Curate of Curiosities

Previously on I Miss The Sunrise, we found and reinforced a habitation, ran into some guy who wants Tezkhra dead, sent a Spanish-speaking lizard to jail.

Our commander asks us to return to our suspension chamber to end the episode. But before that, there are a couple more things we can do.

At some point during the last episode, we got a set of coordinates for a distress signal. Now's the time to introduce a new mechanic: random maps. There are two NPCs near the briefing room named Freddie and Fannie. Freddie gives you the option to explore a random section, or "splice," of space, where you're given a mission to investigate a certain number of nodes. Fannie sells maps for new splices for a cost, yet buying the map for splice 2, where our distress signal was broadcast from, requires us to buy the map for splice 1 first, costing a total of 30000 half-credits, which is more than half of our funds at this point.

No enemies to fight here, just a stranded ship, whose pilot seems happy to see a fleet coming to rescue him. Especially one with a girl with them. This is Luke Martinez, and as you could guess, he's one of those RPG party members whose primary trait is being a horndog.

He reminds me of Kidra, but she was a freak who wanted the lizard D (or at least, pretended to), Luke is just a run-of-the-mill sleazebag.

And he uses a main weapon with Thrust in the name, if he couldn't make his intentions any clearer. I'll be sure to never place him in the same party as Marie.

Chac, the Lacertian that we rescued from that wrecked ship and the other optional party member, is a bit trickier, especially since he's depressed from losing everyone he's cared about, and wheelchair-bound from losing his legs, both to the Shine. Before you can recruit him, you must do the following:

• Get Ros to a rank of 3 or higher, becasue this game uses a proper level-up system now. You will almost certainly reach that level before the end of the episode.
• Have Ros finish a battle as the only member of a fleet,
• Gather up some material to build prosthetic legs, and lastly,
• Pick up his old uniform from the storage room.

It's annoying, yes, but nobody ever said that getting a depressed double-amputee to join your case would be easy.

And with that, it's back to the suspension tanks to end the episode.

The name of this episode seems to be a reference to both a painting of a dog made around the turn of the 20th century, as well as a record label founded a decade later. Maybe it was named that because we're the Inquiry's personal attack dogs.

Yet another RPG protagonist with a mysterious past, huh? Real subversive.

Ros' deeds of daring seem to have gained the attention of representatives of Typelog, the setting's equivalent to [insert tech mega-corp here], and the reason that we have all these text logs to read in the pause menu. They even give our crew a brief run-down on capitalism, since it's one of the things that was repressed prior to the Shine!

The Shine's done a number on their capabilities, and the Lessers aren't helping, so they ask us to capture a few of them (read: blow up their ships). What for? We don't know. Maybe it's to find out how they can operate spaceships when they're clearly not intelligent enough to do so.

In The Reconstruction's second chapter, we not only find ourselves in an entirely new city in need of our help, but we also encounter new enemies (skeletons and bandits in the first half, birds in the second half). Here it's just more of the same Lessers that we've been fighting off since the prologue. Even the objective of this mission, to trap Lessers that are situated on two different paths, feels like a retread of a mission from the chapter in question.

It seems like you're intended to have one fleet go through each of the paths available, especially if you bothered to recruit Luke and/or Chac. In theory, the second fleet should be able to fight on its own, but I wasn't going to take any chances, so after I took out the left fleet, I had the main fleet circle around to deal with the fleet on the right.

Just one craft? You sure this isn't a trap?

Apparently not, It goes down just as easily as all the other enemies.

We're introduced to Typelog's current pet project, the Mind/Matter Interface, some kind of brain uploading project. I remember reading in the logs that well before humanity became a spacefaring species, it found a cure to all earthly diseases. I wonder how computer viruses (provided those haven't been eradicated as well) would effect this project? And would it really give them the needed edge against the Lessers?

We've fraternized with our teammates enough that our chats with them will involve more than one of them at once. First Marie and Mahk, and then Rami and Marie. It's gotten to the point where I'm starting to look forward to them more than the missions.

And Luke here used to fly solo. I wonder why?

And now, to pass our sentencing on El Lagarto Desperado. He stands here convicted of sabotaging Typelog's relay systems, and attempting to loot the Inquiry. For that, it falls to Ros, the fleet commander, to pass judgment, rather than the person that he's taking orders from.

Yes, I'd say sabotaging our efforts is a crime. As far as either of us knows, the Inquiry is the only force in the whole universe capable of keeping order.

You can never be too sure.

And with that, we send El Lagarto to his deathThis decision not only shifts our personality, but also grants us 25000 credits, more than doubling our current stock. So this is the cost of ending a life that's lasted an untold amount of time.

Let's talk to Mahk again. He tells us that his father's business came to be after the Shine. Good to know, but that still raises the question of how much time passed between the Shine and the Inquiry coming across Ros.

