Welcome to Gaia! ::

The large office for the captain and lieutenant of squad eleven is simply furnished with a few desks, shelves, and a few chairs for anyone visiting the place. A long reinforced window overlooks the training grounds below, as the office is on the second floor - giving a better vantage by which to watch. There are two doors. One exits onto a small balcony where the Captain could make comments to anyone in her squadron that was practicing and the other was the main door for those looking to visit.

The sudden chaos that flooded the barracks, with frantic squad members literally falling over one another as they ran around in a blind panic, was all the warning necessary for the Hydromancer to know he was needed. “I see the Captain is back,” he bemused as he slipped from his hammock to the grass below. The lieutenant straightened his droplet-thick water cloak and proceeded to Aruya’s office.

As he passed through the many halls and grew closer to her office, the relief on the faces of squad-mates he passed was obvious. He raised a masked eyebrow at their expressions. The Captain had always had a similar effect on her underlings, but gauging by how more relieved than normal they seemed to be at the sight of the second-in-command, he began to wonder what she had done this time to get the others so on edge. As he turned the last corner to the hallway the captain’s office occupied he was greeted by her shouting from the open portal.

"Get the damn Lieutenant!"

One foot rose from the ground, and by the time it touched back down the Hydromancer at was the opposite end of the lengthy hallway. A pitiful distance to cover with any technique to be sure, but from the sound of things expedience might not be such a bad idea. As he crossed the threshold into the office, his whistle, oddly echoed behind the mask, filled the room.

“Been letting someone wail on you again, Cap?” he casually asked as he looked over his mess of a captain. “And the Hydromancer supposes you want him to patch you up....” He suppressed a sigh as he passed his hands over Aruya. A soft cascade of blue-green light, like Sun rays piercing the surface of the ocean, danced over her features. It was a simple form of Kido healing, one he didn’t even need to recite. It was as effective as it was simple however, actually more effective on her then it really had any reason being. He wasn’t entirely sure how it worked, but he suspected that her body had grown accustomed to his healing over the years. Immediately the younger Shinigami’s minor cuts and bruises vanished, as if wiped away from her skin, while the deeper wounds began slowly knitting.

He was quiet for the few moments it took to began the healing process, focused only on the act itself. Once he was sure the Kido had taken hold he mentally sectioned off enough concentration to maintain the spell, and then turned his attention to his patient. The lieutenant cast a glance over her top-to-bottom in a way that from anyone else would hold a completely different intention. “So the Hydromancer would like to know to whom he owes the pleasure of having to clean up his captain’s wounds to,” he mentioned as he noted just how many there appeared to be.

Listening to his captain talk of the slugfest, he wondered why he ever let her go out on her own at all. Her pointed question on why he wasn’t there himself reminded him of why he had let her go out on her own in the first place. Eyes narrowing behind his mask at her habitual smoking, he offered his excuse, “The Hydromancer at an execution of a Vizard, where a whole gaggle of them showed up?” He barked out a short, humorless laugh. “Both you and the Hydromancer know that half of the other captains and lieutenants would have probably mistaken me for a Vizard as well... and the other half probably suspect I really am one anyway. Some people just can’t handle someone who’s a little different from them.”

The shallow, self-inflicted slice on Aruya’s palm was the next obvious wound to fully close, but he noticed the others were coming along nicely as well. Too bad he couldn’t control what he healed at the exclusion of other injuries. He felt there was something just wrong about smoking while receiving healing, a point he had made on more than one occasion to no avail. The fact she was taking advantage of his healing arts to smoke guilt free, as any damage to her lungs was negated under healing, was grating for some reason. As handy as he was with healing though, he certainly wasn’t gifted enough to have the precision it would required to exclude particular internal organs. Hell, he didn’t think anyone had that kind of healing precision. Healing wasn’t actually his forte anyway, but Kido on the other hand....

His mischievous mind flirted with a rather juvenile idea, running a quick risk assessment. ‘Ah what the hell, why not,’ was his mental conclusion. Focusing his healing through just one hand, he causally flicked his index finger of his free hand up next to the end of her coffin nail. The Hydromancer allowed the smallest lapse in his normally tightly controlled reiatsu at the very tip of his finger, and put the force behind it of all the effort to form a Kido spell that of a fleeting thought, that of a whimcial notion dismissed as quickly as it was formed. As the embers of her cigarette flared bright red for all of a second the Lieutenant jokingly said, “Shakkaho number negative ninety-nine.” He didn’t actually tie the words to the Kido, as the mere act of saying the name would have put far too much power behind it than what he intended, but for humor’s sake.

In a soft puff of ash half of her coffin nail was gone, reduced to a hovering cloud of smoke and ember. Now that was what he called a precision strike. “Doctor’s orders,” he smirked. If she was coming to treat him like her own personal hospital, was going to abuse it for all that it was worth.

Ah the classic invincible spirit of the Shinigami. They so rarely died of natural causes or old age that, to many, it didn’t concern them. Most met their end by Hollow or worse. To be fair, the last high profile case of a sick Shinigami was a former Lieutenant years back who name escaped him at the moment. Or was he he still around? The Hydromancer really needed to stay on top of who his fellow Shinigami were.

A more sinister thought occurred to the Lieutenant, one that upon realization caused him no small amount of shame for not considering before. As the captain of squad eleven, Aruya would most likely meet her end by one of her subordinates. She would never have to worry about dying from old age. There was probably no Hollow out there strong enough to take her down. Even if she did become weakened by an illness, it would only encourage an aspiring squad member to take her down long before she died of the illness itself. He let the morbid thought pass from his mind, and decided not to give her anymore grief over it.

“You would buy the expensive stuff too, wouldn’t you,” he accused half serious. He brought his free hand back over her and resumed full healing. “The Hydromancer would just as soon not give the others the chance to ‘slip up’ in the heat of battle, as it were.” He considered acting little more responsible since he was the lieutenant after all. The idea bounced back and forth far too many times, but in the end he decided that his captain might become abusive if he slacked off too often. “You have the Hydromancer’s word, the next time he is suppose to report to a summons he’ll be there.” After a second or two of final debate, he added, “Probably.”