Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ sore kara... ❯ tsuki no namida da ( Chapter 10 )
[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]
By: awwaw 
Non Anime: Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action | Type: Crossover | Uploaded On: 02.15.2003 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.0K | Visits: 219 | Status: Completed
Non Anime: Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action | Type: Crossover | Uploaded On: 02.15.2003 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.0K | Visits: 219 | Status: Completed
Standard disclaimers apply.
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sore kara...
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tsuki no namida da
"Big question number one!" Zidane raised his hand up.
"Yes, Student Zidane, please speak." Kuja pointed at Zidane with a teacher's rod from nowhere and nodded.
"Teacher Kuja," Zidane twiddled his fingers in embarassment, almost afraid that he was going to ask something stupid, "we are going to go to another planet called Terra, right?"
"Yes, Student Zidane. That is correct." Kuja raised a pale eyebrow.
"Well..."
"... Yes?"
Zidane sighed. He said, "Putting the fact that we are surrounded by water but have no water transportation aside... HOW in the world are we going to go to another *PLANET* when all we have with us are our feet??"
Kuja wagged a finger in front of his face and shook his head. "You don't have to worry, Student Zidane, for I have sent my assistants, Cloud and Squall to inspect the surroundings. Very soon they will return with news to rejoice over."
Zidane was silent.
Thrown off by the monkey's quietness, Kuja traced the direction Zidane was looking at and found himself turning around to face a person, masked with a hood and draped with a cape tattered and torn at the edges. It dragged all the way beyond his feet and whipped around his form with the slow sea breeze.
For a moment, both monkeys were taken aback by the eerie sight which greeted them. Here stood a man who carried an aura of mystery, clothed in weathered linen, expressions masked from view. The worst part of it was that he was standing 6 feet apart from them, atop volumes of water, but yet he did not sink. The waters merely rippled gracefully outwards from his feet.
And yet somehow, he felt familiar.
"Who are you?" Kuja finally found his voice and questioned, unconsciously taking a few steps back.
The masked figure lifted his head upwards. For a while, Kuja thought he could see a bright flash of blue from underneath. That moment soon passed, for the hood quickly covered whatever vestige of blue there was left for view.
"No one you should know." A soft, almost disembodied voice replied him. Zidane and Kuja turned to look at one another, obviously trying to determine whether the newcomer was a friend or foe. While they silently discussed, the man continued, casually remarking, "Your two other comrades are not here yet."
Zidane's loud "How did you... ?!?!" immediately resounded throughout the water-filled planet. Even Kuja was looking uncharacteristically perplexed. The masked man smiled, almost wistfully. He turned his head in another direction.
"But I think, that should be them, over there."
Cloud and Squall were busily scrambling over the waters towards their two friends, huffing and puffing when they finally arrived. They appeared to have alot of things to say.
"You won't BELIEVE what just happened!" Cloud exclaimed happily, putting a hand on Zidane's tensed shoulders and noticing it quickly enough. Temporarily kicking his joy aside, he frowned. "What's wrong? You guys don't seem to be all right."
Squall, being more environment observant, had taken note of the newcomer in hoods and capes from a distance. "Who is he?" He pointed at the masked guy and asked Kuja.
Kuja only smiled bitterly and crossed his arms across his chest. "The cause of our discomfort?" He questioningly replied, as if trying to comfort himself. "Why don't you ask Mr. Mystery Man himself? Maybe he'd be more willing to give you a reply."
"Well," Mr. Mystery Man himself raised his hands and shrugged indifferently, "you really don't have to be afraid of me, since I'm not going to do anything to you at all."
"Oh," Kuja snorted, years of being skeptical and discreet taking over his inclination to want to believe, "and the next thing you're going to tell us is that you're here to help us, no?"
The man snapped his fingers and pointed. "Bingo!" He said. As soon as he said that, he dug around in his cloak and came up with a leather map as tattered and torn as his cape was. He then flung it towards the nearest person, who happened to be Squall.
