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←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Week Fifty-Seven -- The Road to the Viscount (Part One) The feasting and revelry would last for weeks at a time. Great stone tables were set with such an abundance of rare delicacies that we would stuff ourselves until the exotic became mundane. When the lavish spread began to spoil, a ravenous gourmand gleefully proposed that we sample from the fetid pile of composting refuse! The notion was dismissed as decidedly unhealthy. But days later, he was found cackling madly atop a heap of rancid comestibles, licking his fingers in delight. This post has been so tough to write because this is another one of those marathon dungeons, where you’re expected to take a break to return to it later, but I was impatient and did more than I did should have. I’ll try to condense it down, but this’ll still be more of a ramble skipping over a bunch of stuff. Three major things happened. The first is a result of what happened at the end of the last run two weeks ago. We gathered all the doctor’s bags in the Weald, which means there’s an event related to doctors ready to show up. This is really convenient since getting most of the adventurers up to Resolve Level 5 has been a bit expensive. We’ve gotten the blacksmith and guild as cheap as they can be and it’s still tens of thousands of gold to get a single person to maximum equipment and skills. We haven’t spent a lot of time managing quirks or diseases. This is a free opportunity to do some of that, and we’re going to take it. The second major thing is, of course, the Viscount fight itself. Here’s the lineup. It’s a pretty standard Crimson Court lineup, I think. The biggest worry our stress healing slot is taken up by CowCow who would much rather be doing damage, and with the unique stress mechanics of the Crimson Court and these adventurers having a slightly elevated stress level, that’s what Cow ends up doing. Is that going to have a knock-on effect where we don’t have enough burst damage to kill the Champion-level enemies of the Crimson Court? Well, yeah. That’s kind of the third major thing that happens this week. It turns out, one of the hardest dungeons in the game… is hard! First, I’m going to post the map for this thing because it’s huge and then I’m going to post some consequences. The further up the difficulty curve you are, the more likely it is that even a random attack will deal stress damage. Anything that does deal stress damage only deals more. Even LordCowCow can’t keep up. Now, the reason I kept going is that this map also introduces a curio that allows you to camp in this dungeon. My rationale was: if I can just get to the first campfire log of the game, I can mop up most if not all of this stress damage, and the team will be functioning again. I’m already hitting every other stress relief curio on the map, and I still have a bunch of Blood to keep these Crimson Curses at bay. This was a fatal mistake, though. An adventurer can only take so much stress after all, and so, after countless rounds of chewing out her teammates, Junia gets a series of heart attacks that kill both her and the week. Recovering from this will be difficult, but not impossible. We still have 60,000 gold in the bank, which isn’t a lot but will be enough here, and though Junia was the primary-est of the primary healers, we do have a number of backup options. At the same time, the process of grinding back involves multiple Champion-level dungeon runs. I feel like the whole run is on a knife’s edge after this week, and these next few weeks are going to determine whether or not we’re actually going to be able to complete the Darkest Dungeon. -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→

Brian sighed as he bit into something called a “Black Bean Chalupa Supreme®” which tasted, well, it didn’t taste great, but then again, he wasn’t going to Taco Bell at ass-o’clock at night for a majestic palate experience. He was doing this to pay off a debt. That justification worked for the broader scenario too. He owed his life to Shiki, didn’t he? Come inside. Come inside. He shivered. His Chalupa wasn’t appealing to him anymore, which left the videotape and Carmen. The girl was Carmen, right? She’d already outed them both as associates of Shiki, though she hadn’t introduced herself yet despite Brian doing so and he wouldn’t put it past their employer to make that sort of logistical issue. He’d just call her Carmen and see where that took him. If she wasn’t, he figured she would say something. Carmen did say something, but it still was barely anything worth listening to. “I don’t feel comfortable driving,” she said. Which was fine. It was fine. “That’s fine,” Brian said. “I can drive, no problem. Just let me…” He took another bite of his Chalupa, managing to hold back his gag reflex long enough to keep it down. A sip of lemonade helped, but as he got back into the camper van he still wedged the thing into one of its cupholders and tried to forget about it. He grabbed the steering wheel and positioned his arm so he wouldn’t even have to look at it, but he was still aware of its presence and the grip was awkward, so he moved it back. His hands went to his coat pocket again. Still no cigarettes. Okay. Shiki wanted them to poke around in a bathroom for a couple hours, so that’s what they were going to do. He turned the key in the ignition and the camper van sputtered to life once more. “Let’s get this over with.”

