Coriander Society, Fate of the Faithful Part 1 (A Crossover)

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The heroes of the Coriander Society followed their nemesis through a tear in reality and landed somewhere stranger than any world John had seen: The Void. John Carmichael and Asena arrived in a city that hangs from chains and found a riot already underway. They joined forces with Lyrus, a werebear swordsman who cuts holes in space, and brawled their way through a market square. Then they learned that someone close to the Grandmaster was plotting against her. The episode is part fight and part culture shock, and it ends with the heroes’ loot spent on thousands of wooden spoons.

The Story

Through the Tear

John and Asena come from two different worlds, and they met in another universe entirely. They had been tracking Ralzamon, the “Master of the Unknown,” who turned out to be a figure from Asena’s past. They had him on the verge of defeat when a gateway ripped open behind him. A hand reached through, a voice said “I still have need of you,” and Ralzamon was dragged away into the void.

John and Asena leapt after him, along with the wizened old Lawrence Booker Green, another traveller from another universe. Asena can usually bend portals to her will. This one went past the astral plane, past time and space, across “an impossible, paradoxical, infinite distance,” and hurled them head over heels. Lawrence’s shoes did not make the trip. They stayed behind in the Chamber of Crystal and Bubbling Tar, where the fight with Ralzamon had been, and a pair of shoes now sits there alone.

The Hanging City

The travellers landed hard on a bridge high above the ground. The city went on above them as well as below. They had arrived in Prexmarin, the Hanging City, which hangs from enormous chains rising to an impossible height. Each chain holds a level of towers, causeways, markets and neighbourhoods. Golden towers hang from the tops, and ramshackle hovels cling to the undersides like stalactites. No one had noticed them arrive, and there was no sign of Ralzamon.

They did hear yelling and breaking from the market square up ahead. Asena ran straight toward it. John used an illusion to dress them both in local fashion and followed.

Riot in the Market Circle

The market circle was beautiful, with intricate carvings set into the marble floor and copper and bronze worked into geometric patterns. Hulking, hairless brutes with purplish-grey skin were wrecking it. They wore bits and pieces of the Grandmaster’s colours: gold, blue-green and black. At their head stood a figure John recognised. It was Hathim, the blood berserker of Tiamat, a member of her elite hit squad from the world of Lacunas. He wore power armour, now repainted in gold and black with blue-green highlights to match the mob, and he carried two axes glowing with red energy. John’s gun, Krontaka, pulsed in his hand. It sensed traces of the fey in the brutes and something fiendish in their leader.

Then Lyrus charged in from the south with his band of fighters. He was a white-furred werebear, seven or eight feet tall, in grey and black plate. He carried two black swords that swallowed the light around them. His first cut opened a singularity in an enforcer’s chest and sucked the man inside it. “Move into position!” he roared. Knights in bluish plate blocked the north and south exits. John guessed they were Knights of Terra Nimbus.

Asena took the direct approach. She walked up to the brutes and asked whether they had seen Ralzamon. Every gold-clad fighter on the field turned to look at her. There was a pause, and then they all attacked her.

Dragon Fear and Fireballs

Hathim charged first, shoving everyone aside and swinging with total recklessness. John answered in a way that only made sense to him. He called on a blood-red talisman, the red kiss, and the symbol of Tiamat blazed on the back of his jacket. He prayed aloud to the Dark Queen of Dragonkind, loud enough for Hathim to hear. Faced with two of her chosen, the goddess favoured John this time. John shielded Asena in ice, then, since Hathim was immune to cold, switched it to lightning by invoking the blue dragon. When Hathim’s axe struck it, it fried him.

John shouted for help to the nearest large armed stranger: “This guy’s attacking just young girls in the street. I don’t know if you’re some kind of guard, but please, we need your assistance.” Lyrus paused mid-slaughter. “Give me just a minute.” Then John’s shadow stretched across the square and grew wings, and many of the brutes cowered. Hathim did not, “because Tiamat wants him to fear her.” John then pulled a small piece of coral from his bag. It became a water trident and flooded the market, knocking a brute flat.

Lyrus was busy. The brutes’ leader swung a huge maul at him, and Lyrus sliced a portal in the air. The maul and the arm holding it came out ten feet away, and the leader yanked them back just before the portal closed, covered in charred ash. Lyrus pointed a sword at him:

Lyrus: “Take off that armor. It doesn’t belong to you.”

The gold turned misty and faded. Underneath was ramshackle plate and leather with none of the Grandmaster’s insignia. “I see. I’ll deal with you in a second then.”

A knight levitated John twenty feet into the air. Lyrus caught his eye and slashed open a portal right in front of him. John fired a fireball bullet through it into the middle of the plaza. That left John hanging in the air inside his own fireball. A reward had been promised to the first person to sing, so John sang: “Oh no, please fireball, don’t blow me up again!” A screaming monster happened to put itself between him and the blast below, and John hid behind it, untouched.

”Who’s Your Master?”

Asena was still trying to have a conversation. “I don’t know why you’re fighting me. I don’t have an issue with you. I’m looking for someone.” When she demanded the name of his master, Hathim struggled, as if several answers came to mind and he rejected each one. At last he said: “The Grandmaster.” Asena could tell he was lying.

Then a crushing mental presence settled over the market. It dug for every flaw and every scrap of self-hatred. It reminded Lyrus that he had to live up to the legacy of his father, Orin, but his will held. John and Asena knew the presence: it was Ralzamon, “stronger, more powerful than ever.” It found Asena’s impatience and her hunger for direct action, and it made her curse at the wind.

The fight got stranger from there. Hathim cut Asena down nearly to nothing. The Fang of Glotharius at her throat flared silver and imploded, blasting the brutes around her and knocking Hathim onto his back. Hathim got up and fired the jump jets on his armour to hack at the floating wizard. John was still levitating and now upside down, so he conjured a set of illusory Johns, “also floating ignominiously upside down with their hair flailing.” He emptied his bottomless briefcase in search of something useful. A wrench and a rubber chicken fell out first, followed by ten inflatable life rafts, which covered the courtyard in soft landing spots. The four Johns wiggled in midair while the knights watched.

Lyrus made a perfect strike. He cut down one foe, set a knight ablaze with black fire, then cut a portal into the dying knight’s chest and stepped through it to appear behind another enemy. Asena blasted Hathim in the face with her double-barrel shotgun, shouting “You lied to me!”, and melted into Lyrus’s militia. Lawrence rubbed his forehead, pointed at Hathim and told him to “fuck off.” Hathim shrugged off the banishing spell.

John gave himself a pep talk: “John, you’re a fucking wizard… You can do this.” He dropped an anchor from his case, which popped one of his own life rafts, and hauled himself down against the spell. Hathim, with his prey gone, went for Lyrus. Lyrus stood still and let the axe bite into his chest. He watched and waited for an opening. When it came, he opened a portal at his side and pushed both arms through. The swords came out behind Hathim’s head and took it off. The body vanished into another portal, and the head rolled across the courtyard. The remaining enemies looked at it, then at the warriors facing them.

The Last Knights

What remained was cleanup. Asena was sloppier now, shaken by how close she had come to finishing Ralzamon. Krontaka hungered for fey blood and dragged John ten feet toward the brutes’ leader like an invisible dog on a leash, then drew black blood from the leader. Lyrus drove both swords into the leader’s chest and pulled them apart to stretch a portal. He dived through it head-first and fell out of the sky above a fleeing knight, splitting it in two. Each half went into a separate portal. Lyrus landed sixty feet down with a crack of his knees. “I should have saved a portal for the way back.”

