Cloud Strife heaved a great sigh as he mopped the sweat off his face with an already-damp handkerchief. Shielding his bright, sharp blue eyes against the sun that seemed to hang perpetually overhead, he squinted back at his comrades, still carefully making their way over a pebble-strewn hillside a dozen or so meters back. Cid Highwind was using his spear-lance as a makeshift walking stick and was still smoking that damnable dogend of a cigar! Tifa Lockheart, bringing up the rear, looked confident as she strode briskly and eagerly.
Catching Cloud looking at her, she smiled at him. Taken aback, he waved, slowly.
"Whatsamatta, kid?" asked Cid, suddenly right behind him. He had a knowing grin on his face, but Cloud paid it no mind, as usual. "Got lead in your pants? Or something else, eh?"
The grizzled pilot paused next to the spike-haired blonde and looked back at Tifa. She looked as though she had barely broken a sweat. He smiled at her.
This time it was her turn to look taken aback. Turning her nose distastefully in the air, she sniffed at him.
The leathery-faced man grinned even more broadly at this, then nudged Cloud with the haft of his spear-lance. "Don't know what you see in her, lad. Not exactly the most girlish girl, that one, but maybe you like the strong-willed ones, eh?" With a deep chuckle, Cid wiped his face on his blue denim jacket, which already had dark wet pockets of sweat underneath each armpit. "Keep it moving, blondie. This sun's doing a number on my pores."
Without a word, Cloud turned and continued, his heavy SOLDIER boots grinding brittle shells to dust underfoot. Cid muttered under his breath, softly enough so that only Cloud's heightened senses could hear it; trying to get a rise out of the boyo was like slandering a wall. Ultimately pointless.
Cloud marched on, silently, his jaw set determinedly but not angrily. In his gauntleted hands, he cradled a black silk bag.
"What I don't get," Tifa called, while leaping frown from what appeared to be an oddly shaped exposed tree root, "is two things." She frowned to herself as she noticed that she hadn't seen any trees whatsoever in this barren land before, and nearly screamed when she turned around to look again. Before her, rising high out of the dusty ground was a mammoth-sized rib bone long ago bleached in the relentless sun. She did not want to consider what kind of animal would be so monstrous to have a rib like that.
"What was that?" Cid called back.
"I want to know two things," Tifa replied. "First, what are all these stupid fish things doing here? Yuck!" She kicked aside a fossilized fish head the size of a melon.
"Beats me," Cid shrugged. "What's the second?"
"What are we doing here?"
The trio walked out into what finally looked like a clearing. In the center of the forest of spires of bones was an oddly beautiful house, bleached white from sunlight. It looked like it was made from a giant spiraling sea conch and massive driftwood, with odd jutting spikes protruding randomly from it.
Tifa's gaze drifted upwards, speechless.
"Long ago," said Cloud, startling everyone, "the world was flooded. Sea creatures flourished where once was land." His hand rested on the hilt of his huge Ultima sword, ready to draw, as he confidently stepped inside the house. The interior was a conch, if there was any doubt left. It spiraled up and down, lit by blue mysterious lights. Tifa and Cid followed him in warily.
"When the waters of the great flood finally receded, eons later, it stranded the fish here, in this valley, even this far inland. This is what remained." Cloud came across a trapdoor in the floor and lifted it, throwing up clouds of dust into the air. Tiny motes drifted around them. Stairs disappeared into darkness underneath the trapdoor. Cloud peered down into the looming dark, not looking at Tifa. "Does that answer your first question?"
Although he couldn't see her, she nodded behind him.
"As for your second question," Cloud said, seemingly satisfied, "We're going to use this." He held up the black silk bag, which contained something roughly the size and shape of a brick.
The party went down the steps, which along the way somewhere, transformed into...something else. It was still solid, but it seemed to be made of a delicate crystal with an ephemeral purple-white light glowing from with. All of a sudden, it seemed as though the spiraling stairs were made of this light, ready to vanish in a heartbeat. There was no light, besides the steps they walked upon, but they could still see as clear as day. The air above and around them shimmered and refracted, as though they were underwater. The staircase spiraled on....
"Where did you learn all of that?" Tifa asked, her voice echoing eerily back to her.
"The abandoned Shin-Ra mansion, back in Nibelheim," Cloud said.
Cid nodded, comprehending. He had seen the great library underneath the sprawling haunted mansion back in Cloud's and Tifa's hometown. Filled with more books than he had seen in his life, it must have held secrets beyond their imagination. Could this staircase be leading them to the same?
No, they had been here before. And as the great city suddenly loomed before them below, recognition dawned on all their faces slowly, except on Cloud's, who seemed to expect all of this.
"Holy mother," Cid said simply. His jaw hung, and the cigar dropped to the floor.