A/N: This one's a bit longer than usual, but there was really no good place to break it, not with what's coming next chapter.
First Trigger
"What are the other colors of illusion stones?" Kunzel asked as Freyra picked up the shotgun to examine it. "By the way, Eden, should we send our original weapons back to Midgar if we switch them off?"
"Yes, " Eden agreed. "I'm curious about the other colors, too. I know purple is weather-related, so that leaves orange and two others."
"Gray and black," Freyra filled in, looking amused. "Orange is 'true-sight', which means illusions of any sort have no effect on you and targeting is almost impossible to screw up. Gray manipulates density of the user, weapon, and anything touching the person, assuming you can gain so much control of it. Most things you have to try to change the density of, though. Black allows for energy severing—shutting down spells, cutting off power supplies, negating a lightning bolt, and so on. Trust me, some of those things in combinations can create an ability which looks almost deity-like if you don't know what you're up against. Clarity and time is only one of those. White is one of the rarest illusion stones to show up, along with gray and black. Orange, red, and purple are in the category of medium rarity, and green, blue, brown, and yellow are the most likely to show up. By illusion stone standards, this set of ten is a windfall."
"So what else is new? I mean, this is Eden we're talking about, here," Cissnei commented dryly, causing chuckles from Genesis and Freyra as Eden made a face.
"On another topic entirely, where did the three of you go to cause you to come back here a mess?" Ruluf asked curiously of Freyra, Kunzel, and Luxiere, who dropped his original blade into the crate after he'd switched his Materia to the new one.
"To the Materia Mine, of course!" Freyra grinned. "Kunzel has the Materia we got, but I'm pretty sure it's another one we have no prior record of."
"The Materia Mine?" several voices asked in surprise.
"Yeah, of course," Kunzel replied dryly. "A lot of Wutains actually have green Chocobos to get over the mountains. We rented a few, went out to the cave, found there was no more there than in the one north of the Corel Mountains, and headed back with the one Summon Materia we did find. It was no more difficult than that, but the Chocobos were irritable and took us through the densest growth on purpose. It was more like riding acrobatics lessons, honestly."
The words produced chuckles before Eden asked him, "A new Summon?"
In response, the man drew the Materia in question and threw it to the blond Turk, who examined it closely in puzzlement before musing, "Atomos has a gravity-based power, which isn't unusual by the standards of the Planet because Gravity Materia is a fixture here. But you're right, this is a completely new Materia, a Summon we've never seen before. I wonder why it showed up here and now?"
"It had to've been forming in the cave for quite awhile," Genesis commented. "As in, a few years. Materia don't form quickly—even basics like Fire, Ice, and Lightning still take around four months to form when they do it naturally. Reactors speed up the process to about a month, but those are also sub-standard quality, and while we can use them just as well, they have discrepancies, especially in reliability. A natural Summon, even the—'weakest' of them—would have needed at least two and a half years to form in a Reactor core. I guess if Minerva directly intervened, they could form faster, though."
"I see. I guess it's true, then, that people miss things they aren't looking for," Eden shrugged. He then held the red orb up as he looked at Kunzel to ask, "So, do you want it back, or should I keep it?"
"You can keep it," Kunzel shrugged. "I'm a lightning user, so Zack gave me a Mastered Ramuh—I'm good with that one."
"Okay, thanks," Eden agreed, tucking it away. "So did you three collect the Enemy Skills while you were out?"
"No, we still have to do that with you," Freyra grinned. "In other words, on our next day off from meetings. One of the monsters we have to find is in the grasslands, and one's on the beach, so they shouldn't be hard to find. We could make a day of it, like a picnic or something, or we could go do that, then return here to do whatever from there."
"The Razor Weed's Skill will be the harder of them to get, though, because it only hits one person at a time. Manipulate could make it a lot easier since it'll let us choose who we're going to have it hit with its ability," Kunzel explained.
"We'll deal with that on our next day off, then," Rufus cut in. "Now, have all the gifts been allocated, and if not, who else is getting something?"
