WATCH FOR: Tifa. Yuffie's sneaky ninja escape.
"Hi Ti..."
Yuffie escapes.
"... fa."
Aerith looks at the arriving cops and feels a squirt of guilt about the old man. Even so, she assures herself, he was trying - with some success - to hurt her animal pals.
"Did you get a car or anything?" she asks, stepping closer to the buxom battler.
Tifa knits her brow. "Oh, jeez, you just had to go and beat people up while I was gone. Did you at least get any good drops from him?" She watches the Mog go flying.
"Cait!" She always had a soft spot for good ol' Cait! Who couldn't like a cat? She bends down and picks him up by the scruff of his neck, graciously ignoring the kick and Yuffie stealing the food (she brought it to get Yuffie out of her hair, truth be told).
AND THEN THERE'S COP CARS GOOD GRIEF SO MANY THINGS TO REACT TO. The brunette instantly shifts into Run Away Mode, which involves staring at the cops with mean eyes, shoving Cait down the front of her top for safekeeping, and then pulling of an action roll into cover to grab the Mog doll to prepare for dashing off.
"Well, there's a VW bus down the road that I could hotwire!"
Cait Sith blinks as he's picked up. And before he can start his usual don't-pick-me-up-like-that rant... "Hey, waitatic- MMPH!!"
... as he stuffs tissue up his nostrils in an attempt to stem the blood, Reeve has a serious, resigned look on his face. He just /knows/ that the day that Cait Sith's secret is discovered, he is very much a dead man.
Tifa's fists can destroy robots and divine beings.
Reeve knows. This is why he has a will written out.
Yuffie is, meanwhile, discovering that eating eggrolls while running from the po-po results in choking. After throwing(!) a wrapper behind her, one police car explodes on impact, causing three cars behind it to drive, brakes squealing, into the wreck. Yuffie takes this moment to avoid death by asphyxiation, while police officers desperately attempt to save their fellows' lives.
"....."
"Right!" Aerith says, before dashing off after Tifa. She has put the staff away in carefully collapsed form. Hopefully they will not shoot at a woman in a pink dress.
*BANG* *BANG* *BANG*
"STOP AND WE'LL SHOOT!"
"...Shu, it's Stop OR we'll shoot. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Shhhhhhh."
Tifa grabs the Mog and the largest chunks of stuffing, and then makes a wild dash after Aerith, trying not to get shot. She's hates getting shot.
"Hold on, Cait!" she cautions, disappearing around a corner.
The party would find, after turning a few corners, that Yuffie is kneeling over a pile of regurgitated Chinese food. Gross! Behind her, there are six destroyed police cars, and a chinese egg-roll wrapper crinkled on the windshiled of the foremost one.
It is at the epicenter of the structural damage, and one could draw obvious conclusions from this.
Yuffie weakly gets to her knees, and offers a little smile. "I wonder if they have Gil!" This cues the girl running over to the destroyed policecars.
Well, he IS thankful that Tifa's gotten the Mog, but there are much more pressing matters to deal with. Like... "Hold on? To WHAT?!" After a moment of panicked flailing within Tifa's chest area, Cait Sith's arms and hands lash out and grab on to the nearest-
*jiggle*
... yyyup. Dead.
Aerith shows up a few moments later, panting already; she's in a hyper-induced state of manic enthusiasm but she retains somewhat cardiovascularly unfit, as well as not having spent her entire life being an athletic hardbody like SOME PEOPLE have. She is also not a robot cat.
"So," she says, looking at Tifa, "where HAVE you been?! We had to walk all the way in from outside town!" China is really boring and dirty and everyone smokes nasty cigarettes.
"Ugh, Cait! Stop moving around! Just stay next to the stack of Hi-Potions!" Tifa cautions. She tries shoving the stuffing back into the Mog doll as she runs, but promptly forgets what she is doing when she sees Yuffie and a pool of vomit.
Her mouth opens and closes several times, and then she just calmly walks over to the nearby van and gets in. A few seconds later it starts up and Tifa sits quietly in the passenger seat.
She is trying very hard not to think about Yuffie at all.
At all.
Yuffie is behind Tifa by the time the bartender has taken a seat in the van, making herself comfortable in the back. She's swinging a pair of kind-of-burnt handcuffs around on her left index finger, and has a singed police-officer's hat on her head. It makes her look kind of tomboyish.
