Some assembly required

After a quick teleport, it's off to talk to Marcassin. Surprising, his city isn't in total ruin since we've been gone, and he's even cleaned himself up in a spiffy new outfit. The down side is that he's completely useless with putting the over sized balls into the small wand. The problem is that the stones and wand are out of temporal alignment, since the wand is 15 years younger than the stones. He suggests that the sage Khulan might be able to figure out a fix, but she's been missing ever since the big bad wizard took out her floating kingdom of Xanadu. Ester suggests asking her father, since he's one of the only original sages left.

How hard can it be?

The plan to visit Ester's dad gets thrown out right quick, apparently it was only there to motivated them to leave the castle, since they right away find by the side of the road the ghost of one of Khulan's guards. What luck that this ghost just happened to be there at just that moment and with all the information they needed! So the ghost tells them that Khulan is alive and some where near by (with an exact map marker).

The Spirit of Plot Contrivances Past

Turns out that the sage is in that Aztec town they wouldn't let me in to earlier. Apparently she's been ruling this place for a while now, and has been taking pieces of the town folk's hearts so that they won't live in fear. I only know this since Drippy says it straight out, other wise they all talk and act like average NPCs.

Found it!

When the group gets to Khulan, she's about to take the fear out of a little kid. The group yells at her and just as I expected, she unleashes a nightmare.

Saw this coming...

What i didn't expect was what a cheap and annoying ass this thing was to fight. It's main trick is to constantly send out party effecting poison spells. Since Oliver is the only one that can cure poison, he has to run around full time curing himself and the other two. This is more problematic since Oliver's familiars are also the main DPS dealers of the group, so with him on healing duty, there's no time for attacking, and this thing has a ton of health! Also, the nightmare's attacks do 60-90 damadge each time unless you are blocking, and the AI party members almost never block! 

So I was beating my head against a wall trying to juggle keeping the party un-poisoned, not dying, blocking, and do some damage if lucky. After 4 or 5 attempts, I said screw it and let Swaine and Esther die off, then with only Oliver I could concentrate on juts keeping him blocking (and thus also not poisoned) and doing ranged attacked now and then. Surprisingly enough this worked. The Nightmare was made to do team damage, so with only 1 target who is avoiding its spells, it couldn't do much. It then went into a long drawn out war of attrition, the night mare would chip away at Oliver's health even with blocking, and Oliver would chip away at the nightmare's health when not blocking. The up side is that Oliver has a big stack of hamburgers that restore all his health, she he can out last the nightmare.

A big help though was every now and then the nightmare would drop a power up that let Oliver unleash a powerful special attack that does 3 times the damage.

  

EAT THIS!

Finally I beat the nightmare, and the evil wizard shows up in smoke form to curse that his plan is foiled (blah blah blah), but then he scarpers away before actually doing anything when the sky pirate captain shows up. Yet even with the nightmare gone, the sage is still missing the emotion of love from her heart, but oh so luckily the pirate is deeply in love with the sage and offers up some of his love to heal her. Turns out that before being a pirate, he was the head of the Xanadu air guard (explaining where he got the giant airship) and close to Khulan, yet couldn't be with her since she was the ruler of the land and blah blah blah...

Look, now it's the ghost of Plot Contrivances Present!

  
So with the sage's heart healed, she can at last put the stones into the Monstar wand. The solution actually uses in game logic instead of pulling a new magic out of it's ass. Oliver has to cast the spell that rewinds time on the stones to set them as they were 15 years ago while the sage casts the spell to puts the parts together again. 

Hope this also renews its warranty

So with the wand full powered, the party's next course of action is to attack the evil wizard where he lives. Down side is he lives in a castle atop a poisonous swamp (likely that evil looking place i saw before), so before that the group need to assemble the parts needed to make that flute i figured they would need to make back in the January 16th post. 

Also, with all the boss battle stuff, the familiars I won from the casino are levelled enough to go through their first evolution. Unfortunately, nothing has dropped the orb needed to evolve Chick Wing, so he'll be stuck as he is for a while more. Up side is I got a trophy! 

Still looking just as weird and silly

Most important of all though, with the full powered want, I can finally open those purple chests scattered all over. Luckily there just happens to be one in the town...

...meh