Eden sighed, then picked up three odd, clip-like devices with sharp edges and threw them to the ground at Deneh and Nanaki's feet. "You two can pick whichever you'd like of those, but your originals don't have to go to Shinra if you don't want them to." They nodded, so he picked up the last item, a staff made of a dark, rich, brown wood and offered it to Aeris. "If you want that, we'll have to get the blacksmith Shinra uses to add some fixtures to it for the illusion stones, but otherwise, you could start using it right away."
Aeris blinked and took the staff, testing the weight and heft of it as Nanaki and Deneh similarly tested the clips the blond had given them. After a minute, the brown haired girl said, "It's better than my current one, and if the monsters are going to keep getting harder to fight, this will help against them. What should I do with my old staff?"
"That's up to you, I would think," Eden shrugged.
"I don't want any of the clips you gave us," Nanaki said suddenly, making the others look at him. "They're good quality, I have no issue with that, but my—the one Grandpa gave me, which had been used by my father, is better. And it has sentimental value, if nothing else. Thank you for the thought, though."
"That's fine," Eden agreed. "As long as you're happy with what you have."
Right then, Deneh did an interesting trick to get one of the clips into her mane-hair in place of the one she had been wearing, then put her own in the small pack she'd taken to keeping on her. "This one is good for me. You can take the other two and send them off," she said as she pushed the two she hadn't chosen back towards the blond Turk. "It's much better than I had, so thank you! It'll definitely make fighting easier from here on out."
"Great," the Turk grinned, grabbing them and putting them in the box. "Does that mean everyone's done now?" A chorus of agreement came from the others, so he finished up by showing the group some items to do things like protect status or give extra shielding from elements. Once they'd all chosen what they wanted of those, he finished packing up the box, then went to get a servant to seal it and make sure it joined the shipment to Midgar.
It was only in the middle of the night when Rufus thought it might be a good idea to ask Godo if he had a blacksmith who could add the slots Aeris needed to her new staff.
FoW
It was afternoon three days after Rufus and his traveling party had left Midgar (1), and Evan, Yufi, Shelke, and Illis were walking through the Shinra building's lobby, intent on heading home. Well, Evan and Shelke were going to Yufi's with her and Illis because they were going to work on a group project together, but Yufi was heading home.
However, before they'd gotten far from the elevator they'd left, a voice near them said, "So you're the SND subject, Shelke Rui." The group turned to face the speaker, only to see a Wutain man who looked like he was in his forties, with long, black hair in a ponytail, glasses, and an over-all creepy expression made worse by the fact that he wore a doctor's coat. There was something like a half-smirk on his thin lips as he gazed with eerie intensity at Shelke.
"Can we help you with something, Professor Hojo?" Illis asked cordially before any of the kids could say anything. All the kids gave startled blinks and looked sharply at her, but Shelke immediately returned her gaze to the man warily.
"Ah, you're wary of me. Heard stories about me from someone?" Hojo asked, gaze still focused on Shelke. When she didn't answer, he said, "Well, come along with me, then."
"What if I don't go?" she asked timidly.
"That's not an option," Hojo replied.
Shelke paled and backed up, causing Yufi to move in front of her as she declared boldly, "She isn't going with you! Ever!"
"You don't have the right to refuse me. The moment you signed an agreement with Shinra, you also signed your lives away to us to do with as we will, and I've chosen you as an experimental subject. You should be honored to be able to advance the knowledge and capabilities of science, after all," Hojo answered with clear amusement. His gaze then hardened as he said sharply, "Now come along, before I call for support from SOLDIER and the Infantry."
"I have classes I'd rather not miss," Shelke answered, remembering what Genesis and the Turks had said she should tell him. "There weren't any terms in anything I signed for the Academy saying I became a slave for you to just take and experiment on whenever you wanted—you don't own me just because I'm going to school here."
A scowl darkened the man's face, but before he could say anything further, a new voice put in coldly, "The young lady is correct. I must insist you refrain from claiming the Academy student." A look in the speaker's direction showed Sephiroth as he gazed with cold eyes at Hojo from where he stood after exiting the other elevator not long before.
Hojo faced him and asked darkly, "And you think you have either the right or the power to intervene, Sephiroth?"
"I do," Sephiroth agreed evenly, not intimidated.
