Author: A/S
Plot: Very much a PWP situation, the plot is founded solely on things that creep up as I go along. Fear it as you embrace it.
Style: Mugged from several caravanserai of fiction writers on their way to the bazaar, the style enters territories of right and wrong. All intentionally. Baroque language has been gradually weaned from the prose, but if any crops up…it's just proof that I still miss it.
Disclaimer: If I were a rich man
Just like Hironobu Sakaguchi was
Say I'd own every fictive woman and man
From RPG's made by Square, Japan!
But since I am a maiden
And one of particularly extreme penury
I don't own a single one of them
And to that I say, Goddamn!
P.S. on the Disclaimer: Loreena McKennitt owns the song that soothes the savvy lycanthrope.
Author's Note: Feel free to comment on this. On the other hand, please don't leave those one-word regards that suspend belief. You know the kind. The ones that are basically 'this gud cripes 2 lung 2 reed bcuz'. This story might be the base, degenerate, and mostly unworthy excess that brings druthers to all that read, but damn it, not to nitpick, but it would be nice if it also conjured some good constructive criticism. Does the first sentence work for you? What errors are most glaring, etc.?
Hell, tell me that I ought to have one of them can-canning on a pogo stick. Reality's about to bend next chapter, anyway.
Rating: Since parts somewhere off in the distance have been drawn up to include a Satanist, nun-corruption and a commune of earthy folk, 'Weapon of Choice' and three adult men break dancing, some havoc at a convention center and Red swathed in paper towels, it would be safe to stick with my recurrent rating of R.
Final Parody
One Chapter to Fool Them All
One Chapter to Find Them
One Chapter to Bring Them All
And In Sheer Duress, Bind Them
An ordinary day was not once what it was in the heyday of the now post-pretopsian civilization that dawned after civilization after civilization was endlessly plunged into sickness—then extinction. Perhaps this was because the dominant species, yet again, was succumbing to the pratfall of every dominant species on the planet. Maybe it was because, in these twilight years of post-modern dystopia, there were no adversaries quite as horrendously remembered as the warrior whose name derived from the heavens above. He had been sliced and diced into oblivion at least twice by now.
His name was/had been Sephiroth. Paradoxically religious—or, as some on other worlds might have hinted, absolutely religious—on the premise that he was fulfilling a prophecy unspoken in the souls of men, but in harmony with the cosmos nevertheless.
A word on prophecies. On some worlds, they produce warriors, armies, fears of Armageddon, and cult movies that are watched with about as much intensity and incentive as a train wreck. On other worlds, they produce warriors, armies, fears of Armageddon, and men who look suspiciously angelic and are as ageless as some actors associated with such cult movies.
Vincent Valentine, his name a disturbing culmination of strength, weakness, sainthood and sex appeal, though he hardly knew it, sat with an old ally on a hill overlooking a gormengheist of a ghost town complete with its very own patch of pumpkins, suspiciously decayed into Celtic representations of spirits long passed.
Every so often, one of them would erupt in light; then fizzle away, possibly into the atmosphere, possibly into the river of souls that repopulated the world after such disasters as had befallen the current people and their precedents. This would not have explained the fact that a badly wired portable CD player, fashioned from such a device intended for a car, sat lazily between Mr. Valentine and his associate, playing something that was lofty and haunting at once, as Athena was quick-footed and anxious, full of kindness and anxious, or what have you.
I can see the lights in the distance
Drowning in the dark of the night…
A minute or so later…
…echoes of darkness...
Vincent leaned a leather-clad finger on the off button, silencing the compact disk. Something in his expression, subtle as it was, had troubled his slight, dark haired ally.
"Wistful thinking?" Cait Sith, a small coroneted cat in a cape that might be viewed as a magician's or a mighty superhero's from the eyes of a child, wondered if this was to be verified, even as he spoke with a crescent of a smile.