Asena ran up a pillar, backflipped off it, punched the last knight in midair and rode him down into the cobbles. She stood up from the dent “not a hair out of place.” John started stuffing the dead knights’ armour into his bag.

Introductions

Asena, quietly furious, pointed at Lyrus. “I like your sword.” He returned the compliment as best he could (“I like your fists, I guess”) and introduced himself: “I am Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster.” When Asena mentioned that the headless one had claimed the same master, Lyrus called them “Charlatans, all of them.” He healed her with a giant paw on her shoulder and offered her a job.

When she mentioned Ralzamon, Lyrus knew the name: “Ralzamon, General of the Arbiter.” For once, John took Asena’s “weird dreams” seriously instead of waving them off with “that’s really nice, sweetie,” and they came back to her. She remembered the roar of crowds chanting her name. She had fought Ralzamon here, with The Arbiter and the Grandmaster watching. Lyrus bowed, as well as an eight-foot werebear can. It was “not often we get champions here in the Void after the matches.” Asena tried to copy the bow without knowing how. Lyrus explained where they were: the realm of the Grandmaster, “an amalgamation of lost planes. Existing in the same space at the same time.” He pointed, and on every horizon stood The Dread Fortress, an orc-skull monolith in an endless lava field, visible no matter which way they faced.

Then came the bad news. The Arbiter, the Grandmaster’s vizier and right hand, had betrayed her. He was building a coup from the inside, and the brutes in stolen colours were his work, sent to sow unrest. “Why would he do that?” asked Asena. “I liked that lady.” Lyrus had seen the Arbiter’s army himself. He also had a personal grudge. The Arbiter had saved Orin as a child, after his village burned, and had later “murdered my father in cold blood.”

A Man About a Sword

Lyrus objected to looting the honourable dead, but behind him his own soldiers were already doing it. When John explained that where he came from, this was how you made friends, Lyrus picked Hathim’s head off the ground and offered it to him. John wrapped it in cloth and packed it. John also worked out what the brutes were: Pygus, spawn of the mirrored fey planes of Ixandar.

Lyrus cut a portal out of the city, and his men scattered under hoods and cloaks. Asena found the portal cold and jagged, “like stepping out into the wind, into the snow.” When she tried to widen it, it started fraying like bad cloth, and Lyrus quickly closed it. “Your void is weird,” she told him. Lyrus explained that the magic came from the Void itself, “almost a living being,” and that greater wielders than he could do far more with it.

He also told them that time runs differently here. Ralzamon had already served the Arbiter for months, though the pair had seen him minutes earlier. Lyrus remembered him from the arena, fighting Asena to the death in the Kitchen of the Dread Fortress. Ralzamon had “a distinct lack of tolerance for milk,” and Asena had used milk froth against him. It was “one of the greatest battles in the Kitchen of the Dread Fortress that there ever have been.” John finally understood that all of Asena’s stories were true. “I don’t have a good imagination, John,” she said. “Of course they’re real.”

Down a nondescript castle-ward street, John took Asena aside for a private word, and she misunderstood it as a request to go buy spoons. They bought every spoon a small blonde boy had: thousands of ornate wooden spoons, all of them now sharing a bag with John’s “quarter ton of dynamite.” Asena kept the finest one. Out of earshot, John said what worried him. Did the Void collect souls on the brink of death, and would they meet more old enemies here? “Are we dead?” Asena asked. John didn’t know.

The Hideout

The rebels’ headquarters was an old blacksmith shop. Two giant forges roared inside, and one had been taken over by Frank, a large orc stirring a cauldron of stew, while someone nearby was retching from the last batch of his food. Lyrus had warned them on the way in: “Whatever you do, don’t eat Jeff’s food. Sorry, Frank’s food.” Jeff, it turned out, had been fired for stealing the potatoes and had his hands cut off for it. “You have a very good severance package,” John said. In a corner, a silver-haired elf named Baptiste flipped daggers and asked each newcomer whether he had ever stabbed them. An old blind dragonborn felt his way across the floor.

Lyrus explained the rest. Many of his people had served Orin at The Eastern Outpost. After Orin’s death and the Arbiter’s betrayal, they deserted to serve the Grandmaster “from the shadows,” and many were now wanted for treason. They had no way to warn her. Their messengers disappeared, the Arbiter blocked their magic, and pigeons can’t cross the lava. John offered to teach him “the wonderful world of Shadow Warfare.” Lyrus admitted he was a soldier, not a tactician: “My father’s shoes were quite large.” Rain fell, thunder rolled in from the direction of the Fortress, and the heroes finally went to bed.

Notable Moments

• Lyrus beheaded Hathim by reaching through a portal, and only the head was left rolling across the courtyard.
• John sang a ballad begging his own fireball not to blow him up, then hid behind a screaming monster.
• Four upside-down Johns wiggled in midair over a courtyard full of inflatable life rafts.
• Asena realised her “weird dreams” were memories of the arena, including using milk froth against Ralzamon.
• The heroes spent all their gold on every wooden spoon a little boy owned and sent him home early.
• Lyrus’s secret knock turned out to be a normal knock and “It’s me.”

Memorable Quotes

• Lyrus: “Charlatans, all of them. These aren’t the Grandmaster’s forces, merely mirage.”
• John Carmichael: “I have a big gun, and I know how to use it, and there’s a bear over there with a sword that transports you, only what I can assume, to a very terrible place. Or kills you.”
• Asena: “Huh. Why would he do that? I liked that lady.”
• Lyrus: “You’re telling me you never tried to use milk against your greatest enemy?”
• Asena: “I don’t have a good imagination, John. Of course they’re real.”
• John Carmichael: “When we first met each other, I could barely afford to buy a pen. And now we’re just dropping hot stacks on wooden spoons.”
• Lyrus: “Have you ever seen a pigeon fly hundreds of miles over a lava field in scorching heat?”
• Baptiste: “What about you? Have you ever been stabbed by me?”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Lyrus (Mudcat)

• Appearance: a 7–8 ft white-furred werebear in grey and black plate armor over furs.
• Weapons: two light-swallowing black void swords. A cut can open a singularity that sucks the victim in, or a portal that sends limbs or halves elsewhere.
• Portals: slices portals in space to dodge, teleport, dive through enemies’ chests, and let allies attack through them.
  • The sword that lets an ally attack through a portal is a greater silver sword that can cut an astral silver cord on a crit.
  • Artificer-infused teleport boots.
• Other powers: paladin powers (smites, lay on hands, an aura of protection); green flame blade that burns with black fire.
• Family and past: son of Orin. The Arbiter saved Orin as a child when his village burned, and later betrayed and murdered him.
• The rebels: leads Orin’s former men from the Eastern Outpost, who deserted the Grandmaster’s forces to serve her “from the shadows.” Many are wanted for treason.
• Personality: calls himself “servant of the Grandmaster” (“in a way”). Old-fashioned about looting the dead. Rambles a little “like an old man” (Mudcat). “Not a tactician… a soldier.” His inner struggle is living up to his father’s legacy.
• In this episode: killed Hathim by decapitating him through a portal.

