Chapter 5

The SeeDs are scheduled to arrive a week after Rinoa's return. That would have given them a day to prepare, but the train station at Balamb is shut down for repairs for several hours the day they planned to leave. By the time the SeeDs are on the train, they have only a day to get to the Forest Owls' base in Timber.

"Daaaaammiiiit" Zone groans, slapping a palm on his desk. "We're going to have to do everything this morning and be ready by noon! Hyne…I can't believe Bill can't come."

"It's fine; I can do it." Rinoa flips distractedly through files. Her eyes are bloodshot and underlined in blue-gray. It's five in the morning. "It's fine. We're basically ready…I have the codes…Watts went to pick up the SeeDs…The dummy car is ready…Hey, did Watts tell you where he got those shots of the inside of the real thing?"

"The real train car? Apparently from one of those 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous' TV shows. Hope he hasn't redecorated since last month."

"A television show? That sounds kind of sketchy…"

"It's the best we could come up with. It should be pretty accurate; he hasn't used his personal train car in a long time. He's been at the capital. Dammit…Where's the paper? Did it come yet?"

Still reading, Rinoa digs around a stack of paper, pulls out a plastic-wrapped cylinder, shoves it absentmindedly at Zone, goes back to the papers – complicated diagrams of the outside control panels on a train car.

"AHHHHHHHH DAMMIT!" Zone slams the front page face up on the desk.

Donovan Dead, PD Suspects Foul Play

"I thought you didn't like the vice president."

"Well… I didn't want him dead. He was the sanest one in that administration. Now Deling's just going to find someone even worse."

Rinoa tosses the files on Zone's desk. "I'm exhausted. I'm gonna go back to bed. Have Watts or somebody get me when the SeeDs get here, okay?" Without waiting for an answer, Rinoa returns to her room, curls up on the bed. Despite the early hour, she can't fall asleep right away.

(SeeD is actually coming. We've been preparing for half a year, and now they're coming. Seifer would be so…happy?)

Rinoa is floating under beautiful, clear water. As her body sinks, her hair lifts off her shoulders, and the ring on her necklace floats up into her field of vision. Her feet touch the floor of the pool; her legs bend and push off of the bottom. Warm water rushes past her face and her head brakes the surface. The air is cold, stinging her skin and chlorine-dried eyes and she wants to submerge again, but someone is beckoning to her, crouched at the edge of the water. It looks like her mother, wearing a slinky red evening dress. She blinks to clear the water from her eyes and the dress becomes a cross on a white trench coat.

"Seifer!" she calls, waving to him while she treads water. She swims to the edge of the pool and looks up, but the sun is behind him and she can only see the silhouette of his head and shoulders. "Seifer, we did it! What you said about the ball…it worked! SeeD is coming..."

"I know." he tells her "They're here."

As he walks away, his footsteps grow louder instead of fading. Then they become muffled, as if by carpet. He turns and waves to her, and Rinoa sees that it wasn't Seifer at all, but another familiar man wearing his coat.

Rinoa wakes up strangely well-rested and alert. (I must have slept longer than I thought…the SeeDs…the SeeDs are coming!) Something had woken her. Footsteps…

Rinoa opens her eyes and sits up. There's a man in her room – the one who had been wearing Seifer's trench coat. Also her dance partner the night she spoke to Cid Kramer.

"Hey...You're...! You know, from the party..." Rinoa realizes she doesn't know the SeeD's name, but he's definitely the one she had danced with - the one with the eyes. Instead of his SeeD uniform, he's wearing black pants and a black, fur-lined jacket over a white tee-shirt. Three belts, one equipped with a brown items pouch. Black gloves, black clothes, heavy black boots. A silver, stud earring, silver chain necklace with an ornament on the end. All black and white and silver, with some kind of weapon on his back, its handle visible above his shoulder. Very little of the softness she remembers from the SeeD ball, except in the soft, shaggy hair.

"So...does that mean...You're one of the SeeDs?"

