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Deepening
Tifa had spent most of the helicopter flight in puzzled silence, wondering at how...familiarly the Turks treated Cloud. It was like they were personal friends of his, even though he'd never met them before, even giving him permission to go sit at the controls in the front with Verde. She'd caught a glimpse of the book the blond man had given to Cloud to read when he'd climbed aboard, and it had been a book on engineering—something she'd figured he wouldn't know anything about. She didn't know if he'd be a good one, but he had read the book with an intensity she knew meant he was studying it, like it was a lesson for school he found fascinating.
Mostly, the ride had been quiet, though Duain (1), the boy chosen for SOLDIER, had begun bad-mouthing Cloud, and when a warning from Illis hadn't stopped him, Cloud had finally gotten up to sit with Verde in the front for the rest of the flight. That he hadn't been sent back to join them gave all three Nibelheim natives pause—it meant Verde really had given Cloud the right to sit with him in the front. Illis also hadn't been surprised by that, and had actually given Duain a good, hard whack for his bad behavior. Of course, that had left him feeling both put out and cautious, and the two girls just felt confused.
When they'd landed, there had been a SOLDIER Second and someone from the Science Department present to meet them, but no one else. Since Duain and Kalsi (2) were to go with the two waiting for the helicopter, that left her wondering who Cloud was supposed to go with. She knew she'd be going with Illis to her next mentor and minder, but...that left Verde to take charge of Cloud.
"Illis?" she asked suddenly as the two waited for Verde and Cloud. What were they doing to take so long?
"What is it, Tifa?" the woman asked, meeting her gaze.
"Why wasn't someone from an engineering department waiting for Cloud if that's what you brought him to Shinra to do?" she asked. "I mean, the book Verde gave him..."
"He'll be doing engineering," Illis agreed, looking amused. "But not for Weapons or for Urban Development. He's going to be a Turk who will create, remake, and repair our gear and weapons within the Turks, while still doing everything else the Turks need to do."
"A Turk?" Tifa gasped in shock, producing a smirk from Illis—but then she realized what else the woman had said and asked warily, "Doesn't that mean he's doing more work than other Turks?"
"Nope. Turks don't work that way—it's part of our job description to capitalize on all of our natural skills. His happen to include engineering, so he's going to capitalize on it, and his engineering requirements will be fit around what missions he does based on priority. If our weapons are damaged or we're prepping for something especially dangerous, his priority will be getting that ready for us, while his experimental projects will get put on hold for awhile. If no one has dire need of any gear, but a mission comes up which his combat and technical skills are especially suited to, that will take priority. He won't be doing any more or less work than the rest of us unless he chooses to do more."
"Oh," Tifa answered, sighing with relief. She then glared at the helicopter and asked, "What's taking them so long?"
"Verde is probably showing Cloud the shut-down procedure for the helicopter. We can go ahead to our destination if you want?" Illis asked.
"...Will I see Cloud again if I leave now?" the girl asked after a momentary pause. She wanted to stay close to him for just a little longer, feeling nervous about being alone around unfamiliar people in a strange, new place.
"He'll be joining us for supper," the woman offered. "He and Verde first have to go to a meeting with our Director and his Second to work out what will happen with Cloud and under whose direction. More accurately, the decision won't be made until sometime tomorrow, but for right now, they need to meet him and ask some questions they can use to arrive at an answer."
The girl hesitated a few more moments, hoping Cloud would appear at the door with Verde and they could all go together. When he didn't, she looked up at Illis and said, "I think we can go, because it's boring just waiting around here." She would have to get used to it, anyway—being on her own without familiar people around.
