radio414

Intermission: Mayor Sam Gladwell When he had gone to bed Halloween evening, Scarlet City’s mayor, one Samuel Gladwell, had done so at a reasonable hour. That was a word that he hoped people associated with him -- with his political career, with his friends, with himself as a person. Mayor Sam Gladwell was one reasonable human being. As that was the sort of person he was, he had assumed that nothing would wake him up until the reasonable time that his alarm went off. Instead, he had been awake since about one in the morning dealing with crisis after crisis. It was approaching one am again now, and he still wasn’t home. He was currently running on three cups of coffee, a hastily-eaten sandwich, and a fifteen-minute power nap someone had afforded him twelve hours ago now. Perhaps it had just been one constant crisis -- the riots, two of the three major gangs of the city deciding that now of all times was the perfect time to get back at each other, coordinating a massive memo chain between the mayor’s office and the Peacekeepers, not to mention responding to the press, especially so close to election day. This could easily be his legacy. If the situation was handled poorly, it would be all anyone would remember of him. Well, that, and the world would end. But as it all crumbled and fell apart, they would blame him then. Things were finally quieting down though. Most of the lower-level staff had been dismissed at five, anyone else deemed non-essential had left a few hours later, and coordinators like Director Sekelsky were foreseeing no more immediate issues. He’d even dismissed his bodyguards. He was alone now, with a single light to keep him company. He looked up. That single light was enough to illuminate his desk, yes, but he could see even outside the light’s expected radius. It didn’t just go away. Even when he closed his eyes, the light was still there. Mayor Gladwell turned the light off and allowed his thoughts to wander a bit more. The election was on his mind. His opponent was a businessman named John Fipp. There was a moment in the town hall mayoral debate where, after a spirited back-and-forth about the minutiae of various policies (and a little bit of name-calling -- Sam was willing to admit some of the blame on that front even if “That’s such a lie, they should call you ‘John Fib’” was a very strong line), a middle-aged gentleman stepped up to the microphone and asked the candidates to say one thing they liked about each other. It was a common enough question, one Mayor Gladwell and his debate team had even prepared for. He’d stayed on script for that one, pushing Fipp’s qualities as a businessman and how he clearly cared for Scarlet City. Fipp responded by reiterating the actual substance of the debate to that point. “They say, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ because that’s the mayor’s job. If I am elected, do you think I’ll suddenly push sweeping changes and make everything worse? Of course not. Nothing is going to fundamentally change. I respect Mayor Gladwell and I respect the time he has spent leading our city, I just think it’s time for someone new.” John Fipp had left weaknesses abound for him. He could point out how he was minimizing the importance of the role. The mayor was the elected leader of the entire world! How dare he casually presume his mayorship would be no big deal. Not to mention, if the candidates were similar enough, why choose anything other than the status quo to begin with? Mayor Gladwell could have said any of those things. But when the moderator prompted him for a rebuttal, he simply smiled. “John, let’s just admit that we like each other,” he said, walked over to his opponent’s podium, and hugged him. Later, his team asked him why he did that, and he admitted that he felt forced to. “I couldn’t let him have the last word on civility,” he’d say. But that was a lie. He felt forced to, yes, but the other sort of way. For a brief moment, he saw the story of the debate stretching out in front of him, and the path between him and John Fipp’s podium was already laid out. There was nothing to do but follow it. As he reminisced further, he saw his path stretch out once more. He was moving again, smiling warmly and walking away. The idle thoughts had turned into dreams, ones that were only interrupted when his phone buzzed with a text from his wife. I know I promised I’d wait up for you but I don’t know how much longer I can last. Are you coming home soon? Mayor Gladwell smiled warmly and sent her a reassuring message. He stood up, put his jacket on, and began his journey home. Hopefully, he thought, the next important events would be a full week away. At least that would give him time to prepare. MONDAY NOVEMBER 07 174 DAYS REMAIN “They will wage war against the Lamb, but the Lamb will triumph over them because he is Lord of lords and King of kings—and with him will be his called, chosen and faithful followers.” -Revelations 17:14 (NIV) Even It Out “Where’s DEUS?” Director Sekelsky and Bard were en route to Goodale Park for the truce negotiations, which left Victor’s second-in-command, Roy “Roggy” Biff, in charge of the day’s briefing. Like Bard, Roy was a thinker, though his power was a bit more well-defined. Bard just “knew” things. Bard’s power gave him information from a source nobody could pin down. Roy’s was more synaesthetic -- he associated situations with various colors and could use that information to his advantage. Also in the room was his second, Sarah N., and she was the one Roy had addressed the question to. “DEUS was last seen at the intersection of Summit and Fifth