The Undesired Second Chance

Chapter 43: Cell Call

Most of the time, Axel couldn't hear anybody outside of his small cell. He wasn't sure if that was a testament to the thick concrete walls or to the quiet nature of ninja-types, but the point remained: no voices, no footsteps of passersby (if there even were any), and certainly no voices.

Just him, and the sounds of his empty room.

Which had, until just a few seconds ago, included the soft whisper-scrape of pencil on paper.

The blank notebook had been quietly left on the floor recently—it's hard to tell how much time had passed since, but he was fairly sure it had been at least a day. He'd just woken up and found it resting inconspicuously by the wall across from him, along with a single wood pencil.

Although he was a bit suspicious of it, and more specifically, whatever reason it had been left there... but, well, Axel wasn't going to reject anything that might help pass the time.

(It was very boring in his small gray room.)

However, his doodling had to be put on pause for the moment because apparently his cell isn't actually soundproof. Or at least, it isn't soundproofed all the time. Right now, he could clearly hear a conversation happening in whatever hall was just beyond the wall-door.

One voice was definitely Orochimaru, while the other belonged to a woman that was, from the sound of it, absolutely boiling mad: not shouting, but definitely angry. A lot of it was being said too quickly for Axel to follow, and he suspected most of the vocabulary was out of scope for him anyway. What he was able to catch seemed to be demanding answers for something—he didn't recognize any of the verbs, but he thought it might have to do with sneaking or secrets.

Hearing the usual whoosh of air that signaled the concrete wall was morphing open, Axel pushed himself into a more upright position on his small cot. What was distinctly not usual, however, was the person framed by the newly-formed entrance.

The woman was facing away from him, focused on her conversation, but even so Axel was certain he recognized her; translating remembered anime aesthetics to actual real life could make it hard to identify some characters, but she was kind of hard to miss.

"You're still doing a lot of talking without actually saying anything." Shaking her head, she pointedly turned to step inside. "Just tell me—" Mid-sentence, her sharp brown eyes locked with his own probably-vaguely-alarmed blue.

At a bit of a loss for how he should react, Axel cautiously waved in greeting.

She flung a hand in his general direction. "Who the hell is this guy?!"

A young girl he hadn't noticed at first—certainly a ninja, despite her age—breathed a heavy sigh. "Please, Sensei, there's probably more important things to be worried about here..."

"He is physically unrelated to my other project, I assure you," Orochimaru said, smoothly stepping past them both. He looked generally as put-together as ever, though there was something to his expression that Axel couldn't quite place. "However, as you requested that I share the minutiae of my current activities—"

"Cut the fancy chat, Orochimaru," the woman scoffed. "You've brought us all the way here—specifically here—" she gestured to the gray room in general, "and now you tell me this guy's not involved? Just tell me what's going on already!"

Honestly, that was something Axel would like to know, too. The possibility of meeting this particular character in-person had not crossed his mind at all—let alone in this context, whatever it was. It should have been a reasonable assumption; from what he could recall from the show, she had left the village on some kind of personal exile escape-vacation.