WEBVTT

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Theater of the Mind is a dark horror comedy podcast. It is not suitable for all ages and viewer discretion is advised. Content warnings can be found in the podcast description.

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Welcome to Theater of the Mind, episode 24. Our question this episode is from the ultimate rpg campfire card deck by James Damato, and it is what is a line your companions must never cross in order to maintain a relationship with you? Who is most likely to test this boundary?

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Hi, my name is Amanda and I am playing Mel Kelly. For Mel, I think the line that her companions should not cross with her is to not follow through on something they've promised. She's seen a lot of that and an apocalyptic situation. I don't think she would put up with that from her companions. Nothing personal. I honestly think that James might be the one that would be most likely to cross that line.

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I'm Jeremy. I'm playing Elliot Brandybain. And Elliot, he builds much like Emery on Emory. Ah, Mel on trust. So I think the line that you can't cross with Elliot is you can't lie to Elliot about something important. It's okay to put a white lie here and there. Maybe you're embarrassed by it, but if it's something important and you lie to Elliot, that would be very, very difficult for him to trust you after that. And honestly, after his talk with James, he told James that they were a clean slate and he sticks with that. So honestly, at the moment, the closest one that he would be most worried about would be Olnach.

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Which I think is fair given the situation. Hi, I am Brunel. I am playing Olnack Vaga Johnson. And Olnack used to be pretty hardcore on the don't lie to me ever train, but he's had to loosen up on that because, you know, people are people and that's absurd.

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I.

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So. But in the vein of that same kind of idea, any, like, betrayal that feels personal or puts anybody else at risk or in danger would be the line that can't be crossed. And sorry, James, but it's you, buddy. I don't know why. No, I do. I do. You've stole things. You know, you lied about taking Elliot's shirt. You have kind of a track record here. And I know you said you'd never betray us and, like, stab us in the back or whatever, but I'm not 100% inclined to believe you. So I am watching you with now werewolf like style senses.

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Play a rogue, suffer the content.

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This is all jeep's. This has nothing to do with you.

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Oh, yeah, I get that. I get that I'm playing my character?

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No, it has 100% to do with you too, Jones.

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Wow. I heard Jones too. Don't.

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So I guess running along with the can't trust anybody massive trust issue train, I'm gonna go with that as well. The biggest line that you can't cross would be the backstabbing cause too many times in James past, he's been burned, literally and figuratively, for people that he thought that he could trust. And if that happens again, that he's just gonna walk away, he's like, nope, I'm done.

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Who are you most worried about doing that?

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All of you, at this point. I mean, so far, three people have mentioned b by name.

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You don't know.

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You didn't know this, though, did you?

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Fair.

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You're reading minds now. Your character.

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As far as I'm aware, your character has not been part of this conversation, buddy.

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Three d twenty s for insight checks. Uh, really, though, probably, Mel.

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That's fair.

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I think.

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Like, I'm honestly surprised that hasn't come up yet. Yeah, gotta be honest.

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I mean, your patron was kind of like the big, bad oogie boogie, apparently.

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Oh, sorry.

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Ooby boogie.

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In my defense, I didn't read the terms and conditions, so I didn't know when I agreed to it.

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In my defense, I didn't mean to.

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Stand betrayal through ignorance.

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Never contribute to malice. What, you can contribute to ignorance.

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Exactly. I am as stupid as I look.

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Mel, you shouldn't talk down to yourself like that.

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Damn. You gotta bring yourself up. Don't sell yourself short.

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That was meant. I'll have you know my character was average height when I built her. It's all you that have decided she's tiny.

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To be fair, most of the characters you have played, like, the longest running character you played with us, was very short, considering he didn't start short.

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That's funny.

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He didn't even start out with a sheet. I'm Casey Weingarten. I'm playing Emery Lee. Um, Emery is an extremely independent person. Uh, so I think the line that if someone crossed that she wouldn't be able to really look at them the same would be if they questioned the way that she lives her life. Like, there's. There's, like, curiosity, and then there's, like, truly just, like, not agreeing and not understanding with how she's decided to lead her life through the world. And I think that probably the person who is closest to that line is Elliot. Not out of intent, but more out of just. They're on very different wavelengths, and he is a couple generations older than she is. And that causes a little bit of conflict, but not like it's not like, forefront in her mind in any interaction.

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Awesome. There we go. That was one of the more diverse answers we've had in a while.

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Yeah, it wasn't full on trust issues, was it?

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Just. I'm gonna be single forever.

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Also, I think I got so flustered, I didn't introduce myself.

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Oh, yeah, you're Jones.

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I said downs. I did. I just said it fast and weird.

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I'm downs, by the way.

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Hi, I'm downs. Nobody trusts me. Cause I'm a rogue.

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And on that note, let's roll for recap. We'll go highest tells.

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Eleven.

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7612 20. I'm pretty sure it's.

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Yeah, it's.

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Jeremy.

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It's your turn, buddy.

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That's probably fair. Yeah, I haven't. I haven't introduced in a long time. Let's see. Last session. It's been a little while. We fought our way through the cathedral. We didn't wipe out the cathedral. Just the ones that were combatants.

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Beat the crap out of a window.

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We broke windows. We ran up and down stairs, which, Elliot, was not a good plan.

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You fell out of window.

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And we succeeded in taking down the two most powerful cultists, leaders in here, which also were the people we needed to cure Olnach. And then we didn't exactly take one of the nuns prisoner, but I can't remember her name at the moment.

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I don't think she ever got introduced. Oh, she was threesa.

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Threesa. My sister Theresa has decided that she is dedicated to bringing Jacob to Lord Ashrafael. And so her threat of killing him sort of ceased to exist at that point when we realized that, well, she's not gonna kill Jacob at this point, we don't care. And so we are preparing to survive the night while Olnach changes his first time into a werewolf. And I believe we have him locked in the cathedral's prison. Jail cell as well as we were able to. And then we have locked ourselves in our room for the night.

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Yep. And then just this was kind of at the very end, Theresa left and was replaced by a different sister.

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Oh, that's right. Yeah.

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Right at the very end there. So there's a different nun who has not yet introduced herself to you. And just to help lay the land in everybody's mind for cause it's gonna probably maybe kind of matter. You guys are back on the nun half of the living quarters. As we remember, this place was a big square doughnut the nuns were on one half, the monks were on the other, and the cathedral jail cell was underneath on the monk's half. So there is pert near everybody between you guys and Ulnok.

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Yeah, this way, Ulnok. If he breaks out, he'll run a monk over there.

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God damn it.

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Terrible.

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And as I recall, the very last thing that happened was Olnach rolled a 16 constitution save. So that's what we're gonna pick up. Ohnach, you are in a decrepit jail cell in a very cliche, dungeon y looking basement. Cobblestone walls, the whole shebang. And you are in the most well maintained jail cell, which is to say that it still has all of the bars, and they are all still going from ceiling to floor.

