- [Brennan] A list of the topics,
themes, and subject matter
featured in this episode
has been included in
the video description.
(spooky scary music)
(spooky music continues)
(spooky music continues)
(spooky music continues)
Hello, one and all, and welcome back
to another thrilling
episode of Dimension 20.
I am your humble dungeon
master, Brennan Lee Mulligan.
With me...
Shucks, nobody's with me right now.
Last we left off, as you may remember
here on Dimension 20: Neverafter,
the times of shadow had fallen
upon the realms of fairy tale,
and our six intrepid heroes,
being Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio,
Little Red Riding Hood,
Mother Goose, the Frog
Prince, and Puss in Boots,
seeking answers from a magical book,
riddles told to them by a mirror,
all manner of strange signs
pointing in the direction
of the Kingdom of Elegy,
discovered a fairy godmother
and a dangerous army
of half animated objects.
There in the woods by the roadside,
near a rotting pumpkin carriage,
were all of our heroes
k*lled,
which makes telling a story complicated,
because they're all dead.
So,
I suppose there's nothing
left to do but to begin.
Which is to say, once upon a time,
there lived a man, a humble woodcarver,
who wished more than anything for a son.
The man's name was Geppetto,
and he was a maker of toys and puppets,
and one day, he plied
his trade so skillfully
that he carved from
wood a little wooden boy
and named him Pinocchio,
and wonder of wonders,
that boy came to life.
Many adventures did the little boy go on,
meeting cats and foxes,
terrible dogfish the size of whales.
He met a talking cricket, if
such a thing can be believed,
and also, once upon a time,
he met a beautiful fairy
with hair of turquoise
who, telling him that in
order to be a real boy,
he must be good and never tell a lie,
one day granted him that very wish,
turning him from his state
of wood into a real boy,
the son his father Geppetto
had always dreamed of,
and turned 40 pennies into 40 golden coins
that his future might be bright.
That was what they say
happened, once upon a time,
and they say too
that when the boy told a lie,
his nose would grow.
But of course, that
could only really happen
if he was made of wood,
and we shudder to think
what might have happened if he had lied
while given that gift from
the fairy with turquoise hair.
Lou, you want to come
in and play some D&D?
- You gonna k*ll me again?
(Brennan laughs)
'Cause if you're going to k*ll me again,
I'll leave right now.
I don't like to die, Brennan.
I don't like to be here alone, either.
- [Brennan] Why?
- I don't know, 'cause it feels
like you'll k*ll me again.
You could k*ll me as
many times as you want to
before everyone came back.
- No, no, no, no.
- Okay, you're going to do this again?
You're going to switch
it again? Son of a b*tch.
(Brennan laughs)
- Not at all.
Pinocchio.
You have lost your senses.
You have lost your animation.
You have lost your life.
There is some tickling sensation
of insects.
You feel moss and fungus growing
in the damp wood of your
body, and you wonder,
given that you are not a real little boy,
if perhaps this is the
afterlife that awaits you,
that it is simply slow deterioration.
As you feel insects finding
joints and creaks and gnarls and knots
and finding places of
purchase within yourself,
you also feel your staff in your hand,
which is, of course, we know, your nose.
- My nose!
- In this place between worlds,
where do you think it was
that Pinocchio finally decided
to end his curse
in a way that violent and strange?
- I think it would probably
be, he saw the ruin
and effect of the Neverafter,
and that his nose was continuing to grow
as he was continuing to lie,
realizing that though
the world was changing,
the rules were not, and
at some point it was just,
he realized that if lying
is what saved my father,
lying is necessary and
this is holding me back.
It's probably at that point when realizing
that this was going to keep happening
that he took it upon himself
to break his nose from his face.
- One of the only things you can feel
in this in between space is the dull pain
on the front of your face,
that raw, exposed wood
covered with none of the paint or lacquer
that your father so
lovingly applied to you
to give you your shape and vibrancy
and feeling of being something wonderful.
Instead, the open wood serves
as a place for the insects to come.
You hear something.
You hear a little, shoo now!
Get out of here!
You bugs, you better skedaddle!
Leave the kid alone! He's just a kid!
- I believe I recognize
the voice of the 100 year old cricket
that I k*lled throwing a mallet at him
when he attempted to correct my behavior
in the earliest days
of being alive.
- You somehow can see again, and see,
ghostly and translucent
on your body,
surrounded by real bugs,
you see the ghost of a cricket,
the talking cricket that had lived
in your father's workshop,
and the one that you k*lled with a mallet.
You see it sort of jumping ferociously
amongst the other bugs,
but just sort of moving like
mist or vapor through them.
Get on out of here!
The poor kid can't seem to catch a break!
- I guess there's part
of me that believes,
okay, I am dead now.
It's me and that cricket I k*lled.
Here we are, together in the afterlife.
- Do you attempt any
motion? Do you attempt any-
- I would want to, I guess, help,
so I think I will try and
bring my right hand up
to also smack bugs away.
- Still blocky and made of wood,
a translucent, ghostly hand moves,
and as you move forward, you lift up
and are standing above your body
with the little ghostly cricket
able to sit on your translucent hand.
It goes, whoa-h*!
- Cricket.
I'm... I'm...
I'm dead.
- Well, you know,
every cloud's got a little silver lining,
so you might be dead,
but one man's dead is another man's
alive.
- Cricket, I don't need that right now.
I mean, I guess I appreciate you
trying to see the warmer sides of things.
I'm still in my puppet body,
which I guess doesn't make sense.
I'm not a real boy, I'm a puppet,
and I think there's almost a sadness
that comes over Pinocchio
in realizing that this is what he is.
I think, actually, I'm
going to brush the cricket.
Not right now.
- Oh!
- Yeah.
- Hey!
You can brush me off if you like,
but you're a puppet again.
- Yeah, you noticed.
- Well, jeepers. I'm so sorry, kiddo.
I'll tell you what, you
know what you need to do?
- What the f*ck do I need to do?
What the f*ck do I need to do?
- Well for starters, you shouldn't cuss.
- f*ck you. f*ck you!
- At that rate,
you're never gonna be a real little boy!
- Well, clearly I'm not going to be
a real boy ever again, all right?
I'm a f*cking, I'm a puppet! I'm a puppet!
That's what I am, I'm a puppet!
I'm not a real boy. I
tried to be a real boy.
I'm not a real boy anymore.
I'm a puppet, cricket!
I'm a f*cking puppet!
- The woods start to fade from
this place, and as they do,
you feel parts of your joints and limbs
catch on strings,
and you can feel yourself
starting to get pulled
away from the cricket.
Pinocchio, are you doing
that? Are you moving yourself?
- No, Cricket, I'm not doing this.
- Okay, well, listen.
I don't know if I can follow you up there.
It's a lot too far to jump.
- Wait!
- But you got to remember,
you got to be good, and never tell a lie.
- I can't be.
- And do as you're told.
- Cricket, it's different now.
The world's different now.
It's not like it was.
- Well, with that attitude,
it just might stay different.
- Oh my god.
- You move away from the
cricket, through space.
As you do so, you don't
seem to have your staff
with you anymore, and
you can feel your nose
back on your face, but again,
you're very translucent.
As you're moving, what do
you do as you feel yourself
kind of being pulled through space?
- The wood is disappearing.
How long is my nose?
Is it the full lying length, or?
- It's not the full
lying length right now.
- If I feel myself being pulled,
I think I'm going to do my best
to either look, see what's above me,
or the direction that I'm being pulled in.
I don't think Pinocchio
thinks he can actually,
I can't actually, I am not
in control in this moment,
but I am going to try and orient myself
to see what force has taken control.
- You turn around,
looking into the shadows
of the dark forest, and as you do so,
you see,
as it appears,
she approaches.
You're floating at the end of the hallway.
Pinocchio.
- Mom, I'm...
I'm sorry, I...
- Sorry for what?
- I don't know what happened, but...
I don't know where
Rosamund is, or if she...
Hopefully she made it
away, but I don't know.
- Hopefully?
And why can you only
hope for that, Pinocchio,
rather than see to it?
- Because Gerard was like, we
need you on extraction team!
And I was supposed to,
I wanted to be on distraction team with-
- I don't know what Gerard
has to do with anything!
Gerard is not my dear son.
Gerard is not compelled to do
what is best for his poor, ailing father.
I told you to keep the princess safe.
You see the door cracks open.
You see the silhouette of the Stepmother.
You also see, as the door moves,
just a little bit of light
from a missing doorknob.
I don't understand why you
would fail this egregiously.
I don't understand why you
would fail this egregiously.
- I mean, there was a lot going on,
and, I mean, I'm not going to lie,
when I tried to fight back
using some of the magic you gave me, I...
I don't want to...
I don't want to get in
trouble, but I think I...
I found your room. I found your house.
I went in,
and there were bones
on the ground.
- You feel the temperature drop in here.
Stepmother becomes very still.
- I wanted to do it. I wanted to be...
I wanted to do what you asked, but I...
A lot, you know, my head
was all over the place,
and there was just so much going on.
You seemed to know the
woman who k*lled me.
You guys were old friends, or
you played bridge together.
I don't know, Red says that
ladies play bridge, and so-
- You have not met any
of my friends, Pinocchio.
- Oh, okay.
- Did you take anything from the house?
- No!
(Brennan makes a comical
slide whistle noise)
That's why I broke that sh*t off.
- What did you take?
- I only took the doorknob.
(Brennan slide whistles)
Fine, I took a bunch of sh*t!
I took the doorknob.
I took, there was a photo of a guy
who's not my dad, but some other person,
and I took his photo 'cause I
thought it might be helpful.
Or, you know, when I met him,
we'd have something to talk about.
I'd be like, look!
And then I also took, there's a knife.
A little knife by your bed.
- Give me the knife!
- I go to reach into my pockets
just to see if I have it.
- Startlingly, completely un-translucent,
the doorknob, the etching, and the knife
are all in your little
traveler's rucksack.
- I hold up the knife.
- A long arm
travels farther than it should
down the hallway until
it rests before you.
Here, you see something
very much cloaked in shadow,
but long and powerful, larger
than a human hand should be.
- I think Pinocchio is going
to slowly reach out his hand.
And... (Lou's breath shudders)
- The hand stays there with
the knife in it and says,
the rest, Pinocchio.
- Is my...
I take the etching, hand it to her.
Is my dad okay?
- Well, we'll have to
talk about that, won't we?
- Well, I want to talk about it now.
I'm going to clutch the
doorknob to my chest.
- She retracts those things,
deposits them on the other
side of the door and says,
what is your concern for
your father, Pinocchio?
- When I got hit
by your not-friend,
the person you know very well,
she, while I was like, you know,
I don't want to say
dying, but I guess dying,
I heard his voice, and he said some stuff.
I just want to make sure he's okay.
It would be cool to...
It would be nice to talk to him, or,
and I'll give you the doorknob.
It would just be nice to...
It would be nice to talk
to him for a second.
- Giving me the doorknob
is a bribe?
- No, no! I mean, I don't want to...
I just, I feel, I just
want to know he's okay.
You must be so tall.
- She quickly moves her hand
and almost contact juggles
the doorknob into suddenly disappearing,
and the little hole of
light in the door vanishes.
And then she, as quick as anything,
reaches up and snaps
the nose off your face.
- Ah, sh*t!
Ah, f*ck!
- You had the right idea, Pinocchio.
This is quite a liability.
- Yes.
- You seem disappointed in my gifts.
You seem to think that
those powers I've given you
were not enough for you to do
the job that needed to be done.
- I mean, they were...
