The Artifact
By Moonraker One

CHAPTER THREE – The Species Nekusos

	Crono had only recently become aware of the ability to travel through the vast ocean that was time, and already was he beginning to wish he’d merely stayed in bed. Just two days’ worth of normal time for him had been spent on this adventure, and already they’d spanned from the farthest possible reaches of the past all the way to the end of time itself. Now, eighty-five billion years’ prior to his birth was the time Crono and his friends were in, and after being dragged by a strange people (all of whom happened to look like brethren of the Lavos creature) to a very dank looking prison cell, all present wanted their mothers. Frog, just one person of the group who happened to be chained to the wall, looked over at Crono.
	“Crono?” he said. “T’was a great misfortune that got us ‘ere. Shallst I borrow a phrase from your generation? This sucks.” It didn’t seem like Frog to speak in slang—especially slang from four hundred years in the future from his time—but Crono got the message.
	“Yeah,” he replied, “you can say that again.”
	“Didst you not hear me? I said this…”
	Crono interrupted him. “I HEARD you the FIRST time!”
	A booming voice from outside the cell shouted, “SHADDAP IN THERE! Don’t make me have to separate you!” Crono and Frog immediately got quiet. From outside the cell, both could hear the sound of footsteps approaching, and within a few moments, a rather decked-out looking member of whatever species inhabited this planet, came up to the cell.
	“Guard, you may escort them to the dining hall,” he advised. “Do, however, keep them watched at all times.”
	“Yessir!” the guard quickly answered, and opened up the cell door. Taking his keys off his uniform, he hastily unlocked each of the time travelers’ shackles. After they were freed, several additional guards came out of the hallway to escort the travelers to the dining hall. While Lucca and Marle were thinking about what fate awaited them once they got to the dining hall, Crono and Frog, being of the male gender, thought primarily of ways to destroy the guards holding them. On one hand, Crono knew his ability to launch magic, and the guards probably weren’t expecting it, but on the other hand, Crono realized that there were more guards awaiting them ahead, and thus he decided not to risk it by attacking. After quite the long walk through the hallway, they entered a massive dining hall. To say it was grand would be an understatement; there were chandeliers (at least five of them, and they all were covered in gold plating), as well as gem-studded portraits of what had to be their glorious leader.
	“Release them at once!” the most glamorously dressed of the gathering said. “These are not the evil time travelers we have been warned about. They are to be treated as our friends and will dine with us!”
	One of the leader’s subordinates protested. “Lord Nidelos!” he cried. “How do you know that they aren’t the evil time travelers that we were warned about? And haven‘t you said that Humans aren‘t allowed on our planet?!”
	“QUIET!” Nidelos boomed. “the golden artifact told us that these humans aren’t our enemy. Let them dine with us. We shall—this applies to everyone here—treat them as friends.” Crono and the rest of his group sat down at a table, where they were able to relax and enjoy a good meal for a change. Just looking around astonished him at the way there was so little physical diversity from one of these creatures to another. How they distinguished each other was a confusing thought.
	Within a few moments, the meal came. Expecting it to be a rather uniquely disgusting dish, every member of Crono’s party was amazed that their plates contained precisely what they considered their favorite food. “Wow!” Marle couldn’t help but say out loud. “Peppered steak! My favorite!” In response, the leader himself walked up to the group to address the comment.
	“You see, weary time travelers,” he began, “the golden artifact you had used to belong to us, until a freak accident caused it to be sucked into a time portal. We have always used it to obtain information of the future, that’s why no alien species has challenged our military. We tend to be able to win battles before we even fight them, simply because we have the info ahead of time.” The leader walked out of their presence with a  certain prideful swagger in his walk. Everyone seemed impressed with the importance of the artifact. Lucca, however, seemed to have a problem. She had her right fist clenched very tightly, and sweat was forming on her forehead.
	“Lucca?” Frog asked. “’Tis there a problem?”
	I like the enchiladas on my plate! she mentally reasoned.
