Disclaimer: All Final Fantasy characters, storyline fragments, geographical locations, etc, etc, etc. are owned by Squaresoft, not me. obviously...
Author's notes - This is my first attempt at this sort of writing, so any reviews (positive or negative) will be GREATLY appreciated! Also, the rating will almost definitely change from PG as the story goes on. Hope you enjoy!
===
(a small girl listens intently at a door, her face scrunched in concentration. her posture grows more agitated as the off-tune melody sung by her companion grows more ear-splitting.)
"SEFIE!! Be QUIET!" She turned from the door with an expression so exasperated, any witnesses to the scene would have died laughing at such a serious demeanor on the tiny face. But since no one else was present, and the singer paid no attention whatsoever (if indeed she heard it), the effect was completely lost.
The girl threw up her arms, and immediately felt a raking pain down her back. She cried out and spun around, looking for its source. Sefie was still across the room, caught up in her world of what she considered music. Any further thoughts in the other girl's mind were interrupted by a sort of hissing, fizzing sound. She threw open the door of the outside and stared.
Four boys of similar ages were crouched around a conglomeration of black and red paraphernalia, and every one of their eyes was glued on the bright spark that traveled down a fuse towards the pile. The girls simply stood, unable to move or speak.
A mere ten inches from its destination, the spark hit a pile of sand someone had carelessly brushed over the fuse, and disappeared, leaving only a tiny thread of smoke rising upwards.
She suddenly found her voice again, and launched a tirade of physical and verbal abuse at the boys, including many references to Matron, stupidity, and death.
"You're not even DOING it right! That was gonna explode and make you so dead you can't believe it!" She stalked back towards the house, with the clear intent of bringing authoritarian retribution onto the heads of the delinquents. In her righteous indignation, she ignored the painful, unexpected jolt to her shoulder, assuming it had been caused by her own clumsiness. She glanced back, expecting their laughter, but none came.
Instead, the biggest of the boys called out, "Well we're gonna set them off anyway, Quisty, and unless you tell us how, we ARE going to get blown up and it'll be ALL YOUR FAULT!"
Trapped, Quisty sullenly complied. Within a few minutes, the fireworks had been set up properly, and the boys were safely situated away from the rocket heads. Turning back with the intent to get Matron outside NOW, she suddenly doubled over and fell to the ground crying. The pain had returned, now spreading down her front like fire. She only had time to see the boys running towards her for one hazy moment.
Then, the fireworks exploded.
Quistis' mind snapped back to consciousness just as her head collided with a stone wall. She lay there, not sure if the twisting and bouncing sensation was a physical reality, or an effect of her collision.
Two things came to her reeling mind first. One, she was hurt... her whole body was a mass of bruises and scrapes, especially her chest and stomach, which felt like she had been dragged face down over jagged rocks. Two, it was raining. She lay against the wall, thinking of those two things. When no explanation came to mind, she tried to open her eyes and lift her head. A fresh blast of pain washed over her. Something thick and wet had obscured her vision.
This new pain formed another word in her mind: SeeD. She focused with all of her being around that word and used it to sublimate her pain, stop the world from revolving, wipe the blood out of her eyes, stand up, and make sense of things.
She recovered the use of her mind and body to a degree, but instantly realized that the heaving, convulsing landscape was actually the physical reality. She fought to her feet - not an easy task, especially with the thunderstorm making all the stones slippery.
Having a barely tentative control of her immediate surroundings for the time being, Quistis allowed herself to look up and see what she could see illuminated by the frequent lightning blasts.
There was a castle... whose churning defied the laws of gravity and common sense. A bridge stretching out before her, her back pressed to the back of the castle behind her, and... what looked like a guardhouse; small and circumspect in its appearance, yet remaining still amid the spasms of the rest of the landscape. Quistis got the disturbing impression that this structure was somehow drawing creation towards itself like a black hole.
With a burst of revelation, she suddenly remembered everything. Squall, Selphie, and Zell, who were presumably inside that thing, trying to save the entire space-time continuum. Rinoa and Irvine, who, by the looks of things, had probably been thrown off the bridge into the swirling vortex of pure space beneath it. Quistis could no longer sense their presences. However, her military mind told her to concentrate on the three members of the offensive team... she refused to even think of Rinoa and Irvine unless she could do something for them, and it appeared she could not.
