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 May 15, 2020 19:57:28 GMT -6
When he asked for 'something big', he hadn't counted on a dragon. Still, it wasn't the strangest thing he'd seen in the past hour or so. He'd take it.
Day's full of surprises and it ain't over yet.
He craned his head and followed the shape of dragon and rider as they swooped in for the attack. Cutting the air like a knife. He tracked behind on the motorcycle keeping a pace that left no slack on the cable while flashes of sparking metal and wires lit up the surface of the house. Then came the coup de grace. Cloud timed it himself with an internal clock calibrated from every prior battle fought in his life. An unconscious feel for the rhythm of the fight. The impact of the fireball setting the scene alight in a bright orange glow. He could feel the burst of heat even from his position on the ground, a sudden warm wind rustling his hair.
The second the house began to stumble Cloud released his hold on the end of the cable and it pulled away snapping like a whip with the tension. The skin of his forearm discolored in bands where he'd wrapped the cable for grip. His entire upper body was on fire and he let out a hiss of pain between clenched teeth but that was all. No time for pain until that thing was scrap. He flexed his hand and fingers to get the blood flowing through his sword arm again.
When the house fell he felt the shockwave of its impact into his bones. The booming sound of it rattling his skull. The crunch of buckling metal. He braked and angled the bike and rested one foot on the pavement and watched the dragon swoop in for a killing blow that never came.
The day had not yet exhausted its store of surprises.
It took a moment for Cloud to even register the absurdity of what he was seeing as the sound system burst forth from the innards of the fallen house. Even with the speakers angled up and away from him the sheer volume of the sound blast made his eardrums ache. He grimaced against the pain. There were no easy victories, he'd learned that much a long time ago, but this thing was testing the limits of his patience.
He drew his sword from his back and swung his leg over the motorcycle and started walking towards the house. He didn't break his stride when the arms of the house contorted in a scream of metal to be replaced by blades and the buzzsaws spun up and their high whining cut through all the other noise around them. On his face a stony look of equal parts determination and irritation. He stopped and gripped his sword with both hands. As one of the buzzaws came towards him he slipped into a low stance and held his sword up like a batter waiting to swing. A bright blue energy enveloped the blade, tongues of ethereal flame flickering at the edges.
With a forceful shout he swung the blade down and hurled a bright blue arc of pure energy where the sawblade joined the body. It collided with a sound like an explosion and cut clean through the joint and the momentum of it carried the severed arm backwards until it collided with the ground. The teeth of the sawblade embedded themselves in the pavement. On the opposite side, the other blade jerked wildly in the air, the remaining automated systems seeking some recalibration in light of the damage.
But Cloud was on the move before the arm even hit the ground. He dashed in on the exposed side of the house and fought with a powerful fury, heeding his comrade's strategy. He leaped high in the air and came down hard with an overhead chop through the knee joint of one of the legs. Sparks everywhere. Shards of metal littering the ground around like steel snowfall.
Cloud became little more than a blur of blond hair and silver blade, leaving twisted metal and wreckage behind him.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 9, 2020 0:50:19 GMT -6
What was the price of memory? Cloud paid for it in the dark of the night when the screams of the dying in Nibelheim echoed in his skull and the bodies of his friends lay cold and bloodied at his feet. He paid for it when he jumped at shadows and the sounds of twigs cracking like bone and when his peripheral vision caught a flash of silver and black that disappeared when he turned to face it. And yet for all the ill that scarred his mind he wouldn't trade it away. Good and bad shaped him. Gave context to every instinct and thought and feeling. He remembered what it was like to not remember. To fashion a self on a foundation of quicksand. To grasp at a truth that sat achingly out of reach. There were worse fates, Cloud knew, but not many.
"Oh," he said, because he didn't know what else to say. How to voice his commiseration.
