Nash, unlike his drinking companion, is apologetic, but like him is admitting to shitting his pants: “Mia, I’m sorry…but I don’t think I can fight anymore. I’m afraid of what Ghaleon will do to me… Go ahead and laugh at me, Mia. I know I’m a coward. I know I’ve let you down…again…” If you guess that Mia is not going to take the same approach as Jessica, you win no prizes, as being each other’s opposites is kind of their entire deal. “I’m not here to laugh at you, Nash…” she says. “I’m here to thank you for fighting as hard as you did.” So she’s here to give him a real C+ of a thank-you. Mia admits she’s also afraid of Ghaleon and doesn’t blame him for same, and even thanks him for making her feel strong enough to go on despite her fear. Nash stares at her in horror, and I have to say, this is some primo reverse psychology. And the perfect capper: “Nash…if I don’t come back…promise that you’ll look after my mother.” My hat is off, lady. Not only should Nash feel about two inches tall right now, but she’s sweetly threatened him with something that should terrify him much more than Ghaleon. Lemia would make the rest of his life utter fucking misery and he definitely knows it. So, lo and behold, Nash is doing fine! Great, even! “Mia, you make it sound like I’m retired…but I’m in my prime!” he insists. Uh, you all are! You’re all like 17! “If you guys don’t have me with you, how are you going to have a chance against Ghaleon?” Hahahahahaha. Okay, buddy. Mia ignores this performative bluster, obviously, and just thanks him for coming around.
Well, that seemed easy! To the point that Jessica and Mia almost certainly could have done this without Alex, who said and did absolutely nothing to help. At the exact moment I’m thinking this, Squeak says, “Well, we tried, Alex…it was really hard getting Kyle and Nash back in action!” Oh, fuck you, and also fuck me. It can’t be possible for Squeak to get dumber, can it? Even if he submerges his entire body in whatever moonshine Kyle’s been drinking?
On that note, Laike chooses this moment to walk into the bar. Nobody notes how helpful it would have been to have his considerable services against Ghaleon, because he’s clearly over 30 and might have broken his hip in the attempt. But Laike is here to offer an even better kind of help: exposition of facts we already know. “Ghaleon has combined his power with the strength of Althena… And he’s stronger now than he’s ever been.” Sigh. Laike asks Alex if, knowing this, he’s good to try again. Of course Alex is, because he had a dream about Gams complimenting herself. “I’ll do anything to save [Gams],” he says with his Determined Face on. “I’ll give up my life for hers!” Laike’s basically like, “Whoa, you’re not getting away from Daddy that easy.” With this pledge secured, he tells Alex to go get his affairs in order. “Come back when you’re ready, and I’ll show you the way.” A valid question to ask here would be, “How would Laike know the way to Althena’s Fortress?” The question Squeak actually asks is, “The way to what, old man?” I don’t advocate for surrendering longtime pets, but I’m starting to see room for exceptions.
Laike just tells Squeak to be patient, and then sits down in Kyle’s seat and helps himself to Kyle’s beer. Squeak says they should check back with Ram-It, who “might have new weapons…” Ram-It doesn’t sell weapons, but good attempt, butthole. I spend about 15 minutes managing Squeak’s inventory and Talking to Everyone again now that the whole party is here to smart off to civilians, and then Alex returns to Laike. I know I just said that Laike could get off his geriatric ass and contribute to the actual fight, but I simultaneously think it’s hilarious that, at this late hour, Alex is still being deferential to his mentor. You the fucking Dragonmaster, man! Act like it!
Mmhmm. Yes, this all checks out.
Speaking of that. Laike confirms that Alex is ready to go and then bids the teens to follow him. While Laike is still about to show them the way to the castle in the sky, he is first going to take them to “The place where it all began, Alex. The place where you took the first step on your quest.” Oh no, if everyone here is being weird and shitty to Alex, he really does not need a high school reunion on top of it. The guy outside Ram-It’s shop who was bragging about seeing Gamsthena’s thong was bad enough. But he is, at least, going to be arriving in style, as Laike adds, “And the White Dragon is going to take us there.” The painfully stupid “Huh?” is barely out of Squeak’s hateful mouth before he’s glowing with blue light and teleporting the entire group to Burg.
