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https://ift.tt/3dwgIBLha, good news on the Witchering front, DF dragged himself home from work (starting at 7 Monday morning he’d worked 24 hours by Tuesday afternoon), ate dinner with the family in blank-eyed silence, greeted his children by putting his hand mutely on each of their heads, and collapsed facefirst on the couch while the kids shrieked and ran around the room for after-dinner playtime, and at one point the seven year old actually sat on his head and he did not react, though a bit later I noticed he hand his hands tucked over his ears to block out some of the noise. (This is a big house, he could’ve gone and napped somewhere else, but he hasn’t seen his family and this was as much Togetherness as he could muster.) But, after an hour he roused again, and managed to be social, and after the kids went upstairs he fired up the Xbox for some of the expected glitter robots. And then almost as soon as MM got down the stairs he fired up the Witcher, and to my astonishment we got a good solid three hours of play in. So I’ll have more to talk about in the next couple of days!!
Anyhow this is old recap stuff still, and we’re finally going to get Trollolo and Sigi Reuven. Oh yes, good stuff.
So, cont’d from earlier, this is a couple of nights ago now, and we’d just taken the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat in our headlong attempt to flee the fuck away from some far too high-powered enemies.
“I’m out of nibbles n sips,” DF said, perusing his quick-use inventory. I’ve seen players of W3 mention before that their Geralt tended to subsist largely on Raw Meat, and I’m delighted to report that this is mostly true– you can loot Raw Meat from a disturbing array of the animals you kill, starting with like, sheep and deer and stuff, and including wolves, rabid dogs, bears, and even harpies and such. (Not necrophages, I think.) Additionally, you sometimes just find Raw Meat as a lootable item lying on the ground to take? Usually it’s because there’s a wolf or something right there, something that eats critters, and the idea is likely that you’ve just chased the thing off a fresh kill. But it does mean that in essence you’re just picking up hunks of raw meat that you find with the intent to eat them, at some non-immediate point, without cooking, which is like. Disturbing to contemplate with any real-world kind of filter.
The thing is, though, every human opponent you kill tends to have food on them as well? So the bandits we hacked our way through all had chicken sandwiches, and the pirates all had dumplings, and there are often like, ham sandwiches or roasted chicken legs or whatever on the various bandits, deserters, guards, and whatnot you’re called upon to fight to the death.
(At least the plague victim we mercy-killed earlier in this session didn’t have food on him.)
Anyway, there were some chicken sandwiches deep in inventory so he could stick those into quickdraw and keep going. Chicken sandwiches looted off dead bandits are perfectly reasonable things to carry around for weeks and then eat to literally stay alive, right?
So we fought some bandits and liberated the populace but they were an occupying force of Nilfgaardians, which was kind of weird. Like, for really real? This army was waiting for you to kill three ghouls so they could use this fortress? Weird as fuck, guys.
Anyway we did some shopping and then immediately there was a message like “the guards are uneasy, they may attack you” like what the fuck guys. Geralt literally just saved all your lives. Jerks.
We ran down the way and fought some more bandits and liberated another area so that the populace returned. This one was a recently-abandoned village. A bunch of the people were wearing red tabards with white eagles on them, and I had to point out to DF that this meant we’d crossed the front lines and this was now the Redanian army.
The populace of this village was slightly nicer to Geralt; one peasant said “If I ever have a son I’ll call him Geralt,” and we were like aw that’s sweet?
Anyway DF ran off to the nearest ghoul nest to clear that up and then realized Geralt was entirely out of bombs, so ran back to the village he’d just liberated to do a little meditating so he could refill potions and bombs and such. “Gotta run back to that town for a hot minute,” he said, and MM was like “Ahhh a hot towel shave maybe” and he was like “oh they do those in recently-liberated battlefront-adjacent lil towns all the time.”
He came out of meditation and one of the Redanian soldiers was standing there all upset like he might attack. “Fuck off,” DF said, “I’m working,” and ran off back to the ghoul nest.
The ghoul nest had loot that included a sword named Headhunter, which looked badass as hell… but was a little under-leveled. “Might save that one for the sword wall though,” DF mused.
Anyway. Following a quest. The Volunteer. We have to go to White Eagle Fort. OK… it’s… a ramshackle fort made out of… old boats? from which is coming some fairly coherent singing. And in it is…
A rock troll. Now, we’ve already learned that rock trolls are sentient. They can’t talk well but they can talk, and they make sense, and they can hold a conversation, just not with good grammar.
This troll is named Trollololo and he is in the Redanian Army. He loves to sing songs. he is guarding the boats. the boats that he has smashed to make into a fort, because then it is easier to guard them.
He’s cooking something in a huge cauldron. Geralt’s like uh what you got there. He’s like well. See. So thing is. … Long story short, in a well-intentioned bit of accidental violence, he killed all the other soldiers and the peasants they were fighting with. So everyone was dead. Since everyone was dead, it just seemed like a big waste to just leave them there, so he’s cooking them to eat them. But he didn’t kill them on purpose.
