Chapter Five: This is not a clue for investigating, this is a clue for laying down and avoiding
We've made our decision, and slammed our skill points down on the table for their reckoning. We then quietly pick them back up off the coffee table and put them where they belong, because it wouldn't do to have a messy safehouse.
Or, well, any messier than it already is... Geez, you call this place a safe house? There are fire hazards everywhere!
Focusing on SMGs, we've bought pretty much every accessory and attachment possible, for reasons that will become clear later on... For now, we're packing total weapon buffs in the range of +25% accuracy and +22% critchance for our primary rooty-tooty-bang-and-shooty, while our sidearm is just stuck with the +25% accuracy. We had pretty considerable burst damage before, but now it's gotten even crazier. Hopefully enough to help stop the merciless destruction wrought by the unchecked wombat and emu populations.
We've also cleaned out our ammo box and added in a bunch of new ammo types! This isn't particularly interesting just yet though, since none of the ammo types do anything different to the usual critters and spooks we'll encounter on a raid.
Basically, we've bought everything there's any sense in buying, and even a couple things there
isn't any sense in buying, and we've still got $6000 left over.
Let's go see how Zoe's doing.
Zoe: "Ken! I've got excellent news!"
Ken: "What's that, Zoe? Have you found an invasive species we could introduce to control the wild emu population?"
Zoe: "I... What? No.
What? ... Anyways, I wanted to tell you, I'm finally relevant to the plot again!"
Ken: "That's great news! And just in time too, my nightmares were starting to get even worse than before... It was so bad, I never told anyone about it or mentioned it in any way, and I honestly didn't even notice it myself until I started talking to you just now!"
Zoe: "That'll be the plot relevance kicking in, Ken. I've done some digging on some of the other disappearances around the time of your losing your memory, and I think I'm on to something that will make sense so long as I never describe it in detail... But first, I need you to bring me a couple EVP recordings from your parabolic microphone."
Ken: "What? Why? Just any of the countless tapes I've been selling to Redback for cash? The ones I record from screaming lamps and giggling fridges on the job?"
Zoe: "Yes, exactly those. I need two."
Ken: "Just... Two tapes? Recorded from any of the random places I go to?"
Zoe: "Precisely. It's absolutely essential for moving this investigation, and thereby the plot, forward."
Ken: "I'll be back in two shakes of-... Err, I'll be back soon."
As it happens, there's been an update to the game recently, where they added a new mission type: Forensics. This is now the lowest difficulty mission available, even lower than the lowest-level scouting missions, and serves as a place to begin for those who want a smoother introduction to the game... So that when the later portions open up and the difficulty spikes like mad, they can feel even more shocked and confused.
Forensics missions are pretty much just less-difficult scouting missions, and they don't have EVP clues at all, but they
are the only mission type so far to provide slightly different terrain features on the mission map! As such, we're going to be checking one out just to gawp at the sights.
"Authorities have issued a contract for forensic specialists, to collect evidence from a crime scene, note some areas are off-limits". Because of course, when manpower is low, you put out open contracts for forensic analysis of your active crime scenes. Yep. Definitely no problems there. Especially not when you actually give the contract to some galah in a baseball cap with dirty boots and an old fish finder from the bait shop with the words "fish finder 2000" scratched out and "GHOST HUNTER" painted on top.
Let's go solve a crime, shall we?
"Upended car, broken glass, bloodstain, outline indicates head is missing... Looks like natural causes to me."
Ooh, it looks so
fancy now doesn't it! I actually really like the look of the forensics missions, they look like they could've come out of a game that was actually about finding clues and solving mysteries... A better game.
Here we see one of the blocked-off areas, as well as the entrance to the house. The tape hanging from the railing is constantly drifting in the wind, and it looks
really nice and would really help add to the spookiness of this whole situation if I didn't already know the game as well as I do... Which is strange, because this is the only place in the game where that effect is ever used, and it's only on a patched-in extended tutorial mission for beginners. Huh.
