#Schala zeal

[jetglider]

[dishsaop]

alphonse mucha's four seasons / akira toriyama's chrono trigger

(i love the ct women so much i redrew my favorite art nouveau series with them)

[ariulan]

Trying to keep a bit more consistency w how I draw them :^)

[l-una-c]

my Schala redesign! I always thought her canon appearance was a little too plain, so I added some ornamentation. I wanted to reflect her modesty, though, so compared to her mother, her look is definitely understated.

[olibavee]

my part of an art trade with my pal @l-una-c :~) it's of a scene from her chrono trigger fic, featuring her oc Avira and Schala!

[yells-of-the-not-so-danged]

[limit-broken]

Just a Kid 🌴🐚

[princess-schala]

[fomar]

okok since ive thought a little i want to make a full post tomorrow sbout schala and like a possible roleswap because something in me thinks she would be scary if she went full on vengeance instead of having a sort of fawn response to her mother forcing her to power the mammon machine

[therealjasonx]

The entire plot of Chrono Trigger.

[neon-dynasty]

Once upon a time there was a kingdom in the clouds.

The kingdom was ruled by wise monarchs for generations. They supported learning above all, and it was the most prosperous nation in all of history, in either direction.

The monarchs encouraged the kingdom's scholars, who made wonderful discoveries. They took care of the people of the planet below, who did not have the same gifts as those in the sky. And they hoped for an even greater future for all the people of the world.

In time, the hopes of the people in the sky became dreams, and they studied the dreams more than anything. Their crafters and smiths continued to create greater and greater wonders using discoveries found in the kingdom's dreams. And it was in these dreams that the first inkling that a power greater than even the sun was within reach.

The King of the kingdom in the clouds passed away, and his wife, a kind and powerful woman, took the throne. Her dreams revealed that the power was in the ocean far below her kingdom. She set her crafters to make their greatest wonder yet: a palace beneath the waves.

Dreams became reality.

Reality became a nightmare.

The people of the planet were forgotten or worse, and few people from the kingdom in the clouds thought to help them anymore. The people who worked on the palace beneath the waves became monstrous, forgetting who they were. The Queen harmed her people and her planet and her own children in pursuit of the new power. She became cold. Lost to her dreams. Lost to her own zeal.

The Princess was frightened of the woman her mother had become and fell into her own darkness. The Prince attempted to fix his broken family, but he was too late.

When the palace beneath the waves was completed, the Queen set out to take the power herself. She came face to face with a beast that fell from the stars, and had been slumbering under the center of the world for uncounted eons.

It awoke.

With a cry that shattered the heavens, the beast let forth an eruption of malice, furious at being disturbed. It destroyed the kingdom in the clouds, all of its history and achievements and dreams. The survivors were left without their homes and without their gifts. The people of the planet took them in and taught them their ways.

In time, the kingdom in the clouds was forgotten. The beast went back to sleep and slumbered under the center of the world once more.

[dishsaop]

the time gang discovers t shirts

[tragicvictories]

SCHALA -> KINGDOM OF ZEAL

The Kingdom of Zeal was a thriving magic-based Kingdom thousands of years ago. Built atop an archipelago of floating islands, the kingdom carried harsh prejudice against anyone who was not born with the innate ability to perform magic, going so far as to banish non-magic users to the surface below. Magic-users living on the floating islands called themselves Enlightened Ones. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge was the driving force for the Enlightened Ones. Most members of the society put a heavy stake in intellectual pursuits, including arts and technology, but with a particular focus on magic above all else. Knowledge, and especially magic, was power. And none were more magical or more powerful than the royal family. Towards the end of the Kingdom of Zeal's era, Queen Zeal (the latest in a long line of matriarchs) became drunk with power, seeking relentlessly for a source of immortality. When a mysterious stranger came and successfully predicted the events of the following few days, Zeal began to lock herself away from those she once trusted. Her life became increasingly insulated until even the children she had once been so warm to barely recognized her. Events took a turn for the tragic when her three most trusted advisors disappeared, leaving only the mysterious diviner to guide Queen Zeal down her path of ruin. Zeal summoned a terrible creature known as Lavos, with the belief she could leash it and siphon power from it to fuel her eternal life. Instead, Lavos pulled the Kingdom out of the sky and to the bottom of the ocean, destroying it. The royal children and advisors disappeared in the wreckage, and the Kingdom's people lost their access to magic and became indistinguishable from the surface-dwellers they had banished.

[zephiraz]

Okay so in my head there lives Magus and an alternate timeline Janus. They say they don't like or trust each other, but they get along better than anyone.

