In a vain attempt to cut the bonus segment down to a reasonable length, I’ve split the optional characters and bounty hunts into their own post. Enjoy.

Chac is feeling overwhelmed by emotion sometimes, so he’s taken to meditation to calm himself. He invites me to try it with him, but my personality isn’t compatible with meditation and I screw it up. Ah, now I truly feel I am one with Ros. Chac is adamant that controlling one’s emotions is key, since he never wants to go back to being ruled by his emotions like during his depression. I can say something:

“Do you miss your legs?”
“Do you still wish you’d died?”
“Why are you still with us?”

Yikes, all of these seem incredibly insensitive and tactless. I’ll pick the second one, I guess?

Chac: “Never. Without a functional body, it is difficult to have any lasting effect on the universe, isn’t it?”

Hooray for positivity. I think this is a nicely humanist message: what’s important is what you choose to do. Although, now that I say that… hm. Remember this for later.

Next:

He muses on how strange this is. I ask him if the phantom limbs can feel pain too. For some reason he likes this — he says they can, but it’s nothing compared to the pain he felt when he lost them. I guess he interpreted that as me being concerned about his well-being.

He then explains why cybernetics don’t work with lacertians: the regeneration. Remember this from The Reconstruction? The lizards heal too fast for the implants to take or something like that. I’m not sure if that’s actually plausible, though — if the cybernetics need to be integrated into the nervous system, surely accelerated healing would create more connections faster? This might be plausible if their regeneration was good enough to regenerate limbs too, since their body would have a rigid idea of what was supposed to go there and would freak out when you try to tell it no we have another leg here you don’t need to replace it. But in that case Chac’s issue is completely moot and we wouldn’t have a plot. It’s also possible their bodies have an overactive immune system or something that makes them more likely to reject foreign material, but in that case his mundane prosthetics shouldn’t have worked either. I also find it hard to believe that scientists with all their super future technology never solved this problem. Am I really supposed to believe they have light-speed engines but still can’t get working cybernetics for a species with only slightly better regeneration than humans?

“Natural… and technological. Mutually exclusive methods of mending. Why can they not harmonize?”

Because your creator wants to have Deep Thoughts like these.

This feels pretty forced — everything else about the setting is all TECHNOLOGY IS SO AMAZING WOW, but here the limitations are arbitrarily still the same as in real life, just so the author can make a deep point about disability for something. It’s not a dealbreaker, artistic license, whatever, but it’s still a little tacky. (It’s also something you see all the time in speculative fiction, so it’s also cliche — and at least in fantasy it’s reasonable to say “magic just doesn’t work that way”, it gets a bit sketchy when you try to make the same point about the real laws of physics that you can’t custom-tailor to suit your story.)

Fortunately, I actually do get the opportunity to say it’s possible they’ll find a way one day. (One of the other options is “Nature can’t make lasers,” which is cute but completely misses his point.) This causes him to go off on a tangent about how we use technology to overcome nature but nature reclaims as well something something fate? This kind of talk always annoys me. One my favorite moments in Telepath Tactics was when the sciencey character brutally debunked an appeal to nature fallacy by saying it’s stupid to act as if nature is a force with intent and cosmological significance — in truth, it’s nothing but a set of impartial laws and systems. Nothing about nature or our relationship to it is inevitable; we make it happen.

“Try as we might, nature reclaims as well. Perhaps the Shine was a reminder of that fact?”

Oh, this is amusing once you know the truth of the Shine, though. Remember it.

Next:

He’s moping about his dead wife Raxia, who was also an officer on the ship and didn’t survive. Hooray for fridging. At least it’s a minor footnote compared to the rest of the crew and not the main catalyst for his manly angst.

I have to wonder why he would even have a wife, though. We will meet exactly one other couple in this game, and both of them are ancient traditionalists from Earth, like Marie. No one else has a spouse or makes any mention of the concept. I suppose it’s possible that lacertians naturally pair-bond like humans do, and he knew Raxia from before the uplift and sterilization and suppression and all that.

