S4E11 — Beatdown — Sprinkles v Nigel

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A gentle halfling waiter who wanted to win with the power of friendship faced a changeling method actor who wanted to win an Oscar. Sprinkles and Nigel Night Louis met in a dead, glowing forest. What followed involved zombie grandmothers, a face fed to The Box of Chaos and a nine-headed demon of hatred charmed by the Footloose dance. In the end the battle moved inside Nigel’s own body, and nobody walked out.

The Story

Moon Landings and Family Secrets

The Acolytes swooped into The Dread Fortress as heels clacked down its long hallway and a loose dog barked somewhere in the dark. It wasn’t Doug, the audience was assured: “Doug has not been replaced. We just have tons of dogs in the fortress.” The Grandmaster followed a strange buzzing to the throne room. There she found The Shadow King slouched with the lights off, lit only by a black-and-white television with its antenna up.

He was “catching up on the history,” and he had concluded that the moon landing was faked. “You can see the strings. And why is the flag waving?” He added, “I know a thing about illusions.” When she asked whether he’d tell her next that The Void was flat, he said it was “one contiguous plane.” He then admitted he had never travelled much of the land he ruled: “I’ve been to The Shadowlands and Prexmarin and not too far beyond that. Why would I?” The Grandmaster switched off the set and offered him a history he did love: blood and violence.

Two Award Winners

She cut her fingertips on her amulet and opened a portal for the champions. Sprinkles, a halfling dressed neatly as a waiter, confessed he was “really not a fighter.” He had made a bet with a friend that he could win with the power of friendship. The Grandmaster backed the plan: “If it worked for Naruto.” Nigel had long, slicked-back white-gray hair, a Tommy Wiseau coat over a Renaissance shirt and big sunglasses. He introduced himself in a husky drawl as a “BAFTA award-winning actor” sponsored by cherry bubbly. Two goblins, Sarah and another Nigel, fetched drinks. Nigel the actor listed his flavors, including “teardrop,” a sadness-induced bubbly he drank before performances.

The pre-show became one long celebrity rider. Nigel demanded that his Teen Choice Award be waxed, and the Shadow King backed him. Goblin Nigel brought out a silver platter of raw asparagus, then the surfboard prop from “Sponge,” the CW’s gritty live-action SpongeBob, which had won Nigel the Teen Choice Award. Winners were slimed, Nigel explained, as “a ritual of humility.” The Fortress had no slime, but the Shadow King had a CO2 cannon full of blood under his throne, and he blasted both champions with it. Sprinkles spotted chopped guts in it and called it steak tartare. “Sure, if you like to eat goblin,” said the Shadow King, as both goblins turned slowly to stare.

Goblin Nigel climbed onto the actor’s back, and Nigel made him a little baby carrier out of his award-outfit kit: “You can be my Mandalorian.” Sprinkles recognized Nigel from “There Won’t Be Blood” and got his grappling hook signed. Then he asked Nigel’s favorite colors. The answer was “red, like blood, and blue, like the sky. I openly weep while staring at the sky once a day.” Sprinkles handed over a matching red-and-blue friendship bracelet.

Into the Dead Forest

The portal opened onto a cold, damp forest of bare roots and moldy grass, with glowing ground and green fireflies drifting through the branches. “This land is, well, not really meant for living,” said the Grandmaster. “So I figured it’s the perfect place for dying.” The Acolytes shrieked from the fog above, somehow in Nigel’s husky voice. Sprinkles asked for a trowel and started gardening. He told Nigel that his friend had said he couldn’t win “without exceeding amounts of violence. And, you know, I myself am a pacifist.”

Nigel offered a free acting lesson: “You’re gonna hate me by the end of this.” He flung the friendship bracelet back, started a knock-knock joke he never finished, and set spectral hands tickling Sprinkles everywhere. Sprinkles rolled a perfect natural 20 and shrugged it off. Nigel then rolled his own natural 20 against the deadly dirt he’d been eating, which energized him instead. Apparently he had once made a movie where he only ate dirt.

Sprinkles walked in slowly for a hug. Nigel grabbed him by the face to stop it, explaining that acting “is projecting trauma.” Sprinkles opened up anyway. His siblings had called him “stinky head,” and people had mocked his acne and the hair on his feet. Nigel was disappointed when he drifted back into kindness. Then the end of the round brought the night’s biggest bombshell. When the Grandmaster asked how the Shadow King could possibly know what her mother had said, he replied: “Because she was my sister-in-law. It got really confusing there at the end.” He had loved her mother, and he had also killed her mother’s husband, which explains the confusion. The Grandmaster announced, in front of the whole arena, that she was handling this very well.

Truth and the Dark Passenger

She was not handling it well. When Sprinkles offered her a hug, she unloaded. She would rather shove the Shadow King’s face down a trash can, run it over with a lawnmower, grind it into sausage, feed it to Doug, squish what Doug pooped out and throw him over a waterfall. “Elusia, I’m really proud of you,” said the Shadow King. She scooted her chair away from him, loudly, inch by inch.

Nigel magically urged Sprinkles to hit him and even lay down on the ground to help. Sprinkles rolled a 1 and a 2, and the Acolytes booed. He smacked his own head, muttering “No, not yet,” and admitted that the voice in his head was the friend who’d made the bet. He finally landed a single feeble punch and panicked. The Grandmaster threw him a can of bubbly, which dented both the can and the halfling.

Then Nigel brought out his Tony Award, sang from the musical about Britney Spears, and cast a spell of truth that he deliberately let catch himself. A changeling, he reshaped part of his face into Sprinkles’ and asked why Sprinkles needed to please everyone. The truth came out: “It’s because the dark passenger that resides inside me scares me a bit, so I have to counteract it with kindness.” Nigel confessed in turn that he hated his own work, watched his films to cry and yell at himself, had sculpted his own chin, and sometimes didn’t know who he was. “I may just be a face in a box,” he mused. That line turned out to be prophetic.

Meemaws for Days

The cheering Acolytes set off a chaos event. Skeletons clawed out of the dead earth, well armed but wearing sweet old-lady dresses and carrying purses full of Werther’s. “Meemaw meemaws for days!” cried the Grandmaster. Sprinkles gave one last warning: “Do you really want to meet the Dark Passenger?” Nigel did.

Sprinkles closed his eyes and opened them on demonic flame. His bones cracked, his body stretched, his jaw dropped, and knife-like claws pushed out of his fingertips. “Finally, now it’s time for bloodshed.” The first slash was a natural 20, and Nigel only escaped by shifting his face out of the way. Nigel grappled the creature and shoved it face-first into a grandma zombie named Gertrude, who licked its face and pressed the inside of her mouth onto it with her corrosive breath. Then he clubbed it with his Teen Choice Award, which made a sound like the SpongeBob surfboard. The Dark Passenger answered with a frenzy of claws and another natural 20, and the rage rippled into Nigel’s mind. Wedged cheek to cheek among the meemaws, both champions received a surge of power from the grandmothers, a gift from the Acolytes passed on through “a re-gifting process.”

