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.
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year 5, quarter 3
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Post by Cloud Strife on Sept 7, 2020 19:59:30 GMT -6
Cloud wheezed faintly as Barret's arms squeezed the air out of his lungs. Arms pinned against his sides, face half pressed against the blue plaid of Barret's shirt, he stood frozen and staring out of one disbelieving eye while Barret's profanity rattled around inside his skull. At least some things never changed. Cloud managed to bend one arm at the elbow and awkwardly pat Barret's side in a stiff imitation of something he saw someone do once that he thought maybe you were supposed to do in a situation like this.
He'd had his weeks alone in Zephon to think about just how much he missed his friends. What he never once considered was that they might miss him just as much.
When Barret finally let him go, Cloud took a gulp of air, inhaled the earthy scent of the hay and the greens and the chocobos. The big man's tear-streaked face was a sight Cloud didn't know what to do with. He held his palms up and when Barret finally slowed down enough that Cloud could get a word in, he said gently: "Whoa, slow down a little. I'll explain what I can."
He rubbed the back of his neck.
"I'm not the only other one here. I found Tifa and Aerith, up north in a city called Sonora. It's kind of like Midgar, without the plates... or the Mako reactors... or Shinra." He thought maybe he was overselling the city with that description, but the nitty gritty details could come later. "I was looking for the rest of the crew there... It's a big city. But I couldn't find anyone else. I heard something that sounded like a lead, so I came down this way, and..." He shrugged and made a vague gesture with his hands.
"How long have you been here? ... And what do you remember from before you woke up in this place?"
Post by Cloud Strife on Sept 1, 2020 23:14:25 GMT -6
You're still Cloud to me.
It was funny in a way that wasn't funny at all to hear her say that. Cloud hadn't really been Cloud for the time they knew each other. He hadn't even been Cloud to himself. He'd been pieces of a person who'd been Cloud, held together by pieces that weren't. He was a SOLDIER until he wasn't. A failed clone begging for a number until he wasn't. Until he was a husk waiting to find himself buried in the murk of the past.
It wasn't the first time he'd been gone a long way away. Once, in a cold dim basement in Nibelheim...
"You remember when we passed through Gongaga?" he asked tentatively. "There were those people asking about their son who joined SOLDIER. Zack. I said I didn't know him. But you did. You told me you heard he'd been missing."
The air then had been stifling, thick with heat and humidity. They were standing in the shadow of the ruined reactor on a dirt street outside Zack's parents' house. I think it was 5 years ago, she'd told him. He went out on a job, and never came back. He loved women, a real ladies' man. He probably found someone else... But something nagged at the back of Cloud's mind, pulsing like a headache. It was just the heat. Or he was just tired. They'd been on the road too long. It was an excuse like everything was back then. Every bright, blazing neon sign pointing to something being wrong with him was nothing. He was fine.
Until he wasn't.
Thinking back on it now all he felt was a twisted knot in his stomach, the heat of shame on the back of his neck. Like he'd betrayed Zack's memory. Unconscious or not.
Cloud looked up at Sonora's gunmetal sky, at a nothing point in the space between the highrises, watching the dull grey clouds drift and swirl in the wind like the mako smoke hovering over Mt. Nibel.
"The truth is, I knew Zack. But I was never in SOLDIER. I tried to join but I didn't make it. I was just another Shinra grunt, and... I was ashamed of myself. I couldn't go back home and face everybody, so I stayed with Shinra. They'd send us along to support the SOLDIER operatives sometimes. That's how I met Zack. We went on a few missions together. He didn't have to give me the time of day, you know. I was... I was nothing and he was First Class. But it wasn't like that. He always had time for me. He was my friend."
When Cloud looked to Aerith again something in his face suddenly seemed very young. The ghost of that sixteen year old kid who went back to Nibelheim and didn't come out the same.
"He didn't go off and find somebody else," he said softly. "Thought you'd want to know."
