Reasonably Non-Manic Monday
May. 8th, 2023 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickNice weather, not too stressful day, got some important stuff done -- let's go through it item by item --
Work – Fairly unassuming Monday – I did the GL, I put on some more Easter collection gifts, I took a credit card call, I did some roster maintenance, and that was pretty much that. *shrug* Also talked about time off with coworkers – one of them will need some at the beginning of July for family stuff, so yeah, gotta plan around that. I’ll see what I can get in the upcoming months!
Oh, and when I got home, we played beanbags! I did pretty good, Dad did really good, and Mom is holding steady at “no wins but one second” per game. :p Final scores were me 2-W-3; Dad W-2-W; Mom 3-3-2. We’ll see if things go better for her the next time we play!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Ready Lair One!” With her nat twenty from last time, Prudence learned that red dragons are fond of nesting in places like deep mountain caverns and abandoned dwarven mines, and that they appreciate having loads of lava and hot steam spouts and such around (Johnny was like “oh come ON” as they read about how much they like geothermal energy XD). Egbert, meanwhile, learned that his blue-is-red dragons like barren places where they can create gorgeous crystalline structures with their lightning breath, lots of sinkholes to trap adventures, and caverns they can easily collapse and burrow out of should anyone get in, leaving the intruders to die from suffocating and enormous pressure. Perfect for the already-unstable Mistmire! XD Fortunately, he didn’t manage to actually put any of his plans to renovate the lair into action, as Corazon talked him into helping him convince a red dragon to live in the space instead (on the basis of they can both understand Draconic – Egbert from actual study, Corazon from Comprehend Languages). And so the group split up into three “teams” –
Team Lake Hoard – Merilwen and Dob’s adventure finding the lake with all the treasure! As it turns out, they were allowed to take the Fyenghabus to travel to the Lake District (Shattershield making it VERY CLEAR that he didn’t mind if it got a bit wrecked up) – which would have been great had FLANNERY not been on it. Flannery being the jester who is constantly capering around. Even Dob, who had been actually kind of glad to see Flannery at first, rapidly tired of his capering and bouncing and attempts to rhyme “town” with “tour” as the dude sang about their first adventure together, when they got the wheels back for the Fyenghabus while also saving Inkwater from the Order Of Keeping It Down. Fortunately, Flannery fell asleep when they actually arrived at their destination, and – after resisting the urge to either bag up Flannery in his hammock or smother him – Merilwen and Dob were able to sneak out of the tour bus with inspiration-enhanced Stealth rolls.
And then Dob asked Merilwen where the map was, before recalling he’d handed it to Flannery without thinking at one point during the capering. Merilwen promptly used Pass Without Trace to make sure Dob was sneaky enough to get the damn thing back and replace it with a sufficiently large leaf. XD The pair were able to get to the lake without much issue after that, and Dob dove in to check on the status of the treasure. To his surprise, Katie had NOT actually taken the whole lot – she had in fact perfectly divided the haul in half and only taken what she felt was hers.
