When Ichigo woke up, he was confused. His confusion started in its first stage as he felt something wet brushing up against his cheek over and over. A horse, a starch white horse was licking his face. But why was there a horse? Where did it come from?

After pushing the horse's face away came his second realization, which was that he was in the grass on the side of the hill just south of town. The grass was warm and the sun was already fairly high in the sky. It was warm and nice, but he had no idea why he was there.

This lead to his third realization, that the grass was right up against his skin. His shirt was missing, and there was something on his chest. Looking down, his heart jumped up into his throat as he saw a head of messy black hair on his chest. A young girl's arms were wrapped around him.

"For the love of the gods, please tell me I didn't." Ichigo said, closing his eyes and trying to will himself to wake up. But no matter how much he willed reality to change, his senses didn't register anything different. He peaked open one eye, glancing down at the innocent, sleeping face of the sorceress from the night before. She was so close that he could smell her pine scented shampoo. Her graceful, slim body was holding tightly to him so that he could feel her body warmth, causing the young man to gulp and blush a deep red.

How the hell did he end up in this position? His thoughts went back to the night before, but things were not adding up. He was wondering what he should do when the girl started to shift around, her head rising up from Ichigo's chest.

She sat up, yawning wide and moving up her hand to paw at her eyes in a really cute manner. Her bright purple eyes looking towards Ichigo, seeming to not comprehend what she was seeing. The two stared at each other for a few seconds before the girl's sleepy expression turned to one of confusion and then, as her eyes drifted down Ichigo's bare chest, embarrassment.

She pushed herself away from Ichigo and scrambled away from him. "If... if you tell anyone about this! I will turn you into a pig and sell you to a butcher!" The sorceress squealed, her cheeks turning a bright red as she pointed threateningly towards Ichigo.

"Hey don't point at me! I don't have a clue how this happened!" Ichigo said in his defense, holding up his hands. Then he realized something. His body didn't hurt. Looking along his left arm, the burns were gone, and so was the cut from the vampire, only the slightest of scars to show that it had ever been there to begin with.

"D..don't get the wrong idea. I was just healing you. I must have used to much energy and... It doesn't mean anything! Nothing happened so just forget it!" The sorceress shouted, blushing like a virgin. Something that was odd, since rumors said that virgin girls cannot preform magic.

"You're a healer? A real one?" Ichigo said in surprise, looking down at the arm. He'd never seen healing magic before.

"My grades in healing were always the best in school." The sorceress said, turning up her chin to his comment.

"Oh... thanks." Ichigo said, turning his head away. Nearby he could see the remains of his shirt which had been burned pretty badly. "Ichigo."

"Huh? What was that?" The sorceress said glancing back at him, causing him to blush as he saw her purple eyes and still wild hair.

"My name. It's Ichigo Kurosaki." He said, trying to keep his voice from raising up, the way it tended to whenever he got flustered.

The girl seemed to tense up. "I'm Rukia... Kuchiki." She said hesitantly.

"Well Rukia, don't suppose you would be willing to tell me what the hell happened?" Ichigo said. Rukia looked surprised, probably from the informal greeting. Sorceresses were usually seen at the same leave as princesses, yet he referred to her by her given name with no formalities added.

She looked at him for a few seconds before sighing. "I suppose I owe you that much. Fine, listen closely because I refuse to explain this more than once." Rukia said, moving towards a saddle bag that was close by and pulling out a notebook and a pencil. Ichigo blinked in surprise as she began to draw. "There is more worlds that just the one we reside in, dimensional planes where the states of reality differ and the laws of nature and skewed. These worlds we call spheres." She said, drawing a circle in the middle of the page and labeling it Earth and putting odd cartoon bunnies inside of it. Ichigo raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.

"Usually, these spheres do not interact, but there are points where the boundary between one sphere and another becomes thin. We call these points, 'Points of Power'. And wherever they are, large amounts of magic can usually be found." She drew another circle, with it overlapping with the first. "This free magic causes mutations in the creatures that live nearby, recreating what are referred to as 'monsters'." She added fangs to the bunnies in the overlapping region. "The Point of Power in this region was becoming unstable, causing greater mutations in the nearby monsters and making them more aggressive than normal. So I came here in order to restabilize the point before it could threaten the nearby settlement."

"The Ifrit was not truly a monster, by the definition I had given you, as it was not from this world." She drew a cartoon fire with an angry face in the second sphere and then added arrows pointing from it into the sphere labeled Earth. "It was a being from the sphere referred to as the plane of fire, a fire genie that passed through the unstable point of power and manifested in this world. Does that answer your questions?"

"Did you know your drawings are shit?" Ichigo said bluntly. Rukia's glare was as cold as ice and with one solid movement of her hand, he was sent face first into the ground.

"Honestly, for a sorcerer you are such an idiot." Rukia spat.

"What the hell are you talking about? I'm not a sorcerer." Ichigo grumbled as he pushed himself up off of the ground, rubbing his face with one hand.

"Don't lie to me! I saw you gathering the Force just last night! Sure you were wielding it like a baboon wielding a large stick, but there is no way you could have gathered that much without any knowledge of what you were doing!" Rukia said angrily, but seeing the dumb look on Ichigo's face her angrily expression passed. "You really didn't know? You are a source, and didn't know it? You are a completely untrained source?" She said dumbstruck.

"What are you even taking about? What's a source?" Ichigo said confused.

Rukia's expression was hard for the boy to read as she stared at him, but after a few seconds she looked away towards the town. "You live in this town then, don't you? Do you have any family there?"

"Huh, well yeah. My dad and two little sisters." Ichigo said not sure where this was going.

Rukia turned back towards him and then with a serious expression said something that Ichigo had a hard time believing. "Your father, I wish to speak to him."


I'm going to be bumping up the rating from T to M. Since this will probably not be the last mention of sexualized content.

This is just a small connecting chapter before the confronting of Ichigo's day and the revealing of the past. So bare with me for a bit. Sadly that bit might be a while as my stable internet and time to dedicate to writing is coming to an end for the next week, and I probably won't find anymore time to write, and certainly no internet while my family is going into the Outback in Australia.

I would have rather simply stayed home, but as all of you under the age of 18 know, or opinions don't count for ****.