Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

PREFACE

So you think you know all there is to know about FF7, huh? Quick, who saved the Planet from Shinra? That Strife kid with the weird hair? Nope, it was me! Mayor Domino of Midgar! Yes, I'm the true hero, but those AVALANCHE twerps swept me under the rug and took all the credit. They're almost as bad as Shinra. Now they're even ripping off my story; making a game about some guy who was the hero in a war but didn't get any credit. What kind of justice is that?

In the faint hope of claiming at least some credit for my heroic deeds, I present to you the TRUE tale of Final Fantasy 7, starring yours truly, Mayor Domino.

I. THE EARLY YEARS

I never really meant to become a politician. At first -- this was back when I was at Cosmo Canyon, finishing up my doctoral thesis, The Study of Planet Life (yeah, I wrote that -- but do I ever get any credit?) -- I wanted to be a newspaper columnist, but the way things turned out, I ended up being a talk-show host instead.

So I had this talk show, The Mid-Afternoon Show With Tortellini Domino, Wednesdays at 3:30 on SIN. That was back when Shinra was a weapons company, although they still owned a television network. Now, my talk show was pretty popular, at least until Lewis & Clark: The New Adventures of the Corps of Discovery came along. It was a cartoon show about a band of explorer-turned-superhero Moogles who flew around in a covered wagon.

Lewis & Clark was on CNT, Corel Network Television. They were SIN's big rivals back then. Anyway, my talk show was getting killed in the ratings by Lewis & Clark, so Heidegger (Heidegger was the head of SIN in those days) decided we needed a new advertising campaign for my show. He called me down to his office in the Shinra Building (which was only 20 floors back then), and we had a little discussion that went something like this:

Heidegger: What kind of a name is Tortellini Domino?
Me: Uh....

Heidegger suggested we consult with an evil occult force to come up with a new ad campaign -- namely, the marketing department. It was election year (yes, back then you could vote), so the marketing department thought it would be "clever" to have an ad campaign in which I ran for mayor. Now, that was a pretty stupid idea for an ad campaign, but everything still would have turned out okay if it ended there.

But it didn't. The two real candidates for mayor were the incumbent, Bobby Biggalow, and Jean the frog from Breath of Fire 2. Most people assumed Bobby Biggalow was dead, because he hadn't made a public appearance in several years and bore an uncanny resemblance to a department store dummy on TV. That left Jean, but when Jean's major TV commercial consisted of him saying "Vote, vote, vote for me, me, me -- this is my election song", most people thought he wouldn't make a very good mayor, mayor, mayor.

When election day came around, the majority of the population took advantage of that write-in space on the ballot. I'm sure you can guess what happened. People put my name down as a joke thanks to my ad campaign, but when the votes were counted, I had won.

I accepted the position just as a publicity stunt. It would get attention, and I could always resign after a week or two. Unfortunately, before I had a chance, Shinra cancelled my talk show. That left me a choice of either being the mayor or being unemployed. I went with being the mayor.

My first act as mayor was to push a bill through the City Council banning strawberries in Midgar -- strawberries give me the willies. What I didn't know was that Shinra was operating some very profitable strawberry farms near Kalm Town. Shinra's lobbyists descended on City Hall (yes, we actually had a City Hall then) and the law was quickly repealed. This was only the first of what would be many conflicts between me and Shinra.

I did have a few friends at City Hall. One of those was Hart, a former scientist under Professor Gast in the Jenova Project. When Hojo took over, Hart resigned in protest against Hojo's genetic experiments. He didn't give up science, however, as he went on to build the airship Hart and was the second-in-command of the Space Development Division, under my good buddy Palmer. The other was Tseng, who was at that time the janitor of City Hall. He was getting paid a lot, though, because everyone thought he was really an undercover policeman. You see, he was a janitor posing as a policeman posing as a janitor.

Except for a time when a dead ferret got stuck in the ventilation system, my first four months at City Hall were fairly non-descript. Then I got to take a vacation (actually, it wasn't a vacation. The building was being fumigated after the dead ferret incident). Palmer had already gone to Rocket Town to supervise the launch of the Shinra-26 rocket, so Hart and I decided to go join him and watch the launch.

We took the airship Hart over to Rocket Town. We were greeted rather uncivily by the rocket's pilot, Cid Highwind. Cid said some things to us that I won't repeat, because I'm trying to appeal to all ages here. We later learned that Cid irrationally hated Palmer (and consequently Hart and I). I think he was jealous because Palmer has that cool Mako Gun.

So Cid, being the underhanded, shady, untrustworthy, con artist that he is, came up with a plan to get Palmer fired. He was going to sabotage one of the oxygen tanks in his own rocket, then send Palmer to fix it. While Palmer was trying to fix it, he was going to launch the rocket, but abort the launch because Palmer was still in the engine room. However, Cid's evil scheme was foiled when Shera, not knowing of Cid's plan, went to check on the oxygen tanks instead of Palmer. Thus, Cid and Shera took the blame when the launch was aborted, and Palmer got off free. Serves them right.

Cid was not happy about what happened. In revenge, he went and dug up some dirt on us and revealed that Hart had "stolen" a classified data CD from the Jenova Project. It was really all a misunderstanding. Hart had just borrowed the CD to use with Monster Rancher, because he'd heard it made a really strong monster. Nevertheless, Shinra stripped Hart of his position (they must have been bribed by Cid). Not only that, but they renamed the airship Hart to the Highwind. However, I at least managed to get Hart hired as my secretary.

Chapter Text

It was around this time that Mako power was discovered. In fact, when Hart, Palmer, and I got back to Midgar after the Shinra-26 launch was aborted, the first Makoro plant was already under construction at Fort Condor as part of the top-secret "Weehawken Project".

As Shinra turned into a electric power company (combined with the sales of their web browser, Shinra Internet Explorer, which came pre-installed on every Mako power plant for no apparent reason), their profits soared. The rest of the city shared in their prosperity -- at first. Then on one day, known as Rather Dim Friday, the stock market crashed, due primarily to Alan Greenspan sneezing. The Midgar 400 index dropped over 850 points.

Shinra, however, was not affected by this crash. There were now eight Makoro plants in Midgar, two in Junon, and ones in Nibelheim, North Corel, and Gongaga (plus the old experimental reactor in Fort Condor), and they were making big gil, so they acquired the federal government in a hostile takeover. City Hall was bulldozed to make room for a new, 70-story, Shinra Building. My spacious office with nice carpeting, swivel chairs, and a big cardboard stand-up of my idol, Alhazad from Wild Arms, was replaced with a dingy rectangular "office" that bordered on a cubicle. Ah, how I miss those swivel chairs. Hart and I used to spend our lunch break racing back and forth across the room in our swivel chairs.

Not only had Shinra virtually imprisoned me in the Shinra Building, they were sucking the Mako energy out of the Planet. Remember, I wrote the Study of Planet Life, so I knew what they were up to. To try to show the dangers of Mako power, I hired two engineers named Wedge and Vicks to build a tiny scale model of Midgar, complete with actual working Makoro plants. We set the model afloat at sea, and, sure enough, as soon as it hit wave, the Mako plants blew up. Wedge and Vicks were both tragically killed in the explosion, which later came to be known as the Three Inch Island incident.

Shinra was completely unperturbed by my little demonstration, and in fact they so far as to put the remains of the model Midgar on display in the lobby of the 65th floor of the Shinra Building. I knew more drastic steps had to be taken, but I had to wait for the right opportunity.

Eventually, it came. There was an accident at the North Corel reactor, and Shinra torched the town. The next week, I stuffed a dead ferret in the ventilation system and headed for North Corel. The situation there was just like I expected. The town was in ruins; the citizenry angry and confused. I met up with one guy named Barret Wallace. To put it bluntly, his life was in shambles. His wife was dead, his best friend missing, he'd lost his right arm, and he couldn't get off the first level of PaRappa.

So this Wallace guy agreed to form an underground anti-Shinra resistance movement. Little did I know that he would soon betray me and take over the yet-to-be-named rebellion. Anyway, Barret and I agreed to meet in a draw (a draw is a ravine with water running through it) up in the Corel Mountains the next day. Barret said he'd bring some of his friends, too.

The next day, I went up to the Corel Draw. When I got there, Barret was already there. As promised, he'd brought some others -- Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie.

"Well, I guess we're all here," Barret said. "Let's begin."

"Hey, I thought I was the leader," I protested.

"Let's take a vote," Barret suggested. "All in favor of having me as the leader, say 'aye!'"

"Aye!" Barret and his flunkies shouted.

"Ssh!" I cautioned. "Somebody will hear us!"

"That's a majority," Barret declared. "I'm now the leader."

"I have to go the bathroom," Wedge complained.

"Now we need a name," Barret said, looking around. "What should we call ourselves?"

"How about The Resistance?" Biggs suggested.

"Nah," I said. "That's overused. We need something... different."

"The Rebellion Formerly Known As The Resistance?" Biggs suggested again.

I wasn't paying any attention. "Sssh!" I cautioned. "I hear something!"

"What?" Wedge asked nervously.

I looked up the side of the draw. Apparently dislodged by our shouting, several large boulders were rolling towards at alarming speed. "AVALANCHE!" I cried.

"That's it!" Barret exclaimed. "That's a perfect name!"

"No!" I shouted. "That's not what I meant!" As the boulders tumbled into the draw, I shoved Barret towards the path leading down the mountain. "RUN!!"

The five of us dived out of the draw as the boulders smashed into the draw walls. "Hey, we actually made it out of there alive for once," Wedge said.

"The media's probably going to be swarming up here in a moment," I thought. "We'll meet again tomorrow."

The next day, we met again, but this time in a slightly less hazardous locale -- the North Corel Flat Earth Society headquarters.

"All right, this meeting of AVALANCHE is called to order," Barret announced.

"I didn't that mean to be a name!" I protested. "I was just warning you about the avalanche!"

"It's too late now," Barret said. "I already trademarked it."

"Well.... okay, but why does it have to be in all capital letters?"

"You said it in all caps," Barret said simply. He turned away from me to address Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie. "All right, then -"

"Hey!" I shouted. Barret was beginning to annoy me. "How can I say something 'in all caps?' You can't talk in caps! And why are you running everything?"

Barret turned back to me. "Of course you can talk in caps," he said condescendingly. "You can talk in fonts, too. See, look, I'm talking in Arial."

"Oh yeah?" I said. "Well, I can talk in Courier!"

"That's nothing," Barret said. "I can talk in Wingdings!" ("I can talk in Wingdings!")

"That's it!" I shouted. "This has gone too far! I'm quitting!" I stormed outside, slamming the door behind me.

AVALANCHE -- capital letters or no capital letters -- had failed, thanks to Barret's big ego. Even now he shafts me of all the credit and relegates me to my office in the Shinra Building, handing out keycards, in his "modified" version of the story; just like "those damn Shinra" that he claims to hate. I think I read a book about something like this once, but I don't remember what it was.

Chapter Text

I packed my bags and headed back to Midgar. When I got back, I found out Hart had done some recruiting for my failed rebellion. He'd recruited Johnny, Mukki, Zangan, and Holzoff (the mountain climber) to our cause. Unfortunately, said cause no longer existed, or at least was not under my control. I explained the situation to them and sent them home. They seemed pretty accepting about it, although Zangan complained that "even the rebellions are downsizing now."

It was also election time, which meant that every citizen got to go to the polls and fill out a little sheet like this:

Which do you prefer? (check one, or both is even better)
( ) Shinra runs the city
( ) I get executed

Most people chose the former for readily apparent reasons. President Shinra won a resounding victory over nobody in particular. He and the Shinra Board of Directors (Heidegger and the gang) did choose my old friend Tseng, who was still believed to be a policeman posing as a janitor, to head the Turks, replacing Natron O'Daffer, who was removed from his post and flogged after commenting on Vice-President Rufus's hair. Tseng knew about my activities, but he kept quiet about them. Although I was grateful for this, I was worried about Tseng, as the past leaders of the Turks had frequently met with unfortunate circumstances -- one of them was allegedly abducted by aliens, one locked himself in a coffin (but he later joined AVALANCHE -- go figure), one purchased a copy of Spawn: The Eternal, and most recently, there was O'Daffer and the hair incident.

Now, I could fabricate some tales about how I was involved in the Sephiroth incident in Nibelheim. I could; but I won't. That's because everything I'm telling you is just the real story, unaltered by AVALANCHE's lies. Truth to be told, I didn't do anything particularly exciting for a while. Mostly, I hung around in my so-called "office" in the Shinra Building, spending my time devising an elaborate puzzle involving the research archives that could not be humanly solved without assistance, and also wishing I had my swivel chairs back; Hart had won the last race we ever had and I wanted a rematch.

A few years passed. I had become (not willingly, mind you) a total yes-man for Shinra, all my thoughts of rebellion buried back in North Corel with some idiot would could talk in fonts. Then one day, a report filtered down to me (via Tseng) that Sephiroth had apparently reappeared, or at least somebody that looked a lot like him.

Now, this seemed a little unusual to me, because we all knew Sephiroth was killed in Nibelheim (I knew the whole story of what happened in Nibelheim; it was obvious. I could have told them, but they never asked, did they? They would have just claimed they figured it out on their own anyway). Hart and I thought about it and both came to the conclusion that the Lifestream was involved. Seeing a chance to advance myself in Shinra, I volunteered to go to Cosmo Canyon and see if I could find out anything on how Sephiroth might have returned.

I was hoping for a nice vacation in Cosmo Canyon (after all, it has lots of cool stuff there, like humor, fanfics, the PaRappa desktop theme -- okay, enough with the plug), but Shinra had other ideas. First of all, I was flying on HautAir ("The majority of our flights land safely!"), and, even worse, the in-flight movie was Ernest Goes to Hell. I wanted Resident Evil.

While on the plane, I remembered that Reeve had given me an "important package" to open later. I decided to see what it was, so I opened it. It was one of the "impossible" jigsaw puzzles that was all red and had 1,000 pieces. Just what I needed!

I spent most of the plane trip trying unsuccesfully to fit the puzzle together. When I finally arrived at Cosmo Canyon, I grabbed my suitcase, checked in at the motel, and discovered that I had accidentally picked up someone else's suitcase by mistake. It was Baron Ouromov's inexplicably unopenable briefcase. Since there was absolutely no way to open it, I just left it there and went over on to my alma mater, Cosmo U.

I thought I would enjoy seeing Cosmo U again, but upon my arrival, I found that Bugenhagen had cut my name out of the Study of Planet Life and was distributing free copies of it. I made a mental note to add him to the Study's "idiot list." Shortly after arriving at Cosmo U, I ran into Professor Hojo, who was sent by Shinra to "help" me in my research.

Hojo and I were unable to turn up anything the first day. On my way back to the motel, I was passing by Cosmo Candle when I noticed none other than "font boy" Barret. He was talking with Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie. Amazingly, Biggs and Wedge had apparently not been killed yet. I hid inside a trash can and listened to them. Barret was saying that it was time for AVALANCHE (they were still using that stupid name) to move to Midgar and take action against Shinra. I tried to climb out of the trash can, but the lid was stuck.

I tried to turn over so I could kick the lid off, but the trash can was filled and I had no room to manuever. Next I tried to rock the can over on its side. I succeeded, but this improved the situation little. "Help!" I shouted, pounding on the sides of the can.

Eventually, a passing policeman heard my pleas and opened up the can. I tumbled out of the trash can. "Thanks," I said.

"Hey," said the policeman. "You're Mayor Domino, aren't you?"

"That's me," I said. "Want my autograph?"

"No," said the policeman. He then informed that I was being immediately expelled and sent back to Midgar, as Hojo had kidnapped Bugenhagen's adopted "grandson".

Back in Midgar, I told Hart about what I heard at the Cosmo Candle. Perhaps the rebellion had a chance after all. I gathered my old recruits -- Johnny, Mukki, Zangan, and Holzoff. We sent Johnny to the slums (where I presumed they would be) to locate AVALANCHE's new hideout. The others I kept ready in case AVALANCHE needed any help.

Eventually, Johnny located AVALANCHE's headquarters: a bar in Sector 7 called 7th Heaven. He had actually discovered it on accident; he had really wanted to use the pinball machine. Meanwhile, Hart had hacked into Shinra's supercomputer (codenamed "Deep Magenta") and discovered the code to open the security gates at the Makoro reactors. I sent a message to Johnny (who was remaining in the Sector 7 slums as a spy) and hoped he could deliver the code to AVALANCHE. He must have, because the next day, Makoro Reactor No. 1 exploded, followed shortly thereafter by No. 5.

Chapter Text

Shinra was obviously not too thrilled with AVALANCHE's exploits. Tseng informed me that President Shinra was planning to blow up the supports for the Sector 7 Plate, destroying the entire sector and AVALANCHE with it.

Johnny was following the progress of Cloud, and reported that he was in the Wall Market. He (Johnny) had given Cloud a membership card for the Honeybee Inn to help out a plan of Cloud's that was much too elaborate for Johnny to explain in his brief communication. I sent Mukki to hurry to the Honeybee Inn and inform Cloud of Shinra's plans. He must not have delivered the message or something, because Cloud was still progressing at an incredibly slow rate back towards Sector 7.

Something had to be done. I talked with Palmer, who said that Reeve also disproved of President Shinra's plans. When I met with Reeve about trying to persuade the President not to blow up the plate, he said he might consider it, but first I had to prove my worthiness by solving the jigsaw puzzle he had given me. What followed what was a frantic rush of puzzle solving as Hart, Holzoff, and I tried to fit the puzzle together. With the aid of a nearby jigsaw and a few "modifications" (heh), we finally managed to complete it, but it was too late. President Shinra had sent Reno of the Turks to arm the explosives.

Sector 7 might be a goner, but we could still save AVALANCHE. Tseng volunteered to take his helicopter to the slums and fly AVALANCHE to safety. Unfortunately, he was only able to locate and rescue Aerith before the Plate collapsed (AVALANCHE later claimed Tseng had "kidnapped" her... yeah, right), but Johnny sent word that Cloud, Barret, and Tifa were alive and well in Sector 6. Biggs and Wedge, had, as expected, died, along with Jessie.

Tseng and I came up with a plan to bring AVALANCHE to the Shinra Building (where Tseng was pretending to hold Aerith prisoner) and fly them out of the city by helicopter. We dropped a golden wire down to the Wall Market (where do you think that came from?) and waited for AVALANCHE to arrive.

Soon enough, Cloud, Barret, and Tifa showed up at my office in the Shinra Building. They needed the keycard to the next floor, as Tseng's office was several floors above mine. Now, I had spent several years coming up with that devious puzzle in the archives, and I wasn't going to let it go to waste. So I made them guess my password. After several fruitless hours, Hart eventually sold them some hints. It kind of ruined the fun, but at least we made some money off it.

While Cloud was causing a lot of commotion as he made his way up to Tseng's office, Hart and I snuck into the Shinra boardroom and "liberated" several swivel chairs. On the way to the elevator with the chairs, we bumped into a frantic Holzoff, who was looking for me to tell me urgent news -- Sephiroth had come to the Shinra Building and was killing everybody he found.

"We've got to hide!" Hart said.

"Yeah, but where?" I asked. "Sephiroth isn't stupid. He's systematically depopulating the building."

"I know!" Hart said. "The air vent above the bathroom!"

We were already on the 66th floor, so we made a mad dash for the bathroom. As we sprinted around the corner, we froze. Apparently, we weren't the only ones with that idea -- there was a huge line in front of the bathroom, including Heidegger, Scarlet, Hojo, and Reno.

"Oh, man," Hart said. "Now what are we gonna do?"

"I know!" Heidegger said.

"I know!" Scarlet said.

"I know!" Hojo said.

"I know!" Reno said.

Then, in unison, they all shouted, "Let's rap for it!"

Hart and I easily out-rapped Heidegger's gang (because we have the funky flow) and ducked inside the bathroom. We hopped up on the toilet and climbed into the air vent and waited nervously for some sign of an end to Sephiroth's rampage.

Footsteps came from below. "Oh no!" Hart hissed under his breath. "Here he comes!"

The air vent grate jiggled and opened. Palmer's face peered through. "Hey-hey!" he exclaimed. "I've been looking for you! President Shinra's dead! He's got Sephiroth's sword stuck in his back! I ran into AVALANCHE at his office. And Rufus is flying in to the building by helicopter!"

"Is Sephiroth gone?" I asked.

"I think so," Palmer panted, out of breath. "It looks like he came for the President. He left the rest of Management alone."

Hart and I climbed out of the air vent and stepped out into the 66th floor of the Shinra Building. The floor was stained with trails of blood. Tseng came running down the hall. "Tortellini!" he shouted. "AVALANCHE just kicked Rufus's butt! He got away in a helicopter, but Dark Nation's dead."

"Dark Nation?" Hart said. "Poor kitty. He was cool."

"When Sephiroth came, I hid AVALANCHE in the confinement area on the 67th floor. After Sephiroth left, I went to release them, but they were gone. I caught up with them on the roof just as Rufus is flying away."

"Where are they now?" I asked urgently.

"They're trying to escape," Tseng said. "They're gonna need some help, so I left Cloud a motorcycle." I'd just like to point out that Tseng was originally going to be shown giving Cloud the motorcycle before he came driving down the steps, but the slackers in the rendering department didn't want to do any extra work, so they cut that bit off the FMV. "I think they're trying to get out of Midgar."

"They're gonna need some help." I grabbed my pager and paged Zangan.

Now, something must have messed up with the pager system, because my office phone number appeared on the beepers of everybody that worked for the entire Shinra company, in addition to Zangan. In just the time it took me to walk back down to my office, I got 308 messages on my voice mail. By the time I deleted them all, I had 135 more.

"Hey, Tortellini," Tseng said, poking his head into my office. "Something seems to be wrong with the pager system."

"What tipped you off?" I said. As I spoke those words, 12 new messages popped up on my voice mail. "Now look, I'm getting messages from Wutai." I wiped out all the messages.

My own beeper went off. I grabbed it and looked at it. A phone number was blinking on it. Unknown to me at this point, Zangan was trying to page me back with the phone number of a nearby phone booth -- I'd accidentally deleted his reply with the 307 other ones. I grabbed the phone and tried to call that number. It was busy. See, Zangan's page to me had also been sent out to all of Shinra.

"This is not turning out to be a good day," I said, burying my head in my arms on my desk.

Unfortunately, some Shinra workers interpreted Zangan's phone number as a pager number, and tried to page that number, which coincidentally belonged to Barret's buddy Dyne. The calls came to Dyne from everywhere from Icicle Inn to Mideel to Goblin Island (even goblins have pagers these days). Dyne at first tried to return all the calls, but as the pages mounted, he blew his pager into pieces with his gun-arm. He was not happy. The world would pay for this insult.

(In AVALANCHE's version of the story, Dyne wondered where he "went wrong". Trust me, this is where it happened).

Chapter Text

The next day, I was trying to get some indication of AVALANCHE's progress, but failed to find any information to that extent. All the media was occupied with yesterday's "beeper madness" episode.

"Well, at least we've managed to give them some cover," I said to Hart.

I looked at my voice mail. I had collected another 240 messages, despite the fact that the media had made it clear not to call my number. Some people probably called it just because they saw it on TV. I deleted them all, unknowingly deleting one from Johnny informing me that AVALANCHE was in Kalm Town and involved in a long-winded flashback sequence.

We had nothing better to do, so Hart and I took our new swivel chairs out in the hallway for a few races. We almost collided with Zangan as he turned the corner into the hall leaded to our office.

"Zangan!" I exclaimed.

"What the hell happened yesterday?" Zangan asked.

"I don't have a clue," I admitted. "I tried to page you, but something got messed up with the pager system. Seriously messed up."

I filled Zangan in on what happened yesterday. Zangan said he'd run into AVALANCHE on accident on their way out of Midgar. He'd commandeered a nearby crane and helped them escape, then they headed east. Johnny was still tracking them. At this point in time I had no idea where AVALANCHE was headed, but I guessed they were going to Fort Condor.

However, AVALANCHE would have to wait at the moment. Rufus was now President of the Shinra Company, and Palmer and I were "invited" (read: "required") to attend the festivities in Junon. I managed to get some guest passes for Hart and Mukki (Zangan and Holzoff had to stay behind and run the shop in Midgar -- Hart had a secret new robot design that he didn't want stolen), and we were off. Tseng was off the hook, as he and the other Turks were out looking for Cloud's party.

Hart, Mukki, Palmer, and I took a flight down to Junon. According to our message from now-President Rufus, we would be staying at the four-star Ramuh Inn. When we got to where the hotel was supposed to be, we found there was a SOLDIER barracks there instead.

"There must be some kind of mistake here somewhere," Palmer said.

A Shinra MP poked his head out the door. "You here for the celebration? You'll be staying on the top floor."

"What..." I started. "But -"

"Look, whoever you are, I'm just a lowly MP -- I don't make the rules; II just work here, okay? I'm having a bad day, all right? My parakeet is breaking out in rashes, I got a ticket for improperly parallel-parking my Chocobo, and I can't get off the first level of PaRappa. Don't make it any worse."

"Wow, you and Barret could start a support group or something," I said.

"What?" the MP snapped.

"Never mind," Hart said hastily, stepping in front of me. He pushed past the MP and headed upstairs with his bags.

The next day, I was rudely awakened at 5:30 in the morning by a pounding on my door. Sleepily, I opened it. It was Heidegger, dressed as always in Fidel Castro's hand-me-downs.

"You," he said. "Mayor Domino." He consulted a clipboard. "You haven't signed up for a committee."

"Commitee?" I asked.

"Yeah," Heidegger said. "You can be on the decoration committee, the welcoming committee, the production committee, the spend-the-whole-time-partying committee or the cleanup-after-the-spend-the-whole-time-partying-committee committee. Wait, sorry, the spend-the-whole-time-partying committee is full; I took the last slot. There's plenty of room in the cleanup committee, though."

"What is this, some middle school talent show or something?" I asked. I was not in a good mood.

"Sorry," Heidegger said. "You've got to pick a committee."

I turned to Hart, who was standing behind me. "Well? How should we decide?" Hart asked me.

"How about Janken?" I suggested.

"Please, no more PaRappa references," Hart said hastily. "They're growing old."

"We'll be on the decoration committee," I said.

"Okay," Heidegger said. "Report in 45 minutes."

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. "45 minutes?" I repeated. "But it's 5:30!"

"That means you'll be reporting at 6:15," Heidegger said. "Gyaa haa haa!" He turned and left the building.

