Advertisement

7/16/2018

Two Worlds Pacifist Run - City of Ashos Quests (Part II)

Here is the last of the posts covering the good pacifist run quests we found in the city of Ashos:

Hajime Masaware & the Magic Dust-Dealers
Near the gates of the city, you can meet a soldier standing under some outdoor awnings south of the entrance named Hajime Masaware, who will suspect you of being a mercenary and offer you some undercover work.
Hajime Masaware commissions the hero to uncover the identities of the current magic dust dealers of Ashos...
His quest is called "Tracking Down the Magic Dust Dealer," and will require you to pretend to be a magic dust courier in order to find out who is currently a prime dealer.
According to Masaware and information filled in by the protagonist in their conversation, magic dust is apparently not the most harmful substance out there ( "'tis like ale," according to the protagonist), but the leadership apparently outlawed it because they wanted the citizenry edgy enough to have a more motivated work ethic.
One of many rewards of experience points received during each branch of the dust dealer quests...
Caveat: This quest series enters a distinct grey area, since if you complete them all, Masaware and the town guard will actually go slay some of the dust-dealers at their homes. But the good news is: As long as you wait until after the city of Ashos is sacked by orcs (see the earlier "Death and Resurrection of Ashos" post for details) you can bring the murdered dust-dealers back to life using the same "Resurrection" spell that works on everyone else in the city, as long as they're only bumped off and resurrected once. (The crux is to not resurrect the dust-dealers until after the orcs attack and slay everyone in the entire city, since everyone in Two Worlds gets only two lives, but not three.)

As for the quest details:
Masaware will have told you that they captured a courier and tortured him, but the leadership higher up the pyramid was clever enough to keep their dealers in the dark about who is in command, so they only know the courier was supposed to give his package of magic dust to the innkeeper Kenji Sahashi.
Kenji Sahashi is displeased by your involvement, but still provides the magic dust package...
Sahashi's Inn is right on the left-hand side of the upper street heading west from the entrance. He won't be at all pleased to encounter an outsider talking to him in his Inn, but when you talk to him about the dust, you'll receive rewards and he'll send you to another dealer named Takumi Kajiura located in northern Ashos.
Kajiura remarks on the city guard
Kajiura expresses his opinion that bribing the city guards to overlook his operations isn't necessary, since he considers them to be incompetents. He will say some very entertaining things in your conversations, and reward you with more gold and experience points, after which he'll refer you to one last dealer located in the southern wing of the city: Arai Kurihara.
Receiving rewards of XP and gold from Kajiura

After you receive your final round of gold and xp from Arai Kurihara, you can choose whether or not to go back and rat all the dealers out to the guards for even more gold and experience, or whether to shrug off the rest of the mission to keep the dealers from getting in trouble.
When we did these side quests, we didn't actually realize that the guards were actually going to "deal" with the magic dust dealers by slaying them: We only found out about it when we dropped back in on Takumi Kajiura near the teleport later on and found his body lying on the downstairs floor of his house. (We naively thought the magic dust dealers would just be fined for dealing in contraband goods, since everyone including Masaware agreed that the dust is allegedly not all that harmful, and he openly joked about how he and his men enjoy using the confiscated dust themselves rather than throwing it away.)
Kajiura after being "dealt with" by the guards— but he'll be back later after we Resurrect him with our level 15 Air Magic spell...

The odd twist that made everything work out OK with no permanent deaths in the end: Since Ashos is actually doomed to have its entire population wiped out in a scripted plot disaster in which orcs sack the city and massacre everyone, you can only save everyone by casting "Resurrection" on them to bring them all back to life later anyway.
Consequently, we decided to just let the dust-dealers take their lumps temporarily, and resurrect all the dust-dealers later, along with the entire rest of the population of Ashos. (See the final section on "Resurrecting the Dead Magic-Dust Dealers" for what happened at that point.)
After that happens, Masaware and his heavy-hitters in the Ashos police square won't go back and kill the dust dealers a second time either: It would seem everyone in Two Worlds is entitled to two lives when there's a pacifist challenger on the loose going on a resurrection spree with the level 15 Air magic spell "Resurrection."

