Reactor Number One. Along the drive up the sole, winding path up the side of Mt. Nibel, Albert Saunders said very little. The woman in the blue infantry uniform said nothing at all, the upper half of her face concealed as those Shinra-manufactured combat helmets usually did. When Yuffie Kisaragi decided it was time to broach the topic, he preempted her like a child.
"So, you'll want full access to the reactor. And you'll want to see it alone, for whatever stupid reason you're going to give. If I had to guess, ma'am, I'd say it'd be something to the effect of 'I don't need you or your lackeys getting in my way to do my job,' and then you'll make some sort of face." At this point, the major awkwardly attempted to make an expression of overly feminine derision that she could only partially see from the seat behind him in the 4WD military car.
"Is that correct so far, Ms. Kisaragi?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder.
Smartass. She glanced down the narrow mountain road, which looked largely as unsafe as she remembered it. "So the Polaris Air Force put up an actual steel girder bridge over the last three years. Not bad."
"That suspension rope bridge commissioned by the village was a deathtrap," Saunders spoke authoritatively. "Apparently it snapped by a strong wind during Sephiroth's tour of the facility, can you believe that? Killed an enlisted man, almost killed his civilian escorts. Madness!"
Yuffie bit her lip. Saunders continued, now gesticulating wildly in his seat. "When the reactor was originally built, construction equipment was brought in through a series of ancient mining tunnels and natural caverns dating back at least two hundred years. The primary access way was lost in a rockslide in 1993, it was pure luck that reactor infrastructure wasn't damaged at the same time. The bridge had to be built in order to safeguard the reactor."
Sure, whatever that means. "Sure, whatever that means."
The single-lane steel beam truss bridge seemed sturdy enough as their military car carefully crossed it, Yuffie noticing the unsubtle motion detection equipment at either end. I wonder how they're powered. Crossing onto Mt. Nibel onto the other side of the span, Yuffie studied the barren surroundings, jagged rocky outcroppings still devoid of trees. "This place still looks like a nightmare."
"That it does," Saunders muttered with less enthusiasm.
The last barrier to their destination came in the form of a chain link fence within sight of the bridge that she could tell was only a few years old, marked not with a sign from the Shinra Electric Power Company, but the winged insignia of the Polaris Air Force and an unwelcoming message repeated in multiple languages, including Wutaian:
ATTENTION!
THIS IS A RESTRICTED AREA PER THE DEACTIVATION OF THE MT. NIBEL MAKO REACTOR.
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY FORBIDDEN! TRESPASSERS WILL BE SUBJECT TO ADMINISRATIVE PENALTIES AND CRIMINAL PUNISHMENT PER ENFORCEMENT BY THE NEW MIDGAR ARMY.
Yuffie raised an eyebrow. "Do you still get a lot of trespassers?"
"As you're aware, mako reactor tourism has become a thing not just limited to salvagers. It's a free country; we can't stop all civilian travel around the mountain range but we have cordoned off the relevant areas. And we're trying to do it as cheaply as possible." A waiting pair of sentries opened the gate in the fence and closed it after them, and they proceeded on what she hoped was the final leg of the journey.
"And it's just tourists?" she asked in an obfuscating manner.
"No, it's also enterprising scavengers." He glanced at her again. "Who else were you expecting?"
She flashed him a toothy grin. There seemed to be some unspoken prohibition among the regional military against using "the J-word." During the incident in Edge with Kadaj's Gang, the military in Junon had deferred to Rufus Shinra's personal entourage over the issue of Jenova's so-called "head", the largest known remaining sample of the creature's biological mass. After the end of the Jenova War, the military seemed to prefer to first extraterrestrial organism had never been dug up by Shinra in the first place. Even Sephiroth could still be discussed in a historical context. Though it's not that weird that they'd want to put all of that behind them.
