Wutain Confusion
Haruna was sitting at the counter in her shop as she went over an inventory list, gaze occasionally drifting to the patch of new floor panels which now had shelves on it again. The owner of the space had gone back through his records when she'd said it looked like water damage, and had returned to her with data about what had happened to the floor.
As it turned out, hers was the third business there, not the second, and the first one had been an ice cream parlor; they'd put one of the freezers of pre-made goods around where the hole had been. After finding the man he'd bought it from, he'd found out the freezer had been one of Shinra's faulty line (long since fixed after so many years), which while cheap had been the sort to leak both water and chemicals frequently.
Because the location really wasn't great for things like ice cream parlors, he'd only managed to run for three years before handing it off to someone else, who had then sold trinkets there. While it had done marginally better, trinkets were a 'tourist' or 'gift' item and also didn't do well there. In fact, Haruna's business was the first one to make a good profit—tailoring goods worked well in a traditional neighborhood. However, no one had realized there was a weak spot partly because the ice cream parlor owner hadn't realized just how much the freezer had been leaking and partly because the trinket shop also hadn't had anything with any weight there.
It was just chance that she'd put something there which could stress it to breaking, and chance that a customer had dropped something there to act as the final straw. The current owner had covered the repair costs, and even checked the rest of the floor to make repairs to it. He had also expressed his hopes that she would keep her business there and operational—it had brought in more customers to all the businesses in the area, some of which had been about to go under and been saved by the influx.
A glance over at the corner the tailor worked in made her smile faintly at Elmyra—Maya was staying home that day. Because the business was technically a cover for her investigation, by default she wouldn't be keeping it, but that didn't mean it had to go out of business—it just needed to change hands. There was really no one better than Elmyra, and if things went well enough that the President and Hojo were both soon eliminated, Elmyra and Aeris could even move into the home she, Hokuto, and Maya were currently staying in. If they could shut down the Reactors, it wouldn't even be a hardship for Aeris to be away from the ground.
At the very least, the business could go to Elmyra, and they'd see what else could come of it afterwards—that part she was sure of.
Her eyes skipped back to the inventory as she went back to work on it, focusing for a few minutes when she realized she was at a section with very popular fabrics which she had to carefully mark for replacement.
Once done that section of her list, her mind drifted to the note about the Emperor Argento had sent along with the list Cloud had passed on to her. She'd been avoiding thinking about it for awhile because it clashed badly with her personal experience...But truthfully, she hadn't seen him since the incident in order to know what his reaction had been. Assuming he was at fault for Crescent Unit having participated in the attack on her family was premature, especially knowing Argento had been with Crescent Unit before Deepground had stolen her off the battlefield for their experiments.
She suddenly sat back with a sigh, staring up at the ceiling absently for a minute as she tried to sort her thoughts. As a child, her family had been close to the Kisaragi family, and so it should have been, them having been close family, after all. There had been no hint of any malice, not that she'd been able to tell, and not that anyone else in her family had been able to tell, not even her mother—and Eidolons (as Minerva had called the free-roaming ones) had strong senses for deceit and malice. His behavior hadn't changed, nor had the sense about him, otherwise someone should have noticed.
But that Crescent Unit had attacked them had been damning on several levels. Until now, until even some of the Imperial Assassins had been proven to be working against Leviathan, and against Wutai's best interests.
"Is something wrong, Haruna?" Elmyra asked gently from where she sat, working on a dress a woman had brought in for fitting.
Haruna blinked and turned to look at her, then sighed and turned back to the inventory as she replied, "I don't know. What I once thought I knew as fact doesn't seem to be fact anymore."
"About what, if you don't mind my asking?" the older woman questioned, head tipped to the side as she kept working while obviously listening intently.
For a moment, she hesitated, then thought she could do worse than get advice from the woman who had raised Aeris. In some cases, she had gotten advice from worse people than Elmyra. Also, the woman was completely outside the situation, so might be able to help clarify it for her. Of course, she still had to modify it some without losing the essence of it, but that was doable.
