Sunday Gloomy Sunday
Jan. 22nd, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIt was pretty cloudy and blah and chilly most of the day, and then pretty damn rainy all night -- it's still coming down out there, with our main consolation being it's just too warm for it to be snowing instead. Still a BIT worried about it potentially freezing should the temperatures drop, but we'll see what happens in the morning. *shrug* Despite the horrible weather, though, I had a pretty productive day --
Tumblr: I did manage to start a proper dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice before lunch today, yay! Finished it up after we ate (which was earlier than usual), then got to work on the Chill Save update posts. Finished the text of three and got the first paragraph done on the fourth before I decided to call time to play Fallout 4, below. So they’re not QUITE done, but they’re pretty close – I should be able to wrap them up tomorrow, no problem.
And oh, over on Valice Multiverse, actually had an ask reply! So that was nice, got that in the queue. :)
Fallout 4: Had a fairly exciting day and a half or so in the Commonwealth! But I also achieved my goal of basically reaching the Castle, which is good – here are the deets –
A) Started in the South Boston Military Checkpoint, reorienting myself – turned out that I had to go in the OPPOSITE way of the explosions I’d seen last time, which was good. But, of course, I then had to wonder “what ARE those explosions?” and crept forward for a little look-see –
B) And promptly upset the Gunners that had taken over the little out-building that controlled the checkpoint! And unfortunately, Victor had a bad day in VATS at the start of the fight and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. >( I ended up having him chug a Nuka-Cola Quantum to stay in the fight, and eventually he managed to bring down the two Gunners in and around the building itself. . .
Just in time for a vertibird to join the fight! :D On the Gunner’s side. D: Yes, it seems the explosions I’d seen before was some Gunner Corporal harassing some folks in said vertibird, and now he was turning on Victor and Nick. The boys managed to bring it down, but its explosion on crashing broke both of Victor’s arms. Time to stimpack and drink some water and cola!
C) Also time to raid the place now that the Gunners were dead! As you might imagine, Victor found some good ammo and weapons, along with some nice scrappable armor, on the lot. He also found a Fat Man in a truck trailer the group was clearly using as a makeshift sleeping area, so we’re lucky they didn’t try and go for THAT! In happier news, he also found a Guns & Bullets magazine (ballistic weapons do 5% more crit damage now), some vegetable starch (ADHESIVE), and a weapons workbench, where I discovered that one of the laser rifles I’d picked up to scrap might have some mods I’d want to put on the Staggering Laser Rifle I’d gotten earlier. . .AND that the Light Sighted Combat Shotgun might be a real beast if I got its receiver all the way up to Advanced. . .all of this takes materials, though, and Victor only has so much adhesive and crystal and such, so I decided to hold off on those projects and just use the portable workbench to scrap the armor and do a bit of quick cooking to help with the carry weight.
D) Okay, NOW time to go in the direction of the Castle! This involved going right from the checkpoint and under the nearby broken highway into a busted-up town with a raider camp in it. Victor and Nick snuck past the Hawthorne estate to avoid them, coming to a flooded section of road with a WHOOOLE lot of dead raiders on it. Raiders who had Pickman’s Calling Cards on them. Eh-heh-heh. . .at least it was easy to loot the bodies? ^^; There was also a dead settler whom I assume was caught in the crossfire when Pickman appeared, who had a note on him about staying away from the Boston Mayoral Shelter because synths were seen trying to pick it over – new location on Victor’s map to explore later!
E) For now, though, it was up the side of the flooded road by the beach, then over to the other side of the water where there was more room to walk – where the boys caught the attention of a new raider camp. Or possibly the same one as before, I don’t know how far they walked. This time, Victor and Nick chose to fight, with Victor easily taking out the guard up top who’d spotted them before sneaking in through the door and taking out two raiders almost before they could start firing back. The last two were a bit trickier, ducking behind cover before Victor could shoot them – Nick ended up taking out the last one because Victor just could NOT get a bead on her. However, as it turns out, the gang was holed up around the back of a discoverable location – South Boston High School! So that was nice. I sent Victor to do some exploring (after a potty break) and came around the front –
F) To find that we were almost directly across from what I THOUGHT was a brewery, and super mutant territory! Fortunately Victor and Nick were JUST out of sight from the mutants, and were able to get up and away onto a higher floor without alerting them too much to their presence. I wanted to tag the location for the XP though, and so once the heat was off, I had Victor slowly descend and try to approach the location from the side –
Only to set off a mine and break another arm. Stimpack time again, along with melons! And then, pretty much the minute Victor came out of the Pip-Boy, he was attacked by a Legendary Glowing Mutant Hound! Probably the same creature that initially noticed them, to be honest. Victor was fortunately able to put it down quite quickly with the Two-Shot. It gave him a Bolstering Leather Right Arm (where the damage and energy resistance keep going up as your health goes down), which wasn’t great – that one is on the “sell later” pile for sure. I decided this was all enough excitement for Victor for one day (he WAS already starting to feel tired – I’d had to have him chug a Nuka-Cola just to stay awake through the afternoon), so I had him head back to the raider camp, pop some Rad-Away, then allowed him a ten-hour snooze starting at 6:41 PM.
G) Victor woke up at 4:41 AM, fresh as a daisy – I had him pack up his tent, then headed around and found a big gate on the other side of the camp with a mine in front of it. This mine Victor was able to sneak up to and disarm, then he opened the gate to find himself directly in front of – as a bit of sneaking revealed – the Gwinnet Restaurant! I think this is attached or otherwise related to the actual brewery, so I wasn’t totally wrong. :p But it’s tagged now, w000!
