A Step Onto Chronos Chapter Six
The Magic Village
Shadic the Hedgehog
Disclaimer: I own CT! YES! Oh, wait. I'm dreaming...
When the Gate travel ended, we were surrounded by darkness and I was pinned aginst something very much like a wall, by something that felt alot like another person.
"Um, guys? Whoever's closest to the closeet door, could you open it?" I said. I heard a muffled "We're in a closet?", a bit of banging around, and then, "Ah, there it is!" What I could see got brighter as the door was opened and we all fell out.
"Who are you and what were you doing in our closet!" yelled a squeaky voice.
"Yeah! Who do you think you are? Coming in and out of our closet at all times of the day!" reprimanded another.
"What are you talking about?" whispered the first voice. "This is the first time something like this has ever happened!"
"I just thought it sounded good."
"Uh, 'scuse me," I said getting up. "I'm terribly sorry about the whole closet thing, but there's a temporal anomaly in there we need to keep using. So that we can save the world and degrade your crappy dictator-mayor."
"Reeeeallly," the first Imp, with brown skin, rolled his eyes. "So yer what? Time travelers?"
"That is correct," spoke Crono. "And it is highly imperitive that we occasionally requisition the use of your wardrobe in our quest to save the future from the Apocalypse." I was slightly stunned by this amazing use of words from someone I didn't know could talk a few weeks ago, and so was everyone else. By the former, not the latter.
"Um, o-okay, s-sure. You can use our closet..." said the other Imp, a blue one.
"What's wrong with you?" asked the Brown Imp. "By the way, good speech, are you emissaries from the King of Guardia, too?"
"No, no, no. He's just another human being," I replied quickly."But he will make for an excellent King," I added under my breath.
"You should see the old man to the west, he's really nice," tossed in the Blue Imp.
"Right, we'll do that," concluded Lucca. "If we want to make it before nightfall we should get going." We headed for the door and Marle just had to speak up.
"Why are you being so nice? I thought Mystics hated humans."
"Our motto's forgive and forget, but not many others seem to agree with us," answered the Brown Imp.
"Oh, okay! Bye!" Marle waved cutely and followed us out the door. As we were walking into the sunset, Marle asked me something odd, "Hey Joe, what happened to you when Spekkio gave you your magic?"
"What do you mean?" I replied.
"What do you mean, what do I mean?"
"The only freaky thing I noticed about my magic was that I felt like I was being burnt to death, but I could tell I wasn't being hurt."
"That's odd. My magic just felt nice and warm," said Lucca, puzzled.
"I felt a tingly, but the lightning bolt didn't hurt," added Crono.
"And mine was refreshingly cold," tossed in Marle. "But what I'm talking about was your eyes, they looked like cat eyes, except they were red, then they turned completely the colour of molten metal! And as an extra-creepy thing, there was a shade of a demonic being around you. It was about two feet taller, with a snake-like tail, and huge wings!"
"Not only that," added Lucca. "But the shade had orange, scaled skin; dark, crimson hair; and it looked at me weirdly."
"How so?" I asked. I was beginning to get freaked out, because I hadn't ssen any such shade.
"It, it almost looked like it... cared about me!" she whispered. This really scared us. A demon who cared? It was freaky. What really surprised me, though, was that it seemed to reflect my feelings, because I cared about Lucca, too.
"Erm, can we get off of theis subject? I'm getting really freaked out," said Marle, looking worried.
"Yeah," replied Crono. "Why don't we try out our magic? We might need it."
"Good idea. Let's find a place with rocks and other hard stuff," I said. "There's a cave just over there." I pointed just north of Melchior's house, which we could see by now, at a large mountain.
"How do you kno- Oh, right. Other world, game thingy, right."
"Shall we?"
"I dunno," replied Lucca. "It's getting dark. Let's just stop at Melchior's place, see if we can spend the night, THEN go to the cave."
"Okay," I shrugged. Then my brain caught up with my ears. "Hol' up. How'd you know thatit was Melchior's place?"
"He mentioned to me that he lived on the eastern continent."
"Oh."
We got to Melchior's house and he let us stay the night for free, and even supplied breakfast. We said our thanks, bought some stronger weapons, then headed north. As we approached the cave, we began seeing signs saying stuff like: "Go away!" or "Turn back or die!" or, my favorite, "Enter the Magic Cave! See amazing creatures before they eat you!" We ignored the signs and, when we entered, a pair of Henches yelled, "Death to the Mystic's Enemies!"
We didn't even bother pulling out our weapons. Instead, we had agreed earlier, that we just use magic. Lucca and Marle would take the first fight, and Crono and I would take the next. Apparently the girls already had a combo spell, because Marle froze one of them solid, followed by Lucca's Fire spell. They repeated this to the other, melting them both into oddly coloured puddles.
"Well, the Antipode attack in the first battle. That was certainly unexpected," I laughed as we continued. "Hey Crono, you got any ideas for what we could do for a combo spell?"
"Nah," he replied. "We should just hit each one on our own. Fire and Lightning are too much alike."
"Right."
We reached the next battle field and attacked immediatly. Crono raised his arms and concentrated, causing a bolt of lightning to smash into the Hench, disintegrating him in one shot. I attacked next, and I didn't like it. I concentrated the power of my magic and felt pain. A LOT of pain. Flames ripped through my skin and I screamed in agony. I concentrated all the pain and fire I could muster into a ball that I threw into the Hench. It slid in and his eyes widened. Heat began flowing out of his pores, his scars, any kind of opening between his guts and the outside world until he melted away like a snowball in Hell. I panted, shocked that my first spell was Point Flare.
"Are you okay?" asked Lucca.
