Built Ferd Tough

That's not my pun, alas, that's the name of the mission. Never thought I'd say this, but I really need to spend more time playing computer games. Sorry for the infrequency of posts this month.

One down, one to go. I scramble back down to the canyon floor (read: walk off the cliff and fall) and set off to find this Ferd guy, who I'm to beat to death before he has a chance to say anything, as superheros are often conscripted to do, I guess. He seems to be nowhere to be found, but there are plenty of other irradiates to keep me company, so I don't get bored. Much appreciated.


To pass the time we play a game where they throw glowing green crap at me and I punch them in the brain until they stop moving. It's pretty fun for me, and they seem to enjoy it.

Ferd is the first boss in the game you might have to team up for, but also the first boss that wanders around a given area who you'll have to hunt down and find before you can fight him. This proves to be much more of an obstacle than his actual difficulty level most of the time, particularly because everybody else in the area tends to be looking for him too, and you never know for sure whether he's actually around and you're just missing him, or whether he's dead and hasn't respawned yet.

On the plus side, this makes it easier to attract a team if you want one, because that means more people searching and less waiting around for a respawn, since you can all share one. It's this motivating factor rather than the challenge of the boss himself that makes teaming up with as many heroes as possible rather appealing on missions like this. Fortunately, it's the middle of the night and the zone isn't very crowded, so I go it alone. Kind of.

About ten minutes go by of wandering through the desert, alone but for the swarms of aggressive irradiates who keep on insisting on trying to hurt me, but then I spot him, shambling out of a hole that I must have already passed two or three times. Sneaky. I run over to make my displeasure known.

Ferd's about as tall as Alamagordo, but looks a good deal more normal. Apart from missing two fingers per hand, three toes per foot, and one nose per face, he doesn't seem all that different from your average nine foot bodybuilder with glowing arm tattoos.

Big fella, though. I'm going to have to come up with a good strategy to play against his unique size and strength and refine my tactics so as to pffffffthahaha!

Sorry. I run up and hit him a bunch of times.

As I probably ought to have expected by his stature and Vanderbilt's recommendation of teaming up against him, he doesn't go down very easily. He can't hurt me much, but I can't seem to hurt him much either, and he keeps calling in help from other irradiates that seem to just run in out of nowhere. Mostly because I have to keep turning and beating up his helpers to avoid getting mobbed, I start to worry about whether or not going in alone was actually a very good idea.















Just when it's looking like I might not come out on top, I'm suddenly assisted by the Dark Lord of the Sith. ... Wait, what?


Um... thank you? Sir?

Anyway, I'm not saying that I couldn't have taken him on my own, but it goes much faster when somebody helps out with a lightsaber. As soon as the big guy's down, the little guy takes off. That was strange.

So, I start heading back to Vanderbilt, pondering the exact difference between assassin and superhero, when I come across a big stone head with horns. Interesting.

I um, suddenly remember (?) that the statue of Grond back at the base was missing it's head. This, therefore, must be the head of that same Grond statue, and it falls to me, as a superhero-slash-battlefield-assassin, to take a sizable piece of it back with me. Yes, this makes perfect sense to me. I jump down off the rock I was climbing up to beat the assorted mutants to death and retrieve the biggest piece of the statue I can.




A short period of senseless violence later and I walk away with the horn, about twice my height and four times my weight. Don't ask me where I stowed it, because I honestly don't know.

One more irradiate tries to stop me on the way out, some sort of weird half-Alamagordo without the face tentacles or the extra four feet of height. I don't know what his attachment to the statue's horn is, but he's a little bit tougher than the others. Not, however, tougher than either of the two big guys I put in the ground in the last fifteen minutes, or as bad as the big red one with all the arms. That dealt with, I continue on my merry way.

I head back up to Colonel Vanderbilt for my pat on the head and my next assignment. To my surprise, he also offers some insight into my recent transformation.


Y'don't say?

He also gives me some bad news; apparently this whole disaster has been the work of the evil Gigaton, stationed inside the radiation vault right by the base! This is terrible! ... Maybe. Maybe it's a good thing. I have no idea who Gigaton is. Let me guess: huge guy I have to beat up? Shiny.


