Post by Calysto on Dec 22, 2022 1:33:10 GMT -5
Eyes. Empty and grey. She’ll remember that stare in her dreams years from now. The child, not more than seven summers old here in the human world, will live unchanged in her mind even as she grows older. One never forgets the haunting stare of a face with no one behind it.
With a start, Calysto wakes in a bed, her bed. It’s her home, Deneb. Her child remade in the starved sands of Hueco Mundo. Deneb had long since settled into a stable form, and so she could afford to leave him stationary, invisible to spiritually unaware individuals, which was convenient, and a simple house to passersby who were awakened, which was safe. Though he smelled like hollow-- it was unmistakable to any with any sense about them-- it would take an individual skilled in reishi manifestation to discern exactly how the building worked, and because Deneb was a gillian-class menos, he contained multitudes of other hollows inside, all under the singular grip of her dear child. Those pieces could separate with his bounds and form whatever conveniences were needed, furniture, cooking implements. Basically the only things that were not composed of Deneb’s reishi were things brought in from outside and, well, Calysto herself.
Calysto rises from the bed, gently folding the blankets and sheets back into place. Though Deneb had formed the bed from his very being, it took long hours of whispering his form into place and was not easily manipulated from there. It isn’t magical. She can’t just wave the bed into perfect composition. Besides, this is a bit like tucking her child in. He’s safe. That’s what matters.
Pulling on her clothes-- which are NOT made of Deneb’s particles-- Calysto inhales deeply. The window is open, which lets the dim early morning light and its dewy moist air waft in. The window is tuned to the human world, Calysto’s favorite. Another ability of gillian-class hollows is their ability to tear open holes in reality, pushing through the tunnel between into the three realms that are easily accessible, the realm of the living, the realm of hollows, and the realm of the reapers. Calysto doesn’t much care for the desolate sand and stone of the hollow world, Hueco Mundo, nor does she like the potential danger of being exposed in the reapers’ home, Soul Society. Both are accessible alongside the world of the living, and sometimes she thinks it's nice to share firelight with the full glow of Hueco Mundo’s moon or the small, distant meadow Deneb occupies in Soul Society.
It’s still early, so once dressed in thick wool and stiff leather boots, she leaves Deneb from the front door. As she leaves, she reaches out a hand, and a small, squirming blackness leaps from the sill into her hand, Deneb’s only mobile aspect. It’s like a flatworm, wriggling and broad, spade-like with a hole in the center of the broadest part. She holds it close to her chest, the same ritual she always performs, and then slips the creature into the pocket of her bag for safety.
Today is a trip into the city nearby where an acquaintance has agreed to meet her for work. What work exactly she’s supposed to do is still unclear, but Calysto had become known in the local areas for her ability to navigate and track, discrete despite her size. Best in the woodlands in the human world, she prefers work there, but she’s just as adept in Hueco Mundo and rarely in Soul Society. The reapers usually pay her no heed. She’s a good source of information and a rest stop on long journeys. Her policy of treating all comers the same helps too.
The crunching of the snow beneath her boots is the only sound echoing in the mid-morning forest. No animals nearby. That makes sense. It’s winter. The mammals are hibernating in their burrows. The birds are hiding in their holes. She glances at the feeders she’s set up as she walks. Voles taken. Good. The owls have been more scarce in recent months. She sets those up early in the evening after the daytime birds have gone to roost but before the owls hunt. Tracks in the snow. That’s wolves. There’s smaller prints too. A pup in these months? They must have not been able to hold back till the snows melted.
Deneb stirs in her pocket, and in response, she holds a warm, gloved hand to the pocket, keeping him braced from the cold. She can’t help but be caretaker for all, even the animals in the area. As a broken-mask, she should feed on souls, but she can count on her fingers the number of human lives she’s taken since waking in that desert. She lives like humans do, taking of the land only what she can sustain and sufficing on what meager energy it offers. It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes her weaker not to feed on stronger beings, but on the other, being weaker keeps her out of the attention of reapers and lets her hide from hollows.
Like the queen?
The thought rises unbidden, but she shakes it free just as quickly. If the queen summoned her, she’d have to answer, but she tries to stay out of politics. That’s not her business.
