Chapter Text
Gaia withered into a barren husk of her former self, broken memories of things that once were. The seas boiled and evaporated, the skies turned dark and heavy, then the lands cracked and turned brittle splintering apart as if tiny shards of broken glass. Nothing grew, nothing breathed, nothing lived.
The planet died…and this is the moment our story starts.
It’s not much of a beginning, as stories go – more of an ending really – but it was at this moment that a change was made. This wasn’t the first time Gaia had perished, but it would hopefully be the last.
Stories like these usually start with ‘once upon a time’, but in truth, it was more along the lines of ‘once upon a many-of-times’. I’m telling it all wrong, you are probably horribly confused now. Here, let me try again.
In the beginning – the very beginning, not the beginning of our story – a calamity came to the planet, and her name was Jenova. The Cetra – or Ancients as they were to be called later – sealed her away to keep her from poisoning the lifestream, the very soul of the planet itself. Mankind, in all their folly, found her eons later and experimented with what was left of her withered corpse. Curiosity drove the species to great heights, and so it would drive them to extinction as well.
Resurrected in those that carried her cells, Jenova continued her destruction of the planet, only to be stopped by a hero. Well, more like the Hero, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. You see, the Hero and his allies killed the Son of the Calamity and in doing so, they killed Jenova.
Where the Cetra had chosen sealed her away, now she was dead. Or was she?
That very thing that stopped the Cetra from killing the Calamity, choosing to seal her away instead of just ending her…that choice granted Gaia thousands of years of peace. With Jenova dead however, well, she poisoned the lifestream from within, just like the Cetra had predicted.
And so, the planet died. A fate not fitting for the victor, no, it wasn’t really fitting at all.
Using the last remnants of the lifestream, Gaia rewound time to a pinnacle moment – the pinnacle moment – and tried again, whispering into the mind of the newborn Hero. And the Hero…well, he went insane, killed Jenova along with many others, and Gaia died once more.
Gaia made a second attempt, whispered less, and the Hero killed Jenova along with a few others that shouldn’t have died before killing himself. So, Gaia made a third attempt, and then a fourth, and a fifth, and then many more attempts followed. So very many that even Gaia was no longer certain how long she had been stuck in this never-ending loop of death and failure.
On and on it went. Each time the Hero prevailed in the worst way possible, and each time the planet withered into a husk. Gaia even tried to find a different Hero…but that had by far the worst outcome and she almost was unable to rewind. Another Hero was never chosen again.
Gaia had tried nearly every combination in order to preserve the planet, but nothing seemed to work.
If the Hero remembered, then so did the Son of the Calamity. If Gaia tried to impede upon Jenova’s attempt for control, the Hero failed at some difficult and extremely vital task. If Gaia aided the Hero too much, then the Son of the Calamity became that much harder to kill. And so, Gaia died, again and again and again.
Gaia was tired, and let a few renditions play out without any interference (these were by far the closest to an actual win the planet was able to get, but even those ended in devastation). And somehow, Jenova still managed to poison the lifestream every single time. Inspired – if a planet could be inspired – Gaia made another attempt (hopefully to be the last), but kept it very, very small. Thirteen changes, that was all the planet allowed.
Thirteen was, after all, a lucky number.
Thirteen tiny little changes in vastly different times…and that is where our story begins…of a sort. And to make certain we do this right, we need to start off in the correct way with the words that start every story, everywhere.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago something shifted, the ground rumbled, and the earth buckled. Before, during the many renditions, there had been one lone mountain, standing tall in the center of a small cluster of hills. With one little push from Gaia, the plates on her surface crashed into each other where before they had simply touched, and there was no longer just one lone mountain.
Eons later, the largest mountain range on the planet was discovered. It was named Nibelfjöll. It would later be known to outsiders simply as the Nibel Mountains.
Not long after the discovery of Nibelfjöll – just as humans began to truly settle upon the tallest mountain known as Nibelfjall – a heavily pregnant and starving wolf followed the river upstream instead of downstream as she had in the many renditions before. Ravenous and weak from hunger, the she wolf had stumbled into a mako pool while chasing a particularly agile deer. Skin burning from the mako, she followed her nose upstream to where she could smell easy food instead of downstream where she would have found a small cave and died alone in agony, dragging her unborn pups with her.
