This is how I spend my Friday nights

So ... I'm a dork gamer chick.

M and I, my cousin and his girlfriend, two English grad students and the husband of one of them, are playing this Castle Falkenstein-based GURPS campaign. As should surprise no one, it's steampunk-themed.

One of the grads plays a hyper-curious amateur lady archaeologist with Annie Oakley shooting skills. My cousins play a white-bearded Famous Explorer type who shoots what needs shooting, and an impoverished Southern ex-Civil War officer who pilots what needs piloting, respectively. We also have a mortician/secret zombie master who is searching for the secret of immortality with his fame, fortune and offensive smell. M plays a busty-but-modest illegitimate child of the British peerage who has lately been applying her skills as a clockwork toymaker to saving the world. And I play her bodyguard, an embittered one-handed Algerian assassin, not too bright, who has been disowned by his nomadic tribe and generally dislikes humanity.

So currently we're in Edinburgh trying to persuade two people who might possibly be vampires that they don't want to cause rampant poltergeist activity in the city. Previously, we negotiated a peaceful ceasefire between a memory-mashing wizard, a bunch of marine biologists and a bevy of street urchins and stopped an ancient Egyptian mummy from taking over Cairo with a flying pyramid.

I give all of this background for the purpose of sharing some of our better exchanges of dialogue:

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"It's like a pinata! Only it hits back! With lasers!"

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"So we've made it to London?"
"We left London. Remember the whole part where we told Rigo and Tavi goodbye?"
"Oh. No."
"While Desmond is kissing the ground and thanking God that he's back in Merry Olde England, a man in a kilt playing bagpipes while sharing a haggis with a Highland Coo is staring at your suspiciously ambulatory mining equipment and contemplating contacting the police."

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"Pleasantries are the new hotel."

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"I use Sex Appeal on the Chambers."
"It's a government building. It doesn't want in your pants."

...
Also to explain why we made this. See, my character has the one hand and the other one is mechanical. My dad gave us a bunch of old industrial parts which he got from the neighbors after their parents died and left aforementioned parts in the garage, and our free run of the drawer turned up some very convenient numbers of these things ...
... no, you're right. There's no excuse.



A collaborative effort between M and me involving a large connector from Blue Moon Beads' current Orient Express collection, some fun industrial bits, a decorative chain, and more wire-wrapped rings than I've ever made in one sitting. More info and a second view on my Flickr.