Cid had offered to pick her up in Wutai via the Sierra, really he did. Yuffie had declined the invitation though. Her explanation was,

"If these new adversary peoples have a bunch of children kidnapped, there's no way you're coming to all the way to Wutai to pick me up!"

She figured on a good half a day being shaved off the journey to Edge if they skipped over her. Crossing an ocean and several major metropolitan areas in a short amount of time wasn't much of a problem to the future Lady of the Pagoda. As long if she didn't get distracted along the way. So, boarding a boat and hitchhiking Yuffie made her solo trek to the city where all of this weirdness was going down.

From the brief summary she was given over the PHS, a trio of boys had popped up, attacked Cloud on bike, Tifa in a church, and kidnapped quite a lot of children who were terminally ill with Geostigma, claiming they could "Cure" them. As if that wasn't worrying enough, it seemed these new antagonists bore an uncanny resemblance to Sephiroth, and were spouting propaganda about "Mother". Meaning Jenova.

Yuffie bent her mouth into a frown remembering that bit of information. Good news was, now she should be nearing Edge City in say, half a dozen hours, less if she could spot the Sierra overhead, and board. Bad news was, night had fallen, and she was in some creepy forest she had never encountered before. The trees shone eerily luminescent, an affect which she hoped was natural, because, if by some chance it was (pretty likely with her luck) it would mean something like Mako contamination.

trickle, trickle, trickle...

What was that noise? It sounded like when a car had an oil leak, or the noise your toilet makes right after flushing. Geez Yuffie, you call your self an emissary of Leviathan, and you can't even identify a simple noise like that? Then it clicked in her ninja brain, a whole 14.6 seconds after she first heard the trickling sound.

"Stream!" she gave a girlish squeal of glee. For her, streams were synonymous with hand washing, face washing, hair washing, and just general cleanliness. Yes, everybody's favorite princess/ninja was a closet clean freak. Or maybe the word cleanophile would be more fitting.

So, sashaying over to the origin of the water, she leaned down, staring at the waters black reflection of the moon. Wait, black? Surely it must only look that way because of nightfall, right?

"It's dark..." she muttered dejectedly, as she swished her index finger around in the unnaturally coloured pool.

"It is perfectly safe for human consumption, you can be assured." came a voice behind her. Not a grown mans voice, but not a boy either. It was definitely not female in its execution. Kind of gave off a sense of child likeness, much like her own.

So drawing herself up to her full height of a whopping 163 centimeters, she turned around to face the voice, all the while trying her best to look formidable, and wearing her best stoic expression, just in case anything soured.

It was a boy, probably about her age, clad entirely in leather, from neck to toe. Your thinking 'Well, that's not so bad' right about now, aren't you? It got worse. He had silver white hair, that just nearly reached his shoulders, and the bangs obscured one eye. Glow bright green, and serpentine the eyes he had were.

While this might have been entirely pleasing to look at for the average, uninformed non ninja eighteen year old female, for Yuffie it just meant bad mojo. She had just run into a psychotic, oepidial complexed, child kidnapping, Jenova cell and Mako enhanced weirdo. Oh shit.

Yet he didn't seem that way. The smile on his face was disturbingly reassuring. Oh yeah, he had been saying something about the black water being safe for drinking. This brought Yuffie back to the fact neither of them had spoken for a good fifteen seconds.

Deciding to the 'get the hell out of Dodge' route, she rehearsed in her mind that she was going to say "No thanks, I'm not thirsty, so I'll just be going now." That wasn't what came out of her pale rose lips though. What was said was far more potentially dangerous.

"You look like a eunuch."

His eyes narrowed, and his once smiling mouth became a tightly drawn line. Yuffie was sure that he was going to attack, so she was ever prepared to whip out Conformer at a moments notice. The attack never came, instead a witty and insulting retort.

"I can't exactly discern your gender either. Please, enlighten me."

What? How dare he, even if he was an evil insane bad guy, he could not be so dense to not be able to tell she, the great ninja Yuffie Kisaragi was a lady! She had always like to think that when she ninja-ed, she did it with a feminine grace, so that it should be obvious. She frowned threateningly, and the next words she spoke she said with a hard edge like diamond.

"I'm a girl."

Once again, the silver haired youth's expression transformed, back into a smile. Couldn't this guy just pick a mood and stick with it? Obviously not. 'He must be bi-polar or something...' Yuffie thought observantly.

"Oh."

He replied simply, still grinning like a Cheshire cat, or more appropriately, Cait Sith. Was it just Yuffie, or was the meters worth of space between them getting smaller? She hoped she was imagining it, but odds are she wasn't. Soon the space was almost completely gone, as he leaned his head next to her ear as if to whisper something. She could feel his silver hair brush against her ear. She stiffened, and sensed one of his hands hovering above her shoulder blade. Opening his mouth, as if he was about to divulge a secret.

"You look cute when you scowl. Ah, your blushing."

They ended up frozen like that for a few seconds before Yuffie spun around, and took off in a dead run opposite direction. Her 'zero physical contact' rule had nearly been broken by an evil eunuch! So not cool! She really, really wished he had been lying about the blushing thing, because if he hadn't been, it could have only meant one thing. She had actually enjoyed that situation. Eew.

After watching the young foreign girl disappear into the dense forest of glowing trees, Kadaj muttered to himself.

"What the hell...? Where did that come from?" he said, referring to his bizarre earlier behavior and temporary lapse of sanity (what he considered sane, anyway). After contemplating this for a moment or six, he decided it must have been that the girl's bright yellow boots had put him in an unholy trance.

Feh. Denial on both counts.

Authoress Notes: Phew! I think I might have written the first non alternate universe Yudaj in the history of the planet. I worked really hard, trying to find an opportunity where the two could meet each other without distorting the events of the film, and getting the timeline to mesh and all that crapola. I've been shipping these two since about August, so I figured it was about time to get off my lazy duff and write one myself. It's only a oneshot, and kind of flakey, but not too fluffy I don't think? I think I got them both pretty much in character aside from the whole unlikelihood of the situation. Tell me what you think!