“W…where are we?” Squeak asks as they stand on the Burg cliffside housing Dyne’s Monument. I know Laike didn’t say they were going to this exact spot, but come the fuck on, Squeak. “Dyne’s Monument?!” he blurts out in answer to his own question. “Laike? Did I do that? How’d we get here? What’s going on, old man?!” Keep in mind he just did this, albeit under duress and not really understanding how, back on top of THE GRINDERY. Laike doesn’t answer right away–first, his sprite slooooowly walks over to the marble headstone and turns away from Alex, as if afraid to make eye contact with him while spilling his BURNING SECRETS. “Perhaps I should have told you this sooner…” he says, “…but at least I’m telling you now about what happened fifteen years ago. What happened on the day Dragonmaster Dyne…”
Laike trails off, and we are whisked into a memory–BUT WHOSE???–of a day fifteen years prior. On a physics-defying dais floating in the middle of space and tethered only by a single staircase, a pretty lady sprite in a Snow White dress is encased in a beam of white light, her blue hair flying up around her head. Purple and blue energy flows toward her in a corona effect that is difficult for me to look at for more than a few seconds. Motion sickness comes at you from unexpected places! A younger Ghaleon with–I’m just going to say it–a tragique emo haircut shouts, “Step aside, Dyne! I have no more to say to one who will not listen to the voice of reason!” That is to say, his voice. I don’t care what nonsense Lemia or Mia like to talk, this dude is unchanged, and this thing he’s about to witness was not some kind of supervillain crucible he emerged from. Just my two objectively correct cents!
Anyway, Dyne, his sprite extremely not in Dragonmaster armor, but in a blue tunic and yellow cloak, is a few steps up the staircase to the goddess, and Ghaleon is at the bottom, pitching a hissy we’re led to believe he’s had several times before. This time, it seems, he’s here to yell at Althena directly instead of at her intransigent mortal servant. “Don’t you understand?!” he cries. “If she carries out her plan, the world shall perish!” The plan, if you haven’t inferred it and need Ghaleon to mansplain it into the void, is this: “Scattering her powers into the world to be reborn as a human… And you, willing to throw away your power as well! Willing to join her in this madness! Why, Dyne? Why do you continue to travel this selfish path?!” I mean, I can see where he’s coming from! If I knew for a fact God were real, and then found out God was planning to retire to a cabana on a deserted island, I don’t think I’d take it very well. But beyond that, Ghaleon may as well have “HOW CAN YOU LEAVE ME” etched on his forehead, and the “you” is definitely not referring to Althena.
The only crime against Althena’s progeny here is you dressing like My Chemical Nash.
When Dyne finally speaks at length, we see that he was tanned, gaunt, and craggy-faced even back then, like they drew him to look as old as Lemia does today, though I’m quite sure that the Four Heroes were all of an age with each other just like their successors. In his portrait he’s in his Dragonmaster armor, which, again, is invisible on his sprite. I don’t know what it is about that earflap hat that is so fucking hard to render. Dyne tells Ghaleon he’s got it all wrong and that the world totally will not end when he and Althena do…whatever it is they intend to do here. “Though she shall cease to exist as a goddess, Althena shall never pass from this world,” he says. “She will live on in the heart and soul of every human. She will smile each time two people fall in love…” I’m now picturing Gams spending years randomly getting an uncontrollable rictus grin on her face because someone two towns over just got laid and having no fucking idea why. Anyway, this is saccharine bullshit, or as Ghaleon puts it, “a deceptive stream of deadly romantic rhetoric!” which is almost as stupid a thing to say as what Dyne just said, except for the fact that I agree with him. I mean, we know the world does not end with this decision, but Dyne at least can’t have any clue whatsoever how this will pan out.
