World 18: Final Fantasy VII

CHRONICLE ONE: SAGA OF THE JUMPER

JUMP 19: OVER THE SEA AND UNDER THE SEA

Previously: Easy Fix

Themesong: Eh Cumpari by Julius La Rosa

As an elf, I could have sailed on the white ships to the Undying Lands, and believe you me, it was tempting. The elves can sail back and forth to Valinor after all, at least in theory. In the end I chose not to. I didn’t know if, nor was I willing to risk that, that would be counted as either dying or (more likely) choosing to stay. As an elf, I could (also in theory) have remained in Middle Earth until the rise of modern civilization, as Tolkien always claimed that Middle Earth was the history of our own world. But by the end of my stay I’d had enough of Gondor, enough of Rohan, enough of Erebor and Harad and all the other places that had filled my youthful imagination. It just wasn’t that big a place, and woefully underpopulated. Had I wished, I probably could have met every living person in Middle Earth.

Instead I went legend hunting. Three things I wanted, three things I claimed. A Spider, a Balrog, and a Dragon. The first two were… well… not easy… but I knew where they were. The Balrog was within the Mines of Moria; the Spider in the high path near Cirith Ungol. The Dragon took longer. Much longer.

Even with magical scrying and a shuttle craft’s scanners, Dragons aren’t easy to find. I had thought to use Smaug’s remains to get a DNA sample, but the Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain were… idiots. They’d left the entire dragon at the bottom of the Long Lake where he’d settled after being shot.  Not that I blame them. That lake is deep. It would have taken some serious engineering to get the body… but engineering is what dwarves do and there was wealth to be had down there.

As I said, the Long Lake is damned deep. I had to go Argonian and even then… not fun. It’s dark and the pressure is pretty intense that far down. Still, I froze big red and all his jewels and bones and horns into an iceberg, then floated it to the surface. Took weeks to pull everything out of the ice and it smelled… unpleasant to boot. All the surface DNA was compromised. Had to go to the bones with a decidedly un-lore friendly bonedrill.

Equipped with DNA and Starfleet scanners, I found the dragons, eventually, but mostly they were other dead dragons, slain in ages past and left to rot. I collected their bits for later whatever, but I wanted a live one. I needed a live one. I felt the moral imperative of testing my might against such an epic monster.

I eventually found one, far to the north, an Ice Drake named Belagar. It didn’t go down easy and I didn’t even try stealth on it as I had on Saruman. I challenged Belagar in straight up battle, an honor I hadn’t given to Shelob or Durin’s Bane. Both of them had earned their deaths long before I arrived in Middle Earth, unspeakable evils that they were. I’d wanted to take on Ungoliant, but when I found it, ancient, crippled, starving, in its lair beneath the waves in sunken Beleriand, I just Master Balled the fucker. It might have been a great hunt once upon a time, but it was a shadow of its former self and not worth the effort. Thus, I had to settle for Shelob if I wanted to take on a Great Spider.

Shelob, an ambush predator, I ambushed with fire and spellcraft, driving her back into a trap I’d set for her and only once she was cornered did I toss I finish her, giving her a taste of the fear all her victims had known over the long ages. Hurray for Arania Exumai, am I right?

Durin’s Bane, scourge of Moria and Flame of Udûn, I lured to the bridge of Khazad Dum, as had Gandalf, and like Gandalf, I shattered the bridge and dropped us both into that deep unnamed lake with waters as cold as death. And there, in my element, I drowned the flaming beast then locked it in shackles of ice as hard as any ever winterborn. I considered capturing it too, but I’d already used my second MB on the Watcher in the Water, and I’d promised myself an Oliphaunt, and had no intention of beating up a poor defenseless mega-elephant in order to use a lesser ball. I tried an Ultra Ball and a Dusk Ball on the Balrog, but neither worked, so I just finished it. Maybe I needed to stop catching Pandas in every Earth Jump… but I was trying to get enough to form a decent breeding pool.

And then, one by one, in all three cases, Soul of Ice was quenched and tempered in the blood of those great horrors of smoke and darkness. Soul of Ice, Dragonslayer, Webcutter, Flamequencher, Doombreaker. I held my blade aloft at the roof of the world and laughed. I was Jumper, Victorious!

The Balrog’s skull I presented to Dain, King Under the Mountain, along with the news that Moria had fallen to goblins… goblins who were now dead.  My friends and I had hunted them relentlessly through the long dark and fed their corpses to the fire, letting them know that this bastion of the light had been restored, letting them know that henceforth, they would find naught but pain and death in those mithril-blessed halls.

Shelob’s head I brought to Thranduil… you know, dad (Blood of Kings, Elven… you do the math… yes, this means Lego-my-bow is my idiot brother). Father was most… eh… he was most Thranduil. If he’d been a pleasant sort, there would not have been five armies in the Hobbit. Even to family he was not exactly the most gracious… though I was his youngest and it might have been because he felt that I’d taken unacceptable risks. But what is immortality worth if one only plays it safe?

As for Belagar’s bones, those I brought to Gondor as a gift to the King I’d help restore to his throne… a tricky thing to do without the War of the Ring. I’d had to enlist the aid of the Wise… or rather, I had to cross meeting each of them off my list of people to meet and enlist the aid of. See, fixing the Ring Issue had left multiple issues unresolved; from the uncrowned status of Aragorn, to his relationship with Arwen, to the fate of Gollum, to the issue of Grima, and the stewardship of Gondor. Most worrying of all, at least to me, was the fate of the souls trapped in the Paths of the Dead.

