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The nature of much of the Shinra army’s operations occurred in places with a fair bit of wildlife. Whether it was just abundant fauna in the areas they were otherwise occupied in, or the actual wildlife they were there to deal with, animal encounters were a fact of life. That said, there were limits to what any sane person was willing to tolerate, no matter where they were.
Those limits did not include a Green Monitor finding his way into the mess hall of a training camp in the jungles near Gongaga. Those on KP duty had actually managed to miss the animal in their pre-dawn preparations, but when the men started to line up and enter for breakfast, they discovered the intruder - all fifteen feet of him - lounging among the tables near the back of the hall.
The vast majority of the men in the hall hurried to become the men outside the hall, and those on their way in turned around and fled while the kitchen crew barricaded the pass and started trying to determine how they might lure the thing out a door with strategically thrown bait. A handful of soldiers remained, some of them clustering together with their sidearms, and others starting to tip tables over with the aim of making solid barriers they might corral the lizard with.
Through the still-open main doors of the hall came a rather confused trooper, helmet under his arm. There was usually a line for breakfast by the time he got out of the showers, as his bunkmates tended to rush out and leave him in the dust. He hesitantly crept inside, on the lookout for signage or an officer to explain why the hall was largely deserted and most of the men currently at camp were milling around outside. When no one redirected him or gave instructions, he went to the food line, fetched a tray, and carefully moved down the line, serving himself a hearty breakfast and a full mug of coffee, something he almost never got because of how late he tended to be.
He had already put his tray down on a table near the back of the hall when one of the men gathered near the other wall realized that this was not, in fact, a hallucination; there actually was a small blond trooper seated less than five yards away from the large, agitated reptile. Frantic whispering ensued.
“Strife!” one of the men hissed. “Strife, get the fuck away from there!”
Cloud looked up from his eggs and blinked. “Sir?”
“There’s a goddamn monitor lizard on the other side of that fucking table! Get. Away. From. There!”
Cloud stood and peered over the table. Sure enough, pressed up against the legs of the next table over, was the massive animal.
“Oh. Is that all?”
Several of the clustered men made noises of disbelief.
Cloud, meanwhile, put his utensils down and moved round the table.
“…he’s gonna die,” one of the men whispered.
“Is someone gonna go get him ?” another demanded.
While his superiors dithered, Cloud approached the monitor. It was looking away from him, more distracted by the noise and smells coming from the kitchen area, and was largely taken by surprise when the trooper suddenly surged forward and grabbed its tail in both hands, heaving upward to lift the back feet mostly off the ground.
What ensued was a hissing, scrabbling sort of dance as the monitor lizard struggled to maneuver around and either jerk free or bite the trooper holding it, and Cloud hauled backward and jinked whichever way the lizard wasn’t going so he could avoid being bitten.
He headed for the doors, and the men gathered there headed for anywhere else, most of them swearing and gasping and shouting, a few of them holding phones up in an effort to get video of the event.
Cloud shuffled the furious lizard all the way outside and around the building towards the forest, not sure how fast a monitor could get up a tree but fairly certain he could do it faster.
He made the tree line, heaved the lizard to one side, and shot off in the other direction, scrabbling up the nearest tree that he estimated would be too slender for the monitor to follow him up. He needn’t have bothered: as soon as all four feet were on the ground, the monitor took off into the jungle as fast as it could go.
In the aftermath, it was determined that one Cloud Strife had grown up in the Nibel Mountains, where animals, sometimes large and often dangerous, being all up in one's business were simply a fact of life. As a result, he was accustomed to chasing wolves away from his house and helping roust groups of lesser dragons that tried to raid smokehouses. His sense of self-preservation, if he’d ever had one, had either atrophied or been removed a long time ago.
By the time the whole group returned to base in Midgar, rumors of Cadet Strife’s apparent lack of give-a-shit in regards to potentially dangerous wildlife had spread and grown, leaving more than a few people surprised when they actually met the undersized trooper.
It remained worth note, however, that Cloud seemed unconcerned at being called on to deal with any form of wildlife, as he proved when summoned to the medical building in Junon and was pointed to where they ran physical stress tests.
“I hear you’re a dab hand with wildlife,” the whitecoat in charge said dryly.
Cloud shrugged. “They don’t bother me, I don’t bother them, and everything’s fine.”
“Well, we need you to bother these.” The whitecoat pointed to the other end of the room, where several streaks of darting light whizzed around.
“...hummingbirds, sir?”
“ Yes.”
“ ...can I ask why hummingbirds are a problem?”
“Do you want to see the damage one SOLDIER can do if they’re startled mid-stress test?”
Cloud winced.
“My next option is getting an industrial-sized flyswatter, Strife.”
“...I’ll try. But there’s a row of lilac bushes outside that window over there, so unless you’re putting the screen back in, this is gonna happen again.”
“Just go .”
