Preamble:
This chapter grew out of what might've just been one transition scene, ironically into the longest yet. Still, I thought it was an idea worth expanded on, and given how important Kalm is, it probably ought to feature more prominently. Hopefully it's still entertaining.
Directory. Not necessarily by choice, Yuffie found herself listening to the radio, in the form of a pair of unpleasantly slow, unpleasantly relaxed but still distorted voices coming over the speakers at the front and back of the bus she was riding.
Nowadays more often than not, radios were tuned to news broadcasts, including those of T.N.N.'s radio affiliates. Apparently the Shinra Corporation or some company they owned had been responsible for practically all music broadcasts, at least in the Eastern Continent. Yuffie found "the news" tremendously boring and disliked that, though there was something uniquely unpleasant and annoying about news over radio. I hope it's not the format. I might not be cut out for this work.
"So you're talking about splitting the atom? Have you ever read 'A World That is Free'?"
The other voice laughed. "You know I have, and yes, exactly that. Goodman popularized the notion among the public, energy derived from radioactivity, though he didn't event it. He was a science fiction author, not a scientist. But we're living in a science fiction age, aren't we?"
"I'll have to take your word for it, but what does that have to do with the Junon Navy?"
The bus hit a pothole or something similar in the road, and with the bounce the antenna must've been knocked free because the signal turned intelligible. Yuffie sighed.
Junon. The biggest city in the world, swelled three years ago by refugees from Midgar even before Meteorfall. Even refugees from AVALANCHE's bombing campaign. Now they had an army, a navy, and an air force, all bearing that name. And they were pro-Shinra. Yuffie wondered which part of that was most problematic.
Even if I find what I'm looking for in Kalm, I'm going to end up in Junon. They might as well have come out and said that.
Though she could've rode in herself, she'd boarded at one of the bus stops along the old highway outside Healen. It'd be a more discreet way to slip into Kalm, if there was someone expecting her.
Through the closed window, looking past the rows of tiny country cottages and farming plots, the ancient city walls of Kalm came to view, the city's flags wafting in the summer breeze: a brownish rectangle with a white outline and a heraldic circle in the middle. Looking over at her luggage, she opened the TC-5500's leather case and fished out the small metal microphone that she had finally gotten working, its stand folded out of the way, and held it in front of her mouth before pushing the power and recording switches.
[START]
Kisaragi: According to W.R.O. investigation into archives in Midgar, Kalm—technically Old Kalm—was destroyed by the Army Group Midgar, so obviously, Shinra. The Elm District became New Kalm, and then eventually just Kalm in the cover-up. [PAUSE] But here's where it gets interesting: those same archives suggest the Midgar Army made a mistake, and that most of the army was dissolved, whatever that means, and replaced by the army that stayed in Midgar until Meteorfall. The reason for this mistake, or who Shinra was fighting, isn't known. I was able to cross-reference it with a different file, that mentioned one name: Veld. [PAUSE] Today, the government is the Electorate of Kalm which, as far as I can tell, is basically the same thing as the Edge City Committee.
Nearby Passenger: [UNINTELLIGIBLE COMPLAINT]
K: Yeah, well, no one asked you, so beat it! [PAUSE] Rufus Shin…well, Rufus came here after Meteorfall, along with hundreds of other refugees who couldn't make it to Junon. This is where Geostigma was first identified, when it was called the Kalm Fever. The story is that after he grew tired of the death threats from the Kalmish, Rufus bankrolled the construction of Edge the company left the city, never to return.
[STOP]
Pressing the stop button and giving a final unfriendly stare in the direction of the complaining passenger, Yuffie looked back in time to see the bus cross through the open city gates into the ancient castle town. It was hard to believe that something even older had apparently been destroyed, at least mostly, by Shinra. Despite that, the Kalmish used to be relatively pro-Shinra, since without Midgar there'd be no work or even electricity in Kalm. Everything went back to the city. Then Midgar and the Shinra brought Geostigma to the city, back when people thought it was communicable. After that, they blamed Mako Reactors for it, even though the nearest Mako Reactors were hundreds of kilometers away, destroyed with the rest of Midgar. Then after Geostigma was cured, the Deepground struck, and they blamed Shinra for that too.
