spira_rp | It's my very little wonder

It had taken L some time to recover from his thrashing from Ulquiorra. Ulquiorra still wouldn't speak to him, and blanked him entirely when he ran into him. L knew he deserved no more, or no less.

He still got headaches, and he felt dizzy if he worked for too long at a computer. That had slowed him down, that, and having to re-establish his communication network from scratch in and around Rabanastre. Several of his key informants were missing, and most likely dead, and L wasn't sure if the Ryoka had found them, or someone else, and the really frustrating part was that he wouldn't be able to find out.

He'd kept a close eye on the comings and goings and activities in Daguerro, however, even while he recovered. He had good reason to, and now, finally, he would have the opportunity to devote his attentions further afield of the place, because he was finally able to move the 'package' he'd been keeping an eye on.

There was another there, that another party had been sent to collect, but this one was L's alone to deal with, not least because anyone else would probably just kill him.

L had been forced to make the last leg of the trip personally to bring his guest under Khamja's roof. There was space for him, at last. L hadn't been present when Aizen's request to claim Orochimaru's labs had been denied, and he wished he could have been, but L had got his request in before Aizen had even returned from his own trip to Midgar. He could be a flagrant opportunist, when he had to be.

L sloped in through the main doors, ushering his guest in before letting them close. Personal effects weren't an issue, at least. Most of what the other man considered important had already been retrieved, and L had a few details he wanted the man to elaborate on for him as soon as they got the opportunity.

"Your laboratories are this way," L said, indicating the direction they needed to head.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

Hojo had spent many years, since the explosion at his labs, kept quiet and undercover at the grace of L, and Khamja. Hojo had no great love for the clan, in truth, but they funded his research, and that was what mattered.

He'd been to the Palace a couple of times in the past, but he'd been sequestered away in Daguerro for the past few years, poring over whatever scraps of information L deigned to send to him, and mostly getting on with his own work in relative peace.

It hadn't been so bad. Hojo would have happily stayed in Daguerro, but for whatever reason, L had decided to bring him to the heart of Khamja now, and Hojo had agreed only because it was to move to a better equipped laboratory.

That, and some of the scraps of information L had asked for his interpretation on were tantalising, and Hojo might have the opportunity to find out more, here.

He'd left clothes and other such encumbrances behind. All he needed was his research, which he was assured was already in place, including some retrieved from under Shinra's lock and key which Hojo had previously been forced to leave behind.

Well, it was his again now, for all the good it had done those amateurs at Shinra. They had plenty of ambition, but not enough guts to try and achieve, and now they lay in ruins, while Hojo, who had been forced to fake his demise to escape, was reclaiming what they had taken from him.

The Palace, when Hojo entered, was filled with interesting Reiatsu. He recognised one or two of them, of course, and another one wasn't so much recognised as suspiciously similar, although it was faded and the owner seemed to be absent, having left only the impressions that having been here a long time before departing could leave.

There were others, numerous others, that were very interesting indeed.

Hojo clasped his hands behind his back, and ignored L as he shuffled forward. He'd developed a feel for this kind of thing, over the years.

"Hmmm," he murmured. "Interesting specimens you're keeping here."

From:

shoottokill

In the time after the Midgar mission and the unrest that had followed hot on its heels both inside and out of Clan Khamja, Gin Ichimaru had spent his time coming and going, with his time divided unequally between his Third Division work and the desert palace. Dalmasca, the country his jurisdiction encompassed, had settled somewhat in the wake of Midgar, but reports of Fiends had seen a sharp spike in frequency over the last few days and weeks.

He wasn't sure whether it was because of Midgar's fall or just coincidence fuelled by the paranoia of the general public. People were being rather more diligent than usual about reporting incidents related to that particular natural phenomenon recently, so reports were coming in faster and more often of late. Gin didn't think it would last. It hadn't in the past, when disasters both natural or otherwise had caused a similarly catastrophic disruption of the normal life and death ratio on any given continent. The paranoia surrounding Fiends usually subsided after the story ran out of steam on news broadcasts and faded into memory. People gradually lost the will to care about the lost lives of people they never knew and the associated fear of the consequences of such a thing fell away from the forefront of collective concern.

The Palace, on the other hand, had been rather quiet since Grimmjow and his cronies had left to get some air. In the wake of their departure nothing particularly noteworthy had happened which, Gin thought, was probably for the better, entertaining as Khajma's special brand of drama could be.

