the morning after the banquet, we deliver hans his items and meet up with the army. bartosch says he’s been assigned to keep us safe. “i hope you don’t have anything against me escorting you today, lord capon?” i’m headcanoning that he’s clocked that hans is Weird about henry and is worried he’ll be mad about the hookup. but hans knows nothing about it, and he’s happy to have bartosch as an escort. it would’ve been so funny if choosing the romance option with hans earlier made him find out about henry’s banquet hookup (if he did one) and be sulky about it djkfgh once i’ve finished this game and know the whole hansry story, it would be fun to do a full 1+2 (re)play to try and see when i think hans first started catching feelings for henry.

the chamberlain is blabbing about how this will be such an easy attack and henry says “i think i can see now why your lord barely escaped with his life, maybe his captain underestimated the foe as lightheartedly as you!” i love it when henry gets cunty

we are ambushed in the woods, because Some How the outlaws knew about our secret plans that katherine was obviously listening in on [pretends to be shocked]

hans told me to protect the chamberlain (which is big of him since the chamberlain is his personal archnemesis) but i didn’t know how to go about doing that and now he’s dead. oh well, what can ya do! it seems like he was supposed to die in this scene anyway, so i don’t think it’s my fault. he reaped the dramatic irony that he sowed when he was laughing about how easy this battle will be. i guess this is why the demons quest will no longer be available: the quest-giver has shuffled off this mortal coil!

i’m mowing down enemies like nobody’s business omg i can’t believe how far i’ve come in combat. back in the day, one unarmored bandit would send me running for the hills :’) although this is my first combat with hans and a bunch of NPCs fighting alongside me rather than henry 1v7-ing some guys, and it’s a huge help, so i won’t get TOO cocky just yet.

drama! romance!

again, a mark of my combat improvement that during this cutscene i thought “come on game, stop telling me henry’s outnumbered, i bet he could at least try taking these guys singlehandedly! let me at em!”

we meet the leader of the outlaws, a guy called zizka. he challenges us to a 1v1 duel and we kick his ass and stab his eye out, which is very sexy. i hope hans isn’t too injured to appreciate how sexily henry defended him!

but we’re still outnumbered, so zizka takes henry and hans prisoner. iirc the premise of the 1v1 duel was something like “if you’re a sick enough dueler, i’ll take you prisoner instead of killing you” or something like that, hence this sexy moment below:

super dramatic cutscene of the corpses of our other party members hanging from a tree as they take us away.

now i’m playing as godwin, who ultimately tracks henry and hans down to nebakov fortress where they’re being held captive. i learn that godwin is a priest, but also a drunkard and an experienced warrior. i’m fonder of him now than i was at first, but he still wouldn’t be my first choice of a backup PC. would love to play as daddy radzig who is lowkey kinda hot, or how about, oh i don’t know, a woman? any woman? please?

i love that henry and hans are becoming the trosky region’s equivalent of Florida Man. godwin’s asking the locals if they know his two friends and they’re like “oh you mean those weirdos who’ve started brawls and been public nuisances on multiple occasions and keep being the main characters in stories of increasingly wild local hijinks? yeah EVERYONE knows them.”

we return to henry and hans in prison, and who should show up but istvan toth? my first face-to-face meeting with him! how exciting! he has pizzazz, i like him. it’s about time we had a pizzazz-ful villain around here.

“they haven’t yet built the gallows i’ll swing from, boy” that’s a baller line. pizzazz, i’m telling you!

