Don't hate! I know this is a shorter chapter than last, but it's got a TON of info on how things work in this universe. I hope you like it enough to get to the second chapter when things start HAPPENING :) Please read and review if you get a chance.
Chapter 2: Sick
Silence, these were his last few hours of silence. Ichigo tried to take advantage of the calm before the storm, concentrating on the materials given to him to aid in his latest case. Alone, sitting at table in the mess hall, Ichigo only had a photograph with a name attached to it and children's picture book entitled Sleeping Beauty. He had the name memorized by now: Orihime Inoue. As for the book, he read it again and again until he could predict every word before turning each page. Uryu's clues were never easy to piece together. The actual case files on who would be going under each time were hyper encrypted and under strict lock and key. Getting Ichigo the resources needed to save a civilian were all but impossible for Uryu to get outside of Las Noches.
She was kind of pretty, whoever she was, at least, that's what Ichigo thought to himself the first time he saw her. Pretty hair, pretty face, big grey eyes, rosy cheeks…those were the things he could pull from her headshot. He didn't have much to compare her to in his little world, but he could tell…she was pretty. Ichigo knew of words the other boys might have used to describe her, but for him, pretty was enough to encompass what he was seeing. As for her personality, that was all hearsay from Uryu. He said she was a little talkative, but endearing in her own innocent way.
Innocent. What did that mean anyway? It just meant dumb to Aizen. The innocents that Ichigo and the others fought so hard to protect, they were just stupid enough to keep their mouth shut and follow Aizen's rules. Don't talk and don't ask questions, in return, all will be provided. Aizen saw himself as benevolent. Anyone who disagreed was subject to Investigation.
That's where Ichigo came in.
The infamous Investigations instilled lifelong fear in the hearts of the civilians, but any actual Investigation was much more terrifying. You weren't brought into a dark room and asked questions about your personal life. They didn't spy on your home or probe your calls. These were things that were already part of daily life for the civilians. Instead, Aizen gave you hope, beautiful, sweet hope. He soothed your curious mind with talks of an outside world and freedom. He offered those wonderful things, then ripped them from your mind until you were a shell of a person waiting to be filled with his law and his rules. Once a civilian was determined too quizzical or out of bounds with the law, they were put into Investigation. That's when they would be given the Zanpakuto, leaving them prisoners of Aizen's imagination until the day they finally became too useless and were killed, or they simply had too much and died on their own.
But Ichigo had escaped and now he dedicated himself to helping others escape. A part of him wanted to believe that he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart, risking his life every day to save civilians, but he knew deep down that it was all just to ease the pain of failing his family. His mother – Investigated and killed. His sisters – assimilated as civilians and now so scared of the State they weren't even under suspicion to be Investigated, leaving them far beyond his reach. His father – gone without a trace.
"It's almost time," said Renji as he entered the room. Renji Abarai was a member of what was being called The Soul Society. The group hadn't given themselves that name. It was a name from the civilians that had been rescued from Investigations. It was said that when the first civilian was liberated he looked into the eyes of his savior and said: I didn't know people had souls until I met you. "Are you ready?"
Ichigo shook his head.
Renji had been liberating civilians since he had been rescued himself by a man named Byakuya Kuchiki. He vowed to repay Byakuya someday and free his sister. Together, they brought back the girl, Rukia. Then, Rukia joined the cause and brought back Ichigo at the request of his pleading father. That was the only memory Ichigo ever had of his father. He couldn't remember his face or his name, but it had been said that his father worked on the inside somewhere and requested that Ichigo be taken. He wanted to resent his father since his mother had been killed and his sisters were assimilated while he was saved. But he couldn't…he didn't know enough to hate the man. Ichigo believed in truth above all things now. The only real monster that existed now was Aizen.
The State investigated Renji for a lot of things. Renji worked in an underground fighting rink. Below the streets of the city men would gather to take out their suppressed rage on one another. Though the State convinced the civilians that the only violence that endured came from the Espada, some people still carried a foreign hostility. People didn't have a word for their anger and didn't know where it had come from, but there it was, festering inside. Renji felt it every day. When he escaped Las Noches, he realized it was the anger of knowing there were great truths that he was not permitted to understand, living with the knowledge of there being more knowledge than what was provided.
At first, the fighting group was close knit and quiet. No one suspected a thing until an Espada was accidentally brought into the ranks. The Espada embodied the fear that the State strived so hard to instill in every civilian. If they weren't scared of an Investigation, then they were afraid of getting killed by the Espada. Being employed directly beneath Aizen, the Espada had certain privileges. They could roam the streets freely. They were allowed as many possessions as they wanted. All they had to do was intimidate and panic the people into obedience, and, sometimes, be the part of a clever rouse or two. Most notably, the Espada would be put on the television, shown being arrested or tortured. The State persuaded the people to believe this was an Investigation. That's what made it so easy for the people to fall victim to a real Investigation. It didn't seem menacing in the least, it was just a little blue pill that showed them their dreams. What could be wrong with that? Didn't they deserve to escape the nightmare of Las Noches?
When Renji was brought in for his Investigation, it had been revealed that he also kept tattoos under his State issued clothes. Now, far from the grip of the State, Renji riddled his body with ink in a proud display of defiance. He kept his hair long too, vowing to grow it out and never let another man shave his head as part of a uniform.
"I can't fail this time, Renji."
