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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.	By : Nickamano Category: Final Fantasy VII > General Views: 7306 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy 7 is created and owned by Squaresoft, now Square-Enix. Nothing here is owned by me. It was created for entertainment purposes, and I am not profiting financially from the creation and online presentation of this story.

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18. Junon.
Tifa stepped off the ocean ferry in the sea-level harbour at Junon, then paused and looked back. She waved a blind farewell to the Captain, who she assumed would be up on the bridge and probably looking down at the departing passengers from above. Then, she hefted her backpack which now contained last night’s minidress, jewellery and shoes, as well as her usual belongings. And headed for the town laid out before and above her.

She had risen early and paid a visit to Miki in her hospital bunk, recognising how much better she was, even though the teenage girl was still somewhat sedated, and they exchanged a tearful farewell, and then Tifa left her new friend behind.

The harbour elevator was a wide, flat plate, framed by a sturdy security rail, on an angular elevating track that could take people from the sea-level harbour right the way up to the clifftop. And of course, stopping on each of the seven tiers of the commercial, industrial and urban levels on the way. It was generally referred to as ‘the escalator’. The escalator featured a pre-recorded audio-video description of Junon, it’s layout and a little of its history, on a monitor beside the lift’s control board.

Junon itself was a busy harbour town and Shin-Ra’s second city. The huge town was constructed directly out of, and on top of, the granite of the cliff itself. It jutted forward, stretching from the upper surface of the cliff, where the airport was located, down the entire surface of Junon’s cliffs in the form of a multi-tiered, huge and blocky monstrosity. Each tier containing either commercial and industrial buildings, plus apartments and shops. Each tier also jutted further out than the one above it, forming a series of seven giant steps. The monstrosity was constructed from a mixture of coppery orange bricks and stone slabs, black tarmac roads and a partially salt-air corroded metal support structure. Giving the whole place an incidental red-orange colour scheme.

The town reached all the way down to the sea and, rumour stated, even below it. It had also in a continuation, or possibly prototype, of the Midgar project, been erected on top of an already existing and long-established town. As it was built directly above the original Junon fishing village that was still there on the coast line, dwarfed. And also literally eclipsed from the sunlight, as well as half drowned in the pollution and abandoned construction. And pilloried by the gigantic foundations and support structure of Shin-Ra’s upper Junon. The original fishing village had been renamed “Under Junon” but not by the people living there, to them it was the ‘true’ Junon and it always would be. However, Tifa didn’t get the last bit of information from the official source but from listening into conversations going on around her.

Her first stop was a shop. She was growing short of funds and needed to sell some of her less useful possessions. Her first consideration had been the dress and its accoutrements, however on a second consideration it could come in useful in Midgar, maybe for a job interview or to impress someone with information about Zangan. She had learned on the ferry, as much from Miki as personal observation, that being attractive and friendly or even flirtatious, could open doors that simply being kind or alternatively, threatening could not. So, she kept the dress and shoes and instead sold the Enemy Lure Materia, which she had found to be useless to her. Initially she had thought that having the Materia and getting into fights might help her abilities, her martial experience and her fitness, but she soon discovered that fighting wild animals was essentially distasteful and had instead opted only to fight when she was attacked and was unable to flee. So, the Materia had proved useless.

She also sold off a few greens and little trinkets she had picked up along the way. Items she had found or collected that she knew had medicinal or other properties. Things like - Loco Weeds, Bolt plumes, Dazers. She had even managed to mix a Hero drink from a recipe copied from one of Zangan’s books. The shop keeper took them off her hands gleefully, as they were not items that he readily came across, especially the Hero Drink. And Tifa had no doubts that in an hour they would be on sale at his shop for twice the price she got for them. Still, aided her financial situation a little.

Then she took the elevator up to the airport, where she spotted a huge airship, tethered in place and a number of the Gelnika type vertical take-off transports. However, she skirted around the outside of the airport, separated from it by a substantial wire mesh fence.

