No Talk Me Angy
May. 19th, 2026 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crossover_chickYeah, I was in a very grumpy mood today, which I think is a combination of having to deal with the extreme heat that hit today (it was 93F or so for a high, which broke the old record of 92) and the onset of PMS -- it is starting to come up on that time of the month for me! And PMS would explain why the grumpiness came on so suddenly. *shakehead* Hormones suck and should be banned, especially in hot weather. Ugh. At least it's only supposed to last one more day, and then we get some thunderstorms to cool things off again... Anyway, here's the write-up of how my day went:
Work – Was a bit of a frustrating day at work today – or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of a frustrating afternoon, as the morning was pretty dull overall. My tasks for the day ended up including:
A) The usual morning reports and check-scanning
B) Helping my coworker and the printer guy test out the new printer for envelopes that we got today – which was stressful, but more for them than for me, as I didn’t actually have to test-print anything until the very end. ...Where, of course, we had some trouble getting the damn thing to print from the envelope feeder. *grumbles* Printers – they are evil.
C) Taking a couple of credit card calls, including one guy doing a one-time gift and one guy updating his card on all three of his pledges (supporting three parishes)
D) Taking a couple of calls from one of the parish secretaries to add new parishioners
E) Taking a call from a couple having trouble with the website...and spending thirteen minutes on the phone with them trying to figure out why they couldn’t log in and attempting to see if I could reset the husband’s password, only for the wife to object because she was sure they’d forget to change it. Honestly, them talking over each other and getting confused as to whether or not they’d even given this year was the main reason the call took so long. *sigh* Fortunately, they eventually asked if I could just take the gift over the phone, and I was able to do that for them. But yeesh.
F) And helping my coworker try to figure out some weirdness on someone’s pledge billing after she had a long call with a donor, where some gifts that he made at the end of last year (which had to be credited to THIS year’s Appeal as we go by fiscal year) were showing up as payments on the pledge he recently sent in, despite not actually being attached to said pledge. She sent an e-mail to the database people to figure out how they do the billings, because – that’s not right, as you might imagine.
Yeah, I think you can see why some of that would be frustrating. *sigh* And tomorrow I get to have another useless call with the credit card people, yay… *shakehead* We’ll see what happens beyond that.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Fallout: New Vegas - Dust - Ashes to Ashes” by Many A True Nerd! Tonight’s chunklet of “Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic Doc Mitchell Comes To Terms With The Mojave” featured –
A) Doc Mitchell leaving the Ant Mound barn and heading east (with Jon musing about how hunting animals for meat might be a little less viable in this game because there’s just generally less wildlife then there is in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 – side effect of being set in a more-built-up area!) and coming across an abandoned caravan, with a corpse inside. A corpse with a eulogy on him, written by his son, which revealed that he was Hank Jacobson Sr., that he’d been a good father, and that, even in the darkest times, he’d never lost hope, and he’d imparted that to Hank Jr., who vowed to carry on in this hell for his sake. Awww. It was a very sweet moment –
Slightly ruined by Jon noting that Hank Jr. could have taken a moment to BURY his dad, since coming across graves you could dig up was a thing in Fallout: New Vegas. XD But then you wouldn’t be able to come across Hank Sr.’s body with his touching eulogy! And, as Jon himself noted a moment later, there was no guarantee Hank Jr. had a shovel. Can’t dig a grave with your bare hands!
B) Doc Mitchell continuing east across a nearby bridge in the hopes of reaching Lake Mead and thus a source of water (though Jon was sure the mod author had know that would be the first place people would go and thus had surrounded it by raiders or turned it into lava or something) – and spotting a little camp nearby, with a limping survivor in it. Said survivor spotted him in turn (admittedly, Doc M was NOT subtle in his tribal gear) and started running toward him to cause trouble. Doc M thus headed toward the far end of the bridge and prepped himself to start engaging the survivor in combat, ready with his machete to start slicing at the head –
Only for their match-up to be interrupted by the sudden arrival of a bunch of tunnelers! Which are weird freaky frog-like monsters from “Lonesome Road” that hit like fucking trucks if they get in range of you! The survivor almost immediately got taken down by the pack, and Doc Mitchell ran for the middle of the bridge and jumped off to try and shake them (with Jon babbling rapidfire “I’VEDECIDEDIDON’TWANTTOGOEASTANYMORE” XD). He somehow did NOT break a limb doing this, and in fact made it into the little camp he’d found before –
But there was nowhere to hide in there, and he was quickly taken down by the pursuing tunnelers. But in death, he learned a very valuable fact – namely, there was WATER in the camp! In a little brahmin trough! So that was interesting!
