Snippet #1952543

Not a day for celebration, hmm? I'll second that. What a nuisance. The white haired young captain sighed, taking a slight sip of her wine from where she sat in the corner, the thought of all the paperwork she had to do once she returned to the barracks weighing heavily on her mind. She still needed to fill out at least five long files for various pet projects of hers, and had been hoping to make a personal request to the captains as a whole at some point during the dinner. But with at least half of them drunk and the other half enjoying themselves, business would be the last thing on anyone's mind. Swirling her red wine around in her glass, she sighed once again, her amber gaze being turned back on her by the blurred reflection in the small cup. She was going to have to pull an all-nighter again, wasn't she? Her lieutenant wouldn't - and, indeed, couldn't be asked - to fill out any of the diverse and complicated forms and applications.

Her plan had been formed in many parts. Quite simply, she wanted to make a name for Squad 10 as an organization of benevolence, to make its members a force to be reckoned with, and to fill in the gaps left in her ranks by the recent war. Through careful planning, Captain Nura had found a method by which she could outdo the other squads and recover the glory of the Tenth Division.

Firstly, she would make a request - she had planned to make it at the current gathering, but due to the drunkenness of the captains and the informality of the event, that was out of the question - for first pick of the soon-to-graduate sixth years of the Shinigami Academy, under the pretense of needing additional skilled members to manage her squad's normal duties. This would allow her to fill her squad's ranks with the best and brightest young minds not already consigned to the Research Division, the Stealth Force, or the Healers. Once this had been completed, she would put into action several plans she had already set up. Firstly, she would petition for a drastic increase in Shinigami patrols to the deep Rukongai. The levels of crime in those frontier sectors - not to mention the number of Hollows that crept into the wilds beyond the borders of colonized territory - could not go ignored. Using the Tenth as a police force, she planned to bring order to the chaotic regions of the Soul Society. This would allow her men to gain practical experience to apply in combat, and would be good for PR. At the same time, she would propose using the 12th Division's monitoring equipment to catalog the arrival of new souls into the Soul Society. This would allow them to run a missing person search network, and to reunite former families after their deaths. Few people ever found those they once new on the other side, and that was a fact that had to be changed. Doing so would be another boost to Rin's reputation as a Captain, and would also aid in her plans to do away with crime, chaos and disorder in the Rukongai. This would simultaneously allow for individuals with high spiritual pressure to be picked out easily, giving her more potential candidates for her squad. If she put all these plans into motion at once, the Tenth would have its infamy as a "Traitor Squad" soon forgotten, and its slate wiped clean once more. Moreover, Rin would be helping the entire Soul Society through her new measures, and what was a Captain's purpose if not to protect the spirit world? Yes, if all things went according to plan, she had a feeling that she might just be able to fit easily into her new role as a Captain after all.

But it was never that easy, was it? No, she had a feeling that at least something would go wrong with her plans for order and reconstruction. What worried her was that she couldn't have a contingency plan in place for everything. And if something happened that was completely unexpected, it could overturn everything she'd worked for in the past year of management.

Well, she supposed. There was no sense worrying over things like that right now when this night might simply reveal them for her. This was a gathering of the most powerful individuals in the Soul Society. She had a feeling that if anything interesting - or threatening to her plans - would happen, it would probably happen here, during the latter half of the feast. The only option now was to wait and see. Adjusting her haori and zanpakuto as she stood up, she skirted around the corner of the feasting hall, watching the others as she was accustomed to. Even though she had been a captain for almost a year, she was somewhat of a black sheep amongst the other, more experienced officers. She rarely spoke in meetings, and although her opinion, when voiced, was usually considered, she had always been rather low key amongst her peers. She had to face reality. Most of them were grizzled veterans of countless wars. She was, comparatively speaking, a child who happened to have some skills they needed at the time. If she hadn't had experience managing Squad 10 after Jin's defection, she knew that another one of the more capable officers would have been chosen in her place. It was a humbling thought to know that the Lieutenant of Squad 3 - a comparative prodigy who had attained not only Bankai, but a compression-type Bankai, the rarest of all Zanpakuto abilities - was probably a more capable Shinigami than her, Captain of the once-glorious Squad 10. She couldn't help but curse her predecessor for the mess he'd left her to manage. Now that the war was over, if she were to show the slightest sign of incompetence in managing the reconstruction of her division, she knew full well that there were plenty of skilled, nay, preferable replacements in stock. In short, she was nothing special until she could make a name for herself. And if her plans went wrong... Well, then she would probably make a record as the shortest-serving Captain in Soul Society history, unless something came up at the same time that required all divisions to keep their current officer staff. Little did she know that such a calamity - one that would render her various machinations and plots futile, but would strike all squads equally - was just about to occur.