A Return to Normalcy When Override returned to G3’s headquarters, he was met at the front door by Director Sekelsky, Bard, and a third person who, unless Override had been poking around in G3’s employee database, he probably wouldn’t recognize. That person’s name was Chet, a new paralegal hire, and he looked exceedingly uncomfortable standing around next to G3’s highest position and one of its premier heroes. The first thing Director Sekelsky said was, “Where’s Aeon?” At some point, she had run off, leaving Override to complete the task they had been assigned alone. “She wanted to go get food,” Bard said, already cringing at the director’s inevitable response. “She wanted to go get food,” Director Sekelsky repeated in a mocking tone, the kind that probably could have been represented with some good old-fashioned camel case. “Sweet Zorro. Okay. First thing’s first: quarantine.” He leaned in and spoke directly into the side of Override’s ear. “You hear that? Stop mutilating your henchman trying to be sneaky and or creepy. You’re not.” “It’d probably be best not to antagonize him,” Bard said. “You are going to be seeing him in a week now.” “Probably,” the director said, straightening himself back up and readjusting his suit. “But I wouldn’t be able to say that to his face even if I wanted to.” He turned to Chet, who straightened up as well but in a stiffening sort of way. “You understand the nature of what you are accepting here? Who you’re going to be sharing your senses with?” “I do,” Chet said. Director Sekelsky motioned for him to take the signed papers -- all three of them, not just the one with Legion’s blood on it -- and Chet did so before scampering off. The quarantine was simple. G3 had a pretty good, though still imperfect, idea of how long Legion’s power lasted. Chet already had a minimal security clearance inside the building, and would likely be accompanied by guards even if he did encounter something he shouldn’t. In the meantime, he could do busywork or read or just listen to music. Bard and Sekelsky watched to make sure he made it through the doors to be collected by his chaperone, before returning their attention to Override. “We’re going in too,” Sekelsky said. “Debriefing and all that. Caesar being snooty can’t be the only thing that happened to you. You’re going to tell me everything. This was your first time meeting Scarlet City’s three gang leaders, right? What are your first impressions? Do you think a longer truce is feasible?” Where Money Flows Like Water Scarlet City’s biggest mall, Easton, was actually not far from the warehouse Sibyl and the others had just attacked (though with Adler’s help, the physical distance didn’t really matter, did it?). It had a hybrid indoor-outdoor layout. There was a massive building in the center of it all, called “Easton Town Center” where most of the food options resided, though there were some outlets in there as well as one of those movie theaters with an actual kitchen and an actual service staff that would bring you actual food in the middle of a movie if you ordered it. Most of the outlets were outside the building, though, sprawling outwards offering any sort of mundane ware one might want. Perhaps the most important feature of the mall was its status as a neutral ground despite its distance from the rest of the city. That was a big thing Easton’s management had pushed for prior to the foundation being laid however many countless years ago that was. Even capes registered as heroes or villains could see each other without issue here. Adler and Vi hadn’t been hungry just yet, so Adler tossed Sibyl a couple of crumpled bills so she could buy an overpriced burger or rice bowl or whatever else her heart might have desired before they went to the Hot Topic on the Town Center’s second floor. “You can gouge yourself on cookies and ice cream for all I care,” Adler said. “Toodles.” So Sibyl was alone. She wasn’t alone for long, though. As Adler and Vi disappeared into the Hot Topic never to be seen again, Sibyl got a text on her phone: Behind you lmao. It was Lachesis, a singular Fate without her sisters, though she didn’t seem too concerned by their absence. “Just wanted to catch up eye-arr-ell after all that mess,” she said. She looked Sibyl up and down. “You didn’t get too hurt, right? Just gonna be sore tomorrow or even better than that or- Oh, I know this person hang on. Hey! Hey Aeon!” Lachesis tried to wave the immortal hero over, and if that didn’t work she jogged over to Thessa, who had also entered the Town Center. “How’s tricks? Told you Caesar’s shorter in person than all those descriptions about him, right? You wanna hang out? Of course you do, come on.” She didn’t guide Thessa by the wrist again, but she did make sure the hero followed her back to where Sibyl was still standing. “Sibyl, this is Aeon, Aeon, Sibyl,” Lachesis said. “You’ve probably heard of each other? Or you’ve seen Sibyl’s art around town and Aeon, well, she speaks for herself. But we’re going to probably be officially working together soon so might as well get cordial now.” OOC

