A/N: Complete rewrite as of 5/25/18
Wartime was a busy time for armies, and even busier for the arms dealer working both sides behind the scenes. ShinRa Manufacturing was a force to be reckoned with, though most people were too busy to reflect on it; instead, they were simply thought of for what they could do as a tool, a provider of desperately needed weapons and ammunition. It was a bloody venture, but a wildly successful one, and Rupert would be the last one to speak ill of his father's brilliant capitalizing on the situation.
But he couldn't help but think that, ultimately, war wasn't going to be enough. They were raking in thousands of gil supplying weapons, and careful manipulation of supply and demand meant no one would be winning by surprise, but if they kept it going much longer the cost in lives would start affecting the economy. Eventually, things would burn out and there would be a mess left behind. A mess he really didn't want to deal with.
Of course, he didn't go telling his father he thought they should look into new avenues, but he made some subtle inquiries. Looked around and tried to see what other niche might need filled.
He spent a lot of time talking to the weapon smiths, seeing them work, seeing what they came up with - always improving. Always keeping ShinRa at the top of the pack. He was trained to use every sort of gun that had been produced by their teams, though he was partial to his rifle; growing up at the foot of the Nibel mountain range in the land of wolves and dragons, you learned to value a good gun more than most.
Their materia section was far smaller, consisting of a handful of travelers that searched out new materia while out peddling weapons, and a small team that mastered materia for even better trade value. The head of the team was an old man from Cosmo Canyon named Bugenhagen, who had an uncanny knack for assessing the value of new materia and picking places it was likely to form. They had several springs up in the mountains that they watched closely, but it was a painfully slow process.
"If there was a way to manufacture materia, you'd make a fortune," Rupert muttered, rolling a pale green orb between his palms.
"You can't rush the Lifestream," Bugenhagen said. "The Planet gives in its due time."
"I don't expect to make identical materia, but there has to be something," Rupert said, tossing the Restore lightly between his hands. "I want to look into it."
"Oh ho? So sure there's something to find?" Bugenhagen raised a bushy white brow, turning to face him.
"There has to be. What is materia?" Rupert asked.
"We've gone through this before," Bugenhagen pointed out, though he was willing to play along. "Materia comes from the Lifestream, carrying with it the memory of the Ancients. It forms over time in mako flows - more commonly in the bottom of springs or pools, where there's minimal movement to disturb it in the process of condensation."
"Condensed mako." Rupert hummed, eyeing the Restore. If all it was was condensed mako, then there ought to be a way to do that.
"Be careful, if you try this," Bugenhagen warned. "Mako can be dangerous. There's a reason extraction teams have to wear hazard equipment."
"I'll be careful."
Rupert spent a great deal of time around Bugenhagen, tossing theories back and forth while the older man worked on mastering new materia to generate new ones and make master leveled ones for selling. He didn't seem to think it was possible, to force the generation of materia by artificial means, but Rupert couldn't see why not. It was just a matter of speeding up the condensation process, wasn't it?
"You underestimate the significance of the Lifestream's natural order," Bugenhagen warned. "Materia have power from steeping in it, and being exposed to the spirit of Gaea."
Rupert hummed idly, not quite an agreement. "What was the name of that scientist you'd spoken with? The one over in Junon."
"I've spoken with many scientists in Junon," Bugenhagen said. "That's where I've presented my findings."
"Yes, but there was one who was also studying the planet, who would be familiar with mako." And hopefully would be a little more agreeable about helping him find a way to manufacture materia. If they could, it would open a whole new market. Materia was a hot commodity, especially Restores and Fire in this feral, frozen neck of the woods. "What was his name? Do you have his contact information?"
"I believe you mean Grimoire Valentine," Bugenhagen said. "He's finishing up his doctorate in Junon. I have the number for his apartment, assuming he's there."
"I can always leave a message if he's not." Rupert shrugged, getting a pad of paper out of his jacket. "Give me his number."
Rupert really wasn't sure what he'd expected from Grimoire Valentine. Given he'd heard of the family, with words like old blood and old money tossed around, he supposed he'd expected someone more… austere. Someone stern and serious, maybe with an aristocratic bearing. Definitely an intellectual, with how well educated he supposedly was - the man was working on his doctorate, after all.
He got about half of that.
