Last time we reunited with Shion Uzuki, the galaxy’s saltiest bitch, as she reluctantly relinquished control of her beloved blue-haired vibrator, and even more reluctantly reunited with her older brother, Jin. And now she can’t even use the former to take her mind off the latter! Woe.

Shion is still standing, sour bitchface still firmly affixed, in the foyer of Moby Dick’s Café. After talking with Boss one more time (he whines at her about FAAAAAAAAAAMILY again), she heads into his kitchen and uses her boomstick to blow all his kitchen equipment to smithereens. Well, she would, except her prototype Vector device has been replaced by a series of judo kicks, lest we forget that Shion Uzuki, Girl Genius, is also a MARTIAL ARTS BADASS who probably has a beautiful singing voice to boot. Sigh. Her anger at Jin successfully misdirected to some pots and pans, she leaves the restaurant.

Unsurprisingly, Shion is so stoked about spending quality time with her brother that she decides to devote the rest of her afternoon to the Global Samaritan Campaign. Her first target is a young girl standing a few feet away from Agent Bunnie. “Waah!” the girl, a secret old lady named Maple, cries. “A weird lady took the teddy bear Daddy gave me! Can you please get my teddy back?” Who the fuck steals a teddy bear? Was it stuffed with diamonds? When Shion says she will help, a graphical overlay featuring Agent Bunnie announces, “Global Samaritan Campaign…START!!” There’s a game show-like musical sting and everything. Just what Shion needs: more pomp and circumstance over what a great person she is.

If it becomes Shion’s job to find Fanboy Bachelor here a new girlfriend, I am out.

This surely stoned-as-fuck teddy bear thief ran off into the next sector, per Maple, so Shion backtracks to Sector Two, the area with Moby Dick’s. Almost immediately, she runs into the thief, a redhead woman named (sigh) Bonny. From this distance it looks like she is cosplaying Giganta. “Are you chasing me?” she yells. “Do you know who I am? I’m the ultimate master thief!” Yeah, heist of the century, ripping a toy out of a small child’s hands. Shion gives chase, and three seconds later they’re within yelling distance of each other again. “What’s with you?” Bonny wonders. It’s a fair question. “Fine, then! Let’s see if you can keep up with me!” Shion continues her normal brisk booty walk down the path and down a ramp to an area marked “No Trespassing” with a blinking neon sign, but otherwise unblocked. I guess they don’t care about trespassing that much. At the bottom of this ramp she finds Bonny again. She and Shion yell at each other some more, and Bonny doesn’t even understand what the problem is because it’s not like it’s Shion’s teddy bear, but she eventually gives it back by announcing, “Okay, okay! I’ll give it back! Look around your feet! I gave it back! You can have it!” So she’d already dropped it, even as she was arguing with Shion about not wanting to give it back. Also, this means Shion basically walked over the teddy bear on her way down here to yell at Bonny. Good effort, everyone. Bonny still insists she’s a master thief, despite giving back the item of zero value she just stole, so I’m sure we’ll hear from her again. Unfortunately.

Well, judging from your outfit, you just fell out of FFX-2, so you can marry Fanboy Bachelor.

Back to Maple. She’s of course happy to have her teddy bear back (it had all her cocaine) and the GS Campaign screen intrudes again with a triumphant musical sting so I know Shion “Succeeded!!” Fantastic. Shion’s reward is the double attack “Elemental Nocturne” for Jailbait and CHAOS!!!. So basically her reward is nothing. Which I guess is fair given the effort she put into the task.

