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 12, 2021 15:21:22 GMT -6
In the time it took him to blink she was on her feet and if he'd told her where Tifa was, Cloud thought, she'd be halfway there already. He stood slowly, minding the sword on his back with a steadying hand on the hilt as it shifted position. He looked out past the entranceway to the park and into the steady hustle and bustle of the busy street beyond. He looked back to Aerith and nodded.
"Let's go."
Cloud took a stuttering step, an old crumpled flyer crinkling beneath his boot. He paused as though he remembered something, the offered up his arm with an awkward hesitation like someone attempting a skill they'd only just learned. Then he led her out into the Sonoran foot traffic, beginning the trek towards Seventh Heaven. He pointed out the landmarks by which he navigated and explained that Tifa knew the city a whole lot better than he did.
The mess of conflicting feelings stirred up in him had already started to settle. He felt a lightness, then. A notion that maybe he could finally shed the weight of bad memories he kept carrying around. He'd found Tifa, Aerith was alive, and the others had to be around. Somewhere. Things were looking up and maybe momentum would keep it moving that way.
It wasn't his world, but maybe this place could turn out to be a fresh start.
Post by Cloud Strife on Nov 26, 2020 0:59:48 GMT -6
Cloud's gaze followed the tears down the curve of her cheek. A painful tightness gripped his throat. He lifted his hand, hesitated, placed it gently on her shoulder. Eighty-nine letters... He didn't remember much of those four captive years when she wrote them. Flashes, mostly. The basement, the mako tanks. Zack talking at him but the words drifting past, his mind too addled to understand. An endless blue sky. Blood and shell casings and rain, the chemical tang of burnt gunpowder overpowered by the petrichor. A truth wedged like a knifeblade between his ribs.
He would've made it to Midgar if it wasn't for me.
The city was in sight. If he hadn't been dragging a useless, comatose grunt across the world, Zack would've made it. Would've dodged Shinra's cleanup squad and been able to answer for those eighty-nine letters. It wasn't the first time Cloud considered the role he played in Zack's death. It wouldn't be the last, even though he knew there was no universe in which Zack would've left him to rot in a dank, mako-soaked basement. Wasn't the kind of thing heroes did.
There was no use dwelling on a what-if that wouldn't have gone any other way.
Aerith, too, didn't dwell. Like a flipped switch, the shadows of sadness disappearing before her bright smile. Cloud felt the tightness in his throat ebb away. There were more tales to tell her, of course. He'd only scratched the surface of the truth. But now wasn't the time.
"Yeah..." he said vaguely, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'm not as interesting as I thought I was, back then." He flashed a ghost of a self-deprecating grin. A chill Sonoran breeze blew through the park, ruffled his hair. Loose paper fluttered and tumbled in the gust to land silently on the ground. The old park had lost its appeal, he thought, but Seventh Heaven wasn't far.
"Hey, we should go find Tifa," he suggested, nodding towards the street. "She'll want to see you."
Post by Cloud Strife on Nov 10, 2020 12:14:26 GMT -6
He watched the cyclone tear unopposed across the square, watched for the streak of black and silver that told him he missed his shot, but it never came. He dropped through the air with the pull of gravity and saw Sephiroth swallowed up in the maelstrom, carried off in a whirlwind of debris. His foot made contact with a solid surface. He pushed off, boot against the statue face of a man whose name and deeds Cloud didn't know and didn't care to know. He pushed off like a launched projectile, following Sephiroth's path through the slatecolored sky, following him through the shattered facade of a building, through jagged teeth of snapped wooden beams and the crumbling drywall. The structure groaned like a wounded beast.
The screaming winds died and Cloud remained in the billowing dust of their wake, advancing on Sephiroth unhesitatingly, hatred carried forth on Jenova-infected nerves from mind to hand. There was nothing left to say. He'd said everything back in the depths of the Northern Crater and what remained in his heart was wordless. The steel sang for him instead. It sang for his mother, and for Tifa, and for Aerith, and for Nibelheim, and Midgar, and the planet itself. For everything they sacrificed. For all that they endured. For the scars Cloud bore in the places he had been broken.
He wouldn't let it all be in vain. He wouldn't let Sephiroth steal a second chance from this world.