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 23, 2020 23:08:27 GMT -6
When she told him he didn't need to worry about her the barest smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth. She made it sound so simple. Maybe he didn't need to, but that didn't mean he could stop. Then she turned it around on him, and Cloud realized he hadn't given a thought to his own condition since... well, more or less since he'd woken up in this world. He glanced down at himself in a brief scan for injuries. There were accumulated scrapes and bruises here or there on his arms, some old, some new. Dirt on his face, on his clothes, tears in the cloth. Singed edges and black smears of soot from the explosion of the robot he and Caius destroyed earlier. Nothing serious.
Cloud long had a habit of getting by with nothing more than skinned knees.
"Yeah. I'm fine," he answered, and it was mostly the truth. He could use a shower and a hot meal and a week of sleep but neither the robot house nor the thugs in the alley managed to knock him around very badly. "I'm just... tired, I guess. Been a long day."
If a day lasted a couple of weeks.
He found a spot on the wall to lean against and crossed his arms loosely. His expression grew serious. He thought back to the fight, to the people who attacked Tifa. It was still a blur in his head. There was a part of him, like a tight ball of anger in his chest, that felt only regret for letting any of them stumble away.
He knew it was stupid to think that. The only thing that mattered was getting Tifa to safety. But it meant they were still out there. It meant they could regroup and try again.
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 16, 2020 22:35:20 GMT -6
The motorcycle sputtered and died on the road fifteen miles outside of Provo. Cloud pushed it along the shoulder for another three until he opted to roll it off into a ditch where he laid it on its side and halfheartedly kicked some dead grass and broken branches over it. He stood there with his fists on his hips looking down at it. Even when it was running it looked like scrap. Now he hoped it looked like uninteresting enough scrap that it'd still be lying there when he got back. He looked up at the sky, clear and blue and peaceful, and he looked down the road towards Provo at the long walk ahead of him.
At least it wasn't raining.
The trek to Provo started by chance. Three days ago, two men stood outside Seventh Heaven smoking and talking and Cloud was halfway inside the bar when he heard one of them say something about '...a man in a long black coat with a huge @#%$in' sword.' His blood went cold. The look on his face when he rushed back out through the cigarette smoke and demanded to know more sent the men cowering as if he was seven feet tall.
He spent that night coming up with excuses not to believe the story but none of them stuck. Aerith was alive. If she was alive, then what was stopping him from being alive too? He couldn't let it lie. No matter how badly he didn't want to believe it he needed to be sure. If it was false, then Cloud could rest easy. If it was true... Well, that meant Sephiroth needed to die again before he did to this world what he tried to do to theirs.
He needed to die before he could hurt anyone again.
After forty minutes of walking under a high beating sun, Cloud hitched a ride on the back of a grumbling old bulldog of a truck. The sides of the truck bed were weathered wood planks nailed together by hand and the engine of the truck sounded like it was assembled by hand, too. Every dozen or so feet the exhaust belched out a plume of black smoke.
"The farm ain't far from here," the driver shouted through the open back window of the cab. Cloud sat on a crate in the back of the truck, his swords at his feet, leaning towards the window to listen over the roar of the engine. "They got good birds, they'll do 'til you can fix your wheels."
"Thanks," Cloud said, but it was lost in the noise.
-----
The truck dropped him off where the drive up to the farm met the main road. He waved the driver off and the truck rumbled off in a haze of road dust and exhaust. Cloud shrugged his sword carrier into place on his back with a muffled jangle of metal and turned to walk up to the farm when a searing pain nearly brought him to his knees. Like someone jammed a red-hot needle clean through his brain. Fire behind his eyes. Felt like they could burst. His knees buckled. Flash of silver. Cat's eyes. A grin like the devil. An inferno burning everything around him to ash. He screwed his eyes shut tight and breathed through his teeth and gripped his head with both hands like he had to stop it from splitting apart.
Then just as suddenly as it came on, the pain vanished. Cloud straightened up slowly, feeling offbalance in the hollow wake of that sudden agony. He took a few deep breaths until he felt stable enough to walk. His throat was dry and tight and he had to clench his fists to stop his hands from shaking.
Could be nothing. Just stress from thinkin' about it.
When has something like that ever been nothing?
