Chapter Three

Discoverings

by Kal
Cloud and Vincent entered the town. It was as always,quiet, with little people in the streets . In the middle of it, the empty plataform of the Shinra 26 stood there, as a silent reminder that man had gone once into outer space, a silent monument that reminded dreamers everywhere that dreams can come true.Knowing where Cid lived,they were in front of his door in a couple of minutes,and they smiled when they heard the normal string of curses coming from behind it.

"What the hell do you want!?"

Cloud and Vincent just smiled. Cid then passed from being really pissed,to be very happy in just a moment.

"Well, I´ll be damned! What kept you guys from come to visit me before? Get your butts inside my house now!"

They entered the house. It had changed a little since their last visit. What they noticed most was that vases full of flowers were in almost every room. Also, gone were all the machinery parts that littered the floor a long time ago. It was evidently Cid hadn´t been doing many mechanic work lately.

"Sit and have a cool one. Shera! You will never goddamn guess who came!"

Shera got out of the small workshop they had in the house. She was covered with grease, having a couple of black goggles in her head.

"Cloud! Vincent! How you´ve been? It´s been months since you came with Tifa and Barret and his daughter."

"Hello Shera. Glad to see you."

"Hello. Glad you are okay."

Cid came back from the kitchen, with three beer mugs in his hands.Soon, they were remembering, among laughters, their fight against Sephiroth and Shinra. Cid laughed very loudly when he remembered the Turks phrase "We may retreat, but we are still victorious."

"Those assels had luck I didn´t use their air filled heads to mop the floor! HAHAHAHAA!"

Shera excused herself, saying she was a bit tired after working all the day in her Shinra Desert Buster ´67. She went to her room and closed the door.

"Cid, it is great to see you, and I would like to remember our war tales all night long,but..."

Cloud lowered his head, and his voice. "This isn´t a social visit.We hoped you could do us a favor."

Cloud then began to tell Cid about his weakness, how every day he was more and more weak, how he couldn´t lift his sword, and about how Vincent couldn´t transform into the beasts without a great effort. Cid listened in silence, ocasionally taking a breath from his cigarrette. At the end of the story, he just stood in his chair, seeing how the fire consumed his cigarrette. He took a new one from its box and lighted it.

"Well, of course I will take you guys to Junon. I haven´t seen Reeve in a while, and I wanted to talk with him about the new rocket."

"How will you take us? In the Highwind?" Cloud asked.

"Nah.Been too busy to repair it. I´ll take you in the Tiny Bronco II."

"Did you fix the Tiny Bronco?"

"Nah, I built a new one. It seems the other was swallowed by the sea during a storm while we were traveling in the Highwind. A group of fishermen told me all about it. So, a couple of months ago, while I was with Reeve at Junon, he told me they had found something in a warehouse and they didn´t knew what it was. He took me to a labs area in his building and in the middle of many machines,was the most beautiful thing I´ve ever saw."

"It was a JA-2100 engine for a jet. I´d heard about it while I was in Shinra. It seems they thought it was too expensive to be mass produced,so they just locked it in a warehouse. I took it,and after a couple of months, I had my new airplane. And I also added a couple of 17 mm cannons just ´cause I didn´t want to see them rust in a corner of my garage."

"You had military weapons in your garage?" Vincent asked.

"Hell yeah! And if you´re interested, I also have a portable rocket launcher, and a couple of uzi´s that I took as a souvenirs from my days in the Air Force."

"Thanks, but I´ll pass. I think we should go to sleep,since it´s late."

"Vincent it´s right. We´ll sleep at the Shangai Inn, we don´t want to bother Shera and you."
"Dammit! You are not bothering anyone! You can sleep here. The sofa in that room becomes a bed, and it has a rug, so the one who sleeps in the floor won´t be too discomfortable."

"Thanks, Cid." Cloud then went to the room and closed the door.

Cid was going into his room, when he heard Vincent.

"Yeah?" Cid said.

"Cid, haven´t you told Shera?" Vincent asked.

"About what?"

"About your feelings."

"Damn! What the hell are you talking about!? I don´t have any feelings for her!"

"You are lying." Vincent said.

"Go to hell! You don´t know what my goddamn feelings are, so leave me alone!"

"All right. But remember, it´s worse to ask yourself all your life what would had happened if you had talked. She deserves to know."

Cid just stood silent.

"Good night Cid."

Vincent entered the room that Cloud was in, and closed the door. Cid turned to enter his room. In a very low voice, he told something to himself.

"She deserves someone better than me."


Nanaki entered the house. It had been a very hard day. Being Cosmo Canyon´s protector was no walk in the park. First, he attended a meeting with the elders, to resolve if the Canyon should open to other cities, and make it a "modern, bigger city" in words of elder Hagen. In the other hand, "the Canyon should stay as the scientific and research center it had been sice ancient times" in words of elder Bugen. Both of them wanted the best for the Canyon, and it was something that wouldn´t resolve in one day. Nanaki then went to the office of elder Koryan. It was a young man, at 29 years, most elders being 50 and more older, but his merits had earned him the title of elder, and in the voting that followed to choose the new leader of the Canyon, he was elected by the mayority. The older elders doubted he could handle the job, but soon they were pleased to found they were wrong. He did a great job, keeping the researchs at the Canyon, and promoting the use of solar energy to complement the one obtained by eolic means.

They discussed about ways to make the Canyon grow, at the same time keeping it as a research and knowledge center. After hours of talking, they decided to left the matter to other day. Now, everything he wantd was to lay down.

