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There were no stars in Midgar, and if Jan were pressed, she'd have admitted that she missed them. Sometimes, when she stood at the edge of her balcony and looked up, the blackness overhead was so soft and worn that it looked almost solid instead of the wide open, breath-taking sky she'd grown up with in Kalm. But it was the same sky. She knew that.
So instead of dwelling on it, she simply looked back down, and she left the stars in her memories. Midgar had other offerings, after all, such as the overwhelming rush of air that always accompanied a reactor entering secondary burn. The green cloud was impossible to miss, and Jan smiled as she watched it, stretching up from an endless shining city. It kissed the heavy sky with a tenderness that no tree or skyscraper could replicate, and Jan leaned against her railing a little more, as though she could somehow get closer to it.
Oh, she knew the science behind secondary burn– well, as much of it as she needed to. She knew that it was a controlled application of some sort of chemical that bonded with the particulate mako left clinging to the top of the reactor after the final stage of treatment. She knew that the fluorescent green glow that lit the sky regularly but not constantly was a by-product of that chemical reaction designed to return the top of the reactor to a neutral PH balance. She knew that it was only a necessary maintenance of the reactors, but somehow... None of that reduced the magic.
On top of the Plate, it was a way to mark the time. A moment where the city seemingly held its breath. She knew, from what little she'd been under the Plate, that they had no such break from it. The green glow was constant that low, where the mako was still in the first stages of treatment, bombarded with colored lights and broken apart into materials that she had probably been taught about in school but had long since forgotten the names of. After all, there was only one material name that mattered in Midgar, wasn't there?
She glanced back down at her drink– a spiced cider, so bright on her tongue that it felt like light, only made in Upper Four with fruits grown in the hydro-gardens– and she set her PHS back down so that she could resist the urge to call someone. Who would she even call so late at night? Midgar never slept, but the people of it did. Especially those tied to the Shinra grindstone.
Eight-to-five, Monday through Friday, and if she didn't go to bed herself soon, she would be looking at a very long tomorrow indeed.
But her reactor was next. Reactor Five. And she rarely got to see Reactor Five go into secondary burn during the day. She was always in her office, often on the phone. So she didn't go inside. She simply waited, and she sipped her cider, and she worked slowly on the "authentic Costan" tamales she'd grabbed on her way home from work. They were spicy and rich and it had taken her longer than she was comfortable admitting to figure out how, exactly, she was supposed to eat them, but with what she'd managed it thus far... She would have to stop by the food truck again on her way home sometime. She always loved discovering new things.
That they'd been listed on her Shinra Manager Personal Growth Checklist, as recommended by Mr. Tuesti for new things to try in the name of self-discovery, was beside the point.
(Tomorrow's item was a hole-in-the-wall diner over in Upper Three, and Jan was still trying to decide if she could talk Vori into going with her, or if Vori would balk at the idea of going so far out of the way. Even with the trains on time, that was easily going to be a forty minute ride with the all of the other after-work traffic. Still, forty minutes and it would knock one more thing off her list. So perhaps, even if she couldn't convince Vori to go, she'd go anyway.)
She worked her way through the last of the tamales, and she glanced down as her PHS went off. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and she shook her head before she pressed the button to call instead of texting back.
"What do you mean," she asked, instead of waiting for the standard hellos, "am I up? You know I don't sleep until–"
"Until Five does it's thing, yeah, I know. It's polite, Jan, or didn't you know that?"
She snorted as Elvin's voice came over the phone, smooth and easy and familiar, and not for the first time, she wondered what, exactly, her sister had been thinking. Not so much because Elvin was such a catch, but because divorces were messy when everyone involved was in the Company, even as big as Shinra was. There was no way for the three of them to avoid each other.
"I wasn't aware that you knew how to be polite," she countered, and she leaned back in her chair, prodding her tamale with a fork again as she tried to decide if she was quite willing to commit enough to each it with her fingers.
That was how the Shinra Net database on her phone had explained she was supposed to eat them, but she wasn't willing to give up the slight distance that the fork gave her between herself and her new experience.
"What do you need, Elvin?"
He laughed, and Jan glanced back out across the city. The last traces of green glow were fading, sparkling in the dark, and she looked expectantly toward Number Five.
"I just wanted to check on you. See how you were feeling–"
"I can't get you into that meeting, you know. I don't care if you're basically the whole SOLDIER IT department. It's only the current Urban Dev personnel listed allowed, and–"
"C'mon, Jan, you have more pull than–"
But whatever she had more pull than, she'd never know. The shockwave from an explosion knocked the phone straight out of her hand, and she grabbed desperately for the edges of the rail as she turned to look–
All she could see at first was fire. Fire and the screaming metal as Number One twisted and collapsed and–
Her hands trembled hard enough that for a second, she was convinced that she was shaking the railing. She snatched her hands back and she collapsed to the ground, still staring at the reactor, watching as the entire sector flared bright, then went black. For too long, it was dark, as dark in the sector as it was in the sky, and just as thick. She could barely breathe, trying to imagine the panic, imagine the way everyone had to be screaming, had to be sobbing and hysterical and who knew what.
Brownouts in Midgar were common. Power was a limited commodity, and even Shinra struggled to meet demand sometimes. But blackouts? Blackouts only happened when something went horribly wrong, and this...
She worked in the Shinra Company Billing Offices day in and day out. She knew exactly how sudden and how severe panic was over power loss. She could hardly imagine how much worse it was when prefaced with an explosion that rocked everything.
