Chrono Trigger: Dare Chapter 15
Truth
By Crono_12
I backed up against the door, keeping my sword between him and me. The king yawned then pointed his hand at my sword. The Rainbow Sword, the blade created specifically for me, was pulled out of my hands and thrust through the steel door and outside. It looked like it would be traveling for a while.
"My sword!" I exclaimed.
"Let’s see how good you are without that blade," Dalton taunted. "There’s no way you can win. Give up now, and maybe the King will be merciful," Dalton said almost soothingly.
"I don’t think so," I said steadily. The beauty, quite literally, of lightning, is that the attack, even if the bolt doesn’t hit, still blinds anyone close enough. My aim is great. In an instant, I fired a volley of lightning bolts, most hitting, some barely missing, but all effective in shocking and confusing the duo so that I could summon Ramuh. Once done, the familiar monster appeared in front of me and cast his spell.
"Uuaaaaaaaaa!" Dalton screamed in agony as a bolt of lightning struck him squarely and sent him flying, twitching almost comically in midair. The King winced slightly but held his ground.
"So…you can summon. Interesting, but not enough to stop me."
I ignored him then summoned Shiva. "Diamond Dust, fall and freeze!" I shouted and pointed towards the King. He had only a split second before a blizzard struck him full force. Through the gale I could see him trying to escape, but it was too late. As the spell died down, I saw the king encased in a thin layer of ice. Dalton however, was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that I had beaten them, I let my guard down. Suddenly, Dalton tackled me to the ground. He pulled out his sword, but I knocked it out of his hands. He retaliated by punching me on the face. I could feel the cut on my lip, and in the ensuing adrenaline rush I reversed the pin and punched him back. I pulled my fist back for another strike when King Zeal interrupted.
"Hold it. Don’t move. If you do, I’ll blast you out of this world," I heard the King say. "Now, get up."
I slumped my shoulders, then got up. Dalton stood up then punched me in the gut one more time before he walked over to the King’s side.
"Now Crono, do I have to forcefully restrain you, or are you smart enough to come peacefully?" The King spoke. His voice resounded through the large room, creating the effect that he was everywhere. I was about to answer when I felt a warm breeze on the back of my neck. I turned around quizzically.
"What the…?" I said. The wind picked up and started howling. It almost seemed to be saying something. I turned around and saw Dalton and Zeal both frozen in time.
"C...r...o...n...o...," I heard the wind whisper.
"Who’s there? Show yourself!" I commanded.
As the breeze died down, the world began to be more transparent. I could see through Dalton and Zeal, through the walls and the floor, and yet not through me. Then, with an unexpected flash, the world vanished, as if it had only existed in God’s mind’s eye, and that it had just blinked. Suddenly, I was standing in the middle of the cosmos somewhere. From where I was I could see millions of stars, all shining brightly and brilliantly, each dancing to its own tune quite happily. I looked around and saw a red, blue, and white planet appearing sightly larger than a human head away in the distance.
"Aire," I thought. I looked back towards the stars. There was calmness here, a tranquility that I had not felt for a long time.
"Ever since that day five years ago. Strange. Everything I am now is because of the decisions I had made on that day and the few afterwards," I spoke with no sound at all.
I turned around and looked in the distance. Even though I knew it was impossible, I could see Earth. The harder I looked, the closer it appeared until it was just as close as Aire was.
"I miss the Earth. I wonder how Frog and the rest of the guys are reacting." I said again, not even hearing my words.
"Wait a minute. Why am I here?"
"Don’t you like the calm? No hassles, no worries. No one to betray you, no one for you to look after," a voice as calm as my surroundings called out.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"You’ll find out."
"Who are you?" I insisted.
"I should be asking the questions right now. And right now, my first question is, are you the right person for my task?"
"It depends on who you are!" I shouted.
"That’s not important. What’s important is who you are. Are you the person I need?"
"I’m getting sick of this. Where are you?"
"Me? I’m right here."
The world I was in changed. I was now standing in a large room, entirely composed of metal. There were no doors, no windows, only him and me and six walls. He looked exactly like me, from head to toe. As he approached, his face and body changed. He turned into Marle, holding her crossbow. He turned into Cid, his orange eyes shining. He turned into Ecin, with his grinning features and gleaming knives. He turned into Lucca with her straight face and odd violet hair. And finally, he turned into all of them put together. Ecin’s grinning features, Lucca’s soft face, Marle’s compassionate eyes, and Cid’s sword scars.
"What are you?" I said softly.
