Realis 21: The Death Procession Pt. 3
Transcriber: thedreadbiter
Recap        1
Introduction        4
Responding to the Death Procession [16:30]        14
Jud, Flemming, Sacea and Mirador [16:30]        14
Gaje [25:00]        20
Reunited [33:30]        25
The Barrow [39:30]        30
Jud [55:30]        42
Recap
Austin: Realis is a science fiction and dark fantasy series that contains discussion of violence, injury, slavery, cannibalism, and disease. This campaign never depicts sexual violence, always shows you where the sword goes, but never what it does, and always errs on the side of maximalism.
[“Sapryc” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Austin (as Mirador): Church gives me the creeps.
Dre (as Flemming): Why?
Austin (as Mirador): Why’s the church give me the creeps? They’re creepy! They’re liars, they’re hypocrites, they’re…people like us, they string us up, don’t they?
Sylvi (as Gaje): He makes a good point.
Dre (as Flemming): Is this superstition or is there actually something concrete we should be aware of?
Austin (as Mirador): You know, the bugs, the Empest, ehh, you kill ‘em, it’s not a big deal. You fight ‘em, you hide from ‘em—they’re bad, I don’t like ‘em. But these guys scare me. It’s not superstition, it’s history.
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Jack (as Jud): The man who ran this place, Vortigern, he, uh… My master knew, uh—my master had a history with him and his line, and I picked up stuff here and there from my master, and now I know that he’s here. And what great man wouldn’t be buried without the source of his power?
Austin (as Mirador): And your master told you how to move through the barrow by instinct?
Jack (as Jud): Look, I’m tr—you've never been a serving man, have you, Mirador?
Austin (as Mirador): I've been a lot of things.
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Austin (as Socratio Ketteth): Help me get this off!
Dre (as Flemming): How did you get it on?
Austin (as Socratio Ketteth): [shushing] Shh, shh! Y—you can’t—you have to get this off.
Sylvi (as Gaje): Take a step back.
Dre (as Flemming): How did you get it on?
Sylvi: And I'm pointing my weapon at him. ‘Cause I don't like this.
Austin (as Socratio Ketteth): They sent me to find—they sent me to find you. But I know that you are a powerful thaumaturge and that you could help me. Get this. Off.
Dre (as Flemming): How did you get it on?
Austin (as Socratio Ketteth): They put it on me!
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Sylvi: I'm just going to try and rip the gorget off of this guy's neck. Like, pull it in half.
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Austin: You begin to pull on this thing, you're yanking on it, you're trying to rip it off. It won't break for you. It is locked on there. It is cutting into the back of his neck. You don't feel like it will give way, it's supposed to give way. You put both of your hands on each side and begin to pull apart and then you can—a second one of these gems starts to glow, and then the one under your hand starts to glow and vibrate. And it explodes.
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Austin: It explodes, and the topaz is there in the crystal, taking shape, until it finds the shape of the Death Procession.
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Austin: And Mirador, seeing this, goes,
Austin (as Mirador): No, no, no, no, no. Uh-uh!
Austin: And just starts running.
Jack: [laughs] Okay.
Sylvi: I'm also going to say,
Sylvi (as Gaje): Everybody out. Now.
Sylvi: Bellowing it.
Introduction
Austin: Um, let’s talk broad level summary before we get back to it, because it feels like a lot happened last time.
Sylvi: [laughs] What do you mean? It was so chill.
Austin: I mean, the final image, if I’m remembering right, is everybody except for Gaje has fled into the depths of a fallen space elevator church, itself on the boundary to an ancient barrow, an ancient underground tomb, into the mists created by Sacea to cover a retreat from a bunch of weird golden skull-faced knights. Gaje is with the weird golden skull-faced knights. Skull-helmed knights. Their faces aren’t skulls, but they have skull helmets. Is that right?
Sylvi: Am I with them or did I just kill one?
Austin: No. You killed—wait, with them, with who? With who?
Sylvi: The skull… The Death Procession.
Austin: They were on their way into the mist to chase after Mirador Cantata and you killed one of them and took their gun.
Sylvi: To clarify for the listener, I’m not like in a traveling group with them I’m, like, in the same area as them.
Austin: Correct, sorry, yes. You’re in the same scene, effectively, still, with them. everybody else fled that scene.
Sylvi: They’re on a different screen of the video game.
Austin: That’s correct. Right.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Austin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that, any other—okay that’s where we left off. All that accurate? Jack?
Jack: You had lost some…
Austin: You listened to the whole thing, right?
Jack: Yeah. Sort of starting with the really broad detail and then telescoping in as we get closer and closer to where we left off. We are a crew that has been hired to guide Cantata to a destination where Cantata believes that we will be able to find transport to another destination for a purpose unknown to us. We are the hired muscle. We went through the woodlands. We had various run-ins with sort of Leo Suzerainty knights. We met strange wooden people. We arrived in this sort of like plague land. I mean, the whole planet is a plague land. The Bile. The Bile? Yes. Is a plague that has befallen this planet, producing a kind of homicidal anger in sufferers, causing them to kill other people. We found the ruins of this town called Vortigern that was founded by a very, very powerful Leo Suzerainty guy and descendant—or antecedent in the cannibal cult. A guy called Vortigern Gothgeier.
Austin: How much of Vortigern’s relation to the cult did we get?
Jack: We know that Vortigern was inducted—so Vortigern was a respected Suzerainty knight who took the planet of Sapryc for the Suzerainty and became a hero. He spent his whole life seemingly in fear of these strange, like, hunters who he thought were going to come and kill him at any moment. But that didn’t happen. He died old in his bed in Sapric and was buried in this mausoleum, this barrow. Before he died, he was inducted into the cannibal cult by some sort of Suzerainty person who came to him and said, this is a way to live forever, or this is a way to pass on the kind of power and capacity that you have and still have a hand in it. I think that’s what we know of his involvement in the cult. Towards the end of his life, he was inducted.
Um, Jud had visions of a great treasure that Gothgeier had and was buried with, and following the sort of cannibal memories of where Gothgeier was laid to rest, was sort of compelled even further into these barrows that we were already heading in to be like, I can get something extremely powerful. However, as we arrived, we met… Ketteth. What’s his first name?
Austin: Socratio Ketteth.
Jack: Socratio Ketteth.
Austin: I mean, that’s what it was. His name now is… dead. He’s dead. RIP to Socratio.
Jack: He’s exploded, right?
Dre: Damn, fucking got him!
Jack: Fucking shredded. He arrived wearing basically a Saw trap, a magical Saw trap.
Dre: [laughs]
Austin: That’s right.
Sylvi: Right!
