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I’m finally caught up– we didn’t play last night, DF was on the phone with his dad and it was the kind of call where he paced around the entire exterior of the house being really heavily-accented into his phone headset, which alarmed me quite a bit when he walked past the window of the room I was in because I hadn’t expected anyone to be outside.
So we went to bed early while he was still on the phone but then I didn’t go to sleep, like a fool, but I also wrote a bunch of the next Ancient Sea chapter so that was great. Mixed success. And, he’s on call tonight, so he’ll probably be at work overnight and we won’t play tonight either, so we’ll see.
BUT. The night before last, we had a good long Witchering session with some fucking around AND some plot, and we drank the cocktail I had invented, the Yennefer. Here’s the recipe, and behind the cut I’ll explain the Saga of Trollololo and also the exciting Adventure of the Magical Towels.
edited to add ok all this was delayed one MORE day, but also DF’s shift went so late we assumed he was working an overnight until at 11:30 the household was awakened by someone opening every cabinet in the kitchen and then he stumbled up to bed, and then had to go in this morning at his usual 7am start time because doctors’ hours fucking suck, so actually I’ve had two extra days to write this and have not. I have no excuses, but you’ll see what else I’ve been working on eventually, I promise. ANYHOW back to the post, with a recipe.
The Yennefer, a cocktail:
1) Cut the blooms off of a lilac bush until you’ve got enough. Pick the little purple bits very carefully off the tiny green stems. (I got about four cups. It took forever.) Rinse them in cold water if you think they might be dusty. I didn’t, I’m a slob. Make lilac syrup by putting two parts of lilac petals to one part sugar and one part water, bringing it to a simmer, turning it off, letting it cool, and letting it sit for 12-24 hours. Then strain it. TheSpruceEats promised me it wouldn’t be bitter if I sat there like an OCD maniac and picked out every tiny green stem, but they lied; the resulting syrup was sweet and flowery and had a pronounced bitter note to it. HOWEVER, this is Yennefer, so that is perfectly copacetic.
2) I bought a container of sweet candied gooseberries at the Asia Mart a while back (when the grocery stores were wiped out and the asian supermarkets were untouched because of racism), these in fact, so I poured boiling water over a bunch of those and the extra sugar that was loose at the bottom of the package, and wound up with a sweet-tart fruity sort of syrup. (Lacking those, I might have used some cranberry juice.)
3) Combine those two syrups until the taste pleases you somewhat and is slightly too sweet. (I added a little unflavored simple syrup.) Then, add a correct amount of either gin, or white rum if you don’t like gin. (My test batch was fantastic with gin, but MM hates gin, so I used rum for this version.)
4) put in a bit of lemon and/or lime juice to make it more tart, as needed.
5) optional: add other herbal/flowery liqueurs to taste. I had this botanical spirit named Hum that’s red, and I had some blue Cointreau that I put a couple of drops in for color, and I had a little bit of creme de violette.
My Drink Mixing Method is largely that I figure out how many servings I’m making, put in one to two ounces of the hard liquor per serving, and then put in about one part of the combined mixers per one part of the hard liquor, and then I adjust the flavors until it’s the strength I want (I often wind up with much more mixer, up to two parts per one part of hard liquor, but that varies). Most of my drinks are designed to be served over ice to bring them down to the correct dilution.
tw below for assisted suicide, in-game, expressly nothing to do with any real-life things.
We started strong. I poured the drinks, and DF dithered about having any– he has awful heartburn problems and tries to have only water after 5pm unless he’s prepared to Accept The Consequences, but he decided he’d try a cocktail. He asked if MM would put it over ice for him, so she got out the bag of ice in the freezer and discovered it had sort of bricked. He suggested banging it on the floor to break it up, and she had a reply to that which would be much funnier if I had not explained all this, but I have, so:
“I’m not planning on banging right now,” she said, swanning into the room in her particularly magnificent way of walking, with a drink in each hand.
(I know I’ve set the setting-scene before but it’s worth mentioning that MathMom is a stunningly beautiful and of course deeply eccentric woman, tallish and solid-built with classic-length (that’s upper mid-thigh) thick wavy pale-brown hair with natural golden highlights which she often wears in a magnificent crown braid across the top of her head held in place with an array of jeweled and tortoise-shell clips, and she has a predilection for lace-bedecked long skirts, lots of embroidery and hand-embellished trims, lily-white bare arms of astonishingly muscular slenderness, and often a headband with lace cat ears when she’s feeling particularly emotionally-drained. Oh and jewelry, she has a lot of jewelry, some of which is expensive shit inherited from a wealthy aunt who died suddenly 20 years ago, and some of which she makes herself out of an exquisite collection of beads, mostly rainbows of opals. So, there’s an image, for you. She’s decided she enjoys the fashions of Novigrad, so there may be some upcoming augmentations of her wardrobe.)
