Holy mother of fuck the Deep Roads quest is terrifying. I didn't actually have that much trouble beating the Broodmother, but her origin and Hespith's little song were enough to give me nightmares. WAY TO NOT PULL ANY PUNCHES ON THE BODY HORROR BIOWARE.

It did make it easy to decide between Branka and Caridin, though. Even if my City Elf Warden weren't categorically opposed to any kind of slavery, how could I possibly take Branka's side knowing she did that to her own people? Fucking hell.

So, I am pretty sure that our next-door neighbors are drug-dealers.

I've been kind of suspicious for a while, honestly. It wouldn't be that out of the ordinary for our neighborhood, which is a little on the sketchy side (our town is a little on the sketchy side). And they seem to have a lot of people coming and going all the time, including in the middle of the night - I've been woken up by cars pulling out at 3 in the morning more than once. Tonight was kind of a clincher though. L and A drove me home after gaming group, and while I was walking across the yard, two of the guys from next door came out, whistled them down before they could turn out of our side street, and demanded to know what they were doing there. This is at least the third time someone dropping me off has been interrogated, although I think it was the most aggressive I've seen. And yeah, I don't think anyone's that suspicious about other people being around unless they are up to something unsavory.

Honestly, I don't really give a fuck what they do on their property - as long as nobody's getting shot and nothing's blowing up, it's none of my business what they are selling. But I am pissed off that they're bothering people coming here. I know it's a hassle for people to come all the way out here to pick me up, and having the neighbors be nasty just makes me feel even more guilty about it. Also, I am really really glad that our yard is totally fenced off. And that we've started locking the gate. And that my dad has a spear in the closet.

At least gaming group was fun. We've finally started actually playing the game! For the next couple of weeks our party is going to be on a scumbarge traveling to Mars, and since it's a big place we're all doing different things. S is meeting up with a mysterious stranger, L is investigating odd goings-on among the underworld, A is playing in a low-grav tennis tournament, and C is engineering a drug deal. And me? I'm in the red light district rescuing a prostitute. Of course.

Quote of the evening: "You're a scientist! And you have a vagina!"

Closely followed by: "And she killed lots of people, and everyone lived happily ever after. With intestines!"

I...I should hang out with drunk theater people more often.

An Abridged Timeline of Tonight:

6.00: Freshman Guy comes by to pick up his book bag, which he left here last night when we were hanging out.

10.00: I come back from work to a somewhat urgent email from Freshman Guy saying that he can't find his phone. Cursory examination reveals it on my couch. Yeeeah, this kind of thing happens a lot. Last time he left his phone here, we spent three days playing facebook tag before I could get it back to him.

10.30: Freshman Guy comes by to pick up his phone. Since it's Thursday night and neither of us have anything better to do, we end up hanging out again.

11.00: I try to explain my current short story project to him and realize that he has never heard of the Slender Man. This is clearly unacceptable. So I tell him we'll watch the first episode of Marble Hornets, just so he understands the idea behind this story I'm working on.

11.00-2: MARBLE HORNETS. And totheark. I should have known better than to think we could watch just one episode. I at least had the good sense not to turn off the lights, although it was a near thing.

2.00: Freshman Guy is too scared to walk home alone, especially since he forgot his key card (see, I told you this was a thing) and would have to wait around the building for someone to let him in. Apparently I'm the butch in this relationship (okay, I already knew that), because I offered to escort him back to his dorm. Realized too late that this would mean walking back home by myself, in the dark and completely defenseless if the Slender Man came after me.

FOR THE RECORD, EAST CAMPUS AT 2 AM IS REALLY FUCKING CREEPY. It's all big trees and ominous creaky bicycle noises and really very suspicious shadows. And it's not as if I was reading SCP Foundation articles all day before watching Marble Hornets, oh no, I would never be that daft.

