12 000 BC is the Dark Ages in Chrono Trigger, but oddly enough, some of the technology there seems more advanced than in the present for some of the inhabitants.
Humans have come a long way from their ape stage and so has the land. Barren and frozen, the climate is as harsh as the people. Again, the people are divided, into two groups. The Enlightned and Earthbound Ones. The Enlightned Ones are humans with the ability to use magic. They live in the blissful Kingdom of Zeal, where everything seems to be perfect. The civilization there makes even the present day seem primitive. There city is on a floating island, above the clouds, with a sunny, warm climate. The Earthbound Ones are people who were banished from the Kingdom of Zeal, due to their lack of magical powers. They live in the village of Algetty, which is located underground. Their manner, attire, and even personalities differ greatly from the inhabitants of Zeal. They look the time; dirty, primative, and underfed.
The people of Zeal had little respect for the Earthbound Ones, saying only that "They lack what we have." They treated them as inferiors, due to their lack of magical abilities. When Zeal was at its peak of technology and the Queen soul became consumed by Lavos' mighty power, all the other Enlightned Ones were also taken in by Lavos' power and the promise of emmortality. They became loyal servants of the destroyer of the planet's future. Lavos' energy (which he actually drew from the Earth), fuelled the Kingdom and helped them to make great advances in their technologies, but as Magus once said: "Play with fire and you get burned." Such was the fate of Zeal and its inhabitants, but they were to blinded by their own greed and arrogance to forsee it.
Throughout the rise of Lavos in Zeal, the Earthbound Ones were uninfleunced by his great power. They remained outside of Lavos' control. But life was still difficult for them with all the racism they had to put up with from Enlighned Ones. The only people who still treated them as equals were the three gurus (Belthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar) and Schala.
As the Queen of Zeal degenerated futher, nothing matter besides Lavos, and anything that stood in her way needed to be taken care of. She even used her own daughter, Schala, to channel Lavos' power to the Mammon Machine, that Melchior created. She was unstoppable. Finally she ordered the construction of the Ocean Palace as a symbol of Zeal's power. The Mammon Machine would then be placed in the Ocean Palace to draw Lavos' energies more efficiently. Melchior, the Guru of Life, seen what the power of Lavos was doing to the Queen and tried to stop her. He realized that bringing the Mammon Machine closer to Lavos would awaken him. His efforts against the Queen ended with his imprisonment on the Mount Woe. With that, the Queen bacame unstoppable. Earthbound people disappeared to fufill the construction of the Ocean Palace. Most were never seen again. A strange seer also appeared in Zeal and warned the Queen of the arrival of Crono and friends. They managed to rescue Mechior, but Dalton, the Queen's head guard showed up and abducted Schala for the Queen. From then on, there was a constant struggle to stop the unstoppable, the destruction of Zeal. In the end though, it could not be avoided, as Schala ended up activating the machine, and Lavos emerged. The prophet, who was actually Magus attemped to destroy the beast, but it was a lost cause. Zeal fell, and countless lives were lost. Enlightned Ones lost their magical powers (except for a select few wizards) and the survivors tried to start over, as equals. For a while, there was some problems with spirits, as well as the attempted takeover by Dalton, but in the end, everthing worked out, the people survived, and the snow stopped falling for the first time in years...
For more info on NPC's from this time period, click here.
