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Alchemist pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on the massive table in front of himself.
"Between the loss of the Ancients, as well as the death of the lead researcher investigating them, we may need to recall Project S," a fat, blond man in a well tailored red suit laid out for the assembled men and woman within the meeting room. His blue eyes were cold as they scanned the people in the room, skipping over the executives that were just filling seats to land on the ones that truly mattered.
He didn't even spare Alchemist a glance, his gray suit lacked the embellishments of the others and the cart loaded with pastries and coffee, tea and juice that he'd brought in noted him as being... unimportant.
"What about the SOLDIER Initiative?" a scruffy, unkempt man asked. The very air about him, dressed as he was in an apple print shirt, slacks and flip flops, of all things, underneath of his labcoat stank of Mako and apples. "It's been more effective than initially-"
"What about them?" a large, heavy man asked. Unlike the others, his green suit had decorative pauldrons on it and a number of insignias were stitched to his lapel. "The military has been just fine without your lab rats in it and we'll be fine without them!"
Heidegger. A remnant from before the Shinra Power Electric Company had been an 'Electric Company'. He'd survived the regime change from Lionel Shinra to Leopold Shinra and could even manage to last through Rufus's reign, if the boy was allowed to inherit.
"SOLDIER has already been heavily invested in," Leopold answered the scientist's question, his cold eyes sliding away from Heidegger with neither praise nor rebuke. "And the results, if not their discipline, has shown a clear return on investment already. Hollander will take up the initiative and it will be his responsibility, as the new head of Science, to ensure that it continues apace."
Heidegger grumbled while the man in the labcoat, Hollander, preened.
Alchemist found it all rather banal, really. Leopold had already made his decisions and the man could have accomplished the entirety of the 'meeting' by sending out a handful of memos.
"Scarlet," Leopold began, turning his gaze to the youngest director. Freshly promoted, she'd been warming her seat for a bare few months after the untimely demise of her former superior. "Equipment for the new SOLDIER division has proven insufficient so far. Get your machinists and engineers on the job. We're spending more on replacement equipment than we..."
Leopold stopped talking for a moment and shook his head, his hand pressing against his forehead.
Alchemist's drumming fingers stopped, for a moment. He watched, hawkeyed, as the 'president' regathered himself. Then, when it looked as though Leopold was ready to continue talking, he resumed his actions.
"The old Cerberus, Hydra and Griffon frames were fine for the infantry," Leopold told the group as he loosened his tie. "But they aren't holding up for the new SOLDIER division. Not without a lot of enhancements that-"
"Are just not financially viable," Scarlet, young and all too blooded, cut in. She didn't seem particularly happy but the particular reason wasn't apparent, at least, Alchemist didn't think so. He knew the woman had big dreams and grand ambitions. That, in the far future, she would have gone on to design giant robots that could be piloted by normal, unenhanced people.
The Proud Clod. A fitting name for the woman's ultimate design.
"We've been working on finalizing a simplified infantry rifle with selective fire," Scarlet told the group of men. She stood up, attempting to draw attention to her face and her chest, garbed as she was in an outfit that was better suited to a ball or gala than it was a stuffy board meeting. "With the..."
She swayed on her feet for a moment before dropping back into her seat, one hand coming up to pinch at her nose between her eyes.
"...Apologies," the woman begged, her bleary eyes looking around the room. "I'm just a bit... no matter." Scarlet cleared her throat, her cloudy eyes squinting at the men in the room with her. "With a standardized design, we are hoping to..."
Scarlet fell forward, her head impacting the giant wooden table with a meaty 'Thud...'
"...What?" a fat man in a mustard yellow suit asked, confusion clear in his voice. Palmer, ill-regarded by his peers, was the head of ShinRa's aeronautics division. Despite his... reputation regarding his love of food, he was actually brilliant in his field. His was the mind behind the fleet of helicopters and jet planes that allowed ShinRa to dominate the planet instead of just the local continent. His was the mind behind the experimental airship, the Highwind. "Scarlet? You know it's not nap..."
