First appearance: S7E5 — Rock and a Hard Place — Iowa-Ska v the Pebble · watch it on YouTube
Iowa-Ska is a green dragonborn fighter, played by CaptainRoBear, who came to the Void in his mid-forties after “30 years in middle management” and won his only Deathmatch against the wrestler The Pebble. He arrived in a tropical-feather headdress and a barbarian loincloth, with a halberd, a jug of unknown liquid, and a leopard named Odorongo that nobody else could quite see. His fight was a midlife crisis in the arena: podcast-recommended supplements, a scratched Vespa, a poison-filled condom, a stampede of giant chinchillas and a DMT vision. It ended with a halberd driven straight through the Pebble’s barbed-wire tramp stamp.
Story
S7E5 — Rock and a Hard Place — Iowa-Ska v the Pebble
Iowa-Ska stepped into the locker room of The Dread Fortress and announced, “After 30 years in middle management, I am prepared to ascend into this arena.” The Grandmaster took to him at once (“I like him”) and gently asked him to keep his opening third eye closed until later, for the show. The Pebble called him a lizard, and Iowa-Ska corrected him with dignity. In The Chinchilla Forest, which the Grandmaster said should feel like home to him, he swallowed a lion’s mane capsule, a vial of AG1 and “another five stack” all at once. Then he came in swinging with his halberd in the style of the Viper from Game of Thrones, landed the first blood, and stood his ground in front of his Vespa: “That’s my Vespa, Pebble, and I’m going to defend it.”
The Pebble raised one eyebrow at him and ordered him to kneel, and Iowa-Ska kneeled. From his knees, things went badly. Two terrible swings left him crushed by “this mortgage” and by “the weight of this extra $118 payment a month,” and one of them struck “just the wrong pebble,” spraying rock across his Vespa’s paint job. He cried out to the heavens: “Mother Ayahuasca, you have forsaken me!” He topped up on NeuroGum and a gas-station stamina pill, and when the Arbiter pointed out he’d also dropped his “magnum condom for your monster dong,” Iowa-Ska replied, “I don’t use condoms. I’m a dragonborn.” He clipped the Pebble’s legs from behind just before a People’s Elbow could land. The Pebble still bent a lollipop-pink steel chair over his head and announced that “the state of Iowa sucks.” Iowa-Ska got back up and tried his very first compound bow, bought off eBay and fired twice before. He loosed an arrow (“This is for the corn. This is for wooden bat baseball. This is for America.”), and the Pebble caught it in midair and flicked it back past his side.
He returned to the halberd and charged. When the Pebble summoned Thea as a living shield, Iowa-Ska filled the dropped magnum condom with his poison breath and burst it over her “like a wet bag of sand.” His final strike, “for the Iowa caucus,” left Thea clenched onto the tip of his halberd by her butt cheeks, turning it into a bludgeon. The Pebble then hot-tagged in Imbe, an eight-foot minotaur from the stands. Iowa-Ska was doing burnouts and stage-diving into the talcum pools where the Chinchillas roll (“I’m having fun for the first time!”), but he grabbed the bull by the horns and roped him up in a very messy set of knots. Then he took a hit of DMT from his vape and loosed a single arrow that sent the giant chinchillas stampeding over the Pebble. Their leader, Frank, complained about his sciatica. Iowa-Ska pinned the Pebble under his halberd, slammed two javelins down (“Meat’s back on the table, boy”), and healed in a DMT frenzy.
The rest of the fight had more strange turns. He took a shrimp to the face at the chinchilla union’s hibachi lunch and came away with shrimp-shaped burn scars (“I thought this was a simulation”). When the Pebble went for the dick twist and then tried to freeze his balls off with icicles, Iowa-Ska pumped all his blood into what he called “that steam vent of a root wad” and burst through the ice instantly. He also threw paper against the Pebble’s inevitable rock. As the DMT faded, Iowa-Ska opened his eyes and saw Destiny 1 and 2 where the Pebble stood. “You have to kill what you love!” he cried, hacking away “for No Land Beyond” and “for Sweet Business.” With the Pebble rolled face-down, he drove the halberd into the barbed-wire tramp stamp: “Destiny, I loved you, but you didn’t love me back.” Thea dragged the Pebble’s body off to the locker room. Iowa-Ska was crowned the winner, plugged a discount code, and dropped the clutch on his Vespa for a round of victory donuts through the smoke and pyros.
Personality and Abilities
Iowa-Ska is a dad-bod dragonborn with his gut tucked into cloth wraps, a full plumage headdress, and, according to the Pebble, three eyes that are all crooked. He is earnest, a little sensitive about the eyes, and running entirely on wellness-podcast wisdom. He takes his supplements by the handful, cites the Joe Rogan podcast, and insists he’s “not a pro” at archery, just a man who listens to podcasts and has a new range membership. He is fiercely patriotic about Iowa and devoted to a Vespa he can barely ride. He refuses to lease it out of “self-respect,” and mid-fight, while doing burnouts, he finally stopped caring about the scratches. He believes the leopard Odorongo is always with him (“Physically”), though he once called it his jaguar, and when he set the Pebble down on Odorongo, the last foot of the drop was a gentle fall.
In a fight he is a halberd specialist who swings wide and keeps swinging. His halberd also works as a bludgeon if a Thea happens to be attached. He backs it up with two javelins, a rope, the eBay compound bow, a poison breath weapon, and a “perfectly sized dad fanny pack” of lion’s mane, AG1, NeuroGum, a gas-station stamina pill and a vape. He shared some dragonborn biology at length: he does not use condoms, and he made it clear that “if I had two dicks, you would know about it.”
Relationships
- The Pebble: His opponent. Iowa-Ska was “completely internally destroyed” to hear one of his heroes of the past admit wrestling might be staged, and he later killed him while seeing him as Destiny.
- Thea: Called in as the Pebble’s shield. Iowa-Ska burst a poison-filled condom on her and then fought with her clenched to the tip of his halberd.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Liked him from the start, told him his third eye could wait, and crowned him the winner.
- Chinchillas: He summoned their stampede with a DMT-fuelled arrow, and their union chef burned his face with a hibachi shrimp.
- Odorongo: The leopard (or jaguar) he believes is always physically with him.
Memorable Quotes
“After 30 years in middle management, I am prepared to ascend into this arena.” (S7E5)
“I’m here because I have an untenable loan on a Vespa that I can barely ride.” (S7E5)
- “I don’t have time to play games! I’m middle-aged!” (S7E5)
- “This is for the corn. This is for wooden bat baseball. This is for America.” (S7E5)
- “Destiny, I loved you, but you didn’t love me back.” (S7E5)
- “Well, I may have killed Destiny tonight. According to a few tweets, it might not be dead after all.” (S7E5, Dried Blood)