Private Surgery Impossible: Rebuilding a Human [Aria]

[Toraono Michino]

In his anger the scientist had proclaimed that he could fix Suzume’s condition in a single week. After seeing exactly what he had to fix he immediately regretted his heated choices, including his deal to get Michino on the throne. In retrospect, there was indeed a lot more from Nabushin he could of ask for if not for his pride. The twelve hours he had given himself as a “head start” were spent purely on taking small samples, (once he figured out how to do anyways), making a basic diagnosis, and setting up a number of seals in the room the patient was being kept in to regulate the flow of natural energy inside of it. The regulation at the very least seem to put his old colleague’s comatose state in some rest. Her vitals were normal but not sleeping normal, as if she was still awake but couldn’t communicate. It didn’t take a lot of reflection from his own personal hell to realize what she might be going through right now.
Following the first twelves hours the scientist left the Oujia-Ousha’s estate and returned to his trailer. The next three hours were spent clearing his schedule for the week to throw himself into what the Storm Lord asked of him, and after that, he began to meticulously go through every last medical book he had.
Suzume’s condition was unique, and that was a word he loathed. In the decades spent curing both his own and others impossible diseases, the scientist had rarely came across a problem that stumped him like this one. A whole day went by with no progress, the second day shot by the same, and by the third day Tama was nearly ready to write off the poor girl’s condition as inoperable. Even with taboo arts, her condition seemed impossible to fix. By the fourth day, having exhausted all the books written by others, he dove into the cursed knowledge written by his own hand and kept tucked far away.
Yet even with his own brand of forbidden science, even the ones that were straight against the wishes of the Storm Lord, her success rate of coming out on the other side of the operation were slim. Less than 10% survival rate, and only a 2% rate that she’d even come out as the same person. In these four days, with out a wink of sleep, the surgeon had drove himself into a corner. Finally after all these years he came across a case he couldn’t solve despite everything he knew and, well, failure was not something Tama handled well.

It was probably around 11:23pm. A lone yellow light bulb shaded by mosaic glass hung over the small round table tucked into the corner of his trailer’s kitchen/dining/living room. A television propped up on a folding table played static, and a radio on the kitchen bar was playing old music that was just barely drowning both the static and a low-speed ceiling fan. At the table the surgeon half laid across it face down in his defeat. In one hand was clutched a bottle of import vodka from the Lightning Country. It was a 110 proof collectors edition fifth of liquor stored in a copper lined glass bottle. Each taste was like smooth metallic rubbing alcohol but it did the trick. In the other hand was a pen that was tapping a notepad, ink soiling most of the pages, that were ideas either scratched out or just self insults. A shot glass shaped like a skull was knocked over a few inches away, but Tama had stopped measuring his vodka after the fourth shot. He groaned in frustration and inebriation as his brain, though slosh, still continued to grasp for an answer.

“There has got to be an answer…everything…can be solved…” he muttered to himself. He opened his bloodshot eyes and stared at the yellow paper for a moment without even doing so much as breathing. Then suddenly the priceless bottle of vodka flew across the room to shatter against the kitchen bar followed by a yell of frustration. The liquid splashed the radio, shorting it out and Tama had his head in his hands with the only sounds left to comfort him were a squeaky fan and the television’s static. He stood up suddenly, too fast, and took three angry steps away from the table before the alcohol content rushed through his brain and everything went black.
Another 24 hours later and the scientist opened his crusted shut eyes to find himself laying in a pool of vomit on his living room floor, again. He looked over towards the counter and found his precious liquor destroyed and could only grimace at the money wasted. He began to move through a painful hangover to get himself back off the floor when his sight caught notice of a bunch of ants. The bugs had managed to build on top of themselves, one by one, a bridge that lead up towards the bar after something organic that was spoiled by coming in contact with the liquor. His first instinct was to angerly swat at the little bridge when a sudden burst of inspiration hit him. Rebuilding. One by one. Each single piece.
Tama started doing a little excited hop as he realized after four days of research he was being a real idiot. Quickly he darted towards his sanitation room and began to clean himself of both smell and poison.
The sixth day was spent on a different kind of research. Instead of pouring over medical information he instead did as much looking into Suzume’s past as was allowed. Only a few hours in he found where he figured the original change happened and went on an excavation of the very building that had originally collapsed on her. The whole day was spent digging, but Tama located what he needed. It was a simple bone, a femur, that was barely holding together in the buried rubble, but he believed it was his patient’s. Once he brought it back home and did some testing he was able to confirm that the energy Suzume currently was, resonated with the scraps of DNA found in the solidified calcium. From this point on, it was all down hill.
Today was day seven. He had promised to cure Suzume in a single week and was finally prepared to manage the impossible. In the room she was resting Tama had requested help moving in one of his cloning pods that he had tweaked for the procedure. At its side he had gathered three members of the clan he trusted with medical work, minor as it would be, to help him in a nearly impossible task.