The next helpless person available to Shion is just around the corner, in front of a doctor’s office. Jacqueline here is “madly in love” with a “drifter” named Sidney. “He’s a little wild,” she says, “but that just makes him so much cuter, you know?” Gonna be hard to help this woman with her relationship troubles when there are no red flags about this situation at all. What can Shion even say about a love so perfect? Jacqueline’s problem is that she wants to share her feelings with Sidney, but she has no idea where he is. Goddamn. She should write a book on how to be awesome at picking men. Because she is the most awesome at it. “So, I came up with the idea for this letter,” Jacqueline goes on, ignoring me. “I call it Operation Lovely Love Letter!” Of course she does. “With this, no matter where Sidney is, he will know the heat of this passion consuming me! Please find my beloved Sidney and give him this letter overflowing with my love, my heart, my soul!” If Jacqueline were a man, I would be convinced the “Love Letter” she hands to Shion is filled with cum.

So where, oh where could perfect Prince Sidney be? It’s safe to assume he’s off-planet if he’s a romantic drifter or whatever, and sure enough, as Shion exits the district, she hears an announcement from the Second Miltia Transportation Bureau: “Shuttle flights to the [Durandick] have now resumed. Passengers wishing to board, please proceed to the space port.” Now, to be clear, just because this is the future and there’s deep space travel thanks to the U.M.N. columns, this does not mean Shion can just go wherever she wants. There is a shuttle between Second Miltia and the Durandick/Kukai Foundation, but that is it for the moment. So hopefully Prince Sidney is at the Foundation, or he might never know a purple prose-spewing, benighted sad sack cares for him!

Shion enters the spaceport and heads through the gate to the Durandick shuttle. Even though you’d think the spaceport would still be on high alert for cataclysmic acts of terrorism, Shion doesn’t even have to empty her pockets or take off her shoes. A short cutscene shows a shuttle that looks like a couple of welded-together dildos flying from the planet to the Kukai Foundation. (This glorified loading screen will play for each of Shion’s many, many, many trips between the two, in case I ever get confused and think she’s soaring through space like Supergirl.) A black screen later, Shion is riding an elevator up to the unchanged shuttle area of the Durandick, to take another shuttle into the Kukai Foundation. I can’t wait to make this trip through several loading screens dozens of times just to deliver letters to other people’s non-boyfriends!

Sure does.

The Kukai Foundation also hasn’t changed too much, even though everyone reminds Shion that Sectors 26 and 27 (now simply called the “urban area”) had to be cleaned up and rebuilt after the Gnosis attack. So the one thing in this game that plausibly should look different doesn’t, while a bunch of things that had no business changing did. Shion wanders through town–blowing up cars and garbage cans and I’m sure not at all terrifying the locals who just went through a fucking terrorist attack–before eventually entering my favorite place in the Xenoverse, the IRON MAN Bar & Grill.

Please don’t tell Shion about losing weight with THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK. She doesn’t need that.

Up front, you need to know that at some point in the entire day that’s elapsed since Shion was last here, not only has the district been cleaned up, but The Iron 3, also known as the greatest comic series in history, has been retooled as The Iron 4. The logo behind the cardboard cutouts in the bar looks like a Golden Penis Plate with some EXTREME flame decals, and the cutouts indicate that the new addition to the shirtless steroid superhero squad is a burly man with sunglasses and a blond mullet. This has fuck-all to do with anything at the moment, but I have to stop and appreciate the things I genuinely love about this series, which right now amounts to Jailbait, Jin, The Iron 4, and Ziggy’s asscheeks of steel.

Clearly he’s the Poochie of The Iron 4. Though he should probably be rastafied by 10 percent.

Let’s all act really surprised that Sidney is hanging out here in the IRON MAN, though at least he is not posing in front of the cardboard cutouts like a tool. “What? A letter for me?” Sidney says. “Oh! It’s from Jackie! I don’t know why you have a letter from Jackie, but thank you!” I’m guessing mail deliverers around here don’t wear miniskirts and ankle boots. “I’ve got no time to lose!” Sidney goes on. I think he missed the part where Shion is here to hand him a letter, not listen to his life story. “I’m off to Miltia soon as I’m ready! Could you let her know that I’m going to see her?” So he was fine with not letting her know in advance of his visit until Shion randomly showed up with a fluids-dripping envelope, but now Jacqueline needs a heads-up? Fine. It’s not like Shion isn’t going back to her anyway. “Wait for me, Jackie!” he wanks. “Sidney’s coming for you!” I’m sure they will be together forever, where “forever” means “until Jackie is shockingly uncool about opening up the relationship, even though Sidney reminds her they live in the future and everyone is poly and pansexual in the future, and why is she being such a prude.”

