We rejoin Zidane and co as they recover from their beatdown at the hands of Beatrix in Burmecia, which makes the timing between the two groups' diverged storylines a little hard to keep track of. Assuming we haven't just been sitting on our butts for days, Kuja only just left us a few minutes ago, yet in Garnet's segment he was in Treno, and Zorn and Thorn had somehow made it all the way back to Alexandria from Burmecia. I'll have to try and synch all this stuff up once the party regroups later.
In any case, we decide to head for Cleyra, hidden somewhere in the desert adjacent to the kingdom of eternal rain. Seriously, who drew this Patchwork Map? Freya doesn't know how they'll ever find it, but Zidane is ever the optimist, so off we go. Personally, I think it might be in the middle of the towering stationary sandstorm reaching into the heavens, but what do I know.
Actually, for all the talk from both our party and the villains about how hard it's going to be to find Cleyra, there's absolutely no mystery. We don't even have to wander the desert, navigating quicksand and mirages or anything; we just walk up to the sandstorm, walk through it, and bam, we're right outside a giant tree.
Yes, a giant tree in the middle of a desert adjacent to a kingdom of eternal rain. I don't know, maybe the tree turned the plains around it into desert because it uses up all the moisture in the ground to sustain itself. Then again, we'll see another giant tree later, and it's neither surrounded by a sandy desert or adjacent to a major water course, so I guess we'll just assume there's a magic crystal buried beneath its roots or something and move along.
To be fair, the bottom part of the tree that we have to climb up is covered in sand, but on the other hand, who secures their hidden city with a solid steel door, and then puts the big obvious lever that opens that door on the outside?
There are several puzzles along the way, mostly involving altering the flow of sand over different parts of the tree to reach different areas, but more importantly there are a couple enemies in random encounters here that can finally give us a party healer again: Quina can learn the Auto-Life spell by eating giant caterpillars, and the White Wind healing spell by eating a giant bird. I wonder what it'd learn from eating a giant cat....
Reaching the top of the tree at last, we are greeted by a pair of forest oracles.
...who live in the desert.
They've been waiting for us at the request of the Burmecian king. Freya goes with one of them to meet her king, while the other one shows the rest of us around the town. Or, the rest of us, minus Quina, who's going to find itself something to eat. Apparently it didn't fill up enough on giant caterpillars and birds.
The streets are totally empty of people, but the oracle does show us a windmill that uses the power of the sandstorm to pump water up from the ground, so maybe I wasn't so far off with that guess about the tree creating the desert by draining all the water out of the ground. Kind of a puny windmill to be pumping water from that far, though. He also shows us to an observation platform where we can see all the wonderful views being so high in the sky can offer us, like a sandstorm, some more sandstorm, and for a change of pace, even more sandstorm, which the locals apparently pray to. The tour concludes at the cathedral, which is more of a big tent, and houses the magic harp that powers the sandstorm.
If they have the magic item that makes the sandstorm enshrined in their cathedral, why do they pray to the sandstorm? That would be like me praying to my tires whenever I want to drive my car somewhere.
Once the tour is over, we actually start encountering othr people in town, including Dan, the soldier we met back in Brumecia, who apparently took time to loot the local shops on his way out of dodge, because now he's selling weapons and armor. He also apparently has a fairly short memory, because he and his family start accusing Vivi of being one of the black mages who destroyed Burmecia, despite having already met Vivi and hearing Freya vouch for him. Meanwhile, Quina terrorizes the locals while searching for food.
It turns out that the Cleyrans and Burmecians were originally one people, but the Cleyrans split off to live in a tree and dance at some point long in the past when the Burmecians started to cultivate a military, making them not only rat-people, but rat-hippies. Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any bad blood between the two groups, and the Cleyrans and Brumecian refugees are getting along quite well.
Well, mostly.
After exploring the town and heading back to the inn to wait for Freya, Dan rushes in with news that a giant antlion larva
has captured a kid, and gets quickly fed up with the Cleyrans when their first response is to go tell the high priest. Dan's turning out to be quite the hot head, but no time to chew him out now. The group meets up at the antlion's sand pit, and the battle commences.
