Bleach Hereafter RPG

And so, Niji found herself once again waiting in the gazebo of the Hofgarten. The damage caused by the brief skirmish a few days ago had been fixed. It hadn’t even been in the news; and it looked like nothing had happened to it.  Spiritual interference to fix it and reverse the damage, given how perfectly it had been fixed, and the lack of any construction signs. She waited as the sun rose across the park, considering what she knew.  It was frighteningly little, and a large portion of it was taken from a memory of a false life created when Val had lashed out and the fae had tried to intercept.

First, there were the goals, location, and leadership of the Red Lotus. Whether Hibano decided to join her or not, she owed the Red Lotus a visit.

With regards to goals, Val had either misled her, or allowed her to conflate, the goals of the organization with her personal goals of destruction. In the false life, the Red Lotus had the goals of training fullbringers in case Shinigami decided to exert a more direct control over humanity. That goal was reasonable, and she had said as much when she talked to Vice Captain Muimina only a few weeks ago. Of course, that was one of the things she had to discover the truth about. It was, in fact, suspiciously close to what she had told the Vice Captain, and could have been a construction of the illusory reality. She couldn’t know without talking to a member of the organization directly.

However, the false life had provided her information on the location that seemed promising. She looked up the Akai Hasu temple on satellite images and on the internet. It was a normal looking temple in a nondescript location, with a similarly nondescript website, but it matched what had been in the false life. It was even up against the mountain that could have housed the facility that she ‘remembered.’

As for the actual members of their organization, the false life had them interact with a man named ‘Virgil’ as the leader of the Red Lotus, but the more she tried to focus on remembering other details, the fuzzier they got. There were a good number of Red Lotus operatives that she could remember, but on the Quincy side there were only about four or five. With all likelihood, the people Val might have actually known personally were more fleshed out in the illusion.

False memories thrown at her in an attempt to keep her at bay by a woman driven mad. It wasn't much to go on. But she needed, at the very least, to make sure this organization was not driven to pursue Val’s mad goals of destruction.

And thinking of Val, she was bringing along a whole other mess. Hibano, no last name. With any luck, he would be known to the Red Lotus, and they would take him in and help him piece together who he was before Val decided to start riding shotgun in his brain. Of course, if they actually did share Val’s goal, then that would be problematic in its own right. And if he wasn’t known to the organization…well, that was another set of problems. 

After reviewing the footage on Leon’s security cam, Hibano really did look like he could possibly be related to the Tokareva family. While it was impossible that the real Val could have a child Hibano’s age, the rules that governed possible seemed bent to breaking during the fight. Val as the hōgyoku had been ripping tears in the very fabric of reality; pulling attacks and creatures from other potential universes. Had Hibano been stolen from one of these realities as a last ditch effort for Val to save herself? Pull a potential son that never was to serve as a host to try and take over? It seemed too far, even for Val.

Or was it? The woman herself was a complicated mess of emotions for Niji; she couldn’t find it in herself to hate the woman, no matter how much easier that would have been. In this life, real life, she had spent maybe two hours in Val’s company; to say she understood the woman that really existed would have been a lie. During that fight, Val had tried to make her see how a woman could have become so despondent and convinced that the world wasn’t worth saving. Those scenarios still occasionally tickled her memory, but they were more like fleeting nightmares, when examined after the fact, they felt contrived and convoluted. Merely stories twisted to cause as much misery as possible.

The Val she saw daily for a decade never existed, and the soul riding shotgun in Hibano’s brain was the bloodthirsty monster that tried to end the world. A Val that held no affection for her, a nihilistic abomination that should no longer exist. She could hate that, couldn’t she?

What the hell am I doing?

And so, she sat there; at the place she had been stabbed in the stomach by the stranger that was coming to meet her.  This time she was dressed in a semi-formal blue dress, rather than pajamas; for once having one of these spiritual meetings on her terms. The sun peeked over the horizon and the sky began to brighten, but her mood did not; and she stared down at her coffee in contemplation until she sensed a familiar reiatsu signature approaching.


Hibano