SIX: "Everyday Life and Death"
Tifa was waking up and preparing for her day by doing her morning stretches, Cloud was not in his room, Yuffie was reorganizing her prized collection once again behind closed doors, and Cid Highwind sat in a dank bar drinking an imported lemonade.
This was not the case across the sea that morning however, for the day had already began at dawn, as the preparations for New Corel were beginning. Barret had been busy with the other citizens of Corel unloading lumber from the back of a truck for quite some time now. A few teams of people were off in the distance, constructing simple wall frames, for the first house. It didn't take long for a building to take shape, after about an hour and a half the cubed frame of a room was built, another hour and a smaller extension had been added to it. It had been nearly 3 hours of work, and with the teams all working together they had began to add in more framing to the cube, and hanging a wall over the bare frame. By noon, the first house was up. It wasn't much to look at, but it had walls, a door and a few windows. When they really tried, Corel could really work together to create something.
With that first task completed in record timing, it was time for a lunch break. Barret sat alone, outside on a rock by the crossroads between the tents and the Tram going upwards to the Golden Saucer. He had only a sandwich in his hand. He sat and looked hard at the new building, he was proud of what the town was doing.
Barret remembered the way old Corel had been, back in the days when he and his wife lived there, along with his best friend Dyne and his wife and child, Marlene. It was a good life there, until the Shinra came with their reactor. It was because of them his life had taken the path it had. Barret took a deep breath and sighed as he exhaled, thinking of Marlene.
When Dyne disappeared, he had taken her in as his own child, but when Barret became head of Avalanche, she soon came into the care of Elmyra, Aeris' adoptive mother, where she remained still, back in Kalm. He missed his little girl. Over the past year, she too had grown quickly along with it, and now she was nine years old. Marlene had no idea who her real father was, at least the question had never been raised. Barret thought that she knew he was not her real father, mainly because he was a large burly black man, and she was a clever tiny white child. It was clear Elmyra had become a mother figure for her, for she had never truly had one before, with the untimely death of her birth mother in the original Corel fire.
It was around that time that Barret heard a distant noise, from down the road. Over the horizon, another cargo truck was driving towards town. It wasn't a supply truck it looked like a Shinra vehicle, and as it drew closer, that was confirmed.
"The hell is this?" Barret said aloud.
He rose to his feet as the truck came into town and stopped. The passenger door opened and Red XIII jumped to the ground. Barret was a little confused, but the sudden appearance of his friend overcame his curiosity.
"Red? Back so soon?"
Red looked up at Barret, a longer face than usual was about him. "My plans have changed a bit, I had planned on that trip to Icicle town, but these gentlemen here, have informed me that Icicle no longer exists." He said solemnly.
Barret's jaw dropped. "No longer exists? What crap is that?"
"It was burned to the ground yesterday. No survivors...."
Red turned his attention back to the truck cab. "Thanks for the ride back here, fellows."
"No problem! We were heading this way anyhow." A soldier replied as he poked his head out of the passenger side window.
"Hey, where are you guys goin' anyway?" Barret blurted out.
"Gold Saucer. We've got a shipment."
"Shipment? Of what? Shinra and Gold Saucer don't work together, do they?"
"We don't know what it is, we just deliver it. This is the first of it, there'll be plenty more from what we heard around the base." The soldier answered as he pulled himself back into the cab. The truck rounded the corner into the Tram platform where the two delivery workers got out of the truck and went to the compartment. Barret and Red followed. The doors were flung open and a large crate, big enough for two men to carry easily was concealed inside. However upon picking up the large wooden box the two men were having trouble getting it to the Tram.
Barret offered his help. "Need any..uh... help?"
"Nah.. We got it. Thanks though guy." Said the driver of the truck.
A few seconds later the crate crashed to the ground. A poorly constructed corner split off, and a small plastic container fell out. The two soldiers picked up the crate again after the driver yelled at his accomplice for not following instructions properly and got on the Tram. It left immediately afterwards and Barret and Red watched as it traveled up higher and higher until it disappeared against the faint image of the Golden Saucer that loomed on the horizon.