H) With that done, I noticed Victor was missing Nick, so I decided the best way to resolve that situation would be to pop into the high school briefly. Sure enough, Nick spawned in nearby, and the two of them were able to do a quick loot of the place. Three Vault-Tec lunchboxes (with the best one having a Nuka-Quantum in it), some bones and other useful junk, and an upstairs chem lab with a safe that had more ammo and pre-war money and stuff like that. Victor gave some of his spare weapons to Nick to cut down on weight and made a bit of cutting fluid at the chem bench in the lab – can never have too much oil on hand!
I) And then it was back out into the wastes to finally reach the Castle! Fog was rolling in through the streets as the boys proceeded along, which cut down on visibility but at least made them more stealthy. Victor found a truck trailer to pop open shortly after they left the raider camp, but it proved to be entirely empty. O.o Up the street, though, was something more exciting – a trio of super mutants hanging out in an old parking garage. Victor was able to snipe off one of them before they were noticed, and took out the others without too much issue with the Two-Shot. Turns out the mutants had been having a grill-up on an old car chassis – I looted their bodies AND their meat. :p
And then it was just a case of turning back around and following the road toward the quest marker, and the old wreck of a coffee shop where you’re supposed to meet Preston and the other Minutemen! I haven’t actually gone inside, though – I stopped and saved a few feet away. Next time, we retake the Castle, and I see if my “all the explosives” plan to stop the Mirelurk Queen really works!
Writing: Naturally, I updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression after I’d done my playsession for the day! It was pretty much the same as above, with Victor and Nick fighting the Gunners, killing the raiders behind the school, and taking out the super mutants having a BBQ in the parking lot before reaching the coffee shop with Preston, only with Alice being towed along in her sleeping bag with them. There was one significant change I had to make for the fanfic universe, though – as Pickman is dead in that timeline (Alice having drunk him dry), I instead made the raider massacre the work of vampires – specifically, some possibly-feral Nosferatu or Gangrel, judging by the way their throats were ripped open. So Victor and Alice might have that to worry about in the future! (Or they might not. This has been going on for a while and I do forget things. :p) But first, taking the Castle, as we shall do next Sunday. . .
YouTube: Well, the OXBox list video eluded me, but I kept up on Subs and Jon, so that’s pretty good! And given that Kevin’s on the Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday schedule this week, I should have an opportunity to catch up on that list tomorrow. In the meantime –
A) Started this evening before supper with Call Me Kevin and “This prison escape game is a masterpiece” – aka, Kevin plays The Escapists 2! As stated, it’s a prison escape game that can be played either in single player or multiplayer, and involves coming up with an escape plan while also making sure to follow the prison routine so you don’t do things like trigger lockdowns or raise the guard security levels. Kevin was – not exactly great at that last part. XD In fact, by the end of the video, he was pretty much beloathed by the entire prison population, guards and inmates (the guards for constantly upsetting them by not being where he was supposed to be or having contraband or – the case of one particular guard – constantly beating him up to rifle through his pockets for a particular key Kevin wanted to make a mold of; the inmates because Kevin regularly would take on their tasks and just – fail to do them, or start doing them and then deliberately fail them so he could keep the items gathered) – which Kevin considered a good thing, as it meant that everyone wanted him gone so badly no alarm would be raised when he eventually escaped. And he did indeed escape! After many, many, MANY beatings from everyone he had pissed off – I swear, he spent like half of the video either in the infirmary or being carried there. XD But yes, after a lot of pottering around and failing at being a carpenter and reading so many books you think his head would have exploded, he did eventually manage to get free via successfully copying that one guard’s key (which took three tries, but he did do it) to the lower levels of the oil rig he was imprisoned on, stealing a guard uniform so he could walk around there undetected, making a fishing rod out of stolen timber from his carpenter job, a piece of string, a paperclip, and a “juicy worm” (as the game put it), catching a fish and giving it to a dolphin, finding a book on how to speak dolphin when the dolphin gave him a quest, learning the dolphin wanted a cake, and bringing the dolphin said cake in exchange for being allowed to ride it to freedom! ...this is kind of a weird game, if you hadn’t guessed. XD But it is a fun one, and it was great to see Kevin trying to navigate the oil rig and bribe people not to beat him to death. XD Ah, gaming.
B) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and “When you draw punishments for every crime,” aka Gray plays Draw 2 Save: Stickman Puzzle! Stick figures were in trouble in improbable situations, and Gray had to draw them a way out! And we all know how good Gray is at drawing! XD He proceeded to save a stick figure from a spike pit by drawing his own spikes above it (though he admitted it looked more like water); a strange foot-hand thing to stop a guy going through some buzzsaws (the guy got yeeted off the side of the board when the drawing tipped over, but it still counted); the world’s largest and most lopsided umbrella to stop a lady being blown up into spikes; a sailboat with Tom Hanks on it to try and save a cat from falling into water – and when that didn’t work, made a bridge out of Tom Hanks and his abs; a pair of sunglasses to stop a pair of bombs falling on a guy; a terrible stick figure queen to save a king from an assassination attempt; the state of Florida to stop some guy getting shot (after repeatedly failing to save them with the American flag); and a tombstone to shelter a guy from a plane dropping bombs. *shrugs* If it works, it works, right? No matter how badly its drawn? XD
C) And finally, we had this week’s Jon of Many A True Nerd video – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 13 - Radio Violence!” As you might expect from the title, this episode focused on radio towers out in the Capital Wasteland, and the kind of stories they told! And so Wanda set out to explore, showing off the following locales and their related little stories –
I. The Grisly Diner, an appropriately-horrible dinner full of strung-up human chunks that is the site of a raider ambush once you step inside (Wanda defeated the raiders pretty handily with the help of mines and That Gun, since she gets sooo many crits these days), and a holotape from the Keller family, from the terrified daughter as she watched nuclear apocalypse unfold right in front of her and rushed to try to get to the family vault (as they each had a digit of the code to let them inside). Jon thinks that this is a better example of what it’s like to live through the bomb drop than the beginning of Fallout 4 actually showing it, and I think he’s right just because Chelsea on the tape didn’t have the benefit of being the player character and thus some inherent PC badassery. Poor kid. . .
