Chrono Trigger: The Wasteland
First Chapter: Two Truths
Toma Levine XIX had never been very good at dying.
He was, however, highly adept at killing.
The mutant learned the first of these truths when he drew his revolver, despite being half buried beneath the rubble that had collapsed onto him. It learned the second of these truths as its grotesquely deformed head disintegrated into a purple and green mist. Or maybe it hadn't learned the second truth after all. Toma wasn't certain exactly how much cognition a mutant's lower brain was capable of. Chances were they only existed to direct the jumble of extra limbs.
Fortunately, this particular mutant didn't have the additional set of eyes that some had, making its violently thrashing set of limbs far less dangerous than they would have been with the guidance of sensory organs. Unfortunately, this meant that the lower brain's location wasn't visibly apparent. Without rising Toma fired thrice more in quick succession, hitting the most likely spots in the mutant's bulbous abdomen that its lower brain could be. Usually sandwiched between more traditional organs, often the lungs, occasionally the kidneys.
The mutant slumped to its knees. Purple ooze, more visibly similar to puss than the blood it was, poured from the three abdominal bullet wounds and from where its head had recently been. Propped up on all sides by the now still limbs the mutant remained in that position for several long moments before finally succumbing to its asymmetry and crumpling to the ground. Toma rose back to his feet, the barrel of his revolver still aimed at the seemingly dead mutant. Seemingly dead wasn't always truly dead, and he had seen men made truly dead by the seemingly dead before. No one knew everything about how a mutant's anatomy worked, and no two mutants were exactly the same. Hell, many weren't even remotely the same.
Toma slowly moved his right arm, opening and closing his empty fist a few times to test his grip strength. The hand felt strong and nothing was broken. That was something. Dust and fragmented glass fell away from his lead-lined leather duster as he bent down to retrieve his hat. It was made in the wide brimmed style popular with those, like Toma, foolish enough to venture deep into the wastes, and like his duster it too was lined with lead. Placing it back atop his head he drew his other revolver, Masa, and returned Mune to its holster at his left hip. If the mutant was playing dead, he wouldn't have to wait much longer to find out, even if they could be surprisingly clever on occasion, they were never patient long. Toma had known an old man who had carried a small glass egg-timer with him for situations like this. He said that the waiting never bothered him as long as he considered it as a well deserved smoke break. Toma's lips cracked a faint smile as he pulled a cigarette out of his duster's side pocket with his now free left hand and placed it between them. No one had ever pointed out the redundancy of the egg-timer to the old man. A cigarette took longer to burn out than the sand did to fall.
Lighting the cigarette, Toma pondered his silver flint-roll lighter. He'd found it years ago while scavenging for far greater prizes than a simple lighter. It read, Guardia's Millennial Fair 1000 AD May Nadia's Bell Ring in Peace for the Next Thousand Years. The other side was printed with an image of what was likely the aforementioned Nadia's Bell. A souvenir from a kinder age. An adage of hope that hadn't lasted a decade, let alone the desired millennium. Toma finished his cigarette, dropping its ashes to the scorched ground.
The mutant was as dead as that long ago wish for peace, but Toma would need to leave before the sound of his gunfire brought more in, or worse, other scavengers. Returning Masa to its holster, Toma pulled his scouting map from an inner pocket and took a moment to mark his current location, the nameless ruins of some long forgotten village a little north of the old capital of Porre, with an M. Not that marking for mutant encounters was of much real use. Mutants were everywhere, but the people he sold his maps to appreciated whatever information he could offer. The real value of this particular map was the small x just to the southwest of the capital. That find had been an unexpected bonus of his expedition south.
Toma rolled the map up and placed it back into his pocket. The real reason he had traveled this far south was the long thin package wrapped in rags that currently stuck out of the rubble. A relic he wouldn't mind keeping for himself, but his buyer had something to trade that was even more valuable. Toma smiled to himself again. Usually he was the the one trading information for goods, not vice versa. Retrieving his prize he stepped around the mutant's corpse and walked from the now mostly collapsed building.
The planet, ravaged by nuclear fire, had once known a green dream, but now knew two truths:
Toma Levine, nineteenth of his name, entered the wasteland.
And the entity he had long thought of as his Shadow followed.
*Author's Notes: Okay, this one's a little bit different. The concept is based on the hints in Chrono Cross (or maybe it was in developer notes, I don't remember off hand) that Porre was aided in some way by time travel. The Nintendo DS port of Chrono Trigger addressed this by confirming that Dalton was responsible. Of course the particulars of exactly what all he did and how are never revealed giving us fanfiction authors plenty of details to fill in on our own. I supposed that it was possible that the time strewn Dalton had advanced future technology at his disposal (I actually have a separate fanfic idea that will deal with this and the war between Guardia and Porre). Then I went a step further and asked, "What if nuclear weapons were available to him?" and the obvious follow up, "What if he used them?"
This is the story I've come up with following this train of thought. The date 1199 AD in the story description is not a typo. This is an apocalyptic wasteland come 1000 years earlier than it would have had Crono and the gang not tampered with time. Some of my inspiration for this is Stephen King's Dark Tower, so my protagonist is in some ways inspired by King's character Roland Deschain.
Basically I wanted to write about a gunslinger in a scifi/fantasy world and this is what I came up with. I liked the idea of using a descendant of the Toma Levine line and the generational suffix of XIX worked perfectly on two levels. It set the time frame about perfectly where I wanted it (roughly 200 years after CT's present) and is a reference to the all important number 19 in The Dark Tower.
Anyway, I have a good portion of this story already planned out so it shouldn't take me too long to get it finished. I figure it will be about the length of a shorter novella, but things could swing in either direction. Oh, and I'll probably go a little more mature/darker than I previously have, so the rating may end up getting bumped to M when that happens. I hope you give this a read, and if you do, enjoy!