Vampire: Bloodlines part 5: EXPLOSIONS
Dec. 2nd, 2013 02:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlLast time, Ashe dueled the scout of an invasion force, fought a deadly spirit from inside a painting, and put an end to a tale of two sisters.
And you know... did she back the RIGHT sister? Yes, Therese Voerman SEEMED like a bigger threat in the grip of the moment, but in retrospect... while she was professional and seemed well-prepared, very few of her schemes actually seemed to work out. Whereas Jeanette, while she seemed like a lesser threat at the time, actually has a very GOOD record for successful manipulation and schemes. Did Ashe unthinkingly walk into a second trap? One thing's for sure, Jeanette is going to need to be kept at "friendly" status or Bad Things could happen.
I genuinely don't know, because we're bumping up against the limits of my previous playthrough knowledge. Beyond this point I have no idea what's coming. Isn't that exciting? We will discover it together.
So our next step is heading out to see Tung. As it turns out, he's been hiding out in a big rusted-out fuel tank the whole time. Before we go talk to him though... All right, this is embarrassing. I wandered back to the apartment to check for any new email on Ashe's PC. You may recall that across from her apartment is one we were hired to investigate by Bail Bond Guy. It's locked tight, and Ashe is of a melee-and-domination skill bent, so we couldn't actually get in there.
As Ashe left her apartment (no new email, by the way) I happened to glance to one side, towards a potted plant at the end of that hallway. Wait up, hang about -- Why does this plant have the "pick up an item" icon on my HUD? So I leaned in more, and I CANNOT BELIEVE I didn't spot the old "hide a spare key in the potted plant" trick before this point. So, into that apartment we go!
Inside, we rustle around the... very sparse, obviously-abandoned apartment and find a skill book on Being A Peeper. Ew, kind of abhorent, but that's a free point in Stealth. Speaking of points, I study my skills and add a point of Perception and a point of Firearms. There, that's our Ranged up to 5, so we can actually USE that shotgun if need be. Gonna need more ammo for it, though. While our cheap knockoff katana is still our primary damage dealer, nobody ever stopped in the middle of a fight to go "Man I wish I DIDN'T HAVE the option to launch this aggressive misanthrope across the room with one pull of a trigger!"
Incidentally: The XP system works like this -- You get experience points. (I had 12.) Each new rank of a power or trait or whatnot costs XP to buy, on a rising scale. (For example, buying up to three dots of Perception was 8 XP points. Buying a fourth would cost 12 more.) I just thought I'd spell that out, for those of you wondering what I'm doing here when I talk about "adding points" and such.
Ashe's character sheet at the moment looks like this. I'm thinking our next point goes into Strength, since that's a little lagging at the moment and I want a melee skill high enough to keep on the ... ah, cutting edge ... of new weapons.
Anyway! The OTHER thing in this apartment, aside from a lecture on the XP system, is an answering machine. "Muddy", my target, has left a message for his girlfriend (the one who hastily moved out) to let her know that he'll be "downtown", in Skyline Towers "loft" 2A. I file this away for when I inevitably head to whatever hub level connects to/contains "downtown". For this info, Bail Bond Guy gives Ashe a fistful of cash. Mmm, $150.
With that out of the way, it's time for Tung. Seems like he's on a vacant lot, hiding inside a rusty metal tank that was probably for fuel or something. He has all the essentials of life in there: Two mattresses, a lamp, and a 386 PC. He fills Ashe in on the scoop: There's some Sabbat in the warehouse, but MOSTLY humans who the Sabbat have told will be joining them soon. So, if we have to kill a bunch of people, just think of it as upholding the masquerade.
That warehouse needs to go, though, so Ashe will have to slip in, plant the bomb and get back out. Tung appears highly amused when Ashe mentions asking him for more details "after the mission", like he's pretty sure that any kind of post-mission dialog with her would be in the form of funeral rites.
Off we go. That one dot of stealth we got from the skill book proves useful right away in enabling some sneaky action. Ashe does this mission commando-style ... no, not "without underwear". And not "like Lightning" either. She just stays hidden until she can't anymore, and then it's SWORDS FOR EVERYBODY. There's only a couple of bodies on the floor as she makes her way up into the rafters of the train station and skirts across, bypassing a large chunk of what could be a very messy situation.
