A/N: I still feel uncertain about this chapter and will probably revise it within the next month. So any constructive criticism here would be appreciated and taken into account for editing purposes. Also, please note that ellipses (...) in the ancient Centran tablets appear where pieces are missing.

Chapter 10: The Legend of Vascaroon

The over packed sword case sprang open in Seifer's hands, dumping wrinkled clothing onto the floor. Under it all, wrapped in a pair of jeans, was Hyperion. Seifer dropped the case and all of its contents as he pulled his gunblade out, a surge of stomach-tightening emotion rising up his body. He turned it over, inspecting the edge and the gun mechanism for any damage, and finally got down on his knees to gently put the blade to bed in its proper case, snuggled in a tight, velvet nest.

"If you cared about anything else half as much as you do about that gunblade, you might have made SeeD," the instructor said as she walked into the room, fresh from leading Dr. Shipey to the bridge. Zell trailed in behind her, clinging to her heels.

"Did you have to throw my clothes on the floor like that?" he whined.

"You're lucky you remembered my gunblade, Chicken Wuss. Or I'd have done a lot worse than that."

"Can't you two get along for a even few seconds?"

"Not even for my favorite instructor." Seifer grinned and snapped the case closed around his prized weapon.

She frowned. "I know it probably makes you feel big and important, but it's really very small of you to bring that up."

Right. He'd forgotten. She wasn't an instructor anymore. Now she was just a SeeD. Just Quistis. It didn't really make much of a difference to him what her rank was, but the idea that she'd been fired did strike a pleasant and selfish cord. They'd been in all of the same classes together up until they were fifteen, when they had both taken the field exam and only she had passed. Since then she'd seen nothing but easy success and an irritating amount of veneration while he'd been blithely ignored by everyone in command. An old part of him was secretly delighted that someone had finally recognized that she was no more exceptional than her classmates.

Out of the corner of his eye, Seifer watched her bend over and take off her boots. Zell, he noticed, was watching, too.

From the inside of her red uniform, she extracted what looked like a ream of crumpled papers and let them drift from her fingers like leaves.

"What's that?" Zell asked.

"Some of Dr. Shipey's research. He wouldn't leave without it."

"So...you put it down your pants?"

"I offered to put it down mine, but there just wasn't room," Seifer replied, amused.

"Oh sure. Ha ha."

The instructor -- no, Quistis -- tucked her arms into the oversized uniform shirt and with a large sigh worked it up over her head, leaving her standing between Seifer and Zell in just a pair of crimson, army pants and a bra. Dark, sticky blood clung to her sweaty neck and tinted her tangled hair. It was bizarrely sensual and roused some deeply primal, intensely male facet of Seifer's psyche. He was fixated on the gory blemish, even when she bent over to retrieve her change of clothes, until Zell broke the spell.

"Uh...Quisty?"

"Yeah?"

"You just...er...you might not want to talk to the professor like that."

"I'm changing."

"No. I mean...you're sort of..." He blushed.

"You're covered in blood," Seifer said, taking over for the tongue tied Zell. "And your hair's all bushy. You look half animal."

She ran two fingers along her collar bone and frowned. Seifer couldn't see why. As far as he was concerned, she'd never looked more...interesting? Shrugging off the thought, he got back into his own clothes.

There was no reason to stick around as Quistis brushed her hair and Zell stumbled around with his ass in the air, so he wandered up to the bridge where Raijin and Fujin were keeping the professor company. Blue sky and brilliant light surrounded the cockpit. Fujin was in the pilot's seat, her long, thin fingers working over the controls. Raijin was turned around in his seat, peering over the back of it at Dr. Shipey who was hunched as close to the back wall as he could get, clutching his research to his chest.

"Yo! Seifer! Nice job at the base. You probably saved the day down there, ya know?"

"HERO!"

"Well, sure. That's why I'm here."

Of course he was the hero. That went without saying.