I’d like to claim that I, all of two and a half centuries old, knew better than luminaries like Radagast, Gandalf, Glorfindel, Elrond, Cirdan, and Celeborn. I especially would never make such a claim against the wisdom of Galadriel. And so I sought the members of the Council of White and explained to them that I had, through putting the words of Gollum (who had been brought into my father’s keeping in 3009 by Aragorn) together with the hobbit who fought in the Battle of Five Armies, found the Ring of the Enemy and delivered it unto the fires of Orodruin… and that there I had had a vision of things unresolved.

Having slain a Balrog, a child of Ungoliant, a Dragon, and many… many… goblins and orcs and trolls… my words were not ignored by the Council I’d asked my father to call, and they discussed for many days and nights before resolving upon multiple courses of action I shan’t go into but that would, with any luck (read “doses of Felix Felicis”) resolve each of the issues after a time, and before many members of that Council went into the West. Humph, look at them, running away to another realm as soon as the story was over… what did they think they were? Jumpers?

Of course, all the members of the Council knew there were things I was not telling them. This was Elrond and Celeborn and Gandalf… and Galadriel! Of course they knew. But they could not pierce my story, for much of it was real and what wasn’t was concealed by Occlumency.

The one truth I did reveal to Gandalf and Galadriel alone was that Saruman had, in fact, been corrupted by Sauron and a lust for power. I claimed to have sought him out to ask him for ways of dealing with the Ring and that he’d sought to wrest knowledge of its location from my mind before I’d managed to escape. When I’d snuck back into Orthanc, figuring that hiding where I’d just escaped from, I’d discovered him using the Palantir to commune with Sauron and, in my wroth at learning of this betrayal, I’d struck him a killing blow with my sword. I presented the Palantir and staff of Saruman as proof.

“You speak of killing a Wizard as if it were an easy thing,” Gandalf said, voice all a rumble as he struggled to accept in his heart of hearts that his friend of many ages had been a traitor, though he’d suspected something. Perhaps he believed that Saruman could have been saved, had he only found the right words.

“I would not say easy, but I have, I think, proven that killing me is no easy thing either. Am I not a daughter of Thranduil, King of Greenwood the Great? Am I not of the blood of Oropher of Doriath who fought at Dagorlad with Gil-galad?” I asked, drawing upon my knowledge of how a true Sindar would respond to such a comment.

Galadriel chuckled and patted my hand. “Calm yourself, child. I know that pride of old. It was for pride of place that I left behind Valinor and out of pride that I have stayed here in Middle Earth for so long.”

“It is sad, is it not, that Lorien will fade, now that the power of the rings is broken?” I asked, deflecting. “Is there no way to recraft the rings once more?”

“It is the nature of the world,” Gandalf said. “All things fade, or go into the west. Now is the age of men.” and he would say no more.

I took my leave of the Council of the Wise and of the Dragon’s wings, I made a suit of armor for Zane, enchanted against even the harshest elements. And of the Dragon’s claws, I made swords, swords as sharp as thought itself. And even, it must be said, did I turn my hand to ring-crafting… but I did not have the skill of Celebrimbor or Sauron, and so my rings were as the lesser rings, mere essays of the craft.

But Gandalf had been right. All things must end or go into the west and my time in this world was at an end. In my time in Middle Earth, I had fought men and orcs, met kings and heroes and seen a king restored to his rightful place. I had considered the course of history, and whether I had any right to usurp the author’s will as I had… then I had shrugged. These were my stories, my lifetimes… the Author’s will had played out as the Author willed it countless other times. For now, my job was done.

Still, I was anxious for the next jump to begin as that one ended. By mutual agreement, and to celebrate everyone besides RayRay passing their classes, we all decided to jump straight into the planning phase, even before we knew what the next jump would be.

Of course, figuring that out wasn’t exactly hard, since I knew the music coming from the Vending Machines the moment we stepped into the Warehouse. The victory theme from Final Fantasy is unmistakable. The fact that the Wheel of Age was shaped like the Golden Saucer Amusement Park and the Wheel of Location was shaped like the City of Midgar might also have been clues. I gave them both a spin as I stepped over to the machine.

Final Fantasy VII is one of my favorite video games, or had been, once upon a time. I’d collected every Materia, every Limit Break, everything there was to collect in that game. I’d bred Chocobos, defeated the Weapons, saved the day. Now, if only I could keep Sephiroth from killing Aerith. But I was getting ahead of myself.

I looked through the whole Jump Tree… then grunted. It was longer than I’d expected and thus the planning was going to take more effort than I’d thought. Not only were there a ton of options for me, but the companion import option would give each of my companions four hundred CP of their own to spend. What had usually been more about planning my own adventure had become more like like outfitting a group for war or planning an RPG Loadout. Sure, I’d done it before… but five times in eighteen jumps wasn’t exactly common… and even there, most of those five times had had very limited purchase sets. And never before had I been planning a war from beginning to end while doing so.

But all that planning would take CP… quite a lot of it, in fact. And one Drawback gave me all the extra CP I needed and did so without adding undue hardship. All I had to do was kill the game’s two resident super bosses, Ruby and Emerald Weapon, sometime in the next decade. Succeed and I moved on. Fail and it’s game over. I now had sixteen hundred to spend, and spend I did. And no, I couldn’t Master Ball them and call it a day.

With the goal in mind, I selected ‘Cetra’ (Aerith’s race, making us the last two alive) from the Background list. That cost me two hundred and came with the built in drawback ‘Hunted’, but let’s be honest, I was always going to bring down Shinra; having them hunting me was a foregone conclusion. The wheels had pegged me at 21 and placed my starting location as the Golden Saucer, which kept me safely far from Shinra’s main base at least at first. Would have prefered Wutai (Ninja town) or Icicle Inn, but at least it wasn’t Midgar.

