Welcome to Adventu, your final fantasy rp haven. adventu focuses on both canon and original characters from different worlds and timelines that have all been pulled to the world of zephon: a familiar final fantasy-styled land where all adventurers will fight, explore, and make new personal connections.
at adventu, we believe that colorful story and plots far outweigh the need for a battle system. rp should be about the writing, the fun, and the creativity. you will see that the only system on our site is the encouragement to create amazing adventures with other members. welcome to adventu... how will you arrive?
year 5, quarter 3
Welcome one and all to our beautiful new skin! This marks the visual era of Adventu 4.0, our 4th and by far best design we've had. 3.0 suited our needs for a very long time, but as things are evolving around the site (and all for the better thanks to all of you), it was time for a new, sleek change. The Resource Site celebrity Pharaoh Leep was the amazing mastermind behind this with minor collaborations from your resident moogle. It's one-of-a-kind and suited specifically for Adventu. Click the image for a super easy new skin guide for a visual tour!
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Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 9, 2023 22:48:45 GMT -6
Cloud sat on the bench in the courtyard of Yuna's clinic, where he'd been laid up for far too long and where he avoided Provo's authorities with a muddled sense of guilt that he hadn't sorted out yet. He'd taken to testing himself every morning by inhaling the deepest breath he could before his chest started burning. It didn't hurt anymore. It hadn't for days now, but he still kept up the habit, half expecting the spears of fire in his ribs to come stabbing at him again. Just that subconscious pessimism, lurking. He needed to work on that, but it was hard to spend his spare mental energy on anything but thinking up new ways to kill Sephiroth.
He'd come up with a long list of strategies, but nobody would mistake Cloud for a tactician. In the end it was more a creative exercise than a tactical one. With that Angeal asshole having Sephiroth's back, everything had gotten more complicated. And when he thought back to Tifa and Aerith finding him here... It wasn't right to do that to them again, whatever he thought his fighting chances were. He needed to let it lie for a while, but he couldn't. Whenever he had a quiet moment to himself, a minute to think, the only thought in his head was all the ways Sephiroth needed to die.
Vengeance and the Reunion theory had gotten tangled up in his mind once before. Was it the same thing again? And if it was... Well, wasn't that all the more reason for Sephiroth to die?
He scrubbed his hand down his face.
I gotta get out of Provo...
Physically, Cloud was back in one piece, even if he could use a few rounds of practice to shake the rust off his sword skills. Mentally, well, the less said the better. It was about high time for him to get out of Yuna's hair and get some distance between himself and Provo before he did something stupid and violent again. He scratched his chest under his shirt, feeling the rough edge of the new scar next to the old. As if he needed another reminder. Never forget the bad parts, Cloud. Worse things happen when you do that.
A black and white cat came down the quiet street outside of the courtyard. Its claws skittered on the stone. It ran with a kind of indecisive sense of urgency, like it had been half-startled by something. Or someone, judging by the footsteps that followed. The cat slowed and stopped and watched behind it and Cloud watched too as Tifa appeared in the opening to the courtyard. Cloud smiled the kind of small smile that he couldn't help. To someone who didn't know better, it made him look untroubled.
"Hey," he said, shifting over a few inches to make space on the bench. He scratched the back of his head. "I was thinkin', maybe it's about time to get outta here."
Post by Tifa Lockhart on Jan 10, 2023 0:16:45 GMT -6
PROMISE YOU'LL COME AND SAVE ME
Tifa's mind was racing, as it usually was if we're being honest. The girl had been through a lot, so it wasn't surprising that she constantly had one thing or another randomly popping up in there. Whether it was her wondering what her parents would think of her life so far, to what would be happening in her life if she hadn't been brought to Zephon. It was amazing to think what one little thing in your could do to your future.
Provo was quiet, or it was to her. The circus could be happening right next to her and Tifa probably wouldn't of even noticed at this point. She was heading back to Cloud, and she was pretty nervous. There was a lot of information to tell him, but Tifa wasn't sure how he would take it, or if he would even believe it. Then again, it was coming from her, so the chances were higher than it would be with others.
Walking up to the clinic, she gave a small smile when she saw him sitting on a bench. "Hey." She took the spot next to him that he had offered and giggled at his comment. "You have been here quite some time, I don't blame you for wanting to leave." She herself wasn't one to be in one place for too long, especially not being about to get up or do anything, so she could understand Cloud's want to leave.
