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 Nov 2, 2021 22:56:02 GMT -6
Cloud stared up at the ceiling, watching the motes of dust suspended in shafts of sunlight, swirling, drifting. If he closed his eyes he saw the image in negative, sparks rising out of a crackling fire dancing in the smoke against a jet black sky. The fire burned in his sleep and even waking he still felt the heat of it singing the back of his neck, smoldering in the fissures of his broken ribs.
After his encounter with Angeal just outside Yuna's place, Cloud hadn't gone out again. Bed rest only. Healer's orders. She was kind enough not to phrase it that way, but Cloud understood. He'd already made enough work for her, anyway, and so he stared at the ceiling and tried to count chocobos in his head or name all the materia he'd ever collected or think of something, anything, but the looming dread slowly suffocating him.
How many would Sephiroth kill, this time? Which town would be the first burned to ashes? If Cloud had been faster, or stronger, or--
He shut his eyes tight, inhaled a slow deep breath. A dull pain washed over his chest as his lungs inflated. Clean white bandages covered the healing stab wound that had just missed his heart, and the bruising on the rest of his exposed skin had shifted from a deep purple towards an ugly blue-green. He felt tired and weak, like the weight of his own body was enough to pin him where he lay.
He tried counting chocobos again.
The front door creaked, and Cloud lost count somewhere after two dozen. Footsteps followed. He didn't think much of it. It wasn't the first time Yuna had visitors since Cloud had woken up in her care, and he couldn't see the door from where he was anyway. He looked up at the ceiling and started his count over.
Post by Cloud Strife on Oct 2, 2021 12:53:30 GMT -6
Cloud stared in bitter silence. The quiet murmur of the city around them seemed mocking in its placidity. His eyes narrowed. Of course it didn't make sense. There was no sense in Sephiroth's wholesale slaughter of Nibelheim, no reason in his apocalypse. There was no understanding insanity like that. There was only fighting it, the same way you would a wildfire. Cloud loosened his fists slowly, knuckles aching and stiff, nails leaving red half-moon imprints in his palms. If he could will anything to reality in that moment, it would have been for the man in front of him to disappear and let him bleed in peace.
The man grabbed him by the arm instead and Cloud instinctively thrashed in his grip like an animal in a trap.
"Hey-- let go! You asshole--"
He cursed and he fought but he had neither the weight nor the strength to offer any resistance. He wrenched his shoulder. Things popped and tore that should not have. His nerves were alight with fire and his heart pounded like a jackhammer behind his ribcage. One arm still cradled his midsection as the man - Angeal - dragged him back into the building. A cat curled up outside the door startled at their approach and sprinted away, claws skittering on stone.
By the time they were inside there was nothing left in Cloud to fight with. His head swam and his muscles trembled with every action. He stumbled to the bed on which he spent too many hours already and slumped down to sit on it. The mattress creaked as he hunched forward and cupped his forehead with one hand. In the interior light he looked worse. The shadows under his eyes deeper, his skin paler, the thin sheen of cold sweat shining under the bulb overhead.
Angeal... he thought, backtracking. Have I heard that name before...?
It nagged at him, but his mind provided no answer.
Cloud lifted his head as the dizziness subsided. He did not lie down. He watched Angeal and though that fury still burned behind his eyes the flame was waning with exhaustion. Nothing past the Wutai War. Great. Cloud thought back to the inn in Kalm, when he'd first recounted his warped recollection of events. Tifa's uneasy silence. The missing ending.
He took a deep breath. It had been much easier to return to Nibelheim when he didn't remember the truth.
"Nibelheim was two years after the war," Cloud began. "Shinra got reports that the reactor was malfunctioning. Producing monsters in the area. They sent us to clear out the monsters and inspect the reactor. There were four of us. Sephiroth was the squad leader."
At some point in his talking, Cloud's gaze had drifted away from Angeal and over to some indistinct point in space just in front of the wall. The well rose up from the center of the square. One of the strays howled forlornly and wandered past the inn, searching for scraps. A thin wisp of smoke drifted up out of the chimney of his childhood home. He rubbed the back of his neck.
