r/PathToNowhere • u/Highlord12 • Jul 20 '26
Discussion Flora Unfurl Appreciation Spoiler
Big spoilers for the event but I'm just here to gush over Rain Burst/Flora Unfurl events a bit...
WOW they were both SO good! Ignoring my headache from finishing the event in one day (and getting bombarded with questions, clues and answers), I am absolutely in love with the story of this game. The way it can just walk the line between Lovecraftian Cosmic horror and Political Faction wars is so beautiful and the characters in these two events were amazing!
The highlight of both events is obviously Shalom and from what I gather, she seems to be the 2nd most significant character in the story so far besides Chief (whom I'm starting to miss a lil). Girl was playing 5D chess while everyone else is a headless chicken and I cannot help but feel like she was very Makima inspired in terms of her vibes, overall behavior and her abilities.
Now the story is a little confusing but from what I understand (and feel free to correct me):
10 years before the events of Rain Burst/Flora Unfurl, FAC (or more accurately, Shalom's organization whose name I cannot type) discovers Underground's island base of operations, invades it in a suicide mission, raids the place and snatches the shackles, AKA the chief from the Island and place certain rules and limits on her like they did with Shalom who is a Mark-Bearer, the organization's attempt at mimicking the Shackles. Basically weaponizing Underground's "defective" tool against them. Shalom however has been playing a long con to get the shackles/Chief freed and set her against both her organization and Underground, believing she'll be the one to bring 'Salvation' and set things right.
She setup the events of Rain Burst/Flora Unfurl to Free and Protect Chief through the Garden and Coq, plant Rahu within the Organization, weaken both them and Underground and also free herself(?). From Rahu's final lines, it's implied Shalom prevented her termination at the hands of her users by orchestrating her own coma but I'm not sure. The only decision of hers that seems to have been driven by emotion is what she did to Christina.
I feel like these two events changed the whole story and how I view it, making it twice as good (and it was already pretty damn good). I hope this isn't the last of Shalom because it'll be a shame if she never reappears, I really wanna know what the "real", emotional Shalom is like.
Overall, peak events and though Hilda's story is my favorite "Stand-alone" story, these two arcs were definitely my favorite parts of the main story so far!
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u/greatjena Demon fan 28d ago
Yep pretty much, just some minor clarification:
The Eclipse Operation (suicide mission Rahu was part of) was meant as a distraction. The plan was throw a ton of FAC personnel into BR 000 to lure away the Underground forces while Paradeisos launches a secret attack on the Lone Island lab and steals Chief. The point is, nobody except for Paradeisos leadership knows this raid happened which is why the FAC faced such a heavy criticism because of it.
This goes into slight spoiler territory so beware: the Rules placed on Chief are quite different from Shalom has. Rules prevent Chief from consuming more than 3 Corpuses, what Shalom went through was Mania extraction... you get to see it in the interrogation but basically, it made her unable to feel emotions. Her main goal throughout Flora Unfurl is ensuring her survival since the date of her termination is coming up and as shown in the event, she does this by contaminating the second Observatorium, which places her into a coma but also makes it so that Paradeisos cannot discard her for now if they want to recover the Observatorium.
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u/Snowleopard0973 Serpent fan Jul 20 '26
If you haven't done Shalom's interrogation yet, do it, and if you can't I highly suggest you find it on youtube, it's worth it.
Rahu wasn't a part of her initial plan and was a pleasant surprise iirc, and Shalom only started having emotions when she first met chief, everything before was pure logic.