What had happened first: they'd gone to a small and overcrowded café, a bustling place with mirrored walls and golden hangings and waiters in stiff collars. Rinoa had wrapped a bright scarf around her head and obtained some sunglasses, which for some reason were the It fashion accessory in Deling City. Had been for a long time. Probably because they were expensive here, since they were manufactured mostly in sunny places like Winhill and imported in, but also because they were completely unnecessary given the constant Deling City nighttime. It was still morning here, and it was still night. Sunglasses? Useless here.
Deling City being what it was, a girl like Rinoa could be expected to own at least fifteen totally superfluous pairs of sunglasses. She had given Selphie a neon green pair and Irvine some sleek wraparounds. They looked the ultimate in Deling hipster chic.
Rinoa took incognito very seriously, since she was by the now the most easily recognizable face on the planet. But she was very fair-minded about it. Irvine and Selphie had told her they wouldn't mind if she wanted to use her powers, go invisible. But to her this remained unthinkable. If even one of her friends was risking potential discovery by the press, or by a SeeD-hating contingent of the Galbadian army? Then Rinoa, too, would undergo the risks. It was only fair.
So instead of invisibility, Rinoa had invoked her Middle Trabian spell. They wanted to talk without being overheard, but she didn't know a spell to make them inaudible to all but each other. So Selphie had suggested trying to recreate the strange fluke that had infected them all two months ago and left them perfectly able to speak and understand an unknown dead language. It worked.
Selphie loved this spell. She loved the strange, wonderful sense of suddenly thinking differently. Boom! There went your brain. And now you had a new one. You suddenly had highly specific words for some very odd concepts: the sensation of leaving your body behind and becoming one with Hyne's magic, for example. The nostalgia one had for the eternal connectivity of all beings that had existed when the world was young. The ability to exist without contemplating past or future.
It was obviously not Middle Trabian. They just pretended it was, so that Rinoa wouldn't get upset. But the language was somewhat heavy on the ks. It put one in mind of Ultimecia.
It was sorceress-speech.
Oddly, Selphie's GFs loved it. Ifrit and Doomtrain perked right up as soon as Rinoa performed the spell. And Irvine went quiet, a little stunned, like Siren was doing the same. Probably Rinoa's Alexander and Leviathan liked it also. But Rinoa said nothing to indicate this. Instead she got right down to listing everyone she knew who'd been in the library at the time she'd sensed magic use. It read like a who's who of Deling City's elite. These were people whose very names seemed more genteel, more beautiful, fell more sweetly on the ear than just about everybody else's. Alkonet, Baymoss, Spaiss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta, Betel, Calaminth.
There were first names in there, too, but the surnames were more interesting, because they corresponded to Deling's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interim Commissioner, the Treasurer-Appointee, and so on. Where they didn't, Rinoa would often put in that such and such was related to some bigshot on the patrilineal. Spaiss's father was Secretary of the Interior. Ruta's, the head of the Cultural Affairs Cabinet. Selinum and Calaminth's, actual genuine honest-to-Hyne Delings, so it was safe to say that whatever their official jobs were, they commanded far more power than anyone else would have in the same positions.
"Alright," Selphie said, once they had the list in front of them. "Put down the library staff as well."
"Oh! I didn't even think of them," Rinoa said. She put those names down too. In faux Middle Trabian, so that to everyone but them the writing looked like strange blocky doodles, not actual writing at all.
"We should get them out of the way first," Selphie told her. "They could tell us if anyone else was there that day. And it would be better if it were the staff, right? For us. If it's one of your classmates, then we have a problem. Because if they're violating the agreement then either we have to break it to some Deling bigshot that their kid is ignoring international law, or else the Deling bigshot already knows and is in on it."
That latter option wasn't impossible. Just messy and horrible and a political nightmare. A situation tailor-made for SeeD, really. But they wouldn't jump straight to that. They'd eliminate the easier suspects first. Go slow about it. Methodical. Careful and calm the whole way through. Not Selphie's preferred method of operating. She liked explosions and danger. But Xu had told them to keep this low-profile.
"We'll sneak into the library!" Rinoa said. "Lock up the staff and hijack the computers. Get the staff names that way – they won't give them up if they recognize us – and see the access pass data list. You guys can do that. You have the training, right?"
Wow. Assaulting librarians? Not low-profile.
"We do have the training," Selphie said. Then, a little sadly, "We also have the training to just ask."
"And I know enough about Gryphon that I think we'll be able to get the information we need right away," Irvine added, somewhat mysteriously.
Rinoa blinked at them both.
It seemed to Selphie that sometimes Rinoa forgot that, just because SeeD could theoretically topple whole governments and carry out assassinations and hack into every data system save Esthar's, that didn't mean SeeD always would. Stuff like that was often more trouble than it was worth. If they got really flashy about it, started going around advertising everything they could do, then they'd become even more provoking and threatening to the world order than they already were. And then who knew what they'd have to defend against? Galbadia would attack Garden straight out if they thought SeeD posed as much of a threat as SeeD really did. Deling City strategists were not known for holding back militarily, even if at present they were hobbled by recent world events.
The only reason they'd held back so far, as far as Selphie could tell, was because for some people Garden had nothing to do with defeating Ultimecia. The papers still treated Garden like a fancy charity school and less like a military powerhouse. Credit for any recent derring-do went not to the organization as a whole, but simply to the new orphanage gang, in slightly uneven shares. 50% or more to Squall. 40% spread out irregularly among his support team: Irvine, Selphie, Zell, and Quistis. And then about 10% to the new sorceress, who was expected to have gained her powers by toppling the old sorceress anyway, because sorceresses, everyone knew, didn't play nice and were inherently threatening and would always be a problem.