He frowned. Here Ignis trekked the road with supplies to spare and Cloud - dirty, hungry, exhausted - felt sorry for him. In the long quiet dusk and the long quiet dawn Cloud could still reach back into his memory for pictures of better times. For fireworks at Gold Saucer, a father reunited with his daughter, a view of the planet from the edge of space, a night beneath the Highwind. Memories to fuel each step forward when there was no food to do the same. What would he have done without them? And blind besides? Sometimes life was a cruel joke. He found himself studying the man's face in the light of the fire as if its shifting patterns might illuminate some unseen truth from a new angle. Ignis seemed to take all of this in stride and Cloud didn't know the man so maybe that was true. But Cloud himself was a liar when it came to such matters and he thought he glimpsed in Ignis a mask all too familiar.
But something he said struck Cloud.
Ignis woke up here, too.
Ever since he washed up on shore like a slab of driftwood Cloud attributed his circumstances to his last clear memory. Defeating Sephiroth, the lifestream bubbling up from the depths of the crater, everything collapsing around them. After he discarded the notion that he was dead it made sense to him that it was something from his world that threw him here, somehow. In the days and weeks before he made it to the road he explained all this to a tree and the face he made out of the patterns on the bark seemed receptive to the idea. But Ignis hadn't been in the Northern Crater and still ended up in this place. So maybe he was thinking about it all wrong. There was no push, but a pull. He rubbed his chin and gave himself a five o'clock shadow of dirt.
Red XIII would probably have some theory gleaned from Bugenhagen's teachings. Or if Aerith were still--
Not now.
Cloud shook the thought away. He breathed deep the smell of the cookfire and the sizzling meat and the fact that he didn't know what exactly that meat was did not and would not trouble him. Yes, he would take payment in food and still feel like he came out ahead.
Ignis offered Cloud a stick and Cloud reached out and took it uncomprehendingly. He had a line about beggars not being choosers when it came to payment but then Ignis clarified the purpose of the stick and Cloud stared blankly at the vegetables on the sword. He blinked and in a flash his brain displayed for him every permutation of every way he could make the most basic act of cooking go horribly wrong.
Come on. You drove a submarine after skimming the manual and sunk three Shinra attack subs. You can stir some vegetables without screwing it up.
It was something to focus on. With everything swirling around in his head he could use something to order his thoughts.
"Sure. No problem," Cloud said. He shuffled forward and sat nearer the fire and prodded the vegetables cautiously and shuffled them about on the oiled surface of the sword. Nothing burst into flames. So far so good.
In a beat of quiet his mind backtracked. He couldn't shake Ignis's tale. He didn't know what he could do about it but something in him told him he had to do something and it wouldn't shut up until he did. He said, with quiet sincerity: "I uh... I'm sorry about everything you're dealing with. With your sight and your memory. You want to tell me anything about your friend, maybe I can keep a look out for him. Call it even for the food."
Post by Cloud Strife on May 6, 2020 19:26:04 GMT -6
Cloud was under the distinct impression that he and his comrade had this situation well in hand. Then the situation changed. His expectations did not match reality. He thought that after all the things he'd seen and done and endured in his life it said something positive about him that he was still capable of being surprised. When the houses began their violent metamorphosis it was all he could do to cease his gawking and duck under a flying piece of sheetmetal that would have clipped the top of his skull otherwise. Carried on the gust of wind in its wake the smell of hot metal and the chemical tang of machine oil. He brought his blade up to shield himself from further shrapnel and peered past the edge and watched the colossus of homes assemble itself.
These were not the Hell Houses of the Midgar slums.
He felt the explosion from the scientist's lab like a dull beat in his chest and accompanied by Caius's warning Cloud looked and he saw yet another of the mechanical monstrosities lumbering for them. Cloud leaped backwards and landed in a low fighting stance but the thing veered away from the pair of fighters and the machine-mass of the towering house-colossus grew. Its shadow stretched out over the battlefield, its bulk obscuring the low sun. Hiss of hydraulics, squealing of gears and joints, the low thrum of engines like the beating of its machine heart. Cloud craned his neck up and up until his eyes took in the full scale of it.
