the chronicles of europe and also milkshake?? (Patreon)

hello fellow humans, we are writing to you live from our own goddamn home because we are back and no longer in places with fake names like 'koopgoot' and 'nootdorp'

so i personally have every intention to fling myself at the development wall so hard i clip through it starting very soon, but in the meantime, i thought we'd share some of our adventure with y'all! 

cass is here to tell part of this with me, so to differentiate between her and me, we'll use normal lines for me and

these indents for cass

our first destination was london, but going from denver allllll the way to there is a bit much for a wee little babie aeroplane, so we first had a layover in

New York

it was just a few hours, but that few hours was enough to meet up with a Cool Friend of ours. he's pretty underground....... you may not have heard of him...... his name is, i think, Jan Pokemonrejuvenation? yeah, that sounds right.

(we did generally take selfies with a couple failure exceptions but i don't want to post those without everyone's permission)

also in addition to jan we got to see Brave! we weren't even originally expecting to meet Brave there because he's usually in france, but he just happened to be there at the same time we were and it turns out that was p clutch because he had a car we could use to hustle to and from the airport in good time to make cass's extreme specific layover-time-planning work to a T. 

so anyway the four of us went out to dinner at a place called gyu kaku which was very scary to me as a vegetarian but delicious in the end! jan also got me a cute vulpix plush as a birthday present, and to top it all off, we still managed to get back to the airport in time before our airplane turned into a pumpkin

but maybe it should've turned into a pumpkin.
maybe that would've been better.

we now go live to cass to tell the next leg of the story

so we flew into JFK and while we were on the runway we mentioned that we made it! Jan asked, how long were you on the runway? and we were like, oh, like 5 minutes.
he told us then that he had been on there for hours before.
we hadn't been there for hours, but it turns out, this was secretly a harbinger of what was to come.

after getting dinner, we went back to the airport and were like wow there's nobody here, this is great!
we went and asked hey where are the TSA precheck lines? we had deliberately gotten precheck to speed up the process of getting through security for this occasion, and then were told that those lines closed at 8. so, what was even the point?
the regular security check line was slow but we eventually got through it,
and then we walked to our gate.
or at least, what we assumed would be our gate, because the departure boards didn't actually list what gate our flight was at yet,
so we got to the gate and the display board said that it had a flight bound to london.
this was accurate.
the part that was not accurate was that it was the london 9pm flight.
it was not currently 9pm.
it was 10pm.
so ame and i looked at each other, kinda shrugged, and just sat down at the gate.
and oh boy was it a spoicy gate.
there were all kinds of people rummaging around, talking funny,

and we were deeply confused about why our flight wasn't listed and why there was an entire other plane still here an hour late
and our eventual answer came in the form of a withered old lady, maybe going on her 80's,-- 

and this little old lady next to us just asked us,
hey they told me to go to this other gate and the people at that gate told me to go to this gate
so i was like
huh. that's weird.
so i started looking into details on the flight plan.
here's a fun fact if you didn't know-- if you're ever curious, you can just google a flight number and you can get information about what gate that's going or leaving to, where it is in transit, whether it's delated or not, etc. they just agregate that information.
according to google, the flight that she was looking for was already long gone.
i was like, oh shit yeah the flight that you're looking for doesn't exist? or was sent somewhere else?
she said, yeah and then they sent me over here
at first i thought, oh, you missed your flight
but then i discovered, after talking to some other people,
oh
she didn't miss her flight
her entire flight was cancelled due to mechanical failure
and then everything became clear.
we were, in fact, at the gate to the 9p flight to london.
(even though, at this point, it was now like 10:40p)
that flight had been bogged down because the airline desperately needed to figure out how it was going to get all of these people who were going to trash island back to trash island.