But as long as it looked like SeeD was containing Rinoa (which, it had finally come out, was the whole point of SeeD in any case: to take the problem of the sorceress out of nice people's hands), like they were just a bunch of unruly babysitters sacrificed to the world's greatest magical threat, then the public would tolerate Garden.
And just as she'd given Caraway exactly that impression, so too did Selphie give it to the librarian at the Gryphon Library.
"We would appreciate your help," she said, leaning over the front desk so far that she was basically balancing on her hands, her feet dangling back over the edge. The librarian blinked. "We believe a threat against Rinoa may be coming in from G-Garden, and that somebody may have trailed her here a week ago. Could you possibly check the access past list for us? Just to make sure there's nothing suspicious."
Rinoa's librarian was the opposite of their warm, smiling Library Girl back at Garden. He was an insectile, praying-mantis-like creature; the kind of person you could imagine being crushed by accident between the pages of a book and then trapped there, flattened and skinny, for all eternity, until only a bloody imprint on the pages remained. Tall and spindly, wire-frame glasses, indeterminate age. Rinoa's magic-sensing power had written him off as their mystery caster; Selphie had questioned him obliquely about different kinds of magic and agreed that this was a sound conclusion. But he was still useful; he could give them a more complete picture of who else had been there that day. He blinked, looked unhappy to find Selphie so close all of a sudden, and said, "I can assure you that the kinds of persons who enroll at G-Garden never set foot on the Gryphon campus—"
"I have. Three floors, two wings," Irvine said.
"I—I beg your pardon?" said the librarian. He regarded Irvine with the same upper-crusty disdain Caraway had, only there was a slight tinge of fascinated horror as well.
Possibly he read the gossip rags.
Selphie became annoyed at this and propelled herself forward a little more, until she was centimeters from his nose. The librarian grimaced. Her wrists protested, but not by much; she didn't weigh much and they could support her weight for a little bit more, plus this was for a good cause. Namely, freaking out an asshole who clearly thought he was better than her boyfriend.
She also took a minute to remind herself that while she was here in Deling she should remember to murder Rill Tremlett.
"Two wings of stacks on three floors," Irvine was saying, "A star-ceiling reading room on the top floor, twenty-four individual study rooms in the back of the building, newspaper archives in the basement, school archives in the attic, private lecture hall with Estharian jade-inset fireplace donated by Vinzer Deling after the war with Adel, six computer rooms, reading garden with statues of famous alums, this really big staircase," here he extended a hand at the massive spiral staircase just behind the desk, "And a hidden back staircase that connects to a tunnel underneath the basement that then connects to the rest of the campus buildings."
"She told you that!" said the librarian, pointing an accusing finger at Rinoa.
"No," Rinoa said, stunned. "I didn't, actually."
"We'd get farmed out to do bodyguard duty for these kids sometimes," Irvine said, shrugging. "We're younger and better looking than soldiers, we all learn how to drive at age twelve, we can research and pre-plan routes better than any ordinary citizen, we keep our mouths shut about everything we find out or else Martine would have had our hides for betraying client secrets; and, hey. Sometimes we'd even sit exams or write papers so they didn't have to."
The mantis face went red. "A Gryphon student would never cheat—"
"No, they really would," Rinoa said. "What exams did you sit?"
"Introduction to Para-magic," said Irvine. "Plus a few governance seminars. And I turned in a paper on the theory behind Guardian Forces once; that was fun. I got to raid your resources on GFs. We didn't have nearly as many at G-Garden. My client just gave me his access pass so I could get in here to do it. And the funny thing is, it had a photo on it. But as long as I looked like I belonged here, this guy here never once checked to make sure the photo was mine."
"That's right. It must have been you," said Rinoa, pointing at the librarian. "You've been here since I started going here."
Sputtering from the librarian. The mantis face got so red that Selphie hopped off the desk, because possibly this guy's head would explode, and while she had a dark intellectual curiosity that made her want to see that happen, she didn't particularly want to be in the way of the blood splatter.
Irvine nodded. "You were the one whose job it was to make sure I matched the ID being swiped. In fact, I remember you pretty well. I could probably testify to it being you."
"And I have to wonder," Selphie finished, "What people like General Caraway and Minister Alkonet and Secretary Spaiss would think, if they found out you were letting just anyone into their kids' private playground?"
They had him cornered.
"We're gonna need that access pass list," Selphie said. "Even though I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be that helpful. What with you not doing your job and all…"
The librarian scowled. He retreated to his computer and printed the list.
"Thank you!" Selphie said brightly, once she had it in her hand.
They turned to go. Irvine gave a polite tip of his cap to the librarian, which was somewhat undermined by the fact that they'd just shaken the guy down, orphanage-gang style. Rinoa, Selphie reflected, was really getting the hang of being a member of the orphanage gang. She would never be a SeeD – that was raw power and military precision. But being a member of the orphanage gang was just as good, because that was trusting your teammates' instincts, having their backs at all costs, and bullshitting like a pro if it came down to that.
"Hey," Selphie whispered, putting a hand on her back. "Nice work."
Rinoa said, "Thanks, Selph—"
Then she stopped. Just stopped at the foot of the library's massive spiral staircase, right underneath the big, glorious, Dolletian glass monstrosity of a chandelier. Her whole demeanor changed. Her face looked worried. Irvine and Selphie stopped too, to see what was wrong with her, and in that instant someone else came in through the wide double doors in front of them and said, "Rinoa!"