Face Off

A pink-and-yellow meteor crashed into the arena: the Box of Chaos. “Champions, this is my former home,” said the Shadow King. To give it some juice, his spectral hand snatched a quiet Acolyte named Majestic Wolf, nocked them on a giant shadow bow and fired them across the arena. Majestic Wolf broke their neck on the side of the box and fell in. Their soul crawled back out with yellow eyes: “Let’s make a deal.”

Nigel shoved his head in, “going full Nicolas Cage,” and offered the skin of his face. Clawed hands sawed it off, and the box spirit slapped it on itself. The Grandmaster’s verdict: “Face off.” In exchange Nigel got a stone of fortitude and vowed, “I’m gonna win this Oscar without a face.” He snapped his Teen Choice Award over his knee, watched the soul of SpongeBob leave it, and beat the Dark Passenger with the pieces and a SAG award. Then he performed a fleshless-faced dance so unhinged that the Grandmaster invented a new category: Nick Cage damage. Nobody is immune to it. The Acolytes were left stunned. “Sprinkles has been hurt physically,” said the Dark Passenger, “but I have been hurt emotionally.”

Sprinkles’ body fed all its friendship bracelets to the box, while a voice inside screamed that they were worth so much. The box threw them back. A small pet cat wandered in and was now wearing Nigel’s face. Finally the box produced a cursed cloak made of Nigel’s face, stitched together with Sprinkles’ bracelets, which let its wearer become Nigel. “I’m already cursed,” said the Dark Passenger. “I have a demon living inside my brain.” Nigel loved it: “Me versus me. I’m killing myself. This is art.”

Meanwhile the Grandmaster had six goblins drag the grandmothers off through a dark portal. They reappeared at the Shadow King’s seat and beat him with their purses. “Shame on you, Sonny!” He took it without moving. Then his eyes flashed yellow and the grandmothers flew into the sky, where some of them are said to float still, unable to land.

Nigel’s Last Performance

Nigel decided he had to be the villain so his nemesis could be the hero. “All the best performances happen after you’re dead.” He kicked open the Box of Chaos and jumped in whole. The shadow spirit inside skinned him and came out wearing his body like a suit. It took the form of a shadow Robert De Niro and drew a dull, diseased toe knife, a gift from its best friend Danny DeVito. The blow it landed left Sprinkles’ body with an infected wound.

Then the Dark Passenger gave its true name: Melchizedek, the Dark One, come “to find a more suitable host.” Melchizedek used the face-cloak to seal itself inside Nigel’s occupied corpse. “I want a new home!” The arena changed. The fight now took place inside Nigel’s body, spirit against spirit, for ownership of it. Sprinkles’ abandoned body was left wandering outside: “Oh, gee, what the heck is going on, guys?”

Melchizedek’s first move was to threaten the body’s bladder: “I’m gonna make Nigel piss. It’s gonna smell like asparagus!” Inside, Nigel’s essence appeared as a bright-eyed little Newsie, a schoolboy who had just done his first musical and been told for the first time that he was worth something. Melchizedek’s true form was a nine-headed dragon-snake. It froze the boy in mid box step. Then a chaos surge arrived: the Chinese food Nigel had eaten earlier “isn’t meant to sustain both of you,” and an avalanche of chunky vomit and acid swept both spirits to opposite shoulders. As the narration put it, the only true Nigel left was Nigel the Goblin, still riding in the baby carrier on the corpse’s back.

Footloose

The boy broke free by tap dancing, singing “Now is the time to seize the day.” Melchizedek loathed dancing, until Nigel started the Footloose dance and Melchizedek, with a natural 1, was utterly charmed. “Do you have a bad demon daddy?” the child asked. Melchizedek explained that it was “an angel who was scorned from heaven for my transgressions against my god,” and added, “But this dancing is pretty fucking tight.” The boy suggested channeling those God issues into art. A roll on a hastily built table of art forms landed on yodeling, and Melchizedek yodeled. It was really good.

Charmed or not, Melchizedek beat the boy with an Emmy and a SAG award, “awards you have not yet won.” The Shadow King declared it boring and said he had a dentist appointment. The Grandmaster talked him into one more round. He swelled Nigel’s body to gargantuan size and sliced the chest open so the Acolytes could see. Outside, Sprinkles’ body and Nigel the Goblin gardened together, and a beautiful flower field bloomed at the foot of the split-open corpse. Sprinkles was thriving.

The Final Blow

“You see, kid, don’t lose your passion. We’re all gonna kill our demons, but unfortunately, my demon is my own,” the child told Sprinkles. Then he picked up a broken bone from his own corpse and imagined it was an Oscar. He stabbed Melchizedek in the heart three times, “almost like killing myself… ego death style.” Then he lay down and watched an imagined Oscar acceptance speech as he faded. Melchizedek’s last thought was that it had been an unfulfilling existence: “hurt people hurt people.”

The Grandmaster raised her goblet to the champions for taking ownership of an identity and claiming it as their own. “Shadow King, are you not entertained?” He admitted it was “a very satisfying ending, in fact,” and said it deserved an award. Then he raised a hand, and green slime rained from the heavens until it filled the arena. Nigel and Sprinkles, both still lying there, drowned in it. There was no winner.

Dried Blood

Sprinkles’ parting words were about the darkness inside: it’s okay to have it, and sometimes the only answer is “to live through spite. Not to spite anyone else, but to drive all of your anger to the part of yourself that says you can’t do it.” Nigel’s were about craft: “Since the dawn of time, storytelling has been one of the most important things for people to share with each other.” He urged everyone to tell stories because they care about the stories, not about how they look telling them.

Notable Moments

• The Shadow King revealed, mid-match, that the Grandmaster’s mother was his sister-in-law, and she spiraled into a rant about feeding his face to Doug and squishing what Doug pooped out.
• An Acolyte named Majestic Wolf was fired from a shadow bow into the Box of Chaos to power it.
• The Box of Chaos took Nigel’s face, then his whole body, and a cat wandered in wearing that face.
• The Grandmaster invented “Nick Cage damage,” and nobody is immune.
• The grandma zombies beat the Shadow King with their purses and were flung into the sky.
• A nine-headed demon of hatred was charmed by the Footloose dance, took up yodeling and was killed by a child wielding a bone he imagined was an Oscar.

Memorable Quotes

The Shadow King: “Because she was my sister-in-law. It got really confusing there at the end.”

Nigel Night Louis: “You see, kid, don’t lose your passion. We’re all gonna kill our demons, but unfortunately, my demon is my own.”

• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “For one who seeks knowledge and is a scholar, you’re pretty fucking dumb, aren’t you?”
• Nigel Night Louis: “I’m gonna win this Oscar without a face.”
• Melchizedek: “Do you want to try method acting as a corpse?”
• Sprinkles: “Sprinkles has been hurt physically, but I have been hurt emotionally.”
• Melchizedek: “I was an angel who was scorned from heaven for my transgressions against my god… But this dancing is pretty fucking tight.”
• The Shadow King: “Well, I think that this shit’s boring and I have a dentist appointment.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Sprinkles (RRollplaying). A halfling dressed like a waiter: rolled shirt, vest, slacks, dress shoes.

• Personality and lore:
  • A pacifist and gardener. Wins employee of the month for being good-natured.
  • Hands out friendship bracelets in many colors.
  • Was a PA on “Ack Blattom” and worked on Tooth Fairy with the Rock.
  • Grew up with many siblings who called him “stinky head.” Self-conscious about acne and the hair on his feet; proud of his hygiene.
  • Made a bet that he could win with the power of friendship.
  • Inside him lives a “dark passenger,” whom he calls “she… my friend… she made a bet with me.” She gets angry so he doesn’t; he counters her with kindness. “I made a mistake… a long time ago. And now I’m living with it.”
• Gear: a trowel (summoned by the Shadow King), a grappling hook signed by Nigel, a silver pistol on his sheet, and the cursed cloak of Nigel’s face from the Box of Chaos.
• In this episode: his body is left behind when Melchizedek moves into Nigel. He gardens a flower field with Nigel the Goblin, then is drowned in slime.

Melchizedek, the Dark One (RRollplaying). Sprinkles’ dark passenger.

• Rage form: demonic flame eyes, cracking and elongating bones, a dropped jaw, and knife-claws.
• True form: a nine-headed dragon-snake. Called “she” at 1:51:28 and 2:04:11; calls himself “a Lord of Darkness.”
• “An angel who was scorned from heaven for my transgressions against my god,” now “a being of pure hatred and pain.”
• Calls Sprinkles “my flesh puppet… the quivering whelp.”
• Loathes dancing, until the Footloose dance. Turns out to be good at yodeling.
• Took over Nigel’s corpse with the face-cloak. Killed by child-Nigel’s bone “Oscar.”
• Last thought: “hurt people hurt people.”
• (Inferred: the “friend” who made the bet is Melchizedek, based on 0:39:50 “she’s my friend… She made a bet with me” and 0:25:36 “she said that I would not be able to win this without exceeding amounts of violence.”)

Nigel Night Louis (theplaymatt). A changeling actor who sculpted his own chin.

• Appearance: long white-gray slicked hair, a salt-and-pepper beard, a Tommy Wiseau coat over a Renaissance shirt, sunglasses, and a perpetually hung-over look.
• Awards:
  • BAFTA, Cable Ace, a Teen Choice Award (for “Sponge,” the CW’s gritty SpongeBob, which came with a sliming), a Tony (best actor in a play), and a SAG award.
  • He also has an Emmy (later used by Melchizedek).
  • He wants an EGOT and an Oscar.
• Credits:
  • “There Won’t Be Blood” (“You drink my smoothie!”).
  • A CW Paddington remake.
  • The Britney Spears musical.
  • A movie where he only ate dirt.
• Habits: sponsored by bubbly; drinks “teardrop” bubbly before performances. Eats raw asparagus and dirt. Weeps at the sky once a day. Watches his own movies to cry and yell at himself.
• Powers: a method-acting barbarian-bard. Uses Hideous Laughter, Suggestion, a truth spell, Silvery Barbs, Cutting Words, a berserker frenzy, and Phantasmal Force cast on himself.
• In this episode:
  • Lost his face to the Box of Chaos and got an Ioun Stone of Fortitude.
  • Snapped his Teen Choice award to dual-wield it.
  • Jumped into the box and died. His corpse was worn by the box’s shadow spirit, then fought over from inside.
  • His inner child, a Newsie, killed Melchizedek.

Nigel the Goblin and Sarah the goblin. Dread Fortress goblins. Nigel the Goblin fetched the asparagus and the award, rode in Nigel’s baby Bjorn the whole fight, and gardened with Sprinkles at the end.

The Shadow King (Mudcat).

• Watches a black-and-white TV and believes the moon landing was faked. “I know a thing about illusions.”
• Has traveled only to the Shadowlands and Prexmarin.
• Keeps a blood cannon under his throne.
• Says Elusia’s mother was his sister-in-law.
• Calls the Box of Chaos “my former home.”
• Shot the Acolyte Majestic Wolf into the box as an arrow.
• Took 42 purse damage from the grandmothers and flung them into the sky.
• Grew Nigel’s body and sliced it open. Ended the match with a slime rain.

Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer (Caustic Phoenix).

• Brings the champions to the Shadow King.
• Shocked by the sister-in-law revelation; delivered the trash-can/Doug rant.
• Commanded goblins to remove the grandmas. Toasted the champions.

Majestic Wolf. An Acolyte killed as the Box of Chaos’s fuel (broken neck). Their soul now has yellow eyes and runs the deals.

The grandma zombies: Gertrude, Hannah, Anna (“Meemaw Anna”), “Arbitrary,” and others. Some may still be floating in the sky.

The shadow spirit in the box. Wore Nigel’s face, then his whole body. Took the form of a shadow Robert De Niro carrying Danny DeVito’s toe knife.

Doug. The dog. “Doug has not been replaced”; there are many dogs in the fortress.

The cat. A pet cat that wandered into the Box of Chaos and is wearing Nigel’s face.

Places

• The Dread Fortress: the Shadow King’s throne room, the long hallway, the champions’ prep room, the kitchen, and pillars.
• The dead forest arena: cold, damp, glowing ground, green fireflies, bare trees and roots. The Acolytes watch from the fog above. A flower field now grows there from Sprinkles’ gardening.
• Inside Nigel’s body: the second arena, later enlarged to gargantuan size and split open.
• The Shadowlands and Prexmarin, mentioned.
• “A waterfall” in the GM’s rant (unspecified).

Items

• The blood cannon (CO2, blood and chopped goblin guts).
• Bubbly cans (cherry, lime, lemon, teardrop).
• Friendship bracelets.
• Nigel’s awards, the “Sponge” surfboard and the baby Bjorn.
• The Ioun Stone of Fortitude.
• The cloak of Nigel’s face: a cursed, reskinned hellhound cloak that lets the wearer polymorph into Nigel. Its curse is “for some other day.”
• Danny DeVito’s toe knife.
• The bone “Oscar.”
• The Grandmaster’s amulet (opens portals with her blood).

