I've been out here for hours with the other diggers, my pickaxe working in a steady rhythm in the orchestra of digging tools, but today I'm the one to ring metal against metal, instead of the spit and pull of the earth. In over a year at the outpost, this is the first damned piece of treasure I've ever found.
"Hey, the writer finally found something!" I hear Graves call out, standing over me outside my shallow hole. I drop the pickaxe and pull out a small shovel I had stuck in the ground by my left boot, clearing away the excess dirt around the object and wiping it with my gloved hands. I stare at it for a moment, not really knowing what to say. Graves frowns, tipping the lip of his hat upward. "Huh," he says.
I pull the golden skull out of the ground and hold it up in front of me, wiping more dirt off. I look at it a little longer, and then hand it up to Graves, who takes it with an outstretched hand and frowns at it some more. "Who's do you think it is?" Graves asks.
"Beats me," I laugh, flopping back against the side of my hole, "The Gingerbread Man?" I take off my gloves and pull a pack of smokes from my pocket. I've cut down a lot. I bought the pack off a trader a month before and I still have half of them left. The air is so clean out here. It comes off huge glaciers further inland and rolls down to the ocean shore, which is maybe 200 yards from where I'm sitting, so you get that salty ocean taste in your mouth as well. Clean livin'!
Graves puts his thumb in one of the skull's eye sockets, apparently deep in contemplation. "Is it worth anything?" Graves asks. I light the cigarette and breathe it in deep.
"Doubt it," I say with a puff of smoke, "I mean it's gold, sure, but it's not something you want on your mantelpiece." I flick the ashes off the tip of my cig. Graves turns the skull over in his hands and hands it back to me.
"You'd probably get a few thousand gil for it," Graves says. I sit the skull down next to me and continue my habit. The smoke curls around my dirt-stained tan khakis, my dirt-stained brown boots, my gray-white thermal and forearms, which are stained with dirt, and up around my dirty face and hair. I have short, dirty blond hair, brown eyes, a face, you know the drill. I have a beard like pretty much everybody else in Bone Village, except Tooky, who hasn't shaved in six months and only has a scraggle of blonde nastiness around his chin and cheeks to show for it. This place needs more girls.
"Hey what'd he find?" I hear Tim call from across the dig site.
"Golden skull!" Graves calls back, turning away from me to face Tim. There is only that steady rhythm of pickaxes for a moment, then-
"Is it worth anything?" Tim asks.
"Jason doesn't seem to think so," Graves says.
"He'd probably get a few thousand gil for it."
"That's what I said."
"Yeah."
The ring of my cell phone breaks the moment. I forgot I had it with me. I wrestle the thing out of a secure pocket halfway down the pant leg and flip it open.
"This is Jason Weed," I say.
"You've stopped saying 'You've got weed' when you answer the phone?" my editor's voice crackles across the ocean.
"Sorry Todd I didn't know it was you," I say. Todd is technically my boss at The Midgar Times, but it's hard to treat him that way since he's basically been letting me do whatever I want since I joined the paper ten years ago. I basically pick whatever place on the map might have an interesting story and they pay for me to go there. Even my first year as an intern they sent me all over Midgar, whereas a lot of journalists are assigned single sectors.
"I've got some good news for you, Weedy," Todd says, probably from the 50th floor of the ShinRa building, where the offices are, "He's ready." I stand up in my hole, looking past Graves to that tiny pathway in the woods, where a distant, eerie light shines. The story I'm writing is basically about that path, which is an otherworldly passageway to The Forgotten City. Most people still don't believe it exists, least of all the miners of Bone Village. I'd done the part of my story on the miners, and now it was time to go to The Forgotten City and see it for myself. I just needed an escort. There weren't too many people on Gaia who had made it through there alive, and they were all former members of AVALANCHE. Todd had insisted on picking the one who would never answer his cell phone.
"Cloud?" I say, "You got a hold of him?"
"He's agreed to bring you into the city, but there's a catch," Todd says. I wait, staring at that light through the woods. In the pause he purposely created from saying there was a catch, Todd could have easily just told me what it was. He knows I don't like that, by the way. "He wants to go into the city from the north side," Todd says. A fresh breath of smoke catches in my throat. I let the breath out slowly.
"I am on the south side, Todd," I say.
"He's going to be making a series of deliveries from Midgar all the way up to the arctic and he's going to take you to the city after he's done," Todd says.
"Oh great. So I'll just crawl through the icy tundra and meet him then."
"No, that's where it gets good. You'll be traveling with him."
I drop my cigarette on the ground.
"What?" I say.
"You're going from Midgar to The Forgotten City with the world's most reclusive hero!" Todd yells, "And on the way, you're going to do an expose on that pretty bastard! You'll be interviewing him as you traverse the exact same path he took to fight Sephiroth! It's not going to get any better than this Jay, you should be saying yes already."
"How'd you get him to sign off on this?" I ask.
"Well we may be funding his trip a little bit."
"Are you paying him more than me?"
"Uhhh..."
A squealing moan rips out of the woods and a monster's snapping jaws close in front of the light that's held my gaze the last five minutes. A giant red lizard with purple scales along its spine and a long spiky tail bursts through the pathway onto the dig site. The siren goes off. Miners run back as others run forward, machine guns ready. They pump the thing full of bullets, sending the monster moaning and scuttling back towards the woods. The monster is a native of the area and is known for its resilience. Now that the initial shock is over the miners are shooting with bored looks on their faces, waiting patiently for it to drop to the ground, which it finally does, its legs twitching as it falls to its side. The shooting stops. It is quiet.
"Lunch?" Graves asks. Everyone laughs and heads back to the tents. Except for me. I walk to the monster slowly.
"Weedy?" Todd says, "What was that?" My boot crunches the ground right beneath the monsters jaw. I lean over and can see my reflection in his enormous eye, the last bit of life flowing out as a trickle of blood etches across its face.
"Weedy are you okay?" Todd asks.
"Yeah," I say, "I'll do it, it sounds great."
"You bet it does! There's a trader boat coming into the village tomorrow."
"I'll be on it."
I flip the phone shut and walk back towards the tents.
