Just then, Crono burst through her door, quite literally.

"You could have just knocked," Lucca said, picking up the pieces of her door. Crono shrugged.

"Hey!" he cried. "It's our cereal!" He poured some of the stuff into a bowl. "Where's the milk? Why don't you ever put milk in your cereal?"

Crono began pouring milk into his bowl. "Ummm," was all Lucca managed to say before the cereal reacted with the milk and blew up.

Crono coughed out a tiny ball of smoke and promptly fainted from the explosion. Lucca wondered why anyone would make cereal which exploded when mixed with milk. She decided to complain to the king. She kicked the unconscious Crono out of her way and headed for the castle.

As she reached the castle, Lucca heard a muffled "POP" and a ball of smoke mushroomed out of the castle. A small figure flew out of the castle and landed at Lucca's feet. Marle coughed out a small ball of smoke. She had a bowl of cereal clutched in her hand.

"Ugg," Marle stated before fainting.

A bunch of guards ran up to Lucca.
"You kidnapped the princess. Where's the princess?" one asked.
"But she's right here," Lucca said.

Everyone looked down at Marle. Unfortunately, due to the explosion, she looked like she had just returned from a deep fryer.

"Our princess never looked so black," a guard commented.
"Her hair never stood up like that," another said.
"She didn't have a face resembling a burnt omelette," a third stated.

"You're coming with us," they said in unison, dragging Lucca off to the castle.

"You're coming with us."
"Just look, she's..."
"You're coming with us."
"Um..."
"You're coming with us."
"Do you guys say anything else?"
"You're coming with us."

Then Lucca noticed that each soldier was holding a little tape player. The tape was playing, but it seemed to have got stuck and kept playing the same line.

"You're coming with us," the soldiers chanted.

Lucca noticed the blank stares in their eyes. She wondered why she didn't find that strange earlier. She had also noticed the wind-up toy key on the top of their heads, but she had assumed that it was a new fashion statement.

"Egad! The soldiers have been replaced with robots! Oh no! What am I to do?" Lucca exclaimed, stating the obvious.

She grabbed Marle's hand and ran out of the forest, bumping Marle along the ground and into as many trees as possible. The soldiers tottered after them, chanting the same line over and over.

Lucca thought that Guardia Forest had grown very strange lately, since she didn't recall wind-up squirrels clamping themselves to her face last time she visited. Some wind-up caterpillars were making a heroic effort of pinning her to the ground while wind-up birds took up pom-poms and cheered the soldiers on.

Lucca ran straight for her house with a horde of wind-up people and animals behind her. She wondered why she never noticed anything strange about Abut the butcher before. In reality, Abut was not a wind-up toy, he was merely a crazed lunatic.

Lucca ran into the hole where her door used to be, thinking how lucky it was that her parents were on vacation and not around to moan about the non-existent state of the door. She found Crono conscious again and suffering a bit of amnesia as he prepared to pour milk into a bowl of Chrono Trigger Cereal (tm). She snatched the bowl from him, dumped its contents onto the wind-up creatures, and added milk. Lucca was really glad her parents were not around to witness the sudden disappearance of the front wall of the house.

The disembodied head of a soldier rolled around then said, "Time gate...must get...errkk..."

"Oh no!" Lucca said, waving the unconscious Marle in agitation, "those twisted toys are after the Chrono Trigger!"

Crono wondered why they were leading the toys right to the Epoch, or why they should use Epoch at all, but decided to just go with the flow and not ask questions. They hopped into Epoch and stuffed Marle into some convenient compartment.

Unfortunately, the machine couldn't get started.

"We're out of gas?!" Crono screamed, randomly chopping off bits of wind-up toys that had survived the cereal attack. "You can never trust women to handle anything even remotely car-like."
"This thing runs on the most sophisticated blend of futuristic chemicals! You don't just run next door and borrow a cupful," Lucca yelled back.
"Try this," Crono said, tossing Lucca the cereal box and a carton of milk while chopping off toy heads with his other hand.

Lucca shrugged and poured some cereal into the tank. She added just a drop of milk. A small ball of smoke puffed out and Epoch seemed to burp or suffer some other intestinal problem. However, the machine did start. Lucca looked at the cereal box with admiration and tucked it away for later emergencies.

After travelling through a spirally coloured tunnel (Crono wondered about the mindset of a Great Maker who would make time travel look so cheesy), Lucca, Crono, and Marle found themselves floating a few inches above a Mafia shoot-out, 600 A.D. style. They ignored this and flew to Guardia Castle.

The inside of the castle was decorated with black streamers, black balloons, and Queen Leene was playing pin-the-tail-on-the-black-donkey. Frog stood nearby, looking cool.

"Why so mournful?" Crono asked.
"Does thou not knoweth? The passing away of Gumpei Yokoi, inventor of the Gameboy (died Oct 4, 1997)?" Frog said with a sob.
"Oh," Lucca said, not knowing what a Gameboy was.

