Chapter One: Oeilvert's secrets
Kuja
I paced back and forth across the bridge of the Amadeo which happened to be one of Cid's newest non-mist ships. It had an amazing pearly white deck, and light blue chrome paint which blended it into the clouds so easily, and I often thought that other ships might not see her. Unlike her larger sisters, she could only carry four passengers, and no more then 4 tons of cargo. Yet I found myself in love with her non the less, as she had highly decorative rooms and could be flown solo.
The book Zidane had given me to read was a complete crock, stupid and poorly written to the last page. And while I had managed to read through all of those poor pages, I no longer agreed with his opinion that my salvation lay there. It was a pity that I had come to depend upon my younger bother so, I felt guilty now with the amount of effort he had taken to right things.
Now I took flight to Oeilvert, which I knew was currently occupied by some of Queen Garnet's henchmen. The leaders of Garnet's band were the overly breasted Lani and her new companion Serais, a delicate looking mage with magic to equal the Queen's. And of course I happened to be at a fair disadvantage as my own personal abilities lay with magic, which happened to be useless there.
Lucky it also made Serais useless as well.
The Amadeo's tracking system beeped impatiently at me and I found myself using a mental connection I'd build into the ship to shut the noise off. We'd reached the cliffs not more then 18 miles from where Oeilvert lay. I shuffled my way over to the window looking out on the enormous cliffs and the tiny archaic structure. Just outside of the building lay a moderately sized airship that happened to be suspended off the ground slightly as it was too treacherous to land there. I focused my mind slightly allowing it to reinforce the ships sensors, and then sent out a scan of the area below. Instantly I could feel the mage Serais inside the ship. She happened to be alone. Lani I could not feel which made me consider that she must have been in the depths of the structure, and a few Alexandrian soldiers were calmly pacing outside the building.
I sighed and came back into my body again, looking over the information that popped up on one of the ship's screens. It read back to me exactly what I had just determined, and a little something extra. There was a pair of moogles in the tiny structure's ground level.
I yawned and ordered the ship to land on the surface of the plateau we hovered over, and headed back to my room. There I dug out a pair of black pants, a black vest with throwing knives and long silky gloves which had a Mythril lace on the outside of them. I stared down at the large pile of shoes I just happened to have amassed on my last trip to Treno. A silver and black leather pair seemed ideal for this particular mission and I slipped them on. Hanging on the wall I noticed one of Zidane's old sets of daggers which he had given me to practice with. They hardly seemed practical, and I went for the more delicate and slight rapier.
I then rummaged through the top drawer of my bed stand and pulled out the leather face mask which had feathers of my late silver dragon implanted about the edges. I clipped it to my face and turned back to stare at myself in the mirror.
I hated the mask perhaps more then anything else I happened to own now, but it was a necessary precaution. And even though it had not been Zidane's idea, I still loathed my little brother for insisting upon my identity remaining confidential.
Oh how much better life would be if I didn't need to insure that Terra's technology remained safe from these foolish Gaian's. I also needed some of the wonderful databases which remained locked away safe in the mainframe of Oeilvert's system, and perhaps I had also come for the Portalists. Some of the eighteen rocks which were known to create portals through space instantly. I'd never told anyone about these, and luckily Garland took their secrete to the grave. Mikoto for all her vast knowledge about the rocks never knew that four of them had been relocated to Gaia for emergency circumstances. And I hadn't used them years ago when I'd sent Zidane on the chase for the Glug Stone because I worried he might use them to travel where he pleased.
I used one to create the portal into Memoria, but at that time everyone found me to be so immensely powerful that they completely believed I could create portals to other dimensions.
Even Mikoto believed that Memoria had been completely my own handy work.
But she was a silly little girl who couldn't use magic herself.
I sighed and sheathed the rapier on my side and wistfully headed out to the bridge of the ship to wait for nightfall.
Lani
"Oh you fucking retards, that's delicate!" I screamed at some more of the pluto knights which just happened to be oblivious to the fact that the face they were carting away was slipping off their cart.
"Sorry…" One of them murmured before jumping about to fix the situation.
I glared at them all wishing that Serais wasn't such as wimp. If she'd just learn how to hold a friggin spear then she could come down here and help out, but nooooo, she had to be so clumsy and weak that she couldn't handle that. Freaking mages always are helpless as kittens without their magic. And the more powerful they get the less they know about actual fighting.
