Beneath Dark Wings | Ep. 73 | Bargains and Broken Things: Part 1

Welcome to Legends of Avantris. I'm Mikey Gilder and you're listening to Beneath Dark Wings. Here's what happened last time. So welcome back to Beneath Dark Wings. If you have just been binging this and you just watched the episode of the eclipse right before this one, two years have passed. And so I want every so it may feel perhaps in the context of the universe that we're getting back into it. Things might be forgotten. It may take us more time to shake off the rust. I just want you to keep in mind if you've been binging this entire campaign that the campaign started in 2018. It is currently 2024. Just to put that in perspective and that this is it's been two years since the most recent episode. So we are just going to get back into it for the last four episodes of the campaign. So please bear with us. If you're wondering why did they forget that? Why is that not a thing? Why doesn't it feel like they just experienced the apocalypse? We're going to get back into it. We appreciate your grace. Thank you so much. With that, I really skimmed through things for this recap. That's okay. I skipped a lot. It is seven full pages singles based. Oh, wowie. Wowie is that. Are you ready to let me get into character? Let me get my pen ready. There's people that say I'm on episode eight or I'm on episode 12. Listen closely because you're going to get a very quick and dirty recap. Buckle up. Of the entire fucking campaign. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to read this and then at the end we'll have time for questions that are for things that I forgot to mention that you think are relevant. We can tell to everyone and then we will get into the session. We'll ease into it. How does that sound? I love that Mike. Like the hot springs episode. I love the hot springs episode. I think we all need. Hey boomers, remember hot tub time machine? Yeah, I do. Remember kangaroo jack? I found a bunch of cars in my pocket. I got honey all over my legs. You know kangaroo jack is like literally the biggest false advertising bait and switch like for all movies. Yeah. Anyway, Derek, I didn't know you had a pen on there. This is I love Andy. Yeah. I got a Samurai cat. How may I help you? Whatever this is from Tokyo Underground, Great Robin Place in DC. This says upwardly mobile for some reason. Book nerd. We got this at PAX. PAX is a white lotus finger cross. I heart Andy. Easy to make fun to wear. You know, I read that from here. It's easy to make fun of. I'm like, well, that's pretty self aware Derek. One knee and psychic damage. I take four psychic damage. Where's Bardrock? Yeah, you still Bardrock. Yeah. No, Bardrock, the back. The pen actually snapped off. I can solder it for you. Oh, I can solder it for you. Oh, and then this is, this says, I love that, emotional support cleric and I got it for Iris and I got it. I mean, it was given to me by a mod and thank you. Okay. Our story began at the crossroads in the dense forests of Korovakia, a militant human nation on the continent of Striga that is constantly at war with its three neighboring nations. Brought to this land for various reasons, they decided it was safer to travel the dangerous wooded paths together and quickly discovered a village that had been savaged by a plague that turned its victims into a city of terror. And quickly discovered a village that had been savaged by a plague that turned its victims into frothing beastmen. I'll pause here to introduce the characters. We had Toa Kamenui who is searching for the four wind spirits of his home who had protected them from a malevolent volcano god and they had gone missing and he had followed them here. We have Felix Ackerman whose little brother had been taken by the military and he has never been able to find him since. We have Capriccio De Sesto, you can call him deprice, Caprice, not deprice, who had seen in a pamphlet an ancient tome that there was a prophecy for him to arrive at Striga due to the nature of his line and his descendants. We have Lifty who is coming here to help Iris but also on the general lookout for her mother having never actually met her and then Iris of the Sands, she had arrived with Lifty after receiving a vision from Anubis of a string, sarcophagus and chains and the like. And Herja, Anbelhardt, had been, her father had gone missing and was on the way to Striga and she was looking for him. So at this town after investigating the town that had been affected by this beast plague, after finding one infected survivor they brought him to the town of Kierstein where the brotherhood of Lapuard, the god of drink, took him in to attempt to heal him but not before rescuing a belligerently drunk bugbear named Jamity. There they learned that all was not well in Corvacia, people were going missing daily and the ogres, etans and giants of the Highlands were more active than they had ever been. Investigating the missing people they discovered that these giant kin had allied with a massive horde of beastmen known as the Horn Legion taking on the gift of the beast and joining forces to march towards Zentra, the capital of Corvacia where they presumably sought to bring down all civilization on Striga. On this adventure they met Nestor and Nora Strongarm, a brother's sister duo who were hunters at the Lockfeather Lodge which housed an order of hunters pledged to slay the beast that threatened the people of this dangerous land. They returned to the lodge with the strong arms only for it to be attacked by a flock of bird-like demons who attempted to destroy a magical seal beneath the lodge. After the carnage the huntsmaster revealed that he was a master of the 13th order, a secret society sworn to protect the seals that imprisoned Thar's Doom, the chain god, a horrifically powerful elder god of entropy and madness. With the danger of his release being clear the party left the lodge with the hunter captain, Ravalli Frewin, whose entire squad had been annihilated by fiendish creatures near the mountains. Returning to the scene of the slaughter they discovered that this was the entrance to an enormous maze where cultists of the demon lord Baphomet and the deposed archdevil Moloch were performing rituals and child sacrifices to aid in the horned legions advance. The party followed this nearly endless labyrinth and exited out a secret door into the heart of Zentra. Realizing that there were bad agents in the capital city and that they were in way over their head they began to investigate a conspiracy that went up to the media wing of the Korovakian government and eventually discovered that one of the highest ranking officials of the nation, General Kujata, had turned traitor and was a minion of the cult of Baphomet and Moloch. With this knowledge the party stopped an assassination attempt by Kujata on High General Virgil Zern, the ruler of all Korovakia. After revealing everything they knew to the High General, Zern entrusted them as his wings of the raven and they joined forces to protect the city as the horned legion attacked with great fiendish machines of war and hordes of demons along with herds of beastmen. In the battle for Zentra the human sacrifices triggered the manifestation of an avatar of Moloch himself that the party faced in battle alongside Zern, greatly empowered presumably by the raven queen, the patron deity of Korovakia. In the final moments of the battle the demons and the beastmen abandoned Moloch to be slain, revealing it to be a massive sacrifice that brought forth an avatar of Baphomet into the world. The moment this ritual concluded the horned legion retreated into the dark woods and began to move away from Zentra. In the aftermath of the battle Zern rewarded the party and sent them on another mission that was proving even more dire than the wounded and fragmented horned legion. The neighboring nation of Ereos, ruled by the Ocaxian court, an aristocracy of Owl Erococra, was becoming more aggressive and there was an immense increase of magical storms raising overhead. To help whatever dark machinations were occurring Zern sent the party to meet with the Rootwood Alliance, a group of rebels that operated on the floor of Ereos while the wealthy nobility lived in luxury and treetop cities built amongst of normally massive trains. After being welcomed by the rebel leader a Tabaxi named Warrior's Heart, the insurgents were attacked by enforcers of the Ocaxian court forcing the survivors to retreat along with the party. The party sought refuge in a magically hidden garden that was sacred to the Cult of Garrix. This cult of fanatical lizardfolk had been planning and uprising for centuries and entrusted the party with dozens of vials of specially treated oil that was powerful enough to ignite the magically fireproof treetop cities of the Erococra into blazing dragon's fire. Along the way, Bugbear bounty hunters failed to kidnap Lufty, who seemingly was important to the designs of the Owlfolk, and Toa came face to face with Makutu, the rival who had stolen away the windspear from his home islands. Makutu barely escaped but lost his jaw in the process and after the bounty hunters were dispatched the party spared a misguided bugbear named Zorbeck who became a grateful ally and also cut Caprice. That's not what happened! That didn't happen! Stop making this up! Move on, you long-time bugbear! I didn't write that in there. The party finally made their way into the treetop cities of the Owlfolk, securing magical rings that disguised them as nobles with Robas bust alibis so they could move incognito and besting the ruthless assassin, Tybur, the silent death. They eventually arrived in Kaliri, the capital of Erios, and quickly connected with a faction of the nobility that had lost trust in their warmongering ruler, Commodus. After learning of a forthcoming assassination of Lord Commodus, the party attended a masquerade where the conspirators were exposed and publicly executed and the Madden ruler left to the hurricane's eye to conduct a ritual that would bring an end to the traitors of Kaliri as well as the other nations of Striga, all in the name of reclaiming the former glory of Erios, which had once spanned the entirety of Striga. The party pursued Commodus to the hurricane's eye, and this is a little fancy for me. Sorry. Take it. Oh, that's nice. Oh yeah, Mike, you missed the part where Jamity was described as smelling like Bigfoot's dick. I know you have to keep it brief, but these are important details. Please hold all of these details till the end of the video. We can literally go through and see what I missed. That will actually be very important. The party pursued Commodus to the hurricane's eye, a great tree in the center of a storm-swept valley. Before climbing the tree, Toa had a final confrontation with Makuto, killing the traitorous Goliath and putting an end to the threat of his volcano god. The party then confronted Commodus and saw he had imprisoned six wind spirits to fuel an ascension into a world-ending elemental monstrosity, an elder tempest. Commodus revealed that Lufty had a wind spirit in her soul and ripped it from her to transform into the elder tempest and began to fly toward Kaliri to kill all the traitors before killing the rest of Striga. The party rescued Lufty's mother, Alkyra, a jinn in one of the imprisoned wind spirits, and she teleported them to the eternal veil of Aka, a floating island in the elemental planet Eir where time does not pass. It was here they recovered from their wounds and learned that within each of the wind spirits was a wind duke of Aka. All of them, seven of them, angels born of both divine and elemental construction and biology, who had once ended a war against chaos millennia ago and were dormant until the time came to prevent another war. First, they had to deal with Commodus. So they received the elemental boons of a powerful cloud giant named Nimbonsi who teleported them back to Kaliri right before the elder tempest attacked. There, the party faced and defeated Commodus's new storm owl form and with the help of the seven wind dukes, they smote him once and for all. In the subsequent celebration, all was not well as the fanatical cultists of Garex enacted their plan and in an instant half of Kaliri was set ablaze and thousands were burning alive. To spare the city, Lyfty wished for her jinn mother to save all of them and Alkyra sacrificed herself to bring down a magical rain that put out the dragon fire and killed the malevolent cultists. From that noble sacrifice, Alkyra became an angel herself and the eighth wind duke. New leadership was established in Eirios and a peace treaty between the nation and Korovaki was brokered and the party returned to Aka to recover. In the eternal veil, the wind dukes returned to begin waking thousands of obsidian skinned elemental beings of air called the Vati who had been in stasis in Aka until the time came for them to wage war against chaos once more. However, a black gem that had once been Commodus's brought the demonic corruption of a powerful avian demon to Aka and all of the ancient records were destroyed and one of the wind dukes was gravely wounded and corrupted. These dark tidings made it clear that the unchaining of Thar's dune was nigh and the wind dukes told the party that the only thing told them of the only thing that could stop his chaos, an ancient artifact called the rod of law, which had been used once to win a war against chaos but had split into seven parts and spread across the plains to ensure that the power could never be abused again. With this charge, the party returned to Zentra where Zern told them that he knew that a piece of the rod of law had headed north into the neighboring orc nation of Grand, brought by none other than Herc's father. They learned that the horn legion had headed north as well, destroying several seals of the 13th order on their warpath and that their friend Ravalli had headed north to track them and sabotage their advance. The party then teleported to the northernmost outpost of Korovakia and made their journey into Grand where they received urgent communication from Ravalli. They found him at a town ravaged by a beast plague, his arm ripped off and about to be slain by a beastial orc. After slaying the orc and using reincarnation, he was brought back as a halfling. The now halfling orc named Kargash swore vengeance on the horn legion and took off after it on his goat, but not before telling the party to take Krasang past through the strippant spine mountains if they wanted to cut off the horn legion and arrive at the capital of Grand Moghre Kai before the horn legion led by the avatar of Baphomet himself. They made their way to the mountains, but the nightmares of Caprice made manifest reveal that his soul and the soul of all of his descendants and predecessors are owned by Glacia, an archdevil of the Nine Hells, and he would only be freed if he did her bidding. After arriving at the strippant spine mountains, the party made the treacherous journey through the past and took refuge in an abandoned Korovakian watchtower. It was there they found records of an 18 year old Virgil Zern staying there over 40 years prior. That night Caprice was