Chapter 3

#import COPYRIGHT_OWNERSHIP_DENIAL

TRIGGER_WARNINGS="Superstition mockery":$GLOBAL_TRIGGER_WARNINGS


Traveling is boring and unpleasant.

Perhaps you would disagree and claim it's a load of fun, seeing new places and meeting new people?

I'll counter that by pointing out that 1) you almost certainly traveled by plane, bus, car, or some form of bike, motorized or otherwise, and not on foot, 2) you weren't tripping over packs of half-starved predators and ghost-possessed motorcycles every couple hours, and 3) you just countered an argument about traveling with an argument about being at the destination you were traveling to, which is a different discussion altogether.

(I apologize for that hypothetical response, it's a touch rude. Or would be.)

We split into two groups, like in the game. Nobody planned on the paths meeting up before Kalm, but apparently Cloud's group discovered a large area that was mostly mud, and found it wise to track back south. Most of the potential campsites were washed out, as well, so everyone ended up together again. Thankfully the terrain dried somewhat overnight, at least enough that we able to stay away from each other more, but every now and then we'd see the tell-tale Bolt spells of the other band.

I kept safely back with Aerith, as ordered, so when we ran into more half-starved Kalm Fangs, Barret was the first to spot them. It was exciting, terrifying, and sickening… at first. You can only watch somebody do the one-hand Atomic Scissor guillotine to something that just wants to eat so many times before you're jaded.

Of course, I wanted to live to eat too, just like billions upon billions of other critters through history, so I took playing caster and watching Aerith's back seriously. So seriously, like, super cereal yo.

"BALL FOUR!" I didn't have to brace myself much as I swung my staff into the ribcage of a particularly sneaky member of the hyena-like beast, and followed up with an Ice spear through its skull. I still felt a shard of regret killing them, mind you, so I had to try to make things funny.

Vicious comedy is srs bsns.


You may have heard what some of the traditions of yoga and other Eastern "energy flow" philosophies have to say about "centering oneself in the universe" or "sensing one's chi" or other pre-scientific ideas. Well, here, it has externally-verifiable results that are a bit more interesting than blood pressure shifts. It shifts part of the body's Lifestream energy flow to the desired part of your body. The energy – apparently, it's Gaia's replacement for ATP – is referred to variously as Minerva's Possibilities or Miraculous Potential in older writings, but in this day and age is just referred to as MP.

In conjunction with a command word or, if one wishes greater power behind the effect, an entire chant, this MP can be channeled through a properly-equipped materia or two to release the Planet's wisdom in magic. Our favorite half-Ancient taught me about that. Thanks, Aerith!

Exhibit A: Barret zapping around like a Hasted maniac, courtesy of 'my' materia.

I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to have Time materia so early, but I'm certainly not complaining about an extra tool for not dying.

Exhibit B: Using Ice materia for personal air conditioning, in the form of chilled towels and canteens. Because fuck yes, that's why.

Exhibit C: Slowing Prowlers down to make it easier to give them a face-full of Ice and a staff to the crotch. I do not take people stealing from me kindly!


"Hey, Barret, I was wondering somethin'." A grunt. "What's up with these Devil Rider guys? I can see riding out in the country if it were nice, but there's nothing out here but dead dirt. And frankly, they're creepy-looking as all hell."

"They're monsters now, what d'ya think? They're trying to kill us!" From the way he throws a mild glare over his shoulder, I think he's going to just leave it at that, but he shakes his head after a moment and continues: "Word is, there used to be a few biker gangs outta Sectors 3 and 6 that liked comin' out here weekends, try and get some open air, get drunk or high, dependin'. Way I heard it, one of the gangs had a split over the drug money, and a turf war broke out. A couple of the other gangs got into the mix and ended up takin' out the druggers." He shifted my bag a bit – he's a big softy at heart, and carried it for me "jus' 'til Aerith says your calf's fully good for the extra weight, mind, then you're hauling it like t' rest of us!".

"Damn. Don't do drugs, kids, eh?"

That got a grin. "Heh, true dat. Anyways, as all t' Mako pollution spread out, most of the gangs either moved farther out for der trips, or just avoided the area entirely. Word says the ghosts of those killed in the turf war possessed their old bikes, and morphed into monsters. Call 'em Devil Riders, after the gang that split off and started the whole mess. $*%^& Shin-Ra occasionally send their cadets on missions to knock the numbers down, protect the route to Kalm, but never really try to take 'em out fer good."

"Huh. What would that take?"

