Damn. That's an epic degree of loyalty and forgiveness there.
The fuck?! ...Death cultists, man. Just when you think they can't get worse...
Zing!
As soon as I saw the "betrayal" start, I knew exactly where this was going, and couldn't stop laughing. Well played!
That's a quest which doesn't get followup in the game's Act 3, actually. You go investigate the fireworks house but nothing is there as a quest trigger to progress stuff - seems to have been content only partially completed which got released. Cliff's route of it being a bunch of crazy folk is pretty reasonable, all said.
Missing the closing quotation mark, and also "better position" doesn't fit very smoothly with "than even Florrick could help us do."
in time
Valid, but I think switching these words would read slightly better.
I suspect this was intended to be
others
In game the guys at the fireworks shop are clearly identified as Banites, so it's some of Gortash's people. But why he wants terrorist bomb incidents among refugee children is never gone into, no. So either he's got people going offsides, or else Gortash had an objective the game doesn't tell us about and I can't figure out.
Or it's a splinter cell working to overthrow him so they can take his place. Either or. I personally ascribe to the latter interpretation.
He believed selling Karlach to Hell was character-building, he probably thinks blowing up orphaned refugees would help them grow as people.
In hindsight, he may have been setting up a thing where random chaos heightens fear among the refugees and the population generally, so his stock rebounds higher when his people later on 'bring the miscreants to justice'. It is canon that one of the early phases of Gortash's plan was to have Orin's cultists do some random murdering among the populace so as to make the current leadership of Baldur's Gate look impotent to stop the violence or maintain order, so that Gortash could ride in on his white horse and 'solve' the problem later.
To be fair, that's the 5e paladin standard now.
There's a reason I say the Klingons got it right.
Hawke is the single most space-shattering, dimension-ripping, steps-with-thunder, panty-melting, almighty petachad to ever stride through fiction, and every man or male-identifying person, both real and not, in all the cosmos should live in shame for not meeting his standard.
For the sake of accuracy I must demur that not only is my Hawke interpolating rather a bit from where DA canon didn't cover, but it's an actual plot point in this fic that a lot of why he's so mature about relationships now is that he really fucked up with Merrill and he had to learn from that failure.
But learn he did, and that places him in a rare club. lots of people realize they need to be better about something, actually changing to be better is hard, and that Hawke managed it is notable in itself.