C) Doc Mitchell deciding to brave the death camp again because fuck you there’s water there and because tunnelers aren’t that scary if you don’t let them swarm you (like most creatures, they don’t have any Damage Threshold, meaning if you have a good automatic weapon, you can just tear them apart) and because he had explosives, which had to give him some sort of edge. He thus snuck up on the place through the brush (noting with some sadness that a guy who might have been a shop seemed scripted to die), sniper rifle at the ready, and – after getting eyes on a couple of hostile survivors, one of whom had a backpack which Doc M wanted for carrying stuff around in – tried taking a couple of potshots at them. Unfortunately, all this seemed to do is agitate them (and not in the direction of “getting killed by tunnelers”), forcing him to break out a molotov cocktail –
Which led to him learning that those do not have great range when he tossed it upon getting closer and just made a little bit of fire in front of the camp. Cue him then tossing a whole grenade BUNDLE at the camp –
At the same time a guy came around the barricade Doc M was hiding behind to hit him with a pipe. Jon realized that he’d probably been overthinking this and hacked him and his friend (who did have a gun, but, fortunately for Doc M, was a terrible shot) up with his machete, looted their corpses, then cautiously made his way into the camp (as he was in [CAUTION] at the time). He managed to make it to the brahmin trough without any issues, and get a sip of the (admittedly irradiated) water –
And then the tunnelers showed up and he died again. Because the camp was a source of water but also a source of death, as per Jon. :p
D) Doc Mitchell deciding to head in a different direction, away from the Camp of Death (while filing the whole “the various troughs in the world may in fact still contain water” fact away for later) and instead working his way around the side of McCarran toward the Aerotech Office Park and the sharecropper farms, carefully sneaking past the snipers on some of the guard posts doing their best to deal with the local tunnelers (including a Hulking Tunneler, proving the mod was very much not messing about) –
And running into his first Cloud Victim! A person who was exposed to the Cloud, but instead of becoming a Ghost Person, instead got all their skin boiled off or something. As you might imagine, this does not make them happy campers, and Doc M was forced to duck behind a convenient bit of debris forming a barrier and hide when one came for him blasting away with their makeshift particle rifle. Fortunately, he was then able to use the power of the third person camera to get the jump on them with his machete, hacking them up and claiming the makeshift particle rifle for his own! Hooray! Flush with victory, he continued onward with his new gun and – upon reaching the entrance to the park – decided to peek inside and see what he could see –
And discovered a “Cloud Priest” and his flock, indicating that something similar to the Children of Atom had sprung up in the Dust Mojave and that some of the victims of the Cloud were now worshiping it. And they were NOT keen on seeing Doc Mitchell! Doc immediately tried to leave and run for it, but SOMEBODY nailed him in the back, and down he went. Doc M promptly blamed a survivor he’d spotted shooting SOMETHING outside the park and tried to kill him upon reload –
Only to be killed himself by the Cloud Priest, who happened to be the proud owner of a Shishekebab flaming sword. Jon was dutifully impressed.
E) Doc Mitchell reloading and preparing to run from the chasing ghouls, and ducking down into the sewers the moment he realized that he could access them from a nearby manhole – only to immediately regret EVERYTHING because HOLY HELL THE GHOST PEOPLE. Who, of course, only went unconscious when Doc M took them down, because it’s hard to kill them permanently and the mod makes it even harder (if I remember what I saw on TV Tropes correctly, you have to take a specific perk to murder them now). He tried hacking away at one he took down with the makeshift particle rifle in a desperate attempt to kill it before its buddies noticed –
Only for the Cloud Priest and his friend to come down into the sewers and murder him because fuck Doc M for existing in their general area, I suppose. *shakehead* Cue, on a reload, Doc M just running past all the Ghost People (and the one centaur down there) and discovering that they couldn’t actually follow him very effectively, meaning he was relatively safe from their attacks. Somewhat relieved, he popped through a sewer grate he found into another section of sewers –
And promptly fell down a surprise hole on the other side, broke his leg, and got taken out by the people waiting in the room just beyond the hole before he could do much of anything. Jon could simply not help but laugh. :p
F) Doc Mitchell, upon reload, popping on his Stealth Boy, managing to actually safely drop down the hole by dropping from rock to rock, and discovering that what he’d fallen into was a cannibal den! He promptly tossed his MFC cluster bomb into the middle of them and took most of them out like that, roasting the single survivor with the makeshift particle rifle. He then happily looted their bodies, getting, among other things, a “strange meat pie” that the game indicated would very much hurt his sanity to eat. *shrug* Meat may be meat in this wasteland, game! He then investigated the area to see if he could figure out where he was –
And ran into another group of, presumably, cannibals in the next room over. And, in trying to fight them, discovered that the makeshift particle rifle has an ULTRA-slow reload. So he switched over to trying to toss a molotov cocktail at them –
And blew himself up because he was a little too close. Whoops. Well, Jon admitted he was going to die a LOT in this series, so…
G) Doc Mitchell deciding he’d had enough of that starting location and the area around Camp McCarran and returning to The Beginning to check out some of the OTHER starting locales and see what they offered! In order, we had:
I. The Abandoned Home! Which, as you might imagine, was a house which contained such goodies as a bed, a nice bottle of scotch in the fridge, a “wasteland omelet” in the oven, a strange meat pie and some jet on the counter (“I’m a druggie cannibal!”), and a lever-action shotgun and some bullets on the table in the next room! Which was a decently-generous start (even if Jon note the shotgun was pretty terrible until you picked up the specific perks that made it good) –
And then Doc Mitchell went outside and was immediately exploded by the trapped mailbox as well as set upon by some tribals waiting right outside the door. He managed to take one with him before he died, but after a reload (where he figured out he was in a house on the west side of Vegas) saw him immediately explode AGAIN, he decided to leave this starting location behind. As he well should.
