[theme music]
[upbeat music playing]
- In the world of Spyre
did the prophecy foretell
that the dragon Kalvaxus
would rise to power
when once more, were 7 maidens chained,
at the mouth of his cave
what the prophecy could not predict
was what the seven had
in store for the world.
United by prophecy, bound by friendship,
the seven maidens would
quickly become one of Spyre's
premier parties of teen heroes
and all-star students
at the Aguefort Adventuring Academy.
Hello, one and all
and welcome to a thrilling
new season of "Dimension 20"
with a brand new cast of players.
I am your humble dungeon
master Brennan Lee Mulligan
with me for the very first time are our
heroic high schoolers
say hi, heroic high schoolers.
- [Group] Hi, heroic high schoolers!
- Welcome friends to
"Dimension 20: The Seven".
As we return to the world, wait a minute,
the Aguefort Adventuring Academy?
[gasps]
We return to the world of Spyre.
A world of myth and legend
where dragons roam the skies
with a brand new cast of amazing players.
Let's go round the table
and introduce everybody,
Aabria Iyengar.
[group cheering]
- Hello, hi.
- I like this little hype for me.
Hi, I'm Aabria Iyengar
and I'm playing Antiope Jones.
Your ranger danger.
[group cheering]
- [Brennan] Rekha Shankar!
[group cheering]
- I'm Rekha, I'm playing
Katja Cleaver. Neigh neigh.
[group laughing]
- [Brennan] Becca Scott!
[group clapping]
- Hi, stop!
Hi I'm Becca Scott, but
today and for all the days,
I am Penny Luckstone.
- [Brennan] Erika Ishii.
[group cheering]
- What's up everyone, I am Erica Ishii
and I am playing Danielle
Barkstock, you know.
[laughing]
- [Brennan] Hell yeah, Izzy Roland.
[group cheering]
- I'm Izzy Roland and
I'm Ostentatia Wallace
[laughing]
- Bling bing.
[laughing]
- You can't delete.
- Bling bing
- Bling bing, b*tch.
[overlapping chatter]
- That's the bling bing.
- That's a bling bing and-
- [Izzy] Already got it, first line.
- [Brennan] Sephie Valentine.
- I am Sephie Valentine and I am playing
Sam Nightingale.
[cheering]
- [Brennan] Can we all,
can we all, can we all.
[fans flipping]
[laughing]
- I am absolutely crunch to be here.
[laughing]
- g*ng, this is "Dimension 20: The Seven"
as we return to the world of Spyre
to see a group of heroic adventurers.
In the world of Spyre, a
world of myth and legend,
where danger lurks around every corner,
where dread vampires and elder warlocks
stalk the halls of the Necronomicron.
The Mountains of Chaos swarm
with beasts and monsters
and one little country,
and kind of even more simply
one little town in that country,
kind of breaks the mold.
Folks, we are in the nation of Solace
in the town of Elmville ,
where the world's premier
high school for heroes,
the Aguefort Adventuring Academy
houses a group of wonderful
heroic adventurers.
And indeed, we should mention
"Dimension 20: The Seven", the seventh-
also Zelda Donovan,
who will be played by yours truly
[cheering]
- Go, go, go, go!
- [Rekha] Yeah, what's your thing?
- I didn't think of one, it's [muttering]
[group cheering]
- Bling bing, baby.
- Bling bing, b*tch.
- Bling bing
- I totally bling banged.
[laughing]
We are gonna start - not at the beginning.
We're gonna start before the beginning.
Indeed, a year and a half ago,
I invite all of you to imagine
surging mountains of dark red stone,
erupting like the spines of an angry beast
from the very earth itself
[imitates an eruption]
high in the mountains of chaos,
overlooking vast stretches of wasteland.
We see the mouth of an enormous cavern
drenched in shadow,
surrounded by seven peaks
of flat top stone stacked boulders,
and at the top of each stack
of stone, we see a circle
carved into the very stone
itself, Draconic runes.
In the middle of each runic circle
is a maiden, a young woman.
At this very moment coming to
from the depths of torpor and sleep.
I need everybody here to roll
a constitution saving throw
at the beginning of this flashback.
- Sorry, we rolling a d20 guys?
- Yeah
- Cool.
I got four, don't say anything, thank you.
- Amazing.
- 17.
- Amazing, we have a 17 for Danielle.
Did anyone beat a 17?
Did anyone get between a 10 and a 17?
- Yeah.
- Ostentatia what did you get?
- 15.
- [Brennan] 15 for Ostentatia
What did Sam get?
- 12.
- 12 for Sam.
What did Antiope get?
- 7.
- Ooh, 7 for Antiope.
What did, Katja got a four?
- Plus my thing, right?
- Yes, plus Katja's-
- 13, yeah.
- 13, that's right, Katja.
And what did Penny get?
- Also 13.
- Also 13 for Penny.
I'm gonna roll one for
- Come on, Zelda.
- Oh, please Zelda.
[overlapping chatter]
- Sorry!
The wind howls.
[soft music playing]
It is a burning hot wind.
The kind that scorches the
moisture from your skin
and leaves a fine grit of soot
and dust across your face.
All of you are a clad in whatever garb
you were in when either
Aelwyn Abernant or Johnny Spells,
or perhaps even Penelope Everpetal
placed you into the crystal palimpsests
perhaps weeks ago, perhaps months ago,
perhaps for some of us
more than a year ago.
The first person that
begins to wake from torpor
here in slumber is Danielle Barkstock.
Could you please describe
[bright music playing]
your character for us, Erika?
- Danielle Barkstock is a Half-elf,
Asian long and willowy with long hair
that's never been cut.
She's wearing sort of
like a Midsommar style,
like a Scandinavian tunic dress.
But instead of flowers in
her hair and on the dress,
it's all like mushrooms and ferns.
And like the little trendy moss walls,
that you see in bistros.
She is constantly pig-penned
like followed by cloud a little spores
and like a Disney princess,
but for weird little mites and such.
[laughing]
She is just, you know, chillin.
- You come to, just chillin, you see that
each of your legs are free,
each of your wrists are manacled
to long about 20-foot lengths of chain
that go towards the very
edge of the spire you are on.
Sort of like, so in order to get
to where it's staked to the ground,
the other chain goes taut.
So you kind of have these
long wide chains on either side
but you have some range of mobility,
like interpersonally as long as you stay
in the center of that circle.
As you begin to come to,
you look and see again,
these sevens spokes
are centered around this promontory,
this spire of stone.
Almost like these stones here
are either for people to be chained
and witness something
emerging from the cave
onto the Promontory,
or perhaps you're chained in this way
in order to be eaten.
[gasps]
You come to and see a number
of other Aguefort students,
all of whom you recognize
in that way that you recognize people
that you go to high school with,
but none of whom you're
particularly close to.
The only other two kids
in your year that you see are Ostentatia.
You recognize Ostentatia from your year.
But as you are looking around you see
there is actually a freshman
looking student who you
are not familiar with
who is a young satyr
with a green hoodie and a big
emo flop of hair across her face
who is sort of across from
you on another boulder.
- Hey man.
- Hey, um, do you...
Sorry [chuckles]
It's super nice to meet you, I'm Zelda.
- Oh man, I'm Danielle.
Nice to meet you Zelda.
You can call me Yelle,
my friends call me Yelle.
I feel like you could be a friend.
- So I don't know how we got up here,
but yeah, I'm sorry,
that's so awkward to say that first,
I'm your friend.
- Oh, you know, I think
we're up here because
Penelope, you know, was
trying to fulfill a prophecy.
It's supposed to sort of
topple the establishment and
reinstate a new world order
that should be more equitable
than our current patriarchal society.
That's kind of the gist of
what I got from it anyway.
- Wait, you knew about
Penelope's evil plan?
- Oh, I mean, like,
evil's kind of like a relative term, man.
[laughing]
- So why did, wait, so Penelope?
- Oh yeah, you know, it's like
we had all these long talks
late into the night about
how to implement real change.
Real change never happens without outliers
and groups that are willing
to go the extra mile
to shake things up, right.
None of this middle of
the road nonsense, right.
So like things are going real well
when I heard there had
to be sort of sacrifices,
which look, I'm the first one to know
you gotta have sacrifices for the cause
but like, it's just not,
it was kind of harsh vibe man.
So, you know, all the stuff about the evil
that all came out later
and that's not great.
That's not great.
[laughing]
- Sorta fell off the bandwagon there.
- Okay, so it's sort of the chaos
and disruption you were down for
and then they are like-
- Yeah, Yeah, yeah, you got it,
you gotta burn the forest
in order for new growth to happen, right.
- You're awesome.
[laughing]
- [Erika] Yeah, you are
pretty awesome yourself.
- Oh, cool.
Yeah, so you see, as you're having
this sort of heart to
heart where you reveal that
Danielle was briefly
on board when the plan,
Yelle was briefly on board before the plan
took a weird Monarchistic turn.
Yeah, you begin to have sort of visions
of like being trapped in these palimpsests
and a weird thing at the arcade of being
like teleported somewhere
and immediately being teleported
into unconsciousness
back in physical bodies.
And the next person to come
to is Ostentatia Wallace.
Iz, could you please describe
your character for us?
- Ostentatia is...
[laughing]
I'm already laughing.
- Is Jersey mansion trash.
[laughing]
And she is absolutely decked to the nines
in gems and jewels
that she doesn't want anybody to know
she made herself and did not come from
one of the fancy stores at
the international airport.
[laughs]
She's a forge cleric,
she's stocky and stout
and f*cking fabulous.
- Amazing, yes.
Ostentatia is a cleric of the forge god
of the dwarven forge
god Logran Soulforger.
And also, as you've said,
bedecked in jewelry.
You come to the memory of the arcade
of being at your house party,
of Aelwyn Abernant enclosing you in a
gem, crystal palimpsest.
- f*cking b*tch.
[laughs]
- Ostentatia, as you awaken you see
the sort of dire landscape before you
and see that Yelle and Zelda
are both sort of coming to and conscious.
What do you do as you awake?
[gasps]
- f*ck!
[laughing]
I'm gonna f*cking k*ll that b*tch.
- Yeah, and just like
absolute power corrupts
absolute, oh hey Ostentatia.
- Hi!
- You're awake.
How's it going, man?
- Um, bad.
[laughs]
- Yeah.
- What's going on?
- Oh, just a whole,
I'll catch you up later,
prophecy and sacrifice.
Yeah, you doing okay?
There's a lot of our
classmates here, you know,
I guess we should probably
try to figure out a way out of this, huh?
- Yeah.
- [Izzy] Hi.
- Hi, I'm Zelda.
Yelle already said we were friends,
but you don't have to, like,
you don't have to be pressured to like-
- Listen, and as long as
you're not Aelwyn Abernant,
we're f*cking friends.
- Yeah, that is so yeah,
[stutters] she's bad, yeah.
We got put, yeah, put in palimpsests.
I think it's pretty bad-
- A what?
- A crystal, it's stupid.
It's just basically a crystal that
has been scraped of all it's information
and it's not trackable.
And it's used to seal souls
and people inside of them.
- That b*tch can't afford my crystals.
[laughing]
I'll tell them.
- As Ostentatia communicates
that to everybody,
this rage at Aelwyn Abernant,
Katja Cleaver, you begin to come to.
Could you please describe
your character for us?
- Yes, Katja is a half orc battle master.
It doesn't really matter
when you wanna capture her,
she's wearing her horse riding clothes.
[laughing]
So she's got, you know, the
riding pants, the riding boots.
Some sort of oversize nondescript
T-shirt to hide herself.
A little riding helmet,
long, curly, black frizzy braid.
She's Asian too, let's go, South Asian.
[clapping]
- AAPI.
- Happy AAPI month.
[laughs]
Someone is Asian.
[laughs]
Most people are.
And yeah, so that is what she looks like.
When she comes to,
it's with a ferocity
because she is half orc.
But you're a little surprised
'cause what she says is
Cinnamon!
[laughing]
- Someone's having a good dream.
- No, where's my horse, Cinnamon?
- Oh babe, sorry, you're,
long story but we are about to be
virgin sacrifices and stuff.
So whoever this Cinnamon
is, not here, sorry.
- Cinnamon is my horse,
if Cinnamon dies, I die.
- Go ahead, anyone who's awake right now
and make an insight check for me.
- It's 6 plus 13.
- 19.
- 19.
- I had, yeah,
- No, that's not true.
- 6 plus 13?
- 6 plus 13?
- Is 19.
[laughing]
- [Rekha] 17.
- One 17 and 19.
- So Katja says if Cinnamon dies, I die
and both you are powerful
divine spell casters
who know that there are things like,
oh, maybe there's like a soul
bond or something like that.
You kind of get the vibe that
maybe this is not true in a literal sense,
but also maybe it is
true in a literal sense
in just a non-magical way
that Katja might die of grief on the spot
should anything ever happen to Cinnamon.
- Oh, honey, you're-
- Locked in a cave with a horse girl,
that's amazing.
[laughs]
- Thank you.
- It's okay, like, we'll, we'll.
Get out of this little pickle
and then we're gonna
go pick up your horsey.
- You can't pick up Cinnamon,
she's too massive.
[laughs]
- Oh.
- She's the strongest woman I've ever met.
And she's my best friend,
Penelope said she'd be my best friend.
And that's why I'm here,
but it's okay you can have a
best friend that's a horse.
It's okay.
You know, sometimes you
find problems with humans,
but I find no problem with a horse.
- So everyone knows we're all virgins?
- Well, yeah.
- Yeah, that's sort of what they...
There was something with Johnny Spells
and he was working with like
Penelope Everpetal and
some other people, like,
it's not, it's bad.
So we are sort of maybe
gonna get eaten or something.
And then also like people, yeah
people know that we're virgins, yeah.
- Wait, we're gonna get eaten?
- Because we don't have hymens,
[laughs]
- Oh, wait because we do?
- We have extra hymen.
- Myth, myth!
- No, I don't, I think-
- [Izzy] It taste better?
- My hymen's always breaking.
- I don't know how the magic
I don't if the magic counts
like hand stuff or mouth stuff,
I think these like ancient spells
are kind of just gross,
if I'm being honest,
like what counts for where and what.