Jack: And did the full, and I know this is because you’re a massive fan of the James Wan, Leigh Whannell series, Austin. Did the full Saw sequence of, look, you have to get this off me. I can’t explain what’s going on. They’re going to come for me. You know, they’re not people. And then, of course, the Saw trap went off, killing him and summoning the Death Procession at the same time. Something that was interesting that I didn’t…
Austin: They didn’t do that in the Saw movies yet. They haven’t done…
Sylvi: Actually, that was the ending of Saw 3.
Austin: Oh, Saw 3.
Sylvi: The shotgun collar went off and then…
Austin: And it summoned knights.
Sylvi: John Kramer was standing there.
Austin: Right, okay, okay. John Kramer.
Sylvi: Even though he had already died of cancer, I think, in that one
Austin: Oh, yeah.
Jack: Really odd!
Austin: Wow, we’re just spoiling the Saw films here.
Sylvi: It’s fine!
Dre: I don’t know, I don’t know…
Janine: Sorry, I have a five-second movie pitch. The end of—it’s a Saw movie, and the end of the Saw movie, you see the person who’s doing Saw that time, but then Pinhead shows up and kills him. And then it’s Pinhead is doing Saw.
Jack: [gasps] Whoa!
Austin: Pinhead versus Saw. Pinhead versus Jigsaw.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Sylvi: We do need to bring back the crossover horror movie, I think.
Austin: We do.
Janine: Right? Then set them in space.
Austin: Yeah.
Janine: Just put it in space also afterwards.
Austin: And Pinhead says, would you like to play a game?
Jack: Yeah.
Austin: Right? Which is not a thing that Saw actually says.
Jack: But then he says, wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
Austin: [laughs] Oh no! It’s a—
Janine: Oh! Yeah!
Jack: We’re really in it.
Austin: The VVitch is here!
Sylvi: And Barry Cohen from Killing of a Sacred Deer shows up and asks if they want some spaghetti.
Austin: [laughing away from the mic]
Jack: Yeah, yeah, he’s, you know, one, two, three, bleeding from the eyes, refusing food.
Sylvi: [laughs]
Jack: No, my actual question is, something I picked up listening to the recording that I didn’t pick up when we were recording it was Ketteth said or claimed that the Death Procession were not part of the church.
Austin: That is a thing that he says.
Jack: And whether or not that is true, or whether or not he is dealing with imperfect information, or whether there is something really weird going on there and we have somebody masquerading as the Venerant See when they’re not actually part of it. It’s hard to tell. It could very easily be local curate doesn’t actually know what Vatican cardinals are.
Austin: No, we—I was very heavily signaling that they are not who they say they are. Here are some other things that happened. One, they showed up and before they became the Death Procession, they were made of crystal.
Jack: Made of crystal.
Austin: Two, they have laser guns from a different world. Three, I said, I’m adding them to your thing and I’m putting the words [Death Procession] in brackets. As if to say, that’s the term we call them for now.
Jack: Mm. They’re fake.
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: Here’s my other question about the Death Procession.
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: They wear skull masks or skull sort of headpieces.
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: Now, when they first appeared, did you mention these as being like the skulls of bulls? Or did I just imagine that?
Austin: I think you may have imagined that. That’s sick.
Jack: Wow.
Austin: But that’s not.
Jack: So when you said they had skull headpieces, this whole time I was just picturing like gold animal skulls on their heads.
Austin: Mm. No. Not that. That’s fun. Uh, so yeah, as a reminder, three of you are in—I mean, you’re all in the ruins of the Cathedral Omphalic. But, again, Sacea, Jud and Ga—sorry, Sacea, Jud and Flemming and Mirador are off in the mist trying to find a way deeper in or a way around, a way towards the barrow, to escape the pursuant, the Death Procession. And then, Gaje, you have killed one of the Death Procession and picked up an Ephemera. A thing that I am going to say is a reality level two Ephemera, which reads.
Sylvi: Yeah. “The Violet Blaster eradicates anything in its firing line.”
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: Whoa, cool!
Austin: You have three uses of that. You know, better make them count.
Sylvi: I will.
Jack: It’s a… What’s the thing in Dragon Ball that they fire out of their finger? A Dodon Ray?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Austin: Sure.
Sylvi: Wow, Jack, I’m so proud.
Dre: That’s one of them, yeah.
Austin: Wow, good job.
[someone claps quietly]
Jack: It is Dodon Ray time. To me.
Sylvi: And we mentioned that the gun is the only thing that’s… It had color.
Austin: They also produce a sort of golden color.
Sylvi: Yeah, okay.
Austin: And the saw trap also produces sort of like golden color from this big topaz gem.
Sylvi: I thought so.
Austin: But yes, then yes, the Violet Blaster also does produce violet light here in a way that nothing else produces color in any way. So, you know.
Austin: Color, you know what we mean when we say color. You know we’re talking about black and white versus color, you know. It’s, gray is of course a color, but.
Sylvi: Yeah, picture a comic book.
Austin: Yeah, picture a comic book versus picture a black and white movie, you know.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Austin: Where do you want to come in? Who wants to, do we want to start off with the big group and then come back over and see how Gaje is doing?
Dre: Can I ask a mechanical question first?
Austin: Absolutely.
Dre: One of my sentences, “I always project an image of unerring wisdom,” has three checks on it. So that means that I can upgrade it?
Austin: You can upgrade it. You can upgrade it now. You could upgrade it right before you use it next. It’s called realization. And when you realize a sentence, you add some sort of quality to it, some sort of restriction. But you get to increase its rank by one. So yeah.
Dre: Okay.
Jack: Oh, something that is worth saying is if a sentence has been crossed out, realizing it uncrosses it.
Austin: That is correct. So if it has been countered, which it hasn’t been in this case, right? But for instance, Gaje, you have “I always hurt those close to me.” That has been countered. Unfortunately, it has not been, that was only, it’s only at two check marks here. If it was a third one, if it was a third mark, it would be primed and then you could realize it and recover it in the process. It would become uncountered in that moment but that is not the case for this.
Dre: Would it become uncountered and also like move up one?
Austin: Yeah. Yeah.
Dre: Okay. Okay, so it’s not an either/or, it’s an and.
Austin: Correct. Correct.
Dre: Okay.
Austin: But, of course, the thing there is like, you know, there’s a kind of—in some ways, you keep it—you could—you’re in a position where you could keep that at zero reality. And it’s broader. It doesn’t have any sort of restrictions on it. You “always project an image of unerring wisdom,” not just “I always project an image of unerring wisdom at night,” or “I always project an image of unerring wisdom to those who know me” or some other restriction, but it’s only plus zero, right? And you could fail to use it in a situation where failing to use it has a big cost, you know? Or you can upgrade it and you can go up to plus one. And then you might be able to use it to get something you want. But what happens if that restriction has made it harder for you to deploy it because the situation isn’t there, right?
Dre: Yeah.
