S5E3, Eldritch Fangs - Ruby Rust v Robbie Clark and the Hunger

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Ruby Rust, a giant constrictor snake who codes for a living, was pulled onto a freezing mountain peak to fight Robbie Clark, a cheerful boy from a small town, and the eldritch horror that lives in his backpack. The match was a tug-of-war between a snake trying to squeeze the life out of a monster with seven hundred arms and a monster that kept turning its own child into something worse. It ended with a deeply unsettling victory.

The Story

Fight Day

The Lord of Fate, as The Arbiter now styled himself, was asleep when the day began. He lay in a bedroom in a distant tower, far from everybody, until Thea, his tiny pink imp assistant, burst in with snacks. She had hot dogs, fries and nachos with chili, although the concession stand had run out of mustard, and she warned that after the chili nobody would want to sit next to anyone, with “poison gas everywhere.” She bounced on his bed like an excited child, shedding glitter from her wings with every hop. “It’s fight day. You can’t sleep in on fight day. It’s D&D Deathmatch Chaos!”

He clapped his hands and reality tore itself apart, leaving him on his throne and her in the throne room. When Thea protested breathlessly that the food was still back in the tower and she had only small arms, he snapped his fingers and the food appeared. She had brought her clipboard but lost her pencil, which turned out to be stuck behind her, and she spent a while chasing it.

Then Thea announced the arena, a place she called the Voiceless Mountaintop. “Can you name me one mountain that has a voice?” the Lord of Fate asked, and she admitted she may have named it herself. Her pitch was that it would stay voiceless only until the champions arrived, “and then it’ll be the screaming mountaintop, as they have blood-curdling screams as they’re stabbed to death.” The idea grew on him. He made the mistake of asking for her other names, which included “a really big hill,” since “not everyone within the void has seen a mountain before,” and “cold nipples,” “because they look like cold nipples when they get really hard and then they get pointy.” He took the clipboard away from her.

The Champions

Thea bowed so low that she dropped out of the air to kiss the floor, then clapped her hands. Out of a red circle slithered Ruby Rust, followed by Robbie Clark and the Hunger.

Ruby introduced himself as a coder who types on an ergonomic keyboard with enormous buttons, pressing them one at a time with his tail. “You’re a Python who codes in Python?” the Lord of Fate asked. Ruby did not use Python, Ruby or Rust. He used Java, and he turned to show off a drinking helmet with a cup of hot java strapped to one side. When Thea asked whether snakes even have asses, he answered, “I do not, which is why they can’t kick my ass.” He clarified that, zoologically, he does have an asshole, just no gluteus maximus: “Finding a snake’s asshole can be quite difficult.” Thea guessed it was a cloaca, and the Lord of Fate refused Ruby’s offer to show it: “We’ll see your insides soon enough.”

Robbie Clark had left home on a big adventure and found his buddy, The Hunger. “We’re here to save the day,” he said. “Stopping evil doers… and eventually assimilating all biological life into one unified, wonderful flesh sack.” The Lord of Fate liked “the Eldritch Horror in his backpack” for the win. Ruby pointed out that he had no arms and his opponent had seven hundred, most of them with mouths. When he asked the boy to take the backpack off, Robbie explained, “They’re a two for one deal. It’s connected to my spinal cord now.”

The Lord of Fate then raised a complaint. Last week Thea had brought an elderly gentleman to fight to the death, and this week a teenage boy. “Ever since I usurped the Grandmaster, I’m under a little bit of scrutiny across the Void,” he said, and it was bad optics. Thea countered that the rules laid down by the Grandmaster allowed anyone who could fight and had a decent track record. She added that the worst look of all was ageism, and that she had talked to the lawyers. He gave in, since they were already there.

The Voiceless Mountaintop

Thea opened a portal onto a windswept, icy peak where snow crunched underfoot and the sky was already turning red with the sunset. The Acolytes cheered from an arena high above. She had chosen the place so the champions could “spill blood on the beautiful white snow,” which would make it easier to tell when someone had been hit. Asked if they were ready to die, Robbie said, “I don’t understand object permanence yet.” The cold-blooded Ruby warmed himself with a long pull of hot java.

Ruby opened with moves copied from the martial arts films he had watched, which is hard to do without limbs. He went for the ankles and missed, then whipped his tail across Robbie’s thigh. He sucked on the other tube of his helmet, which led to a cartoonish green bottle with a peeling skull-and-crossbones sticker, and spat poison in the boy’s face. Mouthy tendrils coiled out of the backpack, chanted “the child must live” through several mouths at once and sucked the poison out. Two mouths then chomped at Ruby, and the first bite landed perfectly and fed the Hunger. Ruby parried the second and tapped it on the face like a fencer.

Deals in the Dark

“I’m a man of the people. I will give the Acolytes what they crave,” the Lord of Fate declared. He slammed his fist down and The Box of Chaos crashed into the battlefield in a column of yellow and pink fire. A shadowy, skeletal creature clawed its way out. “Who wants to make a deal?”

Ruby cut off the stretch of tail the Hunger had failed to eat, a lizard trick he claimed as a fellow reptile, and handed the wriggling piece over. In return he got the Shield of the Golden King, which promptly fell face down in the dirt because he had no arm to hold it with. The creature fetched a bale of twine and tied it onto him. “It looks good on you.” Ruby bit his tail stump, rolled at Robbie like a hoop and coiled around him.

The Hunger reached into the box and offered ten years of the child’s life. The color drained from Robbie’s face and he vomited up a gross red orb, which the creature swallowed: “Well, I’ve made deals for worse.” In exchange it handed over a small blue pill: “This should keep you going all night long,” with a warning to seek medical help if the Deathmatch lasted more than four hours. The tendrils went “really turgid.” They pelted the snake with ice-packed snowballs, then popped the boy out of Ruby’s coils like a cork.

Hey, Macarena

A chaos event filled the mountains with a familiar rhythm, and the Acolytes swayed and shouted “Hey, Macarena!” Ruby tried to do the hand movements with no hands, “really trying to summon arms.” He failed badly enough that the twine frayed and the shield fell off. “I’ve never seen anyone lose so much in a nat one!” Thea cried. Ruby concluded, “Maybe next time I create a character with arms.” Thea flew down, looked him in his two eyeballs and told him he was “the greatest Ruby Rust out there.”

