Sorceress Memorial

The Sorceress Memorial (エスタ国立魔女記念館, Esuta Kokuritsu Majo Kinenkan, lit. Esthar National Witches Memorial Hall) is a location in Final Fantasy VIII. A structure built to commemorate the Sorceress War, it also functions as a place to seal potentially dangerous Sorceresses.

Story
Although during the game it is largely considered a memorial erected in Esthar at the end of the Sorceress War, the Sorceress Memorial was in truth the reason that the Sorceress War had ended. Laguna Loire, Kiros Seagill, Ward Zabac, and Dr. Odine created the Memorial as part of their plan to seal away the evil Sorceress Adel; they constructed a kind of armored cryo-capsule, placed it inside the Memorial, and crafted a simulacrum image of the girl Ellone, whom Adel was desperately searching for. Once Adel was informed that Ellone was being held inside this newly constructed building, the Sorceress went there at once, probably smelling a trap but trusting in her Sorceress powers to keep her safe.

Once at the Memorial, Adel saw the fake Ellone and moved inside to seize her, intending to transfer her Sorceress Power to the girl and enable the continuation of her own reign of terror. However, when she entered the cryo-capsule, she was immediately flash-frozen. The capsule was ejected from the Sorceress Memorial into space using three Ragnarok airships that launched from the Memorial. An Esthar space station was given the job of monitoring the capsule to ensure that there was never any unusual activity around it; to further hide the capsule from the rest of the world, it possessed an anti-transmission system which prevented it from being found by radar. Unfortunately, this also began to cause worldwide radio static over the planet below, rendering large-scale broadcasts impossible until the upgrade of the Dollet communication systems seventeen years later.

At the time of Final Fantasy VIII, knowledge of Esthar is largely unknown to the rest of the world. As a result, only the people of Esthar even know that the Sorceress Memorial exists, and it seems that few of them understand what the purpose of its construction was, as the general populace attempts to seal Rinoa up inside of it once she receives her Sorceress Powers from Edea in hopes that it will prevent her from ever rising to any kind of power.