Revised Plot and Planning Thread

[Vehek]

Some questions.

King Zeal and Schala were the latest Arbiters.

Why are they the latest? Were they ever Arbiters before Belthasar revived King Zeal?

605 - The party find the Imps dead and return to find everyone else gone.

It's minor, but would the Vanguard TL be slightly different in the short period between this and restoring the TL?


With the AEA, can Belthasar really blame Crono's team for not destroying the past Flame and Schala falling into the DBT?

[ZeaLitY]

Yeah, that's possibly changed. I made it so Belthasar also just wants to aggravate the Frozen Flame, not destroy it, but that aggravating it still carries the risk of altering it so that Cedric couldn't use it.

[Chrono'99]

I misworded the sentence with "latest". Basically the list of arbiters is as follows:

(The first modern human in 3 million B.C.) -> (a few unknown people) -> King Zeal -> Schala -> (a few unknown people) -> Cedric -> (a few unknown people) -> King Zeal revived by Belthasar -> (Serge after CE)

Belthasar and Antaeus make use of the Flame but are not arbiters. In the game, the Flame's normal frame should be the "round" one and it only opens itself into the "flame" form when Zeal, Schala or Cedric are around.

[Vehek]

Chronopolis picks up the signature of Sorin and the Dragon's Tooth, and an agent retrieves them with a Time Egg.

I thought the "I-FOUND-THE-DRAGON-TOOTH-LYING-ON-THE-GROUND" was stupid, but Sorin self-destructs, so that sacrifice would have to be removed for this.

This also seems like another case of Chronopolis having some kind of "temporal sensors".

[Chrono'99]

Yeah, I guess that's one of the more "cloudy" points in the plot, because I made it so that the Dragon Tooth gets destroyed but I had forgotten that it actually has to be intact and retrieved to power Chronopolis. This temporal trip takes care of the "retrieve" part, but not the "it has to be intact" bit.

Moreover, dealing with these non "Blue Gates" trips is tricky...We have the Time Egg stuff but we can't use it too often as Time Eggs are supposed to be really hard to make (apparently only Gaspar ever managed to create complete ones, not Belthasar nor Lucca). And even with incomplete Eggs it's still too convenient; we use like 3 or 4 of these legendary items at this point. The temporal sensor is also too convenient...

Perhaps instead of the Dragon Tooth the party finds some sort of Elemental power source on Cakhula in the Missile Base? I have to go...will think of other possible solutions.

[ZeaLitY]

One of the reasons I have Sorin still alive in a Chronopolis safehouse is to sort of suggest that his arm will become the StrongArm later stored in Chronopolis.

[Agent 12]

yea, we added it back in (albeit kind of in a corny way) for a few reasons:

*  the strong arm tie in that zeality mentioned.
* quite a bit of dialogue mentioning it after
* even more dialogue mentioning it before

We couldn't just have them completely forget the power problem they had been talking about for the last 2 chapters and had gone so far as to send the party back to 65 mil.  We didn't want to take the time right in the middle of zeality's playthrough to add something new.

Is is possible to have sorin just enter a "limit break" mode and jump through the portal and fight off any reptites that merge with it?  He can then appear in a forest all wrecked (think robo after fiona), still protecting the dragon tooth?

--JP

Time Egg uses: 
   Recover King Zeal
   Recover Notes
   Final Dungeon
   Recover Dragon Tooth

are there more?

[Vehek]

The plot says that King Zeal was resurrected, so that shouldn't be a Time Egg use.

Also, the party was supposed to return to Chronopolis after the Flame dungeons through time eggs, at least according to what Chrono'99 said back in 2007.

[Agent 12]

Well they go to the black omen through normal usage correct?  It's the anniversary of the incident or whatever so it works out?

I was under the impression that belth lied about him being resurrected but he actually saved him (seen in the secret scene when you activate the computer terminal on the left of the TDC).  That could also be me just doing my own thing   Also the date of that scene is ambiguous so it could have happened on a year anniversary as well.

--JP

[Vehek]

Anniversary doesn't matter; the Blue Gates only exist in the "present" time (CT time periods + time passed since then).

Belthasar was the one who resurrected King Zeal.

He uses the Frozen Flame, its generator, and a Time Egg to resurrect friends and others.

King Zeal resurrects Schala with the Flame’s power. He does this instead of simply preventing her from dying in the past, because he wants her to experience the same thing he has experienced.

