzy. "You have three phosphates, and then you cut one off and energy comes out."
Kabuto gave her a very strange look.
Once he was done collecting chakra, Kabuto summoned Karin back and she humphed and complained as Tori dragged herself out of the clinic and back to her cell, leaning against the wall the whole way.
"If one session took that much out of you," Karin said, nose in the air, "then you're not going to make it very far in Oto."
She slammed the door closed to Tori's room, and Tori suddenly refound her ability to cry.
It was stupid to cry, she decided after she'd bawled her eyes out. Karin was right: she needed to toughen up if she was going to survive this. There was no point in mooning and crying and wasting time in the bathroom trying to hide the fact that she had been crying.
"Hurry up," Snarly-nin snapped, and grabbed her by the back of her shirt and dragged her away from the sink to join the rest of the group outside. The girl who'd told on her for wasting time jeered at her.
At dinner, the new recruits discussed when the last time they'd had a banana was. A few of them had never even had a banana, which Tori thought was odd.
"We used to get them in the market all the time," the girl who'd tattled on her boasted. Her name, if Tori wasn't mistaken, was Haruka. "We're the only city in the Land of Iron to get imports from Water Country regularly."
Haruka was easily the most interesting in the group, Tori thought. At thirteen, she was the second oldest after Tori, and she came from a samurai family that had been killed or banished or something like that. Haruka had been a thug for hire for a bit before Orochimaru had scooped her up.
"You mean you were," a boy who might have been named Kisuke corrected. "You're here now."
"Yeah," Haruka agreed, then picked at her food for a bit before launching into a description of what bananas tasted like. A girl from a northern country leaned into the story with wide, hungry eyes.
Tori wondered what would happen if the poor girl found out about mangos.
Deciding to integrate herself into the group, Tori asked, "Has anyone ever had a passion fruit?"
No one answered, but Haruka rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. Tori didn't know if that meant no one had or if everyone had and she might as well have asked, "Who else here has tried mustard before?"
Maybe it was because passion fruits were a new world fruit? Did they have new world foods here? No, of course they did, they had potatoes and tomatoes…
When Karin fetched her again the next morning, Tori asked about passion fruits.
"You say a lot of weird things," Karin said instead of giving a real answer.
Instead of making real conversation, then, Tori found herself earnestly explaining what a passion fruit was. "It's got like a leathery shell, and then the part that's edible inside looks like yellow frogs' eggs, except instead of baby frogs it's seeds."
"A baby frog is a tadpole," Karin corrected.
"Where do your potatoes come from?" Tori asked, keeping the discussion on track.
"I don't think a new recruit needs to know our supply chains," Karin snapped, and that was the end of that.
When Tori was left with Kabuto, the first thing he did was hand her a slip of paper. Tori took it without question, and then Kabuto leaned down to examine it in her hand.
"As expected," he said, then straightened up and turned to make some notes.
"Um," said Tori, looking down at the paper. It looked completely normal, the size of an index card and the weight of printer paper. When it was obvious Kabuto wasn't going to explain what was going on to her, Tori asked, "Is there something that was supposed to happen…?"
"It's chakra induction paper," Kabuto said, leafing through papers at his desk with a small frown on his face. "It changes based on elemental affinity. You don't have one."
Tori blinked down at the paper in surprise. She'd always wondered, the way anyone might idly wonder about the fantastic, what her elemental affinity might be. To hear it was nothing was disappointing, to say the least. All those personality tests had lied to her.
"Is that common?" she asked.
"It's not unheard of," Kabuto answered. "But it's not common, no. If you were raised in a shinobi village, it might be considered a sort of disability, but otherwise it won't affect your life."
Tori hadn't exactly been worried about that; she didn't anticipate finding out chakra affinity to impact her life in any way. It just would have been nice to know she had the potential to sneeze fireballs or shoot lightning out of her hands.
The other tests Kabuto had for her today were all physical tests. He tested her reflexes, hitting her knee with a small mallet and shining a light in her eyes, and then asked her to go through a series of strength and flexibility exercises, which was sort of like being in high school gym again.
He let her take lunch in the clinic, and then Orochimaru showed up with a folder full of photographs.