Austin: My general advice is to float it. Unless you have a really strong, interesting, character-driven reason to add a restriction that you think makes a lot of sense. And, sorry, when I say float it, I don’t mean indefinitely leave it at plus zero. I mean wait until there’s an opportunity to bring it to plus one where you feel like you really want that plus one.
Dre: Okay.
Austin: Again, I think if you have a good reason for it or if you’re afraid that someone is going to use a plus one sentence against you, for instance, that might be a good time to realize it.
Dre: Okay. Cool.
Jack: All right.
Austin: So big group. Let’s just say you’ve all gotten back together on the other side of Sacea’s mists. So that is, again, that is Flemming, Jud, Sacea, and Mirador, who I think is huffing and puffing, who is—oh, I guess also…
Jack: Where’s Scrundle?
Austin: Is Scrundle with you?
Jack: We explicitly, Gaje took the door down so Scrundle could get in.
Austin: Yeah, so Scrundle is, I think we, you know, Scrundle probably was moving slower, but you can hear Scrundle coming towards you in the mist, you know?
Jack: The bookies, I would like to know the updated odds on Scrundle making it to the end of the season.
Austin: [laughs] Will Scrundle make it, the longest forum thread, dadadadada…
Sylvi: Do you know the Half-Life 2 challenge where it’s like bring the gnome to the end?
Dre: [laughs]
Jack: Get the gnome? Yeah, we’re trying to do this with Scrundle.
Sylvi: Scrundle is our gnome.
Jack: Far beyond the point of…
Dre: I wanna realize my sentence “I always project an image of unerring wisdom when it comes to saving Scrundle.”
Austin: Okay, great.
Sylvi: [laughs]
Jack: Uh. Yeah, God. We can hear Scrundle kind of laboredly making… What are Scrundle’s pronouns? He/him?
Austin: He/him.
Responding to the Death Procession [16:30]
Jud, Flemming, Sacea and Mirador [16:30]
Jack: Yeah. God. [pauses] I mean, I have an action, but does anybody else want to take action first?
Austin: No, if you have it, let’s jump in.
Dre: Yeah, go.
Jack: Yeah, I want to grab Mirador by his fancy little collar and push him up against a wall and say,
Austin (as Mirador): Hey!
Jack (as Jud): Who the fuck are those people?
Austin (as Mirador): Hey!
Jack (as Jud): They knew your name.
Austin (as Mirador): Hey, let me go! Don’t forget, I’m paying you!
Jack (as Jud): In the dungeon?
Austin (as Mirador): A—b—put me down and we’ll talk! [sighs]
Jack: Glancing around for Gaje puts, you know, drops it, drops him.
Austin (as Mirador): It’s the Death Procession. Weird zealots from the church. They hate people like me who know a little bit too much.
Jack (as Jud): They hate you specifically. None of this “people like you” bullshit.
Austin (as Mirador): A lot of people hate me specifically.
Jack (as Jud): Why do they hate you specifically?
Austin (as Mirador): I’m a little hateable. I… They know that I’m after something that they would like me not to have and that they would like to have themselves! They’re power-hungry zealots. You know the type.
Jack (as Jud): Well, so why don’t they just go for it themselves? Why are they…
Austin (as Mirador): ‘Cause they need me to get it. I’m the one who knows where it is. We’re on the way. If we just moved quicker, we’d be there already. And they wouldn’t have caught up to us.
Jack (as Jud): Don’t put this on us.
Austin (as Mirador): I’m putting it on all of us. We shouldn’t have slowed down with those weird wood guys, and we shouldn’t have… We should have gone around the woods altogether, maybe. I don’t know. Bad strategic planning on my part.
Jack (as Jud): Well, what are you all looking for?
Austin (as Mirador): I… That is not part of our deal. I—Flemming knows. Flemming, you can vouch. It’s something important. It’s something that you’ll all benefit from.
Jack: This is bullshit. Flemming has been given just another complete… Flemming knows a tiny bit more, right?
Dre: Barely.
Jack: He said to Flemming, like, I keep thinking that he said something like, “I’ll show you a lever that can move the world.”
Austin: That’s not wrong.
Jack: But that’s I think what Pythagoras said.
Austin: Yeah, but it’s very similar to that, right? We’re very much in that space for what they said. Mm-hmm. Remember they did that with a successful sentence, “I always tempt with another truth.”
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Jack (as Jud): Can you vouch for him, Flemming?
Dre (as Flemming): Not sure. I’d like to, but this keeps getting more complicated.
Austin (as Mirador): And if I tell you more, there’s going to be a greater risk that they come for you.
Dre (as Flemming): Like they just did?
Austin (as Mirador): They were coming for me. You could be off on some other moon.
Jack (as Jud): Yeah, and we are—
Dre (as Flemming): Yeah. And as you so eloquently pointed out, you’re paying us, so they will come for us again.
Austin (as Mirador): No! This is what I’m saying. You finish this job for me, you get to go live your life. Or if I die, you get to go live your life. But if you know where I’m going, I could die and they’d still come after you. They know I know. They’ll know if you know.
Jack (as Jud): Will they?
Austin (as Mirador): Tell me how you think our world works. If you know the words, they’ll know.
Jack: This is very compelling to a 15-year-old who lives on the thousand moons of Realis. If you say something strong enough, you can, if you believe something strong enough, it can become real. Hmm.
Austin: I love that you’ve jumped to that, which is not what Mirador Cantata just said.
Jack: No. [slight laugh] No. But it dovetails nicely with the kind of child logic, right?
Austin: Yes, 100%.
Jack: Of like, something is only as real as the belief and words tied to it.
Austin: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Sulking. Outsmarted.
Dre: [laughs]
Austin (as Mirador): Let’s just find a way forward. And, uh…
Jack (as Jud): What about… What about Gaje? What about the… What’s the horse called?
Austin (as Mirador): Scrundle will catch up. It’s not a horse, it’s a donkey.
Jack: Uh… What’s Sacea doing?
Janine: I believe biding her time in this conversation, because I think the place that she’s at is let’s just fucking go.
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, so with Mirador.
Janine: Yeah, I don’t even think she’s been participating in this conversation, truly. Like, I think she has been sort of sizing up where they’re at and sort of weighing their options.
Austin: Mm-hm. Yeah, and I think that you have, you know, you’ve effectively been putting together where you’re at in the fallen, the kind of ruins here. And effectively, you’re like, well, based on where we’ve run and where we were and everything else, we can kind of cut off this entire western half of these ruins as the way forward. The way forward is we should have taken a right at this one place instead of taking a left. And then maybe we won’t know after that which way to go. But that’s definitely the branch we need to be in, you know. So you have a pretty good sense of the like—you know, you load up that JRPG map in your head, and you’re like, well, we’ve seen everything on the other side of this map, you know? So the way forward must be over that way.
