Gaspar walked for a long time. When they'd been cast down to the basement, he'd been expecting a small facility of a couple of dozen difficult monsters. Once you got beyond the support pillars, at the fringe, it turned out to a fair sized town, inexplicably hidden in the basement of the Shinra building, and apparently without any way to keep them in check. The town wasn't in good shape, true, with evidence of fairly heavy fighting between the inhabitants and whatever in house garrison was stationed here. The town was in ruins, but he could see that this place had space for thousands. It seemed to be an old town that Shinra had somehow papered over and repopulated. Somehow.
The inhabitants were visible here and there, but no one challenged him for some hours, until he started thinking about settling in somewhere for the 'night'. There was no wind or rain down here to worry about, but he felt it would still be a good idea to find somewhere slightly less out in the open to sleep. Eventually, he found a likely looking shopfront off the main transport routes, that seemed reasonably defensible and wasn't completely ruined.
He was, of course, met at the gate by a gun. Or five, as members of different crews popped up from behind cover, including one in a tower by the gate. Several independent angles, this crew knew their trade.
He was addressed by the one standing directly in front of him, at five feet or less. She didn't mince words. "Move on."
"Well," Gaspar said, shaking his head, "That's not very nice."
"This is not a debate. Leave."
"You know I could kill you all and take this place, yeah?"
Very slight nod. "But you'd get hurt, and wouldn't hold on to it for long."
He considered this. The five obviously knew their way around a gun, and with enhancements, and the fields of fire they had on him currently, he might not be able to fend off them all. A wound, in a place like this, wasn't to be brushed off easily.
"Well argued." He backed away, the guns tracking him until out of sight. That could have gone better. But he'd find somewhere, even if it wasn't ideal. This town couldn't be so huge that-
Another soldier stepped out in front of him on the road. This one was in bulky armour, and was carrying a sword even a SOLDIER would call needlessly oversized. He stopped just out of arms reach, sword ready.
"Em… hello?"
"Your materia. Give them to me."
Gaspar took a step back. "Who are you, exactly? Like, is this just a shakedown, or do you have some authority to take them from me?"
"Immaterial. Hand them over, or I will kill you and take them. All you need to know."
"Quite the deal," Gaspar said, looking them over once more. They were moving lightly for someone in such heavy gear. Making it a chase might work, but he couldn't count on it. He popped the materia out of the slots and handed them over. The heavy armoured soldier started in surprise, but took them. "Good. You've learned your place. It will make things easier on you." He started to turn away.
"Yes," said Gaspar, and ran the soldier through the heart. He'd never have got through armour that thick without total surprise. The heavy armoured soldier fell, and Gaspar retrieved his materia and kept walking. If he hadn't been shot immediately afterward, he would have considered it a successful negotiation.
He hit the ground hard, and rolled in behind the hulk of the fallen soldier. He'd taken the shot straight through the shoulder and out his back, and had instantly lost the use of one of his arms. As the fallen soldier began to dissolve –Mako imbued, then-, Gaspar rolled to into the shadow of a building with one wall still standing, enough to give some shelter. A targeted shot from someone that knew enough about enhancements not to go for the head or heart.
Heavy footfalls sounded, and Gaspar looked up to see another armoured soldier-not so heavy as the first, she still had human proportions, but there was some kind of insignia of rank and what appeared to be some kind of armoured skirt.
Gaspar rolled upright and fought, but she was almost as fast, and a punch in the shoulder and a few brutal kicks brought him down beyond the point of getting up.
Few people could handle a SOLDIER so easily, even wounded.
"You killed my brother!" the Deepground officer said, continuing to kick him on the ground. Ribs cracked, and one stamp broke two fingers on his right hand. A boot came down on one materia he'd dropped, crushing his Bolt to powder. The Sleep materia fell under his body, fortunately, out of sight. He managed to backheel it into a corner as she pulled him up by the hair.
He raised his head. "You…shouldn't… have sent him… alone…" This earned him more broken bones, and he elected to remain silent thereafter. Eventually, he lapsed into blissful unconsciousness, waking up to even more pain as he was being not particularly gently dragged off by the feet.
He came to at the gunpoint of the DG soldier he had tried to turn out of her house earlier.
"You can take a beating", she said, by way of introduction. "Might be useful."
"Yep," Gaspar croaked, "We're… kind of …famous for it."
She tilted her head. "So I see. Anyway, here's the deal. You just killed the brother of our local district commander, and she's dumped you on me to take care of until you're in a state to work off the debt for her. So we don't kill you, you don't kill us when you recover, maybe we can work together after that. In the meantime, you have a sheltered place to sleep."
"How can… you trust me… once I'm better?"
