WHO: Seifer and YOU! Yes, you. With the hair. WHAT: Arrival! And also fleeing from the certainty of cops. >.> WHEN: Tonight! WHERE: Random street/sidewalk in Lawrence. WARNINGS: If you don't count the possibility of the fuzz? Nada!
Seifer liked his sleep. Could you blame him? After everything that had happened over the past few months, he was finally back to being his own man. There were no future Sorceresses ordering him around and no paramilitary or school rules to follow. It was just him, Fujin, Raijin, and some fish. Or it would be if any of them other than Raijin could actually catch a damn thing. What did they want, he was a mercenary, not a fisherman! Though really, he didn’t mind not catching anything. For him, fishing wasn’t about catching things. It was about two things: Having fun with his friends, the way he should’ve been all those months he was off leading an army and letting a twisted Sorceress tapdance on his psyche, and patience. Hyne knew he didn’t have much of that, and more than once he’d had an argument with Raijin about how long they were going to have to wait for a bite. But that was the point of the exercise. Part of what always got him into trouble was his impatience. Waiting on the bank of a lake for a fish to nibble on a squirmy little worm on a hook would teach him patience better than any smartly dressed instructor sitting behind a desk. If there was one thing he’d learned since coming to this little lake with his friends is that fish were more fickle than instructors. Of course, that was the theory. In practice, it just meant that Seifer had a lot of time to sleep while keeping one hand on a fishing rod, hoping that the feel of a bite would be enough to wake him up. It was nice to be able to do that, though. Being Ultimecia’s knight hadn’t left him much time for sleep, and the pressure of it hadn’t allowed him to sleep well on the few opportunities he’d had. There were some nights he still couldn’t, some nights he still saw the Lunar Cry over Esthar and heard the screams of dying innocents. That was part and parcel of a man in his position, though. He’d done these horrible things, and he would just have to deal with the ghosts for the rest of his life. Maybe he didn’t brood about it like Squall would have, but that didn’t mean for one second that he didn’t think he deserved the punishment all the same. Still, some nights he slept. Some nights he slept pretty well, and if he maybe felt a twinge of guilt about that from time to time, well, that was normal, right?
What wasn’t normal was falling asleep on the bank of a lake and waking up as your ass collided with hard pavement where a lawn chair was supposed to have been cushioning it. Teleportation wasn’t entirely unheard of, of course. He’d even done it a few times. Problem was it was always with a Sorceress, and always one controlled by Ultimecia. So before he’d even had a chance to register the pain in his tailbone from colliding with hard pavement, Seifer was on his feet, Hyperion drawn and at the ready in his right hand, his left extended out palm-first with fingers curled, as the flames of a Fire spell waiting to go off danced along his curled fingers. His long white coat fell about his ankles, the red bladed crosses on either arm stretching as his shoulders strained against them. If Squall had somehow failed to defeat Ultimecia, Seifer was damn sure going to back the right horse, this time. Utilizing his years of paramilitary training, Seifer quickly took note of a few details: He wasn’t alone. There were people on the street all around him, though more than a few were backing away from the guy that suddenly drew steel and was apparently unaffected by his hand being on fire. There were cars fighting through typical urban traffic. Fujin and Raijin were nowhere to be seen, though that didn’t surprise him. What did surprise him was that there was no telltale ripple in space that usually marked the opening or closing of the spatial distortion needed for teleportation. Even Ultimecia couldn’t get around that, which left him drawing the unpleasant conclusion that whoever was behind this was not Ultimecia. Some other force from far enough in the future that they had discovered alternative means of teleportation, one that didn’t need to distort space? Theoretically possible, but what motive was there for that? SeeD had already proved that even after a successful Time Compression, they could reverse it. Would someone from a more advanced future really try the same trick again?
No, he was forced to admit. This was something else. Another second and he was forced to admit that he was in no immediate danger, so with a semi-disappointed grunt, he drew the energies for the Fire spell back into him and dropped his left hand back to his side. He didn’t put away the Hyperion, though he did let it fall out of a ready position and down to his side. No immediate danger meant it was time to do a little fact-finding. Maybe there were better ways, but right now Seifer was in no mood for covert ops. Instead he just turned, stormed over to the closest pedestrian as he passed, and grabbed the guy’s arm to spin him around. “Where are we,” he demanded sharply, eyes narrowed at the man. The facial scar probably helped him look intimidating, as did the gunblade still held at his side.
“Dude, what are you o-”
Growling, Seifer lashed out with his left hand, shoving the man into a nearby shop wall and pressing down on his chest to pin him there. “Where. Are. We?”
“Lawrence! We’re in Lawrence, Kansas, Jesus Christ dude is that a sw-”
“Where the hell is that,” Seifer interrupted, uninterested in answering some pleeb’s questions. “Galbadia? Esthar?” Neither seemed likely. The technological level looked good, but not Estharian, and Galbadia’s designs often catered less to the sleek and more to the opulent. Balamb took some cues from both, but tended towards Galbadian design as well. Besides, he’d just been in Balamb and had grown up there, and this didn’t look like Balamb.
“Dude, what the hell are you talking about? What’s Galbadia? This is America you nutca-”
“America?” Okay, this was bizarre. He’d never heard of any nation called America, and part of growing up at a mercenary school meant you memorized every nation in the world before you could drive. Could he have been wrong about the direction of the travel? Could he have somehow been pulled to the future, where it was at least theoretically possible that new nations could have arisen? It would explain why someone wouldn’t have heard of Galbadia, but if that was the case, why wasn’t the technology more advanced? Esthar had better tech than this in the present, and Balamb and Galbadia were only a little bit behind. Or…was he somewhere else entirely? Some other plane, maybe? That was absolutely a possibility, something he’d learned while serving Ultimecia. It would explain the discrepencies in the other various theories he’d come up with. If that was the case, then there wasn’t really anything the poor guy he was holding against the wall could really tell him. With a sigh, he relented, taking his hand off the guy’s chest and taking a few steps back. “Sorry,” he muttered, his free hand coming up in a universal non-threatening position, while he quickly sheathed the Hyperion with his other hand. “Sorry. Bad trip. Just…really bad trip.” And with that he took off at a run, winding his way through the crowd as fast as he could, even as the guy pulled out a little phone, probably to alert the police about the crazy guy with a sword running around. “Fuu, Rai, I could really use you guys right about now…”