In hindsight, thinking that we weren't going to see Acronix again after everything that happened was probably the biggest reason that we weren't able to stop what actually did happen. When we all fought Acronix at the Monastery, we ended up overloading his Time Blade with our elemental powers and made it explode. Acronix disappeared the second that happened with the blade, but it looked like he was blown up with it. We all assumed that was the last we'd see of him, so we just went home with Wu after we found him.
I mentioned two chapters ago that Sensei Yang let us take his old temple and use it as our new headquarters. Honestly, out of everywhere that we've lived, that's probably the coolest one. I mean, it was literally a huge temple floating in the sky! It floated around in a small circle, but it was still flying in the air. Plus, it wasn't just one temple, but actually the temple and then two small buildings that we were also able to use.
I'm not sure what Cole did to make Yang like us so much, but the ninja swear that it looked way nicer when we moved in than at first. The entire building looked almost brand new, or at least really well taken care of. It had a full training ground, meeting area, bedrooms for each of us, kitchen, library, storage areas, fishing pond, courtyard… honestly it's way better than the Monastery. Like, sure, the Monastery has a lot of value since it's where Wu grew up and since we rebuilt it we made it more special but… a floating temple in the sky is way better than a small little one you have to walk up a million steps to get to.
When we first moved in, I told Wu that I wanted to take serious steps towards becoming a true Master like him. When my dad gave me his robes before I left the Departed Realm, I'd told myself I was going to seriously start pursuing becoming a man that he could be proud of. To me, that meant that I would work to become a Master. I'm still technically one in training right now. It was once we moved into a more permanent home, though, that I was determined to seriously see that through.
Wu, however, said that the path to becoming a Master was one that I had to walk on my own. I tried asking him if he could give me lessons, but he said there wasn't anything to teach. Apparently, I was on the path to becoming a Master just by being a ninja. I kept trying to tell him I wanted to learn and seriously work to study to become one, but no matter what I said Wu told me that I was already on my way to it.
I'm not quite sure why Wu never really wanted to give me lessons. I was serious about truly becoming a Master, I still am. To this day I still want to. But… for some reason, it almost feels like Wu is refusing to teach me about this path I want to take. I don't know about the others, but I want to be like my father. One day, I want to grow to be a teacher and pass on what I can do. I mean, half the reason I'm writing this book is because I want to tell everyone about what I learned from everything that happened to me.
On one hand, I guess I understand. If Wu was saying that I was too young to truly start down this road, then maybe that's true. But, he didn't say that. He never said that. So then it just feels like he's telling me that I can't do anything. I want to be a Master, and this was when I wanted to truly start becoming one. The thing is, nothing that happened really did.
Around this time, I was also trying to take more of a leadership role. Until then, I'd more or less been the leader by default since I was the Green Ninja, but I felt that part of me growing into being a Master was to take control of the team. The thing was, during what happened with Morro, Cole had started taking control of the group, so I wasn't really in the leadership role I wanted to be. It'd been more or less understood until then that I was in charge, but...I guess since we were in a point of having some peace again, the others started to take issue with it.
Now, that isn't a problem today, but this is when me being the leader really started. It sort of went hand in hand with me wanting to be a Master. I wanted to grow and develop into my own, and this was when I wanted to start doing it outside of danger. When we were in dangerous situations, nobody had an issue with me, but outside of them I started noticing that the others didn't listen to me as much as I needed them to. I'm not saying that they were ignoring me, but they just didn't see me as capable yet. I guess… in some ways they still thought that I was younger and needed their guidance, so me starting to try to grow up at this point was when they pushed back on it. This was a problem during all that happened with the Time Twins.
Anyways. Now, when we got back to the temple, Wu wasn't feeling right. He was constantly going in and out of sleep, and he had instructed my mom to keep giving him healing tea. We waited hours for him to be awake long enough to actually talk to us, and even then he fell asleep not that long after. We didn't know yet, but Acronix had hit him with the Time Punch, basically blasting him with the forward blade. This meant Wu was starting to age really fast. I guess when you get older, you sleep a lot more.
When we were able to talk to him, Wu told us about how Krux and Acronix were the elemental masters of time back during the Serpentine Wars. After the war ended, they thought of themselves as powerful and decided to try to take over the elemental alliance. In order to stop hem, Wu had blades forged from chronosteel that he used to then take away their elemental powers after confronting them one last time at the Monastery. Wu won and then opened up the Time Vortex to send the blades in and make them lost to time. The Twins jumped in last minute to go after them, which was how Krux was spat back out right away but Acronix emerged forty years later.
Honestly, as far as the motivation the Time Twins had, it's pretty simple. In terms of having the ability to control time, I can understand why they'd think that they were more powerful than everyone else. I mean, I once had the Golden Power, something that let me literally raise mountains. Having power like that really does make you feel like you can do anything you want. When you can do anything you want, knowing that you have to still answer to someone else can be hard. I'm not saying I ever thought of using my Golden Power to hurt Ninjago, but I do know what it's like to want to use power.
