There’s about 3 short chapters covering sidequests and other weird things that have nothing to do with the plot. They bored me out of my skull, and I was the one writing them. I cut out a middle section because it was keeping me from finishing. Nothing important happened…
Chapter 24 --- Sidequests Make Hulk Angry
The Airship touched down in some very familiar watery ruins. Tydus did not have to look long before he spotted the bird he retrospectively appreciated not eating the last time he was here. Clearly, his mental health hadn’t improved much over the course of these thrilling adventures.
He led the way through the rubble, following his guide, which promised him that there was another exit from the flooded room, as well as another fight with Geosgaeno. Once in the water, he realized that the rest of the group had once again abandoned him to the sole company of Rikku and Wakka. Oh, well. Fewer people to tell him to shut up. He swapped everyone’s Yunalesca armor for Geosgaeno armor, wishing fervently for some sort of Ribbon customization, and had just finished preparations when the great guppy-exoskeleton fish monster appeared from whatever large hole it had managed to hide in.
Geosgaeno could recognize a protagonist when he saw one, and knew no cut scene would get him out of it this time. “So much for a nice morning walk,” he muttered.
“Avast!” Tydus cried, “I’ve come to reap my revenge, smelly beast!”
Geosgaeno, incensed by the uncalled-for insult, got over his sleepiness immediately, and charged at the group. In passing, he managed to grab Tydus.
Finding himself in the belly of a beast with airholes and no digestive situation, Tydus quickly got over any anxiety one might usually feel toward getting eaten and gave Geosgaeno’s head a good jab from the inside with his sword. Needless to say, this sort of attack could kill a person. Tydus was released when his cage dissolved into pyreflies, as opposed to having to find an alternate route out.
With that the path to the Chamber of Fayth was clear. Or so they thought. The door leading to Anima would open if the group had all the secret items from the other Cloisters of Trials. Tydus, confident in a guide that had proven itself to be not the most perfect guide in the world, read the next paragraph.
“Aug, what?!” he exclaimed at the floppy book, “I have to go back to Zanarkand’s Cloister?! You stupid thing, why didn’t you say that before.”
Tydus’s loyalty to an aid is a bit fickle.
In Zanarkand, Tydus discovered a nifty little teleport pad that took him right to the entrance to the Cloister. Upon arriving there he saw someone he found he detested more than Geosgaeno. Dona the Bitch Witch was just exiting, followed by her stereotype guardian, Bruno.
“Don’t bother, baby Yuna and friends,” said Dona, “There’s nothing there. No Final Summoning. Just some strangely familiar ghosts that appeared to be pushing a half-naked woman off a cliff. On the bright side, the world will still have Dona the Magnificent to brighten their day in compensation for a permanent loss of the Calm. Spira will survive somehow—“
“Shut up already!” Yuna yelled. “We’ve got a plan okay? Stop rubbing it in!”
“Rubbing what in?” Dona peered at them suspiciously down her nose.
“Oh, um, er… absolutely nothing…” said Yuna.
“Just trying to be more optimistic,” Rikku added.
“Certainly not covering up my own guilt here!” said Wakka. This earned many a silent stare.
Dona gave it up. Winding the truth out of this bunch of dimwits was time better spent earning fame and adoration. “The lack of competence in this room is getting stuffy, Bruno. Let’s go.”
Bruno grunted his consent and followed her out.
“Like that Final Summoning would have worked,” Tydus muttered just loud enough for his group to hear. This earned him some appreciative sniggers.
Inside the Cloister, Tydus played a quick game of Tetris and snuck out before the Spectral Keeper could make him play Monopoly or something. The item was a Magistral Rod, of no particular use compared to what Yuna already had.
Tydus sighed and made his way back to the Baaj Temple Cloister of Trials. He didn’t even bother trying to pick up the Onion Knight since he hadn’t gotten the Celestial Mirror yet. Finally, all the statues in the Cloister glowed in reaction to a handful of mostly useless items that happened to be in annoyingly hidden treasure chests throughout the journey, and the door to the Chamber of Fayth opened.
Inside was a scene not entirely unanticipated. Seymour’s mother, the fayth of Anima, stood above the shine, looking down at her son’s murderers.