Ruby burrowed under the snow, burst up, bit Robbie’s legs and dragged him into the ground. “Ow, my legs. I need those for adventure.” The Hunger yanked the boy into the air by his neck and launched him into a flying kick, which Ruby dodged by flipping over like a snake playing dead. Then came a break, during which the Lord of Fate refused to admit that a lord uses the bathroom and Thea reminded him, “Everyone poops, my lord.” Afterwards Thea demanded snow angels. Robbie noted that “everybody knows that snakes don’t go to heaven.” Acolyte Julia suggested snakes only make snow angles, so Ruby curled himself into an acute one.

The Power of Friendship

Ruby went all in. His venom failed, his attempt to hypnotize the boy like Kaa from the Jungle Book failed, and his landslide became a baby avalanche that stopped right at Robbie’s feet. “That was what I was trying to do. You fell right into my plan.”

Then Robbie decided it was time for the power of friendship. The tendrils stabbed into his body, his eyes went black and veins crackled down his face as the Hunger entombed him into a dark child-tendril amalgam. “That’s what friendship looks like,” Thea marveled. The creature now spoke as “we” and announced, “We are no longer Robbie.”

A second chaos event reversed the setting sun. It rose again hotter and brighter, the snow ran off down the mountain, and the peak became a sudden desert that left both fighters parched. The Hunger grew a taproot through Robbie’s shoe and into the mountain to drink its life force. “Hey! We have to pay for that!” the Lord of Fate shouted, and Thea added, “This is rented land.” The mountain shrank two inches. From then on he ruled that every further deal with the box would also cost the fighter some of their strength.

Ruby snapped off one of his own teeth, which the creature sewed onto a necklace of teeth: “One more for the collection.” In return Ruby received Morir’s Cataclysm, a leather-bound tome whose words wrapped around his skin in glowing markings. He used it for a showpiece trick. Behind the box he shed his skin, climbed back in backwards so it looked as if he were coming the other way, then burst out of the tail end in a surprise bite and botched it completely. The Hunger caught his next lunge with a thorny hand and crushed his drinking helmet, spilling java and poison across the snow. Then a tendril stabbed into Robbie and pulsed like a vacuum cleaner, spilling bits of the child’s liver and organs onto the ground as payment to the box (“That’s really gross,” said the creature). In return it got a rusty spoon that served up tetanus, healed itself, and released perfumed spores meant to make Ruby love it.

The Last Fang

Ruby played along. “Oh, I love you, give me a hug,” he said, then: “But I’m a constrictor snake, bitch!” He finally unleashed his signature Big Squeeze, wrapping the creature tight. For a moment the Hunger and the child seemed to fight each other, and Robbie’s face peeled out to reassure his buddy before being swallowed again. Ruby heard Robbie’s bones break as the Hunger forced its way free and melted into the snow, disguised.

Ruby charged the spot where they had vanished and slammed into a snow-covered rock. “Why am I here?” With “only one trick left,” he began eating his own tail like an Ouroboros, trading flesh for power until he had “eaten now more of myself than a snake can possibly survive.” Pouring blood, he swung his neck like a fighting giraffe and stabbed with his one remaining fang. When the Acolytes asked about the fate of his cloaca, he confirmed, “I’ve eaten my lower half. My lower intestines are now hanging out the back of me.”

The Hunger called him “terrestrial limbless one” and “quite an opponent.” Its spikes tore open a fissure, and Ruby plunged in, wedged between rocks, instinctively reaching for a ledge with limbs he didn’t have. The killing blow came down. The Hunger unzipped around the child, and Robbie stepped out like a butterfly from a cocoon, his clothes oddly clean, looking just as he had at the start. “Oh, hey down there,” he chirped, as tentacles drew Ruby’s biomass up like leeches. “It was sure fun playing! I’m excited for you to become one of the giant biomass!”

Ruby’s last thought was of the website he was halfway through building. “And there never will be,” said the Lord of Fate. The Acolytes gave a standing ovation. The Lord of Fate conceded the pair were mighty warriors, but said that for the public record he would still have preferred a middle-aged adult, though “with the economy, it’s hard to find” champions. Thea invited everyone to the after party for nachos and hot dogs.

Dried Blood

Afterwards, Ruby spoke in the voice of a beaten athlete: “We tried, we turned up and give it 110%… some days it’s your day and some days it’s not your day.” He rebranded himself as “Ruby Red” and blamed his defeat on “an unfair fight with an Eldritch demon,” rather than on a child. Robbie happily reintroduced himself: “this backpack is full of my eldritch horror called The Hunger, and together we fight crime.” At the table, Ruby’s player revealed the snake’s secret move, which he never got to use: constrict, strip away every option, then swallow his opponent whole.

Notable Moments

• Thea’s rejected names for the arena included “a really big hill” and “cold nipples.”
• Ruby lost the Shield of the Golden King by trying to dance the Macarena without hands.
• Robbie sold ten years of his life to the Box of Chaos and got a small blue pill in return.
• The Hunger drank so deeply from the mountain that it shrank two inches, on rented land.
• Ruby shed his skin and climbed back in backwards for a surprise attack, which went horribly wrong.
• Robbie emerged from the Hunger spotless and cheerful as it swallowed his opponent.

Memorable Quotes

Ruby Rust: “I’m cold and I’m cranky because I’m currently fighting an Eldritch Horror and I thought I’d be fighting like a wrestler or something.”

Robbie Clark: “It was sure fun playing! I’m excited for you to become one of the giant biomass!”

• The Lord of Fate: “Can you name me one mountain that has a voice?”
• Robbie Clark: “They’re a two for one deal. It’s connected to my spinal cord now.”
• Thea: “Gosh, I hope you die.”
• The Lord of Fate: “You used to be a worm. You should know better.”
• Ruby Rust: “But I’m a constrictor snake, bitch!”
• Ruby Rust: “Just the website that we’re halfway through working on that’s never going to be finished now.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Ruby Rust (Rob / Robert Hartley GM). The YouTube blurb calls him a “colossal python.”

