dragonlady7

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So for the 4th of July my Dude and I stopped off at DF&MM’s in Rochester; I continued on toward the farm for more agricultural laboring, and Dude went back to Buffalo to continue his self-isolation working from home, but we had a small precious respite of socialization. 

We sat outside on the patio and had a little fire and made smores and the kids ran around and were goofy. In the midst of this, DF went to fix some bit of playground equipment, and came back to where the adults were sitting and declared “I put it in a new hole,“ standing with his hand propped triumphantly on this ridiculous axe/sledgehammer combo he owns. 

He’s prone to declarations like that and long ago we decided it was best to never enquire as to the context. 

As dusk drew down, the kids vanished indoors to be put to bed, and we adults decided not to sit out and get mosquito-eaten, but rather to come inside and close all the windows and doors and blinds. We contemplated watching a movie, but DF was on transplant call and had done two consecutive days with 14-hour shifts (and had suddenly discovered that despite being firmly within the liver transplant team, he could be drafted in emergencies by the kidney transplant team, so that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise; fortunately, his portion of the job is largely unchanged.)

Anyway, he was loopy enough that he thought Xboxing would be fun, so we all got drinks and settled in and he fired up Witcher 3 again.

“We only play Xbox nude and drunk now,” DF said. “New household rules.”

“Oh, okay,” my dude said, and stood up to unfasten his pants. Unfortunately, both of them were bluffing, but that would’ve made this playthrough write up MUCH more entertaining. So, if you prefer, I give you permission to simply imagine that everyone in the room is drunk and naked, as I recount the events onscreen. (What it says about me that I’d still be taking notes is, well, let’s just not consider that too deeply.) (I do think we’d had about a bottle of wine apiece, except that DF had stopped at one glass in case he got called in, so we’d had four bottles between, mostly, three people, and then MM moved on to just drinking a glass of straight vodka that I had assumed was water until I got a whiff. Well, listen, you only live once.)

We loaded the game and were in Novigrad… underwater, breath half used up. “What the fuck,” said DF, “why am I underwater?”

“Well, I mean, in a second you’re going to die of it,” I pointed out, and he swore and had Geralt pop up to the surface. The water was only like nine feet deep. 

“What the fuck,” he said, and got out of the water, and Geralt, unperturbed, proceeded to run around near the wharf in Novigrad. 

We happened upon a strumpet, who with a sultry sort of fretfulness, gave Geralt a quest to save Crippled Kate’s from a bunch of hooligans who had taken it over to drink all the booze in it. 

The hooligans were triflingly easy to defeat with a single application of Axii, which Geralt only bothered to apply to one of them; the rest of them obediently packed up and filed out after their slightly dizzy leader, without questioning his sudden transition to obsequious compliance. The delighted strumpets came back in to reclaim their home.

“This girl’s wearing the Pennsic Uniform,” DF said. (A crop top and broomstick skirt.)

“Oh, yes,” MM said, “I own at least three of that outfit,” which gives rise to the question, why don’t we ever dress up for these gaming sessions? Drunk and naked is one thing but Pennsic Finery would be hilarious. I guess the omnipresent jingle belts would be awkward when dealing with children violating bedtime curfews… The costumes for this whole thing are very Pennsic, as is the combat, but there’s officially No Death Allowed at Pennsic so that’s one very important difference, there.

Geralt didn’t let the strumpets pay him for his work, figuring they’d suffered enough loss of income. Meanwhile DF went to the inventory screen and browsed the list of quests he’d been meaning to get to, and decided it was time to go to the Temerian Peasant Hideout to find out what the deal was with the girl with the shirt open to her navel. Like, she’s not a strumpet, she’s not a mage, why doesn’t she wear a shirt?? We must know. 

Weirdly, even though we just finished a quest with Roche a few hours of gameplay ago, there was some kerfuffle of re-introducing him as a character, that made us wonder whether the right save was loaded. But I had by then recollected the ending in water of the previous session, so I reassured DF that this was in fact the right save. 

Roche was square-jawed and noble at us for a bit, and we got a quest to go save Ves (Shirt Open Girl) from herself, which seems sort of weird/dumb but like, I guess, that’s, what’s going on? OK cool. On the way out of the cave, DF accidentally made Geralt walk through a bonfire and set himself dramatically on fire, but it does tend to go out quickly enough when that happens. So, for the record, Witchers are slightly fire-retardant. (akilah12902​ informs me Quen will put you out if you’re on fire, as well as stopping bleeding, so that’s a useful bit of knowledge. We did not utilize this knowledge. DF maintains an irrational prejudice against Quen, in part because to be fair it’s fairly useless in Death March mode.)

