Everyone kind of gazes around for a few moments, as if wondering whether they accidentally dropped some acid. A disembodied voice makes a store announcement, which apparently clues Yosuke in that they were inside the TV for longer than it seemed. The revelations don’t end there — Yosuke suddenly emits an exclamation point and gestures towards a poster randomly situated between two TVs. Of course, it’s the same poster that was plastered all over the Den of Crazy, only this time, the face is still intact. Chie immediately identifies the woman as Misuzu Hiraagi, the famed enka singer and wife of the councilman’s secretary Mayumi Fucking Yamano was knocking off before her untimely death. DUN!

And we already know who Gary wants for the main course.

“She’s been all over the news lately,” Chie tells Gary, just in case he’s been living under a rock. “Something about…her husband having an affair with that announcer lady who died the other day.” Yeah, “something about”. It’s not like your entire school has been discussing nothing else for the past two days. Seriously, why try to sound vague now, when we’ve been beaten over the head with the minutiae of the scandal umpteen times already? To my complete and utter surprise, Yosuke actually attempts to join the dots and tries to establish a connection between Mayumi’s death and the creepy lair inside the TV with defaced posters of her love rival all over it.

“Now that I think about it…there was that creepy noose hanging from the ceiling…” he continues, all Troubled Face. So…are we supposed to assume that Mayumi found her way into TV Land, hanged herself after going crazy and trashing a strange bedroom, and was then magically spit out onto a random resident’s antenna? Or is she one of the people MB claims were thrown through the TV by an unidentified assailant? My head hurts, and it’s only going to get worse from here.

Apparently, all that thinking was too much for Yosuke’s brain to handle, because he has a mini-meltdown and declares he’s going to wipe what happened today from his mind. Yes, burying your head in the sand is surely the best solution here, Yosuke. It’s not like someone died or anything. Gary would quite like to stay and think about the situation some more, but he doesn’t even get the choice; a black screen railroads him back home faster than he can say “Hey guys, I wonder why Taylor Konishi showed up on the Midnight Channel last night? Do you think we should be worried?”

Back at the Dojima residence, Gary walks in on Nanako and Hot Uncle actually eating dinner together — frankly, I’m amazed she even remembers what her dad looks like — before sitting down to watch TV. But for once, Hot Uncle wants a conversation. Ugh! Not now, Dojima, Gary sighs to himself, but plasters on his best Polite Nephew smile and indulges his uncle. Not like that.

“Well, I doubt you’d know…” Hot Uncle begins. “But have you heard anything about a student named Taylor Konishi?” Well, Gary has plenty he’d like to say about her, not least that she’s an irritating hag who tried to put the moves on his intended boyfriend, but settles for the fact that she wasn’t at school today. “Oh, I see…” Hot Uncle replies hesitantly. “To be honest, we got a call from her family…she’s disappeared.” DUUUNNN! Okay, I’ll stop doing that now.

Torn between concern that a teenage girl has gone missing, and elation that there’s now no danger of her getting her claws into Yosuke, Gary responds by belching an exclamation point. “Work just keeps piling up…” Hot Uncle sighs, as if a suspected murder and a young girl going missing are akin to a filing backlog. How inconvenient of these civilians! Don’t they know their local detective has a junior detective to screw a young daughter to look after?

Before the game designers can throw any more astonishing plot developments at us, it’s time for the Inaba Daily News! Naturally, the first item on the agenda is Mayumi Fucking Yamano’s murder. I swear, before that woman died, local TV must have broadcast dead air for 23 hours a day. The over-excited newscasters practically fall over each other in their eagerness to tell the viewers that they’ve finally established Mayumi’s whereabouts before her death — she’d been holed up in a seedy motel a few miles outside town. Just kidding! She was totally staying at the Amagi Inn. Anyone who’s surprised by that reveal, I implore you to stop reading now — the plot twists to come might blow your mind.

