End of A Reality
by Blue9Tiger/edited and proofreadd by DarkMutatedBrock/La Cidiana, story by La Cidiana
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Editor's Notes: Made a lot of useless changes in this one, mostly due to my Cid possession/obsession problem... Mmm... Cid.. angst... turmoil.... BWAHAH.
A/N: Uh...please be aware that this is pseudo sci-fi/action/adventure. Due to my relative ignorance, this is the best I can do. ; ;
*~*~*
List of Planetouched members compiled by the Mahogany Town Police Department
1. S.O.Demoni
2. I.G.Gainsborough (deceased)
3. E.V-V.Hojo
4. L.V.Hojo (deceased)
5.S.W.Hale
6.B.R.Westwood
7.N.Nanba
8. S.U.A-L.Sebastian
9. R.K.Elm
10. B.D.Ivy
*~*~*
Chapter 17: Too Blind to See
*~*~*
Threads of pale, transient light spun an eerie tangle of energy that hovered a foot or two above ground. The members of AVALANCHE stood warily before it, amidst a biting wind that bent the sparsely scattered grass blades and tore them from their roots. The light that peeked out from the rent in the air served to taunt and tease them as if to say, "What are you waiting for?"
What were they waiting for, anyway? Why the hesitancy and tense apprehension... of something dangerous and deadly? They had gone against certain death before. They had faced the murderous seraph in the very core of hell... and lived. This portal should've been like clearing out Beachplugs on the shores. And yet, enough doubt lingered to keep them from storming into the unknown the same way they had stormed through the gale-ridden mouth of the Northern Crater.
But the Northern Crater wasn't laced with uncertainty. They knew what had festered at the center of the planet's core. They could only guess what was beyond this web of light.
Enough waiting. We aren't going to get them back by standing around.
"We're breaking through."
The blood-encrusted blade that had been nicked and cloven too many times to count now was raised two-handed in the air. It fell crisp on its target. The point of the sword that had seen many Bandersnatch heads fall by its edge drove into the scarce tendrils of dim light, which flared into pulsating rays that hurled Cloud onto the ground, and ripped the sword from his hands. Stars danced briefly in front of his eyes as an upside-down Yuffie landed behind his head and whipped out her shuriken, levelling her nimble eyes with the target and threw. The weapon shaved the air and collided, bending the sparking wound, but clattering uselessly on the ground.
"H--HEY----what the?!!!" Yuffie sputtered while blinking in confusion. Tifa shot her and a still grounded Cloud a frustrated look. She had her arms crossed, leaning on one hip and staring annoyed at the murky sky.
"I told you. There's no way in." A dark laugh penetrated the lengthened silence as the gaunt man appeared suddenly behind Tifa and lengthened her shadow. He raised a slender hand to his holster with that peculiar sluggish, mechanical motion and fired a round with the Death Penalty, smoke pouring out of its barrel and obscuring the light.
"There is always a way in." The curtain of smoke rose and the portal bloomed. "There is never a way out," He approached the bulging orb, his scarlet cape, still filmed in aging dust from that cursed coffin, flowing at the back of his knees. The wind blew with more ferocity which seemed to repulse the light, which shrank and collapsed on itself, leaving the grey sky with no remnant of the disturbance.
"Cut the riddles and tell it straight out, goth-boy!" snapped the ninja, not caring much for Vincent's enigmatic and persistent silence. If he knew, why didn't he tell? What good was it to keep it to yourself? What good were you, then? "Whaddaya know about all this crud?" she asked, impatience drilled in her shifty eyes.
Tifa shot the girl a warning stare, afraid that Vincent would change his mind and return to silence.
Lucky them, he didn't.
"This door..." He motioned with his right arm to the now-nonexist portal. "..leads to an alternate world. A world much like ours, but a utopia in the heart of a much larger dystopia."
"A whuzzah to the whuzzah...?" Yuffie blinked with a puzzled expression.
"You've seen it?" Tifa frowned, apparently understanding the caped-man's lingo.
Vincent shook his head, which was sufficient enough to answer the question, and he didn't elaborate further. But Tifa wasn't going to let their lackidasical comrade off that easily. She clamped both hands on her wide hips and shot a narrow glare at the space where the portal had been.
"That doesn't explain why we're locked out."
The red-caped man was now turned turned away from them, staring into oblivion with those unnerving blood-red eyes, reaching for a less... disturbing memory than the nightmares he lived through. "This Planet yearned to keep its children. But Shin-Ra wanted to keep its Mako rates high. They prevented further migration by making these doors impossible to pass after a certain number had left."
That says something about why it's here," Tifa started, half-hoping that the blinding light would sear open the hazy sky once again.. "But it doesn't help us figure a way past it."
"I cannot help you there," the grave man answered unconcernedly.
"Great, so we're stuck," Tifa muttered. She hauled herself to the wall of sky and landed a roundhouse kick onto it. Still it didn't budge. Frustrated, she stumbled away from it, her tread hard on the unvegetated ground. She felt the coarse, dust-enveloped fabric of Vincent's cape brush past her. She shivered reflexively: Nothing on that man ever warned up. It could be a day in the triple digits with the scorching sun boiling the sands of Costa del Sol, and he and his clothes would be like they were still locked in that coffin. As if he was still dead.
The young woman cupped her forehead in her gauntleted hand, leaned back, sighed, and let it slip down to her side.Things were beginning to look bleaker and bleaker. On top of all that, Vincent was-----mumbling. Quite... unlike him, as it was more characteristic of someone... else.....
"'It... has the properties of a magnet except the lock which seals it. When open, this pole repels and the opposite pole attracts-----'"
She leaned her head to the side, glimpsing the very, very faint spark of what looked like life in the dead pupils thorugh a mass of tangled black hair. Life... loathing, remorseful, hate-filled. But life nonetheless. "'---however, the barrier can be broken by an object of sufficient mass coupled with high velocity---'"
"Vincent...?" Tifa asked, more than a bit unnerved. This wasn't like him at all. Someone content to answer with one or two syllables; if he had anything more to say, it would be in his head, not out his mouth. But wait... the tone, or lack thereof, hadn't changed a bit. As if he was quoting someone.
Sure enough, whatever emotion that had surfaced plunged into the depths of the man's nonexistent soul, and he was speaking normally... as normal as he got, anyway.
"The airship will open the door."
"Now we're getting somewhere," Tifa stated with rising determination. She inhaled
the brisk wind and turned her gaze to the west. They'd find their lost crew soon enough.
Not soon enough to erase the nagging worry in her mind, but if Cid's assistant/cook/tea-brewer/throw rug lived up to her reputation, they'd be through that damned door in no time. "Shera might know how to fix it. Lets pay her a visit."
*~*~*
Reeve didn't need to ask what the hell had happened as he slowed down a mad dash through the hall and spotted the back of the president's stately white trenchcoat. A bandage draped loosely over an embarassing goose egg on Reno's forehead and the fact that Rude's arm was in a sling was enough to tell at least part of the story. Then there was Elena and--the "dead" head Turk--- the latest exec gossip circulated faster than the most outrageous tabloids. Being the practical, realistic type,
it never occured to him that it could be true.....There he was, freshly exhumed, more rock-faced and reserved than ever, fitting for what was so recently a corpse..... but Tseng appeared very much alive.
That wasn't the only thing. Gyahaha and Kyahaha and Lardman were there as well. It must have been of dire importance if the president had summoned all of them there: Except Hojo, of course. That was a no-brainer: tortoises weren't quick to go anywhere. Probably he was holed up in his lab, planning... someone's... premature... demise.....
What lab? Reeve asked himself as he slid closer to the conglomerate that had gathered in front of the scorched heap of tangled metal. Old man finally did us a favor and did himself in, he surmised as teams of Blastoise trudged about the blackened remains, their hydro cannons belching out copious amounts of water that strangled the last strings of fire. A scientist stood rather unimportantly in the background, fiddling with some device. Reeve approached the rest of the corporate giants and at the same time, kept his distance, especially wary of the president...
Who at that moment turned around.
The bearded man's planned step fell short, and he had one foot on the ground and the other dangling quite ridiculously in mid-air, his mouth partly open and his bulging eyes fixated to the face of the President. Incoherent babble dribbled out of his mouth as Rufus stared him down incredulously.
"Reeve, if you have anything to say that is worthy of your intelligence, say it. Otherwise..." His teeth locked into a crooked grimace---Reeve could swear on the bones of his old man that Rufus spent millions on dental work. And the beard..... If there was anyone who spent longer in the bathroom to make sure he was clean-shaven, it had to be Rufus. "Bite your tongue."
Rufus turned back to face the burned lab. The Blastoise team had finished and were withdrawing, but the residual smoke still clung to the air, making it unpleasant to breathe. But that was the least of their worries.
Rufus' arctic gaze burned into the now-useless machinery, the ashes of the equipment which he himself had shrunk a branch of the Weapons Department to cover the costs, and the unoccupied tubes that held "296,000,000 gil," he stated with misleading calmness. He moved away from the yellow tape stretched across the charred rubble.
"296,000,000 GIL!" he exploded in uncharacteristic rage, the frigid ice in his eyes
bursting into flame in tyrannical mania. As the executives stared at him with increased uneasiness, Rufus cupped two palms on his temples and dug his neatly clipped nails into the crown of his head. He had calmed down to the point of sounding genuinely docile, but it wasn't helping.
"296,000,000 gil," he repeated barely above a whisper. With the same even-temperedness, the president spoke through the semblance of a snarl, "I'll be damned if those... creatures could burn that quickly." The snarl tightened. " Or if Hojo could burn that quickly." The frozen aqua glowing in his subzero eyes dashed suspiciously about at flinching employees.
Admittedly, he had held the Turks back. They could have easily stopped AVALANCHE in a weakened state from dealing with security.But he was expecting that the recently acquired creatures would find no difficulty in procuring a meal. Instead, AVALANCHE set the lab on fire. Arson. That wasn't their style. Had someone tipped them off? He wouldn't doubt it. Rufus wasn't an imbecile. He was highly aware of the animosity between his executives. One of them could have given them the hint that fire was the best way to cripple their target. Hm. He would find a scapegoat later. What mattered now was recovering the escaped gil.
At even temperment again, Rufus turned to his executives on a quick, and to Reeve's observation, catlike heel. Calm. Cool-headed. As if nothing had happened. "Heidegger, Scarlet, tigthen security. Have the weaponry trained and broken in."
The two executives knew what that order meant and resented it fully. Yet more of those slobbering Celadon imports to haul in and make Shin-Ra-worthy. Rufus was really laying it hard on them, they grumbled mentally. All this over some crummy labrats that would outlive their usefulness eventually, anyway.