"And here's our lovely destination," Saunders declared dryly. Within sight of the ugly peak of Mt. Nibel, edges into a small clearing surrounded on two sides by a cliff face, was the cylindrical structure she'd seen reproduced in a museum in Junon: an early-model mako reactor from the Shinra Electric Power Company, the kind that had been largely retired from service by the time of the Jenova War. A ten-story tall tower, itself built on a solid concrete foundation, unilluminated except for the setting sun on in the west and a number of portable floodlights arranged around it. More than forty meters above them, a fading red Shinra Corporation diamond staring back down at them like red eye. A few years earlier, a half-dozen carbon steel pipelines would haphazardly crept up from concrete fixtures in the ground towards the top of the structure, not far from a glowing smokestack. The carbon steel pipelines had been severed roughly ten meters from the ground; the smokestack was dark and unused. Some of the brickwork along the bulk of the structure's mid-length was in clear disarray from neglect; the steel gantries that ringed the lower tier were incomplete. It did, in fact, look like a defunct structure, whatever it had done.
"What a pile of junk!" she exclaimed, opening her door. Surprisingly, the major nodded in agreement as he climbed out of the car.
"You asked what a human presence was for. To prevent cannibalization like this. Despite appearances, this whole structure is still filled in valuable materiel formerly belonging to the Shinra Corporation."
She jerked his head at him, with an almost cartoonish frown. "Materiel, not materia. Equipment. Machinery," he clarified.
"Maybe it should've all been destroyed."
Yuffie turned in the direction of the new opinion, given by a much older woman who was descending down the stairs of the structure's entrance. She was pale, with shoulder-length grey hair and a face framed by bangs, wearing a type of plastic biological hazard suit with the detached helmet under her arm.
"Dr. Adaskowa is our local expert on unprovable speculation. And powerplant operation and maintenance," Saunders almost jeered.
"Do you normally wear…uh…" she began.
"Protection? No. The reactor is inactive, just like the signs said." She pointed at the identification card inside a transparent plastic sleeve pinned to her suit. "Kasia Adaskowa, assigned to the Nibelheim Autonomous Region. And you're Yuffie Kisaragi, I take it?"
"Uh, yeah." Good, establish confidence early on.
She gave Saunders marked look of displeasure which he just scoffed at in return. "If there's nothing else, why don't we begin the tour?" she asked sharply. Yuffie glanced warily back at the major, who instead was reached back into the military car, produced a newspaper, then began carefully unfolding it.
"Try not to break anything, all right?" he asked, almost humorously.
"Come on," Dr. Adaskowa mumbled gruffly, turning back in the direction of the structure. Trying not to look worried, she followed after her, scratching her head.
"So then, the suit is for…?"
"Every time the military calls me up here, I check for leaks in the concrete in the pit." She paused momentarily on the stairs. "That's the cavity beneath the reactor housing, the visible part of the borehole through the bedrock. How familiar are you with the design of Shinra's mako reactors?"
"Uh…" she began, despite herself.
The doctor sighed and shook her head. Yuffie swore she could hear Saunders laughing behind his newspaper. "Another damn tourist from Edge City with nothing better to do than waste our time out her," she muttered audibly under her breath. "It's fine, here, look at this."
Yuffie followed her through the main entrance into the dimly lit interior. A woman in blue fatigues with a rifle stood sentry by the entrance, but did not follow them further inside. A faded sign indicated they were on the reactor's observation level, along with a long warning stating trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but further into large, empty concrete room was an obviously newer, larger diagram fixed to the wall: a vertical cross section of the Mt. Nibel Reactor and its earthen extension, helpfully labeled HOW DID A MAKO REACTOR WORK? JUST ASK. Dr. Adaskowa was pointing at it. Yuffie was about to demand who would go through the trouble off putting up such a tacky sign when her eyes were drawn to the text underneath the diagram: BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MINISTRY FOR PETROCHEMICAL INDUSTRY OF THE NEW STATE OF JUNON, followed helpfully by a 10-digit telephone number with the Arujunon area code.
New State of Junon, in case there was any doubt that Kessler is full of crap. "Saunders wasn't joking about the tourism thing," Yuffie mumbled.
