At some point during the festivities, Hugo finds Sana again. “Chief Sana, I’d like to finish our talk here,” he says. “If the Sergeant sees me without a cup…” Whoa. I do hope Sarge is keeping everything enthusiastically consensual. Sana completely misunderstands Hugo’s sentiment and says, “I could never quite fathom celebration after battle. It seems more like they’re trying to forget what happened.” This doesn’t seem like a practical attitude to have, given that she runs the table on the entire region’s wine distribution. Let them drink and fuck and play quarters, who cares? Hugo decides he agrees with her, because Sarge has been so handsy tonight.
Obviously, Hugo’s aim is not to discuss Sarge’s sexual appetites with his surrogate grandma. He wants to pick up where they left off before the Harmonians showed up. “Hugo…” Sana asks. “Do you truly wish to meet the Flame Champion?” On one hand, I sure fucking hope he does, or what has he been doing since the beginning of chapter two? On the other hand, I still don’t understand why Hugo has any skin in this Flame Champion game. Up until this exact moment, he’s wanted to meet the Flame Champion because the plot requires him to. But Hugo tells her he wants this “more than anything,” and gives Sana a better reason than he stated earlier: “I want to meet him and learn how to be as strong as he is. I want to protect Grassland myself. He can’t always do it for us.” That’s the spirit, Hugo! Tug on those little bootstraps until you become the Flame Champion yourself! Sana replies, “If he were to hear those words, he would be overcome with joy.” Well, now Isaac is Ron Paul in my head, and nothing will ever undo this.
Hugo asks if Sana knows where the Flame Champion is, and boy has his time with her been wasted if she doesn’t. But of course she does. “Go and see him for yourself,” she says. “Then decide.” Hugo is confused, because this doesn’t make sense with the information he has, but he doesn’t have time to ask her, “Decide what?” because Sarge appears behind him, demanding to know what he and Sana are whispering about. Don’t worry, dude, he told Sana you’re plenty big. Of course, Sarge overheard what they were discussing anyway, and says, “Sounds like you will have a chance to meet someone very special. Naturally, you’ll take me with you. Right?” He even steps toward Hugo, making Hugo lurch backward in alarm. I know I’ve only just come around to them being lovers, but now I think they might need some time apart. For their emotional health. But of course Hugo tells him he can come.
Sarge morphed into Christian Grey so gradually I barely even noticed.
Lucia assures Hugo that she and the Karayans will stay put while he’s gone, to make sure the Harmonians don’t come back, before mentioning–no pressure–what a big fucking deal it would be if he could coax the Flame Champion out of hiding. “You can count on me,” Hugo tells her. “I won’t come back alone.” Spoiler alert: he’s totally coming back alone.
The next morning, Sarge is super hung over and possibly sore and chafed. Hugo asks if he’s okay, “or did you celebrate a little too much?” Oh, what a tease. Sarge glares at him and then joins the party. Together, they return to the village entrance again, where every important person still in Chisha is waiting for them. He tells Sana he is ready, and Lucia tells him to be careful before taking a step toward him, as if she’s ready to embarrass him again in front of all his friends with a mortifying maternal hug. Hugo flinches backward from her, and blurts out, “You were going to do…that thing to me.” Well, now everyone else has the complete wrong idea. Christ, Hugo. Lucia lowers her chin, a bittersweet expression on her face. “I see you are now a man more than a son… But you still must promise to be careful!” It is beyond hilarious how this is supposed to be one more step toward maturity for Hugo, since he’s not his mommy’s baby anymore, but he looks like an immature teenage dickwad for being so insecure about one hug. Hugo confounds me. But not in the way he confounds Sarge. I am not entranced by Hugo’s penis, I promise.
Hugo is going to be so disappointed that this isn’t a promise of cruising in an IROC-Z.
Speaking of Sarge, Luce says his duck lover is ready, and wants to know who else is going on his Flame Champion fetch quest. Lilly is gonna be so fucking mad about this. Hugo puts together the same party he had when he arrived (plus Mamie in support), which means I just voluntarily added a winger to my party. I can’t decide if this is more or less horrifying than adding Guillaume was. Mua, Hallec, and Fubie all provide encouraging words, or bird cries, at their inclusion, and then Sana tells Hugo where to find the Flame Champion Hideaway. I still hope it’s a spacious, sun-soaked cabana in the Island Nations.
