PMSly, Lightly Stressful Monday
Apr. 27th, 2026 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, like, it wasn't HORRIBLE -- traffic in particular was pretty damn good on my commutes, which I appreciated -- but my hormones acting up made me definitely bitchier than I normally would be. Waking up early because I was cold and couldn't find my pajama pants (I'd kicked them off because I was hot before, and they'd slid down past the end of my bed to get caught in my sheets -- took me ages to find them, with me being like "what the fuck, did they MELT or something?!" the whole time) didn't help either. So it's probably in my best interest to get to bed earlier tonight -- so let's get right into the write-up:
Work – Well, my first day back at work today ended up being, annoyingly, just busy enough that I couldn’t get to everything that I wanted to get to. Mostly because my coworker took the day off and thus I couldn’t get her help on anything (and my supervisor left early too!). My accomplishments for the day included:
A) Doing the GL – which ended up taking most of the morning as there was a LOT of credit card stuff uploaded on Friday, and also a check that had to be split between the Appeal and the Capital Campaign, which led to some weirdness about what paperwork needed to go in what pile *grumbles*
B) Putting on as many of the checks that came in the mail as possible – there were a couple of checks that needed my coworker to sign into a particular site or interpret a particular report that I had to set aside, plus one that just came in too late for me to process it
C) Putting on the latest batch of Easter Collection gifts, which also took a while as there were twenty-three of them and I had to get ID numbers for all the parishes and whatnot
D) Both taking and returning a few phone calls, leading to two credit card gifts, one parish update, one telling a lady what her balance on her Capital Campaign pledge was, and two returned calls that WOULD have been credit card gifts except one lady decided to fill out her pledge card instead and mail it in, and the other was in her car at the time I called her back and said she’d call back tomorrow. *shrug*
Yeah, it was the phone calls that were the problem – they kept coming in JUST often enough to break up my momentum on a couple of the bigger tasks, and prevent me from getting to the other thing I got today – a QC file for the next thank-you. Had to tell our processors I’ll get to it tomorrow. *shrug* Well, I guess I know what I’m doing Tuesday, then!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Let's Play Resident Evil Requiem: LEON KICKS BUTT! ARTIFICIAL ORGANS! ZOMBIE MEATGRINDER? Episode 3!” The second half-hour of Part 3 of the OXBox RE9 LP featured –
A) Leon clearing out the bar and lounge no problem (the singing zombie there never even got the chance to scream at him), discovering the gun that Grace could have claimed just sitting on the bar (Andy was rather annoyed that he’d missed it, because he’d assumed it was in the safe), dismissing an antique coin on the piano as useless to him (to be fair, he sure as shit didn’t need to buy the drug to make his shooting better), then continuing his roaming through the halls of the Care Center, clearing out zombies and cracking open every warped cupboard door Andy could find for goodies and notes (including one about the pantry key on the chef – the gang was like “we did that already!”)
