First appearance: S4E9 — Shootout — Stanley Second Life Gibbs v Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th (Greg) · watch it on YouTube
Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th, Greg to his friends, came to the Void wanting one thing: an honorable duel where everyone shakes hands at the end. What he got was the Deathmatch with the most deaths the arena had ever seen. Greg killed his opponent over and over, nearly always by accident, while losing a toe and three fingers along the way. Then the truth came out. Greg had never been the fighter. His guns were.
Story
Shootout
Greg’s Deathmatch opened in the Shadow King’s gloomy throne room. The Grandmaster had just smashed the Shadow King’s PlayStation, and she gave up partway through announcing Greg’s name. Greg corrected her sweetly (“It’s Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th, actually”) and looked up at the Shadow King with an awed “oh gosh, you’re very tall.” He admitted that one of his many brothers and sisters used to tease him with “Gregor” and that it was a sore spot, so the Grandmaster introduced him as Gregor at once. When asked how he meant to win, Greg said he hoped for a real honorable duel, though he confessed that “some accident always occurs” whenever he stepped into an arena. Through a portal of shattered controller and bleeding amulet, he and the gunslinger Stanley Second Life Gibbs stepped into an abandoned Western saloon. The piano played to itself, and The Acolytes swung cowboy hats in the stands. Greg had already told Stanley he had “a lovely gun.” He then tried a pistol twirl, dropped the gun, and learned that Stanley’s pistol had a safety. “Yours has a safety? Shit.”
The accidents started with the very first bow. Greg bowed awkwardly before the duel, as any gentleman must. One pistol fell from its holster and fired, and the bullet ricocheted into Stanley’s thigh. When Greg bent to pick it up, the other pistol fell and fired too, and Stanley died. “Why does this keep happening?” Greg wailed. Stanley’s little drone revived him in a flash of light, which startled Greg so badly that he toppled backwards and shot off his own pinky toe. Stanley kindly dropped the green toe into a mug of ale “so you might be able to reattach that.” Greg later poured the toe beer and an armful of bar liquor into The Box of Chaos as his offering, then gingerly dropped in the toe itself. The soul inside sneered, “Why the fuck do you think I want your dirty toe?” It took the toe anyway. Then it handed the toe back on a silver chain, as a pendant that let him fly. Greg never once used it to fly.
Greg grew more and more frightened of a man who would not stay dead, and he scolded his pistols to “just work normally for once.” They kept working far too well. One shot burst Stanley’s heart. Another shattered his glass and opened his throat. While Greg cowered under the billiards table, a dropped gun went off and hit Stanley right between the eyes. Then the Shadow King offered to “prismatic finger” the champions with his stolen prismatic spray rings, and the fingering left Greg stiff and restrained, at risk of ending up “rock hard.” Then Stanley’s shadow shot hit Greg in the hands, which cost him a pinky. Greg shrugged off the shot’s blinding magic so completely that it corrected his eyesight instead. Seeing clearly for the first time, he was delighted by the colours: “Did you know that some lizards are colorblind?” Once he had shaken off the stiffness (leaving, Stanley noted, “a stain on the front of his pants”), Greg aimed a heroic shot at a chandelier. The bullet bounced out a window, off two posts outside, back through the bar and past his own face. It brought down three chandeliers and wrecked half the bar, and it broke Stanley’s neck. A whisper came on the wind (“Greg, shoot him”), and his next bullet went straight down Stanley’s barrel.
The truth came out in the final round. Stanley’s flaming golden bullet took off two more of Greg’s fingers, and his next shot broke one of Greg’s pistols. Greg insisted the broken gun had just called him “a little bitch.” He threw it to the Grandmaster, and it shrieked “Greg, you’re a bitch!” as it flew out of the arena. “See? See, I fucking told you!” The remaining pistol had had enough. It floated out of Greg’s hand, pistol-whipped him, and took over the fight. It shot Stanley’s drone to pieces, and with it went Stanley’s last life. Then it turned on Greg. “Greg, you little bitch. You got my sibling killed.” It shot him twice. Bleeding badly, Greg asked the gun what it had wanted all along, then slipped on his own blood, cracked his head and died. The pistol fired into the air to celebrate and killed an Acolyte, so the Grandmaster pinned it to the ground with an arrow, and it burst apart like a mechanical firework. Both champions were dead, and the match had no winner.
Afterwards, Greg took comfort that “at least it was indeed, finally, a noble duel.” His pistol told him to shut up and complained bitterly that it, “the evolution of ranged weaponry,” had been shot to pieces by a longbow.
Personality and Abilities
Greg was green, endlessly apologetic and deeply polite. He promised to pay for the saloon’s damages (“Not for you, Stanley”) and asked whether his pickled toe would be drunk. He spoke often of his family: many brothers and sisters, a “mom and pa” he believed would have wanted him to fight, and a fearsome big sister who used a polearm and always beat him in a fight. At the table, his player described him as the child of a noble with far too many children, very replaceable and terrible at everything. He was a coward at heart. He spent much of the fight hiding behind the billiards table and praying, and he never used his flying toe pendant once. He also seemed rather taken with the Shadow King. He saluted him from the arena floor, and when the Shadow King said “Easy come, easy go,” Greg asked plaintively, “Was I also easy go, Shadow King?”
He fought “a kimbo,” with two pistols, because “a duelist is only so good if they can dual wield.” Those pistols were the real fighters. They were sentient and foul-mouthed, and they fired whenever they liked. In his own words, his pistol was “a far more proficient combatant than I am.” By the end he had nine toes, seven fingers and perfect eyesight.
Relationships
- Stanley Second Life Gibbs: His opponent, and a friendly one. Greg killed him again and again, mostly by accident. Stanley’s dying wish was to meet Greg’s big sister.
- The Shadow King: Greg admired him openly. The Shadow King answered with an 8-ball thrown at his head, then complained that Greg’s death spoiled his own plan to kill him.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: She mangled his name, booed his first accidental kill, and destroyed the pistol that killed him.
- His pistols: Two sentient siblings that used Greg as “a vehicle to get them into the Deathmatch.” One died in Stanley’s crossfire, and the other killed Greg to avenge it.
Memorable Quotes
- “It’s Gideon Regalis Electus Gregorius the 537th, actually. But my friends call me Greg, or Gregory, if they’re feeling very funny that day.” (S4E9 — Shootout)
- “Oh, no. Oh, not again. I’m terribly sorry.” (S4E9 — Shootout)
- “Will my toe be drunk when it gets done?” (S4E9 — Shootout)
- “Stanley! I can see you properly.” (S4E9 — Shootout)
- “It’s the guns. It’s always the guns.” (S4E9 — Shootout)
- “Well, I do suppose that I may have fallen in battle, but at least it was indeed, finally, a noble duel.” (S4E9 — Shootout)