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Intermission

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20 of the third month

My life has become ever more complicated. My mind is burdened. I fear I am losing all my innocence that I once so treasured in my youth. I find myself thinking...thoughts, more and more often. Thoughts of Naruto. Thoughts of the Kitsune inhabiting Naruto's body. And then I see the darkness behind those bright eyes, and I am brought back to reality.

He began his story again as soon as my head touched my pillow. He appeared again in that glass room, surrounded by a sea of darkness. "There were nine of us, originally." The darkness molded and became space and time, with thousands of stars twinkling far, far away. "In the Alpha Centurion system, quite a few astronomical units away from the cradle of our origins, my own, isolated story begins. Here is my home, my original home. A small planet terraformed to be livable. It was an American colony, and so was named after certain parts of the old world." A planet slowly orbited into view, lush with greens and blues of a healthy world.

Again, we dipped into the atmosphere, falling towards a small ridge of land surrounded by ocean. "This is New Cape Cod, named so for its climate and geography that it shares with the original on earth. This colony had been here for near two thousand years, and it was quiet. It was here that I began my life, and, in one way or another, ended it." The fox yawned, sighing as our glass room fell into another laboratory, where everything was backlit with glowing plasma and brilliant, floating numbers and equations. A man, handsome and young, with dark blue eyes and long brown hair strode into the lab, reading reports from a holoscreen on his wrist. "Before my time, man had perfected harnessing the Great Force through machinery. It was my vision, however, to meld humanity with the cosmic force."

Time seemed to speed up, the young man walking out and in, back and forth. Eventually, he began to eat and sleep in the lab. "I locked myself in my lab for nearly five years. I saw neither sunlight, nor tasted fresh air. I lost contact with all by my scientific colleagues, and even those conversations were few and far between. I, like Mandrake before me, poured my very soul into my work." The fox snorted. "Can you believe it, Hinata? I do not even remember my own name. It is blotted from my memory by the nature of my being, yet I remember every person I've ever come in contact with." I asked him what he meant. "It is the way of the Bijuu to forget what he is, and so, his dream will come true."

Time began to slow for the man in the lab, as he slowly took off his shirt, and stepped up to a massive machine connected to a glass, cylindrical chamber. "Radiation is a tricky mistress. I'd injected myself with thousands of serums in preparation for this moment. I'd reverse-engineered my own DNA and introduced genome altering viruses and proteins. This device would bring all that research together." Stepping into the machine, the man took a long breath. I could hear him muttering something to himself as he stood shaking in a shaft of light. "This machine was designed to destroy my body. After all, once cells are differentiated, they cannot be altered easily. No, I needed a new body. And so, I was scared. Nervous. My mind, my memories, all that was me had long been stored into various, fail-safe devices. Now, it was out with the old, in with the new."

Slowly, the man in the cylinder began to twitch, then spasm, as something was pumped into the chamber. He died standing, and his body fell back into...nothingness. "In a sense, I had to destroy this body, and replicate it with the new and improved genome, the artificial harness on this Great Force. My new body would be a battery for this cosmic energy. But for that, I need my old body to fall out of time, and become ensnared in the quantum foam lying just beneath the skin of our universe. There, my essence would draw what it needed."

The chamber lay dormant for a few minutes, before filling slowly with liquid. "Proto-fluid is much like an egg white. The embryo is formed from the yolk, and the white is its nourishment." Time sped again, and a human embryo began to grow within the tank. Then, it grew into a newborn, a child, an adolescent, and finally, it was a carbon copy of the man from before. "It took two decades from my brain waves to become functional, and all my memories were forcibly shoved back into my brain. My soul was returned to me."With a gurgle, the man within the tube came awake, gasping in large quantities of the proto-fluid. "My life as a Bijuu began."

The chamber erupted into ice shards as the newly formed chakra being stepped from his containment, shuddering and staring at his hands. Then, smiling, he straightened, and the lab was gone in a flurry of red petals and explosions, leaving only the man, unscathed and quite gleeful. He roared his victory to a pinkish sky, laughing and shaking in unparalleled mirth. "Back then, I believed myself good, a force of righteousness and iron-handed power in an unruly universe. And nine others soon followed in my steps."

I saw a flurry of faces, men, women, all stepping from some machine or another, in different times and places. "I was the first, and most raw of all, having linked myself to the very limitless Force itself. The others, though vastly powerful, did not do the same, instead imbuing themselves to replenish their own chakra. They were strong, though not as strong as I."

We flicked past worlds, where I saw the man throw buildings, tear down mountains, shifts rivers, and change the landscape. "I lasted for millennia, shifting between the roles of Alleviater and Avenger, to the roles of Villain and Tyrant. Neither held my interest for long, as my mind was still human. I drank deep of the pleasures of the worlds, but nothing satisfies for millennia upon millennia. I ushered in ages and epochs, empires and worlds. I destroyed billions of trillions, and crushed planets like grapes."

