Crono Foreshadowing

[Kyronea]

I think we're all missing something.

Yes, the Time Egg can be used to save someone's life, but what if it wasn't intended that way? What if it was just an experiment in time travel, perhaps even something Gaspar was working on in tangent with Belthesar, or perhaps just following his own line of research, and the only one he ever finished making was the one that he would hand over to Chrono's friends so Chrono could be revived?

[Chrono'99]

I think we're all missing something.

Yes, the Time Egg can be used to save someone's life, but what if it wasn't intended that way? What if it was just an experiment in time travel, perhaps even something Gaspar was working on in tangent with Belthesar, or perhaps just following his own line of research, and the only one he ever finished making was the one that he would hand over to Chrono's friends so Chrono could be revived?

Yeah but that doesn't explain why Belthasar was working on 3 Poyozo dolls and expecting the party to go to Death Peak. Moreover, the Nu who gives the instructions on how to revive someone ends his speech with "The message from me is now complete.", suggesting that Belthasar specifically programmed this message into the Nu (and before Crono died).

In any case, I've realized that the stuff about reviving Schala makes no sense.... Schala didn't even die in the no-Crono timeline! It could be said that Belthasar didn't know that she survived and thus intended the Time Egg to revive her, but that makes the explanation both awkward and too convenient (his plan would be unnecessary, yet ends up conveniently useful for another person...).

So, perhaps Belthasar really did foreshadow Crono's death? Maybe he felt the Black Wind howls like Janus? In this case, Belthasar wasn't preparing the Poyozo dolls when the party met him; he actually began to prepare the Poyozo dolls because he met the party. Sounds possible?

[ZeaLitY]

I guess it is possible to beat Lavos before the Ocean Palace Incident ever occurs, and therefore not need the Poyozo Dolls. Yeah, maybe they were a backup plan...

[Kyronea]

I think that sounds reasonable enough, Chrono'99, the whole "Making the Poyozo Dolls only AFTER meeting Chrono's party" bit.

[V_Translanka]

I thought that he says it has to be used up on Death Peak for whatever reason...some high energy field or something sciencey maybe? And the Time Egg allows the user to return to a specific point in time AND you can change someone, but only if they're deemed important enough to...uh...whoever...the Entity, I guess. But does that mean you have to use it to save someone? How much time were they given as the Time Egg worked? Maybe they were trying to stop time & destroy Lavos...seems like that might be his ultimate goal, yeah?

[ZeaLitY]

I suppose this is now down to the question of whether psychic prophecy is possible in the Chronoverse. Masato Kato authored all of Zeal, including Janus's prophecy, but it may have just been dramatic foreshadowing. If Janus knew Crono would die, why didn't he know several others would too? Why didn't that apparent clarity tell him (let alone other people who can feel the Black Wind and are older, like Schala) that the Ocean Palace was going to explode? But not even considering Janus, Belthasar had to have the foresight to know Crono would die several days, or even weeks beforehand. The Retranslation tells us that he prepared the Epoch as a way to return home, but had to abandon his work in the end and leave it to the party.

Are there any other examples of prophecy? All the Dragonian prophecy turned out to be totally scripted by Belthasar, and the legend of Lavos never really carried a distinct prophecy with it foretelling of ruin. Magus was a distinctly false Prophet. Belthasar's language is precise:

BELTHASAR: Enough.

   The time has come for you to
   attempt «Death Peak.» It's the only
   chance you have of reviving your
   friend.

So, what is the final judgment? Are there any possible explanations? Does this also condemn Janus and the concept of the Black Wind? I mean, if that entire concept is written into canon, then perhaps there is some sort of extra-sensory awareness among Shadow innates of likely future events in history. Still, predestination in a series devoted to changing history...

[ZeaLitY]

I have one theory.

This theory assumes that the Entity is what caused the eclipse and helped the party go back to the Ocean Palace. Gaspar communicated to Belthasar a plan to use the Time Egg on top of Death Peak to try and defeat Lavos; perhaps the Time Egg was even designed to go to that instant in the Ocean Palace so that Lavos could be defeated there and prevent Zeal from falling. Gaspar was aware of the Entity's plan to use adventurers at this point, but did not use this plan as the party were going to arrive in Zeal anyway, it seemed. Belthasar still assumed it would take place, and made plans to allow access to Death Peak. All that changed when Crono died at the Ocean Palace and the party could not defeat Lavos there, suggesting to Gaspar that they weren't ready (and thus needed the sidequests and more time). Gaspar still had the Time Egg on hand, and decided to give it to the party and make use of the original plan so that Crono, a very powerful warrior who could help defeat Lavos, could be revived and the mission completed later. So he corresponded with Belthasar, or perhaps Belthasar knew some other way (this is iffy).