John Carmichael (NinjaManMat1)

• Introduces himself as “ex-wizard, coriander agent, private investigator, and reluctant follower of a very particular dragon goddess” (Tiamat, her symbol on his coat). He has lost his wizard status (“can’t soul gaze anymore”).
• Background: from Earth. Says it’s Christmas, not a corporate holiday.
• Gear:
  • The gun Krontaka, which hungers for fey blood and can drag him.
  • Spell bullets.
  • The red kiss talisman (corruption).
  • Coral that becomes a water trident.
  • A case of carrying/briefcase holding a wrench, a rubber chicken, life rafts, an anchor, a quarter ton of dynamite, and now thousands of wooden spoons, Knight armor and swords, and Hathim’s head.
  • A duel-disk camera.
  • An earpiece radio to Asena.
• Other: has a cat, Chester. Can do dragon fear and mirror image.

Asena (PodsofWar)

• Abilities and gear:
  • A martial fighter with silver-misty-light fists.
  • Can run up walls and has slow fall.
  • Double-barrel shotgun and laser gun.
  • The Fang of Glotharius (planar slip).
  • “Wails from the grave.”
  • A crown that can apparently speak with the dead (inferred from John’s test, 2:52:28).
• Connection to portals: “connected to a lot of planes,” and has power over portals that barely affects Lyrus’s.
• Flaw: “no patience for sitting around… direct action.”
• Deathmatch history: a former Deathmatch champion who fought Ralzamon in the Kitchen of the Dread Fortress, using milk froth against his lactose intolerance. She remembers crowds chanting her name. She also tells John of dreams of a Santa-carriage space trip, which John has never believed.
• In this episode: keeps the finest spoon.

Ralzamon, “Master of the Unknown” (spelling per DM notes)

• A figure from Asena’s past and the Coriander Society’s nemesis.
• Pulled into the Void by a hand and a voice: “I still have need of you.”
• Per Lyrus, “General of the Arbiter,” who has served the Arbiter for months.
• Acts here as an invisible psychic presence that exploits flaws and crushes minds. It is “stronger, more powerful than ever.”
• Lactose intolerant.

Hathim (spelling uncertain)

• Tiamat’s blood berserker from Lacunas, of her elite hit squad. John “thought I killed him and his whole gang.”
• Wears power armor recolored to match the Grandmaster’s colors, with jump jets and immunity to cold. Fights with power axes and battle drugs.
• Lied that his master was the Grandmaster.
• Decapitated by Lyrus. His body was taken by a portal; his head is in John’s bag.

Lawrence Booker Green (GM NPC)

• A wizened old traveler from another universe.
• Lost his shoes in the crossing.
• Casts firebolt, banishment (“fuck off”) and Word of Radiance.

The Pygus leader (“big Chungus”)

• A maul-wielding brute wearing an illusory copy of the Grandmaster’s armor. Fate after Lyrus’s dive-through unclear (inferred dead).

Knights of Terra Nimbus

• Bluish full plate and thundering swords. They fly without wings, levitate others, hurl thunderbolts, and parry. They wear the impostor color scheme.

Lyrus’s militia: commoners, thieves and soldiers in mismatched leathers.

Frank: a large orc cook whose stew is dangerous. Jeff: a former cook fired for stealing potatoes; “We cut off his hands” (speaker uncertain).

Baptiste: a slender elf with silvery-white hair. A dagger stabber, new to the group, who asks people whether he has ever stabbed them.

The old blind white dragonborn (unnamed), at the HQ.

The spoon boy: a small blonde boy with a Swedish-ish accent. Sold out his entire stock.

The Arbiter (only mentioned)

• Per Lyrus: the Grandmaster’s vizier and right hand.
• Secretly betraying her, planning a coup, amassing an army, and sending impostors to cause unrest.
• Murdered Orin. Keeps the Grandmaster isolated. “Master of time, space, and magic,” perhaps thousands of years old.
• The hand that took Ralzamon is inferred to be his (from the recap at 0:03:18 together with Lyrus’s “General of the Arbiter,” 2:10:11). It is not stated.

The Grandmaster (only mentioned)

• Lives in the Dread Fortress and doesn’t know about the betrayal.
• “Low tech.” Asena “liked that lady.”

Tiamat: the Dragon Queen, who answers John’s prayer even “impossible eons away.”

Places

• Prexmarin, the Hanging City: tiers on enormous chains, with a market circle of marble and metalwork.
• A castle-ward street reached through Lyrus’s portal (an unnamed location outside the city), where the blacksmith-shop rebel headquarters stands.
• The Dread Fortress: a monolith like a humanoid orc skull in an endless lava field, visible on the horizon from every direction. Hundreds of miles of scorching lava field surround it (Lyrus’s pigeon line). Its Kitchen was the arena of Asena v Ralzamon.
• The Eastern Outpost: where Orin’s men served.
• The Void: “an amalgamation of lost planes existing in the same space at the same time,” “beyond time and space”; time doesn’t run in parallel with other worlds.
• Coriander-side places: the Chamber of Crystal and Bubbling Tar, Lacunas, Leftover, Merlin world, the Obsidian Tower, and Ixandar (two mirrored fey planes).

Items

• Lyrus’s void swords and teleport boots.
• John’s Krontaka, the red kiss, the coral trident, the case of carrying, the anchor and life rafts, Hathim’s head, and the thousand spoons.
• Asena’s Fang of Glotharius, the finest lacquered spoon, and magic pocket whales.
• 190 gp (spent on spoons).

Lore statements

• The Grandmaster’s troops wear gold-plated armor with turquoise blue-green gems, sometimes with black chest plates (Mudcat, 0:13:32).
• Void magic “comes from the void… almost a living being.” Void portals feel cold and jagged, without astral mist, and take hours of concentration to master. Faulty portals are dangerous.
• Champions rarely visit the Void’s lands “after the matches.” The arena is “here… there… everywhere.”
• Magic and “witchcraft” from other planes exist in the Void but are not common.
• Messages can’t reach the Grandmaster: scouts disappear, the Arbiter blocks magic, and pigeons can’t cross the lava.

Full Round-by-Round

Every beat of the episode, with timestamps (click to expand)

Intro and setup (table)

1. 0:00:00 Gnomes opens the stream as “Coriander Society Adventures and also… D20 Deathmatch!” and introduces Mudcat as the special guest star.
2. 0:02:37 Recap of Coriander Society. John Carmichael and Asena come from two different worlds and met in another universe. They have been tracking Ralzamon, “Master of the Unknown”, who “turned out to be a figure from Asena’s past long ago.” Ralzamon was on the verge of defeat when “a gateway ripped open behind Ralzamon’s psychic shade. A hand reached through, said, I still have need of you, and dragged him into the void.” John and Asena leapt in after him, into a conduit “beyond the astral plane itself, beyond this dimension, beyond the multiverse.”
3. 0:04:00 Chat effects are explained: channel points and Streamloots. The Coriander Society deck has four special D20 Deathmatch cards: the Arbiter, the Grandmaster, Doug the Pug, and the Box of Chaos. Matt asks what Doug the Pug does. Gnomes: “Don’t worry about it.”
4. 0:05:30 Gnomes: this is the first time John has gone to “a completely alien world.” John arrives with 11 hit points. Mudcat: “You’re already dead. You just don’t even know it yet.”

