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“One, two, three, four,” he said in a lilting tenor. He tapped his foot on the ground in time with the song.
“One, two, three, four,” a voice in a higher pitch responded.
“One, two, three.”
“One, two, three.”
“Lalalalalala.”
“Unh-unh. I’m not doing the dance for ya unless you do it too!”
Reeve Tuesti crossed his arms disapprovingly in front of his chest, glaring at his charge. A few metres in front of him, a small robotic cat crossed his arms in response, smirking at him with glee.
“So this is how you repay me for your creation? Defiance.”
“Nyuknyuk,” the cat laughed loudly.
Reeve grinned.
The accent belonged to the grasslands — one that Reeve had been so fastidious about dropping the moment he arrived at the ShinRa Academy in Junon to start his schooling. It was the voice of Ma and Dad and Huxley Stackpoole and countless others from his childhood town.
He was loathe to rid himself of it now. No Cait Sith model would be complete without it.
Reeve held up his hand and curled his fingers over his palm one-by-one. The robot cat copied every movement with a slight, nearly-inaudible whirr. Reeve hummed.
“It seems like you’re still only operating at 80 percent capacity. Mind telling me what’s wrong?”
‘Dunno, boss.”
This particular prototype — his third since the initial design he’d made for his first robotics practical — had the obnoxious habit of calling him “boss” and thought it was funny to do so at any given opportunity, complete with a mock bow that nearly sent the small crown tumbling to the ground from the robot’s head.
That had only happened with the second prototype, and Reeve had made sure to make the crown a part of Cait Sith’s body this time, rather than an accessory.
Cait Sith straightened up from his bow and stared at Reeve expectantly. Reeve often wondered what this type of situation looked like to other executives — a man playing with a toy that he should have outgrown years ago, if Reeve had to hazard a guess. The fact that he was kneeling on the floor of his office, his blue suit jacket thrown across his office chair back and tie abandoned much earlier in the evening would only add to this picture had someone peered in, noticing that the door was slightly ajar.
They wouldn't, of course. Everyone at ShinRa was always busy with their own work, especially in the Urban Development Division.
Fortunately it was quarter past one. Most ShinRa employees punched out at exactly 17:00 and even the ones who didn’t were typically out of the building by 21:00. Reeve often had the run of the upper floors late at night, outside of the occasional infantryman training late into the night at the Training Centre or Professor Hojo and whatever he was doing with his latest experiments in the research laboratories.
He purposefully didn’t read Hojo’s memos when they popped up in his inbox after that particular run-in. Fortunately, Hojo felt emails were generally a waste of time, and didn’t update anyone on his experiments unless prompted by the president. His tests always seemed to necessitate a late hour, and Reeve shuddered involuntarily as he recalled the few things that Hojo had bragged about to him once when they were trapped in the same elevator for over sixty floors.
Reeve had wondered if he could perform unscheduled maintenance on the elevator to make it faster and more efficient after that particular conversation.
When he really thought about it, Reeve was technically doing the exact same thing as Hojo — staying late after hours to perform experiments, which admittedly placed Reeve in highly questionable company. Currently, Reeve was seated on the floor of his office, shirtsleeves rolled up with traces of grease and oil on his forearms, tinkering with a toy robot prototype so it could be used to gather data on the city. He must look ridiculous.
There was just something about Hojo and his experiments that gave Reeve the creeps.
Reeve supposed that perhaps people said the same thing about him: a 19 year-old promoted too quickly playing with a toy cat. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard whispered in the hallways, along with the question of whether he’d truly designed ShinRa’s mako reactor, or whether he had somehow cheated on his senior thesis.
“You alright boss? You’ve got goosebumps! Too cold for ‘ya?”
Reeve nodded and waved his hand in the air. He hadn’t noticed that he had been rubbing his arms nervously.
“I’m perfectly fine. Let’s run a preliminary diagnostics test.”
Cait Sith let out a long, put-out sigh.
“Not again.”
Reeve’s eyes sparkled.
“Yes, again.”
With a flourish, Reeve produced a small cube from the pocket of his trousers. He set it on the floor and pressed a square button at the top. The cube unfolded neatly, producing a chessboard with all pieces in place for a new game.
“That is pretty cool lookin,’” Cait Sith admitted, still frowning.
“I made it for a friend.” Reeve blushed, hoping that Cait Sith wouldn’t pry any further. Fortunately, the robot seemed more focused on acting annoyed that his diagnostics test was a game of chess.
“You know your crown comes from this game,” Reeve said.
“Yea, yea,” the cat mumbled. “Let’s get this over with.”
***
“Checkmate.”
It was the fourth time Reeve had said this in the past five hours. He supposed he should have felt tired, but chess always invigorated him.
“That’s it! I’m done with ya!” Cait Sith punctuated this outburst by kicking over the chessboard.
Reeve sat back, placing his palms on the floor and stared at the ceiling absentmindedly
“S’good to see ya smile, boss.”
“Thanks, Cait.” Reeve hadn't realized he was smiling so much.
“It’s a cat!”
Peering into his office through the door, which Reeve had forgotten he had left open, was a brown-haired girl in a brown and white dress. She grinned and pointed at Cait Sith.