The thing is, the Twins took it in a way that I can't really get. Just because they were powerful, it didn't give them the right to go and take over Ninjago. If Wu and the others hadn't gotten involved, then I totally understand why the Twins would think that they were wronged, a very odd way. But they didn't have a motivation that I could get behind. I know why Morro did what he did, I can even understand the Serpentine to an extent. Even the Overlord was literally just pure evil. But the Twins just seemed selfish. They were strong, so they should rule. I understand the logic at first, but the more I think about it the more I can't really find any way to sympathize with them. They were just, evil.
Speaking of evil, it was after Wu passed out again that we were shown the first taste of what they were planning. The opening of the Borgstore was wrecked by Krux unleashing the first Vermillion Warrior we'd ever seen. We saw this on the news and decided to rush over to stop them… and to help avoid unpacking everything else mom, Dareth and Ronin hadn't gotten done finishing up by the time we got back.
Now, the Vermillion themselves are a little weird. See, the Vermillion are really just suits of armor that are filled up with snakes that just sort of coil around each other and make the armor move. This makes them deadly since you can knock them around and break them apart, but the snakes will just keep getting back in the armor. The only way you can stop them is if you make it so they can't get back inside the armor. Even that won't always work, though, since they can just cobble together random bits of things and make something to throw at you. They once turned regular scaffolding into a body they could use to attack us.
We all raced to the Borgstore in the Stealth Raider (another time we used the thing) and worked to help defeat the warrior. The way we decided to do this was to take turns by rolling a dice to see who got to fight the thing. If we hadn't been messing around like that, we might have been able to stop everything that happened next. When I think back on what happened, it was that and us believing that Acronix was lost in the explosion that really made it so everything happened the way it did. If we had taken the situation more seriously then… maybe this would have been just, a lot easier to handle.
We first found out about the Vermillion's ability to basically regenerate when Cole used his lava arms to break it apart. After he came back from being a ghost, Cole got some new power that let him have… really strong arms. To be honest, I don't know what they do, and neither does Cole. His arms turn orange, his scar he got from being a ghost glows, and then he just can punch things, pretty hard. To this day we don't know what it does and it seems to just be super strength… which Cole already had before. It's just really weird, I think. It's never been a problem, so we haven't tried to look into it yet.
The Vermillion kept reforming no matter what we did, and during all of this Krux sent two more just to mess with us. We figured out the Vermillion were there to capture Borg and take him somewhere, so I told Zane to go and make sure Borg was safe. I wish I'd sent him with someone else to go and help, since it was doing this that also contributed to where this all went wrong. The more I talk about all this, the more it feels like this was all caused because we kept messing up.
Jay and Nya managed to figure out they could electrocute the snakes to make them stop going for the armor, which eventually led them to retreat down into the sewers. Rather than go after them, we made our way around the side of the building to look for Borg. We couldn't find him, but we found his Borg watch, and Zane. Zane was completely knocked out and powered down. Someone had attacked Zane and then kidnapped Borg from him.
I didn't tell the team, but I was really upset after that. Zane getting hurt was because I told him to go after Borg. If we'd just stopped messing around and figured out how to beat the Vermillion in the first place, we wouldn't have let this happen. Maybe the Twins would have kidnapped Borg another way, but it was our fault that it happened. We didn't know what happened, but it was clear that we'd messed up.
The entire way back to the temple, I didn't want to talk to anyone. Something about this situation didn't feel right, and I knew it was our fault. When we had been on Chen's island and Chen pulled a 180 on us and left us stranded there instead, it'd felt like we'd let our guard down. This felt like one of those times. Nya said she would have to work on rebooting him in the Samurai X Cave, and I offered to stay behind and look after Master Wu. I knew someone had to look after him, but I also didn't want to be around Zane after everything.
This was during the time that the Vermillion moved to do the second stage of their plan, which was when all those people got kidnapped. The Time Twins needed people to help build something, so they went around kidnapping buildings and designers. I didn't know about this at first, since I was staying by Master Wu's bedside. When I looked at him, I knew that something was wrong. He'd never slept this much, and I could tell that mom was worried over what was happening with him.
There were several times that Wu would wake up and try to tell me something, then pass out again. The worst was when he looked at me and tried to tell me the secret to being a 'true master.' He passed out in the middle of it, which was kinda frustrating. The longer that it happened, though, the more I felt like something was really wrong. I don't know why, but I just was getting a really bad feeling about it.
Seeing Wu like that started to make me worry about my future. I wanted to become a Master, but right now Wu was hurt. Wu had caused all this by going to the Monastery alone to fight Acronix. If he'd taken any of us, even just me, we might have been able to stop him from getting the Time Blade and ended this. Krux was planning this for a long time, yes, but he didn't know about the Time Blades emerging when they did, or at least I don't think he did. He was plotting something, but Acronix coming back was what started his plans. At first, I was angry at Wu knowing that this was his fault.
The longer that I saw him like that, sick and barely able to think, the more I started to think about myself. If that had been me in that situation, would I have tried to end it on my own? When the Golden Master took my powers, Zane had been the one to step up for me. If I could have, I would've fought him on my own, even if it meant that I had to sacrifice myself. If I could have put myself into the Cursed Realm instead of my father to stop Chen, then I would've made Wu read the spell myself. And with Morro… with Morro the entire time that I'd been under his control, I knew that it was my fault that I let him get as far as he did. Everything that happened with him was because I wasn't strong enough to stop him from possessing me in the first place. If I could have found a way to stop that alone, would I?