Now, I’d forgotten, but the steel sword Geralt currently has is like, this ridiculous fucking scythe of a Fantasy Blade that clips straight through the scabbard and looks goddamned silly. My dude, who has only ever been present for one other episode of this game play, was like “… what is that sword. That’s a big sword.” And the rest of us were laughing too hard to get out a “that’s what she said”.

Anyhow. We met up with Roche in some godawful countryside with hanged peasants, where Ves was off on a mad chase to try to keep Nilfgaardian soldiers from executing peasants on suspicion of being partisans. 

We instantly died as soon as the fight started. Whoops. 

“That’s ok,” says DF, “now I know how the controls work.”

“Well,” my dude suggested, “is it time for Gwent now?”

Ah, so he does know how this game works. Maybe. DF meandered through the inventory screen after the game reloaded, taking a moment to equip himself, and my dude proved that no, in fact, he hasn’t seen much of this, when he asked “wait is that just raw meat?” and DF was like “crunch crunch!”

Geralt instantly got polearmed to death on the reload. “Shit,” said DF, “we gotta grease up for this.” And part of the quest is that we have to save Ves, and she’s got a status bar displayed with her health and it’s getting lower and lower as we fuck around. “All right,” DF said, “we juicin’,” and decocted himself up. 

This time he started off the fight by setting a bunch of Nilfgaardians on fire. Some of them are kind of fire-resistant too. It is super, super, super fucking handy that your enemies are by default fire-resistant, because you can just Igni a crowd and only burn your enemies. 

We did manage to rescue Ves. Finally, finally, someone else noticed she’s not really wearing a shirt, and was like, “why is your navel showing” and she was like “none of your business” which I suppose is a reasonable answer.

At the end there was one wounded Nilfgaardian and Roche was like “ah we should be merciful” and I get that Geralt’s supposed to be noble here, but like, the guy’s fucked up and there’s no medicine in this game and also, as Geralt pointed out, he takes jobs for Nilfgaard sometimes, having a survivor to go and be like “yah this white-haired Witcher showed up and fucked us all up” would be fucking awkward, so DF opted for the dialogue option of “why leave a witness alive to linger in agony what kind of mercy is that really”, and maybe that was wrong but we went on with our lives.

Meanwhile, the children of the village have come out, since the fight is over. DF ran Geralt around to loot the bodies and there were children literally playing on top of the corpses in several cases, which was a bit annoying and also disturbing. Like… guys. 

Anyway. We poked through the loot, and switched out the lovely matching Griffin armor for a ridiculous Guy Fiery flame-patterned sash gambeson, but the stats are better so. Welcome to Flavortown I guess.

We decided to go Check Out The Devil’s Pit. It sounds badass. We wandered away picking flowers and killing lvl 6 nekkers. We found a bandit camp with a lot of wooden staircases and chased people around and killed them, but it wasn’t super exciting, there was a random pit to hell that you couldn’t interact with in any way. Maybe it was supposed to be a mine? I don’t know.

Just to see what would happen, DF Igni’d a goat. “Rude!” Dude exclaimed, but we actually did manage to loot the meat so this went down better than the Skellige Bunny Crimes incident. 

Anyhow. Radovid wants us to repay him for giving us Junior by going and getting him Phillippa Englebreit. Earheart. Whatever. He’s got a bunch of witch hunters posted up outside her hideout– apparently they chased her there as an owl, which sounds like a really great high-speed chase I’m sorry there’s apparently no depiction of.

So we started off by talking to the witch hunters, who were kind of… they’re a bunch of thugs with dorky chinstraps and bowl haircuts and they’re rude to Geralt, so like, fuck those guys. 

We left the rude dorks behind and went down into the weird compound. There were some Aardable walls and some debris. “Ah, nekkers,” said DF. 

“They just want to neck with you,” put in MM.

They did not. They cornered Geralt, who wound up stuck in a dead-end passage without an escape except falling to his death, so he fell to his death. Whoops. Reloaded, had some more difficulties with the nekkers, realized belatedly that they need ogroid oil, duh. 

