A young woman who became lost in the internet is now feared dead, say local Shinra Turks.

They fear that her Central Processing Unit may have become fused with her Internet Service Provider’s router, sending her pinging interminably from site to site.

Tifa (Lockheart) Strife of Edge, Gaia, was last seen by her Avalanche friends last Sunday, happily surfing about the internet.

Around midnight Cloud Strife heard a very loud noise from Tifa’s modem, and when he went to investigate found a glowing blue pile of electro-magnetic embers on her chair. All of the modem’s lights were flashing, and it seemed to be playing a midi version of Weird Al Yankovic’s Eat It.

He said she had recently been wiring herself directly into the computer’s sound system through headphones. Local electronics expert Reeve Tuesti says it could be a case of Spontaneous Modem Fission, where the remaining contents of Tifa’s CPU were sucked into her computer’s, then fed through the modem to the router.

“Our main fear now is that she’ll get pinged to an ‘adult entertainment’ site, where she’ll be auto-refreshed out of existence,” says Mr Tuesti.

"She might also be routed to a games site, where she risks being ganked by World of Warcraft ‘belfs’, or a chat site, where she could be killed by the flood of pheromones surging down the line."

Local Edge authorities at Shinra said they had taken Tifa’s computer to pieces, but found no trace of her, and feared the worst. Mr Tuesti said the scenario was all but hopeless. “There would be bits of her all over the place. One small hope is that the search engines might index her. Of course, she’d have to submit herself to Google, but the others might pick her up somehow.”

Cloud Strife admitted Tifa had been spending a lot of time surfing the internet, but denied that it had become a problem. “Sure, she would twitch at the breakfast table, and she had started to use her mouse as a fork, but what woman doesn’t,” he asked? He said he would now start surfing the net to try to find her, but would wear Anti-Modem Devices, such as magnets, and other protective clothing.