Chapter VII
Back in the Soup
"Materia. They're all like children to me" - Yuffie
Standing in the shower, John washed off what felt like years of dirt. He glanced at the pendant on the shower head, lathered up, closed his eyes, and let the warm cascade stream down his back. Minutes passed. When he opened his eyes he found the room steamed almost to opaque. He took up the amulet again, holding the encased green stone in his hand and rubbing it with his thumb. The metal hadn't tarnished after all; it glimmered like a tiny, eclipsed brass sun under the light. Wait a minute. What light? The shower stall didn't have a -
He flipped back the shower curtain to expose the gloomy room beyond. Except, it didn't resemble a bathroom at all. The towel rack looked like a small bush; the sink stand looked a lot like a mossy rock, and the room's supporting timbers had leafy branches. John blinked, drawing back the curtain, only to find it had become a wet palm fern.
"What the - "
Then he remembered he hadn't taken his medication in days. He relaxed. Only a small bout of insanity. He began to laugh. With the wasting sickness, or "soul leak," as Nanaki had called it, he had trouble remembering to eat some mornings, much less take a pill. Now that he felt better - if feeling better meant hallucinating that his shower had become a rain forest - he needed to find, hmm. His shower, he noted, had grown cold. Turning all the way around, he found trees and plants everywhere, curtained by pouring rain. When he grabbed for the towel rack, his hand came up with another fig leaf.
"Swell," he said. "I hate those dreams where I walk around naked in public." But he shrugged. "My dream; my rules." Outwardly he had a child's body; if he came across a perverted caveman he would deal with it. Besides, he had a fig leaf.
His feet oozed into the forest floor of mud and leaves. When he got through this adventure he would need another shower to wash off the dirt from this shower.
His path ended in a bank of foliage. He reached out to part the greenery and jerked back. A young woman stood in the clearing beyond, her back to him, her dark hair plastered to the her white blouse. She took a few steps, shivered, and stepped out of sight. John followed, fig leaf in place.
He spotted the woman again in a wide clearing. She faced sideways, allowing him to see the pallor on her face, her tan skin gone almost orange. He peered around a tree, trying to glimpse what she stared at. Dim shapes melted in the gray rain. He chanced a few steps, following her gaze. The trees ringing the clearing moved into view. Shapes hulked against them. Not shadows: John made out an arm here, a leg there. Bodies tied to the trees, their arms thrust behind their heads at harsh angles, no, nailed there, metal spikes pounded through their arms like -
John gagged, dropping hard to the ground and covering his face. As the rain continued to fall, his thin film of sanity wafted away, inviting him to scream. He clamped one hand over his mouth and the other over his eyes, lest he wake up naked in a ditch vomiting a soup of mud.
After an eternity, he parted his fingers. The vision remained. He drew a breath but managed not to scream. He watched the woman move to one of the pinned figures, a young man who somehow still lived. He moaned at her approach. A bundle of hanging snakes shifted with him. Wait, not snakes at all, but - oh God - intestines, dangling like a hank of bloody hoses. John wretched but in this dream, as in real life, he had nothing to throw up. He sat there, rocking and dry heaving while the man tried to speak.
"Who did this?" the woman said with a calm that belied her shock. John's stomach tried to shoot out through his nose.
"Shinra," the man said.
"Gregor Granth?"
"Yes. And, k-k-k - " His head slumped. A gout of blood spurted from his lips, the ropy mass of intestines giving one final spasm.
This time, John did scream.
Portek fled across the grassy plains and Wutai rice fields, his gray cloak flapping like a mutant fly wing. Yuffie and Barret gave chase. Portek still had a lead but Yuffie closed on him. To her surprise, Barret kept up. She would have to rethink those "clumsy old oaf" jokes. He even had enough breath to describe in colorful detail what he planned to do when he got his hands - hand - on that squirrelly butler.
