The city in which I was born had a history that stretched back into antiquity. It survived countless centuries. Today, unfortunately, it no longer exists. You will find it on no modern map. Surprisingly, though, it was included on every map only thirty years ago.
The city's name was Iscalis, but I doubt either of you are old enough for that to mean anything to you. It was located in a valley deep in the mountains of the western continent. It remained isolated until the 1938, when the Shinra came. Back then the company was still ShinRa Manufacturing.
There is no record of how the Shinra found out about our little city—they were very vague about that when they came. They showed the people their wares and told of how much easier life would be if only they allowed the Shinra to set up shop in their city. The people were entirely convinced but the officials governing the city were much more wary. They politely declined the Shinra's offer and asked them to be on their way. The move wasn't popular with the people and, two years later, the Shinra were invited back.
At first, things went incredibly well. It was during that time when my mother and her best friend both fell in love with and married men who worked for the Shinra. It worked out better for my mother than for her friend, but that's another story.
Things began to go sour for the Shinra in Iscalis in late 1948. Local businesses, businesses that had been around for generations began failing because they couldn't keep up. People became angry that their friends and neighbours were going out of business. Honestly, it was a bit foolish because the people failed to see that they were the ones running the businesses into the ground by buying ShinRa goods.
Things started to go poorly for my family because my father worked for the Shinra. Luckily, they offered to transfer my father to another division because of his good work for the company. My mother didn't want to leave her home town, though. They fought over it for months. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that my mother, pregnant with me at the time, was in no condition to move. The offer was too good, however, to pass up. My father would accept the offer and go live where he worked. He would come back for holidays. When my mother felt that she was up for the move, we would move to live with him.
It sounded like a good plan, but my mother never did feel up to the move, not even years after I was born. Somehow, though, it worked out for us. My two elder brothers and I, we never saw much of our father but we never doubted him. He always came back for the holidays like her promised, and he wrote to us often in between. He was a good father and we never wanted for anything.
Our mother was good to us, too. Unfortunately, everyone thought she was crazy. She dabbled in science, perhaps dabbled is putting it lightly, at a time when women weren't encouraged to have jobs at all. She had a laboratory in our basement and the results of her experiments often ended up as our abnormal pets. There were rumours that she used my brothers and I for experiments, but that was a blatant lie.
Next door to us was the house where our mother's best friend had lived with her husband. She had always been a sickly girl and she had died in childbirth. Her husband had left with their son shortly thereafter, but he'd never sold the house. When I was five, the poor widower sent his new wife and his son back to the house. He, himself, rarely returned. I remember my mother telling my brothers and I to play with the boy, but we almost never did because he almost never let us. He was a strange, quiet boy and I didn't get to know him well until I was much older.
As for the Shinra, they abandoned manufacturing for electricity by the time I was ten and ceased to be a danger to the local businesses. The people of Iscalis were less than forgiving, however, and when the Shinra turned their base into an airport to be a way-station, the area around their airport was almost instantly abandoned by the "good" people. By the time I left Iscalis, the entire southern border of the city was a massive slum, and the airport was situated at the centre of it.