"...Dammit."
He cursed its maker, cursed scientists with more ideas than sense. But it didn't matter. If this was the thing standing between him and continuing the search for his friends then he wouldn't leave it standing. Everything had a weakness and few of them stood up to his sword. Bring it, then.
Caius didn't have to tell him twice. He offered the man a nod and then set his sights back on target, mako-eyes narrowed, battle-focused. His Fire materia bathed his arm in a green glow yet before he could even conjure the spell from it the gargantuan house took off at a dead run for the city, the ground shaking with every sprinted step. It moved faster than should have been possible. The spell faded before it was cast and Cloud took off after it.
Even haste-enhanced, the house gained ground on him too quickly and all Cloud could do was watch as it crashed through the city. Chaos and screaming. A construction crane toppled over, its arm smashing through the facade of a building like a dull knife. He thought of Sector Seven and a rage bubbled up in him like bile. No more.
He closed the distance to the gate and his eyes swept over the area and landed on the motorcycle. Instinct took him. He put his sword on his back and righted the bike and cranked the starter until the engine rumbled to life. The paint scratched and mirrors a spiderweb of cracks, but it ran all the same.
He sat the bike on the road into the city and turned his head and called back to Caius: "I got a plan! I'm gonna need you to hit it with something big! You'll know when!"
He took off, throttle up, pushing the bike as fast as the engine could muster. It was no Hardy-Daytona but it would do. It would have to. The engine growled like an old dog with fight left in him. It handled rough but Cloud found his balance, learned the language of this bike, nudging it just so until each was tuned to the other, rider and machine. He saw the construction crane laying across the road ahead, half propped up on the shattered frame of a building to block his path on a diagonal. On the other side of it the cable and the hook laying in a heap on the road.
Cloud laid the bike into a skid and drew his sword and slid seamlessly underneath the crane and emerged from the skid on the other side with the crane cable in hand cut cleanly at the end. He sheathed his sword again and drew up the cable into a spool around his arm until he held the large hook in hand. He handled the bike as though it were an extension of himself, weaving between heaps of rubble on the street. He took a fallen sign like a ramp and launched himself over a burning vehicle and landed on the rear wheel and eased the front back down to the pavement. The house up ahead, stomping, arms flailing. Close enough to spit on.
Cloud swung the crane hook over his head like a lasso and threw it, hooking it around one of the house's legs. Immediately he pulled the cable taut. The momentum threatened to wrench him out of the saddle but he held tight to the motorcycle and matched the house's speed.
Then he throttled up.
He sped between the house's legs and began driving figure eights between them, wrapping the cable around and around until the house's stride began to stutter and falter. The gears screaming. A high strained metallic noise like nails on chalkboard.
Cloud fell back again holding the end of the cable with all the strength he could muster. His arms burned. The bike engine groaned in protest. He yelled at the top of his lungs: "NOW! HIT IT!"
Post by Cloud Strife on May 2, 2020 0:03:56 GMT -6
Involuntarily, Cloud rubbed his index finger and thumb together watching Ignis test the temperature of the sword-skillet barehanded. As if he could feel the heat by proxy. Or the nothing-feeling of nerves burned to numbness. He waited for a flinch or a hiss but there was none. The latter, then. Ignis made it clear the jerry-rigged camp kitchen would work and Cloud flashed a small grin. After weeks, maybe, of interminable wandering alone and a feeling like trying to run in a dream these acts of usefulness in small doses began to ease a weight off him. At least he could still do something right.
But Cloud voiced no reply and quiet followed as Ignis got to work.
You need to talk.
What?
He can't see. You need to remember to say things.
Shit.
