Distracted Tired Sunday

Yeah, the period hit me hard today, I am annoyed and sad to report. *sigh* I mean, it could have been worse, I still did pretty well on the old to-do list, but I didn't have a lot of energy or focus, and that did affect my performance in some areas --

1. Keep up with the FO4 Playthrough Progression: Check – as per my play session below, this was mostly Victor, Alice, and Piper getting the radar transmitter; killing some horrible monster lobsters (damn Mirelurk Hunters); heading back to County Crossing so Victor could see about upgrading his guns and get some sleep (and, upon waking, sell all of his chems to passing trader Doc Weathers); going back to the USS Constitution to install the transmitter; getting the final quest from Ironsides to pick up some FLL3 Turbopump Bearings; having Alice get a message from the Wonderlanders that Victor needs to talk to Nick first before doing that (aka the bearings are in Fort Hagen and that is plot important so might as well get Kellogg while we’re there); crossing the bridge into downtown Boston to quickly report on Pickman to Hancock; and then getting badly lost because I sometimes have trouble navigating this game in broad in-game daylight, never mind at night during a radstorm. XD Victor finally called it and had him and Piper get some more sleep instead. Next time, checking in with Hancock, selling some stuff to KLE0, and then back to Diamond City!

2. Keep up with YouTube Subs and Jon's Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel LP: Check! A nice easy three-in, three-out on this Sunday –

A) Started this evening with Call Me Kevin and “The Sims 3 is weirder than you remember” – yes, having played a bunch of The Sims lately, and done whole series in The Sims 2, it was time to check out The Sims 3! Playing as a terrible genie with a desire to become a gold digger and see the ghost of a wealthy spouse named Help Me! XD Kevin moved him into the island world, got him a job as a stylist, and proceeded to learn that he had no idea what was going on in this game or how anything worked. XD Help Me, meanwhile, became buddies with the llama mascot that dropped off his university freebies and would not stop taking selfies with him; went to the beach and – in between trying to romance a random criminal – learned he could summon food at will (leaving an entire roast turkey on the beach) and banish Sims at will (deleting a guy and his beach umbrella from existence); tried to find himself a rich spouse, and discovered he could ensorcel Sims (allowing Kevin to temporarily control them – not that it made it any easier to get a romance going, really) and banish children; began eating ten tons of magical curry because Kevin found it funny whenever he breathed fire from it being too hot; became a partner in the local grocery store; went to his first day of work as a stylist and made over his coworker (shaving his head and giving him loads of body hair) before learning he was a werewolf and getting into a fight with him (he lost) and accidentally dragging him home, where the guy proceeded to savage his couch; went to his SECOND day of work as a stylist and made over a couple of other people (making one a bald cowboy and another a bald superheroine) before deciding his talents were wasted there and going instead into politics; rented the big plaza in the center of the island to throw a party and did nothing but enter the hot dog eating competition that was already going on there (he won!); banished some zombies (because those were a thing in this game); and had such a rough first day at work as a politician after spending all night talking to himself and eating curry he collapsed on the nearest bench. XD Chaos central – that is how we like it on Kevin’s channel. XD

B) Then it was over to GrayStillPlays and “i had to choose the worst ways to wake up,” aka Gray Plays Wake Him Up! It’s silly mobile games time again on the channel, with the conceit of this one being there is a guy asleep in either a reasonable (having dropped off at his computer, snoozing in a ball pit) or unreasonable (fallen asleep on the treadmill, napping on top of a moving train) position, and you have to grab items from the world to wake him up. Or, rather, that’s what you’re SUPPOSED to do. If you’re Gray and you play the level that lets you throw monkeys at the guy and discover you can fire them out of your hands like machine-gun bullets and completely glitch out the game as the guy flies into space, you IMMEDIATELY make it a priority to buy the monkey “weapon” and use it as often as possible to torment the man with monkeys and gain loads of cash. XD (Seriously, you normally get coins in the hundreds; Gray was getting them in the thousands.) Occasionally he did things like throw cats on him in the ball pit so they could feast on his flesh; toss smoke grenades at him while he lounged in his own chimney; and blasted him through the train platform with a million sticks of dynamite – but in the end, monkeys ruled the day. *solemn nod* As they should.

