After a bit more travel and a save point I arrive back in the large room full of magma where I was told to turn back earlier. I use the grapple beam to swing by and notice a small gap in the lava underneath. I roll down and find an energy part, then head back and arrive in Blast Furnace Observation. Samus grapples into a morph ball slot and has to bomb specific parts to release Grapple Beam nodules. One of them gets eaten by that lava dragon from earlier, which probably means it's going to be bothering me very soon. At the end of the pipe I operate a terminal which opens the door to that room. I head in, and confront the lava dragon thing at last.
The dragon will leap out of the lava and shoot fireballs at you, but it has a big glowing weak point that you can shoot at with the wave beam. After doing this a few times, it will sometimes open its mouth, revealing a large green weak point. You can use the grapple beam here to actually wrangle it out of the lava and drop it onto the floor with you, whereupon you can blast it a lot easier. Grapple it one more time and do that and it will remove its own grapple point (well okay then). Now it will sometimes leap onto the surface with you and scurry along trying to eat you. I SenseMove behind it and blast its weak point and after doing this twice it finally dies, draining the lava (what? why did that happen?) and makes the grapple beam points reappear in the room. A nice, if somewhat nonsensical boss. I grapple beam over to the next room and head up to a save point. While wall jumping up, the screen decides to transition with a "loading" part, which causes me to mistime my ascent. Very nice of you game.
"Samus, it looks like that monster is headed to the Geothermal electric-power generator. Track it and put an end to it."
The worst part about this line is that with such a vague description at first I thought it might have meant the lava dragon before realizing he must have meant the bird monster that pinned Samus down. This game.
Heading north, I arrive in a desert area. I see a grapple point in the corridor and decide to swing across to avoid whatever nonsense might be lurking in the sand, and I find myself in the Environmental Test Floor. There are some pits in the sand here which I swear remind me of the sarlaccs from Star Wars. I can only hope that Samus and Adam both get to experience a thousand years of digestion. Worms will pop up out of the holes that you can fairly easily eliminate. There is a crane in the northwest section that requires you to spin it around with missiles so that the grapple beam point faces a terminal which unlocks the way out. Unfortunately every time you missile it you have to wait about 5-10 seconds before you can do so again, making this 'puzzle' take longer than it needs to. From here I go to the Desert Refinery.
This area is not very noteworthy, you just climb some stairs and kill enemies along the way. After a speed boost/shinespark to get onto a vent, I find a missile tank and a save point. Another hallway of enemies awaits me, and then I find a room with an elevator. Samus runs to it but the flying tentacle monster jumps out and breaks it, making me SenseMove to dodge its attack.
Gary Oak The Flying Tentacle Creature is basically the same fight as the previous two times. When you hurt it enough it will fly around and only do its Macross Missile Massacre attack, but it will open its big red eye as well. If you shoot a missile at it, it falls out of the air and plummets to its presumed death. I take the longest elevator trip ever and go through more grapple beam sections and end up in a far earlier area of Sector 3. Now that I have the grapple beam though I can definitely find more.
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Geologists will date anything.