Part 42: Damn, Tybir sucks!

Damn, Tybir sucks!

Last time on Tides of Numenera, we encountered Aligern's "deep, thematic story" where the family and friends he thought the Changing God killed were instead the magic snake tattoos he got from the incident where the Changing God hit the wrong button on his iPad and instead of porn unleashed shadowy nanomachines.



Today we're going to adventure with Tybir, the boringest man in the game, and learn all about his "fundamental brokenness" his love of warcrimes.



We have to tell Matkina to fuck off, unfortunately, but lets ask her about our companions.

: I had some questions about the people we're traveling with.



: Any thoughts about Callistege?

: Her echoes are...annoying. I'd give a discount if someone hired me to kill them.

: What a shame, then, that no one will. Everyone else finds us delightful.



Is this supposed to be clever? I'm not amused.

: What do you think of Oom?

: "It's too damn eager to please." She snorts. "Reminds me of some castoffs I know."

: ::brmmm::



I skip a few dialog screens to get back to the main menu.

: How are you holding up?

: I'll stick with you. You're a different breed from the rest of us. You're making progress.



: I think it's best we part.

: I thought we were accomplishing our goals. I don't mind saying this comes a bit of a surprise.



: I've got a way to contact you if I need you. Farewell.

: I've got things to figure out anyway. See you around. Maybe.


So, remember way back when we first got the Bronze Orb and Tybir was at an orgy? Seriously. Go and look at the prior updates if you don't believe me.



: Tybir, join me.

: Sure, lass. Let me find my trousers, and I'll be right there.



This quest is gonna be bad, I'm telling you right now.



Tybir is, of course, still horrifically underleveled because these game designers did almost everything wrong.

Now that we have Tybir, we can take him to Dracogen to learn about Tybir's Very Sad Backstory.





: Tybir, who's Auvigne?

: Former lover. Forget it.



This is the one time Dracogen is actually allowed to approach being anything remotely like a scary villain, as so far he is 0-2 against The Changing God and the lascars.





I assume this is supposed to be an amusing correction, but my tolerance for this game is low. Once again, the dialogue could speak for itself, but why would you do that?





I still don't understand why Dracogen is supposed to be scary. He's alone. We could ice him right now. Yes, he has the protection of the Memovira, but that's not worth shit.



What you're supposed to do here is talk to Tybir.





: "Dracogen had the right of it," he says, through his teeth. "Auvigne and I were closer than close. The world stomped on us, but we survived it together. Carried each other through wars and harder times."

: He looks away from you. "We were arms of the same body, but with different minds - too different, as it turned out." He takes a deep, shaking breath.



: I don't understand. Can't you use those rings to sense his mind and see where he is?



: We'll find him.



: What happened between you and Auvigne, anyway?

I have no idea how to pronounce that name.



: Where do you think Auvigne is?



: Let's continue on.


So we go back to Little Nihilesh.



Can you guess which NPC we have to talk to progress?



It's not the powerful mutant prince who we have a pretty good relationship with.



Not the blue mutant girl we freed from slavery with powerful psychic abilities.



Not this woman, who is a future Nazi imprisoned by the mutants for poisoning their water supply, because, well...



Seriously. She's a Nazi.



You can feed her to the Maw to the space station because she feels kinda guilty about it, but she's also a video game Nazi. I, of course, forgot her whole deal.



Certainly not the very sad mutant we had emotionally draining not-sex with to send Rhin home, nor the date rapist to his right or the Tides Ghost.



The correct answer is this trash-loving hobo. You might remember from earlier, when he showed off a music box. It made burp noises, so we tried to steal it and than it broke, giving us a full heal cypher. He was a little upset.



: "Yeh, yeh", Crimper says, glancing at Tybir's ring. He rummages within his filthy rags. "I have one just like it".

