What does Gin end up doing after feeding Aizen to The Machine?
Does he help defend the castle against the Bastard later down the line? If so, I can imagine some rather....awkward moments to say the least
have you heard of the coyote who swam 2 miles to alcatraz island on its own and is now gorging on the local seabirds
yup! a real role model.
(it's actually not THAT weird, as coyotes are found on the rest of the islands in that area and are known to be good swimmers. the real thing about this is that it was caught on camera!)
Oh sure, when a coyote journeys to a island unknown to them in order to gorge themselves and feast upon the bounty previously left unspoiled we cheer and celebrate...
BUT WHEN I, THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY....
How many different types of conflict in TPoFaTGIF can be solved with games on a legally-recognized level, which games are usually used, and how are handicaps applied in cases of skill disparity?
Pretty much anything, so long as you can get all the relevant parties (at minimum: the litigant, the defense, and the judge) to agree to the terms.
You can use Resolution gaming for lots of legal disputes, especially on a small scale: Divorces, property disputes, custody of a dog, disputing parking tickets- a lot of small claims court judges actively encourage people to game it out to save docket time. You *can* game a major business corporation for damages instead of a suit, and they'll likely agree to it- because they can hire professional gamers to represent them, so it's not really a good idea.
Legal dispute games have to be selected from a list of state-approved games* with standardized rules, all parties have to sign a waiver that they have read and understand those rules and what the potential outcomes of the game are, and scheduled and played at a public venue (usually the courthouse) under the supervision of a referee and at least one witness per party.
*State approved games are selected to have the following criteria: clear and objective end and win conditions (can't play forever), rules that have a clear victor or victors AND clear losers (no we all won/lost! Because that doesn't help resolve the dispute), rules that are simple to enforce and difficult to cheat at, and can be played by most people with minimal supplies. Duel Monsters is, unsurprisingly, not on any state-approved litugious game list.
A referee can also nullify the game and send the players back to regular court for a variety of reasons including "the players are bickering instead of playing", "one player is having a medical emergency " or "THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE ". They can also declare a party a loser if they are caught cheating, as well as enforce additional rules like a time limit (we need to be out by 5pm), whether or not the game is recorded and/broadcast, or banish nonessential witnesses from the room.
There are a few things that are only rarely settled with games are things where there is an additional party that has a say, but is not part of the dispute, like the kids in custody hearings. A judge will usually not allow resolution gaming in cases involving criminal charges either- no playing to get out of a murder charge, mostly because one party isn't alive to play. It's possible to game your way out of a class-action suit, but that rarely happens because in say "Roy vs the State of Connecticut" you're not going to get the entire state of Connecticut to agree to game it instead of a normal trial.
Handicaps aren't really a thing- if there is a significant amount of skill disparity, the weaker player defends themselves but just not agreeing to play a game and instead go through a regular trial. Before you can game a trial, you have to sign a waiver to the state acknowledging that you know there may be a skill disparity and that you will abide by the results regardless. Physical disabilities have be either reasonably accommodated by the state (another reason they have to take place at an approved public venue), or the disabled party is again advised Not To Play.
You also do not have to play yourself- it's perfectly legal to have someone play on your behalf, and is sometimes outright necessary- you can't have the entire company or the neighborhood suing them playing at once. They can be paid players, or just your friend willing to help you out. Gaming as a career is perfectly viable in TPOFATGIF, and professional court players are some of the best-paid gamers.
I saw ''no playing to get out of a murder charge'' and was like ''But if the murdered person comes back to life, would That be legal? And also dragged up a silly legal drama where a zombie and the ghost of the same person are battling for rights of ownership of an estate
Something something shinigami/arrancar/Quincy/whatever reiatsu not only has colors but textures, opacity, motion etc. Like colors and flavors, everyone *broadly* agrees on what an individual's aura is like, but also everyone is sensing that aura directly with their brain, not with a sensory organ, and so the vocabulary to describe the sensory impression of aura is non-existent and people make do with the sensory and figurative vocabulary they have. It also means that the same aura can have WILDLY different notes and connotations from one perceiving individual to the next
imo, A few are easy to place and fairly universal
Kenpachi: Fight me! The aura
Yamamoto: Fire. So SO much fire
Gin: No
Meanwhile Ichigo and Orohime just comes off as weird no matter who perceives them, him because he is just fucked up, her because of The Everything
Gallus. Gallus. You don’t drop the words “Couchstuck incident” in relation to a giant jackass and *not* elaborate.
Pleeeeease tell us what happened there. Whose couch had the honor?
Shinji went from "Useful Idiot" to "My Personal Nemesis" in Aizen's mind when the first order Promoted-that-day Captain Hirako Shinji gave Also-promoted-that-day Lieutenant Aizen was "Help me finish moving all my crap in, my couch is CRAZY heavy!"
Not only is Shinji's couch crazy heavy, its also really long, no real good handholds and little legs that get stuck on EVERYTHING and while they are trying to take it around the second-to-last corner going up to the captain's quarters on the fifth floor, Shinji suddenly reversed which was left and right again, and not only did they manage to get the couch stuck in the landing, they also got Aizen himself stuck in the couch in a compromising position for over an hour until then first-division third-seat Komamura Sajin was sent over and the giant was able to sucessfully free the couch and subsequently, Aizen.
...Though he could have done it more gracefully than turning it over and shaking him out like an intractable cat.
Aizen threw out nearly everything Shinji had put in his office EXCEPT that couch because while being a shinigami gifts him with supernatural strength, that couch is supernaturally heavy and bears a grudge against Aizen and threw the interloper's back out.
It injured three more fifth division members before, once again, now-seventh-division-lieutenant Komamura Sajin was summoned to move the couch, who took it to the ninth division because Tousen is still deeply traumatized by the events in West 66 and is refusing to sleep in the Ninth's captain's quarters because it gives him nightmares, and Sajin wants him to sleep on something better than "Passed out at his desk halfway through editing".
Tousen ends up sleeping on that couch for the next century when he wasn't sleeping in other, highly inadvisable locations. Upon Kensei Muguruma's return, there is a fairly serious dispute about who will command the ninth (and have Shuuhei as a lieutenant), but it's nowhere NEAR as severe as the dispute between Shinji and Tousen over who gets to keep that couch.
My mom had a two seater that was like, SO, comfortable to sleep on, maybe a distant relative to Dr. Comfortable ''I hate Aizen in particular'' Couch?
However, my brain also went to the two captains having to stay on the couch for as long as possible, with the winner getting to keep it, in a ''You made me get involved and thus need to suffer'' moment from Yamamoto...leading to an unlikely friendship built on the foundations of a Great Couch and a hatred for Aizen
Ok, need to break up an anxiety spiral. I'm going to go walk the dogs at the hardware store, but for when I get back, pls send asks about AEIWAM/TPOFATGIF so I can focus on that?
AEIWAM question: What can you tell us about the Royal Guard? You have mentioned they take care of The Soul Kings remains, is that the criteria for being recruited in your setting?
Question for #AEIWAM, about the Hogyoku:
In Canon, Aizen is using one Hogyoku to figure out how to make Shinigami into Hollow, and Urahara is discovered to have a second Hogyoku when he tries to undo the Hollowfication on the group that would become the Visored. But it's never adequately explained where either of them came from, other than "they were invented by [Aizen & Urahara".