Looking at him, she could see that physically, he was doing much better than when she last saw him. Mentally? That was another story. Cloud could be pretty hard to read, even she had trouble sometimes. There was no doubt that anger still resided inside him, and she didn't blame him. There was so much he didn't know though, and she had no idea how to tell him. "How are you feeling?"
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 18, 2023 22:11:42 GMT -6
"I'm all right," Cloud answered. He had a definition of all right unique to himself. It was still an improvement over the days when he might have answered Tifa with a cocky shrug, ill-fitting bravado, some lame attempt to sound cool like nothing ever bothered him. Those days didn't just feel like a lifetime ago; they were another life, another Cloud cobbled together from fractured memories and failed dreams and the insecurities of a kid ashamed that he was wasn't good enough. And the dangling puppet strings of Jenova cells...
He left that weight behind on another world to sink in the lifestream. Regardless of whatever doubt and anger Cloud still grappled with, he knew himself now. Failures and all. He didn't fear them anymore, because Tifa had seen them too - wandered through the maze of his mind and helped put him back together from nothing but shattered pieces. She hadn't left him behind then, and she was still here now even though he'd added new failures to his record. All he had to fear was losing this.
"Nothin' hurts. Just need to shake the rust off," he added, with a quick glance down at his arm. Free of bandages, the stark line of a new scar ran diagonally across the meat of his forearm. If Angeal's blow had gone any deeper it might've taken his arm off. Cloud flexed his fingers and watched the scar tissue dance over the muscle beneath. He felt no pain, but it didn't feel right either. There was a faint note of uncertainty in his voice.
He gave his arm a little shake and then leaned back until his head touched the wall behind the bench. Cloud wouldn't consider himself the most perceptive guy in the world, but when he looked at Tifa again he thought he saw something hiding in her expression. Tension or nerves, maybe. Something troubling just behind the eyes.
"What about you?" he asked, "Everything all right?"
Post by Tifa Lockhart on Feb 1, 2023 15:06:33 GMT -6
PROMISE YOU'LL COME AND SAVE ME
Cloud stated he was all right and she gave a nod. "You look a lot better, I'm glad to see you're healing well." Though she wasn't really surprised at that fact. She had heard that people who were infused with mako healed faster, so maybe that had something to do with it. His injuries had been pretty bad, so she wasn't sure if the mako would even help that at all.
The two had been through a lot together. From Nibelheim to Midgar and everything in between. They had seen each other go through a lot, and still remained close. He was her best friend, and she wouldn't change that for the world. She was glad to have him here on Zephon, though she did wish that Barrett and the rest of them were here as well. But no, they got Sephiorth instead.
Looking over at his arm, she noticed the new scar that had formed. It looked deep and she was glad he hadn't lost his arm. She wasn't sure if he'd be able to mentally recover if he had. "Well if anyone can do that, you can." She had seen him fight through a lot, and she knew he would come back from this as well.
When he asked her if everything was all right, she looked at the group. "I'm okay. I, uh, ran into Sephiroth..." There was no need to beat around the bush. He could read her like a book and she couldn't hide anything from him. "I'm not sure you know this, but people here can be taken from any point in their previous world. From what he told me, he was taken before the Nibelheim fire. I'm not sure exactly when, but he doesn't remember us at all."
Post by Cloud Strife on Feb 10, 2023 8:52:47 GMT -6
His eyes went wide.
"Tifa--!"
Sephiroth's name didn't stir the usual deep burning anger in that moment but instead a kind of raw animal panic. Cloud knew she was unhurt by the encounter - she was sitting right there beside him, all in one piece. But it didn't take much to send him back to Nibelheim, to the sight of her laying on the cold steel reactor floor, bleeding out. The image like an open wound in his head. Nibelheim festered. The world seemed to never let it heal.
But whatever Cloud might have said he bit back and listened. The panic subsided. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and he thought back to when he'd first found Aerith here, the way she insisted that she never died. It was no crazier an idea than anything else about them being here in some strange new world. Everything was on the table.
But when it came to Sephiroth...
