Zidane wakes up some time later in the guest room at Lindblum Castle and are soon greeted by Blank, who we promptly ditch to go find Garnet. Man, that's cold, Zidane. Isn't Blank, like, your best friend? And we've exchanged about a dozen words with him since he essentially came back from the dead?
We find Garnet up at the telescope on top of the castle again, but Zidane can't get her to say anything despite his best attempts at making a fool of himself, so we head back downstairs to meet with Cid. Everyone else is waiting for us in the conference room, but Garnet remains above the castle, beating herself up for her mistakes.
Steiner reports that Alexandria has been all but completely obliterated, its survivors are left homeless and destitute, and Beatrix has gone missing in the destruction. Lindblum has started reconstruction, but still has a long way to go, and Burmecia and Cleyra are in no better state than before. All the nations of the Mist Continent have been broken by the war Kuja set in motion, and Cid saw him escape from Alexandria aboard the lost Hilda Garde 1 with a compliment of talking black mages. Vivi can't believe his people would be aiding Kuja, but the Regent is certain, and an interjected ATE confirms it, as well as revealing that the jester twin have thrown their lot in with Kuja, too.
There's a quick recap of the earlier plot point that the Regent's wife, Hilda, took the airship after turning Cid into an oglop because he was cheating on her, meaning that Kuja must have gotten it from her at some point. Unfortunately, the Hilda Garde 2 was destroyed when it crashed in Alexandria, and Cid can't keep him mind straight enough as an oglop to design another one. Doctor Tot has been summoned to weigh in on the matter, but before that, Eiko comes in with the revelation that Garnet has lost her voice. The meeting is put on hold so we can go check on her, and Tot declares that she is suffering PTSD from the combination of her mother's death and her kingdom's destruction. He says her voice should come back on its own, but there's no telling when. The good news doesn't stop there, though; the only thing Tot can think to try on Cid, other than getting his wife to reverse the spell, is a remedy from what may have been a joke book. Still, it's our only lead, so we head into town to try and wrangle the ingredients.
The air cabs are back online, though the industrial district is still shut down. Zidane thinks Cinna might have one of the ingredients back at Tantalus HQ, so we start in the Theater District, where we bump into a couple Burmecians we helped out back during Alexandria's invasion. Freya meets with a few Burmecians back at the castle, too, who are making plans to start the reconstruction. There are more Burmecian refugees in Lindblum and elsewhere around the continent. They ask Freya to join them, but she can't until Kuja is dealt with. All isn't grim, though, as the couple introduce Zidane to their newborn kids, who all seem to be about five years old already. Man, they grow up fast.
The Tantalus guys are busy rebuilding the HQ, but take a break to all gather up and talk to us, glad to see Zidane up and around again. Cinna has what we're looking for and goes to get it while Marcus asks if Zidane's ever going to join back up with the group. Like Freya, though, stopping Kuja comes first. That doesn't stop us from looting all the gil inside the headquarters, though.
The second potion is in an artist's studio near the airship station. The artist doesn't even know what it is, so he has no objection to us taking it. I wonder if we're just supposed to assume that the same thing applies to every other random item we've stolen from peoples' houses throughout this and every other RPG in existence.
The last potion is in the possession of the item shop girl, who hands it over because it's past its expiration date, which probably isn't any reason we shouldn't slather it all over the ruler of the nation. Unfortunately, she can't sell us any items because her shop was destroyed in the attack. The weapon and synth shops are both open, though, and an Expy of Selphie from Final Fantasy VIII is hanging out in the former considering getting herself a weapon.
With the ingredients assembled and mixed, we return to the castle to apply them, and presto-change-o, the Regent is now a frog instead of an oglop. Well, at least it's one step further up the food chain. If we just keep Quina away from him until we can round up a few more batches of potion... say, where is Quina, anyway? It's made appearances in Madain Sari, Treno, and most recently the Lindblum docks, but it hasn't actually been in the party since the last time we were in Conde Petie. Not that I'm exactly desperate to have to look at its nightmarish face again, but I would at least like to get back the stuff I left it equipped with.
Cid is less optimistic about further potion treatments than I am, and calls a nix on the whole thing. Our only recourse now is to track down his wife. Cid orders a ship captured from the Alexandrian navy to be prepped for departure, and we decide to head for the Black Mage Village, since seeing black mages on Kuja's airship is currently our only lead. Zidane protests against Garnet coming along, though, because he has apparently forgotten what happened the last time we were in this exact room and he told her to stay behind. Garnet is spared from needing to bust out the sleep weed again by Eiko promising to watch out for her, though, so we're dismissed to regroup at the docks. Unfortunately, the regrouping included Quina, who is waiting for us aboard the ship and complaining about how much trouble it had to go through to find us. Well, maybe if you'd stop running off on your own every time you see something remotely edible....