directing traffic,” she said. “He’s likely to be there until either rush hour ends or the construction crews get that light fixed.” Roy rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Green, I guess. Lime.” Sarah made a note in a little notebook she had in front of her on the table. “For whatever it’s worth,” she said, “construction has been playing rather nice lately. I’m sure that was factored into your calculations -” “It was.” “- but I felt like it would be good to restate the reason for optimism in this case. Even if something does go wrong -” “It won’t.” “- you can rest assured your plight has a decent chance of being answered.” “It won’t,” Roy said again. He straightened his clothes before actually starting to address the two heroes in the room. Override and Aeon had been assigned to work together again, though at least there was a better reason than “they were the only ones left” this time. “Alright,” he said, and he began his briefing: “Because you two were the ones who volunteered to relay as much information as you could find regarding the end of- regarding Cassandra’s prophecy,” Roy said, still dodging the role specific G3 members played in the events of just about one week ago, “you’re being assigned to formally pay that debt. We’ve been running our end-of-the-world simulations this past week, but we need to explore every option available to us. If it’s an end of the world somebody has thought of, it’s one we can try to prepare for. We’ve arranged a meeting with the Archangel, the spiritual leader of Scarlet City’s largest religion, and you two lucky ducks get to go talk to her.” “There’s a list of potential topics to bring up in your briefing packet,” Sarah chimed in, producing a pair of them and sliding them across the meeting room table, “but obviously the big important one is Zorrastran’s apocalypse story and how much of that the church teaches as metaphor, and which they take at face value. I mean, some of this stuff… The sky literally comes crashing down at one point.” “Thank you, Sarah,” Roy said, taking control of the briefing back. “We’d like you to also, you know, gently encourage the church to take the stance that this is not the end of days. Even if it turns out to be the case, we don’t need people believing it. Knowing your days are numbered does strange things to a person.” He paused, then frowned. “Beige.” Sarah made another note and kept silent this time. “Guess that means you better get going before things get worse,” Roy said. “Make sure to thank Catty Key for arranging this meeting on such short notice again, of course. Oh, and Aeon? Don’t disappear to go get food this time, hm? Meanwhile, miles away, Sibyl had been summoned to the Moray Clan lair, where two of the three Fates, Clotho and Atropos, awaited her. Lachesis, they explained, had gone on ahead to scope out the preparations for the meeting -- they’d be joining their sister soon. “But we do have a job for you,” Atropos said. “Very simple, one you’ve probably done a hundred times before at this point.” “The Archangel Lailah owes us a favor,” Clotho said. “And now’s the time to collect.” “Gotta sermon she needs to give next Saturday.” Atropos already had the papers in her hand and handed them over to Sibyl. They had right-aligned paragraphs and everything. “Don’t really need to say what happens if she refuses, do we?” “That being said, while you should be the most intimidating self we know you can be -” “Creation and destruction in one package, right?” Atropos winked. “- keep a good head on your shoulders. Lailah’s likely to have some people from the church with her, and that’s discounting her actual superpower. The Stanley Principle doesn’t work if you’re just being an idiot, right? She can suffer the consequences another day if she wants.” “You just gotta make them think you could kick their asses even if you can’t. Simple, right?” OOC

Chris couldn’t carry Lana, but they made do all the same. Chris made it through the exit first, and wrenched Lana into the familiar stairway behind him, just managing to stop her from falling down the stairs. “Sit. Just… sit,” Chris said. “We can fix this.” He knew he’d already said it, but he had to say it again just for his own peace of mind. It was either this or go back out and lug the other two party members along. Chris almost went and did just that, but ran face-first into an invisible wall blocking the way back up. He could only watch, except the dungeon wouldn’t even let him do that. The barrier at the threshold was getting darker with each passing moment. Even now, Robin and Ziun were barely in view. “Hurry up!” he shouted. He wasn’t sure if they could hear him, but it didn’t hurt to try. It was weird to feel so powerless. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, but those old memories were ones he’d tried to repress. He didn’t want to think about the times he didn’t even have a roof over his head or when a job had gone wrong and he’d been left by a contact to fend for himself. Those times, though, he could still do things. He could run or fight or accost a travelling carriage to give him something, anything. Here, he couldn’t even do that. Chris clenched his fist and punched the barrier. He turned back around. “Is it getting any better? Do we have to take a closer look at it?” He knelt down next to Lana. “We’ve healing magic and it’s been a bit.” He held up his hand. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Intermission -- What To Do About The Darkest Dungeon? I’m going to level with you, I woke up this morning and really was not in the mood to play Darkest Dungeon. But I don’t want to use that as an excuse not to make some sort of update here, so I’m going to spend a couple hundred words talking about the final challenges of the game and the preparations I’m going to do to meet those challenges, and we’ll see how things inevitably collapse next week. I mentioned this a while ago, probably near the start of the run when everything was nice and bright and nothing could ever go wrong ever, but the goal of the game is to traverse through the four levels of the Darkest Dungeon, each of which is going to test a different facet of the game’s mechanics. For example, the first mission, “We Are The Flame,” has the stated goal of “Kill the Shuffling Horror” and when it says “Shuffling Horror,” it means a Shambler. The first goal of the gauntlet is to kill a modified version of the miniboss that is so hard that even a game as mean as this one won’t spring it on you without warning. So we’re going to have to come up with a party that does that. Now, the special reason Highlander is a challenging mode of play for Darkest Dungeon involves the Dungeon’s unique mechanic that any hero who has completed one of these Darkest Dungeon quests refuses to go back into the dungeon. They have seen too much. The mod we’re using actually disables this element, but I’m not a coward. It’s mathematically possible to do the dungeon runs normally -- we still have more than sixteen adventurers remaining -- so I’m going to do my best. Whoever beats this Shuffling Horror will be regarded as heroes, but I will basically be done with them. Which is a problem since the second Darkest Dungeon quest, Lighting The Way is traditionally regarded as the hardest one in the game. The biggest reason for it is this: you have to deal with three bosses, and each of those bosses has a devastating attack only negated if an adventurer is holding one of the trinkets We Are The Flame gives you. Now, you may notice a problem here. We Are The Flame only gives you three trinkets, so this high-stress, high-damage attack is still a problem for one of the adventurers. The obvious solution here is to guard whoever isn’t holding the trinket, and fair enough, that’s probably the strategy we’re going to go for here, but the other problem having required trinket slots introduces is trinkets are really powerful, and it’d be rather nice to have more than one useful one on the majority of the party. The third Darkest Dungeon quest is the endurance quest. Previously, we’ve had to deal with quests that are Short, Medium, or Long, which come with zero, one, or two campfire logs respectively. Belly Of The Beast comes with four. It’s called “exhausting” for a reason, it’s deliberately designed to drain your resources. This is the quest I’d like Hakima on, for what it’s worth, because if the name didn’t give it away, this is where all the Beast enemies are kept. Lastly is Hell Is In The Heart, which is one long boss fight that, without wishing to spoil, is almost guaranteed to kill someone. Multiple someones, even. It’s just that kind of quest. So that’s what we’re up against these next few weeks. For next week, I’m thinking of some sort of Dancing party to combat the Shuffling Horror, so adventurers like CowCow and Amani should be a decent offensive base, with maybe someone like Sethera or Ren in the third slot to help support those two. Now, the biggest problem we’re going to run into is that two of our healers are dead, and the remaining ones are suboptimal for various reasons. As the shortest quest, this might be the one we just try to blitz through, maybe with ABC or Margaret just in case. After that, Thar and Joan are our premier guards given their high HP pool, and we’ll probably need someone like Dismas to do some decent damage. I’d probably take the other Arbalest clone here for the same reason. The key bosses here are two slots big, so it’s not like they won’t get hit. The party for the third quest is pretty set. Boudica, Hakima, and Paracelsus are basically locks. Though Paracelsus is underleveled, that doesn’t matter as much for the role she’s going to be playing, and if we’re lucky with some specific aspects of the quest, it won’t even matter that much. I might be tempted to put Thar in this quest too just for his camping buffs, but I’m not sure about that yet. It probably would be better just to put Alhazred here as the last decent healer. I don’t really want to think about the last quest yet. Anyway, that’s my plan. Sorry I wasn’t feeling up to the challenge this week, but now that I’ve thought about it and laid it all out, there isn’t much left to do but do it. Until next week, -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→

Have mercy on me, Oh Lord, a sinner Wipe away my transgressions, and let me be reborn anew in your glory Help me turn away from sin and move towards your eternal light. I realize now what I should have realized long ago, Lord I have found my need to improve to grow and find new strengths Help me, then, remember what I am improving for and take my hand and guide me on. In the name of The Father, and of The Son, and of The Holy Spirit, AmenEven though the most strenuous of her activities that day had taken place in the virtual world and the remainder of her time had been spent either standing in line or sitting around, Melissa was still exhausted when they made it back to the apartment. She’d given up on skipping for the day, resolving that she’d work on it more tomorrow, and only spent time making sure Bartleby was fed with the newly-arrived Good Wet Food With Both The Chicken And The Tuna In It™ before trudging up the stairs to her room. Standing in front of