Late Update From A Busy Day
May. 10th, 2023 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, lot of running around this Wednesday, getting shit done -- but then again, I did get shit done, both for real life and the online world --
Errands: Managed to complete all of my running around with Mom today without too much trouble –
Clothes Shopping – hit three stores this morning in my quest for new summer tops, pants, skirts, dresses, and sandals for work! TJ Maxx yielded four tops, two dresses, a skirt, and a blue pair of pants for me to wear; Kohl’s, meanwhile, gave me two new bras (since I desperately needed some) and another white pair of pants. No luck on the sandals, though – we looked in the shoe department of both clothing stores and stopped by a shoe place before heading home, but none of them had any sandals that really fit me or looked good. I do have a pair that I can wear, along with some boat shoes, but it would have been nice! Still, I’ve got enough clothes now to get me through the summer, and Mom’s ordered me another bra online to try. Bit of an expensive jaunt, but I am sorted!
Car Inspection – took this up after lunch with Mom to the car place – waited maybe forty-five minutes from the time we arrived to the time they were done. No problems and only fifty-five bucks, hooray. So THAT’S all sorted for another two years, and I can be assured that my car is not going to fall apart anytime soon. :p
Tumblr: Not a lot happening here, admittedly, but I DID get the Victor Luvs Alice queue sorted – reset the queue speed to one for the next three days, and found a Song Saturday (yet another reblog of “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel – look, I like the song, and I have Valice and Valicer thoughts to it these days, so in it goes). So that’s something, at least! One less thing to worry about, anyway.
Sims 4: I did indeed get in some Chill Valicer Save time today! Not a whole in-game day’s worth, but I’m about halfway through their day, and I figure I can finish this session on Saturday. :) Here’s what I did get through today, though –
A) Alice, who woke up at the end of my last session (the one where I rearranged the farm so they could fit a cow paddock behind the barn and moved the wind farm to the side of the lot), was feeling a bit peckish, so I had her transform into beast mode and go off to hunt at super speed. Smiler, meanwhile, was sent down to hatch one of the incubated eggs in the chicken coop (a new baby rooster, so that chicken’s probably gonna get sold or, uh, “traded for meat” – also, the game suggested that I send SHADOW to hatch the new egg, which, um, Shadow’s the DOG, Sims 4), then make a barstool on the woodworking bench to fulfill another notch on the Nerd Brain aspiration track. Alice came back, did some smelling and scavenging (grabbing some pyrite), before going to chat with Smiler a bit and do some push-ups in the barn –
B) While I noticed that Guidry kept trying to drink the gang’s Specter Sips and sent Victor, who was finally at full energy, to distract him for a bit while I kept moving them to the sideboard – and, eventually, to Victor’s inventory. No Specter Sip for you, Guidry! Once that was sorted, I had Victor head into his greenhouse to weed, water, evolve, make a flower arrangement, plant a new chrysanthemum bush, and graft a tulip cutting to said new chrysanthemum bush to finally finish grafting onto three plants (this time SUCCESSFULLY) and complete both another level of his Freelance Botanist aspiration AND finally fulfill his New Year’s resolution! :D So that was nice. This should also get him some birds of paradise for flower arranging, nice. :)
C) While all THAT was going on, I had Alice swap back to her human form and go for a jog (she still wants to get fit for the new year!), while Smiler finished off their barstool, repaired a busted turbine (and cleaned up the resultant trash pile), and checked in on the chickens (cleaning the coop, spreading feed, and chatting to them all – Grumpy still doesn’t like them, but even a bad interaction counts as attention, fortunately). They then got sent over to the obstacle course to try running it with Shadow, as I hadn’t given the new configuration a go yet! Unfortunately, it didn’t go great – Shadow completely refused to do the weaving poles and the tunnel, and she fell flat jumping through the first hoop. She did better on the second hoop, the ramp, and the platform, but meeh. Must train that dog a little more in future!
