Hollow City [FF7/R]

[Guile]

When I posted this to Sufficient Velocity, I wrote a summary for this story:

Aerith Gainsborough wants to follow her destiny, whatever the heck that is. Chadley is doing everything he possibly can to avoid his. And deep down, something is rotten in the bowels of Midgar.

… More than usual, I mean.

A time travel story from the perspective of everyone else.

Click to shrink...

I have a fair backlog stocked up for this one, so I'll be posting quicker than usual for me. Not expecting it to get particularly NSFW; if it comes up (hur hur) I'll migrate it over to the NSFW side.

Chapter 1 – Part 1
Eir, Shinra Trooper
​

When the alarm went off, butts jerked in their seats so hard that one managed to tumble off the worn canvas and plastic to the floor entirely. The mechanical shriek piercing their ears was more fit for a parade ground than a monitoring station not much bigger than a couple of adjoining broom closets; the sound bounced off the walls until it was like the whole world was screaming.

​

"Not another one!" an army grunt groaned in the momentary silence after the first peal of the siren cut out. His hands dropped from where they'd half risen to protect his ears, only to find the regulation anonymous visored helmet Shinra was so fond of in the way. His kit was neat and orderly, from the regulation helmet to his new shoes. Textbook FNGie, in Eir's opinion. Even his visor somehow conveyed helplessness, staring at the wall of monitors and banks of analog switches and levers while trying to ignore the second peal of the too-loud siren.

​

There was a red blinking light beneath the three-console-wide bank of monitors.

​

He barked, "Where even is–"

​

That was as far as she got before they both flinched at another ear-splitting wail, one that warbled weirdly. Possibly they'd skipped a few maintenance checkups at Monitor Station 0-7. Either that, or Purchasing had been cutting corners again. It could go either way, honestly.

​

The warbling scream of the malfunctioning alarm was not an improvement.

​

Her compatriot's helmet ducked down, peeking under the bank. "It's like a knife in my ears. Where's the manual–"

​

Eir spun her swivel chair to face forward, putting her PHS down. There was no way she could focus on her e-mails like this.

​

She was also wearing regulation blue, but with her helmet resting on the console to try and save her poor hair from its natural predator. Not that the helmet would have saved her poor ears; Shinra Weapons Development was good for some things, but 'user comfort' wasn't their end goal.

​

She barked, "Shove over!" and bullied the FNGie aside. She touched a few knobs, trying to remember which one controlled the volume. She finally muttered, "Here, it was, I think–" and turned a couple all the way down.

​

Blessed silence.

​

The FNGie leaned over her shoulder, trying to figure out which monitor the alarm had been linked to. She pushed off with her feet and her chair squeaked its way back over to her monitor bank, more than happy to leave him to fumble around. Social media was blocked on the company PHS network; she checked to see which train lines were down today. Hours early, but it was never too early to daydream about clocking out.

​

"It looks like monitor 3-2 set off the alarm," The Kid offered helpfully, finally picking himself up off the floor. How he'd figured that out from the floor and with Eir and the FNGie in the way she had no idea, but running the numbers through her head, she reckoned he was right. He added, "Which would make this one of mine."

​

He hopped out of his own (nicer) swivel chair and started squeezing his way around the desk that took up at least a third of their little coffin of an office. She considered, not for the first time, what – or more likely who – she'd have to do to get that kind of swanky furniture. Army grunts didn't rate thousand-gil swivel chairs or real wood desks sourced from actual trees. The army got plenty of funding, but it sure didn't trickle down to the grunts.

​

The Kid adjusted his monocle and straightened the way-too-clean, perfectly pressed collar of his zip-up polo on the way so it would lie perfectly flat. Just looking at him made her Shinra blues feel more rumpled and battered.

​

Ugh. The Kid.

​

The fresh-faced fourteen-year-old with soft white curls had joined their little monitor crew months ago, with paperwork claiming he was a Science Division intern sent to keep an eye on things. Way too wholesome for someone who came out of the Science Division. Every company doctor she'd ever had had been greasier than the average slum rat, with clammy hands and hungry eyes. The Kid was the kind of soft that had almost certainly never worked a day in his life, with features like an airbrushed poster model for HairTonic only slightly humanized by a bit of a pointy chin. Not really her type, but if he'd been in her army unit he'd have been passed around like a crowd surfer at a Black Mages concert. As soon as he opened his mouth, though, you realized he was awkward as shit, with no brain-to-mouth filter.

​

It was different when she did it okay? She did it because she was bitter and didn't care who knew it.

​

He talked like someone who had been too busy earning a doctorate when he was 8 years old to learn how to make friends. A genius, almost certainly. Consistently polite and self-effacing, as long as you weren't too offended by his greeting that first day of "Sturdy musculature, but poor cardiovascular health. I recommend increasing your exercise regimen by 10% and quitting smoking." But if someone told her Director Hojo was decanting clones and putting them to work as office staff to save on department budget and asked her to spot the clone, she knew who she'd be pointing a finger at.

​

He wasn't around every day, and his timing was irregular; either he was splitting his time with duties elsewhere or he was using their station as a hideout from unfriendly eyes. Shinra office politics could be like that.

​

Give her the army – well, they were the Shinra Public Security Forces now – any day. At least she got a gun to use on her problems.

​

"Please excuse me," The Kid said, squeezing in past the FNGie. FNGie checked the chart taped to the monitor, matched it to his own list, and obediently stepped aside with a "Yes, sir!"

​

The Kid's fingers flew across the field of switches, adjusting things to his liking with the calm surety of an engineer three times his age. Maybe he'd been cloned from the Science Division nerd who'd built the thing. One of the monitors began cycling swiftly, along with The Kid's muttered commentary:

​

"Break room. No–" the trio saw a security camera video of a room filled end to end with cafeteria tables and a vending machine with vibrant green and neon blue facing before The Kid clicked a button and changed the feed to a vast area with vaguely humanoid type figures prowling about. Humanoid except colored an unusual, bloody black-red and plus the occasional extra limb or tentacle, anyway.

​

"Specimen Testing. No–"

​

"What the fuck–" FNGie muttered in a vaguely traumatized voice. She couldn't tell if he was stuck on the disturbing – and disturbingly human-like – monsters, or the cages along the walls whose bars had been smashed outward. She knew she was wishing the lighting had been a bit worse; the pool of blood and bloody drag marks showed up surprisingly well under the floodlights.

​

There were a lot of questions someone might have about monitor 3-2. On the list, but definitely not at the top, was 'Why are the lights still on? Are we still paying for that?'

​

"You shouldn't think about that too hard," The Kid said absently, still examining security footage, now showing military bloodhounds romping around a kennel type area with the phrase 'Type-F Specimens – Creche' stenciled neatly on the metal wall. He shook his head and moved on with a, "No–"

​

"He's right," Eir agreed, trying to pay attention to her PHS instead of the on-screen horror show. There was another production of Loveless on in Sector 1. She'd definitely remember to avoid that like the plague. "Forget about it. You'll live longer that way."

​

"Eir," FNGie said, like she was the one being unreasonable about this.

​

"I am not getting dragged off by the Turks because you couldn't keep your mouth shut about some evil lab experiments or whatever the fuck that was! Forget. It."

​

The video feed flashed through platforms, hallways and staircases, sometimes empty, sometimes showing a nasty bugaboo infestation. 'Type-D Specimens – Creche' was home to some of those freaky vharghidpolis things instead; four-armed, six-eyed, squirmy worm things that balanced perfectly on their thick tails. Nobody really talked about how those had just appeared in the Midgar slums all at once a few years back.

​

Maybe they were a natural mutation of some other wild monster moving in. Maybe.

​

Either way, they'd managed to establish a breeding population and now they were all over the place.

​

"Research Access– Research Access– Research Access–" The Kid murmured as more and more channels were flicked through quickly.

​

"Is that a wrathhound?" FNGie wondered aloud for the first time in a while, sounding vaguely charmed by the thick slab of white-furred muscle dozing in a corner of 'Type-C Specimens – Nursery.'

​

"Looks like," Eir said at the same time as The Kid said, distractedly, "Confirmed."

​

"My platoon had one," Eir added, voice softer than she intended. Hopefully they weren't going to bond over this or something. "Pretty friendly, for a ninja-hunting 'roid monster."

​

Dogs were dogs. Even genetically-engineered monster dogs.