Lore statements

• Elusia’s mother was the Shadow King’s sister-in-law (“It got really confusing there at the end”).
• The Void is “one contiguous plane,” not flat.
• The Box of Chaos is “my former home” (Shadow King). It is fuelled by an Acolyte soul and grants items for sacrifices.
• Eating goblin “is illegal in most places here.”
• At the Teen Choice Awards winners are slimed as “a ritual of humility.”
• Danny DeVito is “a devil… an infernal” with a multi-millennia-old toe.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening — the Shadow King’s throne room

1. 0:05:57 The Acolytes zoom into the isolated volcanic Dread Fortress. Heels clack down the long hallway, and a loose dog barks in the background. “It’s not Doug, though. Don’t worry. Doug has not been replaced. We just have tons of dogs in the fortress.” As the Grandmaster nears the Shadow King’s throne room she hears a buzzing sound.
2. 0:06:46 — The moon landing. She finds the Shadow King slouched in his throne with the lights out, lit only by a black-and-white TV with its antenna up. She throws the door open and almost terrifies him. He says he’s “catching up on the history.” He claims the moon landing was faked: “You can see the strings. And why is the flag waving?… This is definitely done on a soundstage.” He adds, “I know a thing about illusions.” She retorts, “You know nothing about the moon, though.”
3. 0:07:37 — The flat Void. The GM asks, “What are you going to tell me next time? The Void is flat?” He answers, “It’s not. I mean, it’s one contiguous plane.” She asks whether he ever traveled the land he ruled. He says: “I’ve been to the Shadowlands and Prexmarin and not too far beyond that. Why would I?… There’s nothing out there.”
4. 0:08:11 GM: “For one who seeks knowledge and is a scholar, you’re pretty fucking dumb, aren’t you?” She turns the TV off with its little dials and offers him “a little piece of history that you do love. Blood and violence.” He agrees that this exists.
5. 0:08:52 — The champions arrive. She clasps her amulet, splices into her own fingertips and opens a portal. Two champions walk through, “grand, not necessarily in size”: “Nigel, Nice Louie [Night Louis], and Sprinkles!”
6. 0:09:26 — Sprinkles says he is “really not a fighter.” He just likes to be a nice friend. “I made a bet with a friend of mine that I could win this fight with the power of friendship.” The GM defends the idea: “it works in every freaking anime… If it worked for Naruto.” The Shadow King complains that Naruto has too many filler episodes, and she agrees.
7. 0:10:27 — Nigel has been “a fan of your work for a long, long time.” He introduces himself in a husky voice as “BAFTA award-winning actor, Nigel Night Louis.” He is drinking bubbly and says he’s sponsored by it, specifically cherry. The GM claps in two goblins, Sarah and Nigel (“there’s two Nigels now”), who bring a can of bubbly for the Shadow King too. Nigel lists the other flavors: lime, lemon, and teardrop, “a sadness-induced bubbly that I drank before performances to make me really understand the depth of the human experience.” Sprinkles asks for a cherry, and Nigel tosses him one.
8. 0:11:50 — Appearances.
   • Nigel has long white-gray hair slicked back and a salt-and-pepper beard. He wears a big coat like Tommy Wiseau’s in The Room over a Renaissance dress shirt, “half Shakespeare and half Tommy Wiseau,” with big sunglasses. He looks perpetually hung over.
   • Sprinkles is a halfling. He wears a neatly fold-rolled dress shirt, a vest, slacks and dress shoes, “very fit to be like a waiter.” He goes around admiring the pillars.
9. 0:13:00 — The tour. Nigel the Goblin gives a tour: “Over here, we have another pillar, and over here is the other pillar.” Sprinkles says he’s a fan of both. Nigel: “I remember my first time on PCP.” The GM covers Sprinkles’ ears: “He’s clearly innocent… At least spill some blood before you expose him to different substances.”
10. 0:13:39 — The Rock. Nigel asks whether Sprinkles is the butler: “I thought you guys told me you had Wayne the Dwarf Bronson for this match.” The GM says Wayne was double-booked. Sprinkles explains that he was a PA on “Ack Blattom” (the Rock’s newest superhero film) and also worked with him on Tooth Fairy. GM: “It’s not a throwback if you’re old.” Nigel: “I fucking am.”
11. 0:14:41 — The rider. Nigel asks whether his Teen Choice Award was waxed for the match: “It was in my contract.” The Shadow King backs him: “Did you wax the Teen Choice Award or not?” The goblin Nigel stumbles off to the prep room. Nigel also demands raw asparagus (“I like to eat it crunchy”). Goblin Nigel returns at once with a silver platter of lightly chilled, freshly cut asparagus.
12. 0:15:58 — The fan. Sprinkles recognizes Nigel from “There Won’t Be Blood”. Nigel delivers his famous line: “You drink my smoothie!” Sprinkles says the movie was long, but Nigel was “electrifying.” Nigel pulls a pen to sign his cheek, and Sprinkles offers a grappling hook to sign instead (“pretty badass, actually”).
13. 0:16:52 — The surfboard. The goblins bring Nigel’s surfboard prop from “Sponge,” the CW’s gritty live-action SpongeBob SquarePants adaptation, which won him the Teen Choice Award. Shadow King: “Did you get slimed or what?” Nigel: “All the time… It’s like a ritual of humility and humbleness when you win this very prestigious award.”
14. 0:17:38 — The blood cannon. GM: “We do not have slime here, but we do have blood.” The Shadow King pulls a CO2 cannon full of blood from under his throne and blasts both champions with it. “Now that you’re both dressed for the arena…” There are chopped guts in the blood too. Sprinkles: “Free food… steak tartare.” Shadow King: “Sure, if you like to eat goblin.” Both goblins freeze and turn slowly. “Don’t worry, it’s no one you know.” Nigel: “Eating goblin is illegal in most places here.”
15. 0:18:52 — The baby Bjorn. Goblin Nigel climbs onto Nigel’s back. Nigel: “Small compatriots… It looks good on camera… You can be my Mandalorian.” He asks for an adorable sound, gets one he doesn’t like (“maybe stay silent”), and lectures it: “It’s about being raw… The steak and the blood that you drink.” Tiny goblin hands poke out from under his cloak. He makes a little baby Bjorn out of his award-outfit kit, and Goblin Nigel cradles himself in it. “I’ll protect you for my life. My life is meaningless. My life is about the art.”
16. 0:20:47 — The friendship bracelet. Sprinkles asks Nigel his two favorite colors. Nigel is offended to be asked as “a Cable Ace Award winning performer,” but answers: “red, like blood, and blue, like the sky. I openly weep while staring at the sky once a day.” Sprinkles produces a red-and-blue friendship bracelet “so we can always remember each other as the bestest of friends.” Nigel suspects he keeps them pre-made in every color combo. Sprinkles: “I typically win employee of the month just because I’m so good natured.” He hopes they both survive and “take home the prize together.”
17. 0:22:15 — The arena. “Come, dear award winners, one of a Teen Choice Award and one of the Employee of the Month Award.” The portal opens onto a deep, cold, damp forest. The ground glows, green fireflies dance among bare branches, and nothing grows high: bare roots and trees, with moldy, wilted grass. GM: “This land is, well, not really meant for living. So I figured it’s the perfect place for dying… make sure that it’s a damn good story.” The Acolytes scream above in a lifted, ghastly fog, in the same husky voice Nigel uses. “Give us a performance we won’t forget.”
18. 0:24:07 — The trowel. Sprinkles asks for a trowel. The Shadow King snaps one out of the ether, and Sprinkles starts working on the dead grass. Shadow King: “While you’re down there, maybe you want to dig your own grave.” “I’m small, but I’m not that small.” “Well, I guess they can’t all be winners.”
19. 0:25:20 — Sprinkles’ angle. Nigel asks what he’s after. Sprinkles: “My friend… she said that I would not be able to win this without exceeding amounts of violence. And, you know, I myself am a pacifist.” Nigel answers that to win awards he eats dirt: “I’m one with the earth. You will be one with the earth.” Sprinkles: “I’m a gardener.” Shadow King: “Everyone does have a heart on the inside, and I would like to see his.” He vanishes, pfft.

