Chapter 30: The Notebook

He had already flipped through the entire notebook he'd snagged from under the register last week, and, while fascinating in its own right, it was all basically completely useless to him; a natural consequence of not actually being able to read it. Yet he remained totally convinced that it would be worth the effort he'd put in to grabbing it.

Jiraiya turned a page back and forth, as if hoping for some kind of last minute revelation to suddenly reveal what the lines of unintelligible text meant. There were a few sketches—which were quite interesting, especially the few snippets of sealing arrays he'd seen—but otherwise the entire journal was written in that weird other script that he just couldn't figure out. He'd managed to weasel some tidbits about it from Minato, after some convincing, but those tips weren't quite as useful as he might've expected.

This code, if it even was a code, would be a hard egg to crack.

Which was why he was here, in the empty back alleyway, waiting for Orochimaru to open the darn door so he could pester him into helping.

"I know that you know I'm here," he said, flipping the book shut and tucking it away again.

Pacing back a few steps, Jiraiya gave his teammate his best smile… or at least, he gave that smile to the concealed door of his teammate's personal laboratory. He was pretty sure that Orochimaru was inside, and he knew for a fact that his extra-paranoid friend had something set up so he could see who was outside. Not that he ever had many (any) visitors, of course. The only four people who even knew this place existed—let alone where the door was—would be the members of their old team. As far as he knew, anyway.

"Open up, already!" Jiraiya knocked on the nondescript brick wall again, right on a worn out poster advertising the dango shop around the corner. "I have something I want you to take a look at!"

No response.

Okay, time to bring out the heavy weapons.

"Oro-chan!~" he called, voice singsong and at least half an octave higher than usual. "Let me in!~"

Still no response.

Well, alright then. If that level of annoyance wasn't enough, time for—

Behind him, there came a click as a section of bricks pushed into the wall and shifted aside with a nearly inaudible hum.

Jiraiya turned around, smile still in place and definitely not at all embarrassed that he had been knocking on the wrong wall the whole time. It had been a few years, after all.

From the newly made doorway, Orochimaru gave him a very disgruntled look. His completely disinterested expression might have made it seem like he wasn't, but he was: sure, Jiraiya hadn't seen his old teammate much in the past few years, but he still knew the little ticks that meant he was one wrong sentence away from having the door slammed in his face.

"What do you want?"

"Oh, don't be that way, Orochi," he scoffed, walking up to his teammate with the confidence of a man who totally hadn't been knocking on the wrong wall for the past ten minutes.

Crossing his arms, Orochimaru stepped in front of him to bar his way inside. "Jiraiya. What are you doing here?"

"Well, a few days ago I got my hands on something rather interesting," he said, enunciating each syllable in the word with the particular precise cadence he knew his teammate tended to use. It was undoubtedly the most dramatic way to say that word, after all.

Honestly, Jiraiya may be the most openly out-there member of their team, but he and Tsunade had always known who the true drama master of their little trio was: theatrics had always been Orochimaru's thing.

Slit yellow eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Seriously!" he reaffirmed. Then, halfway backpedaling: "Well, I mean, yes and no. It's sorta for me too, but you'll find it interesting, I guarantee—"

"Stop wasting my time." Orochimaru shook his head, scowling, but he did step back so as to no longer block the entrance (and it was only mostly reluctantly).

Jiraiya beamed at him, stepping inside. "Trust me on this, Orochi."

"Naturally." The remark all but bled sarcasm. "Though who knows why."

With that remark (plus a long-suffering sigh), his moody friend led the way deeper into the lab. Trying to track their route using years-old memories from the last time he had been around was difficult, to say the least, especially since there'd clearly been some expansions at some point.

Passing by yet another hallway sloping away deeper underground, Jiraiya caught sight of a pair of uniformed shinobi just before they rounded a corner: Root agents. That explains the new additions, though he was surprised that Orochimaru would let them operate in his own laboratory space.

It didn't really seem like something he would have done.

Jiraiya wondered when that had changed, and why.

"Geeze," Jiraiya said lightly, looking away and trying to push worried thoughts aside, "you could really get lost down here."

"I rather thought that was the point."

