"Where the hell am I?"
These words managed to convey, perhaps in less colourful terms for some, the feelings of all those present.
It was an enormous plane on which the group found itself, a flat matte black travelling in every direction yet not enshrouding a one of them in darkness. Nay, enormous is not an adequate descriptor, for it suggests a fixed volume: their surroundings looked utterly boundless, as though they floated in space with all the stars turned off.
All of them were shocked. Many of them mirrored the first exclamation made in that strange place. And not a one of them, sadly, had even the slightest inkling where they were.
For the purpose of this occurrence, focusing upon one of these individuals will suffice. The initial man to speak, a one Cid Highwind, has this honour. This is perhaps convenient because – not that he yet knew it – a dream of his. The husky, grizzled mechanic had managed to fall dead to the world while listening contentedly to the radio, laid out upon his couch. This was, then, his own subconscious: however, whether it was also a nexus point into which many other subconsciouses were now joined is unclear. Perhaps every individual, performing a feat not known to his kind ever before, had happened to slip into a peaceful slumber simultaneously: whether this was mere happenstance, or plotted out by fate, does not matter. Needless to say, they were all there, and Cid Highwind, growing impatient with the situation after a mere ten seconds, decided to take action.
"Whoa whoa whoa!" He quipped, garnering a sufficient amount of attention from those gathered around him. He seemed, somehow, to have landed within the apex of the group, situated amongst them at a decisive point that made addressing each man easy. They turned and regarded him, a few tossing the odd, gruff "Whaddya want?" at the pilot.
Having gained an audience, Cid now scratched his unshaven chin. What did he want, anyway? It was a perfectly valid question, after all, one that they deserved an answer to. Summoning his considerable mental energies – a man of his calibre and status obviously possessed a great deal – Cid steeled himself for his reply. He had decided it would be profound yet simple, much reflecting his personality.
"I dunno." Sadly, he couldn't think of anything better to use, despite containing such overwhelmingly grandiose thoughts and schemes in his brain. Or maybe that was just his ego talking there.
His audience looked thoroughly disgusted with his answer: and he could hardly blame them. A large, balding man with a yellow flight suit – or it looked like one, anyway – gibbered roughly at Cid in some language the pilot had never heard before, and chortled to himself. Evidently, he was the only one to understand the joke, as nobody joined him.
"The hell kind of backwards talk is that?" Cid, ever prepared, casually drew a cigarette from the pack tucked in his pocket, and was quite put out over not finding a lighter on his person until one appeared before his eyes, lit the cigarette for him, and promptly vanished. He would never manage to equate this little act as his own wish for a light made manifest through the dream, not that it would have helped anything: and indeed, it was probably for the best, for had he realized his level of control over the situation, scads of naked women would no doubt have been descending from the abyss moments later.
The man shot him a glare. "It's Al Bhed, you twit. Where the hell are we, anyway?" Several of those surrounding him mumbled their eagerness in having this question answered quickly.
Cid shrugged. "How should I know? I was just lyin' on my couch, and bam! Here I am." He dragged on his cigarette thoughtfully. "I'd say this is a dream, but, nah, the cigarette tastes too sweet."
He quickly noticed that quite a few of the men around him had pulled out their own smokeables – ranging from cigarettes to long, curving pipes – and lit them up. The blackness was soon filled with the thick musk of smoke. Nobody seemed to complain about it, either, except for one rather fidgety fellow in a white lab suit. He appeared quite scholarly, and, unlike the rest, did not seem to belong at all. Amongst the rest, there was a kind of camaraderie, as though they were all long lost brothers suddenly thrown back into the mix again.
They were all rather thoughtful. Nobody spoke, but Cid knew that minds were racing towards some sort of conclusion about their predicament. Eventually, he decided that first things, of course, were first.
"Alright, listen up. I think we need some introductions here, eh?"
A well-dressed man in a cape – bearing, as well, a mustachio that twirled up into the air, defying gravity – nodded his assent. "Excellent idea. Why don't we start with you?"
Cid gazed at him, a little put off. Why did people always have to pick him first? "Uh, yeah, sure. The name's Cid. Cid Highwind."
The ruckus this sparked was considerable.
