S4E2 — Under the Bottom — Richardo v Evah

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Two barbarians were pulled into an old pirate cove on the open sea: Richardo “Over the Top” Johnson, an arm wrestler who thought he had come to an arm-wrestling match, and Evah, a woman who let her glaive do the talking. The fight had a blood fountain, a squadron of grandmothers, a table worn as a tutu and a mother crowd-surfing to her son’s aid. It also showed what a Deathmatch looks like when The Shadow King is the one keeping score.

The Story

A Stranger in Her Own Home

The Grandmaster walked the halls of The Dread Fortress like “almost an alien, a stranger in her own home.” She dragged her feet into the throne room, where the Shadow King lounged “in a throne that should not be his.” He was using the skull of Kaja as a hand puppet.

The Shadow King: “Oh, hello, Elusia! It’s me, Kaja!”

The Grandmaster answered that playing with her dead friends was “real funny.” He asked whether she was being sarcastic, because he couldn’t tell. The throne room had become disgusting. The goblins were afraid of it, and only a few dared go in to bring the King drinks and the grapes he gobbled down like a pig. The Grandmaster told them: “Please poison his drink any chance that you get.” She called him “uncle” and stomped about like an upset thirteen-year-old, kicking up the rug.

She had found two champions, “since it seems we can’t avoid it.” The Shadow King insisted that this was their Deathmatch and that they were doing it together. “This is not a bonding experience,” she snapped. “I’m not bonding over murdering people with you.” She promised to prove that in his “dearly missed absence,” The Void had grown stronger. Then she crushed an amulet in her fist. Each time she opened a way through the Void, it cost her a little of her own blood, and it ran down her arm as two large barbarians stepped through.

Over the Top

Richardo made his entrance by threatening management. “Mr. Sir up there, I’m gonna take your crown very soon.” The Shadow King was mostly stuck on the name. “Your name is Dick Johnson? This is the guy you brought here?” Richardo said he went by Richardo, because “we’re not in middle school anymore.” He added a warning: he’d be surprised to reach his final form tonight, “but if I do, you better watch out.”

Evah gave a shorter speech. “I don’t talk. My actions do the talking for me.” The Shadow King loved it. The Grandmaster checked that Evah talked at all (she did, “on occasion”) and reminded both champions that they would be fighting each other, not her. Richardo asked, “What’s charade?” The Grandmaster admitted she “maybe didn’t prep them a lot,” and the Shadow King wondered aloud how the empire was still standing.

She opened a second hole in the Void, and blood ran down her other arm too. The champions found themselves on rickety boards far out on the cool sea, with fish diving beneath them and a treasure map spread on a table in the middle. It was “perhaps a pirate’s cove once used many, many years ago.” “Break all their bones,” the Grandmaster ordered, “but more important than that is to break their spirit.” The Acolytes cheered from the sky with popcorn and blue raspberry slushies. The Shadow King took a gold throne piled with cushion upon cushion, for “he has a very sensitive ass. Or he is a sensitive ass. We have yet to determine.”

Richardo moved first, and he asked where the padded table was, and the strap. He arm wrestled. Evah thought this was a joke and called the whole place a dishonour to “the art of the fight.” The Grandmaster told Richardo to think of it as “unregulated on the streets arm wrestling.” Street rules meant playing for gold, so the Shadow King rose, and gold fountained out of the torchlit shadows onto the table. “Happy now?”

The X Marks the Spot

Evah tensed until her face went red and roared that she was going to crush him. Richardo went from dim to dead serious. He flipped his helmet backwards to “make it special,” flew into his own rage, and found he could see nothing but darkness. He tilted the helmet up enough to see feet, wandered in a circle and ended up facing the wrong way.

Then he leapt off the table, “comin’ top rope.” He hammer-fisted Evah in the throat (“a slap across the throat for tradition”) and followed with a punch to her rock-solid abs. His war cry was “brush your teeth.” Evah saw through it, but he still out-stared her, and she spat on the floor. Richardo decided the floor smelled fine and that the spit “fuels him.” Evah let it be known that she brushes “every day. And every night.”

Her answer came with the glaive. After a flourish of swirls and spins, she slashed across his chest, crossed it with a second cut to form an X (“marks the spot because we’re in a pirate cove”), and stabbed into the centre. “This is how you play the game.” Richardo admired his bleeding scars and decided, “I think this will get me some ladies.”

Harvey and the Grandmothers

The Shadow King tried to summon chaos and rolled badly. The Grandmaster told him he sucked at this, so he took it out on the crowd. A giant shadow hand plucked an Acolyte named Harvey from the stands and crushed him, spilling his bones and blood over the Acolytes, and his blood ran like a waterfall onto the boards. The Grandmaster allowed that he’d deserved it, since they were going to sacrifice him anyway. After a stunned pause, the Acolytes applauded like mad.

When the Shadow King tried to skip ahead, the Grandmaster lost patience. “This is why you shouldn’t run Deathmatches. God, I wish The Arbiter was back here.” She called the chaos herself: “Acolytes, if you would be ever so kind to once again throw us your grandmothers.” Down came five of them: Meemaws, Grandma Dorothy, Tootsies, Diane (curly hair, tight-knit sweater, pearl pendant) and G-Ma. Each was ready to hand out a cookie or a slap with her purse to any fighter nearby. The grannies were especially taken with Richardo’s sexy new scars.

