----------)Part One(--------à
(Dreaming)
1)----------
In Which, Leviathan discovers dirty work afoot.
"Yet another day completed
without a major crisis," Kain reported. "We're on a roll."
"Not hardly," Rosa
sniffed. "Our economy improves a
bit, and next thing you know, everyone in the Kingdom becomes a spoiled
brat."
"They do that on purpose,"
Cecil told her. "Just to make us
feel like we have to work for a living."
The door squeaked open and a little
purple-haired toddler toddled in, bumping into Kain's leg and falling on the
floor with an odd squeaking noise. Automatically, the Dragoon scooped her up in one arm and set her on his
shoulders.
"Major crisis? Hm. On second thought, Cecil, we do
have a major crisis. Your daughter is
bored."
"No, she just does that when
she wants attention. And you being such
a ham, you spoil her."
"Who's the ham around
here?" Kain jibed at him before turning and leaving, depositing the
Princess on Rosa's lap and heading back to the mound of paperwork he had
waiting for him.
* * *
Kuijata sat at one side of the
table, Phoenix at another, and Asura at the third.
At the fourth side, of course, sat
Rydia, another of the ancient documents she kept poring through spread out in
front of her.
"If you'd rather not tell
me," she again insisted, "it's all right. I understand."
Kuijata shook his head adamantly.
"Nope. I want to know. I should know, I think. And since you dug the stuff up, you should know, too."
Rydia blinked at the monster, still
feeling a little uncomfortable with this situation.
Her many years living in the Land of
Summoned Monsters had been dedicated to studying, whether it was of Calling or
of Black Magic. Either way, a lot of
her time was spent reading through the files kept in the Library.
And now, not for the first time,
she'd gotten in a bit over her head.
Asura sighed, folding and unfolding
her many hands rapidly in front of her.
"How best to explain this . . .
" she murmured under her breath. Tossing a glance to Kuijata, she admonished, "We were going to wait
until you were a little older to tell you all this . . . "
"I am a little older," he replied airily.
Frowning with all three faces, Asura
said nothing. Rather, she went back to
folding her hands.
Phoenix just sat there, looking back
and forth between them, ruffling his feathers at random.
Rydia stared at the paper before
her.
Kuijata was just a child. Little more than a toddler. She'd known him since he was just a baby
monster, wanting to know why she didn't have fangs like him.
So how was it that she'd found a
record of his actions for twelve thousand years ago?
"Well?" the monster in
question prompted his Queen.
Asura glared at him, sighed again,
and finally began to explain.
"Kuijata . . . you won't
remember any of what I'm about to say."
"Obviously. Because I have no idea what any of this is
about."
"That was part of the
point. Well, actually . . . it
wasn't. Anyway . . . "
"Anyway?"
"Anyway. Yes, twelve thousand years ago was the last
time you were in action as a Summoned Monster. Back when humans still used the Materia Orbs. Um . . . for a long time after that, you might say nothing
happened. We hung out, did little
monster things. Had our fun.
"After the Second Cataclysm,
two thousand years before the Light Warriors, the first of the Masters was
created. Sadly enough, the first
victims of that horror were the Chocobos . . . each breed in a different
monster. Many still have yet to be
recovered, but obviously, the yellow, black, and whites have been set free over
time. Later even has rumors of a silver
breed . . . another story.
"Later went the Moogles, and on
to many others."
"What does this have to do with
me?" Kuijata cut in.
Asura threw him an evil glare.
"I'm getting to that," she
snapped.
Kuijata straightened up, and she
went on.
"Kuijata's Materia Orb was
among the last of the kind to shatter. In fact, it was still in operation when that sour Mage went on his
trapping spree. Now, as we've seen, a
Masters is usually made up of two creatures - a male and a female of the race
in question. Of course, in our case,
there is often only one of a kind."
"Are you saying this sour Mage
tried to capture Espers into Masters?!" Rydia exclaimed, startled.
Asura nodded grimly.
"And he succeeded. And we reversed the process."
Rydia blinked.
"I thought that once someone
became Masters, there was no reversal
for the process."
"There isn't."
"Then how - "
"It was done once. It can never be done again."
"Explain." This was Kuijata's command.
Phoenix glanced at him and went back
to staring into space.
"Take over, Phoenix,"
Asura suggested.
After glaring at her, Phoenix tucked
his feathers in a bit more closely around him and glanced at Kuijata.