	I can’t stand this foreign food, though! argued a separate mental voice. Lucca couldn’t help it. On one hand, she could remember that food from the southern section of town was her favorite since she was little, but on the other hand, she could remember eating much more exotic food as a child…in the Zeal kingdom. The instant she realized this, her eyes flashed open: these were Magus’s memories, his voice arguing with hers inside her mind, his soul fighting for control over her! She clutched her head in pain.
	“LUCCA!” Marle screeched. “WHAT’S WRONG?!” Just then her hair flashed back to its previous purple color—then returned to Magus blue. She took a look at her hand; her pale white skin—from when the artifact gave her an appearance similar to Magus’s, and his power—flashed back to normal and then back to white.
	“It’s Magus,” she whispered. “In the year six hundred, he must have died when we changed history back there.”
	“Uh, Lucca?” Crono interjected. “We went there to change history, but Lavos sent us here instead!”
	“What happened? You remember, don’t you?” she scolded him, for not thinking. “He fired a blast at us, the artifact got in the way, and a giant portal sent us here. What if, a bolt of energy shot off the gate and killed Magus? Or, if Lavos having used some of his power against us, disrupted the flow and killed Magus that way? Regardless, with his body dead, his soul went to the only other connection to him.”
	Marle gasped. “You!”
	Lucca nodded. “Right. And now, his soul is struggling with mine. I can’t let him win! We have to get that artifact back!”
	Hoping to find a potential strategy, the quartet finished their meal and exited the dining table. Crono himself, couldn’t believe the sheer level of change that had occurred since the morning just the equivalent of two days ago. Just a few days ago, he had a semi-normal life, and in the blink of an eye, he suddenly became a fast-paced time traveler. Also, the friend he’d had since early childhood now had two different souls struggling for possession of one body. Last week, everything that had occurred would have struck him as richly bizarre. Frog, one of the best planners of the group, knew they had to get the artifact if they ever were going to have Lucca turn back to normal. There stood a number of severe obstacles; not the least of which was that an entire alien species had it under their closest surveillance.  Of all the problems, he figured, the group he was in had to get stuck with one of the absolute hardest.
	A servant of the leader came up to the group. Quickly noticing Lucca having a quandary, he offered, “She looks like she needs to lie down. In fact, why don’t you all? I’ve been ordered by the High Lord Nidelos to make sure you have a room to sleep in. If you’ll accompany me to the third room on the left, there’s four cots set up for you all to sleep in.”
	“Thank you,” Crono replied. “She’s just a little under the weather.” As the servant left, they quickly assembled in the room for some strategizing.
	“What do you think we should do?” Marle asked. While waiting for the conversation to continue, she poured a tonic over her wound, causing it to heal semi-instantly.
	“Well,” Frog replied, “whilst you three were eating, I conversed with a member of this race, and found out that tomorrow there shallst be a huge reception in the dining hall where the artifact’s return will be celebrated by its display. We merely have to snatch the golden pyramid tonight, whilst the guards be sleeping.”
	Crono accepted his plan as plausible, with one exception. “How exactly do you know they’ll be asleep?”
	“A constant vigil grows weary eventually, methinks. Nary can a soul stay alert forever.” They all nodded; it was dangerous, and potentially a killer, but nevertheless, they had only it as a plan. “Dost thou like my plan?”
	“Yeah, it’s just great!” Crono sarcastically replied. “So all we have to do is walk in and STEAL it?! Certainly! Why didn’t I think of that one before? I’ll tell you why, because it WON’T WORK!”
	“Well,” Marle interjected, “it’s the only plan we’ve got.”
	“Fine. So we wait until the coast is clear and then grab the artifact. What if it’s in a sealed container or under a glass shield that’ll set off an alarm while we’re trying to break it?”