Being a Cetra made me a ‘Mage’, a being with a natural connection to the crystalline blood of the world (Materia), and blessed with a massive MP pool… a damned good thing since Materia were effectively spellstones one pumped MP through to produce magic… magic like Curaga, Thungaga, and Quake… or, you know, summon Bahamut Zero, a massive six winged dragon that would perform a Base Delta Zero on your enemies.  Big BZ had an attack called Teraflare and it really was nothing short of a magical version of an orbital strike. That it did a metric fuckton of non-elemental piercing damage was just… icing at that point. It was the second most powerful Summons in the game, kept from the top slot only by the absurd Knights of the Round, which leveled thirteen different attacks against your enemies, each of them extremely powerful. Knights of the Round could one shot all but the most powerful foes in the game… or, you know, a chocobo.

Bonus MP is always nice, and an almost instinctive grasp of how to use Materia couldn’t be a bad thing, right? However, being a race of mages was not the reason that the Cetra had been hunted to the edge of extinction. No, that feel to the other Cetra freebie, ‘Voice of the Planet’. Yeah. Really. Cetra could actually hear the ‘Voice’ of the Planet, making them all too aware of what state the planet was in, including and especially if the planet was in pain… and knowledge of what was hurting it. You know… like a giant evil corporation literally draining the planet’s Lifestream to produce ‘Mako’, the energy that ran all modern industry on the planet. 

Of course, that Lifestream was actually the collective soul of all who had lived and those who had yet to be born upon this planet. And that meant that those who could hear the ‘Voice’ also occasionally got visitations from the recently departed, but not in the creepy haunting way.  Regardless of how useful VoP would be in this world, it might really help in future jumps if I end up on Pandora or Alpha Centauri or Deadworld… or any other sentient planets. Or just to commune with some of the more famous planets of lore… like Krypton, Arrakis, and Vogsphere.

Since being a Cetra was pretty much the go to mage build, I figured I’d specialize, and to that end, I snagged the discounted ‘True Magic’ for three hundred. True Magic was a reference to the fact that no one was really casting spells in this word. Magic in Final Fantasy was accomplished, as I said before, by focusing the caster’s MP through a Materia. The caster was merely the battery and targeting agent; the Materia did the actual spell casting… or that was how it normally went. With True Magic, all that changed… at least with regards to Green Materia, the category that encompassed most of the actual combat spells, be they defensive, offensive, or curative. Once a True Mage had used a Green Materia to cast a spell, they’d be able to cast that spell on their own, even without having the Materia equipped… or even on hand at all.

There were two downsides to this, of course. Can’t have the good without the bad. The first was that it would cost just as much MP as normal, but the effect would be slightly lessened. That was unfortunate but understandable. The other was that equipped Materia provided stat boosts… no equipped Materia, no stat boosts. But then again, no need to equip Materia just for the spells meant I could focus more on the stat boosts, right?

I considered the ‘Improved Materia Growth’ perk, which made Materia mature faster, but that wouldn’t be much use in later jumps, so I skipped it. Instead I plunked down another three hundred for ‘Limit Break’.

In the world of Final Fantasy, a Limit Break was a devastatingly powerful attack one could only perform after taking enough damage in battle. The damage acted as a trigger by which the user overcomes their own limits… hence ‘Limit Break’. By practicing one’s Limit Break (i.e. by getting hurt in battle a lot) one could evolve the nature of the attack… though training alone would never be enough to learn ones Ultimate Limit Break… for that you usually needed a specific text to explain exactly how to perform the finishing move. 

I checked my bank. With the three bills to import my companions and the extra six from ‘Optional Bosses’, I had five hundred left, which was enough to buy the ‘Ultimate Limit Break’ item… but paying for it merely guaranteed that I’d find the book that would teach me how to push my Limit Break to its limit. If I didn’t pay, I’d have to search the whole planet to find the book, but either way, the book existed. Somewhere. On a planet the same general size as Earth. No problem.

I considered taking the council of my fears, but ultimately decided that if I didn’t find the book, I didn’t deserve the Ultimate Limit Break. A dose of Felix Felicis or two should be enough to guarantee finding it in any case. So I turned that down… and the Airship too. And even passed on the Ribbon, which was discounted for Cetra, even though Ribbon was good for blocking almost all status effects, since they could be farmed in game… I mean, in the world.

I also decided against buying the Jenova Cells, since I wasn’t exactly certain that I trusted myself with the genome of a hyper-adaptive alien lifeform designed to conquer entire worlds. Sadly, I also passed on buying my own Chocobo. They’re cute enough, but if I really need one, I’m willing to guess I’ll end up in other Final Fantasy worlds at some point. Even more heartbreaking, I even skipped the ‘Multiple Lifetime Pass’ which would have given me limitless Disney tickets. I freaking Luuuuuv Disney!

In fact, the only gear I actually took were the free Armor and Weapons. They free to everyone and weren’t particularly impressive, though each came with two slots for Materia. Oh, and the Packet of Phoenix Downs which was free to Cetra… which was just cruel! Phoenix Downs are healing items meant to revive someone from the brink of death… they don’t work on the dead, just the nearly dead. It was like having a medbay in a pouch on my belt, and one with the same glaring weakness.

Oh… and some starting Materia, of course. Everyone got the big four; Fire, Bolt, Ice, & Cure to start with. They were all from the Green ‘Spell Materia’ group, but Cetra also got a pack of Red ‘Summoning Materia’ as well; Choco/Mog, Shiva, & Ifrit. A stampeding horse-ostriche ridden by a teddybear-imp, plus an ice babe and a fire demon. What can I say? That trio suited my motif down to the bone.

