Project: Gamer Ver. 2 Alpha Build Easy As 1.2.3
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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~~ FROM: Super-Ultra Powerful Best Goddess Terra Tan! (Unsent) ~~
~~ TO: Alchemist (Unrecieved)
~~ Hey! Hope you're having fun on your vacation! I was wondering when you were going to find out I put in a couple of Resort Locations! I've noticed you're having more trouble than I initially expected, but in hindsight I probably should've expected that. It's not like I sent you to Equus or some place like that.
Anyway, hope you have a blast! Talk to you later! ~~
~~ FROM: Super-Ultra Powerful Best Goddess Terra Tan! (Unsent) ~~
~~ TO: Alchemist (Unrecieved)
~~ I took a look at the vocation system you mentioned, and it looks like most of the system failed to deploy. It completely failed to recognize your previous achievements or met requisites. Normally you should have access to a handful of starting classes, but they all got missed. I've got Vana D.L. (Department Lead, she loves that title) looking at it since she's the expert on Job and Class systems.
We might be able to roll out a patch when you get back! I'll keep you posted! ~~
~~ FROM: Super-Ultra Powerful Best Goddess Terra Tan! (Unsent) ~~
~~ TO: Alchemist (Unrecieved)
~~ Usually you've got a snarky or sarcastic remark, are you okay? Your status says you're alive... I double checked, you're not blocked. You don't normally ignore me like this... ~~
~~ FROM: Super-Ultra Powerful Best Goddess Terra Tan! (Unsent) ~~
~~ TO: Alchemist (Unrecieved)
~~ Vana says she tried to implement the patch, but your system is in lock down. Someone is interfering. If you get this, I want you to know that it's being investigated. Please send any information you might have whenever this reaches you. ~~
~~ FROM: Super-Ultra Powerful Best Goddess Terra Tan! (Unsent) ~~
~~ TO: Alchemist (Unrecieved)
~~ I've manually reviewed your log files. It's great to see the new Alpha System is so robust, but it's not supposed to be stressed like that! Please try to avoid entering an Instant Quest while already inside of an Instant Quest. I'm glad to know you're alright, and that you're continuing to push the system the way you're supposed to.
I need you to write a complete review of what all happened, in your own words once you get back. She wasn't allowed to do what she did, she wasn't allowed to force you to help. ~~
~~ FROM: Administrator: TERRA ~~
~~ To: Gaia-F-F-7-C-C ~~
~~ My Office. Now. ~~
-----
There wasn't any North Corel at this point in time. Just a rail station in between Corel and Costa Del Sol so that people could get around by train.
The Gold Saucer, and it was actually still named the Gold Saucer, was significantly smaller than the one featured in Final Fantasy Seven.
Alchemist simply assumed it would either get burned down during the Corel incident which, with Scarlet being... Gone... Should hopefully never happen. Or it would simply get renovated and expanded later on.
They had to get on the transport -leaving- the Gold Saucer to properly exit the quest. Jinx, Alchemist and their familiars riding it -to- the giant gleaming money pit?
It was actually very scenic. They were able to take a lot of pictures of the various monsters and animals that roamed wild below.
It was nice. He was thinking about maybe making a scrap-book when they got home.
'And that's a Cokatolis, Robin. It could turn you to stone, slowly. Just imagine how it feels, your joints resisting as you watch your flesh slowly turn to rock...' Alright... Maybe not the best of images.
That was just one of the many, countless reasons Esuna had been one of his first spells.
As they were getting closer and closer to the gambling den, the first thing that really hit them was the noise.
That godawful music.
They'd been out and about for most of the day. Tying up a few loose ends, checking in on Vincent and Lucrecia, hitting up a Shinra motorsports dealership in Midgar...
He'd still had no luck finding Bahamut Fury. And he wasn't willing to postpone going home to find a super-speed space dragon that fired Exa-Flare lasers. He'd just figure out how to do it himself!
Maybe a solid mastery of Flare, which was closing in on level twenty of thirty-two, figure out how the Energy spell worked, add in the concentration and focusing effects he worked out for Cremation... Yeah, he could figure that out
He'd have to figure out what he wanted to call it later. Something appropriately edge to fit with the theme? Or maybe something that was an inside joke, he loved those.