"A long time ago, when I was still a child, my favorite uncle had been the leader of a special group of people," she began slowly. "They took their orders only from him. At least, that's what I thought at the time. My family should have been as safe with them as they were with him, but...one night, they came to our place and tortured all of us to death except myself and Hokuto. My uncle hadn't been with them, or even the whole of the group he led, but they were still his..."
She paused and drew in a shaky breath, and Elmyra asked, "Did you ever confront him over it?"
"...No. It isn't that I didn't have a few friends keep looking into things...I wanted to know why he would have done that." She paused again for a moment, then went on, "I got a message from one of those friends a bit ago—maybe around a week and a half or two weeks? She told me he had been devastated by our deaths, not knowing some of us had survived, and had thought it had been bandits or a similar group to do it. I don't know if I should believe that after his own people were the ones to..."
The older woman was quiet for a moment as she gave a small hum of thought. After a pause of her own, Elmyra said, "I think it would be hard to reconcile the two opposites. One thing stands out to me, though, and it was also something I had to give serious thought to. Do you want to hear me out?"
"I'd appreciate anything to help put this into perspective," Haruna answered quietly.
"All right. Haruna, I've had a lot of time to think about how Aeris came to me. I'm sure you know she's not my daughter by blood, but...I love her like she is. It was her mother's dying wish for me to take her someplace safe, to take care of her...The woman who had pleaded just those few words to me then died...she had been destroyed, not from outside or by disease—but from the inside, in a way I recognize as over-using a Limit Break. Over-using one to the point of complete bodily shut-down isn't easy. It took Aeris awhile to tell me where she and her mother had escaped from."
"...Where was that?" Haruna asked into the pause the woman left, knowing it wouldn't actually make sense for her to know already if she was a relatively 'new' friend of the girl's.
"The Shinra Labs," Elmyra answered, and the Wutain woman drew in the expected sharp breath. "The thing is...those are heavily fortified Labs with solid, reinforced doors—even assuming her mother could have gotten through the monsters and the people, her actually getting out of the Labs wouldn't have been possible...Unless those doors were open. Unless someone had deliberately opened them for the women to escape." She paused, then sighed faintly and went on, "And then I come to a young man in the uniform of a Turk who, despite having found her, refuses to take her back to the Shinra building unless she's willing to go back."
Cocking her head to the side at that comment, Haruna asked warily, "What do you mean? Even I know what the Turks are."
"Yes," the older woman agreed. "But Haruna, even when in a group, humans are all individuals. They make choices for their own reasons. And I keep thinking that, if the Turk won't take her back to Shinra...just maybe he's also the reason Aeris and her mother escaped in the first place. I'd gotten used to thinking of Shinra as the enemy, and some of them for sure are still a danger to her, but...They also may not all be enemies, because they're individuals within a larger group. If Shinra can have that kind of duality, couldn't any group? And maybe that's exactly what happened with your uncle's group—some of them came to see you as a threat, even if others, and even he himself, didn't."
"But if they swore themselves to him—" Haruna began, and cut herself off when she heard Elmyra sigh.
"You say that like words prevent people from having free will," Elmyra commented.
Haruna opened her mouth, then snapped it shut as she recalled Cloud telling her bluntly that, if a contract is hurting people, throw it out. She knew damned well that there were other reasons to violate or disregard a contract. Even if everyone in Crescent Unit swore loyalty to Godo, that wouldn't have stopped them from changing their minds later, or even from having given it nothing more than lip service in the first place. They weren't asked the defining question, after all—only the Assassins were unless there was a reason to start asking all and sundry.
Before she could think on it further, the door opened as an exasperated, familiar voice called, "Hi Haruna, Hi Mom! I have company I can't seem to get rid of today."
Turning to look, Haruna gaped in surprise as she saw a rather large Jumping following Aeris into the shop—except the Jumping definitely had a horn on its forehead. She couldn't tell if it had anything else yet, but it definitely had that. Elmyra sighed and commented, "Well, you refuse to call her a pet, so I guess she can go where she wants...but I'm rather surprised the conductors let her on the train..."
