Coriander Society — Fate of the Faithful Part 5 (A Crossover)

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The finale of the Coriander Society crossover sends John Carmichael, Asena and the werebear warrior Lyrus into a burning keep in The Shadowlands for one last showdown with their old nemesis Ralzamon. There are giant mechs, a candle-headed adjudicator, a flower slime with main-character energy, and a cookie that cures being small. Under the explosions sits a quiet, strange ending: a broken man asking to be allowed to fall, and something ancient in the dark below him, waking up.

The Story

Fire and Ice

The Void is a patchwork of pieces torn from other worlds, and it is ruled by the Grandmaster, who stages her Deathmatches to keep the boredom of eternity at bay. In the world of Yord, John and Asena were on the verge of finally beating the psychic mastermind Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown, when the Arbiter reached across dimensions and pulled the villain’s shade into the Void. The Arbiter meant to use Ralzamon’s mind-reading powers to spy on the Faithful, the resistance standing between him and his coup against the Grandmaster. The heroes followed Ralzamon and joined forces with Lyrus of the Faithful. They tracked their quarry to a keep in the Shadowlands, where their ally Circe, Master of Magitek, had blown Lyrus up to enormous size with her ray gun.

The sneaky approach did not survive contact with the enemy. Lyrus felled a Draconic Death Knight, one of the Arbiter’s elite servants, but with its dying breath the knight unleashed a Hellball, an explosion of infernal flame. It turned every skeleton nearby into “ash and glass, slurry across the floor” and dropped the giant werebear with an impact that shook the whole fortress.

Circe swooped in on her flying boots and switched her Ray Gun of Amazing Transformation to freeze mode, sealing the dying Lyrus in a block of ice that kept him alive. High above, John hovered in his draconic form with three shadow clones as Aulis the Kindler, a raving fire priest in broken shackles, hurled a fireball at him. John grabbed the Infernal Talisman at his neck. His veins glowed scarlet and he absorbed the fireball, feeding its energy to his patron, Tiamat. Two psionic knights from the world of Lacunas fled from John’s dragon-fear, summoned towering Bogatyr-class mechas, and opened fire with plasma cannons, blasting one of his clones to nothing.

John spotted chains to the north holding some entity in place and declared the rest of the fight “a distraction.” Then he swept down with his gun Krontaka and riddled the Kindler with bullets (“gun, gun, gun, gun!”). He called out Ralzamon: “Hey, you pathetic bastard. Stop hiding down there. Come out and face us.” As if in answer, Ralzamon floated up from below, glowing blue inside an enormous psychic visage. Beneath him, burning yellow eyes stared up out of the chained depths.

Cookies, Souls and Thunder

Asena had been shrunk earlier in the adventure. Thanks to a gift from the watching audience, she found a “drink me / eat me” cookie of not being small in her pocket, complete with tag, and ate it. Back to full size, she punched a skeleton to pieces. Her amulet, the Fang of Goltharius, poured out silver mist, and she ripped the soul out of one skeleton and flung it at another. So little of its soul remained that the second skeleton’s feelings were merely hurt. “It’s very embarrassing. I’m going to punch him now,” she said, and did. The Fang then awakened a new power, and Asena vanished in a flash and reappeared beside John high in the air.

Inside the ice, Lyrus refused to die. Thinking of the Arbiter and his father’s legacy, he willed himself back: “No, no, there’s more to do!” The ice exploded outward and he rose, nearly dead but determined. He healed himself, stepped through the Void and charged across the battlements like a linebacker. Circe flew alongside asking how cryogenic freezing had felt, since she would need “a full report” and possibly tissue samples. When he asked whether she had anything for the bleeding, she offered to freeze him again. He sliced a mecha’s plasma bolts in half with his sword, and the pieces blew up two skeletons on the far horizon.

The Face of a Loved One

John laid Tiamat’s Curse on Ralzamon and opened fire, but the figure at the heart of the psychic storm changed. It now wore the face of someone John had not seen since his last mission on Earth, his beloved Carmen. He knew the trick and hesitated only for a moment. He then hurled Asena at Ralzamon in a classic astral yeet and wrapped her in icy armor as she flew. Ralzamon tried to pass his wounds into her mind, and she shut him out with a natural 20. She had no empathy left for the man who had been a thorn in her side from day one.

On the way, Asena’s dimension-skipping picked up a passenger. Slakura, a little bouncing flower slime, landed on her shoulder. (“Oh, hello.”) Then Asena reached Ralzamon’s true self, Josiah Parsons, and cursed him “directly in the face, right in the teeth” before punching him with a fist of astral force.

Below, Lyrus remembered a moment at the Faithful’s forge before the mission, when the goblin spy Kenny had slipped him a potion of healing: “Good luck out there, boss. Sorry I can’t go with you.” Mid-battle, Lyrus told a mecha, “one second, I’m kind of thirsty,” and drank it. Then he slammed his thunder gauntlets together. The mechs were insulated against lightning, because they were built to fight the blue dragons that had overrun their planet, but nobody had planned for thunder. His anime-grade punch blew out the back of one mech. Short on time, he paid 500 gold for an extra burst of action (“Easy, I’m rich. I don’t know if you guys know this. I’m loaded.”) and kept swinging. Circe phased that mech into the Ethereal Plane. Meanwhile, a planar rift that had cracked open earlier drew in vampiric kobolds that crawled up the walls looking for blood. Their timing was poor, since the keep was mostly skeletons.

Josiah Parsons

John delivered his verdict: “You’ve become that which you hate, Parson, and I’m going to destroy you. So just lie back, think of Yord, and just know that your spirit will return there soon.” His amulet, the red kiss, whispered of vengeance and hatred, and he resisted it. Then he emptied a technically empty revolver: twelve magic missiles and four bullets. Meanwhile the candle-headed Scorched Adjudicator Vargas finally reached Lyrus, and dark, bloody wax ran down his face as he bit into Lyrus’s soul.

John’s barrage tore through Ralzamon’s visage “like bullets through a windshield.” The echo of Ralzamon pulled from Yord was gone. Asena was left holding the glowing Josiah Parsons by the throat over the pit, the version of him she had once faced in a Deathmatch. When she raised her fist again, she saw the man from the photograph, the one from the ill-fated jungle expedition that had changed her life and ended his.

“Asena, enough,” he said. She replied: “What do you mean enough? You’re not dead, so it’s not enough.” He warned her that the one who bound him would come looking for her if she killed him. He begged to be allowed to die alone and keep Yord out of that being’s sight. Asena saw no lie in him, only a broken man who had fought her because he believed she was an abomination. “So you don’t think I’m the downfall of Yord anymore?” she asked. “Things I’ve seen are far worse than anything you might be,” he answered. She asked whether letting go would drop him in the pit. It would. “I’ll do that.” As he fell, his khaki expedition clothes turned back into the hooded robes he wore as a warrior of the Arbiter.

