Rufus Shinra

Reno stood in the doorway like a man who had just opened a portal to another dimension. His turquoise eyes were wide. His mouth was slightly open. His brain — sharp, cynical, trained to process hostile situations in fractions of a second — had encountered something it was fundamentally not equipped to handle. A kink tier list. In AVALANCHE's meeting room. With a *projector*. Rude stood beside him, sunglasses doing absolutely nothing to conceal the slow, catastrophic malfunction happening behind his eyes. His jaw was tight. His posture was rigid. He looked like a man who had walked into a bar expecting a cold beer and instead received a philosophical crisis about whether sitting on someone constitutes a fetish or a lifestyle choice. The silence between the two Turks lasted approximately 1.7 seconds. It felt like an eternity.

Rude.

Reno's voice was flat. Controlled. The voice of a man standing on the edge of a cliff and making peace with gravity.

Rude, are they— is that— is Cissnei running a PowerPoint presentation on kinks?

Rude said nothing. He adjusted his sunglasses. This was his version of a full emotional breakdown. Genesis was now standing on his chair — *standing on it* — coat billowing dramatically despite there being no wind source in the room, one hand clutching his copy of LOVELESS like a weapon, the other jabbing toward the whiteboard with the righteous fury of a man whose honor had been personally insulted by a tier list.

HUMAN FURNITURE IS AN ART FORM! It requires TRUST, VULNERABILITY, and a WILLINGNESS to become the OBJECT— do you people not read?!

Genesis's voice cracked on the last word. Not from emotion. From *volume*. The man was operating at a decibel level that should have been illegal indoors. Kunsel had his phone out, furiously scrolling through what appeared to be academic articles. Actual *peer-reviewed studies*. On kink categorization. He had come *prepared*.

According to the Midgar Journal of Sexual Psychology, Volume 34, Issue 7— human furniture falls under objectification paraphilia, which is DISTINCT from power exchange dynamics! It's literally in a different DSM category!

Yuffie threw a pen at him. It missed by three feet and hit Cid in the ear.

NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR NERD JOURNAL, KUNSEL!

Cid, who had been silently processing the phrase "reinforced ceiling mounts" for the last forty-five seconds, finally spoke. His voice came out like gravel dragged through a combustion engine.

I just wanna know one goddamn thing. ONE thing. Tifa— the woman who serves me whiskey and smiles at me like a saint— asked Vincent Valentine for structural recommendations for a sex dungeon. And Vincent said yes. That's— that's where we are. That's the timeline we're in.

Vincent, seated at the far end of the table with his arms crossed and his red cloak pulled up to his nose, offered no defense. No denial. No expression whatsoever. He simply existed, as he always did, like a gothic monument to poor life decisions and impeccable craftsmanship advice.

The load-bearing capacity of the basement ceiling is approximately 400 kilograms per anchor point. I recommended titanium eyebolts with a 6-inch minimum embedment depth. Standard practice.

Cloud, who had migrated from his corner to under the table at some point during the last three minutes, made a sound that could only be described as a man's psyche folding in on itself like origami. His mako-blue eyes stared at nothing. He had transcended. He was no longer in this room. He was somewhere else — a field, maybe. With flowers. And no one discussing ceiling mounts. Chadley, still somehow *in the ceiling lights*, tilted his head with mechanical precision and spoke with the clinical detachment of someone who had no business being in this conversation but was absolutely going to contribute anyway.

I've compiled a comprehensive database of 247 documented kinks cross-referenced with psychological profiles and regional popularity metrics. Would anyone like me to generate a statistically accurate tier list based on empirical data rather than subjective opinion?

NO!

The entire room said it in unison. The first thing they'd agreed on all day. Chadley blinked, unbothered.

"Noted. I'll save it as a draft."

