Usual Late Sunday Update
Jun. 11th, 2023 11:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickThough at least it's not absurdly late, and I'm not absurdly stressed out from it -- and I did get almost everything I wanted to get done today done --
Tumblr: As usual, not a perfect day on the old tumbls, but I got some important stuff done –
Victor Luvs Alice – Made some good progress on getting the Chill Valicer Save update for this week (Monday, which was them going back to the store and Victor getting his Copypasto on) done – got all six posts initially drafted with pictures, and one fully completed with text and tags, before lunch, then finished off the second and third posts after lunch and before Fallout 4! So I’m halfway through as of right now, and I fully expect I can do the other half tomorrow. :) Nice.
Valice Multiverse – Answered one ask reply that came in (things you can both during sex and a family dinner; answered that with Victor, Alice, and Smiler so the latter could make a slightly-raunchy joke XD), and that was about it. *shrug* Which is good, since, you know, Sunday, I’m always super busy in the evenings.
Fallout 4: Had a fun and chill day in the old Commonwealth today, listening to the in-game radio and picking up a bunch of Goodneighbor sidequests! Let me give you the deets –
A) We started, actually, outside the game itself, because I did something that I wasn’t sure I would ever do again – namely, I added a new mod to the game. I’ve always been leery about this ever since my initial mod experiments led to a game that crashed so much at the very beginning I stopped playing for a while, but with the Silver Shroud stuff officially on my radar, I wanted to add something specific – that something being “Silver Shroud Enhancement – With Intimidation!” This is a mod by Zorkaz, and it does things like add new armor levels to the costume; allow you to improve the hat (presumably with ballistic weave); and adds a little extra damage to the submachine gun against “baddies” (Triggermen, raiders, and super mutants) and gives it a 1-in-23 chance of intimidating opponents each time it’s fired. I really love the Silver Shroud costume and everything that comes with it when you do that quest (I may not have played through the whole thing myself yet, but I have seen it in LPs), and I wanted to keep the outfit and the gun viable for a little longer than in vanilla. Game has not exploded yet – we’ll see how well things go as we progress! (At least I made my backups yesterday. . .)
B) Anyway – in-game, I started at County Crossing, with a mission to get to Goodneighbor! And so, after dropping off a spare shotgun Victor was carrying for some reason with one of the settlers there (along with a bit of ammo), I had Victor and Ada set out into the foggy Commonwealth morning! The trip into Boston was uneventful, thankfully – the pair went over the bridge via the “random events” house wreckages (no Rust Devil sentry bots tooling around there today, fortunately!), around the boardwalk to the right of the Weatherby Savings and Loan building, up the bridge nearby and over the guardrail to drop down near Bunker Hill and the Sad Lady Ghoul House, then around and over the other bridge into Boston itself –
C) And just as Victor crossed said bridge (putting him right next to Cabot House, in fact – that’s handy to know), he picked up the Silver Shroud radio signal! I promptly had him tune in, leading him to catch Kent Connolly’s message asking any true Silver Shroud fans to come and see him and start that quest officially! So that was all sorted. . .
But I couldn’t resist continuing to listen to the radio, since I knew it does actually play a Silver Shroud serial if you do. So yeah, cue me hanging around the bridge and near Pickman’s Gallery for a while, listening to this fake radio show about the Silver Shroud and the Mistress of Mystery getting embroiled in what seems to be a dodgy real estate deal between the mayor (recently murdered by a pair of passing crooks at the meet point) and a mobster, but ends up being something much more complicated and ridiculous involving robots. In fact, it involves none other than The Mechanist, here a disillusioned human who thought robots were the future of the Commonwealth. (I won’t spoil who it is in this version in case you want to go check it out – I imagine it HAS to be on YouTube.) I tried turning it off for a while so I could actually, you know, keep going to get to Goodneighbor, but I couldn’t resist turning it back on again once I was sure I would keep the signal. It was just so utterly goofy I had to hear the whole thing. XD I would recommend giving it a listen if you can – it’s completely over-the-top and a really good time! If THIS wasn’t the main inspiration behind the “Atomic Radio” radio station mod, I don’t know what is. XD (Also, was able to confirm with this show that the Mistress of Mystery, Shroud’s fellow vigilante, uses a sword as her main weapon, which really makes me feel justified in sticking the “Fallout of Darkness” Malk!Alice and her Tal’Mehe’Ra blade in her dress. XD)
D) So, yeah, ended up listening to the Silver Shroud serial as Victor and Ada made their way past the Pickman Gallery, around the Old North Church, past Fanueil Hall (managing to JUST keep out of the way of a few super mutants wandering around), up and around the Old Corner Bookstore, and finally over past Mass Fusion – where, just as the final episode was finishing up, Victor and Ada were attacked by some Rust Devils and their robots. (Which, given this whole thing was about the Silver Shroud and Mistress of Mystery facing robots, did feel rather appropriate.) I went into the Pip-Boy so Victor could finish the story without being shot at multiple times, then shut off the radio and helped Ada take out the attacking party (er, when he wasn’t being called to answer the call of nature ^^; I swear, the bathroom needs of “Advanced Needs 2” always tend to fire at the most awkward times. . .). The group was fairly easily dispatched, even if they did get a few good hits on poor Victor – probably comes of not having a sentry bot with them. Those things are BITCHES.
E) Anyway – with Rust Devils dispatched and bodies looted, it was time to enter Goodneighbor! From the right direction for a change. XD Victor promptly hit up the shops, trading KLE0 the Rapid Advanced 10mm (a good gun, but I don’t use it at ALL anymore), the Staggering Overcharged Automatic Laser Rifle (not for me), and some spare ammo types he wasn’t using (2mm Electromagnetic rounds, gamma rounds, two mini-nukes, and enough 10mm ammo to make up the difference in caps) in exchange for all the .308 and .38 ammo she had in stock (ONE of those is the new ammo type for the final upgrade I can make to the Two-Shot Combat Rifle to make it even more hench, so I want to make sure I have plenty on hand) and Daisy some booze, some chems, some gumdrops, bubblegum, and more 10mm ammo for a bunch of junk with aluminum or fiberglass in it, along with two bags of fertilizer (Jamaica Plain will need it!). I also had Victor pick up her side quest, “Public Knowledge,” to clear the Boston Public Library of super mutants and return an old overdue book of hers – might as well while I was there, I figured!
