Chapter 16: The Midgar Mirror
Lana Vale, top reporter for the well-known tabloid The Midgar Mirror, couldn't believe her eyes when she got to her desk, started on her morning email, and landed on a blatant and unapologetic spite-letter. The note in question was terse, stating only, "Want an exclusive? Thought you people might be interested in this. It's the real deal, not a manip. It's from an old copy of Barely Legal, Harvest Time Special!" There was no signature, and the return address had been scrambled through what she guessed to be an extremely good anonymizer. Tracing the message back to its source would be difficult to impossible, and in her excitement she didn't particularly care, anyway.
What had her gasping in a combination of shock and elation was the digital image attached: A ravishing beefcake shot of Shinra SOLDIER First Class Angeal Hewley, a few years younger and in all his naked glory.
"Holy crap," she uttered, wide-eyed. This was worthy of a huge bonus from the Mirror on her next paycheck, as well as a whole lot of fame and bragging rights. It was a career maker in the world of tabloid journalism! And she hadn't even had to pay a repulsive, money-grubbing paparazzo.
It seemed dear Angeal had an enemy who was trying to stir up a little trouble. Not that it concerned her at all. She worked for a tabloid and didn't bother putting on false airs about "professional integrity." Finally, finally, she had something she could use to spin a story about him.
Despite all the time he spent with Sephiroth and Genesis Rhapsodos, Hewley never seemed to do anything particularly interesting. He kept privacy wrapped around him like a magic cloak and had been the bane of the tabloids for years.
Shinra promoted Sephiroth like there was no tomorrow, portraying him as the greatest hero in recorded history, yet he never displayed anything but arrogance and disdain for the attention lavished upon him. The dissonance made for irresistible tabloid articles.
Rhapsodos was drama personified. Stories about him practically wrote themselves.
But Hewley? Nothing aside from SOLDIER propaganda centering on honor and dreams, war promotions, and silly fluff about dogs and cooking in fan club newsletters. He never put a foot wrong. Whenever the Mirror published anything about him, it was always just a boring public interest piece.
His perpetually good behavior drove every tabloid reporter in Midgar insane. How could a close companion of Sephiroth and Rhapsodos be so dull?
Scandal of the type the Mirror traded in needed at least a seed of plausibility, or seeming plausibility, at the core of all the fantasy and fiction. The trashier rags published unapologetic schlock and made a decent profit doing so, but higher-end tabloids like the Mirror had better standards than that. The gutter press wallowed in nonsense about undying, vengeful ghouls that wreaked havoc from beyond the grave, human-alien hybrid babies, and shapeshifting monsters that passed for human and infiltrated decent society at its highest levels. There was no sense of reality at all in those crazy stories. Only the biggest fools and conspiracy freaks on the Planet would buy into that garbage. They might as well peruse the horror sections of their favorite bookstores.
The Mirror's stories—at least, the successful ones—played into the audience's own biases and expectations about a given subject. The Mirror's readers wanted to believe, and they didn't want it to be hard to do so. They might understand deep down that the articles were mostly just fabrications, but they wanted to play along with the surface fantasy and incorporate it into their worldviews. They wanted to imagine that what they read might possibly, potentially be true. That meant every story needed at least to appear as though it could be true.
Most of the time, celebrities' public behavior supported and drove the fiction. Holo-stars, popular musicians, and their agents worked the tabloids and practically performed for free. Famous writers sometimes stumbled in interviews. Online media personalities did and said stupid, offensive things because they loved and wanted attention, no matter how unflattering. Politicians and corporate executives embarrassed themselves by going off script when making speeches. Lana was glad she wasn't a Shinra speech writer, based on how often the senior officers of that company mangled their carefully crafted presentations.
Rhapsodos's drama queen antics and Sephiroth's arrogance and his contempt for his worshippers also fit the bill, whether either of them intended it or not. In public, the most famous SOLDIERs really weren't much different than any other shallow, insensitive, and spoiled celebrity.
Except for one.
Angeal Hewley had such a damned wholesome reputation as an ideal SOLDIER operative that manufacturing scandal about him would only backfire. He didn't indulge in any kind of bad behavior, at least not in public. There wasn't so much as a whiff of notoriety or even minuscule impropriety about him. He had gained his popularity in large part by being so damned faultless atop his pedestal of perfection.
It had to be a deliberate choice on his part, considering his closest companions' behavior. Many a tabloid journalist cursed his name even as they wrote yet another story about Sephiroth. At least Sephiroth sold papers. Lana had always been certain a scandalous story about Hewley would sell, too, but...nothing.
