Again, my apologies for the long delay. I've had a few major personal issues and changes to work through lately that killed my drive to write for a while. This chapter is a bit shorter than usual, as well.

Begin!

Book II, Part I: Outbreak - Vector's Gambit

Chapter III—Facts

[July 11, 2152 | Galbadia City, Jakob's Armory | 7:12 PM]

It was early evening, but Quintin Lassiter's business was just starting to pick up steam for the day. Business hours in Galbadia City were unusual on the best of days due to the city's nighttime slant. Business itself was good; over time, he had forced out other gun dealers from what he considered 'his turf,' whether displacing them to another district or out of the city altogether. His under-the table dealings helped a lot in that respect, giving him the freedom to lower prices far more than normal while at the same time making tidy profits from his side ventures, tax-free and off the books. The fragrant aroma of his drink roused him briefly from his thoughts, and he took another sip of his coffee before delving back into his thoughts for the day ahead. A couple more hours of peddling goods and he'd be off, probably to find some pretty courtesan to accompany him on a night of fun and drinks in the Shining Night.

The bell on his door rang as he returned his drink to the counter, causing him to lean an elbow on the polished wood as he let out a nearly automatic 'can I help you?' to his new customer.

That was when he saw the red hair.

Quintin could feel the blood drain from his face as he stood there, looking at the face of the person who had just walked in. As a part of the criminal underworld, he didn't fear many people given his position as a gun runner, but this particular person...he'd had a bit of an encounter with in the past.

One that had left him frequently praying to Hyne that it would be the last encounter, but an encounter all the same.

"If it isn't my old friend Quintin," Darius DeValle said, smirking as he walked in the door. "Nice to see you haven't forgotten about me," he added a moment later, noticing the panicked look on the store owner's face.

Quintin did the only thing that immediately came to mind.

He ran.

Breaking from his position behind the counter, he whirled for the entrance to his storeroom, toppling his cup of coffee in the process and nearly tripping over a trash can behind the counter as he shoved open the door leading into the back. Darius sighed, and lightning crackled around his body briefly as he moved, his reactions and movement enhanced by his Lightning Alchemy as he made to pursue Lassiter. He really didn't want to have to chase the guy down, but if there was one thing he had learned over the years, it was that people always ran. It wasn't like he was going to hurt Lassiter, after all.

Unless he didn't cooperate, that is.

The back door of the shop burst open as Lassiter fled into the street, sparing a panicked glance behind him to make sure he wasn't being followed as he took off. Forget his shop, forget his wares, he was not going to have another conversation with that man as long as he lived, no matter what it took. He remembered well what it had cost him the last time, and he had no intentions of reliving that.

His orientation suddenly warped violently as something crashed into him hard from the side, throwing him off his feet and into the wall of the building he was beside before pinning him there like a bar of unbending steel. He blinked for a moment to clear his vision and reorient himself, coughing a few times before looking up into a stern face framed by long white hair.

"Going somewhere?" Revolver DeValle asked, one arm pinning Lassiter to the brick wall with junctioned strength and the other idly resting by a small battle hammer hanging at his side.

"Man, you'd think he wasn't happy to see me or something," Darius commented, walking calmly up from the direction of the back entrance as Sumiko faded out of the shadows nearby, her cloaking technique dismissed.

"This is the guy you were talking about?" she asked idly, looking over Lassiter's terrified face for a moment.

"Uh huh. One of the biggest gun dealers the underworld has to offer - Quintin Lassiter. A while back, when this whole mess started, I came to him for some...advice about what could pull off the kind of shot that killed Lindsey."

"And I...told you everything! Everything I knew!" Lassiter said, his breath regained from Revolver's staggering blow.

"Oh, I know you did. In fact, that's the whole reason I'm here, Lassiter," Darius said, walking over to the shop owner. "Just...confirming some things again, if you will. Let's take this back inside, shall we?"

"Look, I told you already. There are a lot of rifles that could've done that, even back then. Do you even know how many sniper rifles are chambered in 7.62? The Mk 24, the DSR-1, PSG-1, M25...there's a load of them. The only way you'll be able to narrow it down any more is to see if there's a forensics report on the bullet - that might narrow down which of the twenty or thirty guns it is."

