Chapter 5
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"Damn him!" the furious darkly clad young woman snarled, storming about the tiny prison cell, illuminated only by the flicker of torches hanging on the walls of the corridor just outside, and smelling thickly of damn stone and earth. "That bastard! I hope he's rotting in Hell, the lousy, rotten traitor!"
"Quiet in there!" a guard barked at her, rattling the bars noisily.
"Yeah, thanks, pal," Lucca called back. "I needed that."
Then, being greeted only by another rattling of bars, she dropped dejectedly to the narrow wooden bench stretched along one wall.
"Geez...this is not my idea of how to spend an evening," she muttered with a heavy sigh, memories of the events of the past hours rolling over her.
When Lucca and her self-acclaimed mentor had been seized by the army of Guardia, they had been dragged only a few hundred yards – during which both lost sight of Crono and Marle, who had disappeared amidst the swarm of uniformed men – before something odd had happened.
That is, odd to an outside observer who had little experience with magic, and how it looked and sounded when it was cast.
Lucca, however, knew immediately what was happening when Magus started to chant, softly at first and growing in volume until he finished the spell with a bellow of,
"DARK BOMB!"
As blue uniforms flew to the left and right, and Magus emerged, free of his captors, Lucca reflected smugly that it was nice to be working with someone who knew what he was doing. Really, she added silently as she waited to be rescued with another well-placed spell, it had been a long time since she had hailed his Little Triangles of Death with gratefulness as opposed to mockery.
The smugness and gratefulness both evaporated quickly, however, when Magus, instead of using his free range of motion to grant her the same, took to the road, sailing just above it at a speed that none of the soldiers wanted to try to overcome.
Then, being rather high on the intelligence curve, it occurred to Lucca that Magus was not the only magic user in their partnership. Unfortunately, her great intelligence managed to overlook the slight detail of the soldiers currently escorting her none too gently back to the castle having been made paranoid by Magus' escape.
Thus, when she began what was to have been a well-timed Flare spell – after all, when Lucca did something, she did not do it half-heartedly – the guards recognized the odd language, and put an end to her attempt with a sharp blow to the head with a Billy club.
The result of all this was the girl's current situation of sitting in the dungeons of Guardia Castle, alone and seething, while Magus no doubt frolicked, merry and carefree, through sunshiney fields of daises.
Her great anger with her aggravating mentor who would abandon his own student without a thought led her to ignore the utter absurdity of this scenario.
"Hmph! And where are Crono and Marle right now? I like how they just sort of disappeared. Couldn't even arrest me themselves! Some 'heroes of virtue' THEY are! When the going gets tough, pass it off to your guards! You'd think that for old time's sake, they could've thrown me in here themselves."
"This is true," a voice agreed smoothly from behind her. "But you should have realized going into this that villainy wouldn't make you any friends...except with other villains."
"Yeah, great, Magus," she shot back, glaring. "The same friends who will abandon you to make their own escape?"
She turned away from him with a huff, and then did a double take.
"How did you get in here, anyway?"
"Through the giant, gaping hole in the wall," Magus explained dryly, gesturing to the back of the cell, which did indeed seem to be half-demolished.
"Holy crap!" Lucca exclaimed. "There's a giant, gaping hole in the wall!"
"Oh, well, let's just announce it to the guards," Magus hissed sarcastically, wrapping one arm around her waist, pulling her back against him, and clapping his free hand over her mouth.
Needless to say, she didn't appreciate this treatment at all, and he soon came to learn this in the most painful way possible, that of a tapered heel coming down with considerable velocity and ferocity on his toe.
"ARGH! What was that for?" he bellowed, clutching his foot painfully.
"I don't like cavemen," she replied airily.
"Fine," he grumbled. "I apologize. No more manhandling."
"And what about betrayals?" she asked acerbically, beginning to pace. "Can I expect many more of those?"
"Damn it, Lucca, take a look at the situation," he commanded, dropping to the wooden bench. "If we had both been locked up in here, who would have come for us?"
"Well-"
"Exactly."
She came to a halt in front of him and glared down at him, hands on her hips.
"But we could have both gotten away, if you hadn't been in such a damn hurry to take to the road."
"Think about it. Breaking in here to get you gave me the perfect reason to be around the castle!"
"So?"
"What was our initial objective tonight?"
"To come get the Epoch. Oh...right. So, did you get it?"
"As a matter of fact, I did. Your chariot awaits."
"Actually, it's more of a-"
Magus made an exasperated noise.
"Will you let me have my poetic touches, please?"
"Fine," she grumbled, starting over to the gaping hole torn out of the brick wall of the cell. "Hey, Magus, I have a question: how did you blow a hole in the wall so quietly?"
"Quietly?" he snorted. "I made a tremendous amount of noise. You did seem preoccupied, though, so I don't wonder that you missed it."
"Oh," she nodded. Then she stopped short again. "I have another question."
"Go ahead."
"If you were so worried about my shouting getting the guards' attention, why did you blow a hole in the wall? Isn't that sort of thing noisy?"