A long silence fell before the man said, "I suppose we shall see how long your defiance lasts for, my creation. After all, you're overdue for a meeting with me. We should get it done now." He started to turn towards the elevators.
"I refuse," the silver haired General stated flatly.
Hojo froze, then turned to gaze at him with barely contained fury. "You believe you have that right? Unlike the female, you are the property of Shinra, and my personal property, and you have no right to refuse me. You will come with me for your testing, and you will do it now."
"I refuse," Sephiroth answered, gaze turning faintly amused. "First, not only do you not have the power to force me to do so, but my contract terms do not allow you to torture me for the sake of torturing me. As such, you have broken the terms of the contract on more than one occasion, making any requirement I may have had to uphold it irrelevant and unnecessary. In short, I have no contract with you, only with President Shinra, and he has better uses for me than to submit me to your sadistic tendencies."
There was a long silence before Hojo gave a malicious smile and said, "So I was correct. Pity. I shall return to my other experiments, then. For now." He then turned and walked back to the elevator, shoulders hunched as he gave an extremely creepy chuckle.
Once he was gone, the others all blew out sighs of relief—then Sephiroth looked down at Shelke as she tugged on his sleeve, tears in her eyes. "I don't want him to hurt me!" she pleaded.
He rested a hand on her head and replied, "We have no intention of allowing him to do so, Shelke. You are safe." In response, she wrapped her arms around his waist to hug him tightly, crying softly into his belly, so he obediently put his arms around her to comfort her. As much as he took Genesis as his brother in all but blood, he hadn't expected the sibling relation to carry over to Shelke and Shalua as well, but it had. And he had found he didn't actually mind.
Yufi joined Shelke to lean on her back and wrap the gentler girl in a tight hug as she declared, "He's right, and he's not the only one who'll protect you."
"General Sephiroth!" a woman's voice called as she stepped out of the elevator. It was Lunaria that time, stepping out of the elevator opposite the one Hojo had left on. "Good, I caught up to you!" She then paused as she looked around at the group before looking at him again to ask, "What happened?"
"Hojo attempted to claim Shelke for his experiments," Sephiroth told her, and she made a face.
"Yes, we've known that was coming for awhile. He failed this time, but he's also been much more 'hush-hush' about his recent experiments, too. That's not why I'm here, though."
"Then why, Doctor Valentine?" the General asked curiously.
She gave a nod and said, "Doctors Kedran and Blythe are working through all the employee files and have found several people they want transferred to their care, including yourself, Shelke and Shalua Rui, young Cadet Strife, and others here. I've given one copy of the list to each the Turks, SOLDIER, and the Academy, as well as a few others, but I wanted to give you a heads-up so you realize they aren't planning to do invasive and intrusive tests. It also offers protection from Hojo, since them being moved to their care means he can't interfere with them. Not openly, anyway."
"Is there a commonality we all have which would allow such a tactic to be viable?" Sephiroth asked in surprise.
Her gaze was amused as she said, "They found one, a very shocking one. Well, there's more than one—three they've told me about—and every person they're requesting has one or more of them. Their greatest breakthrough was when they examined Cadet Strife's file and asked him for a blood test, only to find his body would reject the current Mako infusions and he'd be refused entrance to SOLDIER without some genetic therapy first."
"That is...surprising. Any protection from Hojo is better than none, however," the silver haired man commented.
"That's certainly true," Lunaria answered in amusement. Her gaze then went to Shelke as she told the girl, "They also asked me to give something to you, young Shelke Rui. I don't know what it is, but they said you'd feel safer with 'it' on you." She then pulled a paper-wrapped, long, narrow, tube-like package from a pocket on the inside of her doctor's coat and offered it to her.
After a moment, Shelke wiped her eyes and let go of Sephiroth so she could take the package—and her eyes widened in shock before she smiled and looked up at the woman to say, "Thank you, Doctor Valentine. They were right to say I'll feel safer."
"Good," the woman smiled. She then looked at Sephiroth again and said, "When you have a free moment, check with Cadet Strife to see how he's holding up—the news he got wasn't the greatest and he could use the support with no Eden to turn to. I think he and Anthony were planning to go to Anthony's place."
