Fanfic / Terrorism And Anarchy

Terrorism and Anarchy by VarianN is a more comedic and light-hearted take on the common Peggy Sue genre of Final Fantasy VII fanfiction. It was hosted in its entirety solely on FanFiction.Net until March 2018, when a secondary host onto AO3 was added. The story currently appears dormant but is known for its sporadic and years-long breaks between updates, so the exact status of the story is unclear.

Tropes Appearing in Terrorism and Anarchy:

• Accidental Time Travel: Cloud was just planning on going down to breakfast. He didn't intend to end up in the Shinra training yard. Subverted later by Minerva, who explains that she intentionally plucked Cloud out of his timeline in an attempt to avoid the Bad Future for Gaia.
• Alternate Self: Averted, as far as discernable. The sixteen-year-old Cloud Strife that originally inhabited this timeline seems to have been completely replaced by the twenty-six-year-old Cloud Strife from the Bad Future. It's unknown what happened to the original that Older Cloud replaced.
• Alternate Timeline: The events of the games from just before the Nibelheim disaster onwards become a Bad Future as soon as Cloud is brought back to that point in time. Cloud's immediate actions change enough that the current timeline cannot possibly follow the same path.
• Ambiguously Human: Discussed frequently in-universe in terms of the Soldiers and the subjects of Shinra's experiments. After Minerva reveals that she has also modified Cloud, this solidifies the implication that Cloud is now definitively one of the least human of the Ambiguously Human cast.
• Ambiguous Situation: In-universe. Cloud deliberately links his saboteur alias CS Delivery with his civilian identity Cloud Strife but never gives the other party in his tentative Shinra alliance enough information to decisively pinpoint and prove the identity of CS Delivery, thus leaving CS Delivery's aims, goals, and characteristics unclear and difficult to predict to his Shinra co-conspirators. Mostly this is because Cloud doesn't want any excess variables in his immediate concerns, so the confusion over his identity gives them something else to focus on while he works on his primary objectives. After he deals with those primary objectives, maintaining the ambiguity over his identity is no longer a major priority.
• Back to the Early Installment: Cloud is brought back in time to the middle of the events of Crisis Core, just a few weeks before the Nibelheim Disaster.
• Bad Future: The events of the franchise from the Nibelheim disaster onwards were this at the moment Cloud was sent back to help Gaia avoid them. Cloud's immediate actions have ensured this exact Bad Future can't occur, but the potential exists for events to fall together in other ways.
• Bad Liar: Cloud is this and knows he is this, despite his tactical and tricky nature. He also, justifiably, has a distaste for deception, owing to how much of his life's problems were caused by it. Cloud actually counted on his deceptions falling apart eventually.
• Balance of Power: Part of Cloud's plan for dealing with the various potential crises in the future is to put a check on Shinra's fiscal monopoly through investing in Wutai.
• Bear Hug: Zack, to Cloud, frequently. On the first occasion, he uses one to covertly judge just how physically different Cloud is from how he remembers.
• Because It Amused Me: Cloud has learned the necessity of levity when dealing with the absurd situations he finds himself in in order to maintain his sanity. As such, while he is very serious about his goals in subverting the Bad Future, he actively encourages himself to let loose on his sense of humor a bit more. His favorite target to troll is Reno, but Cloud also often brings up embarrassing things about Zack in front of others in retaliation for all the embarrassing situations Zack put him in when Cloud really was sixteen.
• Big Brother Instinct: Zack, Zack, Zack. He freaks out over every little hint that Cloud could be in danger, and at one point calls an emergency meeting in the middle of the night because he's worried over what Cloud's up to in Wutai, too concerned to even change out of his cartoon puppy-print pajamas. Reno calls it his "Big Brother Oh Shit Alarm." It's implied Zack's anxiety over Cloud is far worse than it otherwise would be owing to the CS Delivery situation hitting his Trauma Button in regards to Angeal.
• Big Brother Mentor: It's clear that in this universe, Zack spent a lot of offscreen time with sixteen-year-old Cloud, and he very much treats Cloud like his adorable little brother. It's subsequently very hard for him to adjust to the idea that Cloud has changed or that Cloud can take care of himself.
• Big Brother Is Watching: Subverted. Shinra has security cameras, but not enough for the surveillance level they need on Cloud. Reeve's attempts ironically only prove effective on other Shinra associates, as Cloud has modified his PHS to prevent being traced and Cloud's team is skilled enough to locate and be fully aware of the security cameras and taps in their vacinity.
  • Actually, mildly inverted by Cloud, who hacks the Shinra conspirators' PHSes and monitors their communications using skills he learned from Reeve in the original future.
