So, remember how last chapter I said that I felt like I was becoming a Master, and that we had successfully taken the Time Blade? I think if there's something I should learn, it's that we're only allowed to have something good happen to us right before the end of fighting a new villain.
After we recovered the slow blade, we took it back to our temple. I told the guys not to mess with the blade while I went and gave my report to Master Wu. Wu was still more or less in and out of everything, so much so he fell asleep in the middle of my report. Even though I was happy that we had a victory, I knew that something was still very wrong with him. Mom wouldn't tell me, so I decided to just go and try and figure out our next step of the plan.
The first thing I saw was Jay, Cole and Zane all playing around with the slow blade. Now, after seeing more of them, it seems that the Time Blades work on a recharging cycle, so you can use the blade maybe three or four times before you have to let it recharge. At the time, however, I was afraid that if we used the blade too much then we might actually cause some real damage. I mean, the last time that the ninja messed with time, it led to the Megaweapon (that I still don't think actually exists), so we needed not to mess this up.
I was pretty upset, so I told them that something that valuable wouldn't be so easily conceded. The first thing Cole does? Nag at me! Honestly, that made me more angry than I think it would now. I'd assumed we'd gotten past this whole dumb stuff with me being a 'Master in Training' and all that. I'd led us into battle and gotten us a victory. The fact that they were already back to treating me like I was just a little kid was getting pretty old.
But then, right after that, Master Wu got up from bed to come and talk to us, and guess what he said? Literally the same thing I did! And when Wu said it, suddenly the guys thought to listen to him. Thinking back, that still makes me angry. If this had been before they'd first written me off as a Master, then sure, maybe I'd be more understanding. But I thought we were already past this. It turned out that they weren't ready to give it up just yet.
I understand that saying it like that makes me seem like I'm just a little kid upset that the other kids won't listen to me. But, I'd already saved Ninjago at that point. Again, I hate to just leverage my accomplishments, but I defeated the Overlord and saved all of them in the process! I just, I don't understand why suddenly they picked then to be upset at me wanting to take a more active role. We'd defeated Morro, Cole was back to being normal, at the time it felt like the perfect change. Part of why I don't call myself a Master now or tell anyone I'm in training to be one is partially because the guys just made me feel stupid for wanting it in the first place.
Right in the middle of Wu telling them off for the things I was already telling them were wrong was when the Twins made their attack on us. This was when we got a taste of just how easy it was to deploy Vermillion into battle. Since we were on a floating temple in the sky, it was impossible for them to just march up on us. Instead, the Twins used catapults to launch cocoons up at us that broke apart and had the snakes, armor and weapons inside. In just three launches, we had an entire squad of Vermillion outfitted and ready to attack us.
By that point, we had a good grasp on how to defeat them. Our goal was to protect the slow blade, and so we did. We rushed out and beat the first wave with Spinjitzu, which we found out made the snakes so dizzy they didn't want to immediately get back into the armor. The first wave only took a few seconds to beat, which made us feel pretty good about ourselves.
...This was immediately followed by the snakes getting another volley of metal to make a gigantic 'big guy' to come and attack us. Like I said, the biggest thing the Vermillion had going for them was the fact they were versatile. When you beat a few of them, they could just change into something else to beat you. Kai and Nya found a way to lure it off and throw it over the side of the temple, but that didn't mean the battle was over yet. It wasn't even that long before we had more Vermillion on top of us. When you combine the Vermillion being versatile and perfect in a massive army, they were near impossible to keep beating back over and over again.
Now, this isn't exactly one of my finest moments. I knew that we couldn't just keep fighting up there like that, since eventually one of the waves would just overwhelm us by tiring us out. They were firing the cocoons from tanks down below, so if we were able to get down there and disable them, we'd have the advantage. This just so happens to be a time I conveniently remembered I had my Elemental Dragon. I would have used the Bounty but… oh, right, the Bounty was taken down. Honestly, the Bounty gets destroyed so much that at this point it's more worrying to see it flying. The Vermillion just pelted it until it went down, making us have to use our dragons.