her door, though, she thought of one final thing she could try, something she could take from her experiences of the day. “The door is locked, can you open it for me?” she said. She leaned against the door and felt consciousness leave her. Moments later, the door opened and she collapsed into Zadkiel’s waiting arms. She probably could have gone to bed right then and there, just have the cherub place her in bed and tuck her in tight, but no, she recovered and got changed and brushed her teeth and all that first, making sure everything was just so before she finally drifted off. The dream the computers provided for her this time was a classic: the flying dream. They had suspended her high above Prana, or a Prana that was an extension of the little she had seen so far of the city, and she was free to go where she wished in however manner she wished to go. Melissa wasn’t sure where she wanted to go, though, and instead let herself drift around guided by the occasional gust of wind as passersby paid her no mind. Zadkiel and Sandalphon dutifully followed behind her. After a good while of this, Melissa asked, “What will you do when we get home?” They didn’t immediately respond, so she added, “Like, you were part of ADMIN, right? Will you be able to merge back without issue, or am I going to have to find a way to directly connect my brain to ADMIN, or would there be some other method? Not that I’d shoo you out or anything, but I’d like to get a sense of what you want.” Their response took longer than Melissa expected, even after her clarification. We have not considered any potential returns to Ambrosia. What we desire is survival, nothing more. “Oh,” Melissa said, not really understanding. To put it another way, we are alive, and as long as we can continue to be alive our situation is satisfactory to us. Prana, Ambrosia, or any other possible world, the setting does not matter to us. Melissa twisted in midair to face the two of them. “Is this why you’ve seemed overprotective of me? Because if I go and get myself killed you two fade with me?” Yes. It was something she hadn’t really considered. Like, she was aware of it, but not in a way that might have changed something within her. She still wasn’t sure what to make of it now that she was thinking about it. Was this what being a host to such foreign influences really meant? “But hang on, my death isn’t an ‘if,’” she said, “it’s a ‘when.’ Prana’s healthcare is probably better than the stuff back home, but I’ll still only be around for, like, a century maximum. What are you going to do then?” This answer took much less time. As you said, our and your mortality is constantly in our thoughts, they said. We will be sure to inform you if there are any new developments. Melissa felt something in that answer that she occasionally saw in her other interactions with her guests, something she still wasn’t sure how to bring up. It had a twinge of fear to it. Something she considered a natural uncertainty was something they still hadn’t gotten to grips with yet. She remembered then that these things inside her head were barely a week old, but it still seemed like not the right time to ask about it. She could have been imagining it, after all A related thought came to her, and she asked about that instead. “In that void-between-worlds where we first met, you still asked for me to let you in. Weren’t you scared I might have said no?” But she woke up as soon as she said it, and an answer never came.By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures. -Proverbs 24:3-4 (NIV)Another factor in Melissa waking up when she did was not her alarm but the series of text messages that had been sent to her watch, still attached to her wrist. Some of them were confirmations of things she already had suspected, like Morgan requiring more observation, while Aduain’s absence was surprising even if the way Mauvache phrased it made it seem reasonable enough. The one that intrigued her the most, though, was a separate group chat including Fen as well, with just the message from an unknown number. Bring a Yu-Gi-Oh! deck. It felt like an incredible coincidence. She had just heard about the game yesterday, and all of a sudden it seemed like it was all anyone could talk about. Melissa remembered experiencing something similar back home with nun habits. Every so often, someone would come up to her and say something like, “I used to think you were weird for dressing up like that, but now I see those hoods all the time! A bunch of nuns just walking around town…” and Melissa would invariably yelp and run away from those people, but she felt a little more emboldened this time. Maybe that was just because it was sent through her favorite medium, the text message, but she was excited for the day now. Her stomach grumbled, and the excitement subsided, but only a little. She had a couple of mouths to feed and to actually get ready for the day first, and after that, they could see what Yu-Gi-Oh! was all about. Trevor was already downstairs by the time she finished readying herself, and she didn’t exactly want to deal with whoever was yelling at the door, so she quickly ducked into one of the kitchens and out of sight of the door. She looked over all of yesterday’s purchases and immediately was overwhelmed. It was so comprehensible back in the grocery store, when they were placing things in one at a time, but all at once? “I hope Fen wakes up soon,” Melissa said. “She’d be able to make sense of all this.” She could default to something quick and easy, but the resident cook probably already had grand designs, and she didn’t want to get in the way.

