tiassa (
tiassa) wrote in
damned_lounge2009-10-24 01:10 am
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Oktoberfest '09: Regression and What Lies Hidden, by tiassa
Two fics from me, because I'm incapable of writing one that meets the word count. T_T
Title: Regression
Author: tiassa
Beta:
tadity,
murasaki_kaze, and
stopcounting (and
mikasaigo read part to make sure I didn't butcher her character because I don't actually know Naruto SHUT UP ALLIE)
Word Count: 1,688
Rating: Umm...PG...?
Character(s): Touya, Yue, Kurogane, Fai, Soubi, Ritsuka, Shikamaru, Haruno Sakura, Kakashi, Naruto, Okita, Homura, Martin Landel, Lydia, UNNAMED MYSTERY DRAMATIC CHARACTER (dun dun DUUUUHN)
Pairing(s): ...yeahno.
Summary: First people were attacked by zombies, then they died their loved ones' deaths...now they turn into six-year-olds?
“So...you really don't know who I am.”
The white-haired boy shook his head, his expression mostly somber, but with confusion and even a hint of fear visible. If this really was Yue, if the real Yue hadn't simply been...who knew what could happen here, replaced with someone else, then that was enough to convince anyone that something incredibly bizarre was going on here, given that Touya had never seen anything even resembling that emotion on Yue's face before. And this on top of the fact that he was now the size of a six-year-old child...well, all right, there had been more changes than simply physical.
Touya sighed, glancing around warily for a moment to make certain that no other surprises were about to spring out of nowhere, but the hallway seemed free of any of the Institute's monsters for the moment. Thank goodness for small favors, at least.
Up until only a few minutes ago it had seemed like a night just like any other in this place. Touya and Yue had met up, like always, and started toward Sakura's room to pick her up, again just like always. But just as they had rounded the corner in the large hallway between the room blocks, there had been a sudden flash of light and a moment of dizzying vertigo – and once the spots had cleared from his vision Touya had discovered that his companion was suddenly...much smaller. And didn't seem to recognize him at all.
He abruptly realized that he'd been lost in thought, staring off into the darkness, when he was interrupted by a slight tug on his sleeve. Touya glanced down to see little-Yue giving him a pleading look. “Do you know where Clow is? Or Cerberus? Where are we?” In the absence of anything else familiar, the miniature guardian had apparently latched onto him for guidance.
For a moment all Touya could do was stare, trying to reconcile his memories of the distant, grumpy guardian with this, well, child who was looking up at him so hopefully. He finally shook his head with another sigh. “I'm not sure,” he replied, trying to think quickly. “But maybe we can go look for them?”
They weren't too far from Sakura's room, so they could just keep going that way. Maybe she would have some idea of what was going on, or how to fix it. Yue was her guardian, after all. And at the least, it would get them out of the hallway and into a safer area.
As he headed off with the child-guardian trotting along beside him, though, Touya did his best not to wonder about what this meant for Yukito. Maybe by morning everything would be back to normal....
In another part of that same hallway, Kurogane felt a vein throbbing in his forehead as he stared at his own companion in speechless dismay. The small blond boy only blinked up at him in an innocent fashion, then glanced around with a look of confusion before piping up, “Where's Fai?”
A faint growl escaped Kurogane's throat before he pushed it down again. “Oi. Magician. The hell are you doing? You're Fai.” Or so he thought, at least. It still looked like Fai, just...smaller. Although his eyes were both the same color again, like they hadn't been in several days now. The throbbing pain in the ninja's forehead only doubled in intensity as he tried to think about it and only found himself more irritated.
The boy didn't seem aware of just how angry the tall man was, though, and only shook his head. “No, I'm not,” he replied, with the air of someone who had to often correct people who confused the twins for each other. “I'm Yuuhi. Where's Fai? We've never left each other before...” And at that point his big blue eyes started to brim over with tears, and Kurogane had to suppress the sudden urge to slam his head against the nearest wall.