"Yes. This woman has a careening, alternately lilting voice and a burning brand of hair…I ponder her whereabouts, actually, or where such women as this might reside…which consequently leads my mind to wander into corners where…"
"I get the point." Cait cut in, understanding enough of what had been said to know in his circuitry he didn't want to hear the rest. An animatronic with an advanced sense of reasoning, this virtue had served him well throughout his peradventure through the maimed roadways and inverse dementia that was the underworld of a major city, a peradventure which, because it couldn't be helped, and because he needed someone with a sharp eye, mostly involved Vincent. There had been times, but they were mostly repressed, he remembered anew, and with great applaud for his ability to forget…
Even now he remembered, and this made him moan and clutch at his head, cursing his memory banks.
"Are you not well, Cait Sith?" Vincent, ever so graciously, had begun to poke the poor being in the head with what may as well have been a sharpened metal bicycle wheel spoke. It served Vincent as a midway functional digit on his prosthetic arm, and it served Cait more or less as a kebob stick, piercing the fillet of meat that was his head. Realizing his error, Vincent impassively retracted his arm; and Cait along with it.
"Cripes! This is absolutely the last straw, do you hear me?" The cat exploded, scrabbling at the ground with his cartoon-ish gloved hands. Then he went berserk, hissing and weeping to get loose, as Vincent grappled his forehead with his better hand and pushed. On the third attempt, he contorted his leg onto Cait, pressing down with all his force to remove the innocent robot. Underneath of the boot, Cait shouted profanities and half-screeched, half-groaned with anguish.
Finally, Vincent came to his usual conclusion in sticky situations. Cait could only detect the gun click with his sensors, and wondered if he really thought…
"You can't sense pain. Am I right?"
Oh God…
"Perfectly well thank you!" Cait screamed from the base of Vincent's left shoulder, his narrow eyes locked on Vincent's metallic arm and trying to deduce exactly how much circuitry he'd have to gnaw through in order to get loose. Following that, there was immense displeasure on Vincent's part, which might involve getting shot anyway, and the strange new piece of headgear he would have acquired.
"Can't we try jojoba oil first? Or butter?" He pleaded, his tail curling under his belly for protection. Cait's eyes would have swayed the iciest of hearts; they were designed for that very purpose. Vincent hesitated, which turned out to be a hesitation ample enough for a four foot boomerang to rise up from the valley and cleave them in two.
"Boooooo-yah! Score!" It is not true, that some people speak in unlimited exclamation points. That is a misrepresentation on the parts of those who don't know when to stop punching the keys or cramping their fingers when writing something that looks like an inverted ice cream cone, a bat and ball, a ball and chain. Normally, a person will use one or two, possibly even five exclamation points to articulate his or her glee.
Only one person could dare to speak in a fashion that implied this many exclamation points. It was female, existed solely on The Planet Whose Name Does Not Warrant Mention, often abbreviated to The Planet, had only recently attained an age that would be considered legal for voting and tobacco consumption in another place and time, had a long, proud genetic background that involved sneaking around and murdering people, and a history of anorexia.
"Ah! Thank God! Yuffie!" Only in extreme cases such as this might one utter something grateful regarding the poor miscreant ninja. Cait was in such an extreme case, plastered at the edge of her tennis shoe, kissing it with a pilgrim's zeal. Diminutive, stringy, pale—all were adjectives that appropriately described Yuffie.
With a certain piquant dislike arrived at from consistent hecklings, thwarts, foils, and bluffs that emanated from the mind of Yuffie like the reek of offal from a sewer vent, Vincent crossed his arms and turned his back, sighing haughtily and fussing over his cybernetic hand, which was not only down one finger, but dented, and ever so slightly befouled by the claws of a chocobo accidentally caught in the crossfire when Yuffie hurled her great weapon.
The said creature was wobbling to and fro, neck bobbing like a pogo stick and making small mumblings to the effect of 'waark' to itself in a succession that was almost like a cadence. Yuffie, pleased with the attention that was slathered on her by the indebted Cait, stood beaming for a while, the icy mountain winds ruffling her feathery fringe of brown-black hair.