F) And then, it was off to see Kent in the Memory Den! He and Victor had a nice talk, with him reminiscing about the Thanksgiving where his mother made a twelve-pound turkey and they all listened to “Silver Shroud vs Captain Cosmos” on the radio and Victor revealing that he himself was a fan pre-War and that (when Kent was like “wait, how did you listen to them when they were new”) explaining about his Vault’s situation. Kent told him that he wanted to bring the Silver Shroud to life to help strike fear into the hearts of the ne’er-do-wells around Goodneighbor – he’d already made himself a custom machine gun, but he needed the costume to really sell the part. And lucky for him, there’s one nearby, in the old Hubris Comics where they were filming the pilot of the troubled Silver Shroud TV show. Victor agreed to go get it for him, and that was that. :) Dunno if I’ll do that before or after checking out General Atomics, but it’s on the list!
G) With that sorted, and Victor starting to feel a little tired as the evening wore on, I had him do a little cooking at the cookpot outside the Hotel Rexford (making some ‘grape jelly’ out of strawberries and sugar, among other things), and then head to the hotel itself to rent a room – only to encounter one Rufus Rubins outside. Curious, I decided to have Victor talk to him – he asked what Victor thought of Goodneighbor (Victor said that it had changed a lot since the last time he’d been here – you know, pre-War), and introduced himself as a local mechanic, repairing things at the Rexford and spending his downtime at the Third Rail. And he said he had a job for Victor, if he was interested. Intrigued, Victor said he was, and Rufus explained that he was tired of the swill being served at the Third Rail, and had recently found a holotape of a brewing machine over at the Shamrock Taphouse that was SUPPOSED to be delivered to the Hotel Rexford – only the bombs came and it never happened. I immediately realized “oh, this is the quest to get Drinkin’ Buddy!” and – after having Victor ask what the catch for retrieving it was (Rufus saying “you’ll probably have to shoot your way in”) and if the equipment wouldn’t be kind of large (Rufus explaining it was apparently miniaturized – hey, Rufus, it’s not only miniature, it’s mobile and tells awful jokes) – had Victor accept the job and the “Trouble Brewin’” quest. XD Today was the day for all the Goodneighbor sidequests, it seems! :)
H) And with that, I sent Victor inside to rent his customary room at the Rexford (yeah, he could just camp outside, but renting a room gives him the Well Rested perk from sleeping in an actual bed in an actual building), head up, do a little last-minute inventory management (scrapping a bunch of armor pieces he didn’t need to free up room in his and Ada’s inventories) and snacking, then hit the sheets around 9:30 PM. I left it with him having just gotten up at 5:30 AM the next day, ready to head out and have more adventures! We’ll see what comes up first on the way to General Atomics. . .how does anyone get any of the main quest stuff done when there’s all this awesome sidequest stuff to do. . .
Writing: Time for another update on the FO4 Playthrough Progression, as per usual every Sunday! The fanfic version followed all the same beats as the actual play session above – Victor and company leaving County Crossing to head to Goodneighbor, discovering the Silver Shroud radio signal and Kent’s message, listening to the serial as it played out as they headed toward the actual settlement, fighting some Rust Devils outside Mass Fusion, doing some trading with KLE0 and Daisy once in Goodneighbor and taking up Daisy’s request to clear out the public library, meeting up with Kent in the Memory Den and agreeing to get him the Silver Shroud costume, and meeting up with Rufus and agreeing to get him his brewing equipment before staying the night at the Hotel Rexford. The major changes I made were to Kent’s message (he specifically asks for “the General of the Minutemen”) and moving the part where he reminisced about the Thanksgiving where his family all listened to “Silver Shroud vs Captain Cosmos” back to when Victor had his “moment” in the memory loungers (as that’s when the fanfic version met Kent – the dude heard the commotion, and gave Victor a Silver Shroud comic book to make him feel better, prompting them to bond as fans). And I made it obvious that he’s already planning on making Victor the Shroud, with Victor happily oblivious (though Alice sure as hell isn’t, and is deeply amused). But yeah, other than that and the minor changes of everyone reacting to The Mechanist being the villain of that particular Silver Shroud serial, and of Rufus telling Victor he’s pretty sure there may be super mutants in the Shamrock Taphouse (and advising he could get some help from a Minuteman patrol now that they’re back, which, he could – actually, you know what, I have yet to ever USE the flare gun that spawns some Minutemen to help you. . .), pretty much the same as what happened above! Honestly, I don’t expect any MAJOR changes until Victor gets to the Institute, because – well. In my head, Bunker Hill should happen a lot later than it actually does, and you should be able to travel with X6-88 a lot sooner than you actually can. . .
YouTube: Well, the ideal was to watch OXBox, Gray, and Jon, but we only got two-thirds of the way there – however, this week, I chose to focus on OXBOX over Gray, as I REALLY wanted to watch the next episode of the RE4 Remake playthrough (instead of having them pile up and then having to binge them again), and I figured it would be easy enough to catch up on Gray given I get out early tomorrow and then have the next two days after it off. XD Sooo –
A) First up, from OXBox – “Resident Evil 4 Remake: MINECART RIDE WHEE | Let's Play Resident Evil 4 Chapter 11!” Featuring Luis giving Leon some suppressant to keep his plagas from controlling him for a while before its too late; the pair having to navigate an old mine full of plagas-infected villagers; a boss battle against TWO El Gigantes (one armored, one not), where Luis had to save Leon’s ass with some dynamite and one had to be dunked into the molten metal in the pit below the smelting station/boss arena, Terminator 2-style; TWO wild mine cart rides where Leon had to help Luis lean to keep the carts on the tracks while also shooting out obstacles and enemies flying past on other mine carts (which included the chainsaw guy!); a trip through the mine where they dug up the bugs (which, as you might imagine, involved a lot of those disgusting bugs); and finally Luis getting stabbed by Krauser, Leon having a knife fight with his old mentor while we got his backstory, and Luis doing a last-minute save for Leon before dying tragically with one last smoke and asking if Leon though people could truly change. :( Also featured Andy versus Mike and Jane about if the plagas-infected people were experiencing true happiness or not after they found a diary from one of the infected saying “digging makes me happy” after infection (Andy was of the opinion that if a parasite is controlling your brain, IT’S NOT HAPPINESS); the gang continually making fun of Luis for not being as useful as he could while also continuing to lust after his cool jacket; Andy enjoying all the Don Quixote references Luis kept making, and joking that Leon just plain didn’t understand them; Mike LOVING the mine cart sections, calling one particular long jump “sick :D”; the gang making an absolutely HILARIOUS picture of Luis and Leon coming to the end of the first section made to look like a photo op from a thrill ride – “I had a nice time in the Plagas Mine” XD; everyone making fun of the chainsaw guy riding in a mine cart in the second section – at least, until he DID get close enough to actually hit them and end the run in a pile of gore; everyone continuing to hate the awful bug monsters and their awful camouflage; Mike loving the flip Leon did every time he successfully evaded Krauser’s blade in the knife fight; and everyone joking about how smoking will kill you as Luis had his final cigarette and getting sad that Leon didn’t really hold Luis’s hand at the end (though he DID put the lighter back into it and then close Luis’s fingers over it, which – does feel pretty much just as intimate). Good stuff, even if Luis’s death is some rough stuff (and even rougher when you have a tumblr friend who really ships Leon/Luis). But I’m looking forward to Chapter 12!