Red was sniffing the small container that had fallen out of the crate. It was like a small canteen with a twist off top, however it was transparent and contained a thick green liquid. Barret picked it up and investigated it for awhile.
"Should we open it?" He asked Red at that point.
"It doesn't have a label... maybe we shouldn't." Red cocked his head as Barret held the canteen between his gun-arm and his body and twisted the top off with his other hand.
"...or not." Red added.
A smell wafted out immediately piercing their noses, which made Barret put the top back on.
"Ugh... That's nasty." Barret coughed. "I figured it was Mako in there."
Red shook his head, the smell much more overpowering to his sensitive nose. "As did I... however that definitely is NOT a natural substance."
"So... what now? Do we give it back?" Barret scratched his head.
Red sat down. "I'm not sure. Before we do that, I'd like a counsel with the others on it."
"Others? Oh, Cloud and them?"
"Precisely."
Barret began to walk back into town as his lunch break was coming to and end. Red got up and walked with him. "Didn't you meet 'em in Costa de Sol?"
"The Villa was abandoned."
"Weird. They shoulda been past here by now if they left. Just a sec."
He pulled out his PHS and hit a button. After a few rings the other side picked up.
"Cloud?"
"Yeah? Barret??" Cloud spoke over the device, he seemed distracted.
Even Barret who was usually a little slow at picking up on emotional states could tell something was up. "Where are you guys?"
"We just took off from Junon."
"Junon? What're you doing back there? What's that noise?"
"Right.... you don't know. And that's engines; We're on the Highwind."
"I don't know a lot of things! Red here just said that Icicle Town burned down!"
"WHAT?"
"You didn't know?"
There was some distortion over the PHS. Cloud had his hand over the receiver so Barret couldn't make out what he was saying. Then suddenly Tifa's voice came on.
Tifa spoke. "How'd you hear Barret? Your still in Corel right?"
"Tha's right. Listen; Red and I got somethin' here we need to talk about."
"Well, right now we're all heading to the Gold Saucer. Meet us there and we'll all talk."
"A'ight.... See you in a bit." Barret turned the PHS off and looked at Red. "Sumthin' big is happenin'."
Meanwhile, aboard the Highwind II, Reeve comes down a small ladder from the upper deck bridge to meet with the rest of the company. "What's wrong with all of you suddenly?" He asked as he met everyone with a bitter expression of melancholy upon their faces.
Cloud spoke in turn, calm as the words came out. "Icicle Town burned down yesterday.." He slowly raised his eyes from the floor and shot them toward Reeve. ".. But you already knew that."
"Sadly, yes." Reeve solemnly replied. "I would have told you, however I did not want to derail your other efforts with the news. I have a team investigating.."
"What good will that do now? We all know what happened." Cloud looked around at his friends. "Jenova destroyed Icicle, and then she attacked Junon."
"Jenova..?" Cid spoke up. "That makes no god'amned sense at all. We wiped the floor with that spook."
"Are we sure that was Jenova? I mean, Jenova is a monster, right? That was a woman." Tifa broke her silence.
"She called herself the 'Crisis From The Sky', the only reference is Jenova, the original one. The one that came down and destroyed the Cetra." Cloud spoke.
Reeve stepped into the middle of the semi-circle they had formed. "I think it is time I revealed to you all, some findings I have uncovered the past year in Junon." Reeve spoke sternly, then he motioned for them all to follow him into the conference room. After a few minutes everyone had taken a seat around the table, Reeve at one far end and Cloud opposite him. Tifa and Cid sat to the either side of them.
Reeve began. "Surely you of all people Cloud, must have been wondering why I had not been on-site during the Midgar construction, right?"
"Well, a little; I suppose. What's all this have to do with anything?" Cloud admitted.
