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estiroseThe short tale of how I ended up with this fic was: I was drawn in by the request, I watched the episodes and liked them, I wrote a ficlet, I decided to try for a pinch hit, and I ended up with Ingus and Sara of Final Fantasy III doing a little unexpected stuff (like attempting to make this a crossover while I was racing after them yelling "No, I don't want a crossover!"). Spoilers for the game and minor ones for Sapphire and Steel episode 3.
"They're in front of us, somehow," Sapphire was saying mentally, as she and Steel were standing in a small flat in the late twentieth century. They didn't notice Silver standing there, of course, because he knew how to be quiet. Sometimes.
Sometimes.
Silver knew the basics of what the two had been assigned; somehow, within the place, time had become tangled up, distorted. Reports of monsters appearing and disappearing, and all that.
This was the whole reason why Sapphire and Steel were assigned, because this was disrupting time. Or time was disrupting things. In the first draft, I went more into who assigned things, but my canon beta caught that I was assuming some things.
"Can you see them?" Steel wanted to know, and Silver resisted the urge to laugh - it was so him to ask that, stuck in his cold shell of logic.
"More sense them than feel them, but yes." Silver could imagine Sapphire's eyes closed, trying to figure out what was going on. "They're holding hands. Talking. They seem confused."
"Hello there!" He loved watching them interact, but it would eventually get boring. Might as well get to the fun part.
I wanted to write Silver's POV, including his entrance, which I think worked pretty well!
Steel tensed, but it was Sapphire who turned around more quickly. "Silver," she said. Her tone wasn't as sure as it had been a moment ago, as if she wasn't sure of what to make of his appearance.
"I thought I'd drop in." He stopped leaning against the wall. "I'm sure you could use my help."
The two stood still, as if unsure what to make of him, as if he was some stranger instead of someone they knew well.
Silver seems to provoke that reaction, I think.
Steel was the first to recover. "The box over there seems to be a power source of some kind." He didn't point, but it wasn't hard to follow his gaze. Silver had to admit that it was clever; it looked like an ordinary chest that seemed only out of place because the rest of the flat was unfurnished. It was a dark red, maroon, trying to be brown.
The chests in the DS version of FFIII, which was the game remade in pseudo-3D, were red.
Crossing to it, Silver put his hand on the surface. It wasn't the wood it appeared to be, but a piece of machinery. Metal with the texture of wood. It was clever. "I'll see what I can do, then."
He let Sapphire and Steel get back to work. After all, dangerous things were their issue, not his; he just liked machinery, or anything inorganic. In fact, while the people he sometimes encountered in his work were interesting to deal with, he preferred nonliving things. They sometimes talked back, but it was less common, and they were easier for him to deal with.
Despite its appearance, the seam between the lid and the rest of the box seemed to be merely decorative. Silver studied the box, trying to think of what it might be made of. No element of Earth, it seemed.
"I've made contact," he heard Sapphire say. He could imagine Steel, starved for information, had closed the distance between them, while Sapphire tried to give him as many clues as possible. There was a reason they were assigned together often, he mused. "Briefly. They don't know what to make of my voice."
"What are they saying?" Steel asked, though he didn't need to. Sapphire was a professional, they both knew it.
"The woman asked the man where the voice was coming from. The man said it had to be from a crystal. His name is Angus, but he called her 'my lady'."
Sapphire mishears them, which is mostly because I basically put my foot down mid-story and said "No, we are not doing a crossover." In their universe, the Crystals of various elements do talk.
Silver mentally shrugged at the unseen humans' quirks and continued working. It was like all metal, it could be converted, moved, and shaped once he figured out how to manipulate it. He was sure that Steel was likewise turning over the clues in his mind.
"They're approaching the chest." Sapphire's voice, momentarily distracted.
"Do they know we're here?" Steel asked.
This kind of echoes Assignment 3, where Sapphire and Steel are trying to deal with the sealed capsule. Except Ingus and Sara are merely misplaced.
"As of yet, no. They're talking about the possibility that they'd been brought here to stop something from happening, having to do with clouds and darkness."
Cloud of Darkness, the main villain of FFIII, to be exact.
"So, they think they're the heroes." If it had been anyone else, the tone might have been slightly sarcastic. With Steel, it was merely a statement of fact. Silver knew that if the two of them posed a danger to Time and to the world, Steel would deal with them. If they were innocent bystanders… well, Silver hoped it wouldn't come to that.
Sapphire didn't comment, merely continuing her comments. "They're at the chest. The man has taken off some sort of sword belt and has handed it to the woman. He's put on spectacles and he's examining the box. The woman is cautioning him not to touch it again, as the last time he did it summoned a rook."