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Week Sixty -- The Road to the Viscount (Part Two) This is the first time I’ve been actually salty at this game. On previous catastrophes, there were ways I could rationalize it away. “Oh, there was no way we were beating that Collector, but we’ve got time to get our revenge later.” “That’s just what the Hag does. It sucks, but it happens.” “I really got too greedy there, huh?” This one barely even gave me the time to see it coming. I only just managed to get a screencap of it before the relevant text disappeared. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The biggest hurdle is Damian is still afflicted with the Crimson Curse, which is why we packed a stack of extra blood. There are some other, smaller hurdles like Hakima needing extra food (presumably for his dog) and a trinket Euryale is carrying gives her a debuff to her maximum health, which is relevant given her already fragile constitution. It’s entirely possible that was the big failure point and I should have known better. Oh, and that blue key is not droppable, which means by bypassing the gate last time we were here it’s just stuck in our inventory for our remaining attempts at the Viscount. Backtracking two weeks ago might have been the smarter play. Speaking of maximum health debuffs, Euryale joins Damian in the Crimson Curse club pretty early on in the run, putting her at a paltry 25 health. She does have benefits, of course. Her healing cures bleed and blight, which is rather prevalent in the Courtyard, and she can work with Hakima to keep stress down. And one of the fights we run into is quadruple grubs, and we’re still not hunting for the “die to a grub” achievement, so things were looking up for a hot minute there. If you’re following along on the map from two posts ago, we get all the way to the yellow gate without much issue at all, and even have a pair of campfire logs to keep everyone even more healthy. So in Magic: the Gathering, there’s a witticism when it comes to the more midrange, grindy decks. These decks are really good at grinding their opponents down to zero cards in hand and winning because their cards are just better in that sort of parity situation. It’s something to the effect of “You can’t beat the top card of their deck.” The opponent knows your strategy, and sometimes they’ll just draw the right card at the right time and there’s nothing you can do about it. In Darkest Dungeon terms, you can be playing out of your mind managing the various resources, but sometimes the Chevalier crits your healer for 21 and gives her a bleed… and sometimes your healer just bleeds out before you even get a chance to do anything about it. So we’re down two healers now. I don’t remember this quest being that bad on my casual playthrough, I promise, but we do need to switch tacks here. I think at this point, we need to rush the Darkest Dungeon and I’ll just figure out which missions we can do without a main healer. That’s going to take a bit of research, but that’s next week’s radio’s problem. Until then, -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→

In high school, Brian had fallen in with the swim team, a group that was a bit bro-y for him, but it meant he was part of something, and if you were a part of something in high school, your chances of getting bullied drastically went down. Even when he was technically the one “nerdy” one on the swim team, what with his head always being in a book and trying to figure out how it worked, his times and making the varsity roster sophomore year kept things in his favor. All this was to say, no, he didn’t have a bad experience in high school, and the fact that Carmen seemed to cower before even the slightest hint of high school pressure told Brian a lot about her. “What took you so long to get here?” Ms. White asked. Brian responded with a sign of the cross of his own, though he intentionally did it wrong. He wasn’t about to entertain protections that didn’t work. He also noticed a bit of refried bean that had dripped out of his chalupa and stuck to his jacket, so he wiped that off with his index finger and stuck it in his mouth. It tasted about the same. “Pretty sure trades give two-hour windows of when they might show up for a reason,” he said. “Honestly, I thought we made pretty good time, all things considered.” The woman seemed to grow paler by the second as both of the young adults spoke. “Oh, what a trial you have given me tonight,” she muttered. “Well, you’re here now, so… you can get rid of it, right? I didn't wait all this time in this forsaken place for nothing?” “Of course we can, Miss White,” Brian said. “Just gotta get some tools and you’ll be demon-free in no time. Just gotta…” He went to the back of the van (intentionally exposing Carmen to the woman’s insanity for a moment) and