Parity Inversion

Vincent was in Junon again and the city was under attack from AVALANCHE, again. Unlike last time however the Turks were hampered by incompetent leadership in the form of Heidegger and were losing rather than winning. The arrogant head of the Public Safety Department was preventing the blue-suits from coordinating their attacks and keeping them on the defensive until the army arrived, a strategy they were utterly unsuited to. Quite a few of the smarter Turks were calmly bending their orders in order to maintain the advantage.

While professionally irritated by Heidegger's foolishness Vincent was not particularly bothered by the carnage taking shape below. Any Turk worth their training knew that results, not methods, were what mattered to the Company. Besides, adversity was good for the soul, in the immortal words of her former teacher.

She didn't much care for AVALANCHE either, to be honest. Destroying the infrastructure people relied on for survival would not get the public on their side or persuade ShinRa to stop using Mako as an energy source. The people running that particular terrorist cell were either shockingly naive or were using the holier-than-thou attitude as a front for less acceptable activities. Their use of the brainwashed SOLDIERs that Cloud identified as Ravens indicated the latter being more likely than the former.

Vincent herself didn't really care one way or another, but Cloud did care and in the long term it was probably a good idea to ensure that the planet would be habitable well into the future considering she was unlikely to die any time soon. Her gradually expanding sustainable energy projects were finally starting to become more productive and economically profitable, which would eventually tempt the ShinRa General Electric Company into investing. Energy costing absolutely nothing and requiring less safety features and infrastructure than Mako would appeal to their corporate greed, allowing them to reduce costs across the board whilst still charging the customer the market price. Never underestimate the power of greed.

The Avatar of Chaos wasn't in Junon for the fight, however much her tenant was enjoying the carnage. She was there because Avro Lancaster was going to be there.

Veld had not been content to take his demotion and reassignment lying down, refusing to sink into obscurity so that he could be quietly killed off at the President's discretion. Instead he set about consolidating his power base and calling in favours in preparation for a counter strike. Chaos had projected that the bomber nicknamed 'the god of the battlefield' would be involved in said counter strike due to temporarily being outside the Department hierarchy, and had convinced Vincent to visit Costa del Sol in order to lay out a counter-offer for the strawberry blond Turk. Avro had listened, bargained and eventually agreed to the red-eyed avatar's proposal, conditional on Veld actually releasing him from house arrest as the Herald of OMEGA predicted.

As it happened however the plan had gone ahead perfectly and roughly as expected. Veld had dragged Avro out of 'retirement' and the bomber was even now blowing up terrorists while Veld made his way to Midgar to see the President. Once the AVALANCHE insurgents had been driven off Vincent would retrieve her newest colleague and give the smooth-talking blond a lift to his new workplace near Cosmo Canyon and introduce him to Angeal. Avro would be in charge of preventing industrial espionage and spreading misinformation on both Genesis' army and Valentine Industries; a massive task, but the bomber had confessed to being bored.

Blood red eyes coolly scanning the fighting from her perch on top of the Mako Cannon, the rogue Turk waited patiently for the right moment to extract her latest employee.


As of the morning of the third of February, year 0002 ShinRa standard time, Veld was considerably less than happy with the status quo. Two weeks previously he had been removed from his position as Head of the Investigative Department of General Affairs and transferred away from his men. Judicious application of leverage –blackmail for the uninitiated– had enabled Veld to be reinstated, but his fourteen-day absence had brought to the fore all kinds of problems that he now had to deal with.

For one, Heidegger's poorly managed defence of Junon had killed off a dozen Turks and injured another thirty, halving his available forces. This shortage of able-bodied personnel meant that everyone not confined to a hospital bed would be clocking serious quantities of overtime until those critically injured recovered and new recruits were found. Thankfully none of his elite agents had been hospitalised.

For another, they still hadn't found who was leaking information to AVALANCHE, though Hojo was definitely in communication with someone outside the Company. The Turk analysts, whom Heidegger was not even aware existed, had traced certain data leaks to his office computer. As it wasn't his private lab computer the greasy sadist could claim that someone was setting him up, though considering how universally feared the scientist was the excuse was laughable.

The third cause of concern was Avro Lancaster's disappearance from Junon. The bomber had aided his embattled colleagues then vanished into thin air before Veld could draw him back into the fold. Unfortunately since the blond was listed in the Company records as being 'on detached duty', the official pseudonym for being either dead or undercover, indicating that the Turk in question was not drawing pay. Avro had been 'on detached duty' ever since being put under house arrest in Costs del Sol, which made hunting him down unfeasible since the President wouldn't pay to find someone who wasn't costing the Company anything. Having the Turk AWOL was in fact cheaper than keeping him under surveillance, making finding him even less likely to be approved.

