Happy holidays everyone, and welcome to chapter four of Chrono Chaos. I hope you're liking it, because this is one of my personal favorites of 2009. This is not to say I'm coming off of my vacation though. Sorry, but this Ice Demon is going to finish the winter off before he comes back. Maybe. I may be back by February, though that's not a guarantee. What is a guarantee though, is the disclaimer.

Disclaimer: I do not own Chrono Trigger, and I am thanking goodness I don't, because only Square Enix could possibly have done it right. They make the best RPG games out there, and that's no lie. They are the best, bar none, all hail Square Enix, please don't sue me. The most you could get was my help for dialogue with a new FF character. Which I would probably do for a very good price.

We walked for a good hour and a half before we made it to a safe place, one with people. It was a dreary time, and it was the year two thousand and three hundred, so we were a long way from home. We walked into the building, a large dome, and we found that there was no food, but there were machines that let us get a full night's worth of sleep in a few seconds.

"Travelers." A child said. Everyone stood up and gathered around us.

"Did you come from the other dome?" A man asked. "You passed through the ruins, so you must have come from the other dome." We nodded. "Is there any food there? I fear we cannot last much longer here."

"No, there isn't any sign of food anywhere." Lucca said. The people all lowered their heads. "You mean, there's no food here either?" One man came forward and shook his head.

"There is food, but we cannot get to it." He said. He gestured to a ladder. "The food is down there, but we cannot get in, though many have tried. There is no way for us to get through."

"We can get it." Marle said. The man stared. "We've made it through the ruins, so we should be able to get to the food."

"You'd do that for us?" The man asked. "Thank you. I'd all but given up on ever seeing food again."

I walked along the thin beam with my hands in my pockets while the others took their time. I looked over my shoulder and I noticed the distance between us. I was over halfway to the other side and they were still near the beginning, and Lucca was clinging to the beam, crawling, while Marle was holding onto Crono as they moved cautiously. I shook my head, but remembered that I'd trained my balance on thin wires as opposed to the metal beams I now walked on. I walked back at a fairly brisk pace and they all watched me. I stepped onto a small part and jumped over to Lucca easily. She looked up at me as I crouched down to her.

"Would you like some help?" I asked. She looked at the beam and tried to push herself up. I held out my right hand and she slowly took it. I stood up slowly and she followed. I turned and crouched. "Climb aboard."

"I, I couldn't." She said.

"Don't worry; I won't mind any extra weight." I said. "I delivered milk among both villages before sunrise, and I wore a large set of weights on my back, arms, and legs. I trained for speed with a total of two hundred pounds, and still I managed to deliver forty bottles of milk per day before the sun would rise each day."

"Are you sure?" She asked.

"I am, Lucca." I said. "If I can deliver forty bottles of milk in less than three hours each morning with two hundred pounds, I am sure I can balance on these beams while carrying you." She climbed onto my back as Marle and Crono watched me. She put her arms around my neck and I moved my arms to hold her ankles. "Hold on." I looked at Crono and Marle. "We'll go on ahead."

"What do you mean by that?" Lucca asked.

"Hang on." I said. I crouched and jumped ahead of Marle and Crono. Lucca yelped as I began jogging. "This isn't like my training, but it's not bad. I might start a transportation service." She laughed nervously as I turned a corner. "I trained for balance on my mother's clothesline, and then I set up a thinner one made of yarn."

"So, this doesn't bother you?" She asked nervously.

"Not in the least." I replied. "This may as well be a dirt road to me."

I stared around the room. We all felt like it was too easy to get into the room, even though the others had a difficult time of getting in.

"If it was that easy to get in, why did they have such a hard time?" Lucca asked. "They didn't look like they had vision problems, and despite how hungry they must be, I can't see any problems getting over here. They could even try to make it so that they have a wider path somehow, it wouldn't be very hard, even if it would take some time."

"Something tells me something else is in here that keeps them from getting to the food." I mused. I walked toward the door and a large machine dropped from the ceiling, along with a pair of round machines.

"INTRUDER DETECTED." A strange female voice said. "SECURITY PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED." One of the round machines eyes glowed and a bright yellow light was shot at me in a straight line. I jumped back and it scorched the ground. "RECALIBRATING TARGETING SENSORS."

"What is that thing?" Marle asked.

"It's some kind of security machine." Lucca said. "This must be what's keeping those people out of the food storage. We'll have to find a way of shutting it down." I drew my sword and prepared to fight it. "Milliardo? What are you doing? There's no way we can beat that thing."

