Lavoid Trigger Chapter 1
Tiny Red Star
By Nanaki & Paul Nathans
The flaming hand collapsed closed about him, ultrahot red-orange lava ripping into his body, his lungs, his heart, burning pain screaming through his body, and searing his mind with its intensity. The hand clasped about him again and again, turning his structure, his skeleton, his insides to molten matter. His very breath became choked, as if blocked by a leaden weight, and he bit down on his lip to prevent himself from offering her the satisfaction of crying out.
The heat faded away, and blackness erupted behind his eyes, oppressive… A smothering weight bearing down on him that he could not fight, could not do anything about. His legs and knees gave out on him, though he did not feel it. He crumpled to the tiled floor, the stones seeming almost soothing as he fell against them, his form charred, and blackened.
His thoughts turned one last time to the woman who had become the most important person in his life; the beautiful young lady who had mended the breach between him and his family, the woman whose way of looking at the world… Who with her inner strength, her adamant refusal to let life’s concerns drag her down, or to take away the happiness she had the right to achieve in the world, had served as a saving angel’s light for him… The woman who with this and love had finally made life in the destitute world created upon the loss of Vigo worth living.
“Schala...” he whispered.
The blackness overtook him, and his world became naught.
*****
Crono Triggara bolted upright in his bed, fighting the urge to scream. Sweat trickled down his brow, while a crushing weight made breathing difficult. The lurid dream remained hanging in his mind’s eye, although swiftly fading still tangible in the morning breeze. He shuddered, trying to force away the memories, and the pain… Which, although surreal, seemed almost as if it truly existed.
He took a breath...
…Once...
…Twice...
…And exhaled, listening to his throbbing heart.
Schala… The name the young man had spoken throbbed in his mind. What about Schala?
It had been four years already, yet still the memories of the melancholy, morose young lady who was Princess of the Floating Kingdom of Zeal were as vivid as daylight. He doubted he could ever forget that week, although he wanted to a great many times.
Yet that offered nothing as to the source of his incredibly vivid dream.
Although not one to speak, the words came out of his mouth before he knew that they had emerged, the result of his complete perplexity over what had just taken place leaving him with no other channel of response.
“What the heck was that?”
There was no response but the early morning Sunlight. While it was too early to be up and about, he didn’t want to try falling back to sleep. Not after that nightmare. Normally, such dreams wouldn’t phase him, but its luridness, and depth seemed to go far beyond any normal dream. The whole intensity… The excruciating, all-consuming molten hot lava melting into his form… He shuddered again.
And the memories… One young man’s memories of the life on the paradise island of which he and his companions had only gotten a glimpse… Living there with someone who he was obviously very much in love with… Someone to truly experience all that place had to offer… It must have been wonderful.
Thinking of what had just been lost was also painful in itself.
He lay back on his pillow, resting his eyes on the ceiling.
The times of ages long past hold so many treasures. I only wish… I had truly been able to experience them.
*****
The Lavoid opened its eye.
It immediately knew something had gone drastically wrong.
For one thing, the Class B was nowhere within sight, or senses.
There was a planet approaching fast ahead in the Class F, Type IIIs viewpoint, but nothing else. No Lavoids were anywhere about the area.
But that could only mean one thing…
...The butcher…
Jenyel!! it screamed out, casting his voice along an instantaneous thought-transmission wavelength. No answer from that Queen. Aruna!! Nothing from her, too.
It laughed at itself. Like a Lavoid Queen would answer a lowly Class F!
It glanced around frantically. It had been forced to launch from the witch’s cocoon because the risk of it managing to jump away freely without its course being damaged, it had realized, had become close to fifty percent. Maybe the Class B hadn’t been assassinated; maybe it was somewhere else. Yet if that was, and the woman was waiting somewhere, hidden in the planet’s shadows, its lethal magics ready…
Its panic became full-fledged. The Lavoid shrieked, forming whatever auras it could, probing the surrounding area wildly, expecting at any moment to feel those magics lancing into it, shredding it to pieces; expecting to see the woman rocketing towards him, blazing with energies, hands outstretched to send Star magics at it, and wipe it from existence. The Class F screamed the names of all the Lavoids it knew in the silence of its mind, casting them out.
Huntress… Human woman… Hunted us down across the stars… Took out a Class C, Type I, and a Class B, Type Unknown, and left no trace of the latter… Help!!!!
The Lavoid realized how stupid it was being, and forced itself to calm down.
If the butcher was around, panic would do nothing but make survival even less of a chance.
First priority… Determine where you are… Maybe you’re indeed elsewhere…
The Lavoid cast its ‘planet senses’ outwards, and found to its shock that this was the same planet that the Class B had launched from. The third planet in the Kalendra System, which was now… Its sensors picked up… A fertile planet consisting of a twenty-five point sixty-two Standard Hour rotation period and a Standard Year of three hundred seventy-two point eighty-nine days, also in Standard Times.