Here's another chalk outline, and one of the very few clues we can find on this map. These maps are limited to just two types of clues; blacklight clues (which makes sense, sorta) and EMF reader clues (which... doesn't make as much sense, unless the crime we're investigating is their power bill), and the bloody pawprints leading away from the outline are an indication of a hidden blacklight trail leading through the house.
The pawprints lead to a chair in the kitchen, where we find... A pig mask? Did we stumble into CSI: Hotline Miami? No, no... That would be entirely too awesome. What we're probably looking at here is a hungry dingo attack, where the dingo was wearing a pig mask.
"Halt! Put your pedipalps in the air!"
A single rat is startled by our investigation, and leaps out of the chandelier. We fire at it a few times, putting several 9mm rounds into the surrounding walls and furniture, and finally crack its gooey abdomen open on top of some forensic evidence. I'm sure ballistics will understand that we were just shooting at a rat, and that we weren't here during the murder.
This lamp is giving us a powerful reading on our EMF reader, which means... Well, it means that the lamp is connected to electricity, and that the wiring is probably kind of shitty and poorly insulated. So, pretty much like every house in suburban Australia.
Inspecting the lamp, we find a statuette. I'm... I'm not sure
where the statuette was, but unless it was just taped to the inside of the lampshade, it's not unreasonable that the metal statuette could have touched on a couple poorly-insulated wires and made a short circuit, which could easily explain the EMF readings.
With our second clue discovered, we're... Well, we're done. That's it. That's the mission. We could stick around and check the other rooms to see if there's another rat to kill, and that's in fact exactly what we do... Inside the guest bathroom, an eight-legged rat tried to leap out from behind the mirror and ambush us, but due to the close quarters of the bathroom it ended up just flying inside the wall and dropping outside the map instead. After a few moments of scurrying around in limbo, it was respawned in the hall outside and ran up to attack us from behind. But like any good paranormal investigator, we shot it to pieces with high-powered ballistic weaponry.
Compiling the evidence and cleaning some of the rat ichor off of our pants, we head back to report our important findings and help bring this... *checks notes* ...
quintuple homicide case to a close!
Police Chief Wallace: "Well Mr. Ham, what have you got for us? Do we have a lead?"
Ken Ham: "Better than that, chief! All the forensic evidence points to only one conclusion!"
Chief: "Yes? You've identified the suspect? Can we bring this monster to justice!"
Ken Ham: "I've checked with the book, and there's only one logical deduction to be made... It was ghosts."
Chief: "...what?"
Ken Ham: "Ghosts, sir. Ghosts did it."
Chief: "..."
Ken Ham: "I'll be taking my contract fee now, thank you!"
Chief: "...fine." *pulls out wallet* "Here's, eh... Seven dollars. Job well done. We'll be contacting you in the future if we need to arrest any more... Ghosts."
Ken Ham: "What should I do with the spectral evidence? Do you want it in those little baggies like on TV? I think I may have sat on the one, but it's still pretty good evidence!"
Chief: "No, that's... That's fine. You can keep them. Just go. Please."
With a fresh $7 burning a hole in our pockets next to the forensic evidence we stole from an active murder investigation, we head off to find some EVP recordings for Zoe.
Now, all the clues in a given mission are randomized, so there's really no telling how, when, where or what will turn up an audio clue. There will generally be at least one or two on the larger missions, so let's go to one of the upgraded scouting missions and have a little look-see.
Shortly after entering the house, we pick up an audio reading. What luck! Investigating the signal, we find some shrieking shelves guarded by an emu who somehow managed to get the drop on us before we obliterate the birdy nuisance. Making a quick recording of the shelves, we earn ourselves a "Tape #2", because all EVP tapes are numbered according to their general rarity and value, and #2 is a fairly standard, common-level tape to find.
It's either that, or the shelves were singing about airline dentistry. It isn't easy, but nothing is.
In the bedroom down the hall, we find another emu and shoot it to death while it's hiding up on the wall, causing it to ragdoll its way through the bed and onto the ground beneath. Because as we all know, memory foam isn't a real physical object. Taking out our microphone, we discover that the bed is yelling at us. Looks like we've got our second tape!
