I looked out of my window onto the street below. The Shinra army were marching past, all eager to please, to boost the ratings, to make us believe in the government and their mako regulations. I couldn't swallow it somehow. I had only recently moved here to Junon, previously living in the sector 5 slums of Midgar. Here the Shinra Government provided themselves with an all too convenient glossy shine: in Midgar there's no escaping the reality of the way they treat their people and planet.
In Junon the public walk around not even realising how people live in other parts of the world, how the people of wall street market scrape to get by, always staring up at the grime and loose wires on the underside of the plate above them. I used to work in a cafeteria on wall street, serving hot food to those who managed to get enough money to eat out. It was long hours and tiring, but the people who came in never failed to make the day – everyone seems to lose their minds down there in the slums: even the most seemingly together people will start telling you about how they can't stop staring up at the support structures or can't stop riding the trains back and forth or spend all their wages feeding the strays.
Everything changed when the plate fell. The government blamed it on Avalanche but most of us in the slums knew the truth: we knew Avalanche were fighting against them. Maybe it was a mistake. I don't know. But things changed, people lost their charm, the slums lost whatever hope we had. That's when I knew I had to leave, I had to get away from where we were just to survive. To cut a long story short, I made it to Junon. I scraped the money together and now I live in a box room over looking the high street in the industrial city by the sea.
One day I'm hoping to get a ship across the Costa del Sol on the other side of the sea, it's no real escape from Shinra but at least it's hot and the tourism means there's a lot of work. It's a distant hope though, the cost of tickets are unbelievable and the chances of being able to get work on a cargo ship with no experience practically nil. I've even been thinking of applying to work for Shinra, anything for a chance to earn some money and get as far away from here as possible: away from the corrupt capital, away from the voices of the friends and family I lost when the plate fell…it was during this daydream, this reverie, that I started to notice a single out of step soldier in the parade. His blonde hair was crushed under his Shinra cap, and he was always one two steps out of time with everyone else, anxious to keep his cool. But he radiated. Not sexual or even with beauty, but with something that kept him separate from the others. Not a light, nor a halo, nor any sort of tangible presence, it was just something in his step and posture, or the way his uniform hung on his figure. I didn't think about it for long. I turned away from my window, pulling the shutters down and forgot about it.