And with that said they were away.
The gatekeepers fired up the gate to the living world and a hell butterfly came soaring to lead them through. Aoshi had always thought it was kind of strange that the tiny insects were so versatile and so useful in the everyday life of the soul reapers. They were the basis of the communications network as well as the facilitators of travel between worlds… Made you wonder where the real power in soul society really was really located.
On the other end of the tunnel was the world of the living. The portal took Aoshi and his fearless sidekick Reku to the right place, Katakura town, but closer than that was hard. The hollow was nowhere in sight. They’d come out in some kind of industrial area. All round them were huge, squat warehouses painted in different colours to keep them apart. Numbers ten feet tall helped as well. They’d come out right behind warehouse 5. To their left was warehouse 12 and straight ahead warehouse 9. The internal logic of the place made Aoshi groan in imagined pain.
They were by no account alone. The place was in full steam. Humans ran back and forth, drove forklifts and larger vehicles. It was lucky that normal living couldn’t see or sense reapers, because they would have had quite the audience.
The big reaper looked around, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had come out in the wrong place. He tried to sense the thing, but looking for one hollow in a city of this size was like looking for a needle in a haystack on a good day.
“Well, I can’t seem to find the thing from here, how about you?” Aoshi asked his black robed companion. Before she could reply something beeped inside Aoshi’s robe. After some rummaging around Aoshi produced a small black box. The “Denreishinki” resembled a “flip phone” from the living world, but that was where the similarities ended. The thing had so much technology in it that modern phone makers would feint by simply looking at the list.
His big fingers played around with some of the buttons for a while before the screen changed and a blinking dot appeared in the upper left corner.
“Looks like a hollow is nearby. Don’t know if it’s the one we’re after though… Wanna check it out?”