Today’s Borderlands 2 session began by running in circles around Sanctuary picking up bizarre recordings of Tannis recalling being tortured with… ceiling chairs. Whatever the hell ceiling chairs are, although from her descriptions, they sound like sentient chairs that crawl along ceilings. So…either there are sentient ceiling chairs or she’s crazy. In Pandora, either is equally likely. Easy mission, though. I didn’t even get to shoot anything.
Then on to something new. My intrepid soldier companion Mike has been stalled by purchasing a chair (no, I am not kidding – while I’m listening to Tannis blather on about ceiling chairs, Mike is purchasing an office chair), so I pick something marked “Trivial” to go and do by myself.
This quest takes me back to the Dust, and my darling Ellie. She wants me to start a clan war. Conveniently enough, in the same area, Mordecai wants me to fetch him booze so he can get good and drunk in mourning Bloodwing, and there are also some guns stashed here somewhere. So I’ve got things to do.
After chasing the un-shoot-able moonshine wagon around for a while and finding only one moonshiner’s camp (one of ten barrels), falling off a cliff (oops), and deciding I don’t in fact want to fight through that stupid cliff-side settlement for the fourth time, I got bored. Clan war it is. Ellie has me come “check my junk… yard, that is” for some clan emblems, and she gives me some dynamite.
Well, that answers how that area of the map gets unlocked. Ellie has me put dynamite on the Hodunk Speedway sign to destroy their precious giant tire–when the sign falls down, the giant tire rolls through the wall and into the new area. As it turns out, Ellie’s family used to be Hodunk (and she doesn’t like them, in part, because “they like skinny chicks… cuz they’s pussies”), and they were going to turn Ellie into the “clan wife,” which Moxxie wasn’t too happy about and which sounds like a horrible, non-consensual fate (and an excellent justification of hatred and disgust). So that’s a horrible childhood story, but good on Moxxie for leaving (which is to say, good on Gearbox for having a woman leave her stupid, abusive, possibly-incestuous husband and take her kids with her, then having her build a successful life, rather than making her the damsel in a hero-to-the-rescue mission).
Ellie wants me to go sabotage the Holy Spirits, too (I’m okay with this, since I’ll do pretty much anything for Ellie). This takes me to the Highlands, which is where whatever Roland also wants me to do is also located, and that’s something I’m going to avoid until I have my trusty soldier Mike back with me, but since he and Tannis have a thing for chairs, I guess that just means I’ll have to avoid it while finding Ellie’s enemies.
Because I put the Hodunk clan emblem on the wreckage, Mick Zaford (head of the Holy Spirits) wants my help–obviously he doesn’t realize it was me who blew up his distillery. With the distillery blown up, the Holy Spirits (who are Pandora’s answer to the Boondock Saints) want my help killing the Hodunks, which makes Ellie giggle with glee. Okay, my darling. Anything for you!
On a side note, there’s a teddy bear in one of the bar chairs (which I can spin in circles) labeled “Mer.” I wonder if Tiny Tina has been up here (although her thing was bunnies…).
At any rate, I follow Mick down to the basement, where he tells me to “grab that dynamite like a good lad.” Well, despite not being a “lad,” I guess I can grab your dynamite (no, not like that). But only because it will make Ellie happy. Demented leprechauns are not really my thing. I head back out of the bar toward the Dust, and stop off in the bathroom before I leave (because everyone stores ammo and money in their toilets around here – I’m digital, I don’t actually have to pee). Now I have a race to go wreck.
Mike finally rejoins me, and we go plant some dynamite, blow up some racecars, and then Mike’s presence magically makes the Moonshine truck start dropping barrels of beer, so we pick those up, too. With the beer collected, Moxxie offers to buy it off me, instigating an argument between her and Mordecai over who wants it more. Since I really did like Bloodwing, I’m going to give it to Mordecai. Also, Moxxie annoys me because she makes snarky comments about Ellie’s weight. No booze for her.
However, instead of going back to give Mordecai his beer, there’s another quest we can do for him, and–again, since I feel bad for him because of Bloodwing–we go to free all the other tortured animals from the Preserve like a really messed up two-person PETA. We saved the critters, then got into a fight with a very large, flying green thing called the Son of Mothrak, which very disappointingly did not leave behind any loot whatsoever. If you’re going to have a giant monster in the boss fight pit (where we fought Bloodwing the first time through), you really ought to have it drop some fun toys.
The another Mordecai quest, this time to grab a loot chest from some guy named Carson who stole it from Mordecai. As we approach his lair, he warns me to keep away… “unless ya want a milkshake.” Or at least that’s what it sounded like. Well, I like milkshakes. Only Carson’s been abducted and his brother left for dead. Mordecai tells us that Carson’s probably been taken “to the Hyperion friendship gulag,” which sounds like so much fun we just have to go!
Kill lots of robots, find Carson dead because of some other guy named Mobley who killed him in prison to get his stash. So back out we go. Fetch, girl, fetch!
So we get to the hill, and I actually say, out loud, “Okay. I get it.” The name of the quest is “The Good, the Bad, and the Mordecai.” We’re in a graveyard. Standing next to a stash in a grave. Then Mobley and Gettle (a Hyperion guard) get into, I kid you not, a “Truxican standoff” with us. This would be more appropriate if I were alone, of course, but I can’t help but feel like I’m the ugly one, here. (If you haven’t seen The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, then I can’t help you. But you really should. It’s a great—and Classic—movie. I hate Westerns and I thought it was a good movie. Just call me Angel-Eyes.)
We kill them, and grab the stash and some loot. Okay. Now back to Sanctuary and Mordecai. Time to turn in, both in Pandora and on Earth.