"Well, it was pretty obvious she was placidly following me, so I guess they assumed she's my pet, anyway?" the girl replied, leading the way to Haruna, who was still staring at the Jumping oddly. "Cloud thinks she might have come from the most recent monster break-out in the Labs, and she can grow plants like I do," she added to Haruna with a grin.
Reaching up to pinch the bridge of her nose, the Wutain sighed and asked, "So if she's going to follow you around, have you given her a name?"
"Um...I sort of started thinking about it awhile ago, since she wasn't leaving. What do you think if I call her Zeal?" the girl asked, and Haruna looked up at her with a raised brow.
"Zeal? Why that?" the Wutain woman asked curiously.
"Life, living, zeal," Aeris grinned, and Haruna had to sigh at how Aeris had somehow come up with that.
"Then, shouldn't you ask your friend if she likes the name Zeal?" the Wutain asked the younger girl pointedly.
Aeris blinked in surprise, then turned to the Jumping—which was larger than her—and asked, "Are you okay with it if I call you Zeal?" The rather large rabbit sat back on her hindquarters to peer at the girl for a long moment, head tipped to the side, then blew out a gust of air and gave something which resembled a nod enough to take it as one. The response made the Cetra grin and say, "Zeal it is! Thanks!"
"So, if Zeal wanted to follow you today, do you have any idea why?" Haruna asked once the name issue had been resolved.
"No, not really. She scared everyone away from me on the train, though," the girl pouted. "I didn't have anyone to talk with on the ride."
"It's not that long of a ride..." the older woman pointed out in amusement.
"Still, it's a boring one without company," Aeris answered. "So, do you have something for me to do today?"
"I'm still working on inventory, so you could start putting out new stock where it's needed," Haruna offered.
"Okay!" Aeris grinned, heading for the back of the shop. Zeal paused for a minute, saw Aeris return with a bundle of fabric, and decided to explore the shop instead.
"...Why is a Jumping behaving like a curious cat?" Haruna asked no one in particular, noting how it had comically small wings on its back.
Elmyra laughed and commented, "I think you'd have to ask Hojo that question, Haruna, dear. And I really don't think he'll answer you." She paused as Haruna made a face, then commented, "But, did we finish our discussion well enough for you to work through the rest yourself, or was there anything else?"
"I'll think on what you said for awhile and let you know another day if I've been able to sort it out," the Wutain offered as a compromise.
"Fair enough," the older woman agreed. "Did Miss Lancin say she would be back later today, or was she going to pick up her dress another day?"
"...I think she paid for a rush job, so today...? Let me find the invoice..." Haruna replied, turning to find the paper she needed—inventory would have to be put on pause until she had the data so they could be sure the dress was ready for when it was needed. At least it would be a short pause—she had to get that done and out that day or the things she needed wouldn't be in the next delivery.
MB
Chaos had erupted in the Shinra building when Rufus had started re-arranging everyone's storage, and Yufi had just sat back and laughed at them all for most of the morning. Still, she had too much energy to sit and do nothing but laugh while everyone else ran around like disturbed ants for overly long, and she'd reached her limit, so while everyone was busy, she slipped out of the building and wandered out into the city. She'd been thinking a lot about how easily she could be tracked and how recognizable she was ever since Cloud had pointed out that her pendant-stone had been a tracker.
She really wasn't sure what to do about it, though. If she'd been a girl who kept her hair long, she could have changed her looks just by cutting it, but she'd always kept it fairly short. Short styles were harder to change, and she wasn't sure how well they would hold—Wutain hair was famous for not holding things like curls, and color was hard at the best of times because their hair was all so dark. Still, other than changing out her clothes, which she'd already done by wearing the Shinra Academy uniform, the only thing she could really think of changing was her hair.
Also, she was still having some trouble with reading and writing Standard, even though she'd been taught to speak it from—before she could remember, actually. She wasn't even close to mastering Wutain yet, let alone this other language. What she knew was functional, mostly, and people were turning out to be pretty patient with her when she didn't know something, but while that meant she could learn Standard, she was still just in the process of learning it. Reading shop signs was actually testing her knowledge as she wandered through the city—and at least the Shinra building was visible from everywhere, so she wouldn't get lost!
