[SPEAKER_05]: Hello, friends.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the end of Act 3.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks for joining us as we put a bow on the first half of our story and the last three years of the show.
[SPEAKER_05]: As I'm sure you're expecting, if you've listened to us this far, the bulk of today's episode is of course going to be devoted to the recovered life stories of our characters.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's piece of scripted storytelling that my four dear friends read,
[SPEAKER_05]: completely cold with no prep as this was being recorded.
[SPEAKER_05]: But of course we do pick back up in-scene for the last chunk of the episode with what happens upon our heroes awakening from the Oasis.
[SPEAKER_05]: With all the stuff that comes out in the three parts of chapter 150, I hope you can find the time over the next few weeks to pop back to the beginning of the show and give at least the prologue if not the first chapter are realists and there are so many things that we circle back to or re-contextualize here.
[SPEAKER_05]: If it's been a while for you, you might enjoy being reminded of the things that we have been referring back to these past few episodes.
[SPEAKER_05]: And here's the plan for the next few weeks.
[SPEAKER_05]: Monday, September 15th, will release the conversation that the five of us had about Act 3 right after we finished recording what you're about to hear.
[SPEAKER_05]: Plus, I've got a bonus thing to share on top of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: The following week, September 22nd, 11 other Q&A episode with listener questions.
[SPEAKER_05]: So there is still time to send those in info at darknexuspodcast.com or on the socials.
[SPEAKER_05]: After that, September 29th, we'll have another recap and review to get your refreshed before the new season starts, and then act four kicks off on October 6th.
[SPEAKER_05]: As always, thank you, thank you, thank you to our supporters on Patreon and welcome to Tim and Tony.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can find links to our Patreon page and the merch store at darknexespodcast.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, here we go.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you so much for watching this video.
[SPEAKER_05]: Welcome back to Dark Nexus.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tonight, it's Act 3, Chapter 150, Part 3.
[SPEAKER_05]: Alright, we faced the mad poet, and we got what we desired.
[SPEAKER_05]: Or at least we got what we said we desired before we began the long trek to the Oasis.
[SPEAKER_05]: Barnabas got his release from the inmost blot, but at the cost of his memories and experience.
[SPEAKER_05]: Vic secured his daughter's safety, but at the cost of never seeing her again.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as for what the rest of you said you desired, get your memories back, understand your situation more fully, find wholeness again, learn how to find the Roosevelt, you now know what roles learned when he was last here.
[SPEAKER_05]: The location of Neruzven is to be found within the dread pages of the Necronomicon.
[SPEAKER_05]: And after doing battle with some twisted dark mirrors of yourselves, you've secured your bodies and recovered your memories.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what?
[SPEAKER_05]: What were those things that you fought?
[SPEAKER_05]: They weren't exactly dream bodies because who could have been dreaming them?
[SPEAKER_05]: They weren't exactly you from when you were last at the Oasis, because you saw those versions of yourselves.
[SPEAKER_05]: Those hollowed out people weren't those people you just fought.
[SPEAKER_05]: Perhaps they were just like metaphysical screen grabs of yourselves from some moment in your life's experience animated by the mad poet's mad whim.
[SPEAKER_05]: They did seem confused, perhaps not quite whole, a little too dimensional maybe, but were they?
[SPEAKER_05]: were they alive?
[SPEAKER_05]: Were they life?
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you kill them?
[SPEAKER_05]: You?
[SPEAKER_05]: Or were they you already dead?
[SPEAKER_05]: And what exactly does it mean for either one of you to air quotes get the body?
[SPEAKER_05]: If whoever wakes, wakes with both people's memories.
[SPEAKER_05]: If Riptusk were to wake remembering both his life and remembering and feeling grip's life experience, wouldn't he just be grip?
[SPEAKER_05]: Or take that question in the inverse, as grip wakes remembering and feeling Riptusk's life experience will he be Riptusk?
[SPEAKER_05]: Or would the resulting person no matter who'd won that fight always be some new third person?
[SPEAKER_05]: Or does the fact that you had this absolute utter split in your timeline?
[SPEAKER_05]: Were you started over with a blank slate?
[SPEAKER_05]: Does that mean that that person, that old version of you, is and was and will always be forever gone?
[SPEAKER_05]: die in that pool that day.
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you actually die in that pool?
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you die?
[SPEAKER_05]: In Act One, we asked ourselves, what would it meant to build an identity when you have no memory?
[SPEAKER_05]: Who are you when you don't know what you've done?
[SPEAKER_05]: In the process, we discovered some things that were core to your characters based on the actions that you took in a very closed environment with almost no context to shape you.
[SPEAKER_05]: Coming up in Act Four, we're going to be asking Dora Grip and Vic what it means to build
[SPEAKER_05]: and given that you've experienced this split, will the actions of your past selves forever remain a narrative written by someone else not to get too met at here, or will ownership of those choices and experience, sink in and take root.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're going to have to find out.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, here we go, pals.
[SPEAKER_05]: Our last story time with Uncle Buttons.
[SPEAKER_05]: Actually, today's story time with the whole button's family, we're going to do this one together.
[SPEAKER_05]: But yeah, we are here.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is it.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is the last of what I ever created for your characters, backstories.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's my swansong as the long stories from the past guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: After this point, your lives, I pass on to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: maybe you will fill in the gaps, maybe you'll poke at points of confusion or maybe you won't.
[SPEAKER_05]: I do not know, but after this, all four characters will finally be in the same boat in a way they have not been since Ray died.
[SPEAKER_05]: You will all know who you were in addition to who you are.
[SPEAKER_05]: So my friends, thank you for insulting me in this experiment of doing the campaign this way.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's been a really
[SPEAKER_05]: interesting creative challenge to put all of this together with your help and you don't even know yet how much six years for the past six years yeah I I opened up I think I don't think I've said this on air I created two documents in 2019 one was a word doc
[SPEAKER_05]: and I called it the tail.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's literally what we're about to read.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that was just story ideas.
[SPEAKER_05]: I would just open up if I am like, okay, braverts character is probably from a different content.
[SPEAKER_05]: Johnny's character killed somebody, maybe this doctor tries?
[SPEAKER_05]: I don't know, like I've just jot down little stuff like that and then it would get as we went on and on and on I would flesh that stuff out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Then as you all would see things at the table, especially in Book 1, I would just write that in there and then see how I can put that.
[SPEAKER_05]: The other document was, it was a spreadsheet of just dates, because I had to keep for myself.
[SPEAKER_05]: Like the whole timing of where I lie, interacting with your lives.
[SPEAKER_05]: I more understood kind of Lucy in my head, and till we got to the middle of that too, it was like, I actually couldn't know what this time was.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I would, that's where I started playing all this stuff out.
[SPEAKER_05]: And now, I will be able to close one of these documents.
[SPEAKER_05]: forever after this.
[SPEAKER_05]: And here we go.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not where the story begins, or even really, where our story begins, but their story is began.
[SPEAKER_00]: 49 years ago, twenty-eight years ago, twenty-eight years ago, twenty-two years ago, with the birth of Dora Kranak, Victor Zolletov.
[SPEAKER_02]: The retched little of runt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Braiden Vaticus.
[SPEAKER_05]: We will never know the life they might have had.
[SPEAKER_05]: We will never know the person they might have been in a different world in a different timeline.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because what might have been their life was stolen from them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Before they were even born, Gavroni Stoiccia, Nicolus Maria, and Mejwani, the serpent, the Baron, and the conqueror, they made the choice to not just interfere with where a lie, but to torture and murder her, driving her to a revenge scheme that would last decades.
[SPEAKER_05]: and, because a deeply petty and vindictive little shit consumed with ceiling rage because the world refused to acknowledge his superiority because this petty vindictive little shit saw these four as useful tools in his scheme to make himself the most consequential person that ever lived.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dora was born on the 31st of Kathona, the last day of the year of 4669.
[SPEAKER_05]: Her mother was Thessica Antea, though she took her husband Tom Crannick's name.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Crannick's lived simple lives as herders and gathers in the Numerian plains near the black pipe until the barren rose.
[SPEAKER_05]: in a raid by the Baron's men, Tom was murdered and Thessica was captured.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thessica lived the rest of her life in prison in the Baron's castle and it was there that she gave birth to Dora.
[SPEAKER_05]: born in captivity, the daughter of Nicholas Maria, a.k.a.
[SPEAKER_05]: Baron Feshta-Nellett.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dora was a curious child, gentle and thoughtful.
[SPEAKER_05]: She loved more than anything, to read, and she was exploding with psychic potential.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was not entirely uncommon among the children born near the black pipe in those days.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every day she tried little things, every once in a while, something
[SPEAKER_01]: A coin would move, a breeze would rustle, energies would shift.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor was born on the first day of a rastus, or July, in 4687.
[SPEAKER_05]: The youngest of eight children raised and loved by Catarina Stoica and Edward Zalatov.
[SPEAKER_05]: Catarina declined to participate in the family business, her scarrony brother had built up, but Cataroni never held that against his baby sister and they lived in loving relationship, despite Catarina marrying
[SPEAKER_05]: Outside the clan, a simple, forision, herbalist, and hedge surgeon.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor was born on the road in the virizian tradition, and his family traveled the lost coast road.
[SPEAKER_03]: Victor was always on the move.
[SPEAKER_03]: Never stand still.
[SPEAKER_03]: He loved puzzles, logic problems, games, especially hide and seek.
[SPEAKER_05]: AND, just as he was trained openly by his father in the ways of healing, he was also trained, ooh, subtly, by his uncle, with the skills that he'd need to take over his empire should the need arise.
[SPEAKER_03]: Little puzzles, how would you unlock this box if you needed to, little games?
[SPEAKER_03]: How would you sneak up on me from that angle?
[SPEAKER_05]: The wretched runt was born in the spring of 4692 years after his brother, Fargrid.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were the sons of Mej Boitheis and Grand Sons to Mej Onei, the conqueror.
[SPEAKER_05]: The runts small size at birth and traces of a faint human bloodline that surfaced in him cemented the long-standing rumors about the conqueror's parentage, or perhaps his inclinations.
[SPEAKER_05]: The runce childhood was brutal, but marked by the fierce love Fargrid showed his little brother.
