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Late Sleeping Sunday
Sep. 18th, 2022 11:38 pmBasically I woke up briefly just past nine, thought "eh, I'll try to go back to sleep for about a half-hour or so," then the next time I opened my eyes and looked at my clock I went "10:40 AM?!" I haven't slept that late in a WHILE -- though, admittedly, I did got to bed around 2:20 in the morning, so maybe it was only to be expected. I have GOT to remember to get to bed on weekends before 2 AM. . .
Anyway, while I obviously needed the sleep, getting it kind of threw off the rhythm of my day, as is reflected by the to-do list:
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – as per my notes below, Victor, Piper, and Alice have (after taking a moment to clear out the exterior of Haymarket Mall, because raider camps are no good for anyone) made it to Pickman’s Gallery! Which had a lot of angry raiders outside of it. . .and a lot of creepy paintings IN it. Creepy paintings that vampire Alice said smelled good to her, which is never a good sign, is it? Yes, the trio have discovered that Pickman’s a serial killer artist working in raider blood and guts, and even if they don’t like raiders either, they can’t let THAT stand. So they’re working their way through his house and down into his murder basement, killing the raiders they find (mostly because the raiders won’t stop trying to kill them) and navigating the muck, slime, irradiated water, and viscera as best they can. Alice finally got Victor and Piper to take a nap when they found a “rest spot” the raiders had set up in the middle of the surprisingly large basement, and the three are now preparing to push even deeper into the tunnels to find this damn Pickman and bring him to justice – that is, if the raiders don’t get to him first. . . Not that they’re really going to mind if that happens, because that’s still justice, really.
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, the OXBox Hitman 3 double feature, and Jon's latest Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel video: Two-thirds check – sleeping late and spending longer than I intended in Fallout 4 (see below) meant I didn’t have time for the OXBox stuff again. :( But at least I’m fully caught up on Subs, and I didn’t miss out on Jon’s stuff, so that’s something –
A) Started after beanbags with the latest from Call Me Kevin – “Can you play Stardew Valley without farming?” Yes, after playing a hermit in his “main series,” Kevin decided to branch out with “Farm Hater,” a cool dude with sunglasses and a mohawk who wanted to do anything but farm!
. . .as it turns out, doing anything but farming means you are NOT going to have a lot of money in the early game. Farm Hater ended up sleeping away most of spring because he didn’t have anything to do after he sold Mayor Lewis’s gift of parsnip seeds, then started desperately foraging for anything he could sell for a few gold coins, all while being taunted with such things as backpack upgrades and better fishing rods with ridiculous prices just out of reach. XD He eventually stumbled upon a few decent ways to make a bit of cash – thanks to a kind villager giving him the blueprints he needed to make a furnace, he ended up getting into mining, going into the underground on a regular basis to break open rocks and beat monsters to death with a wooden club (that was actually better than the SWORD he got at the beginning of this little dungeon), then smelting the resultant ores himself; selling all the seeds people insisted on giving him as rewards to Pierre at the general store; doing the odd quest for goodies (like giving spice berries to the wizard – now that’s a rare sentence); and – deep sigh – fishing. Oh, as you can imagine, Kevin was REALLY THRILLED to do more fishing, especially with the most basic rod. XD But it paid the bills, so to speak, and kept him in just enough cash to do things like occasionally buy a backpack, upgrade his pick to a copper one (great against rocks, BAD against enemies, as he found out the one time he forgot to take his club), and even sometimes buy 300 gold coffee as a gift for dear Harvey the doctor! Because Kevin looked up who among the villagers was the easiest to romance and Harvey was near the top of the list. XD (Though he hasn’t given up hope that Abigail, who loved one of the random rocks he pulled out of the ground, might reciprocate his affections, and the comments are full of tips like “Romance Leah, you can literally give her random chunks of driftwood.”) But yeah, Farm Hater is not doing so great on Not A Farm right at the moment. At least he’s allowed to LEAVE the damn place and actually see the wider world. . .
B) Then, after supper, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you evolve your duck for 10,000 years” – aka he has moved onto the next entry in the Duck Life series, Duck Life 3! Which takes the whole “duck racing” concept to a whole new level, in that your duck EVOLVES between race courses now. And the evolutions look even LESS like ducks. XD Gray got an Ugly Duck, then a Merduck from his evolutions, getting a boost to swimming speed each time, while some of the other ducks got things like ACTUAL FREAKING LEGS. Like, only one duck stayed an actual BIRD, and even then it didn’t look like a duck anymore, it looked like a sparrow. (Not that it ever looked like a duck to me. . .) Gray trained religiously (with a training partner on certain courses – apparently this game had a glitch where you’d get a double duck occasionally – Gray trained with Leg Duck whenever he was available), maxed out everything, and finally had the power to open up the portal to the other universe and confront the Supreme Duck, taking on his course and blowing up his army of Domo-Kun (remember Domo? The little brown brick with teeth?) with the power of his duck mind – and possibly his duck mohawk. XD These games just get weirder and weirder as Gray completes them – and apparently there is a fourth entry where things just get straight-up violent. :D Oh, Gray’s gonna love THAT one!