As a Cetra, I got a discount on any two additional Materia purchases. Sure. I’ve played the game… several times. I have a perfect memory. I knew where each and every Materia was to be found… in theory. But I had that five hundred burning a hole in my pocket, so I snaked ‘Advanced Summon Materia’ for three, netting me the Summons for Alexander (a living castle with a holy attack), Hades (grim reaper looking skeleton dude unleashing pretty much all the world’s ills (i.e. status effects) from a big black cauldron), and Bahamut ZERO (which, as I mentioned before, was a dragon with a ZOMG Non-Elemental Fuck you and your donkey Attack… from Space!).

That left two hundred and I picked up two Yellow ‘Support’ Materia with that. The first, the ‘Added Cut Materia’ would allow me to perform spellstrikes… Essentially, whenever I used whatever Materia the Added Cut was linked to (you could pair Materia in some equipment) I’d also be able to combine casting the spell with performing a physical attack. So if I linked it to Cure, I’ll be able to attack the enemy and cure an ally at the same time… somehow. The other was the ‘Long Range Materia’… which would give my physical melee attacks an effective attack range of twenty meters… at no MP cost. Insanity.

Not one to pass up a chance to tease me, Zane commented on the foolishness of spending five hundred precious points on something I was going to pick up in-setting anyway, especially since, thanks to the Giant Master Materia that existed in the world of Final Fantasy VII… Gaia, Materia of all kinds could be found in an all but limitless supply for zero CP down and zero CP a month forever.

Frowning in annoyance, I responded, “But if I don’t take them, I’m wasting my discount!” I might have been being a little petulant.

“That’s the dumbest reason for taking something I can think of.”

“You’re the dumbest reason for taking them.”

“Very mature,” he drawled.

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Well, what would you recommend instead?”

“Honestly? Two Ribbons would be good.”

“I can get one of those in the Jump.” I protested.

“How many?”

“Umm… one… Temple of the Ancients…” I paused… “No… three… there’s one at Gaia’s Cliff and one at Battle Square… and actually, we can get as many of them as I want if we morph-farm Master Tonberries.

“I have no idea what those are… but how many copies of Summon Master Materia can you get?”

“Master Tonberry are among the toughest monsters in the entire world… and if we can find all 16 normal Summon Materia? As many as we want, since every time you master a Materia it splits off another. Oh, and defeating Emerald Weapon gets you a complete set of all the Master Materia… if everything plays out like it does in the game.”

“The 16 Materia you know the exact locations of. Those ones? And aren’t we going to kill Emerald Weapon according to your plan?”

“Yes… well… fiiiiine.” I felt like sulking, but he was right. Cetra even got a discount on Ribbons. I switched my purchases and that spent me out, but that meant I was only a third of the way through the madness.

I paused then, considering. My plan to grab the Materia could weaken the party trying to save the world from Sephiroth. There seemed to be only one solution, but it meant giving up on a lot of autonomy, since it made me part of the plotline. I didn’t know how much I’d be able to change things, but honestly, I love the game and it would be awesome to fight besides Cloud, Yuffie, Tifa, and Barret. Plus, I kinda wanted to pet Red XIII. I hit the confirm on the drawback ‘Ain’t No Gettin’ Offa This Train We’re On’ but left the ‘Ruined Forever’ option unselected. ANGOTTWO would make me part of the canon events of the game, while Ruined Forever would make Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and or Advent Children canon. I don’t need the tsuris and I hadn’t played either side-game and had fallen asleep during my only viewing of Advent Children. Even so, joining the plot was bad enough. I was a Cetra, dropping deep into Midgar and AVALANCHE was clearly a sign I must be out of my mind.

And after all that, I still had companions to import. Maybe we could make a difference? But I wasn’t sure. I tossed things out to my companions, asking for volunteers. I got them. No big surprise. The Bosses decided to infiltrate the Turks, though it meant giving up their chance at CP and just starting with the Freebees… Dirty Fighting, Specialty Weapon (6 Materia slots), Basic Armor, The Big Four Materia, and 200,000 Gil as starting cash. Admittedly, Dirty Fighting wouldn’t be much a boost to either of them. Oh, and Joy selected a Rapier for her specialty weapon… fairly normal really… but Ahab decided to get into the spirit of things and selected a freaking Harpoon Gun. Not a spear gun… a Harpoon. Welcome to Midgar indeed.

Team Hibiki decided to go Mercenary, netting them both the ‘Monster Hunter’ that boosted their skills at fighting all the horrible beasties that inhabit this world, making it reasonable to expect them to come out on top in a battle against said monsters, provided they weren’t horribly underleved of course. And they got Advanced Weapons and Armor which were pretty much like basic, but stronger, less realistic, and with 4 Materia slots each.

Ryoga got ‘Mage’ so he’d have a ton of manna to go with his boatloads of stamina, and ‘SOLDIER First Class’, which made him part of the same freakshow as Cloud and Sephiroth, giving him enhanced physical and magical abilities, extreme combat training, and glowy eyes. He seemed pretty stoked by the idea. Yoiko, showing slightly more sanity than her brother, went for ‘Limit Break’, ‘Loot’ (the ability to find more money and rare drops when killing things), and a ‘Map of the Planet’. She said “It says it could be useful if you get lost easily!” I couldn’t argue with that. The map even showed where she was at all times.