"Orochimaru-sama always likes to see the more interesting parts of experiments," Kabuto said plainly, his voice just a tad softer than usual.
Well, thought Tori, shit.
Orochimaru didn't even greet her. He just dropped his folder on Kabuto's desk and started leafing through the notes Kabuto had kept on her.
"Ah, you're right," Orochimaru murmured to Kabuto. "She's not very biologically interesting."
Tori wondered if everyone in this world thought it was socially acceptable to talk disparagingly about people when they were sitting right there in the room with them, or if it was just a ninja thing.
"Well, maybe we'll find something today," Orochimaru said with a pleasant smile that made Tori's skin crawl.
He spread a series of glossy photos out in front of her. "Do you recognize any of these people?"
Tori frowned down at the spread, pretending to concentrate while internally she panicked. He was trying to probe her made-up abilities, which happened to be the only thing interesting enough about her to keep her alive. She absolutely could not screw this up.
"Future sight doesn't work on photos," she said finally, looking up to meet his eyes. Mistake. Orochimaru's eyes were terrifying. She turned back down at the photos. "But I recognize some of these people from Sasuke's future."
Orochimaru leaned in, his terrifying eyes focused solely on Tori and looking as if he might want to eat her. "Tell me about them."
The photos were mostly people from Oto. Tori wasn't very good at faces, but she recognized some of the weirder hairstyles from the cafeteria. Some of the photos were of deceased people, too; she recognized Kimimaro and some of the Sound Five.
The first photo she pulled was Juugo. He was snarling at the camera, eyes wild as an animal.
"Juugo is surprisingly mild-mannered around Sasuke," Tori said. "I don't really understand what his problem is, but it helps to be around Sasuke's…. chakra, I guess?"
"Sasuke and Juugo interact?" Kabuto asked, sounding surprised.
Oops, Tori thought. She didn't want to tell them Sasuke was planning to murder Orochimaru, and she didn't want to say anything that would indicate Orochimaru would never get to take Sasuke's body, lest that upset him.
"Sasuke starts putting together a team to track down his brother," Tori said slowly. "He's very focused on it."
Orochimaru laughed softly, covering his mouth and glancing at Kabuto as if to say, Isn't that the truth?
Tori pulled Suigestu's photo next. "Sasuke also recruits Hozuki Suigetsu. And… Karin isn't here, but her too."
"How does he convince Karin to go along with him?" Kabuto asked, crossing his arms. "They don't get along."
"They don't?" Tori asked, frowning down at the photos, trying to recognize other people. "Karin likes him, though, and he's very respectful of her tracking abilities…"
Should she tell them she recognized the Sound Five too? They were dead, so it wasn't like she could say she saw Sasuke meeting them in the future.
"Can you see Karin's future, Tori-san?" Orochimaru asked. "She said you knew her name before you were told."
"Um…" said Tori, shifting in her seat. "A little bit. It's mostly focused on Sasuke, though…"
Orochimaru asked a few more questions, and prodded Tori into telling the stupid bear story from Karin's chuunin exam, and that Juugo was the basis for Orochimaru's cursed seal.
"But what is a cursed seal?" Tori asked, wide-eyed.
"Maybe one day we'll talk more about it," Orochimaru said vaguely. Then he turned to Kabuto and asked, "Have you confirmed she's from another world yet?"
Kabuto pushed his glasses up his nose and launched into a long explanation of Tori's physical and chakra profiles not being far enough outside the average to be abnormal. Her antibody profile, however, was bizarre.
"Were you a very sickly child?" Orochimaru asked, scanning the paper Kabuto handed him.
"I mean… I was average healthy?" Tori said slowly. "I used to get a lot of ear infections."
Did that count as sickly? She started to lean over the spread of photos to see if she could get a peek of the paper Orochimaru was reading, then realized what she was doing and stopped immediately. One did not simply read over Orochimaru's shoulder.
"You have antibodies against antigens we've never even seen before," Orochimaru said, sounding delighted.
"How did you even test for them, then?" Tori asked, dumbfounded.
"Some of them seem worrisome," Kanuto said, but kept going before Tori could ask, How could you possibly know that if you've never seen the thing causing the antibody? "You've never been hospitalized with fever?"