​

"Ah," The Kid said with satisfaction, as the video feed finally came to rest on a room dominated by a glowing green pool and the words 'Mako Processing' stenciled into the wall. There was a neat circular depression in the grates, but the green sludge had overflowed, coating the whole room with the stuff. The mako was ever so slowly slowly retreating like the tide going out, gathering back towards its point of origin in a way that would make more sense if the room was on an incline rather than perfectly flat. The Kid tapped the monitor thoughtfully, where a catwalk had been smashed by something hard enough to bring the scaffold crashing down. He hypothesized, "Perhaps an eruption?"

​

"... Can mako do that?"

​

"Oh, yes," The Kid nodded happily. He talked like a grad student laying out his thesis. "The dangers of generating energy from a surprisingly temperamental natural resource. It ebbs and flows according to some mechanism we don't fully understand yet. Some of the doctors claim setting mako reactor specifications is as much art as science; they like to talk about a sense that only comes with experience. Director Hojo has some fascinating theories about the Lifestream, actually, although I'm not sure there's a way to definitively prove his hypotheses. He can wax positively poetic on the subject. I think he may have double majored in homeopathic medicine, to be honest."

​

As the flow receded, they could make out something that looked like an enormous, multi-ton metal cap the same circumference as the circular hole. A foot-wide hole was punched through the metal, slightly off-center, and the edges were jagged where the cap had been torn from its moorings by pure force. It had come to rest at an odd angle, propped up on something.

​

"... Can mako do that?" FNGie asked, staring at the monitor.

​

"Well, I'm not an expert in fluid physics," The Kid said. "But probably not, no."

​

They watched as the cap rocked upwards and then came back to rest at its odd angle again. Most of a minute went by, and then the cap rocked again in a way that was definitely not the mako that was inching around the obstruction on the way to its eruption point. She had the feeling that whatever had had the giant metal cap dropped on it was not happy.

​

Finally, the cap was rocked over enough to slam into the grating – silently, the monitor didn't transmit sound – and reveal a pile of sludge. It started inching away back to its origin immediately, revealing first a limb, then a mass of hair, and over the course of a couple minutes revealing–

​

"Is that... a person?" FNGie asked the obvious question of the curled-up shape.

​

"No," Eir said, with more determination than evidence.

​

She didn't want it to be a person, because she couldn't imagine the kind of person that would emerge from a pool of mako like a Wutaian horror movie villain and not immediately seizure, mutate or die. SOLDIERs, scuttlebutt went, got one booster shot of mako, and half of those washed out of the program.

​

And half of that half washed way, way out. All the way to a sanitarium, or a morgue.

​

"I believe so," said The Kid, watching the video feed with a sort of avaricious curiosity. She'd never seen him look more like his compatriots in Science Division. "Can we get down there from here?"

​

"Doubt it," Eir said, silently thanking various Gods for that fact.

​

"Unfortunate," The Kid sighed sadly, like a more normal kid denied a new toy.

​

"Where even is that?" FNGie wondered. Asking more questions.

​

That guy was going to get murdered someday, Eir reckoned.

 

[Guile]

Chapter 1 – Part 2
Aerith Gainsborough, Teenage Ancient
​

If someone asked Aerith what being a Cetra was like, she wwasn't sure what she'd tell them. It's not like she had anything else to compare it to. She might say, it seemed a lot like being a human. Except for when she knew things without having learned them first, but that didn't happen that often. Like overhearing something at market, or on television, and then forgetting where she heard it from. No big deal. Sometimes, she had weird dreams.

Sometimes, she talked to ghosts.

Ghosts liked a sympathetic ear. Wasn't that true of everyone? And even the ghosts that didn't talk back, that just kind of floated around spooking the occasional person spiritually-savvy enough to see them, were basically people. People she could chat to when she was bored or lonely or whatever, although she tried not to do that while out running errands. Anymore. Chris still gave her weird looks, sometimes.

So, ghosts: people. People her age, some of them! Sometimes they were really young, and after she grew up a bit she decided she'd rather not think about that too hard. Sometimes they grumped like the old folks that hung out at the Sector 5 community center instead. Sometimes they sounded like the Wutaians who pretended like they couldn't speak her language because she was bothering them and they hoped she would go away. Which was fine. The selectively deaf ones made the best listeners, honestly.

There were never any shortage of ghosts to talk to. People died all the time, in Midgar.

Her childhood had been an adventure.

All of that was weird, but for all she knew, other people had stuff like that happen to them too. Surely she wasn't the only person out there listening to the dead; that'd be kind of depressing. Like Red! Red XIII could talk to ghosts, she bet.

That's what listening to the Planet was like. She couldn't exactly point at anything and say, Yep, that's the Planet, telling me stuff. She had to work backwards; recognize that she recognized – just for example – Red XIII, fellow nonhuman, warrior and protector of Cosmo Canyon. And friend.

A friend she'd never met.

Well, that kind of roundabout nonsense had abruptly changed today. She'd gone from 'trying to interpret the Planet's voice' to 'Trying to tone down the screaming.' The words were fuzzy, more like getting punched in the brain by a concept, but with an undeniable sense of wrongness.

Look, she was a flower girl, not some kind of linguistics expert.

Unnatural. Inhuman. The invader. The sickness.

That had been a little alarming, and not just because of the feeling of something bigger than her muscling into her brain to deposit its impressions. Who? What? War? Plague? Explain yourself, please!

Beware. They come.

... Thanks, Planet.

It was still nice to be able to properly hear the Planet, anyway. Like she was Cetra-ing right for the first time, or something like that. She was going to chalk that one up as a win.

Even if it had gone from way too quiet to way too loud.

Her dreams got weirder, too. Less of the beautiful, ephemeral green of the Lifestream, more of an icky green like poison. The sense of floating, of peace, of being part of a comfortable, warm collective – like a hug – those had gotten rarer. She'd been getting a lot more dreams with a sense of formless danger settling in like fog. A feeling like desperation, and trying to fix things and messing up and making things worse, which was just… the worst feeling. And then someone reached in and tore the heart out of her chest. Sometimes they put it back in, but not the way it was supposed to be. That part wasn't great, either.

She was sleeping less. And pretty glad they didn't have a lot of neighbors to ask questions like 'Why are you gardening at 3:00 a.m., exactly?' Luckily, her mom was a heavy sleeper.

When she wasn't sleeping (badly), there was a pervasive sense of wrongness hanging around like a gross fog. Not all the time, not something she could quite put a finger to and say 'There it is!' But something that felt off in the air or the water or the earth. Not all the time, just… sometimes. Like she was tending flowers that were growing atop something far fouler than fertilizer. It was old, and deeply buried, but sick. Rotten, and something that would spread its rot if given a chance. Something that everything in her rejected, like her guts rebelling at bad food.

But she had no idea how to find it, or what to do if she did. She couldn't tell people; what would she say? She was getting bad vibes? But this also probably wasn't the kind of thing that could be fixed by a champion flower-grower or a part-time assistant at the orphanage.

It wasn't much good for anything except stressing her out. She was so bad at this Defender of the Planet thing.

Maybe the old Cetra would have known what was up. But she'd lived in Midgar her whole life. And if anyone asked, she wasn't just being nice but being honest when she said that she kinda liked Midgar. Sector 5 had always been her home and probably would always be her home, and she had no idea what it would be like, to live anywhere else. She wasn't blind; the old folks said that things had been bad in Midgar for longer than she'd been alive, and getting worse. Maybe doing Cetra stuff in Midgar was like trying to put an ear to the ground to listen for chocobos at the same time the train was rumbling by overhead.

That's where the feeling was coming from, more than anywhere, she decided. Like, it was everywhere, but especially in the ground beneath her feet. Not actually beneath her feet right here in Sector 5, thank the Planet, but close. She gardened like a woman possessed, all the time. Because everything was connected, and getting her fingers in the earth and tending to green growing things connected her to everything else. And it felt more productive than just sitting on her butt trying not to freak out.

It felt… north? Ish? Maybe. It really wasn't much to go on. Was it in Midgar at all? There wasn't a lot north of Midgar; a bunch of ocean and the northern continent, mostly. Maybe some islands? She didn't exactly do much traveling.

Unnatural, the Planet insisted. It was the metaphysical sensation of a really large person leaning on your shoulder to whisper in your ear. Life from death.

