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iamrootusr · 2 months ago

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Bwahahah, sorry Aizen. You’re god’s capri-sun.

Does said Life Machine perceive said juice box as having a flavor? Or is it just mmm, sweet bitter building blocks of the universe?

Also LOL hollow-flavored

Question for #AEIWAM, about the Hogyoku: In Canon, Aizen is using one Hogyoku to figure out how to make Shinigami into Hollow, and Urahara is discovered to have a second Hogyoku when he tries to undo the Hollowfication on the group that would become the Visored. But it's never adequately explained where either of them came from, other than "they were invented by [Aizen & Urahara". In #AEIWAM, if the Hogyoku was used to make the first Kami, but using it for what Urahara & Aizen were doing, it seems so... low-powered. What if it's not two separate Hogyoku, but rather one Hogyoku split into two parts? Man, I bet Kaname was waiting for the best moment to tell Aizen that Urahara had one

Oh no.

It's MUCH stupider than that.

The *exact* nature and purpose of the hogyoku (and why the instructions for how to make one were just out there for Gin to find on the Soul King's worktable) are MAJOR SPOILERS for the TYBW arc of AEIWAM, but as far as functions go: A Hogyoku is a device used to accumulate massive amounts of Reiryoku (Soul Energy), compress and purify it, and then squeeze it out into an organism later to make it extremely powerful.

If you can guess the spoilers from those two sentences, you get a gold star and drafted into helping me write this damn fic.

I'm not sure where you got the bit about them being used to make the first Kami, but that is (at least now) not the case- Kami form from a similar function, but were not intentionally *made*, and not with a Hogyoku.

ANYWAY,

You are right, the two hogyoku in AEIWAM are under-powered compared to the original plan, but that's mostly because neither Aizen or Urahara could comprehend the sheer scale of Nobody's design, so what they actually made were, essentially Micro-hogyokus.

The Approximate Order of Events:

A fuckass long time ago:

Nobody, Ichibei and Shinso all get the shit stabbed out of them during the Godslaying Event.

Gin is formed from the physical and metaphysical viscera of all three.

As a result, Nobody dies, Ichibei is left a shell of his former self and Shinso loses his body.

Gin realizes that, with Nobody dead and Their various body parts jamming up the wheel of Samsara, there is a very real possibility the Current Life Machine will starve and die before it can give birth to the next one, and the universe they're in will retroactively cease to exist.

Gin decides the best course of action is to put the current Life Machine on life support so it doesn't starve or miscarry while he figures out how to unjam the wheel.

While Gin is figuring this shit out, Ichibei shoves Nobody's corpse in amber and locks the palace to prevent anyone from finding out the "Soul King" is dead, and traps Shinso inside.

Gin finds the plans for The Hogyoku (note the capitalization) on Nobody's worktable, and realizes a smaller version could be used to fill a single soul with an absolute shitwack of energy and that soul could then become an energy capri-sun for the Life Machine.

Gin, however, lacks the engineering knowledge or skill to actually MAKE a micro-hogyoku, let alone convince a soul to submit themselves to the torture of becoming a Divine Juice Box.

...Unless they think it was their idea in the first place.

Gin redacts a few key points about The Hogyoku, including it's scale and intended purpose, and then takes the redacted plans- which are not paper but Concepts- and travels to Spirit World, where most of the Reiriyoku is to dangle the plans in the dreams of various likely-looking maniacs that are slightly too smart for their own good.

late 1700's to early 1800's

After several false starts, Gin finally hits his mark in the disillusioned and bitter Sosuke Aizen, who lost his entire family in a series of catastrophes and is realizing just how cruel and incompetent the afterlife really is.

Aizen changes careers from "Assistant to the central 46" to "Shinigami" and starts his research into the nature of Reiryoku to build "his" vision to make himself God and Fix Everything Forever.

Gin continues jiggling the bait while he waits for Aizen to get some results, and finds a second mark in a bright-eyed and naieve Kisuke Urahara, who thinks he can use it to infuse hollows with whatever it is they're missing and Fix That Forever.

Satisfied that he now has a Juice Box and a Backup Juice box, Gin transforms into a human-shaped soul and appears as a child in the Rukongai as part of his long con to get close to Aizen and Urahara and keep them on track.

late 1800's ish:

Progress is SLOW with both men and Gin is getting frustrated.

Aizen is slighty further along, having learned about Arrancar and the growth instars of hollows while Kisuke was learning how to become a cop, so Gin enters the academy, speedruns it, and attatches himself to Aizen to herd him in the right direction faster.

