In Parts
After Sly had roused himself—only to literally jump on Rogue's back several minutes later and set off another fight between them—Reno had turned the raccoon over to Cloud. And Cloud had been annoyed enough at the fight in the cafeteria that Sly had decided to behave while the blond had him. They were sitting in Weapons while Cloud worked on the requested vibrator boxes and Reno went out to get collars for him to attach them to, and oddly, Sly was staying right there, watching Cloud work with his head tipped to the side and an intensity which was actually starting to worry the blond.
"What's that?" Scarlet asked as she peered over his shoulder.
"They're supposed to be vibrating boxes to put on disobedient pets to break them of certain bad habits," he told her in a flat tone.
The woman chuckled at the words, then gave a small shrug. "That's a lot of small parts, then. That's not your pet, though, is it?"
"It's Reno's. Mine's under the table and insistent on sleeping on my feet," Cloud replied with a sigh, and Scarlet blinked, then crouched to peer under the table. Tyra roused herself enough to look over at the woman, yawn, and put her head back down.
When she stood straight again, Scarlet asked, "So why does it look like this raccoon is trying to learn to make electronic devices?"
"No idea. Somehow, that worries me, though," Cloud replied, making a face. "And that means I need a way of making them so Sly can't get his either off or apart."
"So cloth probably won't actually do you any good, and a raccoon's restrictions are just like a cat's—anything their head fits through, they do, too." She paused for a moment, then said, "The Labs probably have some spare metal collars you could modify. They do experiments on all sizes of creatures and need some way to be sure the subjects can't get out of their binds, so they should even have perfected it and would have a spare in the size you need."
Cloud blinked as he paused in his work, then looked up at her and said, "That's not a bad idea in its own right. I just don't like the idea of meeting Hojo or The Nightmare by accident while I'm there."
"So send Sly's owner," she replied in amusement, then ruffled his hair and went back to her office.
As he went back to work with a faintly annoyed huff at her behavior, he kept an eye on Sly, who was still watching him with frightening intensity. After awhile, the raccoon picked up one of the discarded circuit boards and began chewing on it, still watching what Cloud was doing intently. The action made Cloud snort and say, "You're not fooling me, Sly. Trying to pretend to be normal now won't work. Especially when you're not subtle at all." The words actually made Sly pull the circuit board from his mouth and put it down as he out-right pouted, hunching over a bit in the process.
Giving his head an amused shake, the boy went back to work, knowing he'd need a trigger for the vibrator, too. Those would have to go to Reno and Derin, and as much as he would have liked for them to be in or attached to something they always had on them (like a PHS), that wasn't really practical. These were supposed to be training tools, not permanent fixtures, and they were supposed to be reusable, just in case. By those terms, the vibration boxes weren't an issue, it was the switch to activate them. It would also mean Reno and Derin would have to pay a lot more attention to their pets for awhile.
That was another thing he'd been thinking about a lot lately—was the problem only on Sly's end? If Veld was threatening both, it actually probably wasn't, even if Sly had started it and had done most of the visible prompts. Trickplays had abilities they could activate from a prone position, and even if one of those was the healing 'Hot Springs', he was sure Sly wouldn't appreciate suddenly being drenched in water. The other skills a Trickplay had were elemental and could well go unnoticed if Rogue had only activated just enough of one to irritate Sly but not become the full-on visual ability.
As he finished with the two vibrator boxes and was working on the first switch, Reno returned and offered him two adjustable collars in a thick, black material that was unlikely Sly would be able to stretch to remove. Still...
"Okay, now I need you to find locks that need a key to take off, and those keys can't be somewhere Sly can get to them until you're ready to take the collars off them," Cloud told him in a dry tone. "And they can't be simple locks. Scarlet suggested checking with the Labs, so that's probably the first place to start. If you need to show them what those locks would be going on, you can take the collars with you, since I'm still working on the vibrators and the switches."
Reno raised a brow and asked, "Should I take Sly, too, yo?"
