History revision
revised history for app
BACKGROUND: Kon's world is divided into two halves. The first half is the world we know, the real world, where people live, work, play, breathe, eat, and go about their day to day boring lives. The second is Soul Society, where people go when they die. Soul Society is much like the real world, except more like Edo Japan and with considerably more exploding and fighting things. … mostly it's like the slums of Edo though.
It's not quite so cut and dried though. Many spirits don't go straight to Soul Society. If a dead person has unfinished business, they chill out in the real world for a while, stuck to whatever it is that caused their business, be it a person, a place, or a thing. Furthermore, it's possible for dead people to die again, in which case they become loose spirit particles (presumably, anyway; the series doesn't do a very good job of explaining this).
Most ghosts are fairly harmless. It's not good that they're stuck, but they don't cause much trouble. Some souls, though, aren't harmless at all. These souls are known as Hollows, and they're souls that have lost their hearts. How this happens varies from Hollow to Hollow - some do so through despair, some through rage, some by just being really awful people, and some are created through foul play. The one thing all Hollows have in common, though, is that they live to eat the souls of the living.
Obviously, this is a bad thing, so hundreds of thousands of years ago, a group in Soul Society formed the Shinigami, or Soul Reapers. Shinigami first of all form the ENTIRE upper-class nobility of Soul Society (or so it seems) and pretty much run the place. Their job is to go into the real world and do two things: help ghosts move on, and kill Hollows to protect living souls from getting omnommed. This is not an easy job, especially since some Hollows are ridiculously powerful. While the Shinigami are extremely good at their jobs and can normally take down Hollows without a problem, there's still a large number that are a major threat, and the vast majority of Shinigami can't take on such huge monsters. Captain-level Shinigami, the most powerful of the Shinigami and the main leadership, can of course easily dispatch such monstrosities, but there's only thirteen of them - hardly enough to deal with a global threat, let alone a single city (where most of the action of the series takes place. Apparently the afterlife doesn't exist in the rest of the world, or even the rest of Japan. Except in that one filler arc in the anime.)
As such, the Thirteen Squads (the 'teams' that the Shinigami are divided into) do research to find alternate methods of taking out Hollows. Some learn powerful magic, some just figure if you hit Hollows even harder everything will be fine, and some have more... unorthodox methods.
If by 'unorthodox' we mean 'freaky'.
The most infamous group for this was Squad Twelve, the Research and Development division. Even when they were run by a moderately nice guy they did some weird shit, and it got much worse when they put an amoral psychopath in charge. Yay! Anyway, at one point Squad Twelve decided, as they do, that they'd develop a new superweapon - Modified Souls.
A little background first - Shinigami existing in deep cover in the real world use fake human bodies in order so that they can interact meaningfully with objects wtihout freaking people out too much (in spirit form they are, of coures, invisible, and it's weird when objects start moving on their own). These fake bodies are called Gigai. To avoid rousing suspicion when they suddenly have to exit these bodies to kick ass and take names, the Shinigami developed substitute souls, delivered in a pill, to temporarily inhabit these bodies while they're out.
Mod-souls were an extension of this artificial soul technology. The idea was to create souls with specific superpowers - for instance, extraordinarily strong legs, or extreme strength, or a magnificent singing voice - and then place these souls into the dead bodies of humans for use as weapons against Hollows. Presumably, this was because corpses were cheaper than gigai. In any case, once word of this project reached the higher ups in Soul Society, the ethics of using human corpses got called into question, and the plug was pulled on the project. It was thus ordered that all the mod souls be destroyed, because apparently while using human corpses is unethical, killing hundreds of newly created lives is totally fine.
Kon was one of these modified souls. His specific ability was that he could confer super-powerful legs onto whatever body he inhabited. He sat in his pill-form and watched as his brothers and sisters were all executed for the crime of having been created in the first place, and trembled in fear.
By a stroke of sheer, mad, crazy-ass luck, Kon somehow managed to escape the genocide and got mixed up with a crate of normal substitute souls. This crate somehow ended up in the hands of Urahara Kisuke, the former captain of the 12th Squad and current owner of a small convienence store in Karakura town (the town in the real world that most of the series takes place in.) How Urahara got the crate is never explained - possibly he had it with him when he left Soul Society, possibly he had it stolen, or maybe he gets goods shipped to him routinely, it's a mystery. In any case, he had it with him when one Rukia Kuchiki came to his store.