C) And finally, we had the weekly Jon video of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel! This is looking like the penultimate episode (short game is SHORT, apparently), and it involved Cain wrapping up his time in the ghoul city of Los and descending into the secret Vault-Tec employee vault! With a new and truly awful vertical V-T logo. *shakes head* Guys, you wanna properly read up on the lore here? Or at least the visual design? Anyway, the highlights:

I. Cain wrapped up his business in Los by discovering that the package he delivered from one ghoul merchant to another one was in fact a bomb to get rid of the competition (never mind they were brothers), earning him a discount and allowing him to start getting the good armor; and by finding an NPC he’d totally missed before – Giese, a robotics expert from Vault-Tec who was forced to the surface by an explosion (apparently there was a fight down there involving the biological research people), told Cain about how to get into the secret employee vault in the warehouse (which Jon already knew because this game just ASSUMED he’d already talked to Giese, I guess), and who built Cain a Super Sledge out of junk. Jon promptly declared said sledge his new best friend, especially when he discovered it was one of those weapons that did double damage on each swing.

II. Cain found his way into the warehouse to find the super mutants wrecking up the joint and SOOOO many spiders and other bug enemies. Soooo many. It was frankly excessive. Cain’s Super Sledge did the job, however, providing lots of fun knockback, and the dual submachine guns and assault rifle he found later did the job even BETTER. Yes, Jon is of the opinion there’s far too much combat in this game and it’s far too samely in that you just have to tank it and hope there’s enough stimpacks (like blowing up a whole bunch of robot turrets in one room), but he DOES still like the weapons. He likes how the Super Sledge feels genuinely meaty, and the guns feel good to fire. It’s the little things, you know?

III. Cain found his way into the Vault itself and OH CRIPES SOOO MANY SPIDERS. Not to mention loads of security lasers and occasional super mutants. But mostly horrible horrible spiders that managed to kill Cain once. Jon was not pleased by that. . .

But he was pleased by OCCASIONAL DIFFERENT GAMEPLAY. The Vault actually mixed things up a bit by introducing sliding drawer puzzles, where you had to press buttons to figure out how to open up all the drawers in data storage blocking your path, then how to unlock different rooms for goodies – like bits of the best armor in the game, the Tesla armor. And the resident keycard you need to get deeper into the vault. There was even a section where you played as a little security robot on tank controls going to the spot where it could disable all the remaining hallway lasers for you! Some actual VARIETY in what was happening! No wonder Jon called this episode “The Actually Slightly Good Bit.” XD

IV. After getting the lasers down, Cain found his way into the Murder Hallway and encountered Attius, the current super mutant general, looking for the “weapon” that the vault holds (Jon is of the opinion it’s actually a vault working on fertility, and the mutants are looking for a way to allow themselves to actually breed, as they’re naturally sterile). His assault rifle did the job in the boss fight, but apparently this is not one you’re actually supposed to win – dude had invisible Nightkin on his side, and the fight ended with Cain getting his arm chopped off and being thrown into the “trash pit” below. Fortunately, said trash pit is where a bunch of the vault scientists are trapped thanks to murderous robots and monsters, and one exploring the area, Mary, found Cain and managed to lead him back to the others. Featuring yet MORE changes in gameplay, as Cain was continually losing health and limited to a slow walk and one-handed weapons (which, in Jon’s case, was just grenades, as he’d sold everything else). Fortunately Cain got a new arm once they reached the scientists, and learned the scoop from Patty, the current security officer – apparently Blake, leader of the ghoul cult, was their FORMER head of security and tried to lead a coup against their evil research, which may or may not have led to the explosion that left half the population on the surface. Interesting. . .seems like Blake, for all his faults, was genuinely trying to stop something awful from getting unleashed from the vault. Jon’s left it there for the moment, preparing for an escort mission to turn off the ventilation system so the trapped scientists can escape to the surface through an auxiliary vent. Next time, we will probably see what the end of the game holds, and if it really IS the worst Fallout game. (My money is on “yes, but maybe not QUITE as bad as everyone says it is. Even if it has stupid stuff like being able to fight the original Vault Dweller in the arena fights. And crop-top vault suits. And weird product placement. And – look, it’s BAD, but the weapons are okay.” XD)

