Extra Dad Jokes
May. 26th, 2020 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2A7vRL4
So I’m back to Rochester, having spent the weekend in Buffalo cleaning out my basement so that we can get a new furnace immediately. It’s not an emergency but there’s a rebate if we get it installed before the end of June so it’s kind of an emergency. And for the first time in my life i’ll have central air, which doesn’t seem like it would matter most of the time in this climate until suddenly, like this weekend, boy does it ever.
So anyway I got back to Rochester just in time for Xboxing, except DF was playing his glitter robots game instead, for so long I got fiercely bored and ate my feelings about it. (Actually MM and I just wound up having deeply deranged conversations, as one does. Listen, she and DF had gone on a date, sort of– they’d left the kids with the neighbor girl who babysits, and had gone on a walk to the 7/11 and bought fizzy drinks from the fridge, which like, wasn’t essential of them, and was very defiant, but they did wear masks the whole time and we’re supposed to be reopening here. Who knows, it felt very decadent.
Anyway. Just as I was despairing and getting ready to go to bed, he did eventually switch over to Witcher, huzzah.
We resumed in Novigrad, and took a moment to admire Geralt, resplendent in his newly-acquired Griffin armor, which all matches.
Immediately, we came upon a group of humans beating up an elf. Geralt saved the elf by slaughtering the humans; DF had expected it to be a fistfight and nearly got killed when the humans went full-in with swords. “What the shit,” he said, and proceeded to carve them up while a washerwoman shrieked unceasingly. They each dropped a different lunch entree as their loot, which DF happily collected. He then told the elf to get out of town, which was the less-bad dialogue option. They seem to be trying to tell us something about interracial tensions in Novigrad.
We picked up Following The Thread; I missed when we’d acquired that contract but it was about a monster that had been bothering the local guard outpost. I recognized which quest it was, though, as soon as the guy told us someone else had already taken the contract, but we should go look at the body of the homeless guy that the monster had eaten.
“Ohhhhhh,” I said, probably obnoxiously, “I know who took the contract,” as poor DF was trying to follow the prints, lost them in the water, doubled back, jumped in the water again, and I was finally like “Just check the mill, man, you– there’s blood right there, look at the blood.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. We stepped in the door of the mill and there were audible fighting sounds coming from upstairs. Unconcerned, DF loaded up his inventory screen, figured out what he wanted to oil himself with, got his quickdraw slots loaded up, yadda yadda, and then went up the stairs.
There was already someone fighting the monster, which was an ekimmara. Another Witcher. “HI LAMBERT,” I yelled.
“We know this guy?” DF said. “Oh he was in the tutorial. Right. This guy.” He quickly and brutally dispatched the ekimmara, and was like, “Do we like this guy?”
“We do,” I said. “We super do.”
The cutscene unfolded just fine, and we went with Lambert to collect the reward, and Lambert immediately started getting weirdly aggressive. “What the shit,” DF said, and then Lambert absconded and left Geralt to face three level 9 guards on his own who suddenly wanted to murder him, and DF was like, “what the shit”, and when we caught up with Lambert there was a dialogue option literally labeled as What the hell, Lambert and DF picked that one and was like “we like this guy??”
“He’s kind of an asshole,” I said, “but he’s like, ride-or-die,” and DF was like “hm” and it finally struck me that DF is an only child and doesn’t totally understand that dynamic. Like, yeah, no shit Lambert’s an asshole, but God forbid someone else hurts him. No way!
(DF’s kids would understand, though. They’re currently scream-wrestling one another in the other room, but I tried to break it up and they were like no WTF we’re enjoying this how dare u (i mean, in, like, kindergartner language ofc) and I’m like you know what, fine, just don’t put anybody through a window or anything. I’m about to teach them the concept of safewords because I can’t tell if they’re really upset or not half the time.)
(One time I idly observed to one of my sisters that I’d ask a different sister to help me hide a body if I ever had the need, and she was actively insulted that I wouldn’t ask her first. [I have three, so. Options.] At the next whole-family get together they actually argued over which of them would be most useful at body-hiding. I’d be the least good at it, by the way, if you were ever wondering, out of the four of us, but like, one of us is a pig farmer and another is a military logistics specialist and the third is just real good at planning a party.)