Tydus coughed nervously. “Wow, this is awkward…”
“Hey, no sweat, guys. I knew he was evil, his father knew he was evil. The Guados at the palace probably knew he was evil. Just about everyone knows he was evil. It’s just a matter of who else is also evil.”
“And, er, Anima isn’t evil?”
“No, just misunderstood.”
“Oh… okay…”
“I just wanted the kids at school to stop bullying him, but then he went and killed them. And it all went downhill from there. Sorry he’s been such a pain in everyone’s collective ass. I’m a bad mother, I’ll admit it. To make it up to you, I’ll grant you the aeon Anima. Give Seymour a good spanking with it, eh?”
“What, one Anima against another?” said Yuna.
Tydus wiped the drool off of his mouth to say, “Your Shiva could defeat his Anima, I’m sure we have nothing to worry about.”
As they left, Tydus walked with a particular skip in his step, as if he could leave the ground entirely with a smidge of pixie dust. “There wasn’t even anything but some mini-boss that gave us a No Encounters weapon. This is great.”
The rest of the group grumbled but Yuna looked like she was having a hard time keeping a straight face herself. The first fiends to attack them after the Airship landed in the Calm Lands were met instantly by a three-story-high monster that annihilated them utterly. Yuna couldn’t hide her broad smile as Anima let out a victory roar.
“Now where the hell did that chocobo trainer go?” said Tydus. His guide was annoyingly vague on this subject. “We can’t get to Remiem Temple without a chocobo.”
Four hours later Tydus finally found her sitting on her chocobo, right next to the path to the temple. Auron laughed in a bitter sort of way. He wasn’t getting any younger. Or older, for that matter…
And yet he died when he was young… hmm…
Tydus ignored him. “Hey, trainer, can I have a chocobo to ride?”
“Sure. Would you like to train one, instead of doing what you were planning to do originally?”
“Train? To be a slave?! I think n—wait… actually, yes. Yes, I think I would like to train a chocobo.”
“Well, if you’d just step this way, sir, we’ll have you training with the best of them, because I don’t care about threats to my job, because competition is a good thing.”
As they reached the bottom of the slope, another chocobo appeared with a POOF beside Tydus, and two lines of red balloons appeared with more demure poofs across half the plains. The trainer ran her chocobo down the new track with casual ease, then stopped at the end to call out instructions. “Your first task is to get that drunken chocobo from where you are to where I am as fast as you can. The chocobo will go at one speed and will totally ignore whatever you tell it to do, so you’re betting on the chance that it will randomly go in a straight line.”
“Sounds like a great idea. Maybe I should just sit on the sidelines and cheer it on? Might be safer…”
“No pain no gain. Ready, steady, GO!”
The chocobo jumped into the air, spun around, and started running into the wall behind the starting line.
Five minutes later Tydus convinced the chocobo that the wall just wasn’t interested, and ten minutes after that they happened across the finish line. The trainer, with a look of fascinated horror, looked disbelievingly at her stopwatch.
“That… that…” she stammered, “That broke the record by 13 minutes!”
“WHAT?!”
“Are you the… Chocobo Whisperer?” the trainer whispered breathlessly.
“Um—“
“No,” said Yuna, “He causes riots. And I don’t believe it’s a gift so much as a bad habit. And I refuse to play the secretly jealous callous sidekick that has to drag the main character off his bird and smack the hell out of him.”
“I’m fine with that,” said Tydus, turning to see how unconditional Whisperer-love was.
“But I will smack the hell out of you if you don’t get a move on.”
“Er… So, chocobo trainer, what’s next?” Tydus asked as the rest of the group headed for the Calm Lands outpost to sit in lawn chairs and eat popcorn as the watched.
“The next step in training a chocobo, or, training you to train a chocobo, would be to ride this sober chocobo—“ the drunken chocobo disappeared as another big yellow bird appeared at the starting line, “—to the finish line. If you tell it to turn left, there’s a significantly higher probability that it might listen. However, it might still go right. It always has trouble with its left and right.” The trainer shook her head in sadness. “Oh and there will also be blitzballs thrown at you as if shot from a cannon,” she added quickly.
“What was that last—“
“Three-two-one GO!”
