'Ello, 'ello. What's all this, then? Sure, I stopped writing Tifa's Bogus Journey like, two years ago. But Advent Children and its cliché awfulness gave me reason to come back to the concept, and dust off two old favorites (and by favorites, I mean those obnoxious tag-alongs from Tifa's Bogus Journey). If you haven't read TBG, no real worries. Maybe just check out the first chapter or two to brush up on who 'Greg' and 'Jim-Jam' are. And if you have an exceptional memory, you may notice some lines from TBG popping up within the descriptions of the 'Sephiroth guys' (since they kind of struck me as that unstoppably badass villain type).

Nothing much this chapter, just getting the gang all together again, and laying some groundwork. The true stupidity will begin next chapter.

The room was almost completely pitch-black, two people sitting forlornly at the bar in adjacent stools. They weren't doing much, simply staring at the neatly lined rows of bottles along the back wall in complete silence.

They'd been there some time. Never eating, never sleeping, simply….. waiting.

"You think she's ever coming back?" The one on the left, a man, asked despondently, elbows propped up on the counter, resting his chin in his hands. His hair was long and unkempt, looking more like a mullet than it ever had before.

"Doubt it." His companion mumbled bitterly. "It's been two years now. She probably got tired of us, dumped us off here and ran. I don't think she even liked us. Just put up with us so she could live out her personal vendetta fantasy."

"Really?" He asked, sounding surprised "Two years? Seems like it was only a chapter or so ago that we were still having an adventure." He blinked slowly, staring at himself in the mirror that reflected the room in its entirety, giving the small area an illusion of being far more spacious than it was. His green eyes had since lost their ephemeral glow. Well, it had never been ephemeral before since it normally had a constant, almost agonizing-to-look-directly-at sort of sheen, but I suppose it was ephemeral now, since they didn't really glow anymore.

Though, big words like 'ephemeral' make the writing seem more high-minded and sophisticated. Not like any readers will take pause, bust out an online Thesaurus and call me on the fact that the adjective being used doesn't actually mean what I think it means.

Ethereal.

The word we were going for was ethereal. But whatever. Like anyone would be all like 'Hey! You used ephemeral, when the word you wanted was ethereal. Use a vocabulary within your grasp, jackass!'

"It's like time flows differently here." The woman next to him agreed, running a hand across her clean-shaven scalp, fingers bumping over the staples holding areas of split skin and bone together. Her head wound should have been completely healed by then. Her hair should have begun to grow back, should have reached a manageable length in the time they had been there. But not even a single hair had grown back. There were some rather odd black and pink (no longer could she refer to it as sable-streaked lilac) patterns along her scalp from when her head had been shaved, but that was the most of it.

They weren't cool anymore. Had no reason to be. Nobody, no protagonists, for them to handily upstage, and assert their badassery upon. It was if their appearances had responded to their new sense of self-awareness and despair. They didn't even look ridiculous-powerful anymore. Hardly even looked ridiculous. The looked sad and defeated.

Gods, they looked….. weak.

Normal.

"God, I believed her when she said she'd be back." He nearly sobbed, pounding his fist on the bartop, a blow which, normally, would have cleaved the wood cleanly in two. But now, the liquid in the bottles lined up beneath it barely sloshed against the glass. "I….. I trusted her. I liked her. How could I have been so blind?!"

"It's not your fault. You were created to be this way. Obsessed with her, blindly following her every move, not questioning her as long as you got to stay close. I'm no different. I hate her. Always have. And for what reason? None. No reason at all, I just hate her. I take one look at her, and I want to just….. crush her." She shrugged indifferently, seeming to have come to terms with her lot in her rather tremulous existence.

Tenuous. Her tenuous existence. It's questionable, not unsteady. God, how hard is it to find a Thesaurus, for serious?! How hard is it?! Seriously, how hard is it to take five minutes to stop, type in the word you want to use, and then take the biggest, fanciest synonym for it that you find and pop it into your story?

Er….. all tangents aside, the two morose lurkers were finding their erstwhile freedom of choice beginning to dwindle away; slip through their fingers. He was becoming more and more obsessed, and she was once again beginning to hate the subject of their conversation for no reason.

