Twilight : Bleach

by ilbgar

The Shop

Twilight awoke to find herself in an alleyway. She was some sort of bipedal primate from what she could tell, and she was wearing a light blue shirt with short sleeves, a dark blue skirt that reached to about her knees and had her cutie mark emblazoned on the right side, a lavender backpack that seemed empty, and a pair of white boots.

Once she managed to stand up without having to grab a wall, she made a mental list of her problems in order of how immediate they were. First, a way of getting food and water regularly. Second, a regular supply of food and water. Third, materials for researching a way home, and the power to do so. From what she could tell, this was a different dimension.

She'd been sent here by Cadance, but that was an impostor. She'd been too upset to realize it at the time, but that was not how Cadance would have responded to being accused like that. She was never able to stand seeing others fighting, especially if they had a close relationship. Seeing her fighting with her brother would have been unbearable, plus she would have tried to talk things out before things got to that point.

She soon realized that unless whatever she currently was aged differenly from ponies, she was significanly younger. She was also having trouble deciphering the unfamiliar language other members of the species were using, though she was able to puzzle out a few words due to their use and frequency, she was not even close to forming a coherent sentence.

This could make getting a job of some kind difficult, and while being placed in an orphanage or foster home was not an appealing idea, she was not keen on the idea of living on the street either.

It would also cause her difficulties in discovering a way back home. She knew from experience that nobody took someone whose age was in single digits seriously when they asked for esoteric study materials. She didn't actually know her current biological age, but the point stood.

It was during several unfruitful hours after these musings that she encountered a child, or what she assumed to be a child, crying. He wore a pair of sneakers and a t-shirt, he was also semi-transparent and had a chain attached to a metal plate on his chest that reached almost to the ground.

Despite the utter strangeness of the situation, she attempted to ask him what was wrong. The answer was very disturbing.

"After mommy and me died in the fire, we stuck together, b-but she got eaten by a monster with a mask!" he explained before he broke down sobbing.

Twilight was quite unnerved. She had no reason to believe the person in front of her was lying what with the obvious trauma. That meant not only was she talking to a ghost, but there was something around here that ate ghosts.

His being a ghost explained why no-one else was reacting to his presence and were actually throwing her strange looks. What else would any normal person do seeing someone else talking to nothing and not acting as though it were an imaginary friend?

Twilight was about to try and talk to him some more since she didn't think she could acually touch him to comfort him, when a crash behind her spooked hem both. A large creature with a white mask, a hole through where the heart ought to be, and a body that was like a praying mantis and sickly green had smashed through a nearby alleyway, and was looking at them rather like a starving man would look at a hot meal of his favorite foods.

She tried, and was surprisingly successful, to grab the boy's hand and pull him along as she ran from the thing behind her that was radiating hunger and malice. She yelled "Run!" as the creature started after them, largely ignoring anything in it's path and steamrolling through.

Twilight realize almost immediately that she couldn't outrun the mantis-creaure and she seriously doubed she could fight effectively since she did not have a horn and probably couldn't use magic. Her only option was to out-manuever it using her smaller size. Luckily, her new friend was about her size and, if anything, seemed to be tiring less quickly than she was.

She cursed her sedentary lifesyle, and promised to be more active if she survived. If this wasn't the monster she'd heard about, then it was probably the same kind. She was ducking through alleys with her companion in tow, until she found herself facing a dead end. The mantis wasn't far behind.

She looked frantically for anything she could use as a weapon in her current state, but all she found was a wooden board with jagged edges. She lifted it and tried to get a good grip. She was trying and failing to get her magic to work, but without her horn she had nothing to focus it so she was just managing a dull glow that would only serve to make her more noticeable.

She could always keep running, but she didn't think she could get past the mantis with her companion in tow, and she wasn't going to sacrifice him, someone she'd just met or not. Her only choice was to fight. Considering the fact that she had no experience beyond a few self-defense courses she'd learned as part of her tutelage under the princess and even that wouldn't be useful since she had a completely different form now, she was not liking her chances.

"W-What do we do?" the kid asked, terrified at being trapped.

