Morning Training with my noobs who were not assigned to an element yet went pretty much the same way it always went; a good sweaty run and one or two minor injuries from sparring. I was beginning to think they might just assign a Healer over here on a permanent basis to keep from having my squad members trickle in in ones and twos each day. After the bath that followed post-morning-training and breakfast, I hopped over to the Captain's office to see if he had errands to run that required the presence of his wingman.
It turned out that Kuchiki was going to spend the day with his sister, who was in from the field for a little while. I told him to pass on my regards, and to tell her that she could drop by if she wanted. He nodded distantly and I doubted she'd get the message. I often got the feeling that dear Elder Brother didn't like that I was a consistent presence in her life. Well, not so constant, but our relationship was improving, going back to that old familiarity we'd always had. I firmly quashed the feelings of sorrow at the fact that I was relegated to "friend" in her eyes that tried to rise up and told the Captain I was going to try looking into that thing I'd told him about the day before. His nod was more like a 'do what you want, I don't care' kind of nod, but he dismissed me and I was free to go.
I dropped by my quarters and grabbed the Silvertip tea for Ukitake and the little music playing device for Nemu. If one avenue didn't pan out I could skip right to the next. I hopped over to the Thirteenth Squad Hall and knocked politely on The Squabblers door, to find them squabbling as usual over who was going to give the captain his medicine that day.
"Hey brats, is Captain Ukitake free?" I asked politely.
They stopped mid-argument and glared over at me.
"He's resting!" girl-squabbler, I think her name was Kotetsu, snapped at me. I refrained from bonking her on the head for it. One, she was a girl, and two, I was there to ask a favor so I should play nice.
"He can't be disturbed," boy-squabbler Kotsubaki maintained. I rolled my eyes at their theatrics. He was usually out in the tea pavilion at this time anyway. I could find him myself.
:I don't know why I bother,: I thought.
"Thanks for your help," I said instead, turning toward the door.
I looked around HQ and sure enough, there he was out under the tea pavilion by the lake with his tea-things doing tea-brewing stuff.
"Good afternoon Captain," I called in a friendly manner.
I casually held the tea tin in my open palm in front of me. Ukitake turned and looked over at me, a smile of welcome on his face.
"Ah, Vice-Captain Abarai," he said, his voice genial as always. "What a pleasant surprise. You come bearing gifts I see. And here I had thought that I had seen the last of you when my young squad member returned safely to the Seireitei."
I ducked my head a little at the allusion to my not visiting him as consistently as I had back when Rukia had taken her first mission out in the field. I'd come by every day to choke down on tea that I hated, ostensibly for a friendly visit, but in reality I was desperate for word of Rukia.
"Sorry for not coming by," I said, setting the gift nearby in tacit offering. "I've been a little busy."
"So I've heard. How was Hueco Mundo?"
Was it my imagination or was that a note of teasing I heard in his voice?
"Sandy," I replied succinctly. "And dark."
I sat down properly beside him, my legs had at last grown accustomed to seiza and no longer went numb after ten minutes. Now it took twenty at least. He smiled again and poured me a cup of the tea he had brewing and gestured that I should expand on my answer.
"The sun never rises there unless yer inside," I said. "Strange place. The ground is all hollow underneath and the menos all live underground in a weird forest. The hallways of the citadel itself 'r all stark white an' really even an' regular. The place is a maze, every bit as much as the Seireitei is, except this has levels to it too. It was a pain in the butt to try to get around."
"My own subordinate said much the same to me," Ukitake noted.
"Probably better," I said dryly, and tried to hide my reluctance to drink as I politely brought the tea to my lips to sip it.
"No worse certainly," he agreed with me. "So what brings you here?"
"Can't I just have come for a friendly visit?" I said affecting offended innocence.
He gave me a shrewd look and waited. I quickly caved.
"It's like this," I said. "You're a scholar and have been around the Seireitei for a long time, an' even though I'm a Lieutenant, I'm still pretty young, so you've probably seen a lotta things I haven't."
"The reverse is also true," he said gently. "I have never been to Hueco Mundo."
"I just went there to help Rukia an' the brat rescue their friend," I brushed it off.
I didn't see how I'd done anything so spectacular. Okay, so maybe I'd been planning on going there to bring the poor little girl back to her family anyway, but since carrot-top beat me to it, it didn't count.
:Story o' my life lately.:
"Anyway, I came across somethin' innerrestin' the other day an' I was hoping you might know a little bit more about it."
