A/N: Schedule has been switched from "never" to "weekly".
Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or FFX, nor do I stand to make any money off its creative property.
The Fall of Gaia
Chapter Four: Eye of the Storm
When it looked like the fiends were going to pass by the blockaded equipment shop without fussing too much about trying to break in, and the sounds of fighting outside had moved further on down the street, Zeitu left his position at the door to join Cirri and the other civilians rooting through the equipment shop for supplies.
Cirri had found herself ammunition for her looted submachine gun, and was currently looking through the army surplus clothing for something that fit well enough to replace her tattered red dress which, despite being very fetching, was not proper garb for all the running and fighting she had been doing and had suffered for it.
Zeitu wondered how she could be handling this all so well, when he himself could barely stop his hands from shaking with the adrenaline, fear, and dismay. He had just seen more death in one day than he had ever conceived of in his entire lifetime; excluding his parents, who had died when Cyfia was thirteen and he was just starting primary school, he had never known anyone who had died. He looked at his raw, bloody hands for a moment before forcing the image of the bisected child out of his mind and firming his resolve to deal with the matter at hand.
Zeitu counted the number of people in the room. 7 soldiers, 10 civilian adults, 2 children, Cloud, Cirry, and himself. There wasn't going to be nearly enough food or munitions in this small shop to keep them safe for long if the fiends decided to press the issue of coming inside. The best thing they could do for now is keep quiet and wait for the aid of the Spiran Republic's Al Bhed forces that composed the military; their machina armies were more than capable of fighting the tireless and endless conflict that the glowing fog was imposing on Besaid.
Zeitu turned to face the blonde-haired stranger who was now slumped tiredly against the wall, staring broodingly at his gloved hands. "Cloud?" Cloud's (glowing!?) blue eyes met Zeitu's gaze, the hardened look within signaling very clearly that he did not want to speak at this moment if it wasn't important. "...Never mind, sorry" Zeitu mumbled, walking to the back of the store to find a sphere-net access terminal. He found one. Broken. Well, Zeitu had spent his days fixing things that were in much worse shape at the old man's shop to make them available for sale; while his expertise lay in fixing more archaic forms of equipment, the basic principles would still be the same.
Sphere-net terminals were inactive shells. They were all the hardware and connections to run your computing needs and activated in the presence of a sphere-net key, like the one that was currently a biometric scanning bracelet around Zeitu's wrist. All of the user's account data, programs, storage, personalization settings, etc. were stored in their sphere-net key, which made every single sphere-net terminal the same as every other one: mass-produced passive machina used to conveniently access the data which each user carried with them at all times. Older devices were clunky, requiring the user to insert a valid key physically into the terminal or even go as far as to have on-board data storage and not accept keys at all. The last kind was Zeitu's favorite because fixing one always meant that Zeitu could find the old memories and data of the previous user and feel a sort of connection to them that was deeply cathartic.
Finished with dressing herself in soldier-police issue military surplus, Cirri was watching as Zeitu quietly while he dug around in the innards of the terminal. He was ripping out the now-useless net-connections and using a small soldering tool to create some ad-hoc wiring to bypass the payment-collection box and to allow him to jump the terminal with an external power source. Luckily there were plenty of power options, this being an equipment shop, and he was able to get the terminal online after only an hour or so of determined labor.
"Okay, so you got the thing working, but the sphere-net is down. What are you gonna do?" Cirri asked quietly as Zeitu waved his spherenet-key by the side of the terminal to engage the wireless connection and pull up his desktop. Zeitu pulled the memory core out of his pocket, showing it to Cirri. "A machina saved my life, but was rendered nonfunctional in the attempt. I'm going to see if the personality programming on its memory is still there and install it onto my spherenet-key. It's the least I can do for it." Cirri tilted her head slightly. "Really? It's just a machina. It was doing it's job, and it's not like it can understand your gratitude." This stung Zeitu a bit. "Machina have feelings, you know. They release pyreflies when they're destroyed. Haven't you heard the theories? Personally, I believe the reason why the fiends disappeared is because the machina we use started to use pyreflies as a power source. With all the machina being made at any given moment, souls never have a chance to grow restless and become fiends, and are instead being put to work maintaining our roads and cities and making our lives easier. Enslaving the dead to serve the living." Zeitu couldn't help but feel a little mad at Cirri, even if his was a dying point of view and he could understand why she'd feel the way she did. She looked a little put off, "Does that make you a member of the New Yevon party? They used to say that a lot before they disbanded."
Zeitu turned to Cirri. He had been working the whole time, and the memory dump of the construction robot was now downloading onto his spherenet-key. "I'm not all that into politics. All I know is that facts certainly seem to point to that conclusion, which means that machina probably have souls and feelings, even if they can't express them."
It was at this point that Cloud stood up and walked over to them, and Zeitu and Cirri instantly silenced in his presence. His expression still looked brooding, but also curious. "Pyreflies? And why are you mispronouncing machine?" Zeitu looked at him quizzically. "No one's called them machines for a thousand years or so." The Al Bhed, at the start of their rise to political power, had called them machines for a while to try to convince people to forget the past to move on, but people had stuck to the use of the word machina and after a while it stopped mattering. But before Zeitu could explain this, Cloud had mumbled to himself "a thousand years?" and wandered away to resume his thinking. Zeitu's mouth pulled up in a confused half-smile. What, was Cloud implying that he was some kind of time-traveler or something?
But then... he was awful strong for the average person, and possessed magic. These kinds of things were pretty strong evidence of some kind of sphere-grid, and if Cloud were a time-traveler that would handily explain both the possession of a sphere-grid, his strength, his magical powers, and why he seemed so confused about the subject at hand. Time-traveling wasn't even unprecedented; after all, many suspected Grand Summoner Yuna's husband of having been a time traveler himself: a resident of Zanarkand of 2000 years ago.
But then again, that was ridiculous... wasn't it?
A loud beeping from his wrist indicated to him that the download was complete and he turned back to the terminal to inspect the memory core's contents. He was saddened to discover that the memory-dump of the poor thing's personality was corrupted, and he couldn't access it. Still, it was on his spherenet-key now, and he'd never not have it if he ever got the time to fix the errors. Assuming he lived long enough to try.
His odds were looking good, though, with a powerful warrior at his side and several trained soldier-police surrounding him. And, as it turned out, he apparently had some kind of knack for the longsword that Cloud had handed him because for some reason whenever he picked it up he felt invigorated and strong. He picked it up and swung around a few times, noticing several purple glowing spheres embedded into the blade. Weird... What were those?
There was no time to examine them closer, though, because it was at this moment that there was a sudden thunderous boom against the blockaded door of the equipment shop. Damnit, were they ever going to catch a break? The civilians crowded at the back of the shop, hiding behind the counters and inexpertly pointing their guns at the front of the store. The military-police soldiers formed up in front of them, crouching, and ready to throw their life down to protect those behind them. Cloud stood dead center of the room, calmly taking out his great glowing tooth of a sword and staring quietly. Zeitu semi-confidently stood next to him, to both of their surprise. "Save your ammo. We've got this," Zeitu said to the soldier-police behind him, forcing himself to sound more sure than he was. Cloud almost cracked a smirk at this. Cirri took up position at Cloud's other side, holding her submachine gun up to her shoulder. "Well, we've fought them before, at least, and we've got at least an hour of experience up on anyone else here."
The barricade burst open.
A/N: Thank you for reading.