S7E4 — The Cheese — Sila v Ol' Pumpernicklejack

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Two tiny champions faced off under a full moon: Sila, a scarf-wearing rat on a lifelong hunt for “the cheese,” and Ol’ Pumpernicklejack, a three-foot redcap who arrived straight off the toilet. What began in a graveyard became a lava surf, a rocket ride into the Grandmaster’s cheese platter and a brawl through a truly disgusting tavern. It ended with one champion dripping with brown toilet water and the other lying in the muck, entombed in fondue, exactly as she asked.

The Story

Chess Night at the Dread Fortress

The evening began with the Arbiter wandering the halls of the Dread Fortress, following the sound of snorts and laughter to the throne room. He poked his head in to ask whether the Grandmaster was actually having fun, and she told him to “either open the door or close the door. You’re letting a draft in.” The throne room had been rearranged. Instead of her seat at the end of the purple rug, a table now stood in the middle of the room, and across from the Grandmaster sat Claude, the Fortress’s small, bearded janitor, his tall blue hat slightly askew and his tiny feet dangling well short of the chair’s edge. The two of them were playing chess.

When the Arbiter asked why, the Grandmaster explained that Claude was “better than you,” noting that the Arbiter hadn’t beaten her in “50 years, 52?” He objected that Claude didn’t even speak English. She countered that “everybody knows the French play chess exceptionally well,” then admitted she was only guessing that Claude was French. She sent him back to clean the toilet.

Then she realized it was Sunday. With a snap of her fingers, her everyday robe became her full black and gold armor, and she began to panic. Had there been champions? An arena? Had Thea been involved? The Arbiter assured her that “this time I let Thea touch none of it because she has proven herself unreliable time and time again.” He didn’t know where Thea was. The Grandmaster found that worrying: “There’s nothing more terrifying than Thea idle.” The Arbiter guessed she was “probably like doing worm stuff.” He promised the cream of the crop, and when the Grandmaster asked whether that was for making beer or making soup, he answered: “It’s for making dead champions.”

Two Champions, Both Very Short

The Arbiter clapped, the ripples of sound became visible and tore open a portal, and he announced “Sila versus Old Pumpernickel Jack.” First came a large iron boot, then another. The boots were misleading. Their owner was about three feet tall, hunched and emaciated, with leathery skin, bushy white whiskers, bloodshot red eyes and an enormous red gnomish cap that cascaded down most of his body. His first words were “I was on the toilet, what’s going on?”

The Grandmaster asked whether the Arbiter had grabbed the right one, since this one looked “mostly dead already,” and told him to pull up his pants. The Arbiter insisted Jack had been on his watchlist “for a number of seasons.” Jack asked for parchment paper, the Grandmaster declared that “the Dread Fortress spares no expense on its parchment,” and a row of goblins filed in carrying every kind imaginable. Jack chose the roughest sheet, shoved it down the back of his trousers to finish wiping, and politely asked whose acquaintance he was making.

“I’m down right here,” came the answer. About an inch shorter than Jack stood a rat in britches and a jacket, her blue scarf billowing behind her and slapping him in the chin. Asked whether she’d brought note cards, Sila said she had her nose. The Grandmaster had never seen a talking rat and was not convinced rats were clever. Sila promised to change her mind: “Just you wait. I will get the cheese.” The Arbiter announced he was already pulling for Jack.

Into the Midnight Mausoleum

Another clap opened onto The Midnight Mausoleum, a graveyard stretching to the horizon. Fog seeped between the stones, the grass was “well fertilized, but hungry for more,” and a bright moon shone on every tombstone and on the ring of Acolytes cheering from above. The Grandmaster begged the champions to “bring forth true blood under this moonlight,” then spread her wings and took to the night sky with the Arbiter.

Sila moved first. She scurried around a gravestone on all fours, nose to the ground, and threw a dull dagger that sliced into Jack “like cutting through cheese,” trimming his beard. (“It’ll hurt more that way,” the Grandmaster noted.) Then she did what she had really come to do. She broke out her thieves’ tools and robbed a grave with such speed that the Grandmaster dubbed her “Sila Fast Hands.” Sila came from a guild of rats who loved disguises, and she was searching for the cheese, “and she will find the cheese, whether it kills her or not.”

The first grave was shallow and held the decomposed body of a minotaur, still wearing a few scraps of trousers. After some debate over the name (Brormir? Boromir?), the hosts settled on Tormiir, a minotaur champion of years past. “They all look the same when they die,” the Arbiter shrugged. Sila covered him back up immediately, muttering “Not the cheese, not the cheese, not the cheese.”

Jack, meanwhile, saw his own blood dripping. He took off his red cap, held it under the wound so each drop darkened the red, and said “Oh, Missy.” When the cap went back on, he pulled from beneath it a giant iron sickle larger than himself. He flew into a rage, his wild magic filling the graveyard with ghostly shapes. A huge minotaur spirit rose beside Sila. Jack’s first swing landed, though she twisted away from the worst of it. His second was a perfect strike, and the minotaur spirit exploded next to her. Sila dodged the blast, said “I thought he was coming to help me,” and moved on to the next tombstone.

“Grandmaster, do you have any idea what the fuck she’s talking about?” the Arbiter asked. “Yes, obviously. It’s cheese,” she replied. “Well, it’s not Gouda.” When Jack kept laughing at her from behind a gravestone, she threatened to make “the rest of the hair on your top” go down to the bottom, then asked, “Is he pooping in our arena?” (“We just fertilized,” the Arbiter sighed.) She did compliment Jack’s fashion sense, since his boots matched his weapon. The Arbiter agreed that “if you die, then you’re already dressed for your funeral.”

The Minitaurs

The Acolytes called for chaos, and the Arbiter made a point of saying this one wasn’t his. Tiny white spikes pushed up out of the dug grave, followed by claws and hooves: hundreds of minitaurs, each about three inches tall, swarming to drag the champions into the earth. Both shook them off easily. The minitaurs’ stabbing at their toes felt like a great foot massage, although one sword-wielding minitaur kept stabbing away between Jack’s toes. Jack wondered aloud whether anyone would rather fight one giant minotaur or a thousand minitaurs. The Grandmaster decided her minitaurs had been insulted enough and swept them all into the crowd with one gust: “Congratulations, chat. You are now inundated with thousands of minitaurs.” She declared herself “0 for 2” on cool statements and chaos events alike.

