38

Work / Time

Time: About a half hour later

Place: Mideel "hospital"

"Please tell me you can cure him!" Tifa pleaded, as Susan and Aerith crowded around the catatonic form of Cloud. As her magic had told her, he had washed up that morning on the shores of Mideel, and brought into the ramshackle village. Apparently it was a "hot springs town" and many people of advanced age stayed there. Hence the need for a lot of medical staff in a world of cure potions and recovery magic. The town itself was pretty tropical, and the local architecture reflected that. Plain, wooden buildings seemed the norm here, worked into the greenery as though they had all grown up together.

"I'm not sure there is a cure," said the doctor from the other room. "Except time."

"Wasn't talking to you," Tifa muttered.

"Shove over," said Susan, and Tifa made room for her. Susan took Cloud's hands in hers, and he responded by drooling a bit and looking around with unfocused eyes. She made several Sense checks, from Magic to Spirit, and she didn't like what she discovered. She got an eleven on magic sense, but only a four on Spirit, her current rating of two not very helpful. Her nine was a bit more useful when she tried again, enough to know something weird was now going on with his biology.

"I'm surprised he isn't glowing, all the life energy he absorbed," she began. "Even with a nine I can feel it. It's like a million different Materia all tried to crowd inside his brain at once."

"Did someone mention Materia?" shouted a voice from outside.

"Not now, Yuffie!"

"Sorry!"

"As I was saying. He actually fell into the Lifestream. Imagine what that must be like- it's not air, so you can't breathe. But it's not really liquid, though it has some liquid like properties if it can well up out of the ground. It gets in your lungs and you think you're going to die... but you can't. It's literally life energy. It will not allow you to die. Even a man like this, a soldier, floating there, lungs burning, well, it didn't help the situation any, let's put it that way."

"You can feel that?"

"I feel a combination of the weird sort of magical energy that happens when you use Materia, and him being suffused with a weird sort of analog to what I call Spirit Energy now. First step in any sort of recovery for him is somehow purging that energy from his system. The magical energy is actually really easy. I drop Dead Magic on the whole place and it vanishes like it never was. The life energy, well, I don't want to kill him, so taking that out will be a little more tricky. Too much and I might grab his own soul. Too little and I might as well not bother at all."

"But possible?"

"I think so. I have a spell to transfer Spirit Energy from those that have it to myself. So I know it can transfer various energies around. Now, I don't want to directly take this energy into myself because it's not exactly Spirit Energy and it's not exactly whatever MP is. That's why it's hurting him. If I take it on, he might get a little better but I would get a lot worse. And there's no one that can do the same for me. So I'm going to leave my book with him, and tell it to come up with a spell that can transfer that energy into a suitable vessel. One which I think we already have taken possession of."

"Huge Materia!"

"Did someone-"

"Not now, Yuffie!" both shouted.

"Sorry!"

"You're right though. It's the closest thing to this energy you've got. And being Big McLarge Huge Materia it should hold the energy just fine without blowing the crystal to bits."

"Maybe we should get the others, just in case," suggested Aerith. "I mean, is this why there's four of them? Are we going to need four? I mean why would there be four if we didn't need four, right? What did Sparkle call it?"

"Narrative Imperative. It is suspicious, us learning of the Big M word just before finding him. And needing a vessel to draw the energy away from him?"

"What if you weren't here, though?" asked Aerith. "How would he have cured him then?"

"Maybe you wouldn't have. After all, if I wasn't here, you wouldn't be here to ask the question of how they would have cured him if I wasn't here."

"Buh?" asked Cloud, staring past Susan at something only he could see.

"My thoughts exactly," agreed Aerith.

"This energy will probably drain away by itself, but I have no idea how long that could take. I mean maybe you could 'ground' him in some way, pull it off that way? You guys have more of an understanding of Mako than I do. At least, maybe Shnira scientists do. Maybe they could take that energy and turn it into electricity, with whatever process they have? Pulling it out of a living body must be different than sucking it directly out of the ground though."

"Months to years," said the doctor, poking his head through. "To drain off naturally, I mean. Mako poisoning is bad enough, this is an extreme case. Worst I've ever seen, or heard about."

Susan snorted. "If only it was poison. That we could deal with. It's this energy that's scrambling his brains, no doubt."

"Could you hit him with that knife of yours? Maybe it'll work!" suggested Tifa.

Susan shook her head. "I've always been cautious mixing different types of magic. I once prevented someone from talking about something, then someone else magically tried to force them to talk about that thing. She nearly died. That was a poison, to my magic, so the knife worked. Plus it's the magic component of this condition that's the easy part. Like I said, destroy all magic in this area for a few seconds and it's gone too."

"So why would using your magic to pull the energy out not have some complication?" asked Aerith.

"It could, but he really can't get worse. And once that energy is gone, I can heal him normally. The spell puts things back the way they were before being hurt or damaged. It wasn't meant to purge Lifestream energy out of somebody. They don't have that where we come from. That's why I need a new spell, the sensors in my book can hopefully provide something that won't interact badly with the energy, and just draw it out."

