You blink open your bleary eyes, your body feeling sluggish and your mind downright muddy.
You wince as you try to get up, head aching, muscles hurting like after a day of intense effort.
No, not quite a day of intense effort… More like months of doing nothing, and a single moment of sudden intense action. A body reawakening. It feels disturbing, and more than this, out of place. You've done plenty of effort lately.
You look at your skin and there is something about it that you don't recognize. Is it… Harder? You flex your hand and it sends a throb of pain in your shoulder, which isn't normal. Not only were you not injured when you went to bed last "night" (insofar as there is such a thing in Aizen's fortress), even if you had been you would be healed by now.
You feel strange. Standing up, you walk to the middle of your room and start a simple workout routine, the kind you do every so often despite other Numeros telling you it's useless in a spirit body. You feel… Well, not stronger. But your innate power is answering differently. It's been months since you were in that Arrancar body and you've been progressively learning how to control your reiatsu, but this…
You pause and understanding dawns on you. As an Arrancar, you've always had the same spiritual power as you did as an Adjucha. But this new body, fresh and untested, couldn't properly handle that energy; much of it was wasted when you expended it, leaving you to feel as if you'd grown weaker overall. But now you feel more control over your latent power, as if several more months had passed and you'd slowly grown accustomed to this new form.
But that didn't happen. So what could have caused it..?
You don't have time to ponder these questions right now. Work is awaiting and it's not like a Numero can call in sick. You get your uniform and cloak.
Of course, few people ever want to meet the Pillar Princess.
The Thunder Witch? You're not sure which of her nicknames is more in vogue right now. It could be a problem if you use the wrong one.
You do get the Pillar one, though, more than the Thunder one (does she even have lightning powers? You're not eager to find out). You're currently walking in her "domain," one of the forts at the edge of Las Noches, in a vast empty room with orange walls, filled with red pillars of varying size.
That's the thing with the Privaron. They may be disgraced, granted a special number marking their obsolete status then sent to occupy some useful but inglorious position at the outskirts of Aizen's domain, but they were still Espada once: when they claim a place and say "this is mine," small fries like you just nod and say "yes ma'am."
Now where could she possibly…
"Hey, you!" You start, very visibly - it's a bit shameful, really - and look left and right before remembering where you are and looking up - and there she is, standing on a pillar, arms folded and looking down with a sour look: Cirucci the Thunder Witch/Pillar Princess/Yo-Yo Waltzer (she really doesn't like this one anymore). A short Arrancar but still taller than you, her black hair falling straight on her shoulders, wearing the simple white uniform of your small army, a conservative white robe going down to her feet.
"What are you doing in my kingdom? Don't you know I eat little Numeros for breakfast?"
You're pretty sure this is a joke. Preeeeettyyyy sure. Mostly.
In any case, she's the one who ordered you to come here. You cough to clear your throat.
"Oh my, are you the one they sent to deal with my problem? What a sorry little thing you are."
Cirucci clicks her tongue and hops down from her pillar, a dubious look on her face, and you have to keep yourself from instinctively stepping back. Her spiritual pressure this up close is terrible, a kind of prideful, spiteful power, and you tense instinctively, straight as a plank. The Privaron looks you up and down, checking your sword critically, then steps back. You allow yourself to breathe.
"Would you believe that I don't even have my own Fraccion to handle these things anymore? Shameful, just shameful." There's an angry twist to her lips as she takes a few steps back, whirling in the midst of her pillar forest. The dress looks off on her. "I'm ten times the Arrancar this lumbering oaf is, whatever his spiritual pressure is. And he doesn't even have a Fraccion, just a… Dog. Or whatever. He's powerful but he's not regal."
The turn of the conversation is making you antsy. You were just looking for simple orders, not gossip about people who could kill you in one blow if you mocked them the tiniest bit.
"You're like a wooden stick, girl," Cirucci tells you with a frown. "It's making me uneasy."
You bow apologetically and try to relax your posture. You succeed only moderately.
"In any case this won't do. I may no longer be an Espada, but I am still of their kin. We're nobility and I won't be treated like some kind of rank-and-file. You understand that, right?"
You're not sure you can, but you nonetheless nod as enthusiastically as you can.
"Good! Now off you go," Cirucci says, waving her hand in a gesture of dismissal. She then leaps up several yards in the air and gracefully falls sitting on one of the lower pillars - her dress once again folding badly and damaging the effect.
