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tiny-cloud-dragon · 5 years

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FF7: Random Bits 4 Chapter 4

Here it is, the final chapter for this Random Bit! Thank you to all of you who wait so patiently for me to update!

[Setting: Zack is having a bothersome tooth pulled, and Cloud is elected the lucky man to pick him up from his appointment.]

[Location: The car Cloud borrowed - Mid afternoon, almost at 7th Heaven]

Cloud felt nothing but relief as he turned down the street leading to the 7th Heaven. His enhanced vision could pick out the familiar store front and the sign that shone in the afternoon light like the beacon of salvation beckoning a lost soul home. In the seat beside him, Zack was in the midst of a heated argument with his hand. What he was arguing about was a mystery, as he was currently shouting in 'Boom Shaka-Laka'. The phrase had long ago stopped tickling Cloud's Funny Bone, and had begun to grate on his Last Nerve.

The dragon part of him uncoiled and was pacing, tail lashing peevishly as it hissed in utter vexation and tried to convince him that it would be a very good idea if they ate Zack. Cloud tried to shut out the dragon's ranting as he drove as fast as he dared while still staying mostly within the posted speed limit. He had no desire to be pulled over with an angry dragon in his head and a friend high on general anesthesia, and have to say "Sorry, Officer. I was speeding so I wouldn't have to eat my friend." while Zack shouted BOOM SHAKA-LAKA! the whole time.

Cloud gratefully pulled up to the bar. He got out quickly and wrestled Zack out of his seat belt. Zack was not not on speaking terms with his hand. Cloud had thought that drawing a little face on Zack's hand would keep him entertained so he wouldn't keep licking the window. The hand puppet idea fell into the Cloud's mental list under the heading Things That Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time. Zack had started out talking enthusiastically to his hand, then making out with his hand, and then came the intensely emotional break up. Cloud had been witness to the entire Courtship Process from hook up, to break up, to appearance on family tabloid scandal talk show compressed into the space of three minutes.

Zack was frowning so hard at his hand that the corners of his mouth could have almost been deemed a tripping hazard. Cloud couldn't help but smile at the sight as he shut the car door and pulled Zack's arm across his shoulders to help steady him. "Don't worry, Zack, " Cloud tried to soothe him, "At least you don't owe child support."

Zack harrumphed and glared at his hand. It blinked back at him and sneered as Cloud helped him inside. The door opened like a mouth, rolling out a long tongue like a red carpet welcoming an esteemed guest. They stepped through, the potted trumpet shrub in the corner played a brief fanfare, and the door closed with a genteel burp.

Tifa was behind the bar, getting clean glasses ready for when the bar opened. She began speaking with Cloud, but Zack wasn't paying attention to the conversation because a small Sephiroth had just scampered down his arm and seated itself on the hand Cloud was griping Zack's wrist with. Zack stared at it. It smiled almost benignly at him before pulling out its sword, darting up Cloud's shoulder and, after pausing to giggle mischievously, sliced the string tethering Cloud's balloon head to his body.

Zack gasped as if sucking up all the air in the room and stood by helplessly as the yellow balloon with Cloud's face on it slowly floated up. Right into the briskly spinning blades of the ceiling fan, where it met its end with a loud pop!

Zack shrieked and looked from the falling bits of yellow latex to Cloud's neck. There was a hissing sound, and a new balloon rapidly inflated and floated up out of Cloud's collar, bouncing on the end of its freshly tied string.

Cloud was filling Tifa in on the details of how the appointment had gone when Zack gasped like a set of dying bagpipes. They both looked at Zack as he loosed a lung-shredding shriek that threatened to liquify their eardrums. "What on earth-?" Tifa began as Zack all but gibbered with relief and grabbed at Cloud's head.

"He's been like that ever since I picked him up," Cloud replied, pulling Zack's frantic hands away from his head. "He's got this weird obsession with my head. You should have seen him when I picked him up!"

"I can only imagine," Tifa commented wryly.

Zack looked at Cloud and whimpered "Boom Shaka-Laka?" in the same tone one would use to ask 'are you alright?'

"Don't ask," Cloud said flatly as Tifa raised an eyebrow in question. "Let's just get him upstairs so he can sleep it off."

Tifa pulled Zack's left arm across her shoulders, and helped Cloud walk Zack towards the bar.

"Are you sure he's okay?" she asked, concerned as Zack went "Wheeeeee!" and started making random video game noises when she lifted the flip up counter top.

"Yeah, he's actually looking a lot better than when I first picked him up," Cloud grunted as he turned sideways and maneuvered Zack behind the counter.

"How can you tell?" Tifa grunted, giving Zack a helpful push as he decided to come to a dead stop halfway through the bar access door to stare around the room.

"Well, both of his eyes are looking in the same direction, and he's not falling down every half step."

"I'll take your word for it." Tifa said as Zack looked back and forth between her and Cloud, laughing hysterically.

The magical rainbow portal they had entered deposited them in an alternate universe where everything was the same, except the bar now had an odd 16-bit look to it. One might even go so far as to describe it as 'pre-rendered'. Zack turned his head to mention the observation to Cloud, and bust out laughing. Both of his friends had turned into bulky, low polygon, 3D versions of themselves. Their bodies were made of simple shapes, and they didn't even have hands, just stumpy hooves on the ends of their arms.