D) With animal fun over, Alice returned from her jog, hit the bathroom for a bubble bath (I told her to take a shower, but she wanted the bath), then danced to Smiler’s radio while Smiler amused themselves turning the bonsai bush in the living room into a heart and Victor hit the toilet and shower himself after harvesting everything in his greenhouse –
Just in time for Harley the fox to start menacing the hen house again! The little bastard NEARLY got away with an egg, but Victor was able to get downstairs and order him to drop it in time. The fox ran off with its mouth stretched wide, and Smiler gave Victor a celebratory kiss in the chicken pen. XD Victor then decided to try some of the Specter Sip in his inventory while I had everyone hang around in the chicken pen to keep them in one place, before magically repairing ANOTHER broken wind turbine (grrr) –
E) And bringing everyone to Van Liddelton Groceries so I could do some arranging and start using my new mods! Specifically, my Brazen Lotus produce stands for veggies and fruit (which work like the retail fridges, which is convenient), and the flower fridge for flower arrangements! Though I’ve run into a bit of a problem with that – namely, I’m not sure where the hell to put it. O.o It doesn’t look good in front of the windows, because I want it to face INWARD for shopping purposes, but just putting it free-standing in the middle of the store doesn’t look good either. . .I have, however, discovered a good alternate potential use for it – as a juice fridge. XD You see, the six-packs of fizzy juice don’t go in the regular retail freezers, but they DO go in that fridge, so I’m thinking maybe – if the flower fridge also keeps THEM cool – I can use it as a special drinks cabinet. Just a thought! XD
But yeah, a lot of their time at the store today was me in Build Mode, fiddling with the layout (trying to figure out how many shelves I want and where to put them), making minor tweaks (like changing out the sinks in the bathroom for freestanding ones with built-in cabinets underneath so I could slot soap dispensers onto them – though I discovered I STILL had to use “bb.moveobjects on” to do this, because for some reason the game HATES that I have put that one triple-full-wall-length mirror behind the sinks and will take any opportunity to try and get rid of it), and prettying up the outside a bit (I have made two “planters” with fencing, grass flooring, and a couple of beech trees, and put a couple of signs out front – already it looks nicer!). I actually ended up saving and quitting with them still there, so I can pick up where I left off on Saturday. Probably finish off the day itself with them making more product to fill up more of the shelves! And then the play session after THAT is Love Day, which should be fun. . .
Writing: Got another chunk done on “The Joker And The Queen’s” escape sequence – Victoria and Emily, temporarily separated from Alice, have stumbled across a giant metal door surrounded by more of the strange power-suppressing Corkscrew – and have discovered that there’s what LOOKS like an innocent little chihuahua inside! Naturally, they want to free the poor thing – and the universe seems to agree that’s the right thing to do, given Emily was able to basically instantly pick the door’s lock by inserting a bobby pin into it. XD But they’re about to learn some interesting things about that chihuahua once they get it outside. . .
YouTube: Just the one GrayStillPlays video in the Subs today – I would have tried to watch more, but I got involved in Merge Dragons this evening (they’ve chosen to run an event midweek for some reason, so I had to do my “grinding for high point objects to collect” nonsense before putting the phone on the charger). It was a doozy though – “GTA 5 but the world ends every 30 seconds!” Another Alex Torture Board, this time with a story – namely, Gray was the chosen one carrying a vaccine for the exploding zombie virus plaguing the city, and had to get from one side of the map to the other to evac out with it. Only, uh, the world was ending. Very chaotically. That is, every 30 seconds, Alex’s chaos mod would fire off another world-ending effect for Gray to deal with as he worked his way across Los Santos and the surrounding environs. Things like very low gravity, intense gravity, two levels of global warming (level one put a special bloom effect on everything; level two burned out all the engines in any cars Gray was near), the release of corrosive chemicals from Gray (killing the tires of any vehicle he was near – though, fortunately, not if he was IN the car at the time), the rise of the apes (ape friends with axes), two levels of alien contact (level one was a UFO trying to crush Gray; level two was an actual alien appearing and attacking him with an Up&Atomizer), storms, and the collapse of the sun (the sky went disconcertingly black). Oh, and if anyone knew he had the zombie vaccine, they swarmed him like devoted fans. XD Alex gave Gray a parachute, a regular gun, and a minigun to deal with all this nonsense at the start and told him “do what you must – and lol, no checkpoints.” XD
As you can imagine, what followed was the most ludicrous race across GTA V’s map probably ever. It took Gray multiple tries just to finally get out of the damn army base without being swarmed by adoring fans, nearly crushed by UFOs, and dealing with global warming destroying all the vehicles he could use to get going. And even when he did, stuff like aliens trying to probe him, black holes trying to suck him up, earthquakes slamming him into the ground, and rioters and looters shooting at him made his trip across Los Santos uniquely hellish. Not to mention all the times he ran into or was otherwise murdered by the damn explosive zombies. . .it took a lot of cars, a couple bikes (both motorized and otherwise), exploiting low gravity to float along a few times, a lot of dodging, and a few lucky breaks like the ax-wielding apes apparently considering Gray one of their own, but after who knows HOW long of fighting with the game, Gray managed to make it all the way over to the teleporter and get zapped onto an aircraft carrier, winning the challenge and turning off the chaos. Hooray! We’ll, uh, just ignore that the final bit of chaos said he was carrying a zombie virus. . .