Austin (as Mirador): We can give Gaje a little time to catch up, but the second we have any sign of those guys coming for us, it might be too late. You saw the sort of weird weapons they had.
Dre (as Flemming): You all can go ahead. I’ll go back and get Gaje.
Austin (as Mirador): No! [scoffs] The job is to get us as a group there, is to get me and Scrundle there. Gaje signed up for that. I hate to be a ball buster here, but, uh…
Jack: [laughs] World’s worst ball buster, Mirador Cantata.
Dre (as Flemming): So what? If two of us are dead, that’s less people for you to pay.
Austin (as Mirador): It’s less chance I make it the rest of the way. This wasn’t even the hard part.
Janine (as Sacea): Flemm, let me ask you a question. Flemm and Jud, come here a second. Come on. Mirador, you… teeth or whatever it is you do. [inaudible 23:17]
Austin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvi: We got a union meeting real quick.
Janine (as Sacea): Let me ask you both a question.
Janine: And Sacea is like leaning on her—I think, yeah, she has a walking stick. She’s sort of leaning on her walking stick like with her arm folded and then her other arm over that as if it’s like a bar. But it’s just the knob of the walking stick.
Janine (as Sacea): How much do you both trust Gaje? In terms of competency, you know?
Dre (as Flemming): Highly.
Jack (as Jud): Yeah.
Janine (as Sacea): Then what’s the problem?
Jack (as Jud): Well, I mean…
Janine (as Sacea): Let’s go.
Jack (as Jud): No, they didn’t abandon me when I was having, like, death fed to me. You know? Never leave a man behind, you know?
Janine (as Sacea): Jud, you’re a child. And Gaje is not a child. [laughs slightly]
Jack (as Jud): Well, there’s no need to, you know…
Janine (as Sacea): You know you’re a child.
Jack (as Jud): You don’t have to be rude.
Janine (as Sacea): You know—you’re a competent child. You’re good at the stuff you do, but you’re young. You need the extra attention. Gaje has it.
Jack: Jud, thinking.
Janine (as Sacea): If Gaje is meant to have it, then we’ll meet up at some point. Because that’s how it works. That’s always how it works.
Jack: [sighs] Jud, thinking: this is why I need to get the great power of Vortigern Gothgeier. But yeah, making a point, I’m reading my bond here that says, “Sacea’s methods are otherworldly and I am afraid of her. I need to stay in her good books.”
Austin: Mm.
Janine: [laughs]
Dre: [sighs] You’re right.
Janine: Then let’s go.
Gaje [25:00]
Jack: Can we hear the Procession behind us? Like, do we have any sense of how close they are?
Austin: I have no idea—let’s hop back over to Gaje and see what’s happening over there. Cause they could all be dead. I don’t know.
Sylvi: Oh, that’d be so cool. Wait, can we just say that happened? [laughs] We don’t have to talk!
Dre: [laughs]
Austin: [laughs] No, we gotta unfortunately play this one out.
Sylvi: No, we can’t cut back and they’re all dead and I look really cool? Oh, okay. [laughs]
Austin: Um… I would cut back and use up one of your Ephemera uses and say that another one of them is dead and you’re alone and we just don’t get to see what happened here. But that is—I will say they are not all dead in that scenario explicitly. But you’d be alone and the other ones would have been gone, which is kind of an interesting blank space to leave for the listener.
Sylvi: I think I’d rather play it out. I think. I was joking around. I think I would rather…
Austin: I get you. Yeah.
Sylvi: So, I guess, yeah, that’s my question then. How many are in the immediate vicinity?
Austin: How many were there? Does anybody remember off the top of their heads how many there were?
Jack: I hate to say this. Six.
Austin: One’s dead. Five.
Jack: Five.
Austin: Yeah.
Sylvi: And I’m pretty sure the one I got was the last one.
Austin: Was the one in the rear, yeah. It was like the rear guard, who was not doing a good job of being that. And so yeah so it’s the one who’s the leader and then there’s five other ones. Or, I guess, four other ones.
Sylvi: Oh, fuck. Okay. This is like a big maze, right?
Austin: Yeah, it is ruins that have fallen—it is ruins on top of ruins is what it is. Yeah.
Sylvi: I have an idea. That will also end up using one of my Violet Blaster charges, but is going to be less direct confrontation and probably lead to slightly less of them on my team. On my tail, not on my team. I don’t think any of them are joining my team. So like the way I pictured that encounter—because I saw one of these fire, right?
Austin: You did. You know it’s a Violet Blaster, yeah.
Sylvi: And I’ve seen the damage it can do to not just people but like stone and stuff.
Austin: The environment, yeah.
Sylvi: So in the anime Hunter x Hunter.
Austin: Oh?
Sylvi: Gon hatches a little plan during the trick tower to bust through a wall. I’ve decided to do—I don’t know if it’s necessarily like one-to-one where it’s like I’m just finding a path that’s like next to where you guys are going. But maybe it’s even like, I have to like go up a level.
Austin: Right.
Sylvi: And blast through the floor.
Austin: And blast down? Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah. And like fall through. So I’m ahead of the Death Procession but still behind…
Austin: So have you, in this moment, when we come back to you, are you fleeing from the remains of the Death Procession? Or are you cooking this idea up?
Sylvi: I’ve just lost a hand.
Austin: As you are like looking at them—yeah, I remember. Yeah. This is part of my question.
Sylvi: I think that it’s, as much as Gaje would never admit it to anybody, it’s one of those times where it’s like, if I keep fighting now, I’m not going to be able to win.
Austin: Right. So, in other words, when we turn the page and see the panel, you are mid-stride somewhere else.
Sylvi: Yeah. The stake that I usually carry is like… I don’t know if it could be affixed to my back. He might just have it stuck into his belt right now. And it’s kind of dragging while he walks because he’s got this gun in his hand.
Austin: Yeah.
Dre: Put it on your wallet chain.
Austin: Yeah.
Sylvi: That’s what the manacle is now.
Austin: [laughs]
Dre: [laughs]
Austin: So you’re fleeing from them, and you want to use the gun as a means to get the intention, something like reconnecting with your friends by blasting holes in the wall??
Sylvi: I want to create a shortcut that will get me to my friends.
Austin: And you want to elude the Death Procession in the process.
Sylvi: Yeah, if possible. I at the very least want to outrun them.
Austin: Yeah. Something fun here is, one of the sentences you discovered about these ruins was “the ruins of the Cathedral Omphalic always confuse those without color and light as their guide.” But you have this gun that produces colored light. And so it can’t defend with that sentence, which is interesting. Or it can’t counter with that sentence, which is very fun.
Sylvi: Get owned, you stupid barrow.
