#her relationship with him makes me chew concrete AUGH

[feroluce]

SO LIKE. As much as I roll with the Emanator of Elation Sampo theory, I do have. Some doubts about this specific instance of it. Not that I think Boothill is lying, or that I think Sampo isn't an Emanator, but I wonder if the person Boothill actually met was Sampo.

Just! Sampo is so careful. The only reason we even knew he wasn't of Belobog was due to a dialogue-dependent fourth wall-breaking dream sequence that no other character could have seen. It took a missable dream bubble in an out-of-the-way spot that was seemingly left only for the trailblazer at the very end of a side mission just to confirm him as a Masked Fool. Like it's not just the fact that Boothill mentions this person being an Emanator. It's that he knows they're also a Masked Fool, which is also something Sampo is incredibly dodgy about. Sparkle even seems to call him out on this in her party join line fjkdjaskldj

((But also, Boothill, baby. WHY were you trying to get them drunk????))

And regardless of if you believe him when he calls himself an old timer, he obviously has a lot of experience in doing what he does. He knows what he's doing, he's good at it, and he is viciously capable and competent, unfortunately for his victims smhznskdn

So it just. Feels very unlike him, for him to let his guard down enough to not only let himself get drunk in front of Boothill-

a total stranger btw whom Sampo has absolutely no reason to trust, and a dangerous Galaxy Ranger to boot who has plenty of blood on his hands and a significant bounty on his head

-but to get SO drunk that he lets loose the secret that he's an Emanator.

When Boothill brings this up, he mentions that if Emanators were obvious and known at a glance, it would lead to atrocities. And for as much as Sampo is disliked by his victims (there's an entire anti-Sampo organization in Belobog JFDKLASJFDL), it's all for fraud. He's wanted by the IPC as an intergalactic thief. He scams people out of their money, and only rich people at that. That's mostly all that he's known for. Nothing he does is violent, even though Sampo surely has the capacity to inflict a lot of harm.

And I don't mean that he's exactly a pacifist or anything; Firefly comments that Sampo seems like a highly skilled covert fighter. His voicelines make it sound like he enjoys combat- hell, his ult line makes him sound like a hitman. I like to hc him as being a pretty high ranker in the fighting rings at the World's End Tavern, like we see in the Simulated Universe occurrences.

But I don't think he would enjoy being the cause of uncontrollable violence and bloodshed.

Like yeah he's a dick who scams people on the regs for funsies, but he has lines he refuses to cross, which we see a lot of in how he interacts with Sparkle. More than just not enjoying it, I think he would hate it if he were found out and it caused an incident, especially since he seems so endeared to Belobog and her people now and it looks like he plans to return there. He wouldn't want to bring any of that back to them.

So I just can't imagine him carelessly fucking up bad enough to out himself to a random stranger that could easily put a bullet right through his head.

Sparkle maybe could, though.

Because as we find out later the dreamscape had expanded FAR beyond what it seemed, far enough that the trailblazer had been dreaming since the warp jump in. Most people enter it unknowingly, and don't realize they're already dreaming when they think they're still awake. Boothill and Dan Heng should have already been dreaming during their exchange on the Express that started all this.

And as long as someone knows they're dreaming, completely changing their appearance is easy, even for the common layman. We see this with a couple of NPCs and also Sparkle herself, with her (in)famous impression of Sampo.

Thank youuuuu Sparkle

And yeah, the trailblazer and almost all of the other characters wouldn't know about the expansion until near the very end. None of them realized they were dreaming even outside of their dream pools, and surely none of them would think to be suspicious of another person's appearance outside of the dreamscape like that.

But Sparkle has a script from Silver Wolf.

She knew all the secrets of the dreamscape, and she knew them from the very beginning. There would have been nothing stopping her from appearing as Sampo in front of Boothill and spilling all his secrets.

And she apparently has a long-standing history with Sampo, including trying to get him in on her own much more fiery and aggressive version of Elation.

Maybe all Sampo needs is to be outed as an Emanator, and then when all the violence and bloodshed catches up to him, then he'll finally understand! ദ്ദി(｡•̀ ,<)~✩