Well, he was a big, armored Dragon from beyond the boundaries of reality. That was literally an enemy featured in a game he'd played. The Enforcers were made to correct errors in a digital world...
Once he got the spell figured out, he was going to call it Deletion Ray. That would fit the edgy teen theme of Young Justice while still being an inside joke!
Any which way, he had the summon spells for a lich that threw around status debuffs, a giant holy castle that fired lasers, Odin with his Iron-Cleaving sword, the phoenix of rebirth and the Knights of the Round. He was probably set for large-scale summoned allies. Shades could cover the rest.
"We're here!" Jinx shook his shoulder, pulling him out of his thoughts. He gave her a soft smile as he stood up and stretched, his back and knees crackling and popping.
"You ready to go home?" All in all, they were closing in on two months of time spent here. Maybe a bit more. It had been kind of hard to keep track when they were working their way down to Minerva.
"So ready." Jinx stretched as well, raising her arms up over her head and standing up on the tips of her toes.
Once she settled back on her feet, they stepped out-
"What are you two doing here!" And were accosted by a little brunette missile.
"Yuffie?" Alchemist glanced over to Jinx, but she was just as clueless. "We're getting ready to go back to our home. What are you doing here yourself?"
The little ninja was wearing a black vest over a sleeveless red shirt, and had a pair of black shorts on. She was even wearing a tiny little hat, likely held in place with a hairclip.
The uniform for people working at the Gold Saucer.
The girl was, like, nine. What the hell was Dio doing?!
"Waiting for you, dummy! You told us that you had to stop by the Gold Saucer for something before you would go home, so I've been here so I could go with you!" Oh. That wasn't good. "But Dio was a big dummy! He called Shinra when he heard you were coming!"
That... Actually didn't matter to him, in the slightest.
"Yuffie." Alchemist bent down so he was eye-level with the girl. "If you come with us, you won't be able to go back home on your own. It will be a different kind of place than you're used to, you understand that, right?"
He was kind of against kidnapping a little girl.
He was more opposed to leaving a child out to starve, or expecting them to work and suffer instead of having a chance to be a kid.
Yuffie crossed her arms and glared at him.
Jinx leaned down and pulled the little girl into a hug.
"He's not saying no, Yuffie. He's just worried about you, okay?" The half-dragon said to the little girl.
Yuffie... Didn't know what to do at first, with the contact. How close Jinx was to her. But she slowly brought her own arms up and wrapped them around Jinx in a loose, fragile hug of her own.
"You guys... Spent more time talking with me than my dad ever did. And you didn't yell like my tutors do. I-I don't want to go back to that!" The burdens of expectation and nobility. It did a fantastic job ensuring that relatives were rarely family.
"Yuffie!" An older girl called out further into the landing platform. "Don't bother the guests!"
Nobody actually paid any attention to her.
"Alright then." Alchemist stood up. "Let's get going and we'll figure this all out later."
He waited until Yuffie let go of Jinx before they all got moving, loading up into one of the gondolas leaving the Gold Saucer. Jinx keeping one of Yuffie's hands in hers the entire time.
"Umm..." Yuffie shifted nervously from foot to foot. "Shinra's going to have a bunch of people at the platform. What are you going to do about that?"
In response, Alchemist pulled a toad statue out of his inventory.
"Don't worry about that." He leaned across Jinx and ruffled the girls hair. "I've got a plan for that. They can play with my pet Carrot."
He didn't mention to her that he had redirected his other self, the part of him expanded by Bilocation, to go and loot the hell out of Wutai.
Godo thought his culture had a monopoly on Shinobi.
Unfortunately, with Invisibility, Haste, Teleportation and a burning ball of anger, Alchemist was grabbing anything and everything that he thought Yuffie might need. Like her limit break tome, All Creation.
Or the weapons he'd left behind and they'd stashed in their armory.
Or the interesting elemental Materia that Wutai specialized in that also caused debilitations like Silence and Poison. And the not-so-hidden support Materia that absorbed HP and MP.
...Alchemist was starting to think that he might have a problem.
Just not as big of one as Godo would have once the tallied up everything that was gone. Including the Leviathan Materia.
Back on the gondola, once it started moving, Alchemist took stock of the situation.
It was just Jinx, and Yuffie and himself. Another attendant had actually been stopping people from getting on. Well, that actually worked for him!
