"My lord, the Shinra Army has reached the Tentai village."
"That holds the imperial granary! We must defend it at all costs!"
"No. To defend it would cost us countless warriors."
"Then what do you propose we do? The granary in Tentai holds enough food to resupply them for weeks."
"Lord Godo?"
"…"
"We burn it. We must burn the village down to the ground, and leave nothing in our retreat."
"But my lord! Our people will also starve!"
"We have no choice."
"...We will send word to Tentai."
"Evacuate the women and children first. Any able bodied man must join the army. Shinra has made their move. We must make ours."
"Understood, Lord Godo."
Godo looked up at that round moon veiled by wisps of clouds and hoped he chose correctly.
IV. Reignite
"You are not using enough strength," Sephiroth said as he sheathed his sword and turned his back on the monster he just slashed. The virtual behemoth he fought listed to one side, and then fell over with a grunt. Its bulk dissolved back into code.
"Oh, give me some credit, Seph!" Zack bit back from where he fended off a wyerd, only to slash back at the two guard hounds that remained and had become a nuisance and a distraction. One hound was caught in his wild slashing and was thrown back with a whimper before dissolving back into the program as well. "I'm getting ganged up on here!" The dual horned bull, in the meanwhile had gotten back up, stamping it's feet and lowering its head so that the two hard skewers and its bone plated head were the only things Zack could see.
"Shit," The third class Soldier cursed, "Fire!"
The fireball hurled at the beast glanced harmlessly off its armored head. Rearing itself up once, the bull charged.
Zack threw up his sword up like a shield and braced himself as it locked with the horns. The sharp tip came precariously close to his chest. He struggled as he could feel himself being pushed back little by little but the muscled bull and out of the corner of his eye, he could see the other guard hound circling behind him.
Just then, the wyerd reared up again and threw Zack over its head. The sword still locked between its horns ripped itself out of Zack's grip. Zack quickly righted himself in the air as the hound slammed itself into the wyerd with a strangled yelp. He landed unsteadily on his feet behind the two creatures, now weaponless.
"You should remember- wyerds and their ilk are immune to magic," Sephiroth stated calmly as he approached the last two monsters left. "Which is all the more reason to keep a good grip on your sword, Fair." He slashed into the entangled monsters diagonally. In a single strike, the monsters died. Then, the general pulled out his phone and clicked a few buttons. "I believe we should end here today."
The simulation began to collapse around them.
"Aw, man! I almost had it that time!" Zack whined, but contritely picked his sword back up from where it had fallen on the ground of the VR room.
"I did not see that," Sephiroth retorted, "In such a battle, one slash should be enough for each enemy." Zack pouted.
"I just need to get stronger!" He squatted twice, "But no one is as strong as you, Seph! Don't give me crazy expectations like that!"
The glass door separating the simulation room and the observation deck slid open and both Angeal and Genesis entered.
"Angeal!" Cried Zack, "You are the teacher, man! I'd follow you forever! I don't know how I survived when you were away." Angeal chuckled.
"Sephiroth's coaching skills leave something to be desired, I take it."
"Hm," Sephiroth grunted, crossing his arms over his chest, "I supposed Genesis will have to take over next time Angeal leaves on a mission." Zack looked at him horrified.
"No! I'd rather have you, Seph!" Genesis finally snapped his book shut and looked up, one hand on his rapier and the other pocketing his beloved paperback.
"What's this? In what way am I inferior to Sephiroth?" He fumed, "I'll train him when you are gone, Angeal!" Angeal chuckled.
"Genesis, we all know you lack the patience to be a teacher." Zack nodded earnestly to support his mentor's statement.
"Yeah, like the time you threw your class of cadets into a razor weed patch, or that time you kicked the paratrooper out of the helicopter because he wasn't moving fast enough, or the time you called Heidegger a-"
"I think Genesis gets the idea." Angeal counseled gently as he slapped Zack on the back of the head, mindful that his friend was about to complete the wyerd's work and skewer his protégé like a shish-kabob from Scheherade's Grill. Zack closed his mouth with a click when he was reminded that Genesis is worse than a charging behemoth when his was in a foul mood.
"My friend, the fates are cruel!" Genesis quoted petulantly, "But then, I don't want students anyway,"
"They don't want you either, princess," Sephiroth smirked, "Now then, perhaps some fun for the first class?"
"Can't, I'm afraid," Angeal shook his head, "Zack and I need to report for a mission briefing with Lazard." Genesis frowned.