This small change in direction led her to a nearby group of men who were hurriedly setting up shelter before a storm. Their camp would later grow into a settlement, and that settlement would grow into a village that one day, many years later, would be known as Nibelheimr.
The hunters attacked the female wolf – as was their way – and in her dying moments, two pups were birthed before the lifestream claimed her soul. Instead of killing the pups, a young hunter offered to raise them to hunt alongside them. Nobody commented on the odd glow that their eyes held.
This became a pinnacle moment. A moment where the small sleepy village of Nibelheimr, a backwater mountain settlement nobody knew about, became something else entirely.
Years of careful breeding with various smaller hounds and occasionally another wolf whose eyes would always glow, saw the creation of the Nibel Shepherds, dogs that were notoriously great in shepherding, hauling, hunting, tracking, protection, and combat. And because Gaia loved her little quirks, they always came in soul-bonded pairs – not unlike the Hero and his counterpart, the Son of the Calamity.
A very slight detail, but one that will become especially important later on in our story. But we will put a pin in this for later.
These were the very first changes that Gaia made, minor in the scheme of things, but massive changes for the tiny mountain settlement of Nibelheimr. Where before, in the many restarts that Gaia had implemented, Nibelheimr was just a small village too insignificant to even be marked on most world maps. But this time, there was a small dot on every map of the largest mountain range on the planet.
Nibelheimr – Nibelheim to outsiders – had earned their right to recognition as having the most coveted and rare dog breed in the known world. Hardy hounds with a keen mind, adaptive reasoning, agile bodies, high stamina, unquestionable loyalty, and oddly long lifespan compared to other dogs of any breed. They were trusted in every aspect of society, whether it be as simple pets, working dogs, or as military hounds. And like the region they called home, their training was just as unique.
The training was difficult, and where it would have ruined most dogs, Nibel Shepherds thrived on it. For like the mountain range that they called home, they too were hardy, unyielding, and stubborn. Only someone born to the life of the Nibelfjöll knew how to tame such fickle beasts, and when tested by outsiders, the unknowing, or unwary, they were prone to devastating bouts of destruction.
And so, in this latest – and hopefully last – restart, Nibelheimr wasn’t a village, it was now a renowned town. Groups of various travelers had settled the slopes of the tallest mountain, Nibelfjall, covering most of the entire western facing point from base to near top (nobody ever settled close to the summit, that was where the dragons nested). Tiny villages scattered across the mountain range with Nibelheimr at the center like a heartbeat of a people, the holder of an entire culture, the center of an isolated society.
So, when the Hero was finally born into the world, Nibelheimr was a community of thousands rather than a hundred as it was in all of the previous attempts. Nearly a thousand people lived in the town proper, while most lived in the many smaller surrounding settlements further up the mountain and along the range. These smaller settlements were not marked on any map, their locations and even existence unknown to most outsiders. It was how the people of Nibelfjöll preferred it.
The rest lived in cabins clustering on the mountainside and smaller mountains surrounding the entire range. A large collection of people settled at the base of Nibelfjöll, but those that lived on the mountains proper, considered even those people outsiders.
It was certainly a much more enriching environment for a child.
This small change – a wolf going upstream instead of downstream – brought trade and commerce to a tiny settlement of a dozen. Then it brought explorers and supplies, technology and culture, education and knowledge. Nibelheimr was still a backwater community in the middle of a mountainous nowhere…but this time it wasn’t so backwater and perhaps a little more of a somewhere than it was a nowhere.
The third change Gaia made was possibly the cruelest but the most necessary. The hunter that would one day be the first to carry the name Ó-friðr – a loose translation into the common words of hostility, war…strife – was born on one of the smaller mountains of Nibelfjöll, the furthest to the north. It was there, during the darkest winter in living memory, he came upon a fair-haired maiden lost in the snow. Nobody knew where she had come from, as she wasn’t native to the area and her clothes were ill suited to the climate.
