Chains of Promathia 1-2 Below the Arks
Summary: Rule 1 of being an adventurer: Lose that sense of self preservation. Rule 2: see Rule 1
So… there be shenanigans in the merry land of Jeuno, and of course we’re going to go nose around in it like it’s our business or something.
The Ducal Guard is a good place to start seeing as Wolfgang is the one stomping around Jeuno and yelling at everything. We head to the top of Jeuno, to the Ru’Lude Gardens, and head on over to the Guard’s HQ.
Our master plan of gathering information is the time-honored “ask everyone until the tell us things”. Before we even get that far, however, we overhear a conversation between two Guards. As we already know, Wolfgang is acting nutty lately, but here’s something new: the telepoint crystals at all the crags have freaking shattered, and Jeuno is scrambling ass over teakettle to find out why.
Pherimociel, another nearby guard, mentions the batshit loco things that have been going on in the past few weeks, and tells us a little bit more of the insanity: there are strange energy vortexes in Valkurm Dunes and Qufim Island that suck up people who get too close, and no one knows where the hell they’re being teleported to or anything.
The society of scientists that are based in Jeuno seem to think that it has something to do with the shattered telepoints crystals, but there’s no real clear idea what’s going on. Which is why everyone’s freaking the hell out.
Well, that’s our cue! Swirling energy vortexes sound like that might take a while, so we’ll go check the shattered telepoints first. Hopefully there will be sticks nearby for optimum poking.
We head out to the Crag of Mea, because… because. There, we definitely prove that the telepoint has shattered into a giant pile of crystal fragments.
We climb to the top of the platform and get right to the poking investigation. And are promptly warped away, to… somewhere.
We find ourselves in a room filled with weird machines. At the far end is a staircase leading up to a massive cermet gate that is locked tight. If we’ve come this far, there’s only one natural course of action. Start pressing every button in sight.
One of the machine activates and does some kinda technology voodoo, scanning us like some sort of cermet TSA gate.
While we’re being irradiated, the door at the top of the steps opens, and two of those weird robed guys come bolting out like bats outta hell. Following after them is a cloud of black fog looking stuff, which reaches out and grabs the screaming men and drags them back inside.
The machine finishes scanning us, and I like to imagine it dings like a fry cooker. We are left in a very uncomfortable silence, but we persevere and make the only logical choice. LET’S GO CHECK THE DOOR. Dear Altana what is wrong with us.
It opens, and we are sucked into a blackness, and then…
Rise of the Zilart 17 - Awakening
Summary: We meet up with Aldo and Gilgamesh to wrap things up. Awkwardly.
We go to see Gilgamesh, to let him know the world is saved, and apologize for the whole daughter sacrificing herself thing. He tells us Aldo already let him know. He also tells us the story behind Lion - she washed up on the shore of Norg during the Great War, and Gilgamesh’s father, who was Norg’s boss at the time, told him to look after her.
He says that even though he’s just a pirate, he was lucky to be the one who raised her, making this cutscene more depressing than it had to be.
In Jeuno, the Tenshodo are losing their shit because Aldo hasn’t come back yet. Right about the time they start to threaten us, he walks in, acting like it ain’t no thang even though it was us that did all the fighting up on the floating city.
Verena comes in, wasting no time in asking if she can see Lion, and Aldo breaks the bad news to her. Verena has a little episode, angry because now both of her friends are gone. However, in the middle of it, she suddenly claims that she can sense Lion’s presence with her weird soul-power, and tells us that Lion’s not really dead.
Aldo is just kinda like “YEAH OKAY WHATEVS MAN. SHIT I NEED A VACATION.”
And… that’s the end of Rise of the Zilart!
Rise of the Zilart 16 - The Celestial Nexus
Summary: We almost fail saving the world for a third time. That makes us a TRUE WARRIOR OF THE CRYSTAL!
We reach the center of the shrine, in a creepy hallway that looks like the Zilart punched through to Silent Hill.
Inside the actual Gate of the Gods, a giant crystal is suspended in a crazy cermet machine. Our comrades Zeid, Lion and Aldo have already defeated the vile Zilart scourge, and we can all go home and enjoy a hard-fought victory.
HAHA I’M JUST KIDDING.
