Tunnel Vision

"And so, you see—" Squall broke off and made a noise of frustration, digging his fingernails into the cushion on the back of the chair he was grasping. He had the chair in a choking grip and he shook it in anger as the blank and unbelieving expressions on the faces around him remained unchanging.

"So, you see," Zell took up the thrown thread for him, "we’re in it deep. Real down damn deep. This monster that you nearly couldn’t kill and that nearly killed Squall and that we thought had been killed—well, we did kill it—well, you killed it, I wasn’t here—has at least a cousin out there and it ain’t any prettier or nicer than its dear departed kin."

Zell clapped his hands together and looked expectantly at the group gathered in Dr. Kencie’s laboratory, but he got no more reaction than Squall had.

He frowned and cocked his head at Squall. "Hey, isn’t this the part where we all gasp in shock and then jump into action?"

Squall’s arms jerked and his fingernails ripped holes in the upholstery of the seat he had been torturing. The cushion bled its stuffing into his hand and he flicked it away as he gathered his fingers and palms into fists and glared at Dr. Kencie and the small assemblage.

"You don’t believe me."

Dr. Zhabedy threw a look at Kencie and at Quistis on his other side, then, chewing his lip, dragged his face up to meet Squall’s eyes.

"It isn’t the result of any distrust or inherent disbelief on our part, I think I can safely say, Commander. No, not at all." Zhabedy pulled at the collar of his tailored shirt as if it were pinching uncomfortably close at his throat. "It’s only that, and I believe I can safely speak for my colleague as well as the Captain and the Lieutenant Commander here," he nodded respectfully to Kencie, Captain Caret and Quistis in turn, "that we are only thinking of your recent encounters, shall we say, with the creature…encounters which resulted in—" Zhabedy paused and looked up at the ceiling as if searching there for a suitably inoffensive euphemism, "certain injuries that may have impaired your ability to properly and completely recall every…exact…detail…sir."

Squall glared. "So you think I bumped my head fighting the big bad Scylla and now instead of seeing stars, I’m seeing monsters?"

Dr. Kencie stepped forward and started speaking quickly, as if Squall had said nothing. "Commander, what the good Dr. Zhabedy has just said is true, your injuries sustained while battling the Scylla were serious and, indeed, not properly treated, sir, though we all commend your commitment to duty that kept you moving even when another man would have been convalescing." He paused to give an oily smile to the stoic Squall.

"Still," Kencie continued, "these injuries were very serious, and they now seem to be producing spontaneous and erroneous memories leading you to believe in events and facts created by your own mind. We still do not know much about the Scylla, or the effects of its attack as you, Commander, are the only known being to have survived a full assault of the monster, that being actual penetration of the tentacles resulting in the draining of life energy.

"I think it would be best," Kencie stated, tugging on the lapels of his lab coat and nodding, "to run a full series of tests on you, Commander Leonhart." Kencie spoke to an area slightly above and to the left of Squall’s shoulder, as if he were afraid to look Squall in the eye. "If you would agree to confine yourself to my laboratory for a day or two—a week at the most—I believe that I could certainly determine the cause of your current distress. Ah, and Dr. Kadowaki would, of course and indeed, be able to offer her input. Yes, two weeks at the outside most." Kencie pulled a palm-sized computed pad out of his coat pocket as he spoke and began typing on it using a pen. His eyes were wide and covered in an unnatural, eager glow behind his glasses as he continued to enter and receive data from his computer and nod to himself. Dr. Zhabedy stood beside Kencie and looked up at the scientist with admiration.

Meanwhile Squall, having long since lost what shred of patience he might have had left when he had called this meeting and come down to Kencie’s laboratory, took a step toward Zhabedy just to see the dumpling-shaped professor shrink and cringe.

