First appearance: S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD · watch it on YouTube
TD is a construct who treats every fight as a training exercise. Pulled into The Void by Thea for a Father’s Day Deathmatch, he out-thought, out-waited and out-layered the skeleton brawler Jerry Bonesman in Duck Village before ending the match with a single devastating spell. He was the Grandmaster’s chosen champion almost from the moment he arrived. He left with the win, an intestine belt, a pizza he can’t eat, and a hint that his training has only just begun.
Story
Straining to pull two champions into the Void, Thea let out a small fart that grew into a glittery, gaseous green portal. TD stepped through it into the throne room of The Dread Fortress in S7E6 — Bone Force — Jerry Bonesman v TD. He stood rigid and scanned the room “to understand who exactly is getting trained today.” His first thought was that “this is not the training ground. But there’s so much training to be had upon these grounds.” The Grandmaster called him a work of art and offered to keep him as “the most entrancing art installation here” if he lost. When Jerry called her home “the Dread Hut,” TD called it “a bastion of sorrow” and suggested hanging Jerry on the wall as decor. That settled it: “I’m backing TD on this. Clearly I have my chosen champion already.” The prize was a pizza buffet. TD has no tongue and can’t eat, so The Arbiter had Thea fetch a 25-foot strand of intestine. TD tied it around his waist like a karate belt and magicked the blood off his fingers.
The fight that followed was less a brawl than a seminar. TD opened by wrapping himself in protection and beckoning Jerry forward, then kept adding layers: a clear haze of armor, a fractal blue ward, a frozen aura that bit back at anyone who struck him. Jerry’s best haymaker broke through only the outer layer, and his next punch shattered his own hand. A singing alligator burst from the village fountain with a rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and its song shook loose a memory in TD. His eyes flickered like a projector, showing a bluish-skinned, perhaps draconic person celebrating a first birthday: “the one he was created for.” TD hummed and sang along without realizing it, so beautifully that the Grandmaster cursed his “angelic stupid voice.” He then sealed himself inside an unbreakable dome of force and spent what felt like an eternity (24 seconds, per the Arbiter) posing math riddles while Jerry punched, gnawed and scribbled notes outside. When The Box of Chaos handed Jerry a polymorph wand, TD tried to block his attempt to turn Thea into a dinosaur. He declared it “a each one teach one moment,” but Thea became a massive pink T-Rex anyway and bounced harmlessly off the dome. When the Arbiter grumbled that one of them had better end up dead, TD replied: “Noted. Switching to obliteration mode.” When he next acted, his eyes turned red.
Jerry finally slipped inside the dome in a burst of bone dust, empowered by the Dread Fortress’s orc skull, Seavold. TD copied the trick, stepped out the other side and left Jerry trapped inside. “You were so close, Jerry, but you are not my master. Only one has ever beat me.” He filled the dome with a “disco laser show” of psychic energy, then dropped the wall entirely to give Jerry a fighting chance. When Jerry demanded he put it back, TD said he did not take orders from anyone but his master. Jerry rallied with a frightening one-two punch. TD answered by showing him his own vision of agony: training denizens beaten down blow after blow by warriors chasing their own success. The Grandmaster ruled the shared pain so devastating that every hit would now do double damage. TD smiled a little, “almost Cheshire,” because “the training is soon to be complete.” He split into mirror images that redirected Jerry’s fists into their own faces and chests. When Seavold scorned Jerry’s plea for power, TD stood up for his opponent: “One can’t train if they don’t have a chance to grow and you are stifling this one’s potential.” The skull turned on them both, mocked them as “training dummy, skeleton fodder, bone dust, calculator,” and shattered TD’s ward.
With all damage now tripled and the Arbiter pulling out his metal chair and threatening to come down and kill them both, TD asked one last question: “What can we learn from this? Only one.” He drove a psychic lance into Jerry’s skull while the crowd chanted “Bonesman!” In his final moment, Jerry decided TD was the right one to carry the torch and stop this from happening again. A bony hand and a metallic hand reached for each other. Jerry crumbled to dust from the inside out, his hand last of all. TD looked around and saw no fallen companions, only that bony hand and his own. A slight voice behind him whispered, “You trained him well.”
“Training complete. And this is just phase one.”
As he spoke, his eyes shifted from blue to green: his second directive is necromancy. The Grandmaster called him “ever surprising.” She noted he had “a task at hand. Quite literally, in your hand, with a hand,” and asked what he wanted on the pizza he couldn’t eat. He chose the intestines. She raised his hand to The Acolytes: “Let the training continue.”
Personality and Abilities
TD’s skin looks like skin but has a metallic sheen, his vibrant blue eyes are plainly artificial, blue crystals rise and fall in the air around him, and he wears a cape that “doesn’t really look like it’s for fashion.” He moves more gracefully than his rigid frame suggests, boots up with an audible booting-up sound, and speaks both Common and Draconic. He talks in tests, lessons and arithmetic (“If two plus two is four, Jerry, and five plus five is ten, how did you get to that conclusion?”). He asks after people’s well-being “in a series of numbers,” and when asked for his own, he answered “57.04%.” He keeps reaching for youthful slang and missing it (“getting under your toes. No. Getting under your flaps”). He likes to dismiss weaknesses, including his own, as “a skill issue.”
He insists that “fighting is not my style.” His creed is “each one teach one,” and at his core his directive is to protect. He doesn’t know how he was made. He speaks of his “master,” the one opponent who has ever beaten him, and hums a tune that master used to hum. His eyes change with his mode: blue by default, red for “obliteration mode,” and green for his second directive, necromancy. In battle he is an abjuration wizard and a fortress in his own right. He stacks wards and armor until, as the Arbiter put it, fighting him is “like fighting a Russian nesting doll,” or “a metallic onion.” He can seal himself in an impenetrable dome, block or turn back spells, mirror an enemy’s own tricks, and conjure decoy images of himself. When the lesson ends, he can be brutally final. At the table, his player summed up TD’s philosophy: “The training does not end when the adventure begins.”
Relationships
- Jerry Bonesman: His opponent and, in TD’s eyes, his student. TD coached him, defended him from Seavold, killed him, and was left holding his bony hand.
- Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: Picked TD as her chosen champion almost immediately, admired him as a work of art, and awarded him the pizza.
- The Arbiter: Demanded that someone die, which prompted TD to switch into obliteration mode.
- Thea: Farted open the portal that brought him into the Void and gave him his 25-foot intestine belt. He tried and failed to stop Jerry from turning her into a T-Rex.
- Seavold: The talking orc skull mocked TD and Jerry (“training dummy, skeleton fodder, bone dust, calculator”) and shattered TD’s ward after TD scolded him for stifling Jerry’s potential.
- The Acolytes: Chanted his name, pelted him with blue raspberry slushies, and gave him a heroic surge.
Memorable Quotes
- “Fighting is not my style… But I do enjoy watching those fight and helping them grow.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “That sounds like a skill issue to me.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “Noted. Switching to obliteration mode.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “You were so close, Jerry, but you are not my master. Only one has ever beat me.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “Does not compute. You are not my master. You cannot give directives.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)
- “How do the kids say, egads, I am shaking in my bones.” (S7E6 — Bone Force)