Inca II – By the power of Inca

By Ilmari

Last time I had crash landed on a planet, where a local astronomers set up her computer to calculate positions of three planets, where I should place three great powers of Incas, which would help to destroy an asteroid, which Aguirre, leader of space conquistadores, used for some malevolent purposes. While the computer was doing its calculations, I took a train to…

…search some caves?

I thought I was supposed to use the train to transport my spaceship. Apparently not. Caves it is then.

If this was a horror movie, we would start dying at this point

For some inexplicable reason, the cavern had an abandoned office within it.

This place has seen better days

Even the safe is all rusted up

Luckily they’ve left some useful stuff here: a mallet, shaver, a bottle of mercury, key and ballasted thread (I do wonder what kind of an office would require all these objects)

Time to do some puzzlework. The shaver could be used to cut a piece of a rope from a nearby drawer, and the key almost opened the same drawer.

The solution to this conundrum was apparently to use the sand on the floor to remove the rust from the key. I am not really sure how this is supposed to work. I know you can grind rust off from a metal thing with sandpaper, but how do you do it with loose sand? Oh well, anything goes, as long as I am moving forward.

Doomerang – an Australian version of a famous FPS, where instead of demons, you are shooting kangaroos

Top secret files with suspicious numbers written on the pages – clearly a code for the safe. Now I just had to remove the rust from the safe wheels.

Apparently mercury does the trick

Blueprints for upgrading my ship. I wonder what's the purpose of all these wings in the vacuum of space?

Time goes by while having fun

After two weeks, the computer had calculated the three planets, where I was supposed to set up the three Inca powers. Eldorado sent Kelt Cartier to the Inca council, with a letter appointing him as the chief commander of Inca Empire’s armies. He was supposed to build more of the boomerang inspired ships, while I went cruising around the galaxy.

I am pretty sure this crystal was not meant to be called memory lapse

Inserting a data crystal in my ship I was asked to choose either planet A or planet B. A it is, then. On my way there, I was ambushed by a couple of fighters, which I managed to destroy rather easily. Aguirre ran away and I was given a choice whether to run him down.

Yeah, it didn’t go very well. There were three larger stations that could be only destroyed by torpedoes. In my best run, I managed to destroy two of them, but I didn’t have enough firepower to defeat the remaining one, so eventually I just chose to skip this action sequence.

Another breathtaking landscape

I landed on a beach on a tropical island. I picked up some palm leaves that I could use to uncover footprints on the sand.

 Let’s follow them

I arrived at mangrove

Ibis didn’t want to move, but I did find some oysters, which I could break with my mallet to find a magic pearl. This didn’t have any effect on the scene or on the Ibis, but when I picked another oyster, an ape arrived. Clicking the oyster on the ape made somehow both Ibis and ape leave the place. Now that the Ibis nest was unguarded, I could take a look at it. Inside, I found some regular and one jade egg.

Apparently you can’t just pick this up

Putting the pearl to the jade egg released some sort of demon, who bragged about being the master of the mangrove. He told me to keep the pearl and the jade egg with me when I returned, or otherwise I would regret it.

Is this the ethnographic part of the ethnofiction?

Outside the mangrove I met a local, who had read of my coming from magic smoke (insert your favourite hallucinogenic joke here). He knew of my mission and wanted to help, but first I had to return to the crocodile the two treasures that the demon had stolen from it.

Don’t you just love when strangers make these suggestions?

After showing I was a pure soul, the local led me to a crater, where I was supposed to plant the Inca energy.

That didn’t work

One stele in a glass bubble and three pillars with nothing obvious to do. I checked my surroundings and found a screen with a keystone with a place to put something in there and another screen with two sceptres, picking of which opened up a cave.

After some experimentation, I noticed I could break the calabash into two parts with my mallet. I could then put the other part in the keystone and the other part with the sceptres on the three pillars.

This was enough to break the glass bubble, and now I could place my power on the stele

That task done, I was expecting that I had to deal with the demon in some way. Luckily, the crocodile had avenged the theft of its shiny objects, and I could return freely to my spaceship.

On my way to the next planet, I received a communication from Kelt Cartier, who told me that one of Aguirre’s squadrons was approaching and asked me to interfere, so that they wouldn’t have to waste time, when they could continue building more warships. I tried this a couple of times, but again, I found it easier just to ignore Carter’s plea for help. We’ll see if that decision comes to bite me back in the future…

Session time: 2 h
Total time: 4 h