The portal was as dark and bumpy as any of the normal gateways I was used to, which only seemed to highlight the differences in traveling in between the Realms located in the Dangai by using the mysterious Portal System and traveling between the world of the living and the world of the dead as i was accustomed to. I jogged down the starlight-path and exited out into a dense forest. I put my tongue to the wind, scenting the thick smell of pine resin, snow, soil, and smoke. I turned in the direction that the smokey scent came from, betting that that would be where the Katschei's castle was. From that direction I could also taste the thick, cloying feel of magic.

Let me explain, the scenting ability that Zabimaru grants me is more than just a nose like a bloodhound. I pick up physical scents, but layered in over this were also psychic, spiritual and magical scents as well. For example, I could track an ordinary human being in the purely physical world by the scent of his body just the same as any other dog could, I could also track a soul through the world of the living by the spiritual signature, just as unique to it as the physical scent was. Tracking a soul through the Soul Society was a little more tricky because everything that existed in that place was made of reishin particles; I could weed them out just the same way a dog would sift through the smells in the background, but for some reason my soul-scenter was a little more sensitive to nuances. It was this sensitivity to psychic senses that enabled me to be able to catch people's moods (most times, and be able to tell when most people were lying or telling the truth (usually people smelled like various kinds of pepper when they lied) unless they were a person that was really good at lying or hiding their spiritual scents... like even though Aizen had been lying to everyone for years, I never once picked up the scent of pepper from him. Urahara was just as good at it, I could never tell what that guy was thinking or feeling at any given moment. magic on the other hand had a very different smell. Even Kido just used spiritual power to fuel it, so as much reiatsu as you had was all you had to spend; the magic they used out here in the Divine Realms was different, instead of the magic smelling like an individuals own spirit-scent combined with the "smell" of the spell itself (and each spell had a slightly differnt smell to it, don't ask me why) the magic they used in the Divine Realms all smelled of a particular "type." The magic of the Earth Court had smelled to me like freshly turned soil and the sun-baked rock of the desert, and of a forest after a rain... all the different kinds of scents that a person would atribute to being Earthy i had scented there. Some particular kinds of scents were stronger or differnt with some of the beings than others, but that underlying scent of power and earth was there through all of it. (as for Gebbu, forget about it, it was so overwhelming my nose went dead). I'd picked up other scents that had a feeling of power to them to, though because they were unfamiliar to me, I had no way of knowing what they were.

I followed the scent to the edge of the forest and was there confronted with an enormous Russian-style castle with straight plain lines, a block-like exterior and towers with turrets shaped like pointed, upside-down onions. It was a big place. It towered up for several stories, dominating the Realm. The walls surrounded a immense forest of a garden.

::Katschei, according to the tale, was a powerful magician who collected rare and valuable things, including beautiful princesses,:: Zabimaru prompted me.

AH! So now I recalled where I had heard the name before. On one of my first missions I had encountered a young mortal child who had been able to see me. At first she had been afraid, because she'd been able to see Hollows too (poor kid actually knew that there were real monsters out there in the world) but after I told her that I was a guy who killed Hollow's she'd labeled me a Knight and told me all about the other knights in her story-books that slew monsters and rescued damsels. Curious about her, and the mortal world, I revisited her every night that I wasn't out hunting Hollows during the length of my mission. She made me read to her from out of her storybooks in exchange for telling me about what her world was like. We'd read an old story that had mentioned a Katschei in it. I didn't really recall the details very well... it had had a prince and a firebird in it, and the prince had rescued the princess that the Katschei had taken. I sorta recalled that the Katschei had been a really powerful magician who had found a way to turn himself importal, by sealing away his heart, and that the Katschei had hidden his heart in a really strange place.

"Wasn't it inside a diamond?" I asked Zabimaru.

"More than that as I recall," Zabimaru said. "It was in a chest hidden at the base of a tree, guarded by an ogre and in the chest was supposed to be a rabbit, inside that rabbit was the diamond that held the magicians heart and magic."

Huh. Well, that made it easier!