“Even after suppression had begun, there was still a closeness that we alone felt. Something powerful.”

Yeah I don’t buy this. Love is chemicals just like any other emotion, it’s not a special magical force that transcends all other emotions. Saying all other emotions could be suppressed but you can never eliminate the undying power of tru wuv is romantic claptrap that has no place in serious science fiction. If I really wanted to fanwank this I could maybe posit that the suppression only targeted more active emotions and since companionate love is a calming emotion it slipped through, but overall this is still eyeroll-worthy.

“Never give up on anyone, Ros! Alive, dead, it does not matter! Do you understand? Because, if you do… you may not get that second chance to make things right…”

He finishes with this, but I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. It comes after he says Sorenson pitied him, so it could be referring to that, but you can’t give up on people even if they’re dead? What? How can you get a “second chance” in that case?

But that’s the end of his chats, so onward to…

Oh boy. This is going to go great, I can already tell.

“Marie made Rami give me a mental shakedown, if you follow.”

So Rami’s terrible and only did something about the person who was obviously unstable and pushing Marie to the breaking point after she forced him to. It’s funny because women are so unreasonable and bossy.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I act strangely around the many fine females onboard here.”

Yes, I did notice, Luke. I would rather I hadn’t. He then goes on to describe what for the sake of my sanity I will assume is love butterflies and not sexual arousal in uncomfortable detail.

“It’s all bi-o-lo-gi-cal, or somethin’.”

And this is tangential, but I find it a little grating how many characters are ignorant of incredibly basic scientific facts. Their society runs on science and they have all the time in the universe to learn whatever they want, nobody should be unfamiliar with the word “biological”. But Luke needs to be stupid so we can laugh at the ignorant Latino, therefore the setting’s internal consistency must snap under his weight.

I get to respond!

“Are you gonna be all right?”
“Keep outbursts to a minimum.”
“You need help.”

Well, it lacks the firmness of “I have a one-way ticket out the nearest airlock with your name on it,” but it’ll do. The fact that I’m not playing to his script annoys him, because he apparently expected me to be in favor of what to any reasonable individual sounds like a drug addiction.

Luke: “I can’t make sense of it either! All I know is, it feels good, and I can’t do nothin’ ’bout it. Lacertians? Ehh, not so much, for some reason. Not that I’ve tested it out or anything! No!”

These are real words in a real game that a real person actually wrote.

“I could be on the edge of some breakthrough! Li’l ole me! They’ll wanna cut me open and… uh…”

Sadly I’m sure medical experiments are very safe and ethical in this day and age I mean uh oh yes they definitely will do horrible unspeakable things to you Luke, guess you need to cut it out before anyone notices, huh? Such a tragedy.

“Anyway, that’s all I know. I’ll try and control myself, but I’m no good at making promises.”

Because God forbid he actually change his behavior to be considerate of others. No, the world revolves around him and everyone else will just have to put up with it.

“Rami thinks it’s ’cause of the Shine, but you can blame anything on the Shine, huh?”

Oh right, he also says this earlier. I think the implication is supposed to be that this is just another reawakened emotion from the suppression break, but that just doesn’t make sense — if that was the case, everyone else should be behaving like hormone-addled teenagers too. This is clearly something unique to him. The best fanwank I can come up with is that he somehow managed to dodge the sterilization that everyone else went through. A shame, that.

Well, now that he’s just explained to me why he should be castrated at the earliest possible convenience for his own good, let’s see what other topics he can embarrass himself and everyone around him with. He says Marie tried to educate him on professional conduct, and whines that he doesn’t see why he should bother. I do sympathize, especially when the rest of the crew is so informal too, but in the context of the rest of his personality it makes him come off as an entitled prick.

At this point I can tell him “Don’t mess with Marie,” but sadly the game seems to misinterpret my tone as “LOL she’s so bossy amirite?” because it gets me a PT boost. He then has the obligatory buddy-buddy moment where he says he’ll play along for my sake because we’re such great friends. Hm, I suppose I’m okay with that. He did just say he wasn’t attracted to lacertians so I don’t have reason to be nervous. His inexplicable trust will just make it easier to shove him out the airlock later.

