"Who are you?"

- Kosh, Babylon 5.


It took almost an hour for Yemon to realize he had set off in the wrong direction. He left so flustered that he merely walked straight out of the village, not realizing he was going North. Thrice he stopped with an urge to go back and beat the crap out of everyone in the village until they told him what they knew, but all three times he managed to calm himself. It was on the third that he realized he was walking in the wrong direction.

"I guess I need to pay attention..."

After fiddling with the Pip-boy, he found where he was on the map and established a new route. According to the pre-war paper map, there should have been some sort of industrial park where Vault 12 was located, but the scale made it hard to see. Either way, there were hardly any references he could take, there was only wasteland, and occasionally some smooth blackened remains of a road. Soon Yemon started to avoid stepping on them, the melted tar was very unpleasant to walk on, and got stuck to his waraji if he stepped into the softest parts. It was both intriguing and disgusting at the same time.

He stopped his trek during the hottest part of the day to avoid the heat and save water, taking refuge under the shade of a partly fallen ad billboard. While he waited for the heat to abate, he took out Urahara's diary and looked for the 12th Division.

"Gran-gran said they were the Research and Development. I wonder..."

He had seen the first time he opened the book that it was the very first page of the diary. What he hadn't realized at the time was that it was by far the longest portion of the whole diary, and took almost half the pages.

I felt it was appropriate to start a new diary today, after the return of Kurosaki-san and the rest from Soul Society.

The reason is that we lost. Despite their valiant efforts, Aizen is now in possession of the Hōgyoku. I fear the worst case scenario is closer to come to pass. There are many unknowns to be able to predict our chances of success, at this point all I can do is try my hardest and just hope for the best.

There is still hope, because not all unknowns are on Aizen's side. A fairly big wild card is still on our side.

Kurosaki Ichigo.

"Wow, it's... weird to read something about my great granduncle like this. Okay, lessee... 'Start by reviewing the state of the Gotei 13, first my old and obviously most important division, 12th Division and the Research and Development Institute.' Yeah, obviously," Yemon chuckled, "I wish I had met this guy, sounds like he was a complete riot."

Yemon kept reading, but came to a stop when he read about the Captain of the Division, Kurotsuchi Mayuri.

"Kurotsuchi Mayuri... Where have I..."

He looked up as he thought, and his eyes fell on the billboard. A moment later he opened them wide in surprise, stood up like he had been kicked in the ass, and took several quick steps back to have a better view of the advert.

Spiri-Cola Quantum! New Flavour! New Bottle! Try it now, take the Leap!

At the bottom of the billboard was a weird face with a huge grin and something that looked like a strange hat, offering a thumbs up to the viewer and in big bold letters the brand Kurotsuchi Industries could be read.

"What. The. Fuck. Wait, what's this, there's some smaller writing... 'Some harmless but interesting side effects may occur, our hotli..' Damn this part's gone. What the hell is this?"

He almost went back to reading the diary but the Pip-boy started beeping. The rest time he had given himself was up. Sighing, he took a small sip of water, packed up, and only gave himself a few extra minutes to rush through the remaining pages for anything else unusual about the 12th Division, but nothing caught his eye.

This Mayuri character sounds like real weirdo. I hope he can give us a replacement chip though. Well, he should be able to, Urahara says here the 12th prepared most of the Vaults. Hm, but Takeda said they didn't have any spirit particle filters in his Vault because they didn't need them.

Casting aside his uncertainty, Yemon resumed his march. He arrived a mere two hours later at his destination, at least according to the map and the Pip-boy. But there was nothing there. Flat desert and only the barest of remains of some buildings where the map was telling him Vault 12 ought to be. Not far from him, a cliff side. He went to peep at it, and saw a several dozen meter drop into a large flowing river. He reeled and quickly pushed himself back, falling on his back away from the drop. It had been an extremely dizzying experience.

It wasn't the hiding place he had expected. Truth to be told, he wasn't even sure what he had been expecting, some sort of cave or something similar, perhaps.

"Well, if this Vault's anywhere around here, I guess it ought to be underground... I hope it's not carved on the side of the cliff, I really don't want to do that again."

He started searching. Taking his bokken, he walked around vigorously tapping any piece of ground that seemed firm. There was a hollow metallic echo when he tapped in the middle of what appeared to be the remains of some sort of round narrow building. A tower of some sort, he guessed. He lifted the heavy trapdoor with much difficulty and found there was a well with a ladder embedded on the rocky wall.

"Bingo!"

