Disclaimer: I'll be perfectly fair, here. I know little about FFVII and I like the game even less (I'm more of an old-school gamer). I gave it a lot of thought though, and the fact that this title is a gateway RPG seemed reason enough to pay homage in some way or other. So, I've been reading up a bit on Thompson's 'Campaign Trail' and replaying the game a bit for good measure. This is 'Fear and Loathing Incognita' at best, but I'm hoping it'll still appease all the same.

All characters, place names, and whatnot of FFVII are solely the property of Square-Enix. Used without permission. Lothar Goldfist is a character of my own creation and cannot be used without my consent. Greven, Kamahl, and Belbe are all registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast. All rights reserved, and stuff.

Fear & Loathing: On the Chocobo Trail!

Chapter 1: What You See; What You Get

The sun is setting over North Corel now.

The destitute have gone back into hiding within jigsaw shanties and makeshift lean-tos, somehow believing that it would offer them any kind of worthwhile shelter should Meteor suddenly reappear to finish its job. Even here, in as barren and dry a place as this, you can tell that Fall is drawing to a close. The stench of decaying earth is finally starting to fade, and the air has that harsh hint of cold to it that knifes into the mind, body, and spirit all at once.

It's a welcome change.

Several weeks prior, our biggest problem was trying to convince ourselves that the Turks weren't out to get us, or that there was no silver-haired lunatic with some phallic weapon out to slash us all into ribbons for Mum's sake. No. All of that was gone now. These days, it was more a matter of prioritizing for the coming winter. Some speak of what kind of staples to stock up on, while others are more content migrating south to some temperate region like Gongaga or Mideel.

Refuge, on the other hand, is never truly assured. The shitstorm of weirdness that had come and gone around the globe has left many people believing (myself included) that our troubles are only just beginning. Climatologists and meteorologists, those disinherited from the now-defunct Shinra corporation, have come up with some interesting models projecting weather for the next couple of decades. The Lifestream incident at the Northern Crater, tidal shifts from the appearance of the Weapons, and particularly the effects of Mako byproducts on the surrounding environment all lead to the same forecast: that our winters will become longer and less forgiving.

What does it all amount to? One word - Materia.

It's still around, in some form or other. A very fine line has since evolved between the boycotting and bootlegging of Materia. You don't have to be Gast to understand the implications here. If we truly are on the brink of another Ice Age, a single orb of Fire Materia could be worth potentially millions in the hands of the right dealer. Even now, I can hear muffled whispers from the locals as they go about their routine. There's talk of 'Master' this and 'Mako' that, 'Shield' this, and 'Seal' that. They're hardly discreet about it. If it ever comes back down to our precious Lifestream taking the dent it took back when Shinra was still in power, we as a planet could still very well be fucked.

The thought sent shivers up my spine, so I buried it. The thought, not my spine! These vagrants had their own little reasons for indulging shadows of wealth and grandeur from the past. That wasn't me. I was just a journalist by any other name. My agent sent me here from Nibelheim to seek out a friend of his to help out with a story, something I had been assured would be the story of the century. Of course, he also told me that said 'friend' would likely be taking up space somewhere in the Gold Saucer as a barfly. Hardly a reliable source, but I was tiring from stories about Materia fixations of the disillusioned. I was assured that this project would be different.

As it turned out, 'different' was something of an understatement.

7:00 pm.

It was Thursday down at the Gold Saucer. You want to talk about a place that creeped me out.

The wanderings of a sober, drug-free joe through a place like this isn't altogether different from the odyssey of a ripped and drunken pill-popper on a Saturday night in the Sector 7 slums of Midgar. Quite literally, the Saucer was the hallucination of drugs and alcohol brought into a freakish, nightmare-scale reality. The architecture of all its different domes and causeways were in wild contradiction of where they actually should have been. Going anywhere meant winding up everywhere! Only the games, balloons, and schmucks dressed in chocobo and moogle costumes seemed to downplay just how chaotic this place really was.

I stepped off of my transport at the main gate with no small degree of hesitation. Bad memories of this place, strange memories. I remember competing at the Battle Square and getting outdone by a moogle half my size with a plastic sword. There are fleeting images of my participating in a play, and then getting thrown off stage for indecent exposure. It was because of the Gold Saucer that I somehow got the Shinra logo tattooed to my . . . well, never mind where it was tattooed. None of this is important, anyway. What was important was that I got the hell out of this place as soon as humanly possible.

