I
A thick, stagnant overcast pooled over Edge.
The clouds were grey, the buildings were colourless, but the city's heart was black.
Deep within its many sprawling arteries strode a lonely man, wreathed in a long, tattered vermillion cloth. The noxious fumes of industry suffocated the air, but the true poison which infected the pale-faced gunslinger was the society through which he walked. Around him, the people were strewn across the roadsides like refuse of flesh and bone. Plundered waste skips were left dilapidated and agape, their foetid contents hauled away in tracks of slime for the desperate to dissect. There was a riotous din across the street as men congregated like carrion crows around a brawl. This area had been so destitute that dignity and pride were the only currency left, and it seemed one of those men had come to collect a debt here in the Grimhaven District.
Vincent Valentine was beginning to have second thoughts about being there, but theft was theft.
The stolen Materia was nestled inside his mantle, its ethereal yellow glow concealed well from view. The crowd opposite from him split open, punctured by the collapse of a man choking up blood onto the curb. The fighter was half-nude, his sinewy upper body pocked with abrasions and scars. Judging from the loose necklace of canines, molars and incisors along the road, Vincent didn't enjoy imagining what their lengths would be for something as valuable as his own cargo. The jeering mob flocked around the combatants again, shielding him from the gruesome spectacle of the second man sinking his thumb into the other's eye.
Vagrant traders called out to him, some wily, others aggressive, but not one of them fruitful.
Vincent continued on his way, ignorant to the questionable trinkets on display.
He wandered deeper into the run-down district. Salacious cat-calls beckoned to him from windowsills tinged with red lights and peppered with diseased, crooning crones out for easy profit. There was no response from him; they preyed on the depraved and the needy, not the dead. They would receive nothing from him, an outlandish spectre who haunted through the twisting pathways of Edge's most infamous cesspit. The closer Vincent pressed on to his destination, the warmer and seedier the atmosphere became. He promised himself that this would be the final time that he intervened in Yuffie's poor life decisions.
Finally, the traveller came upon a large, rusted gate. It was stowed away in the mouth of an alley, mounted upon a flight of two concrete steps. Two heavy-set men, each with necks sunken into great, seething canvasses of brawn, barged forward to bar Vincent's way. Leather jackets, dark jeans, and rugged jaws - the pair of them could easily have been congenital twins, bred by the same live-or-die code of life that had stitched together so many of these other forsaken souls.
"Hey, the nineties were ten years ago, freak." One of them lifted his chin, oozing an intimidation that never quite found its mark upon a corpse. The only difference between the two was that the one who spoke had a burn scar melted just above his right brow in the template of a playing card suit - a spade. His opposite number had a club mark printed in stringent white against the deep colouration of his skin, just above the left brow. Their shaven scalps were stitched by an identical, vertical seam that ran from the nape of their necks to their foreheads, appearing like burly, organic scarecrows.
"You don't wanna be here, man," the other chuckled dryly at the first's joke, licking along rows of unkempt teeth. "Pack that string-bean ass up, and lose it."
Vincent eyed them each in turn, silent and contemplative. He wasn't there to cause a scene, although having witnessed what he had, the gunslinger wasn't entirely sure what would constitute one. The three barrels of Cerberus reared their loaded fangs towards the nearest man's kneecap: they were aimed to maim and incapacitate, not to kill. He allowed a sliver of the Materia's light to filter through a gap in his cloak, keeping himself guarded, his actions furtive throughout.
Begrudgingly, the giants lumbered aside.
Vincent drifted between them, not a word exchanged, and not a bullet wasted.
Inside, the den reeked of subhuman squalor. There was a dankness to the hollowed-out living quarters, a musty, foul odour lining the air. The dead man peered around with gall at the array of steel cages littering the room, and disquiet rooted itself in his stomach. The Materia which he had brought back to this group - the Manipulate Materia - made sense. He had seen the recesses of the world, but there was no lower rung than this. Moreover, just how and why Yuffie of all people had managed to infiltrate, or perhaps even strike up some accord with this contemptible scum, had only deepened his need for answers. Nerves numbed by years of morbid slumber flickered to life, and Vincent's synapses twitched and fired through his brain with the threat that everything here was wrong.