"They are sending you back out so soon?" Angeal shrugged.
"The war in Wutai left Shinra shorthanded, I suppose." He answered as he prodded Zack toward the door and in the process saved his pupil from death by pointy sword, "If it's any consolation, I do not believe it is another assignment there."
Genesis frowned to Sephiroth as the door hissed closed closed, cutting off Angeal's reprimand to Zack to "have more focus!" "My soul hath been corrupted by vengeance."
"Reno, you do know that I'm not legal to drink yet, right?"
"Don't' be such a stick in the mud!" Reno retorted, ruffling Cloud's hair as he dragged Cloud through the partially lit street, "They don't check I.D where we're going, yo."
Gun looked at the both of them bemused. Reno asked her if she wanted to get some drinks after work and she almost declined and shot (and not just shot down) the redhead when she thought she was being hit on. Instead, Reno assured her that wasn't the purpose, at least this time. He was dragging a buddy out to "show him the real Midgar, yo!" and had been asking everyone if they wanted to come. Rude was busy chasing down a lead in Sector 6, Tseng never came to these things, Cissnei was gone on a mission, and even Reno had enough sense not to ask Rod when he already asked Gun. They also decided against the usual Turk watering hole, since they did have a civilian in tow.
Of course, Reno's idea of "the Real Midgar," was this dive called Level in the seediest reaches of the Plate. It was as bad as can be without going below Plate. After her recent break-up with Rod, Gun thought, why not? She needed to get out of the office and forget about that jerk face who she still had to work with. And with Reno, her chances of either getting into a bar fight or getting picked up shot up pretty much exponentially. Ends and means.
No wonder Veld's cardinal rule was no fraternizing with coworkers. It got complicated, fast.
To her surprise, when Reno introduced her as Gun to Cloud, the gangly teenager shot her a confused look.
"Oh!" He exclaimed, as though coming to a sudden realization, "You must be Elena's sister, right? Elena Land?" Gun just sighed, seeing no real reason to deny it. Who was the geeky research assistant going to tell?
"Elena talks too much," She said, exasperated. Cloud laughed.
"She is very excitable." Gun tilted her head.
"How do you know?" She asked. Cloud smiled.
"You two look alike," he answered, "But if you were asking how I know Elena, we were in the same materia class."
Gun started to giggle.
"So you are that kid she set on fire on the first day!"
"She did not!" Cloud protested as Reno yelled, "You didn't tell me this, yo!"
As they walked out of the Shinra district, Reno had one arm around Cloud's shoulders and leaned on to him, interjecting occasionally in a loud voice as Gun tried to extract the whole story from her sister's classmate.
The entrance to Level looked like an abandoned and condemned building. In fact, the building was condemned after Urban Development considered this part of the Plate unsafe for the load it was bearing. To lighten the weight on the pillar many of the taller buildings were already dismantled, but plans to turn the flattened areas into a park never came into fruition and shanty towns sprung up instead. The windows and door were boarded up, and the only indication that this was a bar was the wooden plank that had the words LEVEL BAR painted haphazardly on it, crookedly mounted above the weathered wooden door, and the flashing lights that could be seen through the planks blocking up the windows.
"Are you sure we should be bringing Cloud here?" Gun asked skeptically. She wasn't even sure she wanted to be here, and she had a 9mm hidden on her waistband and another backup strapped to her calf.
"No problem!" Reno grinned, baring his canines, and yanked at the door.
The bar was surprisingly warm inside, in contrast to the crisp spring evening outside, mired only by Midgar's smog. Both Turks had shed their signature navy suit jackets and Cloud shrugged off his raw edged hoodie. Since it was a weekday, the bar was mostly empty, with only one or two patrons who looked up when the door opened but went back to watching the chocobo races disinterestedly as they nursed their drinks. The bar tender was a heavyset man in his late forties, smoking a cigarette as he watched them come in.
"The usual for me, pops!" Reno ordered and slid a few coins of gil over the counter as he plopped down a grimy stool, "And the first round for these two are on me."
Gun raised an eyebrow, "I don't need you to pay, Reno. This isn't a date, remember?" Reno gave a salacious smirk.
"Well, unless you want a threesome." Cloud coughed behind a fist, and Gun ignored the redhead.
"I'll have a scotch," She said primly with an eyebrow ticking. The bartender nodded.
"And milk for the kid?" Cloud sputtered.
"Ah, I'll have an Odinale if you have it!" "Pops," since Reno did not introduce the bartender as anything else, raised an eyebrow but left to get their drinks with no comment.
