Slum Detective. Along the cliffs of Arujunon, immediately east and inland of the Citadel, an avenue bearing the same uncreative name terminated at a memorial of sorts, a portion of bullet-riddled stone wall on an ornate dais.
Yuffie stared at a polished metal plaque, clearly just a few years in age compared to a century-old cobblestone wall. "Wall of the Communards," she read aloud with a frown. "In the immediate aftermath of the Midgar-Junon War, the State of Junon faced opposition in the form of a radical worker's government. Declaring itself the Junon Commune, they formed a short-lived revolutionary state, forgiving all debts and declaring all major property collectively held by the populace. In less than half a year, the uprising was brutally crushed by the Junon Army, at an estimated ten to twenty thousand lives loss and many times the number injured. At least three hundred of the self-declared communards were summarily tried after the fighting ended, and executed against this wall." She looked repulsed. "Gawd, is there anywhere in this city that doesn't have a history of slaughter?"
To her right, she heard the unmistakable mechanical click-and-whirl of SLR camera, the kind produced by Shinra in the old days. A young tourist couple, in conspicuously Kalmish dress, looked like they might be enjoying their honeymoon. Weirdos, she thought with a sigh, as the couple kept snapping away of the wall were hundreds were apparently killed and the memorial to their deaths.
Hopefully Aske is actually still around, and not another person brought up against a wall in Junon and shot for treason. That was a ridiculous worry, she admitted to herself. According to the plaque, the Junon Commune had been put down more than a century before she was born. Junon wasn't some distant village that had become a problem for the powers that were, Junon was the power. Shinra's second city, originally their first before the completion of Midgar.
Three years ago, before Meteorfall, the only way she and the rest of AVALANCHE could easily enter Junon was through an unguarded freight elevator accessible from Under Junon, but that was at the height of the Jenova War. Today, she had money and connections, in the form of a passport, so she could follow the road out of Under Junon to the crowded suburbs by the Junon Heights, and from there into downtown Arujunon, directly adjacent to the fortress city. She thought Downtown Arujunon might feel more "normal" than Under Junon, but was proven wrong: more soldiers and officers of the Home Army could see seen, mostly women, but they weren't her concern, doing things like guiding traffic and taking questions from tourist and chastising them when they jaywalked.
"You should check out the Sister Ray monument. Much more impressive."
Yuffie had a strong sense who was talking at her, but waited until she'd turned to face the same direction as the monument before offering a response. Standing on the sidewalk, between her and the street, was another young woman her own age, maybe a year older, a brunette with long, wavy hair. Her wardrobe less considerably less well-kept, aggressively short and threadbare denim jeans and a sleeveless buttoned top that was too small for her. Practically the same outfit she'd warn the last time they'd met, in what was left of the slums below what was left of Midgar's Sector 5 Plate.
"Kyrie Canaan. I hope you're not following me," she managed to mew with the authority of someone who wasn't a year younger.
"Yuffie Kisaragi. I'd say the same thing about you," Kyrie declared back, trying to match her tone.
The first time they'd met, before Meteorfall, Yuffie thought she looked like Tifa Lockhart in miniature, especially around the chest—the comparison still held up, three years later. The slum girl still had those neatly cut bangs under her oversized hat.
With a flourished swing of her hips, Kyrie strolled passed her, stopping at the monument and studying it. "When Labour declared they were runnin' for the elections, they announced it here, in the ghosts of Junon's martyred revolutionaries."
"Is that so?" Since when did this slum detective become such an expert on Junon?
"Well it was only a couple years ago," she reminded her belligerently, hands on her hips.
"What was that like?" Yuffie speculated aloud. "A bunch of politicians standing on the dais, in front of the crowd, spewing out lies for the dumb masses."
She cocked her head and looked at Kyrie with wide eyes and one of her wide grins, canines bared. "I can see why that would appeal to you, slum-girl."
"Not like the princess of the Wutaian Empire would know anything about elections," Kyrie fired back, quicker than she wouldn't expected, a dismissive hand raised in the air.