Richardo heard the crowd cheering for blood and gave them some. He flexed his chest so his wounds sprayed into the first two rows, who drank it up. “This is the blood of what will soon become a god,” he announced. “This is going to lead to blood poncho sales,” said the Shadow King. Richardo drew a one-handed axe that “looks like it should be two” and mocked Evah’s “giant skinny pole,” prompting the Grandmaster’s ruling: “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with a skinny pole.” His glancing swings only exfoliated Evah, who mused that she might cancel her dermaplaning appointment.

She tried to knock the axe from his golden right arm, but his grip held. Then an Acolyte named Zeus screamed, “Kick him in the nards!” Asked where he kept them, Richardo said “back home with the wife,” or in his back pocket “only on Fridays.” It emerged that he had four. Evah told the Shadow King, “You, pretty boy. Shush,” and landed a blow that did one point of nard damage per nard.

The Box of Chaos

A Box of Chaos hurtled down like a comet onto the treasure-map table. “Well, the last soul dried up pretty quickly,” the Shadow King said, “so let’s see if we can find a stronger one.” A shadow hand seized an Acolyte called Commodore Scrib, ripped out his black, yellow-eyed soul and slammed it into the box, and pink and purple flames shot skyward.

Evah wanted none of it. “Nice parlor trick. I didn’t know this was a magic show… I don’t give a damn about your little toy box.” Richardo cheered her on, then took the prize anyway. The box shook, spat fire and produced a gleaming holy sword, which hovered before him. “Did you just turn that man into a sword?” he asked. “No,” the Shadow King corrected, “I actually turned that man into a soul in a box, and then that box pulled a sword out.”

Final Form

Evah promised to send his mother a sympathy card, perhaps take her on a date. Richardo grabbed her hand for a proper arm-wrestle and lost, and she simply pushed him off. So he revealed that it had all been a ruse. He crushed a black orb in his hand, and his body turned to living shadow. Wings sprouted from his back, and his bright sword blazed in the middle of the silhouette. “Being a fallen Aasimar, I’ve done things that you cannot ever imagine.”

Terror swept the cove. Every grandmother quailed, and Grandma Dorothy was so frightened that she pooped herself. The stench poisoned both champions. Evah was left afraid of him. Richardo still missed with the holy sword. One grandmother cooed over his bleeding pectorals and healed him, and Dorothy hit him in the back of the head with her purse. His attempt to gore Evah with his helmet spike failed because the helmet was backwards and sliding down his sweaty head. The scream that followed was muffled.

Evah skated across her own saliva and tried to carve a smiley face into him. Her fear spoiled her aim, so she only managed one eye beneath the X. She charmed G-Ma into helping, but the 96-year-old drained her own life to heal Evah a single point and shrank from four feet to three. “Granny, no.”

The Tables Turn

“What’s the point of being in a pirate cove if there’s not going to be any pirate fun?” With a snap, the Shadow King filled the water with shadow ships that bombarded the cove. Planks shattered, and both champions were hurled into the middle beside the table.

The Grandmaster had had enough. “Enough of this! I want to see movement! I want to see action!” She stripped both of their rage and told them to dig deeper, and the Acolytes granted each a second chance. Evah spent hers at once. She flipped the table and smashed it down around Richardo, so that he wore it like a tutu of nine or ten planks. “Are you entertained now?” “Mildly,” said the King. “I wasn’t asking you.” Her next glaive strike pleased the Grandmaster, who rewarded her: the glaive could now be split in two.

Richardo hugged himself to heal and gave his arm a pep talk, recalling the truck stop where a Slim Jim cost 250 and he had 249, so he threw the shopkeep. He charged with the table and missed (“Oh, the tables have turned”), then yelled into the sky like an angry child: “MAMA!” His mother, Juanita, answered from the stands: “Go get her, my son!” The Acolytes lifted her up until she was crowd-surfing. His second charge smashed the table to pieces, and Juanita hurled the planks at Evah in a masked tag-team. Richardo tried a bear hug, but Evah slipped free so perfectly that she was declared “ungrappable.”

Breaking the Fear

Evah still feared him, so she talked herself through it: “You killed them. You killed them all. You killed your ex. You killed her sister. You killed your sister’s ex-husband. You can kill this guy.” The Grandmaster reminded her of the man who refused her ice cream, and Evah remembered making ice cream from his innards. Richardo was baffled: “Are you crying? Are you mad? Are you stressed? Is ice cream gonna help this problem?” She demanded a slushie. An Acolyte named Vegeta threw down four, three of them stolen from his neighbours. Evah scooped one up and sipped it.

Evah: “I’m gonna put your brains in this thing. And then I’m going to drink them.”

“I like the way she fights, this is getting great,” said the Shadow King. Now Richardo was the frightened one, shaking in his off-brand “Lug” beach sandals. He told her she was in for a trick: he didn’t have any brains to drink. When the turn order got muddled, the Shadow King declared, “Don’t give a shit… Fuck all of you. I don’t care.” “This is why you don’t get to be in charge,” the Grandmaster said. Then his holy sword finally connected, light and dark smashing together, though Evah turned some of the blow aside. He followed with big swings and a shoulder-and-spike hit.

