[ blinks and then sighs. ]

...Of course it is.

[ why wouldn't random places turn into rat museums in this godforsaken airport!!!! ]

And yeah, god, that Australia place was almost impressively pathetic. I also just never want to think about Australia again for the rest of my life when this is over.

[ nods... ] I remember rats were one of the things that kept coming up on the spaceship, too. Kind of annoying,w hen you think about it.

God, no, I really never want to hear about Australia or horses ever again.

Ugh. I really think this might have ruined horse racing for me. Which I guess isn't necessarily a bad thing, but. Still annoying.

[ opens up a bottle of water and takes a sip. ]

Apparently we're always going to come out of these things with an irrational hatred of something.

[ plants, horses, australia... ]

Was that a thing...?

[ who does horse racing in this day and age, wonders the boy who lived in tokyo and doesn't know the first thing about horses, ]

I mean, maybe if it did things in moderation instead of constantly shoving the same shit in our faces?

Huh? We go to the races pretty often. [ there is a tokyo racecourse!! there was a whole osomatsu special collab with the japan racing association!! ] Rarely ever win anything, though.

[ so cutting back is probably a good thing... ]

Yeah, it definitely gets more infuriating the longer they keep dragging out these running gags. Unless this whole thing is actually being aired for an audience of horses, I'd bet anyone watching this has to be sick of the horse bullshit by this point too.

Why go if you never even win anything?

[ well. maybe they won't anymore, but still. ]

Oh my god. An audience of horses kind of sounds like a nightmare. But if you believe those pamphlets people found, it might explain the murder part for this whole thing...

[ horse emotions... ]

[ because they're bored... ]

I'm not really sure anymore how much the auditors were responsible for and how much was the horse. I think I missed whatever discussion there was about this stuff on the other side, I don't feel like I have any idea what the hell's going on.

It's gotten pretty hard to tell, hasn't it? But yeah, I feel that. I'm still confused on what exactly we're supposed to do. Get tickets back, I guess? Race a horse? I don't know.

[ NOTHING MAKES SEEEEEENSE ]

Yeah, the horse has the tickets and we have to convince it to give them back? I guess??? Hence the racing...

Pisses me off that it's putting this on us when it's not like we ever wanted to be here in the first place.

I still don't get how racing is going to fix that, but maybe it's a horse thing...

And yeah, that part's so annoying? We want to leave. And it's just making it harder for us to do that by taking the stupid tickets.

I think getting us out of here isn't really its goal, it's probably trying to force us to help it? So... I don't know, maybe it just wants us to prove ourselves or something?

Prove what, I'm not sure. And we honestly kind of suck, so I don't know what it's expecting.

I've heard some people suggesting we get rid of the airport, but we seriously don't even have a way to do that. Anything else is.. .beyond me.

What else would a horse even want?

I was thinking from that thing about the other horse sanctuary in Australia that it was trying to get us to help send it there? But I guess there's like, an entire Australia horse AU portal this week, so now I don't know why it can't just trot through that and get there on its own.

Maybe they don't know how to use it...? Or like... can't with their hooves or something?

[ we are grasping at straws here. ]

Maybe? I don't have any better ideas, so.

[ shrugs! ]

It just feels weird to be this clueless about things this close to the end.

I guess it really could be anything, by now.

[ ugh ]

Seriously, though. At least we knew we'd have to fight Ruby by this point. It feels like we're going in totally blind here.

Yeah, and we pretty much knew exactly what we had to do to mess with the ritual...

[ we'll ignore how badly he was spiraling about which ingredients were the debuffs the night before endgame ]

Ruby was the villain of your thing?

I guess we know that it's supposedly a race?

[ whatever the fuck that'll even mean in this context ]

Pretty much. She was one of our "hosts," but she was planning to kill all of us from the start to end all of the Reaper's Games.