Post #38 [Cecil]

[Yeah, past-Cecil was fired up for this IF when he joined. It was like he was determined to redeem himself for the "Tenguian" mistakes of his past. >_>]

Posted by Cecil (Member # 47) on :

Sandra now found herself along the trails of the southern edge of Onett. She had looked at the Ramblin' Mushrooms, Black Antoids, and Ma Mouse, all frozen in time and sporting the pink aura of "Stop" around them, induced by the statis field around the Earth.

[In a sense, I was trying to make sure to give some recognition to the various minor characters in EB with these little references as to make them feel a bit more appriciated.]

Sandra felt remorse to all of them. She wasn't expecting to find many people that were not frozen, but she still had the hope backing her up. She also took notice of the frozen Sharks in and around the Onett arcade. They had been gathering supplies for Frank for a food drive they were planning to help make up for all the trouble they caused before Ness shut them out during his own journey.

She took notice of the black outfits they wore. They no longer wore the finned hoods of the orignal sharks, but Sandra could realize that they had once been part of some gang.

[Good perception, my dear Sandra. XD]

Another painful memory flooded into her at that point as she walked through Onett, looking for people unaffected. The frozen sharks reminded her of beginner Serpents.

[Oh yay, a fan-created bit of EB-world history. I was good at coming up with these. :P]

The Serpents were a gang that were to an extent like the Sharks, but worse. They flooded into Northern Twoson when she was only a child, before her disappearance. In fact, THEY were the ones repsonsible for her disappearance to an extent.

[O RLY?]

The Serpents weren't like the standard street gangs. It was rumored a few knew Wicca, or witchcraft, and other such sorcery.

[OH NOES! :O]

Sandra's disappearence had been the proof of this. The clearing she came out of earlier had in fact been around the area most of the old day Serpents hid. One Serpent man had opened the fated gate that she was brought to Santranus by. Sandra jumped in by choice, although not good choice.

[Huh? o.O]

The man planned to summon some kind of monster from the gate that would wreck havoc upon Twoson and all of Eagleland, and Sandra had stumbled along into the forest, grieving her grandmother's death by taking a walk. She realized the only way to stop the monster's approach was to jump into the gate. Doing so reversed the path of the monster, but Sandra wasn't able to get out of the gate, and fell through, into Santranus, to 10 years of living heck in a world not as advanced in technology, but more advanced in the forms of magic.

[Yeah, there's your primary 'explaination', or part of it, to why Sandra has been away from the Earthbound world for 10 years, but this is just the beginning of that exposition folks. :P]

As for the Serpents, they had disappeared themselves the same day, shortly after her disappearnce. She didn't know it, but it was part of the history which had resulted.

[I wonder why the Serpents disappeared anyways? Actually I was going to eventually reveal this, but the IF died off finally before we got to a viable point for this to get revealed. So it will for now remain unrevealed until I get to the closure posts of Frozen. :P]

Shaking the memory away, it gave her another ray of hope for herself, and perhaps Earth as well. She was so immersed in her memory, that she had missed a person that was unfrozen. A boy by the name of Jake was still searching the Hotel Onett for unaffected people. No one knows if Jake caught sight of her as she passed or not, but Sandra continued towards the Onett library, only hoping to find some kind of clue to what the heck was going on.

[Yeah, this was my attempt to hook at least one character up with Cracked Bat and his AC, since they were kinda floating in AC limbo at this point, but Cracked Bat never got back to me. Jake is sadly still roaming Hotel Onett even to this day. :(]

She had caught sight of many other frozen people, all supporting the Stop aura around them. She looked disappointed still, but she then realized something.

I must've been Auto-Hasted because of the time freeze!

[Eh? :o]

Sandra had known some of her supportative and curative magic to act on it's own at times, as if it had a conscience of it's own, protecting the girl from death when seriously wounded, or perhaps in this case, from the time field. That must of been why Dispel failed to remove the haste affects on her.

[In laymen's terms. Sandra has a passive skill called "Auto-Magic" which acts something as a 'guardian angel' type deal. If she's knocked out and left in the middle of a crowd of monsters, her subconsiousness could still occasionally do something to protect her from said crowd of monsters. Or in this case, protect her from possibly being frozen by the time-ray by constantly scanning her for the "Haste" buff and reapplying it if she loses it, so she can't get frozen. :P]

She suddenly heard a loud crash and then a louder splash to her north. Sounded like a big rock fell of the Northern cliffs of Onett and into the water. But that must have meant someone had been unfrozen up there. As far as the Earth was concerned, even the weather seemed frozen in time, so it couldn't have been the wind, or could it?

[Yeah, we're still shaky with whether weather patterns got frozen too or not. >.>]

Sandra decided the northern cliffs were her next destination, and like a beam of light, shot off along the path that would concidentally take her by the house of Ness, one of the four heros of the common world, and hopefully to the peak of the cliffs...

[Yeah, Sandra knows NOTHING yet about the event of Earthbound at all. She has no clue of any of the chosen four except Paula of course, and even then, she probably just think's Paula's a somewhat normal person in the world's history. :P]

(Just wondering if Cracked Bat is still around. If so, are you still in the Onett Hotel, or did Jake move somewhere else?)

[As I mentioned. This was an attempt to rouse Cracked Bat back into the field, but it failed. :(

However it also brings me to another note. I had considered having Sandra join the Smidgen battle and having her head to Threed. However two things happened. One was that the idea to bring in my second AC (you'll see him in the next post of mine folks) and he ended up assisting vitally to that fight instead. The second was that I was fearful that if Sandra got caught up in the Smidgen fight, that with the amount of power she's supposed to have that she could likely ONE-SHOT Smidgen pretty anti-climatically, and there was something of a policy about trying not to have ACs constantly one-shot major enemies or massive armies of mooks in some IFs. I didn't want to arouse someone's anger. -.-;]

[AC/Post Ratio: 16:38]