Return of the Devs: Starsinc / Trapped in Time
Starsinc: A Contract to Save the World
The Queen of Monsters orders a hooded servant to breach Starsinc Fortress and bring her the Star Core. The servant worries about its powerful defenders, repeating a rumor that their leader’s strength rivals the Avatars. The Queen offers no explanation for her interest. Elsewhere, Twilly leads the Hero toward a strange sensation in the woods, where a rift opens and the assassin Final steps through. His face is familiar from a wanted poster, and the Hero has good reason to distrust him.
Final says the world is in danger because the Queen’s agents have already stolen the Core. His proposed rescue is to send the Hero about three weeks into the past, before that theft. He gives a practical reason for caring whether the world survives: without people, there will be no assassination contracts and no money. Final will draw the defenders’ attention while the Hero infiltrates the fortress and takes the artifact from Prime, its keeper. The Hero accepts the plan and follows him through the rift.
Inside Starsinc, Final directs a campaign against Prime’s supposed sources of strength. The Hero battles Star Sprites and Living Stars, gathers sprite essence for Final’s personal use, and takes valuable paintings under the claim that they empower Prime. The task slips between saving the world and helping a thief collect useful prizes. The Hero continues, carrying the successive Nova Badges that mark progress through Final’s instructions.
The fortress’s locked passage requires more work. The Hero examines it, gathers light and darkness fragments, then seeks Chaos Fragments outside Starsinc so Final can form a key. More creatures and guards are defeated before a guard’s key opens the second lock. With the way breached, the Hero reaches Prime. Final has brought his recruit to the keeper and the Star Core, just as he intended.
Starsinc: The Wrong Keeper
Prime sees an intruder who has hurt his people and damaged his home. The Hero protests that the aim is to protect the Core from the Queen, but Prime questions whether this visitor understands its purpose or who can wield it. He concludes that the Hero has come to steal it and attacks. Following Final’s plan, the Hero defeats the keeper and carries the Core back to the assassin.
Final congratulates the Hero, then turns the moment of relief into a betrayal. When the Hero asks about a missing weapon, he points away, strikes, takes the Core, and escapes with the artifact. The Hero is left stranded. Prime returns and names the deception: Final is the Queen’s pawn. The keeper offers a way home in exchange for recovering the stolen Core.
The artifact’s danger gives their new alliance urgency. Final’s earlier explanation called it a store of antimatter left from creation; Prime warns that its use could annihilate the Hero’s entire planet. Those descriptions belong to the characters explaining the stakes, rather than a demonstration of the Core’s destructive limits. What the Hero has seen is enough to change sides: the person supposedly protecting the artifact has stolen it for the enemy.
Prime is too weakened to open the way immediately. The Hero places six beacons around Starsinc to help restore his power. Prime then directs the pursuit toward Final, who has only reached the entrance to his realm. Beyond the portal, in the woods, the Hero demands the Core back and warns that the Queen will not remain a loyal employer. Final refuses to surrender a prize he considers immensely valuable. Their disagreement becomes a battle.
Starsinc: The Core Returned
The Hero defeats Final and reclaims the Star Core. Another attempted strike is blocked, leaving the assassin on the ground again. Even now, he refuses to abandon his confidence in the Queen: he says she will keep him alive because he knows the Hero’s secret. The Hero does not know what he means. Final leaves through the portal with a threat of future revenge, preserving that secret as an unresolved taunt rather than revealing it here.
Back in Starsinc, the Hero asks what will happen to the recovered artifact. Prime answers that his people will relocate it and keep it guarded. They will train for the coming war against the Queen until the Hero needs them. The Core has been recovered for its guardians, rather than destroyed or handed to the Queen, and Final has escaped rather than been killed.
The fortress also offers conversations beyond the urgent recovery. Clairis describes the Starsinc as guardians of existence and claims that Prime knew how the confrontation would unfold. Valle explains technomancy as an interplay of magic and technology, placing its invention far beyond the Hero’s own time. These accounts enlarge the setting without fixing every date in Final’s promised journey or explaining every choice Prime made during it.
After the recovery, Prime offers trials for his armor and weapon, along with opportunities to replay the battles. Their quest listings include repeated titles and a Healer-specific version, rather than several additional story endings. Prime’s claims for his equipment’s ancient origins and enormous power remain promises made by its keeper. The official August 14, 2015 release announcement likewise separates the adventure from the farming quests it unlocks. The immediate story ends with the Core secured and an alliance against the Queen; the trials offer further challenges afterward.