cadets npc account. (cadetsnpcs) wrote in missions, @ 2012-10-24 21:59:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | ! narrative, npc: white seed, plot: a white ship |
TUESDAY NIGHT, IN TRENO.
Doctor Tot was not the most sensible of men. He knew this; everyone in Treno knew it. While working in Esthar he was an undisputed genius, and his tendency to forget house keys, appointments, or to put trousers on before leaving the house, was easily overlooked. But he was no longer in Esthar. When Adel was successfully captured and the city disappeared, Tot had been on research business in Lindblum, seeking grants from the Regent for a new synthetic materia endeavor. He had never been able to go home, and stripped of his funds, his belongings, and his research, had had to start over. But he was an optimistic man, and more importantly, a smart man. Over the next decade, he built a name for himself, tutoring wealthy children in everything from astronomy to alchemy, and in late 2008, settled into retirement in a small apartment overlooking the Treno waterfront.
Aleks Mayhew was one such student. An astonishingly bright boy with the work ethic of a shoopuf and the attitude of a fire flan, teaching him materia synthesis and mechanics had been arguably the most challenging task of Tot's considerable career. But he was not a man to dwell on past slights--or rather, to remember them. Half a decade after Aleks left his tutelage, all Tot had was a sort of dimly glowing pride for his star pupil. And several years after that, when Aleks showed up in Treno with a proposition, Tot couldn't turn him away.
The young man was loitering on Tot's doorstep, smiling casually at passersby who wondered at the handsome new ornament for Tot's porch. He winked at the girls (because what was he if not an adept and studious connoisseur of all that was leggy and beautiful?) and checked his phone idly, for all the world some errant student coming to check in with his professor. It wasn't entirely false.
Tot dropped his keys twice before he looked up and noticed the man on his step, each time drifting back down the street as if he'd just remembered an errand, then shaking his head and moving once again towards the steps. He greeted his student with a startled, "Oh! Hyne's trousers!"
"Doctor," Aleks said easily, pushing away from the doorstep. "Long time, no see. You don't write, you don't call..."
"Well, it's quite difficult with all that moving around, Mr. Mayhew!" Tot said, bustling passed him to the door with a quick glance in either direction. His neighborhood was strictly residential, its inhabitants comprised almost entirely of middle-aged or elderly couples whose children had long since left them to their own tottering devices. The two men slipped inside, into the home-cum-lab where Tot spent the majority of his time. The roof of the brownstone had been removed and replaced with a massive telescope, trained on the skies. Experiments and copper-wire chemist sets littered every surface that wasn't covered in books or notes. On the far windowsill sat a kind of metronome with a large glimmering materia orb at the end of its needle; next to it sat a sort of cat, squashy and misshapen, who leapt with a soft mrow off the sill and trotted directly past its owner to the new guest. Like every other feline Aleks would say he met, the cat began rubbing almost instantly against his legs.
Tot made tea while Aleks picked up the cat, wandering from experiment to experiment with idle curiosity. After pleasantries and updates had been exchanged, Aleks did not waste time. "We need your help, Tot."
"Oh?" Tot said, digging out tea biscuits from deep within a cupboard. "I'd have thought, what's his name? Pumpernickle?"
"Humperdinck."
"Yes, that's it. Doesn't he take care of all these things for you?"
Aleks shrugged, scratching the cat behind its ears. "He's stumped. And you know that's saying something." Tot turned to look at him, his spectacles sliding down his nose in surprise. "Gustoff is, you know. He's too rooted in the mechanical. Convinced a machina can fix this problem. But I think we need more of a magical solution."
"A materia."
Aleks nodded. Tot came over with the tin of biscuits still clasped in his arthritic hands, and sat down slowly at the table. "Tell me again, what...?"
"We've found the kidnapped sorceresses," Aleks said again, shifting the cat off his lap so he could lean forward on the table. The animal hissed at him in disgust and trotted away to find a sunny spot against the window. "But they're--petrified, somehow. It's not a standard Petrification spell. Not even an advanced Break spell. They almost look like materia themselves, all crystalline and translucent. We took a sample, but we can't get a conclusive verdict. There's a lot of Mako readouts--Tot?"
The old scientist's eyes had glazed over, a tea biscuit halfway to his cup. Aleks glanced behind him to make sure there wasn't some large man looming over his shoulder with, say, a halberd or a gunblade at the ready (his thoughts drifted half-heartedly to their pink-haired new recruit, and the icy glare she would have given him if she'd known; and then drifted just as quickly to the leggy singer, and then he thought maybe he should focus). "Tot?" he said again, and snapped at the air in front of his old tutor's face. "Tot, come on, if you're lapsing into senility right in front of me, I'm leaving."