"Ooh yeah! I'm cool!" She jerked a hand down at a force that could have broken her pelvis, had her elbow not collided with a bare part of Cait's skull. The little robot flattened against the ground with a mewl of self-pity and Yuffie, absorbed in her fine work, continued to pose, building up her ecstasy for a shout that would have leveled the gormengheist architecture, had Vincent not interceded.
"Yes. I should think we've had…enough of that skin-shearing tympanum-shattering racket…that you call modulated speech." Impulsively, Yuffie waved her shuriken and with astounding accuracy laid Vincent flat.
"Booyah! So owned!" Her little hips wiggled and writhed out a victory dance with shuriken accompaniment, and she hopped up and down with the kind of schoolchild pride that makes teachers hypertensive.
From his vantage point, (and he had to at least admit that it was a vantage point worth the concussion it brought) Vincent watched her in apparent calm.
"Your over the top pronunciations of victory can only be construed to mean…that you're an addle-minded girl-child with no more capacity for attentive reasoning than our recently departed Cetra colleague."
"So true! Erm…What!" Two steel points landed meaningfully on Vincent's chest, which was swathed in fascinatingly dour black material and currently unenclosed in its usual impenetrable shield of red wool cape. Her eyebrow quirked. He breathed visibly; a change from his nominal state of either non-breathing or concealed breathing. She now knew that his lungs were indeed locatable underneath his cloak. Panic and mendacity deluged his cinnabar eyes.
"Would you two knock the rough stuff off? Yuffie—you're never going to kill him. Vincent—she's never going to understand you above a fifth-grade level." Cait waited a moment, then closed his eyes and ducked, scramming down the hill into the abandoned township between the mountain peaks.
"Gawd! The both of you make me sick! Get back here, you mangy son of a computer chip!" As Yuffie swiped and swished and Cait dropped and dove, heading steadily down the mountain pass and toward the rickety bridge that comprised the only dreadful marker that this place might be otherworldly before it was too late to step back, Vincent picked up the makeshift CD player and did his best to steady it in a crack between his holster and his weapon of choice; a stainless steel handgun, diesel black, ornate, and very nearly the same size and weight of an anti-tank weapon. How he carried it was his business, and so he leaned heavily to the right as he trod the permafrost and icy soil plunging into the vacant town.
Actually, it wasn't so vacant. Revolutionaries unable to release their once glorious past were milling around, hung up on a recent conundrum. On the third house, to the right after crossing the mist-cloaked bridge, a middle-aged man in pilot goggles stood in the upper story window and scrubbed it free of accumulated grime with the help of a seawater blue solvent. A house to the right of him filled the cobblestone square with piano music, a somber chamber piece dedicated likely to lost youth and romance, or to some other pain the heart might feel. At the edge of a fountain, a very tall, robust man, wearing a parka perhaps a size too slim, stood beside a tiny girl, her lips pursed in amazement at a rabbit prancing unassumingly around the chilly, empty basin of marble.
Curled beside the gate, where a sentinel might have been in days passed, was a shaggy, burly, heavily muscled great cat, his claws trim, feathers dancing on his auburn mane and braids trailing into his crimson fur. An eye was permanently closed, scarred over to the very edge of his lip, an injury that was almost the shape of a comet's tail. His good eye, the fine honey-gold of amber, sought them intelligently, and he rose to his paws with a lazy agility.
"You might have to work on a lower profile, Yuffie. Even when you're ten miles downwind of me, I can still hear you." Cait Sith fell from Yuffie's clutches at the same speed as her mouth flopped from a gritting of large, squarish pearly teeth to the vacant darkness of open-mouthed appall.
"Yeah? Well, when I'm ten miles downwind of you, I can still smell you!" Under the cover of distraction, Cait crawled weakly toward the approaching Vincent, who in his opinion seemed to be taking his damn sweet time.
"Touche, touché, my dear." The fire hydrant red lion abetted mildly, flicking his flagrant tail. "But my odor is, for my species and gender, perfectly normal, whereas your pitch and volume…"
I can see the lights in the distance… Everyone turned toward the origins of the sound tensely. Secretly, the lion was delighted. Yuffie had the short-term memory of a gnat.
