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!
Final Fantasy Adventu is a roleplaying forum inspired by the Final Fantasy series. Images on the site are edited by KUPO of FF:A with all source material belonging to their respective artists (i.e. Square Enix, Pixiv Fantasia, etc). The board lyrics are from the Final Fantasy song "Otherworld" composed by Nobuo Uematsu and arranged by The Black Mages II.
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[attr=class,lyric1]infinite in mystery is the gift of
[attr=class,lyric2]the goddess
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth’s hands were shaking. Genesis noticed it when he placed his mug of coffee down, and the sight made him uneasy. His friend’s hands on his sword were always so perfectly steady that it seemed wrong somehow to watch him show weakness. Even when Genesis had taunted him with his origins in the reactor, it hadn’t been quite like this. What was the difference between then and now? Did Sephiroth truly care that much about him and Angeal? The thought made Genesis look away in shame.
Sephiroth started a sentence that he didn’t finish, and that was so unlike him that it made Genesis wince. He didn’t rush his friend though. Sephiroth started pacing back and forth like their apartment had transformed into a cage. In some ways maybe it had. Finally he expressed that Hojo had told him that Jenova was his mother’s name, but that he still didn’t really know what she was. There was an unspoken question there, and Genesis wished anyone else was there to answer it. He’d already answered it once and made a complete mess of it. Maybe that’s why it had to be him this time. He had to do it better. More thoroughly.
“Everything I know about Jenova came from Hollander. I never learned the specifics about your case since that was under Hojo,” he was forced to admit. “I can tell you what she is, but…” But what? Goddess if only Angeal were here. He’d know what to say. He understood what would calm someone quiet and stoic far better than Genesis ever had. “But you aren’t alone this time!” He finally burst out, leaning forward in his chair and biting his lip. They never talked like this. Part of him was embarrassed and the rest was past caring. What exactly did they have to lose at this point? “I did this wrong last time. I was dying and Angeal was dead and I took everything I was feeling out on you. I called you a monster because I’d called myself that all along.” It was hard to articulate everything that had gone wrong in that reactor. Truthfully he was still mad at Sephiroth for telling him he could go rot, but at this point he suspected that those words were spoken in the same spiteful way that he’d called his friend the perfect monster. Maybe they just didn’t know how to talk to each other at all without Angeal.
Sephiroth said that he would have defected if he had told him the truth. Genesis frowned and gripped his legs a bit tighter but didn’t otherwise respond. It was a heavy statement. How different things might have been if Sephiroth had left with them. He asked why Genesis and Angeal hadn’t trusted him in a way that was strangely emotional. All the red-haired SOLDIER had ever wanted was for his friend to show an ounce of emotion, but now that it was here, he wasn’t sure if he liked it. Sephiroth seemed a few seconds away from losing control. Was this what had happened in Niblheim? He hadn’t actually witnessed the fire himself, and Zack had always been cagey on the details.
“I didn’t take Angeal either at first,” he admitted, forcing himself to try to explain what had gone through his mind during those last days at Shinra. All of the guilt and panic as he’d sweet-talked half of SOLDIER into walking out. Not his friends though. “Hollander…said he could cure my degradation if I left with him. He lied of course, but what did I have to lose at that point? I didn’t want either of you to be a scientist’s lapdog with me though.” They already were as it turned out. All of them had been born into Shinra’s science department. Irony had a bitter taste. “Angeal only left later after he’d found me in Wutai. I knew the truth about you two by then. When I thought it was just me…Yes. I should have told you. But I didn’t ” He wanted to hide behind that truth with Loveless, but for once no stanzas came naturally to his lips. It felt like he’d forgotten how to even breathe, let alone speak poetry.
[attr=class,bulk] Genesis started to answer. He tried. But something was stopping him. Some kind of forced hesitance that muffled the sound of the truth.
Genesis was loud. He was emotional. But he was stalling for time. He assured Sephiroth that he was not alone. He admitted that he had wronged him, which was as close to an apology as Genesis was capable. But a word stuck even in this admission. It stuck in that same part of his mind which Sephiroth could not consciously enter.
