Biography of Cid Highwind

By Princess Artemis

On February 22, Joshua and Cheryl Highwind were blessed with a newborn son, Cid Highwind. He wasn't a particularly big baby, but you would never know it to hear him cry. He started out making his feelings known and has not stopped for thirty-two years.

Judging from appearances, the Highwinds were a family of an average sort. Nothing special; Joshua was a mechanic and Cheryl was a housewife, and they lived in the Sector Two slums in Midgar. Sector Two was probably the best of the places available to live in under the plate. Joshua was dark haired and tan, while Cheryl had the blond hair and blue eyes that had characterized the Highwinds for so long. The Highwind name was an old one and long ago had been highly venerated. They never remembered this; all the Highwind name had left to common knowledge was a tradition holding that both sons and daughters would carry on the name. For Joshua and Cheryl, it meant that Joshua would take his wife's name when they married. It had been a very, very long time since the fall of Baron and the Dragoons in its allegiance. It was from the Dragoon Kain Highwind and his father that the name got its renown.

Cid had inherited a double portion of the Highwind spirit; he had his mother's coloring and her explosive temper, but he also had talents that harked back to the Dragoons of old. He had an inexplicable and powerful need to be outside, where he could feel the wind and see the sky and stars. He also had a talent for jumping just a bit higher than most parents could tolerate in a young boy. This was first noticed when he was two. The container of peanut butter was hidden on the top of the refrigerator after a particularly messy encounter he had with it and the wallpaper, but much to his parents' consternation, he managed to reach it by jumping. He had got his hide royally tanned, as it were, after that event, so he never repeated it. That coupled with an innate fear of a strange spirit the toddler felt caused his repressing this ability. For many years afterward, the only time he would make such a leap was if he were too angry to care whether or not he got in trouble for it and too infuriated to fear the strange spirit. It was not until high school that he rediscovered this talent.

When Cid was young, he showed a propensity to tear apart and reassemble every mechanical think he could get his hands on. His father was hardly pleased when he found his five-year-old son, covered in grease, trying to take the heads off the engine in the only car the family owned. Eventually, however, the Highwinds finally realized that their only son was just going to do that sort of thing whether they liked it or not, so when he was seven, they got him a small set of tools and all the safety equipment a budding mechanic could ever need. It has been thought that that was the last time anyone ever saw his bare hands; from then on he always wore leather gloves on his hands and safety goggles on his forehead.

It didn't take long for Cid's parents to realize that he had an absolute genius for designing machines. He built his first radio controlled airplane from parts he took from different appliances around the house without any plans or blueprints. The mechanics of it worked fine, but the plane itself was a beauty to behold. It seemed Cid had an almost instinctive understanding of wind and form; no one really paid any attention to it, but he had spent more time watching birds soar than he had spent tinkering. He did this as a means of escape; his parents fought a lot and he hated to hear them scream at each other, so he would wander far from his home in the slums of Midgar and watch the eagles fly. Sometimes he would stay out until well after dark, thinking that maybe some day he would be able to fly away. He would watch the stars come out, one by one, until a velvety black canopy of twinkling lights spread before him. Somehow there was hope up there. No one could see the stars anymore in Midgar. There were no Mako reactors then, but the plate was there.

In high school, Cid generally earned average grades. He was far too impatient to really apply himself to his schooling. His parents divorced when he was fourteen. He lived with his father from then on, but it was harder than when they were together. His father had become deeply bitter and not a day went by without him complaining about his ex-wife. And there was enough of her in Cid that the resemblance provoked a subconscious hatred in his father, which showed itself mainly in an animosity that he would never admit to. His mother moved to Costa Del Sol, which was too far away to afford many visits. So for many years, he lived in an atmosphere of anger and bitterness that he never understood. His father never noticed when Cid started stealing his pocket-change and using his lunch money to buy cigarettes. Neither did he notice his son's thinness or his frequent late nights--in a way it was as if Cid had no father.

As a young man, Cid was never quiet. He was as obnoxious as they came, but his classmates and teachers saw through that front. They knew all his anger came from a hurt he couldn't accept, and that he felt things deeper than most. So he never really lacked for friends, or at least understanding peers. There were a few times he became truly angry; it frightened him still when he felt that spirit start to form in his hand and the damage it caused. Not everyone had Limits; those who did rarely had a power like that. But for the most part it was well controlled; in fact, at the insistence of a friend, he joined the track team and excelled in the high jump. He was later disqualified, although no one really wanted to explain to him that it was because he was seriously outclassing everyone in the Midgar International Sports Federation.