Aizen's remaining minions were keeping a low profile. For some, this was unintentional and just happened naturally because they weren't troublemakers. For others, however, it was deliberate. Nnoitra and Ulquiorra in particular seemed, to Ichimaru, to be keeping themselves out of the way quite on purpose. Similarly, Orochimaru's old subordinates (now Kuja's), were staying largely off the radar.

It was business as usual, all things considered. At least, it was business as usual until Gin picked up on the brief and tell-tale flicker of reduced protection around the palace that signalled the main doors being opened and then closed.

He knew there was little chance of it being an enemy invader, so he paused in the hallway he was making his way down and waited for the reiatsu to make itself clear, half to satisfy his curiosity and half to see whether it was somebody to keep an eye on. There was, of course, a big tension and risk-related difference between someone like Ariane Emory paying them a visit and, for example, Alucard. It became apparent rather quickly that not only were there two of them, but that both of them had a relatively weak reiatsu in comparison to many of the denizens of the Palace.

One of them was much weaker and was definitely not artificially enhanced. Nothing about it suggested that it was the chakra of a warrior tempered and grown and cultivated with use and training and only being reined in by skill and suppression techniques.

That was L. Gin, in truth, he hadn't really noticed that L was missing until he picked up on his return. L spent too much time in the palace for the halls to ever really be clear of his low-level chakra. It was part of the usual background noise, present even when he wasn't, as if it had leeched into the walls along with everyone else's who spent a significant time there.

He scolded himself for having missed that, but considered the oversight reasonable given how feeble he had been since Ulquiorra's... tantrum.

The other, however, was much more interesting. They seemed stronger, but not strong enough to stand out as particularly interesting in a palace full of Arrancar, Gotei 13 members and other seriously accomplished warriors with chakra reserves that could easily be described as "monstrous" by the general public at best and "literally hazardous to your health" at worst. Whoever it was felt vaguely familiar. Gin probed the recesses of his memory to find the source of his recollection and realised with a start just who it was. That... wasn't possible. He headed into the main hall at a considerably faster pace than the leisurely one he had been taking to see whether his conclusion was correct.

His eyebrows came together when he saw Professor Hojo standing in the hall looking exactly as he had the last time he had seen him which was, Gin remembered, a few months before a meeting had been called to inform members of Khamja that he had died in an accident in the Shinra Laboratories some years ago.

So, his death had been faked and there had been a cover up so elaborate that even Khamja's members had been deliberately deceived. L had been keeping this to himself, though Gin didn't doubt that Illua and Kuja also knew about it. That rankled.

"I heard you were dead," Gin said conversationally as he came into the hall, allowing a look of bemusement to settle on his face.

A smile would have looked too fake for this occasion, even on his face.

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

Hojo looked up at Gin as he approached, and adjusted his glasses. He remembered this one; he'd been younger, and, if Hojo was any judge, and he was, somewhat less powerful back then, too.

"Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated," Hojo said, adjusting his glasses. He'd been told it was for his own protection but, frankly, Hojo hadn't been pleased with it, at the time. Especially since some of his precious research had been lost in the aftermath, and some of it hadn't just been lost to him. He'd spent some of his time since covering old ground because of that, but he'd been promised that a return to the Desert Palace would include some of his otherwise unrepeatable studies. You just couldn't find the samples for some, any more.

"Much to the disappointment of some, I'm sure," he added. Gin included, most likely, and Hojo hadn't really got along with any of the other 'scientists', as they insisted on calling themselves, that he'd met, so he expected they hadn't mourned his apparent passing.

"I'm in need of a larger laboratory," he said, with a sideways and disdainful glance at L, "the arrangements that had been made for me were woefully insufficient for my work, and I'm told that hack Orochimaru got himself killed, leaving his laboratories without an owner." It had only been a matter of time with Orochimaru, who had made a little progress in his field, if Hojo was being charitable, but the fool sought immortality, and it was inevitably going to lead to his demise. Being able to pick over whatever respectable scraps of information Orochimaru had lucked into discovering with his tinkering was like a dusting of icing sugar on the cake. "Of course, I don't expect it to be up to my old standards, but I shall have to make do."

And already he could feel the presence of numerous, powerful specimens he would have to study. He was going to be so busy.

From:

lawlietschiffer

L watched Gin approach, feeling an uncomfortable knot in his stomach that he pretended wasn't there. Gin had outsmarted him, and it still stung.

So when Gin seemed genuinely not to have known that Hojo was still alive and well and plying his trade, that knot loosened a little.

'Yes, Gin,' L thought, 'he was alive this whole time, and it was my doing.' L couldn't quite stop the tiniest, briefest flicker of a smirk, and he almost hoped Gin actually caught it before L wiped it from his face.

