Peace abandoned; Massacres as an intimidation tactic;
Clinical tests; Skinny-dipping with a thief

The fishing boat's motor chugged away as it glided through the clear water, its shadow flickering over coral and the shallow white sand. A cloud of black and white seabirds followed, skimming the surface of the waves, dipping to grab small morsels churned up from the seafloor in their wake. Yuffie, hanging over the side, groaned piteously and shoved with one foot at a chocobo encroaching on her space. Nerthius obligingly drew her head back, but only a few moments later, she was extending her neck again to rest her beak on the rail.

The birds and Fenrir took up most of the deck. To make room, Cloud and Tifa had stripped the vessel of everything they wouldn't need - all the nets, weights, and personal gear its owner left aboard - before taking the docked boat. For the first time he could remember, Cloud felt guilty for stealing transportation. Until now, they'd either bought it fairly or picked it up in the wild. When they stole something, they always took from Shinra. This boat was different - it was some ordinary person's livelihood. He steered around another sand bar, consoling himself with the thought that they'd left a decent price in gil and a note to find the boat near Mideel.

Another worry, much more pressing, was about the big ship they'd slipped past last night. Had it seen them? It had definitely been a Shinra ship. Steering around mangroves, sandbars, and reefs had sent them a lot closer to the larger ship than he wanted. Their little boat had no lights on, so he hoped they'd gone unseen or mistaken for late-night fishers.

"Hey, Cloud? How much longer?" Yuffie moaned, still glued to the rail.

He checked the cabin's clock and guessed their location. "A few more hours. We should get there around lunch."

The ninja turned an even sicklier shade of green. "Ugh, don't talk about food."

Cloud's stomach lurched sympathetically and he looked away. The mako in his blood enhanced his senses, but fortunately, it also stabilized his body's reactions. His motion sickness was controllable, provided he kept his mind busy with other things. Hence his fretting.

Despite the warm sun, a cold breeze washed over them as they clipped along, so the chocobos sat fluffed up. Freyr was asleep with his neck curved back over his body, and Nijoror greeted each passing seabird with a 'wark'. Nerthius blinked her eyes sleepily and ignored Yuffie's further shoves. Denzel hovered at Cloud's elbow to watch him steer, and Tifa sat in the rear, atop a built-in ice chest that must usually hold the day's catch, on lookout.

Suddenly she sat up bolt-upright. "Cloud! There's a Shinra ship behind those mangroves!"

Adrenaline spiked through him. "Denzel, take over."

"Eh?!" The boy's head jerked around, but Cloud was already rushing over to his partner, past the rising heads of the chocobos. She pointed to a clump of dark trees behind them.

"I saw it for a moment between the trees. It's much bigger than the one last night."

Which was a good and a bad thing. It couldn't follow them into shallow water, but it could carry a lot of enemies, and if it was a warship, guns. "You think they saw us?"

"Probably, but I'm not sure they recognized us for us. Even if they come our way, they could just be looking for the stolen boat."

He doubted Shinra would bother with a missing fishing boat. Had the Turks already realized they were heading back to Mideel? Had Shera been identified in Fort Condor? Had the dispossessed fisherman reported the note? Or was this a random patrol that lousy luck led to them?

"Yuffie, can you fight?"

She started to nod, then put a hand over her mouth, grimacing. "I could barf on them."

So they were down a fighter, and vulnerable on the water. They could skirt around sand bars and stick to shallow water, but if the ship had guns… He didn't want to fish Fenrir off the ocean floor. He took the helm back from Denzel, who looked relieved, jerking his hands away from the wheel like it was white-hot. "Do you have all of your equipment on?"

"You think we'll have to fight?"

"Maybe." He began swinging the ship around, returning to hide in the mangroves they had just passed.

The boy's eyes widened and his shoulders bunched, but he nodded stoutly. "I'm ready."

Cloud's mouth thinned. No, he wasn't. You were never really ready.

Tension raced along his spine. He felt trapped. This was a bad place to fight, with water surrounding them and the only solid ground provided by thin sand bars. He killed the motor, and they slid in among the aquatic trees. The chocobos started to rise, and Tifa and Denzel moved to soothe them, doing their best to keep them quiet.