How long?
It didn’t take much time for that answer to register. Most likely a little over eleven thousand Standard Years… That had been the distance of this planet as registered when intercepting the Class B Lavoid Spawn.
Something else was wrong… If a Lavoid had come from here, shouldn’t the surface of the planet have been devastated?
Unless…
Planets were generally cleared of all life they could clear once Lavoids had absorbed enough energy to reproduce. That would make it easier for the Spawns to grow up… Without having to worry about any outside interference from whatever else might be roaming the planet. Perhaps, though, something had happened. The Spawn might have grown up, and launched without the parent laying waste to the planet. Yet that made no sense, only a fool wouldn’t take steps to ensure its survival.
Had the parent also been victim to the butcher, or to something else?
But if that was true, then why had the Spawn been overlooked upon the planet?
All speculation vanished as the Lavoid realized that it was trapped in the planet’s gravity field, and being pulled closer to the atmosphere by the instant.
All thoughts of humans, other Lavoids, and anything else vanished as the Class F began to focus all its energies upon reversing its vector. Burst of energy after burst of energy was channeled out of the front of the podlike Lavoid, erupting in a chain reaction of kinetic energy while the Lavoid itself attempted to move backwards.
The attempts were all in vain. The planet’s gravity well had it in its grasp. The Class F gave up on attempting to free itself and began to gather wavelengths about itself to form whatever kinds of shieldings it could muster, although it was pretty sure it would all be for naught.
The woman that had taken the life of Jenora had sealed its fate as well.
Even if the Class F survived descent and impact, the beings that inhabited the planet could prove its bane. This place could very well be the butcher’s homeplanet, and if she came from this planet, it stood to reason there could be more.
It tried one last time to reverse its course, creating a tremendous eruption of energy, and attempting to rocket backwards at the exact same time, while focusing its shields forwards, and shoving off them as well.
Again, nothing happened.
The Class F let out a plaintive wail and snapped its eyelids shut, sinking into hibernation so it wouldn’t experience the end.
*****
Princess Nadia ‘Marle’ Guardia sat in a light blue plush chair, resting against its back. Her blonde hair was strung in its usual ponytail, which was draped off to the side to cascade down to the left chair arm in a soft waterfall. The tiny pinpricks of light in the sky cast their light on her hair, enhancing its color with an almost ethereal glow. She wore a simple white shirt and light blue shorts, her only piece of jewelry her family’s pendant, which was clasped, as always, around her neck, the blue gemstone resting against her chest. Her gaze searched the stars; gentle and yet perceptive.
She glanced down to the book she was reading and placed a maroon flap between the pages, then closed it, and placed it on the table to her right.
She’d already given up reading when the stars had begun to appear. It was senseless to keep the book in her hands any longer. She dropped her hands to her sides and continued to search the stars, taking in their softly glowing beauty juxtaposed over a stark blackness.
The cool breeze washed over her. Stray locks of her blonde hair whipped in front of her eyes, and she brushed them aside, sighing contentedly.
There were only two nights that she remembered as beautiful as this one. The first had been when her father had given her the pendant she now wore; the second had been the night of the Moonlight Parade. Both had been filled with two of the most wonderful occasions in her life.
Despite that tonight didn’t have anything special to it, she was content to just bask in the beauty of the stars. It would’ve been better if Crono and/or Lucca could’ve been there with her, but a certain Senator had decided to keep her, and her father busy with palace duties. It had taken up a good portion of the afternoon as well as the morning to finish addressing all of the plans the woman had had for establishing a ‘Second Dorino’, and her father had been left with so much to do afterward that she hadn’t been able to leave him in good conscience. She’d been helping him with his duties the rest of the day. She certainly wasn’t going to bother to go all the way to Truce to spend time with her friends this late at night.
Her pendant shimmered with scintillating blue light, a reflection of the stars that hung in the vastness of space above her.
She was content, this time, just to be alone. To bask in the soft luminance of the beauty of the stars, and to let her memories drift over the past. Her father’s gift and her reaction… One of the last times they’d truly had as a family before they’d started to drift apart. The kind twinkle in his eyes as he presented her with the light blue pendant warmed her heart even today when she remembered it. And the time of the Millennial Fair four years ago… When she’d at last made friends, and not only that but had seen more of the world than she’d ever dreamed of seeing… Ending with the magical night when she’d been able to walk in the Moonlight Parade amidst as breathtaking a spectacle of the heavens as she witnessed once again now… And not alone, but with someone who had come to mean a great deal to her… Both were precious memories that she could draw warmth from simply by seeing again.