”A monster…” he muttered, and its very utterance sent a chill of dread up his spine. He stopped his pacing. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see black leather but instead inspected only his bare palms.
He half-listened to Genesis’ explanations. They were like an echo from somewhere far away. Professor Hollander had manipulated Genesis into defection. Genesis hadn’t wanted Sephiroth to become a “scientist’s lapdog.” Sephiroth let out a huff of laughter from the sheer irony of the idea. What had he ever been, if not the very same? What had he been born into? Raised into? Genesis had known that. It was an open secret that Sephiroth had been augmented from a young age. But the rest…
”I signed a nondisclosure agreement,” he said, his voice hollow to even his own ears. ”My childhood. It was…confidential.” It was more than he ever would have said before. He had never spoken of his childhood. Not once. Not even to Genesis and Angeal. To do so would be to go against Shinra doctrine and to put them all in danger.
But more than that, he hadn’t spoken of it because of that horrible twist in his stomach when he lingered a moment too long on those days of solitude and walkways in gunmetal gray. There had been others there. Employees, mostly. The other test subjects…never stayed long.
”Strangers approached me. Some sought a fight. Others…only to talk. They told me…” Sephiroth hesitated. His fingers had gone numb. ”They told me…that Jenova was a monster. Is that what I am? What I’ve been all this time?”
He leaned back his head and laughed, hard and humorless. He’d been told he’d been meant for greatness. He’d been told he was the perfect soldier. He’d been told so many things, and yet, what else was Shinra known for but lies?
His eyes dulled on the ceiling. His arms fell limp at his sides. There was nothing funny about this.
”I only wanted to find my mother,” he said. ”I wanted to be…normal.”
[attr=class,lyric1]infinite in mystery is the gift of
[attr=class,lyric2]the goddess
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth repeated the word ‘monster’ like he was remembering something that he’d previously locked up in a tight little box. Maybe he was. The way that he looked down at his hands, he had the same expression on his face as when Genesis had found him in the Nibelheim reactor. History was repeating itself, and yet Genesis couldn’t have felt more different. He’d felt vindictive back then. Spiteful. The other First-Class had always surpassed him, and even as an experiment he was perfect in every way. Sephiroth would never degrade, and so Genesis had chosen his words to hurt.
Now he felt as if he might be sick. The apples scattered across the table in front of him weren’t helping. Even if they were the wrong color, he could still imagine them as Banora Whites. The fluorescent kitchen lights above them might have almost been the dull flicker of mako. Everything was wrong between them, and Angeal still wasn’t here. The same story playing out a second time.
Sephiroth revealed that he’d signed a non-disclosure agreement about his childhood, and Genesis laughed weakly as he rubbed at one eye. “Well I think you can consider your contract null and void. If there’s anything you want to say.” Truthfully, he didn’t know a lot about his friend’s childhood outside of what was public knowledge. He’d never spoken about it beyond his open disdain for Professor Hojo, so Genesis had been left to imagine the gaps in from there. It likely wasn’t a pretty story. The price of being a successful experiment. Shinra hadn’t bothered to keep him or Angeal when they had Sephiroth. At least not as children. The company had been more than happy to exploit them both as SOLDIER members.
Sephiroth mentioned the others who had approached him to talk about Jenova. Thankfully Zack had warned him about that, so it didn’t catch Genesis off guard even if he still scowled at their stupidity. It was almost as if those so-called heroes wanted another Nibelheim incident. Now here they were, with Genesis being the one forced to tell him the truth. Again. Really the heroes had no one to blame but themselves for this.
“Yes,” he said softly in response to his friend asking if he was a monster. Sephiroth had given a hard laugh, and Genesis didn’t consider that a good sign. He rarely laughed, and certainly not in moments like this. “That’s the truth that Angeal couldn’t live with, and that you couldn’t accept. We are monsters. They made us such.” His mouth was suddenly dry, but getting up to get water was the last thing on his mind right now. “Jenova was excavated from a 2,000 year old rock layer. Shinra believed her to be one of the Cetra when they created us. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps it isn’t. Hollander couldn’t tell me.”