"I'm Squall, the squad leader. There are two others with me." Squall nods. His voice is low, measured, professional. ("Squall…")

His words seem to confirm his authenticity. He is not an illusion or dream. She leaps from the bed, smiling and laughing outloud, sure that he must be feeling her overpowering excitement – it must be tangible – and throws her arms around his neck.

"YEEESSSS! SeeD is here!" she exclaims, laughing so hard now that her eyes tear up. Some part of her hadn't really believed it until she'd seen this strange soft mercenary, looking so out-of-place in her own familiar room.

"Take it easy."

"I'm sorry it's just …" Rinoa walks to her desk. It's just what? That what she'd doubted and simultaneously clung to belief in had finally come? That this one day's work that would change Timber's history? World history? "I'm so happy. I've been sending requests to Garden forever, but nothing...I'm so glad I spoke to Cid directly!" Rinoa laughs. Her laugh is high, like her voice, and naively blissful, like a child's.

Squall looks over Rinoa, taking in her disheveled hair, wrinkled clothes, sparkling brown eyes. She does not look like a key player in an underground political resistance.

"So you were looking for the headmaster at the party?"

Rinoa nods. "You know Seifer Almasy?"

"...Yeah."

"Well, he's the one who introduced me to Cid. Cid is such a nice man. I really didn't think SeeD would come out to help a measly little group like us. But after I explained our situation to him, Cid gave the go ahead right away!"

Rinoa beams at the stony SeeD. "Now that you guys are here, we'll be able to carry out all kinds of plans!"

Squall coughs uncomfortably. "I'm going back to the others"

"Okay, let's go!" Rinoa starts towards the door; her mind is racing. In her spontaneous embrace, she'd seen Squall's eyes up closer even then at the SeeD ball. They were the intensely blue, like the water in her dream. She shakes her head, stops and turns back to him.

"Oh yeah, my name's Rinoa" She offers him her hand. Squall hesitates, and then shakes hands. "Very pleased to meet you, Squall." she says sincerely. They stand in mid-handshake for a minute, and then quickly draw back their hands.

"SeeD members dance quite well, don't they?" she asks coyly.

He shrugs. "Approach your target inconspicuously at a dance party...

There may be missions requiring this sort of subterfuge. It's expected of SeeD to learn various skills."

"Oh…so it's work related." Rinoa had hoped the dance lessons indicated more to SeeD training than combat and stratagem. Maybe they would understand the political, the historical significance of what they were about to do? "That's too bad."

They stand in silence for a few seconds that last for hours. Rinoa clasps her hands behind her back and traces an arc on the carpet with the toe of her boot.

"Okay umm…we should probably get back to the others. Thanks for waking me up." Rinoa turns quickly away. Squall follows her down the hall in silence, Rinoa intensely aware of his eyes on her back, until they reach the entrance room, where Watts, Zone, and the two other SeeDs are waiting.

One is a muscled blond with an exotic tattoo on the side of his face. Blue jacket, baggy demin shorts, tennis shoes, hair spiked several inches in the front. He reminds Rinoa of the basketball players in her high school in Timber. The other is a girl of short stature wearing a yellow jumper and carrying nunchaku on her back. Thin limbs, especially in contrast to her oversize brown boots. Her brown hair is flipped up on either side and in back. Rinoa recognizes both from the ball. Neither has the crisp, military air she'd imagined – they could hardly be older than she herself – but SeeD is an unusual mercenary program. "Touchy-feely" Zone had called it, yet the most effective, proportionate to its numbers, in the world except for maybe the mysterious Estharian elite combat forces...

"This is Zell…" Squall gestures to the blond. "...and Selphie" he nods at the girl. Rinoa greets them and starts to introduce Zone, but Selphie interrupts,

"Oh, we've just met!" she positively beams at Rinoa. She smiles back politely. (That's a cheerleader, not a soldier.)