In #AEIWAM, if the Hogyoku was used to make the first Kami, but using it for what Urahara & Aizen were doing, it seems so... low-powered. What if it's not two separate Hogyoku, but rather one Hogyoku split into two parts?
Man, I bet Kaname was waiting for the best moment to tell Aizen that Urahara had one
Oh no.
It's MUCH stupider than that.
The *exact* nature and purpose of the hogyoku (and why the instructions for how to make one were just out there for Gin to find on the Soul King's worktable) are MAJOR SPOILERS for the TYBW arc of AEIWAM, but as far as functions go:
A Hogyoku is a device used to accumulate massive amounts of Reiryoku (Soul Energy), compress and purify it, and then squeeze it out into an organism later to make it extremely powerful.
If you can guess the spoilers from those two sentences, you get a gold star and drafted into helping me write this damn fic.
I'm not sure where you got the bit about them being used to make the first Kami, but that is (at least now) not the case- Kami form from a similar function, but were not intentionally *made*, and not with a Hogyoku.
ANYWAY,
You are right, the two hogyoku in AEIWAM are under-powered compared to the original plan, but that's mostly because neither Aizen or Urahara could comprehend the sheer scale of Nobody's design, so what they actually made were, essentially Micro-hogyokus.
The Approximate Order of Events:
A fuckass long time ago:
Nobody, Ichibei and Shinso all get the shit stabbed out of them during the Godslaying Event.
Gin is formed from the physical and metaphysical viscera of all three.
As a result, Nobody dies, Ichibei is left a shell of his former self and Shinso loses his body.
Gin realizes that, with Nobody dead and Their various body parts jamming up the wheel of Samsara, there is a very real possibility the Current Life Machine will starve and die before it can give birth to the next one, and the universe they're in will retroactively cease to exist.
Gin decides the best course of action is to put the current Life Machine on life support so it doesn't starve or miscarry while he figures out how to unjam the wheel.
While Gin is figuring this shit out, Ichibei shoves Nobody's corpse in amber and locks the palace to prevent anyone from finding out the "Soul King" is dead, and traps Shinso inside.
Gin finds the plans for The Hogyoku (note the capitalization) on Nobody's worktable, and realizes a smaller version could be used to fill a single soul with an absolute shitwack of energy and that soul could then become an energy capri-sun for the Life Machine.
Gin, however, lacks the engineering knowledge or skill to actually MAKE a micro-hogyoku, let alone convince a soul to submit themselves to the torture of becoming a Divine Juice Box.
...Unless they think it was their idea in the first place.
Gin redacts a few key points about The Hogyoku, including it's scale and intended purpose, and then takes the redacted plans- which are not paper but Concepts- and travels to Spirit World, where most of the Reiriyoku is to dangle the plans in the dreams of various likely-looking maniacs that are slightly too smart for their own good.
late 1700's to early 1800's
After several false starts, Gin finally hits his mark in the disillusioned and bitter Sosuke Aizen, who lost his entire family in a series of catastrophes and is realizing just how cruel and incompetent the afterlife really is.
Aizen changes careers from "Assistant to the central 46" to "Shinigami" and starts his research into the nature of Reiryoku to build "his" vision to make himself God and Fix Everything Forever.
Gin continues jiggling the bait while he waits for Aizen to get some results, and finds a second mark in a bright-eyed and naieve Kisuke Urahara, who thinks he can use it to infuse hollows with whatever it is they're missing and Fix That Forever.
Satisfied that he now has a Juice Box and a Backup Juice box, Gin transforms into a human-shaped soul and appears as a child in the Rukongai as part of his long con to get close to Aizen and Urahara and keep them on track.
late 1800's ish:
Progress is SLOW with both men and Gin is getting frustrated.
Aizen is slighty further along, having learned about Arrancar and the growth instars of hollows while Kisuke was learning how to become a cop, so Gin enters the academy, speedruns it, and attatches himself to Aizen to herd him in the right direction faster.
Aizen is also fucking terrible at Opsec and is discovered by Kaname Tousen, who is immune to Aizen's Illusion Bullshit, but mistakenly thinks that Aizen's lackey, Kiganjo, is the mastermind, and confides in Aizen.
Aizen is about to straight-up murder Kaname to keep him from blowing it when Gin remembers Kaname from the academy and realizes that where Aizen has ambition instead of brains, Kaname is the real genius here, and will definitely speed things up.
Whether he wants to or not.
Shortly after Kaname is cursed into compliance, Kirio Hikifune is recruited into the Royal Guard and Urahara becomes captain of the 12th, where he devotes himself to figuring out how to make his hogyoku.
Everything is coming up Gin!
1900:
Despite being cursed all to hell, Tousen VERY NEARLY blows the whole operation by alerting the rest of the court guard to the location of Aizen's lab, but Gin is able to step in at the last second and stop him.
...By turning 14 of the Ninth's seated officers into hollows that were absorbed by the hogyoku, and the subsequent rescue party into hollows that Urahara spirits away.
Instead of absorbing the rescue party into his own hogyoku, urahara turns them into Visored and they all abscond to the living world/vanish as far as Gin can tell.
Fuck.
Gin redoubles his efforts to keep Aizen on track now that he only has one Juice Box, which means things get a whole lot worse for Tousen but hey, gotta save the universe and that means Aizen Absolutely Cannot Fuck This Up.
1980:
Aizen Fucks it All Up.
Gin has to sprint back to Soul King Palace to molt real fast, and in the fucking three days he's gone, Aizen:
figures out how to use the "export energy" feature on his hogyoku and
instead of exporting the energy into HIMSELF, Aisen makes a sort of super-hollow he calls "White" because that's his favorite color, and dumps all 10,000 souls worth of energy into it.
Aizen then orders Kaname to take White to the Living World to go fuck shit up, just to see what it can do.
Kaname, in the midst of an extreme nervous breakdown, abandons White in downtown Karakura because Aizen forgot to give him end commands, and goes to ground in hopes that Aizen gets his dumb ass killed doing this, or Kaname dies quietly before he can be forced to mutilate or kill anyone else.
Kaname's Obvious Nervous Breakdown is witnessed by Captain Isshin Shiba, who follows Kaname to his meeting with... someone, he looks like a human-shaped mirage? and some creepy-ass hollow, which Kaname takes to the living world and then just... leaves?
White starts to Fuck Shit Up, mostly by wandering around while being a dangerously radioactive to souls, and Isshin decides he needs to kill this thing before it destroys the whole city.
Quincy Prodigy and current host to the ghost of Quincy Freishutz sees White and has the same idea.
Looney-tunes ass battle between White, Isshin, and Masaki breaks out.
Meanwhile, Kaname's continuing nervous breakdown is witnessed by Yoruichi, who stalks him in cat form for a while before she senses the fight break out, and calls Urahara on the way to tell him Shit's Afoot.
Meanwhile, Isshin and Masaki are falling in love. Or at least, Isshin is falling in love with the most insane woman he's ever met. Masaki thinks he's a very cute tactical advantage.
White, all of two hours old, has no fucking clue what the fuck is happening, just that these asshole are trying to kill him.
Isshin and Masaki do a coordinated double attack that backfires and effectively tears everyone's souls in half- Isshin and Masaki are seperated from their Yume-kon: Engetsu and Quincy Freishutz.
Yoruichi gets to the fight and kicks White into two pieces that had not yet quite figured out who is king and who is horse, and then Yoruichi is KO'd by the resulting recoil.