Blank is here too, having been recruited as the ship's pilot because... he's displayed so much maritime knowledge over the course of the game? Whatever. Cid also tells us to talk to him to change party members, marking the point in the game where we finally have almost full control over our party lineup. Almost, because Zidane is locked in, as is typical with the main character.
The only other hitch is that Garnet's PTSD doesn't stop at the plot; it manifests in the game mechanics as well, causing her to sometimes be too distressed to perform any actions on her turn, which would be bad enough if she wasn't one of our only two dedicated healers. Still, I'm going to stick with her because I'd rather deal with the inconvenience of misactions now than the inconvenience of having to catch her up on learning spells and abilities later once she's back to full capacity. I've already got to catch Freya up, since the only battle she's been in since the midpoint of disc 2 was the demonic book boss.
Vivi fills out the fourth spot on the roster, since he's the only offensive magic-caster whose spells aren't tied to summons, and whose MP doesn't also need to be conserved for healing. Barring forced choices by the game or other special situations, this is going to be our party for the rest of the game: Zidane, Garnet, Vivi, and Freya. Admittedly, Freya is getting her spot mostly due to my love of badass warrior chicks and her character design.
When we arrive at the Black Mage Village, all the black mages are gone but three. The one at the graveyard, who Vivi talked about life and death with the last time we were here, confirms that the others went with Kuja because he claimed he could expand the mages' short lifespans. Vivi says Kuja is lying, and asks the mage where he went, but the mage is too depressed to answer. The other two are at the little farm on the edge of the village, where the chocobo egg they've been tending has just hatched. The first mage witnessed the hatching, too, and Vivi asks him why he stayed behind. The mage says he wanted to go with Kuja, too, because he was also scared of dying, but something held him back.
Vivi asks the mage if he thinks Vivi is going to die soon, too, but the mage doesn't know. Kuja said something about the prototype lasting longer than the mass produced version, but that's all he knows. Vivi tells the mage about his grandfather's death, and seeing Garnet's mother die, and that he wouldn't have had the feelings of sadness he did if he was just a puppet like everyone says the mages are. The mage relents, and gives us Kuja's location. His palace is on the eastern end of the Outer Continent, hidden beneath the sand.
There are four pits of quicksand clustered near on another on the eastern end of the continent. One of them leads to Kuja's hideout. The others contain antlions, because this game is perfectly happy to reuse bosses as random encounters later, and I actually have absolutely no problem with this. It's an extra bit of immersion that there are more members of these things' species running around the wild, which I appreciate. It's not even a matter of lazy design like the classic Palette Swap monsters of older RPGs, it's basically just the same monster again, only now our party's level is high enough to render them much less threatening.
Finding the right pit of quicksand isn't much of an improvement over the antlions, because it turns out Kuja was expecting us. The next thing we know, Zidane is waking up in a cell next to Cid and hearing Kuja's voice coming from thin air. Kuja demonstrates that the floor of our cell can open over a pit of lava. Everyone else is trapped in cells like this, as well, but Kuja will let them go if we do him a favor. This is obviously a trap, but without any other apparent options, we have to walk into it. Leaving Cid behind, a pair of black mages teleport us from a gothic basement with neon accents to Kuja's living room. Kuja wants us to go to a place called Oeilvert on the Forgotten Continent and retrieve an artifact called the Gulug Stone. He would go himself, but the place is protected by an anti-magic field.
He'll let us take three of the other with us, and at this point it would be really nice to know whether that anti-magic field means we won't be able to cast spells inside the place, or if we just can't enter it by magic. I'm leaning toward no magic at all, but I'll be damned if I can actually remember. In the end, we pick Freya, Steiner, and Garnet, because leaving her here with an obsessed psychopath who keeps quoting fantasy Romeo And Juliet at her isn't going to be helping her PTSD, anti-magic field or no. At least she can still be the party medic thanks to her Chemist ability doubling the effect of any potions she uses.
We're ferried to Oeilvert aboard the Hilda Garde 1 by the black mages, who won't respond to Zidane's questions. Zorn and Thorn show up to tell us to give up, and then talk about how the black mages are easier to control without sentience, like the Black Waltzes had. They make jokes about the black mages desiring life when they're just puppets, but Zidane throws it back in their faces, saying they're just as much puppets to Kuja as the mages are. That ticks them off, but they can't do anything to us before we get Kuja's special rock.
The airship drops us off at the northern end of the Forgotten Continent with no clue as to where on the continent we're supposed to be going. There's a Qu's Marsh nearby, but with Quina still imprisoned, the only thing to do is ask Mogster for directions. He suggests opening the map with the Select button and asking our enemies to fly us there.
