Back on track, I aim decidedly towards Skal of the Old Watch. In my team for the moment being, I have Windress, who possesses a passing familarity with that faction and whose presence is actually required to progress this questline.
He’s an amenable guy. After a namedrop from Windress, Skal ties blindfolds around our eyes and brings us to the closest hideout occupied by the Old Watch.
I have to admit that was pretty funny. In the basement, we meet a high-ranking member of the Old Watch, Shrike:
Whom the game introduces as “[…] small, almost girlish even. Yet the cut of her armor and the way she moved told you everything you needed to know.” But we’re back to spoilers now.
What clues I perceived on the site of Nena’s murder, I presently share with Shrike and this passably impresses her, netting me +3 Reputation with the Old Watch. A short conversation later, with a confirmation on Hatsuo’s part, and we decide to investigate a certain mysterious warehouse Nena had recently bought in Dockside. Wich is perfect, since I wanted to go there anyway for some other business.
We enter the warehouse, and… wow. That music is something, to say the least. You guys know what a waterphone is? A weird instrument, used to create many of the sonorities become commonplace in horror movies. Here we have a series of dissonant plink sounds, followed by a long second of quiet—not silence, but quiet—then a deep-felt, quasi-physical vroomb that repeats slowly and crescendo, almost pulsating into a disturbing life. That’s how you know something’s weird here.
Yes, a cutting-edge, automated security system there is indeed, and we are forced into a fight against a couple of minute, hovering drones.
Note how my own characters can block my line of sight:
But I really dislike that, for some unfathomable reason, my character when in combat changes into this random dude in riot gear. That’s simply not my character. And while I could understand the rationale that combat gear is logically preferable when in combat, the fact is other girls get to keep their respective sprites. If Diana the fragile Shaper can fight in a skimpy outfit, so too should I the fragile Shaper be able to. It’s a weird decision.
Still, girl power proves sufficient against puny airborne robotics, and only now do I realise characters do not receive XP if they’re not in the fight. So I’ll have to keep that in mind, should it potentially prove detrimental.
Begad! how it deepens, the mystery. My character remarked upon those yellow things vaguely looking like vats fit to hold someone, to which Hatsuo more or less concurred. Natheless our equivocal approximations won’t suffice, and we’ll have to wait until Shrike and the Old Watch learn more about it all.
Once outside the warehouse, we find ourselves footing it in Dockside. Remember how, earlier we had briefly encountered a character named Dejah Mars? This girl, whose sprite is the blue-white-haired one. Well, in Dockside, my keen eye promptly spots the exact same sprite and towards her I dash, only to discover it’s another character entirely, only sharing the same sprite:
Small, not truly annoying yet still irritating issue, but perfectly understandable, and not even were I the biggest most scathing piece of shit in the world would I hold it against a solo dev to not create a unique sprite for every single character, more so in what I suspect is quite a big game.
So I talk to the girl; but dear oh dear, a mini-mystery adds itself to our growing collection! She speaks queerly enough, and the sounds parting the softness of her lips do not match the movements thusly made. There’s suspicion she might be using a universal translator. And trying to help her, I could not, but she mentionned being from another place. And what was that about portals… Am I a fish now? ‘Cause I’m hooked.
Seeing how the matter of that girl is a dead end for now, I enter the building right next to her, the Blood Pit of the Iron Cartel, wherein I aim to talk with their leader Iron Gregarion, whom I had previously met for a hot second and has invited me. The idea being, I think, that to solve the infighting currently ripping the Guild Of Courtesans apart, we might need the help of either the Iron Cartel or the Stormbreakers, to back the Traditionalists or the Progressives of the Guild.
In we go, and talking to the establishment’s patrons I get the opportunity to slide my hand in a dude’s pants, though not as a Courtesan usually does:
Success renders mine own pockets heavier with two items:
Curiously enough, those two aren’t exactly identical. One can apparently only be used in combination with a melee weapon, while the other can be with a ranged weapon. Because any character can—and by default does—equip two weapons, one melee, one ranged. But a shield must imperatively occupy one of those weapon slots. Meaning no soldier with a sword, a gun, and a shield. If I want her to have some additional protection, and +5 evasion sounds nice at the moment, I’ll have to choose between Zafra going melee or ranged.
Still in the Blood Pit, I go and talk with Iron Gregarion:
With that third answer I go for a laugh, and get out of him a chuckle (+1 Reputation!) An exchange later:
Well Greg, Diana isn’t on screen right now, nor are Zafra or Kaywin, so I have both hands free! How about I scratch your back, and maybe later you’ll scratch mine?
In short, he explains having a nephew, Tommasi of name, who causes him no end of grief. But Tommasi proves a hard man to track. Quick to the take, I quest after information anent Tommasi’s whereabouts, and close by the Blood Pit find some sorry whores who worked for him, and whom he—the nithing!—practically abandonned, absconding from his pimp duties.
I try to convince the whores to give me what information I require:
Got damn I’m good. But don’t worry, I didn’t let these famished, armgaunt walking bags of AIDS to their fate after using them to my ends; I provided them with contact information to the Guild Of Courtesans, where they might be able to find a better job, or at the very least a hot meal.
Back to Iron Gregarion, and the man is quite pleased. Also, I would say ruthless:
So that’s done, and I scored a heap of good-girl points with Greg.
But we’re not finished with the Dockside Area. Remember Isutyr? The G-string-wearing, pointy ears-sporting girl hiding from the Travelers’ Guild? Well, she’s presently in my team since she is supposed to meet someone on the docks. A ferry arrives, which we board, but do not exchange words with the crew. Once disembarked, we meet this obvious sufferer of upper back problems:
That right there is some classic JRPG design! Wouldn’t be out of place in a Suikoden. Her name is Miranda, Curatess Of The Three Moons, and I feel radiating from her a force that, though contained, is yet nearly suffocating and so vastly outsums my own paltry power as a Shaper. Talking directly to Isutyr, she says:
I give a resigned response, as I’m not about to mess with that woman, and back with the ferry I go, feeling used in a unsatisfactory manner.
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