Chapter 14: Divine is the daughter, the dream that you sell, you built up your heaven, on the back of hell….
With Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie taking care of Seventh Heaven, the rest of Avalanche set out for Sector Five. Sephiroth was moving with his usual quiet stoicism, Barret seemed to be equal parts angry and worried, and then there was Kadaj….
Tifa had known him for only a few days, and yet could already tell there was something wrong with Kadaj. Sephiroth's younger brother was keeping his head tilted downwards, watching each and every step he took instead of trying to take in what was going on around him.
That would have been odd enough in Sector Seven, but they were moving into parts of Sector Six he'd never visited before, and eventually, they'd reach Sector Five, which would be entirely new to him.
So why wasn't Kadaj displaying his customary neophilia?
"Something bothering you?" She eventually flat out asked.
"I'm sorry..." Kadaj's voice was practically a whisper.
"For…?"
Kadaj slowly raised his eyes to meet hers.
"I got caught in that weird pyramid trap; I lost. I failed. If, if whatever that blue screen thing was, hadn't happened… Sector Seven would have been destroyed. Some hero, right?"
Tifa winced. She'd been trying hard not to think about that particular possibility, focusing on the euphoria of victory rather than what defeat would have meant.
She wasn't afraid to die fighting Shinra, but being crushed under the Plate, watching it happen to all of Sector Seven alongside her…. Well, suffice to say, some deaths were better than others.
"Kadaj, you need to understand that what happened, happened because of all of us, not just you. It happened because Sephiroth, Barret, and Jessie were busy dealing with helicopters; it happened because I was busy kicking the crap out of that bald Turk… and it happened the way it did because someone else out there hacked the Plate release system for long enough that the Turks couldn't use it. Avalanche isn't about what any of us can do; it's about what all of us can do."
"You were winning your fight, though..." Kadaj sulked.
"Yeah, because I've spent the last five years of my life preparing for this, getting myself physically and mentally ready fighting Shinra. Telling myself again and again that if I didn't look out for myself, no one else would. As cliche as it sounds… isn't this your first week on the job as a revolutionary?"
"It's also my first year in general, if that counts for anything?"
It was probably going to be longer than that before Tifa stopped being weirded out by the fact that Kadaj was younger than Marlene.
"Training counts for a lot. If you want, once we get some downtime; I can give you a few pointers. I may not know much about how to wield a sword, but footwork and situational awareness are important, no matter how you fight."
"I'd like that, a lot. Reno managed to disarm me, too, so it'd be awesome if I could actually know what I'm doing if that happens again!" Kadaj agreed, enthusiasm slowly returning to his voice.
"Kadaj, when you fought Reno one on one, were you still using that same grip that I saw you using in the Sector Eight reactor?" Sephiroth's voice drifted back over his shoulder.
"Yeah…. why?" Kadaj's voice held the uncertain tones of a child who knew they'd just done something wrong, but couldn't for the life of them figure out what.
Sephiroth and Master Zangan were profoundly different people and, to Tifa's knowledge, had never exchanged more than a couple of words. All the same, that sharp inhalation and long, slow, exhalation cast her back to her first day of training, when Zangan had seen her make a fist by curling her fingers around her thumb..
XXX XXX XXX
Reeve had gotten the best night's sleep of his life.
Still, all good things must come to an end. Approximately five seconds passed between his eyes opening and him grabbing his PHS. A top of the line model, it was more than capable of keeping track of news bulletins while he'd slept. A quick scan revealed exactly what he'd been hoping to find.
"Shinra SOLDIERs Stop Savage Avalanche Attack, Sector Seven Saved, Plate Plummet Prevented, Terrorist Threat Thwarted!" It was a late-breaking story, the kind that meant editors didn't get a chance to restrain the staff's more enthusiastic members.
Reeve put down the PHS.
His mouth felt weird.
He got out of bed and a few minutes later checked himself in the mirror, like he always did just before heading out the door.
His reflection looked weird.
For the first time in years, Reeve left his house with a smile on his face.
XXX XXX XXX
Elmyra wished she could find a way to sleep, but she'd given up hope of that a while ago. She wasn't even in her bed at this point; she was sitting in a chair in her living room looking at two pictures- one of her late husband, and one of her daughter. She wasn't quite sure how long she'd been sitting there; she couldn't bring herself to look away from those pictures.
WHAM WHAM WHAM!
When someone knocked on your door, you answered it. Doing something that simple was about the limit of Elmyra's capabilities at the moment.
An instant after opening the door, she was nearly bowled over by a massive bear of a man.
"You're Elmyra Gainsborough, right? You helped save my daughter?" her 'guest' seemed to be equal parts grateful and frightened.
"Barret." An unfamiliar female voice called out from behind the man.
"Sorry. I'm Barret Wallace. Marlene's my little girl. Marlene, she's got short hair. She's cute as a button, with the heart of an angel. She was wearing... Uh...pink! She was wearing a pink dress today!" the man half babbled.
"She's upstairs, sleeping…" Elmyra wished she could have found more joy in Barret's sudden, almost-blinding smile.
He started to race up the stairs with speed that Elmyra would never have expected him capable of, his boots thundering with every step.
"I said she was sleeping!"
He balked, then resumed climbing, this time as if the house wasn't on fire. A big man with big boots could only be so quiet, but at least he was trying, now.
Her other three late-night arrivals proved to be General Sephiroth, a woman and a young man.