"Say, where's Magus?" Crono asked conversationally.
"You have some nerve!" the Queen cried. "First you spare his life, then you let him leech off my castle! You have any idea how much I pay for his psychiatric help and how many psychiatrists have given up in despair and became insurance salesmen?"

From an upper floor, a voice cried in frustration, "NO! SCHALA IS DEAD AND GONE! SCHALA IS DEAD! DEAD SCHALA IS! WHY CAN'T YOU ACCEPT AND MOVE ON?"
A monotonous voice replied, "Surely you don't mean that Schala is dead...I must find her."

The psychiatrist stormed down into the throne room, cursing and crying. Frog made another tally in the already very full "left in despair" column.

Lucca thought it was rather odd that the psychiatrist had a wind-up key on top of his head and that he wore a button which read, "Eat Chrono Trigger Cereal."

Suddenly, a gigantic Energizer bunny crashed into the throne room, creating quite an impressive hole in the ceiling.

"So, you know my secret," it said.
"Umm, actually, we haven't got that far yet," Crono replied.

There was an awkward moment when the bunny realised it had appeared too soon.

Magus walked into the room. He took one look at the bunny and asked in a monotonous voice, "have you seen Schala?"

"No! Don't you see? This is an evil wind up toy bent on taking over the world!" Lucca yelled. Crono wondered where she drew that conclusion from.

"Err...yeah, I'm the bad guy...shouldn't we be beating each other up or something?" the bunny said, thinking that this was the most unaware bunch of heroes it had ever encountered.

At that moment, Marle woke up. She took one look at the bunny and exclaimed in a glass-shattering voice, "OOOH! It's SO adorable!"

Lucca and Chrono both dug into their invisible pockets and produced unbelievably large wads of cotton balls they kept for such emergencies. They had learned from their travels with Marle to be prepared. They stuffed the cotton balls as far into their ears as was healthy.

"Quick, we must terminate this evil!" Lucca cried, though the bunny had done nothing except stand and get cuddled by Marle. Lucca turned to locate her fellow heroes. Crono had taken a strategic location under a table in a corner, Magus was still mumbling about Schala, and Frog was hanging around the throne.

"Frog!" Lucca called, "help me defeat this villain!"

Frog drew out a sword larger than himself and stepped forward. He looked at the bunny just standing there, then looked at Queen Leene who was safely fixing her hair in a hand mirror.
"I must protect the Queen!" he cried. He grabbed the monarch by the arm and retreated upstairs.

"Where's Schala?" Magus asked.
"Your sibling with the badly spelled name is inside that bunny!" Lucca cried.
"SCHALA!" Magus screamed and leapt at the bunny, who began aggressively beating its drum.

In a few seconds, the bunny had been reduced to bits of pink fluff and a huge pair of sunglasses. "Where's Schala?" Magus asked, looking at the puffiness around him. "You lie!" he yelled to Lucca, but she, along with Crono and Marle, had already left.

"Crono, it's your cat!" Marle cried.

Indeed it was. Crono had tried to recover his cats after that unfortunate accident where his mother returned home from the timegate, but this one was left behind. Behind the cat was another animal, a dog. Lucca admired how this cliche managed to penetrate all cultures and eras. It was not a large dog as prehistoric dogs went, but there was something odd about it, something Crono couldn't put his finger on.

The dog picked up the box of cereal it had dropped and dusted off its tuxedo. "I'll have to borrow your friend here for a moment," it said, snatching the cat from Crono's hand. The dog then jumped off the Epoch and walked away.

"Oh did you hear?!" Marle exclaimed. "That little doggy woggy talked!"
"Yes, that was rather odd," Lucca said.
"Oooh! That's so adorable!" Marle shrieked. she leaped off the Epoch in pursuit of the talking dog.

"We must save her!" Lucca exclaimed.
"We must!" Crono replied, then turned and flew off in the opposite direction.
"You are flying away from her, right?" Lucca mumbled.
"Yep," Crono nodded.

They soon came upon several heaps of straw which would be considered serious fire hazards if they weren't being used as houses. There was a muffled explosion and a boy flew out through the roof of a hut. Ayla ran up to the unconscious victim on the ground.

"Cereal strong, me like cereal," she said.

"Ayla!" Lucca waved at her. "We're having the same cereal problem in 1000 A.D. Do you know where they're coming from?"

Ayla hopped into the Epoch uninvited. "Where came from?" She took out a box of the Chrono Trigger cereal from an invisible pocket and looked at the side panel. "It says: 'Made in... (insert dramatic pause here) Happy Island of Joy'."

Lucca was slightly disturbed when she realised that Crono was not being sarcastic.