"I will. Thank you, Doctor," the man agreed.
"I'll be seeing you around, then," Lunaria agreed, gave Sephiroth's shoulder a pat, then turned to go back to the elevator.
Sephiroth faced the younger group and said, "You had best head out." With a nod to them, he headed for the exit doors quickly.
"Let's go. I have a call to make once we're in a more private setting," Illis said, herding the group of kids out of the building after Sephiroth. The General had already vanished by the time they got outside.
As soon as they had returned to Yufi's residence, she called Tseng to update him on the incident with Hojo.
FoW
Tseng sat in his office, rubbing his eyes tiredly just after hanging up the call with Illis. He'd known there would come a time that Hojo would eventually approach Shelke, but had hoped it would take longer. Their saving grace was really in the way their Academy kids tended to travel in 'packs', and in how the two Deepground doctors they'd saved had been telling the truth about not having been there because they had wanted to see people suffering. At the moment, that gave him time, and his allies time, to figure out how best to handle the situation.
If he was completely honest with himself, the situation truly felt like it was spiraling out of control, no matter how hard he tried to keep a handle on it. Veld had told him before resigning that, with things the way they had been after the raid on Deepground, there was a good chance Tseng was going to get a 'trial by fire'. The warning hadn't been in vain, and that was currently what the Wutain was trying to weather, given how many things he had to try to keep an eye on and work some sort of damage control with.
Hojo wasn't going to keep waiting forever to get his hands on Shelke, nor was he likely to just let his 'prized subject', Sephiroth, get away from him. If anyone actually thought they were going to be safe with the intervention of Doctors Kedran and Blythe, they were fools, because Hojo wasn't the sort to willingly hand off anyone or anything he'd claimed. No, what they'd gotten was 'time' to figure out how they could possibly work against Hojo's retaliation for the attempt to take his 'subjects' from him. Tseng, knowing how Wutains tended to react to such things, knew they'd just earned Hojo's enmity and a backlash easily as bad as anything Fuhito had dumped (or would later dump) on them—it was just a matter of what he'd do and when.
They had far more problems to deal with than those, as well. If Eden had managed to get the shipment of items to them, he would be very happy when it came in, because they'd need the bonuses from them desperately to even hope to weather what was coming. Even if they'd ended the Wutai War, with Hojo and Fuhito looming on the horizon and President Shinra most likely on their hidden hit list, they were going to have a problem, and lately, problems seemed to get dropped on them in multiples. How many people were going to die by the time they were done? Hopefully not enough to trigger Omega—Vant was turning out to be something akin to a Goddess-send, but if he switched to the state known as Chaos, all bets were off, by Vant's own request.
How in the world did Vant think they could possibly defeat a being as powerful as Chaos, when it had to be at least as strong as the Lifestream itself?
Having no answer to that question, he turned his thoughts to the situation with the traffickers they were trying to track. The Turks had ended up in altercations with a few prominent groups more than once, as well as random stragglers and go-fers, but one in particular was a very literal thorn in the side. It hid its core leadership well, giving it the opportunity to reform again several months to a few years later, so no matter how many underlings they took out, it was an endless fight. It was worse than Corneo's persistence, as at least they knew Corneo was the head and could take him out if needed.
It didn't help that there were several other groups of traffickers of various sorts—drugs, weapons, other valuable goods, humans, animals, and so on—but those were more localized groups with smaller networks, and destroying one caused a new one to take its place, not new members of the same group to step up. He thought back to a discussion he'd had with Kariya back around the time Eden had crashed:
FoW (flashback)
Tseng was sitting in his office doing some paperwork when a knock on the door frame made him look up to see Kariya. The man stepped into the room and closed the door, then offered him a few discs. "Thanks for these, Kariya," Tseng said with a nod at the man as he took them. "How did things go?"
"Most of the runners were shipping things north, towards the northern continent, but it didn't sound like they were going to Bone Village or Icicle Inn. Judet has been noticing pretty regular strangers picking up occasional goods in the latter, though. We'd need better equipment to search the area more thoroughly," Kariya explained.
"What kinds of goods are the runners shipping? Weapons?"