Every single person there was seen to announce, in one way or another, that that was also his name. This followed by a moment of amazement, in which the fact that every person there was named Cid registered in multiple brains at once.
Cid, after a moment of trying to calm people down, simply bellowed for silence. "Shut the hell up! Jeeeeeesus!" He furrowed his brow in thought a moment. "So. . . everybody whose name is Cid, raise yer damned hand."
Every hand flew skyward.
Cid's mouth fell slack.
One Cid – rather nicely dressed and small, garbed in a red vest and black trousers – pushed his spectacles back against his face before speaking. "Surely, this can't be a coincidence. Can it?" His question has followed by many shrugs and grunts. Clearly, they were all more than a little bewildered, and even this simple supposition was beyond the convocation of Cid's.
"Hell if I know. Shiiiit, this is weird." Cid, clearly exhausted from the news, seated himself on, well, nothingness, really, and puffed away at his cigarette.
Another Cid, this one bearing a huge, overgrown beard and enormous piloting goggles – Highwind thought him to look rather like an ape with bad teeth, a pipe fitted between said choppers – raised a hand. "Well, nothing saying we can't make things simpler, eh? Lets break us down into jobs to make it all easier. Who here's a mechanic, or works with engines and whatnot?"
The answer elicited a collective groan, and essentially put them back where they started: all but two of the Cid's raised their hands. Several of them muttered "jeeeeeesus" under their breath, amongst other curses.
Watching the lot of them react to one another was really quite eerie, for even those Cid's who seemed out of place at first began to adopt the attitudes of their fellows. The red-vested Cid, who had seemed rather well disposed at first, was smoking away and swearing like a sailor. Highwind chalked this up to the atmosphere. Even a rather young man with short blonde hair, garbed in what looked to be light armour, had settled in nicely, a small pipe propped betwixt his lips.
Cid Highwind nearly asked another question, but it died before reaching the end of his cigarette. Dammit, can't separate them by facial hair: they've all got at least stubble, 'cept that kid there. Hell, I'm sure he'll sprout a nice moustache, given a year or two.
One of the two non-mechanically inclined Cid's, garbed in shining armour and bearing both spiky hair and spiky beard, raised a hand. "How does everybody spell their name, anyway?"
C-I-D rang through the nothingness. Disconcerted, the armoured man's hand sank back down, and he resumed his discussion with the other non- mechanically inclined Cid, who was also a swordsman. The hooded, white- bearded Cid decided it was not worth the effort to elaborate that his full name was 'Cidolfas'.
The scientist who lurked on the fringes of the group looked about timidly. "Actually, mine is spelt S-I-D."
Everybody looked at him, narrow-eyed. An inherent tension between the Cid's and Sid was nearly palpable. "Yeah, ain't you special, princess." The bald, Al Bhed Cid called out mockingly. The entire group then proceeded to ignore him. Sid moved off to the side, grumbling dejectedly: it was something about Phantoms, not that anybody else cared.
A convention of Cid's huddled around the centre of nowhere – Highwind had evidently been deemed the nexus around which they all operated – and discussed the matter. One Cid, his eyes nowhere to be seen underneath a widely brimmed hat and mouth similarly obscured by a wide brush of auburn beard, discussed the possibility that this was all some kind of time rift that had dragged them all in through some freak accident. The red vested Cid insisted that such a coincidence was extremely unlikely. Yet another – a Cid garbed in a long, vibrantly yellow suit that stretched up over his head in a bizarre hood – suggested that perhaps Magitek technology had somehow warped the fabric of time and brought them all together. He had been conducting some very volatile experiments on the machines, after all, and such things were possible.
Highwind cocked an eyebrow at him. "The hell's Magitek? And why do you dress yourself like a damned banana? I just had to ask." The fruited Cid threw Highwind a dirty look and decided his opinion was above the crusty old pilot before him, thus prematurely ending the query on Magitek.
As the Cid's clamoured about him, postulating theories and swearing up a storm, Cid Highwind very quickly found his patience waning. He just wanted to be back on his damned couch, listening to the damned radio broadcast of Loveless, drinking his damned tea and generally enjoying his damned life. The fact that a new species of otherworldly Cid's had seemingly sprung up around him had Highwind very much put out, and he was quickly formulating the opinion of hating the name 'Cid'.