Something in the Pit

Ralzamon’s psychic might had been the only thing holding the chains below. Now the keep shook. When Asena looked down, the eyes looked back, and she felt her life draining toward them. She remembered a moment from her childhood in the tomb of Sennepolker, standing before something ancient that wailed with hunger for life. This was the same kind of hunger, but colder and more calculating, and its bonds were breaking. “You probably shouldn’t look down there unless you want to go down there,” she advised.

An enormous shadowy hand with joints that bent the wrong way gripped the top of the tower. A horned, wispy shape with glowing eyes hauled itself out. The last mercenary called for “a tactical withdrawal,” and his own skeletons turned on him. Asena’s stolen laser gun misfired with ruinous power, dumped its whole core, and brought a tower down on a mech. Lyrus shot Vargas point-blank with an ogre-sized revolver, spraying wax and blood everywhere, startled himself, and dropped both Vargas and the gun; Vargas fell forty feet. He landed beside Asena (“Where’d this guy come from?”). Lyrus decided firearms were not for him: “I don’t like this.” Circe froze Vargas with “the old nothing personal kid,” and the battered mechas announced, “Critical damage sustained. Returning to base for repairs.” “This is the base. We’re leaving.”

Through the Ethereal

John and his images formed a ring, and “John Prime” poured out a silver ewer that raised a shimmering curtain into the Ethereal Plane. Before stepping through, Lyrus ripped open a portal and dropped the frozen Vargas right in front of the shadow monster. Circe admired the work, looked at the monster, said “Eh, screw it,” and turned it into a chicken, at least for a while. The vampiric kobolds swarmed the deserting mercenary and drained his lifeblood, and whether Vargas survived depended on which wore off first, the ice or the chicken. Drifting through the muffled Ethereal, which felt “more like a blanket,” Asena asked, “Am I in the back rooms?”

Home of the Faithful

They emerged at The Faithful’s hideout, a blacksmith’s forge, where Baptiste was pinning one of the only cushions to the wall with knives. John claimed they had fled immediately, then admitted, “Yeah, no, we killed Ralzamon.” Lyrus took the ewer for The Seer to decide on, explaining that the old man was “like a sharp spoon.” He called Ralzamon’s survival “the enemy of my enemy,” and said Kenny had new intelligence and another band of fighters was coming to help them reach the Grandmaster. The Seer wandered in with his vision clear again. He told Asena that we almost miss the things we chase the longest. “I will miss Ralseypoo,” she said.

Lawrence asked whether Asena had taken anything from Ralzamon. A golden clasp she had torn from his cloak had become a scrap of his khaki collar, and it turned up inside Slakura. With it and a tuning fork attuned to Yord, Lawrence prepared a spell to do what few ever manage: leave the Void. While the Seer slept, John quietly swapped the real ewer for a replica and kept the original. He handed out farewell gifts. Kenny got a ninja disguise. Frank the cook got a vial of acid billed as a spice, which he drank, belched, and pronounced “pretty good.” Baptiste got a vibronic knife “for a very personal stabbing.” “John Carmichael, all of my stabbings are personal,” Baptiste said. “I know,” John whispered. Lyrus repaid him with 400 electrum and wished them a happy retirement before they fell in battle, then began shedding his armor on the floor. Circe left too: “As far away from the Arbiter as possible.” Lawrence’s circle flared purple and black, and Asena felt herself pulled home by her own memories, back to the Crystalline Cavern on Yord. Kenny’s farewell: “I didn’t really like those guys.”

The Ice Throne

Far away, in a twisted echo of the Grand Throne, the Arbiter sat on a throne of ice, white wings draped over its back and eight colored rings on his fingers. He was an ancient being who remembered the reign of the king who ruled before the Grandmaster. He saw a frozen snapshot of the party slipping out of the Void, and among them perhaps one face he had once chosen himself. Before him stood Ralzamon, now merely the man who had faced Asena in the arena. “Once again, you were defeated by her,” said the Arbiter. “She was not alone. This was no duel of honor,” Ralzamon replied. The Arbiter waved it away. Killing him now would be “like stomping on an ant,” and the next phase of his plan had begun. He had one last order: “Gather my champions. For the fight is near.”

Notable Moments

• John absorbed a fireball and fed it to Tiamat.
• Lyrus sliced plasma bolts in half, then discovered the anti-dragon mechs had no defense against a good thunder punch.
• Asena spared Josiah Parsons with three words: “I’ll do that.”
• Circe answered an ancient horror rising from a pit by turning it into a chicken.
• John repaid the Faithful’s hospitality by quietly stealing the real ewer and leaving them a replica.
• Frank drank a vial of acid and enjoyed it.

Memorable Quotes

Lyrus: “Easy, I’m rich. I don’t know if you guys know this. I’m loaded.”

Baptiste: “John Carmichael, all of my stabbings are personal.”

• Circe: “How was the cryogenic freezing experience? I’ll get a full report from you later… I’ll just take tissue samples.”
• John Carmichael: “You’ve become that which you hate, Parson, and I’m going to destroy you. So just lie back, think of Yord, and just know that your spirit will return there soon.”
• Asena: “What do you mean enough? You’re not dead, so it’s not enough.”
• Josiah Parsons: “Things I’ve seen are far worse than anything you might be. Downfall or not, you’ve killed me again.”
• Asena: “I will miss Ralseypoo.”
• The Arbiter: “It would be just kind of sad. Like stomping on an ant.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Lyrus (Mudcat). A member of the Faithful, described by the DM as a “werebear Goliath warrior.”

• Normally about 9–10 ft tall (Large). Circe made him gargantuan, then shrank him back.
• Driven by his father’s legacy and his fight against the Arbiter.
• Gear and powers:
  • Void Swords and green flame blade.
  • Thunder gauntlets (artificer-made).
  • Smites, lay on hands, Vow of Enmity, Stone’s Endurance, guardian armor.
  • Misty step / void step, and Vortex Warp (rips a teleport portal).
• Personality and lore:
  • Rich (“I’m loaded”). Has “a little bit of a temper. I’m working on it.”
  • Scared of heights. Firearms are “not my thing.”
• In this episode:
  • Survives a Hellball and a Soul Tear, and beats down a Bogatyr mecha.
  • Warps the frozen Vargas in front of the shadow monster.
  • Keeps the (replica) ewer for the Seer.
  • Gives John 400 electrum. Says the Faithful aim “to reach the Grandmaster.”

John Carmichael (Matt).

• Warlock/gunslinger whose patron is Tiamat.
• Gear and powers:
  • Spell tattoos. The Infernal Talisman, which carries a corruption risk.
  • The red kiss amulet (Kiss of Corruption).
  • His gun Krontaka, with Warp Spasm and spell bullets.
  • Draconic form, frightful presence, mirror image, Lucky.
• From Earth / Yord (“your last mission on Earth”). Has a loved one, “Carmen,” from Earth. He resisted corruption this episode.
• Kept the real silver ewer and left the Faithful a replica. Gave farewell gifts.