“I have gathered you three here today to break grounds in medical science. All three of you have some background in the field as nurses and have had a hand in assisting with high-profile surgeries. Ousuoni,” he said looking at a particularly young male, “you’ve personally assisted me once. Today we will rebuild the body of this woman, cell by cell, and merge them into one.
“This will be done with both the arcane arts and hard science. You will be assisting me in doing exactly what I say, when I say it, or Suzume will die. We only have 0.005% room for error, but I have faith that all of you have the talent and know-how to complete the return of Nabushin’s heir.” The three gathered nodded solemnly, not really wishing to get tangled with the surgeon purely based on Ousuoni’s play-by-play of the last surgery he helped Tama with. Their faith and loyalty to their family, though, overrode their dislike of the silver blonde. The next hour was spent in prep, the door to the room was sealed off both against outside air as filtered oxygen filled the room and forces of nature, and Tama felt one of his aids slide gloves into his hands. Carefully he pushed them into the entrance into the tube grabbed the bone floating inside, then crushed it into the fluids.

“Okay, next 24 hours are going to be rough, but try to stick with me. I’ll have Suzume in a real body by the end of the day, and ready to take that throne away from Nabushin in a week. Here we go…”

[MFT]

 

[Kazumi]

It was a rare opportunity these days that the Storm Lord left the confines of the village. There were few things that ever required his direct attention, and even with the blood of the Oushi-Ouja coursing through him, he still felt the ravages of the many decades in his bones. It was a common myth within the village that the Oushi-Ouja did not age. Nabushin was, of course, proof that this was not the case, but there was some truth to these rumors. The Storm Lord was likely one of, if not the oldest living member of the village, at least those among the true blooded humans. Their blood made them strong, resilient and gave them the bodies of titans.

The heir was different. Once upon a time, she was small and weak and irrelevant to the grand inner workings of the clan. Her family was small but respected in their own ways. Her father was like most of the others in the clan, a strong and capable Sunan shinobi and her blood-mother was the same. Her kin-mothers were less so, but they too held respected places within the clans as chanters who organized the more devout aspects of the clan. Despite her blood, Suzume followed meekly in the steps of her kin-mothers.

She was small, weak and had little potential in the shinobi arts. Even when she began to display the gifts of the Ox King himself, she was an outlier within the village. Had he other options, Nabushin would have pursued them, but the last heir had died a decade before Suzume was born, and it was unlikely that he had the time to gamble on steadier ground. So he had inveted his villages resources into enrolling her into the academy and providing her with capable instrutors, pulling unseen strings from behind the scenes.

Fate was rarely kind to the Storm Lord, however, and when a strange girl approached one day, claiming to be the heir he had nearly shattered the Storm Throne in his fury. Now she had seemed to lose the gift and her body, by means he, even in his vast power, could not determine. Yet, he had no other choices, he knew he would not survive another dacade, and without leadership the clan would crumble. So, he had once again tried to raise this failure up, but time and time again she disappointed. He even took it upon himself to train the girl in leading the clan in whatever ways she could manage, but even that seemed to be a waste of his efforts.

The girl was bold, determined and hardworking, but she was not what a Storm Lord was. She was not Nabushin. She was not strong; the heavens did not bend to her whims. The damned girl did not even have horns! A part of him resented her and the Ox King for laying this burden on him, but he bore it as he did all others, with strong shoulders and a stiff back. Now the girl was literally wasting away in a back room, and his hopes for the clan’s future were wasting away with her. Yet, with new hardships come new possibilities.

Now, Nabushin stood along side six of his most highly trained shinobi, overlooking a vast expanse of desert far to the wet of the village. It took a day of travel to reach where the scout had spotted the creature, and thankfully she had not lost its track before the band had arrived. The sky flashed white as night momentarily shifted to day as a stream of lightning erupted across the dones, and yet none of the shinobi flinched an inch as they waited for their prey to exhaust itself.