Chuck the Cheese

The Acolytes roared for Sila, and she spent their favor on more grave robbing rather than on Jack. This time she struck gold. In an unmarked grave lay one of her own kind, possibly bearing her guild’s sigil. It was her best friend, Chuck the Cheese, who had been playing hide and go seek with her. “I’ve been searching for years.”

The Arbiter asked whether they were going to ignore the obvious reference. The Grandmaster claimed she didn’t know what he was talking about. Because Sila spoke to the body as if it were alive, Chuck’s corpse stirred and began mimicking her every move. Jack suggested, “Let’s cut the cheese, shall we?” Sila did exactly that. She stabbed her best friend’s body to coat her blade in his necrotic ooze and threw it into Jack.

Jack’s wild magic then summoned Chuck’s actual spirit. “Hey, buddy, why are you stabbing me? What’s going on?” Chuck’s body grabbed a dagger and copied Sila’s throw, hitting Jack, which the spirit found impressive: “Oh, whoa, that was a pretty good throw on my part.” Then Chuck’s spirit exploded beside Sila with a cry of “Stop it! Goodbye.” Jack mopped his bleeding vest with his cap, slammed it back on, and chanted “Blood, blood, blood.” He charged through a crowd of rising spirits, including a large “octopussy kind of individual” that floated up beside Sila, and landed two sickle blows that left her badly hurt.

The Floor Is Lava

The crowd went wild. Blue slushies flew and were poured over faces, drunk Acolytes tore off their clothes and stomped minitaurs in the stands, and both champions received a surge of heroic power. The Grandmaster warned that anyone who died without using it would be buried so deep “that no one will ever find you or be able to raise you from the dead.”

When the Grandmaster complained that her mouth “don’t work so good right now,” the “That’s what she said” jokes followed, and the Arbiter blamed her “mouth antics” for a second chaos event. The graveyard turned to lava. Both champions hopped neatly from tombstone to tombstone, Sila with perfect grace, and the Grandmaster complained that they were laughing in her face. Out of pity, Jack volunteered to fail. His iron boots began to glow white-hot and melt, and he was clumsier from then on. “You’re a very grand master,” he offered. She refused to take his pity.

The Coffin Raft

Sila wiggled her tombstone loose like a seesaw (“We don’t put a lot of maintenance into this place,” the Arbiter admitted) and turned to the Acolytes for advice. They split into tidy huddles and held up billboards, and the winner read: “Ride a floating coffin through the lava.” An Acolyte named August tossed down another pizza to heal her. Sila hopped into Chuck’s coffin, which turned out to be cheap plastic. Inside the lid was carved “You can’t keep a good cheese down.” The Grandmaster reasoned that he “died a winner. Well, until Sila found him.”

Then Sila invited Jack aboard. “Come on! Do you wanna die?!” Jack protested that she had been throwing knives at him “not five seconds” ago, but he jumped on, and she rowed them both through the lava. “I never promised I was trying to kill him,” she explained.

Sila smelled it first. Up in the Grandmaster’s booth sat a platter of “the official sanctioned cheese of Doug the Pug, the beloved dog of the arena.” The Grandmaster offered it to whoever killed the other. Doug approved, since his desire for blood outweighed his desire for cheese, and he had twelve refrigerators of the stuff in the Fortress basement anyway. Sila asked Jack how much he liked cheese. “I like blood, that’s kind of my whole thing.”

Jack let fate decide between Sila’s plan and his own instincts, and fate chose instinct. His eyes went red: “Oh, Missy, Missy Mouse.” He barreled into her and knocked them both off the raft. When his iron boots hit the lava, the pain launched him like a rocket with Sila still in his arms. They arced high into the sky and crashed straight into the cheese platter on the Grandmaster’s balcony, right beside Doug, sending cheese everywhere. They wrestled on the floor like siblings. Jack swung his sickle, and Sila twisted free with a “Not today!”

The Arbiter rose, flared his white wings, and picked them both up by the scruffs of their necks. “We don’t have a lot of rules, but there are some rules.”

Emmery’s Tavern

The arena was ruined (“kind of a shithole now… covered in lava and corpses”), which left plenty of work for the goblins and chinchillas. The Grandmaster wasn’t having champions fight near her or Doug. So the Arbiter wound up and punched both of them across the Void like meteors, past the Dread Fortress and past the moon Vendolyn, and down through the roof of a small tavern. The patrons were knocked out cold. In the corner, a large bartender kept rubbing down the bar with a crusty rag, utterly unfazed: “Welcome to Emmery’s Tavern.” The bar had a hearth, upturned tables and barrels labeled “number two.” The prize cheese was now locked in a case “until you win. If you win.”

Sila sniffed for real cheese and found only processed slices, squeeze cheese and plastic-wrapped singles, smelling “like feet and burritos.” It drove her feral. She rolled on the sticky floor until her fur was caked in grit, pulled out the rocks to make jagged daggers, and stabbed Jack with them. Jack’s wild magic answered by teleporting them both, grappled together, into the tavern’s chimney. After a long clatter, the rat hit the fire at the bottom with Jack landing on top of her. She put out the flames with her butt and rolled out smoking.

The Acolytes chanted “Jack, Jack, Jack.” He dragged his sickle across the floor toward the prone rat: “Burned blood is still blood.” His magic teleported him again, this time into the tavern’s overflowing toilet. There was a splash, wet brown liquid seeped under the door, and then he burst out, leaving a Jack-shaped hole in the door and dripping brown. Sila called it “the crappiest attack you’ve ever done to me.” It was also his most devastating. The bartender watched his toilet erupt and sighed, “I just started that brew.”

Cover Me in Cheese

From Sila’s eyes, the final moment came as “the silhouette of a fecal monster” with only the shine of an iron blade. The blade cut through fur and flesh, and her blood fountained over Jack, “a blood that he has been begging for from the very beginning.” Jack slipped on the toilet water and fell flat on his back (“Ah, my sciatica”), his head coming to rest facing hers.

Sila: “Cover me in cheese.”