II. A Shack! Specifically, the Jean Sky Diving shack, which granted him a femur to beat people with, a weapon repair kit, an Adventurer’s Outfit and a Volcanic Pistol (stored in the locked locker – fortunately the key was right on the desk), and a Sunset Sarsaparilla Star Bottle Cap (Jon delightedly wondered if Doc Mitchell would be hunted down by ghoul Malcolm Holmes). Venturing outside of course put him basically right across the road from the Goodsprings Source, where a handful of survivors were having a bit of a scrap with each other/the wildlife in the campground area. Doc M snuck around them and checked out one of the troughs under one of the water windmills, which unfortunately proved to be bone dry –
And then a tunneler attacked him. Fortunately, as it was only one on its own, Doc M was actually able to take it out pretty easily with a shot from his pistol followed by a swing from his femur. He quickly sussed out that the nearby hills were now full of tunnelers instead of geckos, but decided that could work in his favor if the tunnelers killed the squabbling survivors in the campground area –
And then he found the campground and discovered that, while most of the survivors WERE dead to tunnelers, there was one still wandering around, along with a single tunneler. Both of which were neutral to each other and to Doc M. A puzzled but grateful Doc M went and looted all the bodies (scoring himself, along with some decent weapons, a lovely backpack, yay), then did his best to pick off the survivor and the tunneler –
But while the survivor didn’t go hostile, even when Doc M started repeatedly shooting him in the head, the tunneler most DEFINITELY did, and took Doc M out without too much trouble (though, hilariously, it initially missed the killing swipe). Still, Jon decided that this was a viable location so long as he could get that first bit right (aka, not piss off any for-some-reason-neutral tunnelers).
III. Another Shack! This one wasn’t immediately recognizable to Jon, though it did have a clear story attached to it – namely, that Doc Mitchell had been traveling with an NCR trooper, only for the guy to die after an amputation gone wrong. (This is what you get for not tagging your Medicine skill, Doc.) However, loot-wise it was very poor (containing not much more than a varmint rifle with a single bullet) – and when Doc M stepped outside, it was to be immediately faced with steep cliffs and a whole bunch of tunnelers. Jon determined that they were in roughly the same location as Camp Forlorn Hope and Cottonwood Cove, then decided that wasn’t a particularly interesting part of the map – especially given it was Tunneler Central – and didn’t even wait for Doc M to die before calling it a “no.”
IV. Black Rock Cavern! This put Doc Mitchell in a cave not that far from HELIOS One, next to the corpse of a fellow survivor with 15 caps, a crafting kit, a “grunt outfit,” the Paladin Toaster (the unique Zap Glove that does bonus damage to robots and people in power armor), and a journal –
Where she recorded that Doc Mitchell kept eyeing her special glove and that she had to get out of there. Well – as Jon noted, this was the universe where Doc M was very much not a nice man! Venturing outside, Jon commented that this wasn’t the worst start, as there were plenty of interesting places to visit – Novac, all the tents behind HELIOS One, Old Lady Gibson’s scrap yard, etc. He just had to figure out how to survive all the radscorpions crawling around the landscape. XD Which was tough, because he didn’t get any guns or armor, so – yeah. Good central location, but far from the best goodies-wise.
