Unexpected Offer

A week had passed and Zack and Verde were just arriving back at Cosmo Canyon, as the best way to disguise what they were actually doing was for them to be dropped at Costa del Sol for recon and investigation, then send back a report stating a need to 'track a target'. They had walked from Costa del Sol, and Zack had been finding Verde to be an interesting fellow he would never have expected to have been born and raised in the Midgar Slums. As they were reaching the stair to the town, Zack paused as he heard scuffling above, turning his gaze upward.

And he gaped as he saw Nina trying to climb (down, he thought?) the side of the cliff with something in one arm. Beside him, Verde—who had followed his gaze—said, "I don't think we should just leave that girl to her own devices."

"No, that's—" Zack began as he took a step towards the canyon wall below her.

In the next moment, her grip slipped and she fell backwards, too shocked to even scream, as she struggled to pull the thing (was it an animal?) close to her chest.

"Nina!" Zack shouted in alarm, and jumped forward as he pulled on every enhancement he could to jump and catch her, rolling to absorb the impact. She 'eeped' when he first caught her, then went silent until they stopped with Zack sprawled rather uncomfortably at the bottom of the stairs, his hips and legs on them and Nina on his chest. He released a relieved sigh as he felt her sit up.

"Big Brother Bear!" she gasped, then chirped, "You saved me again! Thank you!"

"Great," he agreed. Then he asked in a dry tone, "So, what were you doing up on the canyon wall, and where're Aeris and Alexander?"

"Oh, one of the kitties had baby kitties, you remember?" she asked.

"Yeah, so?" he asked, using his feet to push on the stairs so he slid backwards across the ground until his hips were on the ground and he could sit up.

"A—I think they called it a Skeeskee?" Nina began, and Zack nodded. "It chased one of the baby kitties to a little hole up there and hurt it. I was trying to get the kitty back safely." She then opened her hands to show a small, brown kitten with scratches across its back. The kitten looked up and meowed pitifully, claws gripping tightly into the front of Nina's brown vest.

"...Okay, and Aeris and Alexander?" Zack asked tiredly as he cast a healing spell on the kitten, closing the wounds and causing the kitten to fluff out all its fur and cling more tightly to the girl.

"Alexander chased the Skeeskee away," Nina replied promptly, but didn't say anything about Aeris. A happy bark announced Alexander's return to them, even as the Bandersnatch licked Zack's face and sniffed eagerly at Nina and the kitten, the latter of which hissed at him.

"...So, what about Aeris?" Verde asked dryly, and Nina blinked at him.

"That's Verde. He's a friend," Zack assured the girl.

"Zack! You found Nina!" Aeris called in relief from further up the stair, as she'd just come around the bottom bend in the stair. "What happened?"

"She apparently went looking for one of the town's kittens after it was attacked," Zack replied in amusement. "And I seem to have a habit of arriving just in time to catch her when she falls from a height." Aeris giggled at the words, then hoisted a sack she carried onto her shoulders and headed down the stairs towards them with another in her hands. "Were you planning on an outing?" he asked, seeing the two bags.

"Yes. With you," she replied to him dryly in amusement.

"Um...Should I ask?" Verde asked, staring at the two bags.

"...Minerva told you?" Zack asked suddenly, realizing that was the most likely option.

"Because Auryn told her she should let us know in advance, she did," Aeris agree.

"Uh...Do you mean Ed? I think someone said he finally switched back to his own name?" Zack asked in confusion.

"Yup!" Nina agreed. "Little Big Brother is Edward Elric! And Auryn Rune! But the kitty has to go back to town before we leave!"

Just then, Deneh and Nanaki bounded down the stairs, halting with sighs as they saw the kitten in Nina's hands. Deneh, who wasn't carrying a saddlebag-like pair of sacks on her back, said, "I'll take the kitten back to its mother and catch up to you. Which direction are you planning to head in from here?"

