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Towards the end of Erica Scarlet’s freshman year at Junon University, a curious document came to her attention. The Planet’s Pulse, by Dr. Lucrecia Crescent, was causing a minor stir on the campus-the thesis was a touch more…ethereal, than those typical of her field. But an excerpt was published in the campus newspaper, and after getting hold of it, Scarlet elected to attend a Q&A meeting hosted on the subject. Biotech wasn’t her field, but the premise made sense to her. Sooner or later, parasites got swatted.
The meet was thinly attended, much of the staff viewing the thesis as being not that dissimilar to someone carrying around a giant ‘The End is Nigh’ placard and screaming at passers-by, but a keen eye would have noted that the top tier people in her field were curiously silent. Professor Tarquin Hojo, a legend on campus for his frothing hate for everything and anything that took him away from the lab (his teaching hours included, but even he couldn’t get around the clause in his employment contract) had merely commented that the thesis was ‘overly reliant on superstitious premises, but a valid thesis if they were to be proven.’ The man actually had something of a fanbase, because anyone he paid any attention to at all had to be at the top of their field. But he wasn’t there today, most likely squirreled away in some lab. Otherwise, attendance was poor, mostly people who actually knew Lucrecia personally, with a few representative staff. The lecture hall was built to accommodate a good four hundred students, but by Scarlet’s reckoning, the dull grey seats sported less than forty.
Dr. Crescent didn’t appear to let this dismay her, and spoke well despite visible nerves, her shiny new doctorate giving her the confidence. She was due to be headhunted for a research project in the private sector under Dr. Grimoire Valentine, which probably also helped. There were several heavily technical questions, which Scarlet didn’t quite get, but Lucrecia seemed to answer well enough. When the initial rush died down, Scarlet raised her hand.
“Yes?”
“Now, I could be wrong, but are you saying that the Planet can just wipe us out with this ‘squire to the lofty heavens’ any time it chooses?”
Lucrecia blinked. “Um…that’s a rather bleak interpretation, but not an inaccurate one.”
When the lecture was over, Scarlet made her way over to the doctor, who was being hugged behind the lectern by a woman with multi-coloured stripy hair, nose, eyebrow, and lip piercings, and the broad shoulders, calluses, and scars of someone who’d put in long hours in a Mako Mine. She’d seen this one’s name on research articles too. One of Dr. Crescent’s few true peers, Gillian Hewley was a close second to her in scientific pursuits, but no bitter rivalry had come of that. Interesting. She was wearing denim dungarees and a green T-Shirt captioned ‘fuck with me and I will end you.’
“You knocked em dead, Lu.” Gillian said, releasing Lucrecia from the hug and drawing back to favour her with an assessing stare.
Lucrecia smiled. “Yeah, all six of them. Oh well. They’ll learn. I’ll show them, sooner or later.”
“Mad! They said I was mad! But I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!” said Gillian, happily. “You’ll fit right in in private practice.”
Lucrecia tried to say something, but couldn’t hold a straight face for long enough, giving Scarlet time to approach.
“Um, excuse me?”
They turned. Gillian squinted at her. “Hey, I know you, you wrote that article about the potential threat of AIs and what can be done to prevent it…Scarlet, right? From Cybernetics?”
“Robotics.” said Scarlet, surprised. “That’s me, yeah. Listen, about your talk, I was really interested, but some of your language went over my head, would you mind maybe having drinks tonight and going through it again?”
Lucrecia and Gillian looked at each other. Drinking with undergrads wasn’t policy, but Dr. Crescent had put three years of hard work into that thesis, and practically nobody had yet showed an interest in it.
“You’re really interested?”
“It’s the end of the world, how could I not be?”
“Alright.” said Lucrecia after a moment. “You know Selene’s?”
They met at the front gate twenty minutes later, Gillian carrying a straight broadsword over one shoulder, while Scarlet had taken a military assault shotgun from her bag. There was a rumour that the monsters were getting active lately, and it paid to be prepared. Lucrecia did not appear to be carrying any weapon at all, though.
Scarlet glanced at her. “You never took combat modules?”
Lucrecia shrugged. “I’m planning on being important enough to have bodyguards.”