[SPEAKER_05]: Fargrid was his protector, was his champion, he gave him the name Gruk, and taught him to take the ironic nickname the others gave him, Riptusk, and own it, as a badge of pride, as their tribe traveled the punishing waste of the Assyrian Cotopech border region.
[SPEAKER_02]: The runt was reckless and aggressive.
[SPEAKER_02]: He had to be, since he was so much smaller than everyone else.
[SPEAKER_05]: And because of the danger of his situation, nearly from birth he had to learn to adapt, to strike hard, to change tactics, to keep the other kids who were always trying to hurt him, off balance.
[SPEAKER_02]: And most important of all he learned how to take a punch, and keep going.
[SPEAKER_05]: Braden was born in Rosenport to Tima Antea on the 20th of Abadius, 4696.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was born in the night of the new moon, coinciding with the Athonian holiday of eternal kiss, which Braden later saw as a portend.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was Galavravaticus's son, or at least that was the story.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nobody was happy on their home.
[SPEAKER_05]: Mommy hated Ray, Mommy hated Daddy, Daddy hated Mommy, and re-nard hated Daddy, and Daddy hated Renard, and Mommy had needs, and those needs were all that mattered in the hate-filled house where Braden eventually Ray grew up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray was a sensitive soul.
[SPEAKER_00]: He needed so much love, and it wasn't until his sister was born that he finally found it.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was born marked, twisted in body, but with a soul like a blazing beacon crying out.
[SPEAKER_05]: to the divine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prain was not his habit by nature or nurture, but when he would whisper a little silly, basically secular prayer to say, doesn't it for a spot of luck, or Caden Kylion for a bit of bravery, more often than not he found that something would happen or seem to.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dora never remembered much of her earliest years, aside from a general sense of terrible, darkness and depravity during her years in the Baron's castle.
[SPEAKER_01]: She never forgot the day she was branded with her father's mark, though, marked like cattle.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did it himself, he pressed the red hot iron into his child's neck, while she screamed and cried, was a pain she never forgot.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor's earliest years were idyllic for a time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Life on the road with a family that loved him, so many siblings, adds an uncle's cousins, and all of them loved little Vic, especially Uncle G, who found every opportunity to visit.
[SPEAKER_03]: On the road, everyone had a job, and his was to care for the pets, dogs, and cats, and ferrets, and parents that their little clan kept around to make life richer and brighter.
[SPEAKER_05]: But when the red death came, everything changed.
[SPEAKER_05]: It started with the leaking swords, and no one was spared no one, but thick.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, hopefully, his eldest brother, Spastionus.
[SPEAKER_05]: But Spastionus wasn't around, so no one knew for sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the darkest days of the plague year, the little Vic would lie in bed with the covers over his head and pretend he was in a coffin, trying to feel what his family was going through.
[SPEAKER_03]: He would imagine himself lying there in the earth with his loved ones, missing and loving them all.
[SPEAKER_05]: His memories of the plague months always remained swimming, but he never forgot the last time he saw Uncle G.
[SPEAKER_05]: The swords were already showing, and whispered in Victor's ear, so it's under the family tree that'll man.
[SPEAKER_05]: What put it there?
[SPEAKER_05]: It's yours if you want it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor didn't know what he was talking about, but he never forgot the instruction.
[SPEAKER_05]: Once they were all dead, it was straight to an orphanage, Bergen Bellings home for wayward boys.
[SPEAKER_05]: Gruk's childhood was rough, especially after his father, both eyes, killed the conqueror and had all of one eye's technological relics purged.
[SPEAKER_05]: In a return to the old ways, it was a life of struggle defined by violence and wrapped in the worship of a demon.
[SPEAKER_02]: Gruk's memories of that period of time are always thin.
[SPEAKER_02]: But one thing that stuck was the game he and Fargrid played, where they took turns slapping each other in the face, each time hitting harder and harder, and both of them laughing and laughing as they did it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Braden's early childhood, mostly consisted of trying to stay out of everyone's way, and to avoid getting screamed at by his mother.
[SPEAKER_05]: His father spent time with him, but most of that time was spent complaining about his mother.
[SPEAKER_05]: Everything changed, though, or at least it felt like it changed once, Darya was born.
[SPEAKER_05]: First of all, mummy calmed down a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And finally, Ray had someone who loved him completely, and Ray made it his life's mission
[SPEAKER_05]: And once Daria could walk, they used her a little trick to slip her out into town with him.
[SPEAKER_05]: Where she would go, and nobody could see her.
[SPEAKER_00]: The feeling of holding your best, and only friends hand in yours while nobody in the world, but you knew they were there, it was intoxicating.
[SPEAKER_05]: They explored every corner of Thrushmore together, always careful.
[SPEAKER_05]: To turn back at the wall on the east side, the line beyond which they were not supposed to pass.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then it happened in their ninth year.
[SPEAKER_05]: Picture the scene.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blue-tiled floor of the barren's throne room.
[SPEAKER_03]: A steep wet, riddle-port alleyway at midnight.
[SPEAKER_03]: Storm was breaking.
[SPEAKER_02]: The hotter to have an empathy at their so ancient, it almost seemed to be natural.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beneath the eaves of the wailing house.
[SPEAKER_05]: Let's start at the wheeling house.
[SPEAKER_05]: We basically know this story already.
[SPEAKER_00]: Young Ray wrapped the chain of his necklace tight around his sister's neck.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he strangled her.
[SPEAKER_05]: It took a disturbingly long time.
[SPEAKER_05]: She fought back.
[SPEAKER_05]: She fought back hard.
[SPEAKER_05]: But in the end, she fell.
[SPEAKER_00]: Raid didn't know what he was doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: The fun juice had kicked in by that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whatever it was that he saw, whatever it was that his father made him see.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was convinced it was trying to kill him.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he fought.
[SPEAKER_05]: and something terrible happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: The chain closed tight.
[SPEAKER_05]: A loss.
[SPEAKER_05]: When it was over, he ran.
[SPEAKER_05]: He barely understood what he had done, but he knew it was bad.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he believed it was all his fault, so he ran.
[SPEAKER_05]: He ran for the woods at the edge of town.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as he stumbled past that little wall on the east side, he ran into the stranger.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nothing was ever the same again.
[SPEAKER_05]: six years earlier in the heart of an ancient amphitheater.
[SPEAKER_05]: It all happened as both eyes rain was falling apart.
[SPEAKER_05]: The jeers about the runt had grown to the point where both eyes took the tribe to the pit of the scourge.
[SPEAKER_05]: Father hauled sun to the center and emits the shards of ancient black rock.
[SPEAKER_05]: He said that anyone could challenge him.
[SPEAKER_05]: In fact, everyone could.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was Fargrid, who stepped forward the first.
[SPEAKER_05]: He did so knowing that any of the other Orcs would slaughter his brother without mercy.
[SPEAKER_05]: But if Fargrid could pull his blows just enough, there might be a tiny chance that Grick could play dead.
[SPEAKER_05]: Possibly survive after the tribe left.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was such a tiny, thin brutal ray of hope, but it was the only one Fargrid could see.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he stepped out to meet his brother on the field of battle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Young Gruk, picked up a rock.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fargrid stuck to his fists.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just as Gruk was winding up for his first swing.
[SPEAKER_05]: Out of the corner of his eye, Fargrid saw the arrival of a group of no-raders cresting the ridge line at the top of the amphitheater.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he also saw, at their head, the stranger.
[SPEAKER_05]: The sight of a fully unmasked Denizan of Lang froze Fargrid for a split second.
[SPEAKER_05]: But Gruk was facing the opposite way.
[SPEAKER_05]: He had no clue.
[SPEAKER_05]: and something terrible happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Rock Swung.
[SPEAKER_05]: A loss.
[SPEAKER_05]: The blow that should have only grazed Fargrid, struck true, and dropped him.
[SPEAKER_05]: The nose on the stranger swarmed over the top of the rise, decimated his tribe, while Gruk stood helplessly at the center in shock, mourning his fallen brother.
[SPEAKER_02]: When they finally reached him, he swung out in fury, but he missed.
[SPEAKER_02]: He fell forward.
[SPEAKER_05]: The howling started, and with it came the pain.
[SPEAKER_05]: Eventually, the stranger reached him.
[SPEAKER_02]: And nothing was ever the same again.
[SPEAKER_05]: Three years earlier, in Riddleport, life in Bergenbelling's home for a wayward boys wasn't great.
[SPEAKER_05]: First of all, there were so many rules.
[SPEAKER_03]: When you woke, when you ate, what you could eat, what you could do.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was not the life Victor had known, it was not a life Victor thrived in.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, of course, there was the abuse.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kids were being neglected.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kids were being hurt, but not Victor.
[SPEAKER_05]: He didn't know why at first, but the other kids were happy to tell him.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's because of your uncle, stupid.
[SPEAKER_05]: Uncle G had always just been Uncle G to Victor, but to everyone else who recognized the surname at once, Uncle G was...
[SPEAKER_05]: You see, Victor had told the staff that he was Victor, Steuicha, not Victor Zollotov.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was a simple little lie.
[SPEAKER_05]: Not even really a lie, just something he did because he was thinking about family lines.
[SPEAKER_05]: There was still one Zollotov out there, hopefully, and Sebastian is.
[SPEAKER_05]: But there were no more Steuichas, so he thought he'd honor his mom and his uncle G, with just a little name change.
[SPEAKER_05]: No harm, no foul, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Except of course, Little Victor had no idea what legendary figure his uncle was.
[SPEAKER_05]: And nobody, and I mean, nobody actually believed the serpent was dead, not at that time, not yet.
[SPEAKER_05]: Stoich's nephew being at Belling's place was so weird kind of test, at least that's what everyone seemed to believe.
[SPEAKER_05]: Who will dare hurt my nephew?
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, nobody would.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once Victor learned about this and he realized he had some leverage, he decided to use it to help the rest of the kids there.
[SPEAKER_03]: He went to the headmaster.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the headmaster listened to the child's threats.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when Belling responded, he spoke to Victor of a plan.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, this place is bad, but it's not my fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, we can help all of the kids.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you're willing to take action.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor, nine years old, was of course willing to take action.
[SPEAKER_05]: Belling drowned the kid in a sea of jargon about protection, rackets, insurance schemes, shady legalities.