They were good. I think
they could've been helpful.
I mean, you don't know Gerard,
but he's just kind of,
he's tough.
He's tough and he really
wasn't, I don't know,
it just didn't go according to plan,
and honestly, I think
a lot of that's on him.
I'm thankful for what you have given me,
but I guess it wasn't enough.
- But you need more.
- Yeah, I could use, I
guess I could use more.
- [Brennan] Great magic
requires blood, Pinocchio.
- I hate to...
I don't really have...
- I know.
So, who do we know that has blood?
- Oh my god.
Who do we know who has blood?
I guess most of my friends are corporeal.
Tim's got blood for sure.
- But I can't reach those people.
- Oh my god.
You want me to go cut my friends?
- No, no, no, no. We
need to send you back.
- What?
Wait, like-
- Look, it's going to get bad!
I told you to protect her.
I told you to watch after her,
and you let things get out of hand.
They almost found her,
and now they know that she's out there.
- Who's they?
Who are they?
- Impudent little child.
I think you know or can
guess who I mean by they,
be they fairies, witches,
ogres, wizards, what have you.
be they fairies, witches,
ogres, wizards, what have you.
The point is to keep the Princess Rosamund
hidden from those eyes.
You said you met a fairy that knew me.
That is altogether too close, and-
(Brennan snarls wetly)
Time is running out.
We know who has blood, your poor father.
You're only hurting him.
- Oh!
- But if he must hurt so
that his son may survive-
- No, wait!
- You have already chosen this path.
Wait here.
And closes the door.
Around you, you hear
the fluttering of wings,
a sudden smell of salt and iron,
like freshly spilled blood,
and you see
the door opens again,
and flying from the center of
the Stepmother's silhouette...
(Brennan imitates the
flapping of wings and caws)
A malevolent, somewhat mangy looking crow
lands on your shoulder.
- Is this...
Hi.
(Brennan caws)
Are you with me now?
- You said you needed more help, my son,
and so I'm giving it to you.
And she tosses your nose to you.
You see that there are etchings or letters
in the wood of the nose
now, and a dampness to it
as it is stained
a sort of murky, dull red with blood.
- Mom, I really appreciate everything.
I appreciate this pet,
and the gifts,
but I don't think I want them
if it means my dad is hurting,
so I don't think,
I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't want this bird. I don't wanna.
I don't wanna. I don't wanna.
I don't wanna. I don't want to.
- It's up to you, Pinocchio.
I don't think your father will
long survive in the world,
and if he returns, he
will return to a world
in which you are dead and gone,
and he will not have a
son to look after him.
I appreciate that you do
not want to do these things,
but to grow up,
to learn what it means
to be a good little boy,
we must sometimes do
things we do not wish to.
Crow can do many things for you.
He is a friend and a watchful pair of eyes
so that I can keep an eye on you.
- I already have a pet.
- What pet do you have?
- A ram. His name is Senator.
- When you return,
you will not be able to
return to Senator's side.
- Why?
- Because that story ended, Pinocchio.
There are things going on
grander and more potent
than you can understand.
It is why I keep things simple for you.
Grasp your nose in your hand.
- I take my nose.
- You feel a lot more
magic flowing through you,
and you stop being translucent.
You come back to your body.
The bugs wither and die off of it,
but you are partially moss covered.
Your joints, they have fungus in them.
You feel some rot and some
fungus in your wooden body,
but you also feel more magical,
and this crow (caws) fluffs up.
- Great.
- You got your crow familiar.
- Yay.
(Brennan laughs)
He's so sweet.
- [Brennan] He's so-
- But he's not Senator.
- Your staff grants a plus one
to attack and damage
rolls for spell attacks.
- Oh, dreamy.
- How about it?
- And all it cost was
my father's blood! Yay!
- [Brennan] Yay!
- Yay!
- She looks at you and says,
other than the fairy,
did you meet anyone else
who knew of me in the
story in which you died?
- There were some...
(clicks tongue thoughtfully)
There were some mice in
your cupboard that I heard.
I didn't meet them, but my friends did.
They seemed to be a chatty bunch.
Maybe you knew them, but
that's it just those two.
- As you say "just those two,"
you feel suddenly very grateful
that you're holding
your nose in your hand,
because you feel a little
tingle under there.
But before you can think about it further,
she says, the mice are
not a consideration.
Pinocchio, I cannot perform this miracle
on your behalf indefinitely.
I have given you the power you should need
to see this work done.
Keep the princess away from
eyes that search for her.
- Okay, yeah, I got it.
- And one day, if you
do as I have told you,
you will be a real little boy again,
and we will all be reunited.
Do you understand?
- Yeah. That's all I want.
- Her hand reaches out
again. She grabs you.
Give me a wisdom saving throw.
- That's a natural 20.
(Brennan gasps)
There's no one here to celebrate.
I got a natural 20. I got a natural 20.
I got it.
- On a natural 20-
- Yeah, what the f*ck happens? (laughs)
- I'm going to give you some choices.
The Stepmother
is grabbing you to move you somewhere.
Do you want to direct
your attention and focus
in the direction where she is pushing you,
or behind you to the direction
that she is coming from?
- Mm.
- And you can have full license
to know as much as you want to know
about either of those
directions on a natural 20.
- I would love to know
about where I am going.
- You see the village of Amanti,
and you see, in this moment,
a version of yourself that
you are being pushed to.
You suddenly see clouds
and sky and fields.
You're rushing through
open air, and as you do so,
you begin to just move through,
see the village coming up.
As you do, the Stepmother
wanted to conceal from you
what was about to happen, and on a nat 20,
you see it is not concealed.
You see yourself
as a real little boy
living happily in Amanti
here in this place,
but you see also that
the village sort of looks
maybe even a little bit worse
than the last time you saw it.
There's some rubble, like
there's been huge violence here.
There's other things that
are sort of going on.
As you look and see the
little boy version of you
look up and see you approaching
like some interplanar,
incorporeal, ethereal comet
headed for this version of you,
the little boy version of you
looks up and goes, what?
And spasms, and as he spasms, you see,
turns into a sort of wood
etching illustration,
much like these set in here.
He becomes like fine
ink prints of himself,
twitching and spasming
in pain, and you see
as you are thrust to occupy
the same space as him,
you see that your stepmother's hand opens,
and those drawings are sucked
into the palm of her hand
as her hand vanishes, and you see
the illustrated expression
of panic and fear
on what looked just like what
you've seen reflected to you
in the mirror when you've
been a real little boy.
In that moment, is there
any piece of clarity
that Pinocchio seeks for?
- So many.
Is the etching similar to
that of the father I saw,
or is it like the drawings
I've seen in Tim's book?
Is it closer to one of those two?
- Closer to the drawing in Tim's book.
Those illustrations are deeply
alarming and terrifying,
but also, it's almost like moments
of having a prophetic vision
where you're seeing through
the fabric of the world
to the structures underneath things.
It feels way more almost
like an ecstatic moment
of seeing the truth of something
rather than seeing a crass piece of magic.
- Great, I am now standing in
the same space that he was,
in the same village that he was.
The only things gone are him,
or the people around him?
What got sucked?
- Just him.
- [Lou] Just him.
- Just him.
- So I've now just taken
his place in this story,
and he has become, in this
story, or in this moment,
he has just become an
etching in her hands.
- Saying it in that way on that nat 20,
the last thing you come
to realize is essentially
that you have replaced
this version of you in this world.
And that you have only done
that in a manner most unnatural,
because your stepmother has willed it so.
- Okay. Are there any other
questions I should ask?
- [Brennan] I think you're good.
- Okay, then I feel perfectly
confused and satisfied.
- Perfectly confused and satisfied.
- Does this seek any
relevancy in this moment?
- Not in this episode.
- f*ck.
- Thank you so much, Lou.
Would you do me the
favor of sending Zac in?
- No. You can scream
for him if you'd like.
(Brennan chuckles)
- [Brennan] Zac, you
want to play some D&D?
- [Zac] You're not going
to k*ll me again, are you?
- I reserve the right, unconditionally.
Pib.
Puss in Boots.
- Here we are.
- You are
in the dark shadows
of the trees,
and you feel like you sense
some smell
of maybe mice
or cushions,
something altogether kind of familiar.
But you also sense nearby
the scent of other wild creatures.
the scent of other wild creatures.
You sense something else,
a little bit different.
You also are filled
with a weird sensation.
You know deep down that you have died,
but there's almost a feeling
of weight coming off of you,
almost like you can breathe more easily
in this weird, shadowy, in between space.
The forest you're in is dark.
There are shadows moving through it.
But you're not human, so
a dark forest with shadows
doesn't necessarily terrify you
in the way it might
terrify a normal person.
Here, it actually feels a
little bit comforting, somehow.
But you also think you can hear creatures
conversing nearby in the woods here.
- I think Pib would just try
to follow whatever that is,
or latch onto any sign of
life in this weird space.
- You walk through the
shadows in the forest,
And,
as you do so,
you feel an invitation
to leave behind
the things that are troubling
you, which is interesting,
because you've already made the decision
to move away from something
that was very comforting,
that kind of attached to your memories,
and instead moved in the direction
of something interesting,
which is a very catlike contradiction,
to be something that is conflicted
between comfort and the familiar,
but then also curiosity and adventure,
and you've just chosen adventure.
- Well, I guess in a
way I'm going to unlatch
what I had grabbed onto
and kind of carry forward
into what is piquing my
interest in front of me.
- Something very sort of unusual happens,
which is, you step away
from your attachments,
and you suddenly become
aware that your body
has dropped to all fours.
You can see behind you
your boots and your cape,
which, you know how attached
to your boots you are,
but there's this feeling
you have of the fact
that they're just sitting right there.
You can go pick them up if you need to,
and you feel a weird sense of calm.
Go ahead and give me
either an insight or a perception check.
- Just kidding, it's a seven.
- [Brennan] What's that, 11?
- Seven.
- [Brennan] Oh, seven.
- Actually, it becomes a 12.
- It becomes a 12.
I think on a 12, I leave it up to you.
You feel a little bit of your identity
You feel a little bit of your identity
fading away.
This could be terrifying,
like you're experiencing
the loss of memories.
You're experiencing the things
you use to define yourself.
And there's another version of this
where you're just letting
go of your ego for a moment.
You're going back to some
other kind of primal being.
And I think a 12 is right in the middle,
where I will truly let
you decide in this moment
whether you let go or
whether you cling tightly.
- I think Pib would,
like a cat,
probably kind of let go, or let go of...
Follow the curiosity.
- You let go,
and you become
a truer version of yourself.
Puss in Boots is behind you.
He's waiting right there.
He's just a pair of boots
and a cape right now,
because you're still using this form,
ghostly and otherworldly as it is,
but with Puss in Boots behind you,
the thing that walks forward
into the forest is just Cat.
You step forward into a clearing
in the wood, where you see,
you can also see at this point
mist starts to curl off your paws.
You're like a spirit.
You're like some other kind of thing.
- Okay.
- You walk into an area of the woods,
and you look up and see
there are two other
creatures in the clearing.
One of them is trapped
with a trap crushing its back ankle,
and you see there is a fox,
and hanging captured in
a net you see a rabbit.
They both turn to look at you,
trapped as they are, and both smile.
You see the Rabbit goes, Hello, Cat.
- Hello?
- You see the Fox looks
and says, Hello, Cat.
It is good to see you again.
- We're seeing each other again?
- It's going to wear off in a moment.
And you see that the Rabbit
turns to look back at you
and says, Well, while
you're shedding your skin,
care to give us a hand
out of this sort of net
that we're caught in here at the moment?