She sank into the brown muck, which matted her fur: “a slim turd. Burnt to crisp.” Then came heavy footsteps. The half-dressed bartender emerged with a pot of fondue and poured the golden liquid over her, encasing her as she had wished. He told Jack the tavern was closing. Jack’s only question was “Do you have any parchment paper at all?” The door opened, and the Grandmaster stood there holding a roll of it. “Oh, Pumpernickel Jack. Congratulations. For victory is yours!” She led him out to a standing ovation. When asked for words of wisdom, he burped, and the crowd erupted for the greatest burp ever heard in a finale speech. She raised his hand and soared him into the sky. His pants, fresh from the bathroom, could not stay up, “leaving a full moon for our acolytes.”

Dried Blood

Chuck the Cheese returned to speak over his friend, buried in “shit and gold cheese.” He called it “kind of living the dream,” since “you found the cheese in the end.” He also revealed that he had starved to death stuck in his hide-and-seek spot, missing his fifteen children, inside a cheap, non-biodegradable coffin. The Grandmaster promised Chuck a permanent place in the graveyard, with a new plastic coffin. Sila’s final words were that “a Twinkie is what they called me in high school,” adding, “I’m not a rat of many words these days, you know?” (“It’s hard when you’re encased in poop and cheese,” the Grandmaster sympathized.) Jack left the Acolytes with this advice: before you sit down in the cubicle, double-check that there’s still paper there.

Notable Moments

• Ol’ Pumpernicklejack entered fresh from the toilet and wiped with the Dread Fortress’s roughest parchment.
• Sila found her long-lost best friend Chuck the Cheese in a grave, then stabbed his corpse to poison her dagger.
• Sila turned Chuck’s plastic coffin into a lava raft and invited her opponent aboard.
• Jack’s melting boots launched him like a rocket straight into the Grandmaster’s cheese platter beside Doug.
• The Arbiter scruffed both champions and punched them across the Void into Emmery’s Tavern.
• Jack’s victory speech was a single legendary burp, followed by a full moon for the Acolytes.

Memorable Quotes

• The Arbiter: “It’s for making dead champions.”
• Sila: “I’m gonna change your mind today. Just you wait. I will get the cheese.”
• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “If you’re going to fight, at least fight in fashion.”
• Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer: “He died a winner. Well, until Sila found him. So I guess he died a winner and then became a loser.”
• Sila: “I never promised I was trying to kill him.”
• Ol’ Pumpernicklejack: “I like blood, that’s kind of my whole thing.”
• The Arbiter: “We don’t have a lot of rules, but there are some rules.”
• Ol’ Pumpernicklejack: “Burned blood is still blood.”

Who and What Appears

Characters

Ol’ Pumpernicklejack (Edward Spence). Winner.

• Body: a redcap (player-stated in Dried Blood). About 3 ft tall, hunched, emaciated, leathery skin, bushy white whiskers, bloodshot red eyes, thinning white hair under the cap.
• Dress and gear: a loose leather vest, huge iron boots and an oversized red gnomish cap. The cap soaks up blood and hides a giant iron sickle, larger than he is.
• Class and powers: Wild Magic Barbarian. His wild magic raises exploding spirits from the graves (a minotaur, Chuck the Cheese, an “octopussy” creature) and teleports him (the chimney, the toilet).
• Personality and lore:
  • Lives for blood: “I like blood, that’s kind of my whole thing.” Says “Oh, Missy” and “Missy Mouse.”
  • Arrived straight from the toilet and wiped with the Dread Fortress’s roughest parchment.
  • Has sciatica.
  • The Arbiter had him on his watchlist “for a number of seasons.”
• In this episode: he rocketed off the lava into the GM’s cheese platter. His boots melted in the lava. He killed Sila covered in toilet water. His victory speech was a burp, and he flashed a “full moon” as the GM flew him up.

Sila (Seum). Pronounced “Sheila” at the table.

• Body and dress: a talking rat, an inch shorter than Jack. Blue scarf, britches, jacket. Runs on four legs, nose to the ground.
• Skills (as played): rogue-like (thieves’ tools, Uncanny Dodge, cunning action), dull daggers.
• Lore:
  • From a guild of rats who like to disguise themselves; her thievery is about uncovering who is behind what.
  • Searching for “the cheese,” whether it kills her or not.
  • Her best friend Chuck the Cheese vanished in a game of hide and go seek; she had searched for years.
• In this episode: she dug up graves, used Chuck’s corpse as poison and his coffin as a raft, and invited Jack aboard (“I never promised I was trying to kill him”). She was killed in Emmery’s Tavern. Her last wish, “Cover me in cheese,” was granted by Emery’s fondue. Dried Blood titles: “Sila the shit,” “Sila the cheese.”

Chuck the Cheese: Sila’s best friend, a rat of her guild (guild sigil on his body).

• Death: hid in a plastic coffin in an unmarked grave in the Midnight Mausoleum during hide and go seek and starved to death (Dried Blood). He had 15 children.
• In this episode: his body was animated for a round, mirrored Sila’s attack, and hit Jack. His spirit appeared and exploded.
• His coffin reads “You can’t keep a good cheese down.” The GM says he’ll get a permanent place in the graveyard.

Grandmaster Elusia Skypiercer (Caustic Phoenix).

• Opening: plays chess with Claude, flips the table, sends him to clean the toilet. Claims the Arbiter hasn’t beaten her in “50 years, 52?” Her robe becomes black and gold armor with a snap.
• During the fight:
  • Self-described 0-for-2 on statements and chaos events; struggles with phrases. The Arbiter: she “didn’t have what you’d call a formal education.”
  • Swept the minitaurs into the crowd.
  • Offered Doug’s cheese as a bounty for a kill.
  • Brought Jack parchment as he won.

The Arbiter (Mudcat).

• Kept Thea away from the prep this time.
• Calls himself experienced (“doing this a long time”); the GM calls him old.
• Flared his white wings and scruffed both champions off the balcony, then punched them across the Void like meteors to Emmery’s Tavern.
• Disclaims the GM’s chaos events.

Claude: a small being with a tall blue hat, bushy beard and tiny feet. A good chess player, better than the Arbiter per the GM. Possibly French (the GM’s guess); “doesn’t even speak English” per the Arbiter. Ordered to clean the toilet; vanishes with a poof.

Thea: unreliable, given nothing to do, whereabouts unknown, “probably doing worm stuff.” The GM: “nothing more terrifying than Thea idle.”

Doug the Pug: “the beloved dog of the arena.” His official sanctioned cheese was offered as a prize, and he has 12 refrigerators of cheese in the Dread Fortress basement. His “desire for blood is greater than his desire for the cheese.”

