Random thoughts of the day: on Lavos from CT

[Destructionator XV]

I just quickly played through Chrono Trigger again, and it was awesome.

Seriously awesome. That game will never get old.

Anyway, the villain in it is an alien life form called Lavos that fell from space, grew up, and was going to reproduce. And oh yeah, it destroyed the world too, but that seems to be a side note to the creature's presence; its main goal seemed to simply be to reproduce.

This makes for a pretty cool idea to work into some kind of sci-fi or fantasy world.

(Which leads to a problem deciding where to put this thread. Is it sci-fi? Well, not really, since I'm probably going to have to invoke magic. So is it fantasy? Well, not really, since I want to avoid magic. Is it computers and gaming? Well, not really, since the game is a starting point for the idea and little more. So I'm sticking it in here since it is logic related, though in a fictional world.)


So what if I wanted a Lavos like alien?

Lavos is awesome. Ancient mysterious alien that falls to a planet, eats for millions of years, absorbs nice genes from stuff there, then spawns incorporating the new genes and sends its babies to repeat the cycle on other planets.

Optionally raining destruction from the heavens to the local life if they become too much of a threat to him. :P

In the game, Lavos is also awesome at using magic and has a pretty awesome command of time and space. But for here, let's just imagine something without the need for such magic except when necessary.

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There are many problems to having a Lavos without some magic. How is it going to get to other planets? The energy required for solar escape (and hell, Earth escape too) is a big enough pain in itself and when you consider that it must also navigate, slow back down, and of course, choose where to go, it becomes near impossible.

The Lavos of the game is arguably quite intelligent, though this is never directly proven; it never directly acts to show its intelligence. I like saying that it isn't really intelligent; Lavos is just an awesome animal that happened to arise somewhere.


If it is indeed intelligent, we could say that it sets a course based on more abstract concepts (realizing the motion between stars, etc). If not, it would just spawn and shoot them off probably at random; perhaps guided by magical instinct (home in on planets with life or something). The death rate would probably be very high either way as spawns continue forever into deep space.

This high death rate seems to require a high birth rate - once a Lavos is mature, it would have to spawn a huge number of times to hope to be successful.


In the game, the mature Lavos is rather quite huge and Lavos spawns are rather small; their shells can be pushed by a small team of people.

The size of a mature Lavos is unknown due to how RPGs display things, but your characters can walk inside the shell for some time, so we know it is huge, but cannot say how huge.

It seemed to have been pretty big as well when it initially landed on the planet. Most this size I would propose is merely an empty shell; the Lavos starship's empty propellant tanks used up millenia ago when leaving its home solar system.

Since a creature growing while in space transit is pretty much impossible, it must have grown before being launched into space. (In fact, it is probably completely inert during the bulk of its space journey, lest it run out of energy mid-trip and die. Thus a Lavos spawn is more of a giant seed than a baby animal or egg.)

I like the mature Lavos being huge, but the Lavos spawns must be much bigger than we see in the game. Perhaps the ones seen in the game were still young and needed to mature further (though that leads us to the question of what Lavos the parent was doing for those first 65 million years). I don't think I necessarily want them mobile while so small anyway. In fact, I don't think I want a Lavos to ever be mobile. (Lavos is, in my mind, a space plant! Which is awesome; plants don't get the attention they deserve in sci-fi. I want to do a few alien plant species... ones that move extremely slowly and such. It'd be fun. But I digress.)

The spawns being mobile does give an advantage: they could move away from the parent and eat for a while on the same planet to grow up before going up to find their new homes.

Imagine a life cycle for mobile Lavoses:

It spawns off the parent as a small creature.

It moves to find a place to live on the home planet.

It eats here, growing up, possibly competing with its parent and siblings.

Eventually, it becomes big enough to find an all new home.

It somehow decides where it wants to go and takes off (invoke intelligence and/or magic here).

It flies through space for a very long time and arrives at a new planet.

It crashes down, matching orbital velocity with the planet the Hard Way. The mostly empty shell is likely destroyed in the impact, leaving a fragile little Lavos to start growing again underground.

Over millions of years, it grows a new shell, this time to protect its youth rather than to fly through space. As life comes in contact with it, it starts absorbing their genes to use in its spawns; kinda like sexual reproduction in a way.

In the mean time, it defends itself from threats using some means. (Invoke magic again for the game Lavos, but it might just have spikes or poison sap or something like that for a more realistic (though less threatening) Lavos.)

Eventually, the spawns are able to move and plant themselves elsewhere on the planet to grow their starship shells. The cycle continues.

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So what we have there are a few distinct stages of life:

Lavos Spawn: the small, mobile newborns. The shortest stage of the creature's life and is armed with spikes to defend itself from predators. (We see these on Death Peak in the game.)

Lavos Plant A: a Lavos Spawn that has found a place where it wants to nest and grow into the next stage. This takes a long time. (We never see them in Chrono Trigger, but it makes sense that they exist given what we do see.)