"No," Tori said. "I get my flu shot every year."
Both Orochimaru and Kabuto gave her a very strange look.
"I get the annual influenza vaccine," Tori elaborated.
The strange looks stayed in place.
Oh my god, you're kidding me, Tori just barely managed not to say.
As it turned out, this world didn't have vaccines. Or rather, they did– they were just produced through some wild method that involved intricate seals that didn't make any sense to Tori, and were basically only used on shinobi going into high-risk areas.
"Of course, a good medic can disrupt pathogen membranes with chakra," Orochimaru said, making a vague gesture at Kabuto.
Of course you can use chakra to bullshit your way out of disease, Tori thought.
Orochimaru pressed her for more information on vaccination programs where she came from. She told him what she knew of how they were made and how they worked, and then about what sorts of diseases were standard to vaccinate against in her country. Apparently the Naruto world somehow didn't have things like measles or whooping cough. No wonder everyone had been so terrified of Dead Water Fever.
When they'd exhausted that topic, Kabuto cut in.
"Other than the strange antibody profile," Kabuto said, grabbing another paper form his desk, "She has a lot of odd behavior that would support that she really believes she's from another world."
Kabuto read off a list of weird things Tori had said or done, including not knowing standard shoe sizes and describing the imaginary passion fruit. When did he even have time to find out about that? Did Karin tell him while Tori was focusing on lunch?
"Passion fruits are real," Tori insisted. "Where do potatoes come from?"
Orochimaru dipped his head to one side, silky black hair falling over his shoulder, as if Tori were an especially interesting beetle he'd found on his garden wall.
"Asking questions is good," he said finally. "Maybe learn to ask better ones."
He left, leaving Tori feeling vaguely lightheaded. That hadn't been so bad. That hadn't been bad at all.
It was after her scheduled dinner time, and Kabuto escorted her back to her cell himself without even mentioning the prospect of food. She fell asleep hungry.
Tori was finally assigned a job in the stockrooms. Every morning she went through her assigned inventories with a checklist and recorded how much they had of everything. She then turned this in to an older kunoichi, who was in charge of keeping track of how quickly things were used and deciding what needed to be ordered.
It was almost an interesting job. Tori liked seeing all the huge containers of food in the kitchen storeroom and how basic weaponry was stored in the armory. Her favorite was the medical storeroom, which featured all sorts of medicines and compounds kept in old fashion glass bottles. It made her feel like an alchemist.
There was another shinobi who also turned in papers to the old kunoichi, who Tori supposed must look after other stock units.
"Tori Mendoza," Tori introduced herself, making sure to give off the friendliest smile possible. "I'm very excited to be working… inven-Tori."
She stuck her hand out to shake and grinned even wider. The shinobi looked at her hand like maybe it wasn't very clean and very firmly ignored her presence after that.
In this way, mornings in Oto were fine. She could usually find at least five or six thoughts and daydreams to distract her from other, more worrying aspects of her life, like her afternoons.
In the afternoons, Tori reported to Kabuto's clinic, where he demonstrated that her assessment of human experimentation being "not that bad" was entirely incorrect.
"Eat these," Kabuto said the first afternoon she went in after being assigned to inventory. He handed her a tiny paper cup containing two brown tablets.
"What are they?" Tori asked.
"Don't worry, they're just soldier pils," Kabuto said. "Eat them."
Tori, understandably, was very resistant to the idea of eating strange pills a trained assassin had just handed her.
"Aren't you not supposed to take more than one at once?" she said, delicately taking the tiny cup from him.
"You'll be fine," Kabuto said, sounding incredibly assuring. Tori knew this was a lie, but she felt better anyway. She ate them.
"Take your shirt off," Kabuto commanded, and Tori reminded herself that he was a medical professional and her Oto-issued underwear included a high-power sports bra that covered her entire chest anyway.
With medical tape, Kabuto attached a bunch of the chakra-absorbing wooden plates to exposed parts of her skin. Tori started to feel the effects of the soldier pills, her heart racing and her brain suddenly restless and unfocused. Her arms twitched and she watched the characters painted on a plate on her forearm slowly rearrange themselves.
She wanted to do something, and she wanted to do something now.