"I'm getting to that. You see, ever since I came into this Shinra thing, I had perpetually been in the dark on matters. Now, having the reigns of the whole operation I decided to take the liberty of learning a bit about the company's past."
"So you've been researching? Anything in particular?" Tifa asked.
"I began looking into Dr. Gast's files on the whole Sephiroth project, however I got a little sidetracked along the way. You see, I stumbled upon his personal journals, from the time he spent in Icicle in seclusion with Ilfalna."
"Ilfalna?" Cid was curious.
Tifa filled him in quickly. "She's Aeris' real mother, and Gast is her father."
"Oh.."
"Anyway...." Reeve continued. ".... She had told him a lot of things about the Cetra that he had never actually put into his official reports. A lot about culture and technology, and a lot of the final days."
Cloud intervened. "Wait a second... Ilfalna was there?"
"That was one thing I never fully understood." Tifa interjected Cloud's outburst. "I mean, Ilfalna and Aeris were both Cetra, but the Cetra died out centuries ago. So how'd Ilfalna even end up in the here and now.... or rather.... the there and then?"
"Yeah! What's up with that?" Cid suddenly realized that was true.
"Here we go." Reeve said. "Okay, Here's how it worked. I know the files weren't really kept very accurately back then, so information is a little sketchy, but from the journals, Gast writes that on the first expedition to 'Knowlespole', the Shell City, they found a huge shard of yellow materia. Sealed inside was Ilfalna, frozen with some sort of advanced time spell. They chipped her out and when she awoke and they did some tests they found she was infected with a peculiar virus; the virus itself was sampled and sent back to Shinra laboratory, and Ilfalna was cured indefinitely."
"Then that means that instead of finding Jenova frozen, they found Ilfalna instead." Tifa realized just how wrong the Shinra papers were, or perhaps they were altered to keep people from discovering the truth.
"In a way, Jenova, the monster we have all had to deal with was discovered that day." Reeve corrected her. "You see the virus that was shipped back to Shinra had a strange DNA to it. and after experimenting on the sample, Gast discovered that it could be cultured into a mass cell structure. From that, a strange beast was grown, and dubbed 'Jenova' after the bringer of the virus as told by Ilfalna."
Cloud sighed as he let the information sink in. "So your saying that what began all of this is a virus?"
"Yes, Jenova was a virus."
"And Shinra decided to start splicing it into soldiers?" Cloud asked another question.
"Gast discovered that the viral DNA strengthened the body when directly combined with other genetic samples, however he did not follow that research. But at that time, Hojo was adamant about it. So he conducted experiments secretly until Gast discovered he had even resorted to experimenting on his own offspring, and even himself."
"Sephiroth."
"Exactly. Well from there we all know what happened."
Cid shook his head. "But what's all this damn mumbo-jumbo have to do with this new broad? Huh??"
Reeve explained further that the virus that wiped out the Cetra had been somehow sent forth from Jenova, the woman who 'came from the sky' one day. Ilfalna was the only one to escape the effect, due to a desperate attempt to survive on the Cetra's behalf. With no cure, they froze her until there was one.
"Why only one person? Why not everybody?" Cloud asked.
"There were not many left at that time anyway.... The Cetra had suffered a tremendous loss from attacks from the Weapons."
"The Weapons?"
"Oh yes, The Cetra had defeated them, but it had utterly destroyed them in the process. After they had been thwarted, the Cetra had began to relax, and slowly spread out again, however within the same year Jenova unleashed the virus upon them."
"How sad." Tifa said to herself.
Cloud sat back in his chair. "Does anyone detect a pattern?"
Cid looked around at everybody. "I'm completely confused."
"We did this to ourselves!" Cloud exclaimed. "The Cetra defeated the Weapons, and then Jenova came to finish the job! Don't you see?"
"Yeah.... that's right!" Tifa sank in her chair. "When we destroyed the Weapons a year ago, that must have triggered something which awakened her now..." Tifa was cut off by Reeve.
"...to finish the job."
There was a eerie silence upon them as that idea set in on them.