The lanky streak before him, clothed in a mussed and dirty suit, lounged on the hind legs of a chair. He had a darker, tanned pigmentation that was stretched taut with cheap, lazy lift operations, and his jawline was festooned with black facial hair. There were others in the room, glowering at him with predatory interest as they each filed through grubby coins, rapped battered shoes with impatience, and calculated their moments, but Vincent had always borne the lesson that the man with the desk was the man who had the authority - and on that personal moral alone, he strolled fearlessly towards the grinning fiend.
"Ah," the so-called businessman clapped his hands, his voice guttural, foreign and patchy. "Welcome! They address me to Owl - come to buy, friend?"
"What do you have?" Vincent asked.
"Why, potions and remedies, of course!" Owl's eyes twinkled with lies against the dim strip of light overhead. "Or, we could cut the bullshit." He gestured back from where Vincent had first set foot inside, the ageless experiment unmoved by his dramatics. "Since you have been met with Hawk and Kestrel at the door and passed by them, you must either be having something very important to us - or something very important is going from you. Which is it?"
Vincent didn't utter anything in reply.
The Manipulate Materia sliced through the scarlet folds of his garments, in a mutually recognised promise.
"You know... we aren't a charity," Owl leaned forward, all four chair legs squealing against the stone. "You must want a good potion for your troubling, then?"
"Potions are all you sell?" Vincent probed, scrutinising every vein across the trader's forehead as they throbbed dishonestly.
"Of a sort." Owl's chuckle was filthy, blighted by horrible knowledge. "There are much different potions, my friend. Potions to stop blood, in example, or to pick up your energy from a down. The 'potions' we sell here are highly good," he tongued against his upper lip, "yes, shit fine potions. They help, ah... loosen up boredom, or loneliness. They change a man's life in a single night! Or a year. Or much years, if you have a right price - heh, heh..."
"Show me." The gunslinger was ever-wary, and mapped out the surroundings. There was a cluster of lowlifes who reacted immediately to their superior's nod, and scrambled to drag aside a heavy barricade. It appeared to be composed of soldered girders in a skin of corrugated metal, with the same dimensions as the frame of bookshelves. As the three men dragged it out of the way, a hidden passageway that led down into the basement revealed itself. The murk awaited them, blowing a muggy breeze across Vincent from its depths. It was uncomfortable, and gradually worsened as they descended into it.
Something ominous lingered in that motionless, sticky air.
Something that prickled Vincent's skin and soul, all at once.
'This is wrong', it said. 'Turn back, go away, this is wrong.'
"Health junkies always speak to me like, 'organic, organic - is always with organic!'" Owl ranted in his shredded, pigeon grasp of the local dialect. "But you don't see poor little farmer-man on fronts of huge stores, don't you? It is always the fast food! People come for quick, come for easy... Yes, you are a quick and easy man! I see in your clothes, in your skin! Haven't seen much sun in life, eh? Is okay, friend, neither have much of us who spent the lives in a Midgar slums!"
Vincent didn't acknowledge him, stoic to the point of living stone. They entered into a cellar, which had a string of three mobile boilers plugged into a narrow carpet of wiring and electrical sockets. Their two faces were set towards cells, barred by iron, three on either side of the room. Soft, unconscious moans punctuated the low thrumming of the heaters, and Vincent became sickened - incensed - by their contents. Inside each lay young women, naked and glistening with sweat, cramped together like battery hens in an iniquitous pit of neglect. They were gaunt, dreaming flesh-mannequins drugged into submission for the next auction, their bodies blotched with the telltale stains of excessive perspiration. The stench of body odour swamped the cellar, bringing to Vincent's mind the vivid and repugnant memories of the past. Not since that grotesque excuse of a scientist had he witnessed such a crude lack of morality.
"You must excuse the smell," Owl continued, sidling past the hordes nonchalant towards their condition. "We warm them lots, they sweat lots. Lots of human body is water, yes? We bring it out, and the girls stay thin and gorgeous for high pleasure," he explained, toeing across an exposed circuit. "Everybody wins."