"Thank you for letting us in so late at night. Mrs. Gainsborough, this is Tifa Lockhart and my brother, Kadaj." Sephiroth introduced them.
"I'm… I'm glad that I could help put your friend's mind at ease, but… while his daughter is safe and sound… Shinra has mine." Elmyra could feel her eyes growing damp as she spoke.
"Explain." It was strange how Elmyra found something comforting in Sephiroth's cold and emotionless tone.
No, not emotionless, near-emotionless. Most people let anger rage through them like a fire; Sephiroth compacted his down into a tiny little ball… and made it burn all the hotter.
"She showed up a while ago with that young girl. She told me to look after her, to call her father, and that she had to go do something very important for Shinra. We hugged… and then… she left."
"I'm sorry, I'm the one who asked her to look after Marlene. I thought that it was the best way to keep both of them safe... but instead, she wound up in even more danger.,." Tifa apologized.
"No, it's my fault. Shinra must have captured her to try and lure me out into some sort of trap..." Sephiroth insisted.
Elmyra began to shake her head, a paradoxical mixture of sob and laugh escaping her throat.
"This… this wasn't any of your faults. Shinra has been after my daughter for over a decade."
"What?" A trio of voices chorused in surprise.
Elmyra sunk back into the chair; this story was going to be hard enough to tell while sitting down.
"Aerith isn't my daughter, not by blood. It all started fifteen years ago. My husband was a trooper who'd been sent to Wutai, but I'd gotten a letter from him saying that he was finally about to get some leave. So, every day I'd go to the train station and wait for him to see if today was the day he'd arrive.
"I never saw him, but one day, I noticed two people who looked to be even worse off than I was. It was a woman and her daughter. The woman had been shot more times than I could count, and her clothing was barely holding itself together.
"The child wasn't hurt, though, but she was afraid. So very afraid. The way she was crouched over her mother's body… she was like a wild animal. The moment I got close to her, took her in my arms, though, she was just the sweetest little girl I could ever imagine.
"I took her in and I thought that would be the end of it… who knows how many orphans there are in Midgar, why should anyone care if I adopted one of them in?
"Except that less than a month later, there was a knock at my door. There was a man there in a sharp blue suit with slick black hair..."
"And a dot on his forehead." Sephiroth finished for her.
Elmyra took a few steadying breaths.
"Yes. He said his name was Tseng and that he was with the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department. That Aerith was an Ancient. That she had amazing powers and could use them to help make the world a better place."
"What's an Ancient?" Kadaj interrupted.
"I'll explain later." Sephiroth shushed him.
"Whatever it was that Shinra wanted my daughter for, it seemed to be something they could only get from her willingly. That's the only reason I can think of why Tseng or someone else didn't just snatch her in the middle of the night, or even right off the street.
"Did she… did she show any signs of actually being an Ancient?" Sephiroth's tone was soft, almost reverent.
"One day, out of the blue, she came up to me and told me not to be sad. I asked her why I should be sad, and she told me that she'd felt my husband die… but it was okay because he'd also just become one with the Planet.
"A few days later, I got the letter about him being killed in action… and Aerith had spoken to me within minutes of his exact time of death. I don't know what it really means to be an Ancient, but that wasn't the only time she behaved strangely either… strangely, but never mean or dangerously.
"She deserves better than this, but since they can only get what they want if she's willing... that's means...even if they did take her away; I'm sure she's being treated like an honored guest... And that they'll send her straight back home once they get what they need."
"Do you really believe that?" Sephiroth's voice was so hard to read- was that pity? Scorn? Both?
"What the hell else can I believe? That Shinra is going to keep my daughter locked up in a cell for the rest of her life for the crime of being born different?!" Elmyra wished she had some way to properly express her rage, even if it was just throwing something small and easily breakable.
"You can believe that we're gonna get your daughter back." Barret answered as he descended the stairs.
Elmyra's fingers twitched uncertainly.
"I didn't hear everything, but I heard enough. Your baby girl put everything she had on the line to keep mine safe; that puts me pretty damn deep in debt to her, and I settle my debts."
"You're just going to end up making things worse than they already are…" Elmyra wished that she could trust these people to save her daughter, but a lifetime in Lower Midgar had taught her that mystical saviors didn't just drop out of the sky to solve your problems.
"Worse than they already are? You heard any reports about what happened in Sector Seven? Well, here's the real truth with no Shinra bullshit: it wasn't Avalanche trying to drop the plate; we were defending it, defending it against Shinra. They were set to murder 10,000 of their own people in Upper Midgar, to kill off the 50,000 beneath them.
"Why?
"All to take out an Avalanche cell so small that over half of it's standing in front of you! Shinra will burn Midgar to the ground to rule over the ashes, just like how they'll suck the Planet dry to be kings of the dust!
"There's only one way this thing is gonna end; Shinra kicked the rocks, so they can reap the Avalanche."
XXX XXX XXX
"So, how exactly are we going to get into Upper Midgar to rescue Aerith?" Kadaj inquired with all the zeal of a fresh convert.
Barret took in the question with a pensive frown, his fervor subsiding as he mulled it over.
"Any trains Shinra plans on running to Upper Midgar will be so stuffed with SOLDIERs on guard duty they'll barely have room for passengers. They might even have people planting bombs in the tunnels to cave 'em in if we try to just walk along the rails. They'd love to have something else to blame us for." He sighed.