Therefore today was looking as if it would suck just as much as most days.
That or it would suck like every day sucked since the beginning of time.
Oh lord how things sucked.
Sucking with the suckers.
"Suck, suck, friggity suck…"
A clatter from beside me caused me to jump and start screaming at some more Alexandrian soldiers, the blond babes just looked at me a little blankly before fixing the face they were carting off as well.
We moved out half the faces in that room, most of which were damaged, but Garnet had wanted every single piece. Even the scraps on the floor were carted out slowly by two of the dumbest pluto knights ever to walk the planet… more like the universe actually.
I ended up leaving just before the idiots were allowed to end for the night, and went off hunting through the maze for some monsters to take my aggression out on.
I found a few Orge's and they fell over with a few hits although one of them kept using the trouble knife on me which just pissed the hell out of me because I ended up curing it every time. And then just as I was finishing up a Garuda I noticed a figure with a slight body and silvery hair moving across one of the floors above me. I watch for a moment, a slight dread building up inside of me. There shouldn't be anyone down here because the guards were up top, and they'd never let anyone Garnet hadn't approved down here.
I looked about for a more direct way up onto the man's level and saw a pair of stairs around a corner to my right. Dashing for those I made my way up to his level and then looked about.
He was gone just like that.
I paced down the stone floor and then back up again.
Not more then twenty feet in the other direction there was a large wall, no doors between the steps I'd come up and the wall though.
"Wait a sec!" I barked, and hurried back towards the wall. I examined the wall closely and noticed a slight crease running in-between the rocks in the shape of a door. I knew there was no way those ancient Terran's would have built a stairway to nowhere. So I started to press in on different rocks, none of them budged. I tried to press rocks in a formation, I tried turning and pulling and every other method I could.
At last I sighed and gave in. The door might only open for Zidane, just as most of these old passage ways did. Which meant I'd need to get Lumos down here tomorrow to try and open the door. After all the guy was a genome, it ought to work for him.
Yawning slightly I moved down away from the door and back through the maze which lead out of decaying structure.
It was then that a thought hit me.
There had only ever been one genome with silver hair.
And I stopped dead in my tracks realizing whom I had seen.
Blank
I watched as Zidane stood idly maneuvering the Invincible about through the traffic of Lindblum. He seemed moderately distracted by something, as he kept on getting a little to close to some of the poor smaller ships. I figured he was probably engrossed in conversing with Mikoto or someone like that. God forbid he was talking to Kuja again, the fact that Zidane seemed to idolize his older brother always bothered me in the back of my mind.
"Hey! Zidane knock it off you almost took out that ship!" I yelled as the Invincible just scrapped past a cruse liner called the Sylvia.
"Sorry," he murmured to be before paying attention to his driving and safely landing the Invincible in it's own personal hanger in one of the many airship docks which were built almost a five miles away from the actual castle. From there we hopped into the one of the new buggies that ranged out to the airship docks.
"Yeah sorry about the flying I was talking with Kuja again." He said a little ashamed about himself.
I shrugged and tried not to give him any hints that it bothered me.
"Hey ya know I think I've got Dagger picking up on this mind speech thing, she's not really able to… erm… contact me first though. You know it's like I've got to send her a message first before she can start sending anything back."
"No way? Man you ought to show me how to do that." I said grinning, and hoping that maybe if he could talk to Garnet he'd lay off talking to his brother.
"I'm not sure it'd work with you. No offense but you haven't ever been good at magic, and it seems like that a key in doing this."
"Oh really?"
"Yeah."
"You ever try it with Vivi?" I asked.
"Naw, but I should, I know him and Mikoto speak like this some times."
"Oh really, so how's crazy doing anyway?"
Zidane snorted at my nick name for his little sister. "She's alright. I think she's staying in the Desert Palace since she's been reading up on all this old Terran crap." He shrugged at me and rested his face on his gloved hand. I looked over his attire, nothing too different from the usual. Blue jeans, a white vest with a long sleeved blue undershirt. And a pair of white leather gloves with some frilly stuff for trim.
"I thought she was like a computer and already knew all that."
"Well for Terra yeah, but she told me she's been looking into things that Garland documented about Gaia. Ya know he has all this information about Ipsen's Castle and how these King's used to rule it proclaiming divine intervention when the mirrors would glow when they touched them?"