The Final Blow

Evah swore to chop him up, cook him and use his helmet for popcorn. Her glaive landed, and Richardo went down. She knelt beside him. “Shouldn’t have come here… She’s not coming to save you. Are you ready?” Richardo asked for five more minutes, because he was tired and didn’t want to go to school. She stabbed him through the chest and lifted him high on her glaive while Juanita wept in the crowd. “This is how you fight. No cheap tricks. No little magic boxes.” She picked a slushie off the floor and knocked it back.

Then the King stepped in. He appeared before her in a burst of shadow. His arm became a blade that sliced up through her cup, her mouth and her head, and he lifted her by the face. “Well, your tongue won’t be doing any more wagging, will it?” He slammed her to the ground and bid the Acolytes goodnight.

Dried Blood

Richardo’s player was inspired by the anime-style X scar Evah gave him, which is why he went “straight to anime spray” and aimed his chest at as many Acolytes as possible. Evah’s player said her favourite moment was finally breaking the fear. She had prepared for charm, not fear, and she felt “required” to make the table pun with the wooden tutu. Richardo was built on the 1987 arm-wrestling film Over the Top, in which flipping the hat flips a switch into berserk mode. Here it became a barbarian who flips his helmet and is “stupid enough to where he cannot see.” Evah’s contempt for the people in charge was modelled on the wrestling faction the Imperium. Her player expected to die, but not to be “insta-KO’d by the Shadow King himself.” The table noted the difference between rulers: under the Grandmaster, even the people who die get to come back, and the Shadow King “just has zero of that.” The mouth-piercing kill was inspired by the liquid Terminator in Terminator 2. Evah’s last word: “I let my actions do the talking for me.”

Notable Moments

• The Shadow King opened the show using Kaja’s skull as a hand puppet.
• Richardo flipped his helmet backwards to rage, then couldn’t see and ended up facing the wrong way.
• An Acolyte named Commodore Scrib had his soul fed to the Box of Chaos, which produced a holy sword.
• Grandma Dorothy pooped herself out of terror at Richardo’s shadowy final form, poisoning both fighters with the smell.
• Evah smashed the table around Richardo like a tutu, and his mother Juanita crowd-surfed in to help him.
• Evah won, and the Shadow King killed her moments later with a blade through the mouth.

Memorable Quotes

• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “This is not a bonding experience, I’m not bonding over murdering people with you.”
• Evah: “I don’t talk. My actions do the talking for me.”
• Richardo: “This is the blood of what will soon become a god.”
• The Shadow King: “This is going to lead to blood poncho sales.”
• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “This is why you shouldn’t run Deathmatches. God, I wish the Arbiter was back here.”
• The Shadow King: “No, I actually turned that man into a soul in a box, and then that box pulled a sword out.”
• Richardo: “Are you crying? Are you mad? Are you stressed? Is ice cream gonna help this problem? Or are you trying to kill me?”
• Evah: “This is how you fight. No cheap tricks. No little magic boxes.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Richardo “Over the Top” Johnson (Danotage)

• Who he is:
  • A fallen Aasimar barbarian, about 6’2”.
  • An arm wrestler who arrived thinking the deathmatch was an arm-wrestling match.
  • The Shadow King calls him “Dick Johnson.”
• Fighting style and gear:
  • Flips his helmet backwards to rage, and then can’t see. The helmet has a spike.
  • Fights with fists and a one-handed axe that “should be two.”
  • Received a Holy Avenger (+3, radiant) from the Box of Chaos.
  • His “golden arm” is his right arm.
  • His “final form” is the necrotic shroud: shadowy body, sprouted wings, frightening aura. Also uses healing hands.
• Family:
  • Has a wife “back home.”
  • His mother Juanita is in the stands. She throws planks “with her strong wrestling arm” and wears a mask. Inferred: she taught him arm wrestling, from “You wanna know who taught me the arm wrestling? Good luck” (0:57:19), which he says in reply to the jokes about his mother.
• Personality and lore:
  • Has four nards, kept in his back pocket “only on Fridays.”
  • The truck-stop Slim Jim story: 249 of 250 copper, so he threw the shopkeep.
  • Wears off-brand “Lug” sandals.
  • Wants the Shadow King’s crown.
  • Carved with an X scar and one “eye.”
• Fate: Killed by Evah, impaled on her glaive.

[[Characters/Evah|Evah (Gro’Murgosh [?])]] (imkattkatt)

• Who she is: A barbarian who rages and uses battle-master maneuvers (disarm, parry, grappling strike).
• Gear:
  • A glaive (polearm master), which Elusia gifted the ability to split in two.
  • Smashed a table into a tutu around Richardo.
• Personality:
  • Taciturn: “my actions do the talking.” Rarely talks.
  • Despises the Shadow King and his tricks: “the art of the fight.”
  • Brushes her teeth morning and night, and has a large spit capacity.
  • Had a dermaplaning appointment.
• Past: Killed her ex, her ex’s sister and her sister’s ex-husband. Made ice cream out of the innards of a man who refused her ice cream (Caustic Phoenix’s prompt, which Evah confirmed).
• Fate: Killed by the Shadow King right after her victory, with a shadow blade through the mouth and head.

