I hated tracking in the cities, they were dirty, and the air stank of machines and nastiness in the air. Worse still was just the sheer press of people all the time moving around, it made it very difficult to wade through all of the scents. Still, I cased the grounds slowly, carefully weeding through all of the scents of the people who were there on a regular basis, building their impressions up layer upon layer like an extra skin of soul-scents. It was when I hit the baseball diamond in the small park in back of the school that I at last hit paydirt. He scent showed through clearly there, vibrant and well. He was healthy when he'd been there last and I told her so.
Then I stopped abruptly as my senses picked up another scent, one that was swiftly becoming very familiar to me. Not spirit, not Hollow, and not Soul Reaper, the scent of incense and burnt metal filled my nose, almost making me sneeze. A Shadow had been here, and very very recently. That scent was fresher than a daisy. With a sinking feeling of dread I backtracked and caught the most recent scent of her kid and followed it very carefully to the edge of the park.
"Yer kid see's 'em too, doesn't he?" I said to her, my tone betraying that I expected the answer to be a yes.
"What, spirits? Yes, as clearly as I do. It's one thing we share, for us it's as clear as seeing a normal person. We even have trouble, sometimes, telling the difference between the two right away."
I nodded to myself. The kid had seen something and walked to the edge of the park, I could smell his scent as strongly as the Shadow I'd picked up. There was another cold spot and the lingering odor that came when a portal between the mortal world and this one was opened. I could smell her kid's scent and the Shadows...
Could he have been taken?
In the Rukongai everyone, including me, had just assumed that the kids who disappeared from a visit from the Shadows were simply consumed, all of their reiatsu drained and their bodies destroyed, but what if that wasn't the case? I was the only person I knew who had been in a fight with a Shadow and what had happened to me when I'd been absorbed into it? I'd gotten taken to the mortal world and turned mortal. What if the Shadows weren't consuming the spirit energy, but were really instead just kidnapping the kids with it and taking them someplace else?
The significance of something else hit me too. I had assumed that, because all of the other kids had disappeared from the Rukongai that it was the only place where people were disappearing from, but this kid had been attacked by a Shadow in the mortal realm while he was still very much alive. That meant that the Shadows were attacking spirits and mortals alike without regard to which world they found themselves in.
"You said he could see spirits like you," I said, as something occurred to me.
Not all of the kids with spiritual powers in the Rukongai had been taken, the girl in the child-gang hadn't been and she had been sleeping in the same room as the boy who'd disappeared. There had to be something I was missing here. Something to do with why they were being taken at all.
"Yes?" she asked, still looking at me hopefully.
"Did he have any other abilities? I mean, besides just seeing ghosts, could he do anything else?"
Well..." she said a little reluctantly, glancing self-consciously around her. "He could, um..."
Her face scrunched up in that cute way Rukia's always had when she was trying to puzzle her way through something. It usually didn't take her long, she was smarter than me.
"When he was a kid he had this outlaws of Sherwood phase, you know, like Robin Hood? He would always pretend to be Robin Hood with a bow and arrow, I didn't think anything of it until one day there was a shooting about half a block away. We heard the gunshots go off, and I grabbed him and threw him down to keep him safe. We look up and there in his hand was this... it flickered there for only a few seconds, but it looked like a bow with a matching arrow made out of pure light."
I stared at her intently.
"Was it blue-white light?" I asked, nearly shaking her by the shoulders.
"How did you--?" she started but I didn't hear her.
A ranged weapon made of spiritual energy meant only one thing to me...
A Quincy. Her son was a Quincy.
Zanpaktou choose their wielders when they are bestowed, and a bond between the spirit of the sword and the spirit of the Soul Reaper was formed when the Soul Reaper took up the sword, but as far as I knew a Quincy's power was born into his own soul, innate within that person and was concentrated through those funny medalions they used.
:I thought Quincies were all of the same Clan,: I thought confused.
Just to double check and be certain I wasn't crazy, I sniffed deeply of the keychain that Isana had given me to track him. I very definitely detected the undercurrent of that power signature that Ichigo's Quincy-friend Uryuu Ishida had; it smelled of fresh cotton sheets and ozone. A weird combination but unmistakable. My nose didn't lie about things like this and I had yet to come across a situation where my tracking skill was unreliable.
The kid was a Quincy. Impossibly.
:But I thought Ishida was the last,: was my only puzzled thought.
