Oddly enough, the game designers allow me a chance to opt out of the endless fellating. After Ellia rises to her feet, expressing surprise over a secret passage in the temple — as opposed to the zombies, penisy candle puzzles, and deadly trap corridors, which are totally normal — she hears a manly scream. The camera helpfully switches over to a dude in a skirt, cowering in a corner of the corridor. Two Charmander zombies stand about twenty feet in front of the guy, facing away from him. Of course his dramatic screeching draws their attention like a recapper to a wang.

The Charmander zombies are big, muscular fuckers, pretty much the opposite of the little withered beef jerkies. They, like their overlord, are red, and resemble humans who had their epidermal layer forcibly removed. Their gimmick, which totally sucks my small prepubescent penis, is that they take more hits to kill than any of the other zombie varieties and on top of that, they regrow their fucking limbs. Even their heads! This obviously makes them the toughest of the undead, and since Penis Assthrustus so kindly chose the Charmander buttplug, this means that I get to fight more of the Charmander zombies than anything else. Those must be tears of happiness I’m crying.

The two Charmander zombies, hot for the guy in the skirt, lumber squishily past Ellia, allowing me an awesome view of their skinless gluteus maximi. Ellia immediately becomes jealous that someone is displaying more of their ass than she is, so she raises the blowgun to her lips and fires a poisonously poisonous dart at the Charmander zombie closest to the totally lame skirt guy. Who’s just standing there, by the way. A little help would be nice, asshat. Of course, the other zombie takes this opportunity to hump the everloving crap out of Ellia from behind. Jesus, at least take her on a date first.

Enraged further by the zombie’s total lack of romantic manners, Ellia goes full-on bukkake, shooting her poisonous load into both the Charmander zombies, over and over until they fall on the ground and disappear. I believe they would have died eventually from the poison after a single dart each, but I have to admit, that was kind of fun.

But enough is enough. Ellia needs a weapon that doesn’t involve being inserted into one of her orifices. Luckily, the random skirted dude lurking in the temple’s secret passage just happens to be a magical blacksmith of some sort. Score! Since Ellia saved his pathetic ass from the zombies, he’ll fix her sword for free. Man, this guy is so lame, he doesn’t even get actual dialogue — RETD has to describe the exchange. He also refers to this guy as a Guard. I hope he’s not guarding anything important. Man, he sucks.

One freaky magical spell later, Ellia has her pointy weapon back, and all is right with the world. Well, except for being trapped underground in another of those fun trap corridors. Woohoo!

Unlike before, when I had a chance in hell of not triggering the traps, in this particular corridor, one of the triggering stones stretches across the entire width of the room.

10) Dancing slave girls were also unable to jump.

Yes, in spite of the fact that inflexible, non-dancing me could hop over that tiny booby-trapped section of the floor, Ellia cannot.

11) Ancient Cambodian dances were probably really boring.

As a result, Ellia must now contend with two large stone slabs that rhythmically pound together, not unlike Squally and Seifer, but without lube. Only by the grace of God do I get through that ordeal without being screwed over by my shitty timing. Ellia ends up in a largish chamber with yet another phallic pillar in the center. The camera takes special care to focus on a stone at the base of the pillar that contains a vaginal opening. Some stone pillars are born with both male and female parts, apparently. Like the temple itself.

Ellia doesn’t linger long in this room — not because she’s intolerant to pillars with gender issues, but because the place is teeming with beef jerky zombies. Fuck that shit. The only other exit leads to — surprise! — another trap corridor. Again with the unavoidable trigger steps.

The ensuing carnage is not pretty. Finally, I feel vindicated for my earlier trap corridor-related bitching, but at the expense of a large percentage of Ellia’s health meter. Using nothing but her dancer-honed timing, Ellia has to navigate roughly fifteen thousand slashing blades, poisonously poisonous darts, and pounding slabs. Her reward for miraculously surviving this ordeal is arriving at yet another zombie-filled room. This one contains a diverse array of zombies, but unfortunately none of them have learned to accept zombies of different colors. No one wins when racial violence is involved, except for Ellia, who books past the zombies as they punch each other in the face.

I have to take a moment to recover after Ellia leaves through the room’s second exit because for once the corridor is just…a regular corridor. Just to translate my surprise into something you can understand, imagine this scenario: “Hey, did you hear? The next female Final Fantasy character design features neither boobs nor ass!” I’ll give you a moment to sit down as well. (Note: That is obviously not an actual scenario.)

In fact, I’m so shocked that even the sight of the funkily-tilting screen doesn’t faze me much. The game designers put so much effort into their sanity effects without even realizing that the shock of not being assraped for once is a lot more brain-breaking.

Cut scene time! Ellia emerges from the non-trap corridor into a familiar chamber. Familiar to us, at least. I mean, if it were familiar to Ellia, she probably wouldn’t be tiptoeing around with that “WTF” look on her face. I’m talking, of course, about the goo-filled chamber of Mewtwo, the Goatse God. Obviously, that whole scene with Penis and the penetrating pillars took place sometime in the distant past, since Ellia was reading about it in the Tome and all, but it seems that Mewtwo is still among the living, the giant pillars no more than ultra-painful body piercings. Of course, like I said before, Mewtwo has probably had a lot of experience with phallic objects being stuck into his many orifices, so something like that wouldn’t be all that lethal to him.