"Alright, Yuffie. Let's just put this on-" Alchemist tied a Super Ribbon to the girl, one of many he'd stolen from the Great Malboros hidden near the bottom of the Cave of Wonders. "-and get Carrot ready for his big debut!"
Alchemist cast Esuna on the toad statue, then immediately followed that up with Stop. Temporarily freezing the now-revealed monster.
A few moments later, well before the spell wore off, the trio disappeared. Almost as though they'd never been there to begin with.
-----
Tseng was waiting alongside a significant number of Turks and Shinra Security forces at the terminal station for the Gold Saucer.
They'd been trying to track Alec Mist for almost two months! Whenever they thought they had a lead, he'd disappear and end up somewhere completely different!
Following the report by Zack Fair, they'd sent a team off to Icicle Inn but discovered they'd missed him by a handful of days.
At least the man had left details outright saying he'd be going back to the Gold Saucer next.
"Alright men." He announced, ignoring the fact that Cissnei and several other members were women. "We should have him this time! His knowledge regarding company secrets has already proven to be a dangerous and compromising liability. The president wants it extracted and his sources silenced."
He gazed across the assorted suits, dearly wishing Verdot hadn't retired the very same day he'd returned.
"Remember. He's shown exceptional talent with both ranged weaponry and Materia usage. If this escalates, close the distance and keep him engaged in melee!" Tseng drew his own sidearm as the rocket car came down the ropeway.
Behind him, everyone else was doing the same.
They were ready. They were prepared! They wouldn't let him slip from their grasp again!
When the Great Malboro exploded out of the rail car and suffused the area with toxic fumes, Tseng chose to amend that thought.
They were not, in fact, ready.
-----
For Jinx, coming back to the cave was almost like a breath of fresh air.
There had been a kind of subtle push, a pressure weighed against her the entire time she'd been in the other world that she didn't notice until it was finally gone.
There was something similar, in Alchemist's demi-plane, except she actually felt welcomed there.
"You guys live in a cave?" Yuffie was looking around, at everything, in wide-eyed curiosity. "I thought only Shinra had computers this big!"
"Not quite." Alchemist calmly explained. "I kinda got kicked out of the cave, so I've been living at a hotel while I've been building my own home. I work in a cave, for a different version of SOLDIER that's mostly not full of human experiments."
"Wait... You can hold a real job? I mean, I would've thought your whole magic and ninja skills and dragon stuff would make you not need a job!" Yuffie shouted, her voice echoing against the stone walls.
"That's actually what he uses for his job, sort of." Jinx pulled one of the nearby computer chairs over and sat down, pushing another one towards the excitable ninja. "Mostly the magic. He does healing and repair work."
"Yeah. And paperwork. I get paid decently for what I do, enough to pay for my hobbies." Jinx could tell Yuffie was becoming less and less impressed. "It does a great job keeping a cover so everyone assumes I'm mostly harmless."
What?
"Wait..." Yuffie was picking up on it, too. "You can turn into a dragon, cast super powerful magic and sneak into really, really important places... And you tricked people into thinking you're harmless?"
"Mostly." Alchemist agreed, leaning forward and placing his elbows on his knees where he sat. "I did ram a pointy metal stick through the chest of a dragon-eating she-wolf. But most people here just think I'm a weird medic, and I'm happy to let them assume as much."
Jinx bit her lip as she considered the kinds of magic that she'd seen him throw around. Looking down at Yuffie, she was starting to get a little concerned. The girl had been oddly silent after-
"-Teach me! Teach me everything!" Okay. The girl wasn't silent at all. She was practically squealing in excitement, Jinx could swear she saw stars in the girls eyes!
"In a bit. I've got to get a few things set up." Alchemist opened his inventory and started digging through it. An increasingly monumental task. After almost a minute, he came up with a thick wad of cash. "Jinx, why don't you take her shopping? I got a lot of stuff, but I don't exactly have any clothes fit for a young girl."
Jinx swiped the bundle of bills with glee. He'd just offered to sponsor a shopping trip! Like she was going to argue!
She was just starting to lead Yuffie out of the room when her sensitive hearing picked up Alchemist on the phone-
"Hey, Batman? I kind of brought back a neglected ninja child from an alternate reality. How do I legally adopt that?"
-----
Watching Jinx lead Yuffie out of the mountain, Alchemist let out a slow breath.
