“Have the ultra particles been returned from the institute yet?” Chihare asked, as she tapped away at the computer on the low table.
“Not yet!” His voice was rough with obvious dissatisfaction. “Shikamaru’s pushed them to hurry, but they just give excuses about how they melt like sugar in water, so we have to do this and this, and then they never give them back!”
“Because it’s an unknown substance. They probably want to keep it as long as they can to study it.”
No change, no change, no change … After she copied and pasted the results, Chihare lifted her face up. “Anyway, where on earth did your comrades find such an unusual substance?”
“Oh,” Naruto said. “This country called the Land of Redaku, waaaaaaay far to the west of the Land of Fire.”
“The Land of Redaku, hm? That name does take me back.”
Without warning, the two-person conversation increased by one.
Chihare gasped and whirled around to find Orochimaru standing there. He extended his long tongue and picked up the binder she had dropped in her surprise.
“This is our equipment, yes?” he said archly. “Could you take better care of it?”
“Orochimaru, you’ve been to the Land of Redaku?” Naruto asked, looking at the snake man with surprise.
“Yes,” he said easily. “When I heard they had a forbidden jutsu that resembled Edotensei, I went to investigate. Although that was quite some time ago now. I made those goggles you’re wearing by applying a technology I discovered in Redaku, you know.”
The tip of his extended tongue flicked around the lenses of the goggles. Naruto pulled back, disturbed, and the corners of Orochimaru’s mouth turned up.
“The jutsu that had been passed down in the Land of Redaku transplanted the power of someone else’s eye. There’s a legend that the Sage of Six Paths produced it for the sake of his blind friend Jean-Marc Tatar. Normally, the jutsu uses a prosthetic eye as the medium for giving the power of sight to a person who cannot see, but I applied it to goggles. They’re still a prototype, but I’m glad they are proving helpful in the girl’s experiment.” Orochimaru shifted his gaze to Chihare. She shrank back and clutched the binder to her chest. “Although, well, it looks like that’s not going too well.”
“It’s not.” Naruto nodded and crossed his arms. “She’s doing all this stuff every day, but the results just aren’t coming in.”
“It’s a difficult thing to give birth to a new technology,” Orochimaru remarked. “At any rate, all you can do is try and then learn from the failures. That’s how Edotensei was born.”
“Enough out of you.” Naruto glared at him. “Don’t lump her work in with a forbidden jutsu.”
Orochimaru grinned happily.
“If you’re using them every day, you must be getting a handle on the goggles. In three days, I’ll have you show me just how much control you’ve gained over the Byakugan,” he said and then shimmered abruptly like a mirage and melted into the air. He was as puzzling as ever.
Naruto’s initial promise to Chihare had been to check for increases or decreases in chakra, but he always helped clean up before heading out. He discarded the special tanks for liquid chakra and washed the petri dishes with cleaning fluid.
“Hey, Chihare?” he asked. “You left the research institute because you wanted to, right?”
Chihare was getting ready for the next day’s tests, and she looked back at him with the syringe to inject liquid chakra in one hand. “Yes, I did.”
“Why’d you do that?” he asked casually, and Chihare was silent for a moment before answering.
“I told you before, didn’t I?” she said finally. “I find other people stressful.”
“That can’t be all of it,” he prodded.
“Why do you think that?”
“I mean, this experiment you’re doing, in the end, it’s for the sake of other people, right?”
Chihare paused and looked intently at Naruto’s face.
Why is this person taking such an interest in me? From the perspective of the Seventh Hokage, I’m just a lone scientist, not even worth sparing a thought for. He has so many prestigious, well-known friends throughout the village, so why does he want to know about me?
She was confident that her experiment held significant meaning for the world and that it merited the cooperation of the Seventh Hokage. But Naruto’s way of engaging with Chihare herself, the person running the experiment, was a complete mystery to her.
Is he like this with everyone? He is like this with everyone, isn’t he?
“I found a star,” she said.
“A star?” he repeated.
Her back still turned to Naruto, Chihare slowly began to speak. “I told you before that my field is astrophysics, right? About six months ago, I was observing the sky, and I found a star moving irregularly. From north to south, south to north—with each cycle, its trajectory changed slightly as it went around this planet.”
“You mean like the moon?” Naruto asked.
“It was much faster than the moon.”
The liquid chakra that dropped from her syringe landed squarely in the center of the petri dish. A twisted circle with just a bit of a tail. Almost like a falling meteor.
“I reported the existence of the star to the institute. But no one believed me. They said there couldn’t be a heavenly body like that. They said it was impossible for it to be going round and changing its orbit at the same time.”
“Couldn’t you have just made them look at it?” he said. “Can’t very well deny what they see with their own eyes.”
“There are no researchers at Kengakuin with the skill to observe this star,” she told him. “That facility is a place to do scientific research that will be ‘useful to people.’ Even if they had looked into the star, nothing would have happened. So management pressed me to give up astronomical research and move to a field that would lead to more practical results. I agreed and left the institute.”