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gertlushgaming · 1 year

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One Piece Odyssey Review (PlayStation 5)

For this One Piece Odyssey Review, we play an RPG project to commemorate the ONE PIECE brand’s 25th Anniversary, which combines classic staples of the JRPG genre with the unique elements of ONE PIECE. This game has been lovingly crafted over many years to ensure that fans can truly touch the world of ONE PIECE… and now, ONE PIECE ODYSSEY is ready to set sail! Produced with direct involvement from Eiichiro Oda, the author of ONE PIECE contributed to this project both with new characters and monster designs and with the main plot.

One Piece Odyssey Review Pros:

- Beautiful graphics. - 29.49GB Download size. - Platinum trophy. - You get the PlayStation 4 and the PlayStation 5 versions of the game. - Graphics setting - performance or quality. - Controller settings - Invert axis and sensitivity sliders, auto compensation for the camera, auto dash, trigger effects, vibration, and rotating the map. - JRPG gameplay. - Japanese voice with subtitles. - Beautiful Anime cutscenes. - Can skip cutscenes. - Tutorial pop-ups as you play. - The main story along with many optional side quests. - Save points are scattered around the world. L - 20 save slots. - Fast loading times. - Gum Gum Rocket (Your rubber arms) allows you to swing and climb on vines etc. - Interaction points show with an icon. - Seamlessly switches between cutscenes and gameplay. - Looks absolutely stunning. - Items are randomly around and are represented as shiny spots on the floor. - Breakable objects like barrels and crates. - Powerful orchestral soundtrack. - All combat is held in seperate areas and isn't always in the same place you are. - Turn-based combat. - TP (Tension Points) are earned and used in battle, it can be carried over. - Earn EXP and money from combat. - The turn order of everyone in combat is shown clearly on the sidebar. - Dramatic scenes occur under specific conditions and can change enemy attacks or abilities. - Get bonus EXP from clearing dramatic scenes. - Rick, Paper, and scissors style combat with power, technique, and speed is more or less effective in different situations. - Level up to increase your stats. - Handy icons show if a character is stronger or weaker than the enemy. - Combat speed increase button. - You see the enemy roaming around and touching them starts combat, hitting them from behind to get an advantage but this also works for them. - Full-party management system for things like equipping artifacts. - Artifact/item placement on a character is a grid and you fit as many artifacts/items within the space. Kinda like the inventory system in a Resident Evil game. - A knockback can happen whereby hitting one enemy can push them into another and damage them. - The color of observation is a technique that will temporarily show enemies that give more exp, hidden items, etc. - Collect the power cube segments to upgrade the power of your abilities and attacks. - Swap which character you explore the world with by pressing the d-pad. - Breakdown walls, secret routes, vines, and more are used within the world. - Hooligans are a fancy way of saying elite (tougher) enemies. - Dr. Sarbays encyclopedia fills in as you collect record cubes from enemies. - Camping can be done at campfires and here you can regain HP, cook, make trick balls, fuse accessories, and change outfits. - Parties can be had and these festivities grant you an increased exp earn rate (30%) for 10 battles, recover HP, and the critical chance is five times better. - Scramble Area Battle: this system allows players to move around through multiple battle areas. - The objective is a list that grants rewards once they are fulfilled, their criteria are kept secret. One Piece Odyssey Review Cons: - Cannot rebind controls. - Invisible walls. - When you go the wrong way in a mission you will get a short but annoying black screen load. - Slow starter. - A lot to take in. - Hitting a save point is slow as you still have to wait for the menu and then select your save slot. Related Post: SC3 Wireless Pro Controller Review (Nintendo Switch OLED) One Piece Odyssey: Official website. Developer: ILCA, Inc. Publisher: Bandai Namco Store Links - PlayStation Read the full article

#PlayStation4 #PlayStation5

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unpopularly-opinionated · 1 year

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So I bought One Piece Odyssey and played it for a few hours tonight. It’s definitely an interesting game. Surprisingly, even though I’ve completed an entire chapter, I don’t know that I’m actually far enough into it yet to say whether I definitively like it or not. It seems like every 5 minutes it’s introducing a new mechanic to me.

Speaking of constant interruptions though…I REALLY hope this gets better, and it seems like it might be, but the first like 2 hours of the game is full of CONSTANT interruptions. I get that they have to introduce mechanics and what not, but seriously it’s like you start the game, move two steps, cutscene. Back to the game, move two steps, cutscene. Okay now climb this ledge aaaaand cutscene. Hey look, let me stop your gameplay to point out something. Hey wait, let me fade to stop the game, scold you for going the wrong way, and then fade to black slowly to really emphasize that you’re not supposed to go that direction. If I hadn’t been streaming it to my friends at the time, I’d probably have quit out of frustration.

Other than that…I think the combat is neat, I suppose. I’ve never really been a fan of JRPGs tbh, but I’ve found a few tolerable over the years and this seems like one. I will say, the UI is very stylized and it’s…kind of unintelligible for a while. Maybe I’m just the dumb one, but there’s a LOT on screen all at once, and it’s kind of hard to understand what’s going on. Once you do though, it’s a very basic Rock-Paper-Scissors system, like Pokemon.

I’m not far enough to fairly criticize the story, but I will say that there is a character who is flatter than a sheet of paper and serves as little more than a plot contrivance. I’m assuming they’ll get more development later on, but the intro was kind of pants because they literally just walked on screen, pulled the biggest plot contrivance macguffin bs, and then promptly fucked off, all without ever having said a single word. You hardly even have enough time to register that they’re a bad guy until after it happens.

I know I’ve basically done nothing but shit on the game so far, but those are just my honest first thoughts. I’m still going to play through it because at the end of the day, it’s One Piece, and it’s written by Oda so I’m hopeful it’ll get better later on. Maybe, maybe not. I honestly just don’t think I’m far enough in it to give an honest opinion. I just started Chapter 2 and now it really feels like this is where the game actually starts, so we’ll see.

Random thought I just had as I was writing this because I almost wrote this in as a bad detail until I realized why they did it, but right from the beginning they literally sidelined both Franky and Brook which had me PISSED because I was seriously looking forward to playing as Brook, but then it hit me that the reason they did that is because this game has you going through the Straw Hat’s memories in order (the whole game is a glorified nostalgia trip ngl), so right now I’m in Alabasta, and back then Franky and Brook weren’t Straw Hats so it actually makes perfect sense why they’d be sidelined right now. Unfortunately that means it’s gonna be a LONG while before I get them though since Water 7 and Thriller Bark are quite a ways from Alabasta.

#random #video games #One Piece Odyssey #Eiichiro Oda #One Piece #no spoilers

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cowthropologist · 3 years

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Is climbing around in the rigging excessively difficult or is this just like a wrist problem I'm having

#the climbing system in odyssey is BETTER THAN THIS #mar plays acbf

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odyssey-owl · 2 years

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TGTB&B Rewrite Scene 3

(Note: This is a rewrite of the AIO episode "The Good, The Bad, And Butch." The original episode dialogue was written by Marshal Younger. Any added/removed/altered dialogue and actions were written by me!)

Butch Evans was late to another Bones meeting. The meetings were a hassle, really, and a waste of his time. Of course, Butch couldn't ever say that out loud.

Butch neared the hideout, an abandoned shack in the back woods around Odyssey, the structure previously known as the Wonderworld Treehouse. After the construction was found to be faulty, leading to an eventual collapse, it was taken to the ground and reassembled. Many years later, the shack would find itself used as a small playhouse in a town called Kidsboro. However, at the present, it served as the Bones of Rath clubhouse. Throughout its existence, the clubhouse had been moved a few times, due to unwanted children discovering its location. Butch approached the current site of the hideout, which was placed slightly behind a cemetery, and about halfway between a local ice cream shop, called Whit's End, and Trickle Lake.

"Let's find out who it was, and just pound him," Butch heard Rusty Gordon say from inside the hideout.

A weaselly voice replied. Rodney. "We gotta do more than pound him."

"You mean, you want to do something in addition to pounding him."

"Exactly!"

"Just as long as pounding is included."

Butch opened the squeaky clubhouse door. He tried to sound nonchalant. "Hey guys, what are you talking about?"

"Someone hung a goofy-looking picture of the principle from the flag pole this morning," Rodney explained.

"And it wasn't us," Rusty added.

"They're on our territory. We're the Bones of Rath. We pull the pranks! We cause the trouble!"

Butch leaned in. "So what are we gonna do about it?"

Rodney scoffed. "I'll tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna do something even better."

"Like what?"

"Something that will get everybody talking about the Bones of Rath again."

Rusty became suddenly interested in where this conversation was heading. "What?"

Rodney thought for a moment. Then his eyes lit up with an idea. "You know the awards banquet next week?"

Butch nodded and thought back to the matching tickets on Sam's dresser drawers.

Rodney nodded. "Wouldn't it be hilarious, if suddenly, in the middle of the program, the sprinkler system went off?" He raised his eyebrows. "All those people in their monkey suits and cinderella dresses, soaked from head to toe?"

Rusty chuckled and joined in. "We can get all the teachers and all the smart kids. It's a nail one, get one free prank."

Rodney winked at him. "You got it!"

"So, what's the plan?"

Rodney gestured with his hands as he talked. "All right, we get inside, we get into the bathrooms and climb up into the ceiling."

"The ceiling?"

"Yeah, I've been up there a couple of times. We used to open up ceiling tiles and pour stuff on people walking by." Rodney smiled at the memory. "Anyway, when we get up there, we flick our lighters a couple of times near the sprinkler sensor above the lunchroom."

Butch couldn't believe it. "That's it? That's all it takes?"

Rodney shrugged, still smiling. "That's it! We've got some of those sensors in stock at the Electric Palace. They're easy to set off."

They'd be easy to get too, Butch thought, considering the hardware store is owned by Bart Rathbone, Rodney's father.

Rusty's eyebrows furrowed as he realized Rodney had forgotten the most important part of the plan. "How are we going to get inside?"

"Inside where?"

"The school. You have to have a ticket to get in the banquet."

"Oh." Rodney stopped for a moment. "I didn't think of that."

"I could pound somebody and just take them."

Rodney shook his head. "Nah, if the kid squeals it could blow the whole thing."

Butch spoke up. "I know somebody with tickets."

Rodney and Rusty both turned to look at him. "Who?"

"Sam Johnson."

A pause.

"Well, can you get them?"

"Sure," Butch reasoned. "He's an easy target."

"Now, you can't just take them," Rodney advised.