Arrival in Prexmarin, the Hanging City

5. 0:06:03 The crossing. John, Asena and “the wizened old Lawrence Booker Green, another visitor from another universe,” jump into the tear. Asena can usually manipulate portals and break out of astral conduits. This one goes “through the astral and beyond it. Beyond time and space, an impossible, paradoxical, infinite distance.” They are hurled head over heels, like the Doctor Strange out-of-body scene.
6. 0:07:28 They land hard on a dusty, smooth surface, dazzled by lights and colors. Both shake it off quickly as “planar veterans.”
7. 0:08:30 The Hanging City. They stand on a bridge high above the ground, in a city that also continues above them. It hangs from enormous chains rising to an impossible distance. Each chain holds a level of towers, causeways, markets and neighborhoods, joined by stone causeways and by plank-and-chain bridges. There are floating platforms. Great golden towers hang from the tops, and ramshackle hovels cling to the undersides like stalactites. John catches his second wind.
8. 0:10:11 Lawrence has lost his shoes. They stayed behind in the Chamber of Crystal and Bubbling Tar, where the party fought Ralzamon. A pair of shoes now sits there alone.
9. 0:10:20 The vibe. John reads the place as fantasy-medieval, partly Renaissance, with “the odd occasional anachronistic touch of Victorian.”
10. 0:11:04 Asena: “Where are we? And where’s Ralzamon?” He is nowhere to be seen, even though they followed almost immediately, and so is the mysterious hand.
11. 0:11:49 On this side, the way in was only “a seam in the air” that sealed itself almost invisibly. Nobody noticed them arrive.
12. 0:11:23 A tumult breaks out up ahead in the market square: yelling and breaking. Asena runs toward it.
13. 0:12:10 John casts minor illusion and concentrates hard to keep it moving with them, so that he and Asena appear dressed in local fashion.

The market circle

14. 0:12:48 The market circle is beautiful: intricate carvings in the marble floor and copper and bronze metalwork in geometric patterns.
15. 0:13:32 The Grandmaster’s uniform (Mudcat). The Grandmaster’s troops wear gold-plated armor, heavy and pristine, adorned with bluish-green turquoise gems, sometimes with black chest plates, “but always kind of this gold and blue and green.” There is no insignia as such.
16. 0:13:57 The impostors. Hulking figures with faint purplish-grey skin, completely hairless, lumpy heads and pointed ears are overturning stalls and growling. They wear only bits and pieces of the gold, green-and-blue and black armor.
17. 0:14:44 John’s gun Krontaka (spelling uncertain) pulses. John asks it to stay alert but do nothing yet. It senses fey traces (“like an offshoot”) from the brutes and a lingering fiendish presence from their leader.
18. 0:15:26 The air of the place is “incredibly refreshing,” and Asena heals (a chat card). Matt: “I didn’t know I walked by an oxygen bar.” This leads to a table tangent about Vegas and the “aqua sarcophagus.”
19. 0:16:33 Hathim. The brutes’ leader wears high-tech power armor and wields two axes glowing with red energy, “power axes.” John recognizes him: Hathim, an agent of Tiamat from Lacunas, from her “elite hit squad.” Later he is called “the blood berserker of Tiamat.” His power armor has been re-done in gold trim, a black breastplate and green and blue “RGB gamer style highlights” so that he matches the impostors.
20. 0:18:20 Lyrus charges in (Mudcat). Lyrus comes from the south with a band of fighters (“a small band of thieves,” joking “50 or 60 men”). He is a seven-to-eight-foot white-furred werebear in huge grey and black plate armor with furs underneath (“it gets cold places”). He wields two giant black swords “like a void in space,” which suck in the light around them and pulse with dark, gloomy void energy.
21. 0:19:55 Lyrus cuts into an enforcer. The void sword opens a singularity at the center of the victim, who is sucked inside it. Lyrus kicks his way forward and shouts: “Move into position!” Several enemies are “cutscene owned.”
22. 0:20:40 The Knights. Knights block the north and south exits. They wear full plate with an odd bluish tint and wield enormous swords that thrum and rumble, and they are unusually light on their feet. John guesses they are Knights of Terra Nimbus, from his reading in “Merlin world.” They share the impostors’ color scheme.
23. 0:21:42 Asena’s opener. Asena runs straight into the brutes and asks whether they’ve seen Ralzamon. The moment Lyrus slices another enforcer “into the negative zone,” every gold-wearing person on the battlefield turns to look at Asena. She tries again: “I don’t know if you can help me because you look like you have some like Lacunas type stuff, but do you know where Ralzamon is?” Hathim pauses.
24. 0:22:57 John had been trying to open a mental link with her the whole way over. He lowers his hand, exasperated.
25. 0:23:35 John’s new disguise. John drops Asena’s illusion; she is back in her survivalist gear, having left “the suit at home.” He remakes himself as a traveler in modern biker leathers. His revolver now looks like a “magitek flintlock,” and he scuffs his hair so that he is recognizable to Asena but not to someone he once wrecked: not “John mother effing Carmichael and I destroyed your entire way of life.”
26. 0:25:29 Everyone hesitates for a moment after the name Ralzamon, and then they all attack Asena. “What?”

