The second time I played it was after I’d gotten FF8 under my belt.  I got to the temple of the ancients, got stuck somehow and couldn’t figure out how to navigate the place.

The third time I played it was ten years ago.  My relatively new and good friend Sama loved FF7.  I’d been rambling to her about Legend of Zelda and she’d listened patiently and talked to me about it even if she didn’t know much about it.  I was determined to return the favor. 

Over all that time I occasionally read SephCloud fanfic so we at least had that in common.  I knew the basis of FF7 and I’d seen Advent Children.  And then we started talking about Time Travel fics and how much we loved them.  Then we started talking about FF7 Time Travel and how there wasn’t one that quite hit exactly what we wanted.

We talked about what we wanted from an FF7 time travel.  From there we decided to do an RP together--we’d write our ideal time travel together as a little RP and maybe share it.

That’s how Counter Crisis started.  It was an RP between two friends who just wanted Time Travel their way.  But, before that?  I buckled down.

Originally we’d discussed using only the original game and Advent Children as our basis for it.  Then I decided to hunker down and play the shit out of FF7.  I went and got myself a PSP and Crisis Core.  I played it nonstop until I got through it.  I cried for a solid hour after I beat it.

I fell in love with Zack Fair--who was already Sama’s favorite character.  I asked her if we could use the Crisis Core canon and she agreed.  I was going to write Zack and Sephiroth and she was going to write Cloud.

At almost the exact same time we wrote the two halves that are now the first chapter of Counter Crisis. 

And then I played FF7 itself, I played it into the ground.  Level 99, stat grinding, everything.  I took notes.  I played Crisis Core again--I took notes.  I looked at the details like the signs out in Midgar so we’d have place names for buildings.  I was obsessed.

We forged ahead.

And then we decided we wanted to share this story we were building.  So... I sat down, I took our RP posts and I had to knit them together.  That’s why the start of the story is as rough as it is.  I had to convert the posts that weren’t the PoV we decided on into that characters PoV.  It was, frankly, hell.    Luckily before long we discovered Google Docs and were able to just start writing it together as a story instead of an RP.

What started out as me wanting to do something my friend liked has turned into over half a million words of story.  It’s something we argued over, something that brought us back together.  Something that has allowed me to grow alongside a person who has become my absolute best friend.

It’s brought me other friends too, and I am so excited to keep sharing this thing with people.

So, y’know, thanks.  It’s been a great journey and here’s to what’s likely to be another decade of trying to write this monster.