It was a strong of fortune, a rare thing for the Storm Lord. A rare Sunan Carnasaur had been sighted far to the west of the village, along with a large horde of the Unbent. A mission that originally had started as a routine diversion from that horde had quickly formed into a plan. It was, perhaps, a pointless plan, but it was easy enough to set into motion. Lure the bloodthirsty horde of Unbent to the Carnasaur and let them kill one another. Nabushin agreed with his scouts that it was unlikely that the creature would be defeated by the horde, but with his might and his top shinobi at hand, he was confident he could do so. From what his scouts reported, it was a fully mature creature either, but there had been no indication of any older or larger specimens nearby, which was not surprising.

Again the night turned to day as bodies went flying, a streak of a metallic sheen streaking across the desert sands as the breath transformed the landscape into streaks of feathersteel. That alone would be valuable, but if Nabushin were to reclaim what fragmented hopes he had for the future of his clan, he would need more than a steady blade and sturdy armor. He would need the strength of that titan. One of his most trusted advisors had recommended the possibility to him. Nabushin was not personally knowledgeable of Ryuu Tama or his exploits, but he had been known to perform miracles.

…..

On the seventh day of the doctor’s month, just as the man gave the order to begin the procedure, a loud thudding came from the front doors of the makeshift lab where Suzume rested. Standing at the door was a familiar mask, the ox visage staring down at whomever opened the door. Within his hands he helf a large metal chest, though it seemed almost diminutive from his massive grip. “From the Storm Lord, a gift for your hard work and ultimate success.” As soon as whomever took the box did so, the messenger would vanish as he had before, a small vacuum of wind in his wake.

The box was locked, but it had a small key already resting within it it. The gilded chest was almost two feet wide and half as thick, and it weighed more than it would appear. Opening it was simple, a single turn of the key, a click and the lid would rise without issue. From within, a breath of cold air emerged, it seemed it was a cooler designed to look like a normal chest. Three things rested inside, one was obviously a heart of some kind, though none of the medics here would have seen its exact like before. The second was a strange organ that seemed to faintly crackle with barely sensed energy. The last was a done written in a crisp hand.

“The Sunan Carnasaur is the greatest beast within Wind Country. Make my heir the greatest Storm Lord the clan will ever know, or else you will meet the same fate as this creature.”

 

[Toraono Michino]

The scientist closed his eyes, breathed in deep, and began to carefully circulate his chakra throughout his coil as he prepared for the mental and physical strain of the miracle he was about to preform. He could feel his flesh heating up beneath the scrubs and surgical gown he had donned as sweat was already starting to bead up on his forehead. One of the nurses dabbed it. Things were fully about to get underway when they all jumped from the sound of their door being banged on.

“SON OF A BITCH, WHAT NOW,” the doctor swore loudly as he removed his gloves from the strange goop and had a nurse removed them. With a few quick stomps the surgeon shifted his bare hands through a few seals and created a barrier between the room and the outside, and then another between himself and the outside. He opened the door from his side and allowed the familiar rude ANBU to place his book on the door before trying to dash off as he did. The scientist stopped time with a snap of his fingers, a rare and powerful technique that he avoided using due to how quickly he was halting the flow. Usually, in order to avoid further pissing off the Universe, Tama would reach out and grab reality and slowly twist the passage of time until it turned into a crawl for him; never truly stopping it. This, however, was him absolutely stepping out of the fabric of reality. He could still only hold it for three seconds, though, and that was still cutting it really close in order to avoid Karma. Raising his foot off the ground he kicked through the barriers and landed his foot square in the ANBU’s sternum. As his foot connected it allowed the man to appear inside of his field of reality for a brief half second to hear the surgeon whisper with deadly sincerity,

“Interupt me again, and I’ll remove your goddamn testicles. Capiche?”
The poor man didn’t have a chance to respond as Tama removed his foot from the kick and restarted time. The force of his kick outside of time suddenly translating into momentum, plus the speed the man normally exited, would no doubt result in a broken body and a firm respect for the surgeon’s properties.
Holding the box with one hand, the arcanist made a symbol with his other hand to make the barriers push out and close the doors behind them to keep cross-contamination to a minimum. He then walked over to a spare table away from the contraption in the center of the room and carefully opened it. Once peering inside at the gifts resting within the chill confines, his heart leaped and a wicked grin crossed his face. He already knew what Nabushin wanted before even looking at the letter,

