Heat Returning Tuesday
Jul. 11th, 2023 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickIt was pretty nice this morning, simply because it was dry, but as the sun really started blazing and the heat started ramping up...yeah, my Mom's hopes to play beanbags when I got home kinda fizzled. And tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter and stickier, bleh. I guess it is summer, but still. *shakehead* Fortunately, I still had a pretty good, productive day --
Work – Another quiet day – coworkers still out with their stuff, and my supervisor out because of home stuff, so it was just me and the assistant director in today! I did the GL, put on a few last-minute gifts, took one call to update someone’s credit card, and did some obituaries and other maintenance. *shrug* Can’t complain!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure Presents: Blades In the Dark – “The Marriage of Lady Fyengeh!” We picked up with everyone more or less in position in the theater – Barnaby was at the bar, chatting with Squiffy before the show and talking about how people just need to listen to them when they say that all their problems would be solved if they just became richer; Zillah and Kasimir had successfully infiltrated the backstage area with Zillah’s sandbags; Lilith was mingling with her fellow “shadow puppeteers;” and Edvard – well, Edvard WAS up in the lighting area with the fake gem on his person (admiring his big switches – Luke told him that the other techs had already warned him off going “IT’S ALIIIIIVE” whenever he flipped one, but he said “I can do it in my mind!”), but, having an inkling that his friends backstage must be there by now, went off to find them and let them know when the gem would be onstage (which was – most of the opera, as apparently “Lady Fyengeh” wears it as a necklace throughout most of it, but there were specific moments in Act One, when it’s first revealed, and Act Three, when it gets tossed into the river, where Edvard had to hit it with a specific spotlight, soooo. . .), excusing himself by citing bowel problems. XD A six on the roll meant that he found Kasimir and Zillah (the latter carefully putting down and then picking up her sandbags in an endless loop to make herself look busy – the other stagehands who were worried about looking idle ended up doing much the same), and Lilith found HIM, coming up behind him and spooking him just for funsies. It was agreed that Lilith should have the gem, as she was probably in the best position for a switcheroo, and Edvard passed it over –
Prompting Luke to wonder where Lilith was going to keep it, as HE was picturing her outfit as a skintight black body suit (and not as a cloaked Nazgul-like thing, as Jane tried to claim). Cue Lilith claiming that she’d put a secret pouch in her suit near her neck to hide the gem – and when Luke started asking her to roll for it, everyone except Barnaby jokingly calling for flashbacks to say how they helped with the pouch/had a parent who tried to popularize neck pouches in these kinds of suits. (Barnaby’s flashback was to ignore all this nonsense and keep on drinking. XD) Luke decided to allow it, but insisted everyone take one stress (causing everyone to essentially go “nooo, our jokey flashbacks have backfired on us” XD). But yes, the pouch was there, and it worked perfectly, the fake gem concealed beautifully from view. Edvard hurried back to his lighting booth; Lilith rejoined her compatriots; and Zillah and Kasimir were confronted by a woman with a clipboard asking what the heck the sandbags were all about as everyone else got ready to move scenery and such – Zillah claimed just to be delivering them, and Kasimir backed her up with a beautiful bullshit story about how they were using them to shore up certain props and they wouldn’t be in the way of the production at all (Luke was so impressed he didn’t even make Johnny roll).
Meanwhile, out at the bar, Barnaby was approached by someone else with a clipboard – Emmeline’s personal assistant and potential protege, it transpired, who was sent out on the soprano’s behalf to invite Barnaby to have a drink with her after the show. Barnaby said yes, but then mentioned that it would be nice to go and say hello to her in the interval – the clipboard guy mentioned that Emmeline generally refuses to break character even during the interval, but the minute Barnaby hinted that he wanted to “compliment her performance,” he was like, “Oooooh, okay, I know this, I’ll go let her know.” XD Yeah, looks like Barnaby is already going to get a LOOOT of use out of “Trust In Me!” XD
Anyway, with that, the bar closed, the lights went down, and the show began! Act One was largely about page Chauncey finding the broken-down Fyengehbus in front of Mistmire and offering to help repair the wheels of steel, and Lilith had her first big moment in helping a bunch of the other shadow-performers lift the wheels to make it look like Chauncey was putting them back on. She did – well enough, though it wasn’t nearly as smooth as the other three wheels “going on,” and Luke started a clock for Lilith getting rumbled. Fortunately, when Edvard’s big moment came to light the ruby as Captain Shattershield revealed it for the first time, he did MUCH better (it helped that he’d made sure to label all the switches), hitting it perfectly and letting the audience truly marvel over its beauty. However, Kasimir backstage happened to notice during all of this that the sides of the stage were now SWARMING with security guards (and they’d already been pretty thick on the ground), keeping a close eye on the gem while it was in play. Fortunately, a quick flashback and a little stress allowed him to establish that Zillah’s “sandbags” were in fact full of ball bearings, and at a predetermined signal, they could open said bags and cause quite a lot of slipping and falling everywhere. So he wasn’t too worried yet. . .