"Are they from the future, or the past?" Silver asked. Not that it mattered. He'd figure out what was going on with the box, and Sapphire and Steel would do what they had to do. Personally, he hoped no monsters appeared. He could do without being in danger.
It was Steel who answered. "We're not sure. Sapphire thinks it's the past." But the doubt in his voice made Silver wonder.
Steel's not stupid, and realizes that their "guests" aren't exactly where they're supposed to be, even by their standards.
"Ah." A push of the molecules here, and there, and suddenly, the molecules - the metal - flowed away. Not that there was anything but more metal, Silver noted, and perhaps the whole box was made of it. He continued pushing molecules inside, making holes in the box.
I never did figure out what was going on with the box, other than "It's magic" and interfering with it causes problems.
Something flickered out of the corner of one eye, and he turned to look. Two shimmers of light formed into two humans as he watched. A young woman in an elaborate headdress and a white shawl over a blue dress, who was holding a sheathed sword, and a young man in the clothing of perhaps the 1700s, wearing spectacles. The two of them, if Silver guessed correctly, were barely into human adulthood.
Sara's dress is... a bit more revealing than I mention here, and a lot more elaborate. Ingus did a Job Change, which means that he basically switched classes. He was a Knight/Warrior before and then went to Scholar, thus his manner of dress.
The man jumped back, snatching the sword from the woman and unsheathing it. "Who are you?" he demanded, placing himself between the three of them and the woman. His words were lightly accented, slightly musical, at odds with the menace in his voice.
This was to go with the "Sapphire misheard Ingus' name" bit.
"Well, hello there," Silver said. It was best, when confronted with violence - or surly people - to smile. It tended to throw them off. "I'm Silver."
This seemed so Silver, to do this.
Silver saw Steel tense. Sapphire put out a hand. "And I'm Sapphire, and this is Steel. We mean you no harm." Her voice was calm. "You were brought here through a disruption in time."
The two young humans looked at her, and then the woman put a hand on the man's sword hand. "I don't think they're the ones responsible," she said gently, pushing his arm down, the sword with it. "I am Princess Sarah, and this is Angus, my fiancé. Is that why the chest is summoning monsters?"
The two are not formally engaged/married in the story, but it's clear that everybody in-game ships them.
"Yes." Steel said briefly. He looked over to the left, and Silver shuddered as he saw the corpse of a four-winged bird, covered in blood.
A Rust Bird. Sara also mentions a Rukh, another monster in the same game (and in fact, the same dungeon).
Curious, Silver touched the blade, to see if it was easier to manipulate than the chest's unknown metal. To his surprise, it was the same. "His sword is made of the same metal as the chest," he told the others mentally so the two humans couldn't hear. Out loud, he asked, "And what kind of metal is this?"
The young man stared at him as if that was the last question he'd ever expected to be asked. "Oratum," he answered after a moment. "Are you a mage?"
Orichalcum, which I managed to mangle far more than I thought. It's a very rare metal in Final Fantasy III, and you only meet it in the sidequest that gives you the Ultima Weapon (which is Ingus' weapon that Silver touches). Technically, Ingus should have asked if Silver was a blacksmith, but Mage seemed more generic and fit in better.
To the humans, what he and the others could do would seem like magic. "In a way, yes." Silver smiled wider. He separated a few hundred molecules, enough to work with. He showed the two the small amount of removed Oratum, as the young man had called it, and then closed his fingers, moving them around. With his mind, he shaped the metal into a small ball. "See?"
In other words, Silver pulls an episode 3 trick again.
The humans stared. Angus, the young man, was the first to recover. "But how will that help us end the menace?" At least he wasn't in a panic. On the other hand, he wanted to help. That tended to be a disaster, even if they meant well.
"Perhaps if you would let us do our work," Sapphire said. "It seems to be our expertise, not yours."
The young woman, Sarah, nodded. "Angus," she said, "This would be like asking Taca to forge Oratum. We don't have the knowledge that these mages do."
Taca = Takka, Refia's foster dad.
That seemed to resolve the matter, for he responded "Milady," and then bowed a little. Sarah curtsied at them, and then the two of them withdrew, much to Silver's relief.
"Sapphire," he said, "Put your hand on this, will you? I want to see if what I'm thinking is right." The chest, the box, seemed to be a solid material, not a computer or anything at all.
Unlike some things I could mention.
Sapphire nodded, placing her hand on the material, and speaking mentally. "This seems to be a power source, but it's somehow... intelligent. As if it was meant to draw people here."