Down the hall was a room that was some sort of training facility, equipped with sets of weights and benches for stretches. Kabuto made her run around the small track. The first few laps were fine; she'd never been much of a runner, but she felt like she'd just downed three energy drinks. She did tire quickly, though, and Kabuto insisted she keep going in quiet, deadly tones. He made her keep going until she couldn't any more.
Karin reappeared while Kabuto was peeling the tape off to gather his chakra plates. He was kneeling over Tori, having left her where she'd collapsed on the track.
"That didn't take very long," Karin observed, sounding bored. "I thought I'd have more time to review disciplinary files."
"She's a civilian," Kabuto said, holding up a plate to examine it in the light. "Even with soldier pills, she can't do very much."
Tori could do so little that Kabuto had to put her shirt back on for her and Karin had to support her weight on the way back to her cell. Tori's cheeks burned with humiliation.
It continued like this for a while. In the mornings, Tori took inventory, and then in the afternoons, Kabuto fed her odd drugs, or made her do physical exercises until she couldn't anymore, or had her do mathematics and puzzles while under the stress of drugs or mild electrical shocks. One day, he gave her something that ended with her vomiting and hallucinating on the infirmary floor, wailing and crying and crawling pathetically, and whatever the experiment was that day had to be cancelled.
She didn't remember how she got back to her cell after that, but when she was lucid again, there was a tupperware of light soup in her cell with a little note from Orochimaru to feel better.
She stared at the note dully. It was on light blue cardstock in careful lettering. She wondered if Orochimaru had written it himself (why would he?) or if someone just sat around writing fake cards on his behalf. She could see how this might be comforting to a younger person who didn't have proper parental figures, like most of the people in her recruitment cohort, but to her it just felt weird.
Or… maybe he wanted her to feel weird. She wasn't going to pretend she might be better at mind games than the combined power of Orochimaru and Kabuto.
Lights went out and she still hadn't touched the soup. Tori hadn't vomited since she was a very small child, and the idea of eating food and possibly doing it again filled her with dread. Still, by morning she was hungry, and she dutifully walked with her recruitment cohort to the dining hall.
"You look like shit," Haruka said bluntly.
"She looks like an onibaba," one of the boys cried. The rest of the children started screaming about how she looked like a demon granny, until Snarly-Nin yelled at them all to shut up.
Tori followed the line to the dining hall feeling very, very tired.
"What is an onibaba?" she asked Haruka when they'd sat down with breakfast, which was undercooked brown rice and salted fish.
"Ugh," was all Haruka said, then she picked up her tray and moved to the other side of the table.
Tori did her inventory duties in a vague haze. After lunch, she walked as slowly as she could to the infirmary, delaying having to meet with Kabuto as much as possible, like a naughty child sent to the principal's. When she did make it there, Orochimaru was sitting at Kabuto's desk, relaxing in the swivel chair like it was his favorite armchair.
Tori thought she should be afraid. Her whole body ached, though, and her brain was numb from exhaustion and humiliation, and she didn't think she had it in her to experience new emotions right now.
"You're wasting your time on this," Orochimaru was saying to Kabuto. "These experiments are redundant."
Tori stood in the middle of the room feeling dead on her feet and waited for them to acknowledge her. Kabuto murmured some apologies, and Orochimaru tutted and said, "If you can't think of anything else, you might as well skip to the vivisection and then send her off to housekeeping or food service or wherever full-time. I'm bored with her."
The word vivisection cut through Tori's existential apathy like a knife. A weird hiccup of fear escaped her, and they both turned to her.
"Ah, Tori, I didn't see you there," Orochimaru said, and Tori wanted to scream at him that of course he saw her because he was a badass ninja and a liar.
"Don't worry," Orochimaru said, "Kabuto has very steady hands, and I'll be directing, so there's no need to–"
Half of Tori's mind said, Yes, it'll be just like routine surgery for them, nothing to fear, and then the other half yelled at that half to shut the fuck up.
"I don't really see," Tori said, her voice weirdly high and on the verge of cracking, "how a vivisection is going to show you anything interesting. You're just testing things at random, none of your experiments have had any controls, I don't think those stupid wooden plates even give you real time data–"
She had to stop because she could feel herself on the verge of tears. She took and deep breath and attempted to calm herself, even though Orochimaru was looking at her with a terrible sort of interest in his eyes.