Terrifyingly, the physics updated upon collecting the tape and caused the emu's corpse to come flying up from out of the bedsheets and actually bounce off the now-physical bed before wiggling to a standstill at our feet. First legitimate scare of the session.
This tape is an "evidence" tape, as opposed to a "clue" tape. As such, it is simply named "EVP", and we'll have to accurately categorize it in The Book in order to identify what's haunting this location.
After finding a Ouija board in a potted plant and a
mysterious amulet in a cast-off hoodie, we have enough clues to decipher and categorize the EVP. Because you can't do that until you've reached that point in the clues checklist.
Um... Sure.
Luckily this turned out to be a "whispers" haunting, which is the easiest to identify offhand. As you might imagine, the other types of EVP recording are... Just a teensy bit difficult to differentiate at first glance.
Now at this point, we're honestly done as far as Zoe is concerned. But we're nothing if not greedy little bastards, so how about we clean this house out for some more
precious swag clues?
Checking out some suspicious temperature phenomena, we enter a room and are promptly attacked by the furniture. An upholstered armchair commits itself to a suicide attack and shatters against the floor as we sidestep it. Due to its noble sacrifice, its soul ascends to paradise where it will be lavished with 99 coats of virgin olive oil.
Enraged, the bookcase launches its own attack.
"Do you see it, hiding up in the corner there? Its beady little spines glittering in the darkness? It's hungry..."
The bookcase manages to connect with our face due to the fact that I was busy taking a picture of it. We inject some bandaids into the wound.
By the way, if you think things are difficult to see in that picture, it's a hell of a lot harder when the event actually happens... First the lights get significantly dimmed down, then the screen starts ripping itself up because VHS camera effects are totally hip in every situation, and then you're somehow supposed to notice the furniture which has levitated up into the total darkness located on the ceiling of each room (no ambient or carried light sources project at an angle that would light them up normally when they're that high up) before it comes crashing down on you. Also I'm pretty sure there's some motion blur happening, but it's difficult to tell with the general "soup" nature of the image at that point anyways.
Turns out we were in the wrong room anyways, and the thermal clue was in the kitchen. Namely, the sink. However, the sink and its accompanying counter are a bit too large to entirely fit inside the thermal scanner's screen, so we need to do a little tippy-tappy dance and move it around a bit before it registers that there's a clue you're taking a picture of.
This is particularly nasty because it's possible to find
fake thermal clues, which are just random areas of heat that show up on the scanner... These are
not counted as clues and never will be, but you can't really tell the difference except by how the thermal scanner reacts to trying to take a picture of it. And if you happen to know this and take a "bad" picture of a
real clue, you can end up roaming around the house on a wild goose chase.
But we happen to know better, because I learned from experience that the thermal scanner is an absolute bodger and not worth a zac.
So instead, the lights started flickering and the wild geese came to chase
us around. A couple spooky wombats show up and start mooing, and in my stupidity I moved into the other half of the living room in order to outmaneuver them... Which, seeing as that portion counts as an entirely new room, another encounter gets spawned while I'm dealing with the wombats and suddenly I get some kebab needles in my backside. The combined assault leaves me needing to jam some drugs into my knee, especially since my vision has been severely reduced thanks to...
"I've got you in my sights! ...I think."
...nightvision goggles! As you've somewhat seen before, spooky wombats are nearly invisible, their location given away only by their glowing red eyes and a faint shadow passing through the air. This is compounded by the fact that whenever there are wombats around, all the lights in the area get a lot darker, so they have a lot more background darkness to blend in with. Nightvision goggles are the prescribed remedy for dealing with wombats, as stated in their Cryptonomicon entry. And indeed, turning on the NVG will cause them to stand out as solid, defined blocks of darkness against the backdrop of slightly-less-dark-ness! You see that sort of extra-dark mass to the right of the potted plant? That's a wombat.
You may notice, however, that the rest of your vision gets absolutely buggered by using the goggles... Despite the fact that womnbats do in fact have better contrast and are easier to spot when you're using the goggles, that only applies to things that are in front of you. Everything behind your back becomes a complete blur, and it's actually
harder to spot one sneaking up on you for an ambush when you've got the goggles on.
