Happy Birthday Alice Liddell!

I'm afraid to say that it wasn't the happiest of Alice birthdays for me -- there was some bullshit at the beginning of the day that threw things off for a while, plus I was still dealing with my sunburns and my period, of course -- but overall it was pretty good. I checked off everything on my celebratory to-do list, at least! And got through most of the usual Sunday stuff too -- let me give you the round-up:

Tumblr: Another night of nothing happening on Valice Multiverse, but I did get a bunch done on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) – even if things didn’t go ENTIRELY to plan...

A) Before lunch, I took a moment to reblog my post for the final chapter of “A Murder Shared Is A Murder Thirded,” because it hadn’t gotten any activity on it except for me having queued it up to my RP tumblr, and I wanted to make sure people saw it. Paid off too, as my friend Ace reblogged it to their tumblr, so yay.

B) Then, after lunch, I posted the photo I took this morning of Alice Dolly riding Us in a race against Dougie while Victor Plush and Smileon cheered her on in honor of Alice’s birthday! Why did I wait until after lunch to post this?

BECAUSE IT TOOK ME THE REST OF THE FUCKING MORNING TO GET MY PHONE TO CONNECT PROPERLY TO MY COMPUTER. Turns out the accursed thing (the phone) needed an update, but it of course never TOLD me this – it just kept refusing to properly recognize my computer as a trusted device. And then the update itself took forever to download and install, thus – photo going up after lunch. *huffs* It was EXTREMELY fucking irritating, let me tell you. But at least I got it up and fulfilled that portion of my “properly celebrating Alice’s birthday” checklist. Hopefully doing the photo posts for Smiler’s and Victor’s birthdays don’t cause me the same grief!

C) And finally, after playing A:MR (below) I spent some time working on my draft for a “How To Write Smiler Alton: A Guide” post, covering Smiler’s key personality traits and suchlike! I didn’t get as far as I might have wanted, but I got a solid start. Maybe next weekend I’ll be able to wrestle it into a postable shape – and that other post I want to do about my Tav!Smiler’s respeccing too. We’ll see!

Alice: Madness Returns: Got to this after getting the photo post for Alice’s birthday up on Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler), spending just under an hour replaying both the Cardbridge section of Chapter Four (and going down the slide that opens the Queensland section right after it, because why not) and the final boss fight with the Dollmaker. Fun as always, though I proved to be a little bit rusty on some of the controls – I accidentally sent Alice careening off the card/invisible platform path in Cardbridge a few times because of missed/poorly-timed jumps, and I had to pause midway through the fight with the Dollmaker to remind myself what I pressed to trigger lock-on mode so I could kill an annoying Colossal Ruin getting in the way of me smashing up the Dollmaker’s hands (Left Trigger on the XBox 360 controller, for those of you wondering). And despite my best efforts (aka dodging pretty much constantly because the hands can’t hit or grab you mid-dodge), I still ended the boss fight with like three roses of health. *grimace* Yeah, uh, the screen was looking pretty cracked by the end of the game! But I still won, and I still got to see Alice reclaim Lizzie’s room key from Bumby before shoving him into the path of an incoming Underground train. :D One of the best cutscenes in the game, in my humble opinion. The other being Alice growing to giant size in the middle of the maze section near the end of Queensland and then getting to smash the Executioner flat beneath her boot. XD Nice to revisit the game every once in a while! Maybe one day I’ll do another full playthrough, if I have the time...though what I’d really like to do is get the original game working again and replay them both. That would be nice.

Writing: Ended up getting to this early thanks to the whole “trying to get my phone to connect to my computer so I could transfer a photo of Alice Dolly to said computer so I could use it to make my tumblr post celebrating her birthday” debacle this morning – while waiting for my phone to update, I decided to channel my irritation with the whole process into the gift fic that I needed to write for my friend Squid (whose birthday will be coming up on 5/16). Why would I do that? Well, because the prompt that they requested for said gift fic was me writing a conversation between Isaac (vampire Anarch baron of Hollywood) and Romero (one of his ghouls, shoots zombies in the cemetery) from Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. A conversation where Isaac realizes that Romero – who has been gushing a lot about the time he spends with Squid’s OC Angeline (a former Camarilla ghoul rescued from a REALLY abusive domitor who now works for Isaac as well) –