Her skin was pale and her eyes so blue they seemed to glow. He took her home and nursed her back to health. She slept for a moon’s turn before waking, unable to recollect even who she was let alone how she had ended up on the mountains. Despite the fact that she was a clear outsider, she spoke the language as if she had been born on Nibelfjöll.
The first hunter that would carry the name Ó-friðr taught her everything he knew, how to hunt, how to forage, how to follow tracks and read the clouds. Somewhere in all of this teaching, they fell in love, had a child, and decided to move to the much safer town of Nibelheimr to start a new life. His family and many other families of the barely established settlement of Forsvollr packed what they could carry and headed south. After a long and hard winter, what they had to carry wasn’t much, but even still, they moved slower than planned.
This had all been written a thousand times before, and it pained Gaia to change anything about the peaceful life these two would have had, but for the future Gaia envisioned, it had to be done.
A great blizzard came down from the top of the mountains, forcing everyone to abandon that which could not be carried in order to find shelter. The cave they found barely fit the settlers, and none of the horses.
The blizzard lasted twenty-two days. During which, a sickness befell the group, killing off the old, the weak, and the feeble. The man-to-be-called-Ó-friðr lost two of his three living grandparents, his father, and both of his sisters. When they were finally able to leave the safety of the caves, most of their supplies were gone and all of the horses were dead.
They called him Ó-friðr – hostility, war, strife – as he scavenged what meat he could from their once faithful beasts of burden and continued on, refusing to give up despite the disastrous fortune and poor chances. But luck was not on his side.
His last grandfather went to sleep by the fire during an oddly cold night, and he did not wake the next morning. His brother went out to hunt deer for the group of dwindling survivors and never returned. His pregnant sister-in-law fell through a crevasse and her body couldn’t be recovered. His father walked into the trees the next dawn and let the nearby river take him.
Ó-friðr, they called him to his face while whispering cursed under their breaths. Despite all of this, he was determined to see them up the mountain and safely to the town that had promised them such a wonderful new life. He never got to see the town, having died less than two miles from Nibelheimr. He drowned after diving into a lake to save a child who had fallen through the ice. When the remaining survivors of the expedition finally reached Nibelheimr, a blonde woman and her equally blonde son trailing behind, rumors flowed and spread like wildfire.
The woman was a witch, they said, claiming that it was she that had brought misfortune down upon that poor family and those that traveled with them. The child was cursed, they whispered, claiming his oddly blue eyes to be proof of being a spawn of evil.
Where before the family had settled Nibelheimr with twelve in their clan, able to claim a large swath of land near the center of the town to build a house big enough to hold such a large family, now there were only two. A witch mother and a cursed child. Their plot of land was much smaller than most, at the very edge of civilization, it rested against the deep dark woods of the snowy mountain.
Stories, legends, folktales, and rumors would follow the Ó-friðr family, later to be called Strife in the common language that was brought in by more and more traders.
Past Nibelheimr however, the language of their ancestors prevailed. It was so much harder to stamp out a culture when that culture was so determined to remain separate and hidden. What use was the common tongue to a people that prayed to gods that the rest of the world had forgotten? What use was the common tongue to the mountains that bowed to no mortal?
The old gods of the Nibel Mountains were cruel, harsh, and indifferent…but on occasion they were willing to listen and acquiesce to those that prayed to them. The common tongue had no home in the hardened lands, the gods that dwelled there only responded to the old language of the ancestors. Whether their response was to aid or hinder was another matter entirely.
The rumors of the Strife family weren’t truly believed, but the human mind was always fascinated by the what if. Those same rumors would one day drive the oldest Strife daughter down the mountain and far away from Nibelheimr, the first of the mountain people to leave in over a hundred years. She vowed to never return, and she didn’t…at least, for a time.
The fourth change Gaia made was much smaller than the others but was no less significant. There was a woman who was traveling to Midgar to seek a better future for herself. On the way there, an unexpected gust of wind caused a pebble to shift under her path, and the heel of her left shoe came loose quite suddenly. Forced to seek aid, she stopped at Cosmo Canyon where she met a strange old man with a long white beard who had a bizarre obsession with tea.