Emery: the large, unfazed, half-dressed (no pants) bartender of Emmery’s Tavern. He polishes the bar with an ancient crusty rag, had “just started that brew,” poured fondue over Sila’s body, and announced closing time.

Tormiir / Brormir: a dead minotaur champion whose decomposed, barely-trousered body lies in a Midnight Mausoleum grave. The name is uncertain; see Continuity.

Minitaurs: hundreds of ~3-inch minotaurs from the first chaos event, now loose among the Acolytes.

August: sent Sila a cheese pizza and a slice of cheese (via a chinchilla), then another pizza. Apparently a chat member.

The cheese professor: a chat member Sila consulted.

Goblins (bring parchment) and chinchillas (cleanup crew; one brought the pizza).

Places

• Throne Room (Dread Fortress): purple rug, main seat, temporarily a chess table.
• The Midnight Mausoleum: a huge moonlit graveyard with fog, well-fertilized grass, a stone perimeter fence, shallow graves (below the water table), champion graves and unmarked graves. Turned to lava and left “covered in lava and corpses.”
• The Grandmaster’s booth / balcony: high above the arena.
• Emmery’s Tavern: a small tavern somewhere past the moon “the Vendolyn.” It has a hearth and chimney, “number two” barrels, one overflowing toilet with no parchment, a storage room, and only processed cheese. Its roof is now holed.
• The Dread Fortress basement: Doug’s 12 cheese refrigerators.
• The Fey Realm: asked about. “No world is ever too far.”

Items

• Jack’s red cap, iron sickle and iron boots (melted).
• Sila’s dull daggers and her rock daggers made from floor debris.
• Chuck’s plastic coffin (the lava raft).
• Doug’s sanctioned cheese platter, later locked in a case.
• Emery’s fondue.
• The parchment roll given to Jack.
• Blue slushies (“expensive in this economy”).

Lore statements

• The Dread Fortress keeps a goblin parchment service.
• Champions are buried in the Midnight Mausoleum, alongside unmarked non-champion graves.
• The GM threatens to bury un-surged champions where no one can raise them from the dead, which implies raising the dead is the norm (inferred, from 0:41:13).
• “We’ve had over 100 people playing” (Caustic Phoenix, table talk-ish).

Full Round-by-Round

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

Opening — chess with Claude in the throne room

1. 0:00:36 The Arbiter walks the halls of the Dread Fortress looking for the Grandmaster. He hears snorts and laughter from the throne room and pokes his head in: “Are you laughing? Are you having fun?” GM: “Either open the door or close the door. You’re letting a draft in.”
2. 0:01:11 — Claude. The throne room has been rearranged. Instead of the main seat at the end of the beautiful purple rug, a table sits in the middle of the room. Across from the Grandmaster sits a small individual with a tall blue hat (slightly askew), a bushy beard and tiny feet that can’t reach the edge of the chair. They are playing chess.
3. 0:02:34 The Arbiter asks why she plays chess with Claude. GM: “He’s actually pretty good at it. He’s better than you. I mean, you haven’t beaten me since, oh gosh, it’s been 50 years, 52?” Arbiter: “He doesn’t even speak English.” GM: “Everybody knows the French play chess exceptionally well… I think it’s a requirement. That and drinking wine.” She admits she’s only assuming: “I think Claude is French.”
4. 0:03:19 — Sunday. “Oh my gosh, it’s Sunday.” She snaps her fingers and her casual everyday robe becomes her full black and gold armor suit. She panics: did he work with Thea? Champions? An arena? She hasn’t signed off on anything.
5. 0:03:41 — Thea left idle. Arbiter: “This time I let Thea touch none of it because she has proven herself unreliable time and time again.” He doesn’t know where she is. GM: “There’s nothing more terrifying than Thea idle. She does the worst stuff.… We’ll find out what that is later.” Arbiter: “She’s probably like doing worm stuff.”
6. 0:04:20 The GM demands two phenomenal, top-tier champions. Arbiter: “the cream of the crop… the top of the barrel skimmed from the finest champions that I could find across all universes.” GM: “Is that for making beer or making soup?” Arbiter: “It’s for making dead champions.” GM: “That I get.” Arbiter: “I’ve been doing this a long time.” GM: “You are old, that is very true.”

The champions

8. 0:04:58 The Arbiter claps. The ripples in the sound become visible and tear open a portal in time and space: “Grandmaster, for your entertainment this evening, I bring you Sila versus Old Pumpernickel Jack.”
9. 0:05:29 — Ol’ Pumpernicklejack. First comes a large iron boot, then another. The boots are deceptive: the wearer is about three feet tall, hunched, emaciated, with leathery skin, bushy white whiskers forming a facsimile of a beard around sunken features, and bloodshot red eyes. He wears a loose leather vest over bony shoulders. Most distinctive is a very large red gnomish cap cascading down most of his body.
10. 0:06:28 — Fresh off the toilet. Jack: “I was on the toilet, what’s going on?” GM: “Arbiter, did you get the right one? This one looks mostly dead already.” Arbiter: “He came highly recommended. He was on my watchlist for a number of seasons.” GM: “Pull up your pants!” Jack: “I don’t suppose you have any parchment paper, do you?” GM: “The Dread Fortress spares no expense on its parchment.” The Arbiter claps, and a row of goblins brings in all sorts of parchment. Jack picks the roughest one and shoves it down the back of his trousers to finish the wipe. “So, whose acquaintance am I making right now?”
11. 0:07:34 — Sila. “I’m down right here.” About an inch shorter than Jack stands a beautiful rat with a blue scarf billowing behind her. The scarf keeps slapping Jack in the chin, and his beard tangles in its fringe. She wears britches, a jacket and the scarf. “And I’m ready to win.”
12. 0:08:09 The GM asks whether she brought note cards. Sila: “No, I have my nose.” GM: “This is the first time I’ve seen a talking rat. You’re truly extraordinary.” Sila: “Pretty sure I’ve seen talking cats and seen talking dragons.” GM: “Not to be rude, but I still have all my fingers… Dragon, very intelligent. I have not heard of rats.” Sila: “I’m gonna change your mind today. Just you wait. I will get the cheese.” Arbiter: “Well, I’m already pulling for Jack.”
13. 0:09:04 — Cheese puns. GM: “Let’s see if there are any holes in her story. I say we breeze on over to our wonderful arena… I don’t know other cheese puns.” Arbiter: “I’m tapped out.”

