"I don't know how to do that."

She steps forward and offers her hand.

"If you kill me, you'll be stuck here forever. Never aging, never dying, and unable to interact with your world again. Stuck in a one moment of time. Alone."

...She probably didn't mean to give so much away. But dimensional travel seals are theoretically possible, and with all of eternity...

Orochimaru will be returning here. He won't kill her, not yet, she may be bluffing and she's interesting besides.

He takes her hand.

-- and she shifts them both back.

The strange boy didn't have time to react, but he does snap something as soon as they appear.

Which makes the man perk up in curiosity, and say something amused in return.

(According to Sasuke, they were barely gone long enough for his sharingan to detect, but vanish they did. Orochimaru is extremely curious now.)

She lets him go and immediately shifts back into the Other Side.

She takes off her mask. She needs to breathe and nobody can see her face when she's here alone.

She edges away from the two strangers and finially takes a better look at her surroundings.

It's fairly plain. Large, cavernous underground room. Most of the floor is sandy. There's a slightly raised stone walkway around the edge. The sand has been disturbed fairly thoroughly, and there's burn marks and places where it's melted together. The snake statue on one end is probably three times her height. There's a set of heavy double doors on the end opposite the snake, and no other exits. The lights come from tightly coiled writing on the walls, letters glowing softly - translating themselves as 'light' with less sensible symbols surrounding them.

It looks like a bunch of capes fought here... or this was some weird rogues lair. But -- what he said had a ring of truth. She would have been able to tell if he were lying.

She takes a closer look at their shadows.

Weird. Not capes, or potential capes. But they're not non-capes, either? Their shadows are more somehow, almost glowing, if a shadow could be said to glow. It's nothing she'll have ever seen before.

Another point in the parallel universe theory...

The Elemental Nations. Definitely not in Earth Aleph. How the hell had she gotten here? She's never shifted into another universe before and she's been doing this for nearly ten Earth years. Hundreds of her years.

...had she been around Simurgh too long? Maybe it messed with her, with her ability to shift.

She doesn't know. And standing around here isn't going to help anything.

She heads towards the double doors to take a look around.

There's a hallway that curls up around the arena. The only doors along it are locked, as are the doors at the end of it. There's no other people shadows.

She has her lockpick set, she takes her time and tries to unlock one of the doors.

Does not seem to have a lock. Or a latch. In fact, it's not clear how the doors are locked, or even how they're supposed to be closed or opened.

Annoying. It was times like these she wished she had super strength. She could really make some progress then.

She wonders back into the first room -- with the ridiculously huge snake -- and investigates it thoroughly. Does she find anything that could help her?

No. It's empty except for the two shadows and the ridiculous snake. If the snake has any hidden compartments, they aren't revealing themselves.

...fine. She puts back on her mask and heads back over to the shadows. She purposefully stands on the other side of them from where she shifted before, further out of their reach and then shifts back.

They turn to face her. The man asks another question.

"Still can't understand you. If you give me some reading materiel, enough for me to get the basics of your language, that will help a lot. And I won't have to make your ears bleed every time we need to communicate."

Written: "I can't allow you to roam freely about my base, you understand. And you still haven't answered my earlier questions."

"Like I said, I go by Akhlys. I expected you to know me because most people do. At least in my world. I'm from Earth Bet. Virginia, originally. The United States of America. Earth. Third planet from the sun... would you like me to go on?"

Nod. He starts scribbling questions, but motions for her to continue.