"Transcending Reality" by: Emerald Eyes
This is chapter six. Thank you soooo much for
writing reviews, people. It means a lot to me. Anyhow, yes, I put an infamous
FF7 cliché in my fic: (insert scary music here) SEPHIROTH RETURNS!!! But… I
give myself some credit for making the story so interesting. And in this
chapter, things start to come together… er, at least a little bit. I own the story but not Final Fantasy. In fact, no one
owns Final Fantasy… according to my fic the characters own themselves! ^o^
"Life
is the crummiest book I ever read. There isn't a hook, just a lot of cheap
shots, pictures to shock, and characters an amateur would never dream up…
sometimes truth is stranger than fiction!" –Bad Religion
Chapter Six: Stranger Than Fiction
"Do you get high?"
"No."
"Pop pills?"
"No."
"You drink?"
"Not recently, no."
"Then how the hell did you come up
with a story like that?!"
Alex shrugged. "It's not a story,"
he said in response to Reno's question, "It's the truth."
Squall looked at the man
incredulously. "We're all characters from a video game?"
"Yeah," Alex replied gauchely.
Seifer, who had awakened a short
time ago, had his hand up to his head nursing a growing headache. The blonde
teenager became increasingly agitated with every word that Alex spoke. "You
could at least come up with something believable. You're giving me a fucking
headache. I'd rather be having a conversation with Chicken-wuss than be sitting
here listening to you."
As if on cue, a bright flash of
light filled the room. Seifer shielded his eyes, along with everyone else. When
he opened them, he discovered that there was now one more person involved in
their perplexing problem…and it was Zell.
"Great Hyne!" Seifer exclaimed,
"You do loathe me, don't you?"
Squall stood staring at his
companion that had inexplicably appeared in the center of the room.
"Zell?" he asked in shock.
"Huh?" the confused SeeD asked,
looking around for the source of the voice. Upon spotting Squall the exuberant
martial artist exclaimed, "Squall! Holy hell! I can't believe I've found you!
The weird guy wasn't lying when said he knew where you were."
"'Weird guy?'" asked Eiko
curiously, staring accusingly at Alex. "Was that you?"
"No," Alex defended, throwing a
puzzled look towards Zell, "I didn't bring either Zell or Rufus here."
"Then who did!?" a
frustrated Seifer asked.
"A weird guy in a lab coat did,"
Zell answered rather vaguely, "He told me to tell you that 'Sephiroth lives.'"
Rufus and Reno exchanged worried
glances with each other.
"That can only be Hojo," Rufus
sighed, "I just don't know how he could still be alive. That's strange. I
thought Avalanche killed him off…"
"Why is it so strange that he's
still alive?" Squall asked, "Aren't you supposed to be dead, too?"
"Yeah," the president replied
absently. He seemed to lose himself in thought.
"Who is this 'Sephiroth' person?"
Seifer asked, wondering what kind of person could make the two ShinRa employees
so upset.
"He used to be a general in the
Army before disappeared around five years ago," Rufus explained, "About six
months ago he reappeared, crazed and filled with delusions. Convincing himself
that he was an Ancient, he had a vendetta against everyone on the planet, and
only listened to Jenova."
"Jenova?" Seifer asked, "Ancient?
What's that?"
"The Ancients are the people who
lived on the planet before humans did," Reno explained, "and Jenova's an
alien."
"Oh," the teenager replied with
celerity. He didn't quite understand, but he wasn't in the mood to press the
Turk for questions at the moment, "So tell me what this Sephiroth did."
"He used something called the
'Black Materia' to summon a meteor," the president explained, "Sephiroth has
unimaginable power. We tried everything and nothing could destroy it. From what
Reno told me, Meteor almost collided with the planet."
"He almost destroyed the planet!?"
Zell asked in horrified awe. The rest of the group was thinking the exact same
thing. After several minutes of dead silence, people brooding over the facts
just given to them, Reno spoke.
"Wait a minute," he asked Alex,
"How did Hojo end up having one of your dimension-warp things?"
