Chapters My name is Arn Strife. Yeah, Cloud Strife finally settled down to have kids of his own. It’s been seventeen years since the Children of Jenova were defeated by my dad… but even so he says that the inheritance he gave me, a giant sword he called the Fairblade, wouldn’t be liftable by anyone but him if that power weren’t needed. And I can pick up and swing the Fairblade with ease.
My dad was teaching me how to use the Fairblade when my sisters and brother were thrust into this adventure with me. It was around time for us to go home when my mom, Tifa called and said that she hadn’t seen my blood-sister, Ava, my adopted sister, Marlene, or my adopted brother, Denzel. Dad said we’d keep an eye out for them, and hung up.
“Where could they be?” I asked dad.
“Hopefully not in the same place as Zack,” dad said. I hated the way he said it. It was obviously meant to be a joke, but he was so monotonous that I was just depressed by it. Did I know the story of Zachary Fair? How could I not!? My dad is the closest thing to alive that Zack will be, thanks to Mako addiction that my father suffered from. I heard the story a lot, and to say that Zack and Dad were friends in the short time they knew each other, that’d be an understatement.
Just when we passed the cliff where Zack now takes his eternal rest, the wind in the area picked up immensely particularly around me and my bike, there was nothing natural about this wind, I yelled for Dad to see if he noticed it, when he turned around the shock on his face was painful, he reached out for me while riding his bike for me, but I couldn’t hold on and was dragged into the wind and through a black hole that was the last thing I saw before blacking out.
I woke up to the feeling of a bug on my forehead. I opened my eyes slowly and looked up to see a butterfly crawling on my head. In Midgard, butterflies are a rarity that can only be seen by leaving it. My eyesight was hazy from up to ten inches away from my face, but I could see faces, however blurry they were. My eyesight cleared up a little and I saw creatures I never saw before looming over me. One of them was yellow, with pink hair and blue eyes. The other was cyan with rainbow in its hair and ruby eyes. I somehow could make out that they were female when my vision completely returned.
“Are you okay?” the yellow one asked. Weird as it was, my dad was friends with a talking lion so I could say I had experience with this.
“I’m-I’ll be fine,” I responded. “Where am I? Who are you? And what are you?”
“What?” The blue one said with a confused look on her face. “Never seen a pony before?”
“Never…”I said drearily. Yeah, we had ponies and horses back home, but they were rarely seen, let alone domesticated.
“Maybe we should get you to Twilight Sparkle’s castle,” the yellow one said. “Can you walk?”
To answer the question I stood up and felt something missing, until it hit me… where was the Fairblade!?
“Uh… what’s that?” I turned to where the blue pony pointed and I sighed in relief as I found the Fairblade where I was laying. I picked it up and slung it on my back.
“Nothing I want you touching,” I said in response to the question. We walked a little ways until we reached a town, the inhabitants of which were all ponies of different colors… “Hey… where are we?” I asked.
“The name of the country is Equestria.” The blue pony said. “The majority of inhabitants of this place are ponies, of Winged Pegasus, Stalwart Earth, or Magical Unicorn origin. That’s as far as I know how to explain, my name’s Rainbow Dash by the way.”
“What about you?” I asked the yellow pony.
“My name is… uh… Flu…shy.” She responded quietly. I turned to Rainbow dash for a translation.
“Fluttershy… Rainbow Dash…” I said. “Definitely not names you give kids where I’m from.”
“Why?” Fluttershy asked. “I mean… what’s your name?”
“Arn Strife. Everyone calls me Arn,” they looked at me with a weird look on each of their faces.
“And you call our names weird?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“Well that’s because the meaning of your name is both hidden and out there, mine is just hidden.” We reached the castle of this… Twilight Sparkle pony, and all I could think was “this is a castle?” There were more parts around its main body than there were needed to make a motorcycle work… okay, maybe not that many.
I knocked on the door with my fist, which seemed to inspire the attention of Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, and the creature that opened the door looked like a child form of Bahamut, with claws instead of wings purple scales and green frills. He looked at me with a shock that said he’d seen me before… or at least something like me. He turned into the castle without noticing the girls.
“Twilight! We’ve got another one!” he shouted into the castle.
“Another one?” Fluttershy asked.
“We’ve got three more inside, one sick with something we can’t identify,” a purple pony with attributes of a unicorn and a Pegasus said as she came to the door. “You look perfectly fine,” she said to me.
“There are more humans here!?” I asked seriously. When she nodded she led me to them and my suspicions were confirmed. On the left of the bed was my blood-sister Ava who would be nine in a month. She and I look a lot like our mom, her hair is shorter than mine but it’s just as dark black. Her eyes were brown.
