#seeing shots of the future to be detective agency is driving me up the WALL

[warlock-enthusiast]

Waking up slow

The Wayhaven Chronicles

Adam du Mortain x female Detective (in the future)

Detective Kat Kingston faces a murder, Unit Bravo and her mother. (Not always sticking with the canon)

Chapter 4: Drinking and thralls

AO3 link

Chapter 1 / 2 / 3

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“Another one?” Kat clinked their empty glasses together. “Another one! You go. I…” Tina tilted her head, carefully deciding if standing up seemed like a good decision or not. “Eh, just go!”

So, that was the answer to that.

Kat took a deep breath and pushed herself up. She’d tried to pace herself, one cocktail, one shot. And she’d failed spectacularly. After three cocktails and five shots, Kat felt wasted. Wobbly legs, a tad crossed-eyed and surely far too unsure of her surroundings. In hindsight, she’d never been particularly talented in going out without getting drunk. Probably in direct correlation with self-esteem and crippling bouts of depression. Tonight had all been about reminiscing about old times and forgetting the present for a while.

But, well. Kat wasn’t here to analyze herself. No, not today, Sir!

For once, she tried to forget about the case and past and her mother and just concentrate on being alive (and drunk). Pushing away the nagging conscience, which bothered her, because of two dead people and a killer on the loose.

Not to mention weird Doctor Murphy and his empty eyes and strange behaviour.

She leaned over the bar and smiled. “Tequila sunrise! Two.”

“Yes, Detective Kingston.” Chen raised a brow, said nothing, and turned around to mix the cocktails.

Getting back to Tina seemed more exhausting than before and her friend patted the empty space beside her. “Ah, wonderful. Come here.”

Kat followed her invitation. Their shoulders touched and she saw a reflection of the bar’s lights in Tina’s eyes. Always so pretty. Always so put together. She hoped that her friend would never lose her spark.

They’d almost shared a good cry earlier, talking about their past patrolling the streets together and missing each other terribly.  

Tina looked relaxed now and drunk and raised the corner of her mouth, a cat waiting for some cream. “So, what’s going on with Unit Dashing? Any compromising situations?”

Of course.

Reading so many romance novels had put a special kind of imagination in her head. About wet, white shirts and fountains and romantic horse riding at the beach, not to mention a whole lot of passionate, nightly encounters.

To be completely fair, Kat had borrowed a few of the smuttier novels and indulged herself.  A lack of romance in her life didn’t mean that she’d suddenly lost all of her baser instincts and needs. She puffed up her cheeks. “They’re driving me insane and they’re so full of shit at times.”

“No help then?” “Maybe a bit. Not much though.” Kat rubbed her eyes. “Well, Agent Sewell is helpful and really, really smart. And Agent Hauville is … how to describe it? A ray of sunshine. I like him, yes.”

She did . The observation surprised herself.

Though, Kat dreaded the day that Felix and Tina formed a bond. A future filled with endless pranks and much laughter and so much warmth. Actually, not the worst thing to imagine.  

Maybe they should spent some time together.

Tina nodded, or tried to, because her movements seemed sluggish thanks to alcohol, and pinched Kat’s shoulder. “A toast to us then. We’re great.” “We are.”

“Yeah!”

“YEAH!”

TIna shuffled closer, her breath hot on Kat’s cheek. “Important question!” “Hm?” “Most handsome?” Tina’s eyes held a dreamy expression. “I vote for Nate. His eyes are just so, so pretty and I’ve always liked a bit of stubble and a good jawline.” “Eh.” “Come on, spill it. I’ve known you for years and we’ve talked about boys so so many times. Even about girls. I know your type.” Kat blushed and nearly spit out his name. “Adam.”

A moment passed.

Then another.

His name hung between them like some deep, dark secret, until Tina began to laugh and to pat Kat’s thigh. “Uh, like your guys cold, eh?”

Kat shook her head. “Remember Bobby?” “Sadly, yes.”

Both of them prefered to stay silent on the matter of Bobby to not ruin their evening.

“I don’t know. It’s just something …” Sighing, she rested her head on Tina’s shoulder. “Something about how he holds himself, always so tense and closed off. He’s clearly built a barrier between himself and the world and I just want to… you know, see what lingers beneath?”

“And you want to see him snap and press you against the nearest wall, ravishing you with his lips.” “MAYBE.” “OH… oooooh.” Tina giggled and wrapped an arm around Kat’s shoulder. “Look there.”

She hadn’t noticed how the bar suddenly went rather quiet. All the laughter and voices ebbing away with the presence of four Agency agents. And Kat knew, her short break was over with them in here.

Shit.