“Oi, oi, ayeee…I thought Nabushin wanted a ‘pure’ human,” he muttered to himself as he carefully closed the box.
“Nurse 1! Change of plans…”
Tama canceled the original procedure. He released the oxygen, took his machine out, and requested a private room with basic mechanical tools. Two hours later and the man was wheeling back in his invention except now it had a closed off chamber full of a different colored liquid from what was floating in the longer part of the tube. He measured it twice, once the pod was in the room, before bolting this one down to the floor. After that the scientist tapped into the arcane part of his knowledge, took about a quart of blood from one of his assistants, and began to paint symbols all across the room. The marks were featured from all over the country - Shinobi, Ancient, Primus, and even some that were completely unrecognizable. They all stretched out from a wide circular pattern that originated surrounding Suzume and the pod, with seven lines stretching out at odd angles from the original center. What would of taken a normal shinobi soldier to paint such a seal, Tama did in less than 10 minutes from the number of times he had done this exact kind of spell.
With the new prep set up, once again did the surgeon seal off his room, don gloves, and place his hands back into the viscus material. Again he closed his eyes and began to circulate his chakra…

Sixteen hours passed. From the bottom of the pod to the top was a vulgarly humanoid mass of muscles that looked…probably female. Two sponges had been soaked through with Hybrid sweat and a horrible hunger had overcome Tama. Yet before him was his greatest work since Chakra Coil Repair and Replacement. He had literally rebuilt the body Suzume once inhabited; cell-by-fucking-cell. Now all it needed was the finishing touches and another 8 hours of incubation. After that, if all his theories were correct, it would culminate in the woman simply waking up back into a normal body.

“Nurse 3, the heart specimen,” the doctor would simply demand as his hands kept busy doing things far too small to be witnessed with a normal eye. The said nurse, a female, would drag herself over towards the chilled box and carefully remove the heart before placing it inside of the chamber that had been added to the top.
“Plunge," he said once the top had been resealed. The nurse reached up and pushed in a purple colored button that began spinning the fluids and heart inside of the chamber. Before long the carnasuar’s heart was broken down into particles and slowly started filtering into the fluids the DIY body was residing in. Almost immediately there was a reaction, but, not an overly positive one. The body inside jolted, then began to twist and move as if it already had a life of its own. Tama increased his chakra pouring into the tube to calm it but he could already see scales starting to form instead of flesh on the raw muscles. With a grimace he slid his foot over two feet and tapped an Ancient rune on the ground. Half of the seal lit up and the doctor nearly fell over from the complicated spell.

“Nurse…1,” he called back over to his side. He made a motion with his head for him to get closer. Slowly the man inched his way closer to Tama until the surgeon suddenly lurched his neck out and bit down on the bit of exposed flesh on the back of the nurse’s neck. The man screamed, but only for 2 seconds, and then went deadly quiet. He dropped to the ground hard as the surgeon took in a deep breath and released it slowly. Little blue whisps of soul escaped his mouth as he closed his eyes and enjoyed the nearly orgasmic feeling of consuming literal life. The other two nurses suddenly realized that they were more than just help for Tama - they were his back up energy. Panic began to set in as they eyed him and the supposedly dead colleague on the floor.

“It’s either me, or Nabushin’s wrath…” he whispered through closed eyes, knowing the state of panic the humans would be in. That line seemed to calm them, for some reason, as the two nurses stiffen up and then get back to what they were doing without missing a beat. Were they really more terrified of an old man over a soul-sucking monster? The old man did just deliver him the heart of the rarest creature known to Suna so…perhaps there was some reasoning in that fear. With a cold shrug the surgeon continued to work, applying the chakra he had just rejuvenated to reduce the scales back. He then looked up and locked eyes with one of his two remaining nurses, the female, and nodded at her. Without any hesitation she quickly ran over to the chilled box and fumbled out the electrical organ. This one Tama removed his glove and took personally before reinserting back into the fluids. As with the bone, he gripped it tight, and crushed it down to a microscoptic level. The color of the fluid went from a murky brown to a very clear purple. Electrical bolts began to skitter across the body and again Tama removed both hands from the fluid and stepped back.
Kneeling down towards the seal he bit his thumb and wrote in two normal shinobi symbols and tapped it with his palm. The seal lit up completely now, all in a blue fire, and the remaining two nurses began screaming as well before falling over inside of the seal with their third co-worker. An swirl of scientific and arcane energy began to twirl around the room, lifting what wasn’t nailed to the ground. Standing back up the scientist lifted his hands into the air and began to move them as if conducting a symphony. Every now and again his body would vanish as he shifted Time as he needed, and then as he neared the end, Suzume’s form lifted off her bed and floated towards the pod.