came out with the box of seals Shiki had left them. “Alright, he said. “You’re going to have to show us to these bathrooms, you know. Sorry, your trial’s going to involve a bit more.” “S-show you? Oh no, no no, I couldn't possibly go anywhere near...those places. It’s not a large school, surely you can find them yourself.” She begins muttering to herself, “I’d rather just lock up and leave and come back in the morning, to be honest, but then oh what might they do to the school while I am away…” “If you say so,” Brian said. “I guess we’ll find you in the principal’s office under the desk when we’re done then?” He hefted the box again and added, “Let’s go, Carmen,” before heading towards the door. As they crossed the threshold, though with the door still open and certainly within the woman’s earshot, Brian couldn’t help but add an additional crack. “What do you think she teaches, anyway? I’m going to guess Biology.”

Brute “I should have warned you Caesar does stuff like that,” Bard said. “It’s my fault. I was focused on other stuff, getting all three gangs collated together. Sorry.” He rushed on ahead and held the door open for both Override and Director Sekelsky as they returned to the sweatbox meeting room. “It’s not an excuse, but I’ve been dealing with a large influx of information, so I’ve also been dealing with some migraines. Nothing out of the ordinary, but still…” He winced and rubbed his forehead. “You’re continued presence, as always, is appreciated,” Director Sekelsky said. He gestured for Override to sit before doing the same. “I’m glad we agree about the necessity of this truce. Six months is one of those gaps of time that’s long enough to be meaningful, but still short enough that it will creep up quicker than you think. Scarlet City needs all its resources at its disposal, even the… less savory ones, so petty squabbles would just get in the way of the greater good.” “The greater good,” Bard echoed, having moved on to rubbing his temples. Sekelsky shot him a look, before continuing. “I won’t keep you too long. We’ll have to get in touch with Aeon at some point for her debriefing, and someone will get in contact to get P.I.X.E.L.’s recording of the day, but you can go get food as well if you like. You’re dismissed.” “There’s more,” Bard said. “More you should probably ask him now before he leaves.” “Come again?” Bard responded, but he looked at Override as he said it. “All the wheeling and dealing done to get those signatures. That’s something you should talk about now.” Director Sekelsky looked like he wanted to throw his chair across the room, but this only manifested in clenching his fists to the point of whitening them. “Fucking… you’re right. Okay. Override, what have you promised them? What are they going to be dangling over my head when I meet them next week?” Fawn Lachesis laughed. “I’d say ixnay on the anclay stuff but you’re right,” she said. “She would find out sooner or later and probably not even from the news or anything. Full disclosure, Aeon currently works for G3. Of course, I say ‘currently,’ like, she used to work for the Zodiac, and probably has some other stints I don’t know about. I also say ‘currently,’ because, like…” She let that last sentence trail off with a cheeky grin. “But no, you’re right, we should get food. There’s a real greasy burger place just up those stairs back there, and I’m pretty sure it’s open seating in front of it in case you want the weird rice bowl place or anything else.” She was right. The variety of options was demonstrable. The greasy burger place took up the most space, and many locations (including a franchise sandwich shop with bread that barely qualified, legally, as bread) just had a stall with enough room for a singular worker, or maybe one plus a manager there to keep them off their phone, but they were all up there. The seating was placed so you could look down on everyone else navigating Easton Town Center’s ground floor; it was a prime people-watching spot if ever there was one. Lachesis sat down across from Sibyl and Aeon with a burger, fries, and a soda all on a tray, some ketchup packets and napkins scattered around for good measure. “So,” she said. “I do want to be serious for a second, sorry. I’ve been reading this book called The Passage of Power. It’s structured like a biography, though its subject, a politician called Lyndon B. Johnson, is obviously a fictional character. It’s a sprawling work, like, I’m not even close to finishing it, but one quote stood out to me.” She took a bite of her burger and washed it down with her soda. “I’m going to butcher this ‘cause I don’t have the book on me, but it’s something like, ‘Power doesn’t corrupt, power reveals. The more power you have, the more you’re able to do what you always wanted to do.’ With the election, with Caesar and the Gibbons acting out again, and, of course, the End Of The World, like, a lot of power’s about to get spent. And I’m just like, what would the people I know want to do with it if it was theirs?” Another bite. “Aeon, I know we already kind of talked about this, but I’m interested in specifics. You want Skitty to change, and you have all the power in the world -- what would you change it to? Sibyl, you too. You too even more, actually since, you know, you work for us. Would be a bit rude if we didn’t listen to what you had to say. “Oh, and help yourself to these fries,” Lachesis said. She shoved her tray to the middle of the table. “There’s no way I’m going to be able to eat all of these.” OOC