(This got a lot longer than I thought it would whoops.)

There once was a king of Zeal, surely. Janus and Schala didn't just come out of nowhere. And the queen wasn't always...like that. No one really likes to talk about how the king died, though. Illness, the seneschal said, though he was newly appointed and had not the full details himself. Illness, the queen cried, deep in mourning, as she tore down the king's portraits and replaced his aides and servants and research partners. Only the Gurus remained, too vaunted to truly be touchable. It was such a sudden thing, the sickness that took him. None who had seen him believed him ill or frail, and he'd been in such fine spirits just the day before, though any murmurs of such are quickly silenced lest the queen dowager hears. You don't wish to upset the lady in mourning, do you? You don't want to disappear.

But the king had been in perfectly fine health, in fact. The only thing that wore on him was his wife's insistence on pursuing a field of research that he viewed as dangerous. The couple had argued about it, the queen proclaiming this new energy source she'd discovered would propel Zeal to ever greater heights, and the king decrying it as madness. He forbade her research entirely after one day walking into her lab to see her research assistant—one Norstein Bekkler—shatter before his very eyes, Bekkler's essence drawn into a black hole in space, ripped from his body with such force that only pulped meat remained.

For weeks the queen pleaded for another chance, defending her research and describing all the different safety measures she could—would—implement, if only she were given the chance. She was so close to a breakthrough! Eventually, the king relented. He did love his wife, and he wanted to believe in her, after all. He allowed her one more chance, on the grounds that he supervise her next experiment. Should at any moment it appear too dangerous to continue, it was to be shut down immediately.

Little Janus with his brand-new kitten in tow saw his parents wandering the halls together, oblivious to his presence underfoot. He followed them, only noticed when he tripped on robes too big for him. His father turned, a face lined with stress and worry brightening like the sun emerging from behind storm clouds at the sight of his son. The king scooped Janus up in a big hug, then set him back down on his foot and urged him away to find his sister. Mother and father have important research to do; it is not safe for little kittens!

Janus watched heavy marble doors shut behind his parents. He never saw his father again. None would ever find out what happened behind those doors.

...But time is as fickle as a kitten struggling in a young boy's arms, spurred by the tantalizing mystery of a slowly closing door. Alfador leaped from Janus's grasp and bolted after the king, the young prince hot on his heels.

Thousands of years later, a motley group of time travelers wanders Guardia's forests at the behest of the Guru of Time. From his perch at the end of all things, Gaspar had seen a disturbance in the vast darkness of time. A loose thread, forgotten in the ebb and flow, causing the weft of reality to fray. It was with great trepidation that Crono led his friends through the dense wood. A bright flash of blue light had signaled the opening of a gate, but finding the thing was proving tricky. Voices echoed amidst the trees, jeering laughter and barely-audible murmuring interspersed with the crack of magic and infrequent shouts of pain.

After long minutes of searching the party found the source of all this noise; Dalton, half obscured by hanging branches, cackling as he channeled magic, draining energy from a groaning man just out of view. It was Magus who acted first. He leaped from the forest's grasp and bolted straight for Dalton, slicing the man's head clean off with a flourish of his scythe. ...And Dalton, a different Dalton, fled into a hastily-summoned black gate with a second prisoner in tow just before the rest of the party could bring their weapons to bear.

With little else to go on but a headless, lifeless body, Crono turned to help up the Daltons' victim, but was startled to find him a spitting image of Magus. With the party too shocked to act, the man stood shakily on his own and dusted his fine robes off. He thanked the party for their timely intervention, and introduced himself as King Zeal.

Magus refuses to believe it, at first. This can't be the king of Zeal. He'd died years ago! The stranger's jaw sets at that, fists clenching at his sides. He states again that he is the king of Zeal; Janus, son of Alfard, who he watched perish before his very eyes.

Janus had pushed the door ajar just in time to see his father disappear into a black hole in space, his mother's face twisted in vicious triumph. Janus ran crying for guards, for Schala, for anyone. The queen in her panic chased him through the halls, hoping to silence the prince. She was captured, raving mad, and sentenced for the murder of the king and attempted murder of her own son. Her lab was shut down, her research burned. It fell to Schala then to lead Zeal under the guidance of the Gurus, who she later joined in scholarship when Janus was old and learned enough to take the burden of the throne from her. There he ruled with fairness in relative peace for several years, until he was recently approached by a man claiming to be a prophet. This prophet spoke of a people divided, of those without magic cast to the frozen earth to toil away building technological marvels they would never benefit from, of a ruined Zeal. Janus ushered the prophet behind closed doors so as not to alarm his subjects. He believed the prophet a madman, of course, but it was his duty as king to thoroughly investigate any potential threat to his people. It was only when the heavy marble doors fell shut behind him that he realized he'd walked into his mother's old lab, and only then that he recognized the prophet as a sycophant who used to aid her in her research. And there beside a yawning black gate stood a man identical save for the ragged patch covering one eye. The false prophet pushed Janus into the gate, and his world went dark. It felt like eternity in a single moment, terror tearing through his mind as suddenly he was a child again watching his father succumb to this same fate, and then he was himself, sprawled upon an unfamiliar forest floor. And then he was nothing, his whole being suffused with blinding pain as the two Daltons drained him of his magic. He was lucky these kind strangers intervened when they did, lest he be drained entirely.

