A/N: Happy New Year, everyone! Sorry that this took a while to upload, I was honestly waiting to see how many reviews I would get for this. When I got my first review yesterday, I decided to upload this today. So, if you enjoy this, please review, and I'll reward you guys with a new chapter a whole lot sooner.

The Warning Comes... A Little Too Late

"One of the many benefits of having a Sorceress as your girlfriend," Squall thought as the two of them landed in front of the gates of Esthar's Presidential Palace, "it's impossible to get lost anywhere." This was especially true in Esthar City, where everything looked rather much the same.

The guards at the palace looked like they had been expecting them, quickly informing the two of where President Loire currently was, which was in the main room. The guards looked like they were particularly glad to see Squall, since, as they informed him, the President had seemed nervous at the beginning of the week when he had first made the call to Balamb, but as the week had progressed, he had begun to get so on edge that his health had started to deteriorate.

Sorceress and Knight both hurried to the main room, where Laguna was currently having an animated discussion with Kiros - well, as animated a conversation as he could have, given the fact that he was sitting down. As soon as he entered the room, Squall could tell that the guard had been right - his father did look extremely pale, as if he hadn't gotten a lot of sleep in the past week. Squall instantly felt bad for not ditching the paperwork and coming as soon he had gotten the call, and the young man hoped that he and Rinoa had not arrived too late.

To Rinoa's relief, he didn't have much time to dwell on it, as Laguna noticed them at that moment. "Squall! Rinoa!" he exclaimed as he got up to hug them in greeting, the relief in his voice. He held his son longer and more tightly than he had before whenever he managed to visit Garden, and by now Squall was nearly bursting with curiosity about what could possibly frighten the usually cheerful and unworried Laguna so badly.

"President Loire, what's going on?" Rinoa asked. "Squall mentioned that you had found a statue that came down with the Lunar Cry, and that you had something else to show him that even you couldn't see?"

Laguna tensed at this while Ward came over carrying a video tape. "I found this on my desk the day I contacted you," the President explained. "I had just come back from lunch and there it was, right on top of all my paperwork, and I was absolutely sure it hadn't been there before."

Squall examined the tape for a moment. "It looks like just an ordinary video tape," he reported. Rinoa couldn't sense that anyone had magically tampered with the tape, either.

"Exactly," Laguna explained. "It's the contents of that tape that you two alone need to see; even I'm forbidden to see it." At Squall's questioning look, Laguna elaborated, "I may be curious, but I'm not dumb enough to do something that could potentially destroy the space-time continuum - especially after Ultimecia and her Time Compression." As Laguna finished, he walked back over to his desk, retrieved a piece of paper and a pen and handed both to Squall. "The video gives specific instructions to write down everything that is said in it." He, Kiros, and Ward all walked to the door. "We're specifically instructed that you two are the only ones to be allowed to watch that. And we were soldiers once;

we still know to follow our orders." And with that, Squall and Rinoa were the only two people in the room.

"Well, that was weird." Squall commented. "Even stranger than usual for my father."

"What do you think we should do?" Rinoa asked, looking at the paper that held a transcript of all the contents that Laguna had watched before being ordered not to.

"Let's just watch it." Squall finally decided. "Worst-case scenario is that it'll just turn out to be some sort of prank that he put together just to get me to visit him."

But Squall couldn't help recalling how scared his father had looked when he first entered. It would take a lot of acting talent to believably fake looking that scared, and, while Laguna Loire was many things, an actor certainly wasn't one of them.

To say that the message that the tape contained was weird was an understatement. Something was about to happen and when it did, he had to trust the man in a blue box? Not even mentioning the fact that the Laguna in the tape said that he was from the future. Rinoa had followed the instructions and diligently transcribed everything that was in the message and put the paper in her pocket when it was over, but Squall had doubts.

"Well, father," he said when he and Rinoa joined the three older men. "I honestly can't decide whether that tape is a sign of you going completely off your rocker, or if you just set up an elaborate prank to get me to visit you."

"Honestly, I think it's a bit mental, too," Laguna confessed, taking his son aside. "Kiros, Ward, Rinoa, would you give us a few moments?" The trio nodded, Rinoa reluctantly so, and they all went back into the main room, leaving father and son alone.

"To be even more honest, I'm even starting to think that the statue reports were a hoax." Laguna confessed as the two of them walked down the hallway. "But that still doesn't account for the disappearances of everyone I've sent to check it out."

"Dad," said Squall through gritted teeth as he walked ahead of Laguna. "I deal with monsters like Abbadon and Elnoyle. A disappearing statue is a matter for a psychologist."

"I know, Squall," the older man argued, "but the fact remains-"

The ending of Laguna's sentence never came. Squall turned around, curious, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw a statue of an angel in the middle of the hall; where it most definitely hadn't been before. "Dad?" the young Commander called out, hoping that it would all turn out to be a prank. The growing feeling of dread in his bones was making him wish that he hadn't left his gunblade back in his dorm at Garden. He cast a quick glance around the hall, hoping that Laguna was just being stupid and hiding in the wings, but no such luck. He turned back to look again at the statue and couldn't hold back a startled shout when he saw that the statue had moved. It was closer now, its hand outstretched, as if to touch him, or grab him.

Fortunately, his shout brought Kiros, Ward, and Rinoa running. "That's it!" Kiros exclaimed. "That's the statue from the Lunar Cry!"

"It moves when you're not looking at it." Squall informed them. "We need to have this thing under constant supervision. It did something to Laguna, one moment, he was right behind me, the next, he's vanished with this thing standing exactly where he would have been."

"'Something is about to happen'." Rinoa quoted. "Squall, the message that we just watched; he said that something was about to happen! This must have been it."

"Well, what do we do now?" Kiros asked as Ward summoned guards for the statue.

Squall and Rinoa exchanged a worried glance. "We wait." Squall told them. "We wait for a blue box."