"Everyone wants on that Trek Wars gravy train, huh?" Yuffie swung her legs up onto the couch and clicked the remote. "Everywhere I turn, Trek Wars knock-offs, Trek Wars promotions, Trek Wars teasers. Look at that, Cloud."

Cloud turned to the television. Onscreen, a kid in an orange jumpsuit and a mean-looking guy in black armor were dueling with laser swords. The armor guy seemed to have the upper hand, but the kid was taunting him.

"I admit it. You are better than I am, Darth."

"Then why are you smiling, young apprentice?"

"Because I know something you do not know."

"And what is that?"

"I am not left-handed!"

The kid tossed his laser sword in the air, caught it in his good hand, and pressed with his attack. The man in black stumbled backward.

"Impressive. Most impressive."

"You'll find I'm full of surprises."

"But there is something I ought to tell you."

This made the kid pause. "Tell me."

"Luke, I am your father!"

"Noooooo!" The kid threw his head back in a fit of horrible acting. The man in black used the pause in the action as an excuse to lop of the kid's right hand.

"You're left-handed now, dummy!"

"Father or not, you're a jerk!"

Yuffie hit the channel button before another line of dialog could be spoken. The new channel had a blond kid lying in a hospital bed and a guy in black armor sitting beside him. The show was obviously a bad soap opera, but Yuffie decided it was probably better than the farce on the other channel.

"Luke, I must tell you one thing before your brain tumor causes amnesia."

"What is it, Darth?"

"Luke, I'm not your real father."

Yuffie switched off the television.

"Diversions aside, Yuffie, I have our new assignment lined up."

XXX

"Cid Highwind?" Yuffie pouted. "We've dealt with smelly miners, disgusting birds, sleazy gamblers, the Turks, Bugenhagen and his tramp of a girlfriend, eBay, and even Ultima Weapon, and I was okay with that. But Cid Highwind? Gag me with a spoon."

"Do you know anyone else who can get us into space?" Cloud almost wanted Yuffie to come up with an alternative.

"I could steal us our own rocket ship."

"But who's going to fly it? Traveling through space ain't like dusting crops."
"I can't do that, either."

"Without precise calculations, we'd fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end our adventure real quick, wouldn't it?"

"I see your point. We need an expert, and the only expert we know is Cid Highwind. I still hate him, though."

"Maybe he's grown up a little since last time we saw him."

"Maybe, but maybe he's still the same guy who camped out in front of a theater for three weeks to get a ticket to the new Trek Wars movie."

"That reminds me. Did he ever get the Christmas present I sent him?"

"What was it?"
"A stick of deodorant."

"Judging by how he smelled last time I saw him, no."

"Maybe he's cleaned up a little."

"I don't know. I've got a bad feeling about this."

XXX

A grizzled old buccaneer of a man let Cloud and Yuffie into his house in Rocket Town, grinning like a fool and motioning for his girlfriend/maid to bring everyone some tea.

"How ya doin', you old pirate?" Cid Highwind attempted to hug Cloud. Cloud pulled away.

"He doesn't like you," Yuffie told Cid.

"Sorry," said Cid.

"I don't like you, either," said Yuffie.

"Look," said Cloud, "we want passage to Ceti Alpha Five, and you're the only one who can get us there."

"Why should I care?" Cid took a puff from his cigarette.

"For the sake of the Rebellion," said Yuffie.

"What Rebellion?"
"Against Shinra."

"Aren't they long gone?"

"It'll be like old times. You'll get to go into space, and I'll get my materia, and everyone will be happy. You'll be rewarded, of course."

"How much?"

"More reward than you can imagine."

"I don't know. I can imagine quite a lot." Cid turned up his eyes and tapped his foot.

"Help us, Cid Highwind," said Yuffie. "You're our only hope."

"Ten thousand, all in advance."

"Ten thousand?" Yuffie frowned. "We can almost buy our own ship for that!"

"But who's going to fly it, kid?"