	Lucca thought for a moment. She indeed hadn’t been planning for that set of circumstances. She knew of three different types of traps that could be in place. One, there could be lasers that, if the beam was broken, set off an alarm. Two, the artifact could be inside a pressurized case, and the release of pressure would cause a trap to be activated. Three, the artifact itself could be connected to the alarm system somehow, and the slightest disturbance of it would be problematic. In any of the three cases, there’d be a major problem if they were caught.  However, she knew of no way to adequately alter the plan for any of the three situations, so all she could do was hope. A knocking on the door caused them all to almost jump; apprehensively, Frog answered the door. At the door stood a Lavos-like being of this planet, dressed in a suit of armor not unlike the space suit Lavos had on.
	“Lord Nidelos would like to invite you over to see the pride and joy of our scientific experiments,” he offered, handing a sheet of paper to the amphibian. “Due to the fact that we are currently involved in a six-species war for dominion of this sector of the galaxy, it may come into use if we are threatened enough.” The one whose curiosity was piqued the most was Lucca, who despite the fact that her mind was divided between two separate souls’ influence, maintained her interest in science. Crono wanted to go simply for the fact that if this was in fact Lavos’s people—as he began to think—it would be useful to know their utmost secrets. Out of the simple fact that Marle and Frog wanted to be with their allies, they tagged along as well.
	The hallways, all decorated with various pictures of the leader of this planet, Nidelos, were as unique as they were vibrant, and the group walked through it until they got to a door which looked as though it were made from solid gold. As it slid open, they saw the regally-dressed leader of the planet himself, and behind him a massive spike-covered meteor with a mouth-like opening at the front. Crono gasped and Lucca almost fainted, for they instinctively knew the energy coming off of the meteor to be what they felt from Lavos. The spiky rock behind them, which looked as big as a domed building, had to have been the living thing that the evil Lavos was connected to. Only it seemed like nothing was connected to it.
	“W…what is that?” Crono inquired, desperately trying to hide the fact that he was fearful for his life.
	Nidelos seemed to perk up. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “This is our scientists’ finest work! Taking a meteor that was lifeless, and using our Spirit Device to inject a soul into it has made a being that can fly through space like a meteor, and fire weapons using magic itself as a weapon.” Lucca shuddered; the magic she was sensing from the meteor had to be huge. A mage beyond compare had to have been sealed within it. “Potential to destroy an entire civilization in a mere moment, and I believe it even has potential to manipulate the evolutionary processes of a populace on a macroscopic level. Also, the person controlling it has potential to live eternally.”
	“And you…never thought that…someone might steal it?” Marle argued, trying to get the point across without explaining her story. Unfortunately, Nidelos picked up on her hints. His facial expression dimmed.
	“Wait! You’re time travelers, right? Does this creation of ours have some negative impact?” Crono wanted to burst out laughing at the degree of the understatement; instead he simply snorted a burst of air from his nose.
	“Dost the name ‘Lavos’ ring a bell, sir?” Frog entered with. The name seemed to take the leader’s breath away; he obviously knew the person in question.
	“Lavos?!” he shrieked. “LAVOS?! WHY, Lavos is our greatest champion! He has lead us into countless victories! Our greatest hero!”
	“Where we come from—which is billions of years in the future from this moment,” Marle explained, “your ‘hero’ Lavos destroys the civilization from which we come; erases all hopes and dreams along with about ninety-nine percent of the populace in a single instant.” Nidelos could not believe what he was hearing; surely, he figured, the time travelers had to have been mistaken.
	“Why, I…I refuse to believe you!” he shouted. “You…you’re a bunch of liars!” Marle almost forced a grin; this reminded her of her conversations with her father. Nidelos thought of one way for him to hear the truth, and he thought of it just as they were preparing to say it.
	“Ask your artifact,” Crono told him. “It is not capable of lying or manipulating the truth as it is.”
