Junk Dealing
May. 17th, 2020 07:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2Tghc6R
So, my dude has come out to visit for the weekend. (Our isolation circle is this family, plus him, plus his mom, and nobody sees anybody else. it’s weird and involves the Thruway. w-ev.) We were like, well, if there’s a Responsible Adult here we should do something civilized like watch a movie or TV show or something, but my dude was like, no no, I want to understand why you all talk about a video game constantly, and I’ve seen the show so I should have some notion what’s going on anyway right? so hook me up.
SO… we fired up the Xbox.
Now, some background: my dude had arrived at about 2pm and had brought with him the fixins to make margaritas, and so by that point I had made two pitchers of margaritas, one over the rocks and one frozen in the blender, and we’d also done side-by-side taste tests of the two kinds of tequila and one of mezcal that were in the house, and there was also a six-pack of Corona beer that this morning there were still two left of but I don’t know where the other four went, and like. Anyway, this was not an evening of restraint. We weren’t, like, heavily intoxicated? but we had certainly over-indulged a bit, festively.
So we sat down and DF was like, well, fuck, I do not have the coordination to do any important quests tonight. This is probably a good opportunity to clear up some of these lil question marks and just… bum around.
We came to in a camp full of bandits. Oh yeah, we died there last time. [“These renegades aren’t even renegades of funk,” DF said disapprovingly.] Well, wasting all the bandits was easy enough and then the refugees came back and were happy. And then DF took it upon himself to Igni the several beehives that were in the camp, and that would’ve been fine except that a) the camp was full of refugees so he deffo igni’d somebody’s grandma, and b) the camp also had the kind of barrels that explode when you igni them and those went up like Guy Fawkes Day and … weirdly didn’t kill any refugees, just made them… faint? and then they got up again? and nobody was mad about this? but we were distressed (we spectators; DF was not, he was like “I’m making this camp safer, those exploding barrels were a hazard, what if some guy who can make fire from his hands came in here and lit them? I’m just getting them out of the way”).
But then Jenny From The Block showed up [the quest is Jenny O’ The Woods and she’s a nightwraith and we’d only gone to fight the bandits to kill time until night so she’d show up anyway, right, I remember now] and it very rapidly became apparent that DF was slightly too tipsy to actually manage to kill a slightly-overpowered wraith. It wasn’t that his coordination was affected so much as that his concentration was, and it was too much.
The upside is that Geralt respawned back before he’d Igni’d grandma, so we could go on our way with clearer consciences. (Not that DF’s conscience seemed to be in any way clouded, but the rest of us had been troubled. “Whatever,” he said. “They were weeping before, they’re not any sadder now.”)
So we fucked off into the countryside, half-intending on heading back to the crones or whatever, but then thinking, well, why not just ramble the countryside and kill whatever we find?
Some level 4 drowners murdered Geralt rather handily, which was a little sobering. Also we realized that the Corona was actually the lo-carb version, which doesn’t tell you how much alcohol is in it. (Google assured us that it’s 4% ABV, so DF could continue using it to hydrate himself.)
“What is that thing?” my dude asked. It was possibly a dead whale; we had reached the coast.
“I dunno,” DF said, “but I can stand on it majestically.” It was sunrise, gorgeously so, and he panned the camera down to look up at Geralt from slightly below, for maximum majesty.
Then he got into the sea, for reasons unknown. We discovered there that drowners will drown you. Oh, it’s not just a clever name. They didn’t succeed, this time.
DF said, “I just want to point out, you know, that when Keanu Reeves did Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Back then? I believed in him then. I was with him before he was cool.”
Then he was attacked by pirates. “What the shit! We’ve never seen pirates before!” Pirates are just like bandits, only with even weirder accents, and slightly more crossbows. Geralt attempted to hide behind a tree until their crossbow guy lost interest, but it didn’t help much. He also discovered that pirates are slightly harder to set fire to than bandits, possibly because they are salty? Inconclusive.
