the LAG

I really like the vibe of the Steel Feather. It's not just a clone of Leaves in the Wind with new people; they're meaningfully organised differently, and in a way that makes sense given their environment. It makes me wonder what the revolutionary cells will look like in the other three zones... and what exactly their plan is for governing once they win. (I suspect that Mist's rev cell will include or be led by Gikyo and Other Guy.)

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It's inconvenient for the vibe that Timasca's music occasionally overwrites the Steel Feather's. And rather odd that they're growing plants underground. They have Cursed, with at least one being Earth specialised, but Quill is anti-magic, so... how does this work?

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The clearance check for the explore segment works really well.

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Don't like that Jiro and Yuman vanished halfway through the run, along with the music, but the setup of the first mission is very good. I mean, it just furthers the establishing-the-character theme of this quest; this mission is a Steel Feather-type, not a Leaves in the Wind-type.

Honestly it's rather unclear what the Leaves actually do to me. They steal information, but they're in Auburn, which is the backwater of Fruma. What else do they do? Juke Zhiraok into giving them documentation? The Steel Feather, by contrast, has a clear set of operations; even if the end goals are opaque, they're still accomplishing significant things by running a mostly self-sufficient refugee camp that doubles as a resistance base. This is good work for a broader revolution, and especially compared to the Leaves.

...I have already forgotten why we went to the Roughworks.

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That gather puzzle is really interesting psychologically. The time pressure makes you want to pick up as much as you can... and despite being explicitly told I shouldn't pack heavy items, the fact that you can, and that the bag superficially appears to have unlimited space, meant that I did. I actually failed it twice! I'm not sure if I could have taken more than the four outlined points (could I have fit the street sign? That'd have been a funny steal...), but I didn't try on my third attempt.

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The timeline on this quest is weird. There's no apparent timeskip after we murder the guards (and, side note, I like that it is recognised that we are killing people during quest combats - although this isn't observed for ambient overworld fights against the military, poachers, and Roughworks folk), yet apparently there was enough time for the military to react and to initiate a lockdown. Several hours must have invisibly passed in the tunnel.

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Hm, Soosu's a bit of a trope. Not one I'm super familiar with, but I've created a one-woman-industrial-revolution before. Rather old character, actually, I'm currently putting her to use as an esoteric storm goddess in a fantasy comedy. This line gives us a bit of a timeline for the industrial revolution in Fruma that's... inconvenient for Corkus, unless Corkus is only a century old, which admittedly is entirely possible. I wonder why she did it? Like I've said, industry doesn't happen in a vacuum, and the conditions in Fruma aren't really the ones that should produce it. Is the revolution concurrent with Fruma establishing its surreptitious connection to Ragni and shipping soldiers?

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Rex implies that Sovereigns are known for having unique blessings. The only arcane abilities Zhiraok has exhibited are supernatural martial arts and self-resurrection, and I believed both of those to be typical of Sovereigns. Soosu is seemingly a general matter-manipulator, although I suspect she'll specifically manipulate earth or solids.

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Oddly, it seems like I can only ask one question here. Did I fail prerequisites that would have let me ask more?

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The map location of the Steel Feather encampment caused an Opificer to spawn inside. That's probably a bug.

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Yuman's guitar looks ridiculous. And... why exactly did he bring it to the Aihan rescue? He didn't use it.

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I was suspicious, from the moment Yuman's music became plot-relevant, that it would be a background track. And it was. That only makes sense.

Flowers is cute.

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Second Soosu face and I think she's adorable, fun, and... small...

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Apparently Yuman uses his guitar to fight. That makes sense. I was slightly disappointed when I got no reactions during the fight to the tune of "jesus christ you are a war machine". But sadly it seems like the WynnPC is not being written as some sort of attack dog with antiestablishment views. It doesn't quite make sense with the apparent lore that the five classes are, like, fundamental universal constants. Unless the rumored sixth class is a bard.

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The bit with waking Zeph up is good. I like it.

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All this talk about morning people but they are underground there is no morning.

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Good humor here. I like the conversation. This is good writing. Especially the gag with Sui eating bread, although some of it is lost if the chat happened to get in the way of her face.