"Terribly so. Which is why I cast a strong, strong sleeping spell on all of the guards before I took out the wall."
"Then...why the big deal about me shouting?"
"I was simply trying to impress on your mind the importance of being calm, collected, and above all things, subtle when you're a villain."
"All part of the training," she murmured, rubbing her forehead wearily.
"Naturally!" he beamed.
"You know, that orphanage idea is looking better and better," she noted with a sigh as they stepped through the jagged hole in the wall of the prison.
"Is it an evil orphanage?" Magus asked suspiciously.
"Copyright," she reminded him mildly.
"Well, ignoring copyright laws is a properly villainous thing to do," he shrugged.
"Yup," she sighed. "Hordes and hordes of screaming kids look like a really good idea right now."
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Crono heaved a long sigh, and glanced sideways as he heard it echoed by the woman next to him on the brown leather couch along one tapestry-hung wall of the room. Patting her arm consolingly, he reflected that this situation sucked quite a large quantity of donkey-arse. Of course, being Crono, he did not word it this way. However, being Crono, he would have worded it more along the lines of "...", which has the aggravating tendency of being rather difficult to translate. It is for this reason that the chronicler of this fine (?) tale has chosen to paraphrase.
Nevertheless, it is fairly certain that Crono's thoughts ran, if not exactly this way, along these lines.
It is also fairly certain that Marle's thoughts ran along a similar line, but before she had the chance to voice any such thing, two visitors bounded happily through the door of Guardia Castle's only Secret Hero Lair.
"Brilliantly done," Munkustrap congratulated the princess heartily. "The villain has been locked away, never to trouble this fair kingdom again!"
"It's wonderful, isn't it?" Victoria added with a happy giggle.
Something snapped in Marle's mind. Bounding to her feet, she very quickly after applied one of those feet firmly to Munkustrap's backside.
"No, it is NOT wonderful!" she shrieked as he crashed through a window, which slowed down his flight only slightly. "My best friend is in the dungeon right now, and we have no idea why!"
"Princess Marle, she was the villain!"
"Think about it, Victoria," Marle requested impatiently. "What exactly did she do?"
"Well...she-"
"She told us about her new hobby, showed us her new outfit, and got dragged off by the guards!"
"But, Princess, she was going to break into the palace! Surely she planned to put into action a nefarious scheme!"
"You watch too many cartoons," Marle informed the little white kitten coldly. "She was coming to get the Epoch! We don't know what she wanted it for!"
"You're in denial," Munkustrap's voice drifted in through the window in a pained groan.
"SHUT UP!" Marle barked, hurling a heavy stone bust of Artemis T. Cledus, greatest banjo player ever to live, and her father's own personal hero, out the window.
"Darn my luck," Munkustrap lamented sadly.
"Characterization," Victoria called out the window, then pausing to bat the tassels on the ends of the draperies. "Oh, dear..."
"I just can't accept that Lucca decided out of the blue to become a villain! That just doesn't seem like her!"
"I suppose you think that starting an orphanage is more like her," Victoria scoffed, losing her patience and with it her shyness. "You have to face it, Marle. It is destiny that you should fight her."
"Well, until she actually does something, I'm not going to base my life on 'destiny'. Crono, come on!"
Rather bewildered, Crono stood up.
"Where are you going?" Victoria asked wearily, unknowingly voicing the burning question currently igniting Crono's mind.
"To the dungeon," Marle replied determinedly. "We have no grounds to keep Lucca imprisoned here! We're going to unlock her, and then we're all going to sit down and have a nice talk. The first thing I want to talk to her about is her taste in men. I thought I saw Magus running away pretty fast when they got nabbed by our guards. Honestly, I don't want to see my closest girl-friend throwing herself away on a guy who'll just turn tail and run the second things get a little tough!"
Crono blinked as Marle stalked indignantly from the Secret Hero Lair, pausing first to grab the dungeon key, hanging conveniently by the door.
"Uh..." he began slowly, then thought better of even asking, and hurried after her.
"The Princess certainly didn't take it very well, did she?" Munkustrap asked weakly as he hauled himself back into the room through the window.
"Oh, dear," Victoria sighed again, offering her companion a helping paw up.
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Together, the Princess and Prince Consort of Guardia strode swiftly along the dark, shadowy corridors, lined on either side with prison cells, lit only by the faint glow of light bulbs set into wall sconces to resemble torches.
"Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five! Here it is, Crono," Marle announced breathlessly as the two came to a stop in front of the cell.
Then, just as she was about to call to her friend, the young woman noticed something that made her pony-tail stand up on end in shock and horror.
"Crono, look!"
Crono, apparently, was already looking, if the expression on his face, eyes so wide that it seemed as though they would fall out at any minute, was any indication. Together, they stared at the gaping hole in the back of the prison cell for a long while. Finally, Marle gave a despairing little cry.
"Whatever came through that wall must have got her," she whimpered sadly. "Do you think it was the mice?"
