First appearance: S1E5, The 2v2 - Chuck Solid Gold Dragon Biff & Richardo v Steely Dan & Thass’Lok · watch it on YouTube
Steely Dan was a hulking warforged paladin and a walking mixtape. He was a giant armored machine with a glaive, and he could speak only by playing cassettes of wildly misheard song lyrics loaded into his chest. He fought in the Void’s first-ever 2v2 Deathmatch, where he befriended a haunted doll, sang karaoke off his own forehead and was stabbed repeatedly by his own teammate. He was then killed by a pillow and used as a weapon. His creator, Diamond Joe, later came looking for him.
Story
The 2v2
Steely Dan arrived in The Dread Fortress with three other champions, all pulled out of a rip in space by The Arbiter. The Arbiter admitted he’d found “some of these guys at the 7-Eleven.” Introduced as “the victor of the cosmic dragon’s duel,” Dan won over the Grandmaster right away. “He’s a walking cassette tape,” she marveled, “who wouldn’t want to be a boombox in real life?” When she charged the champions to spill blood in her name, his chest answered: “It’s the eye of the tiger and I’ve filled my tights.” A random draw paired him with the whispery lizardfolk Thass’Lok against Chuck Solid Gold Dragon Biff and Richardo in S1E5, The 2v2 - Chuck Solid Gold Dragon Biff & Richardo v Steely Dan & Thass’Lok.
The fight took place on the spinning gears of The Clock of the Lost, and Dan’s start was rough. He threw a deck of playing cards in Chuck’s face (“Gin or glaive”), then lunged to grab him and went sprawling across the floor. Tapes flew out of him, and he scrabbled on hands and knees to gather up his entire vocabulary, patching one cassette back together with magic tape. Chuck caught him by the back of the neck, and Dan’s tape offered “Like a virgin, touched for the 35th time.” (“I’m going to need you to stop that. You’re making it weird.”) Then, just as Dan was about to slot a cassette back in, one of Richardo’s arrows spiked straight through it. “That was an original mixtape.” Dan answered by playing the broken tape slowed down to a sludgy crawl (“Take me down with a pair of nice titties”) and carving Chuck up with a flurry of glaive strikes. “Nothing but a flesh wound,” he declared.
Things got stranger from there. An arrow pressed one of his play buttons, his head spun a full circle, and “Steely Dan karaoke” lit up across his forehead with completely incorrect lyrics. Richardo requested “Despacito,” and the Grandmaster rated the show “six out of ten… it beats most karaoke nights.” Meanwhile his own partner decided the gears belonged to the Warforged and that Dan was the real threat. Thass’Lok threw a dagger at Dan and later tried to stab his tape windows to shut him up. Dan, who could not remember his teammate’s name (“Bad ears”), picked up a four-foot poisonous mushroom and beat Thass’Lok over the head with it, singing “shake it like a horny white preacher,” before going back to his glaive. When Richardo blasted a wall of wind at him, Dan simply didn’t move. “He knows where his feet belong,” the Grandmaster said approvingly.
When a creepy haunted doll appeared in the arena and Richardo tried to shoot it, Dan threw himself in front of the arrow, because it was a cute little doll. The arrow went through his head and a cassette popped out. “That’s so thoughtful, sacrificing your brain,” said the Grandmaster. Someone else added, “He wasn’t using it anyways.” The doll branded his shoulder with a burning rune of friendship and became his companion. She bit Richardo with her rotting plastic teeth and fed the stolen life to Dan while the crowd of The Acolytes chanted “DOL! DOL! DOL!” One side of his head had almost exploded, so he balanced a tape on the two remaining prongs, twirled it with a finger, and declared, “I would like to execute the traitor.” He then struck Thass’Lok while Chuck held him by the belt.