• Blessed with Suck: Cloud's Transferable Memory means he has access to a ton of information that no one can be sure enough about to feel they can confidently control him and the ability to transfer memories to others, allowing him to prove he's from the future. It also means that, on top of his own traumatic memories, he's also vulnerable to getting "stuck" in flashbacks of others' stressful and painful moments.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Zack is a very competent Soldier and an extremely intelligent person, but he acts so child-like and goofy with his friends that it's easy for the rest of the Shinra conspiracy faction to forget that.
• Can't Take Anything with You: Minerva has difficulty bringing anything from the Bad Future into the past, and so physically-twenty-six Cloud wakes up having completely taken the physical space of his former self, wearing his former self's now-ill-fitting clothes and carrying his former self's possessions. None of his possessions from his life in the future come with him. Because Aerith is dead, and thus only spirit and memory in the Bad Future, she replaces her former self in spirit and memory and ends up inhabiting her past self's body. This becomes a plot point when it's revealed that, since Minerva struggled with even bringing Cloud back, she decided to alter Cloud so she could put the cure for Geostigma into his bloodstream, rather than struggle with bringing it back seperately from him.
• Changed My Jumper: Averted. Cloud wakes up in the past wearing his past self's clothes.
• Chekhov's Gun: The Jenova cells' enabling of potential psychic abilities between organisms with the cells, particularly their capabilities regarding Transferable Memory, offhandedly comes up in chapter 5 when Cloud accidentally begins to absorb more of Zack's memories while stressed. In chapter 23, Cloud again accidentally absorbs a memory from Zack in front of Sephiroth, which gives Sephiroth and Zack the idea that Cloud can share his memories to prove he's actually from the future.
• The Chosen One: Played with. Of all the people in the future, Minerva chooses Cloud to bring back to the past pre-Nibelheim disaster, but she picks Cloud specifically because he'd already made himself really convenient for her intentions. The qualities that make Cloud so effective as The Chosen One to alter the timeline—his combative prowess, even temper, desire to avoid bloodshed, specific useful relationship ties, and intimate knowledge of the causes for most of the disasters Gaia's trying to avoid—are qualities he gained through being The Unchosen One in the first timeline.
• Chronoscope: The Cetran projector device in the Forgotten Capital makes a reappearance, allowing one of the ghosts to show Cloud something he missed about a past event: his blood contains the cure to Geostigma.
• Cutting the Knot: When Cloud finds himself in the past, he doesn't waste time with subtleties. He instead immediately travels to Nibelheim and proceeds to bomb Jenova, the reactor, and Shinra Manor into nonexistence. The rest of the story is the repercussions of this act and Cloud working to build a better future and continuing to try to steer the metaphorical ship he's pirated onto a safer course.
• Easy Level Trick: Cloud doesn't have time for Genesis' convoluted Collection Sidequest. He just ignores Genesis and enters Gaia's chamber anyways.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Zack is really hurt by all the secrets Cloud kept from him and by how long Cloud used Zack's ignorance to further his own agenda. He seems to accept Cloud's reasons after they talk but is still hurt by the betrayal and tells Cloud that he's not allowed to withold information anymore and he has to let Zack make informed decisions for himself.
• Eye Color Change: Cloud's eyes glow brighter when he feels intense emotions and gain greenish hues and oblong pupils when he uses the psychic abilities associated with his Jenova cells. The more active these abilities are, the greater the change. When sharing his memories of the future with Sephiroth, they become fully green and cat-slit.
• Future Badass: Cloud, from the perspective of the contemporary cast. Living through the Bad Future changed Cloud from an insecure, naïve child who struggled to learn and adapt to Shinra's training program into not only one of the strongest and most proficient combatants of the current cast, but also easily one of the most varied in life experiences and skills.
• Future Foil: Variant: the past and future versions of Cloud are very much a study in contrasts, but due to the selves never directly interacting, their foil is emphasized through the perspective of Zack and the CS Delivery investigation. 16-year-old Cloud was an earnest, shy, insecure, uptight, unintimidating, and at times clueless teenager who appears to have been out of his depth both physically and academically in his Shinra training courses. CS Delivery—actually a 26-year-old Future Badass Cloud—is confident, perceptive, analytical, street-smart, and highly adaptable, with a quiet but wicked sense of humor, and he spends the story (relatively) smoothly juggling multiple complex plans simultaneously that each demonstrate a wide breadth of skills. The difference between them is so jarring to Cloud's Big Brother Mentor, Zack, that Zack can't accept CS Delivery is Cloud for most of the story due to just how different he is from the Cloud Zack knew.