"We go there?" Ayla said, hoping for some long overdue bashing of bad guys.
"Marle's probably there," Lucca said.
"Yeah, I know," Crono said reluctantly, "but I've got to save my cat."

"We follow pretty picture, yes?" Ayla suggested. She pointed to a rough map printed on the back of the cereal box labelled "How to Reach the Evil Big Boss."

"Yes, that's it!" Lucca exclaimed, not the least disturbed that the map included the word "suckers" in the bottom right corner.

And so it was that our heroes found themselves at the mouth of a dark and forbidding tunnel which led to the Headquarters of the Happy Island of Joy.

Above the entrance, a neon sign flashed the evil message, "Entrance" with a picture of a double helix next to it. Crono, Lucca, and Ayla pondered the meaning of this ominous omen for a moment. After stalling for about an hour, they finally decided that they had no choice but to proceed.

After a while, they came upon a small boat. The boat floated on a wide river, as flat as a mirror. Upon closer inspection, it was a mirror. Lucca thought that it was rather pointless to have a boat sitting on a giant mirror, and that it detracted from the atmosphere of eeriness. The boat reached the bank, and sitting happily in it was none other than Marle, waving a lantern. She waved to Crono, who merely sighed, but not in relief.

"Look at me, I'm Karen!" Marle exclaimed.
"That's Charon, it's Greek," Lucca muttered.

"That little doggy was so nice he let me be in charge of this boat in the middle of nowhere," Marle continued, ignoring Lucca. "Of course, it's sitting on a mirror, which is kind of dumb, but at least I won't have to get my feet wet, and I can fix my hair any time I want. Of course, I don't have a clue what happens around here. I don't know why they gave me this job. After all, you know what usually happens to beautiful damsels when captured by evil monsters," Marle said.

"They probably stuck you here so they wouldn't have the life cuddled out of them. And I bet they were afraid you would talk them to death if they put you in a prison," Lucca mumbled.

"I HEARD THAT!" Marle screeched. She pulled Crono and Ayla onto the boat. "Just for that, you can WALK across the river." Marle steered the boat away, taking with her the only source of light.

Lucca was left gaping in the dark, surrounded by the horrors of the Happy Island of Joy, and armed with only a box of cereal and a carton of milk.

Meanwhile, back in good old 600 A.D., Magus was still hanging around a pile of pink fluff. After a moment, Frog tiptoed downstairs. He was dismayed to find that the bunny's pair of shades were cooler than his.

Frog's melancholy was cut short as twenty-three timegates opened in the throne room and proceeded to spew out twenty-three magi. These magi all had odd-coloured hair and long robes, throwing Magus into a fit of confusion.

"Schala?" he said to a purple-haired man. To a fat bald blue-robed magi, he said, "Schala?"

Frog sighed at the sight of the chaos around him. No doubt Crono was out screwing up history again. It was one thing to save all of time and space, but to open random timegates while saving time and space simply lacked style.

One magi held a huge pink cake with icing which read "Magi023--thanks for the idea" and was promptly eaten by a huge amoeba some other magi had conjured up.

Suddenly, Schala dropped from the sky and landed in front of Magus. "Schala..." Magus began, knowing in his heart that this was the moment he had been living for. He was about to begin his moving outburst when Robo suddenly popped up from nowhere.

"'Tis good of you to come, friend. We are much in need of aid," Frog said.
"Sorry," Robo beeped, "I'm just making a cameo. Yup, it's tough work being the most popular character." And with that, he disappeared into a timegate.

Schala whipped around in time to witness the exit of her favourite robot.

"Wait!" she called out. "Can I have your autograph?" She leaped in the timegate after her elusive metal idol, completely oblivious to the emotional outpouring and anguish of her long-lost brother.

"SCHALA!" Magus cried, diving through the timegate after her, and cleverly leaving Frog behind to dispose of the magi by himself.

Magus popped out in a dark cave. In the dark, he made out a purple-haired girl. His mind's inability to recognise anything other than a certain female whose name began with an "S" lead him to the inevitable conclusion.
"Schala! Never again shall you leave my sight!" he cried, grabbing hold of the girl's arm.

"Let go of me, you mental asylum escapee!" Lucca cried, but it was to no avail. She soon found herself tied up in the dankest, darkest, dirtiest cave human imagination could conceive.

One cannot imagine the relief Lucca felt when she realised that she was not trapped in someone's giant toilet. However, this did not help her to escape. Magus had wandered off when he realised that Lucca was not Schala, so Lucca could not even reason with the lunatic.

Just as she was about to die of despair and boredom, she heard an odd "Gollum" sound. She turned her head and was almost scared to death when she saw two huge eyes staring back at her.

The creature, finding Lucca too heavy to pick up, untied her and motioned for her to follow it. Lucca soon found that she had walked into a cage. The creature quickly closed the cage behind her and danced around outside, celebrating how easy it had been to trap her.