He just needed a minute alone to think. Get the order of things figured out.
Bringing back a child? Hadn't even been on his to do list. That was a spur of the moment decision, really, to... Gods, what was he even thinking?
Was he even thinking? He knew he had some prejudice against the entire Wutai quest in Final Fantasy, and the implications that Yuffie had been turned into an amoral thief by her father. That regardless of that, or maybe even in spite of that, she could turn into a reliable, trustworthy ally.
Alchemist began tapping his fingers against the desk he'd been working at, where his computer and printer were set up before he'd gone on his 'Vacation'.
She was a hyperactive, talented ninja child and he'd volunteered himself to take care of her- He and his wife had failed to have children, against their own wishes. He didn't know how to take care of a kid!
Batman hadn't offered any advice, either. His words had simply been to 'Wait.'.
Like he had a host of other options!
Actually, should he have even let her go out into public? Gaia likely had a lot of very different diseases from Earth. The cross infection risk was-
"Zero-Two: Batman" The Zeta Terminal announced, dragging him out of his thoughts.
The caped crusader himself didn't even sweep into the room, just walking normally.
He was likely well enough aware that Alchemist simply found most of his theatrics amusing, rather than grandiose or impressive.
Alchemist was, as Robin was wont to say, 'Whelmed'.
"You found a child on your last... Excursion?" Straight to business. Batman actually sat down in a nearby chair, dispensing with the usual power-plays.
"More that she found us." Alchemist started, trying to remember the proper order of things. "Jinx saw her outside of a local restaurant, staring at the food. She got an extra meal for the kid, and I set up a means of watching her to make sure she'd actually get to eat it. Later on I caught her fighting the overgrown rats to get more food out of a dumpster behind a different diner."
"When I caught her trying to stowaway on the ferry my group was getting on to deal with the next leg of our quest, I went ahead and set up a few distractions and then went to go and let the captain know and cover the cost of adding an extra person to the boat." The girl had been good, there was no denying that. Alchemist hadn't needed to clear the way for her so much as distract one guard dog that was getting close to sniffing her out.
"She was filthy, skin and bones and damned near rabid. Also a runaway. We made sure to put some food in her, try to limit the danger she wanted to literally jump on and eventually convinced her to put on some clean clothes. I don't know how long she'd been wearing the same outfit, but it fought me when I finally got her to go take a bath and put on something clean so I could wash her outfit. We eventually took her back to her home and left her with her father." Which neatly explained Yuffie while completely ignoring things like arson, murder, technical deicide or jaywalking.
"And she found you again afterwards?" Batman asked him, curious and inquisitive.
"Yeah. Her home was recently at war and her dad was kind of important there. No idea about her mom." Which Alchemist was going to have to ask about, wasn't he? "She apparently ran away again, and found her way to the final leg of our quest so she could intercept us and have us take her with us. No idea how she managed that, actually, considering the monsters on the roads usually make travel pretty dangerous."
Seriously, the monsters around Wutai were actually pretty concerning.
"That's going to make things... Difficult, given your own situation." Which one? The part where his existence could be measured in weeks, or the part where his age is only, like, nineteen on paper?
"I'm aware. Hence why I'm asking for help rather than just ignoring things and waiting to get blindsided when someone decides to use the law to be stupid." Sure, someone out there would be quite happy to try and kidnap Yuffie and say they were doing it for her best interests. Claim that, it's the law and their hands are tied and, oh, there's just nothing Alchemist could do.
He did not want to have to prove that line of thinking wrong.
"I can get you in contact with a lawyer, though they tend to be rather... Exorbitant." Well, that was ominous.
"For you or for me?" Alchemist had to ask. He and Batman may both technically be wealthy but they were still in completely different ballparks.
"Yes."
-----
Sort of Omake:
Batman: And how do you know what I would consider expensive?
Alchemist: I recognize a lambroghini when I see one, even if it's been modified to hell and back. And I've seen you wreck the batmobile more times than I care to count.
Batman: ...The only other person on the League who even thinks about how expensive our equipment is would be Green Arrow.
Alchemist: Yes. The man flinging money from a stick. Who thinks that a domino mask does a fantastic job hiding his very distinctive goatee.
Batman: ...Should I just assume you know who everyone is?
Alchemist: I can pretend I don't if that'll make you feel better.
