After a weekend away (and another hour or two of Chocobo Hot and Cold), we return to our quest at Qu's Marsh, where Cid believes there may be a way to reach the Outer Continent. It is also, unfortunately, where we reunite with Quina, who survived the maginuking of Cleyra by... being too hideous to die? Not only is it never explained, it's never even questioned.
The frog pond has been repopulated since we were last here, and there's now a golden frog hopping around as well, so what the hell, might as well catch a few while we're here. Apparently we didn't catch enough, though, as Quina runs off after another one while we're searching the swamp for the excavation site, and, naturally, leads us right to it by accident. The place is called Fossil Roo, implying a connection to Gargan Roo. That, or "Roo" is just the ye olde word for "tunnel" in this world.
No sooner do we enter Fossil Roo, however, than a gate slams shut over the entrance and another one opens to reveal... some kind of undead dune buggy? No, literally, the back half of the thing is a vehicle with some kind of mecha-knight thing on top, and the front half is a skeleton that drags itself along by its arms. "You've gotta be kidding me!" indeed, Zidane.
The thing chases us onto a walkway of bladed pendulums, or maybe they're blunt, because all that running into them does is knock us back and allow the dune buggy skeleton to catch up for a back-attack. The thing casts Lv 5 Death, which targets the entire party and auto-kills anyone whose level is a multiple of 5; these kinds of spells pop up in just about every Final Fantasy game, and they've never made much sense. How can the spell target specific levels if levels are just a gaming abstraction and not an actual part of the world? Anyway, none of our party members are valid targets, but the thing also casts a single-target Death spell that doesn't care what our levels are. Good thing Garnet's learned the Life spell by now...
The thing goes down pretty easily, but only for a few seconds, so we have to get past those pendulums. After a few screens of this, we make it across a gap in the walkway, and the dune buggy of doom falls through in its pursuit. As soon as we lose it, though, Lani the bounty hunter appears, being the one who sicced it on us. Zidane starts to flirt with her, but Garnet puts her foot down to find out why Lani is after her, and Lani reveals that she's actually after Garnet's pendant, and Garnet's survival is optional.
Bizarrely, one of the first things Lani does is cast Scan on Garnet, which serves no purpose other than to make Lani seem more like a fellow adventurer than a monster. Lani goes after Garnet to the exclusion of everyone else in the party, which is actually advantageous, since it makes it easy to counter her attacks. In fact, between the Auto-Potion (automatically use a potion on yourself after being attacked) and Chemist (doubles the effect of potions used by the character) abilities which we just happened to already have Garnet equipped with, all we have to do is maintain a Shell buff on Garnet to render Lani totally impotent with the exception of her AoE Water spell. The only real problem is that buff spells last so briefly in this game that the Shell has to be renewed practically every other spell Lani casts.
Defeated, Lani runs off back the way we came, and we proceed down the tunnel she emerged from to find a wild gargant. Zidane is able to lure it out with some nearby flower snacks, and hops aboard. I should mention that gargants travel by clinging upside down to cables on the ceiling, which means that Zidane is now also upside down. Zidane's an agile enough guy that I don't doubt he could pull this off, and maybe even Garnet, but I'm having trouble picturing Vivi, let alone that lard-tub Quina making it more than ten feet if they could even get on the thing in the first place.
Anyway, two screens later we hop off at the actual excavation site, which is empty except for a lone treasure hunter who explains the upcoming puzzle where we need to redirect the gargants so they'll take us to the Outer Continent. I use the term "puzzle" loosely here, as it's pretty straightforward, but it is a bit frustrating having to waste time riding the gargants between every other screen. All in all, it's actually a pretty short trip to reach an entirely different continent, though.
Question: if monsters are born from mist, and there's no mist outside of the Mist Continent, then where are all the monsters on the Outer Continent coming from? Also, how is Choco getting here? We found a set of Chocobo tracks on the Outer Continent, and was able to summon him just as if we were back on the Mist Continent. Did he ride the giant bugs and go through the water puzzle, too? If so, he did it a heck of a lot faster than we did. Maybe Choco should be the hero.
We also find another Qu's Marsh here, practically identical to Quina's right down to the monsters and Mogster. The main difference is the layout of the frog pond, which seems designed with the singular intent of driving me to madness. Oh, and add Quale to the list of people who can traverse Fossil Roo faster than me, too.
With those stops out of the way, we proceed to Conde Petie, the first thing resembling a town we see upon entering the continent. It's a large stone building straddling a canyon on two long wooden beams, and overgrown with thick vines and branches. In fact, the beams may be living roots. Conde Petie is full of short green guys that like to shout "Rally-ho!" for no reason, speak with Scottish accents, and call themselves dwarves. The group splits up to explore the village, but soon run into a black mage who runs away when Vivi and Zidane try to pursue him. The dwarves tell us that they trade with the "Pyntie-Hets" who live in the Southeast Forest. Looks like we've got our next destination.
The trip is mostly uneventful, save for random encounters with the incredibly annoying Goblin Mage enemies, who seem to get a turn between every one of our party members' actions, and like to buff themselves with Vanish, which makes them impossible to hit, dragging these fights out to annoying lengths when we should be able to just smack each of them with a couple normal attacks and be done with it. Also, massive forest adjacent to a desert again.
Entering the deepest part of the forest, we catch a glimpse of a black mage disappearing down a fork in the trail, and Zidane reminds us of the directions from the dwarves: they live so deep that there aren't any owls. A friendly sign at the middle of the fork informs us of which direction the owls dwell, so we find our way by following the sign until we run out of owls, catching up to the black mage just in time to follow him through an illusion of a dead forest.
Arriving in the village, we immediately find a group of black mages who not only talk, but show fear of humans, and scatter like startled fish. Vivi is ecstatic to find more black mages that are like him in more than appearance, and chases after them.
The design of the village is pretty cool. All the buildings are shaped like black mages' heads, with thatched roofs shaped like pointy hats, and round rooms with windows shaped like eyes and a smile cut into the side. The mages are escapees from Alexandria who crossed the sea by some unexplained method in order to live free of humans, whom they have only known as either slavers or enemy soldiers until now. They don't know how they became sentient, and seem to have lifespans of only about a year, as several have died for no apparent reason. They also use their serial numbers as names.
The team regroups at the inn after exploring the village and turns in for the night, but Vivi wanders out after dark. Garnet wants to go after him, but Zidane holds her back, saying that Vivi needs time to figure something out for himself: if he can call this place home. Garnet's still concerned, so Zidane tells her a thinly-veiled story about his own life, trying to find a place he belonged and answers about his past. Unsuccessful, he returned to Tantalus, where Baku beat the living daylights out of him for abandoning his family. Zidane is still looking for answers about his past, but he has a place he belongs, and he thinks Vivi could feel the same about this village.
Regrouping again the next morning, Garnet has picked up some information that a silver dragon like Kuja's has been seen to the northwest, near a place the dwarves call Sanctuary. Vivi shows up shortly after, saying that all the other mages want to hear all about the outside world when he gets back, implying that Zidane might just be right about Vivi and the village.
