At this point, everybody present is sick of Dennis Rodman’s expository brand of Know-it-all-itis, so Babs cuts him off by muttering “Lavos…” under her breath. M!Sue’s all, “Pardon?” and the scene shifts… into SPACE!
In a scene not entirely unlike the opening of Fanal Fantasy VII, the camera pans and rotates through stars and whatnot… until a spiked orange orb rockets through the screen. It spins and spins and spins some more. The camera also spins around the spinning flaming ball. Lots of spinning. The flaming ball of doom (still spinning) eventually cuts an arc towards Earth…
Back at Tyrano Lair, Babs expounds: “‘La’ mean fire. ‘Vos’ mean big…”, and then the screen flashes red again. A voice off-screen shouts to Babs, interrupting her totally not contrived etymology lesson, and– Look at that! It’s Kino to the rescue! The bumbling blond has come through in the clutch, apparently, for he chose this moment to show up with the group’s trusty Dactyl steeds. Babs practically shoves Punk and M!Sue onto their Dactyls so that they can escape the approaching flaming meteor of Lavos doom, and even takes the chivalrous route by trying to save Dennis Rodman, too. The Reptite leader knows he’s been bested, however, and responds, “Absolutely not! The powers that be have spoken!” But I thought Dennis Rodman was the one who summoned the red meteor to earth? Way to take responsibility for your actions, dude.
What can I say, I’m 12 and I giggled.
Babs writes Dennis Rodman off as overly obtuse and jumps onto Kino’s Dactyl. As the three Dactyls take to the sky, Babs yells back to Dennis Rodman that she won’t forget. What she won’t forget, exactly, is left wide open to interpretation, so I’m going to assume she was talking about how absolutely fabulous his fashion sense was.
On the World Map, a teeny-tiny ball of fire plummets from space and crashes right into the Tyrano Lair, causing a huge field of white energy to expand from the impact site until the entire screen is engulfed in whiteness. That was at the same time very disappointing and overly flashy. Which is weird, I know, but there you have it.
Even weirder is the following scene. The camera, sitting on top of a massive crater, peers down into the aftermath of the crash, but Kino and the Dactyls have mysteriously disappeared and the three party members have been replaced with glowing blue dots for some reason. Maybe they were reduced to dust following impact.
Dot!M!Sue opens the dialogue by exclaiming: “So! Lavos descended in this era!” so that those of us who are really, really dumb and didn’t realize that the giant ball of fire was Lavos can feel even dumber because M!Sue connected the dots before we did. “Lavos huge! Punk fight it?” Dot!Babs asks, like that’s totally a normal question. As an aside, I’m rounding up a group of people to go fight meteors and such that crash on earth, because it totally makes sense to assume that those kinds of things are living and malevolent creatures. So if you’re interested… well, get a resume ready and we’ll talk. Or something. Point is, Babs is being dumb and contrived. Just like this scene.
Blue… dots?
Dot!Babs jumps up and down and yells for Dot!Punk to get his ass in gear if he wants to make it to ground zero in time to stop Lavos. Then all three Dot!Party members scurry off the bottom of the screen…
…and, after a short jaunt on the world map, the party enters a small cave in the giant crater, back in their familiar sprite bodies. As soon as the party enters, M!Sue shrieks, “Th, there’s a [BBP]!” and runs over to investigate. Babs also runs about the cave, sniffing or something like she’s a bloodhound, and remarks, “Lavos very fast! Deep under earth already.”
Lavos’ absence and the presence of a BBP lead M!Sue to deduce that Lavos could potentially be the source of ALL the BBPs. Which, despite the fact that it’s totally implausible, considering that that the BBPs have been leading the party on a sequential path to stop Lavos, is actually the case. Try not to look too shocked when you realize that such a thought process doesn’t totally line up. I mean, it’s Chrono Trigger. “It doesn’t have to be internally cohesive to be fun” was clearly the production team’s motto.
Babs, bored with conversation, essentially tells Punk to go in the BBP so the party can fight Lavos. Punk obliges, and instead of popping out at the Lugubrious Veranda of Intersecting Time-Space Continuums like every other time, the party exits the BBP in…
‘At least… that’s what it says here in the script…’
…Another cave! “Boy, this is exciting!” M!Sue wanks as Punk leads the way out of the cave. I’m just going to let that comment speak for itself. Outside, we get to see just how exciting it is, because, just as Dennis Rodman foretold, it’s totally the Ice Age all up in this hizzay! You can tell it’s the Ice Age from the way snow blows across the white, barren landscape. So, the BBP must have thrown the party forward a couple million years instead of taking them to Lavos. Yup, this kind of deductive reasoning is why I get paid the big, bucks, kids.