it was a flight to manchester, rather than london that had been cancelled, and since the london flights-- the one that had failed to leave, and ours-- were the next flights over, all of the airline staff were in something of a tither.
our flight was supposed to be at 11, and we sat at the gate for hours listening to the staff desperately call up passengers who apparently did not exist or had simply disappeared into the ether, trying to get them seats to get them back to their country.
as we inched on beyond midnight, the 9pm flight was still there. our plane? nowhere to be found.
eventually, there was movement.
we were, as reward for our patience, granted our own gate.
angels sung in a holy chorus as the heavens bequeathed upon us place proper
B23.
cass commented as we migrated to it that she would be really upset if we had spent all that time waiting at the other gate, with hard plastic seats, only to find that the chairs at gate B23 were better.

they were not better.
here is a picture of gate B23. 

you will notice that nobody is sitting down.
that is because there was nowhere to sit down.

there were no chairs.
so we waited there for a while further, doing our best as we watched the status screen tick forward telling us that our plane was current boarding at 12:15a.
the plane was not currently boarding at 12:15a.
it wasn't until around 1a that we were finally led through the off-white linoleum doors,
not to a boarding ramp like we expected,
but down a set of stairs
to a room with,
would you believe it
chairs
it turns out that gate B23 was actually just three separate gates in a trench coat, and the true seating area was sequestered in the basement away from us all where we would be none the wiser.
but even once we saw them, we were not permitted to sit in these chairs, plush, leather, and as inviting as they looked. we were simply snaked in between all of them in yet another queue, and then led out into the dark new york night to take
a bus????
cass joked about taking a bus across the ocean. i didn't know they had that techology! she said. it was one of a parade of comments she was making to keep us all from going crazy, and a woman in line with us commented that cass was really making her night with it.
it was a wholesome reprieve from proceeding to sit on the runway for another hour in a dead cell service zone where we could not tell anyone that our plane was finally leaving three hours late.
thank you JFK airport. jesus fucking khrist.

and then the plane gave us the 'rona.

yeah, so, we had heard that airplane filtration systems were great!
but they aren't in effect when you're just sitting on the runway.
for an hour.
breathing everybody else's air.
awkward.
we'll get back to that later though.
once it got moving, the flight over was, like, fine. we weren't impressed with virgin atlantic's service, and the outlet provided by our seat didn't work for the first few hours. but we finally got to... 

London

we were originally going to london to stay with our co-dev March, happened to have a Spare Room in a House to do things like Hang Out!
in the distant pre-pandemic era, March came over to visit us but i happened to get sick when they did, slept for most of the week they were there, lost my voice, my tongue turned spots, and i got pink eye. so, oops.
so we had time to make up for!
and this time we wouldn't got sick!
what do you mean i just mentioned the rona in the prior paragraph, that's silly !!!!

one of the first things that happened, and really set the tone for a lot of our future interactions, was we got on a bus. a london bus. the really tall ones. you know the ones, right? cass commented, full of bright smiling irony, wow, it's like they stacked two busses on top of each other! that's so cool, if only there were a word for that. an old irish gentleman who boarded the bus with us was not in on the joke. he interjected, sharply, it's called a double-decker bus. wow, i didnt know that! cass continued, having definitely known that. you know, it's so funny how you all drive on the wrong side of the road here! the man once again deigned to interjected, straight-faced, we drive on the proper side of the road.  and so it continued, with cass parodying genuinely obnoxious american tourists, making fun of people making fun of accents, and this man was just wholely committed to not getting it. it was, in its own way, beautiful.

we had a neat little moment when we first got to the house-- we had happened to bring over a plush as a gift for March, and coincidentally, they had gotten plush gifts for both of us as well! so, here's a picture of the umbreon march got me, along with the vulpix from jan!