A sudden explosion shook the entire Toraono Dojo.

 

[Kazumi]

Conscious was a poor choice of words to describe the husk of a kunoichi as she rested on the bed. She could not talk, move or form complicated thoughts, but she still could sense the world around her. Little of it made sense as her vague thoughts floated around her in incoherent swirls. It had been this way for many weeks, but her ability to grasp the flow of time had abandoned her almost as quickly as her body had. Not even her eyes moved, and even her breathing had stopped sometime ago, but there was somehow still a sliver of vitality left within her.

Occasionally there were voices, people that came into her view, but she could not even blink in response to their tears or desperate pleas. That had stopped sometime ago, but she knew not how long. The monotony had blurred together as she laid motionless in a nearly silent room for what may have been an eternity. Coherent thoughts were rare and simple, but the most common that remained stable for long enough for her to feel them was one she couldn’t explain. She wanted to die, to cease existing and to surrender to oblivion, but her body refused. She guessed this must have been the bless, or curse, of the Chains of Jashin, but this was not what she had agreed to.

If there was one solace to take in this blank and eternal existence, it was that at least she felt no pain. Feeling had left her shortly after she stopped moving but that had been proceeded by a gnawing and burning pain that tore at her insides. Now she simply existed, like a stuffed animal on a shelf: unmoving, unfeeling but somehow alive, if one could call this life.

At some point, things changed. Her condition did not improve or degrade, but the silence and darkness of her room had been replaced by firm talk, sounds of grading metal and shuffling feet. Most of what happened was out of her field of view, but she saw at least one familiar face among them, but names had long since abandoned her. The changes were nice, breaking the eternal solitude and silence with distant signs of life that she neither understood nor could enjoy, but it was something. Anything was better than nothing, or at least that was the lone disjointed thought that revolved throughout her blank mind.

The sounds grew to a crescendo, lights flickered and shifted around the room, a scream that resounded through her head, more words and a final moment of silence. Her vision shifted more, and she could distantly tell that she was no longer on the bed as the room began to life and revolve around her. Objects seemed to float at random, as if her mind ha finally shattered and reality truly held no sway over it. Then the pain came. To call it pain was akin to calling molten magma warm. She felt something somewhere within her being pulled and ripped apart, as if that magma coursed through every inch of her body and expanded, trying to burst her apart at the seams.

All vestiges of thought vanished as a primal cry of agony filled her, unable to rip itself free from her useless body. Her eyes did not move, her limbs did not twitch and her face remained as calm and still as he had for so long. The only other sensation she could faintly understand was a pulling, not the ripping sensation that wanted to scatter her essence across the skies but the hungry draw of water into a sponge. It was a sensation she tried to latch onto, but there was nothing with will left in her to latch on with. She was helpless, but as the eons of anguish stretched out ahead of her… it stopped.

 

[Toraono Michino]

The absolute power Tama needed to preform this part of the surgery resulted in the explosion that removed the roof and walls of the room as if they had been built from dust. His Hybrid form withstood the force, but the clothes of his upper body were burned off leaving scorch marks on his chest and arms. Into the light the Hybrid reached to grab the woman’s soul…and around Suzume’s throat wrapped Ryuu Tama’s astral fingers. The gentle pull became a full tug, dragging her through the pain of reinstalling the central nervous system. There were far more gentle methods of doing this, but this was the quickest way to awaken the husk she was back into reality. It wasn’t the ideal way to get reacquainted after a few years, but then again Tama never was good at that kind of stuff.
His right hand shifted into a half-Ram, pointed up at the light to fully craft the seal around the woman’s soul, and then pointed down with a sudden jerk of his arm. At the same time, with his left hand, he began to write arcane lettering into the air before swishing his hand left with dramatic pose at the end. Time then became…wonky. For that brief three-second window Tama loved playing with, combined with all the energy he was using to seal Suzume’s soul back into a body, he had managed to create his own pocket of space. Through this pocket he was able to play god for a moment and fuse the soul back into the body without consequence, then with the shift of his left hand back to the right, he folded the pocket back into the current timeline. Feeling like it was better for his track record, he placed the fold back before he went all pyscho on his staff. His current body before the staff, hands doing impossibly small things in the tube, suddenly froze. His clothes flashed in a green flame that didn’t ignite the oxygenated air as his entire body and pod glowed an impossible white color. The room vibrated hard as the two spaces of time became one, but as reality settled Tama stood with his hands over the body of a bare woman. The pod was destroyed, or at least the glass tube was, as ice and fire clung to both the pod and the surgeon himself; Suzume was unharmed and breathing normally. Her flesh was looked normal as Tama snapped his fingers to get the nurses to swoop in to gown her and check vitals while moving her body back into the bed. Rolling his shoulders to break away some of the ice he slowly started to turn away and slowly walk back towards the doors where he opened the doors to his little surgery theater with dramatic flair.