Eventually, he exploded. "Argh, shit damn ass crap! Can't you idiots shut up for two damned seconds?" Thus the group began on a new line of bickering, and all but Sid – who had simply walked off into the abyss, deciding it was a far nicer place than this – descended on the gruff pilot at their epicentre. Cursing echoed throughout the void, gnawing greatly on the nerves of nothingness itself – after all, who ever said nothingness doesn't have feelings, too?
It decided to get the ball rolling. This was just supposed to be a funny, bad dream for Cid Highwind: however, the forces that be quickly decided that there was only one Cid relegated to each plane of existence for a very, very good reason, and they were very glad they'd only deigned it necessary to gather up a group of around thirty Cid's, as opposed to, say, a thousand or more. The whole lot of them may well have succeeded in doing irreparable damage to, well, existence, swearing up a storm and choking the galaxy itself with their smoking habits.
So they implanted into Highwind the idea that this simply had to be a dream. There was no other explanation for it. No, not a dream: a goddamned nightmare. And Cid, who lay at the bottom of a pile of sweaty, hairy, cursing men, decided it was best to stick with this conclusion. And seeing as it was his damned dream, he furthermore decreed that this sweaty stinky cursing pile of Cid's would now get the hell off of him.
The entire pile simply exploded from within, sending Cid's cascading out in every direction. Cid Highwind emerged, his cigarette magically transformed into a gleaming, golden cigar of the utmost quality – it's a dream, so why not? – and glared at the whole lot of Cid's, rolling about on the ground as they were, swearing they would fix him good for that.
Cid bellowed, his voice amplified by the power of his subconscious. "Shut the hell up, you damned geeks! Get out of my goddamn dream and go back to wherever the hell you came from! Starting with you, banana-rama!"
The oddly clad fruited Cid winked out of existence with a loud pop.
He jabbed a wavering finger at the tall, bald Cid. "And you! Learn to speak some goddamn English! Off ya go!" The bald Cid managed to give Highwind the Al Bhed equivalent of the finger – which was, oddly enough, a deft crotch thrust that greatly unnerved Cid Highwind – before following the fruited Cid.
The two knightly Cid's charged at Highwind, but he was too quick for them both: with a dual snap of his fingers, they both promptly exited his dream. "And stay out! You're not even damned mechanics!"
Both the widely brimmed hat Cid and the Cid clad in gigantic piloting goggles managed to take this opportunity to sneak up on Highwind's back, jumping him with a pair of raucous bellows. The goggled Cid managed to bop Highwind with a thick, heavy mallet to his shoulder before Highwind sent them both packing. Staggering forwards and collapsing from the blow, Cid just barely managed to roll away from a deftly placed kick from the well- dressed, moustachioed Cid.
"Get back here, ribbit!" The moustachioed Cid cried, and Highwind gave him a look so incredulous that he was stopped in his tracks. "Whoops." Highwind, steadily rising again, mimed a gunshot with his fingers at his attacker. Another loud pop defined his passage from the dream quite nicely.
The red vested Cid, much to Highwind's surprise, helped him up with a proffered hand. Highwind grunted him a thanks. "Why aren't you attackin' me, pops?"
The vested Cid only shrugged. "Call it civility. I think you have enough trouble as it is at current, without me adding to it." His following wave encompassed the large group of Cid's that was left, all of which had drawn away from Highwind cautiously. "Could you merely send me home, please?"
"Yeah, sure. Ciao." Vested Cid vanished.
A plethora of Cid's was still left, and Highwind's patience with the entire problem had quickly ebbed into oblivion. "To hell with you all, I'm makin' your exit from this damned place memorable!"
He roared. It was a sound that, mighty though it was, found itself quickly drowned out by his own unconscious creation: and the Cid's, all locating the source of the massively rumbling noise very quickly, barely managed to turn to their right before an enormous airship – the Highwind, naturally – ploughed neatly into the lot of them. The resulting mass exodus of Cid's, all swept up underneath the prow of the Highwind, sounded as though somebody had just fallen headfirst onto a large sheet of bubble wrap. Cid Highwind managed to catch a quick "my airship looks better than that" floating on the wind from the last Cid before he, too, was sent back to where he came from.