Wait, wasn't I supposed to rescue two of you...? He makes no mention of his missing partner, but this Gigaton thing sounds fairly important. So I suppose I'm heading back to base to find this radiation vault. That's all well and good, because I really ought to deliver this giant statue horn that I've been carrying around in my... pocket?... back to the Greenskin base. And that means talking to... erg... Kaufman.


Right, right, and a bang-up job you're doing of it too.

Okay then. Time to find this vault thing and beat up this Gigaton guy to make the sky turn blue again. I don't understand this job as well as I think I ought to.


UP NEXT: A TWIST!

Important announcement to potential players

Well, I'd hoped to play through to the end-game content prior to any changes that may encompass the game when it switches over to free-to-play. However, due in part to my own snail's pace through the game, this is unlikely. The point Iron Will's at now can be reached in about an hour if you rush, though it's taken me about twenty since I've paused to take screenshots and write several pages of superfluous description every three to four minutes of gameplay.

The other contributing factor to why this is so unlikely is that CHAMPIONS ONLINE WILL BE FREE IN ABOUT TWO WEEKS.

http://www.champions-online.com/node/595135

No, seriously, they just announced that yesterday.

So, if you've been reading this blog, or just started, and think it looks like a good time, now's your chance to try it out free of charge. Some of the specifics might be different in your game experience than mine... I don't know what changes they've made to the free version of the game... but I'll continue playing through the paid version and updating this sporadically.

Check it out if you'd like to! Or, you can keep watching me check it out. That's an option too.

A journey deep into the des... a couple hundred feet into the desert.

When last we left our hero Iron Will, he was about to strike out into the desert in search of the lost Greenskin officers Vanderbilt and Gertz. Our epic saga of slouching through the opening area of Champions Online continues!

(Short one today.)

Right, off to find the soldiers. I hop down from my perch on the wall and jog down the road, past the turrets, through the rock canyon, and take my first look at the great desert beyond.













... Oh. There he is.

Vanderbilt and a few soldiers are crouched behind some parked jeeps just on the other side of the rocks, about a fifteen second drive from the Project Greenskin base. Well, that's one mission accomplished, I suppose. In fairness, they're not in direct view of the base, so I can understand why any operation led by Kaufman would have been unable to find them. I wander over and see if I can help.


Okay, good, at least he actually needs a hand, so Kaufman wasn't entiiiiirely mixed up. Plus he looks pissed off and has some pretty nice shades, and is at the very least out here in the mildly uncomfortable desert sun, so those are some points for him right away. Yeah, sure, I'm here to help. What do you want me to do? Go add more ice to the coolers you left on top of the mesa for no good reason, try to assemble a laptop blindfolded without any training, go in search of the jeep ten feet to your right, what's the emergency?

So you want me to dive right in and find a certain abnormally powerful mutant that might be a key leader in the attack? That's... that's actually a really good use for a superhero that you have on your side for a limited amount of time. Fair enough, I'll see what I can do. Anything else?

Ferd is the first "mini-boss" that the game recommends teaming up to defeat. Teaming up in Champions Online is pretty easy on an evening or during the weekend, as there are usually at least a few other heroes in the same situation as you who also need teammates for a specific mission. If you're like me and get most of your gaming done at 3am on a weeknight, though, it can be a bit of a pain. Not to worry, though, the game doesn't actually REQUIRE you to get a group together to complete the mission... the boss is just hard enough that it's probably a good idea. A well-built character can usually solo this one, although it's hairy. Later on you'll encounter missions with a recommended team count of five that are fairly impossible by yourself, but not yet.

There's also apparently a particularly mean mutant out there who's sitting on an active nuclear weapon, and he'd like me to go and kill it, get the deactivation code from it, and deactivate the nuke, which, I would assume, is a high enough yield to blow us and the entire Project Greenskin base sky-high, and is apparently bleeding radiation like a drinking fountain, probably making it hazardous for any normal person to get within a hundred feet of it. That's just... that's a really, really good task to assign an invincible guy made out of metal. That makes perfect sense as a thing to do. I think I'm tearing up a little bit. Bless you, Vanderbilt. I was losing hope.

Right, first thing's first, I'm gunna shut this nuke down before we all die. I run past Vanderbilt's little camp, throw a mutant off the cliff (heh) and drop down to the canyon floor to find this nuke.


It's actually not too hard to spot, on account of the giant pool of glowing green goo it's leaking all over the place, and I've seen it before I even hit the ground.