As her shoe was being repaired, that same strange old man let her stay in his home with his odd talking feline-like companions and taught her the art of tea making. He was certainly peculiar, but she put it to the back of her mind as she continued her journey, several days delayed.
Years later, while waiting for her husband to return from the war, she came into the possession of an unexpected child. Soon after, flowers started to bloom around her home and the old church just down the way. When she made a home in Midgar, widowed and with a child she now called her daughter, overlooking the flowers from her kitchen window, she couldn’t help but think back on the old man and his wonderfully delicious tea.
And so, she began experimenting with the plants and flowers that grew, trying to replicate the tea but always falling just short. Her daughter, seeing her determination to make the perfect cup of tea, began to learn the art herself to help her mother on her quest.
Remember this part, it becomes important later.
Change number five was as simple as it was vital. Due to Nibel Mountain now being a massive range, the weather conditions and temperatures that plagued Nibelheimr were much more severe than any other in the world, as were the people. Careful planning had to be made if a mako reactor was to ever be built on Nibelfjöll, especially since this time there was absolutely no cooperation from the locals, whereas before there had been a begrudging assistance.
And this time, there was a series of unfortunate and frustrating events that befell the planning process that Gaia had absolutely no hand in…except for one teensy little spill.
Late at night, on a Tuesday that was almost a Wednesday, the battery of a smoke detector quite suddenly died, causing the incredibly loud and high-pitched beep to shatter the silence in the room. This caused an overcaffeinated man to jump as he was pouring coffee over his desk, spilling the hot liquid on his hands. In sudden agony, he dropped both the pot and the cup onto his desk, splattering dark coffee and broken glass over the very important blueprint draft and the dozens of papers scattered about.
Furious and in pain, the young man slammed his burnt hands on the desk and threw the ruined months of hard work to the floor before he screamed and stormed out of his office. Several days later, the project to place a reactor on Nibelheimr was scrapped. A recommendation soon came across the president’s desk of several much more viable – and possibly more profitable – locations that would cost the company a lot less money to build…and a lot less frustration.
The recommendation was dropped off by a tired looking man with bandages on his hands.
A mako reactor was never built in Nibelheimr, and neither was a manor to house the employees – and several secret well known projects – in the future. Nibelheimr and Nibelfjöll remained untouched and uninfluenced by outside forces.
Gaia’s sixth change was rather simple but necessary for what the planet believed would be needed for the future if it were ever to survive the Calamity. A small tremor caused a landslide just outside of Midgar. This interrupted the travel of a merchant caravan and an eldest daughter fleeing from her childhood home and the town in which her family was shunned. She wasn’t traveling anywhere in particular, just away. She had stumbled upon the caravan three days from the base of Nibelfjöll. The older couple that was leading the caravan took her in and treated her like one of their own.
Two days into moving rocks, a wandering traveler happened upon them and insisted on helping with the landslide. And so, the fleeing eldest daughter and the wandering man met two years early. They fell deeply in love…or at least they did for one passionate night. The next morning, the rocks were cleared, and the wandering traveler was gone leaving behind an angry soon-to-be mother.
It didn’t take the eldest daughter long to realize she was pregnant, and with no money, no plan, and no support, she accepted her fate and turned back. She returned to Nibelheimr less than a moon’s turn before the baby was due to a house that only her younger sister occupied. She was dressed all in black.
Nothing had changed except for the new circle of scorched earth in their backyard where a pyre had been burnt. Her sister stayed with her for a time, to help with the baby, but one day the grief of losing their parents simply became too much, and the new mother woke to an empty house and a hungry son.
Her sister never came home, and she never bothered to look. She knew that while her anger had taken her down the mountain, her sister’s grief had taken her up it. There was no returning from the top of the mountain, and she mourned her sister in the quiet darkness of the night while her son slept.
Her son, the Hero, was born two years (minus seven days) before his time. Gaia knew that this would make the Hero’s early years harder than they ever were before, but it was necessary to set the stage for the last time.
With no reactor and no mansion, Nibelfjöll was nearly untouched by the outside world…nearly. Nibelheimr became a remote trade town, rich in resources and protected by extreme weather and local wildlife. Hidden beneath the snow and stone of the mountains, from tectonic plates smashing together with such force ages and ages ago, lay bountiful amounts of mythril. A rare and covetous metal that was highly desired, priced, and sought after. It also had the fortunate side effect of interfering with radios, electronics, and even with satellite imaging.
