Gongaga—a hick town with a hayfield outside, and a landfill over the ridge.
Cloud and party had taken the fork where the asphalt ended, following the dirt road down to a desert outcropping of huts. Dome shaped dwellings with sheet metal roofs and speckled sidings dotted the dry ground, wigwams with satellite dishes and propane tanks. A basketball court lay empty, next to a gym with redone and already broken windows, painted in marker tags. The reservation was a rundown hotbed for petty-crime.
They halted their motorcycles in the center of what passed for town, and Cloud gaped in awe.
"Look familiar, Cloud?" Tifa asked, but Cloud crinkled his nose.
"…No…what the fuck? I don't remember that being there…" he pointed to a dilapidated grocery store, "I remember it being over there…" and rerouted it down and across the street.
"…This…" he hopped off his bike in confused awe, "…this is all wrong. Are we in the right place?"
Aerith dismounted her Chocobo and brushed past Cloud without a word.
"Where are you going?" he called after her, but she continued into town on her own. Something about her stride spoke without words. She was not to be followed.
Down past battered shanties with thatched roofs she strode in her white cloak, the grace of an angel that drew stares from dark-haired children playing spear-the-queer in a back alley. For five minutes she walked over gravel and tar chip that had sat for years on the roads. She'd never been here, but she knew the way to the trailer she was looking for. Down a side-path dotted with bits of broken animal stalls, she found the marker that let her know where she was; a dirt-bike with hand-painted decals.
The mobile home sat unlevel behind a tree that had been cut at the trunk, sun cracking the exterior to paint chips. From under a stack of tires, a cat emerged, yelling its head off and striding toward Aerith.
"Hi Katie," she stooped to stroke the grey tomcat, who knew its name. He yowled with tail straight in the air while Aerith took a deep breath. Eyes straight, determined, she walked up the rusted metal stairs. A light tap with the back of her knuckle, and a long moment passed before a woman appeared through the crack in the door, dark hair wrapped in a shawl that ringed suspicious eyes.
"Mrs. Fair?" Aerith asked, no response from the woman. "I'm Aerith Gainsboro. I—"
"I know who you are. Please come in."
"I don't wish to be a bother."
"My ex-husband doesn't live here anymore. My home is your home. Please."
Meanwhile, Cloud and company meandered around the dilapidated downtown area. It was three square blocks long anyway. He passed by abandoned storefronts with dusty glass display windows still bearing the signs of what they once sold—a former candy store, a video rental place with old movie posters still tacked up, a ladies shoe shop, a family-owned restaurant. Now the only places that remained open were a liquor store that doubled as a smoke shop, a chain pharmacy, a notary public, and a walk-in clinic with an STD testing sign hung on the banner.
Cloud recognized none of this, wandering around in a befuddled haze as Tifa followed silent in his wake. A small school lay on the corner of Nothing Street and Nowhere Lane, barbed wire over the chainlink fence that enclosed a dry grass field and construction yard bungalos for classrooms. Like a little prison. He leaned on the fence with long eyes as kids played in the yard at recess. They all had dark hair and dark eyes, no variation. A couple boys squinted up at Cloud leering at the fence line.
"Creeper," they scoffed as the bell rang, and made their way back to classes. Cloud squinted, eventually leaving them be and continued on.
Outside a bodega, the party leaned against the chipped brick wall. Barret was fed up.
"Let's do what we came here to do. Where's the reactor?"
"At this point, I honestly have no idea," Cloud said to the sky.
"Prolly outside town somewhere. I'll ask the shop gal." Barret went inside with Cloud and Tifa in tow. A little brass bell on the door announced their arrival. Barret marched up to the dark haired shopgirl with a big smile on his face.
"Hola, you recognize this hombre?"
"Wrong country, Barret," Cloud grimaced. The girl shot them raised eyebrows.
"Estamos looking para reactor."
"Uhhh, it's north out of town."
"Gracias girl." Barret winked at her, and Cloud ran a hand down his face as they walked out.
They meandered over to their bikes, where the Chocobo was tethered to a telephone pole picking at dried weeds, when they spotted Aerith strolling toward them. Cloud seemed awakened, but she had a distant look in her eyes.
"Where'd you get to?"
"Nowhere."
She walked right past him without so much as a glance.
"…You went somewhere. Wanna share what you seem to know about this place?"
"No."
She tended her Chocobo, ignoring Cloud like a passerby, and it finally hit that point for him.
"Look what the fuck?"
Still no response, not even eye-contact. He stormed up to her.
"I've had to kill friends in the last forty-eight hours! I've lost everything, I've got some psycho chasing after us, and I'm trying to keep you alive, and all you're doing is acting like such a bitch!"
"Cloud, shut up!" Tifa shoved him. She stood in between him and Aerith with a blood glare, while Aerith maintained her distant stillness. But when Tifa turned to put an arm over her shoulder, Cloud caught muffled sobbing.
"At least you still have him. At least you still have him," whimpered Aerith as Tifa rushed her away from the boys for a walk. Cloud caught his breath watching them go, words like cotton in his mouth.