Then,he sensed it. The hairs in the back of his neck arised. He was not alone! The fine insticts that his species had, alerted him of dangers, and this time was no exception. The intruder was in the lab of Bugenhagen. Nanaki entered the room, carefully. The room was dark, but he had no problems to see the intruder. He was against the opposite wall,hoping that whoever entered the room didn´t noticed his presence. Nanaki moved silently towards him, trying to do it as quietly as possible. Then, the intruder, feeling that something was wrong, tried to ran to the door.

Nanaki quickly jumped and tried to make the enemy fall. But he only grabbed the intruders backpack in his teeth. He fighted to not let it go, as the intruder tried to get away with it. They figthed for a couple of minutes, hoping the other would let it go. Then,the intruder kicked him, trying to make him let go of the backpack, but Nanaki ripped it, and the backpack´s content fell to the floor. The intruder quickly ran away, and Nanaki didn´t followed him. He wanted to see what was so important to the intruder to risk being captured.

His eyes then opened with surprise. The four Huge Materias were in front of him, gleaming as they had an inner light. Obviously, the intruder was after them, but why? Nanaki knew they were really rare materia, but they had no other use, apart from making Master materias. He put them in the machine again, and closed the door. He didn´t know the answers to his questions, but he knew of someone who could anwser them.

Reeve was in front of his computer, staring at the screen. What happened to the Shinra Army? The question always was in his mind, like a thorn that bothered him. He had the names of the soldiers, their adresses, heck, even the names of the bars were they got drunk. But they had vanished. How? Why? Where? He wanted to answer those questions, but, meanwhile,he had a company to run. He closed the file and began to see the proyects that were delayed. One of them in particular caught his eye. It had been delayed for more than six months. The one in charge of it always said the same:"I need more time." But Reeve was growing tired of this. Maybe he should send someone to check how the proyect was going.

"But,maybe I should see how it´s going by myself" Reeve thought.

Then again, he had a company to run, he couldn´t supervise every proyect personally. Maybe it was time to see how his "pet" project was going on.

Reeve exited his office and entered the elevator, checking that no one was near. He closed the elevator´s doors, and under the usual button panel, he slid open another button panel.He pressed one of them, and soon the elevator was going down the building, to areas so secret, only the ones who were working on them knew about them. The elevator stopped and it´s doors opened. Reeve then entered a labs area, with all sorts of electronic things on vey untidy desks, with computers working all the time. But, it was nothing unusual for a lab that worked on something so complex as AI:Artificial Intelligence.

"President Reeve! It´s an honor to have you here sir! Welcome!"

Reeve then turned to face the one who talked to him. It was a woman of around thirty years, the classic scientist: gold framed glasses, white lab coat, a pocket protector full of pens and pencils, a calculator in the other pocket. But, she distinguished from others because she was really atractive, even when she looked as the ultimate nerd. She was in good physical condition, altough it was obvious she didn´t do a lot of exercise, with blond, long hair falling behind her shoulders, and a face that made her look like a movies actress. Reeve always had wondered what such a pretty woman was doing in a lab, instead of being a model.
But then again, people always had to follow their own path on life. She was one of the most brilliant people he had in his company, leading the efforts to create Artificial Intelligence before anyone.
"Dr. Connor, thanks. I came to see how was advancing the proyect."

"Well, I´m very pleased to say that we are on the final stages. Soon, we´ll make a computer able to make decisions on its own, without human intervention." said Dr. Connor.

"How much will it be until it´s fully completed?" Reeve asked.

"Well, we are working non-stop. Everyone wants to complete this proyect as soon as possible. I even haven´t sleep in two days." Dr. Connor said.

"That doesn´t answer my question."

"Frankly, we don´t know. Even if we hadn´t overseen anything, it´s too soon to say a concrete date." Reeve nodded in silence. Creating a machine fully able to think and make its own decisions surely had to take an awful lot of time.

"OK. Then, keep me informed as usual, and if you need anything, don´t be afraid to ask for it."

Reeve then went back to the elevator and pressed the button to the floor his office was in. He needed to send someone he trusted to go check Proyect Plus. Maybe I could send someone else he thought.


In a cave near Wutai, the sound of the goats of water dripping from the tips of the estalactites was silenced by another noise.An electrical buzzing that indicated that machinery was being used there. At the sides of the cave where all kinds of scientific instruments, but what outstanded most was a couple of big, metal chambers. Suddenly, in the side of one of them, a red light became green, and the hidraulic sound of a door opening was heard. From inside, a short, black haired man with evil factions appeared.

After being disoriented a couple of minutes, inhalating the air that, until his liberation from the chamber had been breathed through tubes, he got up hesitantly, as it were the first time he walked after a long time. He went near a closet and took out a bundle of clothes. Soon, it was dressed in a white shirt, black pants and a lab coat, and the final touch, a pair of gold framed glasses, made evidently that a new nightmare had begun for his enemies.

"AAHHHNNN!!" he stretched "I knew I had to put a TV in there. It´s so boring to float in that green liquid,just thinking on my revenge." A wicked smiled then crossed his face. "But, then again it´s so much FUN to think about what´s to come."

He chuckled and took a pair of keys from a nearby table, then approached the other chamber. All the counters showed it was nearly done. Soon,where failure was, triumph would appear. He then opened a door,and a frigorific chamber was exposed, full of all kinds of food.

"Healthy mind in a healthy body" he thought. Then he started to laugh, adverting that one of humanity´s worst enemies had returned.