It was a girl.
She italicized 'Rinoa' when she said it. Selphie could hear her doing it. It was in her ultra-genteel voice. Not just Rinoa's regular name, but Rinoa's name said with patrician significance, almost over-enunciated. Rinoa herself did this sometimes when she talked, but she seemed to have trained herself out of the practice overall. It only came up to emphasize points that Rinoa felt more morally grey, more callous minds might gloss over. This girl did it as a matter of course, like she'd been taught that any word she chanced to utter might be so important that she had to emphasize it.
She was tall, nearly six feet. Athletic, broad-shouldered, but with a slim frame in that way Galbadians liked. Her hair was fair, like that of an old Dolletian princess or an Estharian lady warlord, her eyes an indeterminate pale grey. Her face could only be Galbadian, like Rinoa's, but she didn't have the odd delicacy about the mouth, or the uncommon warmth about the eyes. So without her height and coloring she would have been no great beauty. Deling City shop owners and hoteliers had those same features arranged in basically the same way.
"Oh, Missy," Rinoa said, blinking. "Listen, we're kind of busy—"
"Rinoa, you're back! I'm so glad! And who is this? Is the Commander here, too? He seemed like such a nice boy, nothing like what the papers say—"
"No, no," Rinoa said, "Listen, Missy, I— We—"
Missy looked once to Irvine, once to Selphie, and settled on Selphie. Specifically, she put her hand on Selphie's arm, with a kind of odd fluid kindness. Selphie suspected she should find the action overly-familiar, but she couldn't, because Missy seemed very aware of their height differences, and stooped a little to make up for it, and smiled. And while she seemed wary of Irvine, she still grinned at him and said, "Oh, it's so nice that you've brought along a Galbadian this time. You know I was dying to meet him. And you, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. I think you're so strong."
Incognito or not, Missy had apparently identified Irvine right away, and put together who Selphie was. So much for low profile.
With the hand that wasn't holding Selphie's arm captive, Missy reached into her bag for her access pass. Her thumb covered the first part, but Selphie caught her surname: Spaiss, which made her a Deling heiress on the middling to high level, with not one but two genuine Secretarial parents. She also caught Missy's middle name, Abcynthia, which indicated that these parents were stunningly cruel people.
She said, "Rinoa, I'm so glad you've come by, because I thought I was all alone, and, you know, there's nobody here today. Everybody in class A is going out tonight, and I'm the only one still doing the silly governance paper because I was transferred in after you left, so I'm always behind, and—"
"How do you know they're not already here?" Rinoa said suddenly, apropos of nothing.
Selphie approved of this question; they had to figure out where some of these people were if they were going to question them later on.
"They've all messaged to tell me," Missy said, dropping her pass in her bag and fishing out a vidphone instead (high end, one of these new ones that took advantage of the increase in planetary radio function, but backwards compared to the perfected Estharian model). She held it up, like Rinoa could peer through and read all her messages automatically. Which was something that, Rinoa being a sorceress, Missy probably assumed Rinoa could actually do.
After a minute of Rinoa not doing this, but instead just staring at Missy with a kind of puzzled look, Missy passed her the phone. Then she said, very seriously,
"I wanted to talk to you anyway."
"That's nice," Rinoa said. She sounded uncharacteristically short. Not herself at all. "Listen, I have to do something. You can call me later."
This was not good SeeD thinking. If you had to question someone, and they practically opened themselves up to you, then you let it happen. Good SeeDs didn't spit on the blessings of Hyne and all that. Rinoa was learning how to conduct herself like a SeeD, but she still wasn't quite there. So Selphie overrode her. Selphie said, "Actually, Missy, we were wonderi—"
"I don't have your number!" Missy insisted.
"Pretty sure Caraway's stuck it in the directory," said Rinoa.
But then, apropos of nothing, Missy said, "You don't have to be afraid of being a sorceress, Rinoa."
Rinoa blinked. Selphie blinked. Even Irvine, slouching against a column, straightened up and shot them both a weird look, blinking. This had come out of nowhere. It was unusual, strangely direct for someone who had probably grown up surrounded by Deling City double-speak. And it was said in an oddly bland and honest way, with no verbal italics that Selphie could detect. And it was beautifully perceptive – it cut right at the heart of what Rinoa was dealing with these days. Squall had indicated that he felt Rinoa's Deling friends were all barbed speech and ugly gossip, not real friends at all, not that he was any kind of expert on the topic. But maybe he'd been wrong.
"I mean," Missy continued, seeming uncomfortable, "When you were here. Everyone kept bringing up Adel and all that. And that awful other one. Edea—"
"Ultimecia," Irvine corrected. "Edea's not a sorceress anymore, actually, and she's—"
"Responsible for the death of our president," said Missy, waving one long-fingered hand. "But that's obviously not you, Rinoa. Those women were irrational, degraded, wild—"
Wow. Unkind words about Matron aside, Missy seemed to be trying for a compliment, maybe? But she seemed to be trying wrong. Reminding Rinoa what sorceresses could turn into was maybe not the best way to go about this.
"I—" Rinoa began.
"You were raised right here with us in Deling," said Missy. "And we might have had our differences of opinion, but honestly. You're a good and civilized person. Everyone else knows it, too. They're just like that, you know. They're just trying to bring you down. They've been very strange since Ruta's sister took up with these silly G-Garden people, all GF talk and—"
Oh, jackpot. Thank you, Missy. Perfect, wonderful, beautiful, exactly what they'd come for. Selphie let the Matron talk drop (and, anyway, she was somewhat cold on Martron herself; yes, it was Matron, but then there was the ruin of Trabia to consider). Selphie could have hugged Missy.