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We've got a lot of unnoted timeskips here. Several days apparently passed with the only timeskip cue being a single sleep.

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Sui references a sea of mana around her. It's unclear whether this is something that's normally done. Zeph references sparks, but I don't remember if he particularly said they were ambient. I imagine that Twain-like natural magicians maybe have the ability to draw upon that vast well of natural arcana to do more interesting feats? We manifest a lot of Sui-like temporary matter conjurations - my Mage creates and sustains Ophanim, and temporarily creates Ice Snakes, and Shamans manifest a bunch of stuff - but we don't ever seem to achieve Twain-like scales of magic; Theorick was something else.

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I like how names turn white to signify they've acted already. Green/white is a useful name distinction, and setting green people to white is an excellent way to show that they're no longer doing things.

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I didn't notice the secret passage in Yumanu's forge when I went by it the first time. Maybe it wasn't there. I don't think he's a traitor, but my suspicion is an undisclosed connection to Soosu - for one, he could kitbash an entire bionic leg, which is suspicious, although if it's only a peg leg it'd make more sense. More importantly, he's created two energy weapons; those presumably require delicate electronics, and one's a laser rifle. (Both seem to be powered by regular magic? Unclear.)

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I'm starting to see Soosu's character. She's a womanchild - possibly straight up an actual child, prevented from aging by the Sovereign ascension. She's noticeably small. Despite the cutesy aesthetic of her mechs, however, she's deeply intelligent; seemingly a competent administrator, and she's written many advanced books in addition to Sparkles the Unicorn. Is she going to be the psychopathic type? A brutal manipulator? Someone easy to turn good? She's clearly hiding her robotics; these weren't seen outside her mansion, which has a regular guard force. (Her soda brand is Dr Soosu, which isn't super silly.)

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Right, so, we've got another secret collaboration with a Sovereign. This is concerning; it frames all the revolutionary cells as secretly under someone's thumb. When you look at it, neither site was secure, and Soosu has a lot of leverage over the Steel Feather. Her mode of speech is seemingly childish - I suspect she really is a child Sovereign. But she's not super childish. (I expected her, from the name, to be a grey-haired thin, tall granny.) She uses Yusanu as some helper in the lab and as a student; she seemingly is most worried about the noise (metaphorical and literal) from the Incident.

Explodes the robots to demonstrate that she doesn't care about them (if ostensibly because she can resurrect them, although I suspect she wouldn't explode Flowers) and also to show off the matter-manipulation we were told about.

I wonder if Cerid's related to these people? The Corkians brought a lot of Roughworks technical know-how to Corkus, but they clearly weren't able to advance as fast as Fruma - they moved faster in robotics and artificial intelligence, but they lost out on basics like "stuff that doesn't blow up" and "trains". Fruma also, bizarrely, has more advanced consumer goods despite only having two wealthy districts (Auburn and the Roughworks are impoverished, and the Mistwoods presumably has little in the way of an economy, given that it is entirely depopulated). I don't have a head for the timelines here, but I suspect Cerid was Corkian-born. Still, I bet Soosu will be retroactively revealed to have had a hand in the knowledge of those escaping engineers.

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I agree with Rex in this affair. Clearly, the deal was needed; Soosu's corrupt enough to allow this in exchange for a relatively minor favor, but she has all the power here - if the deal is broken, she crushes the Steel Feather, it loses all credibility and its vaunted infrastructure. But it obviously had to have been disclosed. A resistance group is going to fight soldiers!

Luckily, Yusanu isn't evil. His loyalties are askew, but he's cowed by Rex and willing to follow along with us finally hooking into the main plot of Fruma. (Rex's argument that the Sovereigns are the big baddies in Fruma wouldn't be correct in real life - societies don't work like that - but I'll accept it for the purposes of narrative.)

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Seems like Soosu's blessing is an instant kill in combat. That makes sense.

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Easily snuck-through lab with rotating security cameras that leave constant gaps. It's a narrative necessity. If the laws of story and game design weren't in place, Soosu would have cameras covering every angle.