ANYHOW. Down to Witchering.
Properly lubricated with alcohol, we embarked upon a little tour of the monster nests of Velen, “through the Lands of Difficulty,” as DF termed it– all the shit he uncovered whilst too low-level to make it worthwhile. Since we were down there, we figured we’d clear all that out, get whatever loot and XP the place had to offer at the current level, and then move on with the Plot Shit.
We had not really missed Velen’s fight music. See, when Geralt’s involved in a fight, the music changes, and in different places it plays different music, and in Velen it’s this music we call The Hollering, because it has a lot of lyric-less vocal stuff including some stuff that’s kind of hoarse? (Ah, it’s called Silver for Monsters but this is the extended track, the one they actually play really starts at like, the 2 minute mark of the linked video. and like, fine, it’s cool or whatever but after hours of playing you’re kind of like Ah Fuck It’s The Hollering.)
We found a bandit camp based in a half-ruined building that was leaning crazily over. We killed the guys on the ground and then DF got excited to try killing bandits by Aarding them off the top floor, so he ran up there. (There’s an achievement you can get, for killing a number of enemies by aarding them off things. We haven’t got one yet, but there’s time.)
Unfortunately, it wasn’t high enough to kill a level 9 bandit, so Geralt just Aarded him off the building and he was like “ARGH FUCK” and then started shooting arrows up at us. The other one, we just sworded until he mostly fell off but then he died weirdly half-clipped through the edge of the floor and just hung there by his wrist. DF went down to the ground and tried to crossbow him down but that was it, he was just forever going to hang there. It was super weird.
Another scene-setting thing: throughout all of this, DF is treating us to a very professional analysis of the different methods of Coronavirus testing being offered and what they do and do not mean and what they are and are not useful for; his conclusion basically boiled down to that they are useless for an individual and one can make absolutely zero decisions based on one’s own results, BUT they are essential at a population level for analysis and are essential to get– just, don’t actually, like, rely on them for yourself, they’re not going to do you much if any good.
Anyway. After the bandits we swung through a cluster of four Nekker nests, just… clearing them out. We needed a single Nekker heart for some potion or decoction or whatever. We wound up with another bushel basket of assorted bits.
In the middle of this we stumbled across an isolated man who was moaning that the monsters wouldn’t kill him. He was familiar, but hideously deformed by gross pox boil-lookin things. He identified himself: he was the carter we’d encountered aeons ago, carting plague corpses, and Geralt had urgently told him to burn all his clothes and his cart. He’d been unconcerned, but clearly now had caught the plague. He begged Geralt to kill him; he was horribly sick and couldn’t die and had spread plague to everyone he loved. Geralt contemplated it for a moment, and DF said, “you know, this has nothing to do with my medical practice, okay” and agreed to kill him. The man, grateful, gave him a purse of coins, which he’d been saving for his children but now didn’t need. Aww! 😢 Geralt, of course, made it quick, and off-screen mercifully, and then used Igni on the remains.
As we left, there was– well, it looked like a person, in a hayfield, and MM cheerfully started singing the chorus of The Gallant Forty Twa [link is to the clancy bros rendition, on youtube]. “Strollin’ through the green fields, on a summer’s day, watchin’ all the country girls workin’ a’ the hay, I really was delighted–” and then the figure in the field straightened up and leapt at us and she was like “AH SHIT THAT’S NOT A COUNTRY GIRL” because, of course, it was yet another nekker, as the countryside was absolutely rotten with them.
We headed for another question mark which we expected to be probably a fifth nekker nest, and suddenly were confronted with– what the fuck is– oh it’s a wyvern we’ve OH NO THAT’S A LEVEL 28 WYVERN RUN AWAY
OH FUCK IT HAS A GIRLFRIEND WHO IS ALSO LEVEL 28
we scrambled down the hill, to an unknown marker, a cave, let’s go in here DF said, and ran into the cave and the wyvern followed us and I was like THAT’S ITS FUCKING DEN and he was like AH FUCK and turned and ran back out dodging like crazy and the thing was following us ARGH
We ran a distance, and the fucking things were following, and we ran some more and they were still following and DF was like “Fuckit I’m a get into the sea” and ran and dove into the water and swam underwater for a while and the red dot was STILL FOLLOWING and in fact we could occasionally see one of the wyverns as it fucking circled overhead. “What the fuck,” DF said, coming up for air and then going back down.