Who knew Portek had this much stamina? To think she could have put him to work moving crates of books into her new library she had built off her basement? Come to think of it, she will have him build an entire new wing with wine cellar and cupola. So what if Dad called it too swank.
"Damn!" Barret stopped so suddenly she plowed right into him. He barely noticed. "What the hell is that?"
A black, bird-like shape shrieked down from the sky, skimming the grass before setting down long enough for Portek to hop inside. Barret braced himself and let loose a volley of useless bullets. The shape bumped forward, gaining speed before soaring into the sky.
"A Takeo fighter," Yuffie said. "Shinra's latest."
"So that's what's been attacking the Highwind. Damn."
"They're attacking the Highwind?"
"Yes, and dammit, they're about to attack us! Take cover!"
"What cover?"
"Dodge!" Barret popped off a few more shots before the ground around them lit up with streaks of fire.
Yuffie tumbled head over heels out of the way, feeling heat behind her. She fumbled out her shuriken and stared at it dumbly as the plane banked for another run. Barret crouched and fired, more out of habit, while Yuffie powered up her Leviathan summon.
Barret's Bolt spell fluttered against the plane, mere static cling as its weapons turned Yuffie's summoned snake creature into a blue cloud of steam. Yuffie again found herself flying across the ground. She never knew she could fly so far without an airplane.
Barret lay in a heap some twenty meters away. Yuffie started to call to him when she saw him move, saw him raise his gun at the banking fighter.
"Hold your fire. I have an idea." She dashed away, stopping to toss a pair of Fire spells in the air. "Resist this, stuffy old pork face!" she said. From her armlet, she cast a Big Guard spell around herself, then she yanked all the materia orbs out of her shuriken. She hefted the sharpened tire-iron to her shoulder, and assumed a "come hither" stance at the plane.
"As my father says . . ."
The first few shots punched the ground in front of her.
"Eagles may fly . . ."
She drew back her arm, chanting a prayer to Da-Chao, aiming for the whirring pod just below the right wing. As the shots sizzled off her barrier she hurled her weapon, her body spinning full circle before she could dive for cover. Her barrier burst with a thunderclap, leaving her stunned and nearly deaf, yet alive. A grating sound and pall of black smoke told her her weapon had hit home. The plane slowed and sputtered. Righting itself, it tipped back too far, the left wing scraping a streak across the plain before the plane dragged itself down in a final crunch.
Yuffie lay sprawled across the dirt, staring at the sky, afraid to move.
"But weasels don't get sucked into jet engines," Barret said, standing over her. She coughed, the fading green energy of the Life spell sparkling around her.
"Nice shot, if I dare say so myself," Barret said. "Now let's go finish those bastards. Can you walk?"
Yuffie punched out a Cure of her own followed by a White Wind spell. The soothing, alien yet familiar energy cleared her head and senses. She stood up, if still dizzy.
"Yea. Let's paste 'em." She took a step and keeled forward. Barret's arm snagged her about the waist.
"Man, I can't believe I'm doing this. First that Jenova kid on the Highwind nearly rips my arm off, and now I'm supporting the world's most annoying sixteen year old brat."
"Almost seventeen."
"Whatever."
"And thanks." Yuffie blushed. "I can stand now."
"Yes. Well, uh."
Yuffie rooted around in the charred grass, dropping to her knees and running her hands through soot in search of the missing materia. Unlike most people, she had a materia sense that caused her fingers to tingle whenever she got near one of the magical orbs. The only drawback? She had to divest herself of any high powered materia she carried in order to use this sense.
"Here Barret, hold this."
"Your armlet?"
"Any movement from the plane?"
"Just smoke. What are you doing?"
"My materia."
Barret grunted. Still he stayed, bending to help in the search. There. The last of her materia found, she snatched back her armlet, running her fingers over it to check if all its orbs remained.