Arriving at the edge of town, she sees the first signs of the working day beginning. The sun has already cracked the edge of the horizon and casts a brilliant orange and purple glow over the roofs of the town. Calysto keeps to herself as she walks. Some of the people she passes know her, but she’s not exactly hard to miss. The woman is towering and imposing, an eight-foot-tall giant, all bouncing flesh and bright cheer. She keeps a smile on her face, true to her nature, but she refrains from bothering anyone she passes. Not everyone is a morning person like her. Best not to wake sleeping bears.
She slips a hand into the bag as she passes a particularly brighter set of windows. This person has been up for hours yet herself, and the smell of baked goods wafts out from the door, a lazy arm of welcome, coiling steam in the air.
“Farah!” Calysto calls as she enters the shop, hand pulling forth a steel, stoppered container from her bag.
Farah’s bundle of braids leaps up from behind the counter. She’s barely taller than the counter, a small, fierce woman of forty years, dark skin and darker hair, beautiful, smooth complexion as if the cold, dry climate could do nothing against the warmth of her bakery. When she speaks, it’s with an accent-- relative to the area, of course. She’s immigrated to this area from some North African country Calysto’s only heard the name of. Hard to keep up with geography with three worlds to frequent. Besides, Calysto really hasn’t been much farther than a few days' walk, some 50 miles, from Deneb’s presence.
“My dear, you have brought it?” she says, and Calysto nods, smiling. The container is a tiny thing in her hand but takes both of Farah’s to hold.
“Tea leaves, freshly dried. It’s the local variety, but they’re very good. I can attest.”
Farah grins. “I thought it wasn’t wise to take from your own stock? Cuts into profits.”
A warm smile back. “You know I wouldn’t give you anything I wouldn’t drink, Farah. There’s rosehips and blackberry leaves in that one. Very refreshing in the evenings.”
Farah places the canister gently on a shelf in the back. “And in the morning and the afternoon and with cheese at noon. Tea is the lifesblood of the working woman.” With a wink, she strikes a match and lights tinder beneath a wood-fire stove with a kettle on top. “I’ve been waiting all night for it, my dear. Shall we share?”
Calysto waves the notion away. “Sorry, Farah. I’ve got a timetable to keep, myself. A special job. Might take me away for a few days, so make that last till I return, okay?”
Farah nods as she wraps two fresh loaves in paper packaging. “I’ll do my best to take it slow. I’m guessing the next crop will be in the springtime?”
Calysto takes the bread from Farah, places one loaf into her bag, and stuffs the other under her arm to free up a hand to gesture. “Oh, you know, I have my ways of beating the weather. I’ve got more of that blend waiting, but it may be weeks yet before I can dry more of the tea leaves.”
“Not a problem, dear. Be safe on your trip, then. Don’t be afraid to spend more than a hare’s breath with me next time.”
Calysto smiles and answers, “I will, Farah. You’re good to me. Be well, yourself.”
Continuing on her way, Calysto tears off pieces of the bread loaf as she walks, chewing on the warm, yeasty flavor on her way through town. She pulls a crust off and slips it into her bag where Deneb’s little vestige is worming away, trying to get through the paper at the larger loaf, but as the crust is slipped near, the blackness parts to reveal a row of twisting ethereal teeth that grab hold of the bit of bread and slip it into oblivion. The whole crust seems to vanish into a creature too small to hold it, and with that, Deneb slows his squirming and rests.
This is how they get by. Bread, fish, rabbit meat, many root vegetables. It’s hard for hollows to survive on meager “human” food, most of the time, but Deneb can passively sustain on the reishi in the atmosphere in Hueco Mundo. All it takes is a simple rotation of his doors to get his fill from the desert air.
Finally, Calysto reaches her goal, a small, worn-brick building with considerably more windows than its neighbors. It’s an inn, much like her own home, but considerably more mundane. Anyone traveling the roads in this rural area might stay here, which makes it perfect for two spiritually aware beings to convene on work without arousing concern from would-be hunters. It isn’t just reapers to watch for these days. There’s those Fullbringers and the Quincy as well, all keen to take a bite out of the hungry population of hollows and their advanced counterparts, Arrancar.
