Part 10
Last time, we looted our first vault and defeated the traps within to retrieve a precious jeweled chest. Now we're heading onward to kill the Lord of the Dynamos.In the first room after recalling, we find a new type of mechanism. What could it be?
Sometimes I swear this game is taunting me.
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We run into a series of uniques, but none of them remotely challenging; I'm going to try something new and stick unchallenging uniques at the bottom of the post. All the flavor, none of the clutter! Two of the uniques are the King and Queen of Hearts (in that order, one room apart); that's probably the end of the Alice-inspired 'card' series of enemies.
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This encounter was quick enough that I had to go back to the log to put together.
I... actually never did find out what spawned those traps, actually. Left the floor before encountering it again.
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On the next level, we run into a new enemy type:
Blinks around and spawns out-of-depth monsters. Potentially worrying. We dance with it for a little while, cautiously, and then it blinks somewhere that I couldn't find it again.
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We circle around the right side of the level. At the top-center, we encounter a pit filled to the brim with ds and Ds. Dogs? Dragons?
Dinosaurs!
Or, as they're known to us, "enormous sacks of XP". With our +25 speed, we get about six moves in for every one they take; but after a little while I stop even bothering to juke their attacks, because with our defense-boost on, they can barely hit us.
There are kind of a lot of them.
We slowly chop our way through them for about five minutes. At the end, we've killed 36 Stegosauruses, 3 Iguanadons, gained nearly a full level and, also, carpal tunnel syndrome. Ah well.
At the bottom-left of the level, we find the object of our quest: the Lord of the Dynamos!
He opens by blasting us. Charming. We retreat back into the entrance to buff ourselves, get in a scuffle with a few other minor enemies who were in the room, and then juke a trap to get into melee range.
...yeah, this is going to be a long fight.
The healing actually turns out to be to our advantage; we're fast and strong enough that he can't heal nearly as fast as we damage him, and every turn he spends healing is one he isn't blasting out those damned lightning bolts. Eventually he falls. I examine my memory: who or what, exactly, was the Lord of the Dynamos?
A... huge electrical generator.
Huh.
(The short story he comes from is remarkably racist, too. Bonus!)
Afterward, we head back to town and start selling things. Turns out that one of the potions we picked up was Augmentation; we can't drink it, of course, but it's very valuable to us nonetheless. Because...
...it gives us the money we need...
To buy a new set of arms! Replacing our poor old broken arms gives us a straight 40-point jump in AC, in addition to minor boost to Agility and various resistances. (Still no replacement for our broken tin torso, which I think we've been wearing since the start of the game? But we'll live.)
Next up, our quest is to kill 13 Steam-Powered Shotgun Sentries on level 27; shouldn't be difficult, just tedious. After that, though, we're not going to take another quest; I've decided those are just slowing us down. Instead, we're going to keep going up, until the game is a challenge again.
Hubris is for characters that aren't giant robots.
Uniques (besides those with descriptions on the main post):