"What's this?" Squall immediately asked, while busily unfolding the parchment to take a better look.
"What do you think it is?" The man asked in slight irritation. "It's a map, you dorks." He proceeded to point somewhere at the vast blue west. "If you follow this path, maybe... just maybe... you will reach there in 3 days... just in time..."
He turned towards the gang again, smiling. This time, it wasn't merely Kuja alone, but everybody else who noticed the glowing blue eyes behind the hood. Before the questions formed, however, the man spun around and walked across the water towards an unknown destination.
"May the Lunar Cry guide you to Terra..."
Perhaps, it was the way he walked across the water, causing gentle ripples to spread out from where his feet did not touch. Or maybe it was the way the long cape flaired out from behind him. Whatever it was, all four were dumbfounded until the stranger was finally a speck in the watery horizon of the planet. Squall was the first to move, shaking his head and looking down at the map in his hands.
"That man... he had eyes... like yours, Cloud!" Zidane suddenly whipped around and pointed at the semi-exasperated Cloud.
"I'm not surprised, seeing how there were practically an entire army of those people in my times." Cloud blinked and walked over to where Squall was instead. "So, what does the thing say?"
"It's a normal map," Squall pointed, "but it's got a hand-written trail of some sort that's supposed to guide us to some place... here." He landed his finger on the big red 'X' marked somewhere towards the left side of the map. Everybody had, by this time, gathered around and was glancing from behind Squall's shoulders. The SeeD dusted the bottom right corner of the map, squinting as he did. "There's a signature here." He peered closer. "Ip... sen... Ipsen!"
"Ipsen..." Kuja whispered. He looked in the direction the stranger was last seen walking in. "So that man... was Ipsen..."
"Pardon me for saying this, but that guy seem to know who we are and what we're doing." Zidane was turning his head in all directions to catch everybody's glance. "Aren't you guys the least bit surprised at all?"
His reply was 3 people staring at him with half-lidded eyes.
"Oh, by the way." Kuja immediately turned back to look at Cloud. "There was something you guys wanted to tell us wasn't there? Before the little distraction by the strange guy..."
"Hmmm? Oh oh, yeah!" Cloud snapped his fingers. "While we were walking around looking for ways to escape, we discovered something."
Kuja raised an eyebrow.
"We could walk on water."
Silence.
"WHAT?!?!?!"
"Woah, woah!" Cloud backed away hurriedly, only stopping when he bumped into Squall, who was still intently examining the map. "Let me finish, okay? What I meant was, wherever we walked, the water would separate from us, and we'd be walking on dry land instead of wading in water... kindda weird, but it's true." Cloud shrugged. "I'm pretty sure you and Zidane'd probably be able to do it, too."
Squall's head suddenly snapped up from the map, knocking Cloud, who was behind him, to the ground. He turned around, oblivious to what he had just did and excitedly said, "What're we waiting for? Come on, let's go already!"
"Go..." Cloud managed to sit up with the help of Zidane and Kuja. "... go where?"
"Here!" Squall jabbed his index finger at the big 'X' in the map he had been holding. "We gotta reach there before the Lunar Cry begins, or we'll lose our chance of ever going to..."
"HOLD IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It was Kuja.
Everybody froze.
Kuja slithered dangerously close to Squall.
"Lunar Cry. Explanation. NOW."
Squall's gulp could be heard.
"O-Okay..." He moved away from Kuja quickly.
"You may not know this, but monsters are foreign to the planet I live in. Which I assume is called 'Terra' by the people later. How the monsters came to Terra, is actually because of the 'Lunar Cry'.
"The first documented Lunar Cry happened a few centuries before my time, when the gravitational force between Terra and Terra's moon... Gaia, I suppose, was at it's strongest. This pull caused practically all the monsters on the moon to gather at one point and together they dropped down onto Terra. The Cry destroyed an entire continent and introduced monsters into Terra. Additionally, it led to the Sorceress War, which further progressed into many other things and finally, time compression, the main cause of why we are in this place, here and now."