"Yikes." Squeaked Cait, falling out of Vincent's holster, his misty gray tail curling around an orifice he didn't have. "Sorry about that." Vincent had turned his strange eyes to his contraption, his face rapidly assuming a similar hue.
"Oh, it's no biggie!" Yuffie hollered, flailing a skinny gloved hand that ludicrously supported the weight of the olive-toned leather it sported. Her impish face distorted by a maleficent grin, she took a giant leap toward the tall reedy flank of the jasper-eyed waif. "Vinny enjoys hearing that lady's voice! Don'tcha!" The CD player clattered on the ground before pulsing like a puddle of water and fizzling out in red, much as the pumpkins had.
"No." He responded, his eyes, behind their screen of blackish, nightmarishly fecund hair and an excessively long leather headband that managed to keep some of his personal legions of hell in order, agog in earth-shattering shock.
"Oh, come on! Fess up!" Yuffie urged, applying an open-handed chop to his side in comradely affection. It failed to elicit; Vincent's head lowered, wreathing the bleached bone pale of his face.
"Aw, is big bad die-hard Goth Vinnie too afraid to admit he has feelings?" Abruptly, to her sudden shriek-inducing dismay, his eyes came in view, surging through the mass of overgrown hair. They were not the friendliest of eyes; hardened into his skull by tenacity and experience, wrought in their color by a shallowly described past that did neither their color nor their intensity justice.
"It's happened again." He reported quietly, his voice directed to the ruby red lion, who was sitting on his hindquarters with a studied look about him.
"Leakage?" The guardian inquired, batting his tail once more. Small embers, barely twinkles in the dimming light; kindled against tiny shreds of wood and brightened almost jubilantly along the entrance.
"What is it this time?" Wondered the creature, his good eye skimming the environs with a fierceness that in lesser creatures might be considered paranoia.
"A word." Replied Vincent. "'Goth'."
"Interesting. Do you think it has any relation whatsoever to activating that…CD, you had there?" Peering around nervously, the creature relaxed when he realized that the drop from Vincent's belt seemed to have vanquished it.
"The so-called CD Player did not seem to have any effect on when and where the inter-dimensional diffusion occurs." Vincent stated. His voice thickened around the edges a shade, or so the creature felt, sulkily.
"Yet it's from their world." He reminded him; his feathers twitched out of place as a northward mountain wind danced a faerie antic around his mane.
"Who and what they are still has to be…determined." Vincent riposted, with sulkiness so oblique it was definite.
"Cut out the creepy dialogue Jack Skellington!" Yuffie snarled, at her wit's end. She had not been paying attention, preferring to tickle Cait, and when she had, the incompleteness of what was being said had gone over her head. The others now turned toward her curiously, a double-teaming, three-eyed effort. Happily whirring, for he could not actually purr, as he didn't have a windpipe, Cait was spread out beside where she knelt, kneading the air with his gloved hands and squinting in semi-conscious contentment, like a stoner.
"I'll add it to the Database of Undefined Terms Filtering in from the Other Reality." The guardian said eventually, grinning glinting, inches-long canines as he caught Yuffie's expression.
"Not a finessed kind of name, is it?"
"It beats lacking anything with which to denote the extraordinary transverse data we seem to be incorporating into our dimension." He continued, in the absence of speech, the way that anyone with an agenda will. "Unfortunately for us, it's sticking like dust to a quilt instead of amalgamating itself with what's currently there."
"I'm curious, Nanaki." Vincent broke in, addressing the guardian with polite regard that insinuated approaching snark.
"What about?" Nanaki wondered, cheerily innocent. For his ragged looks, the creature was an adolescent—the patchiness of his mane a result of it having yet to fully grow in.
"Why is it that this information affects Yuffie and Cloud the most?" As he said this, gesturing toward Yuffie with an expansive motion of his arm, the ninja was busily humming to herself with her eyes closed, generously applying polish to the shuriken with a scrap of terrycloth.
