Crown Lands and Western Marches. When Kessler, and Kessler's uniformed staff, brought Yuffie below the primary deck that ran the length of the Bonaventura, she was completely certain that they knew what they were doing. There was no way they hadn't considered that she wasn't mentally recording every visible space of the escort cruiser's cramped interior structure. So it reasoned that the Junon Navy had no reason to care if foreign official was seeing rustically uncomfortable insides of one of their active duty warships. And despite the cramped conditions, inside the bridge deck running the length of the ship was still a room for something resembling a meeting room, identified by the old fashion plaque on the door as the captain and guest's pantry.
"What, you store cakes in here?" she asked him curtly.
"No, there's a separate bread room," Kessler replied, in such a manner that she couldn't tell if he was joking or not.
The two took their seats at the wooden table that was the centerpiece of what looked like a small sitting room. Kessler removed his visor cap, putting it on the table in front of him. In response, Yuffie dropped the TC-5500 in its carrying case onto the table near it as loudly as she could managed, before plopping into the empty seat across from him. Kessler just keeping smiling, his one white-gloved hand in the other within reach of his cap.
Yuffie studied the small cabin's rustic décor. A faded black-and-white framed photograph on one wall, a portrait of some boring-looking old man in a navy uniform facing it. A blue-tinted map of the Mediterranean Ocean and the coastal regions, missing the Wutai archipelago. Some strange anchor-themed emblem that looked too old even for the Junon Navy, something from a pre-industrial era.
"You don't think I know why I'm here?" she asked, still staring at the tiny brass anchor framed on the wall.
"I was under the impression you were asking for me by name, so no, I don't. Quite the opposite, actually."
"So you've invented a missile small enough to be fired by one man that can shoot down a plane. Instead of having to drag one of your precious boats out of the water and onto dry land, you can send some unlucky conscript to do the work for you."
Kessler seemed to consider her explanation for a moment. "Yes, in not exactly those terms."
"So you think you're a big freakin' deal, huh?" she goaded him. "With that kind of power?"
"This kind of power?" Kessler scoffed behind that white glove. "Ms. Kisaragi, you can't take over territory with surface-to-air missiles. Only defend it. You don't think the New State of Junon might have an interest in being able to counter the world's largest and most advanced air force?"
She paused and her shoulders slumped. "Have you ever met Cid Highwind?"
"I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of meeting the commander-in-chief of the W.R.O. air forces, no," Kessler replied circuitously.
"Would you like to?" she asked, almost despairing. "I'm gonna' guess 'no', just like everyone else," she finished for him.
Kessler unclasped his hands and that Cheshire Cat-grin faded from his face as he touched his forehead briefly. "The current lines of communication, while imperfect, have some advantages. As a civilian, you may not entirely appreciate the fact that we in the Junon military share a common history with your own W.R.O.'s security forces: the armed forces of the Confederation. The Confederation might be ancient history, but three years ago is, what?" he asked rhetorically. He managed to snap his right hand, in spite of the glove. "The blink of the eye?"
"The point being you don't need to rely on Cid?" she groaned, now resting her head against the lacquered surface of the wooden table between them. This wasn't just Cid. It was an unpleasant reminder that practically every armed man and woman in the W.R.O., over a certain age, was a veteran of Shinra's Peace Preservation. Small consolation that a few started out in the anti-Shinra resistance cells across Planet.
Though after what she'd learn, she'd have to assume a few would own up to having survived from Fuhito's incarnation of AVALANCHE. Gawd, I hate knowing this so much.
"Can I offer you some tea?" she heard Kessler ask the side of her head helpfully.
She lifted her head and stared at him through narrowed eyes. "I didn't join the W.R.O. to become an envoy and weapons inspector."
"What a coincidence. I didn't join the Junon Navy to represent foreign affairs and public policy, and yet here we are," Kessler said, grinning broadly again.
Smooth customer. She decided to change tactics. "I came to Junon this time because some old, ex-military types told me I should. For research purposes."
"What kind of research?"
"You don't already know?"
"I thought it was more polite to ask," he explained. As she unbuckled the lid on the leather carrying case, his eyes wandered along the ceiling and walls of the small cabin. "One obvious if unappreciated aspect about life on a warship: the normalization of the lack of privacy. If you want to have a private conversation, your options are limited to the sorts of spaces directly controlled by a ship's skipper."
