Chapter Three: Pirates Against Deadly Robot Monster

It took Vyse and Aika nearly an hour to reach Shrine Island. It was truly a sight to behold; an ancient, moss-covered tower was surrounded by a deep lake, with several branching, twisted paths across the waters that almost looked like an artwork. Clouds obscured most of the island's solid ground, but there was an area near its southwest edge that was visible enough and sufficiently clear of debris for them to land there. However, they still had to walk for several minutes before finding where the Moon Stone had landed.

When they did, however, they were dismayed. "I don't believe it! That hole has to be at least as big as my house!" exclaimed Aika. "And it broke the wall keeping the water out of the shrine, too! How are we going to get the Stone if it's underwater?"

"Maybe it isn't underwater. Let's go inside the shrine first." Fortunately, the shrine's doors had disappeared long ago, due to time or thieves, and they were able to enter without incident.


Unfortunately, the stone was underwater; it was at the very bottom of the shrine, no less. Vyse and Aika sat on the edge of the shrine's newly-formed lake, discussing various ways to get it out, until Vyse noticed that there were what looked like doors all over the shrine. "Hey, Aika, don't those look like doors? Why don't we try looking around to see if we can find a way to open them?"

"I guess, but I didn't see any tunnels or anything leading down there on the way here. I guess we might have missed them, though. Why don't we go to the top floor? Maybe we could see them from up there."

After several minutes of climbing stairs, however, Vyse and Aika ran into a dead end. One of those strange doors sat at the top of the path, and it didn't to seem have any sort of handle. "Well, that's just great. What are we supposed to do now?" asked Aika. "I mean, unless you can open these things by touching them…" She laid a hand on the door to illustrate her point.

The door promptly opened. "Wow, the ancients must have been really talented to make doors like that," commented Vyse as he stepped outside. "I…don't see any tunnels or anything, though. There's just this weird crystal…"

"Try touching it," suggested Aika, "it worked on the door, after all."

Vyse did as his friend suggested, and poked the spinning, floating jewel. It stopped spinning, lowered itself into a small hole just below it, and began to hum.

Suddenly, light flared out from cracks all over the buildings on the island. The tower Vyse and Aika were on rumbled, and began to sink, causing them both to lose their balance. "Vyse, what did you DO?"

Vyse fought back with "Don't look at me, you're the one who said I should do it!"

As suddenly as the sinking began, it stopped. The Rogues got up carefully and looked around. The level of the tower they were on was now on ground level. Peering into the lake, they could see that the hole the Moon Stone had created was no longer visible. "Well, at least we won't have to drain the whole lake," commented Vyse. "We should go back inside, there might be some way to drain the water down there now."


After walking all the way back down to the edge of the shrine's flooding problem, they saw that, indeed, the door they had entered the shrine through to begin with now opened on a fairly narrow passageway. When they followed it, they found themselves outside, on some catwalks below the island. "I can't believe the ancients would just build a bunch of paths down here where anyone could fall off into Deep Sky!" fumed Aika.

"Well, they probably had some kind of handrails on here or something, but they must have fallen off or something. Besides, it looks like there's a door right over there, so it's not like anyone who would be coming down here would have had far to go."

"Great, let's open it then. Do you think I should try hitting it with my boomerang?"

"Good idea, you'd probably get knocked off if you tried opening it normally."

Unfortunately, Aika almost lost her boomerang when the flood slammed into it on its way back to her. Only a hastily-cast Wevli spell prevented it from falling into the depths below.

On the bright side, though, the door opened right on the bottom of the shrine. "Wow…it really is a big one, isn't it, Vyse? Can we even carry one this big by ourselves?"

"Well, we can try. First we should—wait, why's that pile of rocks moving?"

The rubble in the corner apparently wasn't normal rubble; it floated, revolving around an unseen center, before the rocks changed positions, assumed a vaguely humanlike shape, and crashed together into one entity. It had seven clear gems in a Silver magic circle pattern on its "chest." It then began to emit strange noises that sounded almost like speech, except that they were completely unintelligible to either of the Blue Rogues.

"What is that thing?" asked Aika.

"I don't know, but it looks like it's getting ready to fight us," replied Vyse, drawing his cutlasses.


The battle had gone on for at least fifteen minutes. Vyse and Aika were far more agile than the rock monster, and were able to dodge its attacks, most of which seemed to be based on shooting Electri-like beams of various colors, but neither of them were able to deal any visible damage to it. "Damn it, how do we kill this thing?" muttered Vyse under his breath. "Aika, give me a boost, I'm going to try using that technique I've been learning from Luke and Timmus."

"Got it," answered Aika, who ran over to him, quickly chanting an incantation, then touched him and finished her spell with the word, "Increm!"

With his physical strength and reflexes heightened by the Red magic spell, Vyse ran towards the golem, dodging one more of its beam attacks, then swung both cutlasses down, then up, using the momentum to launch himself into the air. "Take this! Cutlass Fury!" Vyse shouted, bringing down both cutlasses onto the center of the monster's magic circle.

With a deafening crash and a burst of light, Vyse was thrown into a wall, and when his vision cleared, the monster had fallen apart and was lying inert on the floor.

"Man, that was tough," panted Aika. "Hang on," and with another string of syllables, this time ending in "Sacri," she healed most of Vyse's wounds. "We'd better get the Moon Stone out of here as fast as we can, huh?"

"Yeah, I don't want to be anywhere near that thing when it wakes up." And with that, Vyse joined Aika in carrying the Moon Stone all the way back to their ship.


A/N: …All right, all right, I'll stop with the filesharing jokes. Well, for now, anyway. Also, I'm going to wait a bit before I update again. While I'm glad I'm getting reviews at all, I'd kind of like input from more than one person before I keep going. Plus, I'll be able to put together some more ideas for later chapters in advance, which is always nice, and should help me put in some more of that humor I promised you guys.