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The door opened with a red button is bugged. It looks open when you haven't pressed the button.

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I don't know how to spend the Steel Feather tickets...

Soosu apparently hates her blessing, and something about it she "can't stop". At least two Sovereigns can teleport; Zhiraok had a super-dash, so I reckon he's one. Quantum mechanics apparently exists in some form in Wynn and allows teleportation. (Describing the physics of a fictional world is a fool's errand.)

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She apparently cancelled this project due to some sort of disaster. Maybe quantum mechanics in Wynn sends you to the Warp.

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Alright, my supposition was correct. Soosu was turned into a Sovereign as a child, almost immediately after the Queen noticed her immense natural talent for machinery and spontaneous development of not-economically-justified industrial revolutions, and it gave her clinical depression. To be fair, Zhiraok commented that the process was physically painful and, if I remember correctly, had lingering pain after completion; presumably something similar happened to Soosu, and the reason she's somewhat unhinged now is that she never got to properly grow up. She doesn't have much in the way of emotion; the only thing that can give her passion is her work, and it's unclear whether that's a facade. She has a deeply fragile mental state, her books vary in text color due to it, and she resents her status as a Sovereign because of how disoriented and empty it made her. Also because she's apparently become disconnected from human lifespans.

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Yusanu's comment about 'leverage' is that the Queen has promised to unbless Soosu if she finishes the project. This is almost certainly a trick; either the project will kill her, or the Queen won't follow through. Soosu's depression seems to be partially because the mark of Sovereignty has screwed her up and partially because her power has made her struggle to empathise with humans, since it can't detect souls and therefore can't distinguish between the hydrocarbons of a person and a tree. Poor girl. She gives me Bonesaw vibes... like, 70%.

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The Device is oddly small. It makes the Spirit Well noise, but I assume that's not intended, BtB can't possibly be canon.

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Zhiraok thinks Soosu is acting like a child but isn't one. Both of these points are half correct. She is not a child and not an adult, she is deeply screwed up and about to be betrayed by the Queen. (Looking forward to learning what her deal is.)

Soosu seems to be deliberately annoying Zhiraok and not paying attention to him; he's still chasing us. I'm not sure what her angle is myself. Either she legit doesn't care, or she somehow knows that we're stealing the Device and is aiding us by distracting him and Flowers without seeming to drop her guard, or... ugh, I'll progress the dialogue.

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The tone is about to take a nosedive. We're narratively obligated not to succeed here - unspoken plans are usually reliable, but the fact that Syndra is going for the kill, and not us (and also that we're only halfway through Fruma's territories, there's a bunch of other quests listed in the content book, and we haven't followed up on Tasim or the tournament), means we will almost certainly fail, and Syndra will die, throwing the rebellion into disarray and leaving us significantly damaged since whatever Syndra knew about the situation went to the grave with her. We'll probably learn a little bit of Her Majesty's deal during the attempted assassination, she'll demonstrate some power or knowledge we didn't expect her to have, etc. Aside from Syndra, other people might also die; Mora's main character trait is 'fatherly', which makes him a viable target, and any of the three brothers, being new, could die (although I suspect if one specifically were to, it'd be Yulie, since he hasn't been super present in quests). Next quest will also probably explore what Jira's deal is, since they don't seem to live in the station.

 

I wonder if there's a diegetic reason for the Sovereign flashes at the end of every quest. They're nice as a bookend to close the quest on a standard note; ending a quest with no flashback will be a good way to establish that things Went Down.

The Resonance Weaver being non-replicable is obvious. It wouldn't make any sense for this macguffin to exist if losing it wasn't a problem. Still, the fact that there are arts lost to Fruma is notable. Fruma's making progress; Fruma is powerful, and their magic is advanced in many fields. But there's always something forgotten in a fantasy story. The question is: who was better? Who, out there, possibly, in all the histories, could have provided an artifact greater than anything the Frumans could make, with their technology and souls and royalty, that wasn't obviously Light or Dark?

The answer is "Cosmic Nonsense" (I happen to have been spoiled on Majin having Cosmic abilities) or "It's The Olm". The Time Valley Olm aren't that far from Fruma; a Cosmic rock would produce the vibrancy of the Resonance Weaver's core item. Given that it's a "lost art", it's probably the Olm.

