Plot idea prompted by tumblr user teslalindocruz and used with his permission. ;)
The human world is strange and loud and crowded. People talk constantly and crush together in waves on the streets. There's so little room that everything is built up, up, up, and Tesla finds himself small and lost beneath buildings that stretch into the heavens. Every time he looks up he feels faintly galled by their enormity, like they're only there to challenge him. There is a distinct temptation to release his resurreccion, which is - irrational.
The air is thinner here, even though it carries thousands more smells. There's not enough reishi in it. No wonder the humans are all weak and soft and strange. This air would make a hollow weak and soft and strange, too, if he lived in it. It just makes Tesla feel faintly ill and a little bit dizzy.
He twitches at the blinking neon glow from a nearby sign. There are harmless lights in every window, on the vehicles and even in people's hands. Every flash he catches from his peripheral vision reminds Tesla, uneasily, of a cero.
He can sort of see why it's him who's out here, feeling the sickly burn of the sun beating down upon his head. (It rises up from the cement beneath his boots, too. The human world is hot.)
Of all the arrancar capable of passing for human, Tesla is by far the least volatile. Certainly most of the espada would be unsuited to this sort of task... if it weren't already beneath them. Which it is, he reminds himself - although he really doubts their ability to get it done, too. Many of them are... high strung, and easily distracted.
Tesla is not high strung. Tesla is steady and disciplined and, given how unpleasant the human world is, he has decided to take this mission as a kind of backhanded compliment.
That doesn't change the part where he is still completely lost, of course.
"Um... excuse me," says a human, and it takes Tesla an awkward half second to realise he's being addressed. It's just really hard to tell because their reiatsu is negligible and he feels like none of them are real. It's like being surrounded by people made of cotton fluff.
But Tesla is in a gigai, because a gigai is necessary for interaction, and that means people can see him.
Yes. Of course.
"Yes," says Tesla stiffly, turning to it.
It is... short. And wearing a soft hat and a bag with charms dangling from it. One of the charms is a tiny pink pig with wings, which he considers... remarkably unlikely to occur in nature.
"You look a bit lost," says the human uncertainly. He can see it is trying to avoid looking at his eye patch, although he can't tell why. It's eyes linger on the fragment of his mask. "Do you need help?"
Tesla blinks once, slowly. That seems strangely helpful, and therefore suspect. Its reiatsu is really negligible though, and it can't hope to hurt him. He hesitates.
"Ah!" The human waves its hands and turns red around the edges. "I'm sorry for being so familiar, I don't mean-"
It seems like it won't stop talking if he doesn't stop it, so he stares it down and waits until it takes an awkward, mortified pause for breath. Deliberately slow and careful, he sayd: "Do you know where I can find tea? To buy?"
He specifies because the 'buying' idea is a fairly foreign concept to Tesla.
Hollows don't have their own currency, unless you count blood. There is, technically speaking, trade in Hueco Mundo but usually it is the trade of favours between more powerful hollows and arrancar.
There isn't really much in the way of material goods to exchange.
That's changing now, with the shinigami coming to Hueco Mundo. Aizen is changing the hollows far faster than the natural evolution of an individual allows, and he's bringing things with him - strange, luxury objects, things like cushions and chairs to sit on. There are soft clothes that must be worn, always, for reasons many of them don't quite understand fully - the cloth doesn't feel bad, but it's not warmer than Tesla's own reiatsu, either. The arrancar duly don them and try to make an effort to own them, although they don't really know what they're doing. The shinigami - Ichimaru and Aizen, anyway - look condescendingly at some of them like they're doing it wrong, but they never say why.
The changes are... strange. Tesla finds it strange to be still without resting, to sit and pay attention to words rather than actions. It's all don't fidget, don't doze, have a little discipline. There are a lot of new behaviours to think about, and if in the end they fail there's always Ichimaru there to drawl saa, well, I guess you can't expect more from hollows and Aizen to chide him, softly and indulgently, for being unkind.
Tesla isn't sure how much he likes it. He's not stupid enough to bring it up where anyone can hear - except, sometimes, Nnoitra-sama hisses that it's ridiculous, and Tesla feels a bit vindicated.
The human world reminds Tesla of the shinigami: material, busy, complicated in foreign ways. It's exotic, but he already misses home.
Best to focus on the task at hand and leave, then.
"There's a tea shop that way," the human is saying, and rattles off several directions, all quite confusing to Tesla. Tesla measures distance and direction by the moon and his own shadow on the sand. Street names and train station landmarks seem unnecessarily convoluted.