"People like our friends, then. And their monsters." He was still shuddering a little at the four-winged bird. "If it's from their world, they might know something about this." Switching to spoken speech, he turned to address the two humans. "Do either of you know about magic, or at least how to close down... transportation between worlds?"
The two shook their heads. "The last time Angus and the others had to destroy the mirror that served as a gate," Sarah said finally.
Again, this was to make this less a crossover. The mirror to the place where you defeat Cloud of Darkness is never destroyed.
Steel was considering their words. Silver knew that look. Whatever was threatening time and the world, he would stop, and that's what made him a good agent. "Why don't I just melt this down, then," Silver said, before the other agents could say anything. "The rest of you keep me from being attacked by four-winged beasts like our friend over there."
I originally had Silver say "eaten", but one of my betas pointed out that it was never brought up, so I chaged it to "attacked".
The young human Angus looked at him solemnly and nodded, Sarah doing the same. "I should be able to handle this," he said mentally to the others. "But I don't want them to interfere."
He concentrated on the Oratum, melting it down, trying to dissolve it. He didn't have time to pay attention to the others; this was his specialty, and he was going to do what he was supposed to do. Even if it was resisting him, like no metal should. What was this Oratum, anyway, and why was it being so difficult to work with? He gritted his teeth a little, pushing at molecules that suddenly didn't want to break apart and dissolve like good little molecules should.
My canon beta suggested throwing another obstacle in the way. I was so tired that this was what I came up with.
Even when he heard yells, something that sounded like "mandrakes" and "red caps", he didn't look up, trusting Sapphire and Steel to keep him safe.
Mandrakes and Red Caps are both wandering monsters in the game.
"Silver! Got that box taken apart yet?" Steel called. It sounded vaguely like something behind him was being beaten to death with books, but Silver was too busy with the stubborn metal.
The only weapons that the Scholar class has is books. So, yes, Ingus/Angus was literally beating monsters to death with books.
"Working on it, don't worry." He kept working until the chest was torn apart, dissolved to its component molecules. When it was done, he looked up.
The humans, he noted after a moment, were gone. Sapphire and Steel were relaxing... or at least Steel did as much as he ever did.
And dissolving the box made everything disappear, because I didn't want to deal with Ingus and Sara anymore.
"I told you I could do it," he commented to nobody in particular. Sapphire smiled. Steel looked around.
It was time to go home.
I'm not sure where "home" is, but they went... wherever they go.
And a bit of bonus: Ingus and Sara, and teammate Arc (in glasses) as a Scholar.
"They're in front of us, somehow," Sapphire was saying mentally, as she and Steel were standing in a small flat in the late twentieth century. They didn't notice Silver standing there, of course, because he knew how to be quiet. Sometimes.
Sometimes.
Silver knew the basics of what the two had been assigned; somehow, within the place, time had become tangled up, distorted. Reports of monsters appearing and disappearing, and all that.
This was the whole reason why Sapphire and Steel were assigned, because this was disrupting time. Or time was disrupting things. In the first draft, I went more into who assigned things, but my canon beta caught that I was assuming some things.
"Can you see them?" Steel wanted to know, and Silver resisted the urge to laugh - it was so him to ask that, stuck in his cold shell of logic.
"More sense them than feel them, but yes." Silver could imagine Sapphire's eyes closed, trying to figure out what was going on. "They're holding hands. Talking. They seem confused."
"Hello there!" He loved watching them interact, but it would eventually get boring. Might as well get to the fun part.
I wanted to write Silver's POV, including his entrance, which I think worked pretty well!
Steel tensed, but it was Sapphire who turned around more quickly. "Silver," she said. Her tone wasn't as sure as it had been a moment ago, as if she wasn't sure of what to make of his appearance.
"I thought I'd drop in." He stopped leaning against the wall. "I'm sure you could use my help."
The two stood still, as if unsure what to make of him, as if he was some stranger instead of someone they knew well.
Silver seems to provoke that reaction, I think.
Steel was the first to recover. "The box over there seems to be a power source of some kind." He didn't point, but it wasn't hard to follow his gaze. Silver had to admit that it was clever; it looked like an ordinary chest that seemed only out of place because the rest of the flat was unfurnished. It was a dark red, maroon, trying to be brown.
The chests in the DS version of FFIII, which was the game remade in pseudo-3D, were red.
Crossing to it, Silver put his hand on the surface. It wasn't the wood it appeared to be, but a piece of machinery. Metal with the texture of wood. It was clever. "I'll see what I can do, then."
