Antinomia: FF6

Glad to see you've returned to working on this amazing hack! This all looks...amazing! I hope progress continues to go smooth.
As for you're question about Cid, well, I'd probably just have him be dead and advance the story as such. Although what you mentioned sounds interesting!

Yeah.  On the other hand, if Cid is always dead, then Celes will have experience behind her to help convince Terra to leave the town even if she failed to save one of the kids, since she would have gone through something similar herself.  I had also been considering that eventually going to the Solitary Island would trigger a flashback sequence of Celes's event (if she's in the party), and then have a party-specific scene of the other characters consoling her, since in the original game none of the other characters are ever explicitly made aware of what happened to her.