The Shadow King (Mudcat)

• Sits on Elusia’s throne and is called “uncle” by her. Plays with Kaja’s skull as a puppet.
• New to running deathmatches: skips chaos events and loses track of turns.
• Crushes the Acolyte Harvey with a shadow hand.
• Feeds Commodore Scrib’s soul to the Box of Chaos. Makes gold fountain out of shadows.
• Summons a shadow fleet that bombards the arena.
• Kills the winner, Evah. He likes her fighting at first.
• His throne cushions point to a “sensitive ass.”

Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer (Caustic Phoenix)

• A captive “stranger in her own home.” Hates the Shadow King and wants the goblins to poison him.
• Opens void holes with an amulet at the cost of her own blood.
• Claims the Void grew stronger in his absence. “Wishes the Arbiter was back.”
• Strips both champions’ rage and grants hero points.

Kaja: dead; her skull is the Shadow King’s puppet. Elusia calls her “my dead friend” (plural “friends”).

Acolytes named:

• Harvey: crushed.
• Commodore Scrib: soul taken for the Box.
• Zeus: “kick him in the nards.”
• Vegeta: threw four slushies, three of them stolen.
• An unnamed Acolyte betting on Evah.

The grandmas: Meemaws, Grandma Dorothy (the nat 1, pooped herself), Tootsie(s), Diane (curly hair, knit sweater, pearl pendant), and G-Ma (96, shrank from 4 ft to 3 ft).

Goblins: serve the Shadow King drinks and grapes and fear the throne room.

Juanita: Richardo’s mother; see Richardo.

Places

• Throne Room (Dread Fortress): now filthy; the Shadow King sits on the throne.
• The pirate cove arena: wooden platform on the open sea with a treasure-map table, broken up by cannon fire.

Items

• Kaja’s skull.
• Elusia’s blood-costing amulet.
• The shadow gold pile.
• Box of Chaos (Commodore Scrib’s soul), which gave the Holy Avenger.
• The table / wooden tutu.
• Evah’s splittable glaive.
• Blue raspberry slushies.
• Grandma purses and cookies.

Lore statements

• The Shadow King has returned to the Dread Fortress throne; Elusia is effectively a prisoner in her home.
• Opening Void portals costs Elusia blood (via the amulet).
• The Box of Chaos is fuelled by an Acolyte’s soul; “the last soul dried up pretty quickly.”
• Under the Shadow King, winners can be killed by the ruler himself.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening: the Dread Fortress throne room

1. 0:04:59 Elusia wanders the hallways of the Dread Fortress “almost an alien, a stranger in her own home.” She is angry and drags her feet into the throne room, where the Shadow King lounges “in a throne that should not be his.”
2. 0:05:39 The Shadow King plays with the skull of Kaja, using it as a hand puppet: “Oh, hello, Elusia! It’s me, Kaja!” Elusia: “I love it when my friends become your puppets.” The Shadow King: “Are you being sarcastic? I can’t tell.”
3. 0:06:19 Elusia gives him a stare that would freeze his soul “if he had a soul… but as we all know, he’s heartless.” She tells the goblins: “Please poison his drink any chance that you get.” She calls him “uncle” (0:06:41, Caustic Phoenix’s line, mislabelled 03).
4. 0:06:45 The throne room is described as disgusting. The goblins fear it. Only a few come in, to bring him drinks and grapes that he gobbles down “like a disgusting… pig.” Elusia stomps like “an upset 13-year-old,” kicking up the rug.
5. 0:07:31 She has found two champions, “since it seems we can’t avoid it.” The Shadow King: “this is our deathmatch, we’re doing this together.” Elusia: “This is not a bonding experience, I’m not bonding over murdering people with you.” She slips and says “my deathmatch… your deathmatch,” then corrects herself.
6. 0:08:15 She promises to show him “that in your absence, your dearly missed absence, the Void has gotten stronger.” She crushes an amulet in her hand, and blood drips down her arm. Each time she opens a space in the Void, it costs a little of her own blood. Two large barbarians step out: “Ricardo Over the Top Johnson and Evah Gro’Murgosh [?].”
7. 0:09:07 Richardo: “Nobody tells me what to do… Mr. Sir up there, I’m gonna take your crown very soon.” The Shadow King: “Your name is Dick Johnson? This is the guy you brought here?” Richardo: “I go by Ricardo. We’re not in middle school anymore.” He says he should already be crowned victor, and warns: “I’d be surprised if I reach my final form in this arena here tonight. But if I do, you better watch out.”
8. 0:10:55 Evah: “I don’t talk. My actions do the talking for me.” The Shadow King loves it. Elusia checks that Evah talks at all; she does, “on occasion,” in choice moments. Elusia: “with them, you’re not fighting me. You know that, right?”
9. 0:11:51 Richardo: “What’s charade?” Elusia admits she “maybe didn’t prep them a lot.” Richardo: “I got two right here” (weapons). The Shadow King: “If this is how you’ve run the empire while I’ve been away, then I’m not sure how it’s still standing.” Elusia nods furiously at both champions. Richardo: “Why are you doing that to your head?”
10. 0:12:38 — The arena. Elusia opens another void hole, and blood now drips down her other arm. The arena is out on the cool seas, with fish diving underneath. The fighters stand on rickety, worn boards with a treasure map in the centre: “perhaps a pirate’s cove once used many, many years ago.” Elusia: “Break all their bones, but more important than that is to break their spirit. Crush them!” She flies up into the sky.
11. 0:13:36 Acolytes “like angels in the sky” cheer, with popcorn and blue raspberry slushies. The Shadow King sits on a gold throne with garland, on “cushion and cushion and cushion, for he has a very sensitive ass. Or he is a sensitive ass. We have yet to determine.”