B) Leon, heading upstairs to try and find Dr. Gideon’s office, encountering a zombie who’d made a fucking giant bomb out of what looked to be some sort of gas container – Leon managed to explode him without being blown to smithereens himself, though it was rather a close call! Everyone was appropriately stunned and horrified by this turn of events...though the gang then discussing if that particular zombie had been a bomb technician and was just trying to do what he did in life did lighten the mood a bit. XD
C) Leon finding Dr. Gideon’s office – and discovering it was full of supposedly-dead zombies just waiting to cause trouble. Sure enough, after smashing up a bunch of vases and finding a secret lever to open an extremely-slow-moving secret door in the wall of the “conference room” area, a bunch of them became Blisterheads, forcing Leon to fight for his life against the horde. Fortunately, since he’s Leon and thus lives in the “Action Horror” portion of the Resident Evil universe, he easily held his own, bursting the Blisterheads’, well, heads with his hatchet and doing cool axe throws into their chests and whatnot. Even quipped that he’d gotten his cardio for the day afterward, which Jane was quite fond of. :p
D) Leon then using the elevator behind the secret door to head down to Dr. Gideon’s real private office, where he deliberately locked Gideon’s computer by fouling up the password a couple of times to allow his partner – revealed to be a grown-up Sherry Birkin from Resident Evil 2 (I THINK she’s also in RE6, but let’s not talk about RE6) – to catch the IP address and hack into it. Unfortunately, the news she found was not good – apparently both she and Leon are infected with a mutated version of the T-Virus. Which is presumably the same thing that’s been killing all the other survivors of what happened in Raccoon City all those years ago. :( Leon noted that at least they had each other, and they started looking through the files, with Leon taking especial note of one heavily-redacted report that contained the phrase “for the sake of Elpis” (or, as Andy put it, “for the sake of elf piss”) –
Which was immediately followed by a picture of Grace appearing on the screen, and Leon wondering what she has to do with all this. The OXBoxers were hopeful that what she had to do with it was a cure! Game, I swear, if you kill off Leon…
E) The action switching back to Grace (to the disappointment of the OXBoxers, who wanted more Leon and less Actually Scary Bits) as she finished her tumble into the hole and found herself in the hospital’s basement! A Required Scary Game Level, as per Mike, though it was noted to at least be better than a sewer level. She stumbled around taking in all the various horrors and collecting what goodies she could before stumbling upon the save room (a repurposed CCTV room) and reordering her inventory and finding a note revealing the name of her bug-eyed monster nemesis – The Girl. ...rather lacks panache, and the OXBoxers agreed. Anyway, that provided her with the goal of the level – flood the place with light using the ultraviolet lamps the previous workers had placed around the area! Which did require her to find three giant fuse-things called “joint plugs” to power them first…
F) Grace continuing to explore the basement to find the stuff she needed, and coming across various cells, including one occupied by a zombie (“locked up for zombie crimes,” as per Andy – Jane promptly wondered if Andy could let him out, and Mike pointed out that turning on the power would probably automatically open the doors, as that’s just how these games work) – and one occupied by Emily! Left on the bed in there by The Girl, who crawled into the ceiling as Grace watched. A look around the cell revealed a LOT of dolls in various states of disrepair, suggesting that The Girl sees Emily as a new and awesome big dolly for her to play with. Which is depressing AND horrifying in equal measure. At any rate, Emily didn’t respond to Grace’s cries, and there was no way to currently open the door, so saving her had to wait.
G) Grace finding the first joint plug she needed right at the end of the hall and claiming it...followed by her having to duck into a cell because The Girl had inconveniently appeared in the corridor right behind her; cue Andy muttering “oh no” and urging Grace to get under the bed (which, sadly, was not a game-approved option for hiding) while Jane asked what his plan was and Mike suggested Grace just live in the cell (“it’s got a bed; it’s got a toilet”). XD Fortunately The Girl turned around after getting right up close to the entrance of the cell, and Grace was able to follow her until she turned down another corridor, then use the joint plug to open up a room at the end of the hall which contained both some goodies, a dancing Mr. Raccoon (mascot of Raccoon City) statue, and a note stating that one of the workers had taken the toolbox down to the boiler room, as “the quality of the blood the laboratory receives has gone downhill” and the note-writer blamed “some problem during the separation process.” Gross.
H) Grace then heading around and finding another door that could be opened with her joint plug – which, ironically, led her to an area with a SECOND joint plug for her to collect (along with a zombie to shoot and a piece of big construction equipment to fiddle with later once she had the key) – she grabbed her new prize, then left the room via a handy tunnel in the wall...only to see a zombie trying to escape into it from the other end, before getting dragged away and reduced into paste by The Girl. Who then ascended creepily into the ceiling again. O.o Anyone else suddenly getting Alien: Isolation vibes?
