Ellone



Ellone (エルオーネ Eruōne) is an important non-player character in Final Fantasy VIII. Hunted her entire life for her unusual ability to send a human's consciousness back in time, Ellone has nevertheless managed to maintain a childlike innocence about the world, even as a young adult. She is the adopted daughter of Raine and Laguna Loire, and the older step-sister of Squall Leonhart. In Japan, published Final Fantasy VIII materials spelled her English name as Ellione.

Story
Ellone was born nineteen years before game events, in the small village of Winhill on the Galbadian continent. She lived with her parents in a modest home in the town square, next door to the town pub. One year later the Sorceress War broke out between Galbadia and Esthar, and Estharian troops raided Winhill. Esthar's leader, Sorceress Adel, was searching for an heir and the soldiers demanded the village hand over all of its young girls for consideration. Ellone's parents refused to hand over their daughter and were gunned down for their rebellion. Ellone somehow managed to escape the Estharian's clutches, however, and once the soldiers had departed she was taken in by her next-door-neighbor, Raine Loire. In the time that followed, Ellone and Raine enjoyed a peaceful life in Winhill, and Ellone seemed to accept Raine as a mother figure. Their makeshift family was not completed, however, until Laguna Loire, a Galbadian solider, washed up on a beach near Winhill after being critically wounded in battle. Raine took him in and in under six months managed to nurse him back to health. Eternally grateful, Laguna remained with Raine for several years, repaying his imagined debt to her by helping her raise Ellone and patrolling Winhill in a daily effort to keep its residents and streets safe and monster-free.

Ellone grew very attached to Laguna, calling him "Uncle" and following him everywhere. Laguna was similarly taken with the little girl, and enjoyed playing and joking with her. Although Raine and Laguna were only friends at first, Ellone encouraged them to develop their relationship, and they eventually fell in love and married, much to Ellone's delight. Their small family was torn apart, however, when Sorceress Adel's soldiers returned to kidnap Ellone. This time they succeeded in capturing the small girl, taking her away to Esthar to become Sorceress Adel's successor. Enraged, Laguna, along with his friends Kiros and Ward, left Winhill for Esthar to rescue Ellone. Raine, concerned about Ellone's safety, failed to inform Laguna that she was pregnant with his child before he departed.

Once they arrived in Esthar, Laguna, Kiros, and Ward joined forces with a resistance group in attempt to liberate Ellone from Sorceress Adel. The group realized that as long as Adel was alive, she would pursue Ellone indefinitely; Laguna decided that the only way to save Ellone was to get rid of Adel entirely. To this end, Laguna enlisted the help of Estharian scientist Dr. Odine, who built a special cryo-containment device which would effectively bind the Sorceress' powers and place her in suspended animation. The resistance placed the device inside a building they hastily erected just outside of the capitol of Esthar which would later become known as the Sorceress Memorial. They lured Adel to the site using a holographic projection of Ellone, and when the Sorceress entered the building, she was captured. Laguna and Ellone were reunited, and Adel's frozen body was shot into outer space.

