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...
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