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Okay.

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But they are not necessarily in great shape. You get the feeling that they've not used this jail in many a moment.

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Okay.

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So it's not pristine conditions by any means. And as I recall, you guys also barricaded the door that leads into this jail cell. So there is a couple layers of keep Olnach in the basement in place.

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I think there was, like, a couple of sofas. There's a kitchen sink. We shoved everything in front of that door.

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And Elliot's got the keys to the jail.

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Yes. Elliot's got the keys on the opposite side of the everything. So the very last thing that was seen was a very cliche Halloween moon coming over. And unbeknownst to Ulnok, as soon as it crests the mountainous, you start to hurt.

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Okay?

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Every bone in your body aches terribly. You feel every muscle in your body tensing and flexing, and now they're cramping your teeth. If you've ever worn a braces, feel almost exactly like the day after you get your braces tightened. Your teeth are trying to be ripped through your gums currently, and they're ripping through your gums, and you start to spit your teeth out.

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I've had this dream before. No, that sounds awful. Okay.

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You feel your back starting to hunch against your will. Your abs are convulsing horribly, and you feel your bones starting to crack and pop and move and change shape. And right about the time this happens, you black the hell out of the movie. Okay. This is the worst thing you have ever felt by a mile.

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Yeah.

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And you black outdouse. You stand before a panel of high ranking naval officers. The panel consists of four officers, all of whom are clearly higher rank, and they're actual commissioned officers. And, you know, just from having been on the boat long enough, you've got an officer who oversees the aircraft technicians, you've got an officer who oversees pilots, and you've got the ship's highest ranking guy. Admirable. Whatever. Co, you have that guy on the panel. And then there's a fourth one that you haven't interacted with much. You've seen him, you're vaguely aware of him, but you don't interact with this man very often. The aircraft technician, officer, whatever rank, he would be the one who oversees the aircraft techs, he doesn't typically cover your shift. You don't report directly to him. You report to his co. Equal addresses you and says, at one Johnson, at 1300 hours, AC 717 was shot down during a joint training exercise. Data recovered post incident shows that the IFf malfunctioned. The purpose of this panel is to identify where system failure occurred, assess our current workflow for comms breakdowns, and find the party at fault. This hearing is being recorded and will be logged for evidence. Do you understand why you have been brought before us today?

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Yes, sir.

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Our logs show that you are the one who programmed the codes for this flight. Is that accurate?

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That is correct, sir.

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From whom did you receive those codes?

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Sir, I had received those codes earlier in the day, roughly about 0700 for the beginning of flight operations. From the IT tech on the underground, under of the ship. To my knowledge, those codes at the time were all accurate and usable for the day.

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Did you in any way manipulate, alter or adjust the codes you received?

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No, sir, I did not.

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Do you have the foreknowledge to know how to alter, manipulate, or adjust the codes in any way?

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No, sir, I do not.

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You installed the codes as prescribed?

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I installed the codes as regular procedures. Yes, sir.

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Olnack, you are in a cell. Back in the cell, you come back to you. Look at your hands. They are covered with fur. Fingers are narrow, long, disjointed, ending with wicked black claws. You see that your feet have pretty well torn through your shoes. You have. Where your arch of your foot would be is now a new ankle, effectively. And from the ball of your foot to your heel has grown about six inches longer than normal. You feel incredibly powerful. I need you to roll a D 20.

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That's a four.

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Need a dice, Jill?

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I might.

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Yeah.

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Yep.

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Here you go. Put the bad die in there.

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You betrayed me. All right.

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You outside of your own control, stand up and throw your shoulder into the metal bars trying to contain you. They don't give, but you can tell that they're not gonna last long, I need you to roll another D 20.

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Different. Detoin.

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Ah.

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Shit.

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Where'd it go?

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You guys?

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I'll just roll a different one.

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That's a five.

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Oh, my God.

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That is considered an improvement.

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Dude, you consistently roll lower than anyone.

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I've ever met you, actually. I apologize. You have advantage on this particular roll.

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Oh, thank God.

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Oh, cool.

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Now you get a six, maybe a seven, even.

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All right, let's see how this goes. 17.

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Yes, it's better.

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I don't know if it works, but it's better.

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As you throw yourself against these iron bars, you take in a deep breath and you smell more than you have ever smelt before. Almost able to see scent lines leading from your jail cell.

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Okay.

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You smell above and beyond anything else relatively nearby. The acrid stink of fear. Something deep inside of you gets very excited by that. I need you to make a constitution safe.

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Roll high, for the love of you.

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16.

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As soon as that scent hits, you feel the change pick back up again. Your bones continue shifting. You start sprouting fur everywhere. Your nose starts to actually extend forward as your jaw reconfigure its shape. And again, the pain is unbearable. And you black out. I need you to tell us about the morning of the incident. How did. How did that day go leading up to what actually occurred?

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Just for clarification, is this the officer talking again?

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Yes. Uh, no, this is you walking.

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Just me walking through. Okay.

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We are living this through your eyes.

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Got it. So the day usually starts off. We've had our maintenance meeting and everything else. AC 717 is one of the helicopters on the boat that we are going to be flying for the day. There's only two of them on the boat. It's not a very. We're not on an aircraft carrier. We're on a smaller boat. Like a destroyer. Yeah, we'll go with a destroyer. So if anybody wants to look that up to know what that is, that's what kind of boat we're on.

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With all the guns.

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Yeah, it's got a lot of guns. A big cannon on the front. The dooka. Dooka sticks. Yeah.

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A super scary ultra machine gun.

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Yeah. Oh, what is that called? The sea whiz. Yeah.

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Sounds like it's just farting fire.

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It just sounds like it's vibrating really fast.

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Yeah.

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And it unloads a thousand rounds. And anything that gets hit by. It's gone, but, yeah, it's a destroyer. Maintenance meeting has happened in the aft of the ship in the squadron's location. Everything's went according to plan. We just went over flight Ops and what we're going to do, be doing today, we're supposed to be doing a joint exercise later in the afternoon with some forces I don't remember. Right. That wasn't particularly really important at the time. We are in hostile area. We are outside the waters of China. If violations occur, things can go horrifically awry.

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So it's probably taiwanese or australian maybe.

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Yeah, let's go with that. But something that's usually pretty routine in what we're supposed to do. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened at this point. So before we get to flight Ops and everything, it's about 07:00. As previously stated, I'm on the. I can't remember the term for when you're under. Under deck.

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Hello?

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Yeah, I think it's just. It might actually be under deck because there's the main deck and then we're underneath on the ship. There's only like two or three floors. Like I said, it's not an aircraft carrier. We're not really tall, so we're a couple. Couple floors under deck. I'm talking with the it guys. They run all the secret codes and everything. They help program everything. They are the ones who ensure that the codes are ready for the day. To my knowledge, when I get the codes, all the codes are ready for the day. They're all accurate. Everything's good according to it. One gentleman I was talking with, those are the codes that are supposed to be. Go back up, program them in. There's a long, like giant coax cable.