II. The radio tower nearby the diner, which is one of the few actually marked on the map, and that when activated, plays a signal from Bob Anderson, who had a hurt child and was looking for medical assistance. Turns out he and his son sheltered nearby in a drainage canal, which you can find if you’re careful. And once you get inside, you see that help never came, forcing Bob to try and learn how to fix his kid himself by taking mentats and studying a book of medicine, then cobbling together equipment out of what he had. Whether or not he succeeded, we’ll never really know, as there’s two skeletons in the room, and they’re both long dead. (And also both adults, with one looking to be in a dress, sooo. . .then again, I can’t blame FO3 for not wanting to show a dead kid’s skeleton. . .)
III. The radio tower near the robot repair center (aka the home of the Mechanist) at Canterbury Commons, which is not marked and, when activated, produces a signal that is just creepy feral ghoul growling. Follow it, and you’ll find some ghouls down another nearby big old drainage pipe. Turns out these people had the very bad luck of choosing a sewer system right next to a toxic waste dump, got irradiated through proximity and their water supplies, and ended up turning into ferals. And this one has an extra-creepy Bethesda glitch in play, where, if you leave the radio that one of the ferals (a Glowing One, no less) was standing at on, you still hear the growling on your radio. It just doesn’t stop, even when you’ve killed the ghouls. Jon likes to pretend it’s a ghost ghoul. Sweet dreams! :D
IV. The radio tower near Jury St Metro (which we come through a lot), which when activated, gives you a signal in Morse Code (actual Morse Code too!), which leads you to a hidden bunker down a nearby manhole (yes, many many Pre-War survivors hid in the sewers it seems). This one, however, has a present day “sting in the tail” as Jon put it – while the code was put up by a couple of people who died years and years ago, the bunker they’re in shows signs of modern life – specifically, modern RAIDER life. And once you step inside, you trigger an ambush by those raiders – one of whom was wielding a chainsaw in this instance and nearly murdered Wanda. She did manage to kill hilm and take his weapon, fortunately, with the help of That Gun. Jon’s theory here is that, while the raiders certainly couldn’t have slaughtered the ORIGINAL survivors, maybe it was their descendants who got caught and murdered. (Someone in the comments posited that it was an entirely unrelated scavenger group who found the signal and were followed by raiders – either works for me!)
V. An unmarked ghoul settlement in between Arefu and Rockbreaker’s Last Gas, a Red Rocket station near the very rocky and hilly cliffs that make up the northwest corner of the map, which Jon stumbled upon while tracking down another radio tower – unfortunately, the inhabitants were unfriendly and he had to kill them. And also there’s a shack in there that is just FULL of skeletons and weapons, suggesting that the ghouls who live here actually took the place over forcefully from the people who ORIGINALLY lived here. Ghouls do face a lot of stupid discrimination in the Fallout universe, but it appears they can also be trigger-happy assholes.
VI. An abandoned shack on the cliffs overlooking Rockbreaker’s Last Gas, which contains a lot of survival equipment, including a workbench; two pet radroaches named Jitters and Fluffy in a cage by the fridge; and another Keller family holotape – this one from the dad, urging his son to get his ass over to the vault so they could open it. Also a Very Hard Locked locker that Jon will be coming back to once he has enough lockpicking skill. No sign of the owner, though, but maybe that has something to do with the locker…
VII. Broadcast Tower KT8, a marked radio tower with some super mutants and their centaurs around it, which when activated produces another Morse Code signal, which can be tracked with VERY careful jumping around the rocks to a secret sewer entrance. This leads into a bunker with a hatch and some terminals – find the encryption key for them, and you can open the hatch and find the remains of some Chinese spies, who ghoulified and then died in the intervening years (possibly from having a mini nuke on the premises). Jon indicated that finding them was the first step in uncovering proof that there was a MUCH bigger presence of Chinese spies on American soil than the government would ever admit to, shooting back over to Wilheim’s Wharf and using the metro station there to travel to...
VIII. Arlington National Cemetery, one of the quietest places on the map because, well, it’s a real life veteran’s cemetery and Bethesda didn’t want to be disrespectful. There is, however, a mysterious house in the middle of it, and said mysterious house has a shrine to Lincoln in the basement, because why wouldn’t it. There is also a resident, but he only spawns in if you have a particular perk – Lawbringer – which Wanda wasn’t able to get (probably because it looks like it requires you to have Good karma and Jon is firm in keeping her Neutral). He’s a raider who for some reason thinks Lincoln is a god, and his name is Junders Plunkett. Jon was VERY FIRM on this guy being real and worth some money if you take his finger to the Regulators (who pay bounties for the fingers of evil people). Personally I’m inclined to believe he’s real (even without Jon posting proof of him from a guide) BECAUSE of the ridiculous name – you get some weird ones out in the Wasteland. XD
However, the real reason Jon came to the cemetery was to find a radio signal called “The People’s Republic of America,” which had a Chinese woman ranting to the American public about how they were capitalist slaves and such – and he tracked that signal down to...
IX. Mama Dolce’s Processed Food, which is a factory near Arlington National Cemetery! Ostensibly a place which manufactured and sold premade Italian food, it was in fact a Chinese intelligence ring that made things like Sweet-and-Sour Stroganoff (which was actually quite popular) and flavored their offerings with printer ink (because they could get away with it) while simultaneously doing their best to gather intelligence to transmit back to China. There’s even still some of the various officers running around as ghouls, thanks to a massive radiation leak that they didn’t dare call anyone to fix. Just proof that, despite the American propaganda machine, the government was not NEARLY as good at keeping out spies as they thought!
