A/N: Since two of the OC Turks show up here as active participants, they (like Donnel) get descriptions. I'm trying to add them gradually so hopefully people will be good with them by the time a new one (or a few) is introduced, but if it starts getting confusing, please, please let me know in a review or PM so I can include a list of the active Turks at this time, with brief descriptions. The more requests I get, the more likely I will be to add the list. Otherwise, if you're all good with them as they are, I'll proceed as normal.
Leaving Comfort Zones
"Can you really use different types of weapons well enough for the VR scenarios if they're so hard?" Neirine asked after they had left the training room.
"Yes," the Wutain agreed, leading the way first to the Turks' training room and heading for their personal storage. Of course, none of the weapons would be great quality, but they were only meant to be functional for practicing, not real combat.
While he chose weapons, Neirine began poking around the room in awe and curiosity, sometimes picking things up to look at them more closely before putting them back. Tseng chose to revert to his Wutain roots, selecting a katana—a long, slender, slightly curved, folded-metal sword—a dagger of a matching style, and a set of short, triangular-bladed knives called kunais. Once he'd chosen weapons—each blade only had two slots for Materia, and the kunais had none—he moved over to the bracers and found a Shinra Alpha, which had six slots. He then moved over to the Materia selection, which Neirine had already been poking through—but she suddenly pulled her hand back with her mouth open in shock as she held up a red Materia.
"What is it?" he asked curiously, so she offered it to him.
"It was right on the bottom, and it's barely been used, so I think it's been there for a long, long time," she said.
The Wutain just touched it rather than taking it, and found it was the Phoenix Summon. What in the world was a Phoenix doing in there? After a moment, he met her gaze and asked, "Do you want it?"
"To test for the scenario, you mean?" she asked. "That would be a bit of a waste, wouldn't it?"
He gave his head a shake. "I don't think it was ever even meant to be in there, and if it was on the bottom of the basket, it hasn't been used in a long time. If you want to keep it, feel free—Phoenix is one of the best there is."
"Then shouldn't you take it, Si—Tseng? You're the one who is working on real missions and could die," Neirine pointed out.
He gave her an amused look and said, "I'm fine, Neirine. I have some special Materia which will do better for me in real time than Phoenix, so since you dug deeply enough to find it, you can keep it."
For a long moment, she gazed at him uncertainly, then retrieved Rekka from the back of her belt and put Phoenix in the last open slot of six on it. Tseng turned his full attention to choosing the Materia in the basket, knowing he had ten slots to fill—the katana had two linked, the dagger had two unlinked, and the Shinra Alpha had three linked pairs. As he went through the selection—nowhere near as good as the set he currently couldn't access—he had a sudden thought about the point of working together in pairs.
"What do you have on you for Materia—besides Phoenix?" he asked, taking a moment to strap on the sword and dagger sheaths and the bracer.
"On Rekka, Slash All and Health Absorb paired, Poison and Added Effect paired, and Gravity and Phoenix unlinked, and on my Shinra Beta, Sense and All paired and Seal, Destruct, Barrier, and Heal. Everything except Destruct, Barrier, Gravity, and now Phoenix are Mastered," she explained. Shinra Betas weren't nearly so strong in armor as Shinra Alphas and had six slots, two linked and four unlinked.
Tseng looked up at her in surprise as he commented, "None of which are meant for teamwork, except possibly Barrier and Phoenix now."
She shrugged and answered, "Turks mostly work alone, or so I was told."
"Yes, and no," the Wutain answered. "Turks are always working together with one another, though many of our missions—investigative ones especially—are done alone. Combat ones often are paired. You need to be capable of working alone, but also of working with others. For solo work, you definitely have a good set, but it has little use to anyone you may be working with." He paused, then said, "I want you to switch off your Slash All and Health Absorb with Restore and All for this scenario. Also, I'm going to talk to Veld about at least upgrading you to a Shinra Alpha for its defensive abilities."
"...Could I have something like a Wizard Bracelet for the extra slots so I can still keep everything I'm used to using?" Neirine asked tentatively.
"Do you think you're ready to actively wear fourteen Materia instead of twelve?"