Luke: “I… kinda hope you’ll keep me around, even after the Shine mystery gets solved. You know?”

My responses:
“You may be unnecessary.”
“I would be ready for anything.”
“As long as we both survive.”

After all, as we both know, the depths of space can be so very dangerous. :)

At this point, I get his first gift.

Luke: “Hey, hey! So we’ve kinda hit it off, right? You might even… like me a bit, yeah?”

You keep telling yourself that. He gives me some defensive items.

“A couple little things to keep you safe. Well, you, or whoever. Hopefully you thought. Don’t ask where I got ’em.”

…Is he hitting on me? Why is he hitting on me.

“Um, thanks for puttin’ up with me. I-I’m tryin’ to get better, you know.”

I’ll believe this when I see it.

He says he didn’t do much, and mainly avoided conflicts since he was on his own.

“We can’t all be big-time heroes or crooks out there. Some of us just wanna go home.”

Wait, what? What even is “home” to him? People live in space stations, there’s not much reason to get attached to any one. His could have been destroyed, but then he’s kinda screwed on that front. This is hitting the beats of the drifter/criminal who was expelled from his hometown narrative, but that makes no sense in this setting.

Anyway, he says he might not have wanted to join the crew if he had been thinking more clearly, even though in his intro he’s the one that makes the offer and it seems like a pretty calm and rational decision. A lie to make me pity him, perhaps? He continues to say he’s glad he signed on anyway, and hopes he can be more useful. He could perhaps start by not being an entitled creep all the time.

“Really, I hope to stick around a good while. And not just because of Marie, either!”

where is the murder button

Deirdre! You’re a good character, please save me from the awfulness. She says she kept to herself a lot, so she’s kind of sheltered and bad at interacting with people. Because she is a good person, she is grateful that the crew saved her life and wants to repay the favor. I encourage this, which motivates her to train more with her fighter craft. She then muses on how great science is and how human ingenuity can fix so many problems.

“My skeleton is made of science now, huh. It’s a part of me. Like, literally now. More than before.”

I think this is really cute. MADE OF SCIENCE. Deirdre would make a great superhero.

“So, what’s so bad about AUG people? Everyone should want to be their best, no matter what.”

Ah, and we revisit this, only for the narrative to point out how it doesn’t actually make any sense. I think a big part of the problem here is that the heroes have to be good, so they all either understand discrimination is Very Wrong or are crushed under the yoke of unfair oppression. We never actually hear the voices of the opposing side, so we don’t actually know where this is coming from or just how bad it is. NPCs could serve that role, but, like with the main characters, the only ones who really bring it up are AUGs who complain about how unfair it is.

She asks me if I’d want augmentations if I could get them.

“Absolutely.”
“If it made me stronger…”
“Do what you gotta do.”

My answer should not surprise anyone. The others are terrible anyway — the return of Combat Junkie Ros, and an answer that I presume means she’d do it if she was injured and had no other choice, which isn’t what Deirdre was asking. She chides me for my hasty response, but dude, you just made a speech about how awesome it was, what did you expect? It’s also pretty disingenuous, since it’s entirely possible for someone to have thought about this beforehand to the point where they’re now confident in their decision.

Next:

About time Marie told her. Deirdre doesn’t understand what kids are, of course, so she’s still pretty confused. She can’t remember anything from before Purity Point for… some reason. Did she flash the memories away? We already have a whole subplot about scouring memory databases with Tezkhra, she should look into that too.

I can respond:
“You stopped maturing?”
“I wish I were small.”
“You’re still part of the team.”

Hm. Second is just stupid, so that’s out. The third one seems nice, but it actually sounds pretty patronizing to me, since she never said she felt otherwise. I’m a nosy curious nuisance, so further probing is most in-character for me anyway. Although, why would Ros know about growth and maturation if nobody else can remember what kids are? This could be fanwanked by saying Ros started with some basic knowledge and she can extrapolate from that now that Deirdre’s told her more, but it still jumps out to me. Deirdre doesn’t seem to understand the concept either, because she just shrugs and goes “I dunno, emitters?”

