An hour after Wayne had left the house to do some vigilante work, Ichigo had done exactly as she had said that she would do.
It had taken just a tad bit of ingenuity on her part, after all, she hadn't wanted anyone to know what she was doing, just in case. But she had managed to find some wild growing sage outside a little while ago when she had climbed out of her new bedroom window to go look around for some.
It was a stroke of luck that she had managed to locate the sage in an herb garden located on the grounds and grab it. But the hard part was yet to come since she didn't carry a lighter around on her.
Thankfully, she was very skilled at improvising, and was able to use her spirit energy to make the sage heat up to the point of burning.
Then when that was done, she went all around the bedroom, waving it around and uttered prayers that she recalled old man Don Konoji, the spiritualist saying a few times when she had worked a couple of on-site jobs with him at haunted and cursed locations across Japan during her final year of high school.
She also recalled a few of those 'prayers' eliciting very violent and malevolent entities into reacting. And because of that, she was ready for what could happen.
Or so she thought, anyways.
Yet even after doing the same thing in the closet- yeah, she had sucked it up for the sake of cleansing the damn thing of the horrible feeling that she got from it. And finally closed the door behind her feeling accomplished and proud of herself for a job well done, when she suddenly noticed that all of the bedroom's pieces of furniture were floating in the air.
She blinked at the sight, sure that she had to be having a weird mental breakdown or something.
But no, the furniture was still floating around the room when she eventually stopped spazzing out. Which was great because it meant that she wasn't actually crazy.
But was also bad because it meant that she wasn't dealing with any normal ghost or spirit or any other variation of them. No, floating furniture- was more common with poltergeists.
Taking another few seconds to watch the floating furniture she then sighed. Because, damn, she really couldn't get a break. Could she?
Despite her years of being a Soul Reaper, she had never really encountered anything remotely poltergeist related. At least not until one of her summer jobs with Konoji anyways.
And the one time that she had, the activity then had been so violent and dangerous that it had caused the building that they had been in at the time to collapse on their heads.
To say that old man Konoji had been freaked out nearly as bad as she had been by the near-death experience, would be a gross understatement. In fact, his reaction had been eerily similar to the night that they had met, and he had first learned of the nature and origin of Hollows and how they came to be. Yet he hadn't been daunted by the incident for very long.
And because she had been there and hadn't known what was happening any more than he had- he had dragged her along during a few research trips so that they could both learn what they could about what had happened to them.
He had even made sure to bring his TV crew on those trips so that they would be informed of how to tell a typical haunting apart from poltergeist activity since they weren't exactly the same thing.
And floating furniture was definitely one of the criteria that she remembered being mentioned in one of the many, many books that she had come across about poltergeists.
"What the hell?" She muttered, feeling more than a tad bit frustrated. She took several moments to try of think of what she should do when one of the boys suddenly popped his head in.
"Step mother!" Ah, yes. It would be Damian. She thought sarcastically as his voice seemed to stop working the very second that he realized that there was something horribly amiss.
She sent him a withering, What the hell are you doing, look. As she absently noted that the boy was watching a piece of furniture float by him with impossibly wide eyes before finally saying in a rush. "I came to ask you a question about dinner, but I can see that you're busy."
She thinned her lips in displeasure but still managed to get out, "Yes. Yes, I am." Her eyes watching every piece of floating furniture like a hawk.
Which was followed by him saying something about needing to talk to someone far away, and then running off to escape.
She had hoped that that would be the end of her 'company' for a while. But obviously the people in Wayne's home were far too close-knit to be remotely normal in her opinion.
One word from Damian had led to Dick showing up and peeking in on her and then slowly backing away from the door and going god knows what. And that had inevitably led to Alfred walking through the door of the room, and then freezing for all of two seconds before calling out.
"Miss, please stay calm. Master's Dick and Damian are both suiting up to come and save you."
She homed in on his oddly calm voice and narrowed her eyes at the man in suspicion for a moment as she called out in a slightly sarcastic tone. "That's nice, Alfred. I feel safer already."
She was sure that Alfred was aware of the sarcasm in her voice since he sent her an oddly fond grin. As the bed floated in close to her, teetering in the air as if it were going to fall on top of her before then slowly floating off somewhere else, temporarily distracting her.