"If you think you need to for fitting purposes. The point is to make sure he can't get the collar off, which means it has to be small enough that he can't pull it over his head," Cloud replied. "In that regard, Rogue isn't as difficult because even as intelligent as he is, he hasn't got the digits to actually get out of this kind of thing. But, if I'm doing something to one collar, I'm doing it to both to be fair to them, it's just that size isn't as touchy for Rogue. Hellfire, the Labs might even have accurate size estimates for a Trickplay's neck, and they'd just have to give it enough slack for the vibrator box."
"Huh," Reno blinked, then turned to look at Sly. "Okay, then, troublemaker, you're comin' with me this time." At the words, Sly readily jumped onto Reno's shoulder and they both headed out. Cloud had to snort again at how readily Sly accepted the title 'troublemaker'.
It didn't take much longer for Cloud to finish the two vibrators and switches, even being sure each switch only activated one box. As he was finishing, Reno came back with the collars, which Cloud took and checked for their size and locking ability. Both were good then, so he took the smaller one and one of the vibrators and attached it to the collar so he could seal it up fully. As he was using the Weapons machinery to do it, there was no way Sly would be getting the screws undone. He then fixed it to Sly's neck and handed Reno a small box with a dial on it. The raccoon immediately began trying to get the collar off.
"Okay, that's the switch for the collar. I made it so you can use three different levels of vibration, and the idea is for you to only use as much is needed to distract them," Cloud said. "Even when you eventually take them off, please keep them in case they're needed again later. And give me the keys. I'll make sure Sly will never find them."
"Sure thing, yo," Reno agreed as he watched Sly's antics in amusement. "And Derin's?"
"I'll get it to him and Rogue because there's something else I need to talk with him about, too," Cloud replied, so Reno handed over the keys with a thanks and headed away with Sly, who was probably going to spend at least a day just fussing with the collar now.
Of course, that also left him the question of where to leave the keys so Sly couldn't hijack them, and if the raccoon was getting in through vents, chances were Sly would risk his room—and his wrath—to try to get his furry paws on those keys. Or at least on his own.
Once Reno had gone, Cloud pulled out his PHS and found Derin's number, then let it dial. The older Turk answered it in confusion as he asked, "What did you need, Cloud?"
"I need you to come down to Weapons with Rogue," Cloud replied evenly.
"Why?" the other man asked suspiciously.
"Because I have a collar with a vibration box for him, and I need to talk with you," the blond answered, wondering at the suspicion. "Before you say anything, Sly's already wearing a collar, and yes, it only vibrates, nothing more harmful."
After a long silence, Derin sighed and agreed, "I'll be there shortly, then."
He was about to move back to the machinery to fix the other vibrator onto the collar for Rogue when his PHS alerted him to an incoming message, so he sighed and checked it. Then, his expression turned annoyed as he read what Vincent had forwarded—all of the nobles' responses to the 'all-important question' Argento had been sent to ask to the Wutains on Tseng's behalf. And, of course, instructions to get those to Tseng as soon as possible without anyone knowing what it was, and getting rid of the copy on his own PHS very soon. Sending it via PHS to a non-Turk one was asking for trouble, so he would have to go see Haruna to get the data to her. Then again, it was the perfect place to hide something from Sly...
Derin got there just then, Rogue at his feet, so Cloud put away his PHS and finished with the collar as the other man watched. As the black haired man put it on Rogue's neck, Cloud explained to him how it worked and gave him the switch, then asked, "How much of an instigator do you think Rogue is in the fights between him and Sly?"
"He isn't," Derin scowled.
"Okay, have you ever seen Sly looking wet or otherwise ruffled when he attacked Rogue?" the blond questioned, feeling like raising a brow but somehow managing to refrain—yet another skill taught to him by the Turks which was coming in handy. Which still grated on him.
At first, Derin opened his mouth, then shut it with a puzzled expression. He looked down at the Trickplay, who was doing the same thing as Sly and fussing with the collar (much less effectively than Sly), then back at Cloud. "I think I saw Sly looking wet twice, and extremely fluffy one other time...Maybe a little singed on his cheek's fur another time? Why?"