"Ha! A priest, mebbe! Hahaha! Maybe you could melt down the bikes into junk metal, that'd slow 'em down, putting themselves back together!" Great, thanks for the mockery.


I managed to get the gist of AVALANCHE's current goals out of Barret the day after that: catch and defeat Sephiroth, though they were a little vague on the why, then stop the new Shin-Ra president. Oh, and stop the Shin-Ra as a whole from "suckin' the life out of the Planet with those $*%^) machines!", can't forget that. He wouldn't let me.

Wasn't all that difficult either, in retrospect; I suppose that, even this early, Barret saw the need to replace the lost Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge. Once I'd primed the pump on him with the Devil Rider explanation, he was easily-enough guided into ranting about how, "these Mako reactors are suckin' the LIFE outta tha' Planet!" and "Shin-Ra's #*% $! old president got what was commin' to him, murdering everyone in Sector 7! I swear, I'm goin' back. I'm gunna go back for my Marlene!" and all. Poor man. Pretty sure I saw tears in his eyes before he started shooting at a bird that was completely out of range.

That was about when I gestured to Aerith to back me up… and smacked him, right on the arm. "You REALLY don't do subtle and quiet, do you? Gunfire carries! Let's not go wasting ammo and drawing attention if we don't have to." He stood there, shaking, and I scrambled to think of the right words to soften it: "I understand... you want to make sure she's okay. But… she'd probably give you a right long lecture if she found out you were taking 'stoopid chances and bothering a poor defentzless bird', right?"

He snorted, then sagged. For a moment, I could see the weight he was carrying. "Heh. Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right." He looked back up at the bird, and shielded his eyes with the other hand to follow its path east. "'Stoopid chances', eh."

Aerith gave me a dazzling smile when I sheepishly glanced over at her, before shaking her head in bemusement and leading us on.

I really wish I were better with people, there had to be a less-angry-Hermione way to pull that off.


We arrived in Kalm the next morning, not long after the dew had finished evaporating from the grass, and met up with the remainder of AVALANCHE at the Inn. The moment the three of us in our group arrived, Tifa handed out a few flip-phones – sorry, PHSs –with everyone's numbers already programmed in. There wasn't one for me, of course – why would there be? These things do cost money, and Tifa had no way to know whether I'd be joining them permanently.

Well, Aerith told everyone how I'd "bitch-slapped some sense into Barret" and told Tifa, in no uncertain terms, that "she's on her way to Junon, anyway, so she's coming with us!", but that's not exactly a basis for permanency!

Anyhow, I guess Tifa made heavy use of the Steal materia in their fights, because Cloud had sold off a LOT of Ethers. After divvying up supply-purchasing chores, and agreeing to meet up again in two hours, everyone split up again to buy new equipment.


I decided to stick with Tifa as she shopped; I'd eventually confessed to her at camp that I was a vegetarian; meat tastes much better than it did before I...arrived here, but my ethical concerns haven't been fully addressed. She'd rolled her eyes about it at first, then seemed Confused, but after a short back-and-forth that I won't recount here (second-hand preaching, much?) she understood both where I was coming from and what I meant by "vegetarian". Apparently, they went by the non-USA meaning here, and she thought it was incredibly stupid in our situation before I explained. Essentially, she ended up handing me some gil and letting me do that part of the supply shopping myself, with some guidelines on how much food we'd need for seven travelers.

Canned vegetables, dried fruit, lentils and something close to quinoa, cans of pinto and green beans that looked rather different than I remembered, and a traveler's spice set made it into my cart. I even found some Wutaiian ramen and various friendly flavorings, but there wasn't much and it was much more expensive than ramen from home...which is to say it cost twice as much, and thus was still cheap. The noodles' bulk and lack of nutrition made me hesitate a little, but I decided it was easy enough to mix with many other things to be worth it.

I grabbed some flour also – I can figure out how to make tortillas, that's not too hard, and the – yoink –baking powder will do enough for biscuits. Powdered eggs, hopefully better than the MRE's excuse – nope, checked with Tifa (under the honest guise of not knowing the brand), they're not much better, put it back. Hmm...I guess they don't have canola here, or they call it something else. Oh well, vegetable oil it is! I finished off with evaporated milk and some cheeses.

Some women do clothes shopping. Me? I do cooking supply shopping. Raine Sage in Tales of Symphonia has Ruin Mode, I have Cooking Mode.

