Fable

Like, even though I'm not a SAW fan (I think Jigsaw's a pretentious dickhead), the idea of a sort of proto Jigsaw running around during just after the First World War is interesting.

I wouldn't have minded if it was more akin to The Outlast Trials, in that you and other players play the role of victims of this maniac who have to run through the gauntlet in order to survive.

Like I don't intend to shit on people's yums. But I've had way more fun with Outlast Trials than I have with say Dead By Daylight or any other asymmetrical game.

Because with Outlast Trials, I don't have to worry about the enemy player running the most optimized build imaginable while I'm just trying to have fun and dick about.

So, Jeb and I have started playing Grounded.

We're doing pretty well, we still aren't at the point where we can go toe-to-toe with the spiders so, instead we're forced to find a high up place they can't jump up to and turning them into pin cushions.

But, it uh, it very much turns out one of us is more than capable of taking on a small army of ants on their own.

Soooooo. We'd recently unlocked the Smithing Station and the Milk Molar, I'd decided to go looking for a Molar due to wanting to decrease the rate my Hunger/Thirst drains.

I knew there was one in the Red Ant Hill. So, I grab my Red Ant Club and go there with a ton of bandages, a Health Mutation and the Ant-Destroyer Mutation.

Jeb meanwhile was off in the wilderness doing something else.

This is not the first time we'd gone to attack the nest, we managed to break in one time before via teamwork and immediatley left upon realizing the Queen was friendly.

But this was the first time one of us had attacked the hill alone and I had not been prepared for the sheer amount of ants I would have to contend with.

Literally it was two to three ants a minimum that came pouring from the hill to stop me from entering, some soldiers, some workers.

So, I started swinging, stepping back every now and then to heal myself when needed.

But they just kept coming. Eventually I realized "Yeah, I'm going to need Jeb's help with this one."

"Hey, actually I need a bit of help, they're just throwing body after body at me and stopping me from getting into the hill." I tell Jeb calmly after a temporary pause in the deluge of ants.

"Alright, I'm coming." Jeb informs me and stops what he was doing to come help me (cuz he's awesome).

So, as Jeb is drawing closer to the hill, he's coming across more and more Ant corpses and apparently he assumed I had somehow killed the Queen and caused the Red Ants to all die out.

It wasn't until he reached the hill and saw the massive amount of Ant corpses at the front of the hill, reaching towards the blades of grass at the end of the clearing

With me just casually standing, staring into the shadowy depths of the hill, waiting for more to come out.

Then he realized No, the Queen was alive. I'd just gone Doomslayer mode on the Ant Colony.

"Wait, was this you?!" he asked and i turn around and see just how much death I had wrought. The entire fight, I had not bothered to actually look at how many Ants I had killed.

"Oh." I say sheepishly "uh, yeah?"

We then proceed into the nest and Jeb learns what I'm looking for.

"You know we already have the molar in the Red Ant Hill?" he tells me.

"You mean I just risked my life for nothing?!" (Not really though because there were marble and quartzite in that hill we could use for armour/weapon upgrades)

"Yeah."

I should probably mention this: mine and Jeb's dynamic is that, I'm his moral compass. I'm the nice pacifist that tries to resolve conflict peacefully despite my aggressive streak (which I am not all that fond of), especially in games.

Sooo, anytime I'm doing the exact opposite of being an advocate for peace and compassion tends to surprise him.

I think sometimtes he just forgets that I can be just as much of a chaotic force of destructive nature as he is because I go out of my way to not be that for the most part.

Case in point: we played the Tiny Tina's Wonderland spinoff and when we reached the end of the Smurf expy quest and The Papa Smurf Expy was turning into an evil gremlin thing.

I, uh, I just shot him pointblack with a handcannon the second he transformed and turned him into a blue smear on the ground, before Jeb or the now evil Papa Smurf expy could even react.

"WHAT THE FUCK, FABLE?!" Jeb shouted in surprise

"He was going to turn evil." I said innocently as i reloaded my gun.

"True. I just wasn't expecting that."

Aaaand, it's caused me to notice just how poorly formatted the card text is.

No wonder we have such hard time reading and understanding card effects.

