Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

And now, the answer to the question that I’m sure has been plaguing your mind for days; what the hell are we doing here?

Well, we’re certainly not here to fight the lich, as you might have expected. At this early stage and with our woeful shortage of magical power, he’d turn us inside-out, wring us like wet flannels and hang us from the walls to spruce up his otherwise drab crypt before we could say “Inappropriately high encounter level.”

(Note: A few minutes after I wrote the paragraph above, the little corner of my brain allocated to “nagging doubts” started insisting that something very similar to it had been done before by Order of the Stick, which incidentally is an excellent D&D based web comic that you should check out. But hell, I’m using it anyway. It felt like I came up with it at the time, and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then subconscious imitation is unabashed metaphorical fellatio.)

So what’s the story? Well, I’m going to need to take a step back in time here, as there is an important detail that I forgot to note earlier on.

When we’d killed Kalah and left the circus tent, we were approached by a little girl named Myara who, surprisingly, had not been abused or abandoned or murdered or subjected to any form of mistreatment whatsoever. Vespero, reeling from the shock of this, temporarily forgot his curmudgeonly hatred of children and politely asked what she wanted.

She told us that shortly prior to his becoming a delusional megalomaniac, Kalah had purchased a magical lamp from an extremely shifty merchant by the name of Jafir. Owing to the fact that we are not braindead, we were inclined to suspect that the two events were somehow linked, and since kids have no eye for value, we were easily able to persuade her to hand over the priceless magical item.

However, because things are never simple, merely rubbing the lamp did nothing aside from making it slightly shinier, (it's interesting to note that we were never actually instructed to try rubbing the lamp; seems that this is a cliché even in Faerun) so obviously the kid stiffed us and we were morally obligated wreak bloody vengeance upon her. Unfortunately, she was one of those NPCs that simply disappears forever once their usefulness has been expended, so we were left unfulfilled.

In any event, she told us that Jafir is in the habit of staying in the Crooked Crane inn. Sure enough, here we are now on the first floor of that very building, and here he is before us.

As it turns out, he was indeed behind Kalah’s descent into madness (if this surprises you then I question how you have the mental faculties to read this) and, furthermore, he immediately senses that we have the lamp on our person.

At this point he throws subtlety to the wind and reveals his true identity to us; Jafir is a Rakshasa, a race of mysterious, sinister, shapeshifting beings that seem to take pleasure only in being as much of a malignant arsehead to other people as possible.

In other words, they’re doppelgangers with fur. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually are doppelgangers that are just playing up the whole Rakshasa thing for shits and giggles.

He explains to us his motivations for weaving the web that would lead to Kalah’s downfall, (being an arsehead) and he also explains why the lamp won’t work. Apparently we need to speak a command word, which he is offering to tell us for the bargain price of 500 gold pieces. He has no need for the money, he boasts, but it will please him to know what an arsehead he’s been in making us part with it.

To hell with that. Let’s kick his ass.