Cloud sat on the floor back from the fire and drew his knees up and rested his forearms across them. He watched Ignis practice his culinary alchemy with the quiet interest of a layman faced with an artisan. Cloud had many skills and cooking was not one of them. When he was old enough to handle a knife his mother sometimes made him peel potatoes and he did so grudgingly but by the time he left home for Midgar he had long decided that he didn't need to learn. SOLDIERs didn't cook. They ate rations and focused on more important things like training and missions and whatever it was war heroes did. At fourteen he knew everything. At twenty-one he knew regret. He missed her and the things she could have taught him and the moments that never were. What would she think of him now? Sometimes he wanted to throttle his past self. Most of the time. There lay a wide gulf between the Clouds of past and present.
He had to let the thoughts drift by. It was easy to get mired in the muck of Back Then. Instead he drew his focus to the now. To the smell of woodsmoke and the warming cooking oil, the seasoned meat, the promised flavors. He stared curiously at the dagger in Ignis's hand that was not there before. Plucked from thin air. He wasn't sure what he had seen, tired and hungry as he was, questioning his own senses. It wasn't like they hadn't let him down before. He scrubbed a hand down his face, smearing the light streaks of dirt already present.
He sat up a little straighter upon Ignis's questioning. He fumbled for some way to evade the answer but found nothing that wasn't hostile and Ignis didn't deserve that. He rubbed the back of his neck. It was a request far more complicated than it seemed on the surface and even if he intended to be honest about it he didn't know where to start. How do you talk about a self you've barely known?
Distill it to facts, then. Simple and plain. All else was a minefield.
"...Used to be a mercenary," he said after some deliberation. "Now I'm just... on the road. Tryin' to find some friends of mine. I don't know this area too well."
Was that enough? It was something, at least. He drummed his fingertips against his forearm.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 30, 2020 23:45:01 GMT -6
Cloud followed the rise and fall of her breathing for agonizing seconds until she finally opened her eyes. Meeting her gaze, the twisted knot in his stomach loosened. He had waited so long to see her face again. To hear her voice. Sleepless nights alone in the dark of the wilderness he stared into a foreign sky and imagined what it would be like. Never like this.
When she reached her hand out and her fingertips brushed his skin he placed his hand over hers and held it there a moment against his cheek. He studied her face. The blood looked so dark in the murk of the alley and he couldn't see where the bleeding began. Cursing himself for the wrong materia, no supplies, not even a potion. He marshaled his features into a transparent imitation of calm and his breathing was steady and deliberate.
"Sorry I'm late," he said. He tried to return her smile. He was never very good at them at the best of times. "I'm getting you outta here, okay?"
Gently, carefully, Cloud took her up into his arms and rose to his feet. He was sixteen years old in an ash-covered trooper uniform and the air was thick with the smell of mako and of smoke and her blood began to soak into the front of his shirt. He was twenty-one years old in roadworn SOLDIER fatigues in a slum alley in a city he didn't know. He was fourteen, legs dangling over the edge of the water tower under a clear night sky.
He made a promise. Etched in his heart across time and across worlds it was the bedrock of his self upon which all else was rebuilt. He held Tifa against his chest and if anyone tried to stop him from bringing her to safety he would kill them.
She'll be fine. She's tough.
Yeah.
She's bounced back from worse, right?
Yeah.
So don't think about it, just go.
By his reckoning he had to be near Seventh Heaven and by his wishful thinking it had to be as safe as its counterpart in Sector Seven. Even if it wasn't, he had no other option. She was in no state to give him directions.
He carried her out of the alley and turned onto the sidewalk and the city had changed shape between his entrance and his exit. Strangers now enemy. Every shadow a threat. The kaleidoscope of lights, neon rainbows and dull orange cagelights and cold bright halogen illuminating a new face of the city, sinister and conspiring to tear from him what he held dear. He waded through the staring. Men and women parted ways for him. For the coldness of his eyes and the set of his jaw. For the woman in his arms. For the swords on his back. He felt their eyes upon him but none went further.