"Do whatever you have to do," said Tifa. "Just get him back for me."

"You really like him, don't you?"

She nodded. "I always did, since we were little."

"Aw!" Susan and Aerith both clasped their hands and tilted their heads. She gave them a dark look. Susan and Aerith looked at each other and laughed.

"Wha?" put in Cloud.

"You got it, Cloud. You're one lucky fellow, you know that?" Susan stage whispered. "Her boobs are enormous!"

"Can we get on with this?" Tifa snapped.

"Sure thing!" said Susan, drawing her book out of the sub-space pocket. Naturally the Pocket Dimension was just as easy to keep it in, there was no danger of it being locked out in this world. It just didn't cost her any energy, and looked cooler to pull it out of nowhere. She stuck the book by his leg, shoving it to one side. The gems lit up. "Now, bring me the crystal!" She pressed her fingertips together rapidly. "The Materia crystal!"

She waited, her fingers stopped.

"The Materia crystal!" she said louder, her fingers moving even faster.

She waited.

She went to the door, cupping her hands around her mouth.

"THE MATERAIA CRYSTAL!"

Several of the people nearby looked at her strangely.

"What?" shouted Yuffie, sticking her head out of a nearby building. "You have to see this baby Chocobo! He's sooooo cute!"

Susan heaved a great sigh. "I'll just get it myself, shall I?" She went to the Highwind and got the Huge Materia out, then brought it back. She stuck it next to the book, so it was touching both him and the crystal. "Find a way to draw the Lifestream energy out of this person and drain it into this or similar crystals," she told it.

"And now we wait," said Aerith.

"Wait, and go see a cute Chocobo chick apparently."

"I'll stay here," said Tifa. "I'll want to watch him."

Susan put a hand on her shoulder. "I know. He would surely do the same, if the situation was reversed. I'll come see if you need anything in a little while, okay?"

"Okay."

Susan and Aerith left, heading into town to see what it had to offer them. She was getting more used to the party just barging into places but it still seemed kind of weird to her.

Just don't get too used to it and start trying it on other worlds, I guess?

She picked up a Crystal Sword, just because it looked so cool, like it had been cut from some kind of huge crystal. It had two less Materia slots then the Enhance Sword the group had found at the Gaea area, and she wanted to keep raising stuff for them, so she wasn't using it. She stuck it into her own Pocket Dimension, rather than the inventory.

She also picked up an "Amulet" which she considered a steal at 10,000 gill. It raised her LUCk by 10! That might be nothing to people who had maximum stats of 255 (Yuffie's luck was a 30 right now, while her strength was a 50) but for her, that was the maximum LUCk she could have, and then some. Plus it's an Amulet, not a ring. I could wear it under my clothes and no one would even know.

She was going to buy a Wizard Bracelet, a low defense object that had eight linked slots, but she saw the group had one in inventory and figured she might just ask to have that one before she left. She didn't care about the "defense" value the thing had, but Materia slots, that was something useful.

The Materia shop owner eyed her suspiciously, but she let Aerith look the stock over and they only had five, nothing the group didn't already have in quantity.

They spent the night at the inn, and in the morning she went to see what the book had come up with.

"As expected," she told the others, having collected it and the Huge Materia. They were all sitting on the step outside the "hospital" building. "It's going to take all four to safely contain the energy currently in Cloud. The spell says each crystal can only hold a certain amount more, if the crystals are all similar. Given what I felt inside him, that's the safest route. I don't want to shove energy in there and then have it blow up in our faces.

"The grade 7 Pluto spell of Lifestream Transfer can move the infecting energy between any two targets. Get this, it can actually drain energy out of a standard Materia, in effect, transferring AP between two of them. It seems "AP" is actually a tiny amount of life force from the destroyed creature, captured upon killing them. Huh. That makes a tremendous amount of sense, actually. That's why it must be in your weapon or armor, to provide that channel. Just carrying it in your pocket isn't enough to level it." Right, I should have guessed. Stuff like XP and MP are abstractions, even for me. I can't hold them, but something is behind it, it's not just a number. It's a way of representing something I've gained or lost. In this case, Materia is crystalized Lifestream, life energy, so it's probably attracted to itself. That "raises" the Materia and when it can't hold any more, it either explodes or fissions. Luckily this world took the fission route, and a new Materia is born. Neat. The "AP" is just a way of quantifying the level of energy inside the crystal, just like gas inside a gas tank. We could use numbers to represent it, but we usually use a gauge because that's easier to comprehend at a glance when driving.

"We'll try that first, I want to get a feel for the spell before we try it on a person."

"Good call," said Tifa. "Though I trust your magic."

"So do I, but casting a spell for the first time on a living person? Especially something untried like this? No thank you. So, if you have some Materia you want brought back down to zero while another is raised, get it out. Maybe those Earth ones you don't use anymore, shove their AP into the Lighting ones you do?"