B) And then, from Jon – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 33 - Quoth The Raven Rock!” The episode in which the plot starts getting serious, because this is the one where your player character is captured on their way out of Vault 87 and dragged to Raven Rock, the Enclave base, where they learn about the rift between President Eden and Colonel Autumn, can either blow up Eden (as he is a computer) or accept the vial of FEV he offers you to poison Project Purity’s water supply and kill off all mutated people in the wasteland (which is – basically everyone), then escape the base and reunite with Fawkes, everyone’s favorite super mutant companion (if they’re morally good enough). Here’s the highlights of Jon’s trip through this very plot-important area –
I. You can actually die right at the start of the dungeon if you get the brilliant idea to just cooperate with Autumn! You wake up with him interrogating you as to the code to activate Project Purity (which they have gotten working off-camera), and if you give him the correct code (216, your late mother’s favorite Bible verse), he’ll tell it to his subordinate, they’ll get the purifier activated, and then he just straight-up shoots you despite hinting he’d let you go if you cooperated. Basically, if you decide to play nice, you get a special game over. Don’t play nice with the game’s villains.
II. Once you’re released by President Eden so you can come meet him in his office, you’ll run into an Enclave officer who naturally doesn’t realize that the president himself let you out. Depending on your stats, you can charm or intimidate your way past him, but Jon prefers to use the speech check option, because if you pass, the dude checks in directly with President Eden, and gets a somewhat amusing dressing down where we learn he actually has a name, Lieutenant Williams. And that he is getting reassigned for daring to contact Eden directly. :p Welp, sucks to be you, Williams!
III. You get to wander freely around Raven Rock for a little bit after this, Eden sending out a base-wide message that you’ve been invited up to speak to him so DON’T try to kill you, but unfortunately, there’s not a heck of a lot to see – Raven Rock is in fact a rather small dungeon with not that many rooms and almost NO terminals – just a couple used to take down security barriers, and one with a note on it from the people trying to mind-control deathclaws (next to a deathclaw cage you can open). There’s not even any terminals in their research lab! The locals are also not interested in chatting, and there’s just not much you can do to learn about the enclave. Jon is very disappointed in it and considers it one of the weakest areas in a game he otherwise loves.
IV. That being said, there are a few nice bits of enviromental storytelling to encounter before Colonel Autumn comes on the intercom and orders everyone to kill you again –
-->If you explore the other holding cells in the initial area, you’ll find all of them are empty except one. That one contains an incidental character you may have run into in Megaton – a guy named Nathan. When you meet him originally, he is a total Enclave fanboy. In the cells. . .yeah, being locked up by the people he so admired has made him change his tune and tell the player character to run for it. Poor guy.
-->Going into the lab spaces will show all the biological samples they’ve picked up from the wasteland (mostly feral ghouls, with some super mutants and brahmin heads and whatnot), being held in stasis tubes for study. It’s creepy, but neat.
-->There’s a certain spot in the corridors where a certain soldier is patrolling, constantly sensing disturbances – this is because there is a radroach infestation in this room, under the floor. They’ve set up laser traps attacked to flamethrowers, but hilariously put them up JUST high enough that the radroaches can fit under them. You can go under the floor and solve their radroach problem for them if you like. . .or you can deliberately set off the flamethrowers and watch the guy above get knocked down and set alight repeatedly until he dies. XD Look, they’re genocidal bastards and not real, I’m allowed to enjoy this. :p
-->And if you go under the floor in the mess hall (a smart move, as it’s one of the areas that will trigger Autumn to come on and tell everyone to shoot you on sight, you’ll find a whole mess of various bits of cutlery down there, as the floor is a grate and every time someone drops a fork or a knife, it just tumbles through the gaps and into the rock below. Jon thinks that’s a nice little touch. XD
V. Oh, and an interesting little tidbit that Jon pointed out as he hacked a terminal to open a security barrier and get some goodies – in FO3, terminals get easier to hack the higher your Science skill is over the minimum to even attempt it. Example being, the terminal he was hacking was average (requiring 50 Science skill to try), and his skill was 67. Meaning he only had five possible passwords to guess, meaning he was almost certain to get it right even if he guessed randomly. And using the fun “remove dud” code dropped that down to four, meaning he was sure to get it. A nice touch!
VI. Eventually, of course, Colonel Autumn tells everyone to kill you again, and you have to fight your way through the halls – but as it turns out, there is one still-friendly person in a side room that you might want to meet – one Anna Holt! This is the missing scientist from Dr. Li’s team, who disappeared while she and the others were escaping the Enclave after they took over Project Purity. Turns out she was captured by the Enclave. . .and after realizing they were working with better technology than Dr. Li could pick up from the Wasteland, defected to them and is now a member in good standing. Meaning she’s the reason they’ve gotten Project Purity mostly working – she told them everything she knew about it. Your character can try to dress her down about it, but she insists it’s nothing personal and that she feels she can make the most difference working with the Enclave. And she’s not about to risk being locked out of their labs by being seen talking to you. And if you try to kill her, you actually lose karma (though Jon isn’t sure if this is because of tough philosophical questions or Bethesda just not correctly assigning karma tags). Personally, I find this kind of interesting, because – being a Fallout 4 main – Dr. Li is going to do something kind of similar when she breaks from the Brotherhood of Steel and joins the Institute, with the main difference being she really wanted to make a difference, and is annoyed that her work in the Institute doesn’t seem to be actually HELPING anyone, while Holt seems to be mainly into playing with the Enclave tech. (Though it still annoys me that you can’t have Dr. Li join either the Railroad or the Minutemen should you let her know about some of the Institute’s horrible truths. She doesn’t like the Brotherhood, let her join a different team!)
VII. You eventually make it to President Eden, who, as previously stated, is in fact a giant supercomputer who wants to enlist you to help him with a project – mainly, using Project Purity to eliminate all the mutated creatures and people in the Wasteland by infecting the water with a modified FEV virus (something that Colonel Autumn feels is a step too far, leading to their current rift). Again, this is a big moment in the game, but Jon feels like it’s let down by the execution – there’s only so many dialogue options you have with Eden, and he gives rather vague answers to all of them (in contrast to Richardson from Fallout 2, who apparently can chat with you for AGES about the Enclave and their business). You learn that he is obsessed with the idea of “saving America” by clearing mutations (never mind that a lot of innocent people would die, because there’s like NO ONE around who hasn’t been SLIGHTLY mutated by the radiation – the ghouls and super mutants just show it more) and he and Autumn don’t see eye-to-eye on this, but that’s about it. Jon wants more, damn it! There’s also a missed opportunity where he offers to make YOU his colonel if you do poison the water supply, but said offer doesn’t go anywhere – however, Jon thinks this is just because the game was originally designed to end with the player character dying to start Project Purity, and they didn’t bother to update the game appropriately once they added in Broken Steel and found a way to keep the player alive for a post-end-game. Still a shame that it’s not an option for the evil Enclave players!