M!Sue and Babs manage to follow Punk as he wanders aimlessly across the frozen wasteland, miraculously completing the journey without succumbing to hypothermia and getting frostbite all over their exposed skin. Eventually, the party finds an Echo base outpost to crawl into. Even though the building looks large on the outside, on the inside it’s just a room with a glowing pink circle etched into the floor, and walls covered with runes and holographic designs and junk. When Punk steps on the pink circle, he and the ladies are magically whisked into the sky on a pink beam of light. We get a world map view of Punk, Babs, and M!Sue floating up into the clouds on a wave of magical gayness, and then a shot of them materializing in a very… different place. Not only is the music different, all ethereal and chime and citar-y, there is also an overabundance of color and greenery attacking their eyes, very different from the frozen tundra they were just in. Punk and his cohort climb down from the dais they appeared on and venture back onto the world map.
Wow! They’re totally on a floating island in the sky! One of a set of floating islands, by the looks of it, complete with waterfalls plunging downward through the clouds, and cities, and everything else you’re primed to expect when you hear the collocation, “floating island”. Suppressing the urge to shove M!Sue over the edge and be done with it once and for all, Punk makes his way toward the nearest city, “Enhasa,” and steps inside.
Enhasa looks like a new-age bookstore; the floor is tiled and covered with purple rugs, and gilded tables and stools are spread throughout. Everybody is wearing flowing purple and orange robes and wandering around vapidly. A bookshelf stuffed with (what I imagine to be) copies of He’s Just Not That Into You and The Secret stands off to the left, and a Masa/Mune-esque Goblin dances to the right.
More like a nightmare…
Punk runs up to the Goblin to either fight it or talk to it. It announces, “This is the eternal kingdom of Zeal, where dreams can come true, but at what price?” and then teleports away. Weird. As Punk continues Talking to Everyone, he learns that the residents of Enhasa have a strange obsession with dreams and like to just lie around in bed all day, “meditating” about stupid things like the nature of reality and unconsciousness and boring! The people of Enhasa are also, like, really into their Queen, who apparently is obsessed with her own beauty and has used her royal influence to push the development of magic in the Kingdom of Zeal to its limit. Which I’m sure won’t be a pain in the ass for the party at any point while they’re here.
While exploring Enhasa, Punk runs into the dancing Goblin again, who this time says, “Am I a butterfly dreaming I’m a man… or a bowling ball dreaming I’m a plate of sashimi? Never assume that what you see and feel is real!” And then it teleports away again. It’s painfully obvious that the writers were baked out of their minds when they wrote the dialogue for this portion of the game.
While climbing a short flight of stairs in Enhasa, Punk is stopped by a short, purple-haired kid with a purple cat. The kid just stares at the party, prompting M!Sue to wonder what’s wrong with him, and Babs to wonder, naturally, if she can eat his cat. The boy heads down the stairs past the party, and at the bottom, mutters to himself, “The black wind howls…” Turning to the party, he announces, “One among you will shortly perish!” Punk and M!Sue are all like, “what the fuck?” but Babs laughs it off and mentions that she doesn’t think the kid is all that bad. Probably because she, like me, assumes that the creepy kid is foretelling M!Sue’s death, and is totally ok with that.
In the final area of Enhasa, the store, Punk finds the dancing Goblin again. She introduces herself as Doreen and cryptically hints that the party open the “doors of knowledge” in turn. Punk doesn’t actually know what she means by this, but that doesn’t stop him from magically knowing that there are three magic books in Enhasa, one each that produces a column of water, wind, or flame when opened, that are the key to opening a hidden area in Enhasa. Punk finds and opens the books in order — water, wind, flame — and as he opens the flame book, a nearby bookshelf slides into the ground to reveal a hidden room. Punk enters and finds a Nu inside. The Nu announces that the “Guru of Reason” is gone, and offers to fight the party. The party accepts, and the Nu, totally cheating, spawns 5 copies of himself. Nus are obnoxious to fight because they have two attacks, one that reduces a character to 1 HP, and another that deals exactly 1 HP, so the party spends a lot of time gasping in pain during this battle. Luckily, both M!Sue and Babs have healing techs, so the party can stay alive long enough to kill the Nu group. After the battle, the Nu reappears and gives the party a Magic Tab and a Speed Tab, and then disappears again. What the fuck was that all about?