Workout: Back on the bike again today, and back to Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Corpse and Robbers!” After discovering that Richard was moving WAY too fast through the city for such a frail, gaunt dude, Merilwen reported this to the others and said that she feared that Richard was in fact a druid like herself, with Wildshape to turn into something that could move around fast – perhaps even a jackal, like Harris had suggested! The gang was like “oh, this could be a problem” and began wondering how to catch Richard – should they split the party to try and cover more ground and find him, or stay together and just try to follow his path?
And then a tremor shook the city, knocking over a few more turrets, and Giovanni started yelling that he wanted to talk to the management, essentially. Dob and Corazon both tried to get the other to go alone (Dob: “You’re the landlord;” Corazon: “You’re the one who always seems to want to die”), but eventually the whole party showed up to hear Giovanni’s complaint. Turns out Gio had been stiffed on his first dinner – he’d been promised 30 head of cattle, but when he’d gone out to the pen where the cattle were kept, he’d found it open and most of his dinner missing, with only one cow far off in the distance – and Gio wasn’t about to hunt it when dinner was supposed to be SERVED. The gang apologized, though they found themselves VERY SUSPICIOUS of that one remaining cow –
Cue Dob (on a nat twenty Strength/Athletics check) running over and TACKLING the cow, getting it in a headlock, and getting Prudence to fry it with an Agonizing Blast after learning from Merilwen they needed to knock the cow out (reduce it to zero hitpoints) to get it to change back to human shape if it was indeed a druid. One beam went off and hit Dob instead, but Prudence got the cow solidly with the other, and –
Nothing. Just a cow. Dob refused to bring the cow over to Giovanni to eat on the basis of him being a vegetarian (Merilwen was like “You just exploded it!”), so Egbert and Corazon went over to deliver it – Egbert, on a nine to lift it, lifted with his back and tweaked it, while Corazon, on a nat twenty, figured up how to fold it up for easy delivery, unfolding it for Gio and promising they’d find the other cattle and see what happened. Gio was willing to accept this and devoured the cow, and the others got Merilwen to use her Locate Creature spell to track down Richard –
Who was on a bench eating an apple. The gang surrounded him, with Merilwen trying to get Egbert to use “Cone” of Truth – Egbert explained that it was actually ZONE Of Truth (Merilwen pointing out that Egbert uses his spells so little, how was she supposed to know?) and that Richard would have to want to willingly enter it (Merilwen suddenly understood why Egbert used his spells so little XD). So instead Egbert grabbed Richard by the collar and hoisted him off his feet, while Corazon pulled his own “Cone of Truth” (a weird conical knife) out and threatened him with it. Richard professed to not know what they were talking about – sure, yes, he wanted everyone to move out of Mistmire and into Barrow Springs, but he wasn’t zipping around the city super-fast or killing any paladins or anything! Dob tried the apple he was eating – on a Wisdom/Insight check of nine, he thought briefly it was super-poisoned, but then it was revealed to just be an ordinary apple. Merilwen checked her spell – nope, they definitely had Richard. Dob got Prudence to Detect Magic in the general area to make sure their spells were working – yup, everything hunky-dory, her books are magic, she is magic, Corazon The Powerful Wizard is magic, Richard is NOT magic. . . Unsure what the hell was going on, the group chose to let Richard go and let Corazon tail him very sneakily.
