Avalanche

24 hours later, on the Highwind

"Where is he then?" Barret grunted slamming his gun arm down on the map covered table, startling the several Avalanche members that sat around it. Vincent Valentine, who was leaning against a wall out of the way and in the shadows, didn't even flinch. Yuffie was too engrossed in the cartoon show she was watching to pay any of them any mind.

"Well he sure as fuck aint here!" Cid answered him, "I say we turn back. We must of lost him somewhere."

"The hell we are!" Barret bellowed. "That would only waste time. For all we know he's already at the Crater."

"The fuck you say! Their ain't no way he could have got past us! And no one knows for sure that he's headed there."

"Where else would he be going? What else is out here?" Barret swept his hand at the scene outside the cockpit window, at the miles and miles of tundra and snow that led nowhere but Icicle village and the Northern Crater.

"Barret's right." Tifa said. "Up until now Sephiroth has left a trail of destruction for us to follow, the Midgar Zolom and every village and town he passed he torched. He knows we're following, for some reason he wants us too... and now nothing. What could he be up to?"

"Maybe he's dead." Yuffie called out. "Maybe he did us all a favor and killed himself."

"Goddamn it!" Cid cried, while everyone else groaned. "Listen kid, go back to watching your loony tunes all right? Grownups are trying to talk here."

"Oh! Oh!" Yuffie shrieked, leaping to her feet. "Your just saying that because I'm a woman. That's sexist. Tifa tell him that's sexist!"

"Yuffie please-" Tifa started.

"Enough." Cloud cut in.

"Yuffie, Sephiroth's not dead. He just isn't." He said, giving her a stern look. "And if he is, you can tell us all 'I told you so', alright?"

Yuffie glared at Cid, then only slightly mollified and frowning, sat back down to fiddle with the small television she was watching.

"And Cid," Cloud continued. "unless we learn something definite about his whereabouts, we are not turning back or in any way changing course. We are going the Northern Crater. Sephiroth is out there, somewhere."

Cloud looked out the cockpit window, his mako enhanced eyes pensive and brooding. Everyone followed his gaze as though willing Sephiroth to appear and make himself known.

"Damn it!" Yuffie cried, smacking the side of the TV. "They just interrupted my show for a news bulletin!"

"Yuffie!" Cid warned.

"Oh Gaia! You guys, you have to see this."

"That's it!" Cid cried, totally blowing a fuse. "We don't have time for this bullshit."

"No, listen! It's Sephiroth, he's on TV!"

"What?!"

The picture was grainy, and showed live action, in real time. Even as everyone gathered round, it took a moment for what they were seeing to sink in.

Sephiroth was a blur of motion, moving too fast for the camera to capture, but the flow of his silver hair and the swing of his long sword marked him. He was cutting a path through a dense, jam packed crowd of fleeing, panicked people. When that didn't prove to be a quick enough way to decimate the crowd, he raised a hand and shot a devastating bolt of energy that blasted most of the crowd off their feet and slammed them cruelly into the walls of buildings. Then he shot fire materia at them, before leaping out of the way and out of view of the camera.

Avalanche stood stunned as a frightened looking news reporter came on. She stood before a backdrop of a city in flames, in the background people were screaming, an explosion blocked out her voice voice and made her cower down before she bravely continued on with her story.

"Thirty minutes ago, the city of Midgar fell under a devastating attack by rogue SOLDIER Sephiroth and an unnamed woman." A dated picture of Sephiroth from his Shinra days showed on the screen.

"No one knows what they want or why they are doing this." She continued. "Reports tell us that President Shinra is dead, the Shinra tower which housed the entire Midgar Military including SOLDIER, was the first to be attacked. Eyewitness tell us that the building was utterly annihilated in a blast so powerful that it leveled several city blocks. The Upper Plate was attacked soon after, dropping down onto the citizens living beneath it.

"The devastation here is absolute. There was no warning or mercy. Our hospitals, our residential areas, our schools have been attacked and destroyed. Survivors are fleeing the city on foot. To make matters worse, for reasons unknown to our experts, nearly all motorized power has been disabled. Vehicles wont run, there is no power whats so ever, except for battery power and even that only works several miles outside of Midgar, where I'm reporting from. The fire department, rescue teams and police are overwhelmed and simply trying to help as many people get out as possible."

"Oh mama." Yuffie wispered, to shocked to say anything else.

"It's like Nebelheim, all over again." Tifa said, stunned.

"We know where he is now." Cloud said shaking his head at the utter devastation that they were all witnessing it. If anything the sight of it just filled him with hatred and determination. Anger would come later, so would self incrimination about how they had let Sephiroth slip by them.

"He's a bloody demon." Cid said, and beside him Yuffie nodded vigorously.

"Who's the woman though, the one that's with him?" Tifa asked.

"A hostage?" Barret shrugged.

"Perhaps a manifestation of Jenova." Vincent said thoughtfully, intently watching everything on that tiny television screen with his blood red eyes.

"It's Aeris!" Someone gasped.

"It can't be." Someone else answered.

On the TV a young woman had materialized as though by magic. One second she wasn't there and then she was. Her hair was in wild disarray and her pink dress was torn and blackened, but Aeris's bright green eyes were as wide and innocent as everyone remembered.

The reporter shrieked at her appearance and but held her microphone in a badly shaking hand.

"Who...what...?"

