S6E5, Tip to Tip - Part 2 (Richard Knottley v Richard S. Skelman, the leadership Deathmatch)

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Two dicks, one team, and nobody in charge. In the second part of Tip to Tip, Richard Knottley and Richard S. Skelman returned to the graveyard of The Midnight Mausoleum to fight to the death for the leadership of Team B. Over the course of the fight Knottley lost an arm, then all of his flesh, then his body, then his mustache, and finally his grip on reality. He ascended into the cosmos still rolling natural 20s, and the skeleton who had spent thousands of years trying to ascend was left standing, very confused, as the new manager.

The Story

Chinchillas on the Loose

Deep below The Dread Fortress, the halls filled with yips and yelps. A tiny pink imp, Thea, was chasing a horde of chinchillas under furniture and through doorways, in every direction except toward the arena. When The Arbiter asked how this had happened, Thea explained that the chinchillas “went poo poo,” so she had changed their cage. She had opened the door and forgotten to set up the tube to the other cage. She also hadn’t shut the door, because “doors are heavy here… a really poor design choice,” and her magic is “cute magic that goes poof,” not door magic.

The Arbiter shot a bolt from his finger and slammed the door shut, then opened it and shut it again, over and over. “Can I have that power?” Thea asked. “You have that power! It’s a basic thing!” Thea tried a little shock of her own and was amazed. She decided to save it for the returning members of Team B. She also had a plan to give the night’s winner a chinchilla as a welcoming gift. The Arbiter approved, since “the less of them in the Dread Fortress, the better,” and asked her to keep it between them.

Then Thea, who had been “reviewing my notes,” asked when the Arbiter had ever brought the champions before bringing the Grandmaster. He said he wanted to try something new. “Oh, I should have read your mind. Damn it,” she said, and ran her head into the door several times. The Arbiter suggested “two, three more times,” then gave up: “You already ruined it.”

The Grandmaster was right on the other side of that door. She stepped in, lifting her skirt to look at the beasts scurrying underfoot. The Arbiter assured her the chinchillas were exercising, for “cheaper healthcare,” and when she asked where the champions were, he clapped his hands in frustration and ripped open a portal. Through it walked Richard Knottley and Richard S. Skelman. “Oh, so the dicks, pair of dicks are back,” said the Grandmaster, who claimed that the Arbiter had unwrapped a pair of dicks for his last birthday too.

A Deathmatch for Management

Tonight was no mission, the Grandmaster announced. Last week the team had proven they could at least find Thea, but they still had no name and no hierarchy. As the Arbiter put it, “the only way that we know how to solve that problem is to have you fight to the death.” Thea reminded everyone that it wasn’t permanent.

Talk of dominance hierarchies led to an existential detour. Knottley asked whether Thea was “like a pink and little like wormy like kind of thing,” and Thea insisted she was people, because The Acolytes had said so. Knottley allowed that there was a hashtag, “so it has to be real,” but warned that hashtags had also “made the Justice League turn into a four-hour piece of crap.” How would she know if she was people? “That’s a journey you’re going to have to go on,” said Knottley. “Far, far away from here,” added Skelman.

The Grandmaster opened a portal to the mausoleum they had visited before. “Grandfather, hello again,” said Knottley, greeting the grave of Skelman’s grandfather, whom the team had killed again last time. The Grandmaster was more upset that neither champion was wearing the team t-shirts she had given them. Skelman’s was tight around the ribs, and Knottley had been given a small when he “very clearly needed a 2X.” “It’s always a management problem,” said Skelman.

The prize was laid out: the leader would name the team, lead it, file its complaints, control its budget and maybe get a chinchilla. Knottley explained that chinchillas run the government. Then the Grandmaster clapped and twelve chinchillas paraded out, each wearing a fake mustache. “It’s the Parliament!” cried Skelman. “Our government is being run right before our eyes.” For their good behavior they were given the front row of the floating grandstands, and the Acolytes who usually sat there were pushed back a couple of rows. Complaints, the Arbiter explained, went into his filing system, which was a trash can. The budget, which he measured with his hands, was “about this.” Knottley protested that they were worth more, “especially when we have our friend with us, the third dick,” meaning their absent teammate Killy Yesman. The Grandmaster agreed that for a good show they could probably double it, then flew up to sit with the chinchillas.

The Arbiter spread his white wings and rose above the crowd: “Acolytes! Are you ready for some blood?” Skelman pointed out that he didn’t have any.

The Dick Twist

Skelman seemed frozen in the moment, and Knottley took the chance to tell him, kindly, “You might be pale and dead, but deep down inside, there’s something beautiful in there.” Then he opened with his signature move, the Dick Twist: a dance-off, best of three.

Knottley rolled a natural 20, striking classic Vogue poses as cameras flashed (“It’s a grower, not a shower”). Skelman’s hip popped out. Knottley rolled a second natural 20, all bouncing elbows over literal graves, and Skelman’s knee popped out. Skelman had thought this was a battle to the death, and Thea said it looked more like a high school prom. Skelman confessed he never went to his: “Nobody asked me… If I had tear ducts, there would be tears.” Thea dropped to one knee and asked him to prom. Skelman, worried about the legal trouble of an old dead man dating “a small yet somewhat tiny child-esque creature,” hesitated, but Thea only wanted to help him dance. She clicked a button, a disco ball dropped from nowhere, and the tombstones lit up in colors.

The Arbiter had already declared Knottley the winner, but the Grandmaster insisted on a third dance for fun. Skelman lost that one too. One of his arms fell off, and Knottley picked it up: “It goes down here between your legs, right?” Thea stepped on Skelman’s head mid-move, and she limped away crushed: “My first prom was ruined.”

Riding high, Knottley announced that he was here to “break boundaries… and I uncover secret truths.” He warned Skelman that he was about to physically assault him because people had found out about the woman he buried (“I’ve buried so many…”), then launched into the air and brought his elbow down. Skelman’s skull spun around comically, and the two traded a slap fest while Skelman spun blind, insisting his head would run out of steam.

Bones, Peloton and a Ghost

Skelman answered with a challenge of his own. He calmly removed his own arm at the shoulder and looked at Knottley expectantly. Knottley could not match it, so Thea helped. She tugged, then used her teeth, then strapped on a rocket pack, pull-started it like a lawnmower, and on the third pull blasted off with Knottley’s left arm, leaving him bleeding everywhere. She waved goodbye with it and, at Knottley’s suggestion, tossed it into the crowd like a baseball, where it karate-chopped the Acolyte Cookie Monster Steve in the forehead.

Skelman threw the zombie arm he had picked up last time, which tickled Knottley into fits of laughter. Then he donned a leather jacket and hat and delivered a pointy-booted biker kick that Knottley met so perfectly that neither got anywhere, and both wore themselves out. Then something wonderful happened. “Skelly, your spirit is bonding with mine,” said Knottley, and the bones of his lost arm flew out of the crowd “like little Iron Man pieces” and locked into place. “That is the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” said Skelman, who has been a skeleton for a millennium. He celebrated with a front-flipping leg drop into Knottley’s sternum.