: He holds it up, pinched between two claws. It's absolutely identical. "A tall man dropped it in a pile of butcher's leavings a few weeks back." He chuckles, eclipsing Tybir's pained sigh. "Brushed his hands off like he'd handled something awful."

: The filthy man mimes the motion, rubbing his hands fretfully on his greasy clothing, then cackles.

: "That's it," Tybir says heavily. "He got tired of looking for me and dumped the ring with our friend here."

: He offers you an unconvincing grin. "It's better this way. I'm glad he's clear of this place. Glad he's gone!"



: Let's go find him, Tybir.






This is the shrine to Chila. I'm getting Ash of Gods flashbacks something fierce. If I see any riddles the LP is over and I'm uninstalling the game.



Despite us looking for a tall man I talk to this disabled lady.

: Greetings.



Someone in the editing process decided that "The Observant Speck" was a real character name that adults would write.



This is who we would talk to if we wanted to progress the main quest. We have absolutely no desire to do that yet, because things will get real stupid when we do.

: [Anamnesis]: Try to remember.



Oh shi-



The exposition is upon us! Ready the lifeboats!

: "He pored over every scroll," she whispers, half to herself, "wanting to learn how Chila forged a friendship with the Bloom, a bond that imposed no price upon her. Or so he thought."

We already kinda did that.



: Farewell.


We really want to talk to this mutant guy.



We continue with unimportant character descriptions and extra-banal mind reading. Do the horns mean he slept with Auvigne? Don't be stupid, this is Numenera, they're banal character description needed to take up space and write "good".



Wha...



: You aren't Auvigne.

The funny thing is, the one time that it would make sense for the game to give us a character description, we never get a description of Auvigne despite being expected to do a manhunt for him.

: "That his name? No, I ain't." He drops his hand back to his side. "I'm a thief, and I ain't nothin' like what people would call a nice man, but I ain't no 'Auvigne' either."

: He spits on the ground.



You can guess Kelsie is a mutant because she has a normal name that a real person would have instead of all these weird made up genre names.



So yes, Auvigne went and stole a small mutant child's toy. This is an act of great evil, and will be treated as such.

: Listen to the man, Tybir. Maybe he knows where Auvigne is now.



I'm really, really trying hard not to dismiss this maudlin bullshit with Axe Cop crying because he killed a good guy, but it's hard. It's really hard.



: "And he, what, gave you the ring as compensation?" Tybir says, hands balled into fists.



So yea, this asshole murdered Auvigne over a child's toy.

: Put out a hand to stop Tybir.



So the "good" action is to tell Tybir that, because the man is a father who murdered a man over a child's toy, it is wrong to kill him, I don't see that working at all, so..

: [Might] Hold Tybir back.



We got th-





Not pictured - neck snap -



Shit! The game does that thing where it makes you read two whole screens of emotionless dull text and then plays the animation, handily removing the scene of any kind of emotional power.



Oh man, are we gonna have words with Dracogen.


Tybir is mad! We gotta talk to Dracogen about his lov -



: : :mmmm::

: Thought so.

Or we could interrupt the pacing with banality. Numenera!

Anyway, let's talk to Dracogen.





XP! Yes!


: [Raises Blue Tide] Let him continue.



No, there's no option to attack him on Tybir's behalf or anything.





Yes Dracogen. You're very evil.



Really? You think your readers are too stupid to figure out Tybir - don't answer that.



So, to recap, Dracogen isn't an evil mastermind, he's a petty dick who literally needs someone to hand themselves over body and soul. Against serious resistance like the Anchorage or the Changing God, he and his minions get completely and utterly destroyed and he needs to beg for our help. We'll come back to Dracogen in a bit.



Alright. Let's talk to Tybir, see what he's got to say for himself.



What, you think Tybir didn't fuck up enough? Do you feel bad for Tybir?



Oh man! It turns out Tybir was an abusive piece of shit! But wait, there's more!



That's right! Tybir is such a piece of shit that he orchestrated a massacre of children to push away his lover because he had attachment issues.