Any racy but purely fictional story about Hewley would immediately be tagged as baseless malice. Blatant, unmistakable lies could lead to popular backlash from the Mirror's readership, general public complaints, and even a decrease in sales numbers—which might very well lead to unemployment. Always something to be avoided.
Despite numerous attempts, no one had ever found any real dirt on him, and his reputation remained ridiculously unsullied.
Until now. This was huge. "Mister Perfect, your time has come," she cackled with glee.
But was the photo really the real deal like the spite-letter claimed?
She inspected the image critically. It looked like it had been captured with older technology and that there had been a few filters applied to increase the subject's appeal. She wasn't an expert, though, and there was no way she'd take it to her editor without verifying it first.
The Midgar Mirror received huge numbers of faked photos all the time from people looking for a quick payout or simply their fifteen minutes of fame. As such, it had a top notch digital forensics team on staff. They were competent and fast, with expert eyes and a number of fancy software tools for detecting digital trickery in images. She composed an email to them, marked it urgent and expedited, attached the image, and shot it off. Then she waited and spent her time researching the Barely Legal porn magazine.
After a few hours and a number of calls she had reached a dead end, and had learned only that:
1. The magazine specialized in young male models,
2. The Harvest Time Special! had been published around seven years ago.
3. There were unsubstantiated chatroom rumors that the Harvest Time Special! had included a teenaged Angeal Hewley as the centerfold under the rather mundane pseudonym of Michael Stevens.
What a boring name he chose for such a juicy picture, Lana mused. He should have invented a more interesting alias to do his photo justice.
She continued her online searches. There were no images available, and the publisher had gone out of business over five years ago, suspiciously close to the time when Angeal Hewley had made SOLDIER First Class. The few people she had located and called who had once been affiliated with the magazine only responded with "No comment" or even outright lies to any of her questions, which was equally suspicious. There wasn't an actual physical copy of the old porno to be found anywhere for love or money.
She suspected the not-so-delicate hand of Shinra in the centerfold's suppression, and figured she could probably spend a year on research without finding any more information than she already possessed.
She wondered how a money and porn trail could have been so effectively wiped clean, even with the Shinra Company's immense resources. There might be some awkward repercussions to moving forward, but for the most part The Midgar Mirror printed salacious fiction spun from a few tidbits of reality taken out of context, which gave them a pass from most consequences. Since people with serious power generally dismissed the stories as irrelevant entertainment for the unwashed masses, the tabloid also sometimes got away with telling outrageously scandalous truths.
And this? This was real! What a feather in her cap this story could be! Why, she might even get a series of articles out of it.
Most of her workday passed by in a flurry of phone calls, research, and experimental story outlines. She was finishing a rough, somewhat inventive write-up with enough facts to pass for legit when the digital forensics manager finally got back to her.
"Damn, girl, where did you get this?" Hayato Antonov's voice shouted through her PHS, so loud she had to pull it away from her ear. "It's a fucking incredible score!"
She laughed. "I thought so, too. Believe it or not, it came in my morning email. So, from your reaction, it's real? Not just his head digitally grafted onto someone else's body?"
"Hell, no. Every test we've run so far indicates that it hasn't been tampered with at all."
"Excellent!"
"Gonna run with it?"
"You'd better believe it! I'm taking it to Lois as soon as I hang up. Hey, can you get started on blurring out the naughty bits so we can print it? That picture will score some giant circulation numbers, or my name isn't Lana Vale!"
Hayato chortled and agreed. Giddy, Lana ended the call, sent a copy of her rough draft, the original email, and the unedited image to the Mirror's editor-in-chief, Lois Jameson. She grabbed a fresh cup of bad coffee and headed toward Lois's office, right as Lois bellowed out the open door: "Lana, get your ass in here on the double!"
With a big, shit-eating grin plastered across her face, Lana sauntered into the office and closed the door behind her. "You called, oh boss of mine?"
"Sit your ass down and tell me about this!"
As Lana took a seat before the cluttered desk, Lois turned her laptop. The screen was split between Lana's draft and the image of a very naked Angeal Hewley. "So tell me more. Tell me everything! This is the score of the century. No one's ever gotten anything on him before!"
"Yeah, I can't believe it just fell into my lap this morning. I always wondered how anyone who spent so much time with Sephiroth and Rhapsodos could be so bland and mundane, and as it turns out—"
"He's not!" both women chorused together and laughed.
Lana continued, grinning, "If you've read that email and my draft, you know everything I know about it." She delicately rolled her coffee cup between her hands. "I spent most of the day doing a bunch of prelim work on it. The mag's out of print, and no one I could find who might know anything would say a word about it. I suspect ShinraCo paid them to keep quiet. I mean, we are looking at one of their prize PR studs, and they probably want to keep scandal to a minimum."