"...Maybe not just yet..."
"Then for now, you're going to leave your comfort zone and switch them off. It's not good for you to be so attached to a certain set that you can't function without them." At the words, Tseng paused as he thought about what he had on him, then said, "On second thought—you can pick up to four Materia you already use and keep them. Everything else has to be switched off with Materia here in the basket. You can keep your usual Materia in your pockets, but you can't use them during the scenario. I'll do the same, which means even the ones I could use raw I won't be using for this one. We'll count Phoenix as a new one for the purposes of the exercise because it is new to you, so you can choose a maximum of four in addition to it to keep."
The girl's eyes widened in a panic as she watched the black haired almost-eighteen-year-old pull three Materia from their places in his socks and waistband to put in his gear. The ones he'd chosen were Alexander, Full Cure, and Manipulate, though she only knew them as a Summon, Magic, and Command. As he began sorting through the Materia in the basket, she eyed the Materia she had on her and thought about what she'd miss most. Sense and All she had to keep because she'd be disoriented without the input of the combination she relied on during all her tasks, combat or otherwise. After reminding herself of what was in the basket, she felt Destruct and Barrier were the best ones to keep, so removed the rest to put in her skirt pockets.
As she turned to the basket to choose a Poison and Added Effect which weren't hers and felt strange to her, she asked, "How do I plan for working with others while still being able to solo?" When Tseng held out a Restore and All to her after taking one of each for himself, she made a face and slotted them paired in her Shinra Beta.
"By thinking about what would be useful to others. What did you keep?" he asked as he turned and walked back along the shelves to the one where he'd found the Shinra Alpha. As he'd thought, there was another on the shelf, so he took it and went back to Neirine to hand it to her, motioning for her to switch it with her Beta.
She blinked in surprise and made the switch as she said, "Sense and All—I wouldn't be able to function without those—and Destruct and Barrier because those aren't available here. At least the Restore gives me healing I won't get from Health Absorb now."
"What are you doing?" a new voice asked curiously, making Tseng and Neirine look up at a twenty-six-year-old blond man in the Turks' uniform. His hair was cut fairly short and brown eyes gazed at them evenly without giving a trace of anything away. For a weapon, he used a specialized, folding scythe which was currently strapped to his back with the curved blade hidden by the currently shortened handle.
"Since I'm not allowed to work for the next six days, I thought I'd amuse myself by helping our actual 'baby Turk' figure out how to work on partner missions. Since I also haven't been keeping up all my own skills or seen the new VR scenarios for Turks, that seemed like a good way to start. Right now, I'm getting both of us out of our Materia comfort zones—the rules I set are four or less of our usual set of Materia can stay, but the rest have to come from our stores here," Tseng replied.
The blond man looked a bit amused at the words, but looked at the younger girl and asked, "Think you can manage by those terms, Neirine?"
She made a face and answered, "I can, it just feels really strange to use Materia that aren't mine."
From outside the room, a woman called, "Did you find it, Verde?"
"Come in here, Ansha. This sounds like an interesting idea," Verde called back to the woman outside.
Soon after, a black haired, twenty-two-year-old woman in the Turk pant suit had joined them as she asked curiously, "What does?" She had hair falling in a flyaway style half-way down her back, the shape looking almost like a spiked ridge from a distance and the bottom edges of nearly each 'spike' highlighted with blond. Under straight-cut bangs, cobalt blue eyes blinked curiously at Tseng and Neirine, and it was obvious she had Wutain blood, but how much was questionable.
"Tseng and Neirine want to run a newer VR partner scenario while using only four or less of the Materia they're used to and switching the rest off with ones from our stores. There's that one scenario which you can't run with anything less than four, so I thought we could give it a try—getting four Turks together long enough to run it is nearly impossible. Since we're both off work in about five minutes, we have the time."
Ansha crossed her arms thoughtfully for a minute, then gave a nod and said, "We could do that. Also, neither of us has worked with Tseng much, and Neirine hasn't worked with any of us, so it'll be good. What have you two kept so far? Unless you'd rather not run with us?" She asked the question when she saw both of the teens' shocked expressions.