Round 1

20. 0:27:11 — The acting lesson. Nigel: “Normally people pay lots and lots of money for this, but… you’re gonna get an acting lesson for free… You’re gonna hate me by the end of this… Let’s start with pleasure and fun.” He flings the friendship bracelet at Sprinkles, says “Knock, knock,” never finishes the joke, and casts Hideous Laughter: mage hands tickle Sprinkles everywhere (“Goochie goochie goo, buddy”). Sprinkles rolls a nat 20 and resists. “What were you saying about the knock knock joke?”
21. 0:28:31 — The necrotic dirt. Nigel backs off 5 ft (“come on, hit me, make me bleed”) and makes a Con save for the necrotic ground he ate earlier. It’s another nat 20, “back to back.” The deadly dirt energizes him instead (“It must be like made of cocaine”), and he gains advantage on his next turn. Mudcat: “Apparently he did a movie where he only ate dirt the entire time.” GM: “You were not supposed to have that option.” Nigel licks more dirt to end his turn: “Yum, yum, yum.”
22. 0:30:13 — The hug. Sprinkles walks slowly in for a hug (“Let’s just bring it in, okay, fella?”) and takes the Dodge action. Nigel refuses to be hugged and tries to slap him like a little glove (“How dare you?”). In the roll-off, Nigel’s Dex (14) beats Sprinkles’ Strength (12). Nigel grabs Sprinkles by the face and stops the hug: “If I’m gonna get my EGOT, I’m gonna get my Oscar today, I’m gonna have to induce some trauma into you apparently, cuz that’s what acting is. It’s projecting trauma.”
23. 0:32:52 — Sprinkles opens up. He was raised with many siblings who called him “stinky head,” and he cried for a long time. He’s proud of his hygiene, “all kinds of soaps,” and fought his acne. People mocked his appearance and the hair on his feet. Now he’s confident: “the kindness that we can pick up along the way is easier when it’s spread.” Nigel: “You were getting there, but then you lost the plot and started being nice again.” He whispers: “This is gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna hurt you. I’m gonna fucking corrupt you.”
24. 0:34:53 — The family secret. The end-of-round roll for the GM is a 6: “You are an absolute disappointment to me.” When someone says a six is enough, the Shadow King replies, “My mom said that.” GM: “How would you know what my mother said?” Shadow King: “Because she was my sister-in-law. It got really confusing there at the end.” The Grandmaster sits in shock at “this very unwanted piece of family history” laid at her feet before the whole arena. “This is absolutely a great moment and I am handling very well and will not have a breakdown over [it].” She kicks off round 2 “in a very erratic format.”

Round 2

25. 0:35:57 — “You want a hug?” Sprinkles offers the Grandmaster a hug. She explodes. She’d rather shove the Shadow King’s face down a trash can, let a lawnmower run it over, put it through a weed eater, grind it into sausage, feed it to Doug, squish what Doug poops out, “throw him over the freaking waterfall and hope that I never see him after that.” Nigel: “That’s raw… Celestial beings and they have all this weird humanistic trauma… use it.” Shadow King: “Elusia, I’m really proud of you.” She scoots her chair away from him inch by inch, loudly. “I just want to see blood spilled this day.”
26. 0:37:26 — Suggestion. Nigel: “You wanna see blood? You’ll see blood… you’re gonna see my blood.” He casts Suggestion: “come on, fucking hit me… draw blood.” Sprinkles fails (Wisdom 5). Nigel lies down prone to make it easier. Sprinkles’ advantage rolls are a 1 and a 2. “Oh, this is embarrassing on multiple levels as a pacifist.” The Acolytes boo: “You stink.”
27. 0:39:32 — The voice. Sprinkles hits himself in the head: “No, not yet, not yet.” Nigel: “You got a little voice that talks to you too, huh?” Sprinkles: “Yeah, sure, she’s my friend… She made a bet with me.” Nigel: “And I’m a fucking Colonel of Khorne.” Sprinkles points out he can’t be, “because you’re currently a guy.” Nigel: “Gosh, you’re harder to coach than Jonah Hill.” Sprinkles: “Is Jonah Hill a gnoll, perhaps? Gnoll Hill.”
28. 0:40:58 He swings again (18) and punches Nigel for 1 point of bludgeoning damage, without the trowel. Sprinkles panics: “No, no, no… I haven’t lost yet.”
29. 0:41:47 — The can. The GM asks if he needs anything, and he asks for another cherry bubbly. She throws one down, rolling an 18 to hit against his AC 10, for 1 point of “can damage.” It leaves a small dent in both him and the can. Nigel: “Can damage better than can’t damage.” GM: “Points deducted.” Sprinkles: “I like doing can’t damage… because we’re all friends.” Shadow King: “I’m sorry, I fell asleep while you weren’t attacking.”
30. 0:43:14 — The song and the truth. Nigel brings out his Tony Award for best actor in a play. “We need to be truthful and vulnerable.” He sings a song from “the musical rendition of the life of Britney Spears,” trained by “the untrained Russell Crowe” from Les Misérables: “…should have a warning, it’s dangerous, I’m falling.” He casts a truth spell (transcribed “Black Hat’s known the truth”; likely Zone of Truth) and chooses to fail it himself. Sprinkles also fails. Nigel is a changeling: he reshapes part of his face to look like Sprinkles’ (“You can be anybody you wanna be”), then changes it back. “Why do you need to please people so much to make friends? Why can’t you be mean and still have friends?”
31. 0:45:25 — The dark passenger. Under the truth spell, Sprinkles says: “It’s because the dark passenger that resides inside me scares me a bit, so I have to counteract it with kindness.” Nigel: “I just got shivers… that’s our angle.” Sprinkles: “Oh no, she’s gonna be angry… I don’t get angry. That’s her job. I just get sad.” Nigel turns to the crowd like an acting class: “This is what happens when you finally start telling the truth to yourself.”
32. 0:46:42 — Nigel’s truth. “Listen, I fucking hate my stuff… I constantly watch movies so I can look at myself and cry and yell at myself on the screen.” He also loves himself: “Look at this chin… I literally made it myself. I can change the way my face looks. But also… Sometimes I don’t know who I am.”
33. 0:47:36 Sprinkles: “She doesn’t want me to know who I am because I made a mistake… a long time ago. And now I’m living with it.” Nigel: “This is good exposition.” “I tear the line between reality and storytelling… I may just be a face in a box.” Sprinkles: “It’s her. It’s not me… I don’t want to lose this bet because that means I’ve lost who I am.”

