This cutscene just hasn’t gone on long enough yet, so Jailbait feels it’s time for a little Miltian Conflict exposition, complete with Little Master’s trademark pretentious bullshittery. “Joachim Mizrahi…” he starts. Lord knows we haven’t heard enough about him already. I, for one, am simply aching for more. “It was he who opened Pandora’s Box and unleashed the Gnosis upon the galaxy…” Jailbait says. “And we’re all paying for his ambition.” Shion picks up the story in her once-in-a-blue-moon demonstration of knowledge: “Joachim Mizrahi… The brilliant scientist who founded the [U-GEE] Organization…” Of course, it’s something we already knew. Thanks, Shion. Jailbait, though, doesn’t like her version of things, and says so. “Brilliant? He was a lunatic,” he snits, completely ignoring the dismayed look on MOMO’s face. “Unable to bear his curiosity, he invited the Gnosis into our world.” MOMO’s all, “A lunatic…?” in My Puppy Died mode, and turns away from Jailbait, surely about to burst into crocodile Realian tears.

Jailbait is still going. God, I do not care. I just want to pick up the damn controller and do something. He exposits that the Kukai Foundation’s actual purpose was originally to investigate the weird shit that happened during the Miltian Conflict for the Second Miltian government. Then he starts whining about tight pants budgeting. MOMO is apparently even less interested in the ins and outs of the Kukai Foundation than I am, because she leaves the group and starts walking slooooooowly toward the door. It closes behind her, and funnily enough, I can still hear Jailbait talking, with no muffling. Oops, game designers. MOMO cries to herself that “Daddy wasn’t like that…” Yeah, I bet he was a totally together individual if his life’s work was you.

With that, the scene is over and I’m in control of Shion. Unfortunately, there are no nearby cliffs I can send her over, so I settle for talking to the other party members. Jailbait, all of a sudden, is worried that he said something to upset MOMO. No, I think she really enjoyed you calling her fake dad the next coming of Hitler. Touched her heart, it did. “Perhaps the truth that exists here may have been a bit too much for her,” he adds. I hate to say this, but: shut up, Jailbait. Shut up a lot.

Ziggy and CHAOS!!! have nothing of note to say, so Shion goes to her last conversational resort, Corey. Even the Feld Man has nothing to contribute to his lady love, and runs off to join Busty on the bridge. Maybe he’s found a new girl to have a one-sided relationship with. Good for him.

So Shion and KOS-MOS (who is just stuck, mute, in the party with Shion) are really bored. They have two options: go find MOMO, somewhere on the Durandick, and cheer her up, or go find a deserted hallway somewhere and do it. I thank my lucky stars that they decide to go with option #1. For those of you who prefer option #2, well, use your imaginations. Just don’t tell me about it.

Of course, you guessed it: looking for MOMO means I get to take the grand tour of yet another spaceship. But this is no ordinary ship. This is the Durandick, the pointiest, most throbbingly red metal wang in the cosmos. (Not in KOS-MOS. God, you guys.) You don’t get to run up and down the length of such a specimen any old time! Shion and KOS-MOS put on their sluttiest Sunday best and get ready to explore. But before they get anywhere, Shion gets an email informing her that Cathedral Ship is now available for exploration via the Environmental Simulator. Somewhere, probably in Japan, someone is laughing at me.

The Durandick, unlike the Hoglinde or the Elsa, is actually fairly well organized. The ship is split into five sections, each of which are accessible via shuttle. The cylindrical shuttle entering the tube-shaped tunnel as it travels from point to point adds that extra bit of intercourse-like flair to each ride. Whatever else you can say about them, the game designers for Xenosaga are all about the details–I mean, you can’t miss an opportunity to include some phallic imagery in a scene, or all of a sudden you’re off message. The message being, of course, “We love the cock.”

Another email interrupts Shion before she can get into the shuttle. That investment Shion made in part seven has partially paid off, so now Shion has some useless plug-in and a ten percent A.G.W.S. parts discount. Which should be so useful, what with the party’s grand total of 2156 G. I’m gonna be buyin’ A.G.W.S. accessories like crazy with that fat stash. Maybe if it were a ninety percent discount.