- Yeah, I know why should my identity
and you know, my label on
how I'm considered change
just because I've had, I don't even know,
is it like penetrative stuff or like?
- Right, like lots of sex is not-
- [Erika] What counts,
like emotional stuff?
- [Izzy] It's like popping the cherry.
- In the midst of this conversation,
Penny Luckstone, you awaken to hear this.
- [Erika] Because like popping
the cherry is like totally-
- I told them I was a virgin,
all right 'cause I don't care.
- And if you know, like you're
riding a horse constantly.
There is a good chance
that your hymen is broken.
- I'm bleeding three weeks-
- I love it here!
[laughs]
- Becca, please describe
your character for us.
- Okay, I'm Penny Luckstone.
Penny is three feet tall.
She's a halfling, a
lightfoot halfling, a rogue.
She is pressed as much as she can be.
I think she's been
trapped here the longest,
but like everything originally
looked like it was very well ironed
and she's trying really
hard not to get it smudged.
She's a little type A and yeah,
I asked for my chains to be tightened.
'Cause I didn't like the
slack, it was too loose.
[laughs]
- Hi.
- Hi, I'm Penny.
I'm Penny.
- [Erika] Hey!
- I've see you all around,
but I'm very like small.
And if someone's standing in
front of me, you can't see me.
So maybe you haven't seen me,
but I've seen all of you.
- Oh man, no, I definitely
like clocked you around.
Just because something's small
doesn't mean it's not
noticeable and worthy of note.
I'm Danielle, you can call me Yelle.
- Okay, that would be great.
And I will and if I had a hand,
I would write this in my notebook.
- [Erika] Sweet.
- I'm Katja, my horse is Cinnamon
and we don't know where she is.
- I'm so sorry.
- I know.
- How are you dealing with that?
- It's very bad for me.
- I get that.
- I feel horrible.
- I'm here for you.
- Thank you.
- Can use I locate locate animal.
- You know what?
Go ahead and give me a
sleight of hand check DC 15.
[laughing]
- I believe in you.
- I feel like she needs disadvantage.
- Sleight of hand in chains.
- 12.
- 12.
You go to do the like sematic
components of the spell
and the fact that your arms are like
lengthened apart from each other,
prevents you from being able to do that.
As you attempt to cast the spell,
you see Zelda looks over
at you Penny and goes,
I think the guy, it's this guy Gorgug-
- You're doing great, keep talking.
And it's gonna come out when it needs to.
- Wow, you're so nice.
- No! ...yes.
[laughing]
- That's what she said.
- You see, anyway, he's
friends with this kid.
I think, you know, Riz Gukgak,
who was like looking for you, I could just
almost like hear you talking
to him in the crystal,
at the back arcade thing or whatever.
They, I think that they're like,
they were trying to like get us, I think.
So people know that we're like gone.
As as Zelda says that,
Sam you awaken on your pillar of stone.
- As soon as Sam's eyes open,
she starts slamming against the chains,
[bright upbeat music playing]
trying to break them,
droplets of water just
like splashing all over
as she's like trying desperately.
Desperately to get the f*ck out of here.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa.
- My extensions!
- Scary noises.
- Oh, my God.
[overlapping talking]
- Let it out.
- Sam, just wrapped in
emotion and rage and betrayal.
Could you please describe
your character to us?
- Sam Nightingale is a water Genasi
and like at some point
everything she was wearing
was very well pressed,
ironed and clearly designer.
She wears like a matching
blue blazer and skirt set
with a white vest and a white beret.
Has long curly hair
that goes from like
green to blue to white,
like an ocean wave.
Otherworldly beautiful.
But just rip sh*t.
Absolutely f*cking rip sh*t.
[laughing]
- What is rip sh*t?
[all laughing]
- Like ripped
- Ripped?
- But like even more so,
'cause sh*t on the end.
- Oh, super, super ripped.
- Yeah,
- Okay.
- Ripped, ripped.
- Rip sh*t level.
- Strongly as that the
rattling of the chains,
you remember the moment of, you know,
meeting up with Johnny and
Penelope talking to you and you remember
a look in Penelope Everpetal's eyes
that you couldn't clock in the moment.
And now know that Penelope let you,
not only maybe let you
walk into this fate,
but wished for you to.
- I hate everything about this.
I didn't know who any of you are.
I don't wanna be here.
And I want to f*cking m*rder my ex.
- Hey, it's okay.
- Me too.
- No, it's not.
- Yeah, well, like we are here together.
- Okay, well, hey, first of all,
the feelings are valid, okay.
You have every right to-
- Of course my feelings are f*cking valid
I was trapped in a f*cking crystal.
- Man, I've been there.
- Whoa, yeah.
- I've been there too.
- Me too.
- See, been there, done
that bought the T-shirt.
- I'm Danielle, this is Ostentatia,
and Penny and Katja and,
I don't now if I know her but, you know-
- We're doing introductions right now?
- Oh yeah, I mean-
- Well, we're gonna, I think-
- We're gonna be here a really long time
it's like a slumber party
where we're all chained.
- I think we'll get out pretty soon.
- I've heard of those before, I think.
- Hell, yeah, so fun.
But that aside
we're gonna all get out
of this together, okay.
- Okay.
- You look at me, you're gonna be okay.
- Yeah, I'm Sam.
- Hello.
- Nice to meet you, Sam.
- We know.
- Okay.
- Oh yeah, you're like really popular.
We know who you are.
- Right, that is, was
really mostly Penny's deal
but- Penelope's, rather.
- It's okay, she can have the nickname.
[all laughing]
It was just my given name.
- On the seventh spire of stone,
Antiope Jones awakens.
Aabria, could you please
describe your character for us?
- Before you actually see her stir,
there is just a little
puddle that spreads out
on the stone as she wakes up.
Antiope is black, dark
skin, angular features.
She's wearing like black athleisure
but it's all like too short at the elbows
and like ankles 'cause she went through
her big growth spurt while in the crystal.
- No.
- Oh, no.
- Soon as she wakes up,
I had to pee before we started,
[gasps]
- You pissed yourself?
- Why are we looking at her,
no one look at her, it's fine.
- Hi Antiope, it's Katja.
I don't care that you pissed yourself.
- Can I cast prestidigitation
and make it disappear.
- Give me a sleight of hand check.
- Okay.
- Man, it's okay when you
gotta go you gotta go,
nature calls man.
- That's a-
- f*ck!
- Oh, God, math, 13.
- Oh, 18?
- 13.
- Oh, 13, you go and there is a,
with a 13 prestidigitation
little [whoosh] comes over.
Your clothing basically
moves all of the accident
to the stone and off of the clothes.
Which is an improvement.
- We are good, I'll just scooch back,
- Thank you.
- You're welcome.
- I wild shape into like, can I do that?
- You look at that and you're like,
it's time to take care of business.
As you were about to do that, you see
[whooshing]
concentric rings of sulfurous
golden glowing smoke
emanate not only from the
cavern to your stones,
but towards the edge of the horizon.
Each of you
[eruption]
erupts in a beam of golden
light as the stones alight
and hear an infernal
[growl]
- I've also pissed myself.
[all laughing]
- I've also pissed myself.
- Just scooch back.
- [Izzy] In solidarity.
- Oh, I pissed myself too.
[all laughing]
- Wait, a lot, nat one.
- We pissed a little bit.
- The palimpsests have been
sustaining you biologically,
but you are the age
that you would have been
if you'd been aging in the world.
So it wasn't like suspended
temporal animation.
In other words,
you've been going through
biological time in the palimpsest
For some of you like a year and a half
of like not showering,
I think Penny's stuff,
you starch your sh*t so much
that your clothing is still crisp
[all laughing]
- I knew this would pay off someday.
- But there is a moment of recognizing
the passage of time.
For Ostentatia, you've only been here,
you've lost a few months.
Maybe like about three months.
Zelda, even less time than that.
But for Katja, for Antiope, for Danielle,
for Penny, you've lost more than a year
of your life in this crystal.
- Katja, you look old as sh*t.
- Oh, my God, really.
I have cellulite, cool.
[laughing]
I probably look so old
'cause I honestly, in
the last five minutes.
I don't know, have you seen Cinnamon?
- What, no.
I've been in a, no, I haven't.
- You're right, I forgot,
you've been in a crystal.
Okay, get out of my face, okay.
- Go find her.
- Emerging from the cavern are a few,
they don't look Solesian.
They look like they're from the Red Waste.
But you see some sort of
muscular looking humans
wearing like red dragon,
like red dragon scale, partial mail.
These looks like servants of some
Draconic power emerge
from the cavern and go,
It has occurred,
the prophecy has come to pass.
[laughing manically]
- Who the f*ck are you?
- These guys are really nice.
- Eww.
- Taking the two short spears,
we are servants of the
Emperor of The Red Waste
Kalvaxus, long may he reign
in eternal wealth and prosperity
and drop to one knee.
- Kalvaxus?
- Do we know their names?
- These look like the people that came
and bound you up here in this place.
Unless you overheard it in your sleep,
you can go and make a perception check
see if you maybe overheard
one of their names.
- You definitely don't know.
- [Brennan] Cool.
- 21.
- No way.
- The name Mordreth comes to you?
- Which the one f*ck of you is Mordreth?
- I am Mordreth,
servant of the Emperor of
the Red Waste, Kalvaxus,
the prophecy has come to pass,
a king and queen are
crowned anew in Solace
and seven maidens are chained
at the mouth of his lair.
- I'm so happy for you Mordy,
living you truest self.
- Stop!
- Thank you.
- Stop it.
- I don't like that you
trapped us here though.
- You're voluntarily
calling yourself a servant?
- It is an honor to serve
he who may eat me in a single bite,
I hope he does.
- You will need to get a personality babe.
[all laughing]
- Maybe keep your kinks to yourself.
- Yeah, no, I didn't say
that I wanted to hear
your weird freak stuff.
- No, I'm not a,
anyone would be lucky.
- Mordy, are you a freak?
- What?
- Are you a freak, Mordy?
- Gladly, if Kalvaxus wish
me to be then that I am.
- Whoa, if Kalvaxus jumped off a bridge,
would you jump off a bridge too?
- Exactly.
- Yeah.
- Prove it, right now.
- How close is this man
to the edge of the cliff?
- They are pretty close.
I wanna resolve this
'cause I wanna resolve whatever this is.
I also wanna resolve you
wanting to wild shape.
- Yeah.
- So, what does Yelle do in this moment?
- Oh, she's like, oh, that's right.
And she like, poofs into
let's say a t*rd.
[all laughing]
- A t*rd!
You go so, a little
like microscopic thing.
Here's the thing-
- A sea bear!
- A little water bear,
a little water bear.
Now, here's the thing,
you can only go to I think size tiny,
but I'm gonna say an enormous water bear.
So like a corgi sized water bear.
I also think, again,
like Yelle is very much in tune
with parts of the natural world
that are less glamorous.
So you're wild, the
poof of your wild shape
is all of your normal half-elf flesh,
goes fungal in this really perfumed,
fragrant rot smell like a
floral rot as your skin-
It looks like you're dying.
You're just and your body
sloughs off into a sludge.
And there's a t*rd
with no wrists to manacle,
you're out of the manacles.
- Cool.
- You see Mordreth goes, sh*t!
[all laughing]
- Can I?
- Oh yeah, so that's your action.
And I wanna let Sam get an
action in as well, you're out.
- Sam is a little done with
anyone involved with this
and I want to cast tidal wave
from the inside of the cave
and just push them all off the edge.
- [gasps] Oh my God, okay.
Does hideaway have any somatic component?
You have to use your hands for it.
- Let's see,
- [Brennan] If it lists
those there, let me know.
- It doesn't say anything,
Oh, wait, verbals, somantic and-
- Okay, so just give me
a sleight of hand check
to get that spell off.
- Come on.
Okay, that is a 23.
- Woah, incredibly dexterous.
I'm going to say on a 23,
you full pull one of
your wrists out of the...
Wait, you also have w*r caster too, right?
- Yes I do.
- So you bam!, both of
your wrists are out.
You cast hideaway.
- No, a tidal wave.
- Tidal wave.
I was like hideaway?
You cast tidal wave.
They make a saving
throw for that, correct?
- I believe so, it is dexterity.
- Dexterity, here we go.
- That'd be 16.
- Incredible!
They both fail that save.
- Okay.
- Sam, so you go full water bear,
and Sam, you bust out of your
pure like Fantasia, a like spiraling helix
of beautiful glowing saltwater,
like ocean water and foam
goes around the top of the stone
and from the cavern
water just blasts these dudes
and the water comes up so high.
It's like inches away
from the level of stone
that you're on and goes out in a torrent.
Both of these dudes are
blasted into open air
off the mountain side.
- I wanna leave.
- Can I cast-
- I also want that for you.
- Animate objects and just
release everybody else?
- Yes, go ahead.
Give me either a slight of hand
or if you want to use another
skill to break out of it
although actually, as a water bear.
'Cause you're fully free from everything.
- Yeah, yeah, so I go
and then I re-manifest
and just sort of like
start unlocking everybody-
- [Brennan] You unlock-
- I wanted to do something
f*cking cool too but-
[all laughing]
- [Brennan] So you unlock
Ostentatia, and Ostentatia-
- Yeah, Ostentatia doesn't
let you do the rest.
- Yeah.
- She was like-
- Yeah.
- You, which you actually
can do, summon your hammer,
your family hammer to your hand.
As you animate these objects,
what does the spell look
like as your casting it?
- Is that called the Fammer?
- Fammer, family hammer, exactly.
What does it look like as Ostentatia
asks these chains to awaken?
- She just sort of closes
her eyes for a moment.
And all of the links of the chains
just sort of go like, pee
pooh pee pooh pee pooh.
[all laughing]
- And little googly,
it looks like gem eyes open.
Oh, you see that, all of
the links for a moment,
glow a little bit red
with the fire of their forging, just
[imitates fire blazing].
- Ow!
- f*ck!
- It's not that f*cking hot.
[all laughing]
- Get them water.
- [Becca] Impressive though, wow.
- You are all freed,
you were on the top of
this massive mountain,
but with that tidal wave, I will say
some of the Promontory is
covered in some bits of like
metal and some other trappings.
It looks like some like treasure
chests had been emptied.
And you see from inside the cave,
some glittering and
looks like there might be
some other objects within there.