"Sephiroth took care of the monsters pretty much by himself on the way in to town. First time I'd ever seen him fight in person... We hiked up to the reactor the next day. Turned out Shinra'd been using the reactor for experiments. There were pods full of things... people exposed to Mako until they transformed. But that wasn't the important part. It was the chamber at the back of the reactor."
Post by Cloud Strife on Sept 25, 2021 22:59:24 GMT -6
The impact of the bat against the solid surface of the SOLDIER before him sent a shockwave up Cloud's arm, through his spent muscles. He wobbled on his feet when the bat was wrenched out of his hand. He tried to close his grip before the bat slipped out of his fingers but there was no strength left in it. Hollow clatter of the wood against the stones, the skittering and scraping of the metal nailheads. His eyes followed the bat, an unthinking reflex his combat senses were too tired to override, and he didn't see the palm come up to shove him in the chest until he was already stumbling backwards.
He landed on the bench with a dull creak of wood and an involuntary exhale as his back met the wall behind him. Pain radiated out from the center of his chest like a deep smoldering coal fire. He tried to wrestle his face into a scowl, to fight back the agonized grimace, because Cloud had picked this moment to cling to a stubborn sense of pride as though the man pushing him around hadn't already seen how badly he was injured.
He sat with the back of his head against the wall, glaring up at the man with a kind of resigned fury. He was twelve years old again with his knuckles scraped raw. He was fourteen again standing at attention with a bloody nose. He said nothing for a while, letting the other man's words drift in the silence.
Sephiroth did something. Maybe if he didn't have a hole in his chest oozing blood into a thick pad of bandages, Cloud might laugh at the obliviousness of the line of questioning. This asshole never knew the heat of the flames in Nibelheim, or the overpowering stench of iron in a hallway full of mutilated corpses, or the dread of the end of the world hanging in the sky.
This asshole was friends with Sephiroth, and Cloud didn't think anything he could say would make him understand.
He tried to work up some saliva in his mouth, but when he spat defiantly on the ground it was dry.
"Should I start with the part where he killed my mom, slaughtered the people of Nibelheim, and burned the town to the ground?" Cloud asked. The fury still burned in his eyes, but there was ice in his voice. "When he almost killed two of my friends and ran me through with a sword?" His hands balled into fists. "Or when he showed up five years later with a plan to end the world. When he left a trail of corpses for us to follow. When he murdered my friend and summoned Meteor to destroy the planet."
When he pulled the puppet strings, when he reached into my mind and broke it, when--
Cloud paused, swallowed a dry lump in his throat. He took a slow, deep breath in through his nose and exhaled shakily through his teeth. He didn't notice his fingernails digging into the meat of his palm.
"If you want all the details we'll be here a while. But 'why?'. I'll tell you why. Because he's a monster. He chose to be a monster. If you want to pretend like he's human, you should stop lying to yourself for the sake of the world. He isn't. He's just wearing human skin."
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 2, 2021 23:08:55 GMT -6
Every word grated on his frayed nerves like coarse grit sandpaper. He shook his head in a vain attempt to ward them away. The back of his neck burned with rage. It ran up and down the length of his spine, down his arms, collecting in his knuckles. His muscles twitched and his ribs ached with every breath.
"Shut up," Cloud said through his teeth.
The man took two steps into the buffer zone between them but it was the please that snapped the thin thread of restraint holding Cloud back.
"Stop--" He thrust the bat accusingly towards the man's face. "Stop acting like you're the good guy. You show up to help a mass-murdering psycho and now you're saying please. Who the hell do you think you are!?"
His mouth was dry and it hurt his throat to yell. His ribs burned and the flesh beneath the patchwork of bandages stung with the sudden movement. He didn't care. He'd almost ended it - again - almost had Sephiroth dead to rights until this guy showed up. He'd run it back in his head so many times since waking up in Yuna's care, thinking back to the depths of the Crater, to the final blow he landed then, to the blow he would have landed in the square.
If not for him.
For a second Cloud stood there, the tip of the bat pointed at the man's face, wavering with the exhaustion and ache in his arm. The thought looped interminably in his head.