Round 1

27. 0:27:54 Hathim’s battle drugs course through him and he goes first. Chat has given the enemies “heavy firepower,” and one random combatant has weapon trouble.
28. 0:30:28 Hathim charges Asena, shoving everyone aside, attacking utterly recklessly. His first power-axe swing would do terrible damage, and he “smells blood,” doing more to wounded targets.
29. 0:31:44 John’s corruption gambit. John takes a point of corruption from his talisman, the red kiss, which glows like dripping blood. The symbol of Tiamat blazes on the back of his jacket, and he prays aloud to Tiamat, the Dark Queen of Dragonkind, loud enough for Hathim to hear. He supercasts Armor of Agathys on Asena. Gnomes: “between two of her champions, anointed and chosen by her, she favors you in this instance.” Ice shields Asena. Hathim is immune to cold, thanks to drug-chilled blood and environmental armor, so John swaps the armor to lightning, invoking the blue dragon (he once posed as a lightning dragon in Lacunas). Hathim’s axe strikes the ice and fries him. Asena takes only a little damage.
30. 0:35:48 Chat cards on the table: Triple Threat (the first to sing, dance or act gets inspiration), Catchphrase, and later Extra Munitions and Combo Breaker.
31. 0:36:20 Hathim’s second axe misses while he twitches from the shock. His offhand blow lands. Asena tries to roll aside with a focus-point dodge, but it still hits.
32. 0:37:49 John asks Lyrus for help. John pushes through civilians to Asena: “Hey, uh, you, uh, this guy’s attacking just young girls in the street. I don’t know if you’re some kind of guard, but please, we need your assistance.” Lyrus pauses: “Give me just a minute.” He slaughters his way toward them. John swaps places with Asena and puts an arm in front of her; she protests: “I’m fine. I said something wrong though.”
33. 0:39:43 John aims his gun: “I have a big gun, and I know how to use it, and there’s a bear over there with a sword that transports you, only what I can assume, to a very terrible place. Or kills you.”
34. 0:40:21 Dragon fear. John’s shadow stretches across the battlefield and grows wings that exist nowhere else. The Tiamat sigil on his coat lights with multicolored fire. Many of the brutes and one knight become frightened. Hathim is immune “because Tiamat wants him to fear her.”
35. 0:42:12 The coral. From his bag (his briefcase, now disguised as a messenger bag), John pulls a small piece of coral, which transforms into a water trident with water spouting from both ends. He fires a 60-ft water jet that knocks a brute prone and floods the market, soaking magic baubles and apothecary goods. Civilians flee behind John or out past Lyrus’s troops.
36. 0:44:06 Lyrus’s troops wear no uniform. They are commoners and soldiers in mismatched leathers who can vanish into a crowd: a militia. John and Asena place themselves between the townsfolk and the ruffians (“Branding is important”).
37. 0:45:00 The brutes’ leader, with a huge maul, charges Lyrus. Lyrus slices a portal in space with his other sword. The maul and the arm holding it go through and come out ten feet away. The leader yanks it back just before it is cut off, and it comes out covered in charred ash.
38. 0:47:14 Levitated. A knight gestures, and wind lifts John 20 ft into the air, clearing the path to Asena. Another tries the same on Lyrus, who shakes it off. A frightened knight shouts a command to inspire his neighbor, who hurls a thunderbolt at John. The sword clangs into the maul that just came out of Lyrus’s portal. It goes off with a boom and flies across the chamber, and the knight floats after it, flying without wings.
39. 0:49:42 “It doesn’t belong to you.” Lyrus points a sword at the brutes’ leader: “Take off that armor. It doesn’t belong to you.” The armor turns misty and translucent. Underneath are ramshackle bits of plate and leather with none of the Grandmaster’s insignia. “I see. I’ll deal with you in a second then.” He rushes past and cuts into another brute; the void wound spreads open into an ethereal gap in its chest. His artificer-infused boots teleport him back in front of the leader for a second cut, and void spreads through the leader’s chest, “not quite a singularity yet.”
40. 0:53:08 The portal shot. Lyrus meets John’s eye and slashes a void blade through the air (“like a warlock blade from Destiny”). It stops in front of John as a portal, letting John shoot through it. Still floating, John loads a fireball spell bullet and shoots a Knight of Terra Nimbus who is bending to pick up his sword in the middle of the plaza. He yells “Get some cover!” The fireball engulfs the field.
41. 0:57:21 The fireball triggers the brutes’ leader: the first time he takes damage he gets a whole extra turn. He swings at Lyrus, Lyrus opens another gate, and the leader’s arm goes into the fireball. He pulls it back just in time.
42. 0:58:42 Asena evades the fireball. John is still inside it at 20 ft and sings for the Triple Threat: “Oh no, please fireball, don’t blow me up again! … There’s fire licking at my toes. Please, something intervene to help me.” A screaming monster below happens to put itself between him and the blast, and John “drafts” behind it and takes no damage.
43. 1:01:07 Asena’s punches. Asena attacks the prone brute with advantage (“Sleep, sleep, sleep”) and kills it: “Crunch… Tarantino movies, splorch.” As it dies, she uses one of her “wails from the grave” (banshee wails, which the table keeps calling “whales”) to suck life from another enemy. She runs to another brute and lands a left hook, a right jab and an uppercut. Her fists flare with silver, misty light that adds force to every impact. He flies two feet into the air and drops in a heap.
44. 1:04:36 “Who’s your master?” Asena yells at Hathim: “I don’t know why you’re fighting me. I don’t have an issue with you. I’m looking for someone.” “The master commands it” (speaker uncertain). “Who’s your master?” He struggles, as if one answer came to mind, then “wait, no, not that,” then another. He finally says “The Grandmaster.” Asena sees that he is lying. John, distracted by the blood frenzy, does not.
45. 1:06:13 Lawrence shuffles in from across the street, bewildered (“What am I even doing here?”, speaker uncertain), and throws a firebolt from across the street: “I’m helping! Hey!”
46. 1:06:52 Ralzamon’s presence. At the end of the round, “a crushing mental presence descends upon the marketplace,” digging for flaws and self-hatred.
    • Lyrus: his struggle is “living up to the legacy of his father, Orin.” He feels crippling shame and the urge to do something drastic, but “your will is strong. Your purpose is true,” and he resists.
    • John and Asena: “a familiar mental presence, except stronger, more powerful than ever.” This is Ralzamon’s “cracks in your armor” power. Asena fails. Her flaw: “I have no patience for sitting around or the vagaries of society. I prefer direct action wherever possible.” She curses at the wind. John resists.

Round 2

47. 1:10:56 A badly hurt, frightened brute fails to break the dread. It lurches forward “as if his body is not his own” over its comrades’ bodies, misses with its first morningstar swing and hits Asena with the second. She burns a focus point to dodge. Frightened brutes press Lyrus, who cuts holes in space and dances through portals around them: “Too slow.” To outsiders the melee is “a cloud of darkness with weapons sticking out at improbable angles.” John holds Lyrus’s eye for a moment.
48. 1:14:37 A brute who isn’t afraid attacks Asena, and she bobs and weaves “like a Jackie Chan movie.” The morningstar scars the shiny cobbles.
49. 1:15:42 Hathim drops Asena… almost. Asena: “You didn’t tell me who your master was.” Hathim’s axe hits her hard and feeds on her blood. Chat heals her, and she spends inspiration on a planar slip: the Fang of Glotharius around her neck flares with silver light and implodes, dealing force damage to the enemies around her, landing near Lawrence. “I’m not average.” It kills the brutes in her area and knocks Hathim on his back. She hides among the commoners (“Stealth mode”).
50. 1:19:29 Hathim stands and fires the jump jets on his armor to leap up and strike the levitating John (“That’s illegal”). Then, with Bloodseeker, he rushes at Asena.
51. 1:21:00 John, upside down. John: “We just fought one of the most difficult fights of our life… and now we’re engaged in what is effectively, like, a really dangerous bar brawl in the middle of Town Square.” He casts mirror image with his last warlock slot: “Shadow clone jutsu Johns pop out, also floating ignominiously upside down with their hair flailing.” He opens his case of carrying (a “Mary Poppins bag”) upside down. A wrench flies out and a rubber chicken hits the ground. Chat adds Extra Munitions (a level-2 disposable item anyone in the party can cash in).
52. 1:24:03 The dance. For the Triple Threat, John airwalks and wiggles while he digs. Four Johns wiggle weirdly in the air, watched by the Knights of Terra Nimbus.
53. 1:25:22 The life rafts. He pulls out an inflatable airplane-style life raft so that if he falls he won’t die, and then asks for ten life rafts scattered over the courtyard, “this big courtyard bed of life rafts.”
54. 1:26:33 A knight lifts John 20 ft higher, to 40 ft. Another flies up after him with its greatsword, but the blows only pop mirror images. Another knight flies past Asena to Lyrus, and its sonic blade thunders. A thunderbolt at John misses.
55. 1:29:08 Lyrus’s crit. Lyrus rolls a natural 20 on a mook. His sword is a greater silver sword: on a crit against an astral body, he can cut the silvery cord. Gnomes: “We’ll just separate his physical form from his physical form.” The mook dies. Lyrus’s green flame blade spreads black fire onto a knight. He steps through a portal in front of that knight and smites twice. Then he cuts a portal into the dying knight’s chest, walks through it and appears behind another enemy (“nothing personnel kid”). Three enemies drop, “folded in on themselves, inverted or simply separated in two.” His militia is winning behind him: “We’re almost there, men! Keep pushing!” (speaker uncertain).
56. 1:33:26 “You lied to me!” Asena: “Why is he so obsessed with me?” She blasts Hathim in the face with her double-barrel shotgun: “You lied to me!” (“This is why you tell me to use my shotgun”), then punches him. Her stunning strike fails (“usually works on geeks and nerds, less so on these big roided-out dudes”). She disengages with Move Like Lightning and disappears into Lyrus’s militia. John mentions Chester, his cat, who came with them.
57. 1:37:27 Lawrence rubs his forehead, points at Hathim and says “fuck off,” casting Banishment. Hathim resists (inferred; he acts right after).
58. 1:38:19 Ralzamon’s invisible presence aims a mind crush at Lyrus and misses.
59. 1:38:39 Hathim vs Lyrus. Hathim’s prey has slipped away, so he blitzes Lyrus, “the most deadly enemy on the battlefield” (“Bring it on, bitch,” speaker uncertain). Lyrus stands still and lets the axe hit his chest with Stone’s Endurance, growling. Hathim’s second axe sticks in his chest; the drug-crazed offhand swing goes wild.
60. 1:40:43 John, 40 ft up over “a lot of life rafts,” shoots the knight attacking him under the visor. It crumples to the ground and lands on a life raft.
61. 1:42:02 Catchphrase. “John, you’re a fucking wizard… You can do this.” He finds an Acme Corp anchor with rope in his briefcase and drops it. It pops a life raft, which starts leaking, and he hauls himself down 20 ft against the levitation. Chester drops onto the rafts unharmed (“he’s a cat”) and lurks under a counter next to Hathim, in case John needs their sympathetic connection.
62. 1:44:20 The enemies swarm Lyrus. The maul misses; one Knight’s blade lands.
63. 1:45:18 Hathim’s death. Lyrus has never stopped watching Hathim, even with the axe stuck in his armor and blood pouring down his front. After misses and parries he sees an opening. He opens a portal at his side and pushes both arms through. They come out behind Hathim’s head and chop it off. Hathim’s body is sucked into a portal, and only his head is left rolling across the courtyard. The remaining enemies stare at it, then at the warriors arrayed against them. (Break, cut from the mp3.)