At the other end of the hallway, Soubi had halted in his tracks at the flash of light, and now that he could see again he still wasn't quite certain that he wasn't seeing things. Maybe he'd really been blinded, and was now just seeing his own hallucinations. Or...something.
“Hey – what's wrong? Where are we?” The boy with him glanced around the area, curiously shining his flashlight on walls and floor and people passing by, his tail flicking idly with curiosity as he did. He finally turned back to Soubi again, tilting his head to one side a little. “Are you a friend of my brother's? I'm Ritsuka. Nice to meet you!”
Soubi stared for a moment longer, words tumbling through his mind and refusing to order themselves in any sort of coherence. He finally reached out a hesitant hand to brush his fingertips across one of the ears peeking out of the boy's hair. It certainly felt real enough, and Ritsuka ducked away with a quiet giggle. “Hey. That tickles,” he protested, smiling.
Smiling. That was enough to scatter what of his wits Soubt had gathered so far, and he reached up to press one fingertip against the bridge of his nose. What on Earth was going on here?
Close to the door to the east stairway, a young boy with his hair pulled into a tufty ponytail had flopped down onto the floor, arms crossed behind his head and eyes closed as though he'd decided to take a nap in the middle of the hall. A pink-haired girl watched him for a moment with fists resting on her hips, then finally rolled her eyes, sighed loudly, and nudged him in the ribs with one toe. “Get up,” she snapped irritably, but the boy only cracked one eye open slightly to give her an apathetic glare, snorted, and squeezed his eyes closed again.
Kakashi watched the pair blankly for several minutes, as Sakura's kicks grew harder and voice more shrill, and Shikamaru grew even more determined to ignore her. He finally grunted and turned to Naruto, who seemed unaffected by...whatever it was, and nodded toward the pair. “You grab one and I'll grab the other. Let's go somewhere a little safer until we sort this out.”
As the two children were dragged off (kicking and screaming in one instance, and stubbornly going limp and dragging his heels to make it difficult in the other) the small group passed by a man with long hair clad in the uniform of the Shinsengumi. “Hey. It's all right,” he said, noting those passing by and dismissing them as 'not a threat' without taking his eyes off the young boy crouched in front of him. “I'm a friend.”
They'd barely started moving for the night when things had gone strange beyond Okita's ability to describe. He had met up with Homura in the hallway outside their rooms and they had headed off together on their mission for the night – but then once they entered the larger hallway they'd been momentarily blinded, and Homura had disappeared. In a fashion, at least, for the boy who had been standing in his place had the same familiar particolored eyes.
His demeanor was entirely different than what Okita had become familiar with, however, no longer the tall, strong, and confident-to-the-point-of-arrogant man he had befriended in the Institute. No, this was an emaciated child who'd looked only confused and lost before he hunched over to let his raggedy hair hide his face. The Shinsengumi captain pushed aside his confusion and reacted as he would to any frightened child, reaching into his sleeve to pull out a piece of candy which he then offered to the boy with a smile and gentle words of reassurance.
*****
Not only those actually affected by this strange phenomenon were dismayed by what was going on, however. No, there was another, watching the monitor labeled “Main Hallway, 1-West” with an expression of growing dismay. This was completely unplanned and unexpected, and Martin Landel did not like to be surprised. He especially disliked surprises when they were causing minor chaos in the hallway that contained the secret entrance to his monitor room. (“Hide it in plain sight,” the architects had suggested, “Nobody will think to look in the middle of a hallway they go through multiple times a day.” The architects could, to put it crudely, bite him.)
What could possibly be going on in his perfectly well-ordered Institute? Nothing happened here that he didn't plan for, or at least it shouldn't. And if someone had decided to play around then why were they doing it to the subjects? It made absolutely no sense, and that only made him angrier. If one of those oh-so-arrogant doctors he'd allowed to perform experiments had decided to go outside the bounds of what had been agreed upon, heads would roll. Perhaps even literally.