"No riding on a train, no walking the tracks, the support pillars are all going to be on total lockdown as well..." Tifa fumed, her hands clenching into impotent fists.
"I have an idea."
Once again, Sephiroth was on his way out the door by the time he'd finished speaking..
XXX XXX XXX
Despite his normally iron-clad morning routine, Reeve had somehow forgotten to do one important thing… check what time it actually was.
That was why he arrived at Shinra HQ at 7:00 in the morning, while most people lucky enough to have a house in the coveted "Inner Ring" of Midgar and worked 9 to 5 jobs were still fast asleep.
It didn't bother him, though. Nothing could bother him today; not even the realization that since his secretary hadn't clocked in yet, he'd have to fill his own coffee mug.
To Reeve's surprise, he discovered that he wasn't the only one making an early morning run on Shinra HQ's coffee machines; he was further surprised by the identity of his fellow caffeine enthusiast.
"Pardon me, Mr. Mayor." Reeve greeted Thomas Domino warmly, though the elderly statesman's face remained downcast.
"Thanks for noticing me." sighed Mayor Domino.
"Something wrong with the coffee machines on the 62nd floor?"
"Now that you mention it, yes." Domino punctuated the comment with a long gulp from his mug.
"Well, hopefully, the building services people will have it repaired before long." Reeve struggled to maintain his upbeat mood in the face of Domino's dour aura.
"You'd certainly think so; I filed the repair request over a month ago."
"I could file another repair request for you as soon as I get back to my office?" Reeve awkwardly offered.
"That would be much appreciated, Director." Midgar's mayor said, stuffing his pockets with prepackaged creamers.
Reeve didn't have the heart to ask.
XXX XXX XXX
"This is unexpected..." Sephiroth noted in irritation as he gazed at the "closed" sign hanging outside Madame M's Massage Parlor.
A part of him was annoyed at himself for even being surprised; since he hadn't seen any staff during his visit with Aerith, it made sense that the place would be closed whenever its owner was sleeping. In another surprise that shouldn't have been, Madame M seemed to keep a sleeping schedule that was decidedly nocturnal in nature. He was definitely getting sloppy...
"I hate to say it, but if this means we get a chance to sleep before we have to take on Shinra HQ, there are worse things..." Tifa slumped against the parlor's facade, stifling a yawn.
Barret caught the look in Sephiroth's eye and spoke up. "Much as I'm lookin' forward to kickin' in Shinra's front door… I don't see where we've got much choice. Your contact ain't here, we're all tired enough to miss a step… hell, your kid brother's still putting himself back together. Ain't what we hoped for, but we gotta make the most of it."
"Don't worry about me; I'm ready to fight! I barely use that hand, anyway. Besides… I can't remember any stories where the brave hero pauses to grab a nap before rescuing the damsel in distress..." Kadaj seemed to be making a valiant effort to convince himself of his own words.
Looking out at the rest of Avalanche, Sephiroth could see the slight droop to their eyes, the small touches of lethargy in their actions. Not only that, but given how he'd only had two hours of genuine sleep since leaving to attack the Sector Five Reactor, Sephiroth knew that even he was starting to fall victim to a slowly building sense of fatigue. He'd chided Aerith about how important sleep was; now events seemed to have conspired to hand him a chance to get some on a gold platter.
There was nothing they could do right now other than try to get some rest before the next battle, so why did he feel like doing so would be betraying Aerith? It wasn't like he'd pushed himself to stay awake constantly in preparation for POW rescue operations during the war, after all. But then, no Shinra POW had ever faced the kind of treatment Hojo was going to give Aerith...
Sephiroth continued to kick the question around in his head, trying to audit his brain, make it tell him why exactly it had chosen to behave so strangely. Why did he feel compelled to ascend back into the hell from which he had been so eager to escape as a child? What did he think was going to happen in the next few hours, that made every passing minute feel like a failure?
It was objectively irrational. Dissected at a distance, his feelings about the lab, his overwhelming sense of revulsion, had been formed by over a decade of traumatic experience. Contemptible as Hojo was, the man was methodical, almost predictable. Nothing was going to happen in the next few hours that would justify his clenched fists, his pounding pulse, or the whispers of blood and fire, shattered glass and mangled chrome, that were flickering around the edges of his thoughts..
It was objectively irrational. It was unproductive. And clearly, it wasn't going anywhere as long as one of his people was in that lab.
Deprived of reasonable alternatives, Sephiroth resigned himself to the feeling. Even so, there was nothing to be gained by disturbing the troops.
"Yes Kadaj, it's safe to sleep for the moment. Though we'll want to do this in shifts, with one of us staying awake." If he could force himself to sleep, he would. If he couldn't… no need to let on. It'd only worry the others, anyway..
Barret and Kadaj joined them, and after a short discussion, it was soon decided that Sephiroth would take the first shift while the other three slept.
"So what are Ancients? Why is Aerith being one important?" Kadaj, alas, had other ideas.
On the other hand, it was his choice to forgo sleep, and Sephiroth was unlikely to wind up with this much free time on his hands for a while.
"Kadaj, you and I, and everyone else on this planet, we're humans. The SOLDIER treatments we were given in the womb and others were given as adolescents allow us to do things that other people can't, but we're still humans, albeit faster, stronger, tougher, more magically capable humans.
"Humans weren't the first intelligent beings to live on this planet, though. Before us, there was another race, known as the 'Ancients'."