• Who he is:
  • A giant constrictor snake who works as a coder. He uses Java, not Python, Ruby or Rust.
  • He types with his tail on a big-button ergonomic keyboard.
  • He doesn’t get out much and learned to fight from martial arts and action movies.
  • He calls himself a zoologist. Has a cloaca and no nipples. Has a nictitating membrane.
• Gear:
  • A drinking helmet with hot java on one side and a cartoon poison bottle on the other. It was cracked in round 5.
  • Shield of the Golden King (lost to the Macarena).
  • Morir’s Cataclysm (an extra power-up, shown as glowing markings).
• Body sacrificed: cut off part of his tail by autotomy (it regrows), snapped off an incisor, ate his own lower half like an Ouroboros.
• Abilities: constriction, the Big Squeeze, a never-used swallow-whole ability, shedding his skin, hoop-rolling, burrowing.
• End: consumed into the Hunger’s biomass. His last thought was his unfinished website. He calls himself “Ruby Red” in Dried Blood. Pronouns vary between he and they.

Robbie Clark (Cinder / Cinderblock Sally).

• A boy from a small town who said goodbye to his parents.
• The Lord of Fate claims Robbie ran off at 10 and is a teenager. Robbie says he doesn’t understand object permanence and has trouble remembering things “because I am a child.”
• Gave up 10 years of his life and some of his organs to the box.
• Emerged clean and unharmed at the end. Speaks in “Oh boy” and “G. Willikers” style.

The Hunger (Cinder, with some lines tagged 02).

• An eldritch horror in Robbie’s backpack, connected to his spinal cord. Hundreds of tendrils (“700 arms”), most of them with mouths.
• Has no cloaca and an infinite stomach. Its aim is to unify all life into “one giant flesh sack” or “collective bio-consciousness.”
• Powers: sucks out poison, entombs Robbie (“the power of friendship”), drains a mountain through a taproot, camouflages as snow, spore polyps, fissure spikes.
• Items: the blue pill (survives six fatigue) and the rusty spoon (tetanus).
• The pair later insist on being called “the Hunger” or “the Hunger and the child.”

Thea (Caustic Phoenix). A tiny pink imp whose wings shed glitter.

• The Lord of Fate’s assistant, with a clipboard, a performance report and a fear of losing her job.
• Names arenas. Brought the snacks. Has small arms.
• The Lord of Fate says she used to be a worm.
• She keeps up with the cloaca jokes and wants an infinite stomach.

The Lord of Fate (Mudcat).

• Says he “usurped the Grandmaster” and is under scrutiny across the Void.
• His bedroom is in a distant tower because he likes to stay away from everybody.
• Powers seen: rips reality to move them both to the throne room, snaps food into place, summons the Box of Chaos.
• Keeps a performance report on Thea. Wants middle-aged champions. Won’t admit lords use the bathroom.

The Box of Chaos creature (Mudcat). A shadowy skeleton-like creature that claws out of the box.

• Swallowed Robbie’s years. Wears a necklace of teeth of all different kinds, now including Ruby’s incisor.
• Tied Ruby’s shield on with twine. “Honestly, I’m not picky.”

Julia: an Acolyte (chat member) who coined “snow angles.”

Others mentioned: “an elderly gentleman” from last week’s match (unnamed); Grandmaster Elusia (author of the Deathmatch rules); “the lawyers.”

Places

• The Lord of Fate’s bedroom, in a tower “on the other side,” away from everybody.
• The throne room (location not stated).
• The Voiceless Mountaintop: a snowy, windy peak under a red sunset, with an arena of Acolytes above it.
  • It became a desert when the sun reversed.
  • It is rented land and shrank two inches when the Hunger drained it.
  • Thea’s rejected names for it: the mountain, a really big hill, cold nipples, the hard nipple place.
• The concession stand (out of mustard).

Items

• Shield of the Golden King: golden, raises Mettle, shatters on a nat 1 defense. It was tied to Ruby with twine and lost in the Macarena.
• Small blue pill: lets the user survive six fatigue. “Seek medical help” after four hours.
• Morir’s Cataclysm: a leather-bound tome of great power and destruction. Its words wrap onto the reader’s skin as glowing markings and grant a power-up.
• Rusty spoon: tetanus, grants an extra status effect.
• Ruby’s drinking helmet (java and poison), the ergonomic keyboard, Thea’s clipboard and pencil, and the nachos with chili, hot dogs and fries.

Lore statements

• Not everyone in the Void has seen a mountain (Thea).
• The Deathmatch rules laid down by Elusia allow any champion who can fight and has a decent track record.
• The Lord of Fate usurped the Grandmaster and faces scrutiny across the Void.
• Thea was formerly a worm.
• Box of Chaos deals: the first is a free sacrifice; later uses also cost a fatigue.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening: the Lord of Fate’s bedroom

1. 0:05:46 “Welcome to D20 Deathmatch!” The Lord of Fate grumbles: “That’s just a lot of noise.”
2. 0:06:03 Snacks. Thea is thrilled that it’s fight day. She brought a ton of snacks, including hot dogs, but the concession stand ran out of mustard. She also brought nachos with chili (“you probably don’t want to sit next to anyone… poison gas everywhere, and it’ll be part of… the whole thing… at the arena”). Fries come with it.
3. 0:06:18 The Lord of Fate is lying in bed taking a nap. He asks for five seconds to wake up. She counts to five (“One, two, three, four, five. I brought nachos!”).
4. 0:06:55 Thea jumps on his bed and bounces like an excited child. Small glitter escapes from her wings with every hop. She has brought “two really great champions” and chants “You have to get up” over and over. “You can’t sleep in on fight day. It’s D&D Deathmatch Chaos!”
5. 0:07:22 The throne room. The Lord of Fate claps his hands and reality rips itself apart. He is now sitting on the throne, and Thea is in the throne room instead of his bedroom. “It’s a pretty neat trick, right?”
6. 0:07:42 Thea complains, all in one breath, that he left the food behind. His bedroom is “the fault [vault?], you know, tower on the other side, because you like to stay away from everybody.” Fetching the food would take her an hour and multiple trips, “and i only have two time things [two tiny wings?]… i also have small arms.” The Lord of Fate: “Could you breathe in between sentences maybe.”
7. 0:08:29 He snaps his fingers and all the food appears in the throne room. “Are you happy now?”
8. 0:08:42 The clipboard. Thea has her clipboard but has lost her pencil. “It’s behind you.” She chases it around trying to pull it out.