He paused to breath.
"Assuming we are truly on Gaia, Terra's moon, and the Lunar Cry is, according to some information in this parchment, going to happen in roughly 3 days..." He maintained eye contact with as many of the other 3 as he could. "... don't you think it's an excellent opportunity for us to 'drop' onto Terra along with the monsters that will?"
Squall waited for the information to sink in and the questions to form. As he had expected, Kuja was the first to speak out.
"That's, fine and all." He managed to keep his expressions fairly intelligent, while his mind scrambled to assemble the facts quickly. "But have you noticed? We haven't seen a single monster within 100 kilometres circumference of our standpoint. If the Lunar Cry is really going to happen in 3 days... where are all it's participants? It really doesn't seem entirely normal to me."
"Maybe all the monsters are now under-water." Zidane suggested. "If they're not on land, that's the only other place besides in the skies where they could be, isn't it?"
Everybody was visibly startled at this additional fact. Why hadn't they thought of that?? Recovery was quick, however. Cloud had already begun walking away from the rest of them.
"What's the matter, Cloud?" Squall hurried along. He thrust the map to Cloud. "You'd better take this, I think you're better with the geography of this planet than I am."
Cloud accepted the map, but then shook his head and waved his hands about. "Okay, you guys are all giving me a headache. And if I don't find somewhere to sit down soon, the next monster I see is really gonna get it."
The moving off of one person inadvertably forced all of the rest to mobilize as well. To their surprise and slight horror, Zidane and Kuja discovered that what Cloud and Squall had said was true. They *COULD* walk on water. Well, the water separated from them wherever they stepped, that is, and they would be walking on land instead of wading through water.
It was as if the water was reacting to them.
Or maybe somebody was making the water react to them.
Whatever it was, with Cloud's help, by evening time they had walked all the way to the big 'X' marked on the Ipsen map and were resting, fishing and waiting for monsters to appear. The sheer lack of even the most simple of foes began to grate on everybody's nerves. Still, nobody doubted Squall's explanation and experience. The Lunar Cry HAD to be happening. Something, however, was just not right.
Cloud finished his evening patrol when the sun set and still not a monster was in sight over all the four corners of the horizon. Upon walking back to the campfire Squall and Zidane had started for the night, he noticed Kuja playing around with some of his attack materia with unbridled fascination and attention. He circled the ex-villian and found a place to sit down beside Zidane, who was barbequing some fish he had caught.
"What's so interesting with the green thing?" The question came, not from Cloud, but Squall. "Oh sorry, I think it's called materia, right?" He sheepishly hid his face for a while.
"Well, you can call it concentrated Mako if you wanted," Cloud shrugged, "it's just a catalyst for us to cast magic by."
"What's Mako made up of?" Kuja suddenly asked, though his eyes were still fixed on the green orbs.
"I don't know if you're gonna understand this," Cloud blinked, "but, Mako is essentially refined Lifestream."
To his and everybody else's surprise, Kuja frowned, then nodded, as if he had understood everything that had just been said. Wasn't he always the one who insisted on knowing everything and anything? His silence was almost ominous to the audience. "Lifestream, in short, is the fuel the planet and people depend on for life, isn't it?" Kuja asked.
"..." went Cloud. "... yeah, you could say that."
This answer caused the silver-haired man to breath in really loudly, as if in discovery of something unconditionally great. He stood up.
"Do you... mind if I burn it up?"
The world stopped.
"Huh?" Cloud asked, feeling abnormally absymal.
"Burn. It. Up." Kuja repeated. "You know, use fire, scorch it, smoke rises, the thing disappears... ?"
"I get the drift about burning," Cloud scratched his head, "but I don't get the point. Why'd you wanna burn it up for?"
"Nevermind the point, just tell me whether or not I'm allowed to." Kuja pouted. For about half a minute, Cloud became silent and thoughtful. Probably renewing his opinion about Kuja in his freak directory, but with that perpetually spastic look on his face, it was really hard to tell. Nevertheless, he soon began digging around his inventory and threw Kuja 3 blue materia instead.
