Curate of Curiosities

Previously on I Miss The Sunrise, we recruited a whole bunch of people, including a little girl, and condemned the Spanish-speaking lizard from earlier to death.

Our next mission is to meet up with Typelog again, and this time, we take the half-Lesser with us. Between his seeming dullness and Jessamine's assaulting the space donut, we're picking up quite a few untrustworthy teammates.

This is Ral Maha, the manager of the Mind/Matter Interface Project, whose purpose is essentially Neuralink in reverse; rather than insert a chip into your brain, it connects the brain to a digital network. I don't think I've really touched on this, but the Shine resulted in a resurgence of emotion that was suppressed for eons, so having a project that would transcend the limitations that they brought about seems like a natural extension of what we've been doing.

But it looks like someone else has managed to make his way into the superhub with us. It looks like that one Lesser who tried to murder Tez before, but that one had a prosthetic. Maybe there's more than one Lesser with black scales that wants Tezkhra dead!

Whoever it is, he tries to attack the superhub, so Ros sets out to confront him.

Here's something interesting. A one-on-one fight with the Black One. Except not quite, after a few turns, the rest of the fleet will come to back us up. Not that we were struggling with him before.

If Ros bites it, it's game over. At the same time, much like in The Reconstruction, most enemies will prioritize the front-most available target. For that reason, it's dangerous to place him in the front lines, and thus, in this battle, it's best to keep him in the back after his teammates show up. Yet, for some reason, the Black One will continue to prioritize attacking him, even though the person he actually wants dead is right in front of him.

Since we have a bit of a break from the ever-present threat of the Lessers, let's go on with this mind uploading business. This next mission requires us to pick up four energy taps in orbit around a star. What is a star anyways? An enormous fusion reactor, running for billions of years. The perfect thing for uploading a human consciousness.

But the problem is that there are four separate energy taps, that need to be retrieved at the same time, so we have to put our teammates in four separate fleets. So, it's like that one mission with the skeletons from The Reconstruction. I have mixed feelings about these similarities, on the one hand, it can make this game seem like a retread, but on the other, it could show that Space Lizard has taken steps to smooth out that game's issues, such as, in this case, how it took forever to change your party lineup!

You have four fleets and you need to get them onto each of the energy taps. It's far from likely that everyone on the team will be fully equipped, but at the same time, for some fleets, simply avoiding the enemies on the way to the taps isn't an option. Good thing the enemies aren't any tougher than they were before.

But then, Tez notices something about the taps: that they use an energy drawing technology that he developed. So it's confirmed: the Shine killed copyright laws.

But it's not the copyright that he's concerned about, it's the fact that it's being used to handle an amount of energy that it was not tested for. Hey, you're the one who called it Stardraw; why would you be surprised that it's being used to draw energy from stars?

Speaking of potentially dangerous technological marvels, let's check on the mental interface thing that Typelog's about to test out. This had better be worth making us grab those Stardraw batteries.

Ral, on top of being the project's manager, is also serving as the first test subject, connecting her mind to a specially designed network, separate from Typelog's cloud. But nope, her mind got uploaded to the cloud, because after all this time since the Shine, nobody at Typelog thought of installing a firewall. I can see the reasoning: the Lessers that have been bothering us all this time aren't very tech-savvy, despite their sudden ability to operate ships.

So how do we stop her in this state? What's this? She's left her chamber exposed out in space, so we'll be dealing with her by way of a method that plays to Ros and crew's skills at shooting things in space? How convenient! I thought we'd have to improvise a way to counter-hack the system to cut her off or something like that!

This mission is a perfect retread of last episode's ending mission. There are blind spots, relays, even the support nodes on either side of the boss. Don't tell me that Space Lizard is already running out of ideas, as if this game wasn't repetitive enough.

She's somehow easier than El Lagarto was last chapter. So, to make it seem less so, there's a restriction placed on us: she's impervious to pilot damage. But at this point, each of your fleet members should have a loadout that can damage at least two different types of health. The mind spheres are more dangerous, and, like with the MOD Master bounty, they gang up on one party member, but they're ridiculously weak to Marie's main weapon. She goes down in two turns, and we spend the third sweeping up the last mind sphere.

So, um, what do you plan on doing about it, Tez? Sue them? Even if we had a functioning legislative system that wasn't just Ros sentencing prisoners to death, I don't think you want to tangle with the most powerful tech corp in the known universe. They're the ones responsible for backing up people's memories, so who knows what else they're capable of? With the technology at their disposal, they no doubt have creative ways of neutralizing any dissenters.

And that's the last mission for the episode, but before we head back to the cryo-chamber, let's check out some more bounties.

The Twins. There are two enemies on either end of a two-branched map, and you need to dispatch them on the same turn.

The Collector. Stumble around on the surface of...something until you find the enemy, then beat it.

The Excavator. Wait for him to pop out on your side of the planet, and hope he does so right next to one of your fleets. Your reward is his weapon, a drill to pierce the heavens.

And now we end the episode. How did Typelog manage to get its hands on Tezkhra's research? Why does the Black One want Tezkhra dead? Why did he decide to focus on Ros instead? What caused the Mind/Matter Interface Project to go haywire? And more importantly, when does the latent energy thing mentioned in The Reconstruction's epilogue come into play, and when does Mahk turn into Lizard Gandhi?