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Chapter TwentyThree A week later found Kit sitting at the end of one wing of the Tiny Bronco, as it puttered its way around a peninsula, heading northeast into the sea that lay between the two largest continents. She stared out through the morning fog at the land mass to the west restlessly, trying to ignore the sounds coming from the other wing, where Yuffie was fighting a losing battle with seasickness. Kit was grateful her own illness hadn't returned, but the fact it hadn't made it all the more obvious something really was wrong.
After they'd caught up with Cloud, Aeris, Vincent, and the Captain without too much trouble, and discovered the plane had been shot down over the ocean, making it little more than a motorized raft, Barret naturally told Cloud all about what had happened back in Rocket Town. To Kit's surprise, when Cloud started berating her with the same questions Barret had been asking, Tifa and Aeris spoke up in her defense before she could even get a word out, telling him to leave her alone. Kit couldn't understand why - they hardly knew her. But then, she hardly knew them either, and she'd helped them get out of a few tight spots so far.
"This is just another mission," she muttered under her breath. "Don't forget that." So why did it feel so different, she wondered? Why did it bother her that Barret continued to glare at her suspiciously? He had every right to. And why should she care that Aeris continued to shoot worried glances at her, and then went off and talked to Cloud quietly?
But in that case, she was probably being paranoid. Aeris mostly seemed happy when she and Cloud talked, smiling and laughing and touching his arm occasionally, much to his embarrassment. Tifa's increasingly cold, blank expression when she looked at them was starting to mirror Vincent's. When she turned away, however, it was always with a reluctant look of concern.
"I tell ya, I see Tam's place up ahead," Captain Highwind was telling Barret from the front of the plane. Cid - he'd said they could call him Cid, Kit reminded herself. Tough as nails and swearing like a sailor, that was Cid. From the way Cloud and Aeris talked of their meeting with him back in Rocket Town, it wasn't just from having his airplane grounded, either. It was hard to think of someone so infamous as simply Cid, but he really did seem like an ordinary enough man once you got to know him.
Then again, Kit reasoned - if she could get used to think of the legendary Sephiroth as simply her lover, she could get used to anything.
Barret squinted off into the distance. "I don't see nothin'."
"That's cause you don't know where the %$#& to look," Cid snapped. "I've flown all over this $%@# planet, I think I know where his $@$% house is!"
With a sigh, Tifa sat down on the wing next to Kit. "They're perfect for each other," she remarked with a smile. Kit ignored that the smile was just a bit too uneasy, and gave her a nod in response, knowing what was coming. Tifa always asked the same kinds of questions.
After a hesitation, Tifa finally turned her attention out to the ocean. "I was wondering," she began, doing a fairly good job of pretending to be casual. "The process of showering a person in Mako, when they join SOLDIER... does it..."
Kit nodded, waiting for her to finish.
"Does it ever cause delusions?"
Kit turned and looked at her sharply. Tifa looked back at her, startled. That wasn't quite what Kit was expecting. "I don't think so," she replied carefully. "I've never heard of it doing that. Why?"
Tifa bit her lip. "Well, if Mako is the Spirit Energy that Bugenhagen was talking about, and it's the spirits of everyone and everything that has lived on this planet, I... I wonder if maybe it could kind of... cause people's souls to overlap... their memories... of lives that went before," Tifa finished in a rush. "And it's so concentrated in the SOLDIER process..."
Kit nodded again. Of course she knew Tifa wasn't telling the truth. She was worried about Cloud - Kit had gathered that much from all the questions Tifa had asked about what it was like to be in SOLDIER, and how they were trained. But she thought he was having delusions? About what, Kit wondered.
But she didn't ask. She had her own secrets to hide, and wasn't in the business of seeking out those of others. No, her only concern was what they were going to do about Sephiroth. "Nope, I've never heard of anyone having a reaction like that to it," she repeated. "Maybe you'd want to ask Cloud some of these questions? He was SOLDIER before I was, and he was your friend when you were children, he'd probably be happy to tell you about it."
Tifa shook her head stubbornly. "He doesn't like to talk about it," she muttered, staring back out into the waves. "And... he's changed a lot since we were children."
A giggle came from the back of the plane, where Aeris and Cloud were sitting and talking, and Tifa's mouth tightened. "Five years can change a lot," Kit agreed. She felt sorry for Tifa, the girl seemed to be fighting an uphill battle for the boy she loved. Except that she didn't seem to be fighting at all anymore, just watching the tide turn.
Tifa stood and went to talk to Barret, and Kit shook her head. How could someone love a person so much, and not go after him with everything she had? Kit didn't undersand in the least, and so she went back to staring out into the waters. Squinting a little, she discovered she could discern a stretch of land jutting out some distance ahead of them, and a tall shape rising above the early morning fog. "Is that the place you were talking about, Cap - er, Cid?"
Pulling a fresh pack of cigarettes from a pocket inside his jacket, Cid turned and scowled down at her. "@$&% right. I knew you all couldn't be as blind as this bozo here," he said, ignoring Barret's glare. "You SOLDIERs and yer @#%$ creepy eyes..."