After a few seconds she looks down and sees you, and gives a puzzled frown.
"What are you doing still here?"
She didn't actually tell you what your mission was. You stumble around that fact, trying to express it as politely as you can, but then she cuts you off.
"That's just like my staff, to forget that kind of details. What am I supposed to do, explain myself again to the help? Pah!"
She hops from the pillar again - you swallow nervously at the renewed pressure - and makes a flowing motion of her hands that encompasses her dress from the top on down.
"This is bad. Right? I look like a nun." She chuckles at her own joke, then pauses. "Did they still have nuns when you died? I didn't keep up."
You're pretty sure they did, although all that is a bit blurry now.
"Anyway, I've been trying to get a proper dress out of this idiot for weeks now, but apparently I'm a secondary concern now. Because clearly it takes a month to carve out that living asparagus's moon-collar. Is it a moon? I first I thought it was like, a saintly halo or something, but he's clearly no saint."
Is she trash-talking Nnoitra Gilger? You would like to be somewhere else right now.
"Anyway, you don't look like you have much fashion sense. No offense, darling, but full Hollow mask on an Arrancar is just tacky. So I won't bore you with the details; I gave that damned talior all the indications. You just have to go to him and tell him that he needs to hurry himself up. There's a princess waiting."
...does she think you got to choose how much of your Hollow mask you kept when you transformed? No, never mind that, it's not important. You nod rapidly, give her a bow and anxiously look at the exit.
"When you come back I'll teach you how to do a proper curtsey," Cirucci says offhandedly. "This isn't cutting it. Now go!" She adds with the same quick, wavy hand gesture. You are all too happy to comply.
"I can't believe you don't know where to find the tailor of Las Noches. How did you even get your current uniform?"
You don't answer that. You take a hurt expression, but Esmeralda can't see your face behind your mask, so it loses some of its effect. She laughs.
"Of course I remember! I went and fetched it for you! Well, that's what you get for not doing things your own self. Now stop complaining and follow along."
You weren't even complaining. Not loudly, anyway. And you were already following her, although you're not sure she's not stringing you along; you're in the underside of Las Noches, descending a long flight of stairs in a grey stone underground.
"Where'd you get that new cape, anyway?" Esmeralda asks. "I remembered you liking grey better than black. It looks a lot like…" She pauses, her eyes widening a bit. "Did you..?"
It's a cloak, not a cape, which she knows and is teasing you about. And you don't like to talk about it. Esmeralda shakes her head.
"Suit yourself. We're almost there anyway…"
As she speaks, you turn a final corner of the stairs and come into a wide room, all heavy grey stone lit by odd round stone that seem to perfectly imitate the color of the sun.
And it is full of clothes. That's the first thing you notice: glass display cases all along the walls, coat-hangers, sewing tables, all filled with uniforms. Some are stored and displayed like prized possessions (you think you recognize the rather striking cut of Aizen's shinigami-inspired kimono-and-jacket combo), others are heaped upon a table in a disarray of models all subtly different from each other (ten different takes on the same bare-bellied, high-collared jacket).
There is a sound of cutting, sewing, and humming, and a strong spiritual pressure in the room; you hesitate to enter, but Esmeralda smiles defiantly and steps forward. You're not sure how she does it; she's definitely not a combat-type, and her own spiritual pressure is rather weak (weaker than your own, you think, although you wouldn't bluntly tell her that), but she never seems bothered by the proximity of powerful Arrancars. You follow after her, trying to shrug off the disquieting sense of pressure in the room and looking around you for that "tailor."
As you take a few steps inside, the sounds of working stop, sending a shiver down your back. Esmeralda stops, and motions for you to do the same; but then your eye catches something. A beautiful split coat, its two folds patterned like wings, like your old one but put together by a professional. You reach out to it…
"What are you doing in my workshop? Hey, don't touch that!"
You start and back away, looking frantically around you until your eyes rest on a man with long, unruly brown hair, staring at you suspiciously. He is tall and slender, wearing something like a patchwork made out of a dozen discarded attempts at the standard Arrancar uniform sewn together, and what remains of his Hollow mask forms a kind of circle around his left eye, like a monocle without its glass. He steps from behind a display case, and you see that he is carrying a zanpakuto - in the form of a great pair of scissors strapped to his back.