“And in the meantime, I’m her meatshield,” said Gillian, grinning. “Kicking the shit out of people was on the Banoran curriculum, so we’re good.” Her eyes flicked over Scarlet’s full length blue fishtail gown. “Sure you can keep up?”
“Try me.” She’d adopted the dress code after noticing that many engineers were prone to showing up to work in a hard hat and toolbelt, regardless of whether they’d been near a building site or held a hammer in years. It had yet to cause any problems, and if she ever did have to weld a joint, she could do it with style.
As it happened, Scarlet did keep up, the monsters being reasonably quiet tonight. Selene herself was at the bar-the Gi slave brand on one shoulder clearly visible, displayed with, if not pride, also no shame. Rumour had it that she’d made her name as a pit-fighter before escaping to run this place, and it was a brave malcontent that caused trouble in here. As such, it was the chosen venue for students that wanted to talk politics or their chosen field of study without being disturbed. She made their drinks without asking what they wanted while they checked in their weapons, flicking one amused glance to the combat knife strapped to Scarlet’s left ankle but choosing not to call her on it.
Scarlet had never noticed the others in here before, but then, they had been undergrads too once upon a time. Lucrecia’s drink of choice was the expensive cocktail Heartless Angel, Gillian was drinking a local craft beer informally called Tide, while Scarlet was drinking wine. Maybe a psychology student with too much time on their hands would have drawn some conclusions from that, but right now she wanted to get down to business. They found a corner table where it was quiet enough to talk and settled in. Selene favoured polished but cheap wooden furnishings with subdividing screens, so this wasn’t the place for secrecy, but everything they were likely to talk about was in Lucrecia’s thesis anyway.
Once she’d arranged herself to her satisfaction –directly across the table like a schoolteacher, sitting up straight, the arm not holding her drink in her lap- Lucrecia looked up at her.
“Okay, Ms Scarlet, what do you want to know?”
Scarlet ran through the list of questions in her head and decided to start with the most vital. “Short version…how do we stop it? Omega, I mean.”
Lucrecia blinked. “Stop it? You can’t, it’s a force of nature, like an earthquake. Once it starts, it can’t be stopped.”
“I don’t accept that. If I understood right, even a ‘sentient xenoform’ needs a body to act, right? Then the body can be destroyed, even if the monster itself just returns to the Planet.”
Lucrecia cocked her head. That was more understanding than she’d expected from an engineer.
“That would theoretically be true, but those bodies would be built for extinction level events. Even if we had the hardware, wouldn’t it just cause more devastation?”
Scarlet shrugged. “A possibility, but if we’re in a situation where it needs to be used, it’s no time to be worried about a few cracked eggs. That is, assuming you’re right. How sure are you of your information?”
“Sure.” Lucrecia kept her face clear of the flash of irritation she was feeling. “The Cetra tablets-”
“-Fragmented Cetra Tablets-”
“Yes, fragmented, but some of the content was discernible. The Cetra only wrote for the highest, most important purposes, they were all about allotted lifespan and returning to the Planet, long lasting records were against their religion unless it was absolutely vital that the information be preserved. Those tablets were important.”
Scarlet sipped her drink. “Maybe so. But then they expected us to be able to do something based on that information, right?”
“Possibly, but I don’t think direct opposition was intended, and our information is quite thin. The Cetra are long gone, we have no way to find out more without some new Cetra site or come across a long lost survivor that can talk to the Planet and get answers, and that’s assuming that legend is even correct. One thing they were clear on was the nature of the beings in question, this is the Planet’s endgame, its last resort. I doubt anything we have can oppose it once manifested. Although we’d need a Cetra to confirm that.”
“Could we maybe…make one, to be sure?” Gillian asked, after a moment. “This isn’t the kind of thing to leave to chance. Genetic studies is a lot more advanced than it used to be, if we had a sample…”
Lucrecia twitched back, then started thinking about it. “That’s… a big if. And it relies on listening to the Planet being a genetic trait instead of a learned skill. If it existed at all, and isn’t just a garbled myth. Memories fade and get confused over time. Good thought, though, it’s worth looking into. For now, the tablets are still our best source of information. It’s written in stone, and it’s dated to the right period, anyway. If we can figure out enough.”
