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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.

Chapter List
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3. The Reactor.

A vast cavernous area inside the mountain snapped Zangan back into the present. He knew the way, that he had to descend partway to and then follow and new path upwards in order to reach the height of the Mako reactor. He looked across the vast cavern that was equivalent to three or even four storeys in height. It had been used as a construction yard during the building of the reactor and the large space still housed a lot of equipment and leftovers from the construction. Since then, visitors to the mountain had been reusing many of the leftovers to create a quick-travel system. Wooden planks and ladders and leftover scaffolding had been recycled to create a kind of massive armature that doubled as a path and housing for a series of sliding chutes that safely afforded travellers a quick descent to the lowest two levels of the cavernous interior. So, he slid down one of the chutes and then leapt onwards and followed a tunnel down on the cavern’s bottom level.

The tunnel emerged on the cliff face on the outside of the Mountain but the seemingly dead end in fact led down to another tunnel directly beneath him. He dropped down and made his way through the next passage, relying on the natural illumination that suffused much of the wind-hewn interiors of Mount Nibel. The illumination originated from growths of naturally crystalized Mako that refracted light, or via open fissures that exposed the brightly glowing Lifestream below them.

Even with this particular tunnel’s confusing array of clustered stalactites and stalagmites, that made it seem like there were many different passages; only to have them barred by granite teeth, it wasn’t long before Zangan had emerged from the inside of the mountain and was once again on the exterior ascending path, now right beneath the location of the Mako reactor.

Less than a hundred paces along the winding upward path, he discovered another body, a third villager from Nibelheim. The corpse had been left just off the side of the path in a little clearing, beneath the flat area where the Mako reactor had been assembled.

This body had been a woman, and she looked like she had been flash-fried. Similar to many of the charred bodies in the village down below, she looked like she had been burned to death, though unlike the occupants of Nibelheim, hers’ had obviously been electrical in nature. Something like a fifth of her exterior was charred and blackened but the external damage was only visible in two specific locations. There was a large blackened patch of crumbled sooty flesh in a loose circular shape from the side of her ruined face right across one side of her neck and around the upper part of her shoulder. And then there was a consequential burn in her feet. Her climbing boots, that all Nibelheim villagers tended to wear, had been burned down to ashes and her naked feet were charred, twisted monstrosities. The majority of the damage would all be inside her, throughout her torso from throat and clavicle, through all of her internal organs, and throughout one or even both legs, and on into the ground. It was another Materia spell. More than likely a level three Bolt spell, Zangan thought. Letting out a pent-up sigh of sorrow, he stepped over the woman’s body and moved on.

He took the final slope leading up to the reactor quickly and yet only as quietly as his loose-fitting rugged clothing would allow. He wasn’t at all out of breath but the stress of the journey, as well as the recent horrors within the little village had still exhausted him. He had to push that tiredness down and find a new reservoir of fortitude to generate the energy to complete this task, however it was fated to conclude.

There were two more bodies outside the reactor’s entrance. The first was another victim of the Lightning Materia and was in a more or less identical state to the woman. The bolt having shot through the corpse from the top of the head right down to the ground through his feet. This time the massive electrical discharge had practically exploded the poor villagers’ head. Zangan moved onwards quickly, his heart sinking even further as he recognised the body lying in a pool of his own blood ten paces further on. Tifa’s father.

He had been gutted, a deep incision across his upper belly had lain open his flesh and his intestines were all over the place. Splashes of blood had stained and flecked his deathly pale flesh and a pool of the crimson fluid had gathered around him, filling ruts and boot prints in the packed-earth and detritus covered ground. His eyes, open, were staring blankly, though half-rolled up in his head.

Zangan wanted to move on right away, however he spared a further moment to take one last look, knowing that it was pointless. Though it did reveal that the Mayor of Nibelheim was not long deceased, the body barely cold. Though a check for a carotid pulse revealed nothing and the flow of blood from the wound that had laid him open, all the way back to his spine, was still. Zangan looked into Mayor Lockhart’s face one last time and realised in that moment that his eyes weren’t actually rolled up in his head but were staring over at the metal staircase that led up to the entrance door of the reactor.

The grizzled, grey haired martial arts teacher, rose and stepped towards the metal stairs but something in the ground beside the body of Tifa’s father caught his eye. A small hole in the earth. A vaguely wedge-shaped impression that was a couple of inches in length. It wasn’t a perfect cross-section of the shape; the mark showed a scooped and shallowing pointed-end and a slightly mangled side edge.