Did he want her to keep going? Did he want her to break down sobbing? What would get her out of being sliced open and have her organs poked and examined?
"If you gave me an anatomy book," Tori said in a very quiet and desperate voice, "I could just tell you if anything's different from–"
"Tori," Orochimaru interrupted. His voice sounded like honey, rich and velvety sweet, and it made her want to flee. "What do you think Kabuto is testing for?"
"I– he–" Tori's eyes darted between the two of them. Kabuto's face was perfectly blank. She took and deep breath and commanded her voice not to crack or seize up. "Most experiments are to see how my chakra reacts to stresses on the body. I think, before you move on to invasive measures, you could do some qualitative tests on my future vision–"
Orochimaru turned from her to Kabuto, suddenly not interested in listening to Tori at all. "Vivisection was unlikely to be informative anyway. Where does she work?"
Tori was reassigned to the research lab. She nearly wet her pants.
Orochimaru's lab was huge– maybe even bigger than the giant chemistry labs meant for tens of students she'd had classes in in university. It was hard to judge space: where the student labs had been rows of work benches and sinks, this one dedicated a lot more space to shiney metal tables and… more surgical equipment. Which. Great.
There were familiar things, too: racks of test tubes, cabinets of carefully labelled reagents, fumigation hoods, flasks and beakers of all sizes, chemical-sweet smells and artificial lights. And then there were terrifyingly unfamiliar things, like the operation tables and a glass-front refrigerators filled with opaque containers that reminded her, alarmingly, of specimen processing in her mother's blood bank. There were also, baffling, what looked like calligraphy sets scattered along the work benches.
For all the space, though, there was only a single shinobi in the lab when Karin dropped her off. He was old for a ninja (or at least a Sound ninja), perhaps in his early thirties and balding.
"Keizo-san," Karin greeted. "We found you an assistant."
Keizo had his back to them, mixing something in the fumigation hood. "Good," he grunted. "I swear to God, Karin, if this one gets sent on a suicide mission too–"
He turned around fully, taking Tori in. "Oh," he said, impressing unprecedented amounts of disappointment into that single syllable.
"I'm Tori," Tori said politely. "Nice to meet you."
She did not extend her hand to shake, because apparently that wasn't something they did here.
"What the fuck is this?" Keizo sneered.
"Tori-san is a recent acquisition," Karin answered, her voice silky sweet and just as polite as Tori's, yet somehow a million times more dangerous. "Orochimaru-sama thought she could pick up that project you dropped."
Karin stretched out every syllable of their boss's name like a song, and Keizo stiffened. Tori wasn't sure if Orochimaru had personally weighed in on what she ought to be doing in the lab or if Karin had used the name-drop as a power play, but either way Keizo grumbled for Tori to sit down and not touch anything while he finished up in the hood. She sat in a stool near one of the calligraphy sets, and Karin left them be.
The calligraphy set consisted of a box of brushes and a dark stone inkwell. There were also two of what Tori guessed were ink sticks, and a roll of black fabric. There was nothing particularly scientific about it, and Tori spent the next ten minutes or so staring at it and wondering what its purpose was. There were four other ones, too, scattered around the lab.
Then Keizo got up from his work at the hood, disappeared into another room for a minute, and then unceremoniously dropped some type of organ in front of her.
More specifically, he slammed a tray down in front of her, and then dropped the organ onto it with an alarming splat noise. Tori had actually no idea what the organ even was. It was big, dark red with blood, and oblong with slippery smooth skin. Not a pancreas, then; that was the one major human organ she thought she couldn't ID on sight, but in textbook drawings the pancreas always looked like it was made of bubble wrap. A deformed and enlarged kidney, maybe?
"Spleen," Keizo said by way of explanation. "This one's already been treated. So you just have to…"
He paused, grabbed a notebook off a shelf, and leafed through it.
"Yeah, okay," he continued, slapping the notebook down next to the spleen. "You weigh it, write it down. Then you cut out the bone fragments, and weigh it without them. The sample's name is Yamaguchi Suzume."
