Welcome to Now You Feel Like Number None. This story was originally posted on the Sufficient Velocity forums. It takes the form of a Quest, an interactive fiction. At the end of each update, a choice is proposed and voted upon. In this case, the options selected by readers during the story's original run are checked for clarity's sake.

You live in a world of endless night.

You are a monster born out of a legend. When a mortal dies with a soul weighted down by regret and earthly passions, her ghost lingers on as a tormented creature. Eventually, grief consumes this soul, and it becomes a monster. Plagued by a hunger for the souls of others, these Hollows may eventually turn on each other; and from their great interdevouring are born the greater horrors of the dead, which flee the abhorrent sun into a world of their own making.

In a world of endless silver sands, under a starless night and a laughing moon, the greater dead eke out a life of eternal hunger, ever feasting upon each other. For centuries, all you knew was this hunger and the howling of the thousand souls within you. To even remain a single person - to keep your identity, your sense of self - took all your effort and resolve. It took more than this. It took consuming the souls of others just as powerful and tormented as you were; you sew together the cracks in your being with the spiritual energies of countless others.

If ever you failed, if ever you faltered in your feast, you would fall back; your sense of self would be torn apart by the howling storm of souls within you. You had to kill. You had to live.

And then… A man came to you, a man of a kind that should have by all rights killed you. He saw in you a glimmer of potential, however dim, and showed you how to break free of your chains. For ages you had worn a mask to hide your pain and self-loathing; but he showed you how to break that mask and reveal to the world a face full of certainty and purpose.

And when he told you of his quest to claim the throne of God in the skies, you bent the knee and swore loyalty to him.

The hunger was gone. And without it...

...what was left of you?

The Hollow World, like its inhabitants, has an endless hunger. It gnaws at those who wander its sands and sleep under its sky. In a desert where nothing ever changes, it's so easy to get lost.

At least the sand doesn't cling to your pants.

You clutch your compass tighter. As long as you have it, you can always make it back to Las Noches. To something in this nothing.

For now, you scout. It's a pointless duty, and one you were never commanded to do, but it's better than lazing about. Even if it's hardly less boring, it feels right.

You stop and look around, brown eyes wide behind your mask. The moon is only half-full. It's evening. There's hardly a breeze.

Was it nothing?

You draw Polilla. You could have sworn-

Sand tumbles down the dunes, and this time you're sure. Something's moving. Underground.

You take to the sky and stand there instead. You're not going to let yourself be food.

One of the dunes moves. A white horn bursts through the side, followed by one grey leg. Then another. And another.

That's... a lot of legs, you think, as the beast shakes off the sand that had covered it. Now that it isn't masquerading as a dune, you can see it fully. It looks like a horned spider. With, somehow, too many limbs, and a hollow hole punched horizontally through its abdomen.

It's weak, you decide. Just a regular hollow, not so hungry as to need more than the air and sand of Hueco Mundo.

You ready Polilla and prepare to dive.

"Hello!" it rumbles, and you pause.

Hello?

"I have slept long. What are you?"

You are Nemo Elcorbuzier, Arrancar #48 in service to Sosuke Aizen.

The beast hums contemplatively. It sounds like an earthquake.

"Never heard of him," it shouts up at you.

You don't sputter, but it's a close thing. Aizen's ruled Las Noches for... well you're not sure, really, but quite a while.

"A ruler? Now that's a rare thing," the spider replies. "Come down here, we can hardly have a conversation shouting at each other."

You descend cautiously.

"You are a small morsel, aren't you?" it asks. "Surely you can't be that fast with legs that short."

You're not sure if you want to be offended or wary of the implication. You're faster than it, you're sure.

"Pah, maybe in a sprint," it scoffs. "But over a journey I think my legs will hold up better. I can rest some while others walk, and you cannot, biped."

You're skeptical.

"A proof then. Let me carry you to this lord of yours, and see if the leaving was faster than the return."

And why should you trust it?

"We are both Hollow, you and I, and yet it is not our bellies that are empty," it answers. "Now will you let me aid you on your journey and see this Las Noches?"

...Fine.

You climb into the abdomen of the beast. Now that you're here, you can see what look like seats carved into the dark chitin of the hole. Little more that divots, filled with white sand, but they are reassuring and you settle down into one.

And it is well that you did, because the beast is not gentle as it moves. However, despite the bruising your backside has suffered, you begin to see the pillars of Las Noches pass by far sooner than you'd expected.

The spider stops before the great gates. They're unmanned, as usual. No threats exist to Las Noches in Hueco Mundo. You're alone.

You disembark from the beast. It should hide, under the dunes. Another arrancar might think it good prey. You should give it that much advice, as thanks.

"Thank you, small thing," it rumbles. "It is good to be of use once again."

You are Nemo Elcorbuzier, Arrancar of Las Noches, servant of Lord Aizen, and you are reaching the end of a journey.

Your feet hit the silvery sands of the Hueco Mundo, and you feel yielding under you. A familiar sensation so absent in the sun-lit world. You turn and wave your hand as a goodbye, but already the great spider that carried you so far is scurrying away, somewhere away from the ever-present threat radiated by the walls of the fortress.

Las Noches stands before you, its walls so tall as to swallow the sky. It is a construct so vast it never registered to you as a building; rather it is a feature of the landscape, a mountain made by hand. Hands like yours.

You pass the great gates and flinch behind your mask. The sudden shift from endless night to endless day is jarring; you see blue skies above your heads, clouds even, and you know they are false but your body believes their lie. You are not fond of the day.

They say the dome of Las Noches has its very own sky because the sun is Lord Aizen's eye; that wherever fall its rays Aizen can see. It is always day in Las Noches because there is no respite from his gaze.