At the words, Illis nodded and led her inside and to the elevator, where Tifa stared out at the city through the glass with fascination. They arrived at their floor all too soon, but when she saw the Turk's amused gaze, she pouted—everything in Midgar was so new to her! Regardless, the woman didn't say anything, just led her to a door on the floor they'd stopped at and knocked. A minute later, another Lady Turk opened the door, and Tifa was surprised to see someone who obviously had Wutain heritage, but the woman's cobalt blue eyes were proof she had more than that in her. The two were invited in, and Tifa could hear and smell something cooking, making her look for the source—
Only to stare in shock as she caught sight of the cooking appliances in the kitchen, and the cookware itself. Without even thinking about it, she made her way into the room, dazed and awed by what she was seeing, not even realizing she had started talking. "You have ceramics! And glass! And is that a deluxe roaster? Oh, Shiva, you even have the newest peelers—and the blender! How did you get one of those? My father said they cost as much as his yearly wage! Are those knives really—"
She was cut off by a laughing voice as a hand rested on her shoulder, making her turn as the apartment's owner said, "I've been collecting them since I became a Turk, and not only are our average wages higher than any Reactor Foreman's, but we get hazard pay on nearly every mission we do, which often increases our monthly wage ten-fold. I still had to save for two years to comfortably afford the blender, though. It's good to know you're so interested in cooking, because you're going to be doing a lot of it from now on."
"Will I get to use equipment like this to do it?" she asked eagerly.
"We're not sure about the specs for the kitchen you're destined for yet, but with people like Professor Hojo and Scarlet, the head of the Weapons Department, involved in it, I doubt it will be second hand pieces like the main cafeteria has. And no, you won't be working there. Ever. You'll be working with Commander Angeal Hewley, who you'll meet tomorrow, and me to learn the specs of what you'll need to make to properly feed Turks and SOLDIERs, and you'll be learning how to take and work with instruction from doctors and scientists on how to adjust meals depending on situations at the time."
"Like what kinds of situations?" Tifa blinked in surprise. It was definitely sounding like a restaurant instead of a cafeteria.
"In the case of Turks, those orders will come from doctors, and will normally be because we've been injured or become ill, so need certain things to recover. There are also Turks who have issues eating certain foods—allergies, an inability to eat a certain food because of flavor or texture, or other similar reasons. SOLDIERs don't have allergies, but there are some who can't stomach certain foods, just like with the Turks. Your orders for their meals will normally come from the Science Department and will be directly related to their state or phase of infusions or other experiments they're participating in, or because they were injured severely enough to need more than a few hours of recovery time," the woman explained with a smile.
"...So high protein is probably going to be a requirement..." the girl mused.
"But that doesn't necessarily mean meat, and one of the Turks can't eat meat anyway," the older Turk replied. "So, what could you give him that would still count as protein in the kind of quantity he would need it? That is, assuming he was going to be needing all that extra protein in the near future."
"Must you start her lessons now, Ansha?" Illis asked with a tired sigh. "You two may be great talking about details of cooking, but I'm going to pass out from boredom if you keep it up in front of me."
Ansha raised a brow at the other woman and asked, "Does that mean I should stop expecting you for breakfast twice a week?"
"Completely separate thing, that," Illis replied dismissively.
Tifa had to giggle at the exchange and throw in, "But, if—Ansha?" She paused to make sure she had the name right, and when the woman nodded, she went on, "Cooks for you and you have a 'special need', then she has to think about that to cook for you. So, should she not put in the time or effort to do that, which would also mean you couldn't eat here anymore?"
"Okay, kid, you're missing the point," Illis replied in a dry tone. "She doesn't need to put that effort in while I'm sitting here as a guest she's not supposed to be ignoring, and you and she will have plenty of time to go over those things after I've left."
"I suppose there's some truth to that," Ansha admitted in mild amusement. "But only because I'm expecting more company momentarily."
"Cloud and Verde?" Tifa asked curiously.
"Oh, I'm expecting them, too, but not for another half an hour at least," Ansha smirked—only for her front 'hall' closet door to pop open and a blond young man stepped out, followed by a nine-year-old Wutain girl and an orange haired man in the Turks' uniform. Tifa gaped at them as the Wutain girl happily babbled about the 'awesome hidden door' and 'could they get another one made for her if she moved somewhere else soon?'