It's only after hopping out of the rafters and onto a catwalk that the swordfights start in earnest, and for Ashe, bringing a cheap knockoff katana to a gunfight works pretty well actually, in part because it's hard to shoot at someone who has just flung you across the room with a sword-swipe, and in part because it's hard to shoot at someone when you have an irresistable and incredibly stupid urge to fall asleep in front of them.
So getting in to plant the bomb, that's the easy part. It's the part where Ashe makes her daring escape that turns out to be a Problem. For one, we've armed a bomb that has -three minutes- on the timer. For two, as Ashe rushes down the back stairs towards a mostly-unguarded door, a Sabbat vampire busts through it and smacks her one. This does Aggravated damage. Aggrravated damage is a special kind of damage that FLARKING HURTS and takes a LONG, LONG time to heal naturally. This is bad, and there's another Sabbat not far behind him. It's a tense situation as Ashe races the clock, trying to lay out enough damage to kill them without carelessly sidestepping into their claws herself and taking too much hard-to-heal damage. With a minute thirty on the clock she's free to race for a safe distance. At 5 seconds on the clock, she makes it out before things asplode.
Well, that was cinematic. Across the tops of the train cars nearby a wolf runs towards me, before transforming into a vampire wearing sunglasses. (The game keeps wanting me to ask him if he's a werewolf. Yeah no. I've read Dracula, I've played Symphony of the Night, I know that "wolf transformation" is in the Vampire Toolbox.) He introduces himself as Beckett and asks if anything weird has happened around me lately.
My penchant for dry sarcasm has Ashe replying "Why no, nothing at all." almost before he's done talking.
Unfortunately Beckett doesn't appear to grasp sarcasm. Well, if anything strange DOES happen, I should get in touch with him. Or maybe we'll never meet again. Hard to say. Once he's done Crypticing at me (another way I can tell he's a vampire instead of a werewolf), the game sends me back to Tung. We chat for a while, about Beckett (he's a historian/scholar, unearthing vampire lore), about Knox ("No, you didn't 'kill an asian vampire stalking my ghoul', you 'helped me remove a spy without me having to leave my lair'." Well played, Tung.) and then about the Prince, who is gonna want to see me downtown. Sure enough, there's a taxi waiting in front of Ashe's apartment.
As Ashe gets out of the taxi Downtown, she's clonked across the back of the head by a Sabbat with a baseball bat. She comes to a while later, to the sound of them discussing whether they should pull her eyes and teeth out or just leave her pinned to an east-facing wall to say good morning to Mister Sun. They decide on the "pull her apart" route, and one of them turns around to inform the ... player camera that "those in the first few rows WILL get wet". You get back behind the fourth wall right the fuck now, dude. Happily one of them is shot in the head by a guy calling himself "Nines", the dude who spoke up to call bullshit back at the impromptu court at the start of the game. He saves Ashe by brandishing a hand grenade, then tells her to meet him later for "the real story".
Sure, I got nothing better to OH HELL THE PRINCE. I gotta report to him. His base of operations is the "Venture Tower". ... ahahaha get it because it's like Ventrue Tower and he's a vampire sigh okay. On up we go. The Prince is pleased to see Ashe, which is... unusual. Still, he admires her discipline. She reminds him of his time in Napoleon's army. He wants her to look into the Elizabeth Dane, that creepy ship that arrived in port with no one aboard. Three things: There's a sarcophagus aboard. Secure it, but don't open it. Also, check out the passenger list. And don't slaughter an entire ship full of police officers, that's BAD.
Aheh... mmh. Well. That might be... difficult. And then there's Nines Rodriguez. "Give the Anarch community my regards." LaCroix waves, and with that we're dismissed. Interesting. One side of this relationship is taking things FAR more seriously than the other. On the other hand, it'd be real easy for the Prince to punch down, but punching up from Nine's position would take a lot of leverage.
Next time, we'll go see what Nines has to say.