The feeling that came with the whisper wasn't a good one. Not like old things dying and new things growing from the bones of the old; it was a feeling like going against the natural order of life and death and time and space. Things lived and then they died; time moved only ever forward; up was up and down was down.

Except apparently not, maybe! Not all the time. Apparently, sometimes the natural order got mugged and rolled like a chump in the back alleys.

Well, nevermind! She could fix this!

Souls that had never made it to the Lifestream for one reason or another could hang on after death and do some pretty nasty stuff. Most of it was just graffiti tagging, playing tricks on people. Annoying but not dangerous. Ghosts were just lost, basically. Some of them were mean and some of them were sad, but they were just people in the end. The really mean ones could build themselves new bodies and hurt people, and that was maybe a bit outside her pay grade, to borrow something that jerk Reno liked to say. If the Planet wanted to point her at some ghosts, well, she could go hit them with her staff or something. Considering how often she'd played hide and seek in the train graveyard as a kid, you could say she'd been training for that all her life.

That wasn't... exactly it. Didn't quite fit the picture she thought she was seeing. Ghosts were still a fact of life; a weird sideways move that probably shouldn't happen, but did sometimes, because people were stubborn and angry as hell. Everything about this felt bigger than that. A lot bigger. 'The Planet just put out a hit on somebody' big, if she had to be specific about it. That seemed like a big deal. Although if that was the case, the Planet might have to get used to disappointment. She was a flower girl, not a hitman.

So there she was. The flower girl of Sector 5, going around trying to pay attention to flowers and children and ignoring the Turks ominously hanging around for reasons Tseng refused to explain, but with the Planet humming in alarm, louder and more clear than she'd ever heard it (but still not clear enough to explain anything) in the back of her head. Some of the ghosts seemed to notice it too; whispering their fear and fury to anyone who would listen. Dragging themselves closer to the living, trying harder than ever to be heard. Like that would help either group – the living or the dead – instead of just making more work for her.

If she ever found out what was giving her the spooky feeling, she was going to hit them so hard, see if she didn't!

 

[Guile]

Chapter 1 – Part 3
Chadley, Shinra Science Intern
​

The humanoid that came out of the Lifestream was just about the most interesting thing to happen in years, as far as Chadley was concerned. Well, they didn't do a lot of moving, which was something of a disappointment. Twitching, mostly. Some shuddering. Enough to assure him they were still alive, not enough to be a proper seizure. Cold? Random synapse firing, perhaps. They'd dragged their body further away from the hole to rest against the wall, and then just kind of… curled up into a pile of hair and gone to sleep. Or passed out. He was a trifle unsure what the difference was.

They were definitely clothed; even the mass of hair and mako sludge didn't entirely cover the big stompy boots. That didn't necessarily preclude some type of monster, though. Many monsters had a surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of textiles, among other things. The academic arguments on the subject of 'why' were varied and frequently devolved into shouting.

Smoggers and Chronomoggers were discarded Shinra robots that managed to survive beyond their intended obsolescence date by repairing themselves with random slum junk. Had some overzealous Shinra programmer given them that ability? And who was building tech like that up in the Great Glacier or out in the boonies around Cosmo Canyon and letting them loose as Golems? Goblins, Sahagin and Snows were intelligent enough to talk; were they also intelligent enough to weave textiles and smith weapons? The evidence seemed... evident. Or, some argued, wouldn't it make more sense for them to have emerged fully-formed from whatever strange mechanism of the planet was responsible for them?

The mechanism responsible ranged from mysticism to toxic waste in the Midgar sewers, each writer's pet theory put forward with the same self-evident tone that upper management would use to talk about their Promised Land.

He'd given up finding the answer himself when he'd realized the academic journals couldn't even agree where monsters came from. The theories were as endless and varied as monsters themselves, whether born from the Planet or birthed by mako or pollution or evolving or devolving from some other creature or even, as put forward by one memorable astronomer, aliens. Now he just read the articles for the fun of seeing which peer review could find the most elaborate and intellectual way of calling the others lack-witted morons.

Bored with the lack of action but unwilling to stop watching, Chadley spent his time fiddling with the monitors. He'd discovered that the video feed down in Lab 0 had hologram functionality. He wasn't entirely clear why that was the case. Easier to send instructions to the staff, perhaps. Possibly gloating. The Science Department did a lot of that.

It couldn't possibly be a safety precaution; Director Hojo still kept Specimen H0512 inside his third-favorite lab even after it had smashed three hundred thousand gil worth of delicate equipment the last time it got out. Director Hojo had paused the experiments on Ancient DNA for a while after that, but H0512 had definitely not been disposed of. That had been an interesting anomaly, actually; H0512 absolutely shouldn't have had enough mental capacity to become lab-smashingly enraged, even when exposed to Director Hojo, who had something of a gift for infuriating everyone who had ever met him. And yet lab smashing had commenced. Mysterious. Chadley's point, now that he had finally gotten around to it, was that whatever else could be said about Director Hojo (and lots of people said lots of things), he lacked neither vision nor courage, and didn't really believe in safety precautions. Perhaps Lab 0 had been under different management.

Chadley had heard that those in mako poisoning-induced comas could hear the voices of those around them. Preposterous pseudoscience, Director Hojo had assured him when Chadley had related the theory to him. But then, Director Hojo said that about a lot of things, like the entire field of psychiatry.

Thanks to the hologram function, he was 'around', in a certain sense. It was worth a try.

Unless it turned out that Director Hojo had installed any kill switch triggers and he was about to be murdered for doing something anomalous with some secret experiment. Quite unlikely, but not outside the realm of possibility. A lab technician had exploded the other week for unclear reasons that might have to do with learning something he shouldn't have. Director Hojo had spent half an hour after that event sending mails on his PHS with a deranged smile on his face.

It was still worth a try.

So once his two assistants had gone home for the evening, Chadley patched into the feed and started talking into the mic. It wasn't like he had somewhere else to be. Director Hojo had given him a room on the 65th floor. Unfortunately, it was the one labeled 'child experiment room' on the floor plan, and Chadley didn't want it, however artistic its previous occupant had been. Luckily, Chadley didn't require much in the way of sleep these days, and spent most nighttime hours haunting the recreational floors of Shinra Tower.

He didn't have a large well of experiences to draw on. After he'd run out of things to say on the subject of Specimen H0512 and Director Hojo's weird chicken phase that had resulted in the creation of the Makonoids, he talked about the cafe on the 63rd floor and how the kindly lady manning the register had let him use Director Hojo's expense card to try one of every drink and food item to see what he'd liked. His favorite was The Sephiroth, a drink that was half bitter soda water and half lemon-lime syrup. He liked the wafer masamune that came with it. His favorite food item was the five materia-colored soup dumplings. He'd liked the red one with the spicy mala filling, although possibly that was because he'd tried that one first and his mouth had gone numb. He talked about Red Dragon Outfitters, the shop run by the nice man on Fortune Street, where he bought his ascots. Director Hojo had made a strange face when Chadley had first returned with a jaunty ascot (tied around his upper arm by the shop owner himself), but hadn't said anything. Chadley now owned twelve, six of which were the same color.

He talked about the exploded technician. His personal theory was that she'd been a mole sent by Director Scarlett. By hour three, he'd been reduced to explaining the intricacies of hologram technology and virtual reality simulators. He'd visited the Shinra Memorial Museum and Visual Entertainment Hall floors thirty seven times, primarily for the Ancient History and Neo Midgar exhibit.

He'd run out of stories to tell the human-sized lump and looped back around to describing the creature Director Hojo had recently imported from the western continent and its curious properties – being partially made of fire wasn't precisely unique among monsters, but nothing did it quite the way the dog-thing did – when his assistants clocked in for their shift in the morning.

He stopped chatting to the monitors immediately, of course, but the resulting silence felt rather like locking the door after the experiment escaped.

He could hear them muttering. The office was small, after all.

"Is he talking to us?" Trooper 64-533 – Baldwin – said in an undertone.

"Nope," Trooper 52-139 – Eir – decided, pulling her helmet off and letting a surprisingly large quantity of red hair spill out to brush against her shoulders.

Baldwin mumbled indecisively, "Should we ask? About the Science Division thing?"

Eir rolled her eyes. "You can if you want. I'm going to get coffee."

Coffee sounded promising. Chadley asked, "Any chance the coffee comes with novelty wafers?"

