Last time, Typelog turned out to be far more chill than previous events had led me to believe, and I got a new party member. Today, more of that.
This is the next mission briefing. You may remember the FOCS construct from episode 0’s article on spins: it’s a Typelog device that keeps time for the entire galaxy. As I feared when I first read about it, there is only one in existence, so apparently Typelog has no concept of redundancy. It wasn’t damaged in the Shine on account of being planet-sized (because of course our inciting event can’t have meaningful lasting consequences), so once we repair the relays it’ll resynch everything to proper time. I have no idea why Typelog wasted so many resources building a planet-sized clock instead of just using cesium like sensible people. This thing shouldn’t even work right in the first place — a planet-sized object should generate enough gravity to distort time, thus defeating the purpose. Plus the more complex an object is, the greater the chance of mechanical failure, and even tiny mechanical failures should be unacceptable, given the precision a timekeeping device would require… This is a terrible idea no matter how you look at it.
Now of course if everyone just used atomic clocks there would be no drama here and we wouldn’t get to pat ourselves on the back for saving the concept of time. But, you could still make this work: atomic clocks can still be distorted by gravity and other forces, so it would still be beneficial to have a special, isolated location that can correct for that. Handwave it with some magic science that effectively isolates it from gravity (the game basically does this already) and viola, you have a device that serves the same purpose: a true(r) timekeeper that everyone is excited to reconnect to. This would even fit with our revision of larger structures being more vulnerable to the Shine rather than less, since such a facility should be as small as possible to reduce the effect of its own gravity. Oh, and there are redundant ones, obviously, but with the widespread devastation from the Shine damage to even a single one is a huge deal that has to be corrected immediately.
But back to the story we have. It’s confirmed that a spin equals one rotation of the construct, but since we don’t know how fast it moves that doesn’t actually tell us anything. Given the planet comparison, I guess we’re supposed to assume it’s about a day?
Sorenson: “The construct itself is centered within a sphere of rotating equilibrium segments on plasmatic rails. These keep the ring unaffected by gravitation forces, external objects, energy bursts, and so forth.”
Yeah I’m not a physicist but I’m pretty sure this is nonsense. External stuff, sure, a shield can repel that, but gravity? That’s an inherent property of matter, you can’t eliminate the time distortion just with centrifugal force.
Anyway, point is, there’s an SOS saying the shell was breached so I have to go in and investigate.
Rami: “So, we’re gonna find the entry point and figure out what went wrong? Sounds easy enough.”
Sorenson: “Hopefully so, which is why I did not request Typelog’s involvement in the matter. It is just us.”
Woah that sounds super shady. I am pretty sure you need a company’s permission before you start poking their most fragile and important product. There could easily be technical details Sorenson doesn’t know about that could lead to us doing even more harm just by being there. Seriously, timekeeping devices are incredibly fragile! And this one runs on magic science, so we don’t even know how it really works or what might screw it up! I don’t think Typelog is going to be happy about this.
Mahk: “And if we must do combat… I assume we should aim away from the construct, yes?”
Tezkhra: “The construct is so large, we could not hope to damage it with our weaponry alone.”
You just said it was extremely sensitive and needed the shell to isolate it from all the forces in the universe! Am I really supposed to believe that firing lasers and energy bursts all over the place isn’t going to screw anything up??? And he then goes on to say that the presence of their teeny tiny spaceships will cause significant enough gravitational distortion to necessitate recalibration anyway so NBD. Yeah no. Typelog is going to be pissed enough as it is, you can at least make their lives a little easier by not purposefully blasting the thing.
Okay so, this brings up the question of scale. This thing takes up the whole screen, and it is supposedly the size of a planet. Does this mean that every mission map covers roughly a planet’s worth of space? If not, why is the CP cost of movement always the same across missions? I don’t mind the idea that my ships can circumnavigate a planet in one turn, since they probably have super future engines that can do that, but there are some maps later that make me question how big these areas are supposed to be. I’m probably not supposed to think about it too much, but hey, overthinking is what we do here.
Anyway. Two sides are warring for control. Sorenson tells me to eliminate them all.
This person gets not only a portrait but a leitmotif. I’m sure she’s not important. Sorenson orders her to stand down but she refuses, obviously. Mission start!