Is apparently completely oblivious to the fact that he’s in love with her. Like, he considers them merely friends with benefits, despite going on about how great he thinks she is and how much he likes being around her. As you might imagine, this realization is deeply irritating to Isaac – sooo I felt like I was in the exact right frame of mind this morning to write that. XD And I really must have been, because the first draft of the story went pretty smoothly! Like, it’s rough, yeah, but it gets the point across – and it includes Romero accusing Isaac of working on too many romance movies, Isaac snapping a pencil over Romero’s obliviousness, and Isaac calling his adopted childe Velvet Velour for help in getting Romero to realize his feelings at the end (as per an earlier gift fic I wrote Squid). Telling her that he may need her to literally slap some sense into his ghoul. XD So yeah, glad I was able to get that done while waiting for the phone shenanigans to be over – I’ll edit it next weekend, and then it’ll be good to go into the queue!

Workout: Welp, GrayStillPlays uploaded an hour-and-nine-minutes-long video today, so you can probably guess what I watched while pedaling my way through another half-hour on the bike! XD Specifically, I watched roughly the first half of “When work consumes your soul,” aka Gray plays Order 13! This is a horror game where you are a person working the night shift at The Jolly Box Company, tasked with getting a certain dollar amount of orders picked, packed, and shipped before you go to bed in your sad little mattress nook. Because part of the horror is the fact that you live at your workplace, I suppose. XD Every night, your target amount gets larger, meaning you must make more and more trips into the giant dark sad warehouse outside your loading bay door to fetch more and more items to box up and ship out. And, as this is a horror game, naturally weird malformed supernatural demon-creatures are stalking you in said warehouse, skittering along the floor and leaving huge blood stains and body parts everywhere. (Some of which are shippable items!) Meaning you have to make sure to keep out of their way, lest the Bad Things happen and you become the next jumpscare corpse. And on top of that, you also own an adorable orange tabby cat – whom you must keep happy because otherwise, being a cat, it will cause problems. The cat’s happiness drops whenever you venture forth to do your job, so you have to pick fast so you can both come back quickly and give it the attention it so craves, and earn money to buy it distractions like new toys, and a better bed, and food. XD I don’t know WHAT exactly the cat does if its happiness meter bottoms out, and I suspect I shall not know because Gray (as a loving cat dad himself) is very intent on keeping the cat happy. He even named it Spleens, in honor of everyone’s favorite Sims 4 cat. :) Anyway, so far Gray’s been doing pretty good on keeping on top of his quota and NOT getting murdered by the demon-creatures in the warehouse – there’s been a few close calls, but he’s always managed to skirt around them or duck under some shelving until they lost interest and stumbled away. However, that may change soon, because when I left off, he’d just bought his first Basement Certification, meaning he can now venture to the lower levels of the warehouse, where presumably worse demon-creatures live. We’ll find out tomorrow!

YouTube: Got in a Sunday Three of sorts thanks to my determination to watch at least one Alice-related video before the day was over –

A) Of course, we started with with Jon of Many A True Nerd and “Fallout: London - Part 41 - Skin In The Game!” The continuing adventures of Lady Aria and Mad Jack as they wandered through Westminster and –

I. Had a lovely heart-to-heart now that they weren’t being menaced by horrible eldritch ghouls! For you see, now that they were officially mates, Mad Jack felt that he ought to tell Aria a little more about himself – namely, the reason that he wanted out of that basement gym so badly. It seems that he’d developed a feeling down there that he’d gotten before, like someone had punched a hole in his chest, and that all the fighting he was doing – beating up poor innocent people just looking to make a buck – was just making it worse. Aria, being the Perceptive sort, was able to guess that the poor guy struggled with depression –

Which Jack confirmed by admitting to, after a little prodding, trying to kill himself once. You see, part of Jack’s regular costume is a giant noose around his neck, and it turns out that’s not an affectation or part of his “Mad Jack” persona in the ring. It’s the remnant of when he tried to hang himself from a tree, only for the rope to break before he could actually die. He just – never took it off. *wince* This mod does NOT shy away from the hard-hitting stuff with the companions, let me tell you! At any rate, he just wanted to let Aria know, as that’s what mates do – though he was also sure to assure her that he was feeling better now that he was traveling with her. Apparently when he goes around punching people with her, it feels like the right thing to do. (Jon, behind the screen, was like, “Oh Jack, that is REALLY not always the case, I do some HORRIBLE things in Fallout games.” XD) Aria thanked him for sharing, and they continued on their way. No companion quest yet, but after that confession, it feels like his eventual personal mission might be a doozy. Though it’ll take a lot to top “Arthur Mountbatten asking for help with his bucket list because he’s basically got a terminal disease...”