Gary is clearly quite content to have his intelligence insulted, because he doesn’t strangle the Invisible Narrator with its own innards when it whispers “The Amagi Inn…It’s the inn that Yukiko’s family runs…” I just screamed to the heavens on Gary’s behalf, so I missed the next part of the news broadcast, but apparently one of the anchors speculated that Mayumi had retreated to Inaba to recuperate from her recent ordeal. Uh, “ordeal”? The woman intentionally got involved with a married man. If anyone deserves a backlash, it’s Namatame himself, but let’s not paint Mayumi as the victim here — surely Misuzu Hiiragi is the wronged party? Oops, there I go again, trying to apply real-world logic and values to a game in which people can hop inside the TV and summon giant penis monsters by using tarot cards (more on that in future recaps).

Thanks, Invisible Narrator! I had no idea this was the case!

The news broadcast is still ongoing, and now the newsreaders are gushing over the Amagi Inn’s famous hot springs…and the manager’s hot daughter. There’s talk that Yukiko will take over the Inn in the spring (uh, it’s April. Isn’t it already spring?), which means she’ll be the one of the youngest managers on record. One of the guys gets a little too excited at the prospect of this, declaring that he “should book another trip up there”. Gary searches for a wire brush and some brain bleach as the newscaster’s colleague awkwardly steers the conversation towards the weather. “From now until morning, heavy fog warnings will be in effect in the Inaba region,” he reports, which seems almost as redundant as me saying it’s due to rain in England soon. Plus, we all know what happened the last time it was foggy in Inaba — I sure hope no more bodies turn up dangling from someone’s roof!

While I was typing that pathetic bit of foreshadowing, the Invisible Narrator decided to twist the knife yet again by repeating that Mayumi Fucking Yamano had been staying at the Amagi Inn (and that the Inn is owned by Yukiko’s family, in case I or Gary confused them with the other Amagis who live down the street). He then reminds Gary that Taylor Konishi has gone missing, because two minutes is clearly a long enough time for him to have forgotten this essential piece of information. Fuck Taylor and fuck the IN. Gary just wants to eat his ramen and go to bed at this point.

Inaba had decided on an unusual approach for this year’s ‘Best-Decorated Town in the Prefecture’ entry.

Apparently reading his mind, Nanako looks up hopefully and asks her dad if the ramen is ready, to which he replies “Give it some more time”. Time is one thing I don’t have, having wasted far too much of it on this game scene already, so I’m mightily relieved when Gary decides to go straight to bed instead of eating. Before retiring, though, he sneezes, causing Hot Uncle to send Nanako to find some cold medicine. “You should get to bed after you take it,” he advises, blissfully unaware of the disturbing fanfiction those words have probably inspired. Gary obligingly takes it (ew), saves his game (there’s no fucking way I’m sitting through all that again), and then heads to bed, ready for what will surely be an uneventful new day.

But first, we’re treated to another anime cutscene! This one depicts a sleepy Inaba street on the morning of the 15th — birds singing a dawn chorus, the first rays of sunlight filtering through the clouds, a schoolgirl’s body decoratively suspended from a telegraph pole…shit. Well, at least we know where Taylor is now.

Gary arrives downstairs just in time to see Hot Uncle leaving the house, having received an urgent call from work. Right. Incidentally, does the term “booty call” still apply when said call is made first thing in the morning? Leaving poor Nanako to clear away the breakfast dishes, vacuum the house, do some laundry, pay the bills and then go to school, Gary trudges out onto the Samegawa Flood Plain, where it’s now raining. As he passes two random schoolgirls huddled under umbrellas, the Invisible Narrator gleefully shrieks “You can hear girls gossiping…” It feels like that’s the only thing Gary’s heard since he arrived in this fucked-up backwater.

More like someone. And by ‘someone’, I mean Adachi.

I’m going to let you guys in on a little secret here — contrary to popular belief, even we gays have a limit to how much gossip we can endure. Unfortunately for Gary, the gods have decreed that he hasn’t quite reached that threshold yet. Fortunately, he at least has an umbrella to stand under while he has to listen to the two girls rabbiting on about seeing a bunch of police cars down the street. As if on cue, the now-familiar whine of a police siren interrupts the gossip session and the IN remarks “It seems there’s been an incident…” And there was me, thinking someone was just going on the morning doughnut run.