Pretty interesting stuff all round! Next week, though, we’re returning to more familiar locations – perhaps even a visit to Tenpenny Tower! Will Mr. Burke be there, hoping to sweep Wanda off her feet? Only time will tell!
Workout: Got on the treadmill today for a change, and started the next episode of Oxventure Presents: Blades in the Dark – “The Gut Cutter Bargain!” This was the start of “Phase 2” of the first season, and thus the beginning of the episode had the whole gang in their headquarters so Luke could do some housekeeping and montage a few things. The group is now officially a crew of Shadows (who specialize in thievery) and have a crew playbook, meaning that Luke is officially tracking Heat (how much attention is on them after jobs), crew XP gain, and Entanglements (the various ways things can get more complicated after each score). On the other hand, this also means they can get special crew upgrades, and Luke went ahead and gave them a bigger vault in the old antiques shop – because yes, having rescued Barnaby (who insists he must have just gone on a terrible bender with his friend Squiffy instead of being kidnapped – Luke has ruled this is 30% genuine memory loss from various head traumas, 70% repression), the gang was able to get out of him the location of the money he stashed in the vents of the fighting arena back in “High Stakes At The Splintered Bone” (where Barnaby and Zillah were helping an old friend of Zillah’s rob the place of all its takings during the big fight night), and Zillah’s friend managed to grab it for them. Meaning that, after Zillah’s friend’s take, the gang is now sitting on 16 Coin, a pretty darn hefty sum in this world! Not quite enough to retire on, but enough to keep everybody comfortable. They also have the upgrade that gives them an extra die on engagement rolls when they’re sneaking into places, because Luke’s dice are cursed when it comes to engagement rolls. XD
Anyway – with that out of the way, it was time to start the next adventure! And, as usual, it was via having the postman show up with a vase containing a note from their mysterious patron Eleanor and a hammer to smash the vase and get at the note. XD Eleanor praised them for their loyalty in rescuing Barnaby (obviously not knowing that they just didn’t want to traumatize the postman by having him repeatedly deliver Barnaby’s body parts) and in getting into and – more importantly – out of the Dimmer Sisters’ mansion, and said that, if they could get a certain magical bracer out of the Dimmer Sisters’ vault, she would VERY MUCH make it worth their while. Most of the gang was like “I do NOT want to go back into the horrible spooky house,” but Kasimir was intrigued and went off to do his thing with his underworld friends. Edvard asked him to get some actuators while he was out (as he had been building more wondrous mechanical men – one, a copy of him, had actually exploded trying to answer the door earlier) – Kasimir, as he can be a dick sometimes, came back with a box of Astor brand, which Edvard promptly chucked in the street. XD Anyway, Kasimir figured the score might be worth doing simply because the profit could probably allow all of them to retire, but said that they were DEFINITELY not ready yet, they needed to do a LOT of prepwork first. He then assigned everyone some tasks – Edvard was in charge of figuring out the mechanical lock on the door of the vault (Astor brand, so Edvard figured it would be a breeze); Lilith was to research the demon guard that was the OTHER layer of security on the vault; Barnaby was in charge of getting them all out of there, simply because he was so unpredictable, Kasimir figured the Sisters wouldn’t be able to read him; Zillah was to keep her ear to the ground for potential trouble (as the gang had started to get some attention, and Kasimir had been warned trouble might be coming their way as a result); and Kasimir himself was going to try and make friends with a new gang that had set up in the old abandoned trainyard in Coalridge so they could call on them to help with the eventual storming of the mansion. Oh, and they should probably hire an employee for the shop to make it look like an actual storefront and not a place that Edvard raids for clockwork bits for his mechanical men. XD Everyone thus went off to start working on their respective tasks –
Except Lilith, as, in her case, the library where she’d go to read about demons was closed. Thus, she tagged along with Kasimir, who was hoping she could demonstrate her cool Whisper powers and help the gang take them, and the threat of spooks, seriously. They arrived at the trainyard at the same time as a guy named Aldritch from one of the big gangs, the Billhooks – turned out he was there to visit the new gang too, and tell them that if they wanted to operate here, they had better pay their dues. There was no obvious signs of gang activity around, though –
But there WAS a small waif huddled by one of the fences, looking as cold and lonely and frightened as any tiny girl might. Lilith was immediately charmed, but Kasimir figured she might be a lookout for the gang and went over to talk to her. He didn’t pick up immediately on any signs, but offered her a bit of bread and asked if she’d seen anyone coming or going. The girl asked if he was there on business, and Kasimir confirmed that he was hoping to make some friends. The girl then asked Aldritch his business, and he delivered his threat –
Causing the little girl to leap up and STAB HIM REPEATEDLY IN THE NECK WITH A KNIFE. She told the shocked Lilith and perhaps-less-shocked Kasimir that they’d better get moving, and led them away through a secret gap in the fence and into a broken-down train car that had been converted into living quarters, to meet with her gang – a gang ENTIRELY MADE UP OF CHILDREN. XD I mean – yeah, why not at this point. XD I left it off with Luke doing a hilariously squeaky voice for the child gang’s little leader, asking who Lilith and Kasimir were and what they wanted – we’ll see how Kasimir responds tomorrow! Oh, this is sure to be a fun one. . . XD
And that has been my day! Pretty good, as Sundays go. :) And now it is time to head to bed and prepare for another work week. Plus side, I only have three days at the office; minus side, I have that stupid event on Thursday that I really don't want to go to but am trapped into attending, hmph. Also have to figure out some stuff for Mom's birthday on Friday, but that'll be easier to handle. Night all!
