Koyu leaves in a sweaty hurry to alert Gijimu to their plans, and Gustav calls on his manservant, Marlowe, to prepare rooms for Barry and his companions. Marlowe turns out to be a young Bill Gates in a long brown dress and lemon yellow frock. His sprite even carries a book, like the bad haircut and giant glasses weren’t enough of a nerd alert. Upstairs, the Sad Theme of Sadness plays behind Barry and Marlowe in the hallway, because Marlowe’s about to pour out his heart to this waif he just met. “Wow, you’re the strong warrior who defeated [Adolf Hitler]…” he breathes. “You’re about the same age as me, too. How did you get so strong? I’m always reading books, and I’m not strong at all, so everyone makes fun of me.” All he wanted to do was read Ultimate Spider-Man and the jocks gave him a swirly while the cheerleaders laughed at his acne! Ugh. But don’t worry, Marlowe. Eventually nerds take over the fucking world and decide the best use of their new power is to have five million award shows and podcasts patting themselves on the fucking backs for watching Doctor Who and knowing who Neil DeGrasse Tyson is, while still acting like they’re oppressed outcasts. So that’ll be fun for you!
Barry has less than zero interest in this conversation, so he tries to be modest and answers that he isn’t really that strong, a point that Gustav made not two minutes ago. “That’s a lie,” Marlowe whines back. “After all…you’re not like me. A leader who can lead everyone, and strong enough to defeat enemies like monsters… Lord Barry, you’re like a hero in a book.” Oh my God, this guy is such a dip. But at least he has the sense to be embarrassed, as he mumbles an apology and dashes off to his room to create a new D&D character in a red bathrobe and tiara named Lord Larry.
Barry gets ready to retire to his own room, and once Nanami is done mothering him and expositing about Gustav, Bear emerges from Barry just to say, “Nanami, don’t wet the bed.” Wow, what a specific thing to say. Is this a regular occurrence at HoYay Castle? Steam comes out of Nanami’s ears and she screams back, “Who wets the bed?!!!” Who indeed? Maybe Bear does and he’s just projecting.
The next morning, Bear rouses our hero from slumber to let him know that Ridley and Klaus have arrived, like Klaus didn’t sneak, tousle-haired and exhausted, out of Barry’s room early this morning. Barry is trying to hide his smirk from Bear when they both hear the slap of feet in the hallway. Nanami bursts in, yelling, “Oh no, oh no, I slept too late!!” Barry probably gave her Nyquil to make sure she wouldn’t wake up and find him playing human Jenga with Klaus and PUGGY!!!. And the only reason Nanami was worried about oversleeping was concern that Barry too would oversleep without her to wake him, so he and Bear just stare at her like she has two heads.
Downstairs, Barry finds Gustav, Klaus, Ridley, Koyu, and Gijimu waiting at attention. So many disastrous eyebrows in this room. Ridley is commanding their troops on Shu’s orders, and Klaus is here to please Barry provide tactical advisement. Gustav is in the middle of saying, “It’s amazing that everyone has gathered. The soldiers of Tinto City, the Yaoi Army, the 3 Lampdragon bandits, and Muse’s…” But before Gustav can tell us more about Muse, even though I’m sure that won’t be anything to worry about, a small redheaded girl bursts into the room, shouting, “Father! Father!” Gustav introduces his “lovely only daughter,” one Lilly Pendragon. She is only seven years old at this point, but she is every bit the haughty little B she will be as an adult. Anyway, Lilly pokes at her dad’s sprite insistently. “Father!! They say that monsters have come!! They say that scary goblins have come! Father! Father! Drive them away!!” Since Lilly is probably going to yell “DADDY!! DAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDYYYYYY!!!!!” at him until she passes out, Gustav leaves the room to check things out, followed closely by his daughter, and then by Barry at Bear’s urging.
‘Welcome to the 74th annual Hunger Games.’