"Professor Hojo will be a permanent resident here, for the foreseeable future," he said, slightly unnecessarily, but it felt good to rub it in.

Unfortunately, the foreseeable future right now lasted until Hojo met the Arrancar and inevitably wanted to study them. Depending on how he acted then, the future might become a very short period of time, and L had no intention of stepping in if that was the case.

If someone did get him, it couldn't possibly happen to someone more deserving. Even if L probably needed him.

From:

shoottokill

It didn't come as any great surprise to Gin that Hojo was set to be a permanent resident in the Palace.

Other members of Khamja, particularly those with jobs and roles away from the secretive lifestyle of the clan, chose to spend much or most of their time removed from the chthonic passages of the Zertinan Caverns and the palace hidden within them, visiting only when it was imperative that they attend a meeting or felt the need to discuss something with another member.

Hojo, with his faked death and naturally near-reclusive nature, together with the ability to follow the money when it came to funding for his experiments and research, was probably never going to leave unsupervised or unattended again.

"So I see," he said cheerfully, his characteristic smile settling on his face once again. 'We'll see how long that lasts,' he thought, quite idly.

Call some of the current residents 'specimens' to their faces and he'd be lucky to keep his intact, Gin knew. Now that would prove entertaining.

Edited Date: 2015-01-13 12:48 am (UTC)

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

"A fortunate turn of events, perhaps," Hojo said, in response. He was a permanent resident here, now, and he knew he was unlikely to be leaving unless it suited someone else. Fortunately, that suited him just fine, so long as he was provided with samples. "I notice there are a lot of new specimens residing here since the last time I visited."

He seemed to be positively enjoying the thought. Some of them were intriguing already, and that was just from the echoes their reiatsu had left.

"So much data to collect, so much work to do," he lamented, almost cheerfully. His data on some of the existing members would need updating, too. No doubt that melodramatic mistant Genome would still lay claim to the place; Hojo wasn't about to pretend he was fond of Kuja, but he was certainly an interesting specimen who never had let Hojo take any kind of in depth data from him, and he was far from the only one.

That on top of the new specimens... Oh, he was going to be so very busy.

"Now," he said, turning to L, who was easily the least interesting person in the vicinity, for Hojo, "my laboratories?"

From:

lawlietschiffer

L indicated the direction of travel with a lazy hand, the other jammed firmly in his pocket.

If he got lucky, Hojo would irritate one of the more hot-headed Arrancar after L had got him to analyse the files he needed him to look over, and then the world would be rid of one more lunatic who would push the big red button of the universe just to see what it did.

He rather needed Hojo to stay alive until then, however, and if he went around calling people specimens, he wasn't likely to see tomorrow.

"Try to refrain from calling anyone specimens to their faces," he said, quietly, and even L wasn't entirely sure if he meant for Hojo to hear it and take heed.

From:

shoottokill

Gin's grin widened.

So, L wasn't hugely fond of the man either. He seemed... unsettled by his presence, despite obviously being responsible for bringing him to the palace and keeping his continued existence secret from everyone else. Interesting.

Even so, he clearly had some sort of vested interest in him if he was offering him advice designed to at least try to prolong his life by a couple of days.

Gin decided that finding out why would have to be a priority on his list of things to do. For now, however, he was content to let Hojo settle in to his new domain. He doubted that he would have been given free run of all of the labs, but even being given the main block that Orochimaru once occupied was bound to cause at least some territorial disputes with the other scientists in the palace.

Szayel was one such person. The little Ryoka, though more of a researcher to Gin's reckoning, had a small lab set up in an unused room far away from the main laboratory complex. He wondered if he had a key to the door of that room.

Without another word, he gave them both a careless wave and swept away, heading away from the kitchen which had been his prior destination and towards the library. Aizen was in his office and they needed to talk about this new development.

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

The laboratories had proved... adequate. Someone had clearly done a sweep of them and removed any errant samples, and some of the electronics looked as if they'd been installed for him, rather than having been present before. There were also signs that someone had cleared away as much of Orochimaru's research and data as they could find, or as they considered sensitive. Possibly it was his underlings, or possibly it was L; who had done it made no difference when the result was the same.

But they were adequate, at least for now. Hojo had already started a list of supplies and equipment he would need to have brought in so that he could continue working, but L had done better than Hojo had expected of him.

High on the list of priorities was coffee making facilities. Hojo wouldn't have a little team of loyal samples to go and fetch him coffee, so he'd need some closer to hand.

For now, it necessitated him heading to the kitchen. He remembered the location of that readily enough, and it seemed, as present, to be a hub of activity. There were a handful of new reiatsu signatures emanating from within.

