A giant pair of doors opened wide to a bright light (by comparison to the underground city of the previous story), and two very confused Spectrobe masters found themselves and their ship crashing into the side of a grassy hill. Rallen, after dislodging his face from the loose soil, marveled at the cityscape in front of him. A huge maze of short buildings sprawled out from a small cluster of tall, white towers enclosed in a circular wall. Outside the ring of smaller structures was another wall, separating the cleaner looking interior of the micro city from the scattered shacks that made up the rest of the infrastructure. The city was still small in Rallen's eyes, but after wandering around Amestris, it was like comparing Nessa to Kollin.
Jeena got up, took a brief look at the city, and turned towards their poor patrol cruiser. The hull had crumpled and now looked something like an acordian. There was even less chance of fixing it at this point than there had been in Risembool with the ancient tools and primitive technologies. She wanted to see what little could be salvaged, so she called Rallen over to her to help open the crumpled rear door of the ship.
Rallen, dangling precariously from the side of the lab console, grabbed the few add-ons that survived the crash, as well as the hard drive and terabyte secondary memory drive (not that he actually knew what any of these things were. He just grabbed what looked like it might still work). Jeena dragged a couple of older machines from the storage floor out onto the side of the hill.
"What's with the Cyrus Express Machine?" Rallen asked, looking at the device and his partner skeptically. "I'm pretty sure it doesn't work across dimensions."
"I'm not trying to buy anything from that cheapskate," Jeena explained. "I just want to use the matter conversion and transportation hardware. I'm going to try to create an alchemy device." This earned her a confused look from Rallen. He pointe out that the dimension on the other side of the black gate obeyed different laws of physics, but Jeena disagreed. "I'm pretty sure the same laws apply. The main difference is the way that alchemists use the laws of physics."
Rallen gave Jeena a blank stare before asking bluntly, "What does that mean?"
"No idea," Jeena answered honestly, "but it sounded pretty intelligent didn't it? Now hand me your prizmod and the glove it's attached to."
Rallen complied and let Jeena do her thing while he just sat and looked down the hill. A moment later, he noticed a bright flash of light over the wall on the far side of the city. The light then burst into several small comets that plummeted onto the city below. At first he thought it was some sort of fireworks show, but then he saw the comets crash into the ground in locations scattered around the city. The spectrobe master leapt to his feet, thinking that this had something to do with the krawl (which almost every bad thing so far seemed to be linked to). His partner looked down at the city and saw the craters that had not been there before. She reminded Rallen that she was still working on his prizmod, but she assured him she was almost finished.
Ten minutes later, give or take a minute or two, Jeena handed Rallen a big, clunky-looking right glove with his prizmod open and stuck full of wires. He thanked Jeena a little uneasily, to which she explained that it was a rushed job with few resources, so this was the best he could ask for. After a brief awkward silence, Rallen spontaneously sprinted downhill at full speed, Jeena stumbling close behind.
Rallen and Jeena were stopped at the gates of the city's interior by a gigantic gorilla of a man. He wouldn't let them pass no matter what. He made a special point of saying not even if they beat him in battle.
"But we need to get in there," Jeena explained. "We could help fight the… invaders."
"Nope, I can't let you in," The ape-man said with finality. This was when Rallen started to get frustrated.
"We don't have time for this! Aobasar, Iku ze!" Rallen called out the massive bird spectrobe. The gatekeeper freaked out when he saw the creature. He started an angry babble about something hollow, which made absolutely no sense to the spectrobe masters, who had already hopped on Aobasar's back. Just as the feathery creature began its swift ascent, the gorilla-man grabbed one of its talons. Rallen swung down to the spectrobe's stomach, where he was only holding on by wrapping his legs tightly around Aobasar, and swung his sword from his prizmod. He just nicked the big man's knuckles, but he still let go and howled in pain, allowing the great bird and its two passengers to fly up and over the wall of the inner city. Once Aobasar was safe inside Rallen's prizmod again, the two officers wasted no time in getting as far from the gate as possible.
"Why didn't we just stay on Aobasar and fly around to look for the krawl?" Rallen asked, as it had been Jeena's command to land and dismount.
"If the guy at the front door say's we can't come in, it probably means we're less than welcome here," Jeena explained, "and if they've got any sort of long-ranged weapons, we'd be dead if we flew close enough to the ground to actually see anything." Rallen acknowledged this as a good point, so he moved on to ask about the new stuff on his right arm. "You've got your prizmod, the awakening chamber, the incubator, the databases, the excavation equipment, and the card input system, as well as my first prototype of the alchemy machine. It tells you the elemental content of any solid you touch, and then you can manipulate its form. It's supposed to be controlled by thought, so it shouldn't take too long to test."