called to the zenith of the mountain in a waking dream where he finally found the statue of an avian demon man with the name written Thrice Pizzuzu. Finally discovering the being that had been harrowing them this entire time, they continued to the other side of the mountains and were captured by orc soldiers in Moghre Kai. Brought back to the city, they found it to be beautiful and peaceful, almost unsettlingly so. They learned that Gron had once had a dozen warring tribes until they were united by the long lived war chief Shenruo Frostfang with the guidance of his spiritual advisor, a snow leopard to Baxi named Golden Lotus. She had introduced him to a benevolent goddess called the Eternal Blossom and taught him how to quail the inner rage that he had and live a life at peace. They found her as father, Torvald Anvill Hart, who had strangely pledged himself to the Eternal Blossom and it was revealed that Golden Lotus had seen visions of the horn legions attacked and had already collected six out of the seven pieces of the rod of law to destroy Bathamath. However, she needed help retrieving the final piece from the Plain of Limbo after it had been taken by the Gith Zari that called that plain home. With the help of her Kirin companion, Hezaki, the party killed the head Gith Zari named Shivatu and brought back the final piece where it was reforged into a great glaive to be wielded by Shenruo. While Torvald forged it, the party handled the corruption that lingered from the last time it was used. In the cleansing ritual that brought them to the past, they learned that the rod of law was shattered in defeating Miska the Wolf Spider, the former Prince of Demons that led the Oberus, primordial beings from another universe that were the demons before the demons now as we know them. In the final moments of their battle against the Vati and the Winddukes, Miska was struck down, Pazuzu swooped in to devour his remnants, and the lesser demon that had been subjugated by the Oberus turned on their masters and the army was annihilated. However, Herczja was slain in this vision, which greatly affected her living form and required her to be healed by Golden Lotus as the Horn Legion approached. Herczja then revealed herself to be unsettlingly aligned with the Eternal Blossom as well as Rivali Freewing, who had sacrificed his former greatest passion, freedom. After a great feast with the Warchief, the legions of beastmen and demons finally attacked, sacrificing captured devils to conjure an enormous labyrinth to destroy the walls and defenses of Mogrechi. While the defenders went to defend against the Horn Legion, the party went to defend the seal of Thar's Dune beneath the city and faced the Avatar of Ba'fumet himself once he arrived. In a brutal battle, Khargesh arrived to get his vengeance, dying in the process. The party then gave Shingaro an opening and the Warchief slayed Ba'fumet with his glaive, but at the cost of his own life essence as he withered and aged rapidly before finally expiring. In the aftermath, Golden Lotus revealed herself to be a gold dragon named R'jani, the Eternal Blossom. The glaive was now empowered with the power of Ba'fumet and she could now spread her mind control with a rapid spread similar to that of Beast Plague once the forging was complete. She retreated to her lair with Hrsja and Torval to finish forging this weapon. The party pursued and fought through her lair, slaying R'jani but not before she killed Caprice. In death, Caprice was in hell, tortured by Glacia and he called upon Pazuzu three times, who brought him to Pazunia, his lair of the Abyss. While brokering a deal, Azmedeus, the lord of the Nine Hells himself, spoke through Caprice and whisked him away to his own chamber where he made a new deal to defeat Pazuzu. As collateral, he took T'Hrshja and Torval who had been corrupted by the Shatter Glaive. Return to life by Azmedeus, who revealed he had once been an angel that had fallen due to Pazuzu's treachery. Caprice joined his friends and they went back to Aqa to return the Rod of Law to the Windooks after leaving R'vali with the Orcs to teach them how to be free. The party then were sent by Zern to the eastern front of the country to venture into Skethronil, where the necromanic Shadar-Khai that had been warring with Koravakia for centuries had been performing dark magic. He had also learned that kidnapped children had been sent to Skethronil over the past years and very likely, Phyllis' brother Milo had been sent as well. Zern connected them with a count of Skethronil who thought may be an ally in opposing Vorok, the Kerrian King, a vulture-like creature that ruled the nation. On the way to meet this count, they rescued a young girl from Ghouls who had been bringing her to Castle Gloomvale. They met the count, who was a vampire named Esher Kreskov, whose daughter Ravinovia, another long-lived vampire in the body of a child, had abandoned him and made a deal with a dark entity known as Drizlash the Nine-Eyed Spider and turned into a sadistic monster working with the Kerrian King. The little girl, Vestani, was captured by flesh-crafted abominations sent by Ravinovia and Esher swore to help them. He guided them south to the county of Barovia where they met the Vestani and the count named Alexi von Zarovish. They investigated the missing people being taken by the large werewolf pack that lurked in the beastwood and discovered that the Shadar Kai had been extorting them and threatening them to kill the daughter of the pack leader, Old Scratch, which is why they had been aggressive against the humans of Barovia. A peace was brokered between the werewolves and the crusaders and they pledged their might against the Kerrian King and his ghouls. They then investigated the Amber Temple to find a way to save Ravinovia but failed to find any salvation, save killing her. Then the combined forces of the Valley of Barovia rode against the undead hordes of Skethronel while the party infiltrated Castle Gloomvale. There they met a prisoner named Zelix Scythorgos who helped them fight through the castle, sneak past the Kerrian King, finally facing Ravinovia who was a spider abomination that ate her father whole. After a brutal fight, Escher killed his own daughter but then called upon Pazuzu to save them both in a desperate play. They then discovered the main project that Ravinovia had been working on, the Raven Child, which was an avian abomination with two heads flesh crafted from two human children, little Velasca who they had once saved and Milo Ackerman, Felix's brother. Vorac appeared revealing his plan to use the Raven Child to depose the Raven Queen Goddess but Zelix revealed himself to have been Virgil, Zern and Disguise who put a pestilent curse on the Kerrian King. However Vorac escaped and the castle teleported to a realm beyond the mist of death and Zern took the Raven Child to stop the end of the world. The dread domain they were in was Harkir, a realm of death ruled by a mummy lord named Akatep who's soul had been ripped into seven pieces and spread across the realm. However, one of these pieces had been put into Iris at birth by Anubis, her own god. With Akatep trying to capture Iris to reunite the pieces of his cause so he could finally die, the party stopped his attempt to birth a new god and the remnants of the Chaos God set, or with the remnants of the Chaos God set and finally faced Akatep atop his pyramid after he sacrificed Iris and reunited his cause. Oh also out killing Vorac in the process, I forgot to mention. After killing the mummy lord and his soul being brought back to Arcadia for judgement by Anubis, the final seal which was in the chest of Akatep was broken and it was only a matter of time before Thara's Dune was released. The parties joined Virgil's Zern at the black pyramid that served as Thara's Dune's prison and attempted to enact the High Generals master plan to send Thara's Dune to the prison of the Raven Queen's fortress of memories. With the empowered Talangar blade and with assistance from the Seven Wind Dukes, the Rod of Law and the Raven Child, Thara's Dune was smited and devoured. However, before Zern could finish his plan, Pazuzu himself appeared to stop him, devouring Zern and transforming him into a crow demon named Raoum, consuming the power of Thara's Dune in the process. However, in one final act of defiance, devouring Zern caused a silvery curse of the Raven Queen to afflict Pazuzu, which kept the apocalyptic power of Thara's Dune at bay. The party brought the saved children back to Skethronil, where they discovered Esher's betrayal who broke into Count Alexi's castle and stole the shattered hairpin of Stradania von Zarovic, which was imbued by the power of the Raven Queen and needed by Pazuzu to manage Zern's curse. With no time to waste, the party teleported back to Xentra to discover that Bradley Furman, a traitor who would serve the demons all along, was going to sacrifice the entire nation to begin the eclipse in Usher and the Apocalypse. After offering them power in exchange for joining the flock of Pazuzu, the party was able to save most of Koravakia, but were unable to save the denizens of Xentra, who were entirely transformed into avian demons that flew into a black disk that covered the sun, causing an eclipse that opened a portal to Pazunia, Pazuzu's realm. The party flew to stop the apocalypse as thousands of bird demons spilled from the portal, which were then met by the Vaatee, who held the demons back as the party entered the realm of Pazuzu. Seeing the new demon king atop his dark ziggurat performing a ritual to summon forth the Queens of Conclave, a union of all the Oberoth Lords still in existence, to turn this existence into their domain. However, before they could face Pazuzu, Count Esher, transformed by Pazuzu's corruption, opened a portal and whisked the party to a strange realm within the Abyss, another layer of an Oberoth Lord, asking for help in saving his daughter and in the process, offering the chance to break the power that Pazuzu had claimed. Jesus fucking Christ. Gotta give it up. Well done. What a great summary. I relived the whole campaign. We told a lot of story in 36 episodes. Holy moly. Those sessions are long. Not bad. Apparently only 20 minutes. All right. That's not bad. We should put that in Discord for folks that want to read it. Yes. So let's do that at some point. We can like multiple posts. Or just link the Google Doc. Yeah, it's basically 72 episodes. That's fair. Yeah, that's for sure. I need to get a missed. Someone mentioned that Zern was the father of Milo. Yep, Zern is Milo's father. We learned that Zern was sort of the forgotten child of King Barov, Vanzarovic. What else? It wasn't anything major that you missed. You didn't mention Strapon the Camel. Yeah, Strapon. Or the Sphinxes. Or when we turn into animals and Fodmummies. Well, we can't be here for a week for it. Yeah. Yeah, Fiona, Scratch's daughter was killed. She was turned into a horrible nuke, basically a silver nuke for the werewolf. That was fun. That was sad. Oh, I fixed that episode, right? The powers from Asma Dayas says not tall. I have no idea what you're talking about. Oh, I don't. Mine is already. I gotta hope I have mine. I'll have to find it. I bet you it was in my plot. I have the card. And I don't have it. Iron Oppression of Dis is what mine is called. Can you look for that in your Doc Demonspain? Disnut. Iron Impression. I don't think Iris took one, right? Correct. Just like Gange and Prime. Yeah. Clarex. Yeah. Iris. So I have Mantle the Lion King. Oh, man. I forgot I did this shit. I'm going to post this in our Discord. Amala Domini. But either way, that's what it is. Okay, I do have that. I have the reign of the Eternal Sun. Does that sound familiar? No, it would be named. Well, I mean, that's probably a thing, but it would be named if it wasn't Layerspell. I linked the document. I linked them with all... I'm going to have to find that. Amala Domini. I'll make sure we get out of our 20 languages. Amala Domini. That sounds much more intimate. Great name. Amala Domini. It's crazy, because if I had a nickel for each one of my characters that had a power of dis, I'd have two nickels. That's very funny. He can rumble together. It's weird that it's happened twice. The other one's the exploited loophole of... You have five dreads, Mike. Yeah. I'm not used to having dreads. It wasn't a thing back then. Wow, that's right. I did have dreads, but we didn't get any. I didn't think it was... When we came back. I dreaded Feliz. That's fair. But it had only been an episode or two. It was just a handful of episodes. And we never got them. You all find yourself in an inky void. You see movement all around you. You float midair, able to will yourself forward, back, up and down in this strange place. You feel your whole person surrounded. Your skin is crawling. You feel like you hear something. And you can't tell. It doesn't sound like it's coming from the people next to you. But you can hear it. It's not... You're not sure if you're hearing it in your ear or in the back of your mind. And the backs of your neck are tingling as hairs are standing up on your hackles. As you feel like someone is watching you. Something is watching you. As the dark inky liquid all around you that you can somehow breathe. Somehow experience him. As Esher Krezkall floats before you. His blade now sheathed. Having told you that this was a realm of Erekes, the Forgotten Prince. An inky black void that this was... That this was a formerly... A broad, robust domain of whatever Erekes used to be. But him communing with a strange thing, an entity called him who washes from beyond the stars. Had turned this place into nothing. And that his name was never truly Erekes of who he was, of what he was, of what it was. Was forgotten by everyone, including himself. The first of the Oberoth Lords. The first of these Oberoth realms that you are now in. After asking to help Ravanovia. After asking to... After offering to help break the power of Miska the Wolf spider that had been consumed by Pazuzu. So long ago. Esher is almost drifting back as you see that his bald head is covered in feathers to almost form a hair. As the demonic corruption has absolutely increased as he has almost like a raven talon skin along his hands. That goes up to feathery elbows. As he looks at all of you. Simply waiting. What do you all do? I'm gonna look him in the eye. And uh... Was it worth it? Was it worth whatever deal you made? Saying its name? Do you have any regrets? I have nothing but regrets boy. Make no mistake. I have made mistakes my entire life. You heard my secrets. You saw my failures as a father. But... The things that I would do for my daughter. I do not want to think about that but I am trying... To help. This is... Perhaps the only way. After being granted the Aspins of Buzunion. And he coughs up feathers. And you see kind of this dark blood on the feathers. As they drift off into the Inky Void. He looks at you and he says... The only reason why... My new master... Can even hold the power of Thara's Doom. Is the feast he enjoyed so long ago. When he devoured the Prince of Demons. How do you know that... What you're doing is gonna be