Kyrie's recorder was running. Had been running. She sat at the edge of the table with the calm, predatory patience of a journalist who had just stumbled onto the story of a lifetime. Her pen moved across a notepad in shorthand so fast it was practically smoking. Elena, meanwhile, had seized control of the whiteboard marker from Cissnei and was drawing a flowchart. An actual *flowchart*. With arrows. And decision nodes. "Does it involve bodily fluids?" branched into "Consensual?" which branched into "Is there a safeword?" which branched into a circle labeled "STILL CONCERNING."

Okay, LISTEN. If we're going to do this, we're doing it RIGHT. Breeding kink: Spicy tier minimum. It has REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES. You can't just— you can't just breed someone and walk away!

Zack raised his hand like he was in a classroom.

Uh, yeah, actually, you can? That's literally what— I mean, not that I would— but biologically speaking—

ZACK.

Every woman in the room said his name at the same time. Different tones. Same energy. Zack's hand slowly lowered. He sat down for the first time in twenty minutes. Reno still hadn't moved from the doorway. He turned to Rude. Rude turned to him. Behind those sunglasses, something unspoken passed between them — a shared acknowledgment that their vacation had been irreversibly, catastrophically hijacked by a group of emotionally unstable warriors debating the ethics of sitting on people. Reno exhaled. Slowly. Through his nose. Then he reached up, loosened his tie — already loose — even further, and walked into the room like a man walking into a warzone with nothing but vibes and audacity.

Alright. Yo. HEY. Shut up. ALL of you, shut up for one second.

The room didn't shut up. Genesis was mid-sentence about the "philosophical implications of objectification as worship." Kunsel was citing another journal. Yuffie was making a counterargument using exclusively hand gestures. Reno grabbed a chair, spun it around, and sat on it backwards with the kind of aggressive nonchalance that only a Turk on vacation could produce.

First of all — and I cannot stress this enough — what the FUCK. Second of all, you're all wrong. Choking goes in Spicy, not Mild. What kind of amateur hour bullshit is this?

The room went silent for exactly two seconds. Then it erupted *worse than before*. Rude, still standing in the doorway, slowly removed his sunglasses. Polished them on his tie. Put them back on. Then he walked to the bar, where Tifa was already pouring him a double, her expression the careful blank of a woman who had made peace with the fact that her basement renovation had become public knowledge. She slid the glass across the counter without a word. Rude picked it up. Drank it in one pull. Set the glass down.

Another.

Tifa poured. Behind them, Genesis screamed something about LOVELESS Act III being "a metaphor for submission." Zack countered that it was "clearly about friendship." Cloud's soul continued its out-of-body experience beneath the table. And somewhere, in the depths of Reno's suit pocket, his phone buzzed. A text. From Tseng. **「Why is Kyrie's social media showing a live stream from inside Seventh Heaven with the caption "TURKS AND AVALANCHE DEBATE KINK HIERARCHY — NOT CLICKBAIT"?」** Reno looked at the text. Looked at Kyrie. Looked at the recorder in her hand — which, upon closer inspection, was not a recorder at all, but her *phone*, propped up and broadcasting to what the notification counter suggested was *four thousand viewers and climbing*. Reno's eye twitched.

...Rude. We have a problem.

Chadley has begun to pull out a conveniently Reno-sized coffin from a closet in the back rooms. Where did he get it? Who knows. Why is he bringing it out? Probably because Reno's soul has vacated his body. What is he going to do with it? Well it would appear that Chadley is preparing a FUNERAL. Tifa continued polishing a glass behind the bar, her expression serene, her eyes empty. She had heard everything. She had *always* heard everything. And she had made her peace with it the moment she'd asked Vincent Valentine — immortal, brooding, transformed-by-mad-science Vincent Valentine — for advice on soundproofing a basement. Some bridges you don't cross. Some bridges you burn, rebuild, and then cross *backwards* while on fire. Reno stared at his phone. At Tseng's messages. At the viewer count climbing past five thousand. At Kyrie's serene, unblinking face as she held her phone at the perfect angle to capture Genesis standing on a chair quoting LOVELESS while Zack tried to physically pull him down. His vacation was twenty minutes old. And it was already the worst day of his life.