Lavos Starship: the end result of the Plant A stage - the Lavos creature encased in a shell of rocket propellant. It blasts off, goes inert for its long journey, then hits the ground, sacrificing its shell allowing the core "seed" to proceed into the next stage. (This is what hits the ground, killing Azala and the other Reptites in the game.)

Lavos Plant B: the core of the starship stage regrows deep underground to slowly become a mature Lavos. This is the bulk of the creature's life. (In the game, this is what would be there from 65,000,000 BC -> sometime around 12,000 BC at the latest.)

Mature Lavos: Once Plant B has grown up and perhaps absorbed adequate genetic material from its surroundings, it starts growing spawns inside it and gains the ability to surface and attack if threatened; up until it actually starts reproducing, I propose that the creature simply sleeps underground. (This is what we fight in the game. When Zeal is tapping its power with the Mammon Machine, they were taking energy away from the gestating youth, causing Lavos to surface and attack, destroying Zeal to protect its young.

I would further love to propose that the exact same thing happened in 1999 AD - perhaps the future humans tapped Lavos again, causing him to defend himself once more, just this time, against the whole world rather than just one floating kingdom. This would put both his attacks in the realm of pure and simple instinct. My latter proposal is completely unsupported by the game, but an argument could be made that Lavos did indeed attack then to protect its young, just protecting them from a potential threat (since it was about to give birth, civilization on the surface would be a threat to the babies power drain or no).)

Adult Lavos: the adult surfaces and gives birth to its spawns. The cycle begins anew. Above I proposed that Lavos might have attacked in the game in 1999 due to another power drain, but it is probably more likely that the attack there was pure instinct too - maybe all adult Lavoses wipe out potential competitors and predators around them before giving birth to give the spawns the best chance in life.

In fact, this sounds like a likely instinct. That it wiped out a high tech human civilization is just a coincidence; it didn't care about them at all and just did what it was programmed to do to give its babies the best shot in life they could get. Given how slowly the spawns move in the game, even with magic, they could be easily overpowered on their journey to feeding grounds.



To sum up:
1) Spawn: finds a feeding ground, mobile
2) Plant A: grows the starship shell, competes with siblings
3) Starship: travels through space, inert
4) Plant B: grows a reproduction shell and otherwise prepares to spawn
5) Mature: grows spawns inside it, actively defends itself, partially mobile (can surface and sink)
6) Adult: gives birth to spawns, pre-emptively defends itself, immobile (the adult Lavos in the game can be convincingly argued to be what forms Death Peak in the future)

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Aside from handwaving the specific mechanics of space travel, this seems pretty much workable and is reasonably consistent with what we see in the game.

In my next post, I'll discuss an alternative life cycle: one where the spawns are immobile and are launched right off the adult's shell directly into space. (Basically skipping the first two stages of life).

Later, I'll get into how the space travel and other aspects of its life might work, perhaps getting into the magic needed for that. I'll also touch upon how the inside Lavos and the Lavos Core (including the bits) seen in the game might fit into these schemes.

Finally, I'll see about talking more about the life spans, size of each stage, and perhaps get into the creature's initial evolution.

But I have work very early tomorrow morning, so it will all have to wait for now.

[Mayabird]

Actually, I saw Lavos more as a giant space virus than a plant. A planet is like a cell in this analogy, and its DNA (or at least, the DNA of the creatures on the planet) get hijacked by Lavos for its own reproduction, and when it does reproduce, it destroys the planet like the flood of viruses pouring out of a dying cell.

I suspect that Lavos could be artificial, but I have nothing to destroy or defend the argument.

More later, as CT is also one of my favorite games, but I'm sleepy now.

[Steve]

Ooooh, I like. Like Maya I'm a big CT fan.

The theory does seem solid. Though IIRC the game implied that when Lavos arose in 1999AD it was because he/it had come full circle. It had finished feeding off of the planet's core and was ready to release spawn, so it surfaced and lashed out at any other living thing it found.

Of course, one must also consider the scene in the Ocean Palace where it looks like Queen Zeal is directly communicating with Lavos. And there's the entire issue of what happened to the Queen; NPC dialogue indicates she became "corrupted" by the power, but was it standard "power corrupts" or was it something innate to Lavos' energy that poisoned her mind? For that matter the Black Omen was clearly meant to be a focal point or something for Lavos. Was Zeal looking to still draw energy from Lavos or was there something more going on? IIRC she blabbered about becoming immortal.

[Destructionator XV]

A quick observation: Melichor's hut, the dome where Bethlasar builds the time machine, and Lavos' eruption point (which looks like Death Peak, and as I describe above, makes sense in my Lavos lifecycle) are all very close to each other on the map. And so is the Black Omen and Magus' Castle.