That's an invitation if I ever heard one. In her right hand, she fitted the brushed steel body of the microphone into its matching stand, and with her other, plugged in in the stereo headphone jack on the side near the shoulder strap's attachment point.
"That's quite an antique. Even for a ship this old," he observed thoughtfully. "An interesting choice."
"Yeah, well, ya' can't hack a reel-to-reel player, now can ya'?" she countered, opening the plastic dust cover and proceeding to tighten the screw reel holders. She was surprising herself by how natural this had become. "Wouldn't you need to get clearance for this sort of thing?" she asked, her right hand at the bank of four metal dials next to the tape tension regulators.
"Clearance?" he asked.
"On account of you being both an admiral and in the foreign ministry? Or are you that high up that you're your own boss?" she asked.
The overly-broad mischievous grin became a little more subdue. "Just start the recording, Ms. Kisaragi."
She smirked herself before pushing and turning the silver control knob upwards into the record position, next to a pair of additional left and right stereo recording ports. "Have it your way then," she snickered as the reels began to spin as the tape was pulled through.
[START]
Yuffie Kisaragi: [LOUDLY] So, I'm aboard a Junon Navy warship about sixty klicks off the coast, speaking with Admiral Thomas Kessler.
Thomas Kessler: [LOUDLY] Vice Admiral Kessler, aboard the escort cruiser Bonaventura. That's K-E-S-S…
YK: [REACHING OVER] Hold on, see how those needles are jumping? The recording level is too high, I need to adjust.
TK: I can see that.
YK: [SOFTER] Okay, that's better. Sorry, Vice Admiral Kessler, who's a spokesman for the Junon Foreign Ministry.
TK: And Ms. Kisaragi is an envoy for the World Regenesis Organization and, how would you describe it? Chief of its intelligence-gathering service?
YK: [ANGRILY] Gawd, what is with you people, always trying to change the topic back to me? That's so annoying!
TK: If I may offer, you're a very interesting person. Even before the W.R.O., a princess of the Wutaian Empire, a member of the anti-Shinra movement AVALANCHE, the list goes on and on.
YK: No, stop that! Thomas Kessler, Junon Foreign Ministry and the navy!
TK: [CHUCKLING] So, if you're not an envoy, and you're not here a spymaster, why did you come to Junon, Ms. Kisaragi?
YK: [SILENCE]
TK: Dead air…
YK: [LOUDLY] Because someone told me to come. [NORMALLY] Someone I spoke to someone in Kalm during my investigations, someone who worked for people high up in the company, told me to come here. And I'm hoping it wasn't a waste of my time.
TK: [SLOWLY] And this isn't about arms inspections?
YK: I prefer to think of myself as a fact finder, actually.
TK: What sort of facts? What sort of investigation, exactly?
YK: [SMIRKING] Huh, no answer for that? Apparently not. So tell me, Mis-ter Thomas Kessler, what did you do for the Shinra Corporation? Before and during the Jenova War?
TK: No more beating around the bush I see. [SCOFFING] Well, whoever you spoke to previously, I didn't work for the Shinra Corporation. I worked, though I prefer the word 'served', for the Junon Navy, in the General Affairs Office. I wasn't employed in the Foreign Ministry until after the fall of Midgar.
YK: General Affairs. So you weren't aboard a ship then?
TK: It's not obvious? Not usually, no. Few of us were. During Shinra's time barely a tenth of the Junon Navy was operational, which is why I suppose it was called the 'Peace Preservation'. I finished high school the year the Second Wutai World War began.
YK: So you got into the navy for that?
TK: More or less. It wasn't to fight AVALANCHE, if that's what you're thinking.
YK: So you did look me up, huh? [FORCED LAUGHTER] You know, an old man explained to me the difference between the company and the military, a difference I didn't really know even existed. The military, company, and the Turks.
TK: And who was this…old man you spoke to previously?
YK: [GLEEFULLY] Can't go outing my source, now can I?
TK: [PAUSE, FOLLOWED BY SLOW CLAPPING] Well done, Ms. Kisaragi. It's quite possible that I underestimated you.