She followed the path covered from the wind, rain and sea air by a corrugated metal roof, around to a little gate covered by a Shin-Ra guard post. But the Infantry uniformed guard, sitting in his little wooden security hut, barely glanced up at her as she stepped through the gate and onto the foot-worn grass of the land beyond the town.

Once again, Tifa was alone and free and in the wilderness with only her skills, knowledge and experience to aid her in her continuing journey. It was like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders and she found herself smiling broadly, breathing in the damp sea air with reinvigorated elation.

She had a vague understanding of the direction of Midgar in her mind from her memory of the wall-size map in Zangan’s cabin. She should head East until she emerged from the great forest there and then turn North and continue in that direction, over the mountains and when she came out on the other side, she should be somewhere South of Kalm.

Of course, it was all relative. What might look like a short distance on a world map might be a thousand miles or more in reality. Still, she was in no particular hurry. She knew this journey would take time. It was an adventure, and Zangan was meant to be the prize at the end of it. If she could even find him.

Where in the hell was Zangan, anyway? She had had no signs or clues to his whereabouts. Was he trying hard to avoid her? Was he that serious about keeping his distance from her? What if she did catch up with him and made her case of how they could be together and he still turned her down? What then?

It didn’t matter. She still needed to put her point across whether she got that response or not. And to put her point across she needed to find him. And that meant the only lead she had, which was Piran in Midgar. It didn’t matter, it was still the same journey with the same goal. Shrugging off the moment of melancholy Tifa turned East, heading off with a bracing, confident stride.

There were more rolling fields with forests dotted about on the horizon. However, this continent felt different, it was colder to begin with, the cloud cover felt thicker, greyer, a little more oppressive. There was a difference in the quality of the fauna. Not only different genus of grasses and different shrubs, patches of moss, bracken, and some bramble scrub that she avoided but it was much patchier. And also, somehow less vibrant in colour and growth. Even the visible soil beneath and between the shrubs and blades of grass had a dry greyish hue to it, compared to the rich brown soils of her home continent. From a distance it all seemed lighter in colour, as if illuminated by the brightest of summer suns. However, on closer inspection the shrubs were a milky shade of green, the grasses yellowy-green. It just seemed and felt less healthy, somehow.

Then there was the aroma. There was still the rich freshness of damp fauna and pine needles and other forest smells in amongst the salty dampness of the sea air. And yet there was something else, a kind of undercurrent. There was something oily and dank and somehow unpleasant. Something Human, mechanical, machine-like, unnatural even. It wasn’t strong but as unused to it, in this all-natural environment as Tifa was, it was certainly detectable.

Strolling along at a quick, heart-accelerating pace, she eventually spotted the forest she had been keeping an eye out for. It sat there on the hazy horizon, enticing and beautiful, if pale. And after strolling and jogging for a couple of hours, she slipped into the cooling, light-dimming depths of the tree line.

It was a thin forest, the umbrella of leaves thinner so she was easily able to keep the cloud-diffused sunlight visible, which allowed her to keep an accurate track of her direction. Of course, strolling through a forest slowed her down quite a lot, due to its uneven footing and lack of a straight path to follow, as well as the pleasant distractions afforded her by the trees, undergrowth and animals she spotted, or more often heard.

She did have to pause a couple of times to protect herself from attack from predatory wild animals who, around here, didn’t appear to be afraid of humans. Specifically, Formula, purple-pink avians that swooped from the tree tops to glide down towards the ground and attack with beak and talons. Then they would, with a single flap of their strange membranous Mog-like wings, lift themselves back up to a tree again. Tifa had to use well timed flip-kicks and leaping kicks to fight them off. She broke the necks of a couple and after that they didn’t bother her again. However, she took a couple of pecks to the scalp and a talon scrape down her shoulder before she taught them not to attack her. A few uses of her Restore Materia healed the wounds and dealt with any potential scarring.