Properly lubed, we resumed our fight and in the midst of it, leveled up to Level 17. Not too shabby. We also recollected that nekkers do not like being on fire, which, being a guy who can produce fire from his hands on command, that’s a useful bit of information and made things go much more smoothly. Also also, DF realized belatedly he’d been using his steel sword instead of the silver one for the nekkers, which also explained why he’d been doing so poorly. Right, right, that’s how this game works. (I pointed it out. “Wait, isn’t that your steel sword? The huge one?” and DF was like “That’s my pork sword” and we all groaned at him, but like. I’d asked for that, pretty much, hadn’t I.)

One of the nekkers dropped “Monster Bone” as loot, which Dude saw and started singing. “Monster boooooone,” he sang, and MM and I were like “Yeahhhh” in unison and DF was like “Monster Bone sounds like the name of a funk album”

Then there was a roaring fire creature, an Ifrit or somesuch, which, like, well. It was on fire, so we figured it was probably an elementa or something. Also Aard puts out fires sometimes, which did help with this. 

“Oh,” DF said, “he’s killable,” and proceeded to kill him. When he disappeared I was like “oh, he teleports?” but then he didn’t reappear, and DF was like, “No, he doesn’t teleport, I just obliterated him.” Oh. 

In Philippa’s lair, where she was not (though there were owl feathers), we perused the assorted loot. Blood-covered gemstones seemed like a really really odd thing to find, until we discovered that she’d been using them to grow new tissue on to replace her eyeballs that Radovid had removed for her, which is just gross all around. Also, we picked up a book called Care For Your Sword, Soldier! which is far more peppy than I’d expect for the subject matter. We also got a chipped megascope crystal, which seemed useful and important. 

So, now it was time to pick a fight with the fucking witch-hunters, apparently. There might’ve been a way not to fight them but fuck those guys. “Time,” DF said with some satisfaction, “for some Axii executions.” Oh, and Dude Oil. Mustn’t forget to lubricate for dudes. 

“Why,” I asked, as we killed another witch hunter, “does everyone drop creepy dolls as loot?” Why on earth wouldn’t a middle-aged religious fanatic with a bizarre uniform and a bowl cut have a creepy doll on him? Why indeed. 

Anyway. We left the cave, and the dead witch hunters, and made a beeline for Triss in Novigrad to see what she thinks. We trust her more than Radovid; maybe she did some weird bullshit to Geralt in the past but at least she doesn’t seem to think chessmen have literal pulses. “We find her terrible fake American accent endearing,” DF said. As we spoke to her, she clipped through a chair twice. 

We gave her the megascope crystal, and she played back whatever message she could find on it, which was Phillippa talking to… some other sorceress… about regrowing her eyeballs. Well, fair subject matter I guess.

We left, and wandered through Novigrad. “Giant-ass sword,” DF muttered to himself, watching the Stupid Fantasy Blade clip through the scabbard again. And Whoreson Jr still got shooters out here, who keep trying to kill Geralt, and I’d almost suggest that they know Geralt killed Jr but if they know Jr is dead why are they still in his gang? Very confusing. 

Anyway. I had something deep to observe, here, that Dude pointed out, about the whole ecosystem thing here, and I just can’t recollect what it was, so I’m gonna leave this in drafts a tiny bit longer as I try to remember what the fuck it was. Ah, I don’t remember. Someone tell me a punchline!

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ha, 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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so we resume our tale on the streets of Novigrad, with Aiden’s murderers punished and Lambert off to parts unknown. (The post title begs the question: are the witch hunters really cops? I say so and I say fuck ‘em.)

We went to the Rosemary and Thyme, which is a brothel that Dandelion recently inherited. Once there, we immediately were confronted with a dwarf named Zoltan flinging some ne’er-do-wells out a door. Apparently Geralt knows Zoltan, as he seemed delighted to see him. Zoltan was in return delighted to see Geralt, because he had time to utter a happy greeting and cordially invite Geralt to help him in a fistfight. A mob came through the door, and we immediately had to leap into the fray.

We died, of course, because that’s a thing that happens to Geralt distressingly often in Death March mode: he gets literally killed in fistfights. Argh. 

So, behind the cut is more about this sort of gross quest which treads that fine line that Witcher 3 is so good at– This Is A Little Bit Gross And Has A Slightly Misogynist Premise, But Geralt Himself Is Largely Not Gross And Mostly Manages To Be Respectful About It (mostly?), So Enjoy That Entirely Unnecessary Mindfuck. 