The man meeting her today, however, isn’t any of those. He’s simply a spiritually aware human with a job for her. Andreas. He’s waiting by the doorway of the inn as she approaches. He’s tall, for a human. Not as tall as Calysto, of course, but he’s got a gaunt, loping sort of build, like someone swallowed a ladder and shuffled it around into a skeleton. His skin sticks to his bones, making him look like he might fall over at any moment, but there’s a kind of powerful existence behind his eyes, which glimmer gold in the morning light, unnaturally so.
“Cal,” he says before she can get a word out. “Good morning, love. How’s our mum today?”
“Andreas,” she answers in the same flat tone, not her usual warmth. She likes Andreas, but he’s mysterious, and that makes her uneasy. She’s never sure where his jobs are heading and rarely likes where they do go. But he pays well, not just in money, which really only serves her in one world or another, but also in resources and information. He knows more than she does, and there’s power in that.
“Ah, all business today, are we? Well, no worries, love. I’ll hop to it then.” He pushes off the wall and strides towards the door, not towards her. “Come along.”
“You want to talk inside?” Calysto says.
“Better this way,” he answers, not stopping to wait for her. He continues talking even as the door starts to close behind him like he’s expecting her to just keep up, so she doesn’t waste time trailing him inside. “See, I’ve written a spell into the walls, I have. Whole inn’s asleep still. Will be till noon. They’ll all think they’ve just had a long night and not make anything of it. Gives us time to figure out the details.”
He leads her up the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms are. Calysto struggles a bit to navigate the tight corridors as quickly as the beanpole man does, but she does her best. Having no one else to circumvent helps. As he opens a door to his room, he glances back, for the first time making sure she’s with him. “It’s a kid.”
“Sorry?” Calysto wonders if he means he has a child in this room. What on earth could he want her to do here and now? Her specialty was finding things, and though she loved kids, that wasn’t a job.
“The job. There’s a kid. You’ll see.” As she follows him through the doorway, he places a seal on the frame, a paper sheet lined with runes and pictograms that flash with reiatsu and stretch onto the wooden wall. A sealing spell.
Then he sits by a table where the previous night’s half-eaten meal sits. The potatoes have gone hard. It’s a horrible waste. He doesn’t give it a glance at all. “There’s a place three days travel west. Family thinks their daughter is possessed. Called on me to take a look. Kid’s healthy as a horse, just... not there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s not there. There’s no one inside. She walks and talks, well, maybe has talked at some point. She wouldn’t talk to me, and her family said she doesn’t talk to anyone. Point is, there’s no soul inside.”
Is that possible? A human without a soul? “How does that happen?”
Andreas shrugs. “Hard to say. Kid’s young. Seven? Eight? Could have been attacked by a hollow. Could have been subjected to weird magic. My guess? She was born that way.” He grimaces and shuffles in his seat, turning to look at Calysto more directly. “See, you know how this works at this point, right? Souls get a body here, and when they die, they get a body in the next world. When that one dies, they go back here or go to the third. Rinse, lather, repeat, ad infinitem.”
He pauses, looking at her to ensure she's keeping up. “But what happens when a body needs a soul but it’s not ready yet? Theoretically, it should never happen. The flow of souls is so strong that it essentially drives birth over here. You can’t even get pregnant without a ready soul, but things are getting strange these days. I heard there was trouble with the place souls don’t usually go to. Demons. An old Shinigami. You saw the cracks.”
She nods. Everyone had. Cracks in the sky. The fracturing of the veil between worlds. It was what allowed Deneb to wedge himself where he had. Before, he could only switch rapidly between realms, which was draining and time-consuming, but after the cracks, he existed in seemingly all three worlds at once.
“So you think the flow got disrupted? Is it bad for her?” Calysto frowns. The child’s safety is the most important thing for her.
Andreas shrugs. “Hard to say. What I do know is there’s hungry beasties wanting to crawl inside. I saw them all over when I was there. That’s where you come in. You go get the kid. You bring the kid back with you, keep her safe from said beasties, hollows, of course. Then I keep looking for some way to solve her problem. You follow?”
