Disclaimer: I own nothing. Death Note and Final Fantasy are property of their respective owners.

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Light flopped down on his bed, bone-weary. His feet and fingertips tingled with exhaustion. He fell asleep immediately, in his clothes, and lay dreamlessly on his bed for an hour until he snapped awake, aware that he'd passed out and experiencing a moment of terror that his brain would spasm again, producing another phantom from out of its injured core.

He looked up at the shinigami.

"Would you tell me if I dreamed that other life? Or if I am dreaming this one?" he asked, for the hundredth time.

"Of course not, Light," Ryuk said. "I find this all very interesting."

"You remember the other life though," Light said.

"Yes."

"The question then is 'how do I know I'm not hallucinating you?'"

"That is the question," Ryuk laughed, pinwheeling in the air. "You're funny, Light."

"I can't think about it," Light got up from the bed. "I have to finish some work." He reached into his pocket, touched the death note.

A normal day in Midgar was statistically likely to produce the following results.

150 people would be murdered.

150 million dollars (mostly in food and clothing) would be stolen.

1800 women would prostitute themselves for the first time.

60 children would be lost or kidnapped.

45 of them would be sold into a white slave trade.

Light's mind bulleted each point. His psychic dams overflowed. In a moment, the splendor of human suffering uttered its cry. He felt the pressure of Midgar's lawlessness on his back and in his bones. Ryuk laughed, pinwheeling in the air. He stopped after a minute.

"Light, this apartment stinks," he said. "Let's get a new one. Something better than this."

"I'm a civil servant," Light said. "We need to live with very little right now. There's no money for 'better than this.'"

He sat at his computer. He logged into the internet. He started up a few programs of his own design to ensure that he was not being monitored and that he was alone (alone in a dark room of hyperspace he had created using his own program, a program called the 'black box') he began downloading more names.

He worked until midnight, smoking like a detective from a noire film until he ran out of cigarettes and he began to jones for nicotine. It was dangerous to go out in Midgar after dark. Nicotine addiction won out over personal safety. Arming himself with a ring of fire materia he went out into the street, shoes scraping on the grimy pavement, towards the flickering light of a convenience store run by a chain-smoking seeq who wore stained ribbed tank tops and drank malt liquor straight from the bottle. The seeq sat behind bullet proof glass with a grate of safety bars over it.

"Hey Light," he pulled out a pack of Oriental Blacks. "Need any matches?"

"Good gods, yes," Light mumbled, pulling out his Shinra ID. "Tax free," he said. The seeq pushed the cigarettes at him.

"On the house," he said.

"I pay like everyone else," Light handed him a 10 gil, a fraction of the 18 gil he would have paid with taxes added on. He took the cigarettes and started in the direction of his tiny apartment.

Our lives change for many reasons, because of many events. Some of them are very big and mysterious. The sudden shift of gravity that sent a mind as apt and keen as Light Yagami's hurtling through time and space was one of those into the world of Gaia was one of those. Others are very small, though the changes they portend can be much greater.

Light Yagami had almost reached his apartment door when a dump truck cut across the pedestrian cross-walk. He had to jump on the curb and the truck driver, shouting an obscenity at him, swerved on the road, dumping two trash bags into the street. Light grabbed them, pulling them into an alley dumpster. One went in without a problem, the other broke open, spilling its contents onto the floor. The sulfuric smell was noxious. Light held his sleeve over his nose and mouth, kicking a few pieces of scrap metal towards the dumpster when something, little scratches from little claws, caught his eye.

He bent down and picked up the exploded cylinder of a practice grenade, the kind used to train S.O.L.D.I.E.R.s, back when Shinra had an active military.

This was strange, since the S.O.L.D.I.E.R. program had been defunct for years. Practice grenades were no longer manufactured. No one used them.

Light picked up the curved shard, walked underneath the pooling light of a streetlamp. A thin coat of black mako, the kind used to load practice grenades, coated the inside of the metal. The shards were fresh and un-rusted. The grenade had recently been set off.

Scratched on the inside, in little white lines in the soft metal of the grenade shell, were words. Light held his breath. His mind, his world, froze.

help us kira. they sent us back. ferrimas gast.

y k l