A/N – Well, after a week of relaxation I'm ready to crank out more chapters; and just so you readers know, my fight scenes will be fairly detailed – having experience in martial arts myself – so if that's not your thing...well, you know. And yes, that is one of very few blurbs about myself that I will include in my story.

Disclaimer: I don't own Final Fantasy 7...that's Square-Enix's property.

Chapter 5

He was thrown from the rift that opened up onto the ground. He slowly got up, taking a look at where he was now: it looked like the same cavern he was in before being sucked into that teleporter, except there was no machinery; only a vast cave, compounded with light coming from outside.

At least he knew where the ground was now.

He started for the source of light and, after stumbling around in a damp hole in a mountain, was greeted with the ever-welcome light from the sun; there were no thick columns of dust absorbing the sunlight. There were no giant craters strewn across the landscape, either; just a vast grassland extending to his right, and a rather large pizza-shaped metal city with a tower ascending into the sky – the vegetation becoming sparser as you neared this city. Where the hell was he…or when, for that matter?

'That tower…that's where I'll find my answers.' He concluded. Wait, where did that idea come from? It was as if he was being inexplicably drawn towards it. Apparently, his legs agreed with that notion, and he began to head in that direction at a full sprint. It must've been a few kilometers away, though he didn't mind – for some reason he felt stronger than he ever had in the military. From the looks of things, he was faster than ever before, as well. 'No time to think about it…I'm almost there.' As he neared the fifty foot tall wall with a giant painted '3' facing him, he started to have second thoughts about getting to that tower.

His body, however, was bound and determined to get there.

Grabbing one of the looser portions of the sheet metal, he started to climb the wall at an alarming speed – almost like floating up the wall. 'How am I doing this? I was never this fast before at scaling walls!' Nonetheless, he continued on, but he didn't expect there to be guards on the upper plate.

Without warning, three of them attacked; the first threw a punch at Rollin, who grabbed the soldier's arm and snapped it at the elbow, and kicked him into one of the other guards. He caught the other guard by surprise with a lightning-fast jab to the face, stunning him. Quickly taking advantage of the situation, he grabbed the man's head and slammed it into his knee and caught him with a solid kick in the chest with the other leg, sending him rolling on the ground and over the edge of the plate.

There must have been a fourth guard that called for backup, because five more guards showed up – three of them lunging at their newest and very deadly threat, leaving the other three guards to stay back. He brought his knee into one of the men, knocking the wind out of him and sending him back a few feet. Two more took his place in the assault, trying to grab hold of Rollin. One got a hold on his right arm and pinned it behind his back; he popped his arm out of its socket, and using the guard behind him for support, flipped over his head and sent a kick to the back of his head, toppling the other guard in front of him; this left Rollin little time to pop his arm back into its socket before he felt the prick of a group of needles in his neck. 'Not good.' He thought before collapsing from the fast-working sedative. Everything was blurry, and he was slowly numbing up, although he could still hear someone speaking. He remembered only eight words even through his unconsciousness:

"Welcome to your new home, my little specimen."

The world around him was too blurred to make any sense of, every sound was amplified tenfold – he wasn't exactly sure as to why himself, but it wasn't like he could really do anything about it. It seemed like only a few minutes to him before he was thrown onto the floor...somewhere: again, he wasn't sure, and it didn't help that his body was numbed up from the sedatives. As he lay there unable to move any muscle in his body, he tried to think but found it nearly impossible with that stuffed up feeling in his cranium; he found it much easier to relax, falling into a dreamless slumber and hoping that it was all in his head.

A/N – ...okay, not as lengthy as some of the others, but bear with me. :)

Until the next chapter,

Lloyd Redgrave