Aizen is also fucking terrible at Opsec and is discovered by Kaname Tousen, who is immune to Aizen's Illusion Bullshit, but mistakenly thinks that Aizen's lackey, Kiganjo, is the mastermind, and confides in Aizen.

Aizen is about to straight-up murder Kaname to keep him from blowing it when Gin remembers Kaname from the academy and realizes that where Aizen has ambition instead of brains, Kaname is the real genius here, and will definitely speed things up.

Whether he wants to or not.

Shortly after Kaname is cursed into compliance, Kirio Hikifune is recruited into the Royal Guard and Urahara becomes captain of the 12th, where he devotes himself to figuring out how to make his hogyoku.

Everything is coming up Gin!

1900:

Despite being cursed all to hell, Tousen VERY NEARLY blows the whole operation by alerting the rest of the court guard to the location of Aizen's lab, but Gin is able to step in at the last second and stop him.

...By turning 14 of the Ninth's seated officers into hollows that were absorbed by the hogyoku, and the subsequent rescue party into hollows that Urahara spirits away.

Instead of absorbing the rescue party into his own hogyoku, urahara turns them into Visored and they all abscond to the living world/vanish as far as Gin can tell.

Fuck.

Gin redoubles his efforts to keep Aizen on track now that he only has one Juice Box, which means things get a whole lot worse for Tousen but hey, gotta save the universe and that means Aizen Absolutely Cannot Fuck This Up.

1980:

Aizen Fucks it All Up.

Gin has to sprint back to Soul King Palace to molt real fast, and in the fucking three days he's gone, Aizen:

figures out how to use the "export energy" feature on his hogyoku and

instead of exporting the energy into HIMSELF, Aisen makes a sort of super-hollow he calls "White" because that's his favorite color, and dumps all 10,000 souls worth of energy into it.

Aizen then orders Kaname to take White to the Living World to go fuck shit up, just to see what it can do.

Kaname, in the midst of an extreme nervous breakdown, abandons White in downtown Karakura because Aizen forgot to give him end commands, and goes to ground in hopes that Aizen gets his dumb ass killed doing this, or Kaname dies quietly before he can be forced to mutilate or kill anyone else.

Kaname's Obvious Nervous Breakdown is witnessed by Captain Isshin Shiba, who follows Kaname to his meeting with... someone, he looks like a human-shaped mirage? and some creepy-ass hollow, which Kaname takes to the living world and then just... leaves?

White starts to Fuck Shit Up, mostly by wandering around while being a dangerously radioactive to souls, and Isshin decides he needs to kill this thing before it destroys the whole city.

Quincy Prodigy and current host to the ghost of Quincy Freishutz sees White and has the same idea.

Looney-tunes ass battle between White, Isshin, and Masaki breaks out.

Meanwhile, Kaname's continuing nervous breakdown is witnessed by Yoruichi, who stalks him in cat form for a while before she senses the fight break out, and calls Urahara on the way to tell him Shit's Afoot.

Meanwhile, Isshin and Masaki are falling in love. Or at least, Isshin is falling in love with the most insane woman he's ever met. Masaki thinks he's a very cute tactical advantage.

White, all of two hours old, has no fucking clue what the fuck is happening, just that these asshole are trying to kill him.

Isshin and Masaki do a coordinated double attack that backfires and effectively tears everyone's souls in half- Isshin and Masaki are seperated from their Yume-kon: Engetsu and Quincy Freishutz.

Yoruichi gets to the fight and kicks White into two pieces that had not yet quite figured out who is king and who is horse, and then Yoruichi is KO'd by the resulting recoil.

Urahara arrives just in time to see his former coworker and some woman(???) with their souls falling apart, and two large glops of energy. Isshin demands urahara save this woman. Urahara, attempting to figure out how to do that: I can. uh. frankenstein your souls together? Masaki, seeing her way out of Yhwach's grasp: DO THAT.

Urahara uses his hogyoku to stuff the glops of energy into the holes where thier Yume-kon should be, then stitches Isshin and Masaki's souls together to contain the glops within both of them.

Inside Masaki and Isshin, Quincy Freischutz and Engetsu both fuse with/are absorbed by the glops formerly known as white.

This causes Isshin to develop severe amnesia and Masaki to lose her the use of quincy abilities/breaks her connection to Ywach.

Aizen realizes that his hogyoku is now Empty (and useless), but witnesses Urahara use his before absconding with Isshin and whoever that woman was.

Kaname wakes up in bed in the ninth with exactly zero memory of how the fuck he got back from his saw-trap-like bolt hole in the living world, and a really weird headache.

1983:

Isshin and Masaki get HAMMERED at a Halloween party and make Ichigo.