They’re all blasted on the floor while Eald’narche laughs maniacally in victory, like any proper SE villian. When he notices us, he actually makes us an offer to join him in becoming one of the gods of the new Vana’diel. Maybe it’s because we beat the Crystal Warriors? In any case, we turn him down, because he’s obviously a jackass.
He takes this refusal as proof that we are the plague from the story, and decides to go ahead and kill us. We start our scuffle for Vana’diel… and round 1 goes to the adventurers!
During the fight, his eyepatch gets knocked off, and we can finally see that instead of a regular eyeball he has a gross crystal growth thingy. Like a small Kenpachi, for some reason his strength is greater with the patch gone, and version two commands these weird card-looking things called Exoplates. 
We still manage to kick his ass, for all the doom and gloom Yve’noile was spitting at us. In his dying moments, Eald’narche staggers over to the control panel of the Gate and announces that if he can’t have Vana’diel, he isn’t leaving it to us, either. He activates the Crystal Line even though it’s not ready yet, which will make the crystals go out of control again and cause a disaster on the scale of like a thousand Meltdowns and annihilate Vana’diel. And that’s a lot of Meltdowns.
Everyone is just kinda like OH NOES except for Lion, who tells us that she’s going to have to call off the little date thing she offered, and throws herself at the giant crystal. When she hits it, she disappears, and according to Eald’narche this act causes the same “noise” that Raogrimm gave off, disrupting the power flow and stabilizing the crystals. 
While Eald’narche has his dying-moments temper tantrum, Yve’noile appears. She basically tells him that he should stop being such a douchebag, because if he really wants to find Paradise being a douchebag is not the way to go. As they both fade away, she thanks us, addressing us as the Warrior of the Crystal. The real one. 
Outside the shrine, we recuperate with a battered and bloodied Aldo and Zeid. The basic consensus is HAHA WOW THAT WAS A CLOSE ONE, IF NOT FOR LION WE’D ALL BE SCREWED HUH? HOW ABOUT THAT!
As we leave, the full version of the song plays out over Tu’Lia, and we see all the areas we’ve explored around Vana’diel during this mission story. At the end, Grav’iton appears at the Temple of Uggalepih, just to remind us that she was a part of this storyline too.
Rise of the Zilart 15 - The Sealed Shrine
Summary: HOW DO I DOOR?! redux! I’m sensing a pattern here.
We beat the Crystal Warriors, but we still can’t get past the main room of the Ru’Avitau Shrine. Like before, we head all the way back to Norg just to hear Gilgamesh’s opinion on this shocking turn of events.
He’s happy we trashed the Crystal Warriors, but of course we can’t seem to get to Eald’narche now. Gilgamesh theorizes that the city actually isn’t fully up and running yet, which might be why none of the doors work inside. He says all we can do is wait for Eald’narche to power up Tu’lia as he opens the Gate, and then just get there and stop him before he gets too far.
This doesn’t seem like the best plan. But who are we to argue with a pirate?
In Jeuno, Aldo is going stir-crazy. Before he starts foaming at the mouth, some kids come running in to the Tenshodo and tell him to come look at something.
We follow them to Upper Jeuno, to look at a flowerbed. About a million years ago, we learned that Fickblix, Verena’s goblin friend, planted some seeds here when he first got to Jeuno, and now they’re finally sprouting. Right on cue, Verena herself appears, still weak from all that crap Eald’narche did to her, and witnesses it as well.
Surprisingly, Fickblix appears as a ghost or spirit or something, happy that everyone has been taking care of his flowers. He tells Verena that he’s happy he got to stay in Jeuno with everyone. Beastmen don’t have a word for “thank you,” but after he learned it here he was happy every time he used it. After making his bummer goodbyes, Fickblix finally passes on, and then for some reason Aldo’s all “EALD’NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARCHE!” even though Eald’narche didn’t kill Fickblix, the Yagudo did.
So, I guess we can’t find Zeid, so we go back to Tu’Lia and see if anything has changed. The last part of the song, the one about the Crystal Warriors saving Vana’diel, is playing over the ruins. HAHA TOO BAD THEY ARE DEAD.
In the main hall of the Shrine we find none other than Lion, who was supposed to be grounded from all this saving the world bullshit. She wants to help us stop the Zilart, and she feels bad because we’re doing all this and the majority of Vana’diel will never even know it.