Shion and KOS-MOS first travel from the penis quarantine area to the dock, where the Elsa and its crew have been hiding out. No one on board has seen MOMO, and certainly none of them feel like chit-chatting with Shion, so it’s off to the next destination, the residential area. Shion’s bedroom is not labeled on this area’s directory, but if she’s staying here for more than a week or so I’m sure they’ll get that corrected, for everyone’s convenience. A guard near the ramp up to the living quarters says he definitely hasn’t seen MOMO, and would have remembered seeing a girl if he had. “It’s rare to see a girl walking around on this ship!” he says. I only mention this because he is one of at least five NPCs on the Durandick who mentions the lack of women on board. I’m not sure how true this is, since the place is crawling with 100-Series Realians, not to mention Chesty and Busty bringing their considerable estrogen levels to the party. But if it is true…how cute that Jailbait has turned the Durandick, fittingly, into a flying sausage party.

The girls find a ton of shit to blow up in the corridors and the various bedrooms, as well as a silver capitalism point. I’m pretty sure the writers of the strategy guide think money falls from the fucking sky in this game, because they keep telling me to buy things when I have nowhere near the funds to do so. I mean, yeah, thanks for telling me there’s new armor and stuff to purchase, but I kind of blew the little money I had back in Cathedral Ship–you know, where you told me to spend it. And I’m not about to go back to a previous dungeon and level up for two hours just to make money for a new skin-tight bodysuit for CHAOS!!!.

Down another hallway, Shion finds the Durandick’s on-board casino. Once Shion receives the Casino Passport from a very out-of-place treasure chest in the room, she has her choice of slots or poker. Despite my natural inclination to ignore every mini-game this game can throw at me, I have been known to waste several hours at the video poker machines in my day. The game is pretty fun, too, and much more winnable than real video poker, which makes it all the more disappointing that it’s not for real money, but for Chuck-E-Cheese-esque game tokens. I think Shion can win some Golden Penis Plate-shaped erasers for 5000 tokens.

On the bridge, Chesty and Busty are at their usual stations, overseeing their small army of pigtailed MOMO clones, but Corey is nowhere to be found. So much for him making a move on Busty. He probably couldn’t bear the idea of being “unfaithful” to Shion and now he’s in his room with nothing but his own hands to comfort him. Yes, this is sad and disturbing, but not nearly as much as the idea of him actually bedding Shion.

Fourth on the destinations list is the hangar, where several mechanics are complaining loudly about having to constantly repair Jailbait’s oft-abused A.G.W.S. I guess the boy’s a bit gung-ho, I hadn’t noticed before. Here, Shion receives an email with another investment offer. The reward for going with one of the three proffered companies is money and a new weapon for KOS-MOS. That’s just swell and all, but Shion is so broke right now that she can’t even afford the 5000 G in seed money. I have to resort to selling stuff out of my inventory just to make the payment. I really don’t recall money being this much of an issue in this game before, but it’s possible that Cathedral Ship broke my brain so badly that I’m suffering from selective amnesia.

Finally, it’s time to visit the last section of the Durandick, the park. The Space! version of a park is a smattering of fake potted plants and modular benches that look like they were ripped off from an airport terminal, all arranged in front of a bay window with a view of the great black beyond. Fireflies waft around the room in the dark, making a valiant attempt at ambience, but seriously: a moodlit airport terminal is still an airport terminal.

The camera focuses on a bubbling fountain–with the fireflies determinedly lending “magic” to the proceedings–as the Piano of Welling Emotions plays mournfully in the background. MOMO is sitting on one of the benches, contemplating the firefly that just landed in her palm. “What do you all think…?” she asks the bugs. “Joachim Mizrahi, the lunatic… Was Daddy really like that?” And if you weren’t just sobbing for poor, confused MOMO already, she goes on, “Since Daddy built us, does that mean Realians are bad people, too?” Since I’m way past the point of caring about Joachim Mizrahi and the Moral Nature of Realians, I’m left wondering, if MOMO started crying, if she would short out her own circuits and her head would melt, like in that one Simpsons episode.

Shion and KOS-MOS show up at this point to intrude on MOMO’s moment. Shion observes that MOMO looks “kinda down,” when the girl practically has a flashing neon sign above her head reading, “I’M DEPRESSED.” MOMO’s eyes mist over at Shion’s tiny demonstration of caring about her, and she decides to open up to the other girls. Of course, this can’t be done without more stating of the obvious, since MOMO feels it necessary to explain that she was created by Joachim Mizrahi, who created all 100-Series Realians. “I know…” Shion says. Yes, dear. That’s nice. So does everyone else. All choked up, MOMO cries, “Shion, I…Daddy wasn’t a lunatic. …I don’t even know what I am,” her inflection implying that she’s worried about being a loon herself. I think she should be a little more concerned about being molested by loons, but what do I know?