Zell had been useless from the start and had only shown up long enough at the end of the mission to save his own hide. Quistis hadn't done much more, aside from summoning her guardian force. Speaking of which, what the hell had that been? He tried to remember what she'd said it was called. Something like...Bomb-a-hut? No. Bomb-ha-moot? In any case, whatever it had been, he'd been reluctantly impressed. He'd never figured anything so massive and so powerful could come from the mind of a woman so chronically boring. Seeing that dragon drop from the stars at her beck and call, and thinking about her standing half naked in the next room with the heat of battle still flush across her skin sparked an unpleasant flare of respect in his heart for her.

Thankfully, it was smothered when she arrived on the bridge, miraculously clean and coiffed, dressed in strategically feminine clothing that looked pressed and crisp despite spending hours wadded in a ball with Zell's short trousers. And she had glasses on. Where the hell had those come from?

"Dr. Shipey, I'm Quistis Trepe," she said as she sat down in the chair next to him, folding her legs. "This is Zell Dincht. We're SeeDs from Balamb Garden. And that is Seifer Almasy and his associates, Raijin and Fujin."

"Seifer Almasy..." Dr. Shipey glanced at him. "As in, the sorceress' knight?"

"That's me." Seifer waved.

"You're working together? On this Estharan air ship?"

"That's right. We were sent to get you by Dr. Odine," Quistis replied.

Resignation splashed across the man's face. "Dr. Odine? You're working for him?"

"We're not working for anybody, least of all that clown," Seifer announced, uneasy at the idea of being associated with the strange scientist. "He just told us where we could find you."

Shipey digested this information for a moment, then said, "If you're from Balamb Garden, then something must have happened at the crater. Is that why you need me and my research?"

"We need you to do more research," Quistis explained. "When we went to the crater, we found the tomb. But there was nothing inside."

He shook his head. "No. That's not possible."

"We opened the final chamber, and it was empty," Quistis replied, sounding scolding and teacher-like. "If these tablets have been around since the time of Vascaroon, isn't it possible that the weapon was looted or moved in antiquity?"

"Not very likely. The Tomb of Hyne has always been regarded as a cursed place and Trabia is terribly out of the way. Even today. Plus, what would anyone want with the weapon?" Shipey eyed them all. "What do you want with it?"

"Rinoa's their friend, ya know?"

"Rinoa? I take it she's the last sorceress?" Talking about his research was bringing the man out of his shell. And, Seifer supposed, the fact that they hadn't beaten the shit out of him yet improved his outlook on being in their custody. "That must be why Odine sent you. Something's happening to her."

"She's not herself anymore. Dr. Odine thinks that the sorceress power is transforming her into Hyne," Quistis said.

"That's what the tablets say."

"Don't they say any way we can save her?" Zell demanded. "We can't just kill her!"

"If she's actually changing, then that means the legend is true, and killing her wouldn't do any good. The sorceress spark would just pass into someone else, and they would begin the transformation," Shipey replied. "Vascaroon believed the only way to defeat Hyne was essentially to disperse her. The word Vascaroon used is an ancient Trabian one, relating to the rending of flesh -- tearing someone limb from limb."

Zell gasped. "We have to rip Rinoa apart?"

"No. Not Rinoa. It's not that simple. She isn't Hyne. The sorceress power is. That's what has to be spit up again."

"This weapon thing was supposed to be able to do that?" Seifer asked.

"According to Vascaroon."

"It's simple then. We just track down whatever happened to the weapon, and then we use it. Rinoa's fine, Hyne is gone, and Squall gets his attitude adjustment. Doesn't sound too hard to me." Seifer couldn't see why everyone was making this so complicated. In terms of actually carrying out a plan, he was much more concerned about Squall getting in the way than Rinoa. Getting past him would probably be more difficult than finding this fabled weapon.

Quistis pointed to the papers Shipey was still holding to his chest. "Are those copies of the tablets?"

"Original and translations."

"Would you mind if we read them?"

"You can if you want to. But you're not going to find anything new. If Hyne really is returning, there's only one thing any of us can do."

"I'd like to read it anyway."

Shipey sighed. "It'll take me a while to get everything organized."

Quistis followed him as he collected his papers. Curious, Seifer lurked behind her. Since childhood, he'd had a vested interest in sorceresses and so had read a lot about Vascaroon. He felt a strange mixture of awe and oblique dislike toward the ancient hero. Nearly every writer from ancient times regarded him as a god among men, as someone who saw with clarity where others could not penetrate the fog, despite the fact that his historical role in the defeat of Hyne had been minimal. A lifetime's worth of curiosity now drew him now to Dr. Shipey, wanting to know more despite himself about the one period of human history other than his own he'd ever had a sincere interest in.