She felt her lip twist. The residents of Kalm might not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, though they might've been right about Deepground at least. "So, why would someone who was high-up in Shinra's military chose here to retire?" she asked under her breath.
It was a nice enough place. The thing about Kalm, no matter what seemed to happen to it, Kalm always managed to bounce back. Though the residents of Edge resented the suggestion that the refugee crisis and appearance of Geostigma held much comparison to the actual destruction of Midgar.
The bus dropped her off at terminal pressed up against the city walls, where the next order of business was to wait in line and present one's papers to a small kiosk by the exit. Of course, before Meteorfall, no one had ever heard of immigration documentation. You just showed up somewhere and hoped they let you in, if they stopped you at all. Now, every city in the Eastern Continent except Edge and Junon had rigorous immigration controls run by the W.R.O., the consequence of the refugee crisis and the destruction of the world's largest city.
"Next!" a voice shouted over a loudspeaker.
Adjacent to the bus terminal was a customers and immigration kiosk, operated by the associated bureau within the W.R.O.—what that meant for public was an armed official in W.R.O. grey fatigues with a red beret scowling at them to meet often-changing paperwork requirements.
Yuffie didn't care for either paperwork, nor waiting in line, and shoved her way to the front of the queue just as the clerk was shouting "Papers, please!" The clerk was about to bark a rebuke at both her and the surprised man at the front of the line when she flashed a laminated badge on a lanyard.
The clerk's expression changed immediately. "M-Miss Yuffie Kisaragi! We weren't expecting you! Let me find my superior officer…"
Propping herself up on the rail in the front of the line, she gave a shrug. "Cool it. This isn't an inspection. Not that the people behind me look very satisfied."
The clerk sputtered for a few more seconds before allowing her through the immigration checkpoint undisturbed, exempting her from the luggage check. Through the gateway: Kalm, the oldest surviving city in the East, the bedroom community of the former city of Midgar and now Edge's primary trading partner. The city that would've lynched Rufus Shinra if given the opportunity. The last member of the Federation of Midgar in its Great Patriotic War against the Wutai Empire.
"I hate history," she muttered to no one in particular. She hoped her contact in the Kalm didn't, or this was going to be a tedious task.
Since Meteorfall, Kalm boasted probably the best-kept public library across the continent, though Junon claimed its restored State Library would rival it at some point in the future. It had fallen into decay and disuse in Shinra's time, during an unfinished project to digitize it through the Worldwide Network as had been completed with every library of note on Junon. With the W.R.O.'s seizure of the Network, the plan should've continued one day, Yuffie thought. In the meantime, Reeve had strongly advocated for the preservation of the physical library, and understandably got his way.
For Kalm, there was a catch. The W.R.O. had reviewed all of the library's staff, and within a year, most of its mid-level staff were W.R.O. employees. The cynical saw this arrangement as suspicious, and they were right.
In the wake of the Deepground abductions, Reeve brought back one of his point-men from Edge. August Fitzroy was an illegitimate but traceable descendent of the last Duke of Kalm and the ruling House of Kronen. You wouldn't realize it by looking at him that, in another time, he might've been an aristocratic princeling: in his mid-twenties, he was hardnosed and never unserious, eager to learn, and absorbed information like a sponge. The Kalm Library was almost as good a place for him as Edge's underground intelligence community. She even thought, maybe, he would've made a good Turk, if he hadn't hated Shinra at the time.
"Hey Auggy, how's tricks?"
She found August in deep inside the shelves at the Kalm Library, sleeved rolled back and his blazer in one clenched fist, looking more like the midlevel mob enforcer he'd actually been before Meteorfall than a librarian. He tossed his blazer aside and took her hand to shake.