The arena’s name

9. 0:09:12 Thea will take the champions to “this really cool excluded place called the Voiceless Mountaintop.” She insists he echo it. The Lord of Fate: “Can you name me one mountain that has a voice? … Did you name this location?” “I… may have?”
10. 0:09:42 Her pitch: it’s voiceless until the champions arrive, “and then it’ll be the screaming mountaintop, as they have blood-curdling screams as they’re stabbed to death.” The Lord of Fate: “Okay, the idea’s growing on me.”
11. 0:10:08 The other names. She has “at least 20 more names.” He asks for five.
    • “The mountain”, because it would echo really well.
    • “A really big hill”, because “not everyone within the void has seen a mountain before.”
    • He stops her: “I regret asking instantly.”
    • She gets one more in: “Cold nipples… because they look like cold nipples when they get really hard and then they get pointy.”
12. 0:10:52 The Lord of Fate takes the clipboard away from her: “You’ve grown beyond it, I think. I see that potential in you.”

The champions

13. 0:11:07 One champion “won’t poof” because “they don’t have the fists to do it.” Thea bows so low she drops from the air to kiss the floor his feet walk on. She claps her hands, and out of a red circle slithers Ruby Rust, followed by Robbie Clark and the Hunger.
14. 0:11:59 Ruby Rust.
    • “I’m a giant constrictor snake, and I’m a coder in my day-to-day life.”
    • He types on an ergonomic keyboard made for his snake body: very large buttons that he presses one at a time with his tail, “haunt [hunt] and peck.” “It’s very slow, but I’m good at my job.”
15. 0:12:33 The languages joke.
    • The Lord of Fate: “You’re a Python who codes in Python?”
    • Ruby: “I don’t use Python… I don’t use Ruby or Rust either. I use Java.”
    • He turns his head to show a beer hat (drinking helmet) on his head with a cup of java on the outside. “The Java keeps me going, and that’s not the coding language I use either.”
    • “In my after work, I’m also a champion fighter! And I’m going to kick some ass!”
16. 0:13:09 The cloaca.
    • Thea: “Do snakes have asses?” Ruby: “I do not, which is why they can’t kick my ass.”
    • He clarifies: zoologically he has an asshole but no gluteus maximus. “Finding a snake’s asshole can be quite difficult.”
    • Thea guesses it’s a cloaca, like a bird’s. Ruby: “Yes, that’s right.”
    • Someone asks “Who taught you that word?” (speaker uncertain).
    • Ruby: “You wanna see?” Thea: “Yes!” The Lord of Fate: “No… We’ll see your insides soon enough.”
17. 0:14:08 Robbie Clark.
    • “My name’s Robbie Clark! … I come from a small town and I went on a big adventure saying goodbye to my parents and I found my buddy, The Hunger.”
    • The Hunger: “I will consume you!”
    • Robbie: “We’re here to save the day. Stopping evil doers… and eventually assimilating all biological life into one unified, wonderful flesh sack.”
18. 0:14:43 The Lord of Fate: “I’m not quite sure about the child, but the Eldritch Horror in his backpack seems like a pretty solid bet for the win.”
    • Ruby: “I don’t have any arms, and he has 700.”
    • Thea notes that most of the arms have mouths. “That is real gross.”
19. 0:15:15 The backpack.
    • Ruby asks to fight the kid without the backpack: “I’ll take off my helmet if he takes off the backpack.”
    • Robbie: “They’re a two for one deal. It’s connected to my spinal cord now.” Ruby: “Oh, that’s hideous.”
    • Thea compares it to Ruby’s cloaca: both are exposing themselves to the world.

The sidebar: ageism

20. 0:15:52 The Lord of Fate: “Last week you brought an elderly gentleman to fight to the death. And this week you’re bringing a teenage boy. Can we not find something, like, in the middle?” Robbie: “I’m an adventurer!”
21. 0:16:12 The Lord of Fate: “Just because your parents neglected you and let you run off from home at 10 years old does not make you an adventurer.” He asks for someone in their 20s or 30s.
22. 0:16:24 The rules. Thea: “according to the D20 Deathmatch rules that were laid out… by the Grandmaster, Elusia, … as long as they can fight and kick ass and they have somewhat of a decent track record… they can be chosen.”
    • The Lord of Fate: “generally that’s the rule of thumb.” Ruby: “I find that language offensive.” (a thumb joke)
23. 0:16:57 Bad optics. The Lord of Fate: “ever since I usurped the Grandmaster, I’m under a little bit of scrutiny across the Void, and it’s really just a bad look to have old people and teenagers beating each other up… It’s bad optics.”
    • Thea: “You know what’s the worst look? Ageism.” She has “talked to the lawyers.”
    • He relents: “we’re already here.”
24. 0:17:42 Thea asks whether he’d prefer “the hard nipple place.” Ruby: “I also don’t have nipples, so that’s also offensive.” He offers to trade: “I’ll show you my cloaca, you show me your nipples.” Robbie: “What’s a cloaca?” “You wanna see? I’ll show you.”

The Voiceless Mountaintop

25. 0:18:26 Thea, “this tiny little pink imp”, claps her hands five times and opens a portal.
    • The champions step out into a breezy, icy-cold place. Snow crunches underfoot and leaves a clear trail.
    • Billowing white clouds fill the sky, “but the sky, as if beckoning for blood, has already been tinted red as the sun begins to set.”
26. 0:19:12 Thea: “I bring you here to make sure that you can spill blood on the beautiful white snow, … easier for all of us to tell when you’ve actually been hit.”
    • The Acolytes sit in an arena high above, cheering.
    • “Push yourself… to the very tippy top, which is why we’re at the mountain, because it’s the top. Get it?”
    • “Let this voiceless mountain be filled with blood and the sounds of your victory.”
27. 0:20:08 The Lord of Fate: “Maybe a touch overdramatic, but I can’t fault you for the flair.” Thea: “I’m not overdramatic.”
28. 0:20:27 “Champions, are you ready to die?” Robbie: “I don’t understand object permanence yet.” The Lord of Fate: “Close enough.”
29. 0:20:43 Ruby gets cold.
    • Ruby: “I’m a creature that has no homeothermic response… I really appreciate being brought into this freezing cold scenario. Luckily for me, I have my hot java.”
    • He sucks the hot coffee down one side of the beer helmet.
    • Thea: he becomes warm “as if you are in hell itself.”