Then, she stopped at the door to a shop with a sign that read, "Looking for a change? Looking for a new you? Trying to find and bring out your own inner beauty? We can help!" She got the general message, but had no idea what it was they were changing to do any of that.
Curiously, she opened the door to look inside, and heard a bell chime above the door, making her glance up at the literal bell hanging where the door would hit it. It was a nice little bell and made a very happy sound, a lot like wind chimes she'd had at home, given to her by her mother before she'd died. Then, she looked around the rest of the shop and had to blink as she tried to figure out what it was supposed to be. There was a section there for clothing, another section for hair and makeup, still more with books, and even an area with things like incense, strange cards, stones, and other odd things she had no way to define.
"Hello, there!" a woman said cheerfully, making Yufi turn to look at her curiously. The woman had her hair gently waving to her shoulders in dull black and with a single streak of bright green running through it near the front, and dressed in a really brightly colored outfit in all colors of the rainbow which had pants, a skirt, a shirt, and—was it a vest or another, short-sleeved shirt?—over the long-sleeved one. "What brought you here, youngster?" the woman asked curiously. "Something for your parents, maybe?"
"No, not that," Yufi answered, thinking maybe sympathy would be a good thing. "I was rescued from Wutai after people I should have been able to trust tried to kill me. The Turks have been taking care of me—sort of—since. But one of my friends told me I was too easy to track and recognize the way I look now, so I've really been thinking of how I could change the way I look so they won't realize it's me if they come looking."
"Oh, that's a troubling one, isn't it?" the older woman asked with some sympathy. "You say the Turks are the ones watching over you?"
"Yeah. I train with them, too, mostly because that's the only way to use up my energy," Yufi grinned. "Then I saw the sign outside and I was really confused about what it was you were doing."
The woman chuckled. "Okay, then...I'm sure you're still really confused. It looks like you're wearing the Shinra Academy uniform, so do you have a student ID?" Yufi agreed and pulled it out to show the woman, who took it and examined it for a long moment, then gave it back and nodded. "Sometimes there are reasons to change your physical appearance, and your card has the Turks' mark on it, so they're definitely keeping an eye on you. Do you mind if I call them and ask if I can help you with your disguise? They'll have to cover the cost, after all."
"Can you really?" the girl asked eagerly. The woman chuckled and nodded, so she agreed, "Sure, go ahead." The woman quickly found her PHS and a notebook where she'd written down many phone numbers, prompting Yufi to ask, "Do you do this kind of thing a lot?"
"Often enough, sometimes even at the Turks' request. That's why I have a number to call and know their mark on an Academy ID," the woman answered absently, found the number she needed, and dialed it. It was obviously answered quickly, as the woman said, "Hi there, Ansha. I hope you're not overly busy just now? ...No? Good. I have a little Wutain girl in my shop who says she needs a bit of a disguise so she's not so easily recognizable to her countrymen. Are you all right approving that and covering the cost for her?" The silence was longer, and Yufi began exploring the shop while she waited, listening to the woman give Ansha her name and a brief description.
Finally, the woman said with a smile, "Okay, I'll see what I can do. Thanks." She hung up and faced Yufi to say, "So, you have approval for that, and I'll send the bill to them once we see the results. Did you already have an idea?"
"Only really my hair, but it's so short that won't be easy," the girl answered, returning to her to eye her curiously. "I already changed my clothes, and I'm pretty sure I'd rub off any makeup really fast."
"Hmm..." the woman murmured, peering at her intently for a long moment. "I can think of a few other styles which would make your hair fall differently, and that can change how your face looks. We can also bleach your hair so it's something like golden-blond or pale brown-ish. We can even be a little creative if you have a favorite color or two you'd like to add streaks of to your hair once it's paler. There's also things like contacts which are sometimes just for color, not as a replacement for glasses, so we could change that. Let's get started, shall we?"