"As you all know, we're somewhat behind schedule…" Rinoa begins, checking Watts's watch. Watts holds up his wrist obligingly. It's already 7:30. "If you could all step into the meeting room," Rinoa gestures to a rusty door with several scribbled memos scotch taped its surface and flinches, "we're going to go over the operation we'll be carrying out today, and then you'll have some downtime before we begin at about twelve o' clock."

Zell and Selphie exchange surprised looks at the confident directions coming from this 5-foot-three teenage girl, but they follow Watts and Zone into the meeting room. Rinoa holds the door open, entering last and closing it carefully behind her. She watches each SeeD enter, sizing them up. Zell is compact, and has an almost awkward gait, as though trying to take up as much space as possible. Selphie's tiny frame seems weighted to the floor by her boots. Rinoa wonders how she can run in them. Squall walks in looking straight ahead, finds an empty corner, and stares at the floor, arms folded.

A toy train set sits on a fold-up table with a book under one leg in the middle of the room. One wall is taken up with windows, all the dusty blinds drawn, but tilted enough to cast stripes of sunlight onto the carpet dust floating visibly in the lines of light. The room is half-lit by a naked bulb above a bulletin board at the back of the room, full of newspaper and magazine clippings, and a few photos of members of the forest owls at a costume party. The room smells invasively of wood and paint.

Selphie begins examining the train set right away, admiring the tiny plastic trees and train cars (one is made of wood, coated sloppily with acrylic paint and labeled PRESIDENTIAL CAR in sharpie). Zell scans the bulletin board, looking unimpressed.

"Just stand anywhere you want" Zone says offhandedly. A tall, thin Estharian teenager in a blue hoodie and long shorts, Zone isn't physically imposing. His voice however is larger-than-life and self-important. Clearing his throat, he continues, "This is a full-scale operation. Our resistance, The Forest Owls, will be forever known in the pages of Timber's independence!" He paces the length of the small room, drawing out suspense. "Exciting, huh? Well, it all started when we got a hold of top-secret info from Galbadia."

"I got the info sir!" Watts interjects from a corner.

"There's a VIP from Galbaldia coming to Timber" Zone tells them, with a shade of irony. He drums his fingers on the edge of the toy train set.

"Super V-I-P!" Watts adds, impressively.

"The guy's name is Vinzer Deling!" Zone spits out the name like something bad tasting. "Our arch-enemy and the President of Galbadia."

"Vinzer Deling is a scoundrel! He's a dictator, not a president. Not even popular in his own country, sir!" says Watts. Zone turns to give him an admonishing look.

Rinoa cringes inwardly and tries to move the meeting along. "President Deling is taking a private train from the Galbadian capital. Our plan is to-"

"Blow it to smithereens with a rocket launcher?" Selphie suggests.

Everyone laughs nervously except for Squall, listening impassively. (He probably thinks we're totally incompetent…)

"Ahh…not quite" says Zone.

What the Forest Owls planned to do, the SeeDs had to admit, was clever and well thought-out. (Whether we can pull it off is another matter…) Using two switch points leading up to the Timber train station, the Owls planned to insert their own train car into the president's train, appropriate his personal train car, and use the Owl's base to toe itr down a forest-lined track used mostly for tourists. Zone demonstrates the procedure with the toy train set.

"We won't attach any of our cars to any of theirs except for the presidential car." Rinoa explains "So we'll only need to uncouple two sets of cars, the two escorts on either side of Deling's." She points to the two blue plastic cars, with tiny, olive green army men glued to the roofs. "Then we'll need to couple our base and the presidential car together. We'll only have about five minutes total, so at that point we'll need to split into two groups."

"Five minutes? Are you sure that'll be enough?" Zell's voice sounds to Rinoa like an energetic cartoon character's, even through its skepticism.

"According to the simulation that we ran, it should only take 3 minutes to complete the operation. Piece of cake for SeeDs, right?" says Zone.

"Since we can't uncouple the cars directly, we'll have to tamper with the control system that manages the coupling. If we temporarily disable the circuit for the connection, the car will uncouple automatically. To disable it, we have to enter several codes…."

