RELEASED SOUL
Book One: Earth
This is co-written.
Scritch-scritch-scritch-scritch.
The sound of a quill-tip scraping the edge of parchment, ink dripping from its end each time.
It is believed the Avatar has taken up hiding somewhere in the Eastern Earth Kingdom. Your mission is to draw him out and present him, alive, at the Fire Nation Capital in thirty days' time.
P.S.: Be wary of the messenger hawk, General Jaegerjaquez—it bites.
Dark blue eyes scanned the last few lines of the parchment in front of him. Errantly, he flicked his hand at the hawk that had leaned forward to nip his knuckle—a zap of electricity flew from his fingertips, startling the bird into stumbling backward with a large screech, its wings fluttering anxiously and sending the papers scattering across the cabin of the room.
"Grimm-jow!" a voice sing-songed into the silence of the room cheerily.
General Grimmjow Jeagerjaquez jerked upright, eyes pinched in anger as he curled his hands into fists. He stood up from his desk, pushing the chair grumpily underneath it and crossing his arms as he acknowledged the man.
"What do you want, Ichimaru?"
"I told you, it's Uncle Gin," the silver-haired man corrected lightly, surveying the room with his hands tucked behind his back. "My, my, what a mess!" The retired Fire Nation general wandered carefully past the papers scattered across the room, leaning his head slightly out the window of the boat, smiling down at the foamy sea waves that crashed against the metal sides of the vessel far below.
"Get out of my room," Grimmjow snapped, glaring at the man, an unamused frown settled across his features as he stubbornly left the papers on the floor. He tilted his head back in silent exasperation, surveying the chandelier hanging from the grey ceiling, admiring the warm flames for a moment as he resisted the urge to yell. It only seemed to encourage the fox-like man's behavior.
"But we're all having so much fun downstairs!" Gin crowed invitingly over his shoulder as he waved slightly down at the crew on deck. Grimmjow moved closer with an arched eyebrow, glancing out at the men who were responding to the silver-haired man's wave with looks of confused anxiety, pausing in their work, a few even daring to wave back hesitantly.
"I'm sure," Grimmjow responded bleakly, sending a mean look at the men from over Gin's shoulder. They quickly scrambled away from view—the few who had been playing at the Pai Sho table standing up and pretending to fiddle with the cannons with airs of importance.
"Come play Pai Sho?" Gin asked somewhat poutingly as he pulled his head inside from the window, whisking out a white lotus tile from his sleeves momentarily and twirling it lightly between pale fingertips, which were whitened from the cold ocean air.
"No," Grimmjow responded coolly, stepping back to gesture toward the door again.
Gin pouted, and left the singular tile on Grimmjow's desk. "In case you change your mind," he said in his usual, obnoxious, sing-song tone of voice as he stepped toward the exit.
The metal door swung closed behind him just as Grimmjow fell onto his bed with a frustrated grunt. He tilted his neck back to rest the base of his skull against the wall for a moment, listening to the receding footsteps and the sound of the waves crashing against the boat, the angry tides protesting their steady approach.
With a sigh, the blue-haired man reached up a hand slowly to remove the partial mask from his jawline. The faux bone material came loose as the blue fire in his hand heated up the material, expanding it and allowing it to release. It fell into his lap, revealing a red and purple scar disfiguring the skin.
He placed the mask silently into the drawer of his bedside table, maneuvering out of his bed shirt as he sat down again.
He swung to his feet after a moment of hesitation, wandering over to the mirror to tilt his head at the still unsettling and unusual reflection of his own.
Angry, reddish pink scar tissue ran up his stomach, halting momentarily where his head had tucked in, and stretched on across his jawline. The scar was young, still only six months old—and, as predicted, it showed little sign of healing prettily. A swell of red-hot rage fanned up inside him, electricity buzzing at his fingertips.
Snorting out a laugh, he turned away from the mirror again, shrugging his shoulders and falling back on to his bed, glaring up at the ceiling.
He'd be king, that much he knew. No matter what it took. He would regain his honor and title whenever Aizen died; if his demise just so happened to occur soon after Grimmjow's title was returned, well, people would talk. They might even speculate he had something to do with the Fire Lord's passing. It was no matter.
He would kill them, too, if he had to.
"Ichi-go!"
Splash.
Water dripped rapidly from the ends of orange locks, Ichigo blinked the water from his eyelashes. A few feet away, Isshin Kurosaki held an empty bucket, a triumphant look spread across his features.
"What was that for?!" Ichigo yelled, snapping his neck upright to glare into his father's playful gaze as he lifted his shoulders and arms awkwardly away from his drenched body.
"Water-bending attack!" Isshin crowed, dancing away from the infuriated redhead and into the kitchen of their flat. "Imagine, Ichigo—if I had been a water-bender waiting to ambush you. What then? How would you have defended yourself?" he wailed.