C) And finally, we had the wonder that is Jon’s playthrough of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel! In Part Two of this LP, Cain has traversed the big old crater behind Carbon’s bar, fighting tons of giant evil spiders and a few terrible radiation-shooting radscorpions and looting everything he can find (getting lots of new fun toys like a flaming torch for setting enemies on fire and a whole set of leather armor), only to reach the final pit and find that this was all a set up by Richard, the mayor, to get him killed because the raiders wanted Cain dead for what he did to their buddies in the bar or they’d burn the town. And the mayor was only too happy to give them what they wanted, despite the fact that he’s packing so many explosives it should be a crime. Jon had to do quite a lot of ducking and weaving and general flailing to avoid being blown up, and then had to take a long run out of the crater to escape while being swarmed by all the enemies ever after the final explosion of the mayor rendered the crater unstable. Damn. And when he got back to the surface – well, remember how the raiders said they would burn the town if Cain didn’t die?
Yeah, seems like they were going to just do that anyway, as they were already in the process of burning when Cain emerged from the pit. Armpit the bartender died right in front of him after being poorly set on fire (handing over the recipe for radscorpion tail liquor and making a poor-taste joke about ghouls before he passed away), and Jon then spent a truly absurd amount of time running around the town, killing all the raiders and trying to save as many innocent civilians as he could. And then doing it again because he hadn’t cleared West Carbon. And then doing it again because he hadn’t cleared NORTH Carbon. And – yeah, this was about the time when Jon started getting annoyed at the endless waves of enemies sent at him constantly by the game, especially since they were making the game stutter. He was enjoying building up his version of Cain – who is slowly getting better with a gun but is already pretty damn good with melee weapons and ESPECIALLY fire – but the endless slog of having to kill a specific amount of enemies in an area, then move to a DIFFERENT area and do the same thing again, was starting to wear on him.
And things didn’t get better from there – after finally clearing out the four cardinal directions of the town, he got sent back to the warehouse to meet with the surviving named townspeople and pick up his final quest – deal with the raiders at their base, the old mill. (And also drop off Ruby the prostitute’s dead cat that we found in the crater, and pick up a new quest to get her grandmother’s necklace back.) Cain hitched a ride with the local trader, Jesse, then carefully navigated the minefield over to the old mill and went through it, clearing out loads of enemies with all his new toys (he was only semi-impressed by the shotgun he bought, which made him sad), and activating the local reactor to cause a bit of havoc and get into the Raider Matron’s lair. The subsequent cutscene revealed that the slaves she’d been taking from the town were being sold to a Super Mutant General (a very erudite one – seriously, when you’re used to the rather dull-witted super mutants of Boston, ones that talk more normally are a surprise), who despite doing business with her, was only too happy to leave her to deal with Cain alone.
And so Cain faced off against Jane, the Raider Matron in her dominatrix gear! (She jiggled so much when Cain asked her where the Paladins had gone.) After learning that his potential brothers in arms had been directed down to the ghoul city, they had a brawl, in which Jon learned that the flamethrower he’d picked up was NOT his best friend – but then neither was the shotgun, which ran out of ammo shortly before he managed to kill her. Let’s just say she took a LOT of punishment for a woman wearing as little as possible. Cain headed back to Carbon, gave Ruby back her necklace and hooked up with her (er, sort of – her dialogue suggested she was not ready for, um, ghoul private parts), then ran into a wasteland stranger who said that he might make it with the Brotherhood yet and gave him supplies and a map to find his way to Los, the ghoul city.