Zell put a restraining hand on Squall’s shoulder and gave a short laugh. "Squall, man. Come on now. Think about what the good doctors are saying. You did get attacked twice by that thing. And it hurt you pretty good both times. Maybe what Dr. Z is saying makes sense." He beamed at the historian and the diminutive man straightened up again under the light of Zell’s winning grin.

"I mean, can you really trust a memory that suddenly appears out of nowhere? You normally have total recall that’s perfect at recording details." Zell laughed. "You’ve got the mind of a machine, man! So, really, maybe this, like, spurious memory is really just a product of your—" he paused and shook out his free hand, "your futile wish to have done something more when the monster attacked you on the beach, like a victim complex in the face of your impotency when confronted with danger. Couple that with the feeling of helplessness and anger over having lost two SeeDs under your command to this monster, and…" He trailed off and shrugged.

Squall stared at Zell with a face that he hoped showed more anger than horror. He whipped Zell’s hand off of his shoulder and the shorter man looked up quickly. Zell smiled and winked.

Squall blinked in surprise. Zell gave a subtle nod to the wall of skeptical faces across from them and winked again. Squall frowned for a moment, then let his face fall clean and put his trust in the little spidery-tattooed blond.

"Yes, I—" Squall said slowly, having never been strong at either acting or lying, "I can see your point. Maybe what you say is true."

Zell’s grin widened impossibly, his cheeks spreading out to his ears. "There, see?" He put his hand on Squall’s shoulder again and turned the grin on the doctors. "Now as for those tests, maybe they’re a good idea, maybe not, but I think they’re for another time. You sure got it right, Dr. K, when you said the Commander here likes to push himself and ignore his injuries." He made an exaggerated scowl at Squall and then laughed to the two doctors who stared at him, rapt and caught up helplessly in the windstorm of Zell’s energy.

"I think what Squall needs now, more than any more lectures or tests, is some rest, don’t you think? What about it, buddy, do you think that you can get yourself into bed and stay there for at least eight standard hours?"

Squall, stiff and hyper aware of his every gesture in the event that it should give him away, forced a weak, awkward smile. "Oh, I’m sure I could do that if I tried."

"‘If you tried.’ Ha! Squall, you crack me up!" Zell snorted and smacked Squall on the back, sending the taller brunet reeling for a moment before he could right himself.

Ordering himself to get a grip, Squall leant strength to the smile on his lips and faced the people he had called in trust when he had realized there was more than one Scylla still loose on the countryside: Dr. Zhabedy, Dr. Kencie, Quistis and Captain Caret. He smiled at them all until his cheeks hurt and tightened his fists until his nails bit his skin like Scylla’s claws.

"Captain Dincht is right, rest is what I need and it’s what I’ll get right now. I thank you all for listening to me rant. I think you can understand why I was so upset and why I called this meeting so urgently, but I thank you all for keeping such cool heads and holding onto reason while I let emotion and my own stubbornness affect my judgment. You’re right, of course, doctors, the monster Captain Almasy killed was the same one that attacked me and that attacked the team which included Private Bal and Sergeant Rawl."

Zhabedy smiled brightly at Squall but Kencie scowled in obvious disappointment over his thwarted plans to thoroughly dissect Squall.

"You are, of course, welcome to both our counsel and our cooperation at all times," Kencie said glumly.

Squall had to hold his mouth in the shape of a smile so he wouldn’t open it and say what was on his mind. He let Zell steer him out of the laboratory and into the corridor beyond, then he took control and led them toward the private locked elevator.

Squall hissed to Zell out the side of his mouth as he got his key out of his pocket. They had rounded the corner down the hall from the entrance to Kencie’s lab, but Squall was wary of showing any behavior that might prompt the scientist to run him down and lock him up for a month’s worth of surgeries, scrapings, injections, scans, sprays and lobotomies. "Nice show in there. Not very subtle, oh, and thanks for the on-the-spot psychiatric analysis."

"Free of charge," Zell said absently, glancing over one shoulder anxiously. "Here comes Quistis and the Caret that ate the peas, we’d better pick up the pace."

