Akatokiyami - Scattered Souls

Conflict.

War raged unchecked between the inhabitants of Soul Society and Hueco Mundo with the physical realm as their battlefield. Lives were lost, futures were changed, and history was made.

A hundred years later and the repercussions of the inter-realm war between Shinigami, hollow, and the humans caught in between, still marred the landscape of Soul Society's very foundation. The Gotei 13, for whom time seemed to slow to a crawl, had yet to recover from the devastating losses within their ranks that had been the price for victory.

The hollow who had once again tasted the bitterness of defeat, though the losses didn't have nearly as much impact on their masses, retreated back into the depths of Hueco Mundo, fueling their anger and resentment toward the shinigami and the humans they fed on. They remained quietly hidden away searching for new power.

The lives of humans may be short, but their memories are long, passed down through new generations. Among those who's memory have built only rage are the Quincy, hunters of Hollow and Shinigami alike, who disseminated away from their old ways of living outside the cities of man and moved on to live with their charges; for those other humans, this black point in time became nothing but a dark nightmare.

In Soul Society, revolution began to come about: hundreds of souls went missing from the Gotei 13's numbers, only to be discovered roaming the Rukongai as a new threat altogether, or so the Central 46 decreed. Their creator, Gakushiki Rikou, was hunted to banishment from Soul Society, taking refuge in the Material Plane whilst his experiments began to find their ways to him.

In response to this new threat, the successors of the renegade's legacy began creating new weapons, creatures both Shinigami and Human by nature called Bount; after a freak accident, however, these new beings, too, have escaped Soul Society after ages of imprisonment, and now live among the humans, using their recently deceased as nourishment.

More weapons have been created as an evolving effort to combat Soul Society's growing list of enemies, these new toys called Modified Souls, or simply Mod-Souls. Created to surpass natural souls in nearly all regards, the Mod-Souls are, in a way, considered to be the Soul Society's last great hope at truly equalizing the battlefield.

In Hueco Mundo, the monsters that began the first Great War came forth from their shadowy caverns to call forth a new generation of monsters, Hollow who they had deemed powerful enough to be worth either fueling or succeeding them. The new age of Hollow surpassed the old, however, and in their dying throes, the originators of the first catastrophe granted unto the new Hollow their power, their great secret: Shinigamification. Now the Arrancar have moved forward to take dominion of Hueco Mundo, and there are none to stand in their way.

As the scars of the past mend, new thunderheads roll upon the horizon: all have had time to lick their wounds clean, and now, only tomorrow stands between the world and it's next fate, be it salvation or destruction.