Trollolo explains this in far more charmingly indirect language, and it is clear he is not being sly about this. the thing about rock trolls is that they are so genuine. Geralt’s expression is similar to how he looks at the godlings. Not quite; he’s more respectful of them. But he just has this sort of concerned fondness as the troll is speaking.
The game gave us the options of “well, it’s wartime, you do what you gotta”, and “you’re eating people, you have to die” and of COURSE we’re not ANIMALS we picked the first one, we’ve slaughtered so many goddamned people and watched so much senseless death, we’re gonna kill a rock troll now and maybe die in the process? Fuck that.
So Trollolo asked us a favor, then, and we were given a little quest. He needs paint, see. Red and white paint, so he can put the Redanian device, the white eagle on the red shield, onto the door of his fort, so people know what’s up. He’s very earnest about this. He can’t go into the city, see, and so he can’t get the paint. Geralt is like, baby, big dumb terror baby, I will go and buy you paint.
So we go to Oxenfurt and sure enough, the merchant there has red and white paint, together, for sale, with an exclamation point letting you know it’s for this quest. It costs like, a dollar. We buy it and go straight back to the fort and Trollolo is so excited. Now he wants us to paint the birdy for him. I happen to have seen spoilers for this exact bit, and I know that if Geralt paints the birdy, he does an… adequate job, but if he insists that Trollolo do it, the troll makes a absolutely flawless reproduction of the Redanian coat of arms. But you don’t get to do both, so we did the painting and Geralt did an okay job and Trollolo was so happy and we got a bunch of XP and all the loot in the fort.
MM LOVED this quest. “This is my favorite thing we’ve ever done,” she said delightedly, as we jogged to Oxenfurt. Then she was like, “Oh no what is he going to eat when he runs out of dead soldiers?” She started to fret. “Now I”m worried about the rock troll!”
We reassured her that he’d probably be able to leave his post to get more food at some point. He also might forget why he was there, and wander off back into a slightly more safe and less warzoney area.
So now we’re fans of rock trolls, specifically the Rock Trolls & Geralt pairing. He should have a pet one. Of course he’d never treat it like a pet, he’d treat it like a child– well, he always treats people sensitively given their parameters, so really, he’d just treat it like a person with specific parameters, like he treats everybody. If he had a dog he’d treat it like a person too. He treats Roach like a person, in the show anyway– sorry, game Roach mostly gets treated like a magical object, there’s just not much of a mechanism for him to get to be a Weird Horse Girl about it.
So anyway– currently, whenever a quest completes, the game reverts back to showing us The King Is Dead which is a Skellige quest we accidentally started while there, and the next thing in that quest is that we’re to meet Yennefer at her quarters to get dressed up to her specifications. So we discussed that briefly and somehow out of that decided that Sniffing Yennefer would be a great name for a very specific band in a very specific genre but we hadn’t decided what.
Next we went to some little village where they were like “we need you to fight off this bandit gang that’s coming here!” and Geralt was like *squints* this is Suspicious, why do you have so much information specifically about these bandits, and they’re like “well we went to the witch hunters for protection and now the bandits are upset” and Geralt is like *squints even more* why would the witch hunters involve themselves in bandits I gotta think this over.
I Googled it, and was like oh do what you want, it’s not Plot-significant and neither one is great or terrible. So DF was like, sure, I’ll involve myself, let’s see what happens. So the bandits show up, led by this young woman in a red hood, and she’s like “We just want the guy who went to the witch hunters, we’re not gonna kill anyone else.” And Geralt’s like *squints* explain the witch hunter thing to me. And she’s like “oh see this guy? He was my man on the inside in this village, right, he’d sussed out everyone locally who had anything we could steal, so we gave him some kickbacks of our loot. And then he was like I want a bigger percentage and of course we were like no? so he went to the cops on us and the cops killed like half my guys. So I’m gonna kill this guy, yeah, but I’m not gonna kill anybody else.”
“Fine,” DF said, “I mean, she’s gonna kill one guy. I’m gonna have to kill like ten? More? Nah. Snitches get stitches.” So he let her take the guy and she was like “thanks!” and gave him some money and the game gave him XP and we were like cool. And I then explained the spoilers I’d Googled, which is that she’s a fucking werewolf and if you fight her it’s a bitch and a half.
DF shrugged. “Werewolves aren’t monsters, right? Like with the monologue to the gay hunter where Geralt was all excited he might be a lycanthrope?”
“Exactly!” So we went on our merry way, utterly contented to have left a werewolf and her gang of bandits marauding the countryside. Because, I mean, a werewolf isn’t necessarily a monster, and of all the villagers’ complaints about her, none of them had mentioned the lycanthropy thing which implies pretty strongly that she’s keeping it appropriate.