She’d also left behind a dead guy about the same height as Dob against Dob’s half. Dob reported this to Merilwen, and then proceeded to use Speak With Dead to talk to the guy to apologize for his role in this whole mess and ask him about Katie (namely if she had a new man) while Merilwen used Control Water to part the lake Moses-style and scoop up all the treasure into the stagecoaches. Merilwen was very annoyed with him and told him that she’d said he needed to get over Katie, not talk to any more corpses about her, and to block her on “seashell media.” Johnny nearly got up and left the table. XD But the treasure was successfully retrieved, and there was enough of it to still count as a good-sized dragon hoard, so the pair headed back to Mistmire – accompanied by the now-awake-again Flannery. Apparently the dude only needs eight minutes of sleep. They took SOO much psychic damage on their day trip. :p
Team Dragon Estate Agents – Egbert and Corazon’s adventure in finding a red dragon willing to move into Mistmire! After learning that there was a dormant volcano near Barrow Springs that might have a red dragon living in it, Egbert and Corazon set off – Egbert riding on Dogbert, Corazon riding on Egbert, and Percy Junior riding on Corazon. Corazon on a nat twenty spotted a cavern with a red dragon tail poking out of it right away, while Egbert on a much worse roll continued to confuse red and blue and thought they were looking at a blue dragon. Corazon managed to convince him that maybe dragons could change colors and urged him into the cave. Where they met their first obstacle, a pool of hot orange water. :p Egbert was like “I’ve seen people walk over fire before, they just did it quickly,” and thus spurred Dogbert on into a run –
And proceeded to roll a TWO on a Wisdom/Animal Handling roll, which with his modifiers became a dirty one. XD Johnny kindly did NOT immediately murder them, instead having the group get blasted into the ceiling by a steam vent, causing quite a lot of noise (if only from Seal Gaiman’s “bomfed” protests at such treatment), and alerting the dragon to their location. Egbert and Corazon quickly introduced themselves as real estate agents telling local dragons about a hot new lair on the market, and rolled well enough not to be immediately immolated. They told the red dragon – Giovanni Thermal, sometimes known as Geo, nationality a mix between “Dracula” and “Wiseguy” – about the lair under Mistmire, talking up how he wouldn’t have to do his own hunting and how nice the place was, surely that was worth having his heat harvested by the people above to keep the city running. Giovanni was unsure at first, but admitted his current cave was no longer much to his liking – the volcano was going dormant, and his hot orange water pools were starting to cool. So he was at least willing to have a look at the place, though he made the two promise that no other dragons would be looking at it before he gave his “yes” or “no,” and that he wouldn’t have to share the living space. Corazon and Egbert were happy to agree to this, and Giovanni winged off!
Team Lair Renovation – Prudence’s adventure in getting the lair renovated! As the woman with all the knowledge, she stayed behind in Mistmire, wrangling a bunch of local stonemasons and all the set design people from Lady Fyengh’s group to make the lair look appropriately dwarven and fancy. There was some initial trouble – the stonemasons and the set design people not getting on at ALL, and Prudence not really knowing what the hell dwarven ruins look like – but after a bit of yelling and compromise (namely, the set design people were allowed to put a fresco in one corner – and it turned out to be a very nice one, showing a dwarven tunnel with lots of new details to discover as you got up close), Prudence and her workers were able to make the place look like at least the Theme Park Version of a dwarven cavern. Prudence was kind of banking on the red dragon showing up either not knowing much about dwarves or having a withering contempt for them. XD However, that did leave them with a VERY short amount of time to get hot orange water, real or fake, into the lair –
Cue the fracking! XD Yes, Prudence got the set design people to drill down for hot orange water goodness (using the drill they for some reason had on hand), and they did indeed find a good spout of lava! So good that, when they hit it, they caused a minor earthquake that shook off another chunk of wall, and shot up and filled a pool with such force that it immolated a third of the troupe. The others were like “they died as they lived,” and Prudence promptly used the charred bones for décor. XD She finished up LITERALLY just in time for Giovanni to poke his head in – we’ll see what he thinks of it and move onto the final episode, “Corpse and Robbers,” tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “The Joker And The Queen”: Check – back to the escape sequence, with Thirteen’s time to shine! You see, Victor and the Coasters ran into Bravo Team down in the basement, near the exercise yard – and thanks to her power up, Thirteen was able to feel the oak tree and summon its roots to really start wrecking some shit up. . .basically I’m having her unleash the “Hex” ride, with all its evil tree root goodness, on this unfortunate group. XD And things are rapidly going to go from bad to worse, as Victoria and Emily are about to unleash something Phalanx has kept under STRICT lock and key for quite a while now. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – kept it simple with just the GrayStillPlays in the Subs today – “Testing Trains Vs Impossible Loops in GTA 5!” Another Alex Torture Board, this time with a theme of loops! Though the title is a little misleading – the INITIAL part of the board had Gray trying out various cars (including a limo, a four-wheeler bike, a car that looked like an oversized toy, the lifeguard-branded Canis, a Formula One racer, and a supercar) against various terrible Alex loops, starting with the Thinning Loops (a series of loops that got thinner and thinner as they went on), then moving through the Rainbow Loop (a large rainbow-colored loop with subtle ridges designed to wreck tires and throw off suspensions), the Tube Loop (a steep orange Cheeto loop with a jump at the end through a PULSATING thumbnail hole, so it was up to luck if you got through it), the Giant Half-Loops and Strangulation Loop (a series of half-loop transfers made up of those giant abstract people statues holding chunks of tire, followed by a loop stylized to look like a string going around one of their necks), the Onion Loop (where you had to stay on the rim of a giant bowl, because you got transferred from the inner blue layer to the outer orange layer before being shot out onto the next platform), and the Natural Sideways Loop (essentially a sort of wall-ride loop made of grass, where you got teleported on and had to make it around the steep loop to build up enough speed to launch yourself off the nearby ramp and onto the platform with the checkpoint). As you might imagine, Gray nearly drove himself mad trying to find a car with the required top speed to make all the jumps AND the traction and handling to actually do the loops – most of the cars lacked in either one or the other. He FINALLY made it to the checkpoint with the super-car, and faced the final part of the board, taking a train through a loop made of YACHTS over the water –
And completed it first try, because Alex actually made that a nice smooth loop, and the train had enough speed and traction to make it around. The joy in Gray’s voice as he realized he’d done it in one go was palpable. XD Good job, Gray! Just remember, success is fleeting where Alex is concerned. . .
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – managed to get the full text and tags done on three out of the four Chill Valicer Save update posts for this week on Victor Luvs Alice! :) So now I just have to finish off the last one before queuing tomorrow, yay. Hopefully I should be able to manage that without issue!
Not too bad -- though those tumblr posts are gonna need another look-over tomorrow. Mostly because my brain is in "you could do so much better with this writing" mode, and I'll need that look-over to convince myself that they're fine, really. XD But for now, I have to make my way to bed -- night all!
Work – Fairly unassuming Monday – I did the GL, I put on some more Easter collection gifts, I took a credit card call, I did some roster maintenance, and that was pretty much that. *shrug* Also talked about time off with coworkers – one of them will need some at the beginning of July for family stuff, so yeah, gotta plan around that. I’ll see what I can get in the upcoming months!
Oh, and when I got home, we played beanbags! I did pretty good, Dad did really good, and Mom is holding steady at “no wins but one second” per game. :p Final scores were me 2-W-3; Dad W-2-W; Mom 3-3-2. We’ll see if things go better for her the next time we play!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Ready Lair One!” With her nat twenty from last time, Prudence learned that red dragons are fond of nesting in places like deep mountain caverns and abandoned dwarven mines, and that they appreciate having loads of lava and hot steam spouts and such around (Johnny was like “oh come ON” as they read about how much they like geothermal energy XD). Egbert, meanwhile, learned that his blue-is-red dragons like barren places where they can create gorgeous crystalline structures with their lightning breath, lots of sinkholes to trap adventures, and caverns they can easily collapse and burrow out of should anyone get in, leaving the intruders to die from suffocating and enormous pressure. Perfect for the already-unstable Mistmire! XD Fortunately, he didn’t manage to actually put any of his plans to renovate the lair into action, as Corazon talked him into helping him convince a red dragon to live in the space instead (on the basis of they can both understand Draconic – Egbert from actual study, Corazon from Comprehend Languages). And so the group split up into three “teams” –
Team Lake Hoard – Merilwen and Dob’s adventure finding the lake with all the treasure! As it turns out, they were allowed to take the Fyenghabus to travel to the Lake District (Shattershield making it VERY CLEAR that he didn’t mind if it got a bit wrecked up) – which would have been great had FLANNERY not been on it. Flannery being the jester who is constantly capering around. Even Dob, who had been actually kind of glad to see Flannery at first, rapidly tired of his capering and bouncing and attempts to rhyme “town” with “tour” as the dude sang about their first adventure together, when they got the wheels back for the Fyenghabus while also saving Inkwater from the Order Of Keeping It Down. Fortunately, Flannery fell asleep when they actually arrived at their destination, and – after resisting the urge to either bag up Flannery in his hammock or smother him – Merilwen and Dob were able to sneak out of the tour bus with inspiration-enhanced Stealth rolls.