And then there was silence. Existence breathed a gentle sigh of relief. Cid, watching his beloved Highwind sail off into the darkness, collapsed onto his knees, echoed that relief, albeit in a far more verbose and linguistically improper manner.
Stretching himself out upon the nothingness that surrounded him, Cid sighed. Over, done for, adieu. Happy, happy day.
And then it occurred to him: how the hell was he supposed to get out of this? After a cursory attempt at it, he discovered that simply willing himself to wake up did not work.
The curses that filled nothingness made existence shudder once more as it attempted valiantly to figure out why, indeed, it was not over with.
The white-garbed Sid offered the answer, calling out to Cid from across the void. "You forgot me!"
Cid turned to him with great relief. "Shit, right! My bad!"
Once the Highwind had turned back and bombed the hell out of the horrified scientist, Cid found himself collapsing to the ground – such as it was – and fainting.
And the universe, cruel as it was, decided to punish Cid for all the trouble his. . . kind had caused it. As Cid tumbled back into consciousness he found himself flying through a tunnel of Cid's, all spinning around him, poking him, filling his face with cigarette smoke, nattering on endlessly about airships and mechanical matters.
Cid Highwind, naturally, could not help but scream.
---
And when next he awoke, it was upon the couch. He flew up in a torrent of motion, one that nearly caused his softly spoken housemate – Shera – to have a heart attack, as she'd been watching him from a nearby chair, smiling as he gently snored the day away. She fell back in her chair, which collapsed with a loud thud and an exclaimed 'ow!' from Shera.
Cid darted about his house, yelling incoherently. He cleared Shera with a quick bound and made for the door. Shera, wincing as she rubbed the back of her head, implored Cid to tell her what was wrong. He glared back at her, his look one of utter insanity. "Cid? Don't call me Cid! No more Cid's! Damn shit ass Cid! Call me the Captain, you hear? The damned Captain! No goddamn Cid!" And with that he fled the house, shrieking.
Shera, rising slowly and propping the chair back up on all four legs, was utterly shocked. She would not be the only one in town experiencing this emotion, as Cid would climb to the top of the old Shinra rocket that overlooked them all and threaten to jump before the day was through.
These words managed to convey, perhaps in less colourful terms for some, the feelings of all those present.
It was an enormous plane on which the group found itself, a flat matte black travelling in every direction yet not enshrouding a one of them in darkness. Nay, enormous is not an adequate descriptor, for it suggests a fixed volume: their surroundings looked utterly boundless, as though they floated in space with all the stars turned off.
All of them were shocked. Many of them mirrored the first exclamation made in that strange place. And not a one of them, sadly, had even the slightest inkling where they were.
For the purpose of this occurrence, focusing upon one of these individuals will suffice. The initial man to speak, a one Cid Highwind, has this honour. This is perhaps convenient because – not that he yet knew it – a dream of his. The husky, grizzled mechanic had managed to fall dead to the world while listening contentedly to the radio, laid out upon his couch. This was, then, his own subconscious: however, whether it was also a nexus point into which many other subconsciouses were now joined is unclear. Perhaps every individual, performing a feat not known to his kind ever before, had happened to slip into a peaceful slumber simultaneously: whether this was mere happenstance, or plotted out by fate, does not matter. Needless to say, they were all there, and Cid Highwind, growing impatient with the situation after a mere ten seconds, decided to take action.
"Whoa whoa whoa!" He quipped, garnering a sufficient amount of attention from those gathered around him. He seemed, somehow, to have landed within the apex of the group, situated amongst them at a decisive point that made addressing each man easy. They turned and regarded him, a few tossing the odd, gruff "Whaddya want?" at the pilot.
Having gained an audience, Cid now scratched his unshaven chin. What did he want, anyway? It was a perfectly valid question, after all, one that they deserved an answer to. Summoning his considerable mental energies – a man of his calibre and status obviously possessed a great deal – Cid steeled himself for his reply. He had decided it would be profound yet simple, much reflecting his personality.
"I dunno." Sadly, he couldn't think of anything better to use, despite containing such overwhelmingly grandiose thoughts and schemes in his brain. Or maybe that was just his ego talking there.