Deirdre then says she saw her craft as her friend since no one else would talk to her, and she feels a particular connection to it since its stasis chamber was what kept her sane. (So the spaceships do contain necessities, that’s interesting. I presume they all have emitters too. Could people live in their ships instead of in habitations? Why don’t more people do that?)

Deirdre: “I wasn’t afraid to use it like the others were. Is it because I’m a ‘kid’ too?”

My responses:
“It could be natural curiosity.”
“The craft is your toy.”
“You were disobedient.”

o_O

These are all things that people from our time would say, but no one who’s lost the concept of kid-ness would ever think this way. I pick the first one, since it’s the least nonsensical. Deirdre just muses that she’ll have to get used to being perceived this way.

Next:

She’s thinking about how to help the Purity Point inhabitants. If the augments could save her, she reasons that they could do that for everyone else too — but of course the inhabitants would refuse. Of course, they wouldn’t still be around if it weren’t for science — Deirdre suddenly gets frustrated at this perceived hypocrisy and rants about why they can’t see the truth. Uh, because they’re crazy. They’re not thinking rationally and they’re not in control of their decisions.

I think the idea here is that this society isn’t used to this and doesn’t know how to deal with it. However, as I discussed when I went over The Reconstruction’s awful handling of mental illness, that doesn’t make sense. Mental illness is an inherent part of humanity; our brains are flawed and sometimes break. That doesn’t magically go away just because you have laser guns and lightspeed engines. What does make sense is that, with advances in medical technology, mental illness can now be treated or cured painlessly and easily. But this would mean that most people should have a good understanding of how mental illness works and also how to fix it, which isn’t what we see. Even Rami just sort of shrugs and says he doesn’t know what to do with them. That makes it distressingly likely that, like Tez implied in The Reconstruction, they just culled all the mentally ill until there were none left. Such a glorious, progressive future this is.

I ask her if she wants to augment them against their will. She is initially in favor, but then backpedals by saying we should deeply respect the opinions of people who are essentially braindead. She then gets worried that they might be too far gone, and that even if they fixed their bodies their minds would still be irrecoverable. This is why we need neuroscience. Well, I guess the mind/machine project shows that they are looking into it, but that’s on the cutting edge and we don’t see any mundane treatments.

She then gets angry again and says that if they brought it on themselves, maybe we shouldn’t bother helping them at all. I can respond:

“But, they’re your family.”
“They just made a mistake.”
“Leave them be.”

GAH ROS YOU ARE AN AMNESIAC WHY DO YOU HAVE DEEP OPINIONS ON ANCIENT OUTDATED CONCEPTS. I’m just giong to interpret this as her thinking Marie is a cool big sis and trying to imitate her. Unsuccessfully.

Deirdre wonders if maybe they did want this to happen, and decides she needs to stop getting distracted and focus on the good she can do for the Inquiry project instead. Okay.

Jessamine’s personal chats use her leitmotif as a BGM instead of the normal conversation music, which is a nice touch that lends her scenes a more energetic, carefree air.

She tells me about the gang she was running, and tries to claim we’re not so different, since we’re both super-powerful groups who take what we want. I act affronted at this and tell her we’re not thieves, which just encourages her to smarm about how I’ll give in to temptation eventually. She quickly jumps to talking about how most of her pre-Shine memories are in storage, but that she doesn’t care much, since she’s the kind of person who lives in the moment. She then wonders what her gang is up to, since she just told them to keep doing whatever after she left. I can give some responses, but regardless of what I choose, she takes it well and says I’m great.

