My day had begun normally. Dare I say, it was almost idyllic. For the first time in a long, long time I had awakened to a boyfriend sharing my space. Even so, he wasn't just any boyfriend. This one had proposed to me. I even had the ring to prove it.

We were on a camping trip up in the mountains, miles away from anything and anyone. It was our way of celebrating. I guess he hadn't been certain I would accept his proposal. It was mostly because I really hadn't known him for very long. Just a few months ago, I had been single. The romance was, but it was the first luck I'd had with love in years. I figured, finally, for the first time, love was on my side. I was relieved. To be blunt, I'd had more bad dates than I could count. Dating sites seemed to be filled only with leeches, mama's boys, and married men after you reached a certain age.

Sadly, this perfect moment was not to last. Like I said before, I really have lousy luck with love. The worst. I should have seen it coming. I used to think that the guy who dated me and didn't tell me he was married was the lowest scumbag on the face of the planet, but I was wrong.

I'm a little sketchy on the details, but I know we were on a hike through the woods. Then my fiance, that bastard, he grabbed me and knocked me out with some kind of chemical. Thankfully I wasn't awake for what came next. To be blunt, I don't want to know what he did.

When I next woke, everything was strange, blurry, as if I'd been pumped full of psychotropics. Everywhere I looked in the moonlit woods there were trees. They weren't unfamiliar trees, but they weren't familiar either. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear a dog barking, but it wasn't the same bark I recognized from my dog. I was out flat on my back, and I couldn't figure out how to get up. What I saw, what I heard, all came to me as if through some kind of haze. I was having trouble focusing on the woods around me.

I had a vague recollection even in my confusion that this, all of this was my fiance's fault. At least, I was alive. Had he drugged me? I was finding moving exceptionally difficult as if my limbs were all weighed down, and I had no idea how long I had been out. Perhaps I had fallen while under the effects of mind altering drugs? A concussion? Worse yet, why couldn't I remember my fiance's name? I needed to remember because I was going to report his ass to the police. Just as soon as I could figure out how to stand up.

Next to me, I saw a flicker of light, and I forced my eyes to move since the rest of me sluggishly refused. There was a man I didn't know to my left with a syringe in his right hand that sparkled faintly in the moonlight. For some reason, he seemed huge to me. More like a giant than a man. He smirked at me, then spoke, but his words made no sense. It sounded like a different language. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

A pale, thin, and horribly huge hand reached out and his thumb briefly brushed against my cheek. I struggled to make out his features, and for a moment I could pick out yellow eyes lined with purple, framed by long, dark-colored hair. He looked disturbingly like someone I had seen before, but I struggled to place the face with a name. Why was I having so much trouble thinking?

The dogs were growing closer, and, even in my confused haze, I sensed that their nearness concerned him. He rose from his crouch next to me, the syringe in his hand disappearing with a flick of his fingers. Then with a few more strange words in his seemingly foreign tongue, he disappeared into the darkness. I say disappeared because he didn't walk away. It was more like he had melted into the night like an ink stain absorbed by the shadows. A whisper, a bit of ethereal flicker, and then nothing.

It occurred to me then that I should be afraid of what I had just seen, but I wasn't. Cold logic demanded me to consider this scenario calmly. Panic would do me no good. Perhaps I was having some wild dream caused by drugs or severe trauma? I tried closing my eyes tightly and counting to ten like I did when coming out of a deep meditation.

When I opened my eyes again, unfortunately, nothing around me had changed. Though I willed myself to wake, I didn't, and I still couldn't move. It was almost like I was wrapped in some kind of cocoon or a blanket.

Just then, the sound of the dogs was to my left, and a moment later several great beasts ran past me in pursuit. At first glance, I thought they looked a bit like wolves. They too were monstrously huge, just as the man had been. Another enormous dog burst from the woods to my right, the leaves crunching under paw as it pranced up to my prone form. It took all I had to shift a little to watch the great dog. Just its snout was close to the size of half my face.

It came close to me and began to snuffle my body, before giving my face a couple small licks. I blinked but found I couldn't quite laugh at the ticklish feeling. What came out of my mouth was more like a soft 'ehh' sound. This single thing broke through my haze of logical consideration long enough to actually make me feel some blossoming of concern.

This dream, no, nightmare was feeling all too real, and I wanted to wake up. I tried again to will myself back to reality, but after clenching my eyes closed again and thinking as hard as I could, I found that the dog still stood there over me when next I squinted out at the world. The creature looked up as the dry leaves on the forest floor crunched again, and I felt my whole world shift as giant hands scooped me out of the arboreal debris.

A woman with wild hair and a strange, red triangle marking on her cheeks was looking over me with a frown that certainly seemed displeased. Like the man before, she was eerily familiar. Her lips were pressed firmly together, the corners downturned in a scowl, and she clicked her tongue and sucked air in through her teeth as she studied me.

After this moment of consideration, I found myself cradled in the crook of her arm, and the world was flashing by at a dizzying rate as she ran and leaped through the woods. I struggled a little in her arms, but my limbs felt weak and barely moved. I tried to cry out to her, tried to convince this wild giantess to put me down, but all that came out was sobs and unintelligible howling on my part. Eventually, I passed out from the effort.

It took me several more hours to realize what was going on. You see, I never awoke from the nightmare no matter what I tried, but most telling was where I found myself come morning. I was in a crib, right next to what was clearly an infant. An infant who was about the same size as me.

As it all clicked into place, a sort of slow horror and dread settled into my gut. I was a baby, and I didn't understand how. Had my fiance killed me? I didn't remember dying. I wasn't sure what or how this had happened, but the passing of hours and then days soon made me admit that I was no longer in an adult body. So I concluded that this was probably reincarnation.

It was fascinating. It would have been more fascinating if I wasn't scared silly. You see, I had begun to hook names with faces. Orochimaru - that was the name of the man who had left me in the woods. I was certain of it, even though another part of my brain laughed and reminded me that anime was just silly stories.

See, I really didn't want to believe that I had been reincarnated into an anime that I once to watch in college. It was preposterous! However, with time and monotony, even the most ridiculous situation can become normal. After all, I had precious little to do but eat, sleep, and stare at the ceiling those first few months.