Ultimecia Castle - Main

[Adel]

It was wrong: that was all Adel knew she felt. The whole castle felt wrong somehow, almost as though it were haunted. Ghastly shadows cast by fiery candles that did not melt seemed to move out of the corner of her eye yet—despite the lit candles signifying intelligent life in the castle—it seemed that cobwebs covered most everything in the room. A strange looking clock by a pair of double-doors to her left was frozen at nine-thirty.

Chairs lined the wall next to an unlit fireplace to her right in a strange way, as though it were a waiting room of some kind. A pillar was broken in the middle of the room, although it seemed out of place as though it did not belong in the castle. In front of her was a large staircase that lead up to the balcony above, and at the end of the stairs was a pair of unusually beautiful gold and blue doors.

Gated off windows were on each side of the golden door—though no light shone through them—and a pair of white drapes hanging oddly from the window on the right. What appeared to be a stack of coffins lay behind the stairs, which was vaguely alarming. On the balcony to her right, organ pipes seemed to line various window-like indents throughout the wall, as well as another pair of doors like the one on the ground floor.

On the balcony to her left, three small stain glass windows lined the wall, next to a pair of white and gold doors with a chandelier hanging over it, and under a balcony even higher which appeared unreachable from the main entrance. The place smelled stale and vaguely like oil, with hints of wine and perfume losing the last of their strength somewhere from far in the castle’s past. An eerie sounding organ music seemed to flood from every hall, yet stepping into them made the music sound farther away. She could hear monsters roaring in the distance.

“…What the hell is this place?”





((Okay, so here's the rooms. Big gold and blue doors lead to the chandelier, and across that—assuming it doesn't fall into the Great Hall when you walk on it—leads to a dead-end overlooking balcony the courtyard. The door on the bottom left of the main hall leads to a very creepy hallway which goes to the Great Hall. The Great Hall leads to the wine cellar in the ground or the courtyard in the back. I think Ultimecia must have been a drinker because holy shit she has a lot of wine. The courtyard leads either to a dead-end on the right or the chapel in the back. The chapel leads to a rickety bridge over the waterway which leads to the clocktower, and the clocktower leads to the outside of the clocktower or some random balcony where Tiamat is. The outside of the clocktower leads to the bridge to Ultimecia's room. Back in the main hall, the top left door leads to Stairway Hall A, which leads either an "elevator room" on the left or the art gallery at the bottom. The elevator room leads to the treasure room. The art gallery always bugged me because the clock on the floor has a IIII instead of a IV. The art gallery leads to a passage way, which leads to Stairway Hall B (the doors on the top right in the main hall also lead here). Stairway Hall B leads to the flood gate controls, which lead to the prison and the armoury (both dead ends). Xenos, we're in ur base. I make no promises as to the status of ur d00dz.))

[Kefka Palazzo]

"Tele-what?" Kefka mumbled as Adel disappeared into the giant castle, her voice trailing off in a hollow echo. The giant doors seemed to give Adel little resistance, though they hardly budged when he gave one a curious push. "How did you get the door," he started, voice falling low and quiet at the end, "Open?" The gaudy mess that greeted him as he stepped into the castle might have been a welcome sight, if not for the neglected state it lay in now.

The mage swatted at the stale air around him, chasing invisible cobwebs as he stepped further into the dimly lit great hall. The castle reminded him a bit of a grand opera house–all swank and no substance–and perhaps of a chapel, with its vaulted ceiling, arched windows and system of organ pipes in the upper levels. Almost as if frozen in time, a slew of candles continued to burn, as if to spite the fine layer of dust and cobwebs settled in every corner. It was as if some sort of sorcery was at work in this place, though Kefka couldn't be sure if it was in the candles or the illusion of decay.

After a moment of silent observation, Kefka glanced at Adel, curious as to just what had snatched her voice. He shrugged when she finally found the words, and resisted the urge to say, "A magic castle." "You're guess is as good as mine," he chimed, running his finger along the banister at the bottom of the winding staircase and grimacing at the tarnish there. He reached a hand up to pass spindly fingers through the flame of a candle, bemused to find they did indeed burn, while the wax did not melt. Then the he turned, rubbing idly at his soot-stained fingertips as he addressed the sorceress, "I do know something. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and the only thing I want more than to get off this damn continent right now is a good bath."

[Adel]

Adel ignored the little wretch for a moment and she looked about the castle before considering his words more carefully. “You’re an idiot. Where would a floating castle get water? Hmm? Did you see any pipes sticking out of the bottom of the rock?” She asked with a cruel smirk, taking joy in the idea of Kefka remaining filthy and miserable. Still, a bath didn’t sound half-bad. She would also need to begin exploring the castle if she was going to find some way to contact civilization. “I’m going to look around. Do as you will.” She dismissed as she began walking down one of the castle’s lower halls. Odd statues covered the hall’s ceiling, and reminded the sorceress of the kind of things that might frighten children.

Adel recalled briefly that sorceresses of old were said to keep statues like these. They would spring to life under the sorceress’ power and ensnare visitors. Adel didn’t understand why the sorceress would not simply burn the visitors to ash, and so wrote the stories off and idle fantasy rather than actual history; factual history on sorceresses was rare, and often quickly spun itself into fable.