And then, as the opera continued on and everyone was on the move, a man carrying a prop barrel came, well, barreling in from the side, hit Zillah’s sandbags (which she was still stacking), and fell onto the barrel, smashing it and knocking himself unconscious. Zillah promptly tried to help by inventing the recovery position, rolled a two on the Study roll (which she already had no dots in), and ended up jamming his own fist into his mouth, slightly dislocating his jaw, so he could hold onto his tongue and not swallow it. XD However, it seems that barrel was needed quite urgently, as the lady with the clipboard returned looking for “barrel Bertie” –
Cue Kasimir pushing himself to Hunt for a replacement barrel, getting a critical success, and fashioning a replacement with no issue from a chunk of the Fyengehbus prop. Cue Kasimir ALSO, when the lady thanked him profusely for stepping up to the plate, blurting out his REAL NAME. XD The lady promised she’d never forget it and shoved him on-stage to deliver the barrel to Captain Shattershield (now singing about how he was going to send Chauncey down the river in a barrel to get him out of the way; I am now wondering if Shattershield ever actually tried that XD) – Kasimir quickly decided to play it off like he was a silly comic relief character and rolled the barrel to the startled “Shattershield” before giving the audience a cheeky wink (Edvard and Barnaby were both like “?!”). Fortunately, “Shattershield” quickly ran with this and got the audience to give “Barrel Bertie” a round of applause, which they happily gave. Kasimir quickly limped backstage to drown his sorrows with his ever-present fine bottle of whiskey while Luke assured him that his delightful performance would definitely be featured in all the reviews. XD That’s where I left it for now – next time, the opera continues, and we see how things go with the Hobbyhorses and their quest to steal that gem! I suspect chaotically. XD
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has found another horrible torture room – but THIS one, at least, has a freezer with a nice pickable door, and a few bags of blood inside! Two of which are bags of Grout’s own very potent elder blood. The Queen was all for slugging them down, but fortunately Alice remembered Tung telling her that blood bonds and vitae addiction affect vampires too, and she wants to make sure that this stuff is safe to drink first. Though she is definitely taking it with her. (And don’t worry, Alice, it IS safe to drink, though for a different reason than “it’s not fresh from the vein...”)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: One-third check – the struggle to catch up on GrayStillPlays continues! Today I was on yesterday’s offering – “Testing which vehicle has the best balance in GTA 5?” As you might imagine, it was another Alex Torture Board, this one all about seeing which vehicle was best at balancing on increasingly horrible tightropes. Alex built Gray a lovely narrow course consisting of Angled Balancing (where Gray basically had to tip the car at an angle between two tightropes – one lower thin one and one higher thick one – and grind it along – and then TRANSFER AND SWITCH SIDES midway through – also, jump at the end), Wavy Balancing (a tightrope with alternating waves on each side, which got higher and more intense the farther Gray went – also, this particular course was TIMED, with Gray only having 30 seconds to make it to the end before it teleported down to ground level), Alcoholic Balancing (with Gray just having to drive over a wavy line of giant beer bottles, balancing himself on the mouths and avoiding the water spout halfway through), Buldging (sic) Balancing (a narrow roadway with various shapes of various heights and thicknesses appearing and disappearing regularly along it), the Double Tightrope Jump Balancing Thingy (where Gray had to balance his car on either side of a double curved tightrope with a gap in the middle, then speed along and JUMP to another curved single tightrope, then jump AGAIN to the roadway beyond), and – after a checkpoint – Thumbnail Balancing (basically two thin ropes stretching across a huge gap. . .with a windmill in the middle) – and provided him with a vast variety of cars to try! Most stuff either couldn’t make the initial Angled Balancing, or quit when it got to the Alcoholic Balancing as it kept falling off the side (including, sadly, the Wastelander – and, amusingly, the RC car, which Alex hid under one of the giant vans for Gray to find and try) – the quad bike and the Canis both managed to make it to the Double Tightrope Jump Balancing Thingy, but the only one to manage to go the distance (after thirty minutes of trying on the final challenge) was the side-by-side cage car! Mostly because having huge springs serving as separate suspensions for each wheel really does help that thing stay on any roadway. :p Looks like we have another contender for “best car to have in the apocalypse!” XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – finished off the Chill Valicer Save posts for this week and slapped them in the Victor Luvs Alice queue, and did one ask reply and one thread reply over on Valice Multiverse! So that’s all set for another day, yay.