A towering, eight-foot Zemzelett also attacked her in the later afternoon, as she was heading out of the forest to find somewhere to bed down for the night. The large avian-bear-like creature darted in at her from the edge of the forest using lightning attacks as well as swipes from its wide, barb-tipped white-green wings. The lightning attacks set little fires in the dry curled-up bracken fronds forging a blanket of undergrowth throughout the forest. Tifa leapt up high, kicked off from a tree and used a punch-kick and knife-hand combination to stun the creature. She leapt back, undecided about finishing it off or running out of its range of interest. However, the decision was taken out of her hands by a whole flock of Formula swooping down out of the tree tops to shear off chucks of the stunned green-white Zemzelett. And it died where it lay, food for the forest dwellers.

Tifa backed out of the forest edge as the sun began to set and headed North again, toward the mountains.

She found a fast-flowing river sloping down from the mountains, which were at least another four or five days away. And on the river bank she found a little cave. And decided she would use that to stay the night in. She dumped her pack just inside the cave in the edge of its mouth and spent the last half hour of twilight exploring around the cave and gathering up edible roots, nuts and fungi from the forest and then went back to the river.

For her evening meal, she hauled a large fish out of the flowing river. Using patience and her keen eye and superfast reactions, she hooked it clear out of the water and with the same move whipped it over onto the pebbly bank beside her cave, as the last dimness of twilight began to sink away to be replaced by stars and moonlight.

Quickly putting the suffocating fish out of its misery, Tifa then used her perfected survivalist skills to create a little fire with some dead wood from the surrounding countryside, strips of bark fibres as tinder and a piece of flint from the beach to get a spark, using one of the metal reinforcing plates on her Leather Glove to work the flint against. Once the fire was going, she allowed the fish to slow cook on a makeshift spit.

While the fish cooked away, she slipped into the almost pitch black of the cave to investigate its shadowy depths. The last thing she wanted to do was to roll up and go to sleep, blissfully unaware of some kind of hungry carnivorous predator she was sharing the cave with.

There were bats, and quite a few of them, who might be disturbed by her fire, as the light changed to dark and the glow of the flames intensified. However, as night was falling quickly now, they would be leaving the cave anyway to hunt so she didn’t anticipate any problems.

The smooth granite of the cave floor sloped upwards and was surprisingly smooth, though the smoothness soon transformed into a thin bed of natural detritus underfoot, earth, twigs, desiccated leaves, stones and pebbles and then animal bones, all mulched together in the dampness of the air and the river spray.

It smelled dank and musty, with a gamey under-scent. Somewhere between the natural sweetness of the forest and the filth of a rubbish heap. And the smell grew stronger the deeper she stepped into its increasing gloom.

It was in the darkest part of that gloom that she spotted the pair of eyes glowing gold in the pitch black of the rear of the cave. She brought out her Restore Materia orb, and used its natural crystalline illumination to cast a dim green glow around herself. The glow travelled far in the darkness but still didn’t illuminate very much. It just created a hazy outline to a few of the shapes around her, stones and rocks, probably forced to the back of the cave by repeated river floods. There were also more animal bones, and larger ones too. It had definitely been a predator’s home at some point. And then she saw the corpses of two large wolves.

They were half eaten, and yet not all that old, days rather than weeks. It was impossible to see how they had died, but they had died suddenly, as they lay on their sides and didn’t appear to have been messed around with, they weren’t torn apart like most predatory kills would have been. Tifa suspected they might have been shot but it was just a feeling and she could see no evidence.

And then she saw the owner of the pair of golden eyes. It was a wolf pup. It was definitely not a new born, maybe a couple of months old. Old enough to feed itself and leave the den. However, the fact that it was the only pup in the cave, obviously the wolves’ den, was unusual from what Tifa remembered from her father’s and Zangan’s books. Litters were often four to six pups. However, there only the two bodies and the one living pup visible.

Tifa wasn’t sure what to do. For the time being she backtracked to her fire. At least the pup wasn’t about to attack her while she slept. She would be too large and intimidating. It was a really cute little thing too, she just wanted to pull it into her arms and cuddle it, like one of her soft animal toys on her bed back home. However, it was a wild animal, lost and lonely and afraid. So, she left it alone, and instead sat beside her fire in the edge of the cave’s mouth and checked on her fish.