Knottley tested his new powers by firing his bony fist at Skelman. It veered off course, corrected itself at the last second and burst into bone shrapnel, costing Skelman some ribs. Knottley shook off the tickling by smashing the zombie hand against the ground, which Skelman noted might be his ex-girlfriend’s. “We never really resolved that plot line last time.”

Then Knottley revealed a secret. Through his “connection with the company Peloton,” he had stolen a prototype arc bike reactor from their factory: a small orb pulsing with radiation. Thea held it while he fixed his belt, and her fingers melted and her fingernails came off (“I love it when my face melts”). She dribbled it like a basketball, building power with each bounce, and slammed it into his chest. Knottley’s flesh melted away. He was now a skeleton coated in melted Peloton, with the glowing core as his heart. “And now I’m powered by Peloton.”

Skelman demanded a durability test. He took the stance he had imagined playing Captain Falcon back in his N64 days, “back when I had flesh and bone,” and landed a “Falcon, punch!” right on the core. Knottley collapsed into a pile of bones. Skelman explained why he himself never fell apart: Francis, the little gelatinous slime that holds him together. “I get a new one of these, I think, about every week.” He tried to build Knottley into a handbasket so they could go to hell in one, but the pieces were wrong (“You put my hands where my feet went”). His attempt to drop the bones down a well failed too.

Thea offered encouragement (“Remember, you’re more than just bones. You have mental powers”) and spat out her chewing gum for him to stick himself back together with. Both champions declined the gum. It was Skelman who reached him in the end, sitting cross-legged by his skull for a pep talk: being a skeleton “is actually rather difficult… It’s really just a force of will,” and “you can be anything you want to be.” Then he noogied the skull. The Acolytes chanted “Be who you wanna be!” and Knottley took it to heart. His bones turned to dust, swirled, and re-formed as the ghostly specter of Richard Knottley.

When Thea declared herself the referee, the Arbiter reminded her that he and the Grandmaster were the referees and she just dealt with the cards. He called a break right as she freed the next card, and Thea broke it over her knee. “Grandmaster, remind me to send her to the therapist.”

Into the Box

After the break, the Grandmaster was raving about the trailer for Bessie and the Cowdettes, bovine astronauts versus evil alien space turkeys, “my top movie of 2024.” (“Their studio is really milking it,” said the Arbiter.) The Acolytes chanted for blood, and the movie’s promotion swallowed the arena. The lights dimmed, the ground turned sticky, a PBR appeared in every hand, even Knottley’s ghostly one, and a mechanical bull rose beneath both champions. “Roll de yee-haw, motherfuckers,” said the Grandmaster. Knottley shrugged off the ride. Skelman was hurt by it.

Bored, the Arbiter slammed his hands together. The Box of Chaos fell from the sky like a rocket and, “because of technical reasons,” hovered in midair as a column of yellow and pink fire shot from its open lid. Knottley, whose ghostly memory was already slipping, picked Thea up, told her to hold her nose for a cannonball and tossed her in. Shadowy hands sprang out: “Hey, what the fuck is going on? … You can’t just throw shit in my box.” After Thea was set down gently instead, she made herself at home (“Hi, I live here now… You have a lot of toilet paper”). The box’s shadowy tenant demanded rent, so she knocked out four of her teeth on the box’s edge. “What a sucker,” he said, and Knottley received a screaming vial of black liquid that covered his ghost and scrambled his fighting instincts.

Knottley then lifted Thea out and had her pitch all her droppings at Skelman: “Be the monkey you wanna be. Eat my poo.” “It’s my gift to you! I love you, Skelvin!” she cried, as poop splattered him like a machine gun. “I’m used to the goo, but not the poo,” said Skelman. Knottley flew into Skelman to clean him off and possessed his bones. Skelman delivered a lecture on how possession is “inherently evil,” like charm spells, before Knottley offered a handshake and Skelman’s hand passed straight through him. Ghosts lose their memories, he warned.

Then Skelman produced a secret weapon. An Acolyte backstage named Luigi, with a great mustache and a brother named Mario, had told him ghosts are weak to vacuum cleaners and handed him one. Skelman pull-started it and sucked Knottley inside. “Now I have a ghost in a box,” he said. “You have a dick in a box,” said the Arbiter.

Skelman offered the vacuum, ghost included, to the Box of Chaos and asked for new cosmic dice, since his had been terrible all night. A magic blue pill appeared and was snatched back (“That’s mine. Sorry”). Instead he got the Shield of the Golden King, which the Arbiter promptly took back, pulled on a face mask, and blowtorched into a set of golden dice. As for the vacuum, “I didn’t really want this guy. I just wanted the vacuum. This place is a mess.” The Arbiter reversed it and blew Knottley out into the ether.

The Bone Zone

As the crowd chanted “Bone zone!”, Skelman expanded his consciousness and turned the world into his danger dungeon. The only thing that could hurt Knottley more than a wrong conspiracy theory was himself, so Skelman brought in the statue the team had met the week before: a winged likeness of Knottley wearing a mustache “with a nice thick layer of adhesive.” Was he subcontracting the Deathmatch? “I own the dungeon. I subcontract the work inside that dungeon.” The Grandmaster called it a sign of leadership. “I’ve always wanted to play with myself,” said Knottley. The statue opened a pit trap, but Knottley held firm and it became a two-inch drop that only brought them closer. “It’s a meet cute,” said the Grandmaster. “I want you inside of me,” said the statue, and then the dungeon faded.

Thea found Skelman despondent. “This dick has bested me by not even trying… He just seems to continue falling upwards,” he said. “I’ve been this way for thousands of years and yet he ascends immediately.” Thea told him being different didn’t make Knottley better, and that bones were the real winner. “Great words, awful timing,” said Skelman, still covered in her poop. Then the Chinchilla Parliament pulled out translators and heckled both champions with painfully accurate insults (“Why can’t you even roll a die?”), wounding them more than either had managed all night. “Why is our government so mean? Fuck the government,” Skelman said.

Knottley, longing for his statue, simply stood still and waited. Skelman gathered all he had left and sent him back into the danger dungeon, where the statue waited at the end of a long hallway of traps that Skelman’s lackeys had coated in ectoplasmic goo. “Also, lots of fire. So much fire.” An axe came down, a spike box pinned the ghost, and flamethrowers cooked him “like a marshmallow.” The wall of lightning, though, he simply sidestepped: “I sidestep court workers all the time when they’re trying to serve me papers.”

Ascension

Battered and nearly spent, Knottley reached the end of the shaft. “Statue, I say we become one.” The statue admired his thick Peloton calves and varicose veins (“I’m a vein guy. Always have been”), opened its angel wings, and Knottley’s ghost merged into it. When Skelman objected that the statue was on his payroll, it reminded him that it was allowed a fifteen-minute break.

The statue’s rock fist landed, and Skelman’s golden dice shattered on the very first block. Resigned, he told Knottley to finish it: “Become the manager you were meant to be!” Knottley stacked everything into one blow (“Status me, Dad!”), but Francis shot out a pseudopod and shoved the statue back. “I had accepted my defeat. But my slimy friend had not.” Knottley raised his arms, the clouds parted, and a swarm of Peloton bikes swirled through the sky and blasted them both with lightning. “I hate cardio!” Skelman screamed. He swung back with everything he had and landed nothing. Knottley even healed. “He’s healing and I’m dying!”

