Silence reigned over the small room, the two men sitting opposite me quietly observing. This Urahara was speaking absolute nonsense, and I had no idea what to even say to it. Souls? Strongest recorded? What did that even mean? Was this some kind of ridiculous scam? The man opposite me sighed impatiently.
“Are you going to let up your ruse, or will you force me to drag it out of you?” His voice progressively became darker and darker as he spoke.
“Honestly man, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I said, honestly somewhat offended and mightily confused. There was a snapping sound of a fan being aggressively closed, and the sound of cloth rustling, the shadow of Urahara rising to loom over my sitting form—though much shorter than his co-worker.
“No idea, he says.” the man intoned darkly, as if tasting the words and finding them to be revolting, “Not a single clue why your soul might be so powerful that it interfered with a soul sensitivity machine over five thousand kilometres away?”
The man wasn’t quite yelling. He was the sort of man with a voice that made you question if he was even capable of it. But if I had to pick the single most intimidating presence emanating from a man, this would top the charts.
“Uh, no?” I mumbled, almost genuinely questioning myself. If that whole sentence wasn’t so ridiculous, I would be far, far more unsure of myself. This man could just about tell me that I killed three people last night in a forklift massacre, and I’d believe him just on how intimidating he is.
As I uttered the words, I could swear that the temperature of the room dropped, so much so that I began shivering, my body suddenly feeling weak and my breathing becoming laboured. I started to gasp for air, my lungs seemingly incapable of generating enough force to pull in air. The moment dragged on for an eternity, and I began to see clouds of black in my vision of murky grey. My body sprawled on the ground, my muscles unable to hold myself up in even a sitting position, fighting desperately against what felt like gravity itself, as if I were transported under an ocean, bearing the endless weight. I desperately gasped one last time before I knew unconsciousness was coming, or maybe it was death, but no air entered my lungs.
Just as I had given up, there was a bright flash, something that cut through the murky grey of my vision so clearly I’d swear I could actually see it. A dome of pure white energy suddenly surrounded me, lifting the huge weight off of my back. As soon as the weight had been released, I instinctively took in a breath that left me spluttering, gasping in between coughs, trying to get my diaphragm working in order again.
“What are you doing Tessai?” The question, that was really more of a statement, hung in the air like an incorrigible scent. His voice itself embodied the word black. It was filled with what I could only describe as murderous intent.
“I believe that Mister Carter may be simply entirely unaware.” The deep voice was a point of calm within the whirlwind of terror that surrounded me. I swear, at any moment the dome that covered me could go down and I entirely believe that I would die, probably terribly.
“Unaware? Unaware of holding a soul this powerful? Even Kurosaki manifested his powers in ways, and he had nowhere near as powerful a soul as just a kid!” Urahara’s voice reverberated through my very bones, making my body shudder with the effort to simply resist falling apart to it.
“He is blind, it is entirely possible that–“ and then it hit me. Powers. Manifestation of powers? I had always thought that the ribbons I saw were a power, unexplainable by any number of specialists I saw. I remember clearly as a child being overwhelmed by just how many there where, sprouting from everywhere and everything, covering my entire vision in a brilliant white blockade of intangible cloth.
“The ribbons!” I blurted out, and the conversation between the two men instantly died. I immediately felt an entirely new sensation, separate from that of the crushing weight from before. Now it was simply an intense focus, a really intense focus. It was like I was suddenly in a petri dish, an unwilling subject in an experiment that may just cost me my life.
“Ribbons?” Urahara’s voice was less dark but holding a warning of what may come if I don’t answer satisfactorily. I try to scramble for the words that I always told the doctors when they asked me about it, but I hadn’t been to a doctor in years at this point.
“I see ribbons. I used to see them everywhere, but I think I managed to filter some of them out, and now I only get the ones that are important to me,” I said, similarly to how I did when I used to discuss it with a therapist, but suddenly realising that Urahara was probably as far from a therapist as I could get, “I- I mean, I think.”
The silence was renewed, but Urahara’s extreme attention never wavered.
“What do the ribbons look like?” He said coolly.
“White, excessively clean.” I shrugged.
“Have you seen ones of other colours?”
“No?” I answered, questioningly.
“Mister Carter, are you able to see a ribbon from either of us?” The large man rumbled. I felt my face scrunch.
“I mean, I could try? I’ve never tried to see more ribbons, only trying to see less.” There was a silence directly following my words, and it was obvious I was expected to do so. I sighed frustratedly, trying to quell my nerves in the presence of the terrifying men.
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I closed my eyes and concentrated. I immediately saw Suzumi’s ribbon out of the corner of my vision, bobbing in the air not a metre away from my face. It took another moment before other ribbons started to pop into view. It was only a few at first, but as I slowly released my tight grip on this strange sense of mine the ribbons grew, popping into existence from beyond the murky grey wastes. It went from tens of ribbons, to hundreds, until an uncountable amount of them covered every centimetre of my vision, battling each other for space, pushing and jostling others.
I could still immediately tell which ribbon was Suzumi’s, staying the closest to me out of the thousands that sit in front of me.
“I can see… well, a lot of them. I don’t know how to specifically see yours though.” Scratching my head in frustration, trying to sift through the huge amount of them, trying to tie them back to the two men in front of him.