I should point out that from the time we reached Cleyra until now, our party has consisted solely of Zidane. This means that I haven't had a chance to equip anyone but Zidane with any of the gear I just bought from Dan. Kind of a dick move on the developers' part, but at least they were considerate enough to heal the whole party to full, since I also hadn't had a chance to use the inn to recover from the trip up here.
The Antlion casts Fira and has a decent melee attack, but it's most dangerous ability is Sandstorm. This spell reduces the entire party to single-digit health and blinds them. Thank goodness I learned White Wind, though it would have been nice if I'd happened to have set the Bright Eyes ability on everyone to prevent Blindness. The Antlion seems to be vulnerable to ice magic, and a few rounds of Blizzara from Vivi once Zidane is done stealing (which he actually manages in a reasonable number of turns for once) takes the beasty bug down.
The rescued child turns out to be Puck, the little rat-bastard that made Vivi his slave and then abandoned him back at the beginning of the game. Or, as Freya addresses him, "Prince Puck," who has been missing for about three years. Wait, just how old is this kid, again? When Freya suggests returning to the cathedral to meet with the king again, Puck amscrays, though he does come back to say hello to Vivi before immediately getting back to running away. Kinda gotta wonder what he was even doing here if he didn't intent to meet with his father. Vivi says Puck was the first friend he ever had, and runs off after him. Man, talk about setting the bar low.
Freya goes back to continue talking with the king anyway, this time bringing Zidane along for no real reason, and agrees to take part in the ceremonial dance that empowers the protective sandstorm in order to reinforce it against an expected Alexandrian attack. Freya joins four other dancing girls in their mystical Riverdance - no, seriously, it's a Riverdance. I remember the Riverdance craze had just hit its peak around the time this game came out in the states - and I really wish this scene had gotten a cinematic. The game has thrown a lot of cinematics at us over the course of its run time so far, and I think this scene certainly deserved one, because it's honestly a bit underwhelming when done just with the normal character sprites. And as long as I'm being honest, I wouldn't have minded seeing Freya in one of those dancing girl outfits, either.
Oh, don't look at me like that. Is digging the badass dragon knight even if she's a rat-woman really that much creepier than hearing from NPCs how sexy the underaged Garnet is, prancing around in her skin-tight orange overalls the whole game?
Apparently the magic harp that powers the sandstorm thinks so, because all of is strings just snapped, and now we get a cinematic of the storm dissipating. Oh, I see, so we can spare a fancy animation sequence for watching some wind stop blowing, but not to check out some rat-girls bouncing around in revealing outfits? Screw you, Square Enix!
As if to rub it in, we now switch to a low profile shot back in Alexandria Castle, where two of the female human soldiers in the one-piece swimsuit armor show off their legs and butts to the camera as they patrol beneath a suspended cage containing Steiner and Marcus who are, surprise, arguing about whose fault this all is.
Garnet, meanwhile, is being held in her room, where she reflects on her mother's recent actions. It seems the queen started changing a year ago, after receiving a visit from a strange man that was almost certainly Kuja. Zorn and Thorn barge in to drag her off to the queen, who plays off the attack on Burmecia as a preemptive action to stop the Burmecians from invading Alexandria. We're given the choice to believe her or not, and after calling Brahne on her bullcrap, Kuja steps in to drop some creepy lines about the himself and Garnet being players in a tragic romance. He then puts Garnet into a magic sleep so that the next phase of their plan can be put into motion.
It turns out that they've been waiting for Garnet to turn 16 so they could suck her summoning magic out of her; something which Zorn and Thorn have prepared a ritual chamber in the basement for. Why they needed to wait until she was 16, I have no idea. I'd say maybe that's the age of consent in Alexandria, but statutory metaphorical rape law probably doesn't worry a villain much when they're planning on committing regular metaphorical rape either way.