Selphie looks confused, but Zell nods.

"Alright, so we need two 'flyers' who will wear climbing harnesses," she gestures to the closet where Watts is already getting out black, full-bodied harnesses procured from the local climbing gym "and two 'belayers' who will sit on the roofs on the train cars and lower the flyers down. Got that?"

"But there are only three of us…" Selphie says, eyeing the harnesses uncertainly.

"I'm the fourth. Bill was going to be the one to go with you; he'd be better for this." Rinoa says apologetically "he sprained an ankle yesterday; we haven't had time to find someone else. Zone has a weak stomach and Watts…"

"Gathering information's my specialty sir!" Watts explains.

"Watts doesn't do this sort of thing. But I've been through this operation a hundred times on the model; I probably know it the best anyway."

Zell looks impressed in spite of himself. (I guess I don't look like the type…)

After the meeting disperses, Watts gives the SeeDs a tour of the base and teaches them to use belay harnesses. Rinoa returns to her room and almost trips over a cot someone has set up for Selphie.

She opens the bottom drawer of her dresser and pulls out several potions, "status-curing" items, and smelling salts called "phoenix down". Storing the items in the a cheap, items pouch in her pocket, Rinoa opens her blaster edge case and takes out a shining metal wheel, about the size of her head. She folds it in half along a hinge and attaches it to a clip on her belt, buckled around her hips. The semi-circle shaped weapon sits parallel to her legs, the blade pressed flat to her thigh for protection. She folds the weapon's "base" – two rings connected by a contracting spring, and snaps it into the middle of the half-circle. Compact, discreet, easy to use, wretchedly ineffective. Still, Rinoa feels empowered with more than beauty and charisma at her hip.

Preparations complete, she flops down width-ways across the bed, closes her eyes, breathes deeply. Her thoughts slow down and she hears Watt's voice through her door, telling the SeeDs,

"This is our princess's and Selphie's room. Zell and Squall will be in my room, right here sir! We have a few hours before Deling's train is due to reach ours, so you can rest and make any preparations you need to…"

A door opens and closes in the hallway; someone knocks on Rinoa's own door.

"Come in!" On reconsideration, she drags herself off the bed and sits on the cot. Selphie enters and shyly closes the door behind her.

"Hey, guess we're gonna be roommates, huh?"

"Yeah, make yourself at home."

Selphie sits cross-legged on the bed, looks around inquisitively. Rinoa gets up and crosses the room to her chest of drawers. She selects several plastic boxes and another black items pouch from the bottom drawer and hands them to Selphie.

"I think you'll find just about everything you need here…potions, basic status items…"

"Oh it's fine!" Selphie answers brightly. "We carry our own stuff."

Her own rectangular brown pouch, embossed with Balamb garden's modified yin-yang symbol, holds a row of green capsules – potions, a few red capsules - high potions, tiny bottles of phoenix down smelling salts, a dropper bottle of eye drops, tablets labeled "all-purpose remedies", a capped vile of what looks like water marked with a cross…

"Yeah, they equip us really well!" Selphie explains. "So what kind of weapon is that?" She points to the blaster edge at Rinoa's hip. "I've never seen something like that before…" Over the next half-hour, Rinoa learns that Selphie grew up in Trabia Garden, specializes in casting magic, and just became a SeeD along with Squall and Zell. This will be the first mission any of them has carried out under contract.

"That doesn't mean we don't have any experience though" she assures Rinoa "The training at the gardens gives cadets a chance to work in the field. In fact, we all passed our SeeD field exam together…"

And Selphie launches into a story about their mission to help fend off a Galbaldian attack on Dollet, a seaside town far north of Timber.

"So then this Black Widow thing gets up again and chases us down to the beach…" Selphie is telling Rinoa with wide eyes when she's interrupted by a loud knock. "C'mon in!"