Eir looked at him long enough to start verging on what one of the doctors called 'the awkward minute', then finally sighed. "It's probably strong enough for the spoon to stand up unaided, if that counts."

"Sure, that sounds fun."

Chadley waited patiently, but Baldwin was waffling, as if break-room coffee was going to be the most important decision of his day. It could conceivably be; Monitoring Station 0-7 wasn't the most exciting of postings.

Chadley turned back to the monitor bank and looked and then looked again and then jumped out of his seat – he'd taken Baldwin's rather than roll his chair over – to press his nose up against the glass.

"Okay, off you go, enjoy coffee! Take a break, you've earned it," he told Eir. "Take Baldwin. Now."

He'd had suspicions – hopes – when the body had continued to move. But Chadley had turned back to the monitor to discover that the creature from the mako had disappeared from view. He wasn't seeing any evidence of them melting, evaporating, sublimating or exploding, which meant that they were probably moving!

Had moved. Out of view of the monitor in Mako Processing.

Eir paused just long enough in the face of his smiling and waving to communicate that she didn't buy whatever it was he was selling, before grabbing Baldwin's shoulder and dragging him upright.

"C'mon FNGie," she said, at least making the tiniest effort to sound enthusiastic. Chadley appreciated that a lot. She added, "We're going to make coffee. New pot. I wouldn't feed the overnight brew to a bloodhound."

Baldwin made a vague sound of disgust, but Chadley wasn't going to stop watching for a second. This was officially the most interesting thing to happen in his entire existence.

Now, where was his AWOL mystery?

He switched cameras, and found her coming out of Mako Processing. Yes, her, definitely! Significant evidence of secondary female sexual characteristics, couldn't miss it. Together with the boots, he was leaning towards the 'human (?)' angle. No idea how a human emerging from a pool of mako could happen, of course, though he could throw some hypotheses at the wall. Most of them came from late-night horror movies, admittedly. Super SOLDIER, ghost, mako zombie, legendary Ancient come back to murder the humans that stole their world? Human civilian that won the genetic lottery to end all genetic lotteries in the category of 'resistance to mako'? The world contained a lot of crazy things Chadley didn't understand.

She might be something like a Snow, which was classified as an extremely human-like monster. A Lifestream-dwelling Snow variant would be really interesting. Snow that lived in the Great Glacier were apparently natural magic casters, no Ice materia necessary; what would a Snow that lived in the Lifestream be able to do?

He did notice her humanoid hands appeared bulkier than normal, with something like crystalline growths. Which argued for some other, unknown monster type. Or mutation, partial fossilization, something like that? All those options had their charms. He wasn't picky.

He spared a quick look back, seeing that he was alone. He took a deep breath. Adjusted his monocle. Ran a hand through his hair. Checked for kill switch triggers again. No, still alive. Okay.

"Hello!"

She looked up at him and he fell silent, his mind over-working. Physical analysis: likelihood of being at least as human as the majority of Shinra employees exceeding 90% after factoring in new visual data; extraordinary cardiovascular health; lung capacity at least one standard deviation above the human mean; magnificent bone structure of unusual density; musculature powerful yet perfectly flexible. This was a body optimized to operate at peak performance for extended periods of time. Beyond peak human performance, actually, which was either a point in favor of the mako mutant hypothesis, or he was going to have to update their records on exactly what was possible for human physicality. Was his breathing obstructed? He swallowed and reminded himself to breathe harder to make up for whatever blockage might be afflicting him.

"Welcome – back? – to the surface! Or to life. Or to this plane of existence. Depending on which theory about the Lifestream is right, and what kind of entity you are. Would you like to weigh in on that– ah. One way hologram. Well, never you mind. My name is Chadley, and I would like very much to know more about you."

No failsafes set off. Good. Talking too quickly. Dial back approximately 20%. Continue.

"You are currently on Floor B-6 of Lab 0, situated beneath Sector 7 of Midgar. Welcome!"

Hmm, he'd said that part already. She jerked hard and said something his hologram couldn't pick up. Tragic. He mentally logged the data point anyway. His mind flashed through the various camera feeds, calculating. He assumed a lecturer's tone.

"There are various monsters on Floors B-5, B-4, B-2 and B-1, and they are between you and safety. But please consider me your guide out of the bowels of the city." If Chadley could not go to the human (?), bring the human (?) to Chadley. Simple. Not easy. But simple. "Could you give me some indication that you're hearing and understanding me–" She said something he couldn't hear, of course. Still; words! Progress! Her eyes were focused on Chadley through the medium of the hologram. The monitors were a bit old, he couldn't tell what color her eyes were, but they were distinctive. That shine on the feed was… well, SOLDIER was the knee-jerk reaction in Midgar, but really it could be anything. She'd just emerged from a pool of mako, after all! Not too many things could survive that. What had he been saying? "Ah… how good are you at fighting? There will, unfortunately, be some fighting. And after all, just because you look like you could fight a behemoth doesn't mean you can. You did recently arrive from parts unknown, after all."

"Well, I could probably prevail upon… well, not Director Hojo–" Yes, that face of extreme aversion, open disgust and more than a little hatred was typical of those who had made the Director's acquaintance. "–But I could use his access codes to mobilize some Turks if I had to. I'd rather not, keeping this quiet would probably be better for both of us, but–" She turned and started walking. "–Yes, I didn't like that plan either. Now, if you go down that hallway you'll find a ladder leading up to Floor B-5. On the other side of a pack of bloodhounds, unfortunately. They're out of their cages, for reasons I'm unclear on."

The woman paused a moment, before continuing on. She seemed confident. Confidence was good!

"Okay, well, you're getting out of range, so just go on then, and I'll see you again soon!"

Before the woman quite left the feed's view, Chadley watched her slam a kick into a skulking wererat hard enough to send it skipping across the ground three times – four – wow, that wererat was still going, huh? Then it turned out that kick was just a detour on its way to her foot describing an arc like a full moon that put her boot heel through an investigating bugaboo that had flown a little too close. A fascinatingly rapid recovery of motor function after what had had all the hallmarks – briefly – of severe Mako poisoning. Her immune system must be incredibly robust. She hopped on one foot and shook her foot a little to shake off bugaboo guts, but frankly it all just blended in with the gummy remnant mako that covered her.

Yes, this was going splendidly. Chadley flicked to another video feed.

 

[Guile]

Chapter 2 – Part 1
Rude, Professional Turk​

If anyone were to ask Rude (they don't), he'd say he didn't like Sector 5. It was the most idyllic slum in the whole city; practically pastoral. He wasn't a fan. Standing out in the sunlight, amidst the greenery and the flowers, was antithetical to everything a Turk was. Everybody in Sector 5 wore white or bright colors; his sharp black-on-black suit stuck out like a sore thumb, which was a problem when he was supposed to be tailing someone. The marketplace had fresh veggies. Rude hadn't eaten a fresh vegetable in the better part of two decades, and he didn't want to start now.

It was just… a weird place. Turks didn't belong here.

This was the last time he did Tseng a favor.

Well… no it wouldn't be. He'd had that thought before, the last time Tseng had him keep watch on the Gainsborough place. And the time before that. And… well, anyway. Rude wasn't the type to openly buck the system; that's why he had Reno. So Tseng going around Reno and having Rude run this one solo cut down on a lot of complaining.

Rude spent a lot of time on this assignment thinking that if Tseng wanted Turks following a teenager as she worked at the local orphanage, went shopping for her mom, or chattered away to nothing in particular while she tended her riotous flower pavilion, he could come down and do it himself.

And yet, here Rude was. Stalking a teenage girl. It made him feel like a bad man, in a very different way than he usually did when he was on the job.

There were some upsides. Tseng's weird side-gigs paid well, for one; the pay was the same as actual corporate espionage or wet-work. For another, there was a cheap bar just off the train station that did a great cocktail with rum, pineapple and grenadine. Made the trip worth it all on its own.

He glanced over, perfectly casual. The target was still working her way through a used clothing store. Rude had cased the location before, and knew they sold tough, reliable work wear. Slightly unusual for her, but not enough to bother Tseng over.

"That'll be 13 gil," the shopkeep in the wife-beater shirt said to him.

"Mm," Rude acknowledged, grabbing his purchase.

They didn't really do stakeout food here. Rude had to go with a pre-made salad. With a flower in it.

Not his style, but that was Sector 5 for you.

Rude glanced into the bag and found an extra item had been sneaked into his bag. Surprisingly stealthy, actually. He was a little impressed. He debated with himself whether to make a thing of it.