Zane picked AJ as his partner for the roll of Drop-Ins. That snagged them both ‘Survival Kits’ (a small supply of healing potions, status restoring items, and rations), as well as the ‘PHS’ ability (The Party Handling System lets one summon their companions to their side once every twelve hours.) Both should be useful. Zane snagged the Mage package too, because he’s no fool, as well as fifty large in Gil (the local currency) in starting cash and the ‘Lifetime Pass to the Golden Saucer’ (despite that not being useful outside the jump, he said it was a question of utility and simplicity, and that he was taking one for the team). He also picked up the ‘Inventory Perk’, which will allow him to send and retrieve items to / from the warehouse as long as they’re small enough to fit in his hand… like healing potions, grenades, and magazines (dirty or ammo, your choice).

AJ also snagged ‘Mage’, but he went with ‘Final Attack’. It functioned like the Materia of the same name, allowing a person to reflexively lash out with a single technique when they’re KO’d, but unlike the Materia, it could be any spell, technique, or power AJ knew. It might not be easy to target, but it did come with a guarantee it wouldn’t attack us or aid the enemy. And the keyed ability could be changed with a little focus. It made sense for a little goober who couldn’t be killed to have a suicidal retribution attack. He seemed to think that was praise, which I guess, after a fashion, it was.

That just left Bao and Uriel, who were still very much a couple to a degree that sometimes got on my nerves. Sure, the Hibiki’s and I were still… together… but we were pretty open and casual about it. Anyway, the former detectives decided to be Shinra Scientists, with Bao assigned to the SOLDIER program, giving him ‘Knowledge of Experimental Biosciences’ (exactly what it sounds like), and Uriel assigned to Weapons Development Division, which was just scary as that gave him knowledge of Weapons Design. Both of them also started with 200,000 Gil and both snatched up Mage.

Bao grabbed ‘Trade Secrets’, i.e. the intimate knowledge of the inner workings of Mako Reactors, how to build them and how to make variations, like small personal reactors or Materia Forges. Sure, the process wasn’t fast, and if abused it could serious damage or kill a living planet. It would be interesting, he said, to find out what kind of Materia other planets could produce, and he promised to be restrained about it.

Uriel snatched up ‘Dirty Tactics’ as well, plus the ‘Add Slots Perk’, which would let him modify equipment to add Materia slots to armor, clothing, or weapons, in proportion to how powerful the equipment was, how receptive it was to magical energy, and how big the damned thing was… up to a maximum of eight slots in any one piece of equipment. That should come in handy. Apparently Uriel has decided he wants to be our Weaponsmith. With the last of his points, he picked up the ‘1/35th Scale Model of a Shinra Soldier’. I’ve no idea why, but it seemed to amuse him.

Of course, I’d paid for eight companions and was importing eight, since eight was the limit I could have active, but I still had two tickets, all expenses paid, to Midgar, just ripe for swapping out if anyone got bored… and if they didn’t, well, no point letting the CP go to waste. The final ‘honors’ to be in Team Warehouse went to Petra and Francy.

Petra went Mercenary, picking up Monster Hunter, then snagged Loot & the Beach House (a villa in Costa Del Sol, which is very nice this time of year, I hear). Francy went Drop-In, picking up PHS, then took the Multiple Lifetime Pass and Mage. At least someone gets into all the parks free. I wonder if I could borrow the pass sometime?

WELCOME TO MIDGAR

We ended up running out most of the clock on our downtime anyway. This was going to be a massive operation and we needed to have all our ducks in a row. We dropped in right where we expected, five of us on the AVALANCHE Train, four of us in Shinra HQ. I hadn’t been sure about the Rules of Encounter in this setting, the first based off a videogame I’d actually played. In battle, would some force limit us to three on five or so? As it turns out… no. We were free to use our entire party and the enemy was free to use all of theirs.

It rapidly became clear that, I at least, was massively overleveled, so I held myself back, using my basic weapon, armor, and Materia. Of course, I say Weapon, but they were brass knuckles and my armor was a spiked collar, leather jacket (with spikes), and leather pants (without spikes). I looked like the world’s smallest punkrocker. I even had a foot high mohawk that seemed to have absolutely no gel or hairspray in it. The back of my jacket had the Shinra logo in the mouth of a steel skull. I guess that was this world’s version of a red circle.

We hit the reactor and broke it good. Somehow, and this happened even though I knew it would (I hadn’t tried to stop it of course), Cloud and I got separated from the others, running into Aerith in the slums. And that was when something changed. There was a spark of recognition between the flower girl and myself, and I  barely managed to open my mouth before she slapped me.

“Where have you been!?” she half screeched! She even stomped her foot and glared at me petulantly.

I had not been expecting that. I’d been too caught up in the… Woooo… this is cool… and analysis mode to think too much on my overlay memories.

“Sorry Mom!” I said, reacting without thinking. “I was- oww oww!”

She yanked my ear hard. “Don’t call me mom. I was worried about you.”

“Sorry Sis. I joined up with those guys over in Sector Seven who are trying to bring down Shinra… this is Cloud. He’s kinda hunky, even if he’s a bit of a mercenary.”

My elder sister glowered at me, then greeted Cloud politely. She agreed to join us, or rather drafted him to take us home. Everything was on track… which meant it was just about time for Shinra to drop a plate on Sector Seven. Hopefully the rest of my team had convinced Barret to evacuate the sector.

Reno (a Turk commander) showed up with his goon squad before I could check on that, with Joy and Ahab among them. I took the Turks out while Cloud got my sister out of the chapel, though of course my allies threw the fight (and handed over most of their cash which I stashed in the Warehouse). Cloud walked Aerith home while she flirted with him and I tried not to gag. After a night’s sleep for them and a bit of light recon for me… I got back to the house to find that Cloud had snuck out and Aerith had followed. I caught up to them in Sector Six as they were turning Cloud into a woman so they could sneak into some pimp’s mansion.

