melodiesofeternity | [Closed] Retrieval of Expensive Works of Engineering

A smile pulls at the corners of Ashelia's lips at the display of support from Frisk and Snow White. It disappears a second later though, as she slowly starts to realize how much he'll need it. Terra is certainly beautiful in a quietly alien way, but it really is too quiet. What happened here?

"We need to know what's about to happen," Ashelia interjects gently. "We can't be taken by surprise again."

Kuja draws a shaking breath, steadying as he feels the touch on either side. “Terra,” he says, quietly. “It’s a world that hasn’t seen life for eons. There’s monsters, and not much else. I was… created, here.”

He sighs, placing one hand against his forehead. “My formative years were spent here, and I visited on numerous occasions. I have many memories of this place, and none of them were pleasant. What to expect… it could be as benign as my first attempts at spellcasting, or the first time I summoned Opalescence. It could be unpleasant but relatively safe, like the night I was banished. Or…”

He sighs. “We could be looking for a means to leave the planet. Before… Before I completely take leave of my senses and try my hand at world-killing.”

Frisk nods along with Kuja's explanation, although they keep on stealing furtive glances at their surroundings. It was all so... beautiful, albeit in an incredibly unsettling, alien way. Their eyes widen when Kuja reaches the end of his exposition. "Wait, what? 'World-killing?' I thiiiink you owe us a more thorough explanation than that, mister."

Kuja sighs again. "It's a very long story, Frisk. One that starts long before I was created. I've... told you before, that I was, not to put too fine a point on it, a monster." Still am, in most respects. I've only got better at hiding it.

"I'm afraid in any respect we may lack the time to cover my life's history. Depending on where, exactly, this memory begins, we may have minutes to escape, or we may not have a time limit at all-"
He pauses, listening as the low thrum of an airship's engines approach. "An airship. That is... not the Invincible. Where-"

He finds his attention drawn to it. Flying low in the sky, more solid and more real than anything else here, an airship, too far away to see the deck, but he knows, in the pit of his gut, who the pilot is, and that there was only one time that the Hilda Garde appeared on Terra.

"The short version is that we need to get to that airship, and we have, perhaps, half an hour to do so. I'm told that you don't die, strictly speaking, in the Dream Width, but even so I'd greatly prefer to avoid the experience of it."

Snow White vaguely remembered being trapped in the Dream Width before. Back when Dylas and Selphie had been the ones to help him escape. He'd relived that memory countless times. Perhaps instead of death, that was what awaited those in the Dream Width.

Either way, he didn't want to do that again.

"Where you were created..." Snow White didn't entirely understand how that worked and he wasn't sure if he wanted to know. But it was important to Kuja. He nodded.

"Half an hour. Okay. Well, let's get going. You can tell us the rest on the way."

Ashelia's mouth is set in a thin line, her jaw clenched. Father above. Nothing like working with a tight deadline.

As if in answer, she extends a hand, casting Hastega on the group. This is precisely why she enjoys going on missions to the Dream Width - having her full arsenal of magick at her beck and call is no small comfort.

"Lead the way, Kuja." Her voice is terse, but neutral overall. She's focused on getting out of here without being lost in the Dream Width before anything else.

Edited 2018-11-25 20:36 (UTC)

"Thirty minutes. Okay, we can do this in thirty minutes." Frisk takes a deep breath, their red scarf fluttering in the stale wind. "Let's get--" Wait, scarf? Frisk looks down, and finds that they're dressed in entirely different attire: simple, functional plate mail armor, a tattered green cape, and a red scarf. "Okay, this... this is new." At least it feels like they can still move-- holy shit a sword.

A ruby longsword forms in Frisk's hand, which changes to a floating shield with a gesture. "That's... okay," Frisk says, shaking their head to clear away the confusion. "Alright, whatever. Like Ash said, we need to get a move on, so let's mosey."