"Heidegger has left the building," a computerized voice said over the barracks' PA system.

"Oh, shut up," I snapped at it, and went back to sleep. I was awakened 35 minutes by an anxious Hart.

"Tortellini, come on!" he said. "We've got to report to Heidegger in 10 minutes!"

"Heidegger..." I muttered under my breath. "All he does is give one-word answers and apologize for everything." Somebody must have overhead me saying that and told it to Rufus, because I swear I made up that quote. I made up "You spoony bard!" too, but that Tellah guy ripped me off.

The four of us -- Hart, Palmer, Mukki, and I -- headed over to Al-Junon, where the "decoration committee" was putting up tacky-looking red banners reading "RUFUS" all over the place. We had the "privilege" of joining them.

Hart and I were putting up a Rufus banner when a Shinra MP passed by and dropped a piece of paper at my feet, then walked nonchalantly away. "Hey you!" I shouted after him. "You're littering! Come back and here and pick that up!"

The Shinra MP started walking more quickly and pretended not to hear me. "Give a hoot, don't pollute!" I shouted.

"Tortellini..." Hart said quietly, picking up the paper. He started to unfold it. "I think it's a note to us."

I looked over Hart's shoulder at the note. It read, "TORTELLINI - Meet me at the bar in the alley on Eggplant Street. -- Tseng."

"Oooh, a secret note," I said excitedly.

"Sssh!"

After we got our lunch break from the decoration committee, Hart and I hurried to the bar Tseng was talking about. The bar was dark and for some reason mostly blue-colored. The only person inside was Tseng. "I put a dead ferret in the ventilation duct," Tseng offered by way of explanation.

"So that's what that smell was," I said. "I should have recognized it."

"So you made it to the festivities after all," Hart said wryly.

"I ran into AVALANCHE on the way here," Tseng said. "They were in the mythril mines. They seem to be chasing after Sephiroth."

"Yeah?"

"It turns out that a Gelnika's bringing in a big shipment of Materia is coming in to Junon from the caves. Now, there's so many extra troops in town for the celebration that nobody's going to think it very odd if some MPs show up at the Gelnika and offer to help unload it."

"Us," I said.

"Right," Tseng agreed.

"So when does the Gelnika land?" Hart asked.

"In about fifteen minutes."

"Wow, thanks for all the advance warning," I said.

"Sorry, I had to wait until I could get rid of Rude and Elena," Tseng apologized. "I suckered them into playing Persona. They're busy looking for a save point."

"All right, we'd better get moving," Hart said.

"Here, I swiped two MP uniforms for you," Tseng said. He reached behind the bar, grabbed two blue suits of armor, and handed them to us. We put on the suits and hurried to the airport at the far end of Junon. There were several Gelnikas on the runways. All were painted in the typical brown camoflague.

"Let's hope it hasn't landed yet," Hart said, looking at the planes. We stepped on the elevator and punched the button to rise. As the elevator was rising, a Gelnika descended from the sky and came to a stop in the airport.

"There we go," I said in satisfaction. We ran across the runway to the Gelnika. We ran up to the SOLDIER who was overseeing the unloading of the plane. "We're here to help with the plane," I said.

The SOLDIER paid little regard to us. "All right, haul some of those boxes of Materia out of the storage room and take them over to Al-Junon," he shrugged.

For once everything was going well. Hart and I entered the plane and proceeded past several other MPs (all also unloading the plane) to the storage room. The room was filled full of boxes of Materia.

"Now we're talking," I said. "Where are we going to take all this?"

"Let's take it back to the barracks," Hart said quietly. He grabbed as many of the boxes of Materia as we could carry, and I did the same. We staggered back towards the airport elevator. Although I wanted to rush back to the barracks, I tried my best not to hurry, because I didn't want to attract any attention. It was best to act as normally as possible.

The boxes so obstructed our vision that we did not notice the TV reporter hurring towards us until it was too late. "Excuse me, sir, what do you think about the new president?"

"Sorry," I said to the reporter. "Can't talk. I've gotta take this Materia over to Al-Junon."

"Hey, wait," Hart said to me as I tried to brush by the reporter. "We can be on TV. I want to be on TV!"

"But..." I tried to protest. The reporter was looking at me strangely. I sighed, set down the crates of Materia, and took the microphone. I noticed the reporter was from SIN (which made sense, since all the competing networks had been crushed or acquired by Shinra years ago), and arrived at an appropriate response. "I think President Rufus is a real swell guy," I said. "He's super-dee-duper!"

"Hi, mom!" Hart said, waving at the TV camera.

I jabbed him in the side with my elbow. "Knock that off," I whispered.

"And what about you?" the reporter asked, handing the microphone to Hart.

Hart put down his Materia boxes and took the microphone. "Yeah, I'd have to say this is a great moment for the Shinra company. It gives me a real warm fuzzy feeling inside. Rufus is a real new age Shinra president." Somebody must have picked up on that phrase and liked it a lot, because within an hour it was on every one of those cheesy "RUFUS" banners.

"C'mon, Hart, let's get going," I urged.

"- and I want to say 'hi' to everyone back home in Midgar," Hart was saying. "Especially -"

I grabbed the microphone from Hart and shoved it back at the reporter. "Well, we've got to be going," I said. I turned around to pick up the Materia, but it was gone! Another Shinra worker must have taken it.

"The Materia's gone!" I exclaimed.

"Let's go get some more!" I urged. We ran back to the Gelnika and looked into the plane's storage room. It was empty.

"Now what are we going to do?" I wondered.

Hart scooped up a few loose Summon Materia from the floor and stuffed them in his pockets. "I guess we'd better head back to the barracks."

We left the Gelnika and took the elevator out of the airport. As we were walking through the gateway to the main city, we found Tseng running down the hall. "There you are!" Tseng asked. "What happened to you?"

"We got... delayed," I said, glaring at Hart. "And we lost the Materia."

"We don't have any time to worry about that now!" Tseng said. "The parade's starting! You'll be the only MPs out in the city if you don't get over there quicky! Hurry!"

"Um... okay," I said. We ran out into the street. A huge mass of Shinra MPs were marching by in perfect formation. I scrambled to join them.

"Not yet!" Tseng shouted from inside. "Wait until there's an opening."

I tried to back away from the parade. "No!" Tseng shouted.

"But..." I protested.

"Now! Go! Hurry!" Tseng shouted.

Hart and I ran towards the parade. "No!" Tseng shouted. "Not now!"

"You just said -"

"What do you think you're doing?" Tseng yelled at me.

"Uh... what the hell is going on?" Hart asked.

"Quick! Go!" Tseng shouted, pointing.

We ran towards the parade. "Don't move!" Tseng said. "It's not -" He broke off when I punched him in the forehead and knocked him out.

"I didn't want to do that, but this stupid parade is really making me mad," I commented. "Let's go find Mukki and Palmer."

We ducked into an alley and hurried back towards the barracks where we were staying. We almost collided with two people running in the opposite direction. We tried to step to the right to avoid them, but they also stepped in the same direction. So we stepped left, and so did they.

"I hate it when this happens," I muttered. Then I recognized who they were -- it was Johnny and Mukki. "Hey, Johnny!" I exclaimed.

Johnny peered at me in the gloom until he recognizedme. "Tortellini! Hart!" Johnny said. "Good to see you! AVALANCHE is hijacking a ship to Costa Del Sol! Come on!"

We followed them to the Junon docks. Rufus and Heidegger were standing in front of a ship, accompanied by a few Shinra MPs. Rufus was giving a speech and obsessively rubbing his hair. "Who is the boss of you? Me! I AM THE BOSS OF YOU!"

The Shinra MPs all saluted with their guns. Rufus and Heidegger turned and marched on board the ship. One of the MPs took off his helmet and scratched his head. It was Cloud.

"Hey... Cloud!" I hissed.

Cloud turned towards us. "Who -- oh, you're Domino, right?"

"We were going to get you some Materia, but it got kind of lost," I apologized.

"We did manage to salvage a bit though," Hart added. He dug into his pocket, produced a Shiva materia (of course, AVALANCHE later covered this bit up by having Priscilla give it to them), and tossed it to Cloud. Cloud nodded in response and boarded the ship. We followed him.

"Where's Palmer?" I asked Johnny and Mukki.

"He got held up," Mukki explained. "Scarlet needed his help programming her VCR."

"So what's our plan?" Johnny asked me.

"We really gotta find out what Sephiroth is up to," I said. "I mean, we all thought he was dead, but now he's back. Something's up here, but I don't know what. And since AVALANCHE's trailing Sephiroth for the time being, we'd best stick with them."

Chapter Text

The Shinra boat proceeded towards Costa Del Sol. We milled about the deck, disguised as Shinra MPs (although Mukki was posing as a sailor as no armor fit him). I pondered the mysteries of Spam. A few hours into our voyage, Hart rushed up to me, an urgent look on his face. "Tortellini, I just heard a rumor that Sephiroth and Jenova are on board this very ship."

"Gee, everybody's here, aren't they?" I said wryly. "Us, AVALANCHE, Shinra, and now Sephiroth."

Hart produced a compass from his pocket. "I bought this off another sailor. It's a magic compass that points to the nearest source of evil. We can use it to find Sephiroth."

The compass was pointing towards the stairs under the deck. Hart and I followed it down the stairs and around some crates. We hid behind a large box and peered around the side. AVALANCHE was gathered in the hold.... and the compass was pointing directly at them.

"It's pointing at AVALANCHE!" I hissed.

"It must be defective," Hart whispered back, puzzled.

"So... Sephiroth's on this ship, huh?" Aerith was saying.

"Forget Sephiroth... what about those damn Shinra?" Barret said.

"I'm.... not feeling well," Yuffie mumbled through her hands, which her tightly clenched over her mouth. She hurried up onto the deck.

The compass needle jerked to point towards the door to the engine room. "Hey... it moved!" I hissed.

"He's in the engine room," Hart said.

AVALANCE was still conversing on the other side of the room. I stood up and walked over to them. "Hey-a, guys," I said nonchalantly, tossing and catching the compass. "Sephiroth's in the engine room, you know." You might note that the events here are different from what AVALANCHE claims happened (as always); I can't understand why they found it necessary to cut me out of something as inane as telling them that Sephiroth was in the engine room. It's like they're trying to cover up my entire existence or something.

"He's what?" Tifa said.

"You heard me," I said. "Sephiroth's in the engine room. Come on, let's go get him. Time's a-wastin'." I threw open the door and pushed Cloud through.

Sephiroth, Kefka, Zeikfried, and Hel Spites were seated on the floor of the engine room, engaged in a game of Parcheesi. Sephiroth looked up as the door opened. "Dammit, not again," he said. "You heroes are always interfering with our plans... and all we want to do is finish our Parcheesi tournament."

"Look, I didn't mean to bother you, I -" Cloud started.

"Don't wimp out; you're the hero, get in there and kick his butt," I said. Something prodded me in the side and I turned. It was Hart, trying to hand me one of the Summon Materia he'd picked up -- Ifrit. I took it and gave it to Cloud. "Here, you can use this."

Sephiroth stood up, kicking the Parcheesi board aside. "Hey," Kefka protested. "I was winning. That sucks." Disappointed, he teleported away, and was soon followed by Zeik and Hel.

At that point, Hart and I quickly excused ourselves, leaving AVALANCHE to the fighting. Fighting wasn't our job; we were the brains of the operation (or so we thought at the time; AVALANCHE later considered us not part of the operation at all). Things must have resolved themsleves down there, because the ship continued on to Costa Del Sol without incident.

When we got to Costa Del Sol, the four of us -- Hart, Mukki, Johnny, and I -- snuck off the ship and into town. Our first order of business was finding an inn. I'd gotten up at 5:30 yesterday to put up those stupid posters, and spent a sleepless night on the Shinra boat.

We didn't have much in the way of money (as this was originally going to be a quick trip to Junon, courtesy of Shinra), but I challenged the proprietor of the inn to a game of pool, which I won, with the aid of my cue, a drill, and some weights... but, uh, you didn't hear that, okay? Besides, it was either that or storm the Shinra villa (which would have be fun, but we wanted to retain our ties to Shinra for as long as possible).

The next day, Hart decided to sell some of the remaining Summon Materia he'd picked up in Junon to get us some travelling money. When he got to the Materia shop in Costa Del Sol, however, he found it closed. The shop had been looted by an intern -- Yuffie. Hart explained the situation to Butch, the shop's owner. Butch asked to come with us to get his Materia back and bring Yuffie to justice, and of course we agreed. I never did trust Yuffie, and at the time I couldn't imagine why AVALANCHE had hired her... in retrospect, however, she fits right in with the rest of those backstabbing, double-crossing, liars. By the way, Butch sold Pearl and Aero Materias, but AVALANCHE wanted him to be forgettable, so they wiped out those Materia.

Hart and I located Johnny and Mukki and introduced them to Butch. Johnny reported that he'd seen Professor Hojo on the beach. Since Hart and I were still on good terms with Shinra on the surface, we thought we might be able to weasel some info out of him.

We were on the way down to the beach to chat with him when a nearby pay phone started ringing. For no real reason (it seemed like a good idea at the time), I picked it up.

"Hello?" the caller said. "You may have already won 10 million gil... if you can answer this simple trivia question. What is the first name of the mayor of Midgar?"

I almost threw the phone through the side of the booth in excitement. For once luck was on my side. I barely managed to say "Tortellini" through my gleeful laughter.

"Good," the person on the other end said. "I had to make sure it was you. This is Holzoff."

My laughter broke off. "What?" I asked. "You mean I didn't win anything?"

"No, I was just making sure that it was you on the other end. Can I talk to Hart?"

"Damn you, Holzoff, I really thought I was going to win something!" I shouted angrily. This was not funny.

"Look, I'm sorry, but it's the only way I could think of to make sure it was you. Now can I talk to Hart? This is important."

"I'm going to pay you back for this someday, Holzoff, and it won't be pretty," I grumbled into the receiver as I set the phone down and went to find Hart.

Hart took the call and talked in worried tones with Holzoff. After a minute or two of conversation, Hart hung up. It was not good news. The blueprints for Hart's cat-shaped spy robot had been stolen off his desk when Holzoff and Zangan were holding swivel-chair races in the hall. I don't hold it against them, though... those chairs are addictive.

There was nothing we could do about the stolen plans at the moment, so we proceeded on to our interview with Hojo. Professor Hojo was sitting on a lawn chair on the beach, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and lei and sipping a glass of lemonade with a little umbrella in it.

"You look like an idiot," I said. It wasn't the most tactful way to begin a conversation, but that shirt was giving me the heebie-jeebies. I still get nightmares just thinking about it.

Once I averted my gaze from the horrendous tackiness of that shirt, our conversation went fairly smoothly. Hojo agreed to loan us his private seaplane to chase Sephiroth with.

Our party -- now including Butch -- took the seaplane down south and parked it near the Gold Saucer. AVALANCHE had already left town and we needed to catch up with them. There wasn't time to hike through the Corel Mountains, although it would have been nice to check out the old Corel Draw for memories it brought back... the first AVALANCHE meeting... Barret taking over the organization... the avalanche and the idiotic name we got from it... Barret talking in fonts... hmm, maybe we didn't miss much after all. AVALANCHE beat up a poor baby cockatrice for the sake of a piddly treasure, or so I heard, but that's about it.

Upon landing, we left Hojo's seaplane in a safe spot and headed for North Corel. We asked around town and found that AVALANCHE hadn't been in town, but Sephiroth had, and he'd headed for the Gold Saucer. "Hey, we're ahead of them," I said, pleased. "Now let's see if we can catch up with Sephiroth."

"What's with this whole 'Get Sephy' plot anyway?" Johnny asked. "Are we going to do anything besides chase Sephiroth all the way around the planet?"

"Not if we don't catch up wtih him," I said. "Let's pay a visit to the Gold Saucer."

We took the Ropeway out to the Gold Saucer. After a thorough search of the whole place, we learned that Sephiroth had already left, heading southwest. "Let's go have a chat with Dio; maybe he can pass the word on to AVALANCHE for us."

The five of us jumped into the chute to take us to the Battle Square. On the way to Dio's office, we ran into a caped cat riding a huge white stuffed Moogle. "Hey," Hart said. "That looks like my -"

"Howdy, y'all," the cat said through a megaphone. "Can I tell your fortune?"

"Um... okay," I said.

"Tortellini, that's -" Hart tried to say.

The Moogle started rocking back and forth. A piece of paper slid out of its mouth. The cat took it and handed it to me. "Your lucky color is red," I read. "No, it's not, it's blue. And that's not even a fortune!"

"I'm still getting the irons wrinkled out... oops, I mean the wrinkles ironed out," the cat said. "Y'all come back now, y'hear?"

"I recognize that accent... Reeve!" I exclaimed.

"Did you steal my Cait Sith robot blueprints?" Hart demanded. "Reeve, you -"

Reeve / Cait Sith interrupted with a non-sequitur. "So what are y'all doin' in this here Gold Saucer? I thought you guys were supposed to be back in Midgar by now."

This could be trouble, I thought. If Reeve told Heidegger that we'd slipped off to help AVALANCHE, we'd have Shinra's goons on our tail in addition to Sephiroth's. "The Submarine Chase game broke, so Shinra sent Hart and I out here to fix it," I lied.

"Are you sure 'bout that?" Reeve asked. "That sounds like an awfully fishy story to me."

Just then, one of the Gold Saucer's Chocobo-suited mascots waddled up to Cait Sith. "Hey, Cait Sith, do you know when they're fixing the Submarine Chase game?" it asked.

Cait Sith looked at us. "Sorry. I guess y'all are telling the truth."

I stared at Cait Sith in numb shock. "I... we... "

"What y'all waitin' for? Go fix the game."

With Reeve's Cait Sith robot following us, Hart and I stumbled dumbly to the Wonder Square, where we stopped in front of the Submarine Chase game. Some wires were hanging loosely out of the side of the submarine, and the monitor was black.

"Tortellini, it really is broken!" Hart whispered. "What are we gonna do?"

"I know! We g-"

"Cut it," Hart said, clamping a hand over my mouth. "No more PaRappa references, remember?"

"Hey, git to work, y'all," Reeve said.

Hart took a screwdriver and started unscrewing some panels on the submarine. With Cait Sith staring over our shoulders, I grabbed a flashlight from the pile of tools stacked near the machine and shone it into the mess of wires inside the sub.

"I don't know a thing about how this works," I whispered to Hart.

"Neither do I," Hart whispered back.

I grabbed a hammer and pounded mindlessly on the side of the game. "Man, this thing is really messed up," I announced loudly.

Hart tugged on some wires. A huge burst of flame shot out of the far side of the submarine. Cait Sith jumped back in time to avoid being toasted. "Sorry about that," Hart apologized as he grabbed some random wires and connected them.

I found a tube on the underside of the submarine and banged it a couple of times with my hammer. "That submarine looks in worse shape than when y'all started," Cait Sith said.

"Nonsense, we're doing great," Hart said. "See, look." He reached up and flicked the game's "on" switch. The submarine lurched off its supports and rocketed backwards, nearly crushing Cait Sith beneath it.

"That's it!" he shouted as the Moogle picked itself and the cat off the ground. "Y'all are frauds! You ain't here to fix the game! You're going down... to the prison!"

We were promptly seized by several nearby Shinra MPs, hauled to the Battle Square, and tossed down the chute into the Corel Prison. We were joined shortly thereafter by Johnny, Mukki, and Butch.

"Well, this is a fine kettle of Chocobos," Butch said. "I wonder if Coates is still running this place?"

"Who?" I asked.

"Fred Coates," Butch explained. "He's an old friend of mine. He runs the Corel Prison -- or at least, I know he used to."

Butch took us to the prison director's office. Upon entering, we found the place in complete disarray -- the furniture was knocked over and there was visible damage to both the furniture and the walls. "Looks like there's been a fight," Johnny observed.

"What tipped you off?" Butch said sarcastically. He walked to a door on the side of the room and peered inside. "Just what I thought... this is the elevator up to the Gold Saucer."

We hopped in the elevator. Butch threw a lever and the elevator rose up back into the Gold Saucer. When it stopped, we got off and stepped into the Chocobo jockeys' lounge. An unconscious Mr. Coates and Dio were lying on the floor. A man with a gun-arm was running towards the door on the other end of the room. Seeing us, he seized a Chocobo-suited mascot, ducked behind it, and pointed his gun-arm at it. "Don't move or the Chocobo gets it!"

"Barret?" I said in surprise. Then I looked closr. "Wait... that's not Barret. That's some other guy."

"I am Dyne!" the man roared. "Do not interfere with me! I am on a holy crusade to rid the world of pagers! The Planet has spoken!"

"Really? It did?" Hart asked.

"Well... not the Planet itself," Dyne admitted after a short pause. "It was actually the Yellow Clown that visited me in a dream and told me. But I'm sure if the Planet had spoken to me, it would have said the same thing."

"Of course," Hart said sagely.

"Wait a second," Dyne said, waving his gun-arm at us. "I recognize you... Mayor Domino of Midgar." Dyne did a double-take. "YOU! YOU!!! You're the one who is behind all this evil! Die, infidel!" Dyne started firing at us. Mukki and I dodged behind pillars, while Johnny, Hart, and Butch dived under a table. One of the Summon Materias -- it was Ramuh -- rolled out of Hart's pocket and fell on the floor.

"He's completely insane!" Johnny said under his breath.

"So I noticed," I replied.

"Watch this," Mukki said. He unhooked a mirror from the wall and held it ready, close to his chest. As Dyne charged up and fired a Big Shot blast from his gun-arm, Mukki jumped out from behind the pillar and held the mirror in the path of the fireball. The fireball ricocheted off the mirror and smashed into a chandelier. Dyne released his Chocobo hostage and dodged backwards as the chandelier smashed into the ground.

"BRICK!!" Mukki cried.

We rushed towards Dyne, who fled backwards out of the jockeys' room. "Good work, Mukki," I said. "A chandelier needs to get shot down in every story."

"Aren't we chasing him?" Johnny asked, pointing at the door.

"What about Fred and Dio?" Butch countered, looking down at the unconscious pair.

"Let's get Dyne, then we can worry about them," I said. I ran into the main area of the Chocobo Square. Several dead Shinra MPs were lying on the floor. Dyne was backing into the center of the room, waving his gun-arm at the survivors. As I entered the room, I dived at Dyne and tackled him around the legs. He fell across the ticket counter and spun up out of my grasp.

Dyne ran across the room, shot open the door to the Chocobo track, and ran through. I scrambled to my feet and chased him. Dyne seized the reins of a yellow Chocobo -- a real one, not a mascot -- and jumped on. "Run!" he bellowed at the Chocobo. Frightened, the bird took off running. I looked around the track, jumped on a red Chocobo, and gave chase.

Dyne glanced back over his shoulder, and, seeing me, opened fire with his gun-arm. I dodged back and forth across the track while still chasing Dyne. As I passed by one of the sign-carrying Moogles, I yanked the sign from its hands and hurled it at Dyne's Chocobo. Dyne dodged out of the way.

"Tortellini!" a voice behind me shouted. I waited until Dyne and I were rounding a curve (leaving Dyne temporarily unable to fire at me) and risked a quick glance backwards -- it was Johnny, riding on his own Chocobo. "Catch!" he shouted, throwing me a Right Arm of Bomb he had picked up from the Chocobo Square's prize bucket. I caught it -- carefully -- and held it ready to throw.

Dyne and I came into a straightaway. I clutched the reins with one hand and raised the Right Arm of Bomb to throw with the other. Seeing it, Dyne fired at with his gun-arm. One of the bullets pierced the item and it burst into flames. "Crap!" I shouted, quickly tossing the combusting Arm away. It hit the track and spun into a wall, spewing flames in all directions.

I whistled. "Wow, they could round up a whole bunch of those and sells 'em for big bucks on the Fourth of July," I said. The Fourth of July, as everybody knew, was Shinra Day, which commemorated the founding of the Shinra company and was typically celebrated with fireworks.

I heard another set of Chocobo steps from behind. "Never fear, Chocobo Joe is here!" Chocobo Joe exclaimed as he rode by me on his black Chocobo Teioh. "I shall put on my magic gloves of glory and - oh yeah, we weren't going to do PaRappa references."

"It's okay," I said to him as our Chocobos ran side by side. "Hart's not here."

"Let me tell you about the time I..." Chocobo Joe's voice trailed off as he started talking faster and faster, quickly becoming unintelligible. It stopped completely when Joe and I realized that Dyne had halted his Chocobo and was waiting for us in the middle of the track.

"Surprise," Dyne said, holding a metal rod out in front of Chocobo Joe.

"POLE!" I shouted urgently at Joe. It was too late. The rod smacked Joe neatly across the shoulders, knocking him backwards off Teioh, who kept running. Dyne snickered and started his own Chocobo running again.

I tried to reach forward and knock Dyne off his Chocobo, but he was too far ahead. Dyne raised his gun-arm to fire again. At this close a range, I could be in trouble. I considered bailing off my Chocobo, but given the speeds we were running at, that might not be very safe -- but it was probably better than being shot.

Before I had to chance to bail out, I heard the hum of a motor and Cloud's Hardy Daytona motorcycle raced by me. Cloud pulled up alongside Dyne and knocked him off his Chocobo with a sweep of his sword. Dyne landed with a thump on the ground, but fired his gun-arm at Cloud's motorcycle as it rounded a bend. He punctured the rear wheel, causing the motorcycle to crash into the wall of the track. Cloud was thrown over the front and smashed into the wall.

Dyne scrambled to his feet and ran for the exit of the track. We'd just about completed a lap, so the exit was nearby. Dazed, Cloud staggered to his feet to chase him and promptly fell down. "You must still be feeling a little woozy," I said. "You should have been wearing a helmet, you know."

After helping Cloud to his feet, I ran off the track and into the Chocobo Square. Dyne was gone, but my buddies, Reeve's Cait Sith robot, and the rest of AVALANCHE were there.

"Where's Dyne?" I asked.

"The guy with the gun-arm?" Tifa asked. "He just ran out the door. Barret went after him."

Johnny burst through the doors from the track on his Chocobo. "Where is he?" he explained.

"AVALANCHE and I'll take care of Dyne," Cait Sith said. "You guys help the wounded." I noticed Reeve was now refraining from using his accent when talking as Cait Sith.

I started to protest, but Butch shook his head. "They're the ones with all the weapons," he pointed out.

"You do have a point there," I admitted.

"Follow me," Cait Sith said. The cat robot bounded out of the room on his Moogle, followed by the rest of AVALANCHE.