And don't even think about toggling them on and off as needed, because like any good piece of visual enhancement, it blinds you for a moment whenever you activate it.
"Hmm, yes... See these contusions around the neck, and the rigidity of the hands? This man asked for extra sauce on his kebab. The poor bugger..."
After shooing off the wombats and their cuboid shadow poop, we go back into the wrong side of the living room and shoot the needle dispenser that I
couldn't see because my vision was
too enhanced.
We get lucky and find the end of a blood trail without having to find the source (which is usually guarded by an event or critter encounter), and round out our clues for the mission. Leaving a few rooms unopened because we don't need to fight
every damn thing in this house, we finish up and get paid for doing the scout work. The money isn't enough to matter much at this point, but it's something... Now it's time to go to Zoe and drop off our findings.
Finding Zoe at the bar, we're told that these are in fact the
wrong kind of EVP evidence, and we need to get
better ones from the actual Hunting job areas. Welp. I guess we're going hunting?
"Could I just, y'know... Not?"
Hunting missions are the hardest of the hard, and pose a bunch of new and unexpected dangers for those wishing to stay alive. We don't even care about "investigation" or "clues" at this point, all we care about is triggering the rooms and then surviving the inevitable consequences of doing so...
Then we can talk about clues.
Steeling ourselves, we kick in the door and-
"Oh hey, we're here again!"
-immediately get sucked into a portal to the shadow realm. Bugger.
So, yeah, this delightful place that we first saw in the tutorial is what's referred to as the "shadow realm" or "shadow dimension". There's a chance that doors in these missions will instead trap you inside the shadow realm when you try to open them, rather than actually, y'know, open... And you're stuck in there until you kill off the 4(!) wombats who immediately show up to disagree with you. The door still exists as an object in the shadow realm, but it's locked.
We manage to do good work on the wombats and take them all out in just a couple clips... You may notice that the shadow realm also happens to be as dark as the inside of an aborigine's arsehole, which means you're basically forced to rely on the nightvision goggles. Which means you can't see anything on your flanks, so you basically need to just start running immediately and try to gather all the wombats on one side of you.
After killing the last wombat, we're unceremoniously dumped right outside the door as though nothing ever happened. We manage to open it properly this time.
We pick up a lead on a nearby audio clue, but end up going through a bit of a loop as while there are indeed two clue hotspots that responded to the microphone as being clues, the
real clue was apparently causing false positives by being located directly behind those two clues, isometrically speaking...
So we check out a plant, it's not the clue, go into the hallway and check out a painting, it's also not the clue, then end up circling back around into the living room we just came out of in order to find the
real location of the clue, and-
"Oh, bugger."
-are immediately ambushed by another group of four wombats, as signaled by the telly going a bit mad.
We take a couple hits because the things are right and proper bastards to dodge properly thanks to their massive size and nebulous telegraphing, but we manage to put them down...
Finally, a moment of peace to bandage up and check for clu-
BEEP BEEP MOTHERFUCKER-
bugger. That's the ghast alarm.
Since this location is an "active" haunting, a certain spectral fragment of the resident poltergeist is actually awake and moving around. This fragment is known as the "ghast", and it's effectively invulnerable. After exploring a couple rooms in a hunting mission, the ghast will become alerted to your presence and start snooping around... It's difficult to determine
exactly when the ghast is going to find you, but it seems to be determined by number of rooms explored as well as time elapsed.
The only way of dealing with the ghast, beyond letting it run a ghost train on you, is to purchase an EMP countermeasure tripwire for $75, set it up in a doorway like so:
...and then
pray to the big man that you're going to be close to that doorway when the ghast finds you. Once the ghast has locked on, you've got a brief window of time to run back to that door and charge through the tripwire before the ghast hauntingly informs you who your daddy is.
Countermeasures are another one-time usage item, so once it's burned out from deflecting a ghast (it doesn't actually
kill the ghast, it merely sends it away for a while. Long enough to finish the mission completely) it can't be recovered. That's fine enough, at this point $75 isn't much of an issue, but...