But Knottley had won too hard. He had pushed himself past his limit, and he began to fade. “You burned yourself to burn him!” cried Thea. Knottley became one with the universe, all around them, his voice drifting down: “We’ve been looking for you to talk to you about your car’s extended warranty.” Skelman, who had spent thousands of years trying to ascend, was outraged: “You pushed yourself too hard, too fast.”

Team D

The Grandmaster came down from the chinchillas’ row. Luck is part of winning, she told Skelman: “Don’t ever underestimate it. Leverage it.” He allowed that perhaps he was management material, and she named him leader of Team B. His first act was the name. “We three dicks came together as one to do what people thought was impossible, find Thea, clearly the most chaotic object in the universe… I think Team D is here to stay.” Thea clarified: “For dicks.” The ascended Knottley chimed in from the cosmos: “Team D, four. Also, taxation is theft.”

The Grandmaster assured him Knottley would return in his fleshy state next time, because ascension is a loop. “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral,” said Knottley’s voice from the universe. Skelman began asking who and what he was, and the Grandmaster, who just runs the Dread Fortress and doesn’t want to be anyone’s spiritual guide, asked for somebody to come get him. The Arbiter escorted him off, admitting he’d hoped for the name “Dick Dynasty” and promising to see about getting his bones massaged. The Grandmaster closed by telling the Acolytes they had witnessed the birth of the second team, and that “death is not the ending, and it is not what we should fear.”

Dried Blood

In the after-show, the new team lead laid out his agenda. His first order of business was getting their third dick out, since “he’s in too deep.” His second was to stop paying taxes on his many dungeons, because he is now, as Richard taught him, “a sovereign citizen.” The Grandmaster didn’t want to say no, so she allowed it. Knottley, soon to return to human form, complained that “it just won’t let me die.” He was told that the tinfoil hat he kept putting on could be surgically implanted on the inside (“They call me hammerhead”). Skelman promised the Acolytes that Team D would find their third dick and “create the largest dickazord that anyone has ever seen.” At the table, the Arbiter’s player told Knottley’s that he only lost because he won too hard.

Notable Moments

• Knottley opened with back-to-back natural 20s in a graveyard dance-off, popping Skelman’s hip, knee and arm out in turn.
• Thea ripped off Knottley’s arm with a rocket pack, and its bones later flew back from the crowd to become a skeletal arm.
• Over one fight, Knottley went from man to Peloton-powered skeleton to pile of bones to ghost to statue to the universe itself.
• Thea moved into the Box of Chaos and paid her rent in teeth.
• Skelman vacuumed his opponent up with a gift from an Acolyte named Luigi.
• The Chinchilla Parliament heckled both champions harder than they had hurt each other all night.

Memorable Quotes

• Thea: “I’m, is people. The Acolytes said that I’m people.”
• Richard S. Skelman: “I didn’t go to my high school prom. Nobody asked me… If I had tear ducts, there would be tears.”
• Richard Knottley: “And now I’m powered by Peloton.”
• The Arbiter: “You have a dick in a box.”
• Richard S. Skelman: “I own the dungeon. I subcontract the work inside that dungeon.”

Richard S. Skelman: “This dick has bested me by not even trying… He just seems to continue falling upwards.”

• The Grandmaster: “Listen, I just run the Dread Fortress and look over the void. I don’t wanna be your spiritual guide.”

Richard Knottley: “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Richard S. Skelman (“Skelly,” “Skelvin” to Thea).

• Background:
  • An old, dead skeleton who has “existed as a skeleton for a millennia” and has been “this way for thousands of years,” trying to ascend.
  • His grandfather is buried at the mausoleum; Team B killed him “again” last time.
  • Has “buried so many.” The zombie arm/hand he carries may be his ex-girlfriend’s (“maybe”; plotline unresolved).
  • Never went to high school prom: “nobody asked me.”
  • Remembers merging with Knottley into “one giant body” last time.
• Francis:
  • A gelatinous-cube “jelly slime friend” that holds his bones together. He gets a new one “about every week.”
  • Francis waves with pseudopods and saved Skelman’s life in Round 5.
• The bone zone / danger dungeon:
  • A space he can expand into. He “owns” it and subcontracts its work: the statue and his trap-setting “lackeys.”
• Personality:
  • Holds firm opinions on ethics (prom with a minor, possession and charm spells as “inherently evil”).
  • Hates cardio. Played Captain Falcon “on my N64 days, back when I had flesh and bone.”
• This episode:
  • Got the Shield of the Golden King, smelted into golden dice; they shattered on his first defense.
  • Won and became leader of Team B, renamed “Team D” (for dicks), though he now regrets not choosing “Dick Dynasty.”

Richard Knottley (special move “the Dick Twist”; the Arbiter calls him “Dick Twist”).

• Character:
  • A conspiracy-minded man who “breaks boundaries and uncovers secret truths”: “Chinchillas run the government,” “taxation is theft.”
  • Says he dodges process servers. Has a glued-on fake mustache and a “hormone problem” (his complaint about the shirt).
  • Claims a “connection” with Peloton; he stole a prototype arc bike reactor from their factory.
• Transformations this episode:
  • Lost his left arm, which Thea tore off and threw to Cookie Monster Steve. Its bones flew back to give him one regular arm and one bony arm.
  • The Peloton reactor melted away his flesh, leaving a Peloton-coated skeleton with the core as his heart.
  • Collapsed to a pile of bones, then re-formed as a ghost specter (losing his mustache and, as ghosts do, some memory).
  • Possessed Skelman briefly.
  • Was vacuumed up, thrown into the ether, merged into the statue, and called down a Peloton storm.
• Faded/“ascended” into the universe on his fifth fatigue. Per the GM he returns “in his fleshy state next time around.”

Thea. A tiny pink imp the Arbiter “created on a whim,” and “a pink and little wormy like kind of thing” per Knottley.

• Believes she is people because the Acolytes said so (there’s a hashtag).
• Runs the round signs and keeps them in a shed. Has cute magic that “goes poof” and found she can shock.
• Keeps the chinchillas.
• Asked Skelman to prom. Tore off Knottley’s arm with a rocket pack, dribbled the Peloton core, and sat in the Box of Chaos, paying four teeth as rent. Threw her poop at Skelman out of love.
• Broke the round-three card over her knee. The signs got burned. The Arbiter wants to send her to a therapist.
• Team D’s name cites her: “find Thea, clearly the most chaotic object in the universe.”

The Arbiter.

• White wings. Shuts doors with finger bolts. Uses a trash can as the filing system.
• Voices the statue. Smelted the Golden King’s shield into dice. Kept the Luigi vacuum “because this place is a mess.”
• Plans to talk to the GM about “Dick Dynasty.”

Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer.

• Gave the team t-shirts. Insists Knottley’s mustache is fake.
• Seated the Chinchilla Parliament in the front row. Bessie and the Cowdettes is “my top movie of 2024.”
• Named Skelman leader. Doesn’t want to be anyone’s spiritual guide: “I just run the Dread Fortress and look over the void.”

The chinchillas / the Chinchilla Parliament / “Chinchilla Corps.”

• Escaped the Fortress cage.
• Twelve wore fake mustaches and got front-row seats.
• Insulted the champions through translators worn around their necks (a chaos event).