"Yeah, you have to be..." Rusty searched his mind for the right word. "Sneaky."

Butch smirked. "I can be sneaky."

#adventures in odyssey #aio #rodney rathbone #rusty gordon #butch evans #odyssey owl tgtb&b rewrite #odyssey owl writes

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bigmammallama5 · 4 years

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Hey! I saw your post about ac Valhalla and how it’s what you wished odyssey was. As someone who loves odyssey would you recommend it? What kind of things make it better? Thank you :))

Ok fair warning, I thought Odyssey was fun but I had come pretty major critiques on it. I still finished it but it most likely won’t be a game I’ll go back and replay. I’m very achievement driven so I speed-ran through the story line so I could get to everything else lol. I’ve also only played Valhalla for 14-15 hours so take these comments with a grain of salt as I’m sure I’ll most likely change my mind on something at some point later on.

Personally? Yes. I think people should give this game a chance. I feel like the story is more tightly written and it melds some really nice game play features with the old AC games and the newer ones. I think most of my disappointment in Odyssey stemmed from the actual plot lines and not enough variation in game play. It’s not nearly as repetitive as Odyssey was, now including new games and new tasks and enough variation between those to keep me interested EVEN with another massive map. They’ve also brought back more puzzle-ish locations to solve from the older games. They brought back older stealth features like interacting with NPCs to hide and walking with groups of monks while still keeping the newer stealth features like hiding in tall grasses. It’s still leaning more combat-heavy but they’ve thankfully pulled it back from where Odyssey was. I don’t quite understand the power level yet but I do like that your skill tree is more integrated into your weapons and gear-and allows for better nuanced skill building. Could still be tweaked but I like it.

I also really like that it’s more exploration based! Skyrim is one of my favorite games to date for context, and being able to run around in Valhalla and have directions given that are “go to where these two rivers converge outside of x town to find your contact” instead of “go find billy bob joe outside of hoohaa’s hut in yankee doodle town” is really nice. I found the older games were starting to hold your hand a little too much, but of course people are free to disagree with me on that lol I’m not trying to pick a fight. However you can still enable your map to show you as much or as little as you want, that’s a pretty cool feature. Also just to be a music geek for a second, the sound track is ksjhgkldfjghdsfg. Wardruna (edited, sorry I thought it was Heilung) and kulning? The composer from the Ezio games writing with the composer from Origins???? Be still, my melody loving heart. Though to be nitpicky I do like Kassandra’s voice/voice actor better and I think the voice acting is a little stiff and stilted in Valhalla. And I have trouble climbing DOWN but like, that’s probably just me being a dumbass lol

Another trend I’m seeing is people who have only played Odyssey and not Origins might run into some trouble with the combat system. (I’m personally not having any trouble bc it feels Very Origins and I loved that game.) I also play on Xbox and haven’t been having a lot of weird bugs my playstation friends have been having-but there’s no real consistency so just be wary of general goofiness like usual. I’ve gotten some sound bugs but no longboats spinning in the water. Yet. But overall I’m having a much more fun and engaging time than I did with Odyssey and it’s becoming very difficult to put the controller down.

#ask me stuff!#ac valhalla #ridetherythym #sorry for the long answer lmao but #you asked for my onion ksdhjfgdfk

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jack1998sstuff · 3 years

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Operation El Dorado Canyon: Libya Under Air Attack in 1986

In early 1986, an U.S. Air Force F-111F Aardvark pilot and squadron commander knew that something big was coming and that it involved an attack on Moammar Gaddafi’s Libya.

“We had been planning for about four months,” said the lieutenant colonel, “Everybody knew this was coming.” At his request, his name does not appear here.

Plans and rehearsals for a strike on Libya that were already under way intensified after the April 5, 1986, bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin that killed a Turkish woman and two American sergeants, Kenneth T. Ford and James E. Goins, and injured 230, including 50 U.S. military members. U.S. intelligence linked the bombing to the Libya-backed Abu Nidal Organization.

A skit on the British television satire “Spitting Image” showed President Ronald Reagan playing in his bathtub with a toy F-111F. Plans and rehearsals for a strike on Libya that were already under way intensified after the April 5, 1986, bombing of the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin that killed a Turkish woman and two American sergeants, Kenneth T. Ford and James E. Goins, and injured 230, including 50 U.S. military members. U.S. intelligence linked the bombing to the Libya-backed Abu Nidal Organization.

Mission planners hoped the French government would give permission to overfly its territory. Said the pilot: “The White House threw curveballs to the mission planners. The original plan called for a raid by 18 F-111Fs if France gave us overflight clearance or just six aircraft if we had to take the longer journey around the European continent. After France denied overflight permission, orders from Washington kept the raid size at 18 aircraft, introducing an exponential increase in the needed size of the tanker force.”

One target that was put on the list, removed, and restored was the Al Azziziyah Barracks, called the “Libyan White House,” prompting some U.S. flyers to believe they were being tasked to kill Gaddafi.

Plans to use the supersecret F-117 stealth aircraft, then part of a “black” program in the Nevada desert, were scrubbed. Following carrier- based air strikes on Libyan naval targets in March and early April, the brunt of the mission – called Operation El Dorado Canyon – fell on the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing, the “Liberty Wing,” at RAF Lakenheath, England. The pilot interviewed for this story was commander of the wing’s 493rd Tactical Fighter Squadron.

OPERATION EL DORADO CANYON On the night of April 14-15, 1986, the Air Force undertook its first combat since Vietnam. Twenty-four F-111F Aardvarks (including six spares) launched from Lakenheath, supported by five EF-111A Raven electronic jamming planes from Upper Heyford, nineteen KC-10A Extenders and 10 KC-135 Stratotankers. The strike leader – the pilot quoted here – flew an F-111F with the callsign Remit 31.

“We were in the briefing room. I still didn’t think we were really going to do this thing. I was thinking, ‘This is going a little farther than our last exercise.’ Then I looked up and saw the chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, Gen. Charles Gabriel. The wing commander, Col. Sam Westbrook, introduced Gabriel and he started talking. That’s when I knew, ‘This is a “real-world’ mission and they’re going to be shooting at us.”

The F-111F was formidable. With a bulge in its belly caused by its all-weather AN/AVQ-26 Pave Tack infrared targeting designator/reader, it was able to track and designate ground targets for laser, infrared and electro-optical bombs. Two 25,100-pound thrust Pratt & Whitney TF30-P-100 turbofan engines provided power. A variable-geometry or “swing” wing permitted better handling at low speeds in the airfield pattern (when swept forward) and very high speed (when swept back). The crew sat side-by-side, the pilot on the left. Beside him was the weapons systems officer (WSO), who was sometimes called a YOT for “you over there.”

Said the Remit 31 pilot:

“After the briefing, I talked to Gabriel. I didn’t think Gabriel knew me from Adam, but he looked at me, uttered my first name, and asked: ‘Do we know if Col. Gaddafi is going to be asleep in his house tonight?’ I said, ‘Sir, I don’t know, but I promise you he won’t be able to sleep in it tomorrow night.’ No one ever said that our purpose was to kill Gaddafi, but we thought they were telling as much without actually using the words.” 48th TFW commander Westbrook went aboard a KC-10A Extender tanker that would serve as an airborne command post and the Remit 31 crew climbed into their Aardvark. “If I close my eyes, I can still remember what it smelled like in the cockpit,” the pilot said. “When you go out to fly, you have a card that goes on your clipboard. There, you write down all the pertinent information about that flight – the weather briefing, the callsigns, tail number, frequencies. I wrote the code words we would use. We were to transmit the words Frosty Freezer if our mission failed.”

INTO THE MISSION In radio silence, in the early evening of April 14, the El Dorado Canyon strike force took to the air. F-111Fs that typically flew a combat mission lasting three hours would tonight be in the air for 14 hours. From Westbrook on down, no one was completely certain that the Aardvark airframe could tolerate that much stress. As for the men in the cockpits, most of the F-111F crews had never seen combat, some had never refueled from a KC-10A and none had ever done so at night under radio silence.

Once the F-111Fs reached the Atlantic as darkness gathered around them, crews conducted a short refueling to confirm that both tanker and fighter refueling systems were performing properly. Spares replaced two of the primary aircraft while the remaining four spares returned to Lakenheath. The trio of six-plane formations (Remit, Elton, and Karma flights) stayed in company with “mother ship” KC-10As for the circuitous journey around Europe to the Mediterranean.

Each aircraft in Remit and Elton flights carried four GBU-10 2,000-pound laser guided bombs, to attack leadership targets. Karma flight carried nine Mark 82 Snakeye 500-pounders for use against airfield targets.

After the raid, a Pave Tack video showed Remit 31’s four bombs landing short of Gaddafi’s house (the Azziziyah Barracks) but allegedly killing “Hanna,” the Libyan leader’s infant daughter, and injuring others.

Refueling often, the F-111Fs swarmed down on Tripoli shortly after midnight. Flying inbound off the Libyan coast at low level, the F-111F using the callsign Karma 52 (serial no. 70-2389) crashed in the Mediterranean. Remit 31’s pilot saw it happen. “It was a smear across the water. It reminded me of having seen napalm in Vietnam.”

No one knows whether Karma 52 had a mechanical malfunction, whether pilot Maj. Fernando L. Ribas-Dominicci flew into the water, or whether Gaddafi’s air defenses scored a hit. Ribas-Dominicci and his WSO Capt. Paul F. Lorence lost their lives. The rest of the strike force went “downtown,” arriving over Tripoli at 2:00 a.m. local time.

The pilot of Remit 33 (serial no. 74-0178) found himself over Tripoli with an unexpected problem. As he pulled up to loft his bombs (to be followed by a 120-degree banking turn to exit the area), his Pave Tack system malfunctioned, leaving him with only radar to assist in aiming. The rules of engagement dictated that a target had to be positively identified before making a drop. The pilot decided that even without Pave Tack his information was good enough to permit him to drop ordnance, and he did.

By that time, the flight leader in Remit 31 had dropped and was “feet wet,” crossing the coast into the Mediterranean. After the raid, a Pave Tack video showed Remit 31’s four bombs landing short of Gaddafi’s house (the Azziziyah Barracks) but allegedly killing “Hanna,” the Libyan leader’s infant daughter, and injuring others. Total deaths on the ground during the raid were about 60, not the “several thousand” claimed by the Libyan press. Western journalists could find no record of Gaddafi ever having a baby daughter named “Hanna.”