Adam’s dissapproving gaze made her squirm. It shifted from her bandaged hand right to her face, then to Tina drunkenly stumbling over her feet.

“You’re inebriated.”

“Yes. I’m drunk. Sorry, you had to find me here but I’m off duty and well, yes.”

Wonderful conversation.

Kat felt relieved that he hadn’t witnessed their earlier talks. She could live without him overhearing her swooning about him. Especially now, that his cold, green eyes watched her in such a disappointed manner. Her outfit looked ruffled and untidy with the first few buttons of her blouse open and her skirt too high on her thighs. Kat tried to make herself more presentable and earned a scuff from Adam.

“I need, uh, I need to ... “ Tina failed at standing up and used her arms to steady herself. Thankfully Nate came to her rescue and Kat noticed a faint blush sitting high on her friend’s cheeks, as he steadied her with his body. Ha!

“Have to go.” She pressed herself against Nate and let herself be guided to a cab.

Kat waved at her. “Write me when you get home!”

“Nothing wrong with a bit of fun, eh?” Felix tried to make light of the situation and earned a grunt from Mason, who already checked the bar’s drinks and ordered a round of something high in spirits.

“That is settled then.” Felix laughed and guided Kat back to the comfy chairs and sofas.

Drinking with Unit Bravo wasn’t as bad as she’d imagined. Especially with Felix at her side and Nate’s soft smiles and voice. Mason prefered a chair, which let him watch a group of pretty college students, while also offering enough shadow to hide half of his face.

Adam’s shoulders and back seemed straight and tense, but the green of his eyes looked a bit less hard and cold as he talked with his teammates. They cared about each other. All the banter and manly grunting, they cared and they liked being in each other presence. Maybe Kat hadn’t noticed it earlier, but their bond ran deeper than that of colleagues.

Suddenly feeling a bit sappy, Kat got up. “I’ll go and get us a nightcap.”

Her phone beeped and she found a message from Tina, explaining that she just fell right into her bed, followed by a paragraph of eggplants emojis.

Smiling and rolling her eyes, she looked at Chen and ordered the drinks.

Kat didn’t expect Adam so close behind her. She felt his presence, the hard planes of his body. His hand rested near hers and his voice washed over her, while making small talk. Their hands touched, as both reached for the glasses. Helping with carrying the drinks, yes, of course. Her throat went dry and heat rose to her neck and face. Her heart picked up the pace and Adam appeared flustered as well.

For once, unsure of himself? His gaze lingered on her mouth and neck and drifted lower to her chest.  

Something between shifted and fell into place. Just for a second, Kat seemed to know how to approach him and to go forward with this, this feelings.

The moment passed, but the warmth in her face lingered. Everything felt so complicated with him around him. Felix patted her back, seemingly knowing what was going on her head and Kat offered him half a smile.

At least, they could enjoy a drink in peace.

---

To arrest the killer. To get answers. Murphy was the killer.

Kat’s hands formed fists.

She hadn’t been this angry in a while and almost felt the blood rush to her head. Trusting them didn’t get her far. Instead they just lied and lied and kept secrets. A part of her had doubted their intention from the start. Following and protecting her from what exactly? What the heck was going on? Did her mother order them to block important facts from the case? But they never answered her questions, just offered flimsy excuses. Unit Bravo probably slowed down her investigation as well. Would make sense. A part of this puzzle was missing and had been from the start. Kat felt in her bones.

Always so close, yet so far away from a satisfying answer.

Shit, shit, shit. Kat wished to be drunk again, but her mind seemed completely aware and clean and she cursed under her breath. They fucking knew the killer. They knew and did nothing. Let him roam around looking for more victims. And now they seemed against the idea of getting him?

“What…?”

Four people blocked her path. A vile stench filled her nostrils and Kat suppressed a scream. With their rotten skin and milky eyes, they reminded her of bad Zombie movies. Couldn’t be for Halloween and she hadn’t read about a convention in Wayhaven.

“... the fuck.”

They closed in on her and she found Unit Bravo at her side.

“Thralls.” Kat heard Mason grunt and then chaos exploded around her. She’d left her weapons back at the station and tried to remember her training. Shock made it hard, though, and she raised her hands, only to witness Mason clashing with one of those things. A sick crack echoed through the night and the rest of Unit Bravo joined the fight. Felix seemed unusually fast and quick, almost too fast for her eyes. Adam parried attacks with brute force, while Nate prefered a more elegant solution of evading and hitting.

Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her.

Their stench and slow movements froze her blood, but their words brought a whole new rush of fear.

“Bring Kat. Not kill.”

“Detective Kingston?” Another voice cut through her panicked mind and she turned around to find a pale Douglas standing outside of the bar. She hadn’t even seen him in there. He appeared like some deer in the headlights, drunk and afraid and as shocked as Kat felt.  

