Lavos

File:Lavos shell.jpg

Lavos' outer shell.

In the console role-playing game Chrono Trigger, Lavos is a parasitic alien who fell from the skies in 65,000,000 B.C., its impact resulting in an ice age and its eventual resurfacing in the apocalypse. Lavos directly influenced all technology and life on the planet, evolving the planet's lifeforms to cultivate it, and make itself stronger (as Magus puts it, "We were created only to be harvested. All people and all living things..."). Not much is known about Lavos's origins. Upon dystroying the fuckin' planet, it burrows into the depths of the planet so as to slowly gain strength over millions of years. Additionally, upon impact, a splinter of Lavos' core breaks off. This becomes the focal point/MacGuffin of Chrono Cross, the Frozen Flame.

Its name is coined by Ayla in 65,000,000 B.C., roughly meaning "Big Fire" ("La" meaning fire, and "vos" meaning big).

By 12,000 B.C., a magical kingdom known as the Kingdom of Zeal comes into power by harnessing the power of Lavos with a machine known as the Mammon Machine to keep the kingdom prosperous and afloat above the frozen wastes of the world below. This proves to be the kingdom's undoing as Lavos becomes irritated when the Mammon Machine is moved to a power plant on the bottom of the ocean and arises to destroy Zeal and most of the planet (although not as severely as in 1999 A.D.). Lavos then once again burrows deep into the earth eventually becoming forgotten by humanity.

In 1999 A.D. on the Day of Lavos, it surfaces, causing fire to rain down upon the world and, climbing on top of the Death Peak mountain, produces offspring that seek to colonize other planets. This time it devastates the futuristic human society, and by 2300 A.D., humans lived in scattered colonies, trying to survive against the burned out atmosphere.

After a party of adventurers discover time travel and the fate of humanity, they travel through time and eventually defeat Lavos, leading to the events of Radical Dreamers/Chrono Cross.

In the final battle between the heroes and Lavos in Chrono Trigger, Lavos has three different forms. The first form is the outer shell. It combines the attack patterns of nine different bosses from the game: Dragon Tank, Guardian and the Bits, Heckran, Zombor, Masamune, Nizbel, Magus, Azala and the Black Tyrano, and Giga Gaia. It is possible to skip this form by using the Epoch to smash through Lavos's outer shell.

Once the party beats the outer shell, it goes inside to fight the Inner Lavos, which has a body and two arms. Defeating the two arms shuts off the main body defense, allowing the party to defeat it.

File:Lavos Core.jpg

The Lavos Core.

The third and final battle of the game is against Lavos Core. Lavos Core consists of three parts: a humanoid center, and two bits. In order to defeat Lavos, the party must defeat the right bit. Its defense is incredibly high, unless any of the other parts is defeated. Then, it temporarily lowers its defense, allowing to damage it. Once the Lavos Core is defeated, the game finishes, and one of the multiple ends is shown.

Lavos is also the final boss in the sequel to Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, except in the form of the Time Devourer, the result of the defeated Lavos assimilating Schala in the Darkness Beyond Time.

After the final battle, the party sees a glimpse of a shadow of Lavos's bit, giving the impression that one of the bits might have regenerated (and survived), just before the warp back into the present. However, this plotpoint is missing in the PlayStation version.

Lavos' life cycle

The following is Lavos' instinctual life process, as it is explained in Chrono Trigger.

1. Lavos crashes onto a planet.
2. Upon landing on the planet, Lavos buries itself into the planet's core at incredible speed, making a nest in the core.
3. While it sleeps in its subterranean nest, it subconciously and forcefully evolves all life on the planet, while continuously collecting DNA from every living thing in the world. Because of humanity's dominance, this may be the reason Lavos' true, inner form is humanoid.
4. As it sleeps, it evolves itself as it evolves the planet, attempting to achieve the ultimate in evolution.
5. After it’s finished its evolution, and has acquired every bit of DNA from every creature that ever lived, it wakes up, and kills off every living thing it helped to develop.
6. When the armageddon is finished, it combines its own DNA, with that of the planet's organisms to produce offspring.
7. The offspring grow to adult status, and leave the planet to continue the cycle.

At the end of Chrono Cross, it is revealed by Schala that each planet of the universe is actually an ovum, and that Lavos is a spermatozoa.

When it was defeated in Chrono Trigger, Lavos made a desperation move, going back in time and forcefully assimilating Schala, warping her mind, and using her to evolve into a new kind of creature. After that, its purpose became as follows:

1. Assimilate with Schala. This process was very gradual, as the Time Devourer the heroes fight in Chrono Cross is very small, fetal, and undeveloped.
2. When the assimilation is finished, half of Lavos' innate goal is complete; it has evolved into an ultimate life form. Now comes the next part; cultivation. Because of the evolution, Lavos now wishes to devour all time and space, rather than just cultivating one planet.
3. All time is gone, and Lavos, the Time Devourer, is all that remains.

Extra information

• Lavos seems to have some uncontrolled influence in the time-space continuum. It is able to freely travel through time and space, open time portals at will of varying sizes, and avoid its own destruction by transferring its being throughout the fabric of time and assimilating with other beings.
• Presumably, Lavos is the Chrono Trigger mythos' equivalent of every other video game series megalomaniacal villains, and then some. It purposely evolves all lifeforms on earth, including the desire to advance humanity's knowledge and standing (Lucca, before the final battle, has trouble coming to grips with the fact that all of humanity's art and science was ultimately for the purpose of making humanity a better crop), has omnipotent control of space and time, was worshipped unconditionally by the people of Zeal, and ends the world with fire in the year 1999, right before propogating itself.
• The main plot of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross suggests that the time gates were created by Lavos, as Lavos was able to open gates deliberately on a few occasions and the gates often appeared as accidental rips in space-time caused by Lavos' presence. A scene in Chrono Trigger offered an alternate explanation however: due to the timing of when the gates appeared and their significance, the gates may have been created by some other entity reliving its life cycle, and flashing back over important memories in its past which were tied to Lavos. Since the existence of one of the gates predated Lavos's arrival on Earth, and all the time periods visited were related in some way to Lavos's effects on the planet, the gates could have appeared as a result of some entity reliving its life before the world perished, the entity most likely being the planet itself. The gates disappeared after Lavos was defeated, suggesting that the entity was at peace or that Lavos's influence no longer affected the space-time continuum.
• Lavos is the primary, if not sole reason humanity is the dominant species. This is mostly due to the ice age it caused upon crashing to earth killing off the Reptites.
• Because of its life cycle, it is highly likely that Lavos is simply one of a large race of god-like parasites.
• Lavos is referred to as a male in the series for convenience purposes, and possibly the masculine look of its true form. However, the Time Devourer in 'Chrono Cross' is listed as a female, primarily because of Schala.

See also

• Verneshot