"I feel like crap," I replied. "I can't believe my own spell didn't burn me into oblivion! But, as an upside, it was a frickin' Point Flare!" I sighed and stood up straighter. "It was a minor one to be sure, but Point Flare is a spell even Lavos uses! I can't wait for my second level spell!"
We moved on, fighting the occasional Jinn Bottle and Weevil, until we found the Heckran's chamber. Along the way, Crono learned Spincut (stupid name, he doesn't spin at all), Marle learned Cure, I learned a move I called Sonic Blade (I hold my sword away from me and fly past my enemy uber-fast, slicing them in two), and Lucca learned Safe, a barrier against physical attacks.
Before we entered I noticed a little, sparkling sphere outside the entrance. "What's a Save Point doing in a real world?"
"That's called a Safe Sphere here," Lucca replied. "The area around it repels monsters, so that people can sleep peacefully here. No one knows their origins, but they've been around since recorded history."
"Hn, musta been the Entity's fault."
"Who's the Entity?" Asked Crono.
I grinned. "You must wait for a forest to rise from the desert and a robot to work for four hundred years for that question to be asked again. You might just get an answer then."
"You suck."
"Love you, too." We laughed about that and I went on to explain the Heckran's weaknesses. "Use only Magic, physical attackswill cause a severe counter-attack. After a while he will get into a defensive stance and will counter ANYTHING we throw at him, so save the healing stuff for then. Unless one of us happens to be horribly wounded."
We charged into the chamber, not pulling out our weapons. Heckran screamed, "Death to the Mystic's enemies!" We attacked with every offensive spell in our arsenal. I was getting mentally burned with every attack I used, and, thankfully, I only had to use it three times before he entered counter-mode. Marle gave each of us an Ether to counter the magical side-effects. It turned out that over-using our magic caused the initial feeling of getting our magic to increase: Crono's body started twitching a little due to electricity, Marle was shivering, Lucca was sweating, and I was turning red, as if from heat stroke. Lucca handed us all a potion for the scratches Heckran was leaving with his claws.
As I drank the healing liquids I thought of a new attack. It would hurt worse than Point Flare, but it might just finish off Heckran. I explained this to Crono and the gang. They understood and stepped away. The Heckran returned to his "relaxed" pose and I began charging my magic. I forced the flames into a sphere of barely contained energy. It grew brighter and brighter until it was pure white. My brain felt as though it had gone light-speed in the sun's corona. I threw the ball at Heckran, crying the name for the heck of it: "Chaos Flare!"
It struck the Heckran, ripped a hole into his gut and exploded, blowing him in half. The explosion reached out across the room, mysteriously passing right through us. What was left of the monster attempted to claw at us, but when that failed, he panted, "If only... the great... Magus, who... created Lavos four... hundred years ago... had destroyed... the Humans..." He closed his eyes and faded into dust.
"Whoa," Crono gawked. "Magus created Lavos? By the way, nice move."
"Thanks," I panted, before chugging a couple of Ethers. "But it certainly takes a lot out of ya."
"So how're we gonna get back to the Middle Ages?" asked Marle.
"At the end of this room is a pool of water containing a vortex that'll take us back to Truce. To be specific, Lucca's place."
"Cool! Let's go!" Lucca ran off and dived into the pool head first. I followed after, though a little more cautious, and ended up being shot out of the ocean. I landed in a tree and jumped out just before Crono landed. But he wasn't as fast: Marle landed right in his lap. They jumped out quickly and I think I had two reasons why: 1. They were extremely embarrassed, and 2. the branch sounded ready to snap.
"Well, shall we, um, head for the, er, yeah," mumbled Crono. His face was bright red and seemeddetermined to look everywhere but at Marle. Marle reflected him to a T. Lucca and I glanced at each other and nearly broke out laughing.
"The Gate at the fairgrounds?" I supplied.
"Yeah, that's it," Marle muttered. "the Gate at the fairgrounds."
Lucca looked out at the sun far in the west. "Huh. Looks like we were in that cave all day. Why don't we stop at my house for the night?" Everyone agreed and, as soon as we arrived, went to bed or couch or floor, in my case. I woke up in the middle of the night to see Crono shuffling into the kitchen.
"Midnight snack?" I got up to join him.
"Yeah," he yawned.
"Ya wanna know sumthin', Crono?" I sat down at the kitchen table and Crono pulled out some cookies from a drawer.
"What?"
"That demonic image that was supposedly surrounding me sounded almost like a character I had created back home. His name was Barog Firestorm. The oddest part was, I think he reflected my feeling."
I glanced up from the table to see Crono with half a cookie sticking out of his mouth, looking bewildered. He quickly finished eating the cookie and said, "There's a legend, I suppose you could call it, of four beings who helped the making of this world by protecting the person drawing it up. They went by the names up Barog Firestorm, Gaia Earthknight, Kaze Hurricane,-"
"-and Frigida Icestorm," Ifinished with him. "I created those names and characters! (A/N: and don't you readers forget it! ): ) To imagine they'd follow me to another world! The Elementals, children of Creation." We looked at each other completely baffled, and finished our cookies in silence.
As we got up to return to sleep, Crono said, "The only thing about our legen that isn't complete is what the creators and protectors looked like. Maybe you're an avatar or something?"
"Yeah. Right," I couldn't help but be skeptical. "'Night Crono."
"You too."
We woke up the next day and left for the fairgrounds. Crono and I said nothing about our late-night chat, but I felt seriously weirded out that my creations would follow me to another world. When we reached the Gate I told the party that we would end up at the End of Time and would do so pretty much every time we went through a Gate. We activated the Gate Key and went straight to the year 600, wasting no time.
"You call it insanity, I cal it religion"
-Shadic the Hedgehog, Author. (That's me!)