Rukia Kuchiki was a Soul Reaper who had done a very bad and rather illegial thing - given her powers away to a mortal. Granted, this had been in a moment of true desperation: she'd been wounded, the mortal in question was nearly dead himself, and his family was in danger from a particularly vicious Hollow. In any case, she was hiding from Soul Society, and thus could not go through the normal channels to get much-needed supplies for the day-to-day task of Soul Reaping. Thus, she went to Urahara, whose business was semi-legal at best (remember: former captain). In this case, she needed a substitute soul for the very mortal who was running around with her powers, one Ichigo Kurosaki. As a mortal, Ichigo still had this pesky thing called a life, and it was getting a little hard to leave his unconscious body lying around when he went off to do the whole Soul Reaping thing. As Urahara was out of the particular model of substitute soul Rukia wanted, he gave her a different one. In this case, he reached for entirely the wrong box, and ended up grabbing Kon.
Oops.
Suddenly, Kon found himself in a body! It smelled a little funny, and its face hurt because it frowned all the time, but man, it was a body! He could actually run around! Jump on things! CHASE GIRLS!
He proceeded to spend a day on the town gleefully running around, disrupting Ichigo's class by hitting on all the women, showing off and causing a headache for Rukia as she tried to erase people's memories of a dude jumping twenty feet into the air, and then having a not so gleeful time seeing how cruel young Japanese children can actually be. When Kon witnessed a group of kids deleting their Pokemon because said Pokemon weren't performing the way said kids liked, he broke the gameboys rather than continue to watch, as the idea of someone killing another just because said other wasn't 'useful' anymore was obviously a sore spot for him given how Soul Society had treated him.
Yet later, when the same three boys were attacked by a Hollow, Kon rescued them, using his super speed to drag them out of the way. At this point, an extremely angry Ichigo caught up with him, demanding to know what the hell he was and what he was even doing with his body. As Ichigo was about to beat up the offending mod soul, the Hollow turned on them both, interrupting their yelling match. Ichigo easily dispatched the beast... but Kon, for some reason, decided to kick the Hollow's falling body out of the way. The action nearly cost him his life - they'd been fighting quite close to the edge of a rooftop, and Kon almost fell off. Ichigo grabbed him at the last moment, and demanded to know why Kon had done something so monumentally stupid.
Kon pointed to a line of ants marching along the ground. Ichigo, stunned, pulled Kon up onto the roof, and Kon explained that he was incapable of taking any lives - he felt that, given what Soul Society had tried to do to him, it was wrong for anyone to take the life of another, no matter how small that life was. After that, Ichigo figured that Kon couldn't be the monster Soul Society had made him out to be (Rukia had said earlier that the reason the mod souls had been destroyed was not just because of the question of the ethics of their use, but the potential for them to be extremely dangerous if they went rogue) and decided to let him live.
After that, Kon was placed inside a plushie body to use while he wasn't in Ichigo's. The most notable of these was when a young man named Uryuu Ishida decided to have a pissing contest with Ichigo, citing his hatred of Soul Reapers. As it turned out, Soul Reapers had killed most of Ishida's people, the Quincies, a race of humans with powerful psychic abilities and the power to kill Hollows. Ishida was holding a bit of an irrational grudge, and wanted to prove that Quincies were as strong if not stronger than Soul Reapers and, indeed, necessary to save people. To prove this, Ishida summoned thousands of Hollows into the real world, which nearly killed everyone in Karakura town. Kon was extremely upset by this, and proceeded to chew Ishida out for it, telling him that he was risking thousands of innocent lives for the sake of his own stupid evil. Thankfully, Ichigo managed to avert the crisis, and eventually even begame friends with Ishida. Other than that, Kon was involved in very little, other than getting kicked in the face by Rukia more times than can be counted, and getting himself put in a dress by Ishida. Finally, after Rukia was taken back to Soul Society to be tried for her crime of giving powers to a mortal, Kon was left in Ichigo's body for a very long time. What happened during this time is never fully specified, but one can imagine that he lived a fairly 'normal' life, going to school, coming home, and flirting with every girl ever. Ichigo, meanwhile, pretty much beat up everyone in Soul Society, rescued Rukia only to find the bad guy took off to go do more evil, and... basically, a lot of stuff not all that relevant to Kon himself happened.
When Ichigo came back, he caught Kon jacking off to thoughts of an Orihime / Rukia sandwich. And it's after this awkward moment that SUDDENLY CITY.