What options did he have here? He began to warm up his materia. Comet could sink the other ship, no problem, but depending on how deep the water was, it could result in a mass drowning. If it came to it, he'd rather the sailors die than his family, but he wanted to avoid that worst-case scenario. Comet paired with Ice, maybe. Create a float of ice around the ship to slow its intake of water so the sailors could evacuate the ship. It would take time to make the float, though, and they'd be shot at all the while.

On the other hand, any ships in the area that might come in pursuit of them would be rerouted to help the stricken vessel. Mideel would still be warned to look out for them, but they could deal with that on stable ground.

"Cloud, I don't think we should stay with the boat. There's some dry land over there." Tifa pointed through the trees to a patch of glimmering sand. "If there's going to be a fight, I'd rather fight there." She bit her lip. "Also, we should get the chocobos off the boat. It's too easy to spot."

His eyes whipped toward Fenrir. Indignant dismay flared in his chest, but she was right. They could get away on the chocobos, but the bike had to stay. If Shinra found the boat, they would certainly claim the motorcycle, but they would likely send it to Urban Development for analysis, where Cait Sith could keep an eye on it. His only other option to keep Fenrir was to stay with the boat and hope Shinra didn't fire a missile at it.

Denzel and Tifa were more important. He nodded. "You and I will head for the sand bar. If it looks like Shinra's seen us, we'll break cover and draw their attention. Yuffie and Denzel, hide in the mangroves with the chocobos." It wasn't a large area, and the bright plumage of the chocobos would be visible if Shinra came looking. "Yuffie -" She groaned in response.

"See if you can get them to lie down in the water." Dead mangrove leaves swirled in the water, yellow and orange. With the birds semi-submerged, the litter would camouflage their plumage. Hopefully, he and Tifa could provide enough of a distraction to keep Shinra's attention.

Cloud waded through the hip-high water, which caught the black fabric of his pants and dragged against him. He sank a little into the soft ground with each step, and billowing sand hid his feet so that he couldn't avoid stepping into dips. As he pushed himself out of another one, he found himself sourly missing his adult body.

Over the sloshing noise of their progress, he heard the large ship's engines fade to an idle. It was stopping; it'd seen them. He quickly explained his idea about Comet and Ice to Tifa, and she was willing to give it a shot. By the time they reached the sand bar, he could hear multiple smaller engines. That could make things difficult.

He peered out from the last of the mangroves. The Shinra warship had stopped out in the channel, about one hundred yards away, and a dozen small landing craft were cutting through the water towards them. The motorboats began splitting off from each other, likely to surround the small island. Dangerous. If they came at all angles, Denzel and Yuffie would be exposed. He broke cover from the trees, putting a hand up to momentarily shield his eyes from the brilliant reflection off the clear water and white sand.

Tifa came to a stop on the sandbar beside him. "The ship's too far away for me to use Ice, but with those little ones…" She turned to him, voice steady but urgent. "Cloud, Comet."

He nodded. The smaller craft would have to turn back to the ship to act as lifeboats. He gathered his energy, red and black light surrounding him, the strength of the spell building in seconds. He raised his sword, and a dark rip appeared in the sky between him and the ship. He swung the blade down, and burning rocks shot from the rift, smashing into the hull.

It was a glancing blow, only a handful of the stones puncturing into the ship. The rest splashed into the sea. The water boiled where the rocks entered it, and churned and bubbled as it rushed into the torn hull. Above the waterline, smoke billowed out of holes further up the ship's side. Alarms began blaring. The nearest boats started firing at them, bullets kicking up sprays of water and sand, and Tifa cast a Barrier in front of them.

As he predicted, the boats closest to the ship were turning back, but the four nearest to them continued advancing. He could see the smooth helmets and dark uniforms of SOLDIERs. Some had weapons already drawn; others were waiting with grim faces. The atmosphere felt suddenly dry and charged, and Cloud's gaze raked over the oncoming boats, searching for the caster of the incoming spell. Fire rained down onto the beach, obscuring his view of the approaching SOLDIERs behind blinding light. Flames splashed off the Barrier, leaving scorched and stale air and the smell of smoke behind.

