Enderal impressions (part 2)

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@ dyslexicfaser: great work :)
At least you felt sorry for Calia after dooming her by choosing Jespar ;)
14.03.2019 11:09Ragnarok hat geschrieben:
The Aged Man is the previous Pyrean Prophet
The Black Guardian has seen many cycles, and (if he's not lying) the Prophet never survived before. But the legends say that the Aged Man is even older than the Guardian :wink:
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14.03.2019 06:34badgesareus hat geschrieben:
One other sort of NPC I wonder about is the woman in the water in the Aged Man's "basement." She's being patient for him to do -- what? One mystery that hasn't received much discussion.
I never really got around to guessing about her, did I?

I'll offer two ideas, and I think they're both pretty plausible but completely at odds. And we'll never know if one of them is true, or if it's some third thing. That's just how this game rolls, I guess. In both ideas, I think the lover IS some former member of the Cycle, some emissary or Black Stone wielder or... something. It's where the Aged Man is in relation to her that could diverge so wildly.

1) As Ragnarok suggests, the Aged Man was the Prophet, or some other emissary like the Archmage. After all, he calls himself "an observer, a fleshless eye." Fleshless is a direct reference to the emissaries. Probably older than the Pyrean cycle, as Badgesareus suggested, since he certainly feels like he's been doing this for a while. He has this shit down pat. His lover – perhaps his Calia, since she seems rather more accepting than a Jespar would be of all this, but perhaps some other role – did not. Perhaps she wasn't even an Emissary herself. But you know, Fleshless, death isn't necessarily the end. So he's in the process of doing something, trying to bring her back. Perhaps siphoning power from the Beacons or the cycle itself or time or who knows what.

In this hypothetical, the Aged Man survived his cycle (perhaps by finding a magic there-and-then-not manor house?), and the cycle was thereafter altered to include him. That's why I think him the Archmage, since he had the Word of the Dead, but honestly he could just waltz in and pick that back up once the cycle is over, cleaning up a bit before the next actors take the stage. The High Ones and the Veiled Woman know of him, but do not consider him a threat because he's playing ball. Maybe he's trying to flip the table under their noses, maybe they know what he's up to and aren't worried, the same way they were never worried about Arantheal as the Ruler.

This would suggest some intelligent design on the part of the trial-maker, able to incorporate unexpected variables; this isn't something running on repeat by an absent god. Something, perhaps the Veiled Woman, perhaps something above her, is steering this ship. I'm not sure if that's comforting or the exact opposite.

2) The Aged Man was/is a part of the cycle, akin to the Veiled Woman or the High Ones. I'd hypothesize a counterpart to the Veiled Woman, myself, just for the nice Man/Woman duality. He's part of the trial, and has always been tasked with seeing the Word of the Dead into the hands of the Prophet. The 'observer' part of his comment might support this.

The lover would be an emissary herself, from some previous cycle, and somehow, he fell in love with her and tried to rescue her from her fate. The Black Guardian is pretty clearly mistaken about the Veiled Woman; just listening to her talk during Jespar's quest, it's pretty clear she has an ego and something like feelings. She always felt to me like she doesn't want to be misunderstood or mischaracterized, she's just shite at trying to explain herself. Perhaps because she's seeing all eventualities and realities at once. If I were some 8th dimensional super-being, I'd probably struggle to make myself understood to those limited 3rd dimensional types, too. I don't think it would be impossible for a counterpart of hers to fall in love. After all, unlike the Veiled Woman, the Aged Man has a character to play; Arantheal knows of his Gajus persona, the Lightborn knew him as someone to step warily around. He interacts with humanity pretty much flawlessly, if mysteriously.

Damn, I'd play a DLC starring him a la Daud's DLC from Dishonored, in a heartbeat. 'A day in the life of the Aged Man', sign me up.
I like exposition dumps to answer questions, not raise more of them.
Can't really argue with that one. The Black Guardian gives out some answers as he sees them, but since he's an unreliable narrator we don't really know anything for certain. There's a thick vein of hopelessness running through this game I think, even as we (hypothetically) win, that feels very different from the usual straightforward power fantasies of Western RPGs.
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Late as usual. Sorry, as usual. Took a trip to New York, got four wisdom teeth removed, fun times had by all. Onward!