BACKGROUND: Kon's world is divided into two halves. The first half is the world we know, the real world, where people live, work, play, breathe, eat, and go about their day to day boring lives. The second is Soul Society, where people go when they die. Soul Society is much like the real world, except more like Edo Japan and with considerably more exploding and fighting things. … mostly it's like the slums of Edo though.
It's not quite so cut and dried though. Many spirits don't go straight to Soul Society. If a dead person has unfinished business, they chill out in the real world for a while, stuck to whatever it is that caused their business, be it a person, a place, or a thing. Furthermore, it's possible for dead people to die again, in which case they become loose spirit particles (presumably, anyway; the series doesn't do a very good job of explaining this).
Most ghosts are fairly harmless. It's not good that they're stuck, but they don't cause much trouble. Some souls, though, aren't harmless at all. These souls are known as Hollows, and they're souls that have lost their hearts. How this happens varies from Hollow to Hollow - some do so through despair, some through rage, some by just being really awful people, and some are created through foul play. The one thing all Hollows have in common, though, is that they live to eat the souls of the living.
Obviously, this is a bad thing, so hundreds of thousands of years ago, a group in Soul Society formed the Shinigami, or Soul Reapers. Shinigami first of all form the ENTIRE upper-class nobility of Soul Society (or so it seems) and pretty much run the place. Their job is to go into the real world and do two things: help ghosts move on, and kill Hollows to protect living souls from getting omnommed. This is not an easy job, especially since some Hollows are ridiculously powerful. While the Shinigami are extremely good at their jobs and can normally take down Hollows without a problem, there's still a large number that are a major threat, and the vast majority of Shinigami can't take on such huge monsters. Captain-level Shinigami, the most powerful of the Shinigami and the main leadership, can of course easily dispatch such monstrosities, but there's only thirteen of them - hardly enough to deal with a global threat, let alone a single city (where most of the action of the series takes place. Apparently the afterlife doesn't exist in the rest of the world, or even the rest of Japan. Except in that one filler arc in the anime.)
As such, the Thirteen Squads (the 'teams' that the Shinigami are divided into) do research to find alternate methods of taking out Hollows. Some learn powerful magic, some just figure if you hit Hollows even harder everything will be fine, and some have more... unorthodox methods.
If by 'unorthodox' we mean 'freaky'.
The most infamous group for this was Squad Twelve, the Research and Development division. Even when they were run by a moderately nice guy they did some weird shit, and it got much worse when they put an amoral psychopath in charge. Yay! Anyway, at one point Squad Twelve decided, as they do, that they'd develop a new superweapon - Modified Souls.
A little background first - Shinigami existing in deep cover in the real world use fake human bodies in order so that they can interact meaningfully with objects wtihout freaking people out too much (in spirit form they are, of coures, invisible, and it's weird when objects start moving on their own). These fake bodies are called Gigai. To avoid rousing suspicion when they suddenly have to exit these bodies to kick ass and take names, the Shinigami developed substitute souls, delivered in a pill, to temporarily inhabit these bodies while they're out.
Mod-souls were an extension of this artificial soul technology. The idea was to create souls with specific superpowers - for instance, extraordinarily strong legs, or extreme strength, or a magnificent singing voice - and then place these souls into the dead bodies of humans for use as weapons against Hollows. Presumably, this was because corpses were cheaper than gigai. In any case, once word of this project reached the higher ups in Soul Society, the ethics of using human corpses got called into question, and the plug was pulled on the project. It was thus ordered that all the mod souls be destroyed, because apparently while using human corpses is unethical, killing hundreds of newly created lives is totally fine.
Kon was one of these modified souls. His specific ability was that he could confer super-powerful legs onto whatever body he inhabited. He sat in his pill-form and watched as his brothers and sisters were all executed for the crime of having been created in the first place, and trembled in fear.
By a stroke of sheer, mad, crazy-ass luck, Kon somehow managed to escape the genocide and got mixed up with a crate of normal substitute souls. This crate somehow ended up in the hands of Urahara Kisuke, the former captain of the 12th Squad and current owner of a small convienence store in Karakura town (the town in the real world that most of the series takes place in.) How Urahara got the crate is never explained - possibly he had it with him when he left Soul Society, possibly he had it stolen, or maybe he gets goods shipped to him routinely, it's a mystery. In any case, he had it with him when one Rukia Kuchiki came to his store.