Startled cries from the chocobos alerted him to fireballs going wide into the trees. Tifa shot off ice spells to intercept and smother them. "Cloud, we can't fight like this!"

They couldn't. They didn't want to kill people, but this was too much. The fire's heat grew more intense, and he could hear the clinking noise of melting sand. The caster was getting closer. Through the crackle of flame, he could pick up the crunching hiss of the boats landing against the sand, boots splashing as they hit the water, the clang of weapons and armor as the SOLDIERs swarmed over the beach. The materia in his wristband thrummed. He could feel the pull of Full Cure, Restore, Revive. He could kill now and cure after.

"Cover me." Few Summons arrived quickly to a fight. He planted First Tsurugi in the sand before him; his Master Summon materia hummed as energy grew and built. Colored glyphs appeared around him before a ring of light pulsed away and the sky darkened. In that instant, the world held its breath. The bombardment of fire stopped. He could now see Genesis perched on the bow of one of the landed boats, his hand still alight with red fire magic. Closer, a half-dozen yards from the Barrier, Angeal ran at them, leading a charge of SOLDIERs. Then the unnatural stillness broke as the first knight appeared.

The giant and its sword ripped through the gathered force, sending up water and sand and blood. Then it was gone, and the second knight appeared, lance carving a deadly arc. The third came with fire, the fourth sent waves hurtling across the ocean with the impact of its mace. A longsword, a war hammer, Blizzard, a trident, then Comet. Each decimated the shrinking number of lives on the beach. The tenth arrived with a naginata, and then it was the last three. Gawain with his battle-ax. Lancelot with his holy sword Arondight. Finally, Arthur in crown and cape, the largest of the giants, wielding Excalibur.

The sky cleared. The whole attack had lasted for just over a minute, and left in its wake a swath of destruction. Torn bodies lay scattered across the blood-soaked beach. The boats were overturned, and the red leather of Genesis's coat was just visible, buried under sand. At sea, he could see the horror-stricken faces of those who had turned back to the troubled ship.

Carefully, with little time to lose, he picked his way through the corpses. There, he hadn't imagined it. The navy blue suit of a Turk. He crouched beside the man and cast Revive. There wasn't enough energy in the spell to heal much, but it brought him back to the living.

The man coughed and slowly pushed himself into a sitting position, slumping against the side of a boat. A mask of sand stuck to his blood-soaked face. As the Turk blinked his gray eyes back into focus, Cloud stood. Behind him, he was dimly aware of Yuffie and Denzel coming out of the tree line. Denzel went right to Tifa, but Yuffie moved past him, inspecting the broken bodies.

"Watch," he ordered the man. Master Summon glowed again, glyphs rising into the air. The Turk's eyes widened as a red glow built overhead. Phoenix blazed into the sky, its multi-colored fiery plumage outshining the sun. Cloud focused on the bodies around him. They weren't his enemies; he didn't want them dead. They had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wanted to save them, every one. They shouldn't be dead.

High above, Phoenix gave a cry, and fiery feathers rained down around them. The smell of bloody death faded as the men began to groan and stir. In front of him, the Turk's expression went slack with surprise. He glared at the man. "Don't follow us."

He made his way back to his companions, stepping around groggy SOLDIERs as they shook their heads, blinking life back into their eyes. Yuffie skipped among them to his side. As they reached the other two, he whispered, "Head back to the boat."

Cloud was at the treeline. He almost believed that Shinra was going to let them walk away, but things were never that simple.

"Wait."

Cloud was perfectly fine ignoring the call, but Yuffie turned back, hands on hips. "What do you want?"

Behind them, the Turk made his wobbling way to the front of the rising SOLDIERs. "Who are you?"

"AVALANCHE," was her quick, self-assured reply.

Cloud's face tightened, and he cursed internally. Leave it to Yuffie to do the unexpected. Not ten minutes ago, she'd been one lurch away from throwing up, and now she was posturing.

"What are you?"

Before Yuffie could say anything damning, Cloud snapped, "An anomaly," and grabbed her arm to pull her away.