The people of Nibel traded in furs, lumber, various metals, rare herbs, and even the occasional materia and crystalized mako shards. They kept the mythril to themselves, only ever mining as much as they needed and not an ounce more. In exchange, they imported luxury items the Nibel people desired, as the mountain range provided every need. Trade was very profitable, but not nearly as common as most merchants didn’t bother to make the treacherous climb up the Nibel Mountains.
Shinra’s presence on Nibelfjöll was non-existent. And with the untapped resources and failed reactor project, Shinra tried to find a foothold into Nibelheimr another way.
Seen as outsiders, the Nibel people were unwilling to work with Shinra in any capacity outside of basic trade. They didn’t allow outsiders further up the mountain range, didn’t allow them to stay anywhere but at the inn with its limited space, and certainly didn’t allow them to even speak to any citizen outside of what was necessary for trade. The language barrier was the biggest hurdle.
The people that lived in Nibelheimr knew the common language, but few chose to speak it unless absolutely necessary. And as Nibel was a language unlike any other, decoding or learning it was impossible unless taught by a native speaker…and native speakers did not teach it to outsiders, by law.
With no way to get a foothold into Nibelheimr, Shinra decided to send a representative to open negotiations to hopefully gain some sort of control. If they couldn’t build a reactor or an outpost, then they hoped to at least establish some sort of contract of forced loyalty.
The man Shinra sent was known as the Grim Reaper. Grimwell Bowens was a man renowned for closing ironclad deals so in favor of Shinra that the opposing party would have been better off making a deal with the devil. He was also known for extracting confessions from even the most stubborn of people, but that knowledge was only for the Turks. To the public, he was unknown, just the way he preferred it.
President Shinra would call upon him when he needed to cover up the massacre of civilians in Wutai and spin it into a PR campaign that boost recruiting for Shinra’s army…or to strong arm a stubborn community into near indentured servitude. He was only option for the company to bring Nibeheimr into Shinra’s fold without starting a war, something the President was unwilling to do while the war with Wutai drained their profits…for now.
Grimwell Bowens was the worst man that could be sent to Nibelheimr to force the mountain people into Shinra’s fold. So, Gaia tipped things just a bit into her favor – and in the near future in her Hero’s favor as well – by moving a particularly stubborn cloud six miles east.
The Grim Reaper arrived in Nibelheimr on a sunny afternoon near the end of summer. He dropped off his single bag – he didn’t expect to stay more than a day as he usually was able to finalize a contract in just a few hours – and met the Elders across the square at a small meeting hall that also doubled as a coffee shop. The coffee was surprisingly good.
Grimwell liked the general atmosphere and the quaintness of the town well enough, even if he did find the people to be somewhat primitive and the altitude a bit problematic. They used water wheels and solar energy of all things to power their electricity as he had heard rumors of massive quantities of mythril interfering with all other sources of energy. He hoped this deal would pull Nibelheimr into the current century and maybe even get control of their mines. If Nibelfjöll really did have mythril hidden beneath the mountains, the fact that it wasn’t even offered as a trade option to Shinra of all people, was nearly criminal in Grimwell’s opinion.
He was determined to change that.
Barely three hours into negotiations with people that were far more stubborn than he had anticipated, the townspeople were suddenly driven into a frenzy. Grimwell had barely had a chance to ask what was happening before he was being rudely escorted back to the quant inn and told to stay put as there was an unexpected storm on the horizon. One of the inn’s staff members was in his room when he arrived, securing his windows with the odd inside shutters. The outside ones were already locked, from what he could see, casting his room in a dim light.
The storm hit less than an hour later. The winds blew so hard that Grimwell feared that the whole building would come down upon him. For two days he stayed locked in his room, barely talking to the employees that came and went to keep the fire going. On the third day, restlessness overtook him. Out of food and bored, he went down to the lobby where an assortment of merchants, families, and employees were gathered about various game boards and cards. A large cauldron hung over the massive central fireplace, where a young woman was serving a stew out of it to the hungry patrons.