"Yuffie Kisaragi. Right on time, for once."
"A punctual mobster. Or are most mobsters punctual?" She flashed her wide grin at him. August, thin and pale but still muscular under his clothing, with fading brown hair tied in a rattail, ignored her remark in stride. It was all in good humor—August had hated the Midgar Slums Mob almost as much as he'd hated the Shinra Corporation, but it hadn't stopped him from being one of the best factfinders in the business.
"No, just me," he told her, almost smiling, as he released her hand. "What's the hell's that? A dialysis machine?"
Yuffie glanced at her TC-5500 in its carrying case and back at him. "What's everyone's obsession with my luggage? It's a big tape recorder."
"That's putting it mildly." August shrugged, as if to drop the subject. "So, how long has it been? You haven't been back since the kidnapping, have you?"
"I've been busy," she assured him, taking a seat at the empty table behind the selves. Conveniently, August seemed to have cleared this entire branch of the library out by one means or another, giving them privacy. The offspring of royalty could even violate Kalm's prohibition against indoor smoking, as he promptly demonstrated after sitting down opposite of him.
"Of that I have no doubt," he assured her. "How's Edge?"
"Still pretty miserable," she confessed. "But if Reeve says it's getting better…"
"Then it probably is." August was playing with a gold-plated cigarette lighter, opening and closing it, a nervous habit he'd picked up in from his teenage mob days. Yuffie leaned back in her chair and cocked her head. So, is he going to ask me if I met with Rufus Shinra? Or is that beyond even his abilities.
"So…" August began slowly. "I hope you're not here to tell me I'm being reassigned."
Yuffie let her eyes widen in surprise. What that what he thought she'd come here for? To deliver transfer orders? Though August officially worked for the Kalm Library and secretly-officially for the W.R.O., his duties did put him in the purview of Yuffie's intelligence gathering division. She studied his face: he looked even more serious than he usually did, creases on his forehead.
"No. God no. I mean, no offense August, but what good would you do in Edge compared to here in Kalm? Fact-finding guys like you are a dime a dozen in the city," she assured him quickly.
A weight seemed to be visibly lifted off his boney, muscular shoulders. "That's good. That's really good, thank you."
She frowned. "Edge isn't that bad. You know they've cleaned up since Bahamut. Shinra even rebuilt their Meteorfall Monument."
"You mean the Meteor Monument?"
"Yeah that." The monument, supposedly ordered by Rufus Shinra in person, was officially called the Midgar Meteorfall Monument, as indicated by the text inscription on the dais. Many understandably saw it as a silent testament of the corporation's authority in the city built from Midgar's ruins, though Rufus had never publicly said so much. After its controversial completion, somehow the belief spread that Shinra had built a monument to Meteor and its awesome destructive power and not a memorial to Meteorfall and its victims. In Yuffie's formal opinion to Reeve, she concluded it originated from the same group of people who believed Shinra, and not Sephiroth, had summoned Meteor. Yeah, let's rehash the stupidest political debate in the world. Why not?
August still seemed relieved. "That's good. Really good," he repeated. "I mean, you've known about me and Kalm, my family."
Yuffie gave an overdramatic nod, implying that he didn't need to retell the embarrassing story of the illegitimate issue of the Grand Duke of Kalm, the resulting rival family branch that now represented the only known examples of surviving royal blond since the Grand Duchy's collapse. Yuffie disliked August's stories—not because he wasn't a good storyteller, he was, but because everything always seemed to come back to him. And she'd heard his tale about how the Don Asoledo, the crime boss of the Sector 4 Slums, barely held on in the face of Don Corneo's onslaught before the later's death in Wutai—with August's brilliance and cunning, of course.
August's mood seemed to improve nonetheless. "Then why come to Kalm? Surely you're needed in Edge, planning for the Junon Operation."
Oh right, that. Yuffie held her tongue and laughed. "Never mind Junon. There's something I needed to handle personally." She leaned towards him and gestured at him to the do the same; August gave a wary look and craned his head over. "The Kalm Directory still works, right?"
