Welcome to Adventu, your final fantasy rp haven. adventu focuses on both canon and original characters from different worlds and timelines that have all been pulled to the world of zephon: a familiar final fantasy-styled land where all adventurers will fight, explore, and make new personal connections.
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year 5, quarter 3
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Kuja had almost grown used to the idiocy. Had it not taken him months to stop wincing at the Meltigemini’s insistence on speaking in anastrophe? The jesters had been likewise incompetent though they’d been aware of it at least. Self-aware and submissive -- two traits that went a long way for Kuja’s patience. Traits that this moron lacked.
Still, he seemed the type to stumble over victory out of sheer existential spite. Kuja would do best to avoid violence for now.
He started down the hall without waiting. The walls were layered with cobwebs. His steps scattered clouds of dust. This place had been abandoned long before the catastrophe that took the upper floors. It was a place that few had reason to visit, and to which even fewer were granted the honor. Now that privilege belonged only to monsters and the dead.
In the end, Kuja had seized what had been unrightfully denied him. Such an honor indeed.
He glanced within cracked doors and opened archways. There were empty studies. Archives littered with ripped scrolls and scattered pages. These halls were untouched by looters (why else would the traps still be in place?) but the dead had taken their toll. Their stumbling feet knew nothing but destruction.
Kuja paused. A door stood open. Inside there was a flickering light. Kuja’s brow furrowed faintly as he gave the door a careful push. Inside was another office, but this one was different. The shelves were still stocked. The quills were untouched, and the air reeked of magic.
Kuja peered around the edge to see a ghoul charred and rotting on the ground. Around it were markings that glowed in ethereal blue. Kuja glanced from the monster to the sigils and then to the scrolls beyond. Mounted behind the desk was a gleaming golden sword. Kuja’s eyes pricked with caution.
”There’s magic here,” he said. ”Don’t try anything.”
A sending. Kuja had never heard of it. Unsurprising given the nature of his situation, yet it sparked questions all its own. Were the skills of mages all preserved in the transfer between dimensional space? It seemed strange to think of a world more advanced in the magical arts than Terra, but he supposed advanced was the wrong word for it. Different. Evolving under unique circumstances. How could the skill be put to use on Gaia?
A spell that could banish the Mist. How intriguing.
His eyes pricked with intellectual fervor. Souls that couldn’t join the cycle, spirits turning into fiends, and…
”You’re a summoner?” He felt the cogs of his mind churn faster. The power of summoners were as formidable as they were mysterious. He supposed that came with the territory -- being razed from existence after all. Very little knowledge of their practices remained just as Garland had intended. Could it be that they’d developed a magic he’d never so much as touched?
Damn Garland and his orders of genocide! He hadn’t even had the chance to properly study them.
”You’re alone. Are you not?”
Kuja smiled mysteriously. ”I am.” She’d meant it as a joke or perhaps a contradiction. He’d known perfectly well what he’d said. There was no circumstance under which he would have called himself innocent.
”I found myself a victim of unfortunate circumstances. Perpetuated by company I’d rather not keep.” He couldn’t tell which he’d loathe more. Being abandoned in the middle of a haunted forest or spending even one more second in the witch’s company. He supposed the former afforded him free use of his tongue.
He angled his head thoughtfully. ”But I don’t mind traveling together. I happen to know a path back to civilization. Or an approximate of it at any rate.” As far as choosing a direction and keeping it could take him. The forest’s center still pricked at the back of his neck. The more distance he could put between himself and the obelisk the better.
He pushed his hair back with a hand. ”I’ve never heard of a sending,” he said. ”Souls in my world linger long beyond their death, coalescing into something not so different from this Mist.” He gestured towards the forest around them and the newly cleansed atmosphere. The forest felt somehow lighter without its fog. He thought he heard the distant trills of birdsong.
”I’m a scholar of sorts as well as a practiced mage. The Mist has incited violence and spawned monsters for the length of Gaia’s written history. A method to dispel it could prove revolutionary." He touched at his lips, smiling faintly. "If you would teach it to me.”
A strange magic touched him. At first, Kuja couldn’t say its origin nor could he define its purpose. It was gentle, he thought. It touched him with an almost soothing voice, and he felt his soul stir at its call. The Mist dissipated just as quickly, and with it that insufferable sense of suffocation. Kuja paused, head half tilted in thought, before he heard the sounds of something stirring behind him. He brought sparks of magic to his fingers as he turned to face it.
