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inposterumcumgaudio · 2 months ago

Text

Gland_of_Hope

000 PC_Sal All right. Next ingredient. Pituitary extract.

001 PC_Sal Where's my extractor?

002 PC_Sal Dammit. It's broken.

004 PC_Sal Stewart Adams was tinkering with my old extractor, wasn't he? Maybe I can buy it back from him? Or borrow it.

006 WellM Sally. You never come by any more!

008 PC_Sal Well, Fiona--

010 WellM Oh. Cerberus. Yeah. She's never understood me, Sally. Not like you do.

012 PC_Sal She mentioned, among other things, that you've improved my … extractor.

013 PC_Sal Have you still got my extractor?

014 WellM I have! You're gonna be very proud of me. It's much quicker now. Might even sting a bit less.

015 PC_Sal You've improved it!

016 WellM Would you like to test it out?

018 PC_Sal You sure Fiona won't murder you?

020 WellM Oh, she barks, but she don't bite. Much. Hah.

022 PC_Sal I'll let you know how it works.

026 WellM Sally!

028 PC_Sal Are you all right?

030 WellM It's been a bit rough. We split up, y'know, the wife and me.

032 PC_Sal Fiona left?

034 WellM Left? Hah. I found out she cheated on me! With a customer! The lying whore. I sent her packing back to Daddy.

036 PC_Sal But you and I… ah, never mind.

038 WellM Good riddance. I'm a free man, now, should any pretty girl happen to come along. Nudge nudge wink wink. I'm learning to cook!

040 PC_Sal Actually I'm here to buy a thing or two.

042 WellM (sighs) One of these days, I'm going to impress you again, see if I don't.

044 PC_Sal I'll need pituitary extract from someone who's been exposed to mustard gas.

046 PC_Sal Mikey Forrester's clinic ought to have a patient or two like that. I'll send him a note on the blower.

046a PC_Sal Wait. I better send that message off to Mikey.

046b PC_Sal What am I thinking! I better see how Gwen is.

047 PC_Sal Let's see what Mikey has to say for himself.

048 PC_Sal Someone's upstairs? How'd they get in?

049 PC_Sal "Found someone. Meet usual place."

050 PC_Sal Oh, for heaven's sake, Mikey, you could have just written down the name and sent it up the blower.

052 PC_Sal Colonel Lawrence. Wasn't he the hero of Ramsgate?

054 PC_Sal I mean, of course he's been exposed to mustard gas. He was in the Great War.

056 PC_Sal I do need his pituitary extract. I guess I'll have to go pay him a visit.

058 PC_Sal I think I know just how to talk my way past these awful women.

060 PC_Sal I bet I can just walk right on in.

062 WellM Sorry, we're very busy. The family in mourning. Or will be, shortly.

064 WellM With any luck.

066 PC_Sal I've come with the Colonel's prescription!

068 WellM Prescription! What does he need with medicine! He's dying!

070 WellM No, thanks. I know you're a clever chemist and all but … He's very old, and we've all decided to let nature take its course.

072 PC_Sal Oh, it's not a cure! You can't cure old age, can you, hah hah!

074 PC_Sal This is really just to help … ease the way. Help him sleep.

076 WellM Wouldn't mind if he slept a bit more. Always ringing that goddamn bell.

078 PC_Sal All right. I'll give him the pills.

080 PC_Sal I'm afraid it goes in … the other end.

082 WellM Ohhh! Hah. I don't suppose you'd like to administer it?

084 PC_Sal I can do that. I understand that the family is sometimes uncomfortable…

086 WellM Great, well. Up you go.

088 PC_Sal Brilliant. He didn't even ask who sent me.

Dohoho!

See, although I certainly believed Fiona, there wasn't ever actually anything in the game that said Stewart did cheat on her with Sally. Now we know that was the intent. I do kinda wish Sally would have had some sort of quip or comment to make on the idea that Stewart could cheat on his wife and yet feel he had any place to be indignant when what comes around goes around, but whatchagondo?

I do think they took this out because even being unfaithful to his wife, I think Stewart still comes off as very sympathetic. You don't need Fiona to cheat on him back to feel bad for him that he's still pathetically trapped in Sally's thrall and still trying to impress her years after she's left.

Additionally, making Fiona a cheater too... @monstroso once proposed that the reason people kinda gloss over Sally bein' a homewrecker is because Fiona is mean to Sally about it and when you're playing as Sally, that means Fiona is mean to you. So Fiona needs to have the moral high ground if the average player is to have any hope of actually seeing Sally in totality. Similarly to Sally asking Dottie Lloyd-Ramsay if she's jealous while her husband is dying, you can't give Sally any room to debate their character because then she turns the question from her culpability in upending their lives to whether they deserved it for some failing of their own (i.e. "Maybe he liked me because I thought he could be more, did you ever think of that?")