It wasn’t enough. Chuck produced a great club from the back of his trunks and knocked Dan down. As he lay dying, Dan told the doll, “Be safe, eat face.” She kissed his forehead, brought him back from the brink, and vanished from this plane, taking the rune with her. Then every weapon in the arena turned into a fluffy pillow. Dan won one last exchange by batting Richardo’s pillow-arrow back with a holy “smite pillow.” Then Richardo’s spectral bull, Bull One, now a giant pillow, body-slammed him, and Steely Dan died for the second time that day. His last tape: “baby fart, doo doo doo doo doo.” Even dead, he decided the match. Chuck’s club had become an anime pillow with a girl on it, so he tossed it aside, hoisted Dan’s corpse over his shoulder and clubbed Thass’Lok to death with it. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to be clobbered by Steely Dan,” Thass’Lok sighed. Asked afterward for one sentence of advice, Dan offered: “I like big butter can of limes.”
The Scrap Room
Dan’s story continued in S1E10 — The Bear — Diamond Joe v Milliac, when his maker, Diamond Joe, came to the Void after a deal with the Arbiter: fight, and he could find Steely Dan there. “I look forward to seeing my boy again,” Joe said. He introduced his creation as “Steely Dan the Sir,” and the Arbiter remembered him as “quite the instrument of destruction” in his Deathmatch. Joe even asked his opponent, Milliac, whether he’d seen “a sort of eight or nine foot tall steam-powered vibrator” covered in cassette tapes and minidiscs. Milliac replied that he usually upgraded his machines, which Joe found a little impolite.
After the match, the Arbiter kept his word, more or less. He led Joe to a large room full of scrap metal and junk and told him, “He’s in here somewhere.” Joe was free to dig through the pile for his boy’s parts. “You’ve done it once,” came the reply. “Might as well do it again.”
Personality and Abilities
Steely Dan was a huge, clanking steam-powered warforged, covered in cassettes and studded with minidiscs that sparkled in his chest plate. A hidden compartment held a stash of “Now That’s What I Call…” CDs. When one of Thass’Lok’s blades popped it open, Dan launched into an infomercial: “You can’t buy these CDs in the shops. All 30 CDs come to you with a subscription of just $3.99… from the 90s.com.” He rewound his tapes with a pencil. When pressed, he could glamour karaoke lyrics onto his forehead.
He spoke only in misheard lyrics, which made him both baffling and weirdly eloquent: “Forever dumb, I want to be forever dumb,” “Love is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery rune,” “Take me down with a pair of nice titties.” His mind was famously empty, but his heart was big. He was completely immune to fear, shrugging off Chuck’s best trash talk with a cheerful “Young man, there’s no need to feel down.” The Grandmaster said nobody else seemed to know how teamwork worked except Dan and his haunted doll. In a fight he was a holy wrecking ball, swinging his glaive and its butt-end in heavy blessed strikes, though his tendency to scatter his own voice across the floor made for a rough start.
Relationships
- Diamond Joe: His creator, who built him, calls him “my boy,” and came to the Void to rebuild him.
- Thass’Lok: His assigned teammate, whose name he could never remember. Thass’Lok saw him as a threat and attacked him repeatedly, and was finally killed with Dan’s body.
- Chuck Solid Gold Dragon Biff: His main opponent, who grappled him, knocked him down and finally swung his corpse as a club.
- Richardo: The archer who destroyed his original mixtape and whose pillow bull killed him.
- Dolly, the haunted doll: His “wonderful friend,” branded to him by a rune. She stole life for him and revived him once before departing.
- The Arbiter: Pulled him into the arena and later kept his scattered parts in a scrap room.
- The Grandmaster: Called him a walking cassette tape and rated his karaoke six out of ten.
Memorable Quotes
- “That was an original mixtape.” (S1E5)
- “Love is a burning thing. And it makes a fiery rune.” (S1E5)
- “We’re wonderful friends.” (S1E5)
- “I would like to execute the traitor.” (S1E5)
- “Be safe, eat face.” (S1E5)
- “I like big butter can of limes.” (S1E5)