Living Legacy

Chapter 2: The Al Bhed

I don't know what happened in that sphere of water, or how I got out, or if it just got tired of me being there and dumped me in a random location, but the next thing I knew I was waking up in a ruin, gripping a piece of plywood and floating in the water in the midst of a quiet rain storm.

"Hello? Anybody there? Auron?" I don't know what I was expecting. It was clear I was alone. But still, I felt like I had to do something. "HEEEEEYYYYY!!!!" It was just me and my echo.

There was a temple off to the distance, so I decided to swim there, and hope that it wasn't as abandoned as I felt like it was going to be.

I swam around for a while, and found a few places where words had been carved into the wall, but I couldn't read the language. Nothing here looked like Zanarkand, and I began to worry that maybe I had been swept off to a foreign country, where no one spoke my language. But then again, this was an old looking temple, so maybe it was just some...crazy monk writing on the walls.

I eventually got out of the water and onto what looked like it would be an easy path into the temple, but naturally everything crumbled around me and I fell right back into the water. Just my luck. At least blitzball had made me about as comfortable in the water as I was on land, so it was less of a problem and more of an annoyance. At least it was just an annoyance until some fiends decided I would make a nice snack...but I wont bore you with the details. Let's just say the smaller fiends attracted the bigger fiends, which attracted some kind of mega monster that swallowed up three fiends at a time. I don't think I've ever had to swim so quickly in my life. Eventually, I got away from it, and found my way into the temple. Sorry to be anti-climatic, but there are bigger parts of the story to tell.

When I finally got inside, I realize I had made it out of the frying pan and into the freezer...I thought I was going to die in that place. It was cold, drafty, and in ruins. On top of that, I was soaked, and my stupid blitz uniform wasn't exactly warm or heat absorbent.

I must have literally spent three hours looking for a way to start a fire. It was a temple—may have been in ruins, but still a temple—so I managed to find some old withered plants, then used some rocks to try and get a spark going...and after three hours, I finally got it. Just in time to decide that I was hungry. It was a rough night.

I had another weird dream, or maybe it was a flashback, of Auron visiting me at home after we lost a big game.

"It was a bad call. You're team lost because of you." Auron said, as though there was no way that could possibly be offensive.

"You came to say that?" I scoffed.

"I thought you would be crying." Auron retorted.

"Who me?" I shot back.

"You did cry." That little kid appeared out of nowhere in the corner of my house.

It startled me so much I snapped upright, and woke up...just in time to see my fire go out, and a nasty looking fiend scurry down the wall. My sword was too far away to get to in time, I would have been toast...but then the doors burst open, and several people in strange looking jumpsuits/wetsuits came in, and a boy who face was almost completely covered by the mask of his suit pulled something out of his pocket. It was only after he pulled the pin out of it and threw that I realized he had just tossed a grenade in my general direction. I ran like hell to get away from the blast, but the fiend wasn't so lucky. The guy pulled his mask off, revealing a rather young looking face with big blue eyes possessing strange swirls around the pupil.

He didn't exactly look like he was trying to fight me, so I let my guard down, and fell to the ground.

"Whew, that was a close one." I sighed, then someone from his entourage grabbed me from behind by the hair and yanked me to my feet. "Hey! Lemme go!" I fussed, thrashing around until they pulled bayonetted guns out and pointed them into my chest. (Just so you know, I had Sora help me translate everything after, so that I could properly retell what happened here...I didn't even know what was going on at the time, but it suddenly makes so much more sense now...)