Side Hustles
Previously, our heroine made a new friend, beat up some guy and his raccoon pets, and got her kill stolen, along with part of the quest reward.
Fetch quest time. Find 10 scales and give them to this guy. Quite a few enemies drop them. This is because of the alien that I mentioned earlier. Everything, both people and animals alike, that was exposed to its influence grew scales somewhere on their body. This even includes our friend Devon, though the art style made it hard to recognize immediately. I just thought he was a burn victim or something.
There are a number of these fetch quests in the game, and most of them do reward you with money. Almost as if like in real life, you need money to get anywhere in this game, and since the plot revolves around our heroine being short on cash...
I had to do a bit of searching to figure out what this is referencing. For those unaware, it's apparently a reference to a riddle from Virtue's Last Reward. No, I've never actually played it.
More importantly, the phrase is a password to enter the secret shop on the beach.
Zizi Virtue? Really? I have no idea where you came up with this name, but clearly it wasn't from your French classes, if you ever took any. You gave this black market shopkeep a name that's also a childish way to say penis. Surely someone
Anyway, Dick Virtue over here runs a black market shop that also doubles as a lost-and-found service. Right now, it only contains a gun that we can't buy.
Now let's go back to check on the furry in the woods.
Enemies will sometimes drop their souls when you defeat them. You can turn them in to her for cash, and some other special rewards. For example, you can get an accessory for Devon that let him charge up magic power more easily, and thus, use his "spells" (hitting people with a bat) more often.
Oh right, I haven't explained how his magic works. In RPG Maker, alongside HP and MP, party members can also have TP, which works the same way as MP, but builds up when the user attacks or is attacked. A number of RPG Maker games make use of this mechanic, among them the Lisa games. Devon's magic uses TP, even though it's not labeled in the UI as such.
Okay, time for a very special mission. Remember Miss Massacre, that one adventurer we met at the bar earlier? She wants us to meet us at the abandoned warehouse downtown. I'm sure that we can trust her, and that it won't end up to be some kind of trap meant to rob us of our lives, or worse, our hard-earned quest money.
The warehouse is not only abandoned, but full of winding paths, metal detectors that force you into inescapable encounters, and worst of all, it's utterly lousy with scorpions. They hit fast and hard, especialy the mutated ones.
In the depths of the warehouse, you catch up with Kyrie, who is cornering a terrified man, who seems to be this warehouse's manager.
Now, did you think her last name was just an edgy moniker? It turns out to be more apt than you think.
This whole time, while you were busy dealing with the local wildlife, she was on this crusade against what she sees as the corrupt elements of society, including this executive who outsourced his own staff to save a few dollars.
And here it is. One of the game's main themes, if not the main theme. The world is a cruel place, where the masses suffer under the boots of the privileged. in such a world, all you can do is rage against them, until they can no longer oppress you.
And then she fights you. She has quite a few skills to boost her damage output...that all cost HP to use, so she goes down really, really quickly. Also, we are not friends, we literally just met!
And here's our third party member! She has exactly the same skills she used when you fought her, meaning that you have even more health management to keep track of!
Ramona is never going to pay her rent, isn't she?
Anyways, vigilante murder and bashing scorpions' heads in makes you work up quite a sweat, Good thing there's a bathroom right next door.
Oh come on! We just had a boss fight, you can't just spring another one on us! At least he's only slightly trickier to deal with than Kyrie, since we have three party members and he has a pretty basic skillset that doesn't involve sacrificing health.
Never mind that we nearly aided and abetted a gruesome murder, let's go have some chow!
No doubt that that makes for an extremely awkward dinner, having to listen to her justify how she kills people with hammers.
I'll leave it to you to figure out what she meant by this.
Normally, you can take the bus between different areas for $1 for ride. But now that we have three party members, there's a chance that you'll lose an item whenever you ride the bus. But you also have the option of using a rideshare service, which is more expensive, but keeps your stuff safe (and somehow even works when you're indoors). And as for the equipment, you can just pay a visit to Dongs Virtue and buy it back.
This here's the bounty office. As you would expect, it's where you can accept bounties to hunt down for cash. They give exactly $500 each for taking them out, which is more than we got from either of the Adventurer's League quests so far, so if you're really intent on paying rent, keep this place in mind.
The first one we can feasibly take on at this point is the Restroom Killer, whom we just met back at the warehouse, but that doesn't count. You find him cleaning the bathrooms at the casino downtown, literally right down the street from the bounty office. Okay, I guess I understand why he's become a killer. Have you seen how people treat them?
Fortunately, he's exactly as strong as he was 10 minutes ago, that is to say, not very. Moving on.
Next bounty: a magical deer that prowls the woods. It only shows up to attack distracted adventurers.
Fortunately, we have a surefire way of keeping the party distracted.
It seems every single indie game has to have a fishing minigame these days. There's nothing I have to say for this, really. Just move the cursor to the fish icons and mash the confirm button to reel them in. You might be tempted to go for the big fish, thinking they'd be worth big bucks, but since this game is intent on trolling you, the big fish will more often than not just end up being a sea bass that sells for practically nothing.
There's even some worldbuilding tied to this minigame. Like most of the other wildlife in this world, the marine life were infused with magic when the alien arrived. This problem was further exacerbated by the influence of someone or something called the Siren. All this aside, I can't imagine that magic-infused fish would be particularly safe for human consumption.
Once the party is well and truly distracted, the Hell Deer shows up. You know, If I were a deer deformed by alien magic, I'd be a bit wary around people too.
It has exactly two attacks, a regular attack and an AoE attack. So it's not hard to whittle away at its nearly 3000 HP.
Turning in these two bounties gives us a total of $1000, more than we've earned over the course of the game so far. Even if we consider the cost of healing items and equipment, that brings us more than halfway to paying our rent of about $1800. Could this be it? Could Ramona finally be able to pay her rent? We'll find out soon enough.