He asked expressionlessly, "Does your shop give out freebies often?"

"The cats are probably hungry," the old timer had the gall to wink at him.

"Mm. Thanks."

Turks didn't relent, and they didn't quit. But it was easier to just give in with these people, sometimes.

He glanced – casually – back out to find the target, who had been happily browsing, was now gone.

He didn't panic, not even a little bit. She'd probably just gone to another store.

He peeked around a few corners, looked into a few shops; the marketplace wasn't that big. Just as he was starting to become concerned (not panicked, of course; he was a professional), he spotted her in the repurposed trailer that served as Sector Five's only weapons shop.

He considered that in silence for a few seconds.

"Tseng."

His PHS connected, needing no more than that. The Turks got the best toys, Reno was right about that.

Knowing Tseng's phone habits, Rude said without waiting for any kind of greeting, "The target's visiting the weapon shop."

Tseng's voice, slightly tinny over the phone, spoke, "You know you don't need to report such minor details."

"She's been buying sturdier clothes, too. Materia, before that. Substantial purchases at all locations."

Rude let Tseng come to his own conclusions. He'd met the kid before, but he wouldn't say he knew the target well. He decided not to put forth any kind of theory about whether the slum girl who had seemed perfectly content being tailed by Turks for years was going to rabbit.

There was silence for a few moments, as Tseng considered the variables. He finally directed, "If she tries to leave Sector 5, stop her."

Almost like she'd heard them, the girl who'd been browsing knuckle dusters – terrible idea for her body type, she should stick to staves – without a care in the world picked up her purchases and started moving with purpose. Rude added, "Understood," and ambled after her. He just happened to be going in the same direction, that was all.

Just because he might end up abducting a child today didn't mean he should act like he was some thug abducting a child.

He left his PHS on. Tseng wasn't typically a micromanaging sort of boss, but he did like to keep informed. Especially about this target.

If she was going to flee the sector for some reason, it would be better to stop her further north, past the orphanage. The hardest part of the whole affair would be talking her into going home quietly. Rude wasn't a particularly good speaker, and she was … well, maybe most teenagers were like that? Rude barely knew what teenagers had been like when he'd been one. At that age, he had been going through Turk training.

As he walked, he played out possible conversation starters in his head. He could… ask after her mother? Ask her to feed cats with him?

That, of course, was when he turned a corner and she popped up in front of him, hands and bags clasped playfully behind her back like this was a normal, everyday interaction. Or like she was the highly trained operative and he was the untrained civilian.

Awkward.

"Hello, Rude!" she said brightly. "Always nice to see you again."

He really didn't like the target knowing his name. It just felt unprofessional.

"... Aerith. I'm going to need you to go home."

"This is the way to my house, you know." If anything, she got slightly closer, whispering like she was telling him a secret, "I know you know where I live."

Rude determinedly smoothed the wrinkle he got in-between his brows. If she was like Reno at all, then getting any reaction would be a victory for her. "It's also the road out of Sector 5, and you spent today gearing up. You can see why we're concerned."

"I didn't know I had to clear my travel plans with you guys first."

Rude paused. There had been a little heat, there. "Well–"

"Sorry, that was a joke! I know you guys like to keep tabs on everything. This isn't me running away or something like that, it's like… having an adventure without leaving the city, more or less." She shuffled her bags so that she could hold out her thumb and forefinger, spread slightly. "Just a little one."

Actually, in the process of shuffling she'd somehow divested some of her bags so he was holding them instead. Rude was already starting to feel like he's lost control of this conversation.

Most days he was forced to talk to Aerith were like that.

The conversation paused, Rude unsure where to go from here. His eyes drifted down to his PHS. Aerith's, he noticed, did too. Tseng's voice eventually came on. "Please don't do that. Adventures can be terribly messy."

"Tseng," her voice went up an octave, into a pleading register, "don't be like that! This is important!"

"So are you," Tseng said.

She was still smiling. Either she was weirdly okay with being surveilled by a corporate wetworks team, or else she thought they were friends now. Rude wasn't sure which of those options was sadder.

"I know how much you guys want to keep me right where you can see me at all times, on pain of various terrible fates for me or parts of me, depending on what flights of fancy strike You-Know-Who at the time–" Rude mentally inserted 'that creep, Hojo' into the blank. As a Turk, he of course had no feelings at all about how often the Turks were seconded to Science Division. But in the security of his own head: fuck Hojo. "–but I really, really need to check this out!"

Maybe the caring flower girl look was just an act and she didn't really care what her Turk minders did for a living? Rude had met plenty of sociopaths in the program– or it was weirdly positive passive aggression. It had been a while since anyone had dared talk to the Turk uniform that way, he hadn't recognized it.

"Aerith, an 'adventure' isn't worth putting your mother through that," Tseng tried. "Go home."

"Could be the end of the world." She spaced her thumb and forefinger nearly together again. "A little bit."

"... Explain," Tseng demanded.

That was putting a little more weight on the target's story than Rude had been expecting.

"Okay, soooo…" Aerith shifted awkwardly. "Do you guys have some sketchy stuff going on under Sector 7 or 8 or, somewhere around there?"

The silence was deafening.

"You don't have to tell me! I'm just getting a feeling you should probably check up on it, if so. I mean, bad feeling, Midgar… it's probably you guys, right?"

"Yes, probably," Tseng admitted. He added, business-like, "How reliable is this feeling?"

"You guys are the ones who kidnapped Mom because of the feeling stuff, you tell me."

Rude glanced down at his PHS. Is that why– Tseng's head on the screen gave a tiny nod.

Rude knew what kind of auditing backlog just Hojo had built up, nevermind the entire Science Division since his rise to Division Director. They had lives, and espionage to do, they couldn't always be checking up on Hojo. If it even was Hojo; Weapons Development also had the budget of a small nation and a love affair with ever greater destructive power. Making problems go away was one of the rare things they were good at – even if their solutions often caused their own problems down the line that the Turks had to clean up.

"Well, how about you guys go look into it, then?" Aerith suggested.

"We're very busy," Tseng said.

They were. They were also, unfortunately, making time in that busy schedule to tail civilian teenagers. This was Rude's life.

"I'm just saying, if it got back to certain people–" Rude added 'that motherfucker Hojo' into the blank, "–that the girl with the weird feelings told them to someone and they ignored her, certain people would probably disappear someone into the labs. Hint."

Rude rubbed a hand over his face, just in case his jaw had dropped open or he had an inappropriate smile on it at the Planet-sized balls on the girl. To threaten the Turks. With Hojo. It would be mutually assured destruction, surely she saw that?

"... That's not fair," Tseng protested mildly. "We do that."

"Well, I am today, buster!" Aerith had her fists on her hips. "If I can't go, then somebody has to go make sure we're not about to all explode or get eaten or mind controlled or something."

Rude really didn't know how to feel about them getting bullied by a teenager like this. Reno would literally never believe this.

"All right, I'll send Rude to take a look," Tseng said in a tone that Rude had never heard from the boss before. Generally, the boss commanded his subordinates, took orders from those above, and ignored people who didn't matter; he'd never heard him sound conciliatory before.

Then Rude processed what Tseng had just said. Of course. Today was apparently one of those days.

"Thank you both!" she said, all sweetness and light again. She added thoughtfully, like she was trying to help, "It feels kind of like maybe someone was playing with the border between life and death or something? I'd bring a Restore materia."

"Noted," Rude said. Restore was handy for treating injuries and pulled double duty destroying undead, so he'd be covered whatever way she meant that. He didn't use a lot of materia, but he had a bracer full of them sitting around somewhere. Had he left it in the helicopter?

"You know, Tseng, you're all right." The girl sounded vaguely devious, like she was trying to be sneaky. Rude refocused. She added slowly, like she was testing each word as she said it, "Keep this up and you might not even deserve to be wiped out by a rogue bioweapon!"

"Is that a particular danger?" Tseng asked, sounding unconcerned for a man who knew, if not an exact count, then at least had a general idea of exactly how many bioweapons Shinra had unleashed on its enemies and its own people. The ones the Turks knew about, anyway, which was a lot already.

"You guys made him, you tell me."

"You know that doesn't narrow it down." Were there non-Shinra bioweapons out there? Wutai might have a few. They had their own monster-breeding techniques, plus all the ninjas. Rude supposed there had been that thing with AVALANCHE. Veld was probably on top of that one, though.

