Toggle Background Color

Let's Antagonize IVAN

Part 2: Frog Pope's librarian makes sound financial decisions



On our way out of Attnam, we drop by the shop again to take a look at what's for sale. This guy has a few useful items, most notably a key, which we buy since it's cheap and lets us open some types of doors and chests, and a scroll of harden material, which is really good and way too expensive for us. Dude calls us a begger, which is kind of rude. We're an impoverished homicidal banana-sorcerer, not a beggar.



We return to the underwater tunnel we were supposed to explore in the first place, but realize we went in through the exit and are standing where the boss is supposed to be, in pitch darkness, surrounded by angry murder plants. We decide to leave and use the front entrance instead. When we come back here, Genetrix Vesana, the boss, will be located somewhere totally fucking random because we were standing where the game tried to spawn her.



We score some leather gauntlets, a cloak, a decent mace, and a pretty nice (but broken) dagger early on in the first level. Then we find three wands, a ring of electricity resistance, and a suit of iron chain mail. Lucky! Nothing gives us any real trouble, but we do get hit by a couple of zombies. We might contract leprosy and lose a few limbs. No big deal. On to the second floor!



We immediately locate the secret entrance to the Secret Death Floor where early characters go to die of hubris. We choose not to go there. Nearby is a thoroughly exploded gibberling. I have absolutely no fucking idea how that happened; the game notifies you when there's an explosion nearby, so it can't have been a land mine.



We find a chest! This is useful because we can use it to stash shit in. Items kept in a container in our inventory won't break when we're struck by explosions, which is pretty nice considering that broken wands immediately unleash all their effects on the creature carrying them. This is Very Bad for offensive wands, and Infinitely Bad for teleportation wands due to the fact that they only teleport one randomly-selected body part (such as, for instance, the head). We are going to keep this with us and store our scrolls, potions, and wands in it while they're not in use.



We find an altar! We can now contact the goddess of love and DeviantART. She's actually a pretty great goddess to be friends with, but we're going to hold off on making offerings to her for now. We don't want to annoy certain other useful gods until we can immediately placate them with offerings and prayer. We have Big Plans.



An amulet of ESP! This handy doodad lets us see things through walls, assuming they have minds. We also find a ring of fire resistance, which partially protects us from the effects of explosions. IVAN is being suspiciously nice to us. It will kill us soon.



Okay, now we're REALLY suspicious. Ommel stuff gives the consumer raw stat boosts depending on what type of bodily excretion it is. This is ommel earwax, which makes us smarter. We devour it and gain a point each of wisdom and intelligence.



We find a shrine to Valpurus, also known as Frog God, and two of his holy books. This dude is pretty hard to please - don't even bother making offerings to him until you've gotten the go-ahead from his lieutenant, Legifer, the god of justice, yelling, lanterns, and explosions. Frog God can give us a crazy strong, heavy-ass greatsword if we manage to buddy up to him, but we can't really be arsed to do that. Plus it pisses off most of the other gods. Even one or two of the chill lawful-aligned gods get mad at you for becoming a Frog God zealot. Fuck Frog God. We're not gonna read those holy books right now because it'll make us more lawful and align us closer to Frog God, and we want to be bros with other, less judgmental, more hilarious-blessing-granting gods. Also we puked on Frog Pope's floor and we're a little afraid that Frog God might have been watching at the time.



Here's an altar to Infuscor, the goddess of asshole wizards and unpleasant memories. She's alright I guess.



We're getting a little peckish, so we go back to town and kick some more bananas. After we finish gorging ourselves on stolen fruit, we notice that Kaethos is also dead for our current character. Turns out we forgot to pick up part of Peel Mountain and he died on it. oh well, we'll put his holy book of Silva to good use.



We go back to the shopkeeper in Attnam and sell him more rotten bananas. We're still kinda miffed at him for calling us a beggar, so we relocate Peel Mountain to his front door, along with every banana peel we accumulated in the meantime.



Good luck doing business now, asshole.



We use our rotten banana money to fix our broken dagger. The mace we're using is decent, but the dagger is a little stronger and more reliable right now. It's also something we can easily wield one-handed, as is the mace, apparently - all that bludgeoning has made us stronger! We are now dual wielding a mace and a dagger.



The last floor of the underwater tunnel is kind of an annoying mess due to the constantly-spawning murder plants, so we decide to let it be for now, and wander over to Frog Satan's dungeon for a bit instead.



Floor one of Satanland yields an altar to Cleptia, the goddess of kleptomania and premeditated murder. She can give us some pretty neat buffs and things, and she is the chillest of the chaos gods, so we can probably be pals with her and still hang out with the neutral gods. There's some nice stuff in her little mini-temple, too.



Oh shit, an altar to Silva. We want to be friends with her, so we decide to make some offerings. We give her a loaf of beef that was starting to spoil and a wooden shield that we found immediately next to her altar. She is delighted. Ten seconds later we find another one of her holy books and read it. Silva likes us a lot now.



Looks like a skeleton stepped on a land mine over here. We steal its ring of searching and move on, appropriating every other remotely useful-looking thing in our path.



This door has a triangular lock. We do not have a triangular key. We are concerned that the door may have a booby trap on it, and do not wish to kick it open.



We use our freshly-looted mithril pickaxe to smash through the wall instead.



Sophos! This guy is the chillest law god, so basically Cleptia's do-gooder counterpart. He and Cleptia are the easiest aligned gods to get along with if you want to chum around with neutral deities. As the god of nerds and shop class, Sophos can do a bunch of shit that I don't remember at all. We'll probably pray to him to see what happens. In fact, we're going to make an offering and then do that immediately. For science!



He teleports us back to Silva's side of the dungeon. We take this as a sign.



The rat we choose to sacrifice to Silva is apparently marked by destiny. I mean, it's dead, but maybe its ghost will do something important. Who the fuck knows? Anyway, we're gonna go generate money from nothing now.



On the way out, another rat bites us in the dick while we're pausing to drop the dead rat. Destiny: fulfilled.



This is Attnam's library. The librarian, Heathbar, is a little grouchy, but can offer good advice. He also buys books and scrolls, no matter how many times he has already bought them from you.



We repeatedly sell him the same three holy books...



...and then kick them out the door, walk outside, pick them up, walk back inside, and sell them to him again. Heathbar does not object. We decide that we like Heathbar.



Heathbar is selling a number of useful scrolls, particularly a bunch of scrolls of Harden Material. He also has a few holy books. The Mellis book, in particular, catches our eye.



Mellis, the god of political corruption and laissez-faire capitalism, is a good friend to have. He fills empty containers up with stuff. We have two empty cans and three empty bottles, so we pray to Mellis. He gives us a healing potion, some water, some poison, some poisonous food, and some non-poisonous food. Eh, could be worse. Sometimes Mellis gives you ommel stuff, but it's pretty rare.



We want the broken mithril chain mail the merchant has, but it's wayyyy too expensive for us and he calls us a beggar again, that fucking dick. We sell him our school food and buy his scroll of harden material, which we sell to Heathbar repeatedly until we can buy his scrolls of harden material, which we sell to Heathbar repeatedly.



He bankrupts himself buying his own scrolls from us, then placidly watches as we kick them out the door and wander off with them.



We appreciate Heathbar's friendship.