"In the beginning, there was a studio. It had taken a wildly popular franchise under its expert supervision, which ran unimpeded for a full sixty-three episodes. These were very happy episodes, replete with all the sophistication of the manga and blessed with competent animation. Televisions tuned into BLEACH by the millions every week, and there was much rejoicing. Darkness loomed, however, when the cartoon's creators realized they were catching up to the serials from which they drew their material a tad too rapidly. To keep the show on the air and prevent regular viewers from moving on to productions from rival animation houses, the temps were told to sub in for the head writers, all of whom had chosen the worst moment to take a lengthy vacation. Even the building's resident homeless banged their shabby heads together to help the beleaguered writers flesh out a workable draft. According to documented evidence, it is very likely that many of these makeshift raconteurs alleviated the stress of the deadline by deliberately whiffing the hoboes' brown crusty rags, which they believed to be laced with some psychotropic powder. During the ensuing meetings, someone came up with he called an '80s-lookin' vampire guy,' which his friend decided to name BOUNT (after the sickening crash the brand manager's head had made on the keyboard). Another intern imagined he saw a frilly chicken dancing rings around his tea right around when the janitor barged in ranting about how his rare doll collection had caught fire, and with each revolution of the peace pipe the whole thing reached ever more Bacchanalian proportions. The round table agreed unanimously on all proposals, and soon a filler arc was born."
"That's nice, Yoshino," said Ishida, patting the desk by the bed vaguely for his glasses and sitting up out of his sheets, "but it's so early in the morning. There are other ways to wake me up."
"Is something the matter?" she asked, for you see, the female Bount is known to have large chemical stores of naivete.
"I've heard this story a hundred times, Yosh. In fact, it's the only thing you ever talk about." The alarm clock conveyed a hazy 4:52. Ishida adjusted his glasses, which instantly illuminated the entire apartment. It was one room, dilapidated, dank, miserable, with just the wrong choice of curtains. It was the kind of flat the most inventive realty agent couldn't euphemize. But however empty and profoundly depressing or really just damn cloying Yoshino's apartment was, he knew it would always be a home away from home--especially since his dad had started to collect rent with interest.
"Well, there isn't much else to discuss," she responded, holding the sheets to her breasts in her seductively innocent manner. "The bad guys are trying to puncture a rift in the worlds by eating living humans' souls and building enough power to alter the atmosphere. They will then use their unassailable position in Hueco Mundo to conquer the earth in the name of the Bount. Makes perfect sense."
"And why do they need me again?" he asked, pacing the claustrophobic expanse of their tiny, tiny bedroom, tie flailing madly. The look of helpless desire accentuating her beautiful, lusty gaze was so intoxicating he'd nearly forgotten to button his shirt. "It's always Quincy this, Quincy that."
"Come back to bed, honey. You'll know everything... in due time."
Yoshino, sweaty and swooning, lay dying in Ishida's arms, her pretty grey eyes leaked life like a capsized ark of unimaginable grace, tears streamed down Ishida's long, chattering cheeks. In his anguish, one thought gripped his head:
Fuck. Now I'll have to find a new place to live.
He still didn't know anything about anything. Like why that Vincent Price wannabe was raving about soul-sucking horseflies suspended on a magic circle in the sky, or what Yoshino must have slipped in his orange juice that morning.
Kariya was ushering in the apocalypse with tremendous gusto, flailing about with obvious kiddish glee like a grand celestial emcee. "This world will be ours!" he insisted hammily. "Failing that, we shall achieve immortality! Or obliterate Soul Society! Wait, what was our objective again? AH WHATEVS!"
"Yeah! All right! Bount power!" shouted Rebellious Bount, beating his fist in the air. His impressive Pokemon Trainer coif blew metrosexually in the breeze of red ash.
"With this newfound strength we should finally be able to forge past the troubling backstories that originally turned us evil," reasoned Fat Bount.
"I am old," chimed in Geezer Bount.
"We're already dead," said the Bount twins, who were already dead.
"My fan talks. Why?"
"Hey, remember the guy with the snakes?" one of them sniggered.