"Who was this scribe?" Quistis asked. "Dr. Odine told us that he actually interviewed Vascaroon. Is that true?"

"Yes. Jorgan E'Lizul. He was the palace historian for King Zebalga II, the third king of the incorporated Centran Empire," Shipey replied as he sat cross-legged on the floor, collecting and reordering the crumpled and scattered papers that had come out of Quistis's uniform. "When Vascaroon was in his nineties -- an extremely advanced age then -- King Zebalga II sent him home to Trabia to die, and then sent Jorgan E'Lizul there as well to record his story. That's where the legend of Hyne you know came from, the official history commissioned by Zebalga II."

"Yeah, but that sure ain't the legend I've been hearing lately," Seifer said. "This Jorgan guy wrote that one, too?"

"I think that the official history might be an expunged version of the one I found in these tablets."

"Why would the king send his scribe to interview Vascaroon, and then censor what he had to say?" Quistis asked.

Zell wandered into the room and nudged Seifer out of the way so he, too could get a position against the wall. There wasn't much else to do on the ship, so Seifer sent him a nasty glare but moved aside to give the other man room.

"This particular period of Centran history is one that is filled with civil unrest," Shipey began. "The empire wasn't even a century old, and the newly conquered areas of Trabia and the west coast of Galbadia -- Dollet -- were anything but stable and Zebalga II wasn't a very popular king. I think it's likely that he wanted to remind the population of Hyne in order to bring everyone back together and under control. And, more than that, he wanted to remind them that his grandfather had been pivotal in Hyne's defeat. Vascaroon was an exceedingly popular hero. A good word from him was like an endorsement from God. But in here, Vascaroon tells a story that doesn't reflect as well on King Zebalga I or his family."

"So he edited it to make himself look good," Zell guessed.

"Right."

There fell a silence punctuated only by the soft flapping of paper. Seifer watched as Quistis took off her glasses and chewed on one of the ear pieces. All the kind thoughts he'd had about her following the base mission were gone now, replaced by a feeling of boredom and contempt. She was all show: the blond hair, the blue eyes, the pointless glasses, the clothing carefully selected to remind everyone around her that she was young and feminine but also an authority. He'd liked her better as a ruffled battle vixen, blood soaked and sweaty.

"What happened to Jorgan E'Lizul?" she asked. "Do we know?"

"Later historians claim that he was killed during an uprising in the capital against Zebalga II. For good or ill, he was connected to that administration, and when it came down, he fell with it. But nobody mentioned that an alternate history of his might exist. I can only suppose he must have kept copies, and they were taken from the city after the uprising by his family. Probably to the colonies, seeing as these were mostly found in Esthar."

"Then if there are more tablets, they'd probably be in ancient Centran colonial cities?" Quistis asked.

"Probably. In the past few weeks, I've pin pointed a few locations of interest." Shipey was completing his stack now and tapping it against the metal floor to even it out.

"How'd you do that?" Zell asked, and Seifer could practically see the hamster wheel spinning behind his eyes. The guy was a dimwit, plain and simple.

"The locations of Centran texts are well documented. At least, those not destroyed by the lunar cry in Centra proper. It's just that nobody has been able to read them before. And nobody can now either, except me." Shipey swelled with pride. "Why did you suppose I was being held on a base with a data center?"

"Shit. President Krier still has all your research?" Now that Seifer thought back on the set up with Shipey's cell mere feet from a room packed with hard drives, servers, and laptops, it made perfect sense. Of course they'd back up his work. And of course he'd need access to outside resources.

"He has everything. Including my list of points of interest, assuming it survived the blast."

"I think we should probably assume that it did," Quistis said, frowning at Seifer like the entire situation was his fault.

He would have liked to hit her.

Dr. Shipey handed Quistis his stack of papers.

"The tablets did not survive millennia unscathed," he explained. "Some pieces are still missing, but the important bits are there."