I) Grace having to backtrack after the wall tunnel took her into the room she’d just been in (with a now-locked door because, well, she’d removed the joint plug outside), killing a zombie who’d decided to stand up (Andy: “I can help them sit down”), then making her way to the collecting pool...only to discover she would need some sort of crank to open the control panel she needed to access overlooking it (Jane openly went “noooooo” XD). She thus wandered off trying to find what she needed while the OXBoxers talked about whether or not the big pool of blood was a vampire thing (with Jane noting that you normally didn’t want to mix blood types, and Mike saying that it should be fine for a vampire who just intended to drink the stuff). Her adventures eventually took her to the former staff room, where she exploded a zombie’s head with a hemolytic injector (because Andy wanted to), learned how to make molotov cocktails (from the suitcase the zombie had been examining with some interest, justifying Andy’s desire to explode his head), then looted the place for goodies while Jane noted this wasn’t the greatest place to work, given the whole “staff room next to the blood pool,” thing – Andy countered that they did teach you how to make molotov cocktails, which was a transferable skill (Mike: “Like to an evil office block, or an evil orphanage”). :P
J) Grace eventually finding her way through to the boiler room via powering up another door and shoving a crate out of the way of a gap in some internal fencing, picking up the crank-like object she needed from the toolbox (along with an empty bottle, as the game insisted), before returning the way she’d come –
Only for The Girl to drop down from the ceiling in front of the gap she needed to get through. Cue Andy trying to force his way past The Girl anyway because she happened to be facing away from Grace as Mike and Jane urged him to get out of there, and then getting distracted by a free lockpick on the ground when he finally ran away, resulting in poor Grace getting a nasty (if fortunately non-fatal) chomp. Grace then managed to successfully escape The Girl and flee through the gap in the fence back to her save room (barely avoiding ANOTHER painful encounter with The Girl), where Andy dropped a save before sending her back to the collection pool. Where, naturally, she found herself fighting the dead guy who’d been lying there insensate before –
And where The Girl finally caught up to her and BIT HER HEAD OFF. O.O I mean, the OXBoxers kindly blurred it for us, the audience, but you could TELL that’s what happened. First death of the run, folks! Good thing Andy made a save so recently!
K) Andy bowing to peer pressure and FINALLY getting Requiem the Handcannon and its whole two bullets out of the box so Grace would have it in case of an emergency like “nearly having her head bitten off by The Girl,” then returning to the collection pool and THIS time managing to successfully kill the zombie there without The Girl showing up to ruin the party (mostly because, the moment The Girl appeared, attracted by the gunshot, Andy had Grace run back to the save room to hide and heal). She opened up the control panel, slotted in two joint plugs to power everything up, and went exploring the now safely-lit-up space...before having to crawl through a broken-down ventilation fan when the floor collapsed beneath her. On the plus side, this got her to where she was going, and she claimed the third joint plug she needed by a big old bloody channel – PLUS a forklift key that was able to get a nearby forklift’s lifter out of her way. Revealing a door that, when powered, led into a room with another hip bag (increasing Grace’s inventory by another two slots, yay), a map of the basement, and a floor plan of the processing area, revealing that if she could get to the other side, she could turn a wheel to drain the pool (Jane noted the upside-down guy just hanging out in the pool in the drawing, prompting Andy to jokingly go “That’s me” and encourage the audience to tag themselves).
And so I left off with Grace leaving the joint plug in by the side of the big channel to keep the door open, claiming the other two from where she left them in front of the pool, and going to brave the Inspection room! A terrible place with a ceiling conveyor belt full of dead bodies and hanging zombies, which presumably leads to the “zombie meat grinder” in the title. Bleh. >p Tomorrow, we finish off this episode and start Episode 4!
2. Continue edits on Chapter 5 of “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check – got in another page’s worth of edits today, featuring –
A) Kasimir being huffy about Victor not remembering where the pressure plate tiles were in the mosaic in the trap hallways, but Smiler insisting that there had to be a way to guess where they were, and getting down low for a look while asking Victor if he remembered at least where the tiles were supposed to be generally. Victor wracked his brain and said he recalled William telling him they alternated from the left side of the hall to the right and back, and that they were spaced far apart to lull thieves into a false sense of security – Smiler thus scooted over to the left side of the hall –
And spotted a white tile sticking up just a little further than the others! Alice came over to confirm that it was indeed slightly-out-of-place, and said that it was either their pressure plate or the result of a poor laying job. And as Victor confirmed his mother would have never tolerated the latter...well! Obvious answer was obvious.