Oh, and it looks 46a and 46b were meant to bring a little bit of the tug-of-war of priorities from Sally's first quest back to your return to home base at this point. I would have really liked that actually. The first quest makes the house a place of intense stress, but after the fire is dealt with, the house is a peaceful retreat from everything outside. Continuing the stress testing of the first quest in smaller doses would have reinforced that the house was not the safe haven it feels like once the lab is back in order.

#we happy few #sally boyle #stewart adams #fiona adams #poedit #cut/unused content

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inposterumcumgaudio · 1 month ago

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An Analysis/General Overview of Stewart Adams or Lionel? I think they're such interesting characters- Lionel anyways. Stewart kind of seems.... awkward, I think it's implied that him and Sally were something or maybe it was just jealousy from Fiona.

Lionel Castershire is fascinating in his own right, but since your question has more word count about Stewart Adams, we'll go with him today.

One thing I think is interesting about all three characters who share the shopkeeper model is that they are acutely aware of the problems in the town that their services involve. They're all also, to different extents, responding to those problems in under-the-table ways because they understand that bringing attention to the problems themselves would not be appreciated while solving them quietly would. Lionel's the canniest about his observations, probably owing to that his backroom dealings are quite a bit more sophisticated than Reg Cutty's or Stewart's are. We know Reg is aware of the food shortages and what he's done to help keep the town fed. Stewart, for his part, is attempting to use his skills to solve the problem of the toxic fog, in the Village and out. Quite noble and not illegal at all!

But selling Sunshine is.

I once said that I thought Sally was lying to Gemma Olsen about Verloc inventing Sunshine. At the time, I supposed that Sally hadn't invented it either but due to it's illegality, it was given a name following her naming convention. My current theory is that Stewart Adams invented it (or at least, arrived at it independently) and Sally gave it that name retroactively once it became part of her repertoire.

In composition, Sunshine is not that hard to craft. The trickiest part for most Wellies would probably be obtaining the rowan berries. Any passable chemist can make it on their own (and in the case of particularly accomplished chemists like Verloc, may have improved upon it), but Stewart was likely the first to need to make it.

Joy intolerance has probably always been a thing, ever since Joy was first introduced in 1953. If you're an old lady with arrhythmia for instance, maybe taking a drug consisting largely of methamphetamine isn't the best idea. As Joy use is gradually made compulsory, however, being intolerant of it becomes a greater problem. It's something a Wellie would seek help for.

Normally, a talented compounder like Stewart should be able to figure out what component of Joy causes the problem and sub it out for something else, except that the formula for Joy is a trade secret guarded by Haworth Labs. Given that Joy is not actually solving a problem so much as putting a band-aid on it though, Stewart was able to craft something else entirely to help the Joy intolerant skirt the rules. Sunshine would get them past Joy detectors; their behavior beyond that was on the client to manage though. We likely have a bit of a survivorship bias thing going on with Sunshine users nowadays; probably quite a lot of them succumbed to grief over their memories and were beaten to death or were otherwise cast out to Barrow Holm in those earlier years.

And at this point, Sunshine wouldn't have a name because it was something only Stewart was making and it was on the secret menu, so to speak. I think Sally's the one who put it on the map.

When talking to Arthur regarding "exotic pharmaceuticals", Stewart makes the point on two separate occasions that he only sells legal drugs. The first of these - if you trigger the secret dialogue about cod liver oil - is fairly innocuous.

That he specifies legality at this point doesn't come off as amiss, given the broader climate of chemistry in Wellington Wells.

When discussing the second quest he gives you to retrieve the chemicals he sold to Mrs. Chaney however, he tells us a bit more:

The legal standing of his work is important to him, but that he goes on to say that Sally Boyle, oft proclaimed "experimental chemist", doesn't work here anymore and this is a respectable shop consequently implies that this was not always the case.

There's not any information in the game about when Sally started working at Stewart's shop. Given surrounding circumstances though, my theory is that her first stop after leaving the Hastings house was the Design Centre. She likely wouldn't have become the fashionable It Girl she is now if she'd gone straight to the Apothecary. Shacking up with Davey Hackney fits her MO of finding a shitty guy prone to flattery to support her. It follows logically as well that if you have just left home because you were shown that your apparent value to the world is your youth and beauty to go somewhere where those things will provide you with an immediate living.

It also gives Sally time and space to cultivate her own clientbase out of the models and other assorted celebs.

Imagine your husband proposing to hire the prettiest, youngest, and most popular girl in town to work at your humble chemist shop. If you've got any kind of sense, you'd look real askance at that, right? If we're just imagining Sally walking in off the street and begging for a job unproven? I mean, Stewart seems like a genuinely nice guy and we're not really ever given opportunity to see what Fiona's level of empathy and generosity is, but hiring some rando girl off the street to do chemistry is a bit of an ask at that time. Sally even says herself they wouldn't have let her become a chemist if not for the war.