I could've ended it if it wasn't for him.
His lips pulled back in an animal snarl, and like a pressure valve releasing came the guttural yell of all his accumulated hate. He pushed himself forward, the hard soles of his boots scraping gracelessly against the stones while he swung the bat backhanded in a horizontal strike across the man's face. It was clumsy, and it was slow, and every still-healing wound on his body lit up at once with a bright flare of pain.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 4, 2021 0:23:06 GMT -6
Cloud stared at nothing, taking a brief and much needed respite from the exhaustion of thinking until he heard footsteps. Maybe Yuna, there to tell him to come inside in a way that sounded like asking. No, not her. Too heavy.
He lifted his head, mako eyes fixing on a figure in the doorway. Narrowing. His hands curled into fists, white-knuckled.
He stared past the man to the sword hilt jutting up from his back. Too damn clean. Rage flared in him like a muzzleflash in the rain. He stood. There was a whisper of a creak from the bench, all buck fifty of him enough to shift the weatherworn wooden joints. It was obvious in the way he moved that his body was a hundred steps behind his mind. There was a hitch in his rising, the sudden hot burst of pain in the trio of fractured ribs. He was halfway hunched over still as he scrambled from the bench, boots scraping clumsily against the paving stones, the nail-studded tip of the bat following.
He stood in a shadow of a fighting stance. One arm cradled his ribs and the other lifted the baseball bat out in front of him, swaying. The sheet slid off his shoulders and folded itself into a loose heap at his feet. Where there weren't bandages or burns there was mottled blue-purple bruising. A long, deep line of it across his ribcage. He measured the distance between them instinctively in a distance of steps he'd never be able to take fast enough. Not in this shape.
"What is this, a joke?" he asked bitterly. His voice still had a hoarse quality to it. "Sephiroth send you here to play mind games for him? Just here to talk. With that sword on your back. You grave-robbing piece of-- Go to hell."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 15, 2021 0:20:30 GMT -6
Cloud sat on a solitary bench in the shade of Yuna's building. He was a patchwork of bandages and half-healed abrasions, itching pink flesh spotting the pale skin between his more grievous injuries. His shirt was long gone, a bloodied tatter of cloth in the garbage. His pants weren't in much better shape, but he made due with them. He wore a thin sheet like a makeshift cloak around his head and shoulders and he sat upright with his back against the cool stone wall. All he needed was some air, he explained, and promised he wouldn't wander off. His injuries still ached and if he breathed too deeply his chest lit up with white-hot flares of agony, but he managed to walk at a shuffle without falling over. It was progress.
Besides, he'd rather deal with the pain than laying around any longer than he already had. He was going insane, waiting for some word from Tifa and Aerith. Like trying to scratch an itch on the inside of his skull.
The bench faced a quiet street. A few yards away, someone had laid out boxes of junk hauled out of a shed. Foot traffic was sparse. Cloud didn't know if the Provo authorities were out for his head after the fight in the square. They probably were. It was stupid to think otherwise. The stillness of his surroundings was mostly a comfort, then. No one around to look too closely at the living dead enjoying the fresh air.
A few minutes passed. Cloud dared to stand with all the caution of an arthritic senior. He shuffled over to the abandoned boxes of junk, boots scraping over uneven pavement. Something caught his eye. The lure of the familiar. He reached into one of the boxes and picked up a wooden baseball bat spotted haphazardly with nails. For the first time in days he mustered a smile, a minute thing tugging at the corner of his mouth.
He shuffled back over to the bench, turning the bat around in his hands, examining the workmanship. The lack thereof. It had a comfortable grip, a good balance. He eased himself back down to sitting, leaned against the wall, tapped the end of the bat against the pavement and then let it rest against the bench beside his leg.