VIII. Now, in the base game, there is an expectation that you’re going to blow up Eden for being a genocidal computer – there’s both speech checks and Intelligence checks in the conversation to get him to self-destruct, and a holotape that will destroy his mainframe in Colonel Autumn’s bedroom (which you have to be sure to visit before hitting Eden’s office, because it also has the Energy Weapons bobblehead). To the point where, if you DON’T blow up Eden – you just take the vial he offers you so he’ll unlock the door – the game will ACT as if you chose to blow up Eden once you re-enter the base, and there will be doors exploding and people flying everywhere and general chaos (though the game will realize “oh, wait, no, Eden’s still alive, countermand all that” once you get outside). Jon deliberately chose not to blow up Eden to show off this bug –
Only to find that the mod authors had fixed it. Whoops. XD Ah well, Jon, you couldn’t have known!
IX. There are some fun things to note during your final escape from the base, however – as previously stated, there is a deathclaw cage you can open along the way, with a deathclaw that gets a unique “escaping” animation and is actually totally chill with your presence because you saved it. AND if you make sure to take down the final security barrier hiding a weapons and ammo cache from you, you can get a guaranteed GATLING LASER. You know, like the one Fawkes is using on the enemies outside when you get out there. XD A great gun if you’re into big guns (and especially if you’re traveling with Fawkes and thus have his perk where they’re easier to use and do a bit more damage).
X. And with the end game of the main story looming, Jon decided to show off a few little things that were available for him and Wanda to discover now –
-->Nathan’s wife, back in Megaton, DOES ask you if you’ve seen her missing husband – though she doesn’t sound particularly worried about him, and there’s no option to tell her where he is (or was, if you blew up the base). You also can’t tell anyone about Anna Holt, sadly.
-->If you go back to Little Lamplight at this point in base game, you CAN finally finish the story about your own adventures that you were telling local storytelling Knock Knock, detailing your escape from the Enclave (because, again, you’re expected to die in the endgame and thus can’t fill her in on THAT part)! However, when Jon tried it, he found that he couldn’t give her an update – he attributed it to Fallout 3 bugging out, but the comments suggested that maybe “Tale of Two Wastelands” moved it to the post-end-game as now you CAN survive to see that thanks to Broken Steel (which did not patch it on its own). We’ll find out, I guess!
-->And if you use Little Lamplight to re-enter Vault 87 and go through it again, you can go through the door that Colonel Autumn walked through to find an extra room that leads you to the vault’s main door. There’s nothing special in it, though, and in base game opening the vault door just leads to a horrible black void that teleports you back to Fawkes’s cell. However, TTW actually creates a little area just beyond the door and even puts a corpse in it with a master key, allowing you to unlock the (still highly irradiated) main door and just walk out that, allowing you FINALLY completely traverse the vault. Cool. :D
And so the episode ended with everything getting just a little too heavy for Wanda, so she’s going on vacation again! AKA, Jon has a few things he wants to check out in New Vegas, and now seems the time to do it. XD So it’s off to the West Coast on the train next week – that should be a fun trip! I look forward to seeing what exactly it is he wants to do out there. . .
Workout: Back on the bike this Sunday, and back to James Turner’s High School Years Rags To Riches Generational Epic – “I got detention on day 2! High School Years (Part 34)” Highlights of this episode included –
A) As stated by the title, Addison getting detention! Yes, they ended up skipping their first class of the day in order to improve their Mischief skill by pranking the lunch lady – though as it turned out, the principal refused to actually come into the lunch room and catch them, so James had to send them to prank HER in order to get caught and get detention. *shrug* It was in service of their aspiration! And they got a level of Mischief skill out of it, so that was good.
B) Oh, and as you might have guessed from me suddenly using “they” pronouns for Addison, James decided that, since we have the ability to set pronouns for Sims now, he wanted Addison to be non-binary! :) So that’s cool. He just asked for patience if and when he screwed up the pronouns – as he pointed out, he regularly screws up their NAMES (he’d in fact called Addison “Reginald” earlier in the episode), so yeah. He also asked for advice on properly representing a non-binary person in the game at the end of the episode, which was nice.
C) Addison also did some sneaking out later, reconnecting with their best buddy Hilary Price and inviting her to the prom as a friend (and developing a crush on her in the process) before taking her to ThrifTea to have a snack and select a prom outfit (they decided on a hilarious floral suit jacket and matching SHORTS, proving they get their fashion sense from Kevin). XD They gotta live up to their prankster nature!
D) As for Brianne, James decided she should be friends with the Price’s younger kid, Forrest, and sent her over on Easter (after unsuccessfully trying to follow Addison to high school), having them get to know each other before sending them to play together in the park, aww. :) It was very sweet.
E) Except that that One Teacher from the high school was there (the one who is Erratic and thus got naked to go shower in the rain IN A CLASSROOM RIGHT IN FRONT OF SIDNEY), so James brought Reginald to try and “take care of” the guy. This – did not go according to plan, with attempts to Inferniate and ZipZap him at the park just leaving him scorched and stinky, and when Reginald lured him to his thrift store and tried to trap him in a specially-built room, he could not kill him by Inferniating objects in there with him (he just put them out before the flames could spread) nor get him to drown in a small pool (too cold to swim)! It seems that if Reginald wants to keep his kids safe from this bastard, he will have to do so in another way. . .
Yeah – kind of a weird episode. XD But it was fun, and I look forward to watching more later!
Other: We actually got to play beanbags this Sunday! :D Weather was gorgeous with no rain or horrible smoke in sight for a change, so we got out the game and played a few rounds (though only three instead of our usual weekend five because we started kinda late). And let me tell you, not playing for at least a week seems to have given Mom an edge and caused Dad to completely lose his. XD She utterly smoked both him and me, while I managed to claw out second every time thanks to some good throws. Final scores were me 2-2-2; Dad 3-3-3; and Mom W-W-W. I guess that makes up for every time she’s come last before! We’ll see if we get to play tomorrow and what happens then.
So yeah, a pretty nice, productive day! :) And now I have to head to bed so I can get through my one, slightly shorter day of work (and getting gas) before my extra time off. XD Hopefully it won't be anything too bad -- night all!