any different... Than what Zern tried. He tried to... Trick Pazuzu. And at the last moment Pazuzu was 13 steps ahead. Will you stop saying the name? Oh! You said it twice. You just say like Pee-Zizzle or something. Oh I forgot I'm supposed to be really scared of that name. Fish. That's too long. I know I like them stupid but not this stupid. Wait, don't you need to say them in secession? Yes unless it's in a song. Are you sure? I'm very sure. Alright. So you should be fine. You said things between it. Just don't say it again, okay? No Pee-Man, I'm sorry. Shut that sweet beautiful mouth. Honestly, I'm not even sure you should say Pee-Man. I think you should just... Yes, cover your mouth. That was really close. I'm sorry guys. The... Prince. The Dark Angel of the Four Winds. His mind is wracked by the torture of the Raven Queen. Every moment is agony. His mind is assaulted, his body is assaulted. It is a miracle that he has made it this far but I fear that it is everything he has consumed. The power of the Chain Guard, the power of the Prince of Demons. He wants to be the King of Demons to lead the Queen's Conclave, to be the King Consort to the Queen of Chaos who created the First Prince of Demons and then gave that power to Miska. I have not seen so much. Who's the Queen of Demons? The Queen of Chaos? The Queen of Demons? She was... the first one in that domain. That universe that died, that they killed. Pazuzu was the weakest of all of the Oberoth Lords by an insurmountable margin. But he was the cleverest. That is why he had to consume what was left of Miska. You saw it in your visions, didn't you? You participated in that battle? Yes. You saw what the Tenari, the lesser demons did to their masters. The Oberus are broken. Bent. It is effortless for them to throw their lot in with Pazuzu. What choice do they have? But I believe that they can be his downfall. There is nothing that a demon lord hates more than another demon lord. So that's it. That's your whole plan. We're going to figure out a way to unleash the other demon lords on this one. A little persuasion. Never hurt. And then what? Yeah. When all of those demon lords have been unleashed on the P-Man. What then? How do we reign them in? How do we stop them from destroying the world? Yeah, if he's the weakest, then what do we do? When the stronger ones are there? He was the weakest. He is now arisen to be vastly more powerful than any of them ever had been. So what if they come out and they realize that and then... I don't know, fuck off and do demon things and then we just have a bunch of demons. Oh, that's a good point. That seems like more demons when right now all we have is one. We're going to fight twelve demons instead of one. Are you familiar with the saying, cut off the head of the snake? Are you familiar with that one, Felix? Yes, yes, we're familiar. Yes, we're familiar with this one. Grammatically, that makes sense, yes. If you deal with Pazuzu, they will see their opportunity. If you turn them against each other, they will devour him without a second thought. I feel it. I feel what it's like to think like a demon. That bastard Cern must have felt like this his entire life. I don't envy that man. How do we know this, always in some kind of trick? That you're just using us to save your daughter? I would not hesitate to use you to save Ravanovia to give her another chance. But we can do two things at once. We can kill two birds with one stone. I'll get it. You all look terrible. Like you've been torn apart. Do you expect to fight him like this, at full strength? What other choice do we have? We're not giving up. And that is exactly why I'm here. You may refuse my offer. I can open a portal right here. Send you back into Pazunia. It is the palace of 1001 closets. It is the plain of infinite portals. The plain of the yawning pits. No, I think we should rest. Can we rest here? We have time. Time passes slowly here, but it does not stop. Where are we exactly? You're in the Forgotten Land. It's a layer of the Abyss. You had been in Pazunia, the first layer of the Abyss. Now we are deeper, far deeper. A realm, its true origin long forgotten. Its true master, a mere shade of what he once was. He is now known as Aurex, the Forgotten Prince. Is there anything else here? Do you know if we're all alone? We are not alone. Great. Euryse is out there. They are all distracted with the ritual. They all wish to join Pazuzu on his ziggurat. They all wish to get the power he is promising, becoming the King of Demons. So is that what I'm feeling? Like I'm being watched? Is that what it is? Yes. Yes. But it's not a reek that is watching you. What is it? Who is it? It's what. He reached out to content. The stars extend far beyond this reality, but there are things far worse beyond. I had first hand experience of something of a kin to this thing watching us. Wow, it was the worst thing I've ever seen. What was it like? It was the end of all things. But this thing can only watch for now. Whatever it did to Euryse was thorough, but it gave. It gave it no hold here. I dare not speak its name. I wish I did not know it. I wish Pazuzu did not know so much. You mean both? No more names. No more invoking anything. We're done with all that. Him who watches beyond the stars. It's not his name though, is it? No. Oh, thank you. To say his name allows his eye to focus directly upon you. It allows him to stare into your soul, try to achieve his very aims. His noble aims. But you said last time, this guy's cousin or whatever, it was the end of all things, but obviously I guess it wasn't, right? It was pre-empted. Just like this apocalypse, we are trying to pre-empt. All right, so if we could pre-empt that end of all things, then we can pre-empt this end of all things of a few terrible bit. Everyone in Dintra. We gotta not think about that right now, Tau. We gotta press forward, we can do this. Who's gonna tell Captain Freewing about his mother? I don't know. We just, we have to keep moving forward. We can end this. I know we can. We can do anything together. We can find any solution to any problem. We just try hard enough. All right. And those people won't have been turned into horrible bird demons in vain. You said we have time? There is time, but the longer we linger, the more his gaze increases. Esher looks around. I am not concerned with Eryx, but it is that thing that peers into this realm. It concerns me. Do you hear it? Kind of. Do you feel it? It's like in the back of my mind, it makes my hair stand on it. Do you feel the disgust? Ooh, how I do. The disgust for what this place is. The disgust of what I've become. Do you have any way to go back? I don't know. I will try to find out. But we cannot think of anything else until the trints of the aerial planes, the dark angel of the four wings, is annihilated or cast down off his ziggurat. All right, well, I'm convinced. If you want to help us, then we can help you and just take care of everything. Do we all agree? Is that the way forward? I don't think we have any better plans amongst us. I think you're right. No, we were just going to fly right at him on a ziggurat, half dead. Weakened, yes. It's the plan. I'm excited about the plan. Let's do the plan. Okay. All right. What's the plan? Yes, what would you have us do? You brought us to this place, and we're being watched, but you don't like that we're being watched, and quite frankly, neither do I. Iris, think about how much you hate these demons. Can you picture it? Can you feel it? Oh, yes. What is watching us hates them far more than you or I ever could? If you use existence as a taint that has been corrupted, I can't say it's wrong. Oh, why do you think it did this to whoever Riggs was? Why do you think it turned him into not even a memory? But mortal life is required for such demons and corruption to fester. So the full extent of annihilation that him who watches from beyond the stars seeks, is total. We so discord. We turn them against each other. And with Pazuzu gone, it'll be like a power vacuum. They'll all try to move in at once, and it's like if we all tried to get through a door at the same time. None of us would get through, right? I think I would probably find a way to get through. Not if I'm going to get through the door. No, he would steamroll you, and then you'd fall to the ground and cry again. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. I would turn into a demon. Hector man crab, but worse. A hundred times worse. Now we'll never get him to rest. I have a pristos memory. But he needs to understand what we're dealing with. My dear friends. Yes, so darling. What were your names? I miss you, sir. There'll be time to mourn them when this is all done. All right? I'm not feeling so good. We'll solve that problem later. We'll go back there. We'll find Hector man crab. And we'll find him a nice Hector woman crab. And they'll have a bunch of Hector children crabs. They'll settle down. It'll be great. It's going to be fine. I don't want him to settle down. I was going to say, do we want to give him a good life or do we want to kill him? The best way to kill him is with kindness. I want to steam him and season him with an Asian asiary. Oh. Well, that's how we'll fucking do that. With all of this is done, we can go to the Mcconnie Islands and have a crab boil. We can absolutely cook him alive. Let's do that. All we have to do is make sure that the Mcconnie Islands, still there later. It's true. That'll be nice. All right, let's do it. Let's sew discord or whatever you said. But I think we need to rest first, right? We need to get some strength back. We also need a plan as to how we're going to go about sewing this discord. Oh, go ahead. It would mean that we need to contact these other entities. Yeah. I'm assuming making some sort of deals of our own, which I'm not quite happy about. Did you have further plans outside of do this thing or the details up to us? The details are out for discussion. How do we even go about contacting them? There are ways. It is surprisingly easy when there are demons who haven't been contacted or communed with in so long. It's almost like they're a lonely person, desperate for someone to talk to. Do you have a demonic roller dex that you can scroll through to help link us up with demons that would be appropriate for us to speak to by chance? Roller dex? Yes. Oh, okay, I heard something else. Roller dex. I have the sight of... Roller dex. Why is she saying roller dex? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I heard. What else would you have heard? I have the sight of Pazunia in the Oberiths in my mind, Caprice. I have the power of the infinite portals. I cannot raise my blade against another demon. I cannot kill or even speak to the Oberiths that Pazuzu is trying to trick. But I can speak to you. I can share my knowledge. I cannot even collect the parts of my daughter that Pazuzu ripped apart and scattered across these realms. But we can. That is right. All right, so step one, get some rest and we'll sleep for at least eight hours, sleeping or doing lighted activity. If if it was not for our good friend Virgil Zern, I could not even do this. Oh, the man and his gods do no secrets. And if it is any consolation, the dark angel of the Four Winds is in shrieking agony. It's nasty, certainly. I could feel him constantly watching me. I could feel him flying over me until I suppose was the moment that Thoriz Dune was released and Zern was devoured. And after that, I was commanded to retrieve the hairpin and while he has fashioned himself a crown fit for the king of demons, it is not enough to heal him, to cure him. But there is limited time. The power of Thoriz Dune within him grows. I will be undetectable for not much longer. For not much longer. All right. Where do we sleep? I don't really feel like sleeping in a floaty void. I mean, I could try to sleep. No, no, no, no, no, no. If we're gonna try to sleep here, we need to attach each other to each other's hips. I'll circle around. What if we just float apart over the course of eight hours and then we wake up in the void and this guy, hell. What the fuck is this? Mechanically. Mechanically speaking, you can choose a short rest here or you can choose a long rest here. But the, that will change things mechanically. The consequence. You have options, though. Once we're done resting, what is the next step? I didn't feel like we can choose how long we're going to stay here unless we know where we're going when we're done. I had an idea. Pazuzu was not always the king of demons. There has never been a king of demons, only princes. And Miska, the wolf spider whom you experienced defeating was not always the prince of demons. There was one once deposed, broken, cast aside by the queen of chaos herself to give that power to her lover, Miska. I propose we start with him. Use his hate, use his rage. He is allied with the others, only out of convenience and necessity. But he is mustering his power on his own. And who is it? One name is Obok's Ob. But I recommend not saying it in his presence. How do you spell that? Ob-O-X-O-B. Ob-O-X-O-B? Ob-O-B-O-Box-O-B. Ob-O-Box-O-B. Man. Demon names. I'll tell you. Ob-O-Box-O-B. Don't say it. He just said, don't say it. No, in front of him. Unless he's right here. Oh! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! These are powerful demon princes, right? We're just going to walk up to them and be like, hey. Yes, this office is very casual. Hey. I don't know what to expect. What if they just destroy us? On first sight? There is a risk of that. You don't inspire confidence. I'm being honest with you, Lufti. We've stared into each other's eyes and seen each other's souls. Do you think I would ever lie to you? Even after all this? Covered in feathers, and I'm still doubting. This is like... Not my finest moment. What? Oh, God, you were hotter then. Just pants still there. Well, I guess if we have no choice, we have no choice. But where do we find... him? We will find him in the Blurn Marshes. That is his layer. Oh, disgusting. But we must deal with Eriks and procure Ravnovia's head. It is in the void. It is in the darkest void. And that is where Eriks is as well. Well, maybe we should only spend mechanically 60 minutes rusting. Um, I'll look to you, Tarno, and you'll see that I'm... Felix is in rough shit. And I'll look at you and I'll say, I agree. It's a hell of a little bit of time, and I'll be ready. I can do this all day. And maybe with the help of Aris and Caprice, we can, you know, heal up a little bit and... and just relax and gain some of our energy. I know that General Fuhrman really had it out for you. Yeah. But he's gone now. He is forever. All of them are forever. Yeah. We don't have a lot of time to waste. So let's get to it. And I'm gonna... You'll see, like, I cross my legs. It looks like I'm sitting like I normally would on the chair or on the floor. And I pull out my spellbook and I start flipping through it. And I begin to take my short rest. Okay. I can float for a while. All right. Maybe with a little song. I pop my wine. Sure. I'm using my Arcane Recovery. I'll sing something nice and restful. I'm recovering a two and a six. Do we get a short rest? You'll enjoy a short rest, yes, mechanically. So you are choosing not to take a long rest, correct? Take your short rest. I'm using my Arcane Recovery. The two, they have to combine up to level eight. I'm recovering a six and a two. Just so you know. Okay. Do this by the book. Because it matters for old Felix boy. And then I'm using a fuckload of hit dice if I have any left. I only have four left. That's what I'm saying. I'm scared to look to be honest with you. If you spend a hit die, you can add... I have a bug. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. What could I add? You can add... I'm song of resting, so you can add an additional 1d10 hit points. How many is all of these? Sixes. Oh, you know what? I'll sing one of the first songs I ever sang. Here. Sing to us. Oh, the bitter winds are blowing in. And I'm already missing the city. Striga's cold and I have been told we're going to have to endure this kind of weather. I'm certain in time our enemies will find they're defeated and capture... And we capture that weird ass crown. I'll be your troubadour and sing you a tune. If you'll be my friends and my party too. No, I'm not asking much of you. Just fight a little, darling, fight with me. Oh. That was really nice. That was really pretty. That was really pretty. Thank you. An oldie but a goodie. I'll fight with you, Caprice. We're going to see this through the end. Oh, wait. Shit. I have so few hit dies. What the ass? What a terrible roll. Thank goodness you gave me that. I'm going to take your guys asses. You really had a... Actually, that healed me to max. That was very good that you gave me that. Yeah, let me roll that first. Shit. Let me know when everyone's done mechanically, taking care of their... One more hit die to go. Another 11. Let's fucking go. Back to my heart. Actually, I had my con every time and my con's pretty good. Con's plus four. What level is the party? 16. What are we? 16? Wow, you were going that. Goodness. Oh my god, this wasn't even close to enough. I need way more hit dies. Okay. Shit. I'm not... Oh, my reality, folks. My max HP was buffed by someone or something. Do I still have that? Oh, yeah, I was going to say I got a little bit of extra max HP as well. Did Iris do that and would that be over? Or... Fuck, if I know. It was probably aid if I had to guess. So it's buffed by 20. Oh, no, was it Heroes Feast? Do we have Heroes Feast? Yeah, it's max on the 25-20. Yes, you do have Heroes Feast. How long? 24 hours. So it's probably still on the max. Yeah, you still have 50. It's not for a long time. Okay. All right, then I still need to use three more hit dies, I think. So, aid max 28 or 20 max HP was aid for eight hours. You still have aid then. Thank you. Thanks, chat. If it was right before the further fight, then yes. Okay. So no Heroes Feast, right? I don't know. But we still have it for you now. I didn't have anything on mine. Okay. So you all have 20 or whoever was aided. I think it was the three of us, maybe. I would have done... I had it for sure. Probably because I didn't touch my... Oh, yeah. Yeah, because it wouldn't have been... I have no way of knowing. I just know that I have no spell slots. I was not paying attention. Why did we get the max HP modifier? It was from eight. So if you have it in your character, she'd leave it. Okay. Don't add it if you don't have it. And then so I actually need to mechanically take the short rest. Yeah, me too. One, two, three, four. Take short rest, confirm. Six, seven. Stones and... Okay. I got stone and bronze back. That's nice. I have one... I have one die left. I have two. I have two. I've used all of my hit dice. All of my hit dice. All right, I'm back to full. Did you send our... Yes, I did. I did. I did in the ERP channel. Nice. I have... Nice. In the Indiana Jones, even in the ERP server, he had his... Yeah, I've got two hit dice left and I am full health. Oh, that's right. That's what I'm... You just lost it. Sweet. I arcane recovered. I don't think there's anything else I can do. I think this is it. Oh. Oh. Okay. No. No. That's fine. I know long rest of you said this is bad for you. So that's gonna hurt. That's okay. That'll be fine. I'm not worried about it. Oh, dear. You all drift. And... you feel at peace. Almost unsettlingly at peace. As you drift in this inky void as you see the... almost like you're once again in kind of a drop of ink. As you see the liquid pooling all around you. I need everyone to make a wisdom saving throw. May I ask one question before I do? Yeah. While I'm taking my short rest, I'd like to maul over the name that Escher told us about. Yes. So does that mean anything to me in a visual? Oh. Make a arcana check based on what you had studying. Where's my GD-25? I got a 25. 25. 25. Especially now that I'm fluent in this one. You don't know what I taught you. Yeah. Except the DX that I was fluent in this one. Yeah. If you hadn't said that, I was going to say some fucking shit later. Oh, God. That'd be funny. For me. I would say that... that the... it is... it's seen to be a proper name. But I would say that you would have... I guess from your studies in the library... that you would have seen this name come up very briefly. Okay. In the studies of the various demons when you were studying Baphomet and other demons. As the Prince of Vermin. And basically the... And what I would say is that... you would have... there would have been warnings in dealing with... its minions and do not let the stingers pierce its skin. And because of... that's how they reproduce. I would absolutely share this information with my friends during our show. Yeah. What was the last thing you said that's how... They reproduce. So they reproduce. All right, the Prince of Vermin. Yeah. That sounds disgusting. I'll make my wisdom saving thrown out. Oh yeah. Sure. What everybody get? I got a 21. You pass. 25. Pass? Oh! I'm proficient in that. 20. Pass. Come on. What'd you get, Carissa? What? I don't want to be the only one. What? No! Was it saving throw? Fortunately I get a plus five because her... Oh. Fail with me. Oh, fail with me. I get a 12. Yes! I'm not the only one. Okay, 12. We fought or fucked? I need both of you. I'm not enjoying my pocket. I need both of you to roll a d6. Oh no. Oh no. Four. Four. Want me to re-roll? I'll re-roll. Re-roll, because you got it first. Two. You're the rolly boy. Yeah, that's fun. I ain't got no corners on me. I shouldn't have thought about that, Harry! Caprice, you think back and as you come to, you remember all of your friends, you remember your journeys, but you pick up the violin that you have. You have no idea why you have a violin. Oh no. You forget how to play music. Oh my god! No! Huh! You shitty piece of shit. This is really great. Hold it like... Hello? Caprice! What are you doing? It's so silly sometimes. It's really not the place. Is this some kind of bit, a joke or something to liven the mood? What the fuck is this? Toast, Felix. Caprice is doing another bit. Oh, oh, oh! I can't wait for the punch line. Alright, come on, we're all paying attention now. What? Felix, you... You remember everything. You know that you're here, but... And you know that you are a wizard. Wait a minute. Where did you put your spellbook? Oh no. Where do you put your focus? Where did you put everything that you need to do everything? Your relation, you've forgotten where all of your possessions are and you are unable to find them. That's... That's weird. I thought I just had my... You guys saw my spellbook, right? It was right here. I thought I was leaving through it. You were just reading it. Yeah, I saw you, you like, crossed-legged sort of on the ground. Well, we were not on the ground, but in the void here and you were reading it, I swear. You were like sitting, kind of float sitting, and you were reading it and then you weren't holding it anymore. Oh no. Did you put it in your bag? Did you look around? I throw it out. It's just, there's no way. And I go through my pack and I start ripping things out and things start flowing off into the void. Throwing things left and right. I'll probably catch what he's got. I'll cut the plate, you know, some loose papers, a quill. Oh my gosh. I know it's him. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's gone. It's gone. How could this be gone? I must have misplaced it somehow. Hey, you hear? Wait, wait. Do you have a copy? I feel like I'm missing something else too. The knife. Where is it? Isn't it where it always is? You've been taking it out since we've been here. It's always on my head, but it's gone. Don't worry, hold on. I always have you copy of your spell book in my pack. Just for this comic scenario. Okay, I need you both to calm down. No one ever finds anything when they're panicking. That's too, that's too. It's not here. Caprice. It's not here. Can you, can you search Felix for his knife? The backup book is gone to him. It's gone. It will be gone. Yeah. Oh my God. No, I swear, I swear I wouldn't have lost it. Here's the thing. You absolute coconuts. How could you have both lost it? How is this, but... Thieves. There must be thieves. There might be void thieves. Let me look. I checked my pockets for everything. Hold this weird wooden thing. It looks kind of like a woman's body. I don't know what you're talking about. This is your violin. I don't know what that is. That kind of look like a bat. Yeah. I see it now. I will investigate. I will look through the pack. I will double check everything. I'll look under the hat. My pants pockets inside out. I like, yeah, I give you my hat. I like, dump out my bag. It's like floating through the void. Don't, hold on. I mean, even if we can find the back of the book, it's not going to be a most up to date. It's not going to have all the spells in it, but it's something. It's something. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. It's going to be all right. All right, all right, all right. We're going to find it just a minute. Let me just do a little pat down here. Just a little pat down. Excuse me, excuse me. Pardon me. Just one moment. No, I don't find it. I'm guessing I don't find it. You did not. Shit. Look, it's okay. It'll probably be fine. I'm going to go get my stuff. I'm going to get my stuff. Look, it's okay. It'll probably turn up. Just... You might have left it back in Zentra. That would be very bad. I am aware of that, but it would be better than it being lost in this infinite abyss. But he just had it. It has to be here. It may have floated. I mean, we were sort of frisking, right? Like, did you like, absentmindedly like, put it down on the ground and then it sort of like, it could be 200 feet in that direction. No. There's a weird gap in my memory. Something is going on. This is in our fault. Esha, what is this? Who could have taken this? This is the forgotten place. Oh. So how do we get it back? How do we remember? Something's going on. That's why you don't know what that is. And I point to your floating eye, or I point to the violin. I'm holding it by the strings. It's your, it's your, it's your viol. It's your instrument. My, my what? I flip the strings. Violin is way too small to be a viol. It's so weird. You think it's fucking great? It's kind of like a fiddle. It's almost like someone should have been using that word, the whole... I don't play it. Try to play it? Like it's just a song right now. Oh, it's an instrument? Yes! See, this is what I'm talking about. Something's wrong. No, Felix, this is just a running joke. He's, he's going to wait until he gaslights all of us. And then once we're all buying it, he's going to play some stupid song about how we're a bunch of idiots. You're right. Um, alright, I'll, I'll try to play it. Play the song you just played. What are you doing? Oh, I assume that you just turned these knobs in order to produce music. No, stop that! You're going to break it. Oh, okay, well, I'll turn it the other way. And the strings and the relevance like that. There's no sound coming out. Do I have to yell into it? Turn down for what? Oh, but dooms. Turn down for what? How long is it till the last Escher? I don't spend my time here. I haven't forgotten anything. How can you be sure? That's a very valid point. Nikki just broke a whole plane. Drag it across the strings. Stop, stop! And it's awful! Stop, stop, stop, stop! Please! Maybe you just forgot how to play that instrument. Well, I'm sure I've got other instruments. Well, I'll have one here. See if you know how to play this. I have a dulcimer if you'd like to try that for some reason. Turn down for what? Oh, really? It's everything? It's not just the violin. Caprice, caprice, try to sing. That's getting closer. No, no, you have to fret. Yeah, put your hand like that. I'm fretting right now, right? Hold it. Don't fret with me. We're all fretting. See, he hasn't lost. He's making juice. And then do this. You just run your fingers along. Oh, okay. That's all right. That sounds... It's probably horribly enough to my hundred-played-it-in-days-week... You're just playing the same note over and over again. You have to play it. How do you produce additional notes? You just move your hands to the ground. Okay, hold on. That's worse. Maybe just sing a little song. Use your voice. Try your tiefling instrument. Oh, that's a mer-wind. Hold on, hold on. How the fuck in the hell? All right, so I'll just do one of those greats. That sounds all right. That's okay. The string breaks. I'm sorry. It's okay. I wasn't going to play it anyway. So here's the thing. Yes, Felix. I remember a lot of my spells. But only the ones that are currently in my brain. I couldn't tell you what was in that book. Which is crazy because I've been looking at that book every day for my entire life. And even though I can remember some of them... Without the knife I need... All host of items to cast these spells. Maybe we have some of those items. Yes, I can always check my bag. Metals and plants. I have a lot of gold. Gems and... I don't think we can just accept that it's gone. I think he has forgotten, but we haven't forgotten. Maybe we can find it while we're here. You saw Toa and Caprice looking. They couldn't find it either. Well, we have to... I don't know, swim, float, whatever this is. There has to be more here than just nothing. Well, maybe I can float around and look like Caprice. If it floated away, like 200 feet away, I'll just float around and check. Maybe if we think about it, it will just appear. We have to be careful. We don't really want to float out into this nothingness and get lost. We're getting lost. Especially if things are going missing, forgetting things. The last thing we want is Toa to go look for it, and then we all forget Toa. That's true. Oh. Who knows what we might forget? Who knows what we've already forgotten? Oh, gosh. We could have already forgotten so much, and we don't know because we've forgotten. Exactly right. You don't know what you don't know. Oh, gosh. Was there always five of us? I think so. There were six ones. There were six ones? There was? Do we forget? One of our friends? All right. All right. Wait. Who was I? Oh, no. Oh, God. What? Who was I before I became this? You were vampire. Yeah, you were the count. You're Countessia Kriscoff. Of Castle Ramonia. I know my name. Your doctor is Ravanovia. Who? Oh, shit. We can't delay any longer. We know we have to do, and we know we don't really know where we're going, but we know we have to do. We've got to start doing it before we forget it. Didn't Esha say that we needed to get something from this place? Ravanovia's hid? Yes, and then we have to find wherever. Which leads me to another question. Esha, what did you get by saying P-Mam's name three times? You did it to have your daughter back, but now she's in pieces all over the abyss? Oh, yeah. How did you at all get... The girl in the pieces. Yes. She is alive. Just in pieces. Oh, that's for a lie. Well... Do something, and we have to find the head. Better than dead, I think. Oh, so it's like you wished for something, and it sort of came true, but in a bad way you weren't expecting? Monkey paw style. Oh, I thought it was called Oslo's Little Hand. You set that up so hard. I'm not even mad. I'm just impressed. Oslo's Little Hand. That's exactly right. Oslo's Little Hand. When a wish turns on itself with a little grippy hand. What in the world can it be? Oslo's Little Hand. Oh, my God. Hi. If I ever have a me-jand I'm gonna name it that. Yes. Why? I care for the girl, but why? I will remind you, if you will tell us what the long-term effects of being in this void is, because it seems to me that we're all forgetting things here, and that soon we will be destroyed horn. We may be forgotten. Impossivable by anyone who has known us. Shit. