Disclaimer: I don't own FFVIII
An: Another story my mind made me do. I know there are others I should be doing (my Descendants story, my XME story, my old PR stories...), but this insisted for some reason has hijacked my brain.
The constant ringing of the doorbell echoed through the suite, jerking Squall into wakefulness. A brief glance at the clock told him it was 2 a.m. and Squall mentally checked the sorts of things that would be considered worth waking him for at such a time - none of them were good and all of them were vital for Garden's continued operation.
Even his experienced hands were shaking with nerves as he fumbled around in the dark for his two most crucial items (the Lionheart gunblade and his leather jacket, not necessarily in that order), before he rushed out of his bedroom and across a strange room he didn't know the purpose for that was still part of his new quarters all the same - a short while after they'd saved time from the sorceress Cid had taken extended leave and named Squall as the acting headmaster in his place, as well as the in-all-but-name Garden Master, and with that Squall had moved into the Garden's executive suite that priorly was held by one of the bizarrely attired Garden Faculty. Squall had of course been very proud to be taking Cid's place - right up until he realised just how much paperwork came with the job. He was now usually working fourteen hour days not even counting the time spent training.
But this was obviously not the best time to reminisce. As he reached the door he paused but a moment as he junctioned his strongest spells (Ultima, Meteor, Meltdown, Holy, Haste, Triple etc.) - since the only ones he kept junctioned at night were abilities and St-Defs to ensure he wasn't taken easily in his sleep - and opened the door to find Zell on the other side. He was bouncing on his feet in quite a state and with his hoverboard strapped to his back his frantic posture looked really silly.
"Come quickly, it's awful. They're all gone!" Zell cried.
Squall's mirth at the sight of him died on the spot. Images of his friends being drugged and carted off in their sleep flashed through his mind completely removing any remaining traces of sleepiness before he thought the better of it. Had it been that then Zell would've likely been the first to succumb - Zell had never had any Stop status resistance junctioned while Selphie like himself had a Ribbon active, and Rinoa had 100 Stops on St-Def. So chances were it probably wasn't his friends who had vanished. That still didn't bode well however.
"Zell, slow down a bit and start making sense." Squall grabbed his shoulders. He'd have preferred not to do anything so 'touchy' but he didn't see an alternative, he would have to be Commander Leonhart right now - he could be the usual Squall again when it was done.
"I checked the supplies, and it was gone. What should we do?"
OK, so it wasn't people who'd disappeared but items. Squall's thoughts changed to someone having stolen all the weapons and ammo from one of the storage rooms, and worried about what would happen if they were used to say, shell Balamb. He hoped he could catch whoever it was before any real damage could be done.
"One second." Squall activated a monitor in his room and called the front gate. "Has anyone taken anything out of the building in the last half an hour?" he asked the SeeD unfortunate enough to have punishment duty filling in for the gate-man late at night.
"Certainly not out of here Commander," she answered. "Nor has a car left the garage. I suppose it's possible that someone walked out the garage - I think I'd see or hear that but I guess it's just about possible if they were lucky, to say nothing of the hole in the wall down in the Quad but I don't think anything could be carried through that gap with someone."
Luck might possibly be on their side after all. Squall pulled up the admin network which only the senior Garden administrators could access and typed one word into the PC: "LOCKDOWN".
Amber lights started flashing across the Garden as all the official outer exits closed and secured themselves (well, the turnstiles stopped working at least), and the alert SeeDs that Squall made sure were awake at night in case a sudden time sensitive assignment came up proceeded straight to the 2nd Floor Armory before they would go to the briefing room as they were trained to do in this scenario. Squall meanwhile asked Zell to show him what was missing first hand.
The two of them raced along and around corridors almost bumping into Instructor Aki and Doctor Kadowaki on their rounds just before the turn off to the Training Center.
"What's the crisis commander?" The instructor asked. "Why are the alarms blaring?" Since Squall had taken over Garden while Cid was on extended leave he and the strict teacher had been getting along better - Aki had grasped that while Squall didn't like the more severe punishments it was his reluctant duty to dish out, he was OK with regular ones that instructors could give on their own, and now that Squall was managing Garden he had come to appreciate the need for discipline. In fact in the last month their only disagreement had been over Irvine.
"I don't fully know," Squall replied. "All I can tell you is that Zell kept repeating 'It's gone' over and over again. At the moment we're on our way to see just what 'it' is."
"Do you require any assistance?"
"I think we can manage that part. I'll tell you what though, the girl at the gate said that nobody had gone through there, but do you think you could check the hole in the fence at the quad, and if there're no footprints guard it to make sure nobody slips through?"