Kuja does, indeed, take notice of the change in attire, but he doesn't comment on it. The idiosyncrasies of the Dream Width are quite beyond him. He's moving now, at any rate, running across the barren terrain and down the ancient path. Bran Bal is this way, he knows that much. "The rest of the story... fine. Terra has been dead for... I'm not certain of the exact timescale. Many millennia. The ancient Terrans knew they were going extinct, so they took great pains to ensure that they were preserved in spirit, and created... well, I suppose you'd call him a golem. Garland. Immortal, powerful, and focused on the singular goal of eventually restoring Terra to its former glory. Garland found another planet, much younger, which was inhabited by a living Crystal, and so thought to parasitize that planet's Crystal and, in doing so, corrupt the planet's cycle of souls in order to inject Terran souls and, thus, create a Terra reborn."

He passes a pool of water, surface still as glass, turning to look back at the three following. "He wasn't pleased with the slow rate of conversion, however, and decided the cycle needed an extra... push. A major event to speed the process and disrupt the cycle as much as possible." Kuja sighs. "He needed an agent to act on Gaia and return as many souls to Gaia as possible. A 'Reaper', so to speak. None of you are stupid, so I hazard you can guess where this leads."

"So he created you to artificially recycle those souls," Snow White guessed. "Flood them back so new ones would come out."

Snow White wasn't sure how Garland could control which souls were born, but perhaps it didn't matter. Perhaps with enough extra souls in the system, Terran ones would statistically start popping out. Perhaps it wasn't Garland's power at all, but whatever the Terrans had done in preparation.

They reminded Snow of the way the Grimm brothers had cheated death with their magic and his nose wrinkled with disgust. "They should have faced their mortality with dignity."

"That's a terribly diplomatic way of putting it," Kuja replies, with distaste. "But yes. Expedite the return of Gaian souls so that Terran ones could be inserted in their place, through the most efficient means possible. Manipulating a power-hungry queen into starting a war, for instance."
He crests a hill and... has to stop. Not far away, a very small settlement, another airship, looming overhead, one that Snow and Ashe, at least, have seen before. His attention, however, is focused more closely on the fortress in the distance, a monument of black stone. "Ah. And there it is."

Frisk is uncharacteristically silent while they run along with the party as Kuja relates his tale. No quips, no attempts to lighten the mood. Their eyes are shadowed as they ponder the implications of what their friend is saying. They'd known that Kuja had a rough past, but... they didn't pry, and Kuja didn't pry back. Now they regretted that.

They wanted to say it was hard to reconcile the Kuja they knew with... that. But it was all too easy to imagine. They finally do speak up, albeit in an oddly quiet voice. "...so. What does that have to do with this place blowing up?"

Ashelia's uncomfortable squirming at the mention of a 'power-hungry queen,' is interrupted when she spots the Invincible. She looks from the ship to Kuja and back again. That's not what he's looking at. But surely, the airship is how we are to escape... She follows his gaze to the fortress, eyebrows furrowed, before noticing Frisk's uncharacteristic silence.

Taking into account what bread crumbs Kuja had let out about his past previously, it wasn't a huge jump in logic for Ashelia to get to the conclusion of the sad tale herself. "It would seem to me, that perhaps the Reaper has something to do with that. No?" She fixes Kuja in her gaze, jaw clenched. Now's not the time to be pulling any punches. Ashelia may have come here of her own free will, but she's clearly not going to let sentiment get in the way of her escaping. It's hard to think about anything else, faced with tragedy on such a grand scale.

Snow White wasn't angry the way Ashe was. He was simply resigned. This was the past, after all. Being angry about it wasn't going to change anything. Besides... they were ~~just humans~~ unknown to him, personally.

"That's Kuja's ship," he explained to Frisk instead, pointing it out. "In the memory. So... you can assume it probably isn't here just for a visit."

Kuja stares at the Invincible, drifting over the black fortress. Like so much else here, there’s a faint, ethereal sense to it, as though it’s not quite there. “The Reaper, no. Just a Doll with delusions of competence and more power than sense.”
He starts walking, again, at a brisk pace. There’s a glance back at Frisk, and a sigh. “The short version is that I spent over a decade playing along with Garland to avoid my own destruction, in an effort to obtain a weapon strong enough to challenge him. I’m not going to pretend there was any noble goal to stop him from wiping Gaia clean of life aside from the extreme inconvenience that would have been,” he sneers, coming to a stop as the path branches, one leading in the direction of the village and another up to a platform. “Here,” he says, climbing the steps. Carved into the stone is a circle, inlaid with runes in Terran. “We don’t need to walk the whole way, at least.”
This is where it ends, I suppose. It was never going to last forever, anyway.
Kuja waits for the others to catch up, arms crossed. “Today, I find out that my life’s work has been for nothing, that I’ve been outwitted at every turn, and that Garland, fully expecting me to turn traitor to his cause, built in an expiration date. That my days, such as they are, were numbered. I didn’t… take it gracefully.”