Apparently this Alamogordo didn't see fit to camouflage it in any way, but he might not be much of a thinker. Or he might be huge enough that he doesn't particularly worry about somebody coming along and killing him for his passcode. Hrm. Well, we'll see whether or not that was a reasonable assumption to make in a few seconds, I suppose.


As I get closer to the pool, I notice a bunch of the garden-variety irradiates kneeling in the water worshiping the bomb and chanting "radiation is salvation" over and over again. I mostly ignore them.


Standing just a few feet away from the radioactive pool is a mutant who looks different than any I've seen before and seems to be the one leading the little religious ceremony. About eight feet tall, he seems to have a cluster of tentacles for a mouth, blue skin, and several random patches of his body are transparent, both forearms and a side of his face, revealing two radius', two ulnas, and a chunk of brain. Strange fellow. Alamogordo, I presume?

We get right to it; I don't particularly want to hear anything else he might have to say on the subject of sweet radioactive love. A few of the irradiates in the water jump out to help, but a random Snake-Eyes Spiderman looking guy swings in and shoots them, drawing their attention to himself and letting me and ol' Alamogordo concentrate on some good ol' fashioned fisticuffs. Thanks, hero whose name I didn't catch!


Alamogordo's big and he's strong, and he throws more painful radiation-balls than any of the other mutants so far, but he's still no match for Iron Will and his neutronium fists. The fact that I can see right where his brain is certainly doesn't hurt. He goes down without too much hassle, and I find the deactivation code in one of his pockets.

Other than the fact that I catch on fire with weird green radiation the second I set foot in the pool, it's a surprisingly simple matter to walk on over to the bomb and put in the code, shutting it down and preventing the complete destruction of the base. I can see why anybody without an invincible metal body would have had some trouble, though. Score one for the good guys.







That done, I pop back up to Vanderbilt to report in. He gives me the fairly standard hey-thanks one liner, but I like it. He's a professional, we got other stuff needs doin'. I throw him a quick salute and head back out to find this Ferd guy. Hopefully he's about as tough as the late Alamogordo.

















Up Next: Nope, significantly tougher.

Super Heroic Maintenance

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. Oh, the holidays.

As I guessed from the overabundance of still-alive mutants inside his base and the neon-greenish weather we're still having, Kaufman's not done with me yet. He interrupts his busy schedule of barking orders at various superheroes to bark orders at me.

Apparently the good folks at Project Greenskin have set up an advanced technological defense against just such an eventuality as we're currently experiencing: a line of state-of-the-art automated turrets around the front of the base. Nifty-keen. There's only one small problem with this potentially invulnerable defense: the things overheat and short out if left out in the desert sun.

I'm going to let that sink in for a few seconds. We're sitting here in a base in the middle of the desert, which is, like most places I've been, under the sun. This is not a new state of affairs; the sun has been there since a good while before the base was established, and when they built it in the first place they built it in the middle of an already-existing desert.

It was at some point after all of this that they decided, hey, we should probably put out some turrets that will repel the waves of irradiated mutants we're here to keep under control, just as long as these turrets are at no point under the desert sun.

I involuntarily make a strange noise like bare brake pads in my throat somewhere, but I manage to keep a pretty straight face, if I do say so myself. Yes. Yes, sir. I'll go re-start the turrets that short out whenever the sun's out. This sounds like a marvelously constructive use of my time.

Back down the hallway, through the shower tent, down the elevator, and back out to the landing pad. Fortunately, since those personal trainers at the Powerhouse showed me how to use my super-strength to jump fairly ridiculous distances, I don't have to wade through all the irradiates between here and the wall's front door this time, I can just jump right over it.


Hey, neat. I'm actually up on top of the glassed-in hallway on top of the wall where everybody's huddling for safety. I run right over Kaufman just to see the look on his face (completely unchanged) and then pop down to the desert on the other side of the wall. This seems like it should be a fairly momentous event as I'm no longer even remotely protected, but something about being able to vault the wall in a single leap makes it seem a little less so. Besides, there are a couple hundred freakish mutants running around inside the base anyway, so it's not like I'll be seeing anything I'm not used to out here. I make my way over a little hill and a crashed airplane to the first of the turrets and OH HOLY CRAP


The mutants out here are way more... mutated. I'm set upon by one of the ugly ones from inside and then three brightly colored four-armed ones covered in glowing veins with horns growing out of their heads. A least none of them have faces groaning at me from their chests. These guys seem to be made of denser stuff than the other ones, as my fists spatter into their faces more like a hammer into a rotten apple than a hammer into a rotten tomato, but I still don't appear to be in significant danger. A short bout of die-cast pugilism later and the turret is unattended. I flip the power switch and it turns back on, telescoping a big gun out of the ground and pointing it right at me.