"Thanks," she remembered to say. "He took my Aquamarine and my Ifrit. Tifa has another Ifrit but, oh, let's just peel our favorite butler out of his plane. Do you have a can opener attachment for that arm?"
They started for the downed plane. That wing had cut a hundred meter furrow in the earth, a furrow that grew more ragged as they approached the wreck. Debris and small fires dotted their path.
"Hey, there's your weapon. It's now 3-D," Barret said.
"Whoa. My Dad's gonna kill me for this."
Yuffie nudged the twisted metal blades of her once faithful weapon, its four prongs now twisted into different directions.
"Maybe you could start an impressionist art museum."
She snorted. "I was getting tired of that Hawkeye thing anyway. They don't make real shurikens up in Icicle Inn. I'll hit up the weapon shop back home. He always has something hidden away and I know he's bug-eyed over my Comet materia.
"You gonna give up a materia?"
"Relax, big guy. I'll give him the brand new one when I've mastered mine, in exchange for his new materia when he masters his Comet."
"Sounds like promising your first born son."
"Materia. They're all like children to me."
"Only they're more mature."
Yuffie pretended not to hear. They approached the downed craft, close enough to hear the tick, tick, ticking of the cooling metal. Tendrils of smoke snaked from the twisted plane and from clumps of turf. A coppery tang of spent mako hung in the air, thick enough to taste.
"Damn Shinra and their mako engines," Barret said. "Killin' the Planet."
"Luckily Wutai has no major mako deposits," Yuffie said. "Else they'd be dropping their filthy reactors here." She looked back toward the peak of Da-Chao, then northeast toward the dark towers, albeit not visible from here. "Unless they've found one. That would explain those towers."
A grating sound jerked her back to attention. The wreckage began to move as if a slumbering giant had awakened to find itself covered in scrap metal.
"What the hell?" Leveling his gun, Barret backed up.
Yuffie took a step back as well. She fumbled through her loose materia, found what she wanted, turning her focus back to the crash.
The hulk shuddered. The grating grew louder until with a pop, a flat gray cylinder emerged. It dropped to the other side.
"Is the damn thing giving birth?"
"No. It's an escape capsule. Portek, you bastard!" Yuffie activated her spell.
Barret began to fire but ceased. Ricochet. The cylinder rose and hovered. When it spun around to face them, Barret opened fire anyway but the bullets pinged harmlessly off its smooth exterior.
"Duck!" Yuffie's Comet spell shrieked down like a second moon, shattering the wreckage like shards of crockery. Portek rode in his floating cigar and, apparently choosing not to argue with raining planets, whirled off toward the horizon.
"Come back!" Yuffie fired another Comet, this one detonating far afield. "I can't believe he got away. He's just a butler, for crying out loud!"
"Everyone knows the butler always did it. Remind me never to get one of my own."
"Hey, big guy, you don't need anyone to answer your doors."
"Tell me something, Yuffie."
"Yes?"
"Why were you so offended when that Simon guy called you the Flower of Wutai? It sounds like a term of endearment."
Yuffie stared at the dirt. She scuffed her boot. "Flower of Wutai was my Dad's pet name for my mother. Every picture I have of her shows her with magnolia blossoms in her hair. I'm - I'm no flower."
Barret paused. "Your mother. She died when you were, how old?"
Yuffie held up one finger, but she did not look up.
Barret grunted.
"Sometimes I feel like I remember her. I smell a certain flower, hear a certain song. There's a music box in my Dad's bedroom. Sometimes he plays it, late at night. Always makes me want to cry." She pawed the ground again, thought about saying more but lost her nerve. She wiped her eyes with her forearm.
She hopped up, putting on as perky an image as she could. "Let's get back. Maybe my father can figure out a way to track him."
"Good idea," Barret said. "I'd like to get my hands on - oh hell." He looked at his gun arm and shook his big head, trying to suppress a laugh.
Yuffie bubbled over with her own laughter. "I think, big fella, you still have your hand on him."