“Doesn’t she have family? I can’t imagine they’ll be okay with a stranger taking their daughter,” Cal responds.
“Don’t worry about the parents. She’s barely alive to them. After all, she doesn’t talk. She doesn’t take an interest in things. As far as they’re concerned, they have this creature living in their home and want her fixed or gone. This solves both.”
Cal’s lip twists in an irritable snarl. “Abandoning a child they can’t understand. Disgusting.”
Andreas grins. “So you’re on board then?”
She sighs. Andreas knew how to push her buttons. It was a child they were dealing with. “What’s the payment?” she asks. She’d do it for free at this point, but she had to maintain the appearance of professionalism. Most jobs aren’t like this. Most jobs are about stuff. Find this rare herb. Hold onto this package for a drop to another person. That sort of thing. She’s a go-between, not a problem-fixer.
But they’re talking about a child here. How can she refuse?
“Well, job’s standard rate.” Andreas draws forth a pouch of coins. “Half now. Half when I pick her up in three days.”
Then he gives a coy smile. “But I’ve never seen a case like this, have you? Bet there’s shinigami who would want to know. I know information is worth more than gold to some. Might just be worth the job by itself.”
Calysto sighs again. He’s overextending now. “Just give me the half now, and I’ll go get her. 3 days and the other half. If we can figure out what to do, maybe she can go home, right?”
“Right.”
The other loaf of bread stays uneaten as she treks back through town. The town is wide awake now, all bustle and rowdy businessmen peddling wares. They pay her no heed as she weaves through the streets. She turns the idea over in her head. It’s a dangerous proposition. Take the child. Even if she takes Andreas’s information as fact, something about abducting the child feels wrong. Besides, who ever heard of a human without a soul? Was it even possible? What was going to happen in three days' time?
Then again, assuming he’s right, she figures it would be important to look into. Maybe because reapers only care about souls, they don’t look at bodies without them. This might slip under their radar.
Or maybe it hasn’t slipped anyone’s radar at all, and she’s walking right into a trap. There really was only one way to tell.
[3150 words]
With a start, Calysto wakes in a bed, her bed. It’s her home, Deneb. Her child remade in the starved sands of Hueco Mundo. Deneb had long since settled into a stable form, and so she could afford to leave him stationary, invisible to spiritually unaware individuals, which was convenient, and a simple house to passersby who were awakened, which was safe. Though he smelled like hollow-- it was unmistakable to any with any sense about them-- it would take an individual skilled in reishi manifestation to discern exactly how the building worked, and because Deneb was a gillian-class menos, he contained multitudes of other hollows inside, all under the singular grip of her dear child. Those pieces could separate with his bounds and form whatever conveniences were needed, furniture, cooking implements. Basically the only things that were not composed of Deneb’s reishi were things brought in from outside and, well, Calysto herself.
Calysto rises from the bed, gently folding the blankets and sheets back into place. Though Deneb had formed the bed from his very being, it took long hours of whispering his form into place and was not easily manipulated from there. It isn’t magical. She can’t just wave the bed into perfect composition. Besides, this is a bit like tucking her child in. He’s safe. That’s what matters.
Pulling on her clothes-- which are NOT made of Deneb’s particles-- Calysto inhales deeply. The window is open, which lets the dim early morning light and its dewy moist air waft in. The window is tuned to the human world, Calysto’s favorite. Another ability of gillian-class hollows is their ability to tear open holes in reality, pushing through the tunnel between into the three realms that are easily accessible, the realm of the living, the realm of hollows, and the realm of the reapers. Calysto doesn’t much care for the desolate sand and stone of the hollow world, Hueco Mundo, nor does she like the potential danger of being exposed in the reapers’ home, Soul Society. Both are accessible alongside the world of the living, and sometimes she thinks it's nice to share firelight with the full glow of Hueco Mundo’s moon or the small, distant meadow Deneb occupies in Soul Society.
