Chapter Text
“The real threat is not rebellion—it is routine, meticulously rearranged.”
Before Shinra Electric Power Company became the omnipotent corporate titan it is today—able to harness the blood of the Planet with the flick of a switch and privatize entire ecosystems at scale—it was a modest weapons manufacturer headquartered in the quaint mountain town of Nibelheim. Its original filing cabinets, it should be noted, were hand-labeled in fountain pen, its rotary phones in delicate shades of puce, and its office chairs (endearingly) squeaked like mice.
It was during this quieter period—roughly twenty-seven years before our story begins—that one of its more peculiar staff members, Dr. Elio Armand Petrovsky, authored what would later become the most subversive and enduring document in Shinra’s long and unbroken history of institutional hubris.
The manuscript was titled:
SIMPLE SABOTAGE: A FIELD MANUAL
An Illustrated Guide to Undermining the Machinery from Within, Without Firing a Single Shot
It was, by all appearances, a handbook for “workplace efficiency.”
In reality, it was a tactical treatise on how to dismantle any organization—no matter how elite, fortified, or tyrannical—through the deliberate and systematic weaponization of mediocrity.
Dr. Petrovsky, a behavioral economist by training and a quiet contrarian by temperament, had grown increasingly alarmed by Shinra’s manifest destiny. He had been hired to optimize internal structure. Instead, he wrote a manual on how to gum it up so thoroughly, it would collapse under its own procedural weight. His hope was that Shinra would become an ouroboros, an entity doomed to consume itself in existential dread.
He was quietly dismissed in spring. His departure noted in Meeting Minutes 9-C under “Miscellaneous Staff Changes,” sandwiched between a discussion on break room mug theft and a motion to replace the copier toner supplier.
Dr. Elio Armand Petrovsky would end his tenure in the field of behavioral economics forthwith, choosing to return to Nibelheim to live out his life as a hermit deep in the woods.
The field manual, however, was not destroyed.
Instead, it was quietly stamped RESTRICTED and relocated to the lower archives beneath Shinra Headquarters, where all manner of inconvenient documents go to be misfiled and forgotten.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
It would be nearly two decades before anyone accessed it again.
The last person to check out the manual was Doris Bellamy, a Senior Accounts Reconciliation Typist in Infrastructure Budgeting (Division D-7).
Ms. Bellamy was a woman of tremendous fortitude and barely-contained resentment.
She had, for nineteen years, arrived ten minutes early, logged every decimal point with precision, and endured a manager who called her “Red Stapler Lady” without irony. She wore orthopedic heels and collected ceramic figurines of woodland creatures. She asked for nothing—except a seat at the planning committee for midyear budget reviews.
She was denied.
Six months later, every invoice from Divisions B through G vanished into a recursive loop of “Pending Authorization.” The delay cost the company 47 million gil. When questioned, Ms. Bellamy submitted her resignation on a pink sticky note affixed to her sensible shoe, placed squarely atop her supervisor’s desk.
She retired to Costa del Sol. No further contact.
The manual has not been checked out since.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Now then.
Let us pivot gently—imagine a dolly with one jammed wheel squeaking around a corner—into our present timeline.
It is exactly 9:02 AM on a Friday. Shinra Headquarters is buzzing like a well-dressed hornet’s nest. And somewhere five floors below the executive suites, in the Restricted Archives Section (Sublevel 3, East Wing), a Service Center Specialist named Torianne Sutton is wheeling a crate of dry, dust-choked binders between the shelving units with all the care of a newly recruited church parishioner trying not to sneeze.
She is twenty-six years old.
Red hair pinned up in a braided twist.
White gloves.
Press-creased slacks.
A face built for discretion and an expression that implies she is endlessly capable of doing absolutely everything except breaking the rules.
Tori, as she is occasionally called (though more often referred to simply as “that redhead”), is not technically assigned to archives. She is a rotating support fixture—a warm body used wherever warm bodies are needed. Today, her responsibilities include:
- Re-shelving technical manuals returned from Legal Compliance and R&D
- Making coffee for the Procurement Division’s weekly report-out
- Escorting a floor fan from Accounting to Maintenance for unknown reasons
She accomplishes all of this in less than thirty minutes.
Which is fortuitous, as her coworker, Marlo, has begged her last minute to take on this additional task in archives, freeing him up to address a battery spill in the server room within IT.
Now, in the low-humming cool of the archives, she pushes her dolly through Row 56 (Strategic Planning – Decommissioned), scanning spine labels with a faint frown. Titles include:
Minutes from Meetings That Reached No Conclusion
Shinra Chain of Command: A Visual Metaphor
Comprehensive Acronym Index, Vol. I–V
How to Appear Busy Without Doing Anything (well-thumbed)
It’s then that a flickering bulb overhead causes her to pause.
A single shelf—illuminated in strobing pulses—irritates her sense of symmetry.
She sighs.
And here we see the quality that has both endeared her to senior management and alienated her from her peers: Tori Sutton cannot leave things half-done. Even when she should.
She steps onto the bottom shelf, stretches carefully, and tightens the bulb. The flickering stops.
