RECAP! Some Fendelians had Hubert's spy hostage, but Hubert took them to the cleaners like the badass he totally grew up to be, and now she's going to take us to Fendel!
Oswell is commanding some soldiers to help him overthrow Paradine and end his ~tyrannical rule~!!
Hubert marches right up to him and says Father, are you plotting sedition? Again? Oswell snaps at him for being ungrateful and orders his men to attack us. Hubert's adopted family is soooo much trouble.
Smackdown ensues. Hubert steps up to Oswell and asks, "Well? Are you ready, Father?" Oswell shrieks and pleads for Hubert to forgive him. Look, he'll give you all his stuff when he becomes President!! "With your smarts and my fortune, we could rule--"
Look, asshole, now is not the time for a civil war, okay? We're kind of having an economic crisis. If you go through with this, you'll force Hubert to renounce the Oswell name out of shame, and "I don't want to lose another father."
...bawwww Hubert.
Hubert is bemused by his own naivete, but off we go.
Now resuming plot! Back to Warrior's Roost RIOT PEAK to talk with the spy so we can get into Fendel, where we are going to stop them from getting Richard'd.
Asbel is hovering with Hubert again. Hubert admits when asked that he can use the glowy hand stuff too. Why does it only affect the two of them and Cheria?
Hubert has a lot of questions. He is not only suspicious of Pascal, but also of Malik! Where did he learn to fight like that? What is he hiding?
Pascal has literally devoured like nine bananas and interrupts us all by throwing up all over the boat. Hubert and Asbel are disgusted.
Is this where the romance comes in. Because it's preeeetty romantic-- /shot
It's really cold in Fendel. The snowy north!! Our spy can't pinpoint the location of the valkines, but the rumors say it's near the capital, of course.
SKIT! Sophie feels like she's seen peaches before... Somewhere...
Is it because we had roughly a thousand of them because they were all over Strahta?
No. Everyone hovers anxiously to discover whether or not Sophie remembers something from her past, or if she comes from Fendel, even though we found peaches all over Strahta.
Sophie: Oh, I've got it! Peaches look like little butts! :DDD
She's about to go into details about Cheria's butt when Cheria drags her off for a talk.
Stumbled upon a giant crater. Pascal recognizes it, so yeah, she's probably from Fendel. She says it was caused by a cryas explosion; the cryas in Fendel is naturally unstable, so it's hard to control. I wonder why it is naturally unstable. That's weird, isn't it? And nobody asks why it should be so.
Fendelian soldiers see us and approach us, since we're, idk, dressed like soldiers from enemy kingdoms, more or less.
No effort is made to explain how we dodged those soldiers.
This is the shittiest excuse for a town I have ever seen. Ghost town, sure... Anyway, Malik obviously has Significant Past here, he muses on his failures and how this place hasn't changed.
Sophie also feels like she's failed somehow, but she can't think... of how...
SUBEVENT! I spent a night at the inn and Pascal stumbles downstairs shivering in the night to find Malik awake. He starts mixing her drinks to warm her up. Pascal accuses him of being a bartender.
Hubert is also awake, and listens in while Pascal and Malik talk (or avoid talking) about Malik's past.
Pascal is pretty drunk and feels warmer now and contemplates taking her clothes off. Hubert shouts at her. (NOT EMBARRASSED, JUST ANNOYED. Point, Cheria.) "I abhor drunkards," he pronounces.
Malik: People have to unwind sometime. Hubert: I disagree. People who think that way are failures.
Malik sadly agrees. He is, in fact, a failure. It's great to know that Asbel isn't the only member of our party who hates himself!
I feel like I should establish that the people of this town are almost comedically poor. Sad music playing. Ramshackle houses. Six-year-olds who tearfully tell us that they are terrible children because they are too hungry to cry when their mothers leave for work. Grown women searching the ground for cryas the size of grains of sand. Even the cat we can feed for a sidequest is starving.
Malik broods some more about how he totally lived in this town before. This time Sophie catches him at it... since Pascal snores very loudly and it's keeping her up. He claims to be considering a song about two proud men, one of whom becomes disillusioned and leaves.
She asks him to sing it. He says, sure, why not, and then we FADE TO BLACK, game is too wussy to invent a real song.
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