FINAL FANTASY VII
Far away from Earth was a Planet that was very similar to it. The Planet had people, weapons, forests, rivers and other similar things to Earth. However, some things in the Planet were very different from Earth…
A giant energy manufacturing company known as Shinra is harvesting the sheer life energy of the Planet as a simple fossil fuel. Processed and made into products known as Mako and Materia, these materials can work miracles, granting the wisdom of the Ancients to the user…
However, this substance, like all other fuels, is finite in supply, and the Planet's life force is being malevolently drained by the constant exploitation of Mako by Shinra. Though aware of the harmful effects, they function without remorse…
However, the real battle lies not with a corporation, but with a force much more powerful and deadly from the distant past. A long-thought dead warrior bent on becoming more and more powerful, and he, along with the Planet's drained energy, threatens the very existence of everything sacred…
Now, a small resistance movement emerging from the Slums of the dark city of Midgar must stop all the various dangers coming toward the innocent, and one mercenary for hire must look amidst all the lies and deception in his mind, and find the man he is from within…
Chapter 1 IntroductionIt all started harmlessly enough, with a young man in a posh suit, with a small office building, and a dream. The man called himself "Shinra" and he would soon become the founder of a new and successful weapons manufacture company called "Shinra Incorporated".
He was a fairly fat man, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. His parents were farmers in the nearby town of Kalm, but he wanted absolutely nothing to do with that. Only a few months out of college, he sold the bank on the idea of his company, and now it was finally underway, as he decided to base his company in the city of Midgar.
With the help of some of his rich college friends, Shinra had managed to hire quite a good-sized staff team for his development of his company, and they soon began making designs of new weapons, before they got to creating them soon after. The economic climate was just right for his company and very soon it was one of the main premier businesses of the whole of Midgar itself.
Shinra Incorporated slowly began to buy out all of the other companies. Being able to give the people what they wanted was a unique gift that Shinra had, the other companies could not compete with that and soon Shinra was the only weapons dealer left.
After buying out a constructions company, Shinra began expanding into other markets. Being able to do quality building for less money made the orders swamp in as well, and Shinra continued to expand and grow in its size. Soon Shinra and its development team unveiled the Midgar Plate Project. At a press conference Shinra smiled as he said…
"Good citizens of Midgar, I assure you all that the new idea that we at Shinra Incorporated have is simple. We plan on building a city above all other cities in the entire world! This project is also about bringing people together. People working with each other will build the city, and afterwards people working together will maintain it. Midgar will be the greatest city in the entire world! It is only fitting that the city looks the part!" announced Shinra.
The people all agreed and believed it all, and so the Plate Project was soon underway, by agreement of the citizens and the mayor of Midgar, Domino. Soon the industrial and rich sections of the city were fifty meters above the ground, along with extra cities that were created, all of these were to be on the top of the Plate that was to be built above the other cities of Midgar, the cities that some people would still be willing to live in on the ground.
Critics of the Plate Project questioned the time and effort it would take to build and finish the whole project. But they had failed to take into account that Shinra Incorporated had total control of all the supplies and builders.
The project itself took no more than twelve years of non-stop work to complete. Connected by railroad, the people in the old cities, now called the Slums and the lower cities, could commute to the surface, to the top of the Plate where the new upper cities would be.
Most of these people had signed on to work for Shinra Incorporated as smaller companies, but they were unable to buy real estate on top of the Plate. The larger industries had to pay a hefty sum, annually, to get up there. These smaller companies, who were now in a poor location and unable to market simply went out of business.
By this time Shinra was into all the markets: TV, radio, appliances, cars, absolutely everything. With all the revenue they had the ability to employ an entire army with which to protect all the citizens of the city.
Soon, the company decided to take a shot at space travel, the first ones ever to have done so in the history of the whole Planet. But after only meeting with severe failure on the space programme, President Shinra, (as he called himself and was known as now), was faced with a new problem.
The great city of Midgar, becoming ever more famous worldwide across the whole Planet, was therefore growing in its population, and the need for more power and electricity for the citizens of the city had increased beyond the capacity of his power plants.