Soon enough he saw the sign. Rustic and handpainted amid the sea of buzzing lights. He opened the door with his boot and hurried inside and looked for the attention of anyone who might help.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 23, 2020 16:37:06 GMT -6
Cloud hadn't slept since his unceremonious arrival in the city, since maybe a day before that, long having crossed the event horizon where exhaustion becomes a strange clarity. He couldn't have dozed if he tried. The paranoia of survival followed him like his own shadow. The streets of Sonora did not welcome him with open arms and beneath the smog and urban decay he felt the weight of eyes on him wherever he went. Traversing the slums seemed the smartest bet if he wanted to find what he was looking for or perhaps that was just wishful thinking and the slums reminded him of Midgar and the similarity was the only thing he had to hold onto.
One of these days you'll have to accept the fact they might not be here at all.
I don't have to do anything except find them.
He tried to ask around, passing men and women hawking merchandise on the streets or running ramshackle stalls or working in shops if they knew a woman named Tifa, if they saw anyone fitting her description, or maybe a man with a gun-arm, and he re-learned the lesson that information costs money of which he had none. And though his bright blue eyes narrowed and his hands balled into fists he also knew that shaking them down wasn't him. Maybe, for a brief moment in time, it was that mercenary who first set foot in Midgar a lifetime ago. But not him. Not now.
Cloud leaned against the mismatched brick and cinderblock wall of a building near a busy intersection and stood out of the flow of pedestrian traffic with his arms crossed, thinking. Trying to make sense of his predicament. To look past the nerves and the fear and the desperate need to find a familiar face and instead come up with a plan. People passed him by in a constant faceless stream of humanity. In tense singles and conversational pairs. Fragments of dozens of conversations drifted in and out of his hearing until two words called to him like a beacon.
"...Need a goddamn drink. Let's go to Seventh Heaven," a man said to another, the pair crossing the street ahead of Cloud.
And then Cloud was following them, moving on autopilot. Electricity ran through him, a quiet urgency as he pushed through other pedestrians to catch up to the pair. He refused to entertain the possibility of coincidence. He felt it in his gut, a certainty that if fate existed this was it. The world arranged itself to send him this sign at this moment and every mile he walked led to this.
"Hey!" he called out from a few feet behind them. One of them looked back over his shoulder, a cigarette dangling from his lips, and Cloud nodded at him. "Tell me how to get to Seventh Heaven."
Both men stopped in their tracks. They looked Cloud up and down. Took in the wiry muscles and the bright cold eyes, the weathered fatigues of an army they never knew, and the swords. Their eyes lingered a while on the swords and then the smoking man took a drag off his cigarette and exhaled and gestured with directions and Cloud thanked him and took off running before the smoke could dissipate. They watched him disappear and decided to go somewhere else.
When Cloud finally stopped it was not because he found the place he was looking for but because above the ambience of the slums he heard the unmistakable sounds of a fight. The dull impacts of flesh and bone, strikes to steal breath, the scrape of a metal pipe against asphalt. He heard wails of pain, the hostile cacophony of too many angry voices. He couldn't ignore it. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. When he followed the source of the sounds into another crooked slum backalley what he saw mattered far more than what he heard.
"TIFA!"
Fear and rage washed over him in equal measure. He saw her down on the ground beneath their boots and he didn't remember drawing a blade or starting to run but suddenly the sword was in his hand and he was in the fight. The myriad thugs turned to look at him with staggered reactions and they moved in slow motion and everything Cloud did was reflex and instinct. He clipped the legs out from under one of them. Swung for the midsection and cracked the ribs of another. Pommel strike, broken nose. An arc of blood spattered on the pavement. He fought savagely, each swing of the blade like the exorcism of some demon within him. They fought back wildly and in vain and if they hit him the pain of it never made it past the adrenaline. Later, if he tried to recall the details of the fight, only a blank space remained between the beginning and the end.
When his senses returned to him he was standing with one muddy boot planted on the chest of one of the thugs and the tip of the blade against the man's neck. The man made feeble noises and stared at the steel and blood burbled out his nostrils with every strained breath. Bodies lay strewn about the alley, groaning, whimpering. One man supported himself with the wall and staggered out the mouth of the alley and into the street. Cloud felt his hand start to shake and he took a breath and stepped away and returned the blade to his back. Only one thing mattered now.