If you were expecting some kind of thesis from Dyne as to why he and Althena want to do this thing, he doesn’t really have anything else to say about it. We just know Althena wants to be a human pain-in-the-ass girl, and Dyne, uh, wants that too, and Ghaleon thinks the world will fall into ruin without Mom around. He keeps begging, but Dyne is already heading up the stairs, and into an anime sequence.
I hope goddesses don’t have to pee, because this outfit would make it hard.
Now in sepia tone–I guess to convey this is a memory, though the sprite stuff was all in color–the camera that is Dyne’s eyeline pans up Althena’s womanly form, taking in her complicated-looking vagina wrappings. The goddess’s eyes are closed as she sits at the center of her creation’s magical reactor or whatever this is, but she opens them as Dyne approaches. For what feels like 10 minutes the two of them stare into each other’s eyes, hers widening and then moistening as they wordlessly convey to each other that Ghaleon is an obnoxious asshole and they are totally running away to the big city together no matter what he says.
And indeed, Ghaleon is still shouting at him from the stairs to stop as Dyne steps inside Althena’s Cone of Divinity. “Stop before the path you have chosen strips you of the very power that safeguards your soul!” I feel like he didn’t need half those words, especially when the thing is already happening well before he even opens his mouth. It’s almost like Ghaleon wanted this to happen so he’d have a cause for which to turn into a full megalomaniac, so actually stopping it was never a true priority. Dyne begins to glow with Althena’s sparkles, stripping him of his Dragonmaster armor and leaving him in the clothes his sprite looked like he was wearing in the first place. The appearance of his leathery man looking all plain and unmagical in Althena’s arms is too much for Ghaleon to bear, and he just screams, “DYNE, NOOOOOOOO!!!” Finally, he has to shield his eyes as Althena herself glows with a light that consumes the entire platform, but he opens them to deliver more red-assed monologuing, as the music obliges him with a sinister octave drop. “Whyyyyy have you DONE this,” he says more than asks. “What. Is. It. That you can see that I. Cannot. TELLLLLLL MEEEEEEEEE!!!” Listen, if they’re not going to give me subtitles I can transcribe his community theatre Hamlet shit however I want.
What we can see, in a more literal sense, is a baby where Althena was just a second ago. She descends, wiggling gently, into Dyne’s cupped hands. He tells Ghaleon while looking at baby Gams, “I see a bright hope for the future that resides in each and every human being.” There’s something to all that Dragonmaster destiny green-eyes drivel, because Dyne delivers this line with an inflection that is perfectly Alex’s, just in an older voice. Gams is crying now, because I’m guessing Althena didn’t know shitting herself would be a thing she’d have to deal with, and the platform is still jizzing rays of light all over the goddamn place like it wants to make sure Gams has the best birthday ever. Ghaleon, though, is not in a celebrating mood. Fists clenched, trembling as he stares into the light, he answers, “I see only DESPAIR.” The last word literally echoes in the memory as Ghaleon walks away and the anime ends.
But wait! Where was Laike in all this?! It’s his memory, but I didn’t see him anywhere!
Back in the present, Laike provides to Alex what Dyne apparently didn’t to Ghaleon, i.e. Althena’s actual reason for this decision: “Despite her pure intentions, Althena’s presence was causing more harm than good…and her many children were becoming ever more dependent upon her. Instead of working together to improve the world they shared, as she had always wanted…they jealously competed for Althena’s attention, bickering to receive her blessings.” She thought if she just placed one teeny tiny bribe for her children’s college admission, and maybe faked some water polo trophies, they’d finally make something of themselves! How could it go so wrong?! So, Laike continues, “Althena relinquished her power, placing the fate of her children in their own hands…and she assumed the form of a human being, to live in the world she created.” Couldn’t she have just fucked off to Jupiter or something? Seems like playing with fate to hang out on this world, looking every bit like the goddess she once was, waiting for Ghaleon or some other desperate asshole to find her out and do, well, THE EXACT FUCKING THING HE DID. I mean, at least kill him so the secret is preserved! While I’m processing all of this in terms of Althena and Dyne’s decision-making and planning, Alex asks, “You mean…[Gams]?!” Jesus. This is going to be a long conversation.