"Okay," he began,
"Kuijata as we knew him then was Called with his Materia Orb by the sour
Mage, and was promptly infected by Masters' Poison. By the time we found out about it, it was too late and he'd
already become completely Masters. So
Typhon came up with his plan and connived me into going along with it."
"What was his plan?" Rydia
asked when Phoenix stopped his dialogue.
"Um, he fought Masters and
defeated it. For some reason, though,
we figure because there was only one being trapped inside and not two, it
didn't split and reform. It just
died. So by destroying Typhon also, I
managed to resurrect them both into one being. And, I think, there's a bit of Masters in you two, too," he added
to Kuijata, who blinked, startled at the calmness of this explanation.
"Why couldn't you just resurrect
him, um, me, um, whatever? Why'd you
have to destroy Typhon?"
"To reform you from a
completely different creature was beyond my abilities. The energy was needed, as well as pieces of
another person to fill what couldn't be salvaged. So Typhon and Kuijata were both reborn into the Kuijata we have
now."
"I don't get it," Kuijata
snapped.
"I'm not sure I do
either," Rydia added, confused.
Asura opened her mouth to reply,
then shut it.
"In fact - " Kuijata went
in, but shut up when Asura clamped a hand over his mouth.
"Sh!" she hissed.
So the four of them sat there in a
small room in the Land of Summoned Monsters, completely silent, listening.
A deep rumbling sound reached
them. Then, faintly, a tremor could be
felt through the walls, the floors, the furniture . . .
"Cave-in . . . " Asura
murmured under her breath. Always a
problem when you lived in a vast cavern miles beneath the surface of the
Earth. With one swift movement, she was
on her feet and across the room, standing by the door. "Come with me, all of you. We need to find out what's going on."
*
Leviathan arched his neck and
glowered down.
"You . . . ?!"
Rather than reply, his opponent
struck forward with two great balls of fire, blinding the serpent and speeding
away before he could clear his vision.
Asura and the others arrived a
moment later, to find him still seething.
"Leviathan?!" Rydia
exclaimed, looking around. "W-what
happened?!"
He looked back up at the cavern, not
even half the size it had been before being filled with falling rock and
debris.
"It would seem that a citizen
of our little town has completely lost his mind," he explained in a
tightly light voice. "And caused
our passage to the surface to be completely destroyed."
"Completely?!" Asura
gasped.
"Backed up all the way to the
Dwarves' land. The whole thing's
gone."
"Can we still get out if
Summoned?"
"Of course."
"Well then . . . what do we
have to worry about?"
Leviathan turned his attention to
Rydia.
"The simple fact that if Rydia
stays down here for too long at once, her aging will get screwy up once
again. Oh, and also there's the little
detail of a mad monster running around down here destroying things . . . "
"Who?" Asura
demanded. "Who's behind
this?!"
Leviathan's reply was covered by a
huge rumble from all around him.
"On second thought, never
mind," he altered. "Um, let's
get out of here before we're squashed."
No one saw any trouble with that,
and the five of them quickly relocated to the next level down.
"The whole Land of Summoned Monsters
couldn't cave in and crush us all," Rydia muttered to herself. "Of course it couldn't. This place is too huge for that."
"Don't count on it," Asura
commented, overhearing. "Depending
on how large the chain reaction from the initial cave-in will be, this whole
place could be gone by the end of the day."
Rydia threw a look up at the level
above them and was greeted only by the sight of solid rock.
"Oh my."
"Where is he?" Phoenix
demanded of Leviathan, who had to shrug.
"I don't know. He blinded me and bailed. For all I know . . . well, he could be
anywhere."
* * *
Running Baron was a joint effort,
and not just for the King and Queen.
The initial council Cecil had put
together three years ago consisting of seven people had grown now to include
over 20, as the various craft guilds within the Kingdom demanded recognition
along with the various restored battalions. Rather than deal with irate citizens, Cecil allowed it, figuring that
the more information he got, the better.
Most of the original people he'd
selected were still there, however, and he was rather startled one day when
Torram, Captain of the Redwings, barged into the family room where he was
chatting with Rosa and their daughter late one evening.
"Sir!" he greeted, pretty
much shouting.
Startled, everyone in the room
jumped about a mile, the kid started crying, and Rosa accidentally dropped her
sewing and had to instantly start searching the carpet for lost pins so that
the cat wouldn't accidentally eat one, while the cat screamed and attached
herself to Cecil's face.
"Don't do that!" Cecil
admonished in a severe tone to Torram, removing the cat.