I freeze up for one terrifying moment as two gun barrels the size of my fists take aim directly at my throat. Automated turrets, he said. As in, unmanned. As in run by an artificial intelligence.

Socrates! I've played right into it's hands!

A few tense seconds go by while I weigh the pros and cons of trying to bend the barrels out of shape vs. running and diving behind the nearest rock, but then the turret apparently deems that I am not the right type of radioactive mutant and turns to gun down some poor four-armed sod who's walking by minding his own business.

Granted, I was probably about to run over and pound his face in anyway, but it's kinda weird to just stand by while a robotic gun does it. Oh well. I move on to the next cannon and the next one, and pretty soon all of them have been restarted, shot a few mutants, and then overheated and shut down again. Whatever. I head back inside.



Surprisingly, that appears to be the last task that Kaufman had for me. He basically tells me to go bother somebody else, some guys named Vanderbilt and Gertz who are out there in the desert somewhere. I guess he figures he has all the help he needs here with a giant wolfman and some kinda pale radioactive guy who he's giving out assignments to. Works for me. The mere fact that Vanderbilt and Gertz have survived out in the desert for a few days tells me that they're probably more competent than the guy who relies on scientists to research ways out of his problems and thought that overheating cannons were a great defense in the middle of the desert.

Speaking of things that aren't very good ideas, I have to get to work on my anti-radiation device before heading out. Mr. Tiller gives me the last component and basically just points me to a big table covered with deadly weapons and tells me to go nuts. Fortunately, the diagram he gave me is actually pretty well done, and I manage to put the thing together in less time than it took me to assemble my IKEA computer desk. ... But then, my computer desk is currently a pair of filing cabinets with a door on top of them specifically because I never could get the desk proper to stand up straight, but I'm pretty sure this weird machine of mysterious function that I'll be depending on to save me from deadly radiation is going to work just fine.


So, that taken care of (possibly) I guess there's nothing to do but pack up my little machine and strike out alone into the vast desert. I need me some John Williams' Binary Sunset, but the few remaining shattered pieces of my mp3 player are at this point melted to the inside of my pocket, and Mr. Tiller doesn't have any machines that can't kill someone, so I have to hum it.

A final trudge down the hallway, through the anti-radiation shower, and down the elevator, but from there I can stretch my legs and probably jump most of the trip. I spot something on the way over the wall that stops me dead in my tracks, though.


What the heck is THAT thing?

It's without a doubt the biggest irradiate I've seen, standing probably seven feet tall and with four fully formed and exceptionally beefy arms on him. Whatever it is, nine soldiers apparently couldn't take it down, and are scattered all over the platform around it. I should probably just keep on going... but you know what? That thing's a menace. Plus, Vanderbilt and Gertz went out into the desert looking for the irradiates' leaders, and I'm betting their leaders aren't going to be the smallest or weakest ones. Gotta start somewhere, and it might as well be with this big red guy. I get a better angle, line up the jump, and make my opinion of his conduct known.


That doesn't seem to kill him at all. I suppose I should have expected that, but a good one-two has been enough to put down every irradiate I've met so far, so I'm a little disturbed by this discovery. He starts pounding at me with all four of his fists while I punch him in the side of the head as quickly as possible. We go back and forth a bit, and he fights me over to the edge, but I'm holding my own and despite the unexpected time investment, he hasn't actually managed to hurt me yet, so I'm feeling pretty good about this whole thing.


And then he smacks me right off the damn ledge.




Ow. That hurt. That really, really hurt.

I'm pretty surprised. Nothing's actually managed to make me feel like I might be genuinely injured since I pulled myself out of the rubble back in Millennium City. The fall and the sudden stop of the landing, though, seems to have majorly jarred some of my internal kibbles and bits. Must avoid long falls in the future. Good to know.