He only allowed himself some excitement when he finished his climb and reached the bottom. The place was dusty, with plenty of cobwebs hanging from the corners, but it looked less disused than he had thought it would be. The ladder dislodged him into a rather wide, square underground corridor, with support beams on the side every few meters and lined with bricks. The narrow space with a ceiling over his head, buried under meters and meters of soil, felt familiar and comforting.

"No rats in sight either, awesome!"

He flicked the Pip-boy light on and took a few tentative steps away from the well, taking his goggles off. His walk was regular and decisive, and it was several minutes before he saw any changes at all. His heart sank when he realized what he was seeing.

"No. No, no, no! No! Fuck! No!"

The enormous gate of the Vault had been blown off its hinges and was laying in the middle of the corridor. He rushed into the Vault through the opening and saw the second gate had been blown off in a similar manner. There was no power, everything was as dark as the corridor he had just walked. The inside was in disarray, cables and pipes torn from the walls, furniture and equipment broken and thrown across the rooms. That Vault had come to a very violent end quite some time ago.

"I can't fucking believe this! Argh!"

Yemon bellowed in frustration. He had let his hopes build up way too easily.

You fucking idiot.

The layout of the Vault seemed somewhat different from that of Vault 14. The entrance level had a whole lot of broken down heavy machinery, something that was kept in the lower levels of Engineering in his home. There was nothing he could identify as the air or water intakes to connect the Vault to the outside though, so he decided to go even deeper and look for some more clues. With the lifts broken, he had to use his obi as a makeshift rope to reach the next level down.

"No emergency stairs. What kind of idiot builds a Vault with no stairs between floors?"

The second floor seemed to be the living quarters of the Vault. Yemon was quite envious of how spacious and numerous the rooms were. There were bunk beds in all of them, but not in the density they were forced to use them inside Vault 14. However, it was all very... Empty, too. He couldn't be sure if it was because it had simply been emptied on purpose, but the word that came to mind when examining the rooms was sterile. Those rooms were there to sleep and little else.

It took him several minutes more to reach the next floor, making another makeshift rope with whatever was salvageable from the least destroyed mattresses. His father would have probably snickered at his efforts and then offered some advice. Freaking Engineer was a wonder with the Leatherman in his hands.

Yemon sighed.

It's too early to give up.

The third floor was much more than he had imagined. If the second floor seemed huge in comparison to the living quarters of Vault 14, this one seemed monstrous. He had to climb down almost thrice the length of the previous floor distance, making him think there may be hidden floors that had to be accessed some other way, until he came out of the lift shaft and saw that the third floor was simply that tall and huge. The light of the Pip-boy barely reached the ceiling, but what surprised him the most was that the floor was literally strewn with dead bodies. Skeletons, barely any of them intact, a few covered with some tattered rags, a few remains of spears and other primitive weapons. There was rubble in some of the areas where the wall or the ceiling had collapsed, and as Yemon looked closer, he realized much of the equipment had been blown to bits in explosions.

Which explained why he had found two grenades between the skeletons. He knew what they were and the basics of how to use them, but the little things scared the hell out of him. Still, he took them all the same.

There were four doors coming out of the main space. One led to an infirmary, or so Yemon thought. The fact that the infirmary's beds were caked with dark blotches of old, dried-up blood however gave him second thoughts, as well as the nature of the equipment he saw scattered about the place. Saws, blades, sharp implements of all sorts, barely anything that suggested more gentle treatment of the patients.

The computer terminal had been smashed to bits, much to his annoyance. Even without power, he may have been able to take the disk.

The second room was much more intriguing. There were large, broken vats all over it, more than two dozen of them. That particular room had been hit the hardest, there were human remains all over it and, disturbingly, some of them appeared to have had rather grotesque features in life, with huge deformities and monstrous proportions. Yemon didn't give the first one he found a second thought, but became much more suspicious when he realized there were simply too many of them to be just a random coincidence, and that they were only in that particular room, where the vats were.

Human experiments. Maybe. No wonder Urahara says this guy was off his rocker, but considering he was the one who put him in charge though...

Yemon only gave a passing though to the fact that he was thinking about Urahara so naturally, even though he only had the diary and Karin's few stories to go by.

The third room was more intriguing. The main space had been subdivided in what looked like isolation rooms: small, cramped, empty except for one cot and nothing else; and it was by far the largest room he had seen in the Vault. There had to be chambers for at least a hundred people in there.

He took the time to look more closely at the first one. The door had caved in a way that suggested explosives too, but what caught his eye was the remains of all the electronics and piping. They were somewhat familiar.