Apologists for Gaddafi have claimed that westerners over-rated his role in terrorism and his ties to the Abu Nidal Organization. Others claimed that Operation El Dorado Canyon tamed Gaddafi’s bad behavior. That idea went away on Dec. 21, 1988, when Pan American Flight 103 went down in Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270. Libya later acknowledged that its officials were involved, but denied that Gaddafi was.

A popular uprising – not terrorism – prompted the western Allies to return to Libya in Operation Odyssey Dawn in 2011. The first Allied aircraft to be lost in that operation was an F-15E Strike Eagle of the 492nd Fighter Squadron “Bowlers,” – the other squadron, along with the 493rd, that had visited Libya earlier in F-111Fs.

Hearing of the Strike Eagle loss the Remit 31 pilot said, “I’m sorry I missed.”

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oncexinxmyxdreams · 3 years

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OC Profile

Lydia Venkman (The Real Ghostbusters.)

Bio

Name: Lydia Molly (O’Connor) Venkman

Age: 22 when Peter was born and passed away at 32.

Ethnicity: Caucasian with her both sides of her family having descended from Irish Immigrants back in the 1840s.

Species: Human.

Height: 5'5

Weight: 120 pounds.

Hair color: Dark brown.

Hair style: Used to be very long, almost to her waist until she cut it short into a flipped bob during the 1960s. She grew it back out before she passed.

Eye color: Green.

Birthday: September 23rd, 1936.

Gender: Female.

Sexual Orientation: Straight.

Powers (if any): No.

Distinguishing features (if any): Lower lip was fuller than top and had an oval shaped face. Jim said she looked like the actress Natalie Wood.

Blood Type: A-

Clothing

Day to day outfit: Simple dresses with flared skirts and a sash. Think 1950s-early 1960s style. Wore simple flats with them. On weekends, she wore simple trousers and tucked in blouses.

Pajamas/What they wear to bed: Plain white nightgowns.

Formal Clothes: Most formal that Lydia owned was her wedding dress: a lacy A-line gown with matching jacket.

Work/School uniform: Being a teacher, just simple nice dresses and pumps.

Other (glasses, jewelry, etc): Liked wearing ribbons for headbands. Single solitaire wedding ring. A Claddagh ring which was the only family keepsake she took when she married Jim. He gave her necklaces and bracelets, but Lydia sold them to make ends meet.

Health

Physical Illnesses: Weakened Immune System where she usually gets sick easily and for long. Suffers from a severe case of pneumonia.

Mental Illnesses or disorders: Depression.

Medications?: Antidepressant and usual medicines when she became sick, ex. cough syrup, Tylenol etc.

Addictions (Drugs, alcohol?): No. With her weakened immune system she’s careful about addictions.

General Health: Its decent enough, but in her early 30s she becomes more sick from living in bad conditions, her weakened immune system and her lungs not being strong enough. Body shape is rectangular: 32-26-34 and around size 8.

Life/Preferences:

Likes: Teaching, fantasy books, tea, cooking, and spending time with her son.

Dislikes: Dishonesty, depression, getting sick and Jim’s bad ideas.

Career: Elementary teacher.

Hobbies/Talents: Reading was her main hobby. Used to ride horses back in Montana, but eventually grew a new hobby of collecting teacups as she moved around. Talented in piano.

Habits (good or bad): Chewed bottom lip when stressed and twirled hair when writing.

Family: Parents were Joseph and Naomi O’Connor. Lydia had 8 brothers. She was closest to older four: Phillip, Benjamin, Andrew and Daniel. All a year apart. Four younger brothers, are sets of twins: Jacob and Jeremiah came along when she was 3. Then Simon and Silas arrived when she was 4. Had an aunt named Molly that passed shortly before her birth and that's how she got her middle name.

Friends: Not many. Had some nice neighbors at times. She considered her big brothers as her closest friends.

Romantic/Love Interest(s): Mainly Jim Venkman, but its caused her problems.

Pets: Her childhood cat named Copper: He was a European Shorthair breed with deep brown fur. Her family had horses, but her favorite was Valor: An American Quarter Horse with a blue roan coat.

Social Status: Lower class.

Favorite Food: Colcannon Irish potatoes.

Favorite Color: Forest green.

Favorite genre of music: Folk music.

Favorite movie genre: She didn’t see too many movies having only theaters at the time. Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, An American in Paris and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea were her favorite movies in theaters.

Favorite Animal: Elk. She loved seeing them in Montana. Interestingly, elk are considered as a symbol of protection.

Degree of Education: High school graduate and earned a teacher’s certificate.

What language(s) can they speak?: English and a decent amount of Irish.

Can they cook?: Absolutely.

Personality

Positive Traits: Warm, devoted, thoughtful, altruistic and creative.

Negative Traits: Self-critical, self-conscious and sometimes closed off from others.

Archetype: The Mother Figure like Perdita in 101 Dalmatians or Mrs. Brisby from The Secret of Nimh.

Way they interact with others: Very reserved when first meeting. It takes a good while to get to know her.

Way of speaking: Voice inspiration for her is the late actress Elizabeth Hartman. (Yeah, Mrs. Brisby's voice actor because she has a certain blend of vulnerability and strength which I think fits Lydia well.)

Introvert or Extrovert?: Introvert. Not sure where she'd fall for MBTI, but my thought is INFP.

Backstory

Lydia was born in Williston, North Dakota and was the first daughter for her family. Lydia had a weakened immune system and got sick easily throughout her life. When Lydia was 9 months old, her family moved to Libby, Montana to be near her mother's aging parents. It was intended for the family to move back to Williston, but they all fell in love with Montana and never left. Living on farmland, Lydia spent free time with her brothers: they rode horses, went fishing, climbed trees and camped in the summer. Being outside helped her stay healthy. Lydia went to a small school and only enjoyed storybooks. All other subjects were hard and the teachers were cold hearted which made Lydia feel inferior. As she grew, she visited the library more often and her learning skills improved. Her favorite books were Ivanhoe, The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Hobbit. (She loved The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia when they were first published.) After graduating high school, she earned a teacher's certificate with the goal to help children learn in better ways than she did. However, she also desired to have adventures one day even if she wasn’t sure how it’d go. That started changing when she met Jim Venkman.

Jim was a couple years older than Lydia and resided in Montana to hideout from his recent problems. It was love at first sight for him and Lydia grew to love him after several outings. Jim promised Lydia "all her dreams." Her parents, didn't approve Jim because they found him sleazy and doubted it was really love. Her brothers, all younger and older, weren’t sure about Jim and always felt genuine protection for their only sister. Lydia constantly argued with her mother in particular and finally, her parents threatened to disown her. Young, wanting adventure, and thinking she knew best, Lydia left with Jim. She did teach and found creative ways to help her students learn. However, Lydia missed her family and months in the marriage, found herself miserable. Jim was going back and forth with "jobs" and while inadvertent, seemed to take her for granted. Lydia became severely depressed: she felt trapped, dissatisfied and worst of all, lonely. Not introverted/like the quiet, solitude loneliness. It was an abandoned loneliness. That ended after a doctor's appointment where she discovered she was expecting. She gave birth in a quick labor and was with happy tears to have her son. Since Jim wasn't there and difficult to contact, Lydia spent five days with just her baby. Instead of going with Jim's desires to name a son James Jr., she chose Peter. Despite the sudden moving back and forth, financial issues, working overtime to make ends meet and frustration with her husband, Lydia loved Peter more than anything. She did all she could to give him a good childhood. That all came to a crushing end, when she became terribly sick with pneumonia and passed away. She was 32 and Peter was only 10.

Life Goals

Lydia desired to have adventures in her life even if she was fragile. She wanted to believe the best in people and planned to teach for her career. When she became a mother, Lydia's goals all went to her son and that became the adventure of her life; one she wouldn’t change despite the hardships. When Lydia was told her pneumonia was getting worse and survival was decreasing, she imagined what would happen for Peter: Would he go to college? What would be his career? Would he find love? Have his own kids? For her it was unknown, but in all, she hoped he would be surrounded with stable, caring, enjoyable friendships/family members. She'd been happy to know that did come true.

#the real ghostbusters #OC #lydia venkman #peter venkman #fanfic #fanfiction #i'll do some flashback stuff with her #adult laurie's bio is still in the works #mama venkman

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morlock-holmes · 4 years

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I got myself a Switch lite and some games to have some fun while I’m quarantined. This is the first video game system I’ve owned since the original Playstation.

Mario Odyssey definitely lived up to the hype; one of my favorite things to do in platformers is explore and find things, and Odyssey really focuses on that. All the design is fantastic, I would really struggle to name anything wrong with it. Maybe it wouldn’t be quite as exciting if you preferred pure platforming challenges but that’s kind of a matter of taste. For what it is, I think it’s about as good as it could get.

But I got kind of burned out 500 moons in so I’ve switched to Zelda: Breath of the Wild and, uh, it’s not living up to the hype?

To the point where I’m kind of legitimately shocked at how well it reviewed, especially because talking to people who are farther than me the things that bug me apparently keep going throughout the entire game?

Basically my impression so far is that for every thing it does better than the other Zelda games I’ve played, there’s a corresponding thing it does worse, so it all kind of evens out to an average game. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I’ve played all the games that came out up to Majora’s Mask, plus Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons.

Exploring the Overworld is always my favorite part of Zelda, and in some ways it’s more fun than ever. The game does a lot less handholding about how to get places which makes exploring a lot more fun. In a lot of the older Zelda games parts of the map are sectioned off in really obvious ways, like a giant block you won’t be able to move until you get the titan’s mitt or whatever, in this game a lot more of it is, like, trying to figure out if you have enough stamina to climb all the way up that cliff... Maybe I can just reach that ledge there, wait a moment to recover my stamina, and then just barely get to the top...

That’s a lot more fun to me, it really seems more like you’re using your own ingenuity rather than just going to all the things in the exact right order.

On the other hand, other things make it less rewarding to explore. Like, so far I’ve found a bunch of “Shrines”, and instead of the multiple kinds of dungeon environments with interesting visuals and varied locations, each on is one or two rooms that sort of look like they’d be part of a VR training mission in another game.

Also, I really can’t stand weapon degradation and in general I just dislike the approach to loot here. More than once I’ve puzzled out how to reach some interesting, out of the way chest, only to open it and find... A +17 sword. And I already found a +19 sword lying on the ground somewhere and a +24 sword in a different chest and I can’t even take the redundant weapon back with me to sell because all my weapon slots are full at all times so I don’t get caught unarmed when my weapons unexpectedly break, so the whole thing just kind of feels like a waste of time.