• Future Me Scares Me: Sephiroth is disturbed by the behavior displayed by the Sephiroth in Cloud's original timeline, which he describes as genuine insanity. He firmly decides that such a version of himself must never be allowed to come into existence.
• God Test: Sephiroth and Zack encourage Cloud to prove he's a timetraveler by using his apparent proclivity for psychic memory transmission to show Sephiroth his memories of the future.
• Grandfather Paradox: Discussed by Sephiroth in chapter 22, upon him and Reeve first considering time travel as a possible explanation for CS Delivery. Sephiroth disbelieves that Cloud could be from the future because altering the past so implicitly severely would mean that the exact circumstances that sent Cloud to the past will never occur in the timeline now unfolding. He doesn't consider the Alternate Timeline possibility.
• Have We Met Yet?: Discussed by Sephiroth in chapter 23; it occurs to him that owing to his coming from the future, Cloud has unprecedented access to currently classified information, the nature of which those around him can't predict, which comes alongside personal familiarity with an enormous amount of places and people that are as of yet unfamiliar with him.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: Ironically, despite sixteen-year-old Cloud's struggles to function well during the same time period, twenty-six year old Cloud is varied enough with his life experiences to land ten years in the past and hit the ground running.
• Like Brother and Sister: Cloud and Aerith, who are mutually supportive (and mutually mirthful) co-conspirators in their efforts to subvert the future.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Cloud deliberately limits the information flowing to Rufus Shinra conspiracy's faction and keeps them guessing about him in order to distract them from getting in the way of his real objectives until the risk of them negatively interfering is minimized.
  • Cloud didn't want to immediately tell Zack about everything, and so Zack is this until chapter 23. Cloud says that he didn't want to force Zack to choose between loyalties and he wanted Zack's focus on him to help distract the Shinra conspirators from focusing on other matters, but it's also clear that Cloud was afraid of losing Zack's friendship if he hit Zack all at once with the idea that his "little buddy" is now a very different person.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Ironically, both Cloud and Zack feared the other would pull this—Zack feared Cloud would go the way of Angeal after finding out he'd been experimented on, and Cloud feared Zack would take his secrecy and actions as a sign that Cloud had betrayed him and would feel forced to fight him.
• More than Three Dimensions: Minerva is able to pluck Cloud out of his place in one timeline and plop him down in the past to create another.
• No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: Zigzagged. It would've been played straight if anyone else had experienced the years that changed him, but they didn't. Cloud looks enough like his younger self still for others to recognize him, but there's enough differences for those who knew his younger self to be alarmed and search for explanations for the change. They don't land on the idea that he's been through years they haven't until later.
• Non-Linear Character: Minerva, who seems to see backwards and forwards in time but interacts in real-time with at least two characters.
• Older Than He Looks: Part of the reason Cloud's facade holds up is the fact that despite clearly being stronger and more muscular, Cloud's twenty six-year-old body doesn't actually look much older than he did as an infantryman. At one point the Shinra conspirators secretly monitor Cloud's vitals and describe him as being physically an average teen, sans his elevated temperature. Upon finding out that Cloud is twenty-six, Sephiroth is privately taken aback, explicitly mentally noting that Cloud looks no more than twenty.
• Peggy Sue: Cloud's the Peggy, in this case.
• Point of Divergence:
  • Invoked: Minerva drops Future Badass Cloud into the past to create a new timeline that hopefully avoids the destruction of Cloud's first.
  • In practical terms, the first effective point of divergence is Cloud's decision to drop out of Shinra to bomb the Shinra mansion and reactor at Nibelheim.
• Power Creep: Taken advantage of by Cloud in-story. Because the threat levels kept rising through the successive additions to the franchise—and the protagonists' abilities along with it—Cloud of the future is basically a Game-Breaker in the time of the past.
• Retroactive Precognition: A lot of Cloud's initial plans succeed as well as they do because Cloud learned so much about the people and events of this time period after the fact.
• The Reveal: In-universe, Zack and the rest confirm that Cloud is CS Delivery and learn that Cloud is a time traveler in chapter 23. Cloud had tried to break it to Zack alone in a more gentle manner before Genesis burst in dramatically and blew Cloud's secret with Sephiroth and the Turks in hot pursuit before Cloud could manage it.
• Same Character, But Different: Cloud, in the eyes of everyone in the past, especially Zack.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Cloud decides to use the opportunity he's gotten from waking up in the past to prevent to the best of his ability the events he knows will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
• Semi-Divine: It's unclear exactly what Minerva did to Cloud, but whatever it was has made Cloud her standin and the catalyst for enacting her will and power in several situations. She refers to him as her "catalyst," and when the power she's granted him activates, he glows like the trees in the forest of the ancients.