"For the past few millennia or so, I’ve been known as The Observer. Before that, I was known as God, and before that, I was called Tsern."
"Say what? You’re Tsern? But...but," I stammered.
"Hold it. I’ll explain everything," he spoke soothingly. "Back when I was human, I was still experimenting with my magic. I realized I had the ability to mutate non-sentient organic substances. That’s the key right there, non-sentient. I was testing my abilities out on a sea creature close to what you call a turtle, except it was called a ‘pedfi’. For some reason I lost control of my power. The creature mutated into what you now call…"
"Don’t tell me. Lavos. Please tell me you didn’t create Lavos," I interrupted.
He nodded slowly. "I did."
"Then how did King Zeal get hold of it, let alone send it back into time?"
"After a long battle, I managed to destroy Lavos. But what I didn’t notice was that during the battle, pieces of Lavos’s shell were knocked off. When the King came here, his craft landed near them. Then, his scientists and engineers found a way to recreate my original Lavos and boost its energy with some Dreamstone, then gave it to the king as a pet. Eventually, they realized that power can be harnessed from Lavos, and they built the first Mammon Machine. As for sending it back in time, that was I, too. I was fooling around in the seventh dimension and accidentally pushed some matter around a bit without replacing it. King Zeal noticed what happened and ordered his men to investigate. Again, the scientists of King Zeal, aided by the energy taken from Lavos, were able to create a more stable portal. The King ordered that a new Lavos be created and sent back in time to 65 million BC. His orders were carried out to a ‘t’. As soon as Lavos landed, this Universe’s time continuum was twisted into a loop, thus assuring that the King would rule forever. By sending Lavos back, the King insures that he will find it in Zeal, and that he will travel to Aire to search for the monsters origin," Tsern finished the story.
I grimaced. Lucca had explained something like this to me. She called it a time-space loop.
"And the portals on Earth? How did they get there?" I asked.
"Well, I had to have someone get rid of the Lavos on Earth. It wasn’t a coincidence that Marle was wearing her pendant when the telepod was activated. It wasn’t a coincidence that the pendant was made of a Dreamstone, and that you are wearing a shard of that pendant around your neck."
"What the heck are you talking about?"
"Ok, look. The telepod was created with a bit of Dreamstone, though Lucca didn’t realize it. Lavos’s power was boosted with a lot of Dreamstone. Your pendant is made of pure Dreamstone! Don’t you see? I created the Dreamstone in the first place!"
"The day keeps getting better and better. Let me guess. Next you’re going to tell me that you need my help fixing the problems you caused."
"Ah, you found out why I called you here. But first, I have to do a bit of explaining. You see, I didn’t destroy the original Lavos right away. I didn’t know what it could do. I left it in an enclosed space and let it roam around. I saw it could spawn and evolve. Once I saw that it was too dangerous, I destroyed it. However, along with the pieces of the shell it left an egg, which was buried and left alone to evolve for 3 2/3 million years, about the time Lavos reached Earth. King Zeal found that too, and infused it with energy harnessed from the original Lavos along with several enhanced DNA samples from the old one.
"The egg matured at a rapid pace, and took on a lot of its parent’s characteristics. When the egg hatched, a turtle-like being did not come out. Instead, a human-like being emerged. This…thing, was far more evolved than humans, but was still in its infant stages when the King ‘adopted’ it and called it Ibleess. He knew that it was related to Lavos. And this place is no longer suitable for it. It needs food in the form of Dreamstone, and the only place to find it is on two other planets, Earth and Betrise.
"Betrise has the most, but there is enough Dreamstone on Earth for your planet to be a very useful waypoint to Betrise. Once Ibleess gets to Betrise, an uninhabited planet, it will become strong enough to take over the universe, and not even the combined force of all the multiverses would be able to stop it. You have to understand something. This creature does not want to just be powerful. It wants total annihilation. It just wants to destroy. And, if we let it mature, the monster will have infinite universes to decimate."
"And so you need me to help," I summed it all up. "You know, this isn’t the first time I’ve been in a position like this." Then, under my breath, I whispered, "So, the computer was wrong. But the truth is a whole lot stranger than the fiction."
I recapped what Tsern had told me. "So, Lavos was a mistake you made, and the King had taken advantage of that mistake by re-creating the original Lavos, which he harnessed power from. He then created another Lavos and sent it to Earth, thus making sure that he would arrive on Aire because of a time-space loop. Then the king found Lavos’s egg and messed around with its DNA, giving it a lot more power and created Ibleess."
"And your answer is…?" Tsern asked.