What worried Veld about that particular situation was the letter that had been discovered at the Legendary Turk's home in Costa del Sol after he vanished off the map. Said letter had been addressed to Veld and the Head Turk had it in his pocket even now, paper creased from being read, re-read and re-folded several times.

Dear Veld, the letter read,

I won't be rejoining the Company having received a better offer from a former colleague. Vi has the right idea about business and employee satisfaction should go and the boss is by far the better man. I hope not to see you again for a good long time.

Yours, Avro.

It was a surprisingly open piece of correspondence all things considered and gave Veld the creeps. 'Vi' had been the head Turk's nickname for his partner back when they'd been just two more blue-suits working for the newly created Company and it seemed that the red-eyed accident engineer had won the so-called 'god of the battlefield' to her cause. A matter of greater concern was the matter of Vincent's boss; Turk training was very demanding with a great deal of loyalty conditioning so that the blue-suited covert forces would answer only to higher ranking Turks and the ShinRa President himself.

Of course, Veld was currently bending his loyalties by following a Shinra rather than the Shinra, which led him to suspect that Vi had found yet another of the President's bastard offspring to front her activities and support her goals. Said person might not even be aware of their ancestry; The only ones who were that he knew of were Scarlet and Lazard, the Director of SOLDIER, whose mother had been one of the President's favourite Honeybees back when she was younger. Scarlet's parentage was buried under mountains of paperwork since her mother had been the wife of one of the President's former business rivals and had betrayed her husband to her Shinra lover. That had been one of Vi's kills. In return the widow had been provided with a generous independence and had slipped into wealthy obscurity, giving birth to a blonde daughter with her father's temperament ten months later.

Then there was Cloud Strife, another headache. Veld had decided that despite being Vincent's Personage he probably wasn't calling the shots. The blond SOLDIER had a promotion in the works and was efficient, intelligent and highly skilled, but seemed to lack the cutthroat ambition that characterised every Shinra the Turk knew, preferring instead to go with the flow. No fomenting dissent, no suspicious behaviour other than a fondness for teasing Veld's subordinates, no protests against company policy; the short blond seemed content to work the system rather than rise to the top or overthrow it. Shiva blast it, Strife was even polite to the technicians in the Science Department!

The only thing that could be construed as suspicious was his taste in friends. Cloud had been oddly close to Genesis before the General's defection, was very close to his mentor Sephiroth, spent time training with Zack Fair and had a strong friendship with Kunsel. Considering the second-class was a confirmed information junkie and the heart of the SOLDIER gossip network, it suggested the blond had similar interests. One of Tseng's responsibilities was to keep an eye on his fellow half-Wutaian, yet there was not even a hint of Cloud Strife being involved in anything more dubious than supplying the Silver General with smuggled coffee. Considering Veld also availed himself of Wutaian coffee off the black market, that didn't really count as criminal behaviour to the Turk's mind.

Oddly enough it was Zack who was attracting Turk attention at the moment. The cheery first-class had been spotted in places he had no real reason to be, regularly showed up near the church under the Plate in Sector Five and was generally in the vicinity of areas he was not allowed in while never actually being caught trespassing. Unfortunately he spent the rest of his time either in his office or on missions, suggesting that if he was spying, it was for someone within the ShinRa hierarchy.

The number of Zack's reports that ended up in the Silver General's inbox suggested that it was Sephiroth who had instigated the younger first-class' forays into espionage. That the General burned them after reading was confirmation enough to Veld's mind. The Head Turk could understand why Zack was doing it –Sephiroth had more than twice his previous workload and lacked the time to investigate and follow up office politics, which had always been Genesis' specialty– but that he had no idea what the first-class was passing on was positively nerve-wracking. Especially since Sephiroth never seemed to act any differently or follow up on the leads which must be being provided, suggesting that somebody else was.

Exactly how pervasive is Vi's conspiracy and is it the only force at work here? What is going on that I can't see?


Veld is ignorant of Cloud's genetics; only Hojo knows and he's keeping it under wraps so he can continue experimenting on the blond. The Turk Chief has noticed Zack's new behaviour but doesn't have enough pieces to put together a coherent picture. That the Valentines are a network of semi-independent individuals rather than having a clear hierarchy and taking orders from on high makes it even more difficult for him.

On a lighter note, I've recruited a new Turk for the Valentines, so Vi will be able to spend more time with her boyfriend and family rather than running all over the place for work-related reasons.

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