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A/N: So. I just finished reading Clan of Samsara, which is a Naruto fanfic about what is basically a community of SI characters, banding together to form their own clan during the Warring Clans Era. I fell in love with this idea.

PROLOGUE

The Question has existed for longer than living memory, people would say. It is as old as time, and as ancient as the spoken tongue. It traverses cultures, crosses the barriers that define "shinobi" from "civilians," and breaks the boundaries of countries. However, it is as unknown as it is well-known, for although most people across the Elemental Countries know The Question, none of them really know what it asks.

The Question, as everyone who ever heard of it knows, is hilariously easy, and yet at the same time impossible to answer correctly. Such is perhaps because no one truly knows of its nature, no one truly understands what answer it seeks from those who hear it. All they know is that the answer to it, if deemed acceptable, is the password for entry into the Land of Infinity. It is the ticket of acceptance into the advanced civilization — or so rumors say — of the Dead City. Everybody knows it, and at the same time nobody does.

Nobody understands why the sole continental landmass separate from the Elemental Countries was named as the Land of Inifinity, of all things, nor do they know why its people are consolidated into only one community. For that matter, they also do not know why that community decided to call itself a Dead City. Nobody knows why every three years Seekers from the Dead City intrude on houses and orphanages and ask children The Question, why they take some children with them and leave the rest. They don't know why The Question is the Dead City's "admission test", why The Question is posed the way it is, why there is even a Question in the first place.

Though it isn't for lack of trying to find out on their part.

Over the centuries, shinobi clans sent skilled information-gatherers across the seas and to the mysterious city of child-stealers, only for them to never return. There have been expeditions, of explorers and daring individuals, tasked with unraveling the enigma that is the Land of Infinity. None of those expeditions made it back to their home lands; none of them even made it so far as the 5-mile off-shore defenses of the Dead City. There were wars waged in the name of "saving the next generation," and the Dead City came out on top from all of them. If one were to look underwater around those defenses, they would see the multitude of fallen ships and ruined boats and human skulls.

Whenever a certain clan or group of people would decide to attack against the secretive society — it's a preemptive strike, they'd all say, for who in their right mind would let that much power remain in the hands of such an ambiguous lot? — they'd be shot down almost immediately, no matter who or where they are, their bases or compounds would be annihilated by weapons of such destructive power the very thought of them makes grown men tremble in fear to this day. People across the countries have tried to decipher The Question, have dissected its entirety down to the last syllables and inflections, yet none were able to discern it's true meaning.

They eventually learned to stop fighting the Dead City, deeming it pointless and futile. It's not like the people from the Dead City were evil, after all. They only took very few children — just one or two every triennial visit, and the parents of the Taken were always sent monthly packages containing a strange palm-sized device that played recorded videos and messages from their children, who always seemed happy or at the very least safe and content, which was more than what life outside the Dead City can offer. The video devices melted after a three-second countdown past the end of the relay (or if their outer casings were compromised in any way, which ruined the chance of the technology to be studied and replicated) so there was never any lasting evidence of the Dead City or the Taken, but it was a well-known fact that the Dead City was technologically advanced, reclusive, and safe.

There came a point in history when the constant warring of clans resulted in widespread famine and disease, and parents all around begged the Seekers to take their children with them even after those children were declared unworthy of living in the Dead City. Some even went so far as to threaten to kill the Seekers if they continued to refuse their children, but those threats never came to pass — all Seekers are always encased by an invisible force when they leave the Land of Infinity, and nothing they do not allow to come in contact with them ever gets across that force. Not even chakra.

As Hoshino Rei stares at the Seeker kneeling before her, she remembers what her mother — her latest one — told her about the mysterious Land of Infinity (which she knows for a fucking fact should not exist) and the Dead City. She remembers the stories about the Taken. About the explorers who never returned.

She also remembers a bunch of shit about this world — this universe — that she has no business knowing much less remembering. She remembers monsters the size of Nebraska that have so many fucking tails it should be anatomically impossible. She remembers a stupid red-eyed idiot who can vomit fire. She remembers an equally stupid blonde idiot who talks weird with his dattebayo shit.

She remembers Seattle, Washington. She remembers her bedroom-slash-library. She remembers her pet dog, an adorable Samoyed with the fluffiest white fur that she named Leo. She remembers her language. Her culture. Her home.

Her son.

"Who were you?" The Seeker asks her in an almost hopeful voice after he puts up an opaque barrier around them with a wave of his hand, so no one who doesn't know what The Question really is would know how to answer it, and Rei knows that it's because there hasn't been any Taken children in nearly fifty years. Children hadn't known how to answer The Question anymore, hadn't understood what was being asked of them in the first place.

And it makes Rei want to laugh and laugh and laugh, because she's read shit like this in her past life — something she now knows isn't unique to just her — and she's gotta admit, this is some next level self-insertion. This, the Land of Infinity and the Dead City and the Seekers and the Taken... this is almost self-invasion, if that makes any goddamned sense. It isn't even supposed to be possible in the first place, and now she finds out that not only is it actually possible, it's superfuckingpossible times a thousand.

"Rei. Hoshino Rei," she tells him, and as the sixty-something-old man visibly sags in disappointment she adds, in English, "Same as my name in my past life, which is damn weird. Not to mention unfair. I think Death-sama screwed me over, that albino bastard. I'm sure you got a different name. But then maybe that's because my parents were Japanese immigrants to the 'States. Were you Japanese?"

"I..." He fumbles, eyes wide as saucers. "I wasn't. I was... I was a Filipino." Then he shakes his head. "Never mind that! You're... you're one of us! There hasn't been one in decades!"

Which Rei knows, because everybody knows that, but whatever.

She shrugs.

"We thought there would never be another one!" the Seeker exclaims, and he wraps his bony arms around her and hugs her like she'd squirt out molten gold or something if he squeezes hard enough.

Hoshino Rei would be the last child to enter the Dead City.