"What should we do, then? Just go back? Back to the base, back to our story?" She continued, hands falling in into her lap helplessly.

"What base?!" He half shouted, turning toward her, grasping her chin roughly so they were eye to eye "What story?! We don't exist, don't you get it?! We aren't supposed to exist! We never had a real story! We were just a pastiche of two original characters, with ridiculous false back-stories created for the sole purpose of attempted humor! We're not really villains! We were created only to make fun of actual 'attempts-to-make-an-unstoppably-badass villain' villains! My God, don't you see?! She left us, and we have no reason to be written about anymore! That's it! We're gone, completely wiped out of any kind of existence!"

They stared at each other, the silence dragging out almost painfully, his eyes wide and almost wild in his anger, hers baleful and shocked, as the information of their paradoxical existence started to sink in. Finally, she spoke, picking her words carefully, as not to further incite her already ruffled comrade.

"But….. if we don't exist anymore, what are we doing?"

He had no reply, eyes narrowed as he struggled to come to grasps with her question. But, before he could formulate any sort of far-reaching speculation, the door was suddenly thrown inwards, knocked from its hinges in an ungodly burst of strength. A bright dazzling light radiated from the threshold, silhouetting the figure standing there.

Their heads turned slowly, in almost perfect unison, toward the figure, mouths open to speak, but not finding the words.

She had returned.

"Why's it so dark in here?" The almost heavenly figure asked lightly, reaching out, palm flat to the wall, feeling for the light switch. Finally, her hand brushed across it, instantly illuminating the room, despite the fact that the power had been shut off not long after she had left two years ago, citing some 'important matters'.

She looked different. Shorter hair, a more conservative, badass outfit, a decently-proportioned chest (no longer was she flat as a board like she had been after removing those horribly over-sized inserts when this had all first began).

They stared, awe-struck, as if seeing some sort of saintly miracle occurring. But she just breezed into the room, leaving the swirling limbo of the undefined space outside the bar, smiling at them disarmingly, hands out and supine (or, y'know 'palms up' before the thesaurus change), like some matronly goddess.

"Hey-" Her greeting was cut off by the clatter of the bar stools being forcefully abandoned and knocked to the floor, the loud, hurried scuffle of shoes on heavy wood flooring. They lunged at her, catching her around the upper arms and waist in a nearly-crippling grip, but there was no malice in it. No longer would they try to beat her into squealing submission and throw her into a burlap sack.

"We thought you were never coming back, Tifa! We….. we thought you'd forgotten about us!" The woman nearly sobbed, face buried against the martial artist's chest, breathing in heaving, relieved gasps, a thin thread of spittle trailing from the corner of her mouth onto the leather vest Tifa now wore.

"What took you so long?" The man asked from where he was latched around her waist, staring up at her questioningly, his dull eyes blazing back to life with a renewed, re-energized 'glow-in-the-freaking-dark'-ness. It almost hurt Tifa to look directly at them.

She just smiled, laying her hands on them soothingly, giving them a moment before she tried to disentangle herself. They were reluctant to let her go, as if they feared she would leave again, leave them in an existential state of non-being.

"Well….." She started thoughtfully, making her way to one of the tables in the center of the room, motioning for them to follow. She pulled a chair out and sat down, propping her elbows up on the table, resting her chin against her palms. "Oh, let's see if you can figure it out."

"Okay, shoot. Was it something cool and super-important?" The woman asked, grinning wolfishly, her elongated, filed-to-a-razor-point teeth gleaming in the light. It was almost magic, the way Tifa's presence had revitalized their eradicated morale; rejuvenated their ridiculously overhauled powers and 'awesome' (AKA 'ridiculous if you actually stopped for a second and thought about it') appearance. She was starting to feel badass again. And her leather outfit no longer chafed incessantly as it had when Tifa had left them alone.