"Where the Hellfire did the Wutain brat come from?" Illis asked in bemused annoyance, cutting off the younger girl's words.
"Where did they all come from? They couldn't have just been hiding in the closet—it's too small!" Tifa gasped.
"The next apartment over has no door to the hall," the orange haired Turk told Tifa dryly. "So, there's a door between the two bedrooms—my apartment has that one—and Ansha added this door. That way, Edward—" He paused to motion at the long haired blond young man. "—has more than one way to leave the apartment without necessarily resorting to climbing out the balcony. And this girl is Princess Yufi Kisaragi, who decided to hand herself to Shinra, and it was just lucky it was Ed's apartment she picked so Lady Shinra has a chance to run interference and damage control." He then looked up at Ansha and added, "And, she was the one who triggered your alarm, but she apparently hid in one of the kitchen cupboards before I could find her the first time I went looking."
"I see," Ansha answered, gazing at the girl thoughtfully. "Well, I'm sure there's enough for her to eat, too, since one of the basic codes of cooking for groups is—"
"Make sure you prepare more than just for your number of guests, because you might have unexpected guests show up or your invited guests might be really hungry," Tifa immediately said eagerly.
The older man looked amused as the blond huffed a small laugh, but it was the orange haired Turk who commented, "Yup, that there's chef material."
Tifa blushed faintly at the words, not sure if she was pleased or embarrassed—but quickly forgot all about that as Ansha asked her, "Would you like to see if you can pick up the meal preparation from where I left off, Tifa? If you think you can, it's all yours."
"Really?" she asked eagerly. When Ansha nodded, she asked, "If I have a question, can I ask?"
"If it's about a dish you're not sure about the next step in preparation, yes. If it's about ingredients, we'll be talking about that once the others have left, so hold it until then," the woman told her, looking amused and very happy at the same time.
"Okay!" Tifa eagerly agreed, heading back to the stove to check on the dishes being prepared. She was getting to cook already! Maybe being on her own here really wouldn't be so bad?
FoWD
Sirra had managed to get everything together she thought she'd need by nightfall, and had even done a scout around the warehouse—and turned in her other two completed bounties. The escort was already paid, so it just needed to be marked as complete, but the bounty office was paying her for the other, so she got that, too. Since the half-Wutain had been there, she'd asked him about the one who had put out the bounty on the goods runners in Warehouse Eight, and he'd told her 'a Wutain Turk' had put it out, ID and everything. When she'd asked in surprise about 'a Wutain Turk' doing so, he'd described a man with dark brown hair cut short and glasses. Fuhito. Probably using Kariya's ID, which hadn't been fully shut down in the hopes of tracing it.
Regardless, she said nothing about that, and just agreed the situation must have warranted the Turks not being seen there, then went about her business. On her look around the warehouse, she'd let Fuhito's guys see her, and had pointedly looked straight at them to let them know she was aware they were there. By the time she got back near the time she'd be going in, they had all disappeared from the area, all but one she thought she saw on the roof of the warehouse across the way, which was lacking a number entirely. As far as she knew, it had never been given one, not just that its number had gone missing or faded over time—it had no number registry, she'd checked once while she'd been bored in the office one day years ago.
She had ignored that and made her way to the fire escape, silently making her way up it to the windows at the top of the building. If it was like all warehouses (or most of them, at least), there would be a walkway just below those upper windows, and things like cranes and pulleys would be fixed to the ceiling within reach of that walkway. It was possible there would be a section of the building which would have smaller, functional rooms—an office, maybe a smaller-scale storage room or a few, a bathroom—they would normally all be stacked on top of one another in one area so the rest of the floor could be left. After all, that open space was meant for massive degrees of storage, and taking up main-floor space with rooms wouldn't be practical.