Mage Kano Mizoguchi: "Look in the Temple"
This is a critical quest you must complete in order to get inside the Temple of Yatholen (which is mandatory at some point, since it's where you'll eventually need to go to get the "Relic Water Stone" to complete the main storyline):
When you speak with Mizoguchi he'll tell you about the Trachidis insect-creatures that have become such a menace, confiding that he suspects someone is breeding them inside the Yatholen temple.
Mage Kano Mizoguchi will provide you with a key to the Yatholen Temple if you investigate his theory...
While the theory was perfectly plausible, this actually turns out not to be the case, but this is the critical point at which Mizoguchi will give you the key needed to get inside Yatholen temple. (The only other key we know about is on Uchinao Sakamoto, but we don't believe there's any way to get him to fork it over without having to kill someone, which we didn't try.)
After you explore the Yatholen temple, the quest will automatically udpate itself after running or sneaking past the serpents, but not finding any trace of Trachidis or breeding operations. You can then go back to Kano Mizoguchi's house and tell him you didn't find anything. This will disappoint him, but you'll still receive another reward of gold and nonviolent experience points, and will still get to keep the key to the Temple.
Receiving the vital "Key to the Temple in Ashos"
The Temple of Yatholen:
Now that you have the key, you can go and claim the Eye of Yatholen (Relic Water Stone) at any time, keeping in mind that doing so will cause the disaster in which the city is sacked by orcs.
Approaching the gates to the Temple of Yatholen

Since there's no time pressure to get the Stone though, we'd prefer to get the Lv15 Air Spell Resurrection first, because the Ashos teleport is also the trading station of two mercantile Society Mages who sell spell cards: All merchandise varies from day to day each time the merchants of all sorts return to their posts, but eventually you're sure to get the spell if your persist in checking inventories of the mages in Ashos, Cathalon, Quidnar, and possibly elsewhere. This is easiest if you drop teleport stones next to each group of mages. (We eventually found ours in stock with the mage in the Cathalon fountain square, but if you let the two merchant mages in Ashos get massacred by orcs before you have the Resurrection spell, it might take a lot longer to find the spell in stock elsewhere.)
These two mages have rotating inventories of different spells available, so are a good bet to eventually find the Resurrection spell in stock, along with other mercantile mages in Cathalon and Quidnar...
Once you're ready to enter Yatholen's Temple, you will find another atmospheric dungeon that you can sneak through without being seen if you're very cautious. If you're wearing the Orc Camouflage Armor at this point though, the Serpents inside this temple won't attack you, making it a walkover in which you can just walk straight into the misty chamber where the Relic Water Stone (aka "The Eye of Yatholen") is found on a remarkable altar in the middle of a watery ceremonial chamber.

Orc armor or not: As soon as you grab the stone, you'll probably notice some major updates to your questbook, and when you exit the temple you'll find that the city has been sacked by orcs, who have massacred every citizen in the city...

Fortunately this is the point at which you can now go and resurrect the entire population, after deciding how to deal with the conflict that'll arise between the Ashos natives and the orc invaders. (See the previous "Death & Resurrection of Ashos" post for the full details about how we handled that interesting challenge.)

Kouji Hisakawa & Kimura Ishii the Poetry Collector: "Get Back My Letters"
You can find Kouji Hisakawa in the house up at the farthest point of north-central Ashos, and learn that he's looking for help getting back some ancestral letters containing his father's poetry.
Apparently he sold the letters when he was short of gold, but now he wants to buy them back to preserve the family honor since they're heirlooms. Unfortunately, Kimura Ishii, the poetry collector he sold the letters to, does not want to sell the letters back to him, since she apparently thinks they'll be worth more.
Kouji Hisakawa
You can do this quest at any time, by the way, but we ended up doing half of it before the sack of Ashos, and the other half after resurrecting everyone, since we initially had a hard time getting back the letters:
When you go to visit Kimura Ishii at her house in the southern quarter, however, she will offer you a compromise, despite being decidedly stand-offish:
Kimura Ishii
However, after attempting to persuade her to sell the letters, she'll say that she owns a house outside town on the beach, which has become the stomping ground of a pack of ghouls, and she wants them all cleared out of her house before she'll consider selling you the letters.
Kimura Ishii leads you to believe she'll consider selling the letters if you clear the zombies out of her beach house...
If you've recently joined the Committee for the Preservation of the Undead or want to avoid all indirect violence you're welcome to skip this, of course, but we tested out our usual compromise tactic of casting the Chaos Rage spell to make the shambling undead start fighting with each other, and do their own dirty work for us.
En route to our clean-up duties at Kimura Ishii's beach house
A reaper also attacked us on the beach, and after running away from it ourselves, the little fellow ended up jumping in the fray and bumping off a few ghouls to speed up the work. (You'll know when the fiasco is over with, since you'll automatically receive a skill point and the quest log will announce that it's been updated, so you can return to Kimura Ishii.)

