Kagerōza Inaba

Around his colleagues Inaba keeps a restrained look, a lab coat thrown over the black shihakushō on a tall, spare frame. His straight hair falls to the chin and parts to one side, oddly two-toned with green on the right and yellow on the left, above a long face set with round spectacles and hands kept in white gloves. In private he trades all this for a far gaudier guise: a full-length yellow robe that buttons up the front and rears high behind his head, the glasses gone and a cane in hand. Uryū Ishida remarks that the flamboyant getup echoes that of Mayuri Kurotsuchi.

Among the Twelfth Division he plays the courteous subordinate, deferring to those above him, but the mask drops elsewhere: he is curt with Kon and strikes Nozomi without pity. He idolizes Mayuri even while holding himself the superior scientist in every respect, and he nurses open scorn for the Central 46 members who once buried his creator's research out of fear. What tenderness he shows is reserved for Nozomi, whom he warns clear of his attacks and is relieved to find unharmed, a trace of the rage and ambition he absorbed from Ōko Yushima.

Some ninety-six years earlier, the researcher Ōko Yushima developed Modified Soul technology under Project Spearhead, an effort to place artificial souls into dead human bodies to fight Hollows, until Central 46 halted it, wary of souls that could be steered at will. With the work slated for destruction, Yushima distilled its data into a special form of Reishi and cast it into the Dangai, then spun a fresh Mod-Soul from his own essence, one that somehow divided into Inaba and Nozomi Kujō. Carrying Yushima's memories and his dream, Inaba buried himself among the Shinigami, climbing to Seventh Seat while using Dangai study as cover to reclaim the lost data from the Kōtotsu and to build the Reigai, false copies of the Gotei's officers. His Zanpakutō, Raikū, warps space itself, tearing open portals to the Dangai that swallow enemies and recording their attacks to fling back at them, a power that can even duplicate himself. He raises a Reigai army to take Soul Society and to seize Nozomi, since merging with her would revive Yushima. The fusion does briefly restore Yushima as a formidable Mod-Soul, but Ichigo Kurosaki cuts him down, unraveling the union and separating the pair once more. Dying at last, Inaba wonders aloud whether they had been wrong all along.