In the wake of the fight the alley had gone quiet. He ran to Tifa and the heavy sounds of his boots on the pavement were almost deafening. He knelt before her and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and tried to gauge how badly she was hurt. His heart hammered painfully in his chest.
"Tifa?" he said, his voice low, trying to hide the quaver in it. The fighter of a moment ago was nowhere to be found in him now.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 21, 2020 22:30:55 GMT -6
Mr. Strife caught in his ear like a wrong note. Cloud tilted his head and regarded Ignis strangely and he tried but could not recall anyone ever addressing him with that level of formality. A habit, maybe, or by voice alone he mistook Cloud for someone who knew what he was doing in life.
He leaned against the back wall of the hut and the old dry wood creaked in a halfhearted protest against his weight and he watched Ignis produce what seemed to him an endless stream of cooking supplies from a pack that must have been larger inside than it looked. Somewhere in there lay a gourmet kitchen. Cloud thought back to the multi-day operations when he was still an enlisted man under Shinra, breaking from a patrol march to dig through his field kit for some processed freeze-dried reconstituted meal packet that tasted of preservatives and plastic no matter how he prepared it.
One night on his journey he had a dream that he was in the mountains with Tifa and Barret. He was in his old Shinra uniform and they had stolen a supply crate of army rations and were running away through knee deep snow from a squadron of floating Buster swords. An avalanche barrelled down the mountainside towards them and he woke up as the wall of snow hit. He understood the depth of his own hunger only when he woke up longing for the chemical taste of lukewarm ration noodles.
He watched Ignis seasoning the meat with the purposefulness of an artisan and Cloud tried to imagine what it might taste like and could not. He wasn't sure he could name more than two spices. Were the spices in this place even the same? What of the meat? He could question everything in relation to the world he knew and had to stop himself before he led his mind in circles.
Then came the formal address again. Wearing the old SOLDIER uniform and being called Mister only made him feel like an impostor. By habit he waved his hand dismissively, the gesture lost to the other man.
"Hey, uh, just Cloud is fine," he said. Then he swept his eyes over the interior of the hut and while the state of the wood suggested it hadn't been pressure-treated, Cloud didn't trust any of the planks as suitable for cooking. He had no skillet, no camp kit of portable pans, all he had was the swords--
Swords, huh.
That'll do, won't it?
Use what you've got.
Cloud shrugged.
"Got a sword we could use. It's pretty big. Gimme a sec--"
He pushed off the wall and squatted in front of the harness and the six blades he'd left in the corner. He drew out the main blade and flicked his wrist to open it into battle mode and assembled it with all but the smaller folding blades. He held it low to avoid clipping the roof of the hut. It was pretty big.
Minding the space, Cloud approached the fire and looked into it. A base of deep red coals glowing and pulsing with the heat. A pair of planks leaning against each other, their middle sections half burned away and barely supporting the weight of themselves. He gave one of them a tap with the edge of the sword and they collapsed into the fire with a puff of embers and ash.
He squatted in front of the fire and laid the sword across it with the sharp edge faced away from Ignis. He propped the hilt up on a stack of detritus gathered from the hut floor so that it lay flat over the coals. He looked it over and thought about it and adjusted the position just so and looked at it again.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 20, 2020 21:33:43 GMT -6
He was a streak of bright blue against the gunmetal backdrop of the city's outskirts. A formless blur too fast for all but the most trained eyes to follow. He sliced through the air, kicking up dirt and grit and dead grass in his wake and held the Fusion sword singlehanded, out to his side like a great razor-edged wing. The rush of air past his ears seemed to drown out all other noise. Even his breath, his heart. The mechanical house lumbered along in incongruous silence and slow motion, while Cloud closed the gap and broke that tenuous relation between time and distance.
