2. A Rough Welcome


Nanaki stared at the charred cadaver behind the desk. The blackened skin had cracked and the eyes were nothing but empty holes. The mouth hung ajar in a silent scream. The stench was overwhelming.

Was this the collector he had come to meet? Regardless of the answer, one thing was clear. He would not get the audience he had hoped for.

If this was the collector, did she have family? Partners, employees? Nanaki had no idea, but he knew he couldn't linger. It was hard enough to get people to listen to him at the best of times. When a dead human was involved, he would get no hearing at all.

Nanaki had come too far to leave with nothing, though. He could afford to spend a few minutes looking around. He would sense a human long before they sensed him.

The corpse behind the desk was beyond any aid he could offer. Nanaki turned his attention toward her office instead. A metal cabinet squatted in one corner behind the desk, its door gaping wide. A few open boxes no bigger than his paw, made of thick cardboard, were strewn across the shelves and the floor below. The empty ones must have been lids for the ones lined with little cushions of shiny fabric; cushions with small round depressions, Nanaki noticed.

A scenic painting was propped up against the wall on his left. Above it, a thick metal door hung open, revealing several more boxes. These ones were made of wood; some polished, others delicately painted. All of them were open and empty.

Some humans Nanaki had counted as friends and allies. Some humans he had met on the field of battle as worthy foes. And some humans, as he had discovered during his time as a "specimen"… some humans were nothing more than two-legged things.

The thought settled deep in his throat, thickening into a growl he could barely swallow. It took a brief recitation to push those memories down, and a second verse before Nanaki felt sure of his calm. He needed his wits more than ever, now that he had a thief to track down. A thief and a murderer, no less. A two-legged thing.

He rounded the table for a better look at the remains, but the dead human stared straight ahead through blackened sockets and told him nothing. Faint tendrils of smoke still rose from the body, and the stench of burned flesh overpowered everything else. If the killer had left a trail, Nanaki would have to pick it up elsewhere. With a huff, he turned and skulked back through the gallery of stuffed corpses, leaving the human among their number.

As soon as he stepped out onto the porch, he drew in a deep breath. He smelled the cloying sweetness of the roses that grew along the front of the house; the oily stink of the four-wheeled monstrosity parked just outside the picket fence; the anxious whiff of a rabbit hiding somewhere nearby. Aside from the smoke that still clung to his fur, nothing seemed out of place. His ears told him the same. With a frustrated snap of his tail, he leapt down from the porch and headed to his right, around the house.

Nanaki caught it as soon as he rounded the corner – the heady barnyard musk of a chocobo. The trail took him some twenty paces down the road, until he came to a set of parallel ruts in the dirt, interspersed with the deep scratch-marks of a chocobo's toes. The bird musk was heavy here, but beneath it lay a current of something else; a sting in his nose with every drawn breath. The zesty scent of Wutai spices.


Nanaki found the strip of jerky in the grass by the side of the road, right where the man had dropped it. He inhaled the spicy scent, committed it to memory. It wouldn't do him much good yet – the air along the road was too saturated by the smells of birds and greasy vehicles – but this road had only one destination on this side of the mountains. The human settlement of Edge, which had sprung up from the bones of Midgar's carcass. Nanaki couldn't recall a scent like this on his previous visits to the budding city; the trail would serve him well there.

First, though, he had to get there. The idea of traveling there by road, in plain sight of suspicious humans, did not appeal to him, but the wasteland around Edge was treacherous. Travel by night would have been preferable – and more comfortable in temperature – but in a bustling city like Edge, even the strongest scents would intermingle with others and disperse until nothing was left. He couldn't risk losing the only trail he had. And so Nanaki set off, following the road at a distance that would balance the threat of humans with the threat of monsters in the wastes.

The farther he trod upon the blackened soil of the Midgar badlands, the harder it was to keep his hackles down. It was not the relentless heat that bothered him so much, nor the fine dust that puffed up from the ground to tickle his nostrils at the slightest breeze. No, what made his skin crawl was the utter absence of life.

Cosmo Canyon's bare cliffs were still home to snakes and lizards and griffins. Sand spiders and desert mice made their nests in the valley shade. The red sands hid thousands of seeds, waiting for the rain that would blanket the whole canyon overnight in a glorious explosion of color. Even in the driest season, weeds defied the parching heat of the sun.

Here there was nothing. Nothing skittered among these rocks, nothing grew in these sands. A sea of barren black dust. The legacy of the humans, of course.

The legacy of Shinra's humans, Nanaki reminded himself. Shinra had sucked the life out of these lands, not the people of Edge. Some humans were bad, and some humans were good, and most were somewhere in between. He knew this. He had grown up among them. The longer he went feral, though, the harder it was to acknowledge it.

