hey fuckers im back
uhhh who knows how often ill update this, if at all. but i started this a few weeks ago and i guess im proud of how its looking and i want to keep writing it. who knows if The Sickness will allow it to happen but we can Hope eh
anyway its an "OC ends up in so-and-so universe" kinda deal. with a wee bit of a twist, to make an interesting story. because i obviously still have the same tastes in fic as i did when i was 12, except with higher standards i guess. anyway have fun hopefully u'll see me again soon
edit: and of fucking course as soon as i post this thing it turns into a string of html bullshit so if i missed any of those ridiculous html tags in here hmu so i can remove them
...
They don't write in English on Gaia.
It's weird, because in the places I've been so far, everyone seems to speak various, if oddly-accented, dialects of English, but the first time I picked up a book – though it wasn't a book, if I recall correctly, it was a receipt found on the ground in Wall Market near the spicy Korean restaurant I had eaten at on my first day in Gaia, trampled and muddy but ultimately legible – well, it was in a strange mixture of what I assumed was Japanese and obviously Roman characters. Together, they didn't actually mean anything to me.
By that point, of course, I had already figured out that the new planet I found myself on didn't have the same writing system as mine had, simply by looking at the neon lights of the Midgar Slums, but the moment I picked up that receipt was the moment it really sunk in that in this place, I was illiterate. I would never be able to pick up a trashy novel from a gas station to pass the time, I would never be able to read a menu by myself, I would never be able to get a job that wasn't hard labor or petty crime. I'll have to learn to read all over again, and who would want to teach me? All in all, a devastating blow for a former English major.
This is the only reason I feel safe writing this down. No one will ever be able to read the secrets I reveal here. Though I guess it'll be a bitch to have to explain to whatever nosy punk happens across this memoir of mine why a supposed illiterate young vagrant has a journal full of strange, unreadable letters in diary format, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.
I suppose, like all good stories, this one should begin at the beginning – but then, I'm not sure the rules of English literature exactly apply on a planet where "English" isn't even a word. I'll start now. I want to get my thoughts down. I want to plan for the future. If I have one.
I am currently on a chocobo farm, living the dream. If, of course, by "living the dream," one means "shoveling green-tinted guano and chasing enormous, hellishly fast chickens halfway across a marsh every goddamn time the little kid leaves the gate unlocked." I've been on Gaia for perhaps a month – I've barely had enough time for it to sink in that I'm on another planet entirely. But somehow it has.
I still don't know where, in the game series, I am – I would try to judge by the Choco family's ages, but I never really knew how old they were in the game; I don't think I ever paid that much attention to something so minuscule. Both of the children are present, so it can't be too far in the past – it's probably past Turk Vincent-era, at least. Midgar exists and, to my knowledge, the City of Dreams has not been razed anytime recently. Nothing else has clued me in to when I must have ended up; after all, being in the Slums was not very conducive to hearing relevant, recent information, and I got out of there as fast as I could. Living out in the boonies, as one may infer, is even less informative. The Choco family doesn't have anything as fanciful and modern as a television, and their only radio only functions when you stroke its antennae just the right way on a Sunday evening.
The journey I've taken to get here, way out in the countryside away from any possible terrorist attacks or meteor strikes or homicidal science experiments, isn't the most exciting tale. Not by story standards. But it is a tale, nonetheless, and if anything can keep me sane on this trainwreck of a world, it will be the excitement and fervor of telling a good story. Even if it's somewhat lacking in actual fervor and a little more "horrifying" than exciting.
It began with terror and screaming and blood, as beginning new lives is wont to.
One moment, I was laying down to bed at one in the morning – just after finally finishing a sub-par essay over The Nibelungen for my earliest class the next day, my headphones playing soft Celtic music (I had picked up some strange habits during college, but anything that kept me calm and helped me get to sleep during midterms was a godsend) – and the next, I was in another bed, another world, with a half-naked man with a knife in his left eye socket slumping over my horrified form.
What a way to wake up.
I'd rather skip over the panic, the terror, and the angry voices outside that locked door – I had no idea what had happened in that bedroom before I woke up in it, but it seemed as though whoever's... body... this one had been before I came into it had been in a great deal of trouble.