	“Why…I’m going to do just that to prove you wrong! Right now! Let’s go!” With his command, he and the group of time travelers opened the door to exit the room, preparing to find the artifact in its chamber. However, blocking their path to exit the room was a familiar evil, only younger looking. Crono took one look into the eyes of the being and his blood ran cold. Lucca, with Magus’s memories conflicting with her own, wanted to run out of fear and blast his head off at the same time. “LAVOS! Wh…what is the MEANING OF THIS?!” Lavos said nothing, merely lifting his energy saber and driving it into the heart of his leader. With a mild twist and a tug, the leader hit the floor with his life blood pouring out. Crono reached for his blade—and found it not there. It had been confiscated.
	“One of you escaped with the meteor,” Lavos explained, fabricating a story. “You, punk-hair, killed the High Lord Nidelos with a saber you stole from me during the feast,” he threw his sword at Crono who caught it out of reflex, dropped the artifact on the ground, and then removed a couple of glove-like hand coverings which prevented his fingerprints from covering the handle of his sword, “and the three remaining members of your party were left behind before you could take the artifact with you.”
	“YOU FIEND!” shouted Marle, an instant before Lavos raised one of his flipper-like hands and crashed them all into the right wall viciously with a release of magic. As they all fell unconscious from the sheer velocity of the impact, he reached down and picked up Frog’s shiftless form, vanishing and rematerializing inside the meteor.
	Are you my master? the meteor asked.
	“Yes I am,” Lavos replied. “Your power is mine; my name is Lavos.”

		*		*		*
	The darkness of dreamland, in which Crono was in, suddenly found itself broken by a splash of water thrown in his face. Instantly he snapped back to reality, and found himself in a seated position staring at a rather unruly-looking member of Lavos’s species. He jerked his leg in an attempt to stand, and found it chained to the floor; upon further inspection all of his limbs were chained, as were the limbs of his allies. The fact that they were on a moving, jumbling convoy didn’t please him either. The creature looked down at the Human with silent contempt, but couldn’t maintain silence much longer.
	“I KNEW it was a mistake for our lord to take you humans in,” the thing angrily stated. “Now look! You killed him!” He struck Crono across the face with his flipper-like right hand. “I say you killed Lavos too! We just haven’t found him yet!” Crono glared at the creature, wanting desperately to spit on him.
	“WE DIDN’T DO…” Crono wanted to shout in protest, but halfway through his sentence a swift kick in his groin cut him short, causing him to bend over and release a small pulse of spit in pain.
	“SHUT UP! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO TALK!” The thing then lifted a cattle prod that was at his side and shoved it at Crono’s chest, almost breaking the skin. The young time traveler let out a screech as sixty thousand volts coursed through his body. “You should be glad we’re killin’ ya in a humane way. Throwing you into a volcano, you pass out before you hit the lava. It’s a two hour ride to the volcano. Try saying a prayer, or wetting your pants.” The creature then walked on to deal with other prisoners condemned to die. On a more positive note, the punk-haired teen looked to his left, and saw Lucca—back to her normal purple-haired, tan-skinned self. Gone were Magus’s features; Crono suspected that Lavos did it with the artifact so as to eliminate all possibilities of rebellion. But if Lavos indeed wanted to eliminate rebellion, there remained one target…
	Crono thought of it a moment before it actually happened. From out of the sky, Frog plummeted to a crash landing in the sandy desert terrain of the planet they were on. He and the rest of his allies looked up, along with Lavos’s people, to see the familiar, evil meteor descend from the upper stratosphere and come to a complete hovering stop. No, he can’t possibly… Unfortunately, he could.
	And he did.
	As all watched in horror, countless balls of yellow magic flame burst from the spikes of the meteor, and began to fall all over the surface of the planet, shattering high-rise city buildings and incinerating anything in their path. As if that were not destruction enough, the mouth of the meteor opened wide and a large white ball ejected from it, hitting the center of the primary city and neatly incinerating the whole metropolis with a nuclear-like blast. It then turned and did the same to every other of the seven major cities on the planet. Not even the very convoy the prisoners were on—being at least a hundred and seventy miles out of the city—escaped the yellow magical flaming orbs descending from the sky like deadly foul ball hits. The structure of the truck melted partially away from the first fifty hits, leaving a gaping hole in both sides and the top. If it were not for strong steel bands holding them, Crono and his friends, along with seventeen prisoners, would have left. From his high point in the sky, Lavos seemed pleased with his singular act of destruction, which had succeeded in the systematic annihilation of ninety-nine point nine percent of the population, and rocketed off into space, to continue the acts of destruction for eons to come. Lucca figured only her and those with her had survived; even the guards patrolling the convoy had been incinerated. Marle had a second-degree burn on her left leg.