The Box of Chaos’s occupant. A shadowy figure with shadowy hands inside the box. He keeps a lot of toilet paper and wants rent (teeth). Unnamed this episode.

The statue. A statue of Knottley’s likeness (“like looking in a mirror”), met “last week.”

• Has angel-like wings and a glued-on mustache. Works for Skelman in the bone zone but takes breaks off the clock.
• “I want you inside of me.” Merged with Knottley’s ghost.

Others

• The pug: offered its d20 toy to the end-of-round roll (inferred to be Doug).
• Luigi: an Acolyte backstage with a great mustache and a brother, Mario. Gave Skelman the vacuum.
• Acolytes named: Robey, Epic, Rickroll, Cookiemon, Steve, Gator, Scribbr, and “Cookie Monster Steve,” who received Knottley’s arm and got karate-chopped by it.
• “The third dick”: Team B’s third member, unnamed this episode.
• Skelman’s grandfather: dead again.
• Bessie and the Cowdettes: an in-world 2024 movie (bovine astronauts vs alien space turkeys) whose promotion became the yee-haw chaos event.

Places

• The Dread Fortress, deep below: heavy doors, the chinchilla cage, and Thea’s sign shed.
• The mausoleum graveyard (the Midnight Mausoleum per the blurb): graves, tombstones that light up, a well, moonlight.
• The bone zone / danger dungeon: Skelman’s dungeon, with the trap hallway.
• Peloton’s factory (Knottley broke in).

Items

• Team t-shirts (sized wrong).
• The zombie arm/hand.
• The Peloton arc bike reactor (“experimental beta test Peloton core”).
• The ethereal black screaming vial (swaps bloodlust/instinct).
• The Luigi’s Mansion vacuum.
• The Shield of the Golden King → golden dice (shattered).
• The magic blue pill (the Arbiter’s; withdrawn).
• The disco ball, the mechanical bull and PBRs, the chinchilla translators, and Thea’s chewing gum.

Lore statements

• Team B’s leader is chosen by Deathmatch. The leader names the team, controls the budget, and files complaints. Team B is now Team D, the “second team.”
• Ghosts lose their memories (Skelman).
• Ascension in the Void is “a loop” (GM) or “a spiral” (Knottley); ascended champions rematerialize.
• The Box of Chaos holds “a whole little dimension, lots of little hidden leftover souls.”
• The Arbiter created Thea on a whim and never trained her.

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening: chinchillas loose in the Dread Fortress

1. 0:00:49 Deep below in the Dread Fortress, yelps and yips fill the halls. A tiny pink imp, Thea, chases furry chinchillas that dash under furniture and through doors, everywhere except toward the arena.
2. 0:01:31 The Arbiter asks why the chinchillas are out. Thea changed their cage because “they went poo poo.” She opened the door, forgot to set up the tube to the other cage, and expected them to behave. She didn’t shut the door because “doors are heavy here… a really poor design choice.” Her magic is “cute magic that goes poof,” not door magic.
3. 0:02:21 The Arbiter shoots a magic bolt from his finger and shuts the door, opens it, and shuts it again, over and over. “Can I have that power?” “You have that power! It’s a basic thing!” Thea tries her own little shock and is amazed: “I had no idea I could do so many things.” She decides to save it, because Team B is returning and she could shock them instead.
4. 0:03:04 Tonight is the Deathmatch. Thea wants to give the winner a chinchilla as a welcoming gift. The Arbiter likes it (“The less of them in the Dread Fortress, the better”) and asks her to keep it between them: the Grandmaster doesn’t need to worry about this.
5. 0:03:36 Thea asks whether they should fetch the Grandmaster first. She has been “reviewing my notes”: “When has the Arbiter ever brought the champions before bringing the Grandmaster?” He says he wanted to “do something new.” Thea: “Oh, I should have read your mind. Damn it.” She runs her head into the door several times. The Arbiter tells her “two, three more times,” then lets it go: “You already ruined it.”
6. 0:04:37 The Grandmaster is right on the other side of the door. She steps in, pulling up her skirt to see the scurrying beasts underfoot. The Arbiter says the chinchillas are exercising, for “cheaper healthcare.” She asks why the champions aren’t there yet.
7. 0:05:14 The Arbiter claps his hands in frustration and a portal rips open. Through it walk Richard Knottley and Richard S. Skelman (“Skelman. Sorry, Richard Skelman”). GM: “Oh, so the dicks, pair of dicks are back.” She claims that for the Arbiter’s last birthday “a pair of dicks” also came, wrapped, and he unwrapped them. Skelman asks whether ribbons were involved. GM: “It’s always important to pay attention to the dicks in front of you.” Skelman: “It’s all about the boning to come.”

The stakes: leadership of Team B

8. 0:06:19 The GM says tonight is not a mission. It’s a Deathmatch for leadership. The Arbiter: last week they proved they could “at least find Thea,” but there is still no team name and no hierarchy, so one must lead, “and the only way that we know how to solve that problem is to have you fight to the death.” Thea adds: “Remember, it’s not permanent though.”
9. 0:06:57 Is Thea people? Knottley says most mammals exist in a dominance hierarchy. Thea: “Oh, like me?” Skelman asks about reptiles. Knottley: “Aren’t you like a pink and little like wormy like kind of thing?” Thea: “I’m, is people. The Acolytes said that I’m people.” Knottley says there is a hashtag, “so it has to be real,” but hashtags “made the Justice League turn into a four-hour piece of crap.” “How do I know if I’m people then?” Knottley: “That’s a journey you’re going to have to go on.” Skelman: “Far, far away from here.”
10. 0:08:02 The arena. The GM claps and opens a portal to the mausoleum they visited before. Knottley: “Grandfather, hello again. Not this guy again.” GM: “Don’t worry, he’s dead… He did kill him again.” She is disappointed that neither wears the t-shirts she gave them. Skelman’s was “a bit tight around the ribs.” Knottley got a small “and I very clearly needed a 2X.” GM: “We could only print so many.” Skelman: “It’s always a management problem.” GM: “Let’s move one of you into management.”
11. 0:09:00 The perks. The leader gets “the extra quirks and flirts,” chooses the group’s name, leads the group, maybe gets a chinchilla. Knottley: “Chinchillas run the government.” Skelman agrees: “Chinchillas do be running the government.” Knottley adds that they start nuclear war.
12. 0:10:13 The Chinchilla Parliament. She claps and 12 chinchillas parade out, each wearing one of those mustaches. Skelman: “It’s the Parliament! Our government is being run right before our eyes.” Knottley: “Senator.” The chinchillas bow and nod. They were on their best behavior, so they get the front row of the floating grandstands. The top Acolytes Robey, Epic, Rickroll, Cookiemon, Steve, Gator and Scribbr are pushed back a couple of rows to make room. Skelman: “When government officials are in town… we must make space.”
13. 0:11:34 Complaints. Knottley wants to file a complaint about the shirt and “my hormone problem.” The GM says complaints go through the leader. The Arbiter’s “filing system” is a trash can; Skelman calls it “the HR department.”
14. 0:12:57 The budget. The leader controls the budget and could buy as many t-shirts as they want. The Arbiter shows its size with his hands (“about this”). Knottley: “How do you say seven cans of tuna fish? That does not sound like a budget.” Skelman: the Arbiter got double for his birthday. Knottley: “I think we’re worth way more, especially when we have our friend with us, the third dick.” GM: “For a good show, we could probably double it.” “We’ll see what you all whip out.” She flies up to sit with the chinchillas.
15. 0:14:41 The Arbiter flares his white wings and rises above the floating grandstands: “Acolytes! Are you ready for some blood?” Skelman raises a concern about bloodshed: “You don’t have any blood.” Arbiter: “Just don’t spill your own.”

