"You do realize that there's nothing in this library that you don't know, right? I mean... You can't create something that you don't know," Scarlet muttered, rolling her eyes onto something more exciting than just seeing Mana sitting around and meditating or flat out reading.
"Maybe, but I can't entertain these people as a stage magician and there's nothing for me to protect them from inside here. You've taken care of that…" Mana sighed and slammed the comprehensive book she's been skimming through closed.
"Wait, are you saying you want there to be crime and war in our pocket universe? I thought you hated that stuff…" Scarlet stood up and pouted. "Either way, I will not let you stay in this world unless I know you're content. We're doing this for the betterment of Mana, we want what's best for Mana, and that means all of us."
"No. This is great. It's just…" Mana looked down.
It felt selfish to notice minor flaws and inconsistencies in the universe that Scarlet made to contain the Sorceress part of her personality as a fair trade for taking over when or if she wakes up. For all intents and purposes, this may just have been a perfect little world. Scarlet had conjured everything to be well, or so it seemed and left there no purpose for conflict to sprout. Still, something felt creepy about this place.
"It's just what? Also, what's this about you being unable to entertain these people? They'll love and applaud everything you do," Scarlet blew at an unruly strand of her hair falling over her face and sticking to some excessive violet make-up on her eyelids.
"They will but… That's not why I love entertaining people. Frankly, it's scary that you would think that the applause and adoration is the point," Mana stood up and moved past the table to confront her other self. The magician dragged her hand across the empty space in front of them to move them to the Konoha square. An intersection of multiple paths that led to most key areas in the village if one selected a path and walked it all the way through.
"Hey, don't point fingers at me. You're the Sorceress here, you do the magic tricks…" Scarlet shrugged. "Just tell me what's wrong and I'll help you help yourself. All I want is for you to exist here, feeling fulfilled for as long as you want. Time only matters here as much as you make it matter. There's still time to make it work, all the time in the world."
"These people…" Mana muttered, turning to a passerby who froze in place as if a spear had impaled him and tilted him overhead on the spear that stabbed him for his last agony to be admired. "They don't feel like they're happy. It feels more like they've been told to be happy. They're afraid. They seem to be afraid of me, which makes me think they're afraid of you because we have the same face and I've only come here… However long ago…"
Scarlet sighed. A golden flame enveloped her and spread around, burning it all away at the first sight. It was only when Mana cried out and reached for the pocket universe inside of her mind that peeled itself away and disappeared into flames that she realized that the universe stayed underneath them as the column of golden flames erupting from Scarlet tilted them up into the cosmos of Mana's higher mental functions.
"It's dangerous to expose our personas to this plane. Our body might still die, both of us might get lost forever!" Mana warned Scarlet, but it seemed like Mana's doppelganger in a showy red dress preferred her light show.
"I can show something to you. Something that took me a little while to learn," Scarlet spoke with a bland tone as she extended her hand and streamlined the firestorm of golden flames on ahead to whirl in a yellow twister that left a luxurious, classical-style mansion floating on a rocky platform out in the higher planes of Mana's mind.
With the fire-show suspending itself until Scarlet would need it again, the pair floated inside of the mansion only to find a little girl with messy black hair and darker skin complexion, accompanied by two happy parents. Mana's father wore decorations proper to an ANBU member though he lacked a mask, Scarlet made it this way for the analogy to be utterly unmistakable. Mother wore a bloated and opulent pink dress, looking almost like a queen that way.
"Do they look happy to you?" Scarlet asked. It was tough to say who she was addressing with her eyes still gleaming with golden flames, though she angled her face to address somewhere in Mana's direction.
"I mean… They're smiling but… Little girl, are you happy with your life?" Mana leaned down to ask the child with the most acted smile of someone who just saw their creator mold them of golden flames and space dust and told them to smile.
"Am I?" little version of Mana looked around, taking equal time asking both the Sorceress and the Scarlet versions of Mana. "I have an instinct to do this, am I doing it right?" she pointed her index fingers to her upward shaped lips and pearly teeth. Her eyes and forehead looked more nervous than happy.
"See? If you just create something for the sole purpose of being happy, they won't be able to do it. Being happy isn't something as simple as smiling a lot or thinking positive thoughts. It's a sense of self-fulfillment, accomplishment, and love for one's own way of life. I guess it's also about stability and well-being of one's loved ones too, to an extent." Scarlet pointed at the nervous family of three, who by all means should have been happy. Like a capricious goddess, the Mana in red snapped her fingers, erupting in a nova of golden flames that swallowed up the mansion and the stone platform, reducing all but the family residing inside to ashes.
"This is all that is of your so-called world. Just a rock and a house on top. It's gone now. You're left with nothing," Scarlet declared as she pointed at the smoldering chaos sparking violently into oblivion behind the petrified family.
