Guile keeps Edgar posted on his changing tastes as he lives in seclusion from the denizens of Figayro, it would seem. Either that, or Guile just knew what his favorite tea and dishes and flowers were when he was but a sweet ‘roid child, and Edgar learned them then and carried the memories of his twin’s favorite things well into his adult life. Somebody’s gunning for a position among the Fab Five, methinks. And, while I’m nitpicking, why the hell does Guile have three beds in his house? I mean, come on. Three beds? For one wanksty hermit-type? Whatthefuckever. Like I’m supposed to believe that he didn’t need the floor space for his Easy Bake Oven and a shrine to his collector’s edition copy of The Breakfast Club?

Outside Guile’s villa, the party takes a moment to strike up a nonchalant chat with some random old dude chillin’ by the cottage’s well. When Edgar asks if the Old Man knows Guile, the Old Man responds that “he left a couple of days ago after he heard Master Duncan was slain. He headed into the mountains. I heard Duncan’s son, Vargas, is missing as well. I have a bad feeling about this…” Then, as the party wrings the exposition out of their clothes, the Old Man flutters off to Exposition Fairy Forest, where he can romp and roam and be free of his cumbersome, yet vital, information for the rest of his days.

Swiftly exiting the cottage, Edgar eventually stumbles upon the entrance to Mt. Koltz. The party meanders their way up the mountain, traversing Brawler-infested caves and snagging really crappy treasures, like clandestine Tonics that only serve to replace one of the several Tonics used to keep the damn party alive long enough to get to the damn chest in the first place. Grr argh.

Eventually, though, Edgar makes enough headway to notice yet another Shadowy Figure just ahead, and follows him all the way to the mountain’s summit. When the party finally catches “VARGAS,” he incorrectly guesses that they were sent by Guile, jumps backward into a wall, springs off, and lands a crippling spin-kick to Edgar’s face. The kick connects with such force that Twiggy and Winona pop right out of Edgar and the three collapse in the ground in front of Vargas.

Vargas gloats over the party while they stagger back to their feet, and when the inevitable boss battle music kicks in, Vargas triples in size and summons two bear monsters, comically named Ipoohs, to shield him from the party’s combination of Bio Blaster, Fire, and Fail at Stealing attacks. After the Ipoohs die and Vargas himself has lost a set amount of HP, he decides he’s had enough fun with the party and prepares to banish them from the mountain with his “Blizzard Fist” attack.

But oh, how he’s foiled as Guile chooses that exact moment to pop up and confront Vargas about killing his own father! Who writes this garbage, anyway? And what did they do to get fired from Days Of Our Lives? They eat this shit up over there.

Guile demands to know how Vargas could do his dear old dad in, and Vargas snootily responds that he had to do it because Duncan chose Guile to be his Martial Arts MASTAH! successor instead of Vargas. I’m sure that Vargas’s obvious mental stability had no negative impact on that situation. Also, Vargas? Commodus called. He wants his daddy issues back.

Guile drops the bomb on Vargas’s parade by telling him that Duncan had actually chosen Vargas to be successor, and I’m left wondering how that could possibly have not come up, you know, while Vargas was trying to kill Duncan. For one reason or another, Vargas doesn’t believe Guile and offers the party a taste of his “superior technique.” Bamp Bamp Chicka Bamp.

Vargas’s “mortal attack,” Blizzard Fist, sends Edgar, Winona, and Twiggy flying off the screen, but because Guile’s rippling pectorals each weigh as much as a small child, he simply gets pushed back to the right side of the screen, the better to assume his battle position. Vargas, impressed that Guile isn’t overpowered after being blown by his superior technique — hee! — spews some garbage about fate bringing them together before slapping Guile upside the head with a Death Sentence.

The Death Sentence above Guile’s head is supposed to bring some sense of urgency to this battle, I believe, but the damn thing starts at 65 and counts slowly down towards zero, so I think the only way you could die at this part of the game is if you were trying to input Guile’s Blitzes with a defunct DDR pad or something. Anyway, after a beat, Guile tells me that if I select “Blitz” and push left, right, left, and then Circle, something good will happen. You mean like a lawsuit from Crapcom’s Street Fighter division?