At the question, the Wutain man gave a wry half-smile and said, "I don't mind, this was just an unexpected development. Neirine said she can't function without Sense and All, so I figure she'll be our main informant for what we're going into, and she also kept Destruct and Barrier. I was going to tell her to pair Barrier with an All, and because she found a Phoenix in the bottom of the basket, I told her she can officially keep it. I gave her a Restore and All as well, but I don't know what the last pair she picked is. Mine from prior are Full Cure, Manipulate, and Alexander, and I've taken a Restore and All as well."
"Alexander?" both Verde and Ansha stared. It was the blond man who asked, "Where did you get that?"
"It was a gift from a friend when his Mastered," Tseng answered, being vague but detailed enough that they probably wouldn't ask more. They didn't.
"The last ones you've picked, Neirine?" Ansha asked the thirteen-year-old.
"Poison and Added Effect," the girl replied.
"Use an All with Barrier as Tseng said, and—did you have Gravity on you before?"
"Yes."
"Then on your weapon, use Gravity and Elemental," Ansha said with a nod to her before examining her own bracer and the wristbands of the martial arts glove weapons she wore. "Let me take care of Heal—I'll pair it with an All. And I'll be keeping my Contain, Mirage, and Luck Plus. I'll use Time, too."
"None of the Time Materia here are high enough for Stop," Verde commented dryly.
"They don't have to be," Ansha shrugged. "Mirage and Time will be paired with Alls for the rest of you to get the benefits of them."
Neirine finished making the switches and said, "So for me, that makes Poison with Added Effect, Gravity with Elemental, Phoenix, and Destruct on Rekka, and Sense with All, Restore with All, and Barrier with All on the Shinra Alpha, and that's all my slots."
"Good, that's one down," Verde answered absently. "I'll take Seal, then, because putting even just one enemy to sleep is a good idea to even the odds. I can't use many things with Support Materia because my eight-slot is a Precious Watch..."
Ansha and Tseng groaned as Neirine asked, "What's a Precious Watch?"
"Basically, a time-keeper with eight unlinked slots," Tseng answered. "Verde, maybe you can take one each of the elements other than Gravity, just in case we run into something with a weakness to one of them?"
"Yes, there's that," Verde agreed in mild amusement, taking one each of the six base elements—Fire, Ice, Lightning, Earth, Aero, and Water—while grabbing a Seal.
"Okay, my set is finished," Ansha said suddenly. "I have Contain and Gravity with Elementals and Poison and Exit on my glove and Heal with All, Time with All, Mirage with All, Restore, and Luck Plus on my Wizard Bracelet. Tseng, did you just pair Alexander with an Elemental?" She sounded amused.
"I did," he agreed. "Katanas like Holy Blades, and Alexander is the only way to get one without Ultima. That takes care of my sword, and my Shinra Alpha has Manipulate, Restore, and Full Cure, each paired with an All. Will Throw and Gravity be good enough for my dagger?"
"Probably," Verde agreed. "If we're going for rare things there's no duplicate for here, I'll go with Revive, Float, Slash All, and Steal as Well, the last two paired. Revive and Float I'll pair with Alls from here, and...I'll put Mystify on my scythe. On my Watch, I have Fire, Ice, Lightning, Earth, Aero, Water, Restore, and Seal."
There was a moment of startled silence before Neirine giggled and asked, "That means everyone's done now, right?"
"It does," Ansha agreed in mild amusement.
"Let's head for the VR room, then," Tseng answered.
As they headed for the named room, the thirteen-year-old asked, "So working with others means a lot of Alls?"
"Not necessarily," Ansha said. "Some of them are useful, like Barrier and All or Revive and All, just for the fact that your priority is to keep an eye on the well-being of your combat partners. We used more Alls than we normally would have because we were so restricted in what we could keep of our original gear and what we had to replace it with. Nonetheless, everything we worked out is very useful in a group, and a joint investigation with four of us will still probably split us up. Tseng and I have the highest luck and survival rate without any sort of revival method, but if Verde can manage to steal items off our opponents, we'll be better set. If we were starting with the full gear and items we'd normally be able to choose, that combination would be less valid."
