Chapter 5 – Déjà vu: The Sensation You are Doing Something You Have Done Before

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   "Holy hell!" Lucca exclaimed, peering into the distance more carefully as something caught her eye. "What's that?!"

   "It doth be only a shadow cast by a tree, Lucca," Frog replied wearily. "Again."

   "Sorry," she said indignantly. "Geez!"

   "Thou needst to relax, Lucca," Frog said gently, a comforting hand on her shoulder.

   "Yeah, okay," Lucca sighed reluctantly. Then, as something else caught her attention, she straightened up abruptly. "Hey, what's that?!"

   "Another tree," Frog replied through gritted teeth, or at least, the Frog-equivalent, without looking.

   "No," Robo said cheerfully, "I don't think that's a tree, Frog. I think it might be another Lavos Spawn!"

Frog and Lucca gave a simultaneous dismayed groan.

   "I should have known," Lucca muttered, scraping the frost off of her glasses. "I should have known that the Save Point we just passed had to mean something."

   "This dost mean that our friend Auron was right," Frog added thoughtfully.

   "I refuse to admit that! Moron had no clue!" Lucca barked, seizing Frog's collar and dragging him closer.

   "V-very well," Frog hastened to say placatingly.

   "So, what now?" Lucca sighed, releasing a relieved Frog.

   "It seems that there is nothing to do but fight it," Robo said thoughtfully.

   "I was afraid you'd say that," Lucca grumbled, withdrawing her gun. "Well, let's kill us some Lavos Spawn."

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   "WAAAAAAAAAH!" three warriors howled in dismay as they sped through the air, entirely against their will, and directly into a cliff behind them.

   "You know," Lucca said thoughtfully, peeling herself off of the wall, "this seems eerily familiar somehow."

   "This art no time for reminiscing!" Frog exclaimed, groping frantically for his sword, which had fallen to the snow somewhere between where he had been previously, and the rock wall where was currently a Frog-shaped indentation in the snow covering it.

Lucca pondered this.

   "I don't think that's called reminiscing."

   "This art also no time for semantics, either!"

   "Wouldn't that be 'this art neither the time for semantics'?" Lucca asked from beneath the snow that had come loose at Frog's attempt to remove his sword from the rock.

    "Neither art this the time for grammar!" Frog snapped, giving his sword one final, desperate wrench.

It came loose with such suddenness that the brave swordsfrog found himself the next moment lying, rather winded, on the ground, his sword grasped loosely in his hand.

   "Well, if this isn't the time for reminiscing, semantics, or grammar, I guess that means it's also not the time for making snow angels, Frog," Lucca said accusingly, glaring at her ally just before firing off another few shots that did little more than annoy the Lavos Spawn.

   "Maybe he's just taking a nap," Robo suggested, preparing to remove his arm and deliver a good whack upside the creature's very spiky head. Whichever part that is, he thought briefly.

   "No snow angels, and no naps," Lucca said firmly, hauling Frog from the snow.

   "Oh, well if thou dost insist," Frog agreed sarcastically. "Because naturally, snow angels and naps art my first instinct when in a battle."

   "I wouldn't admit that too loud if I were you," Lucca whispered to him.

   "Hey, guys! Stop ignoring me!" the Lavos spawn would have whined, had all sense of logic already flown out the window. However, since a scrap, if no more than that, remained, it did not. Rather, it just sort of sat there, its needles quivering reproachfully.

For a time, at any rate.

If Frog, Robo, and Lucca had heeded the little voice in their heads that whispered, then muttered, and finally barked insistently that they had been in a situation something like this before, and had been put into considerable pain by simply waiting for something to happen then, too, they might have ceased their pleasant conversation and paid the creature some attention.

However, being rather preoccupied by their friendly conversation, they did not.

   "Lucca, it pains me to say so, but methinks thou wert an impractical choice for a mission such as this," Frog ground out. The considerable number of aches and pains from his fall down the hill earlier were to blame for this thought.

Lucca narrowed her eyes at him, somewhat hurt.