The Takeaway: Endings 2

… To the Black Guardian. I already talked last time about how I liked the idea of having the Guardian be more visible during earlier parts of the quest, and replacing the Veiled Woman’s last appearance with him talking you through getting back to him/waking him back up. Let’s set that aside and talk about the Black Guardian physically for a minute:

The aesthetic of the Guardian is pretty much a dead match for the Starling tech we’ve seen through the game. The blocky gold metals and the eerie green flames; the Guardian itself is a super-sized Centurion. This is the aesthetic of modern Starlings like Agnod’s crashed ship, or Kurmai’s Gertrude, or Horst. The aesthetic of the <Old X> side-dungeons which I’ve been assuming were old Pyrean ruins all this time but were probably just the Starling cities that didn’t zoom up into the sky. It’s the aesthetic of the Star City that the Guardian will shortly recommend I flee to.

This is all especially interesting, because the Prophetess comes to the same conclusion (big stompy gold robo = Starlings) and the Black Guardian is adamant that he is not a Starling, and is in fact older than them by far. Now sure, from a Doylist perspective (that is, the perspective of a real life reader, outside the text), the similarity was probably just to save on assets; they already had a giant robot, so rather than make a whole new asset for this guy…

But it’s more interesting to consider this from a Watsonian perspective (that is, from within the text). And for that, we consider what the Ancient Starlings have been for us, thematically. I’d call it ‘superhuman knowledge brought down by human hubris.’ The Starlings were the source by which we learned of the City of a Thousand Floods and the Numinos, and so is the Guardian here to lay some final truths on us regarding the nature of the cycle. As the Starlings survived the Cleansing by using their great knowledge on some desperate ploy to hide from the Cleansing, so did the Guardian. As the Starlings eventually fell to infighting without the High Ones needing to do a thing, so shortly will the Guardian. The Starlings’ mentality doesn’t exactly map to the Guardian’s; so far as I know, the Ancient Starlings never tried to rule humanity from their floating sky city the way the Guardian would. But their purpose in the story is really very similar.

It was a good choice thematically for the Guardian to wear their colors, even if it does mean two entire civilizations were actually that gaudy.

The meat of the Black Guardian conversation, besides explaining the Guardian’s own backstory, is the Black Guardian laying out the two paths for the endings. He recommends fleeing to the Star City in no uncertain terms, but when you press him he acknowledges that you could also run up there and break the machine. Neither option is terribly appealing; the ‘heroic’ choice involves blowing up Enderal, while the ‘cowardly’ choice involves spending tens of thousands of years alone in the Star City, waiting for humanity to repopulate.

As a side note, I wish we got a little more about how exactly humanity spontaneously repopulates in between cycles. The Guardian has been watching this happen dozens of times, does it seriously not merit any commentary? Whoever runs the trial is clearly pulling the species back from extinction just to run through the same exact cycle again. Whoever’s in charge, I feel like the cycle is broken. They repeat the exact same set of variables for millions of years, kept on track by a bunch of sadistic ghostly a-holes, hoping for… what? That humanity will win this time?

If that’s what you want, just make us perfect noble super-beings, not the terribly flawed creatures that we are. There’s a certain absurdity to it. Like, at least with the Mass Effect cycle, new races were rising each time. The Reapers didn’t pick humans back up, dust us off and send us back in every single time to see if we do something clever this time.

Anyway. Endings. It’s interesting that the two endings map reasonably accurately to our two companions; Jespar has long considered running for the hills (help back on by luuuuve), while Calia is a regular little paladin, evil shadowy monster form not-withstanding. Does Calia go with you if you flee the way Jespar does? That would seem weird. I’d expect her to take a crack at poking the Beacon even if you insisted on running away to Star City.

Actually, at the time, my thought was that the endings seemed weirdly bleak for this game. It was difficult to pick apart why I found the bleakness unusual, though, that’s where the ‘weird’ really comes in. Fan-favorite characters have been dying throughout this entire game. I’ve been tossed from cutscene defeat to deus ex machina save half a dozen times. Enderal is a shithole populated by xenophobic peasants, supercilious noblemen and vast quantities of things that want to kill you. At this point, I like maybe three people still alive in the game, and that number will soon be cut by two-thirds. So why was I surprised that the cycle continues grinding away as it always has despite this pebble in the gears?