"I can't, but you gain nothing by killing us." She paused. "And no one survives down here alone."
"…Deal."Gaspar said eventually, fighting the green creeping in from the edges of his vision. She hadn't dropped the gun, but things were looking up. He searched for the Sleep materia and failed to find it.
"What's… your… name?"
"Doesn't really matter, but since you ask, I used to be called Delphine."
"…Delphine… pretty name."
"And yours?"
"Gas… Gaspar. Nice to… meet…"
He couldn't stay awake much longer, but noted with satisfaction that she had sheathed the gun. Well, he'd had worse starts to relationships.
000000
The six of them huddled in their broken shopfront for the next few days, as the battles began once more, as the new interlopers were taught their place. His injuries gave him time to learn about where he was, and what he would have to deal with going forward.
And this place –Deepground, as it was apparently if uncreatively called– was quite the volatile place, by all accounts. Delphine updated him on the details very quietly over the crackling gunfire.
This specific crew of DG soldiers worked at the Sanitation plant, which meant that his Mako enhanced supersenses had to work through the smell for hours. The upside was that this was even worse for the Tsviets, and so someone named Rosso was unlikely to randomly turn up and kill them all. She would be in the thick of the fighting, and so they were presently relatively safe here. 'Relatively' because in Deepground, no one was ever truly safe.
Shinra culture was of course notoriously cut-throat, and people in Shinra HQ could and did disappear if they were unwary, but it still had never been quite this literal. Organised into four sections, this bizarre town was the result of a presumably decades old kidnapping campaign, in which the victims were subjected to Mako enhancements without the usual rigorous vetting involved in SOLDIER. Absent this vetting, there was no particular protection from side effects, resulting in large numbers of recruits losing their minds or becoming dependent on Mako, among all the many other things that could go wrong when Mako was applied to biological materials without due care.
When he asked why this had been done, Delphine could only shrug, having given up searching for answers long ago. Survival was the only concern people could afford down here. Unlike many, she still had memories of the surface, but it was no rose tinted flashback, her dim memories of a long destroyed village in Wutai no comfort in the long nights, but also no burden, no chain keeping her from doing what was necessary.
One could seek control by trying to climb the hierarchy through victory in battle, which was sanctioned both by Weiss and the Restrictors, all of whom believed in gaining strength through battle, but the weak were mercilessly weeded out, and if survival was truly your goal, the trials were best avoided. Keeping out of notice of the powerful was the key to living a long time.
Even in such a place as this, some order had to be maintained. The vending machines dotted throughout the wreck of the town were, by order of Restrictor and Tsviet, sacrosanct and indestructible. Favours could be traded for gil, which could be used to obtain vital supplies to heal wounds and the like. Working to keep the air and water filters functional was important enough to gain some degree of protection from the relentless battle provided you took care not to offend someone particularly. Gaspar had already fallen at that hurdle, but had survived his first lesson. He planned to take it to heart, and avoid confrontations from now on.
Not that even that was free of peril entirely. A tower overlooking this district was the home of someone named Henrietta who liked to take random shots at passersby and so far had eluded capture or death. Feral Guard Hounds and test subjects whose minds had not survived the experience staked out territories at desolate parts of the town and attacked all comers, or hunted the streets for prey to eat. It was somewhat surprising that anyone was still alive at all.
It was not safe to wander around counting, but their best guess put DG number at somewhere between twenty and forty thousand, split between kidnappings from the surface and those born underground. Given the death rate inherent in mass application of Mako infusions, that meant considerably more kidnappings had taken place, possibly up to six figures worth of 'disappeared'
Shinra's benevolent PR image had suffered a few hits in Gaspar's mind by the time Delphine had finished her explanations. None of them had any idea what this project was for. DG were too Mako dependent and blood hungry to make an effective fighting force in the long term. At best, they would be capable of one big bang, but keeping them focused on a target that was not Shinra would be virtually impossible. This enormous operation had to have been built for some reason, unethical though they could sometimes be, the Shinra board had always been logical.
The pace of kidnappings had slowed since the end of Wutai made them harder to hide but they had still been happening up to when the gates had been sealed in the advent of Meteorfall.
Come to think of it, perhaps the Meteor had already hit and Deepground was the only surviving enclave of humanity. Now there was a cheering thought. Either way, Gaspar had seen them set the charges in the shaft. The engineers had been extremely thorough. There was no way out, so whatever else, he would need to get used to the place.
It would not be easy, but there was a chance. At least he had the mystery of 'what is this nonsense?' to keep him busy as he adapted to his new life.
After about a week(insofar as anyone could tell the time with no sun or stars), the battles slowly died down as the new pecking order asserted itself.
Everything was back to normal. Joy.
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