To recap from last time: Kian was unable to save Oldtown from being raided and burned down by the Azadi, and Zoe watched in horror as her food-cart friend Nela blew herself up in front of the EYE building - the paramilitary organization that has closed down Zoe's present home of the district in Propast of Europolis (what was formerly Prague). Zoe herself was left in critical condition, being dragged away by an unseen person.

Well, before the game feels like filling us in on either of those plots, we once again visit our inscrutably destined mystery child Saga. She's grown up since last time; now she's a precocious kindergartener with an affinity for drawing scenes from The Longest Journey. The child naturally has a mysterious link to April Ryan and the White Dragon - neither of which the game has bothered explaining too much, even passively as an optional dialogue option - and after a protracted search of her inter-dimensional home in the Aether for nine of these hidden drawings, Saga finds herself walking through a portal to her first "shift": the name of the mysterious power that lets April and Zoe switch between Stark and Arcadia. Where she's gone, the game wouldn't say. It's also worth noting that Saga's mother vanished soon after the first interlude with her, back when she was an infant. Whether "mommy" is a dragon in human guise or something else entirely has yet to be ascertained.

Leaving Saga's, well, saga hanging like so many sketches on a wall, we return to Kian to see that Oldtown did indeed get roasted and most of the rest of the magical races have been deported to prison camps. At least this gives us less ground to cover for the Marcuria-based puzzles. In this brief section, Kian attempts to get to the bottom of the tubes that the Azadi have installed all over Marcuria. Curiously enough, it's actually a giant adding machine that the Azadi scientists have concocted, and removing the magical races is instrumental to minimizing the amount of magic, or "chaos", that might disrupt the system's calculations. That the game built an entire computer the size of a city made from pneumatic tubes sending calculations in various directions is kind of a neat development, and it remains to be seen what will be done with this technology. It's also apparent that many of the Azadi are ignorant of the magical races true fate in the concentration camps (the game doesn't quite go so far to call them that, but that's the implication), simply assuming that they're getting repatriated back to their homelands. At this point the scene ends as General Hami discovers Kian is still alive - the General is the man who trained Kian and tells him to be careful at the start of Dreamfall, and his presence in Marcuria is a major issue to Commander Vamon - Kian's hated rival and the man most eager to see Kian get executed - and the local Azadi ruler/administrator/"emissary" Sister Sayha, who have been in cahoots to formulate a plan to conquer the Azadi Empire. It's a whole Lannister subplot that the game frequently revisits, letting the player in on who the villains are and what they're up to as far as Arcadia is concerned. Kian escapes the General, but some seeds of doubt have been sown and now it's a matter of seeing if General Hami can expose Vamon and Sayha's duplicity before they are able to arrange a convenient accidental death for the visiting dignitary.

Back to Zoe, we see that she recovered mostly intact from the bomb, but now there's even more stringent martial law on the streets and the city is practically deserted but for the EYE enforcers and their drones. The next few puzzles involve resolving to find out what happened with Nela - she was set up with an antimatter bomb rather than a non-lethal EMP which would've disrupted the EYE's communications rather than exploded a whole block - and finish what the Hand started in uncovering the role the Syndicate has in the phony election and the city-wide clampdown. It also involves a long chat with Hanna, who potentially has the same shifting powers as April and Zoe. We then make a visit to Mr. London's warehouse, where he seems to be torturing some schmuck with a virtual golf game, and some evidence we need to prove that the Syndicate was behind the bomb. It's here we meet Shitbot for one final hurrah - there's a few puzzles that require switching his personality cores around to procure the right evidence without getting spotted by goons (fortunately, there's scarcely any stealth involved). That chapter ends with Zoe finally using the Dreamachine to make her way back to Arcadia through her dream powers, but instead she fully vanishes and shifts over like April Ryan once did. "What the shitty shit is going on?", to paraphrase Mira.

The game concludes with two brief sequences from both Zoe and Kian, as Zoe finds out where the resistance can be contacted (with the help of Crow! Crow's back! And as reluctant to get involved in adventures as ever!), is taken to the resistance hideout and almost meets Kian before being dragged off for questioning, and then the game seamlessly switches to Kian as he is resolved to leave Marcuria to followed the kidnapped Bip - an urchin that he's been building a friendship with over a handful of resistance missions - and find evidence regarding the magicals that have been deported. We also get Anna's story, finally: she's been sweet on Kian ever since he saved her from Vamon's gang on the streets of Sahir when both were far younger, and has been resolute in finding him again. Kian sneaks on board an airship (or "cloudship") leaving for the Ge'en prison colony for evidence of Vamon and Sayha's wrongdoing and the chapter ends on a fairly noncommittal note.

As for the big decisions this episode, we had a few:

• Return the worker's tools or keep them: This is one of those clever ones that gets answered by whether or not you remembered to do something, rather than having a big binary decision flash on the screen with ominous music. I've seen this happen in a few other games of this type, where you might stop for a moment while seeing the end results screen and realizing that it was a decision you made without knowing it was there. I recalled that the missing tools needed for the first part of that mission might get the very Welsh bartender Ulvic in trouble, given that they were purloined under his tavern's roof, so I returned them before entering the computing room and ending Kian's first section. Hopefully I've spared Ulvic from some pressing questions.
• Dodge Falk's shot or Distract him: The first time Zoe tries to use Mira's Dreamachine, shortly into her chapter, it tips off the EYE operatives who have been keeping tabs on her. We come face to face with the German guy working with our therapist Dr. Zalenka, a guy apparently named Falk, as he points a gun in Zoe's face just as she wakes up from the dreaming device. By choosing to dodge the bullet, I let Falk have a great shot at the EYE officer sneaking through the window behind me. Turns out this Falk person, whoever he is (the game reveals his name in the decision description at the end, but as far as I know the game has yet to introduce him), is on Zoe's side. Or, at the very least, not ready for her to be captured or killed by EYE forces. I have no idea what might've happened if I'd chosen "distract". I wonder if I can get my main character killed by making a bad decision?
• Take Likho's hand or leave him behind: Right at the end of the episode, before leaving on the cloudship, I had the choice of taking the grouchy Dolmari Likho along with me. Likho's been on my case since jump street, and every decision I've made so far as Kian seems to piss him off more, so the last thing I wanted to do was to bring him along on a buddy-buddy mission to magical concentration camp island. Probably made a misstep there, since his assistance would've no doubt come in useful, but I really didn't feel like spending the next Book getting threatened in his growly voice for my inadvertent magical racism. This whole on-the-nose holocaust allegory probably the most tiring part of the whole Arcadia section of the game, to be honest.

As it stands right now, Zoe is being detained in the resistance's HQ, Kian is off to gather evidence and potentially free some magical prisoners, and Saga is... I dunno, off doing something somewhere in the multiverse. Somehow I don't think I need to worry about her. I will say that the five/six-year-old Saga's accent - which I imagine is a Norwegian accent, given that child voice actors in video games are usually sourced from the families of the developers - is absolutely adorable.