Jailbait doesn’t wait for an answer–he just tells Shion to come to the shuttle launch in the dock area and meet up. I hope Jailbait’s idea of “playing” with Shion is as naive and innocent as it sounds, or I may have to throw up. Jailbait runs out into the corridor, presumably to pump a few hundred more dollars into the candy machine, while Shion and Corey can only silently raise their eyebrows and shrug in his wake.
In the frightening, unfamiliar land of No Cutscenes, Corey takes off for the shuttle launch after telling Shion to hurry up and get there herself. And then I’m free again! At least, free to walk forward for three seconds until Shion gets an email. Happily, it’s KOS-MOS’s new weapon, rather than an ad for a Namco game or a missive about Super Shion busting criminals, so I manage to talk myself out of a Smirnoff-‘n’-Percocet tonic.
At the hangar, KOS-MOS and Ziggy give a couple of lame excuses for missing out on Jailbait’s Mega Fun Happy Party Time. I don’t want to say it’s likely that they’re sneaking off to bump metal uglies, but I thought I’d throw it out there. You know I love scarring you guys when I can. So leaving them to do their thing, Shion ascends the escalator to the shuttle launch platform, where Jailbait, CHAOS!!!, Corey and MOMO are waiting. After speaking to everyone else about the wonder that is Gaignun’s private beach, Shion talks to Jailbait to get the party started. The group boards the shuttle to the Kukai Foundation, none of them aware that their carefree day at the beach is going to turn into an epic-level wankfest.
In the shadow of the Durandick Tower, the first thing I get to see is Jailbait in his swimming trunks. That is, he has no shirt on. Now, game designers being the soulless, cruel beings they are, I know they would not present me with this bare-chested treat without following it up with at least two brain-obliterating images. As Jailbait hits a volleyball over the net, MOMO is there in a surprisingly tasteful one-piece to swat it back. I mean, I’m sure someone is still touching themselves in inappropriate places because of MOMO in a swimsuit, but it could be worse. One way they could make it worse is to have a nearly-naked CHAOS!!! in the background, leering at his fellow underage coeds, which is of course exactly what they did. In all fairness, I think my memory of this horrible sight was worse than the reality of it, now that I’m looking at it–I remembered a below-the-hips speedo, and our favorite long-donged Jesus is merely in normal, if tight, trunks. But that doesn’t make his actual trunks any less tiny, tight and revealing. I’m pretty sure CHAOS!!! shaves. Down there. I am literally crying blood right now.
WHY GOD
As we switch to a different view for a very necessary CHAOS!!! ass shot, we can see Shion lounging under a beach umbrella in the background, while doing “work” on her futuristic laptop-slash-Boomstick. She’s also wearing a bikini. This not only raises the bile in my throat, but a number of questions. First, what the hell could possibly be so important that Shion has to work on it now, when she should be having a good time? Second, if this piece of work is so important, why didn’t Shion just skip the beach outing entirely? She’s been mopey as shit lately, anyway–“work” would have been a perfect excuse for her to feel sorry for herself in solitude. At the very least, I would think she would have stayed at the beach house in the back and kept on her normal clothes if she was only going to work. The reasonable explanation for this is that the game designers needed this scene to accomplish two things: one, to “prove” to us, again, what a dedicated, ambitious, and geeky scientist Shion is (“Look! She’s doing stuff! She’s not stupid!”); and two, to show her in as little clothing as possible so the fanboys with the glasses-girl fetish can see not only how nerdy she is, but have additional spank material at the same time. Genius!
Oh, and my third question: Shion’s bikini comes with a matching black garter. The fuck is that about?
Seriously, what the hell.