Palmer stood on shaky legs and reached for the woman...
Just to fall over in a heap on the floor.
"What?!" Leopold demanded as he wobbled to his feet while the various top executives of ShinRa collapsed around him. "What is going on here!?"
"...Poison!" one man in a blue suit shouted as he surged to his feet. Verdot, codenamed Veld, did not make it particularly far as he lunged for the door.
Alchemist had sealed it shut, after all.
Still, Verdot, the head of the Turks, tried and failed to force the door open. He actually kept working at it longer than Alchemist had expected, even going so far as to draw his sidearm.
"Uh-uh," Alchemist quietly intoned as he stood up, drawing Verdot's hard, black gaze. The killer stood on shaky legs as Leopold collapsed, the president halfway around the massive table in the room. "That would be a poor choice."
Verdot struggled to look at Alchemist, his hands shaking and his aim off. With how badly he was wavering, the gun wasn't able to keep locked on to the mage.
"You-!" Veld demanded, his hands shaking. "Who are you?!"
"I am the- *BANG!*"
Alchemist's lips pursed into a thin line as Verdot interrupted his grand reveal by shooting Alchemist in the chest.
The man's gaze, confused, turned into a full panic as he continued to shoot at Alchemist's unimpressed form. Bullet after bullet cut into the gray suit the wizard wore. Sixteen bullets in all.
Verdot wasn't a proponent of gun safety, Alchemist noted as the man kept on trying to pull the trigger on his sidearm. Fifteen in the magazine and one in the chamber?
The corporate murderer was just asking for something to happen, keeping his gun loaded like that.
Alchemist just sighed as he reached out, one large hand wrapping around the smoking barrel of Verdot's gun, and gently tugged it away from the panting, panicking man.
And Verdot? The man scrambled back, one hand working futilely at the key-card scanner of the door. His sweaty fingers smudged the screen, failing to input any of Verdot's override codes.
Not that they would have worked. Alchemist had locked the door with magic, not technology.
Alchemist inhaled heavily, filling his lungs with the Carbon Monoxide he'd been Converting the air in the room into, and sat back down to wait as Verdot finally collapsed to the ground.
He only needed to wait for another ten, fifteen minutes at the most. Then?
Well.
ShinRa wouldn't really be able to operate, not since Alchemist had cut off almost every head of the hydra at once. They would spend... god only knows how long, really, trying to reorganize.
And, in the chaos that would ensue?
Well...
Alchemist exhaled, a notice filling his vision of his poison resistance leveling up, and slouched in the very expensive, incredibly comfortable chair he'd commandeered.
Rufus and Lazard ShinRa would fight over who got to control the company, blood would be spilled and everyone would be so focused on the mundane, material things that Alchemist figured he'd have more than ample opportunities to accomplish what he wanted.
-----
Yuffie's legs kicked back and forth, a pen and notebook spread out in front of herself on the dining room table in the house in the demi-plane.
Her dad had her writing out anything and everything she could think of that could go wrong with their plan to draw off the guards in Wutai before the two of them would break into the palace.
And it turned out that there were a lot of things that could go wrong.
Like, the reserve guard might be bigger than they were expecting. Or Godo could use his tranformation technique and become an Asura before they had a chance to talk with Yuffie's mom.
Which wouldn't actually stop them but it would be kinda inconvenient.
Yuffie was eight hundred levels of super awesome ninja, okay? If Godo wanted to grow a few extra arms and another pair of punchable faces?
It just made him easier to hit.
But Yuffie had to think about other things, too. Like, like, like if Leviathan's priests or priestesses didn't call it an emergency when they summoned the great serpent on the opposite end of the Wutaian continent. Or maybe they could try and use the royal Materia to summon Leviathan themselves!
