Chapter One

A Beautiful Friendship And All That…

A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away…

The day had been going normally, as it always had before.

Seifer was standing behind a weather-beaten wall, high atop the roofs of Twilight Town. In his hands a long-barreled rifle and sweat beading his face, stinging his eyes but not wavering his resolve. He panted heavily - his heart raced. He reached up with the hand that was resting on the trigger and slipped off the beanie adorning his head, wiped his brow, and put it back on all in one fluid motion.

Suddenly his sensitive ears twitched at the almost inaudible sound of a pebble skipping across the ground and he immediately cut around the corner of the wall, his rifle point-blank in the belly of a much larger boy than he who also had a weapon pointing at his head.

"So," Seifer panted, his gaze unflinching at his target. "What's it gonna be? You wanna take the shot and win this or hesitate? 'Cause if you don't end me, I will end you."

The boy smiled and nodded, the length of chain encircling his neck clinking as he did. It then made a similar clinking sound followed by a loud yelp from his unawares mouth. He fell forward, directly on top of Seifer, who could do nothing but fire off a few shots into the boys barrel-like chest before he was crushed.

Several yards away lay a young girl with short silver hair - part of it covering her left eye - in a prone position with her own rifle trained on her two targets. She let out a satisfied giggle when Rai fell and crushed Seifer but didn't waste anytime as she got back to her feet and began a sprint towards the wooden plank bridging the gap between the building she was on and the one Rai and Seifer were on.

"Get offa' me you stupid ape!" Seifer groaned, trying to claw his way out from underneath Rai's girth, while the larger boy simply laid there limp and sobbing.

"Those paint balls hurt, y'know! I wasn't even ready for it!"

Fuu skipped over and stopped Seifer's movement with her foot on his back and her gun inches from his face. "La-hoo-sa-her!"

Seething with anger, Seifer slapped the barrel of her rifle away and climbed back to his feet. "This is bullcrap, Fuu! You cheat every time with that sniper routine!"

She smiled and gave him a playful wink with her visible eye. "You-"

"If you say I suck I'll dye your hair green again!"

Fuu gasped and dropped her gun, then grabbed him by the collar of his sleeveless jacket and slammed him against the wall. "YOU!"

With a confident grin, Seifer nodded and crossed his arms nonchalantly, further fueling her anger. "Yep, sure did. I was also the one who cut holes in the front of all your training bras!"

A few minutes later a haggard and hunchbacked Fuu shouldered open the front door of her house, bearing the weight of a severely beaten Seifer and a incapacitated Rai. She stumbled in a few feet, dropped her two passengers to the ground, and collapsed with a defeated huff.

Seifer looked up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan through the less puffy of his two black eyes then tried to look directly in front of him without moving his aching body. "Thanks for the lift, Fuu…"

She grunted something and left it at that.

Rai - his eyes still wet from freshly shed tears - tried to sit up but quickly yelped in pain, clutching his abdomen and the several multicolored paint spots staining his Island-tanned skin. "You two are mean, y'know? I don't want to play this game anymore."

Seifer began a slow and uncoordinated drag across the carpet and over too the couch, which he slowly ascended until he was able to throw himself onto the cushions with a sigh of relief. "If it was up to you we'd be playing board games all day Rai and that is - as the name implies - boring." He slowly peeled his jacket off, each slightest movement and tugging of his arms was accentuated with a groan. When he finally got it off he simply laid back onto it, but at least it was off. "And I want a rematch. This time we play fair...so by my rules!"

Fuu grunted again, but instead of no further reprisal one of her shoes came whizzing through the air and smacked him in the face. A impressive feet considering she was facing the opposite way and almost entirely underneath a coffee table.

"OW! DAMNIT!"

"Revenge…"

After several minutes of silence except for the occasional moan of pain and some mixed heavy breathing, Rai sat up and tried in vain to rub the pinkish welt on his back. "Maybe we should get Vivi, y'know? He's probably wondering where we are."

Ignoring the pain then, Seifer sat up, snatched up the shoe that had been thrown at him and chucked it at Rai. It bounced off his head and knocked him on his back again, and Fuu nimbly snatched her lavender shoe out of the air and put it back on her foot.

"We're done with Vivi, okay! Let that faceless little monster stay in his straw hut and out of my life."

Neither Fuu or Rai were entirely sure what to say about that so they simply said nothing. A few more minutes of awkward silence past before a quiet knocking sounded at the door. Not wanting to get up but knowing it was her house, Fuu got to her feet and hobbled towards the door. She opened it slowly and at first saw nothing, then she felt something tugging at the hem of her shirt and looked down, seeing a very small person with a paper bag over his head. Her first thought (as would it be anyone's) was an alien invasion so Fuu immediately reached into the umbrella rack beside the door and began to violently beat the extraterrestrial into submission.

Seifer and Rai watched the massacre with varying levels of disinterest until Rai recognized the blue jacket and shouted at Fuu: "Hey, stop it! That's Vivi, y'know!"