His left hand balled into a fist and flames grew from the space between his fingers and he hurled a great orb of fire like a curveball pitch. The flame collided dead center with the house's paneled exterior and burst into greater tongues of fire that ran along the structure's surface with a low roar leaving a scorched black pattern on the plate like a flower of ash. The lumbering house stopped in its charge and began to turn, robotic arms bursting forth from its side windows in a shower of glass shards.
Cloud did not slow. In fractions of seconds he thumbed the release on his Fusion sword and flicked his wrist and launched one of the small folding blades into the air. It spun in a smooth arc, daylight glinting off mirror-polished metal and a razor edge, and Cloud caught it in his left hand just as he made to baseball slide under the house, between its stomping metal legs. He drove the blade up into the underside of the house and dragged it through like he was gutting an animal, severing hydraulic lines and wiring in spurts of liquid and a shower of sparks and a long, piercing metal scream that Cloud felt carving into his eardrums.
The house twitched violently and Cloud slid out the other side and rose back to his feet with a catlike grace. His pantleg and his side were streaked with dirt. Face smeared with it like hastily applied camouflage paint. Mako-blue eyes narrowed just so. He smirked.
He hurled the small folding sword like a dagger and drove it through the house's outer panel to the hilt and then he jumped, planted one boot on the handle of the sword, propelled himself into a front flip and landed hard on the roof of the house. It raised its arms and swiped at him. He ducked and felt the wind of the passing claw-hand an inch above his head. It swiped again and he jumped over a glimmering blade at the end of a bulky and dirtcaked metal arm.
"Try harder," he said, as though the robot house might react to taunting.
As the first arm came around again seeking his head Cloud raised the Fusion sword and hacked it apart at the elbow joint. The half of the arm fell in the dirt and the steel stump leaked oil and hydraulic fluid. Cloud jumped sideways down to the ground on the house's armless side and swung low and cut down its leg and it tottered sideways and the ground shook where it dropped.
Cloud wrenched the small blade out of the house's back panel and clipped it back into the Fusion sword. He felt the exertion of the fight like a pleasant awareness of his whole body tuned to a singular purpose. He was neither tired nor hungry nor lonely nor in pain. He felt alive in a way that words couldn't do justice to.
The crippled house shifted on its broken foundation. Mechanical whirring of its innards. Its one remaining arm jutted out further from its side panel with a hiss of hydraulics and took another swipe at Cloud. He jumped backwards and landed light on his feet and cast a sidelong glance at the man he fought with, gauging how his new ally fared against the other house.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 17, 2020 22:34:40 GMT -6
In the milliseconds between actions Cloud assessed the scene and the myriad ways this could play out. The tough guy with the pistol remained chief among Cloud's concerns if only because he did not trust the man would aim true and hit him and not a bystander. The others were nothing. He could handle them. His hands drifted towards the grips of the swords at his back, hovering over those of the two short folding blades. The street was a confusion of bodies and noise. The crowd of gawkers milling about presented an obstacle to the use of his fully assembled Fusion sword but he would make due.
Cloud didn't want to hurt anybody, but if these tough guys kept asking for it he just might have to oblige them.
In all this fractional figuring Cloud did not count on the entry of another combatant into the fray. When the man stepped through the crowd and into the impromptu ring of battle Cloud's hands reflexively closed around the swordgrips. He didn't draw. He shifted his stance and got a good look at the newcomer and the incongruity of him. He seemed made of a multitude of pieces that did not fit together. The weapon conjured a memory of Cid Highwind, oilstained gloves gripping a spear wedged halfway into the mouth of a dragon. But this man was too young and not profane enough to carry the mental connection. It took a moment to register that he had for some unknown purpose placed himself on Cloud's side.
Don't get too comfortable.
I'm not comfortable at all. Don't worry about that.
He stood angled, keeping enemy and tentative ally within the limits of his field of view. Muscles taut, every synapse tuned in the anticipation of a fight, Cloud may have seemed nervous if the look on his face wasn't an unflappable mask of cool.
"It's fine," Cloud said casually. "I'll wrap this up quick."
