The Room of Phantasmagoria
Most Al Bhed were good with machines, because they had that cultural intuition for how they worked just like everyone else. Few were exceptional like himself, but Rikku was another race altogether.
Okay, she was more than good, and he had to painfully admit it. Not that he had ever doubted that the daughter of Cid must know a thing or two, but when she sat in front of that corrosive hunk of metal, her hands moved with graceful ease, as if she had taken it apart several times already. She worked in a dejected mechanical trance, pinpointing circuits, tracing power lines that in the eyes of the rest of his engineers had been too obscured by the salt of the sea. She knew how the current flowed, what kind of resistance it would need, and gadgets that she swore were transistors, but he still wasn't convinced. It was intuitive, but the supernatural kind, not so much a genius, but a marvel. On her own she could never invent something, but it was as though the machines had veins and organs, and she could sense its life. She could understand these corpses of the old civilizations and read their lifelines.
Most of the men applauded, a few—he could see—were quite taken aback by her, like they had never seen a woman work on a machine before. But she was a celebrity after all so he dismissed it. As for her, she indulged herself in ignoring him. She completely denied any acknowledgement of his existence, and he completely denied any recognition of her skill. They still acted as they did when they were children, and perhaps that was why it didn't bother him so much.
"She's pretty good," Tyheam, who was about five years older and also his right hand man, had said to him during a small conference in his office. "It's nice to have some one so good at what they do and so good at how the look." He smirked at Gippal, waiting for a nod in agreement.
"Don't talk about her like that," Gippal had said out of the blue. "I mean, it's gross. I grew up with her, so she's like a little sister." He'd tried his best to salvage whatever that comment had been about. Sure, he was attracted to her—any guy would have to be blind not to be. She had that overpowering energy and that magnetic smile. But she was still like a little sister, an attractive sister. His thoughts dropped the sister thing, before it started feeling like incest.
"Sister? Of course." Ty said with a skeptical expression, but at least he'd left it at that.
After Ty left, Gippal decided that the whole avoidance bit had to stop. He was her boss, and she would at least treat him like so, if nothing else. He was tired of her spoiled nonsense. He also had a plan, which would help him understand what had happened back in that underwater cave. He was mostly curious, but another part of him felt compelled to know, compelled to understand her.
"Are you going to keep ignoring your own boss?" he asked when he entered her work room. She looked up from a machine part she was greasing, but went right back to it, biting her lower lip and focusing with more determination on it. He lowered his voice, when he spoke up again. "Okay then. Well I just can't do this anymore, because I need you," he said and stopped, a devious smirk on his face, and she whipped her head toward him after his pause.
"What?" Her brow creased, and her lips were slightly parted.
"I said I need you—to start on the plans for this thing. I was going to do them myself, but you're pretty good at it." Her tensed cheekbones eased into an expression of relief, but soon after, her eyes had widened in alarm.
"Oh god, you're complimenting me. This can't be good," she said, and he laughed.
"Okay, fine, I have another thing I want to ask you to do. There's this machine part that no one has been able to figure out what it does and I don't have time to play with it." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Well?" he said. She reluctantly put her tools down and stood up. As she walked by him, he noticed a bit of engine grease on her neck and without thinking, he immediately started it to wipe it with one hand.
"What are you doing?" She glared at him, quickly slapping his hand away. He suddenly realized how stupid that move had been.
"You have this huge black spot on your neck," he said, pointing to it. She flushed, and wiped it hard with the palm of her hand until the skin reddened.
"It's gone, really," he said, leading her out of the room and, hopefully, leaving behind that awkward moment back there. They walked past what had once been the cloister of trials, and as they neared the Fayth room where the gaping hole that led them to the Farplane had been, a few pyreflies started gathering around them.
"Wait, where are we going?" She stopped in her steps, carefully keeping an eye on all the pyreflies around her.
"The old Fayth room that led to Vegnagun. We fixed the hole, mostly, and now we use it as storage. No sense in wasting space." He observed her tense shoulders and her wary face.
"Why are there so many pyreflies then?" She raised her hands to her arms, and hugged her torso tightly.
"We don't know. They've been around ever since Vegnagun, and don't seem to go away really. I suppose that it's because the temple is now linked to the Farplane," he said and then seeing her step back as if to exit the room, he added, "Is it a problem?" She straightened her back and glanced up at him with a stern expression.
"No, not at all. Take me to this thing," she said, extending one arm out for him to lead.
They entered the bleary Fayth room, filled with scrap metal, old motors, pipes and other miscellaneous pieces of machinery. They had patched the hole in the middle by nailing metal planks across it. Gippal warned her that they weren't secure enough for walking over them, so in order to get the piece they had to circle around the hole. He finally stopped in a small corner of the room where most of the old motor pipes were piled up.
"This is the piece." He picked up a long mechanical tube. It was as if he had pulled on a lever that suddenly told the pyreflies to surface out of the darkness and surround them. They wisped about the room with a fierce awareness of their presence. Gippal had never seen them act like that. He became quickly nauseated as they stood around him, and though they did shake him a bit, he had never felt a physical reaction around their presence before.
"What are they doing?" Rikku asked, her eyes scanning all around her as she drew closer to Gippal.
"You know how the damn things are. They get all shaken up if someone walks by," he said, attempting to ignore them and handing her the object. Rikku didn't take the piece, but let it fall on the ground. Instead, she continued to gaze around the room. She gasped and tugged on his sleeve.
"Let's go," she said pointedly, pulling at his shirt, but he put his palm over hers and held it there.