Every single dead pirate had a dumpling on him, though, which was nice. And we got an enhanced Griffin steel sword diagram, so that was nice. And one of the pirates had a chicken sandwich! Sweet. Fancy new mauve gauntlets that clash less badly with the orange and black gambeson than the old teal ones.
Another question mark in the water and we dived in, and scored some ducal water, so we don’t have to milk a duke for it. Also some trousers, possibly improved? DF pulled up the inventory screen and we enjoyed a little fashion show, deciding which pants to wear. The one pair was rather puffy and didn’t show off Geralt’s shapely thighs, which. We don’t need to see them to know they’re there, but it does help.
Somewhere in here DF decided he was only ever going to get onto Roach by leaping over her hindquarters, never again from the side like a normal person. This often necessitated quite a long pause while he manoevered around trying to get into the correct position to do it, and sometimes he’d have to get back off the horse in order to try again.
It’s Pirate Central by the Coast of Wrecks, and nobody’s got a shirt on. “Nobody wears shirts at the beach,” MM pointed out. “Yeah only a Poindexter wears a shirt at the beach,” my dude puts in. “You should take Geralt’s shirt off,” I said, but DF was not down.
He killed all the pirates, looted their beer, and then went around putting out every open fire in the campsite again. “Safety’s important,” he said. “Also, you fuckers, I put out your fire, take that.” He passed by a lantern. “That’s contained, gonna leave it.”
At this point suddenly we ran up hard against the item-carry limit. Geralt was now so overburdened that he could not run or roll, and could only walk slowly. We had to either throw a lot of things away, or sell them. “Just throw out the broken rakes,” I said, and MM said, “You say that to the son of [DF’s mom]???” “Fair,” I said. [DF’s mom has. Hm. Some hoarding behaviors.] We broke out in a round of My Humps, proving again that we are ancient, but like. Whatchoo gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?? We couldn’t not.
One of the things was a note that the pirates wrote to themselves– an awful lot of bandits and pirates and smugglers seem to have this habit of writing really oddly heartfelt notes about their hopes, dreams, and immediate goals? And then leaving those things around.
We fast-traveled back to a town to sell some shit to make room in inventory for all our pirate plunder, but it was 2am and nobody was up. We were forced to awkwardly meditate in some dude’s yard for four hours in order to be able to accost him at dawn to sell our things.
“He’s gonna run out of money before I run out of stuff,” DF observed somewhat morosely. “Could you buy something in return?” I suggested. “He doesn’t have anything i want,” DF said. “I can get my shit repaired but that’s like. 20 crowns.” “Ooh,” I said, struck by my own genius, “maybe you can purchase sexual favors from him, that’s something Geralt could probably use!” “Listen, I’ll give you $20 to suck my dick, and then you can use that money to buy the rest of my broken rakes.”
In the end, the merchant had four fucktillion Velen longswords to sell to new bandits so the circle of life, as DF put it, could continue.
Meanwhile, I had noticed one of the lights in the room behaving oddly, and somehow between MM and myself, we had gotten so worked up with amusement that we were semi-incoherent with laughter, and in the midst of it I pointed up at the light and hollered out “THAT WOULD BE AN ELECTRICAL MATTER” [link is to the scene from Father Ted that’s a reference to] and we all wound up absolutely paralyzed with incoherent choking laughter for like. Five minutes. It was so dumb. It was absolutely hilarious. I’m never going to be able to look at that ceiling light again without cracking up.
So. Quality times.
We sobered up a little over meeting a lynch mob and being semi-forced to kill them. Either you walk away and let them string up a guy for having the audacity to try to buy food in their town, or you have to murder a bunch of idiot peasants. We opted for the latter and got 20 xp for it, but it was still sort of crappy all around.
Anyway. We resumed our terrorizing of the Pirate Coast, and my notes got a lot less coherent.
“why am i punching! where’s my sword?” DF demanded, as he accidentally attacked a pirate with his bare fists.
“You sold it to the guy who sucked your dick,” I said. (This was a joke, he hadn’t sold *all* his swords.