"Don't they glow for everyone?"
"Yeah but the King would say that it only glowed because he was on the throne, and when ever someone would try and murder a King he's steal one of the mirrors so that the wall face would stop glowing."
"Damn, people were confused back then."
"Oi, there's a lot of information that I gave Dagger a while back concerning her home town Madain Sari. There was a lot in the book Garland wrote about it. He even talked about all the summons that they ever discovered. It was really amazing. Kuja told me that's why he went after the Garnet rather then Eiko, since he knew Alexander was hers." Zidane explained to me as he thought over some of the things he'd read himself from that book.
The buggy came to a stop and we wondered out into the business district and up towards one of the new restaurants built after the destruction. The one Zidane lead me too was called The Hero, which I found slightly ironic.
"Yeah, yeah…" He said as we entered and one of the waitresses greeted Zidane and took us over to a nice booth. "But you know I get free food for coming here, they said it makes them more popular if I show up every once and a while."
"I'll believe that!" I said grinning and then scooped up one of the menus. "The hell?!" I said as I saw what all of the dishes were called. "Zidane's Ulitma Weapon, a spicy pasta dish with Ulitma kick?"
"Read Dagger's!" He said grinning at me.
I looked down and spotted it just under Zidane's. "Queen's Eidolon soup? That just makes me feel bad for the Eidolons, or the people who eat that."
"Then there's Carol Salad, a tasty salad with butterfly wings and summoner horn shaped croutons. Vivi's is Black Mage Cereal, it's got all these little black mage hats and little black chocolate things with yellow dots on them…. I think those are suposta to be his face, and it has his Octagon Staff thinger in there as well. And Coral Assassin Filet, which is some random grilled fish. Crescent Cake and Sir Rusty Morning Toast. Then if you look at the drinks…" Zidane said flipping his menu over. "You've got Mechanical Menace Garland, which has two shots of that black Burmecian liquor and three cherries in the center. Flame Star which is White Alexandrian wine mixed with orange juice and a cherry. The Desert Palace which has Daguerreo Spirits, that weird looking purple stuff, and strawberries mixed into sand at the bottom."
I looked down at the rest of the list noticing suddenly that I had a drink named after myself. "Hey! Petrified Blank, two shots of Conde Petie Santo and Evil Forest Ale."
"Yeah, they interviewed me and Amarant and… Eiko to get the details for coming up with all sorts of specific stuff."
"Whoa." I scanned over the drinks again noticing a One Eyed Master, which actually contained the eye of a lizard, and The Henchman's Axe, which had a tiny miniature axe that was a perfect replica of Lani's own axe.
"Mikoto's Brethren is really good." Zidane mentioned looking up towards me. "It's a basket of chicken strips with a honey mustard and ranch sauce. It's suposta symbolize me and Kuja."
"Weird. Whatcha going to get?"
"The Doomsday Surprise, it's actually BBQ ribs with this extra spicy black pepper sauce."
"Alright…" I glanced down the menu again trying to sort out what didn't sound disgusting and found the Grilled Iifa Tree. Which had all these pieces of grilled broccoli stuck together with cheese to form the Iifa Tree. "So… what's a good side dish?"
"I like the Black mage tots, they're shaped like little mages and you get em with this tomato sauce. Or you could get the Choco Toasters, which are little pieces of bread shaped like chocobos and it comes with that honey mustard stuff."
I nodded and decided to go with the mages as a side. Zidane waved down one of the waitresses who had her hair styled like Eiko's and wore a fake horn on her head. "How can I help you Zidane?" She said a little bit to flirtatiously for a guy everyone knew was married to the Queen.
"Yeah, I'm getting the Doomsday Surprise with a side of Choco Toasters and a Terra Mixer."
"Alright, and for you Sir?" She said turning to me.
"Grilled Iifa Tree with a side of Black mage tots and a Petrified Blank." I said grinning at Zidane, he attempted not to laugh back.
"Righto, I'll have those out to you boys in justa second." She said before bouncing off.
I watched her for a moment, and then looked back over at Zidane. "I always wondered how I tasted petrified."
He burst into laughter.
Kuja
I brushed my hands over the panel and attempted to get the generator attached to the main database back online. I was in a large command type room with barely surviving Terran technology surrounding me. Vine like wires looped about the walls lazily and large eyeball like windows glanced out onto different levels of Oeilvert. The main panel before me looked quite tree like in the way that the main buttons branched out from a central screen, and the wires connecting it to the rest of Oeilvert looked like roots.