What actually happens is a dumbed-down version of E. Honda’s Hundred-Hand Slap. Lame. Even lamer is Vargas, who promptly falls down dead. Now he dead from Deus Ex Machina. Also, Vargas’s relative weakness really doesn’t give me any faith in the late Duncan — the supposed Martial Arts MASTAH! — and his martial skill. I’m just sayin’.

After the battle and back at the summit of Mt. Koltz, Edgar and Guile share some brotherly love. I mean, have a touching reunion. I mean, catch up on old times. Guile calls Edgar big brother, which is weird, because they’re twins. Unless Square is shooting for that “Edgar popped out five seconds earlier” business, which I sincerely doubt, because I haven’t yet heard the epic tale from a bazillion NPCs about how Edgar cut Guile’s umbilical cord or whatever, and you know Square would totally try that angle to make sure that WE GET IT.

Winona sandwiches himself between Guile and Edgar and stupidly announces that “the brothers are reunited!” Oh, cram it, you klepto, you’re just hoping for some hot twin ménage à  trois action, and you know it. Twiggy gets her very first lines of the recap as she wanders forward to muse that “at first glance [she] thought [Guile] was some bodybuilder who had strayed from his gym.”

Guile walks forward, flexes his muscles, and incredulously repeats, “Bodybuilder!?” Then he giggles and remarks that he’ll take that as a compliment. Oh, what a saint. Guile asks Edgar what the heck they’re doing all the way up here, and after a moment in thought, Edgar’s ADD remembers that the party is headed for the Rebel Hideout in the Sabil mountains. Guile comments that he thinks that’s a swell idea, as he’s been watching Figayro from afar and would hate to see it reduced to a puppet state of the Empire. Even though, you know, he didn’t really care enough to do anything before now. Whatever. After throwing a meaningful glance in Twiggy’s general direction, Edgar struts forward and importantly announces that the time to strike back against the Empire is at hand.

Guile gets all excited and asks if a “bear” like him would be able to help in the fight against the Empire. I was going to make fun of his question, but then I thought about swishy Edgar and waify Twiggy and wimpy Winona, and I think I’d probably have to ask if there was a maximum testosterone quotient or something if I just saw these weirdos out and about, too. So Guile gets a reprieve, just this once.

Everybody amalgamates back into Edgar and the runaway King leads the party through a few caves and down the mountain. The way down the mountain lasts a mere fraction of the time it took to climb, in true Final Fantasy nature, and when the party leaves the mountain, they find that they’ve actually traversed the entire Koltz range and are now in a little alcove directly south of the Rebel Hideout.

That’s pretty convenient, I’d reckon.

Edgar leads the party northward to the Rebel Hideout, which is actually a little tiny cave wedged into the mountainside, and he’s greeted by an NPC in an aviator cap who leads the party directly to a secluded back room. Standing in a secluded corner of the secluded back room is a woman with a tangled mop of brown hair flowing down over a battered tan robe with green sleeves. Edgar approaches the woman and this prompts a little bit of dialogue with the whole party. But more importantly, as Winona, Guile, and Twiggy trundle out of Edgar, Dirty Mop’d Greensleeves turns to face the party, and we can clearly see that she has a moustache. Wha…?

…Oh. DMG is a man. Got it. I suppose I’ll have to think of a better nickname, then. Well, Sam kinda thinks that in-game DMG — real name Banon — looks like the Cowardly Lion, but I kinda think that DMG’s menu portrait looks like a big sunflower. So, in the spirit of compromise, Banon shall henceforth be called the Sunflowardly Lion. That, and I just like weird nicknames. Deal.