- Hm, while I'm...
Can I make an insight check?
- Yeah, go for it.
- That's an 11.
- You look at both of them.
On an 11 insight check,
I think you are truly
confused in this moment.
The Fox looks and says,
I told you it was a mistake to send him.
He has gotten too caught
up in it. Look at him.
He is trying to let go, but he can't.
And you see the Rabbit says,
Come on, have a little bit of faith.
He'll be fine any moment.
Oi, Cat!
It's us, you know?
Tricksy ones, the tricksters.
You see that the Fox turns and says,
We are your fellow tricksters.
- Oh, okay. That makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're all, okay.
I think I get it. What do you mean?
(Brennan laughs)
- You see it all sort of
comes rushing back to you
in a moment, and you see both of them
look at the traps that
they were caught in.
The Fox goes, I would not
consider it an unkindness
for you to release me from this trap here.
The Rabbit goes, I
wouldn't mind it either.
- I think Pib truly does not know
if he can trust them or not,
but knows that for a wild
animal to be stuck like this
is just about the worst
thing that you can imagine,
and I think is willing to take the risk
to cut down the Rabbit and
pry open the Fox's trap.
- Amazing, give me a
dexterity saving throw.
- 16.
- You step forward and a huge
net goes to snatch you up,
and you dance out of the way
at the last possible second.
You see that the Rabbit and Fox both groan
and easily release themselves
from their own traps.
We thought it would be funny
to catch you in a trap as well.
- It would have been really funny.
- It would have been hilarious.
- It would've been hilarious.
- Yes, this is true.
The Rabbit looks and says, so,
seems like you died, huh?
- I guess so, but here we
are, and I feel different.
I feel like, I don't know,
I feel like something's off.
- You see that the Fox and the Rabbit go,
let's go over to the stream,
and sort of go off down the path.
As you walk, you come into this awareness
of this very old,
potent thing,
almost like you've been in
a ton of stories before.
As you're moving, you almost,
having known Pinocchio,
you almost feel like you and the Fox
might've met Pinocchio in a
different life or something.
You feel like kind of a soul that,
in transit to whatever your next life is,
gets to peer at all of
its past incarnations.
- Okay, I think this is
starting to make more sense.
I feel like I've been
here before, haven't I?
- Oh, so many times.
We've died constantly.
It's part of the trickster thing, really.
Y'know, you die a lot.
- You got to take risks.
- Big risks.
It's true, you need to take big
swings in this line of work.
- Okay.
- And the three of you
walk through to the stream,
(trickling stream)
and looking into the water,
the three of you take a moment.
The water begins to part, and you see
vast and many realms of the Neverafter,
many stories, many different versions
of the stories of your companions.
You see different versions of Pinocchio,
different versions of Sleeping Beauty.
All these things kind of
unveil themselves to you,
and you see
lots of great powers
in this world.
You see witches and fairies.
You see monsters,
like a terrible leviathan
coming after Pinocchio.
You see the Big Bad Wolf
from Little Red Riding Hood's legend.
But you also see, over and over again,
this continuation of
animals in these stories
kind of getting up to mischief,
and it always seems to be this thing
where you look back at all the
different lives you've lived
and see the clever fox,
the cunning rabbit.
You see these different versions
of the cat in these stories,
and in some places you're
helping, in some you're hurting,
but you feel this sort
of sudden tug or pull
of understanding that there's
some reason or purpose
of understanding that there's
some reason or purpose
to the animals that
appear in these stories,
and it seems like when you
think of your most recent life
of taking a poor miller's son
and through cleverness and
trickery making him king,
it seemed that there were a lot of forces
trying to control the
flow of these stories
and determine what it is they should be,
and that your role
has often been to upset that.
That you've lived many lives of saying
something's actually going
to be a different way now.
Something unexpected
or strange or hilarious
is going to happen to subvert
the order of how these things tend to go.
- Splash it. (laughs)
- You see that the Rabbit
and Fox next to you,
rather than chiding you for
splashing the vision, each...
(both making playful
little splashing sounds)
What are we doing here?
- I don't know.
- You see the Fox kind
of just scampers off.
I think the Rabbit runs
away from you as well.
There's just a moment of kind of playing.
You take a minute.
(Zac yowls)
You take a moment of playing
in the forest together,
and the Fox looks up,
and you can sort of hear
something off in the wood, far away.
(wolf howls)
- Okay.
Hm.
- Perhaps we should focus up.
Well, you died,
so, you know, this is sort of the thing
we have to talk about, I guess.
What feels like the most fun thing to do?
Should one of us go back instead?
You see the Rabbit says,
if you're tuckered out,
if you're tired, you know,
maybe someone else jumps in the next time.
- No, no, no, no, no. I
don't feel that tired.
I feel like in the last
one, my kind of life
was a little simpler.
I did some trickery, but overall,
I was a little on the sweeter side,
and I feel like,
I think it seems fun and
it seems correct to just
f*ck it all up.
- All right! I like the sound of that!
So we're going to f*ck it
all up. How do you want to...
But you know that there is, of course,
to f*ck it up sounds hilarious,
and that is the number
one virtue to which we-
- Yes, of course.
- Of course.
There is these things, you know,
moving around in the woods here.
It is not, how you say, safe to come back
to these middle places, as well,
between the stories, so
to speak, so I don't know.
Do you have any idea of what it is
you are trying to do out there, or...
You see the Rabbit says, or maybe,
if there's someone it would
be funny for us to side with.
- That's a good question.
I am partial to the miller
and the miller's son.
I think it was very funny
to have such a stupid
idiot become the king.
I feel a little frustrated
in how that one ended,
because we got our ending,
and then things changed after that,
which felt like I, you know,
I respect that from my point
of view as a disrupter, right?
I like to disrupt sh*t.
But it just didn't quite feel
like that was supposed to happen,
in the way that we want things to happen.
- You see that the Fox goes,
see, this is the problem.
When you send a cat as the representative
of the tricksters, cats are lazy.
They like to do one trick and
then they want to lay down.
- Well yeah, because
laying down is the best.
- The Rabbit turns to you and says, well,
a little bit of rest is all right.
But of course, you know,
this next go around,
if it should be you that goes, you know,
maybe we put more of, I don't know,
a bigger trick on the end there.
Obviously it was hilarious
when you made that miller's son king,
but everything's gone sort
of wibbly wobbly out there.
It's like everything
is getting muddled up.
- I mean, I could always
go for a bigger trick.
You guys think I don't
know how to trick people?
What's over there?
- Give me a deception check.
- 10.
- You see,
as you say what's over there,
covered in flies is the body of Tomas.
- Oh god, there is something over there.
- You see the Fox goes... (snickers)
There often is.
Mm. Smells ripe.
The Fox sort of trots
over to Tomas's body.
- I think I'm going to trot over
and get in the way of this fox.
- He is already dead, Cat.
- And you want to join him?
- Give me an intimidation check.
- That's an 18.
- He flattens his ears
and looks at you and says,
this is a big problem.
This is what I was talking
about exactly! This cat!
You are more the hero than you think,
less the trickster, I say.
The Rabbit says, hold on.
No one say anything they're
not going to be able
to take back in the morning.
We got to work together for the
entire rest of storytelling.
- I'm not a hero. I'm a
piece of sh*t, like you are.
- Then why will you not let me
take a bite of your old friend?
- Because that's...
Not all sh*t's the same, buddy!
(Brennan laughing)
- He looks at you
and sort of sneers,
a little moment of disrespect
that he very blatantly
puts in your direction.
I, for one, think that it
is me who should go back
and join this grand
adventure that now unfolds.
One of us should be there, no?
And you see the Rabbit says, now hold on.
It seems clear to me that Cat's journey
got cut a little bit
short, so maybe there's
some other kind of arrangement
we could arrive at.
Cat, certainly there's
something you could say
to convince our friend the Fox here
that, you know, everything's
going to be all right.
I think those things in the
forest have him a bit worried.
- I mean, I understand
that you should be worried.
I feel like everybody's worried
about these big, dark, spooky
things going on around us.
But yeah, like you said,
my sh*t got cut short.
It was completely, like,
we were just trying to
get this piece of glass
out of a fairy and then, like,
I don't know, it just got...
I'm just, to be honest,
the old me was just a little cat,
and the new me is, I think,
a little more equipped for this.
It feels like you're
asking me because you know
that it's my choice, and
that I can go in if I want,
or I can send you in if I want.
But it's not up to you. It's up to me.
- Hell yeah, go ahead and give me
either persuasion or
intimidation with advantage,
if you'd be so kind.
(ambient eerie music)
- Dirty 20.
- Ooh.
Fox flattens his ears,
and the Rabbit's perk up.
So then you do not choose to step down.
- I don't.
- Very well!
And you see he sort of circles around.
The Rabbit says, good on you, Cat,
and he begins to take you off
towards another direction of the forest.
You see the Fox says, try not to die
so quickly again this time, eh?
Because we might run out of these worlds.
This forest has never
felt so small before.
- Yeah, okay, well on the other hand,
why don't you... (gasps)
And I pretend like there's something.
- No roll necessary. He goes, ah!
And goes, that is a low down, dirty trick!
(Zac hisses)
(Brennan growls)
They take you off, and you see
a new pair of boots and a new cape.
- Okay, not too shabby.
I walk over and I...
- You put on the boots,
and you can feel a new ego
kind of forming around you.
You have the memories
of your previous life
as you take them into this new one.
You remember your friends and everything,
but you're jumping into a darker iteration
of the story of Puss in Boots.
As you do, you feel an
enchantment around your boots.
You are stealthier,
slyer than you used to
be, more proficient.
As you start to dive
into sort of the story
of this new version of Puss in Boots,
how do you think he differs
from the previous version that you wore?
- I mean, I think he's got more of,
a little less Paddington,
a little more true scoundrel looking cat.
He seems older,
seems a little more
bedraggled and streetwise.
More of a nocked ear, kind of just,
he looks like he just hasn't had a home.
- You see that as you
move through the woods
with Fox and Cat, they're taking you
sort of to the edge of where they can go.
They pass, and each of them
sort of bows their head,
and you see that there is
a giant, empty spiderweb
up between the trees, and
on a small marble slab
in front of it, you see
in the shape of a ring
is a wound band of spider
silk that gleams with light,
and next to it you see
there are two fang-like daggers,
throwing knives, on the
table in front of you.
- Is this all up for grabs?
- Oh, sorry, this is actually all mine,
so everything here is actually for me.
- Yeah, got it.
- They both leap to scramble at it.
Swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe.
(Zac meows aggressively)
As they look at you, you can tell
that your spirit or
soul or whatever that is
is a way more potent spirit.
This thing didn't start
with Puss in Boots.
Your spirit out in this world is older.
It has lived many, many, many lives.
But you can feel that that
part of your consciousness,
that almost god's eye view
part of your consciousness,
is going to get subsumed in this next one,
but can sort of lend its
purpose unconsciously
to this next form that
you are prepared to take.
The Fox and the Rabbit both look at you
as you prepare to walk
off through the mist
with these new boots
and new pieces of gear.
- I think I probably won't see you guys
for quite a while this time.
- Let us hope it is true.
You bear there the Ring of the Web
and the Fangs of Isengrim.
I would be very careful if I were you.
- Oh yeah, Isengrim, I know them.
- Isengrim is a name that
the Fox has often used
to refer to the wolf, so these
are two wolf's fang daggers.
As you begin to depart, the
Rabbit says, Farewell, friend.
Good hunting out there.
Keep sharp, keep clever.