Issues include A) this means Gaspar corresponded with Belthasar. It is not proven that the Gurus had any real communication. There is still a slight basis for this since Belthasar in the Nu does talk of the entire quest against Lavos; B) this assumes that the Nu is sentient; that it doesn't just have prerecorded messages, but could think enough to know that the original plan was scrapped and the party intended to revive Crono, C) We're assuming Gaspar had the double intention of saving Zeal along with defeating Lavos at the Ocean Palace, and D) the entire game is still geared towards the original narrative that Belthasar knew EXACTLY what he was doing all along and that Crono would die.

The fact that this seems like a pretty far out workaround...I don't know. It's just hard to stomach. We don't know who authored the Crono's death portion, but since the death physically happens in 12000 B.C., it might be Kato. It's hard to inject this much Compendium canon into a scenario scripted for a different thematic purpose.

[V_Translanka]

Perhaps, in the desolate era Belthasar wound up, he figured that anyone who found his shiny letters (why the hell DO they shine? *wakka wakka*) would have someone close to them dead...Also, it might just be that through deduction he figured anyone who could have something Dreamstone charged with Lavos' energy to get through the door (though, really, would it be impossible for anyone to blast through one of the walls? i've always wondered that...but anyways...) would be someone VERY important.

Also, perhaps the Black Wind is related to the Entity somehow and that's why they could feel it around Crono and the whole situation w/Lavos & Q. Zeal. Maybe the Black Wind is another (like i suppose Masa, Mune & Doreen) 'agent' of the Entity...though a less corporeal type...*shrugs*

Either way, perhaps Belthasar (with future means?), knew about the Entity enough to figure that it would send someone to try and stop Lavos...

[ZeaLitY]

It's still tough to believe that he programmed the Poyozos and Nu exactly for that function so far in advance. I mean, there's no mention of an alternate use for those Poyozos.

[V_Translanka]

Well...there are the other Poyozos in the game...most notably in the same era are the ones in the factory which are used as locks...perhaps they form some kind of energy link that allows the door to the Mother Brain to open?

[Thought]

Magus was a distinctly false Prophet.

Was he? Certainly, it isn't like he had some mystical knowledge of the future; these weren't psychic prophesies. However, he still told Queen Zeal and (presumably) other people what was going to happen before it happened. Strictly speaking, that is prophesy. Why should it be discounted because he only knew the future because he lived through it (and, presumably, was able to deduce that Crono and Co would follow him)?

Lavos can use magic. It also influenced human evolution in some manner, which eventually developed their ability to use magic. Lavos, seems to have an awareness of time itself that transends the strict here and now. Could that ability have begun to seep into humans as well?

Ayla, the only character without Lavos influence, seems to have an underdeveloped sense of time (but who knows if that is just because she is a "cave woman")

Certainly, Belthasar seems to need a super-human sense of time in order to enact project kid (he'd have to know that these changes in the timeline would result in these effects, sort of like how a pool player uses their sight and mind to know where to hit the que). Gaspar likewise displays a super-human sense of time as he senses what the party needs to do and how certain actions can change their "future."

This needn't be absolute knowledge of the future, just an understanding of how likelihoods will play out. Janus predicts Crono will die because, by all appearances to him at the time, that is where he is heading (just like an expert pool player can predict where a billiard ball will go after being hit). Belthasar knows that the party will need the dolls and will need to climb death peak by the same ability.

Call it a knowledge of 4th dimensional trigonometry.

[ZeaLitY]

Yeah, I should have said that Magus's fortune telling relied on childhood memories. Archiving discussion:

Why that spot?

That's a good question. The simplest answer is game design, as it's obvious that's why Belthasar's talking about it so early in the first place. The game makes the Chrono Trigger sound notoriously sketchy to activate:

"Gasch: Death Mountain holds the power to
make a person come back to life.

However, in order to draw out that power, that
person must be a truly important and
necessary existence.

Furthermore, a doll identical to that person is
essential.

In that case, the egg should hatch."

1. What is so special about Death Peak?
2. How do you define a "truly important and necessary existence"?
3. Why on earth do you need a doll?

This is complicated by the fact that in Radical Dreamers, Kid's Time Egg causes a temporal distortion without any of this crap getting involved and in some nondescript location, and in Chrono Cross, Masa and Mune used Kid's incomplete Time Egg to send Serge back in time while in some guy's hollowed out tree basement. So right now, the Compendium school of thought is:

1. Nothing's special about Death Peak; it's an aspect of game design to have a big cinematic scene with the eclipse and everything. Or rather, the significance of Death Peak is unknown, and that's slightly enough to keep it out of the hole basket.
2. Belthasar was being dramatic.
3. So that Lavos would not notice Crono's disappearance and realize at that point in history that the threat of time travelers existed, or something.

But even if Death Peak somehow is significant, nothing is done there except the revival of Crono, and Belthasar only learns the party has a Time Egg and whatnot when they talk to him inside the Nu (ergo he's not chatting it up with Gaspar). So he's still building Poyozo Dolls for someone to use to climb Death Peak early in the game for no good reason.