With the threat of Adel removed, Laguna hoped he and Ellone could immediately return to Winhill. The Estharians, however, begged him to stay and help them rebuild. Unaware of Raine's condition, he reluctantly agreed, and sent Ellone home to Winhill ahead of him, promising to follow when his work was finished. Ellone returned to Winhill just in time to witness Raine's baby being born. Raine was devastated that Laguna had not come as well, but Ellone's presence comforted her as she fought to give birth. Shortly, Raine managed to deliver a healthy baby boy, whom she named Squall. The complications which she suffered during the labor, however, proved to be too much to overcome, and Raine died shortly after. Following Raine's death, the people of Winhill sent both Squall and Ellone to Edea Kramer's orphanage, which had been set up to care for children orphaned by the Sorceress War. At the orphanage Ellone, who was older than the other children, helped care for them like an older sister. Consequently, Ellone soon earned the nickname "Sis." Although Squall had no recollection of his mother or his hometown of Winhill, he was instinctively drawn to Ellone, and became more attached to her than the other children. The idyllic peace of the orphanage was shattered, however, when the dying Sorceress Ultimecia and a teenage Squall appeared due to a time warp. Mortally wounded, Ultimecia transferred her Sorceress Power to Edea. The older Squall told Edea that Ultimecia would possess her in the future to try and get her hands on Ellone. Edea realized that she had to take immediate steps to ensure Ellone's safety; enlisting the older children in her orphanage, Edea formed a group called the White SeeD. They were given a ship and entrusted with Ellone's protection from Sorceresses or anyone else who wished her harm. Whisked away on the White SeeD Ship under utmost secrecy, Ellone did not have a chance to say goodbye to her younger brother who grew up believing she had intentionally abandoned him. Ellone remained with the White SeeDs for many years, where she grew terribly lonely. Although grateful to those who had taken care of her, Ellone spent much of her time wondering how things might have turned out had Raine lived and Laguna had returned to Winhill. One day Edea suddenly leaves the White SeeD Ship, embarking on a mission to use her power to prevent her own kidnapping; thusly stopping Laguna from leaving Winhill and abandoning Raine. Buoyed by hope, she went to find Squall, now a 17-year-old cadet at Balamb Garden. Unfortunately much of his childhood memories had been lost due to the use of Guardian Forces in his SeeD training and he had, for the most part, forgotten her. Regardless, Ellone used her power to send his consciousness back in time to inhabit Laguna's past. Although unsuccessful at changing Laguna's actions, Squall's experience triggered many of his buried memories and his revelations allowed the step-siblings to properly reunite. Ellone's attempt to change the past also taught her an important lesson - people may not be able to change the past, but they can make the most of the present. Determined to regain her family, Ellone returned to the White SeeD Ship only to escape again at earliest opportunity, fleeing to Esthar on board an Estharian ship in search of Laguna.

Having found out Laguna, now President of Esthar, was on the nation's Lunar Base in outer space, Ellone followed him there, unaware that Squall was searching for her. Squall followed her to the base, desperate to find a cure for Rinoa Heartilly, who had fallen into a strange comatose sleep. Ellone, still stinging from her failure to help Laguna, was reluctant to intervene. However, after Rinoa, now in a trance-like state, freed Sorceress Adel from her icy tomb and wreaks havoc aboard the space station, Squall begged Ellone to send his consciousness back into Rinoa's past to see what happened to her. Ellone finally gave in, sending Squall into Rinoa's most recent past, and helping him uncover the secret to her strange behavior: Rinoa had been possessed by Sorceress Ultimecia.

Halting Time Compression
The party soon discovers that in the future, Sorceress Ultimecia is using an invention of Dr. Odine's called "Junction Machine Ellone" to send her consciousness into the past to possess past Sorceresses. The invention, Odine deduces, is one which mimics Ellone's powers, created by himself as a result of experimentation done on Ellone's brainwaves when she was held captive in Esthar as a child. Rinoa, after being possessed, reports that Ultimecia was attempting to go back in time far enough to achieve the goal of casting Time Compression. It appears, however, that the machine had limits to how far back it could send Ultimecia, and so she was attempting to find Ellone and possess her as a means of using Ellone's power directly.

Odine uses this goal to design a plan to finish off Ultimecia once and for all. First, he ordered that the party do away with Sorceress Adel, forcing Ultimecia to possess the only Sorceress left in the present: Rinoa. Once Rinoa was possessed, Ellone had to send the Rinoa/Ultimecia consciousness as far back in time as she could to possess a Sorceress in the past. Once the spell was cast, Ellone had to pull Rinoa back to the present and send Ultimecia back to the future, halting Time Compression (if only temporarily) and allowing Squall and Rinoa to reach Ultimecia and defeat her for good. The plan was successful, and Ultimecia and Squall fall through the uncompressing time to land in Edea's orphanage...and start the entire cycle over again.

