REBLOG IF YOU'RE A HUMAN AND YOU USE EM DASH

Fuck i just realised how much funnier it would be if in swap au it would STILL be harry who loses his memory. A sweet guy and a genius, but clueless, so he has to be lead around by a toal disaster of a man. Fuck. I might have to redraw the idea for the comic from the beginning. B'D

X7/Locust City Act's V Plot Details, Tasks, and Endings!

hi everyone! I created a new sideblog EXCLUSIVELY so that I can post this text (I figured my main account is shadowbanned or smth) ANYWAY

you can read the 1-5 Acts' Summaries done by @parasolemn! They've done an amazing job and I wanted to take part in deciphering too, hehe

note: English is not my first language therefore word-guessing can be pretty hard for me. There are some minor places I couldn't undestand so I would highly appreciate your help!

UPD 10/04/2025 @parasolemn kindly helped to fill in some lacunas I had in Endings! At the weekend I'll try to edit other gaps myself

PLOT DETAILS ACT V

So what is Cunoesse’s story?

Cunoesse has brought Cuno to Hämärä Maa as a replacement for a kid she drowned three years ago.

Cuno and Jaakko – the drowned kid – don’t have much in common. Both are/were boys with red hair, and about the same build but that’s about it. Only a child’s mind would come up with a plan to replace the dead kid with an ‘identical’ one so she’d be accepted back in her tribe.

But Cuno can’t just be like Jaakko, he has to *become* Jaakko.

The Suru(?) have a coming-of-age rite that involves drinking a brew made of the bone marrow of a blind underwater cave fish. This experience has sometimes profound, sometimes devastating effect on one’s consciousness.

Perhaps this “Naming Ceremony” doesn’t happen until the Hämäräns are 10 years old, so that’s why Cunoesse never got her name, and this is the pretense under which she lures Cuno into the ceremony – a name for herself (but Cuno doesn’t know it’s also going to be a new name for him.)

Cunoesse believes that if she subjects Cuno to this ceremony and “spirit guides” him through this process Cuno might actually *become* Jaakko. Or at least accept he’s Jaakko now. She’s been laying foundation for this transformation throughout this whole journey.

Cunoesse’s people thought her dead, drowned with the boy. Hardly anyone could recognize her at first sight.

Maybe Cunoesse hid the body (under a rock in one of the caves) before she fled Hämärä Maa, so in her mind no-one can definitively claim the kid she brought back isn’t Jaakko.

Psychedelic Sequence

We want this to be a truly visually … and spectacular setpiece where you can bind the rules of everything <…> and apply dream logic.

The entire underwater showdown will be in FELD.

We can depart form/ play with the … perspective, switching into a side-view showing the vastness of the dark screen, with the C&C small figures sinking.

Experiment with overlays, filters as well as tainted and/or 3D mode/ed addictions (??) in the scene, showing people, motifs and icons elements from their journey. There can be lots of … with the visual elements reflecting decisions the players has made throughout the game.

Competitive Red Checks are the key now feature we want to test here, to create unique playthroughs and the impression of truly “fighting yourself” as the rolled value of Cuno or Cunoesse’s Red Checks affects the difficulty of the other’s counter attack.

For the first time, … and commune with each other.

Cunoesse comes out of the trip with +1 Psyche is she lives.

Blue notes:

Multiple life/death outcomes.

Swarm/Locust City side-plot reaches its conclusion.

New home for Locusts

Funeral cultural event

(another note totally unreadable for me, sorry)

_____________________________________

TASKS ACT V

The path through Act V is still largely TBD

In its bare minimum implementation Hämärä Maa could have the same density as the Deserter’s Island finale of Disco Elysium, where the game’s entire conclusion is communicated through a small number of characters – three very extensive and immersive dialogues (one of which is a stylized dream sequence) followed by a posse epilogue. Although railroaded, Disco’s finale had a “page-turning” quality to it that we should aim for as going too much into the mundane idle of the Hämärans would kill the pacing. However, since the entire journey has been about getting to the island, we should give the player at least a little more to see and do than the Deserter’s Island did.

An example of how the task chain at Hämärä Maa could look:

Face Cunoesse’s folks

Find a new home for the Locust City.

Learn how the brew works

Make the brew

Go to the caves

Survive the caves

Bring “Jaakko” to his parents.

Reactivity/Outcomes

Cuno drowns and Cunoesse is this time for real exited by her people

Cunoesse drowns and Cuno returns to Jamrock alone.

ENDINGS

Ending 1 – Jaakko Ending

Location: Hämärä Maa

Cunoesse is alive, Cuno is brainwashed

Notes:

Cunoesse’s manipulations worked. Cuno has fully internalized Jaakko.

The scene closes with Cuno diving dead-eyed among the Hämäran boys. He’s one of them now.

Loss of Identity. No more Cuno-sentences.

Ending 2 – Pale Ending

Cunoesse is dead, Cuno is alive

Location: Tréville, deserted

Notes:

With Cunoesse dead, Hämärä Maa holds nothing for Cuno anymore. He turns back, aimless.

He lands back in Tréville and finds it deserted. The prison has finally moved.

Cuno sits with him. With Cunoesse’s death, Cuno’s prison has left him too. The thing about freedom is that no one tells you where to go.

