Title: Analogy
Fandoms: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: SFW
Length: 646 words
Summary: Minerva thinks on what should be done with the Black Materia
Content notes: Set after Aphasia, but not relying on it.


Minerva stared down at the black sphere, turning it over and over in her hands. Faint reflections were visible in its shiny surface; she saw herself staring down at the horror she held. There remained the question of the final resting place of this most potent and destructive of spells. Destroying the materia was an option but undesirable; shattering the sphere was easy. Grinding the shattered fragments to dust was trivial. Yet it was a distasteful course of action. Here she held the single instance of the destructive, unnamed materia. Trying to destroy it would produce tiny copies. Hundreds, thousands, millions. Easy to lose. They might be minuscule and incapable of casting their terrible spells but they would grow over time. It might take millenia but the materia would regenerate. Destruction was not an option she had any faith in.

Should they return it to the lifestream then? Tempting but also troublesome. This knowledge now crystalised existed only within the sphere. To return it to the lifestream ran the risk of Jenova or another like her extracting the same secrets from the planet at some future point. She sighed. It needed to remain in-tact and on the surface. They could plunge it into the deepest part of the ocean or bury it in the shifting sands of the deserts. Neither felt comfortable as a solution. Every option brought with it the risk of someone stumbling across the materia. Even if they were incapable of utilizing it, to allow the sphere to fall into any other hands was unacceptable.

She clutched the sphere tighter, her gaze flicking around her chamber, looking for something to give her an idea. If she could blast it into space she would, even allowing for the risk of another like Jenova finding it. She almost laughed. An absurd fantasy; even the creatures now a mix of Lord Bahamut and the dragons could not fly beyond the sky. No; the materia had to remain on the planet.

Her eyes lighted on another sphere, a play-thing from her youth. A curio from what seemed an age ago. She set the accursed sphere down and crossed to the toy. Her fingers slid to concealed panels, catches and buttons set across it's surface almost on instinct. Even after all these years, her muscles remembered how the sphere functioned, how to both enlarge and shrink it. Enlarging was a simple affair; as it got larger, the spaces and positions for one's hands became easier and easier to reach. Smaller was a different matter. Her fingers would be too large to manipulate it in adult-hood, too large to brush the pyramidal mechanism at the centre.

She stopped, thinking hard. Crystalised lifestream formed the basis of the puzzle. It could expand outwards; she was not sure how far, how vast, always wary of the damage such an action could wreak. A torrent of thoughts rushed through her and she grabbed the black materia. Running from her chamber, her thoughts whirled. Please let there be one of the craftsman left, someone who understood these puzzles. Please let it be possible. Please let the accursed black surface be as malleable as the the faded yellow of her toy.

They would take the Black Materia somewhere remote. They would shape it into a structure, hiding it's true nature with another form; imply it contained something. Let it be a maze, a hard to navigate, vast space. And within it, at the perfect centre-point would be the puzzle itself. The mechanism to shrink the materia inside itself. And solving it would shrink the puzzle, the structure, the person solving it. Those who wanted the materia would need to solve the puzzle, trapped inside it. The ultimate solution to the puzzle prevented anyone laying claim to the materia. A neat solution to a problem Minerva hoped she was over-thinking.