Then it hit him.

It was familiar because that was a filter. A spirit particle filter. It had been blown to bits almost beyond recognition, but that's what it was. Those isolation rooms came equipped with a spirit particle filter system each.

He didn't stop to think why that would be necessary when the Vault itself didn't come equipped with one (if Takeda could be trusted with that). He didn't know anything about Kurotsuchi Mayuri to imagine what kind of thing he would be doing with a hundred different spirit particle-filtered isolation rooms, or why would he want them in the first place.

All he knew was that there were a hundred of them. That one was fucked up beyond repair, but there were a hundred of them.

It took him more than an hour to realize all isolation rooms had been blown to shit and there was nothing usable left. Not one of them. It almost looked deliberate.

He wanted to scream in frustration.

"Wait, wait, there's got to be spares somewhere, right? I mean, if they had all this equipment and hi-tech stuff, they've got to have a workshop with raw materials and," he suddenly realized that was what the first floor had, "well, I'll go check again, there must be spares up there. Let's finish checking down here first... Why the hell am I talking to myself?"

The last room was a sharp contrast with the other three. In a few seconds he realized it had to be the main quarters of the Vault's leader. Mayuri himself, probably. There was a huge bed in one of the sides, rotten and decayed but still betraying how opulent it must have been in the past. What intrigued him was that there was a much smaller one not far from it. Did Mayuri had a kid or something like that? Yemon didn't dwell on it. Unlike the rest of the Vault, that room had been meticulously stripped of equipment, book, or anything of the sort, looking even more bare than the rest of the Vault. Unlike the sleeping quarters, there were empty bookcases and furniture that showed how the room had been used extensively in the past.

And overlooking it all was something Yemon had never seen before. It looked like a mixture between a large pipe organ and a computer, with an absolutely huge screen and a double black-and-white keyboard for input.

"That was probably too damn huge to move. I bet they had to build it inside the room. Still," he pressed a few of the keys, to no avail, "with no power it's kind of useless."

Yemon would have paid well for a crowbar at that point, but had to make do with whatever he could scavenge to take the computer apart. Unfortunately, the data storage had been practically destroyed, on purpose it seemed, but he did manage to recover one holodisk that looked promising. He was delighted to see that his Pip-boy could actually recover the data inside, even though it was only two recordings.

"It is clear that regular humans have very low tolerance for spirit particle presence. While they can recover after a brief exposure while showing few side effects, anything greater than that quickly decays their body and turns them into souls or hollows. I will put into place a more extensive screening methodology, I have lost half the recovered subjects already while making little progress, these useless humans are simply too fragile! It will probably be better to scourge for surv-"

RECORDING ENDS...

"Well, son of a... Just what the hell was he doing?"

"-uch a bother. After the rabble destroyed most of my lab while I was out recovering some radioactive samples for my experiments, I have been working to replace the lost equipment, but it is simply too much to repair. If my useless assistants can't get us up and running within a week, I will have to move to the backup facility, after I feed them to-"

RECORDING ENDS...

"Shit, could at least have said where the backup facility is!" Yemon sighed, "I guess I know what happened now, but who attacked here anyway? How did they even find the Vault?"

He suddenly remembered Takeda's words.

You explain about the chip, they see you're human, and before you know it someone's put two and two together and is looking for your Vault. Or something like that. Bloody hell, is there someone targeting Vaults? Why would anyone do that?

He put the holodisk inside his pack and closed it, hoping to try some data recovery later. He was about to leave the room when he noticed a hatch on the floor. It wasn't too big, and it looked surprisingly sturdy. Armoured even. He unlocked it and pulled it up open. For a moment there was a sucking sound as pressures equalized, and then the smell of stale air wafted up. Perhaps that was a secondary exit, like the one under Karin's... No, the Overseer's Command Post. Intrigued, he walked down the ladder.

The long, long ladder.

Do the floors keep getting bigger as the Vault goes down or what? Sheesh.

He found that the ground was surprisingly soft under his feet. He had to walk several meters before the light of the Pip-boy let him see anything other than soft soil (sand, he corrected himself) and blackness. When a wall finally appeared, it was only a narrow strip of rock with rows of bars on either side. Huge, tall bars. Cages.

"What the... This place keeps getting weirder and weirder."

He hadn't thought there would be anything in those cages. He walked along the wall, and saw that, one by one, the cages had been bust open. Bars of metal bent into a twisted mess. Some from the outside. Others, from the inside.

