The Lost Continent is a frozen wasteland, but the ship manages to drop us off withing spitting distance of a place called Esto Gaza, a stone temple with little windmills on top. Despite the Firaga- and Stop-casting murderbirds, the music here is quite relaxing. On that note, though, it's important to keep at least one person set with the Locomotion ability, which nullifies the Stop effect, because having the entire party Stopped is a game over.
Aside from the random encounters with bird monsters, the terrace around the entryway is totally devoid of life. We meet a snobbish bishop inside who reveals that the other black mages have been here, and after a little brow-beating, tells us that they went to an extinct volcano called Mount Gulug, which should sound familiar to anyone who played Final Fantasy I. The bishop explains that the temple is here for the worship of the Shimmering Isle, which can be reached by the Path of Souls. The temple was a popular place before the black mages came, but since monsters followed them, fewer people are visiting. But I was under the impression that there wasn't much travel outside of the Mist Continent, and even if there was, the name "Lost Continent" doesn't indicate a very popular place. Unless this is some sort of negative PR move, like how the vikings named the hospitable island in the north Atlantic "Iceland" so no one else would try to settle there....
The inside of the volcano is a massive cavern where boardwalks and ramshackle buildings cling to the stone walls infested with ghosts, flying fish, and, I'm not making this up, gigantic poison-spewing earthworms-hydras. This is honestly one of the most visually disturbing monsters I've ever encountered in a game, and I don't even remember them. My subconscious must have been blocking them out all these years. Fortunately, they seem to be exceptionally vulnerable to Freya's holy-element lance that we stole from the Ark, so they die quickly.
We also get attacked by red dragons crashing out of the walls or ceilings while we explore at a few points. They can take a real beating, but Freya is utterly obliterating everything in here with this lance thanks to having its holy elemental attack boosted by the gloves she's wearing, plus the Dragon and Undead Killer abilities.
As we near the bottom of the cavern, we're able to see Zorn and Thorn casting the ritual they used to steal Garnet's eidolons in Alexandria on Eiko. For some reason, this time they have elaborate set of magical designs painted all over the floor, whereas it was bare stone in Alexandria. Assuming those markings weren't just there already for no apparent reason, it seems strange that they would have taken the time to make them here when they're on the run, instead of in Alexandria, when the were secure and had lots of time to wait for us to walk into their trap.
Garnet nearly blows her mute stack at the sight, and we rush down to save Eiko, but it seems we don't need to rush, because the jester twins have been trying and failing to steal her eidolons since they got here. Kuja cuts off their bickering about which one is screwing up the spell and tells them to try again, but they warn him that because Eiko is underaged, further attempts could endanger her life. Kuja is too obsessed with beating Garland to care, though, as his soul is apparently on the line if the Terrans move forward with their plans. Eiko's undermoogle pops out at this point and pulls a Chiaotzu, giving Eiko time to regain consciousness and obliterate the jesters by summoning the flying space lion with lasers that was apparently Mog's true form. The senseless part comes from the fact that we were literally walking into the room when it did this, and could have just stomped the jesters' color-coded butts ourselves. Still, at least the six year old girl doesn't have another sentient creature living in her underwear anymore.
Kuja is still here, though, and interrupts Eiko's grief at the loss of her best friend with musings that he could attain a powerful Trance state by stealing powerful souls, based on what he just saw the moogle-eidolon do. He announces that he has no further use for us, and Vivi chases after him as he leaves, but a magical barrier stops the rest of us from following, too. It seems the twins are going to see Mog's Chiaotzu, and raise us a Fusion Dance, becoming a fleshy two-headed monster out of John Carpenter's The Thing. The Antibody ability is handy for this fight, since the conjoined jesters mostly just cast Bio and a paralyzing poison, but even without it this is a pretty simple fight.
Vivi returns after the fight is over with some black mages in tow. Kuja revealed to the mages that he couldn't actually extend their lifespans and abandoned them, and now most of them are just sitting around in total despair. Vivi goes to join them in solidarity, since it's all her can do for now, while an unknown woman suddenly appears to ask who we are and if Kuja's gone. She leads us back to a well-appointed room, and it turns out that she is our missing Mrs. Cid when the Regent hops in and tells her to hurry up and change him back. Being locked up at the bottom of a volcano seems to have made her forgotten about being pissed at her husband, and she agrees to come back to Lindblum.
One cutaway later, and we're back in Lindblum, and I know what you're thinking: I can't believe the volcano didn't erupt, either.
It turns out that while Kuja didn't lay a hand on Hilda (not terribly surprising, given his fashion sense), he did like to monologue (again, not terribly surprising), and told her every detail of his master plan without her even being interested. Hilda's report confirms that Kuja isn't from Gaia, and that his purpose for being here is to acquire an incredible destructive power. Capturing the Hilda Garde 1 was one step in that plan, but Hilda herself didn't figure into it. This, however, reminds Hilda that she's mad about Cid's affair, though he insists that his regret for that is why he risked his life to rescue her. I was going to call him on this, but then again, he did spend an awful lot of time around Quina as a frog, so I guess I've got to give him that. Of course, that only applies to the life-risking; he still only did it to get turned back into a human.
Hilda relents, and turns him back into a man with a kiss on his froggy forehead, with the threat looming that if he ever cheats again the punishment with be far worse.
There's still one thing that bothers me though... what the heck was the Gulug Stone for? We never saw Kuja use it, so presumably he used it to break the seal on Mount Gulug that the bishop mentioned. But if that's the case, then how was Hilda down there? From the looks of things, she'd been there for quite a while, and Hilda wasn't in the bishop's flashback of Kuja arriving with Eiko, which is implied to be the first time he ever saw Kuja. But if she hadn't been there for long, where had she been? Was Kuja keeping her in his underground sand palace, and we just never saw her? And why did Kuja need to go to Mount Gulug in the first place? To use the magic site at the bottom? Why was that even there, how would he have known about it, and why did they need it when Zorn and Thorn were able to do the same thing to Garnet without it? Was it because they knew it would be harder to extract Eiko's? But their argument implies that they weren't expecting any trouble getting the eidolons, only getting them without killing Eiko in the process, which Kuja didn't care about. And again, why was that site even there? There was nothing remotely magical about the rest of the ruins, so why would the site be there, or if Kuja's group made it themselves, why would they need to do it there?
And how could we have visited a supposedly inactive volcano, and not have it erupt when we needed to make our daring escape?!