Asena (PodsofWar). A pugilist.

• Was shrunk earlier and restored by the cookie.
• Gear and powers:
  • The Fang of Goltharius, an amulet with astral wings and soul-ripping, which now grants Dimension Door once a day.
  • A laser gun ripped from a giant machine, now drained. Slakura.
• Backstory:
  • As a little girl she was taken to the tomb of Sennepolker, before a hungry ancient dead thing.
  • Her life was changed by the jungle expedition on which Josiah Parsons died.
• She fought Ralzamon in a Deathmatch in the Void and won. She spared him, letting him fall into the pit.

Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown / Josiah Parsons (DM).

• Psychic mastermind from Yord, a former rich expedition man in khaki.
• Believed Asena was an abomination and the downfall of Yord.
• The Arbiter pulled his shade from Yord and fused it with the Void version; the Yord echo is now destroyed.
• The survivor spared himself nothing: he begged to “die alone” out of the Arbiter’s sight. Yet he appears before the Arbiter, defeated, and is sent to gather the Arbiter’s champions.
• In the Void he wears a hood, robes and a green cloak with golden clasps, “a warrior of the Arbiter.”

The Arbiter (Mudcat, stinger only).

• Appearance: glowing white wings, black and white leathers, eight individually colored rings, long hair and beard, 8–9 ft tall.
• Sits on a throne of ice in his own fortress, “a twisted echo of the Grand Throne.”
• Remembers the shadow king’s reign. “The next phase of my plan has begun… the fight is near.”

Circe (Cersei), Master of Magitek (DM).

• Flying boots, and the Ray Gun of Amazing Transformation with many modes: freeze/cold, the stupendous size-changing ray, the Dapper Density Altering Ray (etherealizing, partly disintegrating), and the bodacious beastomorph ray (chicken).
• Wants a report on cryo-freezing and “tissue samples.” Leaves the Void with John and Asena.

Lawrence (DM). Spellcaster ally with grey hair. Opens the gate out of the Void with a tuning fork attuned to Yord, something “he’s never done before.”

Kenny the spy (Mudcat). Gave Lyrus a supreme potion of healing (flashback) and has found new intel. Got a ninja disguise. “I didn’t really like those guys.”

Baptiste (“Stabtiste”) (Mudcat). Knife-thrower who seems to have endless knives. “All of my stabbings are personal.” Got a vibronic knife.

Frank the cook (Mudcat). His food is “slop.” He drank the acid and liked it. He wants a new spoon.

The Seer (Mudcat). Stumbling, sleepy, “sharper than you think.” His vision is clear again. He’ll decide the ewer’s use. Got the hypno gun.

Slakura (chat card). A little bouncing flower slime that smells of flowers, heals once per scene, and keeps turning up “main character status.” It held the khaki collar.

Enemies:

• Aulis the Kindler: fire/sun priest with broken shackles, gunned down by John.
• Scorched Adjudicator Vargas (“Candlejack”): candle-wax head, hand axes, Soul Tear. Shot, frozen, and warped in front of the monster; fate unknown.
• The Draconic Death Knight (dead before the episode).
• Two principality knights of Lacunas in Bogatyr-class mechas (plasma cannons, power swords, Kinetic Guard, jets). Built to fight the blue dragons that hold most of their planet. They fled.
• The mercenary, killed by vampiric kobolds.
• Skeletal minions.
• The thing in the pit: chained beneath the tower, cold and calculating, life-hungry, with long wrong-jointed shadow hands, curled horns and glowing eyes. It broke free and was turned into a chicken (temporarily).

Others named:

• Booker Green, who was to find a way home.
• Hara, guessed for the illusion; not her.
• Gaston, who did laser maintenance.
• Chester, coming along (“half”).
• Darius, who cares about electrum.
• The spoon guy, retired or on vacation.

Places

• The Shadowlands: a Void region with vampiric kobolds.
• The Shadow Keep / Shadow Fortress, with a broken tower over a pit bound by ebony chains.
• The Ethereal Plane: “like a blanket”; reached by the ewer’s curtain.
• The Faithful’s hideout: a blacksmith’s forge with a smith shop and a living room with one good cushion.
• The Arbiter’s fortress and ice throne room.
• Yord, and its Crystalline Cavern. Earth. The world Lacunas. The tomb of Sennepolker. Northport (mentioned out of character).

Items

• The silver ewer (the “pitcher”): pours a curtain into the Ethereal. John took the real one; the Faithful have a replica.
• Asena’s magic cookie. Kenny’s supreme potion of healing.
• The ogre-sized revolver John gave Lyrus, left behind.
• The khaki collar (once a golden clasp).
• Lawrence’s tuning fork.
• The farewell gifts: ninja disguise, vial of acid, vibronic knife, hypno gun, superior healing potion. The 400 electrum.

Lore statements

• The Void is assembled from pieces of other worlds. The Grandmaster holds Deathmatches against the ennui of immortality (DM narration).
• The Arbiter is plotting a coup against the Grandmaster. He pulls beings across dimensions, used Ralzamon as a psychic spy against the Faithful, and has “elite servants.”
• The Arbiter’s power “feeds the bloody chants of the Deathmatches.” He selects champions from all worlds and remembers the reign “when the shadows ruled.”
• Leaving the Void “very few have done without the direct intervention of one of these powerful beings.”
• Things “have a way of finding themselves here.” John suggests that things crossing between life and death may arrive in the Void.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening and recap

1. 0:00:00 The DM welcomes viewers to “Casters and Castles” and “D20 Deathmatch” and introduces the cast. Table talk follows: Mudcat promotes the newly started Skypiercer series, and Matt is excited for “another chance at dispatching Ralzaman, Master of the Somewhat Known.” The DM jokes that the party might never catch him, so it would keep being the final battle with Ralzamon forever.
2. 0:01:52 — Recap (DM narration). John Carmichael and Asena have travelled “beyond time and space to a place only known as the Void, the domain of the Grandmaster and her treacherous servant, the Arbiter.” The Grandmaster holds deathmatches “to bend off the ennui of eons and eons of immortality,” calling people from across the multiverse. The Void is “comprised of all sorts of different parts and pieces… pulled from other worlds across the multiverse.”
3. 0:02:40 In the universe of Yord, John and Asena were about to defeat their nemesis, the psychic mastermind Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown. Then the Arbiter “reached through dimensions and pulled his shade to his fortress.” The Arbiter means to use Ralzamon’s psychic powers to spy on his enemies while he “plots an insidious coup against” the Grandmaster. Ralzamon can read the minds of the Faithful and project across all space and time “within, you know, reason.” The heroes chased him and allied with Lyrus, “a member of the Faithful, a werebear Goliath warrior.”
4. 0:03:18 They tracked Ralzamon to a keep in the Shadowlands. Their ally Circe (Cersei), Master of Magitek, used her shrinking/anti-shrinking ray to make Lyrus huge. The stealth approach failed and a huge battle broke out. Lyrus vanquished a Draconic Death Knight, “one of the Arbiter’s elite servants.” With its dying breath the knight cast Hellball, a massive explosion of infernal flame that drops Lyrus to 0 hit points. Lyrus fails his first death save.

