Fairly Busy Tuesday

Yes, Psuedo-Sunday #1 this week was pretty productive, to my pleasure! Here's the deets --

The Required Stuff: AKA the reasons I took the day off in the first place, my dentist visit and my Real ID upgrade appointment. Here’s how they went –

Dentist Visit: Fine – got there on time, got all my x-rays (including a panoramic x-ray), got my teeth cleaned and examined, out after about a half-hour. No problems noted, which is good. :)

Real ID Appointment: Mom took me up to the AAA location that we’re registered that, and I filled out the license renewal form. . .only for the lady checking appointments to say (paraphrased), “you know, since they pushed the requirement to have one back to 2025, you should really wait until you have to renew your license anyway in 2023 – if we did it today, you’d have to pay $20 AND your expiration date wouldn’t change, so you’d have to pay the renewal fee ANYWAY at the end of next year.”

Soooo – yeah. Turns out I didn’t need to do this at all. Plus it turns out we’d brought only a copy of my birth certificate instead of the real thing, so it wouldn’t have worked anyway. *sigh* So we just went back home, and I’ll just get the upgrade when my license renews automatically!

Tumblr: Got my queue sorted on Victor Luvs Alice after writing and before the end of YouTube (see below) – four-part chill Save update, and more Alice: Madness Returns and Corpse Bride gif sets for Thursday and Friday respectively. :) And I made sure to take some time this evening after GrayStillPlays to catch up on my dash a little and reblog all of Moose’s most current Doctober fics (though as she noted, it’s kind of more Docember now). XD

As for Valice Multiverse, nothing going on there today activity-wise, so I found a picture of Codsworth to reblog, since he is part of my Sole Survivor!Victor’s family. :) Keepin’ it simple!

Writing: Got another gift fic done – this one for Moose, who wanted more of George and Lorraine, and of ice-skating. I came up with something that’s maybe a slight twist on the prompt, but which I hope will still be enjoyable. :) Fingers crossed you like it, Moose!

YouTube: Oh yeah – kept up with everything I wanted to watch today. :D Taking the day off video games paid off, yay~

A) As promised, I spent the afternoon after lunch watching that OXBox stream that’s been sitting in my Watch Later for ages – “Hitman 3 BIG BAD WOLF Escalation | Killing Three Little Pigs in The Halliwell Fable!” Jane was on the controls with Andy and Mike offering advice and suchlike, for this new fairytale-themed escalation, where you had to hunt down three little pigs (people in pig masks) while running around as the Big Bad Wolf (47 in a wolf mask). Here’s how it all went:

I. Stage One – Task was to kill three little pigs in the forest outside the Berlin club, with the restrictions being that you could not change your Big Bad Wolf Suit and you had a restricted loadout. The pigs greeted 47 on the road with a table of items – a feather duster, a chunk of driftwood, and a brick – and the games began once he picked one up (the items roughly representing the pig houses in the original story – straw (duster – closest thing they had!), driftwood (sticks), brick (. . .brick)). Jane grabbed the feather duster, then headed out into the woods after the pigs! She was able to find two of them without TOO much trouble, chasing them down, knocking them out, and snapping their necks, but the third required quite as bit of hunting. On the plus side, she was able to pick a combat knife while she was searching and thus was able to streamline her murder a little bit when she DID find the piggy. Ended with a calm cycle off down a dirt road and a Silent Assassin rating at five stars, w000. Also, just doing the first level unlocked the suit for her general use, yay~

II. Stage Two – The pigs were now “undercover” as employees in the club (though still wearing their masks), and had to be taken out with melee weapons! Okay, that was technically OPTIONAL, but Jane wanted to do it anyway. Finding a melee weapon that was actually lethal took quite a bit of doing, though – everything Jane saw as she wandered across basically the entire club area (inside and out), Andy said “non-lethal.” Even more hilariously, she actually TOTALLY MISSED two of the pigs along the way – one of them being THE FRONT DOOR RECEPTIONIST. XD To be fair, the guys missed it too until Mike pointed out the mission thumbnail had one of them at a laptop and Andy went “wait a minute. . .” Fortunately, she finally found a hobby knife behind the second-floor bar where the third pig was hanging out, and was able to tamper with a laptop back there to lure said pig in and slid his throat before hiding him in a box. From there, she snuck into the tech room behind the reception and managed to lure away the reception pig’s guard before trying to lure the pig into the room –