Austin: That’s right. All right. But. That does not mean that the Death Procession can.
Sylvi: It can counter. Oh, okay.
Austin: So that is your intention. And let’s see. They are going to try to counter you with “the Death Procession always fights with weapons from another world.” What’s happened here is three of them, including the leader, have broken off to chase you. And the other two… Mm, you know what? No, let’s say the leader stays with two of them and goes through the mist to try to chase Mirador directly. And there’s two of them with you, giving chase to you through these ruins, upstairs, back around, down, et cetera. But you’re going to win this because that is a plus zero sentence from them and it is a plus two sentence from you, because it’s that Ephemera you just got, right?
Sylvi: Yep.
Austin: All right. But that means I do get to mark their sentence, which is very fun to me. All right. So what’s it look like when you reconnect at this point? Paint me a picture of you finding, building this shortcut, making this shortcut for yourself. Oh, wait, sorry. You know what? They can’t counter with that sentence because it’s countered. You countered that sentence from them. So they, in fact, have to try to use something else. They might just not even have anything else that they could use in this scenario. I guess actually they do, but you’re going to beat it, but I’m going to make the offer and reveal a sentence from them anyway.
Sylvi: Hell yeah.
Austin: Which is, you know, there’s a moment here where you’ve gotten to where you’re going to like make one of your shortcuts. But they’ve kind of caught up to you. And I think one of them still has one of these swords and the other one has a Violet Blaster. And they say,
Austin (as Death Procession): Stop where you are. We come with an offer. You could live forever with us.
Austin: And “the Death Procession always offers the gift of undeath to the willing.”
Sylvi: Gaje I don’t think even verbally replies to them. Why would I trust that? They took my hand. Indirectly, but that’s how he’s thinking about it. Just like spits on the floor in front of them and then blasts the hole in the ground.
Austin: Disappears down a drop that would maybe kill them. I guess we would have to ssee.
Sylvi: Probably.
Austin: Yeah, and the dust comes up and you’re gone. And you’re off running again or walking again through the hallways. That is a plus one sentence that they try to use. It has been countered. Or it has not been countered because they were using it to counter you and failed. But it’s marked. Now you know what three of their sentences are. In general, I am trying to remember to put stuff down on your sheets, but you’re responsible for your sheets. Otherwise, I have too much paperwork to do. So. But I like to be kind, you know?
So, the other group, you were asking, can we hear the Death Procession? I think the first thing you hear and see is Scrundle arrives. And then moments after that, you hear a loud blast somewhere down the hallways, and you can kind of see the purple light in the mist. And seconds later, you can hear the sound of someone falling and collapsing on the ground. And yeah, that’s what you hear and see.
Reunited [33:30]
Austin: I will say, Gaje, you can reintroduce yourself into this scene whenever you would like to. Mirador goes over and begins to pet Scrundle right away.
Sylvi: I think… I kind of like the idea of following up Scrundle not that long after and just being like,
Sylvi (as Gaje): Oh good, the donkey made it.
Jack: [laughs]
Jack (as Jud): Did you kill them all?
Sylvi: Um.
Jack (as Jud): What happened to your hand?
Sylvi: He holds up his hand and shakes his head, I think is the answer to… Or lack of hand, and shakes his head.
Austin (as Mirador): Do we have any more of that chronoplasm? It might be too much for it.
Janine (as Sacea): Yeah, I do.
Austin (as Mirador): You think it’ll work on a hand or no?
Janine (as Sacea): Couldn’t hurt to give it a shot. Even if you only get halfway, that’s still more than you got right now, right?
Sylvi: What? Refresh me on what the chronoplasm did again.
Janine: “Chronoplasm cream always heals through time.”
Sylvi: Oh.
Austin: Eh! I don’t really know what that means about this.
Jack: It works in a really weird way.
Austin: Yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: I remember knowing how it worked. And. [laughs] And now I don’t. It’s like it’s working on the past in some way.
Austin: Yeah.
Janine: I’m going to say a gross thing. I just want everyone to brace themselves for it. But it’s, I think this is contrary to what we’re doing here. But. It’s funny in my brain if it grows back the veins and stuff, but not the meat.
Jack: Augh!
Dre: Aww.
Sylvi: That’s sick.
Dre: What about the bones?
Janine: Sorry.
Austin: My eyes are closed. My eyes are simply closed.
Dre: Do you get bones and veins?
Janine: No.
Dre: Okay.
Sylvi: You’ve given me a cool gross idea we could do.
Janine: You get veins. Maybe you get… Well, you need bones for tendons. You get all the stringy bits.
Austin: Mm. Cool.
Dre: Are they just flopping around?
Janine: I don’t know. Magic.
Dre: Sylvi, what’s your idea? It’s probably less horrible.
Sylvi: Oh, are you sure?
Austin: I’m not.
Jack: [laughs]
Janine: [laughs]
Dre: No, I’m not.
Sylvi: Well, I talked… Austin, you kind of have a sneak preview of this because I DM’d you about what I want to do with my hand and my weapon. And it’s sort of a one plus one situation.
Austin: Oh, I see.
Dre: Oh, are we going to Evil Dead this shit?
Sylvi: Yes, very much so. Because when Janine started talking about the chronoplasm, I was like, oh, I… Because I’m picturing this real pulpy fantasy comic, right? That’s been, generally speaking, my viewpoint on Realis as a whole. It doesn’t really need to be super accurate, where he just jabs the non-pointy end or the less pointy end of the stake into his arm and then uses this cream to bind it there and have it grow. Like, have part of him grow around it so it stays there. It’s a little more Cronenberg.
Austin: It is very Cronenberg, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-huh. That’s fine by me. I think that’s about as close as we can get to—we may have just overstepped “showing where the sword goes.” Not—
Sylvi: I deeply apologize.
Austin: But let’s say that that’s about where the line is, right. And I’m happy with the idea of you don’t, you know, you’ve effectively turned your stake, you’ve integrated the stake weapon into yourself physically now.
Sylvi: Yes.
Austin: Is a really interesting thing here, you know?
Jack: This is the divine Integrity.
Austin: Correct, yeah. And at this point, we are in a new scene. You can uncounter “I always carry an unstoppable weapon” and “I always hurt those close to me.”
Sylvi: Cool.
Austin: Both of those seem doable. Are you applying, are you doing all this maybe like on the way forward through the other half of these ruins? Like in the cart? Or are you,maybe you’re too big for the cart, I don’t know.
Sylvi: I think I’m too big for the cart. I think we have established previously that I’m too big for the cart.
Janine: What if Sacea’s sitting on the back of the cart and you’re walking along behind and she’s doing the wound dressing?
Sylvi: I love it.
Janine: Like keeping pace. [laughs]
Austin: Yeah.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Austin: Love it.