YK: Was it my abundant beauty or my want of age? Don't answer that.
TK: Your age, Ms. Kisaragi. You have to understand, by the standards of the military, I'm still considered young. Though I am the same age as your Commander Highwind.
YK: Commander…right. So, you're not secretly working in any other government ministry are you?
TK: Well, it wouldn't be much of a secret if I told you, would it. [CHUCKLING] What did you have in mind?
YK: Oh, I don't know, the Oil Ministry?
TK: You really aren't a weapons inspector, are you, Ms. Kisaragi?
YK: That's what I keep telling you guys! Gawd, it's so frustrating! [GROAN] Let's get something out of the way, remember what I said earlier? About power? I know everything about Junon's real power. Shinra's gone, mako's over, so everyone needs oil. Junon controls the seas, so they control offshore drilling, which means they control oil, which means they can power fuel their ships, so they control the seas. It's a big, boring cycle no one ever shuts up about. [PAUSE] So, you don't work for the Oil Ministry, huh? I'm pretty sure they weren't even around during Shinra's time.
TK: The Ministry of Petrochemical Industry was not. Back then, oil extraction and refinement was mostly of interest to the navy and air force, and was managed by a subsidiary of Shinra's automobile division.
YK: Right, because of the mako reactors. You knew a lot about those even back then?
TK: No more than anyone else in the military, and most of the men that crewed the Sister Ray are either dead or with your organization in Edge, the same place they've been since the fall of Midgar. If that's your line of questioning, you should be speaking with them.
YK: [TAUNTING] Who says I haven't?
TK: All the same, I don't think you're going to learn that much from the Ministry of Petrochemical Industry. You know you should speak to?
YK: Who?
TK: The original designers of Shinra's mako reactors.
YK: [LOUD LAUGHTER] Haha!
TK: I'm sorry, what's so funny?
YK: Haven't you heard? I work for the original designer of the mako reactor.
TK: [LAUGHTER] No, you don't.
YK: Yes I do.
TK: Ms. Kisaragi, let's do some basic maths. Mako-generated electrical energy has existed for more than forty years. Your boss, Reeve Tuesti, was born in 1972. So you think he was designing mako reactors more than two years before her was born?
YK: [PAUSE] Okay, I guess that doesn't make sense.
TK: The design team of the first mako reactor are in their sixties, at the very least, if they're still alive. I know of at least one who is.
YK: And where is he?
TK: To the best of my knowledge, the same place as the first operational mako reactor.
YK: You mean Nibelheim?
TK: The very same. You know your history, it seems.
[STOP]
Yuffie pulled her arm back from the navigation controls on the reel-to-reel. Recomposing herself, she sat back down and stared at Kessler with the coldest, most apathetic brown eyes she could manage. "Did you just tell me Shinra has an operational reactor in the Western Continent?"
Kessler stared back at her, the right corner of mouth almost rising. "I didn't say that. And you know our country's position—our sphere-of-influence, as you'd call it, extends from Costa del Sol to the Sunset Mountains in the north and the Corel River in the south. The Nibel Mountain Range, and Nibelheim, are foreign territory. Your territory, ostensibly."
"So in other words, I should know?" she growled. "Keeping our house in order, and all that crap?"
"After that whole diplomatic row that shut down the Junon Reactor, I assume your government has a vested interest in keeping track of these sort of things. Or is that not why you're here?" he asked, eyebrow raised.
"Would you stop calling it 'my government'?" Yuffie hissed, grasping the reel-to-reel and pulling it towards her on the tabletop. "You government pr-…jerks are all the same, uniforms or not."
"That we are," Kessler ruminated cheerfully while she reached for the large knob on the side of the reel-to-reel and turned it again.
[START]
YK: [FORCED RECOVERY] Of course, you probably won't know that the W.R.O. tracks every surviving mako reactor in the world to guarantee that they've been disabled. Including the Mt. Nibel Reactor.
TK: That all certainly sounds correct.
YK: And we've done a good job of that, unlike how we handled Deepground.
TK: [PAUSE] Ah.
YK: [GLEEFULLY] Not expecting that, huh?