[SPEAKER_05]: Victor didn't understand the details, but he understood the plan.
[SPEAKER_03]: Belling would make arrangements to get all the kids out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Meanwhile, everyone was gone, Victor would slip into the alley, and toss a torch into Belling's window, which Belling would leave open, and filled with oil.
[SPEAKER_05]: Belling would be seen at his club that night, and no suspicion would fall on him.
[SPEAKER_05]: The school would go up at flames, Belling would claim his insurance money, the kids would be taken in by the priests, and Victor could take off and find his brother.
[SPEAKER_05]: But of course, on that stormy night, when Little Victor stood in that alley and tossed the torch he drew rigged from a broken table in the third floor in nursery, and some old used cloth diapers.
[SPEAKER_05]: Something happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: Victor threw the torch.
[SPEAKER_05]: And as it sailed upwards, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the faces above.
[SPEAKER_05]: the kids were all still in there.
[SPEAKER_05]: Locked in their dorms on the second floor and so presumably were the even younger kids on the third floor but it was it was too late.
[SPEAKER_03]: The torch flew a loss.
[SPEAKER_05]: Scratch that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Losses.
[SPEAKER_03]: He backed down the alley unable to take his eyes off what had happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was facing forward but moving backward.
[SPEAKER_05]: And just as he was reaching for the slick cloth rope draped over the nearby wall, his escape route, the stranger reached him.
[SPEAKER_03]: And nothing was ever the same again.
[SPEAKER_05]: And 17 years earlier in Numario,
[SPEAKER_05]: The Baron had all his wives and daughters in the throne room, they were sewing and stitching and knitting and, of course, obeying the Baron's every depraved whim.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until, Jessica refused.
[SPEAKER_05]: What was the final straw that day, Dora?
[SPEAKER_05]: Dora will never know, but something snapped in Thesca, Antea.
[SPEAKER_05]: And she said the word, you were never to say, to Baron Fesca, Nellett.
[SPEAKER_01]: She said, no.
[SPEAKER_05]: And all it took was one of the women saying, no, for the rest, to get that gleam of no in their eyes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Everyone in that blue-tiled room felt the chef to something was happening.
[SPEAKER_05]: And if the Baron didn't act quickly, there would be no going back.
[SPEAKER_05]: so the Baron acted.
[SPEAKER_05]: He began casting spells on Thesico, with the first one excruciating deformation, Dora watched as her mother's limbs twisted, her body contorted, and she screamed in unbearable agony.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it only got worse after that.
[SPEAKER_05]: She stood there helplessly, clutching her knitting as her mother was brutally tortured.
[SPEAKER_05]: She didn't know what to do, she felt so hopeless, so alone.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dora knew she had to act, but the will to hurt, to possibly have to kill it was not in her.
[SPEAKER_05]: She couldn't do it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Her mother raised her despite the circumstances to be kind, to think, to trust, to forgive.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she had to become someone else.
[SPEAKER_05]: and so this beautiful, sensitive, loving, caring child this child nearly exploding with psychic potential.
[SPEAKER_01]: She picked her to metal box with a hinged cover, roughly the size of a lock box.
[SPEAKER_05]: bigger on the inside, and she took every part of her psyche that was sensitive, that was thoughtful, that was caring, and she boxed it.
[SPEAKER_05]: She locked it away inside a prison in her mind.
[SPEAKER_05]: She stripped herself of everything that defined herself in order to release everything inside of her that was anathema to her, to make space in her soul for darkness, to grow, to become
[SPEAKER_05]: she unleashed her viciousness, her vindictiveness, that which acted on instinct instead of information, that which clung to slides and wrongs, that which sought to dominate, to punish.
[SPEAKER_05]: To hate, and once this once in a generation psychic boxed her consciousness, it worked.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dora needed someone who could do what she was incapable of doing, and so she turned herself into that person.
[SPEAKER_01]: She created anathema.
[SPEAKER_05]: She became anathema, and then anathema did what was necessary.
[SPEAKER_05]: As the Baron cast the spell that would end his mother's life, as he was momentarily distracted, young teamer raised her knitting needle, and stabbed him right in the eye.
[SPEAKER_05]: A loss.
[SPEAKER_05]: Scratch that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Two losses.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Baron died, but not before his spell completed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thessica's head exploded, and her trunk was left slumped over.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's shattered monument to what happens when you say no to the Baron.
[SPEAKER_05]: Just as the Baron toppled forward and landed on the needle, face first, shoving it all the way through his head.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anathema wandered away, left, up, right, up, right, down, up, left.
[SPEAKER_01]: She ignored the cries and chaos, only blinded by her tears.
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, soon the stranger found her.
[SPEAKER_01]: And nothing was ever the same again.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the immediate aftermath, she knew what she'd done.
[SPEAKER_05]: But once we rely had her, she found she needed to be anathema, simply to survive, returning to that lockbox was not an immediate priority, and as time passed, it became less and less something she was even aware of or remembered until finally, but it simply lost it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because when Dora boxed herself, she boxed her own psychic talents with her, and anathema
[SPEAKER_05]: She still had Dora's razor-sharp mind, of course, but that mind was as psychically sensitive as a block of wood.
[SPEAKER_05]: He could figure out how to blow things up, or summon aberrations from beyond the veil, but it could no longer read a soul.
[SPEAKER_05]: Or plum its depths, or unlock the mysteries of those deep, secret places inside of others?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, herself?
[SPEAKER_05]: and then Dora sacrificed herself, two teama, and became Tima, but Dora is Tima, and Tima is Dora.
[SPEAKER_05]: Two personas, but one body, one mind, one life, and in truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: One person.
[SPEAKER_05]: The years between that first murder or murders, and the next, those years of change and transition of adolescence, they were rough.
[SPEAKER_05]: When we were like, took anathema into her custody, she had no plan, no direction, she still believed she could capture Gavronian Mej, not knowing that that was never meant to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, she dumped anathema off with her ally, Razzanille, for him to have his way with.
[SPEAKER_05]: as we rely continued the search for her murderers.
[SPEAKER_05]: By the time she found Roney, she was the stranger she established her contacts in the inner sea region, so she dumped him with biting lash and told her to make his life hell, which it was.
[SPEAKER_05]: The situation was similar with Grooke.
[SPEAKER_05]: dumped with biting lash after she found him in the wastes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Ray was born so much later when the situation at Threshmore was already up and running, so there was less physical torment for him.
[SPEAKER_05]: By that time, we realized greatest pleasure was derived from these psychological torture and corruption.
[SPEAKER_05]: We realized pushed Ray's buttons to the point that the poor kid believed he found a savior in Zan Kufan.
[SPEAKER_05]: just as she'd poisoned Riptusk's eternal soul.
[SPEAKER_05]: By getting him to bind himself to Norgal, before then dropping him in a situation where he'd fallen to the worship of the King of the Yellow, she not only helped Rey stumble into a relationship with Zon Kuthan before attempting a similar corruption, but she even taught him to profane Shalen, Zon Kuthan's own sister by seating in Rey an idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote prayers to the eternal rose, and then he would destroy them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the act of using them as components for casting spells dedicated to the Prince of Pain.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, adolescence was rough, mostly again because they had so few choices and so little power.
[SPEAKER_05]: But then something happened that was their choice.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was a choice they likely would never have made if their lives had not been shaped by so much trauma, but still it was a choice that they made.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they made it alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Team Antea freed a devil to slaughter her captain, all to access the forbidden knowledge she sought.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ronnie Steutcher killed an innocent man, just to remain undetected.
[SPEAKER_00]: Braden Vaticus murdered a joyful thing, an exchange for the strength of will he sought.
[SPEAKER_05]: And a road, they never would have otherwise stumbled down on their own, became their path.
[SPEAKER_05]: Exactly as we rely wanted.
[SPEAKER_05]: Four souls corrupted and darkness, four souls choosing lives of ruin and waste, four souls that could be molded by Namira and her son to the labor on behalf of the King in yellow praise.
[SPEAKER_05]: Not that these four choices were an immediate flipping of a switch, but they marked what each would later identify as a turning point, a point of no return, which would haunt them before the end.
[SPEAKER_05]: We've been exploring the story thus far out of chronological order, but from this point forward, we will move linearly through time.
[SPEAKER_05]: 25 years ago in Rosenport, Timo was sold to Lulls by Weirlei as a research assistant to help him in his studies of Carcosa and Haster.
[SPEAKER_01]: The research was intoxicating to 23-year-old Timo.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whole new world was open to her.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, realise that there were mysteries out there even more profound than those of this reality.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were visions, journeys, and power to be had.
[SPEAKER_05]: She was also, of course, on a lot of drugs.
[SPEAKER_05]: She needed to be changed.
[SPEAKER_05]: So as we know, Mun made the drugs and gave them to lulls, lulls, gave them to vaticists and vaticists administered them to Tima, and they worked for years, and years.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tima's mind was opened.
[SPEAKER_01]: and she was made, um, compliant.
[SPEAKER_01]: But whether or not it was driven by the drugs, Tima became fascinated by Haster.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story of a simple shepherd walking into the throne room of a palace, unleashing Tara, is struck a chord.
[SPEAKER_05]: She imagined herself as the pallid mask to Fesca Nellard's queen Kassilda.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thought of unleashing madness and a royal court gave her shivers of ecstasy.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was also when Melison entered the picture and those two hated each other from the jump.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tema had this nightly ritual where she would try to quiet her mind and focus.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something she'd lost, something she'd forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: She would sit in front of a mirror and imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing, version of herself, more can round it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But every time she almost got deep enough within herself, every time she almost found what she was looking for, she'd be interrupted by a banging on the door.
[SPEAKER_05]: Melocin, walking by, just being awful.
[SPEAKER_05]: This happened over, and over, and over.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was ever a hope that Tima might recover the door or within her.
[SPEAKER_01]: It died during those years.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this brings us to the first nexus.
[SPEAKER_05]: Braden was born to Tima.
[SPEAKER_05]: Melson had given roles this idea a few years earlier.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wouldn't it be hilarious if Vaticus was fucking Tima?
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, she was so drugged up.
[SPEAKER_05]: What could she do about it?
[SPEAKER_05]: A piece of her on the inside would be screaming in rage.
[SPEAKER_05]: But what could she do?
