Final Fantasy IX Part #31 - There's Only One Thing I Hate More than Giant Bugs

Part 31: There's Only One Thing I Hate More than Giant Bugs

's Only One Thing I Hate More than Giant Bugs

Last time, Doctor Tot invited us up to his pleasure palace at the top of this tower.

... Yup.

"Now I can save my bro!"

"However it converts into a disco ball if the need arises."

"But 500 years ago, the phrases mysteriously vanished from history..."

Well that is probably because they were tribal hippies who got eaten up by less-hip tribes

"The archaeologist Frederick Ash theorized that 'jewel' refers to the pendant passed down to the ruler of Alexandria.
But the pendant... it is much too small to be referring to the same 'jewel.'"

"Really? I don't like books."

"Was it 'I Want to Be Your Canary,' by Lord Avon?"

I don't know what eight-year-olds are doing understanding para-Shakespeare but w/e

Bullshit, Gaia is toroidal

... actually that would explain why it is always dusk near treno, always night in treno, always sunrise on the forgotten continent, and why there are still day-night cycles elsewhere

FUCK i hate myself for analyzing this even in jest

"And a disco ball, when the situation calls for it. Can't forget that."

Maybe the word you're looking for is "poetic."

"IT SURE IS...

"I am on your side, now and forever."

"I had an old transportation device remodeled in the case of such an emergency."

... How, exactly, do you plan on doing this? Are you going to take her before a grand jury and make her say she's sorry or what?

A bit of a strange theme for an underground area, but still happy and fun.

There's that Mr. Bishop guy again. He holds no bearing on the story at all, but for being a nobody who doesn't even have a defined sprite, he certainly is somebody.

Oh, that's just great.

"Hmm. I also know that Nanza is in love with Grimo..."

moogles are complicated

the monsters down here are very ugly

They have a very special attack called "Stomach" which, while you might think is a poorly translated gastric acid attack, actually has them regurgitate their stomachs and smack you with them.

So first you pull this lever

Then you don't pull this one.

Then you pull this one over here

NOW you pull this one.

FUCK i hate huge-ass bugs

"The princess is bright, but she is still young and naïve. I am concerned about her safety."

hell yes i got a screenshot of doctor tot looking like an idiot

"It's hesitating."

FUUUUUUCK

if there is ONE THING i hate more than giant bugs (and even centipedes)

it is giant snake-worms

there is a fun general anecdote about this

I went to a boarding school for intelligent but relatively poor part-Hawaiian students. It's not one of those odd charter deals where they'll hire anyone who can form a barely-coherent sentence if they have enough charisma, or a place where wealthy parents send their children to meet the children of other wealthy parents, but rather one that gave me a better general education than university ever did, though it did have its boarding school nuances.

We often did community service on taro farms because of the cultural connection. Sometimes we would help build irrigation ditches, which I liked, because the water was too cold and moved too fast for creepy-crawlies and the biggest thing you had to worry about was prawns which, while pretty inedible, wouldn't even bother you. It was hard work digging through the clay, but you were out there with your dorm brothers and the ice-cold water was actually kind of refreshing.

When you weren't so lucky, you had to work in the taro fields, weeding out elephant grass as tall as a man and crushing these glassy pink snail eggs. And by glassy, I mean that you wore construction gloves and hoped you didn't nick your arm because they cut like shattered glass. Taro is a wetland plant, but simply because of Hawaii's climate, unlike rice--which grows in what is basically a watery marsh--taro grows in the sort of cake batter-ey mud you can't make if you're trying (well, it grows in mud unless it is the dry-land kind, which it never is). Centipedes--not the house kind you get in the coastal or US states above Oklahoma, but the jungly kind, or the sort you might find in a desert, all black and chitinous and segmented and terrifying--looooooooooove mud. Which is scary enough, because they bite like a hundred wasps and the affected area is poisoned and swollen and feverish for days and days.

But the worst part of that was the giant worms: bigger than desert snakes, not as big as jungle snakes. They didn't bite because, well, they're worms, but they lived in the soil and perhaps they would peek out on the other side of the plot, which was bad enough, and they swam straight through the slop drawn to the squelching of your feet. You would be knee-deep in this muck (in shorts and slippers, of course; jeans and pants were out, too, because only a fool wears them in 90-degree weather at 80 percent humidity) and they'd snake past your leg and you would just feel this chill go up your spine and you'd start spraying profanities and possibly flail about and push the fellow next to you over and get pulled into the mud along with him and pretty soon everyone was face-up in the mess because it's rather a crab bucket mentality once someone starts falling.

That part was always fantastically fun, but once someone saw a centipede zipping towards them it would be chaos all over again as everyone stumbled over each other to get away from it, unless they had stones of steel.