B) Smiler heading to the other side of the hall and just managing to spot a green tile sticking up farther down – but being unable to spot the third tile, as it was just too far away. Kasimir noted they at least now knew what the problem tiles looked like, and how to avoid them, and said they should take this bit of floor low and slow so they could spot the third tile in time –
Before asking if they were ready to follow “an old professional at this sort of thing.” Alice agreed that, as a rank amateur, she was more than ready, adding that she knew she wouldn’t be able to rely on Rabbit to get her to the end – he’d be more concerned with getting there as quickly as possible. And then scolding Rabbit for giving her a look while Kasimir raised an eyebrow and Barnaby stepped back – Smiler quickly assured them that, yes, she hallucinates, but she knows they’re not real, so it’s fine. :p
C) The others in the group agreeing to follow Kasimir’s lead without a fight (Barnaby noting that he followed his servants around his mansion all the time, so…) and Kasimir loosening up his knee brace so he could lead the group Prowl action! He threw everyone a quick bit of advice (with Victor telling him to call him “Victor” instead of “Master Van Dort” during it, as he’s calling Kasimir by HIS first name and he doesn’t feel much like a Van Dort anymore), then set off, with Victor following in his wake, Smiler behind him, and Alice and Barnaby bringing up the rear. Cue Victor finding the silence rather unnerving, as it just reminded him of how careful and quiet they had to be not to bring the guards or anyone else running –
And then, after they passed the first pressure plate, cue his toe getting caught in a crack and nearly sending him toppling. Fortunately Smiler was close enough to grab him and haul him back – well, something close to upright, anyway. :p I left off there – tomorrow, they make it around the remaining two pressure plates – but not without poor Kasimir taking a bit of a spill, as he himself did not actually roll that well on the Prowl roll...good thing it was a group action and we take the highest result!
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – I was hoping I’d have time for at least a Short, but alas, the Workout Write-Up bested me again. *grumbles* We’ll see what happens tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A – Monday, Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)-only day, no queue to worry about yet. At least I have a few ideas on what I can chuck in there tomorrow!
*nods* And there we have it -- all the most important parts of my day. And now I should wrap up and hit the sheets. At least I've only got three more days this week, then a long weekend! Night all!
Work – Well, my first day back at work today ended up being, annoyingly, just busy enough that I couldn’t get to everything that I wanted to get to. Mostly because my coworker took the day off and thus I couldn’t get her help on anything (and my supervisor left early too!). My accomplishments for the day included:
A) Doing the GL – which ended up taking most of the morning as there was a LOT of credit card stuff uploaded on Friday, and also a check that had to be split between the Appeal and the Capital Campaign, which led to some weirdness about what paperwork needed to go in what pile *grumbles*
B) Putting on as many of the checks that came in the mail as possible – there were a couple of checks that needed my coworker to sign into a particular site or interpret a particular report that I had to set aside, plus one that just came in too late for me to process it
C) Putting on the latest batch of Easter Collection gifts, which also took a while as there were twenty-three of them and I had to get ID numbers for all the parishes and whatnot
D) Both taking and returning a few phone calls, leading to two credit card gifts, one parish update, one telling a lady what her balance on her Capital Campaign pledge was, and two returned calls that WOULD have been credit card gifts except one lady decided to fill out her pledge card instead and mail it in, and the other was in her car at the time I called her back and said she’d call back tomorrow. *shrug*
Yeah, it was the phone calls that were the problem – they kept coming in JUST often enough to break up my momentum on a couple of the bigger tasks, and prevent me from getting to the other thing I got today – a QC file for the next thank-you. Had to tell our processors I’ll get to it tomorrow. *shrug* Well, I guess I know what I’m doing Tuesday, then!