For several days, he watched these strange people, seemingly unbothered as they came and went from the inn in their thick furs and leathers, doing their best to ensure their visitors were fed and warm. A young boy, perhaps not even ten, ran from building to building bringing news each day.
The cold took out Mister Lockheart’s generator, and he and his family are staying with the Porter’s.
A tree came down on Mister Brook’s barn, some of the sheep didn’t make it.
A pack of wolves are taking shelter in Miss Violet’s shed, she thinks one of them had puppies.
Every day for nearly a week Grimwell Bowens sat in that cozy lobby, huddled underneath a soft sheepskin blanket, drank his coffee with goats’ milk, and played some sort of strategy game he still didn’t understand the rules of with an old trader until the storm finally blew over. Tired but relieved, he tied up his fur boots a local had lent him and marched over to the meeting hall in the pathways someone had dug out in the four feet of snow that had fallen since he first arrived.
He could see trees, nearly a hundred feet tall, that had been ripped from the ground and thrown into several buildings. Icicles thicker than his own torso were being chopped off of the roofs and other various structures. Debris and supplies were being collected by the children and put into piles. The people of Nibelheimr went about their day as if a storm hadn’t just torn through their town.
He met the Elders with a quiet reverence for how the citizens of this quant isolated place handled themselves during a crisis. And it was with this respect that he got to work drafting the first of many contracts.
Where normally Grimwell would have worded the contract to always be in Shinra’s favor, this time he was diligent in making it as fair as possible. Because the terrifying truth was, as he penned a coded letter to the President of Shinra Electric himself, that even if they somehow were able to take Nibelheimr with an army, they would never be able to hold it. Not for very long at least. With the extreme temperatures, the unpredictable and severe weather, the dangerous wildlife, and the natural mythril mines interfering with satellite imaging and any communication more advanced than pen and paper, trying to occupy or even control any part of Nibelfjöll was a death sentence.
Grimwell decided it was best for the company to take the loss and instead worked on building a relationship through mutual exchange in order to keep the people of Nibelfjöll in good graces. After all, it wasn’t as if the Nibelians could ever pose a threat to Shinra and their never-ending search for the Promise Land if they refused to leave their mountains.
The man known by Shinra as the Grim Reaper drank a toast with the Elders as they sealed the final contract, shivering in apprehension as they talked about much worse storms that the people of Nibelfjöll had experienced before, in much worse temperatures than negative sixty degrees, winds that had torn buildings apart, and clouds that had dropped enough snow to bury entire settlements. He was stunned to learn that it was what the locals knew simply as a summer storm. Grimwell shuddered to think of experiencing a winter storm.
He couldn’t help but think that the contract they threw together was by far the best outcome for both parties and thanked whatever gods he never believed in as he finally was able to make his way down the mountain and to the helicopter that waited to take him home.
Our eighth change was slightly more drastic and could have gone very wrong if Gaia hadn’t taken precautions to not kill the Hero. It was a risk, a dangerous one that could have backfired, but Gaia needed the Hero to have a sense of the oncoming catastrophic end. Only, he couldn’t be allowed to remember. If the Hero remembered, then so did the Son of the Calamity, and Gaia was not going to make that devastating mistake again.
But the Hero need not remember fully, and Gaia hoped that having a sense of the previous attempts would help aid the Hero in his endeavor to save the planet. In order for that to happen, the Hero needed to be closer to the planet…and there was no place closer than the lifestream.
So, Gaia encouraged a lone carpenter ant queen to make her home in a great fir tree just on the outskirts of Nibelheimr. It would take decades for the ants to kill the tree, years more before it was felled. But when it did, the great tree came down with a resounding boom right onto the town’s schoolhouse.
The Hero was six years old and was brushed to the side with the other children as the townspeople gathered to assess the damage and start repair work. The days would grow long, and the children bored, as the schoolhouse was shut down to be rebuilt. And bored children without supervision would always find trouble.