Tumblr: As usual, not a perfect day on the old tumbls, but I got some important stuff done –
Victor Luvs Alice – Made some good progress on getting the Chill Valicer Save update for this week (Monday, which was them going back to the store and Victor getting his Copypasto on) done – got all six posts initially drafted with pictures, and one fully completed with text and tags, before lunch, then finished off the second and third posts after lunch and before Fallout 4! So I’m halfway through as of right now, and I fully expect I can do the other half tomorrow. :) Nice.
Valice Multiverse – Answered one ask reply that came in (things you can both during sex and a family dinner; answered that with Victor, Alice, and Smiler so the latter could make a slightly-raunchy joke XD), and that was about it. *shrug* Which is good, since, you know, Sunday, I’m always super busy in the evenings.
Fallout 4: Had a fun and chill day in the old Commonwealth today, listening to the in-game radio and picking up a bunch of Goodneighbor sidequests! Let me give you the deets –
A) We started, actually, outside the game itself, because I did something that I wasn’t sure I would ever do again – namely, I added a new mod to the game. I’ve always been leery about this ever since my initial mod experiments led to a game that crashed so much at the very beginning I stopped playing for a while, but with the Silver Shroud stuff officially on my radar, I wanted to add something specific – that something being “Silver Shroud Enhancement – With Intimidation!” This is a mod by Zorkaz, and it does things like add new armor levels to the costume; allow you to improve the hat (presumably with ballistic weave); and adds a little extra damage to the submachine gun against “baddies” (Triggermen, raiders, and super mutants) and gives it a 1-in-23 chance of intimidating opponents each time it’s fired. I really love the Silver Shroud costume and everything that comes with it when you do that quest (I may not have played through the whole thing myself yet, but I have seen it in LPs), and I wanted to keep the outfit and the gun viable for a little longer than in vanilla. Game has not exploded yet – we’ll see how well things go as we progress! (At least I made my backups yesterday. . .)
B) Anyway – in-game, I started at County Crossing, with a mission to get to Goodneighbor! And so, after dropping off a spare shotgun Victor was carrying for some reason with one of the settlers there (along with a bit of ammo), I had Victor and Ada set out into the foggy Commonwealth morning! The trip into Boston was uneventful, thankfully – the pair went over the bridge via the “random events” house wreckages (no Rust Devil sentry bots tooling around there today, fortunately!), around the boardwalk to the right of the Weatherby Savings and Loan building, up the bridge nearby and over the guardrail to drop down near Bunker Hill and the Sad Lady Ghoul House, then around and over the other bridge into Boston itself –
C) And just as Victor crossed said bridge (putting him right next to Cabot House, in fact – that’s handy to know), he picked up the Silver Shroud radio signal! I promptly had him tune in, leading him to catch Kent Connolly’s message asking any true Silver Shroud fans to come and see him and start that quest officially! So that was all sorted. . .
But I couldn’t resist continuing to listen to the radio, since I knew it does actually play a Silver Shroud serial if you do. So yeah, cue me hanging around the bridge and near Pickman’s Gallery for a while, listening to this fake radio show about the Silver Shroud and the Mistress of Mystery getting embroiled in what seems to be a dodgy real estate deal between the mayor (recently murdered by a pair of passing crooks at the meet point) and a mobster, but ends up being something much more complicated and ridiculous involving robots. In fact, it involves none other than The Mechanist, here a disillusioned human who thought robots were the future of the Commonwealth. (I won’t spoil who it is in this version in case you want to go check it out – I imagine it HAS to be on YouTube.) I tried turning it off for a while so I could actually, you know, keep going to get to Goodneighbor, but I couldn’t resist turning it back on again once I was sure I would keep the signal. It was just so utterly goofy I had to hear the whole thing. XD I would recommend giving it a listen if you can – it’s completely over-the-top and a really good time! If THIS wasn’t the main inspiration behind the “Atomic Radio” radio station mod, I don’t know what is. XD (Also, was able to confirm with this show that the Mistress of Mystery, Shroud’s fellow vigilante, uses a sword as her main weapon, which really makes me feel justified in sticking the “Fallout of Darkness” Malk!Alice and her Tal’Mehe’Ra blade in her dress. XD)
D) So, yeah, ended up listening to the Silver Shroud serial as Victor and Ada made their way past the Pickman Gallery, around the Old North Church, past Fanueil Hall (managing to JUST keep out of the way of a few super mutants wandering around), up and around the Old Corner Bookstore, and finally over past Mass Fusion – where, just as the final episode was finishing up, Victor and Ada were attacked by some Rust Devils and their robots. (Which, given this whole thing was about the Silver Shroud and Mistress of Mystery facing robots, did feel rather appropriate.) I went into the Pip-Boy so Victor could finish the story without being shot at multiple times, then shut off the radio and helped Ada take out the attacking party (er, when he wasn’t being called to answer the call of nature ^^; I swear, the bathroom needs of “Advanced Needs 2” always tend to fire at the most awkward times. . .). The group was fairly easily dispatched, even if they did get a few good hits on poor Victor – probably comes of not having a sentry bot with them. Those things are BITCHES.
E) Anyway – with Rust Devils dispatched and bodies looted, it was time to enter Goodneighbor! From the right direction for a change. XD Victor promptly hit up the shops, trading KLE0 the Rapid Advanced 10mm (a good gun, but I don’t use it at ALL anymore), the Staggering Overcharged Automatic Laser Rifle (not for me), and some spare ammo types he wasn’t using (2mm Electromagnetic rounds, gamma rounds, two mini-nukes, and enough 10mm ammo to make up the difference in caps) in exchange for all the .308 and .38 ammo she had in stock (ONE of those is the new ammo type for the final upgrade I can make to the Two-Shot Combat Rifle to make it even more hench, so I want to make sure I have plenty on hand) and Daisy some booze, some chems, some gumdrops, bubblegum, and more 10mm ammo for a bunch of junk with aluminum or fiberglass in it, along with two bags of fertilizer (Jamaica Plain will need it!). I also had Victor pick up her side quest, “Public Knowledge,” to clear the Boston Public Library of super mutants and return an old overdue book of hers – might as well while I was there, I figured!
F) And then, it was off to see Kent in the Memory Den! He and Victor had a nice talk, with him reminiscing about the Thanksgiving where his mother made a twelve-pound turkey and they all listened to “Silver Shroud vs Captain Cosmos” on the radio and Victor revealing that he himself was a fan pre-War and that (when Kent was like “wait, how did you listen to them when they were new”) explaining about his Vault’s situation. Kent told him that he wanted to bring the Silver Shroud to life to help strike fear into the hearts of the ne’er-do-wells around Goodneighbor – he’d already made himself a custom machine gun, but he needed the costume to really sell the part. And lucky for him, there’s one nearby, in the old Hubris Comics where they were filming the pilot of the troubled Silver Shroud TV show. Victor agreed to go get it for him, and that was that. :) Dunno if I’ll do that before or after checking out General Atomics, but it’s on the list!