When Cid was seventeen, the war between Shin-Ra and Wutai broke out. Like many young men his age, Cid was drafted into the Shin-Ra military. There he came into contact with his first real airplane. The idea of it had never occurred to him before, not really. He could have wings. He could fly.

The military force of Shin-Ra wasn't stupid. They let him fly.

It didn't take long for Cid to become an officer. If the military establishment never really impressed him, the other young men drafted with him did. He had a natural talent to lead and a genuine concern for the people under him. He could be rough at times, but it was never out of malice. He easily gained the respect of his crews and for him they would do what they rarely would for others.

He fought at the front in Wutai off and on for a few years, until the Shin-Ra Air Force decided the Captain would better serve in R&D. It was there that he designed and oversaw the building of the Highwind, Shin-Ra's first airship. That was his first baby.

He also first met Shera while working on the Highwind. She wasn't in the military; rather, she was an engineer who had graduated from college by the time she was nineteen. She was an excellent engineer and scientist; what Cid designed, Shera made work. Working closely together, they, along with three other mechanics, were the ones responsible for building nearly the entire airship. Shin-Ra saw that the five made for a great team, and so assigned them something even better than an airship. Shin-Ra wanted to explore space, both for military and for scientific purposes. They wanted a rocket.

Nothing could have made Cid happier. Or Shera, for that matter. It didn't take long for them to build a prototype. It blew up…but that didn't deter them. The five team members, along with a handful of other mechanics, were sent to a remote part of the western continent, close to the islands of Wutai. There, the mechanics and engineers built several small shelters to live in while they built the launch pad and the rockets. Cid was twenty-two at the time, and Shera was twenty. Cid, Shera, and the head mechanic all lived together in what would later be Cid's house. By now Cid and Shera had a close friendship, but it was never more than that. Jordan, the head mechanic, was Shera's best girlfriend and pretty much made sure the Captain never tried anything.

Cid was given the Tiny Bronco at this time, in order to make supply runs. This was his second baby, while the Shin-Ra 26 was his third. It took them four years to go through the prototypes until they reached the twenty-sixth. The Shin-Ra were so impressed with the quality of the work that they decided the next rocket, the Shin-Ra 26, would be a manned flight to the moon. Perhaps it was overconfident, but Cid was beside himself, especially when they decided he would be the one to head it.

After the launch failed, pretty much everyone was disillusioned. Some people blamed Shera for being slow; others blamed Cid for rushing things. But for some reason, they all stayed where they were. The military didn't want them anymore, and Cid was discharged. Six months later, when they thought there would be a chance for another launch, the first Mako reactor was built in Nibelheim. The company quickly abandoned space travel in favor of profit. The mechanics were disgusted and never went back. Cid had a nervous breakdown; it was too much for him. He had put his soul into his rocket, wanting so badly to fly higher than any bird, to reach that hope he saw in the night sky so many years ago. His heart's desire was lost in the bottom line.

It has been said that all the residents of Rocket Town are neurotic. It is probably true, but it was loyalty more than anything that caused all of the mechanics to settle down and live in their 'temporary' shelters, turning them into homes, and founding Rocket Town. They had lived and worked together for four years, some more than that. They just couldn't see themselves leaving what had, in a way, become their family.

Jordan married her boyfriend and moved out…across the little dirt path, where she would constantly wonder if anything exciting were going to happen. She wanted nothing to do with Cid in the state he was in, so Shera took care of him until he recovered. The fact that he had depended on Shera for his sanity angered Cid to no end. He had never depended on anyone his entire life--there was never anyone for him to depend on. It didn't set well. So he started taking his anger at his own weakness and failure out on her. She took it, partly afraid for him, but mostly because she thought she deserved it. She felt responsible for his breakdown, for space was more to him than the word 'dream' encompassed. They lived like that for the next six years; his verbally abusing her until she got so angry that she physically hurt him. But for some reason they never left, never stopped living together.

Six years went by before the Captain's hopes were raised by the impending visit to Rocket Town by Rufus Shinra, the young president of Shin-Ra Incorporated, and before his destiny would forever be altered by a spiky-headed kid and his cohorts.

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