"We are now fifty thousand Gil richer! Also, I powered up my Materia!" She smiles, holding a glowing stone aloft.
At the very least, the Mog isn't actively /bleeding/ stuffing, so it's pushed back in fairly easily. At least it's not bleeding electronic guts or something equally bothersome.
"Roger that, Tifa!" Cait Sith, meanwhile, manages to settle himself near the Hi-Potions- and then he pops his head out of the front of Tifa's shirt, crown slightly askew. "Whew, it's a tight fit in there," Cait quips, flicking an ear as he looks around and takes in his surroundings. The shifting fur will undoubtedly tickle. "So where're we headed next? I mean, aside from 'away'."
The cat seems rather uninclined to move.
A thought then occurs to Cait Sith. "Yuffie, when th' hell didja manage to have time to yoink all that-" The cat closes his mouth. "... on second thought, don' answer that. Don't think I wanna know."
Aerith looks at the van as the others climb into... the back, and the passenger's side seat, and...
And...
Her shoulders slump. She steps towards the drivers' side seat with an exhausted shuffle, feeling the four small blisters on her feet in almost mathemtical detail. She slides in, and holds out a hand towards Tifa as if expecting keys. She has, quite legitimately, not noticed if the motor's already running, or if Yuffie actually has the keys.
She stares out the windshield. She seems haunted. "We can't stay here," she says, in a quiet, ominous tone.
Tifa doesn't mind, largely because she likes Cait Sith the kyoot little widdle kitty cat. Also, she enjoys the attention. It's like a big flashing neon sign going 'LOOK :D8'.
"The motor's running," she points out to Aerith. "We should drive for the gate. NEXT TIME however, we're not going to screw up because I want to just chill out for awhile. Yuffie, I'm looking at you."
Yuffie Kisaragi shakes her head, and leans forwards, pushing cash into, well, everybody's hands. She even puts a dollar on Cait Sith's head. "Nonono! Look! Fifty thousand gil! We could buy a whole lot of stuff with this! I did a good job today!" It is what she does. Can you blame her?
If it helps any... think of how much Drowsy it could buy. Enough to... put Yuffie out for /an entire scene/.
And to think that everyone who knows about the Cait Sith project laughed at Reeve for choosing such an unconventional, non-combat-oriented avatar. WELL, LOOK WHO'S LAUGHING /NOW/?
Cait Sith sighs dramatically, shaking his head in mock exasperation. "Lemme guess; while I was lookin' fer you people, Yuffie's been th' cause of all y'alls becomin' wanted criminals?" he quips. And then there's the dollar on his head! The feline reaches up to take it, eyeing the money with little interest. He's a cat, and his alter ego is Shinra's freaking Head of Urban Development. He doesn't need cash! "... well, I can't complain 'bout the results, but still, we're gonna get a LOTTA people on our tails after this is all over."
"And besides, all y'all've gotta be able to settle down for 'least a day or so without somethin' happenin'. Gotta rest." Cait Sith glances at Aerith, noting her change in tone. "... oy, Aerith, y'alright there?"
"Of course I'm fine," Aerith says in a calm voice. "Why wouldn't I be fine?"
Her foot slams down on the gas pedal, and she makes a sharp K-turn that barely avoids a half-toppled telephone pole before tearing off into the Hong Kong streets.
She explains while accelerating, "It's fine. I'm used to having people after me. It's no big deal." She reaches over casually, yanking up on the parking brake to perform a bootlegger turn after passing through a large intersection, sending all the miscellaneous junk in the van rolling to one side and leaving the van on two wheels for a good hundred feet. After letting it sit for a moment to rattle back to four wheels, she mashes the gas again, heading out into that larger street.
"Yuffie, can you read these signs?" She continues to sound calm, even reasonable as she swerves through slower-moving trucks.
For a long moment, Yuffie is absolutely quiet, eyes wide open, staring vacantly out the windshield. She sometimes gets the impression that her friends don't really... appreciate her all that much. Her jaw goes slack as the train of thought takes her further from her body(meanwhile, Aerith is likely awaiting an answer). All she wanted to do was get enough money so that they could buy all the materia they'd ever need! She knew that she was singlehandedly responsible for most of the AVALANCHE's money and hard-to-obtain goods.
