So by yesterday, I put Garamon's remains into his grave, and he told me that I need to throw the 8 talismans into the volcano. Well, when I say he told me, actually, I told him, as he was asking me the whole conversation how we should do this. That was awesome! The only slight problem? While I had no difficulties obtaining 7 talismans, I was still missing the freaking cup, of which, unlike the others, no NPC spoke as far as I knew. On top of that, I was also missing the third part of the tri-key to open the volcano chamber. Had zero idea where to get either of those items, so I was preparing myself for either a long, exhausting re-exploration of each level, or giving in and looking up a hint online. Two terrible options.
But today, I was shocked by how good the cup "quest" was. As I was thinking about it the whole day (even before playing), I came up with several things I could do to try to track those items down. A few of those were dead-ends, but then at some point, I remembered how I smelled a burning incense way before, after a mage told me it gave him visions of the demon, but all I saw was some weird ass chalice with some random looking symbols. At the time, I had no idea what any of it meant, and prompty forgot it. But now I was thinking about a cup, and my curiosity was aroused. On top of that, I was thinking about those random symbols, and recalled another female mage saying something about some mantra being broken apart into 3 parts and how you could use it to summon items. So I hauled my ass over several levels, looking through crap I stored earlier, and found a bunch of incense. Smoked up like I was a hippy at Burning Man, and saw the different cup pictures and as I expected by that point, there were 3 sets of symbols. So i run over to the shrine of virtues on level 5, thinking i ll chant that stuff there and hopefully get the cup. No such luck, as it was just a triangulating mechanism, which I followed until it brought me to that cave on level 3. I run over there, nope no cup. But the shrines gave it a name for the first time, the cup of wonder, and guess what, my handwritten notes had one for a flute melody called something of wonder, and I put 2 and 2 together. Next thing I know, I am playing music and holding the cup. How fucking cool is that whole "quest"line?
Anyways, after that, I switched over to the key part. Tried a bunch of stuff, none of it worked, I was planning to do a level 8 run for gold coins to give to the dwarf king to see if he will grant me the password to his hoard (yeah, that's a part I haven't figured out
), when I decided to pay a visit to the prison cells again, to see the dwarf who helped me find the first part of the key. Just wanted to talk with him, see if he had any more clues, he didn't. But when I got there, I realized the mage who started me on the 2nd part of the key was in an adjacent cells. And there were 3 cells, with a useless human prisoner in the third, who only offered to sketch a map for me, which I refused earlier since I already mapped out that whole area. But the threesome thing got me thinking, and I asked him for the map. And that of course led to the third part of the key.
