FINAL FANTASY XIII: Reminiscence Tracer Of The Memories

C5: Snow Villiers

Translation credits to Galvea@GameFAQs.

CHAPTER 5: SNOW VILLIERS
Aoede waits at a run-down bus stop, next to a highway…

Aoede waits at a run-down bus stop, next to a highway in the middle of nowhere. She looks at the green fields all around her, and thinks that while the countryside may be a boring place for most everyone else, the lack of action is probably what Snow likes about it, after having fought in “that other word” for so long. Aoede knows she could have made an appointment in town, but Snow enjoys riding his motorcycle on this stretch of road, and Aoede felt that it would be a good place to hear his story. Presently Snow and his motorcycle comes into view, and he stops by the bus stop to inform Aoede that she won’t have any luck catching a bus; the line’s been abandoned for some time now.

Aoede: “Not a problem. I was waiting for you.”

Snow: “…You don’t look like a hitchhiker.”

Aoede: “I heard about you from Serah Farron.”

At this, Snow cuts his engine and they move under the shelter of the bus stop to talk. Aoede tells Snow everything she’s learned so far, and at the end of her story Snow agrees to tell her everything she wants to know, because anyone who has Serah’s trust has his trust too. Snow then relates his story from the beginning; when he gets to the part where Serah dies, he falls silent, and Aoede, sensing that it must be a painful memory for him even with Serah alive now, quickly changes the subject, asking to hear about the age of Chaos.

Snow continues with his story in LR, and we find out that right after the Chaos began taking over the world, everyone took shelter in the man-made Cocoon, the Ark in the sky. Hope, with his charisma, naturally became the leader, and the Conseil de Renaissance (*French for Council of the Rebirth?) was established. Hope was the brains in charge of the big picture, while Noel, Snow and Sazh (who flew about in his airship), dealt with the monsters. But, as it turned out, mankind not being able to age became the bigger problem. Aoede had already guessed that at some point everyone must have been immortal, because some of the people she interviewed claimed to have lived for hundreds of years, but Snow corrects her: they weren’t immortal, it was still possible to die, and with no children being born humanity was doomed to extinction, something the Conseil de Renaissance did their best to prevent.

Snow: “Things were going downhill. The lands we could live in were consumed by the Chaos, little by little, and even “Bhunivelze”, up in the sky, couldn’t escape the damage.”
Aoede: “Bhunivelze” – I keep hearing this word, but what does it mean?”
Snow: “It’s the name of the Cocoon we made. And also the name of God, our biggest enemy.”
Aoede: “Huh…?”
Snow: “I’ll get back to that later. Anyway, the manmade Cocoon began to show wear and tear, and we knew it wasn’t going to be able to shelter us forever. This was when Fal’cie-Pandemonium showed up. It sprang into action and began working at great speed on the lands outside of our Cocoon.”

Aoede: “What kind of action do you mean?”

Snow: “This was a Fal’cie that made things. It began cultivating the lands beside the sea and building homes for people to live in, even though no one asked it to. In no time at all it built something like a city, and then another one a little ways apart from the first. The first eventually became known as Luxerion, and the second became the foundation for Yusnaan.”

Aoede: “So everyone in the manmade Cocoon moved into the cities the Fal’cie built.”

Snow: “Not at first, we were suspicious and stayed away from it for a long time. You can’t trust Fal’cies, and there wasn’t a message or anything either. While we stayed on the alert and waited to see what it would do next, the Fal’cie began its next course of action. It built a plant in Yusnaan and established a supply chain. Food, fuel, the works. The Fal’cie didn’t say anything, but it was trying to bait us, all right – “Leave your manmade Cocoon and come here”, you could almost hear it say.”