: You were afraid to lose him, so you pushed him away?

I like to imagine The Last Castoff saying this as drolly as possible.



So the Endless Battle has some reality fracturing shit that's never really explained, but also has squads of sci-fi soldiers in power armor running around this medieval setting.

: "And then, I gave up the ring to save myself from Dracogen's revenge," he continues, his hands shaking. "Of course I did, and I convinced myself Auvvie wouldn't suffer because of it."



So this all actually ties back to Tybir trying to save Ris from execution after cowardly abandoning him in the first place. Remember Ris, the guy taking the fall for Tybir's treason? It's been a while, but they actually had one thematically consistent (vaguely) story arc. Good job!

: [Raises Indigo Tide] You're right. He died when you could have saved him. What now?

Tybir is an abusive morally bankrupt piece of shit. He will actually like you more if you treat him like crap, because he knows he's an abusive morally bankrupt piece of shit.



This game has a weird fetishization of awful abusive relationships I don't understand, from the slaver revealing she really loved Rhin all along, or that Omahdon really wanted to fuck Perseia until his dick exploded, and now this. On some level it ties back to the Changing God's poor parenting skills.



Your wish is my command.


Yea, that was a thing. Let's give Tybir some space like he requested. Is he going to be mad at us?



What the fuck? He's taking about that Nazi lady from earlier in the update who tried to kill all the mutants for the Fourth Reich or whatever. Really? You forgot Auvigne that quickly? Fuck you!



Also Tybir is not the only party member who murders children. Actually, Oom is a child's toy, maybe he should have something to say about this?

Thank God we got Rhin home.

: Fooled by a pretty face, were you?



I think Tybir is the only character who tells The Last Castoff she's pretty.

: I think it's best we part.



Really? The same as the beginning of the game? You're not gonna say anything about us knowing you're a piece of shit?

He gives us the usual "I won't be around" and we tell him about the Bronze Sphere. I assume if you don't search the instadeath mirror and don't get it (I didn't on my first playthrough) and you dismiss a PC they're gone forever.



That's it! That's the last of the companion stories! I'll have a vote on what to do next, but first I want to talk about Dracogen.

Who the Hell is Dracogen anyway?

Dracogen comes off as a fanfiction character, being a cool and powerful criminal mastermind with sinister magic powers that everyone is afraid of for no reason despite failing at every criminal enterprise we've seen him attempt and pissing away useful assets to settle idiotic personal vendettas. You can't actually fight him, even though Tybir has every reason to. Dracogen is actually a kickstarter backer's OC do not steal, specifically that of Steven Dengler, a Canadian venture capitalist who runs a firm called...wait for it...Dracogen. Taking a look at Dracogen's website, you can see that they pride themselves on giving to charity and investing in tech and gaming firms. Dengler is a pretty big backer too, he gets a shout out when you load the game and he's there on the splash screen of distinguished backers.

I guess he likes to put himself in as evil characters. Steven Dengler is the final boss of a game called Satellite Reign, where he runs an evil cyberpunk megacorporation you have to fight. Hell, he's also the innkeeper in the starting town for Pillars of Eternity. Not gonna lie, if I was rich I would donate a ton to kickstarter developers to make me a final boss too.

I would be pretty upset they made me an inept dumbass though. I'm also legitimately surprised you can't fight him, seeing as Dengler is a cool enough dude to let you kick his virtual ass in Satellite Reign and Wasteland 2.

The less said about the vaguely rapey "toy" dialogue, the better.

Decisions Lie Before Us!

There is a future endgame questline to reconcile Tybir and Auvigne. Do we want to do it?

Vote on the Next Two Sidequests
Help Skoura get her sight back
Collect Hot People for a Weirdo
Free A Slave and Get Him A Job (or Feed Him To Weirdo)

We are almost to the point where we can just blitz the end game and discover the terrible endgame twist.