Chapter 12 The Quest to find Hope - Part 2

A miss.

'No!' I gasped. 'I failed! I-'

'Um, Marle?' said Crono.

I felt like kicking Crono in the shins. 'What?!'

'The Guardian's not doing anything.'

I stared. Crono was right. The Guardian just sat still.

'Why didn't it revive the Bits?' I wondered aloud.

'Power Failure,' said Lucca. 'With no constant source of electricity the Guardian deactivated. Perhaps it just used up the last of its power source to revive the Bits. But they're not here because the Guardian couldn't complete the process...'

Amazing how a power shortage can save your life. I picked up the fallen bolts and replaced them in my quiver feeling a bit strange. The fight didn't depend on me after all. The irony was cruel.

Tentatively, we walked past the Guardian half expecting it to suddenly spring out at us. But nothing happened. We squeezed past the gap in the door and entered the Stock room. My stomach reminded me how very grateful I should be to get past the Guardian at all.

Except my appetite diminished the moment I entered the room and caught a whiff of how the place smelt. I pinched my nose. 'Phew! Something reeks!'

The Stock room was small and square and filled bottom to top with crates. The wood had rotted but the steel strapping had not. At the ceiling a fan hung, long since stopped working, and a light bulb that was completely dead. The strange thing about the scent of the room was that it was not only of food centuries after the expiry date, it was also the smell of death. The same smell I had smelt when mother lay on her deathbed. I shivered.

Lucca examined each box with her torch, nodding knowingly as the light shone down at the food. She closed her eyes and sighed deeply. 'Everything's completely rotten,' she said bitterly. 'The refrigeration must have failed...'

Somewhere to my right I heard Crono spit something out of his mouth. I hoped it wasn't food.

I walked around the room, still pinching my nose. I felt great disappointment indeed. The Power failure was a double-edged sword. We had gotten through... but at a price.

I spotted a figure huddled against the wall. It was a person. 'Crono, look!!' I breathed, dashing over to the person.

Crono came hurrying over. 'What is it?' He looked at the person. He stopped. He stared. 'Is he...' he gasped. 'Is he, you know...'

The man was a horrific sight. His skin had half rotted, leaving some pale bleached bone visible. He had that haunted look about him, like a thing from a nightmare. I knew he couldn't hurt me, but I still couldn't help but feel frightened. I knew death and it wasn't friendly.

'Passed away long ago, I suppose...' I muttered.

'Do you think he died trying to get past the Guardian?' Crono wondered aloud.

I didn't answer him because I suddenly noticed that in his cold lifeless hand, the man was holding something out of the corner of my eye. 'He's holding something.' Out of feminine curiosity I overcame my repugnance of the corpse and opened up the fingers that had curled into a ball in death. It was a small hard thing and I couldn't see it properly. 'What do you suppose this is?' I asked Lucca.

She promptly came over and flashed the torch at the object in my hand. 'It looks like some kind of seed,' she observed. Apple pips, that's what they were.

'A seed?' I mused. 'Do you suppose it could grow in a place like this?' I handed the seed to Crono. He put it in his bag, right next to my pendant. I was still thinking about whether the seed could do good when Crono spoke up.

'The seed will grow. It has to. There is always hope, you just have to search hard sometimes.'

I thought about that. It sounded like the sort of thing a novelist would write.

None of us said anything for a long moment. The smell was really awful but I was still reluctant to leave. I felt as if there was still something to be done.

Crono found it. It was a soiled sheet of paper lying at the dead man's feet. He picked it up and read it aloud. 'The rat is more than just a statue! It knows the secret of the dome! Catch it!' He paused for a minute. 'That rat statue we passed? You don't mean it's...'

I butted in. 'Let's get it!' I rushed out of the door eagerly. I was starting to believe anything by now. Heh heh. Rat statues that can move.

Leaving the Stock room, Lucca, Crono and I discovered that the rat statue that we were supposed to be looking out for wasn't there anymore. For some strange reason, I didn't find that odd at all, but rather, I expected it so.

'There! There it is!' I pointed in the distance. And sure enough, an overlarge rat was standing on a rickety plank some distance away. It didn't look like a statue anymore, but I knew that the statue and the rat were one and the same.