He let Sapphire and Steel get back to work. After all, dangerous things were their issue, not his; he just liked machinery, or anything inorganic. In fact, while the people he sometimes encountered in his work were interesting to deal with, he preferred nonliving things. They sometimes talked back, but it was less common, and they were easier for him to deal with.
Despite its appearance, the seam between the lid and the rest of the box seemed to be merely decorative. Silver studied the box, trying to think of what it might be made of. No element of Earth, it seemed.
"I've made contact," he heard Sapphire say. He could imagine Steel, starved for information, had closed the distance between them, while Sapphire tried to give him as many clues as possible. There was a reason they were assigned together often, he mused. "Briefly. They don't know what to make of my voice."
"What are they saying?" Steel asked, though he didn't need to. Sapphire was a professional, they both knew it.
"The woman asked the man where the voice was coming from. The man said it had to be from a crystal. His name is Angus, but he called her 'my lady'."
Sapphire mishears them, which is mostly because I basically put my foot down mid-story and said "No, we are not doing a crossover." In their universe, the Crystals of various elements do talk.
Silver mentally shrugged at the unseen humans' quirks and continued working. It was like all metal, it could be converted, moved, and shaped once he figured out how to manipulate it. He was sure that Steel was likewise turning over the clues in his mind.
"They're approaching the chest." Sapphire's voice, momentarily distracted.
"Do they know we're here?" Steel asked.
This kind of echoes Assignment 3, where Sapphire and Steel are trying to deal with the sealed capsule. Except Ingus and Sara are merely misplaced.
"As of yet, no. They're talking about the possibility that they'd been brought here to stop something from happening, having to do with clouds and darkness."
Cloud of Darkness, the main villain of FFIII, to be exact.
"So, they think they're the heroes." If it had been anyone else, the tone might have been slightly sarcastic. With Steel, it was merely a statement of fact. Silver knew that if the two of them posed a danger to Time and to the world, Steel would deal with them. If they were innocent bystanders… well, Silver hoped it wouldn't come to that.
Sapphire didn't comment, merely continuing her comments. "They're at the chest. The man has taken off some sort of sword belt and has handed it to the woman. He's put on spectacles and he's examining the box. The woman is cautioning him not to touch it again, as the last time he did it summoned a rook."
"Are they from the future, or the past?" Silver asked. Not that it mattered. He'd figure out what was going on with the box, and Sapphire and Steel would do what they had to do. Personally, he hoped no monsters appeared. He could do without being in danger.
It was Steel who answered. "We're not sure. Sapphire thinks it's the past." But the doubt in his voice made Silver wonder.
Steel's not stupid, and realizes that their "guests" aren't exactly where they're supposed to be, even by their standards.
"Ah." A push of the molecules here, and there, and suddenly, the molecules - the metal - flowed away. Not that there was anything but more metal, Silver noted, and perhaps the whole box was made of it. He continued pushing molecules inside, making holes in the box.
I never did figure out what was going on with the box, other than "It's magic" and interfering with it causes problems.
Something flickered out of the corner of one eye, and he turned to look. Two shimmers of light formed into two humans as he watched. A young woman in an elaborate headdress and a white shawl over a blue dress, who was holding a sheathed sword, and a young man in the clothing of perhaps the 1700s, wearing spectacles. The two of them, if Silver guessed correctly, were barely into human adulthood.
Sara's dress is... a bit more revealing than I mention here, and a lot more elaborate. Ingus did a Job Change, which means that he basically switched classes. He was a Knight/Warrior before and then went to Scholar, thus his manner of dress.
The man jumped back, snatching the sword from the woman and unsheathing it. "Who are you?" he demanded, placing himself between the three of them and the woman. His words were lightly accented, slightly musical, at odds with the menace in his voice.
This was to go with the "Sapphire misheard Ingus' name" bit.
"Well, hello there," Silver said. It was best, when confronted with violence - or surly people - to smile. It tended to throw them off. "I'm Silver."
This seemed so Silver, to do this.
Silver saw Steel tense. Sapphire put out a hand. "And I'm Sapphire, and this is Steel. We mean you no harm." Her voice was calm. "You were brought here through a disruption in time."
The two young humans looked at her, and then the woman put a hand on the man's sword hand. "I don't think they're the ones responsible," she said gently, pushing his arm down, the sword with it. "I am Princess Sarah, and this is Angus, my fiancé. Is that why the chest is summoning monsters?"
The two are not formally engaged/married in the story, but it's clear that everybody in-game ships them.
"Yes." Steel said briefly. He looked over to the left, and Silver shuddered as he saw the corpse of a four-winged bird, covered in blood.
A Rust Bird. Sara also mentions a Rukh, another monster in the same game (and in fact, the same dungeon).