Round 1 (initiative: Ruby 16, Robbie 6)

30. 0:21:55 The ankles.
    • Ruby slithers around, emulating the martial arts movies he has watched, “without any limbs at all.” He goes for the ankles and misses.
    • Robbie: “Help me, the hunger!” The Hunger sends “mass amounts of tendrils in the way of anything that dares harm me, for I am the harbinger of the next life.”
31. 0:23:19 The dead leg. Ruby whips his tail around and gives Robbie a welt across the right thigh. It hits.
32. 0:23:43 The tentacle bite.
    • Ruby: “You’re not the only one who’s hungry!” He bites at one of the Hunger’s tentacles and misses.
    • It just pulses. “Ow, my jaw. I forced it to dislocate. Oh wait, I can do that.”
33. 0:24:20 The venom.
    • Ruby sucks on the other tube of his helmet. It leads to a cartoonish green bottle with a peeling skull-and-crossbones sticker.
    • He takes poison into his mouth “because I’m a constrictor snake, not a venomous snake” and spits it in the child’s face. It hits, and Robbie is poisoned.
34. 0:26:43 Thea: “Your total is already at 14, fucker!” The Lord of Fate: “you don’t have to insult the champions.” Thea: “I’m sorry… I’d do it again.”
35. 0:27:04 The cure. Mouthy tendrils coil out of the backpack. Through several mouths at once they say “the child must live,” and they suck the poison out of the child. Thea goes wild: “Do it again! Do it again!”
36. 0:27:36 The bites. Robbie: “This guy is tough!” The Hunger: “I will just consume like all else.”
    • Two mouths make big chomping bites. The first is a nat 20, which heals the Hunger and gives it an adrenaline.
    • The second goes for “that mean old tail.” Ruby blocks it, whips it around and taps him in the face, “like… sword fighting… he just taps them on the butt to be like, ha ha.”
    • “Ruby doesn’t get out much. Ruby’s basing most of this fighting on martial arts movies and action films.”
37. 0:30:16 Robbie: “we’re going to save the day. Right, The Hunger?” “I will consume.” Thea: “I don’t believe you, but you say it in such a convincing way.”
38. 0:30:36 The performance report.
    • Thea rolls the end-of-round d20 (“the one that is the dice, and it’s got 20 sides”). It’s a 15.
    • She asks whether it goes on her performance report. The Lord of Fate: “Yes… Including the fact that you woke me up from bed today. … Over time, a clear pattern is forming.”

The Box of Chaos

39. 0:31:29 Thea asks for chaos to cheer her up. The Lord of Fate: “I’m a man of the people. I will give the Acolytes what they crave.”
    • He raises his arms: “Chaos!” He slams his fist down, the Box of Chaos slams into the battlefield, and a column of yellow and pink fire shoots into the sky.
    • A shadowy creature claws its way out: “Who wants to make a deal?”

Round 2

40. 0:32:45 Ruby: “I look at the kid with the hunger, and I look at a shadowy deal, and I’m like, I think I need to even the odds.”
41. 0:33:25 Ruby’s sacrifice: his tail.
    • “I’m going to sacrifice the portion of my tail that the hunger could have consumed, but failed.”
    • Through autotomy he cuts off his own tail (“Yeah, I’m a zoologist… Mostly this is a lizard thing, but hey, I’m reptilian”) and hands the wiggling piece to the demon in the box.
    • “That’s fucking weird. But I’m into it.” Then: “And I can regrow it too.” (The split between speakers is uncertain.)
42. 0:34:41 The Shield of the Golden King.
    • The item is “very bright and shiny”: the Shield of the Golden King. It boosts Mettle, and a nat 1 on defense demolishes it.
    • It lands face down in the dirt, its arm strap useless. Ruby: “well, I could have maybe held it with my tail.”
    • The box creature: “Hey, hold on… Don’t worry, I got you.” He goes back into the box for a bale of twine and haphazardly ties the shield onto Ruby. “It looks good on you.”
43. 0:35:57 The hoop snake. Ruby bites his own tail stump, forms a ring and rolls at Robbie like a steamroller with a shield on it. It hits.
    • He uncurls on impact and coils around him to constrict. It hits.
    • He squeezes harder to contain the toothy tentacles and slips. Thea: “The best hog [hug] anyone could ask for.”
44. 0:38:29 Robbie’s sacrifice: ten years.
    • “The hunger, get something cool out of that box.” A tendril says hi to the dark shadow skeleton and reaches into the box.
    • “I give you 10 years of the child’s life.” The creature: “What am I supposed to do with that?”
    • The color drains from Robbie’s face. He vomits up an orb of pustule red, “almost like a gross ball of yarn.”
    • The creature: “Well, I’ve made deals for worse.” He swallows it.
45. 0:39:38 The blue pill.
    • “This shouldn’t have been given to you, this small child.” A small blue pill floats from the hand of the blackened soul. “This should keep you going all night long.”
    • Robbie can now survive six fatigue instead of five. “If your deathmatch lasts longer than four hours, you should seek medical help.”
    • Ruby: “All of the hunger’s tendrils suddenly go really turgid.” A tentacle absorbs the pill.
46. 0:40:15 Snow and ice. The tendrils squeeze out of the constriction and hurl big chunks of ice and snow at the snake. They hit.
    • Thea: “Did you hide rocks in them?”
    • Ruby: “He did the trick of putting the snowball in the freezer… I got told off when I was a kid for doing that.”
47. 0:41:38 The cork. The tendrils pop the child out of the snake’s grasp like a cork.
    • “Let’s make it so we can’t see what’s going on.” A tendril spews a glob of thick mucus slime to blind Ruby.
    • It misses. “My nictating [nictitating] membrane crosses my eyes. Blink sideways.”
48. 0:42:46 “Sidestep.”
    • Thea worries that “sidestep” was insensitive to someone without legs. Ruby: “Calling attention to it was actually worse.”
    • The Lord of Fate: “You used to be a worm. You should know better.”
    • Ruby: “I’m cold and I’m cranky because I’m currently fighting an Eldritch Horror and I thought I’d be fighting like a wrestler or something.”
49. 0:43:36 The mess.
    • Thea: “I really hope that you’ll clean up the mess afterwards.” Robbie: “I don’t like to clean up. I just leave town with the collected biomass.”
    • Thea: “Gosh, I hope you die.”
    • Ruby points out that the shield raises his total. Thea: “Look at how numbers and things go together. I hate smart snakes.”
50. 0:44:45 Thea’s end-of-round roll is a 2 (“if you take the two and you average them together, it’s good”). The Lord of Fate: “it’s almost worse.”