	“Errggh!” Lucca cried as she used what little magic she had left to yank the keys off the torched body of one of the guards. With it, she freed her compatriots. However, she felt they had no hope of escape. Until, that is, a familiar golden pyramid landed a few feet from her.
	“Oh God, thank you!” she cried, picking up the artifact. “Never have I been so glad! Artifact, please take us to our home time!” She waited for them to spin around and appear home. Nothing happened, though, even after a few minutes.
	“Um, Artifact?” Marle entered. “Pretty please?”
	I am sorry, my dear time travelers, it apologized to them. Against the wishes of the one carrying me, I used up the last of my power protecting you from his onslaught.
	“L…let me get this straight,” she said, “you went against Lavos to come here and save us, and you have NO power left to get us off this wasteland of a planet? We’re gonna die here?!”
	Without a time gate, you are stuck here to perish. Please forgive me; I am but a mere artifact. I have no power but what is given to me, and what power I had initially is gone. It is sad; the Nekusos people are gone forever. Lucca laughed as she resigned herself to fate.
	“Just freakin’ WONDERFUL!” she screamed, although no one was left to hear her. “Dying on some God-forsaken desert planet with no one left to hear our story, and no affect on Lavos’s inevitable killing of our people!”
	Crono looked all around him, and saw that lava from newly-aroused volcanic activity had surrounded them in a five-mile-in-diameter bowl-like crater in the desert. They were not even to die of starvation; the heat would incinerate them where they stood. Thinking about his unpreventable death, he took a few steps back, and while the rest of the sand was soft and gave way partially under his feet, he stepped upon something that made the sand more firm; something hard buried beneath its surface. Marle noticed him turn around and begin to dig with his hands.
	“What did you find?” she said as he rifled through the sand with his bare hands, pushing aside mounds of the desert terrain for a few feet down, until he found a box. The lava inched ever closer, but his resolve didn’t fade until he found a dark box buried. He opened it, and found…nothing. Nothing, that is, save for two small gems. One of the gems: one of the gems was black, the other was white. He wondered what they were for…until he grabbed the pyramidal artifact.
	“Artifact!” he shouted. “Can you tell me if these gems go on you?”
	They do, Crono, it had replied, But do you know where to put it?
	Taking the black gem in hand, he placed it into the bottom eye of the pyramid, into the slot where the gem had been gone from. When he did so, the entire artifact seemed to pulse with a white light for a moment. It sparkled in his hand, and the tip of the pyramid opened up, revealing a compartment where a very tiny gem stand still stood upright. He held it close to his face, and gingerly lowered the white gem into the tiny stand. Upon replacing the gem into the stand, the tip slammed shut, threatening to snap his finger had he not pulled it away in time. At the top of the pyramid, a white light far brighter than any previously seen almost blinded them, for it lasted a whole minute.
	“CRONO!” Lucca shouted, for even though the light prevented her from seeing, she felt the lava mere feet from them. After her sentence, though, the light vanished, leaving them with the scenery of before. Nothing had changed with the planet, except the lava was almost upon them. Her eyes felt so heavy…she just couldn’t stay awake any longer. Thus, she fell to the ground into a blissful slumber. Marle noticed that their clothing had slightly changed, but also was so exhausted she fell into a snooze and tumbled to the ground. Crono could only smile as he was ready to meet death in sleep as he went down as well. Frog already had fallen into a state of slumber. They were too into dreams to notice that an invisible sphere of energy had formed around them, protecting them as the lava roared over the force field, entombing them in a protective sphere beneath at least a mile of lava.