"What happened to the original Lavos? The one the King is keeping as a pet."
Tsern’s soft gaze turned cold as ice.
"Don’t you see the destruction? Can’t you see the infertile ground? Lavos has drained and is still draining energy from this planet. Now, only certain places can survive; places that being looked after by Zeal itself. And the only reason they look after these gardens is because the plants growing in them have magical qualities."
"You never answered my question," I told him.
"Fool! I drew it out perfectly for you. Lavos is still in Aire’s core!" Tsern shouted.
A stunned silence ensued. I could almost feel Tsern’s hatred for Lavos, although I didn’t know why he hated the thing so much. But who needs a reason when the object of your hate is so evil?
"All right then. What do you need my help to do?" I asked.
"Ok. Listen. In Ibleess’s present state, neither you, nor I, nor anyone else in the history of this universe, or any other universe can defeat him. Part of it stems from the fact that some of the pedfi had acid sacks under their skin. They could shoot the acid out from its pores. King Zeal enhanced the acid so that it became a quite a bit more corrosive. Thanks to that meddler, Ibleess has a very similar characteristic. That blasted man replaced Ibleess’s blood with the acid. Anytime you strike and draw blood, acid will eat at your sword as well as spurt out of the wound. So, I want you to go back in time and kill all the pedfi that have this ability."
I saw his logic immediately. If we eliminated the acid bearing pedfi, Ibleess wouldn’t have acid either. But why was eliminating acid that important? If I didn’t succeed, couldn’t we just use ranged attacks against Ibleess? I pushed the questions to the back of my mind and let more important ones surface.
"One small problem Tsern. How am I supposed to go back in time?" I asked.
"The Epoch. Oh, and don’t worry about the time-space co-ordinates, I’ve already programmed them in. The only thing you have to do is kill all the acid bearing pedfi in a certain lake. The Epoch will emerge right next to the lake, so you don’t have to worry about that," he replied coolly.
"Well, can I at least have some help?" I asked. My mind went to Marle, but Tsern had other ideas.
"Yes. You can have Lucca. Marle will be way too busy with her own quest. She will be needed desperately somewhere else." Tsern was about to wave me down to the Epoch, but he stopped suddenly.
"Two more things. You’re going to need this sword…" Tsern pulled out a magnificent samurai sword, shaped exactly like the Rainbow Sword.
"This is the Deus Moon. It’s my sword, so be careful with it," he said as he handed it to me. When I grabbed it, I could almost swear I saw it flash brightly, as if it were happy to be with me. I slipped it into the Rainbow Sword’s sheath.
"It’s just like your old sword, except…well, it’s a surprise. You’ll find out."
"You said there was a second thing?" Because of the new sword, my voice had taken on the quality of a kid’s who had just been given a new toy. However, my excitement was derailed when I saw Tsern's grim face.
"Crono, Marle’s survival depends on your success. If you fail, the same acid you are trying to get rid of will kill her. Once you leave this place, you will have exactly 24 hours to kill most of the pedfi that have the acid." He stopped for a second, then spoke in a severe tone, "Do not kill too many of the normal pedfi."
"Why not?" I asked skeptically.
"That…you must figure out on your own. Part of who you are depends on it. If you don’t understand it, you will die, and that is an unchangeable fact," he finished the meeting with a somber note. He waved his and, and for a second before the darkness engulfed me, I saw the entire world shimmer.
I woke up in a huge factory. To my surprise, I saw the Epoch sitting up on a metal stand with Lucca tinkering with the mechanisms through a gap in the support.
"Lucca! How’d you get here?" I asked in shock.
"Crono! We all thought you were dead!" Lucca pulled herself out from under the Epoch and gave me a big hug. I returned it, glad to see that she was ok.
"I don’t know how I got here. One second I was catching my breath with the others after we escaped, the next second I was under the Epoch pushing the Time-Space engine block back into place. How’d you get here?"
"Let’s just say that someone up there either really likes me, or really wants to test me. How are Marle and the others?"
"I don’t know. She took it pretty hard that we left you in there. I don’t think my disappearance will help."
"Where did you get all this stuff?" I asked her as I pointed towards the mound of tools and the field of mechanical parts that lay next to the ship.
"I don’t know. After I dragged myself from beneath the Epoch, I found all this stuff. It was all organized this way too, just as if someone planned for me to use them," she explained.
I nodded curtly. Lucca went back to messing around with the Epoch as I told her what Tsern had told me. I still couldn’t help wonder what was happening to Marle though….
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