“A big cat!”
Reeve sighed. She must have been some sort of executive’s daughter — or perhaps granddaughter in the case of Palmer or Heidegger, although he didn’t want to consider the possibility that either of them had children — to be running around the offices this early in the morning.
“H-hello,” he stuttered. Reeve was awful with children generally. He never knew what to say to them. Whoever’s kid she was, he hoped her parents would come soon, although knowing the other executives, they’d probably left her to wander the halls by herself.
“Hullo,” she said, suddenly shy. She paused before opening the door a bit more and walking in. A few steps past the door, she stepped on a rook.
“This is your office?” She picked up the rook off of the ground and held it out to him with another shy smile.
Reeve nodded. “I’m the Head of Urban Development for the city of Midgar.”
The girl frowned.
“But you’re a kid,” she said.
“I’m nineteen!” Reeve realized the instant he protested that it was pointless to get into an argument with the child of a ShinRa executive, but couldn’t help feel a bit annoyed. He’d been growing out his facial hair for a few years now, and several other ShinRa employees had asserted that it made him look a bit older.
She squinted up at him suspiciously.
“You don’t look that much older.”
Reeve self-consciously fidgeted with his shirtsleeves, rolling them back down so the cuffs nearly brushed his fingertips. He should really invest in a new dress shirt.
“How old are ya, missy?” Cait Sith asked.
“I’m six,” the girl said, addressing the cat seriously. “How old are you?”
“Four months!”
“Four months? And you’re already this big?”
“Reeve over there created me! Cait Sith, at yer service!” The toy cat bowed and the girl giggled, clapping her hands with delight.
“So he’s not real?” She directed this question at Reeve, who was still standing off to the side, watching their conversation awkwardly.
“He’s a robot,” Reeve said, frowning. “But he’s real, in his own way.”
She stared at Cait Sith, tilting her head to the side.
“You made him?”
Reeve nodded.
“Machines are— I can talk to them, I guess,” he said lamely. There was no way she would understand something he didn’t understand himself at times. “I can fix them, or make them, and if there’s something wrong they usually let me know.”
To his surprise, the girl nodded in agreement.
“I hear voices sometimes,” she said. “My mom tells me that they’re the voices of the planet. But I can’t really hear them in here. It’s too loud.”
Reeve didn’t know what to say to this. He was so confused at the statement — maybe this was a new children’s game — that he nearly missed the opportunity that the girl had given him.
“And where is your mom?” he asked. The girl shrugged.
“Probably upstairs. That’s where we live.”
This was even more confusing to Reeve than the girl’s confident assertion that she could hear the voices of the planet.
“Don’t say anythin’ but Reeve lives here too! He’s always here,” Cait Sith said. The robot cat moved closer to the girl and put a paw in front of his mouth as if to block what he was saying from Reeve.
“He even has spare underwear in his desk!” The robot said in a large stage whisper.
“Ewwww.” The girl giggled and Cait Sith burst into peals of laughter, taking a bow for the girl.
“Aerith! Don’t ever run off like that again!”
Both Reeve and the girl, Aerith apparently, jumped.
A woman burst into Reeve’s office, pushing the door so hard that it snapped back towards the doorframe and closed firmly behind her with a slam. Her long brown hair nearly touched the floor as she strode forward, wrapping Aerith in a fierce hug.
“I’m fine, mom,” Aerith said. “Mister Reeve was showing me his cat!”
Aerith’s mother narrowed her eyes at him.
“And Mister Reeve is?”
“Ah! So sorry. I’m Reeve Tuesti.” He held out his hand. After a long pause, he realized that she wasn’t going to take it and settled for a stiff bow. “Head of Urban Development for the city of Midgar.”
“Reeve can talk to robots like I can talk to the planet,” Aerith said with a conspiratorial wink at Reeve.
“Can he now?” This caught the woman’s attention and she studied Reeve again, looking him up and down with vague interest.
Reeve shrugged again. He didn’t really want to explain, especially after he’d been up for over twenty-four hours and hadn’t drank any coffee over the course of the last seven.
“And he made that cat.” She pointed at Cait Sith, who responded with a low bow, waving his maroon cape through the air with an extra flourish. “Can I come here again, mom?”
The woman — understandably, in Reeve’s opinion — looked hesitant.
“It’s okay. I understand. I-I’m not good with children,” Reeve stuttered. “That is, if you asked my childhood friends they’d probably say something like, ‘Reeve, ‘e was hardly a kid! Jus’ a mini-adult.’ Or something like that.” There was something about this woman that made him incredibly nervous.
She looked at him with thinly-veiled amusement as Aerith giggled. Reeve fidgeted with his shirtsleeves again.
“It’s okay mom,” Aerith said. “He’s nice. Weird, but nice.”
“Yea, missy. That’s Reeve alright!” Cait Sith gave her a thumbs up, which she immediately returned with a grin.
“Maybe another time,” the woman said with a smile of her own. “But for now, we have to go back upstairs and Director Tuesti has to go back to work.”
Aerith frowned but leaned forward in agreement.