After the break

64. 1:48:41 Gnomes recaps: the strangers met “a group of individuals claiming to work for somebody called the Grandmaster.”
65. 1:49:22 Asena passes through Lyrus’s people: thieves, rogues, people in old armor and disguises with improvised or hidden weapons, “all designed to blend in and to hide.” She returns to fight. The knights fly “a couple inches above the ground.” No wings. Her second punch spins a knight’s helmet around on his head, but her later blows are sloppy. Pods: Asena is breaking down, thinking about how close she was to taking Ralzamon down. Matt: “It’s almost as if there’s cracks in Asena’s armor right now.”
66. 1:52:58 Lawrence steps across an inflatable raft and hits the levitating knight with Word of Radiance, but it keeps concentration.
67. 1:54:00 Ralzamon’s presence lashes out at each of them in turn. It crushes the mind of one of John’s mirror images, starts to “destroy the mind” of Lawrence, and hits Asena with psychic damage. Lyrus is spared. Mudcat: “Lyrus takes off all his armor.” Gnomes: “Please, take me out!”
68. 1:55:24 John crawls along the ground just above it, still levitating.
69. 1:56:35 Krontaka wants blood. John shoots the fey-like brute leader (with Island’s Bane, which does extra damage to fey) and rolls a natural 1. John is fine with the miss; Krontaka is not. The gun drags him 10 ft toward the target “like some kind of invisible dog.” He fans the hammer for a double tap, and “burbling black blood blossoms forth from the brutish belligerent,” which survives. “This is big Chungus,” their leader.
70. 1:59:34 The two remaining knights see Lyrus’s militia closing in and withdraw 45 ft straight up. The levitate ends, and John plops a few inches down.
71. 2:00:31 The dive. Lyrus cuts the brute leader again with black flame, sticks both swords into his chest and pulls them sideways to stretch a portal, dives head-first through it, and (with inspiration doubling the distance) comes out of the sky above a fleeing knight. He drives both swords into the knight’s shoulders, splits it in two, and the halves are sucked into two separate portals. He flips and lands hard after a 60-ft fall and fails the superhero-landing check. “I’m an eight foot tall werebear. I’m going to land hard.” His knees crack. “I should have saved a portal for the way back.”
72. 2:04:41 The last knight. Asena is tired. “Tired of not killing Ralzamon,” Matt says. She skips her laser gun (“a Han Solo”), runs up a tall pillar, backflips off it “Prince of Persia” style, and punches the last knight in mid-air. They crash down together, and she rides him all the way, leaving a knee-shaped dent in the cracked courtyard. She stands up “not a hair out of place.”
73. 2:07:49 John gets to his feet: “Don’t fuck with the Dragon of Zoquia! Whoo!” (name uncertain). He throws his arms up and holsters his gun. Lyrus cocks his head: “what the fuck?” John starts ripping armor off the dead knights and stuffing it and their swords into his bag.

Introductions

74. 2:08:45 Asena, visibly angry and quiet, points at Lyrus: “I like your sword.” Lyrus: “Uh, I like your fists, I guess. Good, uh, good job. Who, who, uh, who are you?” Asena: “Oh, I’m Asena. That’s John. He usually does the talking because I get us into trouble.” Lyrus: “Oh, one of those, huh? I am Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster.”
75. 2:09:22 Asena says the headless one claimed to serve the Grandmaster. Lyrus: “Charlatans, all of them. These aren’t the Grandmaster’s forces, merely mirage.” Asked whether he serves her: “In a way”, deliberately vague. He lays a giant paw on her shoulder and heals her (Lay on Hands). “Are you looking for work? Because we could use a few soldiers like yourself.”
76. 2:10:09 “I’m looking for Ralzamon.” Lyrus: “Ralzamon, General of the Arbiter. Yes, the Arbiter, right hand of the Grandmaster. … You haven’t heard of the Grandmaster?”
77. 2:10:55 Asena remembers. Using Combo Breaker, John breaks his usual habit. Whenever Asena tells him about her “weird dreams,” like flying through space on a Santa carriage giving presents to schoolchildren who can cast magic, he says “that’s really nice, sweetie.” This time he says “wait a minute, Grandmaster, you mentioned something about that one time.” Asena hears, for a moment, distant crowds screaming and chanting her name, “good feelings.” “I think I’ve been here before… I remember, like, I fought Ralzamon, and the Arbiter was there, and the Grandmaster was there.”
78. 2:13:29 Lyrus: “You, you fought in the arena?” “That’s it! The arena! Is that here?” “You are a champion?” “Yes.” Lyrus: “Yes, it’s here. It’s here. It’s there. It’s everywhere.” He sheathes his swords and gives a small bow (hard for someone his size): “Not often we get champions here in the Void after the matches.” Asena tries to copy the bow, not knowing what to do, which completes the Triple Threat.
79. 2:14:25 Over the earpiece radio, John asks Asena about “a void.” Lyrus doesn’t hear (“a lot of chunks of bodies in his ears”).