Darius frowned at Lassiter's words, mostly because he realized that the man had a point. There were quite a number of rifles that possessed the characteristics needed to make the shot that had killed Lindsey, and they needed something more concrete to go on. He was just a kid when it had happened, and so the details of the police reports had been out of his reach back then - reckless and emotional or not, he hadn't wanted to try getting on the bad side of the entire Galbadia City police force.

"You ever sell any of those?"

Lassiter nodded.

"Guessing you don't have records, then. Under the table and all."

"Bingo," he confirmed. "Those rifles don't go cheap, and they don't go where people can see them. That's how the trade works, you know."

"Thing is, though..." Darius started, pacing the length of the counter, "not just anyone buys those kinds of guns. Collectors might, but if you buy a gun like that...more than likely, you're gonna use it for something."

"What's your point?"

"Oh, you know what my point is, Lassiter. How many people were there back then buying guns like that from you? Five, six at the most? You don't just become a marksman like that overnight, not to make a shot like this. Why don't you try and...jog your memory for who might've bought one of those guns, hm?" Darius said with an all-too-nice smile that promised pain for the shopkeeper should he refuse. Lassiter's face paled again, and he wiped a bead of sweat from his cheek before nodding.

"Y-Yeah. I'll do that."

"Good. I'll be back in a day or two to see what you might've remembered - and if you skip town? I'll know. Trust me."

With the same faux cheery smile, Darius clapped Lassiter on the shoulder like an old friend before making for the door, his two teammates close behind him. As the door shut, Lassiter reached up to wipe his brow with a trembling hand, glad to see the red-haired demon from his past exit his shop. He waited a minute to make sure that the boy was well and truly gone before stepping over to the door quickly and throwing the bolt locks shut, flipping the sign on the door to 'Closed' and drawing the metal bars that served as a theft deterrent closed across the inside of the storefront.

Lassiter knew well that Darius would be back, and that the younger boy meant every word he didn't say about what was sure to happen to him should he not remember something. He strode back across the room just as fast once his task was finished, heading into the back once again and moving to a wall panel on the far side of the room that he swiftly removed, exposing the small safe concealed behind it. With deft movements, he entered the combination for the lock and tugged the metal door open, reaching in and grabbing a cellphone that he kept there. Rattled though he was, there was a call he needed to make, one he'd had to promise long ago to make if the situation ever came up. His finger stabbed at the button to place a call to the only number stored in the phone's memory, and he put it to his ear as he leaned against the wall, waiting patiently for the one on the other end to pick up.

"Carmichael."

"I-It's me. Kid came by just now - thought you should know."

"Just do whatever he's told you to. I'm already on it."

The line disconnected before Lassiter could say anything further, and he dropped the phone to his side for a moment as he calmed himself. The phone he'd just called would be long disabled if anyone happened to get their hands on it - probably already was, he thought - but he didn't want to take a chance on anyone figuring out who he'd just called. His eyes looked around his shop's storage and work area, looking for something to use to trash the phone with, and his gaze settled on a long stick with a wide, square horizontal bar at the end, perpendicular to the shaft of the object.

He walked over and grabbed it, flipping the item over - a wide bar magnet that he used to pick up screws and the like from his shop floor - before placing it on the counter and taking the back off the phone, ripping the battery out before running the magnet along the phone several times to try and scramble the tiny machine's internal storage. Satisfied that he'd garbled anything that might be left in the memory, he dropped the magnet back onto the counter and moved the phone over to a counter-mounted vise. A few smooth turns of the crank on the side, and the flimsy metal and plastic of the phone shattered and broke under the unyielding pressure, leaving Lassiter with a crushed wreck of a phone in his hand. It found its way into the scrap container that held broken gun pieces and hardware, and Lassiter breathed a sigh of relief as he finally let himself relax.

'Relax' was a relative term in his situation, of course, even more so than usual. Some days, it just didn't pay to live in Galbadia.

"Satisfied?" Revolver asked Darius as he opened the door to their vehicle outside, sliding inside as Sumiko moved into the seat behind his.