::How so?:: Zabimaru asked.

"It looks like I won't have to go huntin' through this guy's enormous castle," I said cheerfully. "All I have ta do is sneak in there, find that tree, kill that rabbit and catch 'is heart, then once I've got it, I'll just hold the heart fer ransom and get the Earth Emperors jewels back."

::You really are just a simple creature, aren't you?:: Zabimaru noted wryly.

I smiled. Yeah.

"Fair's fair, y'know," I said. "If he didn't want anyone comin' after 'im then he shouldn't've stolen the goods in the first place. I'm just here ta steal 'em right back, or ransom 'em, whatever works better."

I was still a thief after all. Even after all of these years I'd spent outside of the Rukon District I still had that hardened Rukon thief-edge. I hadn't been much on the liftin' lay, but I knew as well as the next hungry thief how to bide my time in the shadows until an opportunity presented itself.

::If you are going into the stronghold of a magician, you may want to tone down your reiatsu,:: Zabimaru suggested. ::Otherwise, he's going to be able to sense you coming.::

Good point. I stilled and focused my attention inward, envisioning my chakra, calling and casting layers of shields around them and weaving bonds around all of my meridians so that only a very very faint trickle of power escaped, less even than what I normally used. The point was to keep my presence low key after all. When I opened my eyes and looked down, all of my tattoos were back properly on my body! Weaving down my arms and across my chest, surrounding my abs and hips was a dark knot-work of tiger stripes and interlocking tribal artwork. I couldn't see my face but I imagined that since I'd bound my brow chakra, the ones on my forehead were probably in place too. I smiled; it felt like I was back.

I scouted around from the edges of the forest, looking for sentries or guards but didn't encounter any. So I flash-stepped from the edge of the surrounding forest up to the wall encircling the castle and its gardens within and put myself flat against it. The stonework of the wall was mathematically precise and so carefully put together, even without mortar, that I couldn't have slid a piece of paper between the blocks, much less the edge of my sword. No problem. I just took a running start and flash-leaped up to the top of the wall, and scouted there, looking down into the garden beyond.

The garden was tended, I noted, by strange little manikin-looking things about four feet tall that didn't quite seem to be alive, or at least alive in the way I thought of the word. They didn't seem to be self-aware. There were lots of them and they were all armed with with rakes and garden shears and bags slung over thier backs. The little creatures moved almost mechnically, like little wind-up toys, in specific tasks among the garden. One would trim the hedges and another little manikin would come along behind it and rake up the fallen leaves, and another manikin would come behind that one and water the flowers. They completed one spot in thier tasks and then moved onto the next. The gardens themselves seemed to be divided up into parts; a complex, twisting maze of tall rose-hedges took up one third of the garden, a carefully tended bit of wilderness with faux ruins took up another third of the garden, and the final third resembled the gardens at the Kuchiki Estate that I had glimpsed on my visits there to report to my Captain. They had clearings with founains, minature ponds with decorative bridges and tiny pavilions in them.

Inside the garden, patrols of gardener-manikins traveled in shifts, but there were also patrols of guard-looking type manikins. The Guard manikin things were larger than the gardeners, standing about six feet tall, with massive torsos and stronger arms to swing those huge sprears they all had strapped across their backs. Luckily for me (who was intent on sneaking around for now) they wore armor that clanked loudly when they walked. I waited, hidden in the shadow between the top of the wall and a nearby watchtower, for a clear spot to open up in the patrols and landed softly in the hedge-bushes of the nearby garden.

:So far so good,: I thought as I padded on silent feet through the carefully tended grass of the garden whithout making even a whisper of sound. I ducked into the bushes as the patrols of guards passed and waited patiently nearby while gardeners attended their spots, waited until the coast was clear and slunk as quietly as I ever had when I was set on stealing food, from cover to cover. An hour into my heart-pounding game of dodge and hide I realized that, even without looking into the main castle (which was massive) the gardens alone were massive enough to take hours to cover without a definite plan in mind.

:Damn, I'm gonna have ta think about this one then,: I thought to myself.