He follows the direction they're pointing in with his gaze. There are buildings in the way - a backlit sign flickering in the dusk, a creaking awning, a neon crab in the window of an eatery - but Tesla can presumably walk around them.
"...Do you want me to show you," says the human and now it is giving him a very dubious look.
"Past the shop with all the glowing lights," he says, feeling stung. "And then east."
"It's an electrical appliance shop," it says slowly. "You know. Televisions and computers and radios? And then left."
From here, left is left, but if Tesla turns, left is right. East is an objectively better measure. But perhaps humans aren't that bright - or maybe they can't feel the incredible, unhappy burn of the sun the way Tesla can, and east means less to them.
Tesla does not reject everything produced by shinigami or humans out of hand, but he does not like the human world.
"Whatever it is," he says, rapidly becoming dismissive in his irritation.
"It... sells televisions, ji-san," says the human. It seems increasingly alarmed
He's not its uncle. But then, Tesla calls Aizen '-sama' even though he's nothing like Nnoitra-sama and Tesla would absolutely eat him if he thought he could get away with it. Perhaps this, too, is politic.
Tesla understands that honorifics have a social function even when you don't mean them. Perhaps especially when you don't mean them.
"Let me take you," says the human. "You're going to walk into traffic or something, I know it."
"No. I won't," Tesla says stiffly.
Ichimaru warned him about breaking the humans' cars right before he left. And... just because Ichimaru was laughing at him doesn't make it necessarily poor advice.
His response seems only to make the human more concerned, which is exactly the opposite of his intention. Then it tugs him by the elbow. Its hands are colder than he is.
This is... strange. It stings his pride to be pulled around. It is galling. However, he gathers that if he lets it the human will bring him to the tea, and then he can just... exchange his money for the tea and go home. It seems easy. He follows.
He knows it would be easier to just take the tea. Humans sleep. Everything sleeps. But for whatever reason of Aizen's convoluted devising, he is to exchange currency for tea. He wonders if he's being tested somehow, and elects not to think about it.
Tesla is guiltily glad Nnoitra-sama isn't here to watch a human tugging him around by the arm though. It's humiliating.
They stop outside the shop with the glowing screens and the human gives him a very dour, offended sort of look and says: "Televisions. You know. TV."
"Yes," Tesla agrees placidly.
It doesn't seem to make the human feel any better. "...You watch it..? Play movies..?" it says, sort of hopefully.
Maybe this isn't going to get him where he needs to be after all. Annoying. "But I can't smell tea?"
The human gives him the strangest look yet. "You're kind of a weird guy, aren't you?"
"No," says Tesla. Nnoitra-sama says he's weird with relative frequency so he's probably lying.
"Hmm. Well. It's this way," it says, and storms off through the crowd. Tesla tugs his arm back - enough of that, he thinks - but he follows easily despite the crowd. As long as he's paying attention it's just like dodging extremely slow, poorly aimed projectiles.
They turn three corners and walk beneath a shadowy underpass before they get to the shop he's looking for. The human points, but Tesla caught the scent from halfway down the street. It is a mix of smokey and bittersweet and grassy things that mixes unpleasantly with the acrid petrol, cigarettes and hot plastic smells.
It still smells better than the surrounding area though. Tesla follows his nose.
"You're welcome," mutters the human behind him somewhere, low enough that he almost misses it. That's a strange thing to say. He ignores it.
There's a bell that clinks overhead when Tesla enters the store and a strange cat figurine waving near the entry. The tea shop is dark and it smells about twelve times better than the outside. There's marginally less noise and the sun is a lesser burn from beneath its roof.
The proprietor is a human (a different one) who seems to be dozing on a stool behind its bench. There's a flimsy paper book on the bench, and a faint wheezing snore coming from the human's face.
That suits Tesla just fine for now, because there are a lot more kinds of tea than he might have expected. The labels are no help. There's white tea, black tea, green tea, post fermented tea, tea with rice, tea with bark, tea with flowers... there are tea types that seem very different depending on what part of the leaf is involved and whether it was grown in full sun or not.
Tesla inhales carefully, trying to track down one he recognises. Surely if it smells the same as something Aizen has had before, it won't be wrong.
He's very sure he doesn't want to be wrong.
His nose is confused by the mix of scents and his eyes are stinging, which isn't helping with the strange thumping of his head in the thin air, but in the end Tesla selects something fancifully called "jade dew" (although it is the colour of neither jade nor dew) and goes to the bench with the dozing proprietor.