'Everybody?'
Vincent struggled to stomach his distaste. If he clipped a bullet through this man's skull, it would indeed be a 'quick and easy' escape. There would be no justice. This trafficker - this monster - could not survive in Edge with such severe speech restrictions, nor his asininity. There had to be another party involved. Although his fingers skirted against the holster of his weapon, Vincent roamed across the heaters with a calm vehemence, perfectly disguised as disinterest.
"Since when could you install Materia into electrical appliances?" The dead man inclined his head towards the devices, the surfaces of which were each embedded with a yellow and purple sphere. He suspected that the alternate-coloured orbs were 'All', which strengthened the effects across a range of victims.
"Ah," Owl hummed with content, swatting his hand down upon a heater's robust head. "They are very good, my friends are."
"Who are they?" All pretence of harmony was stripped away from Vincent's callous, penetrative stare.
Owl pursed his lips, mulling over the situation. These questions were easing their way into an undesirable territory. Catching Vincent's expression, the man sneered in understanding. They didn't need to explain their positions now. No longer were they amiable partners, hatching out payment terms and bartering over which sack of meat to lend out for a time. Vincent's forefinger rested, itchy, against Cerberus's trigger. The criminal, now caught, snorted in disbelief.
"Just friends." He was shady, unctuous. Untrustworthy.
There was no possibility of the gunslinger accepting that alone.
"Who are they?" Vincent levelled his firearm in a red flare, its three hollow eyes leering towards Owl. The man turned his gaze briefly, thoughtfully towards the exit as thoughts of flight or shouts for assistance from above pulsed through the two. They were slain swiftly by a click of the gun, snapping him to reality.
"You wouldn't kill me," Owl's spindly arms rose in a casual surrender, speaking nothing of respect for the intruder. "You're good man! Very nice man!"
"What you have abused most will die first," Vincent hissed. His brow dripped. "Then we'll see."
"Oh! You want to shoot at a hand of whores?" Owl's sight was unsteady, nervous, flittering from Cerberus, to Vincent, and away towards the caged girls. He slacked in laughter, twisted and tumbled over Vincent's misinterpreted words. "You're one of those! Is okay, we offer for men like you! Go ahead, pick a fill!"
"I'm not talking about them," the ghostly being lowered his aim: down past Owl's chest, past his stomach. It hovered just below his abdomen. "Talk."
"You will not... Please!" The thug's face contorted into an unsightly mask of fear. "Let us discuss, please - you can have a whole, uh," he nodded towards a cell, "this much of them, eh? All for yourself, no charges! No charges for you - a promise! They don't know how to be, uh... people, you know? Is best for them, is what they know, all they know! Taste one for yourself, is all good quality!" Suddenly, Owl barked with rabid ferocity in a language Vincent could not translate, battering against the bars. It was directed towards the girls, that much he knew - the name Natasha was the only cogent thing that spluttered from his lips.
"Give me their names," Vincent demanded, his sympathy having never existed to begin with.
"Is not me, my friend!" Owl lashed out, voice cracking in panic. "I don't... I don't do this, I just sell! I don't take them, I don't... uh, I do not the... okay?"
"Names," his interrogator growled again, accented with venom. This time there would be no tolerance.
"Don... fuck, fine!" Owl whimpered, sunken to defeat. "Is- is Don Santeo, okay? Now, please, we talk about this...!"
He thought with that, he cherished that, and he lived by that.
It was obvious. That was a gnarled, repugnant set of particular organs.
Cerberus roared, recoiling stiffly in Vincent's hand. Burned sulphur swept up in a sallow plume from the gunshot, ripping anguish from the treacherous man's throat. Owl crumpled onto the ground, an obscene slew dribbling out of an equally obscene mouth. Shivering hands grasped at what was no longer there, a mutilated and unrecognisable cavern between his squirming thighs. Blood, ceaseless and explicit, bubbled between his scrabbling, scrawny fingers.
Vincent threw his cloak around himself, head canted towards the commotion upstairs.