As Shion taps away at her little screen, pretending to be occupied with something important, she drifts off into Two Years Ago Flashback Land. Which just proves she’s not really doing anything important, if she’s spaced out enough to daydream about her supposedly dead boyfriend. Supposedly Dead Boyfriend is in the middle of telling Shion about some amazing new development in their lovechild robot. “Shion…” Kevin says, looking up from KOS-MOS Mark I’s sleeping form, “would you laugh at me if I told you that…I think she has a heart?” She wouldn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s not laughable. Either you put one in there or you didn’t, Kev. Shion looks up from her workstation, her expression full of sugary sweetness for her man. “KOS-MOS? Showing emotional behavior?” she asks. Kevin says he’s found some “interesting phenomena” but that “it’s still pretty weak, of course… Almost like a tiny little pulse…” I’m confused. Are we talking about emotions or an actual heart? Wait a minute, I don’t care. Moving on, then. Shion’s face breaks into this wide smile, like Kevvie-poo just proposed. “We should definitely keep an eye on that,” she says. “KOS-MOS’ elemental data structure duplicates that of the human brain, so something like that’s certainly not out of the question.” Kevin stares sadly at Shion while she’s chattering, like he either wants her to shut up and strip, or he’s thinking about how she’s gotta make it all about what KOS-MOS’s data structure looks like and not what’s in her soooooooooooul. Either way, Kevin is just about as lame as his whore of a girlfriend.
Also, memo to the engineers on the KOS-MOS Project: she is not some organism you found in a pond, and you are not studying her for interesting unknown behaviors. You made her. So when she does something that is completely outside the scope of your design, your reaction should skew a little more toward “How the hell did she do that?” than “Oh, fascinating, let’s see what else the Wizards gave her while we had our backs turned.”
Kevin looking forlorn signaled the end of that flashback, and we’re back to Shion at the beach. Now that the camera is positioned behind her–for optimum cleavage shots, of course–we can see a mug shot of KOS-MOS on her screen. “She was empathizing with MOMO back there…” Shion says to herself. “I wonder what her subconscious waves were like…?” The keys on Shion’s holographic keyboard light up as she presses them, to heighten the illusion that she’s actually doing anything. Of course, it doesn’t work that well when the motion capture doesn’t make it look as if she’s hitting the keys at all. As the KOS-MOS photo onscreen disappears, she murmurs, “Flatline… Oh, well. Nothing here at all.” Maybe she’s looking at a scan of her own brain.
Shion is taking a break to sip a fruity beverage when Corey comes over, wearing what looks to be a horizontally-striped woman’s swimsuit from the 1920s. Again, the game designers are on message: never miss an opportunity to make Corey look like a loser. After–gasp!–asking her what’s wrong, Corey nags Shion for working right now, basically for the same reasons I outlined above. Corey is kind of my in-game twin in some respects, except I’m not in love with Shion and, for what it’s worth, I’m probably much more manly. MOMO also comes over to beg Shion to play with her. First Jailbait, and now MOMO. My brain is pretty much stockpiling horrible Shion-related mental images at this point.
But Shion turns down the offer because she is so very very busy with important, Grown Up Things. MOMO leans over, asking if Shion is doing work on KOS-MOS. “It must be really tough,” she says with a straight face. Shion doesn’t answer–she might be reminiscing about Kevvie again–so Corey takes it upon himself to kvetch about the various daily annoyances of working on the KOS-MOS Project. “She’s got a lot of black box areas that even we can’t analyze,” he mutters. This accomplishes the dual purpose of providing foreshadowing and making MOMO innocently ask, “Black box?” Snerk.
‘Well…Shion asked that she handle that task. Alone.’
Corey explains that it has been their job as of late to analyze KOS-MOS down to every strand of hair and curve of bosom, so they can “recreate her original form again.” They want to recreate KOS-MOS Mark I, the homicidal maniac? When Mark II is both just as destructive, less of a loose cannon, and much better looking? Shion hasn’t spent two years giving KOS-MOS a makeover for her health, you know. Corey adds, “The only person who knew everything about KOS-MOS was Kevin…” He immediately clamps a hand over his mouth, realizing that he may have committed the unforgivable sin of hurting Shion’s fragile feelings. But if Shion’s upset by the mention of Kevin’s name, she doesn’t show it. Thank God. Instead, she looks up from her “work” and asks, “Say, [Corey]… Do you think Gaignun and [Jailbait] are father and son? They look a little too far apart in age to be brothers.” Good grief. Could they have possibly thought of a clumsier way to set this up? And Jailbait’s standing right over there. You’d think the gossip could at least wait until they’re behind closed doors. Or, better yet, they could not talk about this at all. It’s not like we won’t have the Very Special origins of Gaignun and Jailbait (and Albedo) crammed down our throats all the way to the end of the next game.