We did a quick search of the Gold Saucer. Most of Dyne's victims were dead, but Dio and Mr. Coates were okay. "Who was that masked man?" Mr. Coates asked.

"He was Dyne," Butch said. "But he wasn't masked."

"Hey, it's Butch!" Mr. Coates said upon recognizing his friend. "What are you doing here, man?"

"I'm trying to get my stolen Materia back," Butch said. "I'm with Mayor Domino here and his friends."

After some boring conversation that I won't bother repeating, Fred Coates decided to come with us. Dio offered us a buggy as a reward for our good deeds (even if we did break the Submarine Chase game), but we already had Hojo's seaplane, so Dio said he'd leave it for AVALANCHE.

By the way, I have no idea why none of this made it into AVALANCHE's highly-fictionalized version of the story, because it was the coolest part of the whole game. It was like a combination of the Chocobo races and the motorcycle chase -- you raced on Chocobos, but you had to dodge Dyne's fire while chucking Right Arms of Bomb back at him, and for some reason the Juicy Fruit song played in the background. If you managed to knock off all of Dyne's life bar, you won the Giant of Bab-il Summon Materia (which was also tragically cut). Sadly enough, AVALANCHE seemed to find it necessary to drastically butcher any scene in which I did any more than hand them a keycard. But it was really cool, let me tell you...

Chapter Text

No sooner had we left the Gold Saucer than Tseng dropped by in a Shinra helicopter. He was on assignment to find some "Huge Materia" and couldn't stick around, but he offered us a warning that the other Turks had finally found a save point in Persona and were out on duty again. Tseng also informed that AVALANCHE was headed southwest to Cosmo Canyon -- the party was now travelling with Reeve's Cait Sith robot, which was reporting on their every move back to Shinra.

We ran into AVALANCHE only once on the way to Cosmo Canyon. They were travelling through the forests near Gongaga Town in their buggy, and, as Tseng had said, Cait Sith was with them. I tried to warn them that the robot was a spy. First, I tried to flag down the buggy with a large needly tree branch, but they kept going.

I ran after the buggy. "Cait Sith is a spy!" I shouted.

They didn't seem to hear me through the windows of the buggy. Still holding the branch, I tried to spell out "THE CAT IS A SPY" using the semaphore flag system.

"What is he doing?" Aerith said, staring out the window (AVALANCHE's dialogue provided for me by Reeve when we were back on speaking terms).

"Perhaps we should stop," Red XIII suggested.

"We don't have time," Cloud said as he drove the buggy. "The Turks are after us. If Domino's got something important to say, I'm sure I'll find a way to find it."

The buggy was gradually gaining on me as I ran alongside it, trying to keep it. I had one last chance -- I tried to spell out the words "THE CAT IS A SPY" with my arms.

"Is he trying to say something?" Aerith wondered.

"It looks like that YMCA thing to me," Barret said.

As the buggy rolled off into the distance, I gave up and trudged back to my party. We followed AVALANCHE (in hopes of warning them again) around the southern end of the continent to Cosmo Canyon.

I wasn't sure that I'd be all that welcome in Cosmo Canyon, as it was only recently that I had been expulled from the town when Hojo kidnapped Red XIII, so we decided to avoid the city. Hart snuck in briefly to repair AVALANCHE's buggy, then we set off for Nibelheim.

When we arrived in town, we found that for some reason that I still don't understand, the town was not burned down and in fact was in an identical condition to its pre-Sephiroth state. To make things weirder, the town was swarming with weird guys in black robes who were talking about "The Reunion."

"This place is creepy," Fred (Coates) said.

"Isn't there anybody here who's sane?" Mukki wondered.

We visited each house, knocking on the door. When a black-robed figured invariably opened it, we asked it if it wanted to buy any Girl Scout cookies, and the figure always slammed the door shut. On about the fifth house, we were greeted by a normal-looking woman.

"Do you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" I asked her.

"Why are you selling Girl Scout cookies?" the woman asked.

"Uh... my daughter is sick, so I'm standing in for her," I said hastily.

"Sure, give me some of the Chocobo-shaped ones," the woman said, reaching for her checkbook.

"Never mind," I said, slamming the door shut in the woman's surprised face. We fled from the house to the safety of the town square.

"Maybe we should try a different approach," Johnny suggested with a distant look on his face.

I suddenly turned to stare at him. "Johnny! You're from Nibelheim, aren't you? Is the place always this creepy?"

"Not when I left," Johnny said. "It was a perfectly normal town." He thought for a moment, then spoke again. "You know, Zangan is from Nibelheim, and he left after I did."

"Let's call him," Hart suggested. He walked to a pay phone, and, not having any money, dialed our office in the Shinra building collect. After a brief discussion, he hung up. "He says it's a quote 'evil conspiracy of ruthless, murderous, death-worshipping fanatics.'"

"All those guys work for the tobacco industry?" I asked incredulously.

"And he also said to check out the Shinra Mansion," Hart said with a nod to the large mansion on the outskirts of town.

We proceeded over to the Shinra Mansion. "Why does it always have to be a haunted mansion?" Butch asked. "That's so cliche. Why can't there be a haunted furniture store or something?"

Mukki shrugged, hefted a crowbar, and smashed out of the front windows. As we climbed in, Hart asked nervously, "Isn't this illegal? Breaking and entering?"

I stared at him. "We've been supplying an underground terrorist group opposing the world's strongest organization, we stole a load of Materia, hijacked a ship, and disguised ourselves as phony repairman, and now you're worried about breaking and entering?"

"I was just wondering if we ought to be doing this, that's all," Hart said.

After a long glare from me, he decided to remain silent, and we entered the Shinra Mansion. We split up to explore the mansion. Hart and I took the west side of the second floor.

We were finding nothing until Hart's shoe came untied. While he was tying it, I moved on ahead. There were several doors at the end of the hall. I opened the one on the right side and peered in. A huge red and green monster stared down at me.

I screamed and slammed the door shut. Hart rushed up. "What's going on?" he asked, reaching for the door.

I pushed his hand away. "Don't.. open... that... door."

"Why?" Hart asked. "What -" He was interrupted when the huge monster burst through the door. We both screamed and fled. The monster lumbered after us.

I looked backwards. The hall ended abruptly behind us. "We're trapped," I said.

"Let's run under its legs," Hart suggested. The monster trudged towards us, one of its hands dragging on the ground. We sprinted under its legs and ran without looking back.

With a growl the monster turned to pursue us. We fled through the door the monster had smashed through. "Now why did we do that?" I wondered after a moment. "This is a dead end."

"In more ways that one," Hart said nervously.

The monster lurched through the doorway, but there was a sudden bang and it dropped flat on the ground. A woman wearing a light blue suit and a beret stepped over it. "Are you all right in there?" she asked.

"I think so," I replied. "Who are you? What are you in doing here?"

"Jill Valentine, Raccoon City Police Department STARS Team," the woman introduced herself. She held out her hand to shake. "Don't worry -- I'm a human. I'm looking for my brother Vincent. Have you seen him?"

"Vincent... Valentine?" I repeated. "He was a Turk like thirty years ago or so. He couldn't be your brother."

"He's supposed to be in this mansion," Jill insisted.

"Well, I suppose you can come with us," Hart said. "But I don't think you'll find your brother."

Jill looked down at the monster. "We'd better do something about this thing. It's only stunned."

"Let's put in the safe," Hart said, pointing at the safe on the wall.

"In the safe?" I asked. "Are you nuts? There's no way we could fit that huge thing in the safe."

"I bet we could if we tried," Hart said.

Holding her head up to the safe, Jill spun the dial and listened carefully. After cracking the combination, she opened the safe and we tried to stuff the monster inside. It was slow going, but it gradually fit inside. With a final shove, we crammed the monster in and slammed the door. Unknown to us, one of the Summon Materia -- Odin -- fell out of Hart's pocket and into the safe on the last push.

Jill dusted her hands off. "That's taken care of," she said. "Now let's look around the rest of this place. By the way, I don't think you've told me your names."

We introduced ourselves and also our non-present friends, then we checked out the room directly across the hall from the one we were in. It was completely dark. "It's dark in here," Hart whispered.

"What tipped you off?" Jill replied.

Something tapped me on the shoulder. "What?" I asked Hart. "Did you tap me on the shoulder?"

"No," Hart said.

"Jill?"

"No."

I digested this information, then I screamed. A light appeared in front of me. It was one of the black-robed cultists, holding up a lit cigarette. "Don't worry," the cultist said. "It's not addictive."

Without me even thinking, my fist flew up and I punched the robed figure across the room. "What'd you do that for?" it grumbled. "I said it's not addictive. We're not targeting children, really we're not."

"Zangan was right," I muttered.

"If you think I'm going to tell you about the secret room behind the stone wall in the northeast corner of the second floor, you're wrong," the figure continued. "So leave me alone. Er, that is, I mean - you didn't hear me, okay?"

We didn't hear anymore of what the figure said, because we were already running out of the room. "Hey!" the cultist shouted after us. "You didn't hear me say that, remember?"

After gathering up the rest of the group, we proceeded to the stone wall. I touched it and it opened, revealing a spiral staircase that led to some caves under the mansion.

"Hey, there's a door up there," Johnny said. He walked up to it and tested it, but it was locked.

Fred handed Jill a lockpick. "Here, take this lockpick. You, the master of unlocking, should be able to use it."

Jill picked the lock on the door and we stepped inside. The room was taken up mostly by several coffins. "Coffins," Butch observed.

"Tortellini..." Hart said nervously. "Please tell me that coffin didn't just move."

"That coffin didn't just move," I repeated. "I think it did, though."

"That's what I was afraid of."

The lid of the coffin opened and a red-cloaked figure with dark blue hair peered out. "Go away, I'm trying to sleep," it snapped.

"Vincent!" Jill exclaimed.

"How did you get here?" Vincent asked, staring at her. "You don't want to talk to me." He ducked back into his coffin and slammed the lid shut.

"Vincent!" Jill insisted, opening the coffin back up.

"Leave me alone," Vincent said. "I have committed a terrible crime against humanity."

"YOU wrote the music for San Francisco Rush?" I blurted.

Vincent grabbed the coffin lid from Jill and slammed it down over the coffin without reply. I shrugged and started for the hallway. "And close the door when you leave!" Vincent snapped from inside the coffin. "There's a terrible draft in here at night!"

"Well, that was productive," I said sarcastically.

"I wonder what happened to him," Jill said. "I can't believe he didn't talk to me. All this work for nothing."

"What are you going to do now?" Hart asked Jill.

"I'm going back home," Jill said. "For now, at least. I have to stop Umbrella's latest creation, the F-Virus. Apparently they won't stop until they run out of letters of the alphabet. How about you guys?"

"We're on the tail of an evil villain out to destroy the world," I said.

"Wait, we don't know he's trying to destroy the world at this point in the game," Hart said.

"Sorry, my bad," I apologized. "We're on the tail of an evil villain who may or may not be out to destroy the world. He's probably headed up north through the Nibel mountains."

"That's where I'm going, too," Jill said. "Want a ride?"

"Sure, thanks," I agreed.

"Hey, you helped me out, fair's fair."

We returned to the entrance of the mansion, unlocked the door from the inside, and stepped back out into the sunlight. We were quite surprised to see Sephiroth standing on the doorstep, staring at us with an expression on his face that was a mixture of irritation and bewilderment, with a touch of condescension thrown in for good measure.

"I knew we shouldn't have broken in here," Hart said under his breath.

"Uh, Hart had to go the bathroom," I said to Sephiroth. "So, uh, we just came in here, uh, to use the bathroom. You know. Right. Heh."

We slid by Sephiroth, who had not moved a muscle and remained staring at us. When we had passed, he walked on into the mansion and closed the door behind him as if nothing had happened.

I shuddered. "That was close," I said.

"Me? Why me?" Hart asked me.

"That was Sephiroth," Butch explained to Jill.

"So I take you don't want that ride after all?" Jill said.

We formed into a brief huddle. "If we cross the mountains to Rocket Town, we can stay one step ahead of him," Johnny said.

"Presuming he is going to Rocket Town," Fred countered.

"Where else is he gonna go?" Johnny replied. "He's leading us on a wild-goose chase around the planet."

"So we take the ride?" I asked. I was met with nods around the group.

We walked out of the huddle. "All right, we'll take the ride," I reported to Jill.

"Okay, I parked the truck outside town," Jill said. We followed her out the north gate of Nibelheim. A gray Shinra van was parked not far from the town.

"You're from SHINRA?" Butch said.

Jill coughed embarassedly. "No, uh, actually I stole that truck."

"Oh, that's all right then."

We climbed in the truck and Jill drove off for the road into the mountains. Our crossing through was completely uneventful (monsters never attack people in vehicles) and we arrived at Rocket Town the next morning.

We parked the truck and headed into the city. "Boy, we sure haven't been here for a while," I said to Hart.

Hart looked up at the rocket that gave the town its name. "It's still there... the ol' Shinra-26. Palmer never did get to launch that thing."

From the local citizens, who, as always, dispensed the same information over and over to passing adventurers, we learned that Rufus was on his way to town to see about re-opening the space program. There was also a guy who started telling some really bad puns, and that situation quickly got ugly.

Luckily, the police were sympathetic to us, as they had apparently had to suffer through that guy's puns too, so we only had to spend one night in jail. Following our release the next day, we left the jail and bumped into none other than Palmer himself.

"Tortellini! Hart!" Palmer greeted us. "Long time no see!"

"Heya, guys," Palmer said. "How did you get all the way over here?"

"It's a long story," I explained. "How about yourself?"

"The President and I came to pick up Cid Breakwind's Tiny Bronco," he said. "We're after Sephiroth."

"Us too," Hart said. "Well, actually, we're helping AVALANCHE, who is after Sephiroth."

"Palmer, these are Butch and Fred," I introduced our newest allies. "Butch, Fred, this is Palmer. You've probably heard of him."

"You know, we've kind of hit the end of the line here," Fred mused. "I mean, we've made a full circle around the continent. If Sephiroth keeps going, we're going to need some way to get across the water."

"Hey-hey, how about the Tiny Bronco?" Palmer asked.

"What?" I said.

"The Tiny Bronco," Palmer repeated with a grin. "Rufus and I were going to take it anyway, but what's to prevent us from beating him to it?"

"Hmmmm.... simple, yet effective. I like it."

"All right, I'll go see if Mr. Breakwind's home," Palmer said, waddling off to Cid's house.

Shortly thereafter, Rufus himself arrived in Rocket Town, accompanied by a full trumpet fanfare, a red carpet, a parade of ceremonial Chocobo cavalry, and a trio of juggling monkeys. "Domino," Rufus said upon seeing us standing in the town square. "What are you doing here?"

I wondered whether Reeve had informed Rufus of the events at the Gold Saucer yet. "Palmer brought us out here to help," I said.

"Oh," Rufus replied, uninterested. He knew I was friends with Palmer, so this did not seem too unlikely.

I relaxed. Apparently Reeve had not informed the Shinra management of our unexpected visit to the Gold Saucer. Either he had forgotten about it in all the excitement of the Dyne incident, or he had "neglected" to tell Rufus about it because of his own anti-Shinra feelings -- I never did find out which it was.

Cid Highwind came out of his house to talk to Rufus, and our party slipped away. "What's taking Palmer so long?" Mukki wondered. "He'd better get a moe on before Rufus gets there."

"Maybe we ought to go have a look at the plane ourselves," Johnny suggested.

The stolen Shinra truck was nearby, so we piled in and drove against town to Cid's house. As we pulled up to his fenced-in backyard, we saw Palmer trying valiantly to hold off an angry Cloud, Vincent, and Aerith with his Mako Gun.

"Hey!" I shouted. "What are do they think they're doing?"

"We've got to rescue him!" Hart declared. He slammed the gas pedal down and the truck headed directly towards the fight.

Things all started to happen at once. Our truck crashed through the fence around Cid's yard. The Flying Bronco started to take off. Palmer hit Vincent with a blast from his Mako Gun. Cloud knocked Palmer onto his back with his sword.

Palmer scrambled to his feet and ran for the Flying Bronco. The plane, running on autopilot mode, lurched towards him, its propellers spinning. Palmer dived to the ground to dodge the propeller.

Vincent fired a series of shots at Palmer. Palmer got to his feet and ran away from the AVALANCHE party. The Tiny Bronco spun directly towards Cloud's group. Our truck drove into the yard, directly towards Palmer. There was a strange, muffled, sound from outside the truck.

"Uh...." Hart said.

I looked out the window. "Where's Palmer?" I shouted over the noise the Tiny Bronco was making.

"Er... I think we hit him," Hart said.

The Tiny Bronco drove towards AVALANCHE. Seeing the plane bearing down on him, Cloud jumped onto the wing and pulled Aerith up. Vincent scrambled onto the other wing of the plane.

"What's going on? What are we gonna do?" Butch shouted, running around the truck for no real reason.

"Quick!" I shouted, throwing the truck door open and jumping out. "Let's get that plane!"

"It's Domino!" Aerith shouted as Hart, Johnny, and I rushed across the yard. Vincent held his gun in both hands and took a shot at us.

"We're on your side, you morons!" I shouted. The Tiny Bronco started to take off. I jumped up and grabbed the plane's door handle. The door swung open, leaving me hanging from an open door as the plane flew off across Rocket Town.

"Help!" I shouted.

The plane dived into the town square, where Cid was talking with Rufus. Cid jumped onto the Tiny Bronco as it passed. "Hey you!" I shouted, still hanging from the door. "Help!"

A Shinra MP raised an anti-tank gun to fire at the Tiny Bronco. I swung my feet and kicked him in the head, knocking him onto his back. Another MP started firing with a machine gun. The Tiny Bronco took a hit on its left wing and started to wobble.

"We're going down!" Cid shouted. "Hold onto your drawers and don't piss in 'em!"

The Tiny Bronco spun down into the water and landed with a large splash. I let go of the door and swam to the surface, spitting out water. "Why didn't you pull me up?" I demanded.

"You were trying to take the plane!" Cloud said.

I climbed up onto the Bronco's wing and sat shivering, my clothes drenched. "Yeah, so you guys could use it," I said bitterly. "You didn't have to beat up Palmer, you know -- he was trying to help too."

"We didn't know that," Vincent said quietly.

I stared at him. "Hey... you!" I said, pointing an accusing finger at him. "What are you doin' with AVALANCHE? A couple days ago you'd locked yourself up in a coffin and you sure didn't want to talk to us! So why'd you get out for them?"

"Sssshh," Vincent said, raising a finger to his concealed mouth. "Be vewwwwy quiet. I'm huntin' Sephiwoth."

"The Bronco won't be flying again," Cid observed as he studied the damage the plane had received.

"Maybe we could use it as a boat," Cloud suggested.

"You can do whatever you @$%$%&in' want with it," Cid said.

"Are you coming with us?" Cloud asked him.

"Sure, why not?" Cid shrugged.

"What is this?" I demanded of Cloud. "Everybody you talk to just joins up! By the time this is over you'll have like thirty people in your party, and I'll be still stuck with six."

"It's the sword," Cloud explained. "Chicks dig the sword."

"You know, there is something I was going to tell you, but I can't remember what it is now," I said. I was, of course, trying to remember to inform the group that Cait Sith was a spy. As it turned out, however, it was quite fortunate that I didn't.

Cloud shrugged. "Maybe you'll think of later," he said. "We've got to go back to Rocket Town and pick up the rest of the crew. I'll drop you off there, too. Hey, that rhymed."

Chapter Text

I managed to convince Cloud to take us with him as far as the island of Wutai, where he was headed. He dropped us off on the shore of the island and then headed off with his own gang. I was beginning to irrationally dislike him and the rest of the AVALANCHE, but we were stuck on the same side at the moment.

"So what's the plan?" Hart asked.

I considered this for a while. Wutai had been kicked around pretty badly by Shinra in the past. Perhaps it was time to settle the score -- or, that is, surreptitiously help the city to settle the score. "Let's go have a look around in town."

We set off to the north, following a winding trail up and down mountains and across a number of rope bridges. We were on one of those such bridges when Johnny, who was in the lead, stopped. "Do you hear something?" he asked.

I stopped and listened. A scraping noise from behind was growing louder quite rapidly. I turned just in time to see a street luge bearing down on me. "DO THE DEW!" its rider screamed in my face as the luge bore down on me and knocked me to the side. I suddenly realized I was in fact not standing on anything at the moment. When in a situation like this, it is usually best to grab onto something reasonably solid. I heeded this logic and grabbed onto the nearest solid thing -- the rope that held up the bridge. This succeeded only in causing the entire bridge to sway violently to one side, dumping the rest of our party (those that had not already been knocked off by the luge, that is) off.

We landed in a heap at the foot of the mountains. "Ouch," Mukki said succinctly.

A quick look around our landing site revealed a cave in the side of one of the mountains. We decided to take a look inside. Johnny shone a flashlight around, illuminating a wooden door at the end of a rectangular passage. Johnny cracked open the door and poked his head and flashlight through.

The flashlight was completely unnecessary. Johnny was peering onto the set on a game show. He quickly motioned for us to join him. Three unknown Wutaiians were standing behind booths, and at the rear of the set was none other than Yuffie Kisaragi. What attracted my attention, however, was the giant neon sign proclaiming the name of the show: "WIN MAYOR DOMINO'S MONEY!!"

"Hey!" I shouted, running onto the set. "What are you doing?"

Yuffie looked up at me, stared at me for a while, and then realized who I was. "Oh no!" she cried. She scooped up the prizes stashed behind the set and fled from the cave. The three contestants, after several confused glances around, decided to follow her and were joined by the studio audience.

"Win Mayor Domino's money? This is a joke, right?" I said nervously.

"She took my Materia too," Butch mumbled.

We ran through the cave after Yuffie, following a series of winding tunnels. Fortunately, there only seemed to be one path through the catacombs. We turned a curve and suddenly found ourselves bathed in daylight. I skidded to a halt as I realized I was standing precariously on one of the many hands of the Da-chao Statue.

"Hey, we're in Wutai," Mukki said. That comment was rather obvious, so I chose to ignore it.

I looked down over the Da-chao Statue. "We can get down from here, right?" I asked.

"I think so," Hart replied.

"Hold on," Fred said. "I've got a funny idea." He reached into his pocket, produced a piece of Kleenex, proceeded across the arms of the statue to underneath one of the heads, and quite calmly stuffed the Kleenex up the left nostril. Chuckling, he walked back to join our group.

"That's touching," I said. "Congratulations, Fred, you've just defaced a prominent religious monument."

"I try my best," Fred said.

We descended the Da-chao Statue to the town proper. The first thing I did upon arriving in Wutai was to run to the nearest ChocoMart and check my ATM card. Just as I feared, there was no money left on the card. "Lovely," I said under my breath.

I then went to join the rest of the gang at the famous Turtle's Paradise. As soon as I stepped into the bar, however, I knew something was wrong. The Turks' theme music was playing. I quickly scanned the bar. Elena, Rude, and Reno were seated at one of the tables, drinking.

This called for action. I dug into my pocket, grabbed a quarter, tossed it into the jukebox, and hit the button to play the Chocobo theme. The Turks vanished and were replaced with some rather confused-looking Chocobos.

"That was clever," a voice behind me said.

I knew it was somebody important, because voices behind people always are significant characters. So I turned. It was Tseng.

"Yo, Tseng," I greeted him. "You're back, I see. What've you been up to? And were the rest of the Turks doing out here in Wutai?"

"The rest of the Turks?" Tseng repeated. "I don't have the slighest idea. They're on vacation... maybe they decided to come out here. As for me, I'm hunting down Don Corneo. He's been leaking out Shinra secrets. So I've been sent here to find and kill him."

"But you're going to get the secrets from him instead," I surmised.

"That was sort of the idea," Tseng said. "Although I don't have a problem with killing the guy afterwards. The fewer the people that know what we're up to, the better. Corneo's a twerp anyway."

I gathered up the rest of the gang, introduced Tseng to Fred Coates, and then we followed Tseng to the north end of town, where there was a large bell. Tseng rang the bell and a door opened in the side of the bell platform. "This is Corneo's hideout," Tseng said.

We descended into the hideout with Tseng in the lead. "All right, Corneo, come out with your hands up!" Tseng shouted.

Nobody paid much attention to us. AVALANCHE was in the process of beating up Corneo's flunkies. Corneo himself was nowhere to be seen. "Sorry, Domino, we beat you to it," Tifa said.

"I keep telling you, Corneo ain't here!" one of the flunkies said before Cid bludgeoned him into unconsciousness with the flat of his halberd.

"Yeah, leave us alone," another flunky said.

"Shut up!" Aerith said, poking him with her rod. "What have you done with Cloud?"

"Never heard of 'im," the flunky said. "All we know is that when we got in here, the furniture was knocked over and the boss was gone."

"Hey, you guys," Hart said to AVALANCHE. "I don't think these guys know what's going on, so maybe you should leave them alone."

AVALANCHE reluctantly lowered their weapons. "Thanks, man," the only conscious flunky said to Hart.

"If you're not responsible, perhaps you could enlighten us as to what is happening," Red XIII said calmly from the rear of AVALANCHE's party.

"Huh?"

"What's going on?" Vincent summarized.

"Larry and I, we was down at the store picking up some Pop-Tarts for the boss, and when we got back, the boss was missing and his chair'd been kicked over. We went to look for him when you guys barged in here and started beatin' the crap out of us. Not fair, it was."

"Well, all we know is that we heard the Don was hiding in this town and then fifteen minutes later, Cloud disappears," Tifa said.

"Maybe whoever's responsible for Cloud's disapperance is also connected to Corneo's, did you ever think of that?" Tseng said.

"Shut up, foo'," Barret said. "That's impossible."

"Why?" Tseng persisted.

"'Cause I said so."

"Oooh, that's a great reason," I said.

"But we don't know anybody in Wutai," Tifa said. "Besides Yuffie, that is."

There was a slight pause. "Yuffie," we all said simultaneously.

"C'mon, let's go find her," Mukki urged. Our party hurried out of Corneo's lair. AVALANCHE lingered behind, probably to victimize the last flunky.

"Okay, guys, Yuffie's probably somewhere in town," Johnny said. "We should split up and find her. I'll check the Turtle's Paradise. Butch, you check the Pagoda."

"But they won't let anybody in there," Butch protested.

"Be creative," Johnny said. "You could climb up the side with plungers or something."

"Hey, that's a good idea."

"I'll take the Da-chao Statue," Fred offered.

"Yeah, you just want to stick more Kleenex up its nose," Johnny said.

