05 Footnotes

These are all applicable footnotes from Chapter Five of the Final Fantasy VII fanfiction story, Beyond Good and Evil. This is not a source of official canon information and, while all of the information stated herein is based on and derived from what is given in canon, this information is not and can not be considered official or supported by the game creators or developers.

Footnotes

Andrew

Another playable Turk from Before Crisis, the canon biography for this young man goes something like this: Andrew (Playable Character B) is a rather brash, proud young man, born in Midgar, on the upper plate. An ex-leader of a gang in Junon, he spent his time getting into turf wars with other gangs and running about on various stolen motorbikes. He is an expert in the area of maintenance and repair of motorcycles, and he's also a good driver (he's shown riding his motorcycle throughout most of the trailers for the game), though we're left to wonder if that applies to all vehicles or if it only applies to his driving skills on a bike. Made the leader of his gang at the age of 18, Andrew gains the full trust of his gang members, and leads them with utmost confidence. Having done so much and come so far at such a young age instilled him with an overpowering sense of bravado and overconfidence...

Being so unfamiliar with failure and rather consumed by his own pride, Andrew decided to test out his skills by trying to steal a motorbike from ShinRa. He was arrested by Reno, and in the fight that followed, he realized that perhaps he wasn’t the big shot that he thought he was. Veld realized his skills could be used to aid the Turks, and he was offered a place in the organization. Andrew quickly realized that if he wanted to become the best, he’d have to work with the best and accepted the offer of employment with the Turks. He now has his sights set on becoming the best there is in that small group, and has aspirations for leadership; you could say he's something of Reno's protégé--striving to follow in the footsteps of the second-in-command who leads all the field missions. Much like Reno, he is known for his speed and agility with his EMR. As a result of his overconfident and brash upbringing, the speech patterns Andrew uses are rather uncouth and informal, something that’s especially evident when he’s around his elder Turks.

In the Last Order OVA he seemed to have some familiarity with Playable Turk C, due to the fact that she teased him during the mission. He was also called "newcomer" by Reno before the Turks boarded the helicopter, but this is probably just a long-standing barb between Reno and his junior, since Andrew has been playable since the original beta version of the game, and is one of the four Turks you can choose from for the very first mission of the game, which is dated in 1991 (please see the timeline for details).

On a random note, it is shown in mission eight of Before Crisis that Andrew doesn’t particularly like snow.

Materia and Intention

After a bit of pondering how materia would work in a non-turn-based setting, we decided the most logical way it could be equipped and wielded was by intention. Casting spells is fairly obvious--one intends to cast the spell, and thinks the name of the spell and the target, and the spell is cast. But what about equipping in the first place? The materia we see in Advent Children are a little bit bigger than golf-ball sized, and yet the materia slots we see in Zack's sword aren't even that big. This rules out physical insertion and removal (and also avoids the issue of armlets and amulets being necessarily huge and unwieldly).

Because the materia interact with a user's Lifestream anyway--it seems like the way magic works is the materia allows the users to channel their own personal store of Lifestream (the part that returns to the Lifestream when they die) through the materia, which directs its usage--equipping and removing materia could be equally simple. The Lifestream reacts to intention, and materia is crystallized Lifestream. A user simply desires to equip a materia into a specific slot, and it is equipped, the crystallized Lifestream becoming a sort of energized plasma that fuses with the metal of the materia slot and unfuses again when the user removes the item or wants to unequip the materia. At that point, the materia would unfuse and emerge from the metal, leaving the slot available for another orb.