#and I get a LOT of wraith wax from specters soooo

[victorluvsalice]

Welcome to Summer Friday in the Chill Valicer Save! Where, as stated in the final post of the last update, we have the gang sending off summer with a party that has always given me trouble for some reason. Let's dive right into it --

-->I started with the gang bumming around the house, as they do late at night – Smiler and Victor in the barn by Victor's cauldron, and Alice upstairs sitting at Smiler’s computer (she HAD been working on her next book, but the interaction had canceled out when I loaded back in). Deciding to start off right with some sweetness, I had Smiler give Victor a nice shoulder rub to help work out the kinks from all his potion experimenting, while Alice got to pet Shadow before being sent out to have some zoomies to lower her burgeoning Fury. Though, of course, the minute she got outside, it started raining. *shakehead* Sorry, Alice! She did have her umbrella, though, and she seemed to enjoy her jog even despite the miserable weather. :)

-->As she was leaving, though, I spotted two things on the front porch – a visiting Lilith Vatore, and a VERY angry red specter! As I’d put Smiler on “making computer chips” duty again (gotta save up for that Servo!), I had Victor go and take care of both after emptying his cauldron of his experimental liquid. First, he gave the specter a potion of good fortune to calm it down – fortunately, the angry little blob was very happy with its gift and gave him a Specter Sip in return before vanishing. He then said hi to Lilith and got to know her a little bit (apparently she’s fond of the color brown) – I was planning on having him invite her in so Smiler could chat with her once they were done making their computer chip, but right after the “what’s your favorite color?” question, Lilith decided she was done hanging out and super-speeded away. XD Well, okay then! I didn’t really want to deal with visitors right now anyway. :p

-->With Lilith gone, I put Victor back on experimenting with potions (he had to learn a few more recipes for his Potion Purveyor aspiration), and had Smiler tune up both the gardening bots (I was GOING to have them make a cybernetic arm, but first they didn’t have enough salvage parts, and then I realized “wait, that will waste items I want for the Servo, never mind”). Alice arrived back from her zoomies as this was going on with much lower Fury, but I figured dropping it even further wouldn’t be a bad idea and sent her upstairs to meditate (with her arm glitched in the “permanently holding an umbrella” animation, annoyingly – I had to reset her later to get it to unkink). After all, the main thing I wanted to do in this playsession was to have Smiler throw a party to celebrate the end of summer! Once she was settled, I thus had them open the calendar and look at the parties available –

And while I was tempted by the kegger, I realized that the better, more seasonally-appropriate option would be to have Smiler retry The Dreaded Weenie Roast. They've done one of these before at the house, but only managed to get Silver because they weren't able to complete the main objective of roasting weenies (because, at that time, I didn't know the stupid campfire doesn’t work correctly on a lot with the “Simple Living” lot trait). Having increased my general store of knowledge, though, I now knew they could get a Gold rank if I just had the party off-lot. So I had them invite their friends Cletus, Aleah, Sara Scott, and Knox Greenburg, designate Victor as their “grill master,” and set up the shingdig to start at Totter Park in Copperdale at 5 PM. :) With that settled, I set about having them finish off their bot tune-ups –

-->Only for the house to start making spooky noises again and knock everyone out of their assigned activities. I was a bit annoyed at first –

But then I realized I had an OPPORTUNITY here. I immediately had Victor and Smiler use their teleports to get up to the séance room (Alice was already in there, as that’s where her mediation stool is), then had them and Alice light all the sacred candles I’d set up around the séance table while I extinguished the lights in the room. With everything in place, I had them all sit around the table –

And cue Victor leading a BOSS-looking group ceremony to increase the house’s spiritual serenity in the light of the sacred candles, the soul scraps on the side table, and the moon salt lamp on the bizarre idol shelf. :D It was really freaking cool –

So cool, in fact, that I ended up taking some video of it. I mean, I just couldn’t resist – and besides, it’s hard to properly capture the flickering house lights effect in a screenshot. Unfortunately, when I uploaded it to YouTube, it ended up being rather blurry (top quality is apparently 360p – what I get for using the in-game video capture tool!), but if you still want to watch it, you can do so here: A Valicer Seance. As per the previous, there is a bit of flickering from the house lights, but I don’t think it’s enough to cause anyone any problems. Especially with how blurry the damn video is. Enjoy what you can!