And you know... did she back the RIGHT sister? Yes, Therese Voerman SEEMED like a bigger threat in the grip of the moment, but in retrospect... while she was professional and seemed well-prepared, very few of her schemes actually seemed to work out. Whereas Jeanette, while she seemed like a lesser threat at the time, actually has a very GOOD record for successful manipulation and schemes. Did Ashe unthinkingly walk into a second trap? One thing's for sure, Jeanette is going to need to be kept at "friendly" status or Bad Things could happen.
I genuinely don't know, because we're bumping up against the limits of my previous playthrough knowledge. Beyond this point I have no idea what's coming. Isn't that exciting? We will discover it together.
So our next step is heading out to see Tung. As it turns out, he's been hiding out in a big rusted-out fuel tank the whole time. Before we go talk to him though... All right, this is embarrassing. I wandered back to the apartment to check for any new email on Ashe's PC. You may recall that across from her apartment is one we were hired to investigate by Bail Bond Guy. It's locked tight, and Ashe is of a melee-and-domination skill bent, so we couldn't actually get in there.
As Ashe left her apartment (no new email, by the way) I happened to glance to one side, towards a potted plant at the end of that hallway. Wait up, hang about -- Why does this plant have the "pick up an item" icon on my HUD? So I leaned in more, and I CANNOT BELIEVE I didn't spot the old "hide a spare key in the potted plant" trick before this point. So, into that apartment we go!
Inside, we rustle around the... very sparse, obviously-abandoned apartment and find a skill book on Being A Peeper. Ew, kind of abhorent, but that's a free point in Stealth. Speaking of points, I study my skills and add a point of Perception and a point of Firearms. There, that's our Ranged up to 5, so we can actually USE that shotgun if need be. Gonna need more ammo for it, though. While our cheap knockoff katana is still our primary damage dealer, nobody ever stopped in the middle of a fight to go "Man I wish I DIDN'T HAVE the option to launch this aggressive misanthrope across the room with one pull of a trigger!"
Incidentally: The XP system works like this -- You get experience points. (I had 12.) Each new rank of a power or trait or whatnot costs XP to buy, on a rising scale. (For example, buying up to three dots of Perception was 8 XP points. Buying a fourth would cost 12 more.) I just thought I'd spell that out, for those of you wondering what I'm doing here when I talk about "adding points" and such.
Ashe's character sheet at the moment looks like this. I'm thinking our next point goes into Strength, since that's a little lagging at the moment and I want a melee skill high enough to keep on the ... ah, cutting edge ... of new weapons.
Anyway! The OTHER thing in this apartment, aside from a lecture on the XP system, is an answering machine. "Muddy", my target, has left a message for his girlfriend (the one who hastily moved out) to let her know that he'll be "downtown", in Skyline Towers "loft" 2A. I file this away for when I inevitably head to whatever hub level connects to/contains "downtown". For this info, Bail Bond Guy gives Ashe a fistful of cash. Mmm, $150.
With that out of the way, it's time for Tung. Seems like he's on a vacant lot, hiding inside a rusty metal tank that was probably for fuel or something. He has all the essentials of life in there: Two mattresses, a lamp, and a 386 PC. He fills Ashe in on the scoop: There's some Sabbat in the warehouse, but MOSTLY humans who the Sabbat have told will be joining them soon. So, if we have to kill a bunch of people, just think of it as upholding the masquerade.
That warehouse needs to go, though, so Ashe will have to slip in, plant the bomb and get back out. Tung appears highly amused when Ashe mentions asking him for more details "after the mission", like he's pretty sure that any kind of post-mission dialog with her would be in the form of funeral rites.
Off we go. That one dot of stealth we got from the skill book proves useful right away in enabling some sneaky action. Ashe does this mission commando-style ... no, not "without underwear". And not "like Lightning" either. She just stays hidden until she can't anymore, and then it's SWORDS FOR EVERYBODY. There's only a couple of bodies on the floor as she makes her way up into the rafters of the train station and skirts across, bypassing a large chunk of what could be a very messy situation.