A group of these troublesome children would lead the others up into the nearby cave system as their parents shooed them away, tired of them being underfoot when they should have been spending their days at school. The Hero followed, not wanting to be the only one left behind. The children found themselves at one of the natural mako pools, the very same one a certain wolf had tripped into an era before, not that they would know anything about that. It was untouched and pure as there was no reactor for thousands of miles, and unknowing of the danger – as children often were – decided to make that pool their new play area.
A dare here, a bit of bullying there, and a small push sent the unfortunate six-year-old Hero right into the pool itself.
Gaia seized the tiny Hero, clutching him close as she wove her web of thoughts and almost memories into his mind, laced his blood with hers, touched his heart with her sorrow and grief and hope, and then pushed him back out once more.
The Hero emerged from the mako pool eight days after he went in, and his mother – she hadn’t left the pool since the children came crying and screaming back into town – pulled his catatonic body down the mountainside like one possessed. She didn’t feel the burns the mako left on her skin and she never bothered to hide the scars that were left from running through the bramble. She chose instead to glare at the townsfolk who had abandoned her son as a lost cause every time someone so much as glanced at them while a storm raged over the entire mountain range.
The storm broke twenty-two days later, the same morning the Hero woke from his near month-long coma, just before his seventh birthday. He opened glowing eyes just slightly more blue than was natural, and frowned as he got the impression that he should be doing something.
Somewhere far away – deep in the jungles of Wutai to be more precise – the Son of the Calamity woke from a restless sleep in a warzone with the odd impression that he too should be doing something.
These two instances are correlated and not unimportant. The next morning, the Hero decided that he should be doing more to help around the house, while the Son of the Calamity decided that he needed to find a way to end the war faster as he was growing quite fed up with the humidity and what it did to his hair.
So, life went on for a long while, with neither the Hero nor the Son of the Calamity any the wiser. And Gaia waited and then she waited some more.
When the Hero was nine, Gaia struck with her next change. A cold wind came in from the north and brought an early chill down upon the mountain. Heavy snowfall stopped trade quickly, stranding several merchants with nowhere to go. They were housed in the local inn but were decidedly unsuited for the early winter. Several became sickly within days. Within a week, the illness had spread to nearly half the town.
Soon the town started to whisper of ill omens, as small towns were wont to do, and it was easy for them to turn their eyes to the strange solitary boy and his equally odd mother who seemed untouched by the illness that ravaged the town. This, of course, had more to do with the mother’s cleanliness and penchant for washing hands before eating, than it did with any sort of witchcraft, but that didn’t stop their neighbors from speculating. After all, the Strife women were witches, and the men were born cursed, or so the legends told.
The Hero, and the woman that bore him, dealt with a harsh winter - the worst that Nibelheimr had seen in nearly a century - and were given no aid or reprieve by their fellow neighbors. And though the Hero and his mother had done nothing to deserve it, they both found themselves at the hostile mercy of the people that they had lived with for years.
Exhausted and furious with the simple-minded people, the Hero’s mother packed up their meager belongings and moved further up the mountain long before the first signs of spring began to appear. Those that lived further out from the town proper were more than happy to help a widow and her son build a cabin and set up a new home, despite the rumors and folktales tied to their family name. After all, what did those that lived in the wilds of Nibelfjöll’s forests care about such stories when every spare moment was spent on surviving the next season. Their time and attention had better use than speculating on rumors.
The town, at least, was happy to see less of them, and sent them housewarming gifts to ease their guilt of forcing a single mother out of her home in the dead of winter. Even if they did still think she was a witch.
The isolation from the town and its people was perhaps rather harsh on Gaia’s part, but she needed the Hero to be as independent, self-sufficient, and capable as possible. So, the Hero grew up alone and nearly entirely isolated – save for his mother, their kind but far-lived neighbors, and the few times they went into town for supplies. In exchange for his isolation, he learned to live from the land and survive in the harshest of places.
And if he grew up friendless, well...Gaia hoped that he would come to cherish the friends he did make later on that much more.
The Hero grew older, grew stronger, and perhaps most importantly, he grew wiser. He helped his mother as much as possible, taking up hunting and foraging to ease some of her burden. He delivered letters and packages to those who lived far on the outskirts of Nibelfjöll, learning much about the mountains and its dangers. And he started to take up odd jobs to bring in some money, so they never had to do without, like the winter when they were run out of the town.
