Part 6: Wherein Local Bureaucracy Causes Delays

Music: Morningmist (Tindeck)

Welcome back! Last time, we finally made it out of Darkmoor Swamp and to Morningmist. Why are we here, exactly? I'm not sure, but Zanthia seems to know where she's going, so all is good. Sadly, we lost the assortment of random debris we used to call our inventory in the flight over. Time to start a new collection. That letter looks like a good start.



It's that letter the dragonfly wanted us to deliver. We can also dig around in the haystack and see if anything else made it across with us.



I'm amazed an object made of glass of all things survived that experience, but I'm sure it's going to be useful. We can go down or left from here. Let's go down first.



One man and his pet dragon. Maybe he can help us figure out where we need to go.



Sure. That's where they send most of my mustard crop.
So, do I just follow the yellow-stained road, or what?
Don't get smart with me, young lady.



Aaaah slow down.

All right, all right. Just go through the gate and down to the dock. You can't miss it.
Thank you sir.

Zanthia wants us to get on a boat by the sound of it, and this mustard farmer, or whatever he is, informs us that it's just past some gate. The gate is to the east of where we landed, so let's go check it out.



That's one way of looking at it, but I have a bad feeling about this. Somehow I don't think getting in the city is going to be as trivial as it was made out to be.

Video: Gate Guards (Youtube)



You can't come in.
No pedestrians on Tuesdays.

That's a rather unusual rule.

I don't think today is Tuesday.
You'll have to leave.
No women without goats.

I saw some sheep earlier. Would that do?

So long. See you around.
Nobody's going in today. We're full.

Full? You're a city! I think. How are you full?



Sorry. It's in the manual.
No strangers in groups of one or three.
I'm with the Royal Mystics! I'm on an urgent mission and if you morons don't let me through, the whole country is going to disappear!



Bye bye. Best of luck. Have a nice day.
I can't exchange pleasantries with idiots.

I'm getting Monty Python flashbacks.

Hey you! I'm in a hurry here!



I demand to speak to your superior!
Sorry. We're self employed.

So, in other words, you're not actually guards. You're just two jerks camping out on top of the wall for no reason.

Is there something I can offer you?
Sorry. We're uncorruptable.
Completely honest.

Banging our heads against Dumb and Dumbass here is getting us nowhere. Let's go talk to that farmer again. Maybe he knows how to get past them.



Never go on a picnic with them.
Huh?
They love sandwiches, but won't admit it. They'll eat all yours.
Boy, there's more crime in the country than one would suspect!

Sandwiches, eh? That's a clue. We've got a little bit more dialogue we can squeeze out of this guy, though.

Surely you could get them to open the gates for me.
I don't know. They're pretty strict.
Oh, come on! Doesn't anybody care that Kyrandia is disappearing?
You mystics need to learn to calm down.

Nice sense of civic duty there. At any rate, apparently the "guards" are suckers for sandwiches. It just so happens that we have a little potion for that.



Sounds like what we need is to get our hands on some sandwich ingredients. We need some mustard, ground wheat, lettuce, and cheese. Say, didn't this farmer say he was a mustard farmer? Unfortunately, he won't tell us anything new until we hand over that letter we've been completely forgetting about until now.



That's me. Thanks for the letter.
Aren't you the Mustard King? I'd love to get your secret recipe.
The Greenberry recipe is: Mix ground radish with vinegar. The recipe's been in our family for generations.

I... what? I don't think that's how you make mustard. In fact, doesn't mustard usually contain, y'know, mustard? In Kyrandia, it seems mustard is made from radishes. Okay, fine. We'll play your game. Speaking of vinegar, there's some just sitting there on the shelf. We'll happily steal that.



While we're stealing things, let's have a look in Farmer Greenberry's cellar there.



Aww. Maybe later. There are two exits from this room that we haven't explored yet; west and east. Let's check out what's west of here first. As soon as we leave this location, though...



We get a little intermission!



... starring Marko and the Hand. I wonder what they're up to. By the way, this cutscene plays out exactly the same regardless of whether you rescue Marko from the mutant plants or not, so as far as I can tell, that puzzle is entirely optional. As expected, Marko's place is full of gaudy magician paraphernalia.

I am very disappointed in you!



This is Zanthia's stirring paddle. If you find any more of Zanthia's stolen equipment, return it immediately!

Aww, the Hand looks all sheepish. I'm sure he was just holding it for when we get back from saving the world. He would never knowingly withhold information on our stolen gear.

Anyway, we were going west.



To this location. A waterwheel (which isn't turning, for some reason), some pipes, and a giant stone fist of some kind.

Typical Kyrandia engineering. Why can't anything be just plain regular?

Shut up, the fist is awesome.



The gears must be stuck. Hey! That stick is jamming the gears.

Dislodging the stick makes the waterwheel turn again, kicking the entire mechanism back into gear.



Strange, that looked like a piece of the fishing boat.

I... have no idea what could have caused that. Actually, it's pretty strange, since it took a dragonride for us to get all the way over here. I'm not entirely sure what they're implying about the relative locations of these two places. Anyway, now that we have the machinery running again, let's carelessly inspect it.



Nonsense, electricity is your friend.





Whoops. Another slightly random death, but at least the game doesn't kill you without warning and at any rate you should know better by now than to neglect to save frequently. The big smashy hand is actually a grinder, but right now we don't have anything to grind, so reluctantly we'll move on to another location. Let's try east of the farmer's hovel.



He was picking up another shipment of mustard.

On the way there, this happens, just in case you hadn't made the connection about the mustard yet.



To the east is the garden, complete with scarecrow and weird... elephant thing. Doesn't every garden have one of those? Hey, hold on, what's that just sitting on the ground? Is that..?



It is! We have our Alchemist's Magnet back! If we ever need to turn lead into gold again, we're covered. Now, this field here could potentially have some lettuce in it, which would go some way towards solving our sandwich conundrum.



Those vegetables have some growing to do before we could eat them. Maybe they just need more water?



The hose doesn't work.

The aardvaphant is a sophisticated watering system, but it doesn't seem to be working. We'll come back to this a little later. We've seen most of the locations on this side of the gate now, though, so we should be able to start solving some puzzles. Ultimately what we'd like to do is get started on that sandwich spell. Now that we've got the grinding mechanism working again, if we could just find some wheat, we'd be 1/4 of the way there. Say, weren't there some fields of gold where we landed? Let's go back there.



Uhh. Hi there.

Hey! What are you?
What does it look like? I'm a ghost!

Nope. This episode just got way too spooky. Next time we'll try to muster up the courage to speak with this apparition and see what we can do to placate its no doubt unquenchable thirst for human blood.