"What do you little ones want?" He asks a bit more politely now that you aren't threatening to touch what is undoubtedly his creation. But before either of you can answer his eyes stop on you and he stares aghast.
"My god, you're a disaster. What's that cloak? Did you cut it yourself? With your own sword, I bet."
You look dejected. You thought your cloak was pretty nice. Sure, it's not wing-like, but it's a trophy, and-
"Stop fidgeting. Look at me." And he's upon you, one finger raising your chin to stare him in the eye. Up close the spiritual pressure is intoxicating, and you clutch your fists to stop your hands from shaking. "The fabric is good. You took it from a Gillian, didn't you? And not one of the mindless ones we used for food, either. A sentient, powerful one. The cloth is still infused with his reiatsu."
He steps back and you inhale sharply. Behind you, Esmeralda bites her lip, a look you can't quite decipher on her face. The tailor pushes your cloak aside, letting it fall over your shoulder, and sees…
"What's that. Did you get my beautiful uniform cut? Is this why you're here, to ask for a spare? That isn't worth my time! Not for a Numero!"
You shake your head frantically. You'd never bother a powerful, important Arrancar for that kind of personal business.
"Aaah, so it is the cloak. Nice thinking. Yes, with such a gift I could put together a nifty little ensemble… Better if you had more, of course…"
Esmeralda steps forward, smiling. "Alphonse, she's here for one of the Privaron."
"That little brat?" The tailor exclaims, eyes wide. "Do you have any idea how hard she's been working me?" Without saying anything further he turns suddenly and walks off. You give Esmeralda a puzzled look and she points to him with her chin, so you follow awkwardly.
"First she tells me, 'I need it puffier.' So I make this!" He says, waving to his right at what looks like an intricate dress, fitting of a noblewoman of centuries ago, and now thrown haphazardly onto a table. "She sends it back, saying 'no, shorter.' So I make this!" He points to a white knee-length skirt of a kind you've never seen but would believe was likely very fashionable once. "But then she says, 'where are the stockings? Where is the lace? I need it sexier!'"
The tailor snaps around, staring you in the face with his wide eyes, and you freeze.
"What's 'sexy?' I don't even know the word! I ask for more details. She tells me, 'it's a gothic style.' So obviously I think, 'ah! I have it!' and produce this!" He says, dramatically showing a simple tunic held with a geometric golden brooch and covered in a cape. "She tells me, 'not that kind of goth!' So obviously, keeping my complaints of historical accuracy to myself, I deliver!" At this point he shows you a thick, multilayered robe, decorated with fleur-de-lys patterns and a long scarf wrapped around the space where the head would be to cover hair and neck.
"And still she complains! She accuses me of not keeping up with the times! What times? Does she have any idea how long I've been in Hueco Mundo? I used to be in the employ of Barragan himself! I-follow-Hollow-fashion," Alphonse says, thumping his chest with a thumb. "And she wants make up! And something that can make her hair curl! I'm a tailor, not a make-up artist!"
You try very hard not to wince - you're pretty sure he would feel it even under the mask - and instead just nod rapidly along with whatever he says, trying to keep prepared for whenever his outburst will put you in danger and you'll have to run; but instead Alphonse stops, visibly spent, and closes and opens his hands reflexively.
When there's been a few moments of silence, you swallow and open your mouth. Then you close it. You raise a hand and the tailor stares at you blankly.
"Right. Your mission. Well, did she give you a comprehensive, detailed description of the exact kind of uniform she wants?"
Not exactly as such, no. Of course, a very reasonable, very professional, very unconcerned-with-their-own-life Numero would have asked for that, but by the end you were getting somewhat worried that if you stayed any longer you would start hearing some kind of criticism of the bathroom habits of the shinigami, or the obsession of Number 6 with keeping his chest bare, and then you would be struck dead out of nowhere on your way to the tailor.
"Well, it's no use then." Alphonse makes a gesture like flicking dust off the air. "You're gonna have to go into the living world and bring me back enough data that I know what the hell a 'gothic lolita' is. "
You blink.
"It'll be completely illegal, of course. I can't very well tell lord Aizen, 'I need to break confinement so that one of the pariah can get the exact clothes she wants.' We'll have to keep it to ourselves. But it's that or you go back and get me what I haven't been able to get all this time.
Well then.
[X]Illegally go into the living world to steal clothes.
[ ]Go back to Cirucci and risk her wrath to get an exact description of the style of clothes she wants.