Unscheduled Vacation
Unscheduled Vacation
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Disclaimer: I,
Lady Valtaya, swear that I do not own FFVII- its
characters or its settings. I also am much too poor to own Naruto and its
characters.
Author’s Note: I
do love crossovers- even when I have to start them off with a mysterious
dimensional teleport…
I’m not dead and I’m still working on all my other
few weeks ago and has refused to leave me alone, so here it is…
Prologue
This underground temple was just too quiet. None of the
other guards had dared to follow Zack inside, but they were friends and Cloud
couldn’t let him go alone. So, two hours later, they were lost in the huge,
creepy place. A torch nearby lit itself as he stepped out of the stairwell and
down onto a large walkway. Cloud looked around nervously, he wasn’t afraid of
the dark, but this place just felt- wrong.
“Uh, Zack… Are you sure we’re supposed to be messing around
down here?”
“Relax Cloud, the war’s over. We’re
just here to catch a thief. I know I saw the jerk run down those stairs back
there…”
Zack had good instincts, but he was far too relaxed- he
never seemed to take anything too seriously about being in SOLDIER. So, Cloud
was about to protest again, but a flicker of movement caught his eye. “Hey,
he’s over there.”
Zack grinned and drew the Buster sword off of his back. “Come
on out, we’ve just got a couple of questions to ask you…”
The thick shadows in the massive room made Cloud wary as he
looked around. He felt safe because he was with Zack, but the room itself felt
strange and foreboding.
It was like the chamber was buzzing with an unknown but
powerful energy that seemed to flow just beneath the surface of everything that
was visible. A dozen fierce looking statues of armed warriors wearing strange
masks were arranged in a ring surrounded them and each was more than 20 feet
tall. In the center of the room on a huge raised dais, was a massive archway
more than 30 feet tall was carved from smooth gray stone and decorated with
strange carvings of demons, all crawling out
of the arch.
“Shinra dogs, you’ll never subdue the spirit of our people!”
“Actually we’re just following orders,” Zack shrugged.
“Don’t shoot the messenger. Besides, you’re the one who stole that thing from a
makeshift lab where it was awaiting transport to Midgar.”
“You fool! Shinra stole this treasure from a temple here in
belongs.”
‘Her?’ Cloud
almost asked. The man they were after had wild silver hair and he wore a half
mask, as well as an eye patch. He was carrying something small in both arms,
but he hadn’t been able to tell what it might be from their previous glimpses
of him.
“I’m sorry, but this is a dead end and I can’t let you take
that anywhere.” Zack sighed; as usual he hadn’t been paying attention...
“Truly, you know nothing about our lands; I can’t believe
“Yeah, well I’ve heard that before, now hand it over…”
“Never!”
For a moment, the tension in the room became almost
tangible, and Cloud paused to look around.
The man darted out of his hiding place in the shadows,
behind the leg of one of the statues. He scrambled up onto the dais past Zack
and toward the arch with almost impossible speed. Cloud had never seen anyone
move so quickly. As the man neared the arch, the eyes of the carvings on the
arch, and the massive statues around it began to glow.
Zack ran after the thief and Cloud dashed after him. Cloud shouted
a warning, but there was a strange mist pouring forth from the arch and Zack and
the thief were already inside of it.
Cloud wanted to stop, but he couldn’t just leave Zack alone
with the desperate thief. He too was caught in the mist and stumbled blindly
into the arch. Cloud noticed the air around him no longer smelled like the underground
temple- it was fresh and smelled like the trees and grass of the deep woods.
When the mist finally cleared, he and Zack were standing in a thick forest.
“What the…”
Cloud didn’t know what to say, he just shrugged and shook
his head and looked around.