"They're blue, but they're made up of Mako too." Cloud nodded when he saw Kuja peer at them with perplexity. "If there's something you HAVE to burn, you'd best be burning those. Those are just low-level All materias."
Finding himself unable to refute whatever Cloud had just said (due to dire lack of knowledge), Kuja shrugged and turned around. With his back against the rest, and the setting sun giving his silouette a soft, reddish-orange glow, Kuja was really a sight to behold. In some ways, he felt unapproachable, but in many other ways he was entirely approachable. Cloud knew it wasn't right to judge someone by the air that surrounded them alone. Otherwise, he and Vincent wouldn't have hit it off so well, would they? Nevermind Vincent was really weirder than he seemed... By the time he focused back to real life, Kuja had already levitated the 3 support materia to waist level. Because he was back-facing the gang, they couldn't see what exactly he was doing. That is, until Flare Star struck the pitiful materia and toasted them into nothingness.
Zidane's mouth was wide-opened when Flare Star appeared. He obviously wasn't very agreeable with sudden displays of powerful magic.
White smoke arose from where the materia used to float. For some strange reason, they didn't dissipate like smoke usually would. They wouldn't float up into the skies, either, merely staying at the low altitude, making them appear more like mist than smoke. They saw Kuja thrust his hand into the smoke, with a spell ready in his hands. As all of them watched on, the white smoke slowly formed the shape of bug-like creature Squall usually saw around Balamb. The shape quickly disappeared, though, when Kuja pulled his hand away. He turned around.
"You were creating monsters!" Squall quickly commented. He paused. "Weren't you?"
"Oh well, that's a crude way to put it, but yeah, I was." Kuja swept a sleeve and settled down quietly beside Zidane. "I was just... testing something out."
Squall turned to look at the white smoke still hanging around. "That?"
"Hmm hmm." Kuja hummed, almost with joy. "There's no doubt about it. Refining refined Mako, which is refined Lifestream, produces Mist. Which can be used to produce pretty darn powerful monsters, by the way." He took a stick of fish Zidane had stuck near the fire and sniffed. "Zidane, the fish is overcooked!" He moaned, which resulted in an immediately flurry as there was a mad dash for the fish.
When everybody had finished collecting dinner, Kuja was once again the focus of attention.
"Why did you suddenly want to test the materia out?" Squall began, chomping rudely on the food. As an observant SeeD, he had long guessed the silver-haired man had doubts and questions about the orbs, but he didn't know why he brought the issue up only now.
Kuja laughed. "Boredom?" He joked. Then, in a more serious tone, he continued, "And it just further confirms that we *ARE* in Gaia. Mist doesn't appear in Terra, no matter how much we burn the blue there." He blinked. "Besides... we might... need the skill, eventually..."
Unable to hear the last sentence clearly, the rest refrained from commenting.
"In any case," Cloud rose from his seated position, "shall we turn in for the night? We'd need at least a lookout, though; since it's monsters we're out in the open waiting for, here." He looked around. "Any volunteers?"
Silence. All eyes were fixed on the asker.
"Okay, wrong question to ask." Cloud sighed. "But at least take turns? I don't wanna be fighting monsters half-asleep tomorrow."
Squall nodded immediately, before turning to look at the other two. Zidane shrugged, indicating his neutrality in all of this. Kuja merely said, "I demand to have the last shift," before quietly disappearing into the darkness. The blond mercenary grinned and waved his hands at Squall, indicating that he would wake him up at the 2nd shift. The other two then shuffled out of the scene.
Left to his own devices, Cloud sat down thoughtfully and replayed the events of the day in his head.
Unwittingly, he had already pulled out the map and was staring at it with immense intensity.
Something felt right. Something felt wrong. He couldn't put a finger to it.
He folded the map up and sighed.