II. Headed to the top part of the map to check out that side quest everyone was insisting Aria had to do – only to get distracted by ANOTHER miscellaneous quest telling them to check out Westminster University. *nods* That is SO the Fallout mood, in my experience. XD Aria thus popped her head inside –

And was immediately accosted by a Professor Butterfield, who said he had a job for someone of her skills. Turned out that the university’s computer systems were under attack by a mysterious hacker, who was using a suspicious code to get into their sensitive files. The university folks were very worried about their carefully-hoarded information being wiped, especially since the virus had managed to lock down the security terminal. Thus, they needed Aria’s help to decode the damn thing and save their files. Aria was like “uh, hacking really is not my forte, but I’ll give it a go” and went to check out the computer bank in the next room, going from computer to computer to see which ones she could actually access –

And discovering, to her relief, that “cracking the code” didn’t actually involve any hacking at all! Instead, it involved correctly answering a bunch of rhyming quiz questions about the UK – like “what’s the name of the famous square named after one of Horatio Nelson’s famous battles” (Trafalgar) or “what’s the famous absolutely massive tree in Scotland” (the Yew, though given it mentioned the tree being a yew in the question, Jon was like “that one feels a little too obvious?”). Given Aria had the power of “being played by a native Englishman” on her side, it didn’t take her long to go through all the terminals, answer all the questions, and get the passcode they needed to unlock the security terminal. She thus proceeded to put that in and unlock the records room, where she found another terminal –

With a message on it saying it was for “the Wayfarer’s eyes only” – aka, Aria. Reading it revealed that it was a message from Smythe, saying that she’d foreseen Aria getting past all her security during this little hack, and that she was even somewhat impressed – but that Aria interfering in her plans needed to stop. Cue three Atkins robots appearing out of nowhere to try and shoot her. O.o Fortunately, Aria easily took the three of them down with her shotgun, and even got a Relentless 9mm (aka a gun that refills her AP on a critical hit) off the one Legendary for her trouble. Jon’s not sure if it’s better than the Freezing one she already has, but figured it was worth hanging onto, at least! But yeah, seems that either one, Smythe still secretly has it out for Aria and was hoping to get rid of her before she became a real problem, or two, Aria stumbled into some content she really should have done BEFORE officially teaming up with Angel and getting at least partially off Smythe’s shit list. Probably the latter, but given what Smythe is like, I’m not ruling out her trying to get Aria killed still!

III. Visited the “NuSkin” facility near the university to finally do that side quest everyone’s been pestering Aria to do – “NuSkin, New You!” NuSkin, as it turned out, was a plastic surgery facility that purported to be able to make people look younger –

By peeling off a person’s entire skin and replacing it with new, wrinkle-free skin! Already horrifying enough, but then Aria asked where the replacement skin came from – only for the robot at the front desk, Miss Crake, to tell her that was a secret, but that there was no worries, as it was guaranteed cruelty-free and had never been exposed to the sun or radiation. Meaning Jon’s first thought was, of course, “basement human farm.” (Well, okay, that was his SECOND thought, his first thought was “abducting and killing poor people for their skin,” but that didn’t fit the “never been exposed to sun or radiation” brief.) The only way to investigate was to book an appointment, though, so that’s what Aria did, visiting Nurse Peggy (another robot) and paying 200 caps (the game told her it would be 100, but maybe they assumed she was paying for both herself AND Mad Jack) to update her look. Jon took the opportunity to give her a new scar (a big cross on her cheek), then had Aria ask Nurse Peggy about the procedure. Peggy reiterated the line about it being a secret – but in her case, it sounded more like she didn’t know where the skin came from. A little probing revealed that she was programmed not to go in the basement, but had a keycard that would let Aria in – and fortunately, thanks to that “Lovecraft’s Presence” token she picked up last time (yes, she still has it – Jon just modded out the weird visual effects it inflicted on her), Aria had the Charisma to convince her to hand it over so she could investigate. She thus headed downstairs (with a little help from the “noclip” cheat, as the door bugged out on her) –