Looking over to his Shinra Public Safety Maintenance Department for support on the subject, lead by a man named Heidegger, they proposed the use of "Mako" energy, believed to be the very energy of the Planet itself. It was very efficient and it was extracted right from nature.
President Shinra was very pleased with this idea, and was immediately interested. He put most of his company's budgets toward the creation of a stable Mako Reactor, which would extract the Mako energy and convert it into vast, useable electricity for the entire city. The first attempts were failures, causing the deaths of more than a few workers.
But just when he was considering about putting an end to the Mako Project, he was extremely pleased and relieved when a young scientist named Professor Gast came up with a Mako Reactor design that was stable and fully functional.
Hiring Gast as the new head of his Shinra Science Department, President Shinra had Professor Gast and his Science Department work along with the Urban Development Department, led by a young man named Reeve, to build enough Reactors for the city.
Considering the size of the whole city it was decided that six Mako Reactors would be needed to transfer electricity to the whole upper and lower cities, but President Shinra decided to increase the number of Reactors to eight, one for each sector, so as to provide for their future growth.
Soon all eight Mako Reactors were fully functional and ready to go, and they would surround eight different points of the whole city with the same distance between each other, and would be built around the Plate rather than above it, which meant they had to be large enough to tower over both the lower and upper cities of Midgar.
Even the massive Shinra Headquarters building would seem small to the Reactors in comparison, as that only stood on the very centre of the Plate, and therefore only towered over the upper cities on it.
When the Reactors were first activated, and were proven to be completely successful, the citizens of the city rejoiced with the knowledge that they would never run out of power and electricity, using this method.
For a fair while, no one even noticed the deadly side effect that these Mako Reactors were having on the environment and the Planet itself, at least not the people on the Plate itself, but below the Plate, in the Slums, there were signs that gave Shinra plenty of reason to worry.
Down below, the Slums (lower cities) had become very polluted, as the residual materials from factories and the Mako Reactors alike, had settled down below.
Within five miles of the slums, outside of Midgar, all plant life quickly died out and disappeared, and soon enough, all of the animals went with it. Professor Gast and his main assistant, a man named Hojo, along with some other Shinra scientists, realised that extracting Mako energy from nature was seriously harming the Planet in some way.
Deciding not to cause a panic among the public, President Shinra buried all those reports and effectively covered-up all the information on the subject, making it strictly clear to his executives and scientists that the information must never be revealed to the public, or there would be severe consequences in store for them.
Fearing what this threat might mean, they all kept quiet about it, as the Shinra Science Department continued looking for new ways to use their miracle energy source, a way that would not harm the Planet.
But President Shinra ordered them to simply ignore those facts, and instead concentrate on finding out if Mako energy could help them in other ways as well. The Science Department went to work at once, and soon made some important discoveries.
By condensing Mako energy, they found they had created a small crystal ball that could somehow harness a certain power of the Planet. Calling this item "Materia" they put it to use with the Shinra's military, which was led by Heidegger, the head of Shinra Public Safety Maintenance.
Another miracle use that scientists had found concerning Mako energy was with human beings. By exposing an individual to low amounts of Mako energy, they discovered that both the physical and mental strength of the exposed individual increased dramatically.
But it was also discovered that it was highly dangerous to expose a person to high amounts of Mako energy, as the result of it would turn an ordinary person into a savage, bloodthirsty monster of some sort.
President Shinra immediately went ahead with the idea of 'Mako infusement' though, and he soon started the SOLDIER program, and had the most elite and brave of his army become Mako infused (though they were careful to infuse them with only the required amount of Mako), to become members of SOLDIER, which would soon become his most elite and feared army of all.
One other physical side effect to this process was that the Mako infused individual now had eyes that glowed brightly, and this was seen as a useful identifying feature to recognize members of SOLDIER. The SOLDIER program was started just in time for a war with the great nation of Wutai.
For the past few years, Shinra and Wutai had been in open conflict over business territory. Open war soon broke out between them, and by the looks of things; the war would go on for a long time, and things would get very ugly. Deciding to put his untested SOLDIERS to use, the tide of the war turned slowly for Shinra at first.