Fuu stopped in mid-swing and looked down at the twitching remains at her feet, then looked at the bent umbrella in her hand and with a apologetic hissing sound she put it back into the bin. "Sorry."

"Vivi!" Seifer got off of the couch and stormed over to the door, grabbing the little boy by his jacket and hurling him into the house with enough force to smash a vase on the other side of the room. "What are you doing here, you little turd?"

Fuu screamed in terror and ran to the scene of the crime, then frantically fished a half-empty bottle of glue out of the kitchens' junk drawer and began the tedious process of reassembly.

Vivi sat up and coughed out some blood, which stained through from the other side of the paper bag. "I know you told me never to come back Seifer, but I really need your guys' help! Please, it's a matter of life and death!"

"Yeah, more specifically YOUR death! Where's my pussy blue sword? RAI! Go fetch my pussy blue sword!"

Rai lost interest some time ago and waved his hand impassively. "Just use one of the umbrellas, y'know? I'm tired."

Seifer threw up his hands and shouted at the ceiling, assuming he could reach a higher power that way. "Why must you curse me with these lazy idiots you pompous, bearded bastard!"

Fuu whimpered and stood up holding the poorly reassembled vase in her hands, gingerly setting it back on the pedestal it fell from. Knowing that this wouldn't fool her parents, she hustled back to the junk drawer and pulled out a Polaroid camera, held it a foot away from her and made a stupid face. She took the picture, shook it a few times until the image faded into view, then power-walked back into the living room and leaned it against the base of the vase. She took a few steps back, held up her hands as if directing the next scene in a movie, then smiled and gave a thumbs up. "Super!"

Vivi scrambled over and hugged her legs, looking up at her with those creepy yellow eyes peering through two holes cut in the paper bag. "C'mon, Fuu! You're the only voice of reason I have here! I desperately need help!"

Blushing but at the same time somewhat pleased with her few position of authority, she shrugged and held the approaching Seifer at bay with her outstretched arm. "With…?"

"MY HAT! I lost my hat last night and I haven't been able to find it! I can't LIVE without my hat!"

"Y'know, I always did wonder what you looked like without the hat on, Vivi." Rai commented, which prompted a teary-eyed Vivi to pull the bag off.

Rai cringed in horror and flew over the couch, burying his head under a pillow and started to console himself with various children's rhymes and songs.

Fuu cupped her mouth and ran into the bathroom, retching all the way, before blowing chunks on the floor and a bit into the toilet.

Seifer screamed like a little girl and began to punch himself in the face, screaming: "THERE IS NO GOD! THERE IS NO GOD!"

Vivi put the bag back on and started sobbing even harder. "See what I mean! I'm not fit for public view! C'mon, you guys gotta help me or else…or else I'll take the bag off again!"

A unanimous cry of "NO!" sounded from all three (Fuu's even trailing a bit of an echo from the bathroom's natural acoustics) and Seifer nodded his head fervently, holding up his hands. "Okay, okay! Just keep the Elephant Man in his zoo and we'll find your stupid hat! Where did you see it last?"

"Well," Vivi said thoughtfully, putting a finger to the point of the bag where his chin would have been, "I just know that I put it in the same place I do every night before I go to bed: A solid steel cage with four locks in my closet."

Seifer raised his eyebrow quizzically. "In a cage? Why?"

"Have you ever seen my hat, Seifer? It's got a freakin' mouth! If I didn't have to wear it I'd dig a deep, deep hole for that demon spawned monstrosity and bury it under thirty-feet of concrete!"

Fuu stumbled back in from the bathroom then, still ill and lacking her natural cat-like balance. She slipped on a puddle of her own vomit and fell into the pedestal where the still drying vase laid. Once again it teetered and shattered on the floor, prompting another round of frantic cries and a tidal wave of glue on Fuu's behalf.

"Let's just get this over with! Rai, Fuu, let's go!" Seifer picked his jacket up from the couch and very suavely put it back on, then headed towards the door followed closely by Rai and Fuu, the latter of which had her hands caked in that weird flaky glue residue. "Just don't leave here, Vivi! God forbid anyone else have too…ugh. Just stay put."

"Right-O!"

Fuu protested, not wanting the little mutant in her house anymore than Seifer wanted him alive, but he closed the door and shrugged. "C'mon? What's the worse he could do?"

A loud crashing sounded from inside, followed by Vivi cursing and pulling open the junk drawer. Fuu began to cry hysterically and had to be pulled away from the door before she ran in and demonstrated some respect for someone else's belongings.

The three took a few steps off Fuu's porch and looked out into the wide expanse that was Twilight Town and were each suddenly gripped with a sense of adventure, a surge of exploration, a veritable tsunami of-

"Hey, you guys wanna go to the arcade?"

"Hell ya, y'know!"

"Wewt!"

…The arcade.

Author's Note: Think of this as the cousin to my now discontinued story "Make Way For Tonberry". It was long done and honestly there was probably not much more I could do with it. However, I think I can milk this for a bit and get a few good laughs. Tell me how it looks and how I can maybe improve upon it and we'll see if this can't turn out decent