Chaos event: the Macarena (0:45:18)

51. Thea lets Ruby roll “since you were gonna show me your cloaca.” Ruby calls it “cloaca privilege.” He rolls an 18.
52. A familiar rhythm blares through the arena speakers and echoes through the mountains. The Acolytes sway in a synchronized dance and yell “Hey, Macarena!” Roll to dance or be embarrassed.
53. 0:46:24 Ruby rolls a nat 1.
    • He has “a love-hate relationship with this… I love watching people dance, and then I try.”
    • He tries the hand movements with no hands, “really trying to summon arms.”
    • “The twine on that shield begins to fray and break, and you lose the shield.”
    • Thea: “I’ve never seen anyone lose so much in a nat one!”
54. 0:48:01 Ruby: “I think I was right to say that I’m disadvantaged… Maybe next time I create a character with arms.”
55. 0:48:18 Pep talk. Thea flies down and looks him in his “two eyeballs.” “You don’t give up… You are the greatest Ruby Rust out there. And I brought you to this arena because you can do it.” Ruby: “Yeah!”

Round 3

56. 0:48:41 Under the snow. Ruby immediately digs down into the snow to hide and takes a sip of java under there to keep from freezing.
57. 0:49:07 He tunnels to the kid and bursts up to bite his legs, “as if I’m gonna try and swallow him from the ground up.” It hits.
    • Thea: “Eat his foot! He doesn’t deserve feet! … If you can’t have feet, no one can!”
58. 0:49:53 Dragged into the ground.
    • Ruby latches on and drags Robbie into the ground. It’s a nat 20 and Robbie is restrained.
    • Thea misheard “drugging a child.” Robbie: “Ow, my legs. I need those for adventure.”
59. 0:51:01 Ruby sips the venom and tries a poison bite through the snow. It misses.
60. 0:52:05 The super kick.
    • The Hunger’s tendrils throttle the child up into the air. He ragdolls by the back of his neck before being set down.
    • “I’m gonna use my special super kick.” The tendrils shove into the ground and launch Robbie forward to kick.
    • He kicks at disadvantage against the hidden snake. Ruby rolls a nat 20 on defense.
    • He barrel-rolls aside, the way snakes playing dead flip over, and the kick slams down: “Snow eruption.”
61. 0:53:42 The lamprey.
    • “This isn’t looking too hot. What do you think we should do?” “Consume.”
    • Three tendrils mash into one giant lamprey mouth that drills down at Ruby (a power-up). It misses; the rolls were read backwards at first.
    • Ruby: he “sort of just like flinched in its direction and you smacked into my helmet instead.” He jokes about losing “a fighting spirit from shame. Self-applied.”
62. 0:54:41 The blame.
    • The Lord of Fate blames Thea for the roll order: “This is your fault for not managing them… I’m making a note of this.”
    • Thea to the champions: “Listen, Lich [?], you don’t make me look bad or I’m gonna lose my job … the attacker rolls first.”
63. 0:55:16 Robbie: “The hunger, this might be our toughest battle yet.”
64. 0:55:33 The bathroom break.
    • The Lord of Fate wants a break. Thea: “Oh, do you have to go to the bathroom?” He: “It’s not really dignified for everyone to know that a lord uses the bathroom.” Thea: “Everyone poops, my lord.” Ruby offers him the book.
    • Robbie: the Hunger has no cloaca. “It has an infinite stomach to hold all life so that we can all unify into one giant flesh sack.”
    • Thea wants an infinite stomach (“really eco-friendly”) and will research it on the break. Ruby: “Can I go home during that time?” The Lord of Fate: “No. You stay here until one of you is dead.”

After the break

65. 0:56:52 Snow angels.
    • Thea: “I want to see snow angels in the ground right now.” Ruby: “That’s really offensive.”
    • Robbie: “Everybody knows that snakes don’t go to heaven.”
    • Ruby: “My snow angel is just a lowercase L. My snow elf.”
    • Robbie’s would be a circle, “a biblically accurate one.”
    • Acolyte Julia: “snakes only do snow angles.” Ruby curves into an acute angle. Thea: “We love our Acolytes.”