“Wait,” I said, “can you use a blackjack in a fistfight???” “Maybe we shouldn’t have been declining to loot those all along,” DF said. 

So we reloaded, and this time survived, largely because Zoltan did most of the fighting. 

(As an aside, apparently Zoltan bears a truly uncanny resemblance to a coworker of DF’s, who is a very short, stocky, gay biker with a mohawk. So every goddamn scene he’d be like “Jack, it’s super weird to see you here.”)

To regen health, you consume food. Various loot lately has been booze so DF figured why the fuck not and downed a bottle of wine. So we had to search the Rosemary and Thyme while drunk, which in Geralt’s case means sort of tunnel-visioned and unsteady. Kind of hilarious, no other consequences, the effects lasted a couple of minutes and the health regen actually worked, so whatever. 

So it’s Dandelion’s brothel, but he’s gone missing. To find him, Zoltan and Geralt find his dayplanner and find his list of recent meetings, every one of which is a woman (with one semi-exception, tw for weird treatment of a gender-non-conforming person– I say weird because it’s… just sort of weird and clumsy and you don’t have any really respectful dialogue options but it’s not like, actively… mean? I don’t know, brace yourselves my friends; also brace yourselves because the entire quest is that Dandelion Lies To His Trollops, And That’s Kinda Funny, which is not exactly not-gross. At least Geralt is reasonably gentle about it with most of them, and is clearly disgusted by his bro’s behavior, not that he’s not enabling him…). So Zoltan tears the page in half and says “Geralt you take this half, I’ll take that.” And off we went.

(Well, we searched the place first, and found nothing interesting, so whatever.)

Apparently there’s only one woman who isn’t a dead end, and I was spoilered for which one, and offered the spoiler to DF, but he declined– the first one was like, right there, so why not, let’s go. Annnnnd it turns out you get MASSIVE XP just for talking to each woman, so that’s worth doing. 

The first one was a laundress, and Geralt saves her nobly from Whoreson Jr’s men shaking her down for protection money– by dismembering them into bloody bits all over her washing. She’s not that excited about this, and Geralt is sarcastic; he seems to have no appreciation for the finer points of laundry.

The next one is… oh. The weird one. It’s a man, or well a male elf, who runs a tailor’s shop, and when Geralt is confused because he expected a woman, the man leaves the room and comes back dressed as a woman (like, dress, makeup, but still the same hair), and Geralt is visibly discomfited and most of the dialogue options seem to be him being like “ew weird”, but DF, to his credit, was like, “I’m not fucking asking him why he’s fucking dressed like that, that’s a gross way of phrasing it, no thank you” so we muddled through as best we could with the other bits of the dialogue tree. The man (I think it’s meant to be clear that he still uses male pronouns?) makes it clear that he and Dandelion never had a sexual relationship and in fact he is completely and explicitly disinterested in pursuing men, and that’s fine, and DF was like ugh why did they have to make this weird. Like… I could see that maybe they assume their target audience would be weirded out but like, it wouldn’t have taken much to make it not weird, it doesn’t have to be like, perfect– just, like, it doesn’t work as a joke (was it supposed to be funny??) and it doesn’t work seriously so what is it doing here; it would have been enormously improved by like, the tiniest bit of uhhh maybe a sensitivity reader or something. I don’t know what they were going for. Anyway…  We got the info we were supposed to get, got the XP, and bought some stuff from the tailor shop that had some yellow exclamation points next to it. (Masquerade masks. why not.)

This boosted us to level 14 and DF realized he had, like, a pile of Experience Points to distribute. (There’s a mechanism in the game where you get, like, a point per level plus a point every so often from something else, and you can take those points and distribute them into a Skill Tree thing that makes you better at fighting, Signs, recovery, things like that. So your Signs can individually get more powerful as you gain points. You need to level up Axii in order to access certain dialogue tree options, for example (only in a few quests but still, they exist); you can also put points into your strong attacks to make them stronger. Things like that.) “Level up Quen so it’s worth using,” I said. “What’s with you and Quen?!” DF said. “I don’t like it when Geralt gets hit,” I confessed. He laughed, and gave Geralt the ability to regenerate health off of adrenaline points instead, so (hopefully) he’s much more difficult to kill. We’ll see which of us was right, soon enough, most likely.

