In the last chapter of Barry’s wartime memoir, written by canonical pedophile Marlowe, Barry and a party full of vendetta-harboring vampire haters finally brought down the Count; while the Yaoi Army, after a boatload of ultimately pointless melodrama from Jess, finally gained the services of the Tinto and Muse armies. Unfortunately, thanks to an Apple accounting error, this resulted in a net loss of a thousand soldiers. Fucking Apple.
Barry’s side job as an Avon lady is not going well.
Like always–since I like putting myself in a bad mood right off the bat in these recaps–the Yaoi Army VIPs are waiting in the war room with undoubtedly ill portents. This time Barry puts off the inevitable, first taking a spin around HoYay Castle, and delighting in finding Jess in the barracks and therefore not with the Yaoi Army VIPs. And he doesn’t even have his own bedroom! I mean, obviously he’s crowding into Hauser’s twin bed at night, but still. Barry needs to find the Suikoclone in charge of housing assignments and give them a raise and a pat on the ass.
Please, don’t stop at your shoes.
After Talking to Everyone in the now sprawling, expansive castle (including the two of-age Lampdragon Bandits, who’ve wasted no time in getting drunk on Barry’s time and dime), and managing his inventory and equipment like a good aspiring dictator should, Barry goes to handle his other major duty as the Yaoi Army leader: participating in cooking battles. In High Yo’s kitchen there is once again a commotion. A chef in pale pink, labeled Chef Ryuko, demands, “Hurry up!!!! Bring that little sneak, [High] Yo, here right now!!!!!” Well, we know the little sneak didn’t make off with their punctuation in addition to the Moon Bird Recipe. High Yo has no idea who this person is, but Ryuko wastes no time in challenging him to a cookoff. “I’m here to take revenge for my big brother, Ryuki!!!!!” he says. High Yo doesn’t admit that he barely remembers who Ryuki was, so he asks Barry what he should do. “Face reality and accept your complicity in a man’s suicide, High Yo,” is not one of Barry’s choices, so he tells him to fight.
And he does so nightly, under the stage name ‘Mistress Maximillia.’
On to the battle. Fukui-san introduces our judges: Stallion, who burns so many calories running that he’ll eat fucking anything, like Michael Phelps; Gordon the trading post maven, who zzzzzzz; Hix, who has “good common sense” about food but, Fukui-san doesn’t add, no common sense about relationships; and Clive, who is taking a break from camping out in Barry’s bedroom and demanding to find Elza. The competitors enter, I have High Yo and Barry set their typical menu of salad, meat, and cake, and then mash X like crazy. I need this formula to change soon so I don’t feel like I’m copying and pasting the same shit every recap.
BARRY NEEDS AN ADULT
That said, I do notice that the wok used by Ryuko’s sous chef has a pink interior and a fuchsia outer coating. Did Chef Ryuko just steal this from Miles Edgeworth’s well-appointed kitchen, or have all the challengers had color-coordinated cookware? …They have!
Chef Ryuko’s appetizer is, no joke, “Meat & Potato,” and vaguely looks like a sausage floating in between two testicular lumps of potato. I fear this will therefore get solid fives from the all-male judges’ table, but they largely pan it. I guess the sausage isn’t spicy enough. Ryuko’s main course, gratin (a gratin of what, it’s never said), does a bit better, and that fucking traitor Stallion awards it a perfect score. But he also gives a five to High Yo’s spicy spareribs, so Barry will refrain from leaving him at the Two River orphanage with a note. Finally, I breathe a sigh of relief as Ryuko presents his dessert, and again I shit you not, spinach cake. Cake! With spinach! Stallion gives this a five as well–pointing to the possibility that his taste buds were lost in a tragic liquid nitrogen accident–but the saner judges hate it. I don’t even need to see the final scores to know High Yo wins. I mean, fucking spinach cake. What the Christ.
No need for games. We know what you were doing.
Maybe Ryuko is celebrating Spanakopita!
“Grrr…..” Ryuko mutters, following the battle. “I understand now…. You beat my brother…. How could I ever….ever have a chance….” Since High Yo and Barry fully understand the Ellipses of Impending Suicide by now, High Yo begs him, “W, wait!!!!! That’s stupid!!! You can’t take your own life!!!” Ryuko replies that both he and Ryuki were “raised among the Black Dragon Group” (which provides me a funny mental image of babies in flamboyant chef’s jackets, chopping onions) and that he has nowhere to go. Ryuko runs away, leaving his poor sous chef behind, and a black screen later a Suikoclone comes back to report that another chef has kicked the bucket on their watch. This restaurant is basically Zanarkand, and High Yo is Sin. The Suikoclone pawed through the dead man’s belongings and “found” Ryuko’s recipe for gratin, netting High Yo another trophy of the culinary damned. “Shun Min, why must I still fight!?” High Yo cries, adding, “ASK ME ABOUT SHUN MIN, LORD BARRY,” with his mind. Barry ignores him and goes about his day.