Yuffie nods at nobody in particular, and her gaze goes steely, beneath that torn and beaten police-officer's hat. Her lips tighten. As various interstate indicators and other exits to the city go flying by(there is another exit a good three miles down the road), Yuffie proclaims, quite gravely:
"...Yes."
Tifa grabs onto the handle above the passenger window that has been thoughtfully placed there by the fine folks at VW. She starts to hum a little tune which is often drowned by the sound of squealing tires or blaring horns.
The bartender flips down the sun visor to use the mirror, fixing her hair.
"Right, then, jes' makin' sure you weren't 'bout to keel over from lack o' sleep an' all." Cait grins, keeping an iron grin on the collar of Tifa's shirt-thing. "Y'all gotta get yer beauty rest, after all!" If there's one thing the cat is good at, it's cracking bad jokes in a valiant but ultimately doomed attempts to lighten the mood and/or break any silence.
For a little while, Cait Sith hums along with Tifa for a moment, utterly off-tune. Also, he's trying not to think about any road signs that would simply say 'yes'. "... hey, anyone want me t' tell y'all your fortunes?" he asks, not for the first time.... this hour.
"Ha ha ha!" Aerith says, rather than laughs. "No, no, I'll be alright. It's not the first time... it's good to have you here again, Cait, reunions are always nice." This is a random word which may perhaps make someone nervous, somewhere.
She says towards Yuffie, without turning her head -at all- - somehow - "Tell me how to get out of town heading north. They put south at the top of their maps here, so they'll be working from south up northwards." She is totally making that up, but doesn't it sound plausible?
"Sure," she adds, to the offer of fortunes. A truck full of chickens honks its horn as they tear past it.
Yuffie is more paying attention to the road signs than anything else, but shakes her head after a moment. "Oh, no, you can get onto the interstate or something if you turn left at the big green signs up ahead. I don't know what an interstate is but it sounds kind of important!" With that said and done, she promptly lies down in her seat, grabs a spare wad of what used to be Cait Sith's moogle, and falls asleep on the thing.
============================ BB Post in Progress =============================
Group: News Broadcasts
Title: Three Gorgons Attack Hong Kong
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*Broadcast from Hong Kong News Channel 4.*
"Tonight, in our fair city, the infamous Three Gorgons made another appearance. Apparently, according to eyewitness accounts, they were attempting to mug several citizens when a former local martial arts master attempted to stop them. And now, live footage from the scene!"
Footage from a circling news helicopter of Aerith, Tifa, Cait Sith, and a fleeing Yuffie. Zoomed in shot from above of Tifa and Aerith. Woo! Oh, and some panned shots of the devastation along one of the streets, cracked pavement, broken buildings, destroyed cars, a large meterorite. That sort of thing. then a cut to Interviews with witnesses.
Zhou Bu, local resident:"It was horrible! They just wouldn't leave poor old man Li alone. He was fighting one of them, and then their furry demon came up and hit him! Then that brown-haired one summoned a giant, and it tried to destroy my home!"
Officer Shu, of the Hong Kong Police: "Huh? Yeah, I knew it was them. I mean, c'mon! Who else would run around in such a skimpy outfit! Asides, I never forget a pretty face! Pity she looked so mean afore she ran away."
Lu Wu, Local Martial Artist: "Those Gorgons! Not only did they assault Old Master Li, they had to go and summon demons while doing so! I dunno about you, but I've never heard of any good coming of such traffic with demons! We'll show them not to mess with the founder of our school if they ever step foot in Hong Kong again!"
Back to the anchor. "Terrifying, isn't it? When will these Gorgons be brought to justice? In light of the recent assault on city property, the Hong Kong Police Department, in conjuction with several local consortiums of local businessmen, are offering a sizable cash reward for the arrest of these obvious criminals, due to excessive property damage and the destruction of several police vehicles. No fatalities were reported, although several are in the hospital at the moment. The Three Talons School, also from Hong Kong, is offering a Five hundred dollar reward for the, I quote, 'Vicious Beating Demanded By Heaven Of That Cowardly Gorgon Ringleader, Her Demon Summoning Harlot, And Their Stupid Fuzzy Demon', Too. Huh. Takes all kinds, I guess. Now, onto the weather!"
"Thanks, Hung! We're expecting fair weather with a low chance of syndicate wars across the southeastern neighborhood, as well as a chance of-" Annnnd then the news moves on.
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