Of course, they hadn't seen the labrats.
Rufus had.
"The rest of you, make yourself useful," he growled to the last two who were, in Rufus' eyes, only suited to enhance the company's reptuation without impacting it. And they knew it. But they weren't about to dispute it. Palmer waddled away in a huff, and Reeve edged away with a suspicious darting eye, blinking madly to get this picture out of his mind that was developing right before his eyes. Paraanoid? Perhaps. But as he drew farther away and the form of his president grew blurrier and blurrier, he could see... CLEARLY..... a bloodthirsty cat in his place...
Reeve took off down the hall so as not to completely lose it... if he hadn't lost it, already. The only ones left were Rufus, the Turks, and the scientist in the background, who was now turning two bizarre-looking devices over in his smooth palms. One, a control box with raised blinking dials, and the other...a simple black metallic box. Rufus raised his hand and swept his hair---and a miniscule bead of sweat, off his high forehead.
The stranger spoke. A mild, forceless weak sort of voice, not to mention belonging to another outsider. But, that Ivy character had proved invaluable to facilitating the growth of their finances.... there was no reason for this Professor Elm to be otherwise.
"Um.....hello, Mr. Shin-Ra. Here I have some... uh... tracking equipment---" He fumbled withthe larger machine in his hands. "--that'll help me find him. Uh... these wonderful people.." He gestured to the Turks using one free hand, shot them a nervous glance, and again looked at Rufus. "--can... er..... do the rest," mumbled the thick-glassed man, fidgeting under the two glaciers that riveted to his squeamish person.
So, this was Elm, most renowned Pokémon researcher in the Jouto region, cheaper than anyone from Kanto or Houen, and certainly far less expensive than Ivy. He acted more strangely than Reeve as of late... which gave him no cause for concern... why should he be concerned? He was Rufus Shin-Ra. Only the richest and most influential man in Kanto, Jouto, and Houen combined. Able to sway the vote with the usual methods, kidnapping, bribery, threats, but all "legally", of course. On top of that, he would again be in posession of four models of lucrative weaponry, once the old man was found. Their profits would soar. At this rate, he would own Kanto. And Gaia. Ah.. yes... everything was going to plan. He had almost forgotten his unseemly outburst already. Why, he was even forgetting that his chin was coated in hair and there were stubs of it that were getting ridiculously long, dotting his cheeks, and he had milk and fish for the past few DAYS. Not to mention that anything and everything continued to irritate him and that blasted headache. Including the small black bug crawling unnoticed across the scientist's shoulder. Following its rounded path with his entire head he ordered Tseng:
"Kindly remove this thing from the professor's garments." A set of disgruntled footfalls rapped heavily on the floor, but the scowl was invisible and the mid-age Turk buried this degradation of being misued and reduced in purpose. How could that young upstart, a foreigner, not to mention a scientist, with no fighting experience whatsoever, with a...... pink rock for a weapon, be given the job of recovering the lost professor? Perhaps the president was losing it. He wouldn't be surprised, with the way he acted and the way Reeve, whom he trusted a great deal more than the callow president, acted around him. But concealing his suspicions and his grudges, he moved dutifully to brush the spider off of the scientist, when a hand snapped up to his shoulder and briskly slapped Tseng's hand away.
"Oh.. it's not there by accident, I brought it along with me." He brought his other hand to his shoulder and let the spider crawl across it, two moving dots crossing his palm. "It's much weaker than Spinarak or Ariados, but it releases enough poison to incapacitate its enemy. And it's good at scaring the daylights out of some people. Some people are so scared of spiders they get incapacitated themselves!" He let the spider crawl on the back of his hand, up his arm, back across his shoulder to his other shoulder, and down his other arm. "Ecosystems around the world depend on these arthropods. They act as a kind of insect control---if you have a bug problem, spiders are the real exterminator-----"
Rufus arched his eyebrows. Why the hell were these scientist types so damn eccentric? This Elm may have had a weak and unauthorative air about him, vaguely reminiscint of Hojo's though completely lacking the intimidation factor, coming off as more of a bookish nerd that had nothing else better to do than prate about spiders, and yet, there was no lack in self-confidence... or stamina.
"You see this?" He let Rufus breathe as he pulled out from his deep labcoat pockets a rolled-up sheet of steel wiring running criss-cross, a simplistic net. The Shin-Ra President tilted his head, staring at the contraption sideways. He held his head straight again, answering through teeth grinding with impatience,
"A net. Why do you keep such a useless device with you?"
"To demonstrate the spider web's ingenuity!" Elm answered with a giddy light in his eyes. Rufus was taken aback by this unwarranted youthfulness, childishness, even, and he issued a growl which he himself was unconscious of.
"Observe its intracacies, its flawless structure, how it's delicate and durable at the same time, how---" The light in his eyes waned to a far more subtle gleam. "It catches the most evasive of prey---" He cut himself off, mentally twitching underneath that dangerous glare. "I will get to work now and bring the Professor back safely..." he resolved apologetically, putting on an unecessarily wide grin and letting the spider crawl into a container in his pocket. Rufus knew the nature of that grin. Too exaggerated to be genuine, it was veiling some disguised purpose, an alternate agenda. Perhaps it was a mistake to hire an outsider for this job. But, he was nothing like Ivy. There was an eighty percent chance that Ivy would bite you in the back. Speaking of Ivy...where was she? An irritated scowl creasing his face, Rufus stalked to his office to make a phone call... and ease his stomach with some smoked salmon.
Smoked? No. Why not raw? Yes, tonight he would eat it raw.
*~*~*
Everything HURT so GODDAMN BAD......
Right now, Cid wanted more than anything else to slow cook in Hades' cauldron. Or get devoured by a Behemoth. Or fight Sephiroth ten times over again with a blunt spear. The bloodiest of deaths paled compared to this... being pinned on his front, wires connecting him to some monitor that beeped persistently in rhythm with his groans of pain, his arched spine that he was sure was gonna crack right through the ragged scars crossing his back, and his arm... his arm... covered to the elbow in rough scales, weighing his arm down, leadening it enough that it felt it would drop straight off his shoulder and twitch on the blood-washed floor. But forget that. It was the only limb on Cid's body that wasn't paralyzed. It moved..... it...... huh?
Cid caught the ripple of muscle through a curtain of racing sweat. The cries died. The clawed limb raised in erratic jitter with a mind separate from and one with Cid's...... sleeping... entity... waiting to be free, waiting to be rid of this human carcass.
The rising and falling crests on the monitor split: now there were two. Which would mean... the other subject was now viable.
"So...you are awake," Hojo quietly acknowledged with his back turned from the specimen. He averted his gaze from the monitor and was busy over the scalpel, a metalloid square, and the tranquilizer fluid. The latter would be indispensable through the early stages. If Draconis Rex killed the host before fully transforming..... He'd rather not risk eight years of research and four years of experimentation. Heh... but it all had been worth it.
Taking the needle he fitted it into the syringe and shuffled towards Cid's arm. The needle barely poked the scales when the other arm reached painfully under and clamped vice-like on the target. Hojo didn't flinch. "It is acting exactly as I anticipated." He very placidly lifted the momentarily
mobile arm and reached the deadlier one, administering the serum and sending a numbing shock through Cid's entire body, freezing the arm..... for a second. Hojo shuffled past the limb and heard an unsettling rip. He looked back to see the top straps torn in two. He eyed them narrowly and took the piece of sillicon. If his foresight told him anything, the straps were primitive restraints that would not keep the subject captive. If it did escape which he was now sure it would, the microchip would guarantee that he would know its location. But.... how to insert it.....?
Simple... like he always did it.
With another hand he took the scalpel still coated in blood from its earlier use.
The beast that had so long slept entombed in this pilot was waking. It felt like.... like... it was clawing through his chest, a fiery pain seared through the cavity which felt hollow despite the crapload of lungs and stuff rearranging themselves inside. As if that wasn't enough, Hojo was cutting into him again, the blood snaking down wherever the blade was doing its bloody work, collecting in a glob at the back of his neck. He wanted to puke. Maybe the sensation of stomach acid and a long-forgotten lunch corroding his cancer-infested throat walls would make him forget how bad the pain gnawed at him everywhere else. Especially the head.... chipping at his skull with that fucking scalpel.... Hojo was putting something into it...GREAT...there was a piece of shit stuck in his head and it was bleeding all over and he was putting back that piece of skull covered in his innards and he was cementing it or somethin'... Now Hojo had taken a needle to it to sew his head back up. Pinpricks of pain stabbed all over his cranium as the needle pushed into his head again and again and again and AGAIN....
However, it was a muted pain compared to that blazing agony that razed his insides.
Now the other arm started to change. The inner pain escalated. The creature continued to tear. It flashed in its mind. Grinning cruelly at the human's demise. Waiting, anticipating, lurking within.
Cid saw it.
It saw Cid.
"Who're.... what're you?..!!"
They call me Draconis Rex... ignorant as they are. I was born without a name... at least not one you would care to know.
"Drac--what?! The hell...?"
I'm surprised... even insulted. You should know me... We share many things, Highwind, many things....
"You're lying..... fucking liar.... ya ain't real... you're just in my mind...."
We saved each other, remember? Or am I expecting too much from you, human?
"Saved---?!"
Your mother told you not to play in the street like the other boys. Said you were... too fragile. They swung at the ball too fast for you. The car was too fast as well, it seems..... It hit you. There was blood on the ground... Lots of blood. You remember the blood, don't you?
"I don't... Never had a mother.... Don't remember..."
You remember her eyes, though, don't you? They were blue, blue like the sky. People said you had your mother's eyes.
"How did you....?! .........Shut up..... Shut the FUCK UP."
I was playing too when they took me. With my brothers.... I was the youngest, a hundred years or so, but I was the Chosen, too. The Chieftains said I would lead the clan to greatness. Then the humans came... killed my brothers as quick as can be, then shot me too.... I don't know about your blood, but I remember mine. They took me, tried to salvage me to further their "great knowledge." And then....
".......Then what."
They were looking for someone with your kind of case. Desperate mother... desperate for anything to save her son. Your genes had a rare design... compatible, they said. Shin-Ra wanted someone to help in the wars to come, someone who could fly their machines like no other... someone who could fly like us. Like a dragon.
"You... no... hah... ain't true, you.... bastard, I was inside a car when I the accident happened... my parents died... I went to the Shin-Ra boarding school and they picked me out for special training...."
You believed that...? I planted the seed of doubt, tried to tell you, and you STILL believed that.....?You were a brilliant little kid too--straight A's in school, amazing test scores, a teacher's favorite, always fiddling with electronics and fixing them too. Perfect candidate for their Master Pilot. Absolutely perfect.