Tumblr: I did manage to start a proper dash-and-tags catch-up on Victor Luvs Alice before lunch today, yay! Finished it up after we ate (which was earlier than usual), then got to work on the Chill Save update posts. Finished the text of three and got the first paragraph done on the fourth before I decided to call time to play Fallout 4, below. So they’re not QUITE done, but they’re pretty close – I should be able to wrap them up tomorrow, no problem.
And oh, over on Valice Multiverse, actually had an ask reply! So that was nice, got that in the queue. :)
Fallout 4: Had a fairly exciting day and a half or so in the Commonwealth! But I also achieved my goal of basically reaching the Castle, which is good – here are the deets –
A) Started in the South Boston Military Checkpoint, reorienting myself – turned out that I had to go in the OPPOSITE way of the explosions I’d seen last time, which was good. But, of course, I then had to wonder “what ARE those explosions?” and crept forward for a little look-see –
B) And promptly upset the Gunners that had taken over the little out-building that controlled the checkpoint! And unfortunately, Victor had a bad day in VATS at the start of the fight and couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. >( I ended up having him chug a Nuka-Cola Quantum to stay in the fight, and eventually he managed to bring down the two Gunners in and around the building itself. . .
Just in time for a vertibird to join the fight! :D On the Gunner’s side. D: Yes, it seems the explosions I’d seen before was some Gunner Corporal harassing some folks in said vertibird, and now he was turning on Victor and Nick. The boys managed to bring it down, but its explosion on crashing broke both of Victor’s arms. Time to stimpack and drink some water and cola!
C) Also time to raid the place now that the Gunners were dead! As you might imagine, Victor found some good ammo and weapons, along with some nice scrappable armor, on the lot. He also found a Fat Man in a truck trailer the group was clearly using as a makeshift sleeping area, so we’re lucky they didn’t try and go for THAT! In happier news, he also found a Guns & Bullets magazine (ballistic weapons do 5% more crit damage now), some vegetable starch (ADHESIVE), and a weapons workbench, where I discovered that one of the laser rifles I’d picked up to scrap might have some mods I’d want to put on the Staggering Laser Rifle I’d gotten earlier. . .AND that the Light Sighted Combat Shotgun might be a real beast if I got its receiver all the way up to Advanced. . .all of this takes materials, though, and Victor only has so much adhesive and crystal and such, so I decided to hold off on those projects and just use the portable workbench to scrap the armor and do a bit of quick cooking to help with the carry weight.
D) Okay, NOW time to go in the direction of the Castle! This involved going right from the checkpoint and under the nearby broken highway into a busted-up town with a raider camp in it. Victor and Nick snuck past the Hawthorne estate to avoid them, coming to a flooded section of road with a WHOOOLE lot of dead raiders on it. Raiders who had Pickman’s Calling Cards on them. Eh-heh-heh. . .at least it was easy to loot the bodies? ^^; There was also a dead settler whom I assume was caught in the crossfire when Pickman appeared, who had a note on him about staying away from the Boston Mayoral Shelter because synths were seen trying to pick it over – new location on Victor’s map to explore later!
E) For now, though, it was up the side of the flooded road by the beach, then over to the other side of the water where there was more room to walk – where the boys caught the attention of a new raider camp. Or possibly the same one as before, I don’t know how far they walked. This time, Victor and Nick chose to fight, with Victor easily taking out the guard up top who’d spotted them before sneaking in through the door and taking out two raiders almost before they could start firing back. The last two were a bit trickier, ducking behind cover before Victor could shoot them – Nick ended up taking out the last one because Victor just could NOT get a bead on her. However, as it turns out, the gang was holed up around the back of a discoverable location – South Boston High School! So that was nice. I sent Victor to do some exploring (after a potty break) and came around the front –
F) To find that we were almost directly across from what I THOUGHT was a brewery, and super mutant territory! Fortunately Victor and Nick were JUST out of sight from the mutants, and were able to get up and away onto a higher floor without alerting them too much to their presence. I wanted to tag the location for the XP though, and so once the heat was off, I had Victor slowly descend and try to approach the location from the side –
Only to set off a mine and break another arm. Stimpack time again, along with melons! And then, pretty much the minute Victor came out of the Pip-Boy, he was attacked by a Legendary Glowing Mutant Hound! Probably the same creature that initially noticed them, to be honest. Victor was fortunately able to put it down quite quickly with the Two-Shot. It gave him a Bolstering Leather Right Arm (where the damage and energy resistance keep going up as your health goes down), which wasn’t great – that one is on the “sell later” pile for sure. I decided this was all enough excitement for Victor for one day (he WAS already starting to feel tired – I’d had to have him chug a Nuka-Cola just to stay awake through the afternoon), so I had him head back to the raider camp, pop some Rad-Away, then allowed him a ten-hour snooze starting at 6:41 PM.
G) Victor woke up at 4:41 AM, fresh as a daisy – I had him pack up his tent, then headed around and found a big gate on the other side of the camp with a mine in front of it. This mine Victor was able to sneak up to and disarm, then he opened the gate to find himself directly in front of – as a bit of sneaking revealed – the Gwinnet Restaurant! I think this is attached or otherwise related to the actual brewery, so I wasn’t totally wrong. :p But it’s tagged now, w000!
H) With that done, I noticed Victor was missing Nick, so I decided the best way to resolve that situation would be to pop into the high school briefly. Sure enough, Nick spawned in nearby, and the two of them were able to do a quick loot of the place. Three Vault-Tec lunchboxes (with the best one having a Nuka-Quantum in it), some bones and other useful junk, and an upstairs chem lab with a safe that had more ammo and pre-war money and stuff like that. Victor gave some of his spare weapons to Nick to cut down on weight and made a bit of cutting fluid at the chem bench in the lab – can never have too much oil on hand!