It's only after hopping out of the rafters and onto a catwalk that the swordfights start in earnest, and for Ashe, bringing a cheap knockoff katana to a gunfight works pretty well actually, in part because it's hard to shoot at someone who has just flung you across the room with a sword-swipe, and in part because it's hard to shoot at someone when you have an irresistable and incredibly stupid urge to fall asleep in front of them.
So getting in to plant the bomb, that's the easy part. It's the part where Ashe makes her daring escape that turns out to be a Problem. For one, we've armed a bomb that has -three minutes- on the timer. For two, as Ashe rushes down the back stairs towards a mostly-unguarded door, a Sabbat vampire busts through it and smacks her one. This does Aggravated damage. Aggrravated damage is a special kind of damage that FLARKING HURTS and takes a LONG, LONG time to heal naturally. This is bad, and there's another Sabbat not far behind him. It's a tense situation as Ashe races the clock, trying to lay out enough damage to kill them without carelessly sidestepping into their claws herself and taking too much hard-to-heal damage. With a minute thirty on the clock she's free to race for a safe distance. At 5 seconds on the clock, she makes it out before things asplode.
Well, that was cinematic. Across the tops of the train cars nearby a wolf runs towards me, before transforming into a vampire wearing sunglasses. (The game keeps wanting me to ask him if he's a werewolf. Yeah no. I've read Dracula, I've played Symphony of the Night, I know that "wolf transformation" is in the Vampire Toolbox.) He introduces himself as Beckett and asks if anything weird has happened around me lately.
My penchant for dry sarcasm has Ashe replying "Why no, nothing at all." almost before he's done talking.
Unfortunately Beckett doesn't appear to grasp sarcasm. Well, if anything strange DOES happen, I should get in touch with him. Or maybe we'll never meet again. Hard to say. Once he's done Crypticing at me (another way I can tell he's a vampire instead of a werewolf), the game sends me back to Tung. We chat for a while, about Beckett (he's a historian/scholar, unearthing vampire lore), about Knox ("No, you didn't 'kill an asian vampire stalking my ghoul', you 'helped me remove a spy without me having to leave my lair'." Well played, Tung.) and then about the Prince, who is gonna want to see me downtown. Sure enough, there's a taxi waiting in front of Ashe's apartment.
As Ashe gets out of the taxi Downtown, she's clonked across the back of the head by a Sabbat with a baseball bat. She comes to a while later, to the sound of them discussing whether they should pull her eyes and teeth out or just leave her pinned to an east-facing wall to say good morning to Mister Sun. They decide on the "pull her apart" route, and one of them turns around to inform the ... player camera that "those in the first few rows WILL get wet". You get back behind the fourth wall right the fuck now, dude. Happily one of them is shot in the head by a guy calling himself "Nines", the dude who spoke up to call bullshit back at the impromptu court at the start of the game. He saves Ashe by brandishing a hand grenade, then tells her to meet him later for "the real story".
Sure, I got nothing better to OH HELL THE PRINCE. I gotta report to him. His base of operations is the "Venture Tower". ... ahahaha get it because it's like Ventrue Tower and he's a vampire sigh okay. On up we go. The Prince is pleased to see Ashe, which is... unusual. Still, he admires her discipline. She reminds him of his time in Napoleon's army. He wants her to look into the Elizabeth Dane, that creepy ship that arrived in port with no one aboard. Three things: There's a sarcophagus aboard. Secure it, but don't open it. Also, check out the passenger list. And don't slaughter an entire ship full of police officers, that's BAD.
Aheh... mmh. Well. That might be... difficult. And then there's Nines Rodriguez. "Give the Anarch community my regards." LaCroix waves, and with that we're dismissed. Interesting. One side of this relationship is taking things FAR more seriously than the other. On the other hand, it'd be real easy for the Prince to punch down, but punching up from Nine's position would take a lot of leverage.
Next time, we'll go see what Nines has to say.
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no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 12:03 am (UTC)You're giving me fun recollections of my playthrough. Like you, I only finally touched the game long after it was 'old hat' - I seriously want to say in the last year or two, tops.
But it was wonderful fun, once, despite some design anachronisms.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 12:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-03 01:15 pm (UTC)