Sure, it was possible for multiple instances of the same summon to exist at the same time. They weren't common because summoning Materia was rare but there were something like four known copies of Ifrit Materia out there and there were stories of two people using that same Materia and having two instances of Ifrit fight each other in the last major war between Junon and the now destroyed Madoran people.
The stronger summoner had summoned a slightly stronger Ifrit and the two of them duking things out had led to the destruction of Madora, a settlement that had once existed where Costa Del Sol now stood.
Whether or not any of it was true, Yuffie didn't know. She just knew what her tutors had told her. Because she did listen, even if they were boring.
Super boring.
Jerks.
In the other room, just below the sound of the television playing Frozen (Again. Aerith loved it for some reason), Yuffie's sensitive ears heard the quiet, almost silent click of the doorknob turning.
With a grin, Yuffie shoved herself back and away from the table and tore off, careful to keep slow enough that she didn't damage the floor or the furniture.
Her dad had talked about reinforcing everything with magic but he kept getting distracted. And it wasn't like she didn't know repair magic. He'd taught it to everyone that was willing to sit down and listen to him long enough to learn it.
The front door swung open and Yuffie froze.
Her dad's face wasn't very expressive. It was like the opposite of hers, where the shape of her mouth and the crinkle of her eyes could give everything away. His was stony and kinda fixed.
But only kinda. He did smile, yeah, but it was normally just a little quirk of his lips. And his eyes didn't open up all the way too often so it was hard to tell if he was surprised or scared but Yuffie had learned to pay attention to the way his eyes moved to figure out what he was thinking or doing.
But right now, behind the naturally blank expression on his face? It was the way her dad was moving his head to look at things while his eyes, distant and unfocused, weren't locking on to anything. That meant her dad was stuck in his head, thinking himself into circles instead of paying a whole lotta atention to the real world.
"Hey!" Yuffie shouted as she lunged at the man, wrapping her arms around his midsection. "What did you do? Where did you go? Did you do anything cool?!"
"I went back to Midgar," her dad said, his words slow. "And I killed the president and his executives."
The sounds coming from the television stopped as Ifalna paused the movie. She and her daughter both turned to look at Alchemist.
"What?" Ifalna asked as Yuffie's dad calmly placed a big hand on top of Yuffie's head, slowly ruffling the girl's hair. "How?!"
"I just... snuck in," Alchemist explained as he turned his head so he could see the two guests in the house. "Then I waited until they were in a meeting and I filled the room with carbon monoxide gas. It... worked."
Yuffie tightened the hug she'd wrapped her dad in.
The only decent executive on the board that Yuffie knew of was some weirdo named Reeve that liked to play with dolls. And she remembered from AVALANCHE's dossiers that he'd been promoted sometime around when she'd been six. The man before him, some jerk named Werts, seriously thought that things like guard rails and stairs were too expensive to put into the reactors.
Jokes on him. AVALANCHE ambushed him during an inspection at the Junon reactor and dropped him into a Mako Pool. Something that would've been impossible if he'd put a mesh netting overtop of it like Reeve had proposed during its refit.
Not the point.
Her dad got weird when he had to do things like that. She didn't get it, really. They were bad guys so it was good to get rid of them, right?
"Hey," Yuffie demanded as she let go of her dad and took a step back. "I've been working on the plan to get in and see my mom. Can you make some hot chocolate so I can tell you everything? I even made draw- diagrams! I even did diagrams!"
"...Sure," her dad told her. "You know, you don't need me to make some hot chocolate, right?"
"But you do it better!" Yuffie pretended to whine. Her dad's eyes slid down to look at her, then up to the kitchen. "With all the cinnamon and whipped cream and stuff!"
"Alright," he said, a quiet chuckle coming from somewhere deep in his throat. "A deluxe hot chocolate for the little lady." He turned his head, his eyes sliding from Yuffie and over to Aerith and her mom. "And what about you two?"
"Can I-" Aerith began to ask, her voice more of a croak than anything before she coughed, clearing the phlegm out enough for her to speak. "Can I have some? Please?"
"I'd like that," Ifalna agreed.