Whew! Glad that's all set. And now it's time to head to bed and prepare to do this all again tomorrow. Night all!
Work – Another quiet day – coworkers still out with their stuff, and my supervisor out because of home stuff, so it was just me and the assistant director in today! I did the GL, put on a few last-minute gifts, took one call to update someone’s credit card, and did some obituaries and other maintenance. *shrug* Can’t complain!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with Oxventure Presents: Blades In the Dark – “The Marriage of Lady Fyengeh!” We picked up with everyone more or less in position in the theater – Barnaby was at the bar, chatting with Squiffy before the show and talking about how people just need to listen to them when they say that all their problems would be solved if they just became richer; Zillah and Kasimir had successfully infiltrated the backstage area with Zillah’s sandbags; Lilith was mingling with her fellow “shadow puppeteers;” and Edvard – well, Edvard WAS up in the lighting area with the fake gem on his person (admiring his big switches – Luke told him that the other techs had already warned him off going “IT’S ALIIIIIVE” whenever he flipped one, but he said “I can do it in my mind!”), but, having an inkling that his friends backstage must be there by now, went off to find them and let them know when the gem would be onstage (which was – most of the opera, as apparently “Lady Fyengeh” wears it as a necklace throughout most of it, but there were specific moments in Act One, when it’s first revealed, and Act Three, when it gets tossed into the river, where Edvard had to hit it with a specific spotlight, soooo. . .), excusing himself by citing bowel problems. XD A six on the roll meant that he found Kasimir and Zillah (the latter carefully putting down and then picking up her sandbags in an endless loop to make herself look busy – the other stagehands who were worried about looking idle ended up doing much the same), and Lilith found HIM, coming up behind him and spooking him just for funsies. It was agreed that Lilith should have the gem, as she was probably in the best position for a switcheroo, and Edvard passed it over –
Prompting Luke to wonder where Lilith was going to keep it, as HE was picturing her outfit as a skintight black body suit (and not as a cloaked Nazgul-like thing, as Jane tried to claim). Cue Lilith claiming that she’d put a secret pouch in her suit near her neck to hide the gem – and when Luke started asking her to roll for it, everyone except Barnaby jokingly calling for flashbacks to say how they helped with the pouch/had a parent who tried to popularize neck pouches in these kinds of suits. (Barnaby’s flashback was to ignore all this nonsense and keep on drinking. XD) Luke decided to allow it, but insisted everyone take one stress (causing everyone to essentially go “nooo, our jokey flashbacks have backfired on us” XD). But yes, the pouch was there, and it worked perfectly, the fake gem concealed beautifully from view. Edvard hurried back to his lighting booth; Lilith rejoined her compatriots; and Zillah and Kasimir were confronted by a woman with a clipboard asking what the heck the sandbags were all about as everyone else got ready to move scenery and such – Zillah claimed just to be delivering them, and Kasimir backed her up with a beautiful bullshit story about how they were using them to shore up certain props and they wouldn’t be in the way of the production at all (Luke was so impressed he didn’t even make Johnny roll).
Meanwhile, out at the bar, Barnaby was approached by someone else with a clipboard – Emmeline’s personal assistant and potential protege, it transpired, who was sent out on the soprano’s behalf to invite Barnaby to have a drink with her after the show. Barnaby said yes, but then mentioned that it would be nice to go and say hello to her in the interval – the clipboard guy mentioned that Emmeline generally refuses to break character even during the interval, but the minute Barnaby hinted that he wanted to “compliment her performance,” he was like, “Oooooh, okay, I know this, I’ll go let her know.” XD Yeah, looks like Barnaby is already going to get a LOOOT of use out of “Trust In Me!” XD
Anyway, with that, the bar closed, the lights went down, and the show began! Act One was largely about page Chauncey finding the broken-down Fyengehbus in front of Mistmire and offering to help repair the wheels of steel, and Lilith had her first big moment in helping a bunch of the other shadow-performers lift the wheels to make it look like Chauncey was putting them back on. She did – well enough, though it wasn’t nearly as smooth as the other three wheels “going on,” and Luke started a clock for Lilith getting rumbled. Fortunately, when Edvard’s big moment came to light the ruby as Captain Shattershield revealed it for the first time, he did MUCH better (it helped that he’d made sure to label all the switches), hitting it perfectly and letting the audience truly marvel over its beauty. However, Kasimir backstage happened to notice during all of this that the sides of the stage were now SWARMING with security guards (and they’d already been pretty thick on the ground), keeping a close eye on the gem while it was in play. Fortunately, a quick flashback and a little stress allowed him to establish that Zillah’s “sandbags” were in fact full of ball bearings, and at a predetermined signal, they could open said bags and cause quite a lot of slipping and falling everywhere. So he wasn’t too worried yet. . .