"Quite," the younger DeValle remarked, smoothly sliding into the driver's seat. "For a few minutes, anyway. I'll let him sweat for a while and see what else comes out of it."

Darius, being a member of a family with quite a bit of wealth to spare, had a tendency to splurge on things that caught his fancy. Most often, that fell in the category of firearms or some high-tech accessory to go along with them, but occasionally he took a liking to something not along those lines. The car he was driving now was one such purchase he'd made not too long ago, and he'd had little chance to truly enjoy it until now. A mid-sized, four-door sedan with surprising amounts of power, the sleek metallic blue automobile had set him back a good-sized amount of Gil, but he'd fallen in love with the car following a test drive and hadn't thought twice about buying it on the spot. It accelerated quickly and cornered quite well for its size, and was more than capable of getting him from place to place in a timely manner.

"And what if he doesn't 'remember' anything?" Revolver asked coolly, prompting a quick glance from Darius just before he pulled out onto the Galbadian streets.

"I'll think of something."

The main streets were starting to fill up now as the nightlife began emerging from their homes, but the residential areas that Darius drove his small group through were as quiet as ever. Darius had planned the first step - their meeting with Lassiter - to be something short and sweet in order for them to take a moment to examine their surroundings. Sumiko and Revolver had come along with him to talk to the gun dealer, while the rest of their team had made their way to a rather innocuous house in one of the more suburban areas of the city. It was a single-story, moderately-sized brick home with little in the way of decoration, merely a tree and some bushes in the small front yard for atmosphere.

Of course, given that the house also belonged to Darius and was used as a safehouse for both SeeD work and personal business, the house was only innocuous on the outside. As he pulled into the garage attached to the house, he noticed that the other vehicle his team was using - a small, tan two-door sport utility vehicle - was parked within, showing that the rest had made it here safely. The door lowered behind them as they exited, and Darius wasted no time heading into the house to reconvene with the rest of the group.

"What's our next move, then?" Sumiko asked as they entered, giving a quick nod to Silvia as she followed Darius into the living room.

"Our next move is that there isn't a move - we'll wait out the night, and see what we come up with in the morning," the red-haired boy replied, leaning back into the sofa alongside one wall of the room. "Easier for us to move around in the daytime, and it'll give Lassiter time to think one way or another."

The blond girl merely nodded in understanding; she'd familiarized herself with Galbadia City and its environs, and Darius was correct in his assessment from her viewpoint. "Where are Andréa and Naoki?" she asked a moment later, noticing the conspicuous absence of two of her teammates.

"Downstairs," Darius said, shrugging. "Not sure what kind of trouble they're getting into, but feel free to go check it out. I put a lot of work into the place." He gestured off towards one area of the house, figuring that Sumiko would be able to find the stairs to the lower level, and watched as she walked off to find their two other teammates.

"You're playing this much more calmly than I expected you to," Revolver grunted, leaning against the doorframe separating the living room from the kitchen. Darius nodded as Silvia took a seat beside him, both pairs of eyes watching the white-haired DeValle brother.

"I've...had a lot of time to think about it," he said after a moment. "If I rush into this, I could lose everything, and I refuse to let that happen a second time."

Another grunt was Revolver's only reply as he turned to move back into the kitchen. It was in moments like these that he could truly see the person his younger brother used to be, and it still hurt him somewhere inside to see how much Darius had changed. He longed to put his father in his place and show him just how much his greed and arrogance had cost him, but knew that he had no way to do that without creating issues he most certainly did not want to see arise.

He would settle, then, for helping Darius chase away the ghosts of his past. It was not a solution, but it was a start.

[July 11, 2152 | Galbadia City, Galbadia City Police Department Warehouse #14 | 8:21 PM]

No matter how many times she pulled stunts like this, Fiona always felt like a chocobo walking into a den of T-Rexaurs. This was just the latest in a string of mad ideas she'd come up with an executed over the past months, she told herself, and fought back the momentary butterflies filling her stomach as she put on her best stern businesswoman expression and pushed open the doors to the structure in front of her. Adjusting the glasses she wore - glass lenses, as she didn't need any adjustments to her vision - she nodded briefly to the guard on duty at the desk as she stepped over.