"The mechanics behind a mako reactor are almost brilliantly simple. More than a century ago, people already understood how to harness natural deposits for what we'd call geothermal power today, even if no one associated it with electrical energy for decades. Even the name, 'mako'…"
"It's Wutaian for 'magical light'," Yuffie finished for her.
The doctor gave an appreciating nod. "Yes, exactly. At the end of industrial revolution, the top chemists and physicists in Midgar, Junon and even Wutai began to theorize that a better model of electricity generation could be developed from mako than using geothermal heat to drive steam turbines. Eventually, that became the field of electrochemistry. The study of naturally occurring fountains and geysers of mako, and the natural breakdown of liquid mako into inorganic compounds when it vaporizes at sea level, becoming the only fluid capable of generating a magnetic field at surface temperatures and conditions…mako was crafted into materia for hundreds of years, but its industrial use only came around when Shinra established its electric power company in Midgar." By then, she'd taken on an amazed, almost dreamy tone as she spoke.
God, she sounds like that book Fuhito wrote, she thought. Borderline insane. "And built this, the first industrial-scale reactor."
Dr. Adaskowa's enthusiasm seemed to leave her like a short breath. When she spoke again, it was with previous dry tone. "The original reactor…doesn't exist. Not in a meaningful way. Reactor Number One at Mt. Nibel, back when they were numbering these things, was completely reconditioned ten years after its completion, in 1978, and then partially reconditioned in Year Two of the new calendar."
"That would've been…" Yuffie began before pausing. "That was the year of the Sephiroth Incident."
"Yes, it was. It was the first time I visited the Mt. Nibel site," she said with a sigh, touching her forehead.
Yuffie frowned, as if remembering εуλ 0002 was only eight years ago. "Your first time with the reactor was only eight years ago? I thought you were supposed to be, like, an expert!"
"I am an expert," she countered sharply.
"What the hell were you doing before eight years ago?"
"I worked for the S.E.P.C. at the headquarters in Midgar," she replied stiffly. "The ones you and your comrades in AVALANCHE were trying to destroy before the war. Did you think there was an abundance of surviving experts after Midgar was destroyed?"
As the unofficial head of the W.R.O.'s intelligence gathering branch, I should probably know the answer to that question. "No?" she ventured.
The doctor stared at her belligerently. "As I'm sure the major informed you, Hollander, Faremis, Hojo; they're all dead."
"Oh, trust me, I knew that. Especially for Hojo." Good riddance to that bug-eyed freak. "And is that how you ended up working for Rocket Town?"
The doctor made an unexpected gesture with her hand, mocking derision. "After people became a lot less interested in mako, and more interested in the biosphere it came from, the Lifestream, yes, there wasn't a lot of other work opportunities for me. If you and the rest of the people with all the power, in the form of guns, votes, and electricity, decided to knock them down, I wouldn't have much work, except then you might need to contend with the unexpected consequences of a worse solution to a bad problem."
That, Yuffie privately acknowledged, was a convincing argument. If you get to be in charge by having all the weapons, and all the machinery and people you need to operate them, whether by coercion or by elections or by anything else, then you obviously get to decide what happens to the mako reactors. If the Rocket Town and Junon hadn't decided, together, to monopolize practically all the oil reserves in the western hemisphere, they'd probably really want a working mako reactor instead. Yuffie looked at the older woman with something bordering on a newfound respect, and it left her with no idea what to say in this sniping exchange.
"So…uh, is that how this whole thing works?"
Dr. Adaskowa's previous bored apathy had returned. With a gloved hand, she tapped the large, new sign fixed to the wall. "A borehole was drilled into an underground mako channel in the bedrock, or as vein of the Lifestream in our current language. Pressure differential and mechanical suction brings liquid mako from the channel, through a structure called the wellhead, into an artificial reservoir resembling a very large hole in the ground, sometimes called a reaction chamber." She helpfully gestured at the bottom half of the diagram. "Inside the very large hole in the ground, a very large amount of mako pools at just slightly over atmospheric pressure at sea level, something it isn't capable of doing in nature. Anchored into this pool is the energy exchange system, which is the only part of a mako reactor the Shinra Corporation was actually able to patent and what turned them from a scrappy upstart arms manufacturer into a global corporate empire and world power," she explained, a sarcastic drama creeping into her voice.