"Go on," he prompted, mildly interested look in his face.
"I was out in the Rukon District yesterday lookin' inta why the heck ain't no-one on the streets at night. 'Snot normal behavior for that neck o' town, y'see. I tailed a covey back to 'is roost because he said one of his mates had seen the thing I was picking up on. I got a good whiff of bad juju."
Ukitake looked over at me, his eyebrows raised in question.
"That's street slang for spirit energy, but it's broader than that, sometimes it means kido, sometimes it means superstitious stuff or it can also mean just plain bad luck or that you think someone's making yer luck bad by using magic."
Ukitake nodded comprehension.
"Anyway this trace of spirit energy that got left behind when the kid got... disappeared was like nothing I've ever smelled before."
"Wait, people are going missing?" Ukitake questioned.
"They think so. If they're not just being murdered as usual, and it's not fer certain they ain't, there's somethin' out there that can cross the Line undetected and is targeting people with strong spirit energy."
Ukitake studied me silently for a very long moment.
"And what do you make of this Lieutenant?" he asked me quietly.
I scratched my head and thought about it.
"I don't 'xactly know what's what yet," I said. "That's why I'm askin' around. I trust my nose and I know what I sensed, so all I need to know now it whether or not anyone's heard of something that c'n move through walls undetected, and smells like incense."
"Incense?" Ukitake questioned me. "That's not a lot to go on lieutenant, and most entries in the archives don't list what a creature smells like unless it's very distinctive."
"It's definitely not human," I added helpfully. "And it ain't Soul Reaper either."
He stared at me after I said this.
"You're sure?" he said after another long silence.
"Yeah," I said. "Human spirits and Soul Reaper Spirits have a distinct sort of scent underneath all the individual differences that mark one soul from the next, somethin' that ties 'em, even in the case of Soul Reapers, to the Human World and to each other. It's like a unified scent, sort of. This new gremlin o' mine didn't have a single speck of that under-scent."
"Hmmm, that is quite the mystery," Ukitake said consideringly. "Something that is spirit, but not human or Soul Reaper huh?"
He paused and thought for a long time, I pretended to drink my tea and waited. Ukitake sipped elegantly at his own, eyes focused inward, lost in thought, then after a while he brightened.
"There are and have been entities in the world that have spirit powers but are not human," he said at last, eyes brightening with scholarly interest. "There has always been a great deal of scholarly debate about whether or not they predated the appearance of the human soul in the world, or whether they appeared after the Humans came to map themselves upon the world and the Soul Society was created, and were simply appropriated by human's into their own belief systems."
I wasn't interested in scholarly debate, I'd leave that up to the scholars. I did have more sense than to say so out loud, especially when Ukitake was doing me a favor.
"Generally it has been agreed that they derive their power from the human spirit, some even say that they were simply "believed" into existence. They are, or rather, they were beings of great spiritual power. It is said that they once had a prescence in the human world, but their existence there has long since faded to myth over the long centuries."
"And they are?" I asked, trying not to sound impatient.
"They're simply called The Believed," Ukitake said. "It is said that they have their own Realms in the Dangai, but so far as I know, no-one has ever been to one, so rumors of their Realms remain unconfirmed. Or if they have been to one, the records of their journey hasn't made it into the archives."
"The Believed, huh?" I muttered to myself.
I made some more pleasant small talk, he commended me on my new element innovation in my own squad and that morale in Sixth seemed to be up by a great deal. He also lamented that so many of his own Reapers were out in the field, and hinted that Rukia would probably be stationed in Harakura for quite some time. After a while he politely excused himself, and I bowed and took my own exit, off in search of someone who might have heard anything more about the Believed.
:Well, the best place to go when looking for information is someone who spends all of her time compiling information,: I thought to myself, already heading off toward Twelfth Squad.
I'd really been hoping to avoid running into Twelfth Squad's creepy Captain Kurotsuchi. The guy gave me (and most people) the screaming heebie-jeebies. Every time I was around him I always got the feeling of being a bug under a bell-jar, that the moment I did something interesting he was going to haul me off to his lab and start experimenting on me. With his weird clothes, evil scientist cackle, odd face paint and general aura of inhumanity, the guy was plain creepy and that's all there was to it.
