Petre, the Format Fetishist
Petre is the Bazaar’s audio-disc guy. Or, as the Fandom wiki labels him, the “Format Fetishist” — a vendor in the Bootleg Bazaar whose stall trades in recordings on every format that ever existed and quite a few that probably shouldn’t have.
If you have any business with PSEUDOPOD’s Mysterious Red Disc — and you do — Petre is the person you talk to.
What the “Format Fetishist” name actually means
Portofiro became a major distribution hub for bootleg Luzian cultural goods specifically because vendors here learned to convert them to international formats — the EMTERR Cultural Blockade prohibits export of La Luz pop culture to the Developed World, so somebody has to do the dub work.
Petre is that somebody. The “fetishist” angle says he isn’t just doing the work — he cares about formats themselves. He’s the kind of vendor who can tell you not just what’s on a recording but what kind of disc it is, what player it was meant for, what playback quirks the format has, and what’s plausibly fake.
That’s the part the game is going to lean on. The Red Disc is a strange object — a recording that plays silent and erases itself. It’s the kind of thing a normal vendor wouldn’t know what to do with. Petre is not a normal vendor.
Why he matters in the main investigation
The two main tasks both push you toward Petre:
- What’s Wrong, PSEUDOPOD? — the disc itself, labelled “Ultra Violeta — You But From A Dream”, is the central piece of physical evidence. Petre is the in-Bazaar expert on what kind of disc that is and what playback behaviour you should expect from it.
- Loose Ends — flags include the disc being silent yet “felt strange” and erasing itself in playback. Those are format-level oddities. They have a format-level explanation, and Petre is positioned to give it.
Even without the Red Disc, Petre is the obvious stop for anything related to Ultra Violeta, the trending L-Pop star whose name is on the disc label. L-Pop is officially sanctioned by La Luz and rumoured to be capable of infiltrating a person’s subconscious. If anyone in Quisach has Ultra Violeta’s catalog on the right format, it’s Petre.
How to talk to him
Skills that play well at his stall:
- Records — speaks his language.
- Technoflex — for the technical side of the formats and the players.
- Personalism — Petre is a fan first. Treat him like one.
- Poetics — if any of the discussion goes into lyrics or composition, this is the skill that lets you actually engage with the music as music rather than as evidence.
Why he’s worth the time
In a Bazaar full of vendors whose specialty is volume, Petre is a vendor whose specialty is knowledge. The kind of NPC you over-talk-to in this game tends to pay back the time. Format obscurities, bootleg lineage, format-conversion stories — all of that is the texture of the Quisach economy, and Petre is one of the cleaner windows into it.
He’s also one of the only people in Quisach who can plausibly tell you whether the Red Disc is doing what it appears to be doing because of how it was manufactured, or because of what was recorded onto it.
What’s confirmed vs. unknown
Confirmed: Petre is a vendor in the Bootleg Bazaar in Quisach, sells audio discs, is nicknamed the Format Fetishist for his obsession with media formats themselves.
Unknown to the player at start: his specific inventory, his price list, whether he has direct opinions on the Mysterious Red Disc and Ultra Violeta, and how deep his vendor knowledge runs into more specialised territory — Opera-grade audio gear, custom-pressing facilities in La Luz, or any of the rumours about L-Pop’s subconscious work. The Fandom page is light at launch, so most of this surfaces in dialogue rather than as Wiki facts.