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Sorry.

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So there's like a long coax cable that we run from the edge of the wall. It would be called a bulkhead in navy terms, that runs that signal so it could talk with downstairs. It. We run it to the aircraft and we program those through this little box that's probably like six inches long and like two inches wide. It's only got a handful of buttons. As far as my memory serves. It's only got like four buttons. The codes are relatively simple. As long as I put the codes in as I was supposed to put the codes in, everything should be fine for the entirety of the day. They cycle every so often and that's automatic as the aircraft is flying, if I recall correctly. So everything goes fine. First aircraft goes off, 08:00. You know, it goes and does what it normally does. They basically just go fly around and, you know, patrol an area. It's mostly for training and exercises. It's not typically to actually patrol anything, but since we are in potentially hostile waters, we're in hazardous waters. They do keep a higher alert just in case something does seem to alarm them or whatever. Still communication with the boat until they're pretty far away and everything goes smooth for the 08:00 flight and the 10:00 flight. Come back from lunch because our lunch is usually around like eleven. Come back from lunch.

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When you come back from lunch, before you find out anything has gone awry, you get back into the mechanics bay.

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Yeah.

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That's where you would have gone to.

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Yeah.

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Whatever you guys would call the mechanics.

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Bay, it'd be, it'd be the same place that we had the maintenance meeting. It's just like. So you have what would typically be viewed as like, not a Harrier. That's a jet where they keep the aircraft. Hanger. Hanger. So it's like a small hangar. The helicopter folds everything in. And while it's inside, it's very cramped. There's not a lot to do.

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Right.

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But when it's out on flight ops, that whole area is open to the right. Typically as you're coming to the aft of the ship would be like a little room. It's not very big, but everybody can fit in it and we can have a meeting. We do meet up usually after lunch and have another quick briefing before we resume flight ops.

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So your officer in charge, whoever you would be reporting directly to, probably a.

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Lieutenant commander at this point.

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The lieutenant commander wants to maximize the space temporarily. There's been some inefficiencies with how you guys have had your shop set up. Okay. And now that you got the birds out of the way, you can move equipment freely. More freely.

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Yeah. Which tracks. That's accurate.

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So he's gonna have you assist in relocating some of the heavier items. You're a big boy. So just to see how well you're able to assist. Let's go ahead. Have you make two strength checks. Actually, just roll the D 20 twice.

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First one's not very successful. Seven.

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Okay.

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Second one's very successful. It's a 19.

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Okay. So you are, you know, you're caught off guard by the weight of the thing to begin with, but you're able to double down and you're able to relocate it. You're able to clean up the shop effectively. And right around the end of cleaning up the shop, um, you said you heard the incident.

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Yeah.

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So you were outside?

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I was on comms.

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You're on comps?

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Yeah. So it's basically how we record the podcast. I'd be sitting next to the. There's like a phone. We talk. Plane captains are outside guiding the aircraft. All the officers and the AWs are getting in there for actual flight ops and operations.

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So they're getting to the. They're getting to the nitty gritty part where, you know, they're not just en route anymore. They've arrived. So you get over to the comms bay and you pick back up from there.

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Okay. So while I'm on comms listening to the aircraft, they still have to be pretty close. But the fact of the matter is, I can still hear them. We hear that they are being pinged by foreigners. What would be the term? Not necessarily adversaries.

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We're just.

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We're near another air base. Right. Like, we're not far off the shore. So we.

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We.

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We've come into their occupied airspace.

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Right.

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Um, they get pings. They're aware of this training exercise, so our codes should be good. But they're getting pings by that aircraft, and it's sending off an alert. And so we're kind of near Hong Kong ish waters. So we're getting pinged by one of the coastal air bases on the border of China. Again, they knew about the training exercise, so they're aware that this is going down. But that's why we have iff. It's identification, friend or foe. So they're pinging the aircraft. There is a bit of a. Even though they speak English, it's not great English. So there's a little bit of a communications barrier. But I can hear our officer who's flying the plane. Let's go. Lieutenant Snyder. He's speaking with the air base and AC 717. We're running a joint training exercise. What seems to be the issue? They're talking back and forth.

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Roll me d 20 with advantageous. Okay.

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Is there any modifier. What are we rolling?

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Yes. What did you roll?

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Twelve.

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Okay. That was with advantage. Okay, perfect. That's a. With a plus four.

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Okay.

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That is a perception. You're able to pick up on what's going on pretty quickly. You're dialed into happening.

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Yeah. Okay.

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Weirdly, you smell this room pretty thoroughly. You smell the sweat of your teammates as they're starting to get nervous. You smell the grease, you smell the oil.

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Okay.

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Like, you can almost taste it. Whether it's the adrenaline dumping into your system or what, you're not sure. Right. But you can tell the way this conversation is going is already in a negative direction pretty quickly. Yeah.

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The alert is still going off. The ping is happening more frequently. There's a little bit more panic in Lieutenant Snyder's voice as he's the one who is directly in communications with that air base. And I can hear overcomes what they're saying. It's escalating pretty quickly. They're clearly not getting a proper identification, being that it's far away from the air base. You can't just take somebody's word for it. The code has the pass. Right. And that's why we're getting the alert. So it's cycling through cold codes because the first code didn't work. So we're trying another code. Unfortunately, that's not working either. This is typically a three strikes and you're out roll, and they're shooting you down. So there's a reason Lieutenant Snyder is freaking out a bit of, if this third code does not go, they're gonna get blasted and everybody's coming down, and we might be able to save them as far as keeping them alive if they don't die from the direct remains.

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While this is occurring. Go to give me a wisdom save with your stats.

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16.

30:41.400 --> 31:03.268
Okay. You're piecing together what's happening very quickly. You're going, and because you understand what's going on, you're also thinking back through your portion of the codes. Right. You are incredibly confident you put those codes in the way they should. Right. Go ahead and continue.

31:03.404 --> 31:20.622
So third code is sent. It is not verbally communicated that it is sentence. But the ping happens again. And I hear the third alert. Unfortunately, I know exactly which alert I'm getting, and I am. My stomach drops.

31:20.686 --> 31:39.660
Right with that. Your stomach drops? Yeah. You come back too. You are now in a hallway, and we are gonna switch back to the party party members.

31:40.200 --> 31:43.192
Uh oh. We don't know what's going on.

31:43.296 --> 31:44.500
Uh oh.

31:45.800 --> 32:24.026
So you guys are in a room. You're in. We'll just say for the ease of me not having to explain the same room again, you're in the same room you were in. They just brought you back to that room. So to refresh our memories, you've got a long, rectangular main room on parallel sides. There are two rooms for the sleeping quarters. There's also a small washroom, wash basin, and a toilet. You have the door on one end, and directly across from the door is a window that oversees the cathedral.