Scarlet shrugged. “A Cetra could just ask the Planet for clarification, right? If this is written in stone, it’s meant for us. We’ll have to do what we can. What does it say, exactly?”
“As best we can tell ‘Soul wrought of terra corrupt...’” Lucrecia kept reciting for some time.
When she’d finished, Scarlet sighed. “Cetra weren’t big on clarity, huh?”
“The Cetra didn’t use language the same way we do, since they could use the Planet as a translator. Written Cetran communication was often more like citations, ‘to understand me, check this memory in the Lifestream’. They started to learn better as their culture declined, but for the period, this tablet is unusually straightforward. What I cited was the most relevant part, there’s some more, but it’s… complicated.” From someone else, that might have been a slur, but if Lucrecia Crescent thought something was complicated, she was probably correct. Still…
“If that’s what passes for clear instructions amongst the Cetra, maybe we’re focusing too much on this tablet. We’re likely to misinterpret, and go the wrong direction. Even if we don’t, who says it won’t require some skill that was last used a thousand years ago?”
“Nothing,” Gillian said, “but we’ve got to try, right? And if anyone can figure this out, it’s Lu. So, what’s the plan, Dr Crescent?”
“ Ah, there’s the respect I deserve. Well, it would prove my thesis, but it’s probably inadvisable to bring about the end of the world. I think we’ve a better shot at thwarting the preconditions than defeating the Planet ending monster in open combat. I doubt any humans could stand a chance.”
“Unless we made humans stronger…” Gillian said, stroking her jaw. “You know, if we could arrest the effects of Mako poisoning, there’s a theory that exposure would result in increased resilience.”
“And extra limbs.” Lucrecia pointed out.
“If it happens, it happens. Tell me a few tentacles would have no combat applications.” Gillian smiled suddenly “And some other uses.”
“The Planet knows about organic beings. She knows the Cetra. She knows powerful magic. To beat her pet, we need to try something she hasn’t seen before. We need to find our own solution. I vote machines.” Scarlet said.
Gillian laughed. “Someone from robotics would say that. But machines break down. Will you have the supply lines to keep them running in apocalypse conditions? Enough coal, or an internal generator? What about funds?”
“All valid points,” Scarlet mused, “but not insurmountable. We’d need to figure out a compact, efficient way to power it. But it’s doable.”
Gillian looked at her. “Maybe, under the right conditions. I still think that our best shot is with humanity itself, though. Dangerous monsters all over the world have learned to fear the human mind, even in its fragile shell. Enhance that shell, and we have a force of devastating destructive power and the mind to use it to best effect.”
Scarlet outright laughed. “ A single Marlboro can still put a hundred trained soldiers to flight, brave heroes or not. Machines do not break under pressure, if this ever happens, we can’t afford to give our countermeasure a chance to break and run.”
“The ability to pick battles is a vital component of winning them. I think you’re underestimating-”
Lucrecia snapped up a hand. “People! Settle down!” They both quieted, although neither was the type to give way easily. Lucrecia had written the thesis, after all.
“Once we get to the stage when your plans come into fruition, both those approaches might work, but once the giant monster is killing people, that’s a problem. Our best shot is to avoid the preconditions that the Planet needs to bring this about in the first place. I mean, build your machines, create your genetic enhancements, but if we ever have to use them, something has already gone wrong.”
The other two looked at her in expectation.
“Something like this would have to have safeguards, even the Planet doesn’t want this to happen prematurely. There has to be some preconditions to the end of the world. If we can find those out, it would be much easier to prevent the ascension on Omega rather than to stop it once active. The best way to find that out would be by making or finding a Cetra source of influence.”
“Why would the Cetra know? Has this happened before?” Scarlet had not been impressed by the Cetran contribution to the safety of the world so far. They’d made a cryptic tablet with vital instructions on it almost incomprehensible, and then inconveniently gone extinct, which didn’t say much for their resilience against the Planet’s superweapons.