So we agree to meet up with Lambert later to discuss His Behavior after he executes a man, but DF had the brilliant idea to go back to the mill to check and see if the ekimmara had dropped loot, which it super had, so that was worth it, and then we got derailed briefly by a random level 2 quest that gave us 1 xp for solving it, but 40 xp for using Axii on a guy, and the incalculable value of letting Geralt make a really stupid Dad pun. The character’s name is Mugs, and Geralt observes that he said he’d gotten… mugged, and as he says it, he hesitates, then like cuts his eyes to one side, like he’s checking to see if he can actually get away with saying this, and the guy he’s talking to is the target of the Axii mind-control so he actually does get away with saying it which only encourages him, argh. (DF was inappropriately amused. It’s only encouraging him too, no, god damn it. The puns alone are why this game’s a hard R. Keep that shit away from impressionable minds.)
“This dank establishment is frequented by a shady clientele,” says the map, of the inn where we’re going to meet Lambert.
“I don’t think they’re using dank the way I do,” DF ruminated.
Unprompted, he asked Lambert for the whole story of Why He’s Executing People And Setting Geralt Up To Have To Fight Guards Without Warning. Lambert makes his tight-jawed way through The Story of Aiden, and I stage-whisper to MM “that’s his boyfriend, his boyfriend got murdered” and she’s like awww and DF is like aww and we concluded he was probably Correct to be slightly unhinged about all of it.
so we managed to keep Lambert from murdering anyone else, but we got given a quest to go to Skellige.
That’s two different quests asking us to go to Skellige, and DF was like, why not?? So he started looking around for a ship that would go there.
As we were walking near the harbor, a strange many-legged snake thing ran by on the ground. Perplexed, we followed it. It was— a whole bunch of rats, all running together, looking like a big snake, but way more wiggly. It was horrifying. We followed it as it wove its way down the street, waiting for it to do something, or mean something.
Then it got itself lodged under a cart, and showed mostly as a writhing horror of pink tails all facing the same way, wriggling like tentacles. It was truly horrifying. Eventually, DF had Geralt throw an Igni at it– but nothing happened; the cart caught fire in a desultory sort of fashion, but the rats kept wriggling in place.
“A glitch,” we concluded, and left it, walking away.
We did another little quest, from the noticeboard, a merchant. Geralt very, very clearly was pleased with himself as he whipped out another Dad Pun:
“Is there an imp or was it an imp… erfection in the notice?”
The merchant did not laugh. Geralt was unrepentant. We haggled over the price the guy would pay for the job. “Small businesses are the foundation of the economy,” Geralt intoned, sarcastically, activating his Maximum Dad Powers as he went off into the night.
We had to track the thing around, and eventually wound up in some guy’s house. It became clear he was a shapeshifter of some kind, from an Incriminating Letter that was left out on the counter saying “once you’ve read this, burn it, I mean that for real”.
There were a lot of lootable items in the house. DF won’t take loot that’s somebody’s; that would be stealing. Except there was some dried fruit and nuts. “Trail mix is trail mix,” DF said fervently, “I’m not turning down trail mix.”
We chased the shapeshifter– a Doppler, as it happened– and found him in some sort of altercation with an elf, which we couldn’t tell the actual hostility of. Geralt pointed out that the Doppler was a Doppler, whereupon he fled. Geralt chased him, and caught up to him eventually, and then the Doppler took on Geralt’s appearance.
The Dad’s Greatest Lines kept coming: Geralt’s sole response was, oh man, I look so old. There followed a desultory fight, and then the Doppler gave over; he’d absorbed all of Geralt’s physical traits but didn’t have his reflexes. More importantly, he’d accessed enough of Geralt’s memories to realize that the Witcher wouldn’t kill him. Geralt told him to leave town, and the Doppler gave him a pile of money.
Recovering from that, we moved along and came across a group of Elves beating a man to death in an alley. The only options we had were to interfere or not; if we interfered, then we could choose to let the Elves kill the man, who they accused without proof of having sold tainted fisstech to their young, killing several of them, OR we could slaughter all the Elves and let the man run off. Again having assumed it would be a fistfight, DF chose to fight the Elves, and then had to kill them or be killed. That one didn’t feel very good. I half want to look up and see what the right choice was, but don’t think it’ll yield much.
Thereafter we resumed our attempts to get to Skellige.
