via
https://ift.tt/2X9qNijDF FINALLY RELENTED AND GOT GERALT THE UNDERCUT
JUST IN TIME FOR DANDELION’S HETEROSEXUAL NONSENSE QUEST
but at the cost of subjecting us to the soul patch. You know what I like the soul patch better than I like the muttonchops so
I had convinced myself I didn’t care but then the next cutscene happened and it was the one with the godling in the house and he looked so solicitous, like he does with godlings, and oh my gosh he just looked so good with the undercut??? Dang y’all, why do they even let you have any other hairstyles with him???
anyway
the literal first thing that happened when we booted up the Witcher 3 was that DF went into the inventory screen to prepare for the fight that had killed him last time, and was scrolling through what he terms his “collection of massage oils”, and muttering the names. He said “Enhanced Insectoid Oil” and MM, who hadn’t been paying attention, perked right up and said “Enhanced Sex Toy Oil??” with great excitement.
Alas. No. What we needed was Hanged Man’s Venom, which we now universally call Dude Oil.
also, an update on a prior installment– you maybe thought I was kidding about Geralt’s Awkward Creepy Horny lines but I just saw a gifset go by that contained the one about the funeral.
[image description: a moving gif of Yennefer, a black-haired woman, standing next to Geralt, a silver-haired man with a full beard, both facing forward and not looking at one another. Geralt: You smell wonderful. Yennefer, looking resigned/disgusted: Geralt– we’re at a funeral. Geralt, smiling and raising his eyebrows: You smell wonderful at this funeral.]
Anyhow. Ahem. Geralt, you’re a fucking disaster.
This is the quest for Lambert: Hammond is one of the cronies of Karadin, who’d murdered Aiden, Lambert’s boyfriend. He’s in some little settlement on Skellige and there are guards at the gate and just pirates all through the place. They’re all like… levels 9 through 12, and there are a fuckton of archers.
DF tried three times to do his usual approach with bandits, which at this point is Dude Oil, Axii, and lots of swording. But they kept killing him by sheer dint of numbers, and since in Death March it doesn’t seem to matter how full your health bar is, Quen only lasts one hit, it was literally not worth casting it most of the time.
So on the third attempt he potioned himself the fuck up with some new decoction that gave him health when he inflicted damage on other people, which was pretty brutally effective. With that, and some judicious luring-out of opponents, and using Igni whenever there was a group of them,and a lot of hiding behind obstacles to avoid archers, he managed to clear out the whole settlement. I’m not sure of this, as there was a lot of ambient noise, but at one point I swear Geralt yelled “Shut up!” at a man who was screaming because Geralt had set him on fire a moment before. Like… pick your battles man, but like whatever.
Along the way, we found Orders From Hammond on several of the pirates/whatevers/guards. They were all the same. They were not complex. “Why the fuck would this guy write out simple orders and hand out multiple copies to illiterate guardsmen?” I asked. “Well, for the plot,” DF said. “No– I want an in-universe explanation for this.”
“Ahh,” MM said, “he has a letterpress, obviously.” “Oh, and since he has one–” “I mean, wouldn’t you letterpress literally everything you ever had cause to commit to writing?” “I mean– hell yes? I would find reasons to commit things unnecessarily to writing.” “So. Hammond has a letterpress and he’s very proud of it.” “This is the obvious conclusion, yes.” “If I was a pirate with a letterpress you bet your ass I’d letterpress every fucking thought that ever crossed my mind.”
“Alright,” DF said, “I gotta reapply my Dude Oil.”
MM snorted. “Sorry,” she said, “the mental image every time you say–”
“Why do you think I say it?” DF said.
We made it up to where Hammond was praying. He was Beefy and was for some reason wearing a kilt with a leg slit which entirely removes the point of wearing a kilt. Anyway, he was challenging to kill but not that challenging, and then he had a Letter On Fancy Stationery from our target, Karadin. The letter referenced the slave trade, just as some bystander earlier had.
“I,” DF said, “am ready to get the fuck out of here,” and zipped off to the nearest fast-travel point. Bickety-bam, we were in Hierarch Square in Novigrad again.
He did some light shopping, selling junk etc., and he was still hopped-to-fuck on potions, though most of the cutscene dialogue didn’t show the toxicity in his face for whatever reason.