Round 1: the Dick Twist dance-off

17. 0:15:30 Initiative: Knottley 14, Skelman 5. Skelman’s camera freezes (table talk). The GM works it in: “you seem kind of frozen in the moment.” Knottley: “now we have the worst version of Skelly, who’s all pale and gross and old.” Then, kindly: “You might be pale and dead, but deep down inside, there’s something beautiful in there.”
18. 0:17:12 Knottley asks what his motivation is. Skelman: “I think you have to kill me again!” “But he’s already dead.” Knottley is “still a little hurting from… that last explosion,” so he opens with Richard Knottley’s special move, “the Dick Twist”: a dance-off, best of three. The winner gains fighting spirit.
19. 0:18:35 Knottley rolls a nat 20: classic Vogue moves, framing the face, cameras flashing. “It’s a grower, not a shower.” Skelman (“Twist and shout”) gets a 9 and his hip pops out. “Put it back in, Skelly.”
20. 0:19:36 A second nat 20 for Knottley, back to back. The GM asks him to describe the moves as he dances “over literal graves.” Answer: bouncing elbows. Skelman pops his hip back in and rolls 14. His knee pops out. Arbiter: “You’re missing a lot of tendons.”
21. 0:20:34 Prom. Skelman thought this was a battle to the death. Thea: “You seem like you’re at a high school prom.” Skelman: “I didn’t go to my high school prom. Nobody asked me… If I had tear ducts, there would be tears.” Thea hops in (she opened the portal door, though, as the Arbiter notes, she can’t open a real door). She gets down on one knee: “Would you… go to prom with me?” Skelman: “How old are you?” “I don’t know.” He worries about “legal trouble… an old dead man and… a small yet somewhat tiny child-esque creature.” Thea: “I was just gonna help you dance.” She clicks a button: a disco ball drops from nowhere and the tombstones light up in colors.
22. 0:22:22 The Arbiter declares Knottley the winner on two nat 20s. The GM insists on a third dance “for fun,” with Thea’s help giving advantage. Skelman hopes for “pity points from the Acolytes and our lovely government, the Chinchilla Corps.” He still loses (17 v 9). One of his arms falls off, and Thea steps on his head mid-move. Knottley picks up the arm: “It goes down here between your legs, right?”
23. 0:23:50 Thea limps off the battlefield, crushed by the horrific dance. “My first prom was ruined.” “We didn’t go to prom!” Knottley’s fighting spirit is maxed. “I’m here to break boundaries… and I uncover secret truths.”
24. 0:25:02 The Info Warrior’s elbow. Knottley warns Skelly first: “I just want you to know I’m about to physically assault you… people found out about the woman you buried.” Skelman: “I’ve buried so many…” Knottley launches into the air and brings his elbow down. It hits. Skelman’s skull spins around comically. Knottley tries to catch the head. Skelman insists “it’ll run out of steam,” and the two trade a slap fest while Skelman spins blind.
25. 0:27:54 The body-disassembly competition. Skelman snaps his head forward (it faces the wrong way first) and gets four actions. “You challenged me to a thing that I’m not very good at. I’m going to challenge something that you are probably not very good at.” He removes his own arm at the shoulder and looks at Knottley expectantly. Knottley auto-fails. Thea: “I thought you’d never ask.” She tugs, then uses her teeth, then straps on a rocket pack and pull-starts it like a lawnmower. On the third pull she blasts off with Knottley’s left arm (“the closest to his heart”). “Thanks for your arm,” she says, waving with it. Knottley bleeds everywhere.
26. 0:29:51 At Knottley’s suggestion (“like you go to a baseball game”), Thea tosses the arm to the Acolyte Cookie Monster Steve. It karate-chops them in the forehead.
27. 0:30:27 The zombie arm. Skelman still has the zombie arm he picked up last time. He throws it at Knottley as a status effect. It tickles him and makes him laugh (“He has such a wonderful laugh”).
28. 0:32:23 Bad to the Bone. Skelman puts on a leather jacket and leather hat like a tough biker and kicks Knottley with a pointed boot. Knottley defends with a nat 20 and they tie: no damage, and both gain fatigue from the effort. “That’s some bullshit!”
29. 0:34:30 The bony arm. Knottley: “Skelly, your spirit is bonding with mine.” Out in the crowd, the bones of his torn-off arm fly from Cookie Monster Steve across the arena “like little Iron Man pieces” and lock into place. Knottley now has one regular arm and one bony arm. Skelman: “That is the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen… I’ve existed as a skeleton for a millennia.”
30. 0:35:13 Skelman powers up a leg drop: a front flip in the air and down into Knottley’s sternum. It hits. Knottley: “I can’t breathe.” Skelman: “Maybe you’ll lose the rest of your flesh and not have lungs next.” Knottley: “That’s not a bad idea.”