[SPEAKER_05]: Nothing.
[SPEAKER_05]: The answer was nothing.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Braden was born, and it wasn't a surprise to anyone.
[SPEAKER_05]: except Ray, how much she hated him.
[SPEAKER_05]: That year, the year Braden was born was the same year Victor burned down the orphanage, by the way.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when his time in biting lashes fortress, blossoming the thorn began.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the same year he was branded on the back of his neck with a mark.
[SPEAKER_03]: His usual hell, unrelenting hell.
[SPEAKER_03]: Much of it he suppressed for the rest of his life.
[SPEAKER_05]: Two years later was when Loll's the third died and Numerous supposedly two a month later, and when Loll's the fourth move the whole entourage to thrush more.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was actually a teamer who gave Loll's the idea to keep his mother in the attic.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was an experiment of sorts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Numeria had given a soul to Hasta, she had delved deep into the mysteries, with the mysteries keep her alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: Without food, without water.
[SPEAKER_05]: They did, in a way.
[SPEAKER_01]: A year later, Tema was weed off the drugs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Her devotion to Haster was complete, in our cut-ups when our necessary, barely got the way of her fully exploiting her higher brain functions.
[SPEAKER_02]: This was around when Riptus killed his brother and where a light took him.
[SPEAKER_05]: A year later, Tima and Vaticus got married, why not?
[SPEAKER_05]: By that point, Tima honestly thought it would be funny.
[SPEAKER_05]: Mary, her rapist, while a bunch of locals, blood out in the court of the unspeakable one, far below Iris Hill, Haster would approve.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that night is when Tima was seated with Shaman door by Munn.
[SPEAKER_01]: Which was a thing, Shaman knows she'd been waiting for.
[SPEAKER_01]: or her life.
[SPEAKER_05]: By this point, she'd been team of her decades.
[SPEAKER_05]: She'd been steeped in the worship of Haster for years.
[SPEAKER_05]: She had murdered, she'd summoned devils, none of this was a life she'd chosen, but it was the life she had.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she was all in, that's the thing about Shaman Dore.
[SPEAKER_05]: Once he's up in there, entangled in your brain folds, entwined in your consciousness, whispering to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: not just of unspeakable secrets endless life immortal power, but also of change, of transformation, and the secret undeniable truth, you are the worst version of yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: that you are less than the shit scraped loose by the cloak of an elder god in a stinking sewer and a forgotten city that fell to ruin before it was even built.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can be a change agent in the universe and bring about cataclysmic transformation.
[SPEAKER_05]: The appeal is real, or at least it was real for Tima.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for loll's, over the many years they worked theorized and plotted together, they came to be in many ways, like twisted little siblings.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that brings us to the second Nexus, a year later, 17 years ago.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni and Riptusk were brought together in blossoming Thorn.
[SPEAKER_02]: Riptusk was branded, and following three separate escape attempts, Riptusk was divested of three of his fingers.
[SPEAKER_05]: These years, the next two years during which back in Thrashmore, Darya was born, they were hell for those two.
[SPEAKER_05]: But a bond was forged between them that was almost unbreakable.
[SPEAKER_05]: Without the other, neither would have survived.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was Ronnie who gave Rip to us the name of Rip.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a secret name.
[SPEAKER_05]: Something only the two of them shared.
[SPEAKER_05]: Something never spoke an outside of their little circle.
[SPEAKER_02]: When he had to be hard, he used the name of Rip to us.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when he thought of who he really was, he was Rip, a survivor.
[SPEAKER_02]: Someone who could hold on, no matter the shit thrown at him.
[SPEAKER_03]: no matter what chaos fell into their lives.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that brings us to the final nexus.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni and Riptus were sold to lolls, and everyone was under the same roof this was 15 years ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tema, of course, immediately seeded Roni and Riptusk, and there was an incident.
[SPEAKER_03]: Runny was slippery, he got out, and he started whispering the name.
[SPEAKER_05]: Damage control was tough, some had to be murdered, some were taken into Iris Hill as new staff, but if you slipped, notice, and won, just one, ended up in Briarstone, a silo, where he committed suicide quite gruesomely in the northwest tower room one after noon.
[SPEAKER_05]: just one of six patients sitting in their rocking chairs staring out over the North lawn.
[SPEAKER_05]: As he slid his throat, he managed to get just half of the inmost blots name out in a feeble, gurgling croak, not enough to infect the others, but it wasn't long after that.
[SPEAKER_05]: That all of her zandalists began drawing the lone standing stone on the island,
[SPEAKER_05]: and soon he was drawing others, the ones in the hills of Thrushmore, and the ones in the wastes of Naruzivan.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're cruising right along now, we'll hit the next chunk of years pretty quickly because what we really want to drive to is when the dream lands entered the lives of these four people.
[SPEAKER_05]: Um, on-made the drugs, Vatican administered the drugs, Ronian Riptusk were made compliant.
[SPEAKER_05]: They fell into their jobs with gusto.
[SPEAKER_05]: They simply loved murdering people.
[SPEAKER_05]: Soon, they were fully Hazzerton's agents and beautiful servants of Carcosa, because that's the thing about Haster.
[SPEAKER_05]: Show people just enough through a little crack in the door of reality, and all they thought they knew about the natural order and the way things are, show them just a hint of other truths out there, and they walk through that door on their own.
[SPEAKER_02]: For some, it's the pure unbridled chaos and nihilism.
[SPEAKER_03]: For others, it's about power.
[SPEAKER_05]: Control.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he's two who ain't never truly known power, who ain't never been in control, who saw existence itself as a kind of prison the appeal was real.
[SPEAKER_03]: During these years, Vick started dreaming every night of his teeth falling out.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he started pulling him out.
[SPEAKER_03]: The pliers.
[SPEAKER_05]: Vaticus would fashion new teeth out of scrap metal and pound them into his skull all this without any anesthesia
[SPEAKER_05]: Ronan ripped us around the drugs for five years, but we're leaned off them ten years ago when Melison proclaimed their conversions complete.
[SPEAKER_03]: You later, Ronan was given permission to take a visit to visit his homeland.
[SPEAKER_05]: He returned with a new rapier, and a tattoo, and... Just as Victor's all-out of had become Victor's Deutsche, and Victor's Deutsche had become Roni's Deutsche during this period.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni's Deutsche became nameless.
[SPEAKER_02]: During this period, Grip kept dreaming that he was travelling a desert to find something or lose something, but he didn't know what it was.
[SPEAKER_02]: He told Roni about these dreams, and Roni was pretty sure he knew what was going on.
[SPEAKER_05]: Grip's soul, now belong to two gods.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nergol and Haster, but it couldn't be fully Haster's until he broke all ties with Nergol.
[SPEAKER_05]: This would take ruthless discipline.
[SPEAKER_05]: He would have to break the sigils, reconstruct his soul, and discipline his mind.
[SPEAKER_03]: No drugs.
[SPEAKER_05]: No dwelling on the past.
[SPEAKER_03]: Live in the present.
[SPEAKER_02]: Live for the king.
[SPEAKER_05]: It...maybe worked.
[SPEAKER_05]: For a time?
[SPEAKER_00]: Around this time, Ray left for university in Chelex.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought he was in control of his life's choices here.
[SPEAKER_05]: But of course, the whole idea had been seated by the weir ally.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, Vic was doing great.
[SPEAKER_05]: Still pulling his own teeth out.
[SPEAKER_03]: But replacing them with gold ones now, he could afford it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The script was doing great, hiding from the sun god crushing skulls.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray was doing great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Torturing people has a teenage priest of an insane god of sadomasochism.
[SPEAKER_05]: And Tino, Timma was doing great, just great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nectip and dark tones relating to legends of Carcosa, stroking the finger bones of the dead daughter, she'd named after the part of herself, she'd forgotten never existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And always, always, Cultivate.
[SPEAKER_05]: By five years ago, the hedge wall went up around Iris Hill.
[SPEAKER_05]: Loles and team as studies were progressing, the world really needed to be kept out, because Loles was cooking on something.
[SPEAKER_05]: No one was totally clear on exactly what Moles was trying to puzzle out, but isn't that the way of closed little cults?
[SPEAKER_05]: No need to ask questions, haster, and jaman door have all the answers.
[SPEAKER_05]: Take the little rewards that make you think you're doing great and just keep reading, cultivating, and killing.
[SPEAKER_05]: The years passed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Riptusk became the constable.
[SPEAKER_05]: Moles spent all the county's money on books.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ronian Riptusk would kill the book dealers who wouldn't sell, or who Lose didn't feel like paying.
[SPEAKER_02]: While they stuck their fingers in every pie of craft and extortion, they could bake up in thrush more.
[SPEAKER_05]: Loles started visiting Zandalis.
[SPEAKER_02]: He wasn't getting the exact access he wanted, so... A change in leadership at the asylum needed to be arranged.
[SPEAKER_03]: The chain of knights was obtained?
[SPEAKER_01]: And team as research practically exploded.
[SPEAKER_03]: Roni and Melison started fucking.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why not, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: Who cares?
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh god, the bleakness!
[SPEAKER_05]: Tima was spiraling into Jomendor, Riptuskin, Roni, were murdering and tormenting so many people, and Ray was back by this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd returned with such a simple plan.
[SPEAKER_00]: Step one, kill his mom.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe both his parents, TBD, step two, kill himself.
[SPEAKER_05]: But somehow... That just didn't happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was promptly seated by his mother while she waited so long, and he just kind of fell into the routines of the group, and he was always so tired.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody actually knew where it was he slept during those years.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because the Iris Hill staff never once found his bunk bed in the guest house, needing to be made.
[SPEAKER_05]: There are thousand stories from this era of their lives, but they all lead to the Oasis.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so it came to pass on the 6th of Sereneth 47-15, the party entered the dreamlands for the first time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni, Riptusk, Ray, and Vaticus knew almost nothing about what they were heading into.
[SPEAKER_05]: They knew they were going somewhere that there would be a trek involved.
[SPEAKER_05]: They knew they needed to keep lolls alive.
[SPEAKER_05]: They knew they were seeking someone called the Mad Poet, but that's about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Lulls and Tima kept from them, all knowledge of the dreamlands, what it was, that that's even where they were going.