Or I get one of a zillion crafting items that I don’t have any immediately obvious use for but I don’t want to sell because it might turn out to be the only way to craft some important weapon upgrade.

Or, currently, I've been spending a lot of time using two-handed weapons I don't really like because the one handed weapons keep breaking and the monsters I run into don't really have good one handed weapons.

I'm hoping to eventually come across a town with a weapon shop.

The limited inventories of the older games also meant that each individual item felt important and useful and rewarding to find; I'd really rather have a few items that each make a large impact on the game than dozens and dozens of incremental things.

Also, I don’t really like open world games where the storyline says there’s a time limit. If Zelda’s barely holding Ganon back then trying to find out if I can ride a bear doesn’t seem respectful of her time, you know?

It doesn’t seem like a bad game so much as I’m finding it really shocking how rapturously people reviewed it. For every good point it does better than most Zelda games there's something it does a bit worse and so far it's kind of averaging out into an okay game.

#breath of the wild #video games

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hotpinkdemoness · 5 years

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Call of Cthulhu: Some Tips For Aspiring Eldritch and Cosmic Horror Writers

So.

Here you are. Reading this post because the title caught your eye. Good, this means you likely will take this more seriously than most people would.

H. P. Lovecraft. That’s a name that has weaved into writing and media in a multitude of ways, for better or for worse, and almost all of those ways have both been emulated perfectly and terribly to the point of being an absolute joke.

I, for one, have noticed a hilarious and uncanny failure in most media trying to be “Lovecraftian”, a failure to capture that same kind of magic that Lovecraft’s works had in them. They usually end up missing one or two gears that make the entire machine work, the system ends up being horribly put together and rushed because they want to be “that one good Lovecraft game” or something.

I’ve been into the whole scene for years now, and I feel like I know this stuff far better than some of these teams believe they do. So humor me as I finally get to the point here.

So before I say anything more, what am I talking about when I mention those failures? Well, I talk mostly from a gaming standpoint, but it can easily apply to other forms of media as well. Games like the most recent “Call of Cthulhu” strike me as hilariously awful, where they try so hard to “be Lovecraft” that they end up missing the mark and feeling like a total piece of garbage fanfiction written by an edgy admirer that doesn’t fully grasp the concept of the machine.

In fact, most of this rant is going to be centered around Call of Cthulhu, because I was frankly very upset with that game after being excited for it for years. It. Was. A. Total failure. I am very glad that I did not spend money on it. It’s that bad. If you want Lovecraftian goodness, that is not the game to play.

I will take this moment now to say that if you take this as me being ungrateful for a developer team’s efforts, well, I’ll give you my retort now: I wouldn’t be this angry about it if that dev team had actually put the proper time and effort into the game instead of releasing a half-baked mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be. A dev team that wants to be respected will earn that respect with a good product, not with something that is clearly slapped together without proofreading or quality control of any kind. The mentality of pointing fingers because someone is upset with how a dev team’s “hard work” is a frankly stupid one and needs to be tossed away so that these devs can actually have that criticism and learn from their mistakes.

So let’s look at what went wrong, shall we?

In most horror, there’s an untold rule. “Show, don’t tell.” Call of Cthulhu, for a game centered entirely around a premise of something barely understandable by human minds,does a lot of telling and showing. The player character magically knows what happened at a scene just by fuckin’ sniffing the air, everyone you talk to has some sort of special detail that pieces things together, you even see the horrors you should be running from or fighting head-on. My gripes with this game’s poor presentation of material are almost endless.

Simply put, they show and they tell...far, far too much for it to work. It feels like amateur writing (much like what this entire rant likely feels like!), it feels rushed. For a detective game, you don’t have to try very hard to put things together. It’s more of a two plus two kind of thing, rather than an elaborate equation that requires you to find what x is in order to solve it. It isn’t subtle, it isn’t gradual.

While we’re at it. That, uh....”shooter” sequence.

Yeah. Uh...don’t do this. Ever. I failed to find a good .gif, but in this part you don’t have to aim, your gun kills far too easily, and there’s next to no explanation for these people needing to be shot other than “they’ve gone insane because this is Cthulhu”. It’s too easy to fight back, and they don’t tell enough.

I feel like even Mega Man does what this sequence does better. You go into Dr. Wily’s territory, not knowing what awaits you other than shit’s fucked and you’re the only hope. You have the tools to get the job done, but it’s only barely so. I mean, look at this, listen to it.

coub

The music, the slow approach to a large wall you have to climb over, the way it invokes this “this is it, this is a big deal and it falls on my shoulders” kind of feeling. This is how you do an encounter like that and this is how you do it well. That’s not even going into the boss fights themselves!

And that’s from a game that isn’t even remotely similar to Lovecraft’s work. This is where my point of “other games not trying to be Lovecraft do it better” comes in. Let’s take a look at another example, one that’s not 30-something years old.

Observation’s hexagonal mystery is probably the best representation of what Lovecraft’s works are that I have seen in recent gaming. The presence from start to finish of this thing, how you are slowly revealed more and more of it without being directly told anything about it. Even at the end you still have no idea what it is, why it is, how it is. You can only speculate based off of what the game has told you, but it’s not a complete picture. They tell, they show, but they deliberately don’t tell you the whole story and they sure as hell don’t show you everything.

The sense of helplessness you feel when you have to interface with the thing, the way that ending went just before...well, I can’t really say much without spoiling it. Point is, it’s a game that has done significantly better to capture Lovecraft’s magic...and it has more focus and inspiration on Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey than anything.

They took notes, baby, and those notes paid off. I’d say they only thing they really miss there is a chance to fight back--which makes sense given the context.

For a good piece of storytelling to feel like it works in the context of being “Lovecraftian”, you don’t need cosmic monstrous godlike things. You don’t need dimensional things crawling out of paintings. You need to understand that Lovecraft’s concepts work not just because of the monsters themselves--there’s a network of things weaved together.

You’ll notice that in his works, there’s a chance that fighting back will work...but it’s improbable at best. Chances are slim, but it’s enough to instill hope. Then you realize that thing that took almost all the bullets to kill is just one of many, many more, and killing that one thing only stirred a hornet’s nest. you have no idea what you just killed, you don’t even know if you actually killed it--you only know that fleeing is your only option now, and that looking back is only going to screw you over. Sometimes fleeing isn’t an option, and things cut to black just before or in the middle of the confrontation to leave you wondering what happened.

And more often than not, the solution to the problem is far more complex than just stabbing a painting with a dagger to instantly win.

I haven’t even gone into the issues that Call of Cthulhu has that make it feel so cheap, but honestly anyone that’s played it will already know about the clipping, awkward animation, lackluster voice acting and nonsuch...it’s stuff I really don’t need to cover.

So hopefully this will have helped to kind of relay the problems and strengths with Lovecraft in media, and how to effectively write a good horror story that preys on the fear of the unknown.

And please don’t use that one scene from Lord of the Rings to try and make your hiding scenes spooky. Please. Try something different if you really want a hiding situation to feel spooky--many other games have done it better than this.

Good god that thing just...eugh. It looks like an Aliens reject. I hate it, not because it scares me...but because it looks awful to me.

#lovecraft #rant #please don't kill me #I spent like an hour typing this I think

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biscuitreviews · 6 years

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Biscuit Reviews Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

When I first heard of the announcement for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey I had no interest in this entry, especially when I saw the first gameplay footage and noticed how it followed the style of Assassin’s Creed Origins. With that, I also figured that Odyssey would contain many of the faults of Origins, especially since it was coming out one year after despite Ubisoft stating that they were going to not do yearly releases for the series anymore. I was originally going to do a Side Seat Review for this game, observing the gameplay and story but not actively play it. However, after watching my wife’s first play session it really impressed me and the next day I went to get a copy for myself and would play alongside my wife, with her as Kassandra and me as Alexios.

This is a first for the longtime series and this approach allowed us to see how these choices evolved and impacted the story. Both characters will follow the same story in the game.

Once selected, you’ll then be living their life during the Peloponnesian War, where your character is a mercenary during the war. They take on a contract to kill a Spartan General which prompts them to pursue the mystery of their family. This is nice change of pace from the standard Assassin’s Creed character plot of Templars kill family member, protagonist angry and goes to seek revenge, a plot that has been used in the majority of titles with the exception of four of them (Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate).

As stated earlier, your choice impacts the story and it’s those choices that determine how certain events will play out. For this being the first time Assassin’s Creed introduces this, I was actually fairly surprised how well Ubisoft managed to execute this. I really felt that my choices had an impact to the overall story.

Both Kassandra and Alexios have great moments in the story and both voice actors deliver excellent performances. There are a few scenes where Kassandra does perform better than Alexios and the same can be said to Alexios as he has scenes where I felt he had the better performance. Both protagonist will even approach a few scenes in different ways as well. A good example of this is the scene where you encounter a character known as the Cyclops of Kephallonia. Kassandra approaches the scene with a playful intimidation making her a mercenary to not take lightly but still , whereas Alexios approaches the scene with a sarcastic edge. Despite being the same line, the approach that both voice actors took with the same line was a cool way to see how it played out.

As mentioned previously, Odyssey continues the gameplay shift that Origins began, turning the Assassin’s Creed series from an open world adventure, to an open world RPG. Where Origins had a weird hybrid with RPG mechanics where everything was dependent on your character’s level, meaning if an enemy was as much as one level above you, you were in for a bit a tough fight. Odyssey however has made the full leap, with obtainable gear, skill trees that the player can place skill points in, in accordance to their gameplay style, and abilities that can be performed in battle. The biggest improvement is even if enemies are one level above you, you can fight them with no issues. Even enemies that are quite a few levels above you, as long as you use the proper abilities, dodge, and parry at the appropriate times, you can take them down.

Another vast improvement is assassinations. In Origins, it didn’t matter if your hidden blade was upgraded to the max, an assassination did not guarantee a instant kill for certain enemy types. So, my initial concern was how assassinations would be handled. With Odyssey, it’s all dependant on specing your skill points in the right abilities in the Assassin Skill Tree, as well as your Assassin Damage stat. If spec’d appropriately, you can easily take down enemies with an assassination no matter what type of enemy they are, bringing back the satisfaction of sneaking up on enemy and killing them without being seen. With that being said there are a few instances where level is still too much of a determinant factor. Although this was a more tolerable issue, I still found it annoying to meet what I feel was a arbitrary number.