Round 2: the Peloton core

32. 0:38:28 Knottley uses his “newfound skeleton powers”: his bony fist detaches and flies at Skelman, veers off course, then corrects at the last second and bursts into bone shrapnel. “I didn’t know I could do that.” Skelman loses some ribs: “Give those back, stupid skeleton.”
33. 0:40:04 Knottley clears the status effect by smacking the tickling zombie hand on the ground. Skelman: “Oh, that’s my former girlfriend, maybe. We never really resolved that plot line last time.” It looks like she’s waving goodbye with every smash. He wants to keep it as “some kind of infiltrating device when we go save our friend.” GM: “What are you going to use your ex-girlfriend’s hand for?” Skelman: “The Grandmaster really thinks very little of me.”
34. 0:41:14 The Peloton orb. Knottley calls Thea over to show her “my cool hand” (“My cool hand, Luke”). He shares a secret: through his “connection with the company Peloton” he has a prototype “arc bike reactor,” which he stole by breaking into their factory. It’s a small orb pulsing with radiation. Thea: “I love it when my face melts.” He has her hold it while he fixes his belt. Her fingers melt and she loses her fingernails. He wants her to use it on him but hasn’t thought it through: “I thought you were the mastermind, Thea. You are people, Thea.”
35. 0:42:41 Thea: “Use it like a basketball.” She dribbles the reactor, which builds power with each bounce, then throws the hardest pass she can into Knottley’s chest. His flesh melts away and he becomes a skeleton, powered by “an experimental beta test Peloton core.” The Arbiter rules it a defensive move (it confuses Skelman), so Skelman has disadvantage on his first attack.
36. 0:44:15 Thea asks whether it’s like Wolverine “but instead of the cool metal… you just have Peloton over your bones.” The table settles on melted Peloton coating his skeleton, with “the snow globe Peloton” core inside as his heart. Knottley: “And now I’m powered by Peloton.”
37. 0:45:08 Falcon Punch. Skelman wants a “durability test.” He takes the stance he used to imagine playing Captain Falcon on “my N64 days, back when I had flesh and bone.” “Falcon, punch!” Despite disadvantage he hits the core. Knottley falls apart into a pile of bones. “How do you stay standing when you get hit?”
38. 0:46:50 Francis. Skelman reveals Francis, the little jelly slime friend (a gelatinous cube) that holds his bones together. “I get a new one of these, I think, about every week.” Without Francis he’d be “just a head on the ground, just yap, yap, yapping.” Francis waves a pseudopod (“a Meatwad situation… Meatwad without a face in green”).
39. 0:47:45 “I still have a bone to pick with you.” Skelman tries to build Knottley’s bones into a handbasket (“we’re going to hell in a handbasket”). It fails: the pieces aren’t the right shape. Knottley: “You put my hands where my feet went.” Skelman then tries to drag him to the nearest well and drop him in. Knottley blocks it.
40. 0:49:38 Thea pops out to encourage Knottley: “Remember, you’re more than just bones. You have mental powers.” (She first yells at Skelman: “No, I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the one whose arm I stole.”) She kicks one of his bones. Knottley strains (“Ah, ah, ah…”). GM: “Did you just turn into, like, Count Dracula?” Thea spits out her chewing gum for him to stick himself back together with, then stomps off. Both refuse the gum (“I don’t think she goes to the dentist”).
41. 0:50:48 Skelman’s pep talk. He sits cross-legged by Knottley’s head: “Being a skeleton is actually rather difficult… It’s really just a force of will… If you want to be a walking, talking, sassy pants skeleton, you’re more than welcome to be that.” He apologizes for “your little Orby thing.” “You can be anything you want to be.” Then he punches (noogies) the skull and it lands. The Acolytes chant “Be who you wanna be!”
42. 0:52:38 The ghost. Knottley: “I’ve surpassed the bones,” then “I fell apart immediately… I’m going to need the bones,” then: “I can be anything.” Channelling “the big dick that he is, the top dick,” his bones turn to dust that swirls in place and re-forms as the ghost specter of Richard Knottley. “I am in spectral form now!” Thea: “Perfect timing, ghosty bud!”
43. 0:53:42 Thea rolls the round’s d20 for the Arbiter, gets a 19, and suggests she should be the one fighting. “Don’t argue with me. I’m the referee.” Arbiter: “No, we’re the referees… You just deal with the cards.” He calls a break for the bathroom and slushies right as she frees the round-three card. Furious that she missed the “train,” Thea breaks the card over her knee. Arbiter: “Grandmaster, remind me to send her to the therapist.” GM: “Anger problems. Got it.”
44. 0:55:07 Ten-minute break. The break is still in the mp3 and excluded, except the intro narration.

Show intro narration (1:02:16, kept)

45. Mudcat reads the standard intro: the dark Void outside all space and time, the Dread Fortress calling, the Grandmaster, Elusia Skypiercer, “though retired from battle,” yearning for glory and bloodshed, the Arbiter “her servant in all things” curating the games, and champions “ripped from time and their plane of existence.” “You, Acolyte, are called to bear witness to D20 Deathmatch.”

