Another Time, Another Place
Authors Notes
- Contains slash, angst, swearing, violence and character death.Pairings
- Sephiroth x Kuja, Cloud x Aeris, Vincent x Tifa, Rufus x Tseng, Reno x Yuffie.Disclaimers
- I own none of the characters mentioned hither.Vincent straightened up slowly. "Cloud, Tifa," He greeted them in a neutral tone.
"How nice to see you! It's been so long!" Tifa was tempted to hug the tall man, but knew better. Vincent looked as wary and unapproachable as ever.
"Anything in particular bring you here or did you just miss me?" Cloud teased as he unlocked the door. Vincent might have smiled, but they could see nothing beneath the strips of red cloth that hid much of his face.
"Some trouble over by Nibelheim," He admitted. "I've heard some strange reports from locals and thought I'd better mention it to you before I went over,"
"You thought right," Tifa said, worried. "What kind of trouble?"
"Some of the local children have been trespassing in the old manor," Vincent said. "Not all of them came back either. And those who did said they had seen.. something,"
"A monster?" Cloud asked, puzzled. Vincent was capable of seeing to any of the monsters in Nibelheim by himself. Why had he came to them?
"Maybe," Vincent said slowly. "That might have been what attacked the children. But what worried me was the stories the survivors mentioned- they saw something that sounded like a modified person in a glass container,"
Horrific images of the Shinra experiments leapt to Tifa's mind unbidden. "An.. experiment?" She asked haltingly.
"An old one if it is," Vincent replied. "I've kept an eye on the area and no-one has entered or left the building. It's mostly likely an old experiment of Shinra's, although I've never seen anything like they described,"
Cloud shuddered. "I suppose we'd better go and take a look," He said. Vincent nodded.
"What did they describe?" Tifa asked, unsure of whether she wanted an answer.
Vincent looked pensive. "They said it looked like a human, but it was glowing. It had feathers, a tail... whatever it is, it's not human,"
"Is it loose?" Cloud asked.
"No," Vincent shook his head. "It was contained in a glass cage in a hidden room. The children were merely startled. Presumably it was a monster that finished them off as they tried to run,"
"How horrible," Tifa shuddered. "We'd better go over as quick as possible and take a look,"
"We'll take the buggy," Cloud said. He stood up, a determined light in his eyes and removed his sword from the wall brackets where it had hung almost undisturbed for the last few years. "Let's go!".
- - - - - - - - -
The ride over to Nibelheim didn't take long. Tifa stared out of the window, a little worried as the landscape flashed by. They were only troubled once, by a small pack of fairly weak wolf-like monsters that soon backed off when Tifa shot a fireball at them through the open window.
"Here we are," Cloud pulled the vehicle to a halt outside the village. He looked somewhat reluctant to enter and Tifa impulsively hugged him.
"Come on then!" She sprang out and Vincent followed, his hand resting near a concealed gun. Cloud hefted his sword onto his shoulders and followed.
Nibelheim had changed very little. Vincent lead them straight through without a pause and Tifa was glad. There were so many strange memories connected to this place... she didn't think she wanted to linger. Once, a stranger approached and tugged at Cloud's sleeve. Her face was white and her eyes unfocused.
"You'll see to that monster, won't you? That monster that killed my little boy?" She asked pathetically and Tifa felt a rush of sympathy for the distraught woman.
"We'll take care of it," She assured her.
"Things like that shouldn't be allowed to live.." The woman's voice trailed off as she was led away by her daughter. Cloud shuddered, suddenly cold.
"Alright," Vincent paused outside the mansion. It was as imposing and frightening as ever. The windows were dark and Tifa hated to think what eyes might be peering out. "Are we all equipped?" He asked. They nodded, and Vincent pushed open the double doors that lead into the depths of the mansion.
"Dark..." Tifa blinked as her eyes adjusted. Cobwebs fell softly from the ceiling, swaying ghostly in the breeze from the open door. Something scuttled just to the side of them and she spun sharply, but whatever it was had gone back into the shadows. There was a soft hiss from somewhere above them. Cloud drew his sword.
Despite the creepy atmosphere, nothing troubled them as they searched the mansion. Eventually they found the culprit- a small but ferocious dragon that had somehow crept in. It was fairly weak by their standards, dying after Cloud attacked it in a rage, but big enough to have seen to the two defenceless children. There was nothing much left of their corpses, but a few scattered possessions in the creature's lair showed where they had met their end.
"Poor things.." Tifa stared at the sad remains of what had been two children. "At least it wasn't whatever they found in the basement,"
"It could still be dangerous," Cloud reminded her as they headed over to the basement. There was a sudden shrill laugh behind them and Tifa whirled only to see the weird, laughing face of one of the small monsters. It cackled senselessly and wound up a thread to disappear into the rafters.