Edited 2018-11-30 02:14 (UTC)

...at least Kuja was being honest. Frisk could give him that, at least. He wasn't trying to hide what he did, at least not anymore. They continue to listen to his tale, expression flat, as the group traverses the ethereal ruins of Terra.

Frisk could sympathize with Kuja, though. The choice (it always came back to choices, didn't it?) to leave was there, true, but considering how many times Garland had apparently pulled one over him... they couldn't blame him for staying. Frisk could blame Kuja for all the lives he took, though. Regardless of who gave the order, the blood was on his hands.

They could guess where his story was going to go next. "So when you realized you were about to die, you had a tantrum and destroyed this place," they say in a flat voice. At least it sounded like it was a victimless crime.

That sounded logical to Snow White. No wonder Kuja had been talking about "death." If they were still on this planet, they would be wiped out whenever the other Kuja destroyed it.

Well, in theory. Snow White didn't exactly want to find out what would happen.

"How much time do we have left?" he asked, stepping beside Kuja onto the platform.

"Time enough," Kuja replies. He steps on the platform as well, the runes begin to glow... and the sensation of teleportation may be an unpleasant one, but when the party emerges, they stand in the entryway of a castle, all black stone in organic shapes, a long corridor ending in a staircase leading up.

"Ten minutes, perhaps. We'd best hurry. The castle is heavily populated with monsters, but pay them no mind; none of them are a threat to me, and I'm... not going to let anything happen to you." He takes off at a run, now, gathering a Flare spell in one hand, ready to release it at the first sign of trouble.

Regardless of Kuja's apparent world-ending strength, Ashelia draws her sword. As comforting as the protection of such a mage might be, she's not going to be caught by surprise this time around. She gives Snow White and Frisk cursory nods before taking off to follow Kuja. As they run, Ashelia extends another hand, casting Faith on the man in front of her. She may have mixed feelings about him at the moment, but she's not stupid - further bolstering his power will only help the group make it to the ship in time.

Frisk eyes bulge out at Kuja's casual display of power, but they keep running, spurred on by Ashelia's Hastega. Dammit, they were missing their Ninja speed more than ever now. And their SOUL Mage abilities appeared to be missing as well. Well, there was nothing to it but to try and figure out what they could do in Kuja's memories...

Grasping a power deep within themself, Frisk can feel their steel will harden into a shield for their allies. They raise their hand, and a red heart shines on the party as they cast Courage, raising the defense of all their allies. "Okay. That's... apparently a thing I can do here," they say, eyebrow raised.

That was... an odd feeling. Snow White hadn't been summoned in such a way in quite a while at this point. That was the only thing he could think of as equivalent to how they'd just traveled, yet no one held the Grimoire.

"How...?" he asked, brow furrowed as he ran to keep up with the others. "What kind of magic was that?"

Even with the asterisk system on Vaikuntha, he was getting used to strange new things. This wasn't Vaikuntha. Strangely enough, whatever Frisk just did seemed to surprise the child, too. So... that didn't seem to be from Vaikuntha, either.

Snow White wondered what he would be able to do here.

"Teleportation circle. Make a runic array, feed it a little mana, and everything within the circle is transported to a matching circle elsewhere."

The shield is appreciated, as Kuja climbs the stairs two at a time, keeping back enough to ensure that the others stay close but not slowing down by any means- "Observatory, observatory, where the hell is the observatory, gods it's been so long since I've been in this damned castle- here!"

Kuja rounds a corner, coming to a large chamber with a spiral staircase leading into the ceiling, crystals and instruments littering the walls, all seemingly monitoring some arcane process. The walls shake, and up above, there's a scream of pain that sounds... draconic. "Less than five minutes, probably. But we're close. Just up one level and then we're home free, I can get up to it and pilot it down."

