Nibelheim. Despite the extravagant price of the train ticket through Corel, she was prepared to bribe her way from Camp Helwitt further into the so-called Nibelheim Autonomous Region. She'd never been particularly good at bribery; she lacked the sort of subtle, contemptuous self-confidence that it seemed to require. If I was Tifa, I could just pull my collar down and stick my chest into my mark's face; I might not even need the bribe after that. That blonde woman, Rachel, probably didn't need to resort to bribery either. If her chest didn't do the job, that massive scythe she carried probably would.
Bribery turned out to be completely unnecessary anyway, to her surprise. In the middle of Camp Helwitt, she found the motor pool. In the middle of the motor pool, she approached a Type 939 military truck, same as in the Eastern Continent, and gave a big, friendly smile at a 1st lieutenant in the Polaris Air Force uniform that was waiting for his subordinate troops to board while simultaneously grimacing at the mud on his uniform coat.
"Excuse me, sir..." How would you like a nice, generous bribe this afternoon?
The lieutenant looked up from his clothes and gave her an eerie, immediately off-putting stare; he wasn't that much older than she was, but he had that same face of a lifetime of hard living, the same as the captain back at Healen Lodge, paired with nearly-disturbing vacant eyes. He said nothing and she found herself frozen mid-sentence. Even in this moment of awkward confrontation, in the corner of her mind she still felt aware of the pistol sitting in a leather holster hanging from the man's belt, and his slack right arm, still a safe distance from it. She remained so until he blinked, looked at the last of the infantry climbing into the truck, and the back at her, his eyes human again.
"Journalist?" he asked finally.
"Y-yes, actually," she stammered out. At least I've got the look down.
"On your way to Rocket Town?" he asked, using the old name for what was now the headquarters of the Polaris Air Force.
"No, Nibelheim actually," she said. She immediately regretted the candor, and didn't bother disguising her face.
The lieutenant frowned slightly, quite without malice, as if he was watching something atypical but neutral in nature, like an old stray cat bullying an overly-eager puppy. Then he sighed, adjusted his kepi cap, and hoisted himself up the back of the truck. "All right then, come on. It's a straight ride there, not much more than an hour."
She knew her eyes were widening in surprise. "That's it?"
"What?" he asked her sharply. Instead she clambered up the truck's open back, along with her luggage.
"No, nothing!" she assured him quickly. The bed of the large 6x6 truck was occupied by a relatively low number of soldiers in the usual Peace Preservation dark blue, each sitting rather relaxed in their seats, with a pre-war assault rifle with wooden foregrip and pistol grip, along with a steel skeleton stock, propped between their sitting legs; the same compact weapons in the caliber 5.56x45mm Shinra used in Midgar, Junon, and everywhere else in what had been Shinra's global empire. They were so common even the security troops in the W.R.O., when they adopted a new rifle called the 'Commando' to replace it, had to use the same caliber ammunition.
The lieutenant sat down opposite her, removing his cap to reveal a mop of messy black hair. "Good answer. Civilians can't go to Rocket Town without permission," he explained, in a tone one might hear a tired teacher explaining something to a pupil.
"As oppose to Nibelheim?"
"Why not?" he countered. "Nibelheim's just a town, whatever the city of Edge says."
She had to concede that point; Nibelheim's political status was largely whatever the people occupying it said it was. Now that was the Polaris paramilitary faction. Though even her royal education in Wutai couldn't completely explain why a military air force would occupy a mountain town in the middle of nowhere. If the current intelligence was correct, you could probably transport the current population of Nibelheim in one of these trucks.
"You don't get helicopters?"
"Out of Helwitt? For Nibelheim?" one of the infantrymen jeered loudly. On either side, his comrades laughed tiredly.
The lieutenant gave them an annoyed look before turning back to her. "There's still one good road in and out of Nibelheim, at the foot of Mt. Nibel. The Polaris Air Force doesn't waste resources like helicopters on places like that."
So that people like Tom Kessler can pretend the town that's home to the first mako reactor isn't ruled by a bunch of uniformed creeps with machineguns? Gawd, I hate the modern world.
Despite being surrounded by said creeps in uniforms, the military truck ride into the Mt. Nibel was probably the most pleasant portion of her journey thus far: cold mountain air and a cloudy, scenic sky overheard only occasionally interrupted by a military helicopter. The truck represented the very last leg of the journey deep into the interior of the Eastern Continent, a part of the world that, from Midgar's perspective, was just on the side of remote. The whole of Nibelheim had been occupied by Wutai early during the Hundred Years War, an occupation that lasted decades and seemed unimportant enough that her great-grandparents apparently usually skipped it when they had regaled her father with stories of the glory days during his childhood. Even back then, Nibelheim had barely a few hundred residents; by the time Cloud and Tifa were born, that was down to less than half that.