'Shhh!' Lucca hissed. 'It might run away!'

Crono peered after it. 'I'll get it. No way could a stupid rat be faster than me!' I seriously doubted that but I nodded anyway.

With what sounded like a deafening noise, Crono's feet hit against the ground as he sprinted after the rat. The rat turned around, squeaked once in a high-pitched squeal and started to retreat very quickly. Crono ran after it and the chase began.

It was hilarious to watch Crono chasing after a very frightened rat that used to be a statue. They ran across planks and made such a racket that I was sure that every other living thing in the ruins must be staring after the two with very wide eyes. The rat was doing its best to lose Crono while Crono was doing his best to catch the rat. Lucca and I were doubled over with laughter at the scene.

Now this is how Crono managed to win the race. After a while, he had begun to get a bit tired for running so hard, but he knew the rat was in the same position. It was too fat and mutated to dive under some scrap metal, so Crono used that fact to his advantage. He ran a bit harder and pushed the rat into an awkward corner and then dived and grabbed it by the tail.

'Got it!' he grinned.

Lucca and I, who were too busy wiping tears of mirth from our eyes before, came over now. The rat was struggling to pull itself loose and it really did look repulsive under the light of Lucca's torch.

The rat squeaked. 'I give up. I'll tell you everything.' I was amazed that it could actually talk and just stood there trying to figure out the trick. Meanwhile, the rat gave Lucca a very long and complicated sounding password to enter the info centre next door. 'Don't make any mistakes, or you'll be sorry!' it said as Crono put it down on the ground for it to go. I stared after the rat as it left. Animals are not supposed to talk... were they?

'Before you ask,' said Lucca, 'it had a computer chip in it and a high power battery.'

'What's a chip?' asked Crono.

Lucca sighed. 'Never mind. Let's go input the password.'

I grinned. 'Oh yeah! Come on!' I tried to shrug off the talking rat statue out of my mind even though it still bugged me.

Lucca crouched down by a nondescript machine sitting motionless in the dark. A few buttons were on the thing but I was amazed to see it was still functional. Maybe it worked off a "battery" too. Lucca punched in a combination, presumably the one the rat had told her and a loud beep and a click told us that access was not denied but rather that we were admitted inside.

Without a word we entered passage beside us, hardly knowing what to expect.

'So this is the info centre!' Lucca mused.

'Wow, it's huge!' Crono gasped.

It was too. However, most of the room was taken up with a massive computer with a massive screen which shone an odd opalescent colour. It was really eye-boggling just to look at. I, who had never really seen a computer before and thought it must be some huge monster, immediately felt for my crossbow, but Lucca put an arm across me and stopped me from doing much harm.

'Good!' said Lucca. 'The computer's still operational! If we run a search on time warps, we might find our Gate!'

She walked up to the computer and started pressing some buttons and staring at the blue screen. I watched her fingers move rapidly on the keyboard and thought what marvellous skills Lucca had.

'Find anything?' asked Crono.

Lucca grinned. 'Here! Got it!

All of us crowded around the computer, which showed a life-like scaled image of the contemporary world. It really looked bleak and desolate with a few domes here and there. It looked nothing like Guardia, past or present. 'Cool.' said Crono.

'East of Arris Dome...' Lucca muttered, pointing to the screen.

'Where's that?' Crono inquired.

'That would be Proto Dome, I believe,' Lucca explained.

'Leave it to Lucca!' I said. 'I'm beginning to think you could find anything with this device!'

I pondered on what a help I had been in the future. Not much.

'Say, what does this button do?' I said, pressing a bright big red button on the keyboard.

A high-quality image came up on the screen. It looked like a map of Truce from our time only with a couple of domes here and there. A long grey road connected Truce, Guardia Castle and Regiorra. Below the map were a few captions that Lucca read aloud. '1999 A.D.? Visual recording of the Day of Lavos...'

Then the file began to run. Crono, Lucca and I stared open-mouthed at the screen, for we were finally about to witness the fate of our world.

Preview

I can't believe that this thing has destroyed our world! Lavos... We're not going to let you win so easily! We're going to kick your butt so hard you won't be able to go Godzilla any more! Next time in the Long Weekend, Apocalypse! The Day of Lavos! Stupid Lavos. You're not going to get away with that!