3. Play Fallout 4 and get the transmitter for the USS Constitution and advance that questline: Check – though I didn’t advance the questline as much as I thought I might. This is how it went –

-->Picked up in Poseidon Energy Turbine #18-F, with Victor and Piper on the verge of getting the radar transmitter they needed! The place was partially flooded though, and you know what that usually means – mirelurks. As such, I had them proceed with caution into the main room, down the ramp, and through the water where the broken catwalk dipped down. Well, with as much caution as possible – turns out that it is VERY EASY to get caught on shit when you enter that one little sunken bit. *rolls eyes* But I managed to have Victor jump out and get to the other little office control area, where he found –

-->Radroaches! One normal, one glowing. O.o Huh. Well, they were easily dispatched with the Two-Shot Combat Rifle, and Victor went to pick up his prizes. Which included not only the transmitter, but also more ammo, a leather chestpiece he could break down for parts, a cryomine, AND another magazine – a copy of Tumblers Today, making lockpicking permanently easier! I – never found it that hard in the first place, but sure! XD With that taken care of, Victor headed back outside (past Piper, still stuck in the water), with me going, “Okay, I’m SURE there were mirelurks around here some–”

--> “. . .Oh wait. They’re OUTSIDE, aren’t they?”

And sure enough, when Victor went far enough out the front door, two freaking Hunters – aka the killer Lobsters – popped out of the parking lot. And to make things worse, one of them was a LEGENDARY. Victor promptly retreated inside to get a better position, but was poison sprayed and smacked around anyway. *wince* Fortunately he has loads of stimpacks (and things to drink to offset the stimpacks making him super thirsty as per my survival mod), so healing up wasn’t too hard, and his Two-Shot did the job in killing the fuckers –

-->And better yet, killing them leveled up him up to Level 25! AKA, he could finally take Gun Nut 3! :D Which I very promptly did, and then took a moment to see if I could do any gun upgrades at his portable workbench. . .not really, didn’t have enough supplies.

-->But that was okay, because we were still nice and close to County Crossing! Victor and Piper (having finally gotten herself out of the water) promptly headed back over there (avoiding the notice of a patrolling Protectron nearby), where Victor built himself a weapon workbench and started seeing what he could do. . .

And I once again fell prey to “hang on a second, what’s the best upgrade path to take here?” Well, that and “oh crap, I don’t have as many supplies as I thought I did.” (Mainly was short on oil, annoyingly – it’s always that, screws, or adhesive in this game, I swear.) I mean – it is better to give the Two-Shot better range, or should I keep it relatively short-range as I’m using it as a day-to-day gun? (Because, hilariously, in its current form, I have the most ammo for it.) What should I do with Righteous Authority? Should I switch my 10mm to the Hitman’s 10mm I found on the Legendary Mirelurk Hunter? But I don’t really aim these days, I’m very much into VATS. . .should I make these guns LIGHTER, then? Hmmm. . . Gun upgrades are hard! I did end up improving Righteous Authority to just have more base damage overall, but – hmmm. I’ll have to have a serious think about what I want from my arsenal going forward.

-->Not helping matters was Victor’s fatigue catching up to him – poor guy was exhausted, even with the help of a Nuka-Cola. So I had him pitch his tent right there next to the workbench and sleep from 11 AM to 7 PM so he could have a clear head heading for the USS Constitution. He stayed at County Crossing for a little bit – harvesting all the crops, noticing Doc Weathers was around and selling him all the drugs he’d picked up/combined in exchange for a bunch of caps and a flip lighter, and moving the second little shack he’d built to house the two newcomers so it would be easier for them to access their beds – but by 9 PM, he and Piper were back on the road, looping around the Deeply Radioactive Thinguses, carefully going across the bridge, and getting up onto the bridge of the Constitution, where Victor installed the new radar transmitter. Mr. Navigator thanked him and gave him 250 caps before directing him to Captain Ironsides, who thanked him for all his hard work (and for not hurting the scavengers – while he personally considers them assholes and filth, he acknowledges they’re citizens of the Commonwealth and thus people he is sworn to protect) and asked for a final favor – to find them some FLL3 Turbopump Bearings for their engines. Victor accepted the mission, and I checked the quest marker on his map to find – “hey, these damn things are on the other side of the Commonwealth, practically! Well, this is gonna–”

--> “. . .wait a second. The spot the game is telling me these bearings are. . .IS THAT FORT HAGEN??”