The arm-wrestling misunderstanding

12. 0:15:26 Richardo wins initiative (9 to Evah’s 8). He asks: “Where’s the table with the pads?… I’m Ricardo Over the Top Johnson. I arm wrestle.… Where’s the strap? Who’s got the strap?” Evah: “This is a joke, right?… I came here to fight, not play little kid games.” Elusia: “Ricardo, just think of this as unregulated on the streets arm wrestling.”
13. 0:16:44 Richardo: “How much gold you got?” Street rules mean they play for gold. Evah: “This whole place is a joke… You dishonor the art of the fight.”
14. 0:17:37 The Shadow King stands, and gold shoots up like a fountain out of the shadows of the torchlight and piles on the table: “Happy now?” Richardo: “There’s no table still, but all right.” Elusia tells Evah: “you don’t need to wait for permission. Begin.”

Round 1

15. 0:18:52 — Evah rages. She stomps her feet side to side, squares off, tenses her muscles, and her face goes red: “I’m going to crush you. Yeah!”
16. 0:19:33 — The helmet flip. Richardo goes from dumb to dead serious (“I know what this is”). He flips his helmet backwards to “make it special” and rages. He’s about 6’2”, “normal human-sized,” though he’s an Aasimar. With the helmet backwards he sees only pure darkness, so he tilts it up to see feet. He walks in a circle and ends up facing the wrong way. Mudcat: “reminds me of the antelopes on the savannah.”
17. 0:22:22 He jumps off the table, “comin’ top rope,” with no weapon drawn. A hammer fist to Evah’s throat (“a slap across the throat for tradition”) is followed by a gut punch to her “rock solid abs.” Caustic Phoenix: “Classic one-two punch.”
18. 0:24:49 His war cry is “brush your teeth” (a meme). Evah sees through it (persuasion vs insight). Richardo: “You see how hard I just hit you? I bet you’re feeling that.” Evah spits. Richardo wins the intimidation-off (14 vs 12), so Evah takes a bane on her first attack.
19. 0:28:24 Richardo: “Okay, maybe no brushing of the teeth. Smells fine.” Caustic Phoenix suggests he lick it off the floor. Richardo: “He likes the spit. It fuels him!… It’s still warm.” Evah: “I brush them every day. And every night.” Caustic Phoenix: “Strong teeth leaves her strong bites.”
20. 0:30:17 — The X. Evah attacks recklessly with her glaive. She does flashy swirls, twists and turns, then slashes across his chest (“Not the pecs”). A second slash crosses the first and forms an X: “Marks the spot because we’re in a pirate cove.” Her polearm master bonus attack stabs right in the centre of the X. She slams the glaive into the ground: “This is how you play the game.”
21. 0:32:34 Richardo admires the bleeding scars: “I think this will get me some ladies.” He flexes his arm-wrestling motions while bleeding.

Chaos: Harvey, then the grandmothers

22. 0:33:12 The Shadow King: “The second half was a lot better than the first half.” His chaos d20 is a 2. Elusia: “you suck at this.” She has Evah roll to “show him what a real roll looks like” (7).
23. 0:33:51 — Harvey. The Shadow King’s eyes glow bright yellow: “I won’t stand for this!” A giant shadowy hand reaches into the crowd, picks up an Acolyte named Harvey and crushes him; bones and blood spill over the Acolytes. Elusia: “he deserved that… we were ready to offer him as a sacrifice anyway.” The Acolytes pause, then applaud like crazy as Harvey’s blood trickles like a waterfall onto the wooden platform.
24. 0:34:55 The Shadow King tries to go straight to round two. Elusia: “This is why you shouldn’t run Deathmatches. God, I wish the Arbiter was back here.” The Shadow King (speaker uncertain, labelled 03): “I’m new to this.” Elusia: “Can’t you hear the Acolytes screaming?… It’s time for a chaotic event.” “So before round two comes the chaos?” “I’m not explaining this to you.”
25. 0:35:26 — The Meemaws (13). Elusia: “Acolytes, if you would be ever so kind to once again throw us your grandmothers.” Acolytes throw the grandmothers they brought down onto the map. Five grandmas are named or nicknamed: Meemaws, Grandma Dorothy, Tootsies, Diane (“beautiful curly hair, tight knit sweater… a nice pendant… made of pearls, holding her clutching hands”), and later G-Ma. They hold what look like rifles, but they aren’t. At the start of a turn within 5 ft of one, a fighter makes a Charisma check and gets a cookie (healing) or a purse slap. Richardo’s sexy new scars give him advantage on the first grandma.