What was going on was that Richard, once he thought he was out of sight of the group, turned into a jackal and ran off! Merilwen attempted to follow with Longstride, the spell that sounds cool but in fact just improves your speed by a light jog, and Corazon Greasing her up to try and help, but no dice, he was gone. HOWEVER, right then Gio caused another tremor and called out that he had another complaint – and when the gang went to see what was wrong, he said that he’d had dogs barking at him through a gap while he was trying to nap on his hoard. Corazon assured him that they hadn’t known about that, and Merilwen was able to squeeze through the gap in her Greasy state and found three jackals on the other side, who promptly darted off. Her attempt to cast Animal Friendship didn’t work, and her attempt to Speak With Animals caused one of them to yell back at her in COMMON to piss off –
So Merilwen, content these weren’t REAL animals, happily made some Spike Growth under them. Two of them were caught in the spikes and took some very nasty damage; one just avoided them, and then used one of his compatriots as a springboard to make it over! And when Merilwen went to investigate – well, I don’t know about the dead one, but the living one was definitely man-shaped. Merilwen called in her friends to help question the guy (which required them all to get Greased up to pop through the gap – Gio kindly covered his nose and said if they looked tasty, bring them back, he’d eat them), and they all demanded to know what was going on, Dob using Cure Wounds as a bit of leverage to keep the guy talking (and alive long enough to answer questions). Turns out that this guy, Richard, and their dead compatriot are all jackalweres (I assume the opposite of a werejackal – that is, they’re jackals who can be people), and they’re trying to get everyone to move out of Mistmire because they serve a lamia who wants to move in. Prudence, smashing a Wisdom/Insight check, was able to give them some good info on lamias as she used to have drinks with one – namely, they love to live in abandoned, ruined cities! And Mistmire, in its current state, is just on the verge of qualifying, if they can convince the people it’s too dangerous to stay. . . So yeah, that’s what the gang is up against for the final boss battle of this whole arc! We’ll see how this goes down, and how the gang deals with Richard and his mistress (and if they manage to keep Giovanni happy) tomorrow!
Other: We did play beanbags this afternoon, after I was done Simming and putting my clothes away and all that – and hooray, we all actually won one today! :) Dad sniped me in the first game with a last-minute eight; I managed to rally in the second game and keep my lead; and Mom finished off the last game with an eight just when she needed it! Final scores were me 2-W-3; Dad W-2-2; Mom 3-3-W. Maybe not the most even scores, but hooray for everyone getting one. :)
Whew! Busy day was busy. . .and now I have to get to bed because I'm back to work tomorrow! At least it's just another two days, and then I have a NON-cleaning weekend to work with. . .night all!
Errands: Managed to complete all of my running around with Mom today without too much trouble –
Clothes Shopping – hit three stores this morning in my quest for new summer tops, pants, skirts, dresses, and sandals for work! TJ Maxx yielded four tops, two dresses, a skirt, and a blue pair of pants for me to wear; Kohl’s, meanwhile, gave me two new bras (since I desperately needed some) and another white pair of pants. No luck on the sandals, though – we looked in the shoe department of both clothing stores and stopped by a shoe place before heading home, but none of them had any sandals that really fit me or looked good. I do have a pair that I can wear, along with some boat shoes, but it would have been nice! Still, I’ve got enough clothes now to get me through the summer, and Mom’s ordered me another bra online to try. Bit of an expensive jaunt, but I am sorted!
Car Inspection – took this up after lunch with Mom to the car place – waited maybe forty-five minutes from the time we arrived to the time they were done. No problems and only fifty-five bucks, hooray. So THAT’S all sorted for another two years, and I can be assured that my car is not going to fall apart anytime soon. :p
Tumblr: Not a lot happening here, admittedly, but I DID get the Victor Luvs Alice queue sorted – reset the queue speed to one for the next three days, and found a Song Saturday (yet another reblog of “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel – look, I like the song, and I have Valice and Valicer thoughts to it these days, so in it goes). So that’s something, at least! One less thing to worry about, anyway.