“I call it, a success! Notify the Storm Lord that his heir should be up and walking around in the next 8 hours, and for the love of the kami, can someone get me godsdammed drink?!”
Tama exploded out of the room with a grin on his face despite the looks he got from the staff at his state of clothing. She was over the most physically painful part of the surgery, but now she had to command her own body to awaken and take back over the nervous system. He guesstimated about eight hours, but, she might prove stronger. Those numbers were the original set before he added thunder lizard.

 

[Kazumi]

The respite from the anguish was short. Her vision and hearing had faded completely and the only sensation she could feel was an alien pressure on her neck that both tried to rip her to pieces and crush her to dust. Clouded visions came back to her as the pain ebbed and flowed. Half-recalled memories of searing pain as black flames had consumed her body, an indescribable sensation that felt akin to being compressed from the size of eternity down to that of a pinprick. That vision uncoiled itself into reality as her mind seemed to be reforming itself around her consciousness. The never ending expanse void shifted to white in her mind, a moment of pure bliss as she felt the embrace of relief from these months of mortal imprisonment. Then, darkness surrounded her world and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime ago, her consciousness faded to silence.
***********

It did not take long for word of Tama’s claims of success to make it to the Storm Lord’s ear. He gravely wished he could dismiss this Merchant Lord from the estates and attend to this development, but with the influx of refugees and Wind Country in chaos, these ties were more important for the clan than they ever had been before. It was not until twenty minutes after the messenger delivered the news before Nabushin made his way from his chambers and out towards the room where Suzume was being stored. His each step glided smoothly to the next, as his black and purple robe glided on the ground behind him, two of his guards trailing feet behind and to either side.

One of his shinobi readied himself and saluted as the Storm Lord approached the building that Tama had strode out in triumph a short while ago. The guards had attempted to persuade him to stay and provide his report to the Storm Lord, but Nabushin had not expected that to proceed as he had hoped. That Ryuu Tama had assistants was a fortunate turn of event, and that he left one behind to clean up his mess was even more so. He knew he could not torture Tama and expect viable results, the reports were mixed and inconclusive but there was much more unknown about the abomination than Nabushin felt comfortable toying with. The remnants of his team on the other hand…

One of the men was still inside, arguing with an armor clad Oushi-Ouja woman. She was as tall as the others of her kind, though not as thick in wide in all the same spots. She had his hand wrapped around his wrist as he glared and tugged against it, but her grip remained firm. As she heard the doors open, she turned and gave Nabushin a respectful bow, her vice grip on the man staying true. “Storm Lord,” she began as the assistant continued to pull and protest. “There were three in total, but the other two have already departed. This one stayed behind to continue to monitor the Storm Heir. He is being,” she turned towards her captive and frowned with annoyance, “difficult.”

Nabushin raised one old muscled hand and made a dismissive gesture. His two guards closed the doors behind him as the woman released his grip, leaving a red irritated circle around the man’s wrist. All three of them fell into place behind Nabushin, tall and stalwart guardians as the stared straight ahead. The assistant rubbed his hand gingerly, wincing at what would turn into a bruise from struggling at the fleshy manacle for the past few minutes when Nabushin began to speak, “I had not expected results so quickly. Were Ryuu Tama’s procedures a success?” His voice rumbled from his throat, carrying no malice but the full weight of authority and age.

The man seemed momentarily caught off guard, and he made a small gesture of respect, but not as great as the Storm Lord truly deserved, a fact that he was gracious enough to ignore. “The patient is stable and healing.” He gestured back towards the bed where a gowned Suzume lay in bed, looking healthier than she had in over a year. “Now if you will excuse me, Storm Lord, I need to return the supplies for the procedure.” He gestured over towards a set of large metal briefcases that were neatly stacked her the corner of the room.