Curious, Silver touched the blade, to see if it was easier to manipulate than the chest's unknown metal. To his surprise, it was the same. "His sword is made of the same metal as the chest," he told the others mentally so the two humans couldn't hear. Out loud, he asked, "And what kind of metal is this?"
The young man stared at him as if that was the last question he'd ever expected to be asked. "Oratum," he answered after a moment. "Are you a mage?"
Orichalcum, which I managed to mangle far more than I thought. It's a very rare metal in Final Fantasy III, and you only meet it in the sidequest that gives you the Ultima Weapon (which is Ingus' weapon that Silver touches). Technically, Ingus should have asked if Silver was a blacksmith, but Mage seemed more generic and fit in better.
To the humans, what he and the others could do would seem like magic. "In a way, yes." Silver smiled wider. He separated a few hundred molecules, enough to work with. He showed the two the small amount of removed Oratum, as the young man had called it, and then closed his fingers, moving them around. With his mind, he shaped the metal into a small ball. "See?"
In other words, Silver pulls an episode 3 trick again.
The humans stared. Angus, the young man, was the first to recover. "But how will that help us end the menace?" At least he wasn't in a panic. On the other hand, he wanted to help. That tended to be a disaster, even if they meant well.
"Perhaps if you would let us do our work," Sapphire said. "It seems to be our expertise, not yours."
The young woman, Sarah, nodded. "Angus," she said, "This would be like asking Taca to forge Oratum. We don't have the knowledge that these mages do."
Taca = Takka, Refia's foster dad.
That seemed to resolve the matter, for he responded "Milady," and then bowed a little. Sarah curtsied at them, and then the two of them withdrew, much to Silver's relief.
"Sapphire," he said, "Put your hand on this, will you? I want to see if what I'm thinking is right." The chest, the box, seemed to be a solid material, not a computer or anything at all.
Unlike some things I could mention.
Sapphire nodded, placing her hand on the material, and speaking mentally. "This seems to be a power source, but it's somehow... intelligent. As if it was meant to draw people here."
"People like our friends, then. And their monsters." He was still shuddering a little at the four-winged bird. "If it's from their world, they might know something about this." Switching to spoken speech, he turned to address the two humans. "Do either of you know about magic, or at least how to close down... transportation between worlds?"
The two shook their heads. "The last time Angus and the others had to destroy the mirror that served as a gate," Sarah said finally.
Again, this was to make this less a crossover. The mirror to the place where you defeat Cloud of Darkness is never destroyed.
Steel was considering their words. Silver knew that look. Whatever was threatening time and the world, he would stop, and that's what made him a good agent. "Why don't I just melt this down, then," Silver said, before the other agents could say anything. "The rest of you keep me from being attacked by four-winged beasts like our friend over there."
I originally had Silver say "eaten", but one of my betas pointed out that it was never brought up, so I chaged it to "attacked".
The young human Angus looked at him solemnly and nodded, Sarah doing the same. "I should be able to handle this," he said mentally to the others. "But I don't want them to interfere."
He concentrated on the Oratum, melting it down, trying to dissolve it. He didn't have time to pay attention to the others; this was his specialty, and he was going to do what he was supposed to do. Even if it was resisting him, like no metal should. What was this Oratum, anyway, and why was it being so difficult to work with? He gritted his teeth a little, pushing at molecules that suddenly didn't want to break apart and dissolve like good little molecules should.
My canon beta suggested throwing another obstacle in the way. I was so tired that this was what I came up with.
Even when he heard yells, something that sounded like "mandrakes" and "red caps", he didn't look up, trusting Sapphire and Steel to keep him safe.
Mandrakes and Red Caps are both wandering monsters in the game.
"Silver! Got that box taken apart yet?" Steel called. It sounded vaguely like something behind him was being beaten to death with books, but Silver was too busy with the stubborn metal.
The only weapons that the Scholar class has is books. So, yes, Ingus/Angus was literally beating monsters to death with books.
"Working on it, don't worry." He kept working until the chest was torn apart, dissolved to its component molecules. When it was done, he looked up.
The humans, he noted after a moment, were gone. Sapphire and Steel were relaxing... or at least Steel did as much as he ever did.
And dissolving the box made everything disappear, because I didn't want to deal with Ingus and Sara anymore.
"I told you I could do it," he commented to nobody in particular. Sapphire smiled. Steel looked around.
It was time to go home.
I'm not sure where "home" is, but they went... wherever they go.
And a bit of bonus: Ingus and Sara, and teammate Arc (in glasses) as a Scholar.