On the right side was Marlene, my adopted sister. She had brown hair, which she keeps tied up with a ribbon that dad got from Zack Fair’s… crush (I guess), Aerith.... who was killed by Sephiroth months after Zack was gunned down… moving on!
On the bed, which looked too big for a pony (And no, I didn’t know they could fall asleep standing up if they weren’t sentient!) was my brother (Adopted) Denzel. His curly grey hair was pasted to his forehead with sweat, water, and some herbal formula by the smell of it. When I entered the room, the girls turned to me with worry on their faces.
“What’s wrong!?” I asked urgently. “What happened!?”
“His bike nearly crushed us!” Marlene said. “We’d be here in the bed if he didn’t push us out of the way.” I looked at his side to see a bandage covering what looked like a very serious gash. I was afraid. Denzel was just on the verge of starting an adult life; starting a business, getting a girlfriend, that kind of thing. It was way too early for him to die, and wherever we were I certainly didn’t want him dying here. I was thinking of what my dad was thinking when he decided to take Denzel in, and his eyes opened.
“Arn… you too?” he said between breaths.
“Yeah… I’m here with you,” I said. “I’m gonna make sure you get outta here alive, alright!?”
“How?” Denzel asked. “The entire planet… is inhabited… by sentient animals…” he held his side gently to show where the damage was. “And I need… a new… liver… by the… sound of it…” he started panting a little. Just when he slipped back into unconsciousness a new pony, dressed in armor that would impress President Shinra of the Shinra Corporation. It was shining with gold so bright I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to get a good look at him. He had fur the color of my skin and mane that matched the blue hue of some of the bottles in my mom’s bar.
“Your highness!” He said to Twilight. “I saw him again!” then he stopped when he looked at me.
“Flash, did you get a good look this time?” Twilight asked.
“I think I have an idea what he looks like,” Flash said. I pointed to myself. “Well you look like the Metal Dragger, but I saw him going for the lake.” There was another human here? I had to find this guy, maybe he could help Denzel. I asked him to take me to the lake. I had no idea what was in store for me there.
Author's Note
Is this crossover any better!?
I asked Flash for details regarding the “Metal Dragger” that we were looking for. The only helpful info I got was that he was always carrying a large slab of metal with him on his back. I pulled the Fairblade off my back and showed it to him.
“This slab of metal… does it look anything like this?” I asked. He got a good look at the sword and nodded.
“This one is a little more detailed than the Dragger’s,” Flash said. “But the size and shape are almost identical.”
“What’s different about them?” I asked. He pointed to two points near the base of the blade, right in the middle.
“There are two holes around here on the Dragger’s slab, each one just big enough to fit my hoof through, I’d guess.” Did I know what they were? It’d be rare for anyone not to by fifteen. Materia slots. And if the slots were by the base of the blade…
“We need to find this guy fast!” I told Flash. But when we reached the lake he stopped.
“No we don’t,” I was confused by what he meant until I turned around. There was a man by the edge of the lake wearing a white cloak that hid his face under the hood, and a sword that was bigger than he was on his back. The sword was black from the edge back and had, just as Flash described, two Materia slots near the base. The hilt was wrapped in red leather, and the guard was just half an inch all around the blade. He looked at me, and I saw deep blue eyes shining through the shadow of the hood.
“Who are you!?” I said. “Why do you have the Buster Sword!?”
“Your father doesn’t seem to need it anymore,” He said.
“But it’s a grave marker now! Isn’t that defiling the grave!?”
“I hardly think it matters,” The guy started to take the hood off, revealing black hair, blue eyes, an X-shaped scar on the cheek… “It was my grave after all.” I knew who this guy was, but how was he alive!? He took more lead in than a normal guy would die from! He pulled a capsule out of his sleeve and tossed it to me. I looked inside after I caught it, and saw what looked to be a liver. “Give that to your brother… we’ll meet again, Arn.” One leap later and he was gone. I was left standing there, speechless at what I just saw.
“Who was that?” Flash asked. The most I could muster in response was; “A friend of my father.”
We rushed back to the Castle and Twilight used “magic,” as she called it to replace Denzel’s Liver with the one that the Dragger gave me. A little later she said she had some work to get back to, and excused herself to a library in the castle. I asked the Bahamut creature, Spike (as he was introduced to me), to watch after Denzel and the girls while I hunted down the guy with the Buster Sword.