The professor sat back against the wall, comfortable after nearly a month of confinement with his role as a prisoner. Quistis held the papers in one hand, her eyes working over the small, neat letters written above the grainy copy of ancient, carved ones. Silently, she put her glasses back on and began to read to herself.

"You think we're just standing here to look at your pretty face?" Seifer asked. "Is there some reason you can't do that out loud so the rest of us can join in the fun?"

Quistis sighed dramatically, but gave in, her voice ringing clear and strong: "In the seventy eighth year of our great empire, Vascaroon, a man who was known by all for his courage and heroism, took ill and died..."

0 0 0

Prior to weakening with age, Vascaroon was taken by a regiment of the king's guard into the northern territories, into the country that the natives call Trabia, a place that the great hero had once called home. Trabia is a wild and wooly place, much different from the calm and serene lands of Centra which bloom with gentle life and rolling hills. Trabia is a land of extremes with great ice sheets and snow capped mountains. The wildlife is large and has no fear of human kind, though the natives seem to have developed ways to contend with the local species and they all wear a combination of soft, blue snow lion fur and tough, leathery mesmerize hide. One can easily see how in a place such as this, a man like Vascaroon could have been forged, ground out between the pestle and mortar of wrathful gods and robust breeding.

It was thus a great sadness to watch Vascaroon pass from our time. He did so alone, at night, in his tent, and was discovered the next morning still on his cot with a great emptiness in his eyes.

All in the camp were touched by his passing, and the Trabian women mourned his loss for three days through wailing processions and heavy feasts that the Trabians took to like beasts, their sadness momentarily washed away. (...)

Though he had seen more of the world and time than any other, Vascaroon was not a man wasted and frail before his death; indeed, he seemed to still possess much of the charisma and power that the myth weavers spin of his youth. Although, he was not at all times terribly pleased to recount the events which had given him such fame: the defeat of Hyne the Magician and the forging of the great Centran Empire under its first king, Zebalga I.

During the days prior to his death, his reluctance seemed to spring from a central and disturbing fact: Vascaroon believes Hyne still lives.

One cannot understand why he came to embrace this idea until something of the being known to the world as Hyne the Magician and the war that waged against this being is understood. (...)

Vascaroon was a young man of seventeen when Hyne the Magician first appeared and began to ravage the Centran country side, stealing children from inside their homes, culling an entire generation that has not yet recovered from the slaughter. For two years the tribes of Centra fought against the scourge, but they were unable to mount a cohesive defense against the being which could appear and vanish at will.

During this period, Vascaroon lived in his native home of Trabia. By the time Hyne's reach stretched to the rocky shores of his homeland, Vascaroon was nineteen and leaving his village to make his own life. This is a tradition with the Trabians, I am told, to never allow all the men of one family to remain in the same place, so as to prevent inbreeding and internecine strife over family valuables. The women are utterly sedentary, remaining in the village of their birth for life, while the men travel, and thus intervillage contentment and diversity is preserved.

Vascaroon headed south into the warmer climes. Zebalga I was at this same time heading north, pursuing the trail of heartbreak Hyne the Magician left in his wake. The two were bound to meet, and did so during the summer of that year.

Although the years long separated him from our founding king, Vascaroon still had much to say regarding his majesty, much of it the stuff one can overhear in a lady's bawdy room. I believe the two had an adversarial relationship, although Vascaroon would not confirm this assumption, springing from the conquests Centran tribes, Zebalga's in particular, were making in the area at the time. Possibly, the two met over clashing swords.

Whatever disagreement the two men had, all was soon set aside as... (...)

King Zebalga made great efforts to bring the Centran tribes of the area together under the assumption that safety exists in numbers, and since Hyne the Magician had not yet attacked a major Centran city, this seemed to be a logical defensive tactic. Vascaroon disagreed.

The Trabians have a legend of a being who comes to earth as a destroyer and wreaks havoc among men. And in their legends, they tell of a single weapon which can be used against the creature to restore the balance. Vascaroon sought this method out while Zebalga built walls around the colonies.

I had not heard of a Trabian legend of Hyne until Vascaroon told me of its existence, and I requested to hear it both from the hero himself and from several local Trabians in the area. All were willing to recount the tale which is apparently a center piece of their oral culture, one they have never written down. I believe this history is the first place such a tale will be written and so take great pains here to preserve it with all the detail I was given.

