Chapter One: Links to the Future

"Hey, Lucca. Whatcha doing?"

Lucca glanced up to see Marle standing over her, smiling brightly. Lucca sighed and brushed some of her messy hair away from her forehead.

"I'm trying to fix this thing," Lucca replied with another sigh, gesturing towards the mess of machinery. "What does it look like?"

"It looks like a junkpile," Marle observed. "What exactly is it that you're trying to fix?"

"You'll see," Lucca replied mysteriously. "Until I get it finished, it's going to have to remain a secret. I want to surprise you two."

"Oh.... okay...." Marle looked disappointed. "We can't just have a hint, though? I know I really want to know what it is. Don't you want to know, too, Crono?" Marle inquired of the redhead as he sat in a chair several feet away from Lucca's work area.

Instead of answering, Crono simply shrugged. He rarely spoke, even to his closest friends. Many people who didn't know him well assumed he was mute, but he'd been known to say a few things here and there occasionally. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that she'd heard him speak a few times, Lucca too would have thought him mute.

A slight smirk crossed her face as she remembered the time not too long ago when he'd come down with laryngitis. She and Marle had had a great deal of fun teasing and laughing about the "vast differences" between the laryngitis-stricken Crono and the normal Crono. They'd endured many death looks from their friend during it, but afterwards he still didn't make any effort to be more vocal.

Wiping a bit of sweat from her forehead, Lucca picked up a screwdriver and began to take apart yet another section of what she'd been tinkering with. It was the components of the Telepod, her successful failure that had started them on the adventure that had ended up saving the world a year ago. It had worked when Crono had tried it, but when Marle stepped on wearing her pendant, it had reacted by opening a Timegate that had sucked poor Marle in and back to the Middle Ages.

Recently, Lucca had become obsessed with discovering why the device had reacted to the Dreamstone in Marle's pendant the way it had. She'd always wondered what it was in the Telepod that had connected with the mysterious stone in Marle's necklace. But it had been a frustratingly idle obsession until she'd cleaned out her old pouch that she'd used to carry items in during their adventure. Out of the pouch had fallen a shard of Dreamstone that she apparently had saved when she'd helped Melchior repair the Masamune. She didn't really remember saving it, and didn't know why she had in the first place. She supposed it had been a mindless action of sorts, just slipping it into the pouch as some sort of keepsake without really thinking about it. Or maybe she'd figured she could use it to investigate the Telepod, but forgot about it in the excitement of invading Magus's castle that followed the repair of the Masamune and its subsequent return to Frog, its rightful owner. Either way, she was glad she'd saved it, and had immediately begun her research into the Telepod's inner workings and circuitry and the effect of Dreamstone on them.

It wasn't as easy as she'd initially hoped. The Dreamstone was an ancient mineral that hadn't existed for countless centuries, except in Marle's pendant, which had originally belonged to Schala, the princess of Zeal. Lucca was also interested in finding out how it had come to be in the possession of the royal family of Guardia, since none of them had any idea what had happened to Schala after she'd used the last of the pendant's power to warp them out of the Ocean Palace. As far as she knew, Magus was still in 12,000 B.C. searching for her. Lucca wondered idly if he'd ever found her.

Even in the Dark Ages, though, the stone had started to become rare, and was only used for things like the princess's pendant and the now-infamous Mammon Machine, the downfall of Zeal Kingdom. Lucca figured that if the Queen hadn't ordered it and the Ocean Palace constructed, the kingdom probably would have survived, as Lavos wouldn't have awakened and would have stayed asleep until 1999. Oh, well.... no use speculating over spilled milk, or in this case fallen kingdoms. Her focus was here, now, on the machine before her and its mysterious components which had reacted so strangely to a mineral that had almost completely disappeared long before the materials to make the parts of the Telepod could be made.

Lucca sighed again as she began to run another test. It was such time-consuming and tedious work.... she hoped it would be worth it. But deep down she wondered if all this trouble could ever be worth it. After all, the most she'd get was an invention that worked properly, but was utterly useless.

Actually, that wasn't entirely true. She'd get a sense of closure, of satisfaction that she'd fixed whatever mistake it was she made. An inventor as well as a scientist, Lucca knew that occasional failures were inevitable in her line of work..... and yet she hated failure, was deeply ashamed of each one. It didn't help that she'd often been teased about her inventions blowing up and malfunctioning.

The worst blow to her fragile ego, however, had been failing to save her mother from being crippled as a young girl. She'd always blamed herself, and had taken to learning about science and machines to prevent further accidents. Burying her guilt and insecurities, she'd created an image of false self-confidence that fooled everybody into believing she really did have something of an inflated ego over her talents and brains. Sometimes she almost believed it herself. But it wasn't until she'd traveled back in time and changed the past so that her mother was saved that she began to really believe it, to achieve some belief in herself. And yet, she was still obsessed with her failures. The Telepod, the most memorable of her failures other than her mother's accident, was one she had endlessly, and until she found the Dreamstone shard, fruitlessly, obsessed over. Now, she finally had a chance to lay it to rest.