"I… I don't want to smile anymore…" little Mana cried out. It was not the sadness of seeing what she knew as her entire world unraveling before her and her own creator belittling it in its entirety that wrought terror in the face of this child, it was the fact that she had to stare at it with a smile and be happy about it.
"Sure, you are!" the ANBU ninja kneeled by his child and turned her head toward his face. It was an attempt to focus the attention of the daughter that he never truly conceived on to him so she could act happy and continue to please their creator by fulfilling their purpose.
"This is great!" the queenly woman exclaimed, raising her arms over her head and letting them wave down with a slow, all-encompassing motion. A lone blue tear ran down her cheek as the woman smiled.
"Do you want to do this or should I?" Scarlet looked to Mana with a tilted eyebrow before snapping her fingers and lighting the kneeling father aflame. The man burnt up to blazing paper shreds and tore apart before his daughter's very eyes. Little Mana's face remained fixed on the demise of her father because the man had turned her head at his smiling face as the last expression of his fleeting will.
"This is… Just… Wonderful, isn't it?" the red, voluptuous lips of the queenly woman pouted and quivered but when she found it impossible to smile through the tears, she clapped her hands to fake joy in other ways. "Oh, but… Now we'll be able to share the nothing we have left amongst just the two of us. We'll… Get to spend more and more time without… Without Tsukumo…"
Mana stared at the scenario and the twisted engineering of her other self with a gaping jaw. Even if something positive was to come out from this lesson, nothing good would have ever shown this to her in this way. Whatever lesson Scarlet meant to show Mana, she could have just told her outright. All of this nightmare fuel was unnecessary.
Scarlet extended her hand, directing her golden flames to surround her in a booming pillar. A gauntlet-wearing hand burst forth from the most intense center of the booming, golden hellfire as Tsukumo peeled the flames away and burrowed through them to emerge anew and reborn. The man panted, floating in mid-air as sweat ran down his face and he looked around with a pale expression, turning toward Scarlet with a petrified expression. This was no longer the face of his creator but his destroyer.
"Did you keep his memories intact?" Mana yelled out.
"What's the point of recreating him otherwise? He needs to know pain, death, terror to appreciate what he has. Can't you see? Unless you teach people what misery is, they can't ever be happy because they won't treasure what they have. Of course, in the material world the violence, the death, wars, and all the little imperfections fulfill that purpose nicely, but in here there are no such things unless I or you make them. I figured I had to find other ways to make these people happy." Scarlet explained as she turned away from her creations as they wrapped around the reborn family patriarch while Tsukumo put himself in between his cruel maker in order to protect his family from her whims.
Ultimately, he failed as when Scarlet switched her attention to Mana, the family scattered as swarms of soap bubbles and popped one by one in a colorful demise. A wondrous sight that did not befit the point of the thing it masked underneath.
"What did you do to those people? Which version of your wonderland is that universe?" Mana asked. Her head hung down, eyes wide and stuttering as they stared into the cold blackness of her own mind. Unlike before, it no longer glistened with nebulae and warm, welcoming balls of fiery gas. It was pitch black and silent to where a phantom shriek filled one's ears after a few moments of welcoming the deathly serenity into one's own self.
"It's the first, don't worry. I didn't destroy an entire universe just to start a new one. These people had to be put through terror, though. I had to show them what evil was like and let that evil scare them, hurt them, and kill them before I did away with it. So… Yeah, they might seem like they're scared but… Unless you want to start over and do it all over again–there's no other way of making them happy," Scarlet shrugged. "I feel you're demanding the impossible of me here, really."
"I can't let you out." Mana shook her head. As her head moved, the magician felt the cold brushing against her moist cheeks, realizing that tears made her eyelids swell up. "You're unhinged. You'll kill, you'll force people to do things, to adopt your ideas."
"My ideas? Wake up, sweetheart, they're OUR ideas. We're both Mana, I'm just as much Mana as you are. It's just that you've been in charge where I haven't still had my shot." Scarlet's tone changed. She was talking down to Mana now. It was as if a facade had shattered a veil of icy glass. "And what an amazing pile of Mount Fecal you've left for me to scoop up…"
"Is there nothing holding you back? Do you even know how far is too far?" Mana tried reasoning with Scarlet still.
"Everything was holding you back. You're a kid born in a cage that's inside a shut house that's inside a city that's part of a country which is an element of a globe. You've long since grown too large for your cage and you want to see the sun in the sky, but you're too afraid to struggle against the bars to break free. I was grateful for your input, Sorceress, I really have been, but someone had to say it and we're the only personae here–you're holding Mana back." Scarlet crossed her hands and pouted her lips. "Frankly, you don't deserve the perfect world I made for you. You've done more damage to Mana than you realize. Can't you realize how amazing Mana is? You could rise through the ranks like nothing but you keep holding yourself back–won't kill, won't use jutsu someone else has made unless it's to save a life, can't be bothered to break a few eggs, and stop being nice to the woman stabbing you this very moment."