"The statue's pretty big," I said. "I'll go with you."

"Hart, Tseng, you take the houses," Johnny said. "Mukki, you get the stores."

We each hurried off to our designated location. Coates and I scaled the Da-chao Statue. "I don't see her," I said, looking down on the statue from the highest head.

"She could be hiding," Fred said. "Let's hide and see if she comes by."

"Like where?" As soon as I asked the question, I knew it was a mistake.

"How about in the nose?"

At Fred's insistence, we climbed out on one of the faces of the statue and crawled into the statue's right nostril -- the left nostril still had Kleenex stuck in it. "Fred, it's pitch black in here," I said. "We're not going to be able to see a thing."

I started to climb back out, but I realized that I had no way of seeing what was down there and thus no way of knowing where to step. I was just as likely to step out onto nothing as onto solid footing. After the incident on the bridge to Wutai, I didn't want to repeat that.

We had no choice but to wait in the statue's nostril and hope we were rescued soon. The rest of the group did know where we were, so maybe they'd come and find us when we didn't show up.

"Whose stupid idea was this anyway?" Fred asked.

"I won't mention any names."

We heard footsteps outside on the statue and some scrabbling on rock, but we had no idea what was going on. That was, we had no idea until we heard Tifa declare, "All right, Yuffie! Give it up! Let Cloud go!"

Something was definitely going on out there. "Fred, I'm going to try to see what's happening. Grab my feet." With Fred holding onto my feet, I managed to inch forward and poke my head out of the Da-chao Statue's nostril.

Below us, Cloud and Don Corneo were tied to the statue, hanging upside down. On the statue's palm, across from them, was Yuffie. Yuffie was being confronted by an angry AVALANCHE.

"I didn't do anything!" Yuffie protested.

"Oh, sure," Aerith said. "Cloud just climbed out there and tied himself to the statue, huh?"

"Right," Yuffie said. "No, I know, it was all because of El Nino. Yeah, that's right -- El Nino."

"Don't listen to her!" Cloud said.

Aerith turned to him. "Are you okay out there, Cloud?"

"I think so," Cloud said. "All the blood's running to my head, though."

"Shut up!" Tifa said to Aerith while Cloud was talking. "That's my line!"

"Well, then how come you didn't say it, chump?"

"I couldn't see anything through all that hair of yours!"

"Oh yeah? Well, take this!" Aerith smacked Tifa with her rod.

"Oh, so you want to fight, huh?" Tifa grabbed Aerith's arm and twisted it behind her back.

"Hey, hey, break it up," Barret said as the conflict quickly escalated.

"I don't mean to interrupt, but Fred and I are stuck up in the nostril here," I said. Nobody paid me any attention.

"All right, let's settle this the old-fashioned way," Yuffie said. "Draw your weapons!"

"No can do," Cid said. "I'm terrible at art."

I suddenly heard the click of a gun being loaded and looked around. Then I saw that Corneo was pointing a gun at Yuffie. "Let me go now, you stupid brat," he said.

"Corneo!" Cid said. "@#$%$! I forgot about him!"

This called for action. "Geronimo!" I cried, shaking loose of Fred's grip and diving from the nostril. As I fell, I swung my hand and knocked the gun out of Corneo's hand. It was a perfect move. Now there was the only the problem of my falling to deal with.

I flailed my legs to try to find something to stand on and meanwhile seized Cloud's left arm. Cloud (who was still hanging upside down) reached down with his other arm and grabbed my left arm. I was now hanging right side up, being held by an upside-down Cloud, who was tied to the Da-chao Statue. This was a slight improvement over falling, but not much.

"Tortellini!" Tseng's familiar voice shouted up from below. "Don't worry, we've got you covered!"

I risked a glance down. At the bottom of the statue were Tseng and Hart, who were holding a large mattress. This made me feel slightly better, but that was offset by the experience of looking down all the way to the ground. I lost my lunch. Luckily I missed Tseng and Hart.

"Uh, I could untie you, and then we could fall down on the mattress," I offered to Cloud.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Cloud asked.

"It's no problem!" Fred shouted from up in the nostril. "Watch!" He crawled forward out of the nostril and slid feetfirst into the air. After a long fall, he landed on the mattress and bounced off, unharmed.

"What about Corneo?" I shouted down to them.

"We'll make a conscious effort to avoid catching him," Hart replied. "A tragic accident, you understand."

"Ha!" Corneo said. "You'll never get me! RAPPS!" At his call, a large blue wyvern-type creature swooped down. AVALANCHE rushed to fight it.

Corneo himself reached over and hit Cloud hard on the arm. "Domino, do something!" Cloud shouted. "If he keeps hitting me I'm not sure I can hold on!"

With a mischievous grin, I reached over and gave Corneo a wedgie. With him hanging upside down, it was able to give him an extra-good one too. "Why do you think I just did that to you?" I asked him. "1. Because I'm ready to die. 2. Because I'm sure of victory. 3. Because I'm clueless."

"Two... number two?" Corneo guessed.

"Nope, it's number four, because you suck," I replied. With an extravagant gesture I pulled loose the rope tying him to the statue. He instantly plummeted towards the ground. As they had promised, Hart and Tseng made a conscious effort to avoid catching him. They were quite succesful.

"Okay, now let me go," Cloud said.

With one hand (the other hand holding tight to Cloud's), I pulled out the rope binding Cloud. We fell down to the ground, where Hart and Tseng caught us on the mattress. Meanwhile, having defeated Corneo's Rapps monster, AVALANCHE descended from the statue.

Cloud stumbled off the mattress, a little dazed. "Are you okay?" Yuffie asked. "Do you need mouth-to-mouth or something?"

"NO!" Cloud said quickly. "No, uh, I'm fine, thanks."

"You sure?" Tifa asked. "You look a little woozy."

"Well, now that you mention it..."

Yuffie was attempting to slink away, but Cid stopped her. "Where's our Materia, you little @#$*($%?" he said.

"Yeah, and my money," I added.

Yuffie looked around and saw she had no chance of escape. She sat down to think. "Well," she eventually concluded. "You guys did save me from that Corneo guy. I guess it would be fair to help you out a little. Besides, I know how much you guys need my help."

"Why are you thanking AVALANCHE?" Fred demanded. "We're the ones who did all the work. They just stood there and acted tough." Fred had picked up the gist of the situation quickly, I noted.

"Oh, you were very heroic," Yuffie said, and kissed Fred on the cheek.

Fred screamed, held his cheek, and fell to the ground, where he lay writhing in the dirt. "Quick!" Hart shouted. "Get some disinfectant! Call an ambulance! This is an emergency!"

I ran to the phone and dialed 911. "Help! We need an ambulance at the Da-chao Statue, now! My friend's been kissed by Yuffie!"

"I hope we won't have to amputate his cheek," Hart said.

"Awww, you guys are so mean," Yuffie pouted.

After the ambulance had carted Fred off, we got down to the business of getting our Materia back. Yuffie had returned all the stolen Materia and money to AVALANCHE in a big heap, and none one of us could sort them all out to their original owners.

"How about we divide it half-and-half at random?" Mukki suggested. Mukki and Johnny had turned up around the time Fred was being taken to the hospital.

"No way," Cloud said. "We had a lot more Materia than you did."

"Out of the goodness of your heart, can't you see it fit to donate some Materia to our worthy cause?" Hart asked.

"No," Yuffie said. "Now shut up."

"Well, then what are we going to do?" Tseng asked.

"How about we take all the Materia?" Cait Sith suggested.

Red XIII walked behind our two parties. "May I make a suggestion?" he said. "Since there's no way to sort out the Materia, why don't we award them to the winner of some type of contest?"

"Sounds good," I agreed. "How about swivel chair racing?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of cricket," Red XIII said.

"Cricket?" I repeated.

"Cricket?" AVALANCHE echoed.

I'm not sure how we got talked into agreeing, but it came down to a cricket match with Hart, Johnny, Tseng, and I playing against Cloud, Cid, Aerith, and Vincent. Right at the start, Cloud whacked the ball with his sword and sent it sailing off into the forest. He then proceeded to rack up several hundred runs (or whatever it is that you score in cricket) while we rooted around in the forest for the ball. After he got to about 340, we conceded defeat. Cricket. Why did it have to be cricket?

Oh well.

When Fred got out of the emergency room the next day, we decided to leave Wutai and try to track down Sephiroth on the mainland. AVALANCHE was hanging around in town (now with all our Materia and money, except for the Summon Materia Hart had stuffed in his pocket), so we were on our own.

"I can't help but feel we're forgetting something," Mukki commented as we left town.

"Butch!" I suddenly cried. "We forgot Butch!"

We raced back into town and proceeded to the Pagoda, where Johnny had sent Butch during the hunt for Yuffie. At first I saw nothing of note, but then I noticed the figure clinging to the fifth-story window. After climbing up the pagoda with plungers (as Johnny had suggested), Butch had been unable to climb back down because there was no way to get under the tiered roofs of the pagoda short of jumping all the way down.

With the aid of several ladders, we managed to rescue Butch, who collapsed on the ground, worn out from his overnight ordeal. "I got stuck up there!" he howled. "I couldn't climb back down!"

"If it's any consolation to you, I was stuck in a giant stone nostril for an hour or so," I said.

"Yeah, but I spent the whole NIGHT up there!" Butch wailed. "I did overhear something interesting this morning, though."

"What's that?" Hart asked.

"It's the start of the day, you fool."

"No, what did you overhear?"

"That Yucky twit who stole my Materia was talking with her father," Butch said. "At first they were just planning on how to bring lots of Materia to Wutai. But then Yuffie said something about getting a special pair of Black and White Materia."

"There aren't any black or white Materia," Johnny said.

"Not quite," Butch said. "Not regular Materia, no. But there is one Black Materia and one White Materia. The Black Materia holds the power of the ultimate Black Magic, Meteor; the White Materia the ultimate White Magic. The Black Materia was sealed away by the Ancients in a temple far to the south. The White Materia was passed down by the Ancients; I don't know where it is now."

We'd never heard any of this, but Butch was a Materia dealer, so we weren't going to argue with him. "We can't let Yuffie get her hands on a Materia like that," Butch continued. "We can't let anyone get their hands on a Materia like that. It could wipe out the whole planet."

"Have you suddenly turned into one of those wise old sage guys?" I asked.

"Trust me," Butch said.

"I hate it when people say that," I said.

"So what are we going to do about it?" Mukki asked. "Get down to the temple and get the Materia before anybody does?"

"It's not quite that simple," Butch said. "You see, the temple is protected by an elaborate trap. And we need the proper Keystone to get in."

Butch was doubtlessly about to explain it to us, but a nearby pay phone rang. I raced to it and grabbed the phone. "Hello? You may have already won 10 million gil... if you can answer this simple trivia question. What is the first name of the mayor of Midgar?"

"Holzoff, is that you again?" I asked.

"Hey, Tortellini," Holzoff said.

"I still haven't forgiven you for the last time, you know."

"Look, it was the only way I could think of to identify you. Can I talk to Hart?"

Hart got on the phone and had a lengthy conversation with Holzoff. When he hung up, he turned to us with a smile on his face. "Zangan's found out where Reeve's keeping the controls for Cait Sith."

"Are they going to get it back?" Johnny asked.

I cut in. "I'm starting to come up with a plan here..."

Chapter Text

Now, I'm going to let Zangan tell the next part of the story, because I wasn't actively involved.

As we'd told Hart on the phone, Holzoff and I had found out where Reeve was keeping the controls to the Cait Sith robot. The controls -- a small triangular black box -- were sitting on a file cabinet in Reeve's office.

As part of Tortellini's plan, we were watching AVALANCHE through the aid of a hidden camera Coates had installed in the Ghost Square inn at the Gold Saucer. The party was currently just settling down for the night. "It's time," Holzoff said.

We left Domino's office and walked on up to Reeve's office, several floors above. "Wait outside," I said to Hozloff. "I'll do the talking."

I entered the office, where I was stopped by Reeve's secretary. "Excuse me," she said.

"You're excused," I replied.

"Do you have an appointment?" the secretary demanded.

"This is very important," I dodged the question. "I don't have an appointment, but I needed to talk to Reeve."

"If you don't have an appoi -"

"If you want to keep Mr. Reeve waiting, it's your problem, not mine," I said. "I'll tell him that you kept me out here."

"All right, go on in," the secretary said. It had to be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it still worked.

I entered Reeve's office. Reeve was currently engaged in a heated game of Minesweeper on his computer. I quickly scanned the room. My eyes stopped on the Cait Sith controls, resting on top of Reeve's file cabinet. He hadn't moved them.

I casually sprawled into an office chair. "Heya, Reeve," I said.

Reeve jumped in his chair and turned. He stared at me for a moment, then recognized me. "Oh, it's you," he said. "Domino's intern. Zangan."

"That's my name, don't wear it out."

"Why didn't y'all knock?" Reeve asked, still shaken by my sudden appearance.

"Sorry," I said. I leaned forward in the chair. "Now let's get down to business," I whispered. From the look on Reeve's face, he obviously expected me to talk about AVALANCHE. I, however, would have to disappoint him. "What brand of pencil sharpner do you use?"

Reeve was caught off guard by this question. After a moment of confusion, he took the pencil sharpner off his desk and looked at its bottom. "Shinra," he said.

"Uh, yeah, dumb question," I said. "What model is it?"

Reeve squinted to read the small type. "It's a D4-560."

"The D4-560," I repeated. "I was just wondering because we need a new pencil sharpner in Domino's office. So are you satisifed with the performance of your Shinra D4-560 pencil sharpner?"

"It's a pencil sharpner," Reeve shrugged. "What can I say?"

"I mean, does it deliver premium sharpening quality? Do you get the perfect triangular tip, or does it come out lopsided? How about efficient shavings reduction? All those kind of things are important in a pencil sharpner, you know."

"For the love of the Planet, it's just a stupid pencil sharpner!" Reeve exclaimed. "Who cares?"

I had him right where I wanted him. He thought I was either really weird or just in here to harass him. Now I made my move. "Look behind you, it's a three-headed Chocobo!" I shouted, pointing over Reeve's shoulder.

"Where?" Reeve turned. As an almost nervous reaction, I pounced on the Cait Sith controls, grabbed them, and fled from the office.

"I got the controls!" I shouted as I charged out into the hall. "RUN, HOLZOFF, RUN!"

Holzoff and I fled to the stairs and charged down to the 62nd floor. Behind us, we could hear the pound of footsteps as Reeve hurried after us.

We ran into Domino's office. "We can't stay here," Holzoff panted. "Reeve's right behind us, and he's probably got security after us too."

"So what are we gonna do?" I hadn't really thought this part over.

"We need Selsun power!" Holzoff said, jumping on one of the swivel chairs. I jumped on the other and we took off out of the office. Reeve ran down and was obviously quite shocked to see two guys riding backwards in swivel chairs careening directly towards him.

We bowled over Reeve and headed directly (well, somewhat indirectly -- swivel chairs are kind of hard to control) to the stairwell. "Guards!" Reeve bellowed, jumping to his feet.

Our swivel chairs ricocheted down the stairs. Some Shinra MPs appeared on the stairwell above us and started firing down on us. As were bouncing off the walls in random patterns at high speeds, however, we were hard to hit.

"We've got to hide somewhere," Holzoff urged. He jumped off his swivel chair, sending it crashing into the side of the stairs. A few moments later, I did the same.

"Where?" I asked as we ran out of the stairwell and onto the 60th floor.

"Somewhere they're not going to look," Holzoff said, glancing around the floor. "There!" he exclaimed, pointing. He was pointing at the ladies' room.

"Uh, Holzoff," I started to protest.

"Sssh!" Holzoff urged, dragging me inside. We jumped inside a trash can and tried to remain motionless. Outside, we could hear the MPs accosting passing workers, trying to find us.

While we waited for them to leave, I took out the Cait Sith controls. From the small viewscreen on the monitor, I could see that the robot was currently "asleep" in the Ghost Square. I guided him stealthily into Cloud's room. Oddly, Cloud did not appear to be in his room, but that just made my job easier. I took the Keystone from the bedstand where it lay and headed for the Chocobo Square.

On the way there, I "saw" Cloud and Aerith walking together. At first, I froze, but then I figured it was best to appear casual and nonchalantly guided Cait Sith on to the Chocobo Square.

"Hey... Cait Sith!" Cloud said, hurrying after me.

I was caught now. Now I could just hope I could complete the mission. I ran down the stairs to the base of the Chocobo Square with Cloud and Aerith running after him. I stumbled to a stop at the end of the stairs.

"The Keystone!" Aerith said, recognizing what Cait Sith was carrying.

Cloud took a step towards me. Just then, Tseng's helicopter swooped down and I hurled the Keystone up to it. Tseng reached out the window and caught it with one hand. It was perfect.

"Yes!" I exclaimed triumphantly. (the real me, not Cait Sith)

I was suddenly aware that someone was looking down at me. Guiltily, I glanced up. It was Scarlet. "Aieeee!" Scarlet shrieked. "What are you doing in here?"

"Uh... I -"

"RUN!" Holzoff grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the garbage can, tipping the can over in the process.

Alerted by Scarlet's cry, Shinra MPs came running. Holzoff dragged me into the elevator and punched the down button.

"I told you we shouldn't have hidden in there," I said.

"Honestly, I'm surprised Scarlet even cared."

I looked up at the floor indicator. "Where are we going?"

"Out of here!" Holzoff said. "They're gonna be looking for us all over the building as soon as word gets out."

I waited impatiently for the elevator to arrive at its destination. Trying my best to ignore the elevator music surrounding me, I turned to the Cait Sith controls and tried to talk my way out of the situation with Cloud and Aerith.

The elevator dinged. Holzoff and I charged through the lobby, hurdled the broken Shin-Ra sign, and ran outside. The "golden wire" that we had left for AVALANCHE was still there. We made our way down to the bottom.

"Hope there's nobody on this rope," I grinned as I yanked it down. There were a couple of agonized screams from above. "Heh, heh, my bad."

"Don't laugh too soon," Holzoff said. "They'll send a general alarm out when they realize we've escaped. We'd better move."

We ran through the Wall Market and the wastes to Sector 5. There we made the final sprint across town and into Aerith's house. I slammed the door shut behind us and sank down to the floor, exhausted.

Marlene screamed. "Ms. Gainsborough, two men just ran into the house!" she wailed. Elmyra hurried downstairs, a worried look on her face.

"Don't worry, we're with, uh, AVALANCHE," I said. I suddenly remembered I needed to tell Tortellini we'd done our part of the mission. I fished my beeper out of my pocket and paged him.

Back to me (Domino). While Zangan and Holzoff were stealing the Keystone via Cait Sith, we were hanging out in Gongaga Town, playing Pin The Tail On The Chocobo and generally acting stupid. When Zangan's page came, however, we got right to work.

We loaded up our gear, jumped on Hojo's seaplane (which we were still "borrowing"), and flew on out to the island. Unknown at the time, however, I had forgotten my pager -- a mistake which later turned out to be critical. After parking the seaplane in an isolated cove, we proceeded up through the jungle to the temple.

"I hope Tseng's made it here with the Keystone," Butch said as were crossing the bridge to the temple.

"In a helicopter? From the Gold Saucer to here? Don't worry, nothing could have happened to him."

I spoke these words just as we stepped into the temple itself. I instantly realized they were quite wrong. For one thing, Tseng was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, and furthermore, there was a sword sticking out of his back.

"Tseng!" I cried, standing over him. "TSENG!"

"What happened?" Hart said in hushed tones.

Johnny took the sword and flipped it over in his hands. "Sephiroth," he said simply.

"Sephiroth," I repeated. I still couldn't believe it. Tseng, one of my oldest friends, was dead. He was just a janitor posing as a detective posing as a janitor, and Sephiroth killed him.

"Hey, wait a sec," Johnny said. "This sword's got something inscribed in it." He held the Masamune up towards the light from outside and peered at the tiny inscription. "Made... in.... Taiwan."

There was silence. "Well, I guess even magic swords have to come from somewhere," Mukki said.

"I have a suspicion here," Johnny said. He held the sword out in both hands and brought it down over his knee. It snapped in two and fell on the ground. "Just as I thought. This isn't the real Masamune. This one of those cheap Gold Saucer imitations."

"Someone killed Tseng with a toy sword?" Fred repeated. "And those things are legal?"

"No, you idiot, they killed him some other way and then framed Sephiroth," Hart said.

"Then who -"

"AVALANCHE!" I shouted. Somehow I knew it was them. I should have known it would come to that. Those no-good, lying, double-crossing scumbags had killed Tseng for no reason at all. Now it was payback time. "Let's go get those son-of-a-Behemoths."

"Not without the Keystone, we aren't," Butch said.

"Shoot, you're right," I said. "Now what are we gonna do?"

"I know!" Mukki started. "We g-"

"Cut it," Hart snapped.

And now back to Zangan for a moment (don't worry, this is the last time)...

Things were not presently going well. Holzoff and I were hiding in Aerith's house in Sector 5, controlling Cait Sith. That was all fine, but upon AVALANCHE's arrival at the temple island, Yuffie volunteered to go on ahead for a scouting mission through the jungle. She returned shaken and reported that Tseng was lying dead in the entrance to the Temple, skewered on Sephiroth's Masamune.

Tseng did have the Keystone, however, so we had no choice but to proceed on through the temple. When we got to the temple sanctum, I detailed the plan that Tortellini and I had come up with to AVALANCHE. Cait Sith being just a robot, he would take the Black Materia, which, being the Temple itself, would cause the whole structure to collapse in on itself. Then AVALANCHE could take the Black Materia, and, hopefully, deliver it to Domino's gang.

After seeing off Cloud and Aerith, I returned Cait Sith to the temple sanctum to take the Materia. Just then, however, Reeve and a platoon of MPs arrived at the door of Elmyra's house.

"Zangan!" Holzoff cried. "It's Reeve! He's found us!"

"You can hide in the cellar," Elmyra said.

"I didn't know this house had a cellar."

"That's why it's such a good hiding place."

"Thanks, but we don't want to risk endangering you, too," Holzoff said. "We're going to have to surrender."

"Holzoff, we've got to get the Black Materia first!" I protested, waving the Cait Sith controls at him.

"Well, hurry up!"

"I'm trying, I'm trying!" I said, frantically wielding the controls. In my hurry, Cait Sith stumbled and fell to the floor. I managed to get him back up and hurried to the pedestal where the Black Materia sat.

I grabbed the pyramid-shaped object, but then I remembered you had to solve a puzzle to get the Materia. I held it up to Cait Sith's eyes for a closer look. "Oh no," I groaned. "It's one of those Magic Eye things. I'm terrible at those."

"Here, give it to me," Holzoff said. I forced the controls into his hand and he examined the view screen for a few seconds. "Oh, that's obvious. It's an octopus playing the bugle in a cave underneath Wrigley Field."

The pyramid opened up. In the view screen, the entire room started to shake. "There, we've done it," Holzoff said. "Now let's go." We marched outside, where the Gainsboroughs' house was being surrounded by Shinra troops.

Holzoff dropped the controls and raised his hands. "We surrender," he said.

Domino again.

The entire entrance room of the Temple suddenly started to shake. I noticed the walls were closing in, then I realized the whole room was shrinking. "What's going on?" Mukki demanded.

"They must have got the Black Materia," Butch said. "Quick, we've got to get out of here!"

We ran outside of the temple. "Back, back, get away from the temple," Butch said. "Form one line so I can count you all. Don't back go inside until the bell rings."

"What?"

"Never mind."

We watched as the Temple of the Ancients gradually shrunk to a tiny black sphere floating in the air -- the Black Materia. There was a bright flash of white light and the Materia fell to the bottom of the crater where the Temple had used to be.

Cid wandered out of the foliage. "I'm gonna have a smoke out here," he was saying as he lit a cigarette. "Ahhh... it's really something, having a smoke in a place like this."

"YOU!" I roared, leaping at him. "You killed Tseng!"

Cid ducked back. "What? We didn't kill Tseng, it was Sephiroth."

I was about to beat him up when Hart shouted, "Tortellini, it's Sephiroth!"

I turned. Sephiroth had appeared in the pit where the Temple used to be. Cloud was also in the pit -- he'd just picked up the Black Materia. "Give me the Materia, Cloud!" Sephiroth commanded. "Give it to me!"

"Do something!" Butch shouted. "Don't let him get that Materia!"

I scrambled down the walls of the pit. Cloud was writhing on the ground and holding his head. Then, leaving a ghostly image of himself on the ground, he got up and walked towards Sephiroth.

"What are you doing?" I demanded. "Don't give him the Materia, Clod! ..err, Cloud."

"Give to me, Cloud," Sephiroth repeated. Cloud stepped closer to him.

"NO!" I yelled, jumping up and down in front of Cloud. "Give to ME!"

"Snap out of it, Cloud!" Aerith said, jumping down into the pit.

Cloud, brushed by me and handed the Black Materia to Sephiroth. "You idiot!" I howled, sinking to my knees. "You idiot!"

Chapter Text

The next day, we were back in Gongaga Town. Cloud had given the Black Materia to Sephiroth and then proceeded to attack Aerith. We managed to stop him, but AVALANCHE left before we could get anyway more information from them on Tseng's murder. We then returned to Gongaga Town to consider our next move.

"We've got to keep Yuffie from getting her hands on the other Materia -- the White Materia," Butch said.

"Yeah, but where is this White Materia?" Mukki protested.

"Doesn't Aerith have a white Materia in her hair?" Johnny asked.

"That's it!" Butch said. "The White Materia is a Cetra heirloom... that's got to be it!"

"We've got to stop her!" I said. "We don't know what she's going to go to to get that Materia."

"We don't know that AVALANCHE killed Tseng," Hart pointed out.

"Yes, but it certainly seems likely," I retorted. I thought for a moment. "She might try to frame Sephiroth again. I'd better get in touch with him."

"What?" Hart said. "You can't be serious!"

"I'm not," I said. "Sirius is in Ogre Battle."

"That's the most stretched joke I've ever heard," Fred said. "Somebody shoot me."

Unfortunately, there were no phones in Gongaga Town, so I had to hike all the way up to North Corel to use one. I called directory assistance and asked for Sephiroth. I heard his phone ring. And ring. And ring. Eventually, he answered it. "Who are you?" he snapped. "How did you get my phone number? I don't need new siding, thank you very much."

"Wait!" I shouted. "This is Tortellini Domino -- the mayor of Midgar. Somebody's framed you for killing Tseng. We think it's AVALANCHE but we're not sure. And now they're trying to get the White Materia from Aerith, and we think they might pin the theft on you, and... and... and I just thought you might want to know."

