Autobiography of a Legend

Slow Start, Fast Stop

After the ninja got back from the temple, I learned about the kidnapping of the people. At that point, the actions that the snakes went through made no sense. Those that were kidnapped know that the Time Twins were building something, but we had no clue at the time. With the confusion as to who exactly was taken, it was hard to figure out a pattern between the victims. It wasn't until we later actually found the headquarters that the Vermillion that we figured out they were all people that worked in construction and craftsmanship. The most important thing, though, was figuring out how we were going to find them.

The pushback the team started to give me about being the leader, however, started then. Master Wu was still in bed, and that meant that we didn't have a Master to fall back on. With this in mind,I told the team that since I was technically training to be a Master (even if Wu wasn't really doing anything for me) then logically I would be the one that would take control of the group. Looking back on it, I sort of went about doing that in a very selfish-sounding way.

The others weren't exactly happy about that, and immediately they tried to take me down a peg by making sure to refer to me as "Temporary Master Lloyd In-Training." I get why they were upset, but it just felt kinda... insulting. I understand the 'temporary' part since I was just filling in until Master Wu was up again, but taking on that last bit of 'in-training' was just unnecessary. And it didn't help that they didn't want to listen to me at all either.

Since we didn't know hardly anything about the Twins, my first goal was to figure out where they took the people. I went as far as to make this whole presentation about places they could be, and my goal was to try and get the others to chime in and we'd work together. I know that some places do that, and I wasn't sure so I wanted a second opinion. The entire time I was doing it, Jay was working to mess with me over and over again. I couldn't get through one sentence without him squeaking a chair or slurping on something or just doing something to throw me off.

I get that on some level, it's hard to accept me as a leader like that. I more or less just volunteered myself for the role, so I didn't start off on the best foot. But I was just as much a ninja as they were. I didn't want to play a card like "I went and defeated the ultimate evil!" or something like that, since that would just be abusing my accomplishments. But the way that they just seemed to brush me aside like that just felt, wrong. It felt like they were intentionally trying to make me angry! I wanted to be a good leader, but that was hard to do when it felt like they were ignoring everything I said.

During this, the Vermillion started up their plan to start stealing scrap metal. We'd anchored the temple nearby Ninjago City so we could be close to where everything was happening, and Ronin came to warn us about what was happening. Apparently, both him and Dareth had been attacked. The idea of them stealing metal, however, didn't make sense. This was literally a day after they'd been kidnapping people, so showing themselves again and now stealing something else just didn't make sense. Because of this, I told the ninja that we needed to stay and figure out their plan instead of blindly rushing in.

The others didn't like that. They just ignored me. They all stood up and went to leave. When I told them that staying here was an order, Kai just told me that he was disobeying that order. Ronin left too, leaving me alone. Having them just throw back my order like that was enough that I felt genuinely angry for the first time in a long time.

I didn't want to try to throw around my power as a Master like that. I didn't want them to think that my entire goal with them was to just order them around, but at that moment I was confused. I know that it's their thing to rush in and figure out what's going on later, but everything that happened had been so confusing that I wanted to know more before we went in. We didn't even know what the Vermillion were called. All we knew was they were working with the Twins -one of whom we only just discovered was still alive- and that they'd kidnapped people. Now they wanted metal!