Seeing Soosu sad is still sad. She's an antagonist, but she's sympathetic, and, more importantly, she's cute. She might find a happy ending still.

I've just realised that I should probably keep a collection of the gear items these quests make. I might have already sold them all off, but I can track which were rewards with the Content Book, hopefully, and they seem to be thematic - this quest's reward was "Espionage".

I believe I've already sold Meliorism, but the rest are going in charbank. And Meliorism would be easy to retrieve on my Warrior. Looking at the ones thus far:

• Queen's Recruit: No item
• A Journey Home: No item
• A New Beginning: Meliorism. 'The belief that the world can be made better through effort.' We're introduced to a resistance movement against the obviously tyrannical government. There's hope for Fruma to get out from under the Queen's oppressive, stratifying thumb.
• The Cursed One: Divided Loyalty. Although not revealed (to my memory) here, Syndra has some involvement with Zhiraok which she's evasive about. Divided loyalty will continue to be a theme amongst the major characters and plots.
• Revelations in Fall: Sureshot. I'm not sure what this might refer to. Rex?
• Solidarity of Steel: Amplifier. Teamwork strengthens the rebellion, and moving to the Roughworks gives Leaves in the Wind better supplies.
• The Price of Ingenuity: Espionage. Most of the quest consists of stealthily moving around, and spying on the activities of the Sovereigns. Nobody in this quest's plot has the full story: Zhiraok may or may not know about the Resonance Weaver project, Soosu doesn't know what the orb is and may not know the end purpose, none of the rebels know what the incomplete Resonance Weaver does, and none of the coronals know who stole the Weaver or how.

 

Zhiraok mentions him in the first cutscene with Soosu. "Have you been taking lessons from Oru?"

Maury and Harvin also mention him in Office the Rails.

Roughworks OST is called Restless. I'd recommend using the OST channel, but avoid logs for spoilers.

In the part where you and Zeph trail Zhiraok through Espren, Zhiraok reveals via conversation his ability to do things quicker via magic acceleration, referred to as "tripling up". He also teleports during the boss fight, which is because his Blessing is time manipulation.

On the beta, there were more but they always explained Soosu no matter the choice. I'd assume its cuz they forgot to write that dialogue so it was a quick fix

 

I don't use OST channel because It Does Not List The Locations Of The Tracks. I don't have any idea why. XavierEXE did.

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It is rather hard to remember all the dialogue and plot events. Lot going on. And there's Gaming. Still, it makes sense; that's two for two on personality-thematic abilities. The workaholic can accelerate time and the inventor can manipulate matter, and neither of these abilities are actually psychologically useful (the first one enables Zhiraok's problems and the second one causes Soosu's).

Where's it revealed that it's time manipulation specifically?

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Boo. Hiss. That's #5 that I'm aware of now. Why did they push this now? It's still incomplete. What are they going to do when they patch in the missing quest content for people who already finished the quests?

 

Read the descriptions.

Only implied, but it is listed as time manipulation on the wiki.
Granted, there is a great deal of evidence that is, from literally of his boss attacks, the log about having "all the time in the world, and I still need to be faster", "no one can keep pace with you" I'd also be willing to accept that it isn't necessarily time related, but that his Blessing lets him apply mathematical concepts to spacetime (which is honestly a lot cooler.)

 

Doing Great Sap Siphon, because I finally found it while wandering.

I like this puzzle. It's a classic, and fairly tough. I'll fumble at it for a while; it'd be easy to solve on paper, but I'm under time duress.

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Worked it out. A number of failures. ADHD eurekas slipping halfwise into the void. I worked out that if I fill C, move it to B, fill C, move it to B, then empty B, there's a 3 in C. So I did this process once, moved the 3 to A, did it again, moved the 3 to A to make a 6 in A, did it a third time, then moved A's 6 to B and filled up A since its need matches its capacity. And kboom.