"Why did you take me here?" Lucca asked, not even considering the possibility that this thing might not speak English.
"You are going to be Gollum's sssupper," the creature hissed joyfully. "Now you ssstay put while Gollum warmss the pot."

"NO NO NO WAIT!" Lucca screamed, which was the understandable thing to do when one has stupidly walked into a cage and was about to be eaten.
Gollum turned back. "Yesss?"
"Umm...seeing as how I wasn't thinking properly when I walked into the cage, shouldn't I have a chance to redeem myself before I'm eaten? Just let me prove to you that I'm not this dumb."
"Of courssse. We'll asssk each other riddless and whoever can't anssswer a riddle lossess."

While Lucca buys herself some time playing riddle games, Crono, Ayla, and Marle were paddling in the moat around the dangerous castle of the evil mastermind.

"I...I can't stand it much longer, this place is too terrible," Crono said.

As Marle steered the boat towards the entrance, dolls in stereotypically ethnic clothing were singing "It's a Small World After All" and rocking back and forth to the music.

"It's a small, small, world..." Marle sang along.
"NO! MUSIC BAD! STOP!" Ayla cried, stuffing her hair into her ears.

Just when Ayla and Crono were about to go mad (and Marle about to lose her voice from singing so loudly), they reached the entrance.

Quickly running into the castle and away from the music, they soon met a wind-up bat flapping in front of them. It was wearing a huge gold chain and a pair of shades. If Crono didn't know better, he would have said that it was a rapper.

A little tag tied to its ear read "Hi, I'm Bat the idea. I belong to Flora Lee. If you should find me where I don't belong, please send this stray idea right back home." Needless to say, the writing on the tag was too tiny for anyone to actually read.

From some mysterious source in the background, a record player scratched out the "Big Boss" music...rap style.

"I won't let you..pp pp ch (rhythmic noises are hard to spell)...pass that easily!" the bat said as gruffly as possible when its voice was a squeaky soprano.

"Who predicted that this pointless and obviously filler riddle game would ensue?" Lucca challenged Gollum.

"Amy Chapman, of coursssse. Hee hee hee, Gollum's dinner can't think of anything witty to assssk!" Gollum clapped his hands while Lucca got irritated. "Gollum's turn! Why did the chicken crosssss the ssssstreet?"

Meanwhile, Ayla was beating up on a bat. Crono and Marle stood to one side, averting their eyes from the gratuitous violence inflicted upon the poor bat.

"Umm, Ayla?" Crono asked without turning his head towards her.
"Quiet, Crono. Ayla must think about killing," Ayla answered.
"Sorry, Ayla, but it sort of struck me that maybe you're wearing yourself out for no reason."
"Why say that, Crono? Ayla fight bad guy...is good."

"Usually, I'd agree with you, but, seeing as how the bat is just a little bigger than your brain, maybe we could just walk right past the thing? I mean, the worst it has done to you so far is maybe spit on you."
"Bat is bad guy. Ayla fight bad guy!!! Ayla no go until bad guy dead!!!"

"This is so pathetic. I'll just go on without her," Crono mumbled to himself.
"Come on, Crono, let's go without her," Marle said, tugging on his sleeve. "It'll be more fun with just the two of us. You can protect me and be my personal knight!" Marle hugged Crono's arm and squealed with joy.

Crono shuddered slightly. He looked at Ayla, who was practically stepping on the poor bat. "Goodness, Ayla looks like she needs some help. I guess I better stay behind after all and help her."

"Drat! She guesssssed it," Gollum hissed angrily.

"My turn. Let's see now..." Lucca looked around her, trying to think of something challenging, something that would give her a win/win situation.

Gollum was already dancing around, hissing with glee for no apparent reason. Now Lucca was really irritated.

"Oh, to heck with it all," she said, reaching into her pockets.

After many utterly unexciting and rather excessively brutal rounds of bat-pounding, the poor thing finally drifted to the floor.

With its last breath, it gasped, "could you...pp pp ch...wind me up...please?"

"Finally! Now may we proceed?" Crono asked Ayla.
Marle ran up to the limp toy. "But being honourable warriors, we MUST respect its last wish!"

While Ayla pondered whether beating up on a creature slightly larger than her fist made her an honourable warrior, Crono rushed to stop Marle from reviving the bat.

Seeing a good excuse to knock Marle unconscious, Crono did so. She fell flat on her face with a satisfying thud.

"I didn't want her to revive this horrible creature of darkness," Crono explained to Ayla, who nodded approvingly.

Meanwhile, Lucca was stumbling around the caves, appreciating the fact that Gollum's eyes glowed in the dark. The riddle game ended in a rather ugly manner. Enough to say that Lucca had an econo-sized box of Crono Trigger Cereal (tm) and a pitcher of milk, and that she was now holding a Gollum-on-a-stick to lead her out of the caves.