“Lydia!” he snapped, leaning forward to tap the screen, as though that would make the picture change. But no, as hard as he poked the unyielding glass surface, the image didn't change. And neither did the door behind him open to admit the head nurse, he realized, and swiveled about in his chair to turn an irritated glare on the door.
The door which was – oddly enough – standing wide open, even though he hadn't heard anyone enter. And through the opening he could see a small girl-child, probably about six years of age, very seriously drawing shapes on the far wall with Lydia's favorite pen.
“Your protectors cannot help you any longer,” a disturbingly familiar voice observed from the shadows in the corner of the room. “Unfortunate that some of the subjects were caught in the crossfire, but it should wear off shortly. You, however, don't have that much time left – ”
And then it went dark.
Title: What Lies Hidden
Author: tiassa
Beta:
tadity,
murasaki_kaze, and
stopcounting
Word Count: 974
Rating: Mentions blood and fighting? PG, I guess?
Character(s): Okita, Homura, Hanatarou, Kenren, Ayumu, Nataku, random un-named History Clubredshirtsmembers
Pairing(s): None
Summary: On the secret stairway to the third floor, and what the History Club found there.
Notes: Kind of a vignette-ish sort of thing more than a story. Just wanted to play with an idea.
The fight had been long and difficult, and the small group was weary and battered by the time it was over. They'd first had to deal with the guardians in the library, a pair of bizarre creatures that seemed stitched together from the worst of the Institute's monsters in order to give them the most advantageous attacks and armored defenses. The battle would have turned for the worse had one of them not discovered a vulnerable point at the joint of neck and shoulder, but he had, and shouted the news to the others, who promptly aimed for the right spot and took the pair of gruesome beasts down.
Then the secret stairway itself was guarded by two nurses, their scalpel fingers sharp and deadly, and that with the passageway narrow enough that only two of them could fight at a time. They'd finally driven the two creatures up into the open area, whereupon they'd been joined by two more orderlies, but at least with room to move the party could use a strategy more advantageous to them. Though it had been difficult, in the end they succeeded in taking down all four of twisted staff members, and two of the least-injured party members were cautiously investigating pockets in the hope they'd carried something of use.
Okita glanced up as Homura approached, absently flexing his arm to test his range of motion with the bandage that had just been applied. “All of ours are present and accounted for,” the swordsman noted, then nodded toward where Hanatarou was examining a shallow gash on Kenren's side. “Kenren-san is the last one who needed to be attended to; once the healer is done we can move on.”
Homura nodded slightly in acknowledgment, his expression turning pensive as he watched the healer begin carefully bandage the wound. “To be this well-guarded – there must be something very important indeed up here. Stay on your guard, and we'll be continuing shortly.” The order was hardly necessary to give, knowing Okita, but he said it nonetheless; something about being here, in the rumored third floor which had yet to be explored by anyone, to the knowledge of the current patient base.
Their rest period was short by necessity, lasting only long enough for injuries to be bound and the fighters of the History Club to gird their figurative loins before heading on. There was only one door visible, so their path was quite clear. The door was locked, but after a short pause in which Ayumu made use of her improvised lockpicks, they headed through.
Nobody was quite certain what they had expected to find up here: a device that would send them home as mysteriously as they'd arrived, more of the stolen weapons belonging to the “patients,” maybe even Martin Landel's private study. No matter, though, for none of them had expected anything resembling what they did find.
“...books?” Kenren was the first to move forward, cautiously examining the nearest shelves for any kind of trap before reaching out to brush his fingertips along the spines. If it wasn't for the fact that these books were all neatly lined up on their shelves, shelves which seemed to stretch much farther than was possible in the size of building they knew this to be, he would have halfway expected to find Tenpou lurking somewhere amongst the stacks. Except – these books weren't the kind of thing he would expect Tenpou to read.