Lest we forget that this game is All About Shion, she reminds us that she is Shion Uzuki, Realian Therapist to the Stars, and thus she is uniquely qualified to make MOMO feel alllllll better. Putting on her Psychobabble Hat, Shion says out of her ass, “Identity diffusion… The eternal dilemma.” MOMO looks at her, no doubt expecting something a little more comforting than that load of crap, but she’s waiting in vain. Now Shion contemplates a firefly in her palm. Smiling at MOMO with the empty bliss of someone whose final brain cell has just squirmed out of her ear canal, Shion asks, “Do you know about the environmental bugs onboard this ship? They’re actually nanomachines, you know, used to keep enclosed spaces like this clean.” There are two options here. That the environmental bugs Shion is speaking about are the fireflies in the room, and that they’re completely unrelated. If the bugs and the fireflies are the same, then Shion is just a space cadet and started talking about something because it landed in her hand. If they’re not the same–and I’m inclined to think they’re not, because they’re only in this room and not all over the ship–then Shion just came up with the weirdest non sequitur ever.

She goes on, ignoring MOMO’s blank stare, “I’d say that…of all the things Professor Mizrahi–or anyone else–created, they rank up there pretty high.” She leaves out the obvious, “Certainly better than you creepy Realians.” But she, stunningly, is going somewhere with this: “These bugs may be man-made, but they function as if they’ve existed all along. Almost as if they were meant to be… I think Realians are the same.” Reaching a crescendo in her grand metaphor, she says, “The only difference between us is the length of our histories. But regardless of our origins, each one of us has an important role to fulfill in this world.” MOMO doesn’t seem particularly cheered by Shion’s yammering–in fact, her expression doesn’t change at all during the whole speech. After a moment, Shion adds, “Besides, I really doubt Dr. Mizrahi was a dangerous person like everyone makes him out to be. And it’s not just because of the environmental bugs. The work he did on Realians was incredibly insightful.” Item one: the fact that the guy did great research does not automatically make him a gentle humanitarian. Item two: instead of bullshitting about invisible bugs for five minutes, you could have just said “I don’t think your dad was crazy” right away. God, Shion.

KOS-MOS finally decides to speak, since staring out the window while Shion yapped was getting boring. “The fundamental Gnosis research Professor Mizrahi left behind played a critical role in the development of modern anti-Gnosis technology,” she monotones. Shion’s sees this as a major breakthrough in KOS-MOS’s emotional development, since she knew to say something to make MOMO feel better. KOS-MOS is all, “Whatever, meatbag, I was just expositing.” And this is finally what cheers up MOMO, who giggles and says KOS-MOS is “funny.” So after all Shion’s fruitless efforts, it’s KOS-MOS making Shion look stupid that gets a smile out of MOMO. I approve.

Shion whines that KOS-MOS doesn’t “take instruction well,” whatever that means–was there a tiff between android and human in the bedroom recently? But now MOMO’s back on the subject of her certifiable dad. She says she never met him, but that he talked to her while she was in the test tube in the lab. “It’s all a little hazy,” she says, “but I remember him telling me that…I could become a real person if I did good deeds.” So…is the Pinocchio-alike in this game MOMO or KOS-MOS? Is there a real need for two characters to share that particular nuance? Or is this a sign that I should stop this recap and start writing a Geppetto/KOS-MOS/MOMO fanfic?

…Even if it is, I’m still not doing that. Okay, moving on. After Shion patronizes MOMO in her usual manner, Corey runs in, waving his arms exuberantly. He announces that the Durandick will be transporting him, Shion and KOS-MOS to Second Miltia once it’s docked at the Kukai Foundation. Corey’s a little inappropriately excited about this, like he just found out he won the naked-Shion-triplets lottery. Shion, for her part, is cautiously optimistic about the ride, and thinks it’s odd that the whole gang is headed for Second Miltia. Writers, listen: pointing out that the whole situation is contrived does not make it less so. Do I need to hire a skywriter?