That nobody else could hear theme music from various movies blaring out was beside the point.
It was an atmosphere thing, and those were important.
Kotetsu and Izumo investigated the rip in the ground, finding it clear enough to wave the others in.
Once out of the wind-blown dust and sand in what was at least relative shelter, there was a collective sigh of relief.
"No wonder they have to import all their food," complained Anko, spitting sand out of her mouth.
"Not all of it, just a lot," said Naruto, defending the homeland of some friends of his automatically.
"Well, this is it," said Kotetsu, brushing a section of wall off to reveal carvings.
"Why didn't the people who found it investigate?" asked Naruto, thinking that it would be a natural thing to do.
"Two reasons, the first being they were on a mission," said Kotetsu. "The second was air."
"Air?" asked Naruto.
"This thing was sealed up centuries ago," said Kotetsu. "If we come to any sealed doors, we open them and wait before entering."
"First we check for traps and other nasty surprises," said Izumo. "Remember those ruins in the jungle."
"One little incident," said Kotetsu, waving off his frequent partner.
"One little incident with flooding tunnels, summoned shark-monsters, and pygmy zombie cannibals," added Izumo.
"Details, details," said Kotetsu.
"'Zombie cannibals'?" asked Anko, thinking that sounded like something a certain snakey shinobi might use.
"Oh yeah, those can be a pain," said Naruto, who'd never run into such a thing that he could remember off the top of his head. Hadn't there been something similar though, once or twice?
"Let's see," said Kotetsu, finding the break in the floor of the rift/ceiling of the complex. "Anyone want to use a lighting jutsu?"
Naruto took a lantern out of his pack and started lighting it.
"I thought you'd have a jutsu for that," pointed out Izumo.
"Yeah, but if there's something to detect chakra use, this won't trigger it," said Naruto, sliding the little glass panel into place.
"On the other hand, a jutsu won't go exploding any pockets of natural gas," pointed out Izumo.
Naruto looked at Izumo, looked at the lamp, then down at the hole before speaking. "So... I guess we leave the lantern somewhere near the exit so we can find our way back?"
"That might work," agreed Izumo. "Nice to see we're all thinking ahead."
"Very chunin-like," added Kotetsu.
Jiraiya and Anko both made noncommital noises, knowing that they COULD recommend such a thing when they got back to Konoha and it might push the three closer towards acceptance of those ranks.
Well, they'd just have to see how it went.
Iruka heard the sound of ceramic cracking and immediately leapt for the teacup on the table.
Especially as he was in the middle of grading papers and had just stepped off for a moment.
While he was fast, he wasn't THAT fast. So he immediately had a lot of wet runny test papers.
Hinata was frowning at the sudden feeling of something wrong but couldn't see exactly what it was that had triggered the feeling.
Her texts of medical jutsu were spread out before her, and she had kept the fish alive through chakra manipulation despite it being out of the water.
Hinata let the fish back into the tank, then went to the window to look out at Konoha. She couldn't see anything that would explain the odd sense of unease though.
"Old," said Kotetsu, his usual bored-sounding voice replaced with almost a childlike eagerness as he examined the writings on the wall.
"What kind of language is that anyway?" asked Naruto.
"One of the old lost languages," said Izumo.
"Can you read this as well?" asked Jiraiya.
"A bit," said Izumo. "Mainly I work with modern languages that are encrypted. There's some crossover though. The problem is that so much of that language, we don't have all the symbols and it's purely phonetic."
"'phonetic'?" asked Naruto softly.
"Sound-based, like hiragana or katakana," said Jiraiya. "No kanji?"
"No ideograms at all," said Izumo. "So the script tends to take up more space, but since we don't know what all the words mean, we can only infer their meaning from context and since we don't know much of the originating culture - some of which we think we know may not be as accurate as we'd like."
CREAK! went a nearby door as Anko opened it.
"Don't do that, you might set off a trap," said Izumo.
"Hey, who's the jonin here, and who's the genin?" asked Anko, summoning a snake and sending it off into the darkness.
CLAK!
All the humans present stiffened and looked in the direction of the opened door that the snake had gone through.
CLUNK!
Everyone's head swiveled around to look down the corridor that they'd entered from.
"Did that sound like -" began Jiraiya.
"-some sort of barrier slamming into place down the way we came?" finished Naruto.
RUMBLE!
"That didn't sound good," said Kotetsu.
"I've got a bad feeling about this," noted Izumo.
clik-kaCHUNK-rattle-rattle-rattle.
"Uh oh," said Anko just before-
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Wed, 05 May 2010 17:16)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.