And then, as the opera continued on and everyone was on the move, a man carrying a prop barrel came, well, barreling in from the side, hit Zillah’s sandbags (which she was still stacking), and fell onto the barrel, smashing it and knocking himself unconscious. Zillah promptly tried to help by inventing the recovery position, rolled a two on the Study roll (which she already had no dots in), and ended up jamming his own fist into his mouth, slightly dislocating his jaw, so he could hold onto his tongue and not swallow it. XD However, it seems that barrel was needed quite urgently, as the lady with the clipboard returned looking for “barrel Bertie” –
Cue Kasimir pushing himself to Hunt for a replacement barrel, getting a critical success, and fashioning a replacement with no issue from a chunk of the Fyengehbus prop. Cue Kasimir ALSO, when the lady thanked him profusely for stepping up to the plate, blurting out his REAL NAME. XD The lady promised she’d never forget it and shoved him on-stage to deliver the barrel to Captain Shattershield (now singing about how he was going to send Chauncey down the river in a barrel to get him out of the way; I am now wondering if Shattershield ever actually tried that XD) – Kasimir quickly decided to play it off like he was a silly comic relief character and rolled the barrel to the startled “Shattershield” before giving the audience a cheeky wink (Edvard and Barnaby were both like “?!”). Fortunately, “Shattershield” quickly ran with this and got the audience to give “Barrel Bertie” a round of applause, which they happily gave. Kasimir quickly limped backstage to drown his sorrows with his ever-present fine bottle of whiskey while Luke assured him that his delightful performance would definitely be featured in all the reviews. XD That’s where I left it for now – next time, the opera continues, and we see how things go with the Hobbyhorses and their quest to steal that gem! I suspect chaotically. XD
2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – Alice has found another horrible torture room – but THIS one, at least, has a freezer with a nice pickable door, and a few bags of blood inside! Two of which are bags of Grout’s own very potent elder blood. The Queen was all for slugging them down, but fortunately Alice remembered Tung telling her that blood bonds and vitae addiction affect vampires too, and she wants to make sure that this stuff is safe to drink first. Though she is definitely taking it with her. (And don’t worry, Alice, it IS safe to drink, though for a different reason than “it’s not fresh from the vein...”)
3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: One-third check – the struggle to catch up on GrayStillPlays continues! Today I was on yesterday’s offering – “Testing which vehicle has the best balance in GTA 5?” As you might imagine, it was another Alex Torture Board, this one all about seeing which vehicle was best at balancing on increasingly horrible tightropes. Alex built Gray a lovely narrow course consisting of Angled Balancing (where Gray basically had to tip the car at an angle between two tightropes – one lower thin one and one higher thick one – and grind it along – and then TRANSFER AND SWITCH SIDES midway through – also, jump at the end), Wavy Balancing (a tightrope with alternating waves on each side, which got higher and more intense the farther Gray went – also, this particular course was TIMED, with Gray only having 30 seconds to make it to the end before it teleported down to ground level), Alcoholic Balancing (with Gray just having to drive over a wavy line of giant beer bottles, balancing himself on the mouths and avoiding the water spout halfway through), Buldging (sic) Balancing (a narrow roadway with various shapes of various heights and thicknesses appearing and disappearing regularly along it), the Double Tightrope Jump Balancing Thingy (where Gray had to balance his car on either side of a double curved tightrope with a gap in the middle, then speed along and JUMP to another curved single tightrope, then jump AGAIN to the roadway beyond), and – after a checkpoint – Thumbnail Balancing (basically two thin ropes stretching across a huge gap. . .with a windmill in the middle) – and provided him with a vast variety of cars to try! Most stuff either couldn’t make the initial Angled Balancing, or quit when it got to the Alcoholic Balancing as it kept falling off the side (including, sadly, the Wastelander – and, amusingly, the RC car, which Alex hid under one of the giant vans for Gray to find and try) – the quad bike and the Canis both managed to make it to the Double Tightrope Jump Balancing Thingy, but the only one to manage to go the distance (after thirty minutes of trying on the final challenge) was the side-by-side cage car! Mostly because having huge springs serving as separate suspensions for each wheel really does help that thing stay on any roadway. :p Looks like we have another contender for “best car to have in the apocalypse!” XD
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – finished off the Chill Valicer Save posts for this week and slapped them in the Victor Luvs Alice queue, and did one ask reply and one thread reply over on Valice Multiverse! So that’s all set for another day, yay.
Whew! Glad that's all set. And now it's time to head to bed and prepare to do this all again tomorrow. Night all!