Fifteen or so minutes later, Cloud emerged from the room with a very confused-looking hummingbird in each hand, tiny heads poking out from between his fingers. He was escorted to the nearest exterior door and released the little animals into a different lilac, hopefully far enough from the testing room.
In the months that followed, Cloud found himself being called on to deal with all manner of wildlife bothering, threatening or just inspecting the military horde that chose to invade their personal space. He wrangled pythons in Gongaga, swore loudly at moose in the mountains, chased bats with a broom in Kalm and investigated strange noises in hollows, caves and crannies wherever his troop went. In the process, he gained a sort of mythos that continued to grow as he continued his escapades.
Cloud Strife caught a 10-foot viper in the officers’ mess with his bare hands. (It was a constrictor, not a viper, and it was so cute he had to boop its snoot several times.)
Cloud Strife chased off an angry bear with just his cursing. (And walloping it on the backside with a broom.)
Cloud Strife tackled the Greater Gongagan Marsh Goose that had been terrorizing training ground five for over a year. (Yes, because it was too big to restrain any other way.)
Cloud Strife put a baby dragon in his pocket . (Entirely true, if somewhat a bad idea.)
The following year, newly minted SOLDIER Cadet Strife and his squad arrived on their second rotation into Wutai. Previously, they had come in the depths of winter and had spent miserable weeks in the frigid, windblown highlands. Thick-furred wolves and long-legged Rock Foxes prowled the edges of their camps, but were easy enough to chase off that Cloud’s services weren’t needed.
This time, though, it was the peak of summer and Cloud’s troop joined one of the main forces in the rolling, grassy southern hills. The heat and thick humidity bore down on them all, wearing tempers thin even before it became apparent that the area was experiencing a grasshopper summer.
In the thick grass and woodland scrub, every step flushed clouds of grasshoppers into the air with a humming whir. The heavy afternoon heat buzzed with them and sunset every evening all but vibrated with their calls. They got into everything; grasshoppers of all sizes found their way into water tanks, combat boots, rucksacks. They were washed in the laundry and swept out of the mess tents. Little brown stains of defensive grasshopper spit peppered every outdoor surface.
Control methods varied, largely because the camp housed SOLDIERs and their significantly enhanced senses, rendering garlic, vinegar and pepper-based solutions unwise or downright impossible in areas heavily trafficked by them. Around the SOLDIERs’ tents, pans and buckets filled with watered-down molasses were regularly skimmed to remove dozens of the insects.
Grasshoppers being the country-wide plague that they were at the time, Cloud generally tuned out grasshopper talk at mealtimes. He had been called upon to deal with some of the largest, most brightly-colored tarantulas he had ever seen earlier in this rotation, but otherwise the oppressive midsummer heat had the local wildlife staying out of the way. Because of this, it took one of his squadmates actually grabbing his shoulder and shaking him before he noticed he was being spoken to.
“O-oh! Sir?”
“ Strife ,” the orderly said sharply. “Your… particular talents are called for. Come with me.”
Cloud got up and followed, mourning the abandonment of his lunch. As he trotted to keep up with the orderly’s long legs, he wondered what might have gotten into camp, especially at this time of day. Snakes had no interest in getting anywhere near the packed earth and heavy boots of the camp, and most other reptiles, barring skittering little lizards that ate fruit flies, seemed to feel the same. Other animals might be seen in the grass beyond the edge of camp at sunrise and sunset, but none had bothered to breach the perimeter.
The orderly marched Cloud straight through the central area where most non-combat work took place and across the wide parade ground, passing into the quieter area where SOLDIERs bunked in individual or two-man tents that Cloud’s end of the camp packed up to six men into.
“…um …sir? What am I supposed — “
“In here.” The orderly lifted a tent flap and shoved Cloud into the largest tent on the row they had been moving down. The interior contained an oversized campaign bed, a folding table and chair, a standard-issue trunk and a non-standard weapons rack.
It also contained approximately three million grasshoppers.
“…oh. Oh wow …”
“ This needs to be taken care of before the end of the day.”
“…taken care of? Sir, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are grasshoppers covering all of Wutai .”
“Commander Rhapsodos insists that his quarters be clear.”
Cloud goggled at the man.
“ Commander Rhapsodos ?”
“Get to work, Strife.”
He marched off, leaving Cloud alone with the tiny sounds of thousands of insect feet on canvas. Cloud sighed heavily and perched on the chair to plot.
About an hour later, the tent flap lifted, spilling hot white sunlight into the tent for a brief moment before the space was filled with broad shoulders.
“… what are you doing?”
Cloud looked up at General Sephiroth himself. His eyes grew very wide for a moment, and he guiltily held up a grasshopper, unable to answer initially because he was still chewing.
“…the Commander needs the tent cleared. And I didn’t get to eat most of my lunch. And… and they taste like almonds?”
Sephiroth stared down at him for a very long, very tense eternity.
“…I like almonds,” he said at last. “Is there a technique to this?”