“The Planet knows what its weapons are. The Cetra talk to the Planet, they’re the people most likely to know these things. By that tablet, Chaos is the precursor, the ‘squire’. The Planet would need some way to control a being that powerful, to avoid it turning against her. There are accounts of Chaos active in Cetran wars, so there must be some way to control it, most likely a summon materia. If we can find that materia and lock it up somewhere, or whatever else we need to do to prevent the summon. And if we can’t stop it in time, there has to be controls on the thing once launched, even the Planet couldn’t want it to be a creature that creates nothing but mindless devastation. Better to be at the control panel of the planet destroying catastrophe than at the wrong end of it.”
There was a short, respectful silence, and then Gillian said “You know, I was joking before about mad science, but damn, Lu, harnessing the planet destroying superweapon wasn’t what I was expecting from you today.”
“You’d prefer to die at its feet?”Lucrecia asked, a spark in her voice.
“I’d prefer to never see it and retire somewhere warm, with a lawn, and a forest, where my kids can run around and hide after kicking the shit out of the neighbours, but we don’t always get what we want. It could be aeons before any of this is necessary, Lu.”
“Or tomorrow. No way to know unless we understand, and for that, we need the right tools. You saw how many people were out there today, there’s no one else concerned about this. Anything that’s done about this will be done by us.”
Three sets of eyes met across the table, and one after another they nodded. If the Planet should one day decide to end the world, it would not be unopposed.
Ten years on, President Shinra stared at her across the boardroom table. She’d done her homework, and brought draft plans. A lot of people were somehow caught by surprise at the fact that the President of a manufacturing company had a good grasp of technical detail. He’d been studying her submission and asking, sharp, pertinent questions for almost an hour now, but now he was looking directly at her. The most powerful man in the world had quite an intimidating stare. He probably practiced it.
“You want me to spend three billion gil on a giant cannon pointing nowhere at Junon Harbour, despite the fact that I have no enemies to aim it at, it would tie up output from the reactor, and result in thousands of people across the world making ‘compensating for something’ jokes?”
“Yes sir.” He also didn’t like overly political language. Best be blunt.
“Why?”
“It’s not the enemies you see coming that are most dangerous, sir.”
The President stared at her for another long moment, then grinned and slapped the table. “Approved, just for sheer balls! Show me what you can do, Ms Scarlet! One thing, though…”
“Yes, sir?”
“Why the name?”
“ ‘Sister Ray?’ No reason.”
“Ms. Hewley,” Genesis said, saluting her. She could still see the boy who worked so hard to keep his apples safe from thieves, but only just. She stood, the better to move quickly if she had to. And she could see the pain he was trying to hide. Degradation was not a quick or easy death.
“Genesis. You’ve grown up.”
“Yes, unfortunately for us both. Where did you get the Guard Spider? It destroyed eight of my copies before we shut it down.”
“A gift from a friend. What do you want?”
“I need your help.”
Gillian sighed. “You know, I might have tried, if you hadn’t just slaughtered my village.”
“You think I’d leave you to choose?” He half reached for his sword, prompting her to lift the Buster Sword into a serviceable guard stance.
Genesis blinked. That sword couldn’t usually be wielded by normal humans.
“You think I could put all that Mako into my body and be completely unaffected? I doubt I can defeat you, but I can stop you from taking me alive, and your answers die with me.”
Genesis lowered his sword. “Why did you do this to us, Mother?”
“Do wha-”
“Equivocate one more syllable and I will cut out your spleen.”
He meant it. Gillian folded her arms. “Does Angeal know?”
“No. I’d spare him knowing what kind of creature his mother was, if I could. Why, Gillian? Why did you do this to us?”
She looked at him, searching for common ground. “I thought I was saving the world.”
He laughed aloud. “Looks like you backed the wrong bird, Mom.”
“I’m not your mother.”
“Stop it! I read the files. Shinra forgot about us, which makes this entire village your baby. You made my parents drive me to you, so that you could mould me as you saw fit. All those heroic stories, this whole village was designed to shape us into what you needed. Don’t complain that we did as we were taught.”
“So that’s why you killed them all? To show me?” He might possibly have a point, but she was still stuck on how that justified a village massacre.
“One reason.” There was a dangerous light in his eyes. “Are you pleased with your work, Mother?”