It was the little things, sometimes, that took a man's mind off the hole in his chest.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 14, 2021 21:54:49 GMT -6
He wanted to lift his hand, scrub it down his face, wipe the sleep from his eyes. His arms were still leaden. He had exhausted his depleted reserves when he had the silly idea to sit upright and his muscles only had the capacity for the rest Yuna insisted he still needed. Cloud wouldn't argue the point. His eyes drifted to the window, the warm rays of sunlight spilling in. His mind ached for sleep, between the thoughts of his friends and the thoughts of the rubble he'd left behind in the town square. The blood on the cobblestones, the carbon char on the walls. His chest throbbed and his bandages itched and his throat hurt. The weight of everything settled on him, pinned him in place on the bloodstained couch.
Don't confront him alone next time.
Next time.
After everything there would still be a next time.
He didn't have it in him to despair at the thought. He'd been so close to peace only to have it torn out of his hands. Maybe he'd never get it back. Maybe he was doomed to this perpetual fight against a living nightmare, the monster scratching at his brain and murdering his friends. No escape. Not even in another world.
If sitting up and moving managed to spark the faintest bit of life in his mangled body, it had all drained out of him now. There was a dullness to the mako shine of his eyes. He wished Tifa was here, and Aerith, safe in this place and not hunted down on the streets of Sonora by a silver-haired madman.
The tendrils of panic wormed their way through his mind and became the roots of his coming nightmares.
"Yeah, you're right..." he exhaled. He wanted to take Yuna's advice. Order. It was a sensible one. He understood that, on a logical level. But the vision of Tifa and Aerith dead on the ground kept returning to the forefront of his mind in sickening detail. Orange light of the fire glinting off pools of blood. Sephiroth's smirk, the cruelty in his laugh--
He just needed to be better. He needed to be stronger, and faster, and tougher, and then he wouldn't need to ask anybody else to take the risk.
No, he just needed Tifa and Aerith, here.
God, he needed sleep. A deep sleep, the sleep of the dead.
"Tifa and Aerith... The apartment's in the slums. Or there's the bar Tifa's workin' at..." Cloud muttered directions to both places as clearly as his exhausted mind would allow. Months of living in Sonora and he navigated mostly by landmarks still. Some of the streets in the slums didn't have names. It hadn't seemed worth it to learn the names of the ones that did. "...Any way you can reach 'em..." I don't want them to worry, he almost added, but he knew that was an impossible ask.
His eyelids were weighted down by boulders and when he closed his eyes it was a long pause before they opened again.
"I think... I should probably sleep..." he mumbled. "...Thanks, Yuna. For helpin' me."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 13, 2021 0:25:56 GMT -6
Cloud watched the shock cross Tifa's face in a sudden rush, disappearing beneath the cascade of tears as the dam of memory burst. He felt a constriction in his chest, in his throat, at the sight of her crying. It was stupid, the way he handled this, springing it on her so suddenly, and now he grasped helplessly for something to say or do to make it right and came up empty handed. Aerith took care of that instead, and he was grateful and ashamed in equal measure.
The entire rest of the bar was silent, the kind of thick silence that tickled at the back of your skull, and only Tifa's sobbing and Aerith's quiet comforting words cut through it. Cloud glanced past them, meeting eyes with one of the hunched regulars at the bar. The man stared, one hand on his forgotten beer, and Cloud felt the back of his neck begin to burn. He glared. His fury was silent but spoke as loud as it needed to. Not a show, pal. The man spun on his stool and put his back to the group.
The tension eased out of Cloud's shoulders and he returned his attention to the two women as Tifa composed herself. She asked the obvious question, the same question Cloud asked, the same one he wondered if he really wanted answered.
"I don't know," Cloud replied with a halfhearted shake of his head, "Nothing about this place makes any sense."
But the truth of it was he hadn't bothered to search very hard for answers since he made it to Sonora. He'd gotten comfortable living here with Tifa. Complacent, even. What did it matter if he understood the nature of this new world when he was helping to pay the rent?
What did it matter how, as long as they were all together again?
"Hey, let's sit down," he suggested gently, nodding his head towards an empty table in the corner. Less of a point of interest for prying eyes. Out of the way if someone else came through the door.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 15, 2021 11:58:17 GMT -6
I've gotta learn how to do that floating weapon thing.
