After all of the nonsense with White Heart on Lowee, Neptune returns to Planeptune to take a breather and partake in some light-hearted fun.
A Herd of Mysterious Creatures (skit)
A herd of blue hedgehogs blur past the party, zooming between a gaming company corporate building (ZECA?) into a pachinko/slot machine company office*.Transforming Functions (5pb skit)
Lyrica learns about Neptune's other form and questions the actions of the other party members. She gets giddy thinking about seeing Neptune transform into her goddess form, and wonders if she can morph into other thinks, such as animals or monsters. IF humors her and says that it's normal for people to do that.How Many Wives? (Red skit)
Red is learning how to win the hearts of her fellow party members, but her feelings just can't reach that one character...!Red apparently has befriended IF and Compa without much trouble, but trying to tame the party leader is harder than it seems, even though she's more similar to Neptune that she wants to admit.
No new quests for the party (within their current level) to undertake just yet, so they head back to Lastation.
Dilemma 1: For Neptune (5pb skit)
Lyrica remembers something about sugar helping with brain stimulation. What she doesn't realize is it only takes effect an hour after intake...Searching for inspiration for a song, she comes across some juice and an expired cup of pudding that belongs to Neptune (leftover from their first encounter with Nisa). While she struggles to decided whether or not to eat it, she has a Good Angel, Bad Angel moment, wherein she can actually see the difference in speaking brackets between the two... -=Devil 5pb talks like this=-, ~*~while Angel 5pb talks like this~*~. She eventually decides not to eat it, as it wouldn't be worth it to spend an hour in the bathroom.
A Request from Avenir
Another request from Avenir, one of the party's regular clients. They find a familiar person waiting at their job site.They are greeted by Ganache at Mega Storage facility 3. Because machines are doing most of the manufacturing work at Avenir, he has plenty of time to slack off and give orders. His new order of business is to get the girls to raid the abandoned storage facility for a rare type of raw ore that can generate countless amounts of energy - supposedly enough to power a game console for thousands of years. Once they get inside, Ganache mocks them for believing such an obviously fake story, and locks them inside to fend for themselves against an assortment of mechanical enemies. IF wonders just how many people Neptune pissed off in her previous life to have so many enemies - Black Heart, White Heart, and now this Ganache guy.
To add grievous injury to insult, he states that the building is primed to explode "soon", prompting the girls to look around for an exit (even though there isn't an actual countdown timer in this dungeon). Things are made somewhat easier with IF's new poison claws, which somehow affect the mechanical enemies still sputtering about.
- Enemies: Automatic Cannon, Micro Burst, Guardian
- Treasure: Tuffmil x20, Detoxin x10, Reflex x25, Gelatin x10, Intelli-bangle (hidden; increases AP slightly)
They slip through the back exit, which is conveniently not sealed off. When they get out, Chian informs them that Avenir's robots had wrecked her shop while they were away. Their assignment and subsequent capture was a distraction to give Ganache enough time to enact his actual plan - destroy his competition. The girls are too late to stop the destruction, but arrive just in time to square off against Avenir's giant Killachine. It dispatches Neptune in her transformed form, leaving Compa and IF alone to clean up its mess. They get a "secret command" from the monster after it's defeated.
Chian, still unwilling to give up hope, reclaims the Mech Sword Armas test model they had been using. She wants to modify it some more so that it will be fully ready to display for the Tech Expo.