The battle at the Shadow Keep: round one

5. 0:04:25 The explosion has incinerated all the skeletal minions nearby, leaving their bones as “ash and glass, slurry across the floor.” The giant Magitek-enlarged werebear falls, and the whole fortress trembles with the impact.
6. 0:05:17 — Circe freezes Lyrus. She flies over on her magic flying boots and sets her “Ray Gun of Amazing Transformation” to freeze mode. She encases Lyrus in a block of ice, which keeps him stable and gives him 40 temporary hit points. Mudcat: “I just got cryo-froze.”
7. 0:05:50 — Aulis the Kindler. “A muttering priest of fire and the sun” goes after John. John is flying 160 ft up on a flight spell from his spell tattoos, in his draconic form, with three mirror-image “shadow clones.” The priest screams a prayer to “some forgotten sun god” and forms a Fireball between his palms. The DM accidentally asks for a “reflex save,” which becomes a running joke about needing a counter.
8. 0:07:24 — Chat’s disposable item. A Stream Loots card gives the party one disposable item each. Asena wants to stop being small, so she gets a “drink me / eat me” magic cookie of not being small, complete with tag. “You don’t remember when you picked that up.”
9. 0:08:30 — The Infernal Talisman. John grasps the infernal talisman around his neck and chooses to succeed on the save. This forces a save against corruption (“Once you start down the dark path, it will dominate your destiny”). His veins glow scarlet, he barrel-rolls clear with his clones, and the fireball evaporates as John absorbs it, feeding its energy to his patron, Tiamat. The DM: “A sacrifice to the Dragon Queen. I dig it.”
10. 0:09:38 — The mecha knights. Two armored psionic “principality knights” from the world of Lacunas are terrified by John’s dragon fear. They leap off the edge, grid lines of power form exoskeletons around them, and they summon their Bogatyr-class mechas (riffed as Voltron and Power Rangers). From below they fire plasma cannons at John. One volley hits, but a mirror image takes it and one clone is obliterated. One cannon nearly overheats (“just like in Warhammer 40k”).
11. 0:14:22 — John guns down the Kindler. John shouts that the party must head north, where chains hold an entity in place: “that is likely our goal. These minions… a distraction.” He activates Warp Spasm from his gun Krontaka (“the power of the ancient Celtic warriors courses through you”) and sweeps down in an arc. The Kindler is described as a human with messy red hair and beard, no shoes, a green tunic, shackles with broken chains on each wrist, and a raving look. John rolls a natural 20, learns he can double-tap on every attack, and guns him down (“gun, gun, gun, gun!”). He levels off 40 ft up.
12. 0:18:04 — The taunt. John: “Hey, you pathetic bastard. Stop hiding down there. Come out and face us…” He pops his frightful presence again.
13. 0:18:40 — Ralzamon rises. “As if in answer, Ralzamon floats up from beneath.” His physical body glows blue with “unearthly flesh,” surrounded by the enormous visage he manifests in battle. Below, the burning yellow eyes in the depths remain, and so do the chains: “It seems there is something else imprisoned here.”
14. 0:20:28 Ralzamon unleashes three psychic attacks. His body takes “the standard Professor X position” while the spectral apparition reaches out to crush John’s brain. John spends a Lucky die, and “John reflects with his will and attempts to hold off the psychic assault”: two wills locked “in direct battle with ancient Egyptian laser beams.”
15. 0:21:56 — Chat cards. The Legend of Lyrus card gives Lyrus either an extra use of his Stone’s Endurance or a free 30-ft teleport after a melee kill. The Wisdom of the Seer goes to Asena. She rolls an 8, so once this session she can declare that any d20 roll is an 8: “a prophetic vision of the future granted by the Seer.”
16. 0:24:05 — Scorched Adjudicator Vargas. (“What a title… it involves some scorching and some adjudication.”) He is a melee monster with two hand axes and a head “full of candle wax.” He is still afraid of John, so he leaps between towers and Naruto-runs toward Asena.
17. 0:25:44 The last mercenary fires his assault rifle at the block of ice holding Lyrus (“It should be pretty easy to hit”) and readies a randomly rolled grenade, a frag.
18. 0:26:45 — Asena returns to full size. She eats the cookie. She punches a skeleton, which is vulnerable to bludgeoning, and shatters it (“My bones!”).
19. 0:28:16 — Traveler in the Mist. Chat plays Asena’s legendary card. Her amulet, the Fang of Goltharius, glows and silver mist erupts from it. She rips the soul out of one skeleton and flings it at the other. There “wasn’t much left of his friend’s soul,” so it does almost nothing: “the skeleton’s feelings are now hurt.” “It’s very embarrassing. I’m going to punch him now.” Crunch. (Table aside: someone gifted Asena an actual whale at some point.)
20. 0:30:24 — Astral wings and a new power. Asena spreads her astral wings to glide down. She feels the Astral Plane connecting every space, even here, and the Fang unlocks a new power: once a day she can cast Dimension Door from it. “It unlocks more of its powers.” To everyone watching, she jumps off, goes “to light speed,” and reappears beside John high in the air.
21. 0:32:05 — Lyrus refuses to fall. As he burns and loses consciousness, Mudcat narrates: “no, no, there’s more to do! As he thinks about the Arbiter and his father’s legacy, and just this feeling of letting him down.” Chat’s healing boost and his “inner reservoirs of resolve, refusing to fail his father’s legacy” bring him back. The ice shatters and explodes outward, and he rises “nearly dead, but still resolved to go on.”
22. 0:33:42 Lyrus can see his allies over the parapets, confronting the giant visage of Ralzamon. He uses lay on hands on himself, then misty-steps / void-steps and charges “like a linebacker,” bowling over skeletons on the way. Skeleton archers spam him with arrows (“little needle pricks”), and he smashes one against a wall.
23. 0:36:54 — Circe. She flies alongside: “How was the cryogenic freezing experience? I’ll get a full report from you later… I’ll just take tissue samples.” Lyrus: “You got anything to stop all this bleeding?” Circe: “I could freeze you again.” Lyrus: “I don’t see how that would help.”
24. 0:37:36 — Gundam swordplay. One mecha (with “classic Gundam nonsense” power sword) can’t reach him and fires plasma. Lyrus rips out his sword and slices the plasma bolts in half. They hit far behind him on the horizon and explode two skeletons (“what are we even doing out here in the boonies?”). The other mecha has shaken off its fear. Its energy blade misses, and it tries to stomp on Lyrus’s foot. “He literally just… pulls his foot back, like, kind of slowly.”