The Vault had been empty for years, decades even, judging by the remains he had seen in the floor above him. Whatever had been in those cages would be just some sort of skeletal remains, if that.

He walked through the open bars of one of the cages to have a closer look.

The first thing that happened was the hissing sound. A low hiss from somewhere deep inside that cage. He stopped on his feet immediately, and his heart suddenly sped up.

It can't be.

He was gripped by a very primal fear. Not merely fear of the unknown, or even the dark, the latter something he could find even comforting after a lifetime inside a Vault. No, he knew there was something in there. Something that scared his very soul.

A pair of red eyes, shining as flames, came to life. He instantly knew he was being watched by something intelligent. And he had to get the fuck away. Right fucking now.

"Hun... gry," a loud, rumbling, deep voice said, sending a chill up his spine.

Oh shit. Run. Stop fucking trembling and run. Run!

He turned and ran as fast as his legs would carry him at the exact same moment the beast lunged forward and chased after him. He slip through the bars of the cage easily enough, and behind him there was a horribly crashing sound, together with the whining of metal being forced to bend in ways it was not supposed to. Yemon ventured a look back and saw an absolutely enormous hollow inside the cage. He (he? it? He. does it really matter?) reeled from the crash, but a moment later he headed straight for a large opening on the other side, bending the bars even more as he forced his way out.

That was a real hollow. Not the tiny rats he had fought before. Not the somewhat larger than usual scorpion. No, that was the real deal. He didn't even think about the weapons he was carrying, it all looked like useless toys next to that huge thing. He had only managed a glimpse of the white mask and a sort of large humanoid figure, before the dim light of the Pip-boy became blessedly too faint to see it.

He climbed the ladder two steps at a time, constantly thinking about not slipping up, not even once. Another crash and the whole ladder trembled as the lower part was yanked from the ground and the bottom third was broken off. Yemon was too terrified to realize just how fast he had suddenly started climbing that ladder. He jumped through the hatch hole and scrambled on all fours as far away as he could. The whole ground trembled with a crash, and a large arm pushed through the opening, reaching blindly around for him.

It came just short. Yemon still took a few steps back before collapsing to the ground on his bum. He was breathing heavily with a wincing noise. There was some sort of pressure in the air that was making it hard for him to breathe properly, and a damnable persistent croaking that was driving him crazy.

Croaking.

He looked at his Pip-boy. The needle on the spiripar counter was doing some very disturbing jumps.

Is that the hollow doing this?

There was another crash, another trembling, and the arm of the hollow was out again. Still couldn't reach him.

The third time there was a loud, ungodly roar that made his blood freeze in his veins, and when the crash came, the ground around the hatch gave way, and half the hollow's body crashed through it, reaching for Yemon. He was too surprised, and more than a bit terrified, to get out of the way in time. The enormous hand of the hollow grabbed his lower half and lifted him in the air.

Yemon let out a loud curse, of surprise, pain, and reproach at his own stupidity. He should have been topside even before the second crash. Desperately, he reached inside his clothes and pulled his revolver out. Without even thinking he emptied six shots on the hollow's mask, making a few dents and apparently angering him, but not succeeding at doing anything more conductive to saving his own skin. He struggled to free himself as the hollow brought him closer to his enormous mouth, and at that moment his eyes fell on the Pip-boy. The croaking had intensified, but that wasn't what caught his eye. It was the glint, under the Pip-boy's light, of the Quincy Cross on his wrist.

The thought came to his head without any effort. Hollow. Quincy. His great grandmother, his parents, even his grandfather, when he was still alive, all had insisted he had to study the texts of the Quincy. Family tradition. The Kurosaki family was the only family that cared one bit about the true knowledge Karin had brought to the Vault.

In his head, he had repeated the lessons a thousand times. Theory. But now there was a gigantic gaping mouth in front of him and he had half a second to apply the lessons or die a rather miserable death.

He raised his left arm, made a fist designed to cradle a bow into existence, and concentrated. Redirect the flow of spirit particles, and let go when shooting. You aren't forcing the power, you aren't shooting an arrow. You are a rock in the river, gently redirecting its flow, not a dam building it up.

The croaking of the Pip-boy intensified and a white light enveloped the Quincy symbol on his left wrist. Yemon made a fist and raised it towards the, now extremely close, mouth of the Hollow. The light intensified, but as it shot through the space he had created with his hand for the bow to appear, it shattered in an uncontrolled explosion of spirit particles. Yemon yelped in pain, and the hollow roared in the same way, as several teeth and parts of his mask shattered and went flying through the air.