Ichigo snorted, rolling his eyes and shaking his head side-to-side like a dog. "It's the Fire Nation we have to worry about Dad, not the Water Tribes. And you shouldn't make jokes about stuff like that," the teen said grumpily, pulling his soaked shirt over his head and tossing it over to the dirtied laundry. "I'm going out with Renji and Rukia, is that all right?" he added as his father wandered over to the herb table, grinding up some random rock (or maybe it was dirt.)
Isshin opened his mouth to protest, but his son took it as assent, nodding as he snatched up a baguette from the bowl of bread in the kitchen. He tucked it between his teeth, pulling a new, dusty-green shirt from the clean laundry basket and pulling it over his head, his orange hair already beginning to dry. "See ya', old man," he called over his shoulder, kicking his heel down to open an optional door in the side of the house, closing it after himself as his dad whined complaints.
Ichigo blew out a breath, running a hand through his drying hair as he looked around, starting his way into the village, eyes peeled for his iconically loud friends.
"Oi, listen here all right, this isn't my brat—you got it?"
Renji Abarai stood, shouting at the top of his lungs, the tattoos on his arms flexing as he squeezed his hands into fists, raising his voice continually at an enraged cart-owner.
"I am not a brat!" an equally-enraged, female voice screeched—the shout was shortly followed by curses of pain from Renji.
"My cabbages!" the cart-keeper kept on, voice tight in rage and tinged with grief for his vegetation.
"Oi, Renji!" Ichigo called, lifting his hand in a slight wave as he jogged over, bare feet beneath his feet coverings picking up the overwhelming tension from the group of three as he approached. "Sorry sir, this here's my little sister. She's a helpless blind, and she's a bit of an idiot," Ichigo said quickly, setting a hand on to Rukia's head.
The black-haired girl quickly began to shake in rage, and Ichigo consequentially lifted his hand, taking a hesitant step back.
"I'll have your heads—one for each head of cabbage," the crazed shopkeeper sobbed as he bent down, going to pick up the leafy-green vegetables.
"You're crazy," Renji sniffed, reaching back to fix his ponytail and shifting his eyes closed as he basked his tan skin in the heavy summer sun. "About time you showed up Ichigo," he added as the two of them turned around, Renji reaching back a hand idly to guide Rukia along with them before she could start with the shopkeeper again—or deny being an idiot. "We've been waiting for you," he added, nodding back to the slightly wrecked cart area, where a shipping cart lay smashed in the middle of.
Ichigo laughed slightly, tilting his head back to narrow his eyes at the slowly setting sun. "I thought Rukia hated riding those things," he added confusedly after a moment, turning to give Renji an arched look—to which he responded with a smile.
"I do," the girl insisted, jerking her arm away from Renji as she gave up her attempt to shout swears back at the cart owner. "I was wearing these stupid things," the girl said, gesturing down to her feet where she wore expensive-looking new shoes, "and I couldn't break them, or my brother would have noticed. And he," Rukia paused, pointing a finger very accusingly up at Renji, who simply arched a ridiculous eyebrow at the girl's gesture, "took me on one of those things without telling me where we were going."
"Hey, hey, it all would have worked out just fine," Renji argued, raising his hands in an appeasing gesture when the small, blind girl shook her fists threateningly, "but she had to go and flip out, do that weird little rocky-thing you guys do, and sent us flying right into that poor man's produce. And then, she tried to blame it on me."
Rukia's pale eyes widened imperceptibly and she stomped one foot in a seeming fit of anger, the earth from underneath Renji seeming to jerk backwards at the last moment, sending the red-head backwards into the dirt with a grunt.
Clearing her throat with an innocent smile, and seeming quite pleased as Renji pulled himself to his feet and sent her a dirty look, the girl tilted her head in the opposite of Ichigo's direction (the shoes were obviously still hindering her ability to see, but neither of the boys took the risk to tell her when she wandered in a slightly errant direction, instead just following her misguided lead) "You were late, anyway, where were you?" she asked. "We don't have any time for practice now," she snapped.
"Yeah, Ichigo, we were finally going to try knife-throwing today," Renji added in a pout, Rukia sending him a scowl as he did so.
"That's not important, his training in earth-bending is," Rukia argued.
"Oi, just because—"
"My dad kept me late," Ichigo cut in, putting a stop to another one of the two's arguments before it could get too heated. "Why don't we have time tonight, anyway? We have all night. I don't like to practice with the little fan-club hanging around, anyway," he said with a shrug.
"Because the Rock Festival is tonight!" Renji shouted, banging his head emphatically to imaginary music. Ichigo rolled his eyes, and after pausing in thought, Renji shuddered. "Speaking of fan-club, that stupid pervert Urahara has moved his shop even closer to the practice ring today. He kept offering Rukia and I candy," he said.