Janine: Because she did say, eh, let’s go and eh, Gaje will figure it out, and here we are. Let’s go. Gaje figured it out.
Jack: Yeah, Gaje got it sorted.
Sylvi: Yeah. Thanks for the vote of confidence. Genuinely.
Austin: Absolutely.
Janine: How do I mark Ephemera use?
Austin: So I don’t think this is actually an Ephemera use—I guess it is because what you’re doing here is you’re using the Ephemera to solve, to counter a, not to counter, but for an unknown situation, right? It’s unclear if you could succeed at healing Gaje and now you can because you’re using this thing. So you just mark it once. All Ephemera has three uses. And so, yeah, anytime that there is a, there’s a word I’m looking for that is not unknown. What is the word I’m looking for?
Janine: Known?
Austin: No. [laughs] No, it’s like more like the word unknown. It’s like a key Realis term.
Janine: Oh. Obscure?
Austin: No, no, no, no. It’s like when you… Uncertain is the word I’m looking for. It was uncertain whether you could heal Gaje or not. You used the Ephemera, the chronoplasm to heal Gaje. So that takes up a use of it. So yeah, you can mark it. All right. Yeah, so you continue going the other way through these ruins. I think there’s a point at which Scrundle just naturally begins to pick up the pace going through these wide hallways. And I think Mirador is like,
Austin (as Mirador): Yeah, they must be gaining on us. Scrundle wants to get out of here quick.
The Barrow [39:30]
Austin: And I think eventually you come to a, you know, imagine a hallway in a church. But instead of having the left wall, there is the stone of a mound of earth that used to have grass all over it, but the grass has been like ripped off by the landing of, the crash of this big ruin, this big space elevator onto it. So it’s like exposed rock and dirt. And, actually, sticking out from that exposed rock and dirt is a sort of hallway built from a stronger stone and a doorway into the barrow, into the place that, Jud, you’ve been hoping to get everybody to, even though it is just the way forward, Vortigern’s Hollow. And it is a much smaller hallway than the ones you’ve been going down, which have been these kind of broad cathedral-like, you know, excess-laden hallways of the Venerant See. And this is, you know, this is your Skyrim dungeon. You’ve opened the door and you were in a little—you are in Vortigern’s Hollow, a barrow in the earth. And that is where it leads.
And here, there is, things start to get dark very quickly. This is a tunnel going down into a tomb. And there might be some unlit torches here, but there is not like, there’s no light coming in from the broken roof of the ruin or from, you know, shattered, where there were shattered windows or whatever. And I think it’s even, this is, it’s too tight for the cart. You could probably bring Scrundle in here, but I think you have to lose the cart if you go this way.
Jack: [sighs] Well, how many supplies do we have on the cart? What’s left? Is this a thing that we could pack it into bags, carry it?
Austin: Yeah, I kind of like that image. The idea that you would have to carry backpacks, big backpacks to get all of your stuff with you. You’re getting close to the Cloister of the Hollow Heart, your goal at the kind of north pole of this moon. If you can get through the hollow, you know, I think that Mirador thinks you could probably get to the cloister in, you know, a couple days travel if you travel hard and fast, you know. But it does mean even if you just take what you need, you got to carry these big backpacks.
Jack: We can load at least one onto Scrundle.
Austin: Oh, for sure. For sure. But yeah. I just love that idea there, that image of y’all descending into this place.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: I am definitely not carrying a backpack.
Austin: Oh, my God.
Dre: I mean, I’ll float it around.
Austin: Oh, I see.
Dre: I don’t need to carry it.
Austin: Now I see.
Jack: Oh, it’s like, right, magic. Magic is, flashy magic.
Dre: It’s Fantasia.
Austin: Yeah, this is your showy magic sentence, right? “I always know a few showy tricks.” Yeah. Mirador is like,
Austin (as Mirador): All right. Just. I basically know, I have an expectation of how these things are built. This is the main entrance here. My guess is that we’ll be able to find either…
Dre: [gasps]
Austin: Yes?
Dre: Mm, I just had an idea.
Austin: Uh-huh.
Dre: What’s showier than making the supplies float?
Jack: Making the supplies really small.
Dre: Making the cart and the supplies in it really small.
Austin: Oh, my God. You’re going to. All right. Yeah, that seems uncertain. Uh, what’s the… It seems uncertain that you’d be able to do that. So yeah, you’re definitely attempting to use that. Let’s see if anything is going to try to counter you doing that.
Jack: Here in the fucking Skyrim dungeon?
Austin: Here in the Skyrim dungeon. Let me look at my version of the sheets instead of yours, where there’s stuff on…
Janine: There’s a Draugr that gets activated when someone tries to make miniatures.
[laughter]
Austin: Uh-huh, that’s right. “When someone tries to make miniatures, appear and ruin it for them.”
Jack: This is, I feel like this is both a Skyrim dungeon and also it’s the terrifying thing that happens every so often in a FromSoftware game where you get a title card when you enter a place.
Austin: Yeah.
Jack: And it says, Vortigern’s Hollow.
Austin: Vortigern’s Hollow. [makes echoing sound effect] Yeah, 100%. [pauses] Yeah, okay. I think that there is nothing here that stops you from doing this. So, wait, did you say you were doing this for the supplies? You didn’t say Scrundle. You just said the supplies.
Dre: No, no, no. The cart and the supplies.
Austin: Okay. Okay.
Dre: Yeah.
Austin: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know about doing this to a…
d No, I’m not going to do that to Scrundle!
Austin: I think it’s more than a showy trick to shrink a person, you know?
Dre: Yeah.
Austin: But, yeah, this makes sense. I like it. All right, you shrink that stuff down.
Janine: Wait, Scrundle’s not a person. What?
Dre: How dare you?
Austin: Scrundle’s a being.
Janine: Scrundle’s a donkey, right? Okay, a being, yes.
Austin: Yeah, Scrundle’s a…
Dre: A sentient creature.
Austin: You know. I think someone…
Janine: I thought something had happened that I wasn’t… that I hadn’t followed.
Austin: No, I think Scrundle is just more than an average donkey.
Janine: Scrundle emerges from the mist, a man.
Austin: Oh, yeah.
Austin (as Man Scrundle): [almost sultry] Hey, everybody, it’s me, Scrundle.
[everyone takes this in]
Austin (as Man Scrundle): Thanks for all the—
Dre: Oh, you’re so hot, Scrundle!
Sylvi: Well, with the “not your average donkey” description. I figured he’d sound like Yogi Bear.
Austin: Yeah, I guess…
Austin (as Yogi Bear Scrundle): Hey, everybody. It’s me, Scrundle.
Sylvi: [cackles]
Jack: [laughs]
Jack (as Yogi Bear Scrundle): I’m on a war-torn moon, Boo Boo!
Austin: Exactly.
