Chapter 1 --- Attack of the Blob, or, Identity Crisiis

One night in Zanarkand…

"What a lovely night in wherever this is!" said a young man, stretching his arms high above his head, "I wonder why there is a mob outside my house…"

He was standing on a dock in front of his boat house, except that, he noticed, the dark water was quite a ways farther down, lapping against the sides of dark buildings and thick support poles covered in graffiti. One patch read "Seymour wuz here."

A small group of people was milling around in the elevated street that led from his house; many were holding bumpy blue balls which reminded the man of radioactive walnuts. He looked up. The sky was cloudless and full of stars; that is, those little star-shaped fruits. He looked around. This place was a forest of tall black buildings with bright neon lights, and there was not a green plant in sight. He looked down. "What shnazzy boots I have!"

"Look, it's the star player of the Zanarkand Abes!" someone cried, pointing at him. Everyone turned and cheered then went back to milling.

"So I am the star player of some team that supposedly plays some sport… I'm going to further assume that this is why I'm dressed so funny," he thought. He looked at the people standing around him. "Maybe if I talk to them they'll tell me where I am." He walked up to a group of boys holding some of the strange balls and prompted one to speak.

"Hey, could you sign my blitzball?" one asked in a high-pitched whine, brandishing his odd ball, a blitzball…

"Okay…" said the man, and took the ball. He then wrote "Tydus" on a smooth spot in big loopy cursive which, if closely examined, proved to look nothing like a "T" followed by a "y" and so on. "Because Tidus sounds too girly," Tydus thought, handing the ball back to the kid.

"Thanks! Have this," and the kid held up a big floppy book that said "Player's Guide" in colorful letters.

Tydus took the book and flipped his blonde hair for no apparent reason. A girl standing nearby fainted.

He opened the book to the first page. It told him in an unusually straightforward manor (proof that it was no ordinary book) that this place was called Zanarkand and that he played something called blitzball. Also, the best way to get things to happen was to talk to everyone at least twice.

"All these people don’t really want to talk to me, do they?" he thought. But they did, and none of them was as profitable as the first kid. Tydus put his guide in the pocket dimension he found inside his oddly cut overalls. He had picked up from the mob that he should head toward the stadium. Of course, he had no idea where this was, and none of the buildings around him looked like it housed any kind of stadium. "But who knows what this sport requires," he thought, starting to worry. Since there was only one way to go, that way he went.

"I hope the entire blitzball game is a cinema, or I'm toast," Tydus thought, and muttered "toast" under his breath as he walked down the street. He was feeling very self-conscious about his clothes, and everyone's staring and pointing didn’t help. Worse, he was cold. "These clothes don’t seem very functional, maybe blitzball is some fashion game show or something. God I'm girly."

The people he talked to on the street were even less interesting than the people at his house, but one gave him some Potions, and another gave him a Phoenix Down. This item supposedly brought one person back to life. Tydus thought this was extremely creepy and ran away from the person quickly.

He reached a section of the street that was deserted. He looked up and noticed a large billboard on one of the buildings. It showed a large picture of someone who appeared to be his father, whom he called "old man" and everyone else called Jeckt. "I hate my old man," said Tydus, and then started into a long soliloquy about hating his father, who disappeared and left him and his mother and was a supreme jerk when he was there. The irony, of course, is that everyone pinned his success in blitzball on his dad's skill. So sad, so sad.

When he was finished he carried on up the road, wondering if there were any cars in Zanarkand that he should maybe look out for. As he neared the stadium he could hear tasteful rock music and saw another mob like the one outside his home, only much bigger and more violent. According to the player's guide this was a mini-game: Get through the mob of blitzball fans! No one seemed perturbed by his odd clothes here. In fact, there were cries of "Get his jacket-thing!" or "Marry me, Tydus!"

He instinctively flipped his hair again, which left him standing in a small clearing of fainted people. He continued through the crowd using this strategy. He did not dare to talk to anyone, which was a shame because they would have given him all seven Sigils, twenty Tetra Elementals, and many Level 4 Key Spheres.

When he finally got through the mob a cinema commenced. "Oh, good," thought Tydus. The cinema showed many people in a huge mechanical stadium, possibly everyone in Zanarkand was there, except maybe the people outside his house and on the street and the garbage men. It also showed a strange suspended invisible bubble in the center of the stadium filling up with water, and then all of Zanarkand in all of its tall black glory. To wrap up the spiffy scene switching, it showed an ominous swell in the water outside the city, performing its own physics-defying water stunt. It was all very pretty. Then Tydus's team, all dressed like him, jumped into the blitzball bubble along with another six people who were also dressed funny. "We will surely drown!" cried Tydus, fighting hard against his team to get to any surface of the sphere. Everyone was giving him funny looks.

"Cool it, man, you're a blitzball player!" said a teammate. "All blitzball players have gills, remember?"

"That's creepy!" said Tydus, but before he could say more on the subject the cinema picked up again and they started playing. Tydus decided that blitzball, on top of being impossible, was also very crazy. He was about to pull off a really awesome-looking shot (called the Jeckt Shot to add to the irony), which required much flipping of the hair, when it carried him out of the sphere, upside down. He noticed that the buildings of Zanarkand seemed to be falling up, or maybe it was just the vertigo… but no, because he then saw a sphere of colorful water that could have been ten times as large as the blitzball sphere, and it was sucking up more water and parts of buildings with it. It was also spitting lasers beams at things, and one of the things it hit was the stadium's delicate machinery that was required to maintain the blitzball sphere. The cushy ball of water below Tydus lost its bizarre surface tension and fell apart beneath him.

Then he fell, too.