It – took me a bit of time and a lot of fiddling on both my iPad and my phone to try and get a good look at where Fort Hagen appears on the map, but I finally found a good image that seemed to verify that it was in the same place where the quest marker is, AND confirmation on the wiki that Fort Hagen is a viable location for this particular quest item to spawn.

Fort Hagen, for those not in the know, is where you confront Kellogg and start Act II of the main plotline.

-->WELP, TIME TO GO TALK TO NICK, I GUESS! XD I love this, it’s like the game itself is going “PLOT, Victoria, remember it?” XD So yeah, time to pick up that thread and just get to Hagen. However, since Goodneighbor’s super close and on the way, I figured I’d finish that up with Hancock first. So Victor and Piper left my favorite robot boat behind to cross the bridge over to the part of Boston with Fanueil Hall and Pickman’s Gallery and whatnot (which had picked up some mines?? Victor deactivated them all, fortunately), retracing their steps past Pickman’s (I WAS gonna stop and pick up the stuff I left in the dumpster outside, but a) couldn’t actually find the entrance, and b) only had about six pounds of carryweight left – I’ll figure it out again later) and Fanueil Hall to try and find Goodneighbor.

-->Cue me getting lost in the wreckage of the various elevated highways, nearly pissing off some super mutants, and ending up doing a loop and arriving right back on the other side of the wreckage closest to Fanueil. >.< All with a radstorm crackling overhead. I decided that Victor needed to get back on a diurnal schedule anyway and had him and Piper camp for a few hours, sleeping from 2:30 AM to 9:30 AM. Ended with it being DAYLIGHT, so maybe now Victor and I can actually find our way to Goodneighbor to tell Hancock what’s up. *facepalm* That next week, along with working my way back to Diamond City to meet back up with Nick!

4. Work on tumblr drafts: Check, though it was a rough one thanks to period brain. :( After getting badly distracted this morning (note to self, stop reading random tumblrs over the ones you actually follow), I managed to get some of my focus back after lunch and get all the pictures for the four-part Chill Save update sorted with a bit of starter text. Got the full text for the first post done after my FO4 stuff, but that was the only one I managed – the rest will have to be done over Monday and Tuesday. Meeh. Also had one ask reply on Valice Multiverse – got that sorted quickly, w00.

5. Get in a workout: Check – back on the bike, and onto the first episode of the Oxventure Orbpocalypse, “Sphere We Go!” We rejoined the Oxventurers right where we left them – having seen Prudence’s magical orb suck up an entire fountain of magic juice (save for the one cupful Prudence got down – apparently her out-of-Warlock spell is Banish! Thought it was just a normal banishing spell she already had access to. . .also, banishing has already been compared to the kissing game “Seven Minutes In Heaven” and everyone is joking about Prudence banishing people together to the make-out dimension XD) and turn into some sort of hellish puzzle orb! While Corazon established that Prudence had no idea the orb could do that, Dob decided to go get a closer look at the thing. Everyone promptly warned him not to lick it, and he said he just wanted to try and read the runes.

He licked it. XD Apparently the purple energy it’s giving out is fizzy and tastes not like grape, but like blue raspberry. He didn’t learn really anything much more than that, though – the runes themselves were all single letters, and from a variety of alphabets, so it was impossible to determine any sort of pattern. Corazon declared he was a Puzzle-Soc kid at his old posh school and promptly set about trying to spell out things like “Butt” while Dob poked at it – Merilwen, meanwhile, noticed that Seal Gaiman had gotten quite excited about the orb and decided to cast Speak With Animals to learn his insights.