I think it’s because of the Veiled Woman.

Twice now she’s popped in as a deus ex machina to save the day, three times if you count getting me tied to a corpse and tossed overboard as a ‘save.’ So when she appeared after Tealor left be down in the dark, and sent me on my way with a side of cryptic nonsense, I just kind of assumed things were back on track. I mean, apparently she literally broke a part of the cycle (Prophet dies after Emperor leaves her) over her knee with a loud snap. Except then she provides just enough of a nudge to get me to sacrifice myself for the good of all or to save literally one whole person from the cycle.

I’ve never gotten the impression that she has any limits on her power or autonomy; she regularly breaks the laws of space, time, life and death whenever she shows up. If she, say, seemed to be pulling a fast one on whoever was running the cycle/trial, keeping things quiet and covert and slipping a little help under the radar, then I’d more easily accept this kind of bare-bones help-but-not-really. If she seemed to be struggling to emote, or didn’t have a human form, I might assume she’s part of something much greater and only able to break away for these tiny moments. But instead, she seems to be in charge of the whole thing, and kind of sassy about it. With her kind of power, the only real explanation for being stuck with this choice is that she cares enough to change things but not enough to actually ensure I and my friends survive. I expect she doesn’t like me much.

Question with the benefit of hindsight: So we know magic is taking phenomena from a sea of potential timelines that are apparently pretty similar; the ‘somewhere, Constantine’s beard is on fire’ concept. So is the Veiled Woman pulling this gambit on an infinite number of slightly different Earths? Or does only one timeline have to succeed to win the trial and get to not be destroyed? If the humans in the Constantine beard-fire timeline succeed, does that save everyone in every timeline? No way to know. Just a thought.

The Black Guardian ends the conversation with a pretty effective bait-and-switch. He gets you to push a lever that begins sucking you into him and (presumably) will let him out. How does this work? Why is that lever on the outside? Would the lever let him run around in my body, or is his old body still doing fine in that weird watery casket on its chest? I have no idea, and I guess it doesn’t matter anyway because Jespar shows up to save the day.

The trick he plays on the Prophetess is really effective, I think half because I’d kind of zoned out over a half-hour-long conversation and half because this hasn’t happened in like 20 hours (and not in the main story). There’s only a couple of recurring villains to talk to, and nobody is really trying to convince you to come along or of how nice they are, honest. None of the High Ones try to get you to change sides; they know they’re going to win just like every time before. Sha’Rim isn’t trying to turn you against Tealor Arantheal; he’s not a republic serial villain, he completed his master plan five minutes ago. Coarek talks like an evangelist, and he does have your soul ripped out if you lie to him, but he’s mostly focused on Tealor. No, the only villain who ever actually pulled a bait-and-switch like this is Pahtira, who tricked you into sticking your hand in a black hole. Which is appropriate, since she also ended up in a giant robot. The guy who ended up in the Black Guardian was either their cycle’s Yerai or their cycle’s Pahtira. Parallels all up in this bitch.

Honestly, the Black Guardian is one of the high points of the entire game, even if I think there are small ways to tie him into the story better.

I don’t really have any problems with the way the endings are constructed. Yes, they’re dark, but not that dark. Sure humanity is dead (again), but living out your life in a paradise-city in the sky with your boo isn’t the absolute worst thing that could happen. Yes, it’s weird that interrupting the Beacon in the middle of doing its thing causes it to explode, but I’m not a magitech engineer. I think that some visual cue that wandering around as everyone else has their soul torn out is difficult might be nice, but it’s still nicely atmospheric without that.

My problem is that most of these people – all the biggest names left alive on both sides of the war – are comatose. Archmage Lexil Merrayil is mumbling deliriously but you can’t talk to him. Sammael’s dead. Commander Eren and Coarek are checked out. Coarek’s other lieutenant, the rogue girl, isn’t even around. Calia and Tealor get a few lines, and that’s great! I just want more of that.