Falling in Champions Online messes you up pretty bad. It doesn't really matter what kind of defenses your character has or how tough they are against combat damage, falling more than ten meters or so will always knock off a significant fraction of their total HP. It will never quite kill them, though; you can fly up to the very top of the sky and let your guy fall to the bottom of the deepest pit on the map, and he'll have exactly 1hp left. This helps prevent you from dying instantaneously from simple pilot error, but if you land anyplace with enemies around it's basically the same thing as falling to your death, as at that point a stiff breeze could kill your character.

Fortunately for Will, here, this ledge isn't actually all that high, so he's still sitting pretty at about half his total HP. Still, it was full a second ago. Pretty significant.

I haven't even pushed myself to my knees yet when the big red creep leaps off the platform and tries to crush me with his landing. Holy cow. This just got real. I'm feeling bruised and bloodied just like a fight in the old days, and the soundtrack in my head has switched over to Duel Of The Fates. Let's do this.


We pulverize each other for another few seconds, but he doesn't last much longer. The fall wasn't really gentle on him either, and his fists just aren't nearly as hard as my face, whereas mine are significantly harder than his. After all that scrapping up on the roof, he finally goes down without much of a fuss on the ground.


This is way more awesome if you're listening to the song.

The nine soldiers on the platform above finally avenged, I climb back up onto the top of the wall to survey the landscape. A vast irradiated desert stretches out before me, cut down the middle by a thin ribbon of dirt road that disappears into the rocks in the distance. I can only imagine what lies waiting for me out there, but somewhere out in all that sand and nuclear fire two brave men are waiting for me to come and save them. If I have to wade through a hundred miles of insane mutants, then that's what I'll do. Because I'm Iron Will, and I'm ready.

Back to binary sunset.


Up Next: Actually, it's like a quarter mile.

Mugging The Mutants

In which our Platinum Protector, Iron Will, strikes back against the vile mutants who have overrun the southwest desert.

With my new orders and a strange diagram of an anti-radiation device of questionable functionality, I set out from the Project Greenskin headquarters on my long journey to, you know, fifty yards away. Half of the trip is by elevator. It's every bit as epic as it sounds.

The instant I step out of the elevator on the ground floor I get mobbed by half a dozen Irradiates who attack me with baseball bats, lead pipes, and glowing green balls of radioactive fire that they can apparently pull out of thin air and throw.

This would be a pretty hairy situation if I was still made out of meat, but as things are, I'm mostly just annoyed that I'm surrounded by so many unattractive people.





It takes somewhere between fifteen and twenty seconds to clock them all in their heads hard enough that they stop moving. Wiping the toxic blood off my knuckles with the jacket of a dead soldier, I'm struck for a moment by the thought that all of this may be desensitizing me somewhat.

... Nah.

I've got no real idea what order I ought to be completing mission objectives in or what the precise layout of the base is, so I pick a direction and start wandering through the base, figuring that between their inability to recognize me as a threat from more than ten feet away and their over-reliance on bludgeoning weapons that are softer than me, I ought to be able to handle any irradiates I may run into. After poking through some piles of dead soldiers, rubble, and the occasional burning jeep, I find my first Project Greenskin scientist, who has apparently angered a mob of five irradiates who are clustered around him hitting him with boards.


I'm unpleasantly reminded of those times I'd happen upon a troop of bigger guys roughing up one of the little nerdy guys in the hallways in high school. It riled me then, and it riles me now. And I react the same way I always have.


The operative difference being that in high school, I didn't have an implicit license to kill and fists in the double digits on Moh's Scale Of Hardness. Which, coincidentally, I only know about because a guy I saved from bullies helped me with my homework. It's a way of life.

Well there's an idea. So, Scientist Guy, I'm supposed to build this anti-radiation device and I have no idea how it even works. You think you could...?

Oh, he's already run away. Well, fair enough, I suppose. I'll catch up with him when I'm done out here.

I also seem to be in the exact area that Mr. Tiller marked on my map as having a high concentration of the parts we'll need to build the thingamapoop. All it takes is a few sudden flurries of excessive violence to clear the mutants, and the crates are literally just sitting on the ground for the taking. Not all of them have the parts I need, but enough of them do that I manage to gather up everything I'll need within a minute or two, even with the added time to knock around the mutants. Alright, so that's one objective down. Since there's no single area where the missing scientists are presumed to be, I suppose I'll head down to the Grond statue and see about stealing some of those uranium rockets Kaufman seems to think it's a good idea to be collecting.