I) And then it was back out into the wastes to finally reach the Castle! Fog was rolling in through the streets as the boys proceeded along, which cut down on visibility but at least made them more stealthy. Victor found a truck trailer to pop open shortly after they left the raider camp, but it proved to be entirely empty. O.o Up the street, though, was something more exciting – a trio of super mutants hanging out in an old parking garage. Victor was able to snipe off one of them before they were noticed, and took out the others without too much issue with the Two-Shot. Turns out the mutants had been having a grill-up on an old car chassis – I looted their bodies AND their meat. :p
And then it was just a case of turning back around and following the road toward the quest marker, and the old wreck of a coffee shop where you’re supposed to meet Preston and the other Minutemen! I haven’t actually gone inside, though – I stopped and saved a few feet away. Next time, we retake the Castle, and I see if my “all the explosives” plan to stop the Mirelurk Queen really works!
Writing: Naturally, I updated the FO4 Playthrough Progression after I’d done my playsession for the day! It was pretty much the same as above, with Victor and Nick fighting the Gunners, killing the raiders behind the school, and taking out the super mutants having a BBQ in the parking lot before reaching the coffee shop with Preston, only with Alice being towed along in her sleeping bag with them. There was one significant change I had to make for the fanfic universe, though – as Pickman is dead in that timeline (Alice having drunk him dry), I instead made the raider massacre the work of vampires – specifically, some possibly-feral Nosferatu or Gangrel, judging by the way their throats were ripped open. So Victor and Alice might have that to worry about in the future! (Or they might not. This has been going on for a while and I do forget things. :p) But first, taking the Castle, as we shall do next Sunday. . .
YouTube: Well, the OXBox list video eluded me, but I kept up on Subs and Jon, so that’s pretty good! And given that Kevin’s on the Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday schedule this week, I should have an opportunity to catch up on that list tomorrow. In the meantime –
A) Started this evening before supper with Call Me Kevin and “This prison escape game is a masterpiece” – aka, Kevin plays The Escapists 2! As stated, it’s a prison escape game that can be played either in single player or multiplayer, and involves coming up with an escape plan while also making sure to follow the prison routine so you don’t do things like trigger lockdowns or raise the guard security levels. Kevin was – not exactly great at that last part. XD In fact, by the end of the video, he was pretty much beloathed by the entire prison population, guards and inmates (the guards for constantly upsetting them by not being where he was supposed to be or having contraband or – the case of one particular guard – constantly beating him up to rifle through his pockets for a particular key Kevin wanted to make a mold of; the inmates because Kevin regularly would take on their tasks and just – fail to do them, or start doing them and then deliberately fail them so he could keep the items gathered) – which Kevin considered a good thing, as it meant that everyone wanted him gone so badly no alarm would be raised when he eventually escaped. And he did indeed escape! After many, many, MANY beatings from everyone he had pissed off – I swear, he spent like half of the video either in the infirmary or being carried there. XD But yes, after a lot of pottering around and failing at being a carpenter and reading so many books you think his head would have exploded, he did eventually manage to get free via successfully copying that one guard’s key (which took three tries, but he did do it) to the lower levels of the oil rig he was imprisoned on, stealing a guard uniform so he could walk around there undetected, making a fishing rod out of stolen timber from his carpenter job, a piece of string, a paperclip, and a “juicy worm” (as the game put it), catching a fish and giving it to a dolphin, finding a book on how to speak dolphin when the dolphin gave him a quest, learning the dolphin wanted a cake, and bringing the dolphin said cake in exchange for being allowed to ride it to freedom! ...this is kind of a weird game, if you hadn’t guessed. XD But it is a fun one, and it was great to see Kevin trying to navigate the oil rig and bribe people not to beat him to death. XD Ah, gaming.
B) Then it was time for GrayStillPlays and “When you draw punishments for every crime,” aka Gray plays Draw 2 Save: Stickman Puzzle! Stick figures were in trouble in improbable situations, and Gray had to draw them a way out! And we all know how good Gray is at drawing! XD He proceeded to save a stick figure from a spike pit by drawing his own spikes above it (though he admitted it looked more like water); a strange foot-hand thing to stop a guy going through some buzzsaws (the guy got yeeted off the side of the board when the drawing tipped over, but it still counted); the world’s largest and most lopsided umbrella to stop a lady being blown up into spikes; a sailboat with Tom Hanks on it to try and save a cat from falling into water – and when that didn’t work, made a bridge out of Tom Hanks and his abs; a pair of sunglasses to stop a pair of bombs falling on a guy; a terrible stick figure queen to save a king from an assassination attempt; the state of Florida to stop some guy getting shot (after repeatedly failing to save them with the American flag); and a tombstone to shelter a guy from a plane dropping bombs. *shrugs* If it works, it works, right? No matter how badly its drawn? XD
C) And finally, we had this week’s Jon of Many A True Nerd video – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 13 - Radio Violence!” As you might expect from the title, this episode focused on radio towers out in the Capital Wasteland, and the kind of stories they told! And so Wanda set out to explore, showing off the following locales and their related little stories –
I. The Grisly Diner, an appropriately-horrible dinner full of strung-up human chunks that is the site of a raider ambush once you step inside (Wanda defeated the raiders pretty handily with the help of mines and That Gun, since she gets sooo many crits these days), and a holotape from the Keller family, from the terrified daughter as she watched nuclear apocalypse unfold right in front of her and rushed to try to get to the family vault (as they each had a digit of the code to let them inside). Jon thinks that this is a better example of what it’s like to live through the bomb drop than the beginning of Fallout 4 actually showing it, and I think he’s right just because Chelsea on the tape didn’t have the benefit of being the player character and thus some inherent PC badassery. Poor kid. . .