"'Course they didn't call themselves 'Ancients' back then; they called themselves the 'Cetra'." Barret cut in.
Sephiroth was mildly surprised, both that Avalanche's leader had decided to forgo a chance at slumber and at how knowledgeable he was on the topic.
"That's correct. The Cetra came to this world from somewhere else, although we don't know where, how, or why.."
"If they'd flown here in the sort of spaceships Shinra used to work on in Rocket Town, we should have found their remains somewhere..." Barret said.
"Would you prefer to take over? My knowledge of the Cetra comes from a reliable source, but it is a few decades old." Sephiroth offered.
"Nah, I'm fine with hearing what you got to say on the topic. Everything I learned in college about the Ancients was the same stuff Shinra told to everybody getting a minor in Ancient Studies, so there's plenty of it that I don't trust."
"You went to college?" It seemed even Tifa wasn't quite ready to sleep yet.
"How about we focus on the Ancients for right now?" Barret grumbled.
"The Ancients were able to display one ability that no SOLDIER, not even me, has ever been able to replicate: an innate capacity to talk with the Planet itself," Sephiroth said.
"Which would explain how this girl was able to know when her foster father died; she's got a direct hotline to the Lifestream," Barret concluded.
Sephiroth inclined his head, "Which, in turn, brings us to why Shinra would want her so badly. Being able to talk to the Lifestream means that she has access to all the knowledge of everyone who came before. She could help Shinra recover secrets of dead scientists like Professor Gast Faremis…"
"Or pick the brains of their dead enemies. A Wutain general drops dead of a heart attack and Aerith might be able to find out enough to win a war before it even started! Then there's the Promised Land..." Barret said.
"Promised Land?" Sephiroth shook his head.."From what I'd read, the Promised Land was the final destination of the Cetra's journey from one planet to the next. It's another planet out in space, not somewhere on this world..."
"Well, that's not the way Shinra tells it these days. 'Unto her Promised Land shall we one day return. By her loving grace and providence may we take our place in paradise.' Far as I can tell, Shinra thinks it's some sorta land of mako and honey."
"Because those up top at Shinra know the truth, that sooner or later they'll run out of mako unless they find a new supply..." Puzzle pieces were falling into place in Sephiroth's head.
"Whichever reason it is, Shinra won't risk seriously hurting her, so that gives us a chance to break in and rescue her!"
None of them argued with Kadaj's conclusions.
XXX XXX XXX
Aerith blinked her eyes open and looked around.
She was in a strange transparent container that had to be roughly ten to fifteen wide. Her nose was filled with the cloying chemical smell of antiseptic. Everywhere she looked was either see-through glass or silvery metal support structure keeping her in.
Her hands were bound in shiny shackles connected by a series of interlocking chains to the floor itself; even if the transparent walls of her prison were opened, she still wouldn't be able to get very far.
That would have been bad enough on its own… but after a few moments, she realized something even worse.
She was alone.
For the first time in her life, she was alone.
No matter how hard Aerith tried to hear the voice of the Planet, she couldn't.
She was alone. So terribly, terribly, alone.
WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP!
The noise came from behind her; spinning to face it, she saw a familiar red-haired man in a blue suit, banging on the glass with an exaggerated, almost manic grin.
Aerith had never been so glad to see a Turk in all her life. She got as close to him as she could; the chains seemed to be exactly the right length so that she couldn't quite reach the edge of her prison.
"Welcome to Chateau de Shinra; my name is Reno, I will be your waiter. Here we serve only the finest of vending machine and commissary products. Or if my lady is of a more discriminating palate, food from the finest of five-star restaurants in Upper Midgar can be provided." He announced with a gracious bow.
"This is no time for jokes! You do realize that..." Aerith could already feel sparks of rage igniting at him making light of her imprisonment.
SLAP!
Reno firmly pressed a piece of paper flat against the side of Aerith's container. It was a menu.
"For your dining pleasure, I took time to highlight the most expensive items. This meal is, of course, completely on the house."
Aerith took a moment to examine the menu.
"I don't have a clue what most of these actually are, let alone how to pronounce them..." She admitted ruefully.
"Would you perhaps care for pasta al nero di malboro, or perhaps a zolom steak? I've heard people have been moved to tears by the taste, or at least by the bill."
Aerith was about to ask Reno exactly what a "zolom" was, when the room abruptly came alive.
She'd thought that the silence that she'd originally woken up to was bad, but this noise was worse. Over Reno's shoulder, she could see half a dozen different machines starting to move around, including a pair of large clamps that vaguely resembled arms.
Monitor after monitor sprung to life, and they each displayed the exact same gaunt face that bore faint touches of five o'clock shadow, and glasses that seemed to have been designed for the express purpose of making it impossible to see the eyes behind them.
It was a face that Aerith had seen in her nightmares for over a decade.
Professor Hojo gazed out at Aerith from countless security monitors. Being the subject of his gaze once was already twice more than she felt comfortable with… and now there was a score of bespectacled eyes focusing in on her.
"Good morning, Professor Hojo!" Reno greeted the head of Shinra's Science and Research Department with his traditional laid-back air of "you might be able to kill me, fire me or cut my pay, but you'll never make me take this job seriously."
"Reno, what are you doing here?" Hojo demanded.
"Hey, that's Vice Turk Commander Reno, to you!"