“Explain to me, in details, exactly what it was that Ryuu Tama did to the Storm Heir that resulted in this miraculous recovery.” His voice contained a faint trace of skepticism and curiosity, but it felt like a foregone conclusion that the man would comply. Nabushin was a straightforward man of honor and respect and yet these many years of dealing with irreputable and lying forces had him grasping for even the slimmest of straws of knowledge. Of the many things he had grown to despise in his advanced age, it were secrets and lies that people attempted to feed to him.

To his credit, the assistant put up a good show for the next few minutes as he tried to refuse the Storm Lord’s inquiries. Claiming to know little to nothing about the details, that Tama had kept all of these secrets to himself, and that even if he had not, he was not at liberty to reveal them. Nabushin detected the scent of fear in the man’s denials. There were dire consequences for betraying his clan’s secrets, not to mention Tama himself, but there were ways around such fears.

“I have an arrangement with Ryuu Tama for the restoration of Oushi-Ouja Suzume to full health, with certain restrictions in play.” His thin eyes narrowed further, “if I have reason to believe you violated those, you will not be leaving this building.“ The implied threat manifested more visible as his three shinobi guards tensed and seemed to ready to strike. The medinin paled slightly, he was not a combatant by any stretch. He could hold his own against the untrained masses, as could any shinobi who graduated the academy, but his odds against three giants which towered over him were slim to none. “I recommend that you assuage my concerns, in all due haste.”

The threat of immediate certain death weighed against possible eventual death served as a good motivator for the man who quickly found his resolve shaking. “T-there is no need for that. I-I am sure he would be happy for me to inform his benefactor of an overview of the process.” At times, the man was glad to be kept in the dark of what exactly Tama did, but with his immediate life on the line he wished he had more to offer. How could he provide this clan lord enough information to sate his curiosity, without revealing secrets if he didn’t know what was a secret and what was not?

Nabushin smiled and his shinobi eased themselves as well. “Good. Now talk.” The Storm Lord’s tone shifted to back to his gentler command, urging the other to speak with the soft encouragement of a tectonic plate shifting behind him.

The explanation took a few minutes and was light on the specifics. Nabushin guessed the man was kept almost entirely in the dark, and what he did explain seemed little more than he could have gathered himself. He had wanted to surveil the room, but something Tama did had prevented any such methods. Frustrating, but that was why he was having this pleasant chat with one of the man’s underlings. The end results were frustrating, however. He made no mention of involving the aspects that Nabushin had expressly forbidden, but the assistant seemed to be completely in the dark as to what the actual results of the process were.

Nabushin's irritation grew like a storm cloud as the man seemed incapable of telling Nabushin what exactly happened to Suzume to bring her back from the brink. He gathered that Tama had made her a new body, somehow, and transplanted her soul into it, but how that worked or what the side effects were outside of his reach. The heavens smiled upon the assistant, as moments before the Storm Lord began to contemplate extracting the information more directly, he saw a stirring of motion from the bed.

*********
Light, sensations and voices began to leak into her unconscious as Suzume’s eyes very slowly began to open. She felt dazed, weak and confused as she tried to push herself up to a sitting position, but her body refused to move. She shifted slightly, but that was all she could manage as her eyes opened barely enough to see. Much to her surprise, she found that she could look around the room, shifting her head in faint and incremental movements as he eyes seemed to dart around haphazardly. He thoughts were still slow, but jubilation was quickly consuming her the vestiges of a smile barely cracked her lips.
*********

Nabushin suddenly stepped past the man and stepped over towards the bed, nearly knocking him down in the process. He knelt down at the bedside and examined the girl and seeing her eyes slowly shifting about, a grin actually spread across his lips. As gruff and demanding as he was, he did care for this child beyond the survival of the clan. “Child, can you hear me?” His voice was soft and gentle, the soft rumble of a distant storm cloud that soothed the farmer to sleep at night. “Are you able to move?”

She did not respond, at least not verbally. Her slight movements seemed haphazard and almost random, but he could see her eyes occasionally trying to fix themselves onto his. He reached out a hand and placed it on her forehead, feeling that she was of a normal temperature. Momentarily content, he stood back up and turned towards the hopeful assistant. “How long until she will recover?” The soothing tone had receded almost completely, replaced by the thunderclap of command.

Momentarily caught off guard, the assistant did not respond immediately, but quickly brightened, finally having an answer that would appease both Ryuu Tama and Oushi-Ouja Nabushin. “A few more hours. Seven or eight, Storm Lord.” He did not know if that meant she would be fully recovered by then, or if see would be well enough to walk, but he did not care, as long as it was enough to life the weight of Nabushin’s command from him.