FINALLY. I have no idea why, but types always seem to be the limiting factor in weapon creation for me. Mission rewards hand out high-level shells like candy and property components can be gotten from treasure boxes with some luck (or persistence), but high-level types are ludicrously rare. This one is level 5, so I can finally put one of those superior weapon shells to use! (If I had used a level 3 type, it would have diluted the quality of the final weapon down to level 4, which I consider to be a waste of valuable components.)
The protective ring shows up in the background of battles here, which I think is a nice touch. Although wait, is it seriously just a ring and not a shell? How would that protect against anything??? Maybe it’s supposed to extend some kind of force field?
We also encounter a new class of enemy. It’s not just orks and robots anymore, pirates are getting in on the action.
Moving to the other end of the map makes me run into the enemy commander, who introduces herself as Jessamine. Time for a miniboss fight!
Her weapon is a whip, which… actually makes a reasonable amount of sense, at least compared to swords and battering rams. It has a unique animation, which I appreciate since that’s hard to come by in this game. Jessamine herself is a pretty regular enemy, and she goes down quick. She has flunkies, but they can only inflict pilot damage, so. Feels like a missed opportunity; if they used systems damage, they might have been an actual threat, since Jessamine’s damage output is on par with the last boss.
After she’s defeated she retreats and takes her forces with her, so only the data pirates are left for me to deal with. I guess that means it’s technically most advantageous to defeat everyone else beforehand, since beating enemies gives you stuff. Regardless, I beat the mission in record time and get a bonus, since less time in the interior means less disruption of the construct.
Tezkhra: “It seems the emergency backup gyro will compensate for most of the time discrepancies.”
Wha…? But I thought you said the construct wasn’t damaged, it’s just gravity distortion. That should affect everything, unless there’s a second magic anti-gravity shield inside the backup? I don’t… I don’t understand.
After the mission, I get new articles.
An interesting and scary concept, although you’d really think that Typelog would have found a way to deal with this back when they first started up. And I have no idea why the thieves I just fought thought there would be any memory data inside a giant gyroscope. (Marie even lampshades this in the briefing, saying the shell also keeps people from poking around but she has no idea why anyone would do that in the first place.)
Well. It would be rude to keep her waiting, wouldn’t it?
This took me forever to figure out on my first playthrough, even though it makes perfect sense in hindsight. I think it’s probably because the bounty hunters are too meta — they feel too much like pure gameplay abstractions, which means you wouldn’t think they’d be involved in story-relevant material. Plus, most players don’t have much reason to talk to them except at the beginning and end of the episode. I remember I tried doing the first bounty hunt right out of the gate and was summarily crushed, so I decided there was no point in going back until I had finished the episode and recruited all the new characters to bolster my ranks. The data screens may have also confused me — those seemed to imply that sidequest locations were things you had to actively track down, not things you could get just by talking to people.
They also charge a really hefty price for this — 25,000 credits, which I’m pretty sure is more than the cost of all of their hunts this episode combined. (Oh yeah, you have to pay for bounty hunts. It’s kind of pointless since the mission reward recoups your losses and you can just reset if you lose. I guess it’s supposed to provide a barrier to entry or something?) It is worth it, but yeesh. I’m basically broke afterward.
Jessamine actually does have boss-level defenses this time, as well as a full set of flunkies. In theory, if they all manage to pick the same target that can actually be dangerous! They don’t because the AI is dumb as rocks, so I still win easily. After the battle, I drag her to the Inquiry for questioning.
She says she actually wasn’t attacking it, she was just fighting the data pirates and when they tried to retreat inside the construct she chased after them. Ah, that actually explains why they were there! For once an inconsistency actually wasn’t a plot hole. I’m proud of you, game.
Jessamine: “Those jerks burn me up! Messin’ with operations and all just for the hell of it! How… how rude!“
I have no idea if Jess is sincere here or if she’s playing up the outrage to get on my good side, and that amuses me. I’m not entirely sure why, but it does.
Jessamine: “I would never attack anyone so… so…”
Marie: “Powerful?”
Tezkhra: “Well-organized?”
Neff: “Influential?”
Rami: “Experienced?”
Jessamine: “All of the above! So, um, it was a big misunderstanding, right?”
This makes me suspect the latter, though. I think a big part of why Jess is a funny character is how well she rolls with the punches. Like the snarker archetype, she’s a fast talker who can easily take control of the conversation and throw out great one-liners on a dime — but minus the snark and derision, which makes her feel more genuine and interesting. Where snark creates a practiced distance between oneself and others, Jess invites a sense of openness. I feel irrationally drawn to her, even if her boisterous personality would normally be off-putting. She evokes a sense that she’s one of those people who’s just fun to be around, you know?