Polygon Cloud turned to give Zack an unreadable look, Zack jerked his face in the other direction to keep from being stabbed in the face by a spear of polygon hair, and almost lost an eye to a polygon tiddy. Tifa patted Zack with a hand stump, and he started laughing all over again.

He continued to giggle as they shuffled up the pre-rendered stairs. The confined space barely left enough room for one person, let alone three, and this caused a storm of frantic clipping as various parts of Cloud and Tifa passed through the walls and themselves.

Zack's brain, still reeling from the general anesthesia, found the whole thing highly amusing, which was nothing of note, considering that in his current state, he would have laughed at the color of dryer lint. One of Cloud's hoof hands clipped through Zack's neck, while Tifa's face clipped through his head, and that was when it went from hysterically funny, to bowel twistingly unsettling. Zack blanched, the color draining out of his face like a flushed toilet as he got a good look at the inside of Tifa's head. He was about to scream when everything went black for half a second as the scene transitioned, leaving them standing in the pre-rendered hallway, all nice and separate.

Wilting with relief, Zack allowed himself to be led down the hall towards the bedroom. They met with a temporary delay when Tifa got stuck on the wall next to the bedroom door. They had to wait while she aimlessly turned in circles and glitched against the wall before finally getting unstuck. Cloud opened the door, leaving Zack wondering how one turned a door knob with a hand that lacked fingers, or even a wrist, and they stepped back into the normal world.

Cloud sat Zack on his bed by the window, where it had been ever since Zack had gotten lonely in his apartment on Base, and Tifa and Cloud had insisted that he move in. He ended up sharing a room with Cloud after he and Tifa got into a row over Zack not wanting her go to the costly expense of renovating the bar to add a new room. Cloud had stepped in with the offer to share his room before Zack ended up having to be carried upstairs in a bucket.

Tifa went back down to the bar to get a glass of water for Zack, while Cloud tried to get Zack comfortable. He pulled off Zack's boots, pushed him over onto the mattress, and was about to toss the blanket over him, when Zack abruptly sat back up with a cry of "Wait!"

"What? What is it?" Cloud asked, slightly startled at the outburst.

"I forgot to floss!"

"What?"

"I forgot to floss!

"You just had a tooth pulled! You don't need to floss right now-!," Cloud began as Zack jumped up.

Tifa returned, glass in hand and found Cloud arguing with an agitated Zack.

"What are you two doing?" she asked as she set the glass down on the desk.

"I forgot to floss," Zack babbled.

"You don't-!" Tifa started to say before Zack shoved Cloud's hands away and started Flossing. Something told Cloud that the immediate future need to be preserved for future generations, so he whipped his phone out and started recording while Tifa gave him a disapproving frown. He noted, however, that she made no effort to step in and stop the shenanigans.

Zack started out Flossing slowly, as if testing his coordination, and then went a little faster. Cloud expected him to stop after the first five minutes or so, but to his surprise, Zack began to speed up. His arms just kept moving faster and faster, becoming mere blurs as he Flossed as if his very life depended on it. Cloud feared that he was going to dislocate either a hip or a shoulder as the motion began to stir up a breeze. The wall calendar began flapping slowly, and random papers on Cloud's desk began to lift slightly. Cloud began to really worry when the curtains started fluttering. He swore he heard a faint whirring noise before Zack Flossed himself into exhaustion and collapsed backwards across his bed, snoring faintly.

"Well, color me impressed," Tifa whispered in admiration as they quietly left the room.

Zack woke a few hours later, jaw a little sore, but feeling much better than he had that morning. He had the vague and suspicious feeling that a lot things (most of them embarrassing) had happened, but darned if he could remember what they were. He sat up as Cloud came in to check on him.

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah," Zack responded, his tone uncertain as he noticed the blank expression Cloud wore. He was very familiar with that look, or lack there of. Cloud usually had that look when he was hiding various emotions. By the way his mouth was tighter than usual at the corners, and the way his eyes were slightly crinkled at the corners, he finding something funny. And it had to do with him. More specifically, something he had done.

"What happened?" Zack asked in such a way that his question covered multiple contexts.

"What do you remember?" Cloud asked, enigmatically.

Zack, feeling more and more uneasy, searched though the jumbled box of hazy memories. He described the events starting from waking up in the exam room, all the way until he Flossed himself to sleep. Cloud listened, not saying a word until Zack was finished. Now everything made sense, including Zack's fascination with Cloud's head.

They spent a few minutes laughing at some of the more outlandish hallucinations, and the more humorous things Zack had done on the way home.

"But the best hallucination was the rainbow unicorn! It had a rainbow mane, an diamond horn, and get this: it flew by farting rainbow glitter!" Zack howled with laughter, wiping his streaming eyes.

Cloud chuckled with him for a few moments before stopping and saying in a dead serious tone, "The unicorn was real,"

The seriousness with which Cloud delivered the news hit Zack's ears like a granite slab. Silence rang loud in the room for a few heartbeats before Zack stuttered in disbelief and no small amount of suspicion that Cloud was pulling his leg, "It what...?"

"The unicorn was real. That was 3rd Class ELITE Eunice Cornelius, who just made his first Shift today."

Zack stared at Cloud, not sure of what to say, so he settled for nodding and saying "Well, Boom Shaka-Laka!"

The End.

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