So they used me to save you. We fused.
"No....."
Both our brains were damaged beyond repair... our bodies too... and... if you care to speak in such vague terms, our "souls" as well.... They put us together, Highwind, made us one being.... Then, to their own convenience, the bastards locked me up. My body, at least.... our soul and your mind, that's all they wanted.
"J-JESUS. I'm not listening to this crap----stupid head, SHUT UP."
They didn't want anything in the way, either. So they killed your mother as soon as the procedure was done. Tracked down your worthless drunk of a father and killed him too. Took away your baby brother and put him in some other family's care... must have been a reason for that. The Shin-Ra don't have mercy.
"I never had a family or a brother or a family so shut up, shut up, SHUT UP."
Then we woke up.
......We fought for a while. It was hard, that first month or so. You cried a lot. For your mother, sometimes, but mostly alone. They ended up putting us in a straitjacket and locked us in a padded room so we wouldn't kill each other. Or, in your case, your own self. You ever wonder about those scars on your wrists?
"No. I got my hands stuck in a wire fence when I was five, you dumbfuck. I remember it clear as day."
Heh. You're right. That's why it hurt so much when you tried to cut through the scars. But you kept on doing it anyway. Finally you gave up, gave into your new soul, and I allowed you to take our body, and then they trained you to love the skies and be with the skies... and kill for them. And all the while, I helped you while you were in control...
Now it's MY turn.
"What?! No.. NO... I AIN'T NO DRAGON FREAK----!"
You can't deny it forever. Why did you want to see what was out there and spread your wings? Because you HAVE wings. My wings.
"You're crazy, FUCKING CRAZY. I must be crazy..."
Why could you summon me in the first place? I was in you.
"NO..."
Why did you fight like one of us? Because you ARE.
"Stoppit..... I'm havin' A REAL BAD dream..... but it's just a dream.... somethin' I need to get outta my system... yeah... that's it..."
And did you ever let ME out? NO.
"GET the HELL OUTTA MY SIGHT-----"
It's my turn, Highwind. You can't deny it.
" ---AAARGHREERRRRRRHHHHH!!"
The human arm flecked with a few scales flew to his eyes and the knuckles caught him square in the socket. The lids started to bruise as Cid remastered the hand and nursed this new pain. Hojo replaced his instruments on the tray and circled the man, black gaze boring into a fractious and combative soul.
"Frustrating, isn't it, to battle your own self? To have members out of joint.....you would think that there was someone there, wouldn't you?"
LET ME OUT......
"You're full of AAACKKKKK-----" The human hand leapt to the back of his neck, the fingers squeezing tight around it and the scaling thumb crushing the throat, strangling the life out of the poor pilot.
"This won't do at all." Hojo reached for another needle and forced it into the renegade arm. It came away rigid, but left Cid half-dead. He lay there, wheezing, gasping, the blue color in his face receding only to overtake the right hand and.....
Change THAT into a claw, too. Nothing could go slower than it already was. It killed to breathe. Things were crawling on the inside. Changing. His lungs suddenly weren't breathing the right air. This was moldy and musty air. He had to be out. Free. To breathe. To fly. No, not with an airplane. To FLY. To fly? Man, his mind was REALLY going on him..... going crazy, yeah, that must be it. He COULDN'T lose it..... not NOW.....
He had to escape.
A staggered swipe of the left claws, and the middle straps were severed. Amidst the crushing pain he pushed himself foward and squeezed underneath the lower straps. Inch. Another squeeze. Inch. His upper torso was hanging off the table. Hojo's eyes were again on the monitor. He edged off the table. Now his ribs were hanging off. The straps were at his ankles. Then the other arm wised up and dug its lengthening nails into the meat of the treacherous arm and tore down through the tender scales. Cid howled with pain and looked on in horror as the gold blood dripped down in parallel streams.
Hojo looked up from the changing signals with a cold frown.
"I suggest you refrain from any other attempts at escape. Draconis Rex does not know it is captive. If you try to move it against its will it could prove to be quite..." A retaliatory scrape of formed claws against half-scaled hide and a scream from Cid swayed the frown into a slight smile. "...painful."
"PAINFUL?!" he roared. "It hurts bad enough... you can't add to it any MORE."
"Perhaps," he acknowledged. "Perhaps I am not as skilled at causing the---" He chuckled as he looked the man up and down and noted the progressing change that that would made his comment rather ironic.. "---human body to suffer. My predecessor was far more adept at that..and to think that he loved his spouse enough to adopt her maiden name as his own. Outrageous for one of this world. I suppose he was acculturated into the other world where the female population is much more foward in thinking. Hah... on the other hand..." An eye shifted to the subject. Its fingers were
growing thicker and visibly rougher. The faint stub of a tail was beginning to poke through the man's cargo pants. The beginnings of wings broke the surface on either side of the horrendously curved spine.
"..Dragons are solely patriarchal. The very strength of the species depends on the male's ability to control and dominate its flock. It is an uneasy relationship, especially among the lesser dragons where there may be two or three potential leaders. If the leader proves insuffiicient, the flock destroys it....."
He stroked his narrow chin. "Which kind are you?" he asked simply, in full knowledge that his first subject couldn't hear him and frankly, didn't care to, wrapped in a thousand simultaneous agonies. If only he could make his arms work for him again, if he could claw through the rest of those goddamn straps...
Cid's mind scrambled for an answer. It tumbled every which way through the pulsing sea of chemicals. They were changing things in his HEAD...He shouldn't be here. He was here. He had to get home. To Rocket Town. No... to the sky. To the clouds. The hell?!? What the fuck was he thinking, he couldn't fly.... not really fly.... He could jump, hell, could he jump, but he couldn't fly. But the chemicals... Said he could...said he was able...
LET ME OUT..... JUST THIS ONCE, LET ME OUT!!! Please... No... I shouldn't be begging...... I SHOULD BE MAKING YOU.....
"ST---STROHHP!!! QUIT TELLIN' ME TO---huh?"
Pouring all his will into controlling that right arm, he raised it and rubbed his throat as tenderly as scales against skin could manage. That's where the vocal chords were, right? Something wasn't right in there...
LET_ME_OUT, DAMMIT!!!!!!
Just then, something roared through him. It was a full-blown bestial cry, unimpeded by his own rough, thoroughly human voice... The beast was awake. It heaved Cid's body upwards, twisted him upright, and sent the claws slashing through the lower straps as well as the wires. Hojo in alarm grabbed for the syringe, but the freed creature slammed Cid's boot into his ribs and the scientist with a crack crashed into the wall. Cid was now on the table, but standing on it, one eye filled with terror and the other with madness, and the beast hurled his helpless body off of the table and onto the floor, squirming uncontrollably. The change quickened. The right arm was consumed past the elbow, and they attacked Cid, slashing his jaw and letting the gold blood dribble down his neck.
The sense he still had left moved his head out of the way to avoid getting torn apart by the damn claws. He wormed backwards on the floor, bloodied and dodging the deadly slash of his own limbs.
Hojo regained his senses and slid up the wall. With an irritated scowl formed on his face, he shoved his hand into his pocket and retrieved the dart gun. But at the very sight of the weapon, the creature lunged for the scientist, Cid's salivating mouth open as the beast roared threateningly in his face. One hand shot to the throat, claws cruelly curved towards the thin flesh while the other one raised for the death blow.
"Belligerent already, I see. We'll have to rectify this."
Swiftly and silently the syringe was released. It sunk hard in the constricting arm and
loosened; the claws gouged into the wall. Cid to his horror found his claws in the wall, and he yanked them out, putting the godforsaken clawed hands to his head in despair... His voice was hardly recognizable to himself as he growled a plea to a deaf deity,
"..GOORRGHHD.... STRROOHHPP... IRGGHHTTT...!!!!"
He felt his chest ram into the door, the syringes searing the choking air around him,
the door buckle and bend under the weight of the monster. The hinges rattled as this
unearthly power rushed the door, warning the ones behind the door to scatter but falling too early to prevent their discovery.
The door fell with a slam and a stirred cloud of dust and Cid charged for the basement exit with hell written on his screaming face. Hojo stood in the doorway, brow knitted in thought. It was then he looked down... and saw the two felines and the girl. He lowered his head, Mako eyes locking with the scared-to-death blue ones of Jessie and Meowth, who didn't know which to be more frightened of: the fleeing monster or the predatory stare that lanced their souls...
"What do we have here?" His menacing eyes shifted to look them over. Two...no three potential test subjects. One a little visually challenged, but all the better suited to his purposes. He removed the needle on the dart gun. With one deft motion he had it fitted with another...with a clouded chemical black as the new moon floating in the tube. He aimed the dart gun down at the fear-stricken Meowth.
"It seems that the old adage of 'curiosity killed the cat' still has not been proved false."
"W---we wasn't snoopin', honest-----!--!--!"
"Meowth's right!" Jessie seconded, her fake confidence signalling James to bolt. Dammit, that 2-watt lightbulb better catch on or they'd all be nailed. She showed a pleasant smile, which failed to mask the quavering fear in her voice from the scientist who couldn't be fooled by a lie hashed up in three seconds, and even if it was the truth, it didn't matter, if it was another specimen that could be sacrificed to science...
"We were just going to leave---!"
"Oh.....were you?"
Yes, we're leaving right_now.
Praying to God that Team Rocket would live up to its name, Jessie and Meowth bombed, the latter's paw wrapped tightly around Persian's tail. James was still in the corner. Stupid idiot. Run faster! He's right behind us!
The syringes started flying with deadly accuracy. Had they been a fraction of a second slower, that would be the end of them. Their pursuer walked coolly after them, the needles embedding into the wall, the floor, the ceiling. The Rockets flew through the nest of bats, their hearts in their throat parched with terror, running faster than they ever thought possible. Every squeak and squeal from the bats that were nailed with the needle stopped their hearts. Every time that could've been THEM that was pierced with the deadly array of syringes. But instead they felt the bats wiry bones crunch
beneath them as their velvet bodies carpeted the bare ground.
Hurry... get going... FASTER, DAMMIT!!!!!
James' panicked gaze caught a heavy oaken door. With all their strength the Rockets pulled it open on its crumbling hinges. When open enough to let them squeeze through, they bombed through it and slammed it shut, a tangled bunch of cobwebs
jarring it in its place. Once inside, with the panic-driven fervor of vampires that were in danger of being exposed to light, threw up the lids of three ornate boxes in the room and pulled the cover shut.
They did not know the cursed purpose of this cobweb-strewn room, nor the three decades of nightmares that plagued the center occupant..... nor the grim blood that stained the plush cushion where dead bones still cried out for mercy. They lay there like the dead men that filled two of the coffins, ceasing to breathe and ceasing to think...think about the complete darkness they had immersed themselves in, about the fact that they were lying with human bones bleached with the passing years, that their pursuer might have heard the door slam and would scour the room and wrench the lid off the coffins to find easy prey and stab into their hearts with that syringe.