It’s still early, so once dressed in thick wool and stiff leather boots, she leaves Deneb from the front door. As she leaves, she reaches out a hand, and a small, squirming blackness leaps from the sill into her hand, Deneb’s only mobile aspect. It’s like a flatworm, wriggling and broad, spade-like with a hole in the center of the broadest part. She holds it close to her chest, the same ritual she always performs, and then slips the creature into the pocket of her bag for safety.
Today is a trip into the city nearby where an acquaintance has agreed to meet her for work. What work exactly she’s supposed to do is still unclear, but Calysto had become known in the local areas for her ability to navigate and track, discrete despite her size. Best in the woodlands in the human world, she prefers work there, but she’s just as adept in Hueco Mundo and rarely in Soul Society. The reapers usually pay her no heed. She’s a good source of information and a rest stop on long journeys. Her policy of treating all comers the same helps too.
The crunching of the snow beneath her boots is the only sound echoing in the mid-morning forest. No animals nearby. That makes sense. It’s winter. The mammals are hibernating in their burrows. The birds are hiding in their holes. She glances at the feeders she’s set up as she walks. Voles taken. Good. The owls have been more scarce in recent months. She sets those up early in the evening after the daytime birds have gone to roost but before the owls hunt. Tracks in the snow. That’s wolves. There’s smaller prints too. A pup in these months? They must have not been able to hold back till the snows melted.
Deneb stirs in her pocket, and in response, she holds a warm, gloved hand to the pocket, keeping him braced from the cold. She can’t help but be caretaker for all, even the animals in the area. As a broken-mask, she should feed on souls, but she can count on her fingers the number of human lives she’s taken since waking in that desert. She lives like humans do, taking of the land only what she can sustain and sufficing on what meager energy it offers. It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes her weaker not to feed on stronger beings, but on the other, being weaker keeps her out of the attention of reapers and lets her hide from hollows.
Like the queen?
The thought rises unbidden, but she shakes it free just as quickly. If the queen summoned her, she’d have to answer, but she tries to stay out of politics. That’s not her business.
Arriving at the edge of town, she sees the first signs of the working day beginning. The sun has already cracked the edge of the horizon and casts a brilliant orange and purple glow over the roofs of the town. Calysto keeps to herself as she walks. Some of the people she passes know her, but she’s not exactly hard to miss. The woman is towering and imposing, an eight-foot-tall giant, all bouncing flesh and bright cheer. She keeps a smile on her face, true to her nature, but she refrains from bothering anyone she passes. Not everyone is a morning person like her. Best not to wake sleeping bears.
She slips a hand into the bag as she passes a particularly brighter set of windows. This person has been up for hours yet herself, and the smell of baked goods wafts out from the door, a lazy arm of welcome, coiling steam in the air.
“Farah!” Calysto calls as she enters the shop, hand pulling forth a steel, stoppered container from her bag.
Farah’s bundle of braids leaps up from behind the counter. She’s barely taller than the counter, a small, fierce woman of forty years, dark skin and darker hair, beautiful, smooth complexion as if the cold, dry climate could do nothing against the warmth of her bakery. When she speaks, it’s with an accent-- relative to the area, of course. She’s immigrated to this area from some North African country Calysto’s only heard the name of. Hard to keep up with geography with three worlds to frequent. Besides, Calysto really hasn’t been much farther than a few days' walk, some 50 miles, from Deneb’s presence.
“My dear, you have brought it?” she says, and Calysto nods, smiling. The container is a tiny thing in her hand but takes both of Farah’s to hold.
“Tea leaves, freshly dried. It’s the local variety, but they’re very good. I can attest.”
Farah grins. “I thought it wasn’t wise to take from your own stock? Cuts into profits.”
A warm smile back. “You know I wouldn’t give you anything I wouldn’t drink, Farah. There’s rosehips and blackberry leaves in that one. Very refreshing in the evenings.”
Farah places the canister gently on a shelf in the back. “And in the morning and the afternoon and with cheese at noon. Tea is the lifesblood of the working woman.” With a wink, she strikes a match and lights tinder beneath a wood-fire stove with a kettle on top. “I’ve been waiting all night for it, my dear. Shall we share?”