Or perhaps it's just Aaroniero messing with the underlings' minds.

The fortress is far too vast for convenience - far bigger than warrants the number of personnel in Aizen's army. It takes you hours to reach your destination, at which point you really wish you could have invited the spider Hollow into the walls. Eventually you arrive at a wide cylindrical building of grey-white stone, windows pierced at seemingly random intervals through its walls by some demented architect.

Enough with walking. You pause below the wall, assessing the height to the window you want to reach; it has a scarlet scarf blowing lightly in the wind, put there by you weeks ago as a reminder. You crouch, tensing your body, and kick the ground.

You don't fly - but you jump good. You hit the walls a dozen yards or so up, and immediately start running. Your cloak billows behind you, parting in two like great moth wings. You start losing your footing and falling back. You push yourself harder in response, a swift kick letting you cross another ten yards in one moment. To any onlooker you would appear to have simply teleported from one spot to the next.

You paddle a little on the last few yards, starting to lose your ground, but you reach the window in time. Your hand darts out and you grab the ledge, then pull yourself up. You land in the room a little less gracefully than you'd hoped, and give a quick and nervous look around to check that nobody saw it.

You're alone in the room, of course - this is Las Noches, density one Arrancar per square mile at best. Your improvised bedroom-apartment is all yours with no one to contest it, but by the same token there is no one else to help you put it together. You had to grab items where you found them… sometimes with a little sleight of hand. But you're happy enough with your little nest. The bed is made up of layers and layers of silk stolen from the nest of some kind of caterpillar-Hollow, and the furniture varies between pleasantly-shaped rocks found in the desert and the odd colored squares typical of Las Noches' architecture. Your curtains, you stole from the human world in one of your rare ventures out.

You take off your wing-cloak and hang it on a nail you hammered by hand into the wall. Then you sit on a rock that's more a suggestion of chair than anything, and brush the silver sand from your uniform.

In fact there is entirely too much of the damned stuff. Your feet whisper faintly with every motion. Sighing, you pull off your boots and shake them, letting the silvery grains fall out onto the ground until they're empty.

Aw, now there's sand on your floor. How will you ever get it out? You don't have a broom. You're not sure anyone has a broom in the entirety of Las Noches; it seems a bit too mundane for the grand designs of the Espada.

You hear a faint giggle, and your head snaps in the direction of the sound.

"Oops, I've been made," says a feminine voice, and the intruder steps out from behind a curtain. It's Esmeralda, a slender Arrancar with short, dark hair and a tired look, her mask covering half her face. How long was she here?

"Oh, I saw your brave attempt at climbing."

You let your head droop, crestfallen, and she giggles again.

"Don't worry. I certainly wouldn't have managed to even reach the window if I'd tried that, so you're already doing better than I am. You'll get the knack of it in time, I'm sure."

You sigh again. You appreciate her reassurance, but you've always been terrible at the raw physical aspect of being an Arrancar. Your Sonido in human form is just shameful.

But really, that's besides the point. She's just trying to distract you from the obvious question, that being what she was doing in your room when you weren't there! You give her a suspicious look, frowning.

"Oh, don't be silly. You know how long it takes to get there from the gates. Someone spotted you and told me, and I knew you'd come here, so I came to wait for you."

Well, it's not like you don't appreciate the company after all these days in the desert. The loneliness is rather consuming. You give her a fond smile, stand up from your rock and take off the scabbard at your waist, laying it on a table… Is that a table? You don't remember if you decided it would be a table, a nightstand or a chair.

Look, it's a featureless white square frame. It could be anything. You have to use your imagination.

"I wouldn't get settled back in so soon, actually," Esmeralda says with a contrite look. "I didn't come here just to say hello - I actually have orders."

Oh, goodie. You can't even catch some rest, it seems.

"Look, you know how it is. Ever since Lord Aizen came back it's been hectic. Well, he hasn't been, obviously, he's just always so… stoic and calm, like he isn't really doing anything. But around him everything is in a rush. I think the Espada are running out of Arrancars that are, uh…"

Disposable. You'd bet they still have their own Fraccion longing about not doing anything much, but they "can't spare them." So the work gets foisted on the unbound like you.

"Don't be like that. We all do what we can for Lord Aizen and the Hollows as a whole."

You shrug noncommittally. Your thoughts on the matter are complicated.

"Be that as it may, we have several orders from various Espadas, and they're all very insistent that I grab the first Arrancar to step through the gates and throw their task at them as a priority over the rest."

And here you thought she liked you.

"Don't look so glum, it also was nice to chat! Anyway, Granz wants to talk to someone about catching a deserter who ran off into the desert with, I quote, 'valuable scientific data.' Aaroniero wants someone to… go hunt a Hollow? I can't see why we'd do that anymore, but whatever. Oh, and…" She swallows nervously. "...King Barragan needs a scout to check on some rumors he's heard? And they all assure me that this is very important business, but apparently not important enough to send one of their Fraccions. Well, that's not fair, Aaroniero has no Fraccion." She leans conspiratorially towards you. "I think he ate the last ones they gave him."

You breath sharply, something like a laugh that died on takeoff. Esmeralda shakes her head.

"Honestly, I think they're just bored and like seeing us scurry around at their beck and call. Anyway, seeing as you can't be in three places at once, you should go see one of them and when the others complain I'll say that the other had already snatched you before I could tell you about their so-much-more-important business."

Sounds like a plan to you. You'll go meet...

[ ]Szayelaporro Granz, the mad scientist, who wants you to find a deserter with stolen scientific data.
[ ]Aaroniero Arruruerie, the cannibal Gillian, who wants you to hunt down a Hollow of particular interest to him.
[X]Barragan Luisenbarn, the deposed king, who wants you to investigate rumors concerning a lost item.