But it sure is scenic, she thought. There were worst ways to spend the last hour of a days-long journey.
The military men kept to themselves, including their commanding officer. At first glance he hardly looked like the type of person who'd have any sort of interesting story to tell, just another thin-faced survivor of the Jenova War. Then the relaxing boredom set in, and staring at his face as his eyes wandered over the landscape, she did see what stood out.
"SOLDIER?" she ventured carefully.
"I wish." As if on cue, he ran a gloved hand over his cheekbones and eye sockets. He had red-orange irises with a discernable glimmer, even in the daylight, how the most recognizable sign of mako exposure manifested in people with brown eyes like hers. "I dropped out of the program, it would've been…six years ago? By some fluke I scored in the top five percentile on the standardized tests out of high school, so they recommended me for officer's school with the Junon Army."
"Where were you from?"
"Oh, I was born in the Sector 6 Slums, but my family immigrated from Gongaga during the Wutai War." His posture relaxed under his coat. "You're from Wutai, aren't you? Not Midgar."
She felt the hair rise on the back of her head. "Well..."
"Not that it matters," he added with a sigh. "There's not even a Midgar anymore. My parents left Midgar after rebels destroyed the fifth reactor. Couldn't take it anymore, so they used their life savings to emigrate to Junon," he scoffed. Yuffie nodded wordlessly.
"Talk about a lucky break," one of the infantrymen muttered.
"It was. It was the last straw for them. Part of the Sector 6 plate was dropped during a 'construction accident', but that was just the city lying about a terrorist attack. Then the whole Sector 7 plate was dropped, except that time it was the city covering up their attempt to flush out AVALANCHE that was based in Sector 7, wasn't it?" he asked indignantly, turning to his comrades. Yuffie found herself fumbling with her luggage eagerly, trying to reach the controls on the TC-5500.
"Hey, hold onto that thought!"
"That was it, right? AVALANCHE, the ecoterrorist army that hit Junon a couple years before that. They were based out of the Sector 7 Slums?" he asked.
A round of agreement came from the soldiers. "Then Shinra, Inc. goes and drops the entire sector plate on them, claims it was the outcome a 'prolonged firefight between terrorists and the Peace Preservation'." He swore loudly, to more agreement from the soldiers. "What was it, two thousand casualties on the upper plate on the first day? Almost half of them dead? God knows how many under it."
"My dad…my father, he was a first lieutenant in the Midgar Military Police," a soldier with a deep voice announced, grimacing under his blue helmet. "They were first on the scene when shooting started, a full platoon. They were trying to avoid a panic, there was zero information about how many rebels they were, or what unit they were attacking. People thought they were hitting another reactor during the daytime."
"And then Shinra orders the entire plate dropped on them, AVALANCHE, the slumdwellers, everyone," the lieutenant muttered. "F- knows why. Revenge for the two reactors that had to be rebuilt, I guess."
There was a moment of quiet, as if out of respect. "That doesn't make sense," one soldier concluded.
"None of it made sense. After Old Man Shinra died and his son took over, the company put out a statement that a 'investigatory committee' would be assembled to look into the reclamation of Sector 7, but that it would mean halting on construction on Sector 6 as all the equipment and labor was diverted." The lieutenant cursed again, this time with more despair than anger.
Yuffie studied his expression, hand still in her luggage. I can see why the military in Junon enjoys the amount of clout it does. Unfortunately, by the time she thought she'd have an opportunity to record them, the military men had settled into a melancholy silence among themselves and said little more.
Without the distraction of their complaints, the periodic bumping of the truck along the road and the cool mountain air eventually rocked her to sleep, and she only jolted awake when the truck shifted and rocked along the final turns as it pulled into its stop outside the borders of Nibelheim village, in front of what looked like a remote country bus station. One soldier sitting near the rear disembarked, replaced by an coat-wearing officer. She pulled her luggage strap over her shoulder and leapt off, turning back once.
"Hey, do you know who's in charge here?"
"Major A. Saunders," the lieutenant replied, unexpectedly helpful once more.
"Good luck!" an infantryman called out while she narrowly avoided a more awkward exchange of goodbyes and continued down the road and up the cobblestone path leading to what she could see was an obsolete but still-operating wooden water tower, the central monument in front of the setting sun over the town of Nibelheim.
This place doesn't change either, does it?
