#samcae

Sampo is implied to show up in an occurrence called Curio Hacker that has you meet a hacker who is trying to replicate Herta's curios, and it specifies them as having blue hair, which is what the game always, always uses to describe Sampo specifically.

This isn't even all of it

Even including the one stupid time he actually was wearing something over his head dmzhndkr

Anyway, the occurrence very much tracks with like...everything else we know about Sampo.

Natasha says that he's always tinkering with devices. And we know Sampo is actually pretty good at it too, because he even has a few canon successes! There's the most frequent one he uses- Sampo has his own supply of smokebombs and flashbangs. But then we also have a readable listing some of his scams he's run, the most important one being here because this one actually shares a name with one of the weighted curios in the Divergent Universe!

"Some of the inventions produced by the Intelligentsia Guild always make people wonder whether the Masked Fools had infiltrated the guild. Apparently, it can detect the tiny divergences in space-time shifts, and establish a relationship between the two closest divergence points, allowing information to be passed between the two - but the only thing the user can hear is their echo from the walkie-talkie. The projects manager Doctor DeWitt indicates that this phenomenon precisely illustrates the high level of similarity between parallel universes, where even the thoughts of the doppelganger would be completely identical." It even sounds like some bullshit he'd pull kldsjafklds

He also sells a perpetual motion machine, and there is a perpetual motion cuckoo clock curio as well, but that feels a little less exciting since perpetual motion is a fascinating and sought-after thing across human experiences, and I wouldn't put it past Sampo to know that it would sell and come up with that on his own. Same with him selling someone an "android puppet" while Herta's space station is literally crawling with them.

Anyway he's clearly having at least some success replicating Herta's collection! And even the two curios he gives you in the Curio Hacker occurrence seem connected to him- neither of them can be found under any other circumstances. They're Sampo Specialties. ☆

Both have negatives effects that, once you weather them, become positives- which is the modus operandi with a lot of Sampo's shenanigans. The Survival Wisdom quest shows this particularly well, where once he's manipulated the trailblazer into getting back some stolen equipment, he really does reward them with an actual treasure map.

One of the two choices you're given fits in perfectly with Sampo's themes of love- he gives you a literal heart.

And the other is the Mysterious Magnetism curio- something Sampo seems to have in spades, at least where the trailblazer is concerned haha.

They comment on love and desire while looking at his wanted poster in Belobog. They describe him with "complicated feelings" and even try drunk dialing him in Amphoreus. I don't think literally any other offscreen/side character gets brought up in totally unrelated circumstances as often as Sampo does.

you ever joke about a ship to yourself and then, like, kinda like it? and then you joke about it to friends and it’s totally an ironic thing bc it’s not like you actually like this character and god forbid you actually like this ship. and then something happens but like it’s literally nothing (museum event) and then you take a couple screenshots or like record a cutscene (museum event!!!). and then maybe you wake up after working on ship art of them and like you’re wishing there’s more art for this ship and you’re polling ppl on instagram about what the widely agreed upon ship name is and then you’re like, aw FUCK.