"It doesn't make a difference," Cloud said. He stared ahead at the empty space in front of him. "The Sephiroth from before Nibelheim is still the Sephiroth who went to Nibelheim."
Where would it be this time? What city would burn because Sephiroth decided he'd had a bad day? How many people would get cut down because mommy told him it was time to conquer another planet?
Which of Cloud's friends would it be this time?
Everything in him then was still in him now, like a barrel of fuel waiting for a spark. A blade hanging over Cloud's neck. And that spark would find the fuel, and that blade would drop, because in the end Sephiroth was Sephiroth.
"It was supposed to be over," Cloud muttered after a long pause. "We stopped him. We killed him. We won."
He took a slow, deep breath, fighting the exhaustion in his bones. The thought of having to do this all again. The knowledge that it had to be done. And the anger, the burning coal fire, the hatred: if Cloud couldn't know peace, then Sephiroth wouldn't either.
He sat up again, looked Tifa in the eyes. Behind the exhaustion and fear and anger and everything else was the steely resolve he took into the depths of the Northern Crater.
Post by Tifa Lockhart on Feb 14, 2023 21:34:52 GMT -6
PROMISE YOU'LL COME AND SAVE ME
Cloud reacted just as she expected. Of course he would be worried when she said that. Standing up, she did a circle. "I'm fine, it's okay." She just wanted to make sure he knew that she hadn't been hurt in any way. Obviously since she had walked up to him and sat next to him, that was obvious. Just for reassurance, she wanted to actually tell him she was okay.
When he stated it didn't make a difference, she also stared ahead. "Not to us, but to him it does." Just like Noctis had said, it wasn't fair, but it was reality. "He still is the same person, yes, but he is now a person who hasn't done all of those things." She sounded crazy. Defending a man who burned down her town, left her for dead, killed her friend, and tried to destroy the planet?
No part of her blamed Cloud for standing his ground on the matter. He went through so much worse because of Sephiroth. Cloud spoke again, and she put her hand on his arm. "We did, and we're still here. We stopped the Sephiroth that was destroying everything." But he was here. It might be younger Sephiroth, who hadn't discovered his origin yet, but he was still here.
There was still a chance he could repeat the same actions as before, but there also was a chance that he couldn't. Meeting Clouds gaze, she gave a nod. "I know you won't, but you can't attack him and destroy things just because you see him. We're not on Gaia anymore, you could get into a lot of trouble. Plus, you said he had someone help him. Who knows, maybe that person could help him do better this time."
Post by Cloud Strife on Feb 26, 2023 23:52:11 GMT -6
If it had been anyone else saying those things, the anger might have flared again, that white-hot fury running up his spine and down into his knuckles. So that was it, then, just forget about it? Cloud got to carry the weight of it all, and Sephiroth got to walk around like nothing ever happened because it was a different version of him? No. He refused to accept that. It all sounded like contrived bullshit to absolve Sephiroth of his sins. The kind of thing Cloud expected to hear from Angeal. Not Tifa.
But it was Tifa of all people telling him this, and he didn't get angry. He couldn't. He sat there as each word twisted a knife in him just a little bit more. The steely resolve wavered and there was a shred of disbelief in his eyes, but mostly he watched Tifa with a wounded expression that the gentle hand on his arm didn't ease.
"How do you know it's not just..." he waved his hand vaguely, "...whatever magic amnesia hits some people when they come here, and he's not just going to remember everything and pick up where he left off? Or that he's not just lying? Playing mind games is what he does. Tifa, he tried to convince you I wasn't even a real person."
There was an edge of desperation in his voice, a shadow of what he sounded like in the depths of the crater when everything broke. Where the new scar stretched around to the inside of his forearm is where his number would have been if Hojo ever bothered to give him one. He'd felt that pull again on his journey to Provo. The gut feeling as the Jenova cells polluting his body reoriented his internal compass. If that could still happen, here on Zephon, then what was stopping any of the rest of it? That voice scratching at his skull. His conscious mind separated from his body, watching, helpless. How was he ever supposed to live with the specter of that hanging over his head?
