A/N: This is a crossover between Naruto and Worm. I don't claim anything in either work. They are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and Wildbow respectively. If you haven't read Worm, I recommend checking it out. It's about a teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, her attempt to become a superhero, and her life as a supervillain. It's much better than my writing.

A/N: This story has a ton of spoilers for Worm. Don't read it if you haven't read Worm. Worm is better written. Go read Worm first.

Beneath me I could feel grass prickle against the exposed skin of my arms, legs, torso, and back. Above me, I felt heat. The blue sky was clear and it was hot, no clouds to block the kiss of the sun against my skin. My only protection from the sun was something that felt wet which had been rubbed across me. Not sunscreen and it was applied in geometric shapes rather than to all of me. What the hell?

I felt disoriented, not because I was laying naked in the grass, but because being in the grass didn't line up with my memories. I could remember dying. Two bullets to the back of my head while I had stared up at the stars. People didn't go from getting shot in the head to laying in grass staring up at the sky. Except I had, which meant it could happen. Someone else might have been thrown for longer, but I had been working as a cape for years. I wasn't used to whatever power had done this to me, but I was used to powers. I could roll with it. Cope.

I needed to, if I was going to catch whoever had done this to me off guard.

I tried to stand, but couldn't. My body didn't feel right. Everything was off. Wrong. I felt tiny, fragile, weak. More then that, I could feel exhaustion setting in, because my body felt done. Not just in terms of being used up, but also as if there just wasn't very much to use in the first place. The closest thing I could compare it to would be how the body felt after going too long without exercise. A lightness. A weakness. Beyond that, I was also tired. I couldn't stop myself from yawning.

"Ku ku ku." The noise, a cross between a laugh and someone doing a bad impression of a songbird, was unexpected. The sleepy feeling that had been dragging me down lifted, replaced by something more normal. I let down the wall between me and the senses of my insects, not wanting to be caught off guard and wanting to know what was going on around me.

It didn't work. My power, it wasn't there. Panic tore through me. The sort of panic someone feels when they realize they are both blind and paralyzed.

I tried to snap my head in the direction of the laughter, but my body didn't do what I wanted it to. I flailed and my limbs came into view.

Tiny limbs. Baby limbs. I was a baby. I tried to shove the horror of what I was seeing away. To push the excess emotion into my insects, like I did so often. I couldn't though. I didn't have my power. It made it harder, but I had to keep it together anyway. Freaking out wasn't going to help me.

Arguably, I'd been in worse situations than this.

I stopped trying to move and stopped to think. A new body, a smaller body. It had implications that I was familiar with. It had taken me months to learn to interpret the senses of my insects. It had taken Regent hours to learn to control the body of someone he hijacked. Assuming whatever was impacting my control over my body was a consequence of my body, I was having the same issue Regent had when he used his power to take people over. Before I would be able to move, my mind would need to figure out how to control my limbs.

Until I could do that, I was helpless. No power. No control over my body. Without a cage, I was a prisoner to whoever had laughed.

"Trying to look at me, hmm?" The voice was smooth, but I couldn't understand a word they were saying. It sounded like Japanese. My first thought was of the enemies I had who would know the language, which naturally led me to think of Lung. The things I had done to him — yeah, I could see him coming after me, wanting vengeance, if he had lived through Scion's attack.

I couldn't remember the details of the fight, not well. Abstractly, I remembered that I had been in control of others, but with every cape added my memories were more hazy. I had lost myself at some point during the fight. Become something other - like Noelle becoming Echidna. Not fully human, not fully my passenger. Going by what I could remember, it occurred to me that it didn't have to be Lung I was dealing with. There had been a lot of capes. So many that there were bound to be a few who wanted my blood for what I had done to them.

It didn't reassure me. Only opened up the space of potential threats still further. It was the opposite of what I needed. If I knew what I was dealing with, I could plan around it, somehow.

The owner of the voice stepped into view. He was human in shape and his long black hair made him look vaguely feminine, but there were so many things that were off. His skin was far too pale, an actual shade of white. His eyes had yellow irises and purple triangles ran down his nose.