32:24.178 --> 32:25.950
Remind me, just the window open?

32:26.250 --> 32:29.934
Kind of. It's one of those, we called it an awning window or whatever.

32:30.042 --> 32:32.454
Yeah, because it opens from the bottom just a little bit.

32:32.542 --> 32:52.250
So it's one of those that kinda, like, angles out, but it's got two metal arms that prevent it from opening very far. Yeah, and even if you could open it all the way, it's not a particularly big window. Yeah, Jake, I think the description was Jacob could maybe squeeze through and that was about it.

32:52.550 --> 32:56.562
I was wondering if maybe we had the window open so we could hear outside side better.

32:56.706 --> 32:59.670
Absolutely, that's absolutely.

33:00.410 --> 33:12.070
You guys are all still awake. You have the new nun who for all intents and purposes looks damn near identical to three set. There's not enough of her. This is.

33:14.370 --> 33:15.710
I was gonna go with twice.

33:17.330 --> 33:21.876
This is Florence, sister. Sir. Florence.

33:21.988 --> 33:23.760
Sister Florence, you mean.

33:25.540 --> 33:30.940
See, I kept thinking like 1253, sir. Monty Python.

33:31.060 --> 33:57.818
Oh, did not follow that one. For all intents and purposes, she looks very much the same. She's a little bit darker complexion. She's got a little bit more of a longer, more angular nose, but that's all you have to see. The rest of it is a robe that looks identical to what Theresa was wearing. So Florence is sitting there with the boy she hasn't shown.

33:57.994 --> 34:00.310
Oh, Jacobs. Jacobs with Elliot.

34:01.410 --> 34:07.750
And she's wherever. Jacobs. Okay. She's under the same rules that Theresa was. She's not letting him not be.

34:08.770 --> 34:16.828
Yeah, but she's not like by herself, him with fair, like none of us nearby, right?

34:16.884 --> 35:11.088
No, absolutely. She doesn't have anywhere near the apprehension that Threesa showed. For most of it. You're almost getting the vibe that maybe they didn't do the greatest job briefing this lady. She is very. She's got more of like, I'm a. I'm a grade school teacher watching a child in a weird parent teacher situation. She's not letting the kid leave. She understands that part of her mission. But she's not as borderline aggressive with you guys as three siblings. That's been your interaction with her so far. Can I have a round of perception checks? Seven, passive.

35:11.184 --> 35:14.568
Oh, twelve, passive 1217 with my negative.

35:14.624 --> 35:18.980
One, two, passive, 1016.

35:19.600 --> 35:21.792
All right, some of us are hyped.

35:21.936 --> 35:22.920
Two of you.

35:23.040 --> 35:26.980
Emery's too anxious to be like, perceiving anything.

35:29.210 --> 35:50.710
Two of you, three of you. Elliot barely. Literally a twelve was the DC on this. Elliot barely makes it. The three of you hear the wolf howl. Shit. The two of you that rolled better than twelve think that you hear a muffled bang.

35:52.650 --> 35:58.466
I feel like as soon as I hear the howl, Mel perks. If she had ears, they'd have perked up.

35:58.618 --> 35:59.390
Shit.

35:59.890 --> 36:05.950
Guys, I could be wrong and I really, really, really hope I'm wrong, but I think the dog just broke out the kennel.

36:06.450 --> 36:08.190
That's like. Yeah.

36:12.250 --> 36:14.310
Cause I'm pretty sure I heard a loud bang.

36:15.370 --> 36:16.630
What are you guys doing?

36:17.290 --> 36:23.634
Don't worry. Taking many terrified free actions.

36:23.722 --> 36:35.196
Do we? I have no idea what to do about like, do we go? Cause we don't want him to go killing everybody I from that temptation.

36:35.308 --> 36:41.680
But the whole point of us being barricaded in here is to keep as much from like we need to stay put.

36:42.740 --> 36:44.084
Why was that exactly?

36:44.212 --> 36:51.120
I'm, you know, I'm sure everybody else is. They've barricaded themselves in their room. There are many things, but they are not scared.

36:52.750 --> 36:54.758
Didn't want us at risk either.

36:54.854 --> 36:58.090
And we also told Olnach that we would protect Jacob.

36:58.830 --> 37:09.702
Fair, I can say. For what it's worth, word has gotten around that there may be danger tonight. We ended all activities early. Everybody is in their own rooms.

37:09.766 --> 37:15.662
You mistake me. I don't really care about their well being. I care about his. If he kills them all.

37:15.766 --> 37:19.364
Well, I'm just saying it'll be hard for him to do that.

37:19.452 --> 37:19.836
Yeah.

37:19.908 --> 37:27.700
I don't know if he was able to break out that cell, which we thoroughly barricaded. I don't think that one of these doors, which I broke earlier. Well, that's really gonna do.

37:27.740 --> 37:28.180
You broke.

37:28.220 --> 37:32.956
With Olnach's help, he's still gotta get out of the room that the cell was in.

37:33.068 --> 37:33.340
Sure.

37:33.380 --> 37:42.140
And if. Yeah, that's my point exactly. If normal Olnock was able to bust through a door. Harry Oldock is absolutely gonna break through a door.

37:42.260 --> 37:43.040
Oh.

37:45.120 --> 37:55.460
I just want to say, out of character, Mel's lack of interesting vocabulary makes this really hard because if it were me, I'd be swearing in every language I know. But Mel only knows one.

37:56.240 --> 37:58.020
That's Alistair Scheissler.

38:00.080 --> 38:22.740
Elliot, while this is going on, he actually is going to go to the spot on the wall that we had seen the eyes the first night that we had seen. And he's going to inspect to see if they're being watched again. I don't imagine that we are. And then at that point he wants to try to figure out if we can like get into the other side as a possible escape route if need be.

38:23.480 --> 38:24.216
Who's clever?

38:24.288 --> 38:34.728
You do see a set of eyes, very obviously trying to make eye contact with you.

38:34.904 --> 38:41.140
So Elliot's gonna walk up and look and said, you know what? It's pretty messed up that you're peeping on nuns quarters.

38:41.560 --> 38:42.400
What is her?

38:42.440 --> 38:50.752
They immediately back away as soon as you bring attention to them and they close the false, they replace the paintings.

38:50.816 --> 38:52.072
You coward.

38:52.256 --> 38:54.112
Oh, I should have hit him with color spray.

38:54.136 --> 38:55.260
That would have been hilarious.

38:58.320 --> 39:21.266
Anyway, I'm going to go to investigating as hard as Elliot is able to, trying to see if he could figure out some way to get either through the wall or if there's some kind of a trap door or something. He's looking for an escape route if he need. If they need one. And that's what he's going to spend his time. Whether it's possible or not, I don't know. But that's what he's going to be trying to do.