You can only have one tripwire at a time. In order to place another one, you need to first dismantle the first one you placed (you get the whole mechanism back, so you at least don't waste it and have to buy a new one), and then hope really hard that the ghast doesn't appear while you're moving to set up the new one. This is because of "conflicting EMP frequencies" or some nonsense.
Anyways, we've got our countermeasure set, and there's not a whole lot more we can do other than keep close to this location for a while and hope for the best...
Checking out a couple more rooms, we nab ourselves some choice clues and, troublingly, don't spark any more hostile encounters. We find a key, which lets us unlock a locked door at the northern end of the hallway, which is useful since we happened to pick up some more EVP traces coming from that room. Poking our heads inside to make sure there's no event associated with the room, we whip out the parabolic mic and-
-
promptly shit our pants. That's the ghast. You can't see it very well, because it moves around your character extremely rapidly and also the entire screen goes black and doesn't go back,
as per usual, but you can see the red lines from where its eyes are repositioning. The fact that an alarm horn blares in your ears immediately upon the ghast's arrival doesn't help you keep your focus either.
I mentioned there were two ways of dealing with the ghast? Yeah, well, thanks to our inability to run when carrying any kind of detective equipment, and the fact that this event
doesn't automatically stow them like many other events will do, we can't make it back to our tripwire in the 3 second grace period the ghast provides us, and so we end up getting smacked way the way down the corridor to the tune of about 80% of our health. Ghost train goes
"boo, boooo!"Now the little cunt is happy and will bugger off to wherever he came from, letting us continue with the investigation. He's not actually intent on
stopping us from doing anything, he just wants to pull our pants down violently and then spirit himself away like the foggy hoon he is. No longer needed, we recover the unused tripwire and continue our investigation.
And what would you know, the EVP clue wasn't even
in that bloody room! Instead we find a clock on the wall that starts chiming and then vomiting blood onto the floor. This is the game's way of telling you that a portal to the blood dimension has opened, and you're about to get swarmed by creepy crawlies. I didn't manage to get a shot of this as I was busy not dying, but suffice to say that about 14 centipedes splashed out of the floor and wanted to have a bingle.
"Fuck you, Mr. Clock... Fuck you."
Still not having found the audio clue, we check the next room over... Therein we find a corpse lying on the ground, and- wait, the body! It's moving! Is this another kebab victim? No, this is... Oh god, are those
eggs?! And they're getting bigger! What could-
EWWWWWW. A bunch of centipedes burst out of the egg-like structures on the person, spewing forth another writhing mass of angry, biting, slippery arseholes.
"Personal reminder: Don't order the chicken kebab either."
Wait a moment... Angry, biting, slippery arseholes? Bursting out of eggs? Long, writhing creatures that are generally unpleasant? I do believe I've been mistaken! these aren't centipedes at all!
With our biology lesson for today complete, we continue snooping around for clues.
Turns out we're in luck! Not only was the tool cabinet whispering plots of violence, but there were some shards of glass on the ground that proved to be concealing a haunted amulet! I... I'm not sure
how you hide a shiny object underneath clear glass, but I suppose that just adds to the incredibly spooky nature of it all!
We do a little quick deduction, and find out that we're not far off from having actually found all of the clues at this location. Happily, we open the door to another room and as the bulbous rat-creature descended from the ceiling, we immediately regretted our decision to do so.
"...bugger."
The rat-mother pushed us back through the hallway and landed a good couple king-hits with her projectile acid spray, but her fat arse proved too easy of a target to hit and we ended up bringing her down after losing not
entirely too much health.
And then all her kids popped out and started running around. Lovely.
After that whole fiasco, we're down to the last 26 healing points from our starting 390. I'd like to mention that our entire health bar, when full to its maximum capacity, is worth 120 hitpoints. Yeah. We've technically died more than three times from all this punishment.
We check our sensors around the outside of a couple more rooms without actually entering them, and since we couldn't pick up traces of either EMF or EVP activity, nor any blood trails leading into those rooms, we decide to give them a pass... But there are still two clues left unfound. However, sorting through the clues from earlier, we find information stating that there's another type of critter at this location, one we haven't seen yet... And that sort of gives us a hint as to where the final clues may be. Namely, outside.