(pictured between them is also a cute crescent shaped amethyst that vulpes got me too!)
and for cass... a meech!!

anyway, we had a nice time in the first few days! it was fun to be a new place, see new stuff! we quickly learned to hate the central line, a tram which, as the locals know, is very warm, stuffy, and makes all kinds of loud screechy nightmare noises. when we first heading to our home base on it, we saw someone napping on it, and cass commented how does anyone sleep on here???

at some point around this time, cass decided she wanted a Milkshake.
we have a good milkshake place in town, and she has a favorite comfort order there.  it's just a chocolate milkshake. with hazelnut, but the important part is the chocolate.
so, we did a google, found a place that had milkshakes,
and they didn't actually just have a normal chocolate milkshake.
how?
this, loves, began one of the greatest struggles and triumphs of our era-- The Great European Milkshake Hunt of 2022. 

Milkshake #1: no chocolate. had to make do with oreo. 

on the second day we were there, we hung out with long-time patron nicky at a board game cafe. in fact, you might hear more about him soon... we played a game we'd never heard of called Scythe, in which cass took over the board with exactly 0 resources and then decided maybe she likes that game.
on the way back, she did her best impression of all of the central line's best noises, hurt her throat in the process, and then fell asleep on the return trip through central line, the literal day after she asked how anyone could sleep there.
classic cass tbh.

over the next few days, she noticed that she was pretty tired. we thought it was just from all the travelling and running around. also her throat was still hurting from the central line impression. it was loud and chaotic enough that we fully thought she had just overdone it.
we did at some point in here try getting another milkshake or two!
Milkshake #2: didn't work out for reasons we can't remember. I think they also didn't offer chocolate or something.
Milkshake #3: was delivered to us melted. and this is when we really started keeping track.
after a bit, she took a test, and we discovered that, fantastically, the travel and screeching had just hidden both of her symptoms, and she was indeed positive.
fuck.

we did our best to carry out a few plans as safely as possible within cass's energy. vulpes had already travelled a fair distance to meet us, so we hung out and Did Our Best! she also got me the cool thing i mentioned above, and it was super nice to meet her!
the next day, we took an ill-advised (haha get it) trip to Birmingham to meet a few other reborn folks, abyss, melon, and blue.
blue in particular made us some super cute, tasty treats!

check these out:

those are birthday cake balls iced in the reborn colors. blue also made each frosting in a different flavor to match their in-game meaning!!! like ruby is pain so red was a spicy cinammon flavor. blue was a fresh mint, green was lemon, and purple was, i forget the details but some kind of gingery citrus flavor? purple and green were my favorites but they were all really good and super impressive! i have also just learned today that they made an amount to match my age, and i'm like, how are there still cool details about this to find out that we didnt even realize at the time?? 

these were definitely a highlight of the birmingham trip-- the aquarium we decided to go to because we thought it would be quiet, was anything but. apparently in an attempt to survive the pandemic, they were blasting Super Loud Pirate Music all the way through, and we happened to be going through the single path with another, very large, very loud family... it was a bit rough all around, but there was one underwater tunnel segment which was really cool, so at least there's that.
they posted a digital survey at the end for feedback.
i thought, oh i will happily tell them to please turn down the music because it is obnoxious
i had a chance to say that within the first couple pages of their survey. it would just be like a three page thing, i thought.
and then there was a four page.
and a fifth.
and an eight.
and a thirtieth-- i'm not even kidding, i swear to god cass and i were just swiping left on these survey pages to get through them all as fast as we could and we did not make it to the end of unique questions before we just decided fuck it and just walked.

anyway, that trip was exhausting for cass and i was starting to feel like i had a sore throat as well, so we also dropped in at a nice turkish cafe, where we explored the cake treats above, and also got,
Milkshake #4: once again did not have chocolate.
but in the end, we did manage to have a good time and avoided getting anyone sick! big W despite everything, and cool cake balls to boot. 

the next few days we had to crash. and we were panic-crashing because we had originally planned to go to 

France

we were originally going there to see brave!!! but brave is in new york!!!!
why are we in france!!!! we were going to wonder. but we had already booked the ticket.
torre had very kindly invited us to play games with their friends when we were there. but we ended up having to ditch the pre-booked ticket after all due to sickness. we spent our france days in london recovering. march and i were both getting Down With The Sickness, though i kept testing negative on all of the at-home ones despite my symptoms. 

we passed those days in a fugue, the three of us all mostly playing Hades on Hell Mode in tandem, among some other games that i can't remember because, again, fugue. 