Aerith rolled her eyes, the picture of a glib teenager. "Do you make many bioweapons with a sword so long it's definitely compensating for something?"

It was hard to tell through the screen, but Tseng's eyes weren't quite focusing on them. Rather, he was staring off somewhere into the middle distance. Had he gotten paler?

Maybe there was something wrong with the video on this new model PHS. That seemed more likely than a slum girl managing to crack Tseng's cool.

He'd be telling Reno athe second he got off work, anyway.

"... I'll keep an eye out for that," Tseng finally said.

"Well, okay, that's everything then," Aerith nodded repeatedly. "Thanks for having this talk. I'll be heading home to Mom now! Keep me updated, okay?"

Despite the no doubt unpleasant work he'd just been saddled with (not unexpected; unpleasant work was standard in his line of work), Rude was actually in a pretty good mood as he escorted Aerith home. He'd remembered the new model PHS's auto-record function. Maybe Reno would believe this after all.

 

[Guile]

Things may gonna slow down a bit now that we're caught up with SV, but I do still have a small backlog.

Chapter 2 – Part 2
Chadley, Shinra Science Nerd​

The probable-woman had been working her way through a surprise gorger nest on Floor B5 – the human-sized eyeless insect monsters really did get absolutely everywhere, down in the slums – when Chadley had foreseen a problem. The monsters were still lairing in the lab, rather than escaping into the slums as R&D monsters had a tendency to do. That pointed to them being locked down tight. Lab 0 had been completely locked down during whatever unfortunate bout of sudden karma had given the experiments the run of the lab. And whatever else Shinra's Science Division was, they didn't skimp on lab safety protocols. They didn't have to; the Science Division was bankrolled by the closest thing the city of Midgar had to a god.

Chadley needed to find the controls that governed those lockdown protocols, or he'd never get to meet his new... friend. Director Hojo would never leave that kind of power in the hands of Heidegger's security teams, so Monitoring Station 0-7 didn't have them. He did know, however, that Director Hojo – who ruled his division like an iron-fisted Wutaian daimyo – would have an override. And that meant returning to Shinra Tower.

It was probably fine. He'd just… avoid bothering Director Hojo directly. He was a busy man.

But he needed to get those doors open. So off he went, bidding his assistants hold down the fort without him. And not to mind the bits he'd borrowed (pried free) from the monitor bank with a knife he'd borrowed off Trooper Eir.

"If you really want to thank me," Trooper Eir said. "you could leave my name out of the report on whatever you were doing here."

She had apparently forgotten that Turks could pull service records. It's not like they needed Chadley to ID a Shinra trooper for them.

"Shit, you're right," Eir realized glumly. "Well, guess it's out of our hands now."

Well, they could kill him. But that would cause it's own problems.

"Wouldn't be worth it," she agreed sadly.

"There is something deeply wrong with the both of you," Trooper Baldwin added.

He wasn't wrong. Rude, though.

"That's Midgar for you," Eir mused. "Try not to get murdered, you weren't too bad for somebody from Science."

Chadley was a little touched, to be honest.

But he had places to be.

Monitoring Station 0-7 was only one maintenance tunnel, a rather rusted ladder, another maintenance tunnel and a sealable hatch away from street level on the Sector 7 Plate. Chadley nodded a hello to a staring boy in suspenders and short pants as he emerged from what probably seemed to the child to be an ordinary manhole.

He ignored the awed, whispered "Slum dweller," behind him.

Then it was only a few blocks of walking to Shinra Tower. He was a little unclear why they'd sectioned off the stations from more centralized Shinra Company infrastructure. If this were run by the Science Division, it would undoubtedly be because they were expecting Troopers Eir and Baldwin to be eaten by something, and wanted space and sealable hatches between valuable executives and replaceable grunts. But perhaps Public Security was different. From what he'd gathered from Eir, they seemed the type to exile problems to dead end postings rather than bury their mistakes more literally.

He hadn't wanted to leave the mysterious mako woman without assistance, even if watching her use one gorger to beat another like swinging a living, screeching flail suggested she would probably manage somehow.

He'd hit on an idea; his monocle already had an interface and hologram tech built in. It just needed a few improvements. Mainly it was an issue of power; there was only so much such a compact device could manage on its own, no matter how advanced. But if he spliced in a battery pack that Monitoring Station 0-7 didn't really need and something he could use as a signal booster – effectively daisy-chaining his PHS to his ocular tech – to wirelessly connect to the lab far below, then he could get the video feed sent to his monocle while on the move. It wasn't really that hard. It would have been easier with a quiet space, a mirror and a few tools – wire-stripping by hand while moving was rather annoying – but he could adapt.

It did mean he had to carry the bulky extra tech in his lab coat and shorts pockets, and the wires running from them to his monocle ruined his aesthetic a bit, but that was a sacrifice he was willing to make to keep a literal eye on things.

"Aha!" he exclaimed as his monocle flickered blue, projecting video directly in front of his eye. He forewent the more traditional cackling laughter so common among Hojo's staff so as not to upset the matron in the white suit jacket and skirt walking by. Then he just needed to focus in on–

"Hello… ah... sir?" The black-haired woman at the front desk said tentatively. Lovely woman, though he'd either forgotten her name or never learned it. "Do you have an appointment, or are you here for the tour…?"

Chadley blinked at her. "Oh, no, I'm fine. Floor 65, you know."

"I should have guessed," she smiled professionally. He smiled back. She seemed nice, and not just anyone could make a baby-blue skirt-suit with matching accessories work. "If you have your keycard, then just go right up."

"Yes, thank you," he mumbled, distracted. There was clearly a skill to watching someone break a wrath hound over her knee – Troopers Eir and Baldwin would be sad – in one eye and still navigating around a potted plant with the other. It was one he hadn't yet mastered.

"... Sir?"

"I'm fine," he assured the receptionist, batting fronds away from his face.

"Of course, sir."

He spent the elevator ride wishing he'd thought to assemble some kind of microphone; having to shout for the monocle speaker to pick up his advice about monodrives was awkward.

"It's very resistant to physical trauma. Do you have any–!" He shouted, interrupted by the view from his feed abruptly transitioning into a spiderweb of cracked glass. He deduced that the camera he was piggybacking off of had cracked due to plunging temperatures as a hellish landscape of ice bloomed. He hypothesized that spending an unknown amount of time in the Lifestream either improved materia or – if the monster theory was correct – had turned her into some kind of super Snow. Either way, he congratulated her, "Impressive!"

On Director Hojo's subfloor, the warm office tones or futuristic flair of other floors gave way immediately to harsher LED lighting in the floors and walls and bare metal grate flooring. As much budget as the Science Division had, very little of it went into creature comforts. It was efficient, for certain; it ensured no one who wasn't 'here for the science', as one doctor had put it, stayed in the division for long. With such frequent turnover it wasn't odd for the occasional intern to be misplaced, but that might well be a feature rather than a bug.

Not that Chadley was involved in that, of course; it wasn't his department, so to speak. But Director Hojo didn't go out of his way to hide it, either.

"Ah yes, Chadley, my dear boy," Doctor Solvarr had a way of oozing around the Science Division floors that was inconsistent with his vertebrate skeleton. It was interesting. "Always so good to see you."

"Thank you," Chadley said politely, as usual distracted by trying to see through the impenetrable goggle lenses staring down at him. "Is the Director…?"

"At a budget meeting!" Solvarr lamented, his jowly face split into a commiserating smile. The man placed a hand on Chadley's shoulder and asked earnestly, "Is there something I can do for you, my boy?"

"No, no, I'm still complying with Hojo's orders," Chadley assured him. 'Go make yourself useful when I don't need you' was an order, right? Right.

"Aren't we all!" Solvarr laughed. "Off with you, then. Bouchard is on Floor 66 monitor duty today."

"... Ah."

Chadley hurried on, ignoring Doctor Solvarr's eyes following him as they often did. He busied himself with checking a few work stations. And then erasing evidence of his electronic movements, of course. Everyone in the Science Division was something of a snoop, either by nature or out of self-defense. But of course Lab 0 wasn't hosting any of the top-level projects. It was literally underground.

Chadley slowed, briefly stymied by what he was seeing with the eye not in Shinra Tower. Metaphorically speaking, thankfully.