"What was that, Missy?" she said, waggling her fingers in front of Missy's face to get her attention.
Missy blinked.
"GF talk," she repeated. "That Headmaster Martine squirreled one or two GFs away, I think? In secret. And Ruta's sister met this G-Garden boy who had one with him, and they're all aflutter with it, because you know none of us uses para-magic. She's probably meeting with him right now. I don't think it's appropriate. Para-magic is so… It's for soldiers. And backroom brawls. I think they're all a little fascinated, though. And jealous of poor Rinoa. Some girls would die to be a sorceress. It's so odd. I mean, it's one thing to meet up with a Garden type and, and…"
Missy trailed off, as if suddenly aware that she was speaking to two Garden types.
"…go slumming?" Irvine suggested. "It's fine. Tell us about the GFs."
"Yes," Rinoa said, oddly urgent. This was the thing about non-SeeDs. Sometimes they couldn't keep their cool. "But I think we should maybe go—"
Go? That made no sense. Missy was proving to be a valuable informant. They should stay, more like, and see what else they could get out of her.
"About Ruta's sister," Selphie said to Missy, talking over Rinoa. "Was she here last week when Rinoa came by?"
"Oh, she's always here," Missy said.
"Like right now!" Rinoa said. "Maybe she's here right now!"
"No, no," said Missy. She brought her phone out again. This time she bothered to actually show them the messages. One, from a Tulip Ruta, simply stated: can't study today, with my hon Yyl Majesdane. ;)
"That's probably the G-Garden cadet," Missy said disgustedly.
"Okay," Rinoa said. "Fine. We know its Tulip."
Irvine and Selphie stared at her. This was coming perilously close to giving up the game, suggesting to Missy that they were here for a reason, letting anyone know that they were here to do more than investigate G-Garden.
"The thing is—" Rinoa said.
"Where's yyiiil whatever?" Selphie said, speaking over her again. "This place they're supposed to be at? See, the funny thing is, Missy, we heard that there were some threats against Rinoa coming out of G-Garden."
"And if we could talk to Tulip's cadet that might orient us," Irvine put in. "Sounds like he's not big on the establishment there."
"Of course," Missy said, brightening. "I'd love to help—"
"Guys," Rinoa said, desperate and not at all subtle. She was distressed enough that she made Missy stop short, stop helping. Instead, Missy put a concerned hand on her arm.
Irvine stared at Rinoa. Selphie stared at Rinoa. Never before had it been alarmingly clear that Rinoa had been raised a slightly clingy Galbadian heiress and not, in fact, a SeeD. She was carelessly throwing them off their lead, just after Missy had so helpfully dropped it in their laps.
Irvine shook his head slightly, warningly. Selphie mouthed: Rinoa. Not now.
In response, Rinoa erupted into a hail of feathers. And vanished.
It occurred to Irvine that maybe sometimes sorceress magic could go haywire. And that if and when it did, the sensible thing would be for the sorceress to try and warn her friends.
He could see the exact same thought occurring to Selphie at the exact same time. Specifically, several milliseconds too late. Rinoa had already been replaced by feathers.
A poor friend you both make! Siren snorted.
"Shut up," Irvine thought at her. "You don't have friends, period. What d'you know?"
As soon as he thought that, it occurred to him that he hadn't had friends, period, until he'd met Rinoa and reconnected with the rest of them. And so Siren thought the same thing, and became just a touch more smug, which was really unwarranted; she was smug enough as she was.
Missy cleared her throat. She looked appalled. She was a good looking girl (a bit wary around Irvine, but who wasn't, with what people were printing about him these days?), if not quite on Selphie's level, and she'd been kind to Rinoa, so whatever Irvine thought about her school or the kinds of people she probably hung out with, he put it aside.
"It's—" he began, as calmly as he could, "It's alright."
Was it?
Was Rinoa alright?
So her powers were acting up. She'd gone invisible, probably against her will. That was all. She was still there, right?
Or something terrible has happened to her, put in Siren, echoing his thoughts.
There was a crash behind them. Irvine whirled around. Some unseen force had knocked a pile of books from the librarian's desk onto the floor. The librarian looked affronted. Missy looked even more startled than she had before. They were so focused on the books that they completely missed seeing one of the white feathers blanketing the floor suddenly drift up and smack Irvine squarely on the nose, three times.
Then, for good measure, it tangled itself in Selphie's hair.
Rinoa was still with them. Just invisible.
"She's teleported," Selphie said suddenly.
Selphie had a remarkable tendency to pull complete lies out of thin air when called upon to explain difficult situations. It wasn't anything SeeD had ever taught her to do. It was just who she was. As a child, she'd been much the same, stealing Zell's toys, putting glue in Quistis's ponytail, tying Squall's shoelaces together, appropriating Sis's dolls, locking Seifer in the beach shed, and then, innocently, concocting very elaborate fabrications that Matron hadn't really believed, of course not, except that half the time she had. Selphie was about as restrained and understated as Zell was, as a Behemoth crashing into your back was. Often she was clumsy and she didn't think things through, and she had an intense preference for violent means when understated stealth would have served just as well. But the girl had a fairly good track record with the bald-faced lie.
Particularly since Irvine always backed her up on it. What could he say? He wanted to see her succeed.