- You as well.
- The Fox nods in assent to you as well,
and you return back to
the world of the living,
into a form of your body running like hell
from the fallen kingdom of Marienne.
- Oh god.
(Brennan laughs)
- Zac, if you could go ahead
and send in Siobhan for me.
- Okay.
Woo!
- [Brennan] Siobhan, you
want to come play some D&D?
- Sure.
Everything's always good
when we're on our own.
(Brennan laughs)
- Rosamund.
- Mm-hm?
- You awake in your bed.
There are no briars.
(Siobhan makes a noise of surprise)
It's a little bit chilly,
because there's not a
fire lit in the fireplace.
You look outside your window,
and you can see the tall
towers of briars there,
but they don't seem to menace the castle.
They just seem to cover the
grounds and the outer wall.
Your beautiful tapestry is here.
It still smells of flowers.
Give me a perception check.
- 17.
- It still smells of flowers in here,
and you see fresh flowers in the vase.
- These are beautiful.
- It can't have been 100 years.
- Hello?
- You hear footsteps
coming up the stairs outside of your room.
- I get up.
- You stand up, and you
hear some kind of clanking,
unfamiliar, something almost like armor,
but it makes a strange noise
that armor doesn't really make.
- I go and open the door.
- You open the door,
and a figure stops
abruptly on the landing,
approaching the door to your room.
You see a strange movement of light,
and then as it stops
abruptly, it just vanishes,
and you're looking into
a dimly lit landing
at the top of a spiral staircase,
and whatever was moving there
that was hard to see already as it was
is suddenly invisible.
And you hear a voice go, oh!
Oh, my apologies. You're awake.
- Yes, good morning.
Who do I have the pleasure of talking to?
- Sorry.
You hear a sort of glass-like clank
as an invisible figure
that is kind of rendered
partially visible as it moves,
as the light moves through the
glass, removes a glass helm,
and a beautiful woman stands before you.
She has a proud, regal countenance.
She is maybe a few years
older than you, somehow royal,
and yet with a touch of
something more worldly.
As she moves and shifts her weight a bit,
the glass armor she wears is revealed.
You see, strapped to her left arm,
sort of a little outline as it
moves of a glass kite shield
and a glass polearm in her other hand.
- Are you Cinderella?
- I am Cinderella.
Are you Sleeping Beauty? Rosamund?
- Yes.
(Brennan sighs in relief)
- It worked.
- What worked?
- We managed to catch you
before you were completely gone.
Or, rather, midway to where you are going.
- Catch me?
- Yes. May I come in, if that's all right?
- Oh, please, yes, absol-
I'm so sorry, my manners!
- Of course, and I apologize for...
You can never tell when you
travel in realms such as these.
She walks in, puts her glass helm down,
and again is sort of, now
that she's in this place
with a little bit more light
coming through the windows,
is rendered, the glass armor
clearly has shape and light.
Glass, it reflects a lot of light.
But wherever it covers
her, it is transparent,
so you can't see through to her.
You just see out through
the other side of the glass,
which means when she's very still,
she almost turns invisible.
You see she has a little sheen
of perspiration from having
just climbed up a couple
hundred steps in heavy armor.
Looks and says, that was
always going to be a real doozy
for whatever prince ended up coming here.
- You know, I don't think
any of the princes made it,
and maybe the steps, frankly, didn't help.
- I have to imagine so,
though I think where you just came from,
there were many challenges
greater than steps.
The briars had-
- Yes. Yes.
They were, I think, trying to protect me,
but I don't know from what.
Myself? The story?
- How do you feel about
that, being protected?
- Well, it's nice to be protected.
But it felt
like less of a protection
and more of a cage, and that was not fun.
That, I didn't like.
- Many of the places that are meant
to keep us safe are cages.
I know you've just awoken,
but also it is cold here.
(quaint piano music)
She gestures to the fireplace.
I'd be happy to make a fire
for you, if you'd like.
I know that you're probably
not much accustomed
to making them, and I
have a lot of practice.
- Thank you, if that's not...
- I could use one as
well. It's cold up here.
She pulls up a seat, goes to work,
and expertly starts to
put a fire together.
Well, Rosamund, I can tell you right now,
though I am honored to have ascended
to the top of your tower, I can tell you
that likewise here as
the last time you woke up
in this place, your prince is not coming.
- But then where is he?
He's supposed to come!
- Well, if we have any luck,
hopefully wherever you
are headed to, he is...
She looks here and sizes you up.
Give me an insight check.
- 14.
- It looks like she
swallows her words a bit,
like she's going to say
something about the prince
and then holds herself
back from saying something.
- Do you know him? Do you know my prince?
What's his name? What does he look like?
Is he tall?
- Your prince is exactly
not only as handsome as
you could ever wish for,
but also exactly handsome
in the perfect way
for exactly what you would want.
- Oh my.
Thank you, I knew it.
- Just like mine.
Just like Snow's.
We're not in your home right now.
This is
a memory.
We're somewhere a little bit unfinished.
- Oh.
- I'm happy to tell you
the circumstances of where
you now find yourself, but...
(Brennan laughs wearily)
It's a lot, and it's very upsetting,
and I don't want to do
anything to upset you,
and I don't want to do anything-
- I just died.
That was pretty upsetting.
- I've died a few times as well.
- A few times?
- Well, there's good news and bad news.
- Okay.
- You're dead, but-
- Is that a good news or a bad news?
- Well, that's the bad news.
- Okay.
- The good news is, you and I
and another princess
that you have yet to meet
who is extremely wise and cunning,
her name is Snow White, we,
(Brennan laughs wearily)
in some ways, are blessed.
- Okay.
- One of the ways in which we are blessed
is that due to the nature
of the Neverafter...
We can die.
- Mm-hm.
- At least more often than most people.
- All right.
- There's two options before you.
I'll lay my cards out on the table.
We've been looking for
you for a long time.
You're very hard to find.
Part of that is just due to
the nature of your curse,
the nature of Reverie,
the nature of the briars,
but also getting to the right spot
within 100 years is very challenging.
Not every version
has that window for us,
and in the world that you are
just very recently leaving,
we found you, and you
died right afterwards,
which is frustrating, more
for you than for anyone else.
- Mm-hm.
- But also frustrating for us.
I'm trying to think where to start.
I've been in battle mode for
so long that transitioning
towards trying to wake someone
up again is challenging.
- Would you like some tea? I can ring.
- You want to ring for tea?
- Don't you?
- At the bottom of the staircase,
if you opened the door, it's just nothing.
- So no tea?
- Let's zoom out.
- Okay.
- Yes, sorry.
There is no tea.
- There's no tea.
- Not here. Not right now.
- But my prince is on his way.
- Your prince is not, okay. Hm.
Rosamund, you're a story.
- Okay.
- We all are.
And something broke,
something changed
within our lands
when the Neverafter...
Some people say that the times of shadow
came to the Neverafter,
but that's not quite true,
or not the whole truth.
The Neverafter in some ways began
when the times of shadow began.
People like you and me
we're not really supposed
to know about each other.
We're not really supposed to find out
how bad of a deal we got.
Have you?
Have you had any interactions
with fairies of any kind?
- Well, I was given gifts by fairies.
- [Brennan] Same.
- And then we fought a fairy,
but she was dead,
but also alive,
and she really wasn't very nice.
She must have been a bad fairy,
like the one that made the briars.
- Bad fairies and good fairies-
- But she was your fairy.
- What?
- Well, she had the shoe.
- She had glass in her chest?
- Mm-hm.
- And a crown on her head?
- Mm-hm, and a really
actually cool looking wand.
That honestly was cool.
- Well, I won't make that mistake again.
The Neverafter is all of our realms, yes?
Kingdoms, the Kingdoms
of Reverie and Elegy,
Shoeberg, the Lands of Lullaby.
All of these places, yes?
- Mm-hm.
- But it's also a little
bit more than that.
The Neverafter is not just
places, it's also times,
and some of us have had
more times than others.
It's not necessarily fair,
it's not necessarily right,
but it is what it is.
You've had vastly more times
and more has happened upon
those times than many others,
and there are those who
wish to manipulate that.
- But I don't remember any of them.
- No, no, and they don't want you to.
They don't want you to remember
how many versions of
your life you've lived,
and the Neverafter itself is something of,
according to our enemies,
a cosmic mistake.
- Oh.
- It's a lot to take in.
Suffice it to say, when the
times of shadow started,
I came into contact
with a princess
from the Kingdom of
Tapestry named Snow White,
and she'd had a mirror that had belonged
to the former queen of her kingdom,
and there were visions when
the times of shadow started
that had to do with all the other
shadows of this world,
these destinies written for us.
There are some changes in
different versions of the story.
I have seen and lived
as versions of myself
that were in some ways quite
different from who I am now.
But the important thing is,
I began to gain the memories
of these other places.
I began to see
what parts of my story
were under my control,
and more to the point,
Rosamund, I began to see
what parts of my story
were not under my control.
And when I began to search
for what those forces were,
if my story was capable
of changing in some ways,
why wasn't it capable
of changing in others?
If in one world
the mice of my house had these names,
why in others did they
have no names at all?
And I said why, in all these versions
of my story, is my mother dead?
Why, in so many of these stories,
if destiny was real,
then so many of the things that happened
didn't need to happen,
and that would be a bitter pill to swallow
if destiny was unfeeling or unthinking.
We don't believe that destiny
is unthinking and unfeeling.
We believe that destiny is a project,
and that there are entities
responsible for it.
Namely,
the ones who gave you your curse,
and the one that showed up
to guide me towards my happily ever after.
- The fairies?
- Yes.
- But most fairies are good.
They made me beautiful and graceful.
They stopped me from dying.
- If I've had a fairy
godmother all this time,
I can't be certain
that she is not just as responsible
for the death of my mother
as she is for the fortune
that came to me upon going
to the prince's ball.
I do not believe that your wicked fairy
and the fairies that gave you your gifts
were unaware of what
the others were up to.
I do not believe that they are constrained
in what they do.
I believe that the magic
that made you fall asleep
for 100 years was a movement
upon the face of the world
for 100 years was a movement
upon the face of the world
to achieve a shape that
the fairies found pleasing.
- Why should I believe you?
- You don't have to,
and I won't seek to make you.
I'm just telling you what it is we know.
After my marriage to the
prince, when I realized
that the nature of our
world was unraveling,
a coat becomes threadbare
and that's dangerous
as the garment unravels,
but it also does let you
see the lining for perhaps the first time.
And as things unraveled
during the times of shadow,
we became aware that,
Rosamund, most of our stories are unkind,
and the world that the
fairies are seeking to restore
is a world with much
cruelty in it already.
There was a great deal
of horror in the world
before the times of shadow came,
and though in some ways yes,
the times of shadow are frightening,
for the first time, people like you and me
actually know the nature of these lands.
We know that we can die,
and that after dying,
those memories can be remembered
by other versions of ourselves.
We know that magic is not
for the fairies alone.
Snow White has learned much of magic
in the time that we have worked together.
- But if it's cruel
to an end,
it's cruel to an end.
My prince needs to prove
himself. That's how I know.
How else will I know if he's my true love?
- Give me an insight check.
- That's a crit.
- Do you want to put your
attention to Cinderella
in this moment, or do you
want to put it to yourself?
(Siobhan sighs)
- I will put it to myself.
- On a nat 20 insight check,
you talk about your prince arriving,
and you look at the door,
and I will hand the narrative reins
to you, Siobhan, for a moment.
- Oh no.
- Because you are in
a liminal space between
lives, essentially.