"What are you so afraid of?" Her hand slipped from his palm and reached into one of her boots for a small dagger.
"You can't hear it?" Rikku said. The dazed gleam in her eyes was starting to frighten him. He shook his head in response. All he could hear was the soft hissing and slight wails of the pyreflies. "The people, you can't hear them?" she asked.
The glowing wisps grew limbs from their ethereal bodies, and started materializing into shadows and finally into human figures. They were Al Bhed that he didn't recognize. Rikku's dagger slipped from her hand and hit the ground. She fell to her knees right beside it, covering her ears and flinching. She was breathing rapidly, almost hyperventilating. Gippal crouched down before her and grabbed her by the shoulders. His heart beat so rapidly that he could feel his rib cage tremble from within.
"Rikku, snap out of it, will you?" The Al Bhed encircled them, and he stood up. She had to have been causing this. They were reacting to her. He was certain of it. He had never understood the science behind those things, but he knew that they were like mediums, more than the ghosts themselves. They read your mind and produced a certain thought pervading your consciousness. He breathed in deep, trying to suppress the nausea and at the same time, attempting to quiet down the adrenaline flowing through his veins and fueling his heart.
"Get away from us," he yelled, and the pyreflies dissipated. It was an automatic response, and they were just gone. Faded in less than second. He breathed a sigh of relief and turned around to check on Rikku. He caught her figure just as it rushed out of the room. He ran out and met with her just of outside the cloister rooms, when she stopped to lean against the wall, gasping for breath. He stepped close to her, and the moment she noticed him, she backed off the wall and away from him.
"Don't come near me," she said in a low tone and looking away from him. "Never come near me." She glanced up at him, her eyes fierce with rage. He had fucked it up royally, and he knew it. He had meant to prove to her he was right and that she couldn't handle the Den of Woe, but he hadn't expected he'd be that right. He hadn't expected anything remotely like that at all.
The rest of the day, he attempted to focus on work as much as possible only to fall back to the image of a horrified Rikku and himself surrounded by the ghostly corpses of the Al Bhed with their strange despaired glares. Last time he checked, that wasn't how the whole Farplane and pyreflies package worked. People went there to stare at happy little portraits of their families, not be attacked by them.
He needed to purge the picture from his mind one way or another. He couldn't ask her who those men had been or what she had seen that had frightened her to the point of break down—she had made that painfully clear. He left office, resigned to the fact that work wouldn't serve as the distraction he needed. It wouldn't serve to wipe Rikku's ghastly expression from his face. He never wanted to see her like that, and he didn't know what the hell he had been thinking taking her there.
He entered his room and found Leila sitting on his bed reading some kind of newspaper. She lifted her eyes over grey jagged border when the door creaked open, but went right back to reading after he closed it. Leila was that tall, svelte and beautiful Al Bhed woman with the typical cynical attitude and focused obsessively on her work. She had that luxurious and mysterious air about her when he first met her—she still did—and he couldn't resist the urge to seduce her. In the end, it happened that she was the one to seduce him, and for the last few months they had been a fun distraction to each other. The power of their hunger drew their bodies together, and they became possessed, consuming each other and then leaving once the physical spell had been broken.
"I'm glad you're here," he told her. She placed the newspaper down and stifled a yawn.
"It's been dull around here, and all the excitement today was Lady Rikku, which I suppose—for the boys—is more than enough." He scoffed and shook his head. Rikku was the last person he wanted to talk about. Leila seemed to notice his distaste for the topic, so she stood up and walked over to him, caressing his chest as she stepped behind him to kiss his neck.
"She's quite nice for a celebrity," she whispered between kisses. Her observant eyes on him felt heavier than her lips on his skin. "She is a pretty little thing, so everyone's taken quite aback by her." She kissed the edge of his jaw and his breath deepened. "So are you, it seems," she said coyly, trying to provoke him, but all she caused was the memories of the Fayth room to stumble back into his mind. He grew desperate. He grabbed Leila's wandering hand forcefully, and then with his body, he pressed her against the wall parting her lips with his own. After a minute or two, he paused to take a breath and she took the chance to move her head to the side away from him.
"Let go," she commanded in a low tone. He released her and moved away, taken aback by the reaction. She had never acted like that before. She fixed her glare on him, and took a deep breath. "Gippal, you're shaking." He slowly looked away from her down to his hands and body. She was right. The tremble rippled throughout his skin, and he felt cold all over.
"It's nothing. It's the fucking Fayth room. You know how it can be." He moved toward her again. He wasn't going to just make fool of himself but appearing as cowardly and pathetic he must have right then. But she stopped him with one hand against his chest.
"You seem to have forgotten how we work. I don't invest any sentimentality on you, Gippal. I don't need you using me to try and make yourself whole. Go find another woman to do that for you." She smoothed down the back of her hair and adjusted her jumper suit. "I've never seen you like this. I personally hate it," she added before she shut the door behind her. He realized then how much he actually hated her, and hated their whole relationship, or lack thereof. It wasn't a surprise to him though. He hadn't noticed before only because most of his relationships had been the physical kind, not as much as with Leila, but still without a lot of drama. He liked it that way for the most part, but right now, he needed something, someone, anything. He couldn't just sit in his room and tremble to sleep. Not with Rikku in his mind. Not with Leila's severe glare on his mind.
He stepped out of his room and headed to the front of the temple. He would get a hover and drive around for a while. He would forget what happened at least for the night. Besides his genius for machines, that was what he was best at—forgetting.