He recognised what he was seeing and the story it was telling him, just like analysing an animal track - like a claw mark of a wolf paw as it walked forward through mud, the slip of the claw altering the shape of the print as the animal lifted its paw from the ground. This track was no claw of course, it was the cross-sectional wedge shape of a sword blade, an occidental style sword blade, single edged and curved and incredibly sharp and strong. Wutai steel. Someone had stabbed their sword into the ground, surprisingly as it was never a clever idea, and then someone had pulled it out again. The same someone or a different someone, it was impossible to determine. Although he noted the small, lightweight boot tracks alongside the sword leading at a run toward the stairs. They were overlapping thicker, larger, heavier boot tracks that had already made the same journey.

And he knew who it would be and he knew who the sword would have belonged to - ‘Masamune’ one of a pair of Odachi, previously owned and carried by a renowned Wutai war chief and taken from his corpse early on in ’93 as a spoil of the war. It had been rewarded to Sephiroth following his first famous victory in the same war and had since become synonymous with the silver haired Poster-Boy of SOLDIER.

Zangan ran, leaping up the metal stairs and slipping through the already open door that led into the reactor proper.

The interior of the reactor was maze-like, though there did seem to be a main pathway, of sorts - of ladders and makeshift gantries, that had been hurriedly welded onto the piping structure throughout the reactor. The pathway led over the top of a deep shaft of exposed Lifestream, the blue-green brilliance throwing gorgeous dances of colour across the otherwise unimaginative and utilitarian colours of constructions - the faded, dull, bought-in-bulk off-yellows and the coppery browns of rust, the bland greys of untreated metals and concrete.

Zangan followed his instincts and progressed up ladders and across gantries, links of dull steel or rusted chain, bolted from concrete wall to concrete wall as makeshift supports and guardrails. He pushed on, moving as quickly as he could. At one point having to tightrope-walk across a steel pipe less than a foot in diameter. Until, in a room bathed in Lifestream illumination, he crossed another gantry, which was essentially a ladder spot-welded to the top of a thick horizontal pipe, and found himself on a shallow concrete shelf, standing in front of an open door with a glowing, yet dim, red light beyond it. He walked through the thick doorway and found himself in some kind of weird experimentation chamber.

The rear of the room was filled with staggered floor-to-ceiling racks, with a central metallic staircase that terminated in front of an arched doorway. Atop the doorway, which was wide open, there was a metal sign proclaiming, in bold capitals stamped into the plate, the word ‘Jenova’. It was not a word he was familiar with.

Filling the racks, the central staircase bisecting them, were twelve strange looking capsules, each a good nine feet in height and vaguely egg shaped, with a small circular window up near the top. They were all labelled ‘Stage 5’ though again, without some kind of context, the meaning was lost on him. There were six pods on either side of the steep metal staircase and the racks were separated into three levels, with four pods on each level. Masses of flexible piping and thick, taped-together clusters of wires emerged from the pitch-black shadows up at the ceiling to trail downward and plug into the backs of each of the dozen pods. More flexi-pipes also ran beneath and between the pods, and beneath each of the narrow gangplanks in front of the huge, strange eggs. Notably, the gangplanks of all three levels, as well as the central staircase, were all devoid of clutter.

Zangan noticed two more unusual elements in the room, one after the other in quick succession. The first was that the second pod on the left in the middle rack was angled wrong, still secure but dipping forward, decidedly off kilter.
The second was Tifa.
He ran to the girl, at the first gangplank on the right at the lowest level. She was mostly hidden in shadow and concealed by a number of the great thick flexi-pipes. She lay there on her side, her brown felt Stetson hat lay on the metal walkway beside her. He remembered the outfit; it had been something she had sent away for from a mail order catalogue. She was still wearing rest of the outfit - a fashion-spoof of ‘Old Mideel’ style rancher’s gear. Skimpy brown suede miniskirt and waistcoat with patterned tooling, tassels and pockets, tooled hide boots with a stocky, two-inch heel, and the hat. Unsurprisingly, she appeared to be wearing her favourite kind of white vest-top beneath the unbuttoned waistcoat.

He knelt at her side and then saw the sweat covering her pale, blemish-less flesh, soaked into her long, near-black hair and yet she was shivering. And then he saw the blood.

Because she was on her side, he couldn’t see the extent of her injury. He could see that she was alive, though due to her sweat soaked, weakened and barely conscious state, she certainly appeared very seriously wounded. He ran fingertips gently down her spine from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, searching for a spinal injury and thankfully finding none. And then he gently and carefully rolled her over onto her back. She whimpered weakly as he moved her, her limbs flopping, head lolling, all but lifeless.