With the latter had come the healing of the breach she’d formed between herself and her father, and acceptance into her family just for who she was. True, she, and her friends had picked up a slight rumor mill, but no one but her father, and the current Chancellor knew the truth. Excluding Crono and Lucca, of course.
Well, save for the people they’d encountered on their journeys, too.
The heavens seemed to shine, reflecting her memories, and happiness.
Normal life… What I’d wanted so hard to achieve I got… Its ironic what it took to get that far, though.
Only ended up in a self-designated struggle against a being that fed on worlds. Only ended up experiencing certain points of history in reality, and influencing that history in some key aspects as well. Only passed through situations that even the skilled combatants of the Guardia Army might not have been able to face down. On the other hand, though, the places she’d traveled to… Especially the lush and fertile jungles in the Prehistoric time period and the floating continent that had hovered above the frozen, barren world of Twelve Thousand B.C…. Traversing them with people that she could talk to openly and where rank and state meant nothing… She’d seen the world and then more and had done so not by herself, but with others.
It amazed her just as much how a simple week could have changed her life so much. Okay, that, and two troublesome addendums. First had been retrieving Crono’s mother from Six Hundred A.D., where she’d gotten trapped in due to… Whatever was wrong with her. A great deal of the time she’d seen Crono watch his mother she could’ve sworn she’d see his eyes flicker with pain briefly. Yet the first time she’d seen this, when she’d inquired as to whether he was all right, he’d simply avoided her questions. She’d dropped the matter, and brought it up at various other points when she’d seen that same pain-filled look, but as he’d shifted the topic each time she’d eventually become certain that there was possibly nothing she could ever do to get him to talk about what was troubling him. And she dared not press him; she didn’t want to hurt him.
Whatever was wrong with his mother was tied into the sadness she’d seen within him at those brief intervals, and, she suspected, was tied into why he so seldom spoke.
She, Lucca, and Crono had speculated on whether they ought to head for the most probable location… The time post-Mystic War… Or scour all the time periods they knew of, in case the Time Gate had somehow thrown her to one of them. Lucca had keyed the Gate to access all of the eras they were familiar with so their friends could return home. Thus that had been a consideration. They’d even speculated on what they’d find there. Marle had wanted to take the Epoch for a ride to the future world herself, just to see if it was okay, but they’d changed their minds. It was more likely the Gate had reverted to its original properties before completely vanishing, they opted to start with Six Hundred A.D. first. They’d found the woman scolding Crono’s cats in Truce Canyon… That was when she’d first seen that flash of pain in Crono’s eyes.
Besides that, there’d been the whole ‘Shadows Nightmare’.
To this day she still wasn’t sure what had taken place. One minute she’d been playing target practice with an enormous amount of missiles in the closest of the three ‘Future Eras’ to their own time, and had met what should have been oblivion, the next minute she’d been back in her room in the castle the day that whole nightmare had started. Along with Melchior and Janice – R-007 had ceased to exist for reasons they would discover later – she and Lucca and Crono had made a beeline to the End of Time, and confronted Gaspar… With Lucca’s gun held to his head.
They’d gotten their answers on the full scope of Gaspar’s machinations then. All of it had been unraveled when Janus, who had simply narrowed the scope of the search for his sister down to prior to when his acolyte Thiek could get a hold of her… He’d become an adept in Chronos Magic to the point where he could harness the replicas of the wavelengths of the Time Gates to traverse time within the period from their present, where the cycle of Time Gates had started, presumedly to Ayla’s time – she didn’t really care much for the hows, although they were still in her mind – had at last found his sister. The timestream had snapped back in on itself, and erased everything Gaspar’s disciples had done. That had – they found out upon inquiring as to if Gaspar knew anything as to R-007s fate – also wiped out R-007, the same materials that had created the artificial intelligence had been bought from Medina… Those materials had come from the same supply that had created the Mystic Warship… Both had been supplied from the Shadows.
The full scope of the obsessed man’s machinations had been larger than anything that they had been able to imagine. All due to his attempts to elude the insanity he was afraid of because of his paranoia of paradoxes. With Schala out of reach, the man’s views of the past had changed from whatever ones he’d learned when he’d first beheld the End of Time. The reason for all he’d done – to prevent paradoxes – Had been negated by the sudden addition of a factor he hadn’t seen in the past. With that knowledge, he’d never taken such drastic steps as he had then. People like his acolyte Thiek C. Smada had never been dragged into the struggle. Although that hadn’t finalized the man’s beliefs about paradoxes. He’d still harbored some paranoia as to its possibilities, but they’d ensured he wouldn’t do anything stupid again by getting a promise out of Spekkio to watch the Guru of Time. After that, the whole situation had been left alone. The Epoch had been stored away in the caverns below the bluffs behind Lucca’s house, and that had ended the aftermath of the repercussions of what they’d done throughout history.