There was silence.

"Could you repeat that?" Sephiroth said eventually. "We've got a bad connection."

"Wait!" I shouted. "This is Tortellini Domino -- the mayor of Midgar. Somebody's framed you for killing Tseng. We think it's AVALANCHE but we're not sure. And now they're trying to get the White Materia from Aerith, and we think they might pin the theft on you, and... and... and I just thought you might want to know."

"AVALANCHE, you say?" Sephiroth said coolly.

"Yeah, AVALANCHE."

There was a sudden sound. "Can you hold?" Sephiroth asked. "That's Kefka calling about our parcheesi tournament." After a brief pause, Sephiroth got back on the line. "Where were we?"

"AVALANCHE."

"Oh, yeah. Well, I'll look into it." Sephiroth then hung up.

Although I was not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed, I returned to Gongaga Town. By the time I got back, it was almost night, so any plans had to wait until tomorrow.

"So how'd it go?" Hart asked me the following day.

"To be honest, I'm not sure," I said.

"Well, we don't have time to wait around," Hart said. "AVALANCHE's heading up north. We've got to catch up with them before Yuffie can swipe the Materia."

We hopped on Hojo's seaplane and flew on up to northern continent. After parking the plane, we headed on up to the nearest sign of civilization -- Bone Village. A few minutes in town revealed we'd need a Luna Harp to pass through the forest to the City of the Ancients.

"Don't worry," a somewhat familiar voice said. "I've taken care of that."

We turned towards the source of the voice. Sephiroth was lounging against the trees. "S-S-Sephiroth?" Johnny said.

"That would be me," Sephiroth said. "Now let's get going. Stand over here."

Somewhat apprehensively, we walked over to stand next to Sephiroth. Sephiroth raised his hands -- one holding the Masamune -- and a white light surrounded us. "Don't misinterpret this," Sephiroth said to us. "I'm not trying to help you out or anything. I just want my name cleared. Don't be surprised if I destroy the world on you."

The white light dimmed, and we were standing in the middle of some shells. "The Forgotten Capital of the Ancients," Sephiroth announced in a deep booming voice.

"You sound like one of those National Geographic announcers," Fred said.

Sephiroth chose to ignore the comment. He gestured with the Masamune towards a large spiraling building in the center of the ruins. "That building holds the Floating Temple. Your friends are probably in there."

"They're not our friends," Hart protested.

We followed Sephiroth to the building and entered. A spiral staircase led down between some weird green seaweed-like stuff. With Sephiroth in the lead, we descended.

"So what's the plan?" Mukki whispered.

I looked down. Below was a vast purple crystal temple-ish building shining brightly even though there was nothing but pitch black around it. "Oh, man, that's even brighter than Hojo's Hawaiian shirt," Hart said, shielding his eyes. We were standing on a long spiral staircase that wound down to the temple. Standing on the temple dais was Aerith. Cloud, Barret, and Red XIII were approaching the steps to the dais below us.

"There they are," I whispered to our group. "Looks like we made in it time. Okay, here's the plan. Johnny, Fred, you guys see if you can - OH MY GOD! THEY KILLED AERITH!"

"Bastards!" Johnny yelled.

As Aerith fell forward, transfixed by a boomerang, Sephiroth leaped down from the steps to the dais and tried to pull the boomerang free. It was too late. Aerith fell to the ground in an oddly bloodless death. The White Materia came loose from her and bounced down into the water surrounding the temple.

"Sephiroth!" Cloud roared, raising his sword.

Sephiroth stared at him. "What?" he asked, unsure of why Cloud was yelling at him.

"She will return to the Planet soon," Sephiroth said sadly, looking down at Aerith's corpse.

"...shut up," Cloud said. "The cycle of nature and your stupid plan don't mean a thing. Aerith is gone. Aerith will no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry... or get angry..."

"My stupid plan? MY stupid plan?" Sephiroth demanded, outraged. "I'm not the one who killed Tseng and Aerith. I won't mention any names, but..."

"Damn right you killed them!" Barret said, waving his gun-arm at Sephiroth.

I jogged up to Cloud and Barret from behind, having taken the route around through the stairs. "Hey... guys," I said. "Sephiroth's innocent. He might be a crazed, evil, homicidal maniac out to destroy the world, but he didn't kill Tseng and Aerith."

"I thought you were on my side," Sephiroth said in hurt tones. "You're damaging my self-esteem."

"Shut up," Johnny said. "You don't have any self-esteem."

"That's it!" Sephiroth shouted. "Prepare to face my wrath!" He summoned up Jenova*LIFE and then flew up into the air. He paused briefly and glared at Cloud. "Cloud, you are a..." and then he was gone.

"I am a what?" Cloud demanded.

"I can hazard as a guess as to what he was going to say, but it might offend some members of the audience," I said.

Cloud pointed his sword at me. "You," he said, "shut up."

At that point, Jenova*LIFE cast Aqualung, spewing out a stream of blue bubbles. Red XIII retaliated with a Cure spell. Yuffie and Vincent dropped down, and they, with the aid of Cloud and Barret, made short work of the monster.

"Hey, wait!" Butch protested. "Don't kill it yet! We need to learn Aqualung! We have all the Enemy Skills but that one! We've spent hours trying to get it but -" His voice trailed off as Jenova*LIFE dissolved.

Cloud turned to our party. "You still here?" he asked. "Get out of here. I never want to see you losers again."

"Hey, hey, wait," I said. "Sephiroth did not kill Aerith."

"Yeah?" Cloud asked dangerously. "Then who did?"

"Well, this is just a guess, but.... Yuffie Kisaragi, in the Forgotten Capital, with the boomerang."

"What?" Yuffie said, shocked (or at least pretending to be shocked). "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!"

"YOU? Beautiful?" This was too much for Hart. He cracked up and started rolling on the floor in hysterics, soon joined by the rest of our party. "Trust me, Yuffie," Hart said. "You have a face that launched a thousand ships... all trying to get as far away from you as humanly possible."

"You want proof?" Fred said to Cloud's gang when we had recovered. "I have a videographic memory."

"A videographic memory?" Barret repeated. "What the hell's that?"

"It's like a photographic memory, but it records a whole event instead of just a picture. See, look." Fred stuck a finger into his ear. There was a humming and whirring sound and a videotape rose out of the back of his pants. Fred took it and held it out to AVALANCHE. "This is the truth."

Hart shuffled through the remaining Summon Materia in his pocket (he was running rather thing on them by now) and found a Summon TV & VCR Materia. He cast the spell, causing a TV and VCR to appear on the temple dais. Fred popped the tape in and pressed Play.

His videographic memory had provided a close-up of Aerith's death. The metal tip of a boomerang clearly pierced her body. Fred rewound it and showed it again. "See that?" he said, pointing. "That's a boomerang."

"Well, it could be, maybe," Cloud shrugged. "But even if it was, what's to say that Sephiroth didn't throw it?"

"Look," Fred said, rewinding the tape again. "Sephiroth came from above Aerith, right? That means if he threw a boomerang, it would have knocked Aerith down flat. But it doesn't."

Fred rewinded the tape yet again. "See? It knocks her back and to the left... back and to the left... back and to the left... The only place that boomerang could have come from," Fred pointed up through the stairwell to the surface, "is from that grassy knoll way up there. And that's about where Yuffie jumped down from."

"You guys are so mean!" Yuffie whined.

"Don't believe me?" Fred said. "Look again. Back and to the left..."

"I don't want to listen to any more of this crap," Cloud said, and smashed the TV set with his sword.

"All right, that's it!" I shouted suddenly, surprising even myself with my anger. "You so-called heroes are nothing but a bunch of lying, back-stabbing, treacherous murderers! You aren't any better than the Shinra! So far you've done nothing but ride along on my work and take all the damn credit! Well, now you can see what it's like on your own! You can try to save the world on your own, but you're not getting any more help for me, because I QUIT! I'm going to do this on my own, and I don't you need lazy pond scum along!" With that, I stormed up the stairs out of the temple.

Chapter Text

The rest of my gang caught up with me on the way out of the City of the Ancients. "Hey... Tortellini," Hart shouted. I stopped. "Wait for us!"

The group caught up to me. "You weren't thinking about leaving without us, were you?" Mukki said. "We're your friends! No matter what that stupid AVALANCHE does, we're still on your side."

I was silent for a moment. "Thanks, guys," I said. "Let's go."

Butch looked up the steep canyon walls that surrounded us. "Where did you plan on going?"

"Uh... er... how did we get here anyway?"

"Sephiroth teleported us here," Hart said.

"It was a trick!" I said suddenly. "It was a trick all along! He did that just to get us trapped here! I should have known better than to trust him!"

"Hey, someone's coming," Johnny said, pointing towards two figures approaching from the south end of the canyon. "And it's not AVALANCHE."

It was Zangan and Holzoff. "Zangan! Holzoff! How did you guys get all the way up here?"

"I'm afraid to say you're no longer the mayor of Midgar," Zangan said. Although I knew it would happen eventually, it was still disappointing. "Shinra wasn't too thrilled with the Cait Sith incident. They threw us in jail, but we escaped and came up here."

"You're going with us, then?" I said, quickly recovering from my disappointment.

"No, Domino," Holzoff said solemnly. "We're quitting."

"You're what?" I gasped.

"We're quitting," Holzoff said quietly. "We've had enough. We've been through a lot for you and it's been fun, but so far we haven't got jack squat out of it. AVALANCHE's gotten all the rewards, and even if they are a bit pig-headed at times, they're the only ones who have a chance. Sorry, Domino, we're leaving."

"TRAITORS!" I shouted at the pair as they walked off into the distance.

"Just let them go, Domino," Fred said.

"Besides, they must have used a Luna Harp to get here," Hart said. "If we hurry, the path will still be open."

We scrambled back to the Sleeping Forest. Sure enough, the road through was still accessible, and we passed through (just at the last minute, of course).

"This still doesn't solve the problem of how we're going to get up those mountains," Fred said.

"I've got a plan," Hart said. "Wait here." Hart hopped into the Tiny Bronco and took off. The next day, he returned in a bizarre new vehicle that he had somehow built out of the Tiny Bronco and AVALANCHE's Gold Saucer buggy (if you're wondering where they went in Disc 2, well, now you know). "Check this out," he said by way of greeting. "This thing should be able to get up the mountains."

We hopped in Hart's combo buggy-plane and he turned the ignition. "Jerky?" I said, offering Hart a piece of jerky.

"No, actually it drives pretty smooth," Hart said.

Our buggy-plane chugged on up over the mountains and on up to Icicle Inn. "Why is it called 'Icicle Inn' when it's a whole town?" I wondered as we disembarked.

"For that matter, why are we taller than the buildings?" Fred added.

When we entered the town / inn, we immediately shrunk down to normal size. This was unfortunate, because a number of Shinra MPs were blocking the roads into town.

"Halt!" an MP said. "This town is under occupation by the Shinra corporation!"

"We have a special permit to enter the town," I said.

"You do?" the MP said suspiciously. "Let's see it."

"Um, I think I forgot I said. But can you let me in anyway?"

"No," the MP said. "Now scram."

"But we have a permit!" I protested.

"I said get out of here," the MP repeated, waving his gun vaguely in my direction.

"You get out of here," I said.

"I'm on guard duty. You get out of here."

"Well, if that's the way you're going to be, you're just going to leave."

"All right, fine," the MP said, storming off. "Hey, wait a sec!" It was too late. We had already hurried into the town and split up.

As always, the townspeople were eager to dispense with useless information, but we did manage to pick up there was a glowing light in the snowfields to the north, and that a "man in a black cape" was headed in that direction.

"That's gotta be Sephiroth," Butch said. "If we hurry, we can stop him and get the Black Materia back."

I looked down the steep path to the Great Glacier. "There's no way we're walking down that," I said. "And we left the buggy on the other side of town."

"Don't worry, I have an idea," Mukki said. He disappeared into the pub and returned shortly with a snowboard. "When I was in there earlier, I ran into some guys I met in Costa Del Sol. They came up here to go snowboarding. AVALANCHE stole one of their snowboards, though."

"A snowboard," Hart observed clinically. "Are we all going to cram on it, or what?"

"Don't worry," Johnny said. "Nobody ever said the laws of physics were important in these games."

"It's called Icicle Inn but it's a whole town, the buildings look tiny when we're not in the town but they're normal size in the town, and we can all ride on one snowboard here. This is sure a weird place."

"And they like Jerry Lewis here too," Hart added.

"Do you think we need a map?" Mukki asked.

"Nah," Fred said. "Maps are for wimps."

I took the snowboard and carried it to the edge of the trail. "Do you know how to snowboard?" Fred asked me, surprised.

"I'll learn," I said. "I can ride a swivel chair, same difference. I mean, how hard it can it be?"

"640 k should be enough for anyone -- Bill Gates," Hart said.

"Shut up, Hart."

I sat the snowboard down and stood on it. "Uh, Tortellini, it's supposed to go the long way," Mukki said.

I looked down. "Oops," I said. "I knew that." I turned the snowboard around, got back and on, and pushed off.

I was in control at first. Really. For about the first three seconds, I was in control. Things rapidly detiorated from there. The snowboard, as if being controlled by some phantasmal remote control, jerked wildly to the side. I waved my hands wildly to recover my balance and tried to lean back and dig the snowboard into the snow and stop it. This only caused the snowboard (with a helpless me attached to it) to spin up into the air. I tried to jump off, but I had forgotten that I had locked my feet onto it. I flew through the air and landed on the side of the course. My snowboard actually ran along the side for a while before spinning upside down and sending me head-first into the snow. I blacked out.

When I regained consciousness, I was skidding on my face along the snow towards a mogul. While my only semi-conscious brain was trying to assimilate this information, I smashed into the mogul. The mogul collapsed, revealing a Moogle sitting at a small wooden table and sipping tea. Irritated at being exposed, the Moogle hurled his tea cup at me. It hit me on the head and knocked me unsconscious again.

I woke up lying in the snow in the middle of a mountain pass. The rest of my party -- minus Butch -- was surrounding me, staring anxiously at me.

I looked up at them. "You know, this is really turning out to be a bad day," I said.

"That was some snowboard run, I must say," Mukki said. "I've never seen somebody go down a course on their head before."

"When you smashed a hole right through that tree -- didn't that hurt?" Johnny asked. "Or were you unconscious?"

"Please, I don't want to hear about it," I said, getting to my feet. "So where are we?"

"We're somewhere out in the middle of this Planet-forsaken glacier," Hart said. "We've been wandering through what appears to be the same mountain pass for several hours."

"It's those wacky laws of physics again," I said. My battered brain finally made the connections necessary to realize that Butch was not here. "Where's Butch?" I asked.

Fred jerked a thumb over his shoulder. I looked behind him. Butch was patrolling the sides of the mountain pass with what looked to be a metal detector. "There's supposed to be a Materia around here somewhere," he explained. "Damned if I know where it is, though."

With Butch combing the walls of the pass with his Materia detector, we set off through the biting cold. Then Fred spotted something on the wall of the pass. "Hey... I think I see something different up there!"

We ran to it, only to discover it was just a Turtle's Paradise ad. "These things are everywhere, aren't they?" Mukki said before Fred tore it down and stomped on it.

After another twenty minutes of walking, we eventually made it of the pass and out onto the snowfields. The snowfields were even worse, because the lack of the rock walls made the wind blow even harder, and we quickly became disoriented.

"We're going to die, aren't we?" Johnny said. "We're gonna die out here on this stupid glacier because someone didn't want to bring a map."

"Okay, okay, it was a mistake," Fred said.

"Where was that Materia?"

"Look! A cave!" I shouted. Using our second (more like eighth) wind, we ran for the shelter of the cave and ducked inside.

"Who's there?" a female voice said inside. It was Elena.

"Elena?" Hart said. "How did you get all the way out here?"

"I fell down the snowboard course and got lost out on the snowfields," she admitted.

"Join the club!" I said bitterly.

We sat down on some rocks. They were a bit uncomfortable, but at this point we didn't care. Unknown to Hart, another one of his Summon Materia -- Alexander -- fell out of his pocket and landed on the cave floor.

"Hey, wanna play Tic-Tac-Toe?" Butch suggested in a display of false cheeriness.

"Shut up," Johnny snapped.

"Okay," Fred agreed.

There was a long silence. We sat on the rocks, staring moodily at the walls and/or ground. Butch and Fred scraped out countless Tic-Tac-Toe grids in the ice.

"You know, the President's headed up this way," Elena said. "We're looking for the Promised Land. They should be coming in on the Highwind. If we could signal them..." She left the sentence unfinished.

"It's our only chance," I said, getting to my feet.

"Yeah, but how did you plan to signal them?" Mukki said. "There's no way we can build a fire."

"Tied again," Butch sighed, and drew another grid.

"I've got an idea," Johnny said. "We could spell out 'HELP' by walking in the snow."

"All right, we'll do it," I said, desperate enough to try any idea at this point. "I'll do the H, Hart and Johnny will get the E, Elena, you take the L, and Mukki, you get the P."

"What about Butch and Fred?" Hart protested.

"They seem to be occupied," I observed.

"Dammit, we've got the exact same result in the last thirty games!" Fred said as he and Butch tied yet again.

The five of us -- excluding Fred and Butch -- headed out into the freezing winds again to complete our mission. I stomped around in the snow, spelling out a crude "H". To my right, the rest of the crew worked at their own letters.

"All right, I'm done with the L," Mukki reported, walking up to me.

"I thought you were doing the P," I said.

Mukki was silent for a moment. "Oops," he said.

I climbed up on top of the cave and looked down on our message. It said just what I thought it did. "Actually, it does describe this place pretty well," I said.

Since there was no real way to change the message and we weren't about to make another one, we headed back inside the cave. "Animal, plant, or mineral?" Fred was saying to Butch.

"So who won?" I asked.

"Nobody," Butch shrugged. "We gave up. Mineral."

"Is it a metal?"

We sat back down on the rather uncomfortable rocks, hoping that somebody would see our message and stop, for curiosity's sake if nothing else. About twenty minutes later, we heard the sounds of engines outside and rushed out to look.

The Highwind (originally the Hart) was descending to land near our cave. "We're saved!" Fred exulted. "Is it shiny?"

"No," Butch said.

Rufus walked up on deck and looked down at us. "Domino," he said. "I guess I should have expected you were behind this." He looked towards our work. "Why the, uh, hell have you done that out there?"

"We thought this place needed a label," I explained. "Well, to tell the truth, it was a mistake. We meant to write out 'HELP'."

"I figured as much," Rufus said. "Well, get on. We don't have all day."

"Thank you, Mr. President, sir," I said. It was always a good idea to suck up to Rufus.

We boarded the Highwind. Rufus nodded towards the rear of the massive vehicle. "You guys can sit in the back."

"I thought we agreed to cut the PaRappa references."

"All right, sit wherever you want," Rufus said, turning to go back down into the airship. "Oh... Elena," he said, noticing the Turk. "What happened to you?"

"It's a long story, Mr. President," Elena said. She walked by Rufus and descended the stairs.

"Has Elena filled you in on the mission?" Rufus asked me as the airship took back off and continued north.

"You're -- I mean, we're looking for the Promised Land," I said. I looked down at the glacier. "That description doesn't exactly apply to this place, though."

"Hojo is quite confident that the Promised Land is in this region," Rufus said.

"Hojo's here?" I said, surprised. "Is he still wearing that Hawaiian shirt? If he is, I might have to shoot him."

"No, he's not," Rufus said with a slight grin.

"Mr. President!" Scarlet said, walking up onto deck. "Mr. President, sir, we're finally picking up something." Rufus followed Scarlet down into the Highwind, leaving our party alone up on the deck.

"Is it tin?" Fred asked.

"Nope."

"Why do you suppose they let us on?" I asked Hart.

Hart considered this. "Maybe because Elena was with us?"

"But Rufus didn't even notice Elena until we were up on deck."

"Hmmmm..." Hart said. "You don't suppose they're up to no good, do you?"

"That's what I'm afraid of."

"Shinra's always up to no good." Johnny joined the conversation.

"Well, look at this way -- whatever they do to us couldn't be worse than being stranded on that awful glacier," I said.

"But, Tortellini, they might be planning to have us write The Family Circus," Johnny protested. "Or even worse, Mr. Boffo."

The airship started to rise. We were nearing the Gaea Cliffs at the end of the glacier. Inside the airship, we -- Rufus, Scarlet, Hojo, Elena, and my party -- were all anxiously watching the Mako reader. Reeve was conspiciously absent, but kept issuing a series of report on AVALANCHE's progress in the same direction.

"We've just defeated a dragon that spontaneously showed up in front of us for no apparent reason," Reeve said. "We're on the rim of the crater now. Y'all'd better hurry up!"

"All right, when we reach the crater," Rufus said, pacing the room, "Domino, I want you and your friends to parachute down into the crater."

"Into the crater, sir? Isn't that dangerous?" I asked.

"The glacier's still not far away," Rufus said. "We could take you back there, if you like."

"So this is what they wanted us for," Hart whispered to Johnny.

"Yes, sir!" I said, saluting.

"You want to go back to the glacier?"

"No, I meant we'll parachute in," I said. "Mr. President," I added.

"Good," Rufus said, running a hand through his air. I resisted the urge to comment on it. "Your mission, and you will accept it, is to stop AVALANCHE at all costs. They're on their way to the crater, too, and we don't want the Promised Land falling into their hands. Damn do-gooders. Honestly, you have to wonder how they expect big evil companies to make any money these days."

"All right, this'll be cool," I said to my friends. "We get to beat up AVALANCHE."

The airship passed over the top of the Gaea Cliffs. "Mr. President, look!" Scarlet said, staring out the window.

The Highwind was flying over a large circular white crater on the tableland above the Gaea Cliffs. Spewing out of the crater was a vast white fountain of pure Mako energy. "This is truly the Promised Land of Mako energy," Rufus said, staring out the window. "A perfect location for Midgar II... it's new! It's not necessarily improved! Now with less fat!"

"All right, Domino, do your thing," Scarlet said. "Kyaa haa haa!"

We fetched some parachutes and marched up onto the deck of the Highwind. "She did mean to jump now, right?" Fred said. "At least, that's what I hope she meant."

We jumped off the airship. "Domino," Hart said as we fell. He did not notice his last Summon Materia, Neo Bahamut, fall out of his pocket and spiral down into the crater. "I know you don't like AVALANCHE, but don't forget, Shinra's the real bad guys, not them."

Our jump landed us on a small green rocky cliff near the edge of the crater. There was only one way to go, so we set off towards the center of the crater. We soon noticed that the black-robed cultists we'd seen in Nibelheim were here as well. "It's those guys again", as Mukki put it.

We spent quite a while trying to navigate a series of windy passes. While battling a Wind Wing (we insulted them until they fled in tears), we saw AVALANCHE race by, but we were too busy with the battle to try to stop them.

After we finally got past the passes, the rocky path turned into a long spiral leading upwards, and it was swarming with cultists -- and AVALANCHE. One of the cultists shuffled towards Cid. "Hey, you," it rasped. "Want a smoke?"

"Sure," Cid took a cigarette from the tobacco executive and lit it. "Thanks, man."

"No problem," the cultist said. "Feel free to have as many as you'd like." It cackled evily and shuffled back to join the others.

"Generous fellow," Cid remarked, stuffing the pack of cigarettes the cultist had given him in his pocket. "Maybe these guys aren't so bad after all."

"Hey you!" Hart shouted, running past AVALANCHE and shaking his fist at the cultist. "You've caused billions of gil of health problems! I'm suing!"

The cultists started to throw themselves off the path and down into the swirling pools of Mako. "Wow..." Hart said. "Did I do that?"

At that point, Sephiroth dropped down from the sky. "What's happening?" he asked, seeing his servants throwing them into the Mako. "Stop!" The tobacco guys continued to dive off as Hart scribbled out a rudimentary lawsuit. "I command you, stop!" Sephiroth waved the Masamune around for emphasis.

"Quick, hide!" I said, pushing Hart behind a rock and ducking down there myself. The others followed my example.

We watched as Sephiroth summoned up Jenova yet again. AVALANCHE smashed her up, then Sephiroth flew off, dropping the Black Materia as he did.

"The Materia!" I cried, diving out from behind the rock and diving for the Materia. "I got it!" I collided with Yuffie, who was also running for it, and we both fell to the ground. "I don't got it!"

Cloud grabbed the Black Materia, but Mukki plowed into him and he dropped it. Barret made a dive for it, but realized too late he was trying to pick it up with his gun-arm. Butch ducked under Cid's legs, punched Cait Sith off his Moogle, and scooped up the Materia. He got back up to see Vincent pointing his (Vincent's) gun in his (Butch's) face.

"Fred! Go long!" Butch said. Fred raced up the spiraling path and Butch hurled the Materia to him. Just as he caught it, Red XIII leapt at him and knocked him down.

"Fumble," Red XIII said dryly, picking up the Materia in one paw and trotting back towards AVALANCHE.

"Hey! Pass interference! Fifteen yard penalty!" Fred shouted, lying on the ground. "Get back here!" Meanwhile, Cloud, Tifa, and Vincent took advantage of the confusion and sprinted up the path towards the center of the crater.

"Sorry," Sephiroth said, dropping back out of the sky and landing in the middle of AVALANCHE. "Quarter's over. Now for the halftime show." He raised his hands and Red XIII vanished into a black void. Sephiroth then himself vanished.

"What happened?" Johnny asked.

"I don't have a clue," I replied.

A loud roar signified the arrival of the Highwind. Rufus was standing on the deck. "Well, Domino," he said over the sound of the engines. "You seem to have failed your mission."

"What?" Barret said, staring at me. "You been workin' for the damn Shinra this whole time?"

"No, that's not it," I protested. "I -"

"President Rufus, Sephiroth's taken the Black Materia!" Cait Sith interrupted. "If we don't get it back from him, it could mean the end of the world as we know it! ...I always wanted to say that."

Rufus considered this. "All right," he said. "We'll worry about the Promised Land later. Get on the airship. We're going to the core."

"We?" Mukki said. "How many people you got in there?"

We boarded the Highwind. "Jes' whose side are you on, cat?" Barret asked Cait Sith as we headed to the core.

"Look, I got us a free ride, didn't I?"

"Good point."

"How did you guys get through that glacier, anyway?" I asked Cid.

"Some mountain climber guy named Holzoff helped us," Cid replied, in a rare quote free of swearing.