"Yo, Selphie" Zell opens the door "Where's Rinoa? Squall said I have to…Oh! Hey Rinoa, here's our info. You were supposed to get it as an attachment with Garden's acceptance but there was some kind of mix up, anyway…"

He thrusts a manila folder at Rinoa. A cover letter water marked with a picture of Balamb garden, a small booklet titled The SeeD Program in gold script, pages of information about each SeeD member, including black and white printed pictures.

According to her profile, Selphie is a magic specialist with only basic required weapons training. She's also a licensed pilot with an interest in space flight and magic-use theory. Zell is a martial artist with a background in mechanics. Rinoa glances up at the SeeDs recalling their exam in Dollet. Zell is pantomiming and making a sound like an explosion. She shrugs inwardly and turns to the squad leader's profile.

Squall Leonheart

DoB: 8/23/25

Height: 5'8''

Blood Type: AB

Hair: Brown

Eyes: Blue

More basic information follows. Squall is a gunblade specialist, whatever a gunblade is, and one of the most promising students in garden according to a short report by the headmaster. His junctioned avatar is a thunder spirit named "Quezacotl"…

(Junctioned Avatar…GFs. Seifer told me about them.) Rinoa flips back to Zell's and Selphie's profiles to find that their avatars are a fire demon called "Ifirt" and a non-elemental avatar named "Siren". It all sounds strange to Rinoa; Seifer never talked about names for avatars. Rinoa tosses the folder onto her desk and looks at the clock above it. Only an hour until Deling's train is due.

"Hey Rinoa, we're going to go check in with Squall; make sure we're all set." The SeeDs leave, Zell with an amiable hand on Selphie's back. Rinoa hears the boys' room's door open and close. (When did this mission start to feel so…real?). These SeeDs have forces she barely understands at their disposal, exotic weapons she's never seen…They didn't even need the Forest Owls' potions – they'd brought their own.

Zell: The Forest Owls' base was really shabby. Like, they didn't even have hot water in the bathroom. No one really lived there – It was just kind of like an office for planning and meetings and whatever. Our room was the size of a frickin' walk-in closet. The Forest Owl leader Zone and the dude that picked us up totally didn't have it together. The other girl, Rinoa, was pretty cute, but she didn't look like a hands-on kind of girl. It turned out though the guy that was supposed to do the mission with us was out sick or something, and she decided to do it herself. Pretty cool…

Anyway, I'd hoped I'd be rooming with Selphie – no luck. But she did laugh at my joke about the priest, the Galbaldian major, and the chocobo while we were touring the base. We had a last minute meeting with Squall an hour before we were gonna make the train switch. I think it was something they told him to do as a team leader; he tried to give us a pep-talk after we'd all checked our items pouches and they'd equipped their weapons. He wasn't very good at it.

"This mission, well….you know. It's our first paid assignment. We're…representatives of Garden…we must behave as such. We need to trust each other completely…think clearly, make good decisions, and…well…our first priority is our safety and the safety of our client."

Squall isn't really a people-person, totally the opposite of Selphie. She and I played cards while Squall reviewed the mission data again. I let her win my Chimera card.

We all got these weird belay devices and climbing harnesses so Squall and I could lower Selphie and Rinoa down between the train cars. The full body ones for the girls were alright, but ours looked some kind of kinky S/M gear. They make it hard to walk too, I couldn't touch my toes. The girls took a few copies each of the coupling codes.

I was actually pretty excited for the mission – it's not like we'd be given grades like the field exam. It was just us and our brains and our belaying equipment. The only thing really bugging me was the dream I'd had on the train over to Timber.

I think we were slipped some kind of sleeping gas, though I've never heard of an inhalant that makes people have the same dream. We all dreamed that we were Galbaldian soldiers. Sometimes I was sure that finding out we'd all had the same dream was a dream itself. Apparently Selphie had the same thought; she kept asking me if I still remembered "Sir Laguna". That was pushed out of my mind pretty damn fast though.

A/N: This chapter is about the SeeDs and the Forest Owls sizing each other up, making snap judgments, and falling short of each other's expectations. Please review & tell me if that message comes across. Thanks!

Devil May Care