"Those are all things a Trickplay can do by not fully activating one of their abilities," Cloud pointed out dryly. Derin scowled, but Cloud cut him off with, "Derin, this is a two-way street. Sly started it in a way by stealing from your room, but you need to realize they're both antagonizing the other, it's not just Sly. And unlike Sly, Rogue can act from a distance, so no one has been noticing when Sly's been reacting to an attack on him, rather than initiating the attack. And we won't be able to stop them unless you're willing to watch Rogue for when he activates his abilities and stop him from doing so."
For a long time, Derin just glared at him, but finally, he sighed and nodded a bit. "I'll start watching for that, then. I don't think I'll find anything, but I'll watch. Either way, they both need to stop fighting, and if this will distract him from attacking back, that will still help. Since you were interrupted in your work on my weapon and I'm here right now, do you have anything to show me about it?"
"Yeah, sure," Cloud agreed, letting him change the subject. The blond got up to go to the locker where he kept his things and pulled them out to show Derin what he'd done so far. The other Turk looked intrigued, so gave his agreement to trying Cloud's idea to make his boomerang lighter.
Finally, when all that was done and the blond had put everything away again, he went to his room to change into the things he kept for his trips to Haruna's and headed out to her place, wondering if she'd be at home or at work. Of course, Tyra followed him loyally the entire way. A trip past the shop showed him Elmyra and another young woman with blond hair there (and a hole in the shop floor), so he headed for the house. When he got there, Hokuto and Aeris were both in the yard playing a skipping game, and both diverted to hug him as he stepped up the walk.
"How did things go?" Aeris asked as she pulled back to look at him.
He shrugged. "They went. Two of the people who should have been protecting the Princess tried to kill her right in front of me, so yeah...I don't think there's too much clean-up left, not if I've gotten the first round of results already. And I have to give something to Haruna."
"You'll stay and play with us after?" Hokuto asked hopefully.
"Yeah," he agreed, making both girls grin and hug him again.
When they let him go, he faced the house again, and saw Haruna waiting at the door for him. She stepped back inside to let him enter, and they both sat at the kitchen table—the living room looked like a storm of cloth had hit it, and Maya was sitting in the middle of it as she worked on some sort of sewing pattern. Soon after he sat, the Wutain poured him tea, so he turned his attention back to it so he could sweeten it.
"So I'm guessing you have news for me?" Haruna asked in amusement.
Pulling out the keys for the collars, Cloud pushed them over to her and said, "Keep those until I come back to get them." She raised a brow, but gave a nod, so he went on, "I got Yufi back here. Fuhito and the Imperial Assassins tried to kill her literally right in front of me, so I ended up killing those two, but Fuhito got away. Vincent has mostly taken over with her so far, and Rufus actually snuck his way over there and ended up helping us. He also managed to survive an Assassin's direct attack on him with relatively little harm, so it looks like his own memories are starting to come to the fore."
Haruna sighed and nodded. "I know I should be surprised, but somehow, I'm not. Find out if Yufi has a little pendant—or something—of a black-colored stone on her, and if she does, get it off her and bring it to me."
"Why?" Cloud blinked in surprise.
"It's a stone that creates a vibration with another stone from the same source. The idea is that you'd take a larger piece of that stone, then break it into the number of smaller pieces you want. It was the only way to create a kind of tracker before we had this kind of technology, and in theory, someone aware of the attraction between stones from the same source can use that to track her location. I think her father and the Assassins all have one as well, along with a few others, but the number made off that one stone was in the teens, so who knows who else may have one."
"Including Fuhito, since he's obviously made friends with the Assassins," Cloud agreed sourly, and Haruna nodded. "I'll see if she'll just give it to me." He then sighed and said, "The last thing is the list of nobles' answers to that question you gave permission to ask. I haven't looked at it to see the results, but I couldn't just send it to you, either—your current PHS is much less secure than the ones we Turks use."