We swam the entire strait underwater, and the wyverns were still following. We got out on the other side. “Maybe these bandits will fight the wyverns,” DF said, harassed, navigating Geralt into the Unknown Settlement. No bandits appeared, but a number of level 11 ghouls came out to play. DF tried to get into the door of a structure but the ghouls clustered around and the fucking door was locked, and the wyvern swooped. “What the fuck!”
He turned and ran back down to the water, where there were some drowners but they were slightly out of range. The wyvern dove angrily but missed. “Well,” he said, “let’s try the boat,” and got into a boat. At first the controller would not let him do anything but swish his sword around, but eventually he managed to figure out how to pilot the boat.
With the wyvern stooping angrily around us, we set off in the boat for a little tour of the coast, and promptly hit a rock, but fortunately didn’t sink.
It took another minute for the wyvern to back off. “We’re taking the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat,” DF said. Sure enough, we could tell now that it was definitely both wyverns chasing. Miraculously, we had taken no damage, by sheer virtue of not holding still long enough.
Finally, finally, the fight music turned off, and the wyverns disappeared, presumably back to their nest that we’d blundered straight into. “The fight music,” I said, “instead of The Hollering, probably should have been Yakety Sax.”
“That would’ve been a bit more fitting,” DF said, steering the boat back toward shore. “Uhhh… Okay,” DF said, “so, uh, where are we now and where are the things we were planning to do??”
Well, we’d intended to do The Volunteer. So we pulled that quest back up, it’s near the bridge to Oxenfurt and we weren’t far from that.
I’m going to cut this post off and finally make it, though, and I’ll do the rest in a later post since this one’s so delayed anyway. ALSO Tumblr just tried its level best to eat this fucking post and i’m super over the way the wifi in this house likes to attempt to murder me.
I’m finally caught up– we didn’t play last night, DF was on the phone with his dad and it was the kind of call where he paced around the entire exterior of the house being really heavily-accented into his phone headset, which alarmed me quite a bit when he walked past the window of the room I was in because I hadn’t expected anyone to be outside.
So we went to bed early while he was still on the phone but then I didn’t go to sleep, like a fool, but I also wrote a bunch of the next Ancient Sea chapter so that was great. Mixed success. And, he’s on call tonight, so he’ll probably be at work overnight and we won’t play tonight either, so we’ll see.
BUT. The night before last, we had a good long Witchering session with some fucking around AND some plot, and we drank the cocktail I had invented, the Yennefer. Here’s the recipe, and behind the cut I’ll explain the Saga of Trollololo and also the exciting Adventure of the Magical Towels.
edited to add ok all this was delayed one MORE day, but also DF’s shift went so late we assumed he was working an overnight until at 11:30 the household was awakened by someone opening every cabinet in the kitchen and then he stumbled up to bed, and then had to go in this morning at his usual 7am start time because doctors’ hours fucking suck, so actually I’ve had two extra days to write this and have not. I have no excuses, but you’ll see what else I’ve been working on eventually, I promise. ANYHOW back to the post, with a recipe.
The Yennefer, a cocktail:
1) Cut the blooms off of a lilac bush until you’ve got enough. Pick the little purple bits very carefully off the tiny green stems. (I got about four cups. It took forever.) Rinse them in cold water if you think they might be dusty. I didn’t, I’m a slob. Make lilac syrup by putting two parts of lilac petals to one part sugar and one part water, bringing it to a simmer, turning it off, letting it cool, and letting it sit for 12-24 hours. Then strain it. TheSpruceEats promised me it wouldn’t be bitter if I sat there like an OCD maniac and picked out every tiny green stem, but they lied; the resulting syrup was sweet and flowery and had a pronounced bitter note to it. HOWEVER, this is Yennefer, so that is perfectly copacetic.
2) I bought a container of sweet candied gooseberries at the Asia Mart a while back (when the grocery stores were wiped out and the asian supermarkets were untouched because of racism), these in fact, so I poured boiling water over a bunch of those and the extra sugar that was loose at the bottom of the package, and wound up with a sweet-tart fruity sort of syrup. (Lacking those, I might have used some cranberry juice.)