I tagged along, amused, sorting through my memory for my past. I appear to have been the daughter of Ifalna and Professor Hojo, Shinra chief scientist, murderer of Aerith’s father (Professor Gast, another Shinra scientist) and general horrible person who experimented on Aerith, Ifalna, and I for years before we escaped, and were taken in by Elmyra Gainsborough, who raised Aerith and Me after Ifalna died.

Well… that was weird. We invaded the mansion with Fem-Cloud (and yes, I’d thought about offering them the use of my J-Water, but decided against it), with me expecting Tifa to say that Don Cornhole picked his lover for the night from one of three girls (Tifa, Aerith, F-Cloud)… but the story had adjusted to make it four. Minor change, couldn’t tell if that was good or bad. We still ended up in the sewer… or rather the three of them did and I, curious to see what would happen to the story, shot Corneo a couple of times in the head, then dropped down after the others, arriving just as they’d finished off the sewer beast, Aps.

As we made our way through the Train Graveyard, I made it a policy to protect the others, taking blows for them and healing them while they attacked, but unlike the game, this clearly wasn’t ‘Take Your Time’ land. That said, we managed to arrive with the Pillar still standing, just in time to watch Wedge fall from the platform high above. I ‘leaped’ into the air, catching the falling Fatso, who landed on me as I cushioned his fall. Aerith and I ran off to rescue Marlene, Barret (the leader of AVALANCHE’s) daughter. I know I’m dropping a lot of names, and this is probably confusing for those who don’t know the Final Fantasy VII lore like I do, but it’s hard to separate out what’s background from what’s important, even now. 

Long story shorter; Migar is the largest city on Gaia, and home to the SHINRA corporation, as well most of their Mako extraction facilities. In fact, Midgar is more giant Mako refinery with people living in it than an actual city. Shaped like a giant wheel, the area between the spokes was where most everyone lived, divided into those who lived on the upper plate in the often smoggy sunlight, and those who lived underneath the plate, in the often toxic miasma. Class division in as simple a divide as possible. The underplates were slums. And home to AVALANCHE, since there wasn’t really anything like a social structure down there.

In order to squash the rebellion, SHINRA was actually going to try to, you know, squash the rebellion… by dropping hundreds of thousands of their own people to their deaths. This would kill thousands more in the slums. Absolute fucking madness. It had to be stopped… but stopping it was not on the books, so that meant evacuating as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, as the story demanded, Aerith and I were forced to surrender ourselves to protect Marlene. Okay, well, Aerith surrendered herself and I went along to protect her. I held off reducing the Shinra thugs to powder as I verified that everyone was okay and that the evac had been mostly successful. Still, that meant we had to wait to be rescued. Which gave us time to get to know Red XIII, who is very nice and fairly fluffy in the flesh… and not at all polygonal.

Dad, Hojo, was being actually almost nice to me… or at least nicer then he was being to Aerith, who he was totally planning on breeding with Red. Seriously. Dude thought a human and a… ummm… Red… could interbreed. Fucking lunatic. But then again, I knew that. He left before I could smash my way out of the test chamber… which I actually proved incapable of doing, which was frustrating. Apparently it had been built to contain magical super strong beasts… and to suppress magic. And there even appeared to be a freaking anti-HF barrier in the floor. This was insane… it was as if Hojo knew of my abilities… maybe he did. I could access my warehouse, but since I couldn’t move the entrance I was stuck… or so I thought. After the fact, I realized I might have been able to open a portal out of the warehouse wider than the cage… but hindsight is 20-20. I was really beginning to regret taking the Train.

The alarms started not long after Hojo left, letting me know everyone was on the way. I pulled out a snackbar and waited. If luck was with us, my companions inside AVALANCHE would be hooking up with my companions in Shinra’s science departments. Soon enough, they burst into dad’s lab, freed us all, then we headed up to the top floor for a showdown with Shinra CEO.

“Did you set the explosives?” I asked Zane in Hebrew. “Of course.” he responded, grinning. I didn’t know if it was going to work… and in a little bit I began to know what a player with a railroading GM must feel like. I’d had Zane rig the Jenova sample with enough High Explosives to vaporize a main battle tank and set to go off the second anyone messed with it. The building shook violently as it went off, while we were still in the elevator on the way up. That wasn’t supposed to happen. We were supposed to get some exposition from the Shinra CEO then get thrown in a cell. A few minutes later, the elevator resumed and we found the Shinra President dead, impaled by Sephiroth’s sword. Somehow Jenova had survived the blast.

And speaking of a tank, the one in the elevator fight is soo much worse when it’s actually firing weapons that are anti-monster attacks instead of anti-personnel. Still we managed to escape the city and the railroading eased up a bit.

The game became significantly more TYT once we were outside Midgar and could explore as we wished, events only triggering once we entered new areas. Still, if we lingered anywhere too long, Shinra started closing in, with SOLDIER units and the Turks. Yet, thanks to our infiltration, we had warning of their movements and managed to stay one step ahead. Of course, Barret kept trying to split us up into groups of 3 or less because apparently 12 people draw more attention than 3 groups of 4… which might be true, but let’s face it, together we were much harder to defeat in detail.

Uriel, once we had a little time, upgraded Soul of Ice and Victoria to 8 Material Weapons and Armor. Yoiko and I and the classic party were totally spamming the Limit Breaks, while everyone else was practicing magic. Cure is waaay too useful a spell, and I’d bought a looot of tents and ethers and status refresh items. It was strange letting enemies attack me, but in game terms I have a metric boatload of HP and thanks to Rolling Counter I was regenerating almost as fast as the monsters could harm me even though I was suppressing my damage resistance.