Light returns. The shadows retreat.
And nestled between a dated marketing pamphlet and an unlabeled black folder, she sees it.
Thin. Red-lettered. Fragile.
She pulls it down and brushes the cover with her gloved thumb.
SIMPLE SABOTAGE: A FIELD MANUAL
RESTRICTED – LEVEL SIX CLEARANCE REQUIRED
She opens it.
Inside: A table of contents that reads like satire. Or a manifesto.
Before she can fully absorb what she’s found, a familiar voice cuts through the silence:
“Ah, Miss Sutton! Always a pleasure to find you here in the stacks.”
The voice belongs to Mr. Percival Dockery, senior librarian of Shinra’s Restricted Archives and lifelong advocate for sensible hat wear. He emerges around the end of the aisle like a benevolent ghost, pushing a heavy cart full of misfiled employee complaints, most of which appeared to be organized by length rather than subject matter.
Dockery has the sort of face that always seems to be mid-apology. His glasses sit low on the bridge of his nose, and he has a habit of talking to the books as if they are old war buddies he hasn’t seen in a while.
Upon seeing Tori Sutton, Dockery brightens in the way only true introverts do when encountering a fellow operator of silent focus.
“I was just saying,” he begins, “we need more of your type down here. No fuss, no mess, no question about which section a document belongs in. Those other specialists? Bah. They require far too much hand-holding. And don’t get me started on the color-coded bins—what happened to spine labels and common sense?”
He leans against his cart with the satisfied air of someone delivering a decisive statement.
Tori, still clutching the slim, dust-worn manual she just pried from obscurity, gives him a small, polite smile.
“Careful, Mr. Dockery,” she says. “You’ll have to compete with the other departments. I hear I’m in very high demand.”
The sarcasm is gentle, like a ribbon in a new payment ledger.
Dockery chuckles and scratches his chin.
“Well then,” he muses, “perhaps I ought to put in a good word with the higher-ups. You deserve a proper transfer. Someone with your moxy could do wonders for this place—especially with the digital initiative breathing down our necks. The whole collection before Shinra became an energy company—do you know they want to scan it?” He says the word like it’s sacrilegious.
“A tragic fate for paper,” Tori sighs.
“I’m glad we agree on this matter, Miss Sutton.”
Dockery smiles again, and then his eyes drift downward to the book in her hands.
“Ah. What’ve you found there, my dear? One of those old marketing pamphlets? The ones printed back when Shinra still cared about winning hearts and minds. Let me guess—‘Shinra: Powering the Future With You’? We’ve got stacks of those behind the filing cabinets.”
He waves a hand dismissively, entirely unaware that the item in question is neither promotional, nor benign.
“Tell you what—take it with you.” He grins. “We’ve got half a crate of those things probably covered in asbestos. Just don’t shelve it next to anything flammable.”
This is a well-meaning gesture.
And a terrible idea.
Tori opens her mouth to politely decline, perhaps offer to log the book for further review, or at the very least misplace it intentionally for plausible deniability—
—but the opportunity vanishes the moment a voice far too pleased with itself echoes through the stacks.
“Oh wow, Tori. Look at you. Making friends with the management again.”
The voice belongs to Janelle Levitz, her coworker from Service Center and longtime purveyor of aggressive compliments. She has a particular kind of smile—broad, dazzling, and fundamentally insincere. Her nails are freshly painted. Her heels too high for utility. Her interest in Tori Sutton’s business: exhaustive and ongoing.
It should be noted here, as a matter of record, that while Janelle Levitz is capable of many forms of charm, she hates Tori Sutton with a passion usually reserved for power outages and unsalted fries.
“Hope I’m not interrupting,” Janelle says, in a tone that ensures she absolutely is. “I just happened to be passing through when I was instructed to find you.”
Tori, who knew better than to react to Janelle’s weaponized sweetness, simply raises one brow.
“You’ve been requested,” Janelle continues, eyes alight. “Human Resources. This afternoon. Sounds serious.”
The thrill in her voice was unmistakable.
To Tori’s credit, she does not react. She simply folds the slim manual under one arm, offering Dockery a brief but genuine nod.
“Then I’ll make sure I’m on time.”
“Of course you will,” Janelle says brightly. “You always are.”
Mr. Dockery, now sensing that the temperature in the archives had shifted to something subzero and petty, makes a quiet excuse about re-alphabetizing the digitization backlog and politely excuses himself.
Tori remains, steady and unflappable, the forbidden manual tucked like contraband beneath her elbow, and the faintest sigh catching behind her teeth.
She is good at saying nothing.
But she is excellent at remembering everything.
And if we are being perfectly frank on the topic and you are keen on learning what becomes of Miss Torianne Sutton and the illuminating discovery of Dr. Petrovsky’s magnum opus, then you must understand this:
What Ms. Sutton did not yet realize is that within the pages of this faded, brittle manual—whose author had long since disappeared from public record—were the exact instructions required to dismantle an empire. Quietly. Efficiently. From the inside out.
She did not set out to destroy Shinra.
She merely intended to fix a dying light.
And this, dear reader, is how all great revolutions begin.