Nope! A black screen carries Hugo to the world map, where a new path draws itself to the “FlameChampHdaway,” like, seriously, in the mountains just northwest of Chisha Village. Boring. But the good news is, we’re not going there yet! Oh my, no. We’ve got even more boring shit to do!
See, once all three of our heroes have completed their third chapters, they will no longer have separate inventories or separate cash. Unfortunately, there is a cap of 999,999 potch, as well as a rather unforgiving inventory space cap, and all three of them are so ridiculously wealthy at this point that as things stand, I will be losing a lot of money at the start of chapter four. With that in mind, Hugo travels back to Buttfuck and other towns to buy expensive and rare armor, make use of Peggi’s services, and generally spend as much money as possible while still having a modest savings and keeping his inventory relatively lean. I also make sure to level the available combatants who did not take part in Fury Rune Grindfest ’14, because why the fuck not.
While in Caleria, picking up a copper hammer for Peggi (from a Suikoclone who will not stop clapping his hands, like one of the weirdos in Hyrule Castle Town), Hugo runs into Hortez VII again, who has gone as far east as he can possibly go without wandering into a different game. Obviously, he has convinced himself that this, this must be Buttfuck, only for Hugo to tell him, “You’ve come to Harmonia’s citadel of Caleria.” Ooh, fancy, a citadel. Sarge must have gotten him a word-a-day calendar for their anniversary.
Uh huh.
Hortez is worried that Hugo is lying to him, because that is the only possible way he could keep ending up at the wrong place. “I wish to open a shop at Buttfuck,” he tells Hugo, “but do not know its location. I must find it before I summon my three wives.” Wow. I would worry about Hortez turning Buttfuck into a creepy FLDS compound, free from both Zexen and Grassland’s anti-polygamy laws, but the dude has a butthole made of snakes on his hat. His wives are probably named James, Richard, and Peter. Anyway, Hortez just got done calling Hugo a liar, but he still wants his help, and Hugo tells him where to go one more time. “Go past that inn, straight out of town and down the mountain path,” Hugo says. “You’ll hit three forks. Take a left at the first fork. Make another left, then a right at the third fork.” These are actually pretty good directions, assuming the goal is to get Hortez back to the Grasslands, and no further. But at least they’re specific. “You’ll see Buttfuck’s gate soon,” Hugo adds after Hortez has already left, and I giggle.
After an hour or so of dicking around, Hugo has his entire entourage kitted out with the sharpest weapons, finest armor, and most upgraded skills he can provide, and has invested most of his remaining cash into gold bars to be sold later, since he’s pretty sure Flame Champion Ron Paul will approve of that kind of financial planning. Finally, he returns to the eastern side of the map and enters the FlameChampHdaway. The Flameaway!
Right away, Sarge and Hugo are less than impressed with the location Isaac chose for his Flameaway, even though the background music is one of the best tracks in the game. But I guess only I think that makes the joint automatically classier. They find themselves outside of a large cave carved out of a granite mountaintop. As Sarge’s footfalls make squashy noises, though there are no puddles or standing water anywhere to be seen, he comments, “You’d think a hero would prefer a less humid place.” I have no idea how a cave in the mountains could have more moisture than the swamp Sarge lives in, but whatever. Heroes prefer dry heat! I guess I too am a hero.
How dare this monster have more than one eye! I’m trying to maintain a motif here!
Like the shrine at Mt. Senai, this cave is teeming with monsters largely of the undead and demonic variety. You’d think the totally-still-alive Flame Champion would keep the monsters outside his primary residence at bay, but I’m sure when Hugo talks to him he will have a really good reason for not doing so, probably that the skeletons are acting in rational self-interest, as the free market demands. At two different dead ends in the cave, Hugo finds skeletons holding Old Book volume 9 and volume 1, which I’m guessing these poor sods tried to steal out of Isaac’s extensive library. Obviously, they’re first editions of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. But Isaac doesn’t mind that they were stolen, as it was his personal responsibility to protect them, and his failing proves that the thieves deserve them more.