*whimpers*

Five AUs I Wish The Universe Would Write For Me:

1. BBC Sherlock

The one where John Watson is a college professor and Sherlock is a...uh...well...no one's really sure what he does (or which department he works for), but he brings in a lot of grant money so they don't ask too many questions. Lestrade is an assistant professor of criminology and Sherlock likes to show up at his lectures and correct him in front of his undergraduates. Mycroft is a dean of something at a rival university and doesn't understand why Sherlock insists on working at an undefined position at a different school. And Moriarty, of course, is an evil biology researcher who has very questionable standards about what you can do with your animal test subjects (and your graduate students). He and Sherlock are constantly publishing academic papers that are mostly full of bitchy comments about each other's research, and neither of them are allowed to attend academic conferences together after they got into a slap fight at the last one. Look, this mostly exists because I want John Watson in tweed, alright?

2. 19th Century Literature RPS of Extreme Crack

The one where all the great English poets of the 19th century are in a boy band together. I cannot even explain this one except to say that is the product of a three-year-ongoing joke with colourofsaying and has only got more elaborate and silly the more 19th century poets we've read as good little English majors. It also completely ignores a) all question of period (Yeats plays back-up, Percy Shelley is on drums, Byron is the pretty-boy front man and Tennyson writes all the lyrics) and b) good sense in favor of ridiculousness, boykissing, and stupid literary jokes. Oscar Wilde is a music critic who's had sex with almost everyone in the band at some point. Wordsworth tried to start his own weird acoustic folk-psychedelic thing with Samuel Coleridge to compete with them, but it didn't really catch on and Coleridge wandered off to be a solo artist. MY GOD WE ARE DORKS.

3. Due South/Torchwood Crossover of Doom

The one where Jack Harkness is Ben Fraser's biological father and they accidentally found Torchwood Chicago. I know I've posted about this before, because it is one of my pet not-remotely-related-to-canon-in-any-way crossover theories (like Lord Vetinari being the Master's older brother), because John Barrowman just looks weirdly like Paul Gross from certain angles. This one actually had a plot! Which is mostly about Team Torchwood going to Chicago to hunt aliens and running into a guy who looks suspiciously like their boss. And then the Fraser and Ray and Ray have to help them fight the alien mafia while Fraser comes to terms with being related to Jack and Jack deals with having a kid he didn't know about (we're still pretending CoE never happened) and Ianto quietly loses it because wtf is his life, seriously? At the end, Fraser and the Rays start Torchwood Chicago (I guess it is sort of a side department of the Chicago PD?), and everyone has plenty of sex, which is how every Torchwood story ends, I suppose.

4. German Football RPS

The one where Marko Marin is a spy and Denni Advic is the double agent with the tragic backstory assigned to work with him on a mission. I don't even like Werder Bremen, but Marko Marin is made of adorableness, and this is an awesome noir AU where he is a sweet, innocent guy being blackmailed into crime in order to rescue his evil ex-boyfriend from certain death. Denni Advic shows up to take the package Marin's supposed to drop off for the bad guys, and when he tries to leave Marin makes him take him with him, because he thinks he'll lead him back to the guy holding his boyfriend. And then explosions! Gun shots! People chasing them and trying to steal back the Macguffin! Advic falling for his naive charm and crack marksmanship while Marin is won over by his tragic backstory and unbelievable cheekbones! Eventually, they defeat the bad guys, Marin realizes his evil ex is evil, and Advic reveals that he was a double agent actually working for the government. Yay happy endings.

5. Tumbling (J-Drama)

The one where the boys are slightly older and supposedly don't know each other, except they are actually all superhero crime-fighters together. Yuuta is a quiet, super-organized, king-of-the-file-folders kind of secretary, and everyone at the company he works for is very confused when Wataru, motorcycle thug turned manga kissa owner, starts showing up at their office to bother him in the middle of the day, and Yuuta has to make up stories about how they are best friends from high school and not guys who spend their free time in tight spandex and body armor fighting supervillains. Tsurumi is a kind of sort of mostly reformed supervillain, and he and Yuuta share an apartment. Kiyama is a broody anti-hero that Wataru bribes into fighting on their side via sex. Basically, everything is the same, but with more transformation sequences.