"Need I actually answer that?" Nanaki wondered painfully, his good eye open in disbelief.
"Well, if it isn't a burden, this cat here'd like to know what's being answered." Cait yawned, his body unwrapping itself from its state of euphoria.
"I'll have to talk low. Into your ear." Nanaki whispered out of the corner of his mouth, darting Yuffie a look. His eye carefully skimmed everything but Vincent before falling directly upon…
"No." Vincent deadpanned.
"Atone for your sins, buddy-boy." Nanaki hissed, flicking his tail in agitation.
"No."
"It would be very kind and humane of you to just…" Nanaki threw in a small gesture with his shoulder, looking pleadingly into where he thought he might locate Vincent's eyes.
"No."
"Would you just fuck off then, so that Yuffie will regardless follow and importune you?"
"Hah—So be it." Vincent began walking into the village; then he turned; his body a line of melodrama. He stood for a moment, glaring them down possibly. It was not easily detectable, in light of his bangs. Testily, he threw his palm up.
"Tifa is up the path. I shall simply see to it that she inherits my trouble." And with that, he skulked off, his cloak disentangling from the jarringly thin figure underneath and blowing harum-scarum on the wind.
"Uh?" Choked Yuffie, her eyes opening in hurt, her limbs suddenly moving under the thrall of a force better known as cosmic teenage crushing. Her acceleration was commendable; she was already running before she even started heading in his direction. "Hey Vinnie! Wait!"
"Humans." Sniggered Cait. "They ain't got a clue."
"That is for certain." Agreed Nanaki, his eyes a well of fondness for the retreating figures. Cait wasn't entirely sure why.
"Who's going to crack this week, do you think?"
"I'm betting everything on Vincent."
"Why him?"
"Because, in Cid's parlance, which is appropriate; Cid has his shit together. Tifa has a sense of humor. Cloud and Yuffie are idiots. Barret and Marlene have the balance that family can bring."
"Well, I'm betting on Cloud again. The man can never have too many nervous breakdowns, and besides—there's a hunch. Which one do you think will go and likely dote over the mental patient/possibly boff him?"
"In extremis, Barret."
"Ah."
"In all likelihood, Aeris."
"Oh?"
"Well, they could always…"
"No, they couldn't."
"Well, I'm just saying…"
"No."
"Merely postulating that…"
"No, they couldn't."
"Well, that's jack shit."
"Another one."
"Oh deary me. Really?"
"Yes. That makes eleven hundred in just the past four days."
"Bloody hell." Cait seethed.
"Agreed. But, what can be done? We might as well perforce back to the gloomy manse and enter it in the database." There would be little perforce-ing done on their clocks, for something obstructed their path, with a sudden, smoke-punctuated gloomy tenacity that forced them both to reconsider it. It bore a large cloak and hood, black in color and sweeping past its feet. In its hand, it grasped a long, wooden staff, much knotted at the end.
Upon its head sat some awful kind of helmet. With Ram's horns on.
"Who the bloody heck are you?" Red wondered, neck bristling. The being goggled at him, sticking its head out and moving with the kind of dizzying wobbling that makes heads explode.
A long beard dangled from what could best be called a chin.
"I could just be a figment o' your imagination. Or, I could be…an all powerful wizard!" He paused for dramatic effect. After the initial shock of his words wore off; Cait and Red found themselves very much at ease. Even sarcastic.
"That's nice. Are you the friendly kind or a canon sorcerer?" As if to answer this query, the heavily garbed man in the ram's horns waved his hand in a fashion that cartoon mice are wont to do when summoning a sea. A stone's throw from Cait's head, a fire erupted. The little cat yelped and feverishly patted his cape, darting looks at the static frame.
"Sheesh! It's like being with Red in the parlor room all over again!"
"Watch it." The wizard smirked, and fondled his gorse beard. It didn't stop there.
He gestured right. A few bricks dislodged from the bridge as a fire raged through the rotting planks.