But Purple Prose Jackie doesn’t have future douchebag vision like I do, so she’s positively beaming at the news of her beloved’s impending return. “Hehehe. ♪ I’ll cast a secret love charm on you! ♪” she, uh, sings. Please do not. I don’t need Shion being overcome with a sudden compulsion to go hump Kevin’s gravestone. What Jackie actually does is give Shion Secret Key 1, which unlocks Psycho Pocket, Jailbait’s old item-stealing ether. This is a much better reward than Shion deserves for delivering one piece of mail, so I will stop being snide and wish Sidney and Jackie a lifetime of happiness, even though I’m convinced he’s gonna run off with the first biker bunny he meets on Mos Eisley.

Well, I wasn’t worried until you opened your mouth.

Shion can find another person in need of her services (god dammit, not like that) inside the doctor’s office. Actually there are several–including Luty, the mute girl who was cured by the power of flowers and friendship, barf–but none of them are ready for Shion’s help yet, except for a man in the far back room, groaning on an examination bed. The man, in positively hideous orange pants, is named Sikes, and he somehow heard from Purple Prose Jackie about Shion’s amazing letter-delivering capabilities. It turns out Sikes is a mailman (please tell me those pants are not postal service-issue) and cannot make his rounds because he has an acute case of Uselessfuckitis. Clearly, rather than reassigning his deliveries to another mail carrier, the smart thing to do is hand them off to Shion. Once Agent Bunnie has assaulted Shion with the GS Campaign theme song, Sikes hands Shion four letters, each labeled with a heart, diamond, spade, or club. “I don’t know who they’re supposed to go to, but I do know where they’re going. Please deliver them for me! Thanks!” Who doesn’t put the recipient’s name or address on a letter? Isn’t that the bare fucking minimum? These should all get returned to sender.

Mostly a bunch of assholes, plus a cool dude in a hat.

So various NPCs around town have been dropping hints in Shion’s hearing that they are waiting for letters marked with one of those four suits. The problem is that multiple people between Second Miltia and the Foundation say they want, say, a diamond letter. But only one person per suit is the correct recipient of these particular letters. Fun, right? Right?! Sikes tells Shion the spade letter should be delivered on Second Miltia, the heart letter on the Durandick, the club letter at the spaceport, and the diamond letter at the Foundation. This, I believe, is enough information to narrow down each letter to a single recipient, so really all I have to do is be patient enough to talk to this doofus who can’t do his own fucking job four times.

A bit more…at all…same difference.

In order of delivery: the spade letter goes to a man in the Area 40 advertising agency in Sector Two, who is apparently going to use the letter’s contents to sue the agency for ruining his business with lackluster marketing materials. The club letter is delivered to an old lady in the spaceport and is from her toddler niece, and if my nieces are any indication, it will be some random scribbles and a drool spot on a sheet of grandma’s printer paper. The heart letter lands in the hands of a spastic man in the Durandick’s park, and contains documents that will keep him from getting shitcanned by Jailbait. And finally, the diamond letter is for a bossy woman pacing around the fountain in sector 27, who says snottily, “I knew you still had respect in you!” Oh, do fuck off. Her letter contains poems from a “friend” on Second Miltia who must use her poetic soul to describe the planet’s amazing propensity to have a naturally occurring daytime and nighttime. If I had a friend who not only wrote poems about the daily miracle of sunrise and sunset, but kept sending them to me because this kind of genius must be shared with the world, I would also be impatient for them to arrive, so I could mock them with as many other people as possible. I wonder if this lady’s friend is Purple Prose Jackie. It would add up.