- I grab a Myrad and hook up with the leader of the initiation and the two initiates further northwest.
The level of snide I'm receiving is impressive even for Enderal, where hateful xenophobia is usually the default expression. Signet Leader Jorek's voice actor in particular does a great job of conveying his opinion of my general worthlessness as a human being.
One of the initiates is nice, seems to be impressed at the way I took on an entire mercenary company and saved the day like a big damn hero the other day.
My knowledge of story structure suggests someone is going to die off before this quest is over. They're wearing bright red; they are literal red shirts. I just can't decide if it'll be the mean one (less visually interesting than the girl with the face tattoo) or the nice one (pathos), or even the boss and we have to fight our way out without him. And then the mean one would probably blame everything on me; he's kind of like that.
- It seems that the forest we're going into is home to a particular breed of giant mushroom that makes arcane fever worse.
Why is it always mushrooms around here?
- Now, you might look at the following screenshot and think 'how much wine did you have before setting out, dyslexicfaser?' but this is what visions look like.
Right, so Arentheal explained what this is. Apparently as the Prophet I'm getting visions from previous cycles, which are
basically Future Vision because the cycles are
just that similar. Everything is the same. Predestination. Creepy.
Hypothetically the lines said by the mysterious voices will make sense only later in retrospect, but I'm sure I'll forget about them by then.
- Later, we meet a friend! He appears to be suffering from a bad case of pink-eye. He does a lot of chanting about 'She wanted to leave, she wanted to leave, now she'll never leave', and there's a corpse in a pine box he's building for her.
- This is what Red Madness looks like: I'm not sure if it's named for the color of the eyes, the caked blood around the mouth, or the general transformation into murderous psychopath.
Dunwar (mean initiate) blows him away with a lightning bolt, and it's kind of hard to fault him for it.
The bossman faults the hell out of him for it, though, saying some apothecarius would give their left arms for a chance to study a live victim of the disease. You'd think they'd be warier given the way Yero (possibly not a victim of Red Madness, but they don't know that) exploded and killed 30 people.
I almost feel bad for the novice, but I'm sure he'll say something that annoys me the next time he opens his mouth.
- So we get to the sacred spot, and the bossman drops the fact that the gods are all dead. I knew this already, and most of the non-Enderal world believes it too, but this is news to the initiates. Dunwar flips his shit so hard I'm half surprised the ruin doesn't land upside down.
He blames the nice initiate for being a witch, the bossman for being drunk, the order for taking in Pathless like us two assholes (me and the nice one), and the world for being pointless and meaningless now that the gods are dead. Bossman shouts him down in proper drill sergeant style, but I almost have to be impressed by the size and shine of this stupid kid's brass balls.
- There's a kind of suspicious stammer in the bossman's voice when he tells us to drink down our [Strange Potions] that sets off warning bells in my head.
My vague worries are
immediately proven prescient when I hit the deck and my vision fuzzes out.
- I wake up in a prison cell. I'm actually kind of surprised this hasn't happened to me before, you know? It's just been that kind of week.
At this point I'm about evenly split between 'Is this a vision quest?' and 'Is the Signet Leader trading in nubile young Keeper initiate flesh?'
- I'm locked in with a new guy named Aixon. At first his ramblings sound like it's the latter and I'm going to have to go it slave gladiator style for a while, but then I add another possibility to the pile: 'Is Aixon one of my past selves, or a past Prophet, or something like that?' because he is talking kind of mystical and like this always happens, in between whimpering about somebody called the Suppressor.
He posits a kind of interesting idea: he says that I died a week ago, sunk to the bottom of the ocean tied to my old peasant buddy. This whole thing has been a fever dream. Magic shit, you know?
I don't think that's actually
true, but
- I'm not entirely sure how I get out of the cell. Like, the wall actually changed into a door for me.
Aixon is
just as confused as I am, and I'm really impressed with his voice actor right around this part. He absolutely nails a voice half 'stunned like a poleaxed cow' and half 'dare I hope?' with a touch of 'why couldn't
I do that?' thrown in for good measure.
Right around when instead of fighting prison guards I'm stabbing ghosts, I'm going with 'Vision quest thanks to a dodgy potion' but I'm not entirely dismissing 'Temporarily dead (will probably get better).'
- I'm reduced to a knife and a hunk of Endralean Crusty Bread (just like old times!) but the prison didn't remove my ability to summon a fire elemental that one-shots the ghosts.
There's corpses and ghosts and hanged people and traps. No Suppressor, though. I die once to a spiked ball trap, but otherwise this segment is a little spooky but not very hard. I find a skull labeled 'Regret' which I have no idea what to do with. I end up dropping it in a minute, when the exit door sends us right back into our prison cell. My knife disappears.
- Aixon starts pouting just because we're probably going to be tortured or whatever for trying to escape, like a baby.
I decide to catch some shut eye while we waited for the Suppressor, but three days later still nothing happened. Afterrubbing my face against every wall, clicking on everything in the room and sleeping in Aixon's bed, I decide to punch Aixon in the face.
- Apparently, that advances the quest.
Aixon isn't sure if I figured it out or just got pissy, but he drops the act. He's me - somehow. All the little whimpering, scared, stupid feelings I'm keeping deep down inside while I play the big hero outside.
Okay.
- I wake up, and Jespar is waiting for me. That's nice.
Except I swiftly deduce we're entering Inception territory, right around when Jespar's voice changes, other characters start teleporting into the room, everyone turns into beings of pure red air, and the room gets all... like this:
- I'm still dreaming, but it's pretty obvious something's hijacked the dream. And it is not impressed with me.
Which, duh. I walked face first into a spiky ball trap like a minute ago and died. I die to wild animal attacks all the time.
- They namedrop The Cleansing, which is probably just The End of The World in smoke person speak.
- Then I actually wake up! Calia (the nice initiate) greets me.
This has been one hell of a ride, Calia. One hell of a ride.
- You can get into her backstory (she killed the family that took her in too, maybe! We're like murder sisters!), but I'm still processing main quest stuff right now and have no time for Calia.
Also, Dunwar's probably not going to wake up. Ever. Probably bossman's fault for laying that 'the gods are dead' bit on him before making him fight his inner demons.
Bummer, I guess, but mostly at this point I'm just glad it's him and not me.
The Takeaway:
Enderal's weird dream game is
strong. No idea where this is going now; there's been a few leads dropped here and there. Peghast, Signet Stone, these new smoke people. Who knows? First things first, probably go meet up with Arantheal again. Maybe yell at him some, for not filling me in on having to fight evil smoke monsters from beyond our reality.
At the moment though, I'm just going to have Calia take me on a tour of the sun temple and try not to think about how my insecurities are apparently a cringing white guy with an emotive voice.