Outside, the scientist tread with steps so light they were thunderous on the packed earth. His hunched body moved malignant across the low-ceilinged passage, death in all its wretched forms embodied in one man. The green gleam cut through the clouding murk. He swivelled his head back and forth, his nose twitching slightly, trained to detecting the faintest odor of concealed beasts, but aside from the pervasive smell of bat guano in the basement, nothing. A brief scowl sketched itself on his narrow visage. It seemed as if his potential specimens had concealed themselves well. He looked at the tracking device. Yes... Draconis Rex was far more important.... to his research and for locating Gemini, Zero-X, and the two hybrids. If the girl and Pokémon didn't turn up, it was only a minor loss to science.
He halted his walk right in front of the door. The cobweb-strewn door... behind which justice was completed. Justice that was his duty and his right to carry out in the first place. Actions which he hardly regretted, deeds for which he felt no remorse, because he didn't need to. It was for science.
"Ha... Valentine... you were such a fool," he sneered at a hazy memory.
The footfalls continued past the door and on towards the murky light, a grisly trail of gold blood marking where Draconis Rex had fled.
*~*~*
The driving torrents of rain plunged through the thinning droplets of blood, pumelling the human tracks that ground a frantic pattern through the grime.
Frantic and despairing of an unavoidable doom.
An invisible clock counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours, punctuating the irreversible passage of impartial time that shoved the pilot deeper and deeper into the sea of inhumanity. The storm raged, bringing its wrath upon the tracks. Coarse fragments of torn clothing lay uselessly near the warped prints that stood in the place of an unmistakable mark of humans. They stretched over the field, the damned being that made them sending the wolves scattering in his path.
To even think that not too long ago he steered the Highwind amidst the blazing face of
Meteor. In full control of the ship and himself. A man like the rest of them in mind and body. Now...... Not even Shera would have recognized the desperate creature, plowing through the mud on four legs, masked with leathery scales, hair gone all but for clumps of yellow jutting from his scalp, the clotted blood leaving frigid globs on his lower jaw and arm the scales on which flashed metallic in the blasts of lightning, both eyes swollen from his hostile fists socking him there, eyes that he didn't know were losing their pupils and being engulfed by blazing aqua, burning in the sockets of a bestial skull.
God... he didn't need to let up running to feel the muzzle protruding from his face, the spearlike teeth that now filled his mouth, the dead weight of... that.... fully-formed tail dragging him down... and there was that metal crap that son of a bitch stuffed into his frickin' HEAD, It was ringing..beeping... buzzing.... whatever that
sound was... that wouldn't STOP...
That and the dogged voice of the beast.
It's time, Highwind.
"NROOGHH....!!!" The dying man pleaded in savage roars, feeling the
weight of time dragging him by the throat into the Pit like so many others had been before him. The bits of yellow shrunk and shrivelled, the fore and hind claws tore from the mud as the wholly freed entity took command and broke the fetter to the earth. The draconic wings sprouted to full length from the animal's ridged back, the layers of hide stretching over the breaks in the skin, sealing the wounds. The fearsome pits of an unearthly aqua radiated an uncontrolled ferocity... of an unspent youth. Tar-choked vapors poured from his jaws as a raspy roar split the clashing elements. He raised his serrated neck to the tumultuous heavens, wings akin to identical steel beams unyielding to the deluge. They began to beat, breaking against the mud below, grabbing the fearsome tides of air. His instincts were rusted by time, by being..... caged in the body of a man.
He roared in enraged bitterness that time had gone by while he stood watching, was forced to become the subordinate because that... that human swept him under a rug and pretended he wasn't there, but he was always there, a part of him, in his soul... he was his soul, driving his ambitions forever skyward.
But he still had those instincts. He could feel them sharpening as the wrathful winds assaulted him from all sides, rushing past the surface of his wings and freeing him from the drowned land, hefting his body foward into the wind, pushing the scaled beast closer to the black clouds. Releasing an imperious roar, he arched his neck and plunged into the treacherous winds, climbing the skies through the hellish wall of water, lightning faulting the blackness enveloping him. Through the raging storm, never once did he hear the screams of the pilot faint and stifled in his head...
But they were there.
And hell if he was going down without a fight.
The war commenced.
*~*~*
The hungry wolves charged through the damp plains, a concerted pack of fur, teeth,
and claws, in pursuit of the grazers farther south. Hojo obliterated their pawprints as he took one step across the ground-out path, quirked an eyebrow, and leaned in the direction of the running wolves. A queer light growing in his eyes, he began to chuckle dryly.
"Time is a punctilious sculptor," he observed, with one eye on the fast-disappearing wolves and the other on the tracking device and the blue dot slowly moving across the map screen. "A pitiful lot they were.... Fugitives from... south Corel, wasn't it? They found refuge in Nibelheim..yes, I was generous enough to give them asylum....." he recounted. "It was effective. The procedure made sure there were no distinguishing marks that separate them from the others... heh..... heh....."
The wolves reached further into the distance, their piercing howls renting the air.
"Children of science, what music they make."
Imagine, the howl of a natural-born wolf the same as a human that was physically altered. As he looked fixatedly at the liquid churning in the glass casing, his conclusion was firm. "'Death... the great equalizer'... how absurd.... it is this... this... that eliminates ALL distinctions and divisions that this presumptuous species contrives. "
The blue dot was moving closer. "That point made, the subject should have fully transformed by now." Soon he would see it... the product of a dragon fused with a human. Two lives preserved, only one able to physically show itself at any given time, now that the process had finished. This would be quite... entertaining.
An explosion of bestial sound made the sky tremble and the clouds quiver.
"HHREEEEEERGHHHHH!!!!!"
Hojo looked at the tracker. As he expected, the blue dot was precisely overhead the Nibelheim grasslands. Draconis Rex dropped from the skies, unfurling his wings at the last second and tearing across the field, roaring rivers of wind following the streak of scales and wings and claws. He traced a wide circle that sliced open the damp earth and shot into metallic clouds, plunging into the winds and gliding into the distance with a masterful cry, but the vast ocean's turmoil raging in his mind.
GET_OUT_OF_MY_FUCKING_BODY.
Draconis Rex felt himself jerk downwards, his wing muscles loosen as the human struggled for control. For a moment he succeeded. The wings furled, and the creature divebombed at breakneck speed, pulling up before smashing into the jagged peak of Mt. Nibel.
You've had your freedom long enough, Highwind. Now YOU'LL be on the sidelines, waiting for your chance to knock MY lights out so you can take---
I'm doin' that right now, bastard.
The human yanked him up and sent him flying backwards, the northward winds
pushing against him. He bent his head downward to flip on his stomach, but the wings stopped before then, and he plummeted to the ground miles below.
You..... A weakened growl escaped his scale lips before the draconic form haltingly
transformed back to the pilot's body. He blinked his black-and-blue eyes, the white
sun hot on his skin. Skin... skin? Must've meant... he held up his rough hands. He was
back to normal. A grin broke the weathered features of his drawn face, and he raised his head to the sky, laughing raucously until he was hoarse. Through a raspy cough and he gave the bird to wherever the bastard was and shouted, "FUCK YOU, HOJO!! I'M STILL HERE, GOT THAT?! NO SON OF A BITCH DRAGON'S 'GONNA TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" The pilot looked over at the shabby town in the distance. Oh, SHIT. SHERA... how am I gonna explain that----
You're going to have a lot more to worry about than that, Highwind.
KISS MY ASS.....
Within the dragon roared. He had his taste of freedom. He wanted it back. He lifted
up Cid's foot, moving it into the dirt, and then the other, making him walk. Cid resisted.
but the dragon held out, making him run, towards the shore, the beach, the lapping water. The stones cut his bare feet as the dragon forced him towards the ocean, and when he touched the scorched white sand he KNEW what the dragon was going to do. The beast hurled him into the ocean, making him crawl across the sand, dunked him underneath the salt water, holding his eyes and nose and mouth open.
Fucking shitface. You're gonna DROWN me.
Good guess.
Another dunk. Another mouthful of salt.
You're gonna kill yourself, too, idiot bastard,
No... hahaa... just you.
He could hear the dragon laughing in triumph. A laugh that shouldn't BE there..... god damn it all.. he was going to kill him... KILL... WHY did he need him? He didn't need him to live. He had lived without him his whole life... hadn't he?! Those stories... lies, all lies, ha....
Cid's mental protests were pointless. The dragon wanted control and if it meant
killing his other half, he'd do it. Over and over he dunked Cid, plunging him into the saltwater while Cid desperately tried to keep himself from going under. He couldn't take it much more... the dragon was about to conquer him.
And then it took over before he expired, coughing and gasping for air with streams of
water coursing down his his face. Draconis Rex lifted off from the shoreline, Cid
cursing him vehemently from within. But why? He'd drowned him...he should be dead...!
Wait. Of course not. A safeguard. To prevent the two subjects from killing each other, the moment one reached unconsciousness the other would take over. But that wouldn't stop the dragon from making his will alone known. He would maintain sole control. He would..... Crash into another mountain and the human would once again subjugate him. This time he rammed headlong into the slopes of Mt. Corel, shaking the very mountain to its core, his bones clattering from the pulverizing impact.
Hojo was completely aware of this as he shuffled southward, his intent gaze darting across the map. The dot would move a while, stop, start, stop, and start again. That must mean... He stared into the sky, a scowl forming on his lips as the sillouhette of the dragon plunged into the shoreline. This did not particularly elate him. Raising his knuckles to his chin, he pondered this dilemma. As long as their struggle continued, the draconic form would never achieve the desired potential, nor would he recover the escaped subjects. But... what to do...
Through the corner of his eye he could see a smoking crater formed by the plummeting dragon. He had better think of something quickly. Though he was intrigued by the struggle, the dragon was to serve higher purposes than be the constant opponent of the pilot. The question was, how to restrain him from resisting the dragon?
Ha... of course..tranquilize the human subject. So simple, so easy... in theory.
He watched the moving dot, loading another syringe into the device with a click. Once it stopped within firing range, he would make his move.
*~*~*
TO BE CONTINUED....
Hey, thanks, MGS, for reading this, too! Tweaked quote is from Dracula. Stay tuned for chapter 18, where the Kuja ripoff makes another appearance, and things start to get ugly (as if they haven't, already) Also, will Cid come to terms with his new "friend"? Find out in the next EXCITING episode of--er..wrong channel. ^^: Stay tuned for chapter 18!
by Blue9Tiger/edited and proofreadd by DarkMutatedBrock/La Cidiana, story by La Cidiana
*~*~*
Editor's Notes: Made a lot of useless changes in this one, mostly due to my Cid possession/obsession problem... Mmm... Cid.. angst... turmoil.... BWAHAH.