3) Combine those two syrups until the taste pleases you somewhat and is slightly too sweet. (I added a little unflavored simple syrup.) Then, add a correct amount of either gin, or white rum if you don’t like gin. (My test batch was fantastic with gin, but MM hates gin, so I used rum for this version.)
4) put in a bit of lemon and/or lime juice to make it more tart, as needed.
5) optional: add other herbal/flowery liqueurs to taste. I had this botanical spirit named Hum that’s red, and I had some blue Cointreau that I put a couple of drops in for color, and I had a little bit of creme de violette.
My Drink Mixing Method is largely that I figure out how many servings I’m making, put in one to two ounces of the hard liquor per serving, and then put in about one part of the combined mixers per one part of the hard liquor, and then I adjust the flavors until it’s the strength I want (I often wind up with much more mixer, up to two parts per one part of hard liquor, but that varies). Most of my drinks are designed to be served over ice to bring them down to the correct dilution.
tw below for assisted suicide, in-game, expressly nothing to do with any real-life things.
We started strong. I poured the drinks, and DF dithered about having any– he has awful heartburn problems and tries to have only water after 5pm unless he’s prepared to Accept The Consequences, but he decided he’d try a cocktail. He asked if MM would put it over ice for him, so she got out the bag of ice in the freezer and discovered it had sort of bricked. He suggested banging it on the floor to break it up, and she had a reply to that which would be much funnier if I had not explained all this, but I have, so:
“I’m not planning on banging right now,” she said, swanning into the room in her particularly magnificent way of walking, with a drink in each hand.
(I know I’ve set the setting-scene before but it’s worth mentioning that MathMom is a stunningly beautiful and of course deeply eccentric woman, tallish and solid-built with classic-length (that’s upper mid-thigh) thick wavy pale-brown hair with natural golden highlights which she often wears in a magnificent crown braid across the top of her head held in place with an array of jeweled and tortoise-shell clips, and she has a predilection for lace-bedecked long skirts, lots of embroidery and hand-embellished trims, lily-white bare arms of astonishingly muscular slenderness, and often a headband with lace cat ears when she’s feeling particularly emotionally-drained. Oh and jewelry, she has a lot of jewelry, some of which is expensive shit inherited from a wealthy aunt who died suddenly 20 years ago, and some of which she makes herself out of an exquisite collection of beads, mostly rainbows of opals. So, there’s an image, for you. She’s decided she enjoys the fashions of Novigrad, so there may be some upcoming augmentations of her wardrobe.)
ANYHOW. Down to Witchering.
Properly lubricated with alcohol, we embarked upon a little tour of the monster nests of Velen, “through the Lands of Difficulty,” as DF termed it– all the shit he uncovered whilst too low-level to make it worthwhile. Since we were down there, we figured we’d clear all that out, get whatever loot and XP the place had to offer at the current level, and then move on with the Plot Shit.
We had not really missed Velen’s fight music. See, when Geralt’s involved in a fight, the music changes, and in different places it plays different music, and in Velen it’s this music we call The Hollering, because it has a lot of lyric-less vocal stuff including some stuff that’s kind of hoarse? (Ah, it’s called Silver for Monsters but this is the extended track, the one they actually play really starts at like, the 2 minute mark of the linked video. and like, fine, it’s cool or whatever but after hours of playing you’re kind of like Ah Fuck It’s The Hollering.)
We found a bandit camp based in a half-ruined building that was leaning crazily over. We killed the guys on the ground and then DF got excited to try killing bandits by Aarding them off the top floor, so he ran up there. (There’s an achievement you can get, for killing a number of enemies by aarding them off things. We haven’t got one yet, but there’s time.)
Unfortunately, it wasn’t high enough to kill a level 9 bandit, so Geralt just Aarded him off the building and he was like “ARGH FUCK” and then started shooting arrows up at us. The other one, we just sworded until he mostly fell off but then he died weirdly half-clipped through the edge of the floor and just hung there by his wrist. DF went down to the ground and tried to crossbow him down but that was it, he was just forever going to hang there. It was super weird.