The arena — the Midnight Mausoleum

14. 0:09:18 Another clap and portal. A dewy mist and fog roll across the floor as they step into the Midnight Mausoleum, a graveyard spanning the horizon.
15. 0:09:49 The GM leads the way. The air is chilly, with low fog seeping between the stones, and grass “well fertilized, but hungry for more.” A large, bright moon shines on every tombstone and on a ring of Acolytes seated above, cheering for Pumpernickel or for Sila.
16. 0:10:42 GM: “I beg for you to appeal to your greatest violent side, to bring forth true blood under this moonlight. And of course, put on a show for my acolytes.” She opens her wings and beckons the Arbiter up into the night sky.
17. 0:11:52 — Initiative. Jack realizes he has feral instinct (advantage on initiative). It doesn’t help: Sila goes first. The two stand on opposing graves, almost at eye level.

Round 1

18. 0:12:42 — The dull dagger. Sila grabs a dagger (“don’t worry, it’s a little dull”) and throws it. GM: “It’ll hurt more that way.” She scurries around a gravestone, sniffing for the right spot, and the throw slices into Jack “like cutting through cheese,” trimming some of his beard hair. Jack begins to trigger his Unstable Backlash, then takes it back. Someone quips “What are you, French?” (speaker uncertain). Sila tosses the knife up and catches it. They fight bunkered behind tombstones, both tiny. GM: does Sila run on two legs or four? Sila: “Four. Absolutely four. Like a nose dipping right down to that ground, sniffing all the way through.” GM: “This is what we needed.”
19. 0:15:34 — Grave robbing. Mudcat allows her thieves’ tools as a bonus action to rob a grave. She rolls sleight of hand (29). GM: “Sila Fast Hands.”
20. 0:17:03 — Sila’s background. She comes from a guild of rats whose key trait is that they like to disguise themselves. Her thievery is about “unrevealing who is behind what,” because she is searching for the cheese, “and she will find the cheese, whether it kills her or not.” GM: “For the big cheese, the ultimate cheese.”
21. 0:17:31 — The minotaur’s grave. It’s a shallow grave (“She’s below the water table”). Inside is the decomposed body of a minotaur, bones intact, a few pant legs barely hanging on. GM: “One of our champions was a Minotaur though.” Caustic Phoenix and Mudcat argue over the name. Mudcat says “Brormir,” the GM confuses it with Boromir, and then both settle on “Tormiir” (“it was all the R’s”). Mudcat: “They all look the same when they die.” GM: “He was notably not very rich, so he barely had pants on.” (See Continuity.)
22. 0:18:56 Sila covers it back up at once: “Not the cheese, not the cheese, not the cheese.” GM: if she resurrected it, “Minotaurs are like cows. You could then milk the Minotaur and make cheese.” Jack: “So immediate blue cheese, just straight out the cow.”
23. 0:19:58 — The red cap. Jack asks whether this place connects to the Fey Realm. GM: “In this world, no world is ever too far.” Seeing his own blood drip from Sila’s cut, Jack removes his big red cap and holds it under the wound, each drip deepening and darkening the red. “Oh, Missy.” He puts the cap back on and pulls from underneath it a giant sickle, larger than he is, made of the same iron as his boots. Then he rages, darting and running between the gravestones.
24. 0:21:24 — Under the hat. Mudcat asks what’s under the cap: “Very thinning white hair. He’s bushier on the bottom than he is on the top.”
25. 0:21:33 — Wild surge: the minotaur spirit. Jack’s wild magic fills the graveyard with a liminal effect: shapes and figures moving around the gravestones. Next to Sila rises a large intangible spirit of a minotaur. It turns toward her but does nothing yet.
26. 0:22:49 — The sickle. Jack brings the sickle down. It hits, but Sila uses Uncanny Dodge to halve it. “With this uncanny speed,” he swings again: a nat 20. GM: “You just needed a warmup hit.” “Pumpernickel Jack is out for blood.” The minotaur spirit explodes beside her. She passes the Dex save and it bursts harmlessly. Jack disappears behind a gravestone. Sila: “I thought he was coming to help me.” Then: “I’m finding the cheese,” and she moves to the next tombstone.
27. 0:24:45 Arbiter: “Grandmaster, do you have any idea what the fuck she’s talking about?” GM: “Yes, obviously. It’s cheese… You don’t know what it is until you find it… Well, it’s not Gouda.” Someone: “I’m sensing some bias from one of the judges” (speaker uncertain, probably Mudcat).
28. 0:25:07 GM, to the hidden and laughing Jack: “If you laugh one more time at me, I’m going to make sure the rest of the hair on your top goes down to the bottom.” Arbiter: “I don’t think that sounds the way you think it sounds.” GM: “Is he pooping in our arena?” Sila digs up another grave. Arbiter: “We just fertilized.” GM: “They’re going to poop in it. They’re going to dig it all up, all trying to find the cheese. It’s fine.”
29. 0:26:10 — Fashion. The Arbiter’s end-of-round d20 is a 5. GM: “If I have to say one nice thing about Jack, at least his boots and his weapon match… If you’re going to fight, at least fight in fashion.” Arbiter: “If you die, then you’re already dressed for your funeral.” GM: “There’s nothing better than a pretty corpse. No, that also sounds weird.”

Chaos event — the minitaurs (0:26:55)

30. The Acolytes call for chaos; the Arbiter insists “it’s not me this time.” GM: “All my chaotic events are fantastic.” Arbiter: “Sure, sure, sure.” GM: “I don’t like you very much.”
31. 0:27:22 Starting at the grave that was already dug, tiny white spikes push up through the ground, as if it were reverse-perforated. Then come claw and hoof: hundreds of “minitaurs,” about three inches tall, swarming to drag the champions half-buried into the graves (Strength DC 16). Both pass easily. The minitaurs poke and stab at their toes, and it feels like a great foot massage.
32. 0:28:45 Jack: “Would you rather fight one giant-sized minotaur or a thousand minitaurs?” GM: “Well, now you have an answer.” Mudcat: between Jack’s toes, one minitaur with a sword is stabbing and stabbing and stabbing. Jack chants “mini-mini-mini…”
33. 0:29:19 GM: “All right, we have insulted my minitaurs enough.” A wave of her hand sends a big breeze that sweeps them all into the audience: “Congratulations, chat. You are now inundated with thousands of minitaurs.… It’s like sweeping the dirt under the rug, except into the fans.” She’s “0 for 2 for my cool, normal, awesome statements, but also my chaotic events. These champions are just making me feel inadequate.” Arbiter: “Acolytes, I’ll have you know that I had no hand in that chaotic event.”