Despite herself, Yuffie took a step closer to the large sign. "And that's this whole electrochemistry thing you were talking about?"
"In layman's terms, yes. At sea level, the chemical compound we call mako doesn't want to remain in its most unstable liquid state. In small quantities, it can crystalize in a variety of lattice structures; useful for hundreds of years. But vaporizing into the air, it releases electrical and heat energy, if only it could be harness. The energy exchange does that; a technological wonder that accesses that transitional state of chemical chage. As Shinra used to tell schoolchildren, subject that mako to enough heat and pressure for the right length of time, and you can mass produce useful crystals, called materia." She glanced at Yuffie questioningly. "What is it called in Wutaian?"
Yuffie blinked. "Ma-te-ri-ah." She felt odd saying it; Wutaian history had always said they mastered the use of materia before the Eastern Continent, something the east seemed to confirm, and yet they used a loanword for it.
"I see. Anyway, with the right amount of heat, pressure and time, you can mass produce crystals, which are cut into orbs. And with the opposite amount of those, you can harvest its enormous potential energy, most of which is electrical. Production of materia produces excess shards, which were usually recycled for later use. Production of electricity produces vaporized mako, which becomes chemically inert and nontoxic. That's how you could stand inside the reservoir of an active mako reactor and not die from toxic exposure."
"Well that's really good to know," she replied sarcastically, before turning back. "Wait, so this whole thing is…was…just one giant battery?"
The doctor laughed, genuinely by the sounds of it. "What you're standing is essentially a giant cathode and anode for a planet-sized battery. Or was. How or when it, the Lifestream, was changed, we still don't exactly know. Hydrocarbon fuels—fossil fuels—are the geological remnants of a dead plant ecosystem, and some animal life that fed on it, from millions of years in the past. Geothermal energy is the stored remainder of the heat from the formation of the Planet, and the phenomenon of 'radioactive decay', same as in that science fiction novel by William Goodman…"
"Yeah, 'A World That is Free', I read it," she lied. "So the Lifestream was a battery?"
"You'd be surprised by what can be considered a battery. The voltaic pile was invented just over two hundred years ago." An unpleasant smile crept over the doctor's face. "Ms. Kisaragi, you've come all this way. Do you want to see this mako reactor's reaction chamber or not?"
Yuffie felt worried. She didn't like it when the doctor smiled, but she felt a growing desire to leave, and to do that, she had to get the whole unpleasant experience over with. The doctor directed her through the observation level and into the central accessway, a shaft that extended through the length of the towering superstructure and lined with decrepit stairs, and they carefully made their way past shuttered offices and storerooms and down into the accessway.
"Per Shinra's recommendations, all extending accessways and maintenance platforms were locked in position before deactivation. Then after that, they started pouring the concrete."
The reservoir was smaller than the outside would lead one to believe, barely thirty meters in diameter. Browning steel girders running along old masonry, and collections of 19th century wheels, cogs, chains and pulleys, frozen in time since the last extension of the accessways. The masonry and rusting steel reached downwards through the chamber until they seemed to halt in an inky blackness in the bottom. Dr. Adaskowa presented her with an industrial torch; she pointed it down and thumbed the switch.
No glowing, churning wound into the Planet. No Lifestream. Just a pit of hundreds of tonnes of hastily poured concrete, left to messily set. More had been poured onto the complex piping and valves of the energy exchange itself, making it unsalvageable.
"Shinra's legacy to our world. A few ghastly towers filled with concrete, and the ruins of the city they built." The doctor almost sounded pleased with her analysis.