G) With that sorted, and Victor starting to feel a little tired as the evening wore on, I had him do a little cooking at the cookpot outside the Hotel Rexford (making some ‘grape jelly’ out of strawberries and sugar, among other things), and then head to the hotel itself to rent a room – only to encounter one Rufus Rubins outside. Curious, I decided to have Victor talk to him – he asked what Victor thought of Goodneighbor (Victor said that it had changed a lot since the last time he’d been here – you know, pre-War), and introduced himself as a local mechanic, repairing things at the Rexford and spending his downtime at the Third Rail. And he said he had a job for Victor, if he was interested. Intrigued, Victor said he was, and Rufus explained that he was tired of the swill being served at the Third Rail, and had recently found a holotape of a brewing machine over at the Shamrock Taphouse that was SUPPOSED to be delivered to the Hotel Rexford – only the bombs came and it never happened. I immediately realized “oh, this is the quest to get Drinkin’ Buddy!” and – after having Victor ask what the catch for retrieving it was (Rufus saying “you’ll probably have to shoot your way in”) and if the equipment wouldn’t be kind of large (Rufus explaining it was apparently miniaturized – hey, Rufus, it’s not only miniature, it’s mobile and tells awful jokes) – had Victor accept the job and the “Trouble Brewin’” quest. XD Today was the day for all the Goodneighbor sidequests, it seems! :)
H) And with that, I sent Victor inside to rent his customary room at the Rexford (yeah, he could just camp outside, but renting a room gives him the Well Rested perk from sleeping in an actual bed in an actual building), head up, do a little last-minute inventory management (scrapping a bunch of armor pieces he didn’t need to free up room in his and Ada’s inventories) and snacking, then hit the sheets around 9:30 PM. I left it with him having just gotten up at 5:30 AM the next day, ready to head out and have more adventures! We’ll see what comes up first on the way to General Atomics. . .how does anyone get any of the main quest stuff done when there’s all this awesome sidequest stuff to do. . .
Writing: Time for another update on the FO4 Playthrough Progression, as per usual every Sunday! The fanfic version followed all the same beats as the actual play session above – Victor and company leaving County Crossing to head to Goodneighbor, discovering the Silver Shroud radio signal and Kent’s message, listening to the serial as it played out as they headed toward the actual settlement, fighting some Rust Devils outside Mass Fusion, doing some trading with KLE0 and Daisy once in Goodneighbor and taking up Daisy’s request to clear out the public library, meeting up with Kent in the Memory Den and agreeing to get him the Silver Shroud costume, and meeting up with Rufus and agreeing to get him his brewing equipment before staying the night at the Hotel Rexford. The major changes I made were to Kent’s message (he specifically asks for “the General of the Minutemen”) and moving the part where he reminisced about the Thanksgiving where his family all listened to “Silver Shroud vs Captain Cosmos” back to when Victor had his “moment” in the memory loungers (as that’s when the fanfic version met Kent – the dude heard the commotion, and gave Victor a Silver Shroud comic book to make him feel better, prompting them to bond as fans). And I made it obvious that he’s already planning on making Victor the Shroud, with Victor happily oblivious (though Alice sure as hell isn’t, and is deeply amused). But yeah, other than that and the minor changes of everyone reacting to The Mechanist being the villain of that particular Silver Shroud serial, and of Rufus telling Victor he’s pretty sure there may be super mutants in the Shamrock Taphouse (and advising he could get some help from a Minuteman patrol now that they’re back, which, he could – actually, you know what, I have yet to ever USE the flare gun that spawns some Minutemen to help you. . .), pretty much the same as what happened above! Honestly, I don’t expect any MAJOR changes until Victor gets to the Institute, because – well. In my head, Bunker Hill should happen a lot later than it actually does, and you should be able to travel with X6-88 a lot sooner than you actually can. . .
YouTube: Well, the ideal was to watch OXBox, Gray, and Jon, but we only got two-thirds of the way there – however, this week, I chose to focus on OXBOX over Gray, as I REALLY wanted to watch the next episode of the RE4 Remake playthrough (instead of having them pile up and then having to binge them again), and I figured it would be easy enough to catch up on Gray given I get out early tomorrow and then have the next two days after it off. XD Sooo –
A) First up, from OXBox – “Resident Evil 4 Remake: MINECART RIDE WHEE | Let's Play Resident Evil 4 Chapter 11!” Featuring Luis giving Leon some suppressant to keep his plagas from controlling him for a while before its too late; the pair having to navigate an old mine full of plagas-infected villagers; a boss battle against TWO El Gigantes (one armored, one not), where Luis had to save Leon’s ass with some dynamite and one had to be dunked into the molten metal in the pit below the smelting station/boss arena, Terminator 2-style; TWO wild mine cart rides where Leon had to help Luis lean to keep the carts on the tracks while also shooting out obstacles and enemies flying past on other mine carts (which included the chainsaw guy!); a trip through the mine where they dug up the bugs (which, as you might imagine, involved a lot of those disgusting bugs); and finally Luis getting stabbed by Krauser, Leon having a knife fight with his old mentor while we got his backstory, and Luis doing a last-minute save for Leon before dying tragically with one last smoke and asking if Leon though people could truly change. :( Also featured Andy versus Mike and Jane about if the plagas-infected people were experiencing true happiness or not after they found a diary from one of the infected saying “digging makes me happy” after infection (Andy was of the opinion that if a parasite is controlling your brain, IT’S NOT HAPPINESS); the gang continually making fun of Luis for not being as useful as he could while also continuing to lust after his cool jacket; Andy enjoying all the Don Quixote references Luis kept making, and joking that Leon just plain didn’t understand them; Mike LOVING the mine cart sections, calling one particular long jump “sick :D”; the gang making an absolutely HILARIOUS picture of Luis and Leon coming to the end of the first section made to look like a photo op from a thrill ride – “I had a nice time in the Plagas Mine” XD; everyone making fun of the chainsaw guy riding in a mine cart in the second section – at least, until he DID get close enough to actually hit them and end the run in a pile of gore; everyone continuing to hate the awful bug monsters and their awful camouflage; Mike loving the flip Leon did every time he successfully evaded Krauser’s blade in the knife fight; and everyone joking about how smoking will kill you as Luis had his final cigarette and getting sad that Leon didn’t really hold Luis’s hand at the end (though he DID put the lighter back into it and then close Luis’s fingers over it, which – does feel pretty much just as intimate). Good stuff, even if Luis’s death is some rough stuff (and even rougher when you have a tumblr friend who really ships Leon/Luis). But I’m looking forward to Chapter 12!