We found a drunk who was willing to sail us there. (A purse with a thousand coins: “heavy like a bull’s ballsack,” he deemed it. WTF.) So we got on a boat.
There was a cutscene, clearly animated by a team of humans who had none of them ever been on a boat; zoomed in, a side table, with a candle on a pedestal holder sitting there, no shade or anything on it, and Geralt leans his swords against the table as if there’s any chance in fucking hell that they’re not immediately going to fall over and knock the candle onto him as he lies asleep, and then lies down, ostentatiously shirtless, to sleep. Then: pirates, attacking the ship! he runs out, fully clothed, swords strapped on. WTF was that cutscene. Why show him naked and unarmed. Why.
(It is, for the record, the first time he is shown sleeping in the game since he awakes from the dream that is the intro module. This suggests that he sleeps purely for fun, approximately twice per quarter-year.)
The fight with the pirates is playable but it doesn’t matter what you do, there’s a cutscene at the end so that you wind up washed up on shore. And then a guy tries to steal your medallion.
We looted the beach, killed a bunch of sirens, and then got cornered by a level Red Skull Of Death Ekhinda, whatever that is, so we had to kill that thing too. We got every bit of storm-wrack and looted everything we could find, but could not find the ship’s captain, who is supposed to be there and still have the heavy-like-a-bull’s-ballsack coinpurse. We might have to look again tonight.
We wound up getting sucked into another cutscene though, and met Yennefer again at a Viking funeral. And Geralt greets Yennefer with a choice of lines, that range from Neutral to Horny. DF chose Horny: “You smell wonderful.” “We’re at a funeral,” she replies, annoyed. “You smell wonderful at this funeral.” Come the fuck on, Geralt.
We managed to escape the cutscenes. “I’ll see you shortly at the wake,” Yennefer says crisply, and of course Geralt says “I’ll be there,” but the way quests work they’ll just wait indefinitely until he comes back, so we scarpered to the other end of the island for Lambert’s quest instead.
Where we promptly died, mostly because it was super fucking late and it was definitely bedtime. But like. We’ll see later if we can manage.
We need to get back to Novigrod, too; if we level up too much there’s a bunch of shit in Novigrod we won’t get any credit for doing. But DF was just curious to see Skellige, and now we’ve got fast travel points there.
So I’m back to Rochester, having spent the weekend in Buffalo cleaning out my basement so that we can get a new furnace immediately. It’s not an emergency but there’s a rebate if we get it installed before the end of June so it’s kind of an emergency. And for the first time in my life i’ll have central air, which doesn’t seem like it would matter most of the time in this climate until suddenly, like this weekend, boy does it ever.
So anyway I got back to Rochester just in time for Xboxing, except DF was playing his glitter robots game instead, for so long I got fiercely bored and ate my feelings about it. (Actually MM and I just wound up having deeply deranged conversations, as one does. Listen, she and DF had gone on a date, sort of– they’d left the kids with the neighbor girl who babysits, and had gone on a walk to the 7/11 and bought fizzy drinks from the fridge, which like, wasn’t essential of them, and was very defiant, but they did wear masks the whole time and we’re supposed to be reopening here. Who knows, it felt very decadent.
Anyway. Just as I was despairing and getting ready to go to bed, he did eventually switch over to Witcher, huzzah.
We resumed in Novigrad, and took a moment to admire Geralt, resplendent in his newly-acquired Griffin armor, which all matches.
Immediately, we came upon a group of humans beating up an elf. Geralt saved the elf by slaughtering the humans; DF had expected it to be a fistfight and nearly got killed when the humans went full-in with swords. “What the shit,” he said, and proceeded to carve them up while a washerwoman shrieked unceasingly. They each dropped a different lunch entree as their loot, which DF happily collected. He then told the elf to get out of town, which was the less-bad dialogue option. They seem to be trying to tell us something about interracial tensions in Novigrad.
We picked up Following The Thread; I missed when we’d acquired that contract but it was about a monster that had been bothering the local guard outpost. I recognized which quest it was, though, as soon as the guy told us someone else had already taken the contract, but we should go look at the body of the homeless guy that the monster had eaten.
“Ohhhhhh,” I said, probably obnoxiously, “I know who took the contract,” as poor DF was trying to follow the prints, lost them in the water, doubled back, jumped in the water again, and I was finally like “Just check the mill, man, you– there’s blood right there, look at the blood.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. We stepped in the door of the mill and there were audible fighting sounds coming from upstairs. Unconcerned, DF loaded up his inventory screen, figured out what he wanted to oil himself with, got his quickdraw slots loaded up, yadda yadda, and then went up the stairs.