Germany

we were also going to go to germany to hang out with our friend and fellow patron lua!!! but we cannot go to germany!!! we are dying squirtle.
after four negative tests, we finally got a proper test and confirmed that i had also come down with the rona, which frankly was a massive improvement over having to mask indoors on the chance that i was somehow fine or had something else.
masks in humid heat wave london are suffering!!! we did not like that!!!! but then it was better, and cass was already getting better. after a few days, we were able to think about picking our plans back up.

incidentally, around this time, i got an email from my mom, telling me that my childhood best friend who i hadn't talked to in like ten years happened to live in

The Netherlands

...which was the next leg of our original trip anyway! cass had thought ahead and gotten travel insurance, so we were able to book a flight to pick back up with our plans, which had us staying with another dev friend, Perry!

...but, we still hadn't had a good milkshake. So, Cass looked at the travel route and noticed there was a Five Guys that we could swing by on the way there. We'd never been to Five Guys before, but we knew it was an American chain, ergo it stood to reason they would have the kind of chocolate milkshakes she was craving. We place an order for pick up and left early before we got to the flight... and then the navigation info for the place was wrong. It was located in a huge shopping center, Stratford Westfield, but we couldn't find it for like twenty minutes because nothing indicated that it was actually on a secret hidden fourth floor of the mall that took us forever to find.
And so we got there, aaaaand....
Milkshake #5: non-existent. their milkshake machine was broken, and since we placed the order online, they also couldn't give us a refund.

Anyway, Perry showed us around his home town, which was frankly gorgeous. I'm not exactly big on taking a bunch of pictures, because I'd rather just enjoy things in the moment instead of trying to hoard memories for the future... and also pictures really never do the pretty scenes justice... so I missed some of the best areas. Buuuut I did grab a few shots to bring back for you all!

this is a huge plaza walkway we were exploring as the sun set,

and a building on the other side of that same plaza

and a cute little alley we walked down that this picture especially doesn't do justice,

this picture is an example of something i feel like americans will appreciate a lot more than europeans, because everything in europe is so cool and close together... but we do not have cute little streets like this in america !!! our streets are always wide and full of gross asphault and cars and everything is spread out and dry and hot because we are legally required to have eight million gross parking lots!!! the rare areas we have that you can just walk around and have a bunch of buildings cutely together are far and few in between. having been to a few more places, i see how a street like this may not even be that uncommon over there, but for us this is novel and cool !!!!

and this whole area around here was frankly venetian with how many little shady rivers and channels were around the place, including back doors that opened nonsensically right onto the river. i should've gotten a shot of those tbh but my brian hadn't turned on yet and also no way i would've even come close to capturing how cool the area was with all of them together.

anyway wow the netherlands is pretty, and we had a blast mispronouncing every word we saw. nothing is safe. idk how the language manages to feel so silly, but i love it. 

the next day we explored rotterdam proper with seal from the main server! or was it ciel? here's a couple pictures taken from atop the euromast, a huge tower that you can go in to overlook the city:

this city is so pretty !!!! you have cool buildings and rivers and so many trees !!!!!!!!!!! what the heck!!!
when we first got there, perry was like yeah rotterdam is ugly and although we can see how we meant in comparisson to his home town, what the heck !!!! this is so cool !!!! i wish to cyberbully him into admitting it is cool !!!!!!! please cyberbully perry!!!!!!
(but only a little bit, he was a great host and super chill)

we also, in our exploration, of course, still had to find another milkshake. there was a beautiful indoor market we explored and then set off to hunt down a milkshake place near us! the last one's milkshake machine was broken-- and maybe there just isn't a good milkshake in england??? a fresh country, a fresh start, a fresh milkshake. that was our goal!
Milkshake #6: we found a local place, and their milkshake machine was, somehow, also broken. how?!?!!!!