“i don’t think henry’s going to hang you, he’s more likely to gut you open and i’ll be glad to help him” hans being a supportive boyfriend

finally some info for me on istvan’s activities from the first game! he was actually the mastermind behind the attack on skalitz (dr. phil works for him), and on top of that, he captured the local castle and captured radzig (and took the sword in the process). i believe henry and hans and co were able to take the castle back and save radzig and send istvan packing, which i’d imagine was the big finale battle of the first game.

all right, marshaling my thoughts in order because i’ve learned lots of civil war lore during this session (henry also interrogated a scholar at the banquet). sigismund and wenceslas are brothers. sigismund is the king of hungary and wenceslas of bohemia, and reportedly sigismund is a very competent king and wenceslas is a very incompetent one, so maybe sigismund WOULD be a better king of bohemia if not for all the murder and mayhem he’s doing to the citizens in his quest to gain control of it. istvan is a hungarian noble, so that must be why he’s loyal to sigismund and why he was sent with dr. phil to do murder and mayhem in skalitz. meanwhile in bohemia, wenceslas and the upper nobility have beef because when he first came to power they thought he was weak and tried to jockey with him for power, so he turned his back on them and worked on finding supporters among the lower nobility, which is the likes of radzig and hanush, who are loyal to wenceslas since he elevated their positions, whereas von bergow and the league of lords are the upper nobility who never liked wenceslas and are now turning to sigismund.

i think i have it all pretty straight! let’s keep moving.

okay, lots of political reveals and backstabbings come to light here. zizka & the outlaws are NOT a secret third side, but in fact are loyal to wenceslas, and they only attacked henry’s group at the start of the game because they’d seen them having a friendly meeting with von bergow’s soldiers and assumed that meant they were sigismund supporters. ergo, zizka & the outlaws are on the same side as henry & the lords of leipa. as of yet, there is no secret third side, but i wish there was because i think both of the existing options kinda suck (which i think the game is doing intentionally as a commentary on War Is Hell)

istvan and his controversially young boyfriend erik were working for zizka, but it turns out they are still sigismund loyalists and were spying on zizka & co for von bergow. so zizka threw istvan in jail with us, but now erik comes to let him out as well as lord nebakov, who is an ally of VB and sigismund and therefore of istvan, and the three of them scamper away.

after some cutscenes and conversations, henry, hans, and godwin make truce and a tentative alliance with zizka because we’ve all realized that we share a common cause (wenceslas) and common enemies (sigismund and therefore VB & istvan). my head hurts from all the side-switching that’s happened in the past 20 minutes and i’m not sure how i feel about allying with zizka, but he seems like a pretty likable guy aside from the fact that he murdered our companions at the start of the game and almost killed me and hans this morning, so i’ll roll with it. i like him as an ally more than von bergow, that’s for sure!

i fiiiiiinally switched back into Henry Gameplay Mode, and after ALL of this, he still has the positive buff from his night with bartosch LMAO that must’ve been some truly mindblowing sex if henry’s still walking on air about it after a whole battle and imprisonment and encountering his archnemesis, goddamn

henry is given a gun. oh boy! incredibly hard to use from the one test session, so i probably won’t touch it again for the rest of the game; i already know that in my hands, the little book would be “kcd2” and the big book would be “kcd2 if henry has a gun”. also apparently kreyzel has been allied with zizka this whole time?! (which is why they have gunpowder.) word, okay. maybe THAT’S why the game kept giving me options to snitch on kreyzel to von bergow (i never did, i wouldn’t betray my weird uncle!)

on that note, i do like how they managed to trick me into snitching to von bergow about olda semine; i believe that i got only the medium ending (the semine-ites survive but the fortress is burned) and there’s actually a good ending where the fortress doesn’t even get burned, if you don’t tell von bergow anything. but where i was in the game, i hadn’t yet learned enough about the political situation to realize that telling VB was a bad idea since it was currently leading me to believe that VB is an ally and olda an enemy, and then when i did learn, i felt so bad and struggled to backtrack with him later and claim i was misremembering, which he didn’t really believe, and then of course the whole semine sequence. some of the stakes and some of the magic would be lost on a replay when i already know who can and can’t be trusted!

haha this suddenly made me think of my beloved gawyn. i always defended him by saying that not having the full accurate picture of a situation will inevitably lead you to make bad decisions because you just don’t have the info needed to be able to make better ones, and now i have lived that for myself! i too fucked up while ill-informed about an ongoing civil conflict and misguided about who’s on my side and who isn’t!

hans says he wants VB dead (because hans was humiliated, ambushed, and almost hanged all because of him). i already hated him thanks to semine and vostatek’s story, so join the club! hans, what do you think about a cute new date night activity i just thought of, assassinating our mutual archnemesis together?

