Jade, Wine, and Turk training
By Kimetara
Multi-part
Disclaimer: FFVII doesn't belong to me. Any original characters, dead or alive, along with this plot do.
Chapter 13: Suspicions and explanations
"Mr. Hamasaki?"
"Hmmm?" Reeve looked up from his desk to his secretary.
"You've received an invitation from Mr. Wallace to his wedding. Would you like it?"
"Yes, please send it up right away."
"Will do. Oh, and Reeve?"
"Yes?"
"Ms. Ayumi is here to see you."
"Great, send her up too."
A few minutes later, Elena entered Reeve's office, holding the white and gold invitation. "Here you go," she offered, bringing it to Reeve's desk.
"Thanks." Reeve gratefully took a break from his work to read the mail. *February 19th...I probably have something that day, but I'll get out of it.* "So Elena, what brings you here?" he asked, directing his attention to the lovely pale blond before him.
Elena bit her lip. "Well...you see Reeve..."
The president of Shinra raised an eyebrow. "Yeah..."
"You remember what I said about Hojo."
"Yes..."
"Well...the source seems to think the members of AVALANCHE are in some sort of danger," Elena blurted out, "and I think you ought to have a bodyguard again."
"Oh?" Reeve considered the proposition. "Do you have anybody in particular in mind?"
"Myself, of course," Elena answered proudly. "I'm not as good as Rude, I'll admit it, but I'm better than anybody else you could get your hands on."
*Yes, you are...* Reeve shook the thought off. Not the time for that. "Alright."
Elena blinked. "That's it?"
"Sure. But you'll have to give up being vice prez, okay?" Reeve looked up at Elena from his desk.
"Yeah, sure! I mean, that job was boring anyway," Elena tossed her head.
"Good then." Reeve pressed his intercom button. "Marisa?"
"Yes, Mr. Hamasaki?"
"For the moment, you have been promoted to vice president of Shinra. Is that alright?"
Marisa choked. "Excuse me?"
"You're the new vice president. Don't worry, Elena will teach you everything you need to know."
"Um...yes sir. Okay."
"Thanks." Reeve turned the intercom off.
Elena cocked her head. "That was fast...but now who's your secretary?"
"You, of course," Reeve answered, amused.
"WHAT?! No way, I'm not going to be a secretary!" Elena shrieked.
"Calm down. It's a lot less horrible than everybody says." Reeve rolled his eyes. "Besides, I can't replace Marisa. What if she doesn't like being vice president? She'll be out of a job. And, this way you can monitor whoever and whatever enters my office," he persuaded skillfully.
Elena pouted for a moment. "...oh, all right," she sighed. Reeve smiled encouragingly.
Elena shook her head. *What by the Planet am I getting into...ah well. Time to bring up my next point.* "Reeve."
"Yes?"
"I've been thinking..."
"Mmm-hmm?"
"Isn't it odd how all the members of SOLDIER just disappeared?" Elena finished.
Reeve sat back, linking his hands behind his head. After Meteor, he'd given practically everybody of Shinra full pardons, including the members of SOLDIER. In truth, he hadn't noticed them very much for the past three years, but now that he thought about it... "Maybe they didn't want the memories, so they left?" he suggested.
"All of them gone? And not just in Shinra, but in all of Midgar?" Elena shook her head. "Impossible. But, they are gone... I haven't seen anybody with Mako eyes for years."
"Besides your own," Reeve added. All members of the Turks had also been exposed to Mako.
"Well, yeah."
"...what do you think we should do about it?"
Again, Elena shook her head. "I don't know. It's just odd, how all they all seemed to vanish."
"Not all..." Reeve mused. "Cloud didn't. I just spoke with him a little while ago."
Elena's eyes narrowed. "So all the ex-members of SOLDIER except Cloud are nowhere to be found..."
"Don't jump to conclusions, Elena," Reeve ordered sternly.