He shook his head and continued on to the farm until somebody came out to meet him, waving pleasantly. Cloud tried to look human and waved back. The quiet chorus of chocobo calls sounded somewhere in the distance. The wafting scent of the birds on the light summer breeze. The farm stirred in Cloud a nostalgia for a time not long ago that seemed impossibly distant all the same.
He explained to the farmhand that he wanted to rent a bird and they discussed the terms and the farmhand led him to the barn to show off the available chocobos. The man rattled off details about their temperaments that Cloud listened to with some degree of attentiveness until he saw the other farmhand at work.
He stopped in his tracks, staring, as though he'd been told to solve a differential calculus equation despite the fact that Cloud definitely didn't know what differential calculus was.
The build was right. The height. The gun arm. The tattoo. The plaid and the cowboy hat didn't track at all, but after the sailor suit, it really wasn't much of a stretch.
"...No way," he said to himself. A wry grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. The other farmhand forgotten, he walked on towards the big man in the... very fine hat, the six swords on his back swaying with every step. He'd since shed the old SOLDIER uniform, but he still looked ready for a fight at a moment's notice. He couldn't reconcile Barret's folksy plaid with the gun arm glinting in the light.
"I've been looking for everybody, but I never woulda guessed I'd find Farmer Barret raising chocobos in Provo," he said, a hint of amusement bleeding into his usually reserved tone. "Nice hat."
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 15, 2020 19:58:49 GMT -6
A piece of him was still that nervous fourteen year old staring at his feet dangling over the edge of the water tower and rehearsing the same conversation in his head even though, in the end, he would never say half of it. That kid would be horrified now. You don't just say those things out loud. Not even if you mean every word. The moment the first syllable left his mouth he felt exposed, but maybe that was the whole point. He'd been wandering for weeks, spending most of his energy just trying to convince himself that he'd even see Tifa or any of the others again. That they were still alive. That he'd have the chance to say things to them that he could be embarrassed about later. He was too damn tired to stay guarded.
That didn't mean he couldn't second guess himself after the fact. Cloud felt the back of his neck get hot and he scratched his head and started to think that maybe it had been a mistake. Until she said she missed him too and he stopped and dropped his hand and looked over at her with those bright Mako eyes just a little wider, a shade shy of surprised. The moment hung in the air like smoke. He studied her is if he wanted to fix every detail of the scene in his mind. That if his memories failed him again at least this would be branded into his brain.
Then he looked down at his feet and while his face reddened reflexively he wrestled with a smile. After a moment he awkwardly cleared his throat and stood up and started to pace slowly around the room.
"So... How're you feeling now?" he asked, nodding his head towards the empty potion bottle. "If you need anything else..."
He made a small open gesture with his arms. Just ask, it said.
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 1, 2020 18:23:13 GMT -6
Cloud didn't know how many people you needed to find needles in haystacks, but now he had two more on the lookout and that had to count for something.
"Thanks," he said, nodding, when Caius agreed to keep an eye out for them. It'd been too long already without his friends and it felt like he was trying to move through the world while missing a limb. He knew, logically, that the distinct possibility existed that he might never find them at all, but he couldn't let himself believe that. So he believed the opposite. As long as he kept putting one foot in front of the other he'd get to where he needed to be.
Sonora seemed like that place. Call it a gut feeling. He didn't know anything about this world, the other cities, or even the city itself. But there was too much familiarity in its skyscrapers and bustling streets, a magnetic pull, that the others must have felt the same. Must have. If he willed it, maybe that would make it so.
Maybe Caius would soar above the main road into Sonora on the back of his trained dragon and spy them wandering into the city.
Cloud found something relatable in the man's story. There was a wide gulf between a dragon and a chocobo but he thought the bond had to be similar regardless when it came to a creature you raised up from birth. A pang of nostalgia hit him. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard the quiet contented trill and rustling of feathers and the creak of an opening stable door above the hum of the Highwind's engines.
"Emergency's one word for it. I guess Vordun probably makes the locals jumpy," Cloud said. "Even when it's the mad scientists they should be watchin' out for."