Starts strong, dips a bit in the middle, then got better at the end 7/10OP Suggestion: got recommended this at work so now i must pass it on to you 6/10

And just like that, something shifted in the distance and, as Chris rounded around the mausoleum, he could see the exit to the floor in the distance. He almost dashed straight towards it. He saw the remaining eye and the remaining several zombies, but nearly disregarded them before he remembered the remaining unfinished business. The zombies were part of that, yes, but one of the dead zombies still had his throwing daggers stuck inside. Those couldn’t be replaced, not without more jobs than he was willing to work. So the plan was those, then the exit. But as he jogged over to the place where he’d felled that particular zombie -- a task made a little difficult by the presence of the fog blanketing the ground, but not impossible, especially when the daggers were sticking out a little bit over it all -- that plan gained extra steps. The first problem was the way the eye and its zombies were moving. He hadn’t been the only one to notice the dungeon room’s new feature; the eye was directing everything to be in their way if they wanted to get out of here. There was also a lone zombie from the previous hordes still harassing Robin and Ziun, so that needed dealt with too. Was Robin still dealing with the effects of that energy beam that eye had hit her with? The questions and extra considerations kept swarming Chris’ head as he imagined the zombies swarming him also, but in the end, he just shook them off. “Alright, here’s the plan,” he said, sheathing one dagger and replacing his string with the other in his off-hand. “Sometimes, when you’re spotted you can’t stay to fight all the guards, you just gotta get out. We’re going to charge forward and break through to the exit.”

Catchy. I like the brass 7/10OP Suggestion: i forgot how fun tropical fuck storm was so now i get to share them again with their new ep, here they are covering jimi hendrix 7/10

Saying Shiki’s name like that was a stupid slip of the tongue. If the girl had been at the van for any other reason, it would have been a peek behind the veil that he would have been responsible for, and if there was one thing Brian didn’t want to be with random strangers, it was being responsible for them. He was doing this paranormal stuff for his own sake and nobody else’s. The fact that the girl had already been brought through was relieving. Of course she had been. Who else would have been interested in that van? He nearly laughed in spite of himself when she said he could have been a Sweeny Todd-esque taco vendor, completely forgetting the assumptions that he had made about her. Well, she could still be homeless. It seemed like Shiki was, after all, probably the most normal thing about Shiki if Brian thought about it. Why couldn't anyone working for Shiki also be homeless? It wasn’t like this job paid that much. “I’m driving to Taco Bell,” he said. “Until Shiki figures out how to give a straightforward instruction. If whatever this is is going to ruin my night, at least I can ruin my night on my own terms. And yours, by proxy, since I’m still paying. I’m Brian, by the way.” Shiki was lucky he knew how to drive manual. It seemed like nobody else in the world could. There were reality tv competitions involving driving -- not that Brian had watched any, but he had been in the room occasionally when an episode came on -- and there was always a challenge involving a manual gearbox. It seemed like even in a situation where learning how to drive properly would be beneficial, people still refused to do it. That didn’t make the van easy to drive, of course. It ran only slightly better than it looked. No matter where he was, it always seemed like there was a Taco Bell nearby. This fact didn’t surprise Brian -- he knew how the franchise model worked -- but he was glad for it. It meant he didn’t have to endure driving for too long. He pulled into the parking lot and rubbed his palms; he hadn’t relaxed his grip since the girl had asked him those questions. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s- wait.” He had just spotted something in the rear mirror. In the back of the van, next to the TV, was an ominously unlabeled VCR tape, the kind of ominous that made Brian swear it had not been there before even though it easily could have. “Yeah, hold up,” he said. “I think this is it.” He checked to make sure the tape was wound properly and stuck it in the slot.

