Chapter Fifteen: State of the Union
Last chapter might have been enough to convince us all that things have changed in the Free City. Mages are under direct attack, and anyone who stands out from the crowd is in danger.
PLEASE BE ADVISED: This blog series (obviously) contains major spoilers for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
Current Level: 17
Current Location: Lighthouse near Novigrad, Redania
Last chapter might have been enough to convince us all that things have changed in the Free City. Mages are under direct attack, and anyone who stands out from the crowd is in danger. This isn’t Radovid’s doing, though, as we’ve seen—the Church of the Eternal Fire is sweeping the city, declaring Novigrad a lost cause and urging its citizens to repent and join the church. You can’t pass a corner without running into a cultist, priest, or other member of the Church, it seems, and our next adventure is no different. It takes us deep into the bowels of organized religion, and it’s not pretty in there.
What did we do?
After our sexy lighthouse time with Triss, we're met at the door by none other than Dijkstra, who wants to enlist us to help assassinate King Radovid. Hold on, WHAT? Yep, Dijkstra says it's for the greater good of all mages, and that Geralt should meet him at the Passiflora if we want to join him in that quest. He's got yet another secret room at the brothel, and there, he tells Geralt that many a political coup was planned in this room. Dijkstra's associate turns out to be no other than Vernon Roche, who is uneasy about the plot but realizes there's no other option. Geralt's task for the moment is simple: find their contact, Gregor, at the border post and ask about the whereabouts of their agent who traveled south and never returned.
We pop down to the border post and meet up with Gregor, who seems disgusted at the state of Redania. Indeed, he enlisted when the last king was on the throne and hates Radovid. He lets us know about a report of an abandoned cart nearby that he hadn't been able to get away to check out yet. We head in that general direction and find that indeed, it's a cobbler's wagon—but it's oddly not damaged at all. Geralt follows a trail of shoes that he finds nearby to a roaming rock troll. It takes a minute, but the troll finally admits that he and his buddies recruited a human to make them shoes. We head into his cave and find the other members of the troll trio, along with Thaler, former head of Temerian intelligence. He's taught the trolls to curse, and they aren't terribly happy about letting him go, but eventually allow it. Thaler walks slow as fuck, but when we finally make it back to the wagon, he thanks us and heads off.
Here, it starts to dawn on me that perhaps I may want to craft the Cat School armor as a stopgap, but I'm going to do it strategically, since I know i'll be doing some running around soon. Admittedly, I should have thought of this last chapter, since I was already close to two diagrams, so I catch up and then head to the Rosemary and Thyme to see dandelion. Inside, Priscilla is upset that Dandelion owns a brothel, but he argues that he can't help what he inherits. He has a plan, though: he wants to convert the brothel to a cabaret. And his plan to get money for this venture is to convince his former lover Sophronia (yep, that’s a name) to ask her dad for it. We meet him at her house to enact the first part of this plan: let Dandelion be her knight in shining armor. Unfortunately, we have to read his script, but she falls for it, and Dandelion goes inside with her.
In the morning, Dandelion is nowhere to be found at the inn, but there are design decisions to be made. The dwarf in charge asks us to pick a décor style, with our options being boudoir and theater. I go with the theater and the dwarf gets to work, leaving Geralt to talk about Dandelion with Priscilla. She sings his praises, including mentioning that he’s never been late for a performance. Hopefully today won’t be the first, Geralt remarks, as he’s still not here. On my way to go find him, I stop by Temple Isle to get another diagram and misjudge a fall distance, which any Witcher player knows is certain death. On my second try, I head into the passageway and narrowly defeat the golem inside the main hall. Now it's time to explore the ruins.
First, we need to solve the puzzle in the room with the creepy ominous statues in order to get the key to the laboratory. We turn the statues so they all face inward and watch the floor open...and hear the battle music begin? There's a pool of water in the opening, filled with drowners that I kill with my crossbow. it wasn't a close call, but it did take a somewhat embarrassingly long time to do that. Nevertheless, we grab the key to the lab and get the FUCK out of that room.
Inside the lab, we have to fight Mad Kiyan, and he proves to be a somewhat formidable opponent. Eventually, he goes down and I collect the rest of the armor set, along with his lab notebook. The mage been running some pretty gross experiments on Kiyan, including giving him various cocktails of drugs designed to kill him and subjecting him to torture, all to prove his hypothesis that a Cat School witcher is a superb conduit for whatever weird magic or demon turned him into Mad Kiyan. Either way, now we have the full set and can move to the worst part: crafting it.
We head off to find Dandelion banging on someone's door in Harborside. The home, he says, belongs to a talented choreographer named Polly, who he needs for his opening performance at the cabaret. She's inside fighting with her fiancé, so we search for her spare key and find it under a bucket. Once we've let ourselves in, we discover that the source of the argument is Dandelion himself: Polly’s fiancé is upset that she's dancing in a brothel. Dandelion begs to explain, which takes forever, but works to convince him that the Rosemary and Thyme has changed.
Once the matter with Polly is resolved, Dandelion sends Geralt on his next task: find Rautlec, the artist who was supposed to make the new promotional placards for the cabaret, so there's no more old advertising out there misleading people like Polly's fiancé. When we get to Rautlec's place, we find no artist, but a handful of bandits looking to collect debts. It's a fistfight which ends badly for me—another fake death. Great.
