Midgar: Testing Grounds

μ - εγλ 1999 November 10

Midgar. Affectionately known as the city shaped like a pizza. Twenty-three years ago, the world's most ambitious construction project was undertaken. Shinra built the world's biggest city, suspended in the air on large plates, all surrounding the Shinra Headquarters Building. At the outer edge of each sector were powerful Mako Reactors, extracting and refining the green liquid beneath the Planet's crust into energy. Midgar was the world's most advanced and industrial city.

Yet, even industrial cities had their own patches of heaven. Sector 3's reactor housed Shinra's Breeding and Beast Department, officially a branch of the Public Security Division. The upper section of the reactor was a complex series of warehouses full of cages, training courses and other quarters all designed for the breeding of the megacorp's Guard Dogs. These tamed monsters were large wolf-like critters with a long tentacle that branched out from the back of their skull. Training them and preparing them for combat was dangerous work.

An alarm started to blare. A particularly feral pup had broken out of its cage. Darkstar was on the loose.

"What in the hell? Darkstar..... Not again." a older man Greel, grumbled. He took a long drag on a fragrant cigar before snuffing it out and standing up from his desk. ' 'Least get a break from paperwork.' he thought, missing the irony that this event would bring more of the dreaded bureaucracy.

"Alright, well, lets see whats going on." He says, moving off towards the holding pens where the pup was.

The kennel was large multi-level area with progressively larger sets of pens for the guard hounds of different ages. However, a specialty area toward the top housed the unique developed hounds, such as Darkstar. Many of the hounds in their pens were howling and baying. A guard lay torn up and savaged by pup. His pen had a broken lock on it but the pup was nowhere to be found. To other guards were standing about looking rather confused.

"What the hell are ya'll standing around for. Repair the damn lock. Sides the corpse who is gonna start telling me what happened with my damned pup?" Greel barked at the guards standing around.

It seemed like, to Greel, it was gonna be one of those days

One of the guards walked up and saluted Greel. He was in the common blue Shinra fatigues with a cutting edge tech-helm that had three red lights at the end of a metal "snout," camera lenses used for various readings and inputs.

"Sir," he began. "We believe it was one of the street gangs. We saw a biker fleeing the scene carrying a cage."

"Ya'll let a crummy biker in here?" Greel muttered in disbelief. "Make the report, include the Darkstar is loose and to not approach. Send some civvies out to find which street gang it might have been and how they got in." He commanded before carefully calming the other dogs down.

The only bright side he could see presently was that none of his other pups got hurt. "Alright Connors, Dusty, Sloan. Calm yourselves, I'm here." He said in soothing tones, trying to calm the agitated hounds.