Last time, there’s an actual antagonist! Today, we’ll be meeting him.
I have to talk to Thomas to continue the cutscene, but I get the opportunity to talk to his guards too. Yay flavor text!
In the next scene, Neff’s come up with a game plan: they can use Lazarus’ personal ID to find any data Typelog has on him. Typelog is funneling all their resources to the front, so infiltrating a station should be easy. Neff finds a good location that only has weak MODs for defenses.
Thomas: “You do realize that just by expressing interest in the location, they already know your plans?”
Marie: “They weren’t listening in. We split from the Typelog observation network when the war first started.”
Thomas: “You think so, do you? Typelog is always watching, always listening. It’s what they do.”
Uh, how, exactly? It’s never made clear how Typelog is able to record every aspect of people’s lives – does everyone have cameras in their brains? It’s not magic, it must happen through a concrete process that can be disrupted. It is totally possible to cut Typelog off. This is meaningless pretentious melodrama.
But will you look at that, the protagonists are actually being proactive and doing things on their own, and they only needed a little bit of prodding! Incredible. It’s like we’re in a totally different game.
This is a very boring mission, barely more sophisticated than the first one. Those red relays may look scary but they don’t do anything. The enemies here are actually sturdier than normal, akin to minibosses, but they’re still no trouble. I let my secondary fleet get some experience on one of them.
To spice things up a little, something interesting happens at the end of the first turn. Everyone freaks out because the computer systems should have noticed them sneaking in, then they engage.
These things aren’t threatening at all – their weapon can barely scratch me and they have basically no defense. They’re unsettling, though! Ominous voices saying “found you” are never good, and this one has ties to the Shine. I think this is a good way of building tension. We think we know what the situation is and what to do about it, but the moment the heroes start making progress a new curve ball promises more things to come.
I cleansweep the map (I love not having to worry about turn limits anymore) and enter.
Neff explains that since this is just a maintenance shaft, there’s no heating. He also says there are no emitters, which surprises me. Assuming Willis and Ral’s white hair isn’t just stylistic it seems that emitters can’t reverse aging, so any time you spend away from them permanently wears you down. That’s scary! You’d think such a cushy society would toss the things everywhere. Emitters are apparently magic and cost nothing to maintain, so why not?
There’s a motherlode of awesome loot here, but also, puzzles! Actual puzzles. It’s been a while. This is one of those ones where poking a tile will toggle all the adjacent tiles on or off and you have to get them all in the same state. It’s 3×4 instead of the usual square format, which throws me off a bit. These things usually confuse the heck out of me, but I manage to blunder my way to victory before the game takes pity on me and lets me skip it. Supposedly this collapses the control array and quarantines the data here, allowing us to access it more easily.
Tez has run off to the location of the second stage, where he is being very bad at acting inconspicuous. This puzzle is pretty silly: the data continuously cycles between the consoles on each side of the room, but there’s only one complete pathway, which I have to mark by stepping on those red panels. This is far, far easier than the first puzzle, and you can probably see the answer even with the text box covering half of it. But still, at least the game’s trying! It’s been so long since we’ve gotten one of these walkaround areas, and I don’t think there have been any true puzzles before this. It’s a shame there aren’t more levels like these.
After I finish, Tezkhra asks if the weird MODs said anything to Ros. Hm, so was that not a universal broadcast? She tells him, but he only gives an awkward silence in response. With that, we can leave.
I’m more impressed they managed to get off their butts to try in the first place, myself. Hm, actually – the moment Sorenson stops micromanaging them, they suddenly become way more inquisitive and proactive. Even back in episode 3, the most interesting and plotty mission happened by subverting his authority. Maybe he’s the one I should be blaming for the slow pacing this time, and the heroes would have actually given me a more interesting plot if it weren’t for him.
They got lucky: they found the ID of Lazarus’ craft. But they didn’t actually have to, because it’s the same one he started with! Looks like it wasn’t very “annihilated” after all. You know, I think Lazarus has a right to be pissed at this point, they clearly didn’t look very hard before writing him off as dead. If I want to be charitable I could suppose they just got a notification that he was shot down and when they went to investigate he had already left, leading them to think the craft was destroyed – still, they didn’t think it was odd there was no debris?
However, since they’re still cut off from Typelog’s network, this alone isn’t enough to locate him, so they’re still shooting in the dark. Marie decides they’ll have to wait for him to make the first move.
Thomas: “That could be disastrous. We know nothing of his actions or desires at the moment.”
Uh, really? Didn’t he contact Thomas already, and in enough detail for Thomas to know he’s “not happy”? Even if all he said was gloating about wanting to destroy Thomas and the Inquiry, that seems like it’d paint a pretty clear picture of his desires.