Round 2 — Chuck the Cheese

34. 0:30:15 Sila won’t attack Jack; she ducks behind another tombstone. The Acolytes have given her five adrenaline (her next hit is a critical). She asks to spend it on grave robbing instead, and Mudcat happily agrees. Critical success.
35. 0:31:13 — The unmarked grave. It isn’t a champion’s grave. She recognizes the anatomy: one of her own kind, perhaps with a small sigil of her own guild. “It’s the cheese. It’s the cheese.” It is her best friend, Chuck the Cheese, who had been playing hide and go seek with her in this grave. “I’ve been searching for years.”
36. 0:32:03 Arbiter: “Your best friend is named Chuck Cheese?” “The Cheese. He prefers the Cheese.” Arbiter: “Are we just gonna ignore the obvious Chuck E. Cheese reference?” GM: “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sila: “She sounds like big fans of my friend.” Arbiter: “Well, you’re not from here, so you wouldn’t know.”
37. 0:32:37 — Ruling. Because Sila talks to the body as if it’s alive, Chuck’s body animates for one round and mimics whatever action she takes. GM: “I can’t believe you set up that your best friend was buried in here in a game of hide and go seek.”
38. 0:33:25 — Cutting the cheese. Jack: “Let’s cut the cheese, shall we?” And she does: Sila stabs her best friend’s body to coat a blade in his necrotic gunk. The oozing “cheese” spreads goo and slime across the tombstones. Mudcat adds an extra d6 necrotic. She throws and hits. GM: “I love that your friend has been so committed that they hid in here for you only so you can use their bodies.”
39. 0:35:21 — Chuck’s spirit. Jack’s Unstable Backlash triggers, and Chuck’s actual spirit appears between the two of them (voiced by Ed): “Hey, buddy, why are you stabbing me? What’s going on?” The animated body grabs a dagger and mirrors Sila’s throw, hitting Jack (Ed voices the spirit, and the body’s attack is rolled at the table). Spirit: “Why are you throwing daggers at me? That’s pretty cool.… Oh, whoa, that was a pretty good throw on my part.” Sila: “Yeah, buddy… I think you die after this one.”
40. 0:36:56 — Chuck explodes. The spirit bursts beside Sila, who passes the Dex save. Spirit: “Stop it! Goodbye.” GM: “What a nice friend.” She asks whether “he left without a bang” counts as a phrase: “I’m realizing I don’t know many phrases very well.” Someone: “You know speak so good.” Arbiter: “To be fair, the Grandmaster didn’t have what you’d call a formal education.” Sila: “That’s true.”
41. 0:38:00 — Blood, blood, blood. Jack looks at his perforated, bleeding vest, mops up the blood with his red cap, growing more frenzied as it gets wetter, and slams it back on his head: “Blood, blood, blood.” As he rushes in, spirits rise from the graves, and a large “octopussy kind of individual” floats up beside Sila (Caustic Phoenix laughs; Ed: “I heard it as soon as I said it”). Two sickle hits land. Jack staggers back: “Oh, oh, oh, I can see blood everywhere.” Mudcat: Sila is “pretty fucked up.”

The Acolytes’ gifts

42. 0:40:11 The GM hints that cheese thrown into the arena might help Sila. The Acolytes are enamored with the blood and with Sila’s search for Chuck. Blue slushies are flying and being poured over people’s faces. People are drunk, ripping off their clothes, and fighting and stomping on the minitaurs in the crowd. Both champions get a heroic surge (“Break the rules. What little rules we have”).
43. 0:41:13 GM: “They have… poured out their blue slushies, which are expensive in this economy. If you die without using your heroic surge, I will bury you so far underneath this dirt that no one will ever find you or be able to raise you from the dead.”
44. 0:42:58 GM: “I’m going to keep my words minimal because apparently my mouth don’t work so good right now.” “That’s what she said” jokes follow. Arbiter: “You backed me into a corner. Had to be done.” Then he announces a second chaos event, triggered by “your mouth antics.”

Chaos event — the floor is lava (0:44:06)

46. Jack rolls the d20 (“since you’re trying to join in”). It’s an 11; the GM flubs it in Spanish (“Ocho!… Once”) and reads the card directly.
47. 0:44:52 The cool night turns sweltering. The ground goes melty, the grass withers, and the whole ground turns to lava. They must hop from tombstone to tombstone (Dex save; the GM calls them “doomstones,” then “Mausoleums, that’s the other word”). Both succeed; Sila rolls a nat 20. Mudcat: “No chaos. That’s way more exciting.” GM: “I’m trying to throw really good chaotic events here, and the two of you are just laughing in my face.”
48. 0:46:31 — Jack’s freebie. Jack offers to fail: his iron boots are slowly turning white-hot in the bubbling lava. Arbiter: “It’s not very often the champions have to give freebies to the Grandmaster.” GM: “Am I that pitiful in this moment?” Jack: “You’re a very grand master.” Someone: “You are alive.” GM: “Oh, that’s right. I’m alive. I will not take your pity.” Ruling: his boots grow heavy and begin to melt, giving disadvantage on Dex from now on.