- Sorry.
- [Brennan] What would you.
- I was gonna say,
I think Katja is full Cinnamon horse mode
where the f*ck is my horse?
- I use locate plant and animal.
- You cast locate
and that might have a
range limit normally,
but because Cinnamon is a magical horse.
Danielle, you put your
hand on Katja's shoulder
[bright serene music playing]
and you get a vision Katja of Cinnamon.
- Oh beautiful.
[all laughing]
- Your beautiful Palomino
like deep auburn rust fur
and a shimmering like platinum gold mane,
just galloping supernaturally fast.
- This is my favorite movie.
[all laughing]
- Down the shoulder of a highway.
Just screaming, Katja,
my mistress I am coming with all haste.
I shall find you!
- You are my best friend. [laughs]
I just saw the most beautiful thing
I've ever seen in my life.
It's my horse, being normal.
- Oh, man!
- And coming for me.
- That's good, that's good.
It's all Gucci, baby.
- Thank you.
- This is Gucci too.
[all laughing]
- Oh, wow, that's incredible.
- Are you sure?
- Yeah.
- Hold on, whait is this f*ck- no.
There is sh*t in there, and there's,
let's go get this stuff.
- I love stuff.
- Oh, yeah.
- Maybe food for Cinnamon.
- Looking at this Promontory
and looking at the fact that there's like,
it seems that there's really no,
you obviously many of you can fly
and teleport do other stuff like that.
So like getting down from the
mountain is a possibility,
but it's also not a thing
that you're gonna be able to do quickly.
So there's a moment of like,
we can go investigate the cave,
we're just like way in
the mountains right now.
As you enter the cave,
everyone here go ahead and make
an investigation check for me.
[light music playing]
- That one's not good.
- 5
- 13.
- 23.
- 23, amazing.
[gasps]
- 23
- 23.
[laughing]
- You guys go into the cave
and see that this is first
of all, it is enormous,
a creature the size of a gymnasium
could move through this space.
So even the openings are the
size of cathedrals, right?
And within it, a stunning
amount of treasure
has been removed from here.
A lot of the objects that are left
are almost like containers,
like chests, like armor stands.
It looks like a lot of things
of lesser value have been left here
in what was at one point, a Dragon's cave.
Antiope, as you move through the space,
you begin to get like dragons scent.
- I f*cking hate dragons.
f*ck this b*tch.
We're gonna find him.
This has awakened something in me.
And I just kick the
closest thing next to me.
- Bang! just like a helmet,
ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, flies off.
You begin to move through.
So I know that we have two 23s,
did anyone else beat a 15?
- Nope,
- No, no worries.
- So everyone's just looking around,
I think for Katja and Antiope,
you are both sort of looking around
and scouting for any
more soldiers or servants
that might be here.
Ostentatia, you're looking
at a lot of the gear here.
You can immediately tell right away
just from being a forge cleric,
nothing of value that would
constitute it being treasure
has been left here, right.
And Yelle, you're looking
around and just seeing
basically like a lot of the natural
sort of like, oh,
something big and draconic
was living here for a long time.
Mountains of chaos tend
to have a lot of parts
of their ecosystem that exists
outside of the natural order.
There are a lot of things like dragons
or abominations or monstrosities here
that tend to come from arcane
or other planar places rather than
what is considered the natural world.
Penny and Sam, I would love to know
what you are looking for in
the cavern here, if anything?
Is there a bent, are you
together, are you separate?
And is there like a focus
of your investigation?
- Yes, definitely.
Okay, we're definitely separate because
I would like to find something
that I can fashion into a bracelet
for each of my new friends.
- Amazing.
- So they know that I will remember us
being chained here together forever.
- I think we all wanna remember.
[all laughing]
- Yeah.
- Silver lining so f*cking fast.
- And..
- I am looking for anything
that can tell us what the hell is going on
and what we can do to m*rder
whatever is coming from it.
- Incredible, there are a
lot of other small chambers.
For a moment I think, Penny and Sam,
you guys are looking together
and you move into this space where
the chambers start to
get a little bit smaller.
Now, a lot of true dragons
in this world have magic
or the ability to change
into humanoid sized things.
But this cavern doesn't really look
like the dragon who lived here
liked doing that very much.
But you do find a small entrance
that again is humanoid sized,
which is immediately sort of interesting.
A small stone staircase
ascends to a landing
that then branches into three other short
staircases that go to other rooms.
In one of those larger chambers
up those staircases.
Penny, you find a number of
shattered pieces of mirror.
- Huh.
Does it look like you could
string anything through it?
- It looks like you could probably
fashion something through them.
And also by the way, you could,
you've seen Ostentatia do
some forging magic already.
Like these pieces of mirror
are really, really beautiful.
You could absolutely.
You could shape them with magic
or you could do a sleight of hand check
or thieves tools check to shape them
and set them into a bracelet.
- I'm really good at making jewelry.
- Making jewelry?
I thought you bought all of it?
- I'm not.
My jewelry's really ugly,
but I do make a lot of it.
Okay, yeah, I wanna-
- It sort of depends on
what you're into, I guess.
- Oh, yeah, give me a
little thieves tools check.
- Okay!
- How do I do that?
- Dex plus proficiency.
- Oh, oh, [whispering].
- Wow.
- These are gorgeous.
- These friendship bracelets,
I'm gonna say there's like a little pieces
of like halfling yarn that are like
very summer camp friendship bracelet
with a little mirror set into it.
And you just sit there,
twining them together.
You find the room with
the most mirror shards.
There's one to the right
that doesn't have as many mirror shards.
And there's two others
that kind of have more.
Sam, you walk up this staircase
as you see Penny on like the main landing,
making these friendship bracelets.
- Yeah, there's a lot of humming involved.
Like I plopped down,
it's so low to the ground. And then,
[humming]
- Penny, was it, hello?
- That's right.
- We need to get out of
here or we're gonna die.
- I don't think so.
All of you are really powerful
and I feel really safe around you.
- Okay, maybe,
I just grab Penny and just start dragging.
- Hold on, hold on-
- You start, yes-
- Okay, I don't get up.
- With that 23 investigation check,
you see something over your shoulder
as Penny pulls back to gather up her work.
[serene music]
In the room to the right,
there's fewer mirror shards.
You hear something for a moment.
- What was that?
- It sounds like a
whisper or the kind of...
It's not a sob, it's more
like the intake of breath
as one is trying to soothe themselves
after crying for a moment.
And it sounds echo-y, far away.
Like it's not even in that
room, but past that room.
- I immediately just keep dragging Penny
and I'm going gunning for it.
- Down the stairs or up
the stairs into the room?
- Up the stairs into the room.
- You grab Penny, move inside
and you have a little
magical mirror of yourself.
In this room,
there are some mirror
shards on the floor but
there is one mirror still standing.
And when I say standing, I mean,
set into the jagged unworked stone.
The floor and steps are all masonry,
they're solid blocks but
the walls and ceiling
are still jagged and cavernous
and set into the natural
forming of the stone
taking a strange geological shape,
almost like water forming into a puddle
and taking the form of
whatever cavity it is in.
There is a dark glass mirror,
not a modern mirror,
not something really chrome and reflective
something much older, a dark glass.
And you see that it sort of swirls and
these did not exist
in the other rooms you went into, Penny
and this is something that is still here,
still whole, in other words.
[imitates whooshing]
Moving.
- When we stand in front
of it, do we see anything?
- Do you wanna see something?
- Woah, okay, what?
[all laughing]
- Yeah, Penny is thinking about
all 19 of her siblings and her parents
and they haven't seen her in over a year.
So they're probably worried.
So that's what's on her
mind as she looks in.
- You think of siblings
[serene music]
and you look through the mist and smoke.
You see a woman who to you
would seem older, an adult,
but a young woman on her knees
holding onto her face in that very like
not just hunched over,
squatting on her butt,
but like fully on her shins,
like elbows on the ground,
long gray and black hair
trailing off into mist,
who appears to be hiding in the mirror.
And you see a young woman
trapped behind crystal and glass.
As you think of your siblings,
you hear that whispered voice again go,
and a face looks up
and you see a tear
streaked face, pale gray
look up a little bit of like
blood red color on her lips,
but sort of black brows.
Anima, is that you?
- Who?
- Hi, cutie pie,
- As you say cutie pie, you see
the voice of the woman in the mirror goes,
I'm still here.
Are you all still there?
I haven't heard from you in a long time.
- Who are you?
- I am...
Who's this asking me
and what may I call you?
I don't want to give you my name.
- Should we give our names?
- Probably not.
- My name is Kelly.
- My name's Cecilia.
- Kelly and Cecilia,
I will guard your names.
I will not, I will not misuse them.
Where, where do you now stand?
I can hear your voices,
but cannot see you.
- Oh, well we look really cute.
Especially Sam, her outfits really nice.
- We're not dirty at all.
- And we did not pee ourselves.
- And we definitely don't smell.
[chuckles]
- You see she looks out and says,
do you see my sisters anywhere out there?
Do you see any other shapes?
They might look like crystal or glass,
something of that nature.
Do you see any others like me?
- How many spaces are
there around the walls?
- There's another one in here,
but there were those other
rooms as well that you remember
where all the mirrors were shattered.
[gasps]
- Wanna bet they were seven?
- Do you wanna,
do we tell her?
- I think she'd wanna know.
- Hey, do you know what happens
if your mirror were to shatter,
totally unrelated to our
previous conversation?
- My mirror, this is far from my mirror.
I would not have it, I would not have it
for all of the stars in the sky
or all the long years of
the turning of the world,
I would not have it.
And you hear a boom!
And you see that the mirrors
glass thumps outward.
You get a feeling that
she is trapped in here.
- I pull out my mirror,
my mirror of the past,
and I am going to think about this woman
whose name I do not know
and look into it, it's a compact.
- [Brennan] Yeah.
- Cute.
- And see what it can
tell me about this person.
[suspenseful music playing]
- You look into your mirror of the past,
the mirror begins to shake in your hand.
Give me an intelligence saving throw.
- That's an 18.
- You hold on to your mind.
When you have looked into the past before,
you sometimes get like a couple of years,
you get like, oh, this person had a rough,
you know, high school experience.
Countless eons and the turning
of the world move past you.
Histories of stars and planets
that cannot exist anymore.
You see this person
whose name she has not given,
but you know her name.
Her name is the Ending of Things.
And she wishes to be free.
- I haven't felt this
bad since math class.
[all laughing]
- Okay, so..
- Should we let her free or,
- Please Kelly, Cecilia.
[all laughing]
Listen to me,
I hear silence and I know that you ponder.
It will be very difficult
for me to escape this mirror
long it has kept me here,
but great power can I
place into your hands
if you should let me free.
All I ask is for your help in this matter.
My sisters need my aid
and I would bring it to them.
- Who are your sisters though?
- The most beautiful and noble
beings that have ever existed
- Do they go to Aguefort?
[laughing]
- Sounds like a Hudol thing.
- You see, she smiles and
looks and she gets up,
takes a step towards you.
And the mist begins to
part and she says Aguefort.
- Oh, no.
- [Brennan] Aguefort Adventuring Academy
- Oh, you've heard of it?
- And you see that she looks
and makes eye contact with you and says-
- No!
- Everyone from below, shut up!
- I'm gonna actually say,
maidens pour into the room.
So you all appear like-
- You guys, this girl's
heard of our school.
- Yes, now all, even from the entry,
see a figure materializing
closer towards the surface of the mirror
from the other side.
Those of you in the doorway so
Katja, Zelda, Antiope,
Yelle and Ostantatia
it's almost like you see it at a diagonal
and you can see that this
thing is not humanoid.
There's just something about it.
Like catching the face at a
diagonal through the mirror.
You see it like extending into smoke
and fractalling backwards into something
far greater than a mortal being.
However, for Penny and Sam,
you both see what looks again like this
beautiful hair flowing down
almost like becoming of a
substance with her gown.
This sort shimmering ethereal black gown.
The only piece of color, again,
just this red on her lips that
if you look, maybe it looks
a little bit like blood.
- Question, is the reason that
when we're in the door
where we feel like this isn't a humanoid,
is it our distance from the mirror?
And it's like, we just can't tell
or is it something where
this mirror shows you something different?
- It's almost more like, to
be honest, like an angle.
In other words, like
the thing in the mirror
has only observed Penny and Sam right now.
- I see.
- And so you're catching something-
- That hasn't seen me
- Yes, so you all rush into
the doorway, you see this.
Sam and Penny, you see again,
that the woman looks and says,
Aguefort, I can tell you
that my sisters are there.
My sisters are there.
- What the hell is that?
- Oh, this is our new friend,
we didn't catch her name.
- Oh, we know the name.
- When I yell that,
can I hunter sense it?
- Yes, you can.
Hunter's sense doesn't
have a saving throw or
anything like that, right?
- No, I just wanna know like
vulnerabilities, resistances.
- Give me a strength saving throw.
- Oh, sh*t, cool, cool, cool.
- Oh no.
- Yeah, three, it's a three.
I got it.
[laughing]
- Oh, no.
- No, no, no, sorry, I lied, it's a seven.
- Antiope you go and...
All of you in the doorway see Antiope
immediately spring to your defense.
And this level of just
quickness of thought,
intensity of purpose.
[upbeat music]
You see Antiope's heroism in this moment,
Penny and Sammy, you see,
[gasps]
this is an invisible spell,
except for when it becomes visible
as the woman in the mirror grabs the magic
and yanks Antiope
you go skid on your back
and go up I'm gonna need
Penny and Sam are the
only people in between it.
The magical tether
anchoring you to your target
is being used to drag you into the mirror.
- Holy crap.
- Thorn whip.
- No, no, no.
- Lightning lure.
- Lightning lure and thorn whip, okay.
[chuckles]
Are you casting this on Antiope
or are you casting it on-
- A point on the ground
'cause thorn whip up or whip up and grab.
- Incredible, these spells do,
if I'm not mistaken deal damage.
- They do...it's an
instantaneous reaction.
- Amazing, I'm gonna need each of you-
- Oh wait, wait, wait, wait.
- Yeah, yeah, go for it.
- Can I counter spell instead?
- Amazing, go ahead and,
yes, I will actually allow
a little ex post facto counter spell here.