They hit the backrounds up to the highest hill in sight, parked at the base and started walking. They could see pipelines protruding from pump stations scattered along the apex. They followed them up to the service road that could only lead to a reactor site. From that high up, they could discern faintly the flickering lights of Midgar far in the distance. Finally, they reached the dozer lot, the heavy machinery bone yard leading up the massive Mako Reactor—a tetral refinery splayed in pipe towers and rigid conduit mayhem.
They climbed the industrial scaffolding steps to find the door rusted open, and the inside ill maintained like an overused carburetor that had never heard of a tune-up. Personnel hadn't been there in years. The station ran on full-auto supplying meager trickles of energy to the populace below, with the majority of its product shipped straight to the capital via a network of spliced pipelines and autonomic functions.
They walked through the creaky reactor like an abandoned aircraft carrier, until they came to the chained off hydrocracker, where the raw Mako was pumped from the source. Cloud ducked under the chains to enter an enormous antechamber, containing only a single encasement in the center.
Jenova's Wrist lay sealed in a titanium pod. The containment capsule stood on a platform suspended over the Mako chamber, a dark decent into apocryphal doom. Hooked up to wires and pressure rods, destruction seemed as easy as slicing them to drop the egg into boiling bile below, until they saw it…
A colossal crystal, hovering in an aural suspension above Jenova, encapsulated of velochasmic glass. The Fal'Cie slept in its chrysalis state, refracting broken light from the neon Mako off its faceted skin. Cloud and party approached the platform cautiously, and still the crystal remained in pause. This could be as simple as getting in and getting out, until Red sneezed.
A screech filled the interior of the antechamber, echoing like blooded livestock. They all threw their hands over their ears. The crystal's cocoon stirred, reflecting jagged sheerlight in enraged spectral patterns. The skin began to shift, and appendages lifted themselves from the crystal's core form in sharp, knife-like spears.
A massive glass mantis stood in their wake.
Cloud's eyes filled with terror at the creature that beheld them, a gargantuan emerald weapon of sheer catastrophe and killing power.
"What the hell kind of bug did we just bug?" shouted Barret, and a sharp laser bolt streaked straight for him. He leapt out of the way, and it was on. The whole party formed up and flipped into combat mode.
Aerith cast a Barrier around the entire party, deflecting the errant lasers that shot out from the Weapon's facets. A massive spiked leg jabbed for them, slamming into the platform as they all leapt away. But Cloud drew his Rapier from his weapon screen and jumped in for a crash-stab into the leg's joint. The thin wire of a weapon slit through the minute gap in armor to pierce soft insectoid flesh, and the creature screamed.
Barret unloaded hell in a burst of rocket fire at the crystal's torso, mostly to distract it while Red and Yulan dashed around it's legs, zipping out of the way of crashing blows. Cloud and Tifa charged in, aiming for the speckles of crystalline armor that didn't shine. These were pure skin and vulnerable to attack.
Tifa kicked up to Cloud's shoulder and launched off him to stab her wooden katana into an opening. The screech blaring in their ears told them she'd hit it. A vicious swipe from a leg sent her careening back, and she crashed into the platform seeing double. Fading from consciousness, life suddenly returned to her. Aerith shot her a wink as she cast Revive.
Cloud climbed the mantis' facets as the rest of the party harassed it. But his accent did not go unnoticed. The head of the mantis swung down, and Cloud saw himself face to face with giant mandibles of slicing precious stone. The refracting eyes of the monster were filled with rage at his intrusion, and the gaping maw shot in to devour him. Then a line of flarefire slammed into the left eye to shatter it. Aerith prepared another Fira bolt.
Cloud had no time. He climbed with all his might up the side of the mighty crystal, until he came to the spot where the neck met the torso. He drove his sharp rapier tip into the joint with all his might, and a serrated ray of light sent him flying.
He hit the deck hard as the girls rushed to help him up. A scream like death rang out in the chamber, and the creature flailed amid shooting black brine. A vortex of lurid light culminated, and the Fal'Cie exploded in electrostatic rays. The calamity snapped the wires of Jenova's Wrist, and the pod fell down into the depths of which none could follow.
Propulsion generators failed, and warning sirens blared. Cloud and party rushed amid a low rumbling to get out of the facility. They hurried as fast as they could down the hill, diving into underbrush as the facility exploded in mushrooming cloud. From way up on that hill, they could see the lights in a portion of the distant city of Midgar go out.
The team picked themselves up out of thorn bushes, brushing themselves off and picking splinters out of their pants legs.
"Well, one down, about a hand full more to go."
"What was that all about?" asked Tifa. "Why do the Crystals not want you to kill Jenova?"
"I don't care what the Fal'Cie want at this point. This will make Sephiroth fuck off. I can figure this out later, but not if I'm dead," Cloud glared, pointing at his branded forearm.
"Well where next, Cloud?" asked Barret.
"Let's just get the hell away from here at this point. I'll check the napkin at the next gas station."
[Received Emerald]