Round 4

66. 0:58:28 Ruby has spent the break planning: “I have to go all in to try and kill this thing before it can power up.”
    • He spits venom again. It fails.
    • He spends his heroic surge (“I dig down deep knowing that it’s all or nothing”) to reset his status effects.
67. 0:59:17 The hypnosis. He tries to hypnotize the kid “all Car [Kaa] from the Jungle Book style”: “You don’t want to fight me. You want to retract this hunger and make it fight something else.” It fails.
68. 0:59:58 The landslide.
    • He slams his body into the rock to bring a landslide of snow down on the kid. It fails.
    • “It’s a baby avalanche”: the snow stops right at Robbie’s feet.
    • Ruby: “That was what I was trying to do. You fell right into my plan. … Don’t try and see behind the code.”
    • The Lord of Fate: “I don’t think that he realizes what the title Lord of Fate implies.” Thea: “What does it imply?” “Never mind.”
69. 1:02:00 The power of friendship.
    • The Hunger: “It is out of resources soon, and I am still turgid with power.”
    • Robbie: “I think it’s time we use the power of friendship. … Go team!”
    • The tendrils shoot out of the backpack and stab into Robbie’s body. His eyes go black, veins crackle down his face, and the creature slowly entombs him into “this weird sort of amalgamation dark child tendril creature.”
    • Thea: “That’s what friendship looks like. How did I not recognize it?”
    • His Instinct and actions per round go up. “Well, jump in, G. Willikers.”
70. 1:03:21 Ruby explains his failed plan: he needed to strip Robbie’s actions before his own signature move, “and instead… you actually have more actions now.”
71. 1:03:41 The spine. “A lot of villains have tried to stop us in the past, and we’ve consumed them all.”
    • The mutant child skitters forward and tries to pierce Ruby’s spine, aiming at cartilage and tendon “so… you are disjointed from yourself.” Ruby defends: “Just the pure terror is keeping Ruby alive.”
72. 1:04:33 The tendrils jerk at “very sharp unnatural angles” in a power-up attack. It’s a nat 1, and Robbie hurts himself.
    • Ruby: “you did more damage to you on your turn than I did to you on my whole turn?” Robbie: “We are infinite.”
73. 1:05:46 Two regular attacks miss. “The power of friendship not helping.”
    • Ruby dodges and dives, then nips between Robbie’s legs and slithers away.
    • Robbie: “But you shall be ours.” Thea: “I think he wants to adopt him, which sounds really nice.”
74. 1:06:43 Monologue manners.
    • Ruby slithers toward the box mid-monologue. Thea: “can I finish talking, you absolute butthole? I’m sorry, you absolute quaker?” Ruby: “That’s more appropriate.”
    • Ruby: “I’m sorry if my preserving my life got in the way of your monologuing. I’m terrified.” Thea: “The longer I monologue, the longer you’ll get to live, probably.”
    • Thea: “Just drink your java, you dumb snake.”

Chaos event: the sun reverses (1:07:46)

75. Thea’s end roll (19) triggers a second chaos event. “Fuck you, Ruby. That means, Robbie, it’s your turn to roll.” Robbie: “We are no longer Robbie. … The Hunger.”
76. 1:08:26 The desert.
    • The setting sun reverses and rises, brighter and warmer. The snow melts and runs off down the steep mountain, the humidity drops, and the mountaintop becomes a sudden desert.
    • Mouths can’t muster spit, and “even your eyeballs begin to dry, even if you also are mostly mouths.”
    • Roll to find water or become dehydrated. Both gain fatigue, and Ruby also loses fighting spirit.
77. 1:09:57 Ruby: “If only I had some kind of refreshing drink.” He meant coffee. “If you’re feeling dehydrated, definitely drink more coffee.”
78. 1:10:26 The taproot.
    • A giant tendril-less taproot has grown out of the child’s leg, pierced the sole of his shoe and broken deep into the earth, draining the life force of the mountain itself.
    • The Lord of Fate: “Hey! We have to pay for that!” Thea: “This is rented land.”
    • The mountain shrinks two inches. The Lord of Fate: “This is costing us a fortune.”

Round 5

79. 1:11:20 The Lord of Fate rules that further uses of the Box of Chaos cost a fatigue. You die at five fatigue, and an action can clear one.
    • Ruby clears a fatigue first, then slithers over: “Please, you gotta give me something.”
80. 1:12:40 Ruby’s sacrifice: a tooth.
    • He bites the side of the box, twists his head and snaps off one of his incisors. “That hurts way more than I [thought].”
    • His tail is slowly regrowing.
    • The box creature: “One more for the collection.” He sews the tooth into a necklace made of all kinds of teeth.
81. 1:13:27 Morir’s Cataclysm.
    • “A leather bound tome of great power and destruction… inscribed… Morir’s Cataclysm.”
    • The words flow from the page and wrap around Ruby’s leathery skin in glowing markings. He gains an extra power-up.
82. 1:13:55 The shed-skin trick.
    • Out of sight behind the box, Ruby sheds his skin. He climbs back into it the other way round and slithers backwards, so it looks like he’s coming forward around the other side.
    • He bursts out of the tail end of his skin in a power-up surprise bite. It’s a nat 1.
    • “Good use of those actions, Rob. Good use of those actions for flavor.” He’s at four fatigue. The Lord of Fate: “Try not to die… as you do more damage to yourself than anyone else.”
83. 1:16:06 The helmet breaks.
    • The Hunger-child reaches up and stops Ruby’s lunge with a hand that grows gnarled thorns and vines. It tries to crunch the snake.
    • Ruby defends, but the crush cracks his beer helmet. It lies useless, and the java and poison spill onto the snow as he escapes.
84. 1:17:30 Robbie’s sacrifice: flesh.
    • A tendril knocks on the box. The creature: “Who is it? What do you people want?” “More power.” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone says that, but what are you gonna give me?”
    • “Do you want flesh or spirit?” “Honestly, I’m not picky.” “Flesh.”
    • A tendril stabs into Robbie and pulses like a vacuum cleaner. Bits of liver and organs spill onto the ground. The creature: “That’s really gross.”
85. 1:18:41 The rusty spoon. “Seeming worthless, you are handed a rusty spoon. If used correctly, it could be your key to your victory. Serve up a helping hand of tetanus” (an extra status effect). It is absorbed into the mass.
86. 1:19:10 The whole child-monster pulses and revitalizes as Robbie spends his heroic surge to heal.
87. 1:19:56 The spores.
    • “You will come to love us.” Polyps on the tendrils release spores that smell like perfume and make anyone who gets too close docile. It hits.
    • Ruby: “I’ll get around to that, I think.”
88. 1:21:31 Direction.
    • The Lord of Fate: “I think they’re doing a great job of killing themselves. I don’t think we need to help.” Thea rolls anyway “because I really wanted to.”
    • “Doesn’t that mean I’m like an overachiever?” “It means you don’t take direction well.”