"So Cloud," Gun started, deciding to move the topic to somewhere safer, "What do you study?"
"Um, mako sciences. Mostly reactor design though. I don't work with the biological division at all, but that's the way more popular track."
"Sounds interesting," Gun commented disinterestedly.
"Not really," Cloud answered sheepishly, not having caught the sarcasm. "It's just a lot of math, really." Reno laughed.
"This kid's a genius," He ruffled Cloud's hair again ignoring the weak protesting. Gun thought in fond amusement that Reno has probably done that to Cloud so often that Cloud gave up on defending himself. "He skipped all the basic classes, yo! Ain't that right?"
"Oh? So what did you get to skip to?" Clouds brows wrinkled up in thought and he stared up through his thick rimmed glasses, as if to remember his course material.
"Well, I haven't really gotten into this semester's classes to really say much about it," He hesitated, "But my most important class last semester was intro reactor design. It's kinda scary actually." He shivered, as if to prove a point.
"What's scary about it?" Reno asked, "Isn't that stuff old technology?"
Cloud was silent in thought for a moment. Then he rummages through the pockets of his faded jeans, digging through it for a while to come up triumphantly with a black pen. Grabbing a napkin from a stack nearby, he spread it open and plastered it to the sticky counter. Then, he began to scribble to the curiosity of the two Turks.
"So, it's like this," He explained as he drew, "You can classify reactors into two types- batch and plug flow." He drew a big tank and added a little propeller to it and then a pipe. "Batch is like…when you want to make Odinale or something. It's a big tank that you have to keep stirring, so its size is kind of limited by the cost of the propeller. The plug flow is better if you want something to keep continuously flowing, but it's not as good for mixing…." His voice pattered out. "I'm not boring you, am I?"
"Nah," Reno answered, "I didn't know you geeks had to learn all this." He laughed. They all paused when their drinks arrived in front of them. Before Cloud could grab it, Reno toke a swig from his mug.
"Uhg, what is this stuff?" He made a face.
"Odinale," Cloud laughed, "The Nibelheim region is famous for this and wolf meat stew. Nothing else really grows there, so people make alcohol by fermenting mostly potato mash along with other unmentionables."
"Tastes disgusting," Reno asserted unrepentantly, then he showed Gun the mug. "Want some? We'd be sharing saliva."
Gun made a disgusted face and shook her head.
When Pops moved off to the backroom, they looked back to Cloud's chicken scratch diagrams.
"So what are the mako reactors we have?" Gun asked.
"Well, that's the thing- it's a mix," Cloud answered as he drew another pipe below his first one and connected the two, "The batch option would make the reactor propellers too big and cost prohibitive you see. So they have to keep recycling fluid in big pipes to keep it mixed. That's why you have that big tank and a lot of big pipes. But….the reaction evolves- uh, that is gives up- a lot of heat. So they build these big cooling towers for all the recycling streams to keep everything balmy in there."
Gun and Reno shared a look above Cloud's head. Their finely honed senses detected eyes on their corner. The murmur of the race commentator in the background that masked their conversation had turned to some new station about news and the volume lowered. Cloud continued, oblivious to his friends' unease.
"So…I would not want to be around that reactor when it overheats... also the fluid that comes out-."
"Gun." Gun nodded to Reno and they turned around. One of the patrons, who had been watching the race before they came in, was shuffling toward the door. When he saw that the two Turks has turned around to look at him, he threw the door open and darted into the darkening streets.
"Reno!"
"Yeah, got it!" With a clatter, they both shot out of the bar after the suspect.
"He ran toward the station! We need to get him before he gets on a train." Reno nodded.
"You take the alley, I'll take the roof." They nodded at each other again and separated. Gun paused only long enough to see Reno take a flying leap at a rusty fire escape ladder before she turned a corner.
As Gun snapped her trusty weapon and ran down the dim alleyways, she could hear the occasional thud of Reno's boots as he leaped from the ledge of one roof to the next, navigating the urban buildings with ease.
"Stop!" She shouted at the shadow moving in front of her. The man made a right and then climbed over a wire fence.
"Stop I said!" Gun struggled over the wire fence as well and continued giving chase. The figure looked back at her and then cut into a narrow alley between the two buildings.