Thomas is adamant that they have to make the first move, and he wants them to hit more Typelog databanks until they have enough information to do so. Neff isn’t very confident in that plan, since Typelog will have bolstered its defenses after that stunt. Eh, is that really certain? Supposedly they’re leaving them undefended because they’re strapped for resources. If EROS tried infiltrating it to get a leg up in the war I could see them going on red alert, but this can’t possibly be the first petty data theft they’ve experienced. If they make a habit of it that could start drawing attention, but I’d say they’re good for a while.
Tez then starts acting weird. Ros puts him on the spot about what he was doing back at the databank.
Ros: “I thought you were done with all this secrecy business. Why are you still trying to hide things?”
She also brings up a plot hole. This takes place after I’ve already seen the conclusion of Tezkhra’s personal arc, which I’ll cover in more detail later but basically resolves with Tez agreeing to stop keeping secrets from everyone. It also resolves the reason he was mucking around with Typelog data in the first place, so I’m not sure what he’s trying to hide now. Blue One stuff, maybe? But how would he even know what to look for? He seems genuinely clueless about his secret identity. He does, however, reveal one thing: the scout MODs talked to him too, but they said “thank you”. Mysterious.
Thomas tells them to stop waffling and get to work. I approve. Ros stays behind, though, and gets a special message.
The big man finally shows himself. His appearance is very underwhelming, I must say. For someone who was supposedly brought to death’s door, he hardly has any more cybernetics than the other cyborgs we’ve seen, and like them they’re pretty superficial. Half his face is still totally fine, and even his bad side is rocking the perfect blond Aryan look. I mean, come on. We’re told he was messed up so bad everyone thought he was dead, and if Ros is a human he’ll also reveal that he’s internalized the game’s nonsensical insistence that cyborgs are freakish and inhuman. He should look like Darth Vader. He should at least have gotten his hair burned off. He’s still far too pretty and intact-looking, so the attempt to make him seem monstrous falls flat.
Lazarus: “My, my. Look at you. One of those disgusting lizard things. It’s a wonder we’re related at all!”
He has a special bit that changes depending on what classification you choose at the start. The human and cyborg bits reference the cybernetics eat your soul thing, so I’m surprised this one is totally unrelated. This could have been good fuel for him to taunt you over how you couldn’t survive what he went through, or that you never have to worry about becoming a freak. Something. I just like consistency okay?
He raises a good point, though: if the Ouranos Project was just relying on random mutations, how did a human and a lacertian get the exact same one? The game keeps insisting this is “evolution”, but they’d have to be on totally different trees since I am pretty sure you can’t breed lacertians and humans together. If their overall body structure is similar I could buy two separate lines getting the same mutation by chance independently, but you generally want to avoid absurd coincidences in fiction. Honestly, I don’t know why it couldn’t just say they were purposefully engineered for this. It would make so much more sense.
From there, Lazarus launches into a pretty good villain rant. He starts by going off on a tangent about being the superior race:
Lazarus: “You and I… we are the most powerful people in the universe! […] We are the chosen! We are an anomaly… a discrepancy in the evolutionary tidepool! No single living being has ever had this much power! We transcend time itself! We are unstoppable!”
The game is still going on about this, and I still insist it’s overblown. This isn’t even an automatic thing, it only works when they’re doped up on chemicals that already make normal people think better too. If they could think at super speed all the time, drugs or no drugs, Lazarus would have a better claim to godhood here – and as a bonus, that could go towards justifying the player’s ability to take as long as they want in conversations and between missions, too, since the whole point of this is to integrate gameplay and story. But as it is, they’re totally normal people who sometimes get a situationally useful superpower provided they have external resources to burn. They don’t actually have a fundamentally different perception of time that transcends human experience. Lazarus’ boasts sound impressive, but they have no basis.
Also, again, he’s just one guy, he’s not unstoppable if he’s outnumbered. If they did have 24/7 transcendence, that might give them a significant advantage even alone. If Ros had demonstrated this earlier – if she had been the one to off Blacky in the comm station instead of Tez, for instance – I could see where Lazarus is coming from. It would also go a long way towards justifying where this ends up, which is a one-on-one duel.
Ros just snipes back that he’s a lunatic while she actually knows what she’s doing.
Lazarus: “Hah! The old man was right about you. You’ve been coddled for far too long into playing ‘fair’.”
Highlighting some foreshadowing for you. If you’re clever, something here should stick out to you.