39:21.338 --> 39:22.630
Roll an investigation.

39:27.130 --> 39:31.110
That's not terrible. 14th.

39:32.330 --> 39:39.990
You think you hear something. Something is intentionally being quiet on the other side.

39:41.090 --> 39:55.650
So he's gonna whisper, who are you? Why do you keep watching? What do you want? I want it.

39:55.690 --> 39:58.070
Go ahead and roll me another perception check.

39:58.570 --> 40:00.390
The painting sprung a leak.

40:01.940 --> 40:02.680
Eleven.

40:03.020 --> 40:04.680
Okay. What do you wanna do?

40:07.700 --> 40:20.380
I basically wanna do an insight check. Is like, why is this guy. I'm trying to figure out who. What the purpose of the person on the other side is. But that's a lot from a sh. And eyes.

40:20.460 --> 40:21.240
I don't.

40:23.260 --> 40:25.320
There was an infliction in the shush.

40:27.670 --> 40:29.210
Yeah, I got nothing.

40:29.710 --> 40:35.606
Yeah, I can't let you inside a shush. So the shush is honest. It is genuinely asking you to be quiet.

40:35.678 --> 40:49.966
So can I. Seeing that Elliot's chewing out the wall, can I go up there and go up to the painting real close and be like, are you here to help us or here to help them?

40:50.078 --> 40:53.980
Here's something important. Do you care if anyone else in the room sees that you're doing this?

40:54.840 --> 41:03.344
I'm kind of trying to keep Florence from seeing this because I don't trust her. But I don't really care if the rest of the party does.

41:03.432 --> 41:12.512
I need you to roll, like sleight of hand or stealth to see if you're able to not bring the nun's attention to this painting.

41:12.616 --> 41:13.344
21.

41:13.432 --> 41:29.030
Okay. You are able to not bring the men's attention to this painting. You come up and you make it look almost as though you are talking to Elliot in hushed undertones. And what do you say that like.

41:29.410 --> 41:33.150
Are you trying to help us or help them?

41:33.730 --> 41:37.270
Trying to help you. Oh, sh.

41:37.570 --> 41:39.910
Is there an escape route from here?

41:42.500 --> 41:43.880
Distract her.

41:45.580 --> 41:54.620
And Elliot's gonna turn around and go over and engage Sister Florence in some meaningless prattles.

41:54.780 --> 41:59.412
Perfect. Go ahead and roll me a lowish DC persuasion.

41:59.556 --> 42:02.340
Tell me about your religion. I'm curious.

42:02.500 --> 42:05.412
Oh, nice. 14.

42:05.516 --> 42:12.506
Okay. Yeah. You're able to draw your attention. What conversation do you strike up? Just for curiosity's sake.

42:12.698 --> 42:30.590
It's gonna be. So how long have you been here? And do you like Sister Theresa? Are you gonna be here till morning? It's just meaningless, polite chatter.

42:31.450 --> 44:29.970
Just to button that up. What you pick, what you learn from her, is she also has spent almost her entire life in this church since she was but a wee child, and she is primarily their schoolteacher, because they do pick up kids. She is their teacher. She's not the biggest fan of Teresa. She absolutely had a level of fear, imposed respect for the hype matron, and isn't necessarily the saddest to see her reign end. But there is a high degree of uncertainty as to who the new hype matrix will be. So you learn that part of three says issue, so to speak, is that she is currently jockeying to try to be the new high matron. But overall, as far as any conversations with people in this place are, she's one of the more pleasant you've interacted with. Very open, very honest with her communication. You don't get any caginess. And you remember back to the breakfast you had with everybody. She is one of the nuns that was particularly kind of friendly. Yeah. With the boy in particular, one of the ones who was kind of sneaking him extra helpings, for what it's worth, she was one of the nicer ones. While he's doing that, Mel, you see just the slightest flutter of the eyes, and there is now a piece of parchment that can be seen just the corner of it, as if, you know, you got the painting with the holes. There's a little cover behind it where the painting's eyes are. Yeah, that just gently pulls back, goes back forward, and you can see a piece of paper.

44:31.630 --> 44:34.422
I'll try. Grab the piece of paper.

44:34.526 --> 44:39.410
You're able roll with advantage, sleight of hand herself.

44:46.720 --> 44:47.872
20 dirty.

44:47.976 --> 44:54.968
Perfect. You're able to pull it out. Nobody notices you pull it out. It's very obviously, it's a small piece of parts with a submarine on it.

44:55.064 --> 45:08.432
Okay, I will. When I get it out, I'll. I will. I don't know how great of an actress Mel is, but rather theatrically, like, sit on the floor, like, in this.

45:08.576 --> 45:09.040
Ugh.

45:09.120 --> 45:17.850
This is just so frustrating thinking I. That she's being convincing so that I can be, like, kind of out of sight when I go to try to unroll her.

45:18.870 --> 45:23.862
Okay, just because you're intentionally acting. Let's get a performance check.

45:23.966 --> 45:27.918
Actually, no. 14.

45:28.054 --> 45:28.850
Okay.

45:29.390 --> 45:31.502
Charisma, caster. Your charisma's pretty good.

45:31.566 --> 45:32.610
Yeah? Yeah.

45:33.670 --> 45:41.998
The nun looks over at ya. But she's actually kind of enjoying the polite conversation with Elliot. She just kind of goes back to talking to him.

45:42.054 --> 45:44.062
I'm not winning any oscars, but, you.

45:44.086 --> 45:49.050
Know, it's a hell of a lot better than. What? Is that the room or whatever? Yeah. Yeah.

45:49.430 --> 45:50.662
I did not hit Howard.

45:50.726 --> 45:51.690
I did not.

45:52.270 --> 46:07.872
Oh, hi, Mark. So you open it up out of Linus sight, and you see written on it is get the nun to fall asleep. And with that, we're going.

46:07.896 --> 46:11.112
Her son is knock her unconscious exactly.

46:11.136 --> 46:12.900
Where my head would. Just like Kong.

46:13.720 --> 46:15.184
I walk up behind the Ned.

46:15.272 --> 46:15.744
What's next?

46:15.792 --> 46:43.790
Yeah, we're gonna flash back to olnach o nok. You are out in a hallway. Oh, you can see that you have ripped your way through just carnage. Okay, those checks you were making were strength checks in the real world, and you broke through the bars, and you blasted the door out of the way.

46:44.130 --> 46:46.870
I didn't know I wanted to fail you guys. My bad.

46:47.690 --> 46:48.790
The one time.

46:54.010 --> 46:55.470
Gotta roll the bad dice.

46:57.460 --> 47:03.560
All right, I need you to make. I need you to roll a d 20.