Lois hummed thoughtfully. "Shinra, huh?"
"Will anyone really care about any deep-dive fact checking, though? Hayato's team has already vetted the image. No manipulation. It's one hundred percent Angeal Hewley. From what I gathered online, other people have been trying to track that picture down for years without luck."
"And yet it was sent to the Mirror. No strings attached?"
Lana shrugged and sipped her coffee. "Someone's settling a score, I figure."
"Probably. It happens often enough." Lois rocked back in her chair, eyes glittering with anticipation. "Well, that's too bad for Hewley, but it's our gain."
That was music to Lana's ears. "So we're gonna run with it?"
"Hell, yeah, we're gonna run with it. No way I'm letting a scoop like this pass by. But we're going to need to tweak the story a little."
"What do you mean?" Lana wasn't really disturbed. It was just a rough draft. The only thing unusual about it was that it was mostly truthful about what little she'd discovered. Lois probably just wanted some eye-catching, drama-filled embellishments to really grab the readers' imaginations. Not that the picture wasn't eye-catching enough, even with Hayato's team cleaning it up for public consumption.
"Oh, nothing dire," Lois reassured her. "So far I like your copy, but is there any way you could somehow bring Sephiroth into the story?"
Lana blinked and took another drink of coffee to cover her surprise. "Why Sephiroth?" she asked after she finished swallowing. "It's a naked picture of Hewley. What's Sephiroth got to do with it?"
"Yeah, that beefcake shot will definitely sell, but anything tied to Sephiroth always drives sales through the roof. He's always good for extra attention in any SOLDIER-related story."
Lana drummed her fingers against her mouth, thinking about the various sources and fan clubs for the most famous First Class SOLDIERs that any good tabloid reporter knew and kept tabs on. "There are plenty of possibilities," she said. "We already know they hang out together whenever they're in Midgar at the same time. The Silver Elite have claimed that Hewley is one of Sephiroth's closest friends. In fact, they say he's one of Sephiroth's only friends. Genesis Rhapsodos is the other."
"Nothing new there," Lois remarked.
"Those guys have batshit-crazy obsessed fans all over the world, even excluding the fan clubs, and they all gossip online endlessly. I can work a few of the most interesting angles into the story. Maybe even get another few paragraphs of copy from them as filler."
"The Keepers of Honor, the Silver Elite, and Red Leather," Lois mused, listing off the three biggest fan clubs for Hewley, Sephiroth, and Rhapsodos respectively. "Maybe that weird Loveless analysis group, too. Those moronic clubs always seem to have a surprising amount of private information about those three SOLDIERs, and Shinra's PR never contradicts them."
Lana nodded. "I've always assumed the fan clubs get fed inside information. I've just never been able to figure out if it's through officially sanctioned leaks, or some bored fool who's doing it for his own entertainment or just for the thrill of it. It's never anything terribly useful, anyway," she said with a roll of her eyes. "Usually it's just dumb fluff about Sephiroth's shampoo or Angeal's houseplants."
"Whatever. They do seem to be the best sources of factual information, even if it is pedestrian. We can spin it to provide enough veracity to make the story seem real. We can always include a stock picture of all three of them alongside the centerfold to increase interest, too. We have plenty from old PR events."
Thinking, Lana tapped her fingers on the edge of Lois's desk. "We can probably get some more candid pictures from the fan sites, too. The kind of quick snap a groupie would take on their phone if their idols happened to walk by in a restaurant or something." With a smug smirk, she added, "I'm imagining the sales." She was also imagining fame and fortune. She'd be the most celebrated tabloid reporter of the year! "Fans, detractors, curiosity seekers, casual readers. Everyone knows who they are, and no one's ever seen anything like this about Hewley. Even cleaned up, that centerfold shot will have every random person who sees it buying a copy. Everyone loves this kind of dirt. It'll sell like crazy."
"It sure will," said Lois with a huge, toothy grin. "We need to hop to this. We can't let another paper scoop us."
"You think my anonymous source might be spreading that picture around?"
"If this source really is settling a score with Hewley, he or she may be hedging their bets. Get the full story updated and finalized. I don't care if you have to stay up all night to get the job done. Overtime is authorized for everyone. I'll edit it myself so we can keep this moving fast and run it as tomorrow afternoon's top news story. Digital and hard copy."
"Front page?" asked Lana, delight in her scandal-loving heart.
"Absolutely front page!"
NOTE: For anyone interested, some of the tabloid journalists' names were taken from famous journalists in comics: Lois Lane (from Superman), Lana Lang (also Superman), Vicki Vale (Batman), and J. Jonah Jameson (Spiderman).