The others moved closer as well, curiously examining the unfamiliar titles. Feeling greatly daring, Hanatarou slid one from the shelf and frowned in puzzlement at the front cover. “'Bleach'? A book about cleaning?” Except...wait. What was that illustration? It looked an awful lot like Renji, if someone had decided to draw a picture of him. But why? Did he dare look inside?
Nataku peeked over the healer's shoulder for a moment, then shook his head and wandered over to look at one of the other shelves. “A lot of these look like picture books,” he observed, pulling one out at random and flipping through the pages. “Why would someone want to guard a room full of picture books?”
While most of the group was investigating the books, Okita and Ayumu had been making a sweep of the room, and a search of a seemingly-blank section of wall had revealed a hidden door. A few more moments and they'd found the hidden switch, and the swordsman ducked into the newly-revealed room, crouched low with his sword at ready. Only a few moments later he looked back out again and gestured for the others to follow. “It's more of the same,” he reported, with a puzzled frown. “Not books, though. Something else.”
The “something else” was identified by those familiar with modern technology as shelves upon shelves of “movies” and “video games.” Still nothing at all of use to them, and no sign whatsoever of what the point of all this was – or why it had been so well-guarded. As a few members of the group began to debate what it all meant, some of the others slipped away quietly and began flipping through the books, until the end of night came upon them as abruptly as it ever did.
"Are we going back again?" Hanatarou hesitantly asked Kenren the next morning at breakfast, and visibly drooped when the older man shook his head.
"Not until we get more information. Too many casualties without enough results." He paused, then grinned and ruffled the healer's hair. "Don't worry, we'll let you know when we need you again."
And Hanatarou just ducked his head and smiled shyly and didn't say what he was thinking: that he'd only managed to read halfway through the series of books he'd found, and wanted to know how it ended.
Title: Regression
Author: tiassa
Beta:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Word Count: 1,688
Rating: Umm...PG...?
Character(s): Touya, Yue, Kurogane, Fai, Soubi, Ritsuka, Shikamaru, Haruno Sakura, Kakashi, Naruto, Okita, Homura, Martin Landel, Lydia, UNNAMED MYSTERY DRAMATIC CHARACTER (dun dun DUUUUHN)
Pairing(s): ...yeahno.
Summary: First people were attacked by zombies, then they died their loved ones' deaths...now they turn into six-year-olds?
“So...you really don't know who I am.”
The white-haired boy shook his head, his expression mostly somber, but with confusion and even a hint of fear visible. If this really was Yue, if the real Yue hadn't simply been...who knew what could happen here, replaced with someone else, then that was enough to convince anyone that something incredibly bizarre was going on here, given that Touya had never seen anything even resembling that emotion on Yue's face before. And this on top of the fact that he was now the size of a six-year-old child...well, all right, there had been more changes than simply physical.
Touya sighed, glancing around warily for a moment to make certain that no other surprises were about to spring out of nowhere, but the hallway seemed free of any of the Institute's monsters for the moment. Thank goodness for small favors, at least.
Up until only a few minutes ago it had seemed like a night just like any other in this place. Touya and Yue had met up, like always, and started toward Sakura's room to pick her up, again just like always. But just as they had rounded the corner in the large hallway between the room blocks, there had been a sudden flash of light and a moment of dizzying vertigo – and once the spots had cleared from his vision Touya had discovered that his companion was suddenly...much smaller. And didn't seem to recognize him at all.
He abruptly realized that he'd been lost in thought, staring off into the darkness, when he was interrupted by a slight tug on his sleeve. Touya glanced down to see little-Yue giving him a pleading look. “Do you know where Clow is? Or Cerberus? Where are we?” In the absence of anything else familiar, the miniature guardian had apparently latched onto him for guidance.
