The Let's Play Archive

Steamband

by PleasingFungus

Part 16

This update ended up being longer than expected, so I'll split it up a bit.

First up: I decided to take a new quest after all.



Lucky! We've fought these guys before: they're pretty fragile, do little damage, and, best of all, will tunnel straight to us!



Should be an easy quest.

(Ha, ha, ha.)

Heading up, we test out the Hussar powers biosterous reminded me of. Most of these are inferior to our Steam-Mecha powers, but Three-Way Strike could be useful turns out to be very good. It seems to use our full blows/turn on all three enemies, which allows us to wipe out all three wasps (pictured) for a nominal cost in SP. This should be very useful.



Upward. We get into a tangle with some Major Demons - Fuijin & new friends, the Akkadians.



Neither Fuijin nor Akkadians are particularly threatening, but Akkadians can tunnel through walls & damage our equipment (slightly), which is annoying - and Fuijin summon more Akkadians and Fuijin.



We tango with them for a while...



But eventually I decide enough is enough.

More Akkadians await on level 6; we head straight to 5.



Several Steam Drills immediately tunnel over to greet us. Lucky!

We kill them and begin meandering through the level. New enemies!



I am so very excited to kill T-Rexes.

(They aren't threatening to us at all, sadly.)

New items!



A Wand of Teleport Other. Should be very useful!

(Or it would have been if I hadn't forgotten about it completely.)

We end up scumming up and down the stairs to regenerate the level. While we're up on level 4, we encounter this curious message:



Repeating every few turns.

Something's crushing the level, but what, and where?

Back to level 5. We try to rest for a while (low on SP), but have little luck; very rude monsters keep showing up to distract us. Plus, we keep hearing weird noises:



What's going on?

After a while, I give up on resting, and wander south. There I find...

It... looks like I forgot to take a screenshot, but just south of our resting spot, I find a dinosaur pit. The dinosaurs inside are busy attacking each-other, for some dinosaurian reason. Hence, the noises.



Further into the level, we find another Prince:



Oo, a prince of Time! I bet he's gonna be fun!



Yep. This permanently loses us a point of speed, too. What a jerk!

I phase door out & fight him in a closer, more confined space, with fewer baby-eating Nazis to get in the way. He dies without further incident.



Rhotomago seems to be an imp, direct inferior to Beezlebub, in the writings of an 18th-century madman. Poor guy.

We use our steam drill to go up to level 4 & regenerate level 5, again. (Down to 2 Steam Drills remaining.) Unfortunately, we explore pretty much the entirety of level 4, and...



Can't find a set of down stairs for the life of us!

We recall and sell & ID items...



This would be really good, if we could get more than 6 blows/turn with it. As it is, it seems to be worse than our other weapons - especially because we're capped on Muscle! (Turns out that it, and presumably other stats, cap at 999. Reasonable, but not a thing I knew before.)

...then we head back up to level 4. (Bizarrely, we still haven't failed the steam drill quest. I honestly do not understand how quest mechanics work.)

Unfortunately, while looking for the down-stairs, we run into another prince.



Shaddai el Chai, Prince of Air. (lit. "God of the Life". These names seem to be pretty randomly assigned.) We've killed plenty of princes before. How bad can this one be?



Well, he likes to summon friends...



...and he's a "gaseous cloud", which means, essentially, we can't hurt him.

We putz around for a few turns with little effect, trying rockets, hussar powers, and just hitting him a lot. (No, no, and nope.)

Then I say 'pfeh!' and steam drill twice.



Let's get this over with.


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