This stranger is supposed to be The Vault Dweller, hero of the original Fallout. Jon is completely baffled by this guy’s inclusion in the game, since – well. The whole point of every mainline Fallout is that you can customize your protagonist to be pretty much who you want. Even FO4, which gave more specific backstories, allowed you to pick if you were the husband or the wife and let you customize their look. Having a very specific Vault Dweller just feels WRONG to him. (Though the guy did get a pretty good line about how mouthing off to him would have gotten you killed and your gear sold to the nearest trader for drinking money thirty years back – since, you know, that’s what so many of the actual players do with enemies. I strip them for leather armor to break down so I can upgrade my armor! XD)
So yes, the episode ended with Cain reaching Los and finding that the ghouls there are apparently part of a nasty cult that regularly sacrifices trespassers, and the only way in is to be in the good books of the Church of the Lost. I feel like being a ghoul is really gonna help Cain out here. So far Jon doesn’t HATE the game, but as stated, he’s not fond of slogging through all the enemies, and he misses the environmental storytelling – there’s a lot of wrecked buildings and such to find (even in the crater!), but there’s no STORY behind it. No reason as to why these people were building there, what happened to them, who they were and why they mattered. Really makes you appreciate Bethesda’s little notes more, doesn’t it? Shame. . .we’ll see where this all leads next week!
3. Play Fallout 4 and hit Pickman's Gallery before heading back to County Crossing: Check, though I didn’t get as far as I expected – turns out Pickman’s Gallery is a lot BIGGER than I initially expected it to be! The creepy blood artist murder house has multiple levels of murder basement, for one thing. . .no wonder they give you the option to just go back to Hancock when you find that one holotape at the beginning. . .but I digress:
-->Started just before Faneuil Hall, with Victor and Piper sneaking out to find Pickman’s Gallery. Got as far as a little narrow gap right by the “construction site” raider camp – when Victor tripped another grenade trap and got blowed up. @.@
-->Okay, so, I’d only been playing for like a MINUTE, so that wasn’t a big deal. Sent Piper and Victor that same way, only this time I looked DOWN and made sure to disarm the trap before Victor set it off. I had them hug close to the wall as they continued, then figured “you know what, might as well clear out the raiders over here” and had them slip into the camp. Victor’s 10mm and Piper’s trusty fiery laser weapon made pretty short work of all the raiders in the area – and their camp turned out to be a discoverable location, Haymarket Mall! Complete with an interior, but in the interest of not getting distracted even further, Victor and Piper didn’t go inside. Victor DID make a stop at the raider’s cooking station to cook up a ton of food and reduce the amount of stuff he was carrying so he could do more looting (we’re running the ragged edge of carryweight here), then I had them head out (after spotting ANOTHER tripwire and a bomb just in time – Victor disarmed both), working their way stealthily through side alleys (past some non-aggressive garbage squirrels) and tagging the North Church before finding themselves on the other side of a freight truck near a whole bunch of raiders! Victor and Piper took out as many as they could find – including the Legendary Raider right outside Pickman’s Gallery – but as Victor was trying to find the one raider they’d missed, one of the trucks in the “parking lot” outside the gallery ended up blowing up due to all the damage it had taken, and Victor ended up gibbed. Damn.
-->All right, let’s try that again with the benefit of hindsight. Restarted in Haymarket Mall right after the mass cooking – Victor redid his looting and disarming, and then he and Piper snuck out again, in a slightly different direction this time, creeping through the streets proper and clearing out one of the many historical cemeteries of ghouls. The pair refound the Old North Church for later, then I decided “you know what? Just for fun, I’m gonna use the alien blaster on these raiders. I haven’t got a chance to use it yet, and it’s good for somewhat lower-level folks like these.”
-->And so that’s what I did – Victor got out his blaster, and he and Piper passed the freight truck and made sure to kill all the raiders in the pizza parlor FIRST before moving onto the raiders outside Pickman’s (including that Legendary). Everything went a lot smoother this time around, and Victor and Piper were able to clear out everybody without issue. Victor got a Quickdraw Mahogany Baseball Bat off the Legendary – not exactly his style, but he can sell it later. (Wonder if Moe Cronin would pay extra for it?) This, however, once again left him overweight, so I had him drop his port-a-potty and one dinner plate (for “Fine Dining” purposes) before scrapping all of his junk (and his old chestplate) to try and make his load just a little bit lighter.
-->Nope! Victor just has too much on him. And Piper of course was already at capacity herself, so couldn’t help. . .hmmm. Only thing to do, it seemed, was store a bunch of stuff in one of the dumpsters outside Pickman instead, like a gun Victor wasn’t using and some old clothes and bunch of explosives. Also finally swapped him from the Minuteman Uniform to the Military Fatigues as they gave him a little bit more damage resistance – I don’t think Victor likes wearing army stuff, but he needs that bit of extra protection.