For a moment all Touya could do was stare, trying to reconcile his memories of the distant, grumpy guardian with this, well, child who was looking up at him so hopefully. He finally shook his head with another sigh. “I'm not sure,” he replied, trying to think quickly. “But maybe we can go look for them?”
They weren't too far from Sakura's room, so they could just keep going that way. Maybe she would have some idea of what was going on, or how to fix it. Yue was her guardian, after all. And at the least, it would get them out of the hallway and into a safer area.
As he headed off with the child-guardian trotting along beside him, though, Touya did his best not to wonder about what this meant for Yukito. Maybe by morning everything would be back to normal....
In another part of that same hallway, Kurogane felt a vein throbbing in his forehead as he stared at his own companion in speechless dismay. The small blond boy only blinked up at him in an innocent fashion, then glanced around with a look of confusion before piping up, “Where's Fai?”
A faint growl escaped Kurogane's throat before he pushed it down again. “Oi. Magician. The hell are you doing? You're Fai.” Or so he thought, at least. It still looked like Fai, just...smaller. Although his eyes were both the same color again, like they hadn't been in several days now. The throbbing pain in the ninja's forehead only doubled in intensity as he tried to think about it and only found himself more irritated.
The boy didn't seem aware of just how angry the tall man was, though, and only shook his head. “No, I'm not,” he replied, with the air of someone who had to often correct people who confused the twins for each other. “I'm Yuuhi. Where's Fai? We've never left each other before...” And at that point his big blue eyes started to brim over with tears, and Kurogane had to suppress the sudden urge to slam his head against the nearest wall.
At the other end of the hallway, Soubi had halted in his tracks at the flash of light, and now that he could see again he still wasn't quite certain that he wasn't seeing things. Maybe he'd really been blinded, and was now just seeing his own hallucinations. Or...something.
“Hey – what's wrong? Where are we?” The boy with him glanced around the area, curiously shining his flashlight on walls and floor and people passing by, his tail flicking idly with curiosity as he did. He finally turned back to Soubi again, tilting his head to one side a little. “Are you a friend of my brother's? I'm Ritsuka. Nice to meet you!”
Soubi stared for a moment longer, words tumbling through his mind and refusing to order themselves in any sort of coherence. He finally reached out a hesitant hand to brush his fingertips across one of the ears peeking out of the boy's hair. It certainly felt real enough, and Ritsuka ducked away with a quiet giggle. “Hey. That tickles,” he protested, smiling.
Smiling. That was enough to scatter what of his wits Soubt had gathered so far, and he reached up to press one fingertip against the bridge of his nose. What on Earth was going on here?
Close to the door to the east stairway, a young boy with his hair pulled into a tufty ponytail had flopped down onto the floor, arms crossed behind his head and eyes closed as though he'd decided to take a nap in the middle of the hall. A pink-haired girl watched him for a moment with fists resting on her hips, then finally rolled her eyes, sighed loudly, and nudged him in the ribs with one toe. “Get up,” she snapped irritably, but the boy only cracked one eye open slightly to give her an apathetic glare, snorted, and squeezed his eyes closed again.
Kakashi watched the pair blankly for several minutes, as Sakura's kicks grew harder and voice more shrill, and Shikamaru grew even more determined to ignore her. He finally grunted and turned to Naruto, who seemed unaffected by...whatever it was, and nodded toward the pair. “You grab one and I'll grab the other. Let's go somewhere a little safer until we sort this out.”
As the two children were dragged off (kicking and screaming in one instance, and stubbornly going limp and dragging his heels to make it difficult in the other) the small group passed by a man with long hair clad in the uniform of the Shinsengumi. “Hey. It's all right,” he said, noting those passing by and dismissing them as 'not a threat' without taking his eyes off the young boy crouched in front of him. “I'm a friend.”