The two young woman stood there, feet planted in front of the martyr's wall, against the hum of pedestrian and street traffic at the entrance of what a sign proudly proclaimed was Junon's Citadel Historical Museum, a large, brown-orange rectangular building behind the memorial that perfectly meshed with the rest of the 18th-century Baroque architecture of the Junon Heights.
Yuffie let the relative silence linger a few seconds longer before turning back to the girl from the slums, expression neutral. "So, Kyrie, why're you here anyway? And if you don't answer me, I'll do the whole 'by order of the W.R.O.' thing and annoy you until you do."
She sighed, then, with an eyebrow raised, stared Yuffie in the face for a few minutes, who rolled her eyes in turn. Great, she's studying me, she thought putting a hand on her hip and waiting.
Kyrie took a few seconds longer after Yuffie started tapping one of her feet on the sidewalk. "Would you believe me if I said I was hired to track down a tall blue-eyed blond bombshell with giant materia?"
Rachel. Yuffie wondered if Kyrie saw the muscles of her shoulders twitch under her vest. She recalled the tall woman from the photograph, towering over a class of fresh-faced Home Army recruits, massive weapon eased on her shoulder. That thing must weigh more than you do. She'd squash you like a bug under her heels. "Still playing at detective, huh?"
"I'd say the same thing for you, Spymaster Yuffie Kisaragi," she snapped back haughtily.
"People really need to stop blurting that out on the street for the world to hear," Yuffie grumbled under her breath, holding back a groan.
"Seriously, you don't think that's a little obtrusive as a listening device?" With one of her faded orange gloves, she pointed at the traveling case for the TC-5500 slung over her shoulder. "Especially for a ninja?"
Okay, how does everyone know exactly what this thing is? Is everyone living today an expert on reel-to-reel tape recorders? Yuffie fidgeted with the leather case and turned to Kyrie. "I'll have you know, I'm a journalist."
Kyrie stared at her, striking brown-gold eyes, head tilted slightly. She then burst into raucous laughter.
"All right, slum-girl, get it out of your system," Yuffie muttered.
"A journalist? A journalist?!" she repeated, hands wrapped around her exposed midriff.
"You appreciate the irony of a pickpocket laughing like this, right?" Yuffie interrupted her laughter after waiting for a few seconds. She turned to the woman in the maroon greatcoat of the Peace Preservation standing like a sentry down the sidewalk, closer to the entrance of the museum behind them. "You know this girl's a veteran pickpocket, right? The kind that robs tourists?" she asked loudly enough for the Home Army officer to turn to her, polished silver insignia shining in the sun.
"Hey, wanted felon over here!" she said, jumping on the balls of her feet.
Kyrie stopped laughing reached for the shorter woman and took her arm. "Hey, what the hell is that for?" she hissed before turning to the Home Army officer, who was clearly staring at them now. "Sorry, my friend has a bad sense of humor, ignore her! No one's getting robbed!" she tried to assure her through a forced smile.
Yuffie let her pull her the past the memorial dais and up the stairs to the museum's ground floor lobby, through the winging glass doors facing the east, stopping on the marble floors and smugly grinning at her. "Try that again," Kyrie hissed.
"You better watch yourself, little girl," Yuffie snickered, easily breaking free and straightening her khaki vest with a sharp motion
"You are, like, six months younger than me, Yuffie Kisaragi!"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever." She was brushing her bare arms before she looked back at the raggedly-dressed woman. "So you're still a detective, huh?"
She sighed. "What've I been saying?"
Just don't ask me about your blond bombshell. I don't know how good a liar I am. Yuffie took a moment to compose herself, mustering up whatever superiority she had on the pickpocket from the Midgar Slums. "I'm looking for someone myself."
She looked Kyrie directly in her large eyes, with an expression that she hoped conveyed an unspoken sentiment that she paid well. "And I pay very well," she added quickly.