One of the new gameplay additions to Odyssey comes in the form of Conquest Battles. In these battles you can side with either Sparta or Athens. The purpose of this is allow one of the nations to gain control of the region of Greece the Conquest Battle takes place. It is then you’ll fight in a battle killing Soldiers from the enemy nation until either your chosen side or the enemies’ meter becomes empty. A successful battle can lead to rewards, however, during the Conquest Battles, I participated in, I found that the rewards I gained were not worth the effort that I put in. I also felt that this feature could have possibly been more woven into the story as a variable that caused minor things to happen, but it proved to be nothing but a meaningless distraction that carried no weight.

Naval exploration and combat also makes a return to this entry and in this one I feel is an understandable downgrade. In Black Flag you have many customizable options for your ship as well as various tool and weapons in the combat. With Odyssey, all you have are arrows and javelins which again is an understandable downgrade considering the time period Odyssey takes place.

The notoririty system also makes a return with some changes. You gain notoriety by having your crimes witnessed by someone. As it climbs up, you will eventually have a bounty on your head where mercenaries will hunt you to claim the bounty. I thought this was an interesting factor as you could be in a middle of infiltrating a fort or in a fight and a mercenary could appear to give you a little bit of an extra challenge. I was however disappointed with how witnesses were handled. This is the first Assassin’s Creed game where you can kill civilians without getting a potential game over. Ubisoft had a chance to further expand stopping witnesses to a crime, a mechanic made famous by Red Dead Redemption, just with their own spin, but Ubisoft didn’t seize the opportunity to do so which left me disappointed.

As far as the controversial aspect on how the game feels artificially grindy to pressure players to purchase the XP booster, I didn’t feel pressured at all. When I mentioned this to my wife she brought up the point that the game has many opportunities for you to gain experience. There was an abundance of quests and activities for you to gain experience. For the players that wanted to simply focus on strictly the main story, which is the side that argues that the game felt artificially grindy, my counter argument for that is that Odyssey does not follow the traditional Assassin’s Creed formula to where you can focus on the main story and not worry about side content. This is an RPG and in an RPG, you have to partake in side content to get stronger and gain additional equipment. It was even like that in Origins where you had to partake in side content to get stronger and I didn’t see any accounts of complaining at that moment so I’m a bit confused as to why this seems to be an issue with Odyssey for the community.

I will add that is rather dirty of Ubisoft to include an XP booster and other boosting items in the game that you have to purchase with real money as a way to try to get extra money from players. In the words of Jim Sterling “If you’ve made a game that people want to pay to not play and they want to pay to skip it, you’ve made a shit game.” Although I don’t believe that Odyssey is a “shit game”, it’s actually the most fun I’ve had with an Assassin’s Creed title since Black Flag, it is concerning that these boosters are included and it does make me concerned that Ubisoft could potentially start doing this in not only Assassin’s Creed, but their other franchises as well.

I know that Ubisoft has had purchasable shortcuts for a while now in their games and although they never interfered with the game before, the fact that they are now offering a purchasable shortcut for XP progression is something that could be a potentially dangerous trend in the RPG genre, especially for Triple AAA games. I am concerned about it because there are already reports of people buying this XP booster and saying how much more of an enjoyable experience the game was and one article even called it it’s “best feature”. I fear Ubisoft will keep this in their titles moving forward and it’s also something I feel they’ll slowly inch towards, making XP gains less and less with each passing title.

As a long time Assassin’s Creed fan, this has become my new favorite game in the series. So much so that I actually plan to play the DLC content at a later time because I had that much fun with it. I hope Ubisoft continues to make improvements to the Assassin’s Creed formula and hopefully we can see a return to following an Assassin or even another Templar for that matter.

However, I feel that fans and players do need to keep a closer eye on these purchasable shortcuts as I am afraid that this could get worse overtime to the point where a player would have to purchase one of these boosters to do even the most basic of progressions. Until then, we as players must continue to push back on the “time-savers” and microtransactions to where they affect the core gameplay.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey receives a 4 out of 5

#Assassin's Creed #Assassin's Creed: Odyssey #AC #AC:O #Ubisoft #Alexios #Kassandra #Greece #video games #gaming #video game review #game review #gaming review #biscuit review #xbox one #ps4 #PC #games #polygon

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undi3sss · 6 years

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Undies' Reviews: Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

Oh boy it's that time of year again, it's time for the annual Assassin's Creed game. Except it's not annual, because they skipped a year that one time.

This year in Assassin's Creed: (Insert random fancy word here) "Odyssey" we're taken back to the Peloponnesian War.

This is the first game in the series were we get to chose between two playable characters, Kassandra and the other one. Lets face it does anyone pick the guy?. Though unlike in Syndicate with the Frye siblings, you're stuck with one character all game, so definitely don't pick the not Kassandra one.

Once you start the game up you're greeted by a giant statue of Zeus' penis. You know you're going to climb it, have a giggle, and then tell all your friends. Except you don’t have friends.

So the story is pretty straightforward at first, it revolves around Kassandra trying to find her lost family. If only they had social media to stay in touch back then.

Later on in the game you get to meet the usual token historical real life figures, this time around we get to meet that old guy from Bill and Ted, So Crates.

If you've played AC Origins then you pretty much know what to expect gameplay wise. The changes are really pretty minor, for example instead of the Phylakes walking around trying to kill you, you have mercenaries walking around trying to kill you.

I hear a lot of people saying this game is grindy and that you'll need to do lots of side missions to be able to be a high enough level for the main story. I honestly didn't see this as a problem, I mean who buys a huge open world game just to experience a small fraction of it anyway?.

You'll kinda be like a Crow who sees something shiny and needs to touch it, because in Odyssey the map is full of things to do, so getting XP is pretty easy.

One of the new features in Odyssey is the conquest system. Which lets you have little battles between Sparta and Athens. At first it was pretty fun pretending to be Gerard Butler and screaming "This is Sparta" as you killed off all of the Athens bois, but that soon wears off.

It's been awhile since I've played Origins, but I don't quite remember it being as easy to get legendary gear. They've added some optional cult leader targets to hunt down and kill and every single one gives you legendary gear. Though legendary gear doesn't seem that great, because you get more stat boosts with epic gear. Did they not play Fortnite? everyone knows legendary should be better than epic.

Assassin's Creed games are like my biggest guilty pleasure, they aren't masterpieces, the story never really grabs me that much, and they are usually pretty buggy. Though they always manage to draw me in with their historical settings and gameplay. You always kinda know what to expect when you load the games up and I'm certainly looking forward to more Assassin's Creed games in the future. I imagine Ubisoft are already working on Assassin's Creed: Sunshine, Galaxy, and Bowser's Inside Story.

I rate this game 7 out of 10. Not enough Zeus Penis

#videogames #assassin's creed #review #gamereview #SuperMarioOdyssey #assassin`s creed odyssey

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jared-hirsch · 3 years

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Diaries, Greece

I. Hydra, 2019

It was so unlike her. She kept comparing her hand to the Iranian of our group and would burst out of restaurants with pride when the waiter or waitress asked if they were siblings. He was too short to be her boyfriend but their chemistry wasn’t that far off; so I suppose sibling was the default between this six-foot blonde thing and this five-foot-and-some-negligible-inches boy. I must admit that she was quite dark.

So I sat there and I stared at her and thought how unlike her this whole thing is. We would roast for hours and hours, drifting in and out of sleep but never drifting out of the brutality of the sun upon on our skin. My mother was always terribly afraid that I would do this. I still can’t spend a day in Montauk without thinking of that shiver that would run up my spine as the aerosol hit my back. And the smell. I screamed like a child – I suppose I was a child – and cursed her. Yet here I am; staring at someone who reminds me so much of my mother and wondering why she, or any of us, really, would do this. She took calculated risks. She had a trust fund, I’m sure, but had already started contributing to her retirement the second that she could. I remember the shock with which she broached the fact that I had yet to begin planning for my own and, after convincing me that she must know my social security number – “the last secret between us” – it became quite the open secret between herself, her mother, her mother’s financial institution that creates IRAs and other things of that nature, and myself. I forgot it, actually, and I have the feeling that she knows it by heart like she knows so many things. She’s a genius, really, not necessarily because of some innate ability but rather because of her strive to perfection. Men, her career, backgammon or some novel thing, the coyness with which she asked for that number – it was all perfected.

Yes, so, I’m sitting there and wondering why on Earth she would torch her skin the way she has and considered whether she, or any of us, would do such a thing with age. I supposed we all wouldn’t. I supposed that it was itself a calculated risk, with the vein boost that comes with white clothing upon tanned skin as the ultimate reward. It really was lovely to look around and see everyone in the color of innocence and the long, flowing curtains that adorned our bodies as we sipped the horrible Grecian wine and smoked cigarettes until our throats bothered us. We are to turn dark now, I thought, not later when there’s the children, husbands, wives, mortgages, and all of the inevitable arrangements that will dissolve whatever bonds exist between us. Although sometimes I doubt that I will ever have that sort of life. Our host – Sergei – is an unhappy man that I see so much of myself in. He was a man of New York, of Gstaad, of here, there, and now Rome who graciously lends us his home each year hoping that the aura of youth that inherently accompanies the conversations we share over a joint as the sun rises, or the naked swimming and cliff diving, or the stumbling to the night’s conquest, will remain.

It doesn’t, of course, for Sergei is an unhappy man. You wouldn’t expect it yet the fact remains. He lost his lover to AIDS, succumbing to the disease himself, and spends many frivolous hours reminiscing about it on the Internet to the nameless, and small, mass of people that watch him pour his wealthy heart upon the screen. I feel for him. He loves me, apparently. Keeps asking Isabel’s mother to set us up; a request I would probably entertain if he were a few, or many, years younger. I’m an activist, of sorts, planning to work with gay men and women in the courtroom, a selfish sort-of-thing that I am nonetheless passionate about. Sergei was the first openly gay therapist in Paris, having worked in San Francisco during the epidemic, and translating that experience into the realities of the French. In a certain way, he carved the way. I think that as I sit on his terrace, too; a terrace I have thought of jumping from a number of times. I haven’t and I won’t. Although I do sit here sometimes and think of how lovely it would be to disappear; not to die, but rather to climb that mountain beside me and leave this world behind. I would miss my mother, and Montauk, and all of these people, though. The toilets also don’t flush here and the showers are rather terrible. Third-world, my friends say, as a Jeff Koons designed superyacht docks in the port. Youth.