Outside the window she had the best chance of opening quietly, she waited for the walkway patrol to pass the window again, opening it just enough to slip her gun nozzle—or more accurately, the silencer attached to her gun nozzle—through the crack she'd opened. When the man passed, she was ready, shooting him through the heart. He went down quietly, and she went back to waiting, knowing the second patrol would be by shortly—and would be more focused on his fallen comrade than on his surroundings, not realizing the other man had been shot until too late.
And, sure enough, she was able to shoot him between the eyes before he could sound an alarm, and he also fell silently, having been crouched over the other man's body.
Once those two were out of the way, she pulled the window open enough for her to slip inside, then mostly shut it behind her as she took a quick look around. This warehouse had no other rooms on the main floor, but to the narrower side of the building, the upper walkway to her right was interrupted by rooms with large windows overlooking the main floor. That meant one was a control room for the cranes anchored to the ceiling, but there were likely at least two others, all inter-linked, and it would be difficult to approach without being seen because of those same windows. No one was in the control room—it had no curtains and the lights were off—but the other two were suspect, and she was nearer the curtained rooms.
She looked around again, knowing she needed a place to hide, and quickly. There were two guys down on the main floor for sure, and it would only be a matter of time before they came looking for their buddies. The curtained rooms also left her a sitting duck anyone looking out from them would be able to see. The only place she likely wouldn't be seen or found was in the ceiling rafters, so she quickly moved to the pulley tied to the rail a few feet down from her entry point and began climbing. Once in the rafters, she assessed the new state of things for a moment, knowing already that the bulk of the members were going to be in one of those two rooms with the curtains.
Past experience dictated the three rooms would have doors linking them, and the boss would be in the middle room. The control room had the consoles operating the two cranes in the room, and possibly other things—and from her new vantage point, she could see two men in the room. Since they were lounging and just chatting with one another, not only were they not expecting trouble, but they weren't actually doing their duty as guards. If she assumed the boss was in the middle room, then the room she had come in closest to was where the rest of the members who didn't have their own homes were sleeping. Below her, down on the main level, she could see three men who periodically ran checks around the perimeter but otherwise just chatted, much like the two in the control room.
Their guards were down even more than she'd have thought from illegal goods runners. Why wasn't Fuhito just getting AVALANCHE to march in and do the task himself?
A moment later, she knew why—if everyone thought the Turks had done it, no one would be looking for him.
Elimination.
With a faint sigh, then a cocky smirk, Sirra pulled out both handguns and shot downward at the men below her. Thanks to her new silencers—they'd cost a pretty gil, but they were worth it—no one would even notice the soft 'ping' which came with each shot, and the sounds of their bodies falling to the floor were louder. She then paused to decide on her best action from there, but made her decision quickly as she realized she couldn't let sheer numbers interfere.
Back before she'd become a Turk, she'd have relished in the firefight, but she'd learned better since then, and from actual trips to the Northern Crater, it was a change in her way of handling things which was entirely viable. In the Crater, if you made a lot of noise by fighting a lot of monsters with weapons as loud and obvious as guns, you'd attract ten times that number. If you knew very well a Behemoth herd was within 'roaring' distance of a pair, you either left the pair alone, or you made sure the rest of the herd couldn't react when you went after the pair. As such, she'd begun perfecting ways to choose her frontal combat battles, and this wasn't a case of frontal combat.
Crowd control was easiest done with magical sleep, and she didn't even have to be in the room to do it—the curtains weren't quite fully closed, and that small opening would be their undoing. With Seal and All paired, she closed her eyes to select a target in that room, then activated the pair, feeling it spread to its maximum of eight. To be safe, she repeated the process by 'targeting' someone not yet influenced by Sleepel, and felt it touch five that time. In other words, she'd saved herself a total count of thirteen. The middle room, sadly, had the curtains fully closed, so she'd be going in there blind, but she'd pretty much already known that. And to be sure of her success, she also put the two in the control room to sleep.