Rallen stopped running and placed his right hand on a nearby wall. "Energy," the device read. Rallen glanced at Jeena and told her the readout. She was flabbergasted. She told him to try himself. He placed his had on his forehead. He pulled the hand away and read the device's screen. "Human Adolescent: Water, 35 liters. Carbon, 20 kilograms. Ammonia, 4 liters. Lime, 1.5 kilograms. Phosphorous, 800 grams. Salt, 250 grams. Saltpeter, 100 grams. Sulfur, 80 grams. Fluorine, 7.5 grams, iron, 5 grams, silicon, 3 grams, and trace amounts of 15 other elements."
"Okay, so that was not an elemental composition, but it was still very useful," Jeena said. "I wonder what went wrong with the wall?"
"Nothing's wrong with the walls," an unfamiliar voice said from above. "They're just short enough for me to hear approaching intruders, and just tall enough for said intruders not to be able to get to me." Rallen and Jeena looked up to the roof of a nearby building to see a skinny bald guy with a spear looking down at them.
"Nice spear!" Rallen began to mock. "You compensating for something?" Before the spectrobe master's mouth could even begin to form his joker's grin, the man's spear lodged itself in the first layer of his jacket.
"That was just a warning, boy," baldy said angrily, holding the back of his spear. "Now I bet you'll think twice before insulting Ikkaku Madarame."
"We're in another dimension with last names?" Rallen asked in frustration. He was beginning to wonder if Nanairo was a fluke or something. He grabbed the spear in front of him at the base of the blade and yanked downward, forcing Ikkaku to topple from his perch on the nearby wall. He then pulled out his cosmo sword, pointing it as menacingly as possible at his new rival (soon to be enemy). Ikkaku picked himself up and dusted himself off before hefting his spear once more and diving towards Rallen, who sidestepped and deflected the blade with his sword. He grabbed the spear just above Ikkaku's hands and stopped the hairless wonder in his tracks. He immediately ducked upon seeing Ikkaku's smug smile, and he was just in time to dodge the front third of the spear, which was swinging around on a short rope right towards Rallen's face. He managed to avoid losing his head (literally), but rammed right into Ikkaku's upward-bound fist, which sent Rallen flying backwards. He crashed into the opposite wall, right next to Jeena.
"I really wish you'd stop calling them dimensions," Jeena sighed, addressing a statement that had already lost its meaning to most readers.
"Not the time, Jeena," Rallen said as he switched to his Zaza Sword and jumped right back into the battle, swinging his sword in an extra showy fashion as to let the flames take full visual effect. Ikkaku was shocked to say the least.
"Where the hell did you get a fire zampakuto? There're only two of them!" The bald guy was freaking out now. This battle was losing its intrigue, so Rallen swapped to his Pepe Sword and jumped straight into battle. "Who are you that your zampakuto has so many forms?" Ikkaku asked under the intersection of the two's weapons in a brief moment of stillness. The warriors clashed their sword and spear a couple more times before Rallen answered.
"I'm Rallen, and I'm just here to help." Their weapons collided several more times and Baldy asked why the boy thought the Soul Society needed his help. The fighting continued and Rallen answered, "I saw those meteors crash into your city, and I thought I knew what they were, so I came to check it out and maybe help where I can." The two pushed off from one another with their blades and flew to opposite sides of the street.
"I mean, technically they've got the same dimensions," Jeena elaborated on the earlier point, "they're just different universes."
"So you two weren't with the four groups of intruders who fell on Seireitei?" Ikkaku asked, slowly lowering his spear.
"No, and, not that it matters, I saw five, not four," Rallen replied.
"No, no, I saw the reports, there were definitely only four reishi clusters falling from the protective hemisphere," Ikkaku assured his new acquaintances. Rallen and Jeena looked at each other with concern. They'd both seen five falling fireballs from their high vantage point.
"What's reishi?" Jeena asked, having left her obnoxious tangent.
Ikkaku rolled his eyes and explained, "Reishi is the spiritual energy that makes up everything in the Soul Society. The deceased humans that live here, the glory of the Seireitei, even. the Soul Reapers are made up of Reishi."
This did absolutely nothing to clear up the situation for Rallen and Jeena. It only managed to raise more questions, but what it did clear up for Jeena was that a being not made of reishi must have landed in this city. The only thing other than Rallen and herself in this place that would be made of something other than reishi was Maja or Jado.
Chapter one of Spectral Bleach is done! This only took one day to write, but I spent at least a week just thinking about how to go about this crossover.
I've got a lot of Spectrobe Science planned in this series of crossovers (as you may have noticed in Fullmetal Spectrobes), but keep in mind that it's still spectrobes, so no science is absolute.
I own neither Spectrobes nor Bleach