If Alex is merely slow on the uptake, Squeak is somehow moving backward in time, understanding less the more he hears. He erupts at Laike, “How would you know something like that, old man?! You’re a liar!” I…just. WHY THE FUCK WOULD HE LIE ABOUT THIS?! WHAT COULD HE POSSIBLY GAIN?! WHY ARE YOU SUCH A SHIT-FOR-BRAINS?!
Squeak’s rotting walnut of a brain at least follows up with the thought to ask Laike who he actually is, though admittedly if it’s even occurred to him to ask that question, how he would not already know the answer is beyond my comprehension. Laike’s sprite paces in front of Alex, and then, in voice-acting, he sighs deeply. Like, full puffing-out-his-cheeks-and-blowing sound. “I know these things because…I’ve kept a secret from you…and the world…. My real name…is Dyne.”
“WHAT?!” shrieks Squeak. So much for his question being rhetorical!
Now that Laike’s SHOCKING REVEAL is out in the world, and long after I’ve been referring to it as the dumbest, most obvious shit imaginable, I also…don’t buy it? I don’t mean from a plot perspective. Duh, no shit, Dyne didn’t die, this is Lunar, good guys don’t die. (More on this later.) I mean they don’t look alike, and not just because of Laike’s obfuscating beard. His hair and skin tone are all wrong, especially for a dude who’s apparently been living outdoors as a hobo for 15 years since entering Dragonmaster Witness Protection. So unless he’s been pancaking on paler makeup and that beret would lift his entire head of fake hair off, this doesn’t really work. And they could have made him look exactly like Dyne and the reveal still would have worked, since none of the main characters knew him, and none of the living people who knew Dyne have ever interacted with Laike. Except for Fartnoise, who also obviously knew who he really was anyway, and just didn’t give a shit.
I dunno. Y’all be the judge.
“I never thought I’d speak my true name again, Alex,” LaDyne says now. “Not since I began my new life.” I know he doesn’t mean it in this way, but he’s definitely said the name “Dyne” a whole fucking bunch of times, today alone. Anyway, this seems like it’s basically the whole story, or at least, the entirety that’s necessary for Alex to know in order to move forward, but it’s not! “Something went wrong when the Goddess Althena began the transformation. She was in grave danger…and I had to use every bit of my power to help her complete the change. Dyne ‘died’ on that day…and was reborn as Laike.” This is them getting around the question that was on the verge of spilling out of my disagreeable mouth: how did Alex become the Dragonmaster if the old one was still technically alive? He died a soul death, apparently, that took away all his MP! Also, way to immediately prove Ghaleon correct that this was a dumb fucking idea. The goddess almost died!
So Laike does not get into this, but I do wonder if this unaccountable glitch in his and Althena’s Operation Cannot Possibly Fail is also the reason Althena became a baby. Because my shipping-based contempt for it aside, I have to assume what they were after was Althena becoming an adult mortal woman and Dyne remaining Dyne and then riding off into the sunset on each other. Who goes along with a plan that turns their lover into a baby so she can fall in love with some other idiot who is also a baby? “I have never regretted what I did, Alex,” Laike lies so Alex doesn’t feel bad about unknowingly stealing his girlfriend. “Not until Ghaleon became the Magic Emperor…” If we’re to believe, as I have established I do not, that this choice on his and Althena’s part basically broke Ghaleon mentally, then Laike should have had regrets long before the Magic Emperor coming-out party. At the very least he should regret his hair choices in the last 15 years.
“Ghaleon is using his power to resurrect the Goddess,” Laike goes on. “Or, even worse, he wants to turn himself into a god…” It’s definitely the second one. Come on, dude. And only Alex, with the powers he absorbed from Dyne’s noble sacrifice, YOU’RE WELCOME BY THE WAY, can stop this. “Althena cannot help you, Alex…to defeat Ghaleon, you must rely on yourselves.” Yeah! You can’t suckle at the fat teat of BIG ALTHENA anymore! You gotta pull on those Dragonmaster Bootstraps!
Well, why wouldn’t this entire game lead to a last-minute screed on libertarianism?