"Point. Sounds fair to me."

"Okay, looks like you guys got yourselves a ship. Let me go find my hairy copilot, and we'll be on our way."

"Hairy copilot? You don't mean…"

Yuffie sneezed as an orangeish, reddish doglike creature eased into the room. "Red XIII? I knew it. I recognized his foul stench the minute I came indoors."

Red XIII growled unintelligibly.

"He recently had a bunch of dental work done," said Cid. "Ate too many Ruby Snacks, and now he can't say a word. Had to get all his teeth replaced."

"You mean he can't talk?" Yuffie's spirits rose.

XXX

"He's still a pain," said Yuffie to Cloud, after the two moved into a private room to discuss the deal. "Both of them are."

"We'll just have to deal with them," said Cloud. "We don't really have a choice if we want to get that ultimate materia."

"I guess not," said Yuffie. "Hey!"

Red XIII, who had apparently been eavesdropping, fell through the unlatched door. Yuffie scowled and kicked him.

"Would somebody please get this walking carpet out of our room?"

Red XIII growled a complaint and scurried away, his pride and the side of his face injured.

"Why don't we settle down and have a pleasant night, dear?" Cloud put his hands on Yuffie's shoulders and began to rub.

"It won't make our traveling companions any less annoying."

"No, but it might help us forget about them. Come on, I'll teach you a new card game."

"Okay," Yuffie sighed. "But this better be fun."

"Oh, it is," said Cloud as he fished through his suitcase for a deck of standard playing cards. "It's called 'Yo, Da Fours.'"

"Funny name."

"Barret made it up."

"Ah, I see."

"Anyway, we deal hands to each other, and then we try to get as many combinations of cards that add up to four as possible. Aces are one and eleven, and faces are all ten. Reds are negative, blacks are positive."

"How many cards to a hand?"

"Five, but then we can trade with the draw pile. We take turns trading with the pile or offering to trade with each other, and we draw up to five cards at the end of each turn."

"What then?"

"Then, we can use the fours we have to trade for points."

"Sounds cool. Whoever has the most points wins?"

"Yep. Here, I'll deal."

"Who goes first?"

"Ladies first."

"Okay, I'd like to trade this card in here."

"All right. That all?"

"Yep, I'm done."

"My turn. I'll offer you this card for anything negative."

"No deal."

"Okay, then I'll stand pat."

"My turn again?"
"No, you forgot the intermediate phase."

"Which is…?"

"Use the fours, Yuffie."

"Ah, I have a black seven and a red three, so I'll take a point for those. I also have two black twos."

"I happen to have a hand of two black fours, a red four, and a black eight, so we're tied. You think you can still win? Want to keep going?"

"I'll try."

"No, Yuffie. Do, or do not. There is no try."

"But you know how much I hate card games that don't involve me robbing people blind."

"That… is why you fail."

XXX

Cid Highwind stood at the head of the dining room table. In front of him lay six garment bags.

"These, crew, are our new uniforms. I had them pressed for the occasion, as I have not been in space for years now."

"I like it," said Yuffie, looking at the one with her name sewn into the breast pocket. "What is this, velour?"
"Indeed," said Cid. "You can tell a man by his devotion to velour. Isn't that right, Shera?"

"Yes, Cid," said Shera, sighing.

"That's Captain Cid, until this mission is over."

"Yes, Captain."

"Better. Now, crew, you'll notice if you look out the window that my starship, the U.S.S. Jazzercise, has around its hull an overly large, incredibly gaudy pink ribbon. Do you know what that pink ribbon stands for?"

"For excitement?" said Yuffie. "For discovery? For going boldly where no one has gone before?"

"No, Yuffie," said Cid, "it stands for breast cancer awareness. My mother passed away three years ago tomorrow, a victim of that horrible disease, and I want you all to be aware of it in case someday, somehow, you feel like donating a small amount of money to a charity. Until then, I will continue to hound you at every point until you feel guilty."