The thing about Elemental Dragons is you have to focus to use them. The group acted like I was crazy going out there, and I know that Jay still teases me about what happened. When I was going down, the Twins sent up Vermillion outfitted with flying gear to come and attack me. One of them managed to get behind me and startle me, which dropped my focus enough through fear and made my dragon disappear. And, once you're hurtling through the air, it's impossible to focus enough on getting your dragon back. The only time I managed to do it was over Chen's island. Any of the ninja that claim they can pull that trick off, don't believe them.
I would have likely hit the ground and not be writing this book had Samurai X not come to save me. Now, this is something that's somewhat less known: Samurai X was supposed to be put away after Nya joined our team. I know a lot of people assume that the current Samurai X is the same one that's been around since the Serpentine were attacking the city, but that's not true. It used to be Nya, and after the incident with Morro, Samurai X was basically hung up like a sword after a war. After all that happened, Nya wasn't supposed to be Samurai X anymore. So, it was pretty shocking being grabbed by them.
Now, the current identity of Samurai X is Pixal. I made sure when I first started talking about her way back during the Golden Master chapters that she would be okay with me saying that. The main reason that she's good with that was because she only needed to hide who she was because she didn't want us getting hurt. Now… the fact that we get involved with some new villain almost every few months makes that reasoning a little weird to me, but nonetheless Pixal is another member of our team that, now, feels like has been around a lot longer than she really was.
Remember how I said that Zane was knocked out by Acronix when I sent him to go and protect Borg? Well, Pixal got so fed up with waiting for Nya to reboot him that she decided to instead use the Samurai X cave to build a new body for herself and take up the Samurai X gear to help us. She didn't say anything to us at first, even after dropping me back off at the temple. I still think that she could have told us from the beginning, since it wasn't like we were powerless. The logic of "if you know my identity then people close to me will get hurt" doesn't really hold up when the people that might get hurt, are already in danger. I mean, the only people that she could have been referring to were Borg -who was captured- and Zane -who had already gotten hurt. So, I mean, it's weird she decided to hide it from us… I still don't fully get it.
The biggest issue this had was on Zane. Zane had been using Pixal to help for a long time, so having her just disappear made him rather nervous. I mean, I would be too if a part of me just, disappeared for no reason. Pixal being Samurai X is something that I don't really associate with the Time Twin stuff now, even though this was when it happened. I more so remember Zane being nervous without her than her actually helping us. Maybe it was because she was more so having to prove herself to Nya, so I only got to see her when she saved me the first time and at the very, very end of this. It was somewhat, weird, sort of like it just wasn't really that big of deal? I mean, no offense to Pixal, but it was pretty obvious that she was Samurai X from the beginning when she came back.
Okay, okay, I meant to talk about Pixal later, let's get back to the topic at hand. So, the Time Twins came to attack us and reclaim the blade themselves, right after the Vermillion knocked Samurai X out of the sky. The Twins were pretty fierce, and I remember that the first thing one of them did (it's hard to tell when they have hoods on since they wear identical armor) was go after Wu who had the slow blade. Wu had come out to help advise us in the battle. Kai had gotten him to see something with the Vermillion helmet he was carrying around, and kept trying to get Wu to tell him what was important about it. The battle with the Twins was intense, but I think what's important was the end of it.
By a stroke of luck, someone got a lucky shot on the Twins and sent the forward blade flying. I caught it along with the slow blade, meaning that we'd managed to take both of the Time Blades. In that moment, we had basically beaten the Twins. Kai (who had tried to save me) and Samurai X had taken out the Vermillion that could fly, I'd wrecked their tanks, and we had the Time Blades now. We'd basically won. I don't like thinking back on this moment a lot, since this was actually one of my most embarrassing ones. We thought we'd won, the Twins were on the ground in front of us, and we had decided to celebrate.