		*		*		*

	“This, my children, is the Shrine of the Four Sleepers,” a woman said, showing her class around the tomb. She’d been to this shrine numerous times over her extensive career as a teacher, and could never properly understand herself why these people never aged. “We discovered them beneath the legendary lava flows of olden times, during the archaeological digs of a hundred years ago. The crust beneath which they were buried dated back no less than a billion years ago, long before our civilization was in its infancy, even.” The class oo-ed and ah-ed as they watched the four blissfully absorbed in dreamland as they lay within their own individual glass cases. At this point, her fellow history teacher chimed in.
	“The legendary Four Sleepers emit a constant stream of energy that will never end,” he informed the class, “and they do not age. Their souls are unaffected by time’s influence, their bodies impervious to its ravages, and no mortal weapon can pierce their flesh. We believe they rule over existence even as they sleep away the millennia.”
	“Mrs. Lakka,” one of the small students asked, “where did they come from?”
	“Ah, they were time travelers,” she explained. “They came to this planet a billion years ago from a point far in the future, and were stranded here after the ancient culture of the Nekusos who’d inhabited the planet before met with a cataclysmic demise.”
	“Mrs. Lakka, wasn’t it the mythical creature Lavos that annihilated his people?” A separate student entered.
	The other teacher gathered his years of knowledge on history and replied, “Lavos was a Nekusian who’d been corrupted by power and destroyed his people out of greed. The Four Sleepers are said to one day put a stop to his evil ways, for he is somewhere in deep space.”
	One small girl almost leapt back in shock as she screeched, “Yaahhh!” Instantly both teachers turned to her.
	“What’s wrong, Eliza?!” shrieked Mrs. Lakka, attempting to figure out what was wrong.
	The girl pointed at Crono as though he were an awakening beast. “He’s…he’s looking at me!”
	“Now, Eliza, certainly you don’t believe…aaaahhhh!” The other instructor attempted to dispel her statement, but when he saw Crono open his eyes, reach out and touch the glass, he dropped his water bottle and almost fainted. When the punk-haired time warrior realized he was inside a glass case, he turned to the nearest person to him, the museum curator.
	“Let me out of here!” he ordered. The museum curator turned immediately to one of his workers.
	“Do as he commands!” shrieked the curator. The man’s language seemed so foreign to Crono, yet his mind was able to translate it as though it were English. A question came to Crono’s mind, and it was immediately followed by an answer.
	How long was I out? Crono asked.
	One billion years, his own voice replied inside his head. Still, you’re eighty-four billion years behind your first birthday. Nevertheless, you aren’t affected by time any longer.
	Why not?
	Because you have transcended it.
	As the glass case lifted, swiftly followed by the cases covering his three allies, he noticed primarily that Frog had been returned to a human form, and secondly, that their clothing was exactly the same except for the presence of a golden pyramid symbol on the front of their shirts, and golden capes attached to them. Stepping out onto the floor, he looked around to see everyone present kneeling before him.
	“Stand up,” he said. “I don’t have to be considered anything special.” Marle and the other three joined him.
	“Crono, what’s going on?” she asked. Lucca could not think of an answer either.
	“Beats me,” Lucca said, speaking for the unelected team leader. “I wake up to find I’m in a case in a museum, a long time away from home.” As the group nervously got to their feet, he approached the male teacher; he instantly stood at attention.
	“Oh, all-powerful one,” he stated, “I am not worthy to stand in your presence!”
	“Where are we?” Lucca asked.
	The kingdom of Rinata, the civilization of Humans that lived after the Nekusian people all died. The answer to all four had come simultaneously inside their minds.
	“We’re the people of the kingdom of Rinata and its surrounding villages,” the teacher answered. None of the time travelers understood what was going on, nor did they realize that a terrible conspirator was lurking just around the corner. Waiting in the darkness outside the solar system surrounding planet Nidelos, was a familiar evil just waiting for his chance to return for more destruction.