Jess then feels bad about how easily we trounced her, and Rami suggests she joins the party so she can learn a thing or two. She says she doesn’t like taking orders, but decides to give it a try anyway.
And I’m glad she does, because she’s actually really good. She has the best contact skill in the game and pretty good defenses too, so Mahk is officially replaced. Her biggest downside is that her thermal/hull weakness will come up a lot, but I can plug that with a defensive module.
You know what’s funny? Jess reminds me a lot of Santes, yet I find myself liking her instead of hating her. I think a big part of it is that she’s not quite so extreme. Santes was impossible to take seriously in any capacity; her behavior was just so over-the-top that it jarred me out of the experience every time she talked. She acted like someone playing a ridiculous caricature, not a real person. That’s an archetype that only works in absurdist comedy where nothing is supposed to make sense or uphold willing suspension of disbelief, so she’s totally incompatible with a serious narrative. Jess never goes that far — she always sounds like someone I could imagine meeting in real life. While silly, she never feels like someone who’s incompatible with reality. Overall, I take Jess to be a sign of the developer maturing as a writer: he took a character archetype that didn’t work in his first attempt and managed to retool it into something that did.
Another part is definitely that she has more depth. Santes was a one-trick pony, so she got really tiring really quickly. Jess has more stuff to talk about, and even has a character arc of sorts if you do her personal chats. That gives her a lot more staying power, I think.
Onto the next mission briefing. After Rami lampshades my ability to spend as long as I want derping around between missions, the agents give me my next assignment. After the Shine, a quarantine vessel broke free from its holding facility. (…So the Shine can still mess up small parts of large objects? Shouldn’t that wreck all the fancy computers? How does this work???) It’s now trapped in orbit around a nearby planet, and it’s going to crash soon. I have to grab it before that happens.
Sorenson: “Typelog wants the facility back, and the entity in charge of the Surface wants it removed from orbit. If the vessel crashes into the Surface body, its power chambers would irradiate much of the Surface.”
Female Agent: “The other client intends to use the Surface for eventual habitation, so clearly this is a pressing issue.”
Tezkhra: “A terraforming project? Why now? And why have they chosen this particular Surface?”
Tezkhra brings up some very good questions that will never be answered, at least not definitively. I have some ideas for what this might be referring to, but it’s never explicitly confirmed, which seems like poor form when building up a mystery like this. If this was some side thing brought up by a minor NPC then leaving the player to piece it together would be fine, but if you’re going to drop a huge hook in the middle of the central plot like this you need to follow up on it.
This mission introduces another gimmick: one-way paths. Pretty straightforward, and they do add tension for time-dependent tasks like these.
And the planet can be seen in the background of every battle, which is a nice touch.
After three turns, the station moves outside of my node map and I have to wait for it to come back around again. Everyone gets really pissy about this:
Tezkhra: “This next pass will be our last chance to stop it. After that, it will be beyond the critical threshold.”
Mahk: “In the meantime, perhaps you should take the time to reflect upon your most recent failure, Ouranos.”
This seems kinda weird to me. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s literally impossible to grab it on the first pass if you have more than two fleets. It’s definitely impossible if you choose to get that green cache, and like, who wouldn’t? It’s no big deal, guys, I’ve got this.
…And actually I don’t got this because I misjudged what node it would land on when it came back and put one fleet too far forward. After some panicking, I manage to loop it back around just in time.
Only after they secure the facility do they notice the “Population: 1” marker. Oh boy, this again! They investigate. After a long hallway of nothing but Lesser traps, they find…
Tezkhra: “It’s a Lesser. Destroy it.”
Marie: “Sounds good to me.”
Geez, Marie. I thought it was only lacertians that had an irrational hatred of Lessers, but the human portion of the crew is just as racist here. The person acts incredibly meek and apologetic, and tries to point out that he can talk. This just leads Marie to say she doesn’t trust anything after the encounter with Blacky, but like, Blacky was overtly threatening, this guy is just here. Do they really think this one is smart enough to trick them into letting it free so it can maul them even though the whole basis for their racism is that Lessers are stupid? Interestingly, he says that he investigated all the rooms up to this point, but this is the only trap he triggered. Rami eventually figures it out: he’s a hybrid, half-Lesser and half-lacertian. They decide to take him back to the Inquiry for further investigation.