Round 3 — the coffin raft

49. 0:48:03 The lava is shin-deep, “iron boot deep.” Sila is safe on a tombstone. “Can I go lava surfing?” She wiggles the tombstone back and forth like a seesaw to work it loose (a Performance roll; “I want to see how well you wiggle.” “The wiggles are sufficient!”). Mudcat: “That tombstone comes loose. We don’t put a lot of maintenance into this place.”
50. 0:49:56 The graveyard is enclosed by a stone fence, and it’s a large cemetery. Arbiter: “It’s like a YMCA from hell.”
51. 0:50:38 — The cheese professor. Sila calls upon “the professor of learnings that I have learned from, of all the cheeses of the world, from chat.” The Acolytes split into well-organized groups of five or six, huddle and write suggestions on billboards. Meanwhile August throws one more pizza and Sila heals again (“That’s six pepperonis I just ate”).
52. 0:52:02 The winning sign: “Ride a floating coffin through the lava.” The GM explains that some coffins are plastic (“I don’t know science either”). Sila hops into Chuck the Cheese’s coffin, and it carries her on a small lava wave toward Jack. Inside the lid is the inscription “You can’t keep a good cheese down.”
53. 0:53:05 Arbiter: “Was he buried alive?” GM: “He was playing hide and go seek… It was his own choice. Commitment to the game. He died a winner. Well, until Sila found him. So I guess he died a winner and then became a loser. I can’t believe I’m reading these out loud.” Someone: “You’re turning into a monster.”
54. 0:53:52 — “Hop in!” Sila invites Jack aboard: “Come on! Do you wanna die?!” Jack: “But you were just throwing knives at me. Not five seconds!” On a countdown he jumps on. She rows through the lava (“You’re a little bit more heavy than I am”).
55. 0:54:43 Arbiter: “You wiggle a gravestone out, ride in a coffin, invite your enemy that you’re trying to kill into the coffin with you and are rowing away?” Sila: “I never promised I was trying to kill him.”
56. 0:55:09 — Doug’s cheese. Both roll perception. Sila (25) smells it first: “It is exquisite. It is aged. It is cheese.” Up in the Grandmaster’s booth sits a platter: “the official sanctioned cheese of Doug the Pug, the beloved dog of the arena.” GM: “If you take the life of your opponent, I will give you our most prized cheese.” Doug supports this, “as his desire for blood is greater than his desire for the cheese.” He also has “12 refrigerators full of it downstairs in the basement of the Dread Fortress.” “Enough cheese that you can swim in it.”
57. 0:57:05 Sila asks Jack, “How much do you like cheese?” Jack, handling his sickle: “I like blood, that’s kind of my whole thing.” She holds her action. The offer stands on the balcony.
58. 0:57:36 — Jack’s choice. The lava is “about five inches in height.” The coffin is plastic and might last one or two more rounds. GM: “Microplastics, am I right?” Jack lets fate decide whether he goes along with Sila’s plan or gives in to his baser instincts (Int save, DC 15: “This is who you are through and through”). Natural 1. Someone: “Dumb as shit.” GM: “It’s hard to break tradition.”
59. 0:59:20 — The rocket. His eyes go red. “Oh, Missy, Missy Mouse.” He charges and spends his heroic surge. He barrels into Sila, unaware of his own strength, and knocks them both off the raft. When his iron boots hit the lava, the pain launches him like a rocket, Sila still in his arms. Their smoking arc flies high into the sky, and they fall “closer perhaps than any champion has thus been” to the Grandmaster, crashing into the platter of cheese on her balcony, next to Doug the Pug and the GM, cheese flying everywhere.
60. 1:00:21 Wrestling on the floor like two siblings, Jack swings the sickle at her. It hits (“I’m going to kill you!”), and Sila Uncanny Dodges (“Not today!”). Mudcat: “That’s a first.”
61. 1:01:42 — Scruffed. The Arbiter stands, flaring his white wings, and picks both champions up by the scruffs of their necks: “Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa… We don’t have a lot of rules, but there are some rules.” GM: “Let’s reset… We’ll reset the arena.” Ten-minute break.

Ad break (1:02:05–1:12:24, excluded)