Verde just stared at her as she moved forward to pick up the kitten by the scruff of its neck with her teeth. Nina had to pry its little claws free, and Zack answered while the girl was working, "We thought the best bet was to head north, clear out that area, and come back south, do the Midgar continent, then head to Wutai. We'd work on the out-of-the-way areas after that, if Minerva tells you there are more out in those places. The northern continent would be last, once everything else has been cleared."

Finally, the kitten was free of Nina's vest, so Deneh nodded once, then headed back up the stairs. The others started walking past Cosmo Canyon, along the path which led to Nibelheim. "They can talk..." Verde muttered in stunned shock, producing chuckles from the others.

"That was Deneh, and this fellow is Nanaki," Zack said, introducing Verde to the two Motos. Nanaki gave Verde a nod, which the blond man returned. "Obviously, the Bandersnatch is Alexander, the munchkin is Nina, and the young lady is Aeris."

"Our guide, yes," Verde agreed, nodding to her. She grinned in reply.

"And everyone, this is Verde. He was Lady Shinra's first choice to destroy the—what Ed calls Jenova Crystals—for us. His first try is going to be trial and error, though," Zack finished the introductions.

"Okay, but I have another task to add to our outing," Aeris put in.

"What's that?" Verde asked in mild surprise.

"In theory, it shouldn't take us much out of our way, but there are a lot of Materia scattered around that Minerva wants us to collect so they don't fall into the wrong hands," Aeris explained. "Au—Ed and I already destroyed the two which would be—well, planetary kill-switches, but that doesn't mean ones like Knights of the Round are safe to leave out and about. She's mapped those in my mind for me because A—Ed has found them in certain places so many times. With the directions I have for the Jenova Crystals, it seems in a lot of cases, they're oddly close together. Until we get to them, we won't know how close, though. Usually, Aur—Ed would do this, but..." Aeris then gave an annoyed look at nothing and muttered, "I'm going to have to remember that..."

"It's not currently possible for Ed to do this," Verde agreed with a faint sigh and a chuckle at her annoyance. "Believe me, getting used to his real name is work. Anyway, we're also supposed to map the locations of the Jenova Crystals on a map I've got, and every so many locations, we're to report them back to Lady Shinra."

"Why?" Aeris blinked.

"Ed thinks something is wrong with this situation, both where they're being put and how many there are—something bigger than just Jenova trying to influence or kill people," Verde explained. "But he won't be able to tell what without having a lot of points where he can track them to see a bigger pattern. That means there's also the possibility they're in the ocean, too, not just on land."

Aeris' eyes widened and she said, "That may be why some of the directions Minerva points me in aren't right—if they were in the ocean, on the ocean floor or buried under it..."

"That means we need that Underwater Ma-ter-ia, right?" Nina chirped, and Aeris huffed in amusement.

"Yes, which is another reason we need to collect the Materia," she agreed.

"All right, then," Verde said with a shrug. "We're good now that we have a plan."

Deneh returned to them around then, and she and Verde were introduced to one another. They traveled until nightfall, when they stopped to eat and rest for the night, the others blinking in surprise at the stack of papers the blond Turk pulled out to study for awhile before turning in for the night. And that day largely set the pattern for their travels for the next several weeks as they walked and waited on ships to take them places.

FoWD

It had been a month since the farce of a tournament, and Sirra had kept to her pattern for visiting the bars for that time. For the most part, she stuck to taking jobs which kept her in Sectors 2, 3, and 4, though often took guard and escort jobs in other areas, especially if it was one of her days to be at the other two bars. Usually, nothing much happened, but there was an occasional asshole who made a fuss or started a fight, and because she wanted to be able to enjoy her drinks, her reaction was both swift and brutal. They didn't die, but they definitely ran, and often didn't return for several days—she'd earned a reputation as a free bouncer for any bar she was in at the time. And to think, her casting out troublemakers for her own purposes had led to that...