Elena hung her head. "Sorry Reeve...I just thought it was suspicious..."
Reeve sighed exaggeratedly before standing up and going to hug the blond. "Stop that, I already told you, there's no need to always keep apologizing. You shouldn't be such a masochist, Elena," he scolded gently. Reeve had been continuously trying to boost Elena's self-esteem. Tseng and Reno's constantly degrading comments, though unintentional, had given Elena something of a complex.
Elena, held tightly in the executive's embrace and her face buried in Reeve's shirt, grinned.
~~~~~
"Here we are." Jason stopped in front of a small trailer, attached to an even larger trailer. He opened the door of the smaller one with a loud *sqeeeeak* to reveal a small room with vents, then another door. Jason opened the second door and motioned for Tifa to go inside. "Go on in and do as you like, the whole thing's yours," he instructed with a grin; yet it was obvious it was a command.
Tifa absentmindedly brushed back a strand of hair that'd come loose in the wind. "Thank you," she murmured, before stepping inside the smaller automobile.
Tifa looked around her new confinement. *Let's see...a fold-out couch, dresser, a stove and oven, and...hah! A bathroom!* She immediately began walking toward the establishment before a thought hit her. *Hmmm...* Tifa detoured over to the dresser. "I wonder...yes! New clothes! And...they're exactly my size..." Tifa trailed off, wondering whether she ought to be worried. She quickly shrugged it off though, and made a beeline for the shower.
~~~~~
"Sooo, Hojo sent you guys, huh?" Reno asked casually. Simone had led him to the larger trailer, this one furnished with three fold-out couches, one actual bed, a fairly complete kitchen, and of course, a bathroom. Other various pieces of furniture littered the inside of the trailer. "How'd you guys get all this stuff here so fast?"
Simone shrugged. "We ordered it from Midgar. And we arrived here so quickly because we borrowed a gold chocobo."
"Midgar?" Reno turned to face the Wutain. "People in Midgar know this stuff is here? You think that's a good idea?"
Simone focused his gaze on a point somewhere above Reno's head. "Nobody knows anything about these items," he answered flatly.
"...ah. All been disposed of, is that it." Reno didn't bother making it a question.
Simone simply walked toward the kitchen. "Do you want something to eat?"
"Yeah, sure." Reno walked toward a window. Looking out, he saw Jason meet Isa, speak with her for a moment, and then they both turned and walked toward the trailer. "Just wondering Simone, why didn't we all just hop on a gold chocobo and head north?"
"Gold chocobos are rare and amazing creatures, not miraculous ones," Simone's voice came dryly from the kitchen. "You can't expect one to hold all five of us. It'd probably end up dying somewhere on the ocean; then where'd we be?"
Reno shrugged. He'd never ridden a chocobo before; Shinra provided more technological, classy forms of transportation. "Guess we'd all be rotting corpses on the ocean floor, huh?"
"Pretty much."
"Pretty much what?" Jason stepped through the door, Isa following silently.
"Just giving our Turk here the run down on chocobos," Simone answered easily, walking toward Jason. "How's the girl?"
Jason shrugged. "I left Matt to watch her."
"I'm going to go out on a limb here and say Matt's the Third Class," Reno interrupted.
"Yeah." Jason turned his attention to the Turk, while Isa made her way to one of the couches. "So, Turk, what do you think of all this?"
"It's Reno," he answered, crossing his arms. "Why does that maniac want me?"
Jason snorted. "You think I try to understand Hojo?" The man shook his head. "All I know, Reno, is that you'd have been better off if you never got involved."
Reno shrugged. "Yeah, he didn't really catch my eye right away, but his offer was impossible to resist."
Jason looked at him oddly. "...how much was it?"
"700,000 gil." Reno smirked.
Jason and Simone exchanged glances. The silence in the room grew thick.
"What's the matter, he can't pay me or something?" Reno asked casually, masking the tension in his voice.