Round 3: Bessie and the Cowdettes, and the Box of Chaos

46. 1:05:51 Back from the break. The GM: “That movie trailer looked amazing. I can’t wait to watch Bessie and the Cowdettes… That is my top movie of 2024.” (The trailer, about bovine astronaut “Cowdettes” led by Bessie fighting evil alien space turkeys, played in the break reel.) Arbiter: “Their studio is really milking it.” GM: “Utterly amazing.” Skelman: “Can we move on, please?”
47. 1:06:18 Thea holds up the broken sign, clashing the two halves together. The Arbiter interrupts again. “Why am I even here?” She throws the pieces up. Skelman: “It’s a good thing I turned her down for prom.” Knottley: “For legal reasons as well.”
48. 1:06:49 Chaos event: the yee-haw promotion. The Acolytes chant for blood (Skelman rolls a 15). An illusion dims the lights, the moonlight goes muted, the ground turns sticky, and a PBR is thrust into each hand (even Knottley’s ghostly one). In a puff of cigarette smoke a mechanical bull appears beneath them both and lifts them into the spotlight. GM: “Roll de yee-haw, motherfuckers.” Knottley: “Skelly, we’ve been put into their promotion for their shitty movie.” Mettle saves: Skelman fails and is hurt; Knottley passes. GM: “I’m beginning to think you’ll like this movie.” Skelman: “Beginning to think I don’t have a choice.”
49. 1:08:37 The Box of Chaos arrives. “This is boring.” The Arbiter slams his hands together. The Box of Chaos falls from the sky like a rocket but, “because of technical reasons,” just hovers in the air. The lid flips open and a column of yellow and pink fire shoots up, lighting the sky like daylight. Champions can sacrifice an action to it for a magical item. Thea now holds four broken pieces of a sign: “Round three.”
50. 1:09:40 As a ghost, Knottley’s memory is starting to disappear: he forgot the turn order. The GM explains the box: trade something, and “there’s a whole little dimension, lots of little hidden leftover souls in there.” Thea mocks “that tin hat you’re wearing” and asks where his mustache went. Knottley: “I have been graced with a ghostly spectral form. And I no longer have a mustache.” Thea: “It was stronger than you.” He blames adhesive “that probably shouldn’t be going on someone’s face.”
51. 1:11:05 Thea goes in the box. “Uppies!” Knottley picks Thea up (he can fly now), floats to the box, has her hold her nose for a cannonball, and tosses her in. Shadowy hands spring up out of the box: “Hey, what the fuck is going on? … You can’t just throw shit in my box.” Knottley: “Wait, Thea’s people.” The box: “It’s not about the sacrifice, it’s about how you go about giving it.” Knottley offers to throw harder. Thea makes him promise not to throw her, runs back “quite stupidly” with her hands up, and is gently set down inside, next to the shadowy figure.
52. 1:12:32 Thea: “Hi, I live here now… You have a lot of toilet paper… This is my favorite snack.” The occupant: “Don’t touch my stuff. You’re gonna have to pay rent.” Thea offers teeth: “I’ve got at least 12 of them.” “Oh, why didn’t you start with that?… I do need those teeth.” She bangs her mouth on the box’s edge and knocks out four teeth. He looks up at Knottley: “What a sucker.” The lid shuts and the box rumbles.
53. 1:13:31 A 2 (“Don’t blame this on Thea”). Knottley is handed a small vial of ethereal black liquid that opens on its own, screams and covers his ghostly form. His bloodlust and instinct swap for the next round. Thea, still sitting in the box: “There’s no cushion for my poop.”
54. 1:14:49 The poo. Knottley asks Thea to gather up her droppings, lifts her out (“Hey, that’s mine”), and has her throw them all at Skelman, hard. “Be the monkey you wanna be. Eat my poo.” Held up by Knottley, Thea pitches like a machine. Skelman is splattered rapid-fire with a whole variety of poop; “clearly she’s been eating a lot of carrots.” Skelman: “You know, I’m used to the goo, but not the poo.” Thea: “It’s my gift to you! I love you, Skelvin!” “I hate this so much!”
55. 1:16:54 Possession. “I’m gonna come over there and clean it.” Knottley flies into Skelman and takes possession of his bones (a nat 20) to clean off the poo. Skelman, losing control of his own limbs: “That was supposed to be a failure.” Knottley: “I don’t think you understand what failure looks like.”
56. 1:18:20 Knottley comes out, apologetic: “I was just trying to help.” Skelman: “I tried to get you to accept your new bony thing and then you went and ascended on me.” He lectures that possession is “inherently evil… like using charm spells on someone… removing free will.” He reminds Knottley of “the time when we killed my grandfather again? And you and I, our bodies became one giant body.” Knottley can’t remember: “Things are starting to get a little fuzzy.” Skelman: “Ghosts lose their memories. … If you want a good boning, you can just ask.” Knottley offers a handshake and Skelman’s hand passes through him: “I don’t know how you picked up Thea to begin with… You’re incorporeal!” “I was focusing really hard.”
57. 1:20:07 The vacuum. During the break an Acolyte backstage named Luigi (“great mustache… wouldn’t shut up about his brother Mario”) told Skelman that ghosts are weak to vacuum cleaners and gave him the Luigi’s Mansion vacuum. Skelman pull-starts it and sucks Knottley into its container. “Now I have a ghost in a box.” Arbiter: “You have a dick in a box.”
58. 1:21:49 The dice wish. Skelman offers the vacuum with Knottley inside to the Box of Chaos (“7 out of 10”). Aware of “the meta narrative… dice that are being rolled cosmically in the sky, and mine have been bad,” he asks for a new set of cosmic dice. The box rolls an 8, then a 5 on the reroll. A magic blue pill appears for a second and is drawn back: “That’s mine. Sorry.” Instead he gets the Shield of the Golden King (+1 Mettle until he rolls a nat 1 on defense, which shatters it). The Arbiter snatches the shield back, pulls on a face mask, and blowtorches it down into a set of golden dice with the same effect. Skelman: “That is some good stuff there.”
59. 1:25:15 “Hey, I’m in here.” Arbiter: “I didn’t really want this guy. I just wanted the vacuum. This place is a mess.” He reverses the vacuum and throws Knottley’s ghost out into the ether.
60. 1:25:41 The bone zone. Skelman: “I’m going to have to take you to the bone zone.” Knottley: “I understand.” Chant: “Bone zone, bone zone!” Skelman expands his consciousness and the world becomes “the danger dungeon.” The one thing that could hurt Knottley more than a conspiracy theory being wrong is himself, so Skelman brings in “the statue that we met previously the last week” to battle Knottley face to face. “I shadow linked him.” GM: “I feel like you hired a third party to do the job.” Arbiter: “You’re subcontracting this deathmatch?” Skelman: “I own the dungeon. I subcontract the work inside that dungeon.” GM: “I think this is actually a sign of leadership.”
61. 1:28:14 The statue (voiced by the Arbiter) is like a mirror, but “I’m wearing a mustache with a nice thick layer of adhesive.” Knottley: “I’ve always wanted to play with myself.” The statue opens a pit trap beneath them. Knottley’s defense holds, so the pit is a two-inch drop that only brings them closer. Arbiter: “Guys, I asked for a lava pit.” GM: “It’s a meet cute.” Statue: “Nowhere to go. It’s just you and me in here.” “We only have one mustache.” Statue: “I want you inside of me.” Then the dungeon fades and the statue vanishes.
62. 1:30:27 Thea consoles Skelman. “Are you doing okay?” “No… this dick has bested me by not even trying… He just seems to continue falling upwards. There must be something said about the managerial system.” “I’ve been this way for thousands of years and yet he ascends immediately.” Thea: “Just because he’s different doesn’t mean he’s better than you. Show him that bones are the real winner here.” Skelman: “Great words, awful timing… I know, it’s still on my body.”
63. 1:32:10 Chaos event: the Chinchilla Parliament heckles. Thea rolls the end-of-round d20 (“I bet it’ll be higher than the two you rolled earlier”); Knottley rolls the event. The front-row chinchillas pull out small translators hung around their necks and hurl insults: “You dress like me ma. You’re terrible! I’ve seen better bones! That ghost doesn’t scare us!” “We just didn’t approve you!” “Why can’t you even roll a die?” Their painfully accurate observations “categorize them quite clearly as big butt heads.” Both champions fail and take psychic damage, more “than either of us have done the entire time.” Skelman: “Why is our government so mean? Fuck the government.”

Round 4: the trap hallway

65. 1:34:33 Knottley wants the statue back: “Where are my statues, yellow man?” From the ether, on the wind: “I want you inside of me.” Skelman: the statues are in his dungeon, “they’re working for me.” Knottley holds and then forfeits all his turns (four this round, from the swapped stats) and just stands there waiting. Skelman: “See what I say about not even trying and then succeeding?”
66. 1:36:00 Skelman uses his heroic surge to reopen the bone zone and send Knottley back into the danger dungeon. This time the statue waits at the end of a long hallway full of traps, and “I’ve had all of my lackeys place ectoplasmic goo on all of the pointy and sharp objects… Also, lots of fire. So much fire.” The statue calls from the far end: “Dick, is that you?… It’s so cold here… I’m at the end of the shaft.” “I’m coming, Statue!”

• An ectoplasm-covered axe slams down. It’s a tie, so both gain fatigue.
• A spike box closes in from all sides, coated in blue ecto-goo, and pins the ghost. Knottley rolled a nat 1, so it hurts more and he gains his fourth fatigue. “I’m a ghost, this shouldn’t hurt.”
• Flamethrowers drop from the ceiling and bathe the hall in fire, cooking him around the edges “like a marshmallow” (powered by the heroic surge).
• A wall of lightning. Knottley simply sidesteps it: “I just kind of watch and wait for the pattern. That’s how I play the Dark Souls games… I sidestep court workers all the time when they’re trying to serve me papers.” GM: “That’s really poor planning.”

67. 1:40:42 The GM is impressed either is still standing. Knottley is nearly spent; Skelman has a little more.