. . .yeah, the party has finally and fully canonically learned where Seal Gaiman came from and what happened to Victor Deidrich from their little museum adventure. XD Victor tried to spin it as Egbert just attacking him repeatedly with the cursed mace when he wanted to learn more about his order (yeah, it took a WHILE for Mike to get the six he wanted to transform the guy), but Egbert – upon hearing this from Merilwen, I assume – pointed out that Victor was going for the alarm, and they all realized, “Oh, this happened while we were stealing the coin, sorry.” Weirdly enough, though, Victor has decided he likes being a seal – being someone who hated small talk and socializing in general (hence why his museum was invite only once a year and would only be open to the public after his death), he appreciates that now he gets to go on adventures, randomly yell whenever he likes, and never have to talk to anyone. Plus he has discovered the absolute wonder of Scotch eggs (to the point where, when Egbert later gave him one, he asked that Merilwen tell him when she could no longer understand him so he could scarf it down without it being too embarrassing to hear what he was saying XD). Merilwen asked if he had any idea what the orb was – Victor admitted he was never sure, but he’d found it in some sort of giant crater, near a mountain with a chunk taken out of it. He put it in his museum in the occult section as he wasn’t sure what else to do with it. He was actually quite excited to see it in action! Merilwen relayed all this to the others and said that the orb was either fired from a great distance or straight up alien in nature. Corazon tried to spell “aliem” on the orb as he wasn’t great at spelling –

And suddenly found a bit of it clicking into place, causing the top to open just a bit and start emitting more purple light. Luke nearly made it canonical that Corazon then put it in Dob’s mouth, light-first, but Andy was able to successfully argue that would be out-of-character for Corazon, who nearly did it before realizing, wait, that’s a terrible idea. Instead the orb ended up on a plinth where they could watch it all together –

And what they watched was a magical hologram come out of the orb, showing three strange conical objects, and then an image of a great tower, linked to a much smaller tower via drawbridge, on a terrible island surrounded by eldritch vines and jagged spikes of metal. Egbert and Merilwen didn’t recognize it (Merilwen because news of the location never reached her section of the woods growing up; Egbert because he’s Egbert – also because he was giving Seal Gaiman/Victor his Scotch egg at the time), but the other three did – the terrible prison of Alcataz, where only people serving life sentences go. It’s in fact a horrible corrupt prison run by the Astor family (Andy’s eyes DID go wide as Edvard briefly came to the forefront XD), and not only do they get lawmakers in certain places to send people to their prison for ridiculously small crimes (like littering), they also don’t separate magic users from non-magic users, meaning that those who can sling spells basically rule over those who can’t in there. It’s a horrible corrupt prison-for-profit, in summary – and apparently, one of those conical things the orb wants is in there. Questions about how they were going to get in there to get the conical thing promptly began abounding –

At least until Corazon pointed out “uh, guys? Why are we doing what the mystery orb wants us to do? Also, no, we should not get ourselves ARRESTED to get in there, what is wrong with you.” He wanted to search his brain for the arcane knowledge to guess if the orb was evil or not – an affronted Prudence said that was her job and promptly rolled Arcana.

And promptly got a crit 1. XD Basically her reasoning came down to “orb powerful and dark, me like that.” XD Corazon managed a somewhat better roll and came to the conclusion that it might be one of the strange magical storage devices created by the first magic users when magic first popped into existence on Geth. So it’s not necessarily evil in and of itself (though my memories of it whispering to Prudence to do its bidding when she first got it make me worried), but they certainly don’t want it falling into the wrong hands. Or, at least, wronger hands then theirs. XD Corazon reluctantly came around on the whole “go to the magical prison and get the thing” plan, and fortunately Egbert talked them into trying to sneak onto one of the supply ships first before getting arrested or having Corazon apply to be a new guard (mostly because then there would be snacks). Though it was agreed that first they should probably stop by a library and do some research on it.

. . .also, wait, didn’t they have a guest party member with them? Yes, Bob (the NPC from “Crawl Me Maybe”) IS still there, but he has no idea what ANY of them are talking about, so he’s just been waiting patiently to see where this goes. XD Hopefully nowhere bad for you, buddy! We’ll see what happens with Bob and the orb and all that tomorrow!

*nods* Okay, not bad, just -- wish my brain had cooperated more with the tumblr drafts, is all. Ah well, period brain is what it is, sadly. At least this should be the worst of it. And now it's time to get through another full week of work. At least I have another three day weekend at the end of it! (Columbus Day and all.) Night everyone!