They reached the elevator and Squall hastily unlocked the door release so they could step inside. He pressed the button for the third level of Garden and then pounded the "Door Close" key. Squall thought they were safe, but then there was a crack! and the black leather of a whip swished into the elevator, forcing Squall to jump out of the way as a whistle of air kissed his face. The thick, rich leather of the whip snapped between the gold-sheathed doors of the lift just as they slowly met, and so the safety mechanism forced them to slide back open.

Quistis and Caret stood on the other side of the threshold, but not for long. As soon as the doors had opened wide enough, she stepped inside the lift and beckoned Caret to follow her. While Squall and Zell still stood pressed against the back of the elevator, both stiff and unsure, Quistis pressed the button that commanded the doors to close again and rounded to face them.

"Squall, I believe you."

Squall was wary, but a fraction of the tightness in his chest loosened.

Quistis went on. "You have perfect recall. Zell was correct in that observation; you fight like a machine. I think that your injuries only caused the delay in your recovering this memory, not the fabrication of the memory itself. Zhabedy and Kencie live with their heads up their asses and only believe what they tell each other." Quistis pursed her lips.

"I believe you though. There are at least two Scylla out there. So what does that mean—do you remember, Squall?" Quistis’s cold blue eyes were quizzing him, boring into him and once more making him stand at the front of her class and recite his homework assignment—but this time he knew the answers.

He recited an old rhyme taught to all Garden students to help them learn as children the perils and patterns of monsters:

"If you find only one
then your work could be done
If you find not its kin
then the battle is won

"If you find two or more
then beware what’s in store
For a hundred’s then likely
and the battle’s a war"

He resisted the urge to recite the well-known verses in a monotone because he knew this was important, but the rhyme was very familiar and was once much hated by the younger Squall who had to memorize and endlessly repeat it for class.

The elevator came to a stop just as Zell, obviously a victim of the same oft-repeated verses, cringed and grimaced, making no effort to hide his distaste. Quistis did not bother to roll her eyes at him; she waited until Squall had exited the elevator first, then walked briskly out behind him. Shuffles behind them told Squall that Zell and Caret were following but he did not look back as he keyed in the code to unlock the electric security system guarding his office and marched into the spacious room with Quistis on his heels.

"Precisely," Quistis stated, picking up exactly where they had left off in the elevator. "Squall, that rhyme isn’t just a torture device teachers use on their students to sedate them into a proper silence. It’s a simple verse that’s been used for many years to teach children a basic truth about monsters: If there’s only one of its kind in the area, it’s most likely the only one of its kind in existence. But if you can find at least one other monster like it anywhere, then—"

"Then you’ve found yourself just at the start of its numbers. ‘When it rains, it pours,’ there are probably many more like it in the area."

Quistis nodded in agreement with Squall. "It’s nothing to do with probability or the odds, it’s just the way it is. If there’s two, then there’s two hundred."

Squall set about palming on his various computer terminals and turned one over to Quistis.

Captain Caret, presumably only just catching on, blurted, "But Commander Leonhart has seen two separate monsters!"

Quistis looked gravely up from the computer monitor at the Captain and nodded. "Yes, Captain Caret."

"But then, does that mean—?" Caret trailed off, his eyebrows disappearing in his hair.

Squall closed his eyes and wondered, in a threefold manner: a) had he, mistakenly of course, kept his lips closed while explaining the situation of the Scylla in the briefing downstairs, thus explaining Caret’s delay in understanding; b) how had Seifer, a vocal and frequent detractor of Captain Caret’s mental prowess, avoided killing the man out of sheer frustration before now; and c) was his, that is Squall’s, head going to explode soon, because it sure felt like it was going to.

"Hyne, Caret, is that your head up your asshole? How did you bend all the way around to get it up there?" Zell cried in amazement before elbowing the Captain out of the way and looking intensely at Quistis and Squall.