"We're actually investigating a report that some of the dissatisfaction in G-Garden might be boiling over into outright sorceress hate," Irvine said, pulling from Selphie's earlier lie to Caraway.
"We told her that if it turned out there really was magic involved, she should teleport right away!" Selphie said. "Yep! That's what we said!"
"Good thing she remembered and took us up on it," said Irvine.
"She's the best," said Selphie.
"Follows orders like you can't believe," said Irvine.
"What a trooper," Selphie said. "So sorry that sometimes we forget that."
"We really don't give her enough credit," Irvine said.
There was a brief, sudden hrrrmph from near Irvine's ear.
"You must take terribly good care of her," said Missy. "I'm so glad SeeD exists to control the sorceress power. Imagine poor Rinoa without you."
Another hmph, this time louder.
"Did you say something?" Missy said to Irvine.
"Just clearing my throat," Irvine said. "Listen, Missy, about your friend. Tulip Ruta? Like Selphie was saying. Can you tell us where exactly she and this cadet of hers might be? I might even know him, so if we can get him to talk straight—"
"Tell you? I can show you! You're so good to Rinoa; it's the least I could do for a friend of a friend!"
Irvine held a hand out towards the door.
"Lead the way," he said gallantly.
But as they walked away, there was a brief tug at his arm.
"I'm staying," came Rinoa's voice, hissed and low, from somewhere just behind him.
Irvine whirled around to where he thought she was. What? he mouthed in her general direction. The librarian, scowling and looking miserable, either because he'd had to deal with SeeDs or because someone had just become feathers with no warning in the middle of his library, or else because of the scattered books on the floor (it was not this guy's day), saw Irvine do this.
"You should really pick those up," Irvine told him hurriedly, tipping his cap. Then he turned his attention back to trying to communicate with the air where Rinoa was maybe standing at the moment.
"I have to do something here," Rinoa whispered. "Meet me back at Caraway's. I think the problem is bigger than we think it is!"
Before Irvine could figure out how to communicate with an invisible person without looking completely crazy, there was a brief shifting of the feathers on the floor, as though Rinoa were passing over them as she walked away. Then the ID pass-scanning machine at the base of the stairs rattled, like someone was climbing over it with no care for the damage they might do. Then he thought he heard, faintly, the kinds of footsteps a hundred-pounds-wet girl might make as she ran up the stairs.
Away from her friends.
In the middle of a mission.
"What in Hyne's patootie…?" Selphie muttered, at his elbow.
She'd put it together, too. Whatever was wrong with Rinoa? Had made her run away from them. Which wasn't very Rinoa-like. Rinoa did not abandon ship; it wasn't her nature. Rinoa took loyalty and teamwork seriously.
On the other hand, it wasn't like anyone could accuse Rinoa of not being overconfident and harebrained.
Remember that time she kicked you down a flight of stairs, Siren put in.
"'Course I do," Irvine thought. "I just thought of it. That's why you can think of it."
Can I have that? Siren said. Good times. From my perspective. Not yours.
"Are we going?" Missy said, having completely missed Irvine and Selphie's baffling exchange with the Invisible Girl. "I do have a paper to write, but I'd much rather help Rin out, because—"
Irvine put Siren out of his mind. Er. Hypothetically.
"As loyal as you are beautiful," he told Missy.
"We can take my car," Missy said, looking prim and flattered.
Selphie rolled her eyes.
"Fine. Let's go," she said. "We can…collect our things at Caraway's—"
Irvine said, "Our malfunctioning—"
Selphie said, "Slightly puzzling, wayward—"
They finished together, "Things."
Rinoa.
"After we've sorted this out," Selphie added. "Mission always takes priority."
"How very military," Missy said mildly. It was hard to tell if she approved. But then she was giving them a ride, so Irvine figured her hesitancy around SeeD could be forgiven. It wasn't standard SeeD procedure to take rides from strange tall heiresses. In the first place, girls like that didn't come around often. In the second, you never knew if 'ride' could be code for 'trapping you in a confined Galbadian military vehicle and shooting you like a dog.' But Missy's car couldn't have trapped them. It wasn't built for trapping. It was built for showing off.
It was an F-type Thrustaevis, sleek and shining and silver-blue, all modern lines, designed after the Dec Arto movement that was in vogue in Deling City right now. After the functionality and solid ugliness of Garden transports, it looked like some grandiose drug hallucination on wheels. Irvine was not a car man by any means – he had too many vices to add another, more expensive one to the list – but this thing would have their humble Balamb mechanic back home paying Missy just for the chance to work on it. To touch it, even.
The inside was so clean and spotless and beautiful that one could have mistaken Missy for a Garden kid, raised into impersonal military precision in all things. There were no small touches, nothing special or unique to reveal Missy's character or interests. There weren't even the obligatory fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror.
"It's new," Missy said. "I only just received my permits from the Commissioner."
After Ultimecia's takeover, to drive in Deling City on a full-time basis you had to pass fifteen tests, including a full background check and a blood test and a test of patriotism. These cost, on average, sixteen hundred gil paid out to the state. The car needed to be registered and insured by the Deling Insurance Co., equipped with trackers to be activated in case of suspicious activity, and it was, per the law, partially owned by the government, who could seize it at any time, for any reason. Officials and heiresses made up the bulk of the city's drivers. The Car Rental had shut down. The bus now checked ID.
Deling was now a city of pedestrians, for the most part.
Selphie, who'd snagged the front seat, was saying, "Now, give us the layout of yyill…"
"Majesdane," Missy said, "Of course."