Round two: the face of a loved one

25. 0:41:07 John puts Tiamat’s Curse on Ralzamon, marking him as Tiamat’s ultimate enemy, and opens fire with Krontaka.
26. 0:41:35 — The illusion. The body at the heart of the ectoplasm is now “someone you haven’t seen since your last mission on Earth. Somebody who once meant the entire world to you.” John guesses Hara; the DM says no, “She’s from Earth.” John recognizes her (out loud: “Oh! Oh!”). He knows Ralzamon has tricks, passes his Wisdom save, and only hesitates on his first shot. In his later speech John calls her “his beloved Carmen.”
27. 0:43:18 Chat plays a Flashback card: anyone can narrate a past moment (“fortunately I planned for this occasion”).
28. 0:44:13 — The astral yeet. John grabs Asena and throws her at Ralzamon, which gives her momentum (advantage). He casts Armor of Agathys on her through the Infernal Talisman, covering her in icy armor. “She’s usually down for a good astral yeeting.”
29. 0:45:00 Ralzamon’s Mind Crush on John destroys his last shadow clone. A second Mind Crush at Asena misses (“He sucks”). Then he tries Empathic Transmission to move his wounds into Asena’s mind and draw strength from her. She burns chat’s inspiration and rolls a natural 20: “you have no empathy for this guy. He’s been nothing but an absolute pain… From day one, he has been a thorn in your side.” His round is “completely bogarted.”
30. 0:47:58 Vargas finally saves against the fear. Since everyone keeps teleporting, he looks around for Asena, “lowers his giant candle jack head for a moment,” and runs back toward Lyrus.
31. 0:48:41 — Slakura, again. Chat plays a Slakura card “for the third time.” The DM: “I can never be with you again. I’m trapped in this other dimension. Just kidding, nerd. Main character status.” A Dimensional Rift card is also played. The mercenary launches his underslung frag grenade at Lyrus (“These giant mechs can take it”).
32. 0:50:52 — Slakura arrives. Asena’s teleport skimmed through dimensions, and Slakura, a little bouncing flower slime, lands on her shoulder. Asena: “Oh, hello.”
33. 0:51:34 — The curse. Flying at Ralzamon, Asena uses a spell tattoo to bestow curse on Josiah Parsons, “the guy at the heart of all this.” His mind is “a mental fortress… the absolute image of sanity and stability, as you can tell by his appearance.” The table burns three inspirations to make it land: two from chat (one specifically “for cursing Ralseypoo”) and Matt’s. Matt narrates: “John is going to shout some really cool bit of… this is how you’re going to go ahead and apply that tattoo. And Asena is probably going to go shut the hell up and then just use it.” The Carmichael curse lands: −1d8 on his attacks and saves. She curses him “directly in the face, right in the teeth” and punches him with “astrally enhanced fist of force energy.”
34. 0:55:07 Chat plays an In the Name of the Moon card: name an enemy’s sins, promise to punish them, and gain a big advantage.
35. 0:55:30 — The rift. Lyrus takes it and rolls a 7: “a small planar rift opens. Just a crack. Dangerous creatures sensing the shift in trans-dimensional energy are drawn to the area.”
36. 0:56:38 — Lyrus’s flashback: Kenny’s potion. At the Faithful’s headquarters, in the smith shop, just before leaving, Lyrus straps on his armor and sharpens his Void Swords. Kenny walks up: “Good luck out there, boss. Sorry I can’t go with you… I’m needed for other stuff.” Kenny slides him a supreme potion of healing. (The DM grumbles that a common card shouldn’t work this well, but allows it.) Back in the fight, Lyrus looks at a “big Gundam MF-er” and says “one second, I’m kind of thirsty.” The potion is “super tiny in his hands” as he chugs it.
37. 0:58:28 — Thunder gauntlets. Lyrus sheathes his swords and slams his fists together; his artificer-made thunder gauntlets spark. He punches the mecha, and its Kinetic Guard force field flickers up. The second punch connects with a smite, “just clocks him in the jaw.” The Bogatyr mechas were designed to fight the blue dragons that have taken over most of their planet, so they are insulated against lightning but not thunder. It’s a “totally anime punch,” with the concussive blast blowing out the back of the mech.
38. 1:01:51 — “Screw the Rules, I Have Money.” Chat’s card lets Lyrus buy an action surge for 500 gold. Lyrus: “Easy, I’m rich. I don’t know if you guys know this. I’m loaded.” He keeps punching. Mudcat to chat: “if you’re rich, you can do whatever you want.” DM: “That’s how the justice system works.”
39. 1:03:06 — Circe vs the mecha. “Fascinating! What an incredible piece of equipment! Click, click! Shrinky mode!” Her stupendous size-changing ray fails against “a giant freaking mecha.” She switches to the Dapper Density Altering Ray and phases the mech into the Ethereal: “Let’s just get you out of the way for now, shall we?” The ethereal mech jets 120 ft straight up to vent its plasma heat and “rain doom.” Lyrus lands one reaction punch as it goes.
40. 1:07:34 The other mech fires again. Lyrus “literally just punches the air” with the thunder gauntlets, and the concussive blast shatters the plasma, splashing it over skeletons.
41. 1:07:58 — Vampiric kobolds. The rift draws in creatures native to the Shadowlands: vampiric kobolds, “horrifying little monstrosities,” crawling up the sides of the fort hungry for blood. “There’s a lot of skeletons, but not a whole lot of blood.” Mudcat: “I knew that was going to come back.” DM: “when you drop something like Vampiric Kobolds, I’m not going to not use that.” (Inferred: Mudcat introduced vampiric kobolds as Shadowlands fauna earlier in the series.)