A girl. Kuja nearly recoiled in surprise. He had no idea what a girl was doing this far into the forest alone. How had she even survived? Still, she danced before him, spinning a mage’s staff before her as she twirled light on her feet. She wore draping silks and beaded jewelry that clicked with her movement and the spin of her dress. Kuja brought a finger to his lips, eyes sharp with interest.
Was this her magic? How interesting…
She said nothing until the Mist had fled and the forest was quiet once more. With that, she muttered something and finally turned her attention to him. Strangely, she didn’t seem surprised to see him. Her eyes didn’t dart from his clothes to his hair to his face, expression wavering with doubt. Instead, she looked at him straight on and apologized.
”I’m so sorry to barge in,” she said as though she were some uninvited guest in his home. ”I heard your magic, but you must have had it under control. You’re a very talented black mage. Flare isn’t easy to learn.”
Kuja’s lips twitched with a smirk. So she’d seen his spells. Would she recognize him as a threat? Her life was in her hands.
He spread out an arm, head tilted in a kind of half bow. It was almost instinctual upon meeting a stranger with such a careful demeanor. He’d spent too long among the nobility. ”Kuja,” he said. ”A pleasure.”
He smirked dryly, crossing his arms. There was, in fact, nothing pleasurable about this dark and miserable place. It was corrupted. Distasteful. Every second he spent within was an offense. ”What was that spell?” he asked. ”It warded away the will of the dead. I’ve never heard of anything like it.” A remarkable feat given his endless study into the records of both Terra and Gaia alike. Despite his situation, his own ignorance pricked at him like an irritable fly.
”Did you come alone? The forest has a way of leading the innocent astray.”
Kuja waited for the idiot to grasp a basic understanding of the door. Then he waited as he seized the handle, shoved it open, and stood vaguely baffled at the edge of the descending corridor. ’Weirdly familiar?’ Had he never seen stairs before?
His white eyes narrowed. Rusted cogs creaked behind them. For a long moment, it looked like Gilgamesh was on the verge of his first ever thought before he straightened with a jerk, eyes wide. Kuja stared back at him.
”A trap?” His eyes drifted from the swordsman to the hallway. It was as mundane as an abandoned temple could prove itself. There was no magic here -- at least no more than any other forsaken corner of this tomb -- and there was nothing out of place. Kuja had explored the place himself after all, and the monks hadn’t been fond of traps.
”The dead must have light feet,” he said instead, hand at his turned lips. Even if something was here, wouldn’t the monsters have tripped it by now? Still, the idiot had a thick skull and defective ears. He kept about his show of performative competence, waving his blade about before taking aim and hurling it down the hallway like a javelin.
Its aim was true -- its course unwavering. It flew as steady as an arrow from his hand, and for a moment, even Kuja felt the faintest faux shadow of respect before it pierced the opposite wall and shuddered to a stop. How anticlimact-
There was a click and then the dropping whoosh of metal. A thin, hallway sized blade dropped from the ceiling and crunched into the proceeding floor. Kuja stared at it.
”What.”
The blade in front of him was ancient and reverently carved. It prosthelytized visions of ruin and warfare, gods and sacrifices, and finally the sickeningly familiar face of the Lich. Kuja didn’t know how the traps had stayed inactive for so long. He didn’t know how or why the monks had installed them into this hallway in particular, and he didn’t know how the idiot had known to check for them. Pacified, they had been nearly undetectable. Kuja’s eyes flit from the blades to his too-satisfied tormentor.
’I half expected a boulder to come barreling down after us!’
”A boulder.” Kuja stared at him uncomprehendingly before laughter rose to his lips. He ran a hand through the front of his hair, tilted back his head, and laughed. He couldn’t keep it contained any longer. This was absurd. This was impossible. This was…
”A comedy! This is a comedy!” Kuja lowered his hand, and his laughter ceased. Yes, that was all this was. Just another play written by another hack of a playwright set to place them at odds. He as the villain would be punished by the antics of his comic relief. The puns, the hubris, the eccentricity. How many times had he seen it on the stage? It was a character as classic as theater itself. The buffoon. The fool.
A comedy. All things considered equal, Kuja far preferred his own tragic end.