A/N: Uh...please be aware that this is pseudo sci-fi/action/adventure. Due to my relative ignorance, this is the best I can do. ; ;
*~*~*
List of Planetouched members compiled by the Mahogany Town Police Department
1. S.O.Demoni
2. I.G.Gainsborough (deceased)
3. E.V-V.Hojo
4. L.V.Hojo (deceased)
5.S.W.Hale
6.B.R.Westwood
7.N.Nanba
8. S.U.A-L.Sebastian
9. R.K.Elm
10. B.D.Ivy
*~*~*
Chapter 17: Too Blind to See
*~*~*
Threads of pale, transient light spun an eerie tangle of energy that hovered a foot or two above ground. The members of AVALANCHE stood warily before it, amidst a biting wind that bent the sparsely scattered grass blades and tore them from their roots. The light that peeked out from the rent in the air served to taunt and tease them as if to say, "What are you waiting for?"
What were they waiting for, anyway? Why the hesitancy and tense apprehension... of something dangerous and deadly? They had gone against certain death before. They had faced the murderous seraph in the very core of hell... and lived. This portal should've been like clearing out Beachplugs on the shores. And yet, enough doubt lingered to keep them from storming into the unknown the same way they had stormed through the gale-ridden mouth of the Northern Crater.
But the Northern Crater wasn't laced with uncertainty. They knew what had festered at the center of the planet's core. They could only guess what was beyond this web of light.
Enough waiting. We aren't going to get them back by standing around.
"We're breaking through."
The blood-encrusted blade that had been nicked and cloven too many times to count now was raised two-handed in the air. It fell crisp on its target. The point of the sword that had seen many Bandersnatch heads fall by its edge drove into the scarce tendrils of dim light, which flared into pulsating rays that hurled Cloud onto the ground, and ripped the sword from his hands. Stars danced briefly in front of his eyes as an upside-down Yuffie landed behind his head and whipped out her shuriken, levelling her nimble eyes with the target and threw. The weapon shaved the air and collided, bending the sparking wound, but clattering uselessly on the ground.
"H--HEY----what the?!!!" Yuffie sputtered while blinking in confusion. Tifa shot her and a still grounded Cloud a frustrated look. She had her arms crossed, leaning on one hip and staring annoyed at the murky sky.
"I told you. There's no way in." A dark laugh penetrated the lengthened silence as the gaunt man appeared suddenly behind Tifa and lengthened her shadow. He raised a slender hand to his holster with that peculiar sluggish, mechanical motion and fired a round with the Death Penalty, smoke pouring out of its barrel and obscuring the light.
"There is always a way in." The curtain of smoke rose and the portal bloomed. "There is never a way out," He approached the bulging orb, his scarlet cape, still filmed in aging dust from that cursed coffin, flowing at the back of his knees. The wind blew with more ferocity which seemed to repulse the light, which shrank and collapsed on itself, leaving the grey sky with no remnant of the disturbance.
"Cut the riddles and tell it straight out, goth-boy!" snapped the ninja, not caring much for Vincent's enigmatic and persistent silence. If he knew, why didn't he tell? What good was it to keep it to yourself? What good were you, then? "Whaddaya know about all this crud?" she asked, impatience drilled in her shifty eyes.
Tifa shot the girl a warning stare, afraid that Vincent would change his mind and return to silence.
Lucky them, he didn't.
"This door..." He motioned with his right arm to the now-nonexist portal. "..leads to an alternate world. A world much like ours, but a utopia in the heart of a much larger dystopia."
"A whuzzah to the whuzzah...?" Yuffie blinked with a puzzled expression.
"You've seen it?" Tifa frowned, apparently understanding the caped-man's lingo.
Vincent shook his head, which was sufficient enough to answer the question, and he didn't elaborate further. But Tifa wasn't going to let their lackidasical comrade off that easily. She clamped both hands on her wide hips and shot a narrow glare at the space where the portal had been.
"That doesn't explain why we're locked out."
The red-caped man was now turned turned away from them, staring into oblivion with those unnerving blood-red eyes, reaching for a less... disturbing memory than the nightmares he lived through. "This Planet yearned to keep its children. But Shin-Ra wanted to keep its Mako rates high. They prevented further migration by making these doors impossible to pass after a certain number had left."
That says something about why it's here," Tifa started, half-hoping that the blinding light would sear open the hazy sky once again.. "But it doesn't help us figure a way past it."
"I cannot help you there," the grave man answered unconcernedly.
"Great, so we're stuck," Tifa muttered. She hauled herself to the wall of sky and landed a roundhouse kick onto it. Still it didn't budge. Frustrated, she stumbled away from it, her tread hard on the unvegetated ground. She felt the coarse, dust-enveloped fabric of Vincent's cape brush past her. She shivered reflexively: Nothing on that man ever warned up. It could be a day in the triple digits with the scorching sun boiling the sands of Costa del Sol, and he and his clothes would be like they were still locked in that coffin. As if he was still dead.
The young woman cupped her forehead in her gauntleted hand, leaned back, sighed, and let it slip down to her side.Things were beginning to look bleaker and bleaker. On top of all that, Vincent was-----mumbling. Quite... unlike him, as it was more characteristic of someone... else.....
"'It... has the properties of a magnet except the lock which seals it. When open, this pole repels and the opposite pole attracts-----'"
She leaned her head to the side, glimpsing the very, very faint spark of what looked like life in the dead pupils thorugh a mass of tangled black hair. Life... loathing, remorseful, hate-filled. But life nonetheless. "'---however, the barrier can be broken by an object of sufficient mass coupled with high velocity---'"
"Vincent...?" Tifa asked, more than a bit unnerved. This wasn't like him at all. Someone content to answer with one or two syllables; if he had anything more to say, it would be in his head, not out his mouth. But wait... the tone, or lack thereof, hadn't changed a bit. As if he was quoting someone.
Sure enough, whatever emotion that had surfaced plunged into the depths of the man's nonexistent soul, and he was speaking normally... as normal as he got, anyway.
"The airship will open the door."
"Now we're getting somewhere," Tifa stated with rising determination. She inhaled
the brisk wind and turned her gaze to the west. They'd find their lost crew soon enough.
Not soon enough to erase the nagging worry in her mind, but if Cid's assistant/cook/tea-brewer/throw rug lived up to her reputation, they'd be through that damned door in no time. "Shera might know how to fix it. Lets pay her a visit."
*~*~*
Reeve didn't need to ask what the hell had happened as he slowed down a mad dash through the hall and spotted the back of the president's stately white trenchcoat. A bandage draped loosely over an embarassing goose egg on Reno's forehead and the fact that Rude's arm was in a sling was enough to tell at least part of the story. Then there was Elena and--the "dead" head Turk--- the latest exec gossip circulated faster than the most outrageous tabloids. Being the practical, realistic type,
it never occured to him that it could be true.....There he was, freshly exhumed, more rock-faced and reserved than ever, fitting for what was so recently a corpse..... but Tseng appeared very much alive.
That wasn't the only thing. Gyahaha and Kyahaha and Lardman were there as well. It must have been of dire importance if the president had summoned all of them there: Except Hojo, of course. That was a no-brainer: tortoises weren't quick to go anywhere. Probably he was holed up in his lab, planning... someone's... premature... demise.....
What lab? Reeve asked himself as he slid closer to the conglomerate that had gathered in front of the scorched heap of tangled metal. Old man finally did us a favor and did himself in, he surmised as teams of Blastoise trudged about the blackened remains, their hydro cannons belching out copious amounts of water that strangled the last strings of fire. A scientist stood rather unimportantly in the background, fiddling with some device. Reeve approached the rest of the corporate giants and at the same time, kept his distance, especially wary of the president...
Who at that moment turned around.
The bearded man's planned step fell short, and he had one foot on the ground and the other dangling quite ridiculously in mid-air, his mouth partly open and his bulging eyes fixated to the face of the President. Incoherent babble dribbled out of his mouth as Rufus stared him down incredulously.
"Reeve, if you have anything to say that is worthy of your intelligence, say it. Otherwise..." His teeth locked into a crooked grimace---Reeve could swear on the bones of his old man that Rufus spent millions on dental work. And the beard..... If there was anyone who spent longer in the bathroom to make sure he was clean-shaven, it had to be Rufus. "Bite your tongue."
Rufus turned back to face the burned lab. The Blastoise team had finished and were withdrawing, but the residual smoke still clung to the air, making it unpleasant to breathe. But that was the least of their worries.
Rufus' arctic gaze burned into the now-useless machinery, the ashes of the equipment which he himself had shrunk a branch of the Weapons Department to cover the costs, and the unoccupied tubes that held "296,000,000 gil," he stated with misleading calmness. He moved away from the yellow tape stretched across the charred rubble.
"296,000,000 GIL!" he exploded in uncharacteristic rage, the frigid ice in his eyes
bursting into flame in tyrannical mania. As the executives stared at him with increased uneasiness, Rufus cupped two palms on his temples and dug his neatly clipped nails into the crown of his head. He had calmed down to the point of sounding genuinely docile, but it wasn't helping.
"296,000,000 gil," he repeated barely above a whisper. With the same even-temperedness, the president spoke through the semblance of a snarl, "I'll be damned if those... creatures could burn that quickly." The snarl tightened. " Or if Hojo could burn that quickly." The frozen aqua glowing in his subzero eyes dashed suspiciously about at flinching employees.
Admittedly, he had held the Turks back. They could have easily stopped AVALANCHE in a weakened state from dealing with security.But he was expecting that the recently acquired creatures would find no difficulty in procuring a meal. Instead, AVALANCHE set the lab on fire. Arson. That wasn't their style. Had someone tipped them off? He wouldn't doubt it. Rufus wasn't an imbecile. He was highly aware of the animosity between his executives. One of them could have given them the hint that fire was the best way to cripple their target. Hm. He would find a scapegoat later. What mattered now was recovering the escaped gil.
At even temperment again, Rufus turned to his executives on a quick, and to Reeve's observation, catlike heel. Calm. Cool-headed. As if nothing had happened. "Heidegger, Scarlet, tigthen security. Have the weaponry trained and broken in."
The two executives knew what that order meant and resented it fully. Yet more of those slobbering Celadon imports to haul in and make Shin-Ra-worthy. Rufus was really laying it hard on them, they grumbled mentally. All this over some crummy labrats that would outlive their usefulness eventually, anyway.
Of course, they hadn't seen the labrats.