Round three: in the name of the moon

42. 1:09:01 — John’s speech. “How dare you take the form of a loved one in order to attempt to avail yourself of your ultimate fate. You yourself said that your crimes must be punished, that you must be released… You’ve become that which you hate, Parson, and I’m going to destroy you. So just lie back, think of Yord, and just know that your spirit will return there soon.”
43. 1:10:10 — The Kiss of Corruption. A chat card makes the “red kiss,” the amulet John wears, glow with whispers of “kill, maim, destroy, anger, hatred, vengeance.” Matt thought it was just a flavor name and backs out (“not really down for eating corruption”). John resists the corruption. The Moon speech instead gives Ralzamon disadvantage on his saves this round.
44. 1:12:25 — Magic missile bullets. John reloads and fires four magic missile spell bullets with his last Krontaka use: twelve magic missiles and four bullets from a revolver that is technically empty. His last Lucky turns a natural 1 into a crit.
45. 1:15:58 — Soul Tear. Vargas finally acts. The flames on his candle head run down, and the wax flows out “sickening, bloody… old blood dark” as he tries to eat part of Lyrus’s soul. The DM burns chat’s one inspiration for him (“Chat shined upon me once. I’m using it”). Lyrus takes heavy necrotic and fire damage and his hit point maximum shrinks. He uses the Legend of Lyrus Stone’s Endurance to blunt it.
46. 1:18:17 — The visage shatters. John’s barrage totals 192. “Each bullet passes through that psychic projection with ripples and tears shattering through him like bullets through a windshield… drifting into nothingness.”
47. 1:18:28 — Josiah Parsons. Asena is face to face with the glowing shape of Josiah Parsons, held in a chokehold above the pit. “This is still the version of him that you fought during your deathmatch a while back… That other part of him is gone, torn away by John’s last attack.”
48. 1:19:34 Her first punch is blocked by “his one glowing blue arm.” Slakura bounces around on his head to flank. The second punch lands.
49. 1:20:49 — “Asena, enough.” As she raises her fist again she sees “the man from the photograph. Not Ralzamon, Master of the Unknown, simply Josiah Parsons, the man on that ill-fated expedition to the jungle that changed your life forever all those years ago and took his.”
    • Josiah: “Asena, enough.” Asena: “What do you mean enough? You’re not dead, so it’s not enough.”
    • “If you kill me, he’ll look for you.” “Who?” “The one who binds me. The one who pulled me here.”
    • He begs: “you and John are fighting the same fight that I’ve been… You’re trying to protect my world, Yord… Let me do one last thing for my world and die alone and leave it out of his sight.”
50. 1:23:01 — Insight. Asena rolls a 21. “The man hanging by the neck is broken. Defeated… the persona he made for himself… has died. This is a man who gave everything that he had to fight you because he believed that you were an abomination… You don’t sense anything except the bottomless pit and an echoing hollow truth in his words.”
51. 1:24:24 Asena: “So you don’t think I’m the downfall of Yord anymore?” Josiah: “Things I’ve seen are far worse than anything you might be. Downfall or not, you’ve killed me again. This is the last thing that I can do for my home.”
52. 1:24:56 — The drop. “I don’t really get it, but… If I let him go, is he gonna fall in the pit?” “Oh yeah.” “I’ll do that.” As he leaves her hand, his expedition clothes and normal flesh transform back into the hood, robes and ornate garments he wears in the Void “as a warrior of the Arbiter,” and the pale blue glow returns. “There were two Ralzamons combined into one before. One of them has died, and the other will die here, alone.”

After the break: what’s in the pit

53. 1:26:00 The break is announced and cut. Table talk on return covers Matt’s suit (“dressed for a funeral”) and the DM’s college black-outfit “whose funeral” story, which he admits didn’t actually happen.
54. 1:27:41 — Recap. Ralzamon was “torn from the world of Yord by the will of the Arbiter, fused with a version, an echo of that same man into one being.” The Arbiter’s secret weapon against the Faithful is shattered. If the Arbiter’s weapon dies, “his attention may drift towards them. And the multiverse can ill afford its heroes to deal with such a power… the ancient evil of the Arbiter himself.”
55. 1:29:21 The Shadow Keep shakes. “Great dark ebony black chains all latched into the base of this tower where something barely restrained by Ralzamon’s psychic might now awakens.” Vampiric kobolds climb those same chains.
56. 1:30:35 — Asena looks down. “Those eyes look back at you.” She feels herself pulled inward and her life essence flows out. She has a flashback: “the little girl in the tomb of Sennepolker, being brought before something terrible, something rotten and ancient and dead, something wailing in hunger for that flame of life that beat within your chest.” What lies below is “of the same kin, the same hunger, but not a wailing, screaming child. Something cold, something calculating, something whose bonds are breaking.”
57. 1:31:57 Asena: “you probably shouldn’t look down there unless you want to go down there.” John: “We’ve accomplished our goal. I think we better go help Lyrus and get the hell out of here.” Asena to Lyrus: “I’m coming to punch things for you.” John: “Lyrus, we defeated Ralzamon. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
58. 1:34:41 Lyrus swears a Vow of Enmity on the undamaged mech and rushes it with his swords. Green flame blade and smites carve into it.
59. 1:37:45 — Exit plan. John asks Circe to “create a path.” She starts shrinking Lyrus to “transport size” (he chooses to fail the save) so she can fly him out. She hits the second mech with the etherealizing ray at “50” to hit. “Not all of your molecules make the transition.” The mech is critically damaged, sparking, parts falling off.
60. 1:39:36 Lyrus: “I don’t know about flying. I’m kind of scared of heights.” Circe: “Exposure therapy tends to be the best approach.”
61. 1:40:39 One mech shakes off its fear. Both phase back into reality and vent their cannons. John recasts mirror image.
62. 1:42:23 — Close Quarters. A chat card has Vargas rush Lyrus and end up grappled, scooped into Lyrus’s arm (“oh, hello, there he is”), “stuck in his armpit.” His axes miss.
63. 1:43:18 — The thing in the pit rises. “One enormous shadowy hand, far too long, the joint bends in the wrong direction,” grips the top of the tower. The other hand lazily follows, and it pushes itself up: “good upper body strength”. It has “a pair of curled horns, this wispy, almost ephemeral body, and those glowing eyes,” emerging from the Shadow Keep.
64. 1:44:04 — The mercenary deserts. “I just work here, like tactically speaking, this is suboptimal. The creature is loose. So I’m gonna recommend a tactical withdrawal, team.” He whistles and gestures to the skeletons, who “just stare at him and raise their scimitars.”
65. 1:44:52 Asena: “I would not like to be close to the monster.” She runs, using pugilist wall-running. “Anyone know where we’re going?” John remembers the pitcher (the ewer) that will take them back.
66. 1:46:20 — Slakura is thrown. Slakura notices Lyrus’s wounds. Asena throws Slakura at Lyrus, and it splats “somewhere on your lower midsection” and heals him. The music gets a compliment (“music slaps”).
67. 1:47:20 — The laser gun goes off. Asena has a laser gun she “ripped off of a gigantic machine.” She thinks the switch is on auto. Chat’s Over 9,000 card makes the laser “incredibly unusually powerful.” “Something must’ve gone wrong with it… Gaston hasn’t been around to do maintenance on it.” It dumps its entire fusion core: rapid fire in a wide cone, the side of the keep explodes, three skeletons slide off, and the tower collapses on the mecha. The mech takes a massive hit and is left smoking. The laser “is gonna need a new power supply.” (Inferred: Asena flipped the switch too far while trying to change modes; the DM narrates it that way at 1:51:28.)
68. 1:52:30 — Lyrus and the gun. Lyrus pulls out the giant ogre-sized revolver John gave him and rolls a natural 1 trying to headlock Vargas. He does it anyway and fires point blank: “Wax and blood splatter everywhere.” The blast startles him, and he drops both Vargas and the gun. Vargas falls 40 ft and lands prone next to Asena. Asena: “Where’d this guy come from?” DM: “Special delivery.” Lyrus: “I don’t like this,” and tosses the gun on the ground. He’s “not really used to the firearms.” He uses his guardian armor for a few temporary hit points.
69. 1:56:19 Two overzealous skeleton archers fall off the parapets into shattered bones, and it “rain[s] bones” around Asena.
70. 1:57:09 Circe shrinks Lyrus back to normal Large size (“like 10 feet tall… like 9 feet tall”). She then walks up to the fallen Vargas, gives him “the old nothing personal kid,” and freezes him in a block of ice. “He was supposed to be so cool and scary, and he’s just getting smoked right now.”
71. 1:57:49 The skeletons attack the mercenary for his desertion after “he uttered a single swear word.”
72. 1:58:45 — The mecha knights flee. “Critical damage sustained. Returning to base for repairs.” “This is the base. We’re leaving.” They fire plasma at the escaping creature (it resists) and fly off. “Dip, dip, potato chip.” “Bring us with you.” “No, we’re fine. We’re leaving.” (Speakers uncertain.)

