Hugo is already almost to Caleria, but that doesn’t stop him from using the Blinking Mirror and then teleporting there, just because he can. Hugo seems like the type who would go out of his way to walk everywhere to the extreme annoyance of everyone he knows, so consider this me forcing him to chill out a little about it. Hugo drags his party to the second floor of the inn and presents them to Nadir, and only at this exact moment do I remember why I put together the party I did: Sarge, Ace, Watari, Ayame, Queen (now Viki), and Hugo. Three men, two women, and Just a Kid. For the record, Viki is only a year older than Hugo, and emotionally they are obviously the same maturity level, but she is a woman and he is a child. I have now written seven different sentences commenting on this and deleted each one for sounding too mad. Let’s just say if Viki were in charge of this army I don’t think she’d get to keep her mommy around as a consultant. Then again, her mommy might be Young Viki. Never mind.

Nadir, delighted with the range of players he’s been brought, says they are “hereby recognized as fellow Thespians!” I will not make the Lunar joke. I will NOT make the Lunar joke. Now that they’re all actors, because Nadir just anointed them as such, he asks, “Might you know of a place where there are actors and I can open a good-sized theater?” Even though it’s very silly to ask this of six people he only decided were actors three seconds ago, he doesn’t say anything else disqualifying like “good actors” or “theater that’s up to building codes,” so Hugo informs him he knows of the perfect place.

I assume Cogs created some pamphlets.

“I have heard of that place,” Nadir says. “A spot for one and all, they say.” It’s true! Everyone is welcome to Buttfuck! Nadir, chuckling and raising his hands theatrically to the heavens some more, already has his mind full of grand plans for his new theater, plans that I’m sure will be dashed the second he arrives and sees what it’s like. His Pokéball GO!!! music hits as his coattails disappear out the door. I give him an hour at Buttfuck before he’s just putting on “one-man shows” starring Koroku in a variety of tiny outfits, because no one else is suitable.

On the Caleria side of the Mountain Pass, Hugo is in the middle of picking some herbs to take back to Frodo as an apology gift for appropriating his bedroom, when he comes across a young man staring stoically over the ridge. This man is so clearly Futch I can’t even attempt to play dumb about it: the dude is so unwavering in his commitment to purple tunics, brown leather gloves, green neckerchiefs, and circlets with dragon wing accents that he probably held a polyamorous marriage ceremony. And yet, despite there being no room for doubt as to who he is…Futch is so fucking hot, you guys. Like, oh my god. He has shoulders for days. First Tuta, and now this. Who else from the series’ history will turn up and be upsettingly sexy?! At this point, I fully expect Hugo to run into Gabocha, but now he’s ripped and fond of wearing tight t-shirts like Mr. Peanutbutter.

Hugo, nosy boy that he is, asks Futch what he’s doing here. Futch doesn’t even pretend he was listening, but he does ask if Hugo knows the area. I have the choice to have him either say, “I know this like my own backyard” (a very odd idiom for a Karayan kid to have on hand), or to be honest. Hugo gets lost in Futch’s eyes for a moment and therefore goes with the former. Hugo, I said. Hugo. Futch asks if Hugo can take him to the nearest town, and Hugo immediately exposes himself as a liar when he says, frowning, “To town? It’s a bit far from here….” It would be impossible to be closer to a town right now without having this conversation on the world map, or in a town. “I won’t keep you long,” Futch promises, the sexy wink entirely in my imagination, as he likely hasn’t cracked a smile since he was in diapers. Then he presses his fingers to his mouth and whistles.

Answering to Futch’s melodic, echoing whistle is, of course, Bright, his now full-grown dragon. Bright flies over Hugo’s head and lands noisily. Hugo, used to friendly large magical carnivores, approaches Bright without fear. “Oh boy! Is this a dragon?” he burbles. “I don’t believe it!” It has been, perhaps, two days since he faced a dragon much larger than this one. Maybe he convinced himself that was some kind of rune mirage? It might have been a rune mirage. Now I feel stupid. Futch introduces himself and Bright, and adds, “My travel companion disappeared along the way. Shall we get going then?” I can’t, even for the sake of name-dropping, get you all excited that he means Hump. He very sadly does not mean Hump. If Hump and Geddy ever met it would cause a cheekbone singularity.

