When the topic rebirth comes up, most people think about Hinduism and Karma. Fewer people, most of them fanfiction addicts, think about the ability to redo their own lives or being reborn with their own set of memories in a different reality.

But only one person, as far as Shiori was aware, had gone through the process and could tell you precisely how it felt to have two distinct personalities in one fragile body clash, fight, and desperately try to survive in some way or form… because this was what had happened to Shiori.

Smiling sardonically down at the faded fabrics she was washing in the river; she shook her head in wry amusement. What would the hundreds of thousands of fanfiction-writers and readers think of if they could see her now? All this time they had been writing about facts and not fiction. Shiori chuckled humorlessly at the irony. How often had her old self dreamed of being in the same scenario? Even years after graduating, marrying, and becoming a so called "responsible adult," she had still loved to give into her childish urges and lose herself in the dreams of fantasy worlds and alternate universes.

And now here she was, a new person with too much knowledge trapped in a young fragile body in a violent world without any physical or monetary way to protect herself from the cold, harsh reality.

Shiori sighed while she pressed the freezing river water out of the yukata in her hands and then carefully folded the still damp fabric and stored it into the woven basket she had brought for the clean laundry. Her gaze wandered over to the still daunting mountain of dirty clothes and then to the slowly climbing sun. She knew very well that she would have to hurry; there were dozens of other things she had to finish before she could return to her home for lunch. So with a last deep sigh, Shiori fished out the next piece of clothing and dunked it into the freezing water.

Here she was now, a soul reborn in the Naruto universe as the daughter of poor farmers without a chance to ever improve her life. Let alone become a ninja.

Not that she wanted that!

God no! Neither in her last life nor this one did she feel the urge to lead an exciting life full of adrenalin and adventure. Truth is, Shiori was a bit of a coward (although she liked to think that it was just her common sense and survival instinct that urged her to live a completely normal and unspectacular life).

Of course, Eliza, the woman she had been beforehand, had read stories of OCs and SIs that had become ninja because they were scared to die as civilians, or gave themselves away through their own stupidity, but that was definitely not Shiori's idea of living.

So civilian it was.

Shiori sighed again while her thoughts wandered to the main problem she had with this life. As Eliza, she had lived an unbelievably wealthy life in comparison to this new one. And Shiori already knew that she would never be satisfied with the life she had been born into: working herself into exhaustion to barely survive from day to day was not what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Even at the age of ten, a young farm girl like herself was expected to help out as much as any adult member of the family, and she knew that her responsibilities would only increase, as she grew older.

A bit wistful, Shiori let her mind wander back some years. She could remember that before she had turned seven, she had lived the life of a cheerful, content, but most importantly oblivious, lower class civilian.

The village she was born into was tiny. There were barely a hundred people living in Kawa. They had no school, or doctor, or even a general store. The little village relied on the bigger villages around it to supply them with other goods than edibles. Kawa, like many other villages in Fire Country, consisted entirely out of small farmhouses. Though, in Shiori's opinion the buildings were more huts than houses (and most of the time they had been built out of any available resource the inhabitants had been able to find at that time). Kawa was about seventy kilometers away from the capital, the seat of the Daimyo, and close to hundred twenty kilometers away from the Hidden Village in the Leaves, better known as Konoha.

Kawa was where Shiori learned to speak, walk, help in the fields, and take care of the house. The chores weren't her favorite thing, but the small girl didn't know anything else, and never even entertained the thought of leaving the place of her birth. She would have probably continued to be oblivious to her poor situation if the river incident hadn't happened.

That day Shiori had followed the older kids in her village to their favorite playground, a group of tall rocks at the edge of the riverbed. In an attempt to impress them, she had climbed a precarious cliff beside the river and promptly fell into it. Shiori could remember the surprise she had felt at the feeling of falling. She hadn't even been scared before she had hit the water and blacked out.

Shiori had nearly drowned.

Years after she had recovered, her grandmother told her what had happened. Her body had been caught in the current and she hit her head rather hard on one of the rocks in the riverbed. If an attentive villager hadn't heard the screams of the other children, Shiori probably wouldn't have survived that day. What followed was a week of delirium and fever dreams… at least, that was what her family told her later. They had been unable to pay for a doctor and had to just wait for her to wake up or die, as morbid as it sounded.

Shiori knew better. In the time she had lain unconscious, two minds had been fighting for dominance in her head. Seven-year-old Shiori of Kawa with the power of desperation versus the thirty-six-year-old Eliza from New York equipped with nothing more than confusion.

Shiori had won.

Her will to live had triumphed over the more experienced but completely unprepared Eliza, and so Shiori, with all her habits of a seven-year-old, naïve civilian, made up nearly ninety percent of the personality that inhabited the young body. Eliza became nothing more than an inner voice, and she and her memories could be ignored if Shiori tried hard enough.

Now, any good psychiatrist will say that such behavior won't help in the slightest and that memories always find other ways to surface, but Shiori was a child and didn't understand what was going on. So instead of actively occupying herself with her past life, the little girl dreamed.

She dreamed of being Eliza. She dreamt of growing up in one of the busiest cities in the world. She dreamt of speaking and writing a completely different language. She dreamt of another girl making friends and studying for school. How visits to her grandaunt and other extended family in the country fostered a love for plants and all things growing. Shiori witnessed as Eliza moved on to college to study chemistry and biology. How she fell in love with a classmate and they married shortly after they had graduated. Then her dreams showed her, Eliza's life as a working adult in a large pharmaceutical company. Shiori witnessed how the long hours and overtime made Eliza and her husband drift apart until they were only strangers living in the same apartment. The divorce that followed was a quick and clinical affair that left a hollow feeling in Eliza but no real anger or sadness about losing her partner. Another four years passed without the grown woman truly living. Eliza worked too much and barely kept in contact with her friends and family and then… well, then she died. The last thing that she had ever seen was those bright headlights of the car that ran a red light in the early evening hours.

Shiori still shuddered softly while she remembered that particular dream and how her grandmother had to wake her up because she was crying hysterically in her sleep. Most of the images didn't make sense to Shiori at first. The school curriculum and technology were so different and far more advanced than she had ever heard of. There was violence too, but not in the same quality as in the Elemental Countries. Shiori was confused and slightly frightened during the first few months; she was, after all, only a little girl when her dreams began. And most importantly she was not Eliza. Yes, she had some of her memories inside of her, but she was not Eliza.

With time, Eliza's voice became stronger again and explained some of the things Shiori didn't understand. Finally, her curiosity outweighed her fear, and the part that was still left over from Eliza's personality started to help Shiori to commit the more interesting information to her own memory.

They used the time during the repetitive tasks of planting rice and caring for it to recite the information until it was second nature for Shiori. Like this she learned about plants, herbs, and basic chemistry. Anything, really, that could be useful in Shiori's life.

Of course, the young girl also had seen and heard all the other lessons and experiences Eliza had gone through, but because it wasn't reinforced like the plant knowledge, it soon started to fade into the background.

The older Shiori grew and the more understanding she gained of the world she now lived in, the unhappier she became about her situation. Eliza's knowledge had given Shiori a glimpse of a life that she wanted for herself, but had no idea how to accomplish.

And then Shiori gradually found the connections between Eliza's memories and this new one. She slowly started to recognize certain places and titles as the ones out of the Naruto manga in Eliza's childhood but continued to hope that it all was just a big coincidence. Until the day a derisive comment from their neighbor about ninja business at the border confirmed Shiori's worst fear.

Ninjas, wars, tailed beasts… how the hell was she going to survive this?