Urahara arrives just in time to see his former coworker and some woman(???) with their souls falling apart, and two large glops of energy. Isshin demands urahara save this woman.
Urahara, attempting to figure out how to do that: I can. uh. frankenstein your souls together?
Masaki, seeing her way out of Yhwach's grasp: DO THAT.
Urahara uses his hogyoku to stuff the glops of energy into the holes where thier Yume-kon should be, then stitches Isshin and Masaki's souls together to contain the glops within both of them.
Inside Masaki and Isshin, Quincy Freischutz and Engetsu both fuse with/are absorbed by the glops formerly known as white.
This causes Isshin to develop severe amnesia and Masaki to lose her the use of quincy abilities/breaks her connection to Ywach.
Aizen realizes that his hogyoku is now Empty (and useless), but witnesses Urahara use his before absconding with Isshin and whoever that woman was.
Kaname wakes up in bed in the ninth with exactly zero memory of how the fuck he got back from his saw-trap-like bolt hole in the living world, and a really weird headache.
1983:
Isshin and Masaki get HAMMERED at a Halloween party and make Ichigo.
Both halves of the being formerly known as White jump from parent to child, taking whats left of Engetsu and Quincy Freischutz with them, and inside the fetal ichigo, the entities re-fuse into a chimera that decides its name is Zangetsu.
Zangetsu then promptly goes dormant because yume-kon are not supposed to be body hopping and reverse-parthenogenesising like this no matter how much energy they have to burn and he's TIRED.
Orihime's parents get drunk and have nasty hate sex in a closet during an office christmas party and make Orihime, setting Shinso's much better secret "Fix The Life Machine" plan in motion.
Urahara finally gets the idea "Hey maybe this hogyoku thing isn't a great idea"
He thinks that he can destroy his hogyoku by sealing it, then sealing it inside a sturdy mortal soul, and letting that mortal die.
Unfortunately, no souls in the living world can handle the radiation of the sealed hogyoku, so he's got to stuff it into a shinigami and then make that shinigami mortal.
2000:
Instead of doing the sane thing and stuffing it into the most immediately available shinigami (himself), Urahara fucks around for 20 years until Rukia comes around, and he stuffs it into her soul instead.
In a weird coincidence that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN COMING, Rukia, who is patrolling the area Ichigo lives in, comes into contact with Ichigo, the kid whose parents Urahara stuffed full of hogyoku glop.
This contact makes the dormant Zangetsu WAKE THE FUCK UP, and reflexively slorp the soul energy out of Rukia. Instead of the full powers of Urahara's hogyoku, Zangetsu only gets Rukia's personal reserves, but its enough for him to be concious and see that OH FUCK THAT'S A BIGASS HOLLOW, ICHIGO'S GONNA DIE FUCK, FUCK WE NEED A WEAPON- BOW? NO, TOO CLOSE. SWORD? YEAH! WE REMEMBER HOW TO BE A SWORD!!
Thus: Shinigami!Ichigo.
This event trips Aizen's radar, and he starts his plan to get his hands on Urahara's still-active hogyoku/fuck over soul society/destroy karakura/make himself the new soul king
the first and second parts of that plan (mostly) work, and Aizen yoinks urahara's hogyoku from rukia and absconds with it, Gin and Kaname, who has been working on his own plan to break the curse, but is exhausted.
Aizen, just to be a dick to ichigo, kidnaps Orihime.
Kaname explains that the hogyokus are tools that consume souls and convert them into energy, and that Aizen is planning to use the one he stole from urahara to devour karakura and make himself into the new god.
"What do you mean 'new' god?"
"I'm like 99% sure the soul king is dead. there's God-sized body parts all over the spirit world."
"Ah. Bad."
Aizen shows Orihime his own, empty hogyoku and monolouges about how only an incompetent and cruel god would make the living and spirit worlds like this. While he's distracted, Orihime grabs the hogyoku and eats it, bringing the next part of Shinso's plan to fruition.
Orihime starts being able to see connections other people don't but she's had AuDHD her whole life so that's nothing new. Her Shun Shun Rikka suddenly gets a whole lot stronger though, and she helps kaname start to break his curse by pulling the nails out of his spine with it.
At the battle of Fake Karakura, Kaname finally breaks his curse and beats the SHIT out of Aizen until he cracks Urahara's hogyoku that aizen loged in his chest, preventing it from absorbing any more power, so Aizen can't absorb real karakura and become a god.
In retaliation, Aizen decides that if he can't be god, then he will at least kill the gotei-13, and fuses with urahara's hogyoku to become stupid powerful
Zangetsu has been trying to speed-train ichigo but the kid is only 16 and this is the apocalypse unless they do something UHHHHH HERE KID, HAVE SOME OF OUR HOGYOKU POWERS YEAH THEY'RE HOLLOW FLAVORED DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT-
Hollow!Ichigo finishes kicking Aizen's ass until he's unable to fight back and surrenders, losing control of, but unable to let of his immense power.
Gin pops up from where he'd been pretending to be a corpse, paralyzes Aizen by stabbing him in the back of the neck, says "thanks kid!" and absconds with his Juice box back to Soul King Palace, and then to the workings of the Life machine beyond.
Gin puts Aizen into something that greatly resembles a horrible combination of The Machine from princess bride, a mouth, and a taffy puller, which operates in much the same fashion as all three to extract all that delicious soul energy from him.
2001:
Kaname wakes up from the coma Unohana had to put him in to let him recover on Valentines day, finally a free man for the first time in over a century.
It's not the first thing he does with his freedom, but kicking urahara's ass for making a hogyoku at all is up there.
Orihime continues to get... weirder.
...and that's as far as I've gotten with much specificity in drafts.
So According to this Q&A Session with Tite Kubo, the original Plan was for Orihime's powers to take a draconic sort of form, but this was abandoned for... reasons.
...Truly, we were robbed.
FORTUNATELY I AIN'T A COWARD
OR OWNED BY SHONEN JUMP :
Not trying to be rude, genuinely curious, why are metal and wood not just earth?
Assorted Reasons off the top of my head:
Metal in this 5-element cycle accounts for all nonliving solids- metals, rocks, minerals, etc. Wood accounts for all Alive or Dead* solids.
*Dead being "Used to be Alive" Which is a really different thing than "Was never alive in the first place" in terms of physics, biology, and epidemiology.
Wood is neither properly a solid nor liquid. It's liquids trapped by malleable solids under pressure, which is a really different thing than "Solid" in terms of physics.
To Put it in ATLA Terms: Wood is it's own Element because Neither Earthbenders nor the Swamp Water Tribe can bend it. (at least once it's dead, and the Swamp Tribe was using Still-Living Algae, the wettest plant. Deceased Tree might be beyond them).
Also how Neither Earthbenders nor bloodbenders can bend Bone.
Putting Living Tissues solidly within either Water or Earth massively unbalances the Elements IMHO, hence, the separation.
the number 5 is in the Fibonacci sequence, and I can do silly numbers things with that :)
I like drawing Pentagram more than Square
This is actually about Magical Blood typing Hell, and two characters having an insane conversation about whether or not ice is a Mineral while their friend is bleeding out :)
The Medical Conclusion About Ice Elemental Typing is the first major discovery Unohana became famous for, and it goes like this:
The category of "Ice Type" has historically been something of a miscellaneous garbage bin of every vaguely cold Zanpakuto ability with no regard for the actual typing. Hence, it's most accurate to say that an unspecified Ice Type is really a "Not Wood Or Air"
There are many types of ice Zanpakuto: ones that convert water or other material around them into ice, ones that just manipulate temperature, and ones that summon ice. Each of these is a different element type. Some examples:
Hiyorinmaru, wielded by lieutenant Hitsugaya, is a water-type because he is manipulating the shape and state of water around him to become structures of ice. It's evident in that his attacks are still liquid before they make contact with the solid surface he aimed at.