The path to the Flameaway itself is in the middle of the branching cave paths, but Hugo proceeds all the way to the back, past a save crystal, to where a treasure boss awaits the party. The Azzodess is basically a harpy with red hair, dark brown skin, a red leather BDSM getup, and a staff that looks like a cocktail swizzle stick. Her only ability of note is to summon a winged lizard demon out of a magic door, which then swooshes around and damages the whole party with its glittery blue fire, and then leaves. This is annoying, but surmountable, mostly because Hugo and Fubie are incredibly badass with their paired Fury Runes. (Sarge is all kinds of jealous of their special rune club.)
The Azzodess was guarding a chest with over 100,000 potch and an assload of nice items (including a not-at-all-foreshadowing Fire Magic Ring), which means Hugo’s inventory is once again a mess, but I do not have the heart to go back to Chisha and sell shit again. As it is, Isaac, who is totally alive and stuff, guys, is probably despairing of his guest ever showing up. So Hugo backtracks to what looks to be the entrance to the Flameaway, a dead end with a suspicious rune–the same rune, in fact, that’s etched into the giant door in the Ancient Highway–engraved into a recessed circle in the stone floor.
I say that it seems to me like it’s the entrance, but the fact is Hugo has no fucking clue what it is, and walks right into the circle and starts feeling up the rune like an idiot. That could be a Sindar booby trap used to weed out gullible unworthies, for all he knows. Hugo stares at it and cocks his head like a curious bird, and right as Sarge is shouting out, “Wait! Hugo!” the circle erupts in blue light and Hugo disappears. Sarge sinks to his knees. No! He was going to propose!
Hugo reappears in a larger stone circle, at the end of a hallway filled with tall, lit torches and inlays of that same Sindar symbol on the floor. So unless these are eternal flames, at least we know someone has been here. Hugo, face permanently set to dopey, wonders where he is. Um, in the Flameaway, genius, like you specifically wanted to be? He reaches the end of the hallway and goes through the door, only to find…Sana, and Chris. I can’t even snark about how Sana beat him here, because Hugo has been dicking around in Buttfuck and Caleria for an hour.
I am so disappointed we don’t get to see Hugo’s ‘WHAT IS SHE DOING HERE?!’ glare.
But Hugo stays more focused than I do, for once, and wonders why Sana is here. She answers, “I am the Chisha Village Chief, but I am also the lifetime companion of Isaac.” Given what we find out later about Isaac, I wonder if Sana is throwing some shade at his other companions with that “lifetime” business. “I am his lifetime companion, and not some flash-in-the-pan WHORE like somebody I could mention.” Hugo processes this, clearly mentally screaming “OMG OMG OMG GRANDMA SANA HAS HAD SEEEEEEEEX” before he asks if she means she’s Isaac’s wife. Throwing further shade, Sana answers in the affirmative, and adds, “I was the only one allowed to come here and the only one allowed to be with him.” OTHER TRANCHES CAN BACK THE FUCK OFF, GEDDY.
Sana goes on, “I wanted you to find the way here on your own. So did he.” But Sana told him where it was! Does it count as finding his own way as long as she didn’t personally guide him here? Regardless, this too is totally in keeping with Isaac’s libertarian bent. Hugo must find his own way, independent of government mollycoddling. Hugo has passed the Flame Champion’s self-sufficiency test–and it looks like Chris has, too–so Sana agrees to take him to Isaac. And Hugo actually does get to “meet” the man right now, but we only get to see Hugo’s carefully staged reaction, without it revealing any other information, other than the fact that Chris looks super hangdog in the background.
Well, okay, Sana gives the game away when she says, “This is him: Isaac, the one I loved.” He’s hella dead, if Sana’s Foreshadowing Mallet hasn’t made that painstakingly clear. But the official reveal of this will have to wait a while. For now, the three of them turn around as one last person shows up–this isn’t shown, but obviously it’s Geddy–and Hugo’s third chapter comes to an end.
And now we get to rewind and get our other two characters to this point! How very exciting. Next time, we’ll see the events that lead Chris to Isaac’s doorstep. Sexy magical forest pixie girls, annoying married old men, and plenty of icy sighs and steely glares await us in part 14!