His audience looked thoroughly disgusted with his answer: and he could hardly blame them. A large, balding man with a yellow flight suit – or it looked like one, anyway – gibbered roughly at Cid in some language the pilot had never heard before, and chortled to himself. Evidently, he was the only one to understand the joke, as nobody joined him.
"The hell kind of backwards talk is that?" Cid, ever prepared, casually drew a cigarette from the pack tucked in his pocket, and was quite put out over not finding a lighter on his person until one appeared before his eyes, lit the cigarette for him, and promptly vanished. He would never manage to equate this little act as his own wish for a light made manifest through the dream, not that it would have helped anything: and indeed, it was probably for the best, for had he realized his level of control over the situation, scads of naked women would no doubt have been descending from the abyss moments later.
The man shot him a glare. "It's Al Bhed, you twit. Where the hell are we, anyway?" Several of those surrounding him mumbled their eagerness in having this question answered quickly.
Cid shrugged. "How should I know? I was just lyin' on my couch, and bam! Here I am." He dragged on his cigarette thoughtfully. "I'd say this is a dream, but, nah, the cigarette tastes too sweet."
He quickly noticed that quite a few of the men around him had pulled out their own smokeables – ranging from cigarettes to long, curving pipes – and lit them up. The blackness was soon filled with the thick musk of smoke. Nobody seemed to complain about it, either, except for one rather fidgety fellow in a white lab suit. He appeared quite scholarly, and, unlike the rest, did not seem to belong at all. Amongst the rest, there was a kind of camaraderie, as though they were all long lost brothers suddenly thrown back into the mix again.
They were all rather thoughtful. Nobody spoke, but Cid knew that minds were racing towards some sort of conclusion about their predicament. Eventually, he decided that first things, of course, were first.
"Alright, listen up. I think we need some introductions here, eh?"
A well-dressed man in a cape – bearing, as well, a mustachio that twirled up into the air, defying gravity – nodded his assent. "Excellent idea. Why don't we start with you?"
Cid gazed at him, a little put off. Why did people always have to pick him first? "Uh, yeah, sure. The name's Cid. Cid Highwind."
The ruckus this sparked was considerable.
Every single person there was seen to announce, in one way or another, that that was also his name. This followed by a moment of amazement, in which the fact that every person there was named Cid registered in multiple brains at once.
Cid, after a moment of trying to calm people down, simply bellowed for silence. "Shut the hell up! Jeeeeeesus!" He furrowed his brow in thought a moment. "So. . . everybody whose name is Cid, raise yer damned hand."
Every hand flew skyward.
Cid's mouth fell slack.
One Cid – rather nicely dressed and small, garbed in a red vest and black trousers – pushed his spectacles back against his face before speaking. "Surely, this can't be a coincidence. Can it?" His question has followed by many shrugs and grunts. Clearly, they were all more than a little bewildered, and even this simple supposition was beyond the convocation of Cid's.
"Hell if I know. Shiiiit, this is weird." Cid, clearly exhausted from the news, seated himself on, well, nothingness, really, and puffed away at his cigarette.
Another Cid, this one bearing a huge, overgrown beard and enormous piloting goggles – Highwind thought him to look rather like an ape with bad teeth, a pipe fitted between said choppers – raised a hand. "Well, nothing saying we can't make things simpler, eh? Lets break us down into jobs to make it all easier. Who here's a mechanic, or works with engines and whatnot?"
The answer elicited a collective groan, and essentially put them back where they started: all but two of the Cid's raised their hands. Several of them muttered "jeeeeeesus" under their breath, amongst other curses.
Watching the lot of them react to one another was really quite eerie, for even those Cid's who seemed out of place at first began to adopt the attitudes of their fellows. The red-vested Cid, who had seemed rather well disposed at first, was smoking away and swearing like a sailor. Highwind chalked this up to the atmosphere. Even a rather young man with short blonde hair, garbed in what looked to be light armour, had settled in nicely, a small pipe propped betwixt his lips.
Cid Highwind nearly asked another question, but it died before reaching the end of his cigarette. Dammit, can't separate them by facial hair: they've all got at least stubble, 'cept that kid there. Hell, I'm sure he'll sprout a nice moustache, given a year or two.
One of the two non-mechanically inclined Cid's, garbed in shining armour and bearing both spiky hair and spiky beard, raised a hand. "How does everybody spell their name, anyway?"