V. And the Hidden Armory! Which dropped Doc Mitchell in the hidden Khan armory at the entrance to Red Rock Canyon, where, curiously enough, everything he could grab was something that the game marked as stealing. Though give the “good karma” Vault Boy face appeared every time Doc M grabbed stuff, he apparently wasn’t worrying about it – especially since it was implied that he’d been locked in by some fellow survivors before they’d died by mysterious means (he had to get the cage key off the corpse closest to the door to actually leave). Naturally, starting here gave him access to some good weapons and decent armor (including power armor, though he couldn’t wear it as he didn’t have the training) –
But it also meant that the moment he stepped outside, he was promptly in [DANGER] from a venomous tunneler. Because there’s always a downside in “Dust!” XD I left off with Doc Mitchell running for Red Rock Canyon itself to see who lived in there and what the situation was – while passing by some worrying-looking totems along the way... We’ll see what he finds tomorrow, along with hopefully what Jon will consider the official “canon” starting location!
2. Continue writing Chapter 1 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got a little over a page done today, covering –
A) Alice warning Knox not to get too comfortable about the situation between the Camarilla and the Anarchs Downtown staying Downtown – after all, Therese and Jeannette had both thrown their lots in with the Camarilla and Anarchs respectively, so… Knox was like “don’t remind me” and commented that he was very glad Tung was not into the politics, as it made life easier – an envious Alice was like “as someone with no choice but to be into the politics, I bet it does.”
B) Alice then steering the conversation back to its intended topic – namely, figuring out what was going on with Victor and his weird “Alice needs me” sense. Fortunately, Knox had done a lot of research on ghouls when he first got recruited by Tung (because he wanted to know what cool powers he’d be getting and what sort of things he needed to look out for), and he actually remembered reading about something that sounded a lot like what Alice had described – a special ability that some ghouls ended up with called “Blood Empathy.” Alice was extremely relieved to learn that Victor’s thing was a known quantity instead of a strange never-before-seen phenomenon – unfortunately, Knox couldn’t tell her what caused it, just that it was something that popped up in ghouls every so often. And that he wished he had it, as it would make serving Tung easier (less e-mails, for a start). Alice warned him that that depended on where he actually was in relation to Tung, as Victor seemed to have a range – her distress over what had happened at Grout’s hadn’t hit him until she was back Downtown. And then had pounded at him for a while because she hadn’t gone straight home, which she now felt guilty about. Knox reminded her that she hadn’t known and that he was sure Victor was fine in the end – Alice admitted they’d both felt a lot better after he built her that blanket nest. :)
C) And Knox, after Alice thanked him for the information, leaning in and asking if Alice might do him and Tung a little favor in return. Alice was amenable (especially since she wanted to stay on Knox and Tung’s good sides, given what they knew about Victor) and asked what they needed; Knox confirmed she was heading to Hollywood to head into the Warrens there and talk to Gary, then explained that Tung had recently lost a data CD down in said Warrens and needed to get it back. And couldn’t go and fetch it himself as he was on the outs with some of the regulars down there. Alice said she could look for it, sure, but was surprised Knox wasn’t going down himself – Knox explained that Tung was pretty sure he wouldn’t get a good reception, especially as a ghoul. People like him were supposed to stay above-ground and take care of everything up there, after all! But since Alice was going to be down there already… He then sweetened the pot by explaining Tung was willing to trade some hacking tips for the CD’s safe return – Alice was only too happy to improve her hacking skills (and rely less on Wonderland’s cryptic hints when it comes to passwords), so she promised to keep an eye out for it.
*nods* Not bad! I’m kind of glad that I thought this would be a good way to slip in Tung’s little side quest – Alice has ended up not reading her e-mail much in these stories, so having it passed through Knox works a lot better. :) I left off with Alice saying her goodbyes to Knox and preparing to head out – next time, she bumps into Jeannette before she gets out the door! Because I can’t set up her thinking she should warn the sisters they need to be a little more openly combative and not pay it off. *nods*
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – even if I’d had the time after the Workout Video Write-Up, I spent most of the rest of my evening crafting a comment for the latest chapter of my friend Nebby’s fanfic “MediEvil Resurrection II” (she just put it up the other day). We’ll see what happens as the week goes on, but I do not have high hopes.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Half check – due to working on the aforementioned comment for Nebby’s fanfic (which I didn’t even finish, because we all know that I’m fucking wordy), I actually completely forgot to even look at Valice Multiverse until just a couple of minutes ago – and, of course, because I forgot, I had two asks and a comment on the “Light Yagami Vs Bugs” ask waiting for me. *sigh* So I guess I’m going to break my usual routine and do something about those tomorrow. I did, however, get my Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) queue sorted for the next three days, slapping up:
A) The movieposters1 Corpse Bride poster (the extra-blue one) for Wednesday
B) The sleepygummy The Smiler mood boards (in varying tints) for Thursday
C) And the wisteriasorrows Alice: Madness Returns fanart (of Alice floating in a lily-pad-filled pond in her Siren dress) for Friday
So that’s at least something.