"Waiting for monsters to gather and drop onto another planet, eh?" He turned to look up at the red moon.
It was going to be a long night.
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tsuki no namida datta
13/6/2001
http://cloud-is.ourfamily.com/
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sore kara...
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tsuki no namida da
"Big question number one!" Zidane raised his hand up.
"Yes, Student Zidane, please speak." Kuja pointed at Zidane with a teacher's rod from nowhere and nodded.
"Teacher Kuja," Zidane twiddled his fingers in embarassment, almost afraid that he was going to ask something stupid, "we are going to go to another planet called Terra, right?"
"Yes, Student Zidane. That is correct." Kuja raised a pale eyebrow.
"Well..."
"... Yes?"
Zidane sighed. He said, "Putting the fact that we are surrounded by water but have no water transportation aside... HOW in the world are we going to go to another *PLANET* when all we have with us are our feet??"
Kuja wagged a finger in front of his face and shook his head. "You don't have to worry, Student Zidane, for I have sent my assistants, Cloud and Squall to inspect the surroundings. Very soon they will return with news to rejoice over."
Zidane was silent.
Thrown off by the monkey's quietness, Kuja traced the direction Zidane was looking at and found himself turning around to face a person, masked with a hood and draped with a cape tattered and torn at the edges. It dragged all the way beyond his feet and whipped around his form with the slow sea breeze.
For a moment, both monkeys were taken aback by the eerie sight which greeted them. Here stood a man who carried an aura of mystery, clothed in weathered linen, expressions masked from view. The worst part of it was that he was standing 6 feet apart from them, atop volumes of water, but yet he did not sink. The waters merely rippled gracefully outwards from his feet.
And yet somehow, he felt familiar.
"Who are you?" Kuja finally found his voice and questioned, unconsciously taking a few steps back.
The masked figure lifted his head upwards. For a while, Kuja thought he could see a bright flash of blue from underneath. That moment soon passed, for the hood quickly covered whatever vestige of blue there was left for view.
"No one you should know." A soft, almost disembodied voice replied him. Zidane and Kuja turned to look at one another, obviously trying to determine whether the newcomer was a friend or foe. While they silently discussed, the man continued, casually remarking, "Your two other comrades are not here yet."
Zidane's loud "How did you... ?!?!" immediately resounded throughout the water-filled planet. Even Kuja was looking uncharacteristically perplexed. The masked man smiled, almost wistfully. He turned his head in another direction.
"But I think, that should be them, over there."
Cloud and Squall were busily scrambling over the waters towards their two friends, huffing and puffing when they finally arrived. They appeared to have alot of things to say.
"You won't BELIEVE what just happened!" Cloud exclaimed happily, putting a hand on Zidane's tensed shoulders and noticing it quickly enough. Temporarily kicking his joy aside, he frowned. "What's wrong? You guys don't seem to be all right."
Squall, being more environment observant, had taken note of the newcomer in hoods and capes from a distance. "Who is he?" He pointed at the masked guy and asked Kuja.
Kuja only smiled bitterly and crossed his arms across his chest. "The cause of our discomfort?" He questioningly replied, as if trying to comfort himself. "Why don't you ask Mr. Mystery Man himself? Maybe he'd be more willing to give you a reply."
"Well," Mr. Mystery Man himself raised his hands and shrugged indifferently, "you really don't have to be afraid of me, since I'm not going to do anything to you at all."
"Oh," Kuja snorted, years of being skeptical and discreet taking over his inclination to want to believe, "and the next thing you're going to tell us is that you're here to help us, no?"
The man snapped his fingers and pointed. "Bingo!" He said. As soon as he said that, he dug around in his cloak and came up with a leather map as tattered and torn as his cape was. He then flung it towards the nearest person, who happened to be Squall.
"What's this?" Squall immediately asked, while busily unfolding the parchment to take a better look.
"What do you think it is?" The man asked in slight irritation. "It's a map, you dorks." He proceeded to point somewhere at the vast blue west. "If you follow this path, maybe... just maybe... you will reach there in 3 days... just in time..."