no, we would not be defeated. cass went to try Five Guys again!!! and then, just as we got to the block it was located at, I noticed we passed another local milkshake and ice cream place. We should support the local businesses! I said, naively, and so we went to that place instead. We ordered up, aaaaand,
Milkshake #7: there were weird white shavings mixed in it???? cass couldn't even chew through it. we determined later it was probably cocount shavings and the machine hadn't been cleaned properly.
fortunately, the store owners were chill about it and offered to remake it for her. they even offered to let her watch! she did, and...
Milkshake #8: okay that was nice of them but it came out super watery somehow and just sucked. :c
we ended up camping out at a different Five Guys for their free refills and playing jackbox, but we were so defeated we didn't even want their milkshake anymore. 

speaking of defeat, that night we tried to order pizza. this is how we learned that dutch pizzas are fucked up, yo. we ordered from a local place, and maybe it wasn't the best because it was a little bit late-- but come on, pizza places should be open late, right???--
cass just wanted a pepperoni pizza. i only saw 'salami' ones. i asked perry, does that just translate to pepperoni? he said yes. but lo, the pizza we got did not have pepperoni-- it was exactly seven full size salami slices. how? why?
and for my part, i wanted olives on my pizza. so i selected olives, and i thought to myself, surely this will be black olives, and not something silly like kalamata.  i do not much care for kalamata olives.
and it was not kalamata olives!
it was green olives!
on a pizza????
who puts green olives on pizza??????????
also they didn't even cut the pizza before delivering it!!! who and why and how?!
i just don't know. how do you mess up pizza?

anyway, on the last day we were there, we were able to meet up with my childhood best friend
y'all, this is the guy who we got kyra from. he and i knew each other since we were 3 years old!!! he introduced me to zelda and pokemon and fire emblem. i used to try and drag him into my RPG Maker shenanigans when i was in middle school and it usually didn't work but he definitely encouraged me back then.
we did not know he was there when we planned this trip. i had not talked to him since like 2011!!!!  that was before i transitioned and wasn't sure if he even knew my name !!!!!!
but we got to meet! and hang out and talk! i had missed him!!! and i don't know if he remembers it but we definitely made a childhood promise to go check in and visit each other when we were smelly old adults and see how each other were doing, so like, hey, goals achieved !!!!
he incidentally had happened to get covid a few weeks ago himself, and started playing reborn during his quarantine. he said he had enjoyed it a lot, remembered when i was first drawing the region map back then, was very proud. so, this was a wonderful coincidence all around!!

aaaaaand of course we had some time to kill and accidentally ended up at the same Five Guys as the previous day, where they actually remembered cass??? anyway, we played Jackbox again and got.........
Milkshake #9: this was the first actual decent milkshake we had!!!!!!!!! just decent though. not great. 

Scotland

from there we caught a flight out to edinburgh. we didn't know when we planned it that fringe fest was going on (rather, i had never heard of fringe fest) so that was a nice coincidence! it's like in the pokemon anime where ash and the gang just happen to stroll into every town when their local festival is going on. the city was straight bussin' with activity though-- frankly far too many tourists. but!! very pretty!! here's one of the first things we saw when we got off the bus from the airport:

that is edinburgh castle, and just below that line of people was an outdoor live concert!! they were doing their best to watch it despite the barrier, lol...

we walked through a park to where we were staying with long-time-friend and longer-time known-troublemaker aaron

that's another big 'picture doesn't do it justice' moment. but the silhouette of the city in the park was pretty lit. frankly, all the architecture in edinburgh was super cool.

