Pilot Wave
Rosso perched on the edge of a rooftop wearing a red SOLDIER uniform, legs dangling over a four-storey drop and hands automatically cleaning her double bladed gun-glaive as she watched Aerith go about her morning shopping. The Deepground escapee spent most of every day watching over the last Ancient, partly because the teenager was Genesis' sweetheart but mostly because the older girl had wormed her way into Rosso's heart to the point that the redhead couldn't bear to see her hurt. Aerith was a shining beacon of all the things Shin-Ra was trying to destroy and the mere sight of her was a soothing, healing balm on Rosso's soul.
As Aerith set off back home with her purchases Rosso levered herself upright and bounced across rooftops and along the underside of the Plate, keeping a sharp eye on her friend's surroundings. The flower girl was utterly incapable of defending herself, as vulnerable as a newly hatched chocobo and twice as cute. However just as Aerith reached the front of her house she almost ran into a very large –if rather dishevelled– Turk emerging from an alleyway, looking like he'd gone on an all night bender and just woken up. Aerith, being understandably skittish of Shin-Ra's blue-suited operatives, dropped her shopping on the front step, turned and ran for her life. Rosso hurried after her; the Turk clearly hadn't recognised her, suggesting his presence was purely coincidental. Besides, from what cousin Vinnie had told her the Turks had a certain pride in their image and were unlikely to go on missions looking like they'd spent the night in a slum back alley. Hopefully she could calm the other girl down a bit and go back home so as not to worry Elmyra, who would be opening the front door on scattered shopping and no daughter.
Unfortunately for Rosso it seemed Murphy, patron deity of unpleasant surprises, had heard her thought and decided to make her life more interesting: as she reached Aerith the flower girl ran into a group of men wearing brown pseudo-uniforms with AVALANCHE patches and carrying machine guns. Aerith, no fool, instantly turned on her heel and dashed back the way she'd come as the men started to give chase and radioed for reinforcements. Rosso did not follow, instead unfolding her gun-glaive and dropping on the men from above, killing them with little difficulty. Threat neutralised she hurried after her charge, finding the slightly older girl hiding behind the same Turk she'd only minutes earlier run away from. The Turk was giving the mass of AVALANCHE troops a real run for their money but his injuries were accumulating and for all his size and strength he was definitely nowhere near as enhanced as Rosso herself. Weighing the situation against the various battle simulations she'd been forced through over the years the ex-Deepgrounder decided that intervening was a necessary risk –she could always off the Turk later– and waded into the brown-clad troops from the rear, swinging her glaive with a fierce war-whoop.
Zack had been right: playing the hero was fun.
Once all the AVALANCHE forces present were dead Rosso lowered her weapon and grinned at Aerith as the other girl peeked out from behind the Turk, whose hand-to-hand skills had been fairly impressive.
"Hey there Sweetie! Big brother asked me to look out for you, remember?"
The Turk relaxed a little as Aerith shot out from behind him to hug Rosso. "You two know each-other?" he asked, eying the enhanced girl's uniform with interest.
"She's dating my big brother," Rosso commented blithely, giving Aerith a quick hug before glancing around at the bodies on the ground. Unfortunately Aerith's safety was more important than looting the dead right now. "Let's get out of here before more reinforcements show up."
"They said they were after me," Aerith whispered in her ear as Rosso led their little cavalcade across the Sector towards the abandoned church, sticking to quiet alleyways and occasionally climbing over buildings. The Turk had made use of Rosso's Restore Materia and was keeping up with ease. He was also eyeing Rosso more thoughtfully; not that she blamed him. She was carrying Aerith on her back, keeping her gun-glaive gripped in one hand and had yet to work up a sweat. News of her presence here would reach the Turk command as soon as she let him out of her sight and her connections to Deepground would emerge in short order, regardless of the beautiful sabotage her brothers had engaged in a few months previously. The redhead knew she would have to disappear before they caught up with her, preferably with Aerith in tow. Genesis was completely nutty about the flower girl and would likely do something stupid if she got caught.
"Where are we going?" the Turk finally asked.
"Somewhere defensible," Rosso replied shortly. "You got a name, mister blue-suit?"