"Should one of us have taken Steal, then?" Neirine asked suddenly, looking down at her bracer.
"No," Tseng answered in amusement. When the others looked at him, he explained, "If I remember correctly, Verde's Steal as Well is Mastered, so if the opponent has anything to steal, he'll get it—any other Steal would become obsolete. You can't steal from an enemy who has nothing."
"It's true my Steal as Well is Mastered, and pairing it with a Mastered Slash All means I'll hit—and steal from—all enemies in range of my scythe," Verde agreed. "My speed is about the same as Tseng's, so it's a lot easier to let me hit first, steal everything they have, and split up the haul after the battle."
"Isn't it hard to fight with a scythe?" the girl asked curiously as they stepped into the VR room.
"It is," the blond man agreed. "But it has the best range and greatest control of any weapon I've found, and once you know how to use it, a scythe can be singularly deadly. Of course, it's not the sort of weapon you actually aim to kill with, it's the sort of weapon you aim to maim with."
"Ew..."
Ansha and Tseng chuckled at the girl's response, and Verde made his way over to the console in the room attached to the VR room. "I'm setting the scenario, which should start with a briefing of some sort before we begin moving," Verde called. "Wait for me to join you before you activate the briefing."
"Got it," Ansha agreed.
There was a pause, then the whole room filled with data strings as it changed, and Tseng, Ansha, and Neirine found themselves in a room which looked a great deal like the Turks' main office. It showed the signs of being the Junon Turks' office, the only other place where there was literal Shinra military presence in the world, and the thought was verified by the view out the window. While none of them were used to seeing scaffolding or an incomplete cannon, it was still obvious what it was. Near them was what served as the Junon Director's desk with a fairly thick file folder on it.
"Where's this?" Neirine asked in curious confusion.
"Junon," both Ansha and Tseng answered absently, scanning the view.
Verde joined them from the side room a few moments later, commenting as he did, "I didn't know the VR rooms could also generate uniforms for people not in them."
All three others blinked, then looked down at themselves, and both Tseng and Neirine found they were dressed in Turk pant suits. The Wutain man chuckled and said, "Then we may as well call our baby by her pending Turk name."
"Cissnei!" Verde grinned, ruffling the girl's hair. "We've been waiting for this for a long time. It's true this is a good excuse to use her Turk name."
Neirine blinked and asked, "Cissnei will be my Turk name?"
"It will," Tseng agreed. "Now, we should see what our mission is."
They gathered around the file folder and opened it, going through the data quickly. It was simple—the date was nineteen eighty-nine, the Mako Cannon in Junon was being built as a new addition to the coastal city, and its plans had been stolen. Their task was to find the terrorist base somewhere in Junon, retrieve the plans, eliminate the terrorists, find out who leaked them information, eliminate the leak, and destroy the terrorist base. It was fairly typical of Turk missions, but from Tseng's fourteen extra years of experience, Junon was the worst possible place to encounter terrorists, and the city had suffered greatly from multiple attacks against it, even just since he joined the Turks, let alone before then.
"This sounds like an actual mission from back then," Verde frowned apprehensively.
"You weren't a Turk back then, though," Ansha commented. "How do you know that's what this sounds like?"
"Eonna told me about it, not much, but enough to serve as an example of exactly why you call in for help on some missions—actually, why you call in to report as you gain more information. Sometimes, that new information will drastically change your best course of action. I think I remember roughly where the base is, but—this worries me. We'll have to watch our step carefully, because the one thing I remember Eonna saying was that they didn't have to destroy the base themselves because the terrorists blew up their own base instead," Verde sighed softly.
"Why would they have done that?" Neirine—Cissnei for the VR mission—asked.
Verde shook his head slowly. "Sometimes terrorists have tasks of their own which they'd rather completely obliterate before turning it over to the people they view as the enemy. Sometimes they'd prefer to destroy themselves and take the enemy with them. Sometimes...it's a trap."
Ansha and Tseng traded worried looks, then Ansha asked, "Is this a trap?"
Looking up at the pair, the blond man gave his head a shake. "No. If I remember right, it was a combination of the first two reasons, not a deliberate or intended trap."