So what does hunter's
sense allow you to do?
- I want to know the
creatures damage, immunities,
resistances, and vulnerabilities.
And if they're hidden from
divination magic or not.
- So immunities,
resistances, vulnerabilities.
- [Aabria] Yeah.
- Gotcha.
- Can I k*ll it is what
I would like to know.
- What you immediately
sense is that this thing is
purely immune to all
forms of necrotic damage,
has resistances to
almost every form of elemental damage,
complete immunity to non-magical weapons.
This thing is stacked with
immunities and resistances.
You skid across the floor.
We are counter spelling.
Go ahead and give me the ability check
associated with counter spells.
- Ugh, that's not good.
That is a nine.
- That is a nine.
So you go to counter,
do not break the spell that is being cast
by the being in the mirror.
And I'm actually going to need
a strength saving throw from you as well.
- Oh, God!
- Of course, this is a great score for me.
That's a 13.
- So, you go to counter this spell and
she's got another rope in the mirror
pulls, I am going to go-
I'm just gonna say it for
people that haven't acted yet.
So we have a thorn whip
that's gonna resolve here.
You're thorn whipping at Antiope
to like pull her back?
- Yeah, well, if I see Sam go,
I'm gonna do something else.
- Okay, you see Sam go as well.
- Okay, I do erupting earth on the mirror.
- Oh no.
- [Brennan] Danielle.
- No, no, don't let her out.
- Don't let her out!
[mirror shatters]
- The mirror shatters.
Sam and Antiope are saved.
[gasps]
- And then where does that person go?
- I think we are about to find out.
- Hey, you guys, I made
you friendship bracelets.
- Oh, cute!
- Amazing.
- They might have a piece of an evil
demon creature in it.
I'm not sure I didn't check these ones.
- Well, this is very sweet
but we might just let loose
the ending of all things.
- Oh, sh*t, man.
- The ending of things,
that's what it's called.
- Her name is the ending of things?
- I don't know if it's a name
or just what she is.
- A very post-modern name, you know.
The ending of things.
- [Becca] That's pretty cool.
- You hear from the
mouth of the cave, hello?
- Hello!
- Hello?
- Hi!
- Wait, no, no, no, don't answer.
- Maybe don't be your
names for like two seconds.
- Oh, yeah.
- You see Zelda looks up and says,
I actually think I recognize that voice.
I think that's Gorgug's friend's mom.
- Is she evil?
- No, she's just a lady.
- They're cool.
- In my experience,
moms can be very evil.
- Hi, if anyone's in there.
This is Sandra Lynn Faeth,
I'm Solesian ranger,
I'm here to rescue you.
Anyone's who's-
- Oh, is this Fig's mom?
- Yes, my daughter is
Fig, yes, absolutely.
- Oh, Fig is she in like the
somatic components class
in like third period?
- We can have this,
I don't know where in the cavern you are.
So if anyone wants to come-
- Upstairs,
- Why is your daughter a fruit?
- Well, her name is
Figueroth, but okay, everyone!
You see that this woman walks in,
who's got kind of like very
crocodile hunter style,
ranger clothes, khaki shorts.
The little tan button ups
with the sleeves rolled up shirt,
big hiking, boots, bow over her back.
She says, oh my God, you all made it.
I'm Sandra Lynn,
there is something very bad happening
back in Elmville right now
at the adventuring academy.
You all were chained up?
You got out?
- Yeah, but we-
- Some of us liked it.
- Did you like...
I wanna put a pin in that.
- Wow, someone's mom
is coming to rescue us.
- Listen, the world is
very much about to end.
So we gotta, there's
an apocalypse to avert.
- As we follow like,
Sandra Lynn, just a question,
were you like in the neighborhood
or did you come all the way here for us?
- Oh, my daughter told me that
you all were captured and
I knew that there was a
lair of Kalvaxus's
nearby in the mountains.
So I came to get you as soon as I heard.
- I don't even know Fig
and she wanted to save me?
- That's so nice.
- It's really nice.
- [Brennan] Yeah, yeah.
- While they're talking about that,
I look at the mirror
and what just happened
and if there's any remnants
of anything in there.
- There was that weird exhalation of wind.
But I think that,
oh, actually, you know what,
anyone who wants to can give me an insight
or an Arcana check if you'd like.
- 22
- What's nine plus 13.
- 13, 9 plus 13 is 22.
[laughing]
- [Sephie] That's a 14.
- Did anybody here beat a 20?
- [Izzy] Yeah.
- [Sephie] Probably.
- Cool, so this is, oh yeah.
- So 26.
- What do we got here, 22, 26?
- 22.
- [Brennan] 22.
- 24
- 24.
And what were our skills
are we're using insight here or?
- Insight.
- Insight, insight, insight.
- Arcana.
- Arcana.
I will say this, so Ostantatia and Yelle
as you're walking out of there
you look at the shattered
mirror on the ground
and can tell that in its own way,
much more ancient and much more powerful
palimpsest has been shattered.
This mirror that was broken here
was holding something here
from a long, long time ago.
And Yelle, you feel,
you got 26, right?
You don't get a bad feeling, necessarily.
You get a feeling like
something is in play.
Something is in the world,
something is moving.
- Could I try and cast mending
on this friendship bracelet
and try to like put the
mirror back together?
- Yeah!
- It's still all attached
so we get dragged-
[laughing]
- You cast a mending spell on the mirror.
And as you do, you guys
feel a powerful magic
connect all of you.
I wanna go into these checks real quick,
but we're gonna talk
about this in a moment.
- She is crying.
- I felt you connect us
and it was really nice.
- You did that on purpose.
- For your checks - Arcana,
you know with that Arcana check
and you got a 22?
Penny, you feel in this space
that Antiope and Sam very much
just had their lives saved.
You can see that
A] something terrible would have happened
if they had gone through that mirror,
like Yelle needed to do that
or they were very much going to go
to whatever the other
side of that mirror was.
And number two, Antiope and Sam,
you just...
There's something about the two of them
as they walk out of there,
the mirror shards shake a little bit more
as they move away.
Antiope you got a
- 24
- 24 insight.
Where are you pointing your
insight to in this moment?
- Just trying to figure
out what that creature was,
what the tether was.
And it's almost a little
bit reflexively inside too.
'Cause I think that's the first
time that she's done that.
So she was like, what is this and why,
how are you, what is happening?
- You feel on a 24 insight.
Yeah, Penny sort of knows
that this sort of nature of
the spell that's happened.
You have a more ranger's intuition.
The thing that just escaped the mirror,
you connect to it.
You also feel like, oh,
that thing marked me in some way.
And some weird rangers intuition
possesses you in this moment.
And you feel a certain thing of like,
and I think you can probably tell also
that Sam has been similarly marked, right?
But you connect to in
some way and go, like,
if something can see me, I can see it.
And you feel a part of you
lock on to nothing more
concrete than a feeling.
But when you remember the face
of the being you saw in the mirror,
completely like transparent
and visible hairs
on your shins and forearms
go to attention, stand up.
You feel the presence of
this thing in the world
in the way that a hunter feels something
that it's pursuing and
know that you can rely on
that connection going forward.
But again, almost similar
to what Yelle had,
where it was not necessarily
this hyper negative thing.
In the shattering of
that mirror you know that
many other mirrors have
shattered just like that.
And the thing escaping
didn't feel to you like
a [imitates evil laugh].
It felt like something
injured and weakened
slinking away from a trap.
It felt like something
getting free somewhere.
The thing you saw was
not a triumphant surge
or charge towards an objective,
but rather a full retreat into
deeper shadows than you can imagine,
in places far from the sunlit world.
And whatever danger is now unfolding
at your old high school.
- All right.
- Would a history check apply here or no.
Just cause I have very good history.
- [Brennan] Yeah, you
can make a history check.
- Oh my God, where is it, 15.
- You clock some primordial writing
on some of the stone in here.
Just interesting, primordial
is the language of elementals.
Something you clock.
- And I can read.
- And Sam can read primordial.
But there's a griffon
waiting for you outside.
Sandra Lynn says, all right,
so, you know, we're so glad we found you.
You're all gonna be okay.
We're gonna get you back there.
My daughter and her friends
might be in a little bit of trouble.
There's a ritual, the
ancient red dragon Kalvaxus.
- f*ck dragons, let's go!
- Cannot wait to find the
backstory behind that comment.
[laughing]
- The f*ck who you washed away
was saying Kalvaxus a lot.
- Oh, okay, yeah. So, some of his servants
also attacked several homes in Elmville.
It's been a wild night,
but we're gonna get you
to Aguefort right away.
And you are swooped up many of you like
one of you in each of
the talons of the Griffin
and the rest of you on
the back of Sandra Lynn.
This Griffin is struggling,
[imitates wings flapping]
- I am clutching on to Sandra Lynn,
and I whisper into her ear,
thanks for showing up.
- She looks back and some deep mom
part of her heart goes,
yeah kiddo, of course, of course.
And hey, good looking out on all of you,
you showed up for each other
when the chips were down.
And Ostentatia finishes
casting the mending.
And as Ostentatia, as you mend the mirror,
you see that the mirror.
You touch it and your face appears
in the mirrors of all
your friends' bracelets.
- My face?
- Your face appears in
everyone else's mirror.
- Whoa,
- Wow
- It's Ostentatia O'clock.
[all laughing]
- I love that.
- We cut a year and a
half into the future.
[all cheering]
Amazing!
It is a beautiful day in Elmville.
It's the beginning for some of you,
it's the beginning of your senior year.
For others of you it's the
beginning of your junior year.
Weird palimpsest shenanigans
and super seniors and repeated years
and some people
intentionally bombing finals
have made a weird mishmash of years
to the point where for Danielle,
Zelda and Ostentatia
it is the beginning of their junior year.
And for Sam, Penny, Katja, and Antiope
it's the beginning of your senior year.
Maybe even for one or two,
you are at the beginning
of your second senior year.
- We don't talk about that.
[all laughing]
- So in this beautiful
morning in Elmville,
it has been a year and a half.
You have ventured into the Red Waste,
you have fought together
to claim dragon's eggs,
you defeated Hyperia
the Gorgon queen of Throshk.
You are the Seven.
You are known in the
Aguefort Adventuring Academy
of some of the most bad-a*s adventurers
of all time, though, again,
having the weird trait
or abnormal trait of
being across years.
You came about not through, you know,
meeting up and making a group
formally on your first day,
but through the actual events
of the terrible prophecy of
the Emperor of the Red Waste, Kalvaxus.
We are going to go ahead and begin.
And this time, you know what, we'll go,
in reverse order.
We are going to start
at the Jones residence.
And I'm actually going
to go ahead and say,
and ask for a little bit of detail here.
Aabria, what does the Jones' home
kind of look like here?
What do we see when we
see the Jones residence?
- The Jo- they call it the compound.
It's very much like single story,
flat, very indoor-outdoor living.
And there's like a central ludus
in between like instead of a yard,
there's just this outdoor training area
I live in a CrossFit box, I think.
[all laughing]
It's very stressful.
- Antiope, you awaken
still on the other side
of this very vertical growth spurt.
- Ow, my bones hurt.
- You have your bow and your
arrows there by your side.
How is your bedroom decorated
as you wake up this morning?
- It's kept super clean
and fairly spartan,
but there's one big mirror at the far end
that you can see there's
like holes in the wall
where it keeps getting moved,
like higher and higher,
because I went into palimpsest
like a solid 5'7 and I'm
like rocking 6'2 now.
So it's like much bigger.
And then there's just like
a bad Sharpied version of a dragon
that gets scribbled out,
just give it a weird look.
[all laughing]
- You walk out to begin to walk through
the halls of your home.
Again, very Spartan, the compound,
any art objects that are here
are dedicated to a
multi-generational lineage
of some of the greatest fighters
that have ever lived in Solace.
You see grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
You even see a hall of portraits
of your older brothers, Ajax,
and Prospero, and Ulysses,
you even see a photo of your
teacher and older sister, Corsica.
- Cool, cool, cool, cool.
- And all of these portraits of them,
not only in incredible combat,
but also incredible combat specifically
in the service of Solace.
A lot of your family has
gone into the military,
has gone into the service
of the Council of Chosen.
Sort of like Solesian National Guard.
And you see that there are all these
models up on the wall of
service, fidelity, and loyalty.
And you see that there is
a big space up on the wall
where your portrait will one day go
and you walk into your kitchen.
A fleet of blenders
[all laughing]
- I need to stay strong.
- Are there.
You see off in the corner
on a little fantasy treadmill
is your dad who is extremely muscular,
salt and pepper mustache,
little salt and pepper like he is-
hair is usually buzzed and shaved,
but he's got a little bit
of salt and pepper stubble,
just around his head where
the balding has come up and around.
Dad is very muscular fit.
But your dad is also like old dad.
Your dad's like, like way later sixties.
- I was a mistake, it's fine.
- Awww.
- A surprise, it was a surprise.
- Surprise, not mistake.
- And you see, he's got like, again,
your dad exercises in
kind of like Olivia Newton John garb,
like headband, weighted wristbands,
weighted like,
[imitates panting]
- Dad, they have for sure
updated workout apparel.
You do not have to wear
like - why is it shiny?
- Keep it going, Mr. Jones.
- The light, it catches
the eye, dad, stop.
- Yeah, you see there's this,
you gotta be limber.
You gotta be, babe, you gotta be limber
you gotta stay on it.
These are the clothes,
I move like a fox in these clothes
You see just
[huffing]
- Silver fox daddy.
- Yeah, okay whenever we talk about
Antiope's dad, we gotta-
- Yep, yep, it's fan time
[laughing]
- So dad is on the treadmill,
here is what you see,
he's got like the real,
you see every 10 seconds,
he reapplies the little
heart monitor sticky
'cause he, of course,
measures heart rate the whole time.
But he's also got a lot of chest hair.
So it keeps coming off and
keep putting it back on.
And your mom, Athena is
also here in the room.
Your mom is a beautiful,
very plump older woman.
She's got some little
half-moon spectacles.
Your mom is an incredible
fighter in her own right.
But also sometime in her middle age,
moved into being a tactician
and studies the history
of warfare and combat.
So you see that she smiles
as she looks over to you,
She's got a huge, like her dreads are up
in like a big bun that is wrapped around
and makes a little bun on top.