Then… one of the Vermillion generals swooped in, stole the Time Blades, captured Master Wu, and then got away.
That's what happened. I'm not even kidding. It was literally all of a minute when we went from winning to just, not! I'm honestly, really, angry about that. Everytime we have a victory, it never lasts. We can't win unless it's at the very end. We can beat the bad guy to whatever they want, defend the people, whatever we want, and yet we will still have to lose. We will always lose when it comes to these things. And at that moment, being humiliated like that? I wasn't exactly feeling anything good towards the Time Twins when we realized what happened.
I think it was the fact that they decided to take Master Wu that makes it sting so badly. It wasn't just that they got what they came for, but they did something they didn't even need to. They were just rubbing salt in our wounds. When we all realized how badly we'd messed up, it was almost like a wake up call to us. We had to step up our game now and stop the Twins. They'd attacked us, won, and then humiliated us.
The entire time that I was working to make a plan afterwards, I was barely holding in how utterly angry I was. After all of the stuff with the guys messing around with me as a Master, with them treating me like I was just some sort of kid, and now losing like that after I'd been so sure we finally had a break, I just… I just wanted to hit something, really hard. But we didn't have time to waste, so I didn't. I took us right to the planning room, even if Kai was acting like a jerk the entire time we were working something up.
The only good news about the entire thing was that we realized that the Time Twins would be taking back the blades to their headquarters, so we could try to scan for them. Since it seemed like everyone had a Temporal Anomaly Scanner (thanks, Borg), we could track them. Of course, Zane's was broken during the fight with the Vermillion, so we had to go on something else. We ultimately split up, with Zane, Cole, Jay and I going to the Museum to investigate things about Krux while Kai and Nya worked on getting the scanner back up on the Bounty.
In order to get there, I got what was probably the coolest birthday present I never use: the Destiny's Shadow. It was basically a miniature version of the Destiny's Bounty that was made to be more like a little ship to help carry us around rather than a headquarters. Like, you know in cartoons when one ship has a smaller ship detach from it? It's sort of like that, but without the detaching. Mom said it was a present she gave me early, and honestly it's the best one I could have ever asked for. Sadly, it's another addition in amazing vehicles that we get that just seem to disappear after we use them. Like, I want to say more about it, but I never got to use it long enough to really have anything more to say about it than this.
So, anyways. We went to the museum and, thanks to Cole messing around with his lava arms, we discovered Krux's hidden room where he had first started breeding the Vermillion and, more importantly, an entrance into the sewers under Ninjago City. From what I understand, the sewers were built a very, very long time ago, and they were basically more like paved caves than sewers. Because of this, they extended far beyond the city. If the Twins were using these tunnels to hide away their soldiers, then it could have led to their main base. Because of this, we called the Shadow down to us and followed the tunnels.
It was during this that we ran into someone that I didn't think I'd see again: Skales. Not only him, but his son. It turned out that they were tracking the Vermillion movements. Skales told us that the Vermillion were actually the offspring of the Great Devourer, and that meant that if enough of them were together, they would make a horde that would basically destroy Ninjago. This was, of course, something we had to stop.
There are two things that I wanted to say here. One, I still find it really upsetting that the Serpentine were basically forced into living underground like that. I mean… it wasn't exactly their fault, when I think about it. From what the ninja told me about the Serpentine legends, Chen basically played on their fear as an entire culture to make them enter into the Serpentine wars. Secondly, it was really Pythor that made the minto a force that Ninjago had to fear. The second that they were locked away again, they abandoned their wars which, made me think they maybe didn't want to even have them in the first place. I feel bad thinking that I'm partially to blame for locking an entire civilization underground, afraid if they came to the surface that they would be persecuted and treated like subhumans.
The second thing was this was the first time I met Skales Jr. He was a pretty cool kid, a little sassy but I could see how he and Skales were related. I don't have much to say other than that, but I wanted a little positive bit in here somewhere. Here's to hoping that Skales Jr. gets to grow up into a cool Serpentine, I guess!