And I really have to go to bed, so I'm going to leave that there for now and fix the spacing tomorrow. We'll see if Wednesday is any better -- night all! EDIT 5/20/2026: Spacing sorted!
Work – Was a bit of a frustrating day at work today – or, perhaps more accurately, a bit of a frustrating afternoon, as the morning was pretty dull overall. My tasks for the day ended up including:
A) The usual morning reports and check-scanning
B) Helping my coworker and the printer guy test out the new printer for envelopes that we got today – which was stressful, but more for them than for me, as I didn’t actually have to test-print anything until the very end. ...Where, of course, we had some trouble getting the damn thing to print from the envelope feeder. *grumbles* Printers – they are evil.
C) Taking a couple of credit card calls, including one guy doing a one-time gift and one guy updating his card on all three of his pledges (supporting three parishes)
D) Taking a couple of calls from one of the parish secretaries to add new parishioners
E) Taking a call from a couple having trouble with the website...and spending thirteen minutes on the phone with them trying to figure out why they couldn’t log in and attempting to see if I could reset the husband’s password, only for the wife to object because she was sure they’d forget to change it. Honestly, them talking over each other and getting confused as to whether or not they’d even given this year was the main reason the call took so long. *sigh* Fortunately, they eventually asked if I could just take the gift over the phone, and I was able to do that for them. But yeesh.
F) And helping my coworker try to figure out some weirdness on someone’s pledge billing after she had a long call with a donor, where some gifts that he made at the end of last year (which had to be credited to THIS year’s Appeal as we go by fiscal year) were showing up as payments on the pledge he recently sent in, despite not actually being attached to said pledge. She sent an e-mail to the database people to figure out how they do the billings, because – that’s not right, as you might imagine.
Yeah, I think you can see why some of that would be frustrating. *sigh* And tomorrow I get to have another useless call with the credit card people, yay… *shakehead* We’ll see what happens beyond that.
To-Do List –
1. Get in a workout: Check – another night on the bike, another night with “Fallout: New Vegas - Dust - Ashes to Ashes” by Many A True Nerd! Tonight’s chunklet of “Post-Post-Post-Apocalyptic Doc Mitchell Comes To Terms With The Mojave” featured –
A) Doc Mitchell leaving the Ant Mound barn and heading east (with Jon musing about how hunting animals for meat might be a little less viable in this game because there’s just generally less wildlife then there is in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 – side effect of being set in a more-built-up area!) and coming across an abandoned caravan, with a corpse inside. A corpse with a eulogy on him, written by his son, which revealed that he was Hank Jacobson Sr., that he’d been a good father, and that, even in the darkest times, he’d never lost hope, and he’d imparted that to Hank Jr., who vowed to carry on in this hell for his sake. Awww. It was a very sweet moment –
Slightly ruined by Jon noting that Hank Jr. could have taken a moment to BURY his dad, since coming across graves you could dig up was a thing in Fallout: New Vegas. XD But then you wouldn’t be able to come across Hank Sr.’s body with his touching eulogy! And, as Jon himself noted a moment later, there was no guarantee Hank Jr. had a shovel. Can’t dig a grave with your bare hands!
B) Doc Mitchell continuing east across a nearby bridge in the hopes of reaching Lake Mead and thus a source of water (though Jon was sure the mod author had know that would be the first place people would go and thus had surrounded it by raiders or turned it into lava or something) – and spotting a little camp nearby, with a limping survivor in it. Said survivor spotted him in turn (admittedly, Doc M was NOT subtle in his tribal gear) and started running toward him to cause trouble. Doc M thus headed toward the far end of the bridge and prepped himself to start engaging the survivor in combat, ready with his machete to start slicing at the head –
Only for their match-up to be interrupted by the sudden arrival of a bunch of tunnelers! Which are weird freaky frog-like monsters from “Lonesome Road” that hit like fucking trucks if they get in range of you! The survivor almost immediately got taken down by the pack, and Doc Mitchell ran for the middle of the bridge and jumped off to try and shake them (with Jon babbling rapidfire “I’VEDECIDEDIDON’TWANTTOGOEASTANYMORE” XD). He somehow did NOT break a limb doing this, and in fact made it into the little camp he’d found before –
But there was nowhere to hide in there, and he was quickly taken down by the pursuing tunnelers. But in death, he learned a very valuable fact – namely, there was WATER in the camp! In a little brahmin trough! So that was interesting!
