TAKE X (6-5-17: The End)

Bonus scene unlocked!



You get to work on the day's tasks - at the top of the list is checking in returned books. The first book on the stack is "Magical Creatures of Ennen" by Makram Amjad. It's the second edition of Amjad's magnum opus - you have no idea what sets it apart from the first edition, since no known copies of the first edition exist, at least not to your knowledge. You always thought that was a little weird.



The book has a bookmark in it, so you flip open to that page to take the bookmark out. Huh - you've never heard of these creatures before.

"The Miracle Men are rumored to be impossible to represent via picture, which is why no such picture accompanies this entry. Legend has it that the Miracle Men are related somehow to the One Goddess. Whether they do her bidding, they were a failed experiment of hers, or something else entirely is unknown - nobody knows for certain whether these enigmatic creatures exist at all."

Weird.

> Escape.



You made it over here none too soon - the guards have made it up to that first structure. You make to escape through the exit, but you stop in your tracks. A brilliant idea occurs to you.

"de Soren. Hold on a moment," you say. When he turns back towards you, you whisper your plan in his ear.

He smiles.













The plan works perfectly. You slip through the exit while the guards are incapacitated.



Dammit. This hallway's not as much of an exit as you thought. All there is here is some weird shining rock on a pedestal. "Okay guys, looks like we might have to swim for it," you say. "Let's get a move on."





"Uh, Mack?" Gio asks, his voice dropping into the wavering timbre he tends to use around strangers, "We, er, might have a problem..."

Grab the orb and scarper!

Befriend!

>They don't seem whole...
>Make them whole

>Mack: Touch the orb on the pedestal

> Grab the orb.



Shining rock on a pedestal in a dead-end hallway guarded by (admittedly really unnerving) monsters? Sounds important to you. You nab the rock and stow it in your inventory.

> Scarper.



You make to duck between the two... things and get out of here, but Gio holds up a hand. "Gio? What's wrong?" you ask, mentally adding that he'd better have a good reason for keeping you from putting distance between yourself and whatever these are.

Gio takes a step forward and turns his head to the side. For the briefest of moments, you're very concerned that he's about to start narrating at them. Instead, all he does is place his hand on what you assume is the shoulder of one of them. "Look at them. They must be hurting, Mack," he says, without looking to you.

"They don't have the capacity to hurt. But they do tend to hurt others."



It's... Pia Amata. Anyone who spends any time in Vezretti knows her face. She's the head of the church - the most important person involved in worshipping the One Goddess aside from, well, the One Goddess herself. She has a serene smile on her face, but that does little towards alleviating your unease at this situation. You've never - never - heard anything bad about Amata herself despite all of the bad news flying around about the church, and that in and of itself makes you wary.

"They can be quite troublesome, the Miracle Men," Amata continues. "They don't have much in the way of conscious thought. The One Goddess gives them a task, and they see it through. That's about it for them."

So these are the Miracle Men... they were always the entry in your dad's book that gave you nightmares most frequently, even though there wasn't even a picture of them.

Gio looks up, directing a cold stare at Amata. "And what task did the One Goddess set for them?"

"To protect the stone you just stole, of course." Amata takes a step forward. You back up out of reflex. "I don't know what it is. And to be frank, neither does the One Goddess. But it's important. That said..."



"I am perfectly capable of defending that stone on my own," Amata says as she waves an arm. The Miracle Men melt back down into the floor as she approaches you, eyes blazing.

ok but we totally need this treasure for [the thing that only Justice knows about rn] uhhhh..... Spite?

Also I'm curious, are the Miracle Men, like, tangible? Can you scoop up Melty M.M. into a jar?

Priorities though. Amata's in the doorway?

Can you just like, knock her off the ledge? There's horrible monsters all around and junk. Like that slime at the bottom.

She can probably handle it, but it'll give everyone else time to go jump into the nasty junk and swim away

So I only now realized there was an archive for this - I suppose it says something about the storytelling that it's been pretty easy to pick up from this chapter. Went and read through it tonight, pretty fun stuff.

Maybe if you hold the stone near de Soren's staff it'll do something? Seems worth a try.

> Knock Amata out.





So it turns out Pia Amata is not very heavy.

> Collect a Miracle Man.



You consider trying to scoop up a Miracle Man in a jar or something, but they seem to have disappeared. Looks like Amata dismissed them pretty thoroughly.

> Hold the stone near de Soren's staff.



"What're you doing, Makram?" de Soren asks as you hold up the glowing stone near his staff.

"I dunno, it's a magic rock, you got a magic rock, maybe something'll happen."

Something aggressively fails to happen.

You pocket the rock again and hope that it's not shining through your inventory. That'd be embarrassing. "Anyway," you say, "let's get outta here. If we can make it back out to what one could loosely call the water before Amata gets her bearings back, we should be home free."





"Or something else could show up. Was this rock hooked up to like ten traps?"

actually it was closer to 15

Well, it might be yet another defense mechanism, but consider this: it's also an exit that doesn't involve swimming through sewage.

So rush through it!

> Actually, it was closer to 15.



"Actually, I think it's more like 15," Gio says.

"What?" you say.



"Oh," you say.

de Soren looks towards the door that just opened in the wall. "I don't know what's back there, but I do know what's in here, and I think it might be worth it to take my chances."

Gio nods. "Agreed. Mack?"

"Let's bolt."



You enter the hidden passageway. There's no light in here at all - even less so after Gio manages to slide the door shut again. After almost falling on your face a few times, you come to the conclusion that there are stairs here, leading up.



This must lead outside. You're as good as free.

Hmm, those eyes seem bad.
> This is one of those rare cases where staring into the abyss will be safer than not, right?

> Those eyes seem bad.