"The hell you will--"
He heard the scratching in the grit of the street behind him as though his brain deemed all other sound nonessential. Brass Knuckles scrambled to his feet and took a swing at Cloud's exposed back. A clash of metal on metal. Then he was in the dirt again cradling his hand and making pathetic mewling sounds and Cloud was standing with both swords drawn and pointed at the ground, his stance open and challenging. He hadn't even looked at the man who lay behind him.
The tough with the pistol raised up the weapon in one hand and pointed it in Cloud's direction. He bared his teeth in what Cloud supposed was his war face but made him look more like a scared dog backed into a corner. Cloud saw the fear in the man's eyes clear as day because he'd seen it so many times in his own reflection.
"What are you gonna do with that?" Cloud asked the man with the pistol. "Shoot me? Your hand's shaking. You won't hit shit. And this guy..." Cloud inclined his head in the direction of his temporary ally, "...Seems like you pissed him off. Can't say I like your odds."
The man with the baseball bat looked between his pistol-wielding compatriot, Cloud, the man with the lance, and the leader of his motley crew still down on the ground and crawling feebly towards the opposite edge of the clearing. He shook his head and disappeared into the crowd. Cloud thought he heard a resigned 'screw this' somewhere in the murmur of street noise.
The pistol wielder stood frozen in indecision and would not lower the weapon in his shaking hand.
Post by Cloud Strife on Apr 10, 2020 13:09:44 GMT -6
Cloud stood back from the fire and crossed his arms loosely. He felt the heat of the growing flames in waves as they swayed and flickered, lighting the interior of the hut from new and shifting angles. His shadow stood gargantuan behind him, watching the scene over his shoulder. A spider hung lazily in a web in the upper corner of the hut where a section of the roof was still intact. Cloud listened to Ignis and considered his answer. A week on the road, the man said. A week seemed a long time and no time at all. Yesterday lasted a week when the month before was a day. Cloud grasped for a mental landmark in his own journey but the days and nights since waking in this foreign place blended together in an abstract blur of unknown territory and silence. A week was a good answer. Maybe he'd have to steal it.
In the back of his mind a voice like Barret's, booming and tactless, wondered how Ignis could tell one day from the next if he was blind, and other familiar voices urged that one to be quiet.
The gnawing in his stomach did not obey the call for quiet and had not gone unnoticed and Ignis' perception gave Cloud pause. He shifted his weight, looking away at a swirl of dust and grit on the hard stone floor. He rubbed the back of his head.
"Uh... Yeah... I guess it has been a little while," he answered.
Cloud watched Ignis rifle through his things, produce a packet of something wrapped in paper. His stomach tightened like a fist as if to remind him of its emptiness and he predicted the coming offer before Ignis gave it voice. Cloud tried to peer further into Ignis' bag of supplies in search of companion packets of food but he was not in a position to see. He looked at the meat as Ignis unwrapped the paper and then he looked at Ignis.
Just take it.
What if he doesn't have much?
Look at him. Of the two of us he's better off.
All I did was share a roof that isn't mine. It's not worth food.
That's for him to decide.
"You sure?" Cloud asked with a trace of hesitation. The base need of his hunger battled quietly with his higher social instincts. "Only if you've got enough to last you until you get where you're going."
From the outside, in the failing light of the setting sun, the ruined hut askew on its foundations and jagged edged with broken planks stood as a weary monument to forgotten things. Its builders long gone and maybe dead. Its purpose abandoned. Left to rot and crumble outside the notice of the travelers on the road before it.
Inside, the warmth of the fire seemed to stretch out past the weathered wooden boards to the boundaries of this alien plane. As if the world itself warmed to Cloud's presence in it with a golden glow and firefly-embers twirling against a darkening sky. With a fellow road-weary traveler who didn't regard Cloud with a reflexive suspicion. He was not of this place but maybe the world would not reject him like a failed transplant and instead usher him onward until he found the people he sought out with singleminded focus.