"Oh, you mean the guy we kept around as a joke? Yeah, wasn't he riot?"
"OI, YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BANTER WHILE I'M DOING MY PRESENTATION GUYS," said Kariya. "Go, my loathsome bitto! Claim your hosts and siphon their souls!"
Ishida clicked on his Quincy-issue walkie-talkie. "Uh, this is ground control. We're experiencing setbacks, the Bount have launched their histrionics. Over."
"Ishida, don't sweat it," crackled Ichigo's maple-sugary voice. "It's a huge swarm of beating wings and probing feelers. How can anyone miss it?"
"They're invisible to normal humans," said Ishida.
"...At least they won't get scared," Ichigo assured him, "you know, before the end."
"You've been a great help as always, Ichigo."
"Roger that."
Ishida lunged away from a random fireball and almost bit his tongue. The receiver toggled frequency on impact with the dense soil.
"Yes? Renji speaking."
"Ugh..." Ishida puffed. "Listen, Abarai, the shit's really hitting the fan, and I mean BAD. At some point the Bount may decide to quit pumping their fists and deal some real damage. Is backup on the way?"
"...Who are you again?"
"Ishida Uryuu!"
"...Who?"
"Goddammit, Abarai, we've met before!"
The voice sounded distracted. "Oh my God, the bitto are evilly zeroing in on a little kid! And even though I could be saving a much more vast quantity of lives by defending places where humans typically congregate, such as hospitals or brothels, I'm going to spend my strength defending him."
"Lovely. Have fun with that." Ishida clicked off his walkie-talkie, chalking up all potential allies as useless. He would just have to defeat all of them on his own. Avenge Yoshino, find new cribs. Today would be a busy day. He rubbed his hands, took in a deep breath and surveyed the mass of Bount. Time for some Quincy-style battlefield analysis.
There was a lady one who seemed to be engaged in some sort of existential battle with her creepy talking fan. Ishida had a feeling the fan usually won. The fat one had large earmuffs around his neck, presumably to listen to whatever composer they danced to three hundred years ago. Rebellious Bount seemed to indulge in a form-fitting, sleeveless shirt that made Ishida wince, and Geezer Bount seemed to be standing asleep. Finally, there was the unsettling Bount standing in the corner with a tie and glasses and black hair and holy crap, Ishida realized, he's me!
Ishida courageously slunk away from the scene right before Yoshino's corpse detonated in a dazzling shower of who cares.
Bespectacled Bount paced his swanky cave apartment, wondering how things could have possibly soured. He had an aged pack of cards, a doll that killed through shadows, and a decent GPA. In other words, he was invincible. Who, he asked himself, just who had been genius enough to guess at Giselle's one disadvantage: light, in all its scarcity?
In retrospect, he should have never let Kariya drag him by the Adam's apple out of his grandma's basement after he'd accidentally pushed him down eight flights of stairs... successively. "Think of all the benefits!" he'd said. "Power. Notoriety. Uh, all the darkness you could want! And don't forget all the tail you'll be getting!" Yeah right. He'd never received those medicinal tiger tails he'd requested. Hopefully continued application of the bugjuice would clear his rare case of thirtysomething's acne instead.
Spectacles took a seat and sulked. What if the only reason Kariya had recruited him in the first place was to use him as bait? The more he reflected on the fishy circumstances surrounding his arrival, the more time he wasted not getting out of the way of a massive fist.
PAWNCH!
"Giselle!" he pussy-wailed. "No! You've turned on me! But WHYYY?"
"Because betrayal seems to be the vogue around these parts," said Kariya, who entered the cave with a smooth spring in his step, whistling ragtime with his hands in jacket pockets. "Haha, push!" he onomatopoeiad.
"NOOOOO!" Kariya kicked Spectacles into the shadow monster's gaping maw, but his glasses fell off midtrajectory and so he became [BLANK] and vanished anyway. Giselle promptly died as well. Kariya didn't know what it had been expecting, trying to eat its master and all, but he empathized anyway, 'cause that's the kind of guy he was.