“i’m jus gong to cut the arms off a bunch of topless men for everyone’s entertainment,” DF said, rampaging through a bunch of scantily-clad pirate dudes. The loot included yet more fisstech! “that’s going in my fisstech collection,” DF said. We’ve decided never to sell fisstech, since it’s evil, but as you can’t really do anything with it, that means he’s just collecting more and more and more of it.
“i just got a key to a cage,” DF said. “i hope it’s a guy who’ll either buy my shit or suck my dick, i’m full again. oh it’s a barber! can i get a wet towel shave?” “… Those are called hot towel shaves, my dude.”
YES UNDERPANTS FIGHT CLUB
(the trousers Geralt’s currently in, when he’s not wearing a gambeson over the top, just leave his ass hanging out in underpants, and since he takes his shirt off for the fistfighting quest, it definitely has become the Underpants Fight Club.
FIST OF THE SOUTH STAR ok that’s an anime reference thanks guys very clever
of a merchant: “will she take my junk??”
We went to Kiera Metz and got given the Plague Maiden quest. Kiera gives us a xenovox, which is deffo a Plot Device. oh shit this quest is only a level 6? we need to do it before we level up too much to get cred for it.
Kiera’s going to rely on “feminine intuition” to know when to reach out and check up on Geralt??? A MAN WROTE THAT. “Oh my lady parts are tingling! Geralt’s in trouble!” Come the fuck on!
AH fuck level 4 drowners hit awful hard considering we’re level 9. is wee precious flower prince geralt too big for his britches???
this is like a carnival of all the different necrophages. Welcome to Necrophage Carnival Island. Mind the exploding rotfiends.
both MM and my dude are passed the fuck out on their respective couches, completely unconscious. maybe we should leave them there.
At some point I stopped taking notes, but Geralt fast-traveled from the island Kiera Metz had sent him to to Novigrad in order to once and for all clear out his inventory, and that went just fine but then on his way out, DF navigated Geralt to hop over a low railing in order to shortcut to another street, and wound up plummeting dramatically to his death off a high cliff. whoops shit
we decided it was time for bed, at that point.
So, my dude has come out to visit for the weekend. (Our isolation circle is this family, plus him, plus his mom, and nobody sees anybody else. it’s weird and involves the Thruway. w-ev.) We were like, well, if there’s a Responsible Adult here we should do something civilized like watch a movie or TV show or something, but my dude was like, no no, I want to understand why you all talk about a video game constantly, and I’ve seen the show so I should have some notion what’s going on anyway right? so hook me up.
SO… we fired up the Xbox.
Now, some background: my dude had arrived at about 2pm and had brought with him the fixins to make margaritas, and so by that point I had made two pitchers of margaritas, one over the rocks and one frozen in the blender, and we’d also done side-by-side taste tests of the two kinds of tequila and one of mezcal that were in the house, and there was also a six-pack of Corona beer that this morning there were still two left of but I don’t know where the other four went, and like. Anyway, this was not an evening of restraint. We weren’t, like, heavily intoxicated? but we had certainly over-indulged a bit, festively.
So we sat down and DF was like, well, fuck, I do not have the coordination to do any important quests tonight. This is probably a good opportunity to clear up some of these lil question marks and just… bum around.
We came to in a camp full of bandits. Oh yeah, we died there last time. [“These renegades aren’t even renegades of funk,” DF said disapprovingly.] Well, wasting all the bandits was easy enough and then the refugees came back and were happy. And then DF took it upon himself to Igni the several beehives that were in the camp, and that would’ve been fine except that a) the camp was full of refugees so he deffo igni’d somebody’s grandma, and b) the camp also had the kind of barrels that explode when you igni them and those went up like Guy Fawkes Day and … weirdly didn’t kill any refugees, just made them… faint? and then they got up again? and nobody was mad about this? but we were distressed (we spectators; DF was not, he was like “I’m making this camp safer, those exploding barrels were a hazard, what if some guy who can make fire from his hands came in here and lit them? I’m just getting them out of the way”).