And then Dob asked Merilwen where the map was, before recalling he’d handed it to Flannery without thinking at one point during the capering. Merilwen promptly used Pass Without Trace to make sure Dob was sneaky enough to get the damn thing back and replace it with a sufficiently large leaf. XD The pair were able to get to the lake without much issue after that, and Dob dove in to check on the status of the treasure. To his surprise, Katie had NOT actually taken the whole lot – she had in fact perfectly divided the haul in half and only taken what she felt was hers.
She’d also left behind a dead guy about the same height as Dob against Dob’s half. Dob reported this to Merilwen, and then proceeded to use Speak With Dead to talk to the guy to apologize for his role in this whole mess and ask him about Katie (namely if she had a new man) while Merilwen used Control Water to part the lake Moses-style and scoop up all the treasure into the stagecoaches. Merilwen was very annoyed with him and told him that she’d said he needed to get over Katie, not talk to any more corpses about her, and to block her on “seashell media.” Johnny nearly got up and left the table. XD But the treasure was successfully retrieved, and there was enough of it to still count as a good-sized dragon hoard, so the pair headed back to Mistmire – accompanied by the now-awake-again Flannery. Apparently the dude only needs eight minutes of sleep. They took SOO much psychic damage on their day trip. :p
Team Dragon Estate Agents – Egbert and Corazon’s adventure in finding a red dragon willing to move into Mistmire! After learning that there was a dormant volcano near Barrow Springs that might have a red dragon living in it, Egbert and Corazon set off – Egbert riding on Dogbert, Corazon riding on Egbert, and Percy Junior riding on Corazon. Corazon on a nat twenty spotted a cavern with a red dragon tail poking out of it right away, while Egbert on a much worse roll continued to confuse red and blue and thought they were looking at a blue dragon. Corazon managed to convince him that maybe dragons could change colors and urged him into the cave. Where they met their first obstacle, a pool of hot orange water. :p Egbert was like “I’ve seen people walk over fire before, they just did it quickly,” and thus spurred Dogbert on into a run –
And proceeded to roll a TWO on a Wisdom/Animal Handling roll, which with his modifiers became a dirty one. XD Johnny kindly did NOT immediately murder them, instead having the group get blasted into the ceiling by a steam vent, causing quite a lot of noise (if only from Seal Gaiman’s “bomfed” protests at such treatment), and alerting the dragon to their location. Egbert and Corazon quickly introduced themselves as real estate agents telling local dragons about a hot new lair on the market, and rolled well enough not to be immediately immolated. They told the red dragon – Giovanni Thermal, sometimes known as Geo, nationality a mix between “Dracula” and “Wiseguy” – about the lair under Mistmire, talking up how he wouldn’t have to do his own hunting and how nice the place was, surely that was worth having his heat harvested by the people above to keep the city running. Giovanni was unsure at first, but admitted his current cave was no longer much to his liking – the volcano was going dormant, and his hot orange water pools were starting to cool. So he was at least willing to have a look at the place, though he made the two promise that no other dragons would be looking at it before he gave his “yes” or “no,” and that he wouldn’t have to share the living space. Corazon and Egbert were happy to agree to this, and Giovanni winged off!
