Na-Nal doesn’t stop there with the mixed messages: barring Marvy’s path off this worthless rock and holding out a large, curved sword is Selma. “There is someone who wishes to speak with you people,” she says. “Will you come along quietly?” If there’s one way Marvy knows how to do things, lady, it is quietly. Axel, unfortunately, does not possess Marvy’s esprit de silence, and it is becoming a problem for both Marvy’s fantasies and his real life. “Is that any way to ask for a favor?” Axel spits back. “This is why I hate elves.” Oh my God, stop, dude. Nobody can even get out “He’s not really with us” before he goes on, “How about you and me going at it right here and now, huh?! Come on!” (The “right here and now” is only spoken, and not in the written dialogue, a weird tic that is all over the place in this game, like the voice actors decided to rebel from this boring script and make it equally boring, but a little longer.)

Lido, ever the fucking diplomat, says they should at least find out what this is about. Selma awkwardly replies, “I would very much appreciate that. I do not wish to soil my sword without cause.” Cool? I guess? She leads them back inland, and Marvy nods once to Lido before they both follow, as far as I can tell the only nod, so to speak, the game has made so far on this mission to the fact that Marvy is the one in fucking charge here. And only after Lido voiced his approval of the idea.

But over a black screen, the unmistakable sound of a metal gate creaking shut is followed by Axel bellowing, “Wait a minute! This is a jail!” Now, don’t let our lack of vision at this moment fool you: when the scene fills in a beat later, this jail–which has a WOODEN gate, Jesus save me–is perfectly well lit and there is no way Axel would not have seen what he was walking into well before he was slammed inside. Holy shit, he is as dumb as…as dumb as Slowe, Marvy realizes with increasing horror. What was he thinking?!

On the other side of the cell bars–which are not only wooden but formed naturally from branches inside this chamber of the Great Elven Tree, so there aren’t even metal HINGES–Selma and the elven elder are watching them placidly. Selma apologizes, which is more than Axel’s dad did, but also says they should get comfortable. There’s no toilet in here, so there is definitely a timer on how long this place will be habitable with five people inside. “Sheesh…” Lido mutters at his second jailing in two days. “The residents of this island are all just so…” For once I am on the good non-king’s side–the people of Na-Nal are useless weasels to the last. Axel peevishly snarls at him, “Did you say something?” and Lido clams up. Come on, Your Majesty, Marvy needs some entertainment if he’s going to be stuck here for a while, and watching two of his least favorite people ineptly pummel each other might be as good as it gets.

The elder praises Selma’s work in rounding up these sheep. Back when Marvy first came to Na-Nal I assumed that the elder was a woman, maybe because Selma was standing there also, making me think the island’s elves were more female-forward in their power structure. I am obviously wrong and stupid, and the elder’s gravelly voice actor, and long beard I did not notice before, bear this out. Lido admits, unsolicited, that they were the medicine thieves, which of course the elder knows already, and he chuckles evilly at Lido’s apology. “Yes. It went just as planned,” he says. Everyone present, including Selma, looks surprised at this. Marvy has two choices in response: “You’re plotting something…” or “What do you mean by that?” Given he just said it went AS PLANNED, the first option is unforgivably Shiony, so the second it is. Obviously, what he says does not matter, and I’m starting to accept that feature of JRPGs as maybe the most true-to-life thing they do. Nothing matters! This smarmy fuck is just going to rattle off his plan regardless! And you’re going to vote for him anyway, you dumbshit!

Sorry. I’m in a mood today. The elder indeed lays it out. “Hmm…I will overlook humans building a colony and claiming to be chief of this island. However, I cannot allow them to sell this land to another country.” I’m not sure if this is a meaningful distinction–the Na-Nal humans basically “sold” the island to themselves and the profit is, like, living there. As far as we know the elves’ status as second-class citizens on Na-Nal will go unchanged. But whenever the elves get involved in this series it careens helplessly into ham-fisted SOCIOPOLITICAL ALLEGORY, and knowing what’s coming I should just go along for the ride. Axel, though, is dumb and sucks: “What are you getting at?” he asks. What indeed! Are you suggesting, sir, that Axel’s dad can’t sell this island if he feels like it? Have you heard of a little thing called EMINENT DOMAIN?