Grimoire had a casual sort of aristocratic grace to him, and was most definitely an intellectual - especially obvious once he got going on a topic, and it seemed like he could go on at length on a wide variety of topics. But he was also surprisingly enthusiastic about things. Enthusiasm that, once he got over his initial surprise, Rupert was happy to tap. Because while Grimoire certainly had his share of mystic leanings, he had no misgivings about 'rushing the Planet' - if anything, the science required seemed to fascinate him.
"Do you think you can do it?" Rupert asked.
"I'm not sure what you'd need, but if you give me some time I can probably draw up some hypotheticals," Grimoire said. "You'll probably need an engineer to make it work."
"We've got those." Rupert waved it off. "I just need something they can work with. A solid idea."
"Well, lucky you I think I can manage that much." Grimoire grabbed one of the notebooks he had sitting beside the chair he was in, uncapping the pen that had been resting on top of it. "You'd need some sort of containment, something to hold the mako in that wouldn't corrode from the acidity. The actual actions it produces would depend on how you were able to simulate the materia formation…"
"Materia forms from concentrated mako," Rupert said.
"Yes, but there's more to it than that, or you'd only find new materia in crevices, not freely sitting in the bottom of a pool or spring," he pointed out. "Something prompts materia to form when mako is gathered. If we knew what that was, we'd have it down."
"I understand that, but is there any reason why we can't try sheer concentration?" Rupert asked.
Grimoire toyed with his pen, thoughtful. "I suppose it's a place to start. But it might be a good idea to… encourage it. Seed the ground, as it were."
"Seed the ground how?" Rupert asked.
There was a moment of silence as Grimoire apparently worked it out in his head, red eyes distant as he thought. "…materia shards."
"What about materia shards?" He asked.
"We make something that will concentrate mako, and drop a shard of materia in it. It might encourage what kind of formation we get," Grimoire said.
Rupert eyed him a moment, skeptical. "Where are you getting this?"
"Off the top of my head," he admitted. "But it makes sense. A fraction of a materia may not be enough to use, but in theory it should still contain the essence of the whole. The memory, if you will. So if something built up around it, the inclination would be to match what was already there, I'd think."
"Isn't it dangerous to break materia?" Rupert asked.
"Only if it breaks while you're in the middle of a spell," Grimoire said. "Otherwise it's little more than any other unactivated magical artifact - full of potential, but without active power."
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask just what other kinds of 'magical artifacts' Grimoire had been exposed to, but Rupert decided that was a conversation to save for another day and more coffee. With his luck, it would distract the scientist completely, and he really needed him focused. "Can you draw that up, then?"
Grimoire hummed, nodding. "I think so. Let me run a few things by Gast, and I'll give you a call."
It took Grimoire the better part of a month to get back to Rupert, enough time that he was starting to wonder if maybe he needed to check back in. But no, he called him up from Junon. Told him to go over to his fax, which was spitting out several pages of explanation to go along with several more pages of sketches.
As it turned out, he'd asked around the university until he'd been able to find an engineer willing to talk hypotheticals with him, enough to flesh out the idea in slightly more concrete terms. Not, unfortunately, someone with the time or willingness to experiment with such a caustic substance, but it was a start. And Rupert knew where to find… creative individuals. His father had a plant in Rakheim, and Rupert was overdue for a visit. It was, if nothing else, a start.
Rakheim was an industrial hub, the population boosted by ShinRa's munitions factory but also consisting of a wide variety of freelance individuals. It was also the first big town between the port of Costa del Luna and the Nibel mountain range, and so had the benefit of trade passing through. It was an excellent starting point for Rupert's search for an engineer to make Grimoire's designs a reality.
Some asking around had him going to a small smithy on the edge of town, not to meet the owner, but to meet the young man working for him. Word had it that he'd done work with materia - bracers and weapon sockets were standard fare, but accessories required a defter touch. And, while he was currently at the smithy, he also helped at one of the larger mechanic shops. That was the sort of versatility Rupert looked for, someone who could bring multiple talents to the table.
He found the man - and just barely that, several years younger than Rupert himself - in the back of the shop, working on a small machine that he honestly couldn't identify. Something with a lot of gears and the shimmer of materia shards laying out in a case to the side. "Excuse me."
"Mm?" He glanced up, smiling faintly. "'llo, what can I do for ya?"
"Rhys Tuesti? I'm Rupert Shinra." He smiled. "And I've got a job for you."