Team Lair Renovation – Prudence’s adventure in getting the lair renovated! As the woman with all the knowledge, she stayed behind in Mistmire, wrangling a bunch of local stonemasons and all the set design people from Lady Fyengh’s group to make the lair look appropriately dwarven and fancy. There was some initial trouble – the stonemasons and the set design people not getting on at ALL, and Prudence not really knowing what the hell dwarven ruins look like – but after a bit of yelling and compromise (namely, the set design people were allowed to put a fresco in one corner – and it turned out to be a very nice one, showing a dwarven tunnel with lots of new details to discover as you got up close), Prudence and her workers were able to make the place look like at least the Theme Park Version of a dwarven cavern. Prudence was kind of banking on the red dragon showing up either not knowing much about dwarves or having a withering contempt for them. XD However, that did leave them with a VERY short amount of time to get hot orange water, real or fake, into the lair –
Cue the fracking! XD Yes, Prudence got the set design people to drill down for hot orange water goodness (using the drill they for some reason had on hand), and they did indeed find a good spout of lava! So good that, when they hit it, they caused a minor earthquake that shook off another chunk of wall, and shot up and filled a pool with such force that it immolated a third of the troupe. The others were like “they died as they lived,” and Prudence promptly used the charred bones for décor. XD She finished up LITERALLY just in time for Giovanni to poke his head in – we’ll see what he thinks of it and move onto the final episode, “Corpse and Robbers,” tomorrow!
2. Continue writing “The Joker And The Queen”: Check – back to the escape sequence, with Thirteen’s time to shine! You see, Victor and the Coasters ran into Bravo Team down in the basement, near the exercise yard – and thanks to her power up, Thirteen was able to feel the oak tree and summon its roots to really start wrecking some shit up. . .basically I’m having her unleash the “Hex” ride, with all its evil tree root goodness, on this unfortunate group. XD And things are rapidly going to go from bad to worse, as Victoria and Emily are about to unleash something Phalanx has kept under STRICT lock and key for quite a while now. . .
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – kept it simple with just the GrayStillPlays in the Subs today – “Testing Trains Vs Impossible Loops in GTA 5!” Another Alex Torture Board, this time with a theme of loops! Though the title is a little misleading – the INITIAL part of the board had Gray trying out various cars (including a limo, a four-wheeler bike, a car that looked like an oversized toy, the lifeguard-branded Canis, a Formula One racer, and a supercar) against various terrible Alex loops, starting with the Thinning Loops (a series of loops that got thinner and thinner as they went on), then moving through the Rainbow Loop (a large rainbow-colored loop with subtle ridges designed to wreck tires and throw off suspensions), the Tube Loop (a steep orange Cheeto loop with a jump at the end through a PULSATING thumbnail hole, so it was up to luck if you got through it), the Giant Half-Loops and Strangulation Loop (a series of half-loop transfers made up of those giant abstract people statues holding chunks of tire, followed by a loop stylized to look like a string going around one of their necks), the Onion Loop (where you had to stay on the rim of a giant bowl, because you got transferred from the inner blue layer to the outer orange layer before being shot out onto the next platform), and the Natural Sideways Loop (essentially a sort of wall-ride loop made of grass, where you got teleported on and had to make it around the steep loop to build up enough speed to launch yourself off the nearby ramp and onto the platform with the checkpoint). As you might imagine, Gray nearly drove himself mad trying to find a car with the required top speed to make all the jumps AND the traction and handling to actually do the loops – most of the cars lacked in either one or the other. He FINALLY made it to the checkpoint with the super-car, and faced the final part of the board, taking a train through a loop made of YACHTS over the water –
And completed it first try, because Alex actually made that a nice smooth loop, and the train had enough speed and traction to make it around. The joy in Gray’s voice as he realized he’d done it in one go was palpable. XD Good job, Gray! Just remember, success is fleeting where Alex is concerned. . .
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – managed to get the full text and tags done on three out of the four Chill Valicer Save update posts for this week on Victor Luvs Alice! :) So now I just have to finish off the last one before queuing tomorrow, yay. Hopefully I should be able to manage that without issue!
Not too bad -- though those tumblr posts are gonna need another look-over tomorrow. Mostly because my brain is in "you could do so much better with this writing" mode, and I'll need that look-over to convince myself that they're fine, really. XD But for now, I have to make my way to bed -- night all!