He turned towards the gang again, smiling. This time, it wasn't merely Kuja alone, but everybody else who noticed the glowing blue eyes behind the hood. Before the questions formed, however, the man spun around and walked across the water towards an unknown destination.
"May the Lunar Cry guide you to Terra..."
Perhaps, it was the way he walked across the water, causing gentle ripples to spread out from where his feet did not touch. Or maybe it was the way the long cape flaired out from behind him. Whatever it was, all four were dumbfounded until the stranger was finally a speck in the watery horizon of the planet. Squall was the first to move, shaking his head and looking down at the map in his hands.
"That man... he had eyes... like yours, Cloud!" Zidane suddenly whipped around and pointed at the semi-exasperated Cloud.
"I'm not surprised, seeing how there were practically an entire army of those people in my times." Cloud blinked and walked over to where Squall was instead. "So, what does the thing say?"
"It's a normal map," Squall pointed, "but it's got a hand-written trail of some sort that's supposed to guide us to some place... here." He landed his finger on the big red 'X' marked somewhere towards the left side of the map. Everybody had, by this time, gathered around and was glancing from behind Squall's shoulders. The SeeD dusted the bottom right corner of the map, squinting as he did. "There's a signature here." He peered closer. "Ip... sen... Ipsen!"
"Ipsen..." Kuja whispered. He looked in the direction the stranger was last seen walking in. "So that man... was Ipsen..."
"Pardon me for saying this, but that guy seem to know who we are and what we're doing." Zidane was turning his head in all directions to catch everybody's glance. "Aren't you guys the least bit surprised at all?"
His reply was 3 people staring at him with half-lidded eyes.
"Oh, by the way." Kuja immediately turned back to look at Cloud. "There was something you guys wanted to tell us wasn't there? Before the little distraction by the strange guy..."
"Hmmm? Oh oh, yeah!" Cloud snapped his fingers. "While we were walking around looking for ways to escape, we discovered something."
Kuja raised an eyebrow.
"We could walk on water."
Silence.
"WHAT?!?!?!"
"Woah, woah!" Cloud backed away hurriedly, only stopping when he bumped into Squall, who was still intently examining the map. "Let me finish, okay? What I meant was, wherever we walked, the water would separate from us, and we'd be walking on dry land instead of wading in water... kindda weird, but it's true." Cloud shrugged. "I'm pretty sure you and Zidane'd probably be able to do it, too."
Squall's head suddenly snapped up from the map, knocking Cloud, who was behind him, to the ground. He turned around, oblivious to what he had just did and excitedly said, "What're we waiting for? Come on, let's go already!"
"Go..." Cloud managed to sit up with the help of Zidane and Kuja. "... go where?"
"Here!" Squall jabbed his index finger at the big 'X' in the map he had been holding. "We gotta reach there before the Lunar Cry begins, or we'll lose our chance of ever going to..."
"HOLD IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
It was Kuja.
Everybody froze.
Kuja slithered dangerously close to Squall.
"Lunar Cry. Explanation. NOW."
Squall's gulp could be heard.
"O-Okay..." He moved away from Kuja quickly.
"You may not know this, but monsters are foreign to the planet I live in. Which I assume is called 'Terra' by the people later. How the monsters came to Terra, is actually because of the 'Lunar Cry'.
"The first documented Lunar Cry happened a few centuries before my time, when the gravitational force between Terra and Terra's moon... Gaia, I suppose, was at it's strongest. This pull caused practically all the monsters on the moon to gather at one point and together they dropped down onto Terra. The Cry destroyed an entire continent and introduced monsters into Terra. Additionally, it led to the Sorceress War, which further progressed into many other things and finally, time compression, the main cause of why we are in this place, here and now."
He paused to breath.