"Point taken, Captain," said Yuffie. But do you have to be so glib? There's edgy, and then there's way out of line.

"But enough serious talk. The pink ribbon also stands for the start of our journey. In particular, my cutting it with a pair of oversized novelty scissors represents the start of our voyage into the unknown wilderness of a planet that was settled only fifty years ago. Shera, my scissors."

Shera looked puzzled. "Your scissors, Captain?"

"You heard me, Lieutenant. My scissors."

"I don't have them, Captain."

"Am I hearing that you do not, in fact, have the scissors I told you to bring to this meeting?"

"Correct, Captain."

"That can mean only one thing: someone stole them! And that person is planning on using them to assassinate me. But our would-be assassin has forgotten one crucial piece of information: rock smashes scissors. But paper covers rock, and scissors cut paper. Shera, we have a conundrum. Search them for paper. And bring me a rock."

Shera sighed.

"Will my sword work just as well?" said Cloud.

"Actually, it would, but will Shera be able to lift it?"

"I can lift it easily," said Cloud. "And look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?"

"When it comes to things like upper body strength, then yes, judge you by your size I do."

"I'll cut the ribbon, then."

"The ribbon cutting process can only be accomplished by someone as alluringly seductive as a woman. Otherwise, there's no reason for me to stare during the ceremony."

"Yuffie can do it."

"Fine, fine. Yuffie can do it. But just this once."

"Yuffie, you up to it?"

"Sure thing, Cloud dear," said Yuffie, "but first I'd like some time alone in Captain Cid's room to look at his collections of past ribbon cutting ceremonies. I want to make sure I do it right."

"Sure thing, sweetheart," said Cid.

"And would you mind telling me where you keep your spare materia? I'd like to study that, too."

"In the top drawer of my desk, on the left."

"Thanks."

XXX

"All right, crew," said Captain Cid Highwind. "We have our ceremony out of the way, we have our uniforms on the table, and we have our launch in t-minus thirty minutes. Any questions?"

"Will this voyage be dangerous?" said Shera.

"You betcha, it will be dangerous," said Cid. "In fact, one or more of us may fail to come back alive. That's why I've gathered the best crew in the known galaxy to man the U.S.S. Jazzercize. Our team will consist of myself, Lieutenant Shera, copilot and first mate Red XIII, ex-SOLDIER Cloud Strife, tactical weapons and stealth expert Yuffie Kisaragi, and Ensign Ricky. Everyone, into your uniforms. Ricky, you get the red one."

"Ah, phooey," said Ricky. "I've got a bad feeling about this."

"Don't we all, Ensign?" said Captain Cid. "Don't we all?"

Ensign Ricky gazed at the floor. "I'd like to call my family before we go. I have a funny feeling like I'm not going to see them again."

"You can call them after the mission and tell them about the rewards of space travel, especially for-profit space travel."

"What good a reward if you're not around to spend it?"

"No worries, Ensign. Worries are for chumps. Now, everyone, to the ship!"

XXX

The U.S.S. Jazzercise zipped through the sky like a mosquito on speed. Stars became streaks of light as the ship sailed past, and actual streaks of light became really long streaks of light comically exaggerated by the Bernoulli effect. Asteroids because like bugs for the ship's windshield wipers to casually flip aside to the ditches at the sides of the hyperspace superhighway. Possibly. The U.S.S. Jazzercise ran on technology so top secret that only Shera knew whether or not it was traveling at excessive warp speeds or taking shortcuts through hyperspace. Maybe both. Maybe it moved from one corner of the universe to the other using an Infinite Improbability Drive. Maybe it used the power of the numbers on restaurant bills. Maybe it was powered by a really, really big rubber band.

It hugged corners at 55. 55 times the speed of light, that is. It did loops. It did corkscrews. The U.S.S. Jazzercise was to space travel what the tea cups were to Disneyland. Fortunately for Yuffie, in space, no one can hear your motion sickness.