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We have to hurry. Do you have any idea of the direction of the head? Yes. This is in the darkest void. Yes. Yes, it's where Rieks, what's left of him, dwells. All right, then we have to hurry. You said that, but which direction? How do we get there from here? We have to think of a memory. A fondest memory, think. Fondest memory? Think, what is our strongest fondest memory I can't recall? What? I have one. I think it really hurt. What's the memory that you're thinking of? When Felix and I run downstairs for ice-creams on this. That's the exact memory that I had! I had the same memory! Does it make a super memory? I think so! I think so! I would say that you think very hard and suddenly you open your eyes and I'm going to have Felix make an arcana check at advantage because Felix's toe is helping you. I see. My eyes are open. 27, arcana. You open up and just like anachronistically, like when you see a flashback or a vision in a movie, where you see yourselves and you see the stairs suddenly in the void and you're both excited and you're shouting about ice-cream sundaes and then you run off down to the left. You just down like this and you all run and you disappear in that direction and it feels as if your past selves, your memories are running towards there deliberately. That's it! We did it! Oh! We did it! Yes, we did it! We gotta follow them! Oh my god, let's go! Let's follow them! And suddenly you both forget. I'm doing this in a void. As you're going through, you both forget what it was, the memory that you thought of. You can't remember. You remember you were following something. You can't remember what it was. Oh no. Yes. I don't... We have to do this way. That's all I know. Felix, do you still remember how to make ice-cream soup? No. No. Oh no. I don't even... I'm not even sure I know what you're talking about. I don't even know if I know what I'm talking about either. Did you guys forget what you were doing just now and what you were focusing on, just as Esher suggested? I know that we need to go a bit way. He's right. We have to go this direction. Come on. There's no time to waste. So we pick a favorite memory? That has to be a favorite memory? If we already have the direction, but you can pick one if we want to validate. Oh, I thought we all had to do it. Let's just go. And you make your way through and you push your way. You push and you continue and you put... you make yourself... You are willing yourself through the space and as you move, you see the bits of shapes and through this inky void, you see... You feel like beyond the space of this ink that you're in, a sheet of black all around you. And you feel eyes watching you. You feel... not eyes, you feel a gaze, you feel a presence, you feel a malevolence around you as you continue onward. And... anyone who has lost memories to roll a wisdom saving throw for me. Come on. You've lost memory. Should we twist? What do you mean you should twist? You guys can twist if you want. I just fucked up my roll real bad. I have a plus three. So I should probably... We're gonna twist you in these four. Give me three for a plus ten, that's huge. Three, four. Three, four. Four for you? Five for you? Uh... Ethan. No, four is like advantage. I think just three, four is fine. Four, okay. And then that's plus seven. Oh, and I'm not gonna roll this one. I can't push you guys for God's sake. I'm gonna use two. I use three. I got three for you, four or two. Perfect, dirty 20. Ooh, go ahead. Okay. Pop, pop, king. I can't afford to forget my spells. I can't get any more. I already am like totally in trouble there. 18. I'm gonna give myself for a little bit. 24. Okay. Dirty 20. 18. That is, I don't know. Oh my God. I had a feeling. Oh, no. We're level 16. So that's jack. And you guys are in the abyss. Yeah, that checks. I'm surprised that... Oh my God, I wonder... I was thinking it was probably 20. Holy shit. Ice cream soup. Abyss my wife. Abyss my wife a lot, Mike. Fuck. So... Toa. You're making your way through. And you not only forget... You not only forget the ice cream sundaes. You're making your way through. You're making your way through. You're making your way through. You're making your way through. Ice cream sundaes. You forget the Mcconnie Islands. You forget the wind spirits. And all you can think about is the horrors you've experienced over the past few months. And you think of the pure ocean, all the horrors you've witnessed in these past months. And especially with the destruction of Zentra, they weigh heavily on you. You wish for the world of a calm and beautiful sea, but now you finally see it. If the universe is an ocean, it's a tainted one. Foul, putrid vile, like an irrevocably polluted sea that bears sick, withered fish. The realms of your existence are attained, and all you can think of is how to protect the realms that aren't of your existence from that pollution. You are a defender of your friends, after all. It is your duty to protect from the unclean. If this realm is something, then the only way to shield against it is to be nothing. You are filled with disgust and repugnance as your spirit turns to nothingness of an impossibly black void. As you see Toa, his tattoos that had once been able to cut almost a faint glow from the blessing from the wind spirits, as they turn an inky black, and they start to run through his skin as he floats forward, as he begins to lose his color, and he begins to lose the essence that has made him. You all see this happen. I'm floating. Believe it or not, I'm floating around. I never thought I'd know more than Capri. Pick up your own copy of our first published supplement, The Crooked Moon, a folk horror tome for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. And don't forget to snag all of the extra goodies, like dice, miniatures, plushies, a tarot deck, and more. Thank you. Toa, your tattoos look a little runny. Can we just do this? It's Dark Toa. He's back. Wait, I'm not Dark Toa. I'm Toa. Yeah, you're Toa. Do you feel okay? But why am I Toa? That's how you were born. Why am I disgusted right now? What? I don't like it. You are so utterly disgusted and you see Esher, the demon. You are in the abyss, the taint of the demons. You feel an immeasurable hatred and disgust towards him. It makes you want to kill him. Oh, fuck. Do I still like my friends? Do I love my friends dearly? You still feel that you must protect your friends from the taint of the demons, the taint of reality. Mikey, you're killing me. You've said taint like 20 times in the last 30 minutes. Taint no mountain high enough. I tried so hard, but you said it so many times. Too many times. That gray will be tainten. I hit my taint cap and I just... I need to protect you guys. We all protect each other, Toa. It's okay. I know that. I don't think Esher wants to help us. He's a disgusting demon. Look at him. He doesn't look like he used to, but I do believe he is trying to help us. He's very selfishly trying to get his daughter back. He may or may not still remember. He's going to try to use us to do that. Yes, he's not helping us for the good of everything, but for the good of himself. He's trying to trick us. But it's helping them the same. Just like Zern tricked us. Hey, hey, hey, hey, easy, easy. Look, right now it's the lesser of two evils. We're going to work with him for now. Just like Ravalli tricked us and Shangoor tricked us. No, Ravalli didn't trick us. Shangoor and Lotus tricked us. Well, the others... Toa, what's going on with you? What's up, man? We've been used by everyone we've met. He's forgotten how to be kind. No, Toa's been through a lot. It makes sense that at some point everything's been holding inside with Bubba-Lah. I'm done being used. I'm done being tricked, especially by a disgusting demon. Oh, my. Get away, Esher. You see Toa's eyes are a pitch black and you can see through him to the void beyond. You can see his through his tattoos or that same inky darkness of the stuff that is made, that is all around you. It's okay. Look, this place is making you sick. We're forgetting things that's changing us. Just try to hold on to yourself. I'm trying to help you. Don't talk to him right now. Let him leave now. Hey, hey, it's okay. Try to remember who you are. You'll never come back. This isn't good, guys. This isn't good enough. I'm protecting you. I know, I know. It's okay. Or what? You cannot stop me. Don't antagonize him right now, Esher. Or I'll kill you. He will kill you. Oh, no. He'll get killed trying to do so. Thank you. Stop it, the both of you. How overpowering is my need to kill Esher? It's very strong. I will let you as the role player determine what that looks like. Oh, my God. I am absolutely putting myself between the two of you. Yeah, absolutely. Even though I know he'll just mow me over if he wanted to. Felix, you don't understand. I do understand. I do. I can't know what you're going through right now, but I understand that you're hurting. Son, use your brother. Your own brother. As a pawn in his plan. I know. That's what he's doing. We're pawns in his plan. We need to kill him. I know this. We have to kill him. We have to remove his taint from our presence. Jer. Listen, I don't trust him either. Silence, boy. How do you expect to get out of here without my portals? You want to be lost here forgotten by all time? Go ahead and kill me. Felix has portals. Felix can do everything you can do now. Felix can't remember his spells right now. That is one of the ones I do remember, though. Never mind. I take it back. You're aware. I trust my friends and I don't trust you. Esher is right for now. We need his help for now. We don't have to trust him. Do you want to become like Eryx? Stop talking to me. Forgot him by all those besides the Overath Lords and the people lost surrounding me now? Do you wish for that? Go ahead and strike me down. Felix. Yes, sir. Because you're my best friend. We won't fight for now. But the sickened. I even think that we just pawns for you. You're going to die. I welcome you to a town. Thank you for trying. Thank you. I mean that. All right. We gotta get out of here. We have to go quick. We have to find the head and life. The power I have and he raises and you can see that his hands are like raven flesh and he has talons. Stop antagonizing him. I said that three times. Fine. I cannot be seen by... ...the... ...by Eryx. Anyway, last he warned Pazuzu. The forgotten prince must not see me. And you see as Escher, in a moment, folds in on himself and you see feathers and you see a feathered bat appears and flaps over to Lufty. And kind of hangs on your little buns. And you see just a small little bat that is covered in feathers. And the beak is... ...like there's almost a little beak protruding from the nose. It's this horrible bat bird abomination. Oh. I guess this is okay, but we need to go. So can we just keep going the same direction? As long as we still remember the direction that we need to feel that we need to go and I would continue to leave. Felix, stay close to him. I will. It's disgusting. It's all right. Just breathe. Come on. Come on. Hold on. Pat my bun. And we continue to try to leave the way. You continue and you feel yourself getting deeper and deeper into this realm, the forgotten land. As you feel something washing you and suddenly the movement of the ink all around you gets less and less. And you feel like you're just in an empty void. And that gaze gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And, Toa, I need to make a wisdom saving throw for me again. Oh, no. I need to make five quicks. Okay. That's why I live there. I remember how to sing now because I saved my wisdom saving throw. What? Well, you never forgot how to sing. Well, you forgot how to play instrument. You started playing instrument. You forgot how to play music. Yeah. Which is detrimental. Which is the 20 should I use? I didn't have a phone. The very best one. That one's beautiful. I... That's pretty good. Okay. Okay. Okay. 25. I didn't trust the process. Oh, the DZ is going up for sure. That sucks. Yeah. It is enough. As you feel that same level of disgust, Toa, as your tattoos are that inky void, your eyes are black, your mouth is black when you open it to speak, but you do not... You do not lose your shape. You do not turn into a blot of ink yourself. As you finally see up ahead something floating in the darkness and you see two shapes. And for the first time, you see a bit of light and you get closer and closer as you see something moving in the darkness. It is large. And as it moves, it just seems to be like a... Like a raindrop running down a pane of glass or a... A... A spawning pool from some primordial ancient time. It is just a bubbling mass of void. And as you approach, you see the bit of light that is just beyond it. And you realize that it is not light, it is a small pale head. Oh, God. Rived in dark ringlet curls. As you see it slightly moving, a child's head. And its eyelids flitter, but no eyeballs are within. Its mouth opens, no tongue. As it floats beyond this inky void. And you all hear something come from that moving pool of ink before you. Ever. Ever. It is almost a faint. A faint. You almost... It is something that is back in your mind, almost a thought. God. As this thing is in between you and the head floating head. Like it is craving memory or wants it. It is possible. Or whatever is holding onto the head is lurking just beyond our sight. We got to stay on guard. As you said we have to deal with... You know who? Well, I can try speaking a memory into the bulb, whatever that thing is. Maybe it would be destroyed or forgotten. We should get closer first. We can't afford to lose anything else. What if that's what it wants? To