Well, OK. She’s not actually schizophrenic. But I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking she was.
One of the coolest concepts in the original Final Fantasy was the inclusion of a dungeon inside of a town. This might have caused confusion for some players who reach the town, yet didn’t know what to do next. However, it was nowhere near as confusing as meeting this lady. This is one of the reasons why it can be good to talk to everyone you meet. Of course, in real life, I’m sure if you met her on the bus, you’d stay away from her.
Consider this scene. You see a girl by a barrel, and she says:
I wanted to save the mermaids living on the seafloor, so I made this submarine out of a barrel. But when I went underwater, I started running out of air, and I couldn’t breathe. It’s totally useless. Even worse, it’s dangerous. You better keep away.
What?!
At this point, you’d be a fool not to stay away. Your first guess would be that she’s crazy. Seriously. What makes her think that mermaids live on the seafloor, much less they exist? How does she know they need saving? How is she going to reach them, via barrel??? She was going to sink to the bottom of the sea floor, in a barrel, to save the mermaids. How was she going to save the mermaids?
So far, none of this is making sense. And if you heard this, you wouldn’t be able to logically process what she just said. You’d know what she said, but there would be no response to the utter crazy you just heard.
But then she keeps talking, and it just gets worst. While underwater, she started running out of air so she had to come back up. She placed herself in a barrel, submerged, ran out of air supply, and couldn’t breathe. Totally useless is an understatement. Completely nuts sums it up completely.
But then again, everyone in Onrac is a little nutty. One girl exclaims:
Look at my legs! Aren’t they wonderful? I love having legs! Look! Look! Did you see that move I just did!
Another older lady asks:
Are those legs really yours?
…?
And finally, some weird guy tells us about a shiny object he saw. It came crashing down from the sky to the waterfalls in the north. No one believes him, but he thinks it was some kind of mechanical creature.
Yep. Some guy saw a UFO.
Of course, this is a fantasy. A final fantasy. The guy actually did see a mechanical creature, we meet him and he gives us the Warp Cube. Everyone talks about legs because everyone here is either a former mermaid or amazed by them. And of course, fantastic stuff happens every day. Even if we’ve never seen a mermaid, we could believe the lady by the barrel that they exist, right?
Of course, we can. We know now that she was a ghost of a mermaid. But, if she was a mermaid and a ghost, why did she go inside of a barrel? How did she run out of the air? Was she just giving the Warriors of Light a hint of what to do next? Or was she really going crazy?