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BlackRose is really insecure about Kite not wanting to investigate keywords. Assuming you were playing straight through, you'd get the e-mail where she asks if you're interested, and then immediately you log in and she wants to know if you changed your mind since then. Poor girl needs to chill a little bit.

Let's take her and go grind some levels. That should take her mind off the protected area. I'd say we'll round up the regular party, but Mistral is unavailable for some reason. So let's grab Sanjuro instead.









Nothing at all interesting happened in either of those fields. I swear the second field came up entirely by random chance.







Okay! With some additional levels under our belt, we should be quite ready to face the upcoming area and whatever we find inside.



Well then. As you can see, we're short both A and Q cores. The A cores are entirely my fault, but the Q core? Odd letters like that mean that the core can only be found from a data bug.

You might even say it's Something Awful. Am I right, guys? Guys? I'm clever, too!

I'm not gonna touch that book. At all. It's way too suspicious. At best, it'll do nothing, and at worst we could wind up like Piros, or even completely corrupted. Plus, "Nullify enemy attacks at a high percentage" sounds way too fishy to fool with. That book has to be a hacked item. Anyway, time for some more level grinding. This time, we're using Mistral and Gardenia because, why not.













The little sunflower in the foreground of the picture is the first chance I've gotten to get a good shot of one of these guys. Every time you data drain an enemy, it turns into a level 1 monster. Plant-like monsters turn into the sunflower you can see. It even makes sense in the context of the story, because you're draining away all the infected parts of the monster, leaving only the unaffected parts behind.

In some cases, you will find items instead of the weak level 1 monsters. The items you find tend to be pretty powerful for where you find them, and the best equipment in the game can only be found in this fashion. Unless the items are guaranteed from data draining, you're better off not farming for them and just being happy at what luck can drop into your lap.

At any rate, we've leveled up plenty now. So let's go check out the dangerous area that Mistral told us about.





This also occasionally happens. Data drain goes out of control and you get a random effect. In this case, we got really lucky and got a complete recovery. Usually the game casts paralyze on a random party member, or something equally undesirable. Data Drain only goes out of control if you use it too many times in succession. Note that, for the game's purposes, using it twice is occasionally too many times.

The dungeon wasn't anything really special. Some of the enemies had poison moves, but I always carry a shitload of Antidotes and Restoratives for just that reason. Purple mist always means a boss, so let's check it out!





A Thousand Trees enemy? What a pathetic data bug. Mistral's flame spells really ruined it quickly.

We got really lucky with a data drain here. Critical Hit is a better added effect than Life Drain, and it still lets us keep Tiger Claws as a skill. No downsides!



Except that. The teeth are the worst part, I think.





Someone in the thread mentioned that some flesh dungeons have a sickly green floor. Well, here it is. You can also see a bit of an anomaly ahead - a door that just opens up into nothingness. Let's see what that's all about!