As Lilly indicated, there are a lot of ugly monsters at the entrance to Tinto, headed up by their pimp, the Count. He bids the people of this dusty shithole good morning. Bear shouts at him to get his attention, and while his zombies bounce up and down in unison like they’re in the “Thriller” video, the Count is all, “Oh, you’re still a thing? Hey.” Bear yells more, “You’ve joined forces with the Highland Army!!!” But Bear is about to make an ass out of you and me, because the Count replies, “Joined forces?? Highland Army??? No, no, it has nothing to do with that. It’s just that I thought how nice it would be to create my very own kingdom here in the mountains.” He has the whole of the world to carve out an undead paradise and he chooses fucking Arizona.
“Thus, Lord Gustav and citizens,” the Count goes on, “I’d like you all to leave. Of course if you become a zombie you can stay in my kingdom.” That’s pretty generous! They can move to someplace that isn’t terrible, and the Count can just hang out here in Bumfuck Egypt and rot in the sun. But of course Gustav doesn’t see it that way. His ultimatum issued, the Count peaces out, as Bear impotently cries “Wait!!!” and swipes at his disappearing form. Bear, I won’t lie, a lot of people saw that. Gustav uses the power of exclamation points to rally his citizens for battle, when I was just about to credit him for keeping it subdued.
Back in his study, Gustav is continuing to not keep it subdued. “You scum, you scum!” he shouts at the wall, this close to punching it. “You think you can destroy our City of Tinto! What a joke!!!!” The zombies, or her daddy’s temper, or something, frighten poor little Lilly, so Gustav calms down a little. And just in time, because someone way more excitable bursts into the room.
Remember how Gustav was just about to tell Barry something about Muse? Well, who could it be but Jess of the Too-Tight Yellow Pants, alongside General Hauser, whose pants are a less noteworthy turquoise, but are still tight. Gustav plays it casual, all, “Hey, have you met my new buddies? Also a vampire was here.” Jess quickly explains through his rat teeth that he’s gathered up around 5000 Muse soldiers and citizens who fled Greenhill. “But when we came back to report, we suddenly find Barry and his group here. What’s going on?” That’s Lord Barry, dingus. Gustav explains, still all chill, that they’re all going to join forces with the Yaoi Army, isn’t that just super? “What are you saying?!!” Jess shrieks girlishly in my imagination. “The Yaoi Army?!! You’re all being deceived!”
Even though it was inevitable that Barry would run into Jess again and Jess would throw a huge hissy about Anabelle, what follows is still somehow surprising in its wankosity. It’s easily an 8.5 on the Tightass Scale. Jess shrilly explains to Bear and everyone assembled, “He’s not part of the State. He’s a spy for Highland which is putting us through all this. Leader of the Yaoi Army? You never know what he’s plotting!!” Bear resists the urge to backhand him and instead replies, “For God’s sake, Jess!!! What proof do you have to say that?! You don’t know the hardships Barry has been through!!!” Nanami basically goes, “Yeah!” in the background and hops in place. Thanks, Nanami. But Jess is either ignorant of all Barry has done that would obviously make him not a spy–like, I don’t know, putting the King of Highland on ice with extreme prejudice–or he is wound so tight that he doesn’t care. “You want proof? I have proof,” he tells Bear. “I saw him!! When Muse fell, he was in the room where Lady Anabelle lay dead! He’s the one who killed Lady Anabelle!” The game “helpfully” provides a sepia-toned flashback of this moment, even though Jess just broke it down as much as is necessary. And oh, he was in the room! Well, you just have him dead to rights, Detective Jess! If this were literally any procedural crime show ever, or Anal Attorney for that matter, that means Barry is the only person we know didn’t do it.
Bear basically tells Jess to pull the rod out of his ass, but Jess turns to Barry for an explanation instead. Barry can answer with a string of ellipses, which simply further convinces Jess of his guilt, or he can mutter something about Jowy. “Are you placing guilt on a friend?” Jess asks, probably scoffing like a haughty dickweed and rolling his eyes conspiratorially at Hauser. “What a great leader you are!” Yeah, what a cop out, blaming his obviously innocent friend who is the fucking King of Highland now Jesus Christ Jess WHAT IS YOUR DAMAGE, SERIOUSLY.