She added in some of the gathered additions of nuts and roots and roasted them in the edge of the fire and then once she was sure the fish was cooked through, assembled her meal and sat down with her back to a water-smoothed boulder and started to eat.

She heard the snuffing of the wolf pup from quite a distance away, heard it ambling closer though always keeping a distance, heard it make a few little whining noises. So, after a while she took off a few fillets of the fish, plus the head and tail and tossed them into the shadows of the cave. Almost at once the pup emerged from the inky blackness and scarfed down the flesh in a few quick seconds. It remained there watching her, neither retreating nor advancing. Tifa threw it another couple of morsels, not quite as far back as the first time and the wolf cautiously advanced again and gobbled down the food. Then it lay there in the edge of the halo of firelight, and watched her finish her meal.

The last few scraps she couldn’t finish, the fish having been so large, Tifa tossed them once again to the wolf. Again, it took a couple of hesitant steps forward and ate the offering. Smiling at the timid receptiveness of the adolescent wolf, Tifa slouched there against her rock, enjoying the peace, the warmth and enticing dance of the flames, the fresh rushing roar of the river and the faint sounds of animals in the night.

She considered the animals, their environment. Their mannerisms. All her life there had been stories of rabid or just aggressive predatory animals attacking humans at random, even going out of their way to attack. However, both her father and Zangan and a number of others, including plenty of the older people who had enjoyed frequenting the London Inn all had the same assertion. That it had only been this bad for the past thirty or so years. And that before, within living memory, there hadn’t been these kinds of issues of attacks by wild animals. Or ‘monsters’ as plenty of people had come to speak of them since. Thirty years, give or take, was the approximate time that Shin-Ra’s Mako research and experimentation had been going on, following its initial discovery of Mako in ‘59. In fact, their own Mako reactor, up on mount Nibel, which had been the first such reactor, she assumed beyond prototypes in labs somewhere, had been assembled and activated something like ten or twenty years before she was born. And she had heard stories of monstrous predatory animals all her life. She started to wonder if the two were connected.

Zangan had already told her that Mako and the Lifestream were the same thing, which led to the natural conclusion that using Mako as a fuel was the equivalent to sucking the blood of the planet, taking its life. However, what if the predatory ‘monster’ animals were actually created because of the Shin-Ra’s reactors, maybe as some kind of natural reaction to the unnatural practice, or maybe it was something about the reactors themselves - the harmonics maybe, or some kind of scent coming from the process. Something psychotropic. Something about or emanating from the reactors that was driving the animals insane and turning them into ‘monsters’. She wished Zangan were with her so she could share her thoughts with him, get his opinion.

The deep thinking finished Tifa off. After a long day’s march, she wanted nothing more than to wrap herself up in her duster and go to sleep. So, she wrapped herself up and settled down for the night. She lay there waiting for sleep to take her, listening to the snap and crackle of the fire, still basking in its warmth. And just in the edge of her heavy-lidded peripheral vision she observed the wolf pup sneaking closer to her and the fire, sniffing around her, at her backpack, at the fire itself. She even felt it snuffling in her hair at one point.

The next thing she knew it was morning and she was awake, lying there on the ground on her side, with the low sun caressing her with its early spring warmth, already brushing away the dewy cold of the early morning.

She slowly became aware of a warm weight pressing up against her and, keeping very still, she steadily lifted her head and craned her neck. The wolf pup was lying against her stomach and chest, on its side, between her and the burned-out fire. She felt her heart practically breaking at the cuteness of that moment. As she watched, the pup seemed to become aware of her observing it, as it opened its eyes and caught her gaze with its own, then rolled onto its belly, gave a great yawn and stretched, then lifted itself up onto its paws, stretched again and then with a flick of its tail, loped off toward the stream.

Tifa lay there watching it for a long moment, taking a long drink from the cool refreshing water. Before she got up herself, stripped off and bathed in its icy flow.
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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.