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” -1 Corinthians 13:11 (NIV)Skipping, it turned out, was really hard. There was the expected mental effort of ignoring the absurdity of someone her age doing such a thing and hoping other people did the same, but Melissa hadn’t really put together before she started that it was basically jogging pace while everyone else was just walking. She had to slow herself back down and ended up at more of a “spring in her step” sort of gait. It was the sort of thing she still had to devote mental effort to, though, since if she forgot about it, she ended up just walking again. Still, the conversation surrounding Melissa did interest her. Any opportunity to learn more about Prana was a good one, even if it was a little disappointing that Fiona and Kelsey didn’t have much new knowledge to impart. There was one thing, though, a peculiar commonality between Melissa’s Ambrosia and Prana that she didn’t expect. “There was a popular card game back home on my world too,” Melissa said. “Actually, now that I think about it, the whole world was kind of set around Duel Monsters. The biggest reason most people had a deck was so if you got in a fight you could settle it over the table. Not to mention the arenas, the nationally-broadcast competitions, the fragments of artificial intelligence jammed into a select few of them that granted control over the world, uh…” She wondered if that made any sense at all to people it wasn’t the norm for. “I had a deck full of these fallen angels called Darklords. Monsters, spells, traps, fusing them together, redeeming them to power them up. I don’t know.” She realized she was walking again and pepped her step back up. Kelsey said, “Kinda sounds familiar, but I don’t know much about it.” Melissa shrunk back in on herself again. “I didn’t really expect you to, just reminded me of home is all. Sorry.” It was false hope. It had to be. She didn’t even like the game that much anyway. Maybe it was so much the better that “yoogeeoh” or however Fiona pronounced it was different. It could be fun to learn something new, something with significantly lower stakes than the Duel Monsters back home. Thankfully, before she could completely isolate herself from the conversation, they arrived a That Ice Cream Place, and, as the little tagline in the shop’s logo said, “It’s impossible to be in a bad mood at That Ice Cream Place®!” Melissa was a bit paralyzed by choice, so she just got a vanilla sundae with chocolate sauce. That, at least, was familiar to her, and it tasted even better than it looked. “What’d you get?” she asked everyone else.“[…]including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” -C.S. Lewis, expanding on 1 Corinthians, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

←Previous Post -- Next Post→ Weeks Fifty-Five and Fifty-Six -- Grinding Up I mean, I promised this. By the end of these two weeks -- spoiler alert -- all but one of these restored-to-twenty-four adventurers is going to be Resolve Level Five or better, and the one that we have left lagging behind will still be more than serviceable in the upcoming fights when we get back to those. That does mean, however, that I’ve got a doozy of a team lined up for the first of these two weeks. Oh my god, of all the teams I have had to not recommend on this show, this is the not-recommendiest. Josephine is a lot of useful things, but the Antiquarian is not a front-line class. The closest thing this team has to a damage dealer is Nammo, the Warrior half of The Sisters, which means the whole party is going to be dancing around as the pair tries and figure out what they’re doing. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, like, of all the parties to be constantly shuffled around, this party does have Euryale who can slither around the battlefield when she loses her human disguise, and both Alhazred and Josephine are placement-agnostic. There’s also plenty of healing to go around, both the mental and physical kind, so we’re not dying quickly even if we can’t kill anything quickly either. This is still a Veteran level dungeon. We’ve seen these for the past several weeks. It’s what we’re used to, so all this isn’t too difficult. I discounted in that lead-up just how good blight was in the Ruins and we’ve got two sources in the party: Junjeong and Josephine. The two of them combined frequently burned down one threat while Alhazred worked on another. We also got a pretty high-dodge team composition. At one point, the entire team dodged getting yelled at by a ghoul, and how do you even dodge getting yelled at? And then sometimes the ghoul did that Another stroke of luck with scouting ahead was finding a secret room, which, since this was an exploration mission, counted to our number of rooms found and let us dodge a prospective room battle. We got out of this fight so unscathed that I immediately turned around and put Alhazred in the next run. Now, a pattern you might pick up from these runs is that whenever I act particularly excited about a team, something goes wrong and whenever I point out all the problems with a team, all those problems seem to disappear. This is a little worrisome since you can’t level out of these dungeons and I’m going to inevitably fall into bad habits, but also, this is a really good team to just clear out big enemy parties. Everyone focuses on the back rows and then suddenly the front rows are significantly less threatening. Nothing more to be said about that. There are even two -- technically three -- secondary healers to keep people alive. Of course, when you run into a miniboss and you don’t have his natural stun counter, then maybe there are some issues. Not a huge number of issues because again, everyone can hit the back rows where The Collector will be, but at the same time, the three actions from level five enemies are, uh, they’re bad! They hurt! And when they’re not hurting, they’re healing the Collector’s health back. So this happens: And then this: I could have quit right then and there, but I think there was a part of me that had still accepted Alhazred as a bonus, as a gimme that we could lose since we had lost once before. This is not an optimal way to play Darkest Dungeon, especially not with the stipulations I’m using, but it is how I played. I should say, Fearful on an Occultist isn’t the worst thing in the world. The worst thing it will trigger besides compounding stress damage is the afflicted party member will run towards the backline, which is negligible with this party setup. It still sucks, but once Alhazred’s health is topped back up, he’s mostly functional. More annoying, though, is the other big status effect an adventurer gets here. Congrats, ABC, you’re a vampire now. I don’t have any blood but the run was basically over at this point, I was just taking a rest to free up some inventory space and got greedy with my camping skills. We got ambushed and I was immediately punished for it. Still, these are only small difficulties, and, more importantly, they’re fixable. Next week, I suppose we’ll give that Viscount a visit, and maybe see if we can’t crawl our way all the way to the boss in one go. We’d better. We’ve only got one invitation, after all. -r ←Previous Post -- Next Post→