Itegumo, wielded by Lieutenant Kotetsu is a metal-type because it physically manifests its own ice, which is a mineral. It's similar to Senbonzakura, which manifests enormous amounts of tempered steel.
Sode No Shirayuki, wielded by Lieutenant Kuchiki, is actually a fire-type because it's manipulating the temperature/energy of materials around it. It's the same principle that Ryujin Jakka uses, only in the opposite direction. Sode no Shirayuki manipulates temperature and supercools, where Ryujin Jakla manipulates it to superheat.
There are MANY Zanpakuto whose element-typing is not clear from their appearance, and type-testing via i-ching or other divination methods is essential, especially for shinigami with Bankai, whose second release may be an entirely different element than the first.
Unohana really, REALLY wanted Mayuri 's help doing statistical DNA analysis to see if there are genetic markers for Zanpakuto elemental types, and to confirm her theory that shinigami can possess two elemental types at once- a dominant and recessive one, like dominant and recessive alleles. She has a theory that the combinations of dominant and recessive element types can explain why some people have the ability to perform Kaido when most don't, and hope that she can breed for it.
Unfortunately all Mayuri wanted to do was make useless drugs and ethically dubious homunculi.
I'm gonna be honest kids.
I have not been doing well.
I've been on the verge of a nervous breakdown since january re: the election.
I can't sleep without medication
I can barely eat
So, I'm going to take a break from the internet for a while
and try to keep what little sanity I have left.
Staying alive is the most brutal protest.
Everyone please check your registration to vote, register your friends and neighbors, and fucking VOTE like your life and mine depend on it because they do.
Have you talked about the agriculture and infrastructure of AEIWAM? Cause in the show we see the people of Seireitei eating, but they’re dead, so that’s a lot of dead people to be feeding. Plus you’ve established the mail service so public services are available in a way.
What’s the food situation look like? Do we have entire districts of people farming? Are there laws about it? Who can be bribed with a very specific food?
Autism Voice: How much are you prepared to learn about this topic?
Because there's 5,236 words under the cut.
Godspeed.
So in canon, souls don't "need" to eat, but do so out of habit, and also the rukongai is largely a feudalistic economy, which is not how habits OR feudalism work.
Not to drastically oversimplify enormous fields of history, political theory and socioeconomic, but if you were ever wondering WHY someone would tolerate living in a feudal system, the answer largely is "Because it beat the fuck out of the previous system, 'constant and devastating warfare'."
How feudalism gets started is easy:
There's a very large amount of people with no effective unified government for whatever reason (humans just moved into the area/an empire collapsed/a volcano blew up the general everything, etc.), and a limited amount of arable land, and therefore, a limited amount of food.
There's always a few assholes, and those assholes immediately try to establish dominance over the good turf with violence. This is the "constant warfare" phase of the agrarian government cycle.
In response, everyone bands together with their families and immediate neighbors to create defenses against The Marauding Assholes.
If one village is particularly defensible, or one marauder is particularly good at defense-breaking, people start to move in with whoever they think will do a better job of helping them stay fed. eventually these groups get big enough to need some kind of organization, and the organization tends to default to transactional loyalty.
I swear to god this is about the food situation.
The Transaction is thus: In exchange for taxes and you occasionally being called in for military Service, your Lord keeps the Marauding assholes away and does the obnoxiously complicated work of governance that helps farming but is too time-consuming for any farmer to actually do. Sounds like a good deal, right?
Smart people will recognize several glaring omissions and problems with that deal, but that's not important right now. After decades of "constant and devastating warfare", this is a relatively sane and fair deal.
This transactional loyalty continues up the political food chain: The leaders of several villages along a river need to coordinate efforts along that river or whatever, so they pick One Guy to be The Lord of the River Districts, typically the most popular guy in the clique.
...Or the one with the most heavily armed peasants.
In exchange for coordinating all the traffic/trade/environmental conditions along the river and ensuring peace between all the river districts, The River Lord also gets paid taxes and can call on all the River Lords to turn up with the heavily armed peasants should trouble come knocking.
Eventually, the River Lord makes an alliance with the neighboring Plains Lord and Mountain Lord and the Beach Lord up the coast because warfare suuuuuucks, and the most popular member of that clique is crowned emperor.
After a generation or two of relative stability, people have forgotten what the previous period of warfare was like, and develop the unconscious bias that it's Always Been Like This/the horror stories of your elders are just superstition. See: people who don't vaccinate their children because THEY never met anyone with Polio.
So they start pushing their luck.
Get funny with the ownership laws and realize they can make EVERYONE a renter and get away with being a shitass landlord.
Justify being a shitass landlord by coming up with things like "The Divine Right Of Kings"
Someone figures out that if you make everyone pay taxes in a grain crop, you can get away with EVEN MORE shitholery because you can force the peasants to use the bulk of their time and space to grow a crop that they have a limited ability to process and eat themselves, and grow their actual sustenance on the margins, so you can keep them in line with the constant but unspoken threat of starvation.
So if the Rukongai is running on a rice-based feudal system (which it is, because Kan is a rice-based currency and there are Noble houses and Lords and Daimyo in canon), souls MUST need to eat or the lords would have all been beheaded for being assholes who can't govern a while ago without the threat of starvation.
See? It IS about the food situation.
SIKE
I need to talk about law enforcement and postal services in the modern Soul Society now.
So the thing is: Until Ichigo and his friends show up and Cause A Ruckus, The Gotei-13 didn't actually have the authority to arrest anybody besides other Shinigami, people actively trying to Kill Shinigmai, and Hollows (theoretically) in AEIWAM.
See, after the initial period of "Various Lords make friends with each other for fun and profit", some Lords got really, REALLY good at getting other lords to sign up for their Multi Level marketing Schemes, and got stupid rich and also regular stupid doing it. Five of them specifically. These five super-popular guys were the Five noble lords, and their families that everyone pledged loyalty to became The Great Noble Houses: Shihouin, Kuchiki, Ise, and Shiba.
AND DEFINITELY NOBODY ELSE.
The fact that all four of these houses were involved in a peculiar incident that imbued them with terrible spiritual power and some really kicass magical artifacts sure helped too.
Theoretically, any of these Four guys could become Emperor, but nobody was willing to bow to anyone else and it rapidly turned into the tensest five-way Mexican standoff, with a shitload of proxy wars between the minor noble houses that served the Great ones.
Great.
We're back to "constant, if somewhat less devastating warfare" AND we have to pay rice taxes.
...so some peasants invent anarchist communalism.
Not communism, they don't have control of the state, but they DO have Lords that are too busy doing poetry and snorting drugs to do their jobs... or catch them doing things that aren't in their lord's best interests.
So one village elder quietly whispers to another about "Hey, let's agree to trade grain and other supplies to each other at a discount and ah... not tell His Lordship about it. We'll have to send messages to each other in secret tho."
So Some Fucking Peasant becomes The Messages Guy, hoofing it all over the Rukongai delivering messages and facilitating an entirely lordless agrarian economy.
