As I’m sitting here on the platform managing Squeak’s inventory some more and making sure to equip the Sword of Althena to Alex–no, grabbing it from the stone did not do this automatically, the henshin sequence lied to us–I get acquainted with the music for the Fortress of Althena. The heavy Pipe Organ of Catholic Guilt is not so much on the nose as smashing the nose to bloody smithereens with a precisely thrown anvil, but that should not be a surprise. My larger problem harkens back to a thing I bitched about way back in Reza: the piece opens with its heaviest notes, and restarts in every new room, and after every monster battle, and probably every time Kyle farts. It’s like God is yelling at me. So, silver lining, I assume Alex is used to this.

The foyer of the Fortress of Althena has a bunch of statues that look nothing like her but a little like the Buddha. An interesting choice given that I assume she just wished this entire place into existence, and statues of her exact likeness are literally all over the world already. Maybe they’re supposed to be some ancient Dragonmaster? Sure. Let’s go with that. Alex would look terrible bald, incidentally.

In the next room, when Alex steps on the first of a long series of platforms floating in the ether, fuchsia energy gates close off his exits until the party can defeat a certain number of the monsters. It’s the final dungeon, for Gamsthena’s titties’ sake, and the game still doesn’t trust me to level grind without being forced into it. I’d be insulted if it weren’t 100 percent fair. A gaggle of floating sea-green crystal sultans in purple capes accost our trapped heroes first. One of them throws a ball of poisonous cum at Kyle, which seems off the rest of their whole brand but it’s fairly effective. The next pack on this platform attacks as soon as the first one is gone, but this set gets the boss fight music because, along with three of the Jizz Crystals, there are two musclebound horse dinosaurs with flaming manes and devil horns. Blucifer, the big-dicked horse statue at the Denver airport, didn’t exist yet when this game was made, so I can only assume the sculptor got the idea from Lunar. One of the Blucifers tries to use something called Burning Knuckles on Nash–I have to assume, smashing him across the face with a hardbound copy of his Sonic slashfic–but Nash dodges it entirely. Listen, if Nash can just evade your biggest attack, you ain’t shit.

A lone chest at the last corner before the stairs contains a Silver Light. It’s basically the bowl with mints in it on the restaurant’s hostess desk. Ghaleon clearly believes in Hospitaliano. A Holy Mace for Jess is waiting in a chest on the next floor, and I could just assume, given this one’s name, that these are items intended for Althena’s worthy defenders sprinkled throughout her home. I could also assume that Ghaleon ran out of space in THE GRINDERY for all the upgrades he intended for his mortal enemies. Which, thinking on it now, is kind of crazy, given that he barely seems to acknowledge anyone not named Alex, and I could absolutely believe he doesn’t even remember who Jess and Kyle are.

I assume these are supposed to be phylacteries, but they’re all holding them like ‘Look at the birthday present we just made you at the state fair glass-blowing booth! It’s for…later.’

It’s more of this for another floor and a half (more chests have a Starlight Bow for Nash and a Dragon Cane for Mia, and no, the latter is not just the Red Dragon’s ladylike foreclaw fashioned into a grotesque walking stick) so let’s just skip ahead to something happening. The teens emerge onto the third floor walkway, Mia asking Squeak if something is wrong. “Over there…” he says, and not fifteen feet away, Gams is running toward them. Oh, they can’t be this dumb, can they? Also, I don’t know how everyone didn’t see her at the same time. “[Gams]!” Alex shouts. “Alex!” Gams shouts. Yup, they are this dumb. She’s even in her old clothes, so she either had time to peel off her divine pasties and lace her braid into her headscarf before making her daring escape, or, you know, the other thing. “Ghaleon was distracted with his preparations for a magic ceremony, and so I…” Gams says, and fucking Kyle finishes her sentence so she doesn’t even have to bother completing the lie, “Took matters into your own hands and escaped! Good work!” I’m already cringing so hard I have pushed my desk chair back several feet and am typing this with the barest edges of my fingertips, but just know if that’s not enough for you to do the same, Kyle goes on, “You’re a brave woman, [Gams]. I like that. I mean, I REALLY like that…” This is so embarrassing that no one even comments on it. It’s just left floating there like a turd in the Althena fountain.