Well, what did I know about men who pursued power and collected stuff? Men who wanted more and more power to horde away wanted someplace they would consider it safe to keep. Maybe he had it hidden under his castle, that would make sense if the access to it was limited. I dreaded the thought of having to figure out a way to navigate a possible rats warren of underground passages. But hoarders, in my experience, tended to separate their "lives" from their hoards. They might live surrounded by all of the stuff they considered valuable, but the real core of themselves that they considered to be personal they definitely kept separate from the junk they accreted. They were usually pretty fussy about their collections too, very "this went here, and that went there" kinda guys. If he collected stuff and hoarded it, that meant he was like a miser...

:I got his number now,: I nodded to myself, pleased, as the key to unlocking his character and figuring out a way to beat him appeared in my mind.

He was just exactly like those Rukon merchants I had used ta steal from when I'd been a kid. Those Rukon merchants had been rough, cruel, ruthless and utterly without compassion. They guarded thier territory jealously and chased off anyone they thought might be a threat to what they had. They hoarded their goods exactly the way misers hoarded gold. But the best of their stuff, I had learned through long observation sitting in the shadows of nearby alleys just watching and waiting, the best of their stuff they kept right close to 'em, in a place where their eyes could fall upon it regularly to make sure it was still there.

:So Katschei's nuthin' but an overblown Rukon Merchant,: I thought. :I used ta steal from his type all th' time fer a livin', this should be a peace o' cake.:

::Don't get cocky,:: Zabimaru reminded me. ::You still have to find the heart.::

Hm, well, the gardens were clear so whatever it was he was hoardin', chances were that it wasn't ta be found out here. He might have a special wing in that castle of his where he kept all of his personal belongings. It looked like I was gonna have to go inside and have a look-see. I made my slow and careful way over to a nearby entrance to the castle. I could tell by the way it was stark and unadorned that it had to be a servants entrance. This was one time where I wasn't going to mind taking the backdoor in. I listened careflly at the door and heard only silence on the other side. That didn't mean much though, this whole place was eerily quiet except for the occassional clank of a guard-dummy.

Silence and caution were the words of the day. It might be fun ta take on all those guards all at once. I was betting that they wouldn't be any more of a challenge than yer average bottom-rank Hollow, but Katschei was said to be a very powerful sorcerer in all those stories an' magic-type stuff wasn't really my thing, especially strange magic-type stuff.

:It's been a while since I had a nice good fight,: I thought as I tickled the lock on a nearby door to get inside. :Not counting the one with you of course Zabimaru.:

::Hmph! I should think so.::

I peeked inside the room and found it to be a storage closet filled with baking pans. I had thought that the Katschei only collected things of value, it looked like this guy was just like a common Rukon bag-lady (unless he actually had use fer about five hundred baking pans). I ducked back into the low-level passage-way and ghosted along the hallway. All of these appeared to be servant's passages. I nipped round a corner as a little servant-manikin wearing a cap and apron and weilding a broom nearly spotted me. I crouched down under a stair and waited.

:I jus' don' like dealin' with all o' this weird stuff. I mean, why can't things be simple? I go out there, I kill a few Hollows and call it a day. That's the life.:

::You sound like a low-rank peon,:: Zabimaru remarked.

I paused. I guessed I did. Funny how I'd never appreciated the simplicity that came with having no real options but to follow orders.

:Nah,: I decided firmly. :Yer right, I'd rather carve my own path.:

I was certainly blazing my own trail through the Divine Realms, gate by gate, busting into foreign courts, stealing from legendary immortal magicians...

I located a guard a carefully tailed him, sticking to any shadows and cover that I could find as he moved along his assigned patrol route and after a little while of observation I noticed something odd about them. They didn't seem to be aware of each others presence. Whenever they crossed paths in the course of their shifts they just walked on by like the other one didn't exist. Any human guard or soul reaper guard, even the most disciplined would at least share a few words. These guys were like machines.