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Let's Play Resident Evil Requiem: LEON KICKS BUTT! ARTIFICIAL ORGANS! ZOMBIE MEATGRINDER? Episode 3!” The second half-hour of Part 3 of the OXBox RE9 LP featured –
A) Leon clearing out the bar and lounge no problem (the singing zombie there never even got the chance to scream at him), discovering the gun that Grace could have claimed just sitting on the bar (Andy was rather annoyed that he’d missed it, because he’d assumed it was in the safe), dismissing an antique coin on the piano as useless to him (to be fair, he sure as shit didn’t need to buy the drug to make his shooting better), then continuing his roaming through the halls of the Care Center, clearing out zombies and cracking open every warped cupboard door Andy could find for goodies and notes (including one about the pantry key on the chef – the gang was like “we did that already!”)
B) Leon, heading upstairs to try and find Dr. Gideon’s office, encountering a zombie who’d made a fucking giant bomb out of what looked to be some sort of gas container – Leon managed to explode him without being blown to smithereens himself, though it was rather a close call! Everyone was appropriately stunned and horrified by this turn of events...though the gang then discussing if that particular zombie had been a bomb technician and was just trying to do what he did in life did lighten the mood a bit. XD
C) Leon finding Dr. Gideon’s office – and discovering it was full of supposedly-dead zombies just waiting to cause trouble. Sure enough, after smashing up a bunch of vases and finding a secret lever to open an extremely-slow-moving secret door in the wall of the “conference room” area, a bunch of them became Blisterheads, forcing Leon to fight for his life against the horde. Fortunately, since he’s Leon and thus lives in the “Action Horror” portion of the Resident Evil universe, he easily held his own, bursting the Blisterheads’, well, heads with his hatchet and doing cool axe throws into their chests and whatnot. Even quipped that he’d gotten his cardio for the day afterward, which Jane was quite fond of. :p
D) Leon then using the elevator behind the secret door to head down to Dr. Gideon’s real private office, where he deliberately locked Gideon’s computer by fouling up the password a couple of times to allow his partner – revealed to be a grown-up Sherry Birkin from Resident Evil 2 (I THINK she’s also in RE6, but let’s not talk about RE6) – to catch the IP address and hack into it. Unfortunately, the news she found was not good – apparently both she and Leon are infected with a mutated version of the T-Virus. Which is presumably the same thing that’s been killing all the other survivors of what happened in Raccoon City all those years ago. :( Leon noted that at least they had each other, and they started looking through the files, with Leon taking especial note of one heavily-redacted report that contained the phrase “for the sake of Elpis” (or, as Andy put it, “for the sake of elf piss”) –
Which was immediately followed by a picture of Grace appearing on the screen, and Leon wondering what she has to do with all this. The OXBoxers were hopeful that what she had to do with it was a cure! Game, I swear, if you kill off Leon…
E) The action switching back to Grace (to the disappointment of the OXBoxers, who wanted more Leon and less Actually Scary Bits) as she finished her tumble into the hole and found herself in the hospital’s basement! A Required Scary Game Level, as per Mike, though it was noted to at least be better than a sewer level. She stumbled around taking in all the various horrors and collecting what goodies she could before stumbling upon the save room (a repurposed CCTV room) and reordering her inventory and finding a note revealing the name of her bug-eyed monster nemesis – The Girl. ...rather lacks panache, and the OXBoxers agreed. Anyway, that provided her with the goal of the level – flood the place with light using the ultraviolet lamps the previous workers had placed around the area! Which did require her to find three giant fuse-things called “joint plugs” to power them first…
F) Grace continuing to explore the basement to find the stuff she needed, and coming across various cells, including one occupied by a zombie (“locked up for zombie crimes,” as per Andy – Jane promptly wondered if Andy could let him out, and Mike pointed out that turning on the power would probably automatically open the doors, as that’s just how these games work) – and one occupied by Emily! Left on the bed in there by The Girl, who crawled into the ceiling as Grace watched. A look around the cell revealed a LOT of dolls in various states of disrepair, suggesting that The Girl sees Emily as a new and awesome big dolly for her to play with. Which is depressing AND horrifying in equal measure. At any rate, Emily didn’t respond to Grace’s cries, and there was no way to currently open the door, so saving her had to wait.