The Void and the Dread Fortress

80. 2:15:14 Asena: “Is this the Void?” Lyrus: “This is the Void. We are beyond the Void… this is the Void, the realm of the Grandmaster, who resides in the Dread Fortress. … There are planets here. This is more, think of this more of an amalgamation of lost planes. Existing in the same space at the same time.”
81. 2:15:56 “All roads lead to the Dread Fortress.” He points with his swords. Whichever way you look, a towering monolith stands on the horizon miles away. It looks like a humanoid orc skull in a lava field that seems to stretch forever, and no matter which way you turn, it’s always there.
82. 2:16:31 Asena: “So that must be where Ralzamon is.” Lyrus: “No, no. If this Ralzamon is in league with the Arbiter, if it’s the same one I think it is, you wouldn’t find him at the Dread Fortress.” The rebels don’t know where he is.
83. 2:16:50 The betrayal. Lyrus: “The Grandmaster has a vizier, a right hand, the Arbiter. He assists her in all things… it turns out that he’s betrayed the Grandmaster. He’s trying to rally a coup from the inside. She’s unaware at this point.” He uses Ralzamon “and many other who would come to his cause.” These men were dressed as the Grandmaster’s forces to sow unrest. Asena: “Why would he do that? I liked that lady.” Lyrus: “Power? Greed? Because he can?” … “I know for a fact he’s amassing an army. I’ve seen it.”
84. 2:18:05 Looting. John wants the “impressive reagents.” Lyrus: “You would desecrate these bodies?… These men died with at least some dignity, some honor.” John points out that they burned half of them alive. Lyrus: “Maybe I’m just old-fashioned.” Behind him, his own soldiers are already looting. John: “Where I come from, this is how we make friends, so I want to be best friends with you.” Lyrus picks Hathim’s head off the ground and offers it to John, palming it like a ball. John wanted Hathim alive to interrogate: “I know that fella.” (John’s deception check covers his attitude while looting, not an outright lie.)
85. 2:20:18 Lyrus’s backstory. Lyrus paces with his hands behind his back: “When my father was a child, the Arbiter first came into our lives. He saved my father after his village was burned, so you can imagine the betrayal against our family. Not only that, but he murdered my father in cold blood.” He checks that John is listening. John is still looting, and his floating camera zooms in.
86. 2:21:01 John’s camera. On his arm John wears what looks like a modified Yu-Gi-Oh! duel disk. It controls a floating remote camera that records everything (“the exposition bot”) and can project holograms that modify terrain. Lyrus: “I see you’ve brought magic from another plane. … There’s a piece or two of this kind of witchcraft and sorcery around if you were to search. We’re not strangers to it, but it’s not necessarily common in these parts.”
87. 2:22:02 John introduces himself: “John Carmichael, ex-wizard, coriander agent, private investigator, and reluctant follower of a very particular dragon goddess.” They shake hands, and Lyrus heals him too: “Lyrus, son of Orin, servant of the Grandmaster. Didn’t I just say this?” John: “You are both might and magic. I love that about you.” Lyrus asks whether the dance was a technique. John calls it “the physical ramblings of a man who had nothing to do… other than the void.” They go round on “in the void and beyond the void.”
88. 2:23:23 John proposes an alliance, since Ralzamon “seem[s] as though they may be the right hand of the right hand of the person that you serve.” He asks for a base of operations. Lyrus: “We should probably get out of here before more come.” On the way out, Lyrus kicks one of his own looters in the face for disrespect. John wraps Hathim’s head in cloth and puts it in his bag.
89. 2:24:42 The Pygus. John’s arcana check: from the archives of the Obsidian Tower he knows of a plane called Ixandar, “the mirror of another.” It is two fey planes, two realms of magic that mirror each other: one a bright force of chaos and entropy, the other a dark force of order that “aligns everything and flattens it before it.” The brutes are Pygus, spawn of Ixandar. They usually serve stronger creatures of Ixandar, which have no visible link to the other forces present.
90. 2:26:32 With Extra Munitions, John quietly swipes reagents (maybe from a shopkeeper) to craft a spell tattoo later at base for Asena or Lyrus. Gnomes, OOC: “Woke up in a bathtub full of ice, short of kidney.” Chat treasure also gives magic pocket whales for Asena and 190 gold pieces.

Through Lyrus’s portal

91. 2:28:17 Lyrus: “By the way, this is Prexmarin, the Hanging City. You might come here for some shopping later on.” Their HQ is outside the city: “It’s not the most comfortable means of travel. Hopefully your constitutions are strong.” He slices open an arched, doorway-sized portal. It is black and void-like but see-through, and it gives a top-down view of a traditional castle ward with merchants and shops.
92. 2:29:01 Asena: “I want to do that.” Lyrus: “Maybe in time I can teach you… are you connected to the shadow plane at all?” “I think I’m connected to a lot of planes.” Lyrus: “It takes hours of concentration to get it right. You don’t want to go through a faulty portal, trust me.” Asena: “I’m not allowed to mess them up anymore.”
93. 2:30:45 Lyrus: “We need to see a man about a sword.” John’s mirror image fades as he steps through. Lyrus’s men put up hoods, throw on cloaks and scatter, so that no one is followed in one direction.
94. 2:31:33 The cold portal. For Asena, this portal is unlike any she has used: colder and more jagged, without the misty feel of astral portals, “like stepping out into the wind, into the snow, but without the moisture.” She tries to widen it. Her usual power does almost nothing, but the portal starts fraying like bad cloth at the edges and unraveling larger. She stops. Lyrus, mouth open: “Uh, what are you doing?” He closes it. Asena: “Your void is weird.… It’s gonna tear.”
95. 2:33:45 Void magic. Lyrus: “The magic itself comes from the void. It surrounds us, it’s all around us. It’s almost a living being. This is just a small sampling of its power. I’ve seen sorcerers, wizards, champions far greater than I who really know how to wield it. This is all I can muster.” John: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a portal that Asena couldn’t [mess] with.” Asena: “I probably could.”
96. 2:34:29 Time. Lyrus: “You’ve been… not only transported in location, but time as well. Ralzamon has been serving the Arbiter for… months? At this point.” They just saw him minutes ago.
97. 2:35:41 The kitchen fight. Lyrus: “Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown?… when I saw him in the arena… watching your friend here fight to the death inside of the kitchen of the Dread Fortress.” Asena: “He’s lactose intolerant.” Lyrus: “He had a distinct lack of tolerance for milk.” Asena: “Yeah, the milk froth. I remember. Yeah, it hurt him.” Lyrus: “It was one of the greatest battles in the Kitchen of the Dread Fortress that there ever have been.” John’s insight finds no lie. He looks back and forth between them and somehow cross-eyed at both. Lyrus: “You’re telling me you never tried to use milk against your greatest enemy?”
98. 2:36:49 John realizes. “These stories that you tell whenever we wake up from our rest… they’re actually real, aren’t they?” Asena: “I don’t have a good imagination, John. Of course they’re real.” “Does that mean you’re gonna start believing me about the non-denominational corporate holiday?” John: “No, that is ridiculous. It’s called Christmas… I’m from Earth.”
99. 2:38:06 John’s memory palace: Asena’s stories began at least weeks ago. Every world he has visited kept time in parallel, except the paused world of Lacunas and the Fae. The Void is most like Leftover, but even Leftover stayed in parity. By Occam’s Razor, John concludes the Void doesn’t follow the universe’s rules. Lyrus: “Time, uh, well, it doesn’t work the same way… we are beyond time and space. And all known realms. We are in the void and beyond it. … I try not to think about it too much… gives me headaches.” John: as a ten-year-old he cried himself to sleep over infinity. He’s exhausted after “going up… a mountain down a volcano.” “Does this blacksmith happen to have a bed?”
100. 2:41:17 Lyrus checks for watchers, not subtly. John backs him up, can’t “soul gaze anymore because he’s lost his wizard status,” and nods: clear. Lyrus: “Our forces reside just down the road there in the blacksmith shop… the front, the headquarters. … It’s makeshift.” John: “we’re used to far worse accommodations, mostly Iraq” (sic, see review).
101. 2:42:39 The cooks. Lyrus: “Whatever you do, don’t eat Jeff’s food. Sorry, Frank’s food.” Jeff got fired for embezzlement: “He was stealing the potatoes.” “We cut off his hands” (speaker uncertain). John: “You have a very good severance package.”