"Ms. Kisaragi, over here!"
Momentarily, she was convinced we was imagining the voice calling out to her. When it repeated more insistently, she shook her head and looked along the right side of the cobblestones. In front of the ring of small cottages that scenically circled the antique water tower, a open-top 4WD off-road vehicle, a military car with the Polaris Air Force insignia emblazoned on the doors. A woman with long, stringy blonde bangs framing either side of her face was sitting against the bonnet, wearing a lieutenant's uniform, a mirrored but otherwise identical version of the one worn by the officer from the Sector 6 Slums.
"You're Yuffie Kisaragi, aren't you?" the woman repeated. She was probably around twenty.
She had immediately felt surprised, but just as quickly, she'd managed to suppress any sign of it, or at least she thought she did. She had thought, in a town a small as Nibelheim, there was a possibility she wouldn't be recognized. The occupants of the military truck hadn't recognized her, or if they had, they hadn't given any indication of it, and she wasn't expecting the military to engage in that level of subtle deceit. So then, Reeve must have called in advanced and gotten me access. Which shouldn't be surprising. Or annoying.
"Yes," she finally answered.
The woman smirked. After closing the distance, Yuffie found herself looking at the small details in the woman's face; the beauty mark just off her left eye, her long eyelashes, her dark red lips. She was, rather obviously, too deliberately attractive to be suitable for a lieutenant in the military, and Yuffie was suddenly felt with the urge to tell her. Even the well-kept, well-dressed military brass at Junon had, separated from their clothes, typical appearances of middle aged and younger men. This woman looked like a two-bit actress dressed in a drab Peace Preservation military uniform, riding boots crusted with dried mud and her kepi grasped by the visor under her crossed arms.
"Welcome to Nibelheim," the woman gloated at her. Not moving, she gestured with a nod across the town center. "That's the inn, where they've got a telephone. General store's next door. Nibelheim Manor's just outside of town, on the north side, you can't miss it. Our headquarters are there if you'd like to say 'hi'."
"I'm sure I will," she replied as coolly as she could manage. The blonde woman seemed amused before donning her cap and turning back to her jeep to reach into the driver's side compartment, and leaving Yuffie to stare at her backside through her greatcoat.
"You're not going escort me anywhere?"
"Why? It's a free country," she jibed back, positively enjoying her own joke but still looking away.
Under normal circumstances, this sort of encounter with the military would've just annoyed her, but the oppressive atmosphere at Nibelheim left an undeniably eerie feeling. The low sound of wind blowing down from Mt. Nibel, the regular squeaking of the water tower's wind blades, the distant sound of military trucks grinding down the road to their actual destinations; in other words, no distinctively human noises until a cottage door opened down the cobblestone road, a blue-uniformed soldier leaving the general store. Despite the distinct white helmet with its three glowing red apertures, it was visibly another woman. Yuffie thought of Priscilla back at Junon. Is this some sort of home guard army?
The uncreatively named Nibelheim Inn, a multi-story building that would've been the largest house in the town if one excluded Nibelheim Manor, she found a much older civilian woman waiting behind the front desk, reading a book until the bell rang with the door. She put her book down and adjusted her reading glasses.
"Ms. Yuffie Kisaragi?" the elderly receptionist asked, as if it were a completely normal thing to say.
She took her time answering; somehow, staring at the aged woman, wide-eyed, in silence wasn't so awkward as to be unbearable compared to what she'd just gone through. "Yes," she answered finally, stretching the one syllable out.
The receptionist seemed slightly put off in turn, but continued. "We were expecting you. A telephone message was left for you," she explained, reaching into the one of the small compartments on the wooden organizer on the counter with her right hand. "I believe…oh, here it is."
Yuffie extended her hand on instinct, palm open, waiting to be presented with a slip of paper, which instead the receptionist held up to her face and squinted through her eyeglasses at. "It was a…gentleman…who left it almost two days ago."
She still had her hand out. "And?" she asked, exasperated.
"He said that he apologized for taking this long to meet your request, and that you could find him 'waiting at the agreed upon location' at your earliest convenience."
Yuffie could feel her expression twisting in irritation. "Did this gentleman leave a name?" she nearly growled.
"No, actually. When I brought that up, he actually said you wouldn't need to ask." She placed the slip of paper on the counter in front of her and adjusted her eyeglasses with her other hand. "I suppose he was mistaken then."
It took Yuffie what, by her estimation, was a tremendous amount of self-control honed by a childhood of ninjutsu training and disciplining, not to smash her hand against the counter and snatch up the note, and instead keep it clasped in a fist behind her back. She managed to extend her other hand and take the room key and mumbled her thanks.