But then Jenny From The Block showed up [the quest is Jenny O’ The Woods and she’s a nightwraith and we’d only gone to fight the bandits to kill time until night so she’d show up anyway, right, I remember now] and it very rapidly became apparent that DF was slightly too tipsy to actually manage to kill a slightly-overpowered wraith. It wasn’t that his coordination was affected so much as that his concentration was, and it was too much.
The upside is that Geralt respawned back before he’d Igni’d grandma, so we could go on our way with clearer consciences. (Not that DF’s conscience seemed to be in any way clouded, but the rest of us had been troubled. “Whatever,” he said. “They were weeping before, they’re not any sadder now.”)
So we fucked off into the countryside, half-intending on heading back to the crones or whatever, but then thinking, well, why not just ramble the countryside and kill whatever we find?
Some level 4 drowners murdered Geralt rather handily, which was a little sobering. Also we realized that the Corona was actually the lo-carb version, which doesn’t tell you how much alcohol is in it. (Google assured us that it’s 4% ABV, so DF could continue using it to hydrate himself.)
“What is that thing?” my dude asked. It was possibly a dead whale; we had reached the coast.
“I dunno,” DF said, “but I can stand on it majestically.” It was sunrise, gorgeously so, and he panned the camera down to look up at Geralt from slightly below, for maximum majesty.
Then he got into the sea, for reasons unknown. We discovered there that drowners will drown you. Oh, it’s not just a clever name. They didn’t succeed, this time.
DF said, “I just want to point out, you know, that when Keanu Reeves did Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Back then? I believed in him then. I was with him before he was cool.”
Then he was attacked by pirates. “What the shit! We’ve never seen pirates before!” Pirates are just like bandits, only with even weirder accents, and slightly more crossbows. Geralt attempted to hide behind a tree until their crossbow guy lost interest, but it didn’t help much. He also discovered that pirates are slightly harder to set fire to than bandits, possibly because they are salty? Inconclusive.
Every single dead pirate had a dumpling on him, though, which was nice. And we got an enhanced Griffin steel sword diagram, so that was nice. And one of the pirates had a chicken sandwich! Sweet. Fancy new mauve gauntlets that clash less badly with the orange and black gambeson than the old teal ones.
Another question mark in the water and we dived in, and scored some ducal water, so we don’t have to milk a duke for it. Also some trousers, possibly improved? DF pulled up the inventory screen and we enjoyed a little fashion show, deciding which pants to wear. The one pair was rather puffy and didn’t show off Geralt’s shapely thighs, which. We don’t need to see them to know they’re there, but it does help.
Somewhere in here DF decided he was only ever going to get onto Roach by leaping over her hindquarters, never again from the side like a normal person. This often necessitated quite a long pause while he manoevered around trying to get into the correct position to do it, and sometimes he’d have to get back off the horse in order to try again.
It’s Pirate Central by the Coast of Wrecks, and nobody’s got a shirt on. “Nobody wears shirts at the beach,” MM pointed out. “Yeah only a Poindexter wears a shirt at the beach,” my dude puts in. “You should take Geralt’s shirt off,” I said, but DF was not down.
He killed all the pirates, looted their beer, and then went around putting out every open fire in the campsite again. “Safety’s important,” he said. “Also, you fuckers, I put out your fire, take that.” He passed by a lantern. “That’s contained, gonna leave it.”
At this point suddenly we ran up hard against the item-carry limit. Geralt was now so overburdened that he could not run or roll, and could only walk slowly. We had to either throw a lot of things away, or sell them. “Just throw out the broken rakes,” I said, and MM said, “You say that to the son of [DF’s mom]???” “Fair,” I said. [DF’s mom has. Hm. Some hoarding behaviors.] We broke out in a round of My Humps, proving again that we are ancient, but like. Whatchoo gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?? We couldn’t not.
One of the things was a note that the pirates wrote to themselves– an awful lot of bandits and pirates and smugglers seem to have this habit of writing really oddly heartfelt notes about their hopes, dreams, and immediate goals? And then leaving those things around.
