Lemmings at the End of Time

This place was not entirely quiet; there was a strange wind beyond the fancy fence that gave a constant murmur to the darkness. After a short while, it wasn't all that bothersome. At least it seemed short. It couldn't be called colorless either, even if it was mostly gray and black. It was a little cool, but not cold. Basically, this place at the end of time wasn't a place she'd want to be, but it was better than others.

Lucca put her hand on the lamppost in the center of this area. There was a bit of fluting to make it more interesting. At the top, there was a bluish-white bulb within decorative caging to give a safe area of light. There was no switch or button to turn it on or off. Not that you'd want to turn it off, not when this lighted area seemed to be all that there was.

"So, what now?" Marle asked, crossing her arms over her chest. "There's not much to do here."

"You don't notice time when there's no time," the old man nearby said. "The more you fret, the longer it will seem."

"How's there supposed to be no time?" Marle asked. "Because time is just, you know, it's always going on."

"It's the end of time," Lucca said, still looking over the lamp. "I suppose the last moment will last as long as people are here."

"That may be so," the old man said.

"What are you doing, Lucca?" Marle asked, looking up at the lamppost and not seeming to notice anything.

She shrugged. "Just trying to figure out this light. How is it powered?"

"Magic," he said, shifting his hat. "Beyond that… I don't remember. I may have made it. Or not."

"Huh, I would have liked to know how this magic works," Lucca said. "If things don't change, it may not run out of power like a normal device. It puts out a nice amount of light, so I'm curious about if it would be good outside of this place."

The old man lowered his head. "Hmm. If you really wish to know, there may be some parts in the supply closet."

"There's a supply closet? Where?" When they first showed up here at the End of Time, Lucca had checked over the area. There was this area around the lamppost, the area with the pillars of light, Spekkio's room, and a stone staircase that didn't lead anywhere. There shouldn't be another room around.

"It may be dark," he said, then gestured with his cane towards the fence across from Spekkio's room. There was a simple gate there… how? It hadn't been there before "It's that way; be careful if you do go."

"Well it's something to do rather than just stand here around the light," Marle said, smiling at the idea. "Come on, let's go!"

"All right," Lucca said, hoping that there was something to explain this light. Or perhaps another piece of technology. Who knew what could have wound up here besides them?

While the lamppost shone bright, the shadows were darker the further they went along a misty path. "Well here's a box," Marle said, stopping by something more like a crate. Lucca got the rough wooden lid with her to shift it off. "And a bunch of machines, looks like. That was disappointingly easy."

"I can't see well in here," Lucca said, checking over the vague shapes. One looked similar to the cage on top of the lamppost. "You make scientific discoveries by trying things out, so I guess just try things out?" She took the round object to get it into the faint amount of light out here.

Marle chuckled. "That sounds like my kind of plan!" She took something close by her. "Huh, well this just seems to be a towel. Why a towel?"

"Towels can be useful," she said, finding an object with the right shape inside the cage. And at one end that would be covered on the post, there was a button. Pressing it caused the bulb inside to glow brightly. "Ah-ha, found one to dismantle!"

"And what's with the rest of these boxes?" Marle said, leaning inside. They were made of odd materials that Lucca recognized as similar to those in the future era. "This one says something… Lemmings? I think? What's a lemming?"

"I don't know," Lucca said. "This seems to be some kind of system, smaller than the things we saw before."

"Ah, that would be a game system," the old man said.

"Eek!" Marle said, jumping closer to the box and nearly grabbing her crossbow. Lucca was startled as well. "Hey, don't sneak up on us!"

He shifted his hat. "Hmm? Sorry, I didn't mean to. It may have been a long time since I've seen anyone. Or maybe not."

"Right," Lucca said, wondering if he was joking around with them. "What kind of game could you play with this, though? It's different from the machines in the future."

"It's from the future," the old man said. "Perhaps you simply didn't see another like it. Well, it is one way to pass what time occurs here. It's a puzzle that's fairly simple to pick up on. Would you like to try? It should still work."

"I found the light I want to investigate, so I'll pass for now," Lucca said, although she was curious about it.

"I'd like to try the game," Marle said eagerly. "How's it work?"

At the insistence of the old man, they brought the game system, the light, and a few tools back to the main area. He gave Marle some basic instructions on the puzzle game while Lucca started taking the lamp apart to see how it worked. She felt like it wouldn't take her long since the lamp wasn't big. When the game system got turned on, it started playing odd but cheerful tunes. It did help to make this place less unnerving.

The tools she had here included one that tracked magical energy, which helped a lot in figuring the light out. The wiring on it was impressively tiny and secured fast to the device's structure. If she was going to match that, she'd need a magnifying glass for the entire process. It turned out to be a simple circuit. A ring of magical crystals was inside the bulb, ones that would react to their neighboring crystals by glowing if they touched each other. The button would break or remake their connections… but how?

"Aaah, grab the umbrella!" Marle said near her.

"What?" Lucca asked, looking up from the lamp.

"I have to get them the umbrellas or they'll go splat," she said, focused on the screen part of the game system. It showed a group of little purple creatures with green hair (they were kind of cute) falling out of a doorway and into a pit. Ones that Marle caught with a moving square got red umbrellas to float safely down so they could walk to another door.

"Why build a door that drops people fatally?" she asked.

"I don't know, but that's where the door popped up on this stage," Marle said. "And these lemming creatures are dumb. I've got to change their jobs to make a safe passage from one door to the next on each puzzle stage. If I don't, they'll just walk off the edge and go splat, or even walk right into water and drown."