As she wiped grease from the machine, finishing yet another unsuccessful test, her thoughts wandered to her friends, the ones that resided in eras apart from her own. She hadn't seen any of them since their goodbyes after Lavos's defeat. The Epoch sat dormant, unused, collecting dust in the hidden garage that Marle had had her father build for them to store the time machine in. After they'd saved the world, they'd gone back to their normal lives, and life was often busy. Lucca kept saying that she wanted to go visit Robo, and Frog, and Ayla, but as of yet none of them had found the time for a visit to their old friends. They felt guilty about not visiting, but at the same time, Lucca was a little afraid to make the trip..... afraid to see if her fears that Robo might not exist in the new future were true. But she was also interested in seeing what sort of descendants she and her friends had. Replacing another component, she wondered idly what sort of things they might be doing now.

"What exactly are you doing?"

Rydia jerked, startled as the voice spoke. Adjusting her glasses, she turned and looked up to see her friend Bleu standing there, a wry smile on her face.

"Jeez, Bleu! Don't do that! I didn't even hear you come in!" Rydia reprimanded her.

"Sorry." Bleu looked chastened. "I didn't mean to startle you. I'm just.... quiet I guess."

"I could tell," Rydia muttered as she adjusted her glasses again and resumed tinkering with the machines on the floor in front of her. Bleu simply shrugged and starting wandering around the house.

She'd been coming here for seven years, ever since she'd accidentally met Rydia and her friend Princess Daria when she was twelve and they were eleven. She'd been escaping her horrible mockery of a home, and had happened to meet them.

Walking around aimlessly, Bleu suddenly winced as she bumped her arm against the counter. Training had been as rough as usual today, and she was sporting another nasty gash on her arm. It, like the rest of her thin, awkward body, was already heavily scarred from years of brutal training and abuse at the hands of the Mystics she lived with.

Half-Mystic herself, her training to be a part of the Mystic army had begun when she was seven, right after her adoptive father had been murdered. They'd killed him because he opposed the training they had in mind for her. Her mother had been dead already for five years, so there was no opposition there. Bleu was essentially a mystery. She was obviously Mystic, her ears and magic ability proved it, but no one knew who had sired her. Her mother had just suddenly appeared one day, and a kind Mystic took her in and unofficially adopted Bleu as his own, though she took her mother's surname of Nightshade.

Once he was out of the way, she'd been given over to the not-so-tender care of Jade and Shade, descendants of Flea and Slash. For twelve years, they'd been abusing and harshly training her. This year, she was going to find some way of escaping her awful life.

It was always her left arm..... Bleu glanced down at her wounded arm, the bandages concealed by the black jacket she wore. Unconcealed was the pale, scarred hand that emerged from the dark sleeve. It had caught the almost full force of a nasty spell several years ago, and hadn't worked quite right since. Frowning slightly, she pulled the jacket sleeve up to hide her hand. Dark, long clothes were her true best friends, hiding her disfigured body from the rest of the world. From a cold, cruel world that stared at and mocked her pale, exotic-featured face and pointed Mystic ears. Even now she self-consciously pulled her hood forward, trying to hide herself.

Hearing a click behind her, Bleu turned her head slightly to see that Daria had entered. Petite and pretty, the young princess resembled her ancestor strikingly, except that she had black hair instead of blonde, and her eyes were a bit darker in shade and gray rather than green. Those eyes now darted around the room, as she took in what was going on. She nodded a greeting to Bleu, then Rydia caught her eye, busily working on the contraption she'd been fiddling with when Bleu entered a while earlier.

"What are you doing?" Daria asked curiously as she approached Rydia.

"Yeah, you never answered me when I asked," Bleu spoke up, taking a few steps towards her friend as well. "What is it you're working on?"

"None of your business," Rydia replied smartly. "Not yet, anyway. It's a surprise."

"I hate surprises," Daria muttered.

Rydia smirked at her. "Too bad."

Daria glowered at her.

"So do I," Bleu agreed. She directed her attention to the princess. "Where's Schala? Didn't she come with you?"

Daria shook her head. "Nope. Said she wasn't feeling well and needed to rest."

Bleu shrugged. "Ah, okay." Schala was a mysterious young woman who had appeared suddenly out of nowhere one day three years ago. Homeless and penniless, without anywhere to go, she'd been taken in and essentially adopted by the royal family. Over the ensuing three years, she'd become good friends with Daria, Bleu, and Rydia.

Rydia swore silently to herself as another small test failed to show anything conclusive. She'd been working on this secret project for some time now, and it was extremely tedious work, testing every little thing, every little part and component, to make sure it would work the way she wanted.

Wiping grease from her hands with a rag, Rydia sat back as she took a brief break from her work. All she needed was one more day...... if she hurried today, it might only take her half a day tomorrow and it'd be finished, and hopefully up and running soon after that.