Interlude V: Scarlet

Disclaimer: Not mine and I make no profit.

She held a caramel-brown cat in her lap, absentmindedly stroking its feather soft fur. He wanted her like nothing else. Catching President Shin-Ra's eye was how Scarlet Abbiss got her big chance to prove what she was made of. The strange, metallic taste that might have been like blood filled her mouth, taste that had come since childhood whenever she wanted something so badly that her mind spun like a spinning top. Scarlet had never been given anything free so she had learned to take. Who is that, a little politician or another would ask those days, trying to sound regal, an attempt that had always amused her. Then they would be told by another little politician who she was, how she was so charming too, made them feel the apple of her eye and making her way up in the world, though rumour had it she did so on her back. Maybe she did, what of it? In Shin-Ra that was the way women made it.

So she told herself, but that was why she hated the female Soldiers so; holier than thou General Sephiroth never slept with a subordinate. He didn't believe breasts impaired anyone's brains, either. And he just refused to sleep with her, like she was under his standards somehow.

She begun as a little girl with pigtails, dirty coveralls and big dreams, interested in mechanics. She believed in the tooth fairy until she was twelve and cried when a mean older kid told her that only an idiot would still believe in Baldur bringing gifts at Solstice. She wanted to become the greatest engineer of all times and when people told her that a girl could never be such person because Shin-Ra had the best engineers and in Shin-Ra women never made it very far she only became that much more stubborn to prove them wrong. The first time she slept with somebody was when she needed better grades in university to get a citation for her résumé. She cried afterwards, but she got used to it.

Often you think at first that you could never do something, but when you are in a situation where you have to you find out its nothing after all. This had happened to Scarlet a week before Corel Reactor catastrophe and she still remembers how easy it was to shot at the two men there, her second time. She felt a brief burst of power, power over life and death and the effect came near to sexual pleasure. She had killed a few times since, but she didn't think much of it. She didn't want to feel that pleasure again, best to be indifferent.

And she got to invent weapons that exceeded anyone else's wildest imagination. It was beauty in machinery: nonequilibrium thermodynamics, weren't the very words like a poem? Entropy production, the equipartition of energy, systems driven out of equilibrium would often exhibit patterned behaviour such as fluctuations of phase transitions. Equilibrium was the most beautiful word she knew.

It's ironic considering the way she began her career, but out of all of Shin-Ra's department heads from the time she joined, Heidegger, Lazard Deuscerius, Palmer, Veld, Hojo and Reeve Tuesti, time has only treated Scarlet well.

Ironically, she was the one who made Veld fear for his daughter's life and she was the one who made Tuesti fear there was no time for his constructive plan of changing Shin-Ra from the inside. She did so with three innocent sentences: Hasn't it been a long time since our first meeting. It was about Elfé, remember? Well, I now have Proud Clod I ready, we can test it on her.It was a casual mention, not one of those razor-sharp quips meant to do harm she sometimes used. Because of it, Veld actually realized that, yes, time was fleeing, he was getting rather old for a Turk, that one day he would die and not be there to deflect Shin-Ra for Elfé-Felicia and there was nothing he could do about it. Reeve realized that his little boy's dream of making the world a better place for all would most likely remain a dream for with his invention of Mako reactors he had already caused one war and would leave the Planet in much worse condition than it already was before they would give them up. She had no idea of any of this going through their mind during ordinary business lunch date.

One year later, when Scarlet met Tuesti in the Junon prototype hangar all again on the field of battle, Lazard already dead and buried, Palmer's Space Program dead and buried, Hojo obsessed to the point of forgetting to eat on a regular basis and mumbling to himself or alternatively to his laboratory mice, Heidegger was still disgraced for attempt to command the Turks in an operation in Junon few years ago when his over-reliance on the military had allowed Avalanche to take the city's airfield, and the Airships, Reeve was mostly ignored and Veld going AWOL with a new armed light airship of hers was the reason they were there.

Of them all, only Scarlet had managed her post without a single lapse. When she pointed this out to Reeve, hoping that it would distract a man she kind of liked from their inability to summon Veld from thin air, he just gave him one of those unreadable looks of his. Then, with a sad, spiteful little smile, he spoke. You won, he said. Don't rub it in.

She had no idea why she briefly felt like she hadn't.

''When I was young it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, they'd be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, oh, playfully watching me.
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, oh responsible, practical.
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Oh, clinical, intellectual, cynical.

AN: The lyrics are from Logical Song by Supertramp. I don't own.