There was already someone fighting the monster, which was an ekimmara. Another Witcher. “HI LAMBERT,” I yelled.
“We know this guy?” DF said. “Oh he was in the tutorial. Right. This guy.” He quickly and brutally dispatched the ekimmara, and was like, “Do we like this guy?”
“We do,” I said. “We super do.”
The cutscene unfolded just fine, and we went with Lambert to collect the reward, and Lambert immediately started getting weirdly aggressive. “What the shit,” DF said, and then Lambert absconded and left Geralt to face three level 9 guards on his own who suddenly wanted to murder him, and DF was like, “what the shit”, and when we caught up with Lambert there was a dialogue option literally labeled as What the hell, Lambert and DF picked that one and was like “we like this guy??”
“He’s kind of an asshole,” I said, “but he’s like, ride-or-die,” and DF was like “hm” and it finally struck me that DF is an only child and doesn’t totally understand that dynamic. Like, yeah, no shit Lambert’s an asshole, but God forbid someone else hurts him. No way!
(DF’s kids would understand, though. They’re currently scream-wrestling one another in the other room, but I tried to break it up and they were like no WTF we’re enjoying this how dare u (i mean, in, like, kindergartner language ofc) and I’m like you know what, fine, just don’t put anybody through a window or anything. I’m about to teach them the concept of safewords because I can’t tell if they’re really upset or not half the time.)
(One time I idly observed to one of my sisters that I’d ask a different sister to help me hide a body if I ever had the need, and she was actively insulted that I wouldn’t ask her first. [I have three, so. Options.] At the next whole-family get together they actually argued over which of them would be most useful at body-hiding. I’d be the least good at it, by the way, if you were ever wondering, out of the four of us, but like, one of us is a pig farmer and another is a military logistics specialist and the third is just real good at planning a party.)
So we agree to meet up with Lambert later to discuss His Behavior after he executes a man, but DF had the brilliant idea to go back to the mill to check and see if the ekimmara had dropped loot, which it super had, so that was worth it, and then we got derailed briefly by a random level 2 quest that gave us 1 xp for solving it, but 40 xp for using Axii on a guy, and the incalculable value of letting Geralt make a really stupid Dad pun. The character’s name is Mugs, and Geralt observes that he said he’d gotten… mugged, and as he says it, he hesitates, then like cuts his eyes to one side, like he’s checking to see if he can actually get away with saying this, and the guy he’s talking to is the target of the Axii mind-control so he actually does get away with saying it which only encourages him, argh. (DF was inappropriately amused. It’s only encouraging him too, no, god damn it. The puns alone are why this game’s a hard R. Keep that shit away from impressionable minds.)
“This dank establishment is frequented by a shady clientele,” says the map, of the inn where we’re going to meet Lambert.
“I don’t think they’re using dank the way I do,” DF ruminated.
Unprompted, he asked Lambert for the whole story of Why He’s Executing People And Setting Geralt Up To Have To Fight Guards Without Warning. Lambert makes his tight-jawed way through The Story of Aiden, and I stage-whisper to MM “that’s his boyfriend, his boyfriend got murdered” and she’s like awww and DF is like aww and we concluded he was probably Correct to be slightly unhinged about all of it.
so we managed to keep Lambert from murdering anyone else, but we got given a quest to go to Skellige.
That’s two different quests asking us to go to Skellige, and DF was like, why not?? So he started looking around for a ship that would go there.
As we were walking near the harbor, a strange many-legged snake thing ran by on the ground. Perplexed, we followed it. It was— a whole bunch of rats, all running together, looking like a big snake, but way more wiggly. It was horrifying. We followed it as it wove its way down the street, waiting for it to do something, or mean something.
Then it got itself lodged under a cart, and showed mostly as a writhing horror of pink tails all facing the same way, wriggling like tentacles. It was truly horrifying. Eventually, DF had Geralt throw an Igni at it– but nothing happened; the cart caught fire in a desultory sort of fashion, but the rats kept wriggling in place.
“A glitch,” we concluded, and left it, walking away.