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So that's the story of the Industrees. Makes sense. Soosu's archetype would seem mechanically-focused, but we've seen her working with plants, too, and the Industrial District is primarily industrial agriculture. I'd imagine the initial five years of breeding weren't really wasted.

We don't have the option to smash the mother tree here. We could. (I'm not sure how it connects to the Industrees being infertile. One wonders about their lifespan if all of their sap is being collected.) The Industrees seem horrible, another depravity of the Industrial District... but, really, they aren't that bad. Trees can't think. They look ugly, yes. But it seems like the system is essentially automated, with only a few workers left managing the biology; improve their working conditions and there really aren't any bad ethics in this project (aside from the replacement of the original trees in the Roughworks, and I suspect those could be replanted in places - besides, the damage to the ecology here is already done, the project continuing isn't bad). It's actually an interesting writing choice. The image of an Industree is nature violated by cruel, callous exploitation... but that's only an image.

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What do you even get from cutting Industrees? The wiki doesn't say.

 

I had a slight suspicion, so I checked wiki to find the max level of Professions and saw that it was exactly one less than that of Industrees. That's... a very strange choice. Why are we being told that these are cuttable, but not allowed to cut them? Are we going to access secret Even Stronger Professions in the Penitence District?

 

I had supposed that the Flush was a quest location, only to discover it was a cave. But we're going into Timasca sewers for a quest anyway!

Slightly dissonant that we couldn't just snipe the raccoon at the start with weapon attack.

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I like the motif use in the sewers.

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There's a lot of wheels to turn. Also my wand is broken for some reason. I hope there are fiendish puzzles here.

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I saw the same leaves as the ones on the Corkian shelter and was disappointed that I couldn't cut them. Except now I have a rake and I can! Parallels that are significant either direction you do them! Yay!

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This sewer is in an obvious state of disrepair. Even discounting the necessary-for-a-game puzzle elements, it's mossy, full of leaves, with constant clogs and sealed doors, and an unfueled generator. When was the last time someone was down here? Perhaps it's a cycle - it's undermanaged, so it gets full of squatters, so people are afraid to manage it.

Soosu is offhandedly implied by the Queen to not be doing a good enough job managing the Roughworks. And... well, it's in a less than ideal state. The Queen might not care about the rampant worker abuse, but there's slums everywhere, addicts to questionable sodas, and a lot of clogged pipes, unusable factories, and deprecated rail lines. Soosu gave the Steel Feather their base, but it was, originally, presumably, an actual train station that was abandoned for actual reasons. What is she doing??

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The water release effects through the doors are extremely clean. I appreciate that.

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One somewhat disappointing thing to me about Fruma is the number of inaccessible, fake paths. I observed this even before the update actually dropped, with the Fruma Gate having vantablock passageways everywhere that were completely solid and fake. I notice this phenomenon in a lot of builds; I'd argue that there should either be less entrances or there should be things past them.

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Raft construction.

There's a bit of a theme I've started to notice with the sidequests being primarily puzzle-based. It's fine. It's good. It gives sidequests clarity and definition.

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Now, this seems like it's an open-ended puzzle, but it's actually not. You have exactly nine parts, just the number of slots there are available. A little saddening. I was looking forward to more 'special effects' than 'moves' and 'you can sit on it'. The block-placing graphic is good, though. I like it. It's unexpectedly good. We also saw this on Off the Rails.

Why were the Auburn sidequests so bad? Both of the Timasca quests I've done were pretty good.

...Hm. That sailing sequence was short and linear. I suspect I'm about to get more complicated rafts to design and use.

 

Two fans, six planks, and a seat. And we've got a corner up ahead. The solution here is obvious.

Damage graphics are good. Control is... not. It's fiddly and extremely manual, which makes it difficult to navigate, especially since the raft doesn't stop immediately.

In the tall room, there was a perfect opportunity to have a secret accessible by sneaking through the iron bars into the pipe behind. But there's barriers instead. Similarly, there's a perfect opportunity to jump off the lift to follow the silhouette, but instead there's some weird physics effect that drops you instead, cancelling your momentum in a distinctly gooey manner. And there's an obvious pathway with an extended corridor in the parkour room, which, if you jump to it, kicks you back to the start of the parkour as if you'd failed a jump.* Fruma misses these sorts of opportunities sometimes.