"Um….." She paused, nose wrinkling up a little as she thought of how to field that question. "Okay, so, basically, here's the run-down. It was two years after Meteor, I was living with Cloud and some kids in the rebuilt city by the ruins of Midgar, where I worked as a bartender, and being all 'Oh, why won't you love me Cloud?', and he was all like 'Oh Aerith, I loved you sooooooooo much, I suck because I let you die. Oh, I'm so angsty!'. And there was this mysterious disease killing people, and then there was all this hub-bub about Jenova, and there were these three guys with completely retarded names that were avatars of Sephiroth, and if they got Jenova's head they would be Sephiroth.

"And then Cloud gets a call from the Turks, and Rufus was alive and shit, and he was all 'Oh hey, I'm not dead, I have the Turks, and there's a new threat to the world let's have a fuckin' team-up'. And Cloud was all 'No. Aerith's dead. Boo hoo. I suck.' And I was all mopey, and I fought one of those Sephiroth guys after I found out Cloud was living in Aerith's abandoned church, and dying from that mysterious sickness. I totally kicked that Sephiroth guy's ass with all these super-human martial arts moves, but then he cheated, and then Cloud had to come rescue my unconscious ass.

"Then, his mysterious illness flared up, and after we woke up, and Reno and Rude helped us (probably because I owned a freakin' bar), Cloud went off to the Forgotten City to fight the Sephiroth guys, and had visions of Aerith. He got outmatched by the Sephiroth guys because they were far, far too powerful (even for the people that saved the Planet and beat the guy they were parts of), only to be rescued by Vincent, who was all being a bitter, broken-hearted man, and living all alone and shit. So then Cloud comes back to the city outside of the ruins of Midgar with a renewed resolve to save the day, two of the Sephiroth guys show that they're totally bad news by beating up on Reno and Rude, then everybody showed up for the big boss fight, and, needless to say, Barret and Nanaki got very little screen time.

Her two companions were sitting there, taking in the whole retelling of her adventure, becoming more and more disenchanted by every unenthusiastic run-on sentence that spilled out of her mouth.

"And then the one Sephiroth guys turned into Sephiroth and Cloud fought him one-on-one for a sense of closure and forgiveness, Barret did some funky jive-talk, Vincent seemed to know exactly every-fucking-thing happening in the plot thus far, and then Sepiroth was all 'I'm going to make you angst even more. You suck.' And Cloud got all like 'Nuh-uh. You suck. My angst and my severe necrophilia will see me through.' And he won, but then the two other Sephiroth guys blew him up, and he was probably going to die, but then Aerith and Zack convinced him that life was worth living, and that it was okay to stop blaming himself and angsting over their deaths (even though it was totally his fault), and he was all 'Surprise, I'm okay, and maybe a tad less angsty now. I still probably won't love you Tifa!'. And then Nanaki said his one line of dialogue, the mysterious sickness was cured and everything turned out a-okay."

It was dead silent, the two of them staring at Tifa in disbelief, almost unable to comprehend the astronomical load of crap she had just spewed at them. They looked at one another, the woman motioning slightly at herself and her companion questioningly, silently pointing out the similarities between these 'Sephiroth guys' Tifa had spoken of, and their prior super badassery.

Finally, she rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue disapprovingly.

"Tch. Fanfic."

"Fanfic." The man echoed, rubbing at his swingin' soul patch while he ruminated over the ridiculous story line. "God, that sounds as bad as the set-up we got. Pff. You'd think the guy would come up with something more original than 'Oh no! The return of Sephiroth! In the form of three guys! Who can only be defeated by a one-on-one fight with Cloud!'."

Tifa flashed a tired, lopsided smile at them and shook her head, as if amused by their naivety.

"Oh, if only, if only." She sighed airily, causing the two of them to snap their attention to her, eyes widening in terror.

"What?!" The woman nearly shrieked, flinching back, as if struck. "If it wasn't a fanfic, then what the Hell was it?!"

Tifa dropped her gaze almost guiltily, shaking her head.

"It was a movie." She murmured dejectedly. "God help me, it was a movie. A goddamn canonical sequel to the videogame. And then after that I made a guest appearance in a videogame about Vincent….. as if fans needed anything else to furiously masturbate over. Aaaaaaaand I also popped up in Kingdom Hearts II. Of course, I didn't do anything except for obsessively run around a town trying to find Cloud. Fucking A guys, my life doesn't revolve completely around Cloud!