Undeterred, the Turk stepped forward, his hoarse voice rising the further away they got. "What do you want? What are you trying to accomplish?"

"To make the world a better place!" Yuffie yelled back as Cloud hoisted her over his shoulder, running forward, leaping off tangled mangrove roots to land in the boat. He started the engine and felt the boat dip as Tifa loaded the chocobos. Yuffie set a shimmering Barrier around them, and Cloud wound their way out of the trees. Shinra had no way of following them, but there was a chance they'd try something as they left.

Out among the narrow channels, he let himself sag, and Tifa took over steering. He moved to the ice chest and peered back toward the little island - the Shinra ship and its flotilla were almost hidden behind the grove, showing no signs of coming after them. He lay back on the cooler and let out a shaky breath. Comet followed by two powerful summons, on no sleep, left him more drained than he wanted to admit. He could take a few minutes to rest, but then they still needed to sneak into Mideel.


It might have been safer to wait for the cover of darkness, hiding within the thick jungle surrounding the tourist town, but that would give Shinra more preparation time. Maybe the company had found the note left at the dock for the fisherman, and maybe they hadn't. Maybe Shinra would think they were heading back to Banora. She didn't know. Instead, she focused on Yuffie, a partial silhouette crouched on the wooden roofline above, observing the street and a Shinra patrol below.

The ninja hopped down. "Alright, street's clear."

Tifa nodded and walked casually out of the alley's shade into the bright sunlit street, Denzel half-a-step behind her. They made their way through the knots of brightly-clothed tourists and more practically dressed locals, up to the clinic's corrugated metal door. Inside, she took a deep, grateful breath of cold air-conditioning, powerful enough to cut through the jungle humidity. She pulled Joni's letter out of her pocket and set it on the receptionist's wooden desk. "I have a referral to see Dr. Liana Focara."

The sprightly young lady behind the desk glanced at the envelope, before turning to her boxy computer and clicking a few keys. "Do you have an appointment?"

"No."

"Okay, that's fine. Dr. Focara is currently with another patient, but if you're willing to wait, she should be available in, oh, half an hour or so."

She glanced back at the door. Yuffie was still outside keeping watch, so it should be okay. "I'll wait. Thank you."

"Alright, if I could just have you sign in." The lady slid a clipboard across the desk towards her. "Do you have your guardian with you?"

Tifa smiled, the lie awkward in her mouth. "I have my older brother." Different places had different ages of majority, but Shinra's minimum age of employment had effectively standardized it as fourteen years old. Denzel was fourteen now, mostly. Subjectively, in their personal timeline, his birthday was just behind them, but if he decided to sync up his age with the calendar date, it was still a few weeks away at the end of November. Time travel had certainly made a mess of things.

Since he looked older than her, the lie worked. The receptionist looked to Denzel. "Can I see some ID?"

She froze. That wasn't something they had planned out. Before she could come up with another lie, Denzel had one of his own.

"Huh? Oh, sorry, we were attacked on the way and lost our packs." He shrugged helplessly. It was true they'd come in without luggage. Their canvas packs were with Cloud.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I'm glad you're alright." A pause and the lady's eyebrow quirked. "But you managed to hold onto the referral?"

"It was in my pocket." Tifa quickly redirected the woman's attention. "I fell into mako a few years ago. It didn't seem to have any bad effects, but recently another doctor recommended I come here as a precaution."

The distraction worked. The woman looked much more concerned about the mako than the missing IDs. She instantly got up to rummage through a filing cabinet. She came back and handed a form to Tifa. "If you could fill this out."

Tifa glanced over the double-sided paper. It was a questionnaire about medical issues. Headaches, their severity and frequency; any hallucinations or memory loss. Any differences in her senses of hearing, sight, smell, taste. Honestly, this form seemed more appropriate for Cloud. Taking a pen, she sat in one of the waiting room's bamboo chairs. Well, she hadn't lied about falling into mako, so she might as well fill it out. She turned in the paperwork and returned to her seat.

Denzel finished looking at the posters on the waiting room walls and sat beside her. "I wonder how Cloud's doing?"