Then suddenly, with the troops all under the command of a single SOLDIER named Sephiroth, things went completely in Shinra's favour in no time at all. Only three years into the war itself, Wutai surrendered unconditionally.
Sephiroth had entered Wutai and destroyed the entire Wutai army head on with nothing more than his and the world's most powerful sword and most powerful hand-held weapon, the Masumane, as well as using his own perfected Materia, and he had come out of it all with not even a scratch.
From then on, Sephiroth became a legendary hero, well known and admired by everyone worldwide. However, the once great, proud nation of Wutai had now been reduced to no more than a tourist attraction.
Pleased and very satisfied with the results of the war, President Shinra turned his attention to the now free global market, knowing triumphantly that there was no other nation or anyone else that could stop Shinra Incorporated from becoming the rulers of the whole Planet itself.
Sending his top executives and department leaders (Scarlet, Heidegger, Reeve, Palmer and Hojo) to all other cities and towns in the world, he convinced many of the local leaders to build Mako Reactors in their city or town too, one Reactor for each one. Not knowing the side effect they had on the Planet, the cities and towns all agreed, the citizens liking the idea of vast, effective electricity in their homes.
Soon, even the entire world itself seemed to be at the fingertip of that one man. As a few years went by, however, some tragic Reactor accidents occurred, with Reactors exploding and killing many of the citizens nearby.
President Shinra, fearing that someone, or something, was trying to rebel against him and put him out of business, began using his military armies and SOLDIERS to oppress the masses that occurred. Small groups began to protest, but they were quickly silenced.
As a result, no one felt they had the power to do anything against them. This is the world that Shinra made…
Nowadays, the dark city of Midgar was still a very big place that wasn't too old, but it was still the very biggest and most powerful city in the world, and it was shaped like a circle.
Midgar was divided into eight sections, from Sector 1 to Sector 8. Midgar was covered by a huge Plate built right above it, which held the upper Midgar cities on top of it, and blocked out the sky and the sun from the lower Midgar cities' view, and prevented the sun ever shining down on the lower cities (the Slums) of Midgar.
Nearly every citizen in lower Midgar was poor, (except for the people living on the Plate in upper Midgar) and Shinra, who were a now huge, very wealthy and evil organisation that took control of the entire world, ran the whole city, not caring at all about the citizens of Midgar or the world.
Some people had begun to hate Shinra, but they were all too afraid to stand up to them. In the middle of upper Midgar, was the massive Shinra Headquarters building, where many of the bosses and workers of Shinra lived and worked.
Shinra had built eight special Reactors around Midgar, which sucked the energy of the Planet out of the ground. Shinra was making a lot of money doing this, even though they were slowly destroying the Planet.
Shinra didn't care at all about other people, and they only cared about themselves, power and money. Many things seemed miserable at lower Midgar, (nicknamed the city of darkness and nightmares), but not Shinra, who were more than satisfied with their total domination over Midgar and the rest of the world.
There was no one who could stop them, or even dare to try. No one, that is, until a certain small band of rebels, under leadership of a most vengeful man, decided to take action against them…
At the Sector 8 upper city of Midgar, sitting on the Plate itself, held up above the lower city, a flower girl from the lower city (the Slums) of Sector 5, was busy selling flowers to the citizens who lived there.
"Flowers! Flowers for sale! Only a gil each!" called the flower girl, trying to make herself heard above all the noise of the crowd in the area.
Of those who did hear her though, some did not even glance at her, while the few that did merely gave her an incredulous look of disbelief and scorn, before walking off along the city without another look back.
The flower girl sighed to herself, and shook her head wearily. She wasn't in the least bit surprised. Flowers in Midgar were so very rare, and it was generally believed that they did not grow in the whole city at all, so it was hardly surprising that no one really believed she was selling genuine flowers from Midgar, and did not take much notice of her.
The whole fact of it all did nothing to hide away her disappointment, however. And the people who really did take notice of her were men that were only interested in her appearance rather than the flowers, and that had only served to make her situation even worse.