"Holzoff," I spat. "That traitor."

On the Highwind, it was a quick ride to the core, which was made entirely of crystallized Mako -- in other words, Materia. "You guys stay here," Rufus said to the four AVALANCHE members.

"I wonder if he means us too," I said.

"Let's presume he doesn't," Hart said. We jumped down onto the stone path and entered the core, where Rufus, Scarlet, and Hojo already were.

"This is it?" Hojo was asking, disappointed.

Rufus looked around the room. "It's that kind of dullness that makes you a second-rate scientist."

"If you're looking for a replacement, I do have my resume with me," Hart said eagerly.

"Shut up, Domino," Rufus said.

"I'm not Domino."

"Well, all of you. You're only long because it would be more of an effort not to take you. Don't expect anything from us."

"You mean we don't get any Frequent Flier miles?" Butch asked, aghast. The whole room started to shake. "I'll take that as a no."

"It's iron, isn't it?" Fred suddenly asked.

"Yup."

Scarlet pointed at the wall. "Something in there's moving!"

Hojo looked at Rufus and Scarlet and pushed his glasses up his nose. "I did tell you about Weapon, didn't I?"

"No," Rufus said bluntly.

"It's a monster created by the Planet to defend itself in times of crisis," Hojo said. "According to Professor Gast's report, that is."

"I never saw that report," Rufus said. "Where it is?"

Hojo reached into his lab coat and produced a sheaf of papers. "Here, right here."

"You keep a lot of things to yourself," Rufus said, taking the report and starting to examine it.

The room started shaking harder. "You know, I really don't think it's safe in here," Mukki said.

"Stop, drop, and roll!" I cried. "No, wait, that's for fires."

There was a loud sound like a woodchuck caught in a vaccuum cleaner and a dazed Cloud, Tifa, and Vincent appeared. "Hey!! Where did you come from?" Scarlet demanded.

"It's a long process," Vincent said. "First, the sperm fertilizes the egg, and then -"

"No, you idiot, how did you just get here?"

"This is where the Reunion is happening," Cloud said dreamily. "Where everything begins and ends."

Red XIII suddenly dashed into the room, carrying the Black Materia in his teeth. "Here's your Materia!" he said, throwing the Materia to Cloud with a jerk of his head. Cloud caught it.

"Gosh, everybody's here, aren't they?" Butch said. "We could have a real party here."

"I brought some Doritos, if anybody wants them," I offered, producing a battered bag from my pocket. "They got kind of beat up on that snowboard ride, though."

Sephiroth's voice suddenly resounded through the core. "Cloud! Give me the Materia!"

"Everyone... thanks for everything," Cloud said. "And... I'm sorry. I'd like to apologize to all of you." He turned to Red XIII. "I apologize." Next Cloud turned to Tifa. "I apologize." Cloud turned to Vincent. "I apologize." He then turned to Rufus. "I apologize."

"All right, all right, we get the idea!" Johnny shouted. "Get on with the show!"

"What is happening, anyway?" I asked.

"I don't have a clue," Hart replied. "I got lost about the time we got out of Midgar."

"Ha!" Hojo said. "This is just as I expected. You there, where's your tattoo? What's your ID number?"

"I... I don't have a number," Cloud said, hanging his head. "I do have a cool tattoo of a Chocobo with rabies on my left big toe, though."

"What?" Hojo said, shocked. "Only the failure survived?"

"Please!" Cloud said. "Give me a number, Professor! I want to have a number -" His voice trailed off when he suddenly flew up to the ceiling and stuck there.

"This has really not been a good day for the laws of physics," Mukki observed.

"Mother Nature must have called in sick," Butch shrugged.

"What was all that about?" Rufus asked.

"He was one of the clones of Sephiroth," Hojo said. "Or something like that. Hell, I'm behind it all, and even I don't understand the storyline! He was a failure, but he has proved my theory about Jenova's Reunion. You see, all the carriers of the cells of Jenova gravitate towards Jenova. I thought they would all head to Midgar, but even Jenova herself left. But being the genius that I am, I soon figured things out. Sephiroth was controlling the clones -- and Jenova."

"I just need somebody to play Parcheesi with!" Sephiroth's voice boomed in response.

"I never was chasing Sephiroth," Cloud, still stuck to the ceiling, said. "He was controlling me. Sephiroth... the Black Materia... here it is." Cloud reached into the translucent cocoon in the ceiling that held Sephiroth's body and handed him the Black Materia.

"Stop! STOP!" Tifa shouted.

"It's too late!" Rufus said. "We'd better leave, quick! Come with me!"

The core started to collapse. We fled just as the ceiling caved in and ran to the Highwind. "That's a misplaced modifier, you know," Hojo said.

"Shut up, Hojo," Rufus said.

The core continued to crumble as the Highwind's engines started. Nothing happened. "It's not working!" Rufus exclaimed.

"Mr. President!" Scarlet said, staring out the window. "The whole crater's collapsing. We've got to get out now."

Rufus's eyes fell on a sign on the wall. It read: "Maximum approved capacity for this airship is: 12 persons. Excessive weight may prevent airship from taking off."

There was silence.

"Domino, get off the airship," Rufus said.

"What kind of a word is 'persons?'" I demanded as Barret and Cid forced up the stairs and off the Highwind. "That's almost as bad as 'pre-order!'"

Chapter Text

The Highwind soared off out of the rapidly-collapsing crater. "We're in trouble," Fred observed.

Five huge monsters burst out of the core as it completely imploded on itself. It did not take me long to figure out it was Weapon. "Quick! We've got to jump one of those things!" Johnny shouted over the loud cries of the Weapons.

I hesitated, but Hart and Johnny quickly jumped on the back of the purple dragon-like one (which I later learned was the Ultima Weapon). Fred followed them on. Seeing no other alternative, I climbed on with Butch. Mukki struggled to get on and resorted to clinging to the Weapon's tail.

The thing flew out of the crater. Seeing the escaping Highwind, it shrieked and pursued it. It seemed capable of flying no faster than the Highwind, however, and the airship got away. The Ultima Weapon continued to pursue it with a mindless determination until the vehicle parked in Junon.

The Ultima Weapon stopped. We waited for it to fly off somewhere. It didn't. It merely sat, staring at the city. "Is this thing broken or something?" Mukki wondered.

After about fifteen minutes, Fred and Butch exchanged glances. "Animal, plant, or mineral?" Butch asked.

Eventually, the Ultima Weapon decided to stop staring at Junon and fly somewhere. At first, we were thrilled, but we quickly realized that it was not going anywhere in particular, and we were soon reduced to listening to Butch and Fred's 20 Questions games. At least the scenery was changing now.

"I think it's defective," Johnny said. "Let's take it back to the Planet and get a refund."

The Ultima Weapon turned its head, and I saw a brief flash of writing in the space between the back of its crested head and its body. I peered down in the crack and tried to make out the words. "The Planet is not liable for any damages, incidental or otherwise, to person or property caused by this Weapon. In other words, if you suck the life out of the Planet and get attacked, it's your own damn fault. The same applies for any morons who try to hitch a ride on its back. NOT INTENDED FOR USE AS A FLOTATION DEVICE."

"Well, I guess that settles that," Fred said.

"Is it a tree?" Butch asked.

There weren't any other alternatives to speak of, so we continued to ride the Ultima Weapon around on its aimless wandering. Eventually, when over Midgar, we spotted the Highwind flying by. "Hey!" Hart shouted, jumping up and down. "Over here! HELP!"

"Don't worry," Mukki said. "I think they're already seen us."

The Highwind was flying directly towards the Ultima Weapon. As it neared, we could see Shinra MPs and SOLDIERs lining its decks, armed with bazookas. The Highwind passed under the Ultima Weapon, the troops started firing. The shells exploded harmlessly on the Weapon's armored skin. We huddled down behind the dragon-like creature's head, praying that none of the shells would hit us.

"Hey! Down there! HELP!" Fred shouted.

Either the MPs didn't hear him (which seemed likely), or they were choosing to ignore us. "Let's jump," Butch suggested.

The Highwind was just about directly under the Ultima Weapon now. We climbing backwards down the side of the Ultima Weapon. One of the MPs gave us a puzzled glance and raised his bazooka to fire at us. We quickly dropped off the Ultima Weapon and onto the deck of the airship.

The troops looked quizically at us, wondering why a bunch of average-looking guys had just jumped off a huge dragon and onto the deck of an airship. I guess I would have too if I was in their situation.

"Hey, aren't you that Domino guy?" a SOLDIER said.

"Er... Domino? Who's that?"

The SOLDIER jerked a thumb towards the stairs. "Throw them in the Chocobo pen," he said to the MPs.

Several MPs seized us and hurried us to the Highwind's Chocobo holding room, where they rudely tossed us in and slammed the door in our face. We heard the sound of retreating footsteps.

I looked around the small square room. Much of the room was taken up by an obese yellow Chocobo, which sat on some straw bedding in the corner. Next to it were some cabinets containing Chocobo supplies. "WAAARK!" the Fat Chocobo bellowed.

"Man, that Chocobo stinks," Fred said, wrinkling his nose.

I opened up the cabinets. There were Chocobo greens, nuts, collars, saddles, and some anti-mite soap. Johnny pointed at the soap. "Soap!" he said. "Let's make a soap gun."

We quickly set off on making a soap gun. After several hours of work (and a whole lot of soap), we managed to fashion something that, with some imagination, could be called an AK-47. Now we just had to wait.

About twenty minutes after completing the soap gun, an MP dropped by to give us our lunch. We hadn't eaten in the last two days (being stuck on the back of the Ultima Weapon), so I was almost reluctant to threaten the guy, but Johnny insisted.

"Freeze!" Johnny shouted, reaching behind his back and whipping out the soap gun. "Don't move, I've got a loaded AK-47."

"Oh yeah, the rare albino model," the MP snorted. "Do you really think you'd fool me with that pathetic excuse for a soap gun? Please, don't waste my time." The MP slammed the door. There were no footsteps, so we assumed he was still outside the cell.

There wasn't anything else to do, so we had lunch. I was about to eat a carrot where I noticed Johnny staring at it. "What?" I asked.

"Don't eat that," Johnny said. "I'm coming up with another plan."

"Great, MacGyver," Hart said. "What is it?"

"A pencil! Some moldy cheese! We could make a motorcycle!" Fred said.

"I'm still working on it," Johnny admitted. "But I think it's gonna get us out of here. The only question is what to do when we escape."

"Parachute down?" Mukki suggested.

"We don't even know where we are," Butch said. "We could wind up in the middle of the ocean or on that stupid glacier."

"How about taking over the airship?" Hart said.

"With what? That soap gun?" I said, pointing at the pathetic-looking gun.

Fred had been listening at the door. "Sssh!" he cautioned from the door. "Someone's coming."

We quickly broke off our discussion as the door to the Chocobo pen opened. A Highwind crew member entered with a leash and collar. "I have to take the Chocobo for a walk," the crew member, fastening the leash on our obese cellmate.

"Hey... wait a sec!" Hart whispered as the crew member started to leave. "You don't work for the Shinra, do you?"

"Not really. I'm just one of the airship's crew members, but Shinra owns the airship."

"How'd you like to own it?" Hart said. "I'm Hart -- the one who built this baby. You did know it used to be called the Hart, didn't you?"

"No kidding! You're Hart? Really?" the crew member said.

"Yeah," Hart said. "So how about it? We're taking over this airship -- are you helping?"

The crew member looked around nervously. "All right," he said. "But I can't let you out of the cell. There's guards in the hall."

"I know," Hart said. "We've got a plan to take care of that. Is the meeting room going to be in use today?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Good. What I want you to do is leave two crew member uniforms in the meeting room. We're going to be breaking out shortly and we're going to need a disguise."

"All right, will do," the crew member said. He then left with the giant Chocobo.

When he was gone, I started to pace the room. "Okay, we've got a plan to escape -- or at least Johnny does -- and a disguise when we get out... but then what?"

There was no response. Nobody had any ideas. "We don't need to fight the Shinra guys," Mukki said after a while. "If we have some weapons or a bomb or something we can just force them to do what we want."

"A bomb," Fred said. "That would work. They've all got weapons to, but a bomb is going to scare them into doing what we say."

"Yeah, but how are we going to make a bomb?" I asked.

"It doesn't have to be a real bomb," Butch cut in. "As long as they think it's a bomb..."

At this point, the Highwind crew guy returned with the fat Chocobo. "I left two uniforms in the meeting room like you said," he whispered.

"Are Chocobo droppings explosive?" I asked.

The Highwind crew stared at me with an expression of shock. "I have no idea," he replied eventually.

"And that's the Chocobo expert," I said. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?"

"I think so, Domino," Hart said. "But next time, you put the trousers on the chimp."

I took one of the bags that our lunches had come in and stuffed it full of all the Chocobo droppings I could find. Then I took the battery-powered clock from the top of the cabinet and put it -- quietly ticking -- in too. "There's our bomb," I said.

"Don't you think they're going to get kind of suspicious if we're carrying that around?" Mukki asked.

"I'll take care of that," I said. I took a marker and wrote "SUSPICIOUS PACKAGE" on the bag. "There. Now they'll think it's a joke, and when we get to the command room, we can just flip it over to the blank side."

"Great," Hart said. "All right, Johnny, do your thing."

Johnny nodded, walked to the door, and pounded on it. The Shinra MP guarding the hall opened it. "Yeah?"

"I need to go to the bathroom," Johnny said.

"Yeah, right," the MP said. "Do you think I'm gonna fall for that? First the soap gun and now this. You must be really desperate." The MP slammed the door shut again.

"That wasn't your plan, was it?" Butch asked tensely.

"Of course not," Johnny said. "That was just to get the guy off his guard. Tortellini, give me that carrot." I handed Johnny the carrot. Johnny took the water from his lunch and poured a trail of it on the floor from the Chocobo bedding to the door. He then held the carrot up to the Chocobo, making sure the bird recognized it.

"Fetch!" Johnny shouted, throwing the carrot at the door. "WARRRK!" the Chocobo cried, stumbling to its feet and running to catch the carrot. It slipped on the water, fell on its large rear, skidded across the room, and smashed through the door, completely demolishing it and taking a good chunk of the frame with it as well.

We watched in exultation as the Chocobo bowled down the hallway. The guard stared at the huge yellow mass rolling towards him and had time for a brief yelp before it crushed him. The Chocobo rolled into the far wall and bounced off, dazed.

Hart and I rushed out into the hallway and ducked into the control room. As promised, two crew uniforms were awaiting us. We put them over our normal clothes and ran to the control room, armed with our fake bomb.

"Whatcha got there?" an MP asked us. He cocked his head at an angle and tried to read what was on the bag.

I held it up with a grin. "Suspicious package," I said.

The MP chuckled and walked off. I set the bag down on top of the control panel and sauntered over to join the other crew members. Shortly thereafter, the SOLDIER in command strolled by. "Are you guys watching 60 Minutes or something?" he asked. The crew shook their heads. "'Cause I keep hearing some ticking sound."

One of the MPs -- not the one who had confronted us -- pointed at the bag on the control panel. "It's a bomb!" the MP shouted.

I whirled to face the SOLDIER. "That's right!" I said. "We've got a bomb and we're taking over this airship!" Hart and I threw off my crew uniform. "Domino to the rescue!" I cried.

"You!" the SOLDIER said. Then he stared at us. "How did you make a bomb? I bet that's no bomb, it's just a clock."

"It's made from Chocobo droppings," Hart explained. "Don't touch it; it'll go off."

The SOLDIER ignored him, opened the bag, and peered inside. "Ha!" he said triumphantly. "It is just a clock." He pulled the clock out, which by now was dripping with Chocobo dung. "Eeewww... what have you guys done to this?" The SOLDIER dropped the clock on the floor and stepped back.

"Looks like Chocobo dung," an MP said. "Smells like it too."

"We're in trouble," Hart whispered to me as the SOLDIER grabbed the dung-coated bag, wrinkled it up, and tossed it in the airship incinerator.

A huge explosion suddenly erupted from the incinerator, incinerating the SOLDIER and most of the MPs. Hart dived away from the explosion and tackled me, although it really wouldn't have done any good. Luckily, the crew members were unharmed, as they were far enough way from the blast. The floor was severely charred, though.

"Holy swords, Batman," Hart breathed. "That stuff really is explosive!"

The remaining MPs threw down their weapons and backed away from us in fear. "That was awesome!" one of the crew members said. "You guys rock! Who are you?"

"I'm Mayor Domino of Midgar," I said. "Or, I used to be."

"You changed your name?" a crew member asked.

"No, stupid, I'm not the mayor anymore," I said. "And this is Hart, the guy who built this airship."

"Hi," Hart said, waving to the crew.

"And I helped them," one of the crew -- the Chocobo guy -- said proudly. "Honestly, I had no idea that it would blow up like that."

"Neither did we," I said. I was still shaken by the sudden and violent explosion.

"I never liked those Shinra anyway," a crew member remarked.

"Neither do we," I said. "This airship now belongs to you guys. Use it well -- preferably to kick Shinra round."

"You're not staying around?" the Chocobo guy asked, disappointed. "Can I have your autograph?"

I immediately gave my autograph. This was great! At last we were the heroes. Unfortunately, our fame would be short lived.

"I was thinking we should move on to Fort Condor to rally the anti-Shinra forces there," I said. I had wanted to drop by Fort Condor since the beginning of our adventures, but I'd never had a chance. "You're in charge of aerial division."

"The rest of our crew is in Junon," one crew member mused. "We'll probably go on to there to pick them up. But we'll drop you off at Fort Condor first."

Chapter Text

I had always imagined Fort Condor to be a majestic stronghold of justice and honor that housed cozy tunnels and beautiful eagles. In reality, the outside looked kind of jagged and ugly and the interior was rather dark and smelly. But the music was good.

The first thing we did upon entering the Fort was to make a beeline for the cafeteria -- all we'd had to eat in the last two and a half days were some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the Highwind. And who did we run into in the cafeteria but none other than Palmer, who was snacking on some lard.

"Yo! Palmer!" I greeted him.

"Hey-hey!" Palmer said. "Domino! Been lookin' for you!"

"Good to see you again," Hart said, sitting down at the table where Palmer was. "I was surprised you weren't up in the Promised Land with Shinra. What happened to you?"

"I've spent a lot of time in traction," Palmer said.

"Oh... yeah," Hart said. "Sorry about that truck."

"We've spent the last two days riding on the Ultima Weapon," Butch said. "But then we took over the Highwind. That was fun."

"The Highwind?" Palmer said. "Hey-hey! That's great! We're gonna need some real firepower to stop Shinra." He got up and started to pace the room. "And not only Shinra, but Meteor."

"But how can we stop a giant meteor?" Mukki asked. "It's.. it's.. it's like trying to stop Microsoft, except the meteor has less money."

"Hey-hey, I've already thought of a plan," Palmer said. "And we're finally going to get to launch the ol' Shinra-26."

"Oh?" I asked.

"There's a thing called Huge Materia," Palmer explained. "It's like regular Materia, except it's, uh, huge. My plan is to load up the Shinra-26 with the Huge Materia and launch it at Meteor. The only problem is going to be getting our hands on some of that Materia."

"Butch?" I looked at the Materia dealer.

Butch stood up and faced the rest of us. "Well, unlike a lot of Materia, Huge Materia can only come out of Makoro reactors -- only the reactors have enough power to crystallize that much Mako. And since they're not produced that frequently, we're going to have to go a lot of different reactors to get some."

"I do know that there's one Huge Materia in the Junon Underwater Reactor," Palmer said. "And I've already been working on that one. Hey-hey, and there's one here in Fort Condor. I've tried to persuade them to give it to us, but they're too worried about the safety of the condors."

"They're letting an evil company suck the life out of the Planet and a huge meteor blow it up, 'cause they don't want to hurt the eagles," Johnny said. "Makes sense to me!"

"Condors," I corrected.

"I hate to ask this... but what about AVALANCHE?" I asked.

"They're in Junon, awaiting execution for 'causing' the Meteor situation," Palmer said. "Scarlet's idea."

"YES!" I exulted.

"Hey-hey, but don't count them out," Palmer said. "Reeve is plotting to get rescue them. Cloud's missing, though."

We spent the next day or so planning on how to collect the Huge Materia, and (unsuccesfully) trying to get the Fort Condor management to fork over their Huge Materia. Fred would go to North Corel, collect the Huge Materia from the Corel Mountain reactor, and transport it to Rocket Town by train. Meanwhile, Johnny would go to the Nibel Mountains, get the Huge Materia, and continue on to Rocket Town. Palmer and the rest of us would sneak into Junon, retrieve the Huge Materia from the Underwater Reactor, steal a submarine, and take it to Rocket Town, where we would launch the rocket and its three Huge Materias.

"That's settled then," I said. "What could possibly go wrong?"

"Er...." Hart decided not to say anything.

A blaring security alarm starting sounding. "All personnel report to mountaintop!" somebody said over the PA system. "The fort is under attack!"

"Are we personnel?" Butch wondered.

"Hey, it's gotta be Shinra," Palmer said. "They're after me... and probably you, too."

"They can't hold the fort on their own," I said. "Somebody's going to have to stay behind and help them out." I surveyed my allies. Johnny and Fred were out -- they had their own tasks. Palmer knew Junon the best, so we couldn't leave him behind. That left Butch, Hart, and Mukki. "Mukki, I'm counting on you."

"No problem," Mukki said. "Don't worry, I almost beat the third level of Red Alert."

Palmer, Hart, Butch, and I took the fire escape out of the fort and set off to the west towards Junon. As we put some distance between us and Fort Condor, we could see the Condor troops battling the Shinra on the mountainside. "Let's hope they win," Butch said.

I noticed Palmer was carrying a plastic white bag. My curiosity eventually got the better of me, and I pointed at it. "What's in that bag?" I asked.

Palmer opened it up and held it up for me to see. "A piece of meat."

"Would you care to enlighten us on why are you carrying that particular item?"

"Hey-hey, you'll see."

We eventually arrived in Lower Junon. From there, there was only one way up into the one -- the Shinra elevator in the side of the Junon supports. Unfortunately, said elevator was being guarded by some MPs. "This is Shinra property," he said. Apparently he did not notice -- or ignored the fact -- that among our ranks were three wanted criminals. "No admittance. Well, no admittance except in special situations. All right, there are a lot of special situations. So no admittance for you. Unless you're a special situation. But you wouldn't be in a special situation -- er, unless there was a generous donation."

"Do you take plastic?" I asked.

The MP gave me a level look. "Show me the money."

"Hey-hey, here," Palmer said, stuffing several bills in the MP's face. He took it, rather surprised. "Have a nice day."

The MP stared at the money, then shook Palmer's hand. "And you have a nice day, too."

We got in the elevator and flipped the lever to rise to Junon. The elevator ride started off normally enough -- the key word here being "started". About halfway up, the elevator just stopped. There weren't any weird noises or shaking or anything; it just stopped. At first, we thought that we'd reached the top, but we hadn't. We were merely stranded in the middle of an elevator shaft.

Palmer fiddled with the levers, but none of them had any effect. "This isn't good," Hart said succinctly.

"Anybody up for a game of 20 Questions?" Butch asked hopefully.

"Should I push the alarm button?" I asked, ignoring him.

"Go ahead," Palmer replied.

I hit the button. "We're sorry," a recorded voice said. "The elevator alarm system is temporarily out of order. If you need to be rescued, please call the Shinra customer support line at 1-900-32-6782-45.

"Good thing I have my cell phone," Palmer said. He took the cell phone out of his pocket and dialed the number we had just heard.

"Thank you for calling Shinra customer support line. If you need assistance in navigating Junon, press 1. If you need emergency services, grovel at our feet, then press 2. If you need rental services, press 3. If you are looking for gas, food, or lodging, press 4. If you need to talk to a live operator, press 5. There will be a 500 gil a second charge for talking to a live operator. If you need a service not listed above, tough luck, buster, you're screwed."

Palmer pressed 2. "If you need the police, press 1. If you need the fire department, press 2. If you need medical aid, we don't care jack squat what happens to you so just hang up the damn phone. To return to the previous menu, press 3."

"Er.... what do we need?" Palmer asked.

"Try number 2," Hart suggested.

"You have pressed the number 2 twice in a row. This would seem to indicate that you have a fixation with the number 2. We will indulge your fixation by forcing you to press the number 2 three hundred times in a row to advance."

It got rather boring.

Eventually, long after we had lost count, Palmer eventually got through. "Please input the street address of the fire by using the buttons on your phone and their corresponding letters."

"Uh... what's the street address of the elevator?" Palmer wondered.

"Hurry up," the recording said in a monotone. "We don't have all day. If you are too incompetent to figure out what the street address is, press the asterisk to connect yourselves to the special needs line."

Palmer pressed 9.

"For a recording in Cetran, press 1. For a recording in Wutaian, press 2. For a recording in Chocobo warks, press 3."

"I don't want foreign language!" Palmer shouted at the phone. This surprised me, because Palmer rarely lost his temper. "Just get me out of this elevator!" He punched the phone's buttons angrily.

"Wark wark wark WARK warkkk wark wark waaark!"

Palmer threw the cellular phone to the ground in disgust.

A ghostly image of Sephiroth dropped down from above and landed on the elevator. Sephiroth was carrying a surveyor's transit and some blueprints. He started looking around through the transit and made some marks on the blueprints, paying no attention to us.

"Hey... Sephiroth!" I said. Granted, it was probably a pretty dumb thing to do, but it just didn't seem right for Sephiroth to be completely ignoring us.

"This'll be perfect," Sephiroth said to himself, then turned to us. "Er... hi. I'm checking this place out for my upcoming theme park, Jenova World. Things are looking good. When I take over the world I'm going to make this place Jenova World."

"I thought you were trying to destroy the world with Meteor," Hart said.

Sephiroth put down the blueprints and stared at us. "Shoot," he said eventually.

"Face it, Seph," Hart said. "You're a failed villain. You don't have an evil laugh, you don't have a sinister plan, and nobody cares about you. You can't even manage to come up with plans that don't interfere with each other!"

Sephiroth stared at us. "Don't worry, we've got a plan to stop Meteor," Butch said. "Just get us out of this elevator."

"All right, all right," Sephiroth said. He muttered an incantation and a giant winged hippopotamus appeared. "You can ride that," he said.

We gratefully hopped on. The hippo flew up the elevator shaft. Sephiroth watched us go. "Do a number on AVALANCHE for me, will you?" he said. "Mwah ha ha ha!" I suddenly realized we had been tricked, but it was too late.