First, something must be said of how the Trabians view the world and its creation... (...)

Zebalga's defenses proved unable to prevent Hyne from entering Centran cities, and within months all of the children in the colonies were missing or dead. The strife was unbearable for some, though Zebalga tried to rally morale around a group of men who were to go out and attempt to confront Hyne and convince the creature to cease tormenting the people of Centra.

It is a great boon of luck that Vascaroon was able to beat this group of ill-fated Centran men to Hyne on the day that they set out, as he now possessed the only weapon which he believed capable of dispatching the calamity.

He was willing to recount little of the actual battle, only to say that Hyne suffered sparaktos, a Trabian word I've been told connotates a dispersal of parts, or the dismemberment of a person limb from limb. Hyne, Vascaroon said, was split down the middle. One half vanished, and the other remained. In a single afternoon, the scourge of our time had been countered and defeated.

The half-body was buried in a great tomb that was built inside a vast scar on the Trabian landscape.

On his deathbed, Vascaroon insisted that this defeat was not a permanent one, and that one day Hyne would return. The pieces of Hyne's power, he said, had merely been spread across the world in a layer thin as gold leafing. One day, he said, the pieces might be able to recollect themselves.

It seems apparent now, months after Vascaroon's death, that this may in fact be the case, as I have heard of women as far apart as the costal southern beaches of Centra and the frozen north of Trabia who suddenly seem to posses a mystical and strange power. They are being called Sorceresses. Various animals in the empire as well are beginning to show odd traits that they never had before. I am forced to wonder whether these are the remnants of Hyne that Vascaroon had spoken of.

In order to ensure that the future remains as safe and preserved as the present, Vascaroon has buried the weapon to combat Hyne in his Trabian tomb. There it will remain, safe alongside his body, forever guarding our empire's vast prosperity.

0 0 0

Seifer had never listened to Quistis talk for so long without drifting off before, although halfway through her reading of the tablets Raijin and Fujin wandered in and, after the curious glances sent their way, Fujin had quickly explained by saying, "AUTOPILOT" before the story continued. Presently, they were all sitting in a semi-circle around her like a kindergarten class. Zell even had his mouth open and was lying on his stomach, his feet up in the air behind him.

"It's weird, isn't it?" he said. "Thinking that Vascaroon and Hyne and all of that might actually be real."

"It's weird thinking that you might actually be licensed to carry a weapon," Seifer grumbled, shoving him.

"I don't need a license," Zell replied. "Ain't nobody who can disarm me o'these." He pounded the floor with his fists.

"ADOLESCENT," Fujin scoffed, garnering herself a high five from Seifer.

"Ugh. Can you believe we have to work with these people, Dr. Shipey?" Zell rolled toward the professor, who was still sitting apart from their group.

Quistis ignored all of them and asked instead, "So that's what the crater expedition's goal was? To find this weapon before Rinoa finished transforming into Hyne?"

Shipey hesitated before replying. "I would have liked to have gone there just to gather more information. It was Krier's idea to move ahead and retrieve the weapon. We still don't actually know what it is or what it does. Or whether this is all a myth. There's a lot of pieces still missing from the story."

"And that's why you hit President Krier at the dinner? Because he was moving forward, and you didn't think he should."

Shipey shrugged. "I lost my cool. He was pushing me off the project."

Seifer had forgotten that tid bit of information. This little, middle aged professor had actually punched the President of Galbadia and lived to tell the tale. He wished he could have been there to see it. At the time, he'd probably been at sea, pulling up an overloaded pot of crabs and fighting for footing among the ice cold waves washing over the side of the Black Mage. It irked him to think that at the same time, Quistis and Zell were schmoozing in the swanky Balamb Garden hotel with Laguna Loire and getting into fist fights with Galbadian heads of state. It almost made him wish he'd stuck around long enough to become a SeeD in the first place.

"Even if Krier finds new materials, he can't read them without you, Dr. Shipey," Quistis announced. "We'll take you some where safe first. Then we'll see about finding more tablets."

"Where is safe, exactly?" Seifer asked.