"We won't know unless we try." I said. "Besides, these things don't look even half as tough as Gato." Crono drew his sword and Marle produced a crossbow.

"He's right Lucca." She said. "You guys beat the Dragon Tank, and that Yakra thing, and who knows how many other monsters. I'm not half bad at fighting myself, so we can take this thing."

"Okay, if you think so." Lucca said. I jumped forward and sliced one of the round ones in half while Marle shot the big one. Crono had sliced the other one in half as Lucca pulled out her flamethrower. "Heads up!" She loosed the stream of fire and the machine just sat there.

"Why doesn't this one attack?" Marle asked.

"It must be dependent on the other two for any fighting." Lucca said. "But I don't think it has just two. It's too easy to destroy them. Keep hitting the big one before any other small ones appear."

"Too late." I said. Four more dropped from the ceiling and I ran up to the closest one while the big one burned. "We are getting to that food, and we shall not be stopped!"

We walked into the food storage room. It had taken the better part of ten minutes of nonstop fighting to destroy the machine. In the end, it was Lucca that destroyed it. She ran up to it after running out of pellets and she smashed the 'camera' with her hammer. At a closer look, it had a bunch of wires in it.

"I still don't get how wires make a machine work." I said. "I just can't grasp it."

"I'll explain it later Milliardo, but for now, what is that horrible odor?" Lucca asked. I walked forward as they looked over the crates. The food had gone rotten. "It looks like the refrigeration unit failed some time ago." I walked up to a dead body and knelt by it. I moved my right hand to my leather cap and removed it. "Milliardo, what's wrong?"

"This man seems to have made it past the security." I said. "And, I'm afraid that he made the same discovery that we did, but he didn't have the luxury of that security monstrosity being destroyed."

"You, you mean he's?" Marle asked. I spotted a single seed in the man's left hand, and a note in his right. I took them and looked at the note. "What's that?"

"A seed and a note." I said. I handed her the seed. "I think that the seed might still be able to be planted." She nodded. "It's probably the only one left, so I think we should tell them to be careful."

"What does the note say?" Lucca asked. I looked at it. It was written in the man's blood.

"It doesn't make sense." I said. "It says 'the password is S16M4'."

"Hey, that terminal we found before we got to the beams." Marle said. "When you tried it, didn't it ask for a password?" I nodded.

"I guess that must be it." I said. "I suppose all we can do is try it." I looked at the note and then at the body. I saw a single injury, where his right lung was. It wasn't big, but I guessed it had pierced his lung, and those wounds brought an agonizing death, and he must have written using blood from that wound. His eyes were still open. "This guy came down here to find food, only to find one seed, and his death." I moved my right hand to his face and closed his eyes. "Let's make sure his sacrifice isn't in vain. We'll give the others the seed, and then we leave it to fate and hope that they can find a good future with it."

"Yeah." Lucca said. "All we can do is hope that the future turns good for them."

We watched a strange recording of a creature that rained destruction on the surface of the world. It was labeled 'Lavos' and it was massive and terrible looking. Spikes adorned a huge shell and it had a horrible looking mouth, and it rained what looked like lines of fire into the sky in every direction, which came down and destroyed much of the surface.

"Oh my, this, this is." Lucca said quietly.

"It, it, it's." Marle said. Crono just stared.

"It's the single most horrifying thing I've ever seen." I said. They all nodded. "Something like that, it should be stopped."

"And, we're just the ones who can do it." Marle said. We all looked at her. "Well, we can travel through time. With the Gates, and the Key, we can try to find out where it first comes into existence, and we can stop it. We can stop this." We all thought about it.

'She's right.' I thought. 'With the Gates and the Gate Key, we can go wherever, and whenever we need to go. If we play our cards right, we can go back to when that thing, Lavos, was first created, we can stop it just by stopping the person that made it. We, we could save the whole world, nay, the future of this world and generations to come.' I looked at the screen that showed us the monster. 'My father would have done it. He would have done everything in his power to find and stop Lavos from ever being made. Therefore, I must strive to do no less, and I shall find the man, woman, or whatever, responsible for that thing and I will stop this future from coming about.' I saw that the others had come to the same conclusion, if using different reasoning and words. "I'm in." Marle smiled. "I'd do this alone if I had to, because that's what my dad would have done. He wouldn't stop until he found out who or what made Lavos. Something that can do this must be stopped."

"You're right Milliardo." Lucca said. "We have the means to stop Lavos, so we have to. If we don't, we'd just as good as unleashed Lavos ourselves."