Alex looked at Reno for a moment
before a dumbfounded look crept its way onto his face. "One day I received a
package in the mail," he solemnly explained, "It didn't have a return address,
so I couldn't tell whom it was from. This device was inside the box.
"I didn't know what it was at
first," he continued, a smile creeping onto his face, "I just started randomly
pushing buttons… and I found myself stranded in Junon for a week. The whole
time I was there I had to listen to the majority of the ShinRa Army practice
for Rufus's dumb welcoming parade."
Rufus glared at the dark-haired
man maliciously but Alex didn't seem to notice. The blonde then noticed that
Seifer was staring at him strangely.
"'ShinRa Army?!' I thought you
were just president of some electric company!" he exclaimed, staring at the man
in awe.
Rufus smiled, "Well, yes. I'm that
too." The youth's surprise at discovering the extent of his power amused him.
"You were in Junon?!" Reno asked
anxiously. Now that he thought about it, he did remember seeing someone
who looked distinctly like Alex. It was while Elena, Tseng, and him were at one
of Junon's many dilapidated diners assuring themselves that they could afford
to slack a little on the job. And even thought they were on duty at the time,
Rude had still headed for the harbor's bar located in a back alley. It was one
of the rare days that Reno had refused to get drunk. During that time, Elena
had yelled at a soldier that was slacking while on duty. The irony. "Hmmm… I
remember you now. You were the weird guy that was staring at us and laughing
while we were talking to that one soldier."
"That one soldier was Cloud
Strife," Alex corrected with wry amusement.
The redhead's jaw dropped and he
shook his head furiously. Alex only nodded back to confirm that what he said
was, in fact, true. Reno then replied derisorily in a quiet voice, "No wonder
why you laughed."
Alex, who patiently waited for the
fiasco to end, continued his story. "It felt like a dream at first. After all,
it was kind of hard to believe I was in a video game. Eventually I began to
understand exactly what the device was capable of. After a while I realized
that everyone in these other places, these 'other realities,' were all living
in a false world. I figured they didn't deserve that. So now you're here, in
the real world, and now I think I finally know who sent me that package."
"It was Hojo, wasn't it?" Squall
asked, "He's the one who invented it, isn't he?"
Alex nodded.
Eiko frowned at the dark-haired
man. "But wait a minute! What makes you think we're just… er, what was the
word?" she asked, searching her memory for the unfamiliar term.
"Video game character," Squall
filled in flatly.
"Yeah!" Eiko confirmed, "How do
you know that that's exactly what we are!? You think that we don't exist or
something! But we do! You've been to where we come from and you know
it's real!"
"The girl's got a point," Reno
added, "If Hojo was the one who sent you that dimension-warp thing, then he's
probably been here."
"And if he's been here," Rufus
added, catching on, "then that's probably how the whole Meteor incident somehow
got made into a video game."
"Exactly!" Reno continued,
"There's tons of stuff out there about Meteor. People have been interviewing
Avalanche on talk shows, and writing books about saving the planet form
Sephiroth. So he could have sold one of those books to a video game company. He
could have traveled to Eiko's world or to Squall's world, and could have done
the same thing there."
"And that's exactly how all of us
got tangled up in this debacle," Rufus concluded.
"Hmm," Alex mused, "I never
thought about it that way before. I've known all of you from a video game, and
when I saw Junon that's exactly what I thought it was. The possibility that
these other dimensions might actually exist didn't even occur to me until now."
"Hey, how about that," Seifer said
surly, "The little bastard's finally figured it out!"
Everyone ignored the knight's
caustic remark.
"So can we go home now?" Eiko
asked hopefully.
The group sat in an uneasy silence
for several minutes before Rufus finally spoke what no one else wanted to say,
"Sephiroth's still out there, and if Hojo can transport him to any one of these
dimensions…
"…then he could be anywhere,"
Squall finished, "including here."
"That would be a disaster," Alex
said, "My world doesn't have magic, and Sephiroth has an advantage. The people
here have no idea what he's capable of."
"We have to figure out what Hojo
has planned, and we have to do it quickly," the president stated, "Sephiroth
once broke into ShinRa headquarters, arguably the most guarded building on the
planet, and killed a significant number of my men. He's a very dangerous
man, and with Professor Hojo influencing him he's even more dangerous."