Round 6

89. 1:22:29 The fake hug.
    • Ruby feels the spores: “maybe I will love it. Maybe I’ll give it a hug.” He shakes off the effect but keeps pretending to be docile: “oh, I love you, give me a hug.”
    • “But I’m a constrictor snake, bitch!” The power-up crush hits.
90. 1:24:17 A second power-up coil is shut down: “Too many tendrils.” A third coil hits.
91. 1:25:45 The Big Squeeze. Ruby finally uses his signature move, the Big Squeeze, which costs Robbie an action while he’s wrapped up.
    • He explains the whole plan: poison, bury and constrict to strip actions, “and none of them hit.” Thea: “You’re showing your cards!”
    • Thea: “you are not allowed to unflex.”
92. 1:28:00 Breaking free.
    • The Hunger and the child are seen fighting each other. Parts of the Hunger break away, and Robbie’s face peels out for a second. “Don’t worry, buddy. We can get out of this. Don’t forget about the power of friendship.” It re-entombs him.
    • He clears the status effect and breaks the grapple. Ruby hears Robbie’s bones breaking as the Hunger forces him out.
    • The tendrils stick into the ground in all directions and take on the color of the snow, camouflaging them as they hide.

Round 7

93. 1:29:35 Thea: “I want somebody dead soon, or else.” Ruby: “I’m surprised that I’m not being consumed already.”
94. 1:29:50 Ruby charges in the direction they went and slams into a mound of snow over a rock. “Why am I here?”
95. 1:30:38 The Ouroboros. “I’m afraid I’ve only got one trick left.”
    • He starts eating his own tail, “like an Ouroboros.” He hurts himself in exchange for a power-up.
    • On a nat 1, he must take as much damage as he’ll deal. “I will do it.”
96. 1:32:24 The last fang.
    • “I’ve eaten now more of myself than a snake can possibly survive.” He rages forward, blood pouring from his mouth and leaving a trail.
    • A softening attack, then he swings his neck “like a giraffe fighting” and stabs with his one remaining fang. The power-up hits.
97. 1:33:50 The cloaca, answered.
    • The Acolytes ask: “When you consumed yourself, did you also consume your cloaca?”
    • Ruby: “I’ve eaten my lower half. My lower intestines are now hanging out the back of me.”
    • Both are now even on fighting spirit.
98. 1:35:00 The fissure.
    • The Hunger and the child: “you, terrestrial limbless one, are quite an opponent. And your biomass will do well to lift up [our?] sack of flesh.”
    • Tendrils crack underground and erupt as spikes. Ruby dodges.
    • The missed tendrils tear outward and open a fissure. Ruby plummets in and wedges between jagged rocks.
    • “Ruby, in their mind, reaches out to grab the ledge. Again, just forgetting they don’t have limbs.”
99. 1:37:14 The kill.
    • Ruby is “Go for the kill!” (said in the fiction). The first attack is swatted away.
    • Ruby bites one of the tendrils and tears it. “You still feel pain?”
    • The second attack is a nat 20. Ruby can’t match it on defense.
100. 1:38:26 The cocoon. - The Hunger unfolds like a zipper around the child. Robbie Clark emerges “as if a butterfly emerging from a cocoon”, his clothing unusually clean, looking almost exactly as he did when the fight started. - “Oh, hey down there. Oh, it looks like the hunger said that we’re going to consume you. That sounds fun!” - Tentacles launch down like lampreys or leeches and suck up Ruby’s biomass. “It was sure fun playing! I’m excited for you to become one of the giant biomass!”
101. 1:39:21 Ruby’s last thought. “Just the website that we’re halfway through working on that’s never going to be finished now.” The domain: RobertHartleyGM.com. The Lord of Fate: “And there never will be.”
102. 1:40:08 The Acolytes give a standing ovation to the Hunger and the child, the victors.
103. 1:40:25 The Lord of Fate’s verdict. “You have proved yourself a mighty warrior somehow… for the public record, I still would rather have had a middle-aged adult fighting here, but… with the economy, it’s hard to find [champions].”
104. 1:40:58 Robbie’s victory speech. “My name’s Robbie Clark. This is my friend, The Hunger… we’re adventurers here to stop crime… if you ever see us, you better get ready to join the collective bio-consciousness.” The Lord of Fate: “That was riveting.”
105. 1:41:28 The after party. The Lord of Fate wants the Acolytes sent home. Thea: they get to join “the after party where we have nachos and hot dogs.” “Welcome and good night to [D]20 Deathmatch!”

Full Dried Blood notes (click to expand)

In-character or semi-in-character (Dried Blood):

• 1:43:12 Rob, in a sports-interview voice: “We tried, we turned up and give it 110%… some days it’s your day and some days it’s not your day.”
• 1:50:19 Cinder as Robbie: “Hi there, I’m Robbie Clark, and this backpack is full of my eldritch horror called The Hunger, and together we fight crime.” (This leads into a plug.)
• 1:50:50 Rob as Ruby, calling himself “Ruby Red”: “When I’m not getting my ass kicked by an unfair fight with an Eldritch demon…” (This leads into a plug.)
• 1:51:15 Mudcat: Ruby is framing his defeat as losing to an eldritch horror “and not so much that he lost to a child.” Caustic Phoenix: “it’s branding.”

Out-of-character (creator notes):

• Cinder’s favorite moment: Rob playing it as though Ruby was never supposed to be in this fight.
• Rob: the mechanics put everyone on a level, so it’s fun to pretend you aren’t. His favorite moment was the power of friendship and the unzipping reveal: “an Ash Ketchum with a mind controlling parasite Eldritch Demon thing.”
• Rob had never lost a Deathmatch before. The “technically never lost” was a team race with Dag/Doug: Dag’s dying hand touched the chest first, beating Mendari and DM Dave. Caustic Phoenix: by beating Rob, Cinder has beaten everyone Rob beat, “by proxy.” Cinder is now “undefeated… one for one.”
• Cinder’s first time playing with Mudcat.
• Rob interviewed Cinder on his channel (“the short rest”). Cinder’s character name came up there, garbled as “Robbie Coltrane.” Ruby’s never-used special ability was to swallow the opponent whole. The plan: constrict, strip all actions, then swallow on the next turn.
• Cinder: “you are thinking too much with strategy… You got to go in with chaos.” Caustic Phoenix: “just go all in with the stupid fun story.” Mudcat: “We do favor chaos here.”
• Plugs: Cinderblock Sally (YouTube), Viva La Dirt League D&D, Robert Hartley GM.