"Hey, Kariya, you kill Joke Bount Mark II yet?" Fat Bounto peered in through the door at the carnage.
"You betcha."
"Let's get going. The Quincy opened up our gate."
"Kickass," said Kariya, "but before we do anything, die."
SLICE! DICE!
Kariya looked down at Fatty's cadaver, which smelt rather nicely of his breakfast bacon. Killing his subordinates was the gift that kept on giving.
"My minions!" he called, traipsing by the shining dimension gate where they were gathered one and all.
"WHAT IS IT BOSS HUH?" slurred Rebellious, no longer rebellious since he was hopped up on bugjuice. But he was spared from vanishing because he was a three-dimensional character, in that he'd spoken more than five sentences before he died. As such, he shall heretofore be referred to as "Hair."
"Where are the good guys?" Kariya asked, smiling impeccably.
"They absconded with the Quincy in arm," said Talking Fan. "And I think they may have mentioned something about 'flaying the imbecile.'"
"Damn. They're not here to applaud my endearing evil. Oh well. Throat kick!"
His underlings toppled like dominoes into a bloody heap from Kariya's light-speed precision throat-kicks; he then butchered the pile of blood-choked Bount with his wind blade. It was a gruesome yet touching display of brutality, and it showed them that he cared. Everyone shared a chuckle of precious air as one by one they resurrected and filed through the portal to Soul Society, a paradise where maybe Kariya would get killed.
A homeless couple shivered under the pitiless moon, keeping by the river so that if they should trip they could drown and be at peace. Outlines of unlucky ryoka coated the streets with countless layers of chalk, and premature dog fetuses nudged with confused groans at the base of trash bins, not understanding how they'd lost their mastery of osmosis.
"Wow," whistled Kariya. "Paradise fucking blows."
"Sir, this is just Rukongai," hacked Geezer.
"They say Seireitei is where all the nice hotels are," said Hair, whilst he and Talking Fan pored over their comically upside-down map (LAUGH AT IT). "Hey! There's a famous shinigami academy right next to Central 46!"
"But I wanna visit the Tower of Remorse!"
"No way, let's go see Soukyoku, the phoenix blade with the power of a million soul slayers not really!"
"Gang, we can always go sight-seeing after we destroy Soul Society. Our first priority is inciting a revolution amongst the petty thugs on the outskirts of civilization so that I can sneak into Seireitei in order to filch a secret seal no one knows about and that needs to charge for a full day before it can explode thereby setting off a bunch of other seals that amazingly no one else has stumbled upon or sensed in any way thereby ending all of existence. Yes, old man?"
"Huh? I couldn't hear you!"
"How's this for a condensed version?" Kariya made the international world-go-boom sign with his hands, to which the old man heartily nodded. Anything that ended up killing Kariya utterly and irrevocably was a fine apocalypse by him.
Fatty raised his hand tentatively.
"Yes, Cholesterol?"
"Um, I was just wondering... why exactly are we ending existence again?"
"All right, now huddle up everyone. I'm going to address this question to the whole team."
They did as they were told, and Kariya poked his head through their huddle-bubble of dysfunction and locked arms with his neighbor Bounts, a vicious smile on his face. "We're going to end existence..." he whispered, careful not to hurt anyone's ears, "BECAUSE I FUCKING SAID SO, THAT'S WHY!"
Kariya was summoning a whirling wind blade to puncture his comrades' skulls when a sudden spike of reiatsu stayed his senseless act of violence.
"Oh no, it's Kuchiki Byakuya!" wheezed Geezer."
"Kariya Jin," Byakuya intoned. "You look like a dirty tax collector," he ad-libbed randomly.
"Maybe I am one," Kariya spat, sounding witty in his imagination.
"I must defend my property. We shall scuffle in the forest. Kurosaki Ichigo will intervene. It will fill four episodes."
"Them sounds like fightin' words." This time Kariya gurgled, then spat.
Oh, it was on.
"Chire, Senbonzakura." Byakuya's blade scattered.