"You are going to get behind me, while I try and fight it. If you can, run and don't look back." she said as bravely as she could. Letting him know she was scared would only make him more scared and likely to do something stupid.

He was about to respond when the mantis rounded the corner. Now that it was this close, she noticed a strange heaviness to the air aroujnd it. She didn't think letting it get the first move would be a good idea, so she charged it. It batted her away more or less effortlessly.

'Well, that was discouraging.' she thought through her pain. She got back up and was about to try again since she at least needed to buy time for her companion to get away. 'Wait,' her eyes widened 'where'd he go?'

The mantis started trying to reach it's back as if there were an itch it couldn't scratch there.

"He didn't." she whispered.

He had climbed onto the giant mantis and started beating on it with his fists. This was doing nothing but causing the mantis to get annoyed, but at least it was failing to get to him. However, it would eventually succeed, and that would be that.

She was desperate to do something to keep that from happening, but the mantis had a claw ready to fling her away while it grabbed at the boy on it's back and her magic still wasn't functioning properly. She forced it to gaher into a Beam spell at her hand through sheer willpower, but it was ten times harder than usual and much weaker and less stable. She had no real alternatives though.

She sent the weakened Beam at her opponent and scored a hit. Unfortunately, the wound it had been dealt healed at a visible rate. She continued to fire while avoiding the wild swings from one of the mantis' scythe-arms. It was a little easier with each use, but it was far more draining in her current state. She only had a few shots left, but she had discovered that when the mask was hit it healed at a relative snail's pace.

She was about to fire for what was hopefully the last time when it threw off the kid. She was distracted for a moment by the necessity of levitating him down so he wouldn't ge hurt, and got skewered for her trouble.

She was pretty sure that the amount of blood she was losing would leave her dead in a matter of minutes, but she was more concerned with the fact that the mask had opened to reveal a set of teeth and the mouth inside it. Her rapidly fading conciousness dimly noted that she was going to be eaten before she died of blood loss and she was consumed by fear.

The mantis suddenly had it's head cut off by a sword. A green-and-white hat was the last thing she saw before passing out from a mixture of relief and blood loss.

*** An Unknown Amount of Time Later ***

Twilight awoke in an unfamiliar bed, and blearily tried to remember what happened through a haze of drowsiness. When she did, she attempted to bolt upright, only to fall back as her body collapsed on her due to poor circulation.

She then met her rescuer, who said something she took to mean something along the lines of "Stop moving or you'll reopen your wounds." He had messy light-blond hair, a hat with green and white stripes, a dark coat with green hems and a diamond pattern on it's lower half. His pants were a dark gray and he wore clog-sandals on his feet.

When it became apparent that she was unable to speak or understand more than five words at a time as a general rule, she began conjuring illusions. These were somewhat unaffected by the change beyond being more draining, so she could ask what each picture was.

After about ten minutes, she manage to learn enough new words in what was apparently Japanese that she could tell him her story about running into the mantis, which led to an explanation of her magic, which led to an explanation of her origins.

Twilight had decided she might as well be open with him if she was going to stay any length of time, though the fact that he'd saved her life might have had something to do with her decision.

"Hm, that's quite the story, but when you deal with all the weird things I have to, you tend to suspend your disbelief quite a bit and gain a knack for figuring out when someone's lying." Kisuke Urahara, as he'd introduced himself, said. Once they'd established her native language was Equish, or rather it's counterpart in this dimension, English, they'd made a lot of progress fairly quickly.

"Alright, so how bad was I when you rescued me?" Twilight decided to get straight to the point.

"It was kinda touch and go for a while, but you'll be fine. You'll need some more bed rest, but you were only out for a couple days and Tessai's got plenty of healing Kido training." Kisuke said.

"Yeah, I was pretty sure it didn't get anything really vital, but I was equally sure that it hit a major artery." Twilight said. She was fairly certain she was still in shock. Otherwise she'd be curled up in a fetal position in terror at how close she'd come to almost dying.

"You should be safe here. There are enough wards against Hollows to fend off any of the low-level ones." Kisuke explained. In response to the question she was about to ask, Kisuke said, "Are you sure you want to know?" She nodded and he continued. "When someone dies violently or with regrets, they don't pass on to the afterlife. Your average person will become a ghost that acts much the same as in life, known as a Plus.