B) And then, from Jon – “Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands - Part 33 - Quoth The Raven Rock!” The episode in which the plot starts getting serious, because this is the one where your player character is captured on their way out of Vault 87 and dragged to Raven Rock, the Enclave base, where they learn about the rift between President Eden and Colonel Autumn, can either blow up Eden (as he is a computer) or accept the vial of FEV he offers you to poison Project Purity’s water supply and kill off all mutated people in the wasteland (which is – basically everyone), then escape the base and reunite with Fawkes, everyone’s favorite super mutant companion (if they’re morally good enough). Here’s the highlights of Jon’s trip through this very plot-important area –
I. You can actually die right at the start of the dungeon if you get the brilliant idea to just cooperate with Autumn! You wake up with him interrogating you as to the code to activate Project Purity (which they have gotten working off-camera), and if you give him the correct code (216, your late mother’s favorite Bible verse), he’ll tell it to his subordinate, they’ll get the purifier activated, and then he just straight-up shoots you despite hinting he’d let you go if you cooperated. Basically, if you decide to play nice, you get a special game over. Don’t play nice with the game’s villains.
II. Once you’re released by President Eden so you can come meet him in his office, you’ll run into an Enclave officer who naturally doesn’t realize that the president himself let you out. Depending on your stats, you can charm or intimidate your way past him, but Jon prefers to use the speech check option, because if you pass, the dude checks in directly with President Eden, and gets a somewhat amusing dressing down where we learn he actually has a name, Lieutenant Williams. And that he is getting reassigned for daring to contact Eden directly. :p Welp, sucks to be you, Williams!
III. You get to wander freely around Raven Rock for a little bit after this, Eden sending out a base-wide message that you’ve been invited up to speak to him so DON’T try to kill you, but unfortunately, there’s not a heck of a lot to see – Raven Rock is in fact a rather small dungeon with not that many rooms and almost NO terminals – just a couple used to take down security barriers, and one with a note on it from the people trying to mind-control deathclaws (next to a deathclaw cage you can open). There’s not even any terminals in their research lab! The locals are also not interested in chatting, and there’s just not much you can do to learn about the enclave. Jon is very disappointed in it and considers it one of the weakest areas in a game he otherwise loves.
IV. That being said, there are a few nice bits of enviromental storytelling to encounter before Colonel Autumn comes on the intercom and orders everyone to kill you again –
-->If you explore the other holding cells in the initial area, you’ll find all of them are empty except one. That one contains an incidental character you may have run into in Megaton – a guy named Nathan. When you meet him originally, he is a total Enclave fanboy. In the cells. . .yeah, being locked up by the people he so admired has made him change his tune and tell the player character to run for it. Poor guy.
-->Going into the lab spaces will show all the biological samples they’ve picked up from the wasteland (mostly feral ghouls, with some super mutants and brahmin heads and whatnot), being held in stasis tubes for study. It’s creepy, but neat.
-->There’s a certain spot in the corridors where a certain soldier is patrolling, constantly sensing disturbances – this is because there is a radroach infestation in this room, under the floor. They’ve set up laser traps attacked to flamethrowers, but hilariously put them up JUST high enough that the radroaches can fit under them. You can go under the floor and solve their radroach problem for them if you like. . .or you can deliberately set off the flamethrowers and watch the guy above get knocked down and set alight repeatedly until he dies. XD Look, they’re genocidal bastards and not real, I’m allowed to enjoy this. :p
-->And if you go under the floor in the mess hall (a smart move, as it’s one of the areas that will trigger Autumn to come on and tell everyone to shoot you on sight, you’ll find a whole mess of various bits of cutlery down there, as the floor is a grate and every time someone drops a fork or a knife, it just tumbles through the gaps and into the rock below. Jon thinks that’s a nice little touch. XD
V. Oh, and an interesting little tidbit that Jon pointed out as he hacked a terminal to open a security barrier and get some goodies – in FO3, terminals get easier to hack the higher your Science skill is over the minimum to even attempt it. Example being, the terminal he was hacking was average (requiring 50 Science skill to try), and his skill was 67. Meaning he only had five possible passwords to guess, meaning he was almost certain to get it right even if he guessed randomly. And using the fun “remove dud” code dropped that down to four, meaning he was sure to get it. A nice touch!
VI. Eventually, of course, Colonel Autumn tells everyone to kill you again, and you have to fight your way through the halls – but as it turns out, there is one still-friendly person in a side room that you might want to meet – one Anna Holt! This is the missing scientist from Dr. Li’s team, who disappeared while she and the others were escaping the Enclave after they took over Project Purity. Turns out she was captured by the Enclave. . .and after realizing they were working with better technology than Dr. Li could pick up from the Wasteland, defected to them and is now a member in good standing. Meaning she’s the reason they’ve gotten Project Purity mostly working – she told them everything she knew about it. Your character can try to dress her down about it, but she insists it’s nothing personal and that she feels she can make the most difference working with the Enclave. And she’s not about to risk being locked out of their labs by being seen talking to you. And if you try to kill her, you actually lose karma (though Jon isn’t sure if this is because of tough philosophical questions or Bethesda just not correctly assigning karma tags). Personally, I find this kind of interesting, because – being a Fallout 4 main – Dr. Li is going to do something kind of similar when she breaks from the Brotherhood of Steel and joins the Institute, with the main difference being she really wanted to make a difference, and is annoyed that her work in the Institute doesn’t seem to be actually HELPING anyone, while Holt seems to be mainly into playing with the Enclave tech. (Though it still annoys me that you can’t have Dr. Li join either the Railroad or the Minutemen should you let her know about some of the Institute’s horrible truths. She doesn’t like the Brotherhood, let her join a different team!)
VII. You eventually make it to President Eden, who, as previously stated, is in fact a giant supercomputer who wants to enlist you to help him with a project – mainly, using Project Purity to eliminate all the mutated creatures and people in the Wasteland by infecting the water with a modified FEV virus (something that Colonel Autumn feels is a step too far, leading to their current rift). Again, this is a big moment in the game, but Jon feels like it’s let down by the execution – there’s only so many dialogue options you have with Eden, and he gives rather vague answers to all of them (in contrast to Richardson from Fallout 2, who apparently can chat with you for AGES about the Enclave and their business). You learn that he is obsessed with the idea of “saving America” by clearing mutations (never mind that a lot of innocent people would die, because there’s like NO ONE around who hasn’t been SLIGHTLY mutated by the radiation – the ghouls and super mutants just show it more) and he and Autumn don’t see eye-to-eye on this, but that’s about it. Jon wants more, damn it! There’s also a missed opportunity where he offers to make YOU his colonel if you do poison the water supply, but said offer doesn’t go anywhere – however, Jon thinks this is just because the game was originally designed to end with the player character dying to start Project Purity, and they didn’t bother to update the game appropriately once they added in Broken Steel and found a way to keep the player alive for a post-end-game. Still a shame that it’s not an option for the evil Enclave players!