The escape

73. 2:00:12 — The ewer ritual. John lands in the middle of the group, with the “frozen block of candlejack” nearby. Four Johns (he and his images) take positions as “John Prime” brings out the silver ewer and pours it out “like an old ritual.” Fog spreads over the stones and rises into a shimmering curtain into the Ethereal. (Fun fact from the DM: the etherealized mechs could have walked back through it.) John holds his turn: “I’m the one holding the Ewer, so I’ll be the last one in.”
74. 2:01:37 — The mercenary’s end. He fights off skeletons until “something crawls up behind him. Small, reptilian, and befanged”. Vampiric kobolds leap on him and drain his lifeblood.
75. 2:02:33 — The Ethereal. Asena steps through. It feels like a quiet room with “really good sound dampeners,” with no fresh, cold clarity like the Astral Sea: “This is more like a blanket.” She can float through things. Asena: “Am I in the back rooms?” DM: “Yeah, basically.”
76. 2:03:44 — Lyrus’s parting gift. Before ducking through, Lyrus slashes the ice block containing Vargas and casts Vortex Warp: he rips a portal and teleports the frozen Vargas 120 ft, right in front of the shadow monster. Matt: “thug life music just starts playing.”
77. 2:04:50 The skeletons scramble toward the portal but are too slow.
78. 2:05:10 — The chicken. Circe: “that was good work. That was nice. Good job. Well done.” She looks at the giant shadow monster (“Eh, screw it”) and fires her bodacious beastomorph ray. She turns the monster into a chicken, temporarily, then flies through the portal. John’s reaction: “Okay, yeah, that was pretty good.” The fleeing mechas don’t notice the chickenification.
79. 2:06:34 John throws his disposable item, a flashbang, at his feet as he steps through.
80. 2:06:45 They float through the Shadow Fortress in the Ethereal while more vampiric kobolds swarm the chains. The only living thing left is the mercenary, “so they’re gonna have to share.” Whether Vargas (Candlejack) survives depends on whether the ice melts or the chicken wears off: “We’ll see.”
81. 2:07:34 John wants to return to the Faithful (“the Freedom Fighters location”), hoping Booker Green has found a way to send them home. Asena: “Booker told me something and I forgot what we were supposed to do and we’re not supposed to do.” The ethereal journey takes hours or a day, avoiding “things that lurk on the other side of the veil.” They pour the ewer again to exit.
82. 2:09:09 — The spoon guy. Should they visit “the spoon guy”? He “retired and moved.” “Son of spoon guy.” “Spooning leads to forking. Maybe there’s a fork guy now.” “Must be knife.”

