Don't Step On The Flowers

Junon, Reno supposed, wasn't half bad. Sure as hell better than Edge, which he couldn't wait to get the hell out of, especially after that weird-assed argument in Tseng's kitchen.

Tseng's ex-kitchen, Reno supposed.

He was sitting in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on one of the city's lower levels, the world's crappiest coffee slowly dissolving a coffee mug in one hand, waiting for somebody in particular. He'd left Edge a little early, dragged a few of the boxes of paperwork along with him so that Rude wouldn't have to haul it all here, and then he'd started to poke around.

Yeah, Junon had suffered a bit since WEAPON's attack. But then, where the hell hadn't?

... Besides Kalm. Lucky, lucky-assed Kalm.

[Open for anyone who might want to call, or who has reason to be in Junon!]

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.]

"Back to work, back to work."

Work for Reno, it should be noted, mostly consisted of him putting his feet on his desk and pretending to be busy. There were reports to be filed. He didn't wanna. That required effort.

Taking jobs that involved him chasing down monsters or beating terrorists to a messy pulp or, dare he say it, the jobs that required making hits? That wasn't work. That was play.

Reno? Reno was working. So hard at work. Staring at paper. Paperwork would be less boring if maybe it came in crossword format. Or word search. Or if it was written out in code that replaced each letter of the alphabet with a different picture of a naked chick. If it did that, maybe it wouldn't be so much work!

Yes, he was totally spending his time hard at work trying to will the phone to ring with his brain. Ugh, work.

[For phonecalls, of course. Reno is, as usual, boooored.]

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 had been another long, hard night. Tseng seemed to be doing everything in his power to drive Reno to the point of cracking since Elena had taken off for Fandom, and Reno couldn't exactly blame him. This time, it had been a run to the outskirts of the makeshift city, under heavy gunfire, to neutralize a group of citizens who had gotten fed up with the poverty. They'd gone out, found themselves some weapons inside the wreckage of the old ShinRa building, and had taken to going door-to-door, shaking people down and waving said guns in their faces until they handed over all of their food.

Not cool.

( In Which Stuff Happens, And Reno Has A Chewy Ear. )

[Open for phone calls or what-have-you.]

Damn, it was good to be on the island.

Daaaaaaaamn, it was so good to be on the island. And sure, the room he'd grabbed at The Arms wasn't his dorm room, but he had a real, honest-to-gods bed here, instead of the lumpy couch Reno had been sleeping on for the past little while, and that alone made the whole trip worth it.

Well, the bed and the minibar. He was going to have to coordinate some kind of drinking outing with the guys before he took off again, maybe. In the meantime, he'd pick up his cellphone and leave some handwavey messages telling his buddies on the island where he could be found.

And then? Then he was going to flop backward on that amazing friggin' bed and just sprawl.

Oh, hell yeah.

[Door's open, and if you figure you'd get a call, you totally did. Mmmm, feels like home.]

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.]

The sun was just starting to sink through the sky, lengthening the shadows across the ground.

Through those shadows, other shadows emerged, hauling the remnants of their unsuspecting prey toward its final resting place.

Smoochy was dead.

And now he was going home.

[Intended for interaction with one, and then reactions from the residents of this particular shiny address afterward, which has been modded with permission by a certain Chem teacher!]