"Lovely evening, kupo!" said the man dressed as a moogle nearby the turnstiles.

"As it is cold," I put in, showing him the temporary pass my agent had given me.

"Thank-you, sir. Please enjoy yourself." And he allowed me to enter. "Hey, how 'bout a tip?"

"Get a real job," I told him.

I could hear a grunt somewhere within his oversized moogle head as I passed him by.

"Well, screw you, kupo!"

I ignored him. Getting into a rumble with one of the Saucer's mascots was worth neither the effort nor the attention. Where was it again that my agent had said to meet up with this contact? Wonder Square? The Speed Square? Ghost Square? Enix Square? Squaresoft? Jesus, I thought. The entire fucking world was Square! I finally remembered my agent placing particular emphasis on chocobos for some reason. Might as well put out the vibe down at the tracks and hope that someone recognized me. Who knows? Maybe I could get lucky with a couple bets or something.

You typically come to hear more swearing than cheering when the Saucer finally vomits you out into the Chocobo Square (there can be only one winner, after all). I can't be sure whether it's gotten either louder or more tranquil since Midgar's destruction. It depends a lot on the winning streaks of most of the chocjockeys, not to mention the losing streaks of the betters and the fights they get into with a winning braggart. Always interesting though, not to mention vibrant. The tracks were as every bit lively and colorful as every other corner of the Saucer.

"Let's have us a beer, man!" I pulled up a stool at the bar, my stare idling at the monitor overhead that gave us updates on the current race. "And a shot of Wild Chocobo with it, sir!"

The bartender carried out my order with little or no enthusiasm. The others nearby didn't seem all that excited either. I gazed back up at the monitor, and had a revelation. Teioh, perhaps the most infamous of all black chocobos, was missing from the card. Always a crowd pleaser, and the best skilled among the S-class racers. They couldn't have possibly retired him already.

"Happened last Friday night, near the end of the ninth race," the bartender replied. "Teioh threw a shoe rounding the last bend, and Joe got thrown from the saddle. Joe's out on a medical, although the doctors are saying he's probably not gonna be returning any time soon, if at all."

"And the chocobo," I asked. "What about Teioh?"

"Reshoed, but it's become ill-tempered for some reason." He offhandedly dried out a beer mug as he spoke. "Only seems to respond to Joe and no one else."

"Cryin' shame," I said, maybe a bit too flightily than I intended. "Anyway, I'm looking for someone who may have come in here. He's a colleague, of sorts."

"What's his name? What does he look like?"

"I wish I could tell you. I was expected here, or somewhere around here at least."

"You're not that journalist by any chance, are you? Lothar Goldfuck?"

Other patrons nearby smirked at the question.

"It's Goldfist, smart-ass!" It was an old joke that should have died a long time ago. "Now, do you want to keep getting cute with me or are you gonna tell me where to find this guy?"

He straightened behind the counter, with an ear-to-ear smile on his face.

"She's right next to you."

All I found in close promimity was an uppity redhead in a jade green cloak and tunic, clutching her betting slip and sitting completely rapt with two blue eyes fixed on the monitor above us. Evidently, she hadn't heard a single word of what we had just been saying and didn't seem to have a care in the world except for . . .

"Number Five! Come on, Number Five! Don't let me down! Please don't let me down. Mommy needs a new pair of boots. Come on . . ."

A lovely young woman obsessing over chocobo racing isn't exactly the most normal thing to be seen at the Gold Saucer, but then the world has experienced far more weirder things than this.

"The Chief of Staff down at the Nibelheim Post said that you were the one to be approached for the 'Story of the Century'. Can you probably elaborate as to what you meant by that?"

"No. NO!!" She seemed to jump off of her stool, knocking it to the floor. "You son of a bitch! Get the mythril out, for Odin's sake!"

"Um, hello . . ." I waved a hand in front of her face.

"In a second," she said, barely noticing me. "Goddamn it, Number Five! You're falling behind! Can't you realize that? Come on, look . . . throw the damn jockey off! Do something! NO!"

Obviously, Number Five wasn't the one to cross the finish line. Well, it did, but not before all the other chocobos in the race.

"Wow," I said, grinning. "This isn't your first time, is it?"