C-I-D rang through the nothingness. Disconcerted, the armoured man's hand sank back down, and he resumed his discussion with the other non- mechanically inclined Cid, who was also a swordsman. The hooded, white- bearded Cid decided it was not worth the effort to elaborate that his full name was 'Cidolfas'.
The scientist who lurked on the fringes of the group looked about timidly. "Actually, mine is spelt S-I-D."
Everybody looked at him, narrow-eyed. An inherent tension between the Cid's and Sid was nearly palpable. "Yeah, ain't you special, princess." The bald, Al Bhed Cid called out mockingly. The entire group then proceeded to ignore him. Sid moved off to the side, grumbling dejectedly: it was something about Phantoms, not that anybody else cared.
A convention of Cid's huddled around the centre of nowhere – Highwind had evidently been deemed the nexus around which they all operated – and discussed the matter. One Cid, his eyes nowhere to be seen underneath a widely brimmed hat and mouth similarly obscured by a wide brush of auburn beard, discussed the possibility that this was all some kind of time rift that had dragged them all in through some freak accident. The red vested Cid insisted that such a coincidence was extremely unlikely. Yet another – a Cid garbed in a long, vibrantly yellow suit that stretched up over his head in a bizarre hood – suggested that perhaps Magitek technology had somehow warped the fabric of time and brought them all together. He had been conducting some very volatile experiments on the machines, after all, and such things were possible.
Highwind cocked an eyebrow at him. "The hell's Magitek? And why do you dress yourself like a damned banana? I just had to ask." The fruited Cid threw Highwind a dirty look and decided his opinion was above the crusty old pilot before him, thus prematurely ending the query on Magitek.
As the Cid's clamoured about him, postulating theories and swearing up a storm, Cid Highwind very quickly found his patience waning. He just wanted to be back on his damned couch, listening to the damned radio broadcast of Loveless, drinking his damned tea and generally enjoying his damned life. The fact that a new species of otherworldly Cid's had seemingly sprung up around him had Highwind very much put out, and he was quickly formulating the opinion of hating the name 'Cid'.
Eventually, he exploded. "Argh, shit damn ass crap! Can't you idiots shut up for two damned seconds?" Thus the group began on a new line of bickering, and all but Sid – who had simply walked off into the abyss, deciding it was a far nicer place than this – descended on the gruff pilot at their epicentre. Cursing echoed throughout the void, gnawing greatly on the nerves of nothingness itself – after all, who ever said nothingness doesn't have feelings, too?
It decided to get the ball rolling. This was just supposed to be a funny, bad dream for Cid Highwind: however, the forces that be quickly decided that there was only one Cid relegated to each plane of existence for a very, very good reason, and they were very glad they'd only deigned it necessary to gather up a group of around thirty Cid's, as opposed to, say, a thousand or more. The whole lot of them may well have succeeded in doing irreparable damage to, well, existence, swearing up a storm and choking the galaxy itself with their smoking habits.
So they implanted into Highwind the idea that this simply had to be a dream. There was no other explanation for it. No, not a dream: a goddamned nightmare. And Cid, who lay at the bottom of a pile of sweaty, hairy, cursing men, decided it was best to stick with this conclusion. And seeing as it was his damned dream, he furthermore decreed that this sweaty stinky cursing pile of Cid's would now get the hell off of him.
The entire pile simply exploded from within, sending Cid's cascading out in every direction. Cid Highwind emerged, his cigarette magically transformed into a gleaming, golden cigar of the utmost quality – it's a dream, so why not? – and glared at the whole lot of Cid's, rolling about on the ground as they were, swearing they would fix him good for that.
Cid bellowed, his voice amplified by the power of his subconscious. "Shut the hell up, you damned geeks! Get out of my goddamn dream and go back to wherever the hell you came from! Starting with you, banana-rama!"
The oddly clad fruited Cid winked out of existence with a loud pop.
He jabbed a wavering finger at the tall, bald Cid. "And you! Learn to speak some goddamn English! Off ya go!" The bald Cid managed to give Highwind the Al Bhed equivalent of the finger – which was, oddly enough, a deft crotch thrust that greatly unnerved Cid Highwind – before following the fruited Cid.