She looks over and smiles and goes,
Antiope, good morning sleepy head.
Nice to see you up.
- Sorry.
- You see that she smiles
and says, you hungry?
- Yeah, can I have-
[imitates blender whirring]
dammit, I can chew, I'm very good at-
- Won't you gonna have to shake,
we have a shake here ready to drink.
- Yeah, thank you.
I don't want bananas in it.
- No bananas, of course, I remember.
- All egg whites.
- You look around and again,
there are like all of
these very worn stools
at the kitchen counter.
You have again, four older siblings
all of whom are within
eight years of each other.
And then you're eight
years younger than Corsica.
And there is very much
a feeling in this house
and has been for a couple of years of like
a long bringing up of the rear,
a long caboose of like all the other kids
grew up and moved out.
And then your mom and dad
kind of act in some ways like
parents that are retired,
but in other words
they could already have
turned your siblings rooms
into dens and offices and workout rooms.
They're living their post-child life
kind of in the last year
or two of your high school.
- The nest isn't empty yet, please.
[all laughing]
- You just got called a long caboose.
- A long caboose.
That's gotta be insulting, yeah.
- That's salt and lemon.
- Like Juicy Couture track pants
with "LONG CABOOSE" along the a*s.
- The caboose part is
really scrunched in there
like a bad happy birthday sign.
[all laughing]
- My siblings call me L Cab
and it's very sad.
- L Cab!
- Listen, L Cab.
- Amazing, the front door opens
and your older sister Corsica walks in.
Sort of walks in waves hi to your parents.
She's got the awesome
silvery chrome buckler over her back
sharp tank athletic shorts.
She's got the gladius at her side,
long box-braids down at the moment.
And you see that she looks
over and just goes like,
hey, Ant, how's it going?
- Hey, hey Cor, how's it, sup?
- It's going good.
You see that she looks over, sits down
and makes sort of a meaningful
eye contact with your mom.
Athena sort of raises her eyebrows.
- I can see, like I can
pick up nonverbal cues.
What is this, what is happening?
- Corsica, am I allowed to say.
- What is, I hate this.
- You see that,
Corsica nods and says,
I'm not allowed to say anything until
Principal Aguefort is
gonna wanna meet with you
and the rest of your pals today,
I just it's an event,
I'm not supposed to share that but
I just heard it in the faculty office so.
- Nope, no, nope, we don't.
What does that, are we in trouble?
Why, what, for what reason?
Hold on, we're, no,
we can't be done with this part.
That's anxiety for the day.
Why are you like this?
- You see that,
Corsica says, I don't
wanna get in trouble.
I don't wanna get in trouble.
Do you still need a ride to school or no?
- I mean, yeah, no, I can,
I can go, I'm fine.
No, I, I would like a ride.
- Okay, I'll give you a ride.
You see that your mom says,
so Antiope, your father brought up
something interesting to me this morning.
Do you remember a colleague of mine,
a woman named Charity Blythe
who works for the Council of Chosen.
She's in charge of the
Ministry of Adventure.
And we talked to her about a internship,
which, you know,
I know that you like
your friends a lot, but-
- I like my friends a lot
and I have a good thing.
Cool, at what point is this
like now this is the point
where you like spring this on.
Why are you?
Okay, keep going.
I'm sorry, I'm listening.
[laughing]
I don't want this, but continue.
- You seem upset.
- It's a big, no, I'm fine.
Don't tell me how I feel.
- I didn't tell you how you felt.
I said you seem upset.
- Cool, I love having a
master tactician for a mother.
Please get the f*ck out
of my head, I hate this.
- Are you saying the
master tactician thing
because you want me to apologize
for who I am and what I do?
- Why are you getting calmer?
Like you get calmer when I get keyed up,
and I feel like that's
an intentional thing
and dad's just there f*cking vibing on it.
You can interact at any point.
- [Brennan] I love you, sweetheart.
- Why is his shirt off?
- The thing is, the mom is hot too.
[all laughing]
- Wait a minute, yeah,
the whole Jones family can get it.
- Yeah, basically.
- You see that your mom says,
you seem keyed up
and you've just said that you're keyed up.
I can tell that you're keyed up.
- Yeah, okay, we don't have to use
that phrase over and over, fine, I'm fine.
I'm fine, I'm fine.
- Does saying it all those
extra times make it happen?
- Oh!
I love playing a teen.
- See, here's the thing I could,
I would say a thing that's hurtful,
but I know you dealt with this like
going through menopause
with all of my other siblings
so I'm just gonna be the chill one
I'm not gonna escalate the situation,
so what's happening?
- Corsica fully pushes herself back
from the table and just looks like,
and you see your mother goes,
do you think that there is
anything other than
love in my heart for you
even when you say hurtful things?
Antiope, that was a very
hurtful thing to say.
And all it did was
telegraph your weakness
and insecurity to me.
- My gosh!
- So bad and now I feel mad again.
- Just remember in life,
when you are committed
to the ideal of strength
in the tradition of
many Joneses before you
that have come and served
the nation of Solace,
remember nothing can harm you,
when you are a part of
something greater than yourself.
And all of these insecurities
and all this ego,
it's all coming because you yourself
are worried about your future
and me and your father
want to help, that's all.
- Thank you for your help.
- I love you.
- I love you too.
- Thank you for saying so.
[all laughing]
- Oh, my God.
- Okay.
- Yeah, yeah, Athena.
- Corsica is in the front seat
of the car driving you to school that day.
And it's like four minutes
of silence is just...
- Well I'll just say it,
I handled that badly, I-
- You handled that badly,
you handled that badly yeah.
- I didn't know.
- I don't want an internship.
I am part of something better than myself.
I got that quote wrong,
I've heard it so many times, I'm sorry.
I have a thing.
And you guys are like
trying to do like a new,
another thing on it
and I don't want that necessarily.
- You're [sighs deeply], yeah.
- Yeah.
- You start getting some texts
on your crystal, by the way.
[message notification chimes]
- Oh, thank God.
- You see it's from Ajax, Prospero
and Ulysses your older brothers saying,
just saying, wow, wow and Ulysses quotes
the thing that you said to your mom
and starts being like,
yeah, they start FaceTiming with you.
You see Ajax, who's this
enormous muscle bound,
Ajax is like, they're lifting.
And then every time he does,
he just eats a huge bowl of eggs.
And then does another few sets.
- Okay.
- Eat a potato.
- Why are you like this?
- What?
- Listen, I don't know if
Corsica said it already,
you can fight it,
and there's a lot of great
training in fighting it.
Mom and dad win,
in the end mom and dad win.
So I don't know what to tell you.
Mom and dad win in the end.
- They always do.
- You see that he says,
love you, Ant, I do.
- I love you too.
I'm scared about the future,
but I'm not having a moment with you.
Like while you're like mid bench.
- Al right, I'm going to get this set.
And again, your brother Prospero,
looks at you sorta like
with little spectacles
Eldritch Knight brother,
and just goes like,
this is a, just, you
know, mom's a tactician.
She appreciates tactics.
So all you have to-
- Why are we not calling
that just manipulator?
That's what that is.
I don't know why we call it tactics.
- That's a pretty good tactic.
You should use that on her.
[all laughing]
- Oh, my God, thank you.
- And you take off with Corsica.
Your final brother, Ulysses
who's the gunslinger
just says like,
Ant, you know, you know that they love you
and they're doing the right thing.
[stutters]
They're worried because you're worried.
- I am a teenager still.
I'm gonna feel that way I think forever.
I don't like this.
- We see Ajax goes,
are you guys all worried?
And when he says that,
your older brother go,
no, I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident.
I think I'm doing great.
And you see Corsica goes, like,
Yeah, I feel pretty good too.
- I hate this.
- We're gonna cut from there
to a beautiful home.
[light music]
We are gonna cut to
a home that is not the Nightingale home.
- No, it's not.
- This is the Everpetal home.
- [Sephie] Yeah.
- [Brennan] Sam, what do we see
when we look at the Everpetal family home?
- So the Everpetal family home,
they are upper middle-class
solidly upper but not upper-class.
But they have one of those houses
that has a white veranda and columns
and a bunch of hanging flowering plants
just all over the place, the entire place.
You can smell it from a block away.
And on the inside, it's all
warm tones of brown and russet
and little bits of green in there.
It's a very welcoming
and inviting home, except
it feels a little empty and cold.
- Sam, you are starting your morning off
in your bedroom which is in
the upper floor of the house.
How is Sam's room appointed?
- Sam's room is probably
just as extra as she is.
We're talking seashells on a mirror,
a large mirror on the corner.
Canopy with a full silk bedspread.
A fluffy fur white rug on the ground.
A vanity that's white
and gold in the corner.
- Beautiful, beautifully appointed room.
You step out of your room,
you get a little text
from Zelda being like,
hey, if you're still good for that ride,
I'd love to come get a ride
with you and Sebastian.
- Definitely, will
definitely come pick you up.
- And you walk downstairs
like in the upper hallway.
Sam's room is, I mean,
every room in this house
is nice and large and spacious.
You walk past a room
with the walls no longer painted.
They just are covered in white primer.
There is no furniture in the room.
There is an elevated part of the floor
as this was a very decadent
master bedroom at one time.
With a room maybe even a little
bit more extra than Sam's,
maybe even pointedly always
a little more extra than Sam's,
that is now very empty.
And the person who once occupied it
is never mentioned in this house.
- It's strange to have a space
that she occupied and not have her in it,
because she always filled the space,
to the point it was overwhelming.
- A very empty house.
You walk downstairs
and you see Rebecca Everpetal down there.
Rebecca Everpetal is...
[chuckles]
Or I should say was
Penelope's human parent.
Penelope was a Half-elf.
So she had an Elven dad and a human mom.
Rebecca looks up...
Rebecca is very upper middle class mom.
Some sort of like very crisp
like quilted pencil skirt, quilted jacket,
like matching matching
and some fillers in her face
being wed to an unaging Elven man.
[all laughing]
- Not fair.
- There is a lot of
- Yo, respect.
- Botox up in that face.
- Yes.
- Up in the mouth.
- And you see that Rebecca is...
There are some cardboard boxes in a corner
and there is, like a suitcase is out
and Rebecca looks up and goes,
Sammy, how are you doing sweetheart?
- Hi, I'm good.
What's with all the boxes, Mrs. Everpetal?
- Oh, oh,
you wanna take a seat, sweetheart?
[all gasping]
[solemn music]
- I'm not sure I do now.
- It's nothing that you have
to worry about, you're fine.
It's about me and Gideon.
I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be,
oh my God.
[crying]
And she starts crying and
laughing at the same time.
- Oh, no.
- Okay, so sweetheart, you know-
- I go instantaneously to her.
- Yeah, she just takes Kleenex
and starts dabbing at herself.
You know, you are my
sweet, you're my daughter.
You're my sweet daughter, kiddo.
Me and Gideon have been
going to counseling
ever since, you know.
- Yeah.
- And you know, it's not...
It's not working.
And I wish I could say
that it was going to,
but it's not.
[imitates sniffling]
- But you can't be alone.
[wheezes]
- Oh yes, I can.
[all laughing]
- I just meant since
everything that happened.
- You know, Gideon is,
you know, he's out working,
he's on a business trip right now
and he got in touch with
me and let me know that,
that we're gonna move forward
and we're gonna make it
sort of a legal process now.
And it's just gonna be better for me
to not be living here.
- He let know through a phone call?
- Yeah, kiddo.
- Do you wanna burn all his stuff?
[laughing]
- I know you could,
you are an incredibly powerful sorceress.
- I can make this happen.
- [Brennan] Sweetie.
- I'm better at drowning
things, but you know.
- Sweetie, he's in Fallinel
with his assistant.
[all exclaim]
- Not the blonde one
Not the blonde one.
- Yeah, the blonde one, yeah.
- He's been spending so much time with her
since she got her butt done.
[all gasping]
- Sam, I know.
[all laughing]
I know that, I know that.
- Your butt looks better.
- God bless you.
[all laughing]
she just gives you a huge hug,
and just starts bawling she's like,
I'm so sorry, I don't know.
You've been through more than any,
you've been through so much
and I don't wanna lean,
I'm an adult, I don't wanna lean on you.
But look, what I wanted to say is
I'm gonna go be with my sister
for a little while.
We're just over at Ashgrove.
We're not that far away.
And the point is this,
I've already reached out.
We're gonna have meals in the fridge,
we're gonna have pre-prepped
meals in the fridge.
And obviously you're gonna
be on my delivery account.
So your food is gonna be here.
You're gonna have a place to stay.
And I'll have the crystals
system up so you can-
- You want me to be here alone?
- Well, you're welcome to
come with me to Ashgrove,
but I know you're in your
last year at Aguefort
and you know, that's a
hell of a commute, kiddo.
- I don't know if I could
be here alone and she was...
- I don't have the answers, sweetheart.
And I'm sorry.
You know, I'll bring it up because she did
call me, I did talk to her last night.
Your mom, Camille called.
- Oh boy, what did she want?
- She said a lot of really ignorant stuff.
- She's still on about the comeback?
Is that what her current obsession is
after she's done f*cking the pool boy?
- She basically said that,
she says she didn't think that you should
finish out at Aguefort
but if you were going to,
it's a short enough time away
now that you're a senior,
that you should be planning a comeback
and planning a re-entry into show biz.
She kept saying, people
don't know Sam Nightingale.
They don't know,
You know, this is a...
and she said a lot of other stuff about
that it will be very in vogue
and I got a bad taste in my mouth.
- Oh, so it's fashionable now
that's why she wants me to do it
while it's fashionable to transition.
Got it, got it, great.
I've deleted her number from my phone.
You can just not answer those calls.
You can just not.
In fact, I prefer you didn't.
In fact, if she calls,
why don't you just
throw your f*cking phone
across the room and shatter into pieces?
Just like I'd like to do to her skull.
I might have anger issues.
- Sweetie, if you didn't,
I'd be more worried.
She takes her crystal out,
opens it up.
You see her delete a number,
delete a contact and
block the number and say,
we don't need selfish people
in our lives, sweetie.
- Thank you, mom.
[imitates crying]
- She fully kisses you on the cheek
and just wraps you up in this big embrace.
