Aug. 10th, 2022

crossover_chick: Doc looking very sarcastically over his shoulder (BTTF: in a sarcastic mood)
I mean, I did get on late tonight, and the period brain isn't exactly helping with concentration, but. . .let's get this show on the road so I can attempt to get some sleep without BURNING UP tonight (seriously, I have been SO HOT most of the day thanks to my awful terrible no-good hormones) --

Work – Another largely quiet day, though we have a few problems starting to pile up – missing mail suddenly discovered; credit card stuff sent back to us for no reason we can see; the usual nonsense with the actual credit card company claiming they’re looking into stuff and then just never do it. And my coworker’s gonna be out tomorrow, so I’ll be handling it all alone. Meeeh. At least it’ll help keep me busy, I suppose – can’t expect the obituaries to last forever!

Beanbags – We did actually get outside today! It was a bit cooler and less humid, though not as much as they’d claimed – and with me being on my period, standing outside throwing beanbags was enough to make me sweat like crazy ANYWAY, so. . . Pretty slow day for all of us – we limped our way through the first game, even Dad. And I never managed to improve enough to actually win a game – though Mom did, so good for her. Final scores were me 2-2-3; Dad W-W-2; Mom 3-3-W. We’ll see if I do any better the next time I play.

To-Do List

1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with the Oxventure “Silent Knight!” Johnny killed the minnow because Ellen made too many fish puns. XD Though to be fair, it’s a minnow, Corazon took it out of the water, it wasn’t going to last long anyway. They ended up giving it to Alfred as a snack. XD

Anyway, with the water supply confirmed to be fine, the gang went back to trying to figure out the poem – Egbert said that he was convinced that the next level of threat had to refer to the couplet about things being high and low, which everyone agreed with. Dob suggested that, while they’d been focusing on things like the sky for the “high,” perhaps if they set their sights a little lower they’d figure it out. Alfred promptly started rattling off all the high places in the town – including the clock tower attached to the church. The clock tower they’d used to lure members of the Order of Keeping It Down into their meat grinder.

Welp, seemed like a good spot to start looking to them! Everyone booked it to the church, and Egbert – not seeing anything obvious on the lower levels – decided to go ahead and hoof it up the tower. Corazon insisted on checking for the most obvious traps as he did, and rolled well enough for Johnny to alert him to a tripwire on the staircase! Dob, panicked, immediately lunged at Egbert’s ankles to stop him – and while he rolled well, Egbert rolled a nat 20 to keep his feet. As Corazon had yelled pretty loudly about the tripwire Egbert was about to walk into, Johnny decided that the natural result of all this high rolling was Dob grabbing Egbert by the ankles and hooking his legs over Egbert’s shoulders, then Egbert reaching over and hoisting him up fully into a piggy-back ride in a stunt so smooth you’d think they’d rehearsed it. XD Fortunately, though, it turned out the tripwire wasn’t anything deadly – instead, it had a bottle on it to make a noise so that it would alert anyone camped out on top of the clock tower of people coming up the stairs. Corazon deftly disarmed it while Dob made a suggestion to Prudence – perhaps she could use her Spider-Climb to scale the outside of the tower and get a look at the top? Prudence was for this, headed outside, started climbing –

And from her vantage point, spotted a cloaked figure in the gathering crowd running for the alley! It seems that, at some point, Johnny had rolled a nat 20 to keep this sneaky figure hidden, and had only now revealed them. Prudence quickly yelled a warning to the others – Corazon immediately took off on foot, sprinting after the figure, while Dob hastily tore open the papoose into a makeshift wingsuit to fly out the window after the person, Alfred safely gripped between his thighs. XD Cue Corazon and Dob sort of racing each other to catch the person, who fortunately smashed into a Standard Chase Scene Pile of Crates, slowing them down just enough to be caught. Specifically, to first have their legs wound up by the makeshift hempen rope bola Corazon crafted while running after them –

And then to be accidentally nutted by Alfred as Dob attempted to tackle them, only to misjudge the angle a bit. Everyone went down, and Dob and Corazon hastily tried not to look at Alfred to stop him crying about his hurt head – but then their quarry looked up, and so started the tantrum. XD Corazon banged the guy up against the wall, revealing that yes, he was a member of the Order of Keeping It Down – he’s still got the crest and everything. He refused to answer questions verbally, instead gesturing to a pouch of scrolls he had on hand for communication – Dob grabbed one at random and found it was just the guy’s grocery list. With stuff like milk, cabbage, and potatoes – and fart meds, after Ellen pointed out anyone eating cabbage wasn’t going to be very quiet. XD Corazon decided the best thing to do would be to drag the guy back to the tower to interrogate him, and so they did.