At Nightcap, things had never devolved enough to warrant her intervention, and she thought that had a lot to do with the asshole whose table she'd hijacked and what she'd done to him with such little effort. She'd honestly never had anything but enjoyable drinks there, Fuhito aside. Speaking of that fucker, though, over the course of the month, she'd been able to note some patterns to his behaviors.

The first was that he tended to stop at the door and scan the room. If someone who was completely new to Nightcap was there when he got there, he'd back out and stay out of sight until the person left. She'd never been in that category to him—she was more notable for her absence than her presence. If it was just the regulars he was used to seeing, or someone who had become one after a couple weeks (one of the guys had started bringing along his fifteen-year-old son), he would walk in and pause to talk with the barkeeper for a minute. From there, three out of five times, he went downstairs, one out of five, he went upstairs, and one out of five, he left again with about a fifty-fifty chance of returning later or not. At least, that was as close as she could assess with her two days on, two days off pattern, and from a few comments from the barkeeper.

About two weeks ago, he had started either staying at the bar for a drink—always only one, of medium strength by a Wutain's standards—or coming back up or down for one after whatever meeting he'd just gone to. It was always only one drink during the night, and never enough to dull his perception of what was going on around him, only just enough to let him relax a little. Drinking tended to make him calm when it was just the one, and she wasn't sure she wanted to see what would happen if he drank enough to get drunk—in her experience, calm drinkers went berserk when they got drunk. It was becoming normal to see him at the bar for half an hour or an hour most nights she was there.

However, that night, two unknown men had come in and sat down beside Fuhito, obviously for some sort of meeting, since he wasn't at all surprised when they struck up a discussion with him. By the barkeeper's pained, harried expression, it was an illegal dealing—which didn't surprise her in the least—but she wasn't sure over what. The likelihood of it being a drug of some sort was high, just because nearly anything else would have been too hard to hide from her trained eye. When a third man, one of the regulars, sauntered over and tried to muscle in on the deal, the other two men got alarmed, snatched the money, left the goods, and ran.

The regular had obviously had a bit too much to drink, and got pissed off when the other two guys left and Fuhito wasn't going to give him any of the product. When the noise level rose due to the man shouting in anger and the barkeeper was trying to get the regular to let Fuhito go, she decided it was too noisy and time for her to intervene. Of course, her doing so also gave her another point to use for Fuhito to just ignore her presence, so it was a double benefit.

She rose, stalked over to the men—and noted how an eerily calm Fuhito had dropped a strange gun into his hand—and seized the yelling man by his collar as she cut off his yelling with one of her own: "Shut the fuck up!" Her snarl reached every corner of the room and made everyone freeze to stare at her in shock as she literally hauled the man away from Fuhito, dragged him to the door, and effectively drop-kicked him outside. He landed flat on his face, and just to be sure he got the picture, she activated her Fire Materia to scorch his ass (literally) and send him running (or drunkenly staggering, more like) down the street with an agonized scream.

"Asshole," she muttered, turning to look at Fuhito, then at his gun pointedly as she asked, "You gonna put that away, or do I need to kick you out too, just to get some peace around here?" She could see the package of drugs in his other hand, but summarily dismissed it as irrelevant to her.

He gave a faint smile and put the gun away, saying as he did, "I intended it only for self defense if he had actually tried to do me bodily harm. As it turned out, you took care of the problem for me, so I have no need to use it."

She nodded and returned to her seat, relaxing back, kicking her feet up onto the table, taking a gulp of her drink, then closing her eyes—or what anyone else would have thought of as her closing them. In reality, she kept them open slightly so she could see what Fuhito did next. First, he pocketed the drug (which she thought was a Mako-based one), then turned to the barkeeper for a discussion for a few minutes. What he did after that was what shocked her, because he got up from his seat and, instead of leaving or going up or down, he made his way to her table. By then, the normal sound level of the bar had picked up again, largely covering the sound of his softly approaching footsteps.