Nodding, Haruna agreed, "I rather thought that would be the case. Wait while I get the device I have for that." She rose and left the room for several minutes, then came back with a small device like a mini portable computer in one hand and a black cable in the other. She sat, then plugged one end of the cord into the device, then pushed the other end over to him. "Plug that into your PHS. It should let it access another 'device', and let you send things to it, including your own messages. In theory, other than this having a screen, it's equivalent to a computer back-up, but meant for things like our PHS's. This one can hold a lot more data than most such devices, though."
"Okay," Cloud agreed, following the instructions. As the data he needed to trade off to her was transferring, he asked, "Did you need me to wait while you look through it?"
"For a few minutes. You can go play with the girls for a few hours after this so I can go through the literal responses more thoroughly for definite removals," she told him absently, gaze focused on the screen as the data came up.
His own side had finished by then, so he detached his PHS and waited until she gave a nod and said, "She was lucky to get all the nobles and Crescent Unit with this. It looks like most of the latter fled and walked right into Angeal and Zack with only an odd few who might have been able to slip away. Some of the names of those who couldn't answer the question surprised me, but if they still have four of the Imperial Assassins, they're doing better than I had dared to hope. I wonder how they even got ten when they should have had eight..." Making a small motion of something like dismissal, she said, "You can go play for awhile while I assess the answers."
Cloud got up and went back outside to join Aeris and Hokuto—and for once, somehow really felt like letting the 'child' part of him out to play for a bit. As such, rather than just sitting stoicly and talking with the girls, he actively joined their skipping game, which made both of them very happy, and more when Tyra even tried to join in. By the time supper rolled around (they'd gone off to get something to eat at a nearby shop for a meal/snack) he was actually tired and just followed the girls inside to eat. It was only as he sat down with them that he remembered he was supposed to have gotten something back from Haruna—but she hadn't called him to get it.
When he gave her an annoyed glare, she told him in amusement, "You were having fun so I decided to let you have at. It gave me more time to be more thorough, too, which was a good thing, or I'd have told you to eliminate someone actually innocent."
"How's that?" Cloud asked with a puzzled frown as Maya, Aeris, and Hokuto just watched quietly in surprise.
"One of the nobles is specifically put in the position of trade to make deals and do things not necessarily honorable to turn a profit for Wutai. Basically, he's no different than the average businessman here. His 'crimes' are also usually minor offenses which don't cause others harm, but that dynamic of his also means his reply to the question comes across as self-serving and detrimental. When I realized he held that trade position, I had to re-assess his answer, and I realized the only people it was detrimental to were the ones who would dare try to pull one over on Wutai in a trade deal," Haruna told him in amusement, and everyone at the table chuckled.
"So that's one less needing to be killed," Aeris commented in approval.
"Yes, Flower Girl, it's one less death," the Wutain agreed. "As for the rest, what's left of Crescent Unit seems to be okay by their answers, and there were seven nobles whose responses require their elimination. The others will need to be investigated. That still leaves about two thirds of the Court with the ones already eliminated and the seven I know have to go. I suspect most of those will be the average noble caught up in Court games no more harmful than the usual petty bickering, but some will be the ones behind this problem, and that won't be solved in a day." She paused, then pushed a paper over to Cloud so he could take it. "Get that back to Argento. It has the instructions she needs to proceed."
"Okay," he agreed, taking it and putting it in his pocket.
"Now that the work is done, what were those keys for?" Haruna asked curiously.
"Collars for Rogue and Sly so they will hopefully stop antagonizing each other into fights," Cloud replied flatly, making the others blink.
Of course, that meant he had to explain the situation to them, which had all of them laughing by the end of the tale. Finally, they were done with supper and their discussion and Cloud could head back to the Shinra building, Tyra at his feet as usual—but on the floor where his room was, he was stopped by Kurosai flying down the hall and landing on his shoulder. Yufi—now wearing the Academy girls' uniform of a black skirt, white shirt, and red sweater—ran around the corner after the bird, then paused as she saw him—
And she grinned as she threw herself on him to hug him and said, "This place is awesome!"