She says, sweetie, if you wanna come stay
in my sister's apartment with me,
we'll snuggle up on the sofa
and we'll get you,
there's a light rail that comes to town
and you can take the
train in to go to school.
If you don't wanna be in
this house, I understand.
- I'll be okay.
I think you need time.
[imitates sniffling]
- Oh.
- Can we revisit setting things on fire?
- There are a few things
that I would love to be ash.
[laughing]
And you go with Rebecca
and collect some stuff and ash,
collect some stuff
and make a little bonfire of Gideon's,
- Incredible.
- There's a crystal vinyl
record collection of Gideon.
- Any trophies, any trophies.
- Any trophies.
- I'm gonna melt that into
a disgusting little brick.
And then just, where is he staying?
- Oh, Gideon?
- Mm-hmm.
He's staying at the
Mithril Arms in Fallinel.
- Classy, I'm mailing it to him.
[all laughing]
- Amazing, after Rebecca gives you a kiss
on either cheek and she says.
I'm not going for a little while
so there'll be time to,
we'll have a little dinner and we'll-
- I know you're not gone forever.
- I'm always, I'm a
crystal call away, sweetie.
And you get into your beautiful
sea foam green Aqua convertible.
- [Sephie] With the seashell
detail and the scale.
- With the seashell
details and the scales.
As soon as you sit in the driver's seat
and put your handbag
with your crystal in it
on the center console
the car automatically
turns on, ah, Sam Nightingale.
[all laughing]
- Okay! Car!
- Okay, car.
[fan flapping]
[all cheering]
- You see that...
[laughs]
Sebastian says, Ms. Nightingale, where to?
- Sebastian to Zelda's house.
- As you wish.
[imitates car zooming]
And you see the exhaust,
like little beautiful bubbles
just come out of the exhaust.
- Yes, my car is f*ck, okay.
- We know.
- We gonna find out.
- I'd love to find out, Sam.
[all laughing]
- Incredible, Sam, we take off
and you go to Zelda's house.
Zelda is moss covered.
You see that there's just a centaur
wearing a Toga passed out on its side
with a wreath of laurel leaves.
You see there's clearly a
party happened here last night,
fully a weeknight.
- So, perfectly normal.
- Perfectly normal.
It's a wild sort of like
bacchanal here most of the time.
[serene music]
Big, big, house windows
are all shuttered up
so that people don't get bright sunlight
in their hangovers indoors.
And hoodie up but with her horns
still crawling around it.
Zelda sprints out and he goes,
hey Sam, thanks for the ride, so much.
- No problem, Zelda, just get in.
- Now as soon she opens the door
and gets into the other seat
and does things, she does every morning,
she's like, shotgun, okay or-
[all laughing]
- You can always take shotgun.
- I just didn't know if
someone else called it.
- No, no, you have shotgun.
You keep that, yeah.
- Oh wow.
- Do I ever pick up anyone
else, forceful like-
- No, I'm sorry, I just...
I always think maybe someone else
is getting a ride and
it would be so awkward.
- It would be like super-
- Do you want me to,
Sebastian, can I write Zelda's name
on the seat now or?
- Mistress, of course.
And you see, Zelda's name
comes in this beautiful
sea foam embroidery
on like the cream leather seats.
- See, full blown permission and consent.
- Oh, my God, thank you so much.
Is everything okay?
- Not really.
I don't wanna bog down the morning though.
Like it's fine, everything's...
[shudders]
The Everpetals' are divorcing.
- Oh my God, I'm so sorry.
- I mean, I can't say I'm,
well, I shouldn't be surprised.
I guess there was a lot of yelling
and f*cking of assistants.
You know, you sort of like
meet people when they're together
and you just sort of expect
them to stay that way
no matter what happens.
Do you know what I mean?
- Yeah, no, I,
it's f*cked up that grownups change.
Like, I mean that,
it's f*cked up that they change.
It's weird when you realize that like,
the people who have always looked the same
and been the same and you've been getting
older and taller and learning more,
and then they, and
something of theirs breaks,
it's like f*cked up.
- Tell it to my mother, she never changes.
There's a lot of cosmetic surgery
that goes into that but-
[exhales deeply]
- Yeah, I can't, I honestly,
I can't think about your
mom too much or I start...
[growling noises]
- You'll go into a rage, yeah.
[laughing]
- I'm sorry, sorry, it's so awkward.
- No, it's fine, it's fine.
If I could rage like you,
I would in fact do so and-
- Honestly, I've seen you
kind of get scarily close.
- Well, you know,
thunder and lightning
and waves and all that.
They have an effect.
- She puts a hand on your arm and says,
I'm really sorry, Sam, it sucks.
- Yeah, is it f*cked
up that I'm gonna miss
Mr. Everpetal too even
though he cheated on her?
- No, like, yeah.
- And I set a lot of his stuff on fire
and melted down all his
trophies from college.
[laughing]
- Yeah, even the things that are like
in your life that weren't great
you still might've relied on them
and had them be familiar.
I get it.
Sebastian with Sam and
Zelda in the front seats,
cruises off towards the school.
And we go over to the Luckstone home.
[all cheering]
Hooray!
So, Becca, what do we see
when we see the Luckstone home?
- Wow, you see the Luckstone.
It is a giant stone
that this sort of thatch lean too
has been built up
against and curving into.
Very simple, modest home that obviously
bits and pieces had to be
added onto over the years
to allow for all the Luckstone children
of which they were lucky enough to have
all 20 of us.
[laughing]
- Lucky number 20.
- Yes.
Well, I was number one.
- Amazing, we zoom into
the Luckstone home,
where it's a busy, happy
morning with 20 kids.
We see mom and dad, Bonnie and Danny.
- [Becca] My Bonnie and Danny.
- Bonnie and Danny are there.
And you see that the home
is a kind of like maddening mix
of order and chaos
because there is no way for 20 kids
to be running around in the house
and not have it be total chaos.
But also you couldn't have 20 kids
without incredible systems of organization
that the parents are putting into place.
So there's things like blocks scatter
and there's like a trap set,
like a rogue trap set up
to like immediately like sweep
the blocks out of the hall
as the next kids run down the hall.
[all laughing]
You see that Bonnie and
Danny are running through.
Danny has like three...
Danny is fully a stay-at-home dad.
So Danny is just there looking like mad.
Okay, get the juice boxes,
and like throwing them
into these sack lunches.
And there's a sort of weird
again, rogue mechanisms.
It's a spinning saw blade
that shoots a bunch of pre-made sandwiches
into the lunch box, it's like...
And your mom's like,
t-minus three minutes
and we are out the door.
You see her look over and go,
Penny, sweetheart, how are you doing,
how are you doing, darling?
- Good, good, do you need me to
grab anything for anybody?
- You're all good, sweetie.
We have 30 seconds to do this.
We got a letter in the mail
from the Society of Shadows.
It would be a bigger deal,
it's a very big deal,
I would celebrate it.
But we're on a schedule.
- Wait, Society of Shadows?
It was the letter for me?
- A letter for you from
the Society of Shadows.
- Okay, and you kept it?
- Kept it from you.
It's an organization of secret rogues.
There's the best rogues in the world
they have an apprenticeship program.
You've gotten a full ride, sweetie.
You've been k*lling it,
you've been doing great.
So you would have to move
to some secret clandestine headquarters.
Again, this should be dramatic
and filled with pauses,
I can't do that right now.
We're not gonna get to the bus on time.
- Mom, I need to know
more stuff about this.
- Here you go, bam,
there's the letter, okay.
That's for you.
- Can we discuss this maybe
and you could tell me all about it?
- Not now.
- Okay.
- Okay, I love you.
- I love you too.
- You're such a great student.
You're the apple of my eye.
You're such a high achiever
- I know.
- And I love it about you.
- That's the time.
- Wait, no, I have a, okay.
- He shows up at the door.
Danny comes over and goes, sandwich.
- Yes, please.
- There it is.
- Okay!
[laughing]
- As you start going out the door,
you see that Bonnie and Danny walk out.
So your mom works and runs
a very stressful tourist
Tavern in downtown.
And your dad is mostly a stay-at-home dad,
but pulls a couple shifts here and there.
All your family are Mumple people.
- Yeah, we are Mumple people.
- You are Mumple people for the most part.
So, but you see the bus
from Mumple comes up
and all your other 19 siblings
begin to pile into that bus.
Your mom says,
are you grabbing a ride
with a friend today
or you need a ride?
- I could crystal somebody and see, yeah.
- That would be great.
Your dad had to pick
up an emergency shift.
Your dad looks and says, yeah,
I gotta go to the mall
and stand at the front
and talk about things that
are happening in town.
- That's a thing you do?
- The city pays some Mumple professors
to just be at the mall and say
sort of things that are going on in town.
- But the Tavern's going great,
you don't even need to do that.
- Well, where...
- I thought money was fine like,
do I need to get a job?
- Sweetie, you don't worry about it.
Mom and I have everything covered, okay.
- No, I know, I know.
- We are on the ball.
- Yeah, no, you cover everything.
It's just, sometimes I
think that you might shatter
into a million pieces and now with-
- If you work, hey kiddo,
if you work hard and you smile
and you put in the elbow grease
and you give it your all
and you sing a little
song about it, I'm fine.
- Okay, dad, I believe you
and take you at your word.
- Al right, see, what do we do, kids?
And you see every one
of your little siblings,
you see them like,
all your little siblings exist in a space.
You can watch the spectrum
of the youngest siblings
who live in the perfect
happiness of a life
where people have worked really hard
to give them everything.
And as it goes up the spectrum
and gets closer and closer to adulthood,
you see the kids that
have gotten old enough
to start modeling your
mom and dad's behavior.
So your dad's like, hey, kids, remember,
sing a little song on your way to school.
And that way you'll be fine.
Your dad gets in a car and takes off,
your mom goes, alright, sweetie,
you have a friend picking
you up from crystal,
can I walk you to the corner?
- Sure, yeah.
- Okay.
- Wow.
Mom, you're doing great.
- Gives you a kiss on the cheek,
she goes like, wow,
oh my God, we carved out.
This is a full two-minute
walk to the corner,
carve that out, take that schedule.
- It was really special.
And I really appreciated the time.
Can we talk about this
Society of Shadows thing?
- Well, you know, your dad
and I are Mumple people.
So we sort of had to take
everything on face value.
But it seems like a very big deal.
It's basically a grad
school, it's a college.
So it's not in Solace,
so you'd have to move to attend.
But it's basically a full
ride apprentice program.
- Well, my whole adventuring
party is here though.
So how do I, how?
- Oh, well, yeah, if you wanted to stay
with the seven, you
could absolutely do that-
- You know the name of
my Adventuring party?
- Sweetie, I know everything about you.
She rattles off like your
birthday, your favorite color,
how you take your sandwiches,
what you like, whats your thing.
- "Take my sandwiches"
Cream, yeah.
- But like, runs down
this list that you can see
is filled with very genuine,
it's two emotions at the same time
neither of which compromise the other.
It is a full and burning love for you
as the unique individual that you are.
And also a ferocious
need to be on top of it.
- Yeah, yeah.
I get that.
- So, you know, yeah,
The seven maidens,
if that's what you want then yeah.
- I couldn't choose
anything else for them.
'Cause they're the most important
thing in the world to me.
I mean, I've already sent them like
- For sure, you know,
one of the things, is it takes, you know,
there's a certain amount of money.
You know, this is a full ride.
So I don't know if you
have a patron or a sponsor
for your adventuring party yet,
but that's something to consider because
if you have to sponsor
yourselves then that,
it all costs something.
So that's just something,
just being practical.
It's just something to think about.
- Yeah, I just feel like a lot of the
sponsors out there are dragons
and we kind of can't go there.
- Dragons have a tremendous
amount of wealth,
you know, and,
[laughs]
but sweetie, ultimately
you make the decision
that's right for you.
And again, you don't have to do this.
I've never heard about this group before.
I think that's the point.
They're very proud about
how secret they are.
But, one of the things I just wanna say is
anything you wanna do is good.
And I support you in
everything that you wanna do.
And there, you know, you've always been
our oldest and kind of
you marched to the beat
of your own little drum and
you know the drum more than I do
and I trust you, okay.
- Wow, that's a lot of pressure,
but yeah, I appreciate it.
- If you get it wrong,
that's beautiful because it
was you getting it wrong.
[laughs]
- So much of a blank check to write
that it really is leaving
too many possibilities-
- You've sailed past the horizon of
your dad and my frame
of reference long ago.
So you're taking our love with you
into an area where we
can't provide perspective.
- Wow, okay, so I'll
just figure it out, yeah.
- You'll have to.
- Okay.
- I love you.
- I love you, and so.
- This is really nice.
- It's really nice sweeter, bye bye.
Did you sh**t a text to anybody
to pick you up on your way to-
- I hit up Sam
to hop in the back of Sebastian.
- Yeah!
- Love it, I love it.
- You can hear the bubbles
coming from around the corner.
- And as bubbles come around the corner,
you hop in the back.
Hey, Penny.
- Get in girl, we're going,
waving, wait no, surfing.
[all laughing]
Surfing.
- All right, like Penny is so tiny
she just hops over into the backseat.
And just immediately,
you can't even see her.
She's way low.
- You have to like take down the arm rest.
And there's like a custom seat,
or like a half wing
sized seat in the arms.
- Like in the cup holders-
[overlapping chatter and laughter]
- [Brennan] Amazing.
- So my name is carved in embroidery
in the tiny cup holder seat.
- In the tiny cup holder seat, exactly.
Amazing, we move from there
[light music playing]
to Skullcleaver Manor,
which is not just a home,
it is rather an estate.
Rekha, could you please describe
Skull Cleaver manor for us?
- It is an enormous mansion
just like the kind of thing
you could take a picture from a helicopter
to get a full view of like
a Beyonce Jay-Z mansion situation.
And that is the part of the house
that is the line of
Cleaver's pride and joy.
But almost as if we're just
panning slightly to the left
is a small stable.
And this is kept up nicely,
but it's not the main
attraction of the house,
but this is where the
action's at for Katja.
There are 101 horses in there.
[all laughing]
If you were like going in Katja's room,
so there's wings of this house, right.
And it's actually kind of a trip
to get to another wing.
