This Charade Packs a Wallop!

Enough digging around in human waste. As long as we're in Darktown it's time to talk to a man about a gem.

It'd be cool if he only said this if you do another quest once you read the note, but somehow I doubt this is actually the case because Bioware.

Valerie lays on the scorn. How dare this peon disrespect her pressing duty to dig around in human shit for tiny rocks?

"I'm not stupid!" *proceeds to threaten the Champion of Kirkwall, a woman with a bodycount approaching the thousands*

"I want the gem this note that I don't know how to read talks about!"

You really wanna do this, don't you?

This encounter comes to its foregone conclusion, with everybody not in Valerie's party stabbed into hairless mannequin parts.

Let's check out the note on mekel's corpse. fortunately it's still legible, even with the bloodstains saturating it.

"This Gem of Keroshek thing the note talks about?" *note does not mention a Gem of Keroshek.* Also, what the fuck is wallop?

That doesn't answer Valerie's question at all, Gamlen.

So I click on the mallet and a new objective appears in my journal.

I have no idea how you're supposed to figure this out without reading the journal, because nobody makes any statements about the origins of the wallop mallet in-game at all.

So we head to the elven alienage and inspect their most sacred of trees, which they apparently also allow people to cut chunks out of to make hammers for the biannual dog lord and apostate stomping.

Hopefully this dipshit isn't going to try to fight us too, I'm really not in the mood for a trash mob right now.

Damn, still slagging on Isabela even after all these years.

Ha ha ha. Racism. *hammers the "ban" button*

Actually Merrill, it's more like an incredibly shitty fetch quest!

Is there anything Fenris won't whine about?

Here's the crate Valerie was supposed to check. Despite having the number of the shipment she wanted, she saved it for last after she had looted every other crate in the warehouse.

Well hopefully it's the gem, because then this quest is over.

*sigh* of course it is.

So Valerie opens the box full of poison gas anyway and a bunch of mercenaries bust in. Why someone felt the need to waste the money on hiring dozens of mercenaries to take down fucking Gamlen is completely beyond me.

Probably should have spent a bit more to get someone who could survive having all the blood ripped out of their body by a lovable dalish blood mage, though.

Valerie finds a note on one of mercenaries' eviscerated corpses. Again, it's somehow still legible despite presumably being soaked in blood.

I want your trash mobs and I want your fetch quests, David Gaider writes a bad romance.

Haha, get ready for a sweet payoff for this line!

So we head to the cave where they first met. How Valerie knows which specific cave the note is referring to is never explained, but it probably has something to do with there only being 2 cave maps in the entire game.

And naturally it's full of fucking zombies.

And finally we meet the mysterious mastermind pulling the strings.

It's an uglier version of Bethany.

i can haz cuzzin?

Probably because I avoided talking with him as much as humanly possible.

He's here for the obligatory combat sequence, obviously!

"You'll have to be more specific. I kill a lot of people."

NOTHING IN THIS GAME MAKES SENSE

Haha get it?

And her name is Charade! Classic. Bravo, Bioware. Bra-fucking-vo.

You know what dude? Let's do it. You want the man dance, it's time to tango.

Will Valerie and her companions survive this heated battle? SPOILER: yes.