47:04.060 --> 47:06.040
Maybe you should roll the bad dice.

47:08.100 --> 47:08.840
Eight.

47:09.740 --> 47:22.788
You throw yourself against the first door you see. It's the door that you smell the strongest fear coming out of, okay? You crack it, you do not break through. I need you to make a wisdom saving throw.

47:22.884 --> 47:27.020
God damn it. All right, my weakest stats.

47:27.060 --> 47:29.948
All right, I think you want to.

47:29.964 --> 47:31.012
Roll high on this one.

47:31.076 --> 47:31.396
Just.

47:31.468 --> 47:32.120
Yes.

47:35.460 --> 47:38.480
That was a plus one. It would have been better, but it's a negative 113.

47:38.940 --> 47:42.292
You are back in the comms room.

47:42.476 --> 47:48.046
Yeah, I think. Is that a four? Okay. Yeah, correct.

47:48.198 --> 48:01.410
Got it. Okay, you are back in the comms room of the boat. Okay, you just had the sinking feeling in your stomach. As you realize what's about to happen. Pick up the story from there.

48:07.830 --> 48:26.828
So I get a sinking feeling immediately after the third ping, because it is not the. This is a good ping. It's a bad sound. It's an alert. And with that, I also hear another alert. It's that something's being shot at.

48:26.924 --> 48:27.684
The aircraft.

48:27.772 --> 49:11.756
Lieutenant Snyder is losing his mind, understandably so. Like, this is AC 717. We're friendly aircraft. We have a joint training exercise, and you can hear everything else happening behind him. You can still hear the chime of the warning light. They've got missile. They immediately go into evasive maneuvers, trying to evade whatever's coming at them. So you hear taking evasive maneuvers, and they're banking. They're turning. I see chaff. Well, no, I wouldn't see anything. I would just hear this. Now I think about it. So I'm inside the boat. I don't see any of this, but they're. So they release chaffanhood. And that's to kind of. If it's a heat seeking missile, it's meant to disperse that heat. So it misses the aircraft. It'll go after the check.

49:11.788 --> 49:12.964
That's the flares you see.

49:13.012 --> 49:13.268
Right.

49:13.324 --> 49:24.580
Okay. Unfortunately, since it's not a combat mission, they don't have a lot of countermeasures on this aircraft at the moment. We weren't expecting to be fired at.

49:24.660 --> 49:25.324
Right. Right.

49:25.412 --> 49:49.370
It's something you have on there just in case. So everybody knows how to load it and everything. But the chaff is not regularly loaded. One side is not both. So he's taken abase of maneuvers. The chaff goes off. I hear the alert and everything, the chaos inside the aircraft, and then I hear a very loud explosion in radio static.

49:49.710 --> 49:51.250
I need you to roll the D 20.

49:55.670 --> 49:58.540
I don't know if that's good or bad. 18. I guess we'll find out.

49:59.000 --> 50:01.740
That's probably better. What happens now?

50:03.200 --> 50:22.120
Um, with that, panic kind of starts to set into everybody because everybody heard the explosion. They're a few hundred yards away, but they're still close enough to be in comms, which means they're less than a mile away, as far as I can recall. That may or may not be accurate.

50:22.160 --> 50:22.424
Sorry.

50:22.472 --> 50:25.544
Navy guys that are listening to this. I haven't been an at for a very long time.

50:25.632 --> 50:27.992
Anyway, things are just changed. If it's wrong.

50:28.056 --> 50:37.160
Right, right. It's. The technology is better. It's not from the Vietnam era, but it was when I was in, so. And it's unfortunately that long ago, but.

50:37.320 --> 50:38.472
All the way to Desert Shield.

50:38.536 --> 51:32.012
Yeah. So everybody's in a panic. We hear the call for aircraft shot down through the boat, which means we're probably going to start banking towards it. Right. Like we're basically doing a man overboard. We're going to try to retrieve anybody that we can, if that's at all possible. So everybody. You don't always wear your life jacket when you're inside, even during flight ops, you know, but I'm inside and we just let the aircraft go, so I would still have my life jacket on and everything. So all of that. All gear is ready. We're about to bank towards that and we're just trying to respond to this. It's organized chaos because it's been drilled, but it's still chaotic.

51:32.196 --> 51:33.972
Full speed towards the incident.

51:34.036 --> 52:02.560
We're going to that we're going to try to get people out there and try to get pontoon boats, something to see if we can recover anything. And if it wasn't the aircraft that just got shot down, we would be sending sarswimmers, however they were in that aircraft. And we have the other one on the other hangar ready to go, but it's folded. It'll take a few minutes to get ready to get out. It would be a quicker response, as determined by higher ups, to send the boat their direction and try to make. Try to do that.

52:02.640 --> 52:08.460
Are you guys prepping the other at to the other ac, get ready to go?

52:09.120 --> 52:21.900
That would be the. That would be the proper response. So we would be as quickly as we can going into the other hangar, which is just across the hall. There's a little p way there, and then you cross that, and there's the other. Other hangar. There's two hangers on a destroyer, if I recall correctly.

52:21.940 --> 52:27.564
I would assume even with a boat that big, when it's all of a sudden changing direction, exploring it.

52:27.612 --> 52:28.196
Yeah.

52:28.348 --> 52:45.358
Let's have you roll a 2016. All right. You are. You do a pretty good job. You only bounce off of a door frame as you're booking a shit over there. You don't eat it. Nothing comes at you.

52:45.414 --> 52:51.490
It's not unusual for a navy guy to be walking on walls when we're banking or in high seas, you know, so.

52:52.190 --> 53:20.850
And while you run to go back to the aircraft, you come back, too. Again. You are now you find yourself in a darken room. You are surrounded by the thick scent of fear, and you feel a rush of rage flowing through you, rage that even parallels or goes beyond the rage you normally feel in combat. This is true animalistic, bloodlust, primal.

53:20.890 --> 53:21.510
Yeah.

53:22.730 --> 54:07.142
You look around, and you see the body of a monk laying before you. His blood coats walls in thick black splotches, and you hear his pulse growing weaker. Your stomach gurgles in anticipation as you hunch over his body. You feel your hands reach forward, out of your control, but the hands you see are covered in matted fur and end in claws that are dripping with crimson blood. Your claws are easily able to shred his robes open, exposing his chest. You force your claws into his flesh right along where the rib cage would meet in the middle. I need you to roll a wisdom saving roll.

54:07.166 --> 54:16.478
One of the ones that's rolling high. You keep rolling so well on the.

54:16.494 --> 54:21.270
Ones that don't matter. Yeah. So that was a nine minus one. That's gonna be an eight.

54:22.130 --> 54:24.950
No, the rest of the party.

54:26.930 --> 54:30.110
Did we hear him busting through that door?

54:30.490 --> 54:31.578
He's beyond the door.