Hugo doesn’t get what’s going on here, even as Futch mounts Bright much as he has mounted Fubie a million times. A black screen later, Bright lands, with only Futch visible on his back, in front of Caleria. As he dismounts, and Bright’s back continues to be unoccupied, Futch thanks Hugo for showing him here, and Hugo gasps in reply, “Ugh… No… No problem. Ummmm, I’m fine…” Good, because nobody asked. “You’re air sick,” Futch says. “Not used to flying, I guess.” I…but…he is! He very much is!

This is even dumber when it looks like he’s saying this to his dragon.

Before I can just chalk this up to the dialogue not changing depending on who the Flame Champion is, the camera cuts to Hugo barfing next to a tree. “It’s the first time I’ve flown this high,” he says, a wholly insufficient explanation but more of one than I thought I’d get. Futch proves again he isn’t listening when he replies, “Bright is one of the fastest flyers in the fleet! I’d love to elaborate, but I have to keep looking for that cocky girl!” What does Bright’s speed have to do with his altitude? And what elaboration is there to be done on his speed? Is Futch a car guy now? He would be a car guy.

Regarding this “cocky girl,” Futch adds, “She takes off without telling anyone; it’s maddening. Her name’s Sharon. Let me know if you spot her. She’s 15 and is dressed like me.” We’ll get to whether that’s true in a minute, but it’s worth noting now Sharon does not have her own dragon and apparently ran off on foot. How far could she have gotten? Futch has a fucking dragon to do overhead sweeps. What’s Hugo going to do that is any more effective? This is wildly stupid.

Hugo has barely stepped foot inside Caleria’s walls when he spots Sharon, a skinny, blonde teen girl in a yellow loincloth and turtleneck, crop-top chestplate, and deep purple thigh-high stockings. The only dead giveaway that she’s Futch’s companion, other than the fact that she doesn’t look like a Calerian, is her headband with flame-colored dragon wings. Assuming the head-wings are part of the dress code of the Dragon Knights, she could not be dressed less like Futch if she tried. It is possible Futch is colorblind.

Sharon disappears behind a corner, and while Futch stands in front of the inn doing nothing, Hugo tracks her to an empty area behind the inn. Sharon’s red eyes dart over the back of this one building in the one part of Caleria not stacked with roving NPCs or vendors in stalls. She smirks. “Oh, brother! Is this all there is? It’s sure in the middle of nowhere. Not much to see, that’s for sure! Why did I even bother?” Girl, you live in a cave. Maybe calm down about how boring Fantasy Santa Fe is. Now that her face is visible, I also have to note that Sharon’s standard-issue dragon wings have been pierced like ears and that she has one tiny sharp fang jutting from her overbite. This all feels like affectation from a teen dipping her toes into furry culture, unless her mother decided to get really close with her dragon one lonely night.

Now that she’s slagged this blank wall to her satisfaction, Sharon turns around, and backs away in fright at this Karayan boy looming over her, something to this point I did not think Hugo was capable of doing. Sharon is pretty tiny. Hugo says, “You must be Sharon.” Sharon, suspicious, backs away from him further, and while anyone with a brain would take this body language as a confirmation and not a denial, we all know who we are dealing with here. Hugo looks around in befuddlement, and just as he’s saying, “Oops! Wrong girl….” Sharon makes a run for it. Good going, Hugo! You were so wrong about this girl’s identity that she ran away to tell her friends about this weird guy who thought he knew her name!

Christ.

Hugo follows this mystery person back to the town gates. Sharon is in the middle of wondering, “Who could that be? I bet it’s an enemy. Flying in on a dragon is awfully conspicuous.” There is no way to parse this where it makes sense. She can’t mean her own arrival in Caleria was too conspicuous, because she did not fly here on Bright. And she can’t mean Hugo’s arrival on Bright was conspicuous, because if she saw that she would have recognized the dragon and known he was with Futch. What the fuck? Hugo tries again with a friendly hello, and when Sharon tries to run from this vacant weirdo a second time, she runs headlong into Futch. “Stop it right there, young lady!” Futch, apparently her dad now, says. “Never leave without telling Commander Milia! What if you were to get lost?”