Well, they’re going to carry on with this stupidity so I may as well recap it. Corey says he’s heard stuff, the most prominent rumors being that Jailbait is a clone of Gaignun and that he’s Gaignun’s illegitimate child. We, of course, already have empirical evidence–if dream sequences count as such, and in this game, they do–that neither of these rumors could possibly be true. And if that weren’t enough, illegitimate child? This is a man with a peacock feather glued to his lapel. If he’s had sex with a woman, then I’m a CHAOS!!! fangirl.
MOMO uses her Realian superpowers to dispel both rumors. “I don’t think he’s a clone,” she tells the mundane humans with her. “Their genome arrays are a little too different for that…” Yes, she’s been spying on Jailbait’s genomes. The perv. She elaborates that, though they’re not clones, they are also too similar to be brothers or father and son. “Is that sort of thing possible?” Shion asks. “Their DNA only has to differ by 0.1% to make them different people, right?” Since when has plausability been high on this game’s priority list? Jailbait brings a merciful end to this conversation when he shows up behind Shion, all “Hey, who’s an illegitimate son?” Well, there go Corey’s minibar privileges.
Corey hastily changes the subject: “Uhh…man, this beach is really great! It doesn’t feel artificial at all.” Jailbait says it’s the Kukai Foundation’s latest product. Yes, I’m sure the average galactic consumer can afford to buy a synthetic beach. Pulling out a remote control, Jailbait says, “You can even change the weather. You can’t have blue skies all the time, right?” Once he presses a button on the remote, dark clouds immediately begin to form in the “sky” above the beach, with the sound of thunder rumbling in the distance. Everyone looks upward, and Shion even scoots out from underneath her umbrella to take a look.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
The camera focuses on Shion’s crotch as she whispers, “I hate…thunder…” Jailbait, in the background of Shion’s cooter, says with worry in his voice, “Shion?” At that moment lightning splits the sky and the thunder booms much more loudly. Shion screams, “Stop it!!! I hate thunder!!” When the view shifts from the sky to the people on the beach, Shion is squatting on the sand with her hands over her ears, looking like a awkwardly busty ten year old. As Jailbait taps the remote to turn off the weather, Shion apologizes, saying she just really, really hates thunder. She’s still doubled over on the ground and shaking like a whiny drama queen leaf. The camera switches to a view of Shion from the back, so we can see CHAOS!!! looking at her with grave concern. Plus the ass shot. God, I hate this game. Maybe I should start crying and hugging my head and then maybe someone will get rid of it for me. Though that’s never really worked before.
And hey, by the way, Shion, if you hate thunder so much, maybe you should have stayed under your fucking umbrella instead of jumping up and looking to the sky when you heard it the first time. Oh, but then your melodramatic, childish breakdown wouldn’t have had the same dropping-to-your-knees-in-terror impact, and what a pity that would have been. Yes, I know, this is supposed to be our first major clue that Shion is emotionally stunted and has serious mental issues. But given that the next several hours of this game will be devoted in large part to her lame problems, I don’t exactly have the patience for her screaming like a whiny bitch now, especially considering her natural penchant for overblown histrionics. I guess the short version would be “Shut the fuck up, Shion.”
I still have an hour’s worth of running around the Kukai Foundation to talk about, but that beach scene siphoned what was left of my will to live. So I’m going to put it off for the next installment, which will be so long and boring on its own that a little more talking to NPCs couldn’t possibly make it any worse. So, next time: personality-free NPCs, excitement-free political “intrigue,” and a dungeon so stuffed with asinine cutscenes and frustrating monsters that it will make my bitching about Cathedral Ship seem remarkably restrained. Till then!