LORE: Diablo 3, ACT 1, Part 2

[Crawford]

I'm going to break these up into sections so that you can read them without getting spoiled if you're still working through the game, and to avoid a giant wall of text.

Part 1 is here: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...3-ACT-1-Part-1

"What do you remember?" Deckard Cain asks the mysterious meteor-stranger.

"I remember nothing... except for a sword that broke into three pieces as I fell. I bet each piece landed in a different dungeon."

Deckard Cain bcomes immediately and irrationally fixated on the sword. "We must find the three pieces. You have to go do that, Hero."

"Look, man, I've been killing zombies for the last several hours, and when they die, they explode in showers of gold coins and weapons," says the hero. "I've been using my town portal to come back here every ten minutes to drop all the loot I find in a huge pile. Why don't you just take one of these swords? They're not even broken."

"No," Cain says. "I want the OTHER sword."

"I bet it's in goat country," says Leah.

"Why?" the Hero asks.

"Because the goat men are rampaging around and killing everybody. So that's where you have to go."

"Really? It seems like the kind of place I'd want to avoid."

But the hero goes to goat country, which is full of angry goat dudes, exactly as advertised. The trees there are also really pissed off for some reason.

It turns out that the angry goats are cave goats, so the hero has to go down into their goat cave, which smells horrible. At the bottom of it, the hero finds Harly Quinn and some cultists.

"What's up," says the hero. "Are you the evil queen from the Disney version of 'Sleeping Beauty'?"

"We're enemies now," says Harley Quinn. But the hero kills the cultists and takes the sword fragment, and Harley Quinn disappears.

The hero takes the sword fragment back to town and gives it to Cain.

"I bet the second fragment is in the ghost temple in the spooky woods," says Cain. "Nobody's been in there for centuries. That's where you should go next."

"Why would this sword fragment be at a ghost temple in some spooky woods?"

"Why wouldn't it be at a ghost temple in some spooky woods? Ghost temples are exactly the sort of places that things like magical sword fragments tend to be."

The hero has to agree that this is true, though it strikes him as a fairly transparent narrative device to send him someplace that no sane person would otherwise visit.

When the hero gets to the ghost temple, the ghost tells him that he has to unearth two magical orbs from the spooky battlefield to gain entry to the temple.

"If it's so hard to get into this place, how did the sword fragment end up in there?"

"You're overthinking this," says the ghost. "Just enjoy the journey."

"You're an asshole, Ghost," says the hero. But he goes and gets the orbs, even though they are in an ancient ghost battlefield in the spooky woods.

"You have performed a great feat," says the ghost. "This proves you are a Nephalem. From now on, everyone will call you Nephalem, so they don't have to refer to you by your actual name."

"That sounds awfully convenient for the voice actors," says the Nephalem.

"Just stop it," says the ghost.

Harley Quinn and her cultist crew are already inside the temple, because apparently no asshole ghosts made them collect orbs from the spooky battlefield to get inside. The Nephalem kills all the cultists and takes the sword fragment anyway, and goes back to town.

"There are a lot more cultists than villagers," says the Nephalem. "What's the deal with that?"

"Shut up," says Deckard Cain.

"There's a village nearby that's on fire," says Leah. "That's probably where the last sword fragment is."

It turns out that the village is on fire because Harley Quinn is burning it down. But the Nephalem saves the villagers from the cultists.

"Don't worry," says the village preacher. "The sword fragment is safe. I left one guy guarding it."

"Sounds like you've got things under control," says the Nephalem. This is ironic, because everything is on fire, and it seemed unlikely that the one guy could protect the sword fragment from the cultists. However, none of the villagers laugh because their homes have been destroyed and their children are probably dead.

Anyway, it turns out that Harley Quinn killed the one guy, and took the sword fragment, and she has gone back to Tristram to find Deckard Cain.

"Fix this sword," Harley Quinn demands.

"If you want a sword, you can take one from the big pile outside," says Cain.

"You think you're terribly witty, don't you?" says Harley, and she pwns Cain. Then Leah turns into the Incredible Hulk and kills all the cultists, but Harley kidnaps the meteor stranger and escapes, leaving behind the sword fragments that she'd been so obsessed with. Just before he dies, Cain repairs the sword, which turns out to be really special.

The Nephalem arrives too late to save Cain.

"I bet you're all fired up for revenge now," says Leah.

"Not really."

"Well, the sword proves the stranger is an angel."

"For an angel, he seems to need rescuing a lot."

"Look you know you're going to rescue him, so stop arguing about it."

"Fine," says the Nephalem. "Can I use the magic sword?"

"No."

"All right. I am going after the angel with no magic sword. Where did they take him?"

"Through the cave that is full of giant spiders."

"Terrific."

COMING UP NEXT, DIABLO 3 ACT 1: EPIC MEAL TIME WITH THE BUTCHER

[Faderade]

you just took like 4 or 5 hours of my life and compressed it into a 15 min read :/

[CursedEmbrace]

Was just quickly skimming through and saw that you said Deckard Cain sent you to the Drowned Temple, it was actually Magda who gave you the clue, which you relaid to Cain and he reasoned, with Leah's help that it was in the aforementioned temple.

Fun read though!

[Crawford]

Was just quickly skimming through and saw that you said Deckard Cain sent you to the Drowned Temple, it was actually Magda who gave you the clue, which you relaid to Cain and he reasoned, with Leah's help that it was in the aforementioned temple.

Fun read though!

Yeah, I had to compress it a little bit. I could have found a joke in the fact that Leah deduced that the sword was in the temple based on a throwaway comment from Magdha, but it wasn't that funny, so I just glossed it over. I was thinking about dealing with the whole reassembling-the-sword problem in one or two sentences, to do the whole act in two sections, but I thought the whole quest was ridiculous enough to merit attention.

[Deleted]

The real question is, did the hero get pants yet?