The kids gather to pool their munny. Roxas shows the others what he made, and Chumlee joins Hayner in celebrating their watermelon-buying riches. God, is Olette the only one around here who can count? Probably not, because she tallies for them. “Nice work, everyone,” she says. “Added to what we started with, we now have… Tada! 5000 munny!” She even holds up a cute orange munny pouch, presumably brimming with little yellow marbles.
Let’s pause here, because this is fucked. So, to review, Roxas brought 1200 munny to the table. But let’s leave out everyone’s prior stash: this leaves 3400 munny, to which Roxas contributed 1050, meaning the other three earned 2350, or just under 800 each. That sounds reasonable, I guess, except Hayner told them all to earn 800 munny each, which he, Chumlee, and Olette did not even manage on average. Also, if everyone pitched in what Roxas did, ignoring how much work they each actually did today, it would still only be 4800, not 5000, so by definition someone just put more in the pot than Roxas, yet here they are sucking him off for going above and beyond. Also, it’s incredibly unlikely they all earned their keep, since a certain sentient tube of hair gel has been standing in front of the train station all day looking at Seifer’s ass through a pair of binoculars. Meaning either Chumlee or Olette basically earned half their total fund alone. (Possibly out of guilt for unfairly receiving a share of their hypothetical Struggle winnings.)
And yes, this is all because, regardless of Roxas’s actual contribution, the total is still 5000 munny–it’s not like they were going to voice act several different cutscenes based on Roxas’s level of industriousness. But let’s say the fuzziness is warranted because of that fact and throw out everything I just said as being nitpicky (which it is). Even then, these chuckleheads still think they’re buying a 2000-munny watermelon just because they earned a grand total of 200 above their bare minimum. Just buying their train tickets will leave them short of that mark. My point is, these kids desperately need to get back to school. Unless, as I fear, their math teacher is Apple.
Vagina!
Olette hands the sack of bad math to Roxas and says they should get their tickets. She and Chumlee run off, while Roxas and Hayner stay behind. Wink. Instead of taking advantage, though, Hayner stares after their friends and says, “We can’t be together forever…so we’d better make the time we do have something to remember.” Roxas gazes back at him, like he has a few ideas for a memorable evening. Of course, he ruins my sad fantasy by going, “Huh?” and cocking his head like a dipshit. Hayner realizes that he’s exposed himself a hair too much, so he backpedals, slugging Roxas in the arm and laughing, “Gotcha!” Ahh. Young love. Going by my own experience, Hayner is about to snap the straps of Roxas’s training bra.
But back to the matter at hand, as Roxas will surely have ample opportunities at the beach to “make some memories” with Hayner. As he’s running into the train station to catch up with his friends, he trips and falls to the ground. A stick not unlike the one he was playing with earlier appears to be the culprit. The other three notice and start back to help him, but when Roxas looks up, he’s staring at the same hooded man he threw the stick at earlier. The hood roughly pulls him to his feet and says something only Roxas can hear. Hayner, though, is more concerned about their train tickets, and yells, “Roxas! Three minutes!” When the camera pulls around, the hood is gone. And inside, when Chumlee asks Roxas to hand over the munny as Hayner is buying the tickets, he pats his pockets and realizes the cash is gone. Jesus, Roxas. Was the skateboard decal and straight-edge temp tattoo vendor right outside the station?
Obviously, that is not what happened. Roxas flashes back to the guy from two seconds ago and yells, “He took it!” He’s about to run off and chase the dude down until Olette asks where he’s going. “Remember when I fell?” he asks. “I had the money before that. I bet that guy took it!” He’s about to keep going, but his friends’ faces, and Hayner’s skeptical (or jealous!) utterance of, “Guy?” clue him in that they think he’s insane and they did not see any such person. In Haynervision Instant Replay, we see Roxas tripping over absolutely nothing, all alone in the square. Smooth move, Ex-Lax. As Roxas is stuck like a skipping record on realizing there was no one there, the last train of the day leaves, and Hayner, Chumlee, and Olette casually leave the station. I feel like they should be a bit angrier about this. They presumably worked hard all day for that cash, and not only does Roxas lose it in half a second and ruin their plans, but he invents some bullshit about being mugged when they were standing right there and know he’s lying. I mean, he’s not, but they would be far from unreasonable for thinking he is.
