Chapter Text
“The real threat isn't rebellion. it's routine, meticulously rearranged.”
Before Shinra Electric Power Company became the omnipotent titan it is today, capable of harnessing the blood of the planet and privatizing entire ecosystems at scale, it was a modest weapons dealer located in the quiet village of Nibelheim. It should be noted that its original filing cabinets were labeled in fountain pen. Its rotary phones came in delicate shades of puce. And its office chairs squeaked as insistently as startled mice.
During this quieter period, approximately twenty-seven years before our story begins, one of its more peculiar staff members, Dr. Elio Armand Petrovsky, authored a document that would later become the most subversive and enduring work ever produced in Shinra’s long history of institutional hubris.
The manuscript bore the title:
SIMPLE SABOTAGE: A FIELD MANUAL
An Illustrated Guide to Undermining the Machinery from Within, Without Firing a Single Shot
It masqueraded as a handbook for “workplace efficiency.”
In reality, it was a tactical treatise on how to dismantle any organization, no matter how tyrannical, through the deliberate and systematic weaponization of mediocrity.
Petrovsky, a behavioral economist by training and a quiet contrarian by temperament, had grown increasingly alarmed by Shinra’s rising hunger for control. 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.
Petrovsky would end his tenure in the field of behavioral economics forthwith, choosing to return to Mount Nibel to live out his life as a hermit.
The field manual, however, was not destroyed.
It was quietly stamped RESTRICTED and relocated to the bowels of Shinra Archives, where all manner of inconvenient documents go to be misfiled and forgotten.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Nearly two decades passed before anyone touched it again.
The last employee to check out the manual was Doris Bellamy, a senior accountant in Fiscal Budgeting.
Bellamy was a woman of tremendous fortitude and barely contained resentment. For nineteen years, she arrived ten minutes early, logged every decimal point with unerring accuracy, and endured a supervisor who called her “The Numbers Lady” without irony. She asked for nothing except a seat on the midyear budget-review planning committee.
She was denied.
Six months later, every invoice from Divisions B through G disappeared into a recursive loop of “Pending Authorization.” The delay cost the company forty-seven million gil. When questioned, Bellamy submitted her resignation on a pink sticky note affixed to her sensible shoe, placed squarely at her supervisor’s throat.
She retired to Costa del Sol. No further contact.
The manual has not been checked out since.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Now then.
Let us pivot gently into our present timeline.
Imagine a dolly with a jammed wheel squeaking around a corner.
It’s exactly 11:02 a.m. on a Friday. Shinra Headquarters is a buzzing hornet’s nest. And somewhere five floors below the executive suites, in the Restricted Archives, a Service Center Specialist named Torianne Sutton is wheeling a cart of dry, dust-choked binders between the shelves with all the care of an archaeologist trying not to sneeze.
She’s twenty-six years old.
Red hair pinned up in a loose twist.
White gloves.
Pressed slacks.
A face built for discretion and an air that implies she is endlessly capable of doing absolutely everything except breaking the rules.
Tori, as she’s occasionally called (though more often referred to simply as “that redhead”), is not technically assigned to archives. She’s a rotating support fixture, a warm body used wherever warm bodies are needed. Today, her responsibilities include:
- Making coffee for the Procurement Division's weekly reporting
- Escorting a floor fan from Maintenance to Accounting for unknown reasons
- Polishing the company’s extensive awards in the Trophy Hall
She accomplishes all of this in less than two hours.
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 cool hush of the archives, she pushes her dolly through Row 56, 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, dear reader, 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, forcing the shadows to retreat.
And nestled between a dated marketing pamphlet and an unlabeled black folder, she sees it.
Thin. Red. 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 as 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 Percival Dockery, senior librarian of Shinra’s Restricted Archives. He emerges around the end of the aisle in the manner of a benevolent ghost, pushing a cart full of misfiled HR complaints, most arranged by length rather than subject.
Dockery has the sort of face that always seems repentant. 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 companions he hasn’t visited in a while.
Upon seeing Tori, he brightens in the way only true introverts do when encountering a fellow operator of intense focus.
“I was just thinking,” 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 oversight. Whatever happened to common sense?”
He leans against his cart, his expression brightening into a conspiratorial grin.
Tori, still clutching the manual she rescued from total obscurity, tries to return his cheer, though her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “Careful, sir. You’ll have to compete with the other departments. I hear I’m in high demand these days.”
