Rogue Galaxy, part 5
I play RPGs so you don't have to! Previous instalments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

The "rules" I mention in these posts are, of course, taken from The Grand List of Console Role-Playing Game Clichés.

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Captain Dorgengoa appears on Dorgenark's bridge for the first time since Jaster joined the group. He's a morbidly obese glutton who appears to have fallen out of the ugly tree. (Kisala evidently takes after her mother). Upon seeing Jaster, he enquires why his crew have recruited some young whelp when he asked them to find Desert Claw, and the whole mistaken-identity thing finally comes out. Although Dorgengoa has half a mind to throw Jaster overboard (from a spaceship, remember...), Kisala, Simon and Steve all vouch for him, and Dorgengoa relents, deciding to give Jaster an opportunity to prove himself by leading the next mission.

Dorgengoa is searching for the lost planet Eden. It disappeared ten millennia ago, and purportedly contains riches beyond measure and the secret to eternal life. Dorgengoa's sources tell him that the ancient Great Tablets are the key to reaching Eden, and that something resembling a Great Tablet has recently been dug up on the mining planet Vedan. Jaster is to investigate, with Kisala assisting.

As Jaster and Kisala disembark, Steve contacts Donald Pocacchio to inform him of their progress. After their conversation, Pocacchio shuts Steve down for a few minutes in order to perform a systems upgrade; well, that's what he tells Steve, anyway. In actual fact, he shuts Steve down in order to be able to converse with Steve's "passenger" — turns out that he uploaded his dead son's soul into Steve. Intriguing, if slightly creepy.

Due to the way the planet orbits, part of the planet Vedan is in perpetual darkness. This is also the part of the planet where the richest mineral deposits can be found, so a thriving city has grown up there. This is Treno Myna, the city of eternal night. Unfortunately, it's a pretty lawless place; mining tycoon Zax Morarty owns the town. His sharp-suited, tommy gun-wielding mooks lurk around every corner.

Jaster and Kisala run into Burton, an explorer, clad in a pith hat and khakis. He's also looking for the Great Tablet, so he and Jaster agree to work together. Unfortunately, Burton has been asking too many questions of the wrong sort of people; hot on his tail are the

M O R A R T Y   C L A N
(They're so pathetically weak that they barely qualify as mid-bosses. Rule 19: swords > tommy guns).

Burton tells Jaster that the best place in town to gather inspiration is a backstreet haunt called Angela's Bar. On the way, the party pass Miyoko and Chie, the destitute mother and daughter they met on Zerard. They still haven't found Sho.

Angela's Bar is probably as non-seedy as a bar in a mob-controlled industrial town could hope to be. The patrons all seem friendly enough, though Jaster isn't too sure about the big guy sat at the bar, staring despairingly into his glass. Angela herself is a native of Vedan; her distended, tufted ears are the giveaway.

The big chap at the bar is Barret Deego, a heavily-built Canis sapiens, formerly a soldier. His right arm is cybernetic and disproportionately large (think Hellboy), with a socket for a gatling attachment. Dialogue between Deego and Angela reveals that she loves him, though does not hide her disappointment at the way that Deego is wasting his life, drinking himself into oblivion in her bar every night.

The door crashes open and in storms Kuja Gale, Zax Morarty's right-hand man, a silver-haired pretty boy, also a Vedan native. He and Deego trade insults; Gale looks down on Deego, calling him weak and pathetic; Deego despises Gale, his former comrade-in-arms, for becoming a mob enforcer after leaving the military. It seems that the two of them have been feuding like this for quite some time.

After Gale leaves, Burton convinces Deego to guide the party through the mines. In order to gain access, they'll need fake ID, so they head across town to find somewhere where they can procure it. On their way back, they run into Gale again; in the course of conversation (if Gale and Deego's exchange can really be called "conversation"), we learn that the Daytron Corporation is willing to pay Morarty a lot of money for whatever it was that's been dug up in the mine. Gale stands to make a lot of money. In Deego's eyes, this makes Gale even lower: he's a criminal, a bully and a sellout. Oh, and he's just torched Angela's Bar (a limited invocation of Rule 48, I think).

Deego no longer needs Burton's offer of money to convince him to guide the party to the excavation site. By destroying his beloved Angela's home and livelihood, Gale has crossed the line. It's personal now.

On the way to the mine, Deego talks a little about his past. Ten years ago, he and Gale were both soldiers in the Longardian military. They both resigned in disgust after a botched mission resulted in heavy civilian casualties. Since then, Deego's life has been without meaning or focus; casual manual work has earned him a meagre living; alcohol has provided a limited respite from the despair and monotony. Gale, on the other hand, fell in with the Morarty clan and rose to power in Myna.

It's a fairly standard RPG mine: tunnels, rocks, and monsters. A fair number of NPCs are working there, both human and robot. It's odd how the monsters never bother them. (In RPGs, monsters are only dangerous when the game requires them to be; possibly a phenomenon related to Rule 153).

As the party approach the excavation site, a volley of rockets flies out of the darkness to meet them. It's Gale, piloting:

E A R L Y   M O D E L   D R I L L   R I G
(Good grief, some of these boss names are dull. Couldn't they have called it "Proto-Drillernator" or something?) It's a Front Mission style walker with a circular saw on one arm and a rocket pod on the other, presumably where the drill used to be. You'd think that such a machine would make mincemeat out of three squishy organic people, but no! Before it blows up completely, Gale bails out, and Deego prepares to face him in single combat.

G A L E
(Two boss fights with no opportunity to save in between! Bad game!)

Despite being armed only with dual semi-automatics, he's a lot tougher than he had been when he was piloting a mech. Funny, that.

Defeated by Deego, Gale explains his motives. He's not interested in power or money for their own sake; rather, he believes that enabling Daytron to get hold of the Great Tablet is the right thing to do: once the secrets held by Eden are unlocked, prosperity and peace will come to the universe. No more fighting, no more suffering. (Does he seriously believe a pan-galactic corporation to behave in such an altruistic fashion?!)

Zax Morarty's helicopter descends to hoist the Great Tablet away, but not before taking a few shots at Gale, who has outlived his usefulness now that the Tablet is in Morarty's hands. Gale makes a swift exit.

Though he's almost certainly wrong about Daytron's motives, Gale's wish to see Eden's secrets used to end war strikes a chord with Deego, who decides to join Dorgenark's crew in order to assist with the search for the lost planet. Angela is thrilled to see him with a new sense of purpose, and promises to wait for his return.

Gale confronts Zax Morarty in order to settle the score. Drawing his pistols, he cuts the mob boss down, only to be murdered almost immediately by Morarty's son who had been lurking in the shadows.

Despite losing the Great Tablet to Daytron, Dorgengoa considers the mission a success — Dorgenark can follow the Daytron transport vessel to wherever they're taking the Tablet. He inducts Jaster as a fully-fledged member of the crew.