"What are you suggesting?" the
leader of Balamb Garden asked.
"I think we should split up,"
Rufus continued, "We should keep an eye on every dimension until Sephiroth is
defeated."
"I agree," Alex said, "Don't
forget that we still have four people missing: Elena and Rude from Rufus's
world, and Raijin and Fujin from Squall's. We have to find them. We're going to
split into groups.
"Eiko," he said, addressing the
young girl, "I want you to go back to Lindblum. It's a big city and they pretty
much know what's going on around the world there." He then turned to the rest
of the group, "Zell and Squall, I want you two to go back to Balamb Garden.
Prepare your troops for a battle with Sephiroth."
He turned to the sorceress's
knight, "Seifer, I don't want you going back with Squall. I don't want to
imagine what kind of disaster that would cause. You're coming with Rufus and
I."
"And where are we going?" Seifer
asked.
"Nibelheim," Alex answered curtly.
The knight still looked ambiguous,
but Rufus understood, "Of course!" he exclaimed, "The mansion! If Hojo kept any
records on his experiments with this incident, then it would be held in the
basement library!"
"Exactly," the dark-haired man
confirmed, "Now I need someone to stay here…" He looked around the room, eyes
falling on Reno and realizing that he was the only one left.
"Reno, you're going to stay," the
man said with reluctance, "You can't stay in this building, though. I'm going
to have to let you stay in my apartment."
The Turk hadn't been paying
attention, and when he heard his name his head perked up and looked around the
room in confusion. It took several minutes for him to realize what the man had
said.
"All right," Alex said, "Remember,
Sephiroth could be anywhere, so stay alert!"
"Wait a minute!" Squall said, "How
are we going to inform each other if we discover Sephiroth?"
"I'll call you on my cellular
phone," Alex explained, "I've found a way to use the dimension-switching device
to make phone calls from the other dimension. The only thing I need is the
number."
Eiko frowned, "But I don't have
one of these 'phones.' What am I supposed to do?"
Reno hesitated a moment before
reaching into his pocket and retrieving his PHS. "I guess I won't be needing
this anymore." He handed the phone to Eiko and told Alex the number. The other
groups followed until the man had everyone's number written down.
Alex pulled the dimension-warp
device out of his coat pocket. He looked around at the group of people. "Is
everyone ready?" The majority of the people nodded their heads. Zell did not.
Instead he spoke.
"Can someone explain to me what
the hell is going on!?"
The SeeD had been quiet all
through the debate, and almost everybody had forgotten he was even there. No
one had filled him in on what was happening.
"I'll explain it all when we get
there," Squall promised.
Alex pushed several buttons on the
device and Eiko disappeared within a bright flash of light. He repeated the
process several times until everyone was gone except for Reno, Rufus, Seifer,
and himself.
"All right," he told the Turk,
"You have a very important job. I want you to watch the news everyday
and read the newspapers frequently, so if Sephiroth shows up, you'll know it.
Don't answer the phone unless it's me. I don't want you leaving my apartment
too often, and if you do, don't carry any weapons. That's not the way things
work here. And last but not least, do not trash my apartment."
Reno nodded, trying to soak in all
the information before he got transported away.
Before long, everyone had gone
their separate ways, hoping to save not only one planet, but several.
End Ch. 6 at
04.09.01.
Okay! Sorry it's so short and it took me forever.
I thought this chapter was kind of dull. I wanted to add more, but I figured it
would make the chapter a gazillion pages long and it would never get
posted. Anyhow, I can't even remember all of the people I'm putting in this
story! It has more characters than Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series! And I
was depressed for a week after I went back to that diner in Junon (where the
Turks were) later in the game and the guy said that Diamond Weapon killed all
of his regular customers! I convinced myself that the Turks weren't
regular customers and that they were somehow still alive.
Anywho, E-Mail me, spookyfox1@hotmail.com
and I hope I didn't make you commit suicide
because you learned the Turks were dead. (That's okay, I'm in denial. Denial is
a happy thing. They're all alive!) –Emerald
Eyes