I resumed in Paper Mario: TTYD by meeting Goombella’s professor, who told us that we had to take the map I had to the Thousand Year Door, located in the sewers. Getting there wasn’t a problem, and it revealed the location of the first Crystal Star we need to collect. Along the way I also got ‘cursed’ by some evil spirit trapped in a chest, and the ‘curse’ allows me to turn into a paper airplane at certain spots to sail over large gaps. That’s an awfully useful ‘curse’…

So, I went off to the first area, Petal Meadows, which was fairly straightforward and led to a town. There, the mayor told us that the crystal was guarded by a dragon I saw fly by earlier, but I had to go get some keys from a fortress first. Reaching the fortress was fairly uneventful, but once there a guardian thwomp challenged me to a…game show? I had to answer five questions correctly, based on the events so far, and it wasn’t too much trouble. That let me get into the basement of the fortress, where I fought off some life-sucking fuzzies and got the two keys.

The two keys opened up a stone that turned into a pipe near the start of the Petal Meadows area, and that led to the dragon’s castle, and I ended there for the night. I also got a new party member, a koopa named Koops (sigh) with a different set of attacks and the ability to get switches and items from farther away.