Her dad works in one area,
her room is in another area.
They often will eat dinner together
through like a zoom
conference call kind of sit-
It just a lot of effort
to get across this house.
Katja kind of lives
by the hands of a lot of the houses staff.
She's chummy with the butler
and the farrier and all those people.
Her bedroom is like how you would design
a two-year-old's bedroom.
She's never made any
amendments besides the bed
because she doesn't care
what her room looks like.
She doesn't really care
about her possessions.
Her closet is like her horse shrine.
She's got all her horse
riding materials in there,
her and I mean materials, I mean books.
I mean letters to each
horse for their birthday,
her riding clothes, dozens of helmets,
all of this sort of thing.
And she is currently at the stable.
- Amazing, your beautiful,
magnificent horse
Cinnamon is there.
She is, again, this
gorgeous Palomino horse.
Like many of the horses
here, she is magical.
She is like a permanency
find steed spell basically.
And Cinnamon is this
like, again, gorgeous,
like auburn rust color with the beautiful,
like shimmering platinum blonde mane.
But a lot of the horses in here, again,
the world of Spyre contains
so many different kinds of horses.
So there are like Elven
steeds and Appaloosas
and paint horses and
other things like that.
And then there are horses
that are straight out of like
a Technicolor Oz like-
Like truly, there are some like-
phantasmagorical Lisa Frank wonders.
[all exclaiming]
- You said the magic word.
[all laughing]
- When people ask about Cinnamon...
Cinnamon is the most important
thing in Katja's life.
And it's like, Cinnamon was born purely
from a child's imagination.
This is like the perfection of Cinnamon,
like straight from like Katja's
favorite series of books,
"The Babysitter's Horse" to reality.
It's a book about a horse's babysitter.
[all laughing]
Into reality.
Cinnamon is born.
- Amazing, just writing
down the Babysitter Horse.
- Yeah, thank you.
It's a series of books, it's incredible,
it's about a horse that
babysits a bunch of girls.
She's a total Christy.
- Amazing, yeah, you're there.
The farrier Gertrude.
Gertrude is a wonderful
lively bugbear woman.
You see, she's there with like
a gray button up shirt
in this big leather apron.
As a farrier she fashions
and fits horseshoes.
She's fittings for these magical
horseshoes onto Cinnamon.
And you see, she looks up,
she's got big rows of these
beautiful brass earrings and chains
along her ears and smiles and goes like...
And has a little nose
to ear chain as well.
- Okay, woah she's Indian, interesting.
[all laughing]
Interesting, Indian.
- And you see that your butler,
Lockwood is there as well,
who is a hobgoblin butler.
But the sort of like
the master of the house
has not been here for a while.
The staff are not very cold to you.
They're actually quite,
so Gertrude is going like,
well, this is gonna be great,
as soon as we get this done here,
and look at this here.
You see that she sort of clips out
and clips the horses hooves
and puts the new horseshoes on.
And she says, ah, beautiful.
Look at that, a perfect fit.
Thank you very much,
Getrude, from Cinnamon.
[laughing]
Lockwood sort of crosses
his arms and says,
it's lovely that, by
the way, for breakfast,
I only got an order for
Cinnamon's breakfast.
I didn't get your order for breakfast.
- Oh, that's okay.
We take the same.
- Hot oats with berries,
very fancy for a horse.
You see and just brings
these two things and she's like,
you must let me put hot
water on the oats for you.
- It's okay.
- Gertrude looks up
and says, well, so, oh,
Getrude looks up and says,
oh, what's this?
And a little screen appears.
There's like literally a
mounted TV screen in the stable.
Skullcleaver Manor is many generations
of half-orcs who descend from
one of the earliest and
most famous adventures
in like the foundation
of Solace's history.
So this is like, old money.
And a screen comes on
and a little-
[imitates beeping sound]
You see it says, Mr.
Cleaver on it, your dad.
- I hit the thing, got my
dry hot oats in my mouth.
I don't know how we accomplish
both of those flavors.
Hi, dad.
- You see, there's the thing.
Is it working, is it working?
- Yeah, dad, it's working.
It works every day.
- I'm in a dungeon, look at this.
And you see he looks up and
you see there's just
like pounding stone traps
and there's like a writhing pit of snakes.
And you see your dad is like
a career professional adventurer.
He's like almost certainly 20th level.
He's like, gotta go in here,
cause I'm kind of demon
lord, can you believe it?
- Oh, my God, dad,
when are you gonna stop doing this?
You don't need to be doing this anymore.
- Listen, as long as the world
needs somebody to run in here
and cleave skulls, your old man's
gonna be cleaving them,
kiddo, that's the truth.
- Can you at least take
direct flights when you go,
I feel like you're trying to
save money everywhere you go.
- Oh, direct flights,
like I'm made of money?
- Okay, you are made-
- And a torpiary, endless topiary.
- Yeah, you are made of money, dad.
You gotta use the money, right?
You gotta enjoy it.
- That money that can become magic items
that can become material components.
You know how many times I've died
and they have to bust a gem to,
to get my dead a*s back alive?
- I know how many times you've died, yeah.
- I died a lot of times, kiddo, okay.
How are you doing?
Is that Nutmeg, Hi, Nutmeg!
- No, Nutmeg is over there.
This is Cinnamon.
- Cinnamon, beautiful, beautiful.
Can you believe this demon lord
We're going deep this time.
- Wow, you can still go that deep?
- Deepest we've ever gone,
every day is a new challenge
it's my favorite part of adventuring.
Looks like your old man still got it,
still got it.
- Okay, dad, you don't need to do that.
[laughing]
All my friends keep talking about that.
- Yeah, you see that your
dad is in this incredible,
your dad is armored up,
he's got like polearm
battleax, sword over here,
a bandolier of daggers,
a flintlock g*n on his other hip.
All of it is magic.
You know that every piece of his armour,
every piece of equipment has a story.
He's got like magical henna tattoos
that he can activate to do like
battle master maneuvers and sh*t.
Literally some of his tattoos can like
spring out as counter spells.
He's adventured for so
long, but he's like,
I got my a*s beat by magic enough times.
But not again.
So he looks and says, ah, kiddo,
so proud of you, so proud of you.
And I wanted to say, I
know it's many months.
I know the year's just starting but
I might still be in the abyss by then.
And I'm not sure about service
'cause it's an extra planar place.
So I don't know how the time works.
Some of these,
Gelgador, my party
wizard, you know Gelgador.
- I know Gelgador.
Always just squishing my
cheeks in a way that's stupid.
- He loves you, he loves you.
- I know.
- So he was telling me that time
might work in a different way.
So I don't know,
I might have to miss your graduation.
But I'm just sending so
much love to you, kiddo.
I'm so proud of you.
- Okay.
- I'm so proud of you.
- Thank you, dad.
And Katja is really sad but
one of the greatest courtesies
she feels she can do for her father
is not show that she is sad.
Because her dad has
done everything for her.
And that would be his biggest nightmare
is if Katja is sad.
- You see that, go ahead
and make a deception roll
for me if you'd be so kind.
- 11.
- Your dad-
- Oh, no.
- Your dad rolled a 10
- I rolled a 10 but with plus one.
- He has a minus one.
[gasps]
So your dad has a minus
one to his insight check.
And so he looks at you and says,
oh great kiddo, I'm glad,
I was worried you might be upset.
I just know 'cause you know,
I miss you like crazy.
- I miss you too.
- You know, obviously,
[soft music playing]
if mom was in the picture,
someone would have been there
just to get you to graduation
and get y'all done up.
But I sent a message to Lockwood.
So, oh, I didn't sorry, I didn't send it.
Lockwood, are you there?
You see Lockwood.
Make an insight check.
- Nine plus two, 11.
- Lockwood was trying to hide it,
you see Lockwood looks disappointed.
You see that he says, Lockwood, buddy,
if you just want to make
sure that graduation,
whatever Katja wants, you know,
whatever the school's asking,
go get the best version.
Go talk to someone, get the
best version of it, okay.
And you see Lockwood says,
right you are, Master Cleaver.
And he says, thanks, bud.
Great, good job.
You know you're all
like family to me right?
Nutmeg too.
[laughs]
- Nutmeg's laughing.
I lie, nobody is laughing.
- He goes, he says, hey,
been all over the multi-verse,
been everywhere, I've been everywhere.
You are the greatest adventure
I've ever been on, all right.
- Thank you, dad.
- I love you like crazy kid.
- Love you too.
- All right, be well, hey, be well
and knock them dead, huh, huh?
Hey, what do Cleavers do?
- Knock 'em dead.
- Knock 'em dead.
[laughing]
- All right, Kiddo, take care
- Bye.
- What does Katja do?
- I think she is very aware
that Lockwood's eyes are probably on her
from knowing that that was like a bummer.
- Yeah.
- And she tries to, you know,
she's been brushing Cinnamon's hair
for probably f*ck three hours.
And she just says to Lockwood,
you don't have to get me anything.
- Well,
[sighs]
if there is anything you wish for,
you know that myself and Gertie
and everyone will do
whatever is in our power
to get it for you, right?
- Yeah, I mean, there's
one thing I wish for,
but he's working.
- You hear a crunch and see that Gertie
has straight up punched
through the stable fencing.
He goes, oh, my hand is bleeding.
I'm gonna go.
You see, she gets up.
Cinnamon looks again at like
the little locket around your neck.
- Yes, which is a half heart
for like a best friend
necklace that's not complete.
- And Cinnamon looks and says,
Katja, why don't we go on a fun ride?
Why don't we go the scenic
way to school today?
I'll take you to school today.
- I would love that.
Oh my God, I mean,
every day you have it's just better
than the previous one Cinnamon.
You are just so good at everything.
- I love you.
And there is no greater love
than that a horse can
have for her horse girl.
- I found one.
The one a horse girl has for a horse.
[all laughing]
- And you see she says, I can't do it,
I don't have hands, I don't have hands.
I can't do it.
If I had them I'd be doing it.
- Dry, hot a*s oats.
- I wanna send a breakfast check to Katja.
There's a picture of me
frowning with a sad blender bottle.
- Dry hot oats.
- We suck.
[laughing]
- Incredible, we are gonna move from Katja
to the incredible Ostentatia Wallace.
A home that we have actually seen crafted
by the incredible Rick Perry,
shout out to Rick Perry.
But how is Ostentatia's home
appointed right now and
where is Ostentatia in
the home as she awakens?
- Ostentatia wakes up
in her cavernous bedroom
that has a lot of purple all over it.
And she's got one of
those like canopy beds.
- Does Ostentatia pray for her spells
in the morning or at night
before she goes to sleep?
- At night.
- Cool, so you pray for your spells,
you feel the magical power as you awaken,
after you've prayed for your spells
to Logran Soulforger.
Minor thing about the god of the forge
in sort of this Dwarven tradition
is a lot of clerics
are able to speak to their deity.
And the dwarves get spells
from the god of the forge.
But in that faith has not communicated to,
or spoken to a cleric in
like many, many centuries.
So you just feel the
presence of the magic there
and awaken and you can hear sounds
in the kitchen downstairs
of music playing,
something is being cooked.
And you can hear your mom
talking to your grandma downstairs.
- Yeah, I like put on
[upbeat lively music playing]
like headphones or
whatever normal people use.
Not like over the ears, but
like in the ears, right?
- Yeah.
- Okay.
[laughing]
And I'm listening to
early 2000s top forties.
[laughing]
and go downstairs and like start my day.
- You head downstairs.
Do you walk into the kitchen
to get something to eat or drink
first thing in the morning?
You head in the kitchen,
as you're listening to music,
how loud is the music?
Would you be able to hear
your mom or grandma
saying something to you?
- No.
[all laughing]
And I walk up and kiss my
Nona on the cheek and like,
like hip bump my mom
and like get orange juice from the fridge.
- She looks at you and she sees
your buds in and you see that she
hit bumps you back and
starts talking something
and you just see her, you can't hear her
'cause she does the cute
little hip bump and just goes.
[laughing]
- I can't hear you.
- She reaches and pulls them out and says,
I know you can't hear me,
coming to the kitchen
like you've got nothing to say to anybody.
Your Nona's over-
- I already said hi.
- Oh, hi miss, hi young miss.
- What did I do?
- Why'd you come in here,
why can't you say hello
like your grandmother's come over.
- Grandma's here everyday.
- Yes, and you should be so lucky
that your grandma comes over everyday.
- Oh my God, what did I do?
- You didn't do, I love you.
And I don't want to fight
first thing in the morning.
- I love you, ma.
- You see that your Nona
comes over and says.
beautiful, beautiful, mwah! mwah!
- You are beautiful,
you're so f*ck hot, grandma.
- You see that she says,
your mom, by the way, is a beautiful,
she's decked out like you as well.
She's like incredibly
orange, tan, like spray tan,
bushy, bushy brown beard.
Your grandma has this
long braided silver beard
with all these old school heirloom
brooches and rings in and you see-
- Can't wait to get those when she dies.
[all laughing]
- And you see that your
grandma doesn't think,
she very cutely, like
grabs your face to kiss it.
But then you say she rubs
her thumb on your chin.
And she goes,
why you shave? You patchy, still patchy?
- It just doesn't grow for me.
- We do, I go with...
She says, get mushroom
from deep under the ground.
- And you see your mom says-
- I know!
- You Nona is gonna make a mushroom salve
if your beard is not coming out,
is it not coming in full?
- It is coming in
but I don't want it to show.
- Don't tell grandma you shave on purpose.
I don't mind that you shave on purpose.
I know dwarves your age shave their face.
Just don't tell your grandma
you shave on purpose.
- I'm not gonna tell grandma.
- Don't take an attitude with me.
- I don't have an attitude.
- Don't take an attitude with me.
- I love you.
- I love you.
Oh, your cousin Chenzo called,
he's having problems at the garage.
Can you do a miracle?
- Yeah.
- Talk to forge god and get a miracle.
- Okay, yeah, I mean, I
can also just like fix it.
- No, he's not getting enough cars in,
he doesn't want you to fix the cars.
If you can do a miracle,
some more cars are breaking
down in the neighborhood.
- Okay, I could try to
do something like that,
but it doesn't just sort of happen.
- Chenzo does a lot for this family
and he doesn't ask for a lot.
