Day Two

I took off work again today to spend time with my mom while she's in town. After a bit of unnecessary evasion 'Oh, call me in the late morning' 'When's 'late morning'?' 'You know, not early morning, late morning.' 'So... 10am?' we'd decided that I'd call her at 10ish and pick her up and drive to my sister's place, and we'd take the bus downtown.

And we did, although it took me 18 minutes instead of the expected 5 to get to the hotel because I got a block and realized I'd forgotten to pack my laptop in the trunk for later, and once we got to Anna's place we decided to have a look at Discovery Park first because it was close. So we got to see the actual cliff in Magnolia Bluff, and the muddy beach at low tide, and wade through an ankle-deep swarm of sand-bees, and look askance at the ranks of grade-school aged kids chanting insults at the fat kid while the adults carefully looked the other way.

Downtown we shopped a bit. We had lunch at the Pike Place market at this little cafe that advertised a 'view of the waterfront'. Note that they didn't specify a view of the water itself, as instead we had a view of the smokestacks and pipes on top of the waterfront buildings. The food was expensive, but good quality and not the standard faire -- mom had cream of jalapeno soup and some corn bread, I had a 'carribean tuna melt' which turned out to be large chunks of fresh tuna covered in chipotle tartar sauce with swiss cheese and fried onions, and Anna had the most complicated garden burger I've ever seen.

After that we wandered through the streets and shops, eventually ending up at Freeway Park. Mom wanted a cigarette, so we fled to the other side of the park (Anna's pregnant, after all) and watched a rapist piss in a fountain. Well, okay, we only had the rumors of many rapes occuring in Freeway park combined with this person being the only adult male present (I don't count) to substantiate the initial impression of him as a rapist, and we couldn't tell for sure if he was pissing, but he was standing in pissing position in front fo the drinking fountain for an awfully long time.

After that we went to the international district to wait for Alex to get off work, lounging around Starbucks with assorted iced coffee and teas. Then we drove home, watched the same episode of the new superfriends that I've seen twice before (the one with Humanite betraying Luthor to Batman in return for funding for the arts), and then it was time for me to head off to Lazar's shadake game.

I left early enough to show up on time for the game... or so I thought. It ended up taking me an hour to get there, although part of that was my inability to follow route 99 (it's hard!) and getting off 405 a stop early, leaving me to drive through downtown Renton, such as it is. So I got there just as they were finishing eating. Which is still on time enough not to miss the game.

I'll detail the game in a separate post.

Scavenger Hunt part 2: Revenge of the Albino

Tonight was Lazar's Shadake game, where we finished off the scavenger hunt, although we have yet to turn in our items and get them scored. I was very nearly killed by a string of *six* 95+ results in a row on percentile dice (high is BAD) including one 00... but managed to save myself by rolling an 03 on my last chance to grab a ledge before falling to my doom, a 21 to keep my grip when a falling monster bounced off my head (and fell to its doom) and a 33 to stay conscious long enough to pull myself up onto a ledge... so many 'save or die' rolls, it's almost like he WANTED me to die. O.O

Anyway, ( game summary. )

Right after the battle with the rats, Lazar casually mentioned that we should pay attention to how many spells we were casting, since he was using the limits... Sophie had 1 spell left to cast until the middle of the next night at that point, while Kiet had 2. 'Or 12, for damage or status.'

And so it came out that by some extremely questionable logic, Kiet's horribly boosted magic was *2* skill levels boosted instead of one! Making it effectively twice as powerful! And had been boosted on the extreme cheap, at a fifth the cost it should have taken! Thank you vague, abusable advantage modifier guidelines.

I managed to convince Lazar that he'd underpriced it, I think, but he wasn't about to retcon it. Sigh.