   "Impractical?!" she laughed in attempt to cover it. "You wanna talk about impractical? Who was the one who insisted that we just had to go on about twenty-seven annoying side-quests involving that shard of that pathetic Masamune before you would consider helping us beat up Magus?"

   "Guys?" Robo called cheerfully as he flew through the air under the first onslaught of needles erupting from the Lavos Spawn, that Frog and Lucca failed to notice.

   "The Masamune! Pathetic?!" Frog sputtered. He balled up a flippered fist, and then relaxed, letting his hand drop to his side. Chin (or Frog-equivalent thereof) lifting slightly, he chuckled. "I ought to know enough not to take thy criticism to heart. After all, I suppose thou art only a woman."

   "Guys?" Robo called less cheerfully and more insistently, and just a wee bit worriedly lest Lucca's wrath accomplish what none of the perils they had faced as a team had been able to thus far, and end Frog's life quickly and painfully.

   "Oh, that does it!" Lucca proclaimed, fairly seeing red at this unlucky comment of Frog's.

Without giving her brain time to talk her out of it, she leapt at the bewildered swordsman, that very bewilderment enabling her to take him to the ground easily.

   "Lucca?" he croaked weakly from underneath her.

She climbed hastily off of him and to her feet.

   "What?" she asked casually, brushing the snow from her knees. Then, as something caught her eye, she gave an exclamation of dismay. "Robo!"

   "I'm just fine," Robo called to the horrified pair. "The rest of the world seems to be a little upside-down, though."

   "I think we can fix that, Robo," Lucca said kindly as she and Frog struggled to flip their very heavy metallic friend right side up.

   "Ah! Much better," Robo commented, glancing around him at the comforting right-side-upness of the cliff face, the mounds of snow, his friends, and the Lavos Spawn.

That same now-right-side-up Lavos Spawn finally decided that he had had quite enough of this, and began to quiver more violently.

   "Oh, great," Lucca whimpered, noting that she had been struck full-force by the sensation that she had been here before, and that nothing good had come of it.

Frog had taken it one step further and reflected that, thus knowing, it was entirely possible for them to get out of the way before the inevitable could happen. Which would make it less an inevitability than an unpleasant possibility.

Robo was carefully summing up the current behaviour of the Lavos Spawn and comparing it to the Lavos Spawn that they had previously fought. Notably similar. Any second, then, a flurry of spikes would burst forth from the creature's shell, giving the three of them a head-start in the business of disguising themselves as porcupines.

Unfortunately, for all the insightful and potentially helpful internal monologue that the three warriors of virtue were systematically working through, it didn't occur to any of them to actually put their ponderings into use to the point of moving out of the way.

Thus, the Lavos Spawn had three remarkably easy targets when it did finally get around to expelling its spines in a great burst of energy and annoyance at being ignored and taken lightly.

The rest of the battle went remarkably like something else that they had done, which lingered on the edges of all their memories (or in Robo's case, his memory banks or whatever else the robot equivalent of a memory might be), but they could not entirely recall.

They endured the very spiky beating of the Lavos Spawn for a while, until Lucca began to lose her temper and commanded the gleeful Robo and the less gleeful and more heroically-noble-while-doing-something-unpleasant-but-necessary-and-ultimately-rewarding Frog to join her in a recently learned three-man attack.

The combined power of three angry warriors was enough to ensure that the Lavos Spawn had breathed its last breath, and dropped to the ground – at least, with the portions that weren't there already – with a tremendous thud.

The threat eliminated, the party set about healing one another's injuries, although Frog wisely deferred to Lucca and a supply of potions for the healing of Robo, since decidedly undignified images seemed to dance through his head when he thought of it, and his tongue gave a warning throb.

The thought of using his Slurp skill to heal a mildly injured Lucca, however, set off no such alarm bells in Frog's head, although perhaps it should have.

Either way, when she felt something wet and warm against the back of her neck, only to wheel about and find it to be Frog's super-duper-ultra-extendable-Frog-tongue, she didn't react as badly as she might have, and Frog escaped with only minor injuries that he wisely cured with a Heal spell rather than Slurp.