Marvy cannot believe he was thinking of sleeping with this man. What a dolt.

Maybe undercutting his just-expressed ambivalence to the humans that currently occupy their land, the elder says, “Humans are such an ugly, infantile race. One petty excuse and they will hurt others without a second thought. I know of no other such species…” But they were fine with the shitty humans they already had! This is all Elven Philosophy 101, but these extremely tired words would land slightly better they weren’t followed by a vague threat to Kill All Humans. “You will be witnesses to the tragedy that will unfold here,” he says. “That is why I will allow you to live. It should be but a few more days, so behave yourselves.” With no other explanation, he leaves, Selma looking weirded out by all this but following close behind him, even as Axel shouts to be let out. I should note now that Axel, Marvy, Keneth, and Paula all visibly still have their swords, and their cell bars are fucking tree branches. Just throwing that out there. No reason.

Marvy is left to run around his tiny cell and talk to the idiots in his company. Though it is still unclear exactly what the elves are doing/have done, Lido now at least realizes they wanted their medicine to be stolen. So on top of everything I said earlier about the genius plan to steal the elves’ tree cum for extremely good and valid reasons, add to that that the elves somehow knew the humans would want to do this and exploited that to enact their own genius plan. Did some elves loudly stage a conversation where Axel’s dad could hear about the amazing properties of their tree cum, and how obviously it would make a fine tribute to any invading nations that might happen to show up?

The words that tumble out of everyone else’s mouths are so dense that a black hole might form in this cell and finally send Marvy into sweet, silent nothingness. “Does that mean he’s going to kill other people?” Keneth wants to know, and honestly he seems so proud of this logical supposition that Marvy can’t even be mad at him. Paula’s observation that the elder is up to some shit, meanwhile, would seem astute if this scene happened before the last one, so it’s possible Paula is going through the time stream backward, and a few hours from now she’s going to ask what happened to Commander Scruffy. I actually brought Paula along on this excursion because I was curious if she would have any impact on the story, what with her connection to the elves here being her only character development thus far. Hahaha, nope! The elder, who was disgusted with her even being near this tree purely on the virtue of her mother carrying out some unspecified treason before she was born, does not even register her presence inside the tree now. No worries! I’m sure Paula has a really juicy character arc coming any minute now.

Some unspecified amount of time later, Marvy and his companions are still standing around staring at each other, possibly determining which one should be cooked and eaten first, when Selma runs, panting, into the room. She slams her sword into the Journeyman Crystal-looking switch on her side, and the wooden bars slide open. “Hurry, get out!” she yells. “Return to your village quickly!” Lido wants the skinny, but Axel’s all, “Who cares! Let’s just get out of here!” This is by far the smartest thing he’s said in Marvy’s presence. Maybe this hot man is redeemable after all!

Down one corridor and Marvy is already back in the altar room where he and Lido found the remedy last night. Dare I say it? The Great Elven Tree is not that great. It seems to be two rooms. But there’s no time to look for other doors or for where all these elves sleep or go to the bathroom, because the Trouble Is Afoot music has queued up. The party returns to the human side of the island.

Overacted screams and moans greet Marvy and friends as they stroll back into the village green. One man in yellow staggers toward them, groaning, and falls on his face on the ground. Axel and Lido are both puzzled by this, until the camera spins behind Axel’s shoulders to show a Kooluk captain and two Kooluk soldiers across the green from them. This is all well and good, but there’s also a ring of bodies all over the green that they definitely would have noticed well before this one guy died in front of them. “We have orders to kill every last one of you bastards!” the Kooluk captain says. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do!” It seems like they’ve made a pretty good start of it, that’s for sure. And just so we are crystal clear on what has transpired here, since the elven elder was cagey about it, the captain over-explains, “You’ve got some nerve, offering us poison! You traitors!!” He screams, again on the forced side, and rushes the Seaward gang, only for all three waves of Kooluk attackers to be taken out within two minutes. Marvy has gotten efficient at killing these dopes.