When he rapped his knuckles gently on the table, she opened her eyes to give him a flat, blank look and asked, "What?"

"Mind if I join you?" he asked genially.

"Why?" she blinked. This was definitely not something she had expected.

"You're obviously powerful and skilled. I may have work for you, if you're interested?" he replied, and she blinked again before dropping her feet to the floor and motioning to the seat across from her. Oddly, his compliment had only sounded like he was stating a fact, not like he was trying to get in her good books or stroke her ego.

"I'm a merc. Work's always good to hear about," she told him. "But I may not do it."

He gave his hand a dismissing wave and said, "Depending on how things go, some later tasks I may have for you have potential of being things you wouldn't want to do. I don't think you'll have issue with things largely amounting to escorts or deliveries here in Midgar."

Tipping her head to the side, she asked pragmatically, "So why ask me directly instead of going to the merc office and making a formal request? It'd be faster."

"A month ago, it may have been," he replied. "Now that I've personally found someone I'd like to ask, it's both more expedient and more beneficial to you to take the work directly from me. Did you know the bounty offices actually take twenty percent of the mission fee from you as their pay?"

Sirra tipped her head to the side and said, "Yeah, I knew that, but never really thought much of it. Why?"

"Getting the task from me directly means you get the total amount, without the twenty percent skimming," he clarified. "And if you're willing, since you're a regular here, I can give you a task any time I happen to see you."

Thinking about that for a minute—and what it would mean for how the asshole viewed her—she gave a small nod and said, "So, deliveries and escorts. What kind of time have I got to get them done in?"

"That's dependent on the situation. On a rare occasion, I may give you a task and need it done the same night. Most of them would be ones you could do the following morning as you go about your business. An escort would usually be scheduled for the following morning, assuming all's going according to plan. If an item needs a specific delivery time, I'll give you that instruction when I ask you to do it, and make sure to give you sufficient time to get there. Obviously, what I would pay you would be at least twenty percent higher than the bounty office offers, and if something's especially sensitive, I'll pay you more than that. If you prove reliable, I'll give you your pay up front, but for the first few, you'll get it at your destination."

She was surprised by how much it sounded like a normal agreement any random merc and potential repeated client would make. She eyed him for a moment, then asked, "What's the catch?" His brow rose, so she pointed with her chin at the pocket he'd put the packet of drugs in. "I know that's illegal. Am I going to have to keep away from city patrols and shit, or am I going to be carrying clean goods?"

His brow rose. "Are you asking to know what you're carrying?"

"No, I'm asking to know its status, asshole," she replied with a sneer, then blinked in surprise as he chuckled.

"Fair enough, I suppose," he admitted. "If you need to be cautious with something because it's either questionable or illegal, I'll let you know. Normally, that shouldn't be the case—I mostly take care of those myself. I won't say it won't happen, though, because in about two weeks' time, there's something I'll need you to move for me, but is most definitely illegal. Is that sufficient?"

For a few long moments, Sirra just sat staring at him, tapping a finger on the tabletop as she thought. On the up-side, he was giving her direct access to him, and the sooner she proved reliable—and trustworthy—the sooner she could off the bastard. In the meantime, however, that would mean helping him enact his plans to harm Midgar and the people in it. The decision wasn't easy, but the one thing which pushed her in favor of doing it was the simple fact that, the sooner she could kill him, the sooner his plans in general would come to a screeching halt.

Finally, she met his gaze and nodded, saying, "It sounds all right. When do you want me to start?"

The smile he gave was borderline creepy as he said, "I have something for you to deliver in the morning, but you'll have to wait here for about an hour while I prep it for delivery—it's got glass in it and needs some padding. Do you mind the wait?"

She waved him off and replied, "I'm usually here until closing time. Whenever you're ready, I'll be here."

He nodded and rose, then left the bar quickly with something akin to a 'spring in his step'. Her agreement had definitely pleased him. And now she would have to meet up with Ruluf again, too...

