Revelation
Previously on The Reconstruction, the Significantly-More-Than-Six Stars guild found out that the Shra basically live in lizard Gor, then Dehl decided out of nowhere to take the guild to a country on the brink of open war, because he's such a bleeding heart.
But first, since we've already explored Rehm's backstory as much as we could, here's some of Dehl's instead!
So yeah, since Space Lizard realized that it would be possible for a player to ignore the questline that leads to Rehm joining the party, and that the entirety of his backstory was completely irrelevant in the end, other than slightly hinting at a villainous faction, he decided to relegate the major inciting events of the main character's backstory to a cutscene more than halfway through this game.
To its credit, though, it's one of the more effective sequences in the game. Here's how it went: one day about ten years ago, Dehl came across his father surrounded by several bloody Shra corpses, ranting about how he needs their blood to cure a plague meant to stop violence that has gone out of hand. I guess that shows the inherent failure of the Sikohlon teachings, which the game never really got that much into outside of the glossary, and even then, its entry on them is awfully brief. Still, using violence in an effort to stop violence is just the kind of irony that some more literary-minded players would take notice of. Then Dehl freaks out and unleashes his magic, knocking his father into a sword that he left lying around. As they say, he who lives by the sword...
Moke is also there, and he seems to have survived the father's experimentation. Dehl carries him to a group of visiting humans. Then when the two of them reach Wadassia, they run into Qualstio, who seems to have been fresh off of burning down Fortifel, as well as Skint, captain of the city's guard. And then the monarchy get's overthrown, ending the sequence.
Now back to the main plot. Remember when Wadassia's food supply was threatened by bugs back in chapter 1? It just so happened to be the only settlement in the world capable of exporting food, so any effect on it would ripple through the entire world. Such as two cities in the middle of the desert who are already suffering religious tensions.
So begins chapter 5, "Free and True." Our guild arrives in the city of Do'Ssha. From the glossary:
<Fih'Jik Language: 'Do`' = Free, 'Ssha' = Home>
A settlement of the Fih'jik people, officially recognized as a populace in FY2303. The residents founded this place to escape the damage inflicted upon Kir`Ssha, the original Fih'jik city, after The Blackening in FY2298. The Dosshians believe that their Supreme One is sympathetic, and would not be angered by changing the designated homeland to this new location. However, the devout Fih'jik who chose to remain in Kir`Ssha despite the extensive damage have branded the Do`Sshian Fih'jik as traitors and heretics, eventually igniting into a civil war that began with the event called the First Dagger Drawn in FY2638, where a border dispute resulted in the stabbing death of one of the High Matrons. (See also KIRSSHA, FIH'JIK CULTURE) Apart from the civil dispute, the city itself is relatively clean and crime-free. Visitors are free to come and go at their own pace, with very little in relation to the zealotry displayed by the Kir`Sshians. A small, two-dock port allows travel by sea for tourism, transport, or trade with the heart of the city.
The game takes place around the year 3000. So these people have suffered tensions for more than 300 years before the conflict got hot, and then (assuming that the civil war ended within a few years) avoided further armed conflict in the more than 300 more years between then and the present day.
More pertinently, this is the home of the leader and founder of the Sikohlon clan, Mahk Sikohlon. I guess he'll be our new client.
Perhaps, but we're already 15 hours in this game and we have not come close to riddihng the world of turmoil like the blurb says, so please, just let us have this.
This is Yfus Crossar. If you've been paying close attention to the screenshots, you might have noticed that one of them had someone mention a Crossar. He's like Santes but with more health and a less useful skillset.
And speaking of Santes, this place is where her sidequest happens to be. It requires her to have 70 spirit, but since she's been in my active party the whole game, and her main attack scales off it, hitting the requirement is no problem at all.
Because apparently she needed it to waltz up to the headquarters of the healing organization that she's a member of, led by the very religious Fih'jik, and blaspheme their god(dess) to their faces. I'm suprised they didn't order her to be executed right there.