Cue the game having a brain spasm and TELEPORTING the pig to a hallway a few meters over, much to everyone’s bafflement. Fortunately the AI then made the pig walk all the way back to investigate the disturbance, and Jane was able to quietly slit her throat and stuff her in a locker. The third pig proved to be standing on the stairs near the dance floor, in a pretty secluded spot – Jane got him to investigate some thrown driftwood (as the items were all on the front desk this time) behind a “tech only” screen, then wanged the hobby knife into his head. He dropped, hiding himself, and Jane jogged back out the front door and hopped back on the bike for a smooth exit. Again, five stars, Silent Assassin. :)

III. Stage Three – The pigs were now angry bikers in their warehouse hideout, and the additional restrictions changed to not being able to kill non-targets and, optionally, if you use a gun, all shots must pass through an NPC. This is the one where it all went a bit Mike, honestly – starting with Jane having to almost immediately restart the level when she found a battle axe in the starting location and then immediately ran into a guy who objected to her having it. XD Fortunately, take two went a bit smoother – after leaving the starting area without upsetting all the bikers, Jane found a basement entrance and was able to discover via Hitman Vision that all the pigs were roughly grouped together on one floor. Having picked up a couple of kitchen knives from the dartboard in the starting area, she was able to use one to murder one pig standing with a friend reasonably near the stairwell, then kite around said friend on the stairs until she got the opportunity to choke him out. She retrieved her knives and tried to hide the bodies in a corner on the stairwell – but, somehow, one of the OTHER pigs saw them and came over to investigate. Jane, unsure how this happened, nevertheless took the opportunity to kill the investigating pig and add him to the pile, then – on the advice of the boys – crept up to the window looking into the security room where the last pig was hanging out and wanged a knife into his head before legging it. She NEARLY went out the wrong door while escaping (having gone down one level too far), made it back to the starting area as that had the nearest escape route, and then – despite some excellent kiting of a guy who nearly saw her to choke him out from behind – managed to upset all the same bikers she’d upset in the first go during her run for one of their motorcycles. She just BARELY hit the “exit mission” button in time while being THOROUGHLY shotgunned. XD Very dramatic exit, but the bodies being found and the painful escape extracted a price – only two stars, and Melee Master Assassin for the title (as she was relying on the kitchen knives the whole time).

IV. And then, since that hadn’t QUITE filled out the two-ish hours of the stream, the gang did a bonus mission – “The Haunted Mansion” in Dartmoor, a user-created Halloweeny featured contract where 47 was tasked to kill the majority of the Carlisle family (Alexa, Patrick, Rebecca, and Gregory). You were supposed to explode Alexa in any disguise, drop an object on Patrick in any disguise, shotgun Rebecca as mansion staff, and figure out your own favorite way to kill Gregory as mansion staff. Jane brought her new wolf suit to the party, but quickly changed it out for the detective costume because that lets you wander all around the level without any trouble, and brought along a gun she unlocked with location mastery, a special pistol that’s undetectable when you’re being frisked. Everything went okay to start, and she was able to quickly locate Patrick and tried her damndest to drop the chandelier hanging above the room he was wandering around in on his head –

Except she JUST missed him. Annoyed, she ended up just shooting Patrick in the head, getting a letter opener and throwing it into Gregory’s skull, and then following Alexa to Zachary’s deathbed and getting her with a kitchen knife while she was sitting there confessing her sins to his corpse (causing some pretty hilariously horrible ragdoll glitching with her feet). She was determined to do ONE of the kills correctly, though, and thus got a shotgun from the cabinet in the hall, stashed it in some bushes nearby, got herself a mansion staff outfit from the people in the staff room (took a couple of tries, but she did it), scouted out Rebecca’s location, and then worked with Andy (Mike having left early due to other commitments) to thin out the guards and find the best route to Rebecca. She did manage to successfully get there, kick open a door, and shotgun Rebecca. . .but doing so so publicly led to her being hunted, and her attempt to escape through the hedge maze ended with her being shot down. Mission failed. :( Chat promptly said that if Mike, master of shotgun chaos, had been there, it would have been okay. XD Ah well – at least Jane got to take her pretty new wolf suit to the Maldives to end the stream. And we got a new definition of “going a bit Mike” versus “going a bit Jane” – Mike screws up the contract in the first eight seconds, Jane screws it up in the last eight seconds. XD Honestly, having watched a LOT of them playing Hitman over the years – feels legit.