Sims 4: I did indeed get in some Chill Valicer Save time today! Not a whole in-game day’s worth, but I’m about halfway through their day, and I figure I can finish this session on Saturday. :) Here’s what I did get through today, though –
A) Alice, who woke up at the end of my last session (the one where I rearranged the farm so they could fit a cow paddock behind the barn and moved the wind farm to the side of the lot), was feeling a bit peckish, so I had her transform into beast mode and go off to hunt at super speed. Smiler, meanwhile, was sent down to hatch one of the incubated eggs in the chicken coop (a new baby rooster, so that chicken’s probably gonna get sold or, uh, “traded for meat” – also, the game suggested that I send SHADOW to hatch the new egg, which, um, Shadow’s the DOG, Sims 4), then make a barstool on the woodworking bench to fulfill another notch on the Nerd Brain aspiration track. Alice came back, did some smelling and scavenging (grabbing some pyrite), before going to chat with Smiler a bit and do some push-ups in the barn –
B) While I noticed that Guidry kept trying to drink the gang’s Specter Sips and sent Victor, who was finally at full energy, to distract him for a bit while I kept moving them to the sideboard – and, eventually, to Victor’s inventory. No Specter Sip for you, Guidry! Once that was sorted, I had Victor head into his greenhouse to weed, water, evolve, make a flower arrangement, plant a new chrysanthemum bush, and graft a tulip cutting to said new chrysanthemum bush to finally finish grafting onto three plants (this time SUCCESSFULLY) and complete both another level of his Freelance Botanist aspiration AND finally fulfill his New Year’s resolution! :D So that was nice. This should also get him some birds of paradise for flower arranging, nice. :)
C) While all THAT was going on, I had Alice swap back to her human form and go for a jog (she still wants to get fit for the new year!), while Smiler finished off their barstool, repaired a busted turbine (and cleaned up the resultant trash pile), and checked in on the chickens (cleaning the coop, spreading feed, and chatting to them all – Grumpy still doesn’t like them, but even a bad interaction counts as attention, fortunately). They then got sent over to the obstacle course to try running it with Shadow, as I hadn’t given the new configuration a go yet! Unfortunately, it didn’t go great – Shadow completely refused to do the weaving poles and the tunnel, and she fell flat jumping through the first hoop. She did better on the second hoop, the ramp, and the platform, but meeh. Must train that dog a little more in future!
D) With animal fun over, Alice returned from her jog, hit the bathroom for a bubble bath (I told her to take a shower, but she wanted the bath), then danced to Smiler’s radio while Smiler amused themselves turning the bonsai bush in the living room into a heart and Victor hit the toilet and shower himself after harvesting everything in his greenhouse –
Just in time for Harley the fox to start menacing the hen house again! The little bastard NEARLY got away with an egg, but Victor was able to get downstairs and order him to drop it in time. The fox ran off with its mouth stretched wide, and Smiler gave Victor a celebratory kiss in the chicken pen. XD Victor then decided to try some of the Specter Sip in his inventory while I had everyone hang around in the chicken pen to keep them in one place, before magically repairing ANOTHER broken wind turbine (grrr) –
E) And bringing everyone to Van Liddelton Groceries so I could do some arranging and start using my new mods! Specifically, my Brazen Lotus produce stands for veggies and fruit (which work like the retail fridges, which is convenient), and the flower fridge for flower arrangements! Though I’ve run into a bit of a problem with that – namely, I’m not sure where the hell to put it. O.o It doesn’t look good in front of the windows, because I want it to face INWARD for shopping purposes, but just putting it free-standing in the middle of the store doesn’t look good either. . .I have, however, discovered a good alternate potential use for it – as a juice fridge. XD You see, the six-packs of fizzy juice don’t go in the regular retail freezers, but they DO go in that fridge, so I’m thinking maybe – if the flower fridge also keeps THEM cool – I can use it as a special drinks cabinet. Just a thought! XD
But yeah, a lot of their time at the store today was me in Build Mode, fiddling with the layout (trying to figure out how many shelves I want and where to put them), making minor tweaks (like changing out the sinks in the bathroom for freestanding ones with built-in cabinets underneath so I could slot soap dispensers onto them – though I discovered I STILL had to use “bb.moveobjects on” to do this, because for some reason the game HATES that I have put that one triple-full-wall-length mirror behind the sinks and will take any opportunity to try and get rid of it), and prettying up the outside a bit (I have made two “planters” with fencing, grass flooring, and a couple of beech trees, and put a couple of signs out front – already it looks nicer!). I actually ended up saving and quitting with them still there, so I can pick up where I left off on Saturday. Probably finish off the day itself with them making more product to fill up more of the shelves! And then the play session after THAT is Love Day, which should be fun. . .
Writing: Got another chunk done on “The Joker And The Queen’s” escape sequence – Victoria and Emily, temporarily separated from Alice, have stumbled across a giant metal door surrounded by more of the strange power-suppressing Corkscrew – and have discovered that there’s what LOOKS like an innocent little chihuahua inside! Naturally, they want to free the poor thing – and the universe seems to agree that’s the right thing to do, given Emily was able to basically instantly pick the door’s lock by inserting a bobby pin into it. XD But they’re about to learn some interesting things about that chihuahua once they get it outside. . .