There was exactly one thing standing between Aerith and having the full attention of Professor Hojo; timidity would win her nothing.
"Reno, you got promoted? When did this happen?" Aerith gushed as if she and the Turk were alone in the room.
Reno, for his part, played along, turning his vastly more welcome gaze back to her.
"That's right, Commander of Vice; Shinra knows talent when they see it! I'm surprised I didn't mention it to you sooner; we really don't talk often enough. I was gonna brag about it back in the church, but something must have made it slip my mind." Reno rambled on with the practiced ease of a man who could hold a conversationwith gun pressed to forehead, regardless of whose forehead and whose gun were involved.
"My laboratory is no place for idle chit chat!" Hojo hissed through the speaker arrays.
"Vice Commander Reno, you will either explain your presence now, or you will explain it later to President Shinra himself!"
Reno turned around again, fished in his uniform, and pulled out a thick stack of documents.
"Professor Hojo, do you know what the acronym TTD stands for? I ask in a technical sense of course; in my off hours, it stands for 'There's The Door', an expression any number of women, bartenders, bookies, and informants have found useful. And please, call me Reno."
"Why don't you enlighten me..." As Hojo spoke, a mechanical arm moved closer, looking like it would love to close around Reno and crush the life out of him.
"You don't know? The Science and Research Department seriously is falling behind in its paperwork. It stands for 'Tested To Destruction'; in theory, it's something that is only supposed to happen on purpose. Now, I don't have to tell a great scientist like you that theory and reality are, alas, not always in perfect agreement. In my position as a member of The Shinra Mako and Electric Power Company's Auditing Department, I recently discovered that the subjects you take a personal interest in are 70% more likely to wind up being reported as 'TTD' when all is said and done.
Since you manufacture most of those subjects yourself, it's hardly my place to raise a fuss if a pile of dead octo-parrots gets shoved into the incinerator every so often. But this one though, this Ancient is different..." As Reno spoke, he turned around and tapped on Aerith's container once more.
"Because of the flaws in your security procedures, her mother was mortally wounded while escaping and this Ancient successfully vanished into Lower Midgar for over a decade. If something happens to her, do you have any spare Ancients laying around?" Reno began to do a faux inspection of the lab, his movements mockingly exaggerated.
"As you pointed out, that was over a decade ago; I have had more than enough time to redesign my security procedures to make sure she will not escape!"
"You say that, but I can't help but notice you're not in the room right now. If you were truly certain that this lab was one hundred percent escape-proof, I imagine you'd be here in person.
So, additional steps must be taken to insure that Shinra's newest Ancient remains hale, healthy, and properly confined. That is why the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department generously offered our services, and in turn, President Shinra wisely accepted our offer.
It seems he feels that the company can always find a new head scientist, but… not to belabor the point, has only the one Ancient." Reno knocked on Aerith's container yet again, either for emphasis or luck.
Professor Hojo was using some extremely high-quality monitors; Aerith could tell because she was able to see the rage building upon his face with every word Reno spoke.
"You… you… I have a task for you, Reno. A very important task." Hojo eventually managed to seethe out through gritted teeth.
"I will have my rank from you, sir! That's 'Assistant Director Reno, if you please!" Reno's facade of theatrical indignation didn't so much as waver in the face of Hojo's sputtering rage.
"Vice commander, assistant director, whatever you are, I still outrank you! Vice President Shinra's newest bodyguard just completed his final treatments and is now ready to serve. He's currently waiting in the Senior Employee Lounge; I want you to make sure that he is familiarized with this building. You should be aware that he had an… adverse reaction to some of our earlier procedures, so he is not to be brought into my laboratory for ANY reason."
Reno sat down in front of Aerith's containment pod and pulled out his phone.
"As flattered as I am by hearing you think I'm the only man capable of briefing the Vice President's bodyguard, allow me to introduce you to this thing we in, or at least vaguely associated with the military, call the chain of command. It is not, as many civilians guess, simply a chain that someone gets beaten with until they agree the person holding said chain is in command…."
Reno proceeded to deliver a monologue so rambling that it should have come with a map and so long that it deserved an intermission.
The abridged version of it was that, while Professor Hojo might outrank Reno, he was nonetheless not in a position to actually give him orders. Thus, until he received a message from someone who was, he planned to make himself at home in Hojo's lab.
While Reno was expounding at length, Hojo pulled out his phone and began to mash buttons on it with a ferocity that made Aerith wonder if he might end up cracking its screen. Eventually, there was a soft chime from Reno's phone, and he picked it up.
"Huh, would you look at that? General Gyah-Hah-Hah himself has orders for me, cosigned by our beloved President no less. Guess I had better get to work." He sighed, sounding a great deal less upset about the news than Aerith felt.
She could only sit there and watch as her knight in a rumpled suit sauntered out of the door, leaving her completely alone with Professor Hojo.
Aerith clenched her fists and steeled her nerves; she would not surrender to despair, not yet.
"Don't forget to order me a zolom steak!" she called out after him.
"Sure thing, sis!" Reno promised as he crossed the threshold of Hojo's lab.
She heard the sound of one hand slapping joyfully against another.
Less than five seconds after a Turk in a rumpled suit left Hojo's lab, a Turk in an immaculately clean one entered it.
Rude walked up to Aerith's container and rapped a hand against it, almost perfectly mirroring the behavior Reno had displayed before.
"Fail safe or fail secure?" Rude inquired in his normal stoic tone.