She outlined what she knew about the place. Irvine committed it to memory, interjecting where he thought he could add some useful fact about the G-Hotel district, and mentally shooed Siren away from the information he was taking in. When Missy had told them all she could, she and Selphie lapsed into a friendly discussion about fashions in Trabia versus fashions in Deling. Irvine would have been an able participant, but for the fact that Selphie had sent him a baleful look over his earlier flirtations, so he mostly kept quiet and stared out of the window for the duration of the ride.
His Garden papers listed Deling City as his hometown. It wasn't, not really. He'd been shuffled from the orphanage to Deling to G-Garden in the span of six years, and yes, most of that time had been spent in what was, on paper, Deling City. But it wasn't Deling City. Not really. It was the Southeast outskirts. That was very different. Blocky, military construction. Miles of garbage dumps and factories and timber-cutting yards, a nameless industrial zone crossed with rail tracks and highways, army vehicles clanking by every hour on the hour, taking parents to the missile site or a training ground, down into the desert for their job at the prison, across to the coasts to serve patrol in the unlikely event that Esthar woke up again someday and attacked from the West.
North of Deling was less polluted, more beautiful, but so overgrown with monsters as to be uninhabitable. In the days of Holy Dolletian supremacy, it had been peopled by the Acenath, an empire that far predated even Dollet's, that had once waged war with the Centrans. The Acenath had possessed a glorious flourishing nation that reached down into where Deling was today. Accordingly, they had some descendants among modern Galbadians, darker-skinned than the rest, with beautiful names like Mosshill or Skyfin, Seagill or Wingflower. But they had angered a sorceress coming out of Dollet, the all-powerful Domitia, whose knight had been one of the most bloodthirsty high dukes of the Dolletian empire. In short time, they'd fallen. Their cities had disappeared overnight, been left barren and empty of people. And it was said that their lands were cursed, now and forevermore. Their last ancient king's name had been struck from the history books; his tomb laid to ruin. And the surviving Acenath became Dolletian.
So too had, over time, the Safra of the desert, the Nah warlords of the midlands, the Kalevan of the Northern peninsula, the Brais who'd once dotted the land near Winhill, and the old Timberi foresters and frontiersmen. Until it made no sense to call the empire Dolletian. Domitia and her knight had consumed the continent. Their realm, though it would eventually break back into scattered city-states, could only be called Galbadian.
And the vast industrial suburban stretches between Deling and the rest of the continent were, to Irvine's mind, the most Galbadian of Galbadian places. Useful. Functional. Ugly. It was where the great machine of the Galbadian army lay, spaced out and separate from ordinary citizens, but always just a day's ride away. Where Vinzer Deling's secrets and worst abuses were buried, alongside valleys of soot-blackened trees and red deserts stained by cheap car oil and para-magic effluence. Irvine had grown up there, but you didn't really grow at all there. Nothing grew. Moving forward in any way was a choking process, gasping for air among the smog and the banging, intrusive activities of the army, ignoring the results of military orders and basic facts and all facets of smothering reality. The people living there – some seventy-five percent of Vinzer Deling's subjects – went to work for the army, scraping by a kind of existence. And then, to live, they pretended they weren't Galbadian at all. They reached out, desperate, for some clear spot of fresh air and freedom in any small way they could: old books, pretty faces, fantasies of old Dolletian cowboys living free among the Safra in the desert, religious ecstasy, sex.
Galbadia was not a happy place. Irvine had willingly traded away a million memories of it. And held on, anxiously, to the clean orphanage, to the wide and endless Centran beaches he'd played on, to the little girl who'd pushed him into tide pools only to rescue him from the sea crabs minutes later.
Unlike people unlucky enough to be born in Galbadia, Irvine had roots elsewhere. Far away, in someplace Deling City couldn't touch. In this way, he could understand Rinoa's love for Timber. Timber might be humble, might be poor. It didn't have the glamour Deling City did, nor did Edea's orphanage. But neither did they have the banal ugliness, and neither they so stifling.
"Though to be fair," Irvine thought, as they crossed the bridge out of the mansion district, "You'd never know how horrible it can be to be Galbadian if you go by Deling City."
It's actually pretty here, said Siren.
"And fake," Irvine thought.
Deling City was the front, the cover, a star on a grat shit pile, blinding you with its brightness so that you couldn't see what lay underneath. It was an architectural and artistic marvel: a mélange of all the different kingdoms Vinzer Deling's distant ancestor and his sorceress had conquered. Old Dolletian castles, mansions paneled in glossy imported Timberi mahogany, beautiful apartment complexes with courtyards and fountains in the style of the old desert palaces, high iron gates with the impressive pyramid-symbols of the Acenath, parks studded with shining cobbles mined near Winhill. Not to mention neon from the outskirts, antique green glass blown by Nah descendants out in Dollet, and beautiful squares and townhouses designed by Timber's infamous and famously artistic betrayer, Baron Shasnamun.
It was a jewel of a town. Even the smog of the outskirts seemed to collect around it in such a way as to offer the city not a cover of hideous, polluted clouds, but a kind of sublime eternal night. Cyrel Leyephs, poetical nephew to Ursula Deling II, had claimed it wasn't smog at all, once you reached Deling City. Instead the nighttime here was a living thing, a breathing monster, a Guardian Force whose eternal task was to protect the sacred heart of the new Galbadian empire. A pretty thought. A nice image to drop, on a dark Deling evening, when you were walking some cute girl upstairs to her room at the G-hotel and wanted to impress her.
