"Damn! How'd you get so good?" Colin exclaimed, watching as Sarah's scores for one of the final chapters in the Dirge counted up her points.

"Practice." She said simply. She normally was terrible at videogames. In fact, this was the first shooting game she actually enjoyed, thus she ended up playing so much that she practically memorized everything that could happen. She grinned into her Daiquiri as she saw that she got an A score. She really did enjoy being good at something other than drawing.

"Holy crapula. Where'd my sucky gamer friend go? She turned good!" he kidded, prodding her side. The prodding caused her to jump, as usual, and she fumbled her drink, letting it fall to the floor where the Playstation was.

With a sickening crack (that's what you get when you have cheap glass on cheap plastic.) the glass shattered against the playstation, its contents emptying all over the machinery. Sarah could only squeak and stare sadly as her beloved machine sparked, sizzled, and died, the TV screen going haywire one moment as the disc was ruined, then finally settling to static.

Colin and Sarah sat there for a moment more before finally the boy spoke, "…Oops…"

"My Playstation!! My Baby!" she cried, sliding off her stool to kneel beside the machine. She grabbed the nearest bit of cloth, which just so happened to be Colin's jacket, and began wiping at the small game box.

"Hey, my coat!"

"My game!" she retorted, then paused, sending an ironic and amused glance his way, "Funny, you would have expected something to happen, eh?"

"…You read too many fanfictions, girl." He replied, and went into the kitchen to grab a towel.

Sarah opened the Playstation, pulling out the game and wiping it off carefully with a paper towel. "Think this still works…?" she asked no one in particular.

Colin knelt over her to look at the CD, "Well, there's no scratches or stains or anything. It should be okay. I'll bring my old Playstation over next time I come, since I was technically the one who broke yours."

"Thanks, Colin."

The pain was excruciating, traveling between dimensions. The vacuum of space wanted all your molecules to spread away from you, to maintain balance in the universe, but the wormhole that they traveled through counterbalanced that with extreme pressure, keeping you whole and breaking you to pieces at the same time. Vincent doubled over as everything went dark and bright at the same time, disorienting all thought and perception of time and space and reality itself.

He knew Cloud and Tifa followed him, but there was no awareness of them or Namani. He was alone.

Alone…

§

"I should probably be heading home now. Care to drive me to the bus stop?" Colin asked her, "Or let me drive to the bus stop and you can drive back."

"Sure." She said, and got up, picking up the dirty paper towels and throwing them into the trash before she grabbed her coat, giving Colin one of her big sweaters, as she killed his with the daiquiri. They never had enough to get drunk, so driving was no issue. One Daiquiri each. Sarah only having a quarter of one this night, seeing as she lost the rest on her Playstation. "I'm driving, though. You had more than me."

"Fine."

§

Tifa pulled her arms in front of her face as she entered the portal, Cloud just behind her. Though he was gone from her senses and mind as soon as she entered the wormhole between worlds. She tried to scream, but the void sucked up the breath and pushed it back into her lungs at the same time, making it impossible to make a sound. Where was Cloud?

§

When Sarah got home she locked the door behind her, throwing her coat on the back of the chair by the door. She looked at the ruined Playstation in front of the TV; not really wanting to mess with it, she decided instead to take a shower. Without thinking further, she went straight to the bathroom, turning the water on and adjusting it to her preferred temperature.

Quickly removing her clothes, she stepped into the shower.

§

Cloud folded his arms in front of his chest, his head bending down to protect his face from whatever he might run into diving head first down the wormhole. Fortunately there was nothing in the way, just nothingness. One thought in the back of his mind was that he was going to have one hell of a headache once he got out of this trip. He knew, logically, that Tifa was only a few feet ahead of him, but she was gone. All he could see was a void. It was better if he just closed his eyes…

§

Sarah stepped out of the shower, wrapping her dripping hair in a towel. A weird ringing was in her ears, reminding her faintly of the tinnitus she had as a child, but not quite the same. It disoriented her only slightly as she grabbed a towel for her body, stepping out of the bathroom even as she wrapped up.

Suddenly the buzzing ring escalated to an ear-piercing whistle, blinding her with its sound. The roof over the middle of the living room caved in as a beam of sickly blue light shot through it. She screamed as wood and shingles fell through into the room around a large red pile that landed on her living room floor, spying what it was when the dust cleared.

It was a man.

Not only that, it was a very familiar looking man, curled up and covering his face with his brass arm, semi-unconscious from the fall.

Sarah crouched on the floor, the towel clutched to her chest as she tried to cover everything she possibly could, staring at the now stirring form of the red-mantled gunslinger on the floor several feet away.

"Nnn..." Vincent groaned, slowly lifting his head, his red eyes falling on the naked woman hiding herself in the towel, staring at him. For a moment his brain didn't make the connection, and his eyes narrowed in confusion as he tried to figure out how he got to be laying on the ground in front of a naked woman.

Or girl. She didn't look that old. She had an innocent youth about her as she stared at him with shocked and terrified cloudy gray blue eyes. Or eye, since one was covered by the towel that was slowly slipping off of her head, revealing some of her short layered hair, a few long pieces sticking out to frame her face. She looked like a bedraggled mess.

"Where am I?" he asked calmly, his mind still not fully comprehending his situation.

"In my… living room?" she said, then the realization struck her, at the very least, "MY CEILING!!!" she screeched, causing the ebon haired man to lower his head again, his ears ringing from her scream.

§

Tifa stood slowly, her head still spinning from the flight between worlds. "Cloud? Cloud!" she called out, one hand to her head, the other stretched out to keep her balance. She heard a groan to her right, and ran through what looked like a neighborhood alleyway toward the groan. She found Cloud a few feet away from the opposite end of the alley, kneeling on his knees and holding his head.

"Ooh… I knew I'd get a headache from that…" he muttered, looking up at Tifa as she neared him. "You all right? Where's Vincent?"

She shrugged, "No clue where he is. It looks like the exit was slightly random, but not by much, we could probably find him. And I'm okay. My head's spinning still, but I should be fine."

As Cloud stood she gave him a reassuring smile, but that was quickly cut off by a piercing scream: "MY CEILING!!!" in the house nearby. They both looked that way, then ran toward the screams, figuring that would be the most likely place to start looking for Vincent.

A/N: Look! Finally they meet! gasp You'll find out where Cloud and Tifa fall soon, though you can trust that they're not too far away. Of course, Namani's long gone by now, seeing as he's probably traveled like this before and knew how to prepare. So he's now hiding somewhere in Portland or somewhere in Oregon.

Vincent: -rubs head- ooouch…Is your floor carpeted?

Nope! Hard wood! Bwaha!