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."
| Next chapter: In Which We Save Wutai, and Learn of a Sinister Plot |