"He'll be alright. He knows what he's doing." She hoped. He'd taken Fenrir and the birds and was leading Shinra on a wild chocobo chase around the island while they took care of business at the clinic. He was tired, and Tifa would rather have sent Yuffie, but didn't want to risk the ninja's impatience letting anything else slip.

A nurse called her name and admitted her to the back. Tifa wrinkled her nose - the wooden walls and floor seemed to exhale a faint perfume of raw mako and industrial-strength bleach. They checked her height and weight on a rattling metal scale before leading her and Denzel into the exam room. There, the nurse checked her blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen levels, and lungs, noting everything down on a clipboard. "Dr. Focara will be right with you," he said as he left, closing the door behind him.

There was a swivel chair in the room, but it was pulled up to what was clearly the doctor's desk, leaving Tifa with a choice between the exam bed and a flimsy-looking metal stool. She chose the stool, and examined the shelves behind her, where securely-sealed flagons of diluted mako in different shades of green glimmered. The hair rose up on her arms, and she looked away, watching Denzel pace around the small space instead, examining posters again. To Tifa, they looked like the same posters she'd seen the last time she'd been here, with Cloud vegetative in a wheelchair.

A woman around Joni's age came in, carrying another clipboard and smiling. "Hello, I'm Dr. Focara. And you're Tifa Wallace?" She glanced down at what Tifa recognized as the questionnaire she'd filled out earlier.

"Yes."

"This is your brother?"

"Yes."

"Are you comfortable with him being here?"

Tifa smiled. "Yes, it's fine."

The doctor smiled back. "Just checking. It says here that you fell into some mako about ten years ago?"

"Yes, but that's not why we're here. We have a letter from Dr. Joni Rous." She held out the envelope.

The doctor's expression became curious. "I thought Joni was in Cosmo Canyon."

"She is. We just came from there."

Dr. Focara hummed a little as she pulled the letter out. Her eyebrows rose as she scanned it. "You know, Shinra asked me to work for them once. They had questions similar to these."

Tifa didn't know what to say to that. She shrugged in response, sharing a glance with Denzel.

"Well, I can write her a response later. Are you planning on taking it back to her?"

"It's what's fastest." Denzel nodded his agreement.

"Probably. I can't imagine Cosmo Canyon gets its mail quickly."

They shared a small smile. Small towns on the West Continent were notorious for the infrequency of their post.

"If you come back tomorrow morning, I should have it written. In the meantime, I'd like to ask you a few questions."

Tifa's pulse picked up, but she smiled calmly. "Like what?"

"After your fall, were you ever checked by a doctor?"

She shook her head. "No." She'd worried about it, a little, in the aftermath, but there hadn't been time, what with attacking WEAPONs and Sephiroth. "But I never suffered any ill effects."

Dr. Focara looked down at the questionnaire again. "I've never seen a case of mako exposure, especially a whole-body submerge, without side effects. I'd like to give you a physical exam and run a few tests."

She gave the woman a contemplative look. As a doctor from the clinic, and Joni's friend, Tifa felt like trusting her, but as someone who studied mako and talked of 'testing', she was suspicious.

Focara smiled reassuringly back. "Nothing invasive, I promise."

With a sigh, she agreed. "Alright." It wouldn't hurt to know.

"Thank you." Dr. Focara moved closer and pulled a pen from her coat pocket. "Can you look at me?"

It was a light pen, and she shone it into Tifa's eyes a few times. Tifa tried not to blink. Focara gave another small hum and turned to the counter behind her. There, she fiddled with an odd machine, a white metal box with a pair of protrusions sticking out like the end of a pair of binoculars. "Alright, now can you look into here for me?"

Doing as instructed, she found it was one of those long-distance eye tests with letters displayed, white on black, at the far end.

"Can you read the line of letters aloud?"

"E, G, D, H, F."

"Good. How about now?"

A new set of letters appeared, smaller than the last, and again she read them off. The process repeated three more times. Then she was instructed to put on a pair of headphones and when she heard a beep, to tap the side it came from.

"And that hand weight in the corner." Focara pointed. "Can you lift it?"

Obediently, she went and picked it up. It wasn't very heavy.

"Have you ever noticed being faster or stronger than those around you?"