"All right, we know what the problem is," Zell said. "Now what do we do first? Shouldn’t we call Rinoa? Wouldn’t having a sorceress around right about now be a good thing? Squall, why didn’t you call her down to Kencie’s lab?"

Quistis pursed her lips, lifting her shoulders as she took a breath and then letting them fall as if the authority she pulled about herself then were an invisible cloak, heavy and cumbersome. "Regulation 57B dash four-oh-two point three."

Zell’s mouth hung open. "Whuh?"

Squall held back an unprofessional sigh. "It’s the SeeD law governing non-disclosure of Garden affairs to non-Garden personnel, and it’s the arbitrary protocol that keeps my hands tied. There’s a list of conditions that must be met before I can call in any person not employed by SeeD as a consultant in any situation that directly involves SeeD soldiers and/or staff." Squall took a deep breath and curled his lip in his disgust. "I can’t involve Rinoa until there has been confirmed injury and the situation is deemed critical by at least two high ranking officers." He looked at Quistis, who returned his gaze coolly before fixing her eyes on the computer screen where she was doing a map scan.

"Here," she said, pointing at the screen. The tip of her chewed fingernail rested on a yellow triangle glowing on a field. "But then, here." She slid her finger over a small distance to indicate a green triangle very close to the first one. The yellow symbol on the tactical map represented the Good Will team’s current position three kilometers north of Balamb Garden along the East Coast of Esthar, and that was all that the program gave them in the way of valuable information; especially regarding the rogue green object on screen.

"Is that all we get? Position? What kind of satellite technology is this?" Zell scoffed.

Squall lifted an eyebrow. "Some of the best considering two years ago transmissions from space was a null concept due to a whole lot of evil Sorceress blocking the radio waves."

Zell sighed and cracked his knuckles. "If you’ll excuse me, Quistis, let a Tech Junkie go to work here. I’ve been over at Trabia for the last three months helping them rebuild and they have the best of everything new out there. The scientists from the Lunar labs have been coming to them to test their new satellites. I’ll just do a little hacking and repositioning and—yep, here, I thought they might still have the same passwords." Zell had been typing while he spoke and he stopped both at the same time. Exact location on both objects on screen using precise latitude and longitude, body temperature, and biological breakdowns scrolled across the screen.

"Whatever that green symbol represents," Captain Caret said, bringing the same map up on another terminal, "the mean body temp is much higher than that of our team. And it’s really close to the G.W. team—like, in meters."

Squall looked over to Quistis and nodded. They didn’t know what it was but it was traveling on land along the coastline like the Good Will team and in basic stats it did not resemble the team of SeeDs out there. They had already meant to alert the G.W. team and bring them in, but now the situation seemed more urgent because whoever was out there was in some very real danger.

Squall the Commander and Headmaster forewent his wrist communicator and picked up a device on his desk that was made specifically for long-distance voice-only communication and that tended to be more clear than his wrist device. Before turning on the device and keying in any one of the SeeD officer’s communicator’s codes that he had memorized, he asked Quistis, "Lieutenant Commander Trepe, whom did you place in charge of this Good Will mission?"

"Captain Seifer Almasy."

Squall’s universe tunneled. The moment passed him by like a windstorm. He could not focus because all he could do was hear the sound of the crashing of wind and the hollow roaring of a thousand ships flying past his ears. No thought, no fear, no panic. Only loud, crushing sound.

"Was I wrong to do so?"

Squall’s eyes whipped to Quistis’s face so fast he thought he heard them snap.

"Wrong?" he echoed, loving how calm he sounded—how calm he always sounded.

"Yes," she said, eyes wide and too innocent. "He is a Captain now—unless that promotion was just a bluff to shut Caret up—"

Caret opened his mouth.

"No, I meant it. Seifer is a competent officer. I’m glad it’s him out there in the field right now," Squall lied through his teeth. "Captain Almasy will listen to reason and won’t shrug off a warning just because he doesn’t like what it might mean."