Her little cropped white vest-top was no longer white but mostly red. A thick, sticky, dark red. And the same colour had soaked into much of the front flaps of her suede waistcoat as well, blackening them.

Her heavy young breasts spread out naturally across her upper chest as she was rolled flat onto her back, for some reason she wasn’t wearing the second layer of a ‘supportive’ undergarment this time. The movement of her breasts drew the saturated vest-top apart too, revealing that it had been bisected from neck to hem. It also revealed the extent of her wound - a six-inch long slice, reaching from her solar plexus, up between her breasts to part way up her sternum. And blood was running from it.

He could see clearly, even under the pooling, drooling flow of blood that the, he assumed, sword slice had bit into her actual breast bone, though possibly not the whole way through it.

This was bad. It was really a minor miracle that she was still breathing at all. And there was now a pool of blood beneath her that wasn’t much smaller in diameter than her father’s had been.

Zangan thought fast, firstly applying pressure to the wound with both hands, ignoring the softness of her breasts under his palms and the horrible grating sound of her scored sternum bending under pressure. However, the blood simply began to well up between his fingers.

It was deathly silent inside the reactor, which he thought unusual, as he would have expected all kinds of humming and bubbling and rattling and machinery noises. However, the silence alerted him to the rotary whirling of approaching helicopters. Three or four of them by the sound of it.

Great, that meant his time was running out too. It could only be the Shin-Ra.

A noise of movement, somewhere behind him drew Zangan’s attention away from the possibly dying girl. The sudden sound had originated from the movement of the spiky haired young SOLDIER, who had apparently been the reason for the half-toppled pod. He was obviously alive though appeared almost as badly injured as Tifa, with at least a couple of fresh sword wounds to his name. He rolled onto his side and slid off the buckled, concave rear of the damaged pod, groaning weakly, then dragged himself heavily over to the central staircase.

“They’re coming…” The young SOLDIER grunted weakly. “…You hear them?”

“I do.” Zangan replied. “This blood isn’t clotting quickly enough.”
“Here…”
Zangan watched the black-haired boy, really only three or four years older than Tifa, reach into a belt pouch and pull out a small green Materia orb. He tossed it to the older man who caught it in one slippery, blood gorged hand, immediately realising it to be a Cure Materia and an almost Mastered level one at that.
“Thank you.”
Zangan used the Materia orb four times on Tifa’s chest wound in quick succession, watching the blood flow slowing. However, it still wasn’t stopping completely.

“This won’t be enough. I need to take her out of here.” He muttered to himself.
“She can’t be here when they arrive, no telling what they’d do. Same goes for you… And I guess, maybe me. This mission’s been a total bust.”

Zangan looked back at the young Shin-Ra employee, wondering about how he was feeling about his employers right now. Then he caught the spiky-haired boy’s eye and shrugged heavily, offering him a rather regretful expression.

“I can’t carry you both, soldier.”
“I understand, I have to find my friend, anyway. He’ll be around here somewhere. You take her and get her to safety.”
“Thank you… I’m sorry, son.”
“Don’t worry about it, just save the kid. Will ya…?”
Then the young SOLDIER looked down at Tifa for a long moment, as the sound of the helicopters grew loud. He gave a little characteristic smirk, not that Zangan would know.
“…She’s way too cute to live only this long... Be a real waste…”
Then his smile inverted to a pained grimace but when he held Zangan’s eyes with his own, they were clear and focussed and revealed a surprising depth of grim determination.
“You really need to get going.” He said.
Zangan nodded. He hurriedly tore a strip off his travelling cloak, rolled it up and then used it to pad Tifa’s bloody wound, hoping to stem the flow. Then he retrieved the girl’s slender little waistbelt, that was secured within the loops of her miniskirt, to pin the padding in place. It was embarrassing to have to manually push her breasts together around the wadded padding of his cloak and then buckle the belt across them, but he worked as fast and mindlessly as he could until he was satisfied that the belt and makeshift dressing should remain in place.

Then he hoisted her up onto his back, equalising their combined centres-of-gravity to make travelling quicker and easier, her chest against his upper back, lolling head against his shoulder and her legs essentially scissored around his waist, his arms hooked under her thighs, his hands securing her in place by gripping hold of his own wide leather waistbelt.

“Good luck.” He said to the boy before heading back the way he had come, with Tifa now secure on his back.
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Final Fantasy 7. Tifa Lockhart: Journey to Midgar.