The hollow let go, and Yemon fell with a roll on the ground. The trashing of the hollow brought him crashing down to the lower level, and only after the smallest of hesitations, Yemon turned around and ran away with the speed of desperation, making for the lift. He climbed to the second floor as the ground trembled around him with the trashing of the hollow, and by the time he made it to the first floor and recovered his obi, the trembling had grown faint, lost deep underground. Yemon gave himself only a few minutes to check the machinery, looking for a spirit particle filtering system of any sort, but he couldn't identify anything, and as the crashing didn't abate one bit, he decided to just make a run for it.

He was oddly relieved when he came up topside. The light of the evening was softer, and he ventured a glimpse around without the goggles. The wasteland wasn't any better that way, but at least he could see more clearly where he had to go. Even so, he put the goggles back on after a few minutes.

"Well, there's nothing to it I guess, I'll go back to Shady Sands. If they know anything about Vault 12... Hm, I wonder if they actually know about this, that's gonna be interesting, if they'll even talk to me that is."

He was brought out of his reverie when a familiar crashing sound suddenly erupted under his feet. He instinctively took several steps back without looking where he was going, and found himself near the edge of the cliff when the Hollow crashed through the ground and appeared in front of him. He was covered in dirt and rubble, and it was obvious he had hurt himself making it out of the Vault, but they were now in front of each other, and buggered if he didn't look even hungrier than before.

Yemon cursed mentally over and over. This time there was little he could have done, even if he had set off as soon as he was topside, the hollow wouldn't have been far behind. He raised his arm and tried once again to create the Quincy bow. The Pip-boy croaked like a frog high on Spiri-Cola, and his reiatsu fluctuated wildly as he tried to bring the flow of spirit particles under control. It was really hard to fight the urge to put pressure on it, instead of letting it just flow as he was supposed to. The hollow paused for a moment when the glow appeared again, but hunger got the best of him and he lurched forward towards Yemon.

Once again, he couldn't control the bow. There was a loud bang as the bow collapsed, and the explosion hurt both Yemon's and the Hollow's arm. He reacted faster than the masked beast and tried to put some distance between himself and the cliff, but the hollow jumped at him without hesitation. This time Yemon managed to keep the bow long enough to start creating an arrow, but when it came to shoot it, he blundered again and tried to shoot instead of release. His reiatsu spiked when the bow collapsed, but this time, it did so directing the spirit particle explosion towards the direction he was aiming at. It still hurt, but hit the hollow in the stomach harder than before. The beast fell on the ground with a very loud and trembling thud, and Yemon could swear there had been several more thuds under his feet.

He didn't stop to think about it. For the third time, he made a bow, and started building an arrow. The Pip-boy croaked louder, his reiatsu increased and started to steady itself as he relaxed and let spirit particles flow into the arrow. When the time to release it came, the bow collapsed for a third time, sending him tumbling back, but the arrow flew forward. It caught the hollow in the right shoulder, and like Yemon had done, the hollow fell to the ground tumbling back.

The muffled crashing underground intensified, and before he realized what was happening, Vault 12 collapsed under Yemon's feet. It all felt surreal, like the sky had suddenly decided to take a tumbling. There were echoes of rolling thunderous crashes, and moments later the Earth itself had taken a tumble and was upside down, flying over his head.

Only it wasn't the Earth. It was him, flying down the cliff with a chunk of rock and a badly wounded hollow. He had never plunged into water from height, and he didn't quite know what to expect. It was a harder crash than he had anticipated, and he was so disoriented he couldn't tell up from down, or left from right, until he was pulled up to the surface by the air bubble that was his, blessedly waterproof, back pack. He spluttered around, fighting to keep afloat without knowing how to swim, and swallowing more dirty water than he would have wanted for a year. He didn't know how long he fought the water like this, but slowly his consciousness started to give way.

He was only jolted halfway awake when he felt himself being dragged off. A voice he couldn't recognize talked close to his face.

"Well, damn, you aren't Ichigo."

"Kuro... saki..."

He had wanted to say Yemon after that, but he slipped into complete unconsciousness before he could.


Author's Notes: Cliffhanger! Dun, dun, DUN!

Blackout1170: I feel completely vindicated after the reveals on the Manga about the Quincy and Ichigo's family (this was originally written in 2011, before the reveals, so hah!). That said, I have other plans for Yemon, and he's too much of a Quincy newbie for all the cool powers, and I think adding all those characters would make the whole thing too complicated. Maybe for the sequel!