On our way back to the airship we're attacked by house. You read that correctly.
Zorn and Thorn won't fly us anywhere else, but they do at least inform us that we need to go south, and will sell us medicine. Of course, "south" leaves a little something to be desired when the path goes through a forking canyon.
Arriving at Oeilvert at the end of the canyon complex, we meet a moogle with enough new gear to nearly bankrupt us, and are immediately thwarted in our quest by a big stone door we can't even budge, until it opens for no reason. The place is full of green, knife-wielding hulks in judge robes and pope hats, and statues that summon doppelgangers of our friends. The doppelgangers are the most dangerous, as they cast instant death spells on your party members if they're the same character. It also seems that the anti-magic field does indeed mean we can't cast spells in here (though it doesn't seem to have told the monsters that), so it's a good thing we left Vivi behind.
Wait, how has Garnet been casting magic this whole time, anyway, if she can't talk?
Despite being partially ruined, Oeilvert is full of Magiteky gizmos like a hall of laser light shows and holographic projections of a planet and airships. The holograms have accompanying text, but only Zidane can read it, and not even all of it. Some words stand out, though: "battleship Invincible still in use." Another set of holograms records the rise and fall of great cities on a planet called Terra. Zidane wonders what all this means, but with the benefit of our third-person perspective, it's pretty easy to piece together that Garland, Kuja, and probably Zidane come from this other world called Terra which doomed itself, traveled to Gaia aboard the Invincible, and now either wants to conquer Gaia or steal all its resources or something nefarious like that. Zidane, of course, doesn't know about Garland, or that the giant sky-eyeball is called Invincible, so we'll just have to suffer through the party knowing less than us for a while yet.
Also, getting really sick of these statues and their instant-kill doppelgangers.
After going through all the holograms, we come to a dome-shaped room covered in stone faces that suddenly come alive and start talking in that language only Zidane can sort of understand. The faces switch to... Gaian? Gaiaese? Common? Basic? English? Whatever, and start laying on the exposition to fill in the details: Terra started to decay, the plants and animals started to die out, and the Terrans tried an act of desperation to save their world, but could only put it in stasis. Heavy, confusing stuff, but the rest of our team is still sitting on retractable floors over a lava pit, so no time to get to the bottom of the mystery now.
A magic elevator takes us down to the room where the Gulug Stone is kept, but as we go to take it, the Highwind from Final Fantasy VII attacks us out of nowhere.
No, seriously, completely out of nowhere. There isn't even room for the thing to fit inside the chamber.
This is one of those bosses that's pretty much guaranteed to result in a reload, not because it's particularly tough, but because it likes to use a spell that hits the entire party with the Confuse effect at once, leaving us to just stare at our team spinning in place and attacking random targets for most of the battle. The Clearheaded ability makes us immune to the Confusion effect, of course, but there's no way to know that we should have had it set before engaging the boss. There's no sign anywhere hinting at the boss's abilities, and none of the monsters in this place use that effect, so all we can do is hit the reset button and do the fight over again with the right loadout. It's wasted time, and it's annoying.
Once the Confusion effect is nullified, it's a very easy fight. The Highwind, or rather, the Ark, only has a couple other tricks up its mechanical sleeves: a moderate damage full-party attack, a missile barrage that reduces one target to 1 HP, and a heavy damage full-party attack that it uses infrequently. And, since we actually managed to steal everything in just a few turns for once, the fight mostly consisted of spamming the Attack command and lobbing Chemistry-boosted Hi Potions as necessary. Eventually the Ark crashes, and we claim our prize.
Well, Kuja's prize.
Speaking of Kuja, he's just informed the rest of the team that he was lying about letting them go if Zidane brought the stone back... sort of. There's an hourglass somewhere in his palace that will open the floors of their cells if Zidane doesn't make it back in time to reset it. That time limit? 10 minutes.
To get back from another continent.
...
Well, nice knowin' ya, guys.
Cid isn't going to stand by for this, though, and comes across a pair of black mages arguing about whether it's right to be helping Kuja kill people in exchange for extending their own lifetimes. Their fear of death wins out in the end, and we hurry past them, which leads to us playing Red Light, Green Light with Cid and a little red monster that must be descended from T-Rex, because its vision is based on movement. Also, we're now down to 6 minutes to save everyone. After getting the key from next to the monster's cage, we then have to fill a set of scales with weights so Cid can climb up it to reach the hourglass. Flipping the hourglass frees everyone from their cells, though for some reason it doesn't open any of the empty cells.
The group forms a second party led by Eiko. It's time to get the hell out of here.
...eh, tomorrow.