Quistis could barely even think with the convulsions of the earth, and decided the first thing to do was to get to a more stable place. The small, unmoving "guardhouse" was totally inaccessible to her; she would never make it across that bridge. She started inching along the side of the wall until she found something she could squeeze herself into. Quickly, she wedged herself into one of the recessed portions of the wall. She was still being thrown around, but now had something to brace herself with.
Once she decided that the position was likely the best she could hope to get, she reached out with her mind to her three friends whose existences she could still be sure of. Quistis had never been an empath, or even heard of any with that ability, but it came naturally to her in the confused world she found herself in. It surprised her, of course, but she could wonder about such things later. She closed her eyes, locked her muscles, and connected to the minds of Squall, Selphie, and Zell.
The chaos she had witnessed was nothing compared to what she found surrounding Ultimecia herself, and her three combatants. Swirls of nothingness and swirls of reality twisted together and danced in ways that no composer's notes could ever match. It was pointless for Quistis to try and describe it even to herself. It was pure Chaos, where time, matter, temperature, emotion, sound, light, and other aspects of the universe that Quistis had never witnessed before were all kneaded together in a monstrous quasi-existence. It was impossible that anything could even EXIST as a single organism, much less that it could actually function in this permeating lunacy, yet Squall, Selphie, and Zell did, as did the grotesque form of a Griever-junctioned Ultimecia. The SeeD's fought, and Ultimecia fought. Though they were obviously drained and hurting, Quistis' friends somehow warred against the sorceress with a power that they had never shown on earth.
Zell was, quite literally, a whirlwind of strength. The words "punch" and "kick" were inadequate to describe the blows he directed at Ultimecia. Where his flesh and blood could not keep up, energy burst from his physical body in beams and swirls of power that lacerated the inconsistent landscape. He glowed with an ecstasy of battle that would have been beautiful enough to bring tears to Quistis' eyes, had she possessed eyes there. However, even Zell's battle-hardened physique could not fully handle that power. Even as she watched, Zell's body was being torn from the inside out, as well as being pummeled by Ultimecia's ruthless barrage of magical attacks. If not for the healing spells that constantly knit his body back together, Zell would have most likely already annihilated himself with his surges of energy.
The healing power was coming from Selphie. Her nunchaku were gone, and she had committed herself fully to the magical stores within her. She knelt on both knees, hunched over, her head hanging in exhaustion, but with her bare arms thrust forward with unwavering strength. The brilliance of her magics shone even in the confusion that constituted the strange world, tracing ancient, immutable patterns in greater and greater intricacies over herself and her friends. White, glowing strands formed hieroglyphical curtains around Squall and Zell, with more strands flying from Selphie's fingers to replace the ones that were being shaken loose by Ultimecia's torrent of spells. Many got through, but enough were stopped by Selphie's barrier to allow the two warriors to focus on their one, ultimate enemy. Fountains of purple burst from her palms, continuously repairing the damage to their flesh. Aside from this, Selphie even had enough strength to occasionally let loose a silver bolt at Ultimecia, giving her an instant's pause each time and allowing Squall or Zell to advance on her further.
Squall himself seemed to transcend mortal limitations. If Zell's onslaught was beautiful, Squall's efforts were worth dying for simply to behold for a moment. In the hands of the Lion-Hearted, reality and unreality were just two paints in his palette. His gunblade was no longer anything truly resembling a gunblade, but instead some other sort of instrument more suited to his newfound power, which Squall wielded with a proficiency unsurpassed in mathematical or artistic perfection.
It was a weapon, and yet there were aspects of it that made the thing difficult to place under that benign heading. As space protrudes from one dimension to two, and then three, Squall's blade extended itself into impossible angles and contortions that gave Quistis a splitting headache just to look at, but seemed to be understood perfectly by its wielder. Something that could never have been imagined in reality now took on an unearthly attribute of perfect destruction in the surrounding insanity. His attacks could not be described as anything but a dance. Squall danced to the music of Ultimecia's fury, and drove pain into her very being with every touch of his.
