20 years before the Nibelheim incident...

The cold steel of the passage's walls served only to intensify the feeling of radiating menace that seemed to emanate from the structure as the 3rd class SOLDIER picked his way along the corridor, carefully stepping among the exposed piping that zigzagged from one part of the wall to another at seemingly random points. He could see at the far end of the tunnel was a large area whose curved walls appeared to host an array of doors surrounding a gigantic cylindrical glass tank, in which floated a large dark shape. From afar, the SOLDIER was unable to discern what it was, if he were to be frank with himself, he didn't want to know.

Despite his distaste with what the mission entailed and the reasons for his particular dispatch, his SOLDIER experience, although limited, had taught him that in an assignment of this importance, refusing to accept resulted in unemployment or worse. He knew only too how cranky his superiors could be when they didn't get their way. Hell, those hypocritical bastards should have taken the job up themselves to see what kind of situations they complacently place their "pawns" into. in fact, if it wasn't for the fact that the offered pay was quite large and that the SOLDIER had a newborn son and a wife to provide for, he wouldn't have even considered accepting this assignment. And, of course, the fact that he had no choice. He had overheard his superiors discussing the mission amongst themselves and had heard his name mentioned, along with another particular word. "Expendable".

Clearing his mind of his irritation, he continued picking his way to the end of the corridor, attempting in vain both to ignore the quiet yet unnerving sounds coming from above him and to resist looking at the hulking dark mass that was becoming larger in his vision as he moved nearer to the opening.

The room he emerged into was far more smartly decorated than the corridor he had just left - the walls, which he assumed were made of the same steel, were white, and most of the doors were made of varnished oak, save for a few bolted shut which were made of slightly blackened metal - inches thick, the SOLDIER guessed - and one which appeared to have crudely been painted blue. To the left was what he assumed to be a secretary's desk - though like the rest of the complex, it was now deserted - and the floor was decorated in a crisscross pattern of red and yellow stripes on a grey carpet. The bare section of the floor that surrounded the cylindrical tank was nearly completely covered by large pieces of dormant machinery from which wires and pipes protruded, connecting an array of meters and pumps to the shape was held inside the cylinder. The centre of the domed ceiling where the tank connected with the room's steel roof was also populated by a number of monitors and containers in which the SOLDIER could see odd, glowing substances. He then forced himself to look at the centre of the room. At the thing in the tank.

What looked like part of a gigantic black spherical shell that had been partly digested was floating, still and lifeless, in the fluid. It was connected via some sheets of fibre to something bizarrely shaped, half-covered by the shell, which the SOLDIER had to move around the cylinder clockwise to see. He then looked up, removing his visor for a clearer view. His eyes widened. There, hanging like an unholy, overgrown Christmas decoration, he could see the monstrosity in full detail.

The deformed, black-skinned torso of what appeared to have once been a human hung lifelessly in the fluid, connected to the shell by a mass of fibrous tissue that sprouted from where its left arm should have been. The thing's head slumped limply on its collarbone, and its expression was unreadable - its eye sockets were empty and its mouth hung slightly open. Its left arm connected back to its torso just below where an elbow would have been on a human. The body itself was disproportionate and shrivelled, and the lower torso where the legs would have connected on a human looked like it had been gnawed off. The hourglass shape told the SOLDIER that if it had been human, it had most probably been female before... whatever had happened to it.

This is sick, he nearly said aloud. What freak would hang this up in a lobby like a fucking trophy?

While staring at the lifeless being with a mixture of horror and curiosity, the SOLDIER had forgotten about the sounds. As he managed to tear his eyes away from the creature and looked around before starting towards the metal door on the other side of the tank, something smelled him from the air vent above.

The SOLDIER looked at the door before drawing his huge sword and stabbing it, using all his strength, into the large keyhole. The metal lock split in a loud crack with such force that he looked around in a brief panic as if frightened that he had been heard. He then pushed open the door and walked through. He found himself in a corridor not unlike the one he had entered the lobby through, though this one was slightly wider and had far fewer pipes. There were strange looking dents and what looked like slash marks on the walls, and a smoking lower half of a disembodied Slalom robot was slumped against the wall, its pink coat of paint darkened by smog. The lower portion of its left arm lay beside it, severed from the rest of the machine. The SOLDIER noticed that the pincer lay in a pool of thick black sludge. As he walked past, he touched the liquid with his boot, which some of it stuck to. He continued onwards towards the end door, which he opened the same way as he had the previous one, again checking behind himself cautiously.