It's Kind of a Big Deal.
It's Kind of a Big Deal because peasants who can communicate are peasants who can ORGANIZE, and when word comes down from the scullery maids and underpaid clerks in the noble houses that the minor houses of X and Y are about to go to war at the behest of their masters THE MOST PECULIAR THING HAPPENS-
Holy shit. Terrible plague outbreak in the lands of Lord X. Hundreds dead. No way any village has anybody to spare for the war. What, you want to look? You want to catch this too? That's what happened to the last guy who came to look and look at him now! Crow food :(
Meanwhile, Lord Y and his two jackass sons have suddenly fallen ill. Must be that Plague from District X. Oh no! They died! Now the only Heir left is his daughter Lady X Who Was Doing All The Work Anyway. How unfortunate :(
;D
and that's not even getting into the network of secret granaries, flash livestock auctions, refugee migration routes and fun new alliances with people like Bandit Gang That Is An Entire Calvalry But Better.
It gets to be such a big deal, there are TONS of message guys, and they organize and demand to be paid properly for all this running and not getting caught by the nobs.
And the first postal service is born.
And shit, now that they're organized, why not formalize some of these grain stores and livestock trades and does the cavalry want to help delivering these messages? Or how about all the Village Elders who are experts in various things write down how all that stuff is done so it can be shared? Maybe they should all have a chance to meet up and share wisdom in person...
Shigekuni Yamamoto is all of eleven years old when he hears the village elder who runs the orphanage float the idea.
Much, much later, he'll recall that THAT was when the Central 46 began.
Gradually, the lordless network of elder advice and tax-free farm economy grows, and begins to develop internal structures of it's own, and slowly grows to rival the Noble Houses in power, the decentralization of the network making it difficult for the noble houses to even recognize as a player, let alone attack.
Sure, lone messengers are often captured by the armies of the noble houses, but the messages they carry make little sense- the peasants use an entirely different alphabet- and the messengers will bite their tongues off and drown in their own blood before speaking.
But the shape of this secret fifth house remains a mystery for a long time until it becomes An Fucking Problem for food-related reasons. Specifically:
Ever Since the noble houses came back with weird magic powers and fucked up artifacts, there's been more and more and MORE people who have their own fucked up magical powers who live bizarrely long lives and also there are these really fucked up creatures with skull-like masks and holes in their chest that FUCKING EAT PEOPLE??
Fortunately, if you've got one of these magical freaks in your village, they're GREAT at dealing with the hole-monsters or "Hollows"
Unfortunately, these guys need a TON of food.
I read a statistical analysis from a medieval European scholar who worked out that in an agrarian economy, if you want to have ONE full-time warrior, you need to have about 1000 people to support that guy in terms of services needed and the labor lost from them being a fighter.
...And these magical warriors have the appetites of three or four people.
So anyone born with Spiritual power in Soul society is a bit up shit creek.
While everyone experiences the threat of starvation but for them, it's a matter of days, not weeks. While their home village would love to keep them, they straight-up may not be able to produce enough food, even if he's a magical farmer most of the year.
The nearest noble house definitely has enough food. But they also know from the Magical Dudes in their own families just how hungry these guys are, AND how powerful they are and how badly a rival house would want them.
So the Noble houses often default straight to conscription, threats of violence against the warrior's home and family, indentured servitude and straight-up curses to control any spiritually powerful people who appear in their districts before a Rival house can make them a decent offer. Or kidnap them.
Basically, unless you're actually a member of the family, the noble houses SUCK to work for. Magical warriors are treated like weapons or animals or worse, are forced to marry into the family.
What are you going to do though? Starve? Not a lot of other options.
...until the secret postal service starts.
Postal Service has Food. And decent wages and working conditions baked right into the way its run.
Sure, it's not easy work, but the magical warriors are the fastest and strongest out there, AND the people most equipped to handle suddenly running into a Noble Guard or a hollow.
Once the word gets out, the magical warriors are practically hammering down the post office doors for a job.
Bit of a rowdy lot, these guys. The Council of Elders realizes. Also, very noticable to the noble houses. it's going to becaome real clear what's going on real fast, and we don't have an army.
Yet...
Enter Postmaster-General Shigekuni Yamamoto, who has been running this for the last 500 years and already built a Dojo to train carriers how to defend themselves.
He's even a pretty heavy hitter of a magical warrior himself!
We'll have him run the army. It's basically the same thing, right?
Yamamoto is made aware of his promotion when the news is first released up north where the council is holding it's meeting this year, and an adolescent Chojiro Sasakibe decides that a good way to apply to the Dojo is to Personally Deliver the News Himself.
At 1 AM
In Sensei's Bedroom.
"...Are you all like this, or are you a special pain in the ass?" the man with the extremely impressive mustache and frightening glare croaks at the lad.
"My ability to inflict discomfort on various backsides has been noted before, Sir!" Sasakibe reports cheerfully. "...But I'm not sure who you mean by 'you all'?"
"You and every other maniac with an ounce of Reiryoku who's apparently headed here at speed?" Yamamoto glowers at the letter he's been handed.
Chojiro frowns, looking off to the side and rubbing his chin, giving the question entirely too much serious thought.
"Well-" the boy grimaces. "I'd say that compared to the population at large, I'm a statistically significant pain in the ass, but compared to just people with spiritual power, I'm only a minor nuisance."
Yamamoto groans, laying back down and staring at the ceiling for a bit.
"How old are you, boy?"
"Fourteen sir!" Chojiro chirps.
"Princess-Who-Understands-The-Heavens, he's fucking fourteen." Yamamoto groans, rubbing his face. "Well. You're my pain in the ass now. Make yourself useful and get me some breakfast."
Sasakibe has been faithfully following that order for the last 1200 years :)
Soon, the Lordless Council of Elders has themselves a sizeable, very powerful and extremely loyal army. In an act of extreme magnanimity, they extend an offer to each of the Four Noble Houses to bring an end to the feuding and create a government and laws for noble and peasant alike to follow and prosper under.
Every Single Noble House: 🗡️⚔️🔪FUCK. YOU. 🔪⚔️🗡️
Well, this was going to happen sooner or later, Yamamoto supposes, and readies for The Final War To End All Wars.
He was so full of hope and promise back then.
The Four Noble houses and Postal Army prepare their initial salvos but before anyone could strike, AN ABSOLUTE SHITWACK OF ARROWS rain down from the sky.
Knock Knock
It's The Quincies.
Everyone scrambles against the invaders, but refuses to ally and soon the last hope of Spirit World is pinned on The Postmaster-General, the couple dozen surviving warriors of his Dojo, and Twelve Fucking Maniacs he hired off Death Row.
To ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE'S VAST SURPRISE, Yamamoto is Victorious.
Well.
Him and some weird monk guy who turned Yhwach into a bug, gave Yamamoto A Mandate From heaven re: The Hollows and Balance of Souls, and Dipped.
The tattered remains of the noble houses finally Unite, but Shigekuni Genryusai Yamamoto has three names now and is like unto a God.
and the twelve shady bastards backing him up are no slouches either.
...Perhaps it's time to Negotiate.
And negotiations happen!
- The Noble houses bring their not-insubstantial forces to the table, along with the fact they're the only people who have a System FOR collecting taxes, something a government really does need.
- The Council of Elders brings it's vast organizational network, expertise in many practical subjects and Lifetimes of Wisdom, only accurate maps of the immediate spirit world.