"Everything from rare monsters to science equipment and tech parts to drugs and weapons. Even people, I think, but the human traffickers have gotten good at avoiding us. I don't think we'd be able to do anything to find out more on that side unless we set up a sting to catch them."
"Hmm..." the Wutain murmured with a small frown, absently gazing at the discs he held. "That's another point. I'll have to see how things go shortly, when I get in touch with Quis and Judet. Take a break for a bit and visit with your kids—unless there's another mission you feel you must do right now?"
Kariya gave a snort and said, "No, I'm good for now. Visiting the munchkins will be good. See you later, then." He gave a wave and left as he pulled a cigarette out, and Tseng just sat back in his seat for a minute, sighing tiredly.
FoW (end flashback)
Some Turks were assigned to tracking the targets they had of other groups, but Kariya and Vant tended to be the ones tracking anything to do with that persistent group—the same one Kariya had given him data on that day. Vant especially had some sort of vendetta against them, having told Tseng that he was sure his generation of Turks had taken them out. If Kariya was right, however, and they were trading off goods to Fuhito, not only did they have to try to track that to its source, but they had to stop the exchanges. It left them the question of what Fuhito was giving them in exchange for their goods, especially if he was now running short on funds after being cut off from both Rufus and his sources in Wutai.
Tseng had also had to take some of the Turks off the search for Fuhito, mainly leaving it to Balto in Midgar, Vant and Kariya wherever their targets were, and Judet and Quis in the north. He often had Balto and Rude switch off with Kariya and Vant when they needed a break. While a few Turks were still running their usual fare of missions (for those not in the main office, finding SOLDIER candidates and gathering intel for Turk missions), most had been sent scouting to fill in data for the SOLDIERs being sent on missions. And for some reason, they were being sent on a lot of missions lately. They had thought they'd have a reasonable number of people in reserve after the Wutai War had ended, both in SOLDIER and the Turks, but instead, monster attacks were on the rise, and it took the Turks' ability to go unnoticed and track information to prepare the SOLDIERs for what they'd be going into.
It was puzzling. If anything, with what they were fixing, the monster attacks should have been decreasing, not almost doubling in a few weeks. The Firsts who had become such due to the Deepground Raid were being worked just as hard, or very nearly, as whichever Commanders were available at the time, and even the Seconds and Thirds were being run pretty much to their max. They were just tired. If it was true that the monsters were Jenova's creations and she wasn't quite dead yet, this could well have been her retaliation, her death throes. There was a good chance of that, which also meant they had to find her last anchors before she managed to completely overrun them with sheer exhaustion.
To complicate matters further, it had taken the Turks a long time to find or track anything to do with their internal spy who had been leaving the black listening boxes around, because the only lead they'd had, even by using the cameras, had been people who were unidentifiable and not registered to Shinra. They had caught a couple once they had realized they were using some of the Turks' own disguise tricks against them, but those people had capsules of poison in their mouths, which they used to end their own lives before they could be questioned. Finally, after several failed attempts to do more than retrieve the records of the discussions recorded on the devices, they had simply pulled down and destroyed all of them, also doing bug sweeps across the whole building to find less obvious listening devices. They had found more than they had expected, and destroyed those, too.
Things were bound to get much worse before they got better, and Tseng was beginning to wonder if this was a symptom of whatever Minerva had been worried about, way back when Aeris had told Eden about her worry.
They could still only keep moving forward in the hopes that things would turn out well in the end.
Tseng looked down at his desk to see the new request for help he'd gotten from Reeve. There were strange fluctuations in the energy output levels of the Mako Reactors, and while Reeve had managed to stabilize them, it hadn't been by finding the problem, it had been by diverting a small portion of the system to be taken by the drain so peoples' power supplies weren't affected. He and his people were still looking for the source of the problem, but it seemed to be external, leading to the assumption that the Turks now also had to find someone who was trying to hijack the Reactors. Someone who wasn't Fuhito.
He sighed, only to be jolted out of his thoughts by Reno asking, "Doin' alright, yo?" He looked up tiredly at his red haired second-in-command, who commented, "Looks like you could do with a good sleep, Bossman."