Quiz Time! What have I done this weekend?

a) attended a four-year-old's birthday at which I was the only person not drinking either sangria or margaritas and got into an argument with a stranger about international trade reform

b) met an Irish tattoo artist who told me about how he spent Friday night drinking with one of the actors from Star Trek (not as implausible as it sounds since we've always got a few movies filming here)

c) played with unbelievably tiny ponies, obnoxious attention-whore cats, and The World's Biggest Goat (no seriously, I'm used to knee high goats, and this thing was the size of a Saint Bernard. GIANT GOAT)

d) all of the above and a trip to the bookstore to boot

EVENTFUL WEEKEND WAS EVENTFUL. I think I need a nap now.

ETA: did some quick googling and DUDE ANTON YELCHIN IS FILMING HERE WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS OMG

The actor who plays Lord Vetinari in the Going Postal adaptation bears a disconcerting resemblance to Roger Delgado.

I'd suggest a crossover in which Ankh-Morpork is part of a long-running gambit by the Master to a) take over the universe and b) blow raspberries at the Doctor, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a regeneration of the Master that could run a large city that successfully for that long (or a Master who would let Sam Vimes within twenty feet of him, come to that). Perhaps Vetinari is the Master's long-suffering, vastly more competent older brother? Occasionally they meet up and have drinks together at the Palace or the TARDIS or whichever planet the Master is trying to conquer at the moment, and Vetinari tries to impress upon him the finer points of Machiavellian scheming. And then Drumknott has to listen the rest of the day to Vetinari sighing that the poor young fool will never be a proper tyrant while he's still mooning over that odd ex-boyfriend of his.

...now I really want to write it.

I may have accidentally given my roommate the impression that I summon demons in my spare time. Ummm...oops?

(Protip: when your roommate is giving you That Look, saying JUST SO WE'RE CLEAR I DON'T ACTUALLY SUMMON DEMONS honestly just makes things worse.)

Bad: reading a book on serial killers when you know you have an overactive imagination and a healthy sense of paranoia.

Worse: reading a book on serial killers at one in the morning when you have an overactive imagination and healthy sense of paranoia.

Worst: reading a book on serial killers at one in the morning and then having the internet fail, necessitating going into your father's dark, unused, boxes-and-power-tools-filled, ominous-shadow-containing office by yourself to reset the router on top of the bookcase. Which you have to do as quickly as humanly possible, muttering under your breath 'there's nothing there there's nothing there there's no - OMG SOMETHING JUST MOVED IN THE CORNER IT'S JACK THE RIPPER.' At which point you break and run back to your room where you know there are no serial killers who want to eat your liver unless there's one waiting under your bed for you to fall asleep oh god oh god.

...or maybe that's just me.

I made the mistake of watching the local news for a few minutes tonight, and came away properly mind-boggled for my trouble. Schools in New York and California close because of flu outbreaks. Schools in New Mexico close because of outbreaks of the BLACK DEATH. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. They had a five-minute overview on the symptoms, when you should see a doctor, what animals to avoid, all the normal stuff (YES THIS IS NORMAL). I remain impressed at how blase everyone here is about it though; the swine flu reports were far more panicked. It makes me imagine conversations like this:

Mom: I'm sorry, Billy won't be in class today, he has a touch of the plague. Poor thing must have caught it from David down the street.

Secretary: Oh, no problem, I'll just mark him absent and ask his teacher to set his homework aside for him. Keep an eye on his fever and don't let him back to class until the buboes are gone!

Seriously, it's weird as hell.

Needless to say it made me very nervous to go out to the yard and move adobe bricks. I know for a fact there are things living in there, and it would be just my luck to get bitten by something and get the plague, instead of mutant squirrel powers.