“i have arrived at the conclusion that a bad day is just a bad day. and it doesn’t mean your whole life is fucked up. and also, things always look better in the morning!” free therapy session with hans. but awww, this is some very sweet character growth for him after how high-strung and tantrum-y he was at the start about things not going his way for the first time ever.

hans suggests betting on a dice game but is like “although you’re totally broke aren’t you?” hans baby I have 5k in my pockets right now. i should be YOUR sugar daddy nowadays.

aww it’s fun playing dice with hans and hearing all the standard dice game lines in his voice! they need to let me hang out with him for the purposes of Just Chilling more often!

various small tasks around the fortress to help out zizka’s crew and get in their good books, since they’re still wary of us. henry helps injured von bergow prisoners, and one of them is bartosch. phew, he survived! and he had to watch henry flirting with klara (without my permission might i add, i thought i was picking a friendly option) right in front of his salad dkjfg

henry backed klara up in insisting to other zizka crew members that the VB captives still deserve medical attention. bartosch tells henry “thanks for putting in a good word for us” my man, henry is still riding high from whatever you did to him last night, so it’s the least i could do.

henry admitted to bartosch & co that he’s joined zizka. bartosch isn’t mad at him about it and says that everybody has to serve one master or another, but hopes they won’t have to meet on the battlefield as enemies. “we have our honor and we won’t betray it.” and thus ends our brief situationship, i imagine. farewell, guy i vaguely knew for a few days!

henry gets to flex his skills in both survival and alchemy (his two strongest, as we know) as he works on expertly diagnosing and treating the patients. i love being competent!

uh oh, a MASSIVE army arrives in the morning! forces from prague, led by both of henry’s and one of my archnemeses: von bergow, istvan, and dr. phil (also noting that this is my first face-to-face encounter with dr. phil!)

“hanush’s pair of buffoons” ayyyy that’s us!

i’m kinda thinking “man, this beef between VB and zizka is none of MY concern, this really isn’t my circus” and wishing i could embody the “if it sucks, hit da bricks” meme in this moment and simply Leave with my two homies (hans & godwin), but henry is too honorable and he believes this IS his circus. istvan and dr. phil being there has made it personal for him, and he says he ran away from them once and will never do so again. haha another point where i’m a bit disadvantaged immersion-wise from not having played the first game; i fully understand that things with istvan & dr. phil are personal for henry, but they aren’t personal for *me*! not the way my hatred of von bergow and the castle blacksmith is personal djkfgjh

big battle ensues, very exciting! i took out a ton of guys via arrows from up on the ramparts. good thing i’d practiced archery so tirelessly during my round of admin before the banquet! then i tried poisoning my sword blade for the first time, and holy shit it kills people in like 1-2 strikes. hohoho, the game has just created a monster! call me Henry of Poisonblade-itz from now on!

but in the end, we’re outnumbered and wind up barricading ourselves in the tower, which they blow up with a cannon. henry, hans, godwin, and zizka are taken hostage, but hans is separated from us and taken away somewhere else since he’s politically valuable. STOP taking hans away from me!!! i’ve had enough of this!! setting my “days since i last had to rescue my damsel” counter back to 0.

in the dungeons of trosky castle, henry wakes up. henry, i am so sorry to objectify you at a time like this, but you look great.