But it was smog. Just like the reality of Galbadia was miles and miles of misery between here, Timber, and Dollet. So too was the reality of the poetical nighttime simply, unmistakably, smog.
"It's so glamorous here," Selphie was saying as they passed the presidential palace. "In Trabia we don't have castles, or—"
"The interior was modeled on the original Dolletian imperial palace," noted Missy.
"I don't remember seeing anything like that in Dollet," Selphie said.
Irvine cut in. "'Cause of Catkin's Men, Selphie."
Selphie turned around, stared, raised an eyebrow at him.
"Catkin's men?" she said.
"You mean you don't know?" said Missy, aghast. "Don't they teach you any Galbadian history in Trabia?"
No, Siren supplied, drawing on what she'd learned from Irvine. Probably not. Because it's mostly propaganda.
"No," Selphie said bluntly. "Of course not. Why would we care? We're not Galbadia."
Missy sniffed. But then, evidently, she decided Selphie ought to learn the story anyway. It was an important story.
Or at least that was the party line.
Zsinma Catkin, if you went by the Galbanization of her original name, had been Dolletian on her papers, daughter of a Nah glassblower in reality, and descendent of warlords in her mind. In her head, it was said, she'd imagined herself the heir to some grand ancient kingdom. She'd been an upstart like that. Rebellious. Born arrogant.
At age fifteen, she'd away from home and trekked across her people's ravaged ancestral lands (not yet industrialized, but overrun with Galbadian army deserters, no place for anyone to live unmolested) to Deling City. There, she'd taken up the newspaper life. She was no great fan of the government. In those days, this was not a killable offense, merely a jailable one. She served time regularly, a week every month in the Deling City PD's cells, until she was twenty-one. She used the time to write angrier, ever-more-critical articles.
It was the era of Ursula Deling IV. Ursula was a weak Deling. The blood of dukes and sorceresses had gone very thin in her. She was harmless and sweet, but very mad. She lived sequestered in the presidential palace with aides and doctors, issuing raving proclamations that rarely impacted or affected the populace. She feared that the eternal nighttime was not smog, but a sign of Hyne, a curse on the city. Therefore she spent hours locked indoors, surrounded by sun lamps, addicted to brightness. Her government rarely legislated at all; the city was lawless—
Not the worst it would become, put in Siren, silently giving voice to a stray thought that had crept up into Irvine's consciousness as he listened.
-and her brilliant daughter, Vincenza III, was still a child, unable to control the family's unruly subjects.
Catkin delighted in the chaos in Deling City in this time. She became a byword for dissatisfaction, sowing discord among the gangsters and thugs proliferating on every corner, and criticizing the palace at every turn. She had the ear of the common man, and she used it to advocate for the end to their continent-wide alliance. Dollet, Timber, Winhill, the desert, the midlands – all pledged loyalty to Deling City. And why? For what? Deling City, Catkin argued, couldn't control itself. So it was time to throw off its yoke. There was no use anymore for Galbadia. Better to go back to being their own nations, once and for all.
Now, Catkin's childish anger, her fantastic desire to disrupt the order of the Galbadian Alliance, had some very real supporters. Immigrants to the city of Deling, two-faced hypocrites from Timber and Winhill who could only survive on Deling City's dime, flocked to her. And the unthinking local man, annoyed at his tax dollars being spent for the benefit of these disloyal places, similarly believed her reasoning was sound. Pioneers out in Galbadia's Centran outposts were already halfway to completing her plan, declaring their Deling-funded communities new nations, urging separation from the mother city.
But shortsighted Catkin had never predicted Adel.
Brutal, deformed, uncontrollable, and wicked, the sorceress had torn through the Estharian continent, crushing whole populations that had opposed her. She'd driven the Estharian Shumi to their cousins in Trabia, obliterated tribespeople who'd traded peaceably with Esthar for centuries, and was now making incursions into Centra and even across the oceans, to the Eastern and Southern reaches of the Galbadian continent. Her hunger for power was insatiable, her evil unmatched.
And the only force that could stop her was a united Galbadia.
So callow Catkin was proven wrong. The twilight of the empire wasn't upon them. Far from it, by some miracle, the good people of Galbadia realized they had to band together. Vincenza III, at the young age of twenty, saw her mother carted off to a care facility, a small sacrifice to make for her people. And then she and her brother Vinzer set about reforming the army, routing out dissident cowards who wouldn't fight, and making plans. For what? The Sorceress War, of course. The Delings were visionaries, and they knew, even before the war had been formally declared, that they had to unite the continent, make of all these squabbling city-states a power that could withstand Adel's magic and superior technology.
Catkin was routed from her newspaper office and offered a chance to do some good, to join the army. But she chose instead to evade her military duty. No great surprise there. She retreated not to Dollet, which was the cultural if not political heart of the empire and therefore a patriotic town. Instead she went to Timber, a place in very real danger because its rail lines stretched across the ocean to Esthar (a throwback to earlier, simpler times, when the Timberi had traded far and wide), and holed up to wait out the war. Her warlord's anger, her fury at Galbadia, hadn't abated. She took up with a crew of similar-minded folk, newspapermen, and preached Timberi separatism even in the face of Adel.
While a few sensible Timberi understood Adel's threat and cleaved to Galbadia, Catkin sowed discord among the majority. She peppered her newspaper – ostensibly a politically neutral outlet with a focus on travel and the arts – with 'warnings' against Galbadian supremacy and what she felt might happen should Deling City seize control after the war.
And what no one ever tells us, put in Siren, Is that she wasn't wrong.