”After you.” His lips still shadowed with his laughter. He felt it catch hysterically in his throat. ”The curtain rises, and we have our roles to play.”
One night when the twin moons of Gaia still hung high in the sky and the city of Alexandria had gone quiet, Queen Brahne had tried to seduce him.
Kuja hadn’t known quite known what to expect when he’d received the summons so late in the night. An echo had suspected. The louder voice of denial had shut it down. For his part, he’d kept his full composure once he’d found himself alone in a room covered in silks with a queen who was distressingly not. It had been the ultimate test of his charisma that he’d escaped untouched and unexecuted. Still, he would never strike that image from his memory -- the folds of mottled flesh, those piggy eyes bright with hunger, the smell of sour meat...
This was the only scale on which Kuja could measure his current pain.
To say that the buffoon’s performance was a disaster would have been an understatement. Normally Kuja would have taken pleasure in such impressive feats of failure, but the would-be knight was incapable of silence and simply refused to die. His laugh scraped against Kuja’s ears. His sickening hubris mocked fate itself. And oh, his fake affects! He spoke as though in some play, but he didn’t do it well. No, it was a mockery to the very concept of theater. Right down to his ’Rocket Punch.’
The timing was like something out of a comedy. The building over-confidence, the declaration of intent, and then utter defeat. Kuja wanted to laugh. In fact, he did quietly behind the back of his hand, but it had almost become like a kind of game. How long could Kuja keep the cracks from his mask? How long until he killed him?
Kuja simply stood by and watched and waited and winced as the imbecile decided to bellow his words like a cannon shot. All the while, the undead crept ever closer with their grasping, greedy hands. Kuja’s lips curled behind his hand as he anticipated the fall. How long would his armor withstand their blows? How long until he was torn apart into wailing, miserable pieces?
Except he wasn’t torn apart. Instead, he finally unsheathed his halberd and threw himself into the fray. Kuja felt his laughter die. The idiot had survived. Kuja closed his eyes and took a long breath that smelled of mold and corpse rot.
If the moron could escort him unscathed, it would be worth it. He would keep his composure as a matter of pride.
”Lovely.” Kuja's eyes landed on a disembodied head as it rolled to a stop at his feet. It gaped at him with a sagging jaw.
”Well, you’ve certainly proven yourself.” Kuja stifled a scowl as he touched at his cheek. ”I doubt we’ll have any trouble.”
From the undead that was. He suspected the so-called Mighty Gilgamesh would meet his own trouble in spades.
Kuja pushed his hair over his shoulder. ”Shall we?”
They met no further resistance as they continued through the upper halls -- Gilgamesh in front and Kuja offering direction from behind. Perhaps some prior adventurers had cleared the temple as they’d looted it? Regardless, Kuja had no doubts that the catacombs had gone untouched. His human shield would have ample opportunity to prove himself useful.
In time, Kuja brought them to an innocuous door on the temple’s west wing. It was plain and sturdy and almost certainly locked. Kuja looked it over with a mild interest. ”The archives are below,” he said. ”You’ll find your treasure there.”
”Be sure to take notes, scholar! It's not every day you get to see a living legend in action!”
”Worthy of epics, I’m sure.” Kuja’s lips curled. There wasn’t a strand of beauty about the man. Nothing poetic, nothing intelligent, nothing to stir the soul except for a grand example of human stupidity. Assuming the man even was human which Kuja highly doubted. He towered like a hulking beast, and he had just about as much subtlety. Was it inherent to his race? Kuja had never met a Qu capable of stringing more than four sentences together after all.
The halls were just as weathered as he remembered. They were ancient, dusted, and whispering with secrets. Or at least, they would have been if he’d been able to hear his own thoughts. Instead, their somber tone was shattered by the bellows of an idiot. He’d taken to narrating himself like the hero of a children’s fable, and the pretense of it all made Kuja’s eye twitch. The moron wouldn’t understand storytelling if it slapped him across his painted face.
How Kuja longed to provide that hand.
Kuja tore his eyes away to the temple itself. They passed the remains of altars and archives, workshops and studies. A wooden door hung on its hinges, and Kuja glanced past to see what had once been a shrine -- now thoroughly looted. A waste. Kuja brushed loose hair from his cheek and looked away. There had once been beauty here, and perhaps there could be again with the passage of time.
Now, there was only the dead and far worse.