Genesis gripped his fists in his lap before suddenly climbing to his feet as he feverishly recited his own interpretation of the conclusion to Loveless. “To become the dew that quenches the land. To spare the sands, the seas, the skies. I offer thee this silent sacrifice.” It both was and wasn’t what he was trying to say, and the red-haired man grasped for the right words.
“There is no normal for us. You decide what to do with this. Not Shinra. And not anyone else.”
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth slowly brought his hand before him as though to study it. For what, he didn’t know. Perhaps to see if it still looked, still felt, like his own. Nausea rose within him the longer that Genesis spoke. Buried memories pounded at the inside of his skull.
”What I…couldn’t accept…”
His fist clenched closed. It felt strangely bare without the cover of his gloves.
”You’re afraid.” His voice sounded foreign even to him. Distant. Hollow. ”That is a new stanza.”
Poetry. That was the least of his concerns. Perhaps that was why it was the safest to pursue.
”What would you do?” It didn’t matter. Their circumstances were not the same. Genesis had been hurt by them. Used by them. But he had still known a normal life. Sephiroth had never known such luxuries.
All that he had ever done, he had done to live up to expectation. He’d been told he had been meant for greatness. That he was to become the perfect soldier, the perfect weapon. All of his suffering was merely the cost. The price of greatness. Of superiority. And this...
Sephiroth was not one for vertigo. Hojo had tested his above average endurance to g-forces and he had no fear of heights. Still, Sephiroth remembered a time, performing on sterile obstacle courses in the sub-basement of the Shinra science department, staring down from the top of a narrow ledge and gathering the courage to force himself to climb down the other side.
He felt the same now, suspended above a dizzying drop into mysterious depths. His mouth was dry, acrid with the phantom taste of mako.
”I was told that I was special. But in the end, I’m nothing more than another of Hojo’s experiments.” Sephiroth sneered with the full force of his disgust, his anger, his shame. ”What would you do?”
[attr=class,lyric1]infinite in mystery is the gift of
[attr=class,lyric2]the goddess
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth mentioned distantly that Genesis must have been afraid because he’d recited a new stanza of poetry for once. “My own interpretation of the final act. I completed it based on my research,” he murmured, wondering if he actually looked as scared as his friend had mentioned. Maybe he did. Not because he feared Sephiroth in battle, even if he was a formidable enemy. Genesis never had managed to beat him, and perhaps he never would. But more than anything, he didn’t want a repeat of what had happened in the Nibelheim reactor over five years ago.
“Yes, I’m afraid. This was the last conversation we ever had, you and I.” He scooped up one of the spilled apples off the floor just to have something to hold onto, and scowled at the weight of it in his palm. “Except I botched it. And a week later, Nibelheim burned to the ground and Shinra announced you were killed in action. That doesn’t mean it was true, but…you were nowhere to be found.” Angeal’s death had been hard, but Sephiroth’s had almost been worse in a way. With Angeal, he’d always wondered if he could have done something differently. With Sephiroth, he knew that he could have.
Sephiroth asked what he would do in his situation, and Genesis looked over at his friend in surprise. “In your shoes?” He asked a bit contemplatively. It was an interesting question. Sephiroth wasn’t degrading, so there would have been no need to rely on the false promises of a scientist like Hollander. Without that, there would have been no army of copies. Just themselves and any other SOLDIERs who had wanted to desert. Maybe things would have been better that way if he could have done a more natural rebellion instead of one that had relied on Hollander.
Genesis was acutely aware that this was his chance to set his friend on a different path than the one he’d walked before, but he wasn’t Angeal. Maybe their other friend could have preached self-acceptance and forgiveness in a way that wouldn’t have sounded patronizing, but Genesis just couldn’t do it without choking. He was nothing if not honest about what they were.
“My soul, corrupted by vengeance, hath endured torment to find the end of the journey in my own salvation and your eternal slumber.” That was likely answer enough, but he still offered his friend the tiniest smirk as he held out the apple he’d grabbed. “I’d kill them all. Experiment or not, you don’t need me to tell you that you’re better than them, do you?”