- Why are you freaking yelling at me now?
- I'm not yelling at you!
[laughing]
- I love you.
- I love you.
- Ya I'll call him but like I got school.
- I'm not asking for you
to move heaven and earth.
I'm asking you-
- You just asked me to
perform a freaking miracle!
- Don't you raise your voice at me.
- You are asking too
much, I'm sorry, Nona.
- You see that Nona takes
a little Sprig of like a floral
deep subterranean mushroom
and just like spritzes some
water on you and your mom.
- Stop, stop,
I put toner on today already.
- When you fight in the kitchen,
it poisons whatever is cooking.
- We're not fighting, we're talking.
- I love you.
- I love you.
- And you see your mom says,
I love you, I love you,
- We all love each other.
- I love you.
- Give me a perception
check if you'd be so kind.
- 18.
[soft upbeat music playing]
- You see that your dad's tools,
his mithril working tools
which just hang on this
leather backed chair
in a little room adjoining the kitchen
and just kind of been there
since the mithril factory
shutdown are gone.
The metal tools are gone.
- Where's dad?
- Oh, your father ran out,
there was a union meeting
they were sort of calling
so he's at the union hall.
- For what?
- Give me an insight check.
- 23.
- It's nothing,
your mom is keeping a secret.
- What is it?
- Nothing.
- That's not true.
- Calling me a liar?
- Yeah, I'm calling you a liar
because you're lying to me.
- Well, maybe I wouldn't lie
if you didn't call me a liar.
- What's happening.
- What, I don't know.
- Yes, you do.
- Look, your father's at the union hall.
It looks like for the time being that
talks with management have terminated.
- Talks with management have terminated,
put it vaguer, please.
- They were trying to get management
to come back to reopen
the mithril factory.
And it looks like at the moment,
there's not gonna be any more negotiating
and not in the way where
they reached an agreement.
In the way where people are
kind of walking away from the table.
- All right.
- Are you happy?
- No.
- Well, me neither.
So that makes two of us.
And you see that Nona looks and just goes,
I am happy.
[all laughing]
You see that your mom
looks and says, so you know
your father, yeah, your
father got the news
a little bit beforehand.
And so he is at the union hall right now.
But looks like they were
closed for a little while.
And that the mithril
factory is probably not
gonna reopen which is fine.
It just means that we're gonna have
to look through for something,
we're just gonna need it,
we're just gonna need
a little bit of grace, that's all.
If you could, I wouldn't hate it.
You see she winks back at you.
And as you get ready for
school, I think that you,
as part of that 23 insight check
that doesn't explain why
the mithril tools are gone.
And you're not quite sure
what that's about.
- Yeah, could I like go to the factory
before I go to school?
- For sure, yeah, you
can head to the factory
before you go to school.
On your way there,
you see your dad out in the neighborhood
walking to his car as you're
on the way to the mithril
factory to go look for it.
And you see him,
so yeah, you see him
walking back to his car.
And also he's got a little
bag of something in his-
- Can I be in his car when he gets in?
[all laughing]
- Yeah, your dad, Carmine,
gets into the driver's
seat, gets in and goes,
holy sh*t, oh, Jesus!
- Hi, daddy.
- What are you doing?
What do you, sweetheart,
my princess, my angel.
You know when you get into a car
and there's someone in there
and you didn't know they
were gonna be in there
that usually means you're
about to die, right.
- Yeah, that's aside the point.
So what's going on?
[tense music playing]
- What you mean, what's going on?
- I mean, what's going on?
- Oh, you, did your mom spill the beans?
- Yeah, but she didn't even have to.
- Listen. Luch, she worries,
your mom worries, we know it, okay?
- What do you have?
- My angel, my princess, daughter,
and he says, this is for you.
And he hands you a bag.
He says, I know that your
next year at school is starting up
and you're out of gemstones for revivify.
And I know that you would hate
for any of your friends
to be permanently dead,
wouldn't we all?
So you know, that's for you
and that's on your old man.
- Where'd you get this?
- What do you mean where'd I get it?
- I mean, where'd you get it?
- Young lady, that's
none of your business,
make a perception check for me.
- Natural 20.
[all cheering]
- Let's go!
- All right!
- Uh, oh, daddy, you gotta tell.
- Ooh, daddy, you gotta tell.
- As you were looking at you
father trying to read him,
your eyes move past him to
what's on this random block in Elmville,
which is a pawn shop.
And you look into the glass case there
and you see a number of
mithril working tools.
- [Izzy] What did you do?
- What do you mean what did I do,
I did nothing, I got them from a friend.
They're a friends.
- Did you give away your tools?
- What does it matter to you?
What does it matter to you what I do
to take care of my family,
I'm your father, you're a kid.
Why do you got a problem
with me taking care of you?
- I don't.
- Okay then, so when I hand you
five diamonds in a bag,
how about a thank you.
- I'll give you a thank you.
[gasps]
Could I cast animate objects on the tools
and make them come into the car for-
- You cast animate objects,
you see this ancient,
small it's for mithril working,
it's for the finest,
armor making and mithril working.
This hammer glows red for a moment,
burning hot mithril eyes
opening the face of the hammer
and it pops up and you see,
literally like legs made
of the wooden handle
and arms made of the wooden handle.
And it goes, thanks kid.
We're getting the f*ck outta here
and smashes the glass.
And you see, it's a jail break, go!
Fellas, go, go!
- Open up the window and drive!
- And you see that the
tools get out and you see that
one of the other tools,
there's a sort of like a pair of tongs
that smashes another case
grabs a g*n out of the pawn shop
and just says, I've got you covered.
[imitates g*nshots]
- Oh, my God!
[all laughing]
- We know what you want, boss, we got you.
And you see that a bunch of these tools,
one of them takes out
a like quick crow bar.
One of them that is a crowbar
is grabbed by another crow bar
and crow bars the trunk of the car open.
And they all leap into the back.
- I've opened the window for you.
- What's that, nah, we are good,
[bangs table]
drive!
And your dad tears off
and you see, he goes,
as he's driving, he's like,
I don't wanna be a f*ck
criminal, Ostentatia.
- You are!
- Now.
- Yeah, well,
[stutters]
everybody knows what you do,
what you've been doing
trying to keep the factory open, okay?
So we're gonna keep that
f*ck factory open.
- Your dad pulls over, gets
out of the car and says,
you want to steal the tools,
you want to grab them,
that's your business.
I'm not gonna be parented by my kid.
I can take care of you, okay?
I can take care of you.
And he walks away leaving you in the car.
- Okay, tools, let's go to the factory.
[all laughing]
- Tools head out to the factory.
We move to a beautiful forest glade,
a massive Holly tree
stretches over the glade.
This is a beautiful home
[light music playing]
that is mostly outdoors
rather than indoors.
There is a beautiful
little multi-bed eco yurt,
geodesic eco yurt,
but there's chickens out here
and outdoor work benches
and beautiful garden.
It's one of those things
where it's just like
do here happens outside.
Erika, please describe the yurt to us
and everything going on inside.
- So Danielle rolls out of bed,
just like slips on the Birkenstocks
and just walks out as is.
The yurt and the sort of
geodesic yurt has been built
to fully integrate with the ecosystem
of the surrounding area.
The Holly tree is enormous.
It has spread its shade and its branches
over a number of like tiny little huts
similarly integrated into the ecosystem.
Danielle pops out and this place
is fully off the grid,
on her way out she
splashes water on her face.
She goes and she picks up the kombucha
from the jug in the corner,
takes a swig.
She goes on outside and-
- You walk out with orbiting
asteroid belt of stones and pebbles
moving around her as
she levitates in space.
Your Elven mom, Alyria,
floats, sees you come out,
exits her sorceress meditation and goes,
uh oh, is the sun rising
twice on the same day?
- Oh, my God.
- Is there a beautiful sunrise
in the middle of the
day, my darling daughter?
- Dawn's greetings, Alyria.
- Dawn's greetings, my sweet daughter.
Oh, I can feel the earth
celebrating you through the ground.
- Man, yeah, they're having a rager.
- Yeah, oh, wow, a rager.
Oh, oh, someone's got school
and friends on the brain.
I remember those parties,
those wild times when I was young.
And that's a part of
the earth's spirit too,
the wild part, yes.
- Yeah, you are a legend, ma.
- Your human mom, Winona, comes out.
Winona is wearing like
jeans, flannel, boots.
She is very proudly wearing like age.
She's like probably in her late fifties,
she's got like gray, messy bun.
She's got two hooks and a hay bale
that she's moving out
somewhere and she goes,
oh, there's my little cactus flower.
- Winona, hey.
- Oh, hey.
[fan flapping]
[Brennan laughing]
- Oh, there she is, sweetheart.
So your fey sorcerer Elven mom
and then your human ranger mom,
you see she comes over and gives you a hug
and it's a long hug.
And it's a good two and a half minute.
- [Becca] Just like Erika's.
- Wow, wow, wow, wow.
There you go, there you go.
- Beautiful, yeah.
- That's nice, yeah.
- It's good, the body wants affection.
It wants touch.
Oh, I love you, I love you so much.
And you're just in that hug
as a little postal truck trundles up
with some mail way out here
at the end of the range.
And you see a little halfling
postal worker, Bud Cubby,
your your little postal worker, he goes.
oh, hey, there,
yeah, it's all our friends,
it's the
Hamstock-Barksdale-Barkstock family.
- Hi, Mr. Cubby.
- Oh, hey.
Kiddo, I gotta thank you so much.
The other week when we
got that intel about
that pipeline, that
crystal extraction pipeline
and we had to go burn it down,
you were just clutch there, kiddo,
I've never seen so many bugs in my life.
You really destroyed a lot
of corporate infrastructure
and I love to see it.
- Oh, Bud, nah, it was nothing, you know,
all of the incredible pyrotechnics that
have just completely destroyed
the foundations down to the rubble
of that whole warehouse,
man, that was all you.
- You sure know how to make fella feel
like a million bucks, that's great.
Well, you know, it's wonderful to see you.
I hope the new school
year treats you well.
And you gotta fight the power
and take it down from the inside.
- Absolutely, down with the man.
- Oh, for sure, all right,
you gals, you have a great time out here.
- Good luck destabilizing the system, Bud.
- Ah, you too, Yelle, be well, kiddo.
And drives off your, your
moms look over and go.
Wow, that's really wonderful.
Look at the positivity that
you bring out in people.
- You know, I just kind of bring out
what's there to begin with,
you can't germinate a seed from nothing.
- From almost nowhere your moms take
two sips from the most enormous
ceramic mugs of matcha you've ever seen.
[laughing]
- As she's talking about that,
she's gathering things
like mushrooms everywhere.
And like, you know, free-range
herbs just all around.
Like, thank you, thank you.
And just, I wanna do something to keep,
you know, our whole,
not-a-cult sustainable, right.
And that means sometimes
taking drastic action,
because as wonderful as it is
to be completely off the grid,
completely independent of
any sort of capitalist structure.
All my friends, all my colleagues,
they are shackled by
the oppressive systems
that had been built up over generations.
And we gotta free them
from that, you know.
- Your mom's looking at you,
give me an insight check.
[papers rustling]
- 18.
- Your mom's look at you
agreeing with everything you're saying,
but you feel a hint of concern
from them in some way
and you see them just share a look.
- What's on your minds, moms?
- You see that Alyria says,
my beautiful star shine,
I love your conviction.
And I love...your conviction.
[laughing]
And you see that Winona says,
Ah, I love your conviction too sweetheart,
just to make sure you...
Hey, why don't you check on your pals?
- Oh man, wow, Penny
sent like 30 messages.
[all laughing]
- Hi, good morning, you're amazing,
I love you, can I get a ride, okay.
- Yelle, as you're checking your messages,
you actually see a little
email thing from Aguefort.
and actually all of you get an alert
of an email from Aguefort
with a newsletter
that comes the sort of like a little like,
hey, the new year's starting up
at beginning of the year whatever thing.
And the other thing you get
in it is an email saying that
you all actually are going to allowed
to skip your first period to
come meet with principal Aguefort
who wants to have special meeting with
your adventuring party in particular.
You see in the little
newsletter, Danielle,
there's a group photo of
the junior year druid class
all together doing like
a group druidic project
to like awaken this Grove.
You're not in it.
And you see them all smiling
and looking at the camera.
It's clearly all the kids that
you're in Druid class with.
And you're not there.
- Well, I'm just gonna
sh**t off a little message
to one of my classmates.
Say like, oh, hey, awoken
the Ash Grove, huh?
Sweet, what-
Oh, I must've missed that, yeah.
- The message shoots off
and hangs there unanswered
for as long as you care to look at it.
- Ouch.
- Read receipt?
- Oh, f*ck.
- [Erika] I'm going to k*ll them all.
- And Danielle, you go to school.
Give me an insight check real quick.
- Dirty 20.
- You look back at your text
history with this person.
This is like the first
message you sent to them
in like maybe like six or eight months.
- I'm busy, you know,
we all live busy lives.
- Exactly, we all live busy lives.
You all arrive at school.
All of you gather and see each other
in principal Aguefort's office
at beginning of the school day.
- Hi
- Oh, hi.
[lips smacking]
- Mwah, mwah, mwah mwah.
- I hug each of you,
but it's just your waist
down that you feel it.
- Just cause it's from the waist down
doesn't mean it isn't just as
beautiful as one of our hugs.
- In a poof of smoke,
Principal Arthur Aguefort appears
the seven, chosen champions,
I have fantastic news.
Your adventuring party is being
broken up at the end of the year.
- What? No.
- And that's all for this episode
of "Dimension 20 The Seven".
- Oh, no.
- No.
- Tune in next time.
[all clapping]
Your adventuring party
is being disbanded at the end of the year.
- I just categorically
have to say no to all of that.
- It's a broken system.
And who are you to deny us
these bonds forged in fire?
- Forged.
- We also didn't think-
- Surely the dissolution
of the structure of your
group of beloved friends
shattered against the
rocks of the material world
with the endless ticking of time,
time, time, by grain of sand.
Doesn't mean you can't stay in touch.
- What do you expect us to do next year?
- Graduate in your year, Miss Wallace.
- Can I roll intimidation?
- Listen here, you're not
leaving until I say so.
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11x01 - Party of Seven
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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.