Ellone's Abilities
Ellone finds herself the object of multiple Sorceress' desire because she was born with a special, non-magically based power. Her ability is never adequately explained in the game, but it is assumed to be a form of telepathy, caused by special electrical waves in her brain. A common theory is that it is related to the other missing half of the sorceress powers that Hyne did not disseminate into the human populace.

In a traditional use of telepathy, Ellone is able to project her consciousness into the minds of others and speak with them mentally, as she sometimes does with Squall. It would seem that she can also receive their responses to her communiques, regardless as to whether or not the recipient of her thoughts has any telepathic ability. When she links herself mentally to another person in this fashion, she calls it "connecting." Conversely, when Ellone severs the mental link, she calls it "disconnecting."

Once "connected" with another individual, Ellone is able to exercise a more unusual aspect of her telepathic powers - the ability to "send" that individual's consciousness into the mind of someone else. When an individual's consciousness is "sent" by Ellone, they are able to reside in the mind of someone in the past - be it recent past or distant. The individual whose mind is being inhabited is seemingly only vaguely aware of the intruding consciousness; Laguna refers to the presence of Squall's mind as the "faeries speaking." Although Ellone's purpose for sending Squall into the past was to affect Laguna's actions, it does not seem that the sent consciousness has any control over the person whom they are inhabiting. Rather, the sent individual acts as an observer to the actions of the possessed person. Perhaps the psychic strength of the individual being sent determines how much of an effect they can have on the possessed's mental and physical actions. This would explain why Sorceress Ultimecia, using a machine which mimicked Ellone's abilities, could manipulate every aspect of Edea, Adel, and Rinoa's processes while in possession of their minds. One would imagine that Ultimecia, a powerful Sorceress in her own right, would have more mental powers to manipulate her victims than the magically disinclined Squall.

On a similar note, it would seem that Ellone's "connecting" ability is confined to the present, in that she can only directly inhabit the minds of others in real time. However, by "sending" another's consciousness into the mind of another, she can transverse the time barrier. One may assume she cannot send her own consciousness into the past; otherwise, she might have attempted to change Laguna's actions herself, without enlisting the help of Squall. However, she might have chosen Squall because Laguna was involved in many fights and Squall has fighting skills, unlike herself. Again, this would explain why Ultimecia needed to use Junction Machine Ellone to send her own consciousness into the past; since one would assume the machine has the same limitations as Ellone herself had, then the Sorceress would have been unable to send the machine's "consciousness" into the past to do her dirty work for her. Instead, Ultimecia had to use the machine as a bridge to facilitate her own mental time traveling.

Regardless, it would seem that Ellone's talent is the subject of much intrigue to the Sorceresses, as Ellone, a non-magical human, is able to perform feats that the Sorceress Power does not encompass. Since Ellone's ability is obviously not magically-based, it leads one to wonder - much as Dr. Odine must have done when he studied Ellone as a child - how the girl's ability actually works. It has been suggested that Ellone's power is actually the ability to manipulate time in disguise; that her power allows her to literally take time in her hands like a length of fabric, and bring any two points in time together. By doing this, she can cause the present to overlap with the past at a precise moment (or at a precise point, such as the consciousnesses of two people) for a brief period of time. Although this would explain Squall's inhabiting of Laguna, or even Ellone's mysterious ability to "wind back the clock" on Rinoa's empty oxygen tank and prevent her suffocation in space, it hits a large snag when one factors in the fact that Ellone's power has limits - namely, she can only "send" the consciousness of someone she knows into the mind of someone else she has met at least once in her life. Basically, she has to have had at least approximate physical contact with anyone she "connects" with. This would seem to reiterate the idea that her power is indeed psychic in origin - that she must have touched the mind of someone in life in order to later manipulate their consciousness. However, since (with Squall's encouragement) Ellone was able to establish a connection with Rinoa, despite having never 'formally' meeting her, it is possible that Ellone's power still isn't mature and therefore posesses some limits.

Triple Triad
Ellone possesses a rare Triple Triad card of Laguna Loire. The card can be won from her by Squall while aboard the Lunar Base. However, this may prove to be a challenge as the Lunar Base uses almost all the card rules found across regions.

Ellone