A Wandering Soul

'How is it that, that buffoon can remember the spirit fluctuations of every single person he's met, yet can't remember where he left the notebook he was using yesterday?' Yoruichi complained in her mind while she shifted through piles of books looking for the one they needed.

Somehow in the few weeks since they had left for the Soul Society, Kisuke had managed to not only undo the efforts Alexandria made to organize his notes last time but also start losing things in areas completely unrelated to the topic they contained.

Yoruichi had actually found an explosives manual in the kitchen. She had no idea why it ended up there, but she was glad Ururu noticed and brought it to her before Ginta found it and started making his own supply of fireworks. She was fond of the kid, but she also didn't want the neighborhood burning down around them.

'Found it, finally!' Returning to the lab Kisuke was in, she saw he was fully absorbed in yet another notebook.

Walking behind him Yoruichi smacked him across the head with the recovered book. "Kisuke, focus. You know we need to finish the details for the Karakura Replacement Plan. No getting distracted." she scolded, snatching the notebook out of his hands.

"Hey! Be careful with that!" Kisuke protested. "It's one of Alex-chan's books, she will kill me if it gets damaged."

Yoruichi blinked in surprise. "She gave you one of her notebooks? I thought she threatened to castrate you if you went digging through her things."

"Ah, hahaha. Well you see, I kinda found it when I was looking for a reference book I leant her and might have borrowed it without asking? But as long as she doesn't find out it's fine!"

Kisuke and his thrice damned curiosity. Alexandria was very relaxed about people wandering into her workshop. She would even explain what she was working on if asked (Not that Yoruichi bothered beyond the basics since she didn't understand that stuff) but she was insanely territorial about her notebooks.

The last time Kisuke 'borrowed' one of her notebooks, Alexandria chased him around for seven hours bombarding him with every Kido she knew and a couple Yoruichi was sure she had never used before.

It took the combined efforts of Tessei, Ururu, Ginta, and herself working together to stop the two of them from destroying the Urahara shop. From then on messing with Alexandria's notebooks was added to the unofficial forbidden things list, right along with giving the kids too much caffeine, letting Kisuke experiment unsupervised after being awake for 72 hours, letting Tessai shop for tea unescorted, or letting Yoruichi have catnip (it wasn't a habit. She could stop whenever she wanted).

And here was Kisuke, ignoring that warning.

"Please tell me it's at least one of her research books and not a project one." Yoruichi sighed covering her eyes with a hand.

"This is one of her research books." her infuriating childhood friend dutifully parroted.

She sighed again. Of course Kisuke would keep going after Alexandria's book. He had always been too curious for his own good and telling him that he was forbidden from knowing something only tended to make him poke his nose into it.

"So what project of hers could possibly make you risk your manhood after last time?" In addition to the damage to the surroundings Alexandria had come up with an interesting lightning based Kido that seemed to solely target the groin of whoever she used it on.

Kisuke had been hit by several and power distance aside, getting electrocuted in that... 'region'... was far from pleasant, given how he had been whining several hours afterwards. And that was before Alexandria had been able to copy Zanpakuto and fight on an even level with two captains for even a little bit.

Now Yoruichi thought they might need to actively restrain their mysterious friend before she leveled the entire town.

"A ship." Kisuke responded, still entranced by what he was reading. Incidentally knocking Yoruichi out of her thoughts of seeing if Soifon would lend her some of her militia to help restrain a furious captain level opponent.

"A what?"

"It's a ship! Alex-chan wants to make a ship and it's one of the greatest things I've ever seen!" Kisuke said, getting more excited now that his attention was pulled away from the book. "From what I've seen in this, this ship could work in the depths of space to the bottom of the ocean if it needed to and there are so many ideas that I never thought of! Sensor arrays, life support systems, power generators, and more. It's all in this" he declares flourishing the book overhead like it was some holy treasure rather than an academic notebook picked up at the 100-yen store.

"And she somehow has perfect designs to a ship that has things you've never heard of before?" Yoruichi asked skeptically. She had long accepted that Alexandria would probably never come completely clean about her past. It was fine. She had also fully accepted that she wasn't working against them.

Still, she would like some idea of Alexandria's past if only to know where she got so many ideas from. And one thing she knew for certain about Alexandria's ideas was that they never worked immediately.

There was a reason no one besides Kisuke was crazy enough to be anywhere near Alexandria's experiments while she was testing them. They had a high tendency of exploding.

Kisuke waved her off "No, the designs here are almost terrible. If she actually tried to make this it would go critical and explode into a million pieces the first time she turned it on."

'Called it.' Yoruichi thought.

"No," Kisuke declared with the same crazy gleam he got when he went through the giant robot building phase a while back. "I'm going to take these designs and make them perfect!" He pulled out another notebook and began scribbling away, lost in his own little world.

Yoruichi sighed yet again as any hope of getting any actual work done today went out the window.

Maybe Alexandria would forgive them going through her books if they presented it as a gift?

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