A Very Different Final Fantasy
Mako, the Lifestream in its viscous liquid form, had been a documented phenomenon for years. The use of mako as an energy source was the pinnacle and pride of the Shinra family. It's ability to enhance a normal human the second major advancement to come out of Shinra's halls. However as much as there was known about Mako—about the Lifestream and the Planet itself—there was still more unknown.
Bunganhagen of Cosmo Canyon theorized that lifestream was in fact the souls of the deceased, flowing in streams beneath the Planet's crust. The Cetra called the Lifestream the 'Promised Land' that all living things will eventually reach at the pinnacle of life—that cresting moment were death claims all. Yet these theories did nothing to fully explain the effect of mako exposure. SOLDIER were strengthened by regular mako injections, and monsters grew more powerful and dangerous with exposure to the substance.
Humans who have been subjected to mako poisoning, a deadly set of overexposure, and survived were reported changed. Stronger, like a SOLDIER, youthful in appearance. In fact warriors of legend could simply be survivors of what was now called mako poisoning. It was a well documented fact that mako springs had been a natural occurrence even before Shinra's reactors. A traveler could easily trip and fall submerged into the flow, dead within minutes, or dead within days, or in a rare chance survive, forever changed.
Mako, however, was more than just the souls of the deceased—it was more than their memories combined into a mass of incoherent, ever flowing, consciousness. Mako held no constraint to time, and as such the memories of a soul twenty-thousand years in the future could be floating about in the streams beneath the crust twenty-thousand years in the past. Mako was timeless, as was the Planet's eternal memory.
It was thanks to this timelessness of mako—of the souls and the memories—that caused the emergence of rare, unique individuals. These individuals were typically considered mako sensitive, which meant that they would grow abnormally sick when introduced to mako in their system, and yet mako sensitive individuals were those with the highest survival rate against mako poisoning. Their bodies absorbed and adjusted mako in a rate that was practically insane.
Not that Shinra realized this.
In one lifetime, such a rare and unique individual was Cloud Strife, the son of Sky Strife and a lonely foreman from the local Mt. Nibel reactor. In that life the truth about Cloud Strife's heritage—Nibelheim's best and worst kept secret—was never revealed. He went on to join Shinra, and ended up an experiment for five years. Cloud became the Planet's Champion against his will, her unChosen Hero—the boy she hadn't desired to test and try, but who had taken her challenges without her realization and utterly demolished them.
In that life, despite his hardships and how he had been forced into a warrior he was not meant to be, Cloud lived a relatively peaceful existence in the end. Yet the Planet suffered, and eventually life was forced to rebuild over hundreds of thousands of years. In that lifetime darkness had been a festering wound, easily closed.
Yet in another life—another world—Cloud didn't have that easy time in Nibelheim. He learned at a young age the truth about his heiritage, and did not go on to be a SOLDIER. In fact in another life the simple act of knowing the truth birthed a vastly different Cloud Strife, and everything and everyone in turn around him changed.
Some say the cataclysm for everything was the Planet's Chosen Hero, Genesis Rhapsodos. They say that his choices, his bitterness and anger, was what fueled everything—that if the degradation of his body and mind had been counteracted earlier then all that had happened wouldn't have happened.
They are wrong.