"Uh, Mack?" Gio says.

"Yeah?" you say. You turn to look at where his voice is coming from, not that it'll do any good with regards to actually seeing him, then freeze. Behind you is a very evident pair of eyes, glowing red. You hope deeply that the eyes are attached to a person. Then you remember that red eyes aren't usually a signifier of anything good and instead hope that there's some harmless, thus-far-undiscovered creature that manifests as a pair of glowing red points of light.

"Hey staff," de Soren says, "can you shed some light on this?"

You blink. "You're really getting into using that staff."

"If they're going to lock me up for using magic, I might as well actually use magic," de Soren says with a shrug. At least, the way he says it certainly sounds to you like there was a shrug involved. Implied shrugs, though useful in communication, are notoriously easy to get confused with other similar intonations. You once accidentally insulted Gio's mom because she took your implied shrug to instead be an implied obscene gesture. You're reasonably certain de Soren's not doing that, though you acknowledge that you could be wrong.



"Westley Mugg." Gio takes a step forward. "It was, in fact, the prosecutor himself. Who knows why he suddenly appeared in this corridor. The darkness behind his mask was no more dark than the shadows that surrounded us, but somehow it was more foreboding..."

Mugg turns his head slightly to look at you. "Is he always like this?"

"Yeah. What are you doing here, though, Mugg?"



"Deadman," he says.

That does little to reassure you.

"Palmer Deadman. Mugg was an alias. Apologies for the trial. I came down here to help you escape." He pauses for a moment to take a swig from the cup of coffee in his hand. You saw him do it, and you're still not quite sure how he managed it through his mask. "I was suprised to see you come right through the door when I opened it."

"Why'd you get us locked up to begin with?" you ask.

"Necessary. Trying to earn the trust of some of the higher-ups. I want to get to Amata."

de Soren looks to the entrance of the corridor, where you came in from. "Well, there's your chance. She came down here, and Makram threw her off of a ledge. She's probably still back there."

Palmer's eyes flare, and he disappears. Looks like that's that - you continue the other way through the corridor.



You exit the tunnel and find yourself in an alleyway off of the Piazza, the major thoroughfare near the church. Looks like it's time to get out of town. You can feel the warmth of that glowing rock from your inventory. Maybe you ought to do some research, too.

Dang, we missed our skill-learning chance. Oh well, not much we can do about it now.

Looks like it's Justice time.

That was the last thing I expected, on both Palmer being there and Palmer being still a good guy.
I presumed basilisk. So not looking in those eyes would've been safer.

Hmm, wonder if we can still unlock the skill later, though it might not be super necessary.

Time for JUSTICE

> Select Justice Steele





Your name is Justice Steele, and to put it bluntly, the past couple of days have been a whirlwind. It took a while, but you were finally able to track down a copy of "Notes on the Emek Archipelago." You've spent a large portion of your life tracking down rumors and theories about these islands, but they all contradict each other. Therefore, you decided to visit the Emek Archipelago and set things straight once and for all. The book you checked out from the library has in it a large selection of the conspiracy theories surrounding this place, so you intend to take notes as to what's true and what's not.

If everything works as you hope it will, you might even be able to make a name for yourself this way. Up until now, you've made a living just by playing music in taverns and inns and getting by on tips, but it's not what you would call a comfortable living. But if you can get your name out there for this, you could write a book, you could do interviews for the newspapers... Why, it could turn your life completely around.



You spent most of your money on travel supplies - a tent, food, a canteen, rope, a compass, and a knife. You also have your trusty violin, which you've had for ages and always make sure to take excellent care of. And with the last little bit of gold that you had, you rented a small boat to get to the islands. It took a while, but you finally hit land.



The island that you landed on is pretty barren - it's all just sand. From here, though, you can see the other three islands that form the archipelago. In the book, the author, Douglas Issrie, refers to them as (left to right, from your perspective) Primus, Secundus, and Tertius, since they have no official names.

You look out over the seas and think about where to start.

It is the final countdown!
>Visit the third first

> Head to Tertius.



You hop in your boat and head to the third island. Upon making landfall, you take inventory of what seems to be here. Looks to you like the only thing here is this... tall building. Looks like an average lawyers' office or something to you, though you'd be hard-pressed to explain why a lawyers' office would be out here.

Lots of trash on the ground for this place being abandoned, though.

Supposedly abandoned, anyway.

>Gather important newspapers from the ground

>Are those shells, or are they just paper scraps
>Probably best to collect them, and then scout out Secundus

> Collect the scraps of paper.



You pick up one of the pieces of paper. It looks like... a page of a journal or something. Though it's stained and torn, you can still make out what's written upon it.

P.1
Let these pages be a record of the hitherto-unknown missing chapter of Ennen's history. Even some of my colleagues would not believe you if you showed this to them; however, know that what follows is the absolute truth.

Huh. Weird.



The other scraps of paper here have writing on them too.

P.15
It wasn't an ideal solution, to be sure, but at the time, it's the best we could come up with.

P.8
It didn't seem like they were, at first. They kept to themselves. They stayed in dark places - perhaps the light was uncomfortable for them. Who knows? In fact, it looked for all the world like they just wanted to be left alone. A lot of time passed like this.

You sort the papers in order and file them at the end of "Notes on the Emek Archipelago" so you don't lose them.

You can now access the Unknown Journal at any time and review the pages you have found.

> Scout out Secundus.



You decide to see what the second island is like before anything else, so you take your boat over that way. All that's here is some kind of dome. It looks unlike any other building you've seen before, and it seems to be made entirely from metal.

Is that another scrap of paper beside the dome? Check it out.

>Try to open the door

>Take the scrap but don't read it
>Knock on the door/dome, and then get into the boat and row to a safe distance