She was aware, as she watched a few flickering spots restore power, that there was a shrill alarm sounding nearby. Something high-pitched and tinny, something desperate.
She wrenched her eyes from the wreckage of the reactor, still putting out the little puffs of green only to be met with new explosions as something else ignited, and she found her other phone. Not the personal one Elvin had called her on; that one had been knocked clear of her in the explosion, and possibly, it had fallen clear off the balcony and was down on the ground. When she pressed the work phone to her ear, it didn't wait for her response.
"Plan A personnel, please report to your work locations and follow emergency procedures," was the official message. The voice was calm, soothing. She was pretty sure Mr. Tuesti's personal secretary had recorded it. "Further updates will be pushed to your PHS as necessary," it continued.
All Jan heard was, "Panic."
She couldn't breathe, and no, this couldn't... This wasn't how things happened on the Plate. This sort of senseless, overwhelming violence just wasn't...
Another explosion, and she jumped, glancing back up at the heap of the reactor, straining under its own weight and groaning loudly enough that she could hear it. How many crews had been inside? How many more crews were already trying to get in there, trying to drag out coworkers and friends and family? How many people would be without power and–
She ran back inside, cider and tamales and personal phone forgotten. How many of her own customers were probably calling frantically, overloading the bare-bones night crew? Had the Tower opened up the call center already? She had too many questions, and she couldn't get those answers in her apartment.
She snatched her keys and jacket on the way out the door, and she barely stopped long enough to lock it before she was running down the hall and the stairs. She had her own calls to make, and she worked from the PHS, pushing a notice to alert her Plan B and C employees, to call the entire office back in. The office staff would manage the phone lines, and the linemen would almost certainly be dispatched to the edges of the sector to assist with shoring up the connections so that Five's power grid would be able to help supplement the missing Reactor One.
Her stomach churned at the thought. No amount of training could have made this real to her. She knew that the grid could function more or less normally with one reactor down. It could work with scheduled brownouts if two were down. She had never truly thought about what that would look like, or why they might be down. In her mind, she'd always assumed that they'd be down for maintenance.
She shoved open the door to the street, and she glanced down either way. The traffic was stopped, people standing outside of their cars, leaning against the doors, watching as explosions and mako washed the sky first red, then green, and then red again. She didn't wait to see if she could catch a taxi. Instead, she grabbed her bike from the rack, fumbling with the lock that she so rarely bothered with.
(Midgar was not the most bike-friendly city. It had lanes, sure, but so many people simply forgot to watch for those on bikes that it was dangerous. Too dangerous for Jan's daily life, if she was honest. Tonight though was like Midgar had shifted, had become a different city. The traffic was still, frozen and transfixed on something that none of them could believe. She heard more than one person asking if it was real, what it meant, what had happened, and she didn't stop long enough to look again. She couldn't. She had a job.)
She had never ridden her bike into work so quickly, and she didn't bother trying to park it. She just spilled off of it and hit the door, fumbling with the lock there for a minute before she got inside.
Sweat dripped off her, and she wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket before she closed her eyes and braced herself. Her hands shoved into her pockets, and her heart stopped. She pulled out the carbon bangle that she was always required to wear on the job, and she stared at the gleaming, glossy materia in the bright lights of the office.
Her lips parted so that she could make herself breathe, because so help her, but she'd never thought of what, exactly, those materia were meant to be used for. Ice for fires. Restore for injuries. If she'd been in Sector One...
"Boss lady?"
Vori broke into her thoughts, and Jan looked up, blinking slightly as she tried to make herself focus.
"Jan," Vori said lowly, and Jan nodded, trying to reassure both of them that it was fine.
"What do we know?" she asked, and she pulled her phone out again just to make sure that she hadn't missed a notice.
"Not much. Reactor One's down, a couple of the linemen are thinking terrorists. I don't think they know, but it's... exciting, I guess. The Tower's phone lines are open to help, and we've got a script, but..."
Another nod, and Jan blew out a breath. That was all she needed to know. She pushed the doors open to the main part of the office, and a quick glance assured her that at least a third of her staff were already in, milling around the chairs, all worriedly checking phones. The others would come in as they managed to fight through the traffic.
"Let's start unrolling phone lines from the Tower. Give those guys a breather, okay?" Jan kept her head high as she crossed the room. She made eye contact with as many as she could, and she smiled. Remained calm. The calmer she was, the calmer her staff would be, and the calmer her staff was, the calmer the sector would be. It was the greatest secret Urban Dev held, and one she'd never been more grateful for. "I'm going to see if we can figure out what's going on, and I'll start calling the VIPs from my office. If you have any problems, let me know."
She didn't shut her office door, and within just a few minutes, the low buzz of desperate conversation had given away to a set of lines ringing, to the rhythmic repetition of a script that none of them understood or necessarily believed.
Shinra Power Company, currently, we are currently working to restore power to Sector One.
She flipped on the TV, and she muted it. She didn't need to hear it to read the ticker tape across the bottom, after all. Then she looked back to her email on the computer. She pulled up the official script passed down from the Tower.
Crews are working to determine what, exactly, happened at the reactor. As far as we can tell, it does not seem to have been a reactor failure.
She rubbed her arm with the palm of her hand. Swallowed thickly.
Rest assured that the Peace Preservation units are doing everything possible to ensure our safety. You have a good night now.
Jan picked up her phone, and she started dialing.