"Jenova…." I forced my eyes open, to obscure memories of another nightmare. The clock read 10.35 a.m. I've never adhered to office hours, and now I can rise and shine whenever I see fit. I get a deadline to kill someone by and I follow it. With seconds to spare.
"Yuffie! You gonna get the mail or what?" She did. Wutaiian bitches always make the most loyal companions, and my greyhound is no different. With an expectant glint in her eye, she dropped the heavy pile of envelopes at the foot of the bed. Final notice for the tenant down the hall, some bar tab the company hasn't paid for me yet, and…oh. Great. Reeve's personal Shinra postmark. That guy patents something new every day. His line of swimwear is plastered all over the billboard on the opposite block. Everyone discreetly neglected to mention the fact that, considering the average hourly rate he pays, not even Costa Del Sol residents can afford to sunbathe. I'm not even sure what I earn now. As a Turk it was fifty grand per mission, with one of those fucking unnecessary pension schemes. Like Turks live long enough to retire.
Dare I open this? Yuffie cocked her head. Sod it. My thumb pulled up the flap at the rear of the envelope and dug a furrow along its length. I tipped the guts out onto the duvet. A single sheet of very expensive paper without watermark or header. Reeve's handwriting, practiced for long and arduous hours in the basement room of Jonathan Shinra's School for Boys, having character all its own and yet at the same time looking like every example of the written word I've ever seen. Not that I've ever seen these words before.
Investigate disappearance: REUBEN, ZACHARY
Born: Gongaga.
Last Seen: Sector 5 Slum.
Subject not terminated at Gaea's Cliff. When you find him, make it clean.
No bullshit. Clean, in this business? Investigate disappearance means find the person, then make them disappear permanently. Another thinker, another human. Someone who is conscious and will recognise me as a threat to their life. Not a mindless ball of screaming sickle-cell insanity or a secretary who turned to acting to repopulate Nibelheim. That was a good job. Valentine joined me for that, saying that he'd like nothing more than to watch the frauds set alight, writhing in their own corrupt inferno. I gave him one of my bullets as a memento, to keep for that 'special' job. The one that just has to hurt, the one they will remember him for long after they rebuild the world. Tseng did his avant-garde nut over that exquisite ballet of blood and gasoline. Apparently I was only meant to kill four of them, the in-crowd that suggested the deceitful scheme. Oh well. No-one left alive to rat on me.
So, where's Zach Reuben? It was about an hour before I managed to wake up properly, and even then I wished I hadn't. Lost in the smouldering symphony of times long past, I watched clouds pour and burn behind my eyes, forming shapes I couldn't hold in focus long enough to question. I guess I'm as bad as Reeve is in that respect. If my target was last seen in Sector 5 then that's probably where I ought to start. I never decided whether I hate this part of an operation or not. After all, project Emanuel has been up and running over a year, this part of the operation has come around quite a few times. If I try to envision how many people are on the payroll for this ongoing façade I'll go insane for sure. I fed Yuffie and myself without breaking that thought.
Not as much activity here as usual, only a few wandering homeless digging through the trash that used to be the Sister Ray. Fucking stupid name for a gun if you ask me. Then again, nobody did. I was too busy debugging the Gelnika, or at least stalling Strife before he found the weapon we knew all along would never stop Sephiroth. Hades, the only Summon materia that was never spliced with quasi-human DNA and called a clone. I backed into an alley and sighed, pushing my weight against a cool wet wall. It's too dark to tell what the wall is wet with.
To bless a prosthetic human with a not entirely supernatural advantage over the next candidate, a particular materia is incubated with it, lending more than discreet mutations to the subject. Attributes like increased strength from a high magic like Ultima. I think that's what they used on Strife. They haven't used it since him. I know mine was a Summon. I think. But the rest of my batch had fire, lending credence to the theory that I absorbed their life force before it had begun to form. My hair is pretty hard to miss. I wonder if it was Ifrit, and that the others just died, my survival being due to some infinite coincidence. Very fucking likely. I was a killer before I could crawl, and that's the way it is. I grinned then at the idea that I might still be a killer long after I lose or forget the ability to walk, pointing my useless old Shinra-issue cattle prod at perspective enemies from the towering magnificence of my rusting wheelchair. Which gets at me the most, I wonder, the image itself, in all its cobwebbed majesty, or the fact that it's probably true.