II. The radio tower nearby the diner, which is one of the few actually marked on the map, and that when activated, plays a signal from Bob Anderson, who had a hurt child and was looking for medical assistance. Turns out he and his son sheltered nearby in a drainage canal, which you can find if you’re careful. And once you get inside, you see that help never came, forcing Bob to try and learn how to fix his kid himself by taking mentats and studying a book of medicine, then cobbling together equipment out of what he had. Whether or not he succeeded, we’ll never really know, as there’s two skeletons in the room, and they’re both long dead. (And also both adults, with one looking to be in a dress, sooo. . .then again, I can’t blame FO3 for not wanting to show a dead kid’s skeleton. . .)
III. The radio tower near the robot repair center (aka the home of the Mechanist) at Canterbury Commons, which is not marked and, when activated, produces a signal that is just creepy feral ghoul growling. Follow it, and you’ll find some ghouls down another nearby big old drainage pipe. Turns out these people had the very bad luck of choosing a sewer system right next to a toxic waste dump, got irradiated through proximity and their water supplies, and ended up turning into ferals. And this one has an extra-creepy Bethesda glitch in play, where, if you leave the radio that one of the ferals (a Glowing One, no less) was standing at on, you still hear the growling on your radio. It just doesn’t stop, even when you’ve killed the ghouls. Jon likes to pretend it’s a ghost ghoul. Sweet dreams! :D
IV. The radio tower near Jury St Metro (which we come through a lot), which when activated, gives you a signal in Morse Code (actual Morse Code too!), which leads you to a hidden bunker down a nearby manhole (yes, many many Pre-War survivors hid in the sewers it seems). This one, however, has a present day “sting in the tail” as Jon put it – while the code was put up by a couple of people who died years and years ago, the bunker they’re in shows signs of modern life – specifically, modern RAIDER life. And once you step inside, you trigger an ambush by those raiders – one of whom was wielding a chainsaw in this instance and nearly murdered Wanda. She did manage to kill hilm and take his weapon, fortunately, with the help of That Gun. Jon’s theory here is that, while the raiders certainly couldn’t have slaughtered the ORIGINAL survivors, maybe it was their descendants who got caught and murdered. (Someone in the comments posited that it was an entirely unrelated scavenger group who found the signal and were followed by raiders – either works for me!)
V. An unmarked ghoul settlement in between Arefu and Rockbreaker’s Last Gas, a Red Rocket station near the very rocky and hilly cliffs that make up the northwest corner of the map, which Jon stumbled upon while tracking down another radio tower – unfortunately, the inhabitants were unfriendly and he had to kill them. And also there’s a shack in there that is just FULL of skeletons and weapons, suggesting that the ghouls who live here actually took the place over forcefully from the people who ORIGINALLY lived here. Ghouls do face a lot of stupid discrimination in the Fallout universe, but it appears they can also be trigger-happy assholes.
VI. An abandoned shack on the cliffs overlooking Rockbreaker’s Last Gas, which contains a lot of survival equipment, including a workbench; two pet radroaches named Jitters and Fluffy in a cage by the fridge; and another Keller family holotape – this one from the dad, urging his son to get his ass over to the vault so they could open it. Also a Very Hard Locked locker that Jon will be coming back to once he has enough lockpicking skill. No sign of the owner, though, but maybe that has something to do with the locker…
VII. Broadcast Tower KT8, a marked radio tower with some super mutants and their centaurs around it, which when activated produces another Morse Code signal, which can be tracked with VERY careful jumping around the rocks to a secret sewer entrance. This leads into a bunker with a hatch and some terminals – find the encryption key for them, and you can open the hatch and find the remains of some Chinese spies, who ghoulified and then died in the intervening years (possibly from having a mini nuke on the premises). Jon indicated that finding them was the first step in uncovering proof that there was a MUCH bigger presence of Chinese spies on American soil than the government would ever admit to, shooting back over to Wilheim’s Wharf and using the metro station there to travel to...
VIII. Arlington National Cemetery, one of the quietest places on the map because, well, it’s a real life veteran’s cemetery and Bethesda didn’t want to be disrespectful. There is, however, a mysterious house in the middle of it, and said mysterious house has a shrine to Lincoln in the basement, because why wouldn’t it. There is also a resident, but he only spawns in if you have a particular perk – Lawbringer – which Wanda wasn’t able to get (probably because it looks like it requires you to have Good karma and Jon is firm in keeping her Neutral). He’s a raider who for some reason thinks Lincoln is a god, and his name is Junders Plunkett. Jon was VERY FIRM on this guy being real and worth some money if you take his finger to the Regulators (who pay bounties for the fingers of evil people). Personally I’m inclined to believe he’s real (even without Jon posting proof of him from a guide) BECAUSE of the ridiculous name – you get some weird ones out in the Wasteland. XD
However, the real reason Jon came to the cemetery was to find a radio signal called “The People’s Republic of America,” which had a Chinese woman ranting to the American public about how they were capitalist slaves and such – and he tracked that signal down to...
IX. Mama Dolce’s Processed Food, which is a factory near Arlington National Cemetery! Ostensibly a place which manufactured and sold premade Italian food, it was in fact a Chinese intelligence ring that made things like Sweet-and-Sour Stroganoff (which was actually quite popular) and flavored their offerings with printer ink (because they could get away with it) while simultaneously doing their best to gather intelligence to transmit back to China. There’s even still some of the various officers running around as ghouls, thanks to a massive radiation leak that they didn’t dare call anyone to fix. Just proof that, despite the American propaganda machine, the government was not NEARLY as good at keeping out spies as they thought!