It amused me vaguely that the Terrians who'd lost all plant life had tried desperately to make their technology reflect nature.
I noted that the main generator was still at 40 function, but the one connected to the main database had malfunctioned thousands of years ago. Most likely something in the earth's surface had shifted to block it's view of the sun, inevitably causing the generator to fail.
I bungled over a few more buttons and then noticed that there were four storage levels to this ancient facility. One of them had already been breached by Lani's little team, yet the other three were secure and undiscovered. I cast the eyeball to my left on a scan of the area from command room to the tiny doorway which secured the first storage level. Sure enough I saw a pair of Alexandrian guards who were happily pacing back and forth training against some dumb monsters. However I didn't quite expect to see Lani standing directly outside the door from which I had entered. She was inspecting the wall with a certain amount of fervor, and keep trying to press in stones or turn them. Laughed a little as she became more and more frustrated about the task.
Yet finally she stomped off presumably to attempt another method for opening the doorway.
I had sensed a genome on the second floor, so it was reasonable that she would snatch him up to open the door for her.
I sighed and entered in a command that this particular genome was to be excluded from entry at any doorway which he had not already visited.
The computer accepted dully and I headed out of the command room to wonder off towards the first storage level. I turned through a series of moderately maze like passageways and then down onto a slider as I preferred to call them. It set up an anti wind barrier and then slid down in a circular motion towards the first storage level. The circular block stopped rather stiffly sending me slightly off balance. I growled at the malfunction and headed through the passageway before me.
The room was full of engine parts that Cid would die for.
It was now becoming apparent to me that I'd need a nice little team of my own if I were to relocate any of this machinery. And I couldn't afford to have that happen since I need to remain "confidential". I slammed my head into the doorway beside me and started to look through the machinery. A small magical time field had prevented this room from aging, however once I opened the door the field shut down. Most likely it wouldn't be turning on again unless I redid the field myself, and forced the computer to take over the operation of the magic.
I sneezed slightly as a light layer of dust started to build up in the air from my movements. And finally I noticed something I hadn't expected to see at all. There were several doors leading off of this room. I headed for the first one and pressed it open. The other side was littered with weapons.
Not the sort of weapons a single person goes about using. These were the weapons of nations.
These were nuclear warheads, stationed about on little platforms, all with little computer terminals attached to them.
I approached the first of them and the little terminal sparked to life, ready and waiting for me to type in the access code to dismantle the barrier around the warhead.
I sighed with relief at knowing that the access codes would have been in Pandemonium, which I had destroyed.
"Well at least something good came out of that." I murmured to myself. And started back towards the other room.
I spent the night looking through the three undiscovered levels of storage, and rigged the slider which went all the way down to the level where the Gulug stone was kept to remain unresponsive to anyone but myself and Zidane. I then by passed some more security codes to ensure that the front doors themselves would now remain unresponsive to anyone but a genome.
That ought to almost halt Lani's current project of taking the faces from the Room of Inquiry away, and should prevent her from doing any more exploring.
The first room had mostly machinery for large Invincible type battle ships. It also had the regular weapons that you could connect to the ships, such as the nukes and some torpedoes ranging from slight class to mega. The second level, which happened to be the one which Lani broke into, contained mainly document crystals and a few databases, but the magic field in this room had fail almost two hundred years before. So there would be little if any information they'd receive even from the crystals.
The third level held regular transport vehicles including one of the most beautiful cars that the Terrians perhaps ever created. While the fourth level held the stones and the knowledge of the ancients. There were mainly crystals in here, each relating information about a single magic spell. There were also sealed magic stones that explained the lack of anyone's ability to use magic here. I sighed and pondered just dismantling the stones. But because of Lani's little mage companion I decided against it, she would after all, be able to sense me quite easily if the seals were to be taken down.
Around four in the morning I found myself getting sleepy and headed back up to the main floor, where I watched the Alexandrian guards sleeping on duty and slipped out one of the numerous holes in the walls. I ordered the Amadeo to drop back down next to the cliff and entered the tiny ship before leaving the ground behind for some cliffs about two miles away where I'd leave the airship to perch out of sight during the day.
Edit: May 18, 2008