Gillian sat down. “‘When the war of the beasts brings about the world’s end, the goddess descends from the sky.’”
For anyone else, that would not have been an answer. Genesis understood, though, even if his own interpretation was different.
“Question is, Mother, did you create the heroes, or the beasts? ‘My Soul, corrupted by vengeance, hath endured torment, to find the end of the journey/In my own salvation.’” He raised his sword and pointed it at her. “ ‘And your eternal slumber.’”
He’d answered her question too. She waited to die.
But in the end, he could not. Whether because of their own long association, the nights by the fire reading LOVELESS, or her relationship to Angeal, she did not know. But eventually, he set the sword aside with a sigh.
“I’ll give you a month. If you’re still alive at the end of it, I tell Angeal, and we’ll see if he has more nerve than I do.”
“You wouldn’t- You need me!”
“I thought I did, but now I realise I trust you even less than Hollander. Goodbye, Mother.”
And he left her, sitting in the dark. Genesis had been a sweet boy, but he’d learned cruelty in the war. Or perhaps, before then, from his own family. She’d wanted to make sure he would be pliable to her needs. But it was too late for useless regrets.
Gillian sat back in her chair, after leaning the sword back against the wall. She’d grown to hate that blade. It had been the death of her husband, and she could see it weigh down her son ever since. He could bear neither to use it nor leave it behind, and the burden would destroy him sooner or later. She’d truly mishandled those boys.
To think, she’d created them to save the world. One was all grown up and participating in village massacres, the other had been so steeped in honour that he’d grown to despise his own existence. She’d done everything she could to prepare them for the day they might be needed to face WEAPONs. The ability to map their traits to create an instantly willing army, regeneration, resilience…she’d done everything she could to give them strength, but it was all for nothing while they lacked the will. Still, there was something redeemable in them, maybe. She’d done her best to mould them, in the belief that they might one day be needed. They both still had that desire, under all the pain. To be a hero. To save the world. She’d given them that.
It was a terrible thing to do to a child. And she’d watched it happen at her command. Lucrecia’s nerve had failed, in the end, but her project had surpassed Gillian’s nonetheless. Had all her efforts been unnecessary, then, all the pain she’d inflicted? By any measure of success, Project G had not gone well, with both test subjects set on self destructive paths. They were both powerful, but unless she could curb that descent, it would all have been for nothing.
Her one success was that her two boys shared the desire to be a hero, if for different reasons. They still had that desire, under the desperation and the despair, if she could root it out. Her last chance for redemption, to claim some measure of success for the project that bore her name.
She sat in the darkness for days, thinking it over, until salvation knocked on her door in the form of an eager puppy with a sword too big for him. While she couldn’t guarantee he’d save her children, between Angeal’s letters and her brief conversation, she knew he’d do everything in his power to try. From now, the future was out of her hands. Genesis’ threat was almost a relief in the end. She had not the courage to linger to see how it would unfold, fearing to see all the pain count for nothing.
Raising children to be heroes was not easy, even if you failed.
“Over to you, Lu.” Gillian said, and reached for the sword.
“It was you. You were the reason I survived.”
Lucrecia couldn’t quite be said to be truly alive, but the words still reached her in her crystal shell. For all her fine words, she’d bowed out early in the quest to save the world from itself. Gillian’s coin was still spinning, depending on what Genesis was planning to do with the rest of his life. Scarlet had chalked up two kills of the WEAPONs the Planet was so very proud of. Lucrecia’s legacy had irrefutably proved her thesis (it would take a brave scientist to dispute the existence of a thirty mile high monster witnessed by thousands of people), and also averted it, give or take a few thousand lives. Chaos and Omega would likely return, but if they did, this time, the world would be ready.
Much had been lost in the process. She’d caused Vincent Valentine immeasurable pain, brought the world to the brink of ruin, caused so much to be lost by so many people. She’d shed so many tears, spent over three decades wracked with remorse for all that she’d wrought. Her sins were legion. Her two best friends had fallen on the path she’d started them on. But the time for tears was over, because everything that had passed paled beside one simple fact, that she had good reason to be proud of. Perhaps even a tad smug.
She’d saved the motherfucking world.