"Wind chisel!" Kariya cried smugly, punching a tiny hole in the wave of little pink petals. Apparently the writers thought that the dancing of petals in the wind would constitute an interesting battle, but Kariya himself thought his weapon was the most kickass thing since sex and soul-sucking horseflies.
"Getsuga tenshou!" Ichigo sliced once the air between the other two. His role in the fight finished, he shook Kariya's hand and they all went back to what they were doing before.
"Wait, that took how many episodes?" wondered Kariya as he strolled back the seven paces he'd strayed from the place he'd left his entourage during the course of the fight. "Man, I'm going to live forever!"
And upon hearing that, Geezer wept copiously.
"Kurotsuchi Mayuri, your days are..." Geezer was seized by an impromptu coughing fit, and his gross spittle flew into his no-clip fish's obedient eyes, which earlier had swallowed Ururu to chords of INTENSE DRAMA.
"Numbered?" Mayuri, amused, tilted his head to the side. "I think not, my friend, for one simple reason--you are filler, and I am not. Therefore there is no question who will win. In fact, this battle won't even influence the plot or character relationships in any significant way. Don't you find all this rather a chore?"
"Kurotsuchi Mayuri, your days are numbered!" repeated Geezer, having forgotten he'd said it already.
"Listen, you brainless toady, it'll only take you an episode to get killed, just like all your loser friends. That's all your worth. You are worth precisely seven days of waning viewer anticipation and roughly thirty minutes of an archive binge. Please just go away. You can even try to destroy Soul Society; honestly, do whatever you like. I just can't be bothered to kill you. I have a busy schedule of experimentation, and you way too lame to qualify as a subject. Besides... Are you even listening to me, old man?"
"Huh?" Geezer snapped out of his reverie. "I was just having the most wonderful dream... it was about a zzzzzzzzzzzzz."
"Okay, fuck it, I'll kill you," shrugged Mayuri. "Natural selection's gotta start somewhere."
"But, but I can't even breed!" Geezer felt a trident sink his heart and thanked his lucky stars that at least it wasn't another wind chisel.
"Ritz, attack!" said Hair, hoping to take control of Soi Fong's body through his adorable floating plant-fox doll... thing, which had earlier possessed Rukia, to INTENSE DRAMA.
Soi Fong heartlessly cut the zipping wonder-fox down with her stinger. "That's it? That was your strategy?"
"Nooooo!" said Hair. "I've injected your body with a deadly, slow-acting poison, slow-acting because I want to talk a lot before you die, deadly because I want you dead."
"You must be the smartest of your group," Soi Fong said. (Hair failed to note her sarcastic tone.) "Unfortunately for you, poison doesn't work on me, 'cause I flow like a butterfly, sting like a bee!"
STAB.
"Oh, god, not again!" Hair fell to his knees, panting. "Attack her, Ritz!" But it attacked him instead.
"That's right, you useless peon," said Soi Fong, who was having fun kicking drilling her heel into the base of his spine, "you're dying a dozen different ways simultaneously. That's how much you don't deserve life."
"No! Please don't kill me! I'm a virgiiiiiiin..."
Soi Fong, turned her back on the cloud of dust, unsurprised by his last words.
Ran'Tao looks an awful lot like Yoshino hyuk hyuk!
As Ririn/Lilin/Lirin/the fucking chicken swapped notes on how to sexually assault Ichigo with fellow retarded modsouls Nova the gay ninja and Claud the I don't even know, the big boys were engrossed in a meeting of their own.
"So you mean to tell me that this 'Joukaishou' is going to destroy the world unless we do something!" gasped Ganju.
"Exactly," said Ukitake, grimacing either with dismay at the inauspicious situation, or with the pain of intestinal bleeding.
"So you mean to tell me that this 'Joukaishou' is going to destroy the world unless we do something!" gasped Ichigo.
"...Yes." Kyouraku was sprawled on the floor, stoned as ever, so Ukitake said that line too.
"So you mean to tell me that this 'Joukaishou' is going to destroy the world unless we do something!" gasped Renji.
Ukitake set down his mug of tea on the ridiculously low table and left, his captain chum still vibing off the bugjuice he'd scavenged off of Hair's sting-riddled cadaver.