Pretty interesting stuff all round! Next week, though, we’re returning to more familiar locations – perhaps even a visit to Tenpenny Tower! Will Mr. Burke be there, hoping to sweep Wanda off her feet? Only time will tell!
Workout: Got on the treadmill today for a change, and started the next episode of Oxventure Presents: Blades in the Dark – “The Gut Cutter Bargain!” This was the start of “Phase 2” of the first season, and thus the beginning of the episode had the whole gang in their headquarters so Luke could do some housekeeping and montage a few things. The group is now officially a crew of Shadows (who specialize in thievery) and have a crew playbook, meaning that Luke is officially tracking Heat (how much attention is on them after jobs), crew XP gain, and Entanglements (the various ways things can get more complicated after each score). On the other hand, this also means they can get special crew upgrades, and Luke went ahead and gave them a bigger vault in the old antiques shop – because yes, having rescued Barnaby (who insists he must have just gone on a terrible bender with his friend Squiffy instead of being kidnapped – Luke has ruled this is 30% genuine memory loss from various head traumas, 70% repression), the gang was able to get out of him the location of the money he stashed in the vents of the fighting arena back in “High Stakes At The Splintered Bone” (where Barnaby and Zillah were helping an old friend of Zillah’s rob the place of all its takings during the big fight night), and Zillah’s friend managed to grab it for them. Meaning that, after Zillah’s friend’s take, the gang is now sitting on 16 Coin, a pretty darn hefty sum in this world! Not quite enough to retire on, but enough to keep everybody comfortable. They also have the upgrade that gives them an extra die on engagement rolls when they’re sneaking into places, because Luke’s dice are cursed when it comes to engagement rolls. XD
Anyway – with that out of the way, it was time to start the next adventure! And, as usual, it was via having the postman show up with a vase containing a note from their mysterious patron Eleanor and a hammer to smash the vase and get at the note. XD Eleanor praised them for their loyalty in rescuing Barnaby (obviously not knowing that they just didn’t want to traumatize the postman by having him repeatedly deliver Barnaby’s body parts) and in getting into and – more importantly – out of the Dimmer Sisters’ mansion, and said that, if they could get a certain magical bracer out of the Dimmer Sisters’ vault, she would VERY MUCH make it worth their while. Most of the gang was like “I do NOT want to go back into the horrible spooky house,” but Kasimir was intrigued and went off to do his thing with his underworld friends. Edvard asked him to get some actuators while he was out (as he had been building more wondrous mechanical men – one, a copy of him, had actually exploded trying to answer the door earlier) – Kasimir, as he can be a dick sometimes, came back with a box of Astor brand, which Edvard promptly chucked in the street. XD Anyway, Kasimir figured the score might be worth doing simply because the profit could probably allow all of them to retire, but said that they were DEFINITELY not ready yet, they needed to do a LOT of prepwork first. He then assigned everyone some tasks – Edvard was in charge of figuring out the mechanical lock on the door of the vault (Astor brand, so Edvard figured it would be a breeze); Lilith was to research the demon guard that was the OTHER layer of security on the vault; Barnaby was in charge of getting them all out of there, simply because he was so unpredictable, Kasimir figured the Sisters wouldn’t be able to read him; Zillah was to keep her ear to the ground for potential trouble (as the gang had started to get some attention, and Kasimir had been warned trouble might be coming their way as a result); and Kasimir himself was going to try and make friends with a new gang that had set up in the old abandoned trainyard in Coalridge so they could call on them to help with the eventual storming of the mansion. Oh, and they should probably hire an employee for the shop to make it look like an actual storefront and not a place that Edvard raids for clockwork bits for his mechanical men. XD Everyone thus went off to start working on their respective tasks –
Except Lilith, as, in her case, the library where she’d go to read about demons was closed. Thus, she tagged along with Kasimir, who was hoping she could demonstrate her cool Whisper powers and help the gang take them, and the threat of spooks, seriously. They arrived at the trainyard at the same time as a guy named Aldritch from one of the big gangs, the Billhooks – turned out he was there to visit the new gang too, and tell them that if they wanted to operate here, they had better pay their dues. There was no obvious signs of gang activity around, though –
But there WAS a small waif huddled by one of the fences, looking as cold and lonely and frightened as any tiny girl might. Lilith was immediately charmed, but Kasimir figured she might be a lookout for the gang and went over to talk to her. He didn’t pick up immediately on any signs, but offered her a bit of bread and asked if she’d seen anyone coming or going. The girl asked if he was there on business, and Kasimir confirmed that he was hoping to make some friends. The girl then asked Aldritch his business, and he delivered his threat –
Causing the little girl to leap up and STAB HIM REPEATEDLY IN THE NECK WITH A KNIFE. She told the shocked Lilith and perhaps-less-shocked Kasimir that they’d better get moving, and led them away through a secret gap in the fence and into a broken-down train car that had been converted into living quarters, to meet with her gang – a gang ENTIRELY MADE UP OF CHILDREN. XD I mean – yeah, why not at this point. XD I left it off with Luke doing a hilariously squeaky voice for the child gang’s little leader, asking who Lilith and Kasimir were and what they wanted – we’ll see how Kasimir responds tomorrow! Oh, this is sure to be a fun one. . . XD
And that has been my day! Pretty good, as Sundays go. :) And now it is time to head to bed and prepare for another work week. Plus side, I only have three days at the office; minus side, I have that stupid event on Thursday that I really don't want to go to but am trapped into attending, hmph. Also have to figure out some stuff for Mom's birthday on Friday, but that'll be easier to handle. Night all!