Though Axel was not in the battle party (I’m not even sure if putting him there was an option when he joined), after the battle, he is standing, panting and sword in hand, over the dead Kooluk soldiers, now scattered among the bodies of Na-Nal civilians, like he just personally murdered these guys. But he’s not bitching about his fucking arm hurting, so at least he’s notched one mark in the Not Slowe column. Lido tries to comfort him with a manly hand on a manly shoulder, because he just has to dad the shit out of everyone around here, but Axel shouts, “Shut up!! Just…Just leave me alone, will you?!” A natural reaction to Lido’s presence, we can all agree.

If Axel is distraught in part because he thinks his father might be among these dead, that tension dissipates a second later when the old man appears behind them, and given the direction he comes from, it is strongly implied he came out of his house just now. What a hero. “So…this is how the Kooluk operate…” he says. How Lido keeps from screaming “I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO” in his face is beyond me. It’s not like he normally has tact. Axel tells his father about the poison, but the Na-Nal chief demonstrates some heretofore unseen good judgment and says to his son, “I heard. But that was merely their excuse. This would have happened sooner or later. It was just sooner…” I hate that this man coming to his senses necessarily means acknowledging Lido was right.

The silver lining, though it is already tarnished beyond repair in Marvy’s mind, is that the chief tells Axel to join the Seaward to cement an alliance. “N-Now, you’re going to trust these guys?” Axel asks, not without reason. I mean, they didn’t do anything to help this situation, other than happen to be standing here when the Koolukalikes showed their true colors. Best-case scenario, they saved the chief himself from being their final victim, and if that’s his reasoning, HOO BOY, he is a bigger dick than I thought. Sure the fuck enough, the chief admits, sounding more like himself, that he doesn’t want to die, and “if cooperation is the only way to avoid such a fate…then I am willing to take that chance.” Goddamn, man. As much as I bag on Lido, he is unquestionably the nicest island leader Marvy has encountered. But though Axel’s dad undeniably sucks, I want Na-Nal back on Viki’s teleport list for trading reasons, so Marvy says, “We accept. Let us fight together!” As far as Marvy can tell “together” doesn’t mean much, given all these dead bodies around his feet, but it beats leaving this dump completely empty-handed.

This seems like the perfect time for an interlude with the Kooluk Mustache Twirlers’ Council, doesn’t it? …It doesn’t? It seems like a really odd time, in fact? Well, tough shit. Entirely over a black screen, since the rest of their budget is devoted to Jeanne’s tit jiggle technology, the still unnamed Governor sighs, “It seems we’ve failed to occupy Na-Nal. Take them with caution. It can be quite difficult to collar a wild dog.” Beyond vastly overselling the tenacity of the mostly dead citizens of Na-Nal, I still do not get this. They failed to take Na-Nal, so they should proceed with caution in…taking Na-Nal? What? Old Man River absorbs almost none of this, only responding, “But Sir [Joe] was assigned to Na-Nal…” How could Joe Bishounen fail?! Did he try winking at them over a background of roses?! The governor whines that Joe’s “methods take too long,” and I don’t even know what that means. I was going to say “not killing people,” but…here we are. “Unless we want the platoon we brought in from HQ to be annihilated,” he goes on, “we must advance southwards more quickly… If they assemble into a united front, they could pose a problem for us…” They conquered Obel and that’s the southernmost Island Nation. They have RAH-ZOO-RILL and more or less have Middleport. They destroyed Iluya and took it over, and already moved on Na-Nal and only failed in their attempt because some elves decided to go rogue. What the fuck is even left, Nay? Literally no one cares about Nay, dude. Even the cats keep trying to leave.

But what the governor really wants to tell OMR is to “keep this quiet” from Joe. At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t know what this means. Keep an apparent change in strategy from him? Because nothing these two just said constituted a tactical shift. Or does he mean their failure on Na-Nal? The occupation JOE IS IN CHARGE OF? How do they even know about this before he does? What the actual fuck?