• Stranger in a Familiar Land: Cloud. He knows so much about the time period he ends up in, but he's so different from how he used to be that he alarms most of the people who knew him and doesn't fit into the role he used to have. Not that it bothers him, because he throws the old status quo into the trash as soon as he can.
• Take That!: Downplayed. The story is a lighthearted alternative to the well-known and generally far more gritty and existential Peggy Sue stories in the Final Fantasy VII fandom, but Cloud does at one point lampshade the common fanfic plot of him staying in ShinRa to try to alter the future while working within the status quo, dismissing the idea as nonsensical and inefficient for his goals.
• Third-Act Misunderstanding: Downplayed — When Zack finds out about Cloud being CS Delivery and Cloud explains to Zack his reasons for his actions, Zack isn't actually upset with Cloud for the bombings, but for the deception, which very obviously hurts him to discover. He softens a bit when Cloud admits he was afraid the truth would damage their friendship and he didn't want to put Zack in a position where he had to choose between his job as a Soldier and his friendship with Cloud, but Zack still isn't entirely happy because Cloud not only kept secrets and manipulated him, but deliberately chose to continue keeping Zack ignorant until this point to minimize Zack's involvement so Cloud could act with minimal unforseen variables. Many of these decisions affected Zack and Zack wasn't given the ability to have his say in them. While he says he accepts Cloud's position, he tells Cloud that he's not allowed to make decisions for him, and he has to tell him everything moving forward so Zack can decide what to do for himself. Zack makes clear that Cloud's concerns over what Zack will choose to do doesn't change the fact that it's Zack's right to make that choice.
• Time and Relative Dimensions in Space: Cloud was in his home in Edge, heading down to breakfast, before ending up in the middle of Midgar ten years earlier.
• Time Master: The person who sent Cloud back ten years is Minerva, trying to spare the planet the damage that spiraled from Sephiroth losing his mind.
• The Time Traveler's Dilemma: Briefly discussed by Zack upon Cloud telling him he's from the future. Zack asks "how [Cloud] could just mess with people's lives like that"; Cloud replies that it was done to make sure people still had lives. Zack seems to accept this, but later emphasizes that Cloud isn't allowed to make decisions for him and that Cloud needs to tell him everything so Zack can make his own informed decisions for himself.
• Transferable Memory: Rather than Cloud simply deluding himself into thinking he was Zack, this story interprets the idea of Cloud having Zack's memories as Cloud literally having Zack's memories owing to the psychic nature of the Jenova cells and the constant proximity and contact he had with Zack during his post-experimentation mako coma, ending with Zack's death. The more green and cat-slit Cloud's eyes, the more open he is to psychic contact, and the more accessible (intentionally or not) others' memories are to him. Because of the familiarity of Zack's mind and memories, Cloud often accidentally picks up on Zack's by accident. It's noted that stress and upset leaves his mind more vulnerable and open to this kind of psychic contact. The Reveal of Cloud being CS Delivery went down in such a stressful way that Cloud's and Zack's mutual stress caused Cloud to begin unintentionally absorbing Zack's memories again, becoming "stuck" acting out a memory of a similarly anxious interaction Zack had with Sephiroth, Rufus, and the Turks in an earlier chapter until Zack can calm down enough to close the connection. When Zack realizes what he's witnessing, he goes white as a sheet. However, when less stressed, Cloud can also use this to his advantage. He can not only gain information from others through the psychic contact, but can show his memories to others—and even act as a middle man in the transfer, showing memories he gained from one party to another.
• The Trickster: CS Delivery's persona is that of a manipulative and cunning man attempting to teach and convince others while never fully disclosing everything he has up his sleeve. The persona falls apart in chapter 23, once he is definitively confirmed to be Cloud, but Cloud had expected that to happen eventually.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • It's implied this is the dynamic Reno wants to form with Cloud.
  • Likewise with Genesis, who has a sincere respect with Cloud but often engages him in Snark-to-Snark Combat.
  • Cloud's end of his relationship with Zack has a downplayed element of this, as Cloud basically considers Zack his brother but also goes out of his way to embarrass Zack in front of their mutual friends as payback for all the embarrassing things Zack did to Cloud when Cloud was a cadet.
• Weird Aside: Several characters are prone to this, owing to the complete absurdity of the situations the cast wind up in, which are often played for both Dramatic Irony and laughs. There's a minor running gag, for example, of various members of the Shinra conspiracy taking time out of their busy schedule of conspiring against President Shinra (and each other) and attempting to riddle out the motives behind bombings and cryptic hints about Jenova and Weapons and the future... to wonder why Cloud has so many chocobos and if he could possibly be building a chocobo army, which is treated as Serious Business.

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