- Mm-hm.
- And on a nat 20 insight check,
you see, talking about your
prince coming up the staircase,
I think you see, in the moment,
as many flashes of versions
of your story as you want to.
- I watch these stories.
They flash in front of me,
and I begin to remember,
and I remember that some of
them are deeply romantic,
and some of them are deeply violent
and nothing to do with
true love whatsoever,
about control and violence and pain,
and I begin finally to start taking in
what it is that Cinderella
has been telling me.
- This is much to ponder.
I've given you a great deal of knowledge
that you didn't ask for, but
I think that you deserve.
- And what about my friends?
- We would not have been able to reach you
in this halfway point to the next world
unless you had been
exposed to some artifact
or some great magic of significance.
Do you remember interacting with anything?
I remember seeing you through
sheets of parchment on my-
- The book! Mother Goose's book!
- I do not know the name Mother Goose,
but I would imagine
that anyone who has held
or been in proximity to the book,
or at least understands its secret,
is likewise, for lack of
a better word, awakened.
If you have friends and
allies, then in this next world
that you go to, I would
recommend you find them.
I must warn you,
there was a time when
myself and Snow White
were under the impression that
these worlds were limitless.
We increased our magical
potency, we increased our power
thinking this is all in some sense absurd.
And in gathering more
magic, we came to realize
that the realms of the Neverafter,
the times of once upon a time
are vast, they are many,
but they do not go on
forever, and I am sad to say
that many of the kinder
worlds have already died.
- Oh.
- So I would ask for caution,
and more than anything, beware of fairies.
They do not mean you well.
I would say also, though
they are not as dangerous
as fairies, you should keep an eye out
for any witches that you might meet.
They have done nothing to harm us,
and in fact in many
cases have been helpful,
but the fairies are
petitioning them for their aid,
and we believe that in time,
the witches are more likely
to side with them than us.
- All right.
- The last thing I will say is,
we cannot travel as
freely between the worlds
as the fairies can, but we are on our way
to where you are now headed.
It may take us some time to arrive there,
but when we arrive there, we
will do our best to find you,
and find you as quickly as we can.
- Is there a place I can go to?
Perhaps the house with the mice?
- You can.
Unfortunately, the gateways that are open
to myself and Snow White
are challenging to find.
We do not know yet by what doorway
we will access this new land.
- Okay.
- But when we arrive, we
will do our best to find you.
If you are there, there
are others of our kind
that we have still been
looking for in this time.
There is one that we were close to finding
in the previous world that
we've made the decision
that we were not so close to finding her
that it does not make more sense
to follow you to this next time.
- What's her name?
- When we communed with
her, she could only dance.
She could not speak and tell us her name.
- Oh dear.
- But though she did not
appear to be able to speak,
she looked at us with great urgency,
and we saw her close to
a coastline, the sea.
When we arrive there, finding you
should be a matter of short work,
but we may be long removed from you.
But if you do find an opportunity
to find a dancing princess
who either cannot or will
not speak near a beach...
I promise that we're on the ball.
I know it sounds like we're not.
It sounds like this is all a stretch.
- No, I just feel so stupid.
- Why? No.
- Everything was a lie
and I didn't see it.
Is true love even real?
- Because you were lied to,
does not mean that everything is a lie.
Do not take the crimes of
those who have manipulated us
and put them at the feet of the world.
It's our time to write the story,
and we're going to make
the world how we want it.
- Okay.
- Here, she looks at you and
motions to give you an embrace.
- I hug her. It's very uncomfortable.
- Yeah.
- Clank, clank.
- I'm sorry, it does take-
- There's a lot of jewels.
- I don't take the armor off because-
- You are burly!
- Hey, I've been fighting a
lot of monsters and fairies
for what feels like an eternity.
- Wow.
- And I don't really
like taking the armor off
because if I do, it's so easy to lose.
- Oh yeah. Oh gosh.
- The pieces are so hard to see.
- Wow. How do you...
Don't tell me. I was
going to ask how you pee.
I don't need to know.
- It's so waterproof.
- Oh boy.
- Listen, the point is this.
It's incredibly waterproof,
and it's a very minor spell to clean.
I don't need to explain.
- Oh, you're using magic!
- It's magic!
- Okay, so you're not
just sloshing around?
- No, no, no, no.
- Okay, okay.
- Exactly, but no, the armor is,
I try not to drink a lot of water when...
You know, this is a bad note to end on.
- No no no, I shouldn't have
asked. I shouldn't have asked!
- Not at all.
- I shouldn't have asked.
It's rude.
- Honestly, it is
kind of nice to talk about.
- Oh. Well, good.
- She hands you a parcel,
wrapped, and says,
this is what I can give you
across this place of memory.
It should be with you when you awaken.
We can die more than once,
but the odds of ending up in
a kinder world are not high,
so I would avoid it, just
like you would before.
She turns to leave,
and you wake up
once again surrounded
by briars, and this time
they are growing out of your
mouth even more forcefully.
But you can feel the parcel
under your arm as you awaken,
and the nat 20 you rolled earlier,
we'll actually continue that
roll in that you are able to,
having seen multiple versions
of your story already,
those other versions you hold
onto sort of ephemerally,
but now you have the experience
of really having two
versions of your life,
and you share those memories
and they are split across.
You remember now,
in addition to the three
fairies' gifts from before,
you remember seven fairies, easily,
that gave you the gifts
of beauty, grace, cunning,
strength, fortitude, and wisdom,
and then the seventh fairy
ended the curse of the wicked fairy.
You feel yourself in a
body, again, stronger,
but also the briars are worse here,
as though this version of the Neverafter
has become stranger, but so have you.
- I, as before,
go to free my hand so I can
pull the briars out of my mouth.
- You free your hand,
go to pull the briars out of your mouth.
Do you do anything differently
this time as you do so,
or do you do the exact
same as you did before?
- Can I just look around
before I pull them out
and see what's around me?
- The same room, choked with briars.
These ones are even thicker and sharper.
They kind of have multiple
points per spoke of the briar,
and you see your skin is much more pallid.
It's almost like these briars
were sapping more from you,
but you have these other
gifts that you didn't have
in the other version of your story.
So your strength and
fortitude that you were gifted
as a baby is still here, just magically.
- Okay, I'm going to use
that strength and fortitude then
to pull these briars.
- This time, you don't even
have to do it carefully.
You cough up a bunch of blood
that splatters on the front of your gown.
You stand up, able to just
push the briars off of you.
The briars begin to speak to
you again. What are you doing?
- Leave me alone. Leave me alone!
I don't need you, leave me alone!
- Give me an intimidation
check with advantage.
- Well, one of them is a one,
and then the other one is an eight.
- You see that they begin to move.
They move away from you,
but also begin to constrict
you again and say, we cannot.
We must keep you safe.
The world comes to destroy the princess.
- You are destroying me now!
Let me go!
- You feel something within you.
You feel a power,
like a deep pool of something, some,
some cunning or some wisdom
that was not there before.
The briars look afraid of this
sudden strength and resolve
within you, but it looks
like they will heed your word
just enough to retreat from you,
but not to grant you passage out of here.
I think you begin to feel,
from that conversation
with Cinderella in that place between,
you feel a magic flowing through you.
- Creatures of the forest,
hello? Are you there?
- They do not speak, as
the ones you saw before,
but the Neverafter is a strange place
during these times of
shadow, and the kindness
of the crumbs you threw into the cupboard
from a version of you which is now dead,
stories have a strange way
of carrying on the actions
of the dead, and mice...
(Brennan chittering)
The briars shudder and shake
as the mice begin to gnaw into the briars.
- Hello, little mice. Thank
you so much for your help.
(Brennan squeaking)
- The briars shudder and retreat
as this kind of horrifying,
swirling wave of mice
issues out from under your bed,
crawling up your gown,
crawling along your arms.
Anytime a little briar comes towards them,
they run and snap at it.
You see that the spindle of
the spinning wheel comes out,
and the mice grab it and hold onto it.
The mice present it to you,
but then also offer to just
take it far away from here.
- Oh, I'm going to take it with me.
- You may mark down the
spindle of a spinning wheel
on your character sheet.
- Great.
This is my story, it's my story!
(Brennan chuckles)
- A gnawing wave of chittering mice
flow forward from you,
and as you emerge from the
castle, they are joined
by birds of the air that
begin to peck up above.
Small sparrows land above
you, and as they do so,
the way is cleared before you.
- What a beautiful day.
(thunder booming)
- Gray skies and endless briars.
Sleeping Beauty, you go to
recover your friends and allies.
(Siobhan breathes out in exhilaration)
Thank you so much, Siobhan.
- Thank you so much.
I'll send the next victim down.
- Go ahead and send, I
believe it's Emily next.
- Emily.
- Thank you.
- Fantastic. Emily!
- You want to play D&D?
- Yeah!
- Let's do it.
Emily, your shirt couldn't
be more appropriate.
- Thank you.
Well, it could be more
appropriate if it wasn't an XXXL.
(Brennan and Emily laugh)
- You don't know how long
you've been walking here,
but it's a beautiful,
sunlit day in the forest.
There's dappled light
coming through the leaves.
You're walking on a really
cozy little forest path.
It's just a dirt path. It's hard packed.
But it's the kind of path
that there'll be a
little wooden footbridge.
- That'd be really fun to traverse.
- And walking beside you,
much too large to fit on the path,
and so therefore off the path,
not right by your side
but just on the other side
of the occasional tree
or shrub or fern
is the biggest wolf you've ever seen,
walking by your side.
- [Emily] Okay, stop being coy
and just make an introduction already.
- Did you want me to say
something to announce myself?
- Just felt like you were kind of, like,
hiding behind the trees,
and I'm kind of someone who's looking for
friends outside of my
grandma, so just say hello.
You don't have to be a creep about it.
- Hello again, Little Red Riding Hood.
I'm sorry you've died.
- Oh.
Aw, fff, ffffffff
freak. Really?
(Emily sighs, disappointed)
Wait, so then this must be my afterlife,
and I'm going to be
reunited with my grandma.
- We can find a story
like that, you and I.
Truth be told,
in most of your stories,
you are reunited with your
grandmother, and I am dead.
- Well, I mean, that seems
like the kind of story
I'd like to read personally, no offense.
- Well, a fork in the road is coming up.
It will be easy enough to go left,
and we will find you
a story
where you and your
grandmother are reunited.
Perhaps one where the
woodsman kicks down the door
and cuts me down,
carves your grandmother out of my stomach.
- Does it offend you
that I would kind of
like if that happened?
- You've already k*lled me once.
- Well, that's kind of unfair,
because you told me to.
- You were kind enough to comply.
- Anyways, I don't have any
interest in doing that again.
- You regret those gifts?
You regret what you became?
- Well,
I mean,
I think that those gifts you speak of,
you kind of gave me
the gifts of survival
without giving me a reason to survive,
and without any assurance
that you won't just take
everyone else from me,
and those gifts also
made me sort of a monster
amongst princes and princesses.
So I would say, mixed blessing.
I'm sorry for speaking back to you.
I know that in some trippy way,
you're kind of an authority
figure, so that was rude,
and I'm sorry I said freak at you.
- You're sorry you said freak?
- Yeah, I am (laughs)
sorry I said freak at you.
Oh, I'm saying it again. Freak!
- I wouldn't have even known
to be offended by that.
- Well, aren't you unflappable?
- I come for everyone, in their time.
(twinkling intriguing music)
It is without malice or cruelty
that I intend to devour
each and every being.
- What about Pinocchio?
- Him too.
- Puss in Boots? He's just a cat.
