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18. Naifu – Sewer Rat

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Naifu crept along in the dark, straining her ears and eyes for anything she could work with. It wasn't pitch dark, but most of the lights had blown in this section of sewer, and nobody from Shinra had seen fit to replace them. The steady drip-drip-drip of unknown liquids echoed along the tunnel, together with the swish-slurp-pop of footsteps. They'd gone about half an hour when she heard a sound that made all the hairs on the back of her neck rise: the chitter of tiny rodent voices and the scritch of not-so-tiny rodent claws.

"Please tell me that's mice. Or a new breed of mutant underground squirrels."

"It's mice," Wabi deadpanned. "Or a new breed of mutant underground squirrels."

"Liar."

"Keep moving."

"I know, I know." After a minute she added, "Slave driver."

"You'd rather stay down here longer?"

"No, I'd rather be home in bed with a hot water bottle. Instead I'm down among the doo-doos looking for a runaway stool pigeon. Not the way I'd planned to spend my Friday night. And –" She froze.

Wabi came up short behind her. His glasses glinted in the dim illumination of the single unbroken light ahead, and his dark hair hung lank against his collar in the horrible damp. Naifu knew his katana was attached to his waist, and that anything rodenty would be no match against his swordsmanship and her throwing knives, but still …

"Something just brushed my foot. Something furry."

"Don't worry," Wabi replied. "It was dead."

She shuddered. "How the hell did I end up with this assignment? Did I tick Tseng off again? I was being really careful after the last time."

"That was when you accidentally blew up that chopper, wasn't it?"

"Technically I wasn't the one who set fire to the fuel tank, but I might've … facilitated the blowing up by puncturing it first. By accident and unintentionally, honest. I was aiming at the pilot, but he could cast spells and defected my needles with a shield."

"You don't have to convince me."

She sighed. Her last couple of missions had been duds, which might explain why she'd ended up on clean-up detail, tracking a snitch who'd decided to snitch Shinra's own secrets to the wrong people and then made a run for it. Yeah, like that would help him. He'd gone to ground, literally, and Naifu had been left trying not to look too disgusted when Tseng sent her down into the sewers beneath Midgar after him.

Which didn't explain what Wabi was doing down here with her. He was a straight arrow, never raising his head above the parapet or pissing people off just for the hell of it, like Youhei or Legend. Neither was he noticeably outstanding, the way Helena or Tseng seemed born for their jobs. He wasn't even quirky, like Reno or Richie, or even Naifu herself. Wabi wasn't good at joking, or a witty conversationalist, or a grump. He wasn't especially unfriendly or sociable. What he was good at was flying under the radar while still managing to be competent enough that nobody even considered him unable to handle a mission.

"So what did you do to land this assignment?" she called over her shoulder. "Shish-kebab something you shouldn't?"

"You should concentrate on the matter at hand."

"I'm pretty much hoping the matter down here stays away from my hands."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know," Naifu started to say, but as she turned to glance at Wabi, she saw him incline his head. Following his gaze, she muttered, "Oh damn."

"Something of an understatement," Wabi said as they inspected the body slumped against the side of the tunnel.

It was their snitch. A hypodermic hung from his exposed left arm. The fingers of his right hand were curled over it, as if they last thing they'd ever done was push down on the plunger and reflexively form a fist of pleasure.

"Lucid," Wabi declared after a cursory inspection.

Naifu involuntarily drew her hand back.

"It can't affect you just through skin contact."

"I know," she said, embarrassed. As if to prove to him she wasn't totally useless, she pressed her fingers against the side of the guy's neck. "He's gone. And he's cold, so he might've been dead for a while, but that could just be the temperature of the water down here." She looked down. "And I use the word 'water' in the loosest sense."

"This smells wrong."

"You're telling me."

"No." Wabi motioned to the needle. "He's not a Lucid addict. No track marks."

The drug had been taking the streets of Midgar by storm for some time, as slum-dwellers sought even a fleeting reprieve from their lives. There were incidents of it turning up above the Plate too, but mostly it circulated the slums. The Turks had discovered several bad consignments recently, cut with other things that made the purer stuff, while still ridiculously addictive and dangerous, seem like talcum powder mixed with water. Shinra wasn't stupid enough to think they could completely stop Lucid's distribution, but they drew the line at letting 'the rough stuff' enter their world in such a way as could also affect their upper world.

Naifu looked at the dead man. "His last information hand-over was drug-related, wasn't it? Maybe the people he was working for got hold of him first."

"Possibly." Wabi was grim – or as grim as he ever got. Maybe his face really would rupture if he formed a proper expression. "We have to clean this up on all levels."

Naifu nodded and wrinkled her nose. Prolonged exposure didn't make the stench of raw human waste any less unpleasant. "You took the words right out of my mouth. I am so gonna barf if we stay down here much longer."

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To Be Continued …

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Side-flings, Homages and Downright Rip-offs

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Wabi is a side-fling to the Japanese concept of 'Wabi-Sabi'. Check it out at en (dot) wikipedia (dot) org (slash) wiki (slash) Wabi-sabi.