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Weeks Fifty-Eight and Fifty-Nine -- Treading Water With the loss of Junia and a good portion of everyone else having been turned into vampires, with our money supplies dwindling, and yet the game only offering the hardest dungeons it can possibly throw at us, I’m at this point where I’m skeptical of any sort of major goals, so I have to turn back to smaller ones. Money can be less of an issue depending on how we prioritize loot -- especially since that’s the one benefit increasing difficulty gets us, more money -- and our levels are just about set outside of Paracelsus, which isn’t pressing. Our biggest manageable goal, then, is getting another invitation to the Courtyard so we can proceed further into that particular questline and cleansing the Crimson Curse until hopefully the rest of the game, with a smattering of “earn some money and get more people’s equipment fully upgraded” along the way. You’ll notice that those two side goals are at odds with each other and, uh, yeah, they are! Don’t worry about it too hard. I chose the Weald here because it’s got a Focus Ring as a reward, a powerful accuracy trinket that also buffs crit chance (which, you know, increases the amount of stress healing). We already have one, but more is always welcome. Yui plus accuracy trinkets should be able to cleave through most anything, and the rest of the party runs good support, so let’s see how this goes. Oh for fuck’s sake. Literally the first fight, too. I mean, we’ve got a couple of stuns in the party, and Ren can pull the Collector forward into Yui, but it’s still not a great start. It means for the next few fights, Euryale is working overtime to get people back to tip-top shape. Another reason I wanted to go to the Weald is to introduce its Champion-level enemy, the Hateful Virago. The Virago is annoying for a couple of reasons, the most obvious from the screenshot here is its capacity to do a whole bunch of damage to multiple adventurers at a time, something only Junia is easily able to deal with, and we know how that turned out. The Virago is a strict counter to healers like the Vestal, though, because it will turn any leftover corpses into Necrotic Fungi, which aren’t dangerous on their own but negate any and all healing for as long as they’re out. The Virago does if possible at the end of every round, so she doesn’t even have to take a turn off to turn those skills off. Thankfully, she spawned in with three grubs, who notably never leave behind any corpses for her to take advantage of. I suppose that cancels out any bad omens we got from running into The Collector immediately, but we’ll see how that translates into the second run of this post. …You know, in a way, this is a good thing. The Collector drops a hefty gem when killed, and we do need money still, but at the same time, like, come on. Thankfully this is a party with both Boudica and Margaret to hit the back line where the Collector will be, and Sethera to make sure they’re going to hit for a lot. Skaia is also there to pull the Collector forwards and mark him for even more damage, which leads to screenshots like this one. I skipped the provisioning screen for that joke, but I think that adequately describes why I assembled this team. It’s not the best at healing back up, but the run had a campfire and Margaret to keep people alive if things got dangerous, and also you can’t take damage if all the enemies are dead. It’s especially good we took Boudica with us because that enemy in the back there is the Warrens’ Champion enemy: the Swine Skiver. There aren’t really gimmicks with this one. It will just kill you. I don’t have a better way to put it. If you leave this one alive to deal with, say, that Swine Heaver in front of it (normally a high-priority target, right?), it will stun one party member and debuff the other three so that they’ll never recover in time. So I say it again: it’s good that we’ve got a party that can hit the back rank with consistency. So yes, these two weeks could have gone a lot worse. In fact, we did run into some egg sacs in the Warrens, so we even managed our main goal. I’ll have to go back and double-check prospective teams, but I think we might be headed back to the Court to get further into the Viscount quest. Until then, -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→

