At the end of the last session of Recettear, we’d just managed to put up the requisite 10,000 pix for our first week’s payment. Big success! We also met Alouette, a bit of an oddball who’s declared herself our rival and will probably be causing trouble in the future.

Now, since we’re coming back to the game after completing week one, let’s just open the menu and remind ourselves what our next payment is and when it’s due.

THIRTY.

THIRTY THOUSAND.

WHAT.

WHAT IS THIS.

I know Tear said the payment was going to increase week on week, but… not by three hundred percent! What the hell, fairy loan company?! I guess I’m just gonna have to… do a really good job running the shop for the next week. Dang. (Side note: if the increase keeps happening at this rate, I’ll be paying back a million within about five weeks!)

We don’t really have anything worth putting out on the shop floor at the moment, so I think priority number one heading into our second week of business is restocking. Reg had some decent stuff last time, so picking up a couple of high-value items with the money we’ve got left over is probably a good start; then, perhaps, a bit more dungeon robbing and hopefully less death than last time.

On the way over to the Merchant’s Guild, I spot that the town square is flashing and decide to head over and check it out; who should be there but the little girl who sometimes pops into our store? She’s a bit upset because her doll’s been damaged, but Recette whips out some sewing gear and fixes it then and there.

Luckily, I don’t have to do any sort of sewing minigame for this to work. The girl’s happy (though we don’t get any reward straight away, I’m hoping she might be more generous next time she’s in the shop) and Recette and Tear have a quick discussion about the virtues of needlework. The upshot is that Tear apparently doesn’t sew, which Recette reasons is probably because she’s too small to hold the needle properly.

On to Reg’s shop, and I pick up as much high-value stuff as I can with the money I’ve got left. No reason not to, I guess, since we’ve got as long as we’re ever going to get before we have to make another payment. Expensive shit acquired, let’s head back and flog the lot.

I sit down and open up… without remembering to put any of the stuff I just bought out on the shelves. Bugger. Luckily, Louie pops in and has a particular request…

Ooooooh. If I remember right, the most expensive thing I picked up from Reg was a piece of armour. Annoyingly, I probably won’t be able to get Louie to pay much over ticket price for it, but I’ll take it as a success anyway.

That’ll do!

Reg pops in and asks for a weapon. I do have a weapon on hand, which I… just bought from him…

He’s not willing to buy it, which I suppose makes a degree of sense because I bought it from him for significantly less money about three minutes ago. Annoying loss, though.

I put out the rest of the stuff I bought from Reg and hope that I’ll be able to make a decent enough profit from it. One more session might get us back up above 10 grand, which wouldn’t be a bad start to the week.

Well, that sounds fun. There’s one right there in the window, buddy.

I asked for only ten percent over the base price and this guy wasn’t having it! What’s going on?! People just don’t want to pay for anything at the moment, apparently.

I’ve just spotted Prime, Alouette’s fairy, hovering around in the store. Alouette herself doesn’t seem to be here, but I wonder whether Prime’s just here to do some shopping or I ought to be concerned. Meanwhile, I just sold this old guy a hat for only twelve percent over the guild-mandated median, and he couldn’t even be a little bit appreciative.

I buy a bowl of beef off Reg for about seventy-three percent of the base. Tempted to just eat it, actually… I mean, I’m actually hungry in real life now. Might find a recipe for legit beef.

This old dude’s into some kinky shit.

I finish up the day with one last selling session. One woman wants a treasure but doesn’t have enough money on her to even pay the base price, which makes me think that perhaps it’s not all about the percentage. Some customers just might only have a limited amount of money on them, which means that even if I make it as reasonable as I possibly can they still might not be able to afford it. On the plus side: merchant level five! I think I might be able to fuse stuff now, possibly; we’ll check it out tomorrow.

Aw, man. I think my days of exceeding expectations might have come to a sad halt.

On day number ten, we get a newsflash about the price of candy. I don’t think we’ve got any candy right now, but I’m not gonna go buy any if it’s likely to be more expensive.

On the way out, Recette stops Tear to ask what the newsflash was. Tear explains that everyone in the city gets updates on important fluctuations in the economy; Recette’s concerned that she’ll never be able to afford candy again.

Tear quickly reassures Recette that prices will stabilise before too long, but points out that it’s always worth having a good variety of items on hand for situations like this.

As usual, Tear decides that a quick tutorial might be helpful, and flashes up a bit of example news.

Pff. I hope Tear didn’t just send out her tutorial newsflash to everyone in the city, or Louie might be in a bit of trouble. Maybe we’ll go dungeoneering in a bit, help him get some of his cred back. In the meantime, we’ll head for the Merchants’ Guild to see whether we’re a high enough level to use fusion yet. We find Louie in the Town Square on the way over; he’s hungry, but doesn’t know which plants are edible. Naturally, Recette knows exactly which plants are edible; with Louie fed (well, left to feed himself from weeds growing in the corner of the square), we meander over to the Guild and discover that we have indeed unlocked fusion!

Unfortunately, we currently don’t have enough ingredients to make anything whatsoever. Instead, I grab a couple more high-value items, then scoot over to the market to see if they’ve got anything on sale there.