If they were sinners, however, they become creatures of mindless hunger who have lost their hearts, represented by the hole in their chests. The mask they wear is meant to shield the exposed instinct, and is a weak point.

Pluses can be turned into Hollows by other Hollows, or if they're consumed by negative emotions." Kisuke's slight smile had faded as he talked, and he'd become completey serious by this point.

"Hollows seek out Pluses in order to devour them and try to fill the void where their hearts used to be. The hungrier ones will even go after living humans or commit cannibalism." Twilight resisted the urge to vomit. They ate people or even each other?! The one was bad enough, but these things were common? She'd been less impacted by the little boy's speech because she was still reeling from being sent to another dimension, but now it had sunk in somewhat after all that.

"Wait, what happened to the little boy? He would have been nearby when you found me." Twilight asked with some concern and a hint of guilt after having forgotten him.

"I performed a Konso to send him to Soul Society, basically Heaven. He'll be better off now." Urahara answered.

"Oh. I'm happy for him then, but... well we never even told each other our names." Twilight said, then blinked. "Where are we anyway?" she asked.

"This is my candy shop. We get the occassional... unusual visitor, but things are pretty quiet right now." Kisuke answered.

"So, how did you find me anyway?" she asked.

"Well, I was going to the store for groceries, leaving Tessai to keep an eye on the shop and I suddenly sensed a Hollow and a strange reiatsu, that's spiritual energy, I didn't recognize. It certainly wasn't a Hollow, and it wasn't a Shinigami or Plus, so I decided to investigate.

I dealt with the Hollow and hurried you over to the shop after performing quite possibly the fastest Konso in history. Long story short, here you are." Kisuke explained, his slight smile back.

Twilight nodded, suddenly feeling very drowsy. "I'll leave you to rest then. See you tommorow!" he waved cheerily.

*** In The Present ***

"Wait a minute, I thought you said ponies don't usually have spiritual pressure." Rainbow said.

"My ridiculous amount of power for a non-alicorn meant that I did have some, luckily this allowed me to cast spells, albeit more difficultly. A normal pony would attract no more attention than the average human." Twilight explained.

"So what happened next?" Pinkie asked.

"When I woke up again..." Twilight said, continuing her story.

Author's Note:

Twilight is somewhat in shock right now, but it will all come crashing down on her eventually. She was able to understand the boy because she'd had a couple hours to figure out more of the language, and had problems with Urahara because she was still groggy at first.

Comments

[Ahrazell]

Yes! New chapter! More soon plz

[Ocean Waves]

Either this is an alternate universe, or you have your Bleach lore off a tad. Plus's have the chain of fate (usually broken from their body unless plot) which slowly degrades over time if not sent to SS. Once the chain of fate is damaged/degraded to the point where it's only got a link or so left, the Plus undergoes hollowfication and turns into a Hollow. The only difference between evil and good Pluses is that evil Pluses that turn into hollows (and probably evil pluses that get Konso'd) don't go to SS when killed by a Zanpakuto, but rather get literally dragged into Hell by a giant harpoon thing. Of course, AFAIK this only happens once in an early episode and never shows up again.

[Fictional Fanatic]

5739606 Actually. Hollowfication can happen to pluses with even the longest chain, by the pull of the chain itself can over time tear a hole in the plus and they turn into a hollow. Otherwise the place bound pluses would be eternal. (referring to the plus who was bound to a hospital, his chain was all over the place.)

[Fictional Fanatic]

Love it, need more.

[ilbgar]

5739606 i'm pretty sure the chain of fate is worn down by the negative energy of it's owner, though Urahara's little pit has shown that outside influences can affect the process. What I don't understand is why it hurts every time a link gets destroyed, and not just when that last bit goes and you ge your heart ripped out.

[R-A-B-G]

This was awesome, wish there were more.

[Ocean Waves]

5739719
True.

5739728
Negativity does make it go faster, but all Pluses will eventually become a Hollow given enough time. Well, except Ichigo who became a Shinigami, and possibly that boy who got shoved in the bird.

[Lord Nopony]

Hmm! Very interesting!