The human does not wake.
Tesla coughs.
There's no movement.
After a loooong second, Tesla flares his reiatsu.
It jerks awake, eyes wide, and gasps for breath like it can't breathe. It might not be able to, under the pressure of Tesla's reiatsu. Its eyes bulge at whatever it is feeling.
Heroically, Tesla resists the temptation to let all of his reiatsu unfurl and watch the stupid thing choke.
Instead he wraps the energy tightly around himself, restrained and deceptively small.
"I'd like to buy this tea," he says instead.
The human coughs and sputters, but in the end all it says is, "Excuse me, sorry, so sorry."
Tesla watches blankly.
"Now, you were-?"
"Tea," Tesla repeats, sliding the big wooden canister of it across the bench.
The tea is exchanged for money with remarkably little difficulty. He has no idea if it's expensive or not and he doesn't care.
When Tesla leaves, it's dark and significantly quieter outside. Night here has nothing on the nights in Hueco Mundo but it is still cooler and more familiar. The sun doesn't hurt as much now. The stores with the neon lights are still open - they glow even more luridly in the relative darkness - but many of the others are shut.
Tesla pauses outside the "electrical appliance store". It is dark inside now, except for the unholy glow of the screens. There's still a story playing silently on each one of them. A sign in the window says BUY NOW: 20% OFF.
Casually, and without really contemplating his motives, Tesla raps the glass window smartly with his knuckles. It shatters in a rain of noisy glittering shards.
He takes one home.
When he first gets back he takes several huge breaths of proper air and shucks his gigai under the moonlight. He carries it back to the laboratory he got it from, shivering with a new sensitivity in the familiar reishi-dense air.
Szayelaporro doesn't deign to acknowledge him at all, except with a sniff when Tesla sets the gigai down in his laboratory. Tesla leaves before this tremendous good luck runs out.
He leaves the television at the door of his own small room in Nnoitra's territory so he doesn't have to explain it to anyone else.
The tea turns out to be more or less what Aizen wants - or so Tesla assumes, because nobody says anything bad about it when he is called upon to report and presents it. There are a few surprised expressions, which is unflattering. Not from Aizen, of course, who doesn't seem to indulge in anything as crass and organic as surprise.
And not from Nnoitra, either, who seems at best bored out of his skull by the meeting, by the talking, by trade and humans and tea. That counts all of the people Tesla cares about.
He is dismissed before the espada are, and he feels Nnoitra's eye following him.
...Despite how ambivalent he feels about opinions other than Nnoitra-sama's, Tesla's still annoyed enough to pause when Loly stops him in a long white corridor to express her sneering surprise that he's able to follow even such simple instructions. "I can't believe Aizen-sama sent somebody like you on an important mission-"
The only reason she does it, he knows, is her belief that he won't retaliate. Tesla's temper is uncommonly slow and restrained for a hollow. He isn't easily riled, which makes him a safe target for Loly's... excess of personality.
Menoly, who has a greater sense of self preservation, is watching him with a quiet and wary air.
Tesla makes an annoyed noise - it escapes him unintentionally, but he still means it - and then turns toward her in the corridor and tilts his head.
"It was just an errand," he says evenly.
"Of course it was," Loly agrees immediately, throwing one pigtail over her shoulder. She's a skinny thing - and not in the way of endless limbs and towering strength. Loly makes him think of birds with their nervous movements and hollow bones. "But that doesn't mean you should expect Aizen-sama to rely upon you in the future. It's not your place to be beside him."
In principle Tesla agrees with that sentiment - his "place" is beside Nnoitra-sama and nowhere else, and the less time he spends running surreal errands for Aizen, the better. The way she says it, however, is galling - like knowing his place, to her, means knowing he is not good enough.
Loly could not be clearer: she thinks Tesla should be lesser in Aizen's convoluted esteem than she is.
He considers eating her. He isn't actually that hungry (although he is always a little bit hungry, because hunger is what hollows are), but he'd like to hurt her. He wouldn't even need to release his zanpakuto. Loly is weak.
Whatever she sees in his facial expression is enough that Menoly catches her partner by the arm and tugs on her. "Loly, enough, come on."
"Hey! Let go of me!"
"Loly."
Now that he's thought about it, the idea seems terribly compelling. He may not even need to draw his zanpakuto. He can just slam his fist into her mask over and over and over, until it chips and cracks and falls away in fragments. He can almost hear her sneering voice gurgling breathlessly beneath her broken face.