"Yuffie! You gonna get the mail or what?" She did. Wutaiian bitches always make the most loyal companions, and my greyhound is no different. With an expectant glint in her eye, she dropped the heavy pile of envelopes at the foot of the bed. Final notice for the tenant down the hall, some bar tab the company hasn't paid for me yet, and…oh. Great. Reeve's personal Shinra postmark. That guy patents something new every day. His line of swimwear is plastered all over the billboard on the opposite block. Everyone discreetly neglected to mention the fact that, considering the average hourly rate he pays, not even Costa Del Sol residents can afford to sunbathe. I'm not even sure what I earn now. As a Turk it was fifty grand per mission, with one of those fucking unnecessary pension schemes. Like Turks live long enough to retire.
Dare I open this? Yuffie cocked her head. Sod it. My thumb pulled up the flap at the rear of the envelope and dug a furrow along its length. I tipped the guts out onto the duvet. A single sheet of very expensive paper without watermark or header. Reeve's handwriting, practiced for long and arduous hours in the basement room of Jonathan Shinra's School for Boys, having character all its own and yet at the same time looking like every example of the written word I've ever seen. Not that I've ever seen these words before.
Investigate disappearance: REUBEN, ZACHARY
Born: Gongaga.
Last Seen: Sector 5 Slum.
Subject not terminated at Gaea's Cliff. When you find him, make it clean.
No bullshit. Clean, in this business? Investigate disappearance means find the person, then make them disappear permanently. Another thinker, another human. Someone who is conscious and will recognise me as a threat to their life. Not a mindless ball of screaming sickle-cell insanity or a secretary who turned to acting to repopulate Nibelheim. That was a good job. Valentine joined me for that, saying that he'd like nothing more than to watch the frauds set alight, writhing in their own corrupt inferno. I gave him one of my bullets as a memento, to keep for that 'special' job. The one that just has to hurt, the one they will remember him for long after they rebuild the world. Tseng did his avant-garde nut over that exquisite ballet of blood and gasoline. Apparently I was only meant to kill four of them, the in-crowd that suggested the deceitful scheme. Oh well. No-one left alive to rat on me.
So, where's Zach Reuben? It was about an hour before I managed to wake up properly, and even then I wished I hadn't. Lost in the smouldering symphony of times long past, I watched clouds pour and burn behind my eyes, forming shapes I couldn't hold in focus long enough to question. I guess I'm as bad as Reeve is in that respect. If my target was last seen in Sector 5 then that's probably where I ought to start. I never decided whether I hate this part of an operation or not. After all, project Emanuel has been up and running over a year, this part of the operation has come around quite a few times. If I try to envision how many people are on the payroll for this ongoing façade I'll go insane for sure. I fed Yuffie and myself without breaking that thought.
Not as much activity here as usual, only a few wandering homeless digging through the trash that used to be the Sister Ray. Fucking stupid name for a gun if you ask me. Then again, nobody did. I was too busy debugging the Gelnika, or at least stalling Strife before he found the weapon we knew all along would never stop Sephiroth. Hades, the only Summon materia that was never spliced with quasi-human DNA and called a clone. I backed into an alley and sighed, pushing my weight against a cool wet wall. It's too dark to tell what the wall is wet with.
To bless a prosthetic human with a not entirely supernatural advantage over the next candidate, a particular materia is incubated with it, lending more than discreet mutations to the subject. Attributes like increased strength from a high magic like Ultima. I think that's what they used on Strife. They haven't used it since him. I know mine was a Summon. I think. But the rest of my batch had fire, lending credence to the theory that I absorbed their life force before it had begun to form. My hair is pretty hard to miss. I wonder if it was Ifrit, and that the others just died, my survival being due to some infinite coincidence. Very fucking likely. I was a killer before I could crawl, and that's the way it is. I grinned then at the idea that I might still be a killer long after I lose or forget the ability to walk, pointing my useless old Shinra-issue cattle prod at perspective enemies from the towering magnificence of my rusting wheelchair. Which gets at me the most, I wonder, the image itself, in all its cobwebbed majesty, or the fact that it's probably true.