“the powerful lords invoke hell to keep simpletons like you in line. god doesn’t give a shit about me, and the feeling’s mutual!” istvan is being an edgelord but also he’s kinda cooking i can’t lie

henry tells istvan “i’ll kill you, and your erik will have to watch, and as soon as i’m finished with you i’ll gut him as well” every interaction between these two is gay on gay violence

“you pretend to be cruel, but you take good care of erik. someone must have really hurt you, am i right?” there i was thinking, wow is henry even managing to find some empathy for istvan? the guy he hates more than literally anything or anyone else in the whole world? but then he follows it up with “the reason i’m interested is it might come in handy while i’m torturing erik” lmao never change henry

zizka’s been tortured for info and now it’s henry’s turn, but he and i hold firm in not revealing anything! ultimately godwin breaks and tells istvan some stuff to make him leave henry alone.

normal brain: hopefully, as a noble, hans is being treated better in captivity, wherever he is
the angst gremlin: i wish he was here watching henry be tortured in front of him as he is powerless to do anything about it

istvan and his cronies leave. later, we hear familiar singing out in the hallway followed by sounds of the guard being killed. i would know the hallelujah domine song anywhere because it gets stuck in my head a hundred times per day: it’s katherine, come to rescue us! that was hot of her and i feel the first faint spark of interest in romancing her, but i’m enjoying her and henry’s platonic vibe so i’ll probably keep it that way. i like it when henry is genuine friends with women! i do have my eye on rosa romance though. when will we meet her? who knows.

regardless, it feels good to be the one getting rescued instead of doing the rescuing for a change. henry can be a damsel one (1) time, as a treat!

katherine and zizka know each other and seem very close; he calls her his sister-in-arms, so it seems she’s part of the band, which i’d already suspected from the ambush. she and henry finally clear the air about her previously refusing to admit she saw him at the pond, now that they’re all in cahoots and can talk freely about such things. and we finally have a female character directly involved in the main storyline in an important capacity! jesus christ be praised!

for the third time in this game, i have found myself with no stuff, no horse, no dog, and no boyfriend. i hate it here! but katherine knows where they’re keeping my stuff, so one part of my mission is to retrieve it, thank god. the other parts are to kill istvan, nab some important documents about sigismund’s plans, and meet up with the others to sneak out of the castle via a secret underground passage.

ha, i guess treating myself to a 2-night petty theft spree ended up being excellent practice for this narratively crucial night of sneaking around through trosky castle stealing stuff! this last stretch of gameplay has just been me being thrilled that things i’ve previously worked hard on practicing are now coming into play in an important way. it’s so satisfying! i was definitely right to hold off on advancing the main plot until i felt more comfortable being put into Situations, because brother, it has been non-stop Situations ever since that damn wedding.

the others are like “oh man henry you’re gonna have to break into various VIP bedrooms to get stuff, do you think you can do it?” guys please, i’ve broken into every bedroom in this castle multiple times and robbed things right from under their inhabitants’ sleeping noses. you might as well ask a fish if it thinks it’ll be able to swim, or hans if he thinks he’ll be able to work his noble status into conversation. they don’t call me Henry of Stealthitz for nothing!

HENRY STILL HAS THE SEX BUFF EVEN AFTER BEING KIDNAPPED AND TORTURED LMAO STOP

cutscene of istvan giving erik a message of the intel he just got from us so that he can take it via horse to someone somewhere (i wasn’t listening, if it said the recipient/destination). istvan says, sounding sincere, “i almost felt sorry for radzig’s bastard. but we got what we want.” oh my, last-minute slight humanizing moment before his death?

he tenderly touches erik’s cheek and says “nobody will hand anything on a platter to men like you and me.” henry is spying on this from the balcony like 🏳️‍🌈🤨❓

me getting sidetracked: oooh a book about the properties of different herbs? [opens it up and starts reading]
henry, pointedly: this doesn’t look like sigismund’s orders
me: shut up henry i’m trying to educate us

we have a laughably easy time sneaking through the whole castle and up to istvan’s room. he is standing dramatically by the window, and a cutscene begins of him calmly chatting with henry and telling him about how they’re narrative foils, which henry vehemently denies. he also talks about how the only way to survive in this world is to look out for only yourself and do whatever it takes to stay on the winning side.