I searched the entire town of Ponyville (Aptly named place, and still very nice) meeting the denizens and looking for clues about the guy who saved Denzel’s life. It took a while, about two days, counting the breaks I took either to help or to take care of other business. I did find him though; he was at the far side of Sweet Apple Acres, doing squats from what I could see. When I got close enough he stopped.
“Hey there, Arn,” He said.
“Nice to meet you, Zack,” I responded. “How are you alive, and why are you here!?” I said as calmly as I could force myself to sound.
“I can’t answer the being alive part,” He said. “That one pony, Celestia, she wouldn’t tell me. But she did say that she thought it would be wise for someone who was familiar with the coming danger in her kingdom to come here.”
“If that’s the case,” I queried. “Why am I here? And for that matter Ava, Marlene and Denzel?”
“That was her doing,” he pointed to a tent set up like a cube as a woman, who I also can say I saw before, but like Zack I only saw her in photographs. She had long brown hair cascading down her shoulders with an auburn glimmer to it. She wore a red coat with a pink dress and brown gardener’s boots.
“Aerith!?” I was shocked now. How did they come back!?
“You must be Cloud’s son,” Aerith said. “And you must be wondering how we came back, that makes three of us, but we were needed here to bring you here.”
“What do you mean?” I was trying to sound calm, but I was freaking out inside.
“Celestia said that her former student, Twilight Sparkle was looking into an artifact that was found in the Evefree Forest,” Zack said. “And she called us here because we come from the same world as the Artifact.”
“The problem is, we can’t get near the Castle Twilight lives in without being recognized as something… Unnatural,” Aerith said. “We need you to find out what the artifact is, and if possible, find out what the danger is so we can stop it.”
It took a week to get over the shock of dead people walking in a magical land of equestrians… but when I did, I started asking Twilight anything about the Artifact I could. But when it became apparent that I had too much curiosity about the Artifact, she shut up and I had to explain why I wanted to know about the Artifact.
“According to Celestia, the artifact has some relation to my home world of Gaia,” I finished. “And whatever the relation is, it’s dangerous.” Twilight thought about my story for a little bit.
“If Princess Celestia said you were supposed to help, then I guess I shouldn’t turn you down.” She told me to follow her to the Library where the Artifact was being held. The thing was just a plaque that looked like it was made of stainless steel.
“I can’t make out what these symbols etched into it are. They’re definitely not from this country. At any point of recorded history. And the alloy is nothing like any of our materials. I can’t… Arn?”
I was paying attention to the story, but I was too stunned to respond.
“I have an idea what this is,” I said. “The writing is from Gaia, Midgard specifically. The letters are J-E-N-O-V-A.”
“What’s… Jenova?” Twilight asked. I remembered very well the stories my dad would tell me about this mutant Ancient. I told Twilight all I knew about the Walking Cataclysm. “That’s… unspeakable!” Twilight said.
“I guess I won’t be going back to Gaia just yet,” I said. “If Jenova is here, then Sephiroth could very well be here too, who would hasten Jenova’s work. Which would be bad.”
“I have to warn Princess Celestia!”
“Tell her not to tell anyone else about this yet.” Twilight wrote down the conversation on a piece of Parchment and gave the parchment to Spike, who immediately burned it by breathing on it. I had to question how Celestia was going to read that now, but that would come up later. I had to tell Zack and Aerith about this latest development.
I rushed to Zack and Aerith’s camp in hopes of getting a chance to tell them about this problem. They found out the hard way already. Long silver hair, a coat that put all dusters before it to shame, and a sword that, though broken, could reach my neck from ten feet away. Or at least it could get my shoulder joint.
“AH!” I felt an immeasurable wave of pain wash over me, as the jagged tip of the sword stuck in my shoulder.
“So… you are the new Guardian…” he said.
“S-Sephiroth!” he grinned.
“You know me then, Arnold?” he said with a stoic sense of pleasure. “I can’t let you oppose mother, so consider this a warning.” Warning? With that he pushed his sword downward easily into my flesh as another slice from the ether tore upward. I was screaming in unimaginable pain. I just lay there, knowing that without help I’d die. Then Aerith stepped out of the Shadows and used a Curaga Materia. That was moments before I blacked out.
Tortured nightmares of the Jenova Crisis haunted me in my sleep. Yeah I had no experience with the Jenova Crisis but somehow I was reliving what my father and Zack went through with Sephiroth. It was like, with one eye I saw through Zack’s eyes, but with the other I saw through dad’s… it’d probably have given me a headache if I were awake. Right when Sephiroth was defeated by my father the first time was where I woke up.