"You say that every mission, but you haven't failed in years. You have nothing to be nervous about." Ichigo's concerned face didn't move at this. Renji groaned. "Do you know how many times I've failed? Do you know how many times I've come back empty handed? It happens to all of us. You get in and you can't gain their trust when synced with the Zanpakuto, or your body ingests the Zanpakuto too fast, or their body ingests too fast, or there's a bug in the programming. These things all happen all the time. But at least you're trying to save people. You're not just sitting on your ass."
Ichigo still remembered the face of his failed mission. He was a young man with brown hair. He was tall and well built. Had he survived, he could have been a great asset to Ichigo's team. When he was investigated and Ichigo synced into his Zanpakuto, they were brought into a strange world of hell fire and darkness. The man turned into a monster. The only thing he said was that he wanted Ichigo to save his sister. Ichigo couldn't take the man to the mental rendezvous point necessary to pull him from the drug's trance. His body rejected the drug and he died. Ichigo was furious and accused Uryu of creating a poor program. Why would anyone want to be in a place like that?
It was later revealed that the man had worked within Aizen's ranks and knew that the end was near. He had made a deal with Aizen to keep his mouth shut in exchange for an extra dose of Zanpakuto. The deal seemed easy enough, but the man used the extra dose during his Investigation process to jumble the program of the original Zanpakuto, the one that was supposed to sync to Ichigo. He told Uryu, before going under, it was his only way to silence himself completely and protect his sister. It had been said that his sister was very young and had she got wind of the State's betrayal at that time, she would not have been strong enough to fight. She needed to question it all on her own before she could join the resistance.
The man's name was Sora.
Ichigo had always known that Orihime was the man's sister, but he had to wait until her Investigation trial before he could take her out of the city. The girl never knew Sora Inoue during her existence within the city of Las Noches. That was part of being assimilated as a civilian. You were given your home and your clothes and your provisions and told that you had no parents, you had no siblings, you had no loved ones. The life cycle went as followed: you were brought into the city as a child, you were raised by the State until adulthood, you were given a job, you were given a life partner who you were allowed to procreate with, then you were brought to work in the highest levels of Las Noches. The children would be raised by the State and the parents retired to working the rest of their life behind the scenes. The parent society made the food and clothes and books that fueled the younger generation.
Sora learned of his sister through a coded message that he was to deliver to his boss at the time. He copied it into a notebook because it resembled a beautiful poem. A friend who had worked in the Coding Department found it and told him it was a coded document revealing the names of children with upcoming birthdays. At first, it seemed silly to carry a list of birthdays with him until that friend decoded the names on the list. There was a girl somewhere in the city with the name Orihime Inoue. The name became an obsession. He wouldn't stop until he found out who she was. That was the seed of doubt he needed to break away from the State. Eventually, the idea of finding her tormented him past the point of no return, and he broke into the States computers to find her file. She had been born to parents that were now returned to the work camps, and she did have a brother birthed to the same parents before her.
Sora Inoue.
He, of course, went hastily into Investigation under the guise of being employed as a personal assistant to Aizen.
The rest was just a case file on a failed attempt to rescue a civilian to Ichigo.
"This is the first time I've been sent to pick up a female," Ichigo admitted.
Renji glanced at the photo his partner held. "Well at least she's cute. Makes you want it more…the rescue that is."
Ichigo tossed him a disgruntled look. "Don't be stupid, Renji. She's just another mark. I just mean this is the first time I've had to try and get a female to trust me well enough to make it to the mental rendezvous point. With men, they all just want adventure, they'll follow you anywhere. But with women…well…I've been told it takes finesse."
"What clues you got to go on?" Renji took a seat next to his associate at the table. He continued to glance at the photo. It pained Renji a little to think that such a handsome looking girl had never been touched by a man in her life because the State told her it wasn't her time. She had a lot to look forward to and she didn't even know. She wasn't particularly Renji's type, but all pretty faces reminded him of loves lost on behalf of the State's silly laws.
"Got a book and a photo. And Uryu mumbled something about fairy tales. Sounds kinda silly to me. What grown person still reads fairy tales? Especially cheesy ones like this," Ichigo spat, tossing the book at Renji. Thumbing over the pages, Renji shrugged. "Uryu didn't even have time to give me an MRP."
Renji cringed at the thought. "No MRP? Those always blow."
The mental rendezvous point, or MRP, was a synced line of thought and imagination that brought both the citizen and their rescue companion into a stage of shallow hallucinations. They would both still be in a dream, but not deep enough to where they couldn't be awakened safely. It required gathering a lot of trust from the citizen, as they had to trust you well enough to go out of bounds of the drug's programming. The difficult part was doing all of this while not mentioning a thing about who Aizen was or what he was doing in the outside world. Ichigo and the others had to ensure that they stuck to the program's patterns and story line enough to make it seem like they weren't out of place in the hallucination. Going into the program without an MRP could mean wandering around for hours and left the citizen subject to complete ingestion of the pill, at which time the programming would fade on its own.
Cursing the whole situation, Ichigo groaned loudly to no one. He glanced down at his watch. "Looks like we've got an hour until physical rendezvous point." From the top pocket of his all black jumpsuit, Ichigo retrieved a little white pill. He didn't bother with taking a sip of water; he just tilted his head back and popped in in. With a hard swallow, the pill went down his throat, beginning its journey for the salvation of Orihime Inoue.
It's a sick, sick world
I'll be your medicine.
- Sam Sparro
