Oops, I forgot the disclaimer on the last chapter! Are you required to have them? Well, anyway, Final Fantasy VII and all related characters and names are copyright Square. I once thought, poor deluded creature that I am, that I owned them, but then a team of nice men in suits came along and told me I didn't, and took all my money to prove the point. So no, I don't own them.
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An Unwanted Chance ~ Chapter One
'Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentis
lucentemque globum lunae Titaniaque astra
spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.
inde hominum pecudumque genus uitaeque uolantum
et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus.
igneus est ollis uigor et caelestis origo
seminibus, quantum non noxia corpora tardant
terrenique hebetant artus moribundaque membra.'
-- Vergil, Aeneid
The sun rose over a landscape that had changed very little since the last days of Midgar. Although the ruined city had at first been swarming with rescue teams, escaping residents, and looters, they had all eventually left. Within a week after the historic defeat of Sephiroth by the resistance group AVALANCHE, Midgar was consumed by the raging fires started deep in the lower levels of wreckage and its atmosphere was poisoned by the toxic discharges of the ruined reactors. Although the environment had recovered quite a bit since then -- almost unreasonably fast, as if some benevolent power were aiding its recovery -- and plant life was fast encroaching on its outskirts, very few had dared to approach the ruins for all the two hundred years since Meteor.
This group, however, was different. The first expedition to attempt to enter the heart of Midgar was busily occupied with pitching camp and setting up cameras and scientific instruments. Standing at the end of a path blazoned through the debris and rubble on the outer edge, Professor McAdams, the Fearless Leader of the expedition, gathered several of the other members for their first foray into the city. After much preparation, roll call, and a short speech to the camera, they set off towards the one clear landmark -- the partially-collapsed but still imposing Shinra Building.
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Am I dead now? That must have been a pretty long fall.... Too bad I blacked out before I hit the lake. It might have been kind of interesting. On the other hand, drowning in Mako isn't -- wasn't exactly on my list of Fun Things To Do Before I Die, ha ha.
I wonder if it's really true that you can't take your stuff with you? 'Cause I really hate to leave my materia collection. Well, old man Godo'll probably sell it, make some money to turn Wutai around... it's not like a disembodied spirit has much use for it anyway.
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Gawd, I think I've run out of stuff to think about. I hope being dead isn't gonna be this boring all the time.
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Wait a second! This is like in books and stuff when the hero is blacked out and he thinks about how he's dead but he really isn't and then he wakes up! Which must mean--
Yuffie opened her eyes.
"I'm not dead!"
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When he came to, he was lying on the floor of his office. (Why am I lying on the floor? I don't remember fainting.) He got up, painfully, dusted himself off, and made his way over to the desk, (I'd better get back to those project reports or I may be getting another visit from Hojo...) noticing neither the gaping holes in the floor, nor the thick layer of dust on everything, nor the fact that the entire front part of the room had fallen in. As if in a daze, he sat down on what remained of the plush executive chair and started to shuffle through papers and forms that should have disintegrated long ago.
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Five hours after their outset, the explorers had already reached the bottom of the Shinra Building. Now they were sitting on the piles of rubble, staring at the sight which not even many of the looters after Meteor had seen -- the shattered glass doors, the broken neon signs, and above them, the blackened, disintegrating tower where once the most feared men in the world had planned the destruction of the planet. Fifteen stories up, a skeletal arm and skull, formerly belonging to a worker trapped within sight of escape by the collapsing ceiling, rested on a windowsill. The cameramen raced around filming the scene and capturing the first reactions of the explorers.
click.... whirr
"What's your plan now that we've reached the Shinra Building, Professor?"
"Well, the laboratories that were inside the building may be too dangerous to enter without protective clothing, so on our first trip, we're going to try and find the President's office, which was on the top floor."
"What do you think you'll find up there?"
"We hope to be able to recover some artifacts both there and along the way. We may even find the President himself -- according to most sources of the day, his body was never recovered. But mostly, we'll be observing and recording the state of the building before anything is moved. It really is thrilling to see with your own eyes the same sights that Tifa Lockhart-Strife described in her account. There have, you know, been rumors of ghosts haunting the city, but I doubt we'll find any of those."
The camera shut off with another click, and McAdams went to gather the team for the next part of the expedition. Armed with flashlights and cameras, they made their way slowly into the ruin, all aware that they were making history.
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author's notes: Alright, so my quote isn't really that relevant. But it sort of fits, and I wanted to use it, so.... um, yeah. Thanks to all the people who reviewed the first chapter! I'm glad that people did actually read it. I think it's going to be coming in chapters about this length, so please tell me if you think it's too short. Writing fanfiction is loads of fun, though I'm not that good at it. All I ever wrote before were essays for school, never any fiction. I have most of the story all planned out... although the category says romance, there won't too much romance in it -- apologies to those who like fluff. If you liked this at all, you should read Wakizashi's "Fragments" (). It's part of what inspired me to write this fic.