Magus mulls this over, staring at the blood-soaked ground beneath him. Still he struggles to find this true, but... His eyes alight on Dalton's head, face-down at his feet. He gently kicks it over. Two glassy eyes stare up at him.

With no sign of the gate that brought him here remaining, the party takes King Janus with them. He is shocked to hear their tale, appropriately dismayed and awed at each turn of fate, but it is hearing what very nearly was his own fate that shocks him into silence. At length, the king resolves to accompany the party in their quest. He might not be much of a warrior, but he is the King of Magic; a peerless enchanter, his wards and barriers know no equal, and the party could surely benefit from a highly learned support mage. He takes the name Magil, after an old tutor of his. He knows that this is not his own timeline, and he defers the name to the self who truly belongs here. Magus, for his part, is hesitant to take the name himself. He is only just starting to get used to hearing it again, after all. Regardless, they both still answer to Janus, and they both share the same goal, unspoken yet firmly understood between the two of them. If one King Zeal found his way here through a black gate, then what of the first? Could their father yet live?

(This was originally a put-me-to-sleep story in my head that I revisited like five times over a few months so the details got muddled between iterations, and some got left out. In one iteration the Other Zeal timeline was literally falling apart as time unraveled from Primary Dalton fucking stuff up in pursuit of power. Also Schala was there. Anyway I just think Magus and Other Janus would hate each other and then be friends. Magus would be so so so jealous of Other Janus getting to grow up in Zeal without a lot of the bullshit. Not much for Other Janus to be jealous of except in the first iteration of this plot it was a love triangle turned half-merged consciousnesses due to time fuckery to we're sharing him now between Crono and the Januses, but that plot is All For Me. Okay goodnight)

[yells-of-the-not-so-danged]

schala redisgn🌟

[ascendancy-echoes]

Prologue

At seventeen years old, Janus had tried his best. He tried to return to ‘normal’ after his adventure through time but such a thing was impossible. Maybe if he had friends to return to or a loved one waiting who truly understood him, but not Janus. The first few months weren’t so bad. Schala was consoling to his heartache that he missed his friends from the future but soon she was reminding him that Lucca had most likely moved on and he should too. After all, he didn’t belong in her time. His home was here and now. 

But Janus couldn’t move on. He regretted leaving Lucca.

As he quietly pined for Lucca, Janus started to feel like he didn’t have a place in Schala’s new life. She had a husband now and she had Xylia too. How could Schala possibly understand when she had two people she was in love with and they loved her back?

It didn’t help Janus that it didn’t take long before the people in the village began to lose patience with his ways. In such a small village, it didn’t take long for him to figure out the truth. Sure the others tried to act like they accepted him, but there was more than one occasion that he overheard people admit quietly that if he wasn’t Schala’s brother, they’d have less tolerance for his supposed needs.

The other survivors from Zeal also had little tolerance for him. They never understood him when he was the prince and now they had more reason to be frustrated with him. For whatever reason, he still had his magic while theirs had begun to fade. Even Schala had started to lose her magical abilities. Janus could have theorized for days why he was so fortunate but the fact of the matter was there was a growing sense of resentment from the others despite Schala consistently reassuring him.

So, heartbroken and feeling increasingly isolated and misunderstood, Janus made a decision one night. While he was never able to apply what he learned from Gaspar or Balthasar to the lessons they forced upon them, between their notes on time magic and his own understanding of magic and enchantment, Janus was confident he could find his own way back to Lucca. He knew in his heart that Lucca was working on rebuilding the Epoch but he couldn’t sit around and wait.

All he needed was the Gate Key Lucca had given him, the last bit of red stone he had kept and time to prepare. No matter what, he would return to his friends. He would reopen the gate in his time and find his way back to Lucca.

After all, time is not unlike a river rushing down the mountain to the ocean at its end.  If one knew their destination, they could plot a course. To where they truly belonged. To home.