“Hey, Arn!” I thought it was my mom, but it turned out to be Twilight. “Feeling okay?”
“My right arm feels a little… heavy…” I responded.
“Not surprising,” I heard Denzel say. “The real one was removed so I had to make a new one out of scratch.” I had to look at it and realized he wasn’t kidding. It was then that I remembered what Sephiroth did to me, and the others. Zack was sitting up hesitantly eating… something that smelled funny from here. Aerith was feeding it to him with a spoon.
“What is that!?” I yelled.
“Cocatrice noodle stew,” Aerith said. Further inquiring revolted me further.
“Well, ponies don’t eat the flesh of other animals!” I heard a new pony say. As far as ponies go… she was pretty, not in a good way, and there’s not really a bad way. She had two curls in her hair big enough to fit my arm through, and my leg could fit through the curl in her tail. She had a white coat and an image of three gems on her- I’M NOT A FURRY!
“Don’t you have cows or something?” I asked.
“They talk,” another new pony said. She was orange coated with an image of apples… there, blond hair and tail, both tied at the base, frekles across her cheeks, and a western hat. “We couldn’t do that.”
Aw great, what could I eat here? Well I wasn’t hungry nor would I be for the next… week… so the problem wasn’t immediate.
“Okay, now that you’re awake from that day long coma, it’s time for rehab!” Marlene said with her arms raised.
It might as well have been Hell, but I pulled through and could use my arm with no problems. And I could use the Fairblade with more ease… though for some reason Denzel gave me a completely modified version of it. Whenever I dulled it (I could do that by folding it in on itself), it looked like a briefcase... Kinda.
It was a week after my Rehab. The ponies and I were on a train headed for the city of Canterlot… we had to talk to Princess Celestia about Sephiroth and Jenova. There were two types of ponies on the train with us… those who didn’t notice me, and those who couldn’t stop noticing me. I guess they don’t have many or any humans in Equestria.
“The hay is this thing?” someone asked while I was asleep. “And why’s it asleep during a train robbery?” I pulled through the haze of my subconscious and saw the face of a unicorn colt behind a bandana.
“Ugh,” I sighed. “I really don’t want to deal with this.” I got up and snapped the hilt of the Fairblade into position… without opening the blade. The tip of his horn started glowing.
“You really wanna take on a hardened-“ He didn’t have time to finish the thought. I slammed the Fairblade into the side of his face. Knocking him against the door on the other side of the car. I groaned, rolled my good shoulder, and faced the other train robber. He started charging his magic… I pulled out a thunder Materia and charged it up. Before he unleashed his spell, I yelled, “Thunder!” and gave him… quite the shock.
“Why is the train being robbed?” I asked the one I shocked.
“Princess Twilight Sparkle’s on board,” he responded. “We thought we could use her as Leverage to get our boss back.”
“Okay… where are your friends?” I asked.
“You think we’re gonna tell you?” The one I smacked with the Fairblade said.
“I wonder if you can still use magic if you lose your horns… the hard way!” I said with a threatening tone.
“You’re bluffing…” they said in unison. In response, I shrugged and propped the Fairblade on the tip. They gave me the details of the heist, and I knocked them out. I climbed out the window and ran along the top of the train. I had to dodge some magic beams around the first-class car… but I did make it to the engine. There were two… pegasi… that didn’t belong in the room with the engineer and fireman. I pulled my handset out of my pocket and called the new number that Zack put in its registry.
“Zack? How fast can you get to Fillydalphia?” I asked. A bit of talk from the other line before Zack responded.
“Where are you now?” he asked.
“Just passed the halfway point between there and Ponyville. If you need a warp or something, bring your bike. You’re gonna need it.” A second later he was on top of the train with me and his bike. “How?”
“Princess Celestia literally summoned me to help explain the threat. She just teleported me here after learning the approximate location.” I had to shake my head to remember what I needed him for.
“Okay, head for the back of the train and get rid of the guys holding the train hostage, meet me in the first-class car.”
“The train’s being robbed!?” Zack yelled. I shot him a look of urgency and he hopped on his bike and rode for the caboose. I jumped into the coal supply and slid down to meet the robbers, who after a bit of surprise, tried to hit me with razor feathers, which I deflected before freezing them with a blizzard spell. I got a call from Zack after disconnecting the train from the engine.
“We’ve got a problem with first-class!” he said. ‘Man that was fast’ ran through my mind before I asked what he meant. The guy holding the car hostage… he’s human. He said that as the engine to this train exploded a mile away.