[SPEAKER_05]: They explained that they'd be going somewhere else and that their only way back would be a command word which only Lulls could speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't want anyone getting ideas, like say, I'll just wake up and leave them to fend for themselves.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they didn't understand that they were in a dream, but they sure found out.
[SPEAKER_05]: We already know what happened then, it didn't go well, they died.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when they woke, they woke almost a month later.
[SPEAKER_01]: This wasn't how the ritual was supposed to work.
[SPEAKER_05]: Obviously, the rules were not rules, or the rules were flexible, or the rules simply didn't apply at the mad poets' oasis.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was so much more to none.
[SPEAKER_05]: The next couple of years were a blur, and they all lead up to the dream quests.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when they did wake up a month later, they were all mad.
[SPEAKER_05]: None of them truly understood how lucky they were that Melison didn't kill them when they were helpless, but she'd heard Ariadne's voice a number of years earlier and she was told not to stand in a little as a way, so she didn't kill them, but she didn't particularly help them recover.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were all insane for a while.
[SPEAKER_05]: But when they did recover as we know from Loles as journal, they learned about the gifts and the hunt for gifts began.
[SPEAKER_05]: Everyone was filled in on the basics of dream travel to to a point just what they needed to know.
[SPEAKER_05]: Loles in his paranoia made sure that the others were drugged every time they went.
[SPEAKER_05]: He wasn't comfortable with the idea of his being asleep while the rest might wake up first.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he wrote to Mon, Mon sent the drugs that would keep their minds active in alert, but their body's unconscious long enough that no matter what happened they would always wake last.
[SPEAKER_05]: Lowles went to the dreamlands night after night, sometimes with his crew, sometimes with hired mercenaries, sometimes with a mix.
[SPEAKER_05]: They did it in the guest rooms upstairs at Iris Hill, he and Tima had the beds.
[SPEAKER_05]: Some of the others would get pallets to collapse on, Braden, and any mercenaries got the floor.
[SPEAKER_05]: Then every morning, when it was required,
[SPEAKER_03]: Roni and Riptus would murder the mercenaries and dump them in a mass grave.
[SPEAKER_05]: This got old after a while.
[SPEAKER_05]: They started to feel a little like flunkies, rather than key players in service to their king.
[SPEAKER_05]: What were they even doing?
[SPEAKER_05]: What was the end game here?
[SPEAKER_05]: Need to know, that's what the endgame was, over and over they went.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the dream, Loles learned about the Mad Poet and passed the information onto Teama, Teamo Research Gifts.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, Ronan Riptusk secured books about ritual magic and brought them to Teama.
[SPEAKER_05]: Teama learned that you could use passwords to bring you to a specific spot in the dream lands, but she had to create them.
[SPEAKER_05]: a process that took time, months, in fact, for the first one she made, and just imagine a couple of few years of this.
[SPEAKER_05]: Imagine the slow, inevitable breaking down that started to happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sure after all we've gone through and act three here, I'm sure you can picture it.
[SPEAKER_05]: But let's let's do the quests, the beginning of the end for this twist of the look of all.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went after the
[SPEAKER_05]: This one shouldn't have had much of an impact on the group since it was in retrospect to the easiest of the quests, but it really did a number on them.
[SPEAKER_05]: The arrived in Brullins ballroom and arranged a meeting with the Vid Count which Loles took alone, while the others waited for hours and hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: Timmer had been feeling like a true partner to Lowe's, but being left out of this conversation gave her pulls.
[SPEAKER_05]: Vaticus looked out the windows and saw the city of Celifia's laid out before him and it broke him.
[SPEAKER_05]: He understood, for the first time, truly, that the dreamlands was a holy universe with actual civilizations and history and people and the sorry state of his life hit him hard.
[SPEAKER_05]: He realized for the first time that there might actually be somewhere to escape to and it shook him.
[SPEAKER_02]: Riptusk saw that huge sun hanging a mobile in the sky, and idly wondered how they'd managed to chain their gall like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was an idle thought of framing from his early childhood.
[SPEAKER_02]: But it brought his mind onto the shining scourge in a way he hadn't thought of him in the years, and standing there at the window, as the sunlight hit his arms, he started to itch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray, suddenly having many hours of quiet time for the first time in a long time, he looked around and wondered what the hell he was doing, how he'd gotten there, and why he was just sitting in some room with his mother not killing her.
[SPEAKER_00]: How had he gotten here?
[SPEAKER_03]: Rony also having his first long stretch of time in the dream doing nothing but sitting around was struck by the lack of jam and door and he said,
[SPEAKER_03]: He got used to the endless plot whispered away in there, but being reminded of what it was like to have his own space inside his head, it kicked something loosened him.
[SPEAKER_05]: They secured the ring and woke.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the waking world, it took a few weeks for teammates to finish the passphrase, for direct travel to the enchanted wood.
[SPEAKER_05]: As she toiled away, Vaticus was distracted, the others had never seen him like this.
[SPEAKER_05]: He just wandered around, or even weirder, he just sat there, not doing anything.
[SPEAKER_05]: It couldn't have been less like him.
[SPEAKER_03]: But Roni noticed, and he leapt on the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Number one, Roni wondered if the drugs Lulls gave him what was keeping John and door out of the dream.
[SPEAKER_03]: He resolved to learn more about Alchemy, so he snuck into Vatican's lab, made copies of his formula as determined as steel as much knowledge as he could.
[SPEAKER_03]: Number two, with Vatican's so distracted, Roni finally found his window to study the outcome of Kletorch to piece out its inner workings.
[SPEAKER_03]: He began to work on a small prototype of his own.
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, Riptus couldn't shake the itch, and he couldn't tell whether or not it was just in his mind.
[SPEAKER_02]: He started dabbling in Jane's drugs, just a little at first, just a taste.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ray found himself feeling unusually angry and fuzzy headed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't get his brain working right, so he started beating the shit out of people in the stain.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went after the part tail next roughly three weeks later on the 21st of Calustrel still February.
[SPEAKER_05]: Loles was hopped up and excited talking up a storm, mouth man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Team has stuck close to him refusing to be left out of anything, because of the similar mannerisms in Jammendor-Fungal growth, the Zugs dubbed her evil sister.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray was bitter and pissed, arguing with everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Angry kitten?
[SPEAKER_03]: Ron had just wanted to wrap this one up and get back to his real-world projects.
[SPEAKER_03]: Get eyes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Riptus was immediately freaked out about how bad his arm was itching under the light of the dreamland's son, and so he abandoned his tattoo needle.
[SPEAKER_02]: He left that piece of himself behind.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hoping that clearing his person of anything attached to the shining scourge would help.
[SPEAKER_05]: When they arrived, Tima thought they could negotiate with the Zugs, Loles agreed with that plan, but Ray ran on a patience and basically strong armed them into taking them to the parts.
[SPEAKER_05]: The fight was brutal.
[SPEAKER_05]: Within moments, Vaticus, Loles and Tima woke themselves up just to ensure their survival.
[SPEAKER_05]: Over a dozen Zugs died.
[SPEAKER_05]: only one worth his salt and the fight was the one they called Mortimer.
[SPEAKER_05]: Eventually, they finished the fight.
[SPEAKER_05]: With Riptus claiming the killing blow on both parts, great warrior, but not before Ronny used Mortimer as a living shield to save himself in a critical moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: and something about that tiny creature dying in his hands, freaked Roni out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Something instinctive kicked in and he was shaking in a way he hadn't been in a long time.
[SPEAKER_05]: They grabbed the tail and woke.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, it was go-go-go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tema wasn't sure she had her next passphrase efficiently honed.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Rytusk was hopped up, fighting, even in a dream was better than thinking so he egg rolls on.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went after the skull of Gould Royalty the very next night.
[SPEAKER_01]: They arrived outside of Iguzkai's, which team appointed out wouldn't have happened if she'd been given more time to work on her passphrase.
[SPEAKER_05]: On this cliff, overlooking the Lenguul and the Cropolis metropolis.
[SPEAKER_05]: There was a civil war brewing between two halves of the mighty civilization and a group of insurgent arcannists were summoning outsiders to help them in their battle.
[SPEAKER_05]: As the party materialized there amongst the Lenguuls, they all got glimpses into alternate lives.
[SPEAKER_05]: and the experience was intense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray couldn't let go of his vision of living as a village healer in a small town, working in partnership with his very much living sister.
[SPEAKER_01]: Teemo was haunted by a glimpse of a self as a kindly educator, but the different name.
[SPEAKER_03]: Arroni was haunted too.
[SPEAKER_03]: By a similar vision himself as Dr. Professor Dick.
[SPEAKER_03]: He tried to brush the visions aside.
[SPEAKER_03]: But something burrowed in.
[SPEAKER_02]: and riptusksaw himself as a mentor to a bunch of kids, and I had no idea how to process that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Finding himself trapped in a summoning circle, holes called in a board, and everyone woke themselves up.
[SPEAKER_03]: Except for Roni.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni... stayed.
[SPEAKER_05]: He talked to the ghouls, and learned about their conflict, and convinced the ghouls to let him help them.
[SPEAKER_03]: He snuck into the city by himself.
[SPEAKER_03]: He found the queen's crypt and stole a Ruby and crust skull.
[SPEAKER_05]: But he didn't leave right away.
[SPEAKER_05]: He stayed.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was curious.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, he found a small mazileum, and an out-of-the-way cave called the Plaza Bones, and hid himself for a bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: He lived three nights without John the Door, just to have the experience for himself.
[SPEAKER_05]: And before he woke, he left a coin behind.
[SPEAKER_05]: Idley curious about what sort of if any impact they could actually make on these places?
[SPEAKER_05]: What if anything they could leave behind that might last?
[SPEAKER_03]: It was an experiment.
[SPEAKER_03]: His intention was to come back and get the coin.
[SPEAKER_05]: But then Sarnath happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, Roni told Laws only what he needed to know.
[SPEAKER_05]: He got the skull.
[SPEAKER_05]: He didn't mention his little vacation experiment, and since they were on a roll, they went again right away, even though.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once again, Team A begged for more time.
[SPEAKER_01]: She knew she could land the party somewhere in Sarnath, but she didn't know yet whether or not she could actually get them exactly where the idol could be found.