C) Doc Mitchell deciding to brave the death camp again because fuck you there’s water there and because tunnelers aren’t that scary if you don’t let them swarm you (like most creatures, they don’t have any Damage Threshold, meaning if you have a good automatic weapon, you can just tear them apart) and because he had explosives, which had to give him some sort of edge. He thus snuck up on the place through the brush (noting with some sadness that a guy who might have been a shop seemed scripted to die), sniper rifle at the ready, and – after getting eyes on a couple of hostile survivors, one of whom had a backpack which Doc M wanted for carrying stuff around in – tried taking a couple of potshots at them. Unfortunately, all this seemed to do is agitate them (and not in the direction of “getting killed by tunnelers”), forcing him to break out a molotov cocktail –
Which led to him learning that those do not have great range when he tossed it upon getting closer and just made a little bit of fire in front of the camp. Cue him then tossing a whole grenade BUNDLE at the camp –
At the same time a guy came around the barricade Doc M was hiding behind to hit him with a pipe. Jon realized that he’d probably been overthinking this and hacked him and his friend (who did have a gun, but, fortunately for Doc M, was a terrible shot) up with his machete, looted their corpses, then cautiously made his way into the camp (as he was in [CAUTION] at the time). He managed to make it to the brahmin trough without any issues, and get a sip of the (admittedly irradiated) water –
And then the tunnelers showed up and he died again. Because the camp was a source of water but also a source of death, as per Jon. :p
D) Doc Mitchell deciding to head in a different direction, away from the Camp of Death (while filing the whole “the various troughs in the world may in fact still contain water” fact away for later) and instead working his way around the side of McCarran toward the Aerotech Office Park and the sharecropper farms, carefully sneaking past the snipers on some of the guard posts doing their best to deal with the local tunnelers (including a Hulking Tunneler, proving the mod was very much not messing about) –
And running into his first Cloud Victim! A person who was exposed to the Cloud, but instead of becoming a Ghost Person, instead got all their skin boiled off or something. As you might imagine, this does not make them happy campers, and Doc M was forced to duck behind a convenient bit of debris forming a barrier and hide when one came for him blasting away with their makeshift particle rifle. Fortunately, he was then able to use the power of the third person camera to get the jump on them with his machete, hacking them up and claiming the makeshift particle rifle for his own! Hooray! Flush with victory, he continued onward with his new gun and – upon reaching the entrance to the park – decided to peek inside and see what he could see –
And discovered a “Cloud Priest” and his flock, indicating that something similar to the Children of Atom had sprung up in the Dust Mojave and that some of the victims of the Cloud were now worshiping it. And they were NOT keen on seeing Doc Mitchell! Doc immediately tried to leave and run for it, but SOMEBODY nailed him in the back, and down he went. Doc M promptly blamed a survivor he’d spotted shooting SOMETHING outside the park and tried to kill him upon reload –
Only to be killed himself by the Cloud Priest, who happened to be the proud owner of a Shishekebab flaming sword. Jon was dutifully impressed.
E) Doc Mitchell reloading and preparing to run from the chasing ghouls, and ducking down into the sewers the moment he realized that he could access them from a nearby manhole – only to immediately regret EVERYTHING because HOLY HELL THE GHOST PEOPLE. Who, of course, only went unconscious when Doc M took them down, because it’s hard to kill them permanently and the mod makes it even harder (if I remember what I saw on TV Tropes correctly, you have to take a specific perk to murder them now). He tried hacking away at one he took down with the makeshift particle rifle in a desperate attempt to kill it before its buddies noticed –
Only for the Cloud Priest and his friend to come down into the sewers and murder him because fuck Doc M for existing in their general area, I suppose. *shakehead* Cue, on a reload, Doc M just running past all the Ghost People (and the one centaur down there) and discovering that they couldn’t actually follow him very effectively, meaning he was relatively safe from their attacks. Somewhat relieved, he popped through a sewer grate he found into another section of sewers –
And promptly fell down a surprise hole on the other side, broke his leg, and got taken out by the people waiting in the room just beyond the hole before he could do much of anything. Jon could simply not help but laugh. :p
F) Doc Mitchell, upon reload, popping on his Stealth Boy, managing to actually safely drop down the hole by dropping from rock to rock, and discovering that what he’d fallen into was a cannibal den! He promptly tossed his MFC cluster bomb into the middle of them and took most of them out like that, roasting the single survivor with the makeshift particle rifle. He then happily looted their bodies, getting, among other things, a “strange meat pie” that the game indicated would very much hurt his sanity to eat. *shrug* Meat may be meat in this wasteland, game! He then investigated the area to see if he could figure out where he was –
And ran into another group of, presumably, cannibals in the next room over. And, in trying to fight them, discovered that the makeshift particle rifle has an ULTRA-slow reload. So he switched over to trying to toss a molotov cocktail at them –
And blew himself up because he was a little too close. Whoops. Well, Jon admitted he was going to die a LOT in this series, so…
G) Doc Mitchell deciding he’d had enough of that starting location and the area around Camp McCarran and returning to The Beginning to check out some of the OTHER starting locales and see what they offered! In order, we had:
I. The Abandoned Home! Which, as you might imagine, was a house which contained such goodies as a bed, a nice bottle of scotch in the fridge, a “wasteland omelet” in the oven, a strange meat pie and some jet on the counter (“I’m a druggie cannibal!”), and a lever-action shotgun and some bullets on the table in the next room! Which was a decently-generous start (even if Jon note the shotgun was pretty terrible until you picked up the specific perks that made it good) –
And then Doc Mitchell went outside and was immediately exploded by the trapped mailbox as well as set upon by some tribals waiting right outside the door. He managed to take one with him before he died, but after a reload (where he figured out he was in a house on the west side of Vegas) saw him immediately explode AGAIN, he decided to leave this starting location behind. As he well should.