But if she already has a clientele that would then be purchasing her drugs from your shop, it'd be hard to argue with the numbers and arguing at all is just saying you don't trust your husband.

What was Fiona to do, really?

Anyway, now that Sally is no longer here, Stewart's working to cut that part of his customer base off, probably both on a professional level and on the "every time some Parade type comes here asking for Sally Specials, I have to sleep on the couch again" level.

And I think it's those types who expected Sunshine to have a name they could ask for. Why would they want a drug that is, in effect, not doing drugs? Is it not cool to do drugs?

Well, it would be if the government wasn't saying you had to.

Obviously, making Joy use compulsory hasn't diminished the popularity of drug use at all among the cool kids, but there's always going to be small subset with oppositional defiance. That's who of Sally's clients she would be selling Sunshine to at this point. "Nothing so cool as breaking the rules!"

One thing about Sally I think does go underappreciated is that she is also a talented marketer. All of her drugs have names that make using them sound fun regardless of what they do. It was also her idea to market her new Joy formula as a new flavor. She thinks about these things, finds demographics for her products. Seeing a useful formula that Stewart developed being under utilized probably seemed like a missed opportunity to Sally, rather than the deliberate downplay that it would have been for Stewart. And thus Sunshine got its street name.

So when Sally tells Gemma that Verloc invented Sunshine, it's probably that "lying with the truth" trick that Byng mentions. She tells Gemma that Verloc invented it (which is technically true if you assume he also came up with a formula for it independently for his own use) when the formula found on the streets - the one Gemma is actually asking about - is the one Stewart developed.

Let's put a pin in that and come back to it in a minute.

Stewart really only has quests for Arthur and they tend to be very shallow on the characterization aside from the matter of his shop's reputation, but there is other thing I want to touch on before we really get into his relationship with Sally.

Stewart's last quest for you, "The Beginning of the Endocrine", tasks you with taking "his" pituitary extractor and collecting samples from a Bobby, a Doctor, and a Crier.

Now, Stewart's been fuckin' with this device ever since Sally left, which at this point would be about three years. What's interesting though is that he's apparently never tested it himself. Like Lionel, he professes to be too busy to leave the shop to attend to any errands outside of it. He's never actually seen the device in use. He can probably imagine, but he's elected to pass the dirty work of it off.

Frankly, it's really rather horrible using this device. The animation is startling to see the first time. And the quest is also sneakily structured in such a way as to lead you to feel a certain way about it.

That is, the objectives are, in order,

Obtain the Doctor Extract

Obtain the Bobby Extract

Obtain the Crier Extract

Bring the extracts to the Chemist

Bobbies are easy to find on the street so you're likely to nab one of them first. Doctors are also easy to find, but if you're struggling, Stewart also marked the Hippo House on your map for you. You're given these two first in the list because while using the extractor on these NPCs is an alarming sight, they are hostile to you and can kill you easily if you give them the chance. Arthur even has a ct line for it, in which he says to consider it karma.

The Crier is last on the list for a reason.

You're likely to leave the Crier to the last too because unless you've already done Lionel's quests up to the point that you had access to St. George, you'd not know where to find them immediately. (You could nab one off the street, but narratively, you wouldn't.) And the reason why leaving the Crier to last is most effective is because she's a helpless little old lady who effectively can do nothing to you. Snapping this ghoulish device around a Crier's head and scrambling her sinuses is supposed to leave you feeling some kind of way about it. In the original lines, the Crier even had a sad little line to make you feel extra bad about what you've done.

So when Arthur gets back to the chemist shop, he gives Stewart a piece of his own mind: "If anyone ever uses one of those on me, I will hunt you down and kill you."

Very tricky, manipulating you to feel bad like that.

You want to know what the real slight of hand here is though?

There are cut lines for "Gland of Hope and Glory" in which Sally was supposed to have her own extractor that was broken, necessitating her to visit Stewart to collect her old one from him. That's what he means when he says here that his is not the only device like this out there.

The real trick that they've pulled here is letting you experience the horror of this device in a limited capacity as Arthur first and then giving it to you as Sally to use as often as you like, when the shock of it has worn off.

Because as Sally, you have no qualms nor compunctions about using the pituitary extractor. At very minimum, she'll use it on a helpless and dying old man. At worst, the player will use it in lieu of (and just as often as) Arthur and Ollie's takedown skill rather than crafting Sally's knockout syringes.

Arthur, for all his faults, often does consider how his actions will affect others and so using the extractor is viscerally horrifying to him. Stewart has to collect the extractor from you when the quest is over, not only because he has to have it when Sally visits in the next Act, but also because otherwise, a player would probably rely on the extractor the way people often do when playing Sally, which would be incongruent with Arthur's character.