Kyrie looked less hostile and more intrigued. "For what, an interview?"
Yuffie glanced around the lobby, largely empty for a desk of receptionists and a uniformed officer standing at the other end, then beckoned Kyrie towards the waiting area nearer the doors. "Don't worry about for what." She sighed, realizing how that sounded. "They're not in trouble. The opposite. Someone in the Junon government."
"Yeah, I don't know if you know this, but that's a big government."
"Someone in the oil ministry, or involved in something called the Clean Air Development Plan. Some kinda' government…program." She winced at her own description. "Barret said his name was Aske."
Kyrie gave a distasteful expression at the mention of Barret Wallace, and Yuffie took the opportunity to crush her flopping hat against her head, leaving her to fidget. "Anyway, Aske."
"Ask what?"
"No, his name…" She groaned. "A-S-K-E. Gawd, it's my second language and I speak it better than any of you."
"And how much does this pay?" Kyrie asked skeptically.
"Depends on what you find." Yuffie ignored her dismayed look with a smug expression of supremacy. "Trust me, I can afford it. In fact…"
A year ago, when she'd felt she'd done all she could to help the reconstruction of Wutai and she'd started doing this job for Reeve, the chairman himself had advised her to carry around envelopes of money—real money, prewar gil in other words—as was convenient. She had never quite mastered the art of the payoff, or for that matter, tipping, a common eastern custom foreign to Wutai, where it was equated with panhandling.
Kyrie's large eyes grew at the sight of the envelope's contents as Yuffie passed it off to her, and managed to turn, eyes closed, with an expression of unparalleled self-satisfaction. "Don't spend it all at once, onee-chan."
She didn't bother hiding her bewilderment at the cash. "Geeze, you W.R.O. types do flash cash after all. And here I thought it was just him."
Yuffie's eyes opened. "Him who?"
Kyrie raised an eyebrow. "Who? The weapons inspectors, from the W.R.O." She scoffed at her. "You mean you didn't know they were already here, meeting with Kessler?"
She scowled, making no effort to hide the truth. "I didn't think they were already here." Goshdarnit, Reeve. "And who's Kessler?"
She shrugged. "Some bigwig in the Junon Navy, fought in the Jenova War. He has some pull with the military or the government or both apparently, so the inspectors all go through him," she taunted her with her knowledge.
Yuffie ignored her tone. "Sounds like he was young enough to not to get passed over for that." Unlike Victor Io. "I guess those are the kind of blood-soaked military men who rule Junon now."
Kyrie rolled her eyes. "Right, like Wutai wasn't dripping in the blood of the Eastern Continent, before Shinra turned it into a tourist trap. Like your people aren't oh-for-two when it comes to world wars, hime-sama."
That stung, she had to admit. Yuffie resisted the urge to punch Kyrie in the face as she kept slowly counting the cash in the envelope.
Putting aside whatever attention they had already attracted, the two parted ways after leaving the public lobby of the Citadel, with a concluding warning from Yuffie, "And fergawdsakes, try and be discreet about this, will you?"
Kyrie disappeared back into the Junon Heights; Yuffie continued west along the Citadel grounds into a pedestrian entrance into Fortress Junon, guarded by the military but only routinely, with infantry in their blue uniforms rushing people, including more tourists, through Arujunon's squished Cliffside District.