-->With THAT sorted, Victor and Piper finally entered the Gallery at 3:35 PM in-game time, to find some raiders talking about going after Pickman and how their boss, Slab, wasn’t going to leave someone who’d “hunted” his men alive. Victor and Piper had to kill them after accidentally alerting them to their presence (Piper doing a LOT of kill-stealing with her gun – I may have to take it from her), which at least got Victor up to Level 24! I eventually chose Scrapper Level 2 for his new perk, to get more out of any old armor or guns he scrapped. The pair wandered around the lower levels, finding – well. The thing about Pickman is that he is a serial killer who uses his victim’s blood and viscera to paint pictures, and their leftover bones and organs to make more art pieces. Complete with a “calling card” left on the bodies (challenging whoever picks it up to find him, complete with a heart painted in blood). So yeah, there were a lot of creepy paintings on the walls, raiders theatrically laid to rest in coffins, other raiders being prepped for dismemberment, and a bathroom with bones all over the place and a bunch of plungers stuck on the wall. O.o And one corpse marked as a quest objective – turned out to be a luckless raider who’d managed to make a holotape of his final moments, detailing what he’d found (it was a message to his buddy Jack, stating he’d found a painting of “Kyle’s body” – and then Pickman found him and told him to keep that expression as the guy tried to flee).
-->As stated, it was then that the game told me I could just go back to Hancock, but I was in this to find and kill Pickman, damn it! So Victor and Piper began making their way further through the house, heading up to the second and third floors and seeing what was there. Which was mainly more raiders, living and dead – and the living ones tended to end up dead pretty quick after encountering Victor and Piper. What was of most note were all the corpses being prepared to be turned into artwork, a surprisingly creepy attic nursery, a near-miss missile launcher trap on the third floor, and a weapon’s workbench which reminded me that I’m SO close to Gun Nut 3 – gotta turn in some of these quests for a level-up!
-->But not before finding Pickman – and on the third level, Victor found a crawlspace “hall” behind the nursery wall, with a big old gap in the middle of it. He managed to pick his way along a pipe to get to the other side and retrieve a caps stash, but wasn’t able to get back the same way and had to slowly drop down back to the ground floor (disarming a mine along the way). And through the secret passage was the entrance to the murder art basement, complete with some raiders looking for their friends and a picture in progress with a blood paint can next to it. *wince* Victor and Piper killed the raiders and proceeded further into the basement. . .
-->And this is where things got complicated, because THERE IS SO MUCH BASEMENT. The pair found themselves slogging through dark tunnels of mud and brick, before coming to a drop that forced them to jump into irradiated water before fighting some raiders on the level just above (including another Legendary – though all they had was a Mutant Slayer’s Metal Left Arm, so I ended up leaving that). They found their way up to the raider level, crossed some pipes, and continued in deeper, through little hallways and roundabouts of sorts, killing more raiders and taking out some of the other defenses, like mines and turrets. I eventually had to stop at one little hideout in the middle of all the murder basement – having killed the raiders there, Victor was starting to feel tired (even with having chugged a Nuka-Cherry earlier), so I let him have a three-hour nap on the mattress there. Which got him Lover’s Embrace with Piper. O.o Freaky, newsgirl. XD Anyway, I’m gonna have to complete Pickman and get back to County Crossing next time! Then it’s finishing up the USS Constitution quest, swinging by Hancock’s to let him know about Pickman, and THEN DIAMOND CITY AND NICK BECAUSE THIS MAIN QUEST ISN’T GONNA COMPLETE ITSELF. Oh, it is SO easy to get distracted in this game. XD
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – bit of a slow start this morning because of my late awakening, but I did manage to get all four posts making up this week’s Chill Save update (Alice becoming a werewolf, the entrance of Guidry, and the Season Premiere pop-up holiday) into the drafts complete with pictures and full text after lunch! So that’s something, at least. And this evening I had just the one thread reply for Valice Multiverse, which was pretty easy, yay. :)
5. Get in a workout: No check – a combination of “I will not have time for all of my other chosen activities” coupled with “my thighs and butt are kind of sore for reasons I don’t quite understand” (all I can think is that in addition to sleeping LATE, I slept WEIRD) meant I decided to skip today. I’ll pick it back up tomorrow with the next Oxventure, “Crawl Me Maybe!”
Additionally:
-->A little muggier today, but still nice enough to play beanbags – I had a great first game, then – well, I didn’t exactly play BADLY, but I wasn’t able to get past Dad ever after that, who had another excellent day. Mom, meanwhile, worked her way up to a win and then back down. XD Final scores were me W-3-3-3-2; Dad 2-W-2-W-W; Mom 3-2-W-2-3. Hey, again, we each won once, soooo. . .