Katie does not torch her skin, or rather her skin is untorchable. Blonde and blue-eyed, she was a shape-shifter. In a white dress she was youthfully innocent – curtsying it across the dancefloor as she learned to do at debutante balls and Chapin Hall. Black, though, was her true form. She was a New Yorker and she wore the color as a badge of honor – at the opera, at the beach, anything was the appropriate occasion. As we piled off the ferry, we agreed that we wouldn’t smoke this trip. Then we smoked, so we agreed that we wouldn’t smoke during the day. Then we smoked during the day, and we realized that our promises to ourselves and all others didn’t matter much on this sparsely populated island. There were no cars, and something about that meant that there were no worries or responsibilities. Only this. Only all of us staring nervously at one another around a table quite densely populated with aperitifs and ouzo, making predictions about our impending foray into adulthood that we tentively accept as fact.

There’s Campbell – who woke me from my drunken dreams to tell me that Riley was threatening suicide by way of that same terrace from which I considered jumping – and then there’s Riley – who wasn’t threatening suicide but was indeed crying over a bottle of wine that she stole from the fridge of the creperie we found ourselves in after the bar and who wished that Campbell – the boy who woke me up – would treat her better. I sympathized with Riley and made my allegiances clear. She will move to Chicago in a month to trade energy at British Petroleum, after climbing Kilimanjaro, and they will break up, I’m sure. He is moving to Los Angeles to both pursue a graduate degree in some type of engineering and “escape” his perceived shallowness of New York… in Los Angeles. There is Sina, from Boston, the Iranian boy whom Isabel uses as a color-swatch. We had spent time together in Barcelona, though not much, and the only thing I had surmounted by that point was that he was both gay and quiet. I have come to learn that he was quiet because he was slow to accept the first fact that I had come to know and that he was, in fact, quite loud, quite brilliant, and quite funny. He told Isabel of his sordid secret approximately two months ago with the announcement that he was dating someone and that someone’s name was Robbie. I don’t know much about Robbie except that Robbie was enough to allow Sina to accept himself for who he is so I do believe that I would quite like Robbie as well. Sina holds not one, but two degrees from Wharton, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a perfect GPA in each.

And then there’s me. My defining characteristics are my height, my sense of humor, and my knack for the dramatic. I hold a degree in Financial Economics from an Ivy League university – as does everyone I have just described – yet I will shortly be working for a non-profit focused on child welfare. I don’t particularly care for children but I decided that if I truly felt that I couldn’t escape the sin of homosexuality then I could at least adorn my life’s work in morality instead of money. Dramatic, as I said, I’ve managed to become afraid of everything in the past six-or-so-years and have spent the last of those six years overcoming each and every thing one-by-one. That’s what brought me to this small island merely eight months ago and unbeknownst to my friends, it’s what brought me here now. At some point, I decided it would be better to jump from some exotic terrace than to never step foot on one and thus I’ve made it a mission of mine to stray further and further away from home, from comfort, and from the familiar.

We arrived nine days ago. We spent time with Alex, a local fisherman that we have referred to as “Odysseus” since our arrival last year. “Penelope” is a more fitting name given that the gentleman awaits Isabel’s arrival eleven-of-twelve months per year as she, who I have referred to as “Circe”, turns men to swine across the world. Or perhaps they’re already swine. The allusions have become a bit tangled but we perpetuate them to remind everyone that we have read the Odyssey and literary references come natural to people like us. Alex would find us line-dancing and smoking in bars, sharing shots of ouzo or a strange beer-and-liquor concoction with the bartenders, or flirting up something that wasn’t him or Dinos or one of the tens of other island men that knew both us and each other but remained quite anonymous by way of names we could neither remember nor pronounce and steal Circe from her nymphs. We would stumble up our two-hundred-and-thirty stairs cursing his thievery only to wake up, share a freddo cappuccino, and do it all again. The sex, Isabel said, was some of the best. Hours, she would say, hours, and we would all agree that hours feels a bit long and perhaps the mechanics of the whole affair contributed less to her ranking system than did the context within which it occurred. She concurred. He, of course, wasn’t the only man that infiltrated our circle but he did figure the most prominently. Alex would take her spearfishing, intermittently pausing to admire her newly carved figure and seduce her into yet another romp in the moonlight, in some cave or open water, or beach on the mainland that would be distant to the prying eyes of the people of Hydra. Privacy, Alex lamented, was hard to come by on the island. That became clear when people began greeting us. We heard you’re back! they would say, and for whatever reason they rejoiced. Parting gifts in the form of shots or lunch or Prosecco or jewelry – courtesy of Alex’s father – were offered and, of course, taken. Bon voyages! were given and one or two people waved as our ferry pulled away from the port.

Last year was much the same, except it came with the four-day power outage that would see us without phones or plumbing before flying off to Mykonos.

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st33d · 3 years

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All These Worlds Are Yours (Except Europa)

It’s been a while since my last CRPG report and I have played quite a lot of CRPGs in the meantime. I’m going to keep it brief. It’s by no means all the games I played over the past year or so, but it is all the games that are worth playing in some fashion or another.

Yet again I didn’t really bother to get decent screenshots so you’ll have to endure some tangentially related Shutterstock photos.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk

It’s like Etrian Odyssey but made by horny 14 year olds. Monsters take the form of purple-black eyes that move only when you do. Colliding with them triggers a JRPG battle with your team. You must conquer around a dozen or so dungeons to defeat a mysterious evil whilst learning about your protagonist’s horny hubris.

I like how it automatically fills in the in-game map, only drawing tiles you have stepped in. Stairways also connect perfectly on most dungeons, leading to some detective work to solve them. The combat is passable. The story is PG13 with random suggestions of poop and sex without really showing any. It’s… a good game with a lot of simple mechanics that it layers up over time to make something quite complex. I really enjoyed solving the dungeons but it’s such a multilayered ball of weirdness that I hesitate recommending it.

Dragon’s Dogma

It’s like Skyrim but with less items, less map, and decent fights. Like, really decent fights. You can climb on the back of beasts and hack pieces off of them or shoot magic arrows that do a host of cool things. The story is pretty anime - I can’t get into why without some major spoilers. Safe to say that after the first (and honestly entertaining) chunk of the game you get an overlay of falling ash pinned to your screen and the monsters become hit point sponges. That’s around when I stopped playing because it felt like I’d reached “an” ending and the rest was about beating as many dead horses with whatever sticks I could upgrade enough to hit them with. Last time I fired it up I got in an hour long fight with an off-brand beholder that basically respawned all its limbs eight times because of its egregious hit points.

You’re joined by some enthusiastic AI companions called pawns who have no story and just kinda throw themselves at enemies whilst repeating the same phrases over and over. I’m not really sure if they’re a blessing or curse. The game overall is pretty jank with terrible traversal (don’t explore, the quests will send you to every corner of the map anyway - twice). Despite all my complaints it’s a lot of fun - at least until the 1st ending. It’s cheap and I recommend it.

Sky Rogue

It’s like a lot of aircraft dogfight games but a bit random. I’ve played this a bit on single player and it’s alright. However I have played many, many, missions in the 2 player mode with a coworker. It’s just very satisfying doing the whole Top Gun team thing taking on a bunch of enemy planes whilst working on upgrades.

Disco Elysium

It’s like Planescape Torment but without the tedious combat or problematic writer behind it. There’s a video of one of the devs explaining how the dialogue is laid out like Twitter in tabloid format for easy reading. This is revolutionary. I want every computer text game to use this format from now on.

I cannot stress how important it is to enter Disco Elysium unprepared. To have no grasp on just how far you will be allowed to explore, who you will meet, who you will travel with, or what you are expected to do. It is a game about amnesia and becoming someone new - if that is at all possible.

I have two pieces of advice however:

Don’t start with Psyche or Physique stats below 2, they’re both your health and the game will surprise you with damage to either in the most unexpected places.

Do every quest. Explore every nook and cranny. Not knowing is the very essence of the game. You’ll have lost that feeling after the ending.

I don’t need to tell you how good the game is. Just look at most reviews.

Everspace

It’s like Descent (that 1st person spacecraft game on the PSX) but in space and it’s a roguelike. Everspace has you mine, salvage, fight, trade, and quest - but you do it all from the comfort of a spaceship that has responsive controls and interesting weaponry. I had a lot of fun skulking round wrecks to salvage parts whilst avoiding patrols of hostiles until I had enough kit to take them on.

It has a substandard storyline but great meta-progression, asking you to grind cash from each run to unlock parts for a better ship on the next. I put in a great deal of hours into this game and I’m looking forward to what the studio does with the sequel.

Horizon Zero Dawn

It’s like Shadow of Mordor but good. My only major complaint was how constant use of the bow had the camera staying uncomfortably close to Aloy’s arse and burying itself in grass during frenetic combat. When the camera wasn’t trying to kill me the combat was astoundingly good. You fight lumbering robo-dinosaurs with special weak spots and various attacks. The quests are also good with a surprising amount of cutscenes and dialogue for a lot of completely optional content.

I was also amazed at how they managed to pull off an almost believable backstory for a world full of robot dinosaurs. Despite some frustrating combat encounters I had a good time exploring its large and very pretty world.

Pathfinder Kingmaker

It’s like Baldurs Gate but not as good. Only on my 3rd attempt at playing the game with the newly patched in turn based mechanics did it start to make sense. It uses Pathfinder’s rules which are deep and tactical - as tactical rules go they’re pretty good. However when those rules fly by at real time speed you don’t learn how opportunity attacks work (they’re more complex than modern D&D) or how to utilise charge and positioning.

The story is pretty forgettable and the encounter design is relentlessly dull. A lot of areas are just simply fight after fight after fight. In turn based mode the fights are pretty good but too many of them are identical. The ones that weren’t I found inscrutable and impossible to pass. If you like min-max fighting and little else then have at it - but I warn you that the UI is lagging behind most popular CRPGs. You can’t even check the world map whilst in a town.

Metal Gear Solid V

It’s like an RPG. Despite not having a main character with stats, in this open world game of hide and seek you kidnap soldiers who in turn become your stats. Through them you gain access to new abilities. Through them you are drip-fed the resources you steal, only becoming able to spend all that you’ve stolen by having enough accountants to do your taxes. It is a brilliant work of roleplaying economics and a thoroughly enjoyable open world game. One where I can completely ruin a mission yet chuckle at my attempts to save what’s left of my dignity.