The next order of business is recruiting more useless assholes to the Yaoi Army! You and Barry are very excited. Barry teleports to South Window, and in the town square he finds the first person on his list of marks, a bald man wearing oversized anal prayer beads. “I am Gantetsu!!! A great priest!!” the man shouts, two inches from Barry’s face. Oh, he’s going to fit right in. “Tell me your troubles,” he adds creepily. The conversation ends here, without Barry telling him anything, so Barry talks to him again. Gantetsu is like, “Well?” and Barry can choose to ask him to join or to rightly state, “I’ve got so many troubles….” I choose the latter, because for real. A Black Screen of Barry’s Teenage Drama later, Gantetsu replies, “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!! That’s nothing! Nothing at all! You’re [sic] troubles are nothing!!!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!!” This man has been here since before King Adolf’s death, so I am confident that this is not Adolf in a really good disguise.
To be clear, he is looking not at Karen, but at the Zac Efron photo spread in GQ.
Barry nearly runs off in tears at Gantetsu’s exclamation point-laden dismissal of his feelings, but he sticks it out, knowing that this man could be useful for telling everyone else at HoYay Castle how their minor league bullshit doesn’t even rate with him. That would totally make Waylon cry in front of everyone. Barry speaks to Gantetsu once more, this time asking him to join the group. Gantetsu proposes a test. “Your strength against my strength,” he says. “If you win, I’ll join you. Now fight!!!” This sounds like it’s about to become a laughably easy duel, but what transpires is actually a contest of strength stats. Barry simply had to bring along enough people to provide a suitably high number. In visual terms, this means his party members emerge from his person to help physically push Gantetsu backward. And his party is Sheena, Sierra, PUGGY!!!, and Nanami, so it’s not like I had to load up the group with thick biceps. Though I totally should have, for Barry’s sake. Gantetsu takes his defeat well and praises Barry’s strength as he signs his recruitment papers. I actually wish they had streamlined this particular recruitment process so Barry would have to “prove” his strength by listening to Gantetsu mock him and keep from running off sobbing.
With Gantetsu in the party–no doubt telling PUGGY!!! that only a candy ass would cry about the Soul Eater killing everyone he cared about–Barry heads for Drakemouth Village and then into the mountain pass. But instead of continuing west toward Tigermouth, he flips a U-turn and takes an alternate path to the east. He finds himself at a dead end with the remains of a campfire and a man in dark hair and a brown cloak, staring out over the forest. The man is an older (over 30) gentleman named Georg, and I am going to struggle every time I type that not to add an “e” on there, but I will leave it be. “Hey, young man,” he says. “What happened? Your face looks like something’s bothering you.” After Gantetsu’s frank and hilarious appraisal of his troubles, Barry is reluctant to open up to another person, even though this one has a strong jaw and gorgeous cheekbones, so he instead asks who Georg is. “Oh, sorry,” Georg replies. “My name is Georg Prime. Guess you can call me a traveling soldier. Are you the Yaoi Army leader?” Barry likes a man who dispenses with the “You’re just a boy” foreplay.
“How is it, young man?” Georg asks. He may have unzipped his pants. “Is fighting tough?” Oh. Way to spoil my fun, Georg. I worry that this vague Auron lookalike is going to go on for 20 screens about how This Is Barry’s Story and how Sin is Genkaku, but he keeps it brief, making Barry and me like him even more. “Well, it wouldn’t be fun, would it,” he understates. Nanami is nodding vigorously. “What do you think about hiring me? It’s funny to say it myself, but I’m strong. What do you say?” Barry is spamming “Recruit” in his mind, but he says he doesn’t have any money to pay Georg. I mean, that’s a fucking lie, but he does need those hundreds of thousands of potch for upgrading two weapons, after all. “Oh, of course,” Georg replies. “Instead of that, I’d like you to make me a ‘promise’. Until this fighting ends, I’ll wield a sword for you. As pay for that, you will not give up in this fight.” If Barry were going to give up, he would have done so back when his relationship with Jowy was salvageable, so he readily agrees to have this salt-and-pepper fox wield a sword for him. God, finally. He used to recruit hotties like this hand over fist, but the poor boy has been in a dry spell.
‘Please say blowjob, please say blowjob…’
Georg also joins the party, and he and his delightful Killer Rune will be Barry’s near-constant companions from now on. No one ever said he didn’t have daddy issues. Next! Barry warps to the Kuskus item shop, where he recruits a recipe for quiche. Let’s face facts, a quiche is a better get than pretty much any character he recruited in the last recap. It’s the perfect brunch-in-bed dish to prepare for Shu, Klaus, and Hump after their Sunday morning four-way.
That’s it for recruiting for now, so Barry returns to the castle. Before subjecting himself to Shu’s bummer-thon, though, he talks to Dick. As he is wont to do every time a next-level stud joins his army, he immediately sets Dick to doing background checks so he knows if he’s hopping in the sack with crazy. It’ll take Dick the rest of this recap to do the requisite research on Georg, but I’ll skip ahead a bit so I can present the full executive summary. For starters, he turns out to have had like three previous illustrious careers–as a general of the Scarlet Moon Empire, an “Ebony Moon Knight” in the Grasslands, whatever the fuck that even is, and a Falenan Royal Knight–even though, at 41, he is not that old. So he’s basically an Anal Attorney character. But look out, Barry! Dick drops the bomb that, “He can’t go back to Falena because he’s wanted for the crime of murdering the Queen. What the hell could have happened back there…” Obviously we will be getting to that at some point, but for the time being Barry reluctantly puts Georg on his “only with other trustworthy, muscular men also in the room” list. Better safe than sorry!