However it did its moving, the ship got to Ceti Alpha Five in time to be met by a small armada of hostile warships.

"Main screen turn on!" shouted Cid to his crew. "Someone set up us the bomb!"

"Ha ha ha," came a voice from the ship's radio. "All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time."

"What did he just say?" said Yuffie.

"I – I don't know," said Cid. "It sounded vaguely threatening and ominous, but also comical. It's almost as if something was lost in translation."

"Let's just blow them up," said Yuffie. She pressed a big red button on the weapon control panel. The beams that shot out of the ship's guns were not quite pure destruction. They were more like 95 destruction, 2.5 devastation, and 2.5 cheesy special effect glittering, but they were a lot cheaper than pure destruction rays, and they were nearly as effective. In this case, they did their job adequately, vaporizing three of the hostile vessels. "Boring conversation anyway," Yuffie commented.

"Don't get cocky," said Captain Cid. "There are still two of them left."

"Roger, captain," said Yuffie.

"Don't call me Roger."

"Captain Cid!" said Shera. "We've been hit! Shields are down to 99.95!"

"Don't panic, Lieutenant. We've been hit worse than that before, and we'll be hit worse than that again. In fact, if my senses are not lying to me, we can expect to be hit much harder as soon as those torpedoes impact our hull."

"Incoming torpedoes, Captain!" Ricky looked frantic.

"Yes, Ensign, I just said that."

The impact caused the bridge to rumble like the apartment directly below Louis Anderson's aerobics lessons. Red XIII began to howl.

"Red," shouted Captain Cid, "damage report!"

Red XIII growled.

"Someone who can talk, damage report!"

Shera piped up, "Two engines are functioning at half capacity, and our reactor core is heating up. We have to finish this fight quickly."

"Lieutenant, did you install any gimmicky and amazingly powerful weaponry before we left, in case we ran into something like these aliens who might attack us for no apparent reason?"

"We still have the Death Sun Ray. That might work."

"It might. It just might."

"Captain, for crying out loud, fire!"

"Yuffie, that's your job. Fire!"

"Yes, Captain," said Yuffie. A few seconds later, a burst of electric death bore down upon the pathetic defenses of the enemy fleet. It struck the lead ship and caused it to explode more or less like a supernova, only without the annoying collapsing into a black hole afterwards. The debris from the explosion hit the tailing enemy vessel and punctured its hull.

"Gee," said Yuffie, "what were the chances that I could see so many space explosions on television without flak from those explosions causing any damage to anything even once?"

"Just one more reason why Trek Wars is stupid," said Cloud. "You know in the third movie, when they blow up that space station the size of a small moon directly over that forest? Man, if that had really happened, everything down on the surface would have been dead meat. Good riddance to the stupid teddy bears, though."

"Hey, I liked the teddy bears."

"It was supposed to be a serious movie, though. Of all the ways for the most powerful empire in the history of the galaxy to fall, it had to be crushed by the frenzy of a bunch of ill-tempered teddy bears. How stupid! Even The Crying Game had an ending less lame than that."

"I don't remember how that one ended, actually."

"Really? The chick turned out to be a guy."

"Really? I would think I would have remembered that."

"Yep. And Soylent Green is people."

"Eww. I remember hearing about that. Second grossest movie moment ever."

"What was the grossest?"

"The second Trek Wars movie. Remember that scene where the hero and the princess kissed, and later it turned out they were brother and sister?"

"That was pretty gross, I guess. You know, with all the changes the series creator made when he did all those versions of the films, you'd think he would have edited that bit out."

"Hello?" Cid looked annoyed. "Will Ebert and Roper please remember we're fighting a battle here?"

"All right already," said Yuffie. "Geez. It's like there's no one else around here who can press the big red button. Okay, here I am, demonstrating my valuable and irreplaceable skills. Only I, the great ninja Yuffie, could possibly have the intestinal fortitude to…"

"Push the button!" Cid dug in his pocket for a cigarette.