Tifa's lips twitched. Seriously? At level ninety-nine, she was stronger than almost everyone she met. The only people she knew stronger than her were… Vincent and Cloud. Her gut suddenly tightened, and she turned away from the doctor to set the weight back down. She and Barret lifted the same weights. They were the same level, and she'd always thought of that as the reason for their matching strengths. But he was a six-foot-six, two-hundred-sixty-pounds wall of walking muscle (or had been before being de-aged). Even at maximum level, it shouldn't be possible for her to be as physically strong as him.

She thought back to her fight with Loz, when she'd pushed herself to her limits to fight a Sephiroth-like opponent. He'd tossed her around, but she'd recovered mid-air, landed on the church wall, and leapt immediately back into the fight. Zangan hadn't taught her that. Zangan couldn't have done it. The only others in AVALANCHE who could have were Yuffie, Vincent, and Cloud. One was a ninja who'd trained her whole life to pull off that kind of stunt; the other two had mako enhancements.

"Tifa?"

Her head snapped up. "Yes."

"Are you-"

"Yes, I'm stronger than nearly everyone I know." She raised a hand to her face, pointing. "I get what you're saying, but I can't be enhanced, my eyes don't glow."

"In our work here at the clinic, we've found that the amount of luminescence is determined by the amount and purity of mako absorbed and the duration of exposure. If you're comparing your eyeshine to a Shinra SOLDIER, then of course yours don't glow as much." Dr. Focara turned her head away momentarily, setting a thoughtful hand to her cheek. "I don't know what they inject SOLDIERs with, but it's not pure mako. Something else exaggerates the shine."

Tifa knew. JENOVA. The brightest eyes belonged to escaped specimens from Shinra, monsters with terrible mutations.

"Eyeshine or not, you're likely around the same power level as a 3rd or 2nd Class SOLDIER," Dr. Focara continued. "I've never had the chance to observe one in action, so I can't tell you for sure."

A level ninety-nine 3rd or 2nd Class SOLDIER. She drew a steadying breath. She glanced at Denzel, who stared back, wide-eyed, and shrugged to indicate his bewilderment.

The older woman considered her, her grey eyes going very soft. "The information that Joni wants… is it for you? Are you okay?"

Tifa shook her head, so vehemently her black hair swished around her shoulders. "I'm fine. Like I said, I never suffered any bad effects from the mako." She knew what those looked like.


Steam curled from the hot spring, blending with the muggy tropical air. Yuffie had found this secluded spot as a kid, her first time as a kid, exploring for materia. It'd been a simple matter for her to sniff it out again. Hotel walls hid most of Mideel's hot springs, but this steep-walled ravine was impossible to build a spa in, and required careful rock climbing to reach, so neither tourists or locals visited the little series of bubbling pools.

With a sigh, Yuffie stretched out in the hot water, feeling knots in her muscles melting away. To think, she'd almost lost the argument with Cloud about coming here. Honestly, who in their right mind would pass up a chance to go for a dip in a hot spring? She rolled her head back to look at the others. "C' mon in, the water's fantastic."

Tifa rolled her eyes as she finished tying up her dark hair into a high bun, and hissed as she dipped her foot into the steaming water. "Hot," she commented and lowered herself all the way.

Now Yuffie rolled her eyes. "No duh. Hey, Denzel, Cloud, you too, or I'm gonna drag you in."

Cloud ignored her. He remained alert, watching the dark undergrowth of the surrounding jungle. Denzel, bashful, stripped down to his boxers and hesitated. The atmosphere was too humid for their clothes to dry out if they wore them in, and they didn't have swimsuits, so they were skinny dipping. "We won't look," Tifa promised, and turned around to emphasize her point, folding her arms across the rocky rim. Yuffie looked at the bright red blush across Denzel's freckled face and laughed, but turned away too. Fireflies were coming out, green dots blinking through the shadowy trees. A parrot scolded them, but it was the only one. The whoops, burbles, chirps and screeches of unseen other animals were unalarmed, including the contented 'kwehs' of their chocobos above, clustered around a pile of greens and a Chocobo Lure. As much as the hot water, the noises helped Yuffie relax. There were no predators, no enemies, stalking through this bit of jungle.