Rukia Kuchiki was a Soul Reaper who had done a very bad and rather illegial thing - given her powers away to a mortal. Granted, this had been in a moment of true desperation: she'd been wounded, the mortal in question was nearly dead himself, and his family was in danger from a particularly vicious Hollow. In any case, she was hiding from Soul Society, and thus could not go through the normal channels to get much-needed supplies for the day-to-day task of Soul Reaping. Thus, she went to Urahara, whose business was semi-legal at best (remember: former captain). In this case, she needed a substitute soul for the very mortal who was running around with her powers, one Ichigo Kurosaki. As a mortal, Ichigo still had this pesky thing called a life, and it was getting a little hard to leave his unconscious body lying around when he went off to do the whole Soul Reaping thing. As Urahara was out of the particular model of substitute soul Rukia wanted, he gave her a different one. In this case, he reached for entirely the wrong box, and ended up grabbing Kon.
Oops.
Suddenly, Kon found himself in a body! It smelled a little funny, and its face hurt because it frowned all the time, but man, it was a body! He could actually run around! Jump on things! CHASE GIRLS!
He proceeded to spend a day on the town gleefully running around, disrupting Ichigo's class by hitting on all the women, showing off and causing a headache for Rukia as she tried to erase people's memories of a dude jumping twenty feet into the air, and then having a not so gleeful time seeing how cruel young Japanese children can actually be. When Kon witnessed a group of kids deleting their Pokemon because said Pokemon weren't performing the way said kids liked, he broke the gameboys rather than continue to watch, as the idea of someone killing another just because said other wasn't 'useful' anymore was obviously a sore spot for him given how Soul Society had treated him.
Yet later, when the same three boys were attacked by a Hollow, Kon rescued them, using his super speed to drag them out of the way. At this point, an extremely angry Ichigo caught up with him, demanding to know what the hell he was and what he was even doing with his body. As Ichigo was about to beat up the offending mod soul, the Hollow turned on them both, interrupting their yelling match. Ichigo easily dispatched the beast... but Kon, for some reason, decided to kick the Hollow's falling body out of the way. The action nearly cost him his life - they'd been fighting quite close to the edge of a rooftop, and Kon almost fell off. Ichigo grabbed him at the last moment, and demanded to know why Kon had done something so monumentally stupid.
Kon pointed to a line of ants marching along the ground. Ichigo, stunned, pulled Kon up onto the roof, and Kon explained that he was incapable of taking any lives - he felt that, given what Soul Society had tried to do to him, it was wrong for anyone to take the life of another, no matter how small that life was. After that, Ichigo figured that Kon couldn't be the monster Soul Society had made him out to be (Rukia had said earlier that the reason the mod souls had been destroyed was not just because of the question of the ethics of their use, but the potential for them to be extremely dangerous if they went rogue) and decided to let him live.
After that, Kon was placed inside a plushie body to use while he wasn't in Ichigo's. The most notable of these was when a young man named Uryuu Ishida decided to have a pissing contest with Ichigo, citing his hatred of Soul Reapers. As it turned out, Soul Reapers had killed most of Ishida's people, the Quincies, a race of humans with powerful psychic abilities and the power to kill Hollows. Ishida was holding a bit of an irrational grudge, and wanted to prove that Quincies were as strong if not stronger than Soul Reapers and, indeed, necessary to save people. To prove this, Ishida summoned thousands of Hollows into the real world, which nearly killed everyone in Karakura town. Kon was extremely upset by this, and proceeded to chew Ishida out for it, telling him that he was risking thousands of innocent lives for the sake of his own stupid evil. Thankfully, Ichigo managed to avert the crisis, and eventually even begame friends with Ishida. Other than that, Kon was involved in very little, other than getting kicked in the face by Rukia more times than can be counted, and getting himself put in a dress by Ishida. Finally, after Rukia was taken back to Soul Society to be tried for her crime of giving powers to a mortal, Kon was left in Ichigo's body for a very long time. What happened during this time is never fully specified, but one can imagine that he lived a fairly 'normal' life, going to school, coming home, and flirting with every girl ever. Ichigo, meanwhile, pretty much beat up everyone in Soul Society, rescued Rukia only to find the bad guy took off to go do more evil, and... basically, a lot of stuff not all that relevant to Kon himself happened.
When Ichigo came back, he caught Kon jacking off to thoughts of an Orihime / Rukia sandwich. And it's after this awkward moment that SUDDENLY CITY.