As a madly blushing Lucca helped Robo to his feet, Frog reflected sadly that he really ought to warn her next time. After all, he had only been tying to help – and he honestly believed that philanthropy had been his entire motive, foolish young man – but it must have been a bit startling to the poor girl to find herself suddenly being accosted with a tongue.

At any rate, soon enough the party was sufficiently well to continue upon their merry, if very cold, way.

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   "It doth be too quiet, do you not agree?"

   "No, Frog, I don't agree, and if you start singing travelling songs again, I'll shove the Shockwave so far up your nose, it knocks against the top of your skull."

   "Heh-heh-heh…I suppose t'would be a shame to thus ruin such a fine weapon. Very well. Thou art the winner. No travelling songs."

   "I'll hold you to that."

   "I'm sure thou shalt."

   "Hey, where's Robo?"

   "I believe that he doth be lagging behind and grinning knowingly at us from several feet away."

   "Hmm. I wonder what the heck that's all about."

   "I-I'm sure I hath no idea, Lucca."

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   "You know," Lucca began an hour later, glancing suspiciously about the cave that the three were making their way through, "this seems to be going entirely too well."

Frog tensed, eyes darting furtively from side to side.

Lucca bit back a laugh at the amusing sight this provided.

 Robo calculated the probability of the story gaining a coherent plot, and found it to be depressingly low.

   "I believe thou hast a point, Lucca," Frog told her in a hushed voice. "We hath been fortunate up until now. I hath a strange feeling, though, that the Providence watching over us doth end here."

   "Why do you think that?" Lucca asked curiously.

   "Because of the Lavos Spawn that doth approach," Frog replied casually, gesturing to the open space just through the mouth of the cave.

   "Dammit!" Lucca howled. "Why can't that spiky bastard keep his damn spawns to himself?!"

   "I fear that art one of the unanswerable questions of the ages, Lucca," Frog sighed.

   "Yeah, along with 'what the hell did that thing reproduce with, anyway?'" Lucca added, shaking her head. "My money's on that Sin thing that Moron was talking about."

Frog blinked, viciously tamping back the question that rose unbidden in his mind as to what two creatures that looked like that would do when they were in need of a little erotic literature, so to speak.

   "Er…I know that thou knowest that the creature's reproduction required no mate, but still, this art a mental image that shall be burned into my nightmares for years to come," Frog sighed.

   "Great," Lucca grumbled. "Now when he thinks of two big, deformed, spiky things going at it, he'll think of me."

Frog blinked again, more rapidly.

   "Well, not until thou sealed thy own fate by saying that…"

   "Frog? Lucca?" Robo called, his good nature starting to slip for the first time. "Do either of you think it might be helpful to our mission of saving Crono to destroy this latest Lavos spawn before it can destroy us?"

   "Ooh! A robot with a sarcastic streak," Lucca commented, crossing her arms and glaring playfully at Robo. "Now I've seen everything."

    "Nevertheless, Lucca," Frog began, striking a triumphant pose as the heroism bug began to gnaw away at everyone's favourite amphibian yet again, "Robo is correct in his assessment of the importance of vanquishing this foe if we are to rescue our fallen comrade, young Crono, from the void of darkness and despair from which nary a mortal has ever returned!"

   "He's really getting into this again, isn't he?" Robo whispered (or said at lower speaker capacity – whichever you like) aside to Lucca.

   "Yeah," Lucca agreed flatly. "And to be honest, he's starting to scare me."

   "Onward! To battle and to greatness!" Frog shouted over his shoulder to his fellow travellers, one of whom sweatdropped greatly and one of whom simply surreptitiously turned down his input volume switch.

Yes, Robo decided, it was much easier to deal with this world when one couldn't hear a thing of it.

Yes, Lucca decided as she watched Frog charge, sword raised triumphantly over his head, at the Lavos spawn, there were definitely people who were made for this lifestyle. ­The rest of us, though…

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End Notes: Whoo! Four months of neglect has brought me to this point! Again, apologies for the lack of recent update, and thanks for reading!