But they have a change of heart right after, when they find out that she was in a war and had to deal with both combatants and civilians that were on death's door, then they start acting meek trying to justify their zealotry. Whatever, at least we get some experience points out of it.
So, why are you here? Did you decide to take on the family business of cryptically babbling at promising adventurers? Because that's what he does, warn us about a sailor who'll need our help. But this guild, and Dehl specifically, has this habit of throwing itself into anything that it can see as helping the community (or at least the guild's client du jour, as with Metzino and Yacatec).
There's one line from him that I want you to take note of, that you can see above. Obviously, the guild hasn't heard anything of that nature at any point since its founding, so the one thing that this accomplishes is making him seem just as opaque in his intentions as his mother.
And come the sailor does, bearing a warning about an island emerging from the Drop, basically this setting's version of the Bermuda Triangle. I'm not even kidding, here's its glossary entry:
An unexplained phenomena first observed by Human seafarers in the navigational center of the ocean, in the northerly region of the Berylbrine Sea. Fortian researchers studying the currents and color changes of the water here estimate the sea floor in the Drop to be several million hand-lengths deeper than the surrounding ocean, with a chance of several hundred thousand lengths occuring within the span of one ship-length. Bubbles of superheated air rise and froth from this stretch of water, and the amount of heat generated by the area becomes so oppressive that, even if the crew of a passing ship were protected, the pitch-and-wood composition of the ship itself would suffer intergrity damage and eventually collapse, boiling the hapless crew alive.
So does this setting not have any equivalent to miles? I feel that above a certain distance, using hand lengths would be increasingly impractical.
Of course, the guild eagerly jumps at the chance to face certain death at whatever awaits there.
Inside, there's an enormous snake with arms who tells them that their presence is attractinbg the spirits it's guarding towards them. Okay, so what is this supposed to be, some kind of psychopomp? And who or what would cause the island that it's on to rise from the depths? Maybe it's Fell and her sons, maybe they set this whole thing up as one of those tests that they refuse to tell us about!
As a superboss, the Tatzylwurm is...honestly, a bit of a chump, even outside the fact that it looks a lot less threatening in battle than it did on the overworld. All of its moves are taken wholesale from the first two chapter bosses (as well as the Cryomancer): it has an attack that pushes you back that's taken from the Hemofalcon, an attack that starts at the back row from the Cryomancer, and a poisonous AoE attack from the Broodmistress.
And both of his attacks that it has actually managed to damage us with do body damage, so you don't even need to bother with the other two health bars. The one saving grace is that they both hit reasonably hard. That, and its battle theme is pretty cool.
This boss took me more than 20 minutes to beat, as you can clearly see from the video, yet if I was able to keep Sirush and Falitza alive, it would have taken a lot shorter.
In the ensuing cutscene, it starts whining about how you beat it and are stealing the ultra-rare spirit from it. I get that it's supposed to be subversive, but given its rather one-note performance for a superboss, it makes it seem even more of a sore loser.
But who do we know that can deal with spirits? Ques suggests that one necromancer guy that we met in chapter 2. Never mind that animating the dead and communing with spirits would logically be two different skillsets.
But he has indeed experimented with resurrecting dead spirits, and can help us with the one we have.
Yes, it's him. Tezkhra, the god of the Si'Shra, now stands before us. And while he was known as a god of plague and filth, he looks downright pristine here, considering he's been in spirit form for an untold amount of time.
So what do we do, now that we have a full-blown god in our midst? Sign him onto the guild, of course, which is carried out with surprisingly little fanfare. What does get some notice, however, is how he robs Rulian of his powers, and his interest in Moke, which I'm pretty sure is for a reason beyond his extraordinarily awful stench.
And that's it. The gang's all here. Every single slot on the party menu has been filled. And boy, what better way to fill out the last slot than with a god who has been foreshadowed since the prologue, yet seems to have little in common than what he was portayed to be? Subversive!