Next:

However, she quickly dismisses this idea, because she thinks the pirates are jerks. She gets into a self-righteous frenzy about how terrible it is when strong people do whatever they want. I’m not sure how much of it is genuine. She preens about how great it is that she showed up to stop them. I can compliment her or be a buzzkill about her breaking in illegally… Eh, I’ll be nice. Unfortunately she just says she’s bitter that I came in and showed her up. She goes on to say she’s a thrill-seeker and wonders if I’ve broken any rules before I came to the Inquiry. Seems like a pretty dumb question since Ros wouldn’t know, but Jess probably doesn’t know that. My responses:

“Not that I can recall…”
“Of course not.”
“That depends on your definition.”

Eh, I’ll be honest. Though it does amuse me that it’s possible for Ros to be unreasonably confident about her own lawfulness. And… I’ll just assume the last one is supposed to be a lie in case you want to play along with Jess.

Jessamine: “Oh, right. You got those memory problems, or whatever.”

Agh wait she did know? Darn it, game! I guess we can pretend she was trolling me. Or she was intentionally probing me to see if I would lie by giving a definitive answer, which is possible since she is smarter than she looks.

Next:

She questions the need for a chain of command; she thinks it would be faster if everyone was autonomous and didn’t have to wait for orders. Hm, it occurs to me that this could have been an interesting gimmick — what if Jessamine had really great stats, but was bad at obeying orders, manifesting in either Pokemon-like disobedience or a reduced bonus from trust values? Might make her too gimmicky, but maybe if everyone else had gimmicks too…

Jess goes on to address the elephant in the room by explaining that, though she called herself the leader, her gang was mostly autonomous and she didn’t have much oversight. This suddenly makes her have a breakdown as she realized that, since they never needed a leader, they don’t need her anymore and will probably forget about her. Okay.

And I’ll cover this episode’s bounty hunts, too.

Mr. Left: “Space is big. Large. Mind-boggling. It is not easy to locate the hiding places of these targets.”
Mr. Right: “Not easy. Thus, we shall require a fee of 5000 half-credits for the next target’s location.”
Mr. Left: “And should you fail…”
Mr. Right: “If you fail…”
Mr. Left: “…the target will be lost, and you will have to pay again to locate the new whereabouts. So don’t fail.”

I find this exchange hilarious. I think I’m a big sucker for them repeating each other (like the “not easy” at the start). Gameplay-wise, like I mentioned with Jessamine in the main plot, the fee is kind of meaningless since I can just restart if I fail.

The first assignment is “The Twins”. Contrary to what you may assume, they are not fought simultaneously, but must instead be engaged with separate fleets. This makes them by far the hardest hunt this episode, since you’ll have to spread yourself very thin unless you’ve recruited all the optional characters up to this point. I mean, the battle system is still easy enough that you could probably win this with two fleets of three and no Deirdre or Jessamine, but there is an actual risk you could lose. Shocking, I know.

I engage the left one with my main fleet first…

Mabel The Alpha Twin doesn’t play by the rules of the game or the laws of physics and uses a chemical auroral weapon, which the Machinatorium cannot replicate. I’m a bit dubious on this — if it’s just blasting the pilot with gamma rays or something, well, that’s part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so shouldn’t the property be luminous? Or “pulse”, whatever that is? A chemical weapon implies an actual chemical reaction to me, not just nebulously making someone sick.

The Alpha Twin brings an entourage of pretty high-level MOD units, but I still send them packing without too much trouble.

Dipper The Beta Twin is much less creative than his sister, and uses a standard weapon. This battle is a bit more difficult because I didn’t bother outfitting these guys properly, but I’m still able to brute force it without losing anyone. Mahk the glass cannon comes close to getting KO’d, but that’s the most exciting thing that happens.

You may notice that these guys’ weapons are even weaker than the last boss’, which seems pretty weird for superbosses. Fun fact: in the beta version, which I tested, they both had an attack power of 900, allowing them to two-shot absolutely everyone (or one-shot, if they hit a weakness). After I told the developer this was ridiculous, he cut the attack power by two thirds. Maybe that was too much, but guaranteed two-shots were definitely unfair. To this day I still don’t know why he gave mid-game bosses such high attack power in the first place; maybe it was a typo?