"I'm glad you're enjoying it," he replied in bemusement. Then he remembered the stone. "Yufi, do you have some sort of black stone on you?"
"Huh?" she blinked, letting him go and pulling back to look at him for a moment. She then shrugged and pulled a little, black stone from the inside of her shirt near the top hem, held there by a pin. "My parents gave it to me when I was still really little and told me to always keep it on me. Why?"
He paused as he eyed the stone, then eyed her for a long moment. "Yufi, maybe that was fine when your Court could be trusted, but now it can't, and that stone is a tracker. There's maybe some range it has, but anyone with another stone from the same source as that one will be able to find you if you keep it on you—including the Imperial Assassins if they have such a stone."
She blinked and stared at him, then down at the stone for a moment, then back at him. "Then what do I do with it?"
"Get rid of it. I know of someone who can probably make sure it disappears," Cloud offered. "She's Wutain, after all, so she should know more about it than either of us."
After a silence, Kurosai made a very odd sound which Cloud could have sworn was a word in Wutain, and at the sound, Yufi's eyes widened and she breathed, "That's how some people kept finding me." She then unpinned it and passed it to Cloud. "Right now, I definitely don't want to be found, and not by more Assassins. Okay, do whatever you want with it. I still have something of my mother's anyway."
Cloud nodded and put it in his pocket. "I'll make sure no one will find you by it. What are you doing now?"
"Getting supper in that awesome cafeteria of yours!" she grinned, grabbing his arm to pull him in that direction. Soon, they were in the Turks' office, but as they passed through Veld's office, where Vincent and Derin were sitting, Cloud stopped to blink at their expressions.
"Go on ahead—I'll join you soon," he told Yufi, who agreed and headed for the cafeteria. Facing Vincent, who had borrowed Veld's usual seat, and Derin, who sat across the desk from him, he asked, "So what's wrong now?" Tyra made her way over to Rogue to sniff him, which distracted Rogue from his new collar.
"I finally found out what the President is holding over her," Derin sighed.
"Her?" Cloud blinked in confusion.
"Scarlet," Vincent answered that time. "And as much as we know the 'hold' is actually false, he's been able to either create or manipulate enough data to make virtually everyone believe the lie. Because he's so wealthy, he can even pay people to tell the lie, and finding counter-data to it isn't going well. Almost everything the President has on her is circumstantial at best, but put together enough things which weren't actually related..."
"And it becomes believable," Cloud finished with a sigh. "And what is it he supposedly 'found' about her?"
"That she's been hacking and hijacking virtually everything everyone's found missing in their files, forget that he has detailed records on at least three dozen other hackers—ones known to have done some of what he's threatened to pin on her. Even though we could prove those ones, we can't prove them all. If it got out the way he intends, especially if he plants evidence and buys off the judge, she'd be deemed guilty without anyone looking further. Not only would that effectively be an execution order for her, but even if he chose to let her live, he'd make such a public spectacle of it that she'd never be able to get another job anywhere," Derin informed him tiredly.
Cloud blinked, then asked slowly, "And why is he even doing that to her when I'm sure he doesn't have that data on any of his other executives?"
"...Apparently, once he started sleeping with her, he didn't intend to stop," the younger Turk replied bitterly.
For a long time, Cloud was quiet, then he shook his head slowly and asked, "All that wasted on just making sure his daughter wouldn't be able to stop sleeping with him." His gaze then moved to Vincent. "How soon do you think Rufus will be ready?"
"Still not for a few months yet, unfortunately," Vincent sighed. "I don't like this, either, but unless we can get rid of all this 'evidence', which Derin tells me is impossible, we have to wait until we're sure Rufus is ready to take over. I hope that will be a shorter time now, but it still leaves a gap where she'll have to deal with some of that. We know the goal, and even Rufus seems willing to work towards it now, so...We're aiming for the shortest time possible."
"See that you do," Cloud agreed, then headed after Yufi.