Despite his best efforts, the corner of August's mouth curled up and he gave a very controlled nod.
"I need to find someone. I don't have a name, but I do have his job history: Captain of Shinra's Presidential Guard in Midgar."
There was a glimmer in his grey-brown eyes. "And you think he's in Kalm."
"Or at least he was."
He gave a less controlled nod. "Then you came to the right place, ma'am."
The castle-like architecture of the Kalm Library included a castle-like basement underneath it, accessible through locked stairways and a dungeon-like passage. With poor lighting and air circulation in her opinion, it mostly served as storage for uncirculated volumes and unused furniture, but also housed what passed as offices for August and his tough-looking colleagues. And, crucially, the Kalm Directory.
"Right through here," he explained more loudly than before, passing a pair of library employees who gave Yuffie a courteous bow as she passed by. "It's taken a lot of work, but we've kept our promise to HQ. The Kalm Directory."
The Directory wasn't much to look at: six mostly-working surplus office computers that, like every machine that wasn't located in W.R.O. Headquarters, had clearly been taken from Midgar City before its destruction, linked together on a long table. Like tree roots, their cables ran haphazardly along the floor to a large server tower, also bearing scars from Midgar but still with working LEDs that blinked periodically. Despite Shelke's best efforts, Yuffie didn't really 'get' computers. But the claim was that the Kalm Directory was the most comprehensive, most accurate residency database in the world since Meteorfall, and possibly before. Another library employee circled around the desk, turning the computer 'terminals' on one by one, the room filling with the sound of spinning fans and hard disks.
She leaned at August. "Back in my AVALANCHE days, Tifa told me about how one of the earlier members hacked the Midgar Railway's security scanner and database, so that they could use Shinra's trains to travel to the Mako Reactors on the Sector Plates. They knew how it worked—even Shinra couldn't register every single soul in Midgar, and most people in the slums didn't have residency status. Some didn't even have work permits. So Shinra basically just tried to find things that stood out. Even then, she couldn't figure out how to beat the system every time," she explained.
August nodded. "Well, not to take Shinra's point of view, but it is easier when you're only dealing with thousands of people and not millions," he offered humbly. "Come on, I can show you while we're using it."
August pulled up a rolling office chair and sat down at a terminal, opposite of another employee whose screen she couldn't see. August's was flickering but seemed dominated by a black window with a flashing cursor at the end of a few words. "Per our mandate by Reeve Tuesti, after the mass kidnappings by Deepground we built a complete residency database for the whole of Kalm, first to reunite families and then to protect them afterwards. We integrated this into both the local immigration desk and similar offices across the continent via the Worldwide Network."
"I guess Shinra left us something useful," the other employee joked. August laughed.
"We have access to the Kalm government's own residency records, and with that we can get an idea of dates of birth, marriage, even educational and vocational background." August seemed to enter his user name and password, because the display showed a crudely rendered lock opening before opening up another dialog box, this one with a list of options. "It's not infallible, we know that. But it's the best system of its kind in the world."
Nice pitch. "Well, let's hope he's in Kalm then."
"You said you didn't know his name—but he was captain of the President Shinra's bodyguard in Shinra. I doubt that's something he'd have written on his residency paperwork, but it does mean he wasn't in SOLDIER or the Turks or the military police. He was in the Midgar Army, probably an officer."
"And you can work with that?"
"It's start. Having served in the Midgar Army isn't something you'd advertise in Kalm, especially not after those vets were killed in the fires last year, but there are other ways to use the data. So if someone lies and says they worked in construction or the railway or the fire brigades, we can see through that."
"How?"
"A few different ways. Like pension checks."
Yuffie looked dumbfounded. "Wait, Shinra is still paying pensions?"