Orochimaru led the way to a small room, just large enough for a table, four chairs, and some space in front of the wall-wide blackboard. It had been ages, but he actually recognized the furniture: it was the same set they had in the meeting room they'd used when they were younger. Though Jiraiya was quite certain that room hadn't been nearly so far from the entrance.

He shook himself: he was way too young to be reminiscing about the good ol' days or whatever! He was only in his thirties! His prime!

"Anyway, check this out!"

With a flourish, Jiraiya pulled out the notebook and knew immediately that he had his teammate's full attention. In a sense, at least; Orochimaru locked onto the small journal and, though his expression remained neutral, his yellow eyes lit with eager sparks of recognition and curiosity.

Taking the notebook from him and opening it to the first page, Orochimaru paused. Then he flipped through several more, stopping when he finally reached a page that actually had something written on it. For whatever reason, there were a lot of blank pages at the front.

He traced a finger across a line of indecipherable text.

"Even the direction is different," he murmured, thoughtful.

"Interesting, right?" Jiraiya leaned forward too, scanning the open page. "I don't even know where to start with it. Well, mostly."

Orochimaru glanced to him, briefly. "Tell me, what do you mean by 'mostly'?"

He smiled his goofy I-know-something-you-don't smile, which he really didn't get to use often. Especially where Orochimaru is concerned.

"You see, my friend, it's really quite simple," he said, drawing out the reveal to be appropriately dramatic. "Minato's shared a few of the things that he's picked up."

Pulling out a scroll, he unrolled it with flare and pointed proudly to the section he had filled with his current guesses and shaky interpretations, as well as what he'd gleaned from his student. It wasn't a very big section, granted, but he was still working on it.

"Not that I've had any luck with the actual words, but I've figured out some of the diagrams."

Orochimaru turned another page, pausing to take in an amateurish sketch of a seal component. Or at least, that's what Jiraiya had assumed it was since, unlike the rest of the notes, it had been drawn in with a brush and ink. It was a fascinating thought, regardless; triangles weren't exactly a common geometry in fuinjutsu, though these spiraled triangles-in-inverted-triangles weren't nearly smooth or regular enough to be used in an actual seal.

Still, it at least got the idea across.

"I knew my precious student sometimes spit-balled ideas off the guy, but I was surprised too." Jiraiya reached across the table to gently tap the incomplete sketch. "Seems it's been working out well for him so far, though."

Still looking over the sketch closely, Orochimaru casually flicked a pulse of chakra at the walls of the room. After a moment, a thin tracery of privacy seals along the baseboard lit up as they activated.

"Has it?"

Jiraiya ignored the seal thing, knowing how paranoid his teammate could be. Besides, he was always happy to gush about his student and his little found family.

"Yeah! He said that Kushina-chan, you remember her, right? Well, she was really pushy about fuinjutsu stuff, kinda running off with any projects, but when it's all three of them she's apparently better about that." Smiling, he proudly added, "I heard they're all working on a 'stasis seal' right now, though he won't tell me what that means."

Orochimaru rolled his eyes, but Jiraiya thought he maybe detected the faintest twitch toward the ghost of a smile, and he counted that as a victory.

Then he remembered one of the other reasons he wanted to see his old teammate today, and his jovial mood faded a touch. "I gotta leave the village again soon."

Orochimaru paused, smoothing down the page he had been about the turn but otherwise not looking up from his careful consideration of the illegible—or, to be more accurate, unreadable—writing.

Jiraiya continued on, as if he hadn't noticed that slight stutter. "Thought I should tell you. I wasn't planning on keeping the book for very long, it's already been longer than I expected," he said, gesturing to the notebook. "But, well… It's the craziest code I've ever seen."

"Code?"

Jiraiya quirked a brow, shrugging. It was a question he'd asked himself, after all, but really: "What else could it be?"

Though Orochimaru said nothing to disagree, the slight crease between his brows suggested that the word didn't settle well. It felt too readable to be called code, somehow—ignoring the fact that neither of them could actually read it, of course. There is often a flow to crazy-unbreakable code that makes it seem disjointed or randomized, where the same set of coded symbols never appear twice in the same order; if it did, it'd be too easy to work out which bits meant which word or character just by frequency of use.