II. A Shack! Specifically, the Jean Sky Diving shack, which granted him a femur to beat people with, a weapon repair kit, an Adventurer’s Outfit and a Volcanic Pistol (stored in the locked locker – fortunately the key was right on the desk), and a Sunset Sarsaparilla Star Bottle Cap (Jon delightedly wondered if Doc Mitchell would be hunted down by ghoul Malcolm Holmes). Venturing outside of course put him basically right across the road from the Goodsprings Source, where a handful of survivors were having a bit of a scrap with each other/the wildlife in the campground area. Doc M snuck around them and checked out one of the troughs under one of the water windmills, which unfortunately proved to be bone dry –
And then a tunneler attacked him. Fortunately, as it was only one on its own, Doc M was actually able to take it out pretty easily with a shot from his pistol followed by a swing from his femur. He quickly sussed out that the nearby hills were now full of tunnelers instead of geckos, but decided that could work in his favor if the tunnelers killed the squabbling survivors in the campground area –
And then he found the campground and discovered that, while most of the survivors WERE dead to tunnelers, there was one still wandering around, along with a single tunneler. Both of which were neutral to each other and to Doc M. A puzzled but grateful Doc M went and looted all the bodies (scoring himself, along with some decent weapons, a lovely backpack, yay), then did his best to pick off the survivor and the tunneler –
But while the survivor didn’t go hostile, even when Doc M started repeatedly shooting him in the head, the tunneler most DEFINITELY did, and took Doc M out without too much trouble (though, hilariously, it initially missed the killing swipe). Still, Jon decided that this was a viable location so long as he could get that first bit right (aka, not piss off any for-some-reason-neutral tunnelers).
III. Another Shack! This one wasn’t immediately recognizable to Jon, though it did have a clear story attached to it – namely, that Doc Mitchell had been traveling with an NCR trooper, only for the guy to die after an amputation gone wrong. (This is what you get for not tagging your Medicine skill, Doc.) However, loot-wise it was very poor (containing not much more than a varmint rifle with a single bullet) – and when Doc M stepped outside, it was to be immediately faced with steep cliffs and a whole bunch of tunnelers. Jon determined that they were in roughly the same location as Camp Forlorn Hope and Cottonwood Cove, then decided that wasn’t a particularly interesting part of the map – especially given it was Tunneler Central – and didn’t even wait for Doc M to die before calling it a “no.”
IV. Black Rock Cavern! This put Doc Mitchell in a cave not that far from HELIOS One, next to the corpse of a fellow survivor with 15 caps, a crafting kit, a “grunt outfit,” the Paladin Toaster (the unique Zap Glove that does bonus damage to robots and people in power armor), and a journal –
Where she recorded that Doc Mitchell kept eyeing her special glove and that she had to get out of there. Well – as Jon noted, this was the universe where Doc M was very much not a nice man! Venturing outside, Jon commented that this wasn’t the worst start, as there were plenty of interesting places to visit – Novac, all the tents behind HELIOS One, Old Lady Gibson’s scrap yard, etc. He just had to figure out how to survive all the radscorpions crawling around the landscape. XD Which was tough, because he didn’t get any guns or armor, so – yeah. Good central location, but far from the best goodies-wise.
V. And the Hidden Armory! Which dropped Doc Mitchell in the hidden Khan armory at the entrance to Red Rock Canyon, where, curiously enough, everything he could grab was something that the game marked as stealing. Though give the “good karma” Vault Boy face appeared every time Doc M grabbed stuff, he apparently wasn’t worrying about it – especially since it was implied that he’d been locked in by some fellow survivors before they’d died by mysterious means (he had to get the cage key off the corpse closest to the door to actually leave). Naturally, starting here gave him access to some good weapons and decent armor (including power armor, though he couldn’t wear it as he didn’t have the training) –
But it also meant that the moment he stepped outside, he was promptly in [DANGER] from a venomous tunneler. Because there’s always a downside in “Dust!” XD I left off with Doc Mitchell running for Red Rock Canyon itself to see who lived in there and what the situation was – while passing by some worrying-looking totems along the way... We’ll see what he finds tomorrow, along with hopefully what Jon will consider the official “canon” starting location!