"I like Kisuke," Rukia protested with a pout. "He has a good heart, I can feel it," she said confidently. "I have good intuition, trust me on these things," she added as she nearly walked into a wall, Ichigo discreetly sliding in between her and the building. She bumped into him, huffing and glaring up as she did so. "Watch where you're going, Twinkletoes."
"Sorry," Ichigo offered politely as she started away from the wall, following after while stifling a smile. "So are we going to the festival?"
"'Are we going to the festival?' Are we going—Rukia, look what you've done to Ichigo!" he shouted at the smug earthbender, who had stopped, arms akimbo as she stood in the center of the dead-end street where they had practiced daily for the past two months, having moved from the square after one too many run-ins with the overzealous cabbage salesman.
He turned to shoot Ichigo an exasperated look, his arms thrown up for extra effect. "Of course we're going, Ichigo! The Rock Festival is only the coolest thing that comes to Boulder City, and Ikkaku wrote me this morning and told me that The Rolling Pebbles are playing this year!" Renji half-shouted, half-whined.
Ichigo paused, frowning slightly and tilting his head to one side in thought. "Who are The Rolling Peb-"
"Oh, Ichigo!" a cheery voice called. The greeting was met with an exasperated groan from Renji, who stomped his heel into the dirt, pointedly refusing to look up at the 'Hat-Candy-and-Sandal' cart or the blond-haired man who ran it, Kisuke Urahara.
The orange-haired earthbender turned and shot Kisuke a genial smile, lifting a hand in greeting. "Hey Urahara, sold any hats today?"
The man shot him back a playful grin as he placed an oversized, blue-rimmed hat with yellow feathers sticking out the side, onto a bare mannequin head, placing it slightly off-center. The salesman didn't look up as he answered: "Not yet, but you know what they say: 'It's not about the sales, it's about the people.'"
Ichigo nodded somewhat hesitantly, one eye pinching unsurely as he coughed. "Uh, yeah. Right. You don't mind us practicing here so close to your stand, do you?" he asked the man, whose stand had moved a good ten feet down the street—away from the other sales carts and onto the once quiet off-road—motioning to the sixty-foot square space around them that was closed off by the backs of businesses.
"Be my guest," the cart-keeper said in a benevolent tone, brandishing a large straw-colored hat, flipping it over into the palm of his hand and then scooping it onto his head, leaving a few strands of hair hanging down to obscure his shadowed face. "I'll just watch while I wait for the evening rush."
Ichigo smiled and nodded, turning back to his two friends.
"What did I say, total creep," Renji said somewhat lazily, tossing what appeared to be a throwing knife in his right hand a foot into the air, the blade spinning once completely before landing in his palm.
Ichigo scowled, opening his mouth to defend the man when he caught in the corner of his eye a piece of ground the size of his fist flying towards him. He side-stepped, turning and watching the earth—bits of dirt flying off as it passed—zoom by his face, only missing it by centimeters before it made rock solid contact with the back of their favorite noodle shop, Kusajishi Noodles.
He turned to his now-barefoot earthbending master as Renji muttered grumpily, spinning his knife between his fingertips.
"Rukia! I wasn't ready for that! You could have knocked my head off!"
The girl smiled widely, planting her left foot in front of her, stance wide. "That's not my fault,' she said, then stomped down with her more forward foot, sending a ripple in the ground towards where Ichigo stood.
Ichigo's eyes widened, and he jumped a few feet up into the air, feeling almost like he was floating for a few seconds, and out of the way before landing and immediately lifting out a cylinder of ground and shooting off slices towards the blind earthbender, who knocked each one away with casual, dismissive flicking motions, her expression bored as she sent the last one back at his face. He swung to the side, letting the rock past by him again.
"Is that the best you can do, Twinkletoes? What have I told you? Don't dance away, keep your ground! You'd think you were an airbender with those feet!" she roared, her voice surprisingly deep for her small frame.
Brown eyes hardened, and Ichigo squared himself again, centering himself over the earth, drawing on his powers. He took in a deep breath and lifted both hands, picking up two mounds of earth on either side of him, both in size larger than his teacher. He swung his hands forward and together, the terra mimicking the movement of his arms as they flew towards the girl.
Rukia lifted both hands digging her feet into the dirt, the earth slowing but not stopping before closing around her with a crushing sound.
Renji let out a whoop of joy from the side. "Good hit, Ichigo! Five more wins this week and you will pass her up!" he shouted encouragingly, having given up his pouting; his knife lay planted into the dirt a few feet away.
Ichigo ignored him as he watched a crack form down the middle of the mound of earth, the center pulling apart in pieces and falling away to either side, revealing a glowering Rukia.
"Maybe you should have dodged that!" he shouted with a laugh.
The sound quickly turned into a yelp of distress when the girl growled dangerously, blind eyes flashing with irritation, and sent his own shots back at him in the shape of daggers.