"What are you talking about?"
"This containment pod. Does it fail safe or fail secure?"
"What does it matter? This is Shinra HQ! We get priority power from all eight reactors and… other backup systems! There is NO CHANCE of us losing power!" Hojo scoffed.
"Six reactors. Fail safe or fail secure?"
Hojo glared at Rude.
Rude just stood there, one set of eyes hidden behind lenses trying to pierce an equally concealed pair.
"Fail secure." Hojo finally conceded.
Rude's eyebrows shot upwards in an expression of, perhaps not quite genuine, shock so great that even his sunglasses couldn't hide it.
"Fail... secure?" He repeated the words as if doubting he'd heard them correctly.
"Section 5 Paragraph 3 of the Shinra company policy relating to the containment of high value living assets." As Rude spoke, he pulled out his phone and started typing away on it.
A moment later, there was a soft "bing" from his device and a veritable cascade chimes resulting from Hojo's phone receiving a message with the telltale tone being broadcast through multiple screens.
Hojo pulled out his phone, started reading, then lowered the device, his scowl deepening.
"You can't be serious." He huffed.
"Company policy. The Ancient should be kept in a manner of containment rated 'fail safe' in case of an accident. Do you have a fail safe container?"
"Of course I don't! Do you realize how dangerous most of the specimens I deal with are? How dangerous this one could be if she broke free? Keeping them in a fail safe containment system would be inviting disaster!"
"I thought there was no chance of this building losing power?"
XXX XXX XXX
With a wide smile on his face, Reno tapped out a message on his phone as he strolled through the halls of Shinra HQ.
"Boss, U R on deck."
If Hojo wanted to play bureaucratic hardball or start making backroom promises to the other department heads to get the Turks off his back, well, more power to him.
The Professor would be personally shining Heidegger's medals by the time that he managed to get Rude out of his greasy hair, and all he'd accomplish was bringing Tseng up to the plate.
Tseng was impossibly good at being a Turk and normally kept what felt like an impossibly tight leash on his subordinates… which was why Reno was really enjoying seeing what happened now that Commander Wet Blanket had finally decided to join in the fun.
Reno's behavior typically amounted to a dozen tiny acts of disrespect but this, this made him feel like a rank amateur. There was nothing slapdash or spur of the moment about Tseng's cross-departmental sabotage. Boss had put the word out that Hojo wasn't going to get a moment alone with their favorite florist until President Shinra himself came down on the "Aerith Protection Squad", so that was exactly what would happen.
The trick to keeping the entire thing running was that Reno should offload whatever task he was given in less time than it took Hojo to come up with and gain permission to assign a task to Rude. Complicating that plan was when he entered the Senior Employee Lounge, there was no sign of Vice President Shinra's new bodyguard.
The only other occupant of the room was a freaky-looking dog.
Not that he hadn't seen weird dogs inside Shinra HQ before, of course. The Science Department's work in the field of canine steroids had yielded some truly impressive results; as long as you didn't care about a few "minor" side effects, like how the ones who didn't die in battle inevitably keeled over from heart attacks within two years of starting their treatments.
Luckily, Reno had spent most of his life learning how not to care about the suffering of Shinra's other human employees, so ignoring the plight of animals came fairly easily to him.
Still, even compared to Shinra's other combat and security breeds, this one was a freak among freaks. It was about half again as large as most of those dogs, was practically fur-less, and its entire body was crisscrossed with visibly glowing blue veins, while its eyes looked more bloodshot than Reno's after a hard night of drinking. Its tail was just a small misshapen nub, but it made up for that lack with a tentacle roughly twice the length of its body growing from its back.
Around its neck was a massive spiked collar, and its body was draped in more chains than Reno would expect to see anywhere other than an S&M parlor… or bike shop.
The dog took one look at Reno and huffed in derision, which to be fair, was the greeting Reno got from a lot of people. Still, the Turk had better things to do than spend all day waiting for some new big-shot bodyguard to show up.
"I've made it to the Senior Employee Lounge, but there's no sign of Rufus' new bodyguard, just his pet, and it looks like one mean son of a bitch." He reported through his radio.
If he had to do Hojo's bidding, then at least it gave him an excuse to frequently report back in and distract the professor.
"Dark Nation IS Vice President Rufus' new bodyguard, you simpleton! Also, he does not like to be referred to as an 'it'. He is more intelligent, more obedient, better paid, and has a higher security clearance than you!"
"Huh, 'he' it is then." Reno had questions about being paid less than a dog, but that was no excuse for misgendering his coworkers.
Besides, far be it for him to insult a guy with teeth that big.
XXX XXX XXX
"Good afternoon, Madam M." Sephiroth greeted the masseuse as she returned to open her shop.
"You're here about the favor, aren't you? Keep in mind it was one." She noted,sizing up his companions.
"I haven't forgotten; one will be enough. I want you to show us how Don Corneo keeps in touch with Shinra."
"What makes you think he has some kind of secret channel to contact Shinra?"
"The part where he admitted to working with them!" Kadaj answered without a moment's hesitation.
Madame M's fan snapped shut.
"It's funny… you think I would have gotten tired of covering for his fat ass sooner. That said, there's no way we can access the 'channel' without everyone in Don Corneo Mansion being aware of it so…"
XXX XXX XXX
CRASH!
AAAAAAAHHHHH!
CRASH!
WOOAAAAAAH!
