![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The flat foster kittens now have two modes: either they are all asleep in adorable poses on the two living room couches, or they are all running around. The first of these is not a problem. During phases of the second, to go to the kitchen and bring water or food back to my room, I have to
1) enter the living room, shutting the door behind me before the kittens have noticed that it's open
2) cross the room and squeeze past the tall cardboard box which shuts the kittens out of the kitchen, pulling it quickly back into place behind me
3) retrieve and replace the kitten which has got through anyway and is by this time trying to fit behind the stove
4) attempt to step back over the cardboard box while holding the plate or glass I wanted without either spilling it or stepping on the kittens milling about below
5) (if successful) go out of the living room into the hallway, closing the door as quickly as possible behind me
6) put down the plate or glass I'm carrying on the stairs to intercept the kitten who is by this time wriggling past the vacuum cleaner into the debris field that is our storage hallway
7) put the kitten back into the living room
8) retrieve both the kittens who escaped while I was doing that
9) put both those kittens back into the living room
10) attempt to rapidly grab the third kitten as it escapes and move it back through the door, using it to nudge both the first two kittens out of the way
11) fail
12) ask flatmate to please help with blimmin kittens.
In this case, when I was back in my room with a not-dropped bowl of muesli, I rejoined the roleplaying game I was playing on microphone. My first choice of character for this game would have been the optimistic, highly qualified yet untried dwarven alchemist in charge of the aethership's engineering division, who got a bonus to any attempted engineering based on the quality of her technobabble, but since my second choice was the devoted servant of a dead god whose very memory most people had already sold on the magical black market for pocket change, who had used dubious and painstaking methods to resurrect one of her sacred fieldmice who now accompanies him everywhere as a familiar, I'm not sorry with how things turned out. Roleplaying is most fun when it's shaped so that characters will do characteristic things. Our session ended with the engineer reversing the polarity of the gravitite of the water-covered asteroid orbiting our spaceship such that it was flung away from us and our engine didn't explode, while my cleric hung in the ship's submerged cargo hold, with one hand on the jawbone of his goddess which he had spent most of his life searching for, as the temporary gills on his neck slowly decayed. And the eighty-year-old half-elven space marine spent the entire session being thoroughly competent while going, "Why a jawbone? Why is the jawbone flooding our cargo hold? I was retiring! Why are there pirates?" And the chaotically occult thief who'd snuck on board impersonating the doctor whose ticket she stole saved several people's lives, probably killed several more people by convincing the dwarven doctors that humans had to be treated using pieces of the things that had wounded them (in this case, fragments of asteroid and pirate blood), and then accidentally electrocuted everybody in the cargo hold using ghosts. I call this a success, on the whole.
1) enter the living room, shutting the door behind me before the kittens have noticed that it's open
2) cross the room and squeeze past the tall cardboard box which shuts the kittens out of the kitchen, pulling it quickly back into place behind me
3) retrieve and replace the kitten which has got through anyway and is by this time trying to fit behind the stove
4) attempt to step back over the cardboard box while holding the plate or glass I wanted without either spilling it or stepping on the kittens milling about below
5) (if successful) go out of the living room into the hallway, closing the door as quickly as possible behind me
6) put down the plate or glass I'm carrying on the stairs to intercept the kitten who is by this time wriggling past the vacuum cleaner into the debris field that is our storage hallway
7) put the kitten back into the living room
8) retrieve both the kittens who escaped while I was doing that
9) put both those kittens back into the living room
10) attempt to rapidly grab the third kitten as it escapes and move it back through the door, using it to nudge both the first two kittens out of the way
11) fail
12) ask flatmate to please help with blimmin kittens.
In this case, when I was back in my room with a not-dropped bowl of muesli, I rejoined the roleplaying game I was playing on microphone. My first choice of character for this game would have been the optimistic, highly qualified yet untried dwarven alchemist in charge of the aethership's engineering division, who got a bonus to any attempted engineering based on the quality of her technobabble, but since my second choice was the devoted servant of a dead god whose very memory most people had already sold on the magical black market for pocket change, who had used dubious and painstaking methods to resurrect one of her sacred fieldmice who now accompanies him everywhere as a familiar, I'm not sorry with how things turned out. Roleplaying is most fun when it's shaped so that characters will do characteristic things. Our session ended with the engineer reversing the polarity of the gravitite of the water-covered asteroid orbiting our spaceship such that it was flung away from us and our engine didn't explode, while my cleric hung in the ship's submerged cargo hold, with one hand on the jawbone of his goddess which he had spent most of his life searching for, as the temporary gills on his neck slowly decayed. And the eighty-year-old half-elven space marine spent the entire session being thoroughly competent while going, "Why a jawbone? Why is the jawbone flooding our cargo hold? I was retiring! Why are there pirates?" And the chaotically occult thief who'd snuck on board impersonating the doctor whose ticket she stole saved several people's lives, probably killed several more people by convincing the dwarven doctors that humans had to be treated using pieces of the things that had wounded them (in this case, fragments of asteroid and pirate blood), and then accidentally electrocuted everybody in the cargo hold using ghosts. I call this a success, on the whole.