Yuffie looked at the mother and daughter duo, the way Ifalna held Aerith against her side. It was a sort of gentle, motherly affection that...
Some part of Yuffie missed that.
But she was a big girl, now. She couldn't worry about how much she wanted that sort of thing.
Yuffie stepped to the side, letting her dad pass ahead to the kitchen and shook her head, focusing on what she was actually doing as her lips spread wide in a toothy grin, her eyes sparkling with mischief at a plan gone right.
She'd pulled her dad out of his funk, which was great.
And she got hot chocolate out of it, too.
Which was greater!
She couldn't wait to tell him all about her plans to get into Wutai!
-----
After dinner, a surprisingly delicious meal made of rabbit meatballs fried in bacon grease served with spaghetti, Alchemist had quietly made his way into his sub-demiplane.
The scaffolding he'd set up had a number of large gaps intentionally spaced throughout, bays for him to work on large, vertical projects. Eventually, he needed to put up his Incorruptus and retool a number of parts.
Get everything put back together properly, really. During his time in Worm he'd dug into some of the deeper secrets of Living Metal and built up a contingency...
Which he hadn't even needed.
And that wasn't a complaint. What he'd built was still fascinating and worth the effort. It just hadn't ended up being useful at the time.
Although, Alchemist was left wondering what he was going to do with the giant Psypher crystal he'd removed from the right arm of his incorruptus. By and large? It wasn't useful any longer. They'd functioned as an intermediary to allow Alchemist and his team to make use of 'Shards', the physical remnants of demons from the story of Bloodstained.
Devour, however, let them skip the intermediary step and subsume the spells or abilities directly into themselves.
Alchemist shook his head and tried to focus. The giant yellow crystal could still be useful, it could still be used to drag an ethereal object into the physical plane. Hell, the size of the crystal he'd had embedded into the right gauntlet of the Incorruptus could put up a field big enough to impact an entire city block.
But that would be another project for another day. The wizard had deadlines coming up soon and he needed to get to work on things that would actually be relevant.
Sliding a hand down his face, Alchemist opened the inventory as he activated Wraith King, creating a host of silent replicas of himself. They stepped out from him, separating before reconverging as they pulled out the equipment they'd already put together over the last few nights.
The first part was the housing of a large machine, significantly taller than Alchemist. It was only the base, to start with. Second came a long, metal rod. On one end was a ball bearing but not the other.
The reason for which soom became apparent. The Alchemists methodically extracted giant discs of reinforced Adamantine that were slid down the length of the rod until they sat within a great hollow in the machine. In between each thin disc was a small washer made of the same material.
Finally, the horde of wizards fitted another ball bearing onto the end they'd been working at and the group tested the design by hand. The great number of discs, not unlike a host of CDs in a tray, spun with surprising ease despite the great weight they carried.
Which was the point, honestly. If the old design Alchemist was attempting didn't work, he'd have to cheat even harder.
It took four of the assembled Alchemists to put the top on the machine. It was an unpleasant balancing act as the quartet moved in tandem, assisted by the gift of Timed Hits.
Once the main body was assembled, the device looked rather strange. It had a tube coming from the top of the house, another one coming from the bottom front of the machine and the long, Adamantine rod they'd been sliding discs and washers down actually poked out from the side.
Slapping his hands down against his thighs, Alchemist took a moment to breathe as the burn in his arms and legs from lifting, moving and fastening everything slowly faded.
There were, effectively, only a few pieces left and they required his personal touch compared to the watered down effects his Wraiths could implement.
"Let's be smart about this. For once," Alchemist said to himself, drawing a number of raised eyebrows and exasperated head-shakes from his copies. "Let's get the outlet put together before we do the inlet. I don't want to flood this place."
None of the replicas said a word as Alchemist extracted a meter long pipe.
They all knew what was being built. They knew how magic and machinery were intended to fit together. So the copies meandered about the great machine that'd been put together and began to check the work that'd been done, looking over every seam and fastener again, and again and again.
