A/N: Ok, here's the next chapter. I've been working hard on it, so I hope you like. Thank you to Carie Valentine for the help and or asking a lot of questions and getting my mind working. And of course thank you to Dark Raion who owns a good portion of this chapter also.

Chapter Two -- 'The Test'

There was a hint of red in the long blonde hair that fell across the face of Quistis Trepe; its long soft strands blurring the information on the screen. She pushed it back with a firm hand and clipped it into place with a plain black slide, slotting it behind her ear. Her task did not require her to be beautiful and so tantalisingly fragrant locks must be sacrificed. Her face was pale under the glare of so many flickering computer screens, each refreshing at different rates. The dull light seemed to be sucking away the remaining colour in the room by illuminating everything in a flickering blue tinge.

Some screens were old, covered in dust and neglected. Large and cumbersome, they took up space on the desk. Heavy to move and with grimy fans whirring away inside, they filled the air with a dreary sound of air spinning. Doomed to work until their cores burnt out and they were replaced by one of their equally hard working neighbours. In the eventual shuffle of technology, the oldest screens were demoted to make way for the new and shiny flat screens.

The words on the screen changed rapidly, too fast for the human eye to decipher. Jumbled words had no correlation and made little sense to anyone but Quistis. She looked from one screen to another, pulling information from one and ordering it with some from another. The computers were effectively one artificial brain, each screen showing a different level of consciousness. To see what Quistis was seeing one would need to see the man, listen to him telling you what he was thinking. Quistis didn't need to see him to know what he was thinking or doing, the code running across the screen told her everything she needed to know about Squall.

She rubbed at her blue eyes, feeling the skin underneath them puffy from lack of sleep. Once she would have covered the dark circles underneath, but she had since learned that no one noticed either way. They never looked at her; their eyes would stray past her, to the screens and to her notes.

Equally neglected were her nails. Society would expect a woman of twenty-one and counting, to take some care. The norm might be long manicured nails; perhaps she worked in an office, taking calls, tapping on a keyboard, being careful not to chip the polish. Maybe she made coffee, went out with her colleagues on a Friday night, fancied the boss, or the man that came to change the water in the cooler… but Quistis Trepe was not a normal girl.

The airport seemed unusually crowded that afternoon, mostly it seemed, with people that had nothing better to do than loiter. Walking briskly through the throng of unfamiliar faces he spotted more than a few shady characters that appeared to be eyeing him and the carry-on sized suitcase he brought with him. He thought nothing of it. Their eyes flicked furtively from Squall to his bag, wondering if they could relieve him of it. It wasn't uncommon, of course, for pickpockets to be one of those loitering. Hoping to prey on frustrated and weary travellers.

At the gateway he briefly flashed his Esthar Cybernetics Corporation ID without bothering to slow down. By now it was merely for show, as he had flown with Esthar Airlines enough that most of the staff recognized his face.

His flight was on one of the more prestigious planes, which were reserved for government affiliates and upper crust civilians, so it was also not a surprise to see that he'd be flying with a Galbadian diplomat. As soon as the diplomats face had sparked recognition, Squall had triggered his memory chip, sifting through ID files in milliseconds. However there was no answer for why the man might be returning home, leaving Squall to form is own speculations.

Was he called back to his own country because of the threats made on the life of President Caraway's daughter? That would indicate that Galbadia suspected international terrorism and feared an attack or similar threat on their people in other countries. Or was it just Esthar?

It's not my place to wonder... I just have to do my job to the best of my ability. And that means being up to par on my Galbadian. I guess now is as good a time as any to finish that final lesson.

Squall opened his suitcase once he'd settled into his seat and took out a much smaller silver case, flipping it open. On the inside was a small rectangular device with a few buttons on the bottom and a screen at the top. He lifted it carefully from its cradle and caught the thin cord that dangled from it. Brushing back his hair from the back of his neck, he inserted the connector at the end of the cord into a small port in his skin. Leaning back into his seat, he closed his eyes.

Select: Galbadian language advanced lesson fifty-six, upload...

After two minutes, the plane had lifted into the air, and Squall had finally mastered the Galbadian language, enabling him to speak it fluently. Having information directly uploaded into his brain did have its advantages... and an equal amount of drawbacks. What was he supposed to do now?

Well, I guess doing a bit of investigation to learn more about the potential enemy could be beneficial to the mission... Even if it's not technically part of the mission.

Closing his eyes once more, for no real purpose other than to shut out the world around him, he mentally instructed the device he was linked to.

Search news articles related to threats on President Caraway's daughter.

As a seemingly infinite list of matches popped into his vision, the sound of a gun being cocked reached his ears, followed shortly by a startled shriek. The images and articles immediately disappeared and he quickly regained his vision to see a man in a pressed business suit standing over the Galbadian diplomat he'd spotted before.

A hijacking? Perhaps Galbadia had had a good reason to remove the Diplomat from Esthar after all, but they hadn't been quick enough.

Looking around he could see four men guarding the aisle of the plane, each armed and watching carefully for any sign of danger. If he moved now, he'd do nothing but cause a mess. He leaned back in his seat and exhaled, closing his eyes in such a way he seemed almost distraught by the situation to anyone passing by. Switching back to the information running through the wire in the back of his head, he began fishing through the information back in the control tower of the airport and the aeroplanes black-box.