Once the first Guard's round was done with (and he started on it again) I ghosted along until I found another one, slowly starting to get a feel for the way the system worked by the time I got to my third Guard. It wasn't like I was invisible, but it seemed that the manikin's had been poorly constructed (I was betting that the magician Katschei, true to miser tendencies, had wasted as little magical power as possible on the guard constructs themselves, counting on quantity rather than quality) and as long as they weren't staring me straight in the face, they didn't seem to notice when I shadowed behind them. I shook my head. This guy was just sad. Or stupid. Or both.

In the course of the tour I found out what it was that Katschei hoarded. Everything. He had rooms devoted to Ancient Egyptian burial treasures, Babylonian funeral masks, Greek urns, Russian matryoshka (nesting dolls), Roman weapons, Chinese statuary, medieval tapestries, Persian rugs, Renaissance artwork, all the way up to a hangar filled with vintage model cars. There was more sheer stuff, almost all of it valuable in some way, than I could even begin to imagine. How long had this guy been collecting?

:We have a Class A, Level Five hoarder here Zabimaru,: I noted whimsically.

::We do indeed, and you seem to have noted that all of the guard patrols pass by that particular room at least once in their shifts,:: he replied.

I was watching that room right then as a matter of fact.

:Yeah, they sure do,: I said.

The place in question was located in a central tower, surrounded by three of the five main castle wings. As such, it was definitely in a place that was nearly constantly guarded. I was betting that the master of the castle visited it at least once a day too. I had found myself a nice little hidey-hole in a spot on a rafter suspended between two corner-pieces way up in the ceiling, partly hidden by someone's ex-coat-of-arms. I was nicely hidden there like a little spider as the activity went on underneath me. I could watch the patrols of guards come and go at my leisure and I had a good view of the strongbox door. Well, if his heart wasn't in there, maybe I'd find the treasure in there anyway and not need to take the trouble to negotiate.

:Whatever it is,: I thought with a partial yawn, it had been a very long day so far and I was beginning to run down a bit. :He values it.:

I wasn't sure what kind of magical protections he had on that place. It would be easy enough for me to physically pick the lock but if I tripped up his magical protections it'd probably set off some kind of alarm and all my sneaking around would have been for nothing. So I waited. It was hard not to slip into sleep because it had been such a long day already for me, but I held on to wakefulness by a hair, allowing myself only a light doze. It would be really stupid if I just fell asleep and got caught by snoring or falling out of my perch.

I wakened fully at the sound of an unfamiliar footstep; not the guards usual clanking, but a lighter, quicker tap. Coming from out of the hallway that led to the north wing was a short, squat little man with spectacles and a bald pate wearing a long dark robe-looking garment and reading from a very large book paced up to the door made a gesture of a cross surrounded by a circle and said

"By Earth, Water, Fire and Air, I command your bindings loose."

The sigil glowed in four colors for a moment and then he pulled out a key, turned the lock and entered.

:Who does he remind me of...?: I thought the moment I clapped eyes on him. Something about him seemed familiar to me.

When he glared up in irritation after nearly running into one of the guard-manikins the curmudgeon-ish scowl on his face told me all I needed to know. He was another of Captain Kurotsuchi's ilk, half-crazed, sorta brilliant and utterly annoyed at interruptions from whatever it is they were workin' on. Kuro-kookie was famous for his hatred of being interrupted in the middle of an experiment. I half expected to see a little manikin version of Nemu trailing along behind the guy.

He came out a few minutes later, still holding his book, and paced back down the corridor. I waited a while for two more guard patrols to go by, for there was a long pause in between every two guard shifts, and then slunk down from my perch. I quickly scurried like a rat through the open space in front of the door then mimicked the gesture and incantation that the Katschei had used, unbinding a lower chakra and pouring a little of my own power into it. To my relief it didn't seem to have some kind of magical recognition spell (if there was such a thing) on it and I pulled out my lock-picks and tickled open the lock. I slipped inside and shut the door behind me. To my relief the interior was well-lit... however what I found when I got in there wasn't at all what I had been expecting.

And with that little cliff-hanger I leave you in suspense until the next time. Ciao darlings! ^_^