B) Then it was over to today’s Call Me Kevin – “This zombie survival game is a masterpiece!” A roughly-hour-long playthrough of Project Zomboid, one of Kevin’s favorite games, with a new character, the oft-electrocuted “God Almighty.” XD He was a strong construction worker who also smoked, was prone to depression, and was a Sunday driver, so any time he was in a car he drove really slowly. Perfect for the zombie apocalypse! XD Kevin had a bit of a rough start with him, spawning in a tiny bedroom in a VERY heavily zombie-infested neighborhood full of car alarms, but managed to escape his starting neighborhood (after picking up some pretty pink underwear and an animal print bra) and make it to the gated community, learning that he was better at stomping zombies than screwdrivering them in the process. And then better at HAMMERING them than anything else. XD He secured his gated neighborhood, disassembling loads of furniture in his neighbor’s houses to up his carpentry skill (as reading was just way too slow for God), stealing a gnome for his front garden, patching up the broken windows and making a new (very bad) door for his own home, starting work on a wall for the front drive, and finding loads and loads of canned food to store in his fridge. Further trips afield yielded even more goodies (including pretty make-up so he could pretend to be a clown if he wished), and he was even able to get his hands on a car –

But then things took a turn for the worse once the zombies started actually landing hits on him. His first injury was a scratch on his hand – fortunately, some bourbon-disinfected bandages and a load of painkillers prevented him from succumbing to that one. But not long after getting his car and taking it on a little trip to a strip mall to pick up loads of stuff from the tool shop and get some gas, he ended up getting chomped, and there was no coming back from that. :( Kevin, however, was determined to send God out on a high (even if his car kept conking out at the worst moments thanks to its terrible condition) and send him out on a final fun run – breaking into the convenience store and not only finally getting him some cigarettes and a lighter (after his previous stash somehow just vanished from his inventory), but loads of candy, which cured his depression! Then it was to the liquor store for some booze to both guzzle down and make molotov cocktails with (burning a bunch of the zombies he hadn’t run over and subsequently burning down most of the strip mall he was raiding), and finally a run through some other neighborhoods to find a better car to go home in (finally located a nice truck with a key inside, which allowed him to run over even MORE zombies). His final days were spent in montage, smoking, eating candy, watching TV, doing some burpees, and running over a few last zombies. He died after six days and 18 hours of survival, which – does turn into a zombie from an infected bite count as “resting?” Inquiring minds. . . I’ve always enjoyed his playthroughs of this game, and I was really rooting for God to make it longer, but c’est la vie. You did good, though, buddy – especially when compared to some of Kevin’s other challenge characters. XD

C) Then, right after supper, while checking to see if there were any new OXtra or OXBox lists to add to the Watch Later now that I’d finished the Hitman 3 stream, I stumbled across this on OXtra from ten days ago – “A Message from the Video Mines ⛏” Puzzled, I watched it, and it turned out to be just Luke and Ellen pretending to be deep in a “video mine” picking out content (with a black screen, mind), apologizing for some missed Show of the Weekends, explaining they’d been very busy with the Oxventure stuff and preparing for the Xmas Challenges. And then Luke sent himself off on an unseen accidental cart ride. XD Delightful.

D) Later this evening, we moved back to the Subs with “SKETCHY: Baby Huey” from Josh Way, aka another entry in his “Duck A Day” advent calendar (or as I have taken to calling it, Duckember :p). Baby Huey is a giant dumb baby duck from Paramount – I VAGUELY recall seeing some cartoons featuring him, but damned if I can remember the content. But apparently he also had a Harvey comics form, PLUS a live action feature film? With an actor in a duck suit? Weird. . . But Josh drew him very well, and talked about how he enjoys cartoon ducks a bit more (talking about how it’s weirdly easy to turn a bill expressive and wondering how the semi-standard “cartoon duck bill” came to be). Fun stuff!

