Mission 59: Cookies
Hello door, meet key card. It was the story of Shinra and it happened every time all the time. When ever an employee, be it someone totally dispensable as most were, a high executive, or a Turk, came and went around the building, they had to use keycards, otherwise the doors simply would not open past a certain level.
"Mr. Turk!" That's why Reno never suspected the little girl to come so close to causing disaster. Of course she was too young to actually work for Shinra, that fact was obvious when Reno looked down at the little voice. She must be the daughter of an executive; she must have gotten bored and wandered off getting lost in the large facilities.
"Hey kid, are you lost? Whose office are you looking for?" At least the child was smart enough to know he was a Turk. Some of the adult employees sometimes couldn't tell who was a Turk and who was a regular Shinra employee and it made Reno wonder how they managed to keep their jobs if they didn't even know that.
The little girl shook her head then set her oversized plastic bag on the floor in front of her and took a few cookie boxes out of it to show them to Reno. "I'm selling cookies! I have chocolate covered, chocolate chip, salty, cheesy, and vanilla."
"You're some kind of girl scout?" So it turned out the kid wasn't lost, she was off to do business while her parent worked, or at least that's what Reno assumed.
The little girl nodded, "yup! Do you want to buy a box of cookies? They're only ten gil." She proceeded to use the sad kitten eyes tactic, though the pictures on the boxes were already effective enough.
Reno didn't know how they did it, but when ever he looked at those pictures in the cookie boxes he wanted to devour all the delicious cookies inside. It was late and Rufus hasn't left Shinra Headquarters. At this rate it would be a several hours before Reno had the chance to eat a decent dinner, but if there were cookies available for him to take back to the office, then he might as well have that for dinner while he guarded Rufus. It wasn't all that rare; Reno was known to stuff his face with sweets any time, for any reason, sweets which he more often than not stole from Rude. Reno's stomach growled encouraging his choice to purchase the cookies, "alright, I'll buy the cookies." Thus it was done, and the girl ended up selling her last dozen cookie boxes.
As Reno made his way his way to Rufus' office with the bag full of cookie boxes, he felt odd. Turks didn't go around buying cookies from girl scouts; it just wasn't Turk-like. Then there was that little voice in the back of his head, that Reno was certain had been permanently silenced long ago, which told him he might be rewarded for his kindness.
Then Tseng of all people received him with a relieved sounding "great job handling the situation," as soon as Reno entered Rufus' office. The president, who looked like he was suffering from a stress induced headache, nodded in acknowledgement while Reno stood there in surprise.
"What did I do? I mean, I fully accept the credit but I want to hear some feedback and stuff." Maybe, just maybe, that little voice was right, and an act of kindness, even if it was driven by hunger, would be rewarded after all.
"An employee, or I should say an ex-employee, of Shinra stole some secret data and hid it in a cookie box that was left unattended on a neighboring desk. We suspect he knew the cookies belonged to another employee's daughter and he planned to later buy the cookie box to get the data out undetected. Fortunately, though the security camera in that particular corner of the office was sabotaged, most likely by the same culprit, someone saw this man putting something in a cookie box, thought it was suspicious, and reported it. Rude, Elena and I put the pieces together with our investigation while you were missing. But since you recovered the data without alerting anyone of the situation and also made the Turks look good by buying the cookies, I will overlook your momentary disappearance, just his once," Tseng explained.
"Finally, it's about time this was solved," Rufus ran his fingers through his hair then announced, "I'm tired and I still have a headache. Tseng, Elena, I'll leave this matter to you. Reno, Rude, to the chopper, take me home."
Tseng and Elena took the bags full of cookie boxes from Reno, "my cookies!" Reno complained.
That caused Rufus to cringe and growl, "shut up!"
Wanting to avoid trouble, and possibly doom, Rude clasped his hand over Reno's mouth and dragged him away; because when Rufus had a headache, he started shooting when people didn't shut up. Some rewards are worse than no reward at all...
End of Mission 59
Disclaimer, I don't own Final Fantasy VII.