He wore a loose fitting beige robe that was kept tight around his waist by a purple belt. An odd color choice, given his complexion. No mask. It also didn't look like a uniform so much as a style of clothing I wasn't familiar with. Maybe the male version of a flowery dress from another culture? I put that aside. Tried to read his body language.

He was peering down at me. Intent. Studying me every bit as closely as I was studying him. Except, he wasn't holding himself like he was expecting a fight. Curious, rather than concerned. I wanted to say that meant he was underestimating me, but I couldn't bring myself to think that. Not when I couldn't use my power or even move like I wanted to.

The man smiled at me. I needed to get control over the situation. Provoke something.

"Waa-" I cut myself off and stopped trying to speak.

I had intended to ask who he was and what he wanted, but I didn't have my tongue and mouth under proper control. Even if I could have spoken, I'm not sure it would have mattered. If he knew who I was, then he knew that I spoke English and not Japanese. The fact that he was speaking in a different language implied that he wasn't communicating with me intentionally.

"Can you understand me?" The man was staring down at me intently. I looked back. "If you can, move or make a noise."

He waited. Then sighed. "Unfortunate. I was rather certain the seal would work. You were recorded, along with all the others, after all. Unless… of course. Not all of the ancients spoke our tongue. You don't understand the language I'm speaking, do you?"

His body language wasn't hostile and from his tone I guessed he was asking a question, but I'd been caught by mad tinkers before and she hadn't been the sort to give away by tone alone that she was planning something monstrous.

I had just fought to save my world. Sacrificed everything. Now I was here. Helpless. Not able to move. Not able to speak. Not able to understand. Was he going to kill me? Was he trying to help me? I had no idea. It was frustrating.

"Very well then. A different approach." The man's hands teleported in front of him to a clasped position. No, not teleported. The robes he was wearing, they had moved and were still moving, swaying, jostled by the momentum of his movement. Not teleportation, but pure speed.

Mover, I thought. Probably a Thinker too, given the fluidity of it. Possibly some sort of Breaker effect as well. The speed of the movement should have led to the fabric of his robes producing a slapping sound upon hitting his flesh, but that hadn't happened. I had the barest moment to notice his hands were almost pointed at me. To realize he was about to do something to me. Then it happened.

The world shifted around me. I wasn't laying on my back staring at the sky anymore. Instead I could see a grassy clearing in the midst of a forest filled with trees so thick that even when I'd been an adult I wouldn't have been able to touch my hands together if I tried to wrap my arms around them. The strange trees weren't the only weird thing. The clearing itself was bizarre. Someone had taken black paint and smeared it along the grass in various patterns. The man was in the clearing too, at the very center of both the clearing and the large rune like drawings. A brush was in his hand and a wooden bowl of black paint was beside him. He was painting a baby with the brush, drawing black lines on their skin.

The scene shifted and I was in a black void. In front of me was a baby. It grew rapidly, aging a year every five seconds. The baby was female, like me. When it reached its teens the scene shifted again. The man was back and the teen was there too. The man gestured with his head, a beckoning motion. Then he walked away and the girl followed him.

Reality lurched again and I was back in the clearing, the strangely pale man staring down at me.

It would be easy to assume I was hallucinating, but before I had been in the body of a baby I had seen a lot. In my teens, I'd been a rather infamous supervillain. Later, I'd become a superhero. I was used to strange powers. The idea of being in a crafted illusion wasn't something new to me. So I kind of got that the guy was trying to tell me how things were. He was explaining that he had resurrected me, that I would be growing up, and that he expected me to follow him. The thing that I didn't understand was why he thought I would go along with it. He hadn't explained that part. There had been no threat of pain and no promise of reward. No incentive at all really.

More then that, the illusion had me on guard, because of what else it implied. Illusions were the sort of thing that got someone either a Master or a Stranger rating. I couldn't rule out that I was being misled. Still, there was a line between paranoia and caution and I needed to find it. I tried to grasp what he was playing at. Why he was doing this? Because anyone who knew me would have known better than to think they could force me to serve them. I didn't do well with bullies.