Round 2

26. 0:37:39 — The blood fountain. Richardo hears the crowd cheering the blood and flexes his chest so blood sprays out of his wounds: “Do you like it?” (Con save passed). The first two rows of Acolytes are in the splash zone and drink it up. Elusia: “We don’t give people medical checks before this.” The Shadow King: “This is going to lead to blood poncho sales.” Richardo: “This is the blood of what will soon become a god.” Evah: “You’re a freaking fountain right now.”
27. 0:39:24 Richardo pulls a one-handed axe “that looks like it should be two… made for one with my strength”. He mocks “your giant skinny pole.” Elusia: “Listen, there’s nothing wrong with a skinny pole.” He turns his whole head to look at things because of the backwards helmet.
28. 0:40:57 A glancing blow “shaves off the dead skin,” then a second swing from bottom to top. Caustic Phoenix: “Death by a thousand scrapes… The exfoliation regimen.” Evah: “after this fight… I’m killing you. I actually had an appointment for a dermaplaning on my face. I think I might need to cancel it. You’re doing a pretty good job.”
29. 0:43:21 Richardo asks the closest Acolyte what she said: “Is it one of the grannies, Granny Derma?” The Acolyte (Mudcat): “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Why don’t you just fight?” The Acolytes are baffled (“This has never, ever happened before”), and one says: “I’m betting on her.”
30. 0:44:26 — Disarm. Evah lands a disarming attack with a superiority die. Richardo keeps his grip (strength save 20): “That grip strength! This is why I hold it in my right arm.”
31. 0:46:54 — The nards. An Acolyte, Zeus, screams: “Kick him in the nards!” Evah’s nature check is 19. Asked where he keeps them, Richardo: “Back home with the wife.… They’re where they should be, I hope.” Asked if they’re in his back pocket: “Only on Fridays.” Then a Lance Armstrong joke (02, likely the Shadow King). Richardo has four nards (“I get asked this question quite a bit”). Evah to the Shadow King: “You, pretty boy. Shush.” Her polearm-master attack lands, and she takes one point of nard damage per nard, four in all: “Let me know if you can feel this.”
32. 0:49:26 Evah spits on the ground again “from my super clean mouth”. Her Con roll shows a huge spit capacity (“I don’t suffer from dry mouth”). “Hydrate… so they can dehydrate.” Richardo: “I hate it.”

The Box of Chaos: Commodore Scrib (0:50:54)

33. The Shadow King rolls 15. The Acolytes go quiet, then stomp and clap around the arena as a Box of Chaos hurtles down like a comet onto the treasure-map table.
34. 0:51:46 Shadow King: “Well, the last soul dried up pretty quickly, so let’s see if we can find a stronger one.” A shadowy hand flies through the crowd and picks up Commodore Scrib. Another hand rips out a black soul with yellow eyes and slams it into the box. Pink and purple flames shoot into the sky. “If you make a sacrifice to our box here, you may be rewarded with something magical.”
35. 0:52:32 — Evah refuses. “Nice parlor trick. I didn’t know this was a magic show.” Shadow King: “It’s very rude… I’m a king!” Evah: “You know what’s rude? You are… This whole place is a disgrace. You disrespect the art of the fight.” Richardo: “Yeah, you tell him.” Evah: “I don’t give a damn about your little toy box.”
36. 0:53:09 — Richardo’s sword. The Shadow King (“arm-wrestling chap… Dick Johnson? Ric-Ric-Ricardo!”) has Richardo roll d100 (22). The lid closes before any sacrifice is made, the box shakes, and fire shoots out. A sword flies out and floats in front of Richardo: a Holy Avenger (+3, with extra radiant damage). The box dissipates with a finger snap.
37. 0:55:04 Evah: “A real fight doesn’t need fancy little boxes or knick-knacks.” Richardo: “Did you just turn that man into a sword?” Shadow King: “No, I actually turned that man into a soul in a box, and then that box pulled a sword out.” Richardo: “I know what that means.”
38. 0:55:36 Elusia: “Let’s just take a freaking break. You’re breaking all the rules here… Hydrate up!” (The break is cut.) 0:56:04 “The Box of Chaos has come and went. Always disappointing, just here for a few seconds.”