Nanaki also knew that the badlands weren't entirely devoid of life – but the life they attracted was a parody of it, twisted beyond recognition. Nothing could live out here for long, but monsters still roamed the wastes, walking a knife-edge between threats, just as he was doing. Bands of human scavengers still scoured Midgar every day, while Reeve Tuesti's WRO guarded the outskirts of Edge at night; this the man himself had told Nanaki. But the humans would leave the ruins by nightfall, and the WRO's patrols dared not venture beyond Edge's borders. And so the monsters would sneak into Midgar's ruins once darkness fell, hunting and scavenging, only to creep back at dawn into the wasteland to hide.

Nanaki hoped he wouldn't have to resort to such tactics. When it came to dealing with humans, he had an advantage over the monsters from the badlands. He wore metal cuffs on his legs and beads in his mane; he had soft fur to shield him for the sun, instead of scales and leathery skin; his tattoos were the work of a civilized culture. The insulting assumption that he was tamed would often keep humans at a distance until his business in their settlements was concluded – so long as he remained silent.

Nanaki could smell the city of Edge long before he could hear it. It stood out against the desiccated nothing of the wastes, as a peculiar blend of life and decay that was awash in a powerful tide of rust. As he came closer, the weaker notes made themselves known, including a surprisingly mordant whiff of old Mako. It must have emanated from the ruins; Reeve had made every effort to find alternative power sources for the new city at Midgar's feet.

Weak as it was, the smell of Mako curled Nanaki's lip. It reminded him of steel walls and white coats, of needles and cages and all-consuming fear. The air in Shinra's tower had been saturated with that aberrant stench. He used it now to guide him; he wanted the side of Edge that lay farthest from the ruins. He knew from previous visits that several chocobo stables had sprung up on the fringes of the city, near the arterial roads north and south. It seemed a decent place to start. The men he was hunting would need to stable their bird somewhere.

However, his first attempt to approach a stable made him doubt his plan. The chocobos in the paddock behind the barn began warking and squawking at the first whiff of his scent. The stable guard cracked off a shot as soon as Nanaki came within range – luckily, she was no marksman. He had come close enough to realize a far more troublesome issue, though: the accumulated droppings of dozens of birds was enough to make anyone's eyes water. Nanaki had no hope of picking up the scent of dried meat through that, no matter how spicy.

Nanaki fell back and revised his strategy. The main road to and from Edge served vehicles of all sorts, including little covered carts pulled by humans on bicycles, trolleying their passengers to and from the stables and warehouses that had sprung up along the road, deeper into the badlands. Nanaki snuck in behind one of the bike-pulled carts and trotted after it as it wheeled into Edge, matching his speed with it, stopping when it stopped. The WRO's border patrol guards gave him odd looks, but no trouble. As he had hoped, they must have assumed he belonged to whomever sat in the cart.

As the road turned into a street with sidewalks, the traffic grew heavier. Nanaki hopped onto the sidewalk and spent a few breaths trying to get his bearings. He was no expert on fabricated dwellings, but the squat houses here seemed flimsy to him; they were little more than boxes with windows, planted straight onto badlands dirt. Perhaps they would soon give way to taller buildings – a forest of construction cranes and metal struts already rose tall behind them.

"Look, mommy! Look at the doggie!"

It was a child's voice, shrill with excitement. Nanaki could see the boy out of the corner of his eye, pointing at him.

"Shh, not so loud!" The woman beside the boy grabbed his hand. "It might hear us."

The boy frowned as he looked up at her, then back at Nanaki. "Is that bad?"

"Come on, sweetie." She was already pulling him away. "We're going home, now."

Nanaki ignored the child and its mother. He was used to hushed whispers and pointing fingers. Humans would call him a dog or a wolf, a cat or a lion. They were all wrong, of course, but he didn't care enough about the opinions of their kind to correct them. It only bothered him when they yelled "monster".

Every breath of Midgar's air had been a lungful of filthy misery – compared to that, Edge was an improvement. The end of Midgar's Mako reactors had much to do with it, as did the lack of Mako-fueled, smog-spewing vehicles. Cars and trucks and motorcycles were still so few and far between that each one that passed by drew not only Nanaki's attention, but that of the pedestrians as well.

That did not mean that Edge's air was pleasant – it was bone-dry and full of dust swept in from the badlands or stirred up by the abundant construction. Nanaki had only spent minutes in Edge and already he longed for the freshness of the Kalm plains.

Worse, the dusty air held no sign of his trail. Nanaki looked back at the road he had traveled in on. It wasn't the only road into Edge, but if the thieves had come here, then they must have crossed the perimeter at some point. If Nanaki circled the outskirts, he would come upon their trail sooner or later – hopefully, a trail still marked by spicy meat. It might be a long trek – Edge had grown by leaps and bounds in the past couple years – but he couldn't think of a better plan.

Before long, his paws were twinging with every step. The badlands dirt had been hot, too, but it had been softer than asphalt, and less sticky. Here, every speck and stone seemed to adhere to the pads of his feet or the fur between them. The shade wasn't a tempting option either; it would only make the flame of his tail all the more conspicuous. With drooping ears and drooping tail, Nanaki trudged onward, wishing his search would come to a swifter end.