CRASH
UAAAAAA!
"Hi Leslie, my older brother's having a defenestration special; are you interested?"
"I think I'll just see myself out..."
"Cool, cool. Hey, by the way, have you ever had a guy in a black robe beg you for a 'reunion' before? Do they do that to everyone with silver hair, or just me?"
XXX XXX XXX
It didn't take the four of them that long to run out of people who objected to their presence, though surprisingly, there was no sign of the mansion's owner himself. It seemed that Avalanche's previous infiltration of the place had sent him fleeing to someplace more secure, less obvious, or both.
"This is how Don Corneo kept in touch with Shinra without anyone realizing it or creating any sort of digital footprint." Madam M explained, gesturing to a long thin pole strewn with wires.
"It's a utility pole. The doctors taught me about them because they need to be protected. Mako reactors churn… I mean drain, the Lifestream to make electrical power, but they're all in Upper Midgar; poles like this one are needed to bring the electricity down into Lower Midgar." Kadaj helpfully piped up.
"That may be what it looks like… but they cut the power flow to this one; Shinra personnel can climb down this pole in the dead of night without anyone noticing them."
"Or we can climb up it." Tifa was smiling, but she didn't quite look happy, it was more like… hungry?
"Damn right, looks we just found ourselves our golden shiny utility pole of hope!"
"Do you need me to help carry, or at least support you?" Kadaj couldn't keep his tongue from running away with him.
"What?" Barret's gaze turned toward Kadaj, and he found himself taking a slow step back.
"It's just; it's a long way up, a really long way up. You've sorta-kinda, only..." Kadaj really wished he had a better understanding of how and why Barret had ended up with a gun for an arm so as to avoid insulting him. "Carrying you would be a bad idea, then I'd just be hauling your entire body myself with only one arm, instead of you hauling yourself with only one arm. So maybe if instead, I worked one arm around your chest, then I could climb with one arm while you climbed with the other, and we'd both help the other climb..."
Barret looked Kadaj up from his feet to his hair, after that he looked Kadaj from hair back down to his feet. Then Avalanche's leader threw his head back and laughed heartily.
"Kid you've got some real heart, but trust me: that sort of tandem climbing would be trickier than me trying to do it on my own."
"Since I ended up getting dragged all over this Sector recently, I'm fairly certain I know where we could purchase some climbing gear. All of you can tether yourselves to me." Sephiorth offered.
XXX XXX XXX
President Shinra glowered at the three men before him.
"So, which of you is responsible for the failure of Operation Damocles?" He let the question hang in the air as he shifted his focus from General Robert Heidegger to Turk Commander Tseng and finally to Urban Development Department Director Reeve Tuesti.
"Mr. President, Operation Damocles called for the agents of the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department to be the ones to trigger the Plate's release. What was that department's director doing during the operation though? He was joyriding around Lower Midgar instead of properly leading his troops!" Heidegger scoffed.
To his credit, Tseng did not shy from President Shinra's accusing glare.
"Mr. President, what some might call 'joyriding' was, in reality, me completing a task that has daunted Shinra for over a decade. Unlike General Heidegger, who chose to physically remain in Shinra HQ, I was observing the operation unfold personally from my command helicopter in Sector Seven. Before the situation became critical enough for me to get personally involved, I caught sight of our missing Ancient and realized that this was our chance to finally have her willingly return to Shinra HQ.
Since the threat Avalanche poses is currently confined to Midgar, I concluded that their destruction was less important than securing the Ancient, especially since to do nothing was to risk her death when the Plate fell. She is currently in the custody of the Science and Research Division, and with her cooperation, Shinra can finally move forward with your plans for Neo-Midgar.
As for the failure of my department to activate the Plate Release System, debriefings have revealed that it wouldn't have made the slightest difference if I took part in the battle. My agents achieved their objective of gaining physical access to the system, only to discover it was currently down for maintenance. Said maintenance, conducted by the Urban Development Department, doomed Operation Damocles to failure before it even started."
President Shinra's eyes now focused their wrath on his third subordinate. Reeve proved to be made of sterner stuff than he would have expected, though.
"During the planning stages of Operation Damocles, I raised the possibility of some sort of localized evacuation or emergency announcement to reduce civilian casualties. Mr. President, you told me to my face that any such actions were unacceptable as they might give away the element of surprise, and that I was to do nothing in regards to Sector Seven until after the operation had been completed; I was to act as if Sector Seven had already ceased to exist.
"I followed those orders.
"Because I had ceased to review data related to Sector Seven, I didn't realize that weeks ago I'd already scheduled a system update to the Sector Seven Plate monitoring system to take place at a time that would overlap with Operation Damocles. Even if I had been aware of it beforehand, what could I have done? If I suddenly changed a previously scheduled update at the last moment, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of atypical behavior you wanted me to avoid?"
"You could have informed the rest of us, and we could have rescheduled Operation Damocles." President Shinra gave the obvious answer.
"In retrospect, yes, but as I said, because I was following your command to completely disregard all matters concerning Sector Seven, it ended up falling through the cracks. Of course, while I'm no military man, from what I heard, if the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department's agents had been able to maintain physical access to the system, they could have simply waited for the update to finish. Am I mistaken, Director Tseng?" President Shinra was mildly impressed by how innocent, bordering on naive, Reeve could sound as he sunk the knife into Tseng's back.