"Rush hour," she heard someone, probably a military policeman, shout aloud, followed by a round of dumb laughter. The western edge of the thin, narrow district terminated at the boardwalk past the rectangular building of the museum, with the crowds funneled into a number of wide stairs, escalators and elevators on either side of the actual Junon Citadel, the massive, armored blockhouse that loomed over Fortress Junon, the tallest building in the Eastern Continent outside the ruins of Midgar, behind what had been the breech for the Sister Ray transoceanic artillery. As she slowly jostled through the crowd, Yuffie stared up at it: even from the relative height of the Cliffside District, the Citadel rose at least ten stories from Arujunon's streets, but at this distance it was possible to see the building underneath the huge, armored sheath, for the corporate office it was, the same semicircular shape Shinra had used for the southern face of 100 Central Plaza, Sector 0, their seventy-floor headquarters building. Shinra had taken over building the fortress during the First Wutai War and completed it in the second, finishing with the Citadel. They built a corporate office, their Junon Branch, and a armored shield around it. She had studied wartime footage, whatever the W.R.O. had recovered: Sapphire Weapon, unlike its cousins Ruby and Emerald, had attacked Junon directly and not just the navy. They fired the Sister Ray for the first time since its deployment during the war; the shielding didn't just protect the Citadel from Weapon, it protected it from the force of its own artillery, enough to shatter most of the reinforced windows on the north side of the Shinra Building at 100 Central Plaza the last time it was fired, as Vincent had told her. Three years later, Junon had restored the rest of the foundation, even if the cannon was still missing, a long landmark among Midgar's ruins.
She flipped her PHS open as she descended down the escalator, so long as she thought she'd have cellular reception. "Pick up, August," she commanded quietly as she descended further into the fortress city.
"August Fitzroy here," a voice at the other ended responded politely before pausing, presumably to check the caller ID. "Boss, I wasn't expecting you? Are you in Junon?"
"I'm on the escalator into Junon City right now. Hey, I need you to check out a name of a local bigwig, someone I've never heard of before," she lied. The name was familiar sounding, but un-placeable. In this sort of situation, Yuffie preferred lying. "Name's Kessler."
"Roger that, boss. One second." She could hear him at a computer keyboard. "Thomas Kessler?"
"Could be it, I didn't get his first name."
A sigh. "According to the computer, Thomas Kessler was a naval commander in the Peace Preservation, under Heidegger. He was one of Shinra's so-called 'functional admirals'—basically, the officers who ran the Junon Navy in the place of the geriatrics who were veterans of the two Wutai Wars."
"What the hell's a functional admiral?"
"So, you see, an 'admiral' is like a general…but for the ocean."
"Shut the hell up, I know what an admiral is!" She held back the fact that the same word in Wutaian, Taishō, meant either "admiral" or "general" depending on context. "Okay, so he was an admiral in the navy. What exactly did he do for Shinra then?"
"Well, by the sounds of it, he wasn't really in the Shinra Company. Remember, Shinra ruled in peacetime…well, mostly. They didn't care about things like naval readiness, not until the Weapons appeared. But they couldn't just get rid of these old men who were the heroes of the last war, and most of them were probably too old to manage their own bladders, much less thirty-thousand-tonne battleships. So...actual power resided with the functional admirals below them."
"Until Shinra collapsed and Junon took over," she concluded for him.
"And then all the power resided in them. It's basically a cabal that's pulling the strings behind the ruling party, or that's the theory."
She snorted. "If Shinra was so worried about expenses, why not just scrap the whole dumb navy to begin with? You tellin' me Shinra was actually that farsighted?"
A laugh from August. "I doubt it. Probably because it'd look really bad to scrap the pride of wartime Junon and leave a bunch of war heroes homeless, not just the admirals. Money can only take you so far. Sometimes, you actually have to make people happy."
"And I guess Shinra figured out how to make Junon happy," she grumbled. Which is how we got into this stupid mess in the first place.
"Well, what were the odds that you'd actually need a war-winning navy to actually fight a bunch of two-thousand year old kaiju?" August asked. "No way Shinra wouldn't have predicted that."
Over the course of the call, Yuffie and the rest of the crowd around her had descended along the long escalators to what looked like the base of the Citadel, where the view of the Mediterranean Ocean was replaced steel latticework and massive concrete pillars that ended in the air. In front of them were the empty foundations that once supported the recoil-absorbing cradle and reloading system of the Sister Ray, along with the artillery piece itself. A large white sign with bold black text explained as much, with an arrow pointing in the direction of the War Memorial Museum, what Kyrie had called the Sister Ray Museum, a discreet building that appeared to be below the Citadel and above a large, open shaft that terminated below the fortress. Another sign claimed that ammunition was transported from subterranean magazine to the mako-powered cannon by powerful steam engines. This whole city is one giant monument to useless militarism, she thought. I bet dad would like it.