Round 3

39. 0:56:36 The Shadow King: “It’s Dick Johnson.” Evah says she’ll be sending a card to his mother when she kills him, maybe flowers, condolences, “Maybe I’ll take her out for a date.” Others (speakers uncertain) join in: “Maybe I’ll give her a house call,” and Caustic Phoenix: “Arm wrestle your mama.” Richardo: “You wanna know who taught me the arm wrestling? Good luck.” Caustic Phoenix: “Arm wrestling was a metaphor, dear.”
40. 0:57:44 — The golden arm. Richardo: “You hit me in my arm, the golden arm… and you missed. What you should have done is you should have hit me in my other arm.” He tosses the axe to his other hand and grabs Evah’s right hand for a full arm-wrestling grapple: “You will do this!” He fails (8 vs 9). Evah just pushes him off.
41. 1:00:00 — Final form: the necrotic shroud. “It’s all been a little bit of a ruse… this is not necessarily what I look like.” Holding the bright new sword, he summons a black orb in his right hand and crushes it, and his whole body becomes dark and shadowy. “Being a fallen Aasimar, I’ve done things that you cannot ever imagine.” He sprouts wings he didn’t have before. All anyone sees is a shadow silhouette holding a brightly glowing sword. Everyone within 10 ft must make a Charisma save or be frightened, including three of the grandmas.
42. 1:02:16 — Grandma Dorothy. All the grandmas fail. One rolls a nat 1 and, out of absolute fear, poops her pants. The stench burns both fighters’ nostrils, and both take poison damage. “Those grandma farts, they are something fierce.” Evah fails her save and is frightened of Richardo.
43. 1:04:38 His Holy Avenger swing misses. Caustic Phoenix: “Maybe you should have licked up some of that spit on the crap.”
44. 1:04:55 — Grandmas on Richardo. One grandma coos over his strong pectorals, which are gushing with blood, and lays on hands to heal him. The one who pooped herself slaps him with her purse: “purse damage,” which rage doesn’t halve. He stays raging because he “got hit by that wave of poisonous shit.” He’s also hit in the back of the head by the purse.
45. 1:07:52 His helmet spike goring attempt misses because the helmet is backwards and slips down on his sweat. He gives “a muffled scream inside the back of [his] helmet.”
46. 1:08:40 — The smiley face. Caustic Phoenix (or Evah): “Destroy this muffled idiot!” Evah attacks recklessly. A Dex save on the floor slick with her saliva goes fine (“like skating on water”). She tries to carve a smiley face into him (“terrible branding”). Once her frightened disadvantage is applied, only one hit lands, so he gets only one eye, under the X and its hole. Caustic Phoenix suggests the “cool S” from middle school next. Evah stays frightened.
47. 1:11:52 — G-Ma. Evah charms the grandma behind her, but she’s “a weak grandma… 96 years old.” She drains her own life force to heal Evah one point and shrinks from four feet to three. Evah: “Granny, no.” She calls her grandmother G-Ma.
48. 1:13:25 — The shadow fleet. The Shadow King: “What’s the point of being in a pirate cove if there’s not going to be any pirate fun?” He snaps his fingers, and shadow ships form in the water around the cove and bombard it with cannonballs. Evah succeeds on her save (21) and Richardo fails (4). The planks around them break, and both are thrown into the middle near the table. Initiative is rerolled: Evah 19, Richardo 8. Shadow King: “Round number one again!”

The new round: hero points and the table

49. 1:15:22 Evah, still frightened, “throw[s] caution to the wind” with another reckless attack. Elusia: “Enough of this! I want to see movement! I want to see action!” She strips both fighters of their rage: “Don’t use your emotions! Go beyond that and dig deeper.” In return, as a gift from the Acolytes, each gets a hero point.
50. 1:18:32 — The wooden tutu. Evah spends her hero point on an action surge, flips the table and smashes it around Richardo “so he wears it like a tutu.” She’s ruled proficient with tables (“I’ve been in taverns before,” Richardo). Richardo now wears a wooden skirt of nine or ten planks, about 2½ ft out on either side. Evah: “Are you entertained now?” Shadow King: “Mildly, that’s getting there.” Evah: “I wasn’t asking you.” Elusia: “Draw more blood and we will be pleased.”
51. 1:20:44 — The split glaive. Her next glaive hit lands without rage. Elusia: “you may see a little surprise in that glaive of yours… your glaive can now be split into two if you ever want to have a little special move.” Evah bows.
52. 1:22:22 — The self-hug. Richardo, “looking like you know, Dark Kazuya… all demoned out,” gives himself a hug and uses healing hands. His pep talk is to his arm-wrestling arm: “We got this… remember the time at the truck stop when we wanted the Slim Jim and the guy at the counter said a Slim Jim 250 and I had 249… we grabbed the shopkeep by the throat and then kind of threw him across.” Instead of a Slim Jim, the target now is “the long skinny pole.” Evah: “Don’t like your new table tray?”
53. 1:24:38 — “MAMA!” He charges to tackle her with the table and misses. Caustic Phoenix: “Oh, the tables have turned.” He yells into the sky like an angry kid: “MAMA!” (Caustic Phoenix: “Are we in a Queen song now?”) He spends his hero point to try again.
54. 1:26:35 — Juanita. His mother answers from the stands: “Go get her, my son!” She grants a d6 of inspiration. The Acolytes lift her into the air so she can see her son, and she ends up crowd-surfing. The table tackle hits and smashes into pieces; both fighters stay standing. His mother is named Juanita. She finds planks in her hands and hurls them at Evah, tag-teaming with her son. Richardo: “From the ropes! She’s wearing a mask too.… an old lady… and then a big strong arm just pulls out.”
55. 1:29:02 Through the broken table they meet face to face. Richardo tries a bear hug. Asked for a bear growl, someone delivers “Oh, God, in my back… Oh, my sciatica” (speaker uncertain). Evah rolls a nat 20 to escape and is ruled “ungrappable” (“unless you want a hug”).

