KILLER WOLF'S PROFILE

The drive was quiet, and it took Not Johnny quite a bit out of his way. Candice had gone for a long walk, she’d never tried walking through that neighborhood before and decided now was as good a time as any. It made a kind of anti-sense, but Not Johnny didn’t get hung up on it. He had an attractive girl in his car, and she didn’t seem to be drunk, or inclined to try and kill him. It was rare. He didn’t exactly trust it.

“So what’s up with you and this Not Johnny stuff?” She asked, playing with the fraying hem of the sweater under her coat. She had significantly more clothes on this time then she had back in her house. “People don’t get to know your real name? Don’t get to know you at all?”

“Everyone gets it wrong, or maybe all my friends are just inconsiderate as shit.” Not Johnny notes that Candice doesn’t seem to like profanity, she stiffens and looks at him when he says it. “What?”

“Nothing.” She lies, goes back to the hem of her sweater. She pulls it up some and Not Johnny glimpses a blue shirt underneath. He also becomes aware that the laces of her shoes are blue.

“Well, this street goes both ways. What’s up with you, blue girl?” Not Johnny asks.

Candice goes to smile, someone else used to call her ‘little blue girl’, and the memory is a happy one. She doesn’t quite make it though, because it has happened again. She tries to cover, and would have fooled most people, but Not Johnny recognizes the look on her face, the sudden state of her body. Everything has changed. He knows it like he knows the back of his own hand.

“Me too.” He says, looking away from her, knowing she’s pleading with him to do just that in her mind. She doesn’t like people to see it any more then he does. She’s in agony. “Open the glove box. Make yourself at home.”

Candice is a little confused by this, but does as she was invited too. She finds the bottles for two of Not Johnny’s medications. The bottles have no prescription data on them, but she recognizes the pills by shape and color. Her eyes light up like she’s that little girl again, getting her first puppy on Christmas morning.

Her large dark eyes search Not Johnny’s face, as if pleading him for something. He nods, knowing that the lump suddenly residing in his throat isn’t going to let him get any words out. He watches her snap the top off and pop one of the pills into her mouth. She clips it back shut and folds the door back into place.

“Thanks,” she says. “My doctor won’t write these for me anymore, and they’re the only things that really help.”

It is only then, when it is too late, that she realizes this could be a massive tactical error. What if…what if this guy is some creep and he just drugged her with something other then what she thought she was taking? What if he’s got some sick fetish and he breaks all his stuff open and comes in them or something. But these thoughts fade, because for some reason, Candice likes this guy. Strange as he is. She keeps searching his face with her eyes.

They get to her house without her changing her mind and leading him to a decoy place. Oh well, she thought. He knows where I live now.

“Take a couple more,” Not Johnny says, meaning the pills in the glove compartment, “I’ve got enough to get by.”

“No, I can’t…” She says, but she wants too, “I have some money in the house, I could buy some maybe?”

“I don’t need money.” Not Johnny said, “I’ve got more then I can take in a month as it is.”

A moment passes, Candice is standing there leaning her head into the car. It is still raining and her back isn’t getting any dryer. It seems the guy is content to sit there and try to out stubborn her, which would usually be a fools game.

“I’ll make you dinner then,” she says with a smile, “How about that for a trade?”

“Sounds good,” Not Johnny smiles, “But not tonight. I’m already running late.”

“You can come over tomorrow.” She says, opening the glove box and emptying some more pills into the palm of her right hand. She puts the bottle away and secures the pills in one of her pants pockets.

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you then.” Not Johnny said.

Candice smiled and closed the door. She sort of jogged up the walk to the front of her house, Not Johnny stayed there watching her to be polite and make sure she got inside alright, but also because she looked good when she moved.

With one last glance, their eyes meeting somehow across the distance and through a rain spattered window, as Candice smiled from her front door, Not Johnny put the car in drive and edged back into the street.

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It is often said that great genius and madness go hand in hand, and are sometimes, if not usually, either interchangeable or indistinguishable. It is a quote that offers little comfort to Not Johnny as arrives in Dunn’s workspace. The place looked like a bomb had gone off, a black, carbon fiber, bomb. Dunn had been fabricating all sorts of things. Not Johnny’s first estimation, that Dunn was designing some sort of protective apparatus to aid in further testing, which would not be occurring, was close to the mark but for the wrong reasons. When he saw the customized knee brace and what looked like a corset of some kind, he got a vaguely unsettling feeling in his stomach.

“All we have to do is come up with a name for you.” Dunn says from his workbench, busy tinkering with some other piece of equipment Not Johnny cannot quite make out from this angle. “And maybe even a symbol.”

“What,” Not Johnny stops talking as he gingerly steps over a mass of something hard and mangled on the floor. A discarded prototype of something. “are you talking about, Jack? I’m not even sure you’re speaking English.”

Dunn spin’s around on his stool. The headpiece is another custom job of his with various lenses for magnification and other uses Not Johnny cannot quite come to place. He flips up the assembly and stares at his friend.

“You’re more then man, my friend.” He said, the sentiment and his expression as he conveyed it lending a slightly unwholesome aspect to the thing. “For once in your life, you’re going to give people a reason to know your name. To get it right.”

“What are you talking about?” Not Johnny demanded.