With every swing of his Fusion sword Cloud hunted for the kill. For the clean decapitation, or a severed artery, or a shattered spine. He did not leave Sephiroth room to breathe. Downward chopping blow to the collarbone, blocked. He pressed forward, sweeping cut up into the ribs, blades sparking on impact like camera flashes. He pressed forward. Again and again, a violent blur of steel brought down with all the strength Cloud's contaminated cells could muster, keeping Sephiroth on the back foot, unrelenting. A cacophony of metal, of snapping wood, sparks bursting as their blades clashed. He swung with reckless abandon, unrestricted by the close quarters of the collapsing room, his sword crashing through the ceiling, a wall, carving up the floor on each backswing. Cloud's muscles screamed at him. Sweat trickled down the back of his neck along his spine. The effects of the Haste spell were beginning to wear off but Cloud willed himself to move faster, even if he tore muscle from bone, even if his lungs burst.
In that moment there was no town square, no crumbling nameless building. There was no Provo and no Sonora and no Zephon. In that moment there was only Cloud and Sephiroth and the weight of the duty Cloud assigned himself. And if he failed there would be no moments after.
A bright aura surrounded him, lit his face, the fire in his mako-eyes. It blew out plumes of drywall dust and woodsplinters in an arc around him. The building shuddered.
"STAY DEAD!" he shouted, and the light flowed into his sword, the metal glowing like a beacon, and he swung for the head--
Post by Cloud Strife on Oct 28, 2020 17:41:28 GMT -6
When she smiled at him the shabby slum room seemed a little less dull and a little less grey. In Cloud's eyes, too, something changed, grew brighter. He glanced down at his boots and huffed a toneless little laugh. Support beam sounded about right. Then she questioned him, and he looked back up, studying her face, head canted at just the slightest angle.
Don't have anywhere else to be? Something about the question rang strangely in his head. Was she probing, or giving him an out? After the long, lonely journey he'd taken through strange lands to get to this stranger one he couldn't think of anywhere else he'd want to be but with a familiar face. An anchor to his past, his world. Proof that everything that happened to him before he woke up wasn't just the twisted dream of his unreliable mind. It was luck that reunited them, as it had been at the train station in Midgar what felt like yesterday and a lifetime ago. Cloud didn't want to push it.
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Don't know where else I'd go," he said. "Only got in to the city today. I didn't... really think too far past trying to find somebody I knew."
I was hoping it'd be you, he didn't say. He cleared his throat like it was insurance against the words slipping out on their own.
"How long have you been here, anyway?"
Long enough to get a job, earn a reputation, and make enemies, at least. If she was here making a living, what happened to the others? Were they stranded in some far-flung corners of the world? If they'd been in the city long enough to find Tifa, Cloud figured she would've mentioned them. That put a journey in his future.
But not now. For now, Sonora seemed like it would suit him fine.
Post by Cloud Strife on Oct 28, 2020 13:17:52 GMT -6
Sephiroth was a black streak almost lost in the white-orange heart of the fireball. The flames crashed and burst against stone and wood behind him and left a charred carbon shadow. Small wisps of fire remained, fed on fuel of wood splinters and scattered detritus like little burning spores. Cloud craned his head up, following Sephiroth's path into the sky, raising arms, swing of the blade--
In the depths of the Northern Crater Cloud's hands didn't shake until after the thing that was Sephiroth fell; after the twisted mass of bloodied Jenova-flesh broke apart, after the last vestiges of Sephiroth's will dissipated in the Lifestream like an inkdrop in an ocean. Then his hands trembled. Sweat beaded on his brow and a sick churning filled the empty space of his stomach and his whole body shook and it was only the tremors of the crater itself, the collapsing rock and earth, that disguised it.
In the end, Cloud didn't want to die.
He was broken, once. He gave up, trapped in what seemed like inescapable misery. But when Tifa refused to give up on him, he clawed his way up from the depths of utter despair and emerged whole. Then he understood the simple truth-- that he wanted to keep breathing after all. Keep fighting. Live to see a world free from Shinra and Sephiroth and Meteor. And he carried that with him on his march towards almost certain death. It took every last ounce of nerve, every drop of blood and sweat and adrenaline, to put one foot in front of the other even as his mind's eye conjured the vision of him bleeding out on a lump of rock deep in the earth among the bodies of his friends and there would be no one left to mourn because there would be no one left.
Cloud spent everything that he had on that final push, the paradoxical battle of accepting the possibility of death without welcoming it. He spent everything but his rage, and he clung tightly to that now even as it burned him. He refused to accept that they fought for nothing. This time, he refused to accept the specter of death.