"Was that sweeper programmed to eliminate intruders but not the experiments that took over the lab?" he asked, baffled. Granted, you wouldn't want your automated defenses to accidentally attack your test subjects unnecessarily, but he'd expected someone would reprogram any available giant mechs at some point prior to being murdered or evacuated. Apparently not.

Now that his new interest had turned it into scrap, he supposed that particular mystery would remain unanswered.

Perhaps Lab 0 had been Director Hojo's equivalent to Heidegger's dead-end postings to weed out the undesirables.

More relevantly, his keycard wasn't working on the Floor 66 elevator. This happened a lot in a workplace that swung between ridiculous grandstanding and raging paranoia as often as his did. Or possibly one of the Turks were messing with the Science Department again. They really should keep that redhead busier than he was.

"Oh no, Chadley, are you locked out of the main floor? I'm so sorry about that," came the voice from the intercom. That would be Bouchard. There was a certain nasal quality to his voice that was distinctive. "Didn't the Director tell you? We changed keycards after that mako explosion!"

Something in the vague vicinity of Chadley's chest was hurting. His heart appeared to be beating very fast. He may require a better exercise regimen. "What mako explosion, Bouchard?"

"Oh, you know, just the materialogists having fun again," the other young scientist said dismissively. "They were trying to synthesize a better Time materia or something like that."

Oh, good, Chadley reflected. His heart had started working again.

"Bouchard, I need to activate a system on Hojo's orders. Are you trying to– oh dear." His heart had started jumping around again as he could hear a tinny, staticky roar coming from his monocle – the poor audio quality didn't disguise that this particular lizard-like screech was writ very, very large. No wonder the ceilings in Lab 0 were 20 or 30 feet high.

It was a tremendously interesting specimen, he would admit. Was that a human's bare muscle fiber peeking out of strips of hardened shell like a crustacean? How had they spliced in enough neural connections to make the extra tentacle-limbs move like that? But more relevantly, it was trying to smash his new whatever-she-was.

"'Oh dear' is right," There was a certain level of malevolent satisfaction in Bouchard's voice. That was typical of the man, though. Maybe his voice just sounded like that? "The Director sent you, and yet he didn't give you a new keycard? Guess you aren't as close to the Director as you thought, huh? Huuuh?"

Considering past interactions, Bouchard would be at this for at least ten minutes. Five if Chadley played along with the scientist's ego-stroking. That was unacceptable for the current scenario. Interesting things were happening elsewhere and he was stuck dealing with this person.

"Hmm, yes, I don't think I can let just anyone in off the street," Bouchard mused, with petty, bureaucratic malice.

"Bouchard, you will let me in or I will hack this elevator and tell Director Hojo why," Chadley said pleasantly.

"... You wouldn't."

It was akin to mutually-assured destruction, yes. Most people only upset Director Hojo once. But Chadley had already experienced the Director's displeasure before, and he was too busy for this.

"Oh no," Chadley whispered as he watched the woman from the mako explosion kick the massive black-and-red monster into the B1 blast door hard enough to dent two feet of steel in the shape of its massive head. It was like an ant kicking a human being and knocking him across the room. On the one hand, that was exciting; he wanted to do some calculations on the kind of force her legs were capable of. He was hypothesizing somewhere in the range of mark 99 anti-fiend artillery. On the other… even if he found a remote control now, that door was probably not going to work with it half bent out of its original shape.

What to do now? He'd have to think of something else. If he could get past Bouchard he might be able to at least find Lab 0's physical location… then he could travel to the slums himself! He'd never been down there, but how hard could it be? The inhabitants navigated it all the time.

"Yes, you wouldn't," Bouchard was saying with more confidence. "The brunt of the Director's displeasure would fall on you, after all. The golden boy wouldn't be so golden then, would he?"

Chadley flipped feeds to get a better look at the busted door. He reasoned – hoped – that with kind of power, she might actually be able to just kick the thing down herself.

Watching the woman walk up to and inspect the door thoughtfully, Chadley wondered if he'd perhaps said that out loud.

"So no," Bouchard said, regaining his rhythm. "I don't think I'll be letting you in, Chadley."

Yes, she had in fact kicked that blast door fully out of shape. Not all at once perhaps, but each kick had deformed the metal further until she casually rolled out underneath its lifted lip, kipped up back to her feet, and left the warped door shoved a couple feet off true in its bent frame in her wake. She kept walking.

Chadley felt a shiver of excitement run up his spine. Shinra's construction subsidiary rated those up to holding off behemoths. It was in their marketing slogan.

"You can submit the form to get the new keycard, just like the rest of us mere mortals–"

Chadley had already left. He said quickly, before she entirely left the range of his cameras, "Do stay put, please! You could use a supply drop. Your current outfit is a bit, well – maybe I can get a trooper to play courier, or–"

"Hey!" Bouchard's voice called out behind him, sounding disappointed and maybe a little uncertain. "You can't just – I wasn't done with you!"

"But I am," Chadley said distractedly. "Found a workaround, I don't need you after all. Have a nice day, Bouchard."

Chadley decided to charitably ignore the sputtering 'Rrgrgr' sound coming from the intercom as an electrical malfunction. He had more important things to consider, like figuring out where she'd come out in the slums when he still didn't know the actual location of Lab 0, and how to either get down to the slums himself, or who he might be able to convince or bully into making a run for him.

There was no way he'd allow himself to miss anything about whatever was about to happen if he could possibly help it.

 

[Guile]

Trying to ignore the siren call of Elden Ring to post more of this. We'll have to see how well that goes.

---

Chapter 2 – Part 3
Aerith Gainsborough, Turk Informant​

Finding a pair of black suits sitting at her Mom's kitchen table again, sipping tea, would probably freak out most people. Maybe Aerith should be one of them. The Turks were, after all, objectively bad people. They were one of the scariest parts of the corporation that functionally controlled every aspect of her city.

Well, the scariest part of Shinra that was seen outside a lab. Once you'd heard Hojo rave about the beauty of your genetic structures and some of the things he wanted to learn from them, even paid killers seemed less scary in comparison.

Even people who had nothing to hide were nervous around Shinra's wetworks teams, on account of their ability to disappear you physically, erase you electronically, and bury anyone who came looking for you in endless reams of bureaucracy. Or a ditch.

But they were still people. Aerith could work with that.

Plus, it was hard to be scared of the Turks after she'd watched Tseng and his serious old world manners pretend he didn't loathe their dandelion tea every time he came by to check on them. But every time, he would still sit down at their table and make that lack-of-a-face that meant he was suffering through the flavor again. Or seen Reno's endless, elaborately polite lines to try to cadge snacks out of Mom's iron-fisted control of her kitchen. Or… well, she'd never gotten Rude to stop by for tea. It was a work in progress. She could imagine him sitting at their carved wood table, quietly suffering about having to act like a normal person. It was for his own good, really; he could stand to eat a salad once in a while. He'd thank her someday!

He almost definitely would not.

This time, Tseng had brought someone closer to her age, blonde and stiff and so new her shoes squeaked. Or possibly it was Tseng that was making the new girl so uncomfortable? Partnering with the boss couldn't be easy, not that Aerith knew what that was like. Mom was the only boss of her, really, and she was only scary when Aerith was doing something reckless and ill-considered. Which happened a lot, admittedly, but Mom was ultimately a softie. Mom loved her more than anything, it's just that sometimes her love took the form of shouting and arbitrary curfews instead of hugs.

The Planet was the definition of a distant boss. Which, speaking of, she wasn't getting much at all from the boss in regards to the new girl. Aerith wasn't quite sure if that meant she was all right, or just irrelevant to Aerith's future, or irrelevant to the Planet. The Planet wasn't in the habit of explaining itself to mere mortals, not even if those mortals were Cetra. She'd have to rely on her own impressions.

And her impression was… well, Aerith was mostly getting the sense that she wanted to get Elena alone for love-love gossip? She wasn't quite sure she could pinpoint what about the cold, professional-looking blonde in the suit suggested 'blushing maiden in love', but that's what her instincts said.

Rather than her instinct as a Cetra, that was her instinct as a teenage girl.

"So!" she said, clapping her hands together like that would help her focus. "What brings the Turks to our humble home? – Oh, thanks Mom!"

"Is Aerith in any trouble?" Elmyra added as she placed tea in front of their two guests, too. Though something in the firmness of the motion or the sound as the ceramic hit the table said that if the trouble was from them then they'd be getting this tea in the face instead.