Calysto waves the notion away. “Sorry, Farah. I’ve got a timetable to keep, myself. A special job. Might take me away for a few days, so make that last till I return, okay?”
Farah nods as she wraps two fresh loaves in paper packaging. “I’ll do my best to take it slow. I’m guessing the next crop will be in the springtime?”
Calysto takes the bread from Farah, places one loaf into her bag, and stuffs the other under her arm to free up a hand to gesture. “Oh, you know, I have my ways of beating the weather. I’ve got more of that blend waiting, but it may be weeks yet before I can dry more of the tea leaves.”
“Not a problem, dear. Be safe on your trip, then. Don’t be afraid to spend more than a hare’s breath with me next time.”
Calysto smiles and answers, “I will, Farah. You’re good to me. Be well, yourself.”
Continuing on her way, Calysto tears off pieces of the bread loaf as she walks, chewing on the warm, yeasty flavor on her way through town. She pulls a crust off and slips it into her bag where Deneb’s little vestige is worming away, trying to get through the paper at the larger loaf, but as the crust is slipped near, the blackness parts to reveal a row of twisting ethereal teeth that grab hold of the bit of bread and slip it into oblivion. The whole crust seems to vanish into a creature too small to hold it, and with that, Deneb slows his squirming and rests.
This is how they get by. Bread, fish, rabbit meat, many root vegetables. It’s hard for hollows to survive on meager “human” food, most of the time, but Deneb can passively sustain on the reishi in the atmosphere in Hueco Mundo. All it takes is a simple rotation of his doors to get his fill from the desert air.
Finally, Calysto reaches her goal, a small, worn-brick building with considerably more windows than its neighbors. It’s an inn, much like her own home, but considerably more mundane. Anyone traveling the roads in this rural area might stay here, which makes it perfect for two spiritually aware beings to convene on work without arousing concern from would-be hunters. It isn’t just reapers to watch for these days. There’s those Fullbringers and the Quincy as well, all keen to take a bite out of the hungry population of hollows and their advanced counterparts, Arrancar.
The man meeting her today, however, isn’t any of those. He’s simply a spiritually aware human with a job for her. Andreas. He’s waiting by the doorway of the inn as she approaches. He’s tall, for a human. Not as tall as Calysto, of course, but he’s got a gaunt, loping sort of build, like someone swallowed a ladder and shuffled it around into a skeleton. His skin sticks to his bones, making him look like he might fall over at any moment, but there’s a kind of powerful existence behind his eyes, which glimmer gold in the morning light, unnaturally so.
“Cal,” he says before she can get a word out. “Good morning, love. How’s our mum today?”
“Andreas,” she answers in the same flat tone, not her usual warmth. She likes Andreas, but he’s mysterious, and that makes her uneasy. She’s never sure where his jobs are heading and rarely likes where they do go. But he pays well, not just in money, which really only serves her in one world or another, but also in resources and information. He knows more than she does, and there’s power in that.
“Ah, all business today, are we? Well, no worries, love. I’ll hop to it then.” He pushes off the wall and strides towards the door, not towards her. “Come along.”
“You want to talk inside?” Calysto says.
“Better this way,” he answers, not stopping to wait for her. He continues talking even as the door starts to close behind him like he’s expecting her to just keep up, so she doesn’t waste time trailing him inside. “See, I’ve written a spell into the walls, I have. Whole inn’s asleep still. Will be till noon. They’ll all think they’ve just had a long night and not make anything of it. Gives us time to figure out the details.”
He leads her up the stairs to the second floor, where the bedrooms are. Calysto struggles a bit to navigate the tight corridors as quickly as the beanpole man does, but she does her best. Having no one else to circumvent helps. As he opens a door to his room, he glances back, for the first time making sure she’s with him. “It’s a kid.”
“Sorry?” Calysto wonders if he means he has a child in this room. What on earth could he want her to do here and now? Her specialty was finding things, and though she loved kids, that wasn’t a job.
“The job. There’s a kid. You’ll see.” As she follows him through the doorway, he places a seal on the frame, a paper sheet lined with runes and pictograms that flash with reiatsu and stretch onto the wooden wall. A sealing spell.