YouTube: Just the one GrayStillPlays video in the Subs today – I would have tried to watch more, but I got involved in Merge Dragons this evening (they’ve chosen to run an event midweek for some reason, so I had to do my “grinding for high point objects to collect” nonsense before putting the phone on the charger). It was a doozy though – “GTA 5 but the world ends every 30 seconds!” Another Alex Torture Board, this time with a story – namely, Gray was the chosen one carrying a vaccine for the exploding zombie virus plaguing the city, and had to get from one side of the map to the other to evac out with it. Only, uh, the world was ending. Very chaotically. That is, every 30 seconds, Alex’s chaos mod would fire off another world-ending effect for Gray to deal with as he worked his way across Los Santos and the surrounding environs. Things like very low gravity, intense gravity, two levels of global warming (level one put a special bloom effect on everything; level two burned out all the engines in any cars Gray was near), the release of corrosive chemicals from Gray (killing the tires of any vehicle he was near – though, fortunately, not if he was IN the car at the time), the rise of the apes (ape friends with axes), two levels of alien contact (level one was a UFO trying to crush Gray; level two was an actual alien appearing and attacking him with an Up&Atomizer), storms, and the collapse of the sun (the sky went disconcertingly black). Oh, and if anyone knew he had the zombie vaccine, they swarmed him like devoted fans. XD Alex gave Gray a parachute, a regular gun, and a minigun to deal with all this nonsense at the start and told him “do what you must – and lol, no checkpoints.” XD
As you can imagine, what followed was the most ludicrous race across GTA V’s map probably ever. It took Gray multiple tries just to finally get out of the damn army base without being swarmed by adoring fans, nearly crushed by UFOs, and dealing with global warming destroying all the vehicles he could use to get going. And even when he did, stuff like aliens trying to probe him, black holes trying to suck him up, earthquakes slamming him into the ground, and rioters and looters shooting at him made his trip across Los Santos uniquely hellish. Not to mention all the times he ran into or was otherwise murdered by the damn explosive zombies. . .it took a lot of cars, a couple bikes (both motorized and otherwise), exploiting low gravity to float along a few times, a lot of dodging, and a few lucky breaks like the ax-wielding apes apparently considering Gray one of their own, but after who knows HOW long of fighting with the game, Gray managed to make it all the way over to the teleporter and get zapped onto an aircraft carrier, winning the challenge and turning off the chaos. Hooray! We’ll, uh, just ignore that the final bit of chaos said he was carrying a zombie virus. . .
Workout: Back on the bike again today, and back to Oxventure: Legacy of Dragons – “Corpse and Robbers!” After discovering that Richard was moving WAY too fast through the city for such a frail, gaunt dude, Merilwen reported this to the others and said that she feared that Richard was in fact a druid like herself, with Wildshape to turn into something that could move around fast – perhaps even a jackal, like Harris had suggested! The gang was like “oh, this could be a problem” and began wondering how to catch Richard – should they split the party to try and cover more ground and find him, or stay together and just try to follow his path?
