Don't Step On The Flowers

Aww, yeah. Reno could get used to this having-an-office-of-his-own shit.

It wasn't that he had any great plans for it or anything. Hell, he hadn't even really thought about spending any time in here right up until yesterday when he figured that he should show up in order to do that parent-teacher interview crap. But this was the place, the one place in the whole freaking multiverse, where he could walk in, toss his shit on his desk, put his feet up, and never have to worry about Tseng beaking at him about the use of filing cabinets. Or about Rikku's recent invasion of fuzzy orange home decor shit.

Yep. Reno could live with this.

If anybody came in looking for an interview with the Unconventional Tactics teacher today, they'd find him with his chair leaning backwards, his feet up on his desk, and a lazy grin on his face.

Heh. They gave him an office. How friggin' messed up was that?

[Open!]

( Wastelands. Wastelands as far... (SPOILERS for FFVII: Crisis Core within!) )

[And done! Thanks to glacial_witch and findingelena for their participation! This follows this post and is the last one we're going to tack up, honest. NFI, NFB, OOC = Love.]

Admittedly, a Wednesday night was a pretty shitty night to go to any bar that didn't actually have something going on. And, in a place like Edge, it wasn't just Wednesday nights that were like that, even at the most popular stop for alcoholic swill in town. It wasn't as though people were going to get together and sing karaoke. Name that tune was pretty much a thing of the past, too. Trivia night? Not so much. But if you got Cid Highwind drunk enough, he'd tell you all about that time he spent about five minutes stuck outside of Gaia's atmosphere.

Word to the wise: Don't get Cid Highwind drunk enough to tell you all about that time he spent about five minutes stuck outside of Gaia's atmosphere.

Fortunately, Reno didn't come to the bar unprepared. He was a Turk. He came prepared for anything, thank you very much. There was a stun baton hidden up his sleeve, extra money for booze tucked away in one pocket, and a deck of cards in one hand. Tifa even tolerated his presence here because he was more or less good business, and he tended to handle her cutting him off when she'd decided that he'd had enough with... minimal leering. Which made him significantly less obnoxious than some of the folks that stopped in for drinks.

And anyhow, kicking the asses of the bar's other regulars at poker? Totally made hitting this place up on his evening off worth any unpleasant aftertaste that his allotted few servings of Corel Ale left behind.

Hey, it wasn't Reno's fault that Barrett was shit at calling bluffs.

[Open for anyone who might want to give Reno a phone call, or what-have-you. He'll probably gloat at you relentlessly, just to rile up the big guy some more.]

"I'm friggin' bored," Reno announced, possibly to nobody in particular, possibly to the bowl of beans that he'd picked. "Bored bored bored."

The beans said nothing.

"You know how bored I am?"

The beans waited patiently for a reply.

"I'm so friggin' bored, I'm talkin' to string beans."

This was what happened when Reno got himself suspended from duty for two weeks.

Fear.

[NFB for distance, as usual, but totally open for phone calls!]

Distress calls from Rookies, left, right, and center. That was what Reno came home to, after over a week without phone reception out in the wastes. And now it was the countdown, before one Rookie would get here, with Ifrit only knew what kind of trauma fresh in her head.

Pick up the phone. Dial numbers. He had well over an hour, between the time Ino's portal would arrive to pick her up, and the time it would actually make it into Edge, after all.

"The boss sends me on one mission in the middle of nowhere, Mako, an' the whole universe goes to Hell without me, zoto."

[NFB for distance, as usual. Open for anyone who needs a Reno call or who wants to give one, all calls will sit chronologically before a certain Ninja visitor, yo.]

It was a good thing that Bat Eyes were so damn easy to take down, Reno mused, as he wiped some bloody monster sludge off of his baton and onto his pant leg. Things had been busy in Edge over the past few days. A few monsters had wandered into the outskirts of the town out of the ruins of what used to be the Midgar slums, and they were having their hungry ways with the locals.

Which suited Reno just fine. He got the pleasure of being hired on by the WRO in order to take care of the threat while they continued working on setting up their military, and on top of the pay that they were giving him to deal with the job, he got to keep whatever the monsters dropped when he took them down, too. Mostly ethers and bubblegum money, but he could live with that.

He finished rummaging through what was left of the corpse of the last one as it faded away to join the lifestream, or whatever it was that dead monsters did, and then he took a seat on the nearest bench, sprawling out, looking up at the bluish-gray haze of sky above him, pulling out his phone, and turning it on.

Sometimes, rebuilding wasn't really so bad after all.

[For anybody who wants to phone or be phoned! NFB for distance, of course! Zack-related spoilers throughout the threads. Read at your own risk, yo.]

( In Which The Posse Talks to Tifa, ) ( The Turks Suffer, ) ( The Rescue Party Arrives, ) ( Reno and Rikku Speak, ) ( Turks Prove To Be Difficult to Kill, ) ( And Cloud Continues To Be Emo. )

[Follows this post. Preplayed with the_merriest, fair_montague, dojima_hime, and sarcasm_guy, the first of whom rocks the coding, and the rest of whom rock no less, but with less HTML. Wee, tiny chunks of dialog once again lifted from Advent Children with a bit of tweaky goodness because we can to spare repetition... and confusion, which Square-Enix manages to excel at. NFB, NFI, and OOC is made of sparkles and lifestream and will be nommed upon accordingly.]