violin good 7/10OP Suggestion: more katie gately keeping me extremely hyped for the end of the month 8/10

is it pronounced job or job

upscaled animation : / but i'll pop off for some eurobeat hell yeah 8/10 strong start with the riff but feels like the most generic lyrics imaginable like there are parody country songs with the exact same lyrics 5.5/10OP Suggestion: new naima bock song starts pretty good and just gets better as the song goes on 7.5/10

Rubber Bullies As soon as Sibyl resolved to start tearing up another ceiling of the place, a BANG! erupted from the kitchen, and the door splitting the two rooms flew off its hinges, went all the way across the room, and crashed into the wall on the opposite side. Standing in the now doorless doorway was Vi, her shoulders heaving with every breath, her parasol extended out in front of her like the thrust of a spear. When Vi walked into the room, it was with almost exaggerated stomps, each one punctuating a spoken word. “I. Am. Going. To. FUCKING. Annihilate. Whoever. The. Fuck. Did. That. To. The. Kitchen.” She reached the door and speared it again, this time enveloping it in her increasingly overwhelming aura before wheeling around to launch it back towards a corner where it collided with one of the treadmills, destroying both of them in the process. The whole building settled a bit, both in the sense that the only thing heard in the aftermath was Vi’s huffed breathing, with even Adler, who had strolled in just now, standing there in stunned silence, and in the sense that things that probably should have been making noise, like the continued collapsing of the workshop just a room over (or floor, depending on how you looked at it) no longer were. They weren’t making noise because they’d stopped in their tracks. Two things happened in quick succession: The first was a resounding “Fine!” which seemed to echo from all four walls and even the ceiling and floor of the recreation room. “Fine, you win, okay? I’ll stop. Just please, please don’t mess things up too bad for them.” The second was a message buzzed in on all three of the Moray Clan members’ phones. Adler took the opportunity to read it aloud in a mocking impression of what the fates actually sounded like. “Heyyyy besties,” he said. “Good job today, they didn’t even kno what hit em. Anyway anyone not licking their wounds too hard might be headed ur way now so get out while the getting’s good, k?” Adler looked up from his phone. “Guess that means you’re in luck, uh, Babs, was it?” Then, to Vi and Sibyl, he said. “Anything else catch your eye that needs doing? And yes, I remembered the shopping trip. I may be lazy, but I’m the honorable sort of lazy.” Soft Power Caesar stared at Override as he received the new treaty as though he were trying to wring out all the possible implications of the latter’s pronunciation. “I feel as though I should yell at you,” he said. “I want you to know that, regardless of your intentions, I feel very disrespected right now, not just that, but all these things we have discussed today. However, because I recognize your intentions as misguided at worst, I will not subject you to some of my… darker impulses. I also just want to make things clear: I know the reason your boss sent you to me last. “He’s a loose cannon. Caesar needs to be held in check.” He said it in falsetto, sounding nothing like Director Sekelsky, though intentionally so. He coughed a few times before his voice was back to normal. “It’s social pressure is what it is. I know what happens when too many lines are crossed. We’ve all heard the stories or seen the remnants of battlefields before the construction crews come in and build everything back up again. If even one of them -- Ophiuchus, who I respect, or The Fates, who I despise -- were not on this list, I probably wouldn’t on principle. But I’m playing by the rules here, you see?” He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a fountain pen. He didn’t sign it yet, though. He thought better of it. “At the same time, you were the ones proposing payment, weren’t you? How about this: Legion?” He motioned with his free hand and Legion shut down the projector, turned the lights back on, and came over to his side. “You are going to carry some of Legion around, that’s all. Just give me a few extra eyes for a day or so, how does that sound?” Caesar opened up a different drawer on his desk and replaced the pen with a pocket knife, with which he pricked Legion’s index finger and guided his hand across the remaining dotted line of the signatories section. “I’m offering this to you willingly,” he said. “This is my mark, take it as you will.” OOC