We got off the hippo and walked out into the streets of Junon. Through bad luck or a cruel twist of fate (or maybe Sephiroth's work), we arrived there just at the same time as.... AVALANCHE. The whole group - Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Red XIII, Vincent, Yuffie, Cid, and Cait Sith - was there.

"Oh no, I thought you guys were dead," I groaned.

"Do we look dead, foo'?" Barret said.

"We've been trying to sort out this @#$#! storyline," Cid said. "Can't say we've been very succesful."

"I'm not a SOLDIER, but I play one on TV!" Cloud said by way of explanation. Now, that is just pathetic. What kind of a line is that? How can somebody spout garbage like that and still be the main character? And now he's in FF Tactics and Ehrgeiz? What's up with that? They should have at least put ME in as a secret character in Xenogears or something!

"Just let us get through, Domino," Vincent said. "We need to retrieve the Huge Materia from the Underwater Reactor."

"So do we!" Palmer said.

"Let's rap for it!" I suggested.

"Absolutely not," Hart said adamantly.

Cloud drew his sword, and Barret and Cid readied their own weapons. "Perhaps we could avoid bloodshed here," Red XIII said, stepping forward. Of all the AVALANCHE guys, Red was the only one that I respected. I would have respected more if he hadn't hooked up with those morons though. "How about we race to the Huge Materia, and whoever gets there first, wins?"

Cloud looked at Red, then at us, particularly Palmer and his substantial stomach. "Sounds good to me."

"All right," Palmer said. "You're on."

AVALANCHE immediately took off running. We jogged along behind them at an intentionally slow pace until they had disappeared from sight. Then we called a helicopter taxi, hopped in, and flew straight to Al-Junon. We got off and proceeded to the elevator to the Underwater Reactor. I looked out the window. AVALANCHE was just climbing up into Al-Junon now. We were in the lead.

When the elevator arrived in the underwater reactor (this time without incident), we were in a long white-floored room with blue walls. A door to our left was being guarded by a large dog. Palmer fished into the plastic bag he'd brought along, took out the piece of meat, and threw it to the dog.

"Ah, the old throw-the-piece-of-meat-to-the-dog puzzle," Butch said. "Very clever."

We stepped by the contented dog and hurried down the corridor. Palmer reached into his coat pocket and grabbed a Junon guidebook. "Okay, let's see here," he said to himself. "We're here, that means..."

We passed out of Junon and into a long clear underwater tunnel. We could see the ocean floor around us. Fishes swam by, pressing against the plexiglass tunnel. "Oooh, pretty," Butch said, looking around.

"We don't have time for that," I said, pushing him along.

A huge ghost ship suddenly materialized in front of us. "Look out!" Hart cried.

I ducked under the ghost ship's sweeping paddle. "I hate random encounters."

Palmer still had his nose in the guidebook and was not paying attention as to where he was going. The ghost ship's paddle caught him in a rather painful location and lifted him into the air. The guidebook fell from his hands and landed in the back of the ghost ship.

"HELP!" Palmer wailed.

I rembered that Palmer had finally given us some weapons -- Mako Guns -- back at Condor Fort. I drew my gun and fired at the ghost ship. It reeled backwards and dropped Palmer. The four of us kept up a barrage of Mako Gun shots until the Ghost Ship exploded.

"Yes!" I exulted. "We won a fight!" We received 1600 EXP and 2000 gil, and found Phoenix Down x 1. Butch gained a level.

"Wow, if we keep this up, maybe we can learn some Limit Breaks," Hart said.

"Look! Down there!" Butch said, pointing down. We looked down through the bottom of the tube we were in to another tube running along the ocean floor, inside of which was AVALANCHE.

"They're catching up," I said, dashing ahead. "We've gotta move."

We ran into the underwater reactor. Palmer located a certain piece of machinery in the sprawling mass inside in the reactor and showed it to us. "Hey-hey, here it is," he said. "The Huge Materia's in the reactor, so, hey, we've got to use this claw to load it into the submarine."

I examined the controls. "Cool, this is like the Wonder Catcher at the Gold Saucer," I said. "This'll be fun." I guided the claw over to the reactor, and lifted out the Materia. Just as I was doing so, AVALANCHE ran by the reactor on an elevated bridge. "Do you think I could grab them with this claw and drop 'em in the Mako pools?"

Palmer had his cell phone out and was calling the Turks' office. "Hello?" he said, trying to make his voice sound deeper and conceal his identity. "This is Agent Guttersnipes reporting. AVALANCHE is leading an army into the Underwater Reactor at this very moment. We need help! Agent Guttersnipes out." He then hung up the phone.

I finished loading the Huge Materia into a submarine. It was the only red one, so it would be easy to locate. "The submarine dock's this way," Palmer said, pointing at a door. We hurried to the submarine dock, blasted the MPs with our new weapons, and climbed in the red submarine. Just as we were climbing in, we saw Reno arriving with the Carry Armor. "Hee hee, that should keep them occupied for a while," Palmer giggled.

"Does anybody know a thing about piloting this?" Butch asked.

"How hard can it be?" I said, taking the controls.

"That's what you said about snowboarding, too," Hart reminded me.

"Oh, shush."

With some trial and error I managed to get the submarine to submerge out of the reactor and set off in a sort of north-west direction (using the word "direction" rather loosely).

"This music is driving me nuts," Butch said. He flipped on the submarine's radio. "I want to let you of my desire; let it let it go, I'm al-"

Hart dove across the radio. "I don't think so," he said, changing the station. The familiar tune of Techno de Chocobo came on.

"You're listening to WARK, the world's #1 Chocobo rock station, and a proud subsidiary of Shinra Inc. And now, 'One Winged Angel.'"

One Winged Angel began, but was interrupted by a burst of static, followed by a message from another submarine. "Leader Submarine is missing! All craft attempt to locate the Leader Submarine."

"That must be us," Hart said.

I cranked up the speed and we took off. Unfortunately, we were pointed in a somewhat downward direction, and we experienced a personal meeting with the seafloor. The submarine bounced and shook a little, but wasn't damaged severely. As I was trying to get the nose pointed upwards, something big, green, and dangerous-looking dived towards us.

"It's Weapon!" Butch shouted.

"Are all those Weapons like the same thing or what?" Hart asked. "I mean, they say 'It's Weapon!' but there's five of them. Is it like Mr. Saturn in Earthbound or what?"

"I'm trying to concentrate!" I shouted at Hart. I tried to go between the Emerald Weapon's legs, but with my abilities (or lack thereof), I just bounced off its foot.

"Incoming torpedo!" Palmer pointed frantically at the submarine's radar.

Butch spun the periscope around. A gray submarine was leading the chase after us. I slammed wildly on the controls, and our sub start to back up directly towards the torpedo. I quickly tried to go ahead, but ended up rising instead. This had the unexpected effect of causing the torpedo to lose its lock on us -- and go after the Emerald Weapon instead.

The gray sub's next torpedo also hit the huge green creature. It swam towards the gray sub. The sub's hatch opened and three figures climbed out. I soon recognized them as Cloud, Tifa, and Cid.

Cloud cast a Flare spell on the approaching Emerald Weapon. The Weapon barely noticed the attack and proceeded to use Aire Tam Storm. The three AVALANCHE members ducked back inside the sub.

"Don't just sit there!" Butch yelled at me. "Get us out of here!"

"But- but- but he just cast a fire spell underwater!" I protested.

I swerved around in a generally westward direction. Meanwhile, a large number of blips started to appear on our radar. Butch took a look at them through the periscope. It was the rest of the Shinra submarine fleet. "Oh oh," he said.

"What?" I asked, concentrating on "piloting" the sub.

"The rest of the submarines are closing in on us."

"Oh oh," I agreed.

A barrage of torpedoes shot through the water towards us. I tried to shake them off, but there were too many and I had no idea as to what I was doing. The torpedoes started pummeling the sub's armor.

"Rise! Rise!" Hart shouted. "We're going to have to eject!"

I took the sub up as high as I could, then we threw open the airlock, dived out, and rose to the surface. "Hey-hey, do you think they'll get us up here?" Palmer asked as we treaded water.

I looked down and saw our submarine sinking forlornly to the ocean floor, taking the Huge Materia with it. We were lucky to have made it out when he did.

Butch pointed up into the sky. "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's -"

"I HATED that show!" I shouted at him. "Not only was it incredibly stupid, but it drove my talk show off the air too. And then I got to be mayor, and I got stranded out on a glacier and then on the back of a dragon and now we're out in the middle of the ocean with a fleet of submarines after us and -"

"- the Highwind," Butch finished.

I waved my hands desperately. "HELP! HELP! Down here!"

"We could spell out 'hell' again," Hart suggested. "That might get their attention."

The Highwind stopped and threw down a rope ladder. Gratefully, we climbed up -- a long climb -- onto the deck of the airship and stood dripping there.

"YOU again?" Yuffie said.

I stared at her. My mouth opened and closed, but no words came out.

"What are you doing on my airship?" Hart demanded angrily.

"Your airship?" Yuffie said. "This is our airship! Finders keepers, losers weepers!" Laughing to herself, Yuffie turned and walked back inside.

We followed her in. The rest of AVALANCHE -- minus Cloud, Cid, and Tifa, who were down in the sub -- was on board. "Hello," Vincent said.

"What's going on here?" I demanded, losing my temper. "How did you get on here? What did you do to the crew?"

One of the pilots waved his hand. "We're right here," he said.

I stormed up to him. "How did AVALANCHE get on our airship?"

"We gave it to them."

"WHAT??"

"We gave it to them."

I stared at the crew member, seething. "When I told you to help the fight against Shinra..." I said in a tone of barely-controlled rage.

"Yeah?"

"...I didn't mean to give the airship to AVALANCHE."

"Sorry," the pilot said. "Kind of late now to do anything about it, though, huh?"

I did not reply, but simply stormed back out onto the deck. "Hey, but we did shoot down a Gelnika!" the pilot shouted after me.

Butch, Palmer, and Hart followed me up. "Those idiots," I said. "Those idiots."

Cait Sith walked up onto deck on his Moogle. "Hey, guys," he said. "So what are you up to?"

"Shut up, Reeve."

"Barret wanted to dump you guys overboard, but we managed to convince him to take you as far as Costa Del Sol and leave you there."

"You're so kind," I said sarcastically.

"Hey, Tortellini, lay off on him," Butch said. "We're lucky they're taking us that far."

Chapter Text

AVALANCHE left us at Costa Del Sol -- still in our soggy clothes -- and flew off without another word. Our first order to was to find some dry clothes. "I guess we'd better be getting to Rocket Town," Palmer said afterwards. "Hey, maybe the others did a little better."

"With AVALANCHE around, don't count on it," I said bitterly.

Our luck took a slightly better turn what a phantom Chocobo carriage showed up and offered to take us to Rocket Town. I got right in, but Palmer wasn't so sure. "We shouldn't accept rides from strangers," he said.

"Look, do you want to walk the whole way?" I asked.

"Okay, okay, let's go," Palmer said.

The Chocobo carriage dropped us off the next day in Rocket Town. We were immediately greeted by Fred. "Yo Tortellini!" he said. "'Bout time you got here!"

"You have no idea what we just went through," I said.

We headed to the Shanghai Inn, where we found that the guy who was in the bathroom when we were in Rocket Town the last time was still there! Mukki and Johnny were also there.

Our reunited party exchanged stories. Fred had got the Huge Materia from the North Corel Reactor and loaded it on the train as he'd planned, but then (of course) AVALANCHE showed up. They'd hijacked Fred's train and drove him off with their fancy eye candy call spells. They then furthermore attempted to crash the train into North Corel (why, I have no idea, except that AVALANCHE is generally obnoxious). Luckily, Fred stopped the train by shooting out its Johnson Rod and saved the town. AVALANCHE took all the credit as usual and were rewarded with an Ultima Materia and a Limit Break manual by the "grateful" townspeople.

Mukki didn't fare much better. He'd led the Condor troops to victory over the invading Shinra. Just about then, AVALANCHE arrived. Red XIII claimed the condors were "injured" and offered to tend to them. Most of them died later that day, in what I'm sure was merely a tragic accident. Uh-huh. Anyway, since the condors were dead, AVALANCHE "offered" to take the Huge Materia off the Fort, and they even got a Phoenix Materia too.

Johnny, however, was our success story. He taken the Huge Materia from the Nibel Mountains reactor with little resistance (the black-robed tobacco cultists tried to stop him, but most died of coughing fits they suffered during the chase) and had brought it to Rocket Town. It was now sitting in the rocket, locked in with a special security code.

"Is one Huge Materia going to be enough?" I asked Palmer.

"I think so," Palmer said. "Hey-hey, I would have liked to have more, but it should work. It'll at least break up Meteor enough that it won't cause very much damage."

The next few days were spent frantically preparing the rocket for its launch. One of these days we were all in the command center when Shinra came. They came all at once, sweeping down on the town and storming every building. The bulk of their force -- led by Rude and Reno of the Turks -- surrounded the rocket command center. We hadn't even noticed them arriving, and the next moment they had completely encircled the command center.

We stared out the window in a kind of numb horror as Reno delivered a message to us through a megaphone (I think it was the HP Shout). "The Shinra-26 rocket is property of Shinra, Inc., and is not intended for private or home use. You are hereby under arrest. I will now read you your rights. You have the right to an unfair trial. You have the right to be searched and seized. You have the right to be executed. You have the right to be tortured, then executed."

"Where's Mr. Clean?" I shouted out the window. It was dumb, but we had to something in response.

"'Mr. Clean' is retrieving the Huge Materia, which is also property of Shinra, Inc., from the rocket," Reno said. He then continued with his speech. "You have been charged with trespassing on the Nibel Reactor, trespassing on the Shinra-26, operating Shinra property for private or home use, and grand theft Materia."

"That would make a cool game," Fred said. "Grand Theft Materia."

"Shut up, Fred," Mukki said.

The phone rang. "I'LL GET IT!" Palmer and I both yelled. We both ran to the table where the phone sat. Palmer was in the lead, but I tripped him and he fell. As I was reaching for the phone, Palmer grabbed my leg and pulled me over backwards. Palmer got to his feet to get the phone, but I put him in a headlock. I reached for the phone with my left hand and did not see Palmer drawing his Mako Gun until it was too late. Palmer rapped me on the head with me, leaving me rather dazed, and grabbed the phone.

We listened to Palmer carrying on a heated argument over the phone. It went on for a quite awhile, then Palmer hung up. "Hey-hey, that was Cid," Palmer said. "He wanted to know, quote, 'Who the @$#%*$&% is jackin' my rocket?'" Palmer lowered his voice to a whipser for no real reason. "I tricked him," he said. "I told him it was Shinra, then I convinced him to pilot the rocket so he could finally get out into outer space."

"Are you sure about that?" Hart asked. "What's going to stop him from just taking off with the rocket?"

Palmer chuckled and pointed to a switch on the rocket launch controls. "See that? That locks the autopilot on."

I grinned a sinister grin as Palmer's plan dawned on me. "Not only does Meteor get blown up, but AVALANCHE goes with it."

"This should be fun," Mukki said.

Loud pounding sounds outside alerted us to the fact that Shinra was trying to break the door down. We quickly started pushing furniture over to block the doorway. "The windows!" Butch said as several MPs appeared at the window with a crowbar.

Johnny opened the window, pointed his Mako gun out, and blasted one MP. Another MP opened fire and Johnny quickly closed the window before he was shot. Bullets blasted holes in the glass. "Can we board them up?" Mukki asked.

"No time," Fred said.

Mukki was gathering up cans of Spam that had been sitting under the sofa for untold eons. "We can use this," he said. Mukki opened one of the cans, grabbed a big blob of Spam, and glopped it on the window, forming a rubbery, bulletproof, shield. Spam is completely impenetrable. He then coated the other window.

"Spam... not even the Donner Party would eat it!" Fred said.

Outside the building, the MPs smashed through the windows, but their crowbars become wedged in the Spam and lost. The troops tried firing through the Spam, but the bullets just bounced off the gooey Spam, inflicting injury among the Shinra troops.

"Oh yeah?" Reno shouted through his megaphone. "Well, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!"

Some SOLDIERs started setting up dynamite around the house. "We could be in trouble," Fred observed clinically.

One of the SOLDIERs suddenly fell to the ground as he was shot in the back. We traced the path of the shot with our eyes and saw... Vincent. Vincent was accompanied by Barret, who was happily gunning down MPs randomly.

"Hey-hey, let them take care of Shinra," Palmer said. "We've got to launch the rocket." He waddled over to the controls, inspected them, and pressed the LAUNCH button. Palmer picked up the radio to the rocket and spoke into it. "Hey-hey!"

"Palmer!" Cid shouted back. "What the hell did'ya do?"

"We finished repairing the Auto-Pilot. So, I laun---ched it!" Over the radio, we heard curses and thuds as Cid tried to free the rocket's controls.

"Hey-hey-hey!" Palmer said. "Almost lift off!"

"What the!?" Cid yelled. "No countdown? It just don't seem the same without it!"

"Hey!!!! Hey-hey!!! Blast-----off!"

We stared out the window as the Shinra-26 finally took off. Huge clouds of smoke billowed out from underneath it, then it soared solemnly off into the sky. "Yes!" I said. "We did it!"

Outside the house, Barret and Vincent were forcing the Shinra troops to play Simon Says and shooting the ones who got "out". Reno, however, had escaped.

"This is one small step for the Planet, one giant leap into deep doo-doo for AVALANCHE," Hart said.

"Hey! I didn't say 'simon says', foo'! You're out!" Barret shot the head off an MP.

We gathered around the control system's monitors to watch as the Shinra-26 soared out of the planet's atmosphere and towards Meteor. "Hey-hey, this could be kind of loud," Palmer warned us.

We were about to cover our ears when a small message flashed on the controls. "Cargo lock opened," it read.

"Hey!" Palmer said. "What's going on?"

"Does that mean the Huge Materia lock?" Johnny asked.

"You bet it does," Hart said. "This is not good."

"Simon says bite your ear," Vincent said. The Shinra troops tried in vain to bite their ear, but none of them succeeded and Barret gunned them all down.

We stared up at the rocket, which was getting smaller and smaller as it approached Meteor. Now the question was whether the Huge Materia plan would still work.

"Escape pod launched," another message flashed.

"What?" Palmer said. "Escape pod launched? Hey-hey! Er...."

There was silence. AVALANCHE had escaped the rocket, and they undoubtedly had the Huge Materia with them, too. "Those fools," Butch said. "That was the only way we could have stopped Meteor."

I kicked the rocket controls in disgust. "Damn you, AVALANCHE! Every time we get anywhere, you always get in our way!"

Chapter Text

We snuck out the back door of the command center, in case Barret and Vincent were hungering for another game of Simon Says. "Now what can we do?" I asked. "That rocket was our only chance of stopping Meteor. We're all dead. We might as well go home and wait for the end of the world."

"Hey-hey, look!" Palmer said, pointing up into the sky.

We stared up. The Shinra-26, now just a small speck in the sky, collided with Meteor. A violent blast of white light erupted across the entire planet. When it died down, and we could see again, we looked up. Meteor was still there.

"Bummer," as Hart put it.

"There's still one last chance," Butch said. "Remember the White Materia? That contains the ultimate white magic, Holy. If we can get our hands on that, we can use it to counteract Meteor."

"Yeah, but where is it now?" I asked.

"The last we saw of it, it fell in the water when Aerith died, remember?" Johnny said. "That was in the City of the Ancients, remember?"

"Ah, the old blue help text. Thanks, man."

We hitchhiked up to Bone Village, where we'd have to dig up a Luna Harp to get through the Sleeping Forest. While digging, however (those archaeologists wouldn't even help us out because we weren't AVALANCHE), we encounter something far cooler... a key to Midgar.

"Guys... look at this," I said. "This a key to one of the gates of Midgar."

"Great," Butch said. "That could be useful. Now we just gotta find that harp."

"Wait!" I said. "With this, we can get into Midgar and finally take on Shinra. They'll never know what hit them. And with all of Shinra's firepower, we won't have any problem stopping Meteor."

"Do you really think the seven of us have a chance against all of Shinra?" Hart asked.

"Doesn't matter," I said. "We're going to Midgar!" I'd waited a long, long, time for this chance, and I wasn't about to pass it up. It was time to wreak vengeance on Shinra at last. AVALANCHE would soon follow (or so I thought). Besides, I had a plan.

I eventually managed to convince the gang to go to Midgar. On the way, I made a stop by the Chocobo Farm to shoot a ferret and collect its corpse. We used the key to enter the Sector 5 slums and started into the underside of Midgar. I led the group to a familiar landmark, but not one that I had ever paid much attention to: the crashed rocket. "You think this thing will still work?" I asked.

"We could try," Palmer said.

We hauled the rocket out of the scrap pile. It was just a test rocket, much smaller than the Shinra-26 -- there wasn't any passenger space inside. Nevertheless, we might be able to ride on top of it.

"I used to build model rockets as a kid," Fred said.

We patched up the rocket and Fred set up a crude launching pad. Nervously, we sat on the rocket, then Johnny lit the fuse. I watched the fuse burn down and realized what we were doing was incredibly stupid -- but it was too late to get off now. The rocket took off, trailing smoke behind it.

My stomach lurched as the ground flew away beneath us. I clung tightly to the rocket and closed my eyes. "How do we stop this thing?" Johnny yelled. I did not open my eyes for fear of what I would see.

I heard the sound of breaking glass. "Bail out!" Palmer yelled. I felt the rocket shift as a number of my buddies jumped off. I did not move.

"Tortellini, get off!" Hart shouted from behind me. Still with my eyes closed, I dived off the rocket to the right. I fell a short distance and landed headfirst in something wet. Shortly thereafter, there was a fairly large explosion from the rocket.

I opened my eyes. I was staring into some water. I tried to get to my feet, but my head was wedged into something. "Hang on, we'll pull you out," Mukki said. I felt a tug at me, and then I popped backwards.

I was sitting on the floor of a bathroom, staring at the toilet that I had just been stuck in. Around Mukki, Johnny, and I were some smoking pieces of the rocket. "Why didn't you jump off earlier?" Mukki asked.

"I was scared," I admitted. The three of us -- me still a little dazed -- walked out of the bathroom and into the hallway, where the rest of the group was. I recognized the hallway instantly. It was the Shinra Building. "Hey! We made it!"

Some maraca music started playing.

I reached into my pocket and took out the dead ferret I'd collected on the way to the Shinra Building. "I learned a few things back at City Hall," I said. "One of them is that a dead ferret in the ventilation duct really stinks things up." Casually, I opened up the nearest duct and tossed the ferret in. "Takes about an hour for it to get really smelly, if I recall."

We hid in one of the bathroom stalls and waited. The maraca music continued to play. A very rancid smell started wafting out of the ventilation ducts and soon became unbearable. We continued to wait.

The building PA system came on. "We are currently unaware what is causing the smell in the building. In the mean time, please feel free to take a breather outside."

"Not like the air out there's any better," Fred said.

Footsteps criss-crossed the halls outside the bathroom. When they had ended, we exited the bathroom to the tune of, uh, maraca music. "All right," Butch said. "Now we can loot this place."

"Hey-hey, you sure everybody's left?"

"I'll go up to the security room and keep an eye on the building," Hart volunteered. "I'll let you know if anybody shows up."

While Hart was in the security room, the rest of us began to loot the Shinra Building. I was in ecstatic. Shinra had tortured me in various ways over all these years, and now we were ripping them off of weapons, items, food, even furniture -- I made a beeline for the swivel chairs in my former office and took them. Palmer found a Behemoth Horn in a storage room, and Butch picked up a Grow Lance. Johnny had the biggest prize of them all -- my cardboard standup of Alhazad, which we had found in Heidegger's office (I'd always wondered what happened to it).

We were in the process of leaving with our first haul when an alarm started to sound. Hart's voice came in on the PA system. "It's Weapon!" he shouted. "One of them, at least. It's coming out of the sea and it's headed straight towards Midgar!"

We rushed to the window and looked out. A huge white robot-like being -- the Diamond Weapon -- was emerging from the ocean to the north of Midgar in a huge spray of water. It sloshed through the water and then onto the land. In the city, people crowded the streets and fled randomly around in terror, screaming. Meanwhile, the maraca music kept playing.

"Of all the times this could happen, it had to happen now," I said. For some reason, I was now speaking in subtitles.

"Will somebody shut those maracas up?" Johnny snapped in a subtitle.

"Hey-hey, forget the loot, we've got to get out of here!" Palmer said, also in a subtitle. We dropped our goods and rushed down to the parking garage. Fred hotwired a jeep and we took off. It was not until we were already out of the building that we released we had forgotten Hart.

Trying to escape the building did not prove to be a good move, because the entire staff of the Shinra Building was still standing outside, waiting for the dead ferret smell to go away. I looked across the hordes of engineers, secretaries, lawyers, and MPs. "Whoops," I said.

We tried to drive right through the crowd. This worked for the engineers and secretaries, who fled from our path, but the MPs started firing on our jeep. A group of lawyers used their occult powers to drop lightning bolts on us. Johnny, who was driving, tried to swerve between them. Some of the lightning bolts blasted MPs or other Shinra workers.

We pointed our Mako guns out the window and started firing at the MPs. One of the MPs threw a stick of dynamite at our car. Mukki caught it and tossed it back, causing a large section of the crowd to flee in terror.

Meanwhile, the Diamond Weapon continued its inexorable, although somewhat stilted, march on the city. Shinra helicopter swarmed around it, firing on it to no avail, and the Weapon swatted many of them down with its huge arms. The whole city was packed with people running up and down the street for no reason and screaming their heads off, all in subtitles. They were also a lot of small and vaguely plastic-like cars.

And the maraca music kept playing.

We made it out of the bulk of the crowds, but the Turks spotted us and started firing on us with uzis. I ducked down in my seat as bullets peppered the side of the car. "We could be in trouble," I noted.

One of the bullets struck our fuel tank. There was a large explosion from the rear of the jeep and the vehicle flipped into the air, spun around several times, and crashed hood-first into the pavement. We tumbled out, remarkably uninjured.

"My peoples say your jeep is disabled," Elena said in a subtitle.

We were seized by Shinra troops, beaten unconscious, and taken to a prison. Now let's jump on over to Hart.

I had no idea what Tortellini was up to; he seemed to have vanished from the building (which was the case, as I later learned). I kept my eyes on the Diamond Weapon approaching the city.