"Quick!" screamed Ensign Ricky. "Somebody has to stop the nuclear wessels!"

"I didn't know Ricky was a Russian name," said Yuffie.

XXX

"Crew," said Captain Cid, "we are marooned on a hostile planet. Only our wits, our ingenuity, and our megatasers stand between us and certain death. That said, who wants to go hunting with me?"

"Hunting?" Shera frowned. "We have enough food on the ship to last for months, and we're not even marooned. We made a safe landing."

"Lieutenant Shera, you're messing up my rhythm. Please."

"Yes, Captain."

"Now, as I was saying, we need to form a hunting party. This planet is infested with the most foul of the most foul creatures ever to roam the universe. Is any of you familiar with what I am saying?"

"I'd understand if you would stop trying to talk like William Shatner," said Yuffie.

"I'll explain it to you, then," said Cid. "Long ago, I, Captain Cid Highwind, led a Shinra task forced assigned to stopping some of the worst space criminals ever to roam the galaxy. Who are those criminals, you ask? Conmen. Conmen of every shape, size, age, and religion, and from all three genders. And after years of dedicated hunting, I believe we got them all. If ever there were a con, you can bet I marooned him here on Ceti Alpha Five."

"So we have to watch our wallets?" said Yuffie.

"Correct. Your wallets, your jewelry, your 401k plans, and your being able to say you've never possessed a fake real estate license are all in danger every moment we stand upon this evil and forgotten soil."

"What if I want to rob them first?"

"Well, then that would be okay. Just be careful."

"Can do, Captain."

"But before we start anything, I think we should mosey over to the casino on top of that hill over there. Maybe someone there can point us in the direction of, uh, Cloud, what was it we came here for again?"

"Outerspacium, the rarest element in the known universe."

"Thank you, Cloud. Outerspacium. Most casino owners use it for toilet paper, but we need some for whatever purpose Cloud had in mind when he hired me for this voyage. Let's move out, crew!"

XXX

Fifteen minutes later, at what at first looked like a reputable blackjack table, Cid Highwind threw up his hands in defeat.

"Coooooooooooooonned! Cooooooooooooonned!"

The dealer snickered. "Youse shouda thought about that before youse played blackjack at a table run by Jimmy da Snake. Now scram, loser."

XXX

"Crew," said Cid, "we've had some setbacks. We've suffered some losses. But we will not let that phase us. In our quest for the outerspacium, we will never give up! Never surrender! Never let a cloudy day get us down. We must look death squarely in the eye and then poke him, with our index and middle fingers, to make him blink. We must be ever vigilant. Danger haunts us yet, but we… shall… prevail!"

"Shut up, Captain," said a voice from Cloud and Yuffie's tent. "We're trying to get some sleep here. What time is it, anyway?"

"It's, uh, 0300 hours."

"Go to sleep!"

XXX

"I can talk again!" said Red XIII at breakfast the next morning.

"Those," said Yuffie, "are the four words I feared most on this trip. Urk."

"Captain Cid," said Red XIII, ignoring Yuffie, "it is logical that you must spend this day hunting down the outerspacium. We should move out immediately after breakfast."

"Hmm," said Cid. "You may be onto something. We'll begin our hunt to the south, in what the locals tell me is called the Village of the Sirens. The scantily-clad, female sirens, that is."

"Just what are you hunting for, anyway?" said Yuffie.

"Outerspacium, of course," said Cid. "What else is there to hunt?"

"Why start the hunt in a village populated by nearly naked women named after mythological characters who tried to seduce sailors?"
"I, uh, heard there was a Starbucks there, and I really need my morning cup of joe to get going."

"There should be one in Materia Town, to the north."

"I'm sure there is, Yuffie, but we're going south. After all, isn't that what man has dreamed of ever since he first looked up at the stars? To make it with a hot alien babe?"

"Your lack of ethics disturbs me, Captain," said Yuffie. "I'm going to go rob Materia Town."

To Be Continued