At least she was a single stairway from the pedestrian entrance to south 7th Street. From there, the other parallel streets of the terraced fortress city were accessible by automobile or on foot, or by using the Junon Funicular, cable cars on inclined rails. In case you forgot any of this, it was all helpfully presented on large signs at eye level for arriving tourists. Soldiers aside, is this really a fortress anymore?
A recording on an intercom somewhere above her reminded people to keep moving, and she did so, jostling through the more relaxed-moving crowd and onto 7th Street, where the foot traffic was finally starting to disperse. Recirculated, air-conditioned air and the musk of crowded tourist and pedestrian bodies was replaced with sharp ocean air, a combination of salty sea wind and the fumes from diesel engines overpowering carbon monoxide. Yuffie suppressed a cough, more out of surprise than aggrevation to her lungs; the air wasn't half as bad Kalm's on average. To her, it smelled more or less the same as Under Junon, albeit more pungent and perhaps a bit saltier when the wind kicked up.
At least I don't need to wear a mask. Stopping at the edge of the sidewalk, she took several deep, deliberate breaths, acclimating herself to the salty air. Maybe I should say something about this on tape. Like how useless Barret's sagely wisdom is.
She was beginning to reach into her luggage when what sounded like a foghorn sounded in the distance, the same sound she had barely heard inside Priscilla's cottage but exponentially louder and clearer, and she crossed 7th Street to reach the western edge overlooking the sea. As she did so, to her surprise the loud, unmistakable rapport of one of a Shinra-built twin-engine helicopter passed overhead, catching a few glances and remarks from the street level as it continued westward. It shrank to a small grey dot in the orange sky, and under it she saw the origin of the horn she'd heard: four clearly-visible warships of the Junon Navy, all steaming in a southward direction, so they could be clearly seen in profile. Trails of black, smokey exhaust marked their path.
Yuffie had paid just enough attention to the W.R.O.'s security and intelligence briefings to discern their make: three Akatsuki-class oceangoing destroyers, about two-thousand tonnes in displacement and close to 120 meters long, distinguished by two exhaust-bellowing funnels, three two-barrel gun turrets and three four-tube torpedo launchers. Actually, I learned about these back when I was a kid, didn't I? These are three of the destroyers that Shinra took as war prizes at the end of the Wutai World War.
No, not Shinra. The Midgar Confederation, she corrected herself mentally. According her tutors, the Akatsuki-class special destroyers, the best warships of their kind in the world, survived more than a decade of service in the Hundred Years War, only to be seized by the victors when Wutai surrendered, along with the rest of the surviving Wutaian Imperial Navy. Part of the "conditional surrender", whatever that meant, at the end of the war was that Wutai no longer got to have a navy. Kind of understandable, considering that's how Wutai invaded the Eastern Continent. Sometime between that and the Materia War a few years later, Shinra reconditioned and rebuilt them, to the best of what Junon could afford to pay as the Confederation's military slid into irrelevance. Almost every warship still operational in the world today belonged to the Junon Navy; the W.R.O. had plans for a naval component of their security forces to join Cid Highwind's air force, but it was hard to call their fleet of patrol boats and coast guard cutters, between half and a fifth the length of Junon's special destroyers, actual "warships."
Then there was the third warship: she didn't recognize it, other than looking half-the-size larger than any of the three special destroyers, with a taller superstructure and a single large funnel behind that. Three large turrets were grouped with a pair forward of the superstructure, and one towards the rear behind what looked like a deck for a helicopter and cranes for a seaplane.
"Excuse me, what ship is that? The large one?" A young man in a white-and-blue sailor suit with yellow trim was standing by a lamppost along the rails, attempting to light a cigarette. Yuffie had no idea how long he'd been standing there.