By the way, why exactly was their plan to buy train tickets to the beach at the very end of the day? I know time is a somewhat malleable concept in this place that’s permanently stuck on sunset, but wouldn’t it make more sense to work all day, get the munny, and then use it first thing in the morning and spend the whole day at the beach? How long were they planning on being there, an hour? What can Roxas and Hayner do to each other under the boardwalk in that piddly shit time window?
These kids make my head hurt. And just to give me a little more throbbing in my temples, a black screen later, the four of them are sitting on the ledge of the town’s clock tower, eating more blue popsicles. Which they bought with their munny they don’t have! Perfect. I was joking earlier about them tipping over the ice cream truck, but now I think I might have been onto something. Either that or Roxas is in some kind of cabana boy situation with the retired candy shop lady. While his friends are eagerly licking away at their popsicles, Roxas is holding his in one limp hand, letting it drip all over the bricks below, possibly ruining someone’s outfit. “It’s melting!” Olette says, but barely even looks at him, so it looks like she’s talking to herself. Roxas sullenly replies, “Sorry,” like his mother just told him she’s tired of buying him new underwear. Hayner tells him, “Cheer up already!” because they are all such good friends to Roxas that they’re buying into his line about being robbed by an invisible man. I wonder if they even bothered looking for the pouch. But that’s silly–it must be gone forever, because Roxas definitely said he didn’t lose it! If I’d lost that kind of money when I was a gangly, horny preteen desperate to impress my crush, I would have never stopped looking for it.
Ew, no.
Out of nowhere, as his friends are staring at him with their blandly cheerful doll faces again, Roxas murmurs, “Can you feel [Junior]?” I want Hayner to fly into a jealous rage at the thought of Roxas feeling up some other guy, but Roxas is just repeating what he heard from the mystery hood, who thanks to retroactive voice acting we know is Ziggy. Except he says it more like, “Can you feel, [Junior]?” Maybe on purpose, maybe a simple case of wooden line reading. Take your pick! Ziggy fades to static and the robot lady voice announces, “Restoration at 28%.” What are they restoring? Does it secretly hate its friends and just want to be the cool guy who always gets to drive and is the constant center of attention? “Naminé, hurry,” Saruman the Red’s voice says, tinged with fear. Or don’t! Take it slow, little lady. We’re in no rush.
In Saruman’s IT lab, as Saruman stares at his monitors some more, Ziggy stands in the corner, casually tossing the kids’ munny pouch into the air. He asks Saruman, “Is it really that hard to make a beach?” It is if you have to account for Roxas’s pathological desire for secluded necking corners. Saruman replies instead, “We’d be giving the enemy another entry point.” Yeah, Roxas has gotten bored with dreaming about the same old entry points, though. Could use another to keep things fresh. Ziggy asks about the munny pouch, like he has no room in his life for an accessory that’s not black and has no zippers, and Saruman says, laughing, “We can always buy some sea salt ice cream.” Is that what those blue popsicles are? Are they actually salt-flavored, or is it like sea salt caramel ice cream? This is important.
Just in case it is not yet clear that Roxas is living in the Matrix, which has been considerately populated with digital hot boys for his entertainment, Saruman goes on, now serious, “Objects from that town must be kept out of the real world. You can delete that.” How could an object from a fake world even exist in the real world at all? Are these two in the real world, or the fake one? Isn’t my headache bad enough as it is, guys? The one solace I can take from learning that Roxas is in some elaborate Inception is that his flagrant Gary Stu portrayal now makes a ton of sense. Of course everybody treasures their photos of him and praises him to the moon for raising a moderate amount of money! No wonder he keeps dramatically fainting and tripping over himself like an Anastasia Steele-level spaz! If we find out his nascent sperm are his angelic backup singers, I’m not even going to be mad about it.