Anyway, Edgar lets the Sunflowardly Lion know that they brought “the [icky] girl” with them, but he says it all eager-like, like he expects TSL to give him a Milkbone and scratch behind his ears or something. Instead, TSL waxes expository, making sure that everybody assembled knows that Twiggy is “the girl who can talk to Espers.” When Twiggy’s all, “Durrr, Espers? What?” Edgar tells TSL that the Empire had complete control over Twiggy, thanks to the Circlet of Distinguishment, and as a result, she’s got amnesia. On cue, Twiggy slides backwards a step and looks Downtrodden.

TSL paces around the room and tells us that “carrier pigeons brought word that she wiped out 50 of the Empire’s best soldiers in a few minutes,” but we already know that that happened while she was piloting that handy Magitek Armor, so whatever. The bottom line? Twiggy continues to be Not Very Awesome. Hell, the damn girl even tells us as much. Right after TSL finishes telling us about Twiggy’s awesome Magitek Piloting Skillz, she’s all, “That’s a lie!!!” and looks sad some more. At the script’s bidding, Winona tears himself away from Edgar’s side to go comfort Twiggy. Like, five minutes too late, TSL barks for Winona to stay put and, in what I imagine to be his bitchiest voice, launches into a story.

“Perhaps you’ve heard this story?” TSL snots at Twiggy as he starts a slow pace in her direction, “Once, when people were pure and innocent, there was a box they were told never to open. But someone went and opened it anyway. He unleashed all the Evils of the world: Envy… Greed… Pride… Violence… Control… All that was left in the box was a single ray of light: Hope.”

Okay, TSL, I would hope that, if you’re going to blatantly rip off the legend about Pandora’s Box, the least you could do is hold back women’s lib and point out that it was actually a woman who opened the Box O’ Evils. And you could also explain what a characteristic like Hope was doing in the Box O’ Evils in the first place. I mean, sure, you only need the bare bones of the story to set up some wonky hope/light metaphor, but why settle for slipshod work, huh?

Anyway, TSL tells Twiggy that the Rebels are now confronting all the Evils from the Box O’ Evils, but they need a Ray of Light and Hope and Goodness and AWESOME!!! to help them strike back against the Empire. And then TSL all but humps Twiggy’s leg as he desperately wishes he could mutter that titular phrase: “Help us Twiggy-Wan Kenobi! You’re our only hope!”

Edgar, thoroughly disgusted at the amount of attention Twiggy’s receiving, what with her being an icky girl and all, reprimands TSL for putting so much pressure on Twiggy, and by way of response, TSL begs exhaustion, calling the summit short. The screen fades to black so that the lazy animators don’t have to make a scene where all the assembled characters meander out of the room.

The morning after. The camera fades up on Twiggy in bed. I would make the appropriate Bamp-bamp-chicka noises here, but come on, it’s FFVI. Twiggy couldn’t get any action from these guys if she offered to pay them with Chippendales coupons.

Case in point, Winona is in the room with Twiggy, but instead of trying to have his roguish way with her as she slumbers, Winona is perfectly content to just stare at the wall. Ten to one says he’s writing a love letter to Edgar.

Anyway, as the camera is now trained on her, Twiggy decides it’s time to wake up. She stumbles out of bed and over to Winona. After hastily stashing his pink stationary in his pocket, Winona awkwardly volunteers that “someone very important to [him] was jailed by the Empire,” and he’s hated the Empire ever since. Because, you know, he’s jealous that he didn’t get to be the bitch of some guy named “Bubba,” too! Also, I totally call Bull Shit on Winona. There is no such “imprisoned special someone” in the game. He’s just a filthy, stinking liar.

Winona tells Twiggy that, after he joined the Rebels, they filled his brain with all sorts of propaganda that convinced him that the Empire is 100% evil. Twiggy’s response? Why, look sad and whine that she has no significant other, of course! Because, dude, if you can’t have your memories or your freedom or even your spine, a wedding band is the best cure for what ails ya. The bottom line is that Twiggy wants some big strong man to make all her decisions for her, but Winona pretty much tells Twiggy to cram it and move on so he can finish doodling little hearts all over his note to Edgar.