I do not, however, have Six-Metric-Craptons-of-Groceries Hauling Mode, so everyone give Tifa a round of applause for meeting me with a sort of wagon-cart! It could be pushed by a person or two, or hitched up to a Chocobo, and the wheels were designed for all sorts of terrain so we wouldn't need to leave it behind in the marsh ahead.

Aerith and Cloud had taken charge of equipment upgrades. Cloud had no need for a new weapon, and Barret had sold his Cannon Ball off to the Weapons store – "I ain't lugging THAT thing too! 'Sides, these babies we tore outta the Custom Sweepers hit plenty haad.". They picked up a claw weapon for Tifa, and Aerith now had a Full Metal Staff – and absolutely insisted on me taking her old one, when we met again.

Well, nobody can say I don't coordinate my weapons and armor! I just want to know why being made of mythril didn't make it count as being a fully-metal staff!

I later silently thanked "Miss Renault" for having chosen a pair of gloves that were tagged as being "Non-Conductive up to 15,000 Ramuh". No point in playing Thundaga-Rod Groundwire in a battle, after all. I didn't get a reply, so I guess I'm not one of those overshadowing inserts?

Everyone else got a mix of Mythril Armlets like mine or, in the case of Aerith and Tifa, a Carbon Bangle.

After our little self-gifted Christmas In Whatever-The-Hell-Month, we all got comfortable at the inn, waited nearly twenty minutes past the time we agreed to meet up for Cloud to FINALLY show up, and listened to his story.

You may be disappointed to learn that while Cloud DID visit Tifa's home, and even played briefly on her piano, he either didn't ruffle through her "orthopedic underwear" drawer or wisely decided to leave that out. Thank him for that, that shit's just embarrassing, for her, him, AND everyone listening!

I couldn't help but feel bad when he mentioned meeting Tifa's dad. Not only did I remember that the guy would get shiskabob'd, but getting told to stay away? Understandable – conservative country dad doesn't want the combat-trained son of the village's unmarried mother around his teenage daughter – but it still hurts, is a little insulting, to be warned away...and amusing when you remember the girl could probably kick little pre-Mako Cloud's scrawny ass with one hand holding her cowgirl hat on!

When Cloud talked about the picture taken of him, Tifa, and Sephiroth together, I chanced a look at Tifa – she looked perturbed, and maybe a little pale. I'm going to talk to her, later. I really probably shouldn't poke my nose in, but… I hate seeing people hurting, and this is leading up to a traumatic point in her life. Which means that, if I really must bring it up again, I damn well better overthink it or I'll just make things worse.

Speaking of poking my nose in: "Wait, you were already inside the reactor, with mountain winds blowing, and you still clearly heard Tifa huff about not getting to go in?"

He sounded a little puzzled even as he replied, "Uh, SOLDIER enhancements include hearing. I guess the cadet reported it later, too? I don't really remember." Darn. Was hoping...I dunno.

Tifa turned the same cold glare on me for interrupting that she'd used on Barret minutes earlier. Brrr, Nibelheim chill! Thankfully Cloud continued without prompting and she quickly resumed her laser-focus on what he claimed happened. I didn't interrupt again, and the story hit all the points I remembered. I'll skip recounting it here, you already know what happened.

"What a fascinating story…." Nanaki and I said at the same time, as the rest walked out. I suspect we meant very different things by that – he doesn't know what really happened, and I probably would've only gotten a vague feeling that other parts felt a little off, if I didn't know better.

Might as well take advantage of the moment of surprise, since we have a brief spot of privacy. "Hey, Red...I've been meaning to apologize for that first time we met. I was a little out of sorts...and I really don't know how I thought you might be-"

"Do not worry about it," he waved it off with a laugh. "As you said, you were 'out of sorts' and injured among people you didn't know. Some people react oddly to stressful situations. Besides, it was hilarious, and a breath of fresh air to not be assumed I am some mindless beast about to attack. I do think I will want to visit this Gold Saucer in the future, however, if they have such lifelike robots."

Puppet Cat meets Sorta Cat. They fight crime. I can't keep the smile off my face as I reply, "Oh, I guarantee you'll find something interesting there. Speaking of..." I'd planned something to set a seed of evidence – there was no way anyone was going to believe my being from elsewhere with some sort of proof I knew things I both shouldn't and can't otherwise – so I walked over to the cabinet by the stairs and opened it. Yes, it's there!

It takes bit of awkward stretching and hopping to reach it, but I still manage to grab the Megaelixer there in only three tries. Take THAT, Squaresoft!

"That... is not yours." Looks like he's starting already!