One of these things turned around and focussed on him. “Kill witnesses.”

“Run, Douglas” In a spur of the moment decision, Kat put herself between them and Douglas and offered him a chance to flee. But what about her? She took a fighting stance, tried to punch her opponent and failed.  Her knuckles hurt from trying to find some weak spot.

Strong fingers closed around her neck and lifted her from the ground. Darkness began to dance in front of her eyes and Kat’s body collided with a wall. Everything hurt and she fought against losing her consciousness and mind. Bile rose in her throat and Kat thanked her reflexes for poking that thing in the eyes and a moment to steady herself and watch her surroundings.

Unit Bravo fought with all the strength and skill of people their rank and training, but the thralls fought without holding back, without fear or tactics. Just an ongoing wall of force. She’d never felt so helpless or ill prepared.

Kat rose her arms. “We can help you! Please, calm down. It doesn’t have to end like this.”

But it did. For a moment, she thought that she’d seen some humanity returning to their faces, but Mason knocked them down, before anything else could happen.

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering and questioning everything.

Kat found her voice to be high-pitched and panicked and she tried to met Adam’s gaze.

“Tell me what’s going on. What is happening here?” Almost a plea, but he didn’t answer. Kat felt tears well in the corner of her eyes, as she discovered the wound on Adam’s arm. It closed itself. One moment there had been a deep gash and the next … gone.

“Adam…”

A sickening crack ended their conversation. Kat felt blood on the back on her head. “Ugh.”

And she fell and fell and hoped that someone would catch her.

[beardycarrot]

L.A. Noire is... interesting. It’s not a terrible game, but at the same time, I don’t know if I can call it a good game either.

You start off as a patrolman in 1946, and play through a few cases of police work as a tutorial. You’re then promoted to detective and work traffic cases, which lays the groundwork for the rest of the game, the meat of which you get into once you’re promoted to homicide. This is the most interesting part of the game, and what you would expect a noir detective story set in 1940′s Los Angeles to be about: investigating what appear to be copycat murders based on the Black Dahlia case, but with odd similarities that definitely make them seem connected.

Unfortunately, while this is interesting in concept, it’s absolutely unsatisfying. Since it’s spread out across multiple cases, and a case is only closed when you arrest the suspect, you have to keep arresting guys you know are innocent... destroying families in some cases. You eventually discover that the cases ARE all connected, because the killer leaves a series of clues leading you to him... and he turns out to be...!

Just some guy, actually. Yeah, just a bartender working for a temp agency that you talked to for a few seconds in the first homicide case. You don’t get any real explanation of his motives before chasing him through the sewers and killing him, and since having false arrests in so many cases would look bad, the police cover it up. That’s the end of that, and you move on to working drug cases.

This, unfortunately, is where the game’s real story comes into play. Half a million doses of army surplus morphine being shipped back to the US after the war were stolen, and... I honestly care so little about it that I’m not going to bother. You’re then demoted to working arson cases because your character has been having an affair with a jazz singer (you’re never told why), and it’s back to repeatedly arresting the wrong people. If you’ve been reading the newspapers that appear in some cases, you’ll know that the actual arsonist is a patient of the doctor involved with the morphine.

It turns out that the fires are being lit because the homeowners are refusing to sell to the housing project going up in the area, but then it turns out that the new houses being built are going to be burned down too for an insurance scam, but THEN it turns out that... maybe not...? Because... the housing project is in the same area that a freeway is being planned to run through, or something? The game doesn’t really attempt to explain itself on this point, and then you chase the arsonist through the sewers, kill him, and then die because... I don’t actually know, at some point someone did something to make the water level rise, which apparently results in a huge rush of water through the entire sewer system.

It’s not a BAD story... but you can’t help but compare it to the Black Dahlia cases. A psychiatrist deciding to exploit two soldiers he happened to meet to make himself rich isn’t nearly as interesting as a mastermind serial killer based on the biggest unsolved murder case of the twentieth century. THAT should’ve been the game’s main plot.

As for the gameplay itself.... eh. You investigate crime scenes and other places of interest by walking around, pressing A to examine objects whenever you get a magnifying glass prompt, and if it’s something important looking at parts of it more closely. Unfortunately, anything not directly related to the case is completely useless. In a game like Phoenix Wright, you can examine almost anything to get some witty banter between the characters; in L.A. Noire, you turn a beer bottle over in your hands and Cole says its unrelated to the case.

The real star of the show, however, is the interview system. You’re given a list of questions to ask, which I think is based on clues you’ve found or received from other interviews, and based on how the person responds you can choose to believe them, doubt them, or show evidence that proves they’re lying. Or, in the version I played, GOOD COP, BAD COP, ACCUSE.