Janice had drifted away from them.
Her life had started to go the way she’d wanted it. She and Crono and Lucca… They were practically an inseparable trio by now. Lucca had been the one most attached to their friends from other time periods, but had grown out of that as she’d realized that the timestream was something it was too dangerous to fool around with.
There had been one final exception.
They’d gotten an explanation on the nature of Time Gates when Gaspar had undergone his interrogation… As to why Janus could use them… And thus, their restrictions. ‘Time Gates’ and ‘Timestreams’ had their own balance as well, the Gates flowed forwards on a ‘connection basis’ of passage through the years being linked to other passage through years. The Epoch had been plotted on the same such theories. Janus had found his sister after three years searching, but despite their brief attempt to look for him, they’d been unable to locate him anywhere.
That had convinced them that their friends had most likely passed beyond their lives by now, and held lives of their own. They weren’t going to search through an entire world for the man and his sister just to see Schala one last time. They’d thought of checking up on Glenn and possibly Robo if he still existed, but had decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Their lives had gone on, she, and Lucca had not even wanted to bother with time travel again, but Crono, who’d taken his failure to save the Princess of Zeal personally had insisted.
To this day, he still wondered what had become of her, and being unable to find ‘Magus’, and his sister anywhere had left them with still more questions. Questions that were, for better, or worse, beyond them now. They’d passed out of reach of their lives in all but thought, soon enough they really would most likely be nothing more than a memory of a time long past.
Yet the memories in themselves were what made life so precious in so many ways. With the breathtaking view of the heavens above, the cool breeze blowing softly about her, and the memories of those precious times long past, she could really ask for nothing more.
A stray snippet of what the Guru of Time had said to her those four years ago when she’d been determined to find a way to restore Crono to life brushed against her mind with a featherlight touch.
“Its called ‘Memories of Crono’.”
She smiled, a tear forming in her right eye, and trickling down her cheek to fall to the balcony floor, and shatter into a million shades of dancing rainbows.
Yes… Our memories… All of our memories…
Tonight, they were alive more than ever before in her heart.
Glenn… Robo… Janus… Schala… And so many others. Her family and her two closest friends… Doan, Kino, everyone they’d met. Her father’s smile as he held out the pendant to her, Schala’s love as she spoke to her younger brother when they’d first met her in the chambers in Zeal Palace… She could at last realize how much value they had.
Nothing special about tonight…?
She smiled wistfully. No. Tonight you’ve given me my memories… Thank you… Crono… Schala… Everyone…
She closed her eyes, content to just feel the breeze for the next few minutes.
That was when it happened.
Like a whipcrack of energies, a low, keening wail seemed to erupt from the atmosphere and emit outwards in a pulsating shriek. Her eyes snapped open in shock, just in time to see a red ‘something’ shoot through the atmosphere. Her pendant burned an angry red and jerked against her chest, sharp pain shooting down her form, and up her neck, and drawing a sharp gasp from her throat. The pain cascaded over her in waves upon waves, her eyes watering with tears from the agony. She could barely see through those tears, her body screaming in agony as the waves of pain overloaded her senses.
The red meteor smashed into the mountains to the west with a distant thud, sending out a cry of pain so intense that she blacked out from it. Her eyes opened an undetermined amount of time later to find her legs wrapped so tightly around the left foreleg of her chair it had cracked under her weight. The chair had crashed to the side, and lay smashed apart on the balcony floor. Her fingernails were biting into the arms of the chair, tearing through the fabric they’d bitten so deep.
She inhaled deeply, several times; it was as if all the air had been driven from her lungs. Her chest arched with the pain that had just recently ripped out from there, and it took a while for her to focus.
She glanced around quickly; hoping no one was nearby. She saw no one, so she could only hope her brief period of anguish had gone unnoticed, and unheard. Her gaze dropped to her pendant, glowing a mixture of red, and light blue.
She’d only seen her pendant glow that fiercely once before.
When it had initially reacted to coming in contact with Zeal’s Mammon Machine. The glow was even now beginning to dim back to its normal state, but its angry colors remained.
In her mind there was only one known type of creature that could’ve resulted in the type of reaction from her pendant she’d just experienced.
“Lavos.”
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Notes: Thanks for okaying this Chapter, Keith. No, this story’s resolution to the conflict of CHRONO TRIGGER: THE SHADOWS is not official, this is not an official continuation to the Series Keith Adams started, this is just aspects of Nanaki’s ‘tribute’ showing up. At least they’re out of the way… I hope. That ought to clear up any possible confusion.
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“Memories… All of you… My… Memories…”-Fei Fong
Wong
XENOGEARS
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