Rufus had.
"The rest of you, make yourself useful," he growled to the last two who were, in Rufus' eyes, only suited to enhance the company's reptuation without impacting it. And they knew it. But they weren't about to dispute it. Palmer waddled away in a huff, and Reeve edged away with a suspicious darting eye, blinking madly to get this picture out of his mind that was developing right before his eyes. Paraanoid? Perhaps. But as he drew farther away and the form of his president grew blurrier and blurrier, he could see... CLEARLY..... a bloodthirsty cat in his place...
Reeve took off down the hall so as not to completely lose it... if he hadn't lost it, already. The only ones left were Rufus, the Turks, and the scientist in the background, who was now turning two bizarre-looking devices over in his smooth palms. One, a control box with raised blinking dials, and the other...a simple black metallic box. Rufus raised his hand and swept his hair---and a miniscule bead of sweat, off his high forehead.
The stranger spoke. A mild, forceless weak sort of voice, not to mention belonging to another outsider. But, that Ivy character had proved invaluable to facilitating the growth of their finances.... there was no reason for this Professor Elm to be otherwise.
"Um.....hello, Mr. Shin-Ra. Here I have some... uh... tracking equipment---" He fumbled withthe larger machine in his hands. "--that'll help me find him. Uh... these wonderful people.." He gestured to the Turks using one free hand, shot them a nervous glance, and again looked at Rufus. "--can... er..... do the rest," mumbled the thick-glassed man, fidgeting under the two glaciers that riveted to his squeamish person.
So, this was Elm, most renowned Pokémon researcher in the Jouto region, cheaper than anyone from Kanto or Houen, and certainly far less expensive than Ivy. He acted more strangely than Reeve as of late... which gave him no cause for concern... why should he be concerned? He was Rufus Shin-Ra. Only the richest and most influential man in Kanto, Jouto, and Houen combined. Able to sway the vote with the usual methods, kidnapping, bribery, threats, but all "legally", of course. On top of that, he would again be in posession of four models of lucrative weaponry, once the old man was found. Their profits would soar. At this rate, he would own Kanto. And Gaia. Ah.. yes... everything was going to plan. He had almost forgotten his unseemly outburst already. Why, he was even forgetting that his chin was coated in hair and there were stubs of it that were getting ridiculously long, dotting his cheeks, and he had milk and fish for the past few DAYS. Not to mention that anything and everything continued to irritate him and that blasted headache. Including the small black bug crawling unnoticed across the scientist's shoulder. Following its rounded path with his entire head he ordered Tseng:
"Kindly remove this thing from the professor's garments." A set of disgruntled footfalls rapped heavily on the floor, but the scowl was invisible and the mid-age Turk buried this degradation of being misued and reduced in purpose. How could that young upstart, a foreigner, not to mention a scientist, with no fighting experience whatsoever, with a...... pink rock for a weapon, be given the job of recovering the lost professor? Perhaps the president was losing it. He wouldn't be surprised, with the way he acted and the way Reeve, whom he trusted a great deal more than the callow president, acted around him. But concealing his suspicions and his grudges, he moved dutifully to brush the spider off of the scientist, when a hand snapped up to his shoulder and briskly slapped Tseng's hand away.
"Oh.. it's not there by accident, I brought it along with me." He brought his other hand to his shoulder and let the spider crawl across it, two moving dots crossing his palm. "It's much weaker than Spinarak or Ariados, but it releases enough poison to incapacitate its enemy. And it's good at scaring the daylights out of some people. Some people are so scared of spiders they get incapacitated themselves!" He let the spider crawl on the back of his hand, up his arm, back across his shoulder to his other shoulder, and down his other arm. "Ecosystems around the world depend on these arthropods. They act as a kind of insect control---if you have a bug problem, spiders are the real exterminator-----"
Rufus arched his eyebrows. Why the hell were these scientist types so damn eccentric? This Elm may have had a weak and unauthorative air about him, vaguely reminiscint of Hojo's though completely lacking the intimidation factor, coming off as more of a bookish nerd that had nothing else better to do than prate about spiders, and yet, there was no lack in self-confidence... or stamina.
"You see this?" He let Rufus breathe as he pulled out from his deep labcoat pockets a rolled-up sheet of steel wiring running criss-cross, a simplistic net. The Shin-Ra President tilted his head, staring at the contraption sideways. He held his head straight again, answering through teeth grinding with impatience,
"A net. Why do you keep such a useless device with you?"
"To demonstrate the spider web's ingenuity!" Elm answered with a giddy light in his eyes. Rufus was taken aback by this unwarranted youthfulness, childishness, even, and he issued a growl which he himself was unconscious of.
"Observe its intracacies, its flawless structure, how it's delicate and durable at the same time, how---" The light in his eyes waned to a far more subtle gleam. "It catches the most evasive of prey---" He cut himself off, mentally twitching underneath that dangerous glare. "I will get to work now and bring the Professor back safely..." he resolved apologetically, putting on an unecessarily wide grin and letting the spider crawl into a container in his pocket. Rufus knew the nature of that grin. Too exaggerated to be genuine, it was veiling some disguised purpose, an alternate agenda. Perhaps it was a mistake to hire an outsider for this job. But, he was nothing like Ivy. There was an eighty percent chance that Ivy would bite you in the back. Speaking of Ivy...where was she? An irritated scowl creasing his face, Rufus stalked to his office to make a phone call... and ease his stomach with some smoked salmon.
Smoked? No. Why not raw? Yes, tonight he would eat it raw.
*~*~*
Everything HURT so GODDAMN BAD......
Right now, Cid wanted more than anything else to slow cook in Hades' cauldron. Or get devoured by a Behemoth. Or fight Sephiroth ten times over again with a blunt spear. The bloodiest of deaths paled compared to this... being pinned on his front, wires connecting him to some monitor that beeped persistently in rhythm with his groans of pain, his arched spine that he was sure was gonna crack right through the ragged scars crossing his back, and his arm... his arm... covered to the elbow in rough scales, weighing his arm down, leadening it enough that it felt it would drop straight off his shoulder and twitch on the blood-washed floor. But forget that. It was the only limb on Cid's body that wasn't paralyzed. It moved..... it...... huh?
Cid caught the ripple of muscle through a curtain of racing sweat. The cries died. The clawed limb raised in erratic jitter with a mind separate from and one with Cid's...... sleeping... entity... waiting to be free, waiting to be rid of this human carcass.
The rising and falling crests on the monitor split: now there were two. Which would mean... the other subject was now viable.
"So...you are awake," Hojo quietly acknowledged with his back turned from the specimen. He averted his gaze from the monitor and was busy over the scalpel, a metalloid square, and the tranquilizer fluid. The latter would be indispensable through the early stages. If Draconis Rex killed the host before fully transforming..... He'd rather not risk eight years of research and four years of experimentation. Heh... but it all had been worth it.
Taking the needle he fitted it into the syringe and shuffled towards Cid's arm. The needle barely poked the scales when the other arm reached painfully under and clamped vice-like on the target. Hojo didn't flinch. "It is acting exactly as I anticipated." He very placidly lifted the momentarily
mobile arm and reached the deadlier one, administering the serum and sending a numbing shock through Cid's entire body, freezing the arm..... for a second. Hojo shuffled past the limb and heard an unsettling rip. He looked back to see the top straps torn in two. He eyed them narrowly and took the piece of sillicon. If his foresight told him anything, the straps were primitive restraints that would not keep the subject captive. If it did escape which he was now sure it would, the microchip would guarantee that he would know its location. But.... how to insert it.....?
Simple... like he always did it.
With another hand he took the scalpel still coated in blood from its earlier use.
The beast that had so long slept entombed in this pilot was waking. It felt like.... like... it was clawing through his chest, a fiery pain seared through the cavity which felt hollow despite the crapload of lungs and stuff rearranging themselves inside. As if that wasn't enough, Hojo was cutting into him again, the blood snaking down wherever the blade was doing its bloody work, collecting in a glob at the back of his neck. He wanted to puke. Maybe the sensation of stomach acid and a long-forgotten lunch corroding his cancer-infested throat walls would make him forget how bad the pain gnawed at him everywhere else. Especially the head.... chipping at his skull with that fucking scalpel.... Hojo was putting something into it...GREAT...there was a piece of shit stuck in his head and it was bleeding all over and he was putting back that piece of skull covered in his innards and he was cementing it or somethin'... Now Hojo had taken a needle to it to sew his head back up. Pinpricks of pain stabbed all over his cranium as the needle pushed into his head again and again and again and AGAIN....
However, it was a muted pain compared to that blazing agony that razed his insides.
Now the other arm started to change. The inner pain escalated. The creature continued to tear. It flashed in its mind. Grinning cruelly at the human's demise. Waiting, anticipating, lurking within.
Cid saw it.
It saw Cid.
"Who're.... what're you?..!!"
They call me Draconis Rex... ignorant as they are. I was born without a name... at least not one you would care to know.
"Drac--what?! The hell...?"
I'm surprised... even insulted. You should know me... We share many things, Highwind, many things....
"You're lying..... fucking liar.... ya ain't real... you're just in my mind...."
We saved each other, remember? Or am I expecting too much from you, human?
"Saved---?!"
Your mother told you not to play in the street like the other boys. Said you were... too fragile. They swung at the ball too fast for you. The car was too fast as well, it seems..... It hit you. There was blood on the ground... Lots of blood. You remember the blood, don't you?
"I don't... Never had a mother.... Don't remember..."
You remember her eyes, though, don't you? They were blue, blue like the sky. People said you had your mother's eyes.
"How did you....?! .........Shut up..... Shut the FUCK UP."
I was playing too when they took me. With my brothers.... I was the youngest, a hundred years or so, but I was the Chosen, too. The Chieftains said I would lead the clan to greatness. Then the humans came... killed my brothers as quick as can be, then shot me too.... I don't know about your blood, but I remember mine. They took me, tried to salvage me to further their "great knowledge." And then....
".......Then what."
They were looking for someone with your kind of case. Desperate mother... desperate for anything to save her son. Your genes had a rare design... compatible, they said. Shin-Ra wanted someone to help in the wars to come, someone who could fly their machines like no other... someone who could fly like us. Like a dragon.
"You... no... hah... ain't true, you.... bastard, I was inside a car when I the accident happened... my parents died... I went to the Shin-Ra boarding school and they picked me out for special training...."
You believed that...? I planted the seed of doubt, tried to tell you, and you STILL believed that.....?You were a brilliant little kid too--straight A's in school, amazing test scores, a teacher's favorite, always fiddling with electronics and fixing them too. Perfect candidate for their Master Pilot. Absolutely perfect.
So they used me to save you. We fused.