Then he sits by a table where the previous night’s half-eaten meal sits. The potatoes have gone hard. It’s a horrible waste. He doesn’t give it a glance at all. “There’s a place three days travel west. Family thinks their daughter is possessed. Called on me to take a look. Kid’s healthy as a horse, just... not there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s not there. There’s no one inside. She walks and talks, well, maybe has talked at some point. She wouldn’t talk to me, and her family said she doesn’t talk to anyone. Point is, there’s no soul inside.”
Is that possible? A human without a soul? “How does that happen?”
Andreas shrugs. “Hard to say. Kid’s young. Seven? Eight? Could have been attacked by a hollow. Could have been subjected to weird magic. My guess? She was born that way.” He grimaces and shuffles in his seat, turning to look at Calysto more directly. “See, you know how this works at this point, right? Souls get a body here, and when they die, they get a body in the next world. When that one dies, they go back here or go to the third. Rinse, lather, repeat, ad infinitem.”
He pauses, looking at her to ensure she's keeping up. “But what happens when a body needs a soul but it’s not ready yet? Theoretically, it should never happen. The flow of souls is so strong that it essentially drives birth over here. You can’t even get pregnant without a ready soul, but things are getting strange these days. I heard there was trouble with the place souls don’t usually go to. Demons. An old Shinigami. You saw the cracks.”
She nods. Everyone had. Cracks in the sky. The fracturing of the veil between worlds. It was what allowed Deneb to wedge himself where he had. Before, he could only switch rapidly between realms, which was draining and time-consuming, but after the cracks, he existed in seemingly all three worlds at once.
“So you think the flow got disrupted? Is it bad for her?” Calysto frowns. The child’s safety is the most important thing for her.
Andreas shrugs. “Hard to say. What I do know is there’s hungry beasties wanting to crawl inside. I saw them all over when I was there. That’s where you come in. You go get the kid. You bring the kid back with you, keep her safe from said beasties, hollows, of course. Then I keep looking for some way to solve her problem. You follow?”
“Doesn’t she have family? I can’t imagine they’ll be okay with a stranger taking their daughter,” Cal responds.
“Don’t worry about the parents. She’s barely alive to them. After all, she doesn’t talk. She doesn’t take an interest in things. As far as they’re concerned, they have this creature living in their home and want her fixed or gone. This solves both.”
Cal’s lip twists in an irritable snarl. “Abandoning a child they can’t understand. Disgusting.”
Andreas grins. “So you’re on board then?”
She sighs. Andreas knew how to push her buttons. It was a child they were dealing with. “What’s the payment?” she asks. She’d do it for free at this point, but she had to maintain the appearance of professionalism. Most jobs aren’t like this. Most jobs are about stuff. Find this rare herb. Hold onto this package for a drop to another person. That sort of thing. She’s a go-between, not a problem-fixer.
But they’re talking about a child here. How can she refuse?
“Well, job’s standard rate.” Andreas draws forth a pouch of coins. “Half now. Half when I pick her up in three days.”
Then he gives a coy smile. “But I’ve never seen a case like this, have you? Bet there’s shinigami who would want to know. I know information is worth more than gold to some. Might just be worth the job by itself.”
Calysto sighs again. He’s overextending now. “Just give me the half now, and I’ll go get her. 3 days and the other half. If we can figure out what to do, maybe she can go home, right?”
“Right.”
The other loaf of bread stays uneaten as she treks back through town. The town is wide awake now, all bustle and rowdy businessmen peddling wares. They pay her no heed as she weaves through the streets. She turns the idea over in her head. It’s a dangerous proposition. Take the child. Even if she takes Andreas’s information as fact, something about abducting the child feels wrong. Besides, who ever heard of a human without a soul? Was it even possible? What was going to happen in three days' time?
Then again, assuming he’s right, she figures it would be important to look into. Maybe because reapers only care about souls, they don’t look at bodies without them. This might slip under their radar.
Or maybe it hasn’t slipped anyone’s radar at all, and she’s walking right into a trap. There really was only one way to tell.
[3150 words]
Last Edit: Dec 22, 2022 1:33:37 GMT -5 by Calysto