The two knightly Cid's charged at Highwind, but he was too quick for them both: with a dual snap of his fingers, they both promptly exited his dream. "And stay out! You're not even damned mechanics!"
Both the widely brimmed hat Cid and the Cid clad in gigantic piloting goggles managed to take this opportunity to sneak up on Highwind's back, jumping him with a pair of raucous bellows. The goggled Cid managed to bop Highwind with a thick, heavy mallet to his shoulder before Highwind sent them both packing. Staggering forwards and collapsing from the blow, Cid just barely managed to roll away from a deftly placed kick from the well- dressed, moustachioed Cid.
"Get back here, ribbit!" The moustachioed Cid cried, and Highwind gave him a look so incredulous that he was stopped in his tracks. "Whoops." Highwind, steadily rising again, mimed a gunshot with his fingers at his attacker. Another loud pop defined his passage from the dream quite nicely.
The red vested Cid, much to Highwind's surprise, helped him up with a proffered hand. Highwind grunted him a thanks. "Why aren't you attackin' me, pops?"
The vested Cid only shrugged. "Call it civility. I think you have enough trouble as it is at current, without me adding to it." His following wave encompassed the large group of Cid's that was left, all of which had drawn away from Highwind cautiously. "Could you merely send me home, please?"
"Yeah, sure. Ciao." Vested Cid vanished.
A plethora of Cid's was still left, and Highwind's patience with the entire problem had quickly ebbed into oblivion. "To hell with you all, I'm makin' your exit from this damned place memorable!"
He roared. It was a sound that, mighty though it was, found itself quickly drowned out by his own unconscious creation: and the Cid's, all locating the source of the massively rumbling noise very quickly, barely managed to turn to their right before an enormous airship – the Highwind, naturally – ploughed neatly into the lot of them. The resulting mass exodus of Cid's, all swept up underneath the prow of the Highwind, sounded as though somebody had just fallen headfirst onto a large sheet of bubble wrap. Cid Highwind managed to catch a quick "my airship looks better than that" floating on the wind from the last Cid before he, too, was sent back to where he came from.
And then there was silence. Existence breathed a gentle sigh of relief. Cid, watching his beloved Highwind sail off into the darkness, collapsed onto his knees, echoed that relief, albeit in a far more verbose and linguistically improper manner.
Stretching himself out upon the nothingness that surrounded him, Cid sighed. Over, done for, adieu. Happy, happy day.
And then it occurred to him: how the hell was he supposed to get out of this? After a cursory attempt at it, he discovered that simply willing himself to wake up did not work.
The curses that filled nothingness made existence shudder once more as it attempted valiantly to figure out why, indeed, it was not over with.
The white-garbed Sid offered the answer, calling out to Cid from across the void. "You forgot me!"
Cid turned to him with great relief. "Shit, right! My bad!"
Once the Highwind had turned back and bombed the hell out of the horrified scientist, Cid found himself collapsing to the ground – such as it was – and fainting.
And the universe, cruel as it was, decided to punish Cid for all the trouble his. . . kind had caused it. As Cid tumbled back into consciousness he found himself flying through a tunnel of Cid's, all spinning around him, poking him, filling his face with cigarette smoke, nattering on endlessly about airships and mechanical matters.
Cid Highwind, naturally, could not help but scream.
---
And when next he awoke, it was upon the couch. He flew up in a torrent of motion, one that nearly caused his softly spoken housemate – Shera – to have a heart attack, as she'd been watching him from a nearby chair, smiling as he gently snored the day away. She fell back in her chair, which collapsed with a loud thud and an exclaimed 'ow!' from Shera.
Cid darted about his house, yelling incoherently. He cleared Shera with a quick bound and made for the door. Shera, wincing as she rubbed the back of her head, implored Cid to tell her what was wrong. He glared back at her, his look one of utter insanity. "Cid? Don't call me Cid! No more Cid's! Damn shit ass Cid! Call me the Captain, you hear? The damned Captain! No goddamn Cid!" And with that he fled the house, shrieking.
Shera, rising slowly and propping the chair back up on all four legs, was utterly shocked. She would not be the only one in town experiencing this emotion, as Cid would climb to the top of the old Shinra rocket that overlooked them all and threaten to jump before the day was through.