"I have questions for you about the past, Kherpi. Many questions." Again speaking in a language I couldn't understand. The man's hand came up to his chin. A classic thinking pose. We were lucky, sometimes those sort of poses didn't cross cultural barriers. "But how to show you that?"

It was desperation, but I didn't want to accept my power was gone, so I reached out for it again. Still, nothing. This wasn't the same as the time Bonesaw had disabled my power. It wasn't there, but distant. It was gone. I was hoping that it was the same here. That with a little time I'd go from a defenseless baby to a baby with the power to control every insect within a few hundred meters. Unfortunately, whatever had disabled my power hadn't weakened.

The man's hands moved to a clasped position again and my world lurched.

This time I was in a room with the man and before us was a puzzle laid out on a large wooden table. It was the sort of puzzle where pieces had different shapes and you had to fit them together to make an image. Some of it was put together, showing a tapestry that showed the evolution of man. Other parts showed a woman spitting out a fireball and a man swinging a sword. The middle was empty though, except for a picture of a giant beetle fighting a golden man. The man gestured toward me in the illusion. Not my viewpoint, but the teen girl that I knew he intended me to understand as myself. She moved forward and began putting the pieces together rapidly. It was clear that she already knew what pieces went where. Every point before the battle between the golden man and Scion was filled. There was one problem though. The pieces she was putting together were blank. There was no drawing on them. After she snapped together a large section of the puzzle, the man set down paints and brushes. The teen reached out, picking them up, and then I was back in reality. Back in the clearing, staring up at the white skinned man with the feminine features.

I was back in the clearing and the man was looking down at me.

Again, I felt as if I understood what he was hoping for me to understand. He wasn't looking for me to follow him so much as he was looking for answers to questions that he thought I could help him with. I wasn't exactly getting a vibe from him that suggested that he was the sort of person I should trust, but the context helped me understand what he was looking for.

Still, I was disoriented. Reeling. I had been fighting Scion what felt like minutes ago and the abrupt change was too much for me to feel as if I had a grip on anything. Or at least, not a solid grip.

His hands moved to a new position and my viewpoint shifted once more. This time the scene was of the sky. The sun rose then moved across the sky and set. It rose again. Then set. Faster and faster it rose and set until the days practically flickered by. Trees rose and fell around me. A river formed and then dried up. A fire raged by, leaving the area black. Then the black was rapidly overtaken by greenery again. Time passed, hundreds of years were whirling by in moments.

The message was obvious. This man had resurrected me. He was from the future, the distant future, and he wanted answers about the past. I came out of the illusion again in the clearing gurgling and happy. I had saved the world and life had went on. People were still around to wonder about the past and investigate it, which seemed beautiful.

The man smiled down at me.

"Ku ku ku. Excited to work with me are you? And to think, Jiraya and Tsunade said that I wasn't good with kids. But no - I won't have you around me until I've assessed you from a distance. Others, I can afford to keep near, but I've heard stories of your conquests, Taylor Hebert. Better to give you to my enemies. Let them raise a little warlord who can't help but conquer her own village."

The man licked his lips, tongue long and purple. Even though I didn't recognize his words, except for my own name, I did recognize what it meant when he licked his lips. It was creepy and it was the sort of creepy that was blatant, evoking the idea that he was thinking about eating me and enjoying it. Which meant he was doing it intentionally. Playing a head game.

A hard tight rope to walk. Unsettling someone, but not giving away that it was an act, that the goal of the action was to leave the person who noticed it unsettled. I didn't have my power. Didn't have full use of my body, even if I was slowly working it out. Still, he had shown me a puzzle in which something that I recognized as a distorted representation of me had fought against Scion. Even with nothing, I had still my reputation. I could use that.

He had wanted to creep me out. I didn't let him, but I stopped gurgling. Then, carefully, I met his eyes. Just as carefully, I smiled. With our different cultures, it was hard to tell what the change on his face meant. The subtle shift in his posture.

He raised his hands again. Moved them at a speed I couldn't follow. This time, I didn't sink beneath an illusion. Instead, the corner of my vision went black.