Tori stared at the notebook. Someone had filled a page with a chart listing each sample's name, the weight of the spleen in total before and after experiment treatment, then the weight "de-boned," and then a calculation of how much of the post-experimental mass had been bone. Yamaguchi Suzume's name was already filled in with her "pre-experiment" weight, along with five others. The names of the samples were people's name. Not impersonal alphanumeric codes, the names of actual people, probably the people the spleen had come from–
Wait.
Why the hell would a spleen have bones?
After rummaging through some drawers, Tori found a glass stirring rod. She poked the spleen with it. It jiggled.
Bones? BONES?
"Weigh it first, shitstain," Keizo barked.
Tori found a box of gloves before she found the scale, and she pulled them on. She paused at the scale, and then in an embarrassingly nervous voice, asked Keizo what she should use to put the spleen on the scale.
Keizo, who was weighing out some sort of powder on the other side of the lab, snarled at her and told her to just put the spleen on the scale as-is.
Tori blinked down at the digital scale's plate, which indeed bore rust-colored stains, as if someone was in fact in the habit of putting bloody organs right on it. That seemed like poor lab maintenance, which she was against on principle, so she measured the basin with the the spleen inside, hit the 'zero' button, and then picked the spleen up. She recorded the absolute value of 'zero minus the weight of a spleen,' which seemed like bad science, but slightly better science than 'just throw it on.'
Then came the problem of step two, 'de-bone the spleen.' Which. What the hell.
Tori had wanted to be a doctor and planned her life around one day cutting up human organs. Or at least into humans. Or, well, going to medical school, specifically, but that wouldinvolve those things.
The point was, Tori had anticipated handling human organs at some point in her life, but she had assumed it would come with some sort of instructions.
She had to go into the Horrifying Surgical Zone of the lab to find a razor blade. She found a whole drawer of them, carefully wrapped in cardboard, right under a display of tools that could just as easily be for torture as for medicine.
Her first cut into the spleen was very awkward. She decided she should cut it in half long-ways, because that would give her a lot of surface area to find the… bones. (Bones?) Wherever spleen-bones may be. She stabbed the blade into the organ and then just… looked at it.
She'd expected it to ooze out blood, like juice from ripe fruit. Instead it just sort of… blurped. Barely any resistance. No bubbling out of juices. Very dull.
Huh.
She moved it, cutting across the spleen, and some blood did come out, but it wasn't the horrorshow she was expecting.
When the spleen was completely in two, she stared down at it and discovered there were actually tiny fragments of bone floating in the flesh of the organ, like seeds in an apple. They were all randomly arranged, and all more or less the size of her pinky nail. That… really wasn't supposed to happen, or else Tori had deeply misunderstood something about human anatomy. What kind of an experimentwas this?
It took a lot of cutting to remove the bone shards, and then more to be sure they were all out, and by the end the spleen could be roughly described as minced meat.
That meant she couldn't use the same technique as last time to measure, because she could no longer just pick up the entire spleen. She found what she was pretty sure was a crucible, zeroed its mass, and then shoveled the spleen bits like chunky play-dough back into its container.
She filled in the rest of the chart. There were previous eleven entries, and Yamaguchi Suzume had an average amount of bones… in her her spleen…
Tori flipped through more of the lab notebook. The notes in previous pages were on sample preparation, which included a lot of notes on surgical removal, preservation, and genetic splicing that didn't really make sense to Tori, in part because they included a lot of doodles of shinobi seals.
Well. That would explain all the calligraphy sets, at least.
In Tori's world, a lot of biological research depended on hijacking the metabolic processes already in use by living creatures. If Tori wanted to splice foreign DNA into the genome of someone's spleen, she'd have to chemically isolate DNA, use an enzyme based on an enzyme from a deep sea vent bacteria to copy it, use more designer enzymes to cut out the the piece of DNA she wanted… and then she wasn't sure how things like viral vectors and CRISPR gene editing worked, but those were techniques based on viral infections and the bacterial immune system, respectively. Tori didn't think one could reliably insert a brand new gene into a whole, grown organ like that, anyway.
