Author Commentary: House of Hope as Trade Hub
((I realize I didn't do this when I said I would, so here I go.))
So! In the last chapter of Higher Than Death, I basically follow the meeting with Raphael as it is presented in the game. Until I don't, and Jack sticks around a bit to meet the Archivist and Haarlep.
The reason why is that House of Hope was meant to be a place you could enter and explore multiple times through out the game.
I'm not ENTIRELY sure when and how you were meant to have access, though I assume it is safe to say that you would be able to go once an act, when Raphael pops up.
Either through Raphael directly, or at the library, you were able to trade soul coins for items from his collection. It's why soul coins currently occupy such a strange, minor role now: they were originally meant to be currency.
It's not entirely sure what the items were either, though it's assumed that the items you could steal at end game would have been part of the shop at some point.
And now, about Haarlep...
You were also able to meet Haarlep multiple times. And more importantly, Haarlep had a whole ass menu of people they could turn in to. That list has been lost to the datamining wipes of old, but I do know that list included Sarevok and Gortash.
Why would Haarlep have Sarevok's body? I have no clue.
WHY would any incubus be restricted to forms they've made "deals" with when they can innately utilize the Shapechanger ability to just become any small or medium sized humanoid? Cause Larian doesn't do research, and/or they cut out that part of the explanation and just had the body trading deal as an interesting tidbit.
But, suffice to say, the cut content includes a House of Hope that you could visit multiple times, a proper soul coin implementation, and an incubus with a proper menu.
Along with. Well. Avernus. An entire Avernus area. And a secondary building that no one really knows what the purpose of it was.
I can't put all of Avernus into the fic; it's already MASSIVE. And I'm not sure if I'm going to include that second mystery building.
But, that was all the inspiration for that chapter of Higher Than Death.