It was just my luck that I'd walk right into Twelfth Squad courtyard and he'd be the first person I'd see. Of course, he was actually with his daughter so it wasn't a total loss. He was scolding her, however, in his usual manner... via the back of his hand. I wasn't some chivalrous idiot and I was generally of the opinion that most women could take care of themselves perfectly well without my help (having grown up with Rukia would do that to a guy, I guessed) but something about the casual way that Mayuri Kurotsuchi smacked her around really put my hackles up. I wasn't really putting any thought into it when I flashed across the courtyard and wrapped my hand around his wrist as he pulled his arm back for another admonition about her stupidity.
It was somewhat satisfying to see the look of consternation on his face as he moved to smack her and found himself restrained. He whirled around with a look of fury on his face to see who would dare interfere with his discipline session only to have to look up (it was very satisfying to be so much taller than he was) at a guy who was bigger than him.
"What is it Lieutenant?" he snarled with ill grace when I squeezed his wrist slightly before letting it go.
He stressed my rank I noted, probably some way of asserting some nebulous authority or somethin'. I only took orders from one guy, and it wasn't this tooth-lipped little twerp.
"Good afternoon Captain," I said, smiling that overly bright smile I used when I wanted to cover up that my feelings were the opposite of friendly.
"Sorry to innerupt yer daily abuse o' yer daughter, but I need to borrow her."
I really hoped he could catch the sarcasm under my pleasant tone. That lemon-faced look he gave me told he he heard it satisfyingly loud and clear.
"Won't be but a minute," I assured him as I snagged the poor hapless Nemu by the elbow and hussled her off.
She tried to make a weak protest but I got her out of earshot before she could do much more.
"Hey Nemu," I said with a smile, feeling a little bit like a doting older brother as I reached into my over-shirt pocket and pulled out the tiny music player I'd won in some kind of lottery-prize thing.
The Quincy had loaded it with music from his computer in exchange for an hour's practice bout with me when I told him I wanted to use it as a bribe eventually. I think he mostly put wussy classical stuff on it. He would.
It was kinda cute the way her eyes locked on it. Normally she had this sweetly bland aura about her, like she had no thoughts or will outside of what her "Mayuri-sama" told her she could have. Personally, I kinda liked it when she grew herself a little spine; women were supposed to have spine, it made 'em innerestin'.
"I got a favor ta ask ya."
"What's the favor?" she asked me sweetly, eyes never leaving the prize I held out to her.
"I need you to fish through that system o' yers in Twelfth and find me anything you can about a race or a people or beings that are called The Believed."
"Mayuri-sama doesn't allow personal projects on his system," Nemu replied, still looking at the player.
"So just don't tell him about it. What he doesn't know won't hurt, besides, it's not personal exactly, you could just say, if he asks about it, that you heard a rumor about there being something out there in the Outer and you wanted to know if it was true or not."
"I haven't heard any rumor--"
"Which is why I'm tellin' ya now," I finished for her smoothly.
I waggled the device before her and her eyes followed it.
"Whaddaya say?"
"I-I guess, if I'm investigating something that might have an impact on the Seireitei--" she said, reluctantly letting herself be persuaded.
"Furthermore," I said, seized by a sudden inspiration. "Aizen got away, though he doesn't have the Hougyoku anymore, but no-body knows where he got to. Most people assume he's hidin' in the Mortal Realm, but you could just be checking all the possibilities, just to be certain."
:Come to think of it, that's not actually a bad notion,; I thought, proud of myself. :There might even be somethin' to it too. Everyone assumes he's hidin' out in the mortal realm, but he's not the type to do whatever people expect him to do. Maybe these Shadows...:
"Mayuri-sama always tells us to try to isolate all of the variables before we come to a conclusion," Nemu agreed.
"An' if you should happen to discuss one or two pertinent variables with a fellow Lieutenant, who's ta say anything about it?"
I handed the player over to her as a silent way of sealing our deal. She took it.
"I will be resting from my research project on the park bench outside of Sixth at moonrise," she replied solemnly.
"Moonrise it is, then," I grinned at her and took myself off while she headed back to her father's lair.
I just filed my taxes yesterday and that means I should be getting my PS3 money so I can get Final Fantasy 13 (I want it, I want it soooo baaaaaaad!!) After which you all may never see me again as I will have been sucked into the Final Fantasy void so eat up the regular posts while you can. ^_^
In the next chapter of Chasing Shadows we get the premeire debut of Baboon King Zabimaru, and what's this, he's offering a deal to Renji? He want's Renji to work on getting rid of those seals on his body? What new challenges await him when he undertakes this training? Find out next time on Chasing Shadows: Ninth Gate