They'd barely started moving for the night when things had gone strange beyond Okita's ability to describe. He had met up with Homura in the hallway outside their rooms and they had headed off together on their mission for the night – but then once they entered the larger hallway they'd been momentarily blinded, and Homura had disappeared. In a fashion, at least, for the boy who had been standing in his place had the same familiar particolored eyes.
His demeanor was entirely different than what Okita had become familiar with, however, no longer the tall, strong, and confident-to-the-point-of-arrogant man he had befriended in the Institute. No, this was an emaciated child who'd looked only confused and lost before he hunched over to let his raggedy hair hide his face. The Shinsengumi captain pushed aside his confusion and reacted as he would to any frightened child, reaching into his sleeve to pull out a piece of candy which he then offered to the boy with a smile and gentle words of reassurance.
Not only those actually affected by this strange phenomenon were dismayed by what was going on, however. No, there was another, watching the monitor labeled “Main Hallway, 1-West” with an expression of growing dismay. This was completely unplanned and unexpected, and Martin Landel did not like to be surprised. He especially disliked surprises when they were causing minor chaos in the hallway that contained the secret entrance to his monitor room. (“Hide it in plain sight,” the architects had suggested, “Nobody will think to look in the middle of a hallway they go through multiple times a day.” The architects could, to put it crudely, bite him.)
What could possibly be going on in his perfectly well-ordered Institute? Nothing happened here that he didn't plan for, or at least it shouldn't. And if someone had decided to play around then why were they doing it to the subjects? It made absolutely no sense, and that only made him angrier. If one of those oh-so-arrogant doctors he'd allowed to perform experiments had decided to go outside the bounds of what had been agreed upon, heads would roll. Perhaps even literally.
“Lydia!” he snapped, leaning forward to tap the screen, as though that would make the picture change. But no, as hard as he poked the unyielding glass surface, the image didn't change. And neither did the door behind him open to admit the head nurse, he realized, and swiveled about in his chair to turn an irritated glare on the door.
The door which was – oddly enough – standing wide open, even though he hadn't heard anyone enter. And through the opening he could see a small girl-child, probably about six years of age, very seriously drawing shapes on the far wall with Lydia's favorite pen.
“Your protectors cannot help you any longer,” a disturbingly familiar voice observed from the shadows in the corner of the room. “Unfortunate that some of the subjects were caught in the crossfire, but it should wear off shortly. You, however, don't have that much time left – ”
And then it went dark.
Title: What Lies Hidden
Author: tiassa
Beta:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
Word Count: 974
Rating: Mentions blood and fighting? PG, I guess?
Character(s): Okita, Homura, Hanatarou, Kenren, Ayumu, Nataku, random un-named History Club
Pairing(s): None
Summary: On the secret stairway to the third floor, and what the History Club found there.
Notes: Kind of a vignette-ish sort of thing more than a story. Just wanted to play with an idea.
The fight had been long and difficult, and the small group was weary and battered by the time it was over. They'd first had to deal with the guardians in the library, a pair of bizarre creatures that seemed stitched together from the worst of the Institute's monsters in order to give them the most advantageous attacks and armored defenses. The battle would have turned for the worse had one of them not discovered a vulnerable point at the joint of neck and shoulder, but he had, and shouted the news to the others, who promptly aimed for the right spot and took the pair of gruesome beasts down.
Then the secret stairway itself was guarded by two nurses, their scalpel fingers sharp and deadly, and that with the passageway narrow enough that only two of them could fight at a time. They'd finally driven the two creatures up into the open area, whereupon they'd been joined by two more orderlies, but at least with room to move the party could use a strategy more advantageous to them. Though it had been difficult, in the end they succeeded in taking down all four of twisted staff members, and two of the least-injured party members were cautiously investigating pockets in the hope they'd carried something of use.
Okita glanced up as Homura approached, absently flexing his arm to test his range of motion with the bandage that had just been applied. “All of ours are present and accounted for,” the swordsman noted, then nodded toward where Hanatarou was examining a shallow gash on Kenren's side. “Kenren-san is the last one who needed to be attended to; once the healer is done we can move on.”