Round 4 — Emmery’s Tavern

63. 1:12:24 The Arbiter is still holding both champions. “We can’t let them fight up here… It’s a safety concern.” GM: “My safety, primarily, and Doug’s.” Arbiter: the graveyard is “kind of a shithole now… covered in lava and corpses.” GM: “Goblins and chinchillas are going to have so much to work with.” She wants a new drink: “beer on tap or something? Blue slushy machine.”
64. 1:13:18 — Meteors. The Arbiter winds up and punches both champions forward at almost light speed. Like meteors they shoot across the emptiness of the Void, past the Dread Fortress, past the moon, the Vendolyn, and down through the roof of a small tavern. The patrons are thrown against the wall and knocked unconscious. In the corner, a large bartender rubs down the bar with a rag, not even fazed: “Welcome to Emmery’s Tavern.”
65. 1:14:05 The GM wheezes about him “really polishing that piece of wood.” Mudcat: “He’s been polishing that wood a long time. It’s got a patina.” The rag is crusty and gross. The room has a large hearth, upturned tables, and barrels strangely labeled “number two.” Round four, “Quattro.” The cheese is now locked in a case “until you win. If you win.”
66. 1:15:04 — Bad cheese. Sila sniffs for cheese (Investigation). “This is not a quality bar.” She finds only cheese product: American cheese, squeeze/can cheese, individually plastic-wrapped singles. It makes her feral. It smells “like feet and burritos stuffed together in these barrels of cheese.”
67. 1:16:48 — Sila’s surge. She can’t rage, so she spends her heroic surge: she rolls around on the dirty, sticky bar floor until rocks, dirt and pebbles are stuck in her fur, then pulls them out to form daggers. Mudcat: “So you’re wanting to be a rat covered in cheese and shit… fuck it,” and gives +2 AC. “Now she’s angry. So she is going to hurt you… Blood it is!” GM: “You are monstrous.”
68. 1:18:13 She hits Jack with a still-dull, rocky, jagged knife. GM: “This is probably still the same knife that you had found and stabbed your old friend with. It is nasty… She’s like trying to stab you with a rock at this point.” Tables and chairs topple. GM: “Destroy it like the last arena!”
69. 1:19:35 — The chimney. Jack’s wild surge rolls a teleport while the two are grappled together, her knife still in him. For a moment everything is dark and warm: he has teleported them both into the tavern’s chimney. A contested save decides who lands on whom, and Jack wins. From inside the chimney comes a clattering, until the stone- and cheese-covered rodent slams into the fire at the bottom with Jack landing on top of her and rolling out. She puts the fire out with her butt and rolls out smoking. Burnt cheese: “I thought it smelled like Fritos and feet.” Sila: “I’m roasting.”
70. 1:22:50 The Acolytes chant “Jack, Jack, Jack.” He has five adrenaline: his next hit is a crit. He stands in his iron boots, turns to the prone rat in the extinguished fireplace, and drags the sickle across the floor: “Burned blood is still blood.”
71. 1:23:59 — Three locations. Jack asks for three places in the tavern. GM:
    • The bathroom. One toilet, overflowing, awful walls, no parchment paper. Someone adds “your mom’s phone number written on the wall” (“Yeah, yeah, lots”).
    • The storage area. Decent fruits and vegetables, dried meats hanging, dark, shelves floor to ceiling.
    • Behind the bartender, “where you notice he’s not wearing pants.”
72. 1:24:46 Jack rolls a teleport: 1–2 the toilet, 3–4 the storage closet, 5–6 “the barman’s asshole.” The toilet. As he raises the sickle he vanishes. Silence. Then a splash, and wet brown liquid seeps out from under the toilet door. He crashes out, leaving a cartoon Jack-shaped silhouette in the door, dripping brown. He runs forward and attacks.
73. 1:26:02 Sila: “This will be the crappiest attack you’ve ever done to me.” Jack: “Shut up.” It’s a crit. Sila: “I will die by smell alone.… We both smell bad, don’t make it out that it’s just me.” “Aren’t rats used to sewers? This is clearly worse.”
74. 1:26:48 Emery leans over the bar: “I just started that brew,” as he watches his entire toilet erupt. Mudcat: “That’s the number two.” Sila goes down. Jack swings again anyway (Sila: “I have to sneeze. For flavor.”) He slips on the toilet water and falls on his back: “Ah, my sciatica, ah.”
75. 1:28:04 — The final moment (GM narration). From Sila’s eyes: she has barely survived the fire, fringed and burned along her back, and looks up at “the silhouette of a fecal monster” with only the shine of the iron blade. Its stench reaches her first, then the blade cuts through flesh and fur, and blood spurts like a fountain, covering Jack “in a wave of red, a blood that he has been begging for from the very beginning.” He slips, falls, and his head bounces off the floor and rests facing her. Her eyes stay locked on him.
76. 1:29:38 — Last words. Sila: “Cover me in cheese.” She sinks into the brown muck, which mats her fur: “a slim turd. Burnt to crisp.” GM: “Burnt slick turd. Now roasted in front of us.”
77. 1:30:00 — Fondue. Heavy footsteps like Jack’s own iron boots, but larger: a half-dressed Emery comes out with a pot of fondue and pours the golden liquid over her, “encasing her as her final wishes. Now entombed, solidified, and prepared to be buried.” He kneels by Jack: “The tavern’s closing, you have to get out.” Jack: “Oh, like now? Do you have any parchment paper at all?”
78. 1:31:15 — Victory. No goblins this time. The door opens and the Grandmaster appears holding a roll of parchment paper: “Oh, Pumpernickel Jack. Congratulations. For victory is yours!” It’s “not your reward, but you can have it,” and she tosses it to him. She guides him out into the cold, crisp evening, where the Acolytes give him a standing ovation. They pause for words of wisdom from “the champion who had slain the rat.” Jack burps (the transcript only catches “Sorry”). They erupt for “the greatest burp they have ever heard in a finale speech.” GM: “You have shown us what a true fight looks like. It is time for the after party.” She raises his hand and soars him into the sky. His pants, fresh from the bathroom, can’t stay up, “leaving a full moon for our acolytes.”
79. 1:33:10 Sila (from the cheese tomb?): “The Minish Cheese… That’s for the graves.” (unclear). 1:33:16 “Welcome and good night to D20 Deathmatch!”

Full Dried Blood notes (click to expand)

In character (canon, Dried Blood):

• 1:37:42 — Chuck the Cheese’s monologue. Caustic Phoenix asks Ed for an impromptu monologue from Chuck the Cheese, speaking to the dead Sila, who is buried in “shit and gold cheese.” Chuck (Ed): “I mean, kind of living the dream, right?… You got all the kind of shit that you have as a rat in life, but also, you know, you found the cheese in the end. And there’s something quite beautiful about that.” “I got stuck playing hide and seek in a graveyard and I starved to death.” Sila: “Oh, you actually died really crummy.” Chuck: “Yeah, that was a long death too… I starved and I missed my family, my 15 children.” The coffin was plastic, cheap and “non-biodegradable.”
• 1:39:47 — Chuck’s place in the graveyard. GM: “Chuck is going to be a permanent part of our graveyard. We’re just going to have to always have his space here… find his broken bone pieces, give him a new plastic coffin, and rebury him here.”
• 1:42:04 — Sila’s final words: “A Twinkie is what they called me in high school.… Those are my final words, enjoy them… I’m not a rat of many words these days, you know?” GM: “It’s hard when you’re encased in poop and cheese.” Mudcat had called her “a shitty Twinkie.”
• 1:43:03 — Jack’s words of wisdom (in-character status unclear): “Whenever you step into the cubicle, before you sit down, just remember to double check, is there still paper there?” Mudcat: “These are the words of wisdom we’re going to leave you with.”

Out of character (creator notes):

• Mudcat: “I don’t think anyone’s ever died covered in that much shit.” Caustic Phoenix wants a museum plaque: “Sila the shit.” Sam: “Sila the cheese… I get my title!” Mudcat: “Technically, she was the cheese.”
• Ed didn’t plan the fecal arc, but it came “full circle” from Jack’s entrance.
• Ed: Jack is a Wild Magic Barbarian, one of his favorite builds because it’s unpredictable. Caustic Phoenix says many location changes happened “because Ed kept throwing his character into so many different spots.”
• Jack is a redcap (player-stated): redcaps have red caps and “big oversized iron boots that they use to kick people.” Nothing special was planned for the boots. Sam: “You didn’t even try to kick me.”
• Chuck the Cheese was Sam’s improvisation. She wanted to uncover hidden spots to find him, didn’t know it would be a grave, and left it to the DMs whether he was alive. The hit paired with Jack’s spirit-raising wild surge.
• Mudcat: Ed’s Chuck accent “screams if Tom Holland’s Spider-Man was a 1940s rat.” Ed: “Oh, Mr. Stark… a bit more Bartok the Bat.”
• Sam worked as Chuck (the Chuck E. Cheese mascot) at 16, her first job: “I was born to do this match.” Ed: “born to do it, not born to win it.”
• Mudcat praised the simultaneous death: Sam miming and Ed in slow motion.
• Sam’s closing line: “I have the best poops ever.”