Entranced by the hypnotic spectacle, Quistis let her mind fall away from the objective actuality of the battle. Her shock was sudden when Zell abruptly stopped moving, and simply stood with his eyes closed and arms uplifted, chest heaving. She snapped back to actuality and saw Squall no longer fighting, but simply straining to control the awesome elements at his command. Selphie had collapsed; conscious, but too exhausted and drained to lift a finger or call forth the least of her spells. Ultimecia was a mass of agony and failing flesh and magic, but with enough strength left, it seemed, to call forth one last curse upon the faltering trio.
The tensity of the situation broke when both Ultimecia and Zell reached their breaking points. Ultimecia channeled all of her being into a variant of the time-compression technique she had perfected, sending a blast of energy towards the three that would break their ties to any single dimension, flinging them to the mercy of Time, which had the power to drop them at any point in the continuum, or simply annihilate them as completely as if their ancestors had never been born, if their spirit could not handle the strain.
A split-second after her release, Zell succumbed to the powers raging within him. His last conscious action was to focus it all into one, all-consuming wave of destruction with Ultimecia at its center. The living impression of Zell in Quistis' mind suddenly disappeared, followed closely by Ultimecia. However, her final spell had been cast, and a shuddering burst of blackness was boiling and frothing, sweeping towards Squall and Selphie. Selphie had seen it, and feebly tried to throw up some sort of personal shield in the fraction of a second she had left. Squall however, had no defense whatsoever against the approaching darkness as he wrestled for control with the very powers he had been commanding with such ease. The sight struck an agonizing chord in Quistis' breast, and she screamed out her opposition towards the unfeeling death that rolled inexorably towards the man she loved so helplessly, so desperately, so uselessly.
Flinging aside every pretense of rationality, the SeeD woman channeled all her anger and unimaginable grief at the imminent event into her empathic relationship with the quasi-dimension she was in contact with. With a surge of emotion, she /transferred/ herself there.. interposed herself directly between Squall and his doom. Her last thought, as the power blew her very being into nothingness was satisfaction in her choice, amid the floods of despair and pain that battered her soul until the last instant of her existence.
Author's notes - This is my first attempt at this sort of writing, so any reviews (positive or negative) will be GREATLY appreciated! Also, the rating will almost definitely change from PG as the story goes on. Hope you enjoy!
===
(a small girl listens intently at a door, her face scrunched in concentration. her posture grows more agitated as the off-tune melody sung by her companion grows more ear-splitting.)
"SEFIE!! Be QUIET!" She turned from the door with an expression so exasperated, any witnesses to the scene would have died laughing at such a serious demeanor on the tiny face. But since no one else was present, and the singer paid no attention whatsoever (if indeed she heard it), the effect was completely lost.
The girl threw up her arms, and immediately felt a raking pain down her back. She cried out and spun around, looking for its source. Sefie was still across the room, caught up in her world of what she considered music. Any further thoughts in the other girl's mind were interrupted by a sort of hissing, fizzing sound. She threw open the door of the outside and stared.
Four boys of similar ages were crouched around a conglomeration of black and red paraphernalia, and every one of their eyes was glued on the bright spark that traveled down a fuse towards the pile. The girls simply stood, unable to move or speak.
A mere ten inches from its destination, the spark hit a pile of sand someone had carelessly brushed over the fuse, and disappeared, leaving only a tiny thread of smoke rising upwards.
She suddenly found her voice again, and launched a tirade of physical and verbal abuse at the boys, including many references to Matron, stupidity, and death.
"You're not even DOING it right! That was gonna explode and make you so dead you can't believe it!" She stalked back towards the house, with the clear intent of bringing authoritarian retribution onto the heads of the delinquents. In her righteous indignation, she ignored the painful, unexpected jolt to her shoulder, assuming it had been caused by her own clumsiness. She glanced back, expecting their laughter, but none came.
Instead, the biggest of the boys called out, "Well we're gonna set them off anyway, Quisty, and unless you tell us how, we ARE going to get blown up and it'll be ALL YOUR FAULT!"