Cloud spared a sidelong glance at the dazzling array of crystal weaponry spinning and hovering in the air, refracting the weak light of Sonora's gunmetal sky and the bright electric blue aura of the man commanding them. A shimmering beacon incongruous with the dull grey industrial zone playing host to the fight. He couldn't help but think that pulling swords out of thin air seemed a hell of a lot more convenient than lugging six of them around everywhere.
But now wasn't the time for gawking over shiny flying blades.
With the left flank covered, Cloud dashed into the fray on the right, kicking up a faint plume of grit from the road. Even without a haste spell enhancing his muscle fibers, Cloud moved with an inhuman speed and agility. The gaggle of thugs swung wildly. Headhunting. He ducked under a baseball bat, weaved to the right as a makeshift spear pierced the air past his left deltoid, took the legs out from under the batsman with a wide sweep of his main blade.
By the time the thug hit the asphalt Cloud had already moved on to the next one. The flat of the main blade met flesh and bone. Dry snap of ribs, a choked cry. Two down. A hatchetblade ricocheted off the steel pauldron on Cloud's left shoulder. He felt the metal ring all the way into his skull and a flare of anger in its wake. He spun and chopped the wooden handle in two with the folding sword in his offhand and the hatchetman took two stumbling steps backwards in a desperate bid to make space. Cloud swung the main blade for a knockout blow when something sharp bit into the back of his knee and buckled his leg. The flat of the main blade clipped a shoulder and finished its arc scraping asphalt.
Sloppy. Come on.
Cloud grunted a low, frustrated noise between gritted teeth. The four remaining thugs swarmed like eager wolves with the taste of blood on their tongues. A barrage of blows rained down upon him but Cloud swung his main blade up like a shield, shifted his weight, waited... And in that breath between attacks, he swung the sword out around him like a steel whirlwind, a blur of silver sending four bodies flying backwards and crashing to the pavement.
From there it was cleanup. A soccer kick to the face as one of them scrambled to all fours, the man's head snapping backwards before he slumped unconscious on the ground. Kicking the weapon out of reach of another, stomping his wrist until something cracked. He planted a boot on one man's chest just as his partner in the fight warped back to him. Cloud looked up, sweeping his eyes over the spread of groaning bodies on the ground.
"They're idiots," Cloud replied with a shake of his head. He looked down at the man under his boot and emphasized each word. "Stay down."
He held on to mercy by a thin thread, but he'd clashed with so many of these faceless thugs already, seen so much of the misery they inflicted on the people of Sonora's slums, that it was a hard choice to pull his punches. He hoisted his main blade up to rest on his shoulder and looked over at the other swordsman.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 11, 2021 20:26:09 GMT -6
When Tifa finally rose to her feet the last vestiges of worry and tension withdrew from the edges of Cloud's mind like an ebbing tide. The desperation that had gripped him and driven him from the moment he woke in this strange new world gave way to an unfamiliar sense of ease. And of something else, bubbling beneath the surface, more familiar but beyond Cloud's ability to put into words. It was Tifa herself who told him once, in the shadow of the Highwind, that words weren't the only way to tell someone how you felt. But without the threat of the end of the world at his back, Cloud found himself too much a coward to say more than he already had.
But he returned her grin. He'd been doing that a lot since she came to. It was hard not to, even if he tried to maintain the cool facade that shielded him back in Midgar.
"Yeah. A drink sounds good," he said, nodding. He couldn't remember where he'd heard the phrase 'liquid courage' before, but maybe that was what he needed now. He started out of the room, holding the door for Tifa, and headed back downstairs with her. The potion looked to have done the trick, but Cloud still found himself watching hawklike for a shaky leg, an unsteady step, ready with a supporting hand. He knew, logically, that she could probably throw him through a wall right now but he couldn't help himself. Mt. Nibel left a scar that ran deep, and some days Cloud felt it more than others.
"Have you heard from anyone else?" he asked as they made their way down to the main floor. "Figured Barret would be causing a ruckus in a city like this..."
A part of him thought Barret would have been the first of his friends that he'd track down, if they were here at all. It was hard to be low key when you had a gun for an arm. Or when you were Barret, generally speaking.