While all this was happening, meanwhile, Egbert, Merilwen, and Prudence made it to the top of the tower, to find a really nice powerful bow and a quiver of arrows waiting there. Seems this tower has a good vantage point of most everywhere in Inkwater – perfect for an assassin who wishes to snipe off an important mayoral figure? The note with the bow certainly seemed to imply that was the case, congratulating them on foiling another plot but saying there was yet another to be found. . . Egbert decided the best thing to do to properly foil this plan would be to shove the bow off the top of the tower and hope it breaks –

Completely ignoring Merilwen going all grabby hands at it. XD It fell off the tower, bounced, and was promptly stolen by a passing child. XD As a consolation prize, Johnny allowed Merilwen to take the arrows, and everyone promptly began roasting Egbert for shoving all the good loot out of the tower (like a really nice enchanted lute, a beautiful pair of cutlasses, a book on how to find atonement. . .) XD Fortunately, Prudence’s preferred present was something that Egbert could NOT shove out of a tower –

The chance to torture a paladin of the Order of Keeping It Down! After getting the paladin up the tower, Corazon tied the luckless man to a chair and handed him over to Prudence, who promptly started dangling him out the side of the tower. The man kept his vow of silence by writing “AAAAAAAAAAAAAH” on a scroll (pressed up against Prudence’s stomach, no less, as he had no better writing surface). She began telling him to confess, and make it snappy, leaning him further and further over the edge –

And then Corazon got HIS Sun’s Turn present, which was Egbert actually using his paladin powers. In fact, he did a one-two punch – Zone of Truth, then a Command word to “confess,” which the paladin JUST failed his saving throw against. He indicated for Prudence to pull him back in so he didn’t have to keep writing on her stomach – she obliged, and he sulkily complained on his scroll that they weren’t giving him much chance to properly rhyme his confession. Immediately everyone began ragging on Johnny to rhyme everything, and Corazon started demanding iambic pentameter. XD Johnny made an attempt at couplets, but ended up going for the montage of the paladin explaining that he was probably the sole surviving member of the Order of Keeping It Down, that he naturally had a hatred for the now-noisy Inkwater and them, and that he wanted to make the place silent again by killing everyone in it. He did NOT elaborate on what other traps he’d laid to make sure this happened, though. . .

Cue Egbert saying “I know what’ll get him ACTUALLY talking – let’s throw him in the tickle pit!” XD Everyone was thrilled with this idea, and dragged him over to the grease hill, where Corazon made an elaborate show of punting the guy down the hill (after making sure Bill, who’d showed up again hoping that Corazon had changed his mind about wanting to play “Carl,” was “executive producing” behind the barn). The paladin did NOT keep his footing and tumbled into the pit, and then rolled a crit 1 to resist the tickling, resulting in probably the loudest, harshest, scariest laugh that anyone in the town had ever heard. A few of the children fled in genuine terror – the rest. . .well, the Oxventurers had to talk them into putting their knives away because no, the paladin was NOT a paladinata. XD

But yes, the paladin has broken his vow of silence and been disgraced! But he still refuses to tell the Oxventurers what his other plans for destroying the town are, and keeps trying to goad them into just killing him. So far Dob has gotten a cyanide pill off him, and Prudence made damn clear that his attempts at reverse psychology don’t work on her. XD Corazon and Merilwen, meanwhile, are off to investigate the scaffolding that’s been erected for the mayor’s speech, figuring there’s probably a bomb or something there. We’ll find out tomorrow as we wrap this up!

2. Continue writing “Londerland Bloodlines”: Minimum check – I had a rather late start on the computer today thanks to beanbags, and THEN I couldn’t find the time for a proper writing session in between summing up the workout-Oxventure-chunk-of-the-day, watching my YouTube videos below, catching up at least a little on tumblr, and getting the queue sorted (also below). . .but I really wanted to write SOMETHING, lack of time and period brain be damned. And I remembered that Terry Pratchett had a decently-low “minimum” that he wrote per day, so I quickly looked that up.