Kuja’s nails dug into his palm. The buffoon! Was he singing or skinning a cat? He pressed a hand to his temple and laughed softly to himself -- certain the idiot wouldn’t hear him over the sound of his own shrieking voice. One incantation and it would be over. Flare. What an intoxicating word. It paled only to the dulcet tones of murder. He breathed in slowly to compose himself.
The dead would wake. They would show their fury, and then the man would prove himself useful or die. If Kuja could manage Brahne then he could manage this.
”Do you hear them?” Kuja’s smile undercut his warning. What a tragedy that the man’s song would be interrupted. He could have lamented it to the sky. ”The dead. They’re rising from below.”
Without that shrieking voice to cover it, he could hear their scratches drawing closer. Their rotten feet slipped wetly against aged stone. Teeth gnashed on loose-hinged jaws. Kuja stopped to make space between him and his ill-fitting guardian, crossing his arms and watching with only a mild interest. He kept one hand slightly raised. He would not risk his life on the bumbling skills of an idiot.
”I’ve prepared my notes,” he said as the sounds swarmed ever closer. ”Shall we witness this living legend?”
Kuja saw wheels turning behind his eyes. Slow, rusted wheels about to shatter. There was a short moment of contemplation before the man relented. ”Well, two heads are better than none…”
Kuja’s lips turned. ”Quite.” God, what a fool he was! It would have been a spectacle if Kuja hadn’t been the one who had to deal with him. He thought longingly of his desert palace and the holding cells he kept beneath. What he wouldn’t give to see him suspended over lava! Let him have his quips then. Kuja would laugh until his throat was sore.
”Of course.” Kuja raised a dismissive hand. ”The monks here collected all manner of artifacts -- many imbued with the magic of an ancient race. Their blades are legendary.”
It was only a partial lie. He had no doubt that the scholars here had horded a treasure trove beneath their feet, but he hadn’t seen any of it for himself. The monks had been terribly secretive every time he’d tried to parse some scrap of research from them. In the end, they’d be torn apart by the secrets from which they’d spurned him. How fitting.
”The upper floors have already been looted. We’ll have to descend through the catacombs. You can go first if you wouldn’t mind.”A human shield. Kuja smirked. In those narrow passages, he didn’t think he could have passed by the idiot if he’d wanted to. His girth had a way of filling the room.
Kuja started towards a hall and then waited, his arms crossed. He gestured towards it expectantly. ”I’ll lead from behind,” he said. ”This place is so very dangerous, and I’m so very weak. How fortunate that we crossed paths.” He had no doubts that the man wouldn’t question the obvious. How had he made it this far if he couldn’t handle himself? The idiot would swallow whatever he was fed. Kuja doubted he’d ever questioned anything in his life.
I'm so sorry for any and all insults provided by Kuja's head
Why should the world exist without me?
The man who burst through the door was a monstrous fool.
He towered over him by nearly two feet -- a hulking mountain of armor, spikes, and loose fabric. Patterns were layered on patterns. Colors clashed in hideous contrast. His face (if he had one) was mercifully hidden behind a false front carved in harsh angles and eclectic stripes. He stood with his back straight and his head proudly raised like a child’s image of a hero.
Kuja’s eyes cooled. A moron. He was dealing with a moron.
After a long, painful silence between them, the man finally shouldered his weapon and let out a laugh that made Kuja’s skin crawl. It was like the death throes of some feral animal. Kuja longed to put it out of its misery.
”Alive or dead, no one has toppled the invincible Gilgamesh!”
”How inconvenient.” The shadow of a smirk touched his lips. If this idiot was invincible then Kuja would swallow Zidane’s sword. He touched at his temple and flipped his hair over his shoulder. ”By all means go charging into the catacombs. I’d like to see your invincibility tested.”
And it would rid him of the burden. Still, Kuja’s eyes flicked over the idiot with a kind of idle interest. He might have had the brain of an oglop, but if those swords were anything to judge by then he had some kind of skill to his name. Kuja could have easily handled the droves himself, but he’d never been one to throw aside a tool when one presented itself. He’d provide a decent shield if nothing else.
”I was about to delve below as it happens.” Kuja cleared his expression and turned to face the man. ”I’m a scholar, and I know a path through these halls. I could show you if you’d help to clear it.”