Squall wasted no time then in calling Seifer using the communicator. Since they could not be sure of a secure line, Squall gritted his teeth and used assigned pass and code words. "Come in Yellow Knight, come in Yellow Knight, this is the Papa Lion from the Pie-In-the-Sky, over."

"I read you, Papa in the Pie, this is Yellow Knight, over," came Seifer’s laconic rejoinder.

Zell was frantically typing and he looked up and nodded shortly. "I bounced you around a few times but I got you a safe line. No one’s gonna hear us pulling our tails in and running from monsters, it’s okay to talk straight."

Squall couldn’t agree with the way Zell had put it, even if it was the truth. "All right, Captain Almasy, I’m told we’ve got a secure line right now so we can ditch the double talk."

"Aw, damn, Papa, I do so like it when you call me ‘Knight’."

Squall narrowed his eyes. "Captain Almasy," he said pointedly, "there is trouble. Can you give me a brief field report."

"Yes, sir. Absolutely shit on shit is happening out here."

A quick glance at the map showed that the rogue object was still there.

"Captain Almasy, you have to—what was that?"

There was the sound of laughter and raucous shouting in the background.

Seifer laughed. "Oh, after we patrolled this and that side of nowhere and found nothing but our own asses, I gave everyone the afternoon off. We’re all just hanging around in an empty field and having a good time. You remember that, don’t you Commander? Fun? Laughter? Playing around?"

Squall cleared his throat and tried to breathe around a sudden growing tension in the pit of his stomach. "Captain Almasy, I need for you to round up your entire team and return to Garden immediately."

"Oh, come on, Squall."

"Captain," Squall snapped, feeling like he was losing control and hating it. His stomach was starting to hurt.

"Commander, just because we finished the work doesn’t mean we can’t use the time for play, huh? Come on, cut us some slack."

"Captain," Squall said just a little breathlessly. "I don’t trust any line to be secure enough, but there is a situation going on back at home base that you really need to be here for and—"

"What, are doctors Doom and Gloom moaning about something else of theirs that I burnt before they got to slice it and dice it for science? Really, Squall—"

"Captain!" Squall clenched his free hand into a fist and took a deep breath before taking a chance on an open line. "Seifer. It’s the Scylla. You have to come back, Seifer. You’re all in danger. You understand? You’re all in danger."

The line was silent for only a moment before Seifer’s voice could be heard, distant but raised as he hailed in his team, rounding them up for a return to Garden.

"All right, Commander, we’ll be back soon, we’ll cover the distance quickly."

"Seifer, be careful, there’s a rogue object on the map, here, just beside you, that’s been staying parallel to you, and it’s body temperature is very high—"

"What do you mean, you don’t know where they are?" Seifer said suddenly. "Oh for crying out—"

Squall swallowed a groan and released the hand that had been in a fist; each finger cracked as he straightened it.

"Captain Almasy?" Squall called into the communicator.

There were murmurs of noise issuing from the device, then Seifer was back.

"Well, Commander, it seems that two members of my party have strayed from our lovely scenic green field, here. We’re all looking about now for them, and perhaps you can hear my team calling for them."

Sure enough, Squall could hear two names being called, though he could not make them out. The yelling stopped abruptly, though, and then someone screamed.

"What’s that?" Seifer seemed to ask himself, though his loud, clear voice indicated that he held the communicator to his mouth again.

"Captain?" Squall said, his voice so beautifully calm.

"Oh, Squall," Seifer said in a very different tone of voice. "When you said it was the Scylla, you meant that there were more of them out here, didn’t you?"

"Seifer?"

Seifer laughed a little while there were more and more screams in the background. Then, Squall heard his muffled "fuck," and then after another shout the communicator fell silent.

Squall swallowed an unprofessional "Seifer?" and instead said, "Captain Almasy?"

He was rewarded only with the static of a dead line.

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