I was experiencing game burn-out and missed the summer event.
Can anyone please TL;DR what happened lore-wise?
(I'm preemptively marking this as spoiler, as answers will probably contain that)
Posted Aug 29, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC
My best recollection is...
F.F. Gebrandt set up a donation drive for a new Museum of Prelapsarian History. Fallen Londoners provided labor and materials, and then helped donate attractions including relics, skeletons, and Neathbow catchboxes. Upon opening the Museum, all the finest of London attended - including the Empress. Gebrandt's machine brought back the salty Prince Consort (or something like him), but then went haywire, causing time and space to warp and some of the Second City to start showing up in London. Specifically to players, we got the option to take home one of the ushabti, stone statues that popped up all over the city.
Soon after, weird happenings occurred. Owners of a new ushabtiu found that their lodgings were tossed, and they got a negative stat penalty. Gebrandt pushed Londoners to find clues about what was going on. Long story short - your ushabtiu is evil, and apparently created by stuffing an unlucky citizen of the Second City into a small, hollow stone statue. After figuring out the truth of the ushabti, Gebrandt hired folks to work on solutions by finding rare items. After gathering what she needed, Gebrandt lured the ushabti to the Museum, tricked them into traveling through a mirror into Parabola, and then broke the mirror, trapping them there.
AFAIK, we're not quire sure what happened to Salty Albert (I don't recall reading that he disappeared after), or what effect putting a bunch of evil statues filled with trapped Second City citizens into Parabola will have.
Thank you :)
"stuffing an unlucky citizen of the Second City into a small, hollow stone statue"
Well that's just mean.
This was a burial practice from the second city dwellers who >!evacuated to Parabola, or at least some of them, who didn't physically travel there!<, to store their physical remains while >!they continued to live on in dreams!<. The people described by the Adoratrice at the end of the Second City Vengeance Parabolan War campaign appear to be>!the dream selves of the folks interred in the ushabtiu.!<
Ah and I thought it was their version of claymen servants. As I got it they got in the little fellas while still lbeing alive.
You bet i took down the echoes or whatever you call them from that; the shade of the consort most definitely vanished once the machine broke itself
Along with the details posted in other comments here, the Prelapsarian Museum we helped build still exists and is visitable in Veilgarden.
There are also new activities in hunts (in Parabola, at Zee, and in the Department of Menace Eradication) and a lab project to study an Ushabti if you capture it at the end of the DME hunt. These are all from the aftermath of the use of the device that have persisted after the majority of the Ushabtiu were lured into Parabola, a d they may give a bit of a feeling for what happened.
There are also apparently tentative plans to eventually have the Prelapsarian Exhibition (and also Mr Chimes Grand Clearing-Out) show up in the Waswood in the future, which may allow for the possibility of reliving the entirety of the event.
That's interesting!
I hope I'll have a chance to get that ushabti and experience the extra content before the next summer event comes around.
As a small mechanical note, the ability to catch an ushabti for the DME, and then study it in your lab provides a reliable, repeatable source of Primeval Hints should you need any, and don't want to cash in Trade Secrets to convert, or grind the Forgotten Quarter for a shot.
In case you need one to buy access to a Lab at the University. 😛
All the hunts are pretty short and straightforward, the most complicated lock involves actually having participated in the event. Hopefully it'll come with the Waswood version, assuming that's something they're even able to get working. Both it and the GCO don't seem like they'd entirely lend themselves to Waswood recreation (on the other hand, neither did the elections moment-to-moment gameplay).
Gebrandt: "I will open a museum, you can help!"
The Empress: "Now that your museum is complete you bring back my healthy husband with those funny Basalt Stones."
Gehrandt: "It's unstable!"
Empress: "Don't care, do it."
*Science goes boom*
Gebrandt: "Whoopsie, now there's Second City stuff in London including malicious Ushabti with dead people inside. You, Londoner, go find clues!"
*1 big scavenger hunt later*
Gebrandt: "Ok I built a huge ass mirror and we use a special perfune to lure the Ushabti into Parabola. Now excuse me, I need to visit a certain Festival and test some well water."
LOL!
I read that in Scotty's voice saying "It's the Basalt Stones, Empress, she can't take much more of this!" :D
Basically! They were using the weird memory run-off of Sphinxstone to manifest basically a revenant of Albert in his prime.
It was uh.... a bit beyond the machine's capacity.
It could have worked if she didn't push the machine past it's limits.
"Ich bin nicht hier."
nothing about it worked.
Gebrandt finally opened that science and history museum, and we helped her do it. His Amused Lordship got to console himself over losing the century party by throwing the shindig for this.
apparently part of the deals Gebrandt made to get away with making and opening all this was to do something for the Empress. It was very sad and it only sort-of worked at best.
it also broke reality and dropped a bunch of Second City era buildings and things into London. including a mess of sorta-ushabtiu that ended up being... bitter. And surprisingly clever in the ways of violence!
We eventually sent most of them to Parabola.
Thank you :)
"dropped a bunch of Second City era buildings and things into London"
Sounds like a very delayed vengeance for being squashed by subsequent cities :P
The implication seems to be that red science was used to fold up parts of the Second City, >!probably to protect the ushabtiu interred within from the Lacre floods!< and the device Gebrandt was using somehow disrupted this.
Adding to the other reply, to be clear the buildings appeared between existing London buildings, with space expanding to allow them to fit. If a honey den and an opera house only had a gap of one metre between them before, there might now be a several-metre-long Second City building there with space to space on each side and with the opera house and honey den unchanged in dimensions.
“Surprisingly clever in the ways of violence” is my new favourite thing. Thank you.