"I'll take that." A gentle girlish voice answered and the reporter backed away, looking badly frightened and ready to bolt as Aeris took the microphone from her.

"People of the Planet, my name is Aeris Gainsborough and I am the very last of the Cetra." She said and every member of Avalanche stood on the cockpit of the Highwind totally speechless and disbelieving at what they were seeing.

"Perhaps you have never heard of my kind." Aeris was saying. "That's all right, for I feel that is my duty to educate you. My race, the Cetra, was nearly extinguished a millenia ago in an effort to save human kind and the Planet against an alien threat named Jenova. We beat and isolated the Virus at great expense to ourselves. Our thriving population was brought to near extinction. Nevertheless, it was felt, and the belief is still held by my ancestors that their sacrifice was worth it.

"Unfortunately, you have taken our gift and destroyed it. You have used the very lifeblood of the Planet and weakened her. Your scientists have resurrected Jenova and left unchecked, she will annihilate this planet with greater speed then even mankind can manage.

"We, the Cetra, have come to the conclusion that humans don't appreciate and value our gift, so I am taking back the Planet and I'm bringing it to a new age. An age of peace and plenty. An age where everyone will treat the planet with the respect that she is due.

"To that end we shall go back to simpler times. A time when a family had to grow it's own food, not buy ready made and tainted with poisons. When a family made its own clothing, build its own shelter, lived life the way nature intended, naturally with no harm done to the environment.

"These are exiting times filled with change and though it may be difficult at first, please understand that with change comes hope for a better future for you and your children. So I command you to leave your cities and towns, for they will soon be razed to the ground. Bring weapons for they will not work. Motorized power and electricity is against natures plan. Mako is the lifeblood of the Planet, it is not meant to be used as fuel."

"But.." The reporter stuttered. "How will people live? So many have been killed or injured and so many more will die if they're forced out into the wastelands with no food or water or shelter. How can this be a good thing? How can anybody benefit from this?"

"I sympathise." Aeris answered, her eyes fever bright. Her face peaceful. "I really do. This is not the way I wanted things to be but I had no choice. If you had a broken limb that was turning to gangrene and the infection was spreading and endangering a healthy body, then wouldn't it be better to cut off that offending limb, so that the body could continue to live. That is what I am doing here. What we need is a clean start. And so I, with the help of SOLDIER General Sephiroth will see to that."

"But how can people live in the Wastelands of Midgar? The nights out here fall down to the minus degrees and the days are scorching hot. There is no water, no food...!"

"All that will be provided for." Aeris said with a beneficial smile, her feverish eyes growing brighter. "The Cetra only want for there to be peace and plenty. Look out behind you."

The camera panned away from the Armageddon that was Midgar and swept over the desolate land that surrounded it.

"All this," Aeris continued, speaking like a mother to a small child. "used to be fruitful, it is only like this because of man-kinds abuse. It doesn't have to be like this, it never did. See now, this is what I've been promising you."

With a broad, slow sweep of her hand the landscape around them shimmered like a mirage, then everything changed from the colors of dust and dirt to every shade of green an unspoiled garden could hold. Where there had been nothing but dirt and gravel there were miles of tall waving grass. Where boulders and cliffs broke the unremitting flatness of the plain, now trees softened the horizon. In the distance the sparkle of a waterfall could be seen, where before there had only been the sheer face of a mountain side.

The reporter was stunned almost speechless. "I...How?..Where?.." Then she looked at Aeris with a stupefied, stunned look on her face. "Are you a goddess?"

Aeris smiled at her, with a peaceful look that transcended her into something almost holy.

"I am a Cetra." She said. "And I give you the Promised Land."

And with that her form shimmered into a rainbow of colors before she vanished from sight.

*****

On the cockpit of the Highwind each and every member of Avalanche was stunned speechless. What they had witnessed was impossible. It was too much to take in. The destruction of Midgar, the apparent resurrection of Aeris, who they had rightfully thought was lost to them forever and the things she had said and done. it was almost too much to take in.

"We are in sooo much trouble." Yuffie said in a hushed, awed voice. Besides her both Cid and Barret nodded mutely.

"That can't be Aeris." Tifa said. "She's dead."

"So was Serphiroth." Vincent said. "And he came back."

"But.." Said Tifa. "Even if she could have come back to life, which should be impossible...she would never cause that much destruction. Aeris, our Aeris, wouldn't even kill a fly. She'd try to catch it first then let it go outside."

"Not to mention the way she changed the wastes of Midgar. How is that even possible?"

But it was possible, unless the whole televised program was one huge, very expensive hoax what they were seeing was indeed real. The reporter was beside herself. Talking a mile a minute, making the camera pan the flames that consumed Midgar to the flowers and grasses that had miraculously appeared and that she now held in her hand.

"It isn't." Cloud said at last. "That wasn't Aerith."

"Who then?"

Everyone looked to Cloud.

"I don't know. But Aerith wouldn't kill millions of people to save them. That's madness. That's as insane as Sephiroth is. Somehow he is to blame for this."

"So if that wasn't Aeris then who was she?"

"I don't know. What's important is that we turn this ship around and stop her."

Everyone solemnly nodded. Cid immediately moved to the control deck.

"But,"Tifa said. "What if it is Aeris and Sephiroth has gotten control of her mind. Turned her bad?"

"Then we have no choice. If she is as powerful as she appears to be and is also teamed up with Sephiroth then we'll only have one shot at her. When he find her, we will have to kill her."