He was always going on and on about how the Soul Society had killed off his clan and how he hated Soul Reapers and he was the last of Quincy and blah blah blah. Sure, it was true, but the Quincies had been destrying the balance and it was a Soul Reapers job to maintain the balance of souls between the living and the dead. The two were kinda mutually exclusive there. Besides, it's not like I had anything to do with it, all that nonsense happened centuries before I'd ever even joined the academy.
I shook my head to clear it and brought my mind back on track. If what I was smelling was true and Isana's son was in fact a Quincy, how had he gotten there? And more to the point, were the Shadows targeting Quincies?
:I don't know nearly enough,: I thought, frowning.
"Where's my son?" she demanded, scowling at me. "I'm warning you, if you dragged me all the way out here as a joke or part of some sick game I'll... I'll bash in all of your windows with a tire iron and come after your kneecaps next."
I looked over at her unhappily. It was bad news, all of it, and I didn't even know where to begin to explain most of it. Seeing spirits was one thing, but telling her about the Soul Society and the Soul Reapers and the Quincies and this new enemy that I'd run across was straining the lines of credulity way past anything that even a sucker would accept. Still, I had to try. The only way to get her son back was to track down the thing that had taken him back to wherever the hell it laired. I didn't even know what it was for certain, much less how to find it.
"I've got his scent but yer not gonna like it... or believe me most likely," I said, art of my tone simply resigned. She'd probably just leave me there or call the cops. Or the mental institute.
"My son can summon a little bow that shoots little arrows made of light. Try me," Isana said, meeting my eyes directly. She wasn't about to be put off.
I sighed and started to tell her as concisely as possible about the Soul Reapers and their mission. About the Quincy Clan, and that her son had the scent of their spiritual power. Winding up the recitation with a recounting of my newly discovered Shadow threat and the fact that I scented that one had been there recently in the park and that her son's scent was mingled with it.
There was a long, angry silence when I had finished. She was pissed. I could tell because that was how Rukia looked when she was about to rip out my spleen. She opened her mouth to yell at me and I cut her off.
"Don't bother," I said wearily. "I c'n see ya don't believe me so I'll just stop wasting time here for both of us. I gotta get started on finding a way to get my own mess undone and get back to my post, before my boss finds me here and kills me himself. I'll walk you back to your apartment and we can go our separate ways and call it a done task."
I hated leaving her there without her kid and without any real hope of getting him back. But what else could I do? She wasn't going to believe the truth because it was just too far-fetched and I couldn't make her believe it, so...
"Good luck," I said. "I hope I'm wrong and the police find that he was just out playing video games all day."
I turned to head back and noted that she didn't follow me.
"Mister Abarai," she said quietly into the night. "I can sense you're a good person, and that you're not lying to me. You really believe everything you say. So either you're delusional, which let me tell you after everything you just told me, I'm more likely to believe, or you're telling me the truth."
I looked over at her, she had a sort of clever look in her eyes.
"So I've got a little test for you," she said.
"What kinda test?" I asked warily. She couldn't ask me to turn into a Soul Reaper because I couldn't do it yet, I needed a gokantekkou for that. I was stuck in this mortal body until I figured out a way to get out of it.
"What does a Soul Reaper look like?" she asked simply, looking at me expectantly.
I didn't see how there was any harm in answering her, so I said
"Well, for the most part, they look like everyone else, except that they wear black shihakushou with a white layer underneath it. A white belt for my zanpaktou. Some others wear accessories like scarves or turtlenecks but I never bothered."
I was strange, my shihakushou and I had always had a sort of love-hate relationship, I wasn't all that happy at having to wear it but as a Soul Reaper it was either that or go naked. It was surprising how much I missed having it on me now that I didn't have one.
"Well good then, you passed," she said simply.
I looked at her in shock. Her slightly smug smirk reminded me so much of Rukia.
"...all of a sudden?" I asked, surprised.
"I saw one a time or two," she told me. "The first time I ever saw one it was fighting some kind of monster. She just slashed at it with her sword and it disappeared. No-one else was able to see her but me."
I wondered if it was anyone I knew.
"The second time I saw one was when I went to visit a wandering soul that was haunting a crossroads after an accident. She did something with the handle-end of her sword and the soul smiled this really peaceful smile and faded out. I'd seen the one from before wearing that same uniform so I figured there must be more like that but I never saw any. Do you have a uniform too?"
"I do, or I did... until tonight I did," I said. "That's why I was naked, the shihakushou is part of my real form, my spirit form, and when that Shadow thing turned me mortal I arrived in this world... ah, as nature intended."