So, thanks to Skales, we had a map of the Vermillion's movements and, more importantly, right to their base. We followed it all the way to the entrance to the swamps north of the city, where we found out that the warriors we'd been fighting were nothing more than an advanced guard. The entire swamp had been turned into nothing more than a breeding round, with hundreds of snakes no matter where we looked. We'd found the Time Twins' base. After some setbacks, we were ready to get in there and see how we could stop the Twins.
It turns out, I wasn't going to be the one that would do it this time.
"Ugh…" Lloyd sighed, "Let's just use that one for this chapter."
"Are you certain?" Zane asked, "I have the previous three recordings still saved. We can use sections of each one if you like."
"No, let's just use this one," Lloyd stretched his arms over his head, "This one I actually finished."
"I see," Zane paused, "Lloyd, where is your difficulty in recording this chapter coming from, if you have any ideas?"
Lloyd leaned forward, a curious look on his face. For some reason, doing this chapter had taken way more tries than he'd like to admit it did. Each time he'd tried, something else had tripped him up until he'd ended up with this chapter as it was.
"Just, everything about this thing feels weird," Lloyd groaned, "I don't know what it is! It's like, all that happened just, didn't happen like it should have? Maybe I'm just upset about the fact that the guys were just, ignoring me the entire time. You were basically the only one that wasn't acting like I was some idiot for wanting to be a Master, and you weren't even there for the first half of it!"
"I have thought about that," Zane leaned forward, "And compiled a theory on it. Would you like to hear it?" Lloyd nodded.
"I believe that the pushback that you were facing was due to the accelerated nature of your growth," Zane began, "You went from a child to being the savior of Ninjago very quickly. Because of that, the others still saw you, in some way, as a child. Seeing you as part of the team was something that we have all come to expect after training you, yet you surpassed your training so quickly that, for many of our adventures, it was possible to think about other things. However, when you decided to step up and become a Master, their perception of you was stuck on the feeling of you being someone they had trained and helped grow, and were no ready to see you take a step and surpass them yet."
"...So, you're saying that they still thought of me as the kid they trained?" Lloyd summarized. Zane gave an affirmative nod.
"I don't know if that makes me feel better," Lloyd sighed, "That kinda makes it worse. After all that we went through, they still saw me as a kid?"
"To our knowledge, the last thing that happened to you, Lloyd, was the loss of your father and you being taken away from us by Morro," Zane told him, "After what happened with him, no matter how much we told ourselves this wasn't our fault, some blame still rested with us. I believe that blame manifested in a desire to keep you safe and apart of the team. When you attempted to step outside of that role, the others felt as though they were losing their grip on you. Thus, they pushed back to you being a leader."
"And, how did you think of this, Zane?" Lloyd asked, still a bit lost.
"Because, regardless of my actions, I shared their feelings," Zane put a hand to his chest, "In some ways, you are still a child to us, Lloyd. You grew up so quickly by sacrificing your childhood for Ninjago that to this day it is hard to see you as the grown up that you truly are. We simply strive to make sure that we treat you as one, rather than hold you back. I would like to ask that you forgive us if we wronged you in that time," Zane bowed his head, "It was not our intention."
Put on the spot like this, Lloyd found himself stunned for words. He thought for a few moments about what he truly wanted to say, but his lips kept finding no purchase to make sounds on. Instead, Lloyd thought for a moment, then rocked up to his feet.
"Hey, it's alright, Zane," Lloyd extended his hand to him, "It's already over with. Let's not worry about the past and think about other things. Like the fact that we got the bowling rink reserved tonight!" He smiled awkwardly, "I forgive you guys and, I don't hold grudges. Let's not think about it, okay?"
"If that is your wish, Lloyd," Zane extended his hand to hold onto Lloyd's own, "Thank you."
"No problem,." Lloyd coughed a bit, then tugged, "Come on, I'm ready to get out of here. Let's go and have some fun."