"You noticed." She gestured to the bartender to have her glass refilled. "If I had my money down on old Teioh, this wouldn't be problem right now. Or even a gold chocobo. The spoils would have been mine a long time ago."

Everyone in earshot shook their heads sadly while one or two of them stood to collect their reward money from Ester, preferring not to listen to silly adventurers' tales.

"But it wouldn't be a longshot then, now would it?" I pulled out my lighter and reached for a cigarette. "And besides that, gold chocobos are a rancher's myth. You'd sooner find Aeris Gainsborough peddling weapons or . . . or Sephiroth baking cookies than . . . than to find yourself a . . . a gold . . . fuck!"

"Problem?"

"Nah," I said. "Just a cheap lighter is all. Could we probably get down to business now? Why was it that my agent had me seek you out, and what kind of story is this?"

She turned and gave me a smile. Quite a charming one too, as though she was saving it for just such an occasion. It almost made me want to write her any story, at any price.

"You're going to write a story about finding gold chocobos."

Well, almost.

"It was nice speaking with you." I smiled back, then tossed some gil on the counter for the drinks. "Best of luck to you and Number Five."

I took my beer and started to leave when she grabbed my arm.

"Look at the logic to this mission, will you? Fossil fuels and industrial toxins have accelerated global warming. All are convinced that we're on the verge of another Ice Age, and you know this. There isn't any stopping it, only escaping affected areas. And gold chocobos can go absolutely anywhere, which would make them the most reliable means of escaping the ice."

I kept fumbling with my lighter, more for something to do than for a smoke at this point. How would Cid Highwind have handled this situation?

"You know," I told her, "I can think of at least a dozen other fucks off the top of my head who'd be better suited to that kind of a job. There's the quack up north who wrote the book on chocobo crossbreeding for one. Hell, even old Choco Billy from the ranch would be an asset. They have credentials, a sound background in raising chocobos . . ."

"But none of them can write, not the way you can anyway. Someone with your perspective on things, not to mention the importance of the availability of gold chocobos, is what's going to make this the story of the century."

"Not to mention give you a slight advantage at the tracks, am I right?"

"Well . . ."

"Great." I've swapped Materia get-rich-quick schemes for chocobo get-rich-quick schemes. Now, I really needed a smoke. "I should probably be going. I'm sure my agent has some other project lined up for me somewhere."

I chose to linger only long enough to wrestle with my lighter for a few more clicks, if only to partially dignify a squandered trip. What a fuckaround. What a waste of time. If I had any clue that this was the story waiting for me, I would have at least placed a bet or two of my own with Ester. My little pony was Number Three, a red chocobo by the name of Feiah that just happened to win while my back was turned.

How do you like that? A missed opportunity and a bad opportunity all in the same evening.

"Oh for Jesus sake, at least let me help you get your buzz on."

"I'm fine. Really."

"But I insist."

And from the neck of her tunic, she pulled out a small green gem fashioned to a black lace. They say familiarity breeds contempt, and truer words were never spoken. It was Materia, Fire Materia to be precise. That much was easy enough to discern, considering how the core of the gem gleamed a bright scarlet color. I was none too impressed, but that didn't matter. I hadn't had a smoke for a good twenty minutes now, and I was getting more irritable by the second.

So I told her, "These are blacklisted, you know," lighting my cigarette all the same. The tip smouldered, even though the orb itself remained cool to the touch. "Handy little things, though."

"You can have that one," she said, "Provided that you take this assignment for me. I'd really appreciate your help. And besides that, the Chief of Staff with the Nibelheim Post is a very good friend of mine. I'm sure he'd really appreciate it, too."

This was a bitch. This was a real bitch. On the plus side, however, I singlehandedly solved whatever problems I once had in always keeping a lit cigarette in my mouth. I looked her in the eye. That special smile of hers was back again, but I ignored it this time. Up on the monitor, I could see that the last race of the evening was about to start.

"You got a name?" I asked.

She smile widened. "Belbe, although most people just call me Bel."

We shook hands. "Well Bel, why don't you get us a couple more drinks? I'm gonna go and put some money on Number Three. We're gonna need some extra cash for a story like this."

I paused for a moment to recall how much it cost just to breed a black chocobo, and I could feel my head start to hemorrhage.

"A lot of extra cash."