Spattered with blood and wearing something positively indecent, even for a relatively open-minded college girl like myself, I climbed out the lace-curtained window and out onto a dark, filthy street – where I immediately vomited twice. I left the scene soon after, sobbing, afraid, and worst of all – unnoticed. There were people. They definitely saw me. But either they didn't want to get involved in any trouble, or they were just too inured to a scene like that to take any pity on a woman like me.
The woman who had been in that room, who had killed that man with that knife - she was gone. I'll never know where. Maybe she's woken up in my body on Earth, and is going around to brothels with my name, killing people with my face. Maybe it was just an accident – a client (for I eventually realized that the place I woke up was a room at the Honey Bee Inn, a fact I was again horrified to discover) who had gotten a little too violent. Maybe there was something deeper going on. I would never know.
She'd probably left some belongings in that room. An ID, maybe, or some money. I wasn't in there long enough to find out, but a few gil would have been useful. A pair of decent clothes would have been useful. Instead, all I had was an unfamiliar body and the blood of a man its hands had killed.
The memory of his eye – the one he had left – won't leave me. I want so badly to write it off as "This world is cruel" and leave it there, as though something like that could never happen outside of Gaia, but I know that the same exact thing could happen, maybe has happened, in my world – and had it happened, I would have been caught and imprisoned for the deed much more quickly on Earth.
As it is, I haven't been found by any authorities yet. I don't think Shin-Ra prioritizes solving the murders of random men by random sex workers, though they might be cracking down on security at the Honey Bee Inn a little more now that someone's been killed there. If I recall correctly, President Shinra – the old one – frequented the place in the original game. Or maybe not him, and just some Shin-Ra employees. Whatever. I'm getting ahead of myself.
After I left the brothel, I found a dark alley to curl up in and freak out – at that point, I didn't even realize where I was. I only knew that I had gone to bed one place and woken up in an infinitely worse place with a body I didn't recognize.
Looking back, that was a pretty dangerous way to spend my first day in the slums, but for the most part, the loud sobbing kept anyone with ill intent from bothering with me – already I was too attention-grabbing. The blood spatters may have helped even more.
By the time I took my head out of my hands, the lights of the city had dimmed... yet the slums were as dark as they ever were; the only difference was in the number of neon names lighting the stilted streets. My hiccups and heart palpitations had finally subsided, and without them I felt empty and dazed – I almost decided then that I was dreaming. But the dried blood was too vivid, the stench of the slums too strong.
I wanted to sit there until I died, but someone outside the alley shouted, and the fear that clenched around my heart then – even though they weren't in view, even though they weren't directing their rage at me – it made my brain leap back into action. I was exhausted, drained, and I needed somewhere safe to lie low – somewhere the police wouldn't find me, somewhere I could sleep, somewhere I could get some actual clothes.
First, I wanted to know where I was.
Very few people were on the streets when I staggered out of my corner on too-high heels and unsteady feet; those few that I saw were either asleep or pretending to be. Too afraid to wake one of them up, I instead followed the glow of neon close by – a busier district was bound to have a few late-night shoppers.
This was approximately when I stumbled into a brightly-lit marketplace and picked a receipt up off the ground and realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. God, my English professor would murder me for quoting that in all seriousness, but the thought had passed through my head the moment I stepped into that neon pit.
The market was populated with shoppers even then, but the late hour meant no one was willing to make eye contact with another person, let alone answer a question from a dirty, frazzled, ill-clothed woman – but I still felt watched, still felt out of place and extraterrestrial and under-dressed. I ducked into the first rickety building I found, teeth clenched tight and shivering not from cold, but from nerves.
The smell of spices and seafood filled the restaurant and the familiar clacking of dishes and the bell over the door and rapid-sizzling fryers made me calm down just a notch. If I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend I was just clocking in for a late shift at the 8 China Buffet – if it wasn't for the grime still sticking to my skin and the chill of the stale night air across my bare legs. I took a seat at the bar, trying to catch the cashier's eye – but the man working the counter took one look at my appearance and scowled before looking away.
"If you ain't got gil, you can get out. We don't do handouts, kid."