This entire town is still freaking creepy three years later. No wonder Vincent spent Sephiroth's entire life here. The whole sordid history would've been amusing if it wasn't so obviously disturbing. She'd read the summary of the W.R.O.'s concluding report on the Sephiroth Incident, his life and his ignominious death. The fact that the Deepground Army's origins lied not with Sephiroth, but the broader SOLDIER paramilitary force, was the best thing you could take from the whole mess, and that angered her. So did the deliberately cryptic message left for her at the front desk by someone who seemed to know where she was. So did the catty blonde lieutenant. It all angered her, and she was still angry when she stormed through the town and up to the closed gates of Nibelheim Manor, the TC-5500 left with her luggage in her room.
"Saunders. I wanna' see him," she shouted at the relatively slight, surprised-looking soldier standing guard by the gate. "Right now."
The bewildered woman accommodated her, escorting her through the gate and into the Victorian-style three-story mansion formerly owned by the Shinra Corporation and now ostensibly property of the village of Nibelheim. She kept her lingering rage up as she was escorted through the front doors and to the foyer, stopping short of the grand staircase, but still noticed the changes since the last time she'd been here: most of the furniture in the foyer was removed, and the interior showed signs of a deliberate, indelicate cleanup. Behind the foyer, a windowed hallway split east and west; the western door led to a sitting room that actually was comfortably furnished by comparison. Through that, what she remembered had been a storage room was converted into a proper office with a central desk, bookshelves, and substantial cabinets in the far corners. A military officer in a dull-colored blouse and tie sat behind the desk, his maroon greatcoat and cap draped over an empty chair against the wall behind him. Above that chair, an array of small framed photographs arranged haphazardly on the wall. Yuffie didn't even bother to hide that she was staring at them, but either the military man was pretending to be unaware, or he was so engrossed in the notebook in his hands that he genuinely hadn't noticed. In a few seconds, she found what she was looking for: one of the photos, second from the top in the group, featured the man sitting at the desk, in uniform, shaking the hand of a much older man in matching dress, the same man she'd seen on the large, hand-painted portrait in the study in Heidzig House in Kalm, the same man in the photo in the cigarette case with his two sons.
Among the photos was a framed piece of paper; after a minute, she found herself deliberately squinting at the small, stylized text on the document while waiting for the military man to look up a notebook.
"New Junon State University," he told her after a moment. "Premedicine."
She looked directly at him. Another thin man with visible bags under his eyes, a dark complexion paired with short-cropped black hair. "You're a doctor?" she asked.
"No, and I don't call myself one either." He closed the notebook. "I was a combat medic during the Second Wutai War, in the New Midgar Army."
So, it was you then. What a coincidence. She didn't respond. "Albert Saunders. Major," he added awkwardly after a moment. She recognized his voice from the minicasettes in Heidzig House's speaker. Saunders himself looked at least a few years older than the photos on the wall, as she expected.
"Yuffie Kisaragi. Journalist."
He raised an eyebrow with some visible strain, as if taking considerable focus to balance how much emotion he wanted to convey on his face otherwise, probably scorn. "That's an unusual professional change."
"Well, I can see how it'd be strange for someone who's doin' the same job for the last decade." He even sounds older than the tapes.
He smirked—the sort of smirk you'd expect from a military officer in uniform, behind a large desk, in a posting that amounted to his own little fiefdom—but only for a few seconds, before dropping back into his neutral, emotion-devoid expression. "Edge City told us to expect you. You're early."
"Great. So when can I see the reactor?"
More eyebrow work, more dramatically this time. "The reactor?"
"You know, that big, round thing on the mountain that's the only reason anyone comes to this Podunk fake village in the middle of nowhere?"
Saunders clasped his chin with one hand, an extended finger scratching just under his left eye. "Edge City said you were coming to see our most important guest, Citizen Uladzimir Illyich."
Is that how you say his name? For someone who was almost never spoken of aloud, somehow she'd never heard his name pronounced the same way twice. "Yeah, about him," she feigned ignorance. "I'll get around to it."
"Get around to it?" he echoed slowly.
"Hey, I don't go to where you work and tell you how to do your job," she blurted out quickly. She half-intended not to say that out loud, and Saunders' expression suggested that was exactly what she was doing at this moment. "Forget I said that. I'll do it second," she insisted.
"May I ask why not first?"
She shrugged as casually as she could manage. "I don't have my tape recorder."
He gave her a different look of tired bewilderment. "You don't have your tape recorder."