The street and the spoons

102. 2:43:36 The castle-ward street is nondescript, the perfect place to hide in plain sight. A teenager rolls his eyes while working a booth. A small blonde boy carves ornate wooden spoons and shouts in a high-pitched, almost Swedish accent. A man in an overcoat flashes it open: “You looking for anything particular?”, selling knockoff magic items.
103. 2:44:58 John pulls Asena aside for a private word out of earshot. Asena: “Yeah, you want to get some spoons?” John hands her the 190 gp bag, knowing he’ll never see it again.
104. 2:45:53 The boy: “Get your spoons!” They want “the prettiest one… shiniest.” Asena drops in a giant fistful of gold. The boy has never seen so much money. He digs into a chest: “This is my finest spoon.” It is heavily lacquered (“if you put a match to this thing, it’s probably going to go up”), carved, and inlaid with what might be silver, “like a cereal spoon.”
105. 2:47:24 Thousands of spoons. John: “Oh, no, no, friend… We’re sending you home early for the day.” They buy every spoon. The flabbergasted boy flips his sign to closed and walks off with the money. John: “When we first met each other, I could barely afford to buy a pen. And now we’re just dropping hot stacks on wooden spoons.” Thousands of ornate spoons go into his bag of holding, “right next to my quarter ton of dynamite.” Asena keeps the finest spoon. Table riff: the boy tells his papa he has retired, in a suddenly German accent. “You lost the spoons. You lost your accent… Are you sure you are my actual boy?”
106. 2:49:42 John and Asena alone. Asena thought they really were there for spoons. “You alright?” “I’m almost dead.” “Same. Big same.” She: Ralzamon was almost dead, then they didn’t find him, “and then some random Lacunas guy almost murders us.” John: “I thought I killed him and his whole gang.” He wonders whether the Void gathers souls on the brink of death, as Ralzamon was when the hand took him, and whether they will meet other old enemies here. “Those people could be pissed if they see me or us.” He urges caution and following Lyrus’s lead. Asena: “He can lead. … Are you saying everyone here is dead? Are we dead?” John: “I don’t know. I hope not.” He suggests a test: “Real quick, take out your crown. … if it works with the crown, then that means I’m dead.” Asena doesn’t follow (“I can talk to you right now”). “Forget it.” He pats her shoulder.
107. 2:53:41 John kicks open the blacksmith door: “I wanna go to bed.” Lyrus’s secret knock turns out to be just a normal knock: “It’s me.”
108. 2:53:56 The rain. Rain falls and drives the less desperate vendors off the street. Distant thunder rolls from the direction of the Dread Fortress, which looms over the rooftops whichever way you look.

The headquarters

109. 2:55:00 Inside is a big smithy where dozens of smiths have worked, now an encampment, with forges in the middle and back and several rooms. Two giant forges radiate heat while people clang on anvils. One forge has been taken over by Frank, a large orc stirring a cauldron of stew and using the forge as his stove. Lyrus: “It’s good to see you, Frank” (speaker uncertain). Frank tastes the stew and likes it. Someone is retching from the recent batch of food.
110. 2:56:16 Baptiste. A slender elf with white, silvery hair practices stabbing in the corner near Frank, flipping daggers in both hands, and winks at John. John winks back. Baptiste: “You have beautiful eyes.” John: “Hey, right back at you.” “Have I ever stabbed you before?” (speaker uncertain). John: “I think I would have known.” To Asena: “What about you? Have you ever been stabbed by me?” “Uh-uh.” “Yes, well, you know, only time will tell, I guess.”
111. 2:57:13 An old white-scaled dragonborn wanders through the middle. His eyes are completely white; he is blind and feels his way, though he moves at a normal pace.
112. 2:57:58 Lyrus: quarters to the left, food by the forges. “Don’t mind Baptiste over there. He’s not very good at anything but stabbing. It’s a useful tool for the right job. He’s kind of new, though.” Baptiste has stabbed so many people he lost track, “or it might be some sort of weird pickup line.” “He stabs both ways, it seems.” “If there’s a spot on the floor, it’s yours. There’s no dibs here.” Don’t sleep in a doorway, and “maybe it’s best that none of you answer the door.”
113. 2:59:30 “You can leave, but just maybe run it by us first… Our presence here is unknown to both the Arbiter and the Grandmaster. We exist and operate in the shadows.”
114. 3:00:03 The Eastern Outpost. “Many of the men and women you will see here served my father, Orin, in the Eastern Outpost some time ago before his betrayal. And his ultimate death. … he was betrayed by the Arbiter.” Asena: “Yeah, he told the story, don’t you remember?” “Once his death became known to us and the Arbiter’s betrayal became known, we left the forces of the Grandmaster to work in her favor from the shadows.”
115. 3:00:40 No way in. “The Arbiter keeps her at a distance, keeps her locked up in the Dread Fortress, so to speak. Not that he can keep her locked up, but he keeps her away from prying eyes. Our messengers, our scouts, always seem to disappear every time we send a delegate.” Magic won’t work: “The Arbiter… is a master of time, space, and magic, probably much like your Ralzamon… Who knows how old he is? Thousands of years? … keeps a tight lock on the Dread Fortress, and the Grandmaster has no reason not to trust him to this point.”
116. 3:02:09 No mobile device: “She’s a kind of a low tech sort of gal.” No pigeons: “Have you ever seen a pigeon fly hundreds of miles over a lava field in scorching heat?” John: he once saw a swallow, “I don’t know if it was African-European,” do something similar over water. “If you want to eat cooked pigeon, that’s the way.”
117. 3:03:17 The rebels’ aims. “The Arbiter has been sending his forces to impersonate the Grandmaster’s forces. I think he’s trying to cause unrest in the region… so that when he assumes power, it will go smoothly for him. … So we step in where we can and push back.” John points out that they left no one to tell the townsfolk the attackers were the Arbiter’s impostors, so the crowd saw a militia beat “the Grandmaster’s forces.” Lyrus: “Many of us had to betray our oaths. Many here are wanted for treason.”
118. 3:04:55 John puts “a relatively small arm around a very big individual”: “Join me as I enlighten you as to the wonderful world of Shadow Warfare.” He offers gossip, propaganda and getting Frank “away from the stews and… out into the marketplaces.” Lyrus: “I am not a tactician. I, I am a soldier. This position was thrust upon me. … my father’s shoes were quite large.” Mudcat: Orin’s feet were “like size 20s.”
119. 3:06:23 The heroes long-rest. John wants to try a spoon but not Frank’s stew. Gnomes: “Test spoon just melts.” Next time they’ll be rested and ready to find out what happened to Ralzamon, help the resistance, and uncover the Arbiter’s plot. Gnomes says the crossover is about three episodes long and will stream Tuesdays 6 p.m. Pacific.