Chaos event — the grandma zombies (0:48:38)

34. The cheering Acolytes trigger a chaos event. The dead ground shifts and mounds, skeletal hands burst out, and skeletons rise across the forest. They are well armed but wear sweet old-lady dresses and carry purses full of Werther’s: “grandma zombies.” “Should you get too close, they’ll try to give you a deadly embrace… Meemaw meemaws for days!”
35. 0:50:17 Sprinkles: “Are you sure about this? Do you really want to meet the Dark Passenger?” Nigel: “Absolutely… Older women get a lot of hate and vitriol inside the acting industry… Let’s beat them up the same way we beat each other up.”

Round 3 — the Dark Passenger

36. 0:50:51 — The transformation. Sprinkles closes his eyes. When he opens them they hold a demonic flame. He rages: his bones crack, his arms and body extend, and his jaw drops and cracks. “Finally, now it’s time for bloodshed.” The dark passenger points at Nigel: “So, would you like me to rip out your spine? Or should we take care of these things together? Send them back where they once came?” Nigel: “I want to see impulse. You do you, hombre.”
37. 0:52:36 — Claws. His phalanges sharpen and push out of his fingertips as knife-like claws. His first attack is a nat 20 with Brutal Critical. Nigel: “now we’re playing.” He casts Silvery Barbs, and the reroll is a 12. “Not the face, not the face.” His face shifts and he slips out of the way. Dark passenger: “Coward, I will take your face and shove it up your ass.” The second attack is a nat 1. “Come here. Why don’t you give me a nice big hug?”
38. 0:54:39 — Grandma’s kiss. Nigel flips his hair, now “late 90s Nicolas Cage hair,” and rages. Both have advantage on the grapple, and Nigel wins. “Give grandma a little kiss.” He shoves Sprinkles into a zombie, Gertrude. She deals 9 necrotic damage: jaw hanging, she licks his face and presses the inside of her mouth onto him. GM: “As we all know, grandmothers have very corrosive breath.” Nigel: “Is the rage coming out? Unleash the cage, baby.” Dark passenger: “You made a mistake bringing me close to you.”
39. 0:57:28 — The surfboard swing. Nigel lets go, steps back, grabs his Teen Choice Award and swings it up (19) for 12, halved by rage. You hear a sound like the SpongeBob surfboard.
40. 0:58:38 — Three attacks. Sprinkles: “Do you want to try method acting as a corpse?” Reckless, he attacks three times. “Sprinkles isn’t here anymore. Sprinkles is a pacifist, but the dark passenger certainly isn’t.”

• The first claw hits for 12.
• The second is another nat 20. Nigel uses Cutting Words: “What are you, Paddington? Paddington Bear? What is this, a weird CW remake? It was a really cool CW remake that I was in.” It cuts the damage by just 1.
• Infectious Fury: Nigel fails the save and takes 40 psychic damage on the crit. “Not the bees! Not the bees!” (speaker uncertain). Dark passenger: “Finally, someone’s come to take out that fragile ego and cut you to death with my pieces.”
• The third hit does 5.

41. 0:63:03 [1:03:03] — The grandmothers’ gift. The two end “butt to butt… cheek to cheek, surrounded by meemaws”: Gertrude, Hannah, “Arbitrary,” and other random old ladies. The grandmothers chant the champions’ names like “old deadly sirens,” but it feels comforting “in that wonderful grandma way.” Both champions get hero points, “thanks to the gift of the grandmothers that came from the gift of the Acolytes. You know, we do a re-gifting process.” GM: “go Super Saiyan or Rose Gold… Plus ultra.”
42. 1:04:32 10-minute break announced. 1:04:47 Shadow King: “Welcome back, Acolytes. Let’s get this over with.” (Cut.)

The Box of Chaos (1:04:51)

43. A beautiful pink-and-yellow meteor falls into the arena and crashes between the champions and Meemaw Anna. The box opens to hot flames and an oddly cool space. Shadow King: “Champions, this is my former home. It’s more spacious on the inside than you might think.” You sacrifice to it and receive a magic item. “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
44. 1:05:53 — Majestic Wolf. “We’re going to need some juice.” The Shadow King’s spectral hand whips over the crowd and grabs an Acolyte sitting quietly: “You, Majestic Wolf!” It forms a giant spectral bow and fires Majestic Wolf like an arrow across the arena into the box. Majestic Wolf hits their head on the side of the box, breaks their neck and falls in. The lid slams shut, the box rumbles, and a column of pink and yellow fire shoots into the sky. Majestic Wolf’s transformed soul crawls out with yellow eyes: “Let’s make a deal.”