We were beset by witch hunters at this point. Not because Geralt has been killing cops and murdering his way through the city– no, but because on our first day in Novigrod which in game-time is like a month ago now, we got harangued by a priest of the Eternal Fire and verbally humiliated him in front of a crowd of people. The witch hunters tell Geralt he’s under arrest and he should hand over his swords. Geralt’s dialogue options are “give me a receipt for them” or “over my dead body” and we dithered for a moment, but I was like “we’ve killed so many cops, what’s two more?” and DF was like “Fair” so we opted to fight. 

Turns out we slaughtered them, consequence-free, and went off into the night two chicken sandwiches richer for the experience. (Why does every single thug have a lunch entree. It’s so odd.) In the midst of the fight an unrelated NPC glitched straight through the combat and unconcernedly kept walking, as Geralt rained down a hail of sword blows directly through his body onto one of the witch hunters. It was… interesting. 

It just sort of makes me remember… I think circa 1998… I had mono and was in Norway over Christmas break and my cousin would play Grand Theft Auto on the computer and I did not have the energy do to anything but sit there and watch him and part of the game mechanism was that as you committed crimes you’d get more and more cops following you around with sirens on and you’d eventually have to do something to clear them off your trail but if you didn’t you could wind up leading this like, high-speed parade of you plus a hundred cop cars around the city. I’m just envisioning that happening in Novigrod with Geralt, where he’s just wandering around and there’s like, a hundred guards after him, and he’s just going about his business and trying to stay ahead of them like a demented game of Snake.

Anyway, that doesn’t happen in Witcher 3, as far as I can tell, but the mental image is amusing. 

Immediately after the encounter with the witch hunters, we walked down an alley and Geralt automatically got into a fight to the death with some thugs who their over-the-head title text informed us were Whoreson Jr’s men. I guess we’re at war with Whoreson Jr., so that’s cool, there was basically no volition in this but I don’t imagine we’re going to wish we were friends with him instead. So Geralt hacked his way through the next pile of thugs– like, there was no volition here, he just got within proximity of them and just– threw hands– we were like okay i guess this is how this works. Amusingly, every thug had a lunch entree except one, who was a man wearing only braies but his loot was a shirt. WTF. 

Anyway we show up at the next place and it’s 2 am and raining, and this noblewoman just happens to be stepping out onto her porch, dressed in the weirdest fucking dress we’ve seen so far this series– it looks like a normal dress suspended from a bright red bra, for no reason– but who knows. 

So the noblewoman, whose name I forget, is accompanied by Morvran Voorhis, a Nilfaardian nobleman who I know from Astolat’s fanfic. He is slightly off-putting at first but winds up to be wholesomely obsessed with horses and refreshingly straightforward about it? So we go to the races with him and wind up riding a horse in a race and– well, DF got stuck in a fence ten feet shy of the finish line, lost, and rage-reloaded the game from the last save point because that was so annoying, but that means that I know whether geralt wins or loses the race everyone is super nice about it for once.

Anyway on the reload Geralt ran out of horse juice but still managed to win the race. After that, we got to talk to Molly, who Dandelion had clearly been stringing along. She was also none too bright, but innocently told us all about Dandelion’s sister. Geralt gamely tried to go along with Dandelion’s lies, I think partly to be a good bro but also, I felt, because it would have bee sort of cruel to disillusion the poor woman, but eventually even still he had to be like… girl he doesn’t have a sister and I need to know who that woman actually was. 

We didn’t really find out, but presumably we got all the info we needed, because the quest updated and gave us our XP. So… we made nice with Voorhis and traveled with him back to Novigrad because otherwise it was going to be rather a slog to the closest fast travel marker, and once there we decided to leave the last woman, Rose Var Attre, for the next day.

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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.

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Last night’s Witchering session was largely marked by the sheer excitement of finally getting a full set (almost) of actual Witcher armor. DF admitted that the lack of fashion in his getup so far had been upsetting to him and he really just wants things to match. But we can’t get the gauntlets because we don’t have powdered monster tissue and DF is convinced that we cannot make it out of anything we have. (Do not ask me how this game’s system of physical objects even begins to work, I don’t understand it.)

Anyhow. We started off back in Crookback Bog, which DF has begun absently referring to as Brokeback Bog, just before the Fiend spawned.
( i wish i could quit you, brokeback bog )

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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.
( behind the cut: super tipsy gaming )