As he climbs the stairs a final time, coming out onto a wide, raised platform on the roof of the castle overlooking a massive, crimson crystal, he has to stop for a moment. It's a sight from not all that long ago, as a bearded, elderly man in black armor, a crystalline orb pulsing in his chest like a heart, wages a pitched battle, eight-on-one- and, terrifyingly, holds his own with contemptuous ease. Perhaps it's something about the way the crystal in his chest seems to suck in the light around it, or the way he somehow seems more heavy than the group surrounding him-
A knight held aloft by psychokinetic force alone, choking.
A man with flame-red hair, on the ground, unmoving.
A young woman with a staff, bringing him back into the fight.
A slavering humanoid in a chef's hat, frozen in time.
Two children, a boy with a hat and a girl with a horn, bloody, exhausted, still trying to cast.
A ratlike woman with a spear, ripped out of the sky by a gravity spell.
And at the center of it all, a boy with a tail like Kuja's, charging with twin daggers at Garland, pink-red fur sprouting as his body glows with a furious light, forcing the old man backwards, to defend himself.

Kuja stares, for a moment, transfixed. He hadn't seen this before, hadn't paid much attention to it. He'd been... busy.

Overhead, the Hilda Garde approaches the looming Invincible.

Ashelia follows Kuja closely, feeling more and more uncomfortable the further into the castle they penetrate. She's only experienced stillness similar to this once before, and there was something (some things) extremely unpleasant waiting for her at the end of that particular trip. So, when she's confronted with the battle against Garland, she's only as surprised as any RPG protagonist might be. She spares a glance upwards. Two airships now? Hopefully Kuja knew which one they'd be able to commandeer.

"Kuja! Do they win? Should we intervene?" Business-minded as Ashelia might be, and with full knowledge that this is only a memory, she's still having trouble seeing those two children struggle so. "Which ship do we take? Kuja!"

Okay, that? Now that was terrifying. They instinctively take a step back, brushing a few stray hairs out of their face as they gulp. "Um, Kuja, who... who the hell is that? And, um, do we need to help those... those people?" Unfortunately, Frisk could hazard a guess--and maybe something more. They squint at the golem, calling upon that same power to Check Garland. "I'm all for, you know. Just hanging out and waiting to get on the ship and not messing with the crazy-looking tin tyrant."

"They win," comes the slightly-hoarse reply. Kuja pulls his attention away from Garland, a flicker of doubt showing in the old man's eyes as Zidane's assault continues, furious and unchecked, moving with inhuman speed- and already the others are rallying, joining the fray as Garland is forced further and further back.

Kuja looks up at the airships, knowing which one he's got to claim. "Please stay out of the way. I'll bring it down. We don't want to be here when everything goes wrong." He rises, then, propelled into the sky by force of magic alone. It was a trick he hadn't used often- it was taxing without the insane power of Trance, but he'd almost forgotten the simple elation of it, of being unconstrained by such petty concepts as gravity... but there's work to do. Already, the smaller airship is drifting, listing to the side without a pilot to hold the wheel.

On the ground, there's an explosion of lethal, violent energy, and Garland is thrown backwards, as the tailed boy's Trance fades, his body shaking with exertion... and as Kuja rises into the sky, there's an eerie symmetry, for a moment, as another Kuja descends, his face alight with a perverse glee.

The Reaper lands in front of Garland, laughing as though enjoying a private joke that nobody else has got yet.

"I must say... I truly adore you all."

Seeing that Kuja again, closer this time, more... vicious... It sent a shiver down Snow White's spine. That wasn't the Kuja he knew, but it was the Kuja that had been before. He needed to remember it was the same man.

For now, though, he just hoped that the memory remained self-contained and he wouldn't have to face the ~~beautiful~~ monster. This deep in the Dream Width, Snow could feel his original power coming back, buzzing at his fingertips, but he knew it wouldn't be enough to take on the full power of Kuja.

Still, kukri in hand, Snow White stood defensively in front of Frisk -- just in case.

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just realized i can get all deltarune up in this shit to match the rpg aesthetic

does that make kuja the susie of this group

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realized I’ve misremembered things so pretend the location of the Invincible isn’t horribly wron

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