The woman motioned her to one of the seats for makeup and hairstyling, and gave her a book full of color images of people with different hairstyles so she could start looking through her options, with the woman pointing out the ones she thought would work best.
…
About three hours later, Yufi was a cross between elated and having a desire to run, and run, and just keep running for a long time, because sitting still for so long had made her hyper. She really looked different now, and probably no one else would recognize her at all—she looked completely Shinra-ized.
Her hair was now a shockingly natural-looking golden color she really liked in a spiked, flyaway style (an actual style rather than Cloud's general mess) which was somehow really soft and had a little blue streak in the little bit of bangs she still had above her right eye. Oddly, her hair was holding the style, which she'd been afraid it wouldn't, and she now had bright blue contacts in her eyes...And she suddenly began giggling when she realized she could pass as Cloud's sister, and even Rufus', for that matter!
She loved it!
She suddenly wondered what Kurosai would think when he caught up to her, and had to giggle again. As she thanked the woman profusely, the woman made her up an appointment to come back to take care of the roots around when they'd start showing, then bemusedly sent her on her way. Down the street she went, deciding to explore the area she was in more while she could. For awhile, she just wandered, looking at things, and not a single person paid any attention to her while she was out—before, people would glance over in mild surprise before going back to what they had been doing.
It was fun to look around on her own, window shopping and peeking into different shops. As she went, Kurosai landed on the fence beside her to caw at her curiously, and she grinned and commented, "So you found me, Kurosai. Should have known I couldn't fool you!" He began following her, staying on the rooftops or balcony railings above her, still peering at her like he didn't know what to make of her. It was kind of funny, actually.
Then she came to one where she stopped to stare—a Wutain woman with a stone on her forehead was at the counter, helping two women with some kind of brightly colored fabric. Fabric just like the woman who had helped her with her hair had been wearing, just like the fabric of the clothes in her shop.
Curiously, she stepped inside, and as the woman at the counter sent the other two women away, she met Yufi's gaze—and blinked in surprise before tipping her head to the side in utter confusion for a moment. Then, the girl was surprised to see all expression vanish off her face for a moment before she smiled a very real-looking smile and greeted her with, "Hello, there! Can I help you find anything?"
"I just want to look around first if that's okay?" she asked curiously while thinking how she wished she could act as well as this woman did.
"Of course, feel free. I didn't know school let out this early, though," the woman commented, her tone amused.
"Oh, that's because the President's son decided to change around everything in storage and everyone had a breakdown, so the whole of the Shinra building pretty much shut down for the day," Yufi grinned in amusement. "I watched them all running around crazily for awhile, then wandered off, since there weren't any classes, anyway, and no reason for me to stay. I'm having fun looking around the city."
"How would changing things around in storage cause a response like that?" the woman asked in what sounded like a truly mystified tone.
"Well, storage had just been a mess. He decided it should be all shelved and organized, and even have clerks responsible for keeping it that way," the girl offered in amusement—then turned to gape at a huge, white rabbit that rounded the corner of the shelf to peer at her curiously.
"Oh, that's Zeal. She followed my honorary sister here today," the woman at the counter said with a sigh. "And she's shockingly placid, so you don't have to worry about her hurting you, despite her size. I'm starting to get the impression she's really more of a big baby."
Glancing up at the woman, then returning her gaze to the rabbit called Zeal, Yufi asked, "Can I pet her?"
"You may. She hasn't stopped the other customers here from doing so yet," the Wutain woman agreed.
Tentatively, the girl reached up to pat the huge rabbit on the head between the ears, which made Zeal close her eyes in bliss and make a sound something like a soft purr. Yufi began giggling as she kept petting her, but all the while, she was thinking how strange it was for the Wutain woman to have a stone on her forehead to begin with—the only Wutains who did were...descendants of High Nobles...with a recent Summon parent...
She blinked in surprise and looked up to meet the woman's gaze for a long moment, then turned back to the rabbit as she asked herself silently, "What in the world is going on here?"