An arc of force barrelled down on him. He swung his sword up over his head and shielded himself behind the flat of it. The impact buckled his knees. The stones of the city square cracked and split and fine plumes of dust and grit billowed in the air around him. The next impact rattled his lungs, stumbled him, dropped him to one knee. He felt a tremor beginning in his wrist.
"No..." he exhaled, pinned beneath his sword and the next shockwave.
Hold on to that rage.
It was all he had in him, that supernova sitting between his ribs, coiled in his muscles, waiting to explode.
Cloud shot up to his feet and fixed his burning blue eyes on Sephiroth. He swung his Fusion sword around, spun with it, a blur of steel, the force of it kicking up a wind that carried with it the shrapnel of shattered stones and splintered wood. It grew into a twister in the blink of an eye, and with a final swing of his blade sent it barrelling straight for Sephiroth.
Post by Cloud Strife on Oct 21, 2020 14:49:53 GMT -6
Cloud shifted his weight onto his right heel and crossed his boots at the ankle. His bones felt like they were slowly gaining weight, a steady drip of lead filling the hollow where his marrow should have been, an ache tugging at his joints. He realized, only after Tifa offered a drink, that he was very thirsty. A drink sounded like a good idea. Tifa mixing it for him sounded like a better one.
When she started into explaining the situation he listened to her with a quiet focus. A furrow of his brows. Gangs. He thought of Midgar again. Sonora was its distorted reflection, a city made up of half-remembered details patched together with dreams and nightmares. Only fitting that in both places Tifa planted herself in direct opposition to some force's oppressive boot. Shinra, gangs, what difference did it make? Of course she would be there trying to make things better for other people. She was possessed of a selflessness that Cloud never saw within himself. Revenge, necessity, money - those he knew well. He still burned with shame to think of who he was back in Midgar, spitting on the plight of the planet to demand fifteen hundred gil.
Tifa chose the harder path, but strong as she was Cloud saw the weight of it resting heavy on her shoulders. The doubt in her eyes. He frowned. Ever since she woke up here she'd been fighting and turning that fact around in his head brought forth a vague and useless sense of guilt. He should've gotten here sooner. Somehow. He was never one to let the logic of a situation stand in the way of blaming himself for it.
But he was here now, and knocking around some idiot gangsters until they got the notion to stay gone seemed well within his wheelhouse.
"Sounds like a lotta work for one person," he said. "Maybe they'll think twice about making trouble, now that you've got backup. ...If you want a hand with 'em, I mean."
Cloud shrugged, as if to say it was no trouble. He didn't know why he was playing it so cool. He almost laughed at the absurdity of it, like he was a parody of the cold professional mercenary he once pretended to be. But the ill-fitting ex-SOLDIER persona was long gone now, and in its place, Cloud was... Cloud. Truthfully, he was still trying to figure out what exactly that meant.
Post by Cloud Strife on Oct 6, 2020 20:37:24 GMT -6
Bright flash like lightning heralding the coming storm. The high ringing clash of steel on steel sounding across the city center. Heads turned. For the first time since the Northern Crater Cloud stared into those inhuman eyes - not Mako eyes, not a SOLDIER's eyes, but a monster, the thing that had taken so much from him and kept trying to take more. His mother, his town, his friends, his sanity, his free will, the whole damn world.
And the bastard was still breathing and still smirking like none of it meant anything.
In that suspended moment Cloud knew without words, without conscious thought, that there was more to this than stopping Sephiroth again. It was more than protecting his friends, more than protecting this world from whatever mad plan he had stewing in his psychotic mind, and it was more than just simple revenge. They'd killed Sephiroth as quickly as they could have back in that crater because they had to, but Sephiroth didn't deserve such a mercy.
What was a fair return on all the suffering he'd wrought?
Sephiroth pushed back against the locked blades and sent Cloud soaring backwards. Something in Cloud's gut anticipated it. Like they'd done this dance a hundred times before. He spun with the momentum, backflipping, landing in a crouch in the space cleared by a retreating crowd of gawkers. The first notes of panic seeping in to the collective murmur. When he straightened up the materia in the Mystile on his wrist glowed a faint green. Sephiroth's voice like needles in his spine.
"Shut up," Cloud said through his teeth. His voice was venom. No games. No mind tricks. He wouldn't make the same mistake twice.