"I think I can manage that." The instructor turned to leave.
Before anyone actually moved however the nearby door swung open, and Squall had his gunblade raised faster than most people could blink (100 haste junctioned on speed after all) before his eyes and brain caught up and he took in the sight of one of his SeeDs, a rank 5 named Chad Clint, (unremarkable but OK for the more boring assignments like guarding Balamb's gate - and at six foot seven he was certainly an impressive sight for bouncer jobs too) and a girl he didn't know the name of but he knew both from sight and her uniform was one of the cadets from the year below him (and also he'd played against her just enough to know that she favoured Page 3 cards), and both looked rather dishevelled with his uniform in need of ironing and her blonde hair somewhat matted.
"Don't hurt us!" The girl cried out.
"What are you doing here? Speak?" Squall was in 'Commander Leonhart' mode.
"We were training. Yeah, training. Had an unfortunate run in with a T-Rexaur. We were just on our way out when the alarms went off, yeah." Chad was stammering his answers and while that was usually a sign of hiding something, the fact that both of them had started to blush gave Squall the impression that it had nothing to do with any stolen item. If the way she was looking at them was any indicator then Doctor Kadowaki understood that too, and possibly Aki, but sadly Zell had missed that detail.
"Um, Jas is it?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"Why're your trousers inside out?"
Squall hadn't noticed that, and it was just the sort of thing he desperately wanted not to see. And with her gun-belt blocking the view of the most obvious parts like the label, how had Zell spotted that? He must be more observant than Squall usually gave him credit for.
"At one point she got bitten hard and we wanted to make sure the potion had worked so she removed them and must've got it wrong when she put it back on," Chad explained. Again his answers were plausible but unlikely, and as Chad continued to shuffle and play his fingers along his warhammer Zell determined to continue his interrogation of them.
"Oh cut it out Chad, you know as well as I do that potions have never had any issues. So I'm forced to conclude that it was you. You're the ones that took them from-"
"Zell, seriously, shut it." Squall turned back to him not quite believing what he was hearing. "Just, stop, now."
"Don't tell me you believe them?" Zell asked in disbelief.
Squall took a few deep breaths before replying. "Zell, a clearly ragged couple has emerged from the Training Center and its attached inverted commas 'Secret Romantic Area' at two in the morning. Even if purely for the sake of discussion their story is untrue, if your mind sees all that evidence and your first conclusion is 'thief' then you're even more repressed than I am, and I will have to recommend the Library Committee hand deliver you some books to explain some more likely possibilities. I daresay your girlfriend would be more than happy to fill you in on any-"
"Right, got where you're going with this, thank you. But Chad, Jas, why would you lie about that? And why Squall apart from your usual disinterest would you not want them to say it? Gimme five guys."
"Instructor Aki." Squall faced the teacher. "Would you please recite for Zell's benefit the related passage of Garden's rules?"
"Gladly. Mr. Dinct, the rule as viewable from the PC bulletin is: 'Any student who engages in sexual promiscuity will be expelled from Garden'. So assuming the commander doesn't want to expel Jasmine and downgrade Chad's pay to rank 0 on the headmaster's behalf he's willing to give their highly dubious story the benefit of the doubt."
"And you?" Zell asked quietly. Chad gripped his girlfriend's hand.
"It's not up to me. I can issue detentions but I cannot expel anyone from the grounds, I can only request whoever's sat in the head's chair does so and given that's Commander Leonhart I'm fairly certain he'll refuse. And while you might not believe it even I would rather not lose a student because someone who only earned his gold uniform because N.O.R.G. was desperate for recruits after you left for Galbradia decided that he was too cheap to rent a hotel room - it's like he doesn't realise half the rules were written to promote craftiness... That said, Chad, you are demoted one rank for violation of proper alert protocols and Jas, for a collection of uniform violations you will serve one detention with me."
Chad and Jas breathed sighs of relief as they hugged each other, as did Squall - it seemed Aki would not be pestering him into expelling anyone after all.
"Please make sure that in said detention you go over basic stealth and recon," requested Squall. "Not looking through the keyhole before opening the door was a rookie mistake."
"~Commander Leonhart, they've assembled in the briefing room." Xu's voice came over the speaker system. Xu wasn't a member of his night squad but she'd been teaching the classes in night missions twice a week so the other days she was his choice for manning the desk in case a call came in at that late hour. Squall wasn't sure how much he liked having Xu as one of Garden's instructors but the appointment had been one of the last things Cid had done so there wasn't much he could do about it. He did however like her as both an operative and an operator and so he was very thankful that she was supervising the night shift.