Round 2, part 2

56. 1:31:02 Evah’s reckless swings miss. A glancing bonus hit carries a Grappling Strike (“grapple the grappler”). Richardo dodges it with a TikTok-meme dodge and just smiles.
57. 1:33:37 — Breaking the fear. Evah fails her save. She spends her hero point on a reroll and succeeds (18), with a pep talk to herself: “You killed them. You killed them all. You killed your ex. You killed her sister. You killed your sister’s ex-husband. You can kill this guy.” Elusia: “You remember that man who refused to give you ice cream that one time?” Evah: “You made ice cream out of his innards. This guy is nothing. He disrespects the art of the fight. And you, you are here to honor it, and I’m gonna crush you.”
58. 1:35:28 Richardo is baffled: “Are you crying? Are you mad? Are you stressed? Is ice cream gonna help this problem? Or are you trying to kill me?” Evah: “Give me a slushie!” An Acolyte, Vegeta, throws four blue raspberry slushies. She paid for one and stole three from the people around her. Evah scoops one off the ground, sips it: “I’m gonna put your brains in this thing. And then I’m going to drink them.”
59. 1:37:03 Shadow King: “I like the way she fights, this is getting great.” Richardo fails to beat a 7. He is now frightened of her, “shaking in [his] boots, or sandals.” They’re sandals: “I just got back from the beach.” They’re made by “Lug… not a lug,” an off-brand. Caustic Phoenix: “we don’t support big corporations here.” The padding has disintegrated from sweat, and there’s blood and spit on the floor.
60. 1:39:17 — Light and dark. Richardo: “I’m kind of afraid of you and there’s the tricks on you: I don’t have brains for you to drink.” Turn order gets muddled. Shadow King: “Don’t give a shit… Fuck all of you. I don’t care.” Elusia: “This is why you don’t get to be in charge.” The Holy Avenger lands (“light and dark smash together”), and Evah parries with a superiority die, reducing the damage. A second big hit comes as he’s “swinging for the fences,” then a shoulder and helmet spike hit.

Round 3, part 2: the end

61. 1:43:41 Elusia: “Evah! It’s just fun to scream your name.” Evah attacks recklessly: “I am going to chop you up into little tiny pieces, and then I’m going to cook them, and then I’m going to use your little helmet for popcorn.” Richardo is afraid but likes it (“He’s weird”). Caustic Phoenix: “like this giant buffet table.” Richardo: “Every part of the buffalo.” The hit lands. Richardo goes down.
62. 1:46:07 — The kill. Evah walks around him and kneels: “Shouldn’t have come here.… She’s not coming to save you. Are you ready?” Richardo: “One moment… Five more minutes. I’m tired. Wake me up in five minutes.” Evah: “Did you just ask me for five more minutes?… Wake up.” Richardo: “I don’t want to go to school.” “You’re dying.” “I feel like I’m dying.”
63. 1:47:36 She slams her glaive into the ground: “This. This is who you brought to me.” Then she stabs him through the chest and lifts him up on her glaive. His body hangs limp, face up. Juanita weeps in the crowd for her son.
64. 1:48:49 Evah: “This is how you fight. No cheap tricks. No little magic boxes.” Holding her glaive, she picks a slushie up off the ground and knocks it back.
65. 1:49:08 — The Shadow King kills Evah. In a large poof of shadow, the Shadow King appears in front of her. His arm becomes a shadow blade that slices up through her cup, through her mouth and through her head, and he raises her up by the face. “Well, your tongue won’t be doing any more wagging, will it?” He slams her down on the ground.
66. 1:49:51 Shadow King: “Welcome and goodnight to D20 Deathmatch!”

Full Dried Blood notes (click to expand)

• Mudcat hosts. Dan: “There was so much blood, is it actually dried by now?”
• The blood fountain: Kat gave Richardo a One Piece-style X scar, so Dan went “straight to anime spray.” He moved his chest to hit as many Acolytes as possible.
• Kat’s favourite moment was finally breaking the fear; she had planned for charm, not fear. Dan used the fear to “mess around a little bit.” Caustic Phoenix: at least a third of Evah’s damage came from the arena. The table skirt / “wooden tutu” was a favourite; Kat felt “required” to make the table pun.
• Mudcat: all three play in Runaway Robot (Joel)‘s Spelljammer campaign. Kat usually plays a “chaos goblin” and wanted Evah to be “an absolute powerhouse.” Dan’s usual character there is Helene [?]. Dan normally plays honourable paladins or rangers. Richardo was inspired by a dumb fighter he once played and by arm-wrestling YouTubers (Juji Mufu [?], Devon Larratt [?]). Arm wrestling and strongman are sports where everyone is competitive but “the bestest of friends.”
• Kat modelled Evah’s attitude on the Imperium (wrestling), disrespecting the shot callers. She expected to die, but not to be “insta-KO’d by the Shadow King himself.” Caustic Phoenix: “the Shadow King is very similar to an ancient dragon. So very doable.”
• Creator note (Mudcat): “The Grandmaster runs the arena in this very honorable way… people get to live, even the people that die get to come back and live again, and like the Shadow King just has zero of that.” Chat didn’t expect it even though “I killed someone at the end of the first match.” Mudcat enjoys coming up with “the most brutal way I can murder people.”
• The shadow-blade kill was inspired by the liquid Terminator in Terminator 2 stabbing through a man’s mouth.
• Richardo is based on Over the Top (1987), a Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling trucker film; flipping the hat is “like flipping a switch” into berserk mode. Hence a barbarian who flips his helmet but “is stupid enough to where he cannot see.” They riff on Stallone vs Danny Trejo (on the “wish list”), Trejo’s donut shop and Iron Chef.
• Final words:
  • Kat: “I let my actions do the talking for me.”