Like, okay, maybe Jess has nestled a tinfoil hat over his home haircut and has decided that King Jowy and Lord Barry are in cahoots–sexy accomplices in a ridiculously complicated and drawn-out scheme to merge Highland and the City-States into one incredibly gay nation they will rule over hand-in-hand, with Barry in a diamond-encrusted royal tiara and fox fur bathrobe. And that plan began with Barry coming to Anabelle’s office at her invitation and murdering her without even locking the door to make sure no witnesses wandered in, Jess, and then…continuing to fight Highland well after he had the last of the City-States’ resistance forces well under his control. You never know what that Barry is plotting!
Does she mean the Count or Jess?
Not that Jess ever bothers articulating anything like this–he just wants to grumble non-specifically about what a bad apple Barry is. He can’t even put effort into his whiny paranoia. Ridley basically tells him that he’s going to have teethmarks on his ankles the next time he says shit about Lord Barry, so Jess stomps out in a huff with Hauser in tow. Gustav is all, “Don’t worry, he’s just on his period fighting hard,” and steers the discussion back toward defeating the Count. But after dealing with Jess for two minutes, the game is just too exhausted to continue, and a black screen curtails the nitty-gritty tactical discussion, picking up that night with Barry, Nanami, and Klaus still in the study. “Wow, it really got dark now,” Nanami comments. “But after all that talking, we didn’t really decide anything…” There’s no way that didn’t turn into a stitch-and-bitch about Jess. Klaus too is exhausted from gossiping about Jess’s crooked teeth and ugly vest all night, so he implores Lord Barry to get some “sleep” (wink) and heads off to “sleep” himself.
The siblings start to head upstairs, but on the way they run into Lilly. Nanami calls her “little Lilly” and she replies, all sass, “No. I’m not little Lilly. I’m Lilly. I’m not a kid.” Somehow, it doesn’t feel equally silly to pull Just a Kid rhetoric on someone who is seven goddamn years old. Calm down, girl. When Nanami asks what she’s doing, she tells them she’s looking for her father, whom she loves and who is “very strong.” Gustav is secretly Yuna? That’s a pretty good disguise. “I’m going to find my father now,” Lilly says and heads for the front door, late at night, when there’s a vampire and a zombie army on the loose. Instead of giving a fuck about that, though, Nanami just opines that Lilly makes her think of Lassie, possibly because of how not remotely alike they are. “Jowy’s there, so she’s safe…” Nanami trails off. She looks like she wants to say something else–maybe she’s finally getting up the courage to ask about the groaning ghost in Barry’s bedroom that sounds like Lord Shu–but she decides against it, and they head to bed.
Nanami is the best.
Aww, someone’s chasing rabbits.
Or not. They find Jess waiting at Barry’s bedroom door. Wow, he must really need to work out some aggression. Jess, despite Nanami’s preparation for a brawl, is not here to fight, but to tell Barry, “I don’t trust you. There’s the matter of Anabelle, and besides that, it should be members of the City-State who save the State. That’s what I think.” Okay, let’s just leave out that Barry is the son of the City-States’ greatest hero, a man who only had to cede control of the town Barry was born in because of blatant cheating on the part of the mayor of Muse, aka Jess’s predecessor. Let’s be generous and agree with Jess that Barry is a son of Highland, and that it is symbolically relevant. Even then, removing all the members of the Yaoi Army who are not from the City-States still leaves a hell of a lot of people–around 50 Stars of Destiny thus far, by my count, plus thousands of Suikoclones–actively working to win the war. And most of the foreigners who are involved, like Valeria and her Toran Republic soldiers, are only there because they were the only allies Barry could find after being stonewalled by–oh, who was it?–fucking Tinto, probably at Jess’s urging. So shut up, choadstool. Nanami blows a big ol’ raspberry at him, a much more succinct and effective response than everything I just said.
Now, at last, Barry can go to bed, but when he is under the covers and finds himself not drifting off to some horrible dreamscape starring Jowy and Jillia, but still wide awake, he knows his night is not yet over. Sighing, Barry leaves his room again and heads down the hall. Bear is fast asleep in one room, but Nanami is standing with her little spritely shoulders slumped in another. Someone wants to talk about her feeeeeeeeeelings.