“I would poison their food first.” (Crys)

“That's... a decent idea, actually. Didn't think of that.”

In the game, you didn't have time to poison food and wait for the guards to eat it. You were speedrunning, after all.

I was still thinking of doing things fast like in the game. Here we had time to weaken enemies first.

“Secondly, I would take out their leader.” (Crys)

“To disrupt the command structure? The leader of the station is a guy named Morzaclair and he stays in the big middle tower, so we'd need to go up instead of down.”

“No, kill the masters of the guards.” (Crys)

“Oh, you mean the leader of all the guard soldiers? The squad leaders just have a different hat, but leader of all squads... I'm not actually sure. He probably looks like everyone else. I've never actually thought about which rando gives orders to other randos. Maybe there isn't one here? If you can spot the top dog, then sure, yes.”

The mid-boss and leader of of Bone Dune Station was Morzaclair, but we didn't need to go out of our way to fight him and there wasn't any particular minibosses under him. But it made sense that the guard squads would have some Hat Mook as the Top Hat Mook, but it was also possible that the station guards operated differently and separately.

“Third, I would set a larger dynamite explosion on the other side of the fortress to distract them from the smaller explosion on this side. Fourth, I would set fires inside the facility and block some of the ventilation channels to spread smoke and gas on heavily guarded areas away from the areas where we are going. Fifth, I would use oil to let the fire spread to above ground walls through parapets –” (Crys)

“Eh? But the fortress is made of stone–”

“No, the bottom part of the fort is stone, but flames will grab the upper parts that are made of wood. Those parts are made to look like stone, but it is simply a coating of whitewash plaster on top of logs to fool enemies into thinking it's all stone. The whitewash protects the wood from fire attacks, but it will burn if it's set on fire from the inside and between layers. Sixth –”

Uh, I need to start taking notes. I had no idea the fortress walls were half-fake. Such details were not coded in the game.

Even though I threw coins and shot arrows in the game to distract guards all the time, placing dynamite as a distraction was way too slow and wasteful for speedrunning purposes, so I had never seriously considered it here. Obvious casual strat in hindsight.

I felt my self-confidence plummet when Crys continued to list over dozen cool ideas to make our mission easier. There were surprisingly subtle interrupts and exploits in the real world too.

As Sun Tzu said, a battle is won before it starts.

No, wait a moment. What did we decide about the food earlier?

“Wait, wait, hold up. Poisoning their food supply is not actually a good idea. The prisoners eat the same food.”

“They give the same food for prisoners?” (Crys)

“Yeah, this place is not like Suleiman's prison islands. Caliph wants to keep prisoners in good condition so that they survive the onerous tests with Strangers tech. They don't starve them without a good reason.”

“I see. Interesting.” (Crys)

“It's also a carrot-and-stick method. They reward those who obediently follow orders and ace the tests, and punish those who resist and fail tests deliberately. The more obedient ones are kept on upper floors. That's another reason why there's no benefit in opening their cells...”

My words trailed off when another memory from the game suddenly popped into my mind.

The leader of the soldiers squads, was there actually one? A certain anonymous NPC that was part of the game, if you played this flashback level casually and used Crystal Pencil as your character instead of Rainwoman... in that case, you had to interrogate the squad leaders to find one specific squad leader who had a glyph lock combination for a security door between upper floor and lower floors.

I had memorized the invariable combinations after first games, so I had never used that route or strat after that and forgotten it.

But there was no way to be sure if the combos were the same here, or always the same like in the game.

I should assume they regularly change the glyph combos, and use a different combo at this point in time.

I was seriously taking this segment too lightly.

“Crys, I just remembered something I overlooked. You were right, we should actually find the Top Hat Mook leader of the guards, take him alive and interrogate him to get glyph lock combos to a security door between floors. I remember one set of combos, but they might not be the same after all.”

“Describe the lock.” (Crys)

“The door has rotating wordlocks with five glyph passwords, sixteen glyphs in every cam. Chair smash combo doesn't work and using dynamite underground is something I'd like to avoid...”

“I see. Picking the lock would take too much time. Kimono, we need to learn the passwords from a guard leader.” (Crys)

“Did you say torture, brother?” (Kimono)

“Yes. Use hammer and chisel.” (Crys)

Kimono seemed eager to start immediately, and of course Crys would go for the sculpture torture instead of common denailing.

In the anime, torture always happened out of frame, like in the episode where they pried info out of a noble by breaking his spine segments one by one starting from tailbone. Cruel, but efficient.

Hopefully the Top Hat Mook spits out the lock combos fast. I don't want to watch or hear sculpture torture.

“Do you know where to get Root of Veracity on this continent?” (Crys)

“Well, the Cipangu wing spiders don't live on this continent, so compounding is not an option. Caliph has potions in Reignland and Rukhkh, of course, but they're not easily attainable... Why do you ask? Do you think we need it here?”

“No, simply confirming possible sources.” (Crys)

“Okay, but as I've said before, let's not get into drugs or poisons and stuff like that too much. Even if it's only to feed it to enemies, Rain might accidentally overdose and then spill out our guts instead of her own. It's not worth the risk.”

“Gary, I have a question. Can we use poison on Caliph Tze?” (Dancer)

“No. Anti-poison routine.” (Crys)

“Yeah, Crys is right. Both Caliph Tze and Suleiman have perfected the art of mithridatism. But it was a good question, thinking new strats should be encouraged.”