The chocobo shot off from the starting line, leaning a bit to the left, but nonetheless heading in the general direction of the finish line. In the glee that he could finish this race without yelling himself hoarse Tydus totally forgot about any suspicious additions to the training that might have just been mentioned.
BONK!
He was brutally reminded.
“Oh, jebus, I’ve been concussed! And what about my bird? What was that?!”
Before he could analyze the situation beyond initial reaction, however, his chocobo was hit by another UFO. It came to a full stop, warked in surprise, then immediately resumed running, slightly more crookedly. Tydus was able to notice a blitzball falling out of the sky directly at them in time to redirect the chocobo in a direction that was sadly not at all heading toward the finish line.
In fact, the balls rained down with the frequency of… rain. Tydus and his ride made an unfortunately large target, and the balls had unfortunately magnet-like aim. In short, Tydus got no peace. Every once in a while, he managed to gain some ground. By the time he reached the end, he had been reduced to bare instinct, his world nothing but blitzballs and chocobos. He even snarled a little when the trainer approached to get him off the chocobo and take it to the emergency vet.
“SNARL!” said Tydus.
See?
“Okay, I guess you learned about the value of single-minded concentration to the exclusion of all other things such as human decency. Well done.” The trained paused as Tydus leapt off the chocobo and began sniffing the air like a feral wolf.
“Er, maybe we should get this over with as quickly as possible, while you’re still concentrating. Then there’s this lovely little rehabilitation center at the trading post that has these really darling curtains and will fix you up good as new… In theory…”
Tydus was scratching behind his ear with a booted foot.
“Right, so, let’s just get you on this chocobo…”
The trainer gently nudged Tydus toward the now-nervous bird, quickly tossed him into the saddle, and immediately ran away to take cover in some tall grass. Instead of jumping off to maul the trainer or eat the chocobo, Tydus was hunched in the seat, looking around suspiciously for any incoming projectiles.
“This next race is the same as the last one, only there will also be seagulls hell-bent on pecking your brains out and the blitzballs explode.”
In the brief period before the trainer started the race and his chocobo dashed with the courage of the stupidly ignorant into a world of pain, Tydus pulled together one thought: “This probably isn’t worth it.”
Afterward, he was just barely conscious enough to amend this to: “This definitely isn’t worth it,” before he fell off the chocobo into a face-full of dirt and grass.
A few seconds and one badly cast Curaga later, Tydus was back up with his sword against the trainer’s throat. He was almost hopping with anger. “Where the hell is it?! I know you have it!”
“Er, what is that, now, exactly?” the trainer asked nervously.
“Give me my Sun Sigil! I’ve had it with these games! It’s mine!”
“You can threaten me all you want, but it won’t do any good,” said the trainer, not irritated. “The moment you leave the Calm Lands I’ll be back to normal. Anyway, the Sun Sigil is a prize you earn, and I’m being quiet charitable as it is, giving you free chocobo training lessons.”
“Oh yeah? Well I—“ Tydus realized there really was nothing he could do. Well, there was one thing…
He flipped his hair for a solid minute, then said, “Pretty please?”
The trainer melted to the ground, retaining just enough muscle control to hand over the Sun Sigil from under her hat.
Tydus triumphantly trotted toward the rest of his troupe, rubbing his neck (not tapping his tummy, ha!). “That flipping really takes it out of you.”
The group made various unenthusiastic sighs and yawns.
“I’m going to skip over to that there cliff where my legendary weapon is,” Tydus continued. “Won’t be but a minute.”
The group made various unenthusiastic sighs and yawns.
Tydus nodded in satisfaction, then proceeded to hike across the Calm Lands with the sort of confidence one would expect from someone with No Encounters equipped. As he reached the short path extending down the cliff he noticed a person was standing at its beginning. Closer inspection showed it was an old soldier wearing entirely black armor, just standing there.
When Tydus was almost level with the soldier he heard a great wheezing intake of breath and then a booming “NONE SHALL—“
Tydus shoved him off the cliff as he walked past.
A short ways down the path, one of those generic glyphs was stuck in the wall. Tydus lightly touched it. Nothing happened. Tydus knocked sharply with his fist. Nothing happened. Tydus beat his hands into bloody stumps on the rock. Nothing continued to happen. Tydus finally consulted his player’s guide. His guide told him things that made him deeply, deeply unhappy.