In his mind's eye he could see page after page of code from the plane's computer system, including a rather sloppy hack job that seemed to have come from the cockpit itself not five minutes earlier. In the information came fast and easy, as if someone had cut a path through it second before him. The security around the system was a push-over, and he easily connected to it and pried it apart himself, forcing the main power off. The back-up generators kicked in, but the lights blinked off, an unnecessary waste of now limited and precious energy.

A questioning murmur rolled through the cabin, and the assailants looked more than a little ill at ease. While the leader of the group, the one that had the diplomat by gunpoint rapidly talked into a communication device, Squall stood, eyes alight and fully functional in the near-pitch darkness and crushed the windpipe of the man nearest him with his hand, the other sliding the gun away in a fluid motion. The sickening crack of shattered bones and broken flesh caught the attention of the man standing in the aisle a few feet away. They weren't too smart, stretching themselves into a narrow single file formation.

The next attacker wheeled around, gun drawn, and was met by a switchblade in his neck. The body, which still barrelled down upon him carried by its own momentum, was thrown into the next guy in line, and two shots finished both off at once.

Before he could so much as flinch, the leader found the arm wielding his weapon being crushed by an iron grip before his life, too, was cut short by a knife through the heart. The darkness had gone completely quiet, no one willing to so much as whisper for fear of catching the attention of the glowing eyed man that stood, nonchalantly covered in the blood of four men. The leader's comm. device crackled to life, and through an ocean of roiling static, he could make out the voice of someone asking 'Is... all right? The... got hacked... trouble flying.'

Squall swiped the device up and spoke into it.

"No, I've had some problems out here as well. I could use back up if you can give it."

"Not a problem. The pilots' are all too willing to help steer when you're pointing a gun at their head..."

She flinched at the sight of more blood splattering the plane interior on the screen, and her heart made a suicide dive for her stomach. Beginning white and fading through a depressing scale of red, yellow, blue as it cooled on the infrared camera. The old man must've sensed her unease, because he chuckled a bit and nodded to the small TV sitting before them.

"He's good, like I told you. In fact, even better than I might've thought."

"He's ruthless," she murmured. "And far too powerful. Such a man... not even a man, a thing like that... shouldn't exist."

"Awfully harsh words from someone like you, Princess."

She scowled at the name, and his hand landed heavily upon her shoulder.

"Perhaps that's true, but, if this test of mine proves anything," he grinned just a bit, "he'll make the perfect body guard for you."

She wondered how this machine of a man would react when he discovered he had been tested; his obvious strength and ability doubted by a lesser man he could easily crush. She shuddered at the paused image on the screen, blood splattered across the camera lens obscuring the view like a hand blocking out the light. Rinoa Heartilly studied the face of a killer, who would soon become close enough to touch. Her body reacted to this in a primeval manner, by raising the hairs on her arms into goosebumps.

His face was cold and smooth, as if carved and created by an artist rather than nature. Across his right cheek was a river of blood that belonged to one of the murdered men. He paid it no attention and resisted the urge of wiping it away, making Rinoa wonder whether he could even feel its intimate presence. She touched her own cheek, sliding her hand down its unblemished surface as if feeling the blood on her own face.

His eyes were like steel with a splash of blue and equally as cold. She shivered at the thought of that piercing gaze touching her skin. She felt as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over her arms and down her spine and had left her to dry out in the rain. Wrapping her arms around herself, she held on tightly and tried to drag her eyes away from the screen.

Rinoa didn't want to imagine how much money had been spent putting that little event together, or how many bribes and backhanders had crossed into crooked sleazy hands. Her father no doubt the architect, taking his due, and paying his way clear. She was never surprised at the greed of humans, and their blinded willingness to look the other way while a tragedy occurred. She had been brought up in a harsh world, with no room for dreams about the kindness of strangers. She trusted few, and it was lonely.

The men that had died would not have been prepared for such a violent death to meet them. Most likely they were crooks, hustlers, occasionally murderers in their own right, living in the dark and decrepit corners of society, where to make money was to take a chance. They had taken a chance today, and had their luck reached its end.

Looking across at her father, his broad shoulders flexed back proudly. His chest was puffed up with confidence and his stance told her that he was steadily denying the spread of grey hairs creeping across his dark head. He was laughing down the phone, a deep chuckle of supreme self-assurance, which could never be shaken by a few dead men in an aeroplane. Rinoa clenched her fists, and pressed her fingernails hard into the softness of the palms of her hands. She wished desperately that she had the courage to walk away from this man, but she was trapped, just like her mother had been before her.

"He will not arrive for another eight hours," her father said, turning to face her in a slow lazy movement, as if the person on the phone was far more deserving of his notice.

Rinoa didn't miss the quick sweep his eyes made over her person, and she turned her back on him for the sanctuary of fresh air. She often wondered if she displeased him, too much alike to her mother, and yet with a wilder defiance of his authority. She was keenly aware of how she must remind him of the woman he had lost, and how much pain she must give him when she refused to call him father.

But he had hurt her in past, in ways she could never forgive. When she would have clung to him, he had pushed her aside. Something was always more important, more pressing, he turned his face away from her tears and never heard her sobbing in her bedroom at night. As a child he had seen her stamping her foot in frustrated anger, at his coldness towards the memory of her dead mother. He had turned to her and called her a word she could never forgive him for. He had called her disappointing.