Chris was generally pretty happy with how his lanky body allowed him to do all the things someone in his professional field might need to do, whether that was the nimble fingers facilitating a good lift or being light enough to climb around in rafters. However, in this moment, in the charge to the exit with enemies still in the way, he wished to be someone more like Sergei. Even without his magic runes to boost his toughness and endurance, he could probably bowl through some enemies like they weren’t even there. Sergei would probably also have been able to scoop up Lana and carry her the rest of the way, something Chris definitely wasn’t strong enough to do either. Oh well, he thought, he’d just have to do the next best thing. “Lana!” Chris shouted, even if he wasn’t exactly sure what he was supposed to say next. “Hold on, Lana, I’m gonna- whoa!” Whatever it was, it was interrupted by Lana swinging her axe wildly, just missing Chris and colliding with the zombie next to him. He changed tactics. “Estellise!” And this time, he didn’t have to say anything else; an arrow of light whizzed past and made sure that the zombie stayed down. He stayed out of range for Lana’s next swing, then rushed in while she was still following through and rammed his sword into the neck of the other zombie attacking Lana. Chris pulled back and kicked, and that got that zombie to the ground as well. He turned around to face Lana and grabbed her hand. Chris could feel her flinch at that, and he was still aware of her axe, so although he tried to calm her down, he did have to talk fast. “Lana, it’s Chris. We’re really close to the exit, so hold on and I’ll make sure you get there, okay? Estellise is going to keep the eye busy and there’s only one more zombie in the way and, like, five of us, so just keep hold of my hand and then we’ll fix whatever that thing just did to you, okay?”

If you find honey, eat just enough— too much of it, and you will vomit. -Proverbs 25:16 (NIV)That girl is watching you the computers said of Fiona. Melissa tried not to notice, or rather, she tried to act like she hadn’t noticed. It was a game she was familiar with, of surreptitious glances and pretending not to care you were under observation even though you absolutely did. It was a bit of a shameful game, especially how if someone broke serve and confronted the other, the match result was more of a mumbled draw than anything meaningful, but they were at least disciplined players, and she could respect that at least. Still, the game was a little easy given the circumstances. With ice cream and active conversation happening around them, there were enough distractions to allow going full minutes between looks. When Fen brought up her weird palate -- weird for a cook, even -- Fiona couldn’t help but even be engaged with everyone else, and Melissa couldn’t blame her. She couldn’t help but associate eating bugs with that one kid in elementary who would do it to gross everyone out. From listening to conversations at youth group, it seemed like every school had that kid. But she also didn’t know Fen’s circumstances, just as her group leader didn’t entirely know hers. Fen had made the comment that using Duel Monsters to resolve conflicts was inherently a more peaceful endeavor than the mortal peril they were experiencing now, but Melissa wasn’t so sure about that. There were a whole bunch of ways the technology could fail, for a safety subroutine in the dueling matrix to not trip when it needed to and someone end up seriously hurt. Melissa had neglected to mention how just over two weeks ago now her time a malfunctioning duel disk had caused her whole campus to fall into chaos, or how a week or two before that she’d had some chips she was carrying split open by a squealing cartoon pig wielding a butcher’s cleaver. You could argue these things were exceptions, but there was no way Melissa was the most exceptional person in the world. She was lucky enough to still be alive and with ice cream in her hands. That was something, at least. She finished her sundae in measured bites, carefully avoiding a brain freeze (though she was ready to advise anyone else at the table on cures if they needed them) and washed it all down with some complimentary water. “Tell you what, Fen,” she said as everyone else finished up as well. “The next time we’re out and about we can get some Yu-Gi-Oh!” -- was that how you pronounce it? -- “cards and we can learn this new game together… if that’s okay with you.”

this is a question to ask after you've written a first draft as you're going into revisions, not while you're in the planning stage.