Aborting A Salt Route

aborting a Salt Route

(Salt Route dreamt by @beabigshot​)

Check the dumpster first. If you go to the right afterward, you’ll discover that you were held up searching for so long that the traffic already cleared. The Queen is assumed to have gotten tired of waiting and drove on ahead, earning you another remark from Spamton about abandonment. You can now go left or right while the road is clear. You probably want to head in the direction of Spamton’s shop, but it’ll be locked and some enemies will be unavoidable this way. Kris’s spare button will be missing and Spamton’s spare will be stuck on selecting Kris. Go right.

The split path you’re supposed to take with Noelle now spells “DIALTONE.” Spamton comments that without Kris, he would have had to keep hopping back and forth over the cones, leading him to muse about jumping through hoops just to get by and taking leaps of faith to make it [[BIG]]. Search the bottle game booths. You won’t find his keys here, but he’ll find the box Noelle tossed. She’s continuing her side of the normal route ahead of you, which means the cheese will be gone when you get to the mouse puzzles and the Ambyulances were already encountered.

Head toward Queen’s mansion. Spamton will remark that coming here won’t get them far until he finds his keys. When he hears the Queen approaching, he’ll put on Noelle’s box. Queen will assume he’s the same friend as before, only they perhaps helped themself to a dip in the pool. Since the Queen didn’t capture you, she caged Ralsei instead and now takes this moment to hire her trucie as a butler, so after a fade-out, Kris is suited up in the lobby and Spamton is still wearing the box. The Queen then leaves it up to the swatchlings in the mansion to train Kris. If you didn’t search until Spamton finds the box, Queen won’t take him with you and he’ll have returned to the dumpster, and checking will only make him talk about everyone leaving him behind.

Spamton will say he remembers where he left his keys. Follow him into the anywhere door and go to the Trash Zone. Talking to idle swatchlings in the mansion may not engage them in a fight, but it’s safer not to wander the halls before you can spare again. When you find Spamton outside his shop, he laughs at himself intermittently as he laments that he locked himself out (with keygen locked inside) and that he just knew the [[spare]] wouldn’t work. Take the anywhere door to Cyber Field and visit Sweet Cap’n Cakes. Talk and select Keys to hire their service. They’ll meet you back at Spamton’s shop to make him a new key, and Spamton, hysterically overjoyed, will give back your [[spare key]]. You can now spare again, and Spamton will offer you a [[Specil Deal]] as thanks, which will restore the keygen sidequest.

This is the point where you can resume your pacifist run, but with a few other changes:

Kris’s room in Queen’s mansion has your name scratched out, with Ralsei inside. He and Susie are still in their cages, and whether you go into his room or Susie’s first, they’ll ask you where you’d been and why you’re in a suit. You can either reply that you and Queen are trucies or that she was out of cages. As you look around for a way to deactivate the cages, you are overwhelmed by the possibilities of what to type into the computer until you deploy Lancer. When he turns sickly, Ralsei tells the party right away what’s wrong. Susie tries rushing the party to the Fountain in response, but they run out of time before he petrifies in the same room as on a normal route. After this and the same conversation with Berdly, Susie prompts Kris to change out of the suit already.

The spotlight puzzles don’t activate until you backtrack with your party, but Ralsei is present to add his own comments this time. When Berdly confesses to being of average intelligence, Ralsei tries to console Berdly, but when he struggles with pep talk that Berdly will respond to, Susie interjects with the same Dragon Blazers analogy.

The Spamton Neo fight is now skippable… kind of. Spamton never got the chance to tell you to come alone this time, so Ralsei and Susie will follow you down into the basement. Susie will try to ask what the hell Kris had been up to without them that brings them down here. If you encountered Jevil in the Chapter 1 save file used for this run, she’ll add, “Don’t tell me you found another weirdo in a basement.” Ralsei will try to reason that Kris must have a good reason, “right, Kris?” When Spamton Neo jumps the party, his drop down separates Kris from the others, but Susie interjects to demand answers, warning that he’ll have hell to pay if he lays a hand on Kris. Spamton Neo turns his attention toward her, finding it humorous that she’s offering him [[free vacation tickets]]. Seeing an opening, Kris, unprompted by the player, slashes at the strings. Spamton will be alarmed and offended at first that you made a move on him with his back turned, but he’ll realize you didn’t actually strike him and it dawns on him what you were doing. From here, he’ll urge you to cut the rest off and let you Act without attacking you on his turns. Deal Gone Wrong will continue to play instead of Big Shot as he continues to vent, giving his version of the story you’re told by the Addisons after this fight. If you Fight him, he’ll get angry and start fighting back. When you make it to the last string, he’ll add to his normal dialogue, “ARE YOU PROUD OF ME NOW??”

In Spamton’s post-battle dialogue, after resigning that he’s still a puppet, he’ll add, “Well. No point in crying over spilled salt, I guess.”

The Addisons’ telling will still be more forward about the events themselves, while Spamton’s telling will be more about his feelings of abandonment, betrayal, dependence, personal worth and being wrapped around someone’s finger.

From here on, you should be back on track for a normal route.