54:31.594 --> 54:41.954
Are you still actively looking? I will say that neither Mel nor Elliot are able to because they are actively engaging their brains in other activities.

54:42.082 --> 54:48.576
I think the other two of us, because we're not doing other stuff, we've just been kind of still listening.

54:48.728 --> 54:51.168
Let's go and roll with the advantage perception checks.

54:51.224 --> 54:59.740
Yeah, I probably went to the window to see if I could, like, see same. Anything natural. 20.

55:00.080 --> 55:06.992
Jesus. I can't roll for shit. Six. So passive. Ten again.

55:07.096 --> 55:08.112
Total of 24.

55:08.216 --> 55:17.722
James, you not only hear the doors get burst open, you hear the screaming as he tears into the monk.

55:17.786 --> 55:18.710
Oh, fuck.

55:19.410 --> 55:21.590
Guys, I don't think it's going too well.

55:25.850 --> 55:26.910
What do we do?

55:28.210 --> 55:29.690
They're talking to a wall.

55:29.770 --> 55:30.710
What do we do?

55:31.490 --> 55:32.590
Do you say that?

55:32.970 --> 55:35.310
No. Well, probably, yeah.

55:35.610 --> 55:36.186
Okay.

55:36.258 --> 55:36.970
I feel like we.

55:37.010 --> 55:39.830
But none looks at you when you say that. They're talking to a Walter.

55:39.870 --> 55:43.262
We're over by the window, and she's in conversation with Elliot right now.

55:43.286 --> 55:45.690
That sounded like you whispered it. Ish. Where are you?

55:47.630 --> 55:51.970
I don't. I feel like. I feel like we need to intervene, but I don't know.

55:52.510 --> 55:56.410
I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. It's probably a really stupid idea.

55:57.750 --> 55:58.110
No?

55:58.150 --> 55:59.566
Probably. It's a very stupid idea.

55:59.598 --> 56:24.800
Yes. However, at that point, because I think Mel wasn't listening and was in the. In her little parchment thing, she's going to message probably James, because Elliot's in conversation, and we know that the conversation would oddly lurch if I messaged him. So I'm going to message James.

56:25.580 --> 56:27.772
Point of order. Does she still have that ability?

56:27.876 --> 56:28.884
I do right now.

56:28.972 --> 56:29.276
Okay.

56:29.308 --> 56:29.828
It works.

56:29.884 --> 56:30.156
Okay.

56:30.188 --> 56:32.802
It doesn't feel as. As it has, but it works.

56:32.866 --> 56:36.018
Just check it, because I was like, oh, wait. You. Okay, got it.

56:36.114 --> 56:39.010
You know, like that, like, sinking dread in the stomach.

56:39.090 --> 56:42.070
You get the sinking dread. You get the scream on your end.

56:43.650 --> 56:48.030
That's what James hears. He hears the scream. And then Mel goes, oh, fuck.

56:48.890 --> 56:49.666
Not helpful.

56:49.738 --> 56:50.350
No.

56:53.650 --> 56:55.470
You could have just said that.

56:56.890 --> 57:11.098
No, sorry, I got distracted. Okay, so I'll update James on what I just found and be like, I know that whatever's going on is probably really bad, but we need to try to get the nun to go to sleep. It'll help.

57:11.234 --> 57:13.402
He's turning a monk into a pinata.

57:13.586 --> 57:22.656
That's the monk's problem right now. We're in here and there's someone who claims that they'll help us or trying to help us in the wall.

57:22.738 --> 57:24.492
Did you read the fine print this time?

57:24.636 --> 57:39.920
Yes, I read the fine print. I read the whole parchment back, front, and sideways, and it says, get the nun to fall asleep. And frankly, that's not gonna hurt anyone. So what's the worst that can happen? Help me figure out how to get the nun to fall asleep.

57:43.620 --> 57:47.300
Does it just need to be incapacitated, or does it actually need to be asleep?

57:47.460 --> 57:53.130
Just says, fall asleep. Get the nun to fall asleep. That's all. It's written on the parchment.

57:54.110 --> 57:55.770
Can it be any more vague?

57:56.230 --> 58:06.850
I. Sorry. It's, like, three inches square. Like, there's not a lot of room. Tell Emery.

58:10.430 --> 58:15.050
Okay. Apparently, Mel found a new person who's apparently going to be super helpful.

58:15.880 --> 58:20.660
Okay, I love how you don't trust that. I don't blame you.

58:21.000 --> 58:24.984
You're just saying that out loud in the room at regular volume.

58:25.112 --> 58:26.872
Maybe quietly tell Emmer.

58:26.896 --> 58:31.056
I'm hoping that, like, we're nuts at this point. That the nun is, like, just quietly.

58:31.088 --> 58:32.660
Tell Emory, you dumb shit.

58:34.680 --> 58:38.064
You can also message Emery.

58:38.232 --> 58:41.940
Fine. I'll message Emery. James is clearly beside himself.

58:42.370 --> 58:44.322
I'm, like, heading for the door at this point.

58:44.466 --> 58:53.066
Yeah, he's panicking. So that. Seeing that James is panicking at this point, I'll have that same conversation with Emory, which has the same gross, disgusting scream, and I'll be like, ugh.

58:53.178 --> 58:54.630
She does flinch.

58:55.650 --> 58:59.514
So does Mel. Oh, God. That's not.

58:59.682 --> 59:09.172
Because they're doing an interesting job at discretion. Can you roll another persuasion check to see if we can keep the nut in in this conversation.

59:09.276 --> 59:11.132
Bam, bam, ba ba. Go pick up again.

59:11.316 --> 59:16.916
If it's somehow weirdly better, you can go for performance, but no. What'd you roll?

59:17.028 --> 59:25.120
Seven. Okay, when I see James go towards the door, I'm gonna say, james, do not go out there.

59:26.260 --> 59:28.840
Were we trying to keep him from killing anybody?

59:29.140 --> 59:41.930
We're trying to keep him from killing us first. If you go out there, it's gonna be worse. If I thought we could help, I would be right behind you.

59:42.550 --> 59:46.130
So we're just gonna let him just have monk buffet?

59:46.910 --> 59:52.290
If we go out there, we will have to kill him. Are you ready to kill him?

59:52.750 --> 59:58.118
I wasn't planning on killing him. I was planning on, like, you know, hide and seek with deadly Ark.

59:58.174 --> 01:00:12.826
If you're gonna. If you're killing. If you're gonna go out there prepared to poke pointy things into our friend Olnach, you realize that you're probably gonna have to kill him.

01:00:13.018 --> 01:00:16.914
I wouldn't stab him. I'm not gonna get that close.

01:00:17.002 --> 01:00:17.870
You should.

01:00:18.810 --> 01:00:30.370
And if he bites you and we have to go through this shit again. There's only so many of you I can keep locked up. And I already felt on the other one.