- The newly-named Court Guard brings it's Much more substantial force, it's Mandate from on high, and Yamamoto's scary mustache and even scarier wife.
Things are actually going pretty well. Yamamoto and the army are getting the civil protections they wanted, the elders are getting the fairer means of governement they wanted and the Noble houses are getting to still be Rich As Cream.
...then someone sneaks in to negotiations.
Well, they were actually brought in, as part of the entourage of one of the Elders, who takes her advice very seriously. After all, she's the oldest being the elder knows- even older than whatever it was that made the nobles so powerful in the first place.
"Listen, I've worked with these slippery shits before. Make damn sure they can't betray you." she growls.
"I know, Yamamoto-sama has laid a very clever trap for them-" the elder nods.
"No, I mean Yamamoto." She growls, yellow eye narrowing as she tracks him and his wife as they meander around the gardens below the negotiation hall. "Not him specifically, but it was a betrayal by someone like him- someone gifted the power of heaven- who cursed me to be as I am."
"...Oh." says the elder, realizing that if Yamamoto could strike down that monster that lead the Quincies, he could very easily turn his blade on the council too.
...And that's when the first cracks in the bond between Yamamoto and The Council appeared.
So it was declared thus:
The actual governing would be done by the Council of Elders, now called the Central 46.
The Noble houses would still be allowed to retain their lands and collect SOME taxes in exchange for clearly defined and legally binding responsibilities.
The Gotei-13 would be responsible for matters supernatural- People with strange powers, the balance of souls between worlds, hollows, etc. funded and housed by the Central 46.
Additionally, the four of the captain's positions in the Gotei-13 would be reserved for the scions of The Great Noble Houses, unless it somehow came to pass that there were no Scions left.
The former armies of the Noble Houses would become the Onmitsukudo*, who would do the actual enforcing of the central 46's laws and collecting of taxes in the Rukongai, as well as independently collecting information for the central 46.
The Central 46 would also cultivate and independent force of spiritually powerful souls to use the art of Kido for Civil Projects and assisting the Omnitsukido or Gotei-13 when necessary.
It's Peace, but it's a Very Uneasy Peace.
As it stands, the Gotei-13 is *a* military branch, and a force to be reckoned with should they decide to throw their weight around, but they are entirely legally beholden to the Central 46 and not allowed to enforce the law.
In fact, the Central 46 and Onmitsukido are allowed to arrest and detain any shinigami they see as a threat, without notice, explanation or Trial. The Central 46 could even decide to stop funding the Gotei-13 altogether and leave them to starve if they chose.
That's why Yamamoto is so strict about direct orders from the Central 46, and why Shinigami aren't allowed into the government quarter of the city.
Is this an excessive amount of world-building? maybe
Is it actually making the writing process easier because I actually know what the broader chains of causality already are so the plot flows more naturally? YES.
More importantly, am I having fun? VERY MUCH YES.
...What the fuck was this about again?
Oh, right.
Food.
So as you can see from the previous fucking doctoral thesis, the food situation is
INTENSELY POLITICAL
AND
EXTREMELY FRAUGHT
...but actually pretty stable!
The vast majority of flat-enough-to-use land in the Rukongai is dedicated to farming. The land mass of the districts gets larger as you get farther from Seireitei, and districts 40-75 are almost ENTIRELY agrarian, with substantial amounts of farming occurring in 20-40 and above 75.
The Primary crop is still rice, but that's been receding since Soul Society finally switched to a Fiat Currency in the 1800s.
Also since about then, a greater variety of crops from the living world have appeared, including: Tomatoes, Potatoes, Crummock, Salsify, Cantaloupe, Avocado, Jicama, Sunroot, Marijuana, Strawberries, Corn, Broccolini, blue berries, boysenberries, Chicory, Cranberries, asparagus, black berries, raspberries, black raspberries, red blackberries, Okra, Coca, lingon berries, elder berries, Rhubarb, gooseberries, salmonberries, bearberries, and so many fucking squash.
New livestock has appeared as well- Soul Society has had an almost unlimited supply of beef from the Chihuahuan Desert cattle trade, but recently there have been new arrivals from the living world- wool sheep, Dairy cattle, Llamas, Mini pigs, Micro Pigs, Guinea Pigs, Fallow Deer, and those fucked up damascus goats.
There is also a bunch of crops native to Soul Society like Hummage, Black yams, ratweed, Pinnerey, Tomangoes, Craic, Duck radish, Sisei, and So Many Fucking Beans. There is also, like Nano Pigs, Pico Pigs, Mega Pigs and the terrifying Giga Pig (actually a type of Cavy). There are also Meat Horses, wool donkeys, and riding cattle, as well as Fertile mules.
Are there Laws About It?
Bruh.
The Soul Society Department of Agriculture was the FIRST formal regulatory agency formed by the Central 46. Even before the IRS.
Soul Society Agricultural and Land-Use Law is so Complex and Arcane that Kaname invents* an entire Rice Farm Subsidy Fraud Case for that takes Momo over a DECADE to investigate in various archives (Aizen is allergic to paper dust), travel to distant districts of the Rukongai (He also gets sick on trains and gates are for emergency use only), and talk to a hell of a lot of lawyers about (Aizen hates talking to anyone who really understands contract law) specifically to keep her physically away from Aizen as much as possible. It even works!
*Sort of. The Rice Subsidy Fraud is Very Very real, but difficult to investigate, so he was leaving her subconscious clues in the crossword to point her to more evidence.
Who can be bribed with Very Specific Food?
As a side-effect of shinigami appetites, very nearly everyone to at least some degree. Most have hard limits about what they will accept any kind of compensation for, but everyone can be at least inclined to consider your proposal with the right snacks.
Ukitake loves cookies. He won't break laws or promises or forgo prior engagements, but he will make little exceptions that will make everyone happier.
It's more effective to bribe Rukia with plushies instead of food.
---
Mayuri wants whole-roasted fish, especially the heads and eyeballs. Technically, Mayuri has no limits, but you're going to need to present him with something exceptional.
Nemu can be persuaded to do some truly startling things for a nice dessert. She's done felonies for a fruit parfait before.
You can't Bribe Urahara with food, but you can bribe him with edibles ;)
Akon has a chart posted on his office door what various favors cost in money, labor, cigarettes, beer and/or pirated media.
---
Zaraki doesn't have a specific food he likes, but is constantly craving calories. He's also very willing to eat all your food and then tell you to go fuck yourself. The most effective strategy is to share food while asking for nothing a few times and then ask for whatever you needed his help with outside of a food context. For better or worse, he's extremely trainable.
You can't Bribe Yachiru with what she's already stolen out of your pockets.
Ikkaku is sort of offended when people fail to attempt to bribe him, and VERY offended if they try to lowball him. What, do you think he's cheap? Will show up anywhere with a buffet tho.
Attempting to Bribe Yumichika is a great way to end up owing Yumichika for the rest of your life. He never fails to make it to Sasakibe's High Teas/Gay Bitching sessions and often takes the snacks home.
---
People try to bribe Rangiku with alcohol all the time, which is really annoying. She is Perfectly Capable of acquiring her own booze thank you! Also, they keep offering her shit like Aged Whiskey which tastes how burnt hair smells. What she REALLY wants is Neon orange "Cheez" or "Nacho Blasted" snacks from the Living World. She craves that Riboflavin.