Things progressed in fits and starts, with me constantly finding things had spun out of control every time I went off to do any grinding. It was like a train I could leave but would have to catch up to on my own. In fact, the best way of doing that seemed to be to keep Zane and AJ with the rest of the group so they could summon us at need. Still, whenever something would come up that my abilities could easily solve, I always seemed to be away or distracted, or some enemy or problem that wasn’t in the game would spring up to throw itself in my way.

I’d expected the Train to be a general thing, a passive way of keeping the story mostly ticking alone… I hadn’t expected this degree of monomania. No meaningful changes I tried to make mattered. If it happened on screen in the game, it happened. Though the details might be a bit different, the scene would resolve the same way it always did. I even threw myself between ‘Sephiroth’ and Aerith… only to be absolutely skewered by that sword, though it didn’t kill me as it plunged completely through me and then through my sister’s body… mother fucker! Aerith wasn’t that lucky. Her body was not designed to survive being impaled… her spirit may have been strong, but her body… alas, was weak.

But if I couldn’t stop that omnicidal fuckhead from summoning Meteor, I guess someone would have to shield the planet with Holy. And, yes, I searched for Aerith’s Holy Materia for hours, diving into the Lifestream again and again, but I couldn’t find it. Not even with the Materia detector I’d built into Victoria. I’m not sure how many of my tears flowed into that greenish glow… but it wasn’t a small number. I was down there for almost three weeks until Zane dragged me back to the surface and sat on me until I calmed down. I spent the next week and a half trying to raise Aerith with every spell at my disposal… all to no avail. Chalk it up to a difference in how afterlives worked if you like, I knew the real reason. It was all my fault.

Not for the first time I cursed myself for taking the plotbound drawback… I hadn’t expected the bindings to be this tight. Hell, even Don Corneo came back, scarred, half cybernetic, but he came back just as the story demanded he would, just to die in a humiliating battle with the TURKs.

Finally, my first change to the timeline in any meaningful way came after the defeat of Diamond Weapon. With Shinra effectively destroyed, Hojo slain, and Midgar in chaos… we stole the Sister Ray. Fucking huge cannon, it had been used to kill Diamond and Sapphire Weapon. If anything could take out Ruby or Emerald, it was that thing. Took bringing the Black Jenny out of drydock to lift the thing, but we did it it. I figure the story was done with it, so it was fair game.

We collected everything, all the summons, all the PCs, all the rare Materia, including all four Huge Materia. Getting the PCs to do that was easy. They were on Rails but shopping side trips and souvenir collecting was apparently okay.

I tried to stop Meteor. Not as hard as I could have most likely, but my warp field generator failed to notably slow it and I realized the force of plot was against me completely. So I saw things through to the end. Cloud’s idiotic betrayal, despite all the attempts I’d made to fix his mental problems, to adjust him, and in the end my attempts to wrench the stupid Black Materia from his idiot hand before he could hand it over to the real Sephiroth.

We killed Sephiroth, avenged my sister’s sacrifice. We freed the Lifestream from his block, Holy saved the planet at the cost of Midgar. Two years had passed. Nothing had changed. But the world was at peace, right? Not even vaguely. Huge power vacuum, messed up ecosystem, all the power systems shutting down. Society starting over in the ruins. It wasn’t a fun time.

Free from being hunted, I gave Cid and Barret Cold Fusion technology. Gave it to Wutai too. We said goodbye to the others and buckled down to training, pushing on to max level, though of course it was impossible to judge. The only reason we could judge when we’d maxed out a Materia is because the damned things spit out (usually) a basic copy of themselves every time you maxed one out. Get enough maxed out Materia of a given type (all the Spell Materia for example) and you can take it to the Huge Materia of that color and get a Master Spell Materia.

We did that a lot. We also scoured the world for Ultimate Limit Breaks for Yoiko and I. Books about punching and bears. Turns out there are a lot of them, but fewer about martial techniques. Scrying magic helped… as did the Palantir of Orthanc. I knew it would come in handy and I’m glad I refused to actually hand it over when Gandalf demanded I do so. It was my prize, no matter what el-beardy the Grey might have to say about it. It came to me, after all.

We found Yoiko’s book in a mountain cave being guarded by a giant ass bear. Yoiko snuggled it into submission and declare its name was Sweetums. Sweetums looked confused as to why the strange girl kept hugging her. We took the book and had to drag Yoiko away from the bear before she tried to keep her.

I also refused to allow anyone to get attached to any of the Chocobos. Didn’t need a Wark Machine Warking up the Wark… errr. Warehouse. I’m not fond of birds… especially birds twice my height.

We only had two goals left. Ruby and Emerald. Both were giant pains in the butt. One hid in the sands of a desert region and had to be fought mono-a-mono, the other hid at the bottom of the ocean and often had a time limit. Ruby was the easy one. I faced it alone, drawing it out of the sands of the desert, then distracted it until the final moment before apparating away to get out of the blastzone as the Jenny Ray smashed a giant hole in BigCrimson’s chest. I jumped back in and cut off its head with Soul of Ice… well, not so much cut as hacked. Damned thing was a Kaiju. Its neck was seven meters thick.

Emerald Weapon… it took… longer. Much longer. First, the game makes it seem like it will hold still. It didn’t. The ocean is a damned big area and while it would attack us if we went to the right area, it fled once we’d done enough damage. Six times we hunted the great green one. To the point where Ahab was asking me if we should start calling it Moby Dick. I flicked a pea at him.