Cuno waits with the prisoner indefinitely. We fade to white and roll credits.

Ending 3 – Bad Ending

Cunoesse is dead, Cuno is dead

No notes, no location

Ending 4 – Circle Ending

Cunoesse is alive, Cuno is dead

Notes:

With Cuno dead and her plan failed Cunoesse must exile herself from Hämärä Maa again.

She goes into another Murder Hangover, back to sleep and hibernation.

The Internal Skull(?) announces “A new epoch of timekeeping is beginning”

(two another unreadable notes for me)

Ending 5? – New Tribe Ending

Cunoesse is alive, Cuno is alive

No notes, no location

Re-Re-Re-mapping Revachol

… and the Insulinde as a whole

Very much inspired by ssshiversss and Map Max, whose versions of the map were absolutely invaluable for wrapping my head around this project. Combining their work with the original map of Jamrock, and doing my best to stay loyal to the (often contradictory) descriptions in the text of the game, I think I’m happy with what I’ve ended up with.

Much like my predecessors, I have elected to separate Coal City and La Delta, and in fact ignore any attempt by the game to convince me that La Delta is west of Martinaise. It just… It just isn’t.

Game description struggles aside, this was really fun!! Details/Description in the alt text.

I just like maps

#same

ok....... i finished the game.. but i nev r got to dance at the church :( at the disco elysium :(((

Based on those lines from DE, I tried to estimate Harry's salary in USD, using prices in Ukraine as a starting-off point (pros of being Eastern European...?)

And I also estimated the price of Whirling's special borsht.

This is not a serious math solution; I took a lot of liberties to round the numbers and didn’t spend much time looking for equivalent products. I mostly settled for the cheapest items sold at big chains of supermarkets.

Methodology here is not great. This is just for fun. I'm not good at math and statistics, sorry TT

What I did:

found the UAH prices for analogues of some items sold in the game

averaged the UAH/reál ratio to estimate the price of 1 reál

then converted the final result to USD

Price of 1 reál

Starting from the game items to feature in those calculations, Frittte products are probably the easiest to find analogues for. As for pawn shop and book items from the game, it’d be hard to estimate, I think, the prices vary a lot. Especially for second-hand items that have lower prices.

FALN pants were an exception, because maybe Cuno sells you the new ones? I took the average price of sweatpants made by a local brand popular among young people.

With magnesium I’m also not sure, turns out it's rarely sold by itself without added minerals or vitamins, such as B6. Medications in Ukraine are most frequently sold in blisters, not small plastic bottles like the one in the game art, so I chose the price for a small tube of water-dissolvable tablets.

The price of Drouamine is taken from the price of Ibuprofen.

The final number was an average of all UAH prices divided by reál prices

So, with those loose calculations, the price of 1 reál is around 41,7 UAH, by today’s exchange rates it’s pretty close to 1 USD.

2. Harry's salary

This is the numbers we get.

With his monthly salary Harry can buy, uuuh, 91 bottles of Commodore Red or 152 bottles of Potent Pilsner or 19 112,50 hryvnias.

Just for comparison,

Data for salaries is taken from the biggest work searching website in the country. Couldn't find the median salaries, though.

The price of a motor carriage Harry destroyed is ~40 000 USD/1 668 000 UAH. It'd take him 7 years 4 months to repay.

3. Conclusions

For a competent detective with a high rank who spent 18 years of his life working in RCM? I thought it’d be more. For lower ranks it'd be much harder to get by, puts into perspective how he lived with Dora.

Vibe-based? Livable, especially if Harry owns an apartment and doesn’t have to pay rent. If we say he spends around half of his salary on rent+bills, he can survive on inexpensive food (if he wants to also by substances).

Genuinely scared of thinking how Jean lives with an even lower monthly pay. Judit has three children... oh god. I hope Harry bought them a lot of kebabs (the price of a very delicious big kebab a friend bought me once was 120 UAH /~3 USD).

4. Bonus: the price of Gorący's special borscht

That's right, we're so normal about borscht here that we have something called "Borscht index". It's the price of ingredients used to cook this essential dish that helps to track inflation.

Information from the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine (March, 2025).

If we say Gorący's pot is 20 L (19 L borscht + 1 L vodka), the price would be around 1394 UAH or 33 reál.

Unless he's cooking the Polish barszcz czerwony, which is pretty different from Ukrainian borscht, if I remember correctly.

So, yeah, if we use Ukraine as a stand-in Eastern European country for Revachol, it'd be like this. Thank you for reading! Sorry if the math is very bad TT

So real

aougohgghwhtvr

I'm going back to my playful colour era, never really realised I left it until my paintings became a little stale. Anyway, please say yes she's really over here like 🥺👉👈

to make things clear i just love showing the sentimental, tender aspects of otherwise codependent fucked up relationship of jean and harry. harry is a sap, you see. a week with kim and if you're nice to him you develop this trust that can be reached only if you're together in the line of work. jean and harry were working two or three years together max, but as that snapcube quote says, SOMETHING JUST HAPPENED. you dont just help your partner get into the motorcarriage as if hes a flightless bird when he's been running around for a week straight!!! as argo tuulik said, there is caring and tenderness within jean, beside his absolutely awful behavior. this is curious to say the least.

Its this