At the hideout of the Faithful

83. 2:09:31 The party emerges in the living room of the hideout (a blacksmith’s forge). Baptiste (“Stabtiste”) has pinned “one of the only cushions” to the wall with a knife and is using it for target practice. Baptiste: “Welcome back… I assume you were successful in your endeavors.” He keeps throwing knives over his shoulder without looking, “too many knives that a person could have on their body.” (Table: they come from the production budget; Bullseye comparison.)
84. 2:10:22 John deadpans that they fled and Ralzamon will ruin everything, then: “Yeah, no, we killed Ralzamon.” Baptiste: “I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.”
85. 2:11:20 — The ewer handed over. John sets the ewer before Lyrus “to get an edge on the remaining forces of the Arbiter.” Lyrus: “I think the important thing is the Arbiter doesn’t have it. I’ll probably let the Seer decide what to do with it.” John: “terrifying… that delightfully insightful and senile old being.” Lyrus: “He’s sharper than you think he is… he likes to pretend he’s decrepit. He’s like a sharp spoon.” Lyrus adds that Frank was looking for a new spoon and asks whether anyone has seen the spoon guy. “I think that they were going on vacation.”
86. 2:13:07 — The report. Asena: “we killed half of Ralzamon… I just let him fall into the pit with that shadowy thing.” Lyrus: “So he’s still alive, huh?” John explains that Ralzamon resigned himself to his fate and understood they were trying to help his homeworld. John believes he will work “somewhat as a double agent… against the Arbiter,” fouling the Arbiter’s operations and keeping his gaze off Yord. Lyrus: “Well, the enemy of my enemy, I guess.… I’ll trust your judgment on this.”
87. 2:15:04 — Time weirdness. John: in Asena’s dreams “she defeats this version of Ralzamon at some point, but it’s already happened… that’s not supposed to happen, but it has or it will.” He’s confident this version and Josiah Parsons are “done fighting.” “Oh well, we’re all dying, it’s just a matter of how quickly.”
88. 2:16:02 Lyrus: “we’ve dealt the Arbiter a significant blow, both with the Ewer and with the demoralizing of your enemy.” John praises everyone, Circe included. John: “you kind of almost died, Lyrus… until you erupted in bestial fury.” Lyrus: “I have a little bit of a temper. I’m working on it.” John: “hold on to that. It kept you alive.”
89. 2:16:59 — The Faithful’s next moves. Lyrus: “Kenny’s found some new information. I have another band of fighters, a very skilled group, coming in. They should be returning any day now… seeing if we can’t make some headway in our fight to reach the Grandmaster.”
90. 2:17:50 Someone (speaker uncertain, voiced by the DM): “We have as much time as we have until the world born dead descends upon us and the other evils.” Asena: “That sounds like we don’t have any time, but we also have all the time.” John: “no rest for the weary… please go ahead and share a drink in our name.” Lyrus: “I think we’ll have several tonight.”
91. 2:18:41 — The Seer. He stumbles in, bumping into a table, then turns decidedly to Asena and John: “My vision, it’s become clear again. I can see the two of you have defeated a mighty foe. How does it feel?” John is “growing kind of numb to the sensation.” The Seer: “this foe was significant, especially to you, Asena.” Asena: “it feels a little anticlimactic.” Seer: “It’s the things that we’re chasing for the longest. Once they’re gone, we almost miss them.” Asena: “I will miss Ralseypoo.” Seer: “I’m sure somewhere out there he misses you too.” To John: “I may or may not have been wrong about your weapon. I can see now it served you well.” He wanders off to sleep. John: “I still don’t know if I like him or not.” Asena: “I like him.”
92. 2:20:59 — The collar. Lawrence asks whether Asena took anything off Ralzamon. When she dropped him, she tore off one of the two golden clasps on his flowing green cloak. In her hand it turned into the torn collar of a khaki shirt from his expedition clothes, “the normal outfit for a rich old dude off doing tourism, trying to usher in a new world for humanity.” It turns up inside Slakura. Asena: “Slakura, what do you have there?” Lawrence picks it up gingerly; it smells like flowers, as Slakura always does.
93. 2:22:35 — The ewer swap. Matt asks out of character whether Mudcat has plans for the ewer. The DM says it was a MacGuffin he made up with “no destiny.” John then swaps the real ewer for “the fake one that they made, the exact replica”. He hands the replica to Lyrus while the Seer sleeps and keeps the real one in his “case of carrying.” DM: “I hate you so much. I’m not going to stop you… I’m putting limitations on that thing.”
94. 2:24:26 — Lawrence’s spell. Using the collar’s emotional connection to Asena and Josiah Parsons, and a tuning fork attuned to Yord, Lawrence builds a spell matrix to do “something he’s never done before”: leave the Void. “Things do have a way of finding themselves here, as you well know,” Lyrus says. John worries that things “crossing from the threshold of life to death have a chance of finding their way here.” Lyrus: “The chaos is hard to predict here… After we’ve dealt with the Arbiter… we’ll have all the time in the world to deal with your cleanup,” with a wink. (Inferred: Lyrus means that dead things can arrive in the Void.)
95. 2:26:38 — John’s farewell gifts (“flotsam and jetsam,” Wizard of Oz style):
    • Kenny the spy: a ninja disguise. “The shadows will be his friends as long as he keeps this disguise nearby.” Kenny: “Got a lot of plans for this. Gonna get me to some tight places and maybe out of some too.”
    • Frank the cook: a vial of acid, presented as “a special spice… Use it wisely,” since it “can’t be any worse than the slop that he peddles.” Frank drinks it, belches, and says “It’s pretty good.”
    • Baptiste: a vibronic knife from Lacunas. “Don’t just throw this at anybody. This is going to be for a very personal stabbing.” Baptiste walks up very close: “John Carmichael, all of my stabbings are personal.” John leans in and whispers: “I know.” (“A love story for the ages.” Earlier: “Jon shares a stabbing with Baptiste, for sure, before they leave.”)
    • The sleeping Seer: the hypno gun (a motor-spun swirly disc that “works because of weird science,” with theremin noises), with a note: “if ever you need to get someone’s attention for your lovely stories, this will be a way that you can keep them entranced.”
    • Lyrus: a superior potion of healing. “firearms aren’t really your thing… you tend to take quite a bit of damage.” Lyrus: “It had a kind of messy… Really loud. Not my thing.”
96. 2:31:58 — Lyrus’s gift. Lyrus pats down his coat: “we have everything we need here,” and hands John 400 electrum. “The greatest currency!” John takes it gladly (“John doesn’t care about Electrum like Darius does”) and shakes Lyrus’s “enormous paw.” “Your friendship was quite enough and you’ve given us far more than you realize.”
97. 2:33:03 Lyrus: “I wish you all the success in your endeavors and maybe someday a happy retirement before you fall on the field of battle.” John: “if it turns out that we shuffle this mortal coil there’s a chance we might see you again… take care, friend.” Lyrus, hot in werebear form, starts pulling off his armor and dropping it on the floor unceremoniously as they leave.
98. 2:33:48 — Circe leaves too. “I’m leaving immediately. First lightning rail… As far away from the Arbiter as possible. Something eradicating every last molecule of your soul.” John: “Lawrence, a table for four and a half, please.” “Half?” “Well, Chester’s coming too.”
99. 2:34:15 — The gate. Lawrence’s teleportation circle flashes between normal blue air runes and “this weird purple and black as it reaches through the void.” His eyes glow and his grey hair floats upward “as he holds two realities in tension in the eye of the paradox.” “Now.”
100. 2:35:09 — Home. Asena’s connection to the Astral Sea feels unfamiliar this far away. Instead of being “forcibly dragged along in the wake of the Arbiter’s terrible hand,” she is “pulled back by your own memories.” They hurtle from the Void “back to Yord, back to the heart of the Crystalline Cavern where Ralzamon’s psyche was stored moments before you defeated him. Perhaps at long last, you’ll never have to fight him again.”
101. 2:36:30 — Kenny’s parting line. As they fade: “I didn’t really like those guys.”

Stinger: the Arbiter’s throne (chat card “We’re Being Watched”)

102. 2:36:44 “In a fortress far from here, in a throne room, a twisted echo of the Grand Throne where the Grandmaster holds court over the Deathmatches.” Mudcat describes the Arbiter: “a very large individual with glowing white wings, dressed in all black and white leathers, sits upon this throne made of ice… eight individually colored rings on his fingers… his long hair and beard,” wings resting over the back of the throne “very blood eagle-like.”
103. 2:38:01 — The DM’s narration of the Arbiter. “This ancient being, this man who remembers the reign of the king before the Grandmaster when the shadows ruled, whose power over the void and ability to reach across time and space feeds the bloody chants of the Deathmatches themselves, who’s responsible for selecting champions from across all worlds for the Grandmaster’s games.”
104. At the moment Lawrence reconnects the two worlds, which “very few have done without the direct intervention of one of these powerful beings,” the Arbiter sees a freeze-frame snapshot of the departing party: unfamiliar faces, “except perhaps for one… that he himself has selected in the past” (inferred: Asena, his former champion).
105. Ralzamon stands before him, his psychic power still around him “but the vast echo that was pulled from beyond, gone. Merely himself, merely the man who stood in the arena against Asena, who was drawn away after her victory.”
106. 2:39:37 Arbiter: “once again, you were defeated by her.” Ralzamon: “She was not alone. This was no duel of honor.” Arbiter (waving the vision away): “Honor doesn’t exist… It doesn’t even matter at this point. I could kill you now, sure. But the next phase of my plan has begun. You’ve served your purpose. And at this point, it would be just kind of sad. Like stomping on an ant.”
107. 2:40:40 “If there is poison in his words… it is mere dregs… bloodied and muddied out by defeat after defeat after defeat.”