She gave me a pitying look even as she seemed to find it amusing.
"So that's why I beat up those guys for their clothes," I said. "That, and I was feeling irritated and they had it comin' to 'em."
"How are we going to find my son?" she asked next.
"We?" I questioned her. "You haven't known me for very long and for all you know I could be crazy, what's with this 'we' thing?"
"The way I see it you're my best shot at finding Alex, so you'd beeter believe I'm going to be sticking to you like a burr until you do."
"I could have been making it all up," I pointed out obstinately, more because i didn't want her getting any more tangled up in my mess than she had to be.
But you weren't, I can tell when people are lying Mister Renji," she said, looking at me with that peircing look that the Healers of Fourth sometimes gave a person, more like they were looking into a person than at them.
"So, how are we finding my son?"
I thought about it. There was a lot going against us. I had been the one to discover them, and, aside of my captain and a few others, no-one was even aware of the existence of the Shadows. Before this mortal nonsense happened to me I'd had only had a few slender clues to go on, and those were more speculation and guess-work than actual fact. I could track a Shadow up to the point where it crossed worlds but how was I supposed to be able to track it after it left the world I was in? I had no idea where they went or even how they were able to cross worlds with almost no ripples for Soul Reapers pagers to pick up on.
"I dunno, gimme a little while ta think about it," I said, sitting down on a nearby bench and looking up.
I could track a human soul. I could track a Shadow because I knew what one smelled like. I didn't know for certain, but I thought that a Shadow was somehow related to the Believed. The Believed had once lived in the human world, often inhabiting shrines and temples...
:Hey, there's a thought,: I thought hopefully.
No-one seemed to know much about the spirit-beings they called the Believed, but it stood to reason that those spirit beings might know something about each other. If I could find one in the human world, and there had to be some of them still hanging around, I could ask them for some information.
"Do ya know where there's a shrine or a temple around here?" I asked.
"It's three in the morning Mister Abarai,"she said her tone reflecting that she had noted my lack of common sense. "None of the shrines and temples will be open."
"Oh," I said, disappointed.
Well there went that then. Isana sighed and after a few more moments of silence she reluctantly admitted
"It looks like we'll just have to wait until the morning. I've been running ragged all day long, I won't be able to find my son if i'm collapsed from exhaustion."
She looked like she was forcing herself. She clearly did not want to be sensible at all but on the other hand she seemed to know that it was the wiser course. I hated being sensible too, it was not something that I was good at. I wanted to be out on the hunt, finding a way to get rid of the mortal shell I was stuck in and back in my Soul Reaper form where I belonged. I was caught by a yawn and realized that I was exhausted. My body felt even heavier than usual, and my eyes were starting to close.
"I guess you're right," I said grudgingly.
I didn't want to give in so easily either, but I was tired and it had been a long and hellish day for me. Maybe I'd go to sleep and wake up to find this had all been a bad dream.
"Do you have a place to stay?" she asked next.
No way was I staying at her place. If word of it ever reached my boss, I'd be dead.
"Uh, yeah, sure," I lied. She looked right into me and said
"You're lying. Come on, it might not be much but it's a roof over your head and a blanket. You're staying at my place."
I opened my mouth to argue stupidly about it and she just shut me down with Rukia's look, the one that said "shut up, you're not getting anywhere" so I closed my mouth and followed behind her like a good little stray dog.
I was talked into a shower and borrowing her absent son's bed for the night. It was too small for me and my feet hung off the end but beggars couldn't be choosy and I had no cash to rent a place to sleep for the night. I was back to being a moocher it seemed.
:She sure does trust easily,: I thought on the edge of an exhausted slumber.
For all she knew I could just be some con man trying to run a game on her, or worse a guy trying to get into her house and steal everything she owned, or serial killer or a rapist. Taking in strangers when she was a single woman living alone wasn't a very safe practice, especially when they claimed crazy stories like mine. It was a little odd that she was so credulous of me. Then again... she did sort of seem to have a way of knowing whether a person was telling the truth or not. Part of that might be because I was a terrible liar, but somehow i didn't think so. There was a lot more to Miss Isana than met the eye.
As set-up chapters go, I've done better, but in the next post we'll finally be getting somewhere. Prepare for the emergence of... Daikon-san! Okay, he's a one-shot cameo for the purposes of exposition but I think he's kinda fun. I hope you look forward to it.