Her tone is light, but under the soft sarcasm lives a growing discouragement. A tiny crack opens inside her whenever someone praises her skill. Tori has come to realize, far too late, that in Service Center, proficiency is a trap. The better you are, the more likely you’re kept, anchored to the sublevels of Shinra Tower with no hope of transferring out.
She has wanted more for months. An opportunity to move upward and step into a role that offers purpose beyond being the most proficient gear in an unremarkable machine. Yet she remains in place, day after day, so dependable that no one with authority has ever considered letting her go.
Excellence, she has learned, can be a cage all its own.
Dockery notices how her shoulders lack their usual lift. He softens. “You’re not yourself today,” he says gently. “What’s troubling you, my dear?”
She opens her mouth to answer, but falters.
“Let me guess.” Dockery softens, all teasing gone. “You’re afraid they’ll leave you stuck down there.”
He scratches his jaw, mulling it over. “Tell you what—let me ping HR later today. Just a friendly check-in so your name doesn’t get buried once the directors disappear for the season. You know how approvals go once everyone scatters.”
Tori’s breath catches. “Sir, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to." His answer comes without hesitation. "I’ve watched you work for months, Miss Sutton. You’re ready for a department of your own. Frankly, I would have you join mine if I could convince them to open a position. I know a steady worker when I see one, and you exceed the mark every time.”
Warmth stirs through her, complicated by the ache in her chest. Dockery is the first person to speak about her potential. The first to imagine her above the sublevels.
He nods toward the stacks around them. “A higher floor would suit you far better than this place. You have an instinct for structure, and Shinra needs staff who can handle delicate material without fuss. I’ll contact HR during my lunch. If we move now, you could have an answer by the end of the month. How does that sound?”
“I would be grateful,” she says, suddenly overcome with emotion.
“That’s the spirit,” says Dockery, pleased. His attention drifts to the book in her hands. “Now then, what have you discovered, my dear? One of those old promotional pamphlets? The ones printed back when Shinra still pretended to court public goodwill?” He shakes his head, rolling his eyes again. “We have crates of those behind the filing cabinets.”
He waves a hand dismissively, entirely unaware that the item in question is neither promotional, nor benign. “Go on and keep it. We have enough of them to build a fort. Probably coated in asbestos by now, so don’t shelve it next to anything flammable.”
The offer was both kind and wildly impractical.
Tori opens her mouth to decline, perhaps offer to log the book for further review, or at the very least misplace it intentionally to stay out of trouble, but the opportunity vanishes the moment a voice echoes through the stacks.
“Well. You certainly waste no time getting close to management, do you?”
A dark-haired woman steps into view: Janelle Levitz, Tori’s coworker from Service Center and her self-proclaimed archnemesis in the ongoing war over how best to navigate the corporate grind. She smiles in a way that is both dazzling and fundamentally insincere. Her nails are freshly painted and her heels are far too high for practical use. Her interest in Tori’s business remains 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 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 answers Janelle’s weaponized sweetness with nothing more than a lifted brow.
“You’ve been requested by HR,” Janelle continues, eyes alight. “Sounds serious.”
Tori falters. A glance toward Dockery reveals the same concern she feels, but his transforms instantly into hope rather than dread.
“How about that,” he whispers, leaning in. “They’re finally moving you up.”
Tori’s not convinced. HR is rarely a herald of good fortune, and Janelle’s eagerness to deliver the message only deepens her unease. Dockery senses the shift in her posture and offers a reassuring smile. “Stand tall, Miss Sutton,” he says. “Good workers attract notice. Remember that.”
“Sometimes more than they realize,” Janelle adds, her grin turning wry.
Tori doesn’t react outwardly. She folds the manual under one arm and offers Dockery a brief but genuine nod. “Then I suppose I’d better make a good impression.”
“Of course you will,” says Janelle. “You always do.”
Sensing the temperature in Archives fall to a subzero, petty frost, Dockery offers a soft excuse about re-alphabetizing the neglected file backlog and makes a tactful retreat.
Tori follows Janelle through the stacks, the forbidden manual tucked under her elbow.
She’s good at saying nothing.
But she’s excellent at remembering everything.
And if we’re being perfectly frank on the topic and you’re keen on learning what becomes of Torianne Sutton and the illuminating discovery of Dr. Petrovsky’s seminal work, then you must understand this:
What Tori did not yet realize is that within the pages of this faded, brittle manuscript were the exact instructions required to dismantle an empire. Quietly. Efficiently. From the inside out.
She didn’t set out to destroy Shinra.
She merely intended to fix a dying light.
And this, dear reader, is how all great revolutions begin.