400 words – three minutes of dictation, according to the site I found the factoid on. I decided that was doable and took roughly ten minutes to crank out 458 words of Victor explaining how Emily chased him through the woods and dragged him into the Land of the Dead, and Alice recounting what she saw when she died briefly before being properly Embraced, and Victor being pleased it matches up with what he saw. Because I couldn’t resist having Alice see the Land of the Dead. XD Ended up being about half a page or so? Either way, I’ll take it as the minimum amount I needed to get done. :) Have to remember that for more “time crunch” and “period brain” days!

3. Keep up with YouTube Subs: Check – two in, two out!

A) First up, Call Me Kevin with “This Zombie Minecraft Mod is insanely fun!” Yes, it’s back to the Zombie Apocalypse Minecraft save, with Kevin looking for new ways to murder zombies! Specifically, he was looking for a way to kill them and get their rotten flesh, as the nearby village was incredibly keen on it, and he wanted the emeralds. After some thought, he decided that a tower of pistons would be his best bet, and went searching out the materials while the zombies around him burned in the lava moat. XD He used his secret tunnel to get to the safe area and grab some wood, then made as many iron pickaxes as he could to mine deep into the earth and grab as much iron and stone as possible to build his tower and his pistons! This led him to discover a mysterious merchant hiding deep below the surface (Kevin literally tunneled into his bedroom), who sold bones, emeralds – and, most importantly, an archaeologist hat! Kevin of course wanted that, so getting rotten flesh suddenly became an even GREATER priority! To the point where Kevin decided to set a timer to see how long it took him to get a working trap!

A half-hour of fiddling with redstone and pistons and trying not to smash himself! XD And even then, the trap didn’t really work EXACTLY how he wanted – he had to use sticky pistons to properly crush the zombies, meaning he had to reset the trap every time it was triggered, which didn’t make it very efficient. But it did allow him to collect SOME rotten flesh, and he liked the basic look of the tower, at least! It’s the small things. Like picking off the stragglers to get as many emeralds as possible from the villagers for his hat fund. XD Though he actually ended up two short when he went down to buy it – not to worry, though, the guy also traded coal for emeralds, and THAT Kevin had in abundance. XD So he handed over loads of coal, then a bunch of the resulting emeralds to get his hat! He was so pleased. XD He ended the episode with a nice little time lapse of him building up his castle base a bit more and making it look even cooler. :D This is such a fun little mini-series on the channel – I hope he keeps going for a while!

B) And second, GrayStillPlays with “Top 100 FUNNIEST fails in GTA 5!” Time for more ridiculous challenge boards in GTA V, this time with Alex and Danny getting Gray to fail as many times as possible before he succeeds. And the best way to do that? Make him chuck grenades everywhere! Specifically, he had to play baseball with a wind turbine so it would hit a grenade at JUST the right angle above his head to blow up a wall blocking a teleporter that he could use to reach the first checkpoint; then play baseball with ANOTHER grenade and wind turbine to blow up the floor of a box hanging in the air so he could teleport into it, fall through it in the right spot to hit the next teleporter, and then get the second checkpoint; run a timed course with perfect precision and speed over disappearing platforms, dropping grenades onto all the right ones to blow up the people shooting at him with rocket launchers while avoiding the fake platforms to get to the THIRD checkpoint; swim BACK through the LOWER part of the maze he just ran across while various Satans launched grenades at him in the water to murder him and then swim through the correct teleporter to make the FOURTH checkpoint (Gray of course went back and blew up all the Satans first); and then make a leap on a motorcycle OVER a wind turbine while simultaneously launching a grenade into a thumbnail hole to destroy another wall blocking a teleporter, then land the motorcycle on the tightrope below to get launched through the teleporter and into the WIN (that last board was Danny, and when Gray finally pulled it off, he had to go back and review the footage in ultra-slow motion to realize he’d even won XD). Fantastic stuff from our favorite hell-duo of GTA V board creators! :D

4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Check – reset the queue speed on Victor Luvs Alice and then got the rest of the week set up in there – tomorrow’s “All Occults Coffee Shop AU” post, the reblog about OTPs liking each other and being gremlins together for Friday, and “Boom Clap” as my latest Valicer song for Sunday. w00!

So yeah, at least I got all the most important stuff done, even a bit of writing. But I'm really hoping that things go a bit smoother tomorrow afternoon. At least we're already past the midpoint of the week now. . .night all!
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