[SPEAKER_01]: But nobody was listening to teamwork, especially lulls.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went after the greenstone idle of the water lizard, very next night, still in February here.
[SPEAKER_05]: They arrived in the palace of King John of the Bone Crown on the 10th anniversary of the raising of Iib.
[SPEAKER_05]: The mood of the palace was muted, first because of the storm brewing out over the lake.
[SPEAKER_05]: Second, the greenstone idle stolen by Lord Dunzeny and his conquering army when they destroyed the city of Iib.
[SPEAKER_05]: He idle had vanished the previous night.
[SPEAKER_05]: It had been held in the high temple of Tumash the illusion, but the high priest had been found dead that very morning, and before his demise he'd scrolled a single word onto the empty altar.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that started the shit show that this quest turned into, the idol wasn't in the Sarnath anymore.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the next logical place to check would be I, but they hadn't really thought of this quest in trekking terms, so they wondered if they'd be better off waking up having team of sea if she could learn more and then popping back in.
[SPEAKER_05]: They hadn't yet processed what happens when you leave the dreamlands and return to the same location.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they woke.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the wicking world, team had dove into more research.
[SPEAKER_01]: After many weeks, she couldn't find any writings on what happened to the idol, and said they should just return and think of this quest as a longer term, exploratory hunt.
[SPEAKER_02]: Meanwhile, Ray declined, a rip-task declined.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was doing more than simply tasting Jane's drugs now, and Vaticus retreated.
[SPEAKER_03]: With Team had distracted another research Roni snuck access to materials she wasn't using and he began to teach himself how to perform the dream lambs excursion ritual.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wanted more control over how and when he went.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just in case.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he wanted to return to Ego's Kai's to find his coin.
[SPEAKER_05]: They returned to the dreamlands on the night of the 8th of Goezeran, this is now April.
[SPEAKER_05]: They arrived in the rain of King Edward the Learned on the 37th anniversary of the raising of Iib.
[SPEAKER_05]: The city was celebrating, the anniversary of the slaughter had become a local holiday.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were partying, and the waters of the lake were rising.
[SPEAKER_05]: The group tracked around the lake over the course of four days and found the ruins of Iib.
[SPEAKER_05]: They walked the empty streets until they found a small stone altar on the lake shore upon which sat a glowing green idol.
[SPEAKER_05]: when they approached, imbshades rose and killed the whole party before they could wake, all except for lulls that chicken shit who got himself out fast enough.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, everyone but lulls woke in a catatonic state.
[SPEAKER_05]: It rolls debated just killing them and moving on with mercenaries, but he feared no, no, no, no, no, he knew that he needed the party's collective experience, and of course he wasn't fully confident in his ability to perform the ritual without Tima.
[SPEAKER_05]: It took a month, due to the general lack of healing and counseling he had access to, but eventually he got the whole group back on their feet again, and they went back on the third of dozen.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was May now.
[SPEAKER_05]: They arrived during the reign of King Howard the Mad on the 75th anniversary of the raising of Iib.
[SPEAKER_05]: Nobody died this time, but they had to prematurely wake themselves, and then this just went on and on and on.
[SPEAKER_05]: They'd go, it would be later.
[SPEAKER_05]: The waters of the lake were higher.
[SPEAKER_05]: The storm was closer.
[SPEAKER_05]: They'd trek around the lake.
[SPEAKER_05]: They'd enter Ibb.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the Ibb shades would be too numerous to overcome.
[SPEAKER_03]: Over.
[SPEAKER_03]: And over.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went nearly every night, sometimes they'd pause for a bit, but not long enough to truly recover.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tema was a machine, but after a while, even her will begin to falter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ray grew both a dollar and angrier.
[SPEAKER_05]: During this stretch of months, Ray had his stance in jail.
[SPEAKER_05]: Grip's drug use grew worse and worse.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ronny developed extreme paranoia, and the relationship between him and Riptus took steep nose dive.
[SPEAKER_05]: Their conflict came to a head over Nixon, and the two were never seen speaking to each other after it.
[SPEAKER_05]: When the party went to Sardeth on the night of the 26th of Sereneth, June now, they finally cleared the imbshades, but as Lulls stepped forward to grab the idol, Bokrug, rose from the lake, and the site drove the mad.
[SPEAKER_05]: They all, Bok, blind.
[SPEAKER_05]: Their eyes, according to medicine, seemed to be functional, but none of them were receiving visual input.
[SPEAKER_05]: It took time to heal the cure of this psychosomatic damage.
[SPEAKER_03]: On and on this win.
[SPEAKER_01]: Over and over.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they'd make through the red shirts.
[SPEAKER_03]: And sometimes they wouldn't.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sometimes they'd avoid seeing bow crook.
[SPEAKER_03]: But sometimes they wouldn't trauma.
[SPEAKER_05]: Madness and mind-numbing repetition.
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point along the way, Ray noticed that he'd manifested a relic from his past, in the hand of his dream avatar, his old scalpel.
[SPEAKER_00]: The one he'd used to mutilate his body after he'd killed his sister.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he remembered that he had killed his sister.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something he pushed so, so deep, and his disgust at himself and his cowardice, and his ruin of a life clobbered him, and he left that piece of himself behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: there in that dream after months of madness, he didn't want to be himself anymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't want to know himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't understand himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't be himself.
[SPEAKER_05]: At the end, they finally got the idol.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was Ray who touched it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the moment he did, he felt a certainty fall upon him.
[SPEAKER_00]: that he was doomed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the waking world, Ray cast commune and got confirmation that he was indeed doomed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it seemed it wasn't bookrook that would get him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone else was coming for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone close to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the others would simply watch as he died.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Ray talked to Melison on the third of the Martian.
[SPEAKER_05]: Twenty-one days before this campaign began, and he asked her to have Recy killed the others.
[SPEAKER_05]: Ronny bought his house on the fifth of the Martian, 19 days before the campaign began.
[SPEAKER_03]: He needed a space of his own, nobody could be trusted, not anymore.
[SPEAKER_05]: Vaticus by now basically wanting to die, told Tim about what he and Ray did to Daria on the sixth of the Martian, 18 days before the campaign began.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tema took to medicine that very same night.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was all falling apart.
[SPEAKER_05]: But there was still three more gifts to get.
[SPEAKER_05]: After the shit show of Sarnath, Roni didn't want to enter a new location without as much information as possible.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, having learned the ritual, grabbed a couple of the mercenaries, Lowe's kept around and used them as secondary casters, and he went to scope out the hard stone quest on the 10th of the motion.
[SPEAKER_03]: and Roni loved it in dilatveline.
[SPEAKER_03]: A whole world of vise and opportunity to do anything he wanted free from Yamendor and Lowell's crew.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he stayed.
[SPEAKER_03]: He did crimes, he made choices, he hooked up with one of the women from the drug den and he stayed with her.
[SPEAKER_03]: He fathered a child with her.
[SPEAKER_03]: He helped raise that child for years.
[SPEAKER_03]: His daughter, Katarina, named after Roni's long dead, nearly forgotten mother.
[SPEAKER_05]: Then one morning, Katarina asked her dad, what his tattoo meant.
[SPEAKER_05]: Roni had almost unconsciously avoided mirrors for the previous 19 years.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he'd forgotten what he looked like.
[SPEAKER_05]: He had forgotten that he was dreaming.
[SPEAKER_05]: The utter pointlessness of his life in dilapidely, which would end when he woke, and the utter pointlessness of his life in the fresh more crashed home.
[SPEAKER_03]: He found the mirror and stared at those tattoos in particular the first one, and something broke within him.
[SPEAKER_03]: He cut that first triangle that piece of himself off his face.
[SPEAKER_03]: Pressed it into his daughter's hand and told her that the next time she saw him, if she did, to give it back to him, spittness face.
[SPEAKER_05]: The next day in the real world, but 19 years later in his timeline, Rooney finally woke.
[SPEAKER_05]: And all that time in the dreamlands, it broke his brain.
[SPEAKER_05]: He couldn't fully parse reality.
[SPEAKER_05]: He couldn't tell any longer what was the dream or what was real.
[SPEAKER_03]: But his past love for grip surfers somewhere in the haze and confusion.
[SPEAKER_03]: He wrote the constable letter, left it at a non-drop spot, and then before he knew it.
[SPEAKER_05]: That night, on the 11th of the ocean, the whole party went to die-lathlean.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was six weeks later there, and they orchestrated their attack on Kwavian Dra and left with a hard stone.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, Lowell's decided to press on the very next night, but two of them didn't show up.
[SPEAKER_02]: Riptusk was high.
[SPEAKER_02]: He didn't give a single solitary shit about anything anymore.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was broken.
[SPEAKER_05]: Meanwhile, Ray had long thought of himself as someone who controlled the narrative of his life.
[SPEAKER_05]: While he had haunted him for so long, he carved her name all over his body in the years following that terrible morning, but he went and took control.
[SPEAKER_05]: He put the past behind him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was well.
[SPEAKER_05]: But then on the afternoon of the 12th of the motion, Ray woke up in the wailing house, curled in Darius' dead arms.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for no reason other than simple cruelty, the monster that he had made her decided not to steal his memories that day for once, and she whispered the truth to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But every single day, since his return from Chelex, he had slept in the arms of the sister he'd murdered, and she whispered torments into his ear.
[SPEAKER_05]: Before the dream voyages, he'd stayed there by night.
[SPEAKER_05]: After the rituals started, he'd slink there in the early hours of the morning and rest with her.
[SPEAKER_05]: Until it was time for her to start hunting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ray saw the truth of himself and his life and understood that he'd never be free of the pain of what he'd done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And something broke within him.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went after the captain's try-corn on the night of the 12th of the Lomotion, 12 days before the start of the campaign.
[SPEAKER_05]: Bleakness hanging over the crew was bad at this point.
[SPEAKER_05]: Lulls could sense it, and he decided to rely solely on Team Up.
[SPEAKER_05]: They did the ritual, but only she descended the stairs.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when she was done with Vadraq and had his hat, she looked around that who she was, what she'd been reduced to.
[SPEAKER_01]: She found herself looking at the vile of silver dust she always kept hidden on her person.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vile had been talisman of swords all her life.
[SPEAKER_01]: She'd always thought of it as a reminder of her own resourcefulness.