Kuja’s footsteps echoed through the somber halls. Not two months before, they’d been polished and hushed with knowledge. Now cobwebs itched over their dull and lifeless edges. Kuja paused as he reached the center of the atrium, glancing about with his hand thoughtfully at his chin. The undead were noticeably absent here. More than likely, they’d taken refuge in the dark underground, but for now it was quiet. Kuja took a few grateful steps towards a scholar’s desk still scattered parchment, quills, and a spilled pot of ink. He slid a finger over its surface and watched the trail of dust he left behind.
”Death on silence slowly creeps,
Through halls of gold and twilight sleep.
Pages on forgotten pyres,
Age to dust and then expire.”
Kuja sighed and slid a hand through his hair. It was a waste, really, the lost knowledge in these halls. He could recover a dozen of its tomes -- maybe half -- but the rest would fall to the ravages of time. This temple was a tomb. It carried with it a somber grace, and one that he was loathe to disturb.
That was, until a horrible noise pierced the silence.
Kuja sneered, turning on his heel. Kuja felt his tail bristle as the tone was shattered. It was a thumping, boorish guffah, something loud and clumsy and bumbling. Magic rose to his fingertips with the whisper of murder, but he took a short breath and silenced it. If there was any mercy left in the world, the source would leave him well enough alone.
But of course he knew it wouldn’t. Mercy was a lie told by children and morons.
Metallic footsteps pounded through the grounds like a charging bull. Kuja felt his fingers curl before he cleared his expression, hand at his cheek as he waited. There was no use picking fights before he’d assured the upper hand. He'd do it in the catacombs then, and only if the buffoon thought to follow him. He’d have plenty of opportunities in its labyrinthine halls.
”You realize this is a temple,” he said as the figure rounded the door. ”You might wake the dead.”
Metaia Temple. Kuja remembered it in its prime. The gleaming stone edifices, the smell of softened parchment, the excitable whispers of idiots babbling far beyond their limited intellect. The temple itself had brought to mind the hushed halls of Daguerreo, and the so-called scholars inside had shown no different a scorn. ’I’ve studied the forces of the Shimmering Island my entire life. What could you know?’ They’d all seen their end eventually, and so had the people of Metaia. A satisfying fate if he said so himself -- and of course he did. Though that wasn’t to say he had any love for the wreckage left behind.
Kuja scowled from his silver dragon at the landscape below. There was no beauty here, and no life either as the two were so often acquainted. The earth was cracked, the air stale, and as he glowered at the drying vegetation he could not help a tinge of disdain. The very soul of the land had been sucked dry. He’d seen more than enough lifeless husks to be finished with them for good.
Had he his own way, he’d have never returned to this ruined wasteland. Had he his own way, he’d have still been locked away far below the sands plotting out some scheme or another, but he hadn’t his own way and he doubted he would for some time.
It was all the fault of that witch. How he hated her. She had offered him nothing less than immortality at the cost of his soul. The wretched hag. She was as hideous as she was dull. He would do her bidding, arrange her downfall, and be done with it. He had no interest in playing puppet any longer.
His dragon soared over the city walls. From here, Kuja could make out the shadow of human forms as soulless as the lands they cursed. They wandered the ruined city searching for the flesh that sloughed off them in rotten patches. Kuja straightened and kept his gaze ahead towards the towering arch of the temple. He would deal with his share of undead in the catacombs beneath. He wouldn’t waste his time on what could rightfully be avoided.
His dragon landed on the temple’s lawn, and Kuja slipped off with practiced ease. His boots crunched on the dry grass, and he sighed, pushing his hair over his shoulder with a sweep of his hand. The surrounding ghouls turned to him, attracted by the noise, and started towards him hungering for the flesh that sloughed off them in patches. ”Go,” he said, glancing towards his dragon, and she took to the sky again. Her heavy wing beats struck him with sharp wind that caught at his hair and skirt. He smirked faintly before gathering magic to his fingertips.
”Fira.” He swiped his hand down and the approaching undead burst into deadly flame. He walked past them without waiting for their death throes. They fell in a fiery heap at his feet.
Within the temple’s depths waited countless tomes left abandoned and forgotten. He would find them, use their ciphers to decode the witch’s puzzle, and restock his library with his findings. It would be quiet, straightforward, and utterly unpleasant.
Kuja gave a wry smile as he approached the doors and the distasteful work that awaited him.