Tifa was waking up and preparing for her day by doing her morning stretches, Cloud was not in his room, Yuffie was reorganizing her prized collection once again behind closed doors, and Cid Highwind sat in a dank bar drinking an imported lemonade.
This was not the case across the sea that morning however, for the day had already began at dawn, as the preparations for New Corel were beginning. Barret had been busy with the other citizens of Corel unloading lumber from the back of a truck for quite some time now. A few teams of people were off in the distance, constructing simple wall frames, for the first house. It didn't take long for a building to take shape, after about an hour and a half the cubed frame of a room was built, another hour and a smaller extension had been added to it. It had been nearly 3 hours of work, and with the teams all working together they had began to add in more framing to the cube, and hanging a wall over the bare frame. By noon, the first house was up. It wasn't much to look at, but it had walls, a door and a few windows. When they really tried, Corel could really work together to create something.
With that first task completed in record timing, it was time for a lunch break. Barret sat alone, outside on a rock by the crossroads between the tents and the Tram going upwards to the Golden Saucer. He had only a sandwich in his hand. He sat and looked hard at the new building, he was proud of what the town was doing.
Barret remembered the way old Corel had been, back in the days when he and his wife lived there, along with his best friend Dyne and his wife and child, Marlene. It was a good life there, until the Shinra came with their reactor. It was because of them his life had taken the path it had. Barret took a deep breath and sighed as he exhaled, thinking of Marlene.
When Dyne disappeared, he had taken her in as his own child, but when Barret became head of Avalanche, she soon came into the care of Elmyra, Aeris' adoptive mother, where she remained still, back in Kalm. He missed his little girl. Over the past year, she too had grown quickly along with it, and now she was nine years old. Marlene had no idea who her real father was, at least the question had never been raised. Barret thought that she knew he was not her real father, mainly because he was a large burly black man, and she was a clever tiny white child. It was clear Elmyra had become a mother figure for her, for she had never truly had one before, with the untimely death of her birth mother in the original Corel fire.
It was around that time that Barret heard a distant noise, from down the road. Over the horizon, another cargo truck was driving towards town. It wasn't a supply truck it looked like a Shinra vehicle, and as it drew closer, that was confirmed.
"The hell is this?" Barret said aloud.
He rose to his feet as the truck came into town and stopped. The passenger door opened and Red XIII jumped to the ground. Barret was a little confused, but the sudden appearance of his friend overcame his curiosity.
"Red? Back so soon?"
Red looked up at Barret, a longer face than usual was about him. "My plans have changed a bit, I had planned on that trip to Icicle town, but these gentlemen here, have informed me that Icicle no longer exists." He said solemnly.
Barret's jaw dropped. "No longer exists? What crap is that?"
"It was burned to the ground yesterday. No survivors...."
Red turned his attention back to the truck cab. "Thanks for the ride back here, fellows."
"No problem! We were heading this way anyhow." A soldier replied as he poked his head out of the passenger side window.
"Hey, where are you guys goin' anyway?" Barret blurted out.
"Gold Saucer. We've got a shipment."
"Shipment? Of what? Shinra and Gold Saucer don't work together, do they?"
"We don't know what it is, we just deliver it. This is the first of it, there'll be plenty more from what we heard around the base." The soldier answered as he pulled himself back into the cab. The truck rounded the corner into the Tram platform where the two delivery workers got out of the truck and went to the compartment. Barret and Red followed. The doors were flung open and a large crate, big enough for two men to carry easily was concealed inside. However upon picking up the large wooden box the two men were having trouble getting it to the Tram.
Barret offered his help. "Need any..uh... help?"
"Nah.. We got it. Thanks though guy." Said the driver of the truck.
A few seconds later the crate crashed to the ground. A poorly constructed corner split off, and a small plastic container fell out. The two soldiers picked up the crate again after the driver yelled at his accomplice for not following instructions properly and got on the Tram. It left immediately afterwards and Barret and Red watched as it traveled up higher and higher until it disappeared against the faint image of the Golden Saucer that loomed on the horizon.