"So what we gonna find at this place anyway?" Barret grumbled.
Cid took a seat at the edge of the wing, not far from Kit. "The guy that set up shop there, Tams - he sees people coming and going from all over the world. Anybody gets lost out there, they end up at his place, and they tell him their story." The flash of a match illuminated the haze for a brief instant as Cid lit his cigarette. "If anyone knows where the Temple of the Ancients is, it'll be Tams."
When they arrived, the man seemed surprised at the sight of them. "Huh? Oh, another customer. You sure picked an out of the way place, but..." He shrugged. "But if it's the Keystone you're looking for, you're too late. Don't have it."
Keystone... that had nothing to do with them. While Cloud questioned the shopkeeper, Kit and the others wandered back to look at the weapons hanging on the walls. Certainly, they were higher quality than a lot of the weapons that weren't Shinra-issue, Kit noted.
"Keystone?" Cloud was asking the man curiously.
"What? You didn't come here for that? The Keystone is they key that unlocks the gate to a really old temple somewhere," Tams informed him. "You're not going to believe your ears, but I heard it was the Temple of the Ancients!"
They all looked up in surprise. "Temple of the Ancients..." Cloud murmured, but Tams just laughed.
"Don't take it seriously. It's just a legend!" he chuckled, returning to his task of straightening the goods on the shelves until Cloud approached him again. "Huh? What?"
"Where is the Temple of the Ancients?" Cloud asked.
Tams shook his head in disbelief. "Come on," he said with another laugh. "It's only a legend. But if it were true, that would sure be something, huh?"
Cloud frowned, and Aeris rolled her eyes, coming to look at a sword with Kit. "It's no use, we're not going to get anything out of this man," she whispered. "I wonder what we can do now..."
Tams shrugged again. "Now that you mention it, I have heard of something called Ultimate Destruction Magic, was supposed to be hidden somewhere in the Temple of the Ancients."
Kit froze. She'd been wondering why Sephiroth would be going to this temple when he wasn't even an Ancient - he had a specific goal in mind, and it seemed he wouldn't stop until he reached it. Of course he would have an interest in the Temple of the Ancients, if there was some kind of powerful weapon hidden inside...
Next to her, Aeris gasped. "Dio mentioned a Black Materia, back at the Gold Saucer!" she whispered.
"Is that what he was talking about?" Kit asked softly.
"I don't know," Aeris replied nervously, "but the words gave me a bad feeling, just like what Tams just said. I wish I could say more..."
"Ultimate Destruction Magic...?" Cloud said.
Tams waved his hand dismissively. "Come on! I told you not to take it seriously!"
Cloud frowned again and changed the subject. "Where is this Keystone?"
"I sold it already." Cloud gave him a sharp look, and Tams looked a bit taken aback. "Yeah well, to tell the truth, I didn't really want to sell it but... That guy had a way about him that made you feel like it may not be a good idea not to sell it to him..."
Aeris's eyes widened. "Do you think he means Sephiroth?" she whispered to Kit, and Kit shrugged more casually than she felt. If Sephiroth already knew where the Temple of the Ancients was, and he had the Keystone, then by the time AVALANCHE caught up with him...
Suddenly she realized what she was thinking. AVALANCHE wanted to kill him, she couldn't let them catch him. She had to the one to find him, she had to find a way to get him to give up this plan... whatever it was, if it involved something called Ultimate Destruction Magic, it couldn't be good.
"Who did you sell it to?" Cloud asked Tams.
"The manager of the Gold Saucer... think his name was Dio. Said he was going to put it in his museum, then he took off out of here."
Aeris breathed a sigh of relief, and Kit could only barely hold hers back. This bought her a little more time to think up a plan.
Cloud thanked Tams and rushed them all back out to the Tiny Bronco to fill the others in. As he did so, Kit was preoccupied with her own plotting. Dio had the Keystone now, and Sephiroth couldn't get in without it, from the sound of things. If only she knew where the Temple of the Ancients was, she could find a way to slip away from AVALANCHE and go there herself... and when Sephiroth showed up, she'd be there waiting, whether he'd managed to get the Keystone or not. Then she could... do something. Certainly, she could think of something to do by that time.
"The way I see it, the best way to keep Sephiroth from getting into that temple is to keep the Keystone ourselves," Cloud was saying to the group. "There's no way any of us would hand it over to him, even if-" He abruptly stopped speaking and shook his head. "There's no way."
Everyone heard his unspoken words as plainly as if he had said them. Even if one of us is a Shinra spy.
"So, to the Gold Saucer?" Cait Sith asked merrily.
Cloud nodded. "To the Gold Saucer. It's going to take awhile, we'll have to go through the Ropeway at North Corel again. So let's get a move on."
Cait grinned and danced around in a circle. "Great! It'll be nice to go home again for a bit."
To Chapter TwentyFour. To the intro. That means it's mine, not yours! |
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