lawlietschiffer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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spira_rp2015-01-11 01:16 am
lawlietschiffer) wrote in spira_rp2015-01-11 01:16 am
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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."
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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It didn't shock Nnoitra that Hojo should know his mother -- she was a senior scientist at Gapra even when he was young enough to know her. It did, however, surprise him that he knew her well enough to have paid attention to her appearance so closely that he would be able to see the resemblance between the two of them.
"Aizen's," he said in answer to his question.
It was a one word answer, but contained within that one word were a lot of unspoken details. They might have been Aizen's, but Aizen was no scientist, not enough of one to create soldiers like them, at least. While he commanded them and claimed responsibility for them, it would be obvious to anyone with a scientific background and a little knowledge about The Archadian Empire, the Gotei 13 captains that held that region and the shadow members of Clan Khamja, that it was Kurotsuchi and not Aizen that was, ultimately, responsible for their creation.
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Hojo didn't like Kurotsuchi, but the man at least had the right interests for the work.
"I see," he said. Behind him the kettle neared boiling, and Hojo turned back to prepare his coffee. "Is this all of you?" There might be more, there might not be; that would depend on how well developed the technique had become.
Hebira's child had found his way to Aizen's employ; that was quite some journey, too. Had he, perhaps, taken up the mantle of his mother, or was he, as his mother feared, a disappointment? Though one who had no less found his way to further a scientific cause; science couldn't happen without specimens, after all, and every specimen helped.
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The worst bit was that he hadn't caught it earlier. They shared a name, after all, although Hebira Jiruga's work was not as well known as Hojo's, she was still a name known to Szayel.
He scowled, and adjusted his glasses. He hated having missed something.
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He had been slightly wrong-footed by Hojo's recognition of him but not enough to make him forget his knee-jerk dislike of Shinra scientists, whether they still worked for them now or not.
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She'd never heard of this Professor Hojo, but Szayel clearly had, and admired him, by the looks of things, and he was surprised that Nnoitra knew him and that Nnoitra's mother, apparently, probably worked with him some years ago and he never knew about it.
Szayel was going to be a bitch about this for hours, she just knew it.
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That was unfortunate.
"Clearly I've been away far too long, for such fascinating specimens to have escaped my attention until now." More than four of them, too. Daguerreo really was the ends of the earth. "I shall have to remedy that," he told himself, and then turned back to pick up his coffee.
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He'd have to needle him about his mother later. Nnoitra had a surprising scientific pedigree.
"We're not your specimens to study," he said, directing this at Hojo, almost cheerfully. They were, of course, fascinating, but the Arrancar were, to Szayel's mind, as much his as Kurotsuchi's, and he wasn't about to have his territory in that area invaded. Not even by Hojo.
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Being referred to as a 'Specimen' irritated him, but he kept a lid on that enough to keep his Chakra from flaring noticeably.
It wasn't because the term dehumanised them, it was because it reminded him of the appalling photographs of a half-flayed Behemoth he had once caught a glimpse of in his mother's research. He shouldn't have been looking, but the sight of that creature, huge and known for its ferocity, lying motionless on a slab and covered in tubes and wires, skin peeled back and flesh pulled apart, midway through some horrific process that necessitated evil looking metal pins being shoved directly into the bones of its hands had stuck with him.
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"Less of the specimen shit," she snapped.
She didn't care who this professor was, if he was going to call her a 'specimen', he was going to get told to fuck himself.
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In ordinary circumstances he might have had the energy to argue, but, as it was, he wasn't fully recovered enough, mentally or physically, to get into an argument about word choices.
He petted the head of his miniature Malboro absently, subconsciously pulling the little thing closer to him.
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It was an odd little pet the little one toyed with, too, but Hojo preferred fauna to flora for his studies. Still, it wasn't something he'd seen before, and perhaps some samples would be worth obtaining, for the curiosity factor.
He seemed unconcerned by Apache's outburst, telling her, simply, "I don't take instruction on what to label my test tubes from the test tubes." Then he sipped his coffee, and grimaced.
He definitely needed a coffeemaker. He couldn't subsist on this for very long; how was he supposed to work without decent coffee?
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She opted to glare, instead.
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He had no real authority over her. She wasn't his Fracción. But, he had been responsible for killing Professor Hojo's ... technically... predecessor and he'd gotten into knee-deep shit even if it was for personal revenge and, as the story went, to save Kadaj from being murdered by the dickhead.
He doubted that this freak would last long, especially if he went around calling dangerous and often unstable individuals 'specimens', but having Apache cero him on his first day would not only be bad form, but it would also confirm what they were ahead of Aizen telling him.
He doubted that Aizen would hand anyone over to him for examination, but getting on his nerves wasn't the best way to test that hunch.
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