What was that cultist-looking motherfucker Sammael’s deal? Or the rogue-type girl from the island? Who knows. How did Commander Eren manage to kill a guy who can tear your soul out of your body? Iunno. Is Lexil still keeping the faith, certain he can come up with a way to stop this, does he wish he’d left us to go looking for his mom like he talked about that one time? Eh. How does Coarek feel about fighting his way in here only for Tealor to flip the table at the last second and accidentally kill everybody? You’ll just have to imagine. How do those random no-name Keepers that have been keeping me abreast on Order gossip all game feel about all this? Sorry, they’re all dead.

That’s the easy way, if you just want to record a few more lines. If you want to keep the quiet, maudlin tone of the ending.

The more-work method would have been to get back up there right in the midst of everything. It’s easy to give up and flee to the moon when everybody is already dead. What if, instead, Coarek with a bloodied Natara at his feet was shouting up at Tealor to give himself up like a good martyr, and Tealor was steeling himself to make the hard choices? If Eren and Sammael were locked in combat there in the courtyard? If Calia had unleashed the Beast and become the terrified savior of the few, faltering nameless Keepers? If Lexil was frantically prodding the machine and muttering ‘Stall him! Give me five minutes, I’m sure I can come up with something if I just had five minutes to think!’

And there you and Jespar are. There to tip the scales, right? Not… as such, no.

Could you talk Coarek down, engage in a proper three-way debate with the fate of the world in the balance? Would Coarek deviously use a dialogue to let Sammael get close enough to tear out your soul again, dooming the world?

Question with the benefit of hindsight: Just a random thought here, but if I’m a Fleshless… some kinda person-copy made by the High Ones, or a magical construct or a soul-made-flesh or who the fuck knows… how can Sammael just tear out my soul like it ain’t no thang? Who are you, buddy?

Ahem. Could you kill Tealor and everyone else in that courtyard, guarding the Beacon like Cerberus at the gates of Hell? Could you abandon your friends in their hour of need, turning your back on their last entreaties and screams? Could you force the last staunch survivors of the Temple into the pods, even be it against their wills, determined to save any you could? What if the High Ones showed up for one last gloat, secure in the knowledge that humanity always dooms itself?

Maybe having a bunch of options here would have been too complex to code, or not fit the themes and style SureAI was going for. But I can’t help but regret all the exciting possibilities that the endings we got closed off.

The endings also have one last trip to the dream house, which was also kinda short-changed. In the ‘break the Beacon’ ending Catharsis, you have to click on the four tombstones out front of the house, symbolically choosing death. In the ‘flee to the Star City’ ending Brave New World, a ghost of Jespar leads you away from the house, symbolically symbolizing your flight from death. Both solid, symbolism-wise. The problem with these is that I had no idea what the fuck I was supposed to do, and had to consult an online guide before I even noticed the tombstones were there.

Plus, look. I recognize that Daddy was a creation of the High Ones, and they already got everything they wanted out of me. There’s no reason for Mr. Nightmare Fuel to show up. But I was pumped to walk up to the house, rap on the door, and punch Daddy right in his smug, nonexistent face. I’m not saying that I needed to symbolically murder the hold the High Ones had over me like this was Cloud Strife kicking Sephiroth out of his soul at the end of Final Fantasy VII, but it would have been nice, y’know?

We could have had a dialogue with the High Ones, free from artifice because they no longer need to manipulate me (or an independent construct of theirs, since in one ending I’m ostensibly trying to hide from them). Or it didn’t have to be Daddy. I would have accepted Aixon, that weirdo sort-of self from the drug-trip prison vision; how annoyed would that asshole have been if he realized I totally slipped the net? Heck, I would have accepted a conversation with Dream Jespar, like, ‘Look, it’s been a hard couple of days, take care of Real Me, okay?’ since he's here already, and all. Or a future vision, interacting with Future Jespar rallying the world against the High Ones (you get a voice-over explaining how things went in the ending in which you died), or letting me talk with some Fleshless from the past, or whatever! The Echo is weird, I would have bought almost anything as being possible at that point.

