No Place I'd Rather Be

If Amaya wanted to be completely honest, and he usually was, he'd say he was relieved to have Slum duty. It wasn't that having it showed how powerful and skilled Amaya was. It wasn't that walking around in his shinigami uniform was an attempt to get someone to engage him in combat. Honestly his Captain wouldn't have sent him here if he was as delicate as his appearance made him appear to be (no one was truly delicate if they spent any goodly amount of time in the slums). No, it wasn't boastful pride or a desire to fight someone that had Amaya happy to be here.

He really was happy to be put in a lower tech environment. It wasn't that Amaya didn't like technology. He did, when it worked correctly. It simply was that broken tech usually had spectacularly disasterous results when put in any close proximity to Amaya. What if something in Sakai Karakura malfunctioned and Amaya was on it? He'd accidentally be responsible for the entire thing falling into Karakura. Or Imaginary Karakura would become a whole lot less imaginary and more real and things would be broken and destroyed everywhere and Amaya would have to try and help clean up because it would somehow be his fault.

No it was best that Amaya be placed in the Slums for a brief rotation than be placed anywhere else. At least in Amaya's opinion.

Besides it wasn't so bad today. The sun was shining prettily, the air wasn't stiflingly hot, and funny smells were at an all time low. What could be better than that? Well not getting wolf whistles or nasty leers from strangers probably. It was hard to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Really, yes he knew he was pretty, he knew he was delicate looking. He also knew that everyone else viewed him as a woman, a notion he wasn't going to change if he could help it. It was just frustrating and mildly disgusting the way these men were acting.

Did they really think women liked being oogled at? He wanted to throw his hands up in the air because he wasn't here for their entertainment. He was here to do his job. Which was round up any lingering souls in the area, pass them on, and try to do it as quickly and neatly as possible without attracting high level hollow attention.

Easy peasy.

"Well this seems kind of familiar."

Andrew had been traveling through the slums as well as he helped out any wayward souls back to the Soul Society through the konso ritual. Being here made him think of when he had been in Rukongai. He didn't remember where he ended up when it came to the district, especially since he had been trying to figure out what his name was mainly. The other priorities was trying to find food while eluding the various criminal element that lingered about. So in a way, he found this location almost familiar before he was a shinigami. He knelt down next to a soul of a child as he smiled kindly at him. He placed his hand on his shoulder, speaking in a calm manner while maintaining eye contact as he placed the hilt of his blade on his forehead so that he could be able to go back into the Soul Society. Did Andrew know where he was going to end up? Was the boy going to be better off? These were things he wasn't sure of. But at the very least he was going to give the boy hope. Who knows, maybe this boy will be one of the new generations of shinigami.

Sighing softly, he then stood up as he arched his back. While looking straight up into the sky, his eyes then opened up in surprise. There was a shinigami nearby. Snapping back to a completely upright position, he started to look around for the shinigami's location. He had been considerably lucky when it came to encounters with shinigami. For all intents and purpose if it were a few centuries earlier, there was always that thought that he would be hunted down and taken out of the picture. But he did learn tricks with the most obvious thing to not do is look for a fight. Show a sign of respect and do not show that he was looking for a fight. If anything he was helping as many souls as he can while keeping an unassuming presence so he didn't draw any attention.

Amaya felt the Vizard and paused. He turned in the direction where he felt the spiritual energy. Standing in the middle of the alley and tilting his head he tapped his finger to the edge of his mouth, mulling over his options. There were quite a few options for just a singular presence.

It always puzzled him as to why some thought his reaction to a vizard should be mild but civil hostility. That was silly, to be honest. Hostility towards a person he'd never met before simply for what they were. It seemed like the highest amount of stupidity in Amaya's humble opinion. The world was colorful, it was strange, terrifying, wonderous, and full of many things that were just as good as they were evil.

Perhaps he had been changed by his own death? Perhaps his life had influenced him to take pause, to measure a situation, to trust his instincts around others. It was his instincts that kept him from dying much sooner than he had, the subtle read of a place that could change his walk to an all out sprint. Maybe the way he had been treated had helped him look past an appearance or a label and try to make his own desicisions. Or maybe it was looking into the faces of people who enjoyed dishing out pain because they could, dying at the hand of a man who had tortured and killed so many other girls....

No Amaya had always looked past labels, looked past a general norm, and gathered his own conclusions. They might be fast ones, he had of course taken to several people almost instantaneously. A mixture of excellent body language skills and a good dose of empathy helped with that.

The Vizard didn't feel bad. It was a nice sort of feeling. One that made Amaya smile and bounce cheerfully down the alleyway, wandering through the maze quite adeptly. When he finally reached where he had felt the Vizard to be he looked around.

"Hello? Hello? I mean I can sense you right now so it's a bit ...silly to hide. I mean you no harm! Oh no! Now I've sounded like one of those old cheesy SciFi shows! Gah! Well what I mean is, well if you aren't doing anything queer or nefarious would you like to patrol with me? Two people are better than one! An- ACK here I am asking you to help and I haven't introduced myself! Amaya Hawke of Squad Seven! It's a pleasure to meet you!"

His voice was bright and sweet as he talked, his elegant hands moving to help communicate. Amaya looked like a sweet but silly delicate girl. Which he was, and he wasn't all at once. His smile was genuine and not a single shred of hostile intent could be found in him or around him. It made him look rather strange, being so obviously kind hearted in a rough place like this.

"I wasn't really hiding, I was just performing a konso on a child and felt your presence when I needed to stretch my back."

Andrew's voice had an honest tone to it as he still had his hand on his lower back. If there was one thing he had some difficulty with when working in the kitchen was when he needed to stoop or bend to get things. And with his height he had to do that more often when reaching for something lower to the ground. But he continued to listen to the shinigami curiously. He didn't feel any sense of dread with this shinigami. Perhaps he had gotten lucky once again and this shinigami didn't stab first and ask questions later. He tilted his head, thinking that the statement could be used for just about any genre. As he started to rattle off the movie genres there were, he seemed to have a blank look on his face. But as he stared into the distance, his mind was still working as he then went back to reality once again.

As he began to think about it with Renji, perhaps this shinigami had been assigned to the outskirts of Karakura to maintain the souls that are present while holding off the hollows. But he still he was pretty curious about Amaya. He had wanted to ask some questions, but when Amaya asked for help all of those questions were put on the back burner. Nodding his head, he smiled as he adjusted his glasses. "It's nice to meet you Amaya, I'm Andrew Takahashi and I'm from the vizard corp. I'm from sector two, which would be the Kidō sector." He then started to look around as he began to contemplate where to go next. "So where did you want to start the patrol first? I had been honestly not following a straight path. I usually go to where the spirits are. I think I might have lost my bearings, but not a problem though. I just a little bit of time to figure out where I am."