He gestured left. Glass tinkled from a window, shattering outward as a vase within exploded under unimaginable heat.
He gestured up, and a silk kitten, suspended strangely in the air, suddenly burst into the worst fire imaginable. Ectoplasm created its own event horizon as it imploded; a plutonium green disk scattering rapidly overhead.
Red immediately pawed at his nose. You never could be too careful, when it came to specks of ectoplasm. Having a knack for recognizing tropes, however, he decided it was best to continue speaking with the madman.
"Uh…I'd ask what all the special effects amount to or why you have to keep immolating things randomly, but perhaps that will all be cleared when you tell us your name and back story." He mimicked as best as he could a helpful human smile, to which the wizard leered back at him idiotically. Something about the flat black eyes, to, reminded one of a ram. This was a creature designed for butting into things, not cogitation.
"My name?"
"Quite simply, your name. Yes." The sentinel fought back the urge to gulp. For a while, the sorcerer chewed this tin can.
"It's Tim." Robotic and organic alike, their mouths hung open.
"Tim?"
His hand flashed right.
His hand flashed left.
His hand flew up, and singed nothing. Red half expected goose feathers to float gently down from a flame lit sky, or a random burning tire. Alas, nothing.
The hand gestured toward them. The felines froze.
"Okay, okay! Tim. Gotcha."
"What are ye seekin'?" Tim asked from behind clenched teeth. His fingers wavered. Cait Sith's tail wound tight around his leathern boot.
"Uh…right now perhaps just a bowl of milk and several throws over my head, thank you very much."
"Y-yes." Red stammered, feathers shaking wildly as his head hammered the air in agreement. "We'd prefer not to seek just yet whatever you're seeking."
Tim's hand went up. To their cringing relief, it clenched into a fist.
"Buggerall! You're no fun lads! I know the place where a dreaded beast lies and here you stand, like two pussies!"
"Maybe that's…because…we are…pussies." Cait plied, unspeakable dread in his voice. Tim blinked, seemingly speechless.
"What Cait said." Red added shyly, trying desperately to squirm behind Cait, who was attempting, in the process, to fit in the space between Red's underbelly and the ground.
Eventually, Tim threw his hand up in the air, as if it couldn't be helped.
"Augh! With a names like 'Kate' and 'Red', 'tis no small wonder! Away with ye! Bunch o' pussies…"
The conversation that followed their sudden and implausible rejection went something like this:
"He's anomalous, right?" Cait, gnawing nervously on the end of his tail. He thanked a self-imagined deity that Reeve hadn't tried to give him characteristics of a true incarnation, i.e., saliva. Still, all of this heroism was wearing him down.
"Definitely a new end of the diffusing spectrum." Nanaki shuddered and tried to reflect on his acquired files, the tumulus of them that sat, unread, on Cloud's desk. For what was hardly the first time, he felt underappreciated. It was no easy trick, scrabbling together a dossier on a keyboard, especially when you don't have something as obvious as say, thumbs.
"Was he…part goat?" The upright robot cat squeaked. Red flicked his tail glumly, pondering whether the unfortunate demise of Cloud would be considered manslaughter or man-eating.
"I don't know," he carped, his hackles raised and teeth glimmering, "But, if we come upon a troll, we'll be sure to ask."
It thundered past them. As it so happens, it was a party of nine frenzied looking men of variable height. All were carrying shields or implements of some kind. At least three of them were quite small.
"Run! They've got a cave troll! Ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!" One paused just long enough to pant in their faces and ran away as fast as he could.
Nanaki and the puppet watched them flee in idle horror.
"Gee, um…Red?"
"Yes?"
"How did Tim know your name? It was never said."
"I expect it was a plot point that'll either backfill itself later on or remain unexplained." Red sighed, dropping into the dirt.
"Oh." There was a long, dawdling pause. Where Red's supine body fell, his tail worked up a brushfire.
"Y'know…Red?"
"Yes?"
"I kinda…sort of hope it remains unexplained." Red rolled over, extinguishing the flames.
"Me too."