Every step also brought him closer to the ruins of Midgar. He could already see the nearest stack of the city's defunct reactors stack, marked by a fading red diamond. Beyond it he glimpsed the tops of Midgar's tallest buildings, now nothing more than empty husks – and at the very top, high above all else, loomed the ruined tower of Shinra.

Nanaki had lost much in that tower. His eye, his pride, his sense of self. His balance. He had leapt at the chance of freedom, sparing little thought for anything but his return to the sunbaked sands of Cosmo Canyon. It was his duty, he had claimed. It was his rightful place, he had declared. Why should he come to the defence of the wild world outside his home, when that world had brought him nothing but pain and disgrace?

He had been as blind and weak as a newborn cub. He had not returned for the sake of honor, but to seek refuge in the lands of his ancestors, to hide behind his duties as a guardian. To hide from the world in shame, both his own and his father's.

That misplaced sense of shame was long gone now, but here in the ragged shadow of Midgar's shattered plate, Nanaki was all too aware of how close that city had come to leaving him in pieces, too.

Nanaki shook his head to rid himself of those unwelcome memories, and as he did, the sharp zing of Wutaian spices pricked at his nose. He stopped and raised his head, pinpointed the direction, and took off at a run.

The deeper he ventured into the maze of backstreets, the more the city's myriad odors mingled and coalesced, coming together into a single pungent smell called Edge, as unmistakable as the musk of some enormous beast. The sting of his trail stood out against it like spatters of blood on snow, leading him ever onward to his prey. To his primal senses, the trail was both temptation and satisfaction rolled into one, and he chased it heedless of the startled looks from the humans in his way.

The trail brought him to a cluster of concrete buildings, all streaked by long lines of seeping rust. Within those buildings was a barren courtyard, and within that courtyard was his prey. The blond man Nanaki had met outside Kalm was resting his broad shoulders against a wall, plucking morsels from a bag of jerky. As soon as he laid eyes on Nanaki, it slipped from his hand.

"You," he breathed. "The demon dog!"

Nanaki scoffed. The human was fortunate that he had brought his feral side to heel. Tenuous as it was, his self-control was enough to let the man's words breeze by him like a gust of wind.

The distance between them was too great to sense the presence of materia. As Nanaki advanced, the human raised both his hands in a placating gesture. For each step Nanaki took, the man shuffled a step or two back.

"It wasn't my idea! I didn't wanna do it, I swear!"

The air was growing thick with fear. The stink of it was affecting Nanaki, raising his hackles; his feral side was still quick to leap to his defense. Fear made humans unpredictable, it whispered – and even one as meek as this might have hidden claws.

"You took something that doesn't belong to you, thief. You will return it." Nanaki's voice had dropped to a rumble in his throat. His instincts itched with the urge to pounce.

"Oh gods," the man jabbered, still backing away. "Odin preserve me, Titan shield me… Oh gods, who comes next! Ramuh… Ramuh–"

"Cease your useless summons," Nanaki growled, "and address the one before you!"

"Oh gods, oh gods!"

The man spun around and took off.

"Stop!" Nanaki roared, but he was too late. The man had already disappeared around a corner.

Nanaki sprang to the chase. He bounded across the courtyard in mighty leaps, dug his claws into the sticky asphalt as he rounded the corner. The sight of his quarry tearing down the street flooded his body with the thrill of the hunt and spurred him onward.

"Help!" the man screamed. "It's the demon! It's coming for me! Help me!"

At first he headed for busier streets, but the thickening herds of terrified humans that scrambled to get out of Nanaki's path must have changed his mind – they slowed him down more than they slowed Nanaki. The man veered into a narrow alley and raced down the passage, hurdling over huddled bodies and smashing through cardboard boxes. But even here he was no match for Nanaki's speed. Every leap brought him closer to his prey; Nanaki could see the pattern of the man's soles, the yellow seams of his pants, the whites of his eyes as he cast panicked glances over his shoulder. Closer and closer he drew, until he could almost taste

A flash of blueish white lit up the alley with a sizzling crackle that echoed off the walls. His prey convulsed in an unnatural arc, frozen mid-step so abruptly that Nanaki nearly crashed into him. He jumped to the side instead, scraping his shoulder against the bricks as he barreled past. His instincts kept him on his feet, made him whirl around to face his prey – but the man that stood before him now was not the man he had been chasing. No, this one loomed over Nanaki's quarry, who lay twitching on the ground.

The newcomer smelled of thunder and lightning. His mane was a red brighter than the sands of Cosmo Canyon, brighter even than Nanaki's own. But it was his clothes that made Nanaki's feral side snap and snarl, for it was a uniform Nanaki knew all too well. It was the black and white suit of a Shinra Turk.

The red-maned Turk straightened up and faced Nanaki, tapping a steady beat against his shoulder with his metal rod.

"Well, well, look who's back in town." He bared his teeth in a grin. "Long time no see, Furball."