[SPEAKER_05]: But now it's screamed to her, the truth, that she was trapped as surely as the cell occultal devil had been.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's something broken her.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she dropped it.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the waking world, the next morning, Tima used a contact other plane spell.
[SPEAKER_05]: The pallid mask, Pastor's emissary, responded, and from him, she learned of the mad poet's requirement of a sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Achila and the nature of Lowe's intended sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Day where the prize Lowe's was willing to pay to find the Roosevelt.
[SPEAKER_05]: It was now the 13th of Lomotion, 11 days before the start of the campaign.
[SPEAKER_05]: They went to Arventon that night, the whole crew was just done.
[SPEAKER_05]: When they arrived, there was bitter disagreement about how to put together this expedition to the black lake.
[SPEAKER_05]: The fighting got so heated that Lowell's just pulled the plug and decided six gifts were enough, so everyone poofed out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Everyone.
[SPEAKER_05]: September.
[SPEAKER_05]: She stayed.
[SPEAKER_05]: She found a scholar at Humbrecht University with access to the secret vaults and the darkest depositories of knowledge, she killed him and took his identity and then she dove into the dark lore, locked away below Humbrecht, and she researched the city's origin for decades.
[SPEAKER_05]: She, of course, went slowly but surely, insane, as the years passed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Her lucid dream body began having lucid dreams inside the dreamlands of being an amorphous being with no physical form she became a dream inside the dream of a dream.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then she dreamed that she was somebody else's madness.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was nothing more than somebody else's emotion, so walked and twisted that it couldn't do when it actually wanted to do, which was to just let go.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when she finally found the information Arventon had kept hidden for so long, on the morning of her 85th birthday, she walked out into the streets and spoke the secret name of the
[SPEAKER_05]: And then, as Arvintan shattered, she was shunted back into her body and she finally woke up after 37 years.
[SPEAKER_02]: After leaving Arvintan, Riptus Grimpt of standing on the battlements of Fort Hale course, his arms thrown wide, as the sun burned him alive, he called out the Haster and dared him to stand up to Nargal.
[SPEAKER_02]: He no longer cared which one of them claimed him.
[SPEAKER_02]: He just wanted it all to be over.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to leave an oven to an early dremth of peaking in on Catarina still a child, sleeping, warm, safe.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the fact that the greatest happiness he'd known in his life was an absolute other lie, made him want to cut his own throat.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the dream, he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Ray simply dreamt of pulling eternally on a chain, a chain that was looped around his own throat.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when Tima came to them,
[SPEAKER_05]: On the morning of the 14th day of the Martian, the day they would return to the mad poets' oasis, they listened to her.
[SPEAKER_03]: They listened when she spoke of freedom.
[SPEAKER_02]: They listened when she spoke of an end to the struggle.
[SPEAKER_00]: They listened when she spoke of an end to not just existence, but to memory and the south.
[SPEAKER_02]: In a scape not only from the bleak pointlessness of life, but from all the horrors awaiting them after death.
[SPEAKER_05]: They chose to march to their own oblivion with full knowledge of what was about to happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: Lowell's had thought he'd outsmarted them, but in the end, they outsmarted him and welcomed with open arms the sacrifice he intended to make of them, he would steal nothing from them.
[SPEAKER_05]: They would finally be free of the lives we rely had cursed them with.
[SPEAKER_05]: And on the night of the 14th of LaMotion, 10 days before the start of this campaign, they entered the Dreamlands and traveled to the Mad Poets of Wases.
[SPEAKER_05]: We know what happened there, Loles drowned them all in the pool.
[SPEAKER_05]: But when the moment came,
[SPEAKER_05]: At the moment, they felt everything they were, all they knew, all they'd done.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, they'd land.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, they'd lost.
[SPEAKER_05]: From the depths of their souls, clinging to the faint belief that they didn't deserve this.
[SPEAKER_05]: That this wasn't their fault.
[SPEAKER_05]: Hoping it can't hope for another chance, a little piece of themselves cried out.
[SPEAKER_05]: As the water has filled her lungs, in her moment of last second panic, steam is so cried out to, remember, and Tima did remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: So remember the little girl named Dora who died that morning all those decades ago, she remembered who she was and who she could be.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this psychic's mind caught in the tide between worlds entangled with the mind of a great old one fueled by reserves of mental power beyond the grasp of most mortals.
[SPEAKER_05]: She remembered, and as that powerful mind slipped into oblivion, she boxed the monster she'd become, and she sank into those waters as Dora hoping against hope.
[SPEAKER_05]: that she could somehow defy this cruel fate.
[SPEAKER_05]: Meanwhile, Rooney panicked in his own way as the water filled his lungs, he knew his entire personhood was about to be stripped of him.
[SPEAKER_03]: But he was slippery.
[SPEAKER_03]: For so many years, he subsumed himself in so many identities that even those who knew him well didn't recognize him after times they saw him.
[SPEAKER_05]: His soul cried out to... Hide yourself.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this mind, self-taught from childhood to avoid detection and hold onto his secrets, this mind entangled with a great old one.
[SPEAKER_03]: He hid himself.
[SPEAKER_05]: He sank fully into the identity he'd studied the most.
[SPEAKER_05]: Maybe the waters will find only Vatican within me and take that away.
[SPEAKER_05]: He thought he hoping to cheat what was to come.
[SPEAKER_05]: Meanwhile, Braden trembled in fear as the water filled his lungs.
[SPEAKER_05]: He'd inflicted so much terror on so many people during his brief life, but despite all the pain he'd suffered, he'd never truly allowed fear to enter his heart until this moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew that calling out to Zan Kufan would not help him.
[SPEAKER_00]: A prince of pain would simply find another useful tool with which to shape the flesh of the world and his image.
[SPEAKER_05]: There would be no miracle for Father Ray.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yet still he prayed.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thought of his lost sister of her tenderness and mercy, and he prayed for his life, wishing he could live and be someone else, if only to honor her memory.
[SPEAKER_05]: And another sister heard his cries.
[SPEAKER_05]: The goddess Shaylan heard this profound wish for atonement, and she answered it.
[SPEAKER_05]: She gave his soul the strength of will to survive this.
[SPEAKER_05]: She wrapped her care around his heart and drove her brother out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Zonkufan, however, did not leave easily, and he cursed his former champion as he left.
[SPEAKER_05]: He may have life, but it will be a short one, one spent dying.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this mind entangled with a great old one only just starting to realize he had so much help he could give, was shale in in mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He prayed to survive.
[SPEAKER_05]: Meanwhile, Riptusk raged blind fury as the water filled his lungs he'd been born weak and after all he'd overcome he was going to die weak and helpless yet again.
[SPEAKER_02]: Fuck this shit, he wasn't ready as it turned out and he wasn't going to go down like this, not like this, not on his knees.
[SPEAKER_05]: His soul cried out to destroy them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And his mind entangled with a great old one fueled by reserves of rage and anger beyond the grasp of most mortals.
[SPEAKER_02]: He clung into the urge to be given a chance to destroy them.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so, they all slipped into oblivion.
[SPEAKER_05]: Those words burned into their subconscious minds.
[SPEAKER_05]: Then, as we know, the Mad Poet opened the Necronomicon before Loles' eyes, and based on an unconscious conception he'd formed over years of conversations with Tima, conversations about the soul, about compartmentalization, conversations where Tima thought she was talking about theories when, in truth, she was talking about her own experience, every part of Loles that couldn't bear to see what he saw.
[SPEAKER_05]: to read what he read, to contemplate using what he planned to use, the pieces of him capable of love, of hope, of allyship companionship sympathy and sorrow, those parts of him broke off, to give his weak shitty little mind, the strength that needed to witness those dreadpages.
[SPEAKER_05]: to witness them as nothing but a vessel untrubbled by such concerns.
[SPEAKER_05]: Which is exactly what he is now in the waking world of vessel, devoid of hope, love, allyship, companionship, sympathy, or sorrow.
[SPEAKER_05]: On his way to take the Necronomicon to Naruzavin, to take Jean-Mendor into his flesh
[SPEAKER_05]: the entire planet to Carcosa, which brings us.
[SPEAKER_05]: Poly.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dadwick is the first to wake.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a, hey buddy, it's pretty disorienting.
[SPEAKER_05]: Your body feels really achy, stiff and weak.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's dark, it's pitch black, or maybe you can't quite open your eyes, or maybe there's something attached to your face.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's hard to tell, but you hear a little stirring rustling in the darkness, and then something warm on your hand.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a, it's a, it's a hand, it's a, it's a warm, hand, a large, hand, a human, okay, okay, it's a human hand, probably.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dad Wick, it, it sounds like Chester's voice.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're in line.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, come quick, come quick, they're waking up!
[SPEAKER_05]: and you hear some movement from a bit of way as a way, but what you don't hear is the gentle splash of waves against the boat, you don't feel any rocking either.
[SPEAKER_05]: All right, Derek, now listen to me, I've got a cloth.
[SPEAKER_05]: hard-rangered so you don't hurt yourself when you're open your eyes.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, undo it, but David, go, go slowly, go.
[SPEAKER_05]: Very, very slowly, no.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, some movements.
[SPEAKER_05]: Right, easy, easy.
[SPEAKER_05]: Very, very gentle.
[SPEAKER_05]: And some, some ones.
[SPEAKER_05]: someone's joined Chester you can tell and you can you can feel now Chester's hands on your head as he removes whatever cloth he's had covering your eyes and then you feel kind of a coolness on your face and you can tell you can tell now that you can open your eyes
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a, well, where am I, how long have I been asleep?
[SPEAKER_05]: Um... Tab like, open your eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tab looks around.
[SPEAKER_05]: So it's the first, the light is just blinding.
[SPEAKER_05]: After a little bit, you, you were just in your, you can, you're okay, all right, you can, you can, you can tell you're in a bed, you're in your bed.
[SPEAKER_05]: in your little flat, in Gregard's shadow, in Kazimire.
[SPEAKER_05]: Chester is sitting on a chair right next to your little bed and standing beside him is J-dove.
[SPEAKER_05]: Welcome back, Tabrik.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can't tell you what relief it is to see you waking.
[SPEAKER_00]: that book raises up their hand, stop.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's so hard to move your arm is barely responding to the request to move.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this jerk of a hand raise probably turns into like a minute long exercise as your shan shakes up into the air.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, where are my friends?