"Normally you could say that, couldn't you?" She resisted the urge to point the spotlight directly into the doctor's face and instead lifted it, redirecting it at the lower accessible gantry that crossed the full length of the reaction chamber. A sealed bulkhead was on the far side, which required the assistance of a military guard who followed them down to it. She supplied the brawn to turn wheel to open it, after which Yuffie gave her a look that made it clear she wasn't to follow them into this smaller, newer chamber, three tiers of empty platforms leading up to another, smaller compartment door, just large enough for a grown man to pass through. And over that, a faded sign of obscenely bold intent: JENOVA.
"This place creeps the hell out of me," the doctor stated, to Yuffie's genuine surprise. She turned to see a dark, unhappy expression on the older woman's face. "I know there used to be a dozen mako pressurization vessels arranged in three rows on either side of the walkway. They were removed and destroyed, per the treaty with the W.R.O.," she explained superfluously, as if she were doing it as much to make evident her agreement with the decision.
Yuffie said nothing, so a nervous Dr. Adaskowa's voice filled the silence. "These pressure vessels, they weren't in the original design. They must've been added after 1978, when this whole compartment was redone. I saw the designs, they were repurposed from experiments used to test the effects of mako exposure on animals at higher pressures, back when that sort of thing was still legal."
"Well, humans aren't the same as animals," Yuffie heard herself say dryly. I wonder how Red XIII would respond to that.
"They were supposed to be fed by tanks of processed mako, not the reservoir inside a reactor. So in Calendar Year 2, there's a leak or something, and that triggers monitors in the reactor, and the military in its infinite wisdom dispatches war hero Sephiroth to investigate." The doctor was staring at a thick, disused rubber tube that had been previously feeding one of those pressure vessels nearest the exit. "Sephiroth was a brigadier general. If the military had properly informed the company, or if the company had passed word further up to the science division, maybe Hojo would've heard, and had the sense not to send Sephiroth of all people to investigate. But why would the military have known any of that?"
Yufffie turned away, looking up the stairway. That was, on the whole, a fairly accurate appraisal of the situation. We blame Hojo for this sort of thing. Mako experimentation. Animal testing. Human testing. Concealing the true nature of an alien creature. How much of that is accurate, and how much of that is because he's not around to defend himself, or be brought in front of a court? Who else is responsible? President Shinra? The military? Hojo's partners in the study of mako, like Gast Faremis? Moral questions that remained unanswered three years after the fall of Midgar.
"I want to see that last compartment."
She'd expected an objection, but not the one she got. "There is no way you are getting me to step inside there."
Yuffie turned back to her. The doctor's expression was angry, almost manic. "I don't care who you are or what you do for Reeve Tuesti's private army, there is no way you're getting me there."
She was tempted to shout at the doctor to do her job. "You're a coward then?" she asked instead.
"Call me whatever names you'd like. I read the reports. I know what used to be in there. And no, I'm not worried about some risk of biological contamination."
"Then what're you afraid of?" she taunted her.
"Everything else. They should've filled this entire compartment with concrete and sealed it permanently. Who says we can't bury all our problems? People without enough concrete on hand."
Yuffie climbed the stairs, took a deep breath, and wrenched open the smaller door after shoving at it with her shoulder. The secondary compartment was unlit and she pitched into darkness before aiming her flashlight again. The beam flickered and bounced across innumerable smooth surfaces, glass and brushed metal; momentarily, she thought there was someone responding in kind with their own flashlight before her vision returned and she realized the interior of the room was lined with a number of other glass panels arrayed around her. She heard herself cursed; it must have been more than that, and closer to a scream in panic, because Dr. Adaskowa came trotting up the stairs and even reached into the compartment to put a hand on her shoulder before she lurched backwards.
Yuffied turned back and saw the doctor, outlined in the dim lighting of the antechamber. "Kisaragi! Kisaragi!" She sounded as if shouting from a distance.
"What?" she yelled back.