"Crystal stasis," Tot said suddenly, and without waiting, had dropped the crumbling biscuit to dash across the room, digging through paperwork and texts. "I thought it was just a myth...!"
"Crystal stasis?" Aleks repeated, following him to the books.
Tot waved a hand vaguely. "It's a spell, an old spell--the Cetra knew of it, with their direct line to the Planet and to the Lifestream."
"This sounds like a lot of Yevonite bullshit," Aleks groaned.
"Not at all, my boy, not at all!" Tot said, his voice rising in excitement. "Ancient texts describe how Cetra summoners were able to--to take a living soul and, for all intents and purposes, lock it in a pillar of crystal. Most scholars simply thought this was a crude form of Petrification, but if you examine the literature closely, you see it's so much more than that. It didn't kill the participants--"
"Participants?"
"Yes! The first people to be locked into crystal stasis were willing to do so. They were loved ones of the Cetra summoners. The term, I believe, is a fayth. Some scholars even believe that these fayths, once awakened, presented with special powers--the first Aeons."
Aleks scoffed. "So you're saying these sorceresses are going to turn into Aeons?" he said, and then paused. "Then again, I wouldn't mind a couple more Shivas running around."
Tot looked sternly at him over the rim of his glasses, and Aleks shrugged. "No, that's not possible anymore," Tot continued, upsetting a stack of books and scaring the cat in the process. "It would have to be performed by a true Cetra, a full-blooded Ancient, for that to even be--that is, if that was even the case, scholars are still divided--well, regardless! My point is, crystal stasis can't be achieved without a significant connection between the sorceress and the Planet."
"A Cetra. They're extinct, Tot, everyone knows that."
"I didn't say Cetra," Tot said, flipping open the massive tome he sought and poring from page to page. "A sorceress only needs to be connected to the Planet. She needs to have the Lifestream coursing through her. And nowadays, the best place to find Lifestream--"
Aleks stared at him, his eyes wide. "Mako."
"A lot of Mako. And the only place you can get a substantial quantity of Mako is--"
"Shin-Ra. But that's impossible. She killed their president, for fuck's sake."
"Don't swear."
"Sorry."
Tot flipped over half a dozen pages, glancing quickly at illustrations and archaic instructions before moving on. "She could be working with Shin-Ra. With Rufus, perhaps. He was never fond of the way his father ran the company, placating everyone with money. Perhaps they wish to bring in--a new regime."
"So--what. She gets injected with Mako like a SOLDIER recruit, goes on a killing spree, fucks--sorry, screws--up Balamb Garden's SeeDs, trashes Galbadia Garden, and kidnaps two dozen sorceresses. For what? For Shin-Ra?"
Tot shrugged noncommittally. "Shin-Ra has never been known for their clear machinations. Greater forces might be at work here."
Aleks began to pace, his hand gesturing inarticulately in front of him as he tried to organize his thoughts. "The kids from Balamb, they were saying Edea wanted the 'Last Ancient.' That she was after the Promised Land. And she's been turning sorceresses into crystal--crystal stasis. Do you think she's..." He sighed, shutting his eyes, trying to think straight. "What if the Aeon thing is true? What if she's trying to make a fayth, but can't do it because she's not a Cetra?"
"Making a new Aeon?" Tot mused, looking up briefly. "Well, it's as likely as anything else, I suppose. What does the Promised Land have to do with that?"
"I don't know!" Aleks snapped, throwing his hands up. Tot looked at him coolly, and he tempered his voice. "No one even knows what the Promised Land is. Maybe you need a fayth to get there. Maybe it's some kind of super Aeon that she's going to use to fu--destroy everything." He sighed and sat back down in his chair, heavily. "Maybe it's nothing."
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Aleks' chin dropping into his hand. Tot flipped page after page in the massive tome. The cat mewed mournfully across the kitchen, waiting for someone to come over and pay attention to it. The materia metronome ticked the seconds by, one-two-three-four. "What are you looking for, anyway?" Aleks said, finally, peering up at the doctor.
Tot didn't respond for another moment or two, and then paused, reading down the length of a page with his finger following his eyes, tracing the words. "Aha!" he said, slapping the page cheerfully. "Regardless her intentions, there's a simple solution."
"What?"
The doctor set the massive, yellowed book on the table in front of his former student, and together they stared at a large, elaborate drawing of a milky-green materia orb. "A cure. The Supersoft. An ancient--Ancient, even--materia, but we should still be able to synthesize it, or a decent facsimile. I knew I had something in here."
Aleks ran his eyes over the page, taking in all the details. "Some of these ingredients--Tot, I don't even know where you'd get a Curse Spike."
Tot waved him off dismissively. "We may need your father's money for that, my boy, but trust me, I can get them. This will cure your sorceresses, if we can formulate it and get it back to your ship."
Aleks grinned. "Then let's get to work."