And encountered something even worse than your standard human basement farm – a CHILD basement farm. Yes, as it turned out, NuSkin’s thing was being an even worse version of Vault 75 from Fallout 4, with children being raised to be happy and carefree all the time in the basement levels before finally being taken upstairs at age 16 – purportedly to dance and eat sweets, but really to be killed, have their beautiful unwrinkled skin harvested, and their bodies sold to the Priscilladog dog food factory. May I remind you that Aria ATE some of that dog food at the very beginning of the game? D: Appropriately horrified by her discoveries (especially since she’d met and kind of befriended one of the kids, Caspian, during her investigation), Aria headed back upstairs, told Peggy what was going on (she was also appropriately horrified, the poor robot), then went and confronted Miss Crake. Miss Crake maintained that what she’d done was indeed cruelty-free, saying that she’d bought a lot of the initial children from cash-strapped parents in Eastminster (asking if Aria thought they should remain with their “doting vendors”), then kidnapped the rest after the rise of the 5th Column in the area made the people living there less desperate (but insisting that they would still have a better life in her basement than in the outside world). Aria wasn’t having it – not in the least because Miss Crake wouldn’t stop referring to the children as “tissue” – and easily took down her and all her Protectron minions with Mad Jack to stop the horrors from going any further. She then went and rescued the kids (getting poor Caspian in particular out of the cage he’d been locked in for “snooping”) and took them back to Eastminster. Jon was initially kind of worried that the locals would not actually be that happy to see all these children, as they were at the very least more mouths to feed –

But when Aria arrived with kids in tow, local Benson Tozer thanked her profusely for her efforts, assured her that any kids who didn’t have parents to go back to would be well-looked-after by Miss Bruna, and gave her 500 tickets that he and his fellow parents had managed to scrape up in gratitude. Leading me to believe that a lot more of these children were straight-up kidnapped than Miss Crake initially said. *nods* But yes, the kids were welcomed back with open arms, and Aria returned to Westminster content in a job well done. She may not be the most moral person on the planet, but harvesting children for their skin is a little much even for her!

IV. And finally returned to Smythe’s office to check in with her post-assassinations! Smythe told Aria that the situation was getting pretty volatile out there (Aria was like “has it?”), and revealed that she planned to take over the Lord Chancellorship as the next part of Angel’s plan to consolidate power. This required her to get some sort of royal decree, but fortunately she had a plan on how to do that. A four-part cunning plan, no less, laid out in black-and-white in a dossier on her desk –

But actually finding out what said plan is shall have to wait for next week, as Jon thought it would be fun to cut it there! XD He does enjoy the occasional cliffhanger of sorts, doesn’t he? So yes, next Sunday, we find out what Smythe’s cunning plan is, and what role Aria will play in fulfilling it! And hopefully, that will come with a side of getting Mad Jack’s companion quest sorted, as I am rather interested in seeing what it is after his confession at the beginning of the video.

B) And then, right before I came over here to do my update, I watched both “American McGee's ALICE - Alice played with her weapons! PART 1” and American McGee's ALICE - Alice played with her weapons! PART 2” by Miss Misty! These are two fun short videos – about two minutes and three minutes respectively – showcasing a bunch of the idle animations Alice had in the original AMA! From spinning her Vorpal Blade on her finger, to doing a card trick with her Cards, to accidentally dropping her Jackbomb on her foot, to freezing the ground in front of her with her Ice Wand (and then slipping and falling on the icy patch), to poking the eye in the Jabberwock’s Eyestaff. All very amusing stuff, and I’m sorry we didn’t get anything like this in A:MR (that Alice doesn’t keep her weapons permanently equipped like in the first game, so if you leave her alone for a while, all of her idle animations are just her yawning or rocking on her heels or suchlike). Though it DOES make me want to do some “weapon idles” for Smiler now…maybe AFTER I get some of the other stuff in my VLA(NS) drafts sorted and posted!

Other: Didn’t think I’d be able to sneak in an Alice-related fanfic before time ran out, but upon quickly checking through my bookmarks on AO3, I found the fic “Crazy” by my friend Newt, which was a short little fic they wrote years ago about Alice enjoying a winter Wonderland while listening to Victor noodle around with a new song. So I happily reread that. :) Hooray!

Aaaand, as usual, I'm heading to bed later than I intended. *shakehead* Granted, I'm getting better at getting the Fallout: London videos summarized faster, but there always seems to be something I need to add in these latest updates that means it still takes forever. *sigh* Well, maybe next Sunday will be better -- we'll see. In the meantime, night all!