And we’re back to Marvy on Na-Nal. What a weird two-minute blackout that was! He should talk to Dr. Yueh about this, assuming he’s met his deductible. For what feels like the tenth time today, Marvy runs all the way back across the island, though this time there aren’t random battles in the middle of the village, and the shopkeeps at least seem to have survived the massacre. Handy! Once he’s back at the beach–where there are still random battles, with the fucking Kooluk no less–he finds a familiar figure: Selma. She cuts straight to the point: “Won’t you take me along with you? Since I freed you from prison, I was banished from my village…” Yeah, about that. Selma notes that she does not think what she did was wrong, and sure, it wasn’t. But what did it accomplish? The Kooluk soldiers are still here (at least, still here on this beach), a bunch of people still died, and the people she freed weren’t going to be killed in the first place. They stopped nothing, and were saved from nothing. Selma really picked the wrong hill to die on. But she can die on that hill a proud Seaward. Back to the boat and off this backwater rock!

Out of nowhere, while Na-Nal is reachable via teleport again, Nay Island is now mysteriously on Viki’s shitlist. Expecting me to notice this and then go out of my way to sail there, with no storyline impetus to do so, is a hell of a way to prod Marvy along. It’s like the opposite of the “GO HERE, NUMBNUTS” red dot. Nonetheless, hoping that this time his assembled party of babes will stick and he won’t be stuck with Ship Stepdad again, Marvy sails northwest from Na-Nal to Nay. If Lido horns his way into the party this time too, I’m gonna need someone to punch him in the dick. How about Cedric? He has powerful leg muscles, and definitely needs a job title.

Thankfully, Lido stays out of Marvy’s way this time–he probably needed a nap on the couch after all that hard work he did. Marvy goes directly to the house of the Nay island chief, a man he’s already met and is definitely less of a stubborn cock than his Na-Nal counterpart. He does still want to see some proof of Marvy’s authority, but thankfully does not spend half my life rubbing the Golden Seal erotically. He asks, incredulously, “The King of Obel entrusted you with his powers? Entrusted YOU?” Yeah, because Marvy is WAY less impressive and kingly than fucking Lido. Whatever.

I’d be saltier about Marvy getting this level of disrespect yet again, but this chief settles down once he knows he’s talking to the big boss man. (It also probably helps that Lido isn’t here, undermining Marvy with his sheer presence.) Marvy, running low on options, requests an alliance with Nay. “This village once thrived on trade,” the chief tells him. “But nowadays, most of our youth go to other places such as Obel.” Dude, that is so sad. It’s also more or less what Nalkul already told us, though I didn’t infer that it applied to the humans here as well as the Nay-kobolds. But the chief’s point is that his village is peaceful and quiet, and unlike those bigots on Na-Nal, they even get along with their non-human neighbors. “In theory, it would be an easy thing to cooperate with you people… But if this village were to be attacked because we supported you… What would you intend to do?” This is a great question! I expect what he wants to hear is that the Seaward and other allied islands will rush to Nay’s defense, as an attack on one is an attack on all. But not only does Marvy not say that, it’s not even an option! Marvy can only choose from a guilt-laden ellipsis or replying, “We can’t take on that responsibility.” Jesus, just lie to the guy!

“You speak with such idealism…” the chief says, in response to Marvy saying nothing at all. “Somehow, I think it blinds you from reality…*sigh*” This is a new twist in the Choice That’s Not a Choice trope: being treated like I picked an entirely absent third choice! But as unenthusiastic as the chief sounds about getting in bed with the Seaward, he still sees his limited options for what they are and hops in between those sheets. He also offers, “Please take any villagers willing to go.” Don’t worry, Marvy’s already adopted all your wayward cats. When prompted again, the chief lets Marvy know that he’s aware the Kooluk navy is up to some shit nearby, and though he wanted to keep that information to himself, “the people of this island are not stupid. Everyone has already noticed them…” I mean, if you say so, sir. He’s saying this because he has some folks he wants Marvy to meet, and Marvy should come back “a little later” to stuff them in a Pokéball. Why not! Marvy could use more allies that do his recruiting for him! BUT THEY BETTER BE HOT, OLD MAN.