The flower girl was twenty-two years old, had a rather slim figure, and soft, long chestnut brown hair wrapped up in a ponytail that seemed to shine at every moment, and she had bright emerald green eyes that also shone in her flawless face, so by all, she was considered very beautiful indeed.
She wore a crimson red jacket, with a bright, long pink dress underneath it ending with brown boots at her feet, and she also wore a pink ribbon around her ponytail to keep it tightened up, with a white bauble-like glass ball tied to the middle of the pink ribbon as well.
She was carrying a basket of flowers around her arm, and she was selling the flowers to other people for little money, and this was a very rare sight in Midgar since there were no other flower girls due to the total lack of plants in Midgar, which were almost never seen in the Slums. The flower girl's name was Aeris Gainsborough.
Aeris was the only person in the whole of the Slums of Midgar who was somehow able to grow flowers (since there was no sun or rain in Midgar due to the Plate blocking out the sky from the Slums, and the atmosphere of the whole city in general as well).
Therefore, how she managed to grow flowers in the dark city at all was simply considered a completely astonishing mystery to every other person, and they were all extremely baffled on the subject, and refused to dwell on it, which of course didn't make selling flowers in Midgar all that easy.
"(I'm a little baffled about it myself. But it only seems natural to me that I can grow flowers in this sort of place, even without sunlight or rain. I can't really expect anyone else to believe it though,) thought Aeris, sorrowfully.
Aeris went all the way from the Slums of Sector 5 to the Sector 8 upper city with her flowers to try and bring some happiness, life and colour to the dark and gloomy city of Midgar, for once. But, as usual, it wasn't working very well.
The dark city simply seemed just as dark and gloomy as ever, and Aeris simply couldn't do anything about it, just like everyone else in the Slums, even though she somehow seemed unique and different in a lot of respects, like being able to grow flowers with no actual sunlight.
Aeris sighed in disappointment, but she was determined not to give up so easily. As ever, she absolutely refused to give up, her will and resolve both extremely strong, and truly unbreakable. Aeris seemed somehow like a bright star of hope in the dark city of Midgar, a light to shine out all of the darkness.
But Aeris was alone, as she had nearly always been. She had no friends, no family (not by blood, anyway) and she had barely any knowledge of her origins at all, only the very basic facts of it, and even this basic knowledge still came as an amazement to her and to the few other people who knew about it, but she had always suspected that her answers must lay somewhere outside of Midgar. She didn't know why, but she felt absolutely certain about this fact. Her pink dress unfolded slightly as she stood up straight on her feet.
Aeris carefully hung her wicker basket, containing several colourful and beautiful flowers, around her arm, and she made her way down the alleyway. Drunken louts staggered out of the Goblin's Bar on her left. Aeris passed the back entrance of it, nearby the theatre.
Currently showing was a play called Loveless, but the next performance didn't start until the evening and the doors were locked. But in Midgar, it was simply like night time permanently, and few of the poor people in the Slums could really tell whether it was day or night at all.
Eight huge Mako Reactors, each positioned in eight different places around the whole of Midgar with the same distance between them, sucked energy out of the ground and converted it into electricity, spewing giant green clouds of smog at the same time.
Aeris stopped at the curb as a chunky motorcycle roared past, and she looked up at the Mako Reactor that towered far above the Sector 8 upper and lower city, just as the other seven Reactors did at the other seven sectors of the whole city. Midgar was certainly a city of nightmares.
"(The Mako Reactors…slowly but surely sucking up the energy of the Planet itself. The Planet's getting weaker…I can feel it somehow. It's as if it's screaming in pain and weariness…and if this keeps up, who knows how long it's going to last…)" thought Aeris.
Aeris wished that she had been brought up in a cleaner town such as Wutai or Mideel, but certain complications meant she had to stay in the urban disaster, living in fear and anxiety every single day, and she had never once set even one foot outside the dark city in her entire life. She simply had no choice, and turned back to the dark alley.