Meanwhile, Alchemist himself was in the process of... wrapping a paper around the middle of the pipe in his hands. It'd been cut so that its width would match the circumference of the pipe and he'd long, long since written everything on it that he needed to know. It was covered in the sharp, almost jagged letters of the Draconic language.
Tracing the letters that he'd painstakingly translated, then checked and rechecked, Alchemist transmuted the outer shell of the pipe so that the letters under his fingers were carved into the almost inviolate metal. Once he'd finished, the mage peeled the paper off and began the process of confirming his work.
That was the real reason that enchantments often took so long to make.
Tying a magical spell to an object and altering the way it works in a way that violates physics?
That was the easy part.
Making sure that the enchantment worked as intended?
That wasn't so easy.
Alchemist could, if he felt so inclined, simply Fuse the spell into the object and call it done. It would work, it was simple, he'd done it before and he'd do it again.
But.
But.
But that left the spell vulnerable to simply being dispelled. And then all of the work that Alchemist had done would fall apart.
However. Putting in the work to create a full and proper enchantment would create a spell that couldn't simply be dispelled. It could be suppressed. And, should a mage of significant enough power come along, it could even be destroyed. But it would resist such efforts, it might even be able to outlast whatever mage thought to undermine Alchemist's work.
Not that any such mages existed on the world of Final Fantasy 7's Gaia. But such figures did exist on DC's Earth. And getting in the practice to challenge them without whipping his dick out was always worthwhile.
Alchemist exhaled softly when he reached the bottom of the script, the pipe rolling over his hands. Everything looked right, which...
Both was and wasn't surprising, considering he couldn't actually read Draconic without having the spell Comprehend Languages active.
The next step that Alchemist performed was to cast Charge on himself before casting Fortify Skill: Enchanting. With a countdown over himself, Alchemist picked up the pace a bit as he extracted a Grand Soul Gem and tapped it against the words he'd inscribed on the pipe.
It shimmered for a moment, the magic seeping in and finding direction before...
Nothing.
Exactly as it was supposed to be.
The spell on the pipe was meant to do something impressive, sure, but it wasn't supposed to be visible.
With that done, Alchemist handed the pipe off to a Wraith to install to the outlet of the machine before he...
Pulled out another pipe from the inventory. And another sheet of paper.
The process that Alchemist went through was very similar to the last one, barring two things. He did not cast Charge before he cast Fortify Skill: Enchanting. And he'd installed the pipe to the top of the machine, the feed, before capping it and using Transmutation to meld the cap in place -before- he made the pipe magical.
But the second that Alchemist tapped a Grand Soul Gem to the feed pipe, it shimmered, briefly, and then the rod that stuck out the side of the giant machine began to turn.
It was slow, at first. It took time to ramp up. But...
Alchemist grinned in satisfaction as he accomplished, through magic and science, a feat that...
Well, honestly, something that he was sure could have been built without magical super-materials so long as he'd been willing to forego as much power as his magically modified machine could pump out.
And, just as important as the one machine was...
~~ Alchemic Bounty! +13 ~~
~~ Duplicraft! +5 ~~
~~ Tesla Turbine (Adamantine, Magically reinforced materials, Create (Input) and Destroy (Output) Water) (Large) X18 have been added to the inventory! ~~
~~ Efficient Crafter activated! Materials have been refunded! ~~
All of the others that would go into powering the Mako reactors...
Preferably without causing any massive, city breaking explosions.
Alchemist, unlike AVALANCHE or ShinRa, really would prefer to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, if at all possible. And he was putting in the work to make that possible.
"Alright!" Alchemist said out loud to the group of assembled copycats. "Let's take ten and get ready to do this all over again."
Several of the clones shrugged. Some of them wandered off.
Alchemist couldn't really blame them. It was tedious work and, honestly, the current batch of Wraiths would time out before they could really help to build another set.
But that was alright.
Alchemist could always make more.