Trapped, Quisty sullenly complied. Within a few minutes, the fireworks had been set up properly, and the boys were safely situated away from the rocket heads. Turning back with the intent to get Matron outside NOW, she suddenly doubled over and fell to the ground crying. The pain had returned, now spreading down her front like fire. She only had time to see the boys running towards her for one hazy moment.
Then, the fireworks exploded.
Quistis' mind snapped back to consciousness just as her head collided with a stone wall. She lay there, not sure if the twisting and bouncing sensation was a physical reality, or an effect of her collision.
Two things came to her reeling mind first. One, she was hurt... her whole body was a mass of bruises and scrapes, especially her chest and stomach, which felt like she had been dragged face down over jagged rocks. Two, it was raining. She lay against the wall, thinking of those two things. When no explanation came to mind, she tried to open her eyes and lift her head. A fresh blast of pain washed over her. Something thick and wet had obscured her vision.
This new pain formed another word in her mind: SeeD. She focused with all of her being around that word and used it to sublimate her pain, stop the world from revolving, wipe the blood out of her eyes, stand up, and make sense of things.
She recovered the use of her mind and body to a degree, but instantly realized that the heaving, convulsing landscape was actually the physical reality. She fought to her feet - not an easy task, especially with the thunderstorm making all the stones slippery.
Having a barely tentative control of her immediate surroundings for the time being, Quistis allowed herself to look up and see what she could see illuminated by the frequent lightning blasts.
There was a castle... whose churning defied the laws of gravity and common sense. A bridge stretching out before her, her back pressed to the back of the castle behind her, and... what looked like a guardhouse; small and circumspect in its appearance, yet remaining still amid the spasms of the rest of the landscape. Quistis got the disturbing impression that this structure was somehow drawing creation towards itself like a black hole.
With a burst of revelation, she suddenly remembered everything. Squall, Selphie, and Zell, who were presumably inside that thing, trying to save the entire space-time continuum. Rinoa and Irvine, who, by the looks of things, had probably been thrown off the bridge into the swirling vortex of pure space beneath it. Quistis could no longer sense their presences. However, her military mind told her to concentrate on the three members of the offensive team... she refused to even think of Rinoa and Irvine unless she could do something for them, and it appeared she could not.
Quistis could barely even think with the convulsions of the earth, and decided the first thing to do was to get to a more stable place. The small, unmoving "guardhouse" was totally inaccessible to her; she would never make it across that bridge. She started inching along the side of the wall until she found something she could squeeze herself into. Quickly, she wedged herself into one of the recessed portions of the wall. She was still being thrown around, but now had something to brace herself with.
Once she decided that the position was likely the best she could hope to get, she reached out with her mind to her three friends whose existences she could still be sure of. Quistis had never been an empath, or even heard of any with that ability, but it came naturally to her in the confused world she found herself in. It surprised her, of course, but she could wonder about such things later. She closed her eyes, locked her muscles, and connected to the minds of Squall, Selphie, and Zell.
The chaos she had witnessed was nothing compared to what she found surrounding Ultimecia herself, and her three combatants. Swirls of nothingness and swirls of reality twisted together and danced in ways that no composer's notes could ever match. It was pointless for Quistis to try and describe it even to herself. It was pure Chaos, where time, matter, temperature, emotion, sound, light, and other aspects of the universe that Quistis had never witnessed before were all kneaded together in a monstrous quasi-existence. It was impossible that anything could even EXIST as a single organism, much less that it could actually function in this permeating lunacy, yet Squall, Selphie, and Zell did, as did the grotesque form of a Griever-junctioned Ultimecia. The SeeD's fought, and Ultimecia fought. Though they were obviously drained and hurting, Quistis' friends somehow warred against the sorceress with a power that they had never shown on earth.
Zell was, quite literally, a whirlwind of strength. The words "punch" and "kick" were inadequate to describe the blows he directed at Ultimecia. Where his flesh and blood could not keep up, energy burst from his physical body in beams and swirls of power that lacerated the inconsistent landscape. He glowed with an ecstasy of battle that would have been beautiful enough to bring tears to Quistis' eyes, had she possessed eyes there. However, even Zell's battle-hardened physique could not fully handle that power. Even as she watched, Zell's body was being torn from the inside out, as well as being pummeled by Ultimecia's ruthless barrage of magical attacks. If not for the healing spells that constantly knit his body back together, Zell would have most likely already annihilated himself with his surges of energy.