After our defeat, the bandits suggest looking for Rautlec at the Vegelbud racetrack before throwing Geralt out. When we head there and meet Rautlec, we find that he comes as advertised: he's an artist in a lot of debt. Someone's offered him a wager to pay it off, but he'll be bankrupt if he loses. Having the money to do so, I pay off his entire sum of debt and he's ever so grateful. He says he'll bring the placards to the inn himself once he's done here. Nice guy! With everything in place, Dandelion is beyond pleased, and announces his cabaret's new name: the Chameleon.
Priscilla only needs to run home for her dress and then they can start the rehearsal. Dandelion buys Geralt a round while the boys wait, and they trade stories of the last few days for a bit. All is well and good until Priscilla is late for the dress rehearsal. Dandelion is initially annoyed, but someone barges in and informs him that Priscilla had been badly attacked. She's definitely going to live, but she's been beaten and forced to drink a caustic liquid. This was no ordinary attack, Geralt concludes, and the medical examiner agrees. In fact, a similar corpse turned up in the morgue recently without a heart. He offers to take us to the corpse to examine it for clues.
On our way through the sewers to the morgue, we find out that the examiner Joachim von Gratz's "preventative medicine" includes killing sewer monsters. He also says that while Priscilla's wounds may heal, he's worried about her voice, as losing that would be a devastating blow to a trobairitz. On the other end, we find the corpse of the victim, a dwarven woodcarver named Fabian Meyer, and begin the autopsy. His hair is burned, eye sockets gouged and burned, and throat burned—and that's just what we see on his head. He's also missing a heart, with a burned salamander egg planted inside the body. We also learn that the throat scaling is from formaldehyde.
Joachim doesn't understand the motive, but Geralt knows enough. This was surely punishment, though he's not sure for what. We don't get much further before the coroner arrives, annoyed that we're here. He does volunteer a bit of information about the victim and the murder that helps us out before we're interrupted by Nathaniel Pastodi, Eternal Fire reverend. Once we're out of earshot, Geralt mentions that Hubert the coroner and Joachim seem to know each other, but Joachim emphasizes that they're on shaky terms and heads off. As for us, it's investigation time.
Our first stop is Eustace, the corpse collector. He's a lovely gentleman with a penchant for robbing the corpses he collects. Luckily, Geralt's Axii sign is working just fine, and he tells us what he found on Meyer's body, even showing us a piece of "parchment" made from human skin with Priscilla's name on it. Geralt is peeved, but Eustace doesn't care, so I hit him in the face and move on. We head for the crime scene next, and the woodcarver's brother Gus is hesitant to let us inside until we announce we're looking for the killer. We find little in the courtyard besides the brothers' shapely sculptures and signs of a fight, but then discover a "concerned citizen's sermon" on paper nearby. Gus opens the workshop and inside, we find more signs of a struggle, along with formaldehyde and evidence of a cleanup effort.
On our way to the alley where Priscilla was attacked, a guard stops Geralt to deliver a message from the coroner: there's been another body found. I'm right next to the alley, so I still cross that off first before heading to the morgue. We don't get far into our investigation before Whistling Wendy, previously standing nearby, summons her friends to beat us up because she thinks we're the attacker, returned to the scene of the crime. Wendy, a Novigrad strumpet, is fond of Priscilla, as she'd offered her a chance at a better life. After we talk, she lets us continue the search.
Sorry to have this run a bit long, but I hate a cliffhanger and ending here would certainly be one. When we arrive at the morgue, Hubert prepares to start the autopsy. We find the killer's customary target note on the body, signaling that the next victim will be Patricia Vegelbud. We head out to her estate and the guards hassle us about the news we've come to deliver. They eventually let us in, where Ingrid also disbelieves us initially until Geralt explains how cruel the killer is. Ingrid leads us to Patricia, and we pass a huge fire that Ingrid explains is the result of their recent trip to Novigrad—Patricia saw the pyres in the square, came home, and burned everything to do with the Eternal Fire. Sure enough, the murderer claims her too, and the Eternal Fire of it all continues to get clearer. Unfortunately, the guards mistake Geralt for the killer and slow him down while the real killer escapes.
Luckily (is there luck in this situation?), the killer left another note on Patricia's body. This time, we even get the location of the next victim alongside the name: Sweet Nettie at Crippled Kate's. At the brothel, a man warns us not to go upstairs to find Nettie, who's with an important client. The client is none other than creepy priest Nathaniel Pastodi—who, upon investigation, is not the murderer, but just into some kind of hardcore stuff sexually. As for the real murderer, the only person who knew Pastodi's whereabouts to frame him would be Hubert. He's at the warehouses procuring more formaldehyde, and I hurry over. but first...I "convince" Nathaniel to leave Nettie alone and pay her anyway. Fuck that guy.
At the warehouse, we discover that Hubert is not just a weird murderer, but also a higher vampire. His only motive for killing is that he agrees with the church—Novigrad is a morally bankrupt city. He only kills to personally send that message. God, what a pious little cultist. Killing him takes a minute, but also pushes me to level 18 to (almost) finish out the chapter. Remember, there's still the matter of Priscilla. At the hospital, we discover she's healing quickly; she's already speaking, and may even sing again someday. In the meantime, she and Dandelion will play as a duet, and Geralt will head off to the Skellige Isles. But as we've grown long here, that's where I leave you today.
Death Count (This Chapter): 2
Death Count (Total): 46
Fell to my death trying to get to a secret path on Temple Isle.
Beaten to unconsciousness by bandits in Rautlec's house.
NOTE: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the intellectual property of the appropriate copyright holders, including the screencaps from the game I have included in this essay. I have no official affiliation with CDPR or anyone else associated with the game/books/universe; I’m just a fan who plays Witcher to cope.