- I think the true cruelty would be for me
to spare some and not others.
- What about Mother Goose?
- Him, too.
- You would give me the
strength to protect Mother Goose
just so that one day the same thing
could happen to him that
happened to my grandma.
- The only time you will accept
to make your life worthwhile is forever?
- I don't really think it's that.
I guess you just make
me do really crazy stuff
that I feel like I need
something really noble
to justify doing it.
- You wish to do something
noble with your strength.
- Yeah, because if I'm
going to be a monster,
at least I could be a
monster for the right side,
or a good side, or...
Your gifts are monstrous.
I don't think I can look
at myself in the mirror.
- You arrive at a fork in the path,
and you look to the left and the right.
I'm going to tell you something, Ylfa.
Down the left-hand path
is a story quite common,
though increasingly less
common in these times of shadow
where you do not k*ll me, but
instead the woodsman kills me,
and you are reunited
with your grandmother.
But you must know that
that story already exists,
and your story ended in the dirt
in front of those barrel soldiers
and anvil-headed monstrosities.
Whichever story you choose
to go to will benefit
from your strength and your knowledge,
but it will carry the burden
of the choices you have
made and your memories.
The left-hand path takes us
to a kinder version of your story,
and that story will receive you
in all of the fullness of
what has happened to you.
- So if I go down the left-hand path,
then the woodsman will be there.
Where was he?
He always came by my grandma's house,
and he didn't come
the day we met,
in the capacity that we met.
- The woodsman's actions
are varied
across different stories.
He, after all, is a
character in your tale,
and though that is a crown
you may not wish to wear,
it is the truth.
- My tale?
Okay, well,
my grandma taught me how to shop,
so what's down the right lane?
- The right lane takes
us to other stories.
It takes us to some stories
where you might receive
answers to the question of the woodsman.
And to your point of
nobility and why it might be
worthwhile to be a monster,
there are stories down that path
that will have your friends.
Mother Goose.
- Is Mother Goose's son alive
down the left-hand path?
Is Jack there?
- In most of them, no.
In many of those stories,
you never meet Mother Goose.
- Is she still in your
stomach, my grandma?
Because you're offering me
a very important question,
and I feel like I should
consult my best friend.
I'm assuming she's in some
sort of suspended animation
that is afterlife, just
waiting for me to also die,
and then we are reunited,
so I would like to tap into
that suspended animation
and access her wisdom, please thank you.
- You wish to speak to your grandmother?
- Yes.
I think that you're asking
me to make a decision
that I should really
speak to an adult about.
- Very well.
The wolf walks
back into the forest.
- I did not know that was going to work.
- Slowly but surely walking
up the path behind you
a few moments later, you
see sort of trundling,
she's got a little shawl
over her shoulders.
She's got a small sort
of parcel of wildflowers
that she's wrapped up, going along.
Oh, hello! Ylfa!
- Grandma!
Okay, this is really crazy,
but right now we're in,
like, a really trippy thing.
You and I need to skedaddle, okay?
I was kind of just sassing
this wolf, but now you're real,
so we're pulling a grandma heist, okay?
Give me your hand and
we're just going to run.
Anything but those two paths.
- You want to stray from the path?
Darling, you need to
listen to your mother!
We can't leave the path, it's dangerous.
There's wolves in this forest.
- I thought that...
Really?
You're just going to parrot
back at me what my mom said?
- Who do you think she got it from?
I had to yell it at her all
the time when she was little.
I constantly had to send her out.
I sent her out to bring
things to my mother,
who lived in the woods at
that time and was very infirm
and needed help with all manner of things.
- I always thought you were the anti-mom.
- Well, I think your mom could
learn a thing or two from me.
I don't agree with every
decision your mother's made.
- Okay, well, this is all totally fine,
because you and I, we're back together.
We can just hang out, like, forever now.
I'm pretty sure that this
is some sort of afterlife,
and so we could just hang out.
Get the raisins. I'll get the oatmeal.
We're making cookies.
- Give me a perception check.
- That's going to be a six.
- She says, all right.
Well, let's go make some oatmeal cookies,
if we're in the afterlife.
I can't believe it. I don't feel dead.
- You don't look dead. You look fantastic.
- Incredible, incredible.
Well, let's off and get
some oatmeal cookies, huh?
- Okay, let's do it!
I'm so glad you're back.
I haven't made a connection
with anyone other than
Mother Goose except for you.
- You see that she walks
over the little footbridge
and takes a right and goes down
the path towards the right.
- Okay.
I get my characteristic
skip back in my step,
which, honestly, becoming a werewolf
has kind of hunched my posture
and made skipping more cumbersome,
and I feel like I'm shaking
it off of me, and I skip down.
(light string music)
Grandma, a lot happened
while you were dead.
So, I did meet some friends.
I turned into a werewolf.
There was this time that we
fought this really evil fairy,
and I took out all this furniture.
I fought furniture.
Remember when we built
furniture that one time?
I basically did the opposite.
- Wow, well, I hope that
whoever owned the furniture
was consulted, and it wasn't done without,
you know, some sort of leaving a note.
I always say it's
important to leave a note.
- Grandma, why are you being...
Why do you sound like
my mom? This is not you.
You're the one who helps
me get a little wild.
You're the one who says, let's
stay up to 7:30 instead of 7!
You're the one who says, we
can have black tea after 2 PM!
- Am I?
- Yeah, that's why you're my best friend.
- Fascinating.
You look up now that you're farther down
the right-hand path.
You don't remember your
grandma's ears being this big.
- Okay.
Got me again, did you?
- Whatever do you mean, darling?
- I mean that you made me think
that my grandma was back
to get me to go down a path
in which I could just keep
turning into a monster
and scaring everyone around
me, including myself.
Do you know what I did
to my family, Grandma?
- You huffed and you puffed
and you blew them all away.
- Yeah.
- Your grandma turns
to look at you and says,
we can be clear, darling.
It's not that I'm in disguise.
And you see that your grandma transforms,
and it doesn't look like a disguise.
It looks like she is a
werewolf herself, and she goes,
to invite someone into the world
is inviting them into a world of shadows.
There is no way to have the
joy of the oatmeal cookie
without walking through
the woods full of wolves.
Your first breath signs the
deed to one day have your last.
Your first breath signs the
deed to one day have your last.
I am sorry that I am gone. I
miss you more than anything.
I am sorry that I am gone. I
miss you more than anything.
I miss you with all my heart.
- When you're gone, I don't really know
what I'm supposed to be fighting for.
- She gets less wolf-like,
and she lifts your chin up,
and she says,
you're my favorite little
girl in the whole world,
and whatever you choose to
fight for, I know is right.
- It's only gotten harder
to make friends now,
because of,
(Emily makes a soft roaring noise)
- If I can give a little
bit of grandmotherly advice-
- As long as it's not the
stay on the path kind.
- No.
I'll say something true.
And you see that she does change
and become more wolf-like,
but it doesn't feel like
the disguise before.
It's like she and the Big Bad Wolf
are maybe the same person or thing,
or there's a part of her
that ate the wolf too.
She goes, the real friends,
the ones that make miracles happen,
the ones greater than any treasure
you could find on any adventure,
they see the wolf in you and love it too.
You're not a monster.
You're not.
- Does that mean I'm a princess?
- You're my princess.
But we are still broke, so.
- Oh, okay.
That's fine. Raisins are pretty cheap.
- Can't all be princesses.
There's a shocking amount running around,
but you can't all be princesses.
- Yeah, no.
All right, then. Wolf it is.
- You asked why one should be a monster,
what purpose there is to it.
Purpose, true purpose,
is always down the scarier path,
through the darker part of the forest.
- I adjust my galoshes
and continue down this right path
that I've clearly already gone down,
but now I do it knowing I'm doing it.
- You walk down this path,
and begin to see
the forest open up,
and as it opens up, you
are looking over a cliff,
but it's a cliff miles and miles,
it's so vastly high above these realms.
You're looking at another
forest down below,
and you begin to feel
at the edge of your mind
another set of memories.
You begin to feel like
a version of your story
where you made
the same choices in the cottage,
where you gained those
gifts from the wolf,
but you start to have memories
in addition to the ones
where you went and found your family,
you have an even bloodier set of memories
of going and finding the woodsman first.
Appearing at your side before you move,
the wolf appears one last time.
You see running from his
eyes and nose and mouth
is a stream of blood,
and you see him shake and shudder
as though he is dying in this moment.
(Brennan snarls wetly)
- I know, I did this to you, so I'm sorry.
- No, there is something else,
something else connected to me
in this version of your story.
- What?
- It is all right.
I am sorry for all you have suffered.
Your friends need you. Take
this gift before it is too late.
He opens his mouth, and
blood that catches on fire
as though it was flammable
falls onto your cloak,
and you see your cloak glow
for a moment with flame.
The flame extinguishes, and you feel
a warmth to your cloak now.
The wolf goes,
this is a less kind story
you now travel to.
Take care, Little Red Riding Hood. (yelps)
You see that the fur is blasted
off of his skin in fire,
and you see he is silhouetted
in flame and disappears,
and you see he is silhouetted
in flame and disappears,
and you hear a (snorts) noise behind him,
and some other beast or entity
call out from this world
you look at below you.
- Who did that? I demand
to know right now!
My name is Ylfa Snorgelsson,
and I will have answers!
- You shout that as you are standing
in the woods near Pottingham
in a much stronger body.
You now remember two
versions of your story
that seem to have unfolded,
one in which you went
to see your family and one in which
you went to see the
woodsman and destroyed him,
not with your breath, but with your claws.
- Oh god. How am I going
to make this right?
- And that's where we'll stop there.
- Thank you, Brennan. Thank you.
Thank you. (Brennan laughing) Thank you.
- If you would do me the
kindness of sending in Murph,
that would be wonderful,
thank you so much.
Murph, you want to play some D&D?
- I do want to play some D&D,
or roll dice.
(Brennan laughs)
I want to do whatever
psychological bullshit
you got going on over here.
- Sorry.
Gerard, you open your eyes,
and you are floating in water
with lily pads surrounding you
and a shock of glass
erupting from your chest.
Blood seeps into the water
around you. What do you do?
- I try to pull it out.
- Give me an athletics
check with disadvantage.
- That's a one.
- Is that a nat one?
- That's a nat one.
- You twist the glass shard again.
You cannot possibly remove it,
but you hear a voice say,
careful, careful, careful!
Don't touch, don't touch!
Ring!
And you see, approaching you,
with beautiful, golden
wings and a corona of light
with beautiful, golden
wings and a corona of light
around her body, is a beautiful fairy.
She has gleaming, golden skin
and bright turquoise hair
wrapped up beautifully with
shells and jewels around it,
and she flits over to you and says,
oh, my poor and dear darling prince!
You are so badly hurt!
- Yes!
- Are you all right?
- No! No, I'm not all right!
And I wasn't all right before
I had the glass shoved in me!
I'm a frog! I'm a prince!
I should be a prince, but I'm a frog!
And now I've been thrown into the water
after being stabbed.
Some furniture kicked
my a*s. What are you?
- I know, I know, I know.
I am so dreadfully sorry.
Your Highness.
- Uh-huh?
- None of this was supposed to happen.
- Correct.
- We need to get you back
with the Princess Elody.
- Correct. Yes.
- We need to find what
has corrupted her mind
that she constantly thinks of w*r,
and we need to change her back.
- Right.
No, no, no. We need to change me back.
- Yeah, of course, yes
yes yes, but of course-
- She's off, no, she-
- She is the one to blame,
because obviously-
- Okay, well-
- You wouldn't have
become a frog if she had-
- It's not entirely her fault!