As the passage came to its end, Adel came out into a large hall with a painted ceiling—dust-covered angels and blue sky covering its majority—filled with musty old furniture and some broken staircases. It looked almost like a battle had taken place in the room a long time ago. Adel noticed a few more doors around her, but a trapdoor on the ground also caught her attention. Moving toward it, Adel attempted to pry it open only to find it locked. Pulling harder, the old and rotted wood around the lock gave way and the door—now quite separate from it handle—flew open. Adel flew back a little from the unexpected lack of resistance, and the door’s handle flew from her grip and smashed a vase sitting on a nearby table. A lesser woman might have been embarrassed by the ordeal, but Adel was entirely too self-important to care about breaking someone-else’s belongings.

As she climbed down the stairs, the musty smell of dust and rot gave way to the strong acidic smell of vinegar, causing Adel to recoil momentarily. As she continued down the stairs, Adel began to understand the odour as wrack after rack of wine bottles presented themselves. A few of the bottles lay broken at the bottom of an older looking rack, and the contents had long since turned to vinegar. Adel realized this meant the bottles couldn’t have been broken long enough for the wine to completely evaporate, and the monsters she’d heard earlier wouldn’t have shut the door behind them. Someone had been here in the last few months, at the very least. Perhaps the same people who’d built the base in that mountain? Unlikely, or else why would they have left to live in a mountain?

Adel studied the bottles closer and her eyes went wide with disbelief. The first bottle she picked up was a brand she’d never heard of, but more important was the year listed. “One sixty-eight Cry Red. Produced in Esthar’s finest greenhouses using soil from the Cantra continent, for that dark flavour you….” She recited monotonously as she placed the bottle back on the rack. One sixty-eight. One hundred and sixty-eight years since the first recorded Lunar Cry had destroyed Centra and they’d reset the year to zero. Adel had been launched into space in sixty-three.

“It…it’s impossible!” She stuttered as the realization sunk in. She could have sworn she’d only been sealed away for a few years. Had she lost track of time so thoroughly? A pang of panic set in as she realized the bottle could have been decades old, and she began looking through the bottles for a newer vintage. As she feared, newer bottles began to present themselves, and the latest one was a bottle produced in one ninety-four. ‘Lady’s Blush. Grown in the gardens of our lady, Sorceress Ultimecia.’ Read the bottle, picturing a pompous looking woman with impossible hair. The implications of the bottle intrigued her almost as much as they infuriated her.

Adel continued looking over the bottles’ descriptions for any sign of what had gone on in the world between her entombment and her awakening, trying not to pay any mind to the fact that she had gone crazy enough to mistake over a hundred years for a mere five. As she searched, she found little in the way of historical fact—wine bottles not being a method of record-keeping especially favoured by historians—and learned only that the world’s political scale had not changed much since her day. Wines from Dollet were common, with Galbadian running a close second. The occasional bottle from Esthar presented itself, though she suspected Odine’s experiments on Estharian land had made farming difficult—an idea backed up by the Red Cry’s claim of being grown in a greenhouse. One or two cheap looking bottles of what was now vinegar claimed to have been produced in Balamb or by those odd little Trabian Shumi things. One bottle spoke with pride about a place called ‘FH’ which did not sound familiar to her, and she filed this away in her mind for later.

It was the oldest bottle that caused Adel to raise her eyebrow with confusion. Hung by a chain near the back of the room, almost as though it were being punished, was a bottle of magically-preserved sparkling wine produced somewhere in Esthar in the year eighty-one. There was no name or label on the bottle, though the glass was inscribed with small letters detailing the year of its production and place of origin. On the back of the bottle was an inscription in smaller lettering: ‘One year ago this day,’ it claimed, ‘Squall Leonhart, Rinoa Heartilly, Quistis Trepe, Zell Dincht, Selphie Tillmit, and Irvine Kinneas set forth under the orders of President Laguna to defeat the Sorceress Ultimecia and save the world from Time Compression. May this bottle commemorate-‘

Adel paused for a moment, double-taking over the name of the Sorceress defeated by these people. Undoing the chain from around the bottle, both for comparison and to shove the Estharian bottle down Kefka’s throat, Adel took it and returned to the bottle of Lady’s Blush. The names matched, and yet were one hundred and thirteen years apart. Perhaps she had been sealed away just as Adel herself had, Adel reasoned; Ultimecia had attempted ‘Time Compression’, whatever that was, before being defeated and entombed before awakening to conquer the future and...produce wine, apparently.

Grabbing the two, as well as a few of the newer, fancier looking bottles for consumption, Adel headed back up to present Kefka with her proof of Esthar’s existence. No doubt he had either gotten himself lost or found the bathroom by now, and so she started off back through the hall she came to see if she might follow his path. Not that she needed to prove anything to someone so worthless, of course, but she had just received some troubling news and had decided a nice gloat would calm her nerves.

((AWW YEAH BIG POST HAVE FUN READING THAT. Also: I don't know anything about wine. So yeah. Xenos, let me know if anything I wrote here is out of whack with your timeline. I assumed Ultimecia would have wine made for her if she was going to have such a huge cellar full of it. I have no idea when we're saying Ultimecia lived. Odine says she lived "many generations" in the future, so I just went with about a hundred and fifteen years.))