and unsettling reflection that flashed at him when ever he passed one of the many mirrors that lined the
walls. “Mother fucker. Futher mucker. Futher mucking sock cucker...”
Reno paused, the blue streak of cursing that had been going non-stop since he left the filing room finally
coming to a rest as his lips continued to work soundlessly, the words tripping over their own feet
somewhere back around his tonsils and landing face first on his tongue. With a sudden pop of horror that hit
him along the spinal chord and raced up to his mind with a sweaty faced and desperate expression, he
realized that for the first time in his life he was feeling something that could not be expressed in four letter
words. His particular favorite curses had lost all meaning in the attempt.
So it was in an uneasy silence that he marched the rest of the way across the building and threw open the
massive stained black oak doors that lead to Tseng’s office. There was an intermittent room between the
spot that Tseng’s desk resided and the doors that lead to the rest of the building, a fact that Reno often
griped about. It was empty space, he always reasoned, that he could be using on something important. Such
as a wall to wall mural of Tip performing a move she liked to call the ‘Honeysucker’.
But now, it seemed, the reason for his argument had been removed. Or, rather, pushed out the other side, as
its hard to remove something by adding something else. And something had indeed been added. One large,
brown desk. One thin, tan man. One molting, green parrot. Whether the three had come in together or had
simply been purchased separately and tossed in a pile, Reno had no idea, but he didn’t like it.
He stared wordlessly at the man sitting at the desk and petting the parrot for a few moments, his eyes wide
in disbelief. He pointed a long, thin finger at him like a gun, his thumb twitching in reflex from his cowboy
playing days of a child. “Who the fuck are you?” he barked, happy to find that his favorite expletive had
found its way back into his functioning vocabulary.
The man, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, was not wearing one of the Turks customary blue suits.
This pleased Reno, as it meant he hadn’t somehow slaughtered Tseng, stripped him naked, and worn the
clothes in some sort of post murder ritual. It displeased him in the fact that someone who most obviously
was not a Turk was currently in the Turk headquarters, sitting at a desk and petting a parrot. He had dark
brown hair and a tan. The man, not the parrot.
“My names Kevin,” he said cheerily, glancing up at Reno. “If you want to make an appointment with Mr.
Chet we can try to put something together now, or I have a number you could call if you’d be
inconvenienced by coming in personally.”
“Interestingly enough,” Reno growled, “I’m already here personally.”
“So you are.” Kevin’s smile broadened. “So would you like to make an appointment?”
“I would like to roast you long and slow over a propane stove burner. I would like to shove you feet first
into that square foot bird cage there until you oozed out the other side in spaghetti strips. However,” Reno
said, cutting off the surprised look and low murmur of fear that seemed ready to escape the mystery man, “I
would be content with knowing who you are.”
“Oh!” Kevin exclaimed, as if the question was at all different from the one he’d answered moments ago.
“I’m the new temp here. Mr. Chet was overwhelmed with some filing work he needed done, so he called my
agency and had me sent right over. I’m like a hooker, except with paper. And if a pen bursts in my mouth
while I chew on it, well, I spit the ink out.”
Reno completely ignored the later part of that rather obscene message, and instead focused on a single word
from its midst. “Files?” he asked, his hands flexing convulsively. “What sort of files?”
“What sort of files?”
Reno blinked. His gaze, which had been locked on Kevin the temp, slowly slid to the left, and focused on the
bright green parrot sitting in its cage. Under his jacket, his hand worked, tightening around the pistol he kept
there in case his pistol was lost, his backup pistol jammed, and his backup backup pistol ran out of ammo.
“Don’t do that,” he snarled at the bird.
“Don’t do that!” it squawked back happily. Sensing danger, the temp inched over to Reno’s right, but even
in his fear of imminent death he continued to sort papers.
Reno’s eyes narrowed into dangerous little slits. The last man who had seen that look was now part of
Wutai’s latest bridge’s supporting pillar. “Have you ever heard of barbecue, little bird?” he hissed, daring the
parrot to mimic him.
“Have you ever heard of mouth wash?” it replied simply, then burst into guffaws of little parroty laughter.
Reno blinked in surprise, unsure he’d just heard something remotely close to what he thought he had just
heard. Either way, he figured, he couldn’t take the risk. He slowly worked the pistol loose from its hip
holster, hoping Kevin wouldn’t scream to loudly when he was sprayed with liquid beak.
“Reno!”