"No....."
Both our brains were damaged beyond repair... our bodies too... and... if you care to speak in such vague terms, our "souls" as well.... They put us together, Highwind, made us one being.... Then, to their own convenience, the bastards locked me up. My body, at least.... our soul and your mind, that's all they wanted.
"J-JESUS. I'm not listening to this crap----stupid head, SHUT UP."
They didn't want anything in the way, either. So they killed your mother as soon as the procedure was done. Tracked down your worthless drunk of a father and killed him too. Took away your baby brother and put him in some other family's care... must have been a reason for that. The Shin-Ra don't have mercy.
"I never had a family or a brother or a family so shut up, shut up, SHUT UP."
Then we woke up.
......We fought for a while. It was hard, that first month or so. You cried a lot. For your mother, sometimes, but mostly alone. They ended up putting us in a straitjacket and locked us in a padded room so we wouldn't kill each other. Or, in your case, your own self. You ever wonder about those scars on your wrists?
"No. I got my hands stuck in a wire fence when I was five, you dumbfuck. I remember it clear as day."
Heh. You're right. That's why it hurt so much when you tried to cut through the scars. But you kept on doing it anyway. Finally you gave up, gave into your new soul, and I allowed you to take our body, and then they trained you to love the skies and be with the skies... and kill for them. And all the while, I helped you while you were in control...
Now it's MY turn.
"What?! No.. NO... I AIN'T NO DRAGON FREAK----!"
You can't deny it forever. Why did you want to see what was out there and spread your wings? Because you HAVE wings. My wings.
"You're crazy, FUCKING CRAZY. I must be crazy..."
Why could you summon me in the first place? I was in you.
"NO..."
Why did you fight like one of us? Because you ARE.
"Stoppit..... I'm havin' A REAL BAD dream..... but it's just a dream.... somethin' I need to get outta my system... yeah... that's it..."
And did you ever let ME out? NO.
"GET the HELL OUTTA MY SIGHT-----"
It's my turn, Highwind. You can't deny it.
" ---AAARGHREERRRRRRHHHHH!!"
The human arm flecked with a few scales flew to his eyes and the knuckles caught him square in the socket. The lids started to bruise as Cid remastered the hand and nursed this new pain. Hojo replaced his instruments on the tray and circled the man, black gaze boring into a fractious and combative soul.
"Frustrating, isn't it, to battle your own self? To have members out of joint.....you would think that there was someone there, wouldn't you?"
LET ME OUT......
"You're full of AAACKKKKK-----" The human hand leapt to the back of his neck, the fingers squeezing tight around it and the scaling thumb crushing the throat, strangling the life out of the poor pilot.
"This won't do at all." Hojo reached for another needle and forced it into the renegade arm. It came away rigid, but left Cid half-dead. He lay there, wheezing, gasping, the blue color in his face receding only to overtake the right hand and.....
Change THAT into a claw, too. Nothing could go slower than it already was. It killed to breathe. Things were crawling on the inside. Changing. His lungs suddenly weren't breathing the right air. This was moldy and musty air. He had to be out. Free. To breathe. To fly. No, not with an airplane. To FLY. To fly? Man, his mind was REALLY going on him..... going crazy, yeah, that must be it. He COULDN'T lose it..... not NOW.....
He had to escape.
A staggered swipe of the left claws, and the middle straps were severed. Amidst the crushing pain he pushed himself foward and squeezed underneath the lower straps. Inch. Another squeeze. Inch. His upper torso was hanging off the table. Hojo's eyes were again on the monitor. He edged off the table. Now his ribs were hanging off. The straps were at his ankles. Then the other arm wised up and dug its lengthening nails into the meat of the treacherous arm and tore down through the tender scales. Cid howled with pain and looked on in horror as the gold blood dripped down in parallel streams.
Hojo looked up from the changing signals with a cold frown.
"I suggest you refrain from any other attempts at escape. Draconis Rex does not know it is captive. If you try to move it against its will it could prove to be quite..." A retaliatory scrape of formed claws against half-scaled hide and a scream from Cid swayed the frown into a slight smile. "...painful."
"PAINFUL?!" he roared. "It hurts bad enough... you can't add to it any MORE."
"Perhaps," he acknowledged. "Perhaps I am not as skilled at causing the---" He chuckled as he looked the man up and down and noted the progressing change that that would made his comment rather ironic.. "---human body to suffer. My predecessor was far more adept at that..and to think that he loved his spouse enough to adopt her maiden name as his own. Outrageous for one of this world. I suppose he was acculturated into the other world where the female population is much more foward in thinking. Hah... on the other hand..." An eye shifted to the subject. Its fingers were
growing thicker and visibly rougher. The faint stub of a tail was beginning to poke through the man's cargo pants. The beginnings of wings broke the surface on either side of the horrendously curved spine.
"..Dragons are solely patriarchal. The very strength of the species depends on the male's ability to control and dominate its flock. It is an uneasy relationship, especially among the lesser dragons where there may be two or three potential leaders. If the leader proves insuffiicient, the flock destroys it....."
He stroked his narrow chin. "Which kind are you?" he asked simply, in full knowledge that his first subject couldn't hear him and frankly, didn't care to, wrapped in a thousand simultaneous agonies. If only he could make his arms work for him again, if he could claw through the rest of those goddamn straps...
Cid's mind scrambled for an answer. It tumbled every which way through the pulsing sea of chemicals. They were changing things in his HEAD...He shouldn't be here. He was here. He had to get home. To Rocket Town. No... to the sky. To the clouds. The hell?!? What the fuck was he thinking, he couldn't fly.... not really fly.... He could jump, hell, could he jump, but he couldn't fly. But the chemicals... Said he could...said he was able...
LET ME OUT..... JUST THIS ONCE, LET ME OUT!!! Please... No... I shouldn't be begging...... I SHOULD BE MAKING YOU.....
"ST---STROHHP!!! QUIT TELLIN' ME TO---huh?"
Pouring all his will into controlling that right arm, he raised it and rubbed his throat as tenderly as scales against skin could manage. That's where the vocal chords were, right? Something wasn't right in there...
LET_ME_OUT, DAMMIT!!!!!!
Just then, something roared through him. It was a full-blown bestial cry, unimpeded by his own rough, thoroughly human voice... The beast was awake. It heaved Cid's body upwards, twisted him upright, and sent the claws slashing through the lower straps as well as the wires. Hojo in alarm grabbed for the syringe, but the freed creature slammed Cid's boot into his ribs and the scientist with a crack crashed into the wall. Cid was now on the table, but standing on it, one eye filled with terror and the other with madness, and the beast hurled his helpless body off of the table and onto the floor, squirming uncontrollably. The change quickened. The right arm was consumed past the elbow, and they attacked Cid, slashing his jaw and letting the gold blood dribble down his neck.
The sense he still had left moved his head out of the way to avoid getting torn apart by the damn claws. He wormed backwards on the floor, bloodied and dodging the deadly slash of his own limbs.
Hojo regained his senses and slid up the wall. With an irritated scowl formed on his face, he shoved his hand into his pocket and retrieved the dart gun. But at the very sight of the weapon, the creature lunged for the scientist, Cid's salivating mouth open as the beast roared threateningly in his face. One hand shot to the throat, claws cruelly curved towards the thin flesh while the other one raised for the death blow.
"Belligerent already, I see. We'll have to rectify this."
Swiftly and silently the syringe was released. It sunk hard in the constricting arm and
loosened; the claws gouged into the wall. Cid to his horror found his claws in the wall, and he yanked them out, putting the godforsaken clawed hands to his head in despair... His voice was hardly recognizable to himself as he growled a plea to a deaf deity,
"..GOORRGHHD.... STRROOHHPP... IRGGHHTTT...!!!!"
He felt his chest ram into the door, the syringes searing the choking air around him,
the door buckle and bend under the weight of the monster. The hinges rattled as this
unearthly power rushed the door, warning the ones behind the door to scatter but falling too early to prevent their discovery.
The door fell with a slam and a stirred cloud of dust and Cid charged for the basement exit with hell written on his screaming face. Hojo stood in the doorway, brow knitted in thought. It was then he looked down... and saw the two felines and the girl. He lowered his head, Mako eyes locking with the scared-to-death blue ones of Jessie and Meowth, who didn't know which to be more frightened of: the fleeing monster or the predatory stare that lanced their souls...
"What do we have here?" His menacing eyes shifted to look them over. Two...no three potential test subjects. One a little visually challenged, but all the better suited to his purposes. He removed the needle on the dart gun. With one deft motion he had it fitted with another...with a clouded chemical black as the new moon floating in the tube. He aimed the dart gun down at the fear-stricken Meowth.
"It seems that the old adage of 'curiosity killed the cat' still has not been proved false."
"W---we wasn't snoopin', honest-----!--!--!"
"Meowth's right!" Jessie seconded, her fake confidence signalling James to bolt. Dammit, that 2-watt lightbulb better catch on or they'd all be nailed. She showed a pleasant smile, which failed to mask the quavering fear in her voice from the scientist who couldn't be fooled by a lie hashed up in three seconds, and even if it was the truth, it didn't matter, if it was another specimen that could be sacrificed to science...
"We were just going to leave---!"
"Oh.....were you?"
Yes, we're leaving right_now.
Praying to God that Team Rocket would live up to its name, Jessie and Meowth bombed, the latter's paw wrapped tightly around Persian's tail. James was still in the corner. Stupid idiot. Run faster! He's right behind us!
The syringes started flying with deadly accuracy. Had they been a fraction of a second slower, that would be the end of them. Their pursuer walked coolly after them, the needles embedding into the wall, the floor, the ceiling. The Rockets flew through the nest of bats, their hearts in their throat parched with terror, running faster than they ever thought possible. Every squeak and squeal from the bats that were nailed with the needle stopped their hearts. Every time that could've been THEM that was pierced with the deadly array of syringes. But instead they felt the bats wiry bones crunch
beneath them as their velvet bodies carpeted the bare ground.
Hurry... get going... FASTER, DAMMIT!!!!!
James' panicked gaze caught a heavy oaken door. With all their strength the Rockets pulled it open on its crumbling hinges. When open enough to let them squeeze through, they bombed through it and slammed it shut, a tangled bunch of cobwebs
jarring it in its place. Once inside, with the panic-driven fervor of vampires that were in danger of being exposed to light, threw up the lids of three ornate boxes in the room and pulled the cover shut.
They did not know the cursed purpose of this cobweb-strewn room, nor the three decades of nightmares that plagued the center occupant..... nor the grim blood that stained the plush cushion where dead bones still cried out for mercy. They lay there like the dead men that filled two of the coffins, ceasing to breathe and ceasing to think...think about the complete darkness they had immersed themselves in, about the fact that they were lying with human bones bleached with the passing years, that their pursuer might have heard the door slam and would scour the room and wrench the lid off the coffins to find easy prey and stab into their hearts with that syringe.