"Assuming we are truly on Gaia, Terra's moon, and the Lunar Cry is, according to some information in this parchment, going to happen in roughly 3 days..." He maintained eye contact with as many of the other 3 as he could. "... don't you think it's an excellent opportunity for us to 'drop' onto Terra along with the monsters that will?"
Squall waited for the information to sink in and the questions to form. As he had expected, Kuja was the first to speak out.
"That's, fine and all." He managed to keep his expressions fairly intelligent, while his mind scrambled to assemble the facts quickly. "But have you noticed? We haven't seen a single monster within 100 kilometres circumference of our standpoint. If the Lunar Cry is really going to happen in 3 days... where are all it's participants? It really doesn't seem entirely normal to me."
"Maybe all the monsters are now under-water." Zidane suggested. "If they're not on land, that's the only other place besides in the skies where they could be, isn't it?"
Everybody was visibly startled at this additional fact. Why hadn't they thought of that?? Recovery was quick, however. Cloud had already begun walking away from the rest of them.
"What's the matter, Cloud?" Squall hurried along. He thrust the map to Cloud. "You'd better take this, I think you're better with the geography of this planet than I am."
Cloud accepted the map, but then shook his head and waved his hands about. "Okay, you guys are all giving me a headache. And if I don't find somewhere to sit down soon, the next monster I see is really gonna get it."
The moving off of one person inadvertably forced all of the rest to mobilize as well. To their surprise and slight horror, Zidane and Kuja discovered that what Cloud and Squall had said was true. They *COULD* walk on water. Well, the water separated from them wherever they stepped, that is, and they would be walking on land instead of wading through water.
It was as if the water was reacting to them.
Or maybe somebody was making the water react to them.
Whatever it was, with Cloud's help, by evening time they had walked all the way to the big 'X' marked on the Ipsen map and were resting, fishing and waiting for monsters to appear. The sheer lack of even the most simple of foes began to grate on everybody's nerves. Still, nobody doubted Squall's explanation and experience. The Lunar Cry HAD to be happening. Something, however, was just not right.
Cloud finished his evening patrol when the sun set and still not a monster was in sight over all the four corners of the horizon. Upon walking back to the campfire Squall and Zidane had started for the night, he noticed Kuja playing around with some of his attack materia with unbridled fascination and attention. He circled the ex-villian and found a place to sit down beside Zidane, who was barbequing some fish he had caught.
"What's so interesting with the green thing?" The question came, not from Cloud, but Squall. "Oh sorry, I think it's called materia, right?" He sheepishly hid his face for a while.
"Well, you can call it concentrated Mako if you wanted," Cloud shrugged, "it's just a catalyst for us to cast magic by."
"What's Mako made up of?" Kuja suddenly asked, though his eyes were still fixed on the green orbs.
"I don't know if you're gonna understand this," Cloud blinked, "but, Mako is essentially refined Lifestream."
To his and everybody else's surprise, Kuja frowned, then nodded, as if he had understood everything that had just been said. Wasn't he always the one who insisted on knowing everything and anything? His silence was almost ominous to the audience. "Lifestream, in short, is the fuel the planet and people depend on for life, isn't it?" Kuja asked.
"..." went Cloud. "... yeah, you could say that."
This answer caused the silver-haired man to breath in really loudly, as if in discovery of something unconditionally great. He stood up.
"Do you... mind if I burn it up?"
The world stopped.
"Huh?" Cloud asked, feeling abnormally absymal.
"Burn. It. Up." Kuja repeated. "You know, use fire, scorch it, smoke rises, the thing disappears... ?"
"I get the drift about burning," Cloud scratched his head, "but I don't get the point. Why'd you wanna burn it up for?"
"Nevermind the point, just tell me whether or not I'm allowed to." Kuja pouted. For about half a minute, Cloud became silent and thoughtful. Probably renewing his opinion about Kuja in his freak directory, but with that perpetually spastic look on his face, it was really hard to tell. Nevertheless, he soon began digging around his inventory and threw Kuja 3 blue materia instead.