That Sally, on the other hand, not only uses the pituitary extractor freely but invented it? It's really a very apt metaphor for her character. It's practically poetic. She created this Saw trap of a tool that she uses with impunity, ripping what she wants out of people with no concern for what happens to them afterward. (Also, how did she make this "quite clever" device if she can't tinker? Wants must, I guess.)

The game is calling collect to tell you something about her. Please accept the charges.

That being said...

Sally tells Gemma that Verloc invented Sunshine. If indeed Stewart was actually the one who made it, why would she do that?

Well, for one thing, despite abandoning him for Verloc, Stewart seems not to be holding any hard feelings about it. This means that he's still available to be called on for a favor if needed. No sense throwing out a perfectly good resource just to keep the heat off herself.

Pinning it on Verloc is satisfying in the sense that it'd be a lie with the truth as stated above. Lies that border the edge of truth are the most satisfying to tell, are they not? Don't they make you feel clever? But it's also a safe move too. Verloc, even if accused of developing Sunshine, is above the law as far as what happens on Uskglass goes. He can explain such an accusation away and even if he can't, it won't matter. Like, I don't think Sally would lie to Gemma with the express intent of making Verloc's life harder. She's not bitter about the break up because she wasn't the one left wondering, you know? But I do think she would do so knowing that he could take the repercussions of it better. What would be inconsequential to him could be devastating to Stewart.

And like with Verloc, Sally also is not bitter about her break up with Stewart because, again, she left him. That he's not sending her death threats or even banning her from his shop is worth maintaining a civil relationship.

I think Sally would still think back on her time with Stewart fondly. She never speaks of him outside her quests in his shop, but he was probably the first man she met who was just as interested in her chemistry as her looks. It's that age old trick: you tell a smart girl she's pretty, you tell a pretty girl she's smart.

Which is not to say I think Stewart had any guile or machinations about this. I know there's an age gap again, but it's not always grooming. I think if Sally fell for being told she was oh so clever, he was just as much prey to her charms telling him he could be oh so much more. I don't think there was any manipulation of the situation on either of their parts here; I think Sally and Stewart just fell into their affair out of circumstance because both of them told the other what they wanted to hear.

And real talk, it's kinda the only logical thing that would have happened and I think they both know it. Like, I don't think Sally actually loved Stewart (or vice versa). Stewart was never going to leave Fiona for Sally. Sally was never going to spend the rest of her life as a side piece to a village chemist. They both had to know their little affair was a temporary arrangement. And so it was and now that it's over, they're both being relatively adult about it. Such a rare thing in this town!

Aside from Stewart's remaining hopes anyway.

Fiona's lines hint at the cut content about Stewart hoping he can win Sally back. But I think those lines were cut because there's enough of a Greek tragedy happening behind that glass just have him trying to be more than he is because Sally convinced him he could be. Like, it'd be one thing if she'd been gassing up Verloc (who is only about a decade older than her) and telling him he could be more. But Stewart is over the hill. If he was going to be more than a village chemist, he would have by now. It was irresponsible of Sally to put these ideas in his head.

When Fiona says she could have gotten over Sally "borrowing" Stewart while she was here, she means it. Like, that was just kind of an accepted part of life back then, that your husband probably would cheat on you at some point. Again, because we now have access to every human on the planet and r/relationship_advice to compare notes, we generally consider cheating as a deal breaker these days. And it is, let's not diminish that, but in a world where you have limited options for life partners and divorce is a difficult and long process, you put up with more and settle for less. And it really wasn't that long ago that this changed. (In some places, it still hasn't!)

Like, Friends had a plot spanning nearly a decade involving whether one character cheated on another and if they could ever get back together. That was the 90's. In the 90's, if your boyfriend cheated on you, you might mull over whether you could "work it out" or if you could stand being alone or how long it would take to find someone new. Sunk cost fallacy like you would not believe!

Now imagine that in a small island town where no one new ever comes and no one can ever leave.

Yeah, Fiona coulda gotten over the cheating. But the aspirations Sally put in him? That's a bridge too far, oi oi oi.

It's as Fiona says; he's not going to climb the ranks anywhere in Wellington Wells and he can't leave the town for whatever opportunities might lie beyond the bridge for a man well past his prime. So what the fuck is he really doing? What is he hoping to accomplish with his tinkering?

It was one thing to wreck her home. But now that Sally's gone, Fiona can't even get her home back the way it was. Stewart is plagued by the flighty ideas Sally put into him. He's not satisfied with what he has anymore and it's not a problem Fiona can fix because the circumstances simply do not permit it. Sally isn't just a homewrecker; she salted the fucking foundations.

And she has the gall to tell Fiona that maybe that's what Stewart liked about her? She's lucky Fiona was in a glass booth or that would have been a short Act.

#we happy few #arthur hastings #sally boyle #stewart adams #fiona adams

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