be sad with memory might empower it, but it also might be the way through. Like a trade for the head? We could also just try to coax the head over here. I mean it's probably unable to look emotion itself, but you know I could try a little something. Okay. Does the blob seem to react to us at all or it's just sort of moving? Now that you are close it does seem to react. As it's kind of moving it extends a bit and almost takes the shape that seems vaguely as if trying to be a humanoid or a beast. You can't tell. It's trying to take a shape, but then it's almost as if it forgets what shape it's trying to take. And then shifts back into just this amorphous blob. Like appendages kind of start to form but then retract. I'm picturing Hexus. Very similar to Hexus. Exactly right. How do I feel about it? You feel a kinship with it. You feel like this is what should await all foul demons. You know that this kinship, this is Zareek's The Forgotten Prince. Before you. That shape, that is the Oberith. And you are, even for what you've forgotten you're almost stunned to think of the power of Pizzuzzo and the Oberith, the dark shapes and the portals you had seen trying to be called forth. But you know that this is the Prince, that whatever he perhaps may have been just like you. Looked just like you. But whatever he is now is as he should be. All thanks to him who watches from beyond the stars. Arreaks, The Forgotten Prince. And you see as it starts to oscillate towards you. As it takes a moment though. As if it took a moment to even remember its own name. As it, as this ink block in just nothingness suddenly moves towards you. And in a moment you see that it changes its shape into the form, something that slightly resembles Toa. You see the shape of the hair and the goos. And you see even through it dark goos of where the tattoos are. And then it shakes its head and suddenly it loses its form and shifts back and forth. And is in between you all and that floating head of Ravnovia. As you said we were going to have to deal with it. I don't know if that means through force or convincing it or what. Hey, can you understand us? I address the wob. Oh I speak to an abyssal. If you spoke in common it did not but then when you speak in abyssal. I say exactly where I said it abyssal. It takes a moment almost like it's trying to register as if it's forgotten language. And then suddenly the language comes back as it then shifts to you. And you see, you feel this presence and all the while, while this is a, you feel a strangeness to this living ink blob. Before you but the threat and the horror that surrounds you is coming from outside. From what's watching you all from beyond. And you feel it's gaze very, very truly and deeply now. Stronger than it's ever been as it turns to you. Alright. Hey, can you understand us? For sure. He has ascended. What? As he should be. All of his demonic filth purged from him. Tell us, stop saying odd shit. It's not odd at all. We could all be so lucky. What are you talking about? Have all of them. Disgusting. Filthiness. It's all tainted. But not him. He's pure. He's whole. He looks like someone spilled an ink pot. You think that's a good alternative? Yes. That's the ideal. Because he's forgotten everything. Everything we remember is wrong. It's not true. It's lost. It's disgusting. Hey, hey. It's alright. Come on, remember. Remember who you are and who we are. And we're all best friends and we're going to be okay. We're going to get through this. I don't. I know I'm Towa. I don't remember really who I am. Besides I know that we're friends. I don't know where I'm from. But none of it matters. Where I was from was tainted. It's not true, Towa. We've been there. I'm getting us out of here. Sort of. I'm done. I'm done with this. I don't want to leave him like this anymore. And I turn to the blob and it goes like this. What do you want? You see that as you're speaking to it, it's starting to drift back towards, kind of turn towards you. And then it's starting to drift closer to Towa. It is kind of extending tendrils. And you hear once again faint, not even a whisper just in the back of your mind. As it starts to, it kind of shifts. And it is starting to slither towards Towa. Would I want to commune with this god? You feel like you might want to. I'll start to float towards him. I will step in front of Towa and look at this blob. And I won't say anything. But I will picture in my mind the moment that all of us met at the crossroads, one of Iris's fondest memories. She'll think of the way that in her mind, she was thinking, you know, Lufty is not so bad. I actually don't mind her all that much. I wouldn't tell her that, but she's not so bad. That's so sweet. And how it was that moment of distraction that everyone else kind of came upon each other. And the first time she had seen Towa and Felix and Caprice and Persia. And how that was the beginning of her found family. Oh. You see as it stops, as you are able to position yourself, it's moving very slowly. And you think very deeply. And as you're thinking about this memory, you see that this ink blob starts to change. The moment you think, you see it ripple out from the center, almost. And then it ripples out from the outside and then back in and then in and out. And you feel as the presence of this thing gets larger as you hear again. As you see that it stops and shutters and slinks away, it's tendrils occasionally reaching out as if any of you try to think back to that memory, it is gone. As a reeks, the forgotten prince has fed upon that memory. And there's nothing in between you and the head of Ravanovia. As however, as you think back to the moment, you try to think back to the moment that you try to think back to the moment where you all met at the crossroads. And it's not there. You try to think back to the moment you met, try to think what was the memory and a different memory stirs. You see a dark ziggurat. You see an enormous bloated woman with blue, purple skin and rather than legs, writhing tentacles with a huge beak, wriggling green hair and a trident and her tears are deep. She is wailing and their bowing in comfort is an avian demonic monstrous person. As you see Pazuzu bowing, raising hands, comforting. And you feel a set, you see the look in Pazuzu's eyes of treachery. You've seen the look of treachery over and over and over again. As that memories, that's all you can picture as you see that this blob goes away and then you realize now as the head is floating, Eriks has left a single orb of ink about that big. That's just pulsing and rippling. And that is what you say. Did I just feel my memory get changed? It's possible. Anything is possible here. Hey, did someone do something? Why is he leaving? I gave it what it wanted. You gave it a memory? Yes, it was approaching Toa and I was afraid in his current state if we let it get close to it at all that it would take Toa and I would rather it have a piece of me than Toa. You did the right thing. You gave us an opening and I would immediately go for the head. And I would reach up and I would at least put my hand near the orb. You do. And you raise your hand to the orb and you see that within that orb you peer into it and although it is a black bit of ink, as you look into it, you see in your mind the memory that you had just seen of this great tentacled queen with her fort spear of power atop the ziggurat. You see other horrible fiendish abominations around. They seem to be wounded. It seems to be after perhaps a battle and it seems to be the... There seems to be... That Pazuzu seems to be bowing and lying to whatever this entity is. And we all have this memory. Those who look into it suddenly you is because you all gave your memory of the Crossroads. You think back to the time that you first met and it feels like, oh wait a minute, you showed up, you got to the Striga and suddenly the period of time when you all met is a period of another world and another plane of existence experiencing this horrible dark ziggurat. Holy shit. Wait, a reeks! This one time in grade school I pooped myself and I waited until it dried in my ass crack and then I let it roll down my pants leg and some other kid got blamed because I shook it out at the back of class and they all bullied him for like a year. Take it! Take it come back! It was way longer than a year. You don't forget. Oh. You don't forget. He's gone. None of you heard that, alright? I too would like to forget that I heard that. You're going to kill Kelsey. You can't leave her. I just said an incredibly brave thing. And as soon as I feel like there's an opening, I would not get to the blah blah blah. I'd go to see if I can retrieve that. You run for and you feel Escher on your head clinging and he's definitely, he's like actually shaking. He's got me by the bones. Exactly right. Exactly. He's hanging on one little claw with Talon and the other one is hanging on your head. We're going to have that one twice. Right? He's a bunsman. And you float forward and you see, you grab this hat and it is, it twitches to your grasp. Ew, ew, ew, ew. As you see the eyes are gone, the nose is gone, the tongue is gone and the ears are gone. As you're holding Rava Novia's head. Ah, and I would, gods help us and I would float back towards the rest of the party with this thing in hand and just kind of like trying to like look at it too much because it's really disturbing and it's moving a little bit. You don't think the other bits are floating around in here, do you? Almost certainly. Oh gosh. I don't know if we need them all. Escher, come on, help us out here. What's going on with this? You see as Eriks is kind of floating away, Escher takes off any flaps and goes in the opposite direction, pressing, flying away from Eriks. Where are you going? Come back here and I'll follow him. He keeps going away and away back into the inky void and suddenly that darkness, you feel that until I need to make one more wisdom saving throw for me. As you feel that gaze of him who watches from beyond the stars. Five. Yeah. Killed it. Thirty. Thirty. I will say with that you feel the gaze and there is something about this retrieving the head of this child and what is at stake and suddenly memories start flooding back and you remember who you are. Your tattoos start to glow with the power of the wind spirits. Your eyes return to their normal shade as you are back, Toa. Hey. I'll be looking at the orb. She's fucking disgusting. I will just smile her off the face of existence. Oh no. I mean she's not very pleasant to look at but that's all a very friendly thing to say about a demon queen. You should still do that if you have the opportunity. Are you feeling all right? Oh my god. You look better. Oh I remember who I am. Oh Toa. Do you remember ice cream sundaes? Are the ice cream sundaes back? Both of you remember the ice cream sundaes. Toa remember ice cream sundaes. Oh my god. How can I have forgotten about that? Oh my gosh. And have Felix is the only one that knows how to make ice cream soup. There's hope yet. I'm sorry for how I was acting. Oh that's not like me. I don't like it at all. I don't like feeling disgusted. It's all right. We knew it wasn't you. It's this place and the sooner we get out of here the better we're going to be. Let's keep up with Escher. He's our ticket out of here. Immediately the bat bird spins and grows larger as you see Escher's vampire form as he runs forward. Give me that. Oh hell no. Hold on. I'm not giving this to you yet. Yeah you hold on. What has he done to you my little bat? What has he done to you? Escher. You can't hear me. You can't see. You can't speak. I know it's hard to see her like that but we have to get out of here and quickly. Do you think that the rest of her is here or elsewhere? Twelve pieces. Twelve planes. Twelve oboe rith lords. We are going to put you back together my little bat. We are going to save you. I swear it. I swear it. And with that he pulls out his rapier and slices through the ink all around you and you see as soon as it makes an indent it cuts through the void and it turns to the color of blood as it oozes out and there's bits of green mixed in in the blood and you all hear a terrible cacophonous buzzing droning as a portal opens up before you in the void. I think you should give him his daughter's aid. Why? Because it's his daughter. Do you want to be carrying it around this whole time? No but if he does anything that it's insurance. We gotta hold on to it. I agree. We need him. Yeah. Either way if he betrays his issue are you going to betray us at this point? I am risking everything. See? If you fail then there's no more world for my little bat to enjoy when we put her back together. I'm sorry by the way for being upset at you and threatening to kill you. Here you go. I threatened to kill you as well. I think nothing of it. I've done far worse. I think because I just went through that experience I'm feeling especially disgusting. And you kind of need my hands free. There is no need to hold on to the head. Just give it to him. If he's going to betray us he'll do it whether he has the head or not. Quite frankly he's more powerful than you are Felix, more powerful than I am. Well I don't think he's more powerful than Felix but... And even if he is I'll... Fine. I'll give you the head for now. But don't think that I can't just burn it. I know. He looks at it. What have I done to you? He was... Mikey was really in it. He got fucking ruined it. Get out of here. Don't. He was like, you know what? It's tough. Put it on your finger. Put it on your finger. Oh! So cool! You're fucking gross! You're fucking gross. I just knocked him off my finger. That's his head. That's a very funny... That's very funny. As he looks... Sorry Mike. And he grabs it and says, what have I done to you? And with that he takes his finger and he draws a circle in the ink again. And a small portal opens and he lets the head sail through. And it closes. And he turns to all of you and he says, Obok's orb was deposed, weakened and defeated, but he spent millennia re-growing his strength, building his swarm of vermin. I do not know what eyes and ears he has in the Blood Marshes, but I will need to be in my other form, at least until we are certain we are unroached. You're in your bat form? Yes. Alright. Let's go. We'll make our way through the Blood Marshes and we'll find this Obok's ob. He turns back into a bat and clings back to your buns. And you are all able to leave the portal if you'd like, or go through the portal. We enter. Let's get the hell out of here. I float expediently. As soon as we leave, we forget that we were in the plane. Just 12 more pieces to go. Forever and ever. Forever and ever again. What were we doing? You all feel... I've been here for two years. I'm hungry, huh? You all feel the gaze of who else could it be besides him who watches from beyond the stars as it has a horrible sense of disgust that fills all of you. As you pour through this portal as it closes behind you and your feet land in ankle-high muck. And you look down and you see just blood all around you and buzzing and buzzing. It's all over as you see a stinking marsh, but far larger and more horrible. It looks like nothing