If I have to stop on every text box to yell and gesticulate and spill my drink all over my keyboard, these two Dragon Knights are never going to join the damn cause, and yet here I am. So Futch chased Sharon to Caleria from the dragon cave, in the Toran Republic? Futch called her his “companion” earlier, which I assumed meant were traveling in the Grasslands together and she just ran off to town, which was, as we have gone over, silly enough. And if that is still what we are to believe, does that mean Commander Milia (also: Sharon’s mom and, I guess, possible dragon-humper) is around here somewhere, so Sharon could have asked her for permission before she absconded to be a whiny tourist?

The best I can do here is that Futch and Sharon are actually traveling together and this isn’t a runaway situation, and Futch only name-dropped Milia because a) what’s he going to do, not name-drop a past Star of Destiny, and b) he wants Sharon to feel bad, since he goes on, looking more put out by the syllable, “Why must you always put me in these positions? You’ll get me expelled from the knights again!” I was about to say expelling Futch over Sharon being a typical snotty teen seems unreasonable, but he was expelled the first time because his dragon was murdered, a tragedy over which he had zero control, so that seems in line with their track record.

Sharon tells him they can beef about her truancy later, as they have a larger problem: “I am being followed by some weirdo! An enemy! Do something!” I am trying to remember anyone being this threatened by and hostile toward Hugo, and drawing a blank. He’s like a Fisher Price Little People toy come to life. He had a life-consuming revenge quest, was granted the perfect position of power to act on it, and now he and Chris are just…buds. He’s the least threatening man ever to exist. But Sharon opines her lack of dragon, since she would order hers to roast this creep alive with a quickness, and suggests Futch do the same. Futch doesn’t even get who she is talking about, until Hugo takes two steps forward and says, “About me, I guess.” She’s threatening to dracarys him and Hugo’s still like, “Heh, guilty as charged!” This boy.

Would this even work on Hugo now? Is he Daenerys?

A black screen shortcuts us past Sharon learning that her overbearing babysitter was enlisting strangers to find her and probably this close to hanging up wanted posters and possibly alerting the National Guard. He tells Sharon to apologize, which she of course doesn’t see the sense in, since “this weirdo” was still following her and staring at her with those vaguely polite dead eyes of his. Futch ends up apologizing for her. “You know how it is with kids her age,” he says. “They can be a handful!” Sharon, like Viki, is a year older than Hugo, and even so I don’t know if this line is supposed to be funny. At least this time Sharon is being treated like the child she is and not a mature woman or whatever.

Anyway, in a HUM DINGER of a coincidence, Futch says they haven’t any time to waste on Sharon being petulant, because “We have to join the Fire Bringer.” Hugo’s like “OH REALLY” and Futch elaborates, “Maybe you’ve heard the same rumor. They say the Fire Bringer are fighting against the Harmonian army. I came to find out, and possibly lend a hand. I was briefly involved with Harmonia once.” This may as well be blaring “WHY HAVEN’T YOU PLAYED SUIKOGAIDEN YET” at me in blinking red letters, and shut up, Futch, I’ll get to your surely crucial interaction with fucking Nash someday, once I’ve forgotten how much he pisses me off in this game.

One last black screen fast-forwards us to Futch learning his new pal’s identity. Sharon, reasonably, wants to know why Futch is taking this dude at his word. This is not the first time a recruit has asked for some sort of proof, such as a glimpse at the shiny immortality-granting marble, or an expert tonfa spin, or what have you. But Futch doesn’t need all that, and not because he is long used to being propositioned by magical doe-eyed teens. No, that wouldn’t be stupid enough. “Call it a ‘knowing’–I get it sometimes,” he says to Sharon. “I sense vibrations, too. Of course, the appearance is totally different from what I expected.” Allow me to translate: Futch is a dumbfuck. The only actual experience he has in these matters should tell him skinny young men in bathrobes are important generals, and he’s ignoring that, but these amethysts he bought at the county fair are giving him a totally heroic vibe about Hugo. No wonder Sharon ran away from him.

Futch eagerly agrees to fight with the Fire Bringer, Sharon figures it would be a hassle to go home without him and joins too, and Bright doesn’t get a lot of say in the matter so he’s also on board. Despite Futch being every bit the drip he was in the first two games, I’ve jumped through more hoops for way less appealing recruits, much less three of them in one shot. Welcome, I say! At least this time a full-size dragon is included with the Dragon Knight.