Before they could come up with some kind of response, offer her any sort of condolences, she pinched at the bridge of her nose tiredly, shaking her head.

"And….. I've got kids now. Jesus Christ, they gave me kids, because apparently I'm some kind of Lady Madonna and taking in all these orphans, like I'm trying to build some sort of fucking pseudo-family with Cloud, in hopes he won't leave. How am I supposed to kick ass like this?! And all these stories, I….. it's always the same premise. I can't, I….. can't stand it."

"Oh Christ…..it's starting all over again."

"It never stopped!" She half-shouted back at him, shaking her head. "The situation might have changed, but it's the same. It's all the same old, same old.

She took a deep, steadying breath, before looking across the table at them, looking tired, nearly defeated.

"I tried to get back here sooner, but my schedule….." She shook it off, waving the thought away brashly "Look….. 'Greg', 'Jim-Jam', I need you guys. I need you-"

"Say no more!" 'Greg' nodded eagerly, his enthusiasm directly after hearing Tifa say she 'needed' them almost unbearably creepy. But no matter how obsessed with her he had been created to be, he would be sure to keep things strangely platonic, trying to assert his independence from his formerly static persona.

"We'll help you! We'll come with you and fuck up any sort of storyline you're tired of!" 'Jim-Jam' agreed, reaching across the table and taking Tifa's left hand in both of her own. "I mean….. if you still want both of us around, that is. I mean, I was always kind of too obnoxious, you know?"

Tifa smiled wanly, heartened by their desire to help her. After how poorly she had treated them at times out of her innate disgust for those 'nigh unstoppable OCs', it cheered her to see that they would still agree to aid her.

"This is a sequel, 'Jim-Jam', you can be different now. You can be cool without trying to show everyone that you're some kind of uber-badass that can't be killed until the fifth-to-last chapter. And we can totally pretend that evil Tifa storyline never happened."

"Uber-badasses, huh?" A smooth, almost feminine voice echoed from the doorway, interrupting the reunion of our protagonist and her loyal sidekicks, causing them to look toward the doorway, seeing two men with silver hair standing there, clad completely in black leather, their green, cat-like eyes glowing in the lighting.

Uh-oh….. looks like these guys are totally bad news.

They stared down 'Greg' and Jim-Jam', before glancing at one another, smirking.

"They don't look so tough." The other one noted, brow furrowed in disappointment. He straightened up, all business-like and looked at Tifa, eyes narrowed. "We somehow didn't die when we blew ourselves up to try and kill Cloud! And now we're back for revenge, or trying to live life and find forgiveness, or….. something else." He explained hastily, rolling his eyes, before smiling ferally at her, eyes glinting. "Now that that's out of the way, wanna play?"

"Oh, fuck this." Tifa sighed tiredly, dropping her face into her hands, letting out a low moan of frustration. "Five minutes. I try to take five minutes away from this shit, and this has to happen?! Jesus Christ, let me sit down for a bit. Let me take a piss. Let me have a moment to myself without two fucking Sephiroth avatars busting into my bar being all 'Surprise! Not dead!...somehow'. God, why did I have to break the door down in my hasty return? That door is supposed to keep assholes like you out of here! I don't have time for this! It's been like….. forever since I've been able to go to the bathroom. Stories never involve me using the toilet, and my back teeth are fucking floating here."

"Come on, play with me." The one intruder prodded, taking a few long, menacing steps toward her, his effeminate looking companion shadowing his approach.

"Back off! The lady said she has to use the bathroom!" 'Greg' butted in, pushing himself up out of his chair, shoving it back. His god-like strength sent it flying backward into the wall, where it shattered into a million tiny splinters.

The Sephiroth guy paused, letting out a small chuff of laughter at 'Greg''s willingness to fight; to defend Tifa from the two mysterious villains.

"Fine," he shrugged, turning his attention away from Tifa, meeting 'Greg''s glow-in-the-freaking-dark eyes with his own piercing, slightly glowing stare. "Then you play with me."