Yeah, part of her still thought killing people in their sleep was cheating, but it was also painless, and unless she had a reason to hate someone, she didn't really want to see them in pain, in her way or not. It was less stressful to her to let them die peacefully, without even knowing they were dead, than to kill them in battle—or worse shit. That the blond stray the Guards were taking care of apparently trusted her not to harm him spoke a lot about how true that part of her held. And because there were only two people she hated, and he wasn't one of them, she'd never have a reason to torture him.
Shaking off her thoughts, she made her way through the rafters to the larger room, slipped inside quietly, and shot every one of them through the heart. Thirteen, as she'd thought, no more and no less, and none she'd missed. There was indeed a door from that room to the middle one, but it was solid and locked—though she didn't dare actually touch the handle in case it alerted the one in the middle room. From there, she returned to the rafters (to be safe), made her way to the control room, and ended those two the same way before eying the door warily.
She had a terrible feeling something was about to go wrong, and because she got those feelings so rarely, she listened to them.
A moment later, the door exploded off its hinges, and it was only the sense of foreboding she'd had which had caused her to be braced against the impact of the door hitting her. It still knocked her back, and knocked her down as it fell on top of her, a bent and uncomfortable weight, but she didn't take serious damage and didn't lose her grip on her weapons. She knew she couldn't stay where she was—no recovery time—so forced herself to move, dragging herself out from under the fallen door and forcing herself to her feet, guns in hand and ready to lift and shoot.
Only to freeze as she saw the man who stepped out of the room.
"...Gorgon..." she breathed as she just stared at him. Even with sunglasses on over his eyes, she'd know that huge man anywhere. And somehow, he'd gotten larger and much more muscular since she'd met him more than ten years ago, when she'd been seventeen. That meeting hadn't been pleasant. What puzzled her was that he'd already been in top form then, and couldn't possibly have gone through the changes he apparently had...
Then, her experience as a Turk dealing with SOLDIERs kicked in and she knew he'd gotten some sort of enhancement, probably Mako based, or at least partially Mako. It was more than that, too—he'd up and vanished one day about a year after he'd gotten to her, and even though she'd searched for him, even using the Turks' resources, she'd found no trace of him. How he was here now, she honestly had no idea.
"Well, well, well! If it isn't little 'Dragon Hunter' Ratri," the man replied with a smirk. "Putting yourself in my path again, are you? You already know what your fate will be, so you might as well surrender and make it easier on yourself."
The words made her feel ill, because she did indeed know what he would do to her, and death was a kinder fate than that. She suddenly felt for the Guards' little stray, and for the first time in a long time, feared for herself, too. She'd gotten stronger, but so had Gorgon. There was no way she could know if she was strong enough to defeat him, and now, she had no choice but to give it her best.
It was only through force of will that she stayed calm enough to think, to plan, and to observe—but then she wondered why her gaze kept focusing on the mark crafted into his belt buckle. A moment later, her mind flashed back to the 'fake' SOLDIER Firsts who had tried to take those two little girls, the Rui girls, from the Turks sent to retrieve them, and she realized the mark on his belt was the same one they had worn.
What the fucking Hellfire? (3)
Notes:
(1) + (2) No, these names aren't important, and you don't have to remember them.
(3) Keep in mind that the Guards in the Turks are the only ones actively aware of Deepground, and Sirra, as a Hound, isn't in the know. Even Verdot only has passing awareness of a group by that name. No one would have been expecting Sirra to meet one as a mercenary, so Tseng also didn't feel it was prudent to share, so she's mostly going into this blind. Her saving grace? Nero and Weiss were apparently the two sent to get the Ruis, and Sirra and the Guard sent with her (Terri in this case, but it would have been someone else in other dimensions because Terri would have been dead) already survived and successfully escaped two of Deepground's strongest.