Post by Tifa Lockhart on Mar 7, 2023 23:30:24 GMT -6
PROMISE YOU'LL COME AND SAVE ME
That look. She was hurting him somehow, but she couldn’t figure it out at first. Tifa had expected anger from him, but not this. He looked, betrayed. Then it occurred to her. She was defending Sephiroth. Taking her hand away, she looked to the ground. It didn’t make any sense to her. Why was she defending him!? After everything he had done to them. Deep in her heart, she knew why. This wasn’t the Sephiroth that had done those things. Why should he suffer when he hadn’t done anything?
Putting her hands to her head, she put her forehead to her knees. She didn’t know what to think anymore. She could remember everything he had done. Houses burning, Aerith dying, the planet being threatened. That was just the beginning of what he had done. This Sephiroth knew nothing of it, it was like punishing a newborn baby for something it’ll do as a teenager. It was all so unfair.
”We don’t Cloud.” She said as she raised her head back up from her knees. ”It could be true, it could be not true.” They might never know, they might know when it was too late. She believed Sephiroth to an extent. His point of origin seemed to pan out, since she didn’t see any reaction but confusion to Jenova, but there was still that chance that he knew exactly what to say to her to let her guard down. Honestly, Tifa was the perfect one to convince because everyone trusted her. She was the calm and rational one.
Taking a deep breath, she met his eyes once more. Though they were signs of mako and SOLDIER and everything Shinra, she could look at them all day. ”We just have to be on guard, maybe see who else we can find. Aerith is here, so that’s a start.” It wasn’t the best answer she could think of, but it was the only thing she had. It wasn’t going to be fun walking on eggshells constantly, but it was what they had to do for the time being. Maybe there was someone else she could talk to. Someone who could help.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 20, 2023 22:46:50 GMT -6
Somewhere along the line, maybe about the time he left Nibelheim, the world decided that nothing was allowed to be simple ever again. Leaving a dead-end town behind, joining the army with delusional dreams of fame and fortune rattling around in his head, that was supposed to be simple. The same worn playbook as hundreds of other dumb kids from all the other dead-end towns scattered across Shinra's pseudo-empire. Look how that worked out for him.
Now he couldn't even take revenge on the monster that murdered his mother and burned his home to the ground and tore his mind to pieces without meeting a wall of complications. For him it was simple, but for everyone else... He could've brought up to Tifa the fact that Sephiroth murdered her father, nearly killed her, but he didn't. It wasn't like she'd forgotten. He watched the conflict waging in her in that moment, twisting like a knife, and he tried to understand why she came out of it on the side that she did but he couldn't. It was what it was, and when Cloud couldn't hold on to rage and hate to pull him through anymore all that was left was a hollow, empty place.
Could be true, could be not true... There was no comfort in uncertainty. He exhaled a long quiet sigh and stared at his hands for a moment before he met her eyes again.
"Yeah," he said finally, scratching the back of his head. Maybe she was just offering him a distraction, but it was one he knew he needed to take. Hadn't finding the others been the only thing on his mind when he woke up in this world, anyway? "If the three of us are here, the rest of them have to be around somewhere. Somebody has to have seen a guy with a gun-arm running around..."
So he left vengeance to lie, unburied, at least for the moment. If his mind would let him. It didn't feel like a solution, only hitting pause, but maybe things would be different by the time they found the others. Maybe by then Sephiroth will have shown his true colors.
Post by Tifa Lockhart on Aug 23, 2023 9:48:34 GMT -6
PROMISE YOU'LL COME AND SAVE ME
Tifa knew she wouldn't be able to completely convince Cloud to not want to instantly go after Sephiroth every time he saw him, but she was at least hoping it would calm him down just a little bit. She didn't want him to be angry all the time. She wanted her friend back, even if he was a pretty cold and distant person. It was the Cloud she knew. He had his own unique personality and she had gotten used to it. Also, he was different around her, and she liked the feeling that he could be more relaxed when she was there.
When he mentioned Barrett the way he did, she giggled. "Yeah, he can't hide himself very well." Though as she thought of that, she really hoped the Barret that was pulled here was the one they knew and not one from before everything. It would be nice to have someone else to talk about everything with. Though, the Barret from their time woud also just attack Sephiroth on sight as well, so that would be something to address.
Cloud was then standing and saying it was time to leave. Giving a nod, she stood up as well. Seeing him standing and healed was a relief to her, and she was glad they were heading out together. She waited until he returned with his stuff, which didn't take long, they set out for somewhere other than here.
