As noted earlier, Goblins won't always ambush The Boy after he leaves the Water Temple. Thanks to shared event flags, the key is to avoid talking to Dirac and his soldiers. With no Goblin ambush, The Boy can reach Pandora Castle without having encountered The Girl. She still bursts out of her engagement meeting, but instead of stopping and recognizing him...

...she just shoves him aside and keeps going. At least this allows The Boy to enter the room she came from. Inside, Elman stands across a table from a generic nobleman and a boy who looks alarmingly like Bob, the big bad bully from Potos Village.

And is apparently just as mature and pleasant as Bob.

The offended nobleman and his whiny kid barge out.

Apparently he's concerned that she's simply not ladylike enough to have a chance at finding a good marriage unless he goes out of his way to arrange one, and expects her to appreciate his efforts. She plainly doesn't, and he doesn't seem to understand her ingratitude.

After talking to Elman, returning to town finds him and The Girl at their home, continuing to argue.

However, if you go see Gemma and the king before entering the meeting room and talking to Elman, the room will be empty, and neither Elman nor The Girl will appear at their home, either.

Sure enough, there they are, with The Girl blocking the way into the room.

Then she simply vanishes. Elman behaves oddly, too.

He's supposed to be using her name, but it hasn't been set yet. The memory location is initialized to a string of twelve bytes of 0xFF. Twelve, because the game technically supports names up to twelve characters in length, possibly as a holdover from the original plans to release it on a CD addon. However, that never came to fruition, and the final text is set up with line lengths that expect names of at most six characters, so that's the naming screen's limit.

In the Japanese version, 0xFF is the code for a space, resulting in a long chunk of whitespace that pushes the ellipses to the next line. In the English version, however, 0xFF stands for "go", so it looks like he's possessed or something (the twelfth "go" is apparently cut off).

Speaking of which, that's another oddity in the English version text encoding. There are dozens of single-byte codes like this one that the parser recognizes as standing for common two-character combinations, but the text itself never actually uses any of them.

In any case, the line above displays normally if you visit after giving The Girl a name, but without her in the party (otherwise he'll react to her directly).

The Girl shows up again downstairs by the doorway.

And then she vanishes again. Through all this, the maid continues to insist that the young mistress remains upstairs with Elman. Apparently this chain of events was never completely finished, but was also never completely removed or deactivated.

On a related note, the pessimistic man near the entrance to Imp Forest has different lines when The Girl is not in the party:

Another way to reach Pandora without first meeting The Girl is to talk to Gemma outside the Water Temple (regardless of Dirac and his soldiers), then go to the cannoneer by Potos Village. The Goblins don't appear until after the discussion with Luka, but talking to Gemma outside is enough to trigger normal cannon service, which includes a route to Gaia's Navel, bypassing the guard who ought to keep you out of Pandora until after seeing Luka. This method risks fouling up important event flags, though, including becoming unable to get the Pike, if you don't go have that talk with Luka before doing too much else.

Trying to enter Gaia's Navel with The Girl in the party, before finding the barrier in Imp Forest, predictably results in an argument.

If leading the party, The Girl gets her way automatically.

And they exit the cave. Otherwise, The Boy gets the option to do things his way.

If he tries to go on, The Girl gives him one last chance to change his mind.

She does at least leave her weapon and other equipment behind.

Which if you think about it means she's running off into the forest unarmed and naked. Except not exactly. If you switch to the weapon she was using, it "swaps" out of the bottom right corner of the screen as though she were down there, so apparently she's still using it, and can even trade somehow!

It's possible to see The Sprite's plea for money without having enough money to donate. He's not impressed.

The rest of the event proceeds as usual, except that the elder only refunds the 50 Rukh cost for seeing the show.

If The Girl, rather than The Boy, speaks to The Sprite after beating the Bud, the dialog changes slightly.

Similar to the other version, that's more literally "big sister", but the connotations when addressing a stranger like that can be rather different.

And what if The Girl ran off on her own, or never joined the party at all? When she isn't with the others, the teleporter on the first screen of the Imp Forest, instead of its usual destination, leads to a special arena room where a pair of Werewolves menace her.

Naturally, this isn't a good time for conversation.

So kill the Werewolves first. She may throw some punches, but appears to be unable to either take or inflict damage during this event, and the Werewolves completely ignore her, so don't expect any help.

Be very careful if you haven't been through Gaia's Navel yet. Even a single Werewolf can do a lot of damage in a short time, and there are two of them here. Getting stunlocked to death is a serious possibility. Coming here alone and without the better equipment and higher levels the trip through Gaia's Navel would give will make this a risky challenge. At least Nikita is (usually) there on the previous screen to save.

She's appreciative, if just as bossy as ever, once the battle is decided. Assuming they've never properly met:

And the group is sent on into the forest. Of course, it goes a bit differently if they've already met.

That's nervous/guilty laughter, appropriately enough.

She'll also willingly enter Gaia's Navel after sheepishly returning to the party, even without having seen the barrier in the woods.

She has yet another reaction if The Sprite talks to her after the battle instead.

Since The Boy needs to talk to her before anything else can happen, this seldom-seen line follows if The Sprite somehow survived when The Boy didn't.

And the party is healed so that The Boy can talk to her now.

Unfortunately, she doesn't heal or revive anyone in any other case. Considering how difficult the Werewolves are for an unprepared party, it would have been nice if this were another of those events that couldn't give a Game Over, but nope.

And now, back to the story!