Hi everyone. I'm just writing this to thank Leppers for that last review. Leppers, don't worry if your life is crazy and you can't review, it's no big deal. You've probably got more important things to worry about then reviewing a story, after all.
Anyway, thank you to everyone reading this. I know there are a few others of you who are reading this, my stats counter says so.
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The cell was dark and cold. Everyone was sleeping in the cell, but not in very comfortable positions. Everyone was either sleeping up against the stone wall or sprawled out across the floor. No one was warm of comfortable.
Lloyd was the only one who hadn't fallen asleep. He was very upset (to say the least) that he and everyone had come that far to save Tiberia, and then trying to save themselves from Tiberia, only to get betrayed near the end.
Lloyd was still sulking when he heard the door to the cell open. Slowly, he turned around, and he was shocked to see who was standing there.
"Zyn!" Lloyd yelled, partly from anger and partly from surprise. "What are you…"
Zyn ran over to Lloyd and covered his mouth with one of his hands.
"Quiet!" Zyn whispered in a commanding tone. "You want Tiberius to hear you?"
Lloyd didn't say a word as Zyn quietly roused everyone and woke them up. It didn't take any of them long at all to start criticizing Zyn about how he had betrayed them.
"Everyone, give me a second to explain, all right?" Zyn asked as he looked at Lloyd and his friends. "Oh, by the way, I thought you might want these."
Zyn reached into one of his pockets and pulled out two black boxes-the teleporters. He threw one of them to Lloyd and the other to Yuan.
"Why are you doing this? Who's side are you on, anyway!" Lloyd demanded.
Zyn kept a calm look on his face. "Don't kill yourself, Lloyd. And I'm on your side."
"Our side?" Lloyd asked, stunned. "Then how come you turned us into that Tiberius guy or whatever?"
"I had to get his guard down," Zyn said. "I'm his second-in-command, and I had to make it look like I wasn't working with the enemy."
"Why didn't you tell us it was all a setup?" Lloyd asked.
"Hey, your reactions had to be natural, right?"
Lloyd groaned, but he was slowly starting to trust Zyn again. However, the same didn't hold true for everybody else, especially Yuan.
"Would you mind telling me exactly what the hell is going on here?" Yuan asked Zyn sternly.
"Yuan, I think I may have to give you a bit of a history lesson for this all to make sense now," Zyn said lowly.
"Aw man, I hate history," Lloyd whined.
So Zyn started telling everybody of what he thought they needed to know in order to understand why Tiberius was acting the way he did and how it all came about.
"4,000 years ago, before any of you were even born, there was a great war on your world. Your people called it the Kharlan War," Zyn started.
"I'll have you know I was alive during that war," Yuan said with his arms crossed.
Zyn looked at Yuan in disbelief. "Wait…you're the Yuan? So the names aren't coincidence? You're the same Yuan that our records told us about?"
"It depends," Yuan said. "What do your records say?"
"Were you one of Mithos's four Seraphim?"
"Yes, I was."
Zyn looked shocked, but a bit relieved at the same time. "Then this will probably make the most sense to you. Anyway, our world came into being about 4,000 years ago during the Kharlan War. This world's name was originally Korsel."
"Korsel!" Yuan asked. "That was the name of someone who served for Mithos."
"Yes," Zyn said. "At least, according to our legends, someone who was working for Mithos. As I'm sure you're aware, Korsel soon decided he didn't believe in the same ideals as Mithos and led a rebellion. He tried to kill Mithos, but was stopped."
"I'm not sure if that's a good thing," Yuan said. "I wish we knew back then what Mithos was going to do with his power."
"Anyway, as the story goes, since Korsel failed at stopping Mithos and realized he would be killed, he decided to flee and used every ounce of strength he had to create a world like Mithos did."
"Oh no," Lloyd moaned. "There's someone just as powerful as Mithos out there? Don't tell me we're going to have to kill him, too."
"Listen to the rest of the story, Lloyd," Zyn said in a stern voice. "Anyway, Mithos decided not to follow and kill Korsel on his own world, but he kept tabs on him. He made sure Korsel understood clearly that if he was doing anything suspicious, Mithos would come along and obliterate him."
"Whoa, this is getting kind of complicated," Lloyd said. "So Korsel was in Mithos's army and rebelled against him, but his plans to kill Mithos were failed. So he created his own world like how Mithos created Sylvarant and Teth'ealla and spent the rest of his life living there and not doing anything, knowing Mithos would kill him if he did?"
"That's right," Zyn clarified. "However, according to our history, Mithos knew that in case something was to happen to himself, Korsel would attack the world and everyone living on it would be completely helpless to defend themselves. So, Mithos took a huge amount of his power and put it into a crystal, then hid it away and shared its location only with his companions."
"It's all coming together…" Lloyd realized. "That crystal that Kayne tricked us into stealing for him was the same one as the one Mithos put a lot of his powers in. That means…when we fought Mithos he only had a fraction of his natural powers?"
"That's right," Yuan said. "Consider yourself lucky he was caring for people other than himself back then when he put all his powers into the crystal."
"Wait a minute!" Lloyd said loudly. "Zyn just said that Mithos only told his companions about the crystal, and you're one of his companions. Did you know about this the whole time!"
"If you're asking me about whether or not I knew of the crystal's origins and that it was hidden on that island, then yes, I knew."
"Why didn't you tell me!"
