To start, the beautiful artwork for The Spire, since I had completely forgotten to post it earlier:
To continue, a second artwork, freshly unlocked in my gallery, of Amy Seagrave striking a pose we’ve seen before:
Continuing further, I spring by the Iron Cartel’s headquarters, to see if the game will provide me an opportunity to distance myself somehow from this faction. Unfortunately, I don’t see any such opportunity. Instead, good old Iron ‘Semen Dump’ Gregarion is now firmly intent on stealing the Seafoam Throne. Faded memories have it the Pirate Kings of old were something and a half; and Greg, having discovered the actual physical throne’s location, bethinks himself to lower his fine leathered ass on it, hoping to benefit from the regal symbol of such an act.
But I don’t want anything to do with him anymore, quite the contrary. Thus I change the subject to aviary considerations and, in so many words, tell him to go fuck a duck.
Time to board the underrail. Destination: the Commercial district, as I still have not delivered to Dejah Mars the Stormbreakers’ gear I surreptitiously recovered in a Dockside warehouse for her benefit—and by extension, my own.
The gear, it appears, were drones.
Then the game offers me a prompt: flirt with her. Cupping my breasts provocatively as often did the figures of Félicien Rops, I tell tall but true tales, flaunting my expertise in all things boudoir-related.
Oh oh oh but charm them off I will, neko girl, just you wait. Between two louder beats of my heart, she mentions having a certain problem in whose resolution I might play a role; the name Tomassi—”a two-bit pimp”—parts her lips, and already I intimate where this is all going. I assure Dejah that Tomassi is well alive, but in the wind after selling the encrypted data he had stolen from his uncle Iron Gregarion. Dejah, in turn, assures me she knows who currently holds said data.
I am given the absurd amount of 100.000 credits in an encrypted form, and the purportedly hazardless task to exchange encrypted credits for encrypted data, in a double-blind deal.
Off the girls and I go to the meeting place.
But not our courtesan kind of whorehouse. No, no, certainly not. Rather it is the most sordid whorehouse, populated by asthenic girls kept enmired in the hazy brumes of oblivion by a nepenthe-like cocktail of drugs their pimp forces them to drink. Johns take their turn in unending succession, one after another after another after yet another, and surely each of these women must be used by twenty or more men a day. I, Kaywin, Zafra, Diana, and Isutyr feel such wrothful revulsion I doubt will allow us to leave this place as we find it.
I haggle a bit, and get Sly to lower his asking price to 90.000 credits, thinking it might make Dejah happy. The exchange goes through without a hitch; and I quickly decrypt some parts of the data slate, uncovering some information on the Progressives I might be able to leverage later, before erasing all evidence of my tampering with the device.
But the girls and I still have business here.
I wish I were provided an option to buy the girls, even if the price was something like 30 or 50 thousands credits. But it’s not possible, so I make what is an obviously futile attempt to reason with this Sly guy before resorting to baser, less civilised means. In the end, he and his crew die.
Unfortunately, the game crashed right after the combat ended (it’s only the second crash so far, and the autosave does its job all the same). Habitually I use Rivatuner to capture screenshots, but for some reason I can’t determine I have problems making it work with this game, and I suspect using the Steam overlay instead for screenshots causes issues in combat, increasing the likelihood of crashes.
I restart the game then load the autosave, to find myself warped standing in front of the Stormbreakers’ headquarters—which might seem like a bug caused by the crash but I’m certain it is not.
And it’s the perfect opportunity to remark upon the fact that, when questing your way through the game, you don’t so much walk from zone X to warehouse Y; ofttimes the game will, say after a conversation with a quest-giver, warp you to a one-time-use place, then warp you back out once your business there is done. Sure, because of that, you don’t get to enjoy sights and sounds, and you don’t have a sense of coherence physically linking this place to that one. All the same, I don’t think it’s a detriment to the game, as almost no game in existence is sufficiently beautiful to make me care about traipsing uneventfully for however many screens separate me from a place of interest, then again all the way back.
Warping me to and fro is a sound, economical way to deal with the whole thing, and in the context of this game it works extremely well.
So then, standing in front of the Stormbreakers’ headquarters as I said. I enter, and see some change:
The tachikoma found itself robotic brethren! These drones being the ‘gear’ I re-appropriated for Dejah some time ago. Speaking of Dejah, I tell her how it went:
Operation ‘Charming Her Pants Off’ has begun.
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