He walked in as if he owned the place, and eyed those resident in the room already, weighing them up on sight and sense, for now. Powerful, certainly, all of them, although they were weak compared to his own prize subject, and, like his own prize subject, they were almost certainly enhanced.

They were unlikely to be new members of Khamja, then; someone had tampered with them, which marked them as someone's minions. Now who might go and do a thing like that?

He adjusted his glasses, studying the littlest one first, before moving across to the effeminate Selkie, and the girl, and then to the large one.

Hmm. Was that a family resemblance, vague and warped as it might be, or was his memory playing a trick?

He huffed dismissively, and made his way to the kettle. They didn't even have a coffee percolator? In the very least, a coffeemaker was going on his list for L.

Edited Date: 2015-01-13 02:57 am (UTC)

From:

cierva

Apache was having a bad day. She was bored, pissed off and cut off from her friends. First Grimmjow and co. had fucked off and left her, her being the newest member of their little band (she was going to make Yylfordt pay for that), and then Nel, who she had been keeping the company of, had gone on some secret mission with Ulquiorra and the Ryoka.

It was for this reason, and not because she was stuck in a room with Szayel, Nnoitra and Luppi, that she was scowling sullenly when the creepy looking old man entered the room.

"Who're you?" She asked after the dismissive huff.

From:

trepadora

Luppi sat at the table, still bandaged and recovering from his beating.

He wasn't feeling 100%, far from it, but he was, at least, not dead or likely to be permanently affected by the after-effects of the injuries he'd sustained. He'd been kept unconscious with sleep spells for a long time after returning from the Midgar mission and, by all accounts, disastrous fight with the Ryoka that had followed.

He healed faster than most thanks to his augmentations and enhancements, but the sheer number of bone fractures in awkward places had necessitated him remaining immobile until they had all healed enough to take the stress of movement. That, even for him, had taken time and he had only been on his feet, albeit somewhat unsteadily, for a week and a half.

Rehabilitation would take longer, but he was expected to make a full recovery. Once he was able to take the strain of release he would be able to use that form to heal more fully, but until then, it was slow going. For an Arrancar, anyway.

As was, he had been catching up on the gossip, important and otherwise, with Szayel. When the stranger walked in, he would have asked the same question as Apache, but she got there first. Something about the man made his skin crawl. His posture was terrible and he looked creepy. Creepy even to a person who found one of the most disgusting creatures on Spira quite adorable.

Luppi leaned on a sleeve-covered hand, watching him shuffle to the kettle.

His pet, an undersized and quite harmless supposedly extinct variety of Malboro (that being the aforementioned creature), nipped at the sleeve over the other hand.

With Nel gone and unable to complain, he had it on the table.

From:

prayingmantis

Nnoitra sat ignoring the others.

He had a newspaper open on the table in front of him that he was reading idly. When the man entered, he didn't even look up.

Nnoitra, for all he was known for being a battle-happy, bull-headed nutcase who valued strength over all other things, was acutely sensitive to reiatsu. He, even if the others had been too absorbed in their conversations to notice, had picked up on the man's signature the moment he had entered the palace, along with the return of L's.

As it was, he didn't feel particularly powerful or threatening in terms of spiritual pressure. Either he was largely non-combatant or he was adept suppressing his reiatsu. Most powerful people, of course, had to do that to avoid flattening or, in extreme cases, outright killing much weaker people just by being near them, but even so, it wasn't too difficult to tell who was absurdly powerful and hiding it and who was merely average but practised in the art of combat. Nnoitra was fairly certain that this man was more likely in the latter group than the former.

Nothing short of a seasoned warrior was likely to impress an Arrancar, anyway. They were all powerful in their own right, even with their Hollow's chakra sealed and out of detection's range until they at least manifested their mask fragments. There was always something odd about them, at least if you had a particular ability when it came to Chakra detection, but it was merely an odd feeling (or, some said, scent) that clung to them like a spider's web until the moment of release, similar to how a building had the ability to gain an aura simply by housing a sufficiently powerful creature or person for a long enough time.

It felt more like exposure than ownership until the moment of release.

Unless you knew better, of course.

From:

sipthehoneylikeabutterfly

Szayel paused with a cup to his lips as the newcomer entered the room. He'd felt the new person come in; they all had, and Szayel had suspected something was going on when his request, or to be wholly accurate, Aizen's request, to take over Orochimaru's laboratories was denied. Szayel was still bitter about it; he'd wanted those labs, and instead they'd been promised to someone else.