E) And finally we had GrayStillPlays and “GTA 5 but every 60 seconds grows your legs!” The sequel to the “neck-stretcher” boards Alex devised, only the rings are around Gray’s middle now. XD As per the last board, we started with a slightly-taller Gray on foot, shooting inner tubes while sliding around at mach speed on a terrible parkour course featuring bouncing teleporters, disappearing ramps, rotating platforms, and tightropes with INCREDIBLY sharp turns. Then, after a “boss fight” with a computer programmer (during which Gray had to resort to kicking his opponent because he was just too tall to punch him), we had the motorcycle section with an even taller Gray having to race along the “rainbow road” (with all the gray sections disappearing periodically – also, it was timed), then launch immediately into a series of jumps off the moving ! signs, then get his absurdly long torso through a series of thumbnail holes, then lean back and use it as a SPRINGBOARD to launch himself to the next platform, getting it through one last thumbnail hole before reaching the checkpoint and the bonus round to get more inner tubes. And THEN, with that sorted, we got to the airplane section, where an officially-absurdly-tall Gray (he no longer even fit properly on the screen!) had to skydive down to a jet, then fly that jet through increasingly twisty gaps in a series of walls Alex had set up (with invisible walls around them to prevent cheating), going upside-down and dragging his head through the water as he followed the arrows and found the correct path to the win! Yes, it was very painful for Gray, but it was very funny for us, so. . . XD

Workout: Yup, back on the bike this evening, and back to the Oxventure “A Fete Worse Than Death!” As a reminder, everyone has swapped bodies thanks to some weirdness with some relaxation tanks, so I have mashed up their names appropriately – Merilzon is Merilwen-in-Corazon, Corabert is Corazon-in-Egbert, Egwen is Egbert-in-Merilwen, Dudence is Dob-In-Prudence, and Prob is Prudence-in-Dob. Have we got that straight for starters? Good.

Anyway – picked up with Merilzon demanding their two gold pieces back from the satyr who sold them the experience (who was later revealed to be named Michael), and then doing fun coin tricks with the gold when Michael handed it back over. Michael assured them that the swap could be fixed, but it was going to be tricky. You see, his boss, Rufus Rutger (Johnny started out calling him “Rutger” but then switched to “Rufus,” so I’ve decided they’re his last and first names respectively) has a mysterious “reset” switch that can undo everything that happened to them – they’ll lose the benefits of whatever relaxation they achieved, but they will also be in their correct bodies again, so net win. The problem is the switch is in his house, and needs a key to unlock it – a key that Rufus keeps on a chain around his neck. And Rufus is not a nice man in the slightest, having punched so many people at this point that his knuckles are on the wrong side of his hand. O.o Adding to the problem is that Michael should have never sold them the relaxation tank experience in the FIRST place – he’s the custodian, and his only job is to fish things out of the pool. He was just trying to make some sneaky money on the side. But, he warned them, they shouldn’t rat him out to his boss, because the penalty for misusing the spa equipment (or indeed any of Rufus’s equipment) is death for all involved – AKA Rufus will just kill them ALL. Which is not the ideal outcome, no. So they’ve got to get the key off him stealthily while he’s down at the village fete!

. . .might I tell you all now that Egwen had sneezed and accidentally cast Poison Spray, inflicting about eleven points of damage on Michael; Dudence had started complaining about how itchy Prudence’s clothes are; Merilzon had started complaining about how shit Corazon’s boots are; and Corabert, in between feeding Seal Gaiman a thousand Scotch eggs, had been examining all of Egbert’s spells and gotten real annoyed. Apparently there’s one in there Egbert’s never even told them about! (What it was was not revealed to us, though maybe Corabert will cast it later for us.) XD Yeah, uh, things were not looking great for the “sneak down to the village fete and steal the key” plan. And they started looking even worse when Dudence asked Prob to teach him how to cast Eldritch Blast safely – and when Prob admitted she’d never learned that, Dudence promptly tried to find out what happens when you fire one into the other using Agonizing Blast for the twin beam. Nat 20 on one, which went perfectly –