Another scene-setting thing: throughout all of this, DF is treating us to a very professional analysis of the different methods of Coronavirus testing being offered and what they do and do not mean and what they are and are not useful for; his conclusion basically boiled down to that they are useless for an individual and one can make absolutely zero decisions based on one’s own results, BUT they are essential at a population level for analysis and are essential to get– just, don’t actually, like, rely on them for yourself, they’re not going to do you much if any good.
Anyway. After the bandits we swung through a cluster of four Nekker nests, just… clearing them out. We needed a single Nekker heart for some potion or decoction or whatever. We wound up with another bushel basket of assorted bits.
In the middle of this we stumbled across an isolated man who was moaning that the monsters wouldn’t kill him. He was familiar, but hideously deformed by gross pox boil-lookin things. He identified himself: he was the carter we’d encountered aeons ago, carting plague corpses, and Geralt had urgently told him to burn all his clothes and his cart. He’d been unconcerned, but clearly now had caught the plague. He begged Geralt to kill him; he was horribly sick and couldn’t die and had spread plague to everyone he loved. Geralt contemplated it for a moment, and DF said, “you know, this has nothing to do with my medical practice, okay” and agreed to kill him. The man, grateful, gave him a purse of coins, which he’d been saving for his children but now didn’t need. Aww! 😢 Geralt, of course, made it quick, and off-screen mercifully, and then used Igni on the remains.
As we left, there was– well, it looked like a person, in a hayfield, and MM cheerfully started singing the chorus of The Gallant Forty Twa [link is to the clancy bros rendition, on youtube]. “Strollin’ through the green fields, on a summer’s day, watchin’ all the country girls workin’ a’ the hay, I really was delighted–” and then the figure in the field straightened up and leapt at us and she was like “AH SHIT THAT’S NOT A COUNTRY GIRL” because, of course, it was yet another nekker, as the countryside was absolutely rotten with them.
We headed for another question mark which we expected to be probably a fifth nekker nest, and suddenly were confronted with– what the fuck is– oh it’s a wyvern we’ve OH NO THAT’S A LEVEL 28 WYVERN RUN AWAY
OH FUCK IT HAS A GIRLFRIEND WHO IS ALSO LEVEL 28
we scrambled down the hill, to an unknown marker, a cave, let’s go in here DF said, and ran into the cave and the wyvern followed us and I was like THAT’S ITS FUCKING DEN and he was like AH FUCK and turned and ran back out dodging like crazy and the thing was following us ARGH
We ran a distance, and the fucking things were following, and we ran some more and they were still following and DF was like “Fuckit I’m a get into the sea” and ran and dove into the water and swam underwater for a while and the red dot was STILL FOLLOWING and in fact we could occasionally see one of the wyverns as it fucking circled overhead. “What the fuck,” DF said, coming up for air and then going back down.
We swam the entire strait underwater, and the wyverns were still following. We got out on the other side. “Maybe these bandits will fight the wyverns,” DF said, harassed, navigating Geralt into the Unknown Settlement. No bandits appeared, but a number of level 11 ghouls came out to play. DF tried to get into the door of a structure but the ghouls clustered around and the fucking door was locked, and the wyvern swooped. “What the fuck!”
He turned and ran back down to the water, where there were some drowners but they were slightly out of range. The wyvern dove angrily but missed. “Well,” he said, “let’s try the boat,” and got into a boat. At first the controller would not let him do anything but swish his sword around, but eventually he managed to figure out how to pilot the boat.
With the wyvern stooping angrily around us, we set off in the boat for a little tour of the coast, and promptly hit a rock, but fortunately didn’t sink.
It took another minute for the wyvern to back off. “We’re taking the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat,” DF said. Sure enough, we could tell now that it was definitely both wyverns chasing. Miraculously, we had taken no damage, by sheer virtue of not holding still long enough.
Finally, finally, the fight music turned off, and the wyverns disappeared, presumably back to their nest that we’d blundered straight into. “The fight music,” I said, “instead of The Hollering, probably should have been Yakety Sax.”
“That would’ve been a bit more fitting,” DF said, steering the boat back toward shore. “Uhhh… Okay,” DF said, “so, uh, where are we now and where are the things we were planning to do??”
Well, we’d intended to do The Volunteer. So we pulled that quest back up, it’s near the bridge to Oxenfurt and we weren’t far from that.
I’m going to cut this post off and finally make it, though, and I’ll do the rest in a later post since this one’s so delayed anyway. ALSO Tumblr just tried its level best to eat this fucking post and i’m super over the way the wifi in this house likes to attempt to murder me.