FoWD

For the last month, Ed had been going out with Yufi, Shelke, and some other random person—Genesis, Tseng, Kariya, Doriss, or any random assortment of Guards—to explore, both in the Shinra building and out in the city. It was getting easier to do, and he was sure Elicia was helping a lot with his ability to do so. To that point, it had been about twice per week, normally with no less than two days between outings, and it had been helping him feel a lot better, a lot more like his old self. He was even starting to adapt to the presences of people like Rude, Freyra, Ruluf, and Illis. That morning, however, he'd heard a commotion in the apartment next door—Kariya's—before Percia had joined him for the day, which was a first.

Since it was one of the days Yufi and Shelke had decided they were going to drag him outside, he and Percia were sitting on a 'park bench' at the edge of a park with fake grass around a sandbox and some play structures for children while Yufi and Shelke played there with a few other children. Elicia was playing in some flowers nearby, making nearly everyone snicker—it was obvious she liked the bright colors of the flower petals.

His thoughts were interrupted by Minerva saying into his mind, :My Ancient Sentinel, I believe you should speak with my Earthen Champion about visiting me at my core now. It would be beneficial were she to arrive there with my Beloved Child, my Budling, and the Dynamism.:

:Is there a reason you need her to do this just now?: he asked in reply, confused to have gotten a request for something which previously had no timeline.

:As things move forward, a purification will be needed. I need to be able to discuss with her what she wishes to do before either Zirconaide or her merged form with Zirconaide will be needed,: Minerva replied in a plain and practical tone of voice. :She will have no time to make the decision or ask questions before the time comes should she not visit with me soon.:

Knowing Minerva's version of 'soon' was different from his, and all humans', he gave agreement and turned to look at Percia. "Do you remember when Nina called you 'Big Sister Gaia' and we had to clarify that Minerva calls you her 'Earthen Champion'?"

"I remember asking what it meant that I somehow 'protect the Planet'," Percia replied in dry amusement. "Are you going to explain that now?"

"It's more like I'm playing messenger," he answered with a faint shrug. "She wants to talk with you about it herself, be able to answer your questions, and there's a decision you'll need to make which she doesn't want to force you to rush to make. Apparently, our group of travelers—the ones with Verde—are eventually going to head in the direction of her core, the place where it's easiest for her to talk with others. She's decided you need to know now so you can make plans with Lady Shinra's help to go meet them by the time they'll be heading there."

Percia blinked, then asked, "And the location?"

"Banora," he replied, shrugging.

"...So we need to tell this to Lady Shinra so she can arrange for me to be with them. Is there even a viable reason for me to need to join them? People would be suspicious if I just joined them long enough for that," she pointed out, and Ed was reminded of Elfé and Felicia for a moment.

Giving his head a shake, he informed her, "All you have to do is mention my name to Lady Shinra and she'll go with it. As for a reason for you to go with them...It would be beneficial for both you and them to go to the Northern Crater with them, as well as to several other areas where there isn't a lot of foot traffic. Because I'm sure they're going to need to go to the Crater to terminate the root problem they're trying to stop."

"...Okay...Are you always so cryptic in your reasoning?" she asked in bemusement.

"Cryptic...?" Ed muttered, then sighed. "I guess I am, somewhat, after everything I've been through. But if you go into the Crater where Jenova was taken out from, that whole area needs to be cleansed of her energy, and the Cave below that also reaches right down to her core. She has a limited number of people she's okay letting in there, and because of what you've always been to her, you're one of them. If you see her first at Banora, she can explain things to you, then you'll have from then until you get to her core in the Northern Cave to think of questions or other things you want to discuss. Also, fighting your way there will definitely improve your strength and skill."

"Hmm..." the young woman murmured thoughtfully. She was silent for a minute before saying, "Okay, I'll talk to Lady Shinra, then."