Cloud nudged his empty glass with his finger and then straightened up, pushing back from the bar.
"Well. I should probably get back out there. Maybe all the commotion caught Tifa or Barret's attention."
Cloud looked in no shape to do anything but collapse into a bed for the next two days, but he also looked like the kind of guy that you couldn't convince of that fact. With his best stoic mercenary face on, Cloud nodded to Caius and adjusted the sword on his back as he prepared to head out.
"Good working with you, Caius," he said, "See you around."
Post by Cloud Strife on Aug 1, 2020 18:07:40 GMT -6
Cloud's eyes searched her face but he didn't know what for. Behind the shine of Mako he tried dumbly to fit the pieces of everything together. To make sense of the impossible. Then a thought hit him like a tight, cold fist square to the gut. She was so certain that the nightmare burned into Cloud's skull hadn't happened to her at all before she appeared here that Cloud questioned what he remembered. Everything from the moment he woke up after the Temple of the Ancients. What if he hadn't woken up? What if everything he remembered was just another twisted illusion cobbled together in a broken mind? Memories lied. He knew that better than most. What if--
Just stop thinking about it.
If she doesn't remember it how can I know it really happened? Nibelheim--
--Wasn't made up. You were there, you just remembered it wrong.
...
You were never at the Forgotten City before. Or the Northern Crater. Or Mideel. All of that was new. You couldn't just make that up, right?
...
Ask the others when you find them. Ask Tifa. Stop thinking about it until then.
He inhaled a slow breath and felt as though he was standing on the edge of a cliff and the saner voice in his head told him to take a little step backwards. He had his feet under him but he was peering over the edge into the bottomless dark and it was a long way down. He knew the fall well. The climb out was a tough one. But he had help. Still had help, if he needed it. When the world started fraying at the edges all he had to do was remember that.
He stopped thinking too much about the wrong things. His existential crisis didn't matter right now. All that mattered was that Aerith was sitting beside him on a battered park bench in a neglected park in Sonora, that she was alive and whole and telling him she forgave him for a failure he thought he'd carry with him for the rest of his life. He needed a minute to let it sink in. To feel the weight lift off his shoulders like she'd just grabbed it and thrown it aside. That simple.
And as the dead weight of guilt left him the anguish in his face faded away and all the questions that still hung in the air, all the truths he still needed to tell moved aside. When she asked him to smile he reflexively shook his head in a weak denial. He didn't smile on cue. Except at the same time her asking him to brought up that small, involuntary curve of his mouth and all the anxious tension he carried in him came out in a quiet chuckle and he looked away, almost embarrassed by it.
He sat up a little straighter. A chill Sonoran breeze blew through the park, rustled his hair, wafted in the smell of industry and exhaust. Midgar felt near and distant all at once.
"Aerith... Hey... Thanks." he said. His voice was warm and quiet, the waver of uncertainty gone. "Whatever's going on with this place... I'm glad you're here."
Silently, he made a vow, etched it into his bones. He wouldn't lose any more friends. Not here, not ever. It didn't matter what it cost him to make that true. He didn't understand this place, this world, why any of them were here, but if he had to make something out of it then he'd make it a second chance.
But she wasn't the only friend he'd lost. And he still owed her the truth about that. About himself.
"...There's still more I have to tell you," he added, rubbing the back of his head. "Stuff that... Well, I never told you the truth about me. About SOLDIER. 'Cause I didn't even know what the truth was. I was pretty messed up when we met. It's... a long story."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 27, 2020 14:24:12 GMT -6
When Ignis started cleaning up his cooking implements, Cloud took that as his cue to grab his sword off the coals. He felt the warmth even in the grip. He set it aside to cool, leaning lengthwise against the hut's ruined wall, flat edge on the ground. He'd scrub it down with sand in the morning. If all else failed, another fire spell would burn the remaining grease to carbon. Clean enough.