natural. Where there are trees, what looks like trees is actually a massive, massive, pepery hives filled with holes pocked everywhere, rising hundreds of feet into the air. You see small insects buzzing all over the place and massive swarms as you smell stench. You see swarms of flies and swarms of skittering things that look like scorpions, things that look like flies, things that look like beetles. All over as far as you can see, as you look up into the sky and the clouds are moving incredibly fast. And the clouds are sky blue and the sky itself is white. As blood stretches all around you, as you've arrived in the blood marshes, as the feeling that you all get is utter disgust. And it's utter dread and the drone that you feel that you hear is almost deafening and it's almost a cacophony. What do you all do? Oh, God! This is disgusting. I can't even think. The blood marsh if you're nasty. It was very funny, Caprice. Well, I'm going to take out a handkerchief and I'm literally just going to tie it around the back of my head and cover my nose and mouth. I don't like bugs. I will hold my breath with my unending breath. Oh, yeah. Wow. You still feel disgusting as the droning is this horrible, horrible buzzing and droning of just swarms flying all around. And you see now as you get your bearings that you see these trees, these pockmarked, it's a tryptophobic nightmare. Yeah. As you see just these huge, skittering insect demons skittering in and out, flying all around. There's four of, as you can see, you see the ruins of the ruins of massive cities. It almost reminds you of a dark version of Harkir, of how many ruins that you see all around you. And then what gives you the most pause as you look through the swamp and through the strange trees, you see chained up humanoid creatures, some demonic, some devil, some look celestial looking, perhaps across the multiverse, beings tied up and their bodies completely covered in holes. Their corpses having perhaps been burrowed in and out, bored as if things have perhaps burst out of them. Well, let's try to stay here as little as possible. We have to go across the marsh. See an obvious direction? Let's look for landmarks and see if there's an obvious direction. Make a perception check. Wow. That's gonna be... That's a dd, folks. Transform of hiking. Amazing perception. I've got a 22. You look around and you see that there is... This is putrid, bloody swamp as far as you can see in all directions, but you see that there are various ruin structures that seem to have been claimed. And I would say that you do see in one far off in the distance that there is a huge ruin of what looks like a primordial palace. What about this massive primordial palace right there on the horizon? Oh, it's right over there. It seems so obvious. I don't know why we didn't think of it before. Well, it seems like... There is mud in my porthole. Yes. I risked that. Thank goodness you have black fur. Otherwise, I would never come out. I can feel it and it's warm. What's a porthole? It's a kind of bird in the Arctic. It smells here. My linen is dirty. I mean, you're all of you is dirty. I want to die. Toa can kill you. Please. No, I don't want to. Arras, do you need to be carried? I need to be killed. No, no. At least let me get you out of the muck and I'm going to go scoop a virus. Toa, I'm so dirty. It smells horrible here. Please, Sophie, can you help? I can help. We've dealt with some awful things, but this is the worst. Arras, you're being a little... There's a palace and it's disgusting. I'm very deep in thought when you say this to me, but almost absentmindedly, I just snap my fingers a few times and begin to press the D-tube and clean you up. Thank God. But I'm clearly in thought while I'm doing this and absentmindedly just trying to clean Iris up, I think. Iris? I have so much better. You're clean now? Yes. Take my hand. No. We need to take my hand. No, it's always sweaty. It's just clammy palms, okay? It's a little hairy, which is strange. I forgot all of my phenobiosthostate when I was in Galtica. I don't have the ability to... It's just clammy. Just fucking take my hand. I want to. It's feeling just cleaned me up. We need Toa to be able to not just carry you this entire time. He needs to be able to fight and defend us. But he's strong and muscular. It's going to be fine. Just take it. But he's warm. I know, but you're going to be able to stay clean and free. I hate when you talk to me. What? This is unrelated. This is for your own good and I'm going to grab a pod and put it in. I cast Fly. I don't have to use this. Fail. You like fly on my arm. Super fly or any kind of... Components. I mean, I've got my focus and I believe that I... What's your focus? My fiddle. My feel. Do you remember how to play it? Yeah, do you remember how to play it? I thought that I saved against that. When you all arrive, you realize except for the crossroads memory. We all have remembered. So I was able to find my ship. Yes, and suddenly you're like, how the fuck did I miss place? Never lost it. It's like, you know, when you're looking for something and it's in your hand the whole time. Oh my God. It was really relaxing on the top of your head. Yup. I thought that we got that back when we initially saved. So I thought that we were... Anyway, fortunately it's all fine because I use my bow of the dying swan to cast him. Ooh. It's a little quirky. Alright, she's got an hour before she has to get mucky. And that's about as long as it's going to take for us to walk there, I'm guesstimating. Let's get going. Felix, are you okay? Yeah, I'm just thinking about what we're going to do when we find this thing. Well yes, Esha, you warned us about the other situation. What are we looking for here? Oh yeah. We're not going to say its name in front of it. No, that's right. But we're going to have to deal with it, I'm assuming. And what part of your daughter are we looking for here? We know she's missing her eyes, her tongue, her ears, her nose. Clearly her body is gone. Is it just head? It's an all head part. Twelve head parts? No. I mean there's twelve pieces. I mean she was more than just a head with this started. I presume there's going to be body pieces. I'm just knowing, is the body one piece and then there's eleven head pieces? I'm just trying to figure out the ratio. Well there's five head pieces so far. You'd think if you're going to split someone up you wouldn't go all head. You'd probably go head, shoulders, knees and toes, right? Oh yeah, at the very least. Okay. Shoulders not really a body part though. Of course it is. It's more like the intersection of two body parts. Like the clavicles, with the arms attached, just like one. Upper torso. I'm guessing torso, legs, feet, toes, arms, hands, fingers. Oh, that's for like... Are you going to separate the toes from the feet? In which case, that's already... Yeah. I wouldn't. No but then it's like a group. The fingers are a group. Why wouldn't you just do hands? And that way the fingers are similar. Because that's not enough numbers! Yes, because if you separate... Toes got a good point. If you separate the hands and then the fingers from the hands, it's just a poem. I didn't think about that, lift up. Hold on. You feel... Lifty. Lift up. You feel... That's still not enough. Unless you can't butt cheek separate. What you do is of course... Bat fang, sink into your right leg. Ow! God! Oh, you're right. The hell? And then the bat skits and then you see Esher skitter back to... Esher! What the hell? Oh yes. Oh he's being rude. No, he said that he couldn't be seen by this thing so he can't answer our questions. Because he's a bat creature, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's tiddling his story up. Does anyone know how to speak to bat creatures? Wait, maybe he means that her legs are here? Oh, is that why you're separated by the calves? She goes over and he nods at you. Oh! He climbs over on your face and nods. I can try to speak that. Well can you just bite Lifty in every place that Robinovia's been split? Yeah, or just like gently flutter your wings, you fucking lilies. He bites your... He bites your other leg. God damn it! That looks like it hurt. All right, we're looking for legs, clearly. Oh, legs. And then he bites your both your arms. Oh, and arms. And arms. Here? All here? No, no, no. He's just telling us the pieces we're going to be looking for. I think we just know that it's body parts. Why is this relevant? I don't know, stop biting me. We'll figure it out. If we find a straight body part, we'll collect it, we'll shove it through the hole. Easy. That's fair, yeah. Easy money. Okay, let's just go, can we go? Can we start going? Yeah, we proceed. You make your way through the swamp as it gets deeper and deeper as you see the looming trees that are bored out and filled with holes, skittering insects. Oh really? They seem to pay you no mind as they look very clearly a demonic in origin as this grand the blood shallows, by the way, he was saying shallows not marches, that's Reckon. The blood shallows. The blood shallows. You make your way through the muck as you see ruined temples and crumbled towers that look even more ancient than the ruins that you had seen in Hark here as you press onward and the buzzing of this swarm gets louder and louder and as you make your way through the muck, it is so loud and everyone to make a constitution saving throw. It's where I'm evoking. Oh, I'm a vant, I'm not a vant, I'm a, I'm perishing on this. Oh, baby, spike it up, let's go. That's Monty, that's just silly. Okay, I'm going to assume that's pretty good. Constitution and constitution. I hope the DC is very low because there was a failed. You have all people? No, it's five plus nine which is a four. It's just not moistened is it? No. She loved me. I'll never take a thing. What did everyone get? 17. 26. 21. 22. You are walking and as you, the buzzing gets louder and louder as you actually make your way around one of these giant, it almost, it looks like equal parts. You're not sure if it's a tree or a mountain or a high, it almost looks like a giant ant hill that rises up and kind of has these fleshy fronds that are all obviously marked with holes as one of these swarms of horrible scorpion flies, for lack of a better word, they're scorpion flies, they're buzzing and it gets louder and louder and it is, you had been gazed upon by an eldritch horror from Beyond the Stars and this is far worse. As you see, you hear a loud, sickening splash as both Toa and Caprice fall unconscious for 10 minutes. From the buzzing? From the buzzing. Yeah, it's from the buzzing. Could you describe these as like meat trees? Kind of, yeah. Are they like the come trees of Pennsylvania? What? What she says. Just describe them as meat trees. Yeah, it's like, yeah, they're meaty, they're kind of meaty but there's also wood, it's very demonic and horrible and... I'm picturing the meat trees from GER. Yeah, their meat trees is kind of like the big spires in Silithus a little bit too. Or you know, those living fleshy Silithus stuff. I'm picturing Caleb from Elden Ring, pretty woman knows that game. Oh, excellent. My face, I need to fix my face. You see Caprice and Toa collapse as the buzzing would fly stop as well. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Oh, shh. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. It is definitely concentration, isn't it? No, fly is concentration. The way that I cast it. Does that skip concentration? It doesn't. It's still concentration. Okay, then we all fall into the muck. Oh, dear. Concentrate, non-fly. Concentrate, non-... It's in my mouth. Oh, God. I look between them to decide which to help first with Caprice's face down in the blood clotty, like showers. Oh, I see bubbles. They don't even think about it. Oh, gosh. There's like no way we can pick up Toa. He's extremely heavy. Without even hesitating before a moment can happen, I would, now knowing where my knife is, I would reach for the knife, hold it in my right hand, and with my left hand do a whistle. Which I can't do. But it would ring out. Do it. Beatrice would pop onto my shoulder, flutter and tweet and immediately grow to a much, much, much larger bluebird as I cast Arcane Hand. Very good. But I'm flavoring it as a giant bluebird. I love that. And she easily plucks them up out of the water. Yeah. Two. You hear one of the bugs like, whoo, whoo, whoo. Damn, Skater. That audience fly is going fucking crazy. As Beatrice goes to pick them up, I think she needs to do an athletics contest to see if she pulls them out of the muck. Each Caprice and Toa, you take... Strength of 26. Yeah, it's a crazy hand. I don't want to take. Oh, you got 26? No, no, I'm sorry. She has a strength of 26. Holy hell. Wow. So that's plus... Plus eight. Yeah. 11 points of piercing damage. 11 points of piercing damage. As you are unconscious, you're not knowing, you don't know why, but... Holy fuck. Both of you need to make con-saving throws again, too. Thanks, Beatrice. That's a 21 total. That is enough. As Beatrice takes her bluebird talons and grabs them and... And you see Beatrice, her eyes, she looks a little, like, surprised. The fact that she has to give it a little bit of oomph as if the swamp is trying to take them. Oh, gosh. As she pulls up both Caprice and Toa. What did you get on your con-saving throws? 21. Four. Four. You see now, as there are holes in both Toa and Caprice, as you see little burrowing insects and scorpions falling out, as, however, as Toa is pulled out and there are some that pile out a shriek and fold down and skitter away into the swamp. You see the ripples. However, Caprice has dozens, as you see movement beneath his skin. Oh, my God. Ew, it's like bot flies. The Varkahans only last a minute. So I would try to have Beatrice move them to a spot where they are not drowning. Yeah. Facedowning in a puddle. Yeah. And set them upright against something. Yeah, you would be easily able to... I mean, there's so many, like, large roots and large... And bits of rubble and stone. You make your way through and you just find bits of... Perhaps there had been a whole city here, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago. It's really hard to tell with the abyss. You would easily be able to find a ruined, tainted piece of stone to put them on. Caprice, you're going to take an additional 15 points of piercing damage. Oh, my God. I would look to diaries and say, oh, this is really bad. I know, my God. No, don't. Look at his skin. Look at what's moving underneath. I can try to dispel it, but I don't know if it's magical. I don't know if it's something you can cure. There's, like, bugs inside of him. Okay, it's really cute. I'm, like, my whole body is crawling. I'm happy you're trying to dispel it. I just don't know if it's going to have any effect. I'll assist you in whatever way you need me to. Oh, I'm tabbed out on most of my ability, unfortunately. I would take a look at what's happening to poor Caprice here. I did have my heart ripped out in case you've got. Touche. And see if I can discern from an arcane perspective whether or not dispelling or attempting to dispel this might have any effect. Or if these are, like, physical creatures that need to, like, physically be removed. And yeah, if I could assist or medicine check or something just to see if I could determine what, if anything. I would say on conch check, medicine check. And am I still unconscious? Ten minutes, yeah. You just hopefully don't have to keep making that scene. So I'm full of holes, but they've left me. Yes, you've been ripped up. They weren't basically working on burrowing in, and you were able to get ripped up, but they just went right for Caprice. 