The voice came from behind him, not in front, which spared the Turk the creepiness of having a parrot
scream his name in a plea for mercy. The red haired assassin spun on his heel, hastily tucking his gun away
again in an effort to appear even slightly psychologically balanced. He assumed he failed by the way Tseng
simply shook his head.
“Tseng!” he responded in kind, and then added. “I’ve got a problem with you. But, more importantly, who
the hell is this?”
Tseng came marching up, looking as crisp and clean as ever, his heavily polished shoes clicking across the
floor. “That’s Kevin,” he informed Reno.
“So I’m told.” Reno responded.
“He’s a temp.”
“So I’m also told.” Reno responded again.
“By the same person?” Tseng asked, causing Reno to pause for a moment to make sure he’d understood the
question. When that moment was over, and Reno still wasn’t sure, Tseng shrugged it off and continued
talking. “Elena phoned ahead. She said I should ‘get a big bag of cookies ready for the picture shredding
baby.”
Reno’s eyebrows shot up to his hairline, and the eyes which were browed started smoldering. “Oh really?”
he snarled.
“No.” Tseng said, with a shrug. “But she did tell me what happened, so I decided to tweak her words a bit
to fit the situation as I saw it. Don’t tell me you’re here to throw a tizzy over some pictures we have of
you.”
“Of me. Of my sister. Of my package, interestingly enough.”
“And,” Tseng cut him off, “of you trying very hard to get a taste sample of the back of Yuffie Kiko Kisargi’s
uvula. That’s why you came here, right? That’s what you have a problem with?”
Stunned by the frankness of his leader, Reno hastily backtracked. “I don’t have a problem with anything.”
The parrot chose this moment to speak up. “I’ve got a problem with you. But, more importantly, who the
hell is this?”
Reno didn’t even wait for his eyes to finish closing in exasperation before he drew his pistol and fired
directly into the center of the bird, reducing it to a green and red mist and splashing Kevin the temp with
liquid beak. Not surprisingly, he screamed, but added a little twist of his own by diving to the floor and
hiding beneath the desk. Tseng, for his part, simply shook his head at the waste of a good bullet. Personally,
he would have just thrown the cage in the furnace, it would have helped heating costs for the building. He
would have to dock Reno’s pay twice, he reasoned.
“What I meant to say,” Reno said, now that the animal stenographer was gone. “Was that I don’t have a
problem, as long as I’m going to Wutai.”
“What makes you think you aren’t?” Tseng asked calmly.
“You. Well, Elena, who I’m beginning to think is just one of your many opposable thumbs.”
“Oh.” Tseng remarked. “That. That was nothing. Here.” He held up a packet, one of the customary
arrangements of paper and envelopes that came whenever they were assigned a mission. Jutting out from
one end was the unmistakable bottom side of a plane ticket.
“Do you mean to tell me...” Reno said, the color draining from his face, “that you only told me I couldn’t go
to Wutai so that I would come to you, so you could *give me my ticket to go to Wutai!?*” he finished in a
scream, his eyes wide, his jaw dropped so low it hardly seemed to be moving.
“Well, I wasn’t about to walk it to you.” Tseng said, shrugging. “You were, like, all the way across the
building.”
Shaking his head in utter disgust, Reno snatched the packet from his leader’s hand and tucked it under his
jacket. “When I get back,” he said, “you and I are going to have a very long talk about the fact you seem to
find amusement in all things stressing to me.”
“When you get back,” Tseng responded, “you and I are going to have a very long talk about how much of
your impending salary bonus is going to be going to our new recruit.”
“Uh.” Reno said, pausing, and deciding that was all that needed said. Then he recanted on that decision.
“What!?”
“You’re mission just changed.” Tseng informed him coldly, but with a gleam in his eyes. “You aren’t going
to Wutai to check out any store. You’re going to recruit a new infiltration agent for the Turks. When you go
about trying to convince her to go along with her new employment, I suggest you don’t mention its almost
solely because I prefer you worn out from hours and hours of kinky ninja sex than hyped up on your own
disgusting juices because you can’t get anyone to receive them. Understood?”
Head spinning, Reno nodded. “Understood.”
Tseng nodded back. “Good. Get out. And you,” he adds, pointing at Kevin, who’s just beginning to poke his
head up from under his now blood soaked desk. “Get me the dossier on a Ms. Kisargi. Somehow I think
we’re going to be glad to have made copies of it, very, very soon.”
Chapter 3