Mustache Girl

Mustache Girl
Species	Human
Role	Major Character Main Antagonist
Voiced by	Eileen Montgomery
Manual info	This is Mustache Girl, who seems friendly on the outside but don’t let the facial hair fool you! She’s after my time pieces and I can’t let her get away with them!
Trading Card desc	Her mustache was dumb and she stinks.

Mustache Girl is the main antagonist in A Hat in Time. After her first appearance in Mafia Town, she and Hat Kid quickly became friends, mainly due to Hat Kid agreeing to help her defeat the Mafia. However, she betrays Hat Kid after her refusal to harness the power of the Time Pieces. Her goal is to collect all of the Time Pieces before Hat Kid, so that she can use their power to fight evil.

Appearance

Mustache Girl - as her name would suggest - is a small girl with a mustache. She wears a red hooded cloak, a pink tunic with a purple sash, purple pants, and green shoes. Her cloak is pinned together with a gold medallion with a star engraved into it. She has golden-yellow eyes and blonde hair, which is styled into two loose pigtails and held together with purple ribbon and green beads.

Personality

Mustache Girl is unruly, rebellious, and snarky. She has a strong sense of right and wrong, but she sees things in a very black-and-white fashion, likely due to her young age. This manifests mostly in relation to the Mafia of Cooks, who colonized her home island. She prefers punishing those who oppose her ideals, not believing in forgiveness or redemption. These punishments are incredibly violent in nature, such as when she mashed up the Mafia Boss' guts and put them into a jar (shockingly, not killing him).

She has a fear of being alone, as seen in the final battle where she begins to panic as people sacrifice themselves to supply Hat Kid with Heart Pons.

However, it is shown in the Storybook "The Hero (obviously)" that she wasn't always this way. She was once very innocent, friendly, and welcoming, but the trauma of the Mafia of Cooks taking over her home completely changed her.

Roles

Welcome to Mafia Town

Mustache Girl is first seen in Mafia Town taking out a couple of Mafia goons, before running away after being spotted by Hat Kid. After chasing after her for some time, Mustache Girl will accuse Hat Kid of stalking her, but ask if she wants to join her in rebelling against the Mafia. She will then direct her to where one of her Time Pieces has fallen and run off.

Barrel Battle

In Act 2, it will be found that Mustache Girl was been captured by some Mafia Goons after her encounter with Hat Kid, and she has to save her. After they are defeated, Mustache Girl will inform Hat Kid that she's seen the Mafia bringing Time Piece|Time Pieces up to the Mafia HQ. The two of them become friends, agreeing to take down the Mafia together.

Hat Kid's Spaceship

After the second act of Mafia Town, Mustache Girl will Hat Kid's Spaceship. Here, she will discuss her plans on assaulting the Mafia. The plan includes, but does not limit to: strangling, choking, watching them beg for mercy, smashing them together into mush, putting their remains in a jar, selling the jars for pocket money, finding the Mafia Boss, dethroning the Mafia Boss, and more. She then teaches Hat Kid about yarns and gives her a Sprint Yarn.

Down with the Mafia!

In Act 4, Mustache Girl and Hat Kid team up to infiltrate the Mafia's headquarters. They split up so that Mustache Girl can keep watch while Hat Kid sneaks in, but it is later revealed during the battle with the Mafia Boss that he's captured her, and plans to kill them both as soon as the fight is over.

Once the Mafia Boss is defeated, Mustache Girl becomes aware of the Time Piece's power and realizes she could use them to stop the Mafia from colonizing her home island. Hat Kid refuses, and the two of them become enemies.

Heating Up Mafia Town

After the fallout of Hat Kid and Mustache Girl splitting, Mafia Town suffers from a major natural disaster due to someone turning on the giant faucets and causing Mafia Town to become flooded with lava. While the Goofy Mafia at the start questions if it was Hat Kid who did this, it becomes readily apparent that Mustache Girl was behind it all.