2. Continue writing Chapter 1 of “Londerland Bloodlines: Downtown Queensland”: Check – got a little over a page done today, covering –
A) Alice warning Knox not to get too comfortable about the situation between the Camarilla and the Anarchs Downtown staying Downtown – after all, Therese and Jeannette had both thrown their lots in with the Camarilla and Anarchs respectively, so… Knox was like “don’t remind me” and commented that he was very glad Tung was not into the politics, as it made life easier – an envious Alice was like “as someone with no choice but to be into the politics, I bet it does.”
B) Alice then steering the conversation back to its intended topic – namely, figuring out what was going on with Victor and his weird “Alice needs me” sense. Fortunately, Knox had done a lot of research on ghouls when he first got recruited by Tung (because he wanted to know what cool powers he’d be getting and what sort of things he needed to look out for), and he actually remembered reading about something that sounded a lot like what Alice had described – a special ability that some ghouls ended up with called “Blood Empathy.” Alice was extremely relieved to learn that Victor’s thing was a known quantity instead of a strange never-before-seen phenomenon – unfortunately, Knox couldn’t tell her what caused it, just that it was something that popped up in ghouls every so often. And that he wished he had it, as it would make serving Tung easier (less e-mails, for a start). Alice warned him that that depended on where he actually was in relation to Tung, as Victor seemed to have a range – her distress over what had happened at Grout’s hadn’t hit him until she was back Downtown. And then had pounded at him for a while because she hadn’t gone straight home, which she now felt guilty about. Knox reminded her that she hadn’t known and that he was sure Victor was fine in the end – Alice admitted they’d both felt a lot better after he built her that blanket nest. :)
C) And Knox, after Alice thanked him for the information, leaning in and asking if Alice might do him and Tung a little favor in return. Alice was amenable (especially since she wanted to stay on Knox and Tung’s good sides, given what they knew about Victor) and asked what they needed; Knox confirmed she was heading to Hollywood to head into the Warrens there and talk to Gary, then explained that Tung had recently lost a data CD down in said Warrens and needed to get it back. And couldn’t go and fetch it himself as he was on the outs with some of the regulars down there. Alice said she could look for it, sure, but was surprised Knox wasn’t going down himself – Knox explained that Tung was pretty sure he wouldn’t get a good reception, especially as a ghoul. People like him were supposed to stay above-ground and take care of everything up there, after all! But since Alice was going to be down there already… He then sweetened the pot by explaining Tung was willing to trade some hacking tips for the CD’s safe return – Alice was only too happy to improve her hacking skills (and rely less on Wonderland’s cryptic hints when it comes to passwords), so she promised to keep an eye out for it.
*nods* Not bad! I’m kind of glad that I thought this would be a good way to slip in Tung’s little side quest – Alice has ended up not reading her e-mail much in these stories, so having it passed through Knox works a lot better. :) I left off with Alice saying her goodbyes to Knox and preparing to head out – next time, she bumps into Jeannette before she gets out the door! Because I can’t set up her thinking she should warn the sisters they need to be a little more openly combative and not pay it off. *nods*
3. Watch something on YouTube: No check – even if I’d had the time after the Workout Video Write-Up, I spent most of the rest of my evening crafting a comment for the latest chapter of my friend Nebby’s fanfic “MediEvil Resurrection II” (she just put it up the other day). We’ll see what happens as the week goes on, but I do not have high hopes.
4. Get my tumblr queues sorted: Half check – due to working on the aforementioned comment for Nebby’s fanfic (which I didn’t even finish, because we all know that I’m fucking wordy), I actually completely forgot to even look at Valice Multiverse until just a couple of minutes ago – and, of course, because I forgot, I had two asks and a comment on the “Light Yagami Vs Bugs” ask waiting for me. *sigh* So I guess I’m going to break my usual routine and do something about those tomorrow. I did, however, get my Victor Luvs Alice (N Smiler) queue sorted for the next three days, slapping up:
A) The movieposters1 Corpse Bride poster (the extra-blue one) for Wednesday
B) The sleepygummy The Smiler mood boards (in varying tints) for Thursday
C) And the wisteriasorrows Alice: Madness Returns fanart (of Alice floating in a lily-pad-filled pond in her Siren dress) for Friday
So that’s at least something.
And I really have to go to bed, so I'm going to leave that there for now and fix the spacing tomorrow. We'll see if Wednesday is any better -- night all! EDIT 5/20/2026: Spacing sorted!