Most poisons and psychoactive substances that existed in Mu-Ur were too slow and too unreliable for speedruns. Soporific serums, paralysis poisons, vesicant gases – all of them had random absorption times (between set boundaries) and random propagation vectors.

Oh, what's that? You want to throw a canister of chlorine gas in a corridor and then realize later that the ventilation ducts have sprayed a green cloud in front of you? Yay for a self-inflicted speed trap!

When it came to poisons and serums, you usually couldn't buy them even if you had the money because High Hats bought every drop they could find. And if you wanted to make the poisons yourself, then – besides hunting the spiders or bats living in Fireland dungeons that secreted these substances, and collecting tree sap, and then compounding them with alchemical tools – you also had to make antidotes (if there were any) in case you accidentally used them on friendlies or yourself.

And even then, boss-level enemies usually had immunities.

Of course, there were gimmick grind streamers who took their time to collect or compound barrels upon barrels of rare poisons and then poured them all into Reignland aqueducts just to see what happens.

Well, you murdered a swarm of background NPCs, raised your infamy level to eleven and called all death patrols in the surrounding area to hunt you down. What did you expect would happen?

I knew the places where to find and steal these agents, but as much as possible, I'd like our party to follow the Geneva Protocol when it comes to chemical and biological weapons – even though we kind of have walking examples of both in our party. It's a blurry line, but I don't want to knowingly step over it.

Just like in real life, large-scale chemical warfare needs to be banned because it's too broken and spoils the fun for everyone.

When the drizzling rain made the fortress look like misty mirage in a moonlight, we zigzagged through the hour of the wolf, and Dancer set out to execute his lonely mission.

Dancer would set up dynamite sticks next to walls, stables and dew domes for later use, then light up stack of distraction dynamite on the other side of the monadnock, then cause some disturbance with rifle fire, then escape and wait for us to come out of the fortress before triggering the bigger batches of dynamite behind us, and finally join our group later at the preset fallback location at Petrified Forest.

Crys gave his pocket watch to Dancer and I synced it with my timer card to the extent it was possible to sync alien time device to human time device.

We waited with our dynamite sticks and fuses on the southeast side of the fortress.

When the first lights of the dawn came through clouds, it was time to go in.

“Dun dun, daa daa, dun dun, daa daa...”

“What are you doing? Shut up.” (Kimono)

“Sorry.”

Mission Impossible theme kept invading my thoughts, but I had actually chosen a different classic film to be the code phrase for this operation.

“Crys, it's time to…three, two, one – Duck, You Sucker!”

Crys used his rifle to shoot a one stick of dynamite placed next to the fortress wall.

The breaching dynamite exploded at the same time with the bigger stack of distraction dynamite placed on the other side of the station. Good job, Dancer!

After the dust settled, there was a gaping hole on the wall.

“Take fingers out of your ears and move, idiot!” (Kimono)

“...Right, let's-a-go! Follow me!”

The siblings had a better night vision and a higher tolerance for loud sounds and blast waves. When I turned on my light card, they were already pushing through the debris and running to the ventilation towers.

“Or let's just follow Crys, either way is fine.”

Hopefully Dancer doesn't get choked by the patrols.

The underground floors of Bone Dune Station were basically old dungeon tunnels turned into a nice facility with clean white walls. The setup resembled a mental hospital mashed up with experimental physics laboratory.

Crys and Kimono walked in the front, killing the few surprised guards and researchers that stepped on our path. There weren't any modern alert systems in this place, and the people above and people below basically lived in a different worlds, so the information about what had happened on the surface hadn't reached lower floors yet.

The secrecy was biting them in their own leg.

Kimono killed a few servants that were in the wrong place in the wrong time, but servant quarters were mostly empty because they had evacuated immediately after explosions and fires started.

After a certain guard squad leader holding glyph lock combinations was found and enhanced interrogation techniques were used, we made it down to the fourth floor without problems.

And in the fourth floor, we had our first complication: there were dozens of cell keys on the guard room wall, but there were no labels or numbers.

For some reason, I thought it would go like in the game and each key would have a label for cell number.

Crap, this was turning into a slot machine run because the station guards were lazy, disorganized bums.

“Problem?” (Crys)

“The keys don't have cell numbers. Should we just take all of them and try them?”

“If Rainwoman is moved out of her cell constantly, take the keys that look most used.” (Crys)

Yeah, obvious strat is obvious. I chose the keys with most scuffs and smudges, Kimono took rest of the keys that looked unused.

“By the way, there's usually a crowbar in that crate in the corner. That's a classic.”

I opened the guard room crate on the way out and took out the black metal crowbar. But it was heavy.

“Uh, on a second thought–”

I put the crowbar back in the crate. I was already carrying enough stuff.

On the fifth floor, Kimono opened some random cell doors and simply threw a bunch of keys to the prisoners, telling them to help themselves. Most of the prisoners that were released ran up the stairs, opened more cells or went out of their way to steal clothes from dead guards, but none of them followed us down.

One prisoner tried to get physical with Kimono immediately after he got out, but Kimono stopped him with a swift kick in the groin.

I stayed next to Crys and gave instructions on where to go and what to look for.

“Left turn here. There should be two sealed ventilation shafts in the next corridor. We'll open the first one and take a shortcut to the sixth floor. Don't set anything on fire here, this area is part of our return route.”

“Sure.” (Crys)

I hoped for good RNG after we reached the seventh floor. In the game, if you played this mission as a Rainwoman, you started the mission from a random cell. Sometimes it was near the guard room and sometimes further away, but most of the time it was somewhere in the middle.

We opened four middle cells and there she was.

We found Rain.