Here's an example, I'm going to copy and paste Mirror Mage of the Ice Barrier's effect:

You can Tribute 1 other Effect Monster; Special Summon up to 3 "Ice Barrier Tokens" (Aqua/WATER/Level 1/ATK 0/DEF 0), and if you do, increase this card's Level by that number, also you cannot Special Summon from the Extra Deck for the rest of this turn, except WATER Synchro Monsters. If this card is sent to the GY: You can add 1 of your "Ice Barrier" cards that is banished or in your Deck to your hand, except "Mirror Mage of the Ice Barrier". You can only use each effect of "Mirror Mage of the Ice Barrier" once per turn.

It's kind of hard to see where one effect ends and one starts right? you've really got to focus.

Here's how I'm formatting them in the fic

You can Tribute 1 other Effect Monster; Special Summon up to 3 "Ice Barrier Tokens" (Aqua/WATER/Level 1/ATK 0/DEF 0), and if you do, increase this card's Level by that number, also you cannot Special Summon from the Extra Deck for the rest of this turn, except WATER Synchro Monsters. If this card is sent to the GY: You can add 1 of your "Ice Barrier" cards that is banished or in your Deck to your hand, except "Mirror Mage of the Ice Barrier". You can only use each effect of "Mirror Mage of the Ice Barrier" once per turn.

Like seriously! The second fight with them was a good one; bouncing around the throne room in Greed, lightning one another up and when they lose for the second time?

They just straight up go "nope, maybe next time" and jump out a window.

And V1 to their credit, goes "not this time, fucker!" and leaps after them!

Then the pair have a shoot out as they slide down a goddamn pyramid until V1 wins and V2 is reduced to a heap of scrap metal and gore on the path below.

Which happens quite frequently and it's a running joke because whenever I tell him to do it, he inevitably ends up stubbing his toe on accident cuz he's kind of a klutz.

Which in turn leads to him cursing me out even if I'm not in ear shot and now he accuses me of cursing him and being a witch.

After he's learned this, I make the bone-headed choice to leave him alone to go look for something.

No sooner had I rounded the corner that this happened:

Jeb: "Right where's a child? I'm going to throw a child!"

Me: "Oh no."

Jeb, laughing: "Oh shit I just killed the child!"

Me: "You did WHAT?!"

Jeb: "It's okay! The Guards didn't see!"

Cue him being pulled into a conversation with a guard and managing to talk his way out of it.

Jeb: "Hey come look at what I've done!"

Cue Jeb tossing the corpse repeatedly as he tries to bring it to me, splattering the ground with blood as he does so.

When he reaches me with the corpse, it turns out that it thankfully WAS NOT A CHILD that he had killed.

It was a Halfling Woman.

But as a result there were just puddles of blood going from where we were all the way to the Lower City Central Wall Waypoint.

.........

........

I took my eyes off of him for not even a minute, may I add? It took him less than a minute to do to a civilian what Hulk did to Loki in Avengers.

EDIT: thankfully he was fully clothed when this happened unlike when we first entered the city. Otherwise the last sight that woman would've had would've been a giant pink Dragonborn cock.

Also, to add onto this:

Jeb is playing Durge. We had recently succeeded in him purging Bhaal's influence from his character.

So Jeb's character no longer feels the urge to horrifically murder someone.

That did not stop Jeb from doing so anyways.

Also this is not the first time he's killed a civvie on accident.

We were in the sewers saving some refugees from Bhaalists and Jeb, not realizing that the refugees were civvies/not the enemy, killed one.

My response was "Did you just kill a civillian?!"

Jeb: "Oh, so they weren't an enemy."

Me: sighing "Reloading the save!"

Fraud is such a fun fucking chapter.

Originally the constant twisting, the inversions of gravity and shifting rooms and warping of space was throwing me off all the time.

Then towards the end I realized "Oh, wait. This just gives me more room to move and new ways to kill shit."

Honestly towards the end I was having the most fun I've ever had with this game by taking advantage of the level's mechanics and zipping around the place like a nutter.

It was a much welcome change to the grapple hook parkour of Violence, can't wait for more updates to come!

Part 18

EDIT: I should probably mention that he was impaled on the tail of a statue of HIMSELF.

The only one allowed to screw with my head is me!