I dunno, I guess I didn’t have enough talking despite the Black Guardian being like 75% talk.
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Do you feel catharsis having written all that? :wink:

There have been countless theories and arguments, over the 2+ years since Enderal was first released, about who or what were the Veiled Woman, the Aged Man, etc. I think the general assumption by most was that Enderal is like some Rubik's Cube, if you twist all the facts and hints just properly you'll get the correct answers. But I wonder if maybe there intentionally are no answers, that SureAI is just messing with our minds and they are rolling on the floor laughing as the players try to logically twist the cube when SureAI has fixed the cube so that you just can't get all the colors to line up perfectly. SureAI are like the High Ones, amusing themselves watching from above as we try to fathom the unfathomable.

My personal preference is for the theory that, as once suggested in the game, the protagonist actually did die in the ocean when thrown off the ship, and in that moment before death which stretched out and out, dreamed all that happened afterwards. Maybe you just dreamed that you went to NY and had your wisdom teeth pulled.

Well, the good news is that SureAI's Nehrim is scheduled to be released on Steam in 2020, so you have a year to rest up and ready yourself for the prologue to Enderal. :thumbsup:

Meanwhile (having finished all the new stuff in FS) I'm going back to play ELEX some more, highly recommended for those who like Piranha Bytes games like the Gothic & Risen series.
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04.04.2019 07:26badgesareus hat geschrieben:
Do you feel catharsis having written all that? :wink:

There have been countless theories and arguments, over the 2+ years since Enderal was first released, about who or what were the Veiled Woman, the Aged Man, etc. I think the general assumption by most was that Enderal is like some Rubik's Cube, if you twist all the facts and hints just properly you'll get the correct answers. But I wonder if maybe there intentionally are no answers, that SureAI is just messing with our minds and they are rolling on the floor laughing as the players try to logically twist the cube when SureAI has fixed the cube so that you just can't get all the colors to line up perfectly. SureAI are like the High Ones, amusing themselves watching from above as we try to fathom the unfathomable.
Enderal has a very different sort of feel to it than the usual, that's for sure.

You're not the hero of the story, except in the sense that the High Ones are playing out the same story across the ages, over and over again. You're an actor.

You don't beat Enderal, you survive it. If I was going to start stereotyping, I'd say it feels eastern European, like Metro or STALKER or The Witcher.
My personal preference is for the theory that, as once suggested in the game, the protagonist actually did die in the ocean when thrown off the ship, and in that moment before death which stretched out and out, dreamed all that happened afterwards. Maybe you just dreamed that you went to NY and had your wisdom teeth pulled.
I could dig being a butterfly dreaming, I think.
Meanwhile (having finished all the new stuff in FS) I'm going back to play ELEX some more, highly recommended for those who like Piranha Bytes games like the Gothic & Risen series.
I might play Witcher 3 or the new Dragon Quest game. Maybe I'll post this on tumblr or reddit or somewhere first, now that it's pretty much done. I dunno.

There is a feeling of catharsis, no lie. I've been playing this game for like a year and a half, which I think is longer than any one project I've ever done in my life.
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I've been playing this game for like a year and a half, which I think is longer than any one project I've ever done in my life.
If you play Witcher 3 (+ the expansions) as diligently as Enderal, you might break that year and a half record!
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This’ll be the last update I make as part of this series, I think, until and unless I run through the new content from Forgotten Stories. Thanks for sticking with me through this long (long, long…) project. It’s been something I could use to unwind for a couple of hours a week (or month, I can be honest) writing stream-of-consciousness blather about something I enjoy. It’s amazing how easy writing this series has been, compared to things like short story work or fanfic.
And now, off we go with…


The Wrap-up:

This game has been a pleasure to play.

I don’t claim it’s a perfect game. Maybe only an 8 or a 9 out of 10, if I were a game reviewer assigning a number based on a gut check. Some of that is the limitations of the game engine; I think the landscapes are generally better than base Skyrim – many are legitimately beautiful – but there’s no getting away from Bethesda’s poe-faced and stiffly-animated character models. Some of that is the occasional gameplay decision that didn’t really land; that platforming segment in the Living Temple, some way unforgiving difficulty spikes throughout the game, especially early on, and my loathing for cutscene defeats has likely been noted once or twice among my readers. And as my readers would notice, while I like almost everything plot-related in the game, I think some parts of them could stand to be deeper or better.