"That scared the life out of me," She shivered as Vincent opened the secret door to the spiraling staircase. Wisps of greenish smoke curled around them. She really didn't want to go down there and face whatever horrific experiment lingered. But they couldn't risk leaving another Sephiroth down there. Perhaps the next children to trespass into the mansion wouldn't be so easily scared. Perhaps one of them might start playing with a machine that controlled the opening mechanism for the creature's glass prison. Perhaps. It was a risk they could not take.
Down into the basement they went, in a line. The wooden staircase felt unpleasantly pliable beneath their light footsteps, as though it might give way any moment. The boards were warped and wet with age and once Cloud stumbled as one sagged and tore like paper under his weight. Bats flitted around their heads, stirring tiny breezes of cold air that felt uncomfortably cool. The basement itself was even more unpleasant. They went passed the secret room where Vincent had lay undisturbed for so long. If they hadn't came along he would still be there, Cloud thought with a shiver. The thought of dormant life lying there lost in nightmares was unpleasant. Especially as it appeared Vincent was not alone all that time and another being slept quietly not far away. A being that wasn't quite human..
It was easy to find the hidden room. Presumably one of the monsters had accidentally knocked one of the bookcases down in a fight, leaving the wooden door behind exposed to the children. The floor was scattered with bits of splintered wood and piles of books, lying in puddles of water. They climbed over them silently, making their way to the door that had been left open. A short corridor, stone walls dripping with water and flourescent moss. Tall doors, sealed with heavy bars. Cloud made them all back away as he blasted the doors with a dose of Fire 3. Whatever lived here, Shinra hadn't wanted it to escape. They stepped through the twisted remains of the door into absolute darkness.
Vincent walked steadily and sure in the dark across the room and hit a switch, flooding the room with light. They blinked painfully as a large stone chamber was revealed, the walls high. Light flickered across machines made dull with ages, stacked papers touched with mould, strange instruments that seem to have been abandoned. A single scalpel caught Tifa's eye. It lay on an operating table, the blade dull and stained red-brown. Rust, she tried to reassure herself. Just rust. But in her heart she knew that stainless steel never corroded and the blade had been put to other use. And never cleaned? What operation had been abandoned so quickly?
"It looks like someone's tried to destroy this place," Cloud commented. He touched the stone walls and Tifa took in a blackened space and how the computer screen below had been melted and reset by intense heat.
"No chance that we did that by blasting the door?" Vincent queried. Cloud shook his head.
"Not at the right angle at all. This doesn't even look like a fire spell. Look at the stone. It's crystallised completely- even Fire 3 couldn't do that,"
They shuddered. "How could the children walk straight through here after seeing all this?" Tifa spoke softly, examining some of the more vicious looking instruments. "I'd have ran for my life if I came here and saw this,"
"They don't know just how terrible people can be," Vincent spoke, leafing idly through some papers. "They were born after Sephiroth's demise,"
"Found anything?" Cloud asked. Vincent nodded.
"Whatever lies beyond here was not created by Shinra," He began, studying the papers through their coating of mould. "It was instead brought from somewhere outside of this dimension.."
"Like Jenova?" Tifa enquired.
"No. Jenova was from this dimension, although from somewhere in space rather than this planet. However, this being was brought forth when Shinra fiddled with something Gast has named 'time compression'. By using tremendous amounts of Mako energy and compressing them within a certain environment under extreme conditions, they were capable of bending the very laws of physics by using a long forgotten magic that allows people to travel between time and space,"
"Why would they want to do that?" Cloud asked. "It sounds terribly unpredictable,"
"It was," Vincent said softly. "And not perfected either. Gast managed to use Mako in a way that meant a kind of portal could be created, but it was completely uncontrollable. Early experiments involved lowly Shinra employees who were put into the portal and monitored whilst using varying strengths of Mako and altering the compression and heat they were exposed to,"
"What happened?" Tifa asked.
"Some of the employees simply disappeared and couldn't be brought back. One was successfully brought back, but he had aged decades within the five minutes he was gone. Some were brought back as mere corpses, but burnt and scarred horribly. Gast believed that they had gone too far into the future and seen what would become of the Planet. Or perhaps they had seen the early planet as a ball of fire. Some were insane. Very few had any reliable things to report,"
"What did they say?" Cloud asked, curiously.
