Part 44

Putting the last Arcane tarot aside for a moment, we head to Luminous to do the Light Magic quest.

Much like the Shadow Magic quest, we gotta head off to some themed labyrinth to do this.

Always discriminating against the robots...

Our numbers are a bit thin with the other guys taken out temporarily, but seeing as how the only way to get into a fight here is to screw things up, we shouldn't have a problem.

As you might expect, this place has a lot of lights.

Time for another silly puzzle! We want the light to be shining on the symbol up there.

So, by twisting the mirrors a bit...

...we can open up the door.

Things get a touch more complicated later with switches and color filters, but I've done this damn quest so many times now I can pretty much do this in my sleep.

The final area yields a few items with the right color of light. Light Blue gets you this armor, which is pretty decent for the early game (not too useful for us now, though).

Yellow gives us money...

...and purple nabs a Sanctuary Stone. Any other color gets us into a fight, with the exception of...

White, which gets us outta here.

And that's it. That's the whole Light quest. It takes all of five minutes.

Hmm, I see we have over 7500 credits (why yes, that's why I went and did the Light quest now). Time for the second of this game's little tricks...

Takonomics, or, "Let's Play Money Making Game."

This is the infinite credit trick. The name Takonomics apparently comes from the name of the tester who discovered it or something. That's what the Brady Guide says, anyway. I think it's kinda catchy.

We start off in Nelson.

Note the dancing skeleton. He's not important to this trick at all, I just felt like pointing him out.

GoldIngots sell for 500 credits here, which is much nicer than the 1000 credit price over in Koorong. Lute is so fascinated by this fact that he buys as many ingots as he can afford.

Next, we head back to Koorong and start selling our ingots. The selling price goes down each ingot, and we sell until the price falls to exactly 520 credits (note that in game, you wouldn't sell them individually, you'd press down and increase the number you're selling until the price falls to 520, then you'd press the button). Note that we have less money than our roughly 7500 starting total, but we've also got 8 ingots left.

Now it's back to Nelson to buy more gold. We've got 18 now, which is more than the 15 gold we had before.

Now we go back to Koorong and lower the price to 0 (once again, not actually confirming the sale, but just increasing the number being sold). Hmm, but there's still 4 ingots left.

So we reduce that to 0 as well. So the last four were counted as 0, but when we press up to decrease the ingots being sold...

The first one brings the sale price back up to 40. So we reduce the number of ingots we're selling to 0 (making the number match our current total of ingots, which is 18), then sell down to 520 again. But the game's essentially raised the price of our ignots by 4 levels due to what we did earlier, so we'll end up with extra money. We use that to buy more ingots, come back here, and next time we might have 9 ingots left when the total reaches 0, allowing us to raise it 9 levels this time. If this doesn't make sense, just understand that we want to be buying more ingots each time in Nelson and making a little more money each time in Koorong.

Eventually we're making decent profit over the original 7500...

And eventually, we've got tons of money. There's a few more notes on this. You need at least 7500 to get the math working, but the more you have initally, the better, as it'll go faster. It takes a few trips to get things started with just 7500. Never try to make more than 50,000 credits total at one time, as I believe the math gets wonky there and screws things up. You can always buy stuff and then come back to raise your total back to the mid-40k's. Also, after you've done this, keep around 20k on you at all times, that's just enough to get you to around 48-49k in one trip to Nelson and back. This trick makes buying things like magic and items like PoweredSuits much easier, since grinding money in this game would probably take longer than the actual quests.

Alright, time to finish the Arcane quest. Off to Baccarat.

Dammit, I sat here for like a minute trying to come up with a Travelocity joke, but it's just not happening.

NotEmelia over here talks more about the gnomes.

And of course one pops on out.

We follow it, because...well, that's what you do when you see a gnome in a casino. Duh.

Hey, at least we don't have to chase a fucking mouse this time.

The jerk doesn't hold the elevator for us!

Seriously, I had to go down like three floors to find another elevator! It would have delayed him all of five seconds to hold it, the prick.

Ah, so close. Had she said "Stop!" instead, the MC Hammer joke would have written itself.

I'm having trouble understanding her motivations here. "You're chasing gnomes? I wanna go too!"

Oh, right, you were the bunny girl with the unique sprite. Man, what are the odds?

Lute is charming, as always.

Down into the large series of caverns inexplicibly hidden beneath a casino parking lot...

We finally come across a stash that would make Scrooge McDuck envious (well, actually, he's probably got more than this). I'm not sure a solid gold car would even work.

Oh great, they're retarded. Or Smurfs, maybe.

They're also argumentative, like all small people.

Lute is very direct.

You need at least 4 ingots for them to hand over the card.

Luckily, I came prepared. They will take all of the gold you're currently holding though, so don't go do this in the middle of doing Takonomics or something.

Yup. Also, that's why I waited to do this until the end of this update: I needed to make enough money for Takonomics first, since you've got to spend at least 2000 to do this quest. That's right, this whole update was about money. Nifty.

And this makes four, so...

The Arcane gift is ours. That means we can go pick up TimeLord now. But that'll have to wait until next...time.