The hut was lit by a low red glow now, the coals pulsing but offering little in the way of radiated heat. If they were going to get some sleep, like Ignis said, Cloud needed to build the fire back up. Palm pressed against the hut floor, Cloud was about to push up to his feet when there was a flash, the light of the coals suddenly refracted in every direction and casting kaleidoscopic patterns on the hut walls for a fraction of a second. Cloud blinked. He was tired enough to think the appearing and disappearing dagger might have been sleight of hand, but there was no way Ignis hid a polearm up his sleeve.
"Uh--" Cloud started. It was nice enough for Ignis to offer to take watch and Cloud was exhausted down to the marrow of his bones. There was a saying about looking gift chocobos in the beak but something about the situation didn't sit quite right.
What's the problem?
...Is it still a watch if he can't see?
Don't think too hard about it. He got this far on his own.
He rubbed the back of his head and then he shrugged.
"Sure, if you want. Let me build back the fire first."
Cloud pushed up to his feet and gathered one of the smaller folding swords that he'd left out of the cooking assembly. He locked the handle in place and stepped over the rubble and past the fire and out of the hut. The gravel crunched softly under the heavy soles of his boots. The weeds pushing up through the dirt whispered against his pantlegs as he passed.
The sword wasn't made for this kind of work but Cloud muscled through it. The wood of the door was dry and weatherbeaten and brittle. It wasn't ideal for burning but making due had become a trend in Cloud's life. What he didn't cleave in a single chop he snapped into rough pieces with his hands and his boots. When it was done he dropped an armload of firewood near the fire and made a teepee of fuel over the coals and blew the fire back to life. He folded his sword and set it down with his counterpart and sat down in the corner again and rested his forearms over his knees.
"Okay," he said, "That should do for now. Wake me when it's time to switch."
But he knew he'd probably still be awake.
He closed his eyes and let the time pass. He drifted off into a world of dreams. He heard his friends call out to him. He watched the world crumble around him. He woke with a quiet start and blinked his bleary eyes and cast a glance around the hut and then tried to sleep again and the cycle repeated until it was his turn to take watch.
He stoked the fire and he scrubbed the dirt from his swords. Eventually, morning came. It was time to move on.
"Mornin', Ignis," he said. He cracked his shoulders and gathered up his swords, fixing the two folding blades into the main assembly. Then he swung the full Fusion sword onto his back.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 10, 2020 22:12:11 GMT -6
She had so many questions and Cloud couldn't blame her. His stammered non-explanation did little other than spark worry and more questions. He wished he had answers for all of them but all he could tell her was what he knew and none of what he knew answered the bigger question that encompassed everything else: why?
It would have been too easy if she could have communed with this planet and drawn out the answers for herself. He was no planetologist but some naive part of him assumed that there must be some kind of a lifestream here. It was how planets worked, right? Just like how people had blood and a heart to pump it through their veins. That Aerith couldn't sense it only added another layer of unease to everything about this place. Like trying to walk the deck of a ship careening with the waves. As soon as you found your footing, the world shifted in a different direction.
His eyes followed her hand as she linked herself arm in arm with him. A strange sense of deja vu. The tension in him began to uncoil by degrees. They walked.
"I'm not trying to hide things from you," he said, "I just don't know if I can explain it all in a way that'll make sense. It doesn't even make sense to me. But... I'll try."
Past a weapons store with black iron bars bolted over the windows and the last letter of its name buzzing and flickering in neon. Down at the end of the block lay the park, its entrance marked by an arched metal sign in flaking green paint mounted on posts bolted into the concrete half-wall. It was empty. It had the sad look of disuse about it. Old flyers peeling from the lamppost and tattered and flapping in the breeze. Garbage scattered like fallen leaves around a trash bin. Patches of rust corroding the chains on the swings. Where there wasn't rust there was graffiti, layers of it in indecipherable cursive weathered and re-painted and weathered again.
With Aerith on his arm he walked over to a solitary wooden bench painted dull blue and flecked by illegible tags in white and silver spraypaint. He sat at one end and shrugged one shoulder to hike up the end of the sword on his back until it hung at a comfortable angle. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and looked like he had to think long and hard about too many different things. He cracked his knuckles for something to do with his hands and he looked at Aerith and took a breath and started talking.