Instead of running away screaming about giant purple pulsating blobs, Ellia decides it’s a good idea to approach the heaving mass of body part pudding. Before she can climb the steps to the dais holding the many-armed goddess statue, a heavily-accented voice stops her in her tracks.

A pair of skirted guards brandishing long spears are all, “Bitch, step away from the big purple thing.” A split second later, these two prove themselves to be just as lame as Magical Blacksmith Guy down the hall, as they are quickly snatched up by two phallic purple appendages and pulled into what I’m assuming is a gaping maw. We don’t exactly get to see that particular organ. Ellia stares, hands over mouth, all “Christ, that’s the biggest fucking schlong I’ve ever seen!” Obviously, Xenosaga didn’t exist at this time. Before she can decide what to do with this new dilemma, yet another voice catches her attention. It’s our decaying friend, Penis Assthrustus, who must have been lurking somewhere in the hallway behind Ellia, unseen. “So, you are reduced to feeding on flesh and bone, [Mewtwo],” Penis taunts. Forgive me my ignorance, but assuming that a god needs sustenance in the first place, what else would he eat? Was Mewtwo formerly a vegetarian?

Penis continues to stick it to Mewtwo — not like that — expositing all over the freaking place about how he’ll continue to die a slow, painful death for many millennia. I think Penis is totally trying to play it off like he really meant for his spell to take a long time to work. But I see through that shit.

Why is Penis here anyway? I mean, given that he knows at this point that Mewtwo is going to take a while to die, did he just show up to rub Mewtwo’s…er…orifices in that fact? Is he checking to make sure the pillars haven’t fallen over or something? Does he do this on a regular basis, complete with the smacktalking?

It’s not like we’re going to find that out anytime soon. What we do find out is that although Penis is an undead skeleton with destructive powers and kind of a nasty ‘tude, he has a large amount of concern for the well-being of the ladies. In his usual brusque tone, he informs Ellia that for her safety, she should really head on out of this place. After all, she doesn’t want to endure the same phallus-related fate as those two skirted jackwads, does she? With these words of caution, he makes like a tree and gets out of there. You know, rather than reducing Ellia to cinders for intruding upon his god-killing handiwork. See, he’s just a big rotting softie!

Before Penis Assthrustus takes two steps toward the exit, a purple orb of fire starts glowing between the arms of the goddess statue. It shoots a purple bolt into Ellia, who screams and falls to the floor. Luckily, Penis is too busy thinking about his latest kitten-rescuing charity to concern himself with the events taking place two feet away from him. Whatever the case, he’s just gone.

One black screen of I Suppose Some Time Passed or Something later, Ellia awakes to find a pair of sandaled feet right in her face. “You are one of the chosen many, flesh and blood,” the man’s voice intones through a reverb filter. Pardon me while I roll my eyes. Of course she is. Another Black Screen of Why the Hell Do We Need a Black Screen Here? allows Ellia to move into a sitting position on the stairs of the dais. But Reverb Man continues his spiel as if no time passed at all. “It is now your destiny to fight the Eternal Darkness.” Another black screen. Jesus. The next shot shows Reverb Man holding a flaming orb in front of his chest. And boy, is he one ugly mofo — I’m not sure which is more disturbing, the dead, empty eyes or the hideous pageboy cut. Well, it could be worse — he could be Penis. At least he has all his facial features. “I give you a gift in return for an obligation,” Reverb Man blahs. According to him, “the gift is [her] life,” while the obligation is to house one of Mewtwo’s hearts — the flaming orb — inside her body. And I don’t mean it like that, you sick perverts. Jeez, that sounds like a great deal, Reverb Man!

Apparently, though the pulsating organ no longer resides inside its original owner, it’s still really fucking powerful or something and bad people are after it. So it’s up to Ellia, dancer extraordinaire, to keep it secret and keep it safe. Poor Ellia doesn’t even get to say yay or nay to this supposed “deal” before the now-purple heart buries itself in her chest cavity. Ellia’s eyes glow purple for a moment and she gasps and falls over, allowing Reverb Man to make his staggering escape. Fucker.

Well, now Ellia has been granted her wish of becoming someone important and meaningful or whatever. I bet she’s feeling really fucking awesome about that. Not that we know, since Ellia doesn’t treat us to a Final Fantasy-style monologue about her innermost feeeeeeelings. In fact, she doesn’t even react at all — no facial expressions, no dialogue, nothing. But even with her newfound mission in life, which I’m sure is much better than dancing in a skimpy outfit for some royal asshat, Ellia still isn’t done with her chapter. What the hell do I do next?

Ah, yes. Presumably, now that Ellia shares an internal organ with the purple beast, she can now approach him without being molested by errant tentacles. The goddess statue holds yet another long, hard object — a metal staff. And we all know what to do with phallic objects, right? Yup, you stick them in holes.