Red was sniffing the small container that had fallen out of the crate. It was like a small canteen with a twist off top, however it was transparent and contained a thick green liquid. Barret picked it up and investigated it for awhile.
"Should we open it?" He asked Red at that point.
"It doesn't have a label... maybe we shouldn't." Red cocked his head as Barret held the canteen between his gun-arm and his body and twisted the top off with his other hand.
"...or not." Red added.
A smell wafted out immediately piercing their noses, which made Barret put the top back on.
"Ugh... That's nasty." Barret coughed. "I figured it was Mako in there."
Red shook his head, the smell much more overpowering to his sensitive nose. "As did I... however that definitely is NOT a natural substance."
"So... what now? Do we give it back?" Barret scratched his head.
Red sat down. "I'm not sure. Before we do that, I'd like a counsel with the others on it."
"Others? Oh, Cloud and them?"
"Precisely."
Barret began to walk back into town as his lunch break was coming to and end. Red got up and walked with him. "Didn't you meet 'em in Costa de Sol?"
"The Villa was abandoned."
"Weird. They shoulda been past here by now if they left. Just a sec."
He pulled out his PHS and hit a button. After a few rings the other side picked up.
"Cloud?"
"Yeah? Barret??" Cloud spoke over the device, he seemed distracted.
Even Barret who was usually a little slow at picking up on emotional states could tell something was up. "Where are you guys?"
"We just took off from Junon."
"Junon? What're you doing back there? What's that noise?"
"Right.... you don't know. And that's engines; We're on the Highwind."
"I don't know a lot of things! Red here just said that Icicle Town burned down!"
"WHAT?"
"You didn't know?"
There was some distortion over the PHS. Cloud had his hand over the receiver so Barret couldn't make out what he was saying. Then suddenly Tifa's voice came on.
Tifa spoke. "How'd you hear Barret? Your still in Corel right?"
"Tha's right. Listen; Red and I got somethin' here we need to talk about."
"Well, right now we're all heading to the Gold Saucer. Meet us there and we'll all talk."
"A'ight.... See you in a bit." Barret turned the PHS off and looked at Red. "Sumthin' big is happenin'."
Meanwhile, aboard the Highwind II, Reeve comes down a small ladder from the upper deck bridge to meet with the rest of the company. "What's wrong with all of you suddenly?" He asked as he met everyone with a bitter expression of melancholy upon their faces.
Cloud spoke in turn, calm as the words came out. "Icicle Town burned down yesterday.." He slowly raised his eyes from the floor and shot them toward Reeve. ".. But you already knew that."
"Sadly, yes." Reeve solemnly replied. "I would have told you, however I did not want to derail your other efforts with the news. I have a team investigating.."
"What good will that do now? We all know what happened." Cloud looked around at his friends. "Jenova destroyed Icicle, and then she attacked Junon."
"Jenova..?" Cid spoke up. "That makes no god'amned sense at all. We wiped the floor with that spook."
"Are we sure that was Jenova? I mean, Jenova is a monster, right? That was a woman." Tifa broke her silence.
"She called herself the 'Crisis From The Sky', the only reference is Jenova, the original one. The one that came down and destroyed the Cetra." Cloud spoke.
Reeve stepped into the middle of the semi-circle they had formed. "I think it is time I revealed to you all, some findings I have uncovered the past year in Junon." Reeve spoke sternly, then he motioned for them all to follow him into the conference room. After a few minutes everyone had taken a seat around the table, Reeve at one far end and Cloud opposite him. Tifa and Cid sat to the either side of them.
Reeve began. "Surely you of all people Cloud, must have been wondering why I had not been on-site during the Midgar construction, right?"
"Well, a little; I suppose. What's all this have to do with anything?" Cloud admitted.
