Never as it Seems [Emunio]

No one really bothered to pay attention to a few more lights in Vegas; aptly-named, people in this city had become so inured to the constant presence of lights, it was almost a given that everyone kept a pair of sunglasses available at all times. Even so, there were certain lights within the confines of the city that the people would never dare toy with. Young, rebellious teenagers would smash lampposts eagerly, laughing and jostling one another on various dares. Some drunken lushes, down on their luck, would threaten to bludgeon some other poor soul with a nearby lightbulb if they weren't given another beer, or the keys to their car, or any other number of things probably best left out of their grasp. And even a few clever, resourceful ne'er-do-wells would go out of their way to cultivate a few moving patches of darkness within the city, for however short a time it'd last. Dark patches were always in demand, when certain people needed to make certain problems go away.

But no one in Vegas dared touch the will-o-wisps, for various reasons. First and foremost, they were literally moving patches of fire, and mankind had learned long ago a respect for the magic that is fire, a respect so deeply ingrained it was beyond thought. There was always that tiny part of the hindbrain insisting there was nothing worth getting that couldn't be gotten through alternative methods, namely ones that kept you very very far away from flames. Even ones that made no noise, and threw off no embers. And secondly, everyone knew that these will-o-wisps were of particular value to a certain someone. A value that was, by and large, shared in kind with the people who respected the role of these floating lights.

Watch closely now, as another patch of blackness appears in the city of lights: This one, artificial and transitory. Which isn't to say darkness as a normal concept is persistent: The absence of something is always, by its definition, temporary, as there are so very many somethings out there, and there is always only ever one kind of nothing. But this was a darkness that wasn't truly an absence of light, and moreso a glimpse into somewhere else, a place where light was too slow and lazy to bother getting up in the morning.

And immediately, with the mindless urgency of automatons, each of the will-o-wisps within a half mile began to shoot up into the sky, towards the skyscraper that the creature had just appeared atop. They circled around the newcomer, wordlessly, each one whispering at a slightly different tone. They spoke English, completely unaccented, and each one was so quiet that it was impossible to make out defining features about them.

"Listen."
"Hear."
"Pay attention."


They hovered around the arrancar's head, each one around the size of a man's head. They began to gently flicker, with hues of red and green and gold, as if someone had thrown chemicals into each fire, different ones at different times. They didn't move quickly, but quickly enough to be unsettling to watch as more and more of them joined. The messages seemed to repeat, in a dozen languages, as they spoke once more.

"Get ready."
"Get Scared."
"Bow."

And then, from very close, eerily close, someone could be heard humming. At first it resonated from all directions at once, seeming to fill the air with a solid wall of sound. There was no real tune to it that could be gathered, nothing but a solid resonance of sound that could be felt in the body, something that made bones rattle and hairs twitch. But after a second, words became clear, as -something- could be seen taking to the sky, a long-winded white creature that exuded enough spirit energy to make the air itself suddenly feel like a solid cocoon.

"You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies..."

The words themselves reached the arrancar's ears almost at the same time as the creature, flying at prodigious speeds that probably would've broken the sound barrier if he was bothering to interact with the particles in the air. Instead, he simply landed on the skyscraper, not even a minute after the uninvited guest had arrived, speaking in a pleasant, amused bass tone. His skin itself was covered in red scrawls, runes that seemed to resemble some norse script, and changed in eye-watering ways every time he so much as moved a finger. His face was completely impossible to see, hidden behind an ivory mask, and he had eight horns, each curling back and away from his head. Even so, he spoke like a father, while he tilted his head to the side.

"Business or pleasure, if you don't mind? It's just that I left a hell of a party to come give you a welcome, and if you're here to pass the time in pleasant company, we may as well head back in a jiffy."