Squall turned around and walked in front of a security camera and spoke to it. "Talk to me Xu, is anyone other than us in any of the corridors?"
"~[Squeak][buzz] That's a no commander."
Squall divided it up in his head. "Xu, send Mark and Karona to guard the garages. Aki, are you still here?"
"Yes Commander."
"Take Chad with you to the Quad as reinforcements, we've wasted more than enough time here. Doctor, take Jas to the infirmary, check her over against the very slim chance they were telling the truth, and then find an excuse to keep her for overnight observation - I don't want a cadet wandering around on their own. Xu, stay where you are with somebody, don't care who on the cameras and should anyone appear direct me and Zell their way. Split the remaining six people into two groups of three, the instructions are to methodically check everything that the cameras don't cover that wouldn't have been locked - the training center, the lift, my office and everything else on the second floor, the bathrooms, the larder... in short the complete works. Go now all of you. Zell, lead the way to where it was taken."
Expecting danger with every step Squall followed as Zell went round another corridor, then down another, until they were outside the library and Zell was gesturing frantically. Squall followed his line of vision, stared a little harder, and was filled with a growing sense of disbelief.
"Let me get this straight." Squall's voice was flat even by his standards. "You woke me up at 2 a.m. - that rare time when I'm actually able to get some sleep, allowing me to believe something truly horrible had happened and allowed it to cascade so it's causing all sorts of chaos, all because the Library Hallway vending machine has run out of Mini-Chocobars?"
"It's a disaster," Zell pled. "Fix it please."
Squall tried to find a way to express his displeasure. Surely there must be an option somewhere? The old Garden faculty, difficult though they were, had never once had this problem... Of course.
"OK Zell, hear's what I'm going to do," said Squall slowly. "You are demoted 5 SeeD ranks for being down here out of hours. Just because none of the faculty are here to stand in the way of the corridor any longer doesn't mean the rule against being here after dark has been repealed. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to bed. I suggest, come morning, that you go to Balamb and acquire another few crates. You're lucky I'm not assigning you to the 'Safeguard idol singer mission' for this."
Crisis averted, or more precisely, false alarm discovered, Squall lifted the lockdown - the lights returned to normal and the exits unlocked, and Squall raced to the briefing room to recall his alert SeeDs before he went back to bed, undisturbed this time, enjoying nice dreams of fighting Abyss Worms with Rinoa, Selphie and (for some reason) Nida.
But morning came all too early for Squall. After a meagre three hours of sleep he was already forcing himself out of bed - he could cancel early morning classes and give the students a break, which was only fair given their sleep had been disturbed by the alarm too and he shifted the Garden wake-up call back an hour after leaving a message on the PCs and main noticeboards to explain what was happening. His own nigh-endless paperwork was stockpiled in his office and it wouldn't do itself, and if he didn't get at least some done before breakfast then he wouldn't likely get out of his office until gone 10 that night.
Sadly though there was nothing quite like processing the admin department's stationary procurement forms to lull an already tired individual back to sleep so when Squall next looked at the clock it was nearly midday.
Hoping some sunlight would help him wake up Squall wandered to an outside window and gazed out, but down below him he couldn't believe his eyes. Garden rules were being broken left, right and centre and Squall wondered if he'd somehow cancelled all classes rather than just that one. It was then that he realized he'd left one of Garden's sharpest eyes for rule breaking guarding a fallen down glorified fencing panel all night.
It was one of those days...
Characters (and their reletive canonicity):
Squall, Zell, Rinoa and Selphie are playable.
Doctor Kadowaki and Instructor Aki are canon members of Garden's staff - Aki's the one that keeps pay-cutting Squall for rule-breaking and at one point chastises the library committee and Kadowaki runs the infirmary. They're the only staff who still appear after the civil-war (other than Cid).
Xu is canonically one of Quistis's friends/club-members who helps to oversee the Dollet mission and is a regularly occuring NPC throughout the game - making her a teacher was just me being me.
Nida's the pilot who graduated along with Squall, Zell and Selphie and isn't much of a fighter at all.
Chad, Jas, Mark and Karona are my OCs and so not canon. The girl at the gate is technically one of my OCs but is just a random person so could just as easily be anyone standing around in any sort of Garden uniform other than the faculty.
I think that's everyone.
An2: Just checking here is case I write anything else for this fandom, Zell's girlfriend doesn't have a canon name does she? So I'm free to make one up? (At the moment I'm tending towards 'Paige Turner' just because I like stupid puns.)
Please point out any glaring errors you find - sometimes the author is the last to see them.