It's... She's... The things...
The problem is the outer
things ruining our life, okay?
- On this, we can agree. Yes, absolutely.
- If there's not giants
coming knocking places down,
destroying our castle,
Elody never would've got it
in her head to go off fighting.
The bad stuff is all out there.
We had a very nice life in the castle.
- You are so correct. A
wonderful, wonderful life.
- So just undo this.
- [Brennan] Yes.
- The glass first.
- Yes.
- Then the frog thing.
- Yes.
- And then just tell me where Elody is,
and we'll figure it out.
- So, here's the issue.
- Okay.
- All of this, the times
of shadow, the Neverafter,
me and all of the other fairies
are working as hard as we can
to fix this and get
everything back on track.
There are so many happily ever afters
that need to continue to ever after.
- Right.
- It's just that it's all
kind of become a little
scrambled, you know?
- Yes, yes, I know.
- So we're fixing problems,
but we sort of have to
fix them in the order.
You know, sort of like, well,
before you have to bail out the boat,
but you also have to fix the
leak at the bottom of the boat,
and you have to get enough
water out to fix the leak,
but also the water will keep...
These are complicated issues.
- It sounds uncomplicated to me.
I am in front of you, and
perhaps there are other things
that you need to deal with,
but it seems like the easiest thing
for you to do right now would be
to pull this glass out of
me and then wave your wand
and turn me back into a handsome prince.
- Well, I would love that.
Interesting point, though.
You're not in immediate danger of dying,
because you are dead.
- Fantastic, so put me...
Okay, so then what? Put
me in the f*cking book.
The book seemed cool.
Everything was just...
When King Cole went in there, just back-
- Sorry, book?
What book?
- Can I do an insight check?
- [Brennan] Give me an insight check.
- 12.
- Let me roll.
The fairy's got a pretty good poker face,
but you did see a reaction
to you mentioning the book.
- The theoretical book
of how things should be.
You know, you are cursed.
You become a frog.
You find true love.
You're not a frog anymore.
Everything's great, and then oop,
you start turning into a frog again,
then you k*ll the fairy
who did that to you.
If anything, that's a sequel. We're done.
Unless this is a trilogy, in which case,
get the glass out of me.
- I understand.
In the world in which you died,
a fairy cursed you.
But ask yourself this, Prince Gerard.
Would you have become
wed to the Princess Elody
had you not been turned into a frog?
- Okay, yes.
I don't begrudge
the first frogging.
But after that, I did it.
- Yes, yes.
- That's it.
- I'm so glad that you can see reason.
- The first frogging is, of course,
a part of one of the Neverafter's
most beautiful love stories,
but the second one is a mistake.
- You keep referring to these things as...
There's just the one
thing, and it's ruined.
- Yes, yes, of course you are right.
There is just one time,
one once upon a time from which you hail.
I am so sorry to say, but
in that world, you are dead.
You cannot return to that world.
But, but, there are
worlds that are so close!
I mean, we're talking so, so close.
Hardly any, you know, variation.
- Are they better? Am I
not in this situation?
- Well, better is interesting.
There's a world that we have in mind
that we would love you to go to,
because I believe you were
in the company of a princess.
- Rosamund?
- Yes!
The Princess Rosamund of Reverie, exactly.
The way we fix all of this
is to get a handle on
the big loose threads.
That's the way that all of
this comes back into harmony,
and there are certain individuals
that have been contacted
by some of the people that
we believe to be responsible
for most of the chaos that is happening.
To be clear, we don't
believe that Rosamund
is responsible for any
of that, but we believe
that she may be in contact
with certain individuals that,
if we were able to contact them,
that, oh, we might be able
to really fix all of this.
- What about Elody?
Where is she in this story?
- Cards on the table,
here's what we would love.
We would love for you to
come back to life.
- Perfect.
- Now, when you come back to life,
you might be in a version of your body
that is a little bit more
in the wrong direction
than this one is now, but-
- Worse than a glass shard
in my chest under the water?
- [Brennan] Well, that's the other thing.
- Okay.
- I would love
to take that glass shard off your hands.
- Perfect.
- Can you remove it?
- Well, the first time, I ended
up stabbing myself with it,
and then the fairy exploded,
and that almost k*lled me.
I was k*lled by furniture.
Then I tried to do it just
now, and you yelled at me.
Which is rude. I'm a prince.
- I am so very sorry, Your Highness.
What about this? We are
going to bring you back.
You are going to enter a world
where all of this gets
to go back to the way
it was before, but not right at the start.
At the start, it will
seem substantively worse.
However, there is an
opportunity within that world
for you to rejoin the
companions that you met,
which seems interesting.
You mentioned something.
Was there any sort of
object of significance
or anything of that kind?
- I think it was just the companionship.
- Hm. Give me a deception check.
- That's a 13.
- She looks at you and
says, companionship?
- Yes, Elody and I,
before all of this got turned upside-down,
we had many, many friends
who began becoming distracted
by more serious matters,
and I was kind of left to my own devices,
and it's been nice to be around...
It's just been nice to be
around the old friends again.
- Gerard, we are working as
quickly and diligently as we can
to make everything right
again, and I promise you
that if you discover
by what means you and
your companions were able
to come to places like
this where you may speak
with a shard of glass within your chest,
and more importantly than that,
if you are able to keep an
eye on the Princess Rosamund
and specifically tell me
if anybody
speaks to her
or if she has found a contact
with any of the forces,
giants and ogres and wizards
and all manner of terrible things.
We believe that there might be people,
quite wicked people,
that are courting her.
- And if they're going after princesses,
have they gone after Elody?
- It's quite possible.
I am prepared to bring you
into this new world where you
can hopefully help us solve
these problems, Gerard.
I would take it myself, but
I actually cannot touch it,
so if you could do your best
to remove that glass shard-
- It's just super sharp.
- Okay.
- Do you have, like, gloves or something?
- You see that she takes
some pieces of lily pad
and hands them to you.
You rolled a nat one
before to remove this,
so I'm going to give
you disadvantage again
on the athletics check here.
- I don't like this dice.
It's been treating me
poorly. Let's try this one.
Do you want the high
number or the low number?
- Well, it's disadvantage,
so I'll take the low one.
- Well, even the high one is only a nine,
but the low one is a six.
- You go and sort of
cut your froggy hands.
- Ow!
Ow!
Ow!
I told you that was going to happen.
- Look, Your Highness-
- You just came in so
strong and so magical,
and then you can't even touch glass?
- Not that glass.
- Because it's for Cinderella?
- You know from whom the glass came?
- Yes, the person who cursed me
is the same one who's
looking for Cinderella.
- Yes.
You see she goes and casts
a little bit of magic on the glass shard.
The glass shard sort of shakes,
and she goes, all right.
There's no getting that out here.
When you come back, any
of your mortal friends
should be able to help you remove that.
- So this is staying in?
- It's got to, but it shouldn't.
It should come back to our
hands as soon as possible.
All you need do is find any glade
under the light of the moon.
Find that, place that shard there,
and I shall appear to retrieve it.
Can you do that, Gerard?
- Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.
It feels like I'm doing a lot
of the heavy lifting here.
- Deliver the shard to us,
and I will speak to those of my council,
and we will make the retrieval
of Princess Elody our topmost priority.
Can you manage that?
- Yes.
- Very well.
And with that,
you suddenly awaken,
once again in the woods
outside of the Kingdom of
Greenleigh, the sound of chaos
out far off over ridges
and through the forest.
You are much more froglike than before.
- Gah!
- But nestled within your
chest is the glass shard,
and though it stings
you every time you move,
it does not seem to deal
a death blow to you.
You are much more monstrous
than you were before,
and have some sort of horrifying toughness
that allows you to continue to live
even impaled upon this
shard of glass as you are.
You also are a little confused.
You have sets of memories
of the wonderful life
you lived with the Princess
Elody, but this world,
the attack from Snowhold
was so much more violent,
the losses so much greater.
You remember seeing Elody
astride a blood-soaked horse,
her eyes wide with battle rage,
huge, golden mace overhead.
This is a darker version of your story,
and you are most confused
about the manner in which you changed,
because you thought you remembered
receiving a kiss from a
princess in the form of a frog
as the act of faith and
love that transformed you,
but you have this strange,
surreal memory now
of being picked up and
thrown into the wall.
- That's not how it's
supposed to be at all.
- The sounds continue,
but you know that you are alive once more,
and that your companions
are somewhere out there.
And that's where we'll stop.
If you could go ahead and send Ally in,
that would be great.
- All right.
- Ally, you want to play some D&D?
- Yeah!
- Let's do it!
- Wow.
It's just you and me, huh?
- Just you and me.
Mother Goose, you come to
(exhilarating string music)
in a place so far from horror
that it's hard to describe.
You are in a clear, blue sky
with puffy, white clouds everywhere,
flying over the village of Pottingham
and its neighboring
villages, and you are flying
on the back of a massive,
shimmering, golden goose,
on the back of a massive,
shimmering, golden goose,
just soaring through the air.
You're flying for the
first time in your life!
You're flying on the
back of a giant goose!
- Is it the gander?
- It looks like the gander,
but it's obviously a
totally different color.
From up ahead, you hear a voice say,
how are you holding on back there?
Is it all all right?
- Who is it?
- It's a different voice.
- Who are you?
- The goose, I should imagine!
- This is the goose
talking, that I'm riding?
- Yeah, it's the goose
talking that you're riding.
You can see it's whipping its head back
and sort of talking against
the wind rushing past you.
- Who are you? I'm petting the goose.
Who are you?
- The goose! The goose!
As in, what's good for
me is what's good for...
- The other you!
- My other half, yes.
- Wow.
- Well, here.
Let's find some place to talk.
I've tried to remove you as much as I can
from many of the more
miserable liminal spaces
between the life you are departing
and the one you now head to.
You are dead, I am afraid.
- Right.
Right!
Okay.
I'm dead? I can see that I'm-
- You feel totally corporeal.
You've got the book by your side.
- Oh, I was going to ask!
- You have the book with you.
- Okay, and it's the same?
Can I look and see, is Nat King
Cole's famous song in there?
- Yes, all of Nat King Cole's discography,
all the Christmas stuff, it's all there.
(Ally Laughing)
No, Old King Cole and Jack
Be Nimble are both there,
along with the word shoe, as before.
All of that is still there.
- Wow, wow.
Okay, yeah, let's land.
- You land, and as you land,
you sort of get off the goose's back.
The enormous goose turns
around to look at you and says,
Mother Goose, an honor and
a pleasure to meet you.
- Thank you.
- I understand that you
have run afoul of...
You may call him my other half, my shadow,
my brother, if being evocative suits you.
- Yes.
The horrifying red bonnet?
- Bad choice, that bonnet.
- Yeah, I just...
- Huge swing and a miss.
- Honestly, the first time I met him,
I thought, this is the
cutest thing I've ever seen,
and then he bit my thigh really hard.
- Yes, he will do that.
A lot of geese do that.
Honestly, even I have kind of an urge
to do that from time to time.
- Even if you're not even holding
a sandwich at that height, they just...
- Yeah, they want to tell you what's up.
They want to tell you who's boss.
- It's a little nip. It's a warning nip.
- Well, I speak now to
the man who has brought
a sliver of hope to the
realms of the Neverafter.
- The book!
- Clever wish.
- It's worked!
- Or, rather, it has begun to work.
- Okay.