"You're right that we're not on our planet anymore. I dunno know how we got here, or why... But we're not the only ones. When I was on the road I met somebody else who woke up here. He talked about places that I never heard of. Places that aren't on this world either. Whatever grabbed us, it's grabbin' all kinds of people from all kinds of places."
That was the easy part. It was the recap on the cargo ship, or in the hotel at Gold Saucer. It was gathering the facts all together and speaking them out loud, as much for his benefit as it was for everybody else's. That was all he had straight about this place. It was worth about as much as the lint in his pocket.
"He said he woke up missing memories. Even Tifa doesn't remember everything. Maybe I'm missing something, too. I don't know. But I remember the Forgotten City... And what happened after."
His composure started to crack and he looked away, straight ahead at nothing. He clenched his fists and the leather of his gloves creaked with the tension. The memory still so raw he might as well have been there again, standing in that ethereal light, that heavy silence, watching, frozen...
Keep it together...
How the hell am I supposed to do that?
"Sephiroth was after you, so we followed you to the Forgotten City. Found you praying. Tryin' to summon Holy," he said. His voice was quiet and even and measured and balanced on the edge of a blade and if he so much as breathed wrong it was all going to shatter like a mirror against his fist. "Sephiroth... Took control of me, again, like he did at the Temple... I tried to fight it. He almost made me--" Cloud swallowed back a hard lump in his throat and shook his head. "I snapped out of it, but he was there... I couldn't... I couldn't stop him. He killed you, Aerith."
He screwed his eyes shut tight like that might stop the scene from playing in his mind again and again and again as it had so many times before. It didn't and he opened his eyes and blinked away the burn welling up in them and found the guts to fix them on Aerith once more even with her death on his mind. To imprint this picture in his head. The life in her eyes. Did this absolve him of the sin of his failure? Could he bury the horror of it?
"He killed you but now you're here and I don't... I don't understand what's happening."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 5, 2020 14:36:47 GMT -6
He froze in place. His throat went dry when she smiled at him and spoke to him in words that weren't just an echo of the last conversation they'd ever had. Only when she threw her arms around him did he accept the reality of it and even then it was only just. Something stung in his eyes. He had to fight to wrangle himself into some measure of composure by the time she pulled back to look at him. He held it together with tape and string.
Cloud had changed but she was the same. The same face in his dreams, the same voice in his memory, the same ache in his heart. In his nightmares this scene would end with a great black shape looming up behind her but it was nowhere here. Just a stream of agitated Sonoran pedestrians flowing around them and muttering bitterly as they passed.
When she stepped back and told him she'd last been in the Forgotten City, he looked away and crossed his arms over his chest and tried to disguise it as a nothing reaction but did a poor job of it. Too many thoughts and memories ran through his head too quickly. She didn't remember what happened to her. How was he supposed to tell her-- should he even tell her? But above all, one thought rang out clearly in the mess of his head:
Keep it together.
Cloud cleared his throat and renewed his composure and looked back at her.
"Aerith... There's... Ah..." he stammered, rubbing the back of his neck. "We should find somewhere to sit down and talk. A lot... a lot happened."
Too much of which he still didn't understand. He wished someone smarter than him was here to explain it in his stead.
He remembered passing by some dingy urban park on his way over from the slums to this side of town. Graffiti covered benches and rusting swings bordered by a concrete half wall. It wasn't far. Most of all it was quiet. It beat trying to talk in the street while a crowd of pedestrians shoved past them. He nodded in the direction of it, for Aerith to follow him as he started to walk.
"This city's called Sonora," he explained. "Tifa's here, too. I'm still lookin' for everyone else."
He found himself staring at her as they walked, only glancing away when he needed to get his bearings. In a world that stole people from their own maybe it shouldn't have been so difficult to grasp that its reach wasn't limited to the living. Yet the wound her death left on him was so deep that Cloud hadn't even considered the possibility. He didn't know what to think now. A part of him remained on edge, waiting for the catch, the other shoe to drop. The rest of him just wanted to take it for what it was. She was here again. What did it matter why or how?