TK: The topic of the Deepground Army? No, I wasn't. Though to be completely transparent with you…
YK: Oh, yeah, you're the image of transparency. [SNORT]
TK: To be completely transparent with you, in my capacity as an officer of the Junon Navy, there's not much I can say about the suppression of the Deepground Army in last year's…incident.
YK: Incident, huh?
TK: [IMPATIENTLY] What I'm saying is you'd want the army.
YK: Yes, yes. The Junon Army. The New Army of Midgar. All those guys. The people who actually did something during the Jenova War.
TK: [CHUCKLING] Yes, them. May I speak freely?
YK: [GROANING] Gawd, I wish someone would.
TK: In our ongoing dialogue with Edge, there is a historical personality who has consistently come up. That's something I can say on behalf of the Foreign Ministry.
YK: Illyich?
TK: [LONG PAUSE] I…
YK: Isn't that who you mean? The political prisoner?
TK: Actually, I was going to say the top-ranking man in SOLDIER, Sephiroth.
YK: Why would anyone care about Sephiroth? He's dead and buried.
[STOP]
Kessler stared at her, eyes wider than she'd seen them, as she stopped the recording again and drew her hand back, concealing it in her vest. She waited a minute while the two sat in silence, listening to the ambient noise of the warship that surrounded them, the whirling of metal against bearings, the creaking of the hull, and the muffled sound of a hundred footsteps.
"Mr. Kessler…Admiral Kessler, whatever you're called. I know that Sephiroth has…had a history in Junon, going back to the first AVALANCHE Insurgency."
"Is this a conflict of interest? What with your background and…" he asked.
She ignored him. "Sephiroth died three years ago. The Kadaj gang, those cheap copies, more than a year ago. The east Midgar Basin is still strewn with what's left of the Deepground Army from the Battle of Midgar, what hasn't been picked over by scavengers and animals," she enlightened him.
"A glorious victory for the security forces of the World Regenesis Organization," Kessler offered in a small voice. "To be sure."
"Well, they…we do have a mantle of responsibility to the world. It's in the name, after all." She felt her own lip curl up. "If the Junon Army, like the name says, was raised in defense of the State of Junon, where does that leave the New Midgar Army?"
Kessler seemed to appreciate the jab. He likes a scrap, this one. "Since there stopped being a Midgar? Well, a Midgar with living residents anyway. While it is true that we coordinated with them in the defense against Deepground before that aforementioned glorious victory, and I won't lie that we're on good term, at the end of the day…they don't answer to the military hierarchy in the Citadel. You'll need to take it up with them."
"And who's 'them'?"
"I don't know, I'm not in intelligence-gathering," he replied rather unconvincingly. "But if I had to speculate I'd say go to where they're currently the most organized."
Healen Lodge, he means. "So you're saying Shinra controls the New Army of Midgar. But not the Junon Army, of course," she patronized him.
She expected him to give a defensive smirk back, as usual, but instead Kessler grasped his peaked visor cap in his right hand, his glove deforming the soft wool of the white crown. He held it at her. "You see the metal cockade on this cap?"
"You mean the badge."
He nearly rolled his eyes. "Yes, the badge. You see that symbol?"
She squinted her eyes at the small stamped-metal badge. "An anchor over a Shinra diamond surrounded by a wreath. Same as the others." She leaned back into her wooden seat. "Those flat-top caps the army wears, they have the same badge, minus the wreath and anchor."
He nodded. "Except it's not the Shinra diamond, is it?"
"Huh?"
"Look closer," he said, offering her the cap. She took it and stared harder. The whole emblem couldn't be much more than four centimeters tall; underneath the little metal anchor, the diamond was less than half that. After a few seconds of staring, she could just barely make out a tiny pattern of symbols in the diamond, in contrast with the distinct flat geometric shape used in Shinra's logotype. Likewise, under the separate piece of the anchor, it looked like the diamond was missing not just a portion at the top vertex, but the bottom vertex opposite that, making it horizontally symmetrical as well as vertically.
I never noticed that. Then again, why would I? "So it's different. Why's that?" she heard herself ask, to her immediate regret.
Kessler was smiling again. "A very long time ago, before your parents or my parents were born, the princes of Junon fought the princes of Midgar."
She'd heard part of this story before. "For what?"