“From Hell’s Heart I scoff at thee,” I muttered.

It wasn’t that Emerald was tough. He wasn’t just tough, he was a juggernaut. The fight was only tangentially like the game, which wasn’t unexpected, a lot of the fights had been more realistic, less turn based. It was that he was fast and tough and attacked relentlessly… and he was a great big coward too. Sorry, I mean he knew when to retreat. So finally, I had to divide my group… I know, I know… into three groups. The important thing was that Zane, AJ, and I weren’t together. Zane and AJ were waiting at either end of the narrows that Emerald dwelled in.

My primary group attacked him, buzzing around the giant Kaiju like… sea wasps. We had limited mobility, which was a big problem, but we could, most of us, survive the crushing depths thanks to various magics and the Underwater Materia. Ain’t magic grand?

We hammered him with everything we had, mass attacking him with Bahamut ZERO and Knights of the Round and Neo Bahamut, support members healing the front line and generally staying back from combat. It was a grindfest, just like the first six hunts. We’d even called in Cloud and Yuffie and Vincent to help. Then BigGreen bolted. I judged the direction and called AJ. “Now!” He ported us to him with the PHS just as Emerald Weapon reached him, and we hit the beast again, making him flinch back from us.

Zane, meanwhile, had moved up to our original spot and when BigGreen fled again, we ported to him one last time, hoping the monstrosity didn’t have much left. We certainly didn’t. I’d run out of MP, and using PK Games so much had drained my PP pretty completely. True, the cold water was keeping me in pretty much infinite Ice, but Emerald has an attack that knocks out Regen for a while, so I was feeling every stomp and blast. Oh, and spamming potions in real life tends to make one violently ill… and they’re not actually instant.

Finally, reeling, he turned to flee once more, slowed perceptibly, and I struck, lancing through the water as fast as a turbine propelled Argonian can swim, landing on the beast’s back, and hacking with my sword as fast as I could. I wasn’t going to let this giant green asshole end my chain.

He rolled, thrashed, dived, did everything within his power to throw me off, to grind me to paste, but I clung to him, HFLF-Elf-Enchanted-Materia-Boosted-sword cleaving chunks of carapace off him. I burrowed into him like the world’s most pissed off scarab beetle, and there, deep within his chest, where I hadn’t actually been looking for it, I found the god damned book! Asshole Programmers!

I grabbed it and pulled it into my Mind Palace. I wasn’t sure if I could do that, it wasn’t another person, but I’d pulled equipment and clothes in with me before. though normally being held or worn by others. Still, it worked. I read the book… then read it again. It was mental, but it made perfect sense. I sheathed my sword, pulled on my Elven Enchanted Materia Knuckles (Made from real Balrog Horn and Burstone) and tried the attack out.

“TOTAL BITCH: MOTHERFUCKER PUNCH FEST!” might be a mouthful, but apparently the secret is to just… let all your anger, rage, and frustration out in one thousand supersonic punches. I don’t know what their normal range is. I’ve not been pissed off enough to use the attack since, and even if I had been, I doubt I’d have thought to run experiments. But that’s beside the point. I was in direct contact and my blows blasted the Weapon’s body to fucking smithereens.

I giggled, drained, exhausted. “Fucking Pwned!” I said as I created an ice chunk to lift me to the surface. My friends found me floating there. Zane asked, “Zo? Optional Bosses better or worse than general badstuff?”

“Better. Sure, they put time pressure on us, but we get to prepare. So yes, I’ll take cosmetic annoyances over any of them… but the real pain in the butt? Plotline. When you can’t do shit to stop it… christ. That’s three times. I couldn’t stop the Reapers from coming, but I could prepare, could kill Saren only once he’d fulfilled his purpose. I couldn’t stop the Seed of Magic from being shattered… because of Plot… not… armor… but you know. Couldn’t stop what happened here. Fuck… next time I sign up for Plot Tracking… smack me one. Wouldya?”

“You Got it… but what if the jump has it built in?”

“We’ll worry about that when it comes to it. Come on. I can still feel the planet griping about the Jenova taint. Bao? How’s that reactor coming along?”

Bao, unlike the rest of us, had spent most of his time refurbishing one of the Mako Reactors still attached to Midgar’s Ruins for a specific purpose. This Reactor wouldn’t burn Mako… it would purify it. It was a giant Jenova filter, and it incinerated any foreign matter it pulled out of the Lifestream. It also attracted the Jenova Cells through a synthetic Reunion signal. It wasn’t perfect, and it wouldn’t work in the time we had left, but hopefully, if time continued in this world, the clean energy and purified Lifestream would help Gaia recover, thus fulfilling the vision from five hundred years in the future where Red XIII and his child looked down upon reclaimed ruins of Midgar.

It was with some regret that we left behind the world of Final Fantasy VII. It had been an interesting place, limited in many ways, and very much like being inside a video game. At times stifling, at times frantic, full of sadness and beauty in equal measures. We took with us power, but felt light on learning, and utterly lacking in enlightenment. We also took with us a small pool of the Lifestream with which we surrounded our garden and suffused our meditation pool. We did not know if it could be transplanted into other worlds, but it seemed a worthy experiment.

If Jenova and the Lifestream were compatible, and Jenova an interplanetary parasite, perhaps the Lifestream was an interplanetary symbiont. Only one way to find out… find a suitable host world. But that would have to wait. For now, it was on to another brave new world… If only I didn’t have this nagging feeling I was leaving something behind.

Next: World 19 – Destiny Manifest

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Sharjis and Aerith, The Gainsborough Sisters… Happier Times.