Kid. I suddenly wondered how young this body was, and how young it looked, and bile rose in my throat. I took a minute to force it back down. The man went back to taking orders from the customers who had money, apparently confident that if I thought I couldn't get a free meal, I would leave. I didn't even notice the word gil – my mind had jumped straight over it and onto kid.
I tried to catch his eye again, using a pleading tone of voice. "I'm not here for a meal, please – I just want to—"
"If you ain't here to eat, you can get out. No loitering," he snapped with the same brusque, angry tone as before – the words were his only acknowledgment that he'd even noticed me there. Other patrons were beginning to look my way, if they weren't already. The old couple a few chairs down sent us glares.
"Please, I only want to ask one question—" I tried again, stressing my words in an attempt to get through to someone, anyone. Again, interrupted.
"Can't you see you aren't wanted here, girl?" a grungy man a few chairs down snapped.
I flinched, but I couldn't leave without an answer, and I was too stretched thin to be polite anymore and too frustrated to keep my voice down. "I just want to know where in the seven hells I am!"
The man at the counter stopped pretending not to notice me – he put his fist on the counter like he was trying not to punch it. "Yer in my restaurant, exactly where you shouldn't be," he growled, and I should have been angry but I was mostly afraid, "and if you don't leave in twenty seconds I'm going to get my shotgun—"
"Richerd, don't you dare," a woman from the kitchens nearly shrieks. "Last time you brought that old thing out you nearly shot your self, you brutish fool of a man. Just answer the damn girl's questions and she'll leave – isn't that right, girl?" She was leaning around a hot stove with a knife in hand, and the look on her face was almost as scary as the man's. What kind of lawless hole is this place? I thought outrageously as I nodded with wide eyes.
"Fine! God damn it, Mertle, if you weren't here—" the woman gave him a look and he stopped himself. "Whaddaya want, harlot?"
I swallowed my rage at the chance to find some answers. "Where are we? What country? What city?"
"What kind of stupid question—" Mertle cleared her throat; the other patrons of the restaurant had gone back to eating their food and pretending not to listen, waiting for me to finally leave. "This is Midgar, kid – how much did you drink this morning to end up here in the city of dreams and not know it?"
Midgar? What, am I in Scandinavia? "What country?" I pushed.
"Ha! Whaddaya mean 'what country'? There's only two countries, and there's only one Midgar. I can tell ya, this ain't fuckin Wutai, if that's what yer thinking."
Wutai. Midgar.
I said thanks and left, very quietly now. The bell over the door chimed loudly as it closed behind me, and I could feel my heart beating in the back of my head at almost the same volume. My knees felt like they might give out, so I leaned against the wall for a moment or maybe forever.
The bell chimed again.
"Hungry?"
I didn't recognize her face or her scratchy smoker's voice – it seemed like every voice I'd heard in the Slums were that way, choked by dust and debris and starved of clean air. But the woman's hair I dimly recognized – grey, frizzy, and wrenched up in a tight bun, leaving the heavily weathered and spotted face free of obstruction. I remembered her as an older woman who had sat in the far corner of the shop and watched silently, neither condemning nor welcoming, her food going cold. I stared at her and couldn't remember how to speak.
She shoved a half-full box of rice into my hands and turned to leave without another word. Cold. Impersonal. Yet it was a more generous offer than I'd seen in my time in Midgar. I managed to offer a sort of quiet thank-you, but I don't think she ever heard it.
That was the first act of kindness anyone had taken towards me on Gaia – and for a long while after that, it would be the only one.
...
yeah so pls give me some feedback im always a slut for commentary
i have a good bit of this planned out but as always, i am diving in headfirst with no idea how im gonna resolve things in the end. im sure ill pull through with a bombastic ending eventually, if we ever get there. fingers crossed eh
there will also be some main characters in here. eventually. turks, most likely. possibly some others later on. like i said, i have only planned so far. i know how irresponsible this is but i hope you will still enjoy what i DO manage to pump out
also.
she will not become a SOLDIER. ive noticed there are quite a few "first 'female' soldier" fics floating around right now and let me just preemptively say this is not one. our little oc is a cowardly baby who i want to protect. but ill put her through a lot of shit anyway because, yknow, You Gotta