In the comms room, we see Shion sitting alone in the dark, tapping away at a console. The monitor looks like it’s displaying a U.M.N. screen saver, for what it’s worth. Also, why is the room dark? It may be the middle of the night, but the diurnal cycle is an artificial construct on this spaceship, and Shion herself just woke up from probably a solid eight hours of drugged slumber. Is this supposed to communicate what a dedicated scientist she is, that she’s burning the midnight oil? Hey, Shion, get over yourself and turn on the fucking lights. Anyway, she gasps as she hears something behind her, and gets up from the work she’s pretending to do to find Red staring at her from the other side of the room. This is probably the reason the lights are off: the spooky ghost girl wouldn’t look as spooky with them on. Shion confirms for me, the slow idiot playing this game who saw Red mere minutes of game time ago, that this is her good buddy Red, and then she asks, “Was this all your doing?” What is “this” here? You know what? I don’t know or care. Red is silent, so Shion keeps asking vague questions: “What’s this about? What in the world are you and Feb trying to tell me?” This is the weirdest nitpick, but this is the second time this recap Shion has used the phrase “What in the world” and it’s really an odd idiom to have survived into the 60xx era of people living permanently in deep space and there being, like, multiple human-inhabited “worlds.” This is what I focus on when the alternative is paying attention to the plot.

Red merely tells Shion that Feb is “waiting” for her and that “There is no time left,” a concept I am sick of this game throwing around when all these assholes do is stand around and talk. Shion at least picks up, since Red is too CRYPTIC AND MYSTERIOUS to just fucking tell her, that the place Feb is awaiting her is the one from her dream. “And there, you must make an important choice,” Red says. “It is for your sake, as well as theirs.” I assume she means Cecily and Cathe, though, again, CRYPTIC. They clearly want Shion to make a specific choice in a specific direction, but it wouldn’t be any “fun” if they just told her what they wanted. Better to let Shion wonder about it until she’s in the moment and just makes the most stupid, impulsive choice available. She “explains” further that “It is something very important to both your past and to your future.” What is this, a fucking riddle? What is the point of hinting at this shit? Either tell her, or don’t. Also, Red closes her eyes as she says this last part and pulls her clasped hands to her chest, like she just nailed the melisma in her audition for The Voice. This little bitch.

I will spare you Shion asking for clarification, again, and Red denying it to her, again. She does mention that “the path” has been opened, and Shion assumes that means Miltia. “Feb’s sisters are on Miltia!” Shion realizes. Oh, no. I kind of thought she and I were, for once, on the same page. What was I thinking? Red’s internally like, “Uh…wow,” but tells Shion to hurry and do whatever it is they want her to do, “Before he awakens again.” I should not have to tell you she does this while speaking slowly and breathily and with a lot of unnecessary pauses. Some man is waking up from his nap and will want a Dagwood sandwich on the double, toots! TIME IS RUNNING OUT!

Blah blah blah, save my seeeeeeeeeeestras, yadda. Red seems more or less done with her visit anyway when Corey’s voice calling for Shion comes from outside the room, and then Red is gone. This fact does not stop a sour expression from taking over Shion’s face as the lights come on and Corey enters, like Red was just about to give her the exact GPS and stupid Corey ruined everything. He’s in the middle of almost certainly asking her to go get a coffee with him as she bustles past him out of the room, barely stopping to say, “I’m sorry, I have to go somewhere now.” WOOF. Even for the Shion-Corey dynamic, that is a cold brush-off. “Talk to me later, okay?” She doesn’t add, “Or don’t, fuck off,” but it’s implied. Corey is enough of a worrywart that he takes this as Shion being in some kind of trouble and asks her, “Hey, where are you going in such a hurry?” Given how hard she just ethered him I expect Shion to ignore the question entirely and just shove past him out the door, but she’s all, “Old Miltia.” Ha! I mean, she does totally say it in a “Why don’t you fucking tell me not to” way, just to stay on brand. Corey attempts to turn this shit into a comedy routine: “Ah, I see. It’s very romantic this time of… Wait, Miltia?!” I don’t buy this: he listens to every stupid syllable out of this woman’s mouth, and there is no way he’d let his brain gloss over a single one, even for a moment.

“Do you understand what’s going on out there?” Corey asks her, in a callback to Shion blasting Miyuki’s supposed cheerful ignorance. “We’re on high-security alert! There’s a war about to start! Besides, what are you gonna do for transportation? There’s no way the Administrations Bureau’s gonna authorize a transfer in a state of emergency!” If I may pinpoint where Corey goes wrong here, it’s in not even letting Shion get a word in edgewise before he pivots from why she should not do this thing at all to how she cannot logistically do it–he’s just opening himself up for her to suggest some dumbass workaround that he will then have to support because he turned this into a problem-solving exercise and also because he has no self-respect. Right on cue, Shion replies, “It’s all right, I’ve got an idea. There’s a transport here on the [Dämmerhung] that Kevin was developing concurrently with KOS-MOS. If I use it, I can travel through hyperspace without going near the U.M.N.” Perfect! Let’s get this party started!