A faint smile formed on the Wutain's lips as he said, "I'd like to, believe me, Reno. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to work out well at the moment."
"Ya ain't gettin' any brownie points by wearin' yourself out, yo," the younger of the pair answered dryly.
"I know that, too," Tseng agreed. "It looks like Hojo has made the first move to try to claim Shelke. And to attempt to reclaim Sephiroth. There are so many aspects to what's going on right now that I'm honestly feeling overwhelmed by it all."
Reno cocked his head to the side, then shrugged and said, "You knew he'd do it. And we're the Turks. It's our business ta keep it all straight, yo. If ya can't, you really need ta rest."
"That's easy for you to say when you don't have to assess all the data and give all the orders to keep everything running smoothly," the Wutain Turk replied in amusement.
"So let me give it a try while you get some rest, yo," Reno offered with an impish grin. "Ya know I'ma good commander 'n' tactician. Gimme a chance ta prove it while ya get some shut-eye, yo. I can't mess somethin' up badly in one night."
Tseng gave him a faint smile, then turned to look at his computer screen thoughtfully for a minute. "If I do this, you'll have to be brought up to speed on some things you hadn't known or been dealing with before, which is going to mean you'll have to delve into quite a bit of paperwork. Is that okay with you?"
Reno made a small face, then gave a shrug. "Paperwork's a must for Turks, yo. Gotta do it, no matter what. If I'm gonna be the next Director, I'd better start gettin' used ta it, right, yo?"
The older man's brows rose into his hairline as he commented, "That's a surprisingly mature reaction about paperwork from you, Reno."
"Hey!" Reno glared at him, but it wasn't very heated, more like mild irritation.
"What changed?" Tseng asked curiously.
The red haired Turk was quiet for a few long moments before he reached up and rubbed the red mark off one of his cheekbones, showing the scars hidden beneath it openly for the first time. (2) He then pulled his hand away and looked down at the red on his fingers as he said, "Things're changin'. I'd been—like a kid just playin' a game before. 'Cept now the 'game' ain't no fun anymore 'n'...it just hit me that a buncha people're probably gonna die all at once, yo. Found that out the hard way in the Slums."
"I beg your pardon?" Tseng asked in confusion, gazing intently at Reno.
"Went out ta one o' my usual haunts, yo. Shoulda been same ol' same ol', but on my way back, some creepy monster tried ta take a bite outta me," the red haired Turk answered. "Ya, monsters in the Slums ain't uncommon, but those're all Mako-crazed or just—normal. For Midgar, anyway. This one was different, yo. It wouldn't fuckin' go down, no matter how many times I shoulda killed it, and when it was recoverin', I couldn't attack it. Somethin' was keepin' it from dyin', an' I only finally got ta kill it 'cause it was small—a Funny Face—'n' stuck in Pyramid. I wouldn't even call it healin' like the SOLDIERs get, 'cause it ain't. An' it seemed—electrified, I guess, yo. If that's the sorta thin' poppin' up now—there ain't no 'game' no more. If a Behemoth like that turned up, we'd be royally screwed."
The Wutain Turk rubbed his eyes tiredly with a sigh as he said, "And that's one more problem. It's the first one of its kind I've heard of, anyway." He dropped his hand and looked up at Reno as he said, "Fine, if you're really game to take over here for awhile, I'll bring you up to speed, then get some rest. While you're here, do up a formal report on the monster and the issues you encountered during the battle. I'd like to have it by morning so I can forward it to the people who need it."
"Will do, yo!" Reno agreed with a grin and nod, moving around the desk to stand beside Tseng as the man showed him the new data he needed. As he did, Reno rubbed off the other red mark so his scars were visible on both sides of his face.
Notes:
(1) Keep in mind that this is happening later the same day Eden found the Wutain Black Market—and Midgar and Wutai City are exactly 12 hours apart, with Wutai being ahead by that much. Eden called Tseng around 6AM Midgar time, and all of this is happening after that time.
(2) This is Reno coming closer to what he looked like in FFVII and later in the timeline, with his scars showing instead of bold red marks. I'm not even going to try to guess why he even has those scars, so feel free to make up whatever history for Reno that you like.