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).
| Next chapter: In Which Rufus Becomes President |