They do indeed, so I make what might turn out to be a bad decision and spend all of my remaining money on stocking up. Let’s check out a dungeon to finish up the day – maybe one we’ve already cleared, so we know we’re not too likely to… y’know. Die.

Louie costs about 225pix to take to the dungeon, which just so happens to be exactly how much money we have left. Let’s go!

We make our way through the Jade Way, re-doing the set of floors we’ve already managed to beat. All seems to be going pretty uneventfully until…

Um.

Well, this is new.

The girl says she’s ‘… lost, somehow’. Recette and Tear explain that telling her exactly where she is might be a bit tricky, since each floor of the dungeon changes its shape whenever someone enters. (I don’t know if I’ve seen a game justify procedurally-generated levels before, but I dig it!)

Okay, so she doesn’t even know she’s in a dungeon. Bit concerning. She explains that she was on her way home from… somewhere she can’t remember, and seems to be at a loss for any further explanation as to how she might have got there.

Tear tells her to look for a floor of the dungeon with a big red door, and with that the girl is gone. I wonder whether we’ll meet her on the boss floor?

Reginald Drisby is still here – it suddenly occurred to me as we came down that he might not be any more, since we beat him last time – but the girl doesn’t seem to be anywhere. Maybe she already beat him and got out of here?

He goes down, again. Poor Reginald Drisby. I opt to leave now rather than keep going, since we’ve already got as much as we can carry and I don’t much fancy risking death again.

Still don’t have enough of anything to do any fusing, much to my disappointment. Time to go home for the day, I guess!

Morning brings another newsflash: ‘Reading is reaching an all-time high in popularity among young women!’… and then something about how great Terme Finance Company is. I guess we might get young women coming in and asking for books, so I might go and see if I can pick one up. I need to do at least one lot of selling first, though, because my bank balance is currently stone-dead zero!

One lot of selling gets us… well, a little bit. There’s a newsflash about shield prices going up, candy prices stabilising and something from the church about being wary of the dark arts, so that’s all good fun. A second sell-sesh brings another newsflash, this time about armour prices going up and some sort of ban on ‘walnut bread fishing’. Let’s see if we can’t pick up a book now, just in case that craze comes into play…

Market’s closed, so nope. We head back home and end the day having exceeded expectations again! Back on track!

The next day, the news tells us that the book boom is over, so that came to nothing. I’m not really sure what the best move is now to max out the amount of pix we can earn in the next five or six days, so I decide to go for the classic ‘got a day free’ option of… you guessed it, dungeon running! We’ll give the next stages of the Jade Way another go and see if we can’t do it without dying this time.

Oh, hell, it’s you again.

She doesn’t remember us, which I suppose I ought not to be surprised by.

Okay, at least she knows where she was supposed to be this time. It’s… a small improvement, but I’ll take it. After a quick discussion about onions and sukiyaki, our mysterious friend disappears again. I don’t think this is the last time we’ll be seeing her.

It’s not long before I run into a few of the blue knights who made my last run so tricky – but, mercifully, none of those deadly fish, at least for the first couple of floors.

SPOKE TOO SOON, THE FISH ARE BACK.

Luckily, I’m in a decent enough state that I survive this time. They even do some damage to the enemies in the area!

A couple of well-timed level ups get me to the boss of this part, who is…

… not here?

Tear theorises that we can’t go any lower now, but perhaps if we were stronger, the dungeon might let us access even lower floors. Basically, we need to be a higher level before the Jade Way will allow us below floor fifteen. Recette wonders whether the dungeons are just lonely when there aren’t people in them, when all of a sudden…

Charme demands that we hand over all our stuff. I guess the ‘thief’ in her name should have clued me in that that was about to happen.

I’m all ready to give her everything she wants, but… I don’t get the option to. Instead, I have to fight Charme!

Unfortunately, Charme is really dang fast, so I couldn’t take a lot of screenshots. She runs around at a rapid pace, throwing out webs that would, I assume, slow me down, but I managed to avoid them. Despite her speed and high HP, as long as I kept moving around I was able to beat Charme down without tooooo much trouble.

Bless you, Recette, for having the first instinct to make sure that the woman who tried to steal all your crap is okay.

Though Charme is not, in fact, on the verge of death, she is pretty beaten up (darn right, Louie kicks ass); Recette offers her some ointment for her wounds.

Aww, we’re a good pair. I’m starting to get the feeling that this might be a ‘Defeat Equals Friendship’ sort of situation; I sure as hell won’t complain if I can swap Louie out for Charme when we’re dungeon-busting. I love Louie and all, but it’d be nice to have a bit of a change.

Recette’s parting words are to invite Charme to visit us at Recettear, which she says she might just do. Tear, perhaps understandably, isn’t thrilled at Recette giving the woman who just tried to murder us and steal all our stuff the address of the place where we work and live, but Recette thinks she seems pretty cool.

Dungeon beaten, we pick up a reward of a ‘Very Odd Vase’ and mosey on back to the store. That’s day twelve cleared and, I think, time to wrap it up. See you all on Day Thirteen!