Our glass room shifted about, venturing to one world, then another. Finally, it came to rest on one in particular. "This is your world." It was a brown world, with drab, thick clouds and nothing but sand and rocks rolling on and on. "It is here were we gathered, the Bijuu. We had war, we had peace, and through our combined efforts, shaped this world." Green spread here, water erupted there. The planet indeed changed. "Ours was a tenuous relationship, where Brothers and Sisters fought more like animals." The fox hummed, as if pondering something. "We slowly began to lose our original forms, becoming more and more like animals. We chose to become what beast we were most like, unconsciously, or consciously. And so, we shed our original skin."

Dark forms rose and towered against the mountains of the world. A fox, massive and furious, laughed deeply, sonorously, and tore out into the wastelands, breaking no oxygen, seeing no light. This being was of the world, but not completely. "There is, of course, a very basic problem to being immortal, Hinata." The fox shifted in his chair, and the glass room sped after the massive Kitsune's running form. "Beyond all the boredom, beyond the fact that my feelings, emotions, and aspirations bled away as I realized exactly how long my life-span was, there was the simple loneliness." The sun spun around the world, flicking over the horizon and dipping back on the other side with the eternal revolutions of the quiet, desert planet. Greenery sprang up as power bled from the nine Bijuu, oceans sprang to being, and life gradually began. "I long lost the ability to feel anything for creation, for annihilation, for anything. I was a statue with a mobile body. Eternity is ever so much longer than I would have thought."

The sun spun faster and faster, blurring and turning the sky into an eternal twilight as time leapt forward for the audience of two. "Then, lo and behold, man himself came to our lonely little world." With a sudden jerk, the sun halted in the sky, and a massive spacecraft plummeted out into the world, casting aside water, wood, and dust. People poured out and a village soon sprang out onto the world's crust. "I had lain in a sort of deadened state for nearly two million years, my attention wandering to the farthest reaches of space, and I saw them coming in their little faster-than-light ships. Finally, me and my Brethren had something to do! We would be like gods unto these little creatures."

A startling laugh arose from the fox, disproportionate to his size. "Oh, but we didn't realize that they all ready had themselves a little god. Not that they realized it, but the Mother was among them. These humans were naturally imbued with the Great Force. We, the Bijuu, who had forgone our own humanity to acquire that power, were jealous. The power bled from the Mother herself, and we could do nothing about it. We'd lost before we'd even begun to fight." Time sped again, and multiple wars erupted, blackening the sky. Massive domes were constructed, enclosing humanity from the encroaching darkness. Bijuu, one by one, were imprisoned in these domes, and controlled. "Our biggest mistake was to underestimate how inventive humanity is. We reduced these people to pre-atomic technologies, and still they managed to ensnare us. It is only recently you are recovering from our footsteps." The Kitsune sighed, and a clay pot materialized in the air before me. "This was my prison for nearly one million years, and long did humanity forget that I was there. Luckily, curiosity ensnares your species more than it should."

Naruto, I said, and he nodded. "My current cell is not comfortable, nor large, but far more fun than I would have thought. This is simply because now, I can siphon emotion, thought, feeling. It's delicious to feel again, Hinata."

I asked why he would show this to me. Why would he enlighten me? "Because, my dear, naïve girl, I can now feel pride. And pride prompts my story to be known. If it is not, then I am not." The wicked smile scribbled itself on his face. "And now, I am."

And so his history dreams ended.

17 of the Twelfth Month

Things have escalated. There is prolonged battles our among the downtown areas, the Royal Guard and Akatsuki using bombed out buildings for barracks and sniping at one another across streets come now to be known as 'no-man's land'. My father's car was struck by a high-caliber bullet and killed one of the body guards. We had a fine funeral. Now that this war is starting to affect us, my urgency is increased. The countryside is now riddled with massive holes, charred and smoking. One nearly struck the House.

Our operations begin in earnest tonight. The Eye has contacted us all. Naruto is supposed to meet us en-route, but we have only a rough approximation as to when. He's been gone for nine months now, and it'll be good to see him again. Perhaps only he has not lost his joviality and love for life in these morose times.

I go. Perhaps for a long time.

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Yo. Been a while. This is mainly cause I got discouraged in this story when I had, like, 24 hits and almost no reviews. Just that sick feeling that your story sucks. It took me a bit, and a review, (Haha) to kick myself in the head. I remembered that I don't write for ya'll, but for me. So, without further ado, whether or not anyone reads this, I'll put it out there, because this story is just too much fun. :)

-Raz