Dre: [laughs] God.
Austin: So, yeah, you’re able to move in here. No problems carrying the supplies you need. I think Mirador is like,
Austin (as Mirador): And, you know, this is why you’re on the team, Flemming. This is incredible. Thank you very much. All right, now like I was saying, I think we usually go straight. We go right, right, left, left, and then we go dead ahead. If there’s no door there, sometimes they put a back door on these things. But if there’s not, it’ll be a thinner wall because of the way they construct them. It should be pretty easy to get out of here. As long as we just keep to that route, we should have no problems in here.
Jack (as Jud): Does it take us through the treasure chamber?
Austin (as Mirador): Through the treasure chamber? No.
Jack (as Jud): Through the burial chamber? Through the…
Austin (as Mirador): Does it take us th—no, we’re going to avoid [laughs] the burial chamber of Vortigern Gothgeier! Why would we go through the burial chamber?
Jack (as Jud): Okay. No, it’s asked and answered. Understood.
Austin (as Mirador): Okay.
Jack (as Jud): Right on.
Austin (as Mirador): Worried about you, kid.
Jack (as Jud): Are they… You’ve been in barrows like this. Are they, like, all structured the same with the burial chamber—the treasure r—the burial chamber in a place? In, like, a special place? Like, are we gonna pass it? Like, next to it?
Austin (as Mirador): [scoffs] I think you have to keep your eyes on the prize. And the prize is getting away from the guys who are going to kill us.
Jack (as Jud): Right. Yeah. Okay.
Austin (as Mirador): Now everybody light a torch and let’s get moving.
Janine (as Sacea): Jud, are you going to run off again?
Dre (as Flemming): Oh, you just said it. I was going to pull him aside and ask, but you just said it.
Janine (as Sacea): This… It sounds like you’re… I can hear some gears turning, and it sounds like those gears might lead you to run off again. And if that’s going to happen, or if you think it could happen, just give us a heads up. Okay, kid?
Jack (as Jud): Sacea, can I have a word?
Austin (as Mirador): Oh, my God!
Janine (as Sacea): You can have as many words as you want. What’s up?
Jack (as Jud): Come over here. Come over here.
Janine (as Sacea): Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Dre (as Flemming): Let’s walk and talk.
Austin (as Mirador): [tired] Yeah. Let’s walk and talk.
Jack (as Jud): Sacea, can you do scrying?
Janine (as Sacea): [sly] Why are you asking, Jed?
Jack (as Jud): [like a little goblin] Treasure!!!
Sylvi: Do you do little jazz hands when you say that?
Janine: [laughs] Does he say it like that??
Austin: [cackles] Like a gremlin!
Jack: [laughs]
Jack (as Jud): There’s a treasure in the barrow.
Sylvi: There’s gold in them there hills.
Janine (as Sacea): What makes you say that?
Jack (as Jud): I know it. And, you know, you said if I’m going to run off, give you a little heads up. And I don’t have any intention of… You know, of running off.
Dre: [making implying noises]
Janine (as Sacea): Lots of places in the world look like they’re going to have treasure and then they have treasure…
Jack (as Jud): No, but I know it.
Janine (as Sacea): And lots of places in the world look like they’re going to have treasure and they don’t have treasure. They just have a dead guy.
Jack (as Jud): No, I know there’s treasure. I know it in my blood.
Janine (as Sacea): In your blood?
Jack (as Jud): In my blood.
Jack: And he like thumps his chest.
Janine (as Sacea): Do you know what the treasure is?
Jack (as Jud): It’s… it’s, like, very powerful.
Janine (as Sacea): Okay, you’re unselling me. Because…
Jack (as Jud): It’s the treasure of Vortigern Gothgeier. It’s his ancestral treasure.
Janine (as Sacea): Looking at where we’re at, how would you feel about us suddenly having something that’s very powerful?
Jack (as Jud): Great.
Austin: [laughs] Head empty.
Dre: Yeah.
Janine (as Sacea): You’re so young.
Jack (as Jud): Well, okay. Well, you don’t have to do any, you know, you don’t have to do any scrying or anything.
Janine (as Sacea): What would the scrying get you?
Jack (as Jud): Finding where the treasure is!
Janine (as Sacea): Mm. Mm-hm.
Jack (as Jud): You know, scrying for power, scrying for, like, a passage. Because he’s just going to walk us through here. And you know he’s not going to…
Janine (as Sacea): Mm-hm.
Jack (as Jud): Like he’s going to try and shortchange us. So we got to get ours.
Janine (as Sacea): Well, those are two separate issues. We can get ours out of him if we have to.
Jack (as Jud): I don’t understand why this isn’t compelling for you.
Janine (as Sacea): So you’re saying you’re going to run off and look for this treasure if something comes up? Yes or no, Jed? I’m not going to tie you up and throw you… We don’t have a cart to throw you in. Well, it’s too small for you, but…
Jack (as Jud): Yeah, like if the opportunity presents itself, yeah.
Janine (as Sacea): Okay.
Janine: Ooh. I’m looking at Sacea’s stuff to see, like, what’s the compromise here? What’s the… I don’t want to—because I don’t want to do anything that feels cheap, you know?
Austin: How so?
Janine: I don’t want to be like, boom, the treasure’s here now because of smoke or something. I want to do something interesting.
Austin: Are you hoping… What is the narrative intention that you want in the broadest, most abstract sense? Are you trying to help Jud get to treasure? Question mark, question mark, question mark.
Janine: I’m trying to help Jud explore the things that Jud desires without dying. And also without getting us killed.
Austin: Mm. Okay.
Janine: Um…
Austin: So yeah, are you… You could use, I can imagine ways to use these sentences towards that end.
Janine: I’m really coin tossing about whether or not I want to actually try and find treasure or whether I want to try and trick Jud somehow.
Austin: Right.
Jack: Stop saying “treasure” like it’s just another treasure. It is the treasure of Gothgeier, Vortigern Gothgeier. “Treasure.”
Janine: Okay. All right. I have a thought. I would like to… You know in like Fable and games like that where you summon a little sparkle trail to tell you where the fuck to go?
Jack: [laughs] Yeah.
Janine: I want to summon something like that. I want to do smoke to get a little trail. But there is a condition.
Austin: Ooh, what’s the condition?
Janine: The condition is that Jud has a set amount of time before I come and get him.
Austin: Oh, that’s fun.
Jack: [laughs]
Austin: Sure, sure, sure.
Janine: So you gotta fucking run. You gotta get in. You gotta get out.
Austin: Yeah, I like this. This is fun.
Janine: And this is, the sentence I’m applying here is “I always exert my will over the atmosphere with my perfumes.” My will is, show this kid where this fucking treasure is.
Austin: Uh-huh.