Battle of the Birds

Though not an active participant in the story, her presence is given away by some subtle cameos found throughout the levels in the chapter. Notably, her writing is found in one of the rooms of Murder on the Owl Express, on a blackboard in the room with the first piece of evidence. There is another cameo that can be found on a whiteboard in the B3 floor of Dead Bird Studio's basement.

Time's End

Once Hat Kid has collected 25 Time Pieces, there will be a playable segment with Mustache Girl. Here, she sneaks onto her spaceship, breaks into the vault and uses the Time Pieces to tamper with the timeline. Her meddling with its history causes it to degrade into a lava-filled wasteland, with her new castle at the center of it all.

In The Finale, Mustache Girl declares herself the leader of the world, "The Justice", vowing to completely rid it of bad guys. However, she becomes corrupt and forces everyone to line up and be judged to decide their fate, where she is judge, jury, and executioner. Hat Kid skips to the front of the line in order to get to the bottom of all of this. Mustache Girl initially judges Hat Kid as good, giving her the chance to leave, but quickly changes her decision when Hat Kid continues to rebel, beginning the final boss fight.

During the battle, everyone else will appear to back Hat Kid, telling Mustache Girl to "get lost", and later sacrificing themselves to supply Hat Kid with enough Heart Pons to overpower Mustache Girl and turn back time, returning everything back to what it was.

Credits

After Hat Kid appears on her ship with all the recovered Time Pieces, she will check on what happened to Mustache Girl. Finding her unconscious on Mafia Island, and she can make a choice on whether or not to give her a Time Piece to give her the power to defeat the Mafia. The results of this decision are never seen.

Gallery

See: Mustache Girl/Gallery

Trivia

• Mustache Girl's red cape gives her a resemblance to Little Red Riding Hood, the titular character of a folktale of the same name.

• Mustache Girl and Queen Vanessa are both voiced by Eileen Montgomery.

• In the Nyakuza Metro DLC, a dye called The Justice is available for purchase. This gives Hat Kid a palette similar to Mustache Girl's, and a sash to match.

• If Hat Kid takes too long to hit the Mafia Boss during his Mafia Ball attack, Mustache Girl will say, "Hat Kid! Hit him already!" This is one of the only times someone directly refers to Hat Kid as such.

• During her playable section, Mustache Girl cannot climb ladders. According to Hypo - the Animation Lead at Gears for Breakfast - the team didn't have an animation for Mustache Girl climbing ladders, so they decided to simply not let her do it.
  • This also happens when bouncing on the Earthling Sitting Device.

• During her playable section, Mustache Girl can go up the slide to the Mail Room without the need for the Ice Hat.
  • This room originally had a Time Rift in an earlier build of the game, which could be entered as Mustache Girl. When collecting the Time Piece she would t-pose, as she doesn't have an animation for it.

• Oddly enough, Mustache Girl has animations for swimming, despite it being impossible to enter Hat Kid's bedroom while playing as her.

• Mustache Girl has several unused lines that would have played while inside Hat Kid's Spaceship, which imply the cutscene where she broke the Time Pieces would have been longer.
  • There are also lines for her mentioning the doors being locked, where she theorizes that they're activated via facial recognition.
    • Yet, the Wowl Band and the Mafia Boss are able to make it into the Machine Room just fine.

• There would have originally been more playable Mustache Girl segments, likely in-between each chapter, but they were cut for time.
  • In the launch version of the game, there was unused text for a playable Mustache Girl segment in Subcon Forest. The opening cutscene for this could still be activated in-game, albeit unvoiced, and it was impossible to activate the encounter with the Snatcher.

• While the decision to give Mustache Girl a Time Piece in the end cutscene notes that Hat Kid may not be able to get home if she does, the decision has no actual bearing on what happens, as the game only has one ending.
  • Originally, however, there would have been an alternate ending where giving her the Time Piece would actually prevent the spaceship from being able to take off, forcing Hat Kid to walk home. At the end of this sequence, she and Mustache Girl would meet at a bookstore as adults, where she would finally return the Time Piece to her.