The Hero even grew fond of the kennels that lay not far from his home. He spent his summers with the breeders, learning how to take care of and train the unique and highly prized shepherds his people were renowned for. And if he happened to come to like dogs more than people...well, dogs were considered man's best friend for a reason.
As the Hero continued to grow, so too did the Son of the Calamity – also an outcast among his peers for being not only strange but also frightening – in physique and in mind. He ended the war in Wutai, was promoted to General and reassigned back to Midgar (his hair had never thanked him more). He made tentative friends with two others who were perhaps not quite as strange as he was, but fairly close, and grew an interest in cloud watching. Though he could never explain as to what exactly he found so interesting about them.
As they grew older, Gaia prepared her tenth little change. Somewhere on the plates of Midgar, a cat went into heat a week early. Her yowls of discomfort kept the secretary of Project Development awake into the early hours. Working on only a few hours of sleep, she tiredly searched a stack of files as she chatted away on the phone with coworker down in legal. Clumsy from exhaustion, she accidentally knocked the entire stack over.
Frustrated, she hung up the phone and got to work on sorting the mess out when she stumbled upon the Nibel/Shinra contract. Curious about the town she had only heard vague stories of – mostly about failed projects and stubborn people – she thumbed through the shockingly generous contract and noted that Shinra was set to receive updates on dogs they were to obtain when training was completed. Further investigating showed that there hadn’t been an update from Nibelheim since the notice that four of their prized bitches were pregnant nearly six months ago.
Used to taking action on her own to keep work off of her boss’ plate – especially since his marriage was going down the toilet due to his infidelity issue – she decided to send a letter to Nibelheim’s kennel asking for a quick update. In her own, very personal opinion, Project Development was better off without her boss’ interference anyways.
Nibelheimr’s kennel master received the letter just a few days before two pups from a nearby kennel were about to be put down.
With the contract with Shinra in place just the year before, Nibelheimr was to provide dogs to work no less than ten years for Shinra’s Public Security Forces. The number of dogs and how frequently they were provided was very vague and in favor of Nibelheimr, as it took a very specific kind of dog with a special kind of temperament to pass the training that Shinra required.
Originally, as Nibelheimr’s kennel was much larger than the other six on Nibelfjöll, the Elders had planned to have those dogs trained for Shinra’s purposes merely for the convenience of it. However, since the contract had been signed, the four litters that were born to Nibelheimr’s kennels were unfit for the rigorous training required for a multipurpose military dog.
Frustrated, the kennel master of Nibelheimr was going to wait another year for the next round of pups. After receiving the letter from Shinra requesting an update, he decided to reach out to the other kennels to find a suitable pair instead. Relations between Nibelheimr and Shinra were tentative at best, and the kennel master did not want to be the reason they had a falling out.
As luck would have it, two Nibel Shepherds were born to the smallest kennel just several months before. These two shepherds were small for their breed, runts of the litter, and it was thought that they wouldn’t make it through the night. Somehow, the two stubborn pups soldiered one night after the next, and the next thing anyone knew, they were six months old.
They were smaller than the other pups their age by nearly half, and had been born with the undesirable shorter fur coat that occasionally popped up in the breed. While their fur wasn’t what one could call short, it was definitely not long enough for the weather and snow of the mountains. Normally, pups that were born with the shorter fur gene were put down, as it was a kinder death than freezing. Just as the kennel master of Nibeltavallr had decided to put them down, he received a letter from Nibelheimr’s kennel master asking about a suitable pair for Shinra. And it just so happened that Nibeltavallr, the kennel closest to where the Hero and his mother now lived, had two pups ill-suited for the climate of Nibelfjöll, but had the right temperament for the sort of training Shinra desired.
Two pups were saved and although that had been how our story started, this is where our story truly begins. As for the three final changes, well, a broken rotary arm would bring about an unscheduled maintenance stop, a motorbike parked two feet to the left will cause an errant ball to bounce off the wheel and later, an open window in the middle of the night will trigger a perfectly-timed sneeze.
But those haven't happened yet.