"He can say in the palace with Laguna. Fujin, set a course in for Esthar."

Fujin and Raijin got up, stretched, and went back to their posts on the bridge.

"I've still got some materials I'm working on translating," Shipey said. "I hadn't finished it when you...um...rescued me."

"Great. Maybe the answer we need is already in our hands. You're welcome to all the onboard computers that you need to do your work, Dr. Shipey. I don't know if you've used Esthar work stations before, but Zell can show you how if you need any help."

"Yeah! Come on, I'll show you. It looks sorta complicated at first, but it's all color coded. You'll catch on in no time." Zell grabbed the professor's hand and pulled him to his feet.

Shipey wobbled and quickly grabbed his papers from Quistis before the over-zealous blond pulled him from the room, babbling eagerly about how exciting it would be to assist in ground-breaking research. It was a strange side of Zell that Seifer had never seen before -- the eager student. He'd always figured the guy got by in his classes on the pity card. Who knew he had a passion for learning? He supposed Quistis was surprised as well, because she was looking at him with an odd expression on her face once they were alone in the room.

"Didn't think he had half a brain to spare," he said. "Wonder why he doesn't use it more often."

"Is there some fundamental reason that you refuse to give him a break?" she asked, eyes narrow. "He saved your life down there. And mine."

"He saved my life? Were we on the same base?"

"If Zell hadn't commandeered that armored car, we both would be dead."

"If I hadn't taken control in the storage facility, everyone here would be dead."

Quistis stood up and crossed her arms tightly across her chest. "That's what you think happened? You think you saved the day by throwing a few grenades? Have you forgotten who is the high ranking SeeD here and who is the fisherman, Seifer?"

"Have you forgotten who is the failure?"

She sucked in a sharp breath, and he stood up to so that they could be nose to nose.

"No. I haven't. You're the failure," she said. "I'm a rank A SeeD...one of the best mercenaries on the planet. A hero. You're a fallen knight from a lost war."

"You froze down there. So I took action. If I hadn't, those two soldiers would have noticed the professor was missing and raised the alarm. We wouldn't even have gotten out of the storage facility for Zell to make his daring rescue in the first place."

Quistis ran a hand through her hair, ruffling up the smooth, perfect ponytail she'd created. "Do you still think that acting on instinct, running into battle without thinking, is the way a good soldier functions?"

"Sometimes, a good soldier has to." He smiled. "Maybe you don't remember, but I saved you down there, too."

"If you mean dragging me to the ship--"

"That's exactly what I mean."

"You didn't save me. I was perfectly capable of getting there myself."

"Right. That's why I had to carry you."

Her hands fisted at her side and she growled deep in her throat. "I didn't ask you to! In fact, I asked you to let me go!"

"So then, let me get this straight. Next time, you think I should stand in the hallway and plot out a detailed plan for escape as the soldiers approach, ready to discover us any second. And I should leave you behind unless you specifically ask me to bring you along?" He didn't understand why she was so upset over the whole thing anyway. If this was how she treated someone who'd pulled her out a nest of angry, Galbadian soldiers with guns pointed at her head, then in the future he'd definitely do his best to leave her behind. There was no winning with this woman.

"No! God. You're impossible."

"You're the one who wanted to work with me."

"Yeah! I remember that!" she snapped and turned around so her back was to him.

They stood in silence for a few seconds. Even though a rational part of Seifer's brain knew that it was a signal to let the argument drop, he couldn't resist aggravating it further, pushing the limits to see how far she'd let him go.

He reached out and shoved her, not hard, but enough to knock her off balance. "Bet you wish I was Puberty Boy. Don't you?"

"Yeah. Honestly, I do," she said, spinning around again to face him. Her eyes were overflowing with warm, angry tears. They startled him, and he took a step back, his hand burning from touching her, as if her sadness was a flame that could sear him.

"Oh God. Why are you crying?"

"I'm not crying!"

"Looks a hell of a lot like crying to me."

"Damn it," she swore quietly and wiped the tears from her cheeks with both hands. "I just wanted to tell you to give Zell a break. He's never done anything to you. Leave him alone."

"You and him an item or something?" Seifer asked, puzzled. "You keep defending him."

