#bardic-tales

The Sector 7 café smelled heavily of dark roasted beans and artificial sweetener, providing a stark contrast to the crisp mountain air of Rinnos or the humid, earth-scented depths of the Mideel jungle.

At a small corner table beneath a flickering neon sign, Bianca Moore adjusted the drape of her heavy knitted sweater.

Across from her sat Azaela Sharpe, wearing a comfortably oversized sweatshirt and aggressively stirring a mountain of sugar packets into a vanilla iced latte. Perched on the edge of the third chair was Sapphire Aphelion. She was a picture of vibrant, chaotic energy. Her eyes darted between the blinking digital menu board and the porcelain mug resting in front of her.

"Alright," Azaela announced, setting her metal spoon down with a sharp, definitive clink. She took a long, blissful sip of her liquid sugar. "Rules of the table are officially in effect. We are three normal girls having a normal coffee date. No talking about corporate military protocols, no mentioning mad scientists, no existential brooding, and absolutely zero trauma. Understood?"

"Agreed," Bianca said, a small, playful smirk tugging at her lips as she leaned her chin into her hands. "I am on a strict, self-imposed vacation from the madness. If anyone starts drifting into analysis or psychological damage, I'm using my veto power. Let's talk about something incredibly mundane. Hobbies. Outfits. The weather."

"The weather in Mideel is much better than the smog in Sector 7," Sapphire offered cheerfully, her accent carrying the slow, warm cadence of the southern islands. She grabbed a small paper napkin, pulled a heavy fountain pen from her pocket, and carefully dipped it in a tiny puddle of spilled coffee before scrawling 'Dear Friends, I hope this finds you well' across the top. She stopped, staring down at the blinking PHS device that Azaela had set flat on the table. "Though I must say, these tiny PHS everyone stares into are highly unnatural. I tried to type a quick message to my father earlier, but there was barely any room to sign it properly. It's a total lack of manners."

"Sapphire, it's a text message," Azaela laughed, leaning back. "You don't need a formal epistolary sign-off. It already shows your name at the top of the chat bubble."

"It's about the principle!" Sapphire huffed, tapping her pen against the napkin. She aggressively took a bite out of a chocolate chip muffin, chewing with unnecessary ferocity. "It's just like that microwave upstairs in our temporary quarters that makes the food hot in seconds. It lacks respect for the culinary arts. Back home in the jungle, if you want hot stew, you build a fire, you gather the kindling, and you wait. You respect the wood! You don't subject a perfectly innocent potato to invisible radiation!"

"I am never letting you near the kitchen in Rinnos," Bianca laughed, her wings giving a joyful, programmatic flutter against her chair that she didn't even bother to suppress. "Zack would join your anti-microwave crusade instantly, though. He’d probably try to build a literal brick fire pit right over the living room hearth just to prove a point about roasting marshmallows manually."

"See? Zack understands the sanctity of the flame," Sapphire pointed out.

"Zack understands anything that lets him play with matches," Bianca countered, taking a slow sip of her own herbal tea. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the sticky table. "But really, if we're banning kitchen appliances from our conversation, let's talk about entertainment. What do you do for fun? Have any of you seen any good movies lately? Modern ones, preferably."

"Oh, I love movies!" Sapphire said, her eyes lighting up with genuine excitement. "We had an old cathode-ray CRT television box in the village square. The signals were decades old, but my absolute favorite is The Maiden of the Chocobo Farm, released in 1968. The grand orchestrations! The sheer, unadulterated drama! Truly, modern digital storytelling has completely lost its way."

Azaela stared at her, her straw hovering halfway to her mouth. "Sapphire, that movie is literally forty years old. It’s practically black and white."

"It is a timeless masterpiece!" Sapphire leaned halfway across the table, suddenly snapping her teeth together in a playful, sharp snap inches from the sleeve of Azaela’s oversized sweatshirt. "I bite people who disparage the classics, Azaela. Consider this your only warning."

"Hey! No biting the SOLDIER," Azaela laughed, pulling her arm back but grinning broadly. The lighthearted bickering felt deeply relieving. "Though I guess I can't talk too much about sophisticated tastes. If I could eat hot pizza and drink vanilla lattes for every single meal without ever looking at a vacuum-sealed military ration again, I’d die a happy woman."

"A woman of baseline culture," Sapphire declared, nodding her approval.

"Pizza is a universal human right," Bianca agreed thoroughly, breaking off a piece of a pastry. "Back in Midgar, when things were... well, before we left for the mountains, getting a fresh slice away from the standard cafeteria food was the highlight of my week. Though, speaking of food, Sephiroth has been trying to make pumpkin soup back at the cottage. He gets so incredibly serious about it, standing over the pot in this massive, ridiculous slate gray sweater while the winter blizzards rattle the windows. He looks less like a legendary warrior and more like a very tall, very brooding mountain chef."

Azaela smiled softly at the mention of the knitwear, her mind briefly drifting to her own quiet moments, before she shook her head. "Wait, Bianca, you're breaking the brooding rule. Mentioning mountain isolation counts as brooding adjacent."

"Is it brooding if it’s domestic?" Bianca challenged playfully, raising an eyebrow. "I think talking about a man failing to properly dice a pumpkin is entirely within the safety zone. Besides, you're the one who brought up military rations."

"Fair point," Azaela conceded, raising her iced drink in a silent toast. "We'll allow the pumpkin soup, but only if no Shinra recipes were involved in its creation."

For a few minutes, the conversation drifted into comfortable, lazy rhythms. They argued animatedly about the sheer ridiculousness of high heels, the proper way to dress for a sudden winter storm, and why the simple combination of bread, cheese, and tomato sauce was humanity's greatest collective achievement.

Bianca watched her two friends, a genuine sense of lightness pushing down her inner demon which always threatened to overtake her. There were no ancient prophecies to fulfill today, no genetic manipulations to constantly fear, and no endless cycles of corporate exploitation to untangle.

They were just three girls: a wing-bound angel enjoying a rare moment of peace, a mountain of refined sugar, and a chaotic jungle gremlin threatening to bite anyone who insulted old media—bound by a shared, silent agreement to let the rest of the heavy world fade away, if only until the coffee in their mugs ran completely cold.

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