If he were thinking logically he'd remember that memories were a funny thing in this place, but he wasn't thinking logically. His head was filled with all the worst moments of his life on an endless loop and the singular clear idea that cutting Sephiroth's head off would make it all stop.
A blue light enveloped him and he charged at Sephiroth, a Haste-enhanced blur, faint puff of dust and grit kicked up from the cobblestones in his wake. Cloud knew Sephiroth was faster than him and he couldn't afford to give him space to react. Even still their blades clashed shot for shot, the percussion line of some new epic of violence and vengeance. Light strobing in bright bursts of sparks, one after the other, a dozen times over before the first began to fade.
People were running. Cloud was only peripherally aware of this, the multitude of frantic voices and stampeding footsteps. A distant scream. The townspeople in Nibelheim never had the luxury of running. He angled away from a blade thrust and felt the force like a gust of wind past his ear. He swung up with his Fusion sword, clashing against the end of the masamune just to knock it off line, just to buy himself a little time. Half a second. A fraction of that. He had to keep pressing. He had to get Sephiroth on the back foot.
Another green glow, the mastered Fire materia embedded in the guard of his sword. A primal yell as he hurled a great fireball at Sephiroth. The blast of heat was familiar. The flames roared so loud in his ears that Cloud couldn't hear himself.
XX/XX/XXXX - Met a guy named Ignis on the road. Said I'd keep an eye out for that Noct guy he's looking for. I'm not the only one who woke up in this world not knowing what the hell's going on. [complete]
XX/XX/XXXX - Got to a city named Sonora and fought a house with a guy named Caius. Has a pet dragon. He said he'd keep an eye out for Tifa and Barret. [complete]
Post by Cloud Strife on Sept 18, 2020 22:21:26 GMT -6
He told himself he was looking for proof that the stories of the man in black with the sword and the silver hair were anything other than coincidence, but the truth was he knew the answer with certainty before he ever set foot in Provo. He felt it, in his guts, in his bones, in the static buzz in the back of his mind. He could taste the iron on his tongue and feel the sharp white-hot burn through his chest and he could hear the hum of the reactor from a long way away in space and in time. A long way that was never long enough. It filled him with the weight of a familiar reflexive dread. Yet the more he turned it over in his mind the more that dread ebbed away. Like a receding tide. Like ash in the wind. In its place clarity. Certainty. Hate.
Sephiroth was here. Sephiroth was alive. That meant Sephiroth had to die.
There was something freeing about the hate he felt, the knot of rage that burned like a hot coal between his ribs. Burned too hot for the fear or dread or apprehension to sit alongside it. It was pure and it was fuel and it felt limitless. It radiated from him in waves, in the steel of his stare and the tension of his muscles and the way he moved with a predator's grace and a murderer's purpose.
The sword on his back swayed as he walked and his hands were balled into tight fists. He could have been following the murmuring of Provo's civilians about the stranger with the silver hair and the sword or he could have been following the reckoning of his own internal compass. A nagging thought that this was history repeated hovered like a fly and Cloud swatted it aside.
Killed him before, he told himself. I'll kill him again.
The street opened up into the bustling square but in the dull grey light Cloud did not see the gaggles of tourists or the towering statues or the looming facade of the city hall. He saw a tall figure in black with long silver hair. He saw the fire bursting through the windows of his childhood home. He saw Tifa bleeding out on the floor of the reactor. He saw hallways filled with blood and bodies. He saw Aerith's lifeless eyes and limp body. He saw Meteor and the depths of the northern crater and every nightmare of every horror branded inside his skull. Because of him. All of it because of him...
Cloud's hands shook, tremors of fury and adrenaline. The blood roared in his ears. The rest of the world fell away.
Sephiroth had to die.
He drew the sword from his back and broke out into a sprint, the tip of the blade dragging behind him and throwing a trail of sparks. The crowd parted like the sea. He let out a primal scream of abject rage, a scream to make his throat bleed, and he leaped high in the air and held the sword over his head like the executioner's axe and he swung it down at Sephiroth with the full weight of his hatred.
Post by Cloud Strife on Sept 9, 2020 6:02:27 GMT -6
I'll be going on a camping trip from the 19th to the 27th and I won't have any internet access at any point during that time, so I'll be gone from Discord as well until returning to civilization. I may be a bit slow on replies in the lead up due to trip preparations as well, but will try to stay on top of event posts.