Even that ability is radically different and unique in the Chrono world. For Project Kid, he may have had the use of the Neo Epoch, the power of the greatest supercomputer ever built (which was on an island far from Belthasar in CT's 2300 A.D.), and most importantly, the Entity's aid (the extent of which is unknown).

[V_Translanka]

This is complicated by the fact that in Radical Dreamers, Kid's Time Egg causes a temporal distortion without any of this crap getting involved and in some nondescript location, and in Chrono Cross, Masa and Mune used Kid's incomplete Time Egg to send Serge back in time while in some guy's hollowed out tree basement.

El Nido could be seen as being pretty important, if for no other reason than the magical energies of the Power Spots then how about the nearness of the temporal disturbance of the Dead Sea?...And Hermit's Hideaway (wait, is that where it happens?) is near the center of El Nido...

[Thought]

Even that ability is radically different and unique in the Chrono world. For Project Kid, he may have had the use of the Neo Epoch, the power of the greatest supercomputer ever built (which was on an island far from Belthasar in CT's 2300 A.D.), and most importantly, the Entity's aid (the extent of which is unknown).

Certainly, the use of the Neo-Epoch and "the greatest supercomputer ever built" are substantial benefits, but are they enough to explain the god-like implementation of Project Kid? I would propose that alone they do not.

1) The Neo Epoch: A terribly useful device; it could not only allow him to gather data to formulate his plan, but he could have also used it to nudge “history” in the right direction if it wasn’t heading towards his desired goal (has it ever been discussed if Belthasar might have been the one to cause the fall of Porre?) However, its use is limited by Belthasar’s own life span. He had 13000ish years worth of history to predict (could he even predict when Lavos might pull Chronopolis back?) and control; certainly he couldn’t have given his full attention to all those years (and all the people that there entails).

2) Fate: Of course, FATE is terribly useful for controlling factors for most of history; it prevented the citizens of El Nido from behaving in a way that would alter time beyond what Belthasar planned for. Unfortunate, that doesn’t apply to every other human in the world that could have been influenced by El Nido (consider Porre; Belthasar couldn’t rely on FATE to ensure that they behaved according to plan). As for FATE helping him plan, the computer had a "huge repository of historical knowledge dating back to prehistory," but as the existence of the civilization of Zeal was not known definitively by Chronopolis Scientists, this repository seems to have significant limitations. Even apart from this, the repository could not have contained complete information on contemporary times (recorded history just doesn’t contain the sort of information necessary to definitively predict counterfactual histories).

Without overarching principles, Belthasar planning Project Kid seems like an impossibility. There are too many variable that remain unknown (and unknowable) for Belthasar to construct a definite route to producing Serge as he is in the game. It would be akin to throwing a beach's worth of sand into the air in such a manner so that, when it fell, it would produce a perfect model of Edinburgh Castle. It is possible, but it is an undertaking that seems to be totally beyond the means available.

Yet I said “without overarching principles.” At first glance, Project Kid seems even more difficult than throwing sand to make Edinburg Castle; at least sand always falls down. Yet why shouldn’t there be laws governing the behavior of time, just as gravity governs the behavior of falling objects. Admittedly, assuming a natural "sixth sense" about how time works is probably too much, but Zeal was a highly advanced civilization and at least two of the Guru's worked extensively with time. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Zeal in general (and possibly just the Guru's in specific) were able to develop an understanding of 4th dimensional laws of physics; a framework for understanding how changes to the timeline will play out. This is actually supported by Gaspar, who was working on a device to restore lost timelines. Such careful manipulations of time would seemingly require substantial understanding about the mechanics behind the loss of those timelines in the first place. With enough experience working with such a level of temporal science, one might just as easily gain an intuitive knowledge of time (again, just like how a pool player can develop an intuitive understanding of how billiard balls will bounce off each other and the sides of the table).

With such a scientific background, Belthasar could have intuitively known (but still based on mathematical principles) that Crono and Co were headed on such a course through time as would result in the need for them to use a time egg (presumably, in this timeline he never built one of his own).

However that still wouldn't necessarily explain why he conceived of the poyozo before he met Crono (he references them, but it isn't certain that they existed at that point). Unless, that is, he knew that the que ball had been hit (and even if he didn't see that happen, he knew history well enough to know what balls it needed to hit in turn and thus was able to deduce where it would come from and where it would be heading). As you said, the Entity helped him in some ways (the extent of which is not known), so it may have been as simple as the Entity communicating in some manner that it had started a traveler down a path that could lead to the salvation of the future.

Anywho, just a

Thought

[V_Translanka]

Well, Belthasar is obviously some kind of temporal mechanics/chaos savant capable of improbable computations.

Perhaps the Poyozos are more significant...Two of those on Death Peak basically just give clues, but the first actually changes into a tree...>_>