She watched for a moment as the umbrella lemmings walked the opposite way of the exit door upon landing. They went right to a wall in their way, turned around, and finally went to the exit. "Huh. that's a strange puzzle."

"I think it was popular at some time," the old man said.

"Well it is fun," Marle said. "Still, I hope Crono and the others get back soon so we can go on the next part of the adventure."

"Yeah," Lucca said, turning back to the lamp. "If I'd known about the limitations of gates, I might've made a second gate key so we could get more done."

"i guess we do have all the time in the world to save it," she said. Lucca chuckled at that; after a moment, Marle laughed too.

One of the problems of figuring out this light was that turning it on made it harder to see what was in the ring because it was so bright. But a close look found tiny glints on the connecting wires there when it was turned off. Maybe the wire there was actually a continuous line of tiny crystals that made a full connection when the button was pressed? But those crystals would be little more than dust to fit on that wire. What about the magic here made this system work?

"Uh, Lucca? Do you have any idea how to solve this one?"

"You're the one that's been playing the game," she said, looking up at the screen. The entrance door here let the lemmings out into a V-shaped valley made of thin ground; it looked like they couldn't get out of it. Water covered most of the bottom, save for a platform to the side with the exit door.

"Well I'm stuck on how to do this," Marle said. "Any time I try to get them out, they end up falling into the water. Or the exit is too far down and the fall kills them."

"What kind of jobs do they have?" Lucca asked, looking at a bunch of icons along the bottom. Some jobs seemed unavailable, at least if the 0 count meant that.

"I've got two kinds of diggers and a basher," she said. "The basher goes straight across, this digger goes straight down, and this guy with the pick goes down diagonally. They also gave me a builder; they make stairs going up diagonally. But I don't see the point of that one."

"And going down over the exit is too high?"

She nodded. "Yeah. I tried a basher at the very edge of the platform, but it was still too high."

"What if you put a digger of some kind lower, and then put a builder at the end to cross the distance?" Lucca suggested.

"That might work, the builders only go a certain distance," Marle said. "But I've got too many out, I'll have to restart this stage." She highlighted a bomb icon. All the lemmings suddenly shook their heads and exploded.

"Why do their heads explode like that?" Lucca asked, bothered by it.

Marle frowned. "I don't know; they have exploders who do only that and I don't like them. I want to save all the little guys, not leave a few behind to die."

"That really is a weird puzzle," she said.

She watched for a bit to see how the puzzle game worked. Marle assigned the first lemming to enter to be a pick digger. Before the second one even entered, the digger broke through and she quickly changed it into a builder that put down one little platform after another. She made the second one a builder too, in part to keep it from diving off into the water. When the first one ran out, it shrugged and walked off the end of its stairs. It dropped safely onto the exit platform and left. Marle changed the second builder into a downward digger as the third was coming along, to make sure the stairs didn't get too high for the lemmings to drop off of.

"All right, that worked!" Marle said, going to another icon to speed up the entrance of the remaining lemmings. "Thanks Lucca!"

"Sure," she said, smiling.

It was actually interesting now that she'd watched a stage play out. Lucca watched the next stage and asked about the other jobs. There was a blocker who stopped other lemmings from walking off a ledge, acting like a wall. Unfortunately, there was no way to tell a blocker to stop blocking, so they had to turn it into an exploder to end the stage. It seemed like a cruel design of the game.

After a few stages, that small cruelty got huge. "They're only giving you five exploders for this stage?" Lucca asked. It was a lot of small thin platforms too. The right diggers could carve out a safe descent for the rest without sacrificing any of the lemmings. But with only exploders, five would have to die. Or maybe three...

"Ugh, that's awful," Marle said. "The umbrella stage was fun cause I could catch them quick enough. This isn't fun."

"Why would they build a puzzle where the only option is to kill a few or they all die?" Lucca asked. "The whole game is about saving these silly lemmings from themselves."

"It is just a game," the old man said. "It's not like you're actually sacrificing animals, or saving them."

"I still don't like seeing them explode," Marle said with a frown.

"Yeah," Lucca agreed, picking up a book that had been with the game system. Maybe there was another way. "Though it is a game; I'm glad we don't end up with situations where someone really has to die in order to make sure others live."

"That would be awful," Marle said. "But we're changing history. Well, the others are right now. We'll make sure that more people survive than before, with better lives too! We're not limited by cruel puzzles like this."

Lucca nodded, finding a list of odd codes in the book. "Yeah. Oh wait, do these change the way the game is played?"

"Yes, but I believe most people considered that cheating," the old man said.

"Well it's worth cheating if we can find a way to solve this without resorting to suicidal explosions," Marle said.

"Right, that should be perfectly solvable without killing any lemmings," Lucca said. "It looks like we'll have to turn the game system off so we can put in the codes at the start. Here, this one makes all jobs available on all stages. The notes says that the game's suggested jobs will be white and the extra jobs will be yellow. So we could try the stages as intended, except cruel ones like this."

"That sounds good to me," she said, shutting the system off so they could put the code in.

Lucca still thought it was a very odd series of puzzles, but it was more fun to help Marle figure out the solutions than to keep trying to figure out the lamp on her own.

A/N: Written as a gift. I picked Lemmings because I wanted an older cooperative game but had some trouble figuring out which game. Lemmings is single player, but I have fond memories of discussing harder levels with friends like this. Plus, Lemmings and Chrono Trigger both have creative ways to avoid death.