"Call me Lock, Miss Rosso," he replied, deep voice impeccably respectful. Rosso bristled internally but didn't let her irritation show; she suspected he was one of those men who held open doors and pulled out chairs for women, the chivalrous protective type. It rubbed her the wrong way, like she was being mocked and her skills belittled. Intellectually she knew it wasn't true, but he still unconsciously pushed her hot buttons. She wasn't fragile, didn't need taking care of that way. She was strong, a survivor, a warrior queen in her own right; she didn't need a knight in shining armour to rescue her like in the stories Nero liked to read.
Rosso hurried up to the church and slammed the doors open, then paused on the threshold, berating herself for her carelessness:
"Okay, so I take it those goons were yours," she said to the skinny scientist standing over by the flowers with another dozen troops, a large man and a vaguely insectoid woman, "But they weren't very polite to us at all. If they wanted us to come here they could have just asked." Backchat and cheek had both been severely punished in Deepground, but Genesis had taught her it was good for distracting people and stalling. In this case it also enabled the Turk to slip away unseen, preferably in search of reinforcements.
"And who might you be, Miss..?" the scientist inquired, his voice leaving Rosso with a vaguely unclean feeling down her spine.
"I'm just Miss Gainsborough's bodyguard, Mr..?"
"I am Doctor Fuhito of AVALANCHE," the scientist replied, the emphasis slightly irritated. "With me are Shears and Elfé."
Elfé looked like she wasn't all there, both sets of shiny black wings twitching and her eyes vacant. Vinnie looked like that when she was having a knock-down, drag-out argument with Chaos inside her mind.
"We would like to talk to your charge regarding a matter of some urgency, madam bodyguard," Fuhito went on, tone subtly condescending. Rosso let Aerith slide off her back and led her forward a little so they were no longer in the way of the door, then stopped and turned to lean against the wall.
"Aerith?" she asked, looking her friend and possible future sister in the eye.
The teenage Ancient drew herself up to her full height –which wasn't much– nodded and turned to meet Fuhito's gaze. "Please tell me, Dr. Fuhito."
As the fanatical scientist launched himself into his spiel Rosso let her eyes wander, noting in passing that Lock was climbing the side of the building. The teenage fugitive ignored Fuhito's voice completely, letting his zealotry wash over her as she studied her surroundings in greater detail.
The man Fuhito had introduced as Shears was indeed the primary field commander of AVALANCHE; she recognised him. The Valentines had acquired quite a bit of information on the environmental terrorist group after Cloud first met the Ravens, as they all agreed that anyone who did that to people was an enemy regardless of the cause they claimed to fight for. Shears looked like a construction worker or a docker, large and broad with well-defined muscles and messy hair sticking out from underneath a green bandanna. He was a stark contrast to short, slim, bespectacled Fuhito, whose slicked-back hair and tidy clothing mae the scientist look like a lawyer.
Rosso had only ever seen fictional lawyers and even though she knew television dramas were not a reliable guide to reality Fuhito fit the sleazy, amoral stereotype too well for there not to be a certain amount of truth in the comparison. Her hands twitched, itching to cut him down and be done with it.
Elfé was more interesting. With prominent ivory markings emerging from the tanned skin of her arms and jaw and those black, beetle-like wings, she was even more physically alien then Genesis had described Sephiroth as being, superseded only by Vinnie's Limit Breaks and Chaos himself. Her incomprehensible muttering and occasional clutching at herself however suggested either a severe multiple personality disorder or advanced possession. Considering her appearance, Rosso was leaning towards the latter.
She was however unable to verify her suspicions as AVALANCHE forces started dropping from the rafters in various stages of injury. Shears immediately headed up to do battle with Lock, who had just climbed in through a hole in the roof, so Rosso hit Elfé with the strongest Confuse spell she could muster, grabbed Aerith around the waist and fled. On her way across the open area around the church Rosso spotted Tseng and made a mental note to call Genesis as soon as Aerith was back with Elmyra; Midgar was no longer a safe place for either of them to be if the Turks' second-in-command was taking an interest in them.
Well it has been almost literally forever, but I have updated! And it's from a brand-new point of view! The Nibelheim incident is about a month away now, incidentally. Oh, and Rosso is about a month younger than Aerith. Talk about totally different people...