In the moment, I always chose to do things with my friends. I relied on them and made sure that they were there and working with me. But, what if when I grew older, I didn't? My dad said that one day my friends could have grown to covet my Golden Power, and that was when I had barely any of it left. One day, I could be left alone, my friends could be turned against me or I might just have messed up so badly I would try to fix it myself. Would I make a mistake as badly as Wu did, one day?
I still don't know. I wish I did, but I don't. I'm still working to become a Master, even if what happened with the Twins put that on hold for a long time. Sometimes, it feels like my future is just going to continue being a string of dangers that won't stop coming. Seeing Wu in bed like that just sparked all sorts of worries in my head. One day, would I be someone like Wu, my father, or someone entirely different?
At this point, Nya managed to get a copy of Zane's last recorded memory and slow it down to find out that Acronix had survived and attacked him, as well as that Dr. Saunders was actually Krux. At the same time, Kai had taken the helmet of one of the Vermillion and went to figure out more about it at the museum. Since Krux had just taken Borg prisoner, Kai walked in at just the wrong time for them, and Krux had to pose as Dr. Saunders to try to get him to leave. It was during all of this that Krux was so eager to get him to leave he accidently revealed himself.
...Okay, something I feel the need to point out here. Kai said that Dr. Saunders hit something and ripped off his silly mustache and glasses, and Kai identified him from the painting that we'd seen. The thing is, Kai said he recognized Krux from the green markings that he had around his eyes. But… I always thought that was makeup, right? Kai said Krux had those on when he got back up, so… how did ripping off his mustache make his eye mask, thingy come back? This was also another reason why Krux shouldn't have hung up the painting in the first place, since we wouldn't have even known who the Time Twins were if he hadn't done that. It was sort of like hiding a clue to your real identity in plain sight.
Cole and Jay went to try to stop the Vermillion, but were caught up with Cole's lava arms acting up. The Vermillion got away, and the Time Twins had gotten both of their first steps of their plan done without a hitch. Acronix had a time blade and we had new enemies to deal with, and we had a slithering suspicion that it was only about to get worse from there.
"Let's stop there," Lloyd told Zane, "I'm kinda out of things to talk about with this."
"Of course," Zane nodded, transcribing down what he said, "I'll have finished cleaning up our recordings up through the end of Chen's invasion by tonight. If all goes well, we'll have your book ready for final revisions by the time you finish talking about the most recent set of events."
"Good," Lloyd sighed, "Thanks for doing that, Zane. I know that I'm not always the most… well, I know that I'm not always the best talker."
"Many people would say that they are not as well," Zane smiled, "It is more important to get across your true feelings on the situation before worrying about readability. An autobiography should be true to the person it is about, rather than the audience that reads it."
"Yeah, yeah," Lloyd sighed, "...Hey uh, Zane? Can I ask you something?"
"I am listening," Zane informed him.
"What I was talking about in my chapters, about the whole thing with my future…" He paused, "Who… Who do you think I'll grow up to be?"
"Besides who you are now?" Zane asked back, "You have been true to yourself since you became the Green Ninja, Lloyd"
"I mean as a Master, as a ninja, all that," Lloyd bit his lip, "Who do you think I'm going to be?"
Zane gave a pause to gather this thoughts, "I think that you will be who you wish to be, Lloyd. Since you have become a ninja, you've always been determined to be someone that others can look up to. Even now, in your chapters you express the desire to be the best person you can be. If that is true, then I believe you will grow to be a great and true Master."
Lloyd bit his lip, "But… I've made mistakes. I made bit ones. I let the Overlord off the Dark Island and, I let you down with the Golden Master. How can you know that I'm going to grow up to be someone that's… you know, a good MasteR?"
"Because those that wish to become something great are the ones that truly do," Zane told him, "I know you will keep your heart in the right place, Lloyd. You have nothing to fear about your future, as long as you continue to strive to be someone you can be proud of."
Lloyd was quiet for a moment, taking that in. After doing the chapter, he'd needed to hear that. Actually getting to hear it helped him more than he knew he did. He looked up to Zane, giving him another warm and friendly smile.
"You really do know what to say, Zane," Lloyd chuckled, "It's just like when we first started writing this book."
"I have had these thoughts myself, Lloyd," Zane looked up, "Knowing that my father built me to protect others places an expectation on me. To realize my true potential and myself after losing my original body to the Golden Master, I was forced to ask myself that very question. I have come to terms with it, yet I know that is partially due to who I am. To know who you are yourself is something that is key to knowing where you will end up."
"Maybe you should be the Master, Zane," Lloyd smirked, "You're the one that seems to know what he's talking about."
"I would say the same to you, Lloyd," Zane stood up, "Wisdom is a matter of perspective, not just experience."
"Heh, I guess you're right," Lloyd stretched out, "Same time tomorrow?"
"I will be waiting," Zane informed him.