To keep the peace, Vinzer Deling, acting for his sister, cracked down on Timber, urging them to see the light and unite with the rest of the continent. And a few did. Timberi soldiers fought against Adel, even if many were conscripted unwillingly, and Timberi blood was shed in Centra and the South just the same as anyone else's. But even then, some Timberi remained bitter. Angry, prideful, stupid. They saw themselves as too good for the rest of the continent. They preferred to ally themselves with wretched, cruel Esthar, those distant cousins of theirs in the thrall of the sorceress, rather than bend the knee even once to greater Galbadia.
These became Catkin's men. A network of backstabbing, honorless Timberi, they fought alongside good, united Galbadians in many a regiment, but all the while they were sending information back to Catkin, and Catkin? Was sending it across the rails to Esthar.
Her real flaw is that it wouldn't make a difference, in the end. Esthar or Galbadia, Adel or Deling, said Siren.
"No, she was pretty sure even Adel wouldn't be so bad. What Missy's not saying," Irvine thought, "Or what Missy doesn't know, maybe. Is what Vinzer Deling was doing to Timber, to get those men to fight. It's why he built the damn D-District in the first place, really. To hold their families, and to set up a hostage group, captive Timberi to build his weapons, craft his bombs. "
…!
"Yeah," Irvine thought. "It's a pretty story, the way she tells it. But you have to see both sides."
So Catkin orchestrated a brilliant traitor's arrangement. A web of informants who had little love for the country protecting them, who sold themselves, like callous mercenaries, to Adel's spymasters. And for a time it worked. Catkin herself, undercover as a normal reporter, went undetected; and her men became fanatics in her name, determined to use the war to end the Galbadian alliance at all costs, even at the cost of takeover by Adel.
Until a middling general by the name of Caraway (possibly they knew him?) should intercept one of their communications. Grim and quiet and not terribly personable, Caraway was nevertheless a die-hard patriot, a man who dreamt of United Galbadia and who became committed to tracking down each and every traitor and seeing them punished.
Caraway's men killed a fair few, those that resisted. But overall they were merciful. Caraway's sweetheart was Timberi by birth, and the general had a soft spot for her countrymen by extension. So Catkin and the bulk of her men became political prisoners. Loyal Dollet, Catkin's old hometown, agreed to host them on the far north coast, where they could do no harm. Then, after the war was over and the threat of Adel gone, they could turn over the prisoners to Deling City for a trial.
Catkin's men spent the latter half of the war in the strongest fortification Dollet had to offer: the old Holy Dolletian castle that stood where the continent met the Northern peninsula. Conditions there were probably better than they deserved. The castle was ancient, but secure and imposing. It still recalled the days when the statesmen of old, dukes and kings, princesses and sorceresses clad all in red, had argued forcefully with the people of Dollet for the dream of a united Galbadian continent. It was a fitting place to put these traitors. Not a cruel place. But simply one that would remind them, at every step, that they were fighting against an inevitability.
It is said that, when Adel mysteriously vanished and Esthar retreated, Catkin's men didn't celebrate. They stormed their guards, demanded to be set free. They'd lost, but they wanted to take Galbadia down in any way possible. The Dolletians radioed Deling City, terrified that Catkin and her men would escape and wreak havoc on their small seaside town.
Vincenza Deling herself came out with a force of soldiers a hundred strong. They sought to put down the rebellion, and take Catkin and her men to the D-District prison for trial. But, somehow, perhaps through some illicit connection, Catkin had gotten hold of a bomb. When Vincenza arrived and attempted to talk sense into the rebels, she detonated it, killing Vincenza, herself, her men, and anyone in a five hundred meter radius.
The only reason anyone knew what had happened was because the residents of Dollet had seen the smoke go up, and pieced together the story in the days afterwards.
So Catkin died rather than go to the D-District? said Siren.
"Can you blame her?" Irvine thought.
And so now all that was left of the original castle was a hole in the earth, and a great expanse of blackened, sooty dirt in the North, stretching out in all directions. A piece of original, beautiful Galbadian heritage was lost. Vincenza, most brilliant of the Delings, was gone. The heads of Dollet and Timber submitted themselves to a loose association with Deling City after this, almost more out of humiliation than genuine thanks for the Galbadian army's defense of them during the war, and the alliance settled back into an uneasy peace for the most part, interrupted only by bands of rebels who were stupid enough to see more than death and betrayal in Catkin's horrible, honorless suicide run.
So that was Missy's story. Selphie thought she could detect a bias.
When Raijin found himself pulled back into his own head, something odd happened. The sorceress wasn't there. Another girl, one with perfectly nice brown eyes, who looked like the first otherwise, but older, was sitting in her place. She nodded to someone just out of sight. She said, "Shoo, shoo, bad bedside manner."
It took Raijin a few moments to process this.
Every bone in his body hurt. Before he'd been expelled from his own mind, he'd been hurting for so long that he'd no longer really felt it. But now he did feel it. It came roaring back. The pain from his ribs, wrists, knees, and ankles. His left cheekbone, which felt bruised and raw. Where the skin on his back had come off. Where he'd nearly bitten through his tongue.
"Hey," said the new girl. "She's gone. It's just me. Listen. Listen. I think I know a way to get Seifer back."
Raijin was so disoriented that for a minute he couldn't understand why they'd want to bring Seifer back. They'd only be bringing him back here. He worked his way around the gumminess in his mouth, and said this.
The girl rolled her eyes. "So he can rescue you, and the two of you can go get Garden, and then you'll all fix this place. Duh."