Tesla takes two steps forward, staring blankly at the mask fragment around her eye. Yes. He can almost feel her under his hands now. His reiatsu rises all on its own, filling the corridor between them. In the back of his head the word is throbbing, repeating until it's not even words anymore, just a cacophony of crush, crush, c r u s h-
"Loly!" says Menoly, at increasing pitch and urgency.
"What's going on?" asks a new voice, low and steady, and it's backed by a wash of icy reiatsu that freezes Tesla in his tracks.
"Nothing," says Menoly quickly, but it's telling that she doesn't take her eyes off Tesla.
He blinks slowly and turns towards Tier Harribel where she stands in the corridor with one hand on the wall. Their meeting must be over.
She is at ease, doesn't even reach for her weapon, but the reiatsu around her is wary.
There is a long, tense pause. "Aa," Tesla says finally, straightening up. He draws his reiatsu in more tightly, shivering as the feeling recedes. There's no need to make such a fuss as all this. "Nothing."
It is against the rules to kill each other in Las Noches, technically. It never seems to stop Nnoitra or Grimmjow much, but there are privileges to being one of the espada.
"Then you can keep going," Harribel says, calm and implacable.
Tesla takes the dismissal as it is given. He walks away from Harribel carefully, one foot in front of the other. He can feel her at his back. It takes an effort not to turn and keep an eye on her, although having an eye on her will not help if she decides to attack.
Tesla almost walks into the television coming in, and he eyes it uncertainly. He doesn't know what possessed him to take it.
He sleeps off his headache from the human world's poor air and pounding sunshine in a pile of blankets that smells of nothing but him and, a little, of Nnoitra. (Alright, not everything from the human world is stupid. Tesla likes blankets. They are warm and soft and their dry thin fibres cling to whatever scent is around them.)
A kick in his side wakes him. "Ne, Tesla."
Tesla flinches and cracks open his eye. The light is wrong, so all he sees is a towering silhouette with a huge circular shape on top. It smells familiar though. Nnoitra is even taller when Tesla is horizontal, and he is a particular expert at looming.
"The hell is this thing doing here?"
Tesla looks at the television. Its screen is dark, but it's still in one piece. "I found it in the human world," he says.
He rolls away and gets to his feet fluidly, shaking off the confusion of sleep. He can feel his hair doing something weird and he pats it uncertainly. Nnoitra is eyeing the television and not Tesla.
"More human shit, fine. Why's it here?"
A good question. Tesla finds it unaccountably hard to answer. Finally he says, "If you dislike it, I will get rid of it immediately."
That's clearly not the response Nnoitra is looking for. "What do you want more human stuff for?"
Some of the espada, like Starrk and Harribel, restrain their reiatsu when they deal with lesser hollows. Nnoitra isn't one of them. Standing steady beneath the full pressure of Nnoitra's reiatsu with all the weight of his attention upon him is a little bit like staring into the sun.
"It lights up. Tells stories." He realises how frivolous and stupid that must seem, and a part of him wants to curl back up and put the blankets over his head. The human world clearly made him loopy. "...It seemed interesting at the time."
He's not quite sure if he should apologise or not.
"...A toy." There is an incredulous pause. "What kind of..." Nnoitra grunts to himself, which could mean anything, trails off, and turns back to Tesla. "A toy?"
Nnoitra frowns, wide mouth tugged down, eye narrowed upon Tesla's face in the dim lighting.
It is, isn't it? Tesla went to the human world and brought back a toy. That sounds stupid. He feels kind of stupid.
Nnoitra-sama is asking him a question, so Tesla answers even though it's kind of humiliating. "Yes," he says.
"I sure have a strange damn fraccion," mutters Nnoitra. "Whatever. Keep it, I don't care."
...Really?
"Don't start acting weird about it," he adds severely, scowling harder.
Tesla agrees. He's still in two minds about the thing himself.
Thirty seconds later, Nnoitra drags Tesla out for training. He's as relentless in his efforts as ever, so they don't return until hours later. By then, Tesla is bleeding in six places and ready to drop. His snapped clavicle will take at least the next several hours to heal, and he still has to find someone to eat if he wants to recover. He should have eaten Loly when he had the chance.
Nnoitra will leave him behind if he isn't fully recovered, and he'll probably yell at him for remaining injured, too.
Tesla puts it off for several long minutes but in the end he levers himself up. There are things more important than his comfort. He needs the food. Maybe just a gillian...
He doesn't even really think about the television again for days.
next up: tesla hooks up his television, what an adventure