Homura nodded slightly in acknowledgment, his expression turning pensive as he watched the healer begin carefully bandage the wound. “To be this well-guarded – there must be something very important indeed up here. Stay on your guard, and we'll be continuing shortly.” The order was hardly necessary to give, knowing Okita, but he said it nonetheless; something about being here, in the rumored third floor which had yet to be explored by anyone, to the knowledge of the current patient base.
Their rest period was short by necessity, lasting only long enough for injuries to be bound and the fighters of the History Club to gird their figurative loins before heading on. There was only one door visible, so their path was quite clear. The door was locked, but after a short pause in which Ayumu made use of her improvised lockpicks, they headed through.
Nobody was quite certain what they had expected to find up here: a device that would send them home as mysteriously as they'd arrived, more of the stolen weapons belonging to the “patients,” maybe even Martin Landel's private study. No matter, though, for none of them had expected anything resembling what they did find.
“...books?” Kenren was the first to move forward, cautiously examining the nearest shelves for any kind of trap before reaching out to brush his fingertips along the spines. If it wasn't for the fact that these books were all neatly lined up on their shelves, shelves which seemed to stretch much farther than was possible in the size of building they knew this to be, he would have halfway expected to find Tenpou lurking somewhere amongst the stacks. Except – these books weren't the kind of thing he would expect Tenpou to read.
The others moved closer as well, curiously examining the unfamiliar titles. Feeling greatly daring, Hanatarou slid one from the shelf and frowned in puzzlement at the front cover. “'Bleach'? A book about cleaning?” Except...wait. What was that illustration? It looked an awful lot like Renji, if someone had decided to draw a picture of him. But why? Did he dare look inside?
Nataku peeked over the healer's shoulder for a moment, then shook his head and wandered over to look at one of the other shelves. “A lot of these look like picture books,” he observed, pulling one out at random and flipping through the pages. “Why would someone want to guard a room full of picture books?”
While most of the group was investigating the books, Okita and Ayumu had been making a sweep of the room, and a search of a seemingly-blank section of wall had revealed a hidden door. A few more moments and they'd found the hidden switch, and the swordsman ducked into the newly-revealed room, crouched low with his sword at ready. Only a few moments later he looked back out again and gestured for the others to follow. “It's more of the same,” he reported, with a puzzled frown. “Not books, though. Something else.”
The “something else” was identified by those familiar with modern technology as shelves upon shelves of “movies” and “video games.” Still nothing at all of use to them, and no sign whatsoever of what the point of all this was – or why it had been so well-guarded. As a few members of the group began to debate what it all meant, some of the others slipped away quietly and began flipping through the books, until the end of night came upon them as abruptly as it ever did.
"Are we going back again?" Hanatarou hesitantly asked Kenren the next morning at breakfast, and visibly drooped when the older man shook his head.
"Not until we get more information. Too many casualties without enough results." He paused, then grinned and ruffled the healer's hair. "Don't worry, we'll let you know when we need you again."
And Hanatarou just ducked his head and smiled shyly and didn't say what he was thinking: that he'd only managed to read halfway through the series of books he'd found, and wanted to know how it ended.
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Also, I see that Sai is scrubbing toilets again, as this can be the only reason for his absence. >|
...♥
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Or he was running late to meet with the others because I'm so bad at writing characters from canons I don't know, notice how Naruto was just kind of there ;_;
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Hilarious. XD
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and had to deal with idiot Fai-mama, so I won't hurt you too terribly... XDKuro's Comments: He says he'd yell at Fai to stop crying because he's a boy and boy's don't cry! (or that's what you tell young boys, at least...) He also grumbling about why he's always stuck dealing with Fai's stupid problems....
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Well, hopefully not monster-infested.
dear god I should never say something like that to youno subject
I ttly don't have time for monster threads right now