At this point, we got confused for awhile on our run, since Kimura Ishii  still refused to give us the letters even after we did all of her work clearing the zombies out of her beach house, and subsequently disappeared from her house in Ashos, after throwing us out with a few sharp words.
Ishii throws us out when we request she keep her end of the bargain and sell us the letters...
We figured things out later though, with an interesting twist, since we didn't do it until after Ashos had been sacked by orcs, and we'd already resurrected everyone inside (described in the previous post in detail):
Since we didn't know how to get the letters after she chased us away, our plan was to wait until Ashos had been sacked, then resurrect the soldiers and turn the fallen orcs to the defense side also until the city was fully controlled by the defenders, and then resurrect the more vulnerable citizens, including Ishii. However, to avoid fruitless argument, we were hoping to be able to nab the letters from her first, before casting the Ressurection spell to bring her back to life.
However, after throwing you out of her house after you tell her that you've gotten rid of the ghouls at her beach house, Ishii apparently actually left Ashos and went out to her beach house instead of remaining inside the doomed city. This meant that she ironically became one of the few natural survivors when the orcs sacked the city and killed everyone else, even though she was also the only person in the city who had a special item we wanted to take before reviving her...

Fortunately, things still worked out with an additional oddball twist: After the fall of Ashos, our hero was wearing the Orc Camouflage armor to make it easier to move among the ranks of orc invaders without being attacked, and this caused Ishii to have an interesting reaction to us when we dropped by her beach house to ask for the letters:
Ishii talked to our hero in the Orc armor when he shoved his way in the door, and she agreed to sell him the letters for 500 gold despite being as unfriendly as usual...
However, immediately after handing over the letters and taking the gold, Ishii drew her sword and started whacking at our hero (coming pretty close to one-shotting him with a single blow after catching us by surprise), and chasing him a significant distance up the beach to drive him off her property ...
After paying her 500 gold for the letters and receiving them at last, the protagonist is chased off the beach by a sword-wielding Kimru Ishii...
Fortunately the hero's running speed allowed him to outdistance all adversaries as usual, and Ishii eventually sheathed her sword and went back to her beach house with her gold, while we ran away with the Hisakawa family letters...
We then went back into Ashos and delivered the letters to the grateful Kouji Hisakawa (who we had already resurrected along with his family earlier, along with all the other Ashos citizens). This concluded these particular misadventures with yet another nice reward of gold and nonviolent experience points.
A grateful Kouji Hisakawa receives the letters at last (after which you'll receive a reward of gold and experience points)
Resurrecting the Dead Magic-Dust Dealers:
Our final task before leaving Ashos was to resurrect our dust-dealing acquaintance Takumi Kajiura. It's necessary to save his resurrection until sometime after the orcs are dealt with, since if you revived him before the orcs sacked the city, he'd end up getting killed twice and become impossible to resurrect. If you wait until after you're done with the orcish problem, however, you'll be able to resurrect him and find that he has not changed in the slightest since being executed by the guards for heading the local dust-dealing operations.
Takumi Kajiura brought back to life by the Resurrection spell...
In fact, he'll still make more disparaging remarks about how the guards are supposedly so incompetent that it's not even worth bribing them with some gold as insurance for his operations:
Prior to his being slain by the city guards, our protagonist asked if he'd bribed the guards, and he stated: "Nay... 'twere like a leash on a toothless dog, if I paid them."
After the police showed up at his house and executed him and his wife for dealing magic dust, we thought he might have changed his mind, but instead immediately gave us another package of magic dust and asked us to deliver it to someone else in the city.
And when we asked him if he'd bribed the guards this time, he said "No need. They are incompetent. 'Twould be like paying a blind and deaf man to watch your wife..."
On this last note: If you head upstairs, you'll also find Kajiura's wife lying where she was slain either by orcs or by the anti-dust enforcers (we're not sure which), and can now cast Resurrection on her too to bring her happily back to life:
A nimbus of light surrounds Kajiura's wife after reviving her with the 'Resurrection' spell.
At this point, the time came to bid our friends the Kajiura's farewell, and leave the city of Ashos after a long and eventful stay.
Kajiura bids the protagonist farewell and wishes him good fortune...