It should be mentioned, then, that he had yet to successfully apply that trick to the notebook. And not for lack of trying, of course.

They poured over the journal together, minutes slipping easily into hours, even though they didn't really make much progress. It had been ages since they worked together on something like this, having both gone their very separate ways after Tsunade… left. It was nice.

At the very least, Jiraiya felt justified in needing the help now; if even Orochimaru couldn't crack it open after an evening of hard work, it must be a tough one.

"I'd love to pick his brains for what all this stuff is," Jiraiya half complained, nearly three hours after he'd brought out the notebook. His scroll was filled with new notes—the results of their combined effort—but he didn't feel like they were any closer.

Pausing mid-word on the blackboard—by now covered in notes and smeared chalk dust from partially erased text—Orochimaru gave him a distinctly unimpressed stare.

Knowing that look, he just shook his head. "The guy's just a civilian, and Minato would get on my case if I tried any funny business."

Orochimaru considered that for a moment, then gave a slight nod. "No sense taking this hobby too far, I suppose."

"See? I knew you'd get it—"

Suddenly, feeling that telltale twist of chakra, Jiraiya glanced toward the doorway. There was no doubt that Orochimaru noticed it as well, but he didn't even bother to look up from the notebook. A moment later, announced only by a swirl of wind—and no leaves, not in here—a shinobi with a blank white mask appeared.

Another Root agent.

"Orochimaru-sama."

"Oh?" Jiraiya leaned closer to his teammate, turning so that his mass of white hair quite thoroughly blocked the entry from view: it had its uses, in and out of combat. "What's this guy here for?"

"Likely to do with one of my experiments," Orochimaru provided, still not looking up from the book. "Boring, really. Tedious and…" He actually hesitated—no way—before adding, "Wasteful."

Jiraiya quirked a brow at that. "What do you mean?"

That question got him no answers, as expected, but it did bring a rather odd expression into his teammate's yellow eyes.

Then the moment passed, and Orochimaru waved away his curiosity. "It's no concern of yours, Jiraiya."

"Hey, if it's bothering you, I'd say it's my concern!"

He was soundly ignored as, with a gesture to the wall and a pulse of chakra, Orochimaru took down the privacy seals. For a moment, Jiraiya considered pressing the issue anyway—he didn't like just being closed out like that—but he let it drop.

"Orochimaru-sama," the agent repeated, monotone. "The commander wishes to speak to you."

Author's Note:

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Translating an unknown language—and unaware that it is, in fact, an unknown language—must be very difficult.

Anyway, hello everybody! Are you looking forward to Halloween?

Since I got a review asking about this, and I figured some other people might be curious, I'm going to give a bit more details on what the coins entail world-building wise. None of this will be need-to-know for the story (or else it will be included in the story when it comes up), so you don't need to read it here. But just in case you're interested…

So, functionally speaking for the characters in this story, Axel is the first person to end up on this side from Earth. No canon character is gonna show up with all the details.

If anybody else from Earth came over in the past—and, more importantly, if anybody actually knew about it—it has been lost to history thanks to the sneaky share-nothing attitude of ninja. Plus, it's entirely likely that nobody would have noticed; in the pre-chakra era, and even in the early days of its presence, people likely would not be able to tell the difference between an Earthen and the rest of the locals.

(There is a difference, a very fundamental one, but more on that in a later chapter.)

Something as large as a person accidentally falling through is really rare, anyway. In all the history of reality (or realities, as it were), we can only be sure of two: Axel, and whoever brought the story of the Naruto world into ours.
The slip between worlds is more easy for small items, like coins and such. It is most easy for things like light and sound to make it through (hence the haunted-ness of the forest). It's like how sometimes when you drop something small and it seemingly vanishes into thin air, except in this case it has literally done that.

Thanks to KeinNiemand, who asked about this in a review and, as such, prompted me to get it down in an organized way. I have a little notebook with bits and bobs, but it's not always to most tidy thing.

Anyway, sorry for the long AN. Just thought I'd share and I finally happened to have it all written down.

Updates on the 15th of every month, though late in the day on Colorado time.
Thanks for all the reviews, favorites, and follows!

See ya on the flipside, everyone!