Ichinose and Kenpachi squared off in the horizon. To Yachiru it was obvious who would win.
"I have justice!" charged Ichinose, ugly nostrils flaring (thanks for that animators!).
"And I have a wicked eyepatch," laughed Kenpachi, who was correct.
The arena was enveloped in blinding light, but Yachiru didn't need her sight to know Ichinose was slain.
"So how was the fight?" She always liked a blow-by-blow playback at the end of one of his duels; more specifically, she always liked to hear him tell her a blow-by-blow playback, and he was usually more than happy to oblige. Today, however, he had only one thing to tell her:
"I'm glad Ichigo isn't dead yet."
Kariya plunged his hand through Fatty's solar plexus, which again smelt pleasantly of bacon--maybe with the teensiest hint of cinnamon toast.
"GAH NO!"
"Really? You weren't expecting it? I would have expected it."
"T-tell the Burger King... I love him." Fatty's bovine tongue lolled to the side.
Kariya caressed his temporarily lifeless body. "I will, Cholesterol. I will."
But he never did, did he. Bastard.
Ichigo fought Kariya. Kariya fought Ichigo. Yoruichi sighed with relief. The filler was ending at long last.
"Wake up, Byaky," she ordered. "It's about to get good."
"So... boring... sleepy..."
"Shinji vizard espada grimmjow vasto schiffer."
Byakuya snapped back to attention.
"I am reformed! I vow revenge against you, Kariya Jin!" said Ichinose, evidently still alive.
"Listen, shortstuff, you can trash talk when you're not slowly perspiring to death. God, man, come back once you've taken a shower."
"HA! YOU JUST GAVE ME THE PERFECT OPENING!" broadcasted Ichigo, charging, sword at the ready.
"Wait, don't you want to hear my sad story first?"
Byakuya automatically crumpled to the dust dozing.
"Er..." Ichigo hesitated, anxiously watching Ichinose's color drain away as if cinematography were foreshadowing his second death. Remember kids: Death is always sadder when filtered in black and white.
"Surely I'm entitled to a little storytelling?"
"W-water..." Ichinose wheezed. It was terribly difficult trying to maintain hydrated when faced with the scorching stares of ten million less than satisfied viewers.
"Right, so this crazy bitch named Ran'Tao (of all names!) explodes a rancid batch of modsouls and inadvertently creates Bounts, which scatter all over the world instead of disintegrating. And I'm all like, REVENGE!"
He minced for the camera.
"But first I'm a little kid, and get this–the same crazy bitch who created me rescues me from these shinigami who are ordered by the brass to kill me! But she gets exiled for it, so I wander the desert with my folks, traveling all Moses-like against the wind, acting all oppressed and stuff when (holy crap) I merge with my doll because the pendant the crazy bitch gave me activated my true potential and I kill a bunch of hollows with the paralyzing finger that disappeared mid-filler. But after that my brethren despise me for being too powerful, so they go their separate ways and somehow piss of the Quincies. Oh, I forgot to mention that we had a steady source of souls to consume throughout all of this. Anyway, Mayuri–"
"Ichinose's melted into a gelatinous ooze by now!" Ichigo rudely interrupted.
"Fuck you, there's more. How would you like it if I interrupted one of your save-the-dame tirades? Oh wait, for a main character you hardly ever say anything important, do you."
BURN.
"He's right about explaining backstories!" said Fatty, clinking brimming beer steins with a rosy-nosed Hitsugaya by the sidelines. Oh, and he was still alive, too. "I told Hitsugaya my traumatic backstory about the Bounto-in-training and we instantly bonded!"
"His account reminded me of Hinamori's painful death."
"But she isn't dead!" yelled Yoruichi.
"YES SHE IS!" Hitsugaya bawled.
"Joukaishou just about ready, folks," grinned Kariya.
"You do realize that if you destroy the world, you die too, right?" said Ichigo.
"...WHAT!"
"If you just let me impale you through the heart, I can defuse you!"
"Sounds reasonable to me!"
And so concluded a ludicrous arc of filler.