Well, getting the fragment was cake. We just walked into the Water Temple, let Eria unlock the door to the place, then ran in an got it. No problems.

From there, we ran to the cave to the north, where we are currently fighting our way through some caves to the crystal. We’re on the third level now, and the fighting is getting thick, but we’re holding our own for the moment.

It takes a lot of potions to get us back to full strength now, but our healing spells are quite powerful, so I think we’ll be ok in here. Once, however, we got ambushed from behind, which resulted in two of our party getting killed in battle. With a little worse luck, it is conceivable that we wipe out in here. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Status: Killing things with a purpose.

I felt like Columbus as we bravely sailed off the edge of the floating world. We traveled through some mist and smoke, finally arriving on a great plane of mist with three islands. One of the islands is our own floating world. The other two are as yet unexplored.

We circumnavigated the largest island, which appears to have a large temple and a cave. From there we cut north to the smaller island. Here we enter a small village. The only thing we found inside was an old man looking over a sick daughter. We gave her a potion, and she snapped out of bed.

She then told us a mysterious story of how time has been stopped in the land. She implores us to help fix this, which we must do by going after the water crystal. Not sure the connection here, but we’ll take her word for it. For now this is fairly straightforward. We’ve simply got to go get a fragment of the water crystal (I think) at the water temple, then go to the water crystal cave and use the fragment to unite the water crystal. Simple!

Right. I’m betting this is going to get a lot more complicated before we’re done, as nothing is simple in Final Fantasy III world.

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose

Well, after all that build up that the dwarf leader gave us, I expected Gisaru to be something important, or magnificent, or at least mildly interesting. Instead, it was a simple little town on the edge of the outer sea. We bought a few of those magic keys, which they make there, and some other potions and sundries, but otherwise, I can’t find anything special about the place. Not sure if I missed something or not, but oh well.

Onward! Tomorrow we’ll sail off the edge of the world!

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose.

The good King Argus was thankful that we were able to defeat Hain and rescue his people. He rewarded us by giving us a time gear, and told us to take it to Cid. Aha! The pieces of the puzzle continue to click together!

We head back to Cid and hand over the gear. The man is a literal speed demon, as it takes him no time at all to use the time gear to fit some huge rotors to our Enterprise. Our Enterprise can now fly!

The wonders don’t cease there, as Cid tells us a bit of our background as well. Apparently, a long time ago we weren’t living on the floating world we currently inhabit. According to Cid, there is another world below ours. Cid was flying around on that world when a mighty storm hit and tossed his ship up onto the floating world. This seems to have been when we were little children who happened to be passengers on Cid’s ship, and he took us safely to this floating world. He now encourages us to use the Enterprise to explore this other world and set everything right.

So much responsibility!

Before we go sailing off the edge of our world, I want to go check out Gisaru, the town that supposedly lies on the eastern edge of the outer sea of our floating world.

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose.

Photo Credit: g-s-h Thanks!

Whew! Finally, with our white wizard nearly out of lower level healing spells, we ran into Hain, the evil warlord. The battle was dicey, and a couple of times the outcome could have gone either way, but we had enough high level spells left that we could take down Hain before we ran out of gas.

Hain fell with a thud, we saved all the prisoners, and the massive tree was ecstatic to have been released from the evil Hain’s control. The benevolent giant set us down on the outskirts of some woods on the west side of the inner sea. We took a quick jaunt over to that beat up village, and the villagers there are grateful as well. Tomorrow, we’ll head up to the Castle Argus, to see what information they might offer.

Glad to be out of that one alive!

Status: Killing Stuff with a Purpose