Crono scratched his head for a moment, and then withdrew from his pocket, able to hold much more than it should have due to the alternate dimension within it specifically meant for holding his stuff, a copy of the script. Flipping back several pages, the young man scanned the pages briefly. Finally, recalling where exactly the mice had come in, he tossed the script over his shoulder, where it promptly disappeared in the grand and illogical tradition of anime, and patted Marle gently on the shoulder, about to remind her that there were no evil mice. However, just as he opened his mouth, a familiar laugh, tinged with an unfamiliar quality, rang out behind them.
Both whirled about and froze in shock that was really quite odd, given the entire predictability of events.
"Lucca?!" Marle exclaimed.
"That's right," the purple-haired girl smirked, cackling gleefully.
Seconds later, her cackling trailed off and she blinked in bewilderment as she found herself engulfed in a hug by a teary Marle.
"I'm so glad you're safe," Marle sobbed. "We thought the evil mice that are out to take over the planet had got you!"
"Evil...mice?" Lucca repeated, unable to scratch her head as her arms were both pinned quite firmly to her sides by her friend's over-enthusiastic hug.
Crono held up the script before her eyes and pointed to a spot on the page. She peered closely at the spot for a moment.
"Oh, right," she nodded thoughtfully. Then, her expression shifting to annoyance, she firmly disentangled herself from Marle's arms. "Hey, I'm kind of trying to be menacing here, Marle. And it's not really helping my self-image as a scary villain if your first instinct when you see me is to give me a big hug."
"But you're not a scary villain," Marle giggled. "This is all just one big misunderstanding."
"Actually, it isn't," Lucca corrected her coldly.
Marle's eyes filled with tears.
"But…but…but…WHY?!"
"Because this is where I belong now. This is what I was born to do. I will avenge the wrong that has been done to me! I will travel back in time, and then the man who wrote that loathsome song, "Bad Moon Rising," will cease to exist! And moreover, because he will be gone from his own past, the song will never have been written! Gyah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaaaaaaah!"
"You fiend!" Marle exclaimed, getting into the act at last. Beside her, Crono mirrored her dramatic pose. "That song is one of the crowning achievements of modern man!"
"A song?" Random Prison Guard #4 laughed in disbelief. "Your motivation is to get rid of a song you don't like?"
Lucca shrugged defiantly.
"Well...yeah..."
"It needs work," the man told her kindly.
"You think so?"
"Silence!" Marle exclaimed. "Lucca, you were once our friend and ally, but even as a friend, I can show no mercy to anyone who would seek to eliminate something so beautiful and precious! From here on out, we shall be enemies! Hey...how did you get out of jail, anyway, if the evil mice didn't get you?"
"Oh, I used my feminine wiles to charm the prison guard into letting me out," Lucca replied, striking an exaggeratedly sexy pose, batting her eyelashes.
"You're kidding," Marle said, her tone heavy with incredulity, a sweatdrop suspended at the side of her head.
"Well, yeah," Lucca admitted with a grin. "Actually, Magus busted me out."
With that, she reached around behind her and pulled the warlock, who was busily assuming an unconcerned posture of crossed arms and mask of apathy and annoyance, from hammerspace.
"Tell me again," he requested, annoyed as he tried to work the kinks from his shoulders and back, "why do I have to ride in your back pocket? Not that it isn't fun, just a little uncomfortable."
"'Cause," she replied with a chilling dignity.
"Oh, of course," he scoffed. "'Cause."
"It's just as good as the reasons you have for most of the things you do," she shot back. "'Why did you burn down that town, Magus?' 'I didn't like the colour of the mayor's tie.' Real good reason, there."
"Oh, shut up!"
"You shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"Um…whose line was that?" Marle asked Crono, scratching her head in confusion.
Crono shrugged, and then went back to his task of shining The Rainbow on his cape. Damn, but he had the coolest sword ever!
Meanwhile, the fight had continued.
"YOU shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"YOU shut up!"
"Guys!" Marle interjected pleadingly. "Why can't you both just get along? You know, it doesn't present a very professional image when you can't stop bickering long enough to finish telling us about your evil plan."
"Who said we cared to tell you?" Magus scoffed.
"I already told them," Lucca informed him seriously.
Magus blinked.
"You have?"
"I have," she replied.
"She has," Marle added.
"It needs work," Random Prison Guard #4 piped up.
"Shut up!" Magus bellowed, silencing the man with a well-placed ball of fire. Then he sighed, and then turned to Crono and Marle. "Now, brave heroes, if you'll excuse us, we are very busy, and cannot spend any more time in idle chatter. If you wanted to have an epic battle, well, perhaps that might be different-"
Both Crono and Lucca winced at the idea.
"-but as you don't seem to be thus inclined, we really must take our leave of this place."
"Yeah, bye, guys," Lucca chirped, turning around with a sweep of her cape and bouncing up the stairs.
With an irritated grumble roughly translating as "she just doesn't get it" Magus darted after her.
And back in the prison, Crono and Marle watched them go, looking utterly perplexed.
"They're really bad at this," Crono said decidedly.
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End Notes: Even more pointless than last time! Do the wonders never cease?! ^_^