Back to the briefing room. So, the entire civilized universe runs on universal Greenwich Time, governed by a rotating torus-like object somewhere in space. You see, this, darling, is a device. A device that many thieves and many pirates would die to take control of. In many ways it's like one of your toys, but it isn't. It's a bit too big to play with anyways.

Another Lacertian? Doesn't matter, there's enough room in the Inquiry's brig for her.

As a commander, she seems to be a top priority, so we sneak past a couple trash mobs (or not), to get to her. She introduces herself as Jessamine, or Jazzy for short. Cool, all the more reason to want to send her to the brig! With her, you just do the same thing as usual. She and the two, sigh, Jazzy's Girls accompanying her go down in one turn. Afterwards, she withdraws her forces, leaving you to face a couple of...drones? Lessers? Who cares, at least the space donut's safe.

But seeing as how our adversary had both a name and a portrait, this may not be the last we see of her. At the start of the episode, these two Lacertians cosplaying as the Men In Black show up on the Inquiry, offering us bounties to hunt. As luck would have it, Jazzy's one of them.

She's a bit harder this time around, but still not too challenging. The only reason that I recorded both of her encounters was for her theme song.

After we apprehend her, she explains that having her forces attack one of the centerpieces of cosmic infrastructure was just a joke, you guys. Seems legit, let's sign her onto the fleet, where she'll get plenty of opportunities to harm even more important things!

It's a bit weird seeing a female Shra, I mean Lacertian, I mean lizard person who isn't locked up in a breeding dungeon.

And while we're here, let's check out another of these guys' bounties.

There's one called the MOD Master, and the only notable things about him are that his ship is huge, and that his MOD minions gang up on Mahk.

Okay, back to the main story. Next mission, grab a Typelog probe that's in orbit around a planet.

Because the gameplay was starting to get repetitive (the navigation gameplay; I'm not sure anything can be done for the combat) this mission introduces a new mechanic: one-way paths. I'm not entirely sure how they work in space. It's another gimmick that will likely only be used once or twice after this mission, just like the blind zones.

The problem is, you can't catch up to it on its first go-around, so after it gets out of range, you have to watch your teammates chew you out like you could do something about it.

One occupant? Uh oh. Looks like a certain Lacertian has made his way over here.

Whew, it's not the one I was thinking of, just a totally different lizard person. His name is Daszk, and he's a hybrid between a Lacertian and a Lesser. Ignoring how a Lacertian and a Lesser would end up reproducing, seeing how brutish, violent, and unintelligent the latter are, at least we can see why he's under quarantine. Oh, and also he joins the party, because he can fly a ship, and that's pretty much the only question on the Inquiry's fleet application form.

But enough about him, here's another recruitment quest that you probably wouldn't know existed without a walkthrough. And sadly, unlike with The Reconstruction, there's no character guide packaged with this game.

There are four data fragments found in the Inquiry, Habitation Zero, and the Typelog Superhub. Read their descriptions in the inventory screen and you get another set of coordinates, just like the ones that led us to Luke.

Punch them in, and instead of a random map, we end up in the Purity Point habitation, populated by women who talk weirdly, call the party impure, and, unlike the NPCs in other habitations, do not move at all. Even our party members are freaked out!

But there has to be more to this place than that, right? Of course, all you have to do is check these handprints on the wall, that are really easy to miss even if you're thorough.

There we meet a rather frail-looking young woman. Not only is she the only one here who can move, but she's also rather short. Like with El Lagarto, we have the option of taking her with us, or leaving her to be driven to madness at the hands of these purity-obsessed freaks. Not only is taking her away from her clearly the right thing to do in these circumstances, but as we find out, her insides have been fried by unfiltered emitter energy, so that she'll die if she's ever out of range of one! Fortunately, Rami has a plan: augment her at the Inquiry! Tell me why we have the option of leaving her here again?

You see, when I say the emitters halt the aging process, I mean they halt it completely. None of the usual thing with immortals where they grow to young adulthood and stay there. Instead, it's the slightly less usual thing, that you often see in Japanese media, where they're stuck at prepubescence for all eternity! Though, for what it's worth, the way that her augments are drawn makes her look like an old lady. Speaking of which, what happens if you're already old and senile when you start receving emitter treatment? Do you just live through eternity in a withered haze? A truly terrifying prospect, yet one that Space Lizard so far isn't willing to approach.

What's more, although they grant immortality, they have a nasty side effect: if the radiation that they emit isn't fitered by a stasis chamber (of which there are several on board the Inquiry) it can affect the mental faculties of anyone exposed to them. And since the inhabitants of Purity Point eschewed the usage of machines, deeming them impure... But hey, they've had eons to figure this stuff out, so it's not surprising that some may have forgotten.

So, in this one page, we've recruited five party members, completed three story missions and hunted down two optional bounties, with no end to the episode in sight. I guess now's a good place to pause.