"Christ, can you say anything else?" 'Jim-Jam' cut in, rolling her eyes. "Is this going to be a poorly-written fight scene, or a poorly-written orgy? Oh, play with me, play with me, play with me!" She mocked, tossing her head back and faking a breathy gasp.

The Sephiroth guy glanced at her, stern façade crumbling away, and he hastily turned, hiding his face from them, pouting.

"Are you crying, brother?" The femmy-looking Sephiroth guy asked, laying a hand on the more masculine-looking one's shoulder.

"I am not crying!" He protested, turning on his heels, blinking harshly to try and back up his lie.

Watching the exchange, 'Greg' and 'Jim-Jam' traded glances, before looking over at Tifa for some kind of indication of what they were dealing with. The martial artist however, still had one hand to her face, palm of her other hand slapping furiously against her brow frustratedly, as if trying to block the whole thing from her memory.

"Shut up!" She finally shouted. "I know you guys didn't have a lot of goddamn dialogue, but for fuck's sake, you can say more than just 'Wanna play?' you don't have to break down in tears all the time, and if you two say one word about that decapitated head, or your 'brother' or anything of the sort I swear to God, I'll hand out a gratuitous one-sided ass stomping."

The two Sephiroth guys looked at each other uneasily, not sure of what to make of her loud, defiant nature. This wasn't the same Tifa that they had interacted with for all of five minutes. She wasn't trying to defend any children, not trying to convince their 'brother' of anything. She was just pissed.

"Look here….." Femmy started up, hands on his narrow, boyish hips. He flicked his hair back with a slight toss of his head, slit-pupils dilating. "We are simply looking for brother, and if you-"

There was a low snarl from the direction of Tifa's table, and the wood suddenly ignited into a blaze of blue-white flames, courtesy of the loss of 'Jim-Jam''s patience.

"What did she just say?!" The original character half shouted, eyes narrowing. Had her original, lilac cat-eyes not been gouged out and replaced by normal ones, her stare would have matched that of Femmy's. She glanced at Tifa, who was still leaning dejectedly against the flaming tabletop, looking like she wished this would all just stop, her legs crossed tightly. "Go to the bathroom and take a load off. By the time you get back, we'll have this all taken care of."

"You sure?" Tifa asked, peering through her spread fingers at the other woman, who just nodded eagerly, and stood up from her chair. "I mean….. I don't know if people really want to read about an OC vs. Sephiroth avatar fight."

"Well, fuck 'em! You want a fight, or do you want to take them in and see that they reform?" 'Greg' asked hotly from his position between Tifa and the Sephiroth guys. "Just put a good fight song on the jukebox, and take a well-deserved piss. 'Jim-Jam' and I are crazy powerful!"

"But I don't have a ju….." Tifa started to protest, trailing off as 'Greg' simply snapped his fingers, causing a jukebox to materialize out of absolutely fucking nowhere.

Ah ha! Another one of 'Greg''s ill-defined powers revealed.

Jukebox-out-of-fucking-nowhere.

"Okay, fine." Tifa finally relented, pushing herself away from the burning table, patting out a few flames that had snaked up onto her forearm. She made her way over to the jukebox and hastily pressed a few buttons, before hurrying into the back of the bar, presumably to the nearest bathroom, leaving 'Greg' and 'Jim-Jam' to their hurly-burly.

"So, you want Femmy or Manly?" 'Jim-Jam' asked, sizing the two intruders up, lip curled back, obviously not impressed by what she saw.

"Well, Manly looks like a martial-arts type. You always have to have martial-arts types punching the Hell out of each other." 'Greg' replied, cracking his toes, ready to give them one of his trademark barefoot-beatings.

And as the opening strains of 'She Blinded Me With Science' began to blare from the jukebox, our dear, dear OCs rushed toward the two Sephiroth guys, ready to show them who ruled the hierarchy of unstoppable villains with retarded names.

End One.

'Greg' and 'Jim-Jam' going up against Femmy (Yazoo) and Manly (Loz) next chapter. And Tifa gets out of the bathroom.