Once Gary leaves the flood plain we skip straight to the afternoon period, meaning that whatever happened in class this morning will forever remain a mystery. I’m not sure I can go on without knowing exactly how Class 2-2 managed to discuss Mayumi Fucking Yamano’s death for the trillionth time, but I’ll try to continue for the sake of my loyal readers. I hope you both appreciate my dedication. After lunch, what seems like the entire student body (with the exception of Yukiko, and Taylor, of course) is gathered in the auditorium, having been summoned to an emergency assembly. Maybe the principal is going to announce the location of the spring field trip?

‘Well, I don’t know what he was talking about, but when I walked past the window I heard Detective Dojima telling that young assistant of his to ‘take it’. Weird, huh?’

Since the principal is running late, Gary gets to listen to yet another pair of chittering schoolgirls for a while, their conversation proceeding as follows:

Rumour-loving girl: “Hey…did you see it yesterday?”
Long-haired girl: “Of course not…what, is that rumour for real?”
Rumour-loving girl: “I dunno, but it seems like a lot of people have seen it.”
Gary: “…”
Ben: “Ohpleasegodmakeitstop”
Invisible Narrator: “You overhear people gossiping about something…”

Really, that last sentence should be printed on the box — it sums up the entire game thus far in a nutshell. Gary almost wishes he were hanging from someone’s antenna right about now. Distracting him from the vapid gossiping going on all around him, Chie wonders why Yukiko hasn’t turned up. Don’t worry, she isn’t in mortal peril (yet). Yosuke seems worried about something too, but before Gary can coax it out of him, Queen Tut, aka Ms Sofue, calls for the assembly to begin.

Yasogami High’s principal, an unnamed old dude rocking a white beard, tells the students he has a terrible announcement to make. I could make up any number of faintly humorous alternatives to said announcement, but since we all know what it is I’m just going to come out and say it — he reveals that Taylor Konishi has passed away, and that the police are currently investigating the circumstances around her death. “Passed away…!?” Chie exclaims. Yes, Chie, passed away. Kicked the bucket. Bit the big one. Ceased to exist. Gone to the big liquor store in the sky. Wait, that last one actually sounds kind of tempting.

Yosuke reacts with a pained expression and an emotional “…”, which I think is supposed to tell us that he had romantic feelings towards his late senpai. We know better, of course. Having given his students a whole five seconds to process the fact that one of their peers has died, the principal makes sure to cover his ass by declaring Taylor’s death was in no way related to bullying. He then urges the students to co-operate with the police and to “provide only the facts”. Yeah, like that’s going to happen — gossip and hearsay are like oxygen to these kids. They probably don’t believe anything they read in their textbooks unless it’s whispered to them by an over-excited classmate.

You’re right — this game is much more far-fetched than that.

We cut to a scene in the school hallway, where Gary and Chie stumble upon — all together now! — yet another pair of gossiping girls. I have no idea whether they’re supposed to be the same girls as the ones in the auditorium, and frankly, I don’t care; I just want them to go away. One of the girls mentions how creepy it is that Taylor’s death is so similar to Mayumi Fucking Yamano’s, only for her friend to point out the very important difference that one was found hanging from an antenna, and the other, a telephone pole. Of course, they end up putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with “serial killer”, which is technically correct, but then they have to go and overdo it with the tinfoil hat theories. “Someone said the cause of death was some unknown poison,” one of the girls pulls out of her ass. How positively tragic it would be if this mysteriously poisonous poison were to somehow find its way into the school cafeteria and kill off all of these gossip-mongering chipmunks.

…Sorry, I was daydreaming. What did I miss? Oh, right, nothing. As Gary and Chie look on blankly, the girls continue wildly speculating about Taylor’s death. One of them says her friend told her they saw Taylor pop up on the Midnight Channel — so THAT’s who that girl was! — but her gal pal dismisses it as having been a nightmare. This sounds mighty familiar to Gary, but then again, so does 90% of the dialogue he’s heard so far. “The media’s been broadcasting their interviews with [Taylor] nonstop, so maybe they just had her on the brain,” she suggests, unknowingly hurling the Truth Tomahawk straight at Gary’s head. Since that line is important, I would tell you to remember it, but we’re probably going to hear it another 371,600,845 times before the end of the game, so it’s cool.