Ros wants him to explain, but Lazarus says she has to understand his goal first. He reminds us of the ostensible central theme by saying she’s thinking too small: he doesn’t care about going on a killing spree like Thomas fears, and is interested in something far greater than the human race. He doesn’t give any details, which is annoying but for once actually justified given that this is coming from a clear-cut villain. He just says that ~there can be only one~, so he has to kill Ros to establish his dominance.
Lazarus: “Your foolish friends can’t help you now. In fact, I seem to recall that they already helped to thin our ranks once before, didn’t they?”
Ros: “The third sibling… They said she was killed just like you.”
Yes, the Ouranos sibling who never matters except as The Dead One is the woman. This one is all on me.
Time for a trip down memory lane. As I’ve mentioned before, I was a beta tester for this game back when it was in development, and in the first draft of episode 4, the dead Ouranos sibling was referred to with male pronouns. I was a baby feminist in 2012, so when the game potentially cast all three of the “most powerful people in the universe” as male, my Unfortunate Implications alarm tripped and I requested the developer gender-flip one of them. He agreed to do so for this sibling, since it would only require a change of pronouns.
Looking back, I’m not sure if that really fixed things so much as swapped out one problem for another. It comes down to the classic pick-your-poison of if it’s better to have women represented poorly or not at all. If the player picks a male Ros (which, let’s be honest, I’m pretty sure is assumed), the player will get exposed to some female representation, but only in the most token, inconsequential form, pushed out to an offscreen, posthumous role. (Granted, flipping Lazarus wouldn’t have been any better, since he’d just turn into the stereotype that power makes women crazy.) It reeks of a zero-effort inclusion made only to appease the feminists, because it was. Might it have been better for this to be kept as it was? Maybe. I do still think that any representation at all is the better deal here, just because this is supposed to be an egalitarian society so erasing women from such an important group is egregious.
Honestly, though, I don’t know why there’s a third sibling at all. Lazarus is the only one who ever matters. Fridgings may be trite but at least they usually have some impact on the plot, but the Ouranos sister’s never does. Lazarus already hated the Inquiry before then, and it was a genuine accident so it’s not evidence of a sinister plot to get Ros killed. Given that these people are apparently crap at confirming deaths, her being “killed just like Lazarus” could provide an opening for her to return alive and well too and provide some role that Lazarus doesn’t, but she never does. I get the distinct impression there was something planned involving the third sibling that was cut; it just doesn’t make sense to include such an extraneous plot point otherwise.
Lazarus: “It’s you. It’s all down to you. One being at the center of one universe. A glorious thought, isn’t it? Hang on to it, too. You never know when it’s the last thought you’ll ever have… dear sister.”
And with that, he lets me go. Not bad as far as villain introductions go, I must say. We’ve never seen such a direct threat since Lagarto, but Lazarus is far colder and more intimidating. He gives us important plot information too, foreshadowing the existence of a greater mastermind behind all of this while still leaving room for speculation. I approve.
We get another territory report after the mission, as per usual. What happened to this guy? He sure got somber quick. Was his hab destroyed?
Ros bumps into Neff when she leaves the room. He says he noticed an energy anomaly that looked like a communication channel, and asks if she knows anything about it. Yes, time to bust this wide open! Lazarus has revealed himself and they know what he wants, it’s time to –
Ros: “Nope. No idea.”
Haha just kidding we’re doing the thing where the hero withholds vital information for no reason.
This trope pisses me off more every time I see it. It reeks of patronizing alpha-maleness – the ostensible reason is usually that it would endanger people to know about it, but that’s always proven to be a flimsy excuse. Knowledge is power. By refusing to share important information with people, you’re saying you can’t trust them to use that power responsibly, to protect themselves. There are cases where that mistrust might be justified, if you know the information might drive them to make an impulsive decision, but “the bad guy contacted me and told me about his plans” is not one of those cases. The rest of the crew is currently working themselves ragged trying to stop Lazarus, and they believe humanity’s survival hangs in the balance. Ros isn’t willing to take that weight off their shoulders? The implication seems to be that Ros is ~so noble~ for dealing with this on her own and not dragging her friends into danger, but again, that’s patronizing and selfish. Her friends have proven countless times that they can handle themselves. What’s so different about this? If she really cares about them, she should tell them and let them come to their own decisions. The fact she doesn’t makes it look like she actually cares more about feeling special by keeping a secret.
Don’t keep secrets, people.
Neff totally buys this because he is a good friend who trusts Ros far more than she deserves, then says there’s a meeting in the assembly room she should check out. We will investigate that next time; I’m sure the meeting can wait for us, us being transcendent god-beings and all.