VIII. Now, in the base game, there is an expectation that you’re going to blow up Eden for being a genocidal computer – there’s both speech checks and Intelligence checks in the conversation to get him to self-destruct, and a holotape that will destroy his mainframe in Colonel Autumn’s bedroom (which you have to be sure to visit before hitting Eden’s office, because it also has the Energy Weapons bobblehead). To the point where, if you DON’T blow up Eden – you just take the vial he offers you so he’ll unlock the door – the game will ACT as if you chose to blow up Eden once you re-enter the base, and there will be doors exploding and people flying everywhere and general chaos (though the game will realize “oh, wait, no, Eden’s still alive, countermand all that” once you get outside). Jon deliberately chose not to blow up Eden to show off this bug –
Only to find that the mod authors had fixed it. Whoops. XD Ah well, Jon, you couldn’t have known!
IX. There are some fun things to note during your final escape from the base, however – as previously stated, there is a deathclaw cage you can open along the way, with a deathclaw that gets a unique “escaping” animation and is actually totally chill with your presence because you saved it. AND if you make sure to take down the final security barrier hiding a weapons and ammo cache from you, you can get a guaranteed GATLING LASER. You know, like the one Fawkes is using on the enemies outside when you get out there. XD A great gun if you’re into big guns (and especially if you’re traveling with Fawkes and thus have his perk where they’re easier to use and do a bit more damage).
X. And with the end game of the main story looming, Jon decided to show off a few little things that were available for him and Wanda to discover now –
-->Nathan’s wife, back in Megaton, DOES ask you if you’ve seen her missing husband – though she doesn’t sound particularly worried about him, and there’s no option to tell her where he is (or was, if you blew up the base). You also can’t tell anyone about Anna Holt, sadly.
-->If you go back to Little Lamplight at this point in base game, you CAN finally finish the story about your own adventures that you were telling local storytelling Knock Knock, detailing your escape from the Enclave (because, again, you’re expected to die in the endgame and thus can’t fill her in on THAT part)! However, when Jon tried it, he found that he couldn’t give her an update – he attributed it to Fallout 3 bugging out, but the comments suggested that maybe “Tale of Two Wastelands” moved it to the post-end-game as now you CAN survive to see that thanks to Broken Steel (which did not patch it on its own). We’ll find out, I guess!
-->And if you use Little Lamplight to re-enter Vault 87 and go through it again, you can go through the door that Colonel Autumn walked through to find an extra room that leads you to the vault’s main door. There’s nothing special in it, though, and in base game opening the vault door just leads to a horrible black void that teleports you back to Fawkes’s cell. However, TTW actually creates a little area just beyond the door and even puts a corpse in it with a master key, allowing you to unlock the (still highly irradiated) main door and just walk out that, allowing you FINALLY completely traverse the vault. Cool. :D
And so the episode ended with everything getting just a little too heavy for Wanda, so she’s going on vacation again! AKA, Jon has a few things he wants to check out in New Vegas, and now seems the time to do it. XD So it’s off to the West Coast on the train next week – that should be a fun trip! I look forward to seeing what exactly it is he wants to do out there. . .
Workout: Back on the bike this Sunday, and back to James Turner’s High School Years Rags To Riches Generational Epic – “I got detention on day 2! High School Years (Part 34)” Highlights of this episode included –
A) As stated by the title, Addison getting detention! Yes, they ended up skipping their first class of the day in order to improve their Mischief skill by pranking the lunch lady – though as it turned out, the principal refused to actually come into the lunch room and catch them, so James had to send them to prank HER in order to get caught and get detention. *shrug* It was in service of their aspiration! And they got a level of Mischief skill out of it, so that was good.
B) Oh, and as you might have guessed from me suddenly using “they” pronouns for Addison, James decided that, since we have the ability to set pronouns for Sims now, he wanted Addison to be non-binary! :) So that’s cool. He just asked for patience if and when he screwed up the pronouns – as he pointed out, he regularly screws up their NAMES (he’d in fact called Addison “Reginald” earlier in the episode), so yeah. He also asked for advice on properly representing a non-binary person in the game at the end of the episode, which was nice.
C) Addison also did some sneaking out later, reconnecting with their best buddy Hilary Price and inviting her to the prom as a friend (and developing a crush on her in the process) before taking her to ThrifTea to have a snack and select a prom outfit (they decided on a hilarious floral suit jacket and matching SHORTS, proving they get their fashion sense from Kevin). XD They gotta live up to their prankster nature!
D) As for Brianne, James decided she should be friends with the Price’s younger kid, Forrest, and sent her over on Easter (after unsuccessfully trying to follow Addison to high school), having them get to know each other before sending them to play together in the park, aww. :) It was very sweet.
E) Except that that One Teacher from the high school was there (the one who is Erratic and thus got naked to go shower in the rain IN A CLASSROOM RIGHT IN FRONT OF SIDNEY), so James brought Reginald to try and “take care of” the guy. This – did not go according to plan, with attempts to Inferniate and ZipZap him at the park just leaving him scorched and stinky, and when Reginald lured him to his thrift store and tried to trap him in a specially-built room, he could not kill him by Inferniating objects in there with him (he just put them out before the flames could spread) nor get him to drown in a small pool (too cold to swim)! It seems that if Reginald wants to keep his kids safe from this bastard, he will have to do so in another way. . .
Yeah – kind of a weird episode. XD But it was fun, and I look forward to watching more later!
Other: We actually got to play beanbags this Sunday! :D Weather was gorgeous with no rain or horrible smoke in sight for a change, so we got out the game and played a few rounds (though only three instead of our usual weekend five because we started kinda late). And let me tell you, not playing for at least a week seems to have given Mom an edge and caused Dad to completely lose his. XD She utterly smoked both him and me, while I managed to claw out second every time thanks to some good throws. Final scores were me 2-2-2; Dad 3-3-3; and Mom W-W-W. I guess that makes up for every time she’s come last before! We’ll see if we get to play tomorrow and what happens then.
So yeah, a pretty nice, productive day! :) And now I have to head to bed so I can get through my one, slightly shorter day of work (and getting gas) before my extra time off. XD Hopefully it won't be anything too bad -- night all!