"Apologies, Your Majesty, but I
think part of our territory is under attack."
Rosa gasped so hard that she dropped
all the pins she'd been picking up.
The cat jumped out the window.
"Where?"
"Way off in the distance. We can only see it because, well, it's dark
out, and you can see explosions better in the dark - "
Cecil cut him off, rushing past and
mumbling for him to follow, with Rosa mumbling something to herself about
explosions and how much she sometimes hated her life.
A Lookout Tower had recently been
built onto the Castle, fully equipped with as many long distance viewers as
Kory would scrounge for them (" . . . don't see why I need to take time away
from my studies to help out a group of foreigners
. . . and no offense, Cecil, but you're about as foreign as they
get!"). This was where the pair of them
headed now, with the intention of getting a better look at what was happening.
Kain met them at the base of the
Tower.
"Fire on the horizon!" he
merrily greeted to explain his presence.
"So he tells me," Cecil
replied, jabbing his thumb at Torram.
And so there were three of them who
clamoured to the top of the Tower instead of just two, ignoring the sleeping
Guards completely.
For now. (insert evil laugh)
"Okay . . . " Cecil
muttered, getting a fix on the area in question with his telescope,
"That's an Airship."
"Very astute, Your
Majesty," Kain remarked. "Which one?"
"It's the Unity," Torram quickly identified.
"The Toroian Airship?"
"That would be it."
"Why would they be attacking
Baronian lands?"
"Let's just ask them,"
Cecil snapped, hurrying back down the stairs. "Torram, drag your people out of bed. We'd better get over there while there's something left to
save."
"Yo!" Kain acknowledged,
fast on his heels.
*
About ten minutes later, Enterprise appeared on the scene with
the Redwings in tight formation behind it, scaring Unity away so fast that Cecil didn't bother to chase it. After all, they knew where it was going.
So they let the Redwings go on after
the retreating Airship, while Enterprise
set down on the ground to assess the damage.
" . . . but the worst thing
about war, I'm finding, is the paperwork," Cecil muttered to Kain as Enterprise landed.
Kain blinked.
"That's what you get for being
King!" he brightly reminded his old friend. "Now see, if you'd just stayed a Dark Knight, you probably
wouldn't have any paperwork at all. Of
course, I might have killed you somewhere along the line instead . . . "
"Be silent, Minion," Cecil
snapped.
A cursory glance gave little
information. It seemed like the
Toroians' target had been little more than a tiny poultry farm. Nothing that would prompt such a violent
reaction from the rival Kingdom.
"Spread out," Kain ordered
the Redwing members who filtered out of the ship around them. "Search for any survivors of this
mess."
Obeying without hesitation, they
scurried around through the smoke and flames for signs of life.
"I don't get it," Cecil
mumbled, shaking his head. "What's
Toroia's beef? They've been giving us
trouble ever since I became the King . . . but never outright attacked
us."
"Maybe whoever lives here could
explain it," Kain suggested, pulling his Lance out from the sling on his
back and poking at the smoldering remains of a burning chicken coop. "Then again, maybe one of them just got
a particularly nasty case of salmonella . . . "
"Shut up, Kain. We should be helping them look for survivors."
Kain saluted.
"As you command, My
Liege!"
* * *
Rydia barged into her room, throwing
a few articles aside to dig out the item she was searching for, the item which
was hidden deeper than anything else she owned.
Finally, after flinging aside an old
pair of shoes, three books, a jacket made of Chocobo's feathers, and a piece of
fruitcake she'd been saving "for later" (for well over a year), she
pulled the Twinharp out of her sock box.
Setting it on the ground in front of
her, she realized that she wasn't entirely certain of how to use it. So she did what she thought was best.
"HELP!!!!!" she bellowed
at the top of her lungs.
Thousands of miles away, on the
surface of the planet in the Kingdom of Damcyan, Edward jumped about a mile and
a half at her cry.
If he wasn't awake a moment ago, he
was now.
Landing on his feet, he rushed over
to his dresser, where the other Twinharp sat, its strings chiming discordantly.
"Rydia?" he called.
"Edward! I need help - the Land
of Summoned Monsters is collapsing, and we're all stuck inside!"
Not wasting the time to ask stupid
questions, he quickly realized the only thing he could do.
"I'll have Chia Summon
Chocobo. Be with him!"
"Right, thank you!"
Carrying the instrument with him, he
bolted from his room and rushed off to rouse Damcyan's only Caller.