And I just cleared out the majority of the stuff in my e-mail inbox (Moose's messages and some comments from AO3 from someone re-reading the Forgotten Vows Verse), so that makes me feel better too. Still owe a reply to Ace over on FF.net though. . .hopefully I can get to that after work tomorrow! We'll see what happens. . .in the meantime, night all!
Anyway, while I obviously needed the sleep, getting it kind of threw off the rhythm of my day, as is reflected by the to-do list:
1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – as per my notes below, Victor, Piper, and Alice have (after taking a moment to clear out the exterior of Haymarket Mall, because raider camps are no good for anyone) made it to Pickman’s Gallery! Which had a lot of angry raiders outside of it. . .and a lot of creepy paintings IN it. Creepy paintings that vampire Alice said smelled good to her, which is never a good sign, is it? Yes, the trio have discovered that Pickman’s a serial killer artist working in raider blood and guts, and even if they don’t like raiders either, they can’t let THAT stand. So they’re working their way through his house and down into his murder basement, killing the raiders they find (mostly because the raiders won’t stop trying to kill them) and navigating the muck, slime, irradiated water, and viscera as best they can. Alice finally got Victor and Piper to take a nap when they found a “rest spot” the raiders had set up in the middle of the surprisingly large basement, and the three are now preparing to push even deeper into the tunnels to find this damn Pickman and bring him to justice – that is, if the raiders don’t get to him first. . . Not that they’re really going to mind if that happens, because that’s still justice, really.
2. Keep up with YouTube Subs, the OXBox Hitman 3 double feature, and Jon's latest Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel video: Two-thirds check – sleeping late and spending longer than I intended in Fallout 4 (see below) meant I didn’t have time for the OXBox stuff again. :( But at least I’m fully caught up on Subs, and I didn’t miss out on Jon’s stuff, so that’s something –
A) Started after beanbags with the latest from Call Me Kevin – “Can you play Stardew Valley without farming?” Yes, after playing a hermit in his “main series,” Kevin decided to branch out with “Farm Hater,” a cool dude with sunglasses and a mohawk who wanted to do anything but farm!
. . .as it turns out, doing anything but farming means you are NOT going to have a lot of money in the early game. Farm Hater ended up sleeping away most of spring because he didn’t have anything to do after he sold Mayor Lewis’s gift of parsnip seeds, then started desperately foraging for anything he could sell for a few gold coins, all while being taunted with such things as backpack upgrades and better fishing rods with ridiculous prices just out of reach. XD He eventually stumbled upon a few decent ways to make a bit of cash – thanks to a kind villager giving him the blueprints he needed to make a furnace, he ended up getting into mining, going into the underground on a regular basis to break open rocks and beat monsters to death with a wooden club (that was actually better than the SWORD he got at the beginning of this little dungeon), then smelting the resultant ores himself; selling all the seeds people insisted on giving him as rewards to Pierre at the general store; doing the odd quest for goodies (like giving spice berries to the wizard – now that’s a rare sentence); and – deep sigh – fishing. Oh, as you can imagine, Kevin was REALLY THRILLED to do more fishing, especially with the most basic rod. XD But it paid the bills, so to speak, and kept him in just enough cash to do things like occasionally buy a backpack, upgrade his pick to a copper one (great against rocks, BAD against enemies, as he found out the one time he forgot to take his club), and even sometimes buy 300 gold coffee as a gift for dear Harvey the doctor! Because Kevin looked up who among the villagers was the easiest to romance and Harvey was near the top of the list. XD (Though he hasn’t given up hope that Abigail, who loved one of the random rocks he pulled out of the ground, might reciprocate his affections, and the comments are full of tips like “Romance Leah, you can literally give her random chunks of driftwood.”) But yeah, Farm Hater is not doing so great on Not A Farm right at the moment. At least he’s allowed to LEAVE the damn place and actually see the wider world. . .
B) Then, after supper, we had GrayStillPlays and “When you evolve your duck for 10,000 years” – aka he has moved onto the next entry in the Duck Life series, Duck Life 3! Which takes the whole “duck racing” concept to a whole new level, in that your duck EVOLVES between race courses now. And the evolutions look even LESS like ducks. XD Gray got an Ugly Duck, then a Merduck from his evolutions, getting a boost to swimming speed each time, while some of the other ducks got things like ACTUAL FREAKING LEGS. Like, only one duck stayed an actual BIRD, and even then it didn’t look like a duck anymore, it looked like a sparrow. (Not that it ever looked like a duck to me. . .) Gray trained religiously (with a training partner on certain courses – apparently this game had a glitch where you’d get a double duck occasionally – Gray trained with Leg Duck whenever he was available), maxed out everything, and finally had the power to open up the portal to the other universe and confront the Supreme Duck, taking on his course and blowing up his army of Domo-Kun (remember Domo? The little brown brick with teeth?) with the power of his duck mind – and possibly his duck mohawk. XD These games just get weirder and weirder as Gray completes them – and apparently there is a fourth entry where things just get straight-up violent. :D Oh, Gray’s gonna love THAT one!
