melodiesofeternity | [Closed] Retrieval of Expensive Works of Engineering

"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.

Ashelia took a step forward in front of Frisk as well, sword extended forward between their little trio and the larger group facing off with Kuja. Or should she call it the Reaper? No. It's Kuja. He did these things.

By Kuja's account, they have less than a couple minutes before his past self engulfs the entire planet in flames (or however he did it) and they're all lost in the Dream Width. She looks up at the airships, mind racing. Should they intervene? If they do, will it buy Kuja more time to gain control of the airship...?

It was one thing to hear about one of your best friends having been a horrible monster back home, and another entirely to see it with your own eyes. The horrible mockery dripping from the Reaper's voice sends shivers down Frisk's spine, and the cruelty alight in his eyes just looks wrong to them. They gulp, repressing the urge to flee and praying for their Kuja, the real Kuja, to take them out of here. Even though they knew somewhere that the two were one and the same.

The Reaper, it seems, is ignorant of the three spectators. He doesn't even seem to care that the eight of them are preparing, wounds being tended to, reserves replenished-

"You not only broke the seal to Terra, but you've done me the favor of defeating Garland!" His gaze lands on the tailed boy, amusement dancing behind his eyes. "Ah, Zidane... You truly are an extraordinary Genome, worthy of my affection~"

'Zidane' snarls, raising his knives again. "What're you doing here, Kuja?!"

"That's not a very nice way to greet your brother, Zidane."

"Shut up! You're no brother of mine!" Kuja snorts, turning to face Garland now with the air of a put-upon servant.

"Oh, my! Such ferocity! Why, Master Garland, I do believe he intends to turn against Terra..." There's that faint, gloating sing-song quality again, as though he's winding up to some grand punchline...

Garland, even mortally wounded, is having none of it. "Kuja... what are you scheming?"

The Reaper's face is the picture of injured innocence, laughter building in his throat again. "Scheming? Me? No, just defeating the enemies of Terra!" he turns, facing the assembled party once more, an orb of flame forming in one hand, black at the center- "Come on, now! You can sleep alongside the souls of Terra... for all eternity!"

And like that, the battle is joined. There's an explosion of magic, a Flare Star cast into the center of the eight- but it's not enough. Kuja's not as strong as Garland was, that's abundantly clear. There's a scream as the dragoon drops out of the sky, spear-first, leaving him bleeding. A sword is barely dodged, leaving a deep gash, a few silver-white feathers shorn off as he just dodges a whirling blade overhead-

Only to be struck by a twin assault of Flare and Holy, thrown violently backwards by the child mages, working in tandem. He emerges from the smoke burned, clearly in pain-

So why is he still laughing?

Overhead, the Hilda Garde stabilizes, and begins to descend.

Edited 2018-12-10 18:43 (UTC)

Ashelia stays between Frisk and the fearsome fight in front of them, not moving an inch. She looks up to the ship, then down to the fight, then up, then down - and it looks like the Reaper is down for the count.

A chill runs down her spine when he laughs. This is all part of his plan somehow. He's baiting them...but for what? His Melody? But Ashelia had always been under the impression it was a strictly Crystallian convention...

"Stay back," she says to Frisk. "If events proceed apace, this is the beginning of the end for Terra." And us, is Ashelia's unspoken implication.

Edited 2018-12-14 16:17 (UTC)

"Something's off," Snow agreed, shaking his head as he watched the memory of Kuja. "He keeps getting hit, but he keeps laughing. Who laughs after that?"

There was some kind of plan, some scheme -- there had to be. It set Snow White on edge.

He glanced back up at the ship. "Come on... hurry up..."

For once, Frisk's anime knowledge seems to be coming in handy, and not just for quippy references. Although this wasn't exactly how they were picturing their big heroic nerdout. In fact, this was quite terrifying now that they had context for it. "Shit, shit, he's... there's this. Thing. Where villains always, always only bust out their strongest attack once the heroes got 'em on the ropes, and Kuja is. Totally. The type to play to that trope."

The attacks are not done. The Reaper tries to cast, throws out a Holy spell in retaliation, but the spell is blocked by a wall of stone, raised in defense, a summoned dragon's breath deflected only just enough to leave him stunned, not dead, stone around him dripping into molten slag-

He looks down, at the blade protruding from his gut, a knife thrust deep and then withdrawn. He falls to his knees, and Zidane steps back, growling. "It's over, Kuja."

Pain. Pain was always a large factor, pain and fear of death and the adrenaline rush that came with battle. For a moment, there's real fear in the Reaper's eyes, as he feels the cold of death encroaching on his vision, a low gasp of pain... Had he miscalculated?

No.

Something in him changes. "The time is now." The eight seem to realize it, as the Reaper begins to stand again, his body glowing, magical energy arcing off him and grounding itself in the stone around him, hair and feathers darkening to the red of blood. The light fades, before long, but now he's rising into the air, arms spread wide. "Trance... shall I show you all its power?"

Frisk's assessment, it seems, is nearly correct. A single orb of azure flame is conjured, and flicked into the sky. It splits, arrows of light scattering across the battlefield, decimating everything in sight and reducing the hardened stone to rubble- and the assembled heroes to their knees. The Reaper's expression is nothing short of exultant, laughing with sheer, unbridled joy at his newfound capability. "Yes! This! This is the power I've longed for! The power of souls! They assault any threat that tries to destroy them!"

Thankfully, perhaps, Kuja takes this opportunity to land the Hilda Garde, inexpertly, behind the three observers. There's a shriek of metal and a ladder hurriedly tossed overboard. "We have less than a minute, everyone on the ship!"

"Yes...he is." Ashelia answers Frisk, but her gaze doesn't move from the Reaper until Kuja arrives with the airship.

The young queen does not need to be told twice, nudging Frisk to board first. "Come now, let's away."

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

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