The hulking elderly man turned towards Suzume who continued to faintly twitch as she struggled to make any coordinated attempt at moving. “Good.” A few seconds of trepidation rested across the room before he continued, “you may leave now. Inform Ryuu Tama that I expect a detailed report of exactly what he did and what to expect, but the initial results appear… promising.” He was hesitant to say optimistic, Tama was not as foul as Akkuma, for example. Had he been forced to resort to that fiend for assistance, he might expect Suzume to collapse into a sludge of flesh or turn into a blood crazed beast as much as she might actually recover.

The trio of shinobi stepped away from the door, the woman who had served as his momentary captor opening it and allowing him to pass, but not without a small glare of annoyance. A stare that said he should do well to not run into her anytime in the near future, lest she extract her frustration at the dishonor of being unable to please the Storm Lord with his immediate compliance.

 

[Toraono Michino]

Nabushin had sent out for the doctor, but, it was nearly a full day before Tama did as he do, and appeared into the court out of nowhere. Teaching the scientist about the secret in and outs of their facility was going to lead to inflicting the Storm Lord with a heart attack one of these days, what with the Hybrid’s love of messing with people. It had been a necessary evil at the time, as it was with most things Tama was involved in, but the deed had been done with the secrets of Suzume’s recovery tightly wrapped up. In the fully 24 hours after the surgery the man spent the time in a blur of alcohol and whispers, but, no one was talking about anything involving the Toraono as a whole. It was still all about the Battle at the Wall, the Unbent, worries about missing and probably dead relatives…the usual.
The scientist chose to reveal his presence at the end of one of Nabushin’s many meetings. No doubt with the recovery of his heir, the man had a lot of things to set back into motion that was probably slowing down due to his distractions with Suzume’s illness. As soon as the men currently trying to court Nabushin’s favor had left, Tama magically appeared in the center of the room; with a colorful mix drink in his hand. He was dressed in baggy shorts, flip flops, an undershirt, and a loud unbuttoned colorful shirt that hung off his shoulders. His right hand was wrapped up in medical bandage and looked like it was covering an obvious wound. Over his eyes were a pair of shades and his hair was down, cascading over his shoulders. He had been relaxing, as he was want to do today, but an ever insistent ANBU from Nabushin’s clan holdings wouldn’t leave him alone. He had no idea how the person had managed to finally climb the entire Kazekage tower after Tama lifted himself up there; especially as the only way to the very top was climbing.
“Looking for an explanation, I take it? I guess she’s probably still having problems moving but, that’s not unusual getting used to a new body…”

Tama didn’t explain in detail what he did, only the science that most people away from medical would struggle to understand. Of course, the procedure could be easily summoned up. He rebuilt the body Suzume had last inhabited because it had a link to her current form. Then he added the big lizard DNA, but as a coating to her current strain, which would reinforce the body’s natural abilities. After that, the electrical organ was broken down and coated along her Chakra Coil to boost a natural affinity for the Lightning element. After that he literally absorbed most of the life force of two humans to create a burst of power big enough to shock his creation into life and bend the laws of space and time. The last one was probably the most important as attaching a soul to a body, living or not, was a feat that wasn’t easy to repeat. He had extensive knowledge of forbidden arts that allowed him to store a soul inside of a corpse, but they were draining and Suzume would of just been a soul bound inside of a cage of death. To preform the miracle he used, he had to rip open a moment of time using a human soul’s energy and allowed the universe to flow through him for three seconds. In that moment Tama had finally experienced what it was like to be truly god-like but, knew full how bad these kind of things rebounded so only used the amount of time he would stop time with to bind Suzume’s soul to the living mound of tissue he had brought with them. Then he collapsed it back into the timeline before his attack on the nurses; causing a heap of confusion, but a successful procedure. The backlash of keeping his secrets, secret, was that Karma had briefly found a moment to attack the scientist, and scythed the flesh of his right hand. It looked like, after some time, it would heal…but it was painful. The flesh had been charred black and his skin cracked to bleed with every movement of his fingers. His hand literally felt like it was on fire, even now, stupid drunk as he was trying to quote medical science at a man who was more talented in death than the doctor ever hoped to be.
Once his explanation was done he gave some recommendations and that, if Nabushin allowed it, he would be back to check on Suzume in a few days to take notes on her recovery. If all went well he might have found a way to restore hearty ghosts back to life, completely unaware that Suzume held a special case in her connection to a Death God.

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