C) And finally, we had the wonder that is Jon’s playthrough of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel! In Part Two of this LP, Cain has traversed the big old crater behind Carbon’s bar, fighting tons of giant evil spiders and a few terrible radiation-shooting radscorpions and looting everything he can find (getting lots of new fun toys like a flaming torch for setting enemies on fire and a whole set of leather armor), only to reach the final pit and find that this was all a set up by Richard, the mayor, to get him killed because the raiders wanted Cain dead for what he did to their buddies in the bar or they’d burn the town. And the mayor was only too happy to give them what they wanted, despite the fact that he’s packing so many explosives it should be a crime. Jon had to do quite a lot of ducking and weaving and general flailing to avoid being blown up, and then had to take a long run out of the crater to escape while being swarmed by all the enemies ever after the final explosion of the mayor rendered the crater unstable. Damn. And when he got back to the surface – well, remember how the raiders said they would burn the town if Cain didn’t die?
Yeah, seems like they were going to just do that anyway, as they were already in the process of burning when Cain emerged from the pit. Armpit the bartender died right in front of him after being poorly set on fire (handing over the recipe for radscorpion tail liquor and making a poor-taste joke about ghouls before he passed away), and Jon then spent a truly absurd amount of time running around the town, killing all the raiders and trying to save as many innocent civilians as he could. And then doing it again because he hadn’t cleared West Carbon. And then doing it again because he hadn’t cleared NORTH Carbon. And – yeah, this was about the time when Jon started getting annoyed at the endless waves of enemies sent at him constantly by the game, especially since they were making the game stutter. He was enjoying building up his version of Cain – who is slowly getting better with a gun but is already pretty damn good with melee weapons and ESPECIALLY fire – but the endless slog of having to kill a specific amount of enemies in an area, then move to a DIFFERENT area and do the same thing again, was starting to wear on him.
And things didn’t get better from there – after finally clearing out the four cardinal directions of the town, he got sent back to the warehouse to meet with the surviving named townspeople and pick up his final quest – deal with the raiders at their base, the old mill. (And also drop off Ruby the prostitute’s dead cat that we found in the crater, and pick up a new quest to get her grandmother’s necklace back.) Cain hitched a ride with the local trader, Jesse, then carefully navigated the minefield over to the old mill and went through it, clearing out loads of enemies with all his new toys (he was only semi-impressed by the shotgun he bought, which made him sad), and activating the local reactor to cause a bit of havoc and get into the Raider Matron’s lair. The subsequent cutscene revealed that the slaves she’d been taking from the town were being sold to a Super Mutant General (a very erudite one – seriously, when you’re used to the rather dull-witted super mutants of Boston, ones that talk more normally are a surprise), who despite doing business with her, was only too happy to leave her to deal with Cain alone.
And so Cain faced off against Jane, the Raider Matron in her dominatrix gear! (She jiggled so much when Cain asked her where the Paladins had gone.) After learning that his potential brothers in arms had been directed down to the ghoul city, they had a brawl, in which Jon learned that the flamethrower he’d picked up was NOT his best friend – but then neither was the shotgun, which ran out of ammo shortly before he managed to kill her. Let’s just say she took a LOT of punishment for a woman wearing as little as possible. Cain headed back to Carbon, gave Ruby back her necklace and hooked up with her (er, sort of – her dialogue suggested she was not ready for, um, ghoul private parts), then ran into a wasteland stranger who said that he might make it with the Brotherhood yet and gave him supplies and a map to find his way to Los, the ghoul city.
This stranger is supposed to be The Vault Dweller, hero of the original Fallout. Jon is completely baffled by this guy’s inclusion in the game, since – well. The whole point of every mainline Fallout is that you can customize your protagonist to be pretty much who you want. Even FO4, which gave more specific backstories, allowed you to pick if you were the husband or the wife and let you customize their look. Having a very specific Vault Dweller just feels WRONG to him. (Though the guy did get a pretty good line about how mouthing off to him would have gotten you killed and your gear sold to the nearest trader for drinking money thirty years back – since, you know, that’s what so many of the actual players do with enemies. I strip them for leather armor to break down so I can upgrade my armor! XD)
So yes, the episode ended with Cain reaching Los and finding that the ghouls there are apparently part of a nasty cult that regularly sacrifices trespassers, and the only way in is to be in the good books of the Church of the Lost. I feel like being a ghoul is really gonna help Cain out here. So far Jon doesn’t HATE the game, but as stated, he’s not fond of slogging through all the enemies, and he misses the environmental storytelling – there’s a lot of wrecked buildings and such to find (even in the crater!), but there’s no STORY behind it. No reason as to why these people were building there, what happened to them, who they were and why they mattered. Really makes you appreciate Bethesda’s little notes more, doesn’t it? Shame. . .we’ll see where this all leads next week!