Hitsugaya lets everyone believe he's a slut for watermelon so they don't offer him the thing he'd actually have to fight to not accept: Jerky.
---
Tousen will not be 'bribed' into doing anything and will get extremely offended if you imply that he might consider it. He will, however, go to remarkably extreme lengths to get his hands on persimmons without paying for them. Not theft, that's very unethical, but he holds a bizarre principle about never paying for that fruit so that means exploiting agricultural, fair use, zoning and Tree laws to find or plant persimmon trees that are Perfectly Legal for him to pick from.
Kensei is similarly stony about the idea of being 'bribed', and worse still has an utterly flavorless protien-based diet. Mashiro knows he's got a pathological craving for Oreos and exploits it regularly.
Shuuhei will not be bribed but he will be VERY grateful if you go fill up his water bottle for him. Dweeb.
Mashiro will sell her own granny for a corn chip because she likes snacks, loves shenanigans, and knows her granny can kick a man in half and could use the excitement.
---
Everyone *knows* Shunsui is a drinker, but the trick is that he's savoring some really, REALLY good stuff very slowly. You can't afford the shelf he's drinking from.
He thought he was immune to food-based Bribery until Nanao was out of town one week and the rank-and-file Shinigami she left to mind him introduced him to the grand tradition of the post-spree Dirty Great Fry-Up. It was like waking up in heaven to his hungover ass, and now he's the one attempting to bribe his minder into making it again every time he wants to go on a bender because he refuses to wake up from one any other way again.
Nanao did not believe the minder when she told Nanao of the great power of The Dirty Great Fry-Up, but now that Shunsui limits his sprees to the availability of breakfast the following morning, Nanao is trying to figure out what kind of raise it's going to take to keep the fry cook on staff.
---
Sajin Komamura is a deeply honorable man who doesn't even like eating lunch out with a visitor lest it be misconstrued and because he's still self-concious about eating in front of others.
Last spring though, someone put up flyers for Game Share tags, and Komamura met with them in private to negotiate terms and ended up putting almost half a month's salary towards at least two does, one wild sow, as many marmots as they can bag (they can keep the pelts), and the offal/feet of the other animals they bag on other tickets. Half of the following month's salary went towards an adequate chest freezer.
It's worth it though. His diet had been suffering from lack of variety and some of the vitamins and other nutrients from parts humans don't eat and by December his coat is LUXURIOUS.
Tetsuzaemon won't do anything illegal but will do some remarkably stupid shit for a beer.
---
You don't even SAY the word 'bribe' in the sixth division. Byakuya will remember you forever if you bring him an extremely specific brand of seaweed snack though.
Renji will eat anything handed to him, which is a problem because he almost broke a tooth on a stapler he thought was going to be a sandwich. He's unbribable because his brain won't process anything you say to him while he's eating.
---
People kept bringing Aizen Chocolate when he was captain and he HATED it. It's not that he dislikes the food: it's that his Dead Twin Brother was an absolutely peerless confectioner and made chocolate that could make the angels weep. Not only are Aizen's standards ridiculously high, the food is a genuine trauma trigger for him.
Shinji loves him some Black Thunder Chocolate bars but is so goddamn bad at conversations that he will not grok what the FUCK someone is talking about when they try to bribe him. He'll think they're a bad conversationalist with good taste in candy.
Some god thought they were being real funny when they made Momo be born with an aversion to peaches and a deep fondness for Sour and bitter Flavors. Shinji did manage to remember her joking about that and bought her a jar of pickled lemons for her birthday as a joke, and was genuinely surprised when she was moved to tears.
You have to Bribe Hiyori to even get her to listen to your proposal for the thing you're actually trying to bribe her for. For Better or Worse, she trades in novel potato chip flavors.
---
Attempting to bribe Unohana with food is an absolute crapshoot, because what she'll accept is a complex internal metric of how serious the favor is, how much she likes you, and how much she likes the proferred snack. You might be able to get a perscription for something that's normally a band substance for some Senbei, you might lose your nose for even bringning Okra into her hosptial. Best not play that particular roulette.
Isane is impossible to bribe because she just agrees to stuff before you can bring out the payment. Sure, you got your surgery moved or your hands in some pretty heavy drugs, but you'll walk away with the feeling that, since you didn't actually pay her for this, you actually OWE her now, and you'd be right. You'd better believe she'll call in that favor whenever she needs it, because you're *friends*, aren't you?
It also never occurs to anyone to offer her her favorite food: Apples.
Hanataro has accidentally taken bribes multiple times because he did not realize people were attempting to pay him. He thinks it's just basic manners to show up at someone else's home or office with snacks and also people are wildly misinformed about what he's legally allowed to do. What? they wanted me to BREAK A LAW? FOR KIT-KATS??
The boy loves him some kit-kats but not to the point of committing a FELONY, what the fuck???
---
Izuru once walked in on Gin swallowing a rat whole, turned around and tried desperately to pretend he hadn't actually seen that for a year, until he REALLY fucked up his scheduling conflicts and needed an extra week of paid time off to go to a friend's wedding and in a fit of panic, attatched a deceased rat suitable for serpentine consumption he purchased from a pet store.
Gin was more than happy to give him the time off and hey, a little hazard pay so you can get something nice for the happy couple
Unfortunately, this also condemned Izuru to having Gin lean out of his office at least every other month and holler "Hey Izuru? What's our Rat Guy's phone number?" loud enough to be heard by the entire Division.
Rose can be bribed with anything from a patisserie.
---
People keep givng Soi Fon honey which is honestly starting to feel like a microaggression at this point. What she REALLLY wants is a bucket of fried chicken.
You can't Bribe Omaeda with food, he's the one feeding YOU. Sit down and stop yapping, you're skin and bones!
---
Yamamoto does not accept bribes, at all, ever. He does accept all forms of SUPER MEGA SPICY FLAMING DEATH-REINCARNATION-AND-SECOND-FLAMING-DEATH TURBOFIRE HOT hot sauce.
Sasakibe has been assisitant headmaster of Shin'o academy since it was founded before the fall of Rome. no matter how delicious your offer or how clever your scheme, an adolescent dork already made a better version of it like 700 years ago. Pathetic.
What Sasakibe REALLY wants is to be able serve high tea to an adoring crowd. Hope you like cucumber sandwiches.
Okay this is like 5.2K and it's 3AM I'm gonna end this and go to bed.
Question adding onto this: How does the soul king palace get their food? Do they have floating farms? Using divine magic? How did Kifune influence their policies and methods?
You know what never gets explored in Bleach canon so far as I know and I've decided to have Mental Illness about today?
The friendship between Yamamoto and Unohana.
Because after Sasakibe, she's the friend he's known the longest and he I'd definitely the friend she's known the longest. He trusts her with his body, she trusts him with the mantle of command there is some PROFOUND TRUST AND INTIMACY GOING ON HERE .
Yassssss, fed me looooore
Preferably in the slightly demented ''Half drunk ramblings at four in the morning wearing underwear and a lab coat'' kind of way
"Ay, Yachiru!" Chigiri Shijima called. "I need another hand and y'ain't squeamish!"
"My apologies Sir." Zenjoji gulped, trying not to hurl. "I can do blood and guts but I can't do bones!"
"Weenie." Shijima rolled her eyes as the large man hurried out of the tent. "Where is that girl?"