The healing power was coming from Selphie. Her nunchaku were gone, and she had committed herself fully to the magical stores within her. She knelt on both knees, hunched over, her head hanging in exhaustion, but with her bare arms thrust forward with unwavering strength. The brilliance of her magics shone even in the confusion that constituted the strange world, tracing ancient, immutable patterns in greater and greater intricacies over herself and her friends. White, glowing strands formed hieroglyphical curtains around Squall and Zell, with more strands flying from Selphie's fingers to replace the ones that were being shaken loose by Ultimecia's torrent of spells. Many got through, but enough were stopped by Selphie's barrier to allow the two warriors to focus on their one, ultimate enemy. Fountains of purple burst from her palms, continuously repairing the damage to their flesh. Aside from this, Selphie even had enough strength to occasionally let loose a silver bolt at Ultimecia, giving her an instant's pause each time and allowing Squall or Zell to advance on her further.
Squall himself seemed to transcend mortal limitations. If Zell's onslaught was beautiful, Squall's efforts were worth dying for simply to behold for a moment. In the hands of the Lion-Hearted, reality and unreality were just two paints in his palette. His gunblade was no longer anything truly resembling a gunblade, but instead some other sort of instrument more suited to his newfound power, which Squall wielded with a proficiency unsurpassed in mathematical or artistic perfection.
It was a weapon, and yet there were aspects of it that made the thing difficult to place under that benign heading. As space protrudes from one dimension to two, and then three, Squall's blade extended itself into impossible angles and contortions that gave Quistis a splitting headache just to look at, but seemed to be understood perfectly by its wielder. Something that could never have been imagined in reality now took on an unearthly attribute of perfect destruction in the surrounding insanity. His attacks could not be described as anything but a dance. Squall danced to the music of Ultimecia's fury, and drove pain into her very being with every touch of his.
Entranced by the hypnotic spectacle, Quistis let her mind fall away from the objective actuality of the battle. Her shock was sudden when Zell abruptly stopped moving, and simply stood with his eyes closed and arms uplifted, chest heaving. She snapped back to actuality and saw Squall no longer fighting, but simply straining to control the awesome elements at his command. Selphie had collapsed; conscious, but too exhausted and drained to lift a finger or call forth the least of her spells. Ultimecia was a mass of agony and failing flesh and magic, but with enough strength left, it seemed, to call forth one last curse upon the faltering trio.
The tensity of the situation broke when both Ultimecia and Zell reached their breaking points. Ultimecia channeled all of her being into a variant of the time-compression technique she had perfected, sending a blast of energy towards the three that would break their ties to any single dimension, flinging them to the mercy of Time, which had the power to drop them at any point in the continuum, or simply annihilate them as completely as if their ancestors had never been born, if their spirit could not handle the strain.
A split-second after her release, Zell succumbed to the powers raging within him. His last conscious action was to focus it all into one, all-consuming wave of destruction with Ultimecia at its center. The living impression of Zell in Quistis' mind suddenly disappeared, followed closely by Ultimecia. However, her final spell had been cast, and a shuddering burst of blackness was boiling and frothing, sweeping towards Squall and Selphie. Selphie had seen it, and feebly tried to throw up some sort of personal shield in the fraction of a second she had left. Squall however, had no defense whatsoever against the approaching darkness as he wrestled for control with the very powers he had been commanding with such ease. The sight struck an agonizing chord in Quistis' breast, and she screamed out her opposition towards the unfeeling death that rolled inexorably towards the man she loved so helplessly, so desperately, so uselessly.
Flinging aside every pretense of rationality, the SeeD woman channeled all her anger and unimaginable grief at the imminent event into her empathic relationship with the quasi-dimension she was in contact with. With a surge of emotion, she /transferred/ herself there.. interposed herself directly between Squall and his doom. Her last thought, as the power blew her very being into nothingness was satisfaction in her choice, amid the floods of despair and pain that battered her soul until the last instant of her existence.