Round 5: the merge, Francis, and the Peloton storm

68. 1:41:38 In the bone zone, face to face. Knottley: “Statue, I say we become one.” Skelman: “That’s not allowed!” Statue: “I do want you in and around and inside of me… especially with your thick, muscular peloton legs.” Knottley shows off his calves. Statue: “I’m into the varicose veins… I’m a vein guy. Always have been.” The statue opens its giant angel-like wings to embrace him, and Knottley’s ghost merges into the statue (free action). Skelman: “No, no, you’re on my payroll, statue.” Statue: “You don’t know me off the clock?… I’m allowed a 15-minute break.” Skelman: “Work-life balance. No, you’re right.”
69. 1:43:18 “Let’s fly up there and give him a knuckle sandwich.” The statue’s rock fist lands. Skelman rolls a nat 1 on defense and his golden dice shatter immediately, on their very first defense roll. He takes extra damage and more fatigue. Skelman, resigned: “All right, Richard. Do what you must.” Knottley: “With a heavy heart. I mean, I don’t actually have a heart. I’m a ghost now… Inside of a statue.”
70. 1:44:50 Skelman: “Use all of your things! Do it! Become the manager you were meant to be!” Knottley stacks everything on one attack: “Status me, Dad!” Skelman rolls a nat 20 on defense. “I had accepted my defeat. But my slimy friend had not.” Francis shoots out a pseudopod to block what would have been the final blow and shoves the statue back. Skelman stands: “You’re right. I do still have a chance at this… I will not take this lying down then.” (He’d forgotten Francis’s name: “I was going to call it Jeff.”)
71. 1:46:56 The Peloton storm. With “a little bit of Peloton magic somewhere deep inside my soul, which is deep inside this statue,” Knottley raises his arms. The clouds clear and a swarm of Peloton bikes flutters through the sky, swirling, throwing arcs of lightning, until a beam of electrical energy blasts down on both of them. Skelman: “I hate cardio!” It’s a nat 20 for Knottley. Skelman is left with almost nothing.
72. 1:49:13 The last exchange. Skelman swings: “ha ha, punch, punch.” One roll is a nat 20 that meets Knottley’s own nat 20, and the other is a nat 1. He lands nothing, and Knottley gains health from it. “He’s healing and I’m dying! … I’m not even trying.” But Knottley’s nat 20 is his third adrenaline, which gives him a fatigue: his fifth.
73. 1:51:04 Knottley fades. Thea: “You pushed him to the edge! It was strategy the whole time! You burned yourself to burn him!” Skelman: “Dick, what’s happening?” Knottley: “I’m just fading away.” Skelman: “You’re ascending again? God damn it! … I’ve been trying for thousands of years to ascend.” Knottley becomes one with the universe, all around them. His voice: “We’ve been looking for you to talk to you about your car’s extended warranty.” Skelman: “You pushed yourself too hard, too fast. The ascension takes time, meditation, energy.”

Aftermath: Team D

74. 1:52:22 GM: “He has faded away. Pay no mind to the Arbiter. He’s gathering his thoughts.” Skelman had forgotten the Arbiter was up there: “I’ve been here the whole time.” GM: “Thea’s been around a lot. She does the dirty work down there… But I do require a leader who can be present. Who can lead.” She leaves her seat next to the chinchillas to approach him. Skelman: “It’s been a bit by accident… Fuck the government.”
75. 1:52:58 GM: “Listen, luck is part of winning. Don’t ever underestimate it. Leverage it.” Skelman: “Perhaps I am management material.” GM: “That’s what we see in you. Not just me and the Arbiter, but all of the Acolytes… I want you to lead Team B. First rule of order: what is your team name?”
76. 1:53:53 The name. Skelman: “We three dicks came together as one to do what people thought was impossible, find Thea, clearly the most chaotic object in the universe… I do owe my success to the other two dicks. I think Team D is here to stay.” GM: “Two letters down, but it is absolutely your choice. Team D it will be.” Thea: “For dicks.” The GM suggests the shirt read “Team D” with “for dicks” in smaller text. Skelman would consult “my other dicks,” and the ascended Knottley’s voice chimes in: “Team D, four. Also, taxation is theft.” GM: “Is there like a mystery fourth dick?” “No, no, no.” Skelman: “I’m listening to the universe. It’s talking to me a lot more often.”
77. 1:55:17 The loop. GM: the others will “rematerialize because as they continue to elevate, they should realize it’s a loop,” and Richard Knottley “will return back in his fleshy state next time around.” She puts a hand on Skelman’s bony shoulder. Skelman: “Does that mean Ascension is for nothing?… Has it all been for naught?” Knottley’s voice: “It’s not a loop, it’s a spiral.” GM: “Listen, I just run the Dread Fortress and look over the void. I don’t wanna be your spiritual guide.” “Who am I? What am I?” “He’s having a crisis. Somebody come get him.”
78. 1:56:14 The Arbiter flies down and escorts Skelman off the field. “I really thought that you were going to choose Dick Dynasty as a team name.” Skelman: “Oh, shit. That’s such a good one… We can change it?” Arbiter: “You said it in front of all the Acolytes,” but he’ll talk to the Grandmaster. Skelman says his management style is “much more cooperative with my underlings.” The Arbiter promises to “get your bones massaged.” “Yeah, rub that bone.”
79. 1:57:09 Closing. GM to the Acolytes: “You have witnessed the birth of our second team. Remember that these deathmatches are not just for fun, though they are hella fun… it is also here to remind ourselves to stay vigilant, to push ourselves. Death is not the ending, and it is not what we should fear. We are stronger… everything in the universe pushes towards our victory as long as we push there ourselves. Hold on to your faith, hold on to the Void.” “Welcome and good night to D20 Deathmatch!”

Full Dried Blood notes (click to expand)

Opens: “Welcome back, Acolytes, to another episode of Dried Blood… one of those episodes in season six.” Mudcat introduces “Richard Knottley, Richard Skelman, RealLifeFakeWizard, Runaway Robot.”

• Skelman is the new team lead (Caustic Phoenix: “Congratulations on being the new team lead”).
• Skelman, asked for his first order of business: “I only have control, really, over two people here, and one of them is currently locked away at a re-education camp. I think our first order of business is that Dick and I are going to get our third Dick out. He’s in too deep.” It’s unclear whether “re-education camp” means Knottley in the vacuum or the third Dick.
• Skelman’s second order of business: “I’m no longer paying taxes on my many dungeons that I have throughout the realm… because I am now, and as Richard has told me, a sovereign citizen. I am my own man!” Knottley’s player: run the businesses through an offshore account and revoke their citizenships. Caustic Phoenix: “I don’t want to say no. So we’re going to let that happen.”
• Knottley is “soon to be returning back to your human form.” Knottley: “It just won’t let me die.” Caustic Phoenix says he can come back built differently.
• The aluminum-foil hat: Knottley’s player has now put it on five times. Mudcat’s “quick lore update”: he could have it surgically implanted on the inside. “They call me hammerhead.”
• The Dickazord. Caustic Phoenix has heard rumors of a “dickazoid.” Skelman: “we did do that in the first episode.” The third dick is needed: “our son Cola Man” (unclear name). Skelman’s final words, in character: “This will not be the last you see of us, for we will go delve deeper and find our third dick, reclaim him as one of our own, and then we will create the largest dickazord that anyone has ever seen.”
• Knottley’s sign-off: “Live dangerously.”

Creator notes (out-of-character)

• Mudcat to RealLifeFakeWizard: “you just can’t win one of these even when you roll nothing but nat 20s.” RealLifeFakeWizard says he was trying to lose and it felt uncomfortable to be ahead: “I’m supposed to be the heel.” Mudcat: “You only lost because you won too hard.”
• Skelman’s player had bad dice all night and the week before, plus Foundry and camera trouble.
• Both players: the characters have bonded, which made fighting each other hard (“I can’t do it in character”). “The dicks are better together.” They felt this episode was tamer than Part 1, which hadn’t been demonetized yet.
• Skelman’s player jokes that Knottley answered whether you’d “get with” yourself: “The answer was yeah.”
• Mudcat enjoyed describing a mustache as having “good mouth feel.”
• Caustic Phoenix’s George Washington “20 goddamn dicks” line is an old internet meme reference (“What are you on, Tumblr?”).