TWO on the other, which went COMPLETELY out of control and took THE ENTIRE RELAXATION TANK ROOM DOWN. Some Dex saves later, and everyone was okay except Corabert, who had learned just how little Dexterity Egbert actually has (Egwen, meanwhile, was LOVING Merilwen’s high Dex). He took 14 points of damage, leading to an OOC “sidebar” with Luke asking what happens if Corabert dies, because is it Corazon or Egbert’s soul that will be passing on to the afterlife? Johnny got very confused for a moment trying to figure it out – I think their final decision was “I’m gonna rule that all three of Corazon, Egbert, and Merilwen would die, with at least one body reduced to a husk.” Dudence was just happy he and Prob would be fine. XD And then that was almost immediately followed by Dudence making the “fete worse than death” joke that named this particular live show, and a bunch of jokes about using editing afterward to edit out Mike’s literal-minded response of “really bad fete then” and add in canned laughter from the audience (which the audience took a few tries to get right). XD

ANYWAY, festival! The village had put up all sorts of spooky banners like “have you ever thought about where your tongue is in your mouth” (Mike sure did after that) and “The Game” (as in, you just lost). There was an apple bob, an ale tent, various fair games, and even a green dragon wyrmling with its teeth and claws corked for the kids to hit with foam-covered bats. Egwen promptly went to the ale tent to drink his usual amount, and got so drunk that Merilzon refused to switch back until the hangover was cured. XD Corabert, meanwhile, went to the “guess the weight of the pig” stall and tried using Speak With Animals (yes, this is a spell Egbert has) to get the pig to tell him its weight, saying he’d split the winnings – the pig was very anti-capitalist, though, and rightfully pointed out there was no NEED for him to use money, he was well-taken-care-of by his farmer. Dudence was all for swapping the pig into a human body, and Corabert’s newly-lowered Wisdom made him think this was a fabulous idea. Prob told them to focus, then promptly used the apple bob and its fake-brackish water to try and clean off Dob’s body a bit, as it was just FILTHY. (Dudence, upon learning that nothing was as icky as his skin, got in quite a huff. XD) Eventually, though, the gang remembered they were looking for Rufus, and started investigating. Corabert got a very nice 19 and spotted the guy coming out of the wine tent, heading toward “Pin The Eye On The Beholder” with a sneer. Dudence, with an 8, got distracted by how itchy he was again. Merilzon, with 24, not only spotted Rufus, not only was able to pick out that the key was on his left side, but ALSO looked at the pig and suddenly knew its exact weight. So she filled out a slip and handed it to the livid farmer, reveling in the smugness. Egwen, with another 8, was still too drunk to be of any help –

And Prob got a freaking two (or possibly a secret crt 1) and became convinced that Rufus had disguised himself as the green dragon baby and hopped in to fight it, stripping the foam off a bat. And then got a crit 1 on the roll for initiative. However, the dragon didn’t roll well enough to chomp Prob, so Johnny ruled that it just missed her with its corked jaws and she fell on her butt to general hilarity. Prob probably began telling everyone her name was Dob, thank you very much. XD She managed to pull off an incredible flip after that in response to the others telling her to, but her attack roll was rubbish and she just lightly spanked the dragon. Who then got a crit 1 too and inhaled a bunch of cork before throwing it all up in the corner. Corabert and Dudence finally pulled her away while she was trying to root through the sick for the key. XD Corabert demanded everyone regroup, and he and Merilzon pointed out Rufus as their target –

And Dudence promptly strolled up to him to say hello, attempting to use Charm Person. Unfortunately, Rufus proved resistant (possibly because of what a horrible grouch he was), so Dudence fell back on Plan B – proclaim how a Beholder wasn’t scary at all and then Summon Greater Demon. Prob was like “I was SAVING THAT!” XD Johnny gave Dudence some examples of demons that could appear, but Dudence was like “Dob’s mind doesn’t work like that – can it be a giant demonic duck instead?” XD And so Johnny ended up having Dob summon a horrible goose-demon (apparently patterned after a killer swan they made up for a game of Werewolf in a past stream), which DID very much distract Rufus enough for Merilzon to just lift the key off his neck, no problem. XD Well, at least step one of the plan has been completed! Now they just have to get to that lever before Rufus notices anything amiss. Or possibly gets killed by a goose. XD

Not too shabby -- just wish I'd fit in answering Moose's latest messages, but hopefully I can get to those tomorrow. In the meantime, it's time for bed because I do have work tomorrow, much as I'd like to just have the entire middle of the week off. :p Night all!