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Aerith and Tifa laughed as they watched the two blond(e) Strifes quibble over details to the proposed air circulation plan.
"I'm telling ya Cloudy, you'll wanna go bigger than that." Claudia advised her son, tapping her pencil on the edge of the piece of cardboard they were using to draw up plans on. "And there are stairwells that go up near enough to the side-vents that bring this accursed stagnant air back down here. Put in a few v-junctions and the ducts will only be half as effective. Combine that with a larger-scale air circulation system and this whole sector will drop in temperature and humidity."
"Especially when we get the plants installed." Tifa pointed out, leaning casually against Aerith, who was still giggling.
"They're doing so well!" Aerith interjected brightly, her green eyes alight with happiness at the thought of all the seeds that Claudia had thought to bring for her. "And with some of the demolition we'll be doing to make the playground, we should have plenty of dirt! And there's an underground stream not too far from the playground, so we should be able to set up a rather easy watering system."
"The three of you." Cloud managed to say in a relatively level voice. "Should have never met." Then he cracked a grin at his Ma- all boyish mischief and sly plotting- and said, "You wanna go big? Let's go big."
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In the end they are no longer planning on what amounted to an oversized house-fan.
Good thing that Cloud now had torches and a decent smithy. His Ma was rather scary in her brilliance sometimes, but this was the woman who raised him, so what's a man to do?
Aerith and Tifa had grown worryingly close. Worryingly in that between a combination of Aerith's charm and Tifa's right hook they had somehow managed to unseat the local petty crime boss. Not the main crime boss of the Sector Five Slums, but the one who ran the outer edges, mostly racketeering and other related crimes. Tifa had then repurposed the group and now was effectively their leader.
By 'Tifa was effectively their leader' Cloud meant that somehow he was in charge of them and Tifa gleefully bashed any dissidents in the gut or the head, depending on how friendly she was feeling that day.
Cloud had been surprised by how many of the men were former Shinra employees- former Shinra Infantry- and had felt somewhat responsible for them after learning that. These were just people who were in a similar situation to him, only they had not had Claudia Strife and her 'if there's a will, there's a way' attitude towards things as their Ma. It made Cloud even more grateful to his Ma and he swore that he would help these broken people find their feet. It was the least he could do, after all. Cloud was lucky- he had Ma and Aerith and Tifa and Mrs. Gainsborough- but these people had nothing. Forced to work like dogs; doing dirty jobs for scraps.
The very thought of one of his squad mates having ended up like this incensed Cloud. It made him angry and defiant in the same breath and so he shoved aside his own doubts, his own misgivings and history of abject failure- because he had Ma, Aerith, Tifa, and Mrs. Gainsborough to lean on and each and every one of his cherished, fierce women were flawless- to make a difference.
Thus the locals were divided up into groups and sent off to work.
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Given that Claudia Strife's life motto was 'waste not, want not', piles were beginning to form near Cloud's shop as the crews painstakingly worked through rubble. It was a bit slow going as each group needed a capable fighter, but they were slowly learning how to fight with whatever they had. Claudia proudly told Cloud that it was his example that motivated a lot of them.
Cloud didn't see it, but whatever made Ma happy.
There were women who had been doing a lot of dirty work or drudge work that Claudia and Elmyra- "Really, Cloud, Elmyra is fine."- repurposed. The elder women did not push these other females into anything, but they were more than willing to teach them something new. If the women liked being 'companions' as Claudia had delicately termed them, then Claudia and Elmyra did their best to teach them about safety. They even had plans for an apartment complex that just needed a little care that the girls would be able to use as a safe alternative to going with a client to an unknown location.
The petty crime syndicate had had quite a bit of capital- that is their boss had been a smarmy, slimy bastard who paid his people very little- and Cloud had made sure to invest that money back into the people. He still did his odd jobs six mornings a week and repeatedly told his new employees that he would feel wrong taking money he hadn't earned.
After what Tifa and Aerith had caught the former boss doing- well, it was not as if the man could use the gil in the Lifestream. It had been a bit strange for Cloud to hold Tifa through the nights immediately following that experience, but he had been awed by the depth of Tifa's convictions.
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Cloud held firm in his opinion that Tifa and Aerith should ever be allowed out and about alone ever again. The girls just laughed at him and used him as a pillow during naptime. Tifa curled up next to one side while Aerith sprawled out over him as usual. Except nowadays he had both dark hair and earthy brown hair tickling his nose whenever the girls shifted around in their sleep.
It had felt a little strange to invite Tifa at first, but Cloud realized that his childhood crush on her had dissipated. No longer merely the pretty girl he wanted to impress more than anything, Tifa quickly grew into a close friend. A lot of that most likely had to do with how quickly Aerith had taken to her, but Cloud loved his ladies fiercely- just not in the way he would have imagined as a child.
When he had talked to his Ma- he might have been twenty-one but he had been a stuttering mess- about his revelation about being exclusively romantically attracted to males and merely aesthetically attracted to females, the woman had just given him a knowing smile and hugged him.
The moment had been interrupted when Elmyra had called out through the window, "By the goddess Cloud, you couldn't have waited another week?!"
"Never bet against a Strife!" His Ma had called back with a gleeful grin.
Cloud had buried his face in his hands and had not bothered to ask.
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The new design of the air circulation system made use of some rusted out shipping containers- after they had been cleared of monsters, scrubbed up, sealed, cut to be two-containers wide with no inner divider before being welded together, and then stacked end-to-end and welded secure- were raised along the inner wall of the Sector Five Slums by a series of pulleys. They doubled up all along the rocky edge of the furthest inner wall of the Sector Five Slums, running up to just a few hundred feet short of the opening to the Upper Plate.
The next part had actually been the most annoying for Cloud. He took the extra metal from the containers and made fan blades. It took some trial and error, but eventually learned how to make the blasted things the way he wanted. His smithy was satisfactory but trying to make fan blades for a gigantic tower was not what it had been designed with in mind. However, Cloud was nothing but stubborn and he had persevered.
Well, that and a foul-mouthed man named Cid Highwind had come bursting in one afternoon.
"What the fuck are ya planning on doing with those, blondie?" The man- tall with short blond, bright yellow hair and a cigarette dangling from his lips had bellowed.
"Making a fan that helps moves some of this shitty fuckin' air around." Cloud had responded reflexively, reminded sharply of Jonesy's lover. "What's it to you?"
"Well, ya ain't gonna get much bang for yer buck if ya don't add some tilt to those fuckin' blades." The blond had stubbed out the cigarette grabbed a nearby apron and jumped in beside Cloud. "Name's Cid, kid. Let me teach you a fuckin' thing or two about aero-fuckin-dynamics."
Cloud had come to know that Cid had been looking for work in Midgar since Shinra had unexpectedly shut down their Space Division. He had a wife back home in Rocket Town, but without the Space Program work was hard to come by out there. Though, Cid had admitted one evening while they sipped on some spiked tea Tifa and Aerith had brought them, work wasn't exactly easy to come by in Midgar either. Cid had actually been trying to get into contact with Cloud for almost a year, wanting to see if they could team up and run a shop together as Cloud was Cid's only major contender as a handyman.
Despite Cloud's extreme hesitance to drag anyone else into his life Cid was surprisingly stubborn and annoyingly useful.
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Feel free to leave me a note on your way out~!
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