"No. We're friends, Seifer. You understand that word? Friends?"

"Yeah. Sure. Friends. So then what about me? Why don't I get any of this good-will?"

She stared at him. "Huh?"

"All the sorceress' knight comments. The traitor thing. You never jump in and defend me. So there must be something special between you and Chicken Wuss." Seifer found imagining the two of them in a relationship difficult. Zell didn't strike him as the sort of person who was emotionally developed enough to actually have a relationship with a woman, and especially not one as high maintenance as this one.

"Seifer..." She looked away from him. "We're not friends."

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. "No shit."

For some reason, her statement surprised him. Sure, he'd never been interested in spending his free time with her or anyone else from Garden, but it had never really occurred to him that she might actually dislike him either. Realizing it now, he was embarrassed and angry. Fuck it. He didn't want to be friends with her. He didn't want to have anything to do with her. Why the hell was he even on this ship, sticking his neck out for these people?

"Look...it doesn't mean that we can't ever be, I guess."

The tips of her fingers brushed his arm. He looked down at her hand and watched the way her skin trailed across his own, gentle and reassuring. And he was bewildered by it. Her eyes were still swollen from tears as she stood there, telling him she didn't like him, but she could. Someday. Maybe. He was quickly loosing track of the point of this entire conversation. Quistis Trepe was unhinged. The woman couldn't hold a straight thought for more than a few seconds.

"Seeing as we're being so nice and honest," he began, stepping away from her touch. "Taking Shipey to Esthar is a mistake."

"You think so?"

"I do."

"Want to share why?"

"Odine."

She sighed. "I thought you might say that."

"You don't really trust that guy, do you?" When she opened her mouth to reply, he interrupted. "I remember. You don't trust me either. Fine. But I'm not the one who's made a career of studying sorceresses. And we're talking the mother of all sorceresses here. The guy's got to be interested in studying Rinoa."

"I know he is. But what else can we do? At least Odine doesn't want to kill her."

"Why not just keep him on the ship? Would save a lot of time."

"We can't take the chance that Krier might get him back."

"We won't. Raijin and Fujin can watch over him."

Her boot heels clicked against the floor as she paced away from him and back. He watched her move, plagued with doubt, and he wondered if Vascaroon and Zebalga had been stymied by a similar argument thousands of years ago, the leader looking for any way to play it safe as the great hero urged him to take a chance and go straight for the heart of the thing -- not to defend against Hyne, but to really fight back. These were decisions, he realized in a sudden epiphany, that she probably wasn't used to making. Squall had been their leader during the war and since.

"I won't tell anybody it was my idea," he offered. "Not for a few days, anyway."

"Generous of you."

"You know I'm right. Hand Shipey over to Dr. Odine, and you can kiss his ass goodbye."

"So instead we just jump right in?"

"Head first."

She sighed, the exhalation blowing aside a wisp of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail and across her face. The heavy mask of control she wore was showing its cracks, exposing deep fault lines. He'd never been in the field with her before, and was amazed to see what an uncertain SeeD she'd turned out to be. In class, she had been all confidence, out-performing everyone with a smile on her face. And as an instructor, she'd possessed the unmistakable gleam of self-righteous superiority. It dissolved away now, here, on this ship above Galbadia, and she sagged under the weight of her responsibility.

He never would have guessed. How had she fallen so far?

Something about it made him smile. And he was searching his mind for something to say, a perfectly aimed insult, when Zell walked in again through the sliding doors.

"What's goin' on?" he asked. "What're you two doing?"

"Nothing. It's fine," Quistis said.

Zell didn't look convinced.

"Is everything alright with Dr. Shipey?" she asked.

"Yeah. He's working."

"Good. I need to talk to him."

Quistis glanced back at Seifer as she walked toward the door with a quick twitch of her head that made her ponytail swing and brush her neck. He wasn't sure what it meant until he caught up with her on the bridge.

"Dr. Shipey, you said you had a list of places of interest," she began. It was like waiting for a volcano to erupt or an eclipse to blot out the sun. The natural order was overturned. A thing of rare beauty was about to occur, possibly for the first time in over a decade. "What's the closest one?"

"I...um...I would guess the Tomb of the Unknown King," he replied, glancing up from his terminal.