Dandelion tea, Aerith thought while hiding a grin, was pretty terrible. It was really hard to tell if her mom low-key hated Tseng and just couldn't express it to his face, sometimes.

Tseng and Elena shared a glance, before he inclined his head slightly.

Elena reached up and loosened her tie to hang loose around her neck. She unbuttoned two buttons. Her posture changed from upright, knees together and almost prim to the open-legged, slouch-shouldered look of a slum gang hoodlum

"Hey, sister," she drawled. "Don't bullshit us, huh? We're the Turks! We know what's up."

It was pretty much a pitch-perfect recreation of the kind of knife-wielding bully-boys that swaggered around Wall Market in leather pants and faux-Wutai dragon-embroidered muscle shirts.

The silence while Aerith and Elmyra digested was really loud. Tseng had a hand over his eyes, either to rub away a headache or possibly to hide.

Elena's eyes darted around, reading the room. In one swift move her shirt was re-buttoned and the tie nowhere to be found, as if to say 'What tie? I always wear my suit this way.'

"Too much rolling the R's?" she asked Tseng in an undertone that Aerith and probably her Mom could still hear. It wasn't a very big table.

"Let's start with 'yes, too much of that'," he murmured back blandly.

"Sorry!" she mumbled. "The teachers didn't mention how you guys prefer to lean on people. I was improvising."

"Indeed. Try to remember we're the Turks, not a Sector 6 gang."

"... Are we not a gang? I feel like someone would have mentioned that, if that were true?" she returned doubtfully. "Sis never said anything. And actually, Reno said–"

Something about the look on Tseng's face caused her to fall silent mid-sentence. Tseng said firmly, "The first rule of the Turks is to not listen to what Reno says."

Elena said meekly, "I thought the first rule was 'Assume nothing'."

Tseng slowly closed his eyes and breathed, in a surprisingly similar way to Aerith's mom did when she came back home gross from playing with cheap fertilizers or mucking out the water flowers. Aerith glanced at her mom and slightly tilted her head. The lines around Mom's mouth were standing out strongly with what someone unfamiliar with her might think 'anger' but Aerith could tell was 'mirth.'

"Every Turk has different rules. Yours is 'Don't listen to Reno'."
"Right, Bossman."

Elena was fun. Aerith could watch her accidentally drive Tseng up a wall for ages.

"We are actually here," Tseng said precisely, in that sharp tone of his, "to reassure you. Yes, there was something in the area. But those projects are decommissioned now."

Aerith blinked. "Rude already looked into the–"

"Yes," he said, cutting her off. That was rude, but then, Tseng liked saying things out loud as little as he could get away with.

That would be reassuring, Aerith thought, except that she definitely still had the bad feeling from the Planet. If anything, a bit louder. Or closer. Or something like that. So if it wasn't Shinra, what else could it be? It was always Shinra. Their business model started with burning the blood of the Planet for fuel, and they just got shadier from there. Their company motto had actually been 'Using fear and power to create a better future' when Aerith was a kid, before they'd gotten a better PR guy and rebranded. Swell people, Shinra.

"A derelict facility suffered a malfunction in mako processing," Tseng said, finally getting to the point. "We aren't a cleaning crew."

"Are you not?" / "Are we not?" Aerith and Elena asked at the same time, then glanced at each other. Aerith giggled.

Tseng gave a sound that might, if graded generously, be considered a single, sharp chuckle. "We are, at most, a metaphorical cleaning crew. Monsters are the Science Division's department."

Aerith concluded, "So, someone–" [i[Hojo,[/i] "–left a bunch of monsters to run riot beneath the slums, but it's not really a problem? Probably cheaper to sweep it under the rug, right?"

Huh, that had come out bitterer than she'd intended. She might have more issues with megacorp policy than she'd realized.

"I assume so," Tseng agreed, cool as ice. "Hardly a catastrophe, in any case. Heidegger would be happy to get his troops some target practice."

"And that's the only secret science lab in that direction, right? Or secret weapons development, or a sinkhole that might drag us screaming into the earth from mako-drilling, or whatever? Well, I'm reassured," Aerith said airily. Obviously, she reflected, if you want something done right, you had to do it yourself.

Tseng apparently saw something of her plans on her face. He added, "Rude will be taking a look in person. Just in case."

"That's nice of him," Aerith agreed blithely. "Anyway, yeah, probably nothing! Bad intel, huh? My source probably just… made a mistake. Right?"

"That's not my department either," Tseng said simply. "I'm sure you won't believe it, but human error does happen."

It was probably too late to slip laxatives into his tea, huh? When her source was 'the Planet', the only possible source of 'human error' was Aerith herself.

She was hardly perfect, but she knew what she knew.

… Mostly.

"Sources…" Elena mumbled, looking down at her tea. Then she looked around, taking in the homey interior of their kitchen. "The house…" She stared at Elmyra. "... maybe the dad?" Then up into the middle distance, the gears turning in her head. "Then would that mean…"

All three of the others around the table paused patiently. Aerith was curious to see what Elena had worked out; the Turks keeping an eye on an escaped test subject and the – so far as she knew – last Cetra, without dragging her back into Shinra custody and Hojo's clammy clutches or, as far as she could tell, telling their corporate masters where she was at all. It wasn't the kind of thing anyone would expect from them.

"I get it now," Elena whispered intensely.

"Oh?" Tseng inquired.

"Yeah, sorry, don't mind me! I wasn't quite caught up. I get it now, though." The blonde winked at Aerith conspiratorially.

Elena glanced around, noticing the incomprehension on Aerith and Elmyra's faces, and possibly reading the same into Tseng's poker face. She sighed, like a student being forced to go up to the front of the class and show her work to the teacher. "Fine, if I gotta say it… spymaster, right? Keeping tabs on the slums? Lots of Turks went to ground and only surface when they absolutely have to. Sis hasn't been back to Midgar in like six years. And affording a place like this on an ordinary trooper's salary, even under the Plate? Shyeah right. So… dad fell in something super classified like, say, that big thing six years ago? But obviously you're still on side if you're reporting to Tseng direct. So… yeah. Sorry about earlier, I thought we were here to push you around until you coughed up some answers or something."

Mom raised a red-brown eyebrow. " Well, you understand I can neither confirm nor deny your hypothetical..."

"Oh yeah, totally, I get it," Elena assured them breezily, waving her hand back and forth.

"Well, look at the time," Tseng said flatly.

"Drink your tea, at least, Tseng. You came all the way out here." Mom said placidly, still with that quirk to her mouth that said she was finding this hilarious.

Tseng began drinking his tea rather faster than was polite.

"And your new recruit seems delightful. Make sure to take care of her. I'd hate to see what happened to my husband happen to her."

That seemed a safe bet, Aerith figured. Presumably Elena wouldn't be gunned down in a foreign country during a war Shinra started by people just trying to protect their home. Elena was a Turk though, so she supposed she couldn't rule it out entirely.

"Aw, thanks Mrs. G!" Elena looked touched. Aerith got the sense that she didn't have a lot of experience being looked after or mothered. "That's just how the Turks are though, right? Live hard and die hard and take the bastards out with you when you go!"

That sounded like a Reno quote.

"Here," the blonde in a black suit said as she pulled out her PHS and showed her number to Aerith, "hit me up and we'll hit the town! I know a place in Wall Market that can get us free drinks, it'll be great! Oh, do you want Rude's number too? I'm pretty sure he's lonely and available. Guy's kind of a softie under all the layers of badass, he's always getting tricked into these honeypot schemes–"

"Well since we've informed you of the situation we're done here, thank you for the hospitality," Tseng interjected smoothly, in tandem with the tink of his teacup on wood. "Come along Elena, we have work to do."

"But I didn't get to–"

"Now, Elena," Tseng continued, already en route to the door. "We're on the clock."

With a last rather earnest-seeming duck of her head to Aerith and her mom, the Turk shorter than Aerith trotted off after her boss, quickly skipping to his side. As they headed out the door, Aerith could hear the blonde ask, "So like, did Sis ever work with her dad, or–"

"Your next job will be in Sector 2," Tseng said with a voice clipped and sharp enough that Aerith could still hear him as they vanished into the darkness outside. "We'll see if your fighting skills are better than your op sec."

"Oh yeah," Elena agreed. "Way better!"

---

A/N: The dots. Elena has connected them.