Every character you interview uses facial motion capture of an actor, which is pretty cool. They even used a couple who are instantly recognizable, like Michael Gladis and Greg Grunberg. The idea is that you’re supposed to watch their faces to determine whether they’re telling the truth... but it kinda feels like a waste, since the signs aren’t little twitches at the corner of the mouth or their neck muscles straining or anything like that. Every character that I can remember has the same tell: being unable to look directly at you.

A downside of the motion capture is that it captures the whole head... but only the head. There are a few places where the animators weren’t quite able to match the movements of the body to how the head is moving, which is really immersion-breaking and kinda gross at times.

Depending on how well you do in an interview, you can receive clues that will help you out in future interviews or lead to small breaks in the case, but none of the interviews are actual fail conditions: you can get every question wrong and still progress through the game. Unfortunately, the game only tracks the number of questions you got correct, and not which ones they were, so all future dialogue plays out as if you did it perfectly. A memorable example of this was the police captain congratulating me on outing the Venezuelan consulate general as a sexual predator... which I neither did nor even assumed.

The third type of gameplay is the action set pieces, which if you fail enough times, you have the option to skip... that should give you a pretty good idea of their quality. These consist of chasing suspects on foot, chasing suspects in a car, or shootouts. The shootouts are the easiest, as your character can take a ridiculous amount of damage, you automatically heal after a few seconds of not being shot, you have unlimited ammo, and the areas they take place in are always conveniently filled with Gears of War-style pillars and chest-high walls. Foot chases aren’t exactly difficult... you can tackle the person if you get close enough, but you never will, because the game throws vehicles and pedestrians in your path to slow you down. You just have to follow the suspect for long enough, and they’ll eventually either tire out, take a hostage, or ambush you and force a fist fight. For most chases your character will draw his weapon, but even if he says “stop or I’ll shoot!” that’s not actually an option. Killing the suspect, and in some cases even just injuring them, can result in a game over... despite the game being perfectly okay with you killing people when the narrative says to.

The hardest are the car chases, largely due to the game’s driving controls. The cars accelerate and brake realistically, which is fine, but power steering wasn’t available on commercial vehicles until the 1950′s. What this means is that if you’re going above ten miles an hour, you have the turning radius of a tank. The computer-controlled cars, unfortunately, don’t seem to be as limited by this issue, and as with the foot chases they throw a lot of things in your path. While your partner will constantly urge you to case them at top speed with your siren blaring, the driving controls just can’t handle high-speed chases. The only way to consistently beat these sections is to drive slowly and carefully and just wait until the suspect gets hit by a bus, or whatever pre-determined end point the chase scene has. To give you an idea of how hard the vehicles are to control, I once lost a suspect because I’d somehow Austin Powers’d myself.

Finally, there’s the traversal. The game basically uses the Grand Theft Auto style of open world (which makes sense, as it’s a Rockstar game), but there’s never any reason to commandeer a civilian vehicle: you always have your partner’s car to get around in, and even if you do get a different car, half the time it will revert you back to your partner’s car when you enter the little cutscene that plays when you arrive at a location. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to do in the open world; as this is a Serious Detective Game, there aren’t any side activities like bowling minigames or anything.

You can find a few rare vehicles hidden in police lockups that are marked on your map, or discover historic landmarks that aren’t, but everything else is just finding items scattered around the city that you can’t see from your car. Considering that any damage you do to vehicles or city property is deducted from your rank at the end of each case, it’s best to just fast travel everywhere and pretend that the open world doesn’t even exist... buuuut, the game only gives you a tutorial on how to fast travel on the twenty-third case. The game has twenty-six cases. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say that the tutorial should’ve come much, much earlier.

I know that I’ve probably sounded largely negative, but again, it’s not a terrible games. Almost everything was poorly-executed and it should’ve been refined prior to release, but it’s not like it’s an unfinished or fundamentally flawed game... it’s just a lot harder to praise something when it’s completely average. If I were to give it a number score, with one being barely playable and not at all fun, ten being the best game I’ve ever played... I’d give it a solid five. Not a great game, but not a terrible one either.

...Oh, except for the fact that Switch port is absolutely abysmal, that would probably dock it a few points if I’m talking about the Switch version specifically. The pop-in of background details is frequent and distracting when you’re in areas that buildings aren’t blocking your view, characters’ heads will sometimes be a glitchy hair-colored texture for just a second when they first appear, you can see some extreme frame loss and slowdown while walking around on foot out in the city, and worst of all, the game crashes a lot. In my 393 hours playing the Switch version of Skyrim, the game crashed four times. In my thirty hours playing L.A. Noire, it had seven separate crashes.