"Perfect. We can be there in an hour. Fujin, change course to Deling City and the Tomb of the Unknown King."

A surge of pride tore through Seifer, rocking him back on his heels. She'd taken his suggestion. They'd argued about it, and he had won. Naturally. But still, it tasted so very sweet. He followed her to the front of the bridge and then flopped down in the seat next to her, throwing a heavy arm across her thin shoulders. They tensed and compressed like a spring under his touch, adding a visceral pleasure to his victory.

"Sounds like a brilliant idea...Quistis."

0 0 0

The lights in the underground data center still weren't working properly, so the soldiers had stuck round, emergency lights to the walls. They were glowing a bluish-white, illuminating the beaten walls and the stacks of servers, half buried in puffy mounds of fire-retardant foam. Three stories up, men were mopping up water and inspecting the munitions for damage. Four cases of S.A.A. rounds had already been packaged up for re-manufacturing.

Jack Krier stood in the midst of the foam, surveying the damage, as two officers worked to clear off an LCD panel and hooked up a fresh keyboard to one of the computers.

"What the hell happened?" he asked. He'd just arrived, but he already knew this was a major disaster.

"They threw two frag grenades down the stairs. Killed Lt. Col. Pearson and set off all the fire detectors."

"I can see that. Who were they?"

"SeeDs, we think. But they flew out of here on an Esthar ship."

"Then what makes you think they were SeeD?"

The officer brought up an image on the screen of the Galbadian crest. A progress bar beneath it blinked back and forth as the computer booted up.

"One of them summoned this...dragon. It took down thirty two men."

"SeeD it is then." Krier puzzled over this as the two officers used the computer to access each of the servers and assess what data loss had occurred. The foam was designed to protect electronic equipment in the case of a fire, but it did nothing to shield it from explosives or flying shrapnel. Some of the units near the door had taken a particularly harsh beating. Thankfully the brunt of the explosion had been absorbed by the unfortunate Lt. Col. Pearson.

If the group that had abducted Dr. Shipey were SeeD, that meant they had to be from Balamb Garden since Martine and his forces had been occupied at the time. He would have suspected that the attack had occurred under order from the sorceress herself, except that the group had escaped on a ship from Esthar. That particular detail pointed his suspicions toward Dr. Odine. Although, he'd heard rumors that Balamb Garden possessed an airship of Estharan design, so he wasn't ready to come to any immediate conclusions.

"Looks good, Sir. Minimal data loss, even on some of the badly damaged drives. And we might be able to recover some corrupt files from redundant storage."

"How much of Dr. Shipey's research have we lost?"

"None, Sir."

"Back up all of his data to a laptop for me. Then get this place cleaned up."

Krier paced in the foam as they set to work, wondering how he was going to present this to the public. Between the navy's unsuccessful assault on Garden and what looked very much like an Estharan attack on a Galbadian military base, the political landscape was about to get very sticky. He could think of a dozen men off the top of his head who would be knocking down his door the moment news reached them, demanding that he declare war against the reclusive nation. And, although war wasn't in his best interests, he was curious if it wouldn't make for better footing to operate under. It certainly gave him a handy pretense to explain the attack on Balamb Garden.

He'd wait, he decided, until after Duran and Crecentia's debriefing. He had to know what happened in Trabia.

"Sir?"

"What is it?"

"There's a file on here you might want to look at right away. It looks like a list of locations."

The soldier pulled up a text file and displayed it on the LCD. A list of a dozen odd locations flashed up on the screen under the provocative heading, "Centran Ruins of Interest." The first on the list was Deling City, the Tomb of the Unknown King, followed by a variety of places around the world, some of which Krier didn't recognize.

"Print those out for me. And plot them on a map if you can."

"Yes, Sir."

Krier started toward the ravaged stairs, flicking foam off his shoes. "Let me know as soon as your finished. I want to leave as soon as possible."

There was a confounding amount of things to do before word of the base attack leaked out. And it would, he knew that. These men were largely privates still in training. He'd be lucky if everyone in Deling City didn't already know by the time he got back. Mercy be with him. He hoped he'd have at least five more hours of peace before having to decide whether to go to war.