It hadn't been the Ryoka, that much had become very quickly clear, and Szayel didn't imagine that Kurotsuchi would have need of a laboratory in the Desert Palace when he had the entirety of Draklor under his command.

Not knowing who might be taking them had irritated him as much as the fact that it wasn't himself, and he'd bitched to Luppi about it when he found out he wasn't getting them. Poor Luppi, at the time, had been a captive audience, stuck in the infirmary.

When L had returned with a new reiatsu signature in tow, Szayel had come to his conclusions, but had been too busy to go and nosy at the time. He'd come for his evening gossip with Luppi, the preferred topic today being the nature of Nel and Ulquiorra's mission with all of the Ryoka, when he'd felt the new reiatsu signature approach.

The man was old, or at least, as old as Szayel's parents, which was Szayel's bar for 'old', with bad posture, long hair that looked like it was that way out of a lack of care rather than as a style choice, glasses, and the faint whiff of stale cigarettes followed him.

Szayel narrowed his eyes, watching the newcomer over his cup.

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

Hojo made a quick assessment of the attitudes. One who didn't care, one who was abrasive, one who was nosy, and one that was what was best termed 'aggressively staring' at him.

No concern, in any case.

"Professor Hojo," he answered the abrasive one, "and whose are you?"

Not who they are; he didn't care about that. They were all just specimens, subjects, someone's experiments from the feel of their reiatsu; they'd all been exposed to mako and Mist at some point, and there was that subtle sense about them that Hojo recognised very well from a lot of experience that these people were, in some way, not right. Hojo had made enough like that himself, over the years.

He wanted to know whose specimens they were. That was far more interesting.

From:

sipthehoneylikeabutterfly

Szayel lowered his cup, sitting up much straighter.

That was not possible, the man died in a laboratory explosion years ago.

"The Professor Hojo?" He asked, hardly able to believe it. Of course, this was Khamja, and who knew what tricks they'd pulled and favours they'd called in to fake a death. The last word on Hojo was that there was a brewing controversy over some of his work, and then there had been the accident.... Oh, the rumours at the time, that Shinra had decided to get rid of him, that it was a deliberate attack by radicals, or rivals.

Of course, it had been an engineered accident, but not by anyone that anyone had suspected.

From:

cierva

Apache looked from the old man to Szayel with the unmistakable air of the completely unimpressed.

"Who?"

If Apache cared enough about the scientific community to pay attention to those who commanded respect within it - which she didn't - she still may not have known him. She was, for all intents and purposes, a foreigner.

A scientist, well known or not, was not likely to be a name thrown about in casual Jyllandi circles.

From:

prayingmantis

Nnoitra tensed slightly at the mention of the Professor's name, his eye narrowing as he lost focus on the words printed on the newspaper.

He remembered seeing his name printed on documents detailing the vivisection and artificial augmentation of monsters for Shinra's army using both Mako and a form of advanced mechanical enhancements not too dissimilar to Automail. From what he knew, Professor Hojo spent much of his time dealing with experimentation on higher life forms rather than the creation of bioweapons like the Militarized Units, but he certainly had a hand in it.

It didn't surprise him that Szayel knew who he was.

"He's the old head of the Midgar Scientific Research Division at Shinra HQ and he used to be a senior scientist in the department of Biomechanical Research at Gapra," he said roughly. "He's supposed to be dead."

From:

trepadora

Luppi just stared at Nnoitra.

He had expected the answer to have come from Szayel, since he didn't doubt that he would want to show off his knowledge of others in the field, or the Professor himself.

From:

sipthehoneylikeabutterfly

Szayel's attention swung from Hojo to Nnoitra, sharply.

"How do you know that?" He asked, disdain dripping from the 'you'. He'd been about to tell everyone himself; he was struggling to contain his gushing, but Nnoitra?

Nnoitra knew exactly who Hojo was already, and that was just as unexpected as Hojo showing up alive and well in the Desert Palace.

From:

doesthissmellofchloroform

Hojo smirked, his attention now caught. He'd noticed a resemblance, but that was confirmation.

"You're Hebira's child," he said, looking directly at the tall one. The pink haired one was clearly some sort of tedious science groupie, and although the adulation was far from misplaced, Hojo didn't have time to spare for dealing with his ilk, but the son of Hebira Jiruga required a little more attention.

Hojo actually smiled, although it wasn't a nice smile. Hebira hadn't talked about him much, but Hojo had heard fragments now and again. How interesting that he should be here, under someone else's command in Khamja, and having undergone some enhancement himself!

"The apple didn't fall far from the tree, then," he said. "Whose are you?" He repeated, much more interested in the answer, now.

It's my very little wonder

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