Both halves of the being formerly known as White jump from parent to child, taking whats left of Engetsu and Quincy Freischutz with them, and inside the fetal ichigo, the entities re-fuse into a chimera that decides its name is Zangetsu.

Zangetsu then promptly goes dormant because yume-kon are not supposed to be body hopping and reverse-parthenogenesising like this no matter how much energy they have to burn and he's TIRED.

Orihime's parents get drunk and have nasty hate sex in a closet during an office christmas party and make Orihime, setting Shinso's much better secret "Fix The Life Machine" plan in motion.

Urahara finally gets the idea "Hey maybe this hogyoku thing isn't a great idea"

He thinks that he can destroy his hogyoku by sealing it, then sealing it inside a sturdy mortal soul, and letting that mortal die.

Unfortunately, no souls in the living world can handle the radiation of the sealed hogyoku, so he's got to stuff it into a shinigami and then make that shinigami mortal.

2000:

Instead of doing the sane thing and stuffing it into the most immediately available shinigami (himself), Urahara fucks around for 20 years until Rukia comes around, and he stuffs it into her soul instead.

In a weird coincidence that ABSOLUTELY NOBODY COULD HAVE SEEN COMING, Rukia, who is patrolling the area Ichigo lives in, comes into contact with Ichigo, the kid whose parents Urahara stuffed full of hogyoku glop.

This contact makes the dormant Zangetsu WAKE THE FUCK UP, and reflexively slorp the soul energy out of Rukia. Instead of the full powers of Urahara's hogyoku, Zangetsu only gets Rukia's personal reserves, but its enough for him to be concious and see that OH FUCK THAT'S A BIGASS HOLLOW, ICHIGO'S GONNA DIE FUCK, FUCK WE NEED A WEAPON- BOW? NO, TOO CLOSE. SWORD? YEAH! WE REMEMBER HOW TO BE A SWORD!!

Thus: Shinigami!Ichigo.

This event trips Aizen's radar, and he starts his plan to get his hands on Urahara's still-active hogyoku/fuck over soul society/destroy karakura/make himself the new soul king

the first and second parts of that plan (mostly) work, and Aizen yoinks urahara's hogyoku from rukia and absconds with it, Gin and Kaname, who has been working on his own plan to break the curse, but is exhausted.

Aizen, just to be a dick to ichigo, kidnaps Orihime.

Kaname explains that the hogyokus are tools that consume souls and convert them into energy, and that Aizen is planning to use the one he stole from urahara to devour karakura and make himself into the new god. "What do you mean 'new' god?" "I'm like 99% sure the soul king is dead. there's God-sized body parts all over the spirit world." "Ah. Bad."

Aizen shows Orihime his own, empty hogyoku and monolouges about how only an incompetent and cruel god would make the living and spirit worlds like this. While he's distracted, Orihime grabs the hogyoku and eats it, bringing the next part of Shinso's plan to fruition.

Orihime starts being able to see connections other people don't but she's had AuDHD her whole life so that's nothing new. Her Shun Shun Rikka suddenly gets a whole lot stronger though, and she helps kaname start to break his curse by pulling the nails out of his spine with it.

At the battle of Fake Karakura, Kaname finally breaks his curse and beats the SHIT out of Aizen until he cracks Urahara's hogyoku that aizen loged in his chest, preventing it from absorbing any more power, so Aizen can't absorb real karakura and become a god.

In retaliation, Aizen decides that if he can't be god, then he will at least kill the gotei-13, and fuses with urahara's hogyoku to become stupid powerful

Zangetsu has been trying to speed-train ichigo but the kid is only 16 and this is the apocalypse unless they do something UHHHHH HERE KID, HAVE SOME OF OUR HOGYOKU POWERS YEAH THEY'RE HOLLOW FLAVORED DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT-

Hollow!Ichigo finishes kicking Aizen's ass until he's unable to fight back and surrenders, losing control of, but unable to let of his immense power.

Gin pops up from where he'd been pretending to be a corpse, paralyzes Aizen by stabbing him in the back of the neck, says "thanks kid!" and absconds with his Juice box back to Soul King Palace, and then to the workings of the Life machine beyond.

Gin puts Aizen into something that greatly resembles a horrible combination of The Machine from princess bride, a mouth, and a taffy puller, which operates in much the same fashion as all three to extract all that delicious soul energy from him.

2001:

Kaname wakes up from the coma Unohana had to put him in to let him recover on Valentines day, finally a free man for the first time in over a century.

It's not the first thing he does with his freedom, but kicking urahara's ass for making a hogyoku at all is up there.

Orihime continues to get... weirder.

...and that's as far as I've gotten with much specificity in drafts.

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