- As I'm sure you
might've fathomed by now,
these lands of the Neverafter are
(solemn piano music)
lands of magic,
lands of wonder and mystery,
and indeed, they are lands of story,
and all creatures of these lands
know many versions of their tales.
Or, rather, each version knows itself.
But hanging in the balance of harmony,
they simply live the
wanderings of their stories,
tell the tales they
tell, but occasionally,
there are some whose tales
involve the collecting of tales,
and therein lies
a potential gateway
into what some might call the
true reality of our world,
horrifying as it is to consider
that there are as many Mother Gooses
as there are Little Red Riding Hoods,
as many Frog Princes as
there are Sleeping Beauties.
These people that are friends of yours
exist again and again and again,
not within the same land,
but upon different times,
and the Neverafter is more
than just the few kingdoms
surrounding Pottingham,
but rather the Neverafter is even larger
than most folk expect or know.
Some few have glimpsed the true reality.
Some fairies, I believe all witches,
and as of late, some princesses as well.
But more to the point, also
you, Timothy, have glimpsed it.
You have found a way
to bring your son back
from the fate that the
gander had befall him.
While he is not fully back,
you have preserved a version of him.
- Is that good for him,
though? Does he like...
What happened to King Cole?
Is this a good thing that
I'm providing for them?
- I leave that up to you to decide.
I can tell you this, they are happy.
- Okay.
- I understand the horror
of placing someone in this
book, but the truth is,
you and I are somewhat
in a book right now.
- Are there more books?
- Beyond my ability to count,
although it does seem
that they might not be
as countless as once we thought.
I shall tell you this.
I am the goose that laid the golden egg.
- Oh.
- And I also gave
a golden egg to a boy named Jack
in the world-
- My Jack?
- This is where things become tricky.
There are many worlds with
a Mother Goose in them,
but the one that you now travel to,
the one to which many of your companions
have already been compelled,
and therefore I suggest
the one that you should most travel to,
is one in which
the Jack to which I gave the
golden egg is not your son.
You will recognize him there,
but his story is somewhat different.
Your son has many stories, and it is rare
for someone's stories to vary
as much as your son's do.
- So he's alive, but he won't know me.
- He will not know you in this new world,
but the Jack of your book does.
- Can't I just swap them?
(Ally laughs)
- If you wish.
- No.
- The book was granted by a clever wish,
but it was granted by the gander,
who I should tell you
now, I have never seen.
Wheresoever I am are times
of peace and prosperity and wonder known.
Wheresoever goes my brother
come the times of shadow.
Indeed, the times of shadow
and the gander are...
(Brennan sighs)
I don't know if it is right to
say that they are synonymous
or to say that one causes
the other, I do not say.
Wheresoever he flies, they lie.
Wheresoever they lie, he flies.
But I know that I cannot go where he is,
and the world to which
many of your friends
have already traveled, he is
there as well waiting for you.
- I was going to ask.
So you've been watching.
You know what I did in the last life.
Is it working? Do you have any notes?
- I have no notes. What I know is this.
There is more power in
that book than you imagine.
There are things you can
call upon, and indeed,
you can take things out of
the book that you have put in.
It is not a permanent banishment.
Rather, the space that they
occupy within that book
is under my wing, so to speak.
It is joyful there.
Things are better.
But you have removed them
from the other worlds which they occupy.
- Can I ever go in the book?
- If you wish to write
your own story, you may.
- Can I ask you one more question?
- You may ask me as many
as you'd like, my friend.
- Which of Jack's stories am I going to?
- Jack was born to poor farming folk.
He is far away from your
hometown in this world,
but he was, as he was in your life,
a lad
clever in his own way, neither...
Prone to stealing, from time to time,
but for reasons that seemed good to him.
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we don't know
for sure if he stole anything,
so I just, you know.
- It's hard with your kids.
- You know, I'm just-
- It's hard with your kids.
- It's just, you know,
he was so smart as a kid.
He was so smart, so I can't...
Okay.
- He's quite wealthy
in this version of the Neverafter,
as he spent much time with me
before the times of
shadow came to this place,
and he not only took that
but a harp, a magical harp.
He traded a cow to a
magician for magic beans,
and then shimmied up a beanstalk
and stole from a giant.
When the giant found out, he...
I hope this is not upsetting.
And again, in this
world, he's not your son,
but you will see the connection to him.
He k*lled him. He k*lled
a guy. He k*lled a guy.
- He k*lled the giant?
- He k*lled the giant.
He chopped the beanstalk
while the giant was climbing,
and the giant fell to his death.
- Damn.
- And people really painted
the giant to be, like, the bad guy.
- Mm-hm.
- But what happened is,
Jack stole from this giant a ton of times.
- Kind of home invasion homicide.
- Yeah, home invasion slash
homicide situation. Giant, yeah.
- Okay. Honestly, I'm still proud, sorry.
(Brennan laughing)
He's just always up to something.
All right, okay. Where am I going?
- My brother has tangled up the knot
more than he ever has before.
There are many forces within these realms
that have become aware
of the nature of reality
in a way that has not brought
them peace or understanding,
but has brought them terror
and a desire for power.
There are some entities
moving upon the nature
of the fabric of this
realm, of this Neverafter,
and again, when I say this Neverafter,
I mean all of the Neverafters,
all of the times of once upon a time,
and the reaction because of
the presence of the gander
and the presence of these times of shadow
has been w*r and panic and betrayal,
and there are powerful entities
now taking drastic measures that...
Normally I don't act this directly,
but there are less once upon
a times than there used to be,
and they are diminishing rapidly.
- Is it because they've
been put in this book,
and they're safe and happy?
- To put it a different
way to you, Mother Goose,
the things you have put in the book
have actually added
realms to the Neverafter,
which is not a thing that
creatures of those realms
tend to be able to do.
It's a very good thing,
but it's also a very frightening
thing, and I understand
why it would frighten
you and your companions.
And the truth is, I don't know
why the wish resulted in the book.
You wished for a way to save your son,
but I think in some ways
you view all the world as your children.
You take care of people and things.
- Yeah.
- So the book offers an opportunity,
and I do not think the
things you have done are bad.
For one, they are eminently reversible.
You could pull King Cole or
your son Jack out at any time.
I do not know if Jack would
be alive upon being removed.
I think that the issue here
is that you wield powerful magic.
You can draw on that magic.
Some of those rhymes that you have written
have a potent power of their own,
and you yourself are a witch
capable of wielding them.
- Yeah.
- But I would say this.
The magic of your book is good.
It is taking people that are
very hurt in the Neverafter
and at the very least
putting them somewhere
where they can live and be safe
until you can figure out what else to do.
But I think the thing that you are right
to be slightly horrified by is,
I don't know what the
endgame of the book is.
- It's just a waiting room.
It's not the solution.
- Essentially. But it's
a very safe waiting room.
- Is there a way that I can invite you in
when I'm in the times of shadow?
- Unfortunately, no.
And you see here, the goose leans over
and a golden tear forms in her eye,
and it drops onto your book,
and the book becomes a magical object
that is going to grant
you extra spells known.
- Oh!
- We'll talk about it more later.
- One last question.
What about my husband?
Is he in this realm?
- Yes, he is.
That, I can offer you.
If you wish to see him
upon your return, you can.
But also, if you wish to arrive elsewhere,
that can happen too.
- I mean, I would just like to peek.
I'm not really trying to-
- Mm-hm.
You see the goose nods
and says, very well.
I'll open a door to you.
You will experience
not only the you that died,
but the you that lives
now in this world as well,
and this world was a harder
world than the last one
you came from, which
was already hard enough.
- Yeah, okay.
- The book you hold is special.
It is a waiting room, a
safekeeping, an ending,
but perhaps also a beginning.
In time, I trust you to discover it,
but I know that the book
is not as special as
the man that holds it.
- Thank you. He starts
crying and he hugs the goose.
- The goose hugs you
back, and a doorway opens,
and you begin
to return to-
- I thought it was the
f*cking ink thing again.
- No, no no no.
- The goose ices you.
- The goose f*cking ices you!
(Ally laughing)
You return,
and you suddenly awaken
at your desk.
You're in your house. It's dark here.
There's smoke through the
window, like there's a fire
over the hillside in
the middle of the night.
You look around, and you see,
with a long nightcap and
nightgown, holding a little candle,
Henry, your husband,
looks into your office,
and you immediately have
two sets of memories.
Really, you realize what this
is, which is essentially,
in another world, you
died, and the spell here
is that the you that was
living in another world
suddenly just gets those
memories, gets the experience
of that life that the now
dead version of you lived.
And in this version of the story,
Jack never came to you and Henry,
and is not
a shocking or a bloody horror
that awaits you here, but in this world
where you and Henry
didn't have Jack together,
and in a world where the times of shadow
were even starker and more
horrifying than before,
this version of you
was a little bit less happy
than your older version,
and you remember now
not making your first wish
with the gander to save your son,
and now you suddenly have
the memories and powers
of this other version of you
that learned all of these
things from the goose
and also knows that your
companions are out there
knowing the same things you do.
As you are looking at a book
and Henry goes, darling?
Is everything all right?
The book in front of you shows an image
of a group of eight fairies.
And with that, you know that your allies
have arrived back in this world.
Ally, thank you so much.
Would you go ahead, take a second,
and then I'm going to call
everybody back into the dome.
I'd like to go ahead and call
all of our intrepid
heroes back to the table!
- Secrets, secrets, secrets.
Everybody's got secrets.
- Woo!
- You guys heard all that?
- Tell me all your things.
- I k*lled another person.
- Let's just say I'm a duck now.
- What?
- [Zac] No, I'm kidding.
(players laughing)
- Welcome back to the table.
Say hi, intrepid heroes.
- Hi, intrepid heroes.
- And that's our show! Thanks so much.
- As we return now
to the lands of the Neverafter
in various new shapes, wearing new forms,
all of you journeying in a new life
with memories of past selves,
and ones whose endings were
far from happily ever after,
make sure to tune in next
week as our intrepid heroes
of the lands of Neverafter
convene and reform
in a new tale
once upon a more horrifying time.
We return to a new Neverafter.
- My, you've really
blossomed into a young lady.
(Emily softly roars)
- Absolutely haunted.
- Miserable tavern full of
the rough and tumble customers
at the edge of fairy tales.
- Hey, guys!
- Puss in Boots?
- Yeah, it's me.
- Is that you, Gerard?
- Gerard?
- We got to get this correct.
- She felt like she was of shadow.
- Who is your mom?
- Your regular mom?
- Moms are complicated!
- I was a frog
for a long time, and no
one came looking for me.
- My mom is really
beautiful and really nice.
- I blew my mom away.
- Okay, I'm so glad you
said that last word.
(everyone laughs)
- You are like, oh sh*t, that's hard.
- Wow.
- I'm sorry.
- Also, in this version
of the story, I have-
- It sounds already like there's
multiple bad fairies cursing people.
(Brennan gibbering)
(Murph screaming)
(Emily growls)
- [Brennan] This will be
the most obvious thing.
- We got it, we got it.
- What?
- Crazy.
(Brennan caws)
- [Emily] The wolf got taken
away by something bigger.
- In any given moment,
how much of your life are you remembering?
- Is that going to get
more and more diluted
if we potentially keep dying?
- It's really bad for you to keep dying.
(ominous music)
(ominous music continues)
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16x04 - Once Upon a Time
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A tabletop role-playing game show produced by and broadcast on Dropout and created and generally hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan as the show's regular Dungeon Master.
A tabletop role-playing game show produced by and broadcast on Dropout and created and generally hosted by Brennan Lee Mulligan as the show's regular Dungeon Master.