[SPEAKER_05]: Husband and wife look at each other.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you can tell, there's like some silent negotiating going on about who's gonna have to answer that question.
[SPEAKER_05]: Chester Wins, so Jado says, So Barnabas is, he's out in the other room, he's in Skywins, little set up there, he, he was the first to wake, but
[SPEAKER_05]: There's nothing left inside of him, he, well, no, his body speaks occasionally, but just little words, little snatchers of a song, maybe we've been doing the best we can with him.
[SPEAKER_05]: He, we, well, Stasi, found in his hand, a letter,
[SPEAKER_05]: she pulls out this letter and saying how hard it is for you to still move your body as you're just saying she opens it up and holds it before you and the letter says my friends that is what we are yes I think so we are intertwined in any of it
[SPEAKER_02]: Disting that intertwines us is an abomination beyond our ability to comprehend.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet, it is the thing that has defined the last two groups that have felt like packed to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Please forgive me for intruding on you in the dreamlands.
[SPEAKER_02]: But this was an instance where it is better to ask forgiveness in permission.
[SPEAKER_02]: The truth is a matter is, I cannot live with this thing in my head in a longer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I cannot simply wait until the inevitable happens, until the fungus invades me and envelops my brain.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have watched it happen to those I loved before, I cannot allow it to happen to me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I cannot watch it happen to you all.
[SPEAKER_02]: I do not know what I will find when I catch up with you, I do not know what will happen or what I will do.
[SPEAKER_02]: But based on what I have learned from you of what happened to you last time, I think the mad poet can take this affliction from me.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I believe, like was used, this will also take all of my memories, all of my past, all knowledge of who I am and have been.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it is a fair trade.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have no one to return to.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have no pact to rejoin.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one to look for.
[SPEAKER_02]: No one to avenge in immobil.
[SPEAKER_02]: And even if I did my mind, the vessel of my being of every thing I am and can do and can create is corrupt and will eventually consume me with madness.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't hear music anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: Better to empty the vessel and start a game.
[SPEAKER_02]: In this way perhaps I can contribute to your calls after all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Grip, it seems we never really talked.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a corrupt constable with the soul of a sailor.
[SPEAKER_02]: You look at home on the water.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know you fear you are little more than a killer, but you have shielded your friends from harm and death and horror so many times.
[SPEAKER_02]: You endured pain so they did not have to.
[SPEAKER_02]: Does this not remind you of someone?
[SPEAKER_02]: That week, I have never seen more distance between one's physical stature and the shadow of influence one casts on the world.
[SPEAKER_02]: I would fear your power if I doubted your heart.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are not of the other's past, you and I, and their past is a fairness that drives them relentlessly, but it makes them soon.
[SPEAKER_02]: They will need you, and maybe you are coming to an edam as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Vick of the many names and voices, Goal, Rooney, Vick.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have watched all three of you.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're hard to read the tunoses.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have such compassion in you, I can sense it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You are a killer, I can sense it.
[SPEAKER_02]: We are all of us multitudes, no?
[SPEAKER_02]: You and grip have passed your both trying to run from and reckon with I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: I see a spark in his eye when he is in the rigging, but spark will carry you when all this is done.
[SPEAKER_02]: And... And Torah.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's not the word in any language I know, first of all I do share.
[SPEAKER_02]: More than friends, more than family.
[SPEAKER_02]: We met with both of us in the strolls of madness, having seen something we should not, and somehow we brought teachers back.
[SPEAKER_02]: We were each other's raft in the flowed waters of insanity.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you all had not found me next to that Kravas and that poor soul, I'd think I would have died there as a fox, never remembering who I am.
[SPEAKER_02]: I am sorry I am not strong enough to continue with you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm sorry, I woke up next to you so very naked and unexplained.
[SPEAKER_02]: Also, I have never forgotten the time Tima Calisley dropped me in that courtyard.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can tell her to fuck off from me.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is almost time for the last time, sweet dreams, Miss Anis.
[SPEAKER_05]: As you finish reading,
[SPEAKER_05]: Jade, I've takes your hand, thick and torrent grip are out there too.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's still sleeping, but maybe this is a sign.
[SPEAKER_05]: They'll start coming to a topic.
[SPEAKER_05]: You've been asleep for over two months.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the others?
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's the end of chapter 150.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm gone!
[SPEAKER_05]: Finally, what are Act 3 Epilogue?
[SPEAKER_05]: Robert, Katie, and Johnny.
[SPEAKER_05]: Your characters hover in the terrible abyss that lies between sleeping and waking.
[SPEAKER_05]: between now and then, the void between lives, the void outside of time, all is darkness.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the darkness is eternal without beginning or end until, in the void, there is the sound of a bell.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know it now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Two of you know it very well, you heard it twice a day, day and day out for years.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the bell at the shrine of the far, tolling out over Okano over the Skindock, over the flesh fairs, over the shipwreck and the circus, tolling dawn or dusk.
[SPEAKER_05]: The time of change and transition to the city's myriad residents, the governor, the princess, the master of auctions, the nobles and humans and rat folk, even the corpse or G must surely
[SPEAKER_05]: You know this bell, well, and you even know now exactly where it's being heard from.
[SPEAKER_05]: It is being heard from inside of blossoming thorn, biting lashes stronghold.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then there's a series of words and clicks and a buzzing and another sound.
[SPEAKER_05]: It makes no sense to you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then, a voice, flat, genderless, inhuman, locating.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's not language per se.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a word or an idea in your head, locating the bell tolls again.
[SPEAKER_05]: an image explodes into your mind from across the impossible void, you see Okano from above.
[SPEAKER_05]: A yellow city, baking in the sun, dry as a bone, despite the obari oceans, rounding it on one side, and a towering ring of mist-covered mountains, enclosing it on the other.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now you're in the city at street level.
[SPEAKER_05]: You hear a gluttonous cacophony of growls and barks like hyenas squabbling over a carcass.
[SPEAKER_05]: You hear screams, human screams, screams of pain and anguish.
[SPEAKER_05]: You see flags of shame, skulls, burning whips, inverted ships.
[SPEAKER_05]: You see banners in a riot of different languages, Kellish, Mawangi, Oceiriani, and a truly weird concoction that baffles Dora for it uses the Abyssal script, but not its words, Vic and Grip recognize it at once, though they cannot read it.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the written form of the Null Tongue.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now you're viewing a building.
[SPEAKER_05]: Three stories, hundred feet tall, perfectly circular fortress of grim granite.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's blossoming thorn.
[SPEAKER_05]: close up.
[SPEAKER_05]: You see the face of an old woman, human, brown, wind-scoured leathery skin, eyes cloudy with glaucoma, long thin, wispy gray hair.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's the prisoner.
[SPEAKER_05]: She looks up from the floor.
[SPEAKER_05]: Stairs right into your soul with her cloudy gray eyes, and without opening her mouth, she speaks.
[SPEAKER_05]: A direct transmission of her thought into the inside of your mind.
[SPEAKER_05]: There you are.
[SPEAKER_05]: at last.
[SPEAKER_05]: Single tier, what's her left cheek?
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, wake up, save me.
[SPEAKER_05]: And at long last, you do wake.
[SPEAKER_05]: In Stabwick's living room, in Kazimire, on the 23rd day of frost, 4719 day 151 of the campaign.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's the end of Act 3.
[SPEAKER_05]: What the fuck?
[SPEAKER_05]: Before we next meet, you will all level up, of course.
[SPEAKER_05]: But there is much to discuss about Vic Grip and Dora between acts.
[SPEAKER_05]: You've all just become whole and that means you have some decisions you need to make between sessions here.
[SPEAKER_05]: What impact?
[SPEAKER_05]: This knowledge and these experiences may have on you, may on your personality and your build as well.
[SPEAKER_05]: You can use this moment to do a little bit of stealing of feats or skill ranks from your former life.
[SPEAKER_05]: And exchange for a giving them up from this one, of course.
[SPEAKER_05]: If you wish, if it seems appropriate, I will of course share those sheets with you.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have seen the fifth level of versions of your alternate selves, but not your ninth level of versions.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll give those to you in the break here.
[SPEAKER_05]: Katie, you'll have to decide what this all means for Dora, does she, you know, don't answer now, but does she keep Teemo half of herself as a separate still boxed entity and continued to move forward as she has in the past, does she do something else, folder back inside of herself, swap out for she could potentially swap out for an entirely new psychic discipline for the second half of the AP if you wanted to, more in line with what she is now, there's a lot to discuss.
[SPEAKER_05]: And also, a fun little detail, this is one of my favorite little things that this AP sprinkles in.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm sorry Paul, but the campaign traits of anyone who survives to this point, who had woken up in Briarstone, they all get new abilities added on to them at this point.
[SPEAKER_04]: So we'll discuss that.
[SPEAKER_05]: I will save that as a surprise for when we do the leveling conversation next time.
[SPEAKER_05]: Outstanding.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_05]: Thanks y'all for book three.
[SPEAKER_05]: We'll see you soon.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dark Nexus is produced by plug-in home productions.
[SPEAKER_05]: This podcast uses trademarks and or copyright's own buy-pies-owned corporate and used under PISO's fan content policy.
[SPEAKER_05]: This podcast is not published in door store specifically approved buy-pies-o.
[SPEAKER_05]: For more information about PISO Inc.
[SPEAKER_05]: and PISO products, please visit PISO.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's P-A-I-Z-O.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: Dark Nexus uses music and soundscapes by SirenScape.
[SPEAKER_05]: Check them out at sirenScape.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's S-Y-R-I-N-S-C-A-P-E.com.
[SPEAKER_05]: Opening and closing themes along with additional music composed by Rob Coslaric, artwork for Dark Nexus is by Matt Wallquist, a thanks to DMCP Richard and R.I.
[SPEAKER_05]: Paul and Shen in Scotty, Jason Jess, Joe, Chelsea, Matt, Dave, Derek, Darren, McKaylaJ, H. The Biscuit Buddies, and everyone we've gained with over the years for all the memories and inspiration.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yay!
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been waiting for this my whole life.
[SPEAKER_05]: Love all.
[SPEAKER_05]: Double love.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know what I can do.
[SPEAKER_05]: I can just do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it,