"They are in Kalm, anyway. Railway pensions ended 'bout year after Meteorfall, unfortunately for them. But Military Police and army pensions are still honored." August's fingers moved back and forth over the loud, clicky keyboard faster than Yuffie could've managed herself. "All direct deposit, all by mail. Officially, no one in Kalm has access to payment transfers over the Network except the city government."
"So you're able to track everyone sent a pension check in the mail. Can you tell the difference?"
"Now we can. Military Police pensions are bimonthly, Midgar Army pensions are monthly."
"You're joking."
"Sometimes it's that easy." With particular flourish, August struck the key marked 'RETURN' and the server tower in the corner made a new, audible whirling noise. The terminal's screen flashed a few times, then line after line of text appeared in the window, each one starting with a residency number and a recorded name.
"And this is…?"
"Every resident of Kalm identified as having received as Shinra pension in the post since the system went online."
"That's…incredible!"
"And it's automatically updated with regular data, daily. Next time something like Deepground happens in Kalm, we'll know every single person who's gone missing before their own families do." He put his hands over his head. "Think about how many lives we could've saved, families reunited. If we just had…"
"More money?" she finished for him.
August looked at her. "That would help. More money for hiring personnel, training, better equipment." He gave a determined smile. "In a few years, we could monitor every single person in Kalm. Then Edge. In a generation, we could have an intelligence-sharing agreement with almost every city in the Eastern Continent."
The smile faded from her face. "And you don't see anything wrong with that?" Yuffie asked.
He gave her a blank look. "What? You don't think it'd be worth the cost?"
"Never mind," she muttered, looking back at the screen, which was still scrolling by. "God, if anything, this is too many names."
"Well, we could start with people who're still in Kalm. Leave the rest for afterwards if we need them."
"Do that."
August typed something too fast for Yuffie to see, and the list stopped scrolling, flashed, and then a new, shorter list appeared.
"Still a lot of them."
"Yeah, I can see that. Can you narrow it down to men over forty?" He looked at her momentarily. "It's just a guess."
"Probably a safe one for the captain of President Shinra's bodyguard."
Hopefully we're thinking of the right President Shinra. "I don't suppose you can sort by who was getting the biggest pension, right?"
"Unfortunately, custom and law prevents us from opening everyone's mail." Yuffie couldn't tell if he was joking or not.
She cocked her head. "Do you have information on where they live? In Kalm."
"That we do have. What're you thinking?"
"Get rid of everyone living in pensioners' homes, old age homes, and hospices," she guessed. "Let's say he couldn't have stayed secret for that long."
August obeyed, and the screen changed again. "That leaves…private residences and apartments, mostly."
The list was indeed shorter. Yuffie leaned towards the terminal, and August politely shifted out of the way. "These addresses…there's wards in them, the Sunset Ward, the Wall Ward, the Elm Tree Ward…"
"Everything within the walls' technically one district, but there was eight wards."
"Can you list all these by the wards, richest to poorest?"
He glanced at her again, realization coming to his face. "You think he's living it up?"
"I know I would," she mumbled. The screen changed again. "So the ones on the button live in the slums?"
"I think the residents of the Wall Ward would resent that description, but…"
She interrupted him. "Okay, so excluding the bottom two…that's only eleven names." She frowned. "Are you excluding people who're, you know, dead?"
He raised an eyebrow. "As far as I know, yes. Why?"
"Just that the name near the…never mind. Can you print out the whole list for me?"
"Don't have a PHS?"
"Yeah, I just can never figure out how to use the camera," she grumbled as the other library employee stood up and walked in the direction of the now-noisy printer.
August smirked before his expression sobered. "So, if I'm allowed to ask…why's the W.R.O. looking for Shinra military veterans here in Kalm?" Yuffie felt her eyes widen despite herself. "This isn't something you'd need a squad of security troops for, is it, because we could call HQ…"
"No!" she blurted out louder than she meant to. "No. We're…I just need to speak to one. In person. If I can find him." She felt like she might begin to regret having asked for the Kalm Library's help at this rate.
"Is that what that antique is for?" August asked.
"If I can find him."