After all this is over, Lion asks that we grab a boat and go traveling the world. If you’re a dude she more or less asks you out, and if you’re a girl it’s like a “just-us-girls” thing. Sorry Lion, but if I’m sailing around the world even semi-romantically with an FFXI NPC, they better be tall dark and corsai- -AHEM THE DOOR IS OPEN LET’S GO STOP EALD’NARCHE!
Rise of the Zilart 14 - Ark Angels (Divine Might)
Summary: We do epic battle with the Crystal Warriors. Didn’t Aldo just say he would take care of this?
For this next shindig, I’ll be using screens from when I cleared Divine Might, back when I was running with my old HNM shell. The purpose of this is twofold: So I can get all the Crystal Warrior stuff done in fewer screenshots.
Also, so I can look cooler than I actually am.
So anyways! After going inside the giant palace, we once again run into Yve’noile, who explains that this place is called Ru’Avitau, a shrine built around the Gate of the Gods. She also tells us that even if we did make it to the Gate, we’d just be thrashed by the Crystal Warriors, like every other time we’ve faced the Zilart.
So, for some reason Yve’noile thinks that we should go find the Crystal Warriors before then, and fight them on our own terms. She says if the children of Altana can’t fight them, then we don’t have a chance against Eald’narche.
It would have been nice to know this a little bit sooner, lady.
Anyways, we can either fight them one by one, or if we’re feeling particularly insane in the membrane, all at once. They are located in the La’loff Amphitheater, a place where they go when they’re being idle and not beating the crap out of us… which is basically all they do.
So, we go fight them in either way you please, and manage to best them. Somehow. They turn into crystal and shatter, and we take a piece from each of them, for… souvenirs? Isn’t that something serial killers do?
If we fought them one by one, then we just head on without incident. But if we beat them all at once, Yve’noile appears again to freak out that we’ve gotten so strong.
Since, in this case, the shards came from all of them at once, she is able to transform their power into a shiny new earring for us which makes our faces look like this :D
Rise of the Zilart 13 - The Gate of the Gods
Summary: We learn the story of the Zilart for a third time and then ride a teleporter to Columbia Tu’lia.
We reach the Hall of the Gods to test out the crystal and see if all that crap we did actually meant something. Surprisingly, Aldo and Zeid are there waiting for us. What the hell have you two been doing all this time while we were on this wild chocobo chase?
The good news is, the crystal actually does open the gate. But on the other side is just a bare room. There’s a platform with a weirdly colored floor, but nothing happens. The three of us just stand around looking at each other and shrug wildly.
Suddenly the apparition of a woman appears on the center of the platform, looking like the projections we saw in Chamber of Oracles. Sure enough, she introduces herself as Yve’noile, and among the Dawnmaidens she’s like the head priestess or the Pope or something.
Anyways, we must look like idiots or something, because she bothers to explain the story behind the Zilart for a third time: Crystal, Zilart Princes, Gate of the Gods. I think we all know this by know, except maybe Aldo, but he can read the cliffnotes, dammit.
What we do learn is that this place was originally a temple to Altana, before it was converted into the waystation housing the teleporter that brought people to Tu’lia. Yve’noile mentions, on the side, that the energy from the Meltdown accumulates in the bodies of living things to become the small less powerful crystals we see around Vana’diel. It’s a little creepy to think about, actually. She activates the platform, which is actually the teleporter, and wishes us luck in saving Vana’diel.
When we reach the top, we’re in a small room with a clear walkway, and beneath us is afgjgfgj -
It’s the clouds over Vana’diel afghgfghgh wow that is high. The floor is solid, though, and forms little digital patterns whenever we step.
We finally exit out the hallway and find ourselves in the floating city of Tu’lia, in the Ru’Aun Gardens.
Following closely behind us are Zeid and Aldo, and as we approach the center, the song about the Crystal Warriors rings out. Aldo takes offense to the part about blood soaking the earth, and talks some smack about the Zilart’s Crystal Warriors. Zeid more prudently decides that if he’s going to die, he’ll go down swinging, and we all go charging for the palace in the middle of the city.
--Nation Master List
--Rise of the Zilart Master List
--Job Quest Master List