It also fails to stick the landing. At around the 20th mission the game starts committing to its plot and the rot sets in. Bit by bit it becomes worse to play. There was trouble at Konami when the game was made and it feels like the end of the game was hit the hardest. This was the part that was tested the least and had the worst ideas thrown into it. Metal Gear Solid V is still worth it for the 1st half of the game.

Final Fantasy 8

It’s like the other Final Fantasy games but poorly paced and balanced. The junction system is incredibly interesting in that it tries to sidestep the whole issue of items by gluing your characters to guardian angels. It’s built in card game Triple Triad is simple and engaging. The story is kinda interesting with some time travel shenanigans going on...

But it’s pacing is dreadful with endlessly copypasted rooms. The magic draw system is miserable (and yes I know you can get GFs to convert items to magic but then it’s more tedious busy work to upscale all the magic into something work attaching). The world map is shockingly empty. And the characters are just yawn, yawn, yawn.

Pick it up on sale.

Torchlight 2

It’s like Diablo 2 but not quite as good. Still worth playing though. I got it on the Switch and found that playing it with a gamepad was a pleasant experience.

It has a few balance problems with the Engineer class being ridiculously overpowered compared to any of the others (and way more fun). And there’s some annoying bugs that prompted a few reloads. Still pretty entertaining however.

Pokemon Shield

It’s like every other Pokemon game (surprise surprise) but easier. As much as I like how they’ve removed a lot of busywork from this entry, it makes it feel like the only challenge in the previous titles was the busywork. When really it was the busywork that held you back from just kerb-stomping everything in your path.

It’s not until the final DLC that you’re given some pokemon that are needlessly tedious to catch and some group battles using randomly selected pokemon that test your knowledge of the game’s systems. The only real challenge in the game is in the online multiplayer against humans where your pokemon level is normalised and encyclopedic knowledge of the title’s history is required.

My internet is terrible so the online gameplay is dead to me. It’s a very fun game, but also a very disappointing one.

Burnout Paradise

It’s like a sandbox game for cars. Except that you’re not really driving a car, it’s more like you’re driving a bobsleigh with a rocket attached to it. Unlike most driving games you aren’t given terrain that slows you down. Even if you hit a wall you’ll skate off it so long as you collide sideways. The game just wants you to drive like an arsehole and go faster and faster - to the tune of Epic by Faith No More (literally).

I mean yeah, it’s not an RPG by any stretch but it’s one of the best sandbox games I’ve played. Even when you’re not doing a “mission” you can just drive around the city finding back alleys and ramps to fly off of. It’s just a massive playground with very little negative feedback.

Cyberpunk 2077

It’s like a bunch of different games you’ve played before but not quite as good. The story is the best bit. I really liked the characters I got to hang out with. I guess I would have enjoyed the gun fights if I hadn’t been playing Doom 1 before I played it. And I would have enjoyed the stealth if I hadn’t already played Metal Gear Solid V with its superior A.I. It has cool Obra Dinn style brain movies to explore for detective work but I enjoyed the spectacle of them more than the execution (though I did enjoy them more than Obra Dinn which I found tedious to navigate or understand).

I saw one review say it was the most backwards view of the future. Not imagining what could be but endlessly paying homage to cyberpunk stories of the past.

I see other reviews say play it when it’s fixed. When the myriad of bugs (and I experienced enough to impact gameplay) are solved.

I say play the sequel. It’s worth experiencing but there’s too much going on that’s playing catch up to other titles.

Shiren The Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate

It’s like Rogue. I first played Shiren 2 on the Nintendo DS and was amazed by its deep systems and story meta progression - various tales progressing in the game only after each death and subsequent replay.

This entry is technically Shiren 5. Holy shit the content in this thing. There are 15 optional dungeons with different rules. Over a hundred block pushing puzzles using various mechanics of the game that you can just walk up and play in the 2nd village you enter. A minesweeper minigame. Loads of tutorial levels. All of these give you rewards which you can take on your main adventure which is a wholly different set of dungeons. I’ve unlocked several companions to adventure with and the game is hinting there are even more later on. It is obscene the amount of value there is packed into this title. And it’s fun. A little unfair at times, but as with all roguelikes the later depths require knowledge and a lot of caution. Strong recommendation for roguelikers.

Dicey Dungeons

It’s like Dream Quest but with dice. I played the prototype of this at the 7DRL after party. Terry was quite bashful about his creation and didn’t want to submit it. I honestly didn’t see why he shouldn’t as many of us had made far worse in the past.

I put off playing this until it finally landed on the Switch as complete as any roguelike can hope to be. It’s quite different to Dream Quest in that it requires a bit of math to do well in. If you’re not prepared to do basic sums then it’s hard to make progress. Also unlike Dream Quest it’s very balanced. There’s definitely some cheesy tactics you can pull off to get cheap victories but not without some thought and planning.

In a sea of deck building roguelikes, Dicey Dungeons is quite simply refreshing. There’s a lot of good ideas in here you won’t see elsewhere - give it a go.

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okimargarvez · 7 years

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KISS THEORY

Original title: Kiss theory.

Prompt: bad day, test a theory.

Warning: none.

Genre: comedy, romantic.

Characters: Luke Alvez, Penelope Garcia.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: oneshot 10 in Garvez collection.

Legend: 💏😘.

Song mentioned: Di più, Tiziano Ferro. This story is dedicated to my kore @talesoffairies & my mentor @theshamelessmanatee and to all those who have had a bad day, especially commuters (like me, for a while 😁)

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

KISS THEORY

She was always repeated it: never get up with the crooked moon, with a head full of negative thoughts. You end up making true your predictions.

Indeed, that's exactly how it goes. At her defense Penelope claims to have been agitated only after having, fortunately, looked at the alarm clock and realized that the betrayer had not deigned to play at the right time. So, she should prepare herself twice as fast, and of course, as usual in such circumstances, there were a thousand other small problems that had aggravated the delay. The shoe hinge had broken, and she had to pick another pair. The jar of her face cream had escaped her hands and had fallen on the floor, shattering in a thousand pieces of glass; a splinter had scratched her calf. It had also been necessary to disinfect the cut.

Yet she should have imagined it. For once, one time who she wasn't in her house spending the weekend out of town, everything had to go wrong. She had been almost astonished when the door knob had not stayed in her hand, blocking her until the arrival of a housekeeper, in the hotel room she had stayed to sleep.

As she walked toward the railway station, she was almost convinced that the worst was over. It was enough to send a message to Emily and warn her that she would arrive late, but she would come anyway. It was not the first time she was not timely, but today she was two hours late. In any case, she had his own laptop, which could be connected to computers in her cave bat. Had it been indispensable, she would have been able to do her job in any circumstance.

You could see that she didn't take a train from a lifetime. The first thing she had noticed was a series of yellow writing, an annoying light for her tired eyes, a series of signals pointing to arrivals and departures, destinations, stops and delays, obviously. She had tried to search her own train, at first failing to find it. Luckily, she had bought one of those universal tickets, that is, not with a set fixed time. The first convoy that stopped in Washington would arrive after ten minutes. She was even able to smile as she headed toward the platform. This before were spent much more than ten minutes, feeling the cold air penetrating into every fiber of her body and slowly, freeze like Jack by Shining. Not even a single announcement, a warning, something to inform the poor on the trackside. Most, old and young, were bend over their phones. She didn't want to type, increasing the headache that in the meantime had formed. So, she had just waited, waited and still waited ...

Then the train had finally arrived. Many people weren't get off, but she had been able to check the total lack of seats in the class she could occupy with her ticket. Just when she was about to climb, she had remembered to not obliterate it. Cursing herself she had miraculously succeeded in stamping it, thanks to the same number of commuters that were still coming on board. The she was feeling lucky. But it was a long and standing trip, crushed like a sardine, warm, sweaty but still able to feel the cold along her legs, she had found a way to change her mind.

Not being able to do anything she was even more nervous and, so it ended with falling into professional deformation. She had listened to all the stories of her neighbor and had inevitably given a judgment. And most had been negative comments. There was so much carelessness, ignorance happily accepted, indifference, phrases that did not want to say anything, mania of protagonism, fullness of self, boasting of their own knowledge just to undermine others. So much so that she had tried to close everything out, not to hear anything because she wanted to believe it, that the world was better than this horrible vision. However, the headphones could not be reached unless she had wrench her wrist or some other part of her body, in a sad imitation of a circus contortionist.

Penelope then resigned. She had begun to count the number of stations missing and how long it took before reaching the goal. She had notice of one thing: his life was nothing but a scanning, a succession of tasks to be performed, inputs that pressed on his brain, spinning to prevail over each other. She had spent much more time than she had ever noticed thinking "Still little, and this too will be over," practically without being allowed a break between a "still a bit" and another "still a bit".

Wake up, dress up, makeup, take the car or the subway; careful to close the door well, do not forget the keys in the lock, not leave no light on, prepare a part of the clothes for tomorrow. And then go to work, come in, open the door, be careful that there won't be no one behind you to whom can end up in the face, clean your shoes on the doormat at the entrance if it's raining, prepare your hands in anticipation of the blow if the one in front of you doesn't care about your presence. Walk to the elevator, understand instantly if it has already been called by someone, otherwise you press the button. Wait for the doors to open, come aboard (please don't let me be ending as those of Profondo rosso), you still anxiously fearing that arrive somebody who wants to enter, no one: parts; someone: ask what floor to go. Arrivals to yours, get down (again the same prayer), safe. Open the door (repeat as above), look to the right and left as if you should cross a busy street. One step after another, no, yet one; goal. Type the code, don't make mistake otherwise you'll cause a total block, too much responsibility, too much pressure ... (I'll have a heart attack sooner or later, soon, very soon). Put your hand on the handle, push it down, open (do not need to repeat as above), you survived even today. Give yourself a sigh. Okay, just don't overdo it. Now turn on the system, before press this button, yes, then that other, good; resonate your magic harmony. Well, now you can even take a look at your socials, are there any news? It would have been better if you didn't. However, there is no time to reproach yourself, beep, a case has come. How's? Bad as it should be? Prepare all the material, send it to the team's tablet, be careful, I recommend, that's right, not repeat the mistake made with Hotch that day. Do not give anyone a chance to tripping you up, continue to pretend that it's not important that no one person ever valorizes what you do. You do not have to do that for that, you do not have to do that for that. Did you send them the data? No!? What do you expect, hurry up! ... now (oh no, I have to go to the bathroom, what to choose? Duty or pleasure, have to ... Pleasure ... it's not a pleasure but a human need. I'm human? I was thinking of I was changed into one of my computers, by dint of live surrounded by them). Done. Message. Open (don't delete), read. Meeting. Now. Breathe, slowly, like that. You did everything (but I need to go to the bathroom ... can wait). Explain. Listen. Reply.