All these things have one common thread: Lavos is accessible through there. Melichor was gated to 1000 AD from Lavos, and gates don't move you on the map (note: he was gated to a house in the nearby village rather than to his hut, but still, I'll say close enough). Ditto for Bethlasar.

The Black Omen and Magus' Castle both were built to access Lavos - to suck his energy with the Ocean Palace or to summon him to kill him.

(Side note: what about Janus going through the gate? He should be close to the same point as the other gurus, but it looks like he came out of Truce Canyon. I'm willing to say he actually gated to somewhere that looks like Truce Canyon rather than the real thing. This introduces a new gate, but it looks like Lavos made a temporary new one anyway. The developers just reused the same map to save time; no point wasting art assets and cartridge memory on something seen for just ten seconds on screen. So I argue he came out close to where he would later build his castle, in the middle of Ozzie's existing territory. That makes more sense to me than him coming out close to Guardia Castle and happening to see Ozzie there anyway - if the Mystics already had a strong presence on that side of the bridge, it seems like the war should have been won for them already. Of course, it is possible that the humans fought them back after that point.)



Anyway, what conclusion do I mean to draw from this? Simple: the evidence looks string that Lavos is indeed incapable of moving. The movement from his crash point at the Tyrano Lair to where we see him in the rest of the game (about one screen to the left) could be explained by him having some inertia after hitting the ground and moving underground thanks to it (he did hit from the upper right part of the screen, so he'd be moving in the right direction), or he moved with the continents (which are very much rearranged from prehistoric to present. But the Tyrano Lair moved in the opposite direction - the Giant's Claw in 600AD is about a screen's distance to the right from where it was in prehistory, so I think this is unlikely.).

So him hitting the ground at high speed and getting into his position thanks to that, then not moving again, seems most likely. This probably implies something about his depth under the Earth, but I'm not sure.

Furthermore, tapping his energy effectively requires close proximity. This is also shown by Zeal building the Ocean Palace underwater, with the express goal of getting closer to Lavos.

(Slight problem, btw: when you teleport to the Ocean Palace, you don't see any land around, whereas by all other appearances, it should be very close to where you gate into 12000 BC in the first place, which is obviously on land - the Black Omen hovers almost right above that Gate. But oh well; I'll blame it on the game scale being imprecise messing up the accuracy of the details we see on screen.)


Finally, since Zeal found the location of Lavos, there must be some way to detect him and home in on him. Since the 2300 AD humans were apparently oblivious to his presence, magic is probably responsible for this. I imagine a real life Lavos could be located with the same kind of equipment we use to find underground oil, but we'd need to know the approximate location already (he must look like a big rock, [edit: though maybe with strange heat patterns /edit] which would be pretty unremarkable if you weren't looking for him); magic is probably the only way to really find him in the first place.

Thus, a Lavos could hide underground on most planets without worrying much about being hunted down.


EDIT 2: Oh foo, a real Lavos might be easier to find, since he'd want to be at a more shallow depth presumably to better interact with his prey. Maybe; he might be fine just filtering underwater organisms and tapping geothermal heat at a greater depth too. So it seems likely - and supported by the location of the Ocean Palace, though little else in game - that a real Lavos would be a kind of deep sea creature.


I'll get back on my original task and responding to you guys' comments when next I'm online.

[Mayabird]

On the size of Lavos and its spawn:

It's hard to tell exactly how large Lavos was when it landed. It was apparently large enough to cause a mass extinction, but it also had to be going at an incredible speed to go into interstellar space in the first place, which could make up for some mass. But then again it didn't destroy the Tyranno lair despite being a direct impact. (Just going to have to shrug here.)

The important thing, though, is that the mature Lavos is still probably a lot larger than its spawn. Your note about Lavos possibly being unable to move reminded me of a comment from Mother Brain in the Geno Dome. She commented that there weren't enough resources on the planet to support Lavos & offspring and humans, but there would be enough for robots. I took that to mean that the Lavos spawn would be growing much larger for their interstellar voyage and eventually all that would be left would be a much smaller, lifeless rock or rocks the size of a large asteroid (like what's left of a planet after the Oankali have gone through their entire cycle and their world-ships split off into space, if you've ever read that series). It wouldn't be large enough to support an atmosphere or any lifeforms greater than some hardy bacteria (maybe) but robots would do just fine, probably even better since they wouldn't have to deal with rusting or competition.

If Lavos can't move, the entire destruction sequence in 1999 AD was Lavos releasing the spawn so that they could be scattered and travel around the world to places where they could feed and grow to their full size. A problem with this hypothesis is that I don't remember seeing any spawn outside of Death Peak. Of course, there were large areas of the world map that we couldn't access, and those might have been younger spawn that were still slowly moving out. Alternately, many of the spawn could have already burrowed into different places out of sight of the party. It's also possible that they weren't being scattered, and Lavos was just preparing the surface for them to start leaving the nest, so to speak. Going back to the evil plant analogy, Lavos was just plowing the fields to sow its seeds.