"Journalist?" he asked, cigarette between his lips.
Sure, why not? After all, I'm assuming you're a sailor from how you're dressed. "Yes I am!"
He finally succeeded in lighting it and nodded at her, his flat, visor-less cap bobbing on his head. "I think that's the Fort Corel, part of the Fort Condor-class. Why, you looking to interview sailors?"
"Yes," she replied a little too fast. She gave him a dry look as he leaned back on the lamp post. "Not you, some actually on a ship."
"Then you should call up the Foreign Ministry's public relations desk, get aboard the navy's flagship before she's put out to sea again," he explained, apparently still interested in their conversation. "Sounds like you missed the celebrations last week."
"Yeah, I heard that." With forced casualness, she reached into one of her vest's pockets and did the most journalistic thing she expected to do all day: she pulled out a paper notebook, drew a pen out from the spine, flipped it open to a blank page and began writing. "So, Mr. Sailor, if I wanted to speak to someone at the P.R. desk of the Foreign Ministry, who would that be?"
The sailor blew out a cloud of smoke and shrugged. "That's Mr. Petty Officer Third Class. And I don't know, I guess someone who works for Tom Kes…"
"Kessler?" she finished for him.
"Yeah, him. He's an admiral, but he's also spokesman for the Junon Foreign Ministry." He cocked his head before removing taking his cigarette between two fingers, almost femininely. "Sounds like you've heard of him, then again, you're a foreign journalist."
This conversation has gone on way too long. "Thank you, you've been a big help," she lied very politely, returning the notebook to her vest pocket, adjusted the shoulder strap of her reel-to-reel's carrying case. She had more questions, but the cigarette-smoking sailor seemed like obviously the wrong man to be asking them too, as much for who he was as what he would actually know near the bottom of the Junon Navy's hierarchy.
She could guess why the sailor was just standing there—perhaps he was on leave, or slacking off during an errand—but he seemed like the wrong person to ask why three of the distant destroyers were steaming under power, belching black plumes of smoke after them, when the cruiser keeping pace with them wasn't.
They, the New State of Junon or whatever they called themselves, knew she was here, there was no way they wouldn't at this point. Priscilla was wrong; she wasn't sneaking into Fortress Junon, she was walking in. A ninja didn't carry a reel-to-reel tape recorder in a leather carrying case over her shoulder; whatever Barret or Kyrie or even Reeve might've thought, this wasn't some errant adventure like the old days. AVALANCHE ended three years ago, and the Wutai World War, the one she'd been alive to see, ended ten. If history lived in Junon, it could stay buried there, along with any history she had too.
Author's Notes:
So, I bet you weren't expect Kyrie Canaan, the mouthy little (maybe not so little) troublemaker who was elevated to a greater role in the recent remake. Neither did I, but I also thought this chapter was...kind of boring without her. In fact, it might still be. I know I've been rather skeptical of the remake, and I still am, but I won't lie and say I didn't get a laugh out of her expanded cameos from her rather short appearance in the novel The Kids are Alright: A Turks Side Story into a game herself (as well as how much she looks like a junior Tifa Lockhart). Her actual questline, I suspect, is rather dubious (why would Shinra attempt to execute someone they paid to be a town crier?), but I'm not above using visual aids as helpful. On the other hand, her inclusion could be mistake and I'll have no one but myself to blame.
We finally come into Junon, as in the Junon we remember from the game. Previously, I made a mistake (that I have actually corrected): apparently, Deepground kidnapped as many as 1,200 people from Junon specifically, though it's hard to picture them not doing even worse in a growing, wild city like Edge (where Kadaj's gang kidnapped children with little more than a story and a truck). Except to hear more of that (even though, as noted, I'm deliberately ignoring certain events of Dirge of Cerberus). And always, let me know what you think, what you like and don't like, and if you can stomach this level of incessant world-building for...not very much happening. Thanks again!