"I said, 'What is it?'" she repeated, a look of frightened focus on her face. Yuffie gave her a confused look. "You were nearly screaming."
"It was…" She looked back into the compartment before realizing she'd stepped out of it again, then aimed her flashlight. Aiming more carefully, she could eventually make out definite shapes: industrial pressure tanks, made of brushed blue metal and lined with cautionary stripes, rising out of the bowl-shaped reservoir below. A series of massive, flexible tubes running to the back of the compartment and then…nothing. A cavity in the back of the compartment, an obviously empty space where something a few meters tall and at least a meter in diameter could've sat on very obvious display.
"Where is it?"
"Where is what?" Dr. Adaskowa, eyebrows raised in confusion.
"Je-…" She stopped herself and just stared at the doctor, who took a careful step backwards towards the stairway. "In the middle of that room," she said finally.
"That's directly over the energy exchange system. Those two lines of tanks were part of the old dangerous pressure failsafe, deemed obsolete after the reactor was completed." Adaskowa shook her head. "I pieced together there was a nonstandard mako reservoir in the center, but it was removed sometime after the Sephiroth Incident. It wasn't there when my team arrived after that."
"Just say it," Yuffie muttered.
"Excuse me?"
"Just say its name. The name of the creature inside your 'nonstandard mako reservoir'," she snapped. "I want to hear you say it."
Adaskowa stared at her blankly. "Jenova. The tank that held the specimen, Jenova." Her lip barely curled. "Like the sign said."
In the next moment, Yuffie was standing outside the main entrance to the Nibel facility, taking deep, almost painful gulps of cold mountain air as the soldier posted on sentry watched her. The doctor followed in short order, dropping what sympathy had been evident in her expression by the time she was outside.
"I don't want to hear it," Yuffie preempted her, still taking deep breaths. The doctor shook her head, but said nothing.
"Are we done here?"
That same, unfriendly question was posed impatiently by Albert Saunders, waiting patienty by the military car and playing with the plastic visor of his cap when she found him. Yuffie wondered how long he'd been prepared to wait for her, standing there in his coat and riding boots.
"Well?" he repeated, almost sounding angry.
"Yes, we're done," she finally relented, looking away despite herself.
"And?"
"And what? My findings?" How is that any of your goshdarn business? She managed to hold that back. "My findings are that it's an empty, deactivated reactor, just like you said it was."
She thought Saunders was going to taunt her about how she could've saved them a great deal of trouble by not insisting on seeing the reactor, or better yet not coming to Nibelheim in the first place. Instead, Major Saunders smoothed the creases over the breast of his uniform and climbed back into the car. After a moment, she climbed in after him.
"Looks like quitting time almost," she blurted out. She immediately wondered why she'd worded it in such a way.
"Yes, it almost is," he said, in a conciliatory tone. "Well, you'll know where to find me in the morning. There's not much to do in town during the evening. Or the day." He frowned. "Or really at any time, truthfully."
"You're not going back to the mansion?" The implication had been unexpected. "Where are you going?"
He gave her a perplexed look bordering on the amused. "I'll be going back my room in town. What, do you think I stay in the manor overnight?" he asked, as if to suggest What are you, insane?
Yuffie stared at him, bewildered. She had never considered that the military in Nibelheim would've roomed anywhere else except for the Shinra Manor, but in both of her visits, the estate only had a perfunctory presence of soldiers and officers, once again, most of them young women who would've looked out of place in the Midgar Military Police of the past. It's kind of weird, seriously. She said nothing else until the car had reached its destination in front of the Nibelheim Manor gates, still flanked by sentries.
"Oh, and Major Saunders. About what's-his-name."
Standing in the doorway, Saunders stopped and frowned at her. "Uladzimir Illyich," he reminded him.
"Yeah, that dude. I'll interview him tomorrow." She paused. "Does noon work?"