🙁
With that sorted, it’s time for more of Junior’s staticky memories to play in Roxas’s brain, all set to sad piano music. I will try to make this quick. To give me incentive to keep it moving, OH BOY, we start with Atlantica, and King Triton lecturing our boy about meddling in other worlds, while Junior’s merboy nipples stare at me, unblinking, boring into my brain. After Ariel has waxed rhapsodic about getting to see other worlds someday (ha, like Junior’s going to bring some broad aboard his gummi ship), we cut to Olympus Coliseum, and Phil reluctantly conferring the title of Junior Heroes on the Mouseketeers while Samcules looks smug, for he is the Senior Hero, with the varsity letter jacket to prove it. More quickly now: Aladdin sets the Genie free and he grows a giant blue dong right in front of Junior’s eyes; Jack Skellington and Sally plan for their Halloween celebration, but this time together, and they’re holding hands and zzzzzzzzzzzzz; and Junior summons Mushu, who’s all, “I am Mushu!” in case I’d forgotten. From the Actual Important Characters Department, Riku asks from inside Monstro’s butthole, “Or are you too cool to play [grab-ass] now that you have the Keyblade?” and Junior wonders if Riku has fallen down on the job of finding “her,” a task that was clearly only Riku’s responsibility. On Neverland, Fuckboy McDunning-Kruger says in oblivious amazement, “I still can’t believe it. I really flew. Wait ’til I tell Kai–” So glad I got to relive that one. Another Unimportant One-World Wankers Lightning Round: Tink blasts Junior in the face with gold glitter atop Big Ben as Peter Pan sighs in relief; Bitch and Junior commiserate about how very very hard they’re searching for their super important women who are not even really hidden, because they want to mack on them, like, so much; and Winnie the Selfish Bearchild Pooh asks Junior where he’s going, and Junior says, “I’m getting the fuck out of here, and then I’m lighting this book on fire so you and Tigger can’t inflict your toxic narcissism on anyone else.” Except he actually says, “I’m gonna go look for my friends. They’re waiting for me.” Speaking of toxic narcissism. Finally, more Neverland: back on the Jolly Roger, Riku is butthurt about being less important than @%$#!!! and Goofy, and showing off comatose Kairi like a prize pig; and Junior is shooting the Jizz That Believes into Big Ben’s keyhole. (Aaaaaand Roxas has ruined more linens.) The sequence ends with Riku and Kairi on a white screen, slightly distorted and out of focus. Whew! Man, I swear I played the first game, guys. I kind of wrote about it and everything. We don’t need to do this.
Presumably watching all this–I mean, maybe, I don’t even know anymore–is Saruman the Red, still sitting at his Bionic Wanker programming console. Elsewhere, Naminé is standing in a different white room than her usual, with glowing green concentric circles on the floor. She’s looking at a giant white artichoke, like the one that trapped Junior, but opaque. A network of tiny cranes and robot arms hover above the artichoke, like it’s the unattainable prize in a claw machine. The camera zooms in oddly on the small of her back before anything even happens, and now Naminé is standing in pure blackness, except for the white light radiating off of her. Oh my god, Naminé is Kingdom Hearts. Look at how dark that girl is! There’s no light at all! Junior’s voice asks, “Who are you?” She somehow both smiles makes a duckface, but whatever she says in response, we can’t hear the answer. Seriously, I know they think this random mute button is a clever storytelling device, but it’s annoying as shit. And with that we fade on Naminé too. Really glad I got to see all this! Nothing more rewarding than bunch of scenes I’ve already covered, and a new scene that revealed absolutely nothing! Good effort today, gang.
Roxas is about to wake up, breathless and messy, to his third day, but we will leave him here for now. He needs time to clean up, anyway. Next time, more adventures in the Hot Boy Matrix, including the Struggle, featuring a very special defending champion, so long as you still get excited about Final Fantasy characters in hilarious outfits. And who doesn’t? See you in part two!