Tezkhra: “If he is a hybrid, he will make a fascinating lab discussion. And dissection.”
Wow, Mr. Logical sure is being a dick. You’re not supposed to have emotional biases remember? Displaying the patience of a saint, the hybrid goes along with this.
Lesser?: “S-sorry… I can’t help it…”
Lagarto: “This punishment is very cruel and highly unusual! I would rather you just kill me now!”
Oh hey, I didn’t know this happened! I always release Lagarto at the start the episode, so I’ve never seen this before. I presume this is supposed to be amusing, but Lagarto is right, this is unnecessarily cruel. You can clearly see two other empty cells to the sides; they don’t need to consolidate them like this. Plus, I thought the whole reason they were doing this in the first place was because they assumed the Lesser would be violent and dangerous. Are they trying to get Lagarto killed??? Why is the Inquiry crew so horrible.
Sorenson notices the hybrid has a uniform, which implies he has a history they can investigate.
Sorenson: “I’m at a loss, Marie. Perhaps the Typelog researchers would know what to do with another Lesser.”
Lesser?: “Daszk. My name’s… Daszk. So stop callin’ me ‘Lesser’, okay?”
Hmm, do I detect some irritation?
The game claims that half-Lessers don’t have Lesser aggression, which feels like a cop-out. Daszk (how do you even pronounce that?) is effectively just a lacertian mind in a Lesser body, which actually seems to reinforce the idea that Lessers are inherently inferior and people are right to hate and fear them. Wouldn’t it be far more interesting if he did have some residual belligerence and other Lesser thought patterns that people had to navigate? It would make sense for his behavior to regress only when pushed to the limit in times of extreme stress, like we have here, which would have the bonus of karma coming back to bite our “heroes”. You could even use it to make a Very Special Episode about how oppressed minorities lashing out and fighting back doesn’t make them as bad as their oppressors, which is something I would have really appreciated after The Reconstruction’s awful handling of Skint. Instead Daszk just gets used for a bog-standard lesson about how racism is Very Bad in a bland, nonspecific way that has no relevance to real-world behaviors and philosophies.
Sorenson decides to retrieve Daszk’s craft and use its ID to determine where he came from, but it’ll take a while so I won’t know the results until I attend the next briefing.
…Which I can do immediately, but that’s video game time for you. Sorenson says we have no new assignments yet, but he does have a few announcements. First, the crew is going to start working with Typelog more directly. Ral Maha, the white-haired woman we glimpsed at the superhub, wants to meet everyone in person. She has some fancy-sounding science project she wants the Inquiry’s help with, but Sorenson refuses to disclose details himself, as usual. Mahk is whiny about this.
Mahk: “Is it truly wise to get so involved with this corporation? They may yet swallow us whole.”
Rami: “Hey, we got involved with yours, didn’t we?”
Mahk: “We’re different! You know what we’re after. But, it seems Typelog is keen to surprise us at every turn.”
Actually no, I don’t know what the Sikohlon are after. Money? Power? Pride? It could be any of those or none. They’re pretty weird and cagey about their true motives. I’m not entirely sure if that’s the point and Mahk is supposed to look hypocritical here, or if the Sikohlon really are meant to be portrayed as straightforward and trustworthy. I suppose it’s meant to be foreshadowing, as we will soon witness the only shady thing Typelog will ever do, but it’s still pretty weird.
Sorenson then makes a second announcement:
It seems really backwards for him to announce this after the actual briefing, but it is more dramatic this way. Sorenson apologizes for Daszk’s treatment, which Daszk meekly accepts, then explains that Daszk belonged to a small peacekeeping force similar to the Inquiry project. It appears they abandoned him after he got trapped in the facility, so Sorenson figures if he’s got experience with this kind of work then sure, why not.
Aw, Ros is the one who has to sit next to him. She must have a snout of steel.
Daszk is a more moderate form of Neff: great hull and pilot defense, poor systems. His competency in ballistics also allows him to have a good backup weapon. He’s got bad AP, though, and his offense is only decent, so Jessamine’s still my lizard of choice. The best defense is a good offense and so on.
This is an awkward place to cut it, but the next scene forms the start of an “arc” of sorts, so I want to lump it in with the final missions. Until next time!