23 on his phone. He was very tasty. 23 on medicine. Like a teamwork. What I will say is that you are able to determine that these are definitely living creatures, but I think that if you do use some sort, they are very magical. They are demons. They are fiends in nature. And so if you were to use a dispel magic, you could roll forward to see if it would basically purge them out. That's pretty cool. The question is fourth level or seventh level? There's no in-between. I would attempt to use a spell magic. And what you would see is you'd see me raise the knife. Like I'm going to go for a skin, and I'm like putting my hand around one of these moving things. Like it looks like I might go to cut it out, but then my left hand will glow with flash blue arcane magic. I attempt to dispel these creatures from his. So I'm just going to roll the spell magic. And I'm just going to tell you what I get. I want you to add in. It's an Akana. No, just a Akana. Just a, I believe. This just says any spell third and nearly ends for fourth spell or higher, make an ability check using your spell casting ability, which is just plus five. Yeah, right. I would be assisting you, yeah? For dispel, you can't assess that on the right. I can give him guidance, which gives us a d4 to the next ability check. Yeah, you should it. Yeah, I would. Guide your hand with golden sands. If we can twist it, it might not be a bad idea to add like three, two, two or three. What do you think? How many we have? That's not to it. I got guidance in plus five. Got it. You know, this will be the time I roll one, which is fine. No, perfect. 17 plus five is 22. You see the movement that reminds you of the Dusk Elves, the Shadar Kai who had been gifted with the scarabs, the Necromanic Scarabs from Anka Tep. That you'd seen so long ago as at least a dozen of these horrible beetle-like scorpion fly creatures pour out of Caprice. And I need you, Caprice, to make one more Confusion Samurai Thoflonite. Your past mess. I can't take it anymore. I just can't. Give me some 17. 17. They pour out of Caprice and you see no more wriggling beneath the skin as you hear the loud droning of that tower that had knocked them out directly next to you. You've been able to resist it, but it is this horrible buzzing as these flying insects are kind of flying all around you, but they're not seeming to attack as you do this. But now, basically, both Toa and Caprice, there's a large, broken block that would have taken a brick bigger than any kind of brick that you had seen before, even in Harakir. It would have taken perhaps a thousand mortal humanoids or whatever kind of horrible beast to be able to move this thing as you rest them on that. Oh, God. Okay, all right. No panic. I think the bugs are gone. Yeah? They seem to be gone, but they're, you know, full holes and they're unconscious. Okay. All right, thanks for the health virus. Oh, you're welcome. Let me, Caprice looks worse for wear. It looks disgusting. I can't even look at him. He does look quite disgusting. I hate to do this, so I'm going to grab his clammy swipe on and I'm going to cast Cure Wounds on him at a second level. You channel the power of Anubis, although he has gone back to Arcadia. You are the vessel of his power as Caprice. You suddenly wake up and feel the pain of having been born. Eleven points of healing. As you see these, as you, as you feel as if you've been turned into an anthill. Oh, God, I'm covered in holes. I hate this. Oh, this is bad. Well, that's gross. What the fuck? What the fuck has happened when I pass out? Why do we think of things like this? You went sick, puppy dog. Oh, I miss when we eat dark wings, folks. Oh, this is really bad. Really bad. Oh, God. I got, I got, I got some stuff about this. Hold on. Oh, I pull out a Ziploc bag full of, of, of ointment. I still got, I still got two charges on this bag. Before fucking music, girl. Here, here, here, take some for Toa. Oh, I have to touch Toa too. I have to touch Toa too. There you go, there you go. I'll take some. Two D8 plus two hit points for both of us. And it ceases any poisoned or disease, specifically. You feel the holes closing up as you apply the ointment. And Toa, you suddenly are, are rocketed back as, as, as Iris, wherever you want to apply the oil, you can. Slowly. Oh, your chest is looking mighty wounded. There are any holes there. Oh, these, these biceps, triceps. What happened? It's best we don't talk about it, but you're okay now, sort of. Felix, come here. Come closer. This is just like me in 1990, not film the money. Darling, bring it, please. Okay. And Rachel, my, look, you're, you've been wounded. It's going to be okay. I don't want anyone to panic. I, with Iris's help, we were able to dispel or stop whatever it was within you. Thank God. And I don't want anyone to panic, but I do want to remind everyone that allegedly the minions of this being reproduced by burrowing into the skin. Oh. Toa, do you feel pregnant? So, if anybody feels weird, let us know immediately. What does it feel like to be pregnant? I don't know. I don't know either. If you start wanting pickles with your ice cream soup, let us know. That does seem kind of good. No. No. Am I aiged? Chawa? No. Okay, never mind. It doesn't taste good. I guess, I guess me saying no like that won't prohibit the possible impregnation. So, you do whatever you want. Let us know. Speak up. I don't know how to respond to that. I'll say the same thing. I feel fine right now, but if I feel any eggs or riglin', you'll be the first to know. We are not off to a great start here. Why'd I pass out? I heard that sound and it just like... It was the buzzing. I mean, it's pretty intense. It's really hard to concentrate on anything that noise. It's throbbing inside of all of us. Can we like run? Say, damn it! We gotta move. We might be... Two of us might be pregnaante. Orema, okay. We must hurry. Let's go. I started sprinting. We rushed. To the palace. You do. If that's what's a fertilization look like, I don't want to see what the birth looks like. Oh, God. You see these things that look like trees or these great spires or like giant ant hills as these creatures that are a mix between ant, scorpion, fly, beetle, are flying all around and the buzzing gets larger and then you... Or it gets louder and louder as you finally make your way to just these utterly destroyed... What could only have been a palace or perhaps an enormous temple. But what it would have taken to destroy this thing, you cannot even imagine. As you see, the ruins have been... Have overgrown with this just fleshy substance that's pulsing, pop up with holes, insects crawling all over it with enormous spires rising up, organic spires with the buzzing insects flying all around and you make your way into the ruins of this palace. And what I will say is who would like to guide to figure out where to go. As Escher is just clinging on and he is trying to guide you, but in that form it's difficult for him to communicate. He can't like ratatouille me with my buns. Oh, I'm gonna roll for... Roll animal, he'll let you roll for ratatouille. Let's roll for ratatouille. Batatouille. Batatouille, everybody. Oh my God, batatouille. Yes, roll for batatouille. Oh, that wasn't very good. I got an eight. You can see that he's trying to batatouille you. And you are not picking up what he's laying down at all. I'm just freaking eggs everywhere. And so I'll say, eventually, maybe you'll be able to develop a bond strong enough, especially after everything that you've been through with Escher, that he can batatouille. Because that's the greatest thing I've ever heard in my time. You know, we need that to happen. What's he saying? Lifting? I don't know, you know, I feel like he's telling me, all right, go left. I don't know. Whisk this, do that. It doesn't feel applicable to our problem right now. Whisk? I don't know. What's going on? It's just vegetables. You do feel that it's interesting that he is not taking off in the sky as perhaps being a small bat might be a very easy morsel for one of these giant insects that you occasionally see flying overhead. And so whoever wants to attempt to figure out where to go, I mean... Aris! You know pelises and castles and stuff like that. Oh, none that look like this. Oh yeah, I feel like you'd be well equipped. Come on. I could try to inspire you with a song. Would you have to touch me again? No, only touch you with my emotional singing voice in your heart. Well, I do love when you sing. Yeah. If I don't do it. I'm in the abyss, I might be pregnant, we're in the blood shallows now. And I'll give you inspiration. That was brilliant. That's really good. That was brilliant. That's really good. That's right, I was saying blood shallows the whole time. He's what he sees. You ratatouille. All right, so... Oh, God. I will... ...attempt to do what? Lead us, lay, pretend this is your temple. Confidently walk forth and find out where we need to go because it'll just feel right in your gut. Oh, right. If you had something important in your castle, in your temple, where would you put it? The very back behind Handsome Girls. Just imagine that and find the Handsome Guard. Okay, all right. All right, I'll step forward, you can hear the blood and slashes my feet sink down into it. I'm not going to look down, I'm going to look forward towards this hideous temple and I'm just going to march forward and... Make a surrel to good advantage. As you step into this castle, you realize not only is the motion above you of just the clouds of vermin and insects all around you buzzing, you see the pure, the strange blue clouds almost rocketing over you. As if it's anachronistically like a super fast time lapse of a day, but it's just sped up as fast as possible. It's almost dizzying to look up. A temple is a temple is a temple is a palace is a temple. They're all the same. I hope. I got a 20. 20? Nice. You get a sense of this place where a palace is a palace and you start to see is that you want to get out of the environment. You want to get out of the shallows of the marshes. As you enter, there's occasional areas of where there are had rooms where the roof is still above you, but mostly it's exposed to the elements. You do however find huge ruined chambers, cracked hallways, and Iris guides you through without getting lost with that role. As you make your way deeper, as you see the flesh growth on the walls pulsing, the kite in a shell of insects, you see the creepy crawling of all these strange hybrid demonic fiendish insects all around you until you finally the smell and the buzzing gets louder and louder until you the buzzing was normally in pulsing in waves and the deeper you get into this palace, the droning is consistent and it is maddening is bouncing off all of the walls of reverberating. And as you get closer with these large spires of of of anthill type growths, you see up ahead as were perhaps the grand audience hall may have been in this fantastical otherworldly palace, an enormous hole that is bored deep into the soft wet earth, all sorts of strange veins of what you found going down and these massive spires surrounding it, almost the biggest spires of these anthill like growths that you've seen yet as you see that they are, that have these enormous holes like the size of a full grown adult. And you see right there and the buzzing is so loud, you feel like if this is where the former Prince of Demons would be lurking, this is where it would be. Well, I think we found where it looks. Well done. You have to go down there? I believe so. We have to be ready for anything. All right. Stand behind me. Are you sure? I'm OK. You might be pregnant. I know. I'm just going to hope that I'm not. Positive thinking. I'm going to manifest that I'm not. Oh, I love that for you. Would you like a crystal? I have 12. Does that help? Oh, yes. You just put crystals everywhere and anything you want comes to you. Sure. All right. I reach into my pack. Here are my quartz and there's my pere d'oe and here's some jasper. What kind do you want? Turquoise. I'm going to give you some gems, some crystals. Anything you want, manifest, if you have these crystals. That's what I was told. That's what it said in the pamphlet. Why wouldn't you get those out and just be like, we need all these pieces right now? Because I haven't figured out how to make them work yet. I'm going to manifest very hard with this. Thank you, Aros. You're welcome. I'll start to slowly lead the gang down into this disgusting pit. You do. And as you make your way into this courtyard that is surrounded by almost that the spires are all coming up and meeting at the top, you see growth and the droning gets incredibly loud and suddenly you hear a bursting forth. You as bursting forth from all of these growths, you see the insects that you had seen before were child's play. Oh, God. As you see, oh, these are the true minions of Abok's Ab. As these horrible insect-like creatures that are across between a scorpion, a fly, and an ant, but where ahead would be, you see fused together of three humanoid-looking demon skulls. As they take to the wing and they burst out, flying into the air, huge pulsing stingers extending from their abdomen, pulsing with that same disgusting blood-red goop of the blood shallows. As they swoop down, the buzzing is cacophonous. As I eat everyone to make a constitution saving throw and roll for initiative. Damn. And we can take a break there if you like. Coffee break. I wouldn't mind. Let's get initiative done and then thank you. I love these things. I miss these days so bad. Your frost ice really helped me out. Yeah, yeah. If you know how to roll them, they always do good. 21 for constitution. 21 for con. Okay, you resisted it. 25. 25 for con. You're good. 17. 17 for con. You double 13s. Look at that. My initiative is only a 16 though, but I'm not very fast. 10 for con. Oof, that. Rolled a natural one. 21 for con. For con. Toa's just not having a good day. And... Oops. I don't think we make any today. That's right. You're going to go absolutely ham in combat. 20 to... I'll make some during the break. Yeah. And let me just see. Let me see the DC. Here's your... You're... You only got a 10. The droning, you were off your game. I think it was probably perhaps the realm of the forgotten lands. I'm spooked. And you see Toa collapse onto the ground as the buzzing is so awful you fall on the ground. 17, those guys. Yes. As these enormous insect demons swarm upon you, I'll take everyone's initiative. Eight. Nine. So I'll just do Toa. Toa is nine. Iris is eight. Felix's got a 16. Felix is a 16. Lufty's a 22. Lufty's 22. 18 for Derek. And then 18. I mean, Caprice. Caprice. And then, okay. 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