She frowned very intensely down at the lab notebook. There were a lot of pages on testing different sealing arrays, which just… transferred the gene of interest from one sample to the other. No sequences, no chart of enzymatic activity, just page after page of meaningless squiggles. Tori would have to spend forever pipetting clear liquids into each other, but these people just drew a fancy drawing and bam, science.
Tori was so caught up trying to divine meaning from the lab notebook that she didn't notice Keizo until he was breathing down her neck.
"Quit goofing off," he snapped, and Tori nearly jumped out of her skin. "There's more in the fridge."
There were indeed more spleens in the glass-faced fridged, sitting in plastic tubs like dinner leftovers. The first one Tori pulled had a single, huge ossified chunk that composed almost half the mass. Tori was unsure if this meant to experiment had gone well or not. She added a column for notes on the morphology of the bone mass.
Tori got through one more dissection before she was shooed away to lunch, after which she reported to Kabuto's clinic in much better spirits than she had had in days.
"Does all your science rely on seals?" Tori asked as Kabuto went through his usual ritual of taping wooden plates to her. "We have a lot of, um, chemical kits…"
She tried to explain how to isolate DNA for a civilian. Kabuto did not seem to be listening. He gave her a dixie cup of a sweet liquid to drink. It made her whole world go sideways, and Kabuto made her run laps until she vomited her disappointing lunch back up.
At dinner she drank the juice box she was given and ate part of the rice. She pushed the rest of her food– the world's saddest boiled shrimp and some extremely limp pickled vegetables– around uselessly on the tray, still hungry but unwilling to eat, and then announced that any of the new recruits could have it if they wanted.
A fist fight broke out. Tori watched dully as one little new recruit set another one on fire with a jutsu. Haruka, the samurai girl, leapt into the fight swinging her naginata and screaming at everyone to shut up.
No one else in the cafeteria intervened. Fights weren't uncommon, although they rarely got this out of hand. One of the new recruits– a ten year old boy– lost two fingers to Haruka. He scooped them up and ran out of the cafeteria red-faced and crying. Snarly-nin, who watched them like a hawk from the door of the mess hall, rolled his eyes exaggeratedly before running after the boy.
Tori comforted herself with the thought that Kabuto could probably stick the fingers back on. She couldn't tell if she actually cared anymore.
"This is good," Orochimaru told her several days later, flipping through her section of the lab notebook. Tori had gone through all the spleens in the specimen fridge and expanded the chart with extra notes. "Why didn't you get through it faster?"
Tori twitched. She didn't know what would happen if she failed this review. She could, perhaps, die.
She didn't want to die.
She gave him her best sweet smile.
"She only comes in in the mornings," Keizo grunted. He'd been hovering nervously at Orochimaru's shoulder as he flipped through Tori's notebook.
There was a lab bench, closest to the surgical beds, that was ostensibly Orochimaru's. It was a mess of test tubes and pipettes left out, some with samples still inside. Calligraphy brushes and inkstones were scattered at a random. While Tori and Keizo had bottles of useful reagents carefully stored in the shelves above their benches, Orochimaru's were left wherever he'd been last using them.
Since Tori had been transferred to the lab, Orochimaru had spent the entire week "indisposed." She didn't dare question what that meant.
"She also missed two mornings," Keizo continued, sounding accusatory. Tori kept smiling, trying to seem as pleasant as possible.
"Kabuto needs me as a participant in your experiments, Orochimaru-sama," Tori said, and then felt immediately disgusted with her own simpering.
Tori had missed two full days of work because Kabuto had given her something that had made her so paranoid she'd had several screaming fits in her room and Snarly-nin had just left her. Her last forty eight hours had mostly been a blur of feeling Really Bad and picking a lot of skin off her fingers and arms in nervousness, and she wasn't sure what she would do if Orochimaru announced he wanted to vivisect her again.
Scream, probably. And then maybe vomit, since that was a thing she did now.
"Oh, those aren't mine. Kabuto is very gungho about his little tests," Orochimaru said with the same hint of amusement that an indulgent parent might have. "I think you make him nervous, Tori."
He smiled at her, warm and inviting. Bile churned in Tori's stomach. She copied him, a toothless and disarming grin.
"I don't see why," she said after a beat when she was sure she wasn't going to hurl.