Corey does try to push back against this idiocy, though he again pulls the transparently overacted “Oh, well that makes sen–Wait, what are you saying?!” Is he putting together a fucking audition reel? Knock it off, dude. He notes that this transport is a “AA Rank secret,” like fidelity to her employer’s trade secrets has ever been a motivating factor for her, and indeed she tells him her mind is made up. She leaked KOS-MOS’s black box to the Kukai Foundation! She stole the 3rd Division’s urgent assignment to fix MOMO’s brain! She’s never had a phone conversation with a coworker or boss she couldn’t turn into a fight! Shion ain’t care! And now she decides to shove past him out the door, only after she has told him what she’s doing so he can decide to follow after her like a lost dog and also provide her tech support she would be hopelessly lost without. Maybe she’s not so dumb after all. Corey bemoans his cursed fate as a dude with terrible taste, critically low self-esteem, and a hazy job description, and then calls out “Hey Chief! Wait up!” and runs after his lady love.

GOOD FUCKING QUESTION

Outside the comms room, Shion has already nestled Corey into her talons without so much as a comment or a thank you for his help, and tries to remember where this transport actually is. It would be funny if neither she nor Corey had any idea because the secret died with Kevin, or they don’t want to loop in Miyuki, or something. But no, as it happens, the tech in question is down that elevator that we learned earlier leads to Vector’s classified weapons storage area. Good thing all the Realians on the Dämmerhung are insatiable gossips. Shion gets on the elevator without a single person asking her what her business is in the Top Secret Vault in the middle of the night. Granted, that’s probably because everybody who would have something to say about it is asleep, and did not get woken up by Realian ghosts telling them to go on a vision quest to a dead planet.

Once they reach the correct floor, Shion tells Corey, who is rubbing at his hair and looking wilted, but for an actual reason this time and not because that’s his default animation, “I think the craft we’re after is below us in the Research Block of the Restricted Area, on the AA Rank Private Dock. The security here is reinforced at night, so there will be robot sentries all around. Well, let’s go have some fun, [Corey]!” Jesus. It’s fun! Tee hee, let’s lose our jobs and probably get court-martialed later! Corey tries to say basically this, but he’s too afraid of making her mad to use those exact words. “(Did I hand her a stimulant instead of a sedative?)” he then worries to himself, as if baffling mood swings are not a regular part of the Shion Uzuki Experience.

And because Corey is, in this game anyway, too shrinking a violet to participate in combat, it is down to Shion to get them past these robot sentries and to her their goal. Solo combat with Shion sounds painful in more ways than one, but lucky for me and more so for Corey, the robots Shion is about to destroy by the dozens are particularly susceptible to her Miyuki-designed M.W.S. It’s not hard to explain the ease by which Shion deals with this supposed reinforced security by a) game mechanics wizardry and b) the M.W.S. using, like, EMPs or something. But I am choosing to believe Miyuki is actually a deep-cover industrial saboteur, and her otherwise inexplicable willingness to give Shion free shit is her being savvy enough to know that Shion + powerful weaponry + time = the destruction of Vector and the end of its fat government contracts. There are going to be a lot of Federation Parliament hearings about this.

The down side to this, of course, is that Shion is actually breaking into a high-security facility all on her own–and in meatspace, not a fucking Encephalon dive–and is doing so with such efficiency that it’s probably going to make her think even more than she already does that she should be included in all the hush-hush goings-on of her more capable friends. They’re never going to shake her dumb ass now.

Not helping matters are the deadly robots themselves, who…take at least two turns to even attack this rogue Vector mid-level manager, despite her immediate escalation to lethal force, instead politely asking her to “Disengage your weapon and surrender.” And none of these things have machine learning stored on the cloud, apparently, because they all keep asking her. She is never going to put it down, dummies! Another robot model, this one with actual limbs, does do some actual attacking of this intruder, but its hits are so pathetic that even Shion can withstand a lot of them before I need to do anything about it. (Which I of course do–as much as it tempts me to leave her health pool low to see if a random crit will excise her from my life, she’s my only party member and I don’t want to do this shit all over again.)

Shion continues down the hallway from the elevator to a large warehouse area likely chock full of industry secrets sitting in random crates that Shion explodes for free med kits. There are cranes and transports everywhere, and it really seems more like a product line floor than a top secret storage facility, but what do I know, I don’t run this fictional multi-galactic conglomerate that gives Shion Uzuki dozens of direct reports. Obviously! Inside a shack within the larger room, Shion blows out a cargo door to find Decoder 18, which I’m sure will be to open a door that has a key to a Level 4 Class H skill I will never even get to. This game is good!

A ladder leads Shion to the top of this mini-building, where she finds a gatling gun of some kind pointed at a large open window, behind which boxes are trundling along on a conveyor belt. The big red button attached to this gun is too much for Our Lady of Poor Impulse Control to handle, so she presses that thing real good. I’m talking about me. The shot has to be timed to hit a box as it goes by, which is fun when there are two different confirmation screens to get through to do it. Eventually, one of the boxes explodes with a little Dr. Mario pill, signaling the end of this thrill-ride mini-game.

I hate to agree with Shion, but YEAH, QUIET, YOU NERD

A gun mounted on the other side of the roof has a similar button, but this time Corey chooses to whine at Shion not to touch it. This must mean it’s key to moving forward, so Shion presses the button with gusto. The gun goes buck fucking wild, shooting wildly at the north wall of the warehouse and blowing up a big orange loading van to reveal a door. What the hell was the door doing behind that thing in the first place? Is the lock busted and this was some foreman’s workaround? “Ahhh! I told you not to!” Corey moans, as if his protests have ever, once, been a deterrent to Shion’s behavior.