I've been thinking about the Nibelheim incident, and the official timeline keeps messing things up.
According to the timeline:
Sep 22 - Sephiroth, Zack, and Cloud visit the Nibelheim maco reactor.
Oct 1 - Sephiroth burns the town and goes missing.
The OG doesn't state the dates specifically and doesn't confirm the number of days Sephiroth spends in the manor. According to Cloud's flashback, the light in the basement never went off, but that's just it. Cloud wakes up in the manor when another infantryman is keeping watch, sees Sephiroth in the basement one last time, runs after him into town and finds the town burning.
In CC, Zack says that the lights in the basement never went off, "and on the seventh day..." he walks out of the inn and finds the town in flames. Which means Sephiroth was hiding away for nearly a week. If the journey to the reactor and back took them one full day and Sephiroth disappeared on the following morning... we end up with three lists of events which just don't add up anyway.
If we take Sep 22 as the turning point of events, then CC unravels as follows:
09/22 - Investigation / Sephiroth goes nuts
09/23 - Sephiroth disappears / Day 1
09/24-09/28 Days 2-6
09/29 - Days 7 / Nibelheim burns
If we assume Sep 22 is the day when they arrive in Nibelheim:
09/22 - Arrival
09/23 - Investigation
09/24 - Sephiroth disappears / Day 1
09/25-09/29 - Days 2-6
09/30 - Day 7 / Nibelheim burns
And only if we assume that Zack starts counting days AFTER he finds Sephiroth in the basement, which is weird, because he discovers the basement first thing in the morning, and basically there's a whole day ahead of him...
09/22 - Arrival
09/23 - Investigation
09/24 - Sephiroth disappears
09/25-09/30 - Days 1-6
10/01 - Day 7 / Nibelheim burns
Either one or two days are lost in this mess of officially given dates, or Gaia has a different number of days in September, or CC is simply a retcon fuckup machine, which ruined not only the Nibelheim incident by shoving Genesis into the scene but also the amount of time spent in Nibelheim for the sake of using the iconic number 7 again. Your thoughts on that?
UPDATE: or maybe I was wrong with my assumptions, and the way to Mt.Nibel and back took them longer than one day. The area looks pretty dark around the reactor, but on the other hand, it's always night in Sector 8 in Midgar too...
09/22 - Arrival
09/23 - Investigation
09/24 - The party returns in the morning, Sephiroth disappears, the party catches up on sleep, and finds Sephiroth in the evening
09/25-10/01 - The party kills time in Nibelheim to find the town burning on the 7th day.
Nah, now I regret giving that so much thought as it does add up in the end but still contradicts the official timeline a little bit.