[Agent 12]

Oh yea I'm an idiot about the blue gates :-/  haha.


I think the current path we took is to have an agent extract King Zeal from the timeline at the last moment...

I feel like that seems a bit more plausible than belthasar somehow resurrecting him?  I dont mind Zeal + Flame resurrecting schala that is a LITTLE less out there.  I dont know what are other peoples opinions?


--JP

[FaustWolf]

You can feel free to lift an idea from AEHU, which is that anti-annihilation energy can literally "anti-annihilate" objects that the Frozen Flame previously annihilated. If it vaporized King Zeal, it can reassemble his atoms if manipulated properly. Maybe the FF "hears" Gaspar's (oops!) dream of seeing Alphard again and decides to make that wish come true?

Actually, that's exactly the direction I thought CE was going to take when I read the plot synopsis, so I was literally borrowing the idea from CE. I guess I'm giving it back.

[Chrono'99]

Is is possible to have sorin just enter a "limit break" mode and jump through the portal and fight off any reptites that merge with it?  He can then appear in a forest all wrecked (think robo after fiona), still protecting the dragon tooth?

That wouldn't be possible as Sorin is a human with cyborg implants, rather than a complete robot. Mmh, the Dragon Tooth is connected to the void, so we could perhaps have Sorin use it to remain as a ghost to protect it (a kind of throwback to the scrapped Valle Crimse ghost knight from the sidequest thread I guess). But is it...believable? I mean, a cyborg ghost living for 62 million years...

Concerning the StrongArm, what's curious is that Norris says it was "in development in Porre", but it was also "excavated near an ancient ruin" according to Luccia and destroyed when Norris "caused the explosion in the lab". Kinda hard to reconcile these statements, though I guess different things could have happened in the two different dimensions. For Sorin, I tried thinking about a solution involving our own Porre Lab, which would fit all three statements (Porre excavates Sorin, tries to repair him, before the party takes him back to Chronopolis), but that can't be as I would be mistaking Norris for William.

Perhaps we can just have Chronopolis excavate the Dragon Tooth in 2,305 A.D. (offscreen, during Marle's Antaeus chapter), thanks to Crono/Glenn/Magus's report of their adventure in Prehistory. They would simply repair the Tooth, and would have found the cybernetic components of Sorin's dead body too, including his arm. That only partially explains the StrongArm but I guess there are enough theories out there for the "in development in Porre" bit (this could be something that happens only after the Time Crash of CC).

---

Time Egg uses:
1   Recover King Zeal
2   Arrival in Chronopolis (prologue)
3   Recover Notes
(4   Recover Dragon Tooth?)
5   Black Omen Trip
6   Final Dungeon

I like FaustWolf's idea of Belthasar (not Gaspar) using the FF anti-annihilation energy to "wish" King Zeal back (eh, that sounds like Abel wishing Elly from the Zohar in Xenogears). However, I think Zeality wanted to use the RD concept that the Frozen Flame + a Time Egg = control over space-time. Presumably using a Time Egg for that purpose won't shatter it, though RD is vague on this.

At most, we could lower the count to 4 Time Eggs if we don't use one for the Dragon Tooth and if the one used for the final dungeon is actually the one that was used to resurrect King Zeal. In Chapter 21 "Let us Part in Zealous Regret", King Zeal would simply leave his Time Egg to the party when he "invites" them into the Spire of Telos/DBT:

1   Recover King Zeal / Final Dungeon
2   Arrival in Chronopolis (prologue)
3   Recover Notes
4   Black Omen Trip

[utunnels]

Concerning the StrongArm, what's curious is that Norris says it was "in development in Porre", but it was also "excavated near an ancient ruin" according to Luccia and destroyed when Norris "caused the explosion in the lab". Kinda hard to reconcile these statements, though I guess different things could have happened in the two different dimensions. For Sorin, I tried thinking about a solution involving our own Porre Lab, which would fit all three statements (Porre excavates Sorin, tries to repair him, before the party takes him back to Chronopolis), but that can't be as I would be mistaking Norris for William.

Offtopic.

[System]
   There's a mysterious being inside.

How coult that be  "a being"?
Doesn't that a canon or a gun?

BTW, its JPN name is Dark Burst. It makes sense why it was translated as StrongArm, since Grobyc equips that as his robotic arm.