"What else? Hegemony over the Eastern Continent." Reaching over, he opened one of the drawers lining the wall and produced a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, and began drawing something: a pair of identical diamond-shaped shields. He then drew a pair of similar but not identical crowns, one over either diamond, before filling out the details inside the shields. The shield on the left featured alternating shaded and unshaded stripes in one half and a crudely rendered bird of some kind in the other; the shield on the left a double cross rising out three hills on one half and a trio of fleurs-de-lis arranged in a triangle.
"Midgar, Junon," he elaborated, putting down the pencil. "Eventually, they formed a dual monarchy in the face of threats from the west—at the time, the Principality of Kodaishu, an extinct kingdom that claimed to be the descendants the Cetra." To demonstrate, Kessler folded the paper over once, and then again, to merge the left half of the one shield and the right half of the other, dividing their crowns.
"Kodaishu," Yuffie mumbled.
"A millennia ago, they ruled from what is now called Gongaga. That merger dominated the eastern hemisphere for centuries. But sometime after they conquered the Duchy of Kalm, kings and queens fell out of fashion at symbols of national unity." His eyes wandered back up to her momentarily. "Well, here in the east anyway. But their heraldry did not."
With two sharp motions, Kessler crossed out an identical slice of both the top and bottom of the diamond, where the two symbols merged. "The Eastern Confederacy, which replaced the Royal Council of the Crown Lands and the Western Marches. When Junon fell to Wutai, it became the Midgar Confederation. Around that time, what was left of the royal heraldry was unofficially abandoned for the solid red of blood sacrifice. And around that time, a young man named Shinra appeared in the Midgar Basin."
With Yuffie's eyes still planted on him, Kessler shifted back into his seat. "None of this is a secret, you know. There's a museum to Old Man Shinra here in Junon that explains it," he smirked.
Yuffie could feel herself turning red. "Thanks," she spat out after a moment longer. "Glad I didn't bother recording any of that. Boring story anyway."
Kessler raised his hands apologetically. "And here I thought I had a good one for Reeve Tuesti's envoy, one you could bring back to your boss."
"And tell him that story?" she rolled her eyes. "No thanks. What else should I tell him? That Junon's military isn't just a bunch of barely-floating wrecks and fortress canons pointing the wrong way?"
"That, I suppose."
She packed her reel-to-reel into its carrying case, along with its accessories, and rose from her seat; Kessler politely rose to his feet, and the two exited through the narrow cabin door.
"Despite your best efforts, this was a boring visit, Kessler," she judged aloud.
"My apologies," he mewed back, guiding her through the corridors.
She took one last, long look at her surroundings, a reminder that they were aboard a floating steel ship and not in some subterranean tenement. "So, did this floating rust bucket actually do anything during the wars?"
Kessler paused and looked back at her, face full of thought. "As I understand it, she played in the sinking of the Amagi."
Yuffie could feel the hair on the back of her head stand up. She tried to hide that, and the feeling of regret that followed. "Is that so?"
Kessler's stoic face broke. "No, that's a lie. The Bonvatura is an escort cruiser. The most it probably ever did was shooting at the Wutaian Imperial Air Force."
With some effort, Yuffie managed to return his smirk with interest. He means, "Back when Wutai had one, fifty years ago."
Author's Notes:
Another chapter produced long, but at least faster (and, in fact, would've been longer-quite a few passages were cut and will appear in future chapters). Rather than moving directly to Walker's Account, as I should've, I thought I'd chance it and put this out for what is probably the most popular overall property I'm writing anything for (at least with the continued buzz with Playstation exclusivity with the post-game content for the aforementioned Remake; and here I am, not playing any of it). Hopefully if you're reading this, you have enough enjoyment of history dumps because, oh boy, here's another background history dump for you either way. As you can probably infer from the last chapter and the chapter before that, Thomas Kessler is, reasonably, an "important character." I had a serious fear that, in an extended conversational or interview setting, he'd end up sounding practically indistinguishable from Victor Io, with whom he has some superficial similarities (they're both military careerists, they are both polite to Yuffie in acknowledgement of her status, etc.). Yuffie, at the very least, treats Kessler different than Victor. Maybe it's still a problem in this chapter. Or maybe this chapter was a great success, let me know, will you?