"Nothing suspicious here."
Yep, I was right.
"Something suspicious here."
And now we officially meet the dirt kebab... A group of 4 tentacles that pop out of the ground and try to give you a good slappin' while dirt and dust obscure half the screen and shaky camera movements obscure the other 65%. Even in our weakened state, they're not nearly as dangerous as they look. They're incredibly bad at hitting moving targets so long as you don't move in a straight line directly to our from them, because then the massive reach of their slappin' end will hit you and plant you face-down in the dirt looking like a fool. But even then, they don't actually hurt as much as, say, having 14 angry snakes suddenly appear in your pants.
With Kebabthulu out of the way, we help ourselves to the rope hiding under a knocked-over mailbox. Or maybe it was inside the mailbox? Difficult to say... Mail-order rope? "Drop us a line, we'll send you a rope"? Who knows...
They're clearly interdimensional beings, you can tell from the fact that they have no underside and are completely devoid of texture or detail.
8 out of 9 clues, still one to go... We're out of medkit bandages by this point, but still have our stims and a reasonable amount of health to go on. Still, doesn't hurt to employ a little more caution in the final stretch... After doing a cursory check of the outside, we head back into the house and start checking doors again to find stray emanations, and sure enough there's a signal coming out from behind a bathroom door hidden inside one of the bedrooms. We set an emu trap, just in case, and gently smash the door open to get a peek inside.
No emus, no rats, no fountains of blood... Just an ordinary dunny, all things considered. Checking our EMF reader again, we find that the signal is coming from... The toilet. Because of course it is.
Rummaging around in the porcelain kingdom, we find... Uh... In the toilet, we find a scorch mark. Yes. We find a "structural clue", some sort of indication that a conflict took place at that spot.
Inside the toilet.
...fuck it, let's just analyze this thing and get out of here.
Structural clues are, in my opinion, the dumbest clues of the lot... Nevermind the fact that you find them inside of books or toilets or whatever, or that you apparently don't care about how incredibly decrepit and run-down the rest of the house is, but just
look at the definitions! "Would you say what happened here was a clash, or a struggle? What about a battle? This is important!", and it really
is important, because if you identify it as being an "encounter" instead of a "conflict", you may completely misidentify the type of poltergeist haunting the area.
And it's not that hard to misidentify something when you see the
teeny tiny differences between the different types of signs! I mean, look at those examples! You're supposed to identify something by
eyeballing particle sizes? Pull the other one, it's got bloody bells on.
Anyways, we've gathered all the clues at this location, including the two EVP clues that Zoe needed, and successfully identified the haunting ghostie down to the third and most detailed degree, so let's get out of here before more wombats show up.
Ka-ching!
So, yeah... A slight economic upgrade from the scouting missions, clues from hunting missions can be worth upwards of $500 per each. This makes it so that money grinding later in the game is less about successfully completing higher-level scouting missions, and more about starting a hunting mission, grabbing one or two clues, and then just leaving before anything kills you.
Hilariously, we forgot to pick up the bear trap we put down... So despite the fact that it never triggered, we're still out the $12 expense. But as you can probably guess, we're not exactly strapped for cash at the moment. Let's head back to the bar.
Zoe: "Did you get the recordings?"
Ken: "Yeah, here you go. You making a mixtape?"
Zoe: "No, I'm going to cross-reference these with some other EVPs that have been recorded by previous hunters. All I need to do is load up the central database and compare these recordings to the ones on the website... The WiFi's pretty good here, so it shouldn't take more than a day or two for the page to load in. Come see me after an unspecified amount of time has passed and I'll have something interesting for you!"
And with that, Zoe gives us $1,100 for the tapes and goes back to being a background ornament. We're a few grand richer, as well as having earned another level!
At this point we're at level 15, which means we're only two levels away from the unannounced maximum level cap. We can't grab all the skills in the book, but we've got enough to get the most important ones sorted. There's one extra skill I'd like to try getting my hands on, but we'll see how everything pans out in the end.
...
"What am I still doing up here?"
Author
Topic: HellSign Hunters: Australian Pest Control (Read 13969 times)