“You may need to focus more locally, Mister Carter. Imagine the bounds of your awareness to be confined to this room, the walls a barrier between your sense of the soul to reach beyond. Constrict it to just this room and what is within it.” I nodded, and with some effort I reigned in my sense, drastically cutting down the of ribbons further and further, though Suzumi’s ribbon stubbornly remained in my vision. However, as the ribbons slowly dissipated, being pushed away by my constriction of my senses, two ribbons began to shimmer into existence slightly further away from my face than normal.
At first, they were unremarkable, not clear enough within my vision to see correctly, but as my curiosity grew, my focus on those two ribbons became hyper specific.
They were both a striking red. A colour I had never seen a ribbon be before, only seeing the same pure white for everybody. But it went further than just the change in colour, as I looked at them more closely, I saw patterns weaved into the ribbons, as if they were conglomerations of hundreds of different ribbons sewn and weaved into one, blood red ribbon.
“I see them! They are red, and look like they have designs in them even, I’ve never seen anything–“ I was cut off buy another wave of even more intense pressure. The smell of ozone filled the air, as if it were about to rain. Due to the white barrier that surrounded me, assumedly thanks to Tessai, I wasn’t as affected as I was last time, but my breathing became laboured and began to feel shaky again.
“He can see our reiraku, in untraceable gigais created by me!” Urahara was very close to yelling at this point, and a spike of fear shot through me. This man had been so close to knocking me unconscious, if not killing me, only minutes before. I had little doubt, after feeling that pressure, that he could kill me if he wanted to, possibly even with Tessai trying to stop him.
“And he clearly as no idea what that means, Kisuke. Absolutely oblivious to how extremely difficult that would be.” Tessai’s tone was different now. Before his voice was light, despite its deepness. He was clearly servile to Urahara, and extremely respectful of him. But this tone was different, it was commanding, a magnetizing force in its own right. Tessai was drawing a line.
“With this sort of power, he’d be capable of exposing almost anything we did, if the wrong person managed to get their hands on him, he could singlehandedly change everything.” Urahara’s voice was low and quiet now. Menacing in its intensity. But Tessai moved swiftly, surprising for his big frame, instituting himself in between me and the murderous candy store owner.
“And we have him in our hands. He is a living version of the soul reader we have been working on for decades!”
“He is too dangerous. If we let him live, someone will find him, and then there will be another war.” Tessai paused at Urahara’s words. I could feel it from how Tessai’s ribbon coiled into what almost looked like a rope. A dreadful anticipation built inside of me, waiting for something tantamount to a bomb going off. Tessai’s ribbon shifted and I braced for impact.
“I see. If you cannot see reason, then perhaps I shall call upon Kurosaki.” The room went freezing cold. Straight to my very core I believed right there and then that I would die. Then it was gone. The barrier, the pressure and that gaze. All gone in a split second. Urahara huffed like a petulant child.
“Fine, keep him as a pet if you want, Tessai.” And he strode out of the room calmly. As his footsteps receded down the hallway, and his ribbon disappeared from my view, Tessai turned to me, placing a large hand on my shoulder.
“Are you alright, Mister Carter?” I shook my head immediately. I was decidedly not alright.
“What the actual fuck was that, Tessai?” I said, genuinely angry and terrified at the same time. Tessai grumbled something about swearing but let it pass.
“Mister Urahara has been making a device that is supposed to be top secret, only known to me. He created it to serve as the warning for a potential invader into the Human World. It has been suffering from many issues, despite being the most advanced soul sensitivity device ever created.” He paused to sit on the other side of the low table from me, sighing.
“What is a soul sensitivity device?” I asked, having only heard Urahara talk about it earlier.
“Think of it like a radar, but for souls. Especially powerful ones. Though keep in mind that calling it a radar is a gross oversimplification.” I nodded, some of the anxiety slowly seeping away now that I was getting answers for what was going on. I suddenly realised that I was absolutely covered in sweat, my clothes soaked and sticking to my skin. Thankfully, Tessai was observant and offered me a handtowel of some description, that I started to use the wipe myself down as best I could.
“Anyhow, we had created this device to sense for powerful intruders to the Human World, something that has become a more recent event in the past few hundred years. However, the device always seemed to encounter issues with interference that neither Mister Urahara nor I were able to account for.” Tessai paused, maybe for dramatic effect.
“That interference was you, Mister Carter. From an extremely long distance, your soul itself is so potent that it was capable of interfering with the device. Your job application letter on its own caused the device to burst into flames when in the same room as it. And yet we are unable to detect your actual power, even while doing so much as physically touching you. It is unheard of.” Tessai’s voice was like a stone wall. There was no room for questioning whether what he said was true or pure fiction, just that it was.
“How is it possible that you are unable to sense it? If it made the machine blow itself up, wouldn’t that mean that you’d be able to, I don’t know, feel it?”
“We should. And that is precisely why Mister Urahara acted with such hostility.” I scrunched my eyes up in confusion and frustration.
“What do I even do with any of this information? I know absolutely nothing about any of this!” Frustration bled through into my words more than I had expected them to. But hell, it was damn justified. Tessai simply hummed in thought for a moment, his silhouette shifted tilting his head to the side and raiding his hand to meet his chin.
“We train you.”