the night we got in, we were also hurting for some food. it was a bit late, so we tried to order delivery. and we had been hurt by dutch pizza. so we wanted good pizza. so we ordered pizza. i picked a safe vegetarian option that listed no meat.
it came with ham.
so... fezzdog happened to be hanging out with us that night too! because he happened to be there for fringefest, and he became the proud owner of a whole-ass pizza while i ordered replacement delivery.
we first ordered food around 10p.
and i ordered a replacement around 11. a veggie wrap that didn't list what was in it, but it was vegetarian and i didn't have time to be picky.
and then time passed...
midnight...
it was nearly 1am when i still didn't have my food. i called the place and caught them just at the last minute where they told me they couldn't reach me to deliver it, but i did finally get it just as the place closed!!!
the veggie wrap had bell peppers in it. i am mildly allergic to those. ah well. we tried hard.
also though, meanwhile to all of that, cass went back to the pizza place to try and get a refund, and had to go through online
and the online chat representative
to her credit, did eventually give cass a refund,
but the things she said were just:
"rest assured, i will help you in the best way possible :)"
"please wait while i contact a team member who can help you in the best way :)"
"i understand the issue. let me see what i can do to help you in the best way :)"
...okay she didn't type the smiley faces but 'help you in the best way' has just become our own meme from this because what
i
what
...whatever, it's not worth thinking about too hard....
...but what?

anyway, from the community, we also mane up there and had some big chill moments in between getting lost in all the Bustle. the whole place was just buzzing.
here's victoria street the following day, a cute row of shops up a winding hill.  

a couple pictures from the roof of camera obscura, a museum of optical illusions:

definitely completely unrelated to the aforementioned place, i had my head cut off again! a hydreigon out there is eating well:

and here's a random shot of the downtown architcture in the distance as we were walking back from everything:

also here we hopped into a burger place that had some nice food, and more importantly... !
Milkshake #10: the best milkshake we found in europe. chocolate, nice and icy, just good quality foodcoma-inducing milkshake. hooray!

and then the next day we trained back down to

London... part 2!
now with 100% less covid!

we had a whole lot of people to meet that ended up getting shoved to the back half. also, being away and seeing cool places in other places made us realize we hadn't really seen the cool places in london! so the next few days we really went our party-hard best and going and doing Neat Stuff and seeing People! 

we hit up wicked (i'd never seen wicked... i was a failure of a theatre kid, but no longer !!!), took a boat tour or two, got a shitty Milkshake #11 but it was cheap so who cares, checked out the palace and walked right on by it, esp after having been blasted in the face with green park just being dead, shriveled, and anything but green from the heatwave ( :amydespair: ). the wind blew once and the dust from the park nearly knocked us into next tuesday. 

pictures that i took mostly to prove that yes we were in london!!!!!

the next day we met up with a gaggle of folks from the community, including lissa, wilder, azery, and lua who managed to fly all the way out from germany just to catch us on the take 2, jesus christ fam, took an extended boat tour which definitely sunburnt several of us (oops), and then decided to hit up one of the places we saw from the tour. it was an old warship which had been decomissioned and turned into a museum that people could explore!

you can see it on the thames here!

that sounds cool, right? doesn't that sound cool. we thought it sounded cool.
...it wasn't very cool. especially because this was still during the heatwave. i think stepping into the top gun chamber just murdered at least two of us with heat outright, and although there were some cooler parts of it the ship, in both senses, it was kind of a bust overall. oh well. we went and got Milkshake #12 and hung out at a five guys again, lol

y'all there's so many more Five Guys in europe than we see here. seriously we'd never been to one before. 

here's the real highlight of the boat tour, peep this:

does that county hall building say Shrek's Adventure?
yes. yes it does.
why?
i don't know.
i don't even want to know.
but from now on i'm going to adopt this as unequivocal proof that london is actually just run by Shrek. 

over the last couple days we got to see some folks again, the main new face being Posty from the main server and also deso! and we mostly just chilled because Gosh we were tired again at this point. 

