A moment of awareness blinked first. A puny line of grey pencil, stroking across a white sheet and drawing a line of memory on which this awareness was merely a dot. Yet when looking down on the said line, one could see the dot and mark it as something profound. Focus on that awareness brought Mana back. It made that awareness permanent, but it was difficult. Had it not been years upon years of practicing meditation, she'd have not been nearly as aware of something odd transpiring with her own body.
Pulses of red fissures looking frighteningly vein-like, containing something crimson that pumped through them in an unhealthy manner, shocked in pain. A whirl of flames became a full-on firenado, from which, once the fiery natural structure burst, Mana returned to consciousness. Or at least it seemed like she was being conscious. The magician looked down, seeing aged yet resolute locks around her wrists and her heels.
A tall and thick, femininely shaped figure in a loose, dark tunic and a black headpiece with a white headband lacking a signature of any village or the Allied Ninja on the forehead protector leaned over Mana. She stared down from within an iron helmet upon which the headpiece hung. The vizor of the helmet was down and the woman's eyes didn't possess any lustering qualities in the gloomy room, yet Mana knew she was looking right at her somehow. It was an almost supernatural, horrific kind of internal knowledge.
This was a mental world of some sort. This was exactly how Mana knew all this. With the gaunt nun leaning over Mana to do something to her with her thin, branch-like fingers sticking out from within ghastly, black sleeves, another whirl of flames surrounded Mana, this time it enveloped the nun and the mental construct died in a petrifying scream of an entire village being burnt down. It sent chills down Mana's spine, but it also felt somehow… Suiting and familiar to her.
Something was wrong. Mana had roamed plenty of mental realms, laid siege on many mental forts, but this was nothing like anything she's tried before. There were no memories of what she was trying to do before this. Very few details of her life, however loose, existed in her mind. Whatever was outside this dark room might not have existed at all.
As Mana let her bare feet touch the gentle and expensively soft carpet underneath her feet, she couldn't help but look down and admire something she had noticed earlier but hadn't had the time to delve into. What was it she was wearing? A red dress with golden, fiendish motifs stretching out the front of it all over her chest. With a stumble, Mana approached a glistering heap of silver that had some reflective properties to it and snapped her fingers. A burning cat's eye opened up an inch over her fingers and revealed an image of her in the mirror that made Mana gasp.
Though… She couldn't quite understand why. This red make-up, these hair accessories keeping her dark, curly hair in check and falling straight down her back. The golden rings around which her hair was tied and the large ring-shaped earrings hanging off her ears. The face-paint, the illustrious accessories, and the weird red dress… All of it felt strangely right and continuously hammered down on the nail sparking in her mind that something had been wrong.
Mana… That was a weird name, but it was the name that felt right. She didn't look like mere Mana though; she felt stronger, better, braver. Unbound, figuratively and literally. Mana felt underwhelming, she was the Empress. Even though the Empress couldn't quite understand the source of that conclusion, the title felt as right as the name she awoke to.
Her body still felt a tad stiff, as she threw a punch chakra surged through the Empress' body and formed the burning bones of an arm over her shoulder that had sharp, bony protrusions sticking out from over its forearm that imbedded into the hard wooden door and incinerated it within mere moments, reducing it to mere burning woodchips. That's right, power, technique, speed, vitality, none of that mattered in this mental realm, only willpower. And the Empress felt like the queen of willpower at the moment. She couldn't help savoring how sweet the rush of willpower felt by dragging her sharp, decorated fingernails down her forehead and caressing her cheeks before they met her magenta-dyed lips.
"Stop! Return to your premises at once, recruit!" a towering shape of moving plastic. A lumbering doll dressed in a tuxedo and donning orderly silver hair and a rich and thick line of burly mustache pointed its finger to the Empress and began walking toward her, putting up its dukes as swinging them about in an almost comical stance while it shuffled with its feet in the approach of the unruly escapee.
"You are in contempt of the final exams, ma'am! Please return to your chambers, this is not the time nor the place for young ladies to be walking about!" the second toy-butler remarked, raising its hand as it began approaching the Empress looking to guide her back to the chamber.
"Exam?" the Empress muttered. As the second, guiding toy-butler reached her, bending its upper body by its knees to guide her back to the room she just burst out of, the Empress' body dissolved into flames that covered the doll-like giant making him stumble back and pat its own burning shoulders. The Empress molded back into existence behind both burly guardians of this sophisticated hallway. "That's right, something rings a bell here. I wonder if…"
The Empress raised her hand, sending more of her fiery armor fists to smash the guardians of the mental fort. This was her way to get to the bottom of all this–tear down this mental fort, destroy all of its guardians and make a struggle against its master's will. Once everything they've built is torn down–the Empress shall rule this meager place as she rules Konoha and the… Why did her mind skip a beat there?
The Empress' fiery armor fist collided with the boxing doll golem, who blocked the blow by crossing his dukes up. The impact made the protector skid back and shake its arms to flail the flames off of his burning tux. Both dolls realized the Empress was hostile by now and they weren't some weaklings. Whoever built this mental fort was an incredibly skilled ninja with mental fortitude training.