istvan seems to have given up and accepted that he’s at the end of the line now that he’s locked alone in a room with a royally pissed off and very martially capable henry, so he invites us to kill him, but wonders whether we will do it the foolish but honorable way by challenging him to a duel, or if we’ll be smart and do it the underhanded way and thus prove ourselves to be like him just as he’s been saying we are.

now we’re in conversation mode and i’m presented with choices. as IF i would go straight to the killing when i could first learn some tea! i’m really enjoying this scene with istvan and don’t want it to end.

istvan says that erik and henry have similarities; erik was orphaned in the razing of his own village. orphaned BY istvan lmao we love a good ol’ toxic gay villain ship every now and then! having the Good Rep of henry and hans means you can go hogwild with the Bad Rep on the villains’ side. erik is noticeably younger than istvan, so depending on just how young he was during the razing of his village (calling it “orphaning” does make me think he was a kid or teen, since otherwise you’re not really an orphan you’re just an adult whose parents died lmao), it’s likely some kind of grooming situation where istvan took him under his wing right when he was alone and vulnerable and needed a parental figure to latch onto, and then eventually they became lovers. wow! we don’t have time to unpack all of that.

henry responds like so. out of context it sounds like he’s being welcomed into the Medieval Bohemia Queer Support Group

henry: you speak about him like he was your son
me and istvan: united in a moment of baffled speechlessness at how bad henry’s gaydar is

but then henry says “hmm or actually back in the courtyard it seemed like there was something more to it. you love him!” he got there in the end!

“are you begging me? we’ve hardly got started and you’re already begging?” another top-notch No Context Henry Quote to add to the collection. hans will be hearing this one later, no doubt!

but the context is that istvan is, quite sincerely, begging him not to go after erik. “drown me in blood if you want, but leave him be. please.” i have wandered into positively shakespearean levels of gay on gay violence! this is so tasty!

we’ve finally run out of conversation topics and it’s time to kill istvan, which makes me really sad because he was SUCH a fun and compelling antagonist in the 3 scenes i had him for and i don’t want to lose him so soon (i mean, we met him and lost him within a single liveblog post, and only 2 irl days for me!) but again, that’s on me for not playing the first game. i imagine he’s the Big Bad of the first game and thus must be cleared off the stage only halfway through the second to make room for Bigger Bads. but the other Bads we’ve seen so far (von bergow & dr. phil) are nowhere near as fun or compelling as istvan! especially with all the henry-foiling making things so personal between them.

i wish istvan had survived long enough for hansry to be in higher gear so that he could observe it and draw even more parallels between him and henry! alas! though i feel like henry would be paralleling erik instead in that one; i can imagine istvan-erik as like the dark twisted version of hans-henry. the powerful nobleman and the devoted little doggy who follows his every order because he took him in when he had nothing and nobody else.

i dithered over the How To Kill choice for a while, but decided to be boring and kill him in an honorable duel. as much fun as i’ve had letting henry’s chaotic neutral side show during all my burglary sprees of late, i think he would be so shaken and upset by istvan comparing them that he would be desperate to prove the opposite in this moment by doing the honorable route!

the duel was much easier and shorter than i’d expected, and then there’s a dramatic cutscene of henry running him through and pushing him out the window, where he tumbles down from the highest tower of the castle on top of the hill. damn! it ain’t medieval bohemia without a good defenestration or two; i remember that much from AP euro, at least.

and henry has the Dad Sword back!

