I know, most of you think I have something in mind when I sit down at my computer to write these things, but that only happens once in a blue moon (actually less often than that, blue moons happen about 3 times as often as I know what I’m going to write on Sunday).
So, yesterday was RPG day. We did the Palladium game that’s based in the present day. I’m still playing as Godwin Smythe, wealthy owner and CEO of a mid-level international logistics company and nascent Mage. My character owns both a Lambo, and a Hennessy Viper that he keeps in his condo at the Texas Motor Speedway (party house, 5 bedrooms for a choice of decor), and he has a fleet of delivery vans he can divert to in-game needs (ostensibly the fleet of trucks are backups to the front line delivery vehicles). His business is based at Alliance Airport which is basically across the street from TMS and the condo, so he can talk to his security people or grab a delivery truck just about anytime.
In yesterday’s game we reset back at the bombing of the bar in Denton, only this time instead of my character being found rummaging through the rubble looking for additional survivors, I used See Aura to determine the number of survivors not standing up to be zero, then beat feet out of the scene so as to not attract attention to having survived a blast that leveled a pre-WWII building. My character used Invisibility(superior) to hide the entire group and their trails to get away from the scene, and we then called my limo driver to come pick us up and take us back to the condo, where we worked with my security staff to discover that the bombing was part of a ritual to summon >something< that was probably Not Nice from some place that was ditto. We used satellite surveillance to find where this ritual was going to be held, and when we got close we used my magic sense as a mage to pinpoint the location. One of the party members was able to use one of his animal companions to scout the location out real-time so we didn’t go into this fight blind. As a mage I knew that at the point we were at >something< was going to come through even if we disrupted the summoning because the connection had already been made to that dimension, but if we disrupted the summoning it would be a whole lot less nasty than what was being summoned. Interesting thing was that because of the summoning all magic users’ spells were 3X as effective and delivered 3X damage or healing but only cost 1/3 normal casting costs, effectively raising all our magic users 20 or so levels for the duration of the summoning ad for 30 minutes after we disrupted it. This part is very important to the story.
We slipped in by using that invisibility thing again to get past the mundanes guarding the ritual, and set up a plan that would use our magic users fire control powers to distract the ritualists’ attention away from the circle where the head ritualist was doing the summoning. Remember that 3X effect during and 30 minutes after the ritual I mentioned? Well one party member was going to cast Pillar Of Fire as a distraction for the head ritualist in the center of the circle while I used Fuel Fire to cause the torches lighting the proceeding to distract the outer ritualists away from the circle. The pillar of fire that was only supposed to singe the head ritualist inside the circle while another party member tried to stab him, incinerated him, while my “distracting” torches set all the other ritualists’ hair on fire and caused them to run around like confused ants when someone uses a magnifying glass on a sunny day. An unfortunate side effect of the pillar of fire was setting the party member that was supposed to stab the head ritualist on fire as well from being too close to the pillar. This displeased him, to put it mildly. We managed to capture one minor ritualist and put out his burning hair and render him unconscious for questioning later. The creature that ended up coming through was just a gargoyle that went in the direction of OKC to rampage, so no big losses there except for innocent population. Sorry OKC!
Funny time, while maintaining our cover as “innocent anglers” who had nothing to do with the other events nearby one of the party members caught what would be a world record alligator gar (a common fish in NTX) had we not used magic to paralyze the fish when it rolled to the surface so we could land it. And had we not been playing a RPG instead of fishing IRL. 😉 This was a Grandfather Fish.
The Good News is that the process has been set in motion to get Wells Fargo away from the mortgage and pay off the mortgage the day after. Before the end of the month we will own our home outright, no mortgage, and we can start thinking about saving some money to pay for deferred maintenance like painting the outside and fixing the bathroom. The interesting thing is the loan we are setting up to remove WF is almost 2% lower APR than our current mortgage with WF and would be paid off 5 years quicker…
I’m using an old school method of doing design work on the Sprint T, I had some xeroxes made of some pictures from a magazine (Hot Rod Magazine 06/13, there was a photo montage that included the view I needed) of the body I want to use. I will draw in the structural members on the copy so that I can visualize where they should go.I will have to make some kind of demarcation in the copy that accentuates the actual interior dimensions of the body so I can know if the frame will actually connect directly to the body or only through the belly pan welded to the frame…
And that looks like enough words for today. Tomorrow is another day.
PSA, Opus the unkillable badass Poet
Witch on a Bicycle 