3. Play Fallout 4 and hit Pickman's Gallery before heading back to County Crossing: Check, though I didn’t get as far as I expected – turns out Pickman’s Gallery is a lot BIGGER than I initially expected it to be! The creepy blood artist murder house has multiple levels of murder basement, for one thing. . .no wonder they give you the option to just go back to Hancock when you find that one holotape at the beginning. . .but I digress:
-->Started just before Faneuil Hall, with Victor and Piper sneaking out to find Pickman’s Gallery. Got as far as a little narrow gap right by the “construction site” raider camp – when Victor tripped another grenade trap and got blowed up. @.@
-->Okay, so, I’d only been playing for like a MINUTE, so that wasn’t a big deal. Sent Piper and Victor that same way, only this time I looked DOWN and made sure to disarm the trap before Victor set it off. I had them hug close to the wall as they continued, then figured “you know what, might as well clear out the raiders over here” and had them slip into the camp. Victor’s 10mm and Piper’s trusty fiery laser weapon made pretty short work of all the raiders in the area – and their camp turned out to be a discoverable location, Haymarket Mall! Complete with an interior, but in the interest of not getting distracted even further, Victor and Piper didn’t go inside. Victor DID make a stop at the raider’s cooking station to cook up a ton of food and reduce the amount of stuff he was carrying so he could do more looting (we’re running the ragged edge of carryweight here), then I had them head out (after spotting ANOTHER tripwire and a bomb just in time – Victor disarmed both), working their way stealthily through side alleys (past some non-aggressive garbage squirrels) and tagging the North Church before finding themselves on the other side of a freight truck near a whole bunch of raiders! Victor and Piper took out as many as they could find – including the Legendary Raider right outside Pickman’s Gallery – but as Victor was trying to find the one raider they’d missed, one of the trucks in the “parking lot” outside the gallery ended up blowing up due to all the damage it had taken, and Victor ended up gibbed. Damn.
-->All right, let’s try that again with the benefit of hindsight. Restarted in Haymarket Mall right after the mass cooking – Victor redid his looting and disarming, and then he and Piper snuck out again, in a slightly different direction this time, creeping through the streets proper and clearing out one of the many historical cemeteries of ghouls. The pair refound the Old North Church for later, then I decided “you know what? Just for fun, I’m gonna use the alien blaster on these raiders. I haven’t got a chance to use it yet, and it’s good for somewhat lower-level folks like these.”
-->And so that’s what I did – Victor got out his blaster, and he and Piper passed the freight truck and made sure to kill all the raiders in the pizza parlor FIRST before moving onto the raiders outside Pickman’s (including that Legendary). Everything went a lot smoother this time around, and Victor and Piper were able to clear out everybody without issue. Victor got a Quickdraw Mahogany Baseball Bat off the Legendary – not exactly his style, but he can sell it later. (Wonder if Moe Cronin would pay extra for it?) This, however, once again left him overweight, so I had him drop his port-a-potty and one dinner plate (for “Fine Dining” purposes) before scrapping all of his junk (and his old chestplate) to try and make his load just a little bit lighter.
-->Nope! Victor just has too much on him. And Piper of course was already at capacity herself, so couldn’t help. . .hmmm. Only thing to do, it seemed, was store a bunch of stuff in one of the dumpsters outside Pickman instead, like a gun Victor wasn’t using and some old clothes and bunch of explosives. Also finally swapped him from the Minuteman Uniform to the Military Fatigues as they gave him a little bit more damage resistance – I don’t think Victor likes wearing army stuff, but he needs that bit of extra protection.