"One brought back reports of a strange and greatly advanced world he had visited. He was gone for a few minutes of our time, but he said days had passed for him. The world he had visited accepted time compression, amazingly. But they knew nothing of materia or Mako energy. Luckily he was looked after by an authority figure, a President he said. He was unfortunately not a very learned man and he didn't gain any useful results beyond the city name. 'Esthar', they called it,"
Tifa dropped the scalpel she had been examining. "Did he go into the future?" She asked.
"It would appear he at least went into the future, and possibly visited another world. If he visited the future, it was a terribly far away future for the language was somewhat different and there were no familiar continents. Millenia must have passed for the appearance of the world to be shaped thus!"
Vincent paused. "Of course, not all of them went into the future. Another went into a kind of past, where people had not heard of Mako and had very few reliable machines. They used steam and also ran on something they called 'Mist'. Perhaps the ancestor of Mako, Gast speculated. The report was not very reliable, alas,"
"So how does the monster fit into this?" Tifa asked eagerly. "Did one of them.. bring something back?"
"Almost. After losing their employees and gaining no real results, Shinra decided to try to bring someone back from the world. Typical Shinra attitude, transporting people through dimensions to satisfy their curiosity and gain more power,"
Vincent turned over the page and scanned in. "Apparantly it was harder to bring anyone back. Certain conditions were required. Gast speculated that a state was needed where the world they made contact with was.. unstable. Heavy with magic, perhaps. To be honest, I think that means they knew nothing,"
Tifa and Cloud exchanged glances. The visions were worrying ones. People being passed into strange and unknown worlds, thrown into new civilisations and brought from their world into another to be nothing more than a research specimen.
"After several failed attempts, contact was eventually made," Vincent continued. "The existence of the world Shinra connected with was in danger. The life of the planet had been threatened and a neighbour to it had been destroyed. The area in which the specimen had found was full of old magicks and it was highly unstable at the time. The experiment was a success.."
"What exactly did they bring back?" Tifa asked, unsure if they wanted the answer.
"It was almost human," Vincent continued. "Very weak at the time it was brought here. The style of dress was not recognisable as any within the past thousand years of our Planet. It was either from another planet, or from another time. There are some slides they took.. drawer 24a.." He read the faded labels on one metal cabinet and pulled it open. There was a painful sound as it racketed open, like old bones breaking. He pulled out a steel box and examined the contents.
"Are they legible?" Cloud asked.
"Barely," Vincent replied, holding them to the light and passing them on. They appeared to show a person- whether it was male or female was unsure, with a strange and rather unearthly beauty and a distinctly odd sense of dress. It appeared heavily sedated within the damaged slides, some showing it in a glass cage much like had been used for Aeris and Red XIII under Hojo's control.
"Anyway," Vincent continued. "The experiments lasted well over a year. It was dubbed Project Kuja after the subject's name. The specimen was kept and examined here and various abnormalities were noted. A tail, feathers growing amongst the hair, altered gene structure. At first the creature was willing to talk although obviously quite disturbed by what had happened. The results were taped, although I doubt they will still be intact. It was apparantly not a normal example of its world. It reluctantly talked about its life and described itself as a 'Genome', an altered form of a human. Beyond that, it refused to talk about its life and was reluctant to take part in experiments which mostly tested its magic abilities as well as some Mako infusion. Scientists observed it had undergone great mental trauma recently and they resorted to.. interrogation,"
"Torture?" Tifa asked softly. Vincent looked pained.
"More or less. I'm sure you don't need to know the details of the reports but Gast became impatient and resorted to using physical means to get the creature to talk more. Unfortunately it had the opposite effect and the specimen effectively cut itself off from the world. It refused to talk or take part in any more experiments. It was declared dangerous after an experiment went wrong here,"
Vincent's gaze flickered over the blackened patches as he continued. "The creature was undergoing electric shock treatment when strange physical changes were noticed. It appeared to be lit with a reddish light and the hair and eyes appeared scarlet. The number of feathers increased and it seemed altogether less human. The CCTV camera picked up images of the incident. The creature showed no sign of undergoing a limit break as we know it and had no materia on it, yet it managed to cause what one survivor described as a 'rain of fire'. Examinations of the tape showed it to be similar to the effects of the Ultima materia. But it had no materia and should have been incapable of casting magic!"
"Perhaps it just didn't want to show them what it was really capable of," Tifa suggested, sympathetically.
"Maybe," Vincent put down the papers. "Either way, the experiment was called a failure and the creature was put into storage. The rooms were shut off and the whole thing covered up. Typical Shinra operation,"
"So whatever they brought back is in there?" Cloud asked, his eyes on the enormous steel doors in the corner. Vincent nodded.
"These results look pretty old, but it's possible to survive in suspended animation for decades. Whatever it is, Project Kuja is still alive!"