Shinra was powering up the Sister Ray to fire. The lights in the security room went out with a crackle as the huge cannon absorbed all the power in the city. I was left in the dark.

A minute or so, the power came back on. My eyes immediately went to the view screen. The Diamond Weapon was in the process of flying into the ocean, and it had a large hole in its chest. It apparently managed to get some shots off before it kicked the bucket, however, as some large fireballs were currently flying directly at the Shinra Building. Luckily, they were targeted a higher floor.

A mischievous grin crossed my face. Rufus was still in his office. I flipped a switch to connect the security room's cameras to a monitor in Rufus's office. "Hey you!" I shouted. "Is that roadkill on your head or is it just your hair?"

On the big display panel, I could see Rufus staring at me in the monitor, shocked that anybody would blatantly insult his hair like this. "Yo' mama's so fat she has to come inside when it rains so the yard will get some water!" I continued.

Rufus was so enraged by my comments that he did not pay any attention to what was going on outside. The fireballs struck his office window and a huge explosion enveloped the room.

When I regained consciousness, we were sitting in a jail cell somewhere in Midgar. Our whole group (except Hart) was there -- me, Mukki, Johnny, Butch, Fred, and Palmer. And we had some company as well. Reeve.

"What are y'all doing here?" Reeve asked.

"We were trying to loot the Shinra Building, but we got caught," Butch explained. At least we weren't talking in subtitles anymore. "But how about you?"

"I was helping out AVALANCHE," Reeve said. "Heidegger finally figured what I was up to."

"Frankly, I think you deserve it," I said.

"Hey, wanna hear a joke?" Palmer asked. "Hey-hey, this kid is at school. Some kids are making fun of him, so he calls them blue bananas and they beat him up. He goes inside to tell his teacher. 'What are you doing here?' the teacher asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up,' the kid says. 'You called them blue bananas? That's very bad,' the teacher said. 'I'm afraid I'll have to send you the principal.' So the kid goes to the principal. 'What are you doing here?' the principal asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up. I went to tell my teacher and she sent me to you, and now I'm here.' 'You called them blue bananas? That's very bad,' the principal said. 'I'm sending you home to talk to your parents.' The kid goes home, and his dad is there. 'What are you doing here?' his dad asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up. I went to tell my teacher and she sent me to the principal, and the principal sent me home, and now I'm here.' 'You called them blue bananas? That's very bad,' the kid's dad says. 'Go outside and think about what you did.' The kid goes outside and sits down on the porch. A policeman comes by. 'What are you doing here?' the policeman asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up. I went to tell my teacher and she sent me to the principal, and the principal sent me home. My dad told me to sit outside, and now I'm here.' 'You called them blue bananas? That's very bad,' the policeman says. 'I'm going to have to arrest you.' So the kid winds up in juvenile court. 'What are you doing here?' the judge asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up. I went to tell my teacher and she sent me to the principal, and the principal sent me home. My dad told me to sit outside, and a policeman came by and arrested me. And now I'm here.' 'You called them blue bananas? That's very bad,' the judge says. 'I'm going to have sentence you to 15 years in jail.' So the kid gets sent to jail. 15 years later, he gets out of jail. As he's leaving the jail, he runs into a girl he used to know at school. 'What are you doing here?' she asks. 'I called a bunch of kids blue bananas and they beat me up. I went to tell my teacher and she sent me to the principal, and the principal sent me home. My dad told me to sit outside, and a policeman came by and arrested me. The judge sentenced me to 15 years in prison and now I'm here.' The friend starts laughing so hard she ends up rolling on the ground. She rolls out into the street, gets hit by a car, and dies. The moral of the story? Look both ways before you cross the street."

There was a numb silence -- well, there would have been, except the maraca music kept going.

"That's the dumbest joke I've ever heard," Fred said.

A guard passed by our cell in the hallway. "Hey, you! I demand that you release us!" Fred said, waving a piece of orange cardboard. "I have a Get Out of Jail Free card!"

The guard did not respond, because he was presently being propelled into the wall by a figure in a black cloak that had kicked him in the stomach. The figure approached our cell and pulled back its hood. It was Zangan.

"Zangan?" Mukki whispered.

"I'm baaaack!" Zangan said. "I saw what you guys were doing with the rocket. That was our only chance."

"You mean -?" I started.

"Yeah, yeah, AVALANCHE is stupid, you're not, I was wrong, you were right, yada yada yada. Now let's get out of here." Zangan picked the lock on the cell and we crept out. Reeve tagged along behind us.

On the way out of the prison, I spotted several Moogles in another cell frantically shaking maracas. "Zangan," Johnny said. "Can you open that cell?"

Zangan did so.

Johnny walked in and suddenly snatched the maracas out of the Moogles' hands. "Stop... playing... that... infernal... music..." he said to the Moogles.

"Kupo," a Moogle said sullenly.

Johnny handed them the maracas back. The Moogles took them, but did not start playing. Satisfied, Johnny closed the cell door and we left the prison. Just as we were leaving, I heard the Moogles tittering and the maraca music started back up again. Johnny ran back inside the prison and returned a few minutes later. There was no maraca music. "Okay, let's go," he said.

Zangan had parked his truck outside the prison. We all climbed in, with Zangan driving. "Now where do we go?" he asked.

I looked out across the skyline of the city. There was no sign of the Diamond Weapon. "Weapon's gone," I observed. "Let's get back to the Shinra Building. We gotta find Hart."

Zangan drove off towards the Shinra Building, but soon stopped the truck. "What's the matter?" Mukki asked. "Why have we stopped the car?"

"I forgot to close the door," Zangan said. He closed the door, then started the truck.

"A word of warning, Zangan," Fred said. "Don't do that when Hart's around."

The prison was on the fringes of the Sector 8 plate, so we had a ways to go to reach the Shinra Building. We were about halfway to the Shinra Building when things got interested. A huge red robot was lumbering down the street, directly towards us.

I looked up to the top of the robot. Two people were in the cockpit, although I couldn't tell who they were. "Gyaaa haa haa!" one of them said -- it was obviously Heidegger. He looked down at the car and spotted me in it. "Well, well, it's Domino," he said. "You sure did treat us like dogs up until now."

"This is our new Proud Clod," Scarlet, the other rider, said. "The ultimate in anti-Weapon artillery. Kyaa haa haa!"

"You think that thing has a chance against Weapon?" Butch blurted. "Give me a break!"

The Proud Clod stepped towards us. "Step on the gas!" I shouted.

"Step on the gas," Zangan repeated. He slammed the gas pedal down and the car shot between the Proud Clod's legs. The Proud Clod turned slowly around, and then lumbered after us.

Our truck zipped down the street with the Proud Clod chasing us. "Check and turn the signals to the right," I said.

"Check and turn the signals to the right," Zangan repeated.

"Now turn to the right."

"Now turn to the right." Zangan swerved down a narrow side street. The Proud Cloud tried to fit in, but couldn't. Instead, Heidegger merely flipped a switch and blasted the obstructing buildings into oblivion, then continued the chase.

We turned out into another street with a sizable lead over the Proud Clod. Suddenly, a manhole ahead of us flew open. The Chocobo Sage popped up out of it, holding a Chocobo in his arms. "Chocobos love trucks!" he said.

"Step on the brakes!" I shouted. I didn't want to run over the Chocobo Sage.

"Step on the brakes," Zangan repeated. He slammed the brakes and the truck stopped, but by that time the Chocobo Sage had disappeared back into the manhole. Zangan hit the gas and we accelerated again. The Proud Clod continued to chase us.

We neared the Shinra Building. By this time, most of the staff had returned to work inside the building -- either that, or they'd gone home. Hart, however, was standing in front of the building. As he saw our truck approaching, he started jumping up and down and waving his arms frantically.

We almost made it to the building. It was so close. We were halfway across the parking lot when the Turks struck. They were standing on top of a car, still armed with uzis. This time, they "only" managed to blow one of our tires.

Our car started bouncing around. "Woh ho ho huh! Stop the car!" I shouted at Zangan. "We got an emergency, can't you see?"

Zangan slammed on the brakes. We jumped out of the car and turned to face the Turks.

"Don't you guys ever go away?" Fred said. We all had our Mako Guns drawn, except for Reeve and Zangan.

"Our company may be in turmoil, but an order's an order," Elena said. "That's the will and spirit of the Turks. Believe it!"

"I know we have a weird relationship, but... we have to end this... like Turks!" Reno said.

"Besides, you have no idea how long we spent trying to find a save point in Persona," Elena added.

"That wasn't us, that was Tseng," I said.

"Tseng..." Elena paused for a moment and lowered her gun.

That was all the time we needed. "BUM RUSH!" Zangan shouted. He leaped into the air and spun around Elena several times, accompanied by bright flashes of light. Elena stumbled and fell to the ground.

Zangan whirled to face Reno, who was armed with nightstick, and Rude, who still had his uzi out. "Kick, punch, it's all in the mind," Zangan said.

"THAT'S IT!" Hart roared from across the parking lot. "NO MORE PARAPPA REFERENCES! NONE!!!" Enraged, he grabbed an entire ashtray and hurled it towards the car where Zangan, Reno, and Rude were standing. Zangan was facing towards Hart, saw it coming, and ducked, but Reno and Rude were not so lucky. The ashtray hit them in the backs, knocked them down, and rolled down off the car.

While we were fighting the Turks, the Proud Clod had been steadily approaching us. It was now standing in the parking lot. With a sweep of its left hand, it picked up Hart and lifted him into the air.

"Help!" Hart shouted.

"Kyaa haa haa!" Scarlet laughed.

The Proud Clod grabbed onto the side of the Shinra Building with its right hand and started climbing up. In its left hand it held a screaming Hart.

"Y'all've got to do something!" Reeve said.

"Yeah, but what?" Mukki said.

Butch pointed up into the air. I followed his hand upwards. A dark blue saucer-shaped vehicle was descending from the sky with flashing lights. As we stared in shock at it, the saucer touched down in the Shinra parking lot.

A ramp folded down from the side of the saucer, opening a doorway. A group of chimpanzees wearing light blue spacesuits trooped down. One of the chimpanzees was carrying a green flag, upon which was a chimpanzee head and a sickle.

"Greetings, human," the flag-carrying chimpanzee said. "We are the Space Chimps. I am our leader, Pongo La Ropa. Do you require our assistance?"

"As a matter of fact, we could," I said. I pointed to the Proud Clod. "That thing's got our buddy."

"Very well," Pongo La Ropa said. He turned to the other Space Chimps. "Any good bads here?"

"I'm the best good bad in this squad, General," a Space Chimp said, raising its hand.

"All right, Sergeant Chunky," Pongo said. He glanced up at the Proud Clod. "I think this situation calls for the Banana Bites, what do you think?"

"The same," Sgt. Chunky agreed.

Pongo unzipped a pouch on his space suit and removed a long rectangular yellow box. Text on the box read "BANANA BITES: Chocolate-covered banana bits". Pongo handed the box of Banana Bites to Chunky. "Careful with these."

Chunky nodded and unstrapped a grenade launcher from his back. He opened up the ammo case and the box of Banana Bites, then shook the box's contents -- three black roundish pieces of chocolates, presumably containing banana -- into the grenade launcher.

Pongo La Ropa pointed up towards the Proud Clod. "Through the window, off the computer, into the toilet, through the pipes, out the gutter, off the helicopter, through the cockpit window, into the fat guy's mouth."

Sgt. Chunky raised the grenade launcher and fired it. A Banana Bite arced across the night sky, and broke through a 64th-floor window of the Shinra Building. It disappeared inside the building, only to later shoot out of the gutter, bounce off a helicopter in the sky, break through the Proud Clod's cockpit, and lodge itself directly into Heidegger's mouth.

Heidegger started coughing and held his substantial stomach. "Heidegger?" Scarlet asked. "Heidegger?" Heidegger pitched forward and fell on the Proud Clod's controls. Whatever buttons he fell on caused the Proud Clod to leap off the Shinra Building and into the air. The Proud Clod sort of hung there for a moment and there plummeted to the ground. Hart dived out of the Proud Clod's hand as it neared the ground. The Clod struck the ground and exploded in a sphere of red flames.

Hart rolled across the ground away from the fire and came up at Fred's feet. "Thanks for the help," I said to the Space Chimps.

"No problem," Pongo La Ropa said. "Bailing people out of otherwise unsolvable situations is our job. If you ever need any more help, feel free to give me a call." The Space Chimp handed me a business card, which listed him as a "Registered deux au machina".

The Space Chimps climbed back inside their saucer and flew off, never to be seen again. "Who were those masked chimps?" Hart asked.

It was not until now that what had just happened sunk in for me. "We did it!" I suddenly shouted. "We finally beat Shinra!"

"Not quite," Reeve said. "Hojo's going to fire the Sister Ray again. The city can't handle it. We've got to stop him. Let's git!"

I looked up across the city skyline. A lone figure was standing on the Sister Ray platform, silhouetted against the rain. It was Hojo.

The Sister Ray started to glow. "We don't have time!" Zangan shouted. "That sucker's gonna fire any second!"

I looked around the parking lot. My eyes fell on some wood hanging out of a dumpster on the side of the building. I rushed over, grabbed a board, and set it up on a speed bump, carefully aiming it to point directly at Hojo. Finally, I picked up the head of the demolished Proud Cloud.

"Palmer... come over here," I said. Palmer did so, and I directed him to stand on one end of the board. I then stuffed the Proud Clod head down over Palmer's own.

"Hey-hey, what are you doing?" Palmer asked nervously.

"Okay, everybody, on the count of 3, jump on the board," I instructed.

"Hey-hey-hey-hey!" Palmer protestd.

"1... 2... 3!" We all jumped on the free end of the board. Palmer was catapulted into the air and arced across Sector 8.

We watched our rotund friend hurtle towards the Sister Ray platform. As Palmer approached the cannon, Fred said anxiously, "Back... back... back..." Palmer smacked into Hojo, knocking the scientist tumbling from the platform. "He's outta there!"

We rushed over to the Sister Ray. Palmer was kneeling on the ground in a dazed state, his head protected by the Proud Clod's head. Hojo, however, was lying flat on the ground.

"You okay?" I asked, kneeling down over Palmer. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Palmer said something unintelligible.

"What?" I asked.

Palmer repeated it.

"I think he said, 'I can't get this helmet off!'" Hart translated.

We tugged on the Proud Clod's head and eventually managed to yank it off. "Well?" I asked.

Palmer looked at me. "You're not holding up any fingers anymore." I held up three fingers. "Three," Palmer said.

"How about Hojo?" Reeve asked.

Johnny took a look at him. "Dead," he reported. "Dead as a doorknob."

"Doornail," Mukki corrected.

"Sorry."

"Now we have done it," I said triumphantly. "We have beat Shinra. It took me ten years, two resistance organizations, a trip around the world, and cost me two jobs, but we've finally done it. We beat Shinra."

Chapter Text

"It's not over yet, you know," a voice behind us said.

We looked back. The Turks were standing across the street. "Oh, man," Mukki groaned. "Can't you just leave us guys alone?"

"We weren't planning on fighting you," Reno said. "What's left to fight for?"

"Then what is left?" Hart demanded.

"Sephiroth," Rude said simply.

"And Meteor," Elena added.

We had one last job left to do. "Guess it's time to insert Disc 3," Hart said.

"Oops," Palmer said. "I think I chucked that a while ago."

We spent the better part of the following day hunting for Disc 3. We eventually found it and we were ready to head off to the North Crater in one of the former Shinra Company's planes. Fred, however, insisted on a slight side trip to the Gold Saucer which will be revealed in due time.

We -- our party currently consisting of me, Hart, Johnny, Mukki, Butch, Fred, Palmer, and Zangan -- landed on the rim of the North Crater. "Don't tell me we have to hike all the way down that," Mukki groaned.

"I won't," I said. "I brought something along."

I opened up the plane's trunk and produced a bundle of bungee cords. "Bungee cords!"

Some maraca music started. Johnny jogged around to the other side of the crater and came back carrying some Moogles by the scruff of their necks. He nodded towards the crater. "Cut that music or in you go."

"Kupo," one of the Moogles said.

We attached our bungee cords to a large rock and stood ready to jump. "So how do we do this?" Butch asked.

"Just jump," I shrugged. "How hard can it be?"

"You said exactly the same thing about snowboarding and piloting a submarine," Hart pointed out.

"All right, all right, but this time it will be easy. Let's go." Taking the lead, I jumped down into the crater. The others soon followed me.

We plummeted past a dizzying series of ledges and pathways, eventually passing into a small hole and into the center of the Planet itself. Green Mako energy rushed around us. Our drop ceased abruptly and we moved downwards at a crawl.

"What's... going... on... ?" I asked.

"Major... slowdown..." Fred said.

At the very center of the center of the Planet we found a huge, purplish, mutated Sephiroth-thing. Surrounding him on some stone ledges was AVALANCHE, and they were doing a number on Bizarro Sephiroth. As we plummeted among the ledges, Red XIII cast Flare on Sephiroth's head.

"It's morphin' time!" Sephiroth declared. He started to transform, but at that moment our bungee jumps sent us spinning back up to the top of the crater.

"This could be a bit more difficult that I thought," I admitted.

We jumped back down in. When we arrived at the core of the Planet this time, Sephiroth was in the form of an angel-like being. Cloud, Tifa, and Red XIII were fighting him.

"Hey guys!" Hart shouted, waving, as we bounced upside-down into the middle of the fight.

"It's a-me, Domino!" I said.

"SUPER NOVA!" Sephiroth shouted. Luckily, we bounced back up in time to avoid the spell.

"You know, this could really be quite difficult," Johnny said.

We dived into the crater a third time. When we reached the bottom, Sephiroth's Super Nova spell was still going on. "Er... we'll be leaving now," Palmer said. We quickly bounced back up.

"All right, guys, this time, try to grab onto something," I said.

We jumped yet again. This time, Cloud was casting Knights of the Round. We fell down between the Knights, who were flying around and swinging their weapons. I felt my bungee cord go slack and looked up. One of the Knights had severed the cord with his mace. I frantically tried to climb up the segment of cord I was holding, which served no useful purpose.

I landed on the ground in front of AVALANCHE. The rest of my party bungeed back up out of the crater. Above us, King Arthur appeared and dealt Sephiroth a final blow with Excalibur. Sephiroth started to crumble.

"Hey, we did it," Cloud said nonchalantly. "No... wait! He's still alive!"

A gray tube opened up where Sephiroth had been moments earlier. Cloud was sucked in and vanished. "Cloud!" Tifa shouted.

"Leave this to me!" I said, jumping into the tunnel after Cloud. The tunnel wound around through a phantom black void and eventually dropped me out on a flat rock plain that seemed to extend infinitely in all directions. The sky was a black void.

Sephiroth was standing in human form on the plain, and Cloud was bashing Sephiroth with his sword. The blows bounced off Sephiroth with no effect, and Seph stood laughing at Cloud's attempts.

"Cloud... here!" I said, tossing Cloud the item we'd picked up in the Gold Saucer on the way to the crater -- the Omnislash Limit Break manual.

Cloud took the manual and started thumbing through it. "Just a minute here," he said to Sephiroth. "I've got to take a look at this."

"Take your time," Sephiroth said.

Cloud finished flipping through the manual. "Omnislash!" he yelled, leaping at Sephiroth with his sword raised. He sommersaulted around Sephiroth, sending out waves of energy. Sephiroth stumbled backwards, dropped to his knees, and then fell down.

Sephiroth's body began to dissolve. "Any last words, Sephiroth?" Cloud sneered.

"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"

"Huh? What do you mean?" It was too late. Sephiroth was gone.

"Hey, Domino, thanks for the - " Cloud started. Then the gray tube opened back up, and Cloud and I were sucked back through. We popped out in the bottom of the crater.

The crater was starting to collapse -- whole chunks of the ledges on the walls were breaking off and dissolving in the Mako. "We've got to get out of here!" Cloud said.

"Cloud!" Tifa said from above, trying to reach down.

A rope fell down beside Cloud and I. I immediately scrambled up it, to the ledge where the rest of AVALANCHE was waiting -- or most of them. Yuffie and Vincent were nowhere to be seen. Tifa was still trying to pull Cloud up. "Climb the rope, @#$#$!" Cid shouted down. Cloud scrambled up the rope to safety on the ledge.

I looked up. The rope had not been thrown by one of AVALANCHE, it had come from above them -- I assumed it was one of my crew. I scrambled on up it. Below, the crater continued to crumble. "These darn bad guy headquarters always fall apart," I muttered.

At the top of the crater, I climbed out to find my party waiting for me -- and Holzoff. At first, I barely even noticed him, as I was worn out from the frantic climb. "Sephiroth's dead," I reported to my party. Then I saw Holzoff and did a double take. "Holzoff! What are you up to?"

"I saw all the battles going on up here and dropped by to lend a hand," Holzoff explained. "Good thing I showed up when I did. And, uh, sorry about bailing out on you earlier."

AVALANCHE climbed up out of the crater, barely in front of a rising tide of liquid Mako. At Hart's urging, we climbed into our former Shinra Company plane and took off. AVALANCHE got in "their" Highwind (originally, of course, the Hart) and flew off just at the last minute as the crater collapsed. Of course, if they'd just taken the rope out, they wouldn't have to get out at the last minute, but they have to do stupid things for dramatic effect.

Butch looked up in the sky at Meteor. "Now let's just hope Holy can stop Meteor in time."

"Forget Meteor, we've got to find Yuffie," I said.

"What?" Mukki asked. "We're still not done?"

"Yuffie and Vincent vanished while Cloud was fighting Sephiroth," I said. "The Planet only knows what she's up to. We've got to find her."

"There's only one she could have gone," Hart said. "South."

We flew south, looking for any sign of Yuffie, which wasn't easy at our height. Above us, impressive pyrotechnics surged across the sky as Holy was unleashed on Meteor. Just as we reached the south end of the continent, we spotted something -- Hojo's seaplane, which we had left there en route to the Forgotten Capital, was taking off. "Hey-hey!" Palmer said. "The seaplane!"

Our plane didn't have any weapons, so we were reduced to tailing the seaplane and waiting for it to land. The plane touched down in the water near Nibelheim, and sure enough, Yuffie got out, dragging an unconscious Vincent. We landed a distance aways and followed Yuffie into town.

By the time we got to Nibelheim, Yuffie was nowhere to be seen. "Where do you suppose she's gone?" Fred asked.

"There's only one place she could have gone," Johnny said. "The Shinra Mansion."

We climbed back in through the broken window and fanned out to search the mansion. Butch and I figured she'd be in the basement, so we went there. And sure enough, we found Yuffie in Hojo's former lab, sorting through the various scary-looking devices in the room. Vincent was lying on an operating table.

"The game's up, Yuffie," Butch said. "Where's my Materia?"

"What?" Yuffie asked innocently. "I didn't -"

"You killed Tseng," I said. "And Aerith. You didn't think we'd fall for your stupid ruse, did you?"

"I reckon I got no reason to kill them, uh huh," Yuffie said. "Besides, you can't prove I did anything, uh huh."

Butch and I drew our Mako guns. Yuffie darted to the operating table, grabbed Vincent's body, and held him up in front of her. Since Vincent was taller than Yuffie, this made a rather effective shield. We lowered our guns. Yuffie backed towards the library, holding her boomerang in one hand and Vincent in the other.

Yuffie, however, had forgotten just who the previous inhabitants of the mansion were. I reached onto a shelf and grabbed a gatling gun loaded with cigarettes left by the cultists. One flick of a switch turned on the gun's minor-seeking mode, and I started firing. As cigarettes curved around Vincent towards her, Yuffie dropped the former Turk and fled. "You haven't seen the last of me, uh huh!" Yuffie shouted as she dived out the window. "I'll be back!"

For the time being, however, the world was saved. By the time we got back to Midgar, Lifestream had protected the Planet while Holy destroyed Meteor (or something like that), and it was over. AVALANCHE, of course, took the credit for even that.

At least Reeve remembered us. Although he was kind of jerk sometimes, and did hang out AVALANCHE, he was the only one who even cared about our exploits. And so, as the new president of Shinra, he reinstated me as mayor and returned my cardboard standup of Alhazad.

In other words, I was right back where I was started. I still had an office in the Shinra Building, still took orders from Shinra, and still didn't do anything. "But, hey, we saved the world," as I remarked to Hart one day as we hung out in our office. Hart was playing Solitaire on the computer, and I was going to get the door, because there was somebody waiting outside.

"The era of Mako power is over, Sephiroth is dead, Meteor is destroyed, and Yuffie won't trouble us for the time being." I reached for the door and opened it. "In fact, I'd say the only thing that could pose a threat to the world would be -- BERNIE STOLAR!!!"

"Ha ha ha! RPGs die!" Bernie laughed.

"Tortellini! Do something! Quick!" Hart shouted.

Bernie Stolar was holding a PlayStation in his hands, and he was reaching for the Power button. There was only one thing to do. I jumped on my swivel chair and sped towards Bernie. "You can't stop me!" Bernie said. "Our new console will -" I slammed into him and sent him sprawling backwards out of the office. Bernie was sucked into the portal from which he had entered our world. The portal closed up with a sucking sound, and I skidded harmlessly across the hall.

"A new Sega console? Is it Tuesday already?" Hart said.

And so it ended. We had overthrown Shinra, defeated Sephiroth, thwarted Yuffie's plans, and saved the world from Bernie Stolar's demographics. But the greatest evil had yet to be touched. AVALANCHE.

Five hundred years later...

Red XIII and two of his cubs bounded across a misty valley. They scampered up the valley wall and stopped on a high ledge. Below them lay a vast forest with a river running through it. Birds flew by overhead. And in the middle of the forest were the crumbling ruins of Midgar. Childlike laughter sounded. Standing on that cliff, staring at the forest, Red XIII and his cubs carried on a deep, philosophical conversation.

"What does this all mean, anyway?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"And how come the people in FF Tactics don't have any noses?"

"Son, some things in life just don't have answers."

EPILOGUE

There you have it. The true, the TRUE, story of the events of Final Fantasy 7. Hart, Palmer, and I -- and the rest of our gang -- were the true heroes. AVALANCHE did none of the work, as I'm sure you've gathered by now. But they conspired with the remnants of Shinra, the people of Cosmo Canyon, and the whole world to suppress our story. The true story of Final Fantasy 7.

And so my task now is to tirelessly fight AVALANCHE at every turn, asking only for credit where credit is due. Again and again, I am always ignored or portrayed as a villain (like that Christmas episode). But as any reader of my tragic tale knows, I am the true hero.

(cue starry background with "THE END")