"You had Kratos to help you. Believe it or not, he and I couldn't believe that the crystal was being hunted down was the same one that Mithos put a lot of his power in."
Lloyd was starting to get agitated that Yuan knew a lot more about the crystal (as did Kratos) and neither one of them told him about it. He was about to start complaining until Zyn talked over him.
"Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?"
"…yeah," Lloyd finally said.
"Okay. At any rate, there was soon a war on Korsel's world hundreds of years later when more people came to live there. Korsel was killed in a battle, and his second in command, commander Vice, took over."
"Commander Vice?" Lloyd asked. "Kratos was telling me all about him! He told me Vice died a mysterious death." (recall back to chapter 18)
"Mysterious death? Heh. I guess Mithos didn't have the best intelligence out there," Zyn said with a smirk on his face.
"What do you mean?"
"Vice followed in Korsel's footsteps and kept a grudge on Mithos after the failed assassination attempt. He continued making the people of Korsel think that you guys were the enemies and that you must be stopped."
"Why didn't you come down to crush us?" Lloyd asked.
"Because Mithos was still alive," Zyn answered. "If they tried coming down, Mithos would destroy them all in a heartbeat."
"So…the only reason you guys invaded our world is because Mithos was dead and there was no one in your way to stop you from annihilating us!" Lloyd yelled.
"Yes, but that's not important right now," Zyn said. "As I was saying, Vice didn't die a mysterious death or anything of the sort. Two of his highest ranking soldiers led a conspiracy and killed him."
"…what?" Lloyd said. He was at a loss of words for what was going on. He couldn't believe everything Zyn was telling him.
"Yes," Zyn said sadly. "The two conspirators' names were Tiberius and Zyn."
There was a gasp or shocked expression coming from everyone in the cell.
"So you helped Tiberius gang up and kill Vice?" Lloyd asked, trying to make sure he understood everything.
"Yes," Zyn sadly said. "That turns out to have been the biggest mistake of my life. After the deed was done, Tiberius and I made Vice's death look like an accident. Since Tiberius was the second-in-command, he was given the position of leader of the world. He changed the world's name from Korsel to Tiberia."
"He named the world after himself?" Lloyd asked.
"Yes," Zyn replied. "And he's been, if anything, worse than Vice ever since. He's become power hungry and hostile and he has become violent to unspeakable extents with your world."
"All of this just because Korsel didn't succeed at doing something almost 4,000 years ago?"
"Wow, Lloyd!" Genis exclaimed. "You actually remember everything Zyn just told us?"
"Shut it, Genis."
"That's correct," Zyn said. "When we noticed that your two worlds were now one, we hoped that Mithos had been killed. Sure enough, you guys were powerful enough to defeat him. With Mithos gone, there was no one who could stop our army when we invaded."
"So you guys planned for a couple months before coming down and looking for the crystal so you could use it to power that giant space station and destroy our world?" Lloyd asked.
"We actually went down sooner than that. But a soldier was caught by Stromm's fleet and revealed that we were coming to find the crystal, so Stromm started looking for it on his own. Soon enough, it was a race between our world and Stromm to find the crystal."
Lloyd had an even harder time believing it now. If it weren't for that fateful time when he and Colette's boat got sidetracked while fighting Skelter and his pirates, then they would have never got lost in the storm and washed ashore that island. And if that didn't happen, then Kayne's boat wouldn't have come to rescue them. They wouldn't have gotten caught up in the race to find the crystal. And if it weren't for Lloyd and his companions, then maybe the crystal would never have been found at all. The part that irked Lloyd most of all was that if he didn't kill Stromm after Stromm acquired the crystal, then he wouldn't have had to stop Tiberius. Even more so, Kratos would have still been alive.
"Then you interfered and killed Stromm, thinking you were saving our world," Zyn said. "While you did save our world, you practically doomed your own."
"I know," Lloyd said. "But I destroyed your space station and the crystal with it, so doesn't that pretty much end your hopes to destroy it?"
"Lloyd, did you listen to a thing Tiberius said when we just met him?" Genis asked. "He said we only temporarily thwarted his plans. Meaning it's only a matter of time before he comes back even harder and with more motivation than ever to destroy our world."
"You're right and wrong," Zyn said. "Tiberius will try harder to destroy your world now; make no mistake about that. However, to say you only temporarily thwarted his plans would be a giant lie. By destroying the space station, you destroyed his secret weapon. Now, he has nothing to destroy your world with at all. Not only that, but the power source, the crystal, was also lost in the explosion. Now he has nothing to power his next giant weapon."
"Well, I guess that's a relief," Lloyd confidently said.
"But that doesn't mean we should just let him go," Zyn said. "You may have stopped his plan, but he's just going to try again. We have to stop him before he tries something more sinister."
"We?" Lloyd asked. "You're helping?"
"Yes," Zyn said. "I don't want Tiberius to rule any longer; I can't even stand the fact that our world is now named after him."
"Look, we got bigger things to worry about than its name," Lloyd said. "You want us to help you take down Tiberius once and for all, right?"
"Yes," Zyn said.
"What do you say, guys?" Lloyd asked, turning to his friends. "You guys up for one last fight?"
"Yeah!" Genis, Colette, Raine, Sheena, Regal, Presea, Zelos and Yuan all said in unison.
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All right, a lot of information was passed around in this chapter, and that should pretty much tie up any loose ends so far in this story. So please, if you're confused about anything that happened just now, please ask me in a review and I'll do my best to answer it.