Isa, surprisingly, was the one to respond. "Oh, he can. It's just that he won't," she declared, her voice carrying a tinge of bitterness. Jason and Simone both looked at Isa respectfully.
"What do you mean?" Reno's tone had turned serious. He'd gotten caught up in something way over his head, and he knew it. *Time for some answers...*
Isa stood abruptly. "He may not be the real, original Hojo, but there's a reason we all call him that," she stated flatly.
The redheaded man raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? I thought it was just another lunatic thinking how good he is for coming up with such an amazing cover name." Reno, over the past four years, had met more Hojos, Sephiroths, Jenovas, Meteors, and Ancients than the Planet could ever hope to recover from – although he had made a point to avoid any Tsengs, Rudes, heck, even Elenas. He'd also made a point to kill anybody that had the guts to give themselves the cover name "Reno" – hence why it was rumored the name was cursed, and even the criminal world of the slums didn't utter it.
Isa laughed cynically. "If he were just another simple delinquent, do you think we'd be serving under him?"
"You got a point. So, what's with Hojo number two?"
Isa paused for a moment. "I've forgotten his real name," she finally said. "To be honest, I think he's forgotten it himself. It was about three years ago, when one of us first nicknamed him Hojo – a nickname he took proudly, as if it were a compliment," she spat out.
"Yeah..." As interesting as that little tidbit of information was, Reno was more concerned about why he was given that nickname. He was careful not to allow the three members of SOLDIER see that though. He'd get more information faster if he simply went along with everything said.
"For purposes of telling, the original will be called Professor Hojo, while the current just plain Hojo." She paused. "That's how it is anyway."
"He used to Professor Hojo's personal aid," she continued, sitting back down. "He was the only one that could stand it."
"Over time, Professor Hojo's fascination and enthusiasm for...biology passed on to him. Hojo became the professor's right hand, he was allowed access to everything the Professor created – except for the research on Mako. That, Professor Hojo kept to himself. He believed it was the key to his greatness, and greedily wanted the credit to be his, and only his." Isa took a deep breath. "But as for everything else, the technology, the cloning, the Mako exposure, Hojo was given full admission."
"Wait," Reno interrupted. "I thought you just said he wasn't allowed access to Mako."
"He wasn't allowed access to the research," Isa corrected. "It would have been hard for the Professor to keep Hojo from completely avoiding Mako, as much of the Professor's experiments involved the substance. So, Hojo was taught how to operate the machinery that monitored the Mako flow – he just didn't understand how it worked."
Isa smirked. "Hojo is not the brightest of people. He is by no means intelligent enough to comprehend the workings of Mako by simply being given the instruments; what he needs to understand is a complete explanation."
Reno nodded. "Go on."
Isa glanced up at Simone, who gave a barely perceptible nodded and stepped forward. Quickly, Simone leaned up against the wall, his arms crossed and his face thoughtful. Jason moved to sit down.
"Well...the Professor was killed by AVALANCHE. When that happened, Hojo took some of the Professor's best tools and escaped from Midgar, because the rat knew that when Meteor hit, Midgar would be first to go." Simone's brows furrowed for a moment, then smoothed out. "Once it became obvious Meteor had been stopped, Hojo devoted his time to playing with the tools he'd taken. He was even able to create some of his own by following the basic guidelines of the stolen instruments; others, he refined."
"One of those tools controls the Mako in the bloodstream of all the members of SOLDIER."
AN: And the mystery of whether Hojo's dead or alive is revealed! *dun dun da dum!* Sorry if the whole explanation was a bit confusing, with the Professor Hojo and the current Hojo all together. ^^;; I'll be continuing the rest of the explanation in the next chapter, but I felt like ending this one here (it was getting long).
Oh yeah – I don't believe anybody knows about Lucrecia's cave except for herself and AVALANCHE, which is why Reno and Simone don't know they're immune to drowning.
R&R!