The power was out. It was dark and disorienting as I rolled over in bed, fished my cell phone from my bag, and looked at the time. 2:32 a.m. I sighed and reached to my bedside lamp. Dead. Completely dead. I wondered how long it had been since the outage.

The fire materia glowed crimson in the dark, and I compared it to two glowing eyes. I shivered again and pulled the covers up over my cold chest and shoulders.

The Mako reactors would be fixed tomorrow and everything was going to be fine. Why then, couldn't I go back to sleep? I glanced at the illuminating materia, sighed, and then shoved them into the dresser drawer. The room went black.

I'd worked part-time in the Midgar City Hospital for a while now, as barely-there Registered Nurse. After mom died, I'd taken up her job there, even thought I'm only 17. It seemed as though everybody was hired young. In the hospital, in Midgar, in SOLDIER…

"Nurse, Dr. Wrathsons needs you in room 219." the same assistant from last night told me and I shook off my afore thoughts. I nodded and headed straight there, the coffee I'd had that morning barely starting to kick in.

"Broken arm," the gray headed doctor told me as I walked in, "I've got everything set. You do the honors?"

He left, handing me a bundle of beige fabric. I went to the young man sitting on the medical slab- who looked quite stoic even with an injury- and coiled the fabric where Dr. Wrathsons had indicated.

"Your general…" I started, surprised at my own voice, "He left this here last night. Could you return it to him?" I asked.

The man looked at me and I saw that he was only about 17, close to my own age. I expected him to say, "Sure, I'll have that back to him in a jiffy," but I'd expected too much from a man who'd barely ever smiled before.

"The general is busy today. He and a few others were headed down to the reactor at Mt. Nibel. I can not take it to him." he slid off the table and left.

My hopes were only down for a moment. Mt. Nibel. The reactor for my town was there. Sephiroth had probably went there to check up on it there due to the outage last night. I was in luck.

I clocked out at the front at 2:30 that afternoon, hoping that I could find him before he left.

Something lingered in my mind, though… Why was I so bent on giving the materia back? I'd never met Sephiroth until yesterday and he'd been the same as any other SOLDIER I'd ever encountered. Maybe I bit more intimidating, a bit more articulate, but still…

I remembered when I was a kid, I'd known a boy in the village. We weren't close but he spoke to everyone, including me, about his dream to join SOLDIER. There had rumors that he had made it, but I was never sure if those were true. A lot of boys had big dreams like that, but most of the time they stayed dreams. I wonder if the general had been like that. Maybe that's why I was so drawn to seeing him again, because it brought back a memory.

But that chill, those eyes of his, there was something peculiar about all of it. I had to find out.