This new room looked to be an abattoir of sorts. The walls were made up of surgically clean tiles, which were white and polished, save for a few small splashes of red. The metallic pang and the fresh colour told the SOLDIER that this was blood, and was fresh. The low ceiling, and floor were both made of grey stone and also had splashes of blood on them, and, the SOLDIER noted with a small jolt of fright, the top half of the Slalom lay to the left of the room in a small pool of the sludge, looking as if it had been partly digested. In the left and right corners of the wall in front of him were two large, prison cell-like cubicles , in between of which was another door. Aside from a distant scraping which the SOLDIER hoped was just another harmless background noise, the room was completely silent. He walked to the left cell, and peered in through a conveniently placed small barred window. Inside was a smaller version of the cylindrical tank in the lobby . The most noticeable difference was that this one was empty and, save for some condensed liquids which had collected at the bottom, dry. Behind it, another steel door had been wrenched off of its hinges and flung to the side to lean awkwardly against the wall of the adjoining passage to which the door would have opened previously, which seemed to curve to the right towards something in front of the room. The SOLDIER assessed the cell again, making sure he had looked past nothing, and walked over to the cell to the right. Inside, there was no tank. Instead, too bizarre to be a monster, yet too monstrous to be an alien, there was a creature, silently dangling upside-down from a bar lowered off of the ceiling.

Most of the entity appeared to be made of twisting dark green tendrils which shined with moisture. The creature had arms and hands, the latter of which appeared to simply be a split in the structure of the arm that resulted in five separate short thick tendrils forming a makeshift hand. A group of tendrils from the torso merged into one to form the creature's long neck and head, which was turned to the side. From what the SOLDIER could see, the creature, facially at least, had human features; eyes which were closed, and an open grimace which resembled a mouth. The creature hung off of the bar via a single foot of tendrils which wrapped around it. The SOLDIER assumed that the creature was either dead or asleep. He hoped it to be the former.

He walked towards the door quietly, unwilling to disturb the creature if -the SOLDIER shuddered at the possibility- it were merely hibernating. This door had no lock, and as the SOLDIER looked around for an alternative way through, something screamed.

It set him off. He turned back and ran through the corridor with the destroyed Slalom, too frightened to check if the creature had awoken or not. His first impulse was to run far, far away from the facility, but he knew that returning empty handed might be a worse idea than staying. He ran into the lobby and looked around frantically before calming slightly. What was he to do? Deciding to leave it to fate, he chanced right and took the wooden door opposite the lobby's entrance. Behind him, something silently dropped onto the floor from an open ventilation grate.

The door led him into a large, office-like room filled with blank computer screens and other dead machines, some of which looked to have been sliced into or eaten by acid. The SOLDIER, after stopping to catch a bit of breath and calm himself somewhat, examined the room around him. There were a few security cameras on the ceiling, all still and dead save for one which was silently swinging around in a state of aimless malfunction. The floor was carpeted, like the lobby. There was a thin trail of fresh blood on the floor which led to the half open steel door at the end of the room. The SOLDIER heard a quiet, dull, randomly sounding thud from somewhere in front of him. He forced himself to move onwards, stopping only when out of the corner of his eye he noticed one monitor was still working.

"INNER PERIMITER SECURITY BREACHED. ALL PERSONEL EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY"

Old news, he thought. The computer next to it had a message warning of a mako leak in a containment cell.

Nothing, however, warned him that he was being followed. What vaguely resembled a muscular legless humanoid had been silently stalking him through the ventilation system, using its senses to pinpoint the SOLDIER as it followed him from room to room. Now, they were on the same vertical level, and it watched from the doorway, standing on its hands, its inhuman wide-eyed stare tracking his every movement.

The SOLDIER moved quickly through the steel door at the end, which was partially on its hinges, through another steel-walled passageway, to a third room not unlike the one in which he had found the tendril creature. There were no cells in this one, but that was not the only difference.

The SOLDIER had accomplished his mission, but he would not live long enough to realise it.

A wall of bone for a face with empty, statue-like eye sockets faced him. One of the shoulders which it stood on held an arm was clearly human, save for a pair of small talon outgrowths at the elbow, yet the other another just appeared to be a thick appendage with a large orb of a green crystalline substance. Had the SOLDIER time, the smell would have told him that the substance was pure crystal mako. One leg seemed humanoid, and the other was covered in a tough-looking red sheet of skin which reached to the creatures abdomen. Its torso was muscular and scaled with dull grey plates. The creature was sitting in a kind of lotus position, surrounded by the same black sludge the man had seen part of the destroyed Slalom lying in. On its laplay a dead, bleeding human.

The SOLDIER, unable to control his voice box enough to scream, managed a lame gasp and stumbled back, only to hit the steel door-frame painfully. He felt around behind him frantically, keeping his eyes on the beast in front of him, which was slowly rising to its feet. The man found his way into the corridor, and was about to turn around to run. He found his hands against a different surface.

Rough was the last thing he thought before two sharp blades impaled him, one in his abdomen, one in his upper torso, piercing his spine and tearing through his heart, causing blood to flow out onto the floor. He began to slump down as the blades withdrew, and was dead before he hit the grey stone floor.

The blades, attached to a pair of thick tentacles, withdrew themselves into a hole in the legless creature's abdomen as the stone-faced entity made its way to the newly slain, ready to compare it's relative value to that of the other dead man, and prepared to fight for the new food if deemed worthwhile. Later, the tendril-bodied creature would awaken, and make it's way to the source of the smell of blood, to scavenge on whatever pieces had been left by its half-brothers.

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A/N Well, there you have it. The prologue to my fanfic. Sorry this edit and chapter 1 took so long to come out. R&R... whatever that actually means.