Space! A small spaceship lands on a crystal-shaped structure as a subtitle informs us that this is 46 hours later. A few U-GEE grunts exit the ship as we get a good, long view of the door. Then, right as the ship takes off again, a ghostly green shape jumps from the ship door and onto the dock, landing with a clank. Gee, I wonder who it could be!

Invisible!Ziggurat 8 goes over his mission in his head, and reminds himself that staying out of combat for now would be a good idea. This notion, combined with his invisibility, tells me that this is going to be one of those annoying “stealth” dungeons, where I have to make like Solid Snake and hide behind boxes and shit. Lovely. On the bright side, I finally get to play. Just to remind you, the last time I had to pick up the controller was page 2 of the last recap.

The going is easy enough at first–Invisible!Ziggurat 8 has no problem avoiding U-GEE soldiers in the area, even though it would be hard not to hear the clanking of his metal feet on the metal platforms. But who ever said nameless grunts in videogames were smart? Not I.

After pillaging the area of loot by blowing shit up with his Boom Stick–not that anyone notices the random explosions–Invisible!Ziggurat 8 plants two electronic devices on some metal posts and then runs past them through a torchlit archway. But once he’s on the other side, facing an area that looks like a cathedral, his invisibility field or whatever it is goes haywire and he becomes visible again. “Damn it. A malfunction,” he says, with all the emotion of someone saying, “The toast is ready.” For some reason, right at the moment he’s at his most vulnerable, having just been exposed to any enemy passerby, he chooses to reflect on the exposition he heard from Dr. Yuri.

Turns out that the founder of U-GEE left a bunch of classified information in the Realian girl’s brain, so at least we know what the hell Margulis was on about before. In the flashback, Dr. Yuri says, “It’s data that could affect the entire fate of mankind.” Or it’s the Colonel’s secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices. Either way. As for what the founder has to do with the girl: “The founder of [U-GEE] was the same man who advocated the creation of that child … Joachim Mizrahi. A madman who lost his humanity by immersing himself in science.” There sure is a premium on this “humanity” stuff. Probably more expensive than gasoline.

Now, don’t all shout out at once that Dr. Madman and Dr. Yuri here share the same last name–we’re getting to it. Dr. Yuri senses that Ziggurat 8 would quite like to point this out, so she says it for him. “Yes, you guessed correctly. He is my ex-husband. Do you want to know what it was like being married to a murderer?” Maybe she gets this kind of shit a lot from people, hence the defensiveness, but she’s acting like Ziggurat 8 is gawking at her fucking lightning bolt scar. Lady, build a bridge and use it to get the hell over yourself.

Ziggurat 8 says that he does not, in fact, want to know what that was like, and Dr. Yuri seems a bit put out, like she was all ready to rant about that evil man and how much happier she is now being a butch lesbian. “In any case,” she says, deflated, “it’s certain that the Organization is frantically trying to get its hands on that data.” Ziggurat 8 nods and confirms that he’ll be departing in the morning.

Before he leaves, though, he asks to have one thing clarified. “My instructions are to take the Realian to the Miltian star system…” he says. “Yet she’s registered with the government as your daughter. Why is it that you don’t want me to bring her back here?” Dr. Yuri gives a bullshit answer about the girl being needed in Miltia for “an operation vital to the human race.” But it’s really because Dr. Yuri doesn’t want to see her icky, nasty, sub-human Realian daughter. What a nice mom. Foisting her kid off on government nannies so she can live up the single lesbian lifestyle.

Back to the mission, where somehow Ziggurat 8 hasn’t been shot to pieces by fifteen guards by now. “[Yuri] Mizrahi…” he murmurs. “What a strange woman.” I believe the term you’re looking for is “bitch.”

Now the fun part begins. I have to get Ziggurat 8 through the next few rooms without being caught by guards, without the assistance of invisibility. Ziggurat 8’s advice for me? “(It would be best not to run, in order to avoid alerting the enemy. I can walk by holding down the R2 Button while I move.)” Running or walking, he still clanks when he moves, so avoiding detection seems like a lost cause to me. But I have to try–since he is on his own with little means of healing, fighting every guard in the place would be ill advised.

So Ziggurat 8 walks at the pace of molasses in January through the temple, using conveniently placed walls and pillars to keep himself hidden. To my great surprise, I only get him busted by the guards three or four times, instead of the one hundred percent fail rate I was expecting. Luckily, even though he’s alone, he’s still a super-badass (with a giant Swiss army knife for an arm) and I manage to keep him alive without blowing all of my healing items. I’m the best gamer ever!

I wonder if he has a bottle opener in there, too.

Up a secret pathway, Ziggurat 8 gets more loot and discovers one of those red Segment Address doors. Upon checking the item menu, I realize that Ziggurat 8 has somehow acquired all the items and accessories that Shion had, including the Segment File! Wow, that’s just super! And not at all ridiculous!

Now where’s CHAOS!!!…?