He hit the ground with a thud, but was surprisingly okay. He was near the stadium entrance, the large rustic statues and supports now piles of large rubble. The tasteful rock music was now screams of terror as people fled from the ruin. To add to the confusion, a man in an elegant red robe with a small beer keg and what might have been a lame left arm was casually leaning on a large Katana a few yards away.

"Hey!" called Tydus, running toward the strange man, "Some guy I know!"

"My name is Auron," said Auron. "This is not debatable," he added before Tydus could try to correct him.

"Why are you here?" Tydus asked.

"I am here for reasons that I will not tell you. Neither will I tell you anything that is important but instead lead you on a god-awful quest to find it all out for yourself," Auron replied. He have Tydus a stern look. "Furthermore, this is not your story and never will be."

"But--"

"Ever."

There was an awkward silence.

"Anyway, Auron, I'm not sure what the norm is around here, but there seem to be foul plots afoot, and they are looking to become asneaker or, god forbid, aboot! So what say we stop standing here and look for escape? Hello? Auron?" Auron was already walking calmly away.

"Hey, wait!" Tydus called as the ground started shaking. He ran after Auron, but suddenly everything stopped dead. The people still fleeing around him, Auron, even the rumbling street were all frozen.

"Don't cry."

Tydus whirled around, flipping his hair, to identify the voice. It belonged to a creepy little person who was either a young boy or an old lady. The face was hidden under the large purple hood of his cloak.

"What?" Tydus asked.

"Don’t cry," he repeated.

"I'm… not crying…" he said, bewildered, and indeed he was quite a ways from crying. Strange things were happening all around him, but it wasn't upsetting so much as confusing. Then the midget disappeared. "Good riddance."

With the exact amount of 'suddenly' as when everything stopped it all started moving again, including the road, which was, it must be restated, very high above the churning water. Tydus resumed running toward Auron, who was now standing in front of many evil-looking pods.

"Here, from your dad," Auron said as he tossed a big sword to Tydus. It was red and jagged, and almost taller than Tydus himself.

"A sword? Am I supposed to fight with this? What would we even be fighting?! What do you mean, this is from my old man? Why is a big round thing attacking the city? What's going on?!"

"Considering I already said I would tell you nothing, you are just wasting your breath," Auron answered, hefting his own oversized weapon.

"Arg…" said Tydus. He gave up and opened his guide. It told him that there were some things to fight and then some other loopy things would happen. "Even the guide hates me!"

"The what?" Auron asked.

"The guide! My player's guide! Right here!" Tydus said irritably, flapping it in Auron's face for emphasis.

"Why are you doing that with your hand?"

"You can't see it?"

"See what?"

"Never mind," said Tydus with an evil grin.

"Stop playing around, we have to fight these pod things." As he said this the pods sprouted legs and sharp beaks and the world went blurry (like just-drank-entire-case-of-beer blurry).

"I'm gonna be sick," Tydus moaned.

"Stupid battle transitions," remarked Auron. Then the world came back into focus. "You strike first, Tydus."

"Okay." Tydus almost cut off his head. "Practice swing! That was just practice!" He ran up and sliced at a pod monster, which the guide called a Sinscale. Small numbers appeared next to it: 103. "Yeah! That's how much butt I kick!"

"My turn," said Auron, sounding bored. He walked up to a Sinscale, raised his Katana with both arms, and struck down. The numbers showed 580.

"What?! Come on! I can't suck that much!" Tydus whined, "And just what's the deal with your left arm?"

"Nothin' doin'." A beast attacked Tydus, doing crackers for damage.

"You won't even tell me that?"

"No." Auron sidestepped an attack from another pod creature.

"I can see you're gonna be a jerk."

"Your turn, " Auron said.

"A curse on your family!" Tydus yelled as he flipped his hair menacingly at the Sinscale. Two dropped dead immediately and the other was put in shock. Auron finished it off and the battle ended. Tydus even threw his sword in the air in celebration, nearly losing a hand.

"Yeah, we won! We won!" said Tydus.

"Well don’t get too excited, we have 24 more battles before we get to the boss for this, the first of many 'levels,' and that's pretty minimal and straightforward when compared to the others, " Auron said in a rush of very unpleasant information.

"I don’t think I want to ask you about anything anymore…" said Tydus.

They hacked their way down the street until they reached a giant squid-like monster.

"Rawr!" said the oversized Sinspawn.

"Grr!" said Tydus.

Auron sighed. This relationship between him and Tydus wasn't doing well at all.

"According to the guide, Sinspawn Ammes only uses Demi, so it can't kill us," stated Tydus.

"I have my overdrive now, I'm just going to kill this thing and cheese to your imaginary guide!" Auron said, and proceeded to hack the evil thing to pieces using his Bushido. It died in a puff of ability points.

"Wowee," said Tydus. "What now?"

It was at this point that the ground directly below Tydus gave out. Before he could fall to his doom he managed to grab a side of the ruined road.

"Little help!" Tydus requested, but smug little Auron just stood there. Then the giant water sphere, which had by now nearly obliterated all of Zanarkand, was directly above them, sucking the crumbling buildings into itself. The road started to rip off its supports. It was all very epic.

Auron looked up at the sphere with what Tydus thought was sorrow, but it was the same expression he used for being angry, happy, hungry, and bitter, so he wasn't sure. He had a nagging suspicion that Auron was up to no good and was regretting ever following him. The road he had such a precarious grip on gave a shudder and started lifting into the sky, into the gaping hole in the sphere.

"You are sure?" Auron asked it. Tydus was greatly annoyed that the sphere seemed to be in the loop while he was left out in the cold.

The sphere thing must have said yes because Auron finally bent down, but instead of giving Tydus a hand, he grabbed him by the collar. "Dammit, Auron, I said help, not choke!"

Then the sphere sucked him into the hole. It was so unpleasant that Tydus lost consciousness.