G) Grace finding the first joint plug she needed right at the end of the hall and claiming it...followed by her having to duck into a cell because The Girl had inconveniently appeared in the corridor right behind her; cue Andy muttering “oh no” and urging Grace to get under the bed (which, sadly, was not a game-approved option for hiding) while Jane asked what his plan was and Mike suggested Grace just live in the cell (“it’s got a bed; it’s got a toilet”). XD Fortunately The Girl turned around after getting right up close to the entrance of the cell, and Grace was able to follow her until she turned down another corridor, then use the joint plug to open up a room at the end of the hall which contained both some goodies, a dancing Mr. Raccoon (mascot of Raccoon City) statue, and a note stating that one of the workers had taken the toolbox down to the boiler room, as “the quality of the blood the laboratory receives has gone downhill” and the note-writer blamed “some problem during the separation process.” Gross.
H) Grace then heading around and finding another door that could be opened with her joint plug – which, ironically, led her to an area with a SECOND joint plug for her to collect (along with a zombie to shoot and a piece of big construction equipment to fiddle with later once she had the key) – she grabbed her new prize, then left the room via a handy tunnel in the wall...only to see a zombie trying to escape into it from the other end, before getting dragged away and reduced into paste by The Girl. Who then ascended creepily into the ceiling again. O.o Anyone else suddenly getting Alien: Isolation vibes?
I) Grace having to backtrack after the wall tunnel took her into the room she’d just been in (with a now-locked door because, well, she’d removed the joint plug outside), killing a zombie who’d decided to stand up (Andy: “I can help them sit down”), then making her way to the collecting pool...only to discover she would need some sort of crank to open the control panel she needed to access overlooking it (Jane openly went “noooooo” XD). She thus wandered off trying to find what she needed while the OXBoxers talked about whether or not the big pool of blood was a vampire thing (with Jane noting that you normally didn’t want to mix blood types, and Mike saying that it should be fine for a vampire who just intended to drink the stuff). Her adventures eventually took her to the former staff room, where she exploded a zombie’s head with a hemolytic injector (because Andy wanted to), learned how to make molotov cocktails (from the suitcase the zombie had been examining with some interest, justifying Andy’s desire to explode his head), then looted the place for goodies while Jane noted this wasn’t the greatest place to work, given the whole “staff room next to the blood pool,” thing – Andy countered that they did teach you how to make molotov cocktails, which was a transferable skill (Mike: “Like to an evil office block, or an evil orphanage”). :P
J) Grace eventually finding her way through to the boiler room via powering up another door and shoving a crate out of the way of a gap in some internal fencing, picking up the crank-like object she needed from the toolbox (along with an empty bottle, as the game insisted), before returning the way she’d come –
Only for The Girl to drop down from the ceiling in front of the gap she needed to get through. Cue Andy trying to force his way past The Girl anyway because she happened to be facing away from Grace as Mike and Jane urged him to get out of there, and then getting distracted by a free lockpick on the ground when he finally ran away, resulting in poor Grace getting a nasty (if fortunately non-fatal) chomp. Grace then managed to successfully escape The Girl and flee through the gap in the fence back to her save room (barely avoiding ANOTHER painful encounter with The Girl), where Andy dropped a save before sending her back to the collection pool. Where, naturally, she found herself fighting the dead guy who’d been lying there insensate before –
And where The Girl finally caught up to her and BIT HER HEAD OFF. O.O I mean, the OXBoxers kindly blurred it for us, the audience, but you could TELL that’s what happened. First death of the run, folks! Good thing Andy made a save so recently!
