First appearance: S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD · watch it on YouTube
Jerry Bonesman (“It’s Jerry Bones Man, all right? Not Bones Min.”) was a skeleton champion who brawled his way through S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD. He arrived with a grudge on behalf of every low-level skeleton ever smashed for loot. He spent most of the match punching a wall that could not be punched, turned the Arbiter’s assistant into a dinosaur, and tried to recruit the giant skull of The Dread Fortress as his patron. He lost, but he ended his fight in a moment of grace that nobody, least of all Jerry, saw coming.
Story
Thea pulled Jerry into The Void by straining every muscle and letting out a small fart, which grew into a gaseous green, glitter-flecked portal, and she mangled his name on arrival. He corrected her and declared himself “All bones, baby.” He found the place cold and badly decorated (“Where are the bones, man?”) and asked whether it was called “the Dread Shack or like the Dread Hut.” That cost him the favor of the Grandmaster, who promptly declared his opponent, the training construct TD, her chosen champion. The Arbiter then folded space and dropped both champions into The Duck Village, a quaint town of market stalls, a church and ducks wandering through the fountain. The Grandmaster made one request: please do not harm the baby ducks. She also threatened to handicap Jerry’s first punch if he kept bringing up the Dread Hut.
TD opened by stacking layer upon layer of magical armor, so Jerry answered in kind. He opened a “third eye” to lay a baleful hex on the construct, then sealed the gaps in his rib cage into bony armor as his cheekbones spiked outward. Then he threw a haymaker (“Behold! My fisticuffs!”) that tore through one of TD’s shields and burst into the next before fizzling out. His follow-up missed, and his hand audibly shattered. When Thea brought water, Jerry gulped his down and it poured out through every empty hole onto his robes and between his legs, so it looked like he had pissed himself. TD then sealed itself inside an unbreakable dome of force. Jerry’s arm cracked open and oozed black ichor that hardened into a bony Dread Hand, and he finally explained his cause: “This goes out to all of the adventurers out there that go and kill level one skeletons. I’m here to kill you. Too many of my skeleton brothers are dead.” The Grandmaster called it “the revenge story I didn’t know we needed.” The dome did not care. Jerry punched it, gnawed it, considered pushing it, and accepted a notepad from Thea to “write down your thoughts,” while TD fed him gentle arithmetic about little Tommy’s apples.
The Arbiter couldn’t bear to watch, so he summoned The Box of Chaos at Jerry’s feet. Jerry addressed it as “Mr. Box” and was told, “Mr. Box was my father. He’s dead now.” He offered his shattered wrist and hand (“You can slap people with this”), and the box, which was “building something,” accepted. It gave him a femur from some large animal that worked as a wand of polymorph. After Thea explained the dental program and her Tooth Fairy windfall, Jerry turned her into a massive pink T-Rex. TD tried to snuff out the spell and Jerry pushed through anyway. Thea threw her whole body at the dome, and the dome held. After a break, Jerry asked the question nobody had ever asked: what was the name of the giant skull outside? The Grandmaster revealed it as Seavold. Chanting “Seavold, be bold,” Jerry became the Great Bones Man, with true horns and a spiked, Godzilla-like spine. The skull’s call wrenched both champions onto the Fortress’s front lawn among the lava fields. Jerry burst into bone dust and reformed inside the dome, face to face with TD, because “he’s not going to bone from behind.” TD simply copied the trick and stepped outside, trapping Jerry in his own victory. It then filled the dome with a disco laser show of psychic static that nearly finished him. “I’m still here. I’m still here.”
When TD dropped the wall, Jerry screamed, charged and landed a one-two punch powered by the force he had learned from punching force. The blow left TD frightened (“I am shaking in my bones”). TD answered by showing him a vision of training denizens beaten down by warriors chasing their own success, and Jerry asked himself, “Oh no, have I become the thing I was fighting against?” With a natural 20, he shook it off. He then punched his way through a swarm of mirror images. When nothing else worked, he prayed: “For all the bones, please see me.” Seavold spoke, something the Acolytes had never before seen the Dread Fortress do. Jerry asked to be the skull’s knight, protecting “all undead, all bones, all skeletons, even the ones inside of the people that have flesh still.” Seavold called him “but an ant” and the match “a farce,” then lashed out at both champions with insults (training dummy, skeleton fodder, bone dust, calculator). The Arbiter threatened to kill them both if nobody died. TD drove a psychic lance into Jerry’s empty skull while Jerry led the crowd in a “Bonesman!” chant. In his final, clearest moment, Jerry ran the numbers and decided TD was “the right one… He’ll stop this from ever happening again… sometimes somebody else has to take the torch.” A bony hand and a metal hand met, and then Jerry crumbled to dust from the inside out. His hand was the last of him to fall. At the table, his player admitted he’d been planning to “cartoon shovel his way out” from under the dome.
Personality and Abilities
Jerry was a polished white skeleton with ossified horns. He wore glowing purple and dark cobalt robes with thick leather gauntlets, and a necrotic mist of tiny grasping hands trailed him everywhere. He had no eyes, “not even glowy orbs,” which made winking difficult and finding things harder. By the Grandmaster’s verdict he was “all bones, no brain.” His player described him as a low-level adventurer in the mental sense: still learning, never all-knowing. He was cheerful, crude (“Just a giant boner”) and earnest, and he kept a bag of trinkets collected from years of dealing with low-level adventurers. After the match, at the table, he was dubbed “our bone salesman.”
He fought as a “punch skeleton”: haymakers, one-two combos, a defensive brace and a bone-grown Dread Hand. He backed up his fists with “black magic” drawn from his god, the Dreadlord Bonar. That magic let him open a hexing third eye, armor himself in frost, step through space as bone dust, curse foes and swell into a frightening Form of Dread. Channeling Seavold made him more orcish and opened a true third socket in his forehead. His black magic, he admitted, sometimes needed a nap.
Relationships
- TD: His opponent and accidental teacher. Jerry ended the fight trusting TD to carry on his cause and took its hand as he died.
- Thea: Brought him to the Void, gave him a notepad, and volunteered as a T-Rex. He thanked her for “believing in the bones.”
- Seavold: The Dread Fortress’s skull, whose name he was the first to ask. He offered to be its knight and was rejected.
- The Box of Chaos: Took his shattered hand and gave him a polymorph wand in return.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Backed TD after the “Dread Hut” insult, but loved his revenge story.
- The Arbiter: Called him “kind of a dick” and helped him anyway by summoning the Box.
Memorable Quotes
- “It’s Jerry Bones Man, all right? Not Bones Min.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “I’m just here to crack these knuckles and throw some hands… or maybe throw some bones. If I could wink, I would.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “Too many of my skeleton brothers are dead.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “I got put in forced jail.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “Calculator is wild work. It’s actually diabolical.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “So maybe, just maybe, if one of us gets out of this alive, we can make a change.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)