“Let’s leave here, Alex,” Gams says. Well, at least someone is reacting to Kyle showing his ass. Squeak insists they can’t do that, as Ghaleon “is trying to become the supreme ruler,” phrasing I find inexplicably hilarious, but obviously this very real Gams doesn’t give two shits about that. As Squeak and Alex seem like they’re possibly catching on, Gams continues to babble, “Whether it’s Althena or Ghaleon, we need someone to lead us… You can’t let such wretched human beings fumble about searching for purpose… We should be thanking Ghaleon for taking this enormous responsibility upon himself…not trying to stop him because of our misguided fears.” Okay, at this point I have to assume this person is not even trying to fool them, because five seconds of research would have told them this is the wrong approach. Like, just tell them you’ll lead the way to Ghaleon so you can all stop him together, and then usher them into the Woodchipper Chamber. Or say you’re scared and need to be escorted outside first, and then push Alex off the platform to his death. There’s lots of ways to do this if you want to do it right.

By the time the two, uh, people who know Gams best have figured this out, everyone else has too, even Kyle: “You’re not [Gams]! The woman Alex told us about is nothing like you!” Yeah! She would never escape on her own! Kyle doesn’t consider the real Gams a can-do fuckable broad at all! At this, Royce–for it is Royce, not that you needed me to tell you–laughs, and throws a magic purple cloud of netting at the party. It disappears immediately, so everyone in the party spins around like Royce just pulled a quarter out of their ears. Kyle demands to know what Royce–I mean, “filthy wench”–did to them, to which she replies, “He, he, he…I simply prescribed a little mandatory…relaxation for you.” God knows almost everyone in this party could stand to be a little less uptight. Without even knowing what that means, Jess snarls, “You’re not worthy to use magic, you evil hag…” If magic is doled out based on moral rectitude, we’re already in the fucking Upside Down, girl. “Oh, but I am, darling,” Royce replies. “Hadn’t you noticed? I’m quite proficient in all manners of mischief…” This game would be better if Royce were literally a cartoon mouse who lived in a hole in the wall in THE GRINDERY.

Royce goes on, to my boredom, “I’m afraid that the only way you can remove my little spell is for you to defeat me. But the likelihood of that occurrence is quite…remote. For you see, first you must prove yourselves worthy to challenge me at all! Until then, I predict a great deal of bloodletting in your future…” This very much makes it sound like she “predicts” them doing a lot of bloodletting, not having their own blood spilled, but who cares how words work? Royce wishes them “Pleasant dreams” as one last thudding hint as to what she’s done, and then vanishes. If the goal was to get these dummies to give up and leave, which the ploy with Gams seemed to imply, then casting a spell on them and telling them they have to keep going forward to get rid of it is, uh, counter to that. Squeak wonders what Royce did, as we have established that even blunt hinting sails through his tiny ears, but it’s not like anyone else has an answer, either. In fact, they’ll have to wait for another battle to find out.

It turns out, as the party faces off against some more Blucifers and Jizz Crystals, that Royce has cursed them with–gasp–a sleep spell. At the beginning of every battle, two random party members start with little cartoon sheep over their heads. Even in the worst-case scenario–a sleeping Mia, say, gets decked in the face so hard she just dies, which totally does not happen in this very first battle–this is not exactly a pressing problem. Like, Xeboobia’s contribution to the Kill Me to Break the Curse genre was turning Jessica’s dad to fucking stone. That seems a little more urgent than making our heroes 40 percent narcoleptic. It makes every battle take a bit longer and/or use a bit more of the party’s resources, but who cares? It’s not like Alex is saving his money for a romantic graveyard honeymoon anymore.

And Royce doesn’t even maximize whatever suffering this does cause: two floors of monsters later, on the sixth level of the fortress, she is waiting for them on an empty platform. She hasn’t even rigged magical land mines or anything! I “predict” Royce is phoning this shit in because she wishes she could be somewhere else right now, in sweatpants. “Looks like we passed your little test, honeybomb!” Kyle shouts at her. I remember not thinking Kyle’s various nicknames for women were weird back in the day, and I wonder what I was thinking. Like, what is a honeybomb? I don’t know, but my best guess is something Tigger only does for Pooh on his birthday. “Infidels!” Royce, suddenly a tinpot dictator, shouts back. “Why do you fight instead of succumbing to the destiny I have foreseen?!” I think I’ve made my opinions clear on how well Royce incentivized that outcome. This leads Jess to go back to our eleventh-hour theme, to wit: “we know that our destiny is not under your control, Royce.” Whatever truth there is to this is, again, because Royce is a fraud, not because a goddess gave them back control of their lives by secretly becoming a baby, but I guess those can be two sides of the same side-boobed coin.