The only problem is that there's a good ten or so irradiates milling around directly between here and there. I could probably go aroooound... nah, actually, you know what?


I wade on in, ignoring the sizzling green fire that they keep sticking to my chest and swinging my arms around pretty much randomly until I make it to the cluster of them near the cliff's edge, at which point it's time for a good ol' fashioned Roomsweeper.

Be sure to write. Jerks.

I lost count at twenty, but I think I've cleared just about every mutant on the upper level this side of the wall. Don't mean to toot my own horn, but I am really earning these new pants.

Okay, right, down to the Grond statue. Being invincible opens up a whole plethora of routes that I wouldn't have thought to take just a week before. I destroy a fair chunk of the sidewalk at the bottom of the cliff, but walk away completely unscathed and trot down the hill to where various mutants with bombs tied to their backs are scattering them about haphazardly around the statue. Not sure what their plan is, here, but I'm guessing those are the bombs Kaufman wants.


Aside from the fact that they insist on leaving time bombs wherever they go, these bomber mutants are about the most well-mannered irradiates I've met so far. I can walk right up to them and stare them in the eye, and they just sort of shrug and keep wandering around setting bombs up. They don't even try to stop me when I sit down right next to one and disassemble his bomb WHILE HE'S SETTING IT. How polite.

Yep, don't mind me, fellas, I'll just be undoing all your hard work right in front of your faces. I'll be out of your hair in a minute.

I must say, this is going very smoothly. I wonder if I might have a career in a bomb squad after this. Seems a practical application for invulnerability, and I seem to have a knack for successfully disarming bombs without any
Oh, damn. So apparently these bombs are on a timer, too. Well, that has an effect on things. Guess I'll have to follow these guys around and jump on the bomb the second they put it down.

So much for my new pants.











So I do that for a while and get blown up a few more times before I have enough bombs to satisfy Kaufman. This seems like the kind of mission I'd expect from Socrates, not a military professional. Oh well, that's taken care of, now all that's left is rounding up the remaining endangered scientists. I jog back up the stairs with half a dozen uranium cores jangling around in my pockets and look for some citizens in distress.

Do me a favor and start humming Trey Parker's "Montage".























Okay, you can stop now, I only had the two.

I find and subsequently rescue two more scientists without incident before I run into something genuinely intimidating.

"Jesus Christ! What the hell is that thing?" you may find yourself asking. That, my friends, is some sort of weird headless purple goon with a face in it's left pectoral and two extra baby arms writhing out of it's stomach, of course. I find it beating up another scientist and, when it realizes it's been discovered, it jumps up onto a crate at about head height, leans way over the edge while balancing on one foot with shocking gripping strength, and screams agony and horror at me from it's malformed nipple-mouth.

Needless to say, I punch it in the chest-face for about five minutes longer than necessary while the scientist covers his face and cries behind me. You and me both, pal.

So apparently the mutants come in more flavors than just hillbilly and soldier. Good to know. I'm beginning to see why they requested some superpowered assistance with this whole situation.

Anyway, I find one more scientist before my PDA tells me that I've saved all the missing scientists that Kaufman knew about. And I finally get the thank-you I've been waiting for this whole time.

Yes. Yes I did. Will you help me build this radiation thing?

So that's everything on my checklist. I head back to the elevator, this time opting not to fight my way back through an angry mutant army and simply jumping up to the helicopter pad. My legs must be pretty strong at this point.







Run across the landing pad to the big metal door, ride the elevator up, stand under the shower heads for a few minutes, jog down the hallway and boom. Alright, I took care of that stuff for you, Kaufman. What should we do now?











R... Research a way out of this mess?

I think Kaufman might overestimate the expediency of research or the practical applications of academic study. But um, yeah, okay, right on. Here's hoping they research us out of this as soon as possible.

By the way, what the heck did you need all these bombs for?




Oh. Um. Thank you. I'm very proud of me.

Somehow praise out of this guy just doesn't seem as heartwarming as it would be from, like, a police chief who went above and beyond the call of duty to defend his city from an alien invasion, for example, but I guess I'll take it in lieu of any sort of an explanation for what I was doing out there whatsoever.

From the way everyone's still standing around all poised and tense and the glowing green weather we still seem to be having, though, I don't think I'm quite done here yet.

Up next: This assumption was perfectly valid!