Outside, the scientist tread with steps so light they were thunderous on the packed earth. His hunched body moved malignant across the low-ceilinged passage, death in all its wretched forms embodied in one man. The green gleam cut through the clouding murk. He swivelled his head back and forth, his nose twitching slightly, trained to detecting the faintest odor of concealed beasts, but aside from the pervasive smell of bat guano in the basement, nothing. A brief scowl sketched itself on his narrow visage. It seemed as if his potential specimens had concealed themselves well. He looked at the tracking device. Yes... Draconis Rex was far more important.... to his research and for locating Gemini, Zero-X, and the two hybrids. If the girl and Pokémon didn't turn up, it was only a minor loss to science.
He halted his walk right in front of the door. The cobweb-strewn door... behind which justice was completed. Justice that was his duty and his right to carry out in the first place. Actions which he hardly regretted, deeds for which he felt no remorse, because he didn't need to. It was for science.
"Ha... Valentine... you were such a fool," he sneered at a hazy memory.
The footfalls continued past the door and on towards the murky light, a grisly trail of gold blood marking where Draconis Rex had fled.
*~*~*
The driving torrents of rain plunged through the thinning droplets of blood, pumelling the human tracks that ground a frantic pattern through the grime.
Frantic and despairing of an unavoidable doom.
An invisible clock counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours, punctuating the irreversible passage of impartial time that shoved the pilot deeper and deeper into the sea of inhumanity. The storm raged, bringing its wrath upon the tracks. Coarse fragments of torn clothing lay uselessly near the warped prints that stood in the place of an unmistakable mark of humans. They stretched over the field, the damned being that made them sending the wolves scattering in his path.
To even think that not too long ago he steered the Highwind amidst the blazing face of
Meteor. In full control of the ship and himself. A man like the rest of them in mind and body. Now...... Not even Shera would have recognized the desperate creature, plowing through the mud on four legs, masked with leathery scales, hair gone all but for clumps of yellow jutting from his scalp, the clotted blood leaving frigid globs on his lower jaw and arm the scales on which flashed metallic in the blasts of lightning, both eyes swollen from his hostile fists socking him there, eyes that he didn't know were losing their pupils and being engulfed by blazing aqua, burning in the sockets of a bestial skull.
God... he didn't need to let up running to feel the muzzle protruding from his face, the spearlike teeth that now filled his mouth, the dead weight of... that.... fully-formed tail dragging him down... and there was that metal crap that son of a bitch stuffed into his frickin' HEAD, It was ringing..beeping... buzzing.... whatever that
sound was... that wouldn't STOP...
That and the dogged voice of the beast.
It's time, Highwind.
"NROOGHH....!!!" The dying man pleaded in savage roars, feeling the
weight of time dragging him by the throat into the Pit like so many others had been before him. The bits of yellow shrunk and shrivelled, the fore and hind claws tore from the mud as the wholly freed entity took command and broke the fetter to the earth. The draconic wings sprouted to full length from the animal's ridged back, the layers of hide stretching over the breaks in the skin, sealing the wounds. The fearsome pits of an unearthly aqua radiated an uncontrolled ferocity... of an unspent youth. Tar-choked vapors poured from his jaws as a raspy roar split the clashing elements. He raised his serrated neck to the tumultuous heavens, wings akin to identical steel beams unyielding to the deluge. They began to beat, breaking against the mud below, grabbing the fearsome tides of air. His instincts were rusted by time, by being..... caged in the body of a man.
He roared in enraged bitterness that time had gone by while he stood watching, was forced to become the subordinate because that... that human swept him under a rug and pretended he wasn't there, but he was always there, a part of him, in his soul... he was his soul, driving his ambitions forever skyward.
But he still had those instincts. He could feel them sharpening as the wrathful winds assaulted him from all sides, rushing past the surface of his wings and freeing him from the drowned land, hefting his body foward into the wind, pushing the scaled beast closer to the black clouds. Releasing an imperious roar, he arched his neck and plunged into the treacherous winds, climbing the skies through the hellish wall of water, lightning faulting the blackness enveloping him. Through the raging storm, never once did he hear the screams of the pilot faint and stifled in his head...
But they were there.
And hell if he was going down without a fight.
The war commenced.
*~*~*
The hungry wolves charged through the damp plains, a concerted pack of fur, teeth,
and claws, in pursuit of the grazers farther south. Hojo obliterated their pawprints as he took one step across the ground-out path, quirked an eyebrow, and leaned in the direction of the running wolves. A queer light growing in his eyes, he began to chuckle dryly.
"Time is a punctilious sculptor," he observed, with one eye on the fast-disappearing wolves and the other on the tracking device and the blue dot slowly moving across the map screen. "A pitiful lot they were.... Fugitives from... south Corel, wasn't it? They found refuge in Nibelheim..yes, I was generous enough to give them asylum....." he recounted. "It was effective. The procedure made sure there were no distinguishing marks that separate them from the others... heh..... heh....."
The wolves reached further into the distance, their piercing howls renting the air.
"Children of science, what music they make."
Imagine, the howl of a natural-born wolf the same as a human that was physically altered. As he looked fixatedly at the liquid churning in the glass casing, his conclusion was firm. "'Death... the great equalizer'... how absurd.... it is this... this... that eliminates ALL distinctions and divisions that this presumptuous species contrives. "
The blue dot was moving closer. "That point made, the subject should have fully transformed by now." Soon he would see it... the product of a dragon fused with a human. Two lives preserved, only one able to physically show itself at any given time, now that the process had finished. This would be quite... entertaining.
An explosion of bestial sound made the sky tremble and the clouds quiver.
"HHREEEEEERGHHHHH!!!!!"
Hojo looked at the tracker. As he expected, the blue dot was precisely overhead the Nibelheim grasslands. Draconis Rex dropped from the skies, unfurling his wings at the last second and tearing across the field, roaring rivers of wind following the streak of scales and wings and claws. He traced a wide circle that sliced open the damp earth and shot into metallic clouds, plunging into the winds and gliding into the distance with a masterful cry, but the vast ocean's turmoil raging in his mind.
GET_OUT_OF_MY_FUCKING_BODY.
Draconis Rex felt himself jerk downwards, his wing muscles loosen as the human struggled for control. For a moment he succeeded. The wings furled, and the creature divebombed at breakneck speed, pulling up before smashing into the jagged peak of Mt. Nibel.
You've had your freedom long enough, Highwind. Now YOU'LL be on the sidelines, waiting for your chance to knock MY lights out so you can take---
I'm doin' that right now, bastard.
The human yanked him up and sent him flying backwards, the northward winds
pushing against him. He bent his head downward to flip on his stomach, but the wings stopped before then, and he plummeted to the ground miles below.
You..... A weakened growl escaped his scale lips before the draconic form haltingly
transformed back to the pilot's body. He blinked his black-and-blue eyes, the white
sun hot on his skin. Skin... skin? Must've meant... he held up his rough hands. He was
back to normal. A grin broke the weathered features of his drawn face, and he raised his head to the sky, laughing raucously until he was hoarse. Through a raspy cough and he gave the bird to wherever the bastard was and shouted, "FUCK YOU, HOJO!! I'M STILL HERE, GOT THAT?! NO SON OF A BITCH DRAGON'S 'GONNA TELL ME WHAT TO DO!" The pilot looked over at the shabby town in the distance. Oh, SHIT. SHERA... how am I gonna explain that----
You're going to have a lot more to worry about than that, Highwind.
KISS MY ASS.....
Within the dragon roared. He had his taste of freedom. He wanted it back. He lifted
up Cid's foot, moving it into the dirt, and then the other, making him walk. Cid resisted.
but the dragon held out, making him run, towards the shore, the beach, the lapping water. The stones cut his bare feet as the dragon forced him towards the ocean, and when he touched the scorched white sand he KNEW what the dragon was going to do. The beast hurled him into the ocean, making him crawl across the sand, dunked him underneath the salt water, holding his eyes and nose and mouth open.
Fucking shitface. You're gonna DROWN me.
Good guess.
Another dunk. Another mouthful of salt.
You're gonna kill yourself, too, idiot bastard,
No... hahaa... just you.
He could hear the dragon laughing in triumph. A laugh that shouldn't BE there..... god damn it all.. he was going to kill him... KILL... WHY did he need him? He didn't need him to live. He had lived without him his whole life... hadn't he?! Those stories... lies, all lies, ha....
Cid's mental protests were pointless. The dragon wanted control and if it meant
killing his other half, he'd do it. Over and over he dunked Cid, plunging him into the saltwater while Cid desperately tried to keep himself from going under. He couldn't take it much more... the dragon was about to conquer him.
And then it took over before he expired, coughing and gasping for air with streams of
water coursing down his his face. Draconis Rex lifted off from the shoreline, Cid
cursing him vehemently from within. But why? He'd drowned him...he should be dead...!
Wait. Of course not. A safeguard. To prevent the two subjects from killing each other, the moment one reached unconsciousness the other would take over. But that wouldn't stop the dragon from making his will alone known. He would maintain sole control. He would..... Crash into another mountain and the human would once again subjugate him. This time he rammed headlong into the slopes of Mt. Corel, shaking the very mountain to its core, his bones clattering from the pulverizing impact.
Hojo was completely aware of this as he shuffled southward, his intent gaze darting across the map. The dot would move a while, stop, start, stop, and start again. That must mean... He stared into the sky, a scowl forming on his lips as the sillouhette of the dragon plunged into the shoreline. This did not particularly elate him. Raising his knuckles to his chin, he pondered this dilemma. As long as their struggle continued, the draconic form would never achieve the desired potential, nor would he recover the escaped subjects. But... what to do...
Through the corner of his eye he could see a smoking crater formed by the plummeting dragon. He had better think of something quickly. Though he was intrigued by the struggle, the dragon was to serve higher purposes than be the constant opponent of the pilot. The question was, how to restrain him from resisting the dragon?
Ha... of course..tranquilize the human subject. So simple, so easy... in theory.
He watched the moving dot, loading another syringe into the device with a click. Once it stopped within firing range, he would make his move.
*~*~*
TO BE CONTINUED....
Hey, thanks, MGS, for reading this, too! Tweaked quote is from Dracula. Stay tuned for chapter 18, where the Kuja ripoff makes another appearance, and things start to get ugly (as if they haven't, already) Also, will Cid come to terms with his new "friend"? Find out in the next EXCITING episode of--er..wrong channel. ^^: Stay tuned for chapter 18!