“Ha, ha, ha…I’m afraid you’re swimming in denial, dear child,” Royce tells Jessica. There is no Nile River on the moon, stop doing this. “As the tide is rising,” she goes on (and rivers also do not have tides, while we’re here), “I shall permit you to glimpse your end in a manner you can’t deny!” With a magical flourish of red light and a sound effect like an underwater wind chime, she provides our heroes a “vision” of themselves dead and rotting on the battlefield–even Squeak! Lady, to my endless regret, that can’t even happen in game. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining dead baby dragons. It’s so transparently a pathetic fiction that even these mushheads don’t buy it, Jess noting that she’s just projecting her wishes as visions and even Nash yelling at her, “But you have no power over us, Royce!” Hey, this is a big moment for him, given that he used to spend his time locked in a parlor with her, forced to gossip about his friends. It’s not treated like a big moment, but it is one. Once his friends have all had their one-liner go at Royce, Alex finishes, “The future isn’t something to be told! It’s something to be created…” A fact none of them seemed to care about until an hour ago when it was told to them. No matter! Royce is good and pissed now that they’ve shit all over her grift, and the boss battle is on.

First of all, Boss Royce is like 20 feet tall. You would be forgiven if this is not the first thing you notice about her in this fight, though, as she is also cloaked in flames with malevolent faces and has wrapped herself, neck to toe, in a purple serpent with one eye. No, I didn’t make that up, I just phrased it the way that made me happiest. She also has a unicorn horn for some reason? Because the one-eyed throbbing purple snake wasn’t enough, I guess?

This isn’t even the first time she’s made herself one half of a caduceus, so I have to respect her commitment to her brand.

Since her curse is still in effect, Alex and Nash begin the fight asleep, unable to appreciate the majestic tower of WTF that Royce has fashioned herself into. “I saved this just for you!” she cries as she basically Flash Cuts Alex and Jess, waking up the Dragonmaster but bringing him down to seven hit points. Well, butt. Of course, Royce hitting hard does absolutely nothing to change my strategy as a player–this game’s sliding scale of difficulty is “How many Star Lights will you have to use”–but I find it irritating that this lady who’s been ducking our heroes for their entire adventure has the sheer audacity to not be a wuss.

The next three turns, Royce uses a single target Flare Strike on Alex, who is, I guess, resistant to fire now. Maybe I spoke too soon about ol’ Royce. She does manage to KTFO Nash in one hit the turn after, but…that’s Nash? He was probably busy staring at Kyle’s ass, as I have unintentionally but delightfully positioned them thus on the battlefield. The same attack brings Kyle down to around 100 HP, so clearly this was just random chance. Though I would love it if she only ever attacked the Dragonmaster, per her brief from Daddy Ghaleon, and also Nash, for her own personal reasons. And that’s more or less all she gets to do anyway, as she goes down in seven or eight turns. The answer, by the way, was zero Star Lights, so I really did overrate her based on the first turn. She even drops a Silver Light, so I’m in the black as far as this lady’s concerned.

Royce, her hair and makeup all messed up from being hit with two swords and a bunch of lightning bolts and fireballs for 10 minutes, stumbles backward. “Impossible…can’t…be…!” Oh she dying. I expect her to talk a bunch more with increasing ellipses about her premonitions never being wrong, or something about THE VEIL, but instead she just disappears, probably to die, possibly to cry about how dumb she looks. Kyle says once she’s gone, “Well, I guess what they say is true…fortune-tellers really can’t see into their own futures.” Do they say that? He concedes that maybe she was the one awash in the waters of denial, which is the way more sensible conclusion. Jessica just says she’s happy that bitch is super dead, and everybody forms back up inside Alex to move on, not a syllable falling from a single set of teenage lips about the possibility she’s not dead. Look, Royce is dead, and in a minute when they don’t have the curse anymore they’ll have their confirmation on that, but right now? After what they went through with fucking Ghaleon? I’d be at least harboring some doubt.

Past the now-open door Royce was guarding is a particularly fancy fountain statue of Althena surrounded by a circle of purple runes. Pretty full of herself, this bitch, wasn’t she? Alex takes in its healing without stopping to think at all about how insane it is he’s been praying TO HIS GIRLFRIEND for his ENTIRE LIFE, and moves on through the next door, where he finds a ramp, open to the sky, to the next part of the tower. The soul-deadening organ dirge has been replaced with the frenetic theme usually reserved for waves of monsters, so I fully expect Tempest to appear stage-right with a Cadillac-sized longbow. Instead Alex traverses a dark corridor lined with orbs colored to represent each of the four dragons. It opens up into a room that doesn’t look entirely unlike Damon’s Spire, except all the walls have smaller Althena statues set into little prayer alcoves. All of this would make more sense if this place had once been open to public worship, but given that we’ve heard nothing of the sort, I have to assume Althena once roamed these halls, leaving offerings for herself to have a good hair day, or for the dragons not to send her any passive-aggressive memos.