"I'll grab some spell books and magic supplies and we'll fix this in no time!" Alfred shouted as the dresser got a little bit too close to him and sent him scurrying out the door before she could so much as to call after him.
Magic what?!
But nevertheless, she got a sick sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach at the prospect of anything magic being remotely introduced to the poltergeist since there were easier ways to get rid of it.
Sure enough, barely twenty minutes later, Dick and Damian were fighting several pieces of the furniture that had been morphed into wooden hob goblins due to Alfred accidentally forgetting the eye of newt and dragon's blood in a specific spell.
And she...well, she felt like she really was going to have a heart attack, any second now since this was by far the worst-case scenario that could have happened.
But had to content herself with fighting off several goblins snapping and snarling at her with a fire poker. While Dick was suddenly knocked to the floor several feet from her by a few others, and she had to sacrifice the poker to skewer two of them through the head to stop them from getting any closer to the boy's throat. Giving him not only a distraction as well as something to grab and use to fight back.
She was pleased to say that so far, none of them were dead. Which was great. However, they were greatly outnumbered by the furniture turned hob goblins, and if that wasn't bad enough- the damn things were multiplying and any of them that took any damage were also fixing themselves.
But that was alright.
Breaking things turned out to be a forte of hers. One that she excelled at greatly.
Which was why having her around in dangerous situations was always a good call. Taking a cursory look around the room while grabbing one of the goblins by its wings and ripping them off savagely as she quickly weighed whether or not to change into a Soul Reaper and end this mess. Against whether or not she could live with Alfred and the kids learning about things that they shouldn't.
In the end, it was a very easy choice for her since the lives and wellbeing of others would always win out over her own wants, needs, and desires.
The only real downside to the choice was the fact that she no longer separated her physical and spiritual beings from one another. So even as a Soul Reaper, with her power sky rocketing, she would be physically seen by them.
But again, their lives and wellbeing were what was paramount in her mind.
Kicking the last of the goblins that had been surrounding her, away, she took a breath and focused her energy on the change.
The pulse that usually went hand in hand with her using her abilities while still in her human flesh and blood form was noticed by everyone and everything in the room.
She could see it in the way everything/everyone suddenly stopped and went completely still. Even their breathing seemed to have stopped.
The looks of alarm on Alfred and the boys faces nearly mirrored the goblins own as the phantom wind that accompanied the pulse began to blow. Creating a small whirlwind that could be felt from every corner of the room. Next was the glowing blue ribbons of spirit energy that slowly began to crawl their way up her legs before abruptly bursting into blue flames.
There were shouts of alarm heard from Alfred and the kids. But the flames died down almost as quickly as they appeared.
And once they did, there she was in all her Soul Reaper glory with her zanpaktuo in hand. Black chains wrapped around her neck, running down to cross her chest in an X and disappearing underneath the waist of her clothing. Her blue eyes glittered a darker shade of blue- indicating that her spiritual energy was still there despite the eerie calm.
Lying just beneath the surface of her human flesh and blood.
Anyone that ever had the misfortune to see the glitter of her eyes- the same as the blue lightening that had flashed across the Soul Societies skies the day that she had met Yhwach the King of the Quincy...usually didn't survive for very long.
This was a simple fact that had been proven time and time again during the Thousand-year war. When she had struck down one Quincy after another for their crimes against Soul Society, her friends, and the late Soul King.
The goblins, though, didn't know any of those things. They lacked the cognitive ability to understand the threat that she posed to them as beings that were a combination of excessive energy and magic. And as such, she was going to be able to destroy them easily.
She did too. Destroy them easily, that is.
It really didn't take much to stop them once they all turned on her and lunged for her. The entire fifty or so of them going for her with fervor, all of them intending to rip her to shreds. They never managed to touch her, though. She wouldn't allow it. Which was why they all burst into blue flames and burned to ashes with loud shrieks of anger.
The ashes floated to the floor in little flurries reminiscent of snow.
Letting herself change back to her normal self, she then looked over at Alfred, Dick and Damian to see the three of them gaping at her in slack jawed disbelief and then looked away from them and stuffed her hands into her pants pockets and then walked away.
She recognized that the three would need a while to wrap their minds around what had just happened. Just like she knew that they would have questions.
Questions that she couldn't answer right then. At least not yet anyway.