"Crono, what about you?" Marle asked. He nodded. He wasn't one for words very often. "Okay, that settles it. We're going to stop Lavos. Let's go, we need to get to 'Proto Dome', and we need to find out if anyone knows anything about Lavos." Crono nodded and they walked out.

"Milliardo?" Lucca asked when they had left.

"Yes?" I asked.

"Um, you, you're doing this because your father would have?" She asked. I nodded. "So, if your father wouldn't have, you'd just go home?"

"No." I said. "My father would have stopped it, but that isn't why I'm going to." She leaned in. "I know that this future isn't right, and we might be able to put it right, and that means we have to try. I could never forgive myself if I didn't at least try to save the people of the future. I know that millions of people must have died when that thing came out of the ground that day, and we might be able to stop it, so we have to." She nodded. "And Lucca, you don't have to call me Milliardo. You can call me Gene, and in fact, I'd prefer you do." She nodded again.

"Okay." She said. "Let's go, before the others get too far ahead of us."

We had given a man named Doan the seed, and the others in the Dome had promised to take care of it and use it to build a better future. He had given us the keys to something called an Airbike, telling us it would help us get through the ruins ahead of us. We ran up to the bike when a bunch of machines came out of the rubble, six in all. We all readied our weapons, but they didn't attack. A seventh machine came out, with wheels and strange objects on the back that emitted smoke. He challenged us to a race, but none of us knew how to drive the large Airbike before us.

"It's simple my brothers and sisters." He said. He called himself 'Johnny'. "You, my white haired brother in the black suit, come over here and I'll show you. You look like you can handle this baby." I walked forward, confused as to why he referred to us as if we were family. He gestured for me to look into the vehicle. "You see those pedals down there?" I nodded. "The one on the far right is the accelerator, which makes it go. It starts up when you put the key in this." He put his hand on a small opening. "Just like a door." I nodded. "Put the key in and turn it to the right and the Airbike will rise a few feet off of the ground. Then you put your right foot on the right pedal, but put your left foot all the way to the left. You'll only need your right foot." I nodded again. "The pedal to the immediate left is the brake, and that slows it down and stops it if you hold your foot on it." He pointed to a single handle in front of the seat on the right side. There was a red button on top of it. "This is the control stick." He grabbed it and turned it to the right. "Turn it right to make the Airbike go right, but do it slow or you'll turn it and likely crash. Turn it left to make it go left. Press the red button for a speed boost, but only hold it down for a few seconds or so, or the engine might not be able to handle it." He looked at me as he leaned back. "Do you understand?"

"I believe I do." I said. I saw Lucca gulp. "Okay Johnny, you've got yourself a race." I held out my right hand. "Good luck, brother." He smiled and took my hand.

"Same to you bro."He said. "You're gonna need it. Oh, and you see that thing in the middle of the dash?" He pointed to a strange device and I nodded. "That plays music. Press the sideways triangle to start it, and press the square to stop it. It's got some good tunes, and they'll get you fired up." I nodded and jumped in, and the others followed. He changed into a three wheeled vehicle and made a loud noise. I put the key in and turned it, and the Airbike made a sound louder than any monster roar I'd ever heard, but it somehow brought a smile to my face as it rose into the air a few feet. "How do you like it?"

"I feel good." I said. I put my hand gently on the handle and turned it left to right. I looked behind me to see a pair of fins turning with it, likely to divert the flow of air to make the machine turn. I looked ahead and spotted a pair of goggles on the 'dashboard'. I picked them up and put them over my eyes. "Let's get this party started."

Lucca and the others stepped out of the Airbike unsteadily while I smiled, putting the goggles back while Johnny rolled up slowly, looking defeated. He changed back to his more human looking form.

"Man, nobody's ever beaten me before." He said. He looked at me with a smile of respect. "You're pretty good considering you've never driven before." I smiled as he held out his right hand. I took it in my own while the others watched. "We'll have to do this again sometime. I had a great time racing you. What's your name?"

"Gene." I replied. "Gene Alastor." He smiled wider.

"I think I'll call you 'Full Tilt' Gene." He said. "How's that grab you?" I smiled. I kind of liked it. Full tilt meant giving it your all in a race, going all out trying to win.

"I like it." I said. "I'll be sure to come back someday to race you again, bro." He smiled and gripped my hand slightly.

"I'll hold you to that." He said. "Nobody's ever beaten me before, and I aim to win next time." He gave me a competitive grin, which I returned with a lean-in.