me checking the sword’s info: [child receiving an avocado vine voice] it’s a longsword! thanks…………….. [tucks it away with no intention of using it ever]

i’m a basic bitch, shortsword was the default weapon the game gave me and thus it is the only one i use! and i can use shields with them, which makes me feel safer. plus, i’m my own blacksmith now; no matter how narratively significant the Dad Sword is, i’d rather wield swords we crafted with our own two hands. which feels like a nice angle on henry’s character growth in and of itself! letting go of his dads a bit and being ready to be his own man.

henry after pushing istvan out the window: ………i hope the bastard didn’t have those keys on him

LMAO henry <3 maybe the shared braincell was over with hans tonight, for once

i got my stuff back, again! JCBP!

meeting up with godwin to get the important docs. godwin can’t get into the locked room, which is really embarrassing for him because it’s only an easy-level lock. i found the keys to it in istvan’s room, but i decided to lockpick the door instead just to flex on godwin. gotta show him why they call me Henry of Lockpickz!

we make our escape with katherine and zizka, and the gang discusses the nature of revenge. i had henry say that killing istvan didn’t make him feel much better because now he just feels empty (because *i* feel empty after losing such a good villain so quickly). godwin says “there’s a hole in your heart where hatred used to be. you have to fill it with something.” yeah, like love for hans <3 “you can fill that hole with faith in our lord!” sure godwin. haha i keep forgetting he’s a priest; i like when he shows genuine faith as well as wisdom/emotional intelligence, it makes his character more interesting and surprising underneath the “drunk old grizzled warrior” surface.

godwin lectures us that giving istvan a chance to fight us was too risky and we should’ve killed him the sneaky way instead. “what would’ve happened if you’d lost, did you think about that?” yeah i would’ve reloaded the save godwin

fun escape sequence involving lots of sneaking around through the woods with tons of guards patrolling! but you already know that they call me Henry of Stealthitz, so this is easy peasy. my proudest moment was killing a guard to death with a single shot from afar with a poisoned arrow (helped out by a perk for doing higher damage when attacking people who don’t know i’m there, which i’d only just unlocked after leveling up stealth twice during this whole night’s escapades)

what’s that you’re asking? does henry still have the sex buff? you bet he does.

godwin splits off from the party to return to radzig and hanush and let them know about hans’s capture. henry, katherine, and zizka continue on to the fortress of suchdol. we have officially reached the second map!! very exciting! i can’t wait to have a whole new map to explore.

ooh, suchdol is the scene of the future siege in the flashforward! i’d better make sure i learn my way around before it becomes an emergency. i’m nervous to now be in a map full of large buildings, because i have historically struggled with navigating those!

and henry has finally lost the sex buff, RIP! to recap, here are some events that did not put a damper on henry’s good mood about getting laid:

• fighting a whole battle
• getting taken hostage
• coming face-to-face with his archnemesis
• switching sides in a war
• fighting another whole battle
• getting blown up by a cannon
• getting taken prisoner
• being tortured for information
• escaping jail
• killing his archnemesis

accurate bi awakening portrayal. NOTHING could bring my man down after getting dicked down for the first time. Good For Him!

man, if a one-night stand with a near-random NPC could do all that to henry, then sharing a night of passion with his beloved hans ought to be able to sustain him through the whole siege. they call it suchdol because they sucked all- [a hook yanks me off stage]

anyway. the lord of suchdol ushers us inside to eat his leftover lunch, and i had to indignantly take a screenshot of these two rudeasses immediately helping themselves to the two bowls of stew and not leaving one for me:

okay fine, zizka is badly injured from torture and from me stabbing his eye, and katherine Is A Woman, so I GUESS they ~deserve~ better food than i do as the able-bodied man of the group. hmph.

i will note that henry is down to 14 hunger out of 100 even though he has at least ten pounds of perfectly good food in his inventory, so it’s his own fault for being too stupid to feed himself during an offscreen timeskip when i’m not there to make him do so.

the lord of suchdol says “history is full of kings who are dumb shitty kings but the blood in their veins is more important than being a good king. yeah wenceslas is a bad king, but who cares?” uhhhhh henry wanna help me create that secret third side?

