a series of caves

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3brpuzb

This is perhaps a less-epic W3 recounting than normal, but I find I don’t feel right if i haven’t summarized it. 

Last night I was introduced to the concept of “juggling”, which is a video game technique where if you spam the attack button just right you can just rain pain down upon an opponent without the opponent ever getting a chance to attack you in return. And, it turns out, this is how you, as a level 6 Precious Wee Flower Prince, can murder the shit out of a freshly-spawned level 12 Nekker Warrior before it can come and terrorize your cursed swine. 

We saved the village idiot in the moment, but I don’t think he understood our cautioning him that he should probably leave. So. Well, we can’t really think about that much, can we. 

So that was creepy cave #1 of the evening. 40 exp for saving a bunch of pigs, and no reward besides that, but whatever. (Geralt gets paid in weird increments, and often not at all, but sometimes for no reason he’s suddenly got a lot of money, I don’t really understand it.)

Next up we decided to go get our fortune told by a weird old guy. Why… not. But this involved, oh boy, running around through some monster-infested fields. Which, sure, as a slightly leveled-up Witcher, would be a great way to just come and get a shitload of loot and XP– destroying monster nests is great for that. But Precious Wee Flower Prince Geralt is not at that point yet and it would mostly be a huge pain in the dick to try to do it now. So we Bravely Ran Away a bunch. 
(DF, mashing buttons, muttering at some monsters who are following him beyond where he thinks they should: “Go to your hoooooome, guys” and it was in that moment i realized how fucken old that movie is, christ.)

The old man, predictably, wants us to go find him a rare root, in a particular cave, so we go do that. This cave is creepy, full of monsters, and full of shitloads of… nothing. We do like five circuits of the cave, in vain. MM is only half-paying attention and looks up and sees Geralt passing by several lootable items, and says “Oh, what are those?” DF’s answer: “I don’t have enough tarragon sauce for all these mushrooms.”

But we find the root eventually and fuck off. That’s Creepy Cave #2 for the day. Again, we loot food items from a dessicated skeleton. Why is that a thing??

Thence to attempt a quest called Dairy and Darkness. “I’m a big fan of dairy,” DF says. “Like… almost to the point where it’s a vice.” 

To do this, we had to go east of Oxenfurt. So we went to a fast-travel point in Oxenfurt, and then went to cross the bridge off east to the mainland. Geralt whistled for Roach, had some difficulty getting on her and accidentally waved a sword around and got the guards rather agitated (whoops wrong button) so it was time to peel out and… Roach would run and run and not move. Weird?

So he dismounted, ran most of the rest of the bridge, whistled, got on the horse, and again she ran and ran but made no forward progress. What??? 

Finally he just walked across the bridge, and got on Roach at the end. Weird. 

So we went to the mage’s wrecked house and poked around. We instantly found the portal and oh yeah the weird cursed doll from the shop in Novigrod opened it, ok. Great. But like, we hadn’t looked around at all? So we did, and found a switch in the wall that turns the sky off. 

Yeah, it makes the moon blood red and the sky black. But it didn’t do anything else. So we turned the sky back on and kept going. 

The cheese caves were not only dark, but also just. Stinky. To the point of Geralt doing his dainty little “ack, ack” coughs. He coughs like an old lady at a cotillion. “Ehem, ehem.” Which is hilarious because he only does it when he’s starting to lose health because the smell is so bad he’s literally dying. So like. Anyway. Also we did an experiment and used Cat and determined that an hour in-game is like, zero time really, and sort of annoyingly so. 

There was so much dark cave, much of it full of horrifyingly stinky cheeses, and no loot. Just– no loot, anywhere, no mushrooms, no nothin’. We swam around and finally, finally found a weird room with flickering torchlight and an apparent corpse hooked up to a copper pot still for some reason, and some cheese lying around. It was weird. Then we found a wall that had a glyph on it like one would have if it wanted you to Aard or Igni it, but this was a glyph we hadn’t seen. Much Googling later, and finally akilah12902 explained that it indicated there was a thing we were supposed to have to open the thing and we didn’t have it, shit. Well… whatever. 

A foglet came out and we had to fight it off, and three times in a row, DF carefully selected Quen, and then went to cast it, and it cast Igni instead. It was weird and annoying. 

Anyway we escaped the weird cave with our life, mostly (there was an unfortunate dying incident that we took as an excuse to redo a minor plot point that we then accidentally did the exact same way a second time so like… twice, we threw a bomb instead of lighting a torch… anyway. But, we got out. 

Onward, with a steel sword named Emmentaler (why not) and not bloody much else. Got out into the mage’s house through the weird portal, and immediately, Geralt took it upon himself to, instead of hopping over the wall, climb up a pillar and stand majestically atop it, hair ruffling in the breeze. 

“Of course that’s what I fucking meant to do,” DF snarled, exasperated. 

We decided, since tonight’s theme is Caves, to return to the quest Wandering In The Dark. So we hustled back and rediscovered… oh yeah. Kiera, who DF had dubbed Boobs McSassy, is still standing right by the mouth of the cave. 

Geralt looted a trunk and got an astonishingly good pair of trousers out of the random chest. “These,” DF said approvingly, “are fighting trousers.” Somehow, despite the muttonchops, he felt that Geralt was starting to look like he was a Witcher on purpose. But like. The muttonchops, man… Anyway. (You can kind of overlook them.)

We noticed that Boobs McSassy’s idle animation consists very predictably of: her adjusting her hair, her adjusting her skirts, her adjusting her shirt, her adjusting her breasts, repeat. It was really something, we sat and watched a cycle of it like, wow, girl, try wearing a whole shirt if you’re having that much trouble. But like. 

Several steps into the cave, she moans, “Ugh, what I wouldn’t do for a hot bath” and I was like she just took one??? and MM pointed out, no, she’s been standing around by this cave entrance for like, months in in-game time? So, I guess, fair enough, Written By A Man Boobs McSassy. 

Anyway– “I forgot to grease myself!” DF said, upon encountering his first wraith. “How can I fight a spectre without the proper lubricant?”

We self-immolated by stepping on some mushrooms, reincarnated just outside the entrance, and tried again. Annihilated several wraiths, including one who left kind of a gross oil-slick of blood kinda situation on the surface of the water, which we eventually deduced couldn’t be the wraith’s blood and was likely Geralt’s instead. “Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!” DF declared, further cementing the fact that he’s old as fuck. (Want to feel old? Dodgeball came out in two thousand and fucking four.)

So we wandered through this cave, murdering wraiths (”we’ve got so much fucking essence of wraith now. i hope we can sell this.”) and picking up loot. (”Oh, hell, this is a really nice fucking shirt, what the fuck was it doing in a rock?”) 

(”Of course the fruit on this skeleton is dried. who the fuck… whatever.”)

In the midst of this we reached level 7. Huzzah! And then got murdered by a gargoyle. (”Wow that thing hits hard.”) 

Reloaded, tried again, went a different way, avoided the gargoyle, made it out alive. 

And then DF was like “I wanna fight that gargoyle” and turned around and went back in.

And got murderated again. So… we left it there, we’ll see next time we play where it picks up.

So, that was An Evening In Various Caves With Wee Precious Geralt, the Flower Prince of Level 7.