"I'm getting to that. You see, ever since I came into this Shinra thing, I had perpetually been in the dark on matters. Now, having the reigns of the whole operation I decided to take the liberty of learning a bit about the company's past."
"So you've been researching? Anything in particular?" Tifa asked.
"I began looking into Dr. Gast's files on the whole Sephiroth project, however I got a little sidetracked along the way. You see, I stumbled upon his personal journals, from the time he spent in Icicle in seclusion with Ilfalna."
"Ilfalna?" Cid was curious.
Tifa filled him in quickly. "She's Aeris' real mother, and Gast is her father."
"Oh.."
"Anyway...." Reeve continued. ".... She had told him a lot of things about the Cetra that he had never actually put into his official reports. A lot about culture and technology, and a lot of the final days."
Cloud intervened. "Wait a second... Ilfalna was there?"
"That was one thing I never fully understood." Tifa interjected Cloud's outburst. "I mean, Ilfalna and Aeris were both Cetra, but the Cetra died out centuries ago. So how'd Ilfalna even end up in the here and now.... or rather.... the there and then?"
"Yeah! What's up with that?" Cid suddenly realized that was true.
"Here we go." Reeve said. "Okay, Here's how it worked. I know the files weren't really kept very accurately back then, so information is a little sketchy, but from the journals, Gast writes that on the first expedition to 'Knowlespole', the Shell City, they found a huge shard of yellow materia. Sealed inside was Ilfalna, frozen with some sort of advanced time spell. They chipped her out and when she awoke and they did some tests they found she was infected with a peculiar virus; the virus itself was sampled and sent back to Shinra laboratory, and Ilfalna was cured indefinitely."
"Then that means that instead of finding Jenova frozen, they found Ilfalna instead." Tifa realized just how wrong the Shinra papers were, or perhaps they were altered to keep people from discovering the truth.
"In a way, Jenova, the monster we have all had to deal with was discovered that day." Reeve corrected her. "You see the virus that was shipped back to Shinra had a strange DNA to it. and after experimenting on the sample, Gast discovered that it could be cultured into a mass cell structure. From that, a strange beast was grown, and dubbed 'Jenova' after the bringer of the virus as told by Ilfalna."
Cloud sighed as he let the information sink in. "So your saying that what began all of this is a virus?"
"Yes, Jenova was a virus."
"And Shinra decided to start splicing it into soldiers?" Cloud asked another question.
"Gast discovered that the viral DNA strengthened the body when directly combined with other genetic samples, however he did not follow that research. But at that time, Hojo was adamant about it. So he conducted experiments secretly until Gast discovered he had even resorted to experimenting on his own offspring, and even himself."
"Sephiroth."
"Exactly. Well from there we all know what happened."
Cid shook his head. "But what's all this damn mumbo-jumbo have to do with this new broad? Huh??"
Reeve explained further that the virus that wiped out the Cetra had been somehow sent forth from Jenova, the woman who 'came from the sky' one day. Ilfalna was the only one to escape the effect, due to a desperate attempt to survive on the Cetra's behalf. With no cure, they froze her until there was one.
"Why only one person? Why not everybody?" Cloud asked.
"There were not many left at that time anyway.... The Cetra had suffered a tremendous loss from attacks from the Weapons."
"The Weapons?"
"Oh yes, The Cetra had defeated them, but it had utterly destroyed them in the process. After they had been thwarted, the Cetra had began to relax, and slowly spread out again, however within the same year Jenova unleashed the virus upon them."
"How sad." Tifa said to herself.
Cloud sat back in his chair. "Does anyone detect a pattern?"
Cid looked around at everybody. "I'm completely confused."
"We did this to ourselves!" Cloud exclaimed. "The Cetra defeated the Weapons, and then Jenova came to finish the job! Don't you see?"
"Yeah.... that's right!" Tifa sank in her chair. "When we destroyed the Weapons a year ago, that must have triggered something which awakened her now..." Tifa was cut off by Reeve.
"...to finish the job."
There was a eerie silence upon them as that idea set in on them.