Kefka Palazzo — Roleplayer Guild

Cidolphus Escovane

Twenty Seven | 15, September | 6’0” | First Class
“Wind and time, rapes the flower trembling on the vine.  Nothing yields to shelter.“ 

 Soldier Base – Briefing’s Conclusion

 Earthen pools stared back into orbs of pure energy, unbroken.  The woman made an impression, one that lingered on after her departure in the form of a memory upon his face.  She was clearly faulted, incapable of curtailing her exuberance.  Or was she simply unwilling to do so?  He couldn’t imagine the elites, specifically Magdalena, to place any amount of effort in training one who seemed so obviously flawed, unless she showed remarkable skill at restraint.  But the impression is what it is, and as she left the room, and Cid took his first steps towards his quarters, his mind was already made up about her – She was dangerous.  She studied his face, the stubble on his chin, his jaw. She touched him without so much as a moment’s hesitation, concerned with nothing more than the comparison she was drawing in her own mind, a comparison that meant little to him.  He was studying her eyes.  The innocence ran deep and true, but there was something beneath it in there: knowledge and power.  Shards of each buried deep in the woman’s soul, lingering until needed.  The extent of both, Cid was unsure of.  He knew little of her, only what he had seen in the few times they’d shared a drill, and even then she seemed so carefree, almost child-like to his mind.  Burn that away..  focus the girl.  

No, Cid shook his head, discarding the idea, as he stepped into the metallic walls of the corridor, walking back towards his quarters.  She wasn’t his concern, didn’t have anything to do with his objective.  Magdalena’s sanction of her as a Saboteur was beyond question, and so he would accept her as such, and bequeath her the appropriate skills and considerations.  Obviously, his respect for Magdalena’s judgment would have to supersede his own impression, as the woman has an abundance of experience with the child, and Cid’s is wanting.   But still he would keep an eye out, re-evaluate as his own experience grew.  

And with that, he shoved the woman from his mind, as his booted feet began to ascend the stairs to the upper levels.  His bare hands were given to gliding across the steel of the guardrail as he rose, enjoying the cold tactile sensations of the metal, the occasional rough patches where moisture and age had turned sleek, cold steel into rust.  It was almost therapeutic, allowing him to center himself again, pulling his focus together on the sensation in his hands, away from the fading memories of fingertips twirling on his cheeks.  He squared the landing, ascended another flight, and by the time he left the stairwell, his mind was already retracing the gathering, replaying the details of the mission.

He entered his quarters. 

…try to keep him alive

“Rayne said he has to die,” Cid responded to the voice in his mind, one recalling the command of his superior, the other the fervent demand of the President.  Cid plucked a duffle from his closet, sat about packing a few sets of extra clothes.  His mind searching for a compromise, some collaboration of directives that would allow him to satisfy edicts from both superiors; however, he quickly gave up the pursuit, understanding that their mandates delineated the broad end of the same spectrum – life and death.  He tucked a spare pair of boots into the back end of the bag, and zipped it up, leaving it sitting upon the creased, neatly made blankets of his bed, as he stepped to the mirror in the room.  His eyes scanned over his armor, looking for signs of wear in his uniform: fraying edges or broken threads.  The right vest pockets were bulging, as they always were, with rounds of his side arm.  His belt clip held both the weapon, which he despised using due to the noise it made, and the dagger he kept there , the blade a preferable choice.  

 Rayne is a demagogue.   His emotions are blinding him.  Hollow, crystalline blue eyes look back at him through the mirror, their ephemeral nature making them seem all the more haunting, as the voice echoes through the cavern of his skull, as though it originates from deep within himself.  A florid show of emotion, a haughty rejection to inquiry, or rebuttal, and we’re lead to believe that he’s powerful and righteous in his disdain for the SeeR.  He may be an effective orator, but Magdalena’s is the voice of prudence 

“Perhaps,” Cid spoke, a whisper, as he was never certain what in the room could be monitored, taken beyond these walls.  Nobody knew of the conversations he had, at least, to his knowledge nobody knew of them, and to report, he was not aware of another soldier having such… access to their patron.  Perhaps it was nothing more than a mental breaking, induced by the stress and pressures of the transformation from thief to Soldier, but Cid preferred another explanation: that what he saw, what he felt, was real.  

She was before him again, replacing the mirror.  Long, golden hair.  The childish face, bursting with its joys and its lack of concern.  Her actions characterized by a lack of restraint, as she reached up, circled his cheeks it the very same manner as before, but the same hollow, crystal eyes looked back into his earthen stare.  She surprised you,

“A recent irritation,” Cid returned, explaining the sudden resurgence of the memory to his mind. 

You wish it had been thus… The blonde vanished, supplanted by waves of deep, brown locks.  Cidolphus’s heart beat heavily, his eyes pulling back from the hold of the crystalline before him, to look upon soft cheeks, and almond shaped eyes.  She was thin framed, small, with soft lips that Israel knew as one knew the color of the moon.  She was meek, subtle in every way, and yet a restrained vitality burned within.  In some ways, she had been much like his Saboteur counter-part, and perhaps that explained the transient superficial fluttering the earlier exchange had invoked in him.  Again, hands touched to his face, but this time, Cid’s rose up to rest upon them.  

The vision subsided, and Cid snapped back to the present.  The transient calm that had settled over him gave way to a tenacious and wary alertness that he felt rather comfortable with.  He zipped up his duffle, after completing his packing, and fetched his spear from the closet in which it rest.  He slid oath keeper to the harness on his back, passed his gaze over his quarters in a final scrutinizing search, to be sure he didn’t leave anything he intended on taking, shouldered his burden and left the sanctuary of his quarters.  Before he depressed his fingers to the lock, his right hand felt against the familiar bulge in his uniform where he kept his data pad: a small device only a few inches wide by nearly twice again as tall.  It possess only a single button on it’s top edge, to activate the device, making it seem rather simple; but it was a Saboteur’s aide.  Through it, he was capable of much, and with it, any terminal he came across could be put to use in the mission to come.  Satisfied that it still remains in its folds of his uniform, he depressed the lock on his room, headed off towards the departure area.  

As he walked, he fished the small device from his pocket, accessed the framework known only to the Saboteur.  The system opened immediately in response to his access codes, and his fingers moved skillfully across the surface of the device.  The message he was sending was quite simple, but finding it’s recipient had taken him a few minutes of searching.  In a world of code names and secrets, it seemed nearly impossible to stumble upon her in the depths of the framework: so he looked up the Soldier’s called, pulled up profiles accompanying the ID ranges.  He sent a message to her publically, one that would appear to anyone else as nothing but a string of random characters, a cypher required to make full sense of the transmission. 

It read simply: “Silence is best – Shadow”
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