So Susan read the spell over, getting seventeen and fourteen on Scripture and Theory, respectively, both enough to understand the difficulty twelve spell. She then put the two in front of her (the range was (T)Special, meaning she had to be close enough to touch the subjects, but not actually touch them.) and spent a few minutes transferring "AP" out of the Materia they no longer used.

As that worked perfectly, Susan was confident that with the four Huge Materia, Cloud could be purged of the Lifestream and his recovery could begin.

"The next one we should get is the Condor Reactor one," suggested Barret. "Shinra has been hitting that place off and on since we got out of Midgar. Once we take the Materia out, there will be no more reason to attack it!"

"Not a problem," said Cait Sith, "I'll have the final attack force move in before noon. You can get there before then, right?"

"You better believe it, cat."

"Wait, attack force? I don't want to hurt any Shinra soldiers," protested Susan.

"Nah, nothing like that," said Cait Sith. "Shinra typically sends a bunch of monsters they've rounded up against the place."

"The first time we went there, we didn't have a lot of money," explained Aerith. "We did it the way the people holed up there suggested, getting different mercenaries to fight for us." She gave a great sigh. "They all got wiped out, and in the end, the boss monster rushed the place. We had to go ourselves and defeat it."

"Then the next time we went over there, we didn't bother with the mercenaries. Waste of money," further explained Barret. "We just rushed them ourselves. Why let them get all the money, XP and AP?"

Susan had to admit, that was a little silly. "So we'll just do the same now?"

"Darn right. Get them going, spy, we'll take off in a little while."

"If it's all the same to you, I'll stay here," said Tifa. "I want to make sure Cloud is all right."

"If you're staying, I'll stay," said Aerith.

Tifa didn't look overjoyed at this proclamation, but recognized her claim to be there.

And who will he be happier to see, when he finally is lucid again?

The group ate a leisurely breakfast, and hopped in the Highwind to head to the reactor.

We just left the Highwind sitting there. Why don't monsters attack it? I mean they're roaming around, right? Even if we can't see them... and I still haven't figured out how that's supposed to make sense. What keeps them out of towns, for that matter?

At the entrance to the resistance base carved into the rock, Susan looked at the thin rope the others wanted her to climb. I don't actually have... wait a second. She got out her character sheet, and yes, there was Climbing in a skill group with Catching and Bicycle and Gymnastics. Just found some more skills to cannibalize! I don't think I've ever used Catching or Bicycle. What was I thinking? Gymnastics might be useful, if I combined it with my martial arts.

She made her Climbing check with a four, because she rolled absolute minimum, and got nowhere on her first attempt.

"Not a word," she said to her companions. She tried again, getting an eight but taking the -1 for retrying, but technically her difficulty was at a -1 for the rope, as she was technically climbing the rock face, not the rope itself. So it evened out in the end, and she scrambled up it.

Once inside, she looked around, even visiting the little rest area they had, with the save point near the beds she had been told about some time ago.

"You guys should save," she said, looking at it.

"You're right! Aerith isn't here, so I keep forgetting!" said Barret, going over to it. "Thanks!"

That done, the party was Barret, Na, and Vincent, as he still hadn't forgiven Yuffie. (And he wasn't going to use Cait Sith, are you crazy?) And Susan, of course.

She watched as the odd creatures walked or flew up the mountain, uncontested. Once they reached the shack they encircled it and the "boss," a Cmd. Grandhorn, came out, and the group rushed it. Na threw some Meteors at it, with the Green Materia of the same name, and Susan went back and forth Mimickingthat and Vincent's lighting blasts. In between, Barret shot it a bunch of times that was that, they got a new armor, the Imperial Guard, and 800 XP, 80 AP.

"Done!" said Barret, examining the armor. "Why did Shinra even bother?"

"Are you guys, and I hate to say this because coming from me you have no idea the irony value, but are you guys, I don't know, overleveled for all of this? To use your term, I mean."

"Maybe," said Barret, unconcerned. "Consider our opponent. We need to get stronger yet."

"Yeah, okay."

"It's a good cycle," explained Vincent. "Before we had the Highwind we walked everywhere. That gave us plenty of opportunity to fight things. That raised our level. It also gave us money, that we could use to buy better equipment. Also some monsters, like this one, drop or have better stuff we can Steal. That further increases our effectiveness. That lets us fight tougher stuff, getting us more money, letting us buy even better stuff."

"I see what you're saying. Man, the economy here must be really bizarre, if anyone can just walk around and make money beating up monsters that roam the countryside."

"Any case, let's grab the Huge Materia and get on the next one. Cait Sith, what have we got left?"

"Junon and the one loaded onto the rocket."

"Rocket? What's this about a rocket?" demanded Cid.

"Yeah, to keep up appearances Shinra is going slam the rocket into Meteor. For good measure they've got a Huge Materia, or to the press a "secret weapon" aboard. They calculated the mass of the thing, and there's not enough explosive power in the rocket fuel that will be left, but they have to be seen trying everything."

"We're going there next!" he decided.

Barret shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me."

"I'll let them know you're coming."