Round 4

45. 1:07:51 — Face off. Nigel thinks the flames will hurt, so he shoves his head in, “going full Nicolas Cage, trying to go Ghost Rider,” and offers the skin of his face. The face doesn’t burn. Two yellow demon eyes stare back, and Freddy Krueger-like hands saw the skin off his face, cutting through nerve endings and sinew. Then, like Dwight from The Office, the box spirit slaps the face on itself. GM: “Face off.”
46. 1:09:36 The box gives him an Ioun Stone of Fortitude (+2 Constitution; his HP rises to 137). GM: “Turns out you can manage to eat more of this dirty, dirty dirt.” Nigel: “I’m gonna win this Oscar without a face. You try acting without a face.”
47. 1:10:44 — Breaking the award. He goes into a berserker frenzy, snaps his Teen Choice award over his knee and dual-wields the pieces. “You see the soul of SpongeBob leave, as I had conjured it for that performance.” “You wanna know what it costs to win all these awards?” Goblins (00): “We wanna know the cost.”
48. 1:11:41 — The SAG award. His reckless attacks with his SAG award hit, and one is a nat 20. He slams Sprinkles in the head with both pieces “like that little wind-up monkey,” for 39.
49. 1:13:31 — The gyrations. Nigel does weird body gyrations, with blood flying from his fleshless face. His performance check is a 30: “basically Abed from Community doing the Cage.” The GM awards an extra d6 of “Nick Cage damage,” its own category. Mudcat: “No one’s resistant to Nick Cage damage… We all had to watch Gone in 60 Seconds. No one’s immune.” Nigel: “Nick Cage damage is ascended psychic damage.” The Acolytes are stunned, essentially paralyzed, for the next few minutes. Sprinkles: “Sprinkles has been hurt physically, but I have been hurt emotionally.”
50. 1:16:19 — The bracelets. Sprinkles sacrifices all of his friendship bracelets to the box, “as this voice screams in the head of the body that is Sprinkles”: “No, the friendship bracelet! It’s worth so much!” The figure in the box, still wearing Nigel’s face, catches them and lines its arms with them. The first result tosses them back: “We don’t want this.”
51. 1:17:47 — The cat. Nigel’s face flings out of the box too. GM: “There’s a small pet cat actually right now that has wandered into the Box of Chaos and it is wearing your face.” Sprinkles suggests an Evil Dead-style Necronomicon. Caustic Phoenix suggests the What We Do in the Shadows cow with a human face. “Everyone believe what you want to believe for this cat in the box.”
52. 1:18:32 — The cloak of Nigel. The box rumbles again. The figure, no longer wearing Nigel’s face, holds a cloak made from Nigel’s face, sewn together with Sprinkles’ own friendship bracelets. It’s a reskinned hellhound cloak that lets him polymorph into Nigel and use Nigel’s whole kit and hit points. “It’s a cursed item, but we’ll worry about that some other day.” Sprinkles: “I’m already cursed. I have a demon living inside my brain.” Dark passenger: “I’m gonna save this for later. And then in your dying moments, you can watch as you kill your own career.”
53. 1:20:19 Nigel’s own face whips around on the cloak. “Do it. Me versus me. I’m killing myself. This is art.” He is shirtless from “bulking up for a Marvel movie or a DC movie.” Three reckless claws hit (20, 21, 18), and Infectious Fury triggers again (Nigel’s Wisdom save is a 4). Mudcat: “You never go full Nick Cage.” 24 damage. Dark passenger: “Do you want to be an actor? Why don’t you try playing dead?” GM: “You’d be perfect for the role.” Mudcat: “You’re hired.”
54. 1:23:17 — The grandmas leave. The Shadow King rolls a nat 1 at the end of the round, “the worst,” and says he rolled one last time too. The Grandmaster snaps her fingers and six goblins run out, each grabbing a grandmother and dragging her off through a dark portal. Holes remain where they were. The smell of death returns moments later, because the grandmothers have gone up to the Shadow King’s seat to beat him with their purses: 42 points of “purse damage.” “Shame on you, Sonny!” Werther’s-laden purses and brooches strike him.
55. 1:25:20 The Shadow King takes the hits unmoving in his throne. Then his eyes flash yellow and the grandmothers fly into the sky. “That was interesting. Can we move on?” “Every now and then we’ll see a grandmother floating in the sky… still unable to land.”
56. 1:26:12 The GM explains hero points again: “dream big… an ultra move… Be reckless with your dreams.” She warns that a forgotten hero point brings “the wrath of the Acolytes.”

Round 5 — Nigel’s last performance

57. 1:27:42 Nigel to “Evil Sprinkle”: “You’re my biggest nemesis… I need to make you the hero and I’ve gotta be the villain.” He kicks the box open and jumps in whole: “All the best performances happen after you’re dead.” He gives his life so this is his last performance ever: “regardless of what happens today, I’m dead.” GM: “This is unhinged.”
58. 1:28:20 — The skin suit. Mudcat: “Fuck it. We’re doing it live.” The shadowy soul fillets Nigel’s skin off piece by piece. Nigel dies in the box, and the shadow spirit comes out wearing him like a skin suit, with only the shadow face inside where the face should be. Everything it does now deals an extra d10 necrotic. The new voice: “Aren’t we all just meat sacks being worn by any persona that we want to have?”
59. 1:29:28 — Danny DeVito’s toe knife. It shapes itself into a shadow Robert De Niro: “I’m going to fucking slice you up.” It pulls out “my little toe knife… given to me by my best friend, Danny DeVito.” Sprinkles: “Maybe you’re a bad fella.” It hits for 40 bludgeoning (“it’s a dull knife”) plus 15 necrotic.

• The knife is a prop from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. DeVito, “a devil… an infernal,” gave it to the shadow in the box.
• It carries whatever disease lives in a toe “that has existed for multiple millennia” and never had its shots.
• Sprinkles takes an infected wound.

60. 1:32:15 — The name. GM: “Should we still call you Sprinkles?” “My name is Melchizedek, the Dark One, and I have come to find a more suitable host.” “That is the name of my flesh puppet. That pathetic little halfling, the quivering whelp.” GM: “So we have flesh puppet versus flesh puppet.”
61. 1:32:54 — The hostile takeover (hero point). Melchizedek: “This… slightly occupied vessel of this famous actor… is a much more worthy vessel for a Lord of Darkness than a tiny little halfling named Sprinkles.” He tries to kick the shadow out of Nigel’s body. He takes the face off the cloak and uses it to “lid myself into the body.” “I want a new home!”
62. 1:33:28 — The arena moves inside Nigel. “Our arena changes as it is now taking place inside Nigel, as spirit versus spirit. You two will fight for ownership of Nigel Night Louis’s body.” Both fighters use Nigel’s capabilities. GM: “There are two wolves inside of you.” Sprinkles’ body is left unoccupied outside: “Oh, gee, what the heck is going on, guys?” Inside, the two are incorporeal and can trigger Nigel’s bodily actions.
63. 1:35:25 — The asparagus. Melchizedek: “I’m gonna make Nigel piss. It’s gonna smell like asparagus!” Nigel’s player: “Sometimes you plant a seed… and the opportunity comes up out of nowhere.” GM: asparagus piss is very toxic, Con save.
64. 1:36:03 — Their true forms. Nigel’s essence takes the form of a bright-eyed little Newsie: a high schooler who just did his first musical and was told for the first time that he was worth something. Melchizedek: “I’m going to tear you apart limb from limb, boy.” Melchizedek’s true form is a nine-headed dragon-snake thing. GM: “Your childhood version of yourself face off this nine-headed demon.” The kid does a little box step. GM: “We have no sympathy for the British children.”
65. 1:38:08 — Hold Person. Melchizedek drops his rage: “Hold still, boy.” He casts Hold Person, and the Newsie freezes mid box step.
66. 1:39:24 — The stomach acid. The Shadow King’s roll of 9 crosses the chaos threshold, “despite the two nat ones in a row and taking 46 points of damage.” “I’m not sure there’s much I can add to this. It’s already so chaotic.” He and the GM both planned the same thing.