So, we went and met up with Lambert, who had the scoop on his boyfriend’s murderer. “He’s a slaver,” Lambert said, “but he’s remade his life and does a bunch of charity work and has a new name and all. Fancy mansion yadda yadda.”
So we went to meet Lambert there, and went in and the guy’s got a wife and a couple of kids and… is, himself, a Witcher. He’s a Cat school alumnus who adopted a couple of kids and their widowed mom, and now has rebranded himself as an upstanding businessman. Fine nice clothes, just one sword, totally reformed. Totally!
The dialogue options don’t give you any way to ask him about the slave trading. “But just Lambert said that,” DF pointed out, “we don’t know that it’s true.”
“Uh,” I said, “like five different people have said that, I don’t actually think this is in any way hearsay.”
MM was like “LAMBERT IS YOUR BROTHER YOU BACK HIM UP RIGHT NOW.”
“Yeesh OK,” DF said, and told Karadin he was a lying sack of shit.
There ensued a fight, and Karadin led off by immediately jumping over and hitting Geralt super hard, but in the amount of time it took DF to pick an oil for Geralt’s blade, and to hit him a couple of times and then back off, Lambert had absolutely destroyed the guy, and he was dead before Geralt could even really get a lick in. (Lambert is so far the only NPC who has ever been a lick of good in a fight, as it happens.)
Lambert, like, spat on him and walked away after that, and Geralt was like “welp” and left too.
In consolation, DF betook himself to a barber shop, where he gave Geralt a terrible soul patch and moustache combo, but made up for it immediately by going for the undercut, which is, oh my gosh, it’s so good why do they let him have any other hair?????
we then did the Dreaming quest, which as a level 7 quest gave us 0 xp but we needed it for Plot. So we hunted around a house to find, of all things, a godling, with whom Geralt was exactly as solicitous and gentle as he had been with Johnny– this one was causing harm, having trapped an oneiromancer in terrible scary nightmares, but she herself thought scary dreams were fun and was only trying to play. Geralt made a deal with her, that she’d free the woman from the dreams and let him talk to her, and in return he’d tell the house’s owner that it was permanently haunted and couldn’t be fixed, thereby leaving it safe for the godling to live in. She agreed, and told him, “Gee, Mister Witcher, you’re a really nice person,” and the cutscene showed Geralt’s face and he looked honestly sort of taken aback and delighted (and also hot, because, undercut). With great sincerity, he smiled slightly and said, “Thank you, people don’t often say so.”
The dialogue gave you the chance to go back on it, but DF was like, “I told the godling I’d lie for her, I can’t go back on that now,” and agreed to it.
During the quest he’d had to Aard a few blocked doors and wall bits and things. “Home renovations by Geralt of Rivia,” I said. “I’m good at demo,” DF said. I texted the preceding exchange to
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
akilah12902 who had a fantastic punchline: “everything else I have subcontractors for”
On the way out of the quest we SAW THE WEIRD RAT PARADE GLITCH AGAIN. I must know, is this a thing??? What the fuck??? it did the same thing, sort of snaking eerily through the market, and then got stuck under the same cart in the same way, and that was it. WEIRD AND FREAKY.
Anyhow.
The oneiromancer that the godling had trapped was a sorceress wearing even less of a shirt than Kiera, who we then had to go see. She met us in an inn, and was like, “I’ll help you find your missing woman, now tell me about her.” Geralt makes much of being reluctant to talk, but then she makes it easy to go through the dialogue tree and share every single anecdote of Ciri that he’s got loaded up, so we found out a bunch of backstory that way. Geralt gets a little misty-eyed in the recitation.
He then proceeds to dream of Dandelion, who we haven’t seen at all yet. He’s in a fantastic, almost bejeweled-looking doublet, absolutely resplendent, remonstrating with a barn swallow. So……… that whole entire quest was just to tell us that since we’ve already talked to everyone else in town that Ciri would know, we should find the last person she’d know, who is Dandelion. But, I guess without the quest we wouldn’t know where to look for him, so. (He owns a brothel now? Gross? Well, why not. I am prepared not to like Dandelion very much.)
Anyhow– that was enough excitement, and we betook ourselves to bed after that.
Tonight probably won’t have much playing either; we’re all overtired and Girl keeps coming down the stairs to ask one more question and it’s two hours past her bedtime and she’s overtired and driving us all nuts, so. Ugh.