"Well," Orochimaru said, snapping the notebook shut. "You know how former spies are with their secrets."
Tori absolutely did not. She watched Orochimaru toss the notebook back onto her bench and listened to him give Keizo a string of orders, starting with critiques of Keizo's own work and follow-up experiments he wanted.
"I want to continue the ossification project," he finished in a very calm way that made Tori want to do whatever he said immediately. "If you can't handle it and your current experiments at once, teach Tori the seals."
Kabuto stopped summoning her to his clinic, and Tori started learning ninja science full-time.
Keizo did not care about whatever she had to say about how things were done at her old lab. He rolled his eyes and complained when she didn't even know how to hold the calligraphy brush correctly. He sighed deeply when she didn't know any of the six standard arrays for seals. He gave up talking to her when she asked what chakra was made of.
After several futile hours on the first day, Keizo left her alone with an introductory book on sealing while he puttered around his side of the lab. The book was obviously for children, and relied on Tori already knowing a lot of chakra theory she was missing. Still, she dutifully practiced the six standard arrays that made up the first half of the book. Hers looked ugly and lopsided, but the book assured her she could still get results from malformed brushstrokes as long as she had "proper stroke order and high quality chakra."
What did that mean?
Chakra, Keizo had recited in a bored tone before he'd abandoned Tori to teach herself, was found in all bodily tissues, and sealing ink used human blood, so she should be able to craft and use seals without being able to mold chakra.
Learning seals was… boring. Boring was the word. It was repetitive, she wasn't very good at it, this world continued to fail to adequately explain what chakra was anyway, and she had no idea what anything she was copying actually meant.
Where a lab in her world might have a binder of protocols, Orochimaru's lab had random sheets with sealing instructions shoved all over the place. A lot of them had no labels, and some of them were marked as vaguely as "37ºC" or "scar tissue."
Apparently, if you wanted to edit all the genomic code related to bone growth, all you had to do was know the stroke order for the "ossification" seal and then stick it in the right part of your array. It was the most infuriating thing Tori had ever heard.
"What about epigenetic controls?" she asked. "What about loci with multiple targets?"
"What?" said Keizo. "This is too advanced for you. Haven't you learned the cooling seal yet?"
The first proper seal Tori tried, after practicing drawing the components for days, was a seal that cooled things down to 4ºC. The version a ninja scientist would usually use had a second component to keep their target at a four degrees, but she was starting simple.
(There was another, completely different looking seal for warming a frozen thing up to 4ºC, which was the second most infuriating thing Tori had ever heard.)
Tori pricked her finger with a scalpel she borrowed from the surgical half of the lab and mixed several drops of blood in with her ink. She very carefully set up her array, and then added the command for cooling, and set a beaker of water in the "target" space of the array.
She dropped a thermometer in the beaker. Nothing happened.
She got new paper and tried again. And again. And again. She tried right through her lunch break.
Something like a mix of disappointment and panic formed in the back of Tori's mind. She wanted to make the magic seal thing work because it was infuriating but also kind of awesome. She needed it to work because if she couldn't perform Orochimaru's weird research tasks, then she wasn't sure what would happen to her.
"I don't know, try more chakra," Keizo said when she came to him in a panic. He shooed her away from where he was working on his own, stupidly complex seal.
More chakra, Tori assumed, meant more blood. She pricked another finger and milked blood into her ink until her finger went all tingly and white.
She drew out her seal extra carefully this time, holding her wrist with her left hand to keep it steady. When she placed the beaker with its thermometer in the seal, the thin line of mercury started to shrink.
"Keizo!" she cried, leaning over her seal to watch the thermometer drop to exactly four degrees. "Keizo, I did it!"
The seal exploded.
NOTES:
Since I got some questions, here's an FAQ...
When does this take place?
Tori guesses Sasuke's age to be fourteen or fifteen, so this takes place one to two years before the start of Shippuuden (time kept vague because the entire Naruto timeline is one big hand-wave). Akatsuki is going strong but they have some time before they start really getting involved in the plot.
Are Hidan and Kakuzu coming back?
YES. Tori will eventually interact with all Akatsuki members and the main plot will focus on them.
Thank you for all your lovely reviews so far. If you liked something you read, feel free to leave me one. :)