K) Andy bowing to peer pressure and FINALLY getting Requiem the Handcannon and its whole two bullets out of the box so Grace would have it in case of an emergency like “nearly having her head bitten off by The Girl,” then returning to the collection pool and THIS time managing to successfully kill the zombie there without The Girl showing up to ruin the party (mostly because, the moment The Girl appeared, attracted by the gunshot, Andy had Grace run back to the save room to hide and heal). She opened up the control panel, slotted in two joint plugs to power everything up, and went exploring the now safely-lit-up space...before having to crawl through a broken-down ventilation fan when the floor collapsed beneath her. On the plus side, this got her to where she was going, and she claimed the third joint plug she needed by a big old bloody channel – PLUS a forklift key that was able to get a nearby forklift’s lifter out of her way. Revealing a door that, when powered, led into a room with another hip bag (increasing Grace’s inventory by another two slots, yay), a map of the basement, and a floor plan of the processing area, revealing that if she could get to the other side, she could turn a wheel to drain the pool (Jane noted the upside-down guy just hanging out in the pool in the drawing, prompting Andy to jokingly go “That’s me” and encourage the audience to tag themselves).
And so I left off with Grace leaving the joint plug in by the side of the big channel to keep the door open, claiming the other two from where she left them in front of the pool, and going to brave the Inspection room! A terrible place with a ceiling conveyor belt full of dead bodies and hanging zombies, which presumably leads to the “zombie meat grinder” in the title. Bleh. >p Tomorrow, we finish off this episode and start Episode 4!
2. Continue edits on Chapter 5 of “The Van Dort Vacancy”: Check – got in another page’s worth of edits today, featuring –
A) Kasimir being huffy about Victor not remembering where the pressure plate tiles were in the mosaic in the trap hallways, but Smiler insisting that there had to be a way to guess where they were, and getting down low for a look while asking Victor if he remembered at least where the tiles were supposed to be generally. Victor wracked his brain and said he recalled William telling him they alternated from the left side of the hall to the right and back, and that they were spaced far apart to lull thieves into a false sense of security – Smiler thus scooted over to the left side of the hall –
And spotted a white tile sticking up just a little further than the others! Alice came over to confirm that it was indeed slightly-out-of-place, and said that it was either their pressure plate or the result of a poor laying job. And as Victor confirmed his mother would have never tolerated the latter...well! Obvious answer was obvious.
B) Smiler heading to the other side of the hall and just managing to spot a green tile sticking up farther down – but being unable to spot the third tile, as it was just too far away. Kasimir noted they at least now knew what the problem tiles looked like, and how to avoid them, and said they should take this bit of floor low and slow so they could spot the third tile in time –
Before asking if they were ready to follow “an old professional at this sort of thing.” Alice agreed that, as a rank amateur, she was more than ready, adding that she knew she wouldn’t be able to rely on Rabbit to get her to the end – he’d be more concerned with getting there as quickly as possible. And then scolding Rabbit for giving her a look while Kasimir raised an eyebrow and Barnaby stepped back – Smiler quickly assured them that, yes, she hallucinates, but she knows they’re not real, so it’s fine. :p
C) The others in the group agreeing to follow Kasimir’s lead without a fight (Barnaby noting that he followed his servants around his mansion all the time, so…) and Kasimir loosening up his knee brace so he could lead the group Prowl action! He threw everyone a quick bit of advice (with Victor telling him to call him “Victor” instead of “Master Van Dort” during it, as he’s calling Kasimir by HIS first name and he doesn’t feel much like a Van Dort anymore), then set off, with Victor following in his wake, Smiler behind him, and Alice and Barnaby bringing up the rear. Cue Victor finding the silence rather unnerving, as it just reminded him of how careful and quiet they had to be not to bring the guards or anyone else running –
And then, after they passed the first pressure plate, cue his toe getting caught in a crack and nearly sending him toppling. Fortunately Smiler was close enough to grab him and haul him back – well, something close to upright, anyway. :p I left off there – tomorrow, they make it around the remaining two pressure plates – but not without poor Kasimir taking a bit of a spill, as he himself did not actually roll that well on the Prowl roll...good thing it was a group action and we take the highest result!
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – I was hoping I’d have time for at least a Short, but alas, the Workout Write-Up bested me again. *grumbles* We’ll see what happens tomorrow!
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: N/A – Monday, Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler)-only day, no queue to worry about yet. At least I have a few ideas on what I can chuck in there tomorrow!
*nods* And there we have it -- all the most important parts of my day. And now I should wrap up and hit the sheets. At least I've only got three more days this week, then a long weekend! Night all!