"Possession is nine tenths of the law, and I possess it."

"You stole it." Ouch.

"You think you can get it back up there? Because I can't. Besides, we're trying to save the world here, going up against a fallen war hero who slaughtered his way through Shin-Ra headquarters, yes? This is far more likely to save lives – OUR lives – with us than it is here, and if we survive we'll likely have enough gil to replace it. And I intend to do so. ...I don't like this either, but there are good reasons."

Nanaki seemed only partly convinced, but he kept his muzzle shut on our way out. Hypocrisy on my part aside, that made me feel worse about the whole thing. Should've just come back up, with an excuse or something. "Hey, I think something fell out of my pocket, I'm going to check upstairs real quick. Wouldn't have lost the points gained with Nanaki like a dumbass, either. Still...seed's planted, I hope.


A Tech Note

The PHS is incredibly...well, hokey, clunky, and primitive. The whole thing's about the size of one of those fruit smartphones back home, but three times as thick and designed in a flip-phone format.

From what little I've seen on our way to Kalm, I suspect that there are very few places outside towns where anything resembling Earth's cellphone towers exist – flying monsters tended to make nests in such things, when ground-bound ones didn't simply destroy the equipment, so maintenance was pricey. These phones work more like a long-range walkie-talkie, or by using a laptop-sized external antenna to connect to one of a few geosynchronous satellites. Bandwidth and latency are terrible in that mode, as you'd expect, and cloudy weather tends to make voice communication drop into a higher-redundancy, lower-bandwidth mode that made some folks hard to understand a word of.

Still, it's smaller than the satellite phones of the 1990s, as it runs off shards of Mako crystal and so doesn't need as giant of a battery to last a long time. A really, really long time – think months, or even a year and a half for some models. More importantly, it's waterproof (up to 100 meters, a stenciled-on message said), and hardened enough that it wouldn't break from falls less than 25 or so meters so long as it was latched shut. Even if it wasn't, well, there was a better than even chance that the worse that would happen was some ugly scuffing and a need to replace the screen protector.

More importantly yet, it has a calendar and a clock, which together revealed that Gaia's time systems were loosely similar to Earths, though counted and labeled differently – the months were merely named "First Month", "Second Month", etc., and they were all 30 or 31 days long; every five or six years, there was a leap week added. I didn't see the sense, and given Gaia's lack of an Internet-equivalent and phone-based ability to access it, I can't research it further; I guess I'll have to find a library to learn more.

The hours of a day were the same, thankfully – as much as I like the idea of a 100-second, 100-minute, 10-hour day, I would look a fool trying to wrap my head around it in practice!


Author Note

So, yeah, Beth's made a slight fool of herself by pulling a Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Cloud's story that way, but it's the only discrepancy she can point out without revealing she knows far too much about what's going on – and in front of a semi-puppet of Sephiroth, to boot!

As for the Megaelixir – yep, that's actually there in the game. Why the equivalent of a budget motel would have one of the most powerful healing items in the world stashed in an out-of-the-way cabinet anybody renting the room could find and take, I have no clue. Gameplay and Story Segregation, amirite?

Oh, and...not a correction, to chapter 2, but more of a clarification: Sephiroth is not actually a teenager. Even in Crisis Core, he's about 20, and he's around 27 in FF7 (according to the Final Fantasy wiki). Beth is mistaken, due to not actually having paid attention to the character ages when she...well, he, then...played FF7, and due to how easily Sephiroth was freaked out and completely changed his self-identity just from reading some books for a few days. Our peculiar SI did play part of Crisis Core, as did I obviously, but not the whole thing, and she doesn't have access to the games or Earth's internet right now to look the info up.

In reality, Sephiroth had been in emotional turmoil since the AVALANCHE Insurgency and the Genesis War, so...for a couple years. His loyalties were upset enough that he told Zack he was considering retiring, before the Nibelheim Incident. Between learning the incomplete story of his creation from Genesis, feeling guilt from refusing his former friend's request to possibly save the latter's life, and reading the misinformation stored in the Shin-Ra Mansion's basement about Jenova (who he'd been told was his mother, rather than Lucrecia), aaa~nd quite possibly some mental prodding from the not-quite-dead Jenova at the top of the stairs inside the reactor...yeah, Sephiroth was mentally unstable at the time. It doesn't matter if you're the baddest mofo on the planet, you're still vulnerable to psychological manipulation.

In short: Beth doesn't know as much as she thinks she does, and she's making some flawed assumptions. :D