But the story is deep and evocative. It tackles complicated, adult subject matter with purpose and determination. And by ‘adult subject matter’ I don’t mean ‘sex’, although hey, there’s that too! And nobody makes a big deal of you getting into bed with your love interest now and then. It’s just a thing consenting adults do when there aren’t Vatyr to be murdered or mystical evil doo-dads to find. But I mean issues of life and death (and undeath), of racism, of responsible use of power both political and personal, of rhetoric and hope leading people into evil, and of course, religion. Looots about religion. Sci-fi is the traditional medium for exploring real-world issues with enough distance that people don’t have knee-jerk reactions based on real-world events, but clearly it can work in fantasy too.

People are allowed to have good reasons for the things they do, even the stupid ones that get people killed. People in general in this mod are great, barring a few bizarre exceptions in the side-quest content like the addict girl who seemed normal at first glance, then had a psychotic break, locked her brother in a cage and tried to murder him and the heavily-armed malcontent he hired (you). The voice acting is top notch for any game, which makes the VA work incredible for a free mod.

The worldbuilding is dark but lovingly crafted into a fascinatingly cracked society. Enderaleans are a bitter, xenophobic lot, trapped in a strict caste system, and strongly religious in a world where God is dead. Barring a few kindly souls, they generally hate you, individually and institutionally. But I still want to know everything about them. Let me know more about Sublimes, SureAI. Give me more proselytizers and town criers in the Ark marketplace. Let me poll random fleshmaggot victims about their political opinions. Give me more lyrical gushings from the greatest terrible poet I’ve ever met. Teach me about the Rhalata grubbing in the muck, Natara’s supercilious reams of Order history, the Qyran intellectual polygamists and Arazealean witch hunters and asshole Kilean merchants and militantly atheistic Nehrimese, the Starlings dreaming of their lost home in the skies, the Skaragg barbarians with Lovecraftian horrors locked in cave paintings, the myriad wonders and terrors of the Lightborn’s reign. An unnecessary amount of the world SureAI created seems to be populated by bandits and monsters and undead (wandering the trackless wilderness from monster to monster is somebody’s jam, but it isn’t mine), but the parts of the world with people in it pop more than Skyrim’s werewolf warriors and lonely, sullen mage colleges and nonsensical thief guilds and empty, pointless orc villages ever did.

The music is absolutely wonderful. This is a game where I have stopped while riding through a random farm and listened to a track from start to finish. If the music team for Enderal have other work on Soundcloud or CDs or whatever, please, let me know. Because, wow. And the minstrels in every tavern might be the same two vocalists (one male, one female), but the songs are hauntingly beautiful and further color Enderal’s background with a steady, thoughtful hand. I mean, sometimes that background is fucking weird, like with the Song of the Vatyr, but that shit still had a lot of thought put into it.

I think that’s what makes it easy to get so into Enderal, in the end. A smart plot is necessary, of course. Well, a plot, anyway; intelligent narrative design is appreciated but probably not required. I’ve played games where the plot was vague nonsense, and that can be okay if there’s something else to focus on instead. People to interact with, characters you can wind up and watch putter along, you need those too. But then you give those characters backgrounds that bounce and catch against others, creating a tapestry of competing ideologies and beliefs. That’s gravy. Then you add art and music, poetry and history and culture. Collections of religious fables and encyclopedias. Mythology and beliefs; competing mythologies, even. A bonus. Extras. But as you pile on all these separate pieces, the world becomes richer and more interesting. It becomes the sum of all these things, and even more than the sum of its parts. In little ways, it becomes a true world, that you can watch from the other side of your computer monitor. If you’re lucky, and SureAI has done their job right, the secondary world comes alive and you exist there instead for a little while. SureAI put a lot of thought into everything to do with this world. They worked so, so hard to create a world with heft, with the weight of history. A living world makes it easy to want to live there.

Well, maybe not live there live there, Enderal is kind of a shithole. But you get what I mean.

Better to end this retrospective here, I think. I can feel it getting heavier with – not the weight of history, but of all that pretentious arthouse critic stuff. So I’ll just say: so long, SureAI, and thanks for a year and a half of enjoyment.
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I have this vision of you riding off into the sunset on Whirlwind. Adios! :thumbsup:
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