i don’t know why, but this line made me laugh harder than almost anything else in the game so far omg:

i was hanging around chatting to katherine and zizka and suddenly i get this screen! what the fuck????

is this because i didn’t immediately go to bed like he invited me to? because i went up to him and said “ummmm no offense but you’re not famous”? to be safe, i avoided both things the second time and this time i did not fail.

also, in the first timeline when i got a chance to talk to katherine, she told us that the whole force at nebakov but for us 4 prisoners was killed, including klara, RIP. but henry will never know that in this timeline since peter of pisek apparently will lose his shit if i try to talk to my friends for 1 minute before going to bed.

henry’s haunted by dreams about istvan and killing him; i’m glad istvan will continue to haunt the narrative, at least. henry’s dreams also include his dad (dead dad martin, that is) speaking on behalf of his conscience, asking him if it was worth it and how many more names are on his list, how much more blood will he need to spill before it feels like enough. beautiful cinematography!

i met the wife of the captain of the guard, who self-importantly says “it’s good my husband didn’t hear you, he’s terribly jealous and he could have you whipped” girl i don’t want you. i literally just said “good morning goodwife”

then i met her husband and he is boasting about his garrison. they are both instantly my archnemeses, so i wanted to tell him his garrison was a joke, but i forced myself to be diplomatic and say “fighting isn’t really my thing” (complimenting the garrison was not on the table, obviously). to which katherine replied “getting captured is more your thing, right?” NO i’m not HANS! shut up! oh dear, i think i am to katherine what hans is to me.

now the captain’s saying most soldiers wouldn’t even want to take on his men, let alone an ordinary boy. i cannot let this stand, so of course i shout “look here, i was only being polite, i’d happily take on your men!” day 1 brushing elbows with the uppity cityfolk and i’m already being ragebaited so easily. i miss bozhena’s hut.

…………….i lost the duel. i’m embarrassed. imagine losing a duel to a guy named pullcock. but it wasn’t my fault!!!! the captain said “let’s stuff this dumb baby’s clothes with sand so he doesn’t get hurt” and next thing i knew i was overencumbered and could barely move. they encumbered me on purpose to make me lose, the bastards!

and katherine poured salt on the wound afterwards:

this screenshot really shows you the ridiculousness of her medieval victoria’s secret push-up bra. you ARE allowed to dress love interests like normal women you know.

i went to track down zizka. katherine told me where to look for him, but it still took me ten minutes to find him because i’m directionally challenged when placed inside a large human settlement. the Zs in zizka are pronounced zh, and so i’m wandering around thinking “zizkebab where are you?” completely unintentionally, my brain just did it on its own. i’m afraid he’s now stuck like that in my head.

as i’m wandering around the whole fortress, i’m seeing sooooo many locked chests and must physically restrain myself from racing over to lockpick them in broad daylight in front of 15 NPCs. oh man, think of how many locked chests there are going to be in kuttenberg!! putting me down in a city full of locked chests is the equivalent of sending a gambling addict to vegas. i love that i started this game like “i’m going to be a law-abiding citizen!” and now i have genuine actual kleptomania.

we meet with a noble named margrave jobst, another kcd1 character henry already knows but i don’t. i’ve about reached my capacity for how many old white men in dope hats i can keep track of, and if i meet one more after this, it will put me over the edge. i learn that zizka hates jobst and doesn’t trust him, though they are technically on the same side, so i’ll keep my eye on him. zizka’s officially my homie now, i’ve warmed to him a great deal and i trust him! (now watch him betray me later, that would be so typical)

jobst invites us to stay and hang out at suchdol, but henry passionately exclaims “i have to rescue sir hans! i made a promise i’d protect him!” too right, henry! let’s go get our damsel!

after the convo, we set out with zizkebab to begin looking for hans. fingers crossed we find him next time!