"Mr. President, as you are no doubt aware, the group known as Avalanche was first founded six years ago in February of 2001, with their first action being an attempt to sabotage the Sector Eight Reactor. To combat them, the Investigation Sector of the General Affairs Department had access to nearly a dozen field agents, myself included.
For reasons that are not mine to gainsay, our budget has been steadily decreased over the last few years, our losses unreplaced, to the point that I now only have a pair of field agents. On top of that, Avalanche has proven itself to be more ideology than organization. Every member of its first iteration is either dead or so thoroughly gone to ground that we've been unable to find any trace of them… and yet here we are... fighting Avalanche.
Additionally, while the first iteration had access to 'Ravens' who were physically similar to SOLDIERs but mentally far inferior, this iteration seems to be able to field genuine SOLDIERs, including Sephiroth himself. There was also what one of my agents described as a 'mini-Sephiroth', for lack of more precise terminology.
Faced with such opposition, my department is dangerously understaffed; the fact that Reno and Rude were able to obtain physical access to the Plate Release System at all is a testament to their skill, dedication, and professionalism."
President Shinra looked right into Tseng's eyes. Tseng allowed his own eyes to tilt downwards slightly, showing submission without the guilt implicit in looking away.
"I've heard enough, for now. You three are all dismissed; be aware that there will be even more thorough reviews of Operation Damocles' failure in the future."
XXX XXX XXX
"And this is the General Affairs Auditing Department Lounge… You will probably be down here a lot- to watch your boss yell at me for failing to do my job the way he wants it done, to watch him pin medals on me accomplishing the impossible, and then one last time to rip my throat out because I've decided to go out in a blaze of spiteful glory. Just make sure you're in top form for that third one, because you wouldn't be the first mongrel I've killed with a broken bottle." Reno explained jovially.
He'd taken Dark Nation on a tour of Shinra HQ to all the important places, or at least nearly all the important places. He hadn't taken the Vice President's new bodyguard to the Urban Development Department because, after hearing rumors of how its director had come into work looking like a man who had spent an entire month in Wall Market with an unlimited expense account and met several women of surpassing beauty and negotiable affection, Reno simply didn't have the heart to ruin Reeve's rare good mood.
"Sadly, Heidegger's orders said I had to keep eyes on you until Rufus arrives later tonight, so here's what will happen; I'm going to close this door and relax by watching some TV. I'll finish your employee orientation with an important lesson that Tseng taught me the first time I came into the office: if you shit on the floor you have to clean it up yourself." Those words of ancient wisdom properly imparted, Reno collapsed onto the couch with the air of an Olympic diver and the grace of a dead fish.
As he started to flip through countless channels wondering how it was possible to have so many options and yet nothing worth watching, he heard an irritated growl.
"What's that Dark Nation? Timmy fell down the well?"
The oversized canine jabbed his tentacle at the chessboard sitting on Tseng's desk; as per usual it depicted a match that they'd started but been too busy to finish.
Reno just rolled his eyes in exasperation.
"What, playing fetch too lowbrow for you? If you promise not to drool on it, we could even use my nightstick."
Dark Nation just gestured emphatically with his tentacle one more.
"Nothing doing. Give me one good reason why I should…"
Before he could finish the sentence, Dark Nation began to shift about awkwardly and scratch at his neck, causing a bag that must have been hidden behind the chains to come free and drop to the floor.
There was the telltale "clink" of gil coins and Reno's eyes widened.
When he noticed the denomination on those gil coins, they got wider still.
"Well, damn. And here I thought Hojo was just tryin' to piss me off!"
He wasn't sure why exactly someone at Shinra had decided it was necessary to pay quite that much money to a dog, but on the other hand, there had probably been days when people had pondered the exact same questions about Reno.
"You want to… play chess.. for money." Reno slowly put the pieces together.
The prospect of gambling drew the Turk's attention far more than being told that there was a child in desperate need of rescuing from a borehole. Still, Reno was nobody's pigeon.
"First we'd get in a lot of trouble with the Boss if we touched his chess set, even if I grabbed a picture of the board on my PHS before we started playing. Secondly, as the challenged party I believe that it's only fair that I get to decide the weapons."
XXX XXX XXX
"A flush beats a straight despite them both involving five cards, and both of those lose to a full house. Got all that?"
Dark Nation nodded eagerly.
"Good, now since I doubt you can hold five cards at the same time with that weird thing growing out of your back, we'll stick to Corel Holdem, it works like this..."
Reno fed his lucky deck of cards into an automatic shuffler that Tseng had insisted the Turks use to keep his subordinate from palming cards, then scooped one card off of the deck, placing it face down between them, before dealing two cards to his opponent and another pair for himself.
It was time for the Turk to make like Dark Nation had just jumped in a mud puddle… and take him to the cleaners!
End Chapter
AN: My editor/co-author Fenrir, was kind enough to point out that Kadaj's canonical "knife fighting", grip on Souba that he uses in Advent Children is a profoundly stupid fighting style in a one-on-one duel, especially against another southpaw, which Reno just happens to be. Also, if you've never read the Princess Bride or gotten more hands-on experience; if you curl your fingers around your thumb when you make a fist, you'll inevitably risk breaking your own thumb when you punch someone.
Finally to those who are wondering, I'm as surprised to find out as you are that the "Gast" in "Professor Gast", was his first name, but Gast Faremis is his quasi-canonical name so I'm using it, much like Brian Lockhart..