Alone in the dark alley, Aeris stood alone there in deep thought. If one were to have peered down the alley at her, they would have seen her lips moving, but with no sound escaping, but no one really noticed her.
"(Doesn't anyone see the effect that the Mako Reactors are having? Or do they just not care at all? Knowing Shinra, I guess it's the latter part. But even so, this whole thing has to be stopped somehow…)" thought Aeris, though she knew that she could do nothing to help the Planet, especially considering that it would be by herself.
She nodded slowly…then shook her head…and whispered something to herself, still clearly in very deep thought about the subject to pay more attention to anything else around her at the present moment.
With a weary sigh, she got slowly back up off the ground, brushed the loose, wet gravel off her knees and off her pink dress, and picked up the woven basket of flowers she carried, and walked on.
Aeris headed to the mouth of the alleyway, and was just about to cross the street when a pair of loud motorcycles flew right past her, pouring steam and rotten gas fumes into the air, mixed with the terrible smell of stale Mako energy from the Reactor that towered over the city.
Aeris wrinkled her nose up at the horrible smell and coughed slightly. Several more people brushed past her as they moved along the sidewalk, and a rusted-out old blue car followed the motorcycles.
Aeris often wondered why she had even bothered to try to bring colour to this black city by selling flowers, when she knew the situation here was pretty hopeless. Far above her, other than the Reactor belching noxious green clouds of burnt Mako energy, stood the massive Shinra Headquarters itself, in the very centre of the Plate, but it still towered over the upper cities, and could be just as easily seen as the Reactors in the opposite direction of the tower.
Surrounding the massive building in the centre, from eight different corners on the outer side of the whole city, were the eight Mako Reactors that sucked energy out of the living earth itself and converted it into usable electricity for resources, appliances, and other such things. The huge column of glass and steel hung ominously over the city.
In the centre of the Plate and the whole upper and lower cities, was the massive Shinra tower, the Shinra Headquarters. It was far taller and larger than any other man-made construction in the entire Planet and was made up of about 70 floors, each floor with an ant farm of Shinra employees, working all day long to maintain power for the whole city.
The Shinra Headquarters towered over the whole city of Midgar in the centre of it, just as the Mako Reactors also do, on the outskirts of it in the eight points of the circle-shaped structure of Midgar.
The whole Plate surrounded the building before the Reactors, with the upper cities and sectors on top of the Plate, while the lower city (the Slums) were far below the gigantic Plate, which was held up by several support structures in each sector to keep it and the upper cities from crashing down onto the Slums and lower cities.
"(The Shinra Headquarters…home to Shinra Incorporated themselves. Soon, they'll probably come after me again. I know they won't ever give up, no matter where I go, or how long it takes. And I don't know if I can evade them by myself for much longer…)" thought Aeris, grimly.
Deciding to get out of the crowd and traffic for some peace and quiet in this city for once, Aeris noticed another narrow alleyway, and she walked into it alone, still carefully carrying her basket of flowers. As she walked down the alleyway, she suddenly noticed a small blazing green fire at the ground before a brick wall.
"(Green flames? How very bizarre, but that's not the unusual thing about it…I can somehow…sense something from the flames…something very strange indeed…)" thought Aeris, perplexed.
Intrigued for a reason that she couldn't explain, Aeris knelt down slowly in front of the green fire, gazing deeply at it, her emerald green eyes locked on the similarly green flames, as she gently lay her basket of flowers beside her, folded the edges of her pink dress, and clasped her hangs together.
Mysteriously, Aeris seemed to see something in her mind, something beyond the darkness behind the flames. A night sky with several dozen stars and galaxies all around, and she suddenly heard a faint sound from it, as though something was trying to communicate from there.
"(What is this? It's as if…as if the stars themselves are alive somehow…and the Planet itself…seems to be trying to speak…to say something. It seems impossible to imagine…but I feel…as if it really is trying to call for help…)" thought Aeris, awestruck, staring into the flames.
Leaning even closer to the fire now, her emerald green eyes glowing, Aeris started to speak, to communicate, when she suddenly felt herself being grabbed roughly at her shoulders, and being hauled onto her feet. At once, the bizarre connection was broken as quickly as it had come.