She heard the splash as Denzel entered the pool above theirs. She looked up him, laughing again. His spring of choice was even smaller than theirs, pretty much a one-person pool. That just left… "C' mooonnn, Cloud, you said you lost them, so take a moment to unwind." She emphasized her point by stretching out again.

"They know we're still on the island."

Confidence made her grin. "And they won't bother checking any of the hot springs, because we're on the run and obviously have no time to relax." She'd come to this spring almost every time she'd been on the island, and she'd never seen tracks or signs of anybody else using it.

He sighed, but finally undressed. Despite all the buckles and buttons on his outfit, he was quick about it. He kept the Zeidrich equipped, materia glittering around his wrist. Her fingers itched looking at it. They soaked in silence, and when he looked like he was starting to relax, she scooted closer. He sent her a low-level glare, a warning not to mess with him. She bit back her grin. Time for a distraction.

"So, what did they have to say at the clinic? You looked a little freaked out, Tifa."

Cloud shifted abruptly toward the brawler, his motion sending a ripple through the pool. Yuffie took the opportunity to slide a little closer. Out of concern, of course.

Tifa rubbed her arms and wouldn't meet their eyes. "It's… The doctor there seems to think I'm enhanced."

"What!?" Cloud's eyes were wide, all his attention on his partner.

She slid closer again, torn now between genuine concern for her friend and gaining her prize. "You mean when you and Cloud fell in, the mako actually affected you?"

"Apparently," Tifa nodded. "She thinks I'm around the same level of enhancement as a 3rd or 2nd Class."

She was nearly there. "Huh. Wouldn't you notice the difference, though?"

A shake of the head. "We were gaining levels so fast back then, it didn't seem like much of a jump."

"But what about your senses? She did a lot of testing those," Denzel chimed in.

While Tifa and Cloud were distracted looking across the small spring at Denzel, she gauged the distance and depth between her and Ziedrich around Cloud's wrist, propped underwater on a rock outcropping.

"Well," Tifa knit her fingers, thinking. "I'm not amazing, at least in AVALANCHE. Cloud and Vincent are enhanced. Nanaki is, well, Nanaki, and Yuffie's been training her senses since she was tiny." Yuffie refused to let the praise distract her, but her chest did puff up a tiny bit. "I was just the best out of the rest," the martial artist shrugged. Yuffie, apparently focused on Tifa, stretched her fingers out. Almost there. "Besides," Tifa continued, "Barret and Cid and Shera all work with machinery, they're all a little hard of hearing. Around you all, it wasn't hard to think of myself as just normal."

Got it. "Weird, but okay, Tifa's enhanced." Yuffie drifted slowly away, materia hidden in her closed hands.

"But," Cloud's voice was quiet. "Your eyes… I didn't realize…"

Tifa touched Cloud's cheek, sad but reassuring. Yuffie groaned, but Tifa spoke before she could tell them to get a room. "They don't glow because it was such a short exposure."

"They do, a little." Cloud brought his hands up too, gently cupping her face. "I just thought they were bright."

They made a cute couple, but with Ziedrich out of the water, Cloud was bound to notice his missing materia as soon as he stopped staring into his girlfriend's eyes. Yuffie wanted to control the reaction.

"Anyway~," she said in a singsong voice. "I thought up a way to get off the island without running into Shinra."

The two pulled apart. She grinned and held up Cloud's Master Magic. He cursed, immediately checking Ziedrich, now bereft of materia. Her smile grew. "Cast Mini on Fenrir, and the chocobos can carry it. No more boats." Utter glee laced her voice.

"Does that work?" Denzel asked.

"It works on weapons and gear, and when I was waiting for you earlier, I practiced on other inanimate objects." Like the book she'd stolen off that SOLDIER. "It works fine. Stop by the clinic tomorrow, pick up the paperwork, then we're off to the Canyon, with no. more. boats."


Notes

So I went with the Dissidia version of Comet instead of the main game for a few different reasons, and I'm pleased with the way the fight came out.

Yes, Yuffie stole Loveless. And a lot of materia from the SOLDIERs on the beach.