Dre: [laughs]
Jack: [laughs]
Austin: And it’s treasure as defined by Jud, right?
Janine: Yes.
Austin: Yeah, it’s the thing that Jud desires.
Janine: Uh-huh.
Austin: Okay. Then, yeah, a little mist forms on the ground here, a little fog that you could follow, a trail of it, that you could follow deeper in to the barrow, away from everybody else, who has moved on, I guess, except for Gaje. Gaje, do you walk away with Mirador and Flemming?
Sylvi: Yeah. I’m guarding Mirador right now. I’m not in the mood for another one of Jud’s little adventures, you know?
Austin: I gotcha. All right.
Janine: All right. I should say that the censer is sort of wafting around, probably low to the ground, probably within a couple millimeters of one of the bottom parts scraping the ground, but it’s very precisely not. There’s a lot of chain control. And I think Sacea just says, like, this trail will lead you to a treasure if you take more than… Mm. What’s a good number of breaths? If you’re measuring time in breaths? Like sixty breaths?
Austin: That doesn’t seem like enough. Also, this is very funny. It doesn’t matter what we’re going to say. Jud’s going to [laughs] hold his breath!
Janine: That’s why I thought it was funny.
Austin: It is funny!
Dre: According to John Hopkins, the normal respiration rate for an adult person at rest is twelve to sixteen breaths per minute.
Austin: Oh, then that’s, yeah, okay.
Dre: That’s like five minutes.
Austin: Five minutes? Five is not a lot.
Jack: [laughing] Five minutes…
Dre: That’s not a lot.
Janine: A hundred. A hundred breaths. That’s a nice round number.
Austin: That’s a good round number. It’s a powerful number, isn’t it?
Janine: Mm-hm.
Austin: Not that we use numbers here. But. Y’know.
Janine: A hundred breaths. A hundred… Maybe… Is it a hundred breaths? But I don’t specify whose breaths.
Dre, Jack and Sylvi: Oh!
Jack: We’re in some…
Dre: That’s fucked up.
Jack: Mother Goose fairy tale.
Janine: I kind of did the reveal there when I could have held on to it, but… I wonder if Sacea just says, you know, a hundred breaths.
Jud [55:30]
Austin: Mm-hm. Let’s stay with Jud for a moment. I want to paint this just a little bit. Jud, what’s the path towards the quote-unquote treasure room look like?
Jack: Oh, God. Well, I mean, I just go clattering off into the dark, you know, straight away, right? At a run. And I think I am holding my breath, or I’m trying to breathe as little as possible. It is, almost immediately the tunnel floods. Not water rushes into it, but.
Austin: It’s a flooded tunnel?
Jack: It is a flooded tunnel. And so, you know, first I’m up to my ankles in water, and then I’m up to my waist in water, and then it lessens again and, you know, I’ve kind of crossed through this thing. And then as the stone dips down again I go back down into deeper water again. You know, sightless fish move silently in the water next to Jud’s feet. I think that there are…
Austin: While you’re moving through that space, you suddenly remember a pair of different views of that flooded hallway. One is looking up at a strange figure. One is like someone who is being carried looking up, right? And one of the people who is carrying their flat body, their flat dying or undead body, is… The person carrying them is scarred badly. Scarred and healed over. The scars are obviously healed over, but wounded and healed over again and again. You can’t quite make out a lot of details. It’s dark in this memory. The other memory is of the person who is scarred looking down at Vortigern Gothgeier, and you feel these memories in your blood.
Jack: Huh. And I follow the passage of the… How do you pronounce the word? Is it bier [beer] or bier [buyer]?
Austin: I don’t know.
Jack: Like a slab that a body is carried on.
Austin: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Jack: A movable frame in which a coffin or a corpse is placed before burial or cremation. Bier [beer]. I follow this twin memory of the bier as it passes. And I think that there is like painting on the walls. Obviously it’s in black and white, it’s in weird shades of gray. We don’t know whether or not Sapryc has always been in black and white. It’s a moon sentence.
Austin: It is a moon sentence. So it’s true now.
Jack: Sapryc is always seen in black and white.
Austin: In the memory, it is in black and white.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s these daubed figures of Gothgeier successes and also I think of… I don’t know what faith the Suzerainty follows.
Austin: Generally speaking, today, the Venerant See is embedded throughout.
Jack: It’s powerful enough.
Austin: But there are people who have different folk traditions. And have different smaller…
Jack: I think it’s like petty faiths.
Austin: Yeah. Mm-hm. Especially at this era. And I can give you some more here, which is like, as you get closer and deeper in, there’s some recurring symbols on the walls. There are leaves intertwined at the sort of… What’s the—the stem, I guess, the stem of the leaf? The stems of the leaves are interconnected and almost tied together. And then there is bark. There are kind of like trunks of trees as columns as you get deeper and deeper in. Some of those trees have like the classic, there is a face in the bark of the tree.
And eventually you make your way to the burial chamber. And the burial chamber is— at the center of it is what is clearly the big sarcophagus where the person of importance has been buried or is entombed. It comes up to your, a little higher than your waist, made of some sort of very hard stone. But it is not the only sarcophagus in here. There is also a standing one in the shape of a tree. And that one is at the feet of the one that’s laying flat. And it’s standing and it’s clear that the whole front of the tree could open as a coffin, as a stone coffin. And then throughout this part of the—do you have a torch or something for light? What are you seeing with here?
Jack: I feel and have always felt more comfortable in the dark.
Austin: Okay. There is no light here.
Jack: Oh, god, then, yeah.
Austin: You’re in a tomb. There is not—and there’s no residual light.
Jack: That’s true. This is not Skyrim, where there are little…
Austin: Correct. Yeah.
Jack: Then I have a lantern that I held on to before the, before a bunch of our lanterns got shrunk.
Austin: Sure, yeah. Then by the lantern light, you know, you can see that there are treasures here, gems and jewels and coins, some old swords that look ritualistic or sacramental or mostly for show. A suit of armor is placed on a sort of mannequin on the other end of the room. But you know that in some ways the juiciest treasure is the stuff inside the sarcophagi. Right?
Jack: Oh, yeah. Yeah, because the important stuff, that’s why you put it.
Austin: Yeah, of course. Everybody else making your way through the dungeon, so to speak. I think Mirador at this point, Sacea, when you come back, just goes,
Austin (as Mirador): He ran off, didn’t he?
Janine (as Sacea): Yeah, but we can get him back pretty easily when we need to. He’s got a few breaths left.
Austin (as Mirador): Well, that sounds dire.
Janine (as Sacea): It’s not.
Austin (as Mirador): Trusted you this far.
Austin: And I think in the distance, you can hear the door of this place slamming open as your pursuers have arrived.
[“Sapryc” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Austin: They are a few minutes behind you at this point, but they are moving closer. What do you do?