"Ma'am! You will return to your premises or you will be returned!" both doll butlers waved their plastic hands out in front of them as they shred out of their burning up tux sleeves. A spinning pillar of shuffling cards formed something stick-shaped and when both of them pointed these sticks toward the Empress, they hurled fireballs right at her but with waves of her hand and a dance of Fire Release mass of flames of her own making, she deflected those blasts to devastate the nearby rooms.
"The proctor is aware of the fact you are showing hostility, young lady," the more willing to reason butler pointed its plastic finger at the Empress. Seeing a sight of something most curious indoors, the Empress waved her hands inward, forming skeletal arms made of solid Fire Release chakra to smash both oversized dolls from both sides, one against the other.
Seeing them collapse into a heap of plastic junk that melted away into pink goop and then simply became stacks of cards that burnt away into nothingness sent a liberating rush through the Empress' head. She stumbled back with a painful grunt. Only when both of the doll butlers were gone, did she sneak up to the doors she let those guardians blow down to look inside at something curious she had noticed.
Inside those doors, stretched on a wooden rack, not unlike the hard imprisonment the Empress found herself in upon her awakening, laid someone remarkably similar to Shige-H. Had the woman's hair not been straightened out, had she not worn tamer and much more themed over an evening gala make-up and had she not worn a bloated, pink, evening gown, a set completed by silky gloves stretching up to Shige-H's elbows, she'd have been the young woman the Empress could vaguely recall about.
"So, the other recruits are all positioned inside these chambers as well. They don't seem like their usual selves, even though I feel just fine the way I am. Those servants mentioned something about some exam… Ugh, I need to smash more of them, tear everything down," the Empress flicked her hand, forming the burning cat's eye that hopped off of the tip of her fingers and latched onto the wandering nun with a knight's helmet underneath, burning her up at once. The hag died in a scream of a thousand different voices, but the more of those residents the Empress did away with–the more control she felt over herself. The more memories came back.
"Wake up, you pompous thing, I need someone to help crash this castle party, cause some general mayhem," the Empress smirked as nudged her slumbering friend and ripped the iron restraints around Shige-H's limbs. Once the Empress touched them, sealing glyphs lit up that burnt the Empress' hand, but with a little of perseverance they came off all the same.
"Oh… Oh my…" Shige-H waved her gloved hands over her lips. "Have I fallen asleep by accident, have I missed the party? I'm so terribly sorry!"
"This is frustrating, you don't sound right, but I sound just fine to me," the Empress ran her hands through her hair, combing it with her delicately maintained fingernails before pinching her lip in thought. "In any case, get up. We need to tear this place down. Smash the pottery, kick any house cats and certainly strangle all the butlers and maids."
"That does not sound like a very ladylike pastime…" Shige-H gasped.
"Fine, do whatever, just stay with me and don't get yourself recaptured. I need to free as many people as I can to cause as much damage to this mental fort as possible," the Empress pointed her sharp finger to Shige-H, stopping it just a few inches off Shige-H's eye.
"B-But why?" Shige-H wondered. "We're already late, the bash must be downstairs and if we engage in any more buffoonery we can be certain to get into trouble."
"Yes, that's what I'm counting on," the Empress nodded while walking out the door of the room and extending her hands to form a couple of rotating lightning vortexes and moved in each side of the corridor, sending shocks and bolts in all directions that ripped and tore through the walls.
Barks came from all directions. While the Empress had hoped that her thunderous vortexes will envelop and destroy these wind-up dog toys dressed with maid-like ornaments, headdresses, and frilly wristbands while they hopped and ran on the walls as if gravitational forces of this mental realm bent to their will. It was frustrating that they eluded the Empress' whirlwinds this way, but they'd promptly be punished for their survival.
"Oh my! Unruly, wild beasts in the halls! Mayhem, mayhem, I tell you! Where is papa?" Shige-H gasped and screamed out after peeking out through the doorway while the Empress got to work. She did not expect her fiery, ethereal armor hands to shatter upon impact with the nimble wind-up dogs and thus they pounced over her, pinning the Empress to the ground. Oil dropped off from their mouths as they reached down with a threatening snarl, telling the unruly recruit to sit still while a butler comes down to subdue her and restrain her properly again.
"Oh no, don't maul her, she's but a lady! Just like me, oh papa, oh, why did you leave me, papa?" Shige-H covered her forehead and neatly folded like a quivering leaf. With her embracing the expensive castle hall carpet, the wind-up dog perched atop of the Empress began reassembling itself into something resembling restraints that shut over the Empress' wrists and her heels again. Another dog and yet another joined into this constructor puzzle until they became a colorful rack with the head of a wind-up rottweiler atop of it, just above the Empress' head, drooling oil.
Freedom returned to the Empress without asking her for permission to do so. Feeling weightless, she raised her hand up in front of herself to stop her fall short and enveloped herself in a turbulent gale of a heatwave that kept the Empress levitating. Once she set her feet down and looked behind her at the rack that was to be, only a sharply dressed young man of a pale face and a ponytail of dark hair stood behind her, surrounded by shattered wind-up parts of the canine patrols.