"If you know where we're going, we'd better head out," Tseng sighed. "We have more work to do than just eliminating the base, after all."
"Too true," Ansha agreed. "By the way, how is your Sense different from a normal one, Cissnei?"
Verde and Tseng led the way from the room as the girl said, "It's not just the Sense, it's the All, too. Those were the first two Materia I was given when I was seven and they've been with me since, but the longer I had them paired on me, the more access to more data they started giving me. At first, it was just basic stats of an enemy or a few, but now, it's more like—there's a hundred foot circle around me, at least, where I read everything from who and what is where, if there are holes in the terrain, if there are paths, passages, obstructions, hidden doors or compartments. It basically gives me a detailed map of everything around me."
The others went cross-eyed as Verde said, "Power to you, kiddo, if you can keep input like that straight along with active-time combat—or other—activity. Are you using it now?"
"No. Mr. Shinra—the one who trains with me—told me my eyes kind of look glassy when I use the pair. I wouldn't notice, because the map layout of my surroundings creates ghost images over what's really there and I can react just as well to both the solid stuff and the ghostly overlay. That's on top of a topical map appearing—imprinting itself—in my mind, like a close enough camera view of my current range to see details of what something is. And it still gives me data on things like enemies, but not just enemies, it gives me data on anything or anyone it can in my range, allies, animals, monsters, enemies, whatever."
At Cissnei's explanation, Tseng asked, "Does that mean you can ask it to lead you to certain data, or is that still a manual search?"
"Depends on the type of data. If we're looking for important documents which are in my range, it'll show me where there are documents to find, but we'd have to then manually search. If I'm looking for a person who has the data, or if we know a pair of Guard Hounds will be guarding it, I can find those specifically," Cissnei explained.
By then, they were in the lift to head down to the streets, so Ansha said, "You know, you guys—I don't think we should all go to the warehouse to destroy it, and there are only so many places a warehouse has to hide things, so we should split our party. Cissnei and I will look for the data on the leak while the two of you take out the base. We'll meet up after to see where our investigation is at and take our next step."
Verde and Tseng traded looks, then nodded and Tseng said, "We can work with that for now. I suppose Cissnei will be able to find us easily enough. Did we want to prearrange a meeting place or just let her guide you to us once you've found what you can?"
"The archway between the two halves of Junon, where the path to the Reactor is," Verde said immediately.
Ansha gave a wry grin, Tseng shrugged, and Cissnei asked, "The what?"
"You'll see when we get back there," Ansha told the girl. "We'll go looking for the two of you if you don't show up in a certain amount of time, though."
The lift stopped, so they got off and parted into their groups as Verde agreed, "Fair enough. See you later." Tseng followed closely as Verde led the way towards the town on the harbor side of the same archway over the street which supported the tram-lift they'd just used.
As they left, both of them snickered when they heard Cissnei ask, "Do Turks always talk this much?"
On the way to the Junon warehouses, Verde asked, "Why were you taken off active duty?"
"Apparently, I'm getting reckless and Veld wants to keep me locked up to cure me of the urge to act without proper data and support," Tseng answered with a small sigh.
"You? Reckless?" the blond Turk asked with a raised brow.
With a small scowl, Tseng bit out, "It's not like I can just pick and choose to—" He stopped abruptly as Verde turned to look at him in mild surprise, then gave the younger man a thoughtful look.
"Does that mean you don't trust the Turks?"
At the question, Tseng looked away and said, "It's not so much an issue of trust as it is an issue of keeping you from getting the backlash. If you legitimately don't know, you can't be blamed."
"You think any of the Execs would believe we don't know, even if it's true we don't? We're the Turks, we deal in information. Besides, all of us have noticed your strange behavior and the number of cases we suddenly have answers for when they're new cases and we haven't even finished collecting data for them yet. Some of our number actually know some Wutain culture and tradition, so we've all sort of guessed you have Leviathan's Blessing," Verde informed the younger man as though he was discussing something as mundane as the weather.
Which, of course, caused Tseng to stop in shocked silence, as he'd never actually intended that information to go past Veld, Kariya, and Reno.