"Shit," she cursed, and she followed into the dark, turning her body and head sideways, back to the wall to minimize exposure. Where is he? Gun's eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, out of the dim light of the flickering street lamps. She could see a glint of metal in the man's hand. He has a gun! Gun panicked, cursing for her lack of foresight in getting stuck in these close quarters. Why didn't she notice it before? Why didn't he shoot back? She leveled her gun at him, unable to see where she would hit if she fired. It would be risky, since they wanted this guy alive. Before Gun could pull the trigger, Reno slammed into their suspect from above. The man dropped instantly.
"Yo, miss me?" Gun sighed.
"I almost shot you," She snapped at the smirking redhead, "Drag him out. We need to process him."
The two left Veld's office an hour later after the debriefing. They exchanged a look.
"So…" Reno hedged, "Aren't we forgetting someone?" Gun froze from where she had slumped against the wall.
"Aw, fuck!" She cursed, "Where's Cloud?"
"Oi, get back here you little shit!"
Genesis trudged out of the theater in the Fifth District thoroughly disgusted. He heard about the newest rendition of the Loveless play through Angeal and had taking some time away from the headquarters to watch it. The play ended up being the same drivel it always was, with the thoroughly unsatisfactory ending of the Hero disappearing into time and space while the love of his life waited without any real hope of seeing him again. The main characters, which they decided to name Leon in this rendition, made some of the worst choices possible until the very last moments. To add to the misfortune of wasting his time to see this, the infamous Crimson Commander was swarmed by his fanclub at the theater despite the late showing. Sometimes, Genesis wished he could have been an I Want to be Your Canary fan instead. No one watched that old play anymore.
At that moment, a lanky blond teen leaped onto the ground and hit a roll, stopping at Genesis's feet. Genesis caught sight of wide eyes, which made the teenager look extremely ungainly behind those hideous, unfashionable glasses. Looking up, Genesis realized that the boy must have fallen or jumped at least two stories.
Behind him, still on the roof, a thug was crying bloody murder but didn't seem particularly willing to jump after the blond, with good reason.
The blond seemed to hesitate a little upon seeing Genesis standing before him, looking down with an incredulous expression. With a jump like that, most people would have broken a bone or two. Instead, with almost frightening agility, the blond, who Genesis decided to call Monkey, jumped up on his feet and dashed past the commander.
Seeing the Red Commander, the thug also decided that discretion was the better part of valor and he disappeared from the rooftop.
"He's gone?" a meek voiced asked from behind Genesis. Monkey reappeared from the shadow cast by the theater.
Genesis, now having a closer look could see that the panting teenager had several large gashed in his cloths and his hands were slightly cut up.
"What the hell did you do?" Genesis asked curiously.
The kid gave him a wide look.
"Nothing, honest!" He rubbed his hands nervously against the sides of his worn jeans, "I got a bit lost after I got ditched at a bar on the wrong side of town...anyway, thanks Commander!"
He waved and scampered off. To Genesis's surprise, the blond took a running start right into a wall and instead of running painfully into it, the blond used his momentum to run up it, grabbing onto a ledge and dragging himself up. Within seconds, the blond hair disappeared from sight and then the cadence of footsteps over the rooftops did as well.
Strange monkey, Genesis decided. Well, it's not his problem if blond kids found new ways to get themselves killed these days.
"Blond kid with spiky hair and ugly glasses." Angeal repeated with a confused frown the next morning, "Now why does that sound familiar? Maybe Zack knows him."
"I know Zack is outgoing," said Genesis, "But I doubt he knows everyone getting into trouble in the middle of Midgar. No, I don't think Zack would know him."
"I know who?" Zack panted as the door slid open from another completed session.
"Genesis was just telling us about his late night rendezvous." Angeal smirked.
"Ooooh, are we going to meet her …or him?"
Genesis shot Angeal a look that promised a lot of pain.
"No, I saw a flying monkey. Stupid glasses, blond. Angeal said you might know him."
"I'm not sure? I might've seen someone like that around. That's kinda vague, ya know? Like half the people in Midgar, including Lazard." Zack scratched the back of his head, looking a little perplexed as if trying to recall why that sounds familiar. "So how did he manage to piss you off?"
"He didn't"
"Oh! It's that way, huh? I could get his number for you if I see him…maybe…"
"Zack!" Angeal chastised with a barely muffled laugh.
"Zack," Sephiroth chorus with his lips twitching.
"You bastards," Genesis bit out crossly. Then he turned away angrily. "Never mind."
They disbanded after that. Genesis stored the topic at the back of him mind and soon it became forgotten as the reports from Wutai flooded in.
Another long lapse between updates. My apologies. Chapter 5 should be faster in coming, considering I am half way through it.