Look at the people you love and convince yourself that might not be the last time you see one of them. Shut up in your bunker and make dance those fingers. A stop, first, at the bathroom. All done. Let's run. No call lost, fortunately. They expect you to stay always available, as Luke once said, joking with you.

Luke. Think about that name had forced her to go out of her thoughts abruptly. A second before losing the train stop and risking even to catch in a fine.

Penelope's odyssey was not over yet. Itaca was still very far away. She had to take a tram. As far as she was concerned, she couldn't remember the last time that she had taken one of them. But she had able to restore her usual smile. Especially because at least it wasn't raining. What she should have said is "was not yet raining". Because shortly thereafter it was unleashed a cloudburst full-scale; a car had wet her completely, rather that slow down to pass with red yellow; finally, she had taken the wrong tram, or rather the one indicated on the map he had consulted, but that from that day it diverted the course and wouldn't stopped near the Bureau. She had understood it a little too late, she had to take the same tram in the opposite direction, then walk a piece of road to the right tram.

And she had immediately noticed the man in the driver's seat: auburn, muscular, vaguely South American air, mustache and beard hinted that much that was enough, probably high. She had been forced to look at him, because she had to ask him to confirm that this time he was directing for the FBI. And so, she had heard his voice, velvety, soft, in a word intoxicating. And she had also seen a photograph in the lower right corner of the glass; a little dog. Curse! - Sure, Miss, we'll arrive there in ten minutes.- he was even polite and his smile ... remind me of Luke's. No, I didn't think about it seriously. Instead, she did. But she hadn't dreamed about it: the photo was there (of the dog), there was some physical resemblance to the newbie as well; even kindness, despite would cost to her admit it, was making them similar.

During the actual ten minutes, the effect of the handsome tram driver had vanished: pushy and shove, crunching feet, backpacks in the face had brought Penelope back to her morning's mood. She was even forgetting to come down to give him a last glance.

The last steps and finally she comes to the very tall building where she has been working for more than ten years. In this small bit on foot, she revisited all the disadvantages experienced up to here. She touches the Itaca shore with a sigh. She gets aboard the elevator stay alone until the arrive to her floor. True, she has an hour and a half late, but she absolutely must go to the bathroom. And it goes without saying that a further obstacle is waiting for her on the way, however beautiful he is to be looked at, him is still an impediment between her and the cozier cabinet.

She pretends not to see him, but the attempt goes blank. -Garcia!- caught. -What happened? Are you okay?- she raises her eyes to plant them in man's, literally, she hopes to pierce him with her gaze. She doesn't care that he seems really worried about. She must reach the bathroom and then the rest of the team! Why do not he get out of the way?

-No, I'm not okay!- she answers, feeling close to exploding. -And before you can say it, no, I don't want to do anything funny or to smile and pretend that everything is OK! Because isn't it okay, okay?- damn those salty drops that press to the side of her eyes. No, crying wasn't in the list of things to do today. -I'm tired, I'm cold, I've ruined my shoes in the way of walking here and there and the only good thing is that with all the miles I've been doing and the stress I have lost some weight, at least 5 pounds!- she leaves no time him to touch the thought of opening mouth and replicating something. -Don't say anything, don't dare!- Luke nods and looks almost scared. -The alarm clock wasn't ringing, the train was late- she starts to enumerate -yes, I took the train, why, I can't?- even this time is denied at him the opportunity to defend himself. He didn't say anything, she is inventing comments, perhaps thinking of reading his mind, but she has calibrated bad the crystal ball. -I wasn't in my house.- she feels obliged to say; in Luke's eyes pass shadows. -Twenty-five minutes late waiting on the platform! But if we were in Japan...- she loses the thread of speech - they are always punctual and love cats. I love cats. But even the dogs.- she probably adds it only for Roxy, not certainly to not hurt him. -All the animals ...- the man grins, and then she tries to recover. - ... and then ... Then when I took the train, I couldn't sit down! And it was cold there too!- she continues to complain. The words overlap each other, and Luke decides to focus only on the movement of her lips. -I don't understand how it's possible, indeed, yes that I understand it: they shoot the outside air inside, so in the summer they are always an oven and in winter only the penguins are missing ... Zaira told me this ...- she's new going out of the way. -And the tram, I had to take a damned tram too - what she doesn't tell him is that the tram's driver was not bad at all and that she had remembered Luke while she looks at him. -Full, with young sitting and older men standing! And the speeches ... both there and on the train ...- she shakes her head, trying to shake off those phrases she can't get out of her ears. -No, no.- she finally pauses, and Luke thinks he can say something. He thinks bad. -I want to believe that the world is better than that- she restarts even more quick and puts an almost theatrical emphasis (JJ told him once Garcia occasionally recited with a therapy theatrical company) -a nice place full of gentle, wonderful people ...- she's staring too intensely him. Demonstrate to Alvez that him is not indifferent for you, isn't even in the list. -I can't do it, I can't do it, in days like this!- the tears are always there, lurking, waiting for the right time to get noticed. -They were also doing jobs for which they changed all tram's stops, and of course there was not even a warning. Nothing ... and I ... I just wanted to go to the bathroom, maybe take a cup of tea before I had to study yet another horrible case ... and instead I had to meet you!- she accuses him, pointing her glazed finger against him.

-I just asked you how you were ...- the man raises his hands, in a gesture of rendition that isn't the first time he is forced to do in front of her. But he fails, or perhaps doesn't want, to completely conceal a happy smirk. She immediately notices it.

-Well, are you satisfied with my answer?- she asks. -I can also add more details, for example that I have also been hurt with the cream jar, I can ... - the ramble is gently interrupted or rather it goes off on the lips of the SSA Alvez, who thus captures two birds with one stone. She takes a lot more time to understand what's going on than to answer the kiss. Her body reacts automatically, almost as he had typed the right sequence. For the first time since she woke up, indeed, for the first time she didn't know how much time, Penelope has cleared head, not flashing none square like in The Sims, to warn that something is going on and so many other tasks await their time. She abandons herself to the mere sensations: his taste, he had certainly taken a cappuccino for breakfast; the softness of his mouth and the roughness, magic contrast, of his beard on her skin; the heat transmitted by his hands, wrapped around her side of the head and her neck; the symphony of their breathing, wheezing as they tried to find the way to breathe without being forced to separate. The view is the only sense she doesn't use, because she doesn't need to see him to know he's there, it's kissing her and he's always wonderful.

Unfortunately, in the end, they're forced out of the state of apnea. Slowly she lifts her eyelids and scrutinizes him. Luke's mouth is swollen now, molded by their effusion; will she also be her tanned in the same way? It's just after she falls in shock: did I really get snog with Luke? She would like to ask him why, if it's a joke, if he went mad ... she would want to say so many of those things, but she can't. She used too many words before and now she has finished the characters available. -You're better now?- he can only take advantage of the prime opportunity. His tone is sweet with some joking. Penelope nods, looking at him as if she faced a god, as she always looked at Morgan. -And now, you still cold?- one of his hands didn't abandon the contact with the female body and now patters her shoulder.

-No ...- she replies sincerely, but then she changes her expression and with it an idea as well. -Yes.- Luke doesn't put much time to understand why. He takes her face in his hands and crushes his mouths again with hers. This time the kiss becomes fierier, as if they were following a hierarchy of levels that are forced to pass in order to access the next one. Neither of them care at all to being in a federal office, where things like this are not seen every day, indeed, and it is also forbidden to "fraternize" too much with coworkers.

-And now?- he asks, with his forehead resting on hers.

-A little less ...- her voice sounds like those of a minx little girl. She still wants him, she's not satisfied. He asks to himself if he'll ever be; he, of course, no. They remain staring at each other, breaking out in turn at laugh. -Then?- Penelope says, breaking the silence.

-Then what?- she decides to give up. She has completely forgotten the reason she's in front of this white door with a toilet paper and the symbol of two humane stick figures.

-Nothing.- typical woman response.

-Penelope ... - he warns her both with the tone and with the look.

-Ok- she doesn't take much to surrender. -Why.- she exclaims without using a question mark.

-Why what?- Luke continues to look too naïve.

-Why you kissed me.- how can she says it, she doesn't even know. -Well, it was nice- she corrects instantly -stratospheric, wonderful, but ...- but she wants more and Luke is ready to give her that exact this. All he can.

-You want everything, including a statement.- he laughs, but then back serious. The woman nods, he immediately catches her hands with his. -I kissed you because you were nervous, agitated, and depressed.- he begins, noticing how Penelope's hopeful and dreaming expression waver, leaving room for the sadness. And those tears are still standing there, looking out, not throwing them down. -I kissed you because I wanted to do it since a lot of time, at least from your first met with Roxy.- already far better. Blonde's cheeks regain color and even her heart start to beat. -I kissed you not because I liked you- even negative -but because I'm cooked, in love, about you.- he spells good every single word catching up. -And last but not least ... I kissed you because I wanted to test a theory.- she frowns, not understanding what he wants to suggest. -Did you know that to make a simple expression, a smile or a weeping, we using a lot of muscles?- it's still not clear what he's getting at. -Somewhere I've read that a simple gesture like a smile, if done by the right person, or a kiss, is able to straighten up a bad day.- Penelope finally understands.

-So ... - she's got a moment of embarrassment, but then she comes back resolute. -Did you know that to test the correctness of a hypothesis, the tests have to be repeated several times?- Luke responds with a malicious grimace, one of his classic reactions when he's close to her.

-Oh yes? How many times?- she approaches him.

-I don't know ... a lot ...- she shrugs. Both of them reduce the distance and resume the effusion where it was interrupted, this time even more intensely, decisively in more intense ways, as if they had levels to be overcome to access the next stage, the mandatory steps to be crossed. - Maybe it would be better ... to change the location ...- she can say between a breath kiss and the other.

-Or we can continue the experiment later, maybe tonight, when the case is resolved ... - man's words bring her back to earth.

-Yes, the case! I'm astronomical late.- he takes her by the hand, combining their fingers, and he tries to walk in the direction of the meeting room. But after a few steps Penelope stops. -You go ahead. I have to do something.- and in front of his stunned gaze she enter in the toilet.

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#garvez #penelope garcia #luke alvez #garcia x alvez #luke x penelope #bad day

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