Prologue

During the battle over False Karakura Town

Szayelaporro Granz blinked, glancing around. He was a little disoriented, despite having fully expected the transition to be hard. What he hadn't expected was the sudden panic that gripped him as the seconds slipped by, each one coming and going again in heartbeats.

The wound in his chest where Mayuri had stabbed him was already healing, the last of the insidious poison completely disabled inside his body. Szayelaporro stepped back, putting out a hand to steady himself against a fallen pillar. His form blurred for a moment as he reverted back to his unreleased form, then he sheathed his sword, sinking to the ground to let himself recover.

Mayuri had thought slowing a killing blow to the time of a thousand years was a cruel way to win a battle, cruel and ingenious. And with anyone else on the other side of the attack, he would have been right. But Szayelaporro rivaled Mayuri's cruel genius, and when you give a genius a century for every second, particularly a genius capable of manipulating his own body's chemistry, how can you be surprised when he finds his way out?

Szayelaporro knew he couldn't just die. There were captains in Hueco Mundo, in Las Noches itself, and he could tell that Aizen, his Generals and the three first Espada were already in the World of the Living, possibly fighting against the rest of Soul Society's forces now.

The Espada inside Hueco Mundo… there was another story. Szayelaporro frowned as he tried to find his companions' reiatsu, but all he could feel was an almost overwhelming pressure from Ulquiorra. Anything else there might have been to feel was drowned out.

He rested there until he felt strong enough, then began investigating the area, looking for clues as to what had happened after he had been poisoned and stabbed. As he expected, the Shinigami scientist had found his lab. He smirked as he pictured the "fun" Mayuri would get out of the equipment and experiments Szayelaporro had set up in there. The notion almost made being stabbed and suffering it for a few centuries worth it. He walked through the now empty lab, hardly caring about the missing projects. Nothing in here had been that important, most of it just sabotage. His real treasures would have been much harder to find… had his rival even bothered to look.

He released his Resurrección again for just a moment, using the coded sequence to open the secondary vault. As soon as it opened, he reverted back, not wanting to use more energy now then he needed to. He was relieved to see it was all still here, his experiments, his tests, his equipment, his backups…

His backups.

He smiled. They were still here. Whatever happened now, he was ready.

The plan was still in place.

[Author's Introduction:

Backup Plan is my main Bleach Fanfiction, started late March 2013, completed early February 2014. As one of my biggest writing projects so far, there are a few quirks I would like to point out at the beginning. I'll try to keep it short. :)

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Backup Plan was written with purposefully limited information. I held off reading any of the manga past the end of the anime so my original ideas would remain uncorrupted by new knowledge, so please read with that in mind and keep any reviews free of manga spoilers.

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Backup Plan was written as a novel, with a novel's pacing, so the first few chapters may be slow. It does not stay this way. :D It is also fully complete, so I should be able to update regularly.

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Backup Plan was a Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge, the entire book written over the course of three and a half months with a strict word-count goal. (Results of Nanowrimo may vary.)

While I have edited it, there are some parts that might simply not make any sense. These instances should be few and far between, and they are not meant to set a tone for the chapter or book.

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OCs will appear. Some are rather important. However, I have tried to make all major OCs as reasonable as possible. Please be patient with them. :D

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And that concludes my introduction. I'll try to keep any author's notes from now on infrequent and short so as to avoid interrupting the story. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!]