"You're wrong!" Mana shouted out. Her body was shaking. Whereas it looked forward to exploding with anger and lash out at this Scarlet persona, she took as her ally this entire time, her eyes continued to weep. "We're not Mana. You're not even me!"
"That's right, keep denying reality, princess. I don't care what you believe, I won't let you control that body and keep dragging us into an early grave any longer. I think we've had enough of Sorceress Mana, Empress Mana is so much better for us," Empress lashed right back at Mana with matching passion.
"You're nothing but a figment of my inner fears. Ever since I started working as a ninja, I was afraid that I'd take a life, that I'd do something wrong or take a shortcut. Worse, I was afraid that I'd become stale, that the lines would become so blurred that I wouldn't see where they were anymore. Heck, I feared forgetting that the lines were even there. You're not another me, you're just the sum of those fears. I am Mana, and you're just what I am afraid to become!" Mana stepped in against her other self. The two stopped against each other so close that one extra step would have made them run into one another.
"If that is the case, how about you prove it, big girl? How about you show me how real and complete you are and kick me out? What's wrong? Afraid you won't be able to handle it? If your fears are better than you–maybe they deserve to be in charge, maybe if they're more than what you are–they're more you than you are?" Empress beamed a spiteful glare. There it was, the source of all that "Other Me" talk. The misguided way in which the Empress saw the world and the reason that birthed the delusion that she deserved to take over.
"Wind Style: Finger of Fate Jutsu!" Mana yelled out, thrusting two of her fingers out. It was one of her earliest techniques that she perfected before the finals of the Chuunin Exams. A jutsu she called her own to an extent that she could perform it without uttering its name or even casting any hand seals. She lashed out, but the idea of dispelling and overcoming her fears of going too far and recognizing no moral or legal limitations was too alluring to resist.
"Fool!" Empress mocked Mana. She spun around in a circle, forming a weak vortex of wind around her which deflected the stream of cutting wind propelled from Mana's fingers. She used another jutsu from her childhood that Mana had perfected by the time of the Chuunin Exams–the only method of being quick enough to fend off from one of Mana's perfected techniques.
"I am not restricted by meaningless nonsense that holds you back. Your fears make you predictable and weak!" Empress scoffed as she weaved a clone technique hand seal. "Fire Style: Shadow Clones!"
As Mana bit her cheek on the inside and prepared for an influx of attackers, she came to realize that what she saw as delusions of grandeur may have had more point to it than she cared to admit. Here she had a version of her that didn't fear Fire Release–her own elemental affinity solely because of how destructive it was and what it signified and dabbled in it to a higher extent.
The clones all came pummeling. There was not a hint of self-protection in their fighting styles. Just high kicks and acrobatics. They wanted Mana to fend them off and undo them, as that was when they were the most dangerous. There was solace for Mana because she knew what this theoretical concept for a technique was capable of and that doing away with these clones would have made them erupt in a firestorm strong enough to engulf her whole and put the strength and control of her chakra augmentations to the test. Every single clone had the potency to kill her if she beat them if she fought back.
Any hint of damage, any ninjutsu technique except for a Water Release one would have resulted in the same outcome. Here, resistance truly was futile. A kick to the back of her head made everything go hazy.
"A pathetic attempt, but the outcome would have been the same, no matter how long you resisted. Maybe it's for the better that you accept it and just let me take over. You should have just stuck to the lovely little world I made for you, but you've squandered even that…" Mana had never hated the sound of her own voice ringing in her head. One of Empress' doppelgangers kept stomping at her head to keep her dazed and confused.
A beam of bright light enveloped Mana alongside a feeling of liberating weightlessness. A rotating kaleidoscope of enlightening views with a dominating beacon at the end of the tunnel.
"Whoa!" Damisan froze still when Mana jumped up and wrapped his arms around him. The fact that he lacked notable arms and his usual metallic shoulders only made him that much more huggable at the moment. "Love the enthusiasm, Mana, but… I hope you won't mind if I can't hug you back right now."
"You fucking freakazoid, what did you do!?" Endo burst into the room, kicking the door open. He stopped with an ajar expression. He must have been waiting around for Mana to recover for quite a while since he's been waiting outside and he looked taken aback by the magician just coming alive and hugging the first person she saw. "Excellent work… I guess…" he cleared his throat.
"Mana!" Shige-H yelled out as the rest of the Stars burst into the room. "It took a couple of hours, but the sample worked out just fine!"
Mana was so ecstatic to have blown through her time inside her own mind and returned to her own body that she left the natural question of what the heck Shige-H was talking about for the future. Right now she was just glad to be back.