I just noticed that the moogle we saved at after Cid's rescue is named Mojito. Did that drink exist yet in 2000?
Kuja's palace is full of religious statues, cryptic messages addressed to a paladin, torch-lighting puzzles, and Mind Flayers. These particular Mind Flayers aren't the Demonic Spiders they were in the original Final Fantasy, but they are still pretty annoying, between the various status effects at their disposal. The Bio-spamming leopards with Cleopatra haircuts are pretty high up there, too. The high encounter rates in here don't help.
Neither one is half as annoying as the fact that I spent over two hours trying to figure out how to open a door that turned out to be a wall decoration because I couldn't recognize a flight of stairs due to the camera angle, though. At least I got a lot of XP and gil out of it....
Lighting the last candelabra activates the palace's defense system, because why wouldn't you set up your automated home security system to only turn on after the person robbing your house inputs the activation code? Anyway, this particular home defense system is a floating obelisk that can't power itself up because we already stole all the magic armor and accessories that were powering it on our way here. Because asking the burglars to turn on your home security system isn't enough; let's base its effectiveness entirely on your TV, computer, grandma's jewelery box, and all the money in the safe still being there when they do it.
Without any of its defenses intact, all we have to do is have Eiko cast Carbuncle to buff the entire party with Reflect, then have Vivi cast Bio on our own party a couple times, causing it to bounce back at the obelisk for over 6k damage. After a couple of those, the boss goes down like a chump, and I'm left wondering if there might have been a special reward for beating it without turning off its defenses, because that was way too easy. Then again, that might be because after three hours of unintentional grinding we've gone up about 10 levels since we got out of the cells.
Meanwhile, Zidane's group has just returned from their mission. Kuja makes the others wait outside while Zidane brings the stone in himself, and shows Zidane Eiko, Vivi, Amarant, and Quina unconscious in another cell. They're fakes, though, as the real B Team teleports into the room where Steiner, Garnet, and Freya are waiting, and Eiko rallies them to stop Zidane from handing over the stone. They make it in time, but Zorn and Thorn managed to take Eiko hostage on the way, and Kuja just levitates the stone out of Zidane's bottomless pockets and teleports away. We hurry back down to the Hilda Garde 1, but too late to stop them from escaping. All we can do is get back to the boat and follow the airship as far as we can.
Fortunately, not only is the boat faster than the airship, but Kuja decides to fly almost entirely over the water for some reason, making it easy to track him to the Lost Continent.