We did another little quest, from the noticeboard, a merchant. Geralt very, very clearly was pleased with himself as he whipped out another Dad Pun:
“Is there an imp or was it an imp… erfection in the notice?”
The merchant did not laugh. Geralt was unrepentant. We haggled over the price the guy would pay for the job. “Small businesses are the foundation of the economy,” Geralt intoned, sarcastically, activating his Maximum Dad Powers as he went off into the night.
We had to track the thing around, and eventually wound up in some guy’s house. It became clear he was a shapeshifter of some kind, from an Incriminating Letter that was left out on the counter saying “once you’ve read this, burn it, I mean that for real”.
There were a lot of lootable items in the house. DF won’t take loot that’s somebody’s; that would be stealing. Except there was some dried fruit and nuts. “Trail mix is trail mix,” DF said fervently, “I’m not turning down trail mix.”
We chased the shapeshifter– a Doppler, as it happened– and found him in some sort of altercation with an elf, which we couldn’t tell the actual hostility of. Geralt pointed out that the Doppler was a Doppler, whereupon he fled. Geralt chased him, and caught up to him eventually, and then the Doppler took on Geralt’s appearance.
The Dad’s Greatest Lines kept coming: Geralt’s sole response was, oh man, I look so old. There followed a desultory fight, and then the Doppler gave over; he’d absorbed all of Geralt’s physical traits but didn’t have his reflexes. More importantly, he’d accessed enough of Geralt’s memories to realize that the Witcher wouldn’t kill him. Geralt told him to leave town, and the Doppler gave him a pile of money.
Recovering from that, we moved along and came across a group of Elves beating a man to death in an alley. The only options we had were to interfere or not; if we interfered, then we could choose to let the Elves kill the man, who they accused without proof of having sold tainted fisstech to their young, killing several of them, OR we could slaughter all the Elves and let the man run off. Again having assumed it would be a fistfight, DF chose to fight the Elves, and then had to kill them or be killed. That one didn’t feel very good. I half want to look up and see what the right choice was, but don’t think it’ll yield much.
Thereafter we resumed our attempts to get to Skellige.
We found a drunk who was willing to sail us there. (A purse with a thousand coins: “heavy like a bull’s ballsack,” he deemed it. WTF.) So we got on a boat.
There was a cutscene, clearly animated by a team of humans who had none of them ever been on a boat; zoomed in, a side table, with a candle on a pedestal holder sitting there, no shade or anything on it, and Geralt leans his swords against the table as if there’s any chance in fucking hell that they’re not immediately going to fall over and knock the candle onto him as he lies asleep, and then lies down, ostentatiously shirtless, to sleep. Then: pirates, attacking the ship! he runs out, fully clothed, swords strapped on. WTF was that cutscene. Why show him naked and unarmed. Why.
(It is, for the record, the first time he is shown sleeping in the game since he awakes from the dream that is the intro module. This suggests that he sleeps purely for fun, approximately twice per quarter-year.)
The fight with the pirates is playable but it doesn’t matter what you do, there’s a cutscene at the end so that you wind up washed up on shore. And then a guy tries to steal your medallion.
We looted the beach, killed a bunch of sirens, and then got cornered by a level Red Skull Of Death Ekhinda, whatever that is, so we had to kill that thing too. We got every bit of storm-wrack and looted everything we could find, but could not find the ship’s captain, who is supposed to be there and still have the heavy-like-a-bull’s-ballsack coinpurse. We might have to look again tonight.
We wound up getting sucked into another cutscene though, and met Yennefer again at a Viking funeral. And Geralt greets Yennefer with a choice of lines, that range from Neutral to Horny. DF chose Horny: “You smell wonderful.” “We’re at a funeral,” she replies, annoyed. “You smell wonderful at this funeral.” Come the fuck on, Geralt.
We managed to escape the cutscenes. “I’ll see you shortly at the wake,” Yennefer says crisply, and of course Geralt says “I’ll be there,” but the way quests work they’ll just wait indefinitely until he comes back, so we scarpered to the other end of the island for Lambert’s quest instead.
Where we promptly died, mostly because it was super fucking late and it was definitely bedtime. But like. We’ll see later if we can manage.
We need to get back to Novigrod, too; if we level up too much there’s a bunch of shit in Novigrod we won’t get any credit for doing. But DF was just curious to see Skellige, and now we’ve got fast travel points there.