And then a tremor shook the city, knocking over a few more turrets, and Giovanni started yelling that he wanted to talk to the management, essentially. Dob and Corazon both tried to get the other to go alone (Dob: “You’re the landlord;” Corazon: “You’re the one who always seems to want to die”), but eventually the whole party showed up to hear Giovanni’s complaint. Turns out Gio had been stiffed on his first dinner – he’d been promised 30 head of cattle, but when he’d gone out to the pen where the cattle were kept, he’d found it open and most of his dinner missing, with only one cow far off in the distance – and Gio wasn’t about to hunt it when dinner was supposed to be SERVED. The gang apologized, though they found themselves VERY SUSPICIOUS of that one remaining cow –
Cue Dob (on a nat twenty Strength/Athletics check) running over and TACKLING the cow, getting it in a headlock, and getting Prudence to fry it with an Agonizing Blast after learning from Merilwen they needed to knock the cow out (reduce it to zero hitpoints) to get it to change back to human shape if it was indeed a druid. One beam went off and hit Dob instead, but Prudence got the cow solidly with the other, and –
Nothing. Just a cow. Dob refused to bring the cow over to Giovanni to eat on the basis of him being a vegetarian (Merilwen was like “You just exploded it!”), so Egbert and Corazon went over to deliver it – Egbert, on a nine to lift it, lifted with his back and tweaked it, while Corazon, on a nat twenty, figured up how to fold it up for easy delivery, unfolding it for Gio and promising they’d find the other cattle and see what happened. Gio was willing to accept this and devoured the cow, and the others got Merilwen to use her Locate Creature spell to track down Richard –
Who was on a bench eating an apple. The gang surrounded him, with Merilwen trying to get Egbert to use “Cone” of Truth – Egbert explained that it was actually ZONE Of Truth (Merilwen pointing out that Egbert uses his spells so little, how was she supposed to know?) and that Richard would have to want to willingly enter it (Merilwen suddenly understood why Egbert used his spells so little XD). So instead Egbert grabbed Richard by the collar and hoisted him off his feet, while Corazon pulled his own “Cone of Truth” (a weird conical knife) out and threatened him with it. Richard professed to not know what they were talking about – sure, yes, he wanted everyone to move out of Mistmire and into Barrow Springs, but he wasn’t zipping around the city super-fast or killing any paladins or anything! Dob tried the apple he was eating – on a Wisdom/Insight check of nine, he thought briefly it was super-poisoned, but then it was revealed to just be an ordinary apple. Merilwen checked her spell – nope, they definitely had Richard. Dob got Prudence to Detect Magic in the general area to make sure their spells were working – yup, everything hunky-dory, her books are magic, she is magic, Corazon The Powerful Wizard is magic, Richard is NOT magic. . . Unsure what the hell was going on, the group chose to let Richard go and let Corazon tail him very sneakily.
What was going on was that Richard, once he thought he was out of sight of the group, turned into a jackal and ran off! Merilwen attempted to follow with Longstride, the spell that sounds cool but in fact just improves your speed by a light jog, and Corazon Greasing her up to try and help, but no dice, he was gone. HOWEVER, right then Gio caused another tremor and called out that he had another complaint – and when the gang went to see what was wrong, he said that he’d had dogs barking at him through a gap while he was trying to nap on his hoard. Corazon assured him that they hadn’t known about that, and Merilwen was able to squeeze through the gap in her Greasy state and found three jackals on the other side, who promptly darted off. Her attempt to cast Animal Friendship didn’t work, and her attempt to Speak With Animals caused one of them to yell back at her in COMMON to piss off –
So Merilwen, content these weren’t REAL animals, happily made some Spike Growth under them. Two of them were caught in the spikes and took some very nasty damage; one just avoided them, and then used one of his compatriots as a springboard to make it over! And when Merilwen went to investigate – well, I don’t know about the dead one, but the living one was definitely man-shaped. Merilwen called in her friends to help question the guy (which required them all to get Greased up to pop through the gap – Gio kindly covered his nose and said if they looked tasty, bring them back, he’d eat them), and they all demanded to know what was going on, Dob using Cure Wounds as a bit of leverage to keep the guy talking (and alive long enough to answer questions). Turns out that this guy, Richard, and their dead compatriot are all jackalweres (I assume the opposite of a werejackal – that is, they’re jackals who can be people), and they’re trying to get everyone to move out of Mistmire because they serve a lamia who wants to move in. Prudence, smashing a Wisdom/Insight check, was able to give them some good info on lamias as she used to have drinks with one – namely, they love to live in abandoned, ruined cities! And Mistmire, in its current state, is just on the verge of qualifying, if they can convince the people it’s too dangerous to stay. . . So yeah, that’s what the gang is up against for the final boss battle of this whole arc! We’ll see how this goes down, and how the gang deals with Richard and his mistress (and if they manage to keep Giovanni happy) tomorrow!
Other: We did play beanbags this afternoon, after I was done Simming and putting my clothes away and all that – and hooray, we all actually won one today! :) Dad sniped me in the first game with a last-minute eight; I managed to rally in the second game and keep my lead; and Mom finished off the last game with an eight just when she needed it! Final scores were me 2-W-3; Dad W-2-2; Mom 3-3-W. Maybe not the most even scores, but hooray for everyone getting one. :)
Whew! Busy day was busy. . .and now I have to get to bed because I'm back to work tomorrow! At least it's just another two days, and then I have a NON-cleaning weekend to work with. . .night all!
no subject
Date: 2023-05-11 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-12 03:52 am (UTC)