-->With THAT sorted, Victor and Piper finally entered the Gallery at 3:35 PM in-game time, to find some raiders talking about going after Pickman and how their boss, Slab, wasn’t going to leave someone who’d “hunted” his men alive. Victor and Piper had to kill them after accidentally alerting them to their presence (Piper doing a LOT of kill-stealing with her gun – I may have to take it from her), which at least got Victor up to Level 24! I eventually chose Scrapper Level 2 for his new perk, to get more out of any old armor or guns he scrapped. The pair wandered around the lower levels, finding – well. The thing about Pickman is that he is a serial killer who uses his victim’s blood and viscera to paint pictures, and their leftover bones and organs to make more art pieces. Complete with a “calling card” left on the bodies (challenging whoever picks it up to find him, complete with a heart painted in blood). So yeah, there were a lot of creepy paintings on the walls, raiders theatrically laid to rest in coffins, other raiders being prepped for dismemberment, and a bathroom with bones all over the place and a bunch of plungers stuck on the wall. O.o And one corpse marked as a quest objective – turned out to be a luckless raider who’d managed to make a holotape of his final moments, detailing what he’d found (it was a message to his buddy Jack, stating he’d found a painting of “Kyle’s body” – and then Pickman found him and told him to keep that expression as the guy tried to flee).
-->As stated, it was then that the game told me I could just go back to Hancock, but I was in this to find and kill Pickman, damn it! So Victor and Piper began making their way further through the house, heading up to the second and third floors and seeing what was there. Which was mainly more raiders, living and dead – and the living ones tended to end up dead pretty quick after encountering Victor and Piper. What was of most note were all the corpses being prepared to be turned into artwork, a surprisingly creepy attic nursery, a near-miss missile launcher trap on the third floor, and a weapon’s workbench which reminded me that I’m SO close to Gun Nut 3 – gotta turn in some of these quests for a level-up!
-->But not before finding Pickman – and on the third level, Victor found a crawlspace “hall” behind the nursery wall, with a big old gap in the middle of it. He managed to pick his way along a pipe to get to the other side and retrieve a caps stash, but wasn’t able to get back the same way and had to slowly drop down back to the ground floor (disarming a mine along the way). And through the secret passage was the entrance to the murder art basement, complete with some raiders looking for their friends and a picture in progress with a blood paint can next to it. *wince* Victor and Piper killed the raiders and proceeded further into the basement. . .
-->And this is where things got complicated, because THERE IS SO MUCH BASEMENT. The pair found themselves slogging through dark tunnels of mud and brick, before coming to a drop that forced them to jump into irradiated water before fighting some raiders on the level just above (including another Legendary – though all they had was a Mutant Slayer’s Metal Left Arm, so I ended up leaving that). They found their way up to the raider level, crossed some pipes, and continued in deeper, through little hallways and roundabouts of sorts, killing more raiders and taking out some of the other defenses, like mines and turrets. I eventually had to stop at one little hideout in the middle of all the murder basement – having killed the raiders there, Victor was starting to feel tired (even with having chugged a Nuka-Cherry earlier), so I let him have a three-hour nap on the mattress there. Which got him Lover’s Embrace with Piper. O.o Freaky, newsgirl. XD Anyway, I’m gonna have to complete Pickman and get back to County Crossing next time! Then it’s finishing up the USS Constitution quest, swinging by Hancock’s to let him know about Pickman, and THEN DIAMOND CITY AND NICK BECAUSE THIS MAIN QUEST ISN’T GONNA COMPLETE ITSELF. Oh, it is SO easy to get distracted in this game. XD
4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check – bit of a slow start this morning because of my late awakening, but I did manage to get all four posts making up this week’s Chill Save update (Alice becoming a werewolf, the entrance of Guidry, and the Season Premiere pop-up holiday) into the drafts complete with pictures and full text after lunch! So that’s something, at least. And this evening I had just the one thread reply for Valice Multiverse, which was pretty easy, yay. :)
5. Get in a workout: No check – a combination of “I will not have time for all of my other chosen activities” coupled with “my thighs and butt are kind of sore for reasons I don’t quite understand” (all I can think is that in addition to sleeping LATE, I slept WEIRD) meant I decided to skip today. I’ll pick it back up tomorrow with the next Oxventure, “Crawl Me Maybe!”
Additionally:
-->A little muggier today, but still nice enough to play beanbags – I had a great first game, then – well, I didn’t exactly play BADLY, but I wasn’t able to get past Dad ever after that, who had another excellent day. Mom, meanwhile, worked her way up to a win and then back down. XD Final scores were me W-3-3-3-2; Dad 2-W-2-W-W; Mom 3-2-W-2-3. Hey, again, we each won once, soooo. . .
And I just cleared out the majority of the stuff in my e-mail inbox (Moose's messages and some comments from AO3 from someone re-reading the Forgotten Vows Verse), so that makes me feel better too. Still owe a reply to Ace over on FF.net though. . .hopefully I can get to that after work tomorrow! We'll see what happens. . .in the meantime, night all!