There was a quiet *thud* as something flew through the tent flaps and hit the ground beside the Medical cot. Yamamoto cracked an eye open from where he lay on his side, wheezing, and saw a severed forearm on the ground beside them.
"NOT THAT KIND OF HAND YOU JACKASS!!" Shijima howled as Yamamoto laughed despite his current rib injuries.
"...Is this one better?" Unohana asked, stepping into the tent and offering up another severed forearm. "There's a big pile on the edge of camp but it's almost all right hands because of the way the Quincys aim, so it'll take me a while to find a left-" She explained, apparently entirely serious. "Oh, You need me to hold something."
"...I'd get on your case about the meanings of common idioms but I did ask you for a spare foot this morning." Shijima sighed, turning her attention back to Yamamoto. "Go wash your hands and then come back here. I need you to hold the Boss' ribcage open while I go on a shrapnel hunt."
"Dickshitting cockweasels." Yamamoto grunted to deal with the pain as The Kenpachi joined him on the cot, following Shijima's directions about where to sit and grip the partially-split ribcage. She was a slip of a thing- barely 5'2" and lean as a sighthound, but her grip was like iron.
"...How did this happen?" she asked, frowning. "It looks like an up-and-out shot, but there's no entry wound."
"Ricochet shot off a wall while The General's chest was parallel to the ground throwing a punch." Shijima said. "Damn lucky on both counts- that the bastard hit him at all, and that it only went as deep as it did. Alright Boss, I'm going in, scream as much as you want."
Yamamoto had enough dignity that he didn't scream but he did gurgle with the nauseating feeling of Shijima's hands rummaging around in the vicinity of his liver.
"What's that with all the bumps?" Unohana asked, head cocked with curiousity.
"Gallbladder. This big thing is his liver, which cleans any nasty junk out of the blood and makes Bile, which lets you digest food. It costs a lotta energy to run, so if you start to starve, the body stops making bile. The Gallbladder is like a spare can of Bile, so that when you do find food, you can digest it even if your liver is takin' a nap." Shijima explained, picking fragments of bone out from between Yamamoto's innards before they tore something important open. "Stictly speakin' you can live without it, but if you run out of food, you're gonna starve even faster."
"And that blue thing?" Unohana asked.
"Blue thing-?" Shijima frowned, following her gaze. "Huh. Hey Boss, did you know you have Blue kidneys? I've only seen this once before and I must've taken apart at least ten thousand corpses by now-"
"I know that I've got my goddamn ribcage split open and nowhere near enough sake in my body to tolerate it much longer Shijima!" Yamamoto growled.
"Fussy, fussy!" Shijima sighed. "I think I've got the really big pieces out but the small ones can be their own problem- oh. Never mind here's a big motherfucker!"
Yamamoto rolled his eyes and dropped his head back- the easiest angle for Unohana to hold his chest open put his head in the young thing's lap, and he tried to distract himself by studying her. She had immaculate skin, even with the way her eyes sank back into her skull with exhaustion. There was something strange about the proportions of her face- eyes large and doll-like, jaw narrow and delicate-
"Unohana." he grunted, frowning. "...How old are you?"
Shijima looked up from where she was Rinsing out his chest to get any lingering fragments out from between the organs and into the corner of his diaphragm. "Huh. I never noticed it before, but you can't be older than twenty."
"I'm twenty-six." Unohana muttered.
"...That your Chronological age, or your Living one?" Shijima asked, scooping out the final fragments. "People age different here in Soul Society, especially powerful souls like us. I'm almost three hundred chronologically, but I'm about 45 for my Living Age."
Unohana did not respond, chewing at her lip and looking away.
"...Unohana." Yamamoto growled.
"I- um. I died about twelve years ago. Haven't aged much, I think." She mumbled.
There was a pause as both the severely sleep deprived or injured adults in the tent tried to do math.
"YOU'RE FOURTEEN?" Shijima howled.
"I died like, two weeks from my birthday." Unohana muttered. "So I'm probably fifteen now?"
"I'VE BEEN LETTING YOU DRINK WITH US AND LOOK AT FUROFUSHI'S DIRTY BOOKS AND-!" Shijima yelped in horror.
"We're in a war zone and all got hired off death row." Unohana grumbled. "My childhood ended a while ago."
Shijima sputtered, then resumed threading her Surgeon's needle to stitch The General up. Eventually, Unohana could let go, but she didn't leave, opting to stay put with a comforting hand on Yamamoto's shoulder, watching Shijima work.
"Okay Boss, you're not gonna bleed to death or have a hemorrhage, but we'll see how much I have left in me." Shijima sighed, placing her palms on either side of the wound.
"...Haido, right?" Unohana asked as the wound began to glow. "How's it work?"
"You know how to channel your reiatsu for Kido, right?" Shijima asked, and the girl nodded. " 'S like that, but instead of pouring yourself into a dark hole and imaginging the other end at your fingertips, you imagine the other end is the injury you're trying to heal, and the wound undoing itself and back into the shape the body is supposed to be in."
"...That's it?" Unohana asked, sitting up a bit.
"I make it sound easy but only a few people are born with the ability to channel Reiatsu into another's body without destroying them, and it takes a lot of practice and schooling to learn how to knit the body back together and- OH, FUCK YOU." Shijima groaned as Unohana placed her hands on top of Shijimas and the previously flickering glow steadied and tripled in size.
"I can pour, and I think I know how ribs go, but you tell me, okay?" she asked.
"Yeah, yeah, alright." Shijima groaned. "We start with the bones- See how there's three layers on this broken edge here? Start with the darkest one in the middle- it's gooey, and soft like a sponge. And build a bridge of marrow from there, to this edge here-"
---
Two hours later Yamamoto was glaring at the space he felt like he really ought to have a scar.
"That one's a real monster." Shijima sighed, lighting up a cigarette as Unohana trotted off in the general direction of the cooking fire to see what she could badger out of Zenjoji.
"We're all monsters, Shijima." Yamamoto hummed, rubbing over the outright pristine patch of skin next to his sternum.
"Not like her we're not. You and I just go bump in the night, she's gonna grow up to haunt everyone's nightmares."
"Hm. Grown up too much already." Yamamoto grunted. He looked over to see Shijima grinning at him.
"Why, GENERAL!" She teased. "I had no idea you had such a soft spot for children!"
"I'm not a complete monster." He muttered, watching as Zenjoji offered her and Sasakibe some early-season persimmons he'd foraged. "I don't like seeing young things in the street- God! She's even younger than Chojiro was when he joined the dojo."
"Is that why you founded the shin'o dojo?" Shijima asked, offering him a cigarette as well. "Foster's home for little horrors?"
Down at the cooking fire, Sasakibe was having to wrestle the girl away from snitching meat-bones directly out of the soup.
"I started it because I was tired of everyone getting mugged and murdered all the time." Yamamoto grunted. "...but a home for all us monsters isn't a bad idea Shijima. Maybe she won't grow up so awful if she grows up among her own kind."
You know what never gets explored in Bleach canon so far as I know and I've decided to have Mental Illness about today?
The friendship between Yamamoto and Unohana.
Because after Sasakibe, she's the friend he's known the longest and he I'd definitely the friend she's known the longest. He trusts her with his body, she trusts him with the mantle of command there is some PROFOUND TRUST AND INTIMACY GOING ON HERE .
Yassssss, fed me looooore
Preferably in the slightly demented ''Half drunk ramblings at four in the morning wearing underwear and a lab coat'' kind of way
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