*On closer inspection, this is actually the same path we came from earlier, except it's inexplicably drained. This whole room is just the upper level of the earlier room we were in. Odd, because I don't think there were many elevation changes in the raft rooms.

Oh, good, a more complicated raft segment. The rudder is good; it solves the problem I had with the forward-and-left room earlier. I feel like it's setting up several more puzzles.

I like the running theme of the sewer layout being coherent. It's not really laid out in a proper map, but you're able to see earlier rooms sometimes, and you're able to understand how this got you to keep following the raccoon.

Whether or not floating debris in this fourth(?) raft segment is collidable is inconsistent. That's not good.

The silhouette was indeed Fichu. I suspect we'll be using them on our raft later. The addition of new parts is a fairly slow process; makes it feel like it's a long-haul puzzle quest. How many overcomplicated sewer tunnels can one Soosu need? And why can Fichu access locked doors?

...Tickets? And a metro-like butterfly blaze? Soosu, what the hell is your subway system. This is a flooded, rotting subway track. How did this happen? Why does it link directly to your sewers? Why are your sewers not maintainable? This is a mess. I'm seeing why the Queen thinks you're a bad administrator. Wait, an actual train just passed over there. Aren't you concerned about your image here??? Why are they running on waterlogged rails?? There's windows!! Aren't you worried about crashes, or people seeing the sewage-filled train station full of bugs?

...it just spat at me??

Fichu clearly does have some experience exploring these tunnels. I suspect some sort of affiliation; they're making a gift for Soosu, so my wild guess is their parent(s) run the sewer. Except apparently they don't have a key, and they're a thief. Good walkaround with them. I like the justification that this is indeed stuff from the maintenance crew, who have to do the work via absurd rafts due to the sorry state of the sewers. And the lore that, because of how execrable this is, the water is full of rust and unsafe to drink. Classical industrial district.

Every part at once! One is mission-critical, but really, they all were, and the damage usually doesn't destroy parts anyways. Harpoon vs. Fan... I think I'll take the reliability of the Fan. The Harpoon's faster, but it tends to crash.

...Okay, I'm seeing the value of the Harpoon. These are really tight spaces.

...Damnable, I got Trained. But now I know how to get through with less damage. Ooh, the loading bugged out, okay. F1 reveals that I'm getting thrown into raftless water and repeatedly rerun in this way. I'll /class, but I'll have to rebuild the raft.

...Oh, the raft's saved. Neat.

Getting it through all this is hard. It gets dinged up a lot. If I explode after the halfway mark I'm sent to the start, but it still respawns full-healed at the halfway mark. Weird.

Overall, good quest. Tough, but ultimately its puzzles were not sprawling, and even though there were only two transport methods, they had distinct niches (Harpoon is better for delicate positioning and angling, Fan+Rudder is better for long stretches or easy curves). I get a rubber ducky! Instead of money. And I can't keep my caged raccoon. I suppose I already have one.

 

While trying to fit a circle to Life Before Technology (seemingly in the middle of the Roughworks), I accidentally discovered 'The Canopy's Hideout'. So I guess I know who the Mistwoods rebels are.

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It's comical how much of a scam Slay Hedoro is. 4 Emeralds and -5% rent. Wow.

 

Finally figured out Life Before Technology. It was indeed in Timasca. Looks to be a look at Soosu's invention. Looking towards the heart of this little place makes my screen orange with heat...

She didn't make it alone. Her whole family helped advise her... that's kind of sad, considering what it got her. From looking at the good ol' sepia photos, seems the Roughworks was always a trash heap. It was just brown instead of grey before.

...hang on, they had photography?

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My triangulation was very successful for Hidden in Plain Sight. ...That's not exactly hidden, you busted through a wall.

It's hinted that these raccoons are intelligent, and the wall has a conspicuous raccoon painted on it. Auburn gets foxes and Roughworks gets raccoons; I haven't seen anything for the Mistwoods, and know virtually nothing of the Highlands. Aelumia, of course, would be butterflies.