"I just hope you don't plan to interview me," he half-joked. "What's so important about Shinra's bodyguard?"
Yuffie gave an expression of mock disgust, which she hope hid her discomfort with his latest questions. "I saw Shalua, by the way," she said, as offhandedly as she could manage.
August's eyes bugged out. Even the other employee stopped in his tracks, papers in his hands. "What, where? Wait, with the Shinra?"
So they do know I was at Healen Lodge. Maybe they don't know I met with Rufus himself, she thought optimistically. "I didn't say where," she answered as cryptically as she could manage.
August's mouth shut and he blushed. Yuffie gave a deliberate cough to clear her throat and took the printout from the other employee. "You might as well know, we didn't talk. I mean, I didn't have a chance to."
"'Cause she was with the Shinra," the other employee concluded quietly.
Yuffie gave a neutral shrug. August's eyes wandered back and forth between them, like he was trying to weigh in on this himself.
Before the Battle of Midgar, before she'd found her younger sister, Shalua Rui had been a familiar and unmistakable sight at the Kalm offices, moving between there, organization's Mythril Mountain headquarters , and Edge. You could guess it was a crush, but I doubt it. More likely, people just liked her in general.
Then after being wounded trying to escape Deepground, she'd was treated in medical stasis aboard the Shera. The W.R.O. had presumed her missing-in-action after the airship was shot down over the Battle of Midgar. That had been almost a year ago.
"How did she look?" August asked, rising from the chair. He closed the door the door to the small room.
Yuffie was surprised. She'd never even considered that herself. "She was up and walking," she concluded.
"We shouldn't assume…" the other employee began. "We shouldn't assume she's defected to them."
Defected. That was the word. Defected to the people who keep the lights on and the computers running. Defected to the people who pay the bills. Yuffie kept that to herself.
"Shalua was always on the move."
You know, I'm standing right here. You could just ask. "You know, she told me…before Deepground surfaced, before she met Vincent…that she hated the Shinra for kidnapping her sister for SOLDIER."
A glimmer of hope appeared on the other employee's face. August's remained sullen as he turned from the door.
"But she hated AVALANCHE too, you know," she explained.
"Why?" the library employee asked, sounding more than a little surprised.
"Was it because SOLDIER took her sister, but AVALANCHE took her arm and her eye?" August speculated aloud, crossing his muscular arms in front of the door. "Was it that?"
The list in her hand, Yuffie just shrugged again. "Mighta' been."
Author's Notes:
Four thousand words just to establish how Yuffie found what she was looking for. The thing of it is, Master Ninja Yuffie is presumably good at finding people (she found Vincent, who didn't want to be found, and a dying Rufus, who probably did), so I hope this doesn't end up taking away from that. On the bright side, this might be the single best demonstration of Yuffie's actual role in the W.R.O. I've seen yet (it tends to be something I skipped on). One of Yuffie's original foibles, I seem to remember, was her occasional inability to keep something to herself (the video game format is also to blame for that)...she's done some growing up since then.
More world building, filling in the gaps. Surprising, Episode: Shinra in On the Way to a Smile elaborates on many more things than I ever did, and at least in my last reading of it, I don't feel a major pressure to try and justify or even quietly retcon certain elements for the sake of suitability or just-not-being-bonkers. At least, not like I did with Dirge of Cerberus. I worry that I might have beyond the appropriate amount of cynicism or lack of sympathy towards the W.R.O., but it's pretty easy to imagine such events in a cynical light when they're left rather open-ended. Remember, this is the darker side of the W.R.O., the side less occupied with building apartment blocks and more concerned with people, what they think and where they go. Had the Kalm Directory existed in Edge, Advent Children might not have happened. Well, that's fun to sepculate anyway. And yes, I like Shalua. We'll see more of her.
At the risk of sounding ungrateful, despite having half of the next chapter basically completed (maybe), I may take a break from this to give due attention to my other older works. Of course, I'm always glad for some feedback and some idea of how things are going.