My reward for this is just the property components from their weapons, which are level 5. Not bad, but not terribly remarkable either.

Mr. Right: “We have another target for you to apprehend.”
Mr. Left: “A lone AUG calling himself ‘The Collector’. Shy. In hiding. But a thief, and a menace, nonetheless.”
Mr. Right: “Collected a sphere of stolen goods to shield himself. Mostly [carboderm]. Therein lines the danger.”
Mr. Left: “His craft regenerates extremely quickly. You must strike fast, strike hard, and strike together.”

This one is really annoying. As far as I can tell, The Collector’s appearance is totally random. He’s invisible, and on one of those many nodes… theoretically. I’ve managed to circle the entire thing and miss him a few times. I am gravely disappointed; the game promised puzzles, not gambling.

One of the quirks of this is that The Collector always ambushes you and gets the first turn. His attack (pelting you with junk from his shell) is actually respectable, having the same attack power as Lagarto’s weapon.

From the hunters’ description, you might think this could be an actually engaging battle, in line with my previous musings about how the battle system would work better with higher regeneration rates. Unfortunately, his “extremely quick” regeneration is still worthless — he only regenerates about 150 health per turn, which is, like, one and a half attacks if I’m being generous. And he’s alone, so I don’t even have to spread out the damage. He goes down in a single round, before his regeneration can even become a factor.

Oh hey, you know what might have actually been clever? If he regenerated whenever you acted, rather than just on his turn. That would have given him a lot more staying power.

My reward is a booster shell and a middling-quality hull defense boost that I will never use.

Mr. Right: “Impressive display. Another target awaits your iron grip of justice. We suggest you not keep him waiting.”
Mr. Left: “He is a Lacertian known as ‘The Tunneler’. A coward. But a vandal of Surface worlds and satellites.”
Mr. Right: “His pulse drill is to be admired. From afar. An ambush will be necessary to capture him. he is fast.”
Mr. Left: “Wait for him to emerge from hiding, then immediately intercept him before he escapes. One chance.”

This one is also really annoying — once again, it’s completely luck-based. See all those one-way nodes at the bottom? I can’t attack him directly — once he reaches the final line, he escapes. I have to pick a spot once he emerges on the surface of the planet and hope he runs into me — and you may notice that most of those nodes have multiple paths, so there is no guarantee he will actually run into me even if I correctly pick an adjacent node. I get really lucky here and he emerges on one of the spots with only one path, but if you’re unlucky, this mission can be very frustrating and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Also, to revisit the scale issue, this seems consistent with “Time Waits” — the planet is about the same size as the FOCS construct. It is also nearly as big as the sun in “Star Power”, however.

Since enemies that run into you get the first turn, this battle also starts with an ambush. And will you look at that, his attack power is actually mildly threatening! If he was smart enough to attack the same target twice in a row he might actually be able to KO someone! But he isn’t, so I crush him in a single round thanks to the fact that I can deal ~250 damage to him per attack. Bosses in this game really needed to have way higher defense.

My reward for this is actually worth it: I get his pulse drill! Machinatorium contact weapons cannot be pulse, so this is a special snowflake. It costs 4 AP so it quickly becomes outmoded, but it’s cool nonetheless. And since I have no idea what “pulse” is supposed to be, I can’t even grumble about how it breaks the laws of physics!

Mr. Right: “Your fleets are noteworthy indeed. When the criminal element comes to a boil once more, we shall let you know.”
Mr. Left: “For now, rest. There is little else to hunt at this time. In this… episode.“

And with that bit of levity over, I’ll take their advice and end it here. I must say though, as much as I disparaged the plot this episode, I think it’s really improving on the character front. Everyone has at least one more scene than they did last episode, and they’re much more coherent overall. Some character arcs are even starting to coalesce! Some parts are still muddled, especially Ros’ side of the conversation, but I do think this is a marked improvement. The game is really trying to make every character interesting and engaging, and even if it falls short of the mark sometimes, that’s far more than The Reconstruction ever did.

Next time, episode 3.

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