"It's a date, ma'am." Saunders departed without so much as a smirk, leaving Yuffie to scowl at the back of his head as it was replaced by the smug face of the lieutenant with the beauty mark, still in uniform, whom he passed as she exited the gate. After a stiff command not to say anything, Yuffie allowed the lieutenant to escort her back to doors of the inn, a stroll that took all of a minute.
This whole town is kind of weird. She left messages for August Fitzroy and Reeve Tuesti upon entering the inn, sitting in the armchair in her room and ordering room service. When it was delivered, she was playing aimlessly with the spare reels for the TC-5500 player. Her dinner consisted of some unappealing western continental cuisine consisting of overcooked vegetables, a baked potato and some grilled chicken, which she picked at for a few minutes as she waited for the sun to set. Only then, did she return the plates and cutlery back on the serving tray, leave it in the hallway outside her door, pack some spare pillow from the closet under her bedsheets and stealthily exit through the second floor room window and leave the village through the northern road leading back up Mt. Nibel.
Scaling Mt. Nibel on foot, rather than by military car, at night was slightly more challenging than she had prepared for, compounded by the slow-moving military patrols all along the main route, though the stomping of their boots and trails of their flashlights made them otherwise easy to avoid. Reactor tourism indeed, she thought. While clearing the perimeter fences would've presented little physical challenges, there were enough guards posted on either side along with large floodlights that she decided to take the back entrance through the caves, as described to her by Tifa and Cloud, climbing through claustrophobic man-sized pipes of rusting steel left behind from the reactor's completion. It also put her out of range of most of the motion detectors, as far as she knew.
"Whoever this jerk is, this better be worth it," she announced as she clambered up to the pipe, which exited in the rocky cliff face immediately behind the Mt. Nibel Reactor, once she kicked away the cheap wooden boards closing it off. From there, it was a matter of scaling brick-and-concrete face of the reactor to an unsecured ventilation shaft, drop herself through, and crawl back down into the observation level, just out of sight of someone waiting for her, but not out of their hearing.
"You really took your time getting here, didn't ya'?" an aggravated, but not hostile, voice asked, the speaker on the other side of the pedestal carrying the information sign put up by the Junon Petrochemical Industry. If she hadn't seen the speaker through the grating, she would've recognized him by the voice, that smarmy, slightly nasal tone of disreputable man pretending to be younger and stupider than he actually was.
"You contact me through Barret Wallace, maybe the worst middleman in the history of middlemen. Then you make me track you down to the other side of the world. You should be grateful I got here as fast as I did." Brushing the dust and dirt of the metal shaft off her arms and clothing, then brushed her hair out of her face. "By the way, your bosom buddies Rude and Elena seem well. Next time, send them."
Turning around the concrete column, the thin, lanky frame of Reno of the Turks, spiky red hair standing in disarray, black-blue suit worn over an unbuttoned collared blouse. "So then," he announced, taking his hands out of his blazer pockets and putting them on his hips. "Ask me what you want to know."
She already knew what she intended to ask. "What's Junon's Clean Air Development Plan?"
Author's Notes:
Another long chapter, after another long wait. Exactly what I hoped to avoid when I started writing this story. It would've been longer if I hadn't cut out notable chunks dealing with, among other things, Jenova as she/it appeared in the original Final Fantasy VII video game in the most iconic moment in Nibelheim, perhaps even more so than Sephiroth's fiery, soundtrack-thundering destruction of the whole village. We're coming up to the conclusion of Act II (in some ways, I would've liked to have already started that), and the introduction of the most iconic of the Turks seems a suitable way to set that up. I do intend to spend at last some time trying to reconcile Reno's infamous actions in the game (really just part-and-parcel of the Turk's overall infamy, it just so happens Reno is their face) with his outright helpful portrayal in Advent Children (further augmented in Advent Children Complete, where he and Rude outright steal the film, to its benefit). Is that still a sore point with fans of the franchise even beyond the intended controversy? That's a good question, given the remake's intentions to rewrite all these things. As usual, thank you to anyone who's staying with this story this long, and please share your opinions, etc., as it helps push me along.