After sneaking through the first two pillared rooms, Ziggurat 8 finds himself in a corridor above a room full of pews. See, they had to make sure I remember that this is an abandoned shrine to something or other, or there would have been no point to bringing it up before. Not that there was a point. Sigh. Past this area the temple look is abandoned and we’re back to corrugated steel. At the bottom of a ladder, Ziggurat 8 spots an A.G.W.S. “Hmm, that A.G.W.S. looks formidable,” he says to no one. “I’d like to avoid fighting if possible. I wonder if I could distract him?” This is my cue to have him run over to the convenient crane nearby and use it to knock over some boxes. Sure as shit, the A.G.W.S. sees the commotion and runs over to examine the wreckage for a week. Ziggurat 8 takes this scant opportunity and runs in the opposite direction. The A.G.W.S., natch, doesn’t turn around to see what’s making that extremely loud clanking sound over by the ladder.

As Ziggurat 8 enters the next corridor, we cut to the Realian girl, sitting alone in her cell. Outside, some guy is saying, “That’s odd, B Block hasn’t checked in yet.” The girl looks up as the source of the voice leaves two others in charge as he goes to check in on the other guards. The girl gets up and walks over to the cell door, the camera staying fixed on her legs and panties, which is not at all creepy. “Is something wrong out there?” she asks the guard, and he tells her to shut up. Because U-GEE and all its employees are evil and mean. Dejected, the girl sits down again. And around the corner, Ziggurat 8 says loudly and clearly, “That must be where she is.” Then he turns the corner and bum rushes the two guards. Since they’re obviously blind and deaf, he manages to smack head-first into them before they can even react.

After a short battle with the guards, Ziggurat 8 approaches the girl. She seems a bit scared of him, for some reason. Couldn’t be the horrific display of violence she just witnessed. “The [Jedi Council] sent me here to rescue you,” he tells her. “The [Jedi Council]?” she says, overjoyed. “Mommy?!” Yes, dear, your succubus whore of a mommy. Ziggurat 8 gets ready to bust down the door, but the girl tells him the alarms will go off. Girl, he’s beeeen setting alarms like gangbusters already. Chill. Nevertheless, Ziggurat 8 follows her instructions to go get the master key. Come on, I bet he’s got a lock-picking kit stored in his arm somewhere.

Ziggurat 8 runs down a staircase and plays Super Stealth Ninja Spy But With Metal Feet some more until he reaches a door on the ground floor. Through it, he finds another corridor (this is fantastically exciting, I know) and a control room. One easy battle with a robot later, the cyborg has the key, and so clunks his way back to his rescue charge.

Analysis: Has not yet reached puberty.

Ziggurat 8 leans down to the girl’s level and, while in Terminator!Mode, asks her if she’s the 100-Series Realian he’s looking for. She looks downcast and repeats that she doesn’t like people calling her that. Like Margulis, but without the evil, Ziggurat 8 asks her if she has another name. But before she can answer, one of the “unconscious” guards outside flops an arm and apparently triggers an alarm. Red lights flash everywhere, which is handy, since we’ve established that all the guards in the place are deaf and so they probably won’t hear the sirens.

Ziggurat 8 gets ready to run, but as he turns away she cries, “MOMO!” Ziggurat 8 turns around to stare at her, because if someone just randomly shouted “MOMO!” at you, you’d think they were crazy, too. She clarifies, “Daddy calls me MOMO…I meant…he called me MOMO.” Yes, it’s an acronym. No, I don’t know what it stands for, nor do I care. YES, I know “momo” is Japanese for “peach.” Do not email me about either of these things, please.

“All right,” he says. “Let’s go, MOMO.” She nods and says “Okay!” like he just asked her to help him bake cookies. It’s one of MOMO’s two modes of speech, the other being My Puppy Died Mode. She runs out the door after Ziggurat 8, entranced by his shiny metal ass.

Heh. Hehehehehe.

Outside the cell, MOMO informs Ziggurat 8 that she can help him out in battle. The strategy guide, wonder of the printed medium that it is, tells me that now it’s totally okay to enter into battle, because MOMO is in the party. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that, from a gameplay perspective, this makes sense, because MOMO has healing ethers. But it just seems a little incongruous that Ziggurat 8, the inhuman fighting machine, has been running like a fucking pussy from all the guards up to this point, but now that he has a 12-year-old girl with him, one that, I might add, he’s supposed to keep out of harm’s way, he can confront all the bad guys with guns that he wants.

Once Ziggurat 8 and MOMO have covered their battle formations in conversational dialogue, they’re all ready to escape. As instructed, I put MOMO in the back row directly behind the cyborg, and I think how much better that would be if MOMO were a hot guy.

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The two of them can’t go out the way they came, because there are a few guards in the way, and that’s just insurmountable. Instead, they go back to the corridor where Ziggurat 8 found the master key. When some guards show up on their trail, they duck into the control room.