Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

With the thief brought to harsh justice, it’s time for mission 2. Heading through the first secret door located in the downstairs corridor, we come to a carpeted room filled with brightly coloured pillows of all shapes and sizes. Its occupants include a man sitting slouched in a chair with his legs parted wide, and an exhausted dwarf lying flat on his back.

I don’t know what’s been going on in here and I don’t care to.

More importantly, this room contains the woman we’re looking for: Baisera. Before talking to her I once again have to take my headphones off because of awful voice acting.

I don’t quite know how to describe this one. Her first line is “Go away…leave me alone, I beg you,” and presumably she’s supposed to sound pained and depressed. However, the actor isn’t remotely convincing, so what you end up hearing is someone who’s trying to feign a pained and depressed voice and failing miserably.

Still, perhaps I’m making an assumption I should not be making here. Perhaps she was supposed to sound like she was trying to fake it. After all, she obviously wasn’t particularly upset about her husband’s death if she immediately took the opportunity to go and sample a high life of sex, slaves and drugs, so perhaps she’s trying to convince us otherwise so that we don’t judge her.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention the drugs, did I? Apparently she’s become a black lotus junkie. For those who don’t know, black lotus is occasionally referred to and hinted at being a potent and highly illegal drug in this game…although interestingly, in later editions, its extract was made into a lethal poison. That would certainly explain the killer headache she seems to be having.

We have the opportunity to taunt her by rubbing the fact that her husband is now an accursed zombie in her face at this point, but as tempting as that is, she refuses to talk to you from that point on and you can’t finish the quest, so we won’t do that. Instead we tell her about his fate and agree to meet her at the graveyard, because lord knows I certainly wouldn’t want to go smooching a zombie without a shifty and mentally unstable stranger with me as a chaperone.

Before she goes, Vespero says “You’ll thank me for this later, you know.” Yes. Quite. I’m sure she’ll be just overflowing with gratitude after she contracts whatever variety of illnesses you can catch from French-kissing rotting meat.

As a parting note, she tells us not to take too long, since she isn’t going to wait around in the graveyard all day…which is fair enough, since we’re going straight there, but I’m pretty sure this is a lie and she is more than happy to wait there all day, all week, or even all month, because just like all NPCs she lacks any sort of initiative and requires the presence of a protagonist to accomplish anything. Know your place, woman.