and then the flight back.
the flight back itself was great! it was an eight hour flight that felt like four hours. although somehow cass's in-flight television died on both of the invidiual flights over.
----
what, patreon just like interrupted me posting, to make me do a captcha. patreon, what??? i'm not a robot. i live here. this is my house. i have been not a robot for years. i have been making this post for several hours. what?????
... i, okay.
so the flight was decent. the airport out of london, however...
i mean, it's heathrow. I'm led to understand heathrow is always a disaster. we got there with almost a couple hours to spare (after being hung up by desperately trying to avoid the central line, much to our own detriment)
and the line to check bags was past the door.
it was just a swarm of very confused people doing their best. apparently the check in software at the front had crashed. and virgin and delta mixed services for the day.
i don't know, it was a mess.
and then we realized
the cut off time was 50 minutes before departure
and we were sitting in a very long line 52 minutes before departure.
for as much of a disaster as the airport was, the staff were great. an attendant helped us get our bag in time so we could go up to security. and security was a second cluster. when we were approaching just t-minus 30 minutes, we asked for help and were allowed to jump forward... to a second line. and we asked again there, and were jumped forward...
and then our bag got caught up for an extra detailed check... i packed the shampoo in the wrong bag. we had to swap positions with the detainee in front of us because by this time we had 8 minutes left before departure.
it took four people yelling at the security official for him to please just toss the shampoo so we can Bolt.
and Bolt we did.
did you know it is a 20 minute walk from security to some gates in heathrow? by their own sinage.
did you know that they put an entire bloody shopping mall between security and the gates?
i didn't! until then!
and we had to actually sprint. 20 minute walk done in 5 or so, with the two of us weaving as best we could through the crowds of shop-goers, shoutting directions to each other -- left! no, right!!-- as we went.
fun in retrospect but jesus christ painful and hair-tearing in the moment.
we did eventually make it and it was all gravy from there. 

this was frankly only the second-worst sprint of the trip, as when we were first leaving denver and had three suitcases with us, we had to sprint up four flights of stairs at a tram crossing where the elevator was broken just to catch our flight out in time. we were just about dead from both of these, but agreed the stairs were easily worse. 

anyway, we made it, and finally arrived back at

Denver

...wait, the post isn't over yet?

so incidentally, we had another event planned in this city. it was scheduled before we decided to take this trip, and the trip cut into half of it becuase of airline timings and prices. so, it was really out of the flying pan and into the fire for us. 

so, if you're very well versed on stories of the old online league, you might know that before it was called the Reborn League, it was tagged as another name-- The MonkeyPro League! MonkeyProductions is a website started by a friend of mine, MonkeyDog, who is still a patron with us here today. It was originally an RPG Maker/social site which spun off from a community I joined when I was 11. the site never really went beyond the same dozen or so people, but that group of friends has persisted since then. in fact, if you were to look through the memberlist of reborn's forum in join-order, you'd probably find most of them in the first few dozen entries.  

so back in 2016 we finally all met up, rented a house, and played games for like a week straight and it was incredible! we vowed to do it again soon-- but the pandemic threw a wrench into our plans. however, we finally got our reuinon! so we flew back in just in time to catch the latter half of it. cass got to meet them, i got to see them again, and we all had a super nice time in what amounted to like a boardgame buffet over two days. 

also.
the place they rented this time, we realized when the sun went down
has an incredible view of our city. this is from the third floor of the rented house, a loft where where one of the walls is comprised entirely of windows. it's another picture-doesn't-do-it-justice moment, but nonetheless:

the lights were off and cass and i were up there alone. we were both just struck by the scene and how colorful downtown is. my phone absolutely doesn't quite pick it up over the bright yellow, but if you look closely you might see the handful of buildings lit in different colors, which were themselves rotating. the stadium, just barely visible over the apartment on the right, happened to be having a concert, beams of light shifted through the air, and the whole thing glowed in its own colors too. 

having been all over the place now, this was an incredible capstone to our trip. one common theme while we were abroad was-- we didn't realize how nice denver is in a lot of ways, even compared to other places. we had already been thinking that, but suddenly, unexpectedly having this entire view really just hammered it home for us.

we like this place.
and it's nice to be back.
thanks for waiting for us everyone <3