Startled, she averted her gaze from the fire, which quickly went out like a light, and she stumbled backwards slightly before seeing four thugs standing in front of her in the alleyway, arms folded and looking menacing.
Aeris knew these people, and quickly grabbed her basket of flowers from the ground and took a few steps backwards, her stomach suddenly cold.
"Well well, Aeris, long time no see again. Your week's up, and we're getting very…impatient," hissed one man, with a few gold teeth and several broken ones, with greasy hair and cold grey eyes.
The others behind him sniggered mischievously, their eyes looking right at her in a way she certainly didn't like whatsoever, so she ignored as best she could.
"What do you want, Vulcue?" demanded Aeris, attempting to make her voice sound hard and furious, but she couldn't entirely disguise the shaky nervousness of her tone, and they noticed it too. The leers of the men grew wider. Vulcue sneered nastily at her.
"Don't you play dumb with me, Aeris, you know full-well what I want. I'm gonna get my 3,000 gil one way or another, so pay up or we're gonna take a little visit to the Don. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to see someone like you, pleased enough to…heh, heh, heh…" sniggered Vulcue, braking off as he leered at her, while the others were sniggering stupidly.
Aeris didn't need him to finish his sentence, she knew perfectly well what the Don of the Slums would do to her, like he did to all other girls, and the very thought of it only made her stomach grow colder.
"Look, I'm just selling flowers right now for that money, and if you would just give me a day, I'll have the money and give it to you, and then you just leave me alone," said Aeris, sharply, but with a little desperation in her voice too. The thugs still sneered nastily at her.
"By selling only one measly gil for a flower each? Pathetic, woman, pathetic. You know…you ought to try selling your body instead, you'd knock any man dead in a second for tons of cash," said Vulcue, nastily, as he reached out and pinched her cheek hard.
Aeris slapped his hand away at once and she actually succeeding in hurting the bastard, but Vulcue snarled viciously and punched her straight across the same cheek he'd pinched, sending Aeris falling to the ground in a heap, though she quickly sat-up back up, clutching her bruised cheek, and glaring at them defiantly. The men roared with laughter.
"I'll be expecting that money later on, Aeris. And if you don't have it ready for us…then on second thought, we might just have that body of yours for US, instead of the Don," said Vulcue, nastily.
He and his thugs roared with laughter again as they left the alleyway into the streets, and they were soon out of sight among the crowd.
As soon as they were out of sight, Aeris slowly chanted to herself, her eyes closed and hands clasped, still kneeling on the ground and concentrating calmly, as a wave of bright energy suddenly seemed to wash through and around her, and her cheek was no longer bruised, and it no longer hurt either, not in the least, nor did her body.
"(There, completely healed. I'm still not quite sure how I can heal myself like that when no one else can, but like growing the flowers, it just seems all too natural for me. But it's another thing about me I'd better keep to myself…)" thought Aeris, knowing that this was yet another thing people would find too hard to believe, that they would harshly judge her for.
Aeris could well have killed those men in an instant if she had only used her Materia, but she was frightened and nervous, and she had never killed anyone before, nor did she like the idea of that sort of thing either.
Therefore, she was at a loss of what to do about her situation. And Vulcue and his cronies weren't the only threat that she faced at Midgar. They weren't even the worst of it whatsoever…
The city of nightmares…now more than ever, that was certainly what the city seemed like to Aeris, and she felt a profound desire to leave this detestable place forever, even fantasying that one day her knight in shining armour would come to take her away from this place and the suffering she had endured from it, but she knew dreams like that never became reality, and knew that she would have to face every day of her life being stuck in this urban nightmare…
Deciding that she'd better leave the alley before anything else happened, Aeris got back up, hung her basket of flowers back around her arm, and walked out of the alleyway to the streets of the Sector 8 upper city, and proceeded to try to sell her flowers, needing the money for several different reasons, and for a moment, she had entirely forget about the green flames, and the strange sound and the stars that had seemed to come right from them…