• The Chinese food Nigel ate earlier “isn’t meant to sustain both of you.” The stomach gurgles like a small motorcycle.
• Both pass the Con save against the smell: “quite an iron nose.”
• Both fail the Dex save (the Newsie auto-fails, being held). An avalanche of chunky vomit and acid sweeps them to opposite shoulders of the body, for 16 damage each.
• Mudcat: “You’re both Nigel, but there is no Nigel… The real Nigel’s dead in a box.” “Will the real Nigel please stand up?” The “true Nigel” is still Nigel the Goblin, riding in the baby Bjorn on the body’s back: “Nigel the Purse.”

Round 6

67. 1:44:47 — “You can’t stop the beat” (hero point). The child Nigel is “the essence of the love for art and theater of Nigel as a child.” He tries to break the hold by tap dancing: “It’s not about the accolades yet. It’s about just the pure fun of doing it.” His performance roll is a 27, and he breaks free, singing “Now is the time to seize the day… Let us seize the day.” Melchizedek: “Impossible.”
68. 1:47:08 GM almost calls him Macklemore. Melchizedek: “I’m going to pop some Nigels.” Melchizedek “loathe[s] dancing,” so he resists with History. Nigel: “Oh, so you don’t want to dance?” and starts the Footloose dance. Melchizedek rolls a nat 1 and is charmed: “No thespian before has convinced you that dance is an art… you are truly lost in the sauce.”
69. 1:50:06 — Demon daddy. Child Nigel: “All this anger inside of you. What happened? Do you have a bad demon daddy? Is that it?” Melchizedek: “No. I was an angel who was scorned from heaven for my transgressions against my god. And now I have been forced to become a being of pure hatred and pain. But this dancing is pretty fucking tight.” Nigel: “Maybe you can get over your daddy, I mean, God issues, if you just channel it into something artistic.”
70. 1:51:28 — The yodel. “Melchizedek is going to think, all nine of her heads, what art would she be good at?” Everyone builds a d12 table: singing, dancing, underwater basket weaving, crafting dollhouses, confectionary cakes, yodeling, leatherwork, drawing, sidewalk chalk art, beatboxing, dice molding. (Twitch streaming was dropped: “The lowest form of art, maybe.”) The roll is 8: yodeling. Melchizedek yodels. Nigel: “That’s really good. Just keep working at it. Find your passion. Don’t let anybody bring you down.”
71. 1:54:04 — Awards not yet won. Charmed only to dance, and since the child had begged to be hit all along (“Hit me!”), Melchizedek takes an Emmy in one hand and a SAG award in the other and beats the child with “awards you have not yet won.” That’s 15 damage, the Emmy “got some angles.” They debate whether two souls in one body share a rage: “What if we have to rage together? Because we share one heart.” Nigel keeps raging: “rage tap dancing… Jimmy Jr. level intensity.”
72. 1:57:17 — “I have a dentist appointment.” GM: “Well, what do you think so far?” Shadow King: “Well, I think that this shit’s boring and I have a dentist appointment.” She asks for one last round and asks him to split the body open so the Acolytes can see: “We’ve got a great seamstress.” The Shadow King snaps, Nigel’s body grows to gargantuan size, and a shadow finger slices the chest cavity open “like a Smash Bros map.” “Fine, one more round. Get on with it though.”
73. 1:58:25 — The garden. Outside, Sprinkles proper gardens with his trowel and gets Nigel the Goblin to help. “We just gotta take our minds off it. A lot of therapy after this one.” “Sprinkles is thriving.” A beautiful flower field appears at the foot of the carved-open Nigel.
74. 1:59:11 — The Oscar. The child Nigel looks to the crowd “like really bad CGI. Like they de-aged the regular Nigel.” To Sprinkles: “You see, kid, don’t lose your passion. We’re all gonna kill our demons, but unfortunately, my demon is my own.”

• Still in his frenzy, he picks up a broken bone from his own elongated corpse and imagines it as an Oscar: “Use my imagination, because that’s how I originally got into acting… I’m going to fucking beat you to death with it.”
• Three hits do 71 damage. “It’s fucking overkill as you’re mutilated by a child.”

75. 2:01:53 — The ego death. He describes it:

• Part of his method acting is casting Phantasmal Force on himself to put himself in a scenario.
• “I know I’m dead after this… I’m doing this for myself, for my child, the child that is me. Which is my only child because I have a huge ego.”
• He jumps on Melchizedek and stabs him in the heart three times, “almost like killing myself… ego death style.”
• Blood splurges on his face “like that animation in Kill Bill.” He sighs, drops the bone, and watches a phantasmal Oscar acceptance speech, looking at the award and at himself as a child. “And I just lay there.”
• Sprinkles’ player: “Truly an EGOT death.”

76. 2:03:04 — Melchizedek dies. As Nigel fades, the Acolytes turn to Melchizedek, stabbed three times, with Nigel lying beside him. “What goes through your mind?” “What an unfulfilling existence, being this force of pain and hate… hurt people hurt people,” and “that’s the last thing on Melchizedek’s mind as she just dies.”
77. 2:04:11 — The toast. “Splayed open in this body, large and consuming of this entire arena, two souls now collapsed.” The Grandmaster raises her goblet: “showing us how important it is to see ourselves in this place, to take ownership of an identity and claim it as our own, whatever it may be. Shadow King, are you not entertained?” “Oh, that was a very satisfying ending, in fact.”
78. 2:04:58 — Slimed. “I think it deserves an award.” The Shadow King raises a hand, and green slime rains from the heavens onto Nigel and the original Sprinkles, both still on the ground. The arena fills until both champions drown in slime. “Welcome and good night to D20 Deathmatch!”

Full Dried Blood notes (click to expand)

In character (canon, Dried Blood):

• 2:12:48 Sprinkles’ final words: “When you got something real dark inside you, it’s okay to have that… sometimes the only thing to do in response to that is to live through spite. Not to spite anyone else, but to drive all of your anger to the part of yourself that says you can’t do it. And that way you can direct all the kindness that you now feel towards the good parts to everyone else.”
• 2:14:01 Nigel’s final words: “Since the dawn of time, storytelling has been one of the most important things for people to share with each other… tell stories because you care about the stories, not because you care about how people see you as a storyteller.”

Out of character (creator notes):

• RRollplaying had wanted to be invited “for months.” He’s a forever DM and a writer first (“like Ray Bradbury… but a lot worse and a lot more caffeine”), and he’d never met Matt before. He calls Nigel “a Daniel Day-Lewis–Nick Cage combo.”
• Mudcat had been trying to find a way to cut Nigel’s face off since the Nick Cage talk began, and the Box of Chaos was the only option.
• theplaymatt prepped only what the awards looked like. The Nick Cage bits were improvised: “have ideas, sure, but don’t be married to them.” He loves tone shifting, which is why he played the child.
• Caustic Phoenix praised how both kept the barbarian fight RP-focused and revealed backstory through combat choices. She teared up at the child-Nigel moment, which reminded her of her parents first seeing her on stage. “Mr. Fortune Cookie” for “hurt people hurt people.”