Listen the in-game morality in this joint is wild.
Anyhow I had just decided we weren’t going to get to anything plotty tonight when suddenly we were back in Novigrad and looking for Sigi Reuven’s bathhouse. This is the key to finding where the fuck Dandelion went, and since Dandelion’s apparently the only person who saw Ciri when she was in Novigrad and didn’t throw hands with her, we need to talk to him, quite apart from the concern of whether Geralt cares about him at all.
There was a lengthy bit of confusion since the Where To Go map is 2D and the actual terrain is very much 3D; we wound up in the foyer of someone’s house semi-accidentally looting their potted plants and failing to knock on the door (listen there are only so many Interact buttons) before we finally realized that the entrance to the bathhouse was somewhere slightly farther down the block and also three stories down. We had to go back around like a quarter mile of a ramp before we could get down there, and it was a whole hilarious thing, and then we had to bang on the door forever.
But then we were in, and after a brief interview, Geralt was Naked And Towel-Clad and wandering through a bathhouse full of similarly-clad people. And yes, they clearly took a lot of trouble rendering Geralt’s nude torso for this– not only is he extremely heavily-scarred, he also has a welter of fresh bruises everywhere. It’s … oddly lovingly-rendered, but like, you do you, CDPR, why not.
And of course, Sigi Reuven is really Dijkstra, who I have encountered in a lot of recaps of earlier games and such, and in the novels he’s important, and he’s in fanfiction– all right, lovable stainless-steel-trap bastard of a spymaster turned crime lord, who reads Geralt with astonishing ease, but like, listen it’s not that our boy’s particularly deep it’s that nobody really bothers to look. Still. Dijkstra gets full marks because he looks. He’s like “last time we met you shattered my ankle,” and Geralt’s like “I wouldn’t have had to do that if you’d stayed out of my way,” and they kind of stand there and then are both like eh what can you do, and go on with their business.
He also just told Geralt not to “swing your steel cock about”. 😂🍆
Unsurprisingly, some goons come in and try to assassinate the mob bosses in the bathhouse, so Geralt gets to fight wearing a towel and wielding a mace. Fortunate/unfortunately, these are Magical Miracle Towels and so don’t come loose no matter how athletic the feats of mayhem Geralt performs. Afterward, Geralt’s torso is all gleam-y with sweat, but in a disturbing touch, so is the towel, so that’s more disconcerting than hot.
The surprise bit of this quest is that it turns out that Dijkstra is running a credit union. Which someone heisted. Oh and his guard was ANOTHER ROCK TROLL. Geralt is so sympathetic to this poor rock troll, but, as a huge testament to his character, so is Dijkstra– he completely knows the limitations of this troll and works with them as best he can to achieve the result he wants.
Now. You and I know, by now, that Dandelion was absolutely the fuck involved in heisting the gold in Sigi’s vault. This has come up; Priscilla told us about it. (I’m saying that here because I may not actually have mentioned it since these playthroughs are not actually meant to be effective walkthroughs, but rather just stories.) So this entire time Geralt is like Oh. My Gosh. How Could This Happen. I Cannot Imagine Who Would Ever Do Such A Horrible Thing. (He’s not all that bad at it really, but he’s not entirely stonefaced.)
Geralt casually brings up Dandelion. He’s looking for him, see– Dandelion knows about something he needs to know about. He’s got reason to think someone’s got Dandelion captive, and Dijkstra certainly, since he knows everything, after all, would absolutely know where he is, and could help Geralt find–
“I’m not going to help you look for your gigolo boyfriend,” Dijkstra says drily. Anyway. He gets Geralt to go look through the sewers for him, and gives him some Pops Mold Antidote, and Geralt actually makes an expression of disgust as he downs the potion.
“Ugh,” says a man who lives off potions that turn his veins black, and who eats raw meat that he finds on the ground on a regular basis, “that is foul.”
He goes on a festive little jaunt through the sewers, killing Drowners and finding random loot and a couple little bits of gold, a jewel, a ring– a body– and makes serious observations about the bomb that was used and how the whole thing must’ve gone down. Regular Sherlock Holmes shit.
And he’s like “oh yeah Dandelion totally did this.”
He came back to give his report, and possibly we would have done some more gaming but DF’s phone went off and he pulled it out and looked at it and was like “uhhhhh we’ve got a curfew lockdown now For Police Action” and that was rather… more of a real-world intrusion than we’d been expecting.
SO like, that’s a thing that’s going on. It’s outside the scope of this long unrelated entry to discuss it but like, support to the protestors and it’s all so Big Scary, and I’ll talk about that separately– but, suffice to say, we were done gaming for the night.
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akilah12902 what we’d missed out on by doing this quest ass-backward and she was like eh. maybe more money? 
