• It was a chance meeting. She had never meant to stray away from her nursery school class and her teacher, but they were just taking sooooooo long at Ichiraku Ramen. The young girl had wandered off in search of adventure. Little did she know that she would get more than she bargained for.

    The girl had been walking in the hot sun for nearly half an hour. 'That building looks nice and cool inside,' she thought, so she went in to see. It was cool just as she had expected but the inside was not.

    She had never been here before because her attendants had steered clear of it. That gave all the more reason for her to look around this strange new place. The girl walked down the hallway which was flanked with doors on either side, all of which were locked. The same thing resulted when she tried all the doors on the second and third floors. However, one door on the top floor responded to her touch as she turned the knob.

    It wasn't locked but no ordinary person could have gotten inside. Someone had placed a protective barrier on the door so as to block the door to intruders as well as sound proof the room to protect from outside noise. His work required concentration in its purest form, so interruptions and distractions were taken very seriously.

    'I wonder what he's doing,' the girl wondered as she walked toward the man who was standing over a lighted table working with something that looked peculiar to her young, inexperienced eyes. She walked over to the side to get a closer look at what he was working with from the small end of the table, but just as she reached the end he turned to wipe his hands with a damp rag. On his hands, dripping like water, was crimson liquid that she somehow knew was blood and just knowing this fact caused her to let a childish scream escape from her lips. (What? She's only three years old after all.)

    His concentration broken, the man turned his head furiously around, looking for the thing that had so churlishly interrupted his important research. When his eyes came to rest on the small figure shivering in the corner, he stalked over to it and kneeled down to get a better look. Facing an uncertain fate, the child said, "Please sir, I beg you please don't kill me. If you do, I have no parents to perform the funeral rites, no relatives to pay their respects at my grave, not like they would have any considering I'm so young. Also, I have no friends who would lay flowers on my grave after I was gone. I have no one to love and no to love me; please, don't kill me!!!!!"

    As she said these last words, she began to cry a torrent of tears that fell from her eyes as water rushes over a steep cliff, plunging down to its certain doom below, so fell her tears. Normally the man could not be bothered with other people's emotions, but something in this girl, this one, sweet, sad little girl, made him pick her up in his arms and hold her close. "Now, now then, hush child," he said, his voice as smooth as corn silk. "It's all right. You have nothing to fear whilst I am here. I'm sorry if I scared you so."

    She stopped her weeping and looked into his eyes. In those golden eyes, she saw true integrity and contrition, even though she could only see a small portion of his pupils. "It's okay Daddy," she said.

    'Daddy?', Orochimaru thought, turning his head away for a moment, 'I've never been called that before.' Then he spoke again to her, looking into her beautiful, brown eyes which shimmered not just with tears but with loyalty and longing. "I am glad that you are quick to recover and willing to forgive me. What is your name my child?"

    "My name is Ariel sir. As I said, I have no parents, friends, or close relatives. My parents died in the Nine-Tailed Fox attack two years ago. I was just a year old then so I don't remember many details, but the nursery maids told me that my parents sacrificed their lives to save the village as well as me. The other kids seem to avoid me for some reason or other but they never tell me why. I'm sorry if I interrupted you."

    "It's quite all right Ariel. If I had not been, I never would have met you. I have a feeling that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

    Epilogue

    Not long after, that room where they met was discovered by the Third Hokage. Orochimaru fled the village, with Ariel close at hand following her "father" with unfaltering loyalty and longing.

    Want to know what happens next? Stay tuned for Part Two.