Dunn hooked his thumbs under the straps for the headpiece and pulled it off. He popped up from the stool and led Not Johnny off to the side. There was a blackboard with random notations scribbled in chalk, computer printouts were taped up around the borders.

“I’m not sure how, or why, but you seem to broadcast the frequency of pain.” He tapped a point on one of the printouts as if it was supposed to mean something to Not Johnny, “You’re brain is like a radio station, and you’re sending out some bad vibes. That’s how you do it, how you hurt people without touching them. How you can give them seizures.”

“What about these?” Not Johnny asked, holding his, still gloved, hands up.

“Not sure.” Dunn shrugged, “I’m having to guess here. For some reason you’re hyper conductive. Your output is low, but it seems enough to interfere with certain electronics. It seems you can put the signal out two ways, one of them somehow you do with brain waves…I don’t have quite the right equipment to be sure or to gauge it though. The other, you do by touch…you send out a charge and somehow it carries the signal direct. From what you told me, how the second guy at the bank got the worst of it…that’s what I think is going on.”

“Okay, two questions.” Not Johnny said, the sides of his head pestering him with a dull throb. He’d made sure not to miss his last dose of pills. “How do we turn it off, and what is all this shit,” he waves his arms to indicate the span of Dunn’s warehouse, meaning the new constellation of clutter, “for?”

“That is not two questions.” Dunn says, “It is the same question.”

“So what’s the answer?” Not Johnny asked.

“You don’t turn it off, you use it.” Dunn said, “And all of this shit, as you call it, and I’ll let that slide right now because I haven’t explained it to you yet, is to keep you from getting killed while you do.”

“I don’t understand,” Not Johnny said, although he was fairly afraid he did understand exactly what Dunn was getting at.

“It’s put up or shut up time, NJ. You said you wanted to help people, later tonight I’m going to give you the chance.”

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The stalker crouched low, trying to use the bushes for cover from the street. There wasn’t much he could do about the house next to his target, and the fact that it had an annoying propensity for facing his hunting ground with a number of windows. Luckily, there were no lights here. He’d have to be careful in his timing.

He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt back just a little and looked up at the sky. His cycle was not dictated by the moon, at least not in the normal way, how some lesser beings feel they have to do their ritual and whatever else that goes along with the true act under the light of a waxing, waning, or full moon. No, he just needed lunar cooperation. It had to be a new moon, a night when there was no extra light from the sky.

Everything else he could handle.

He dropped low as movement inside his target’s house drew his attention. The victim was home, was less then ten feet away from him and had no idea. He smiled a cold smile. There were some things he would have liked to have changed. The place was not exactly ideal.

The stalker realized he was starting to get greedy. He should let this one go and get another, get one who fit the pattern perfectly. This one was a bit too young for him, but then again it wasn’t even about her at this point. He chuckled to himself dryly. It was just a test then, a test to see if he could expand his craft…work without a net.

This will keep me sharp, he thought to himself. He liked things that were sharp.

author=Dudesoft
I hated Steampunk before loving Steampunk became mainstream. I still hate it.
-_\\ -hairflip-

Or are you still bitter nobody noticed the Pipe-Turner dangling above the entrance to the Xonex den?

You can make a separate event to clean out any items that should not exist in the inventory, like the Blessed versions of the weapons. Just make another common event that checks to see if you have any of those items in your inventory, and removes them if necessary. Call it from the end of the removal common event(s).

I used this in an old game where the weapon, and by extension the animations and stats, changed based on the player's stats for that weapon type. I had basic versions, Dagger/Sword/Bow/etc, and then the duplicates for different levels of proficiency. At the start of the battle, I checked what weapon was equipped and stored a value into my WeaponUsed variable. (It would be complicated, but possible to do this with dual wield.)

The weapon would swap out for the different versions as needed. At the end of the battle, I removed the weapon and ran an event to put the right basic version back in place by referencing my storage variable. Then, I just did simple "If party has Item X, remove Item X" events at the end to keep the inventory clean.

It really seems like you are doing things the hard way here, and you're expecting the engine to make distinctions it just doesn't make. Also, I've had entire custom battle systems that didn't take as long to load as some of your common events do.

By the way, you didn't seem to pack the RTP_RT.exe file with your project. I had to copy one into the folder to get RM to even open the file.

For starters, you do not need to add the Blessed Weapon type to the inventory. The equip command automatically generates the item if it is not already in your inventory.

EDIT - Okay, here's why it happens.

When you check if they have the Oblivion equipped, you have -

If Oblivion Equipped
---If Oblivion Equipped


You're TRYING to check for them having it in both hands. The engine just sees you checking to see if they have it equipped AT ALL.

If they only have one equipped, they will STILL pass both checks.

In that event, you equip the Oblivion TWICE, which is why two of them show up.

EDIT AGAIN-

To fix it, separate the checks into two calls. Just check to see if they have one of SWORD TYPE equipped, then after you swap it out, THEN check to see if they have the same SWORD TYPE still equipped and do your second swap then.

I remember a line from a review for The Space Adventure which summed up the usual concept of "mature" perfectly: "On the whole, Space Adventure Cobra is about as 'Mature' as your average frat party, and about as predictable and exciting too."

The terms we're fumbling around in the dark for are "deep" and "meaningful."

There are plenty of games with "mature" content, but not many that are deep or meaningful.

Rant about a game I found deep/meaningful -