"They're blue, but they're made up of Mako too." Cloud nodded when he saw Kuja peer at them with perplexity. "If there's something you HAVE to burn, you'd best be burning those. Those are just low-level All materias."
Finding himself unable to refute whatever Cloud had just said (due to dire lack of knowledge), Kuja shrugged and turned around. With his back against the rest, and the setting sun giving his silouette a soft, reddish-orange glow, Kuja was really a sight to behold. In some ways, he felt unapproachable, but in many other ways he was entirely approachable. Cloud knew it wasn't right to judge someone by the air that surrounded them alone. Otherwise, he and Vincent wouldn't have hit it off so well, would they? Nevermind Vincent was really weirder than he seemed... By the time he focused back to real life, Kuja had already levitated the 3 support materia to waist level. Because he was back-facing the gang, they couldn't see what exactly he was doing. That is, until Flare Star struck the pitiful materia and toasted them into nothingness.
Zidane's mouth was wide-opened when Flare Star appeared. He obviously wasn't very agreeable with sudden displays of powerful magic.
White smoke arose from where the materia used to float. For some strange reason, they didn't dissipate like smoke usually would. They wouldn't float up into the skies, either, merely staying at the low altitude, making them appear more like mist than smoke. They saw Kuja thrust his hand into the smoke, with a spell ready in his hands. As all of them watched on, the white smoke slowly formed the shape of bug-like creature Squall usually saw around Balamb. The shape quickly disappeared, though, when Kuja pulled his hand away. He turned around.
"You were creating monsters!" Squall quickly commented. He paused. "Weren't you?"
"Oh well, that's a crude way to put it, but yeah, I was." Kuja swept a sleeve and settled down quietly beside Zidane. "I was just... testing something out."
Squall turned to look at the white smoke still hanging around. "That?"
"Hmm hmm." Kuja hummed, almost with joy. "There's no doubt about it. Refining refined Mako, which is refined Lifestream, produces Mist. Which can be used to produce pretty darn powerful monsters, by the way." He took a stick of fish Zidane had stuck near the fire and sniffed. "Zidane, the fish is overcooked!" He moaned, which resulted in an immediately flurry as there was a mad dash for the fish.
When everybody had finished collecting dinner, Kuja was once again the focus of attention.
"Why did you suddenly want to test the materia out?" Squall began, chomping rudely on the food. As an observant SeeD, he had long guessed the silver-haired man had doubts and questions about the orbs, but he didn't know why he brought the issue up only now.
Kuja laughed. "Boredom?" He joked. Then, in a more serious tone, he continued, "And it just further confirms that we *ARE* in Gaia. Mist doesn't appear in Terra, no matter how much we burn the blue there." He blinked. "Besides... we might... need the skill, eventually..."
Unable to hear the last sentence clearly, the rest refrained from commenting.
"In any case," Cloud rose from his seated position, "shall we turn in for the night? We'd need at least a lookout, though; since it's monsters we're out in the open waiting for, here." He looked around. "Any volunteers?"
Silence. All eyes were fixed on the asker.
"Okay, wrong question to ask." Cloud sighed. "But at least take turns? I don't wanna be fighting monsters half-asleep tomorrow."
Squall nodded immediately, before turning to look at the other two. Zidane shrugged, indicating his neutrality in all of this. Kuja merely said, "I demand to have the last shift," before quietly disappearing into the darkness. The blond mercenary grinned and waved his hands at Squall, indicating that he would wake him up at the 2nd shift. The other two then shuffled out of the scene.
Left to his own devices, Cloud sat down thoughtfully and replayed the events of the day in his head.
Unwittingly, he had already pulled out the map and was staring at it with immense intensity.
Something felt right. Something felt wrong. He couldn't put a finger to it.
He folded the map up and sighed.
"Waiting for monsters to gather and drop onto another planet, eh?" He turned to look up at the red moon.
It was going to be a long night.
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tsuki no namida datta
13/6/2001
http://cloud-is.ourfamily.com/