"You're staging a breakout, aren't you? That seems improper, although I, for whatever reason, can't help myself but feel exhilarated by that thought. Ever since I've opened my own eyes, I felt a certain call to action, and perhaps you two ladies in need was exactly it," Skaven with orderly Nara clan hairdo stated while picking the fallen Shige-H off the ground and flipping her over his shoulders.
That's right, someone in Skaven's past trained him well in mental fortitude and probing as well. Better even than the Empress herself. And yet, the Empress couldn't help but feel like Skaven took his sweet time breaking out and wouldn't have broken out at all had it not been for her sending ripples of discord across the entire structure like she did.
"Do you know what's going on? You smashed those dogs so you must have gained leeway to struggle against this mental hold we're under. What have you found out?" the Empress inquired in a demanding and authoritative tone as if he owed her that knowledge and didn't merely ask for it.
"Well, I assume not that much more than you already know. We're currently in the prep course graduation exam, and this is merely how it proceeds. They put the recruits into a mental lockdown to prevent cheating, their personalities altered by the mental fort. I'd wager that the suppressing effect was weaker on us because we were so well-trained in mental intelligence gathering. Still, you don't quite look like yourself, are you feeling okay?" Skaven scratched his head. He must not have felt too well as he had been used to be scratching his shaved side on that side where now ample black hair stuck out and brushed against his hands.
"Never felt better!" the Empress smirked, taking a gander at her hands and her decorated fingernails before clenching her hands into fists. "Excellent, so this is the final prep course exam. And this is the mental fort of none other than the proctor, or so that doll guard claimed. This means that we can reverse this mental hold and seep his feeble mind of every ounce of information it holds. We can make sure the Stars get perfect grades."
"We could do that, that's for sure," Skaven cracked his neck to the sides and rolled his wrists. The idea clearly exhilarated him, but he couldn't quite understand why.
"Then our goal is simple–find and free the rest of the Stars, free them and then tear this place down brick by brick. Leave that proctor a debilitated vegetable at our mercy, useless and to be discarded for we will have all the information that's of any worth already," the Empress pumped her fists to the sides before turning to the side where the wind-up dogs came from. She couldn't quite sense inside this realm. What was present here weren't chakra signatures but just mental avatars of their owners, just a lesser element of what comprised chakra.
"Maybe we don't need to go that far. Just making sure we get top grades will be fine. If they find out we've tampered with the exam, we might get into trouble, after all," Skaven tried gently nudging his maddened comrade back onto the right track.
"Maybe so, once the Sorceress sees how effective my way is, she'll finally shut up and move out of my way, let me handle the reigns from now on!" the Empress nodded to herself and strutted with confidence toward the next corner while examining the golden tiles on each of the doors inside of a fancy hotel-like hallway.
"The Sorceress?" Skaven asked his comrade. Him not feeling entirely right in this body, with this appearance and fostering this faux personality, made him perturbed why Mana would feel this liberated and confident in her red dress, drastic make-up, and overcompensating personality of murderous malice.
"Good, he's here too," the Empress muttered without acknowledging Skaven's question before she turned the handle and walked into the room. The helmed nun hissed and launched herself at the Empress, having become feral and even more terrifying with the damage that the unruly recruits had been causing inside this mental fort but Skaven's shadowy hand smacked her aside and slammed her against the wall, crushing her with his arm like a bothersome pest that she was. Once again, the Empress ripped the handles off of what looked to be a literal scarecrow built out of spare engineering parts.
"I am activated…" Damisan declared. "Booting up. Motion sensors and mobility systems booted, perception interface–online. Vital operations are a go. Activation procedure–all clear."
"I guess Damisan is a robot of some sort in this world," Skaven observed the obvious as the scrap scarecrow took off of the restraint platform and stumbled a few steps forward.
"Good, he can serve us better without all the additional baggage of being a pitiful cripple then," the Empress sighed and smacked Damisan's back covered in a sheet of scrap metal. The shock forced the scrap tinman to fumble forward faster, to do its best to maintain some sense of balance. "You heard that? You better do as we say or we'll scrap you. I always thought that six people were too much for any group–five just has a better ring to it, don't you think?"
"He's one of the Stars, Mana, we're not leaving him behind. The whole point is getting the Stars to ace the test and score maximum points, Damisan is a Star too," Skaven said with unconscious Shige-H still on his shoulders. "These guys aren't as well trained as us at this sort of thing–whatever the proctor did to them is fully effective against them. It's not their fault they're acting like this."
"Excuses…" the Empress looked away with a scowl, biting her lower lip and getting some magenta dye on her teeth in the process. "Fine. Someone else's mental fort is a dangerous place to be wandering about in. I would have been done in again if it weren't for you. Maybe we need all sets of hands we can get. Let's try to find the rest then."
With just two people left to uncover, the greatly altered Stars set out on their mission to cheat their way into a perfect score on the final prep course graduation exam!