That was too easy for him. "Fine, how about 'because I said so'? I wanna' see the reactor, so I'm gonna' see the reactor. And don't give me that 'we need time to prepare', crap. It wouldn't be a surprise inspection then, would it?"
"It's not really much of a surprise inspection now, ma'am." She hadn't expected that as a response, though there was no mirth in Saunder's voice. "I can't speak for wants going on in Junon, with your…weapons inspectors…but things work differently in the Nibelheim Autonomous Region."
Yuffie stared at him, head cocked slightly. "That might be the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time."
"It may be, ma'am, I wouldn't know who you've been talking too," he replied very quickly. He reached for the old-fashion telephone handset on his desk and began dialing a number.
"Who's that for?" she asked suspiciously.
"Well, you hardly expect to us to just let you walk, unescorted, around a deactivated Shinra Corporation mako reactor, do you?" he asked. It was clear from his tone that the suggestion was supposed to sound like it was inviting calamitous disaster, but Yuffie just resented the implication that she, by herself, was capable of breaking something so large, so severely in such a short time. "Between ourselves and Camp Helwitt, we have at least one specialist trained by the S.E.P.C. who can professionally verify its status."
"Yeah, I guess if I was Reeve Tuesti I wouldn't trust you guys either." She straightened her posture. "Wait, so you have someone who worked for the Shinra Electric Power Company itself?"
"How would you propose ensuring the safety of an intact and deactivated mako reactor?" he asked her, momentarily smug. "We have member of the team who originally built the reactor, a scientist under…Dr. Hal Hollander." She saw him furrow his brow at another piece of paper in front of him.
"Hollander?"
"Colleague of Gast Faremis and Yasutomo Hojo. The three big wigs of Scientific Research and Development at the Shinra Corporation. All very dead, but some of their subordinates are still around, as I'm sure you in the W.R.O. are well aware."
She gave him a brief, mischievous grin. "And she lives in town?"
"Most of Nibelheim's current civilian population are involved in upkeep of the deactivated reactor."
"So let me get this straight." Yuffie put her hands on her hips and glanced around the somber, mildly unpleasant room. "Forty years ago, Shinra built an active reactor that required no active human presence to maintain, which you, the Polaris Air Force, have deactivated and now need a human presence…to maintain."
Saunders stared at her. "Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't sound very efficient."
"I guess they just don't build them like they used to?" she taunted him in a singsong voice.
"That doesn't make sense, ma'am."
"Shut up. And who is this scientist?"
"Dr. Adaskowa. I'm sure she'll be willing to show you're her C.V. if you ask." A smile flickered on his face. "It's like a résumé."
"I know what it is," she growled back. She turned, then looked back at Saunders, an eyebrow raised. "Dr. Adaskowa, so she was employed by Shinra's powerplant division, right? And not the army or SOLDIER or any of those other freakshows?"
Saunders cocked his head slightly before laughing shortly. "No, I assure you she was not in SOLDIER, despite many of the unusual characters that were included in their ranks. It was called the Shinra Electric Power Company for a reason," he said, as if reminding her.
"So she'd know about electrical power generation."
Saunders' look of amusement was gradually shifted to impatience. "Yes, it's in the name I believe."
"And she doesn't work for the Junon government?"
Saunder's brow furrowed again and he crinkled his thin nose. "Where are you going with this?"
"Forget I asked," she told him dismissively. That was too easy. I might as well have asked him about the Clean Air Development Plan. For all I know, Saunders is Barret's Aske, some unassuming military man watching over a shuttered reactor. But aside from Barret's uneducated opinion, and Kyrie who she knew to be an idiot, there was nothing establishing with certainty than Aske was a man. "Just have her meet me at the reactor, I don't like to be kept waiting," she said with as much bravado as she could muster.
"Consider it done, ma'am," Saunders replied, his previous sarcasm returning. "And if you'd ever like to interview me, I'll be waiting here in town."
"Don't be so sure I won't," she warned him as she left. "Who's more delusion out here in the boonies, the prisoner or the jailers?"
"I assure you, the prisoner is."
Author's Notes:
Quite a long chapter (among the longest to date), for an even longer wait. My other stories are suffering from neglect even more so than this one, but I found this one surprisingly challenging to write (probably the most challenging one in this story), for reasons of how to handle the strange town of Nibelheim and the new characters it would require require. Yuffie seemed to find it a challenge as well. I may end up taking another "break" from this story if only to try and get caught up on other works (or not; I have a better idea how the next chapter is going to work than I did for this one), but in any case, as always I welcome whatever feedback I receive. Thanks for staying with me this long!