"Evening," she said, letting just a twinge of her Estharian accent slip through her normally muddied mix of accents. She'd long since become skilled at keeping her accent controlled to the point where it would be hard to pick up on just where she was from, which also led her to try imitating the accents of other areas. The result was a blended mix of enunciation and pronunciation that she tended to use while in disguise, hinting at many different places but impossible to trace to any one origin.

"Evening," the guard replied, his tone jovial but marred a bit by fatigue. "Guess I'm not the only one up late."

"Seems so," she replied, stepping over to the desk and presenting an identification card to the guard. He looked it over for a moment - Det. Diana Tsurimi, he noted - before handing it back to her and shifting in his chair.

"What can I do for you, detective?" he asked.

"Just came by to pick up a case file. You remember the Holloway murders?"

The guard's momentary wince was indication enough of his impending response. "Nasty one, that. Heard they tore his case apart at trial."

"Didn't get to see it myself, but that's what I've heard too," she commented with a nod. "Unlikely as it sounds, we just received word yesterday that there has been some new evidence brought in that suggests Holloway is innocent. I didn't think there was anything that could prove that to be right, but the chief wants me to bring a copy of the case files down to go over them and see if there's any credibility to it."

"You're kidding," he muttered, shaking his head before turning to the computer at his desk and typing in a query. "Hirasi, Holcomb...Holloway. Here it is." He looked up again and turned, gesturing down the hall. "Go down the hall to 2A. They should be in there - just watch the dust. Some of those haven't been touched in a while."

"Thank you," she said, starting to make her way down the hall. "Is there a copier there as well?"

"Copy room's first door on your right there," he responded.

Fiona silently thanked the fact that sufficiently upsetting information tended to keep people from asking too many questions as she moved past the first few doors, looking for the one the guard had indicated. Her choice of case wasn't an accident - the records were stored alphabetically, as expected, and the files she was really after were in the same group. It was just a simple matter of finding something troubling enough to make people think with their emotions first and not their logic, and then keeping herself calm enough to play it out.

Child's play.

She opened the door to room 2A a minute later, flipping on the light switch on the wall beside her as she gazed over the rows and rows of folders and boxes, sorted onto plain metal shelves that lined the walls and sat in neat rows across the room. A quick glance showed her that she was in the 'G' section, which was the one she wanted, and she started running her finger down lists of files, looking for the correct one.

"Ga...Ge...Geneave."

Quickly, she pulled out the file folder and opened the contents, seeing a stack of papers inside - everything from police reports to eyewitness accounts to forensic details. Satisfied, she took all of the papers out of the folder and stuffed them into an inside pocket of her suit jacket, replacing the empty folder in its place as she moved on to the 'H' section. It wouldn't do to have everyone think she was leaving without what she came for, after all. Another moment's searching located the case file for the Holloway case, and she took the entire folder this time before exiting the room and heading for the copier. It took a few minutes for her to get the papers copied - thanks to what appeared to be one of the most archaic copy machines she'd ever seen - but the minutes passed without incident, and she soon found herself on the way out after replacing the original folder for the case file.

"Find everything okay?" the guard asked, to which she nodded.

"I did," she affirmed, a wry smirk sliding over her face. "Though, I have to say, you could do with replacing that copier. It looks like it dates back to before the Sorceress Wars."

The guard gave a hearty laugh at that, nodding in agreement. "We can get brand new cars every year, but can't find it in the budget for a decent copier. Just the way it works, I guess."

She shook her head at the notion before turning to leave again, offering a quick parting wave and a 'good night' as she exited the building. Once outside, she let out the sigh of relief that she'd been holding in, heading towards her car parked at the curb.

'It always amazes me how easily you can get access to things by pretending you're an authority figure...' she thought to herself, unlocking her car and sliding inside. The papers inside her jacket found their way onto the seat as she cranked the engine and roared off into the night to do a little late-night reading.

If there are any issues with any of the gun facts, I apologize; firearms are not my strong suit. I'll try and make the next chapter longer to make up for this one, as well. Until next time...