[attr=class,bulk] There was little that Genesis feared in the world. He was impulsive, brash, and ultimately careless. They had both seen combat, and Sephiroth knew well that Genesis did not fear death unless, it seemed, if it came from within. He also feared the loss of his friends. Of Sephiroth. He had not feared any such thing when he had taken Angeal and left Sephiroth behind.
He wondered what had changed – Genesis, their circumstances, or himself.
Genesis scowled at the apple he had chosen to take into his hand. Sephiroth kept his eyes to the ceiling, watching him only in his periphery, listening to the words that tumbled carelessly from his lips.
Unsurprisingly, he quoted Loveless.
”Kill them all…?” Sephiroth echoed, his lip twitching into something like a smirk. ”Do you mean all of Shinra? Or all of humanity?”
Hatred pounded hot in his veins. Hatred, betrayal, and fear.
”I died.” It was simple. Direct. Hollow. ”I was thrown into the reactor. I remember…the mako. It flooded my lungs. I was burned inside and out, and it came to no end.”
He looked down at his hand, clasping and unclasping it experimentally. It felt somehow bare without the familiar tension of his leather gloves.
”My mind was broken by it. My memories. Everything which led to that moment. That path began at the end of the war. When you went missing in action.”
His smirk soured with bitter irony. ”After everything I’d endured…That was too painful to accept.”
Sephiroth knew his own fears. They did not include death or pain, but rather, a return to endless solitude and the fear that, no matter how he tried, he had never been more than a product, a weapon engineered by the executives for their own ends. The other subjects in Shinra’s science department were abominations, disposable and undeserving of life. He’d thought himself different.
He’d been wrong.
”What was the point of it? Of all of it?” He scowled and slid a hand to his forehead which pounded in rhythm with his heart. ”I am…nothing.”
[attr=class,lyric1]infinite in mystery is the gift of
[attr=class,lyric2]the goddess
[attr=class,bulk] Despite everything, Sephiroth’s lips twitched into something like a smirk as he asked if Genesis meant that he should kill everyone at Shinra or all of humanity. The air around them was still tense, but that didn’t stop Genesis from rolling his eyes in response. “Let’s not go overboard here, Sephiroth. Humans make theater.” There may have been a moment deep in his degradation when he would have had a different answer, but that was a period he’d done his best to forget. Angeal called it him losing his honor, and perhaps his oldest friend had a point for once.
Genesis’ description of what had happened in Nibelheim seemed to awaken some memories for Sephiroth, and he confirmed that he had indeed died in the reactor. “You were…thrown in?” Zack had never told him the full details, but being immersed in mako was an incredibly gruesome way to die. Grimacing, he glanced away as his friend recounted which memory that he’d decided was the beginning of the end. When Genesis himself had gone missing in action.
He sat down a bit heavily in his abandoned breakfast chair as he looked down at the apple still in his grasp. “...I should have come to you both,” he admitted, injecting bitterness in his voice as he gestured towards his wing. “But I was ashamed of this, and I believed Hollander’s promises that he could cure me. I didn’t know who I could trust in Shinra, and there were things he brought up that I knew neither of you would approve of.” Namely the copies. Hollander had thought it would add to their firepower since they were going up against Shinra. Genesis would have agreed to anything at the time in order to save his own life, but he’d still been cognizant enough to picture Angeal’s disgusted face if he could have seen the other SOLDIERs locked up and transformed. It had made him cautious to approach Angeal, and Sephiroth…well, he’d never been entirely sure where the general’s loyalties lied.
He certainly knew now, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
Sephiroth declared himself to be nothing, and Genesis scowled as he slammed the apple he was still holding back down on the table. “There is no hate, only joy, for you are beloved by the goddess. Hero of the dawn, Healer of worlds.” He had bruised one side of the apple, which wouldn’t matter for making juice, but the sight of it still riled him up more. “I have yet to so much as ruffle that perfect hair of yours in combat, and you dare call yourself nothing? What does that make the rest of us? Don’t be stupid, Sephiroth. It doesn’t suit you.”