We fast-traveled back to a town to sell some shit to make room in inventory for all our pirate plunder, but it was 2am and nobody was up. We were forced to awkwardly meditate in some dude’s yard for four hours in order to be able to accost him at dawn to sell our things.
“He’s gonna run out of money before I run out of stuff,” DF observed somewhat morosely. “Could you buy something in return?” I suggested. “He doesn’t have anything i want,” DF said. “I can get my shit repaired but that’s like. 20 crowns.” “Ooh,” I said, struck by my own genius, “maybe you can purchase sexual favors from him, that’s something Geralt could probably use!” “Listen, I’ll give you $20 to suck my dick, and then you can use that money to buy the rest of my broken rakes.”
In the end, the merchant had four fucktillion Velen longswords to sell to new bandits so the circle of life, as DF put it, could continue.
Meanwhile, I had noticed one of the lights in the room behaving oddly, and somehow between MM and myself, we had gotten so worked up with amusement that we were semi-incoherent with laughter, and in the midst of it I pointed up at the light and hollered out “THAT WOULD BE AN ELECTRICAL MATTER” [link is to the scene from Father Ted that’s a reference to] and we all wound up absolutely paralyzed with incoherent choking laughter for like. Five minutes. It was so dumb. It was absolutely hilarious. I’m never going to be able to look at that ceiling light again without cracking up.
So. Quality times.
We sobered up a little over meeting a lynch mob and being semi-forced to kill them. Either you walk away and let them string up a guy for having the audacity to try to buy food in their town, or you have to murder a bunch of idiot peasants. We opted for the latter and got 20 xp for it, but it was still sort of crappy all around.
Anyway. We resumed our terrorizing of the Pirate Coast, and my notes got a lot less coherent.
“why am i punching! where’s my sword?” DF demanded, as he accidentally attacked a pirate with his bare fists.
“You sold it to the guy who sucked your dick,” I said. (This was a joke, he hadn’t sold *all* his swords.
“i’m jus gong to cut the arms off a bunch of topless men for everyone’s entertainment,” DF said, rampaging through a bunch of scantily-clad pirate dudes. The loot included yet more fisstech! “that’s going in my fisstech collection,” DF said. We’ve decided never to sell fisstech, since it’s evil, but as you can’t really do anything with it, that means he’s just collecting more and more and more of it.
“i just got a key to a cage,” DF said. “i hope it’s a guy who’ll either buy my shit or suck my dick, i’m full again. oh it’s a barber! can i get a wet towel shave?” “… Those are called hot towel shaves, my dude.”
YES UNDERPANTS FIGHT CLUB
(the trousers Geralt’s currently in, when he’s not wearing a gambeson over the top, just leave his ass hanging out in underpants, and since he takes his shirt off for the fistfighting quest, it definitely has become the Underpants Fight Club.
FIST OF THE SOUTH STAR ok that’s an anime reference thanks guys very clever
of a merchant: “will she take my junk??”
We went to Kiera Metz and got given the Plague Maiden quest. Kiera gives us a xenovox, which is deffo a Plot Device. oh shit this quest is only a level 6? we need to do it before we level up too much to get cred for it.
Kiera’s going to rely on “feminine intuition” to know when to reach out and check up on Geralt??? A MAN WROTE THAT. “Oh my lady parts are tingling! Geralt’s in trouble!” Come the fuck on!
AH fuck level 4 drowners hit awful hard considering we’re level 9. is wee precious flower prince geralt too big for his britches???
this is like a carnival of all the different necrophages. Welcome to Necrophage Carnival Island. Mind the exploding rotfiends.
both MM and my dude are passed the fuck out on their respective couches, completely unconscious. maybe we should leave them there.
At some point I stopped taking notes, but Geralt fast-traveled from the island Kiera Metz had sent him to to Novigrad in order to once and for all clear out his inventory, and that went just fine but then on his way out, DF navigated Geralt to hop over a low railing in order to shortcut to another street, and wound up plummeting dramatically to his death off a high cliff. whoops shit
we decided it was time for bed, at that point.