01:00:31.110 --> 01:00:34.170
I just don't like it when we leave somebody high and dry.

01:00:34.630 --> 01:00:37.090
He's out there, he's winning.

01:00:37.550 --> 01:00:38.330
Exactly.

01:00:38.670 --> 01:00:41.998
His sanity's in danger.

01:00:42.174 --> 01:00:43.126
Exactly.

01:00:43.278 --> 01:00:43.902
That's always.

01:00:43.966 --> 01:00:46.110
We don't want him going the way of Griff.

01:00:46.230 --> 01:00:48.702
We don't. But we can't stop him right now.

01:00:48.766 --> 01:00:51.650
Like, how is he supposed to keep the monster under control when he's.

01:00:52.390 --> 01:00:53.502
What do you want to do?

01:00:53.526 --> 01:00:55.878
I want you to buy all head Elliott with a persuasion.

01:00:55.934 --> 01:00:59.804
I was going to distract him if he's after me. And I can avoid.

01:00:59.892 --> 01:01:00.932
I'm rolling so terribly.

01:01:00.956 --> 01:01:04.340
I can be. I. Elliot can be persuaded at this point.

01:01:04.380 --> 01:01:04.820
Under ten.

01:01:04.860 --> 01:01:06.560
This is terrible idea.

01:01:07.340 --> 01:01:09.760
I never. Like I said, it's a stupid idea.

01:01:10.180 --> 01:01:16.756
Above all, we're actually supposed to be protecting Jacob. So if you all go herring off, you're gonna leave me to protect him?

01:01:16.828 --> 01:01:17.548
I never said that.

01:01:17.564 --> 01:01:18.700
Everyone had to go with me.

01:01:18.740 --> 01:01:19.604
That's not high enough.

01:01:19.692 --> 01:01:20.908
I don't think it's high enough.

01:01:21.004 --> 01:01:23.306
You're gonna take Jacob with.

01:01:23.428 --> 01:01:24.310
Everything is much better.

01:01:24.390 --> 01:01:26.770
I said you guys don't have to come with me.

01:01:27.510 --> 01:01:34.730
Oh, hell yeah. No, we've got one. We've got to stick together on this. We have to.

01:01:36.790 --> 01:01:38.330
I don't like it.

01:01:38.750 --> 01:01:48.772
I don't for a moment like it either, but I don't think we have a better option. If we had a better option, I'd be right with you.

01:01:48.966 --> 01:01:51.176
If we had a better option, we wouldn't be here.

01:01:51.248 --> 01:01:53.952
I'm trying to come up with one right now, but no, let's have you.

01:01:53.976 --> 01:01:55.500
Roll a persuasion back.

01:01:57.400 --> 01:01:58.264
Try and charge.

01:01:58.312 --> 01:01:59.968
I have three.

01:02:00.064 --> 01:02:06.220
Fuck me. You both feel very firm about your stances.

01:02:06.560 --> 01:02:09.656
I would like to join in this persuasion.

01:02:09.808 --> 01:02:12.944
Go for it. On whose side are you on?

01:02:13.032 --> 01:02:24.926
I am on Elliot's side to stay put. That was part of the plan. And plus, Elliot doesn't know this, but I think that I might have another plan. And I think that it could. If nothing else, it'll give us a way out if we need it.

01:02:25.038 --> 01:02:25.598
Perfect.

01:02:25.734 --> 01:02:28.110
So I'm just waiting.

01:02:28.230 --> 01:02:29.690
Yeah, go ahead and roll.

01:02:31.710 --> 01:02:34.610
I haven't. I haven't pulled above a ten yet tonight.

01:02:35.150 --> 01:02:36.290
Do you have.

01:02:37.670 --> 01:02:38.558
Doing great.

01:02:38.694 --> 01:02:41.022
Fuck. Is it called proficiency?

01:02:41.206 --> 01:02:42.330
Yes, I do.

01:02:42.670 --> 01:02:44.678
Bad proficiency. You do have proficiency in it?

01:02:44.734 --> 01:02:44.990
Yeah.

01:02:45.030 --> 01:02:45.766
Nevermind.

01:02:45.918 --> 01:02:46.890
Uh, twelve.

01:02:48.390 --> 01:02:53.142
We're all just in a stalemate. None of us like anything that anyone else is saying.

01:02:53.246 --> 01:02:54.094
The original plan.

01:02:54.142 --> 01:02:56.450
Sorry, the messaging is making me nauseous.

01:02:56.990 --> 01:03:20.180
The original play worth mentioning? I know you guys aren't exactly team none here. I get it. All right? If you go out there, you're either taking the boy towards the beast or you're leaving the boy in a room with me. You don't seem to trust me. I would not let the boy anywhere near a wolf.

01:03:21.520 --> 01:03:24.140
No, I agree with the nun on this one.

01:03:24.640 --> 01:03:31.256
I hate leaving Olnach out there, but I don't know what we could do.

01:03:31.448 --> 01:03:38.980
I mean, quite frankly, and I mean this with no disrespect, it would make my night much easier if you just left the boy with me.

01:03:41.600 --> 01:03:43.688
We have no interest in making your life easy.

01:03:43.744 --> 01:04:12.874
That's kind of the vibe I'm picking up. I don't like anybody dying. The monks are my family. You guys are supposed to be our guests. That's not going great. I'd rather you nothing die here. Seems how you are. The first draft of our new missionary mission. For whatever the right word of that is. It's not missionary mission. But that's what it is. Now.

01:04:13.002 --> 01:04:14.670
That's what we're going with.

01:04:17.810 --> 01:04:23.218
Just for what it's worth, those are my two cent. Do with that what you will.

01:04:23.354 --> 01:04:29.270
What if. What if Jacob's in a room, right? I'm assuming.

01:04:29.310 --> 01:04:30.422
I'm assuming he's in the main room.

01:04:30.446 --> 01:04:31.510
I'm guessing we're all together.

01:04:31.630 --> 01:04:33.126
Yeah, I think you all are. Room in here.

01:04:33.198 --> 01:04:36.170
I think he's sitting in the corner with Charlie, probably.

01:04:40.590 --> 01:04:43.102
I never said that you guys had to go with me.

01:04:43.246 --> 01:04:45.358
James, that's stupid and we all know it.

01:04:45.414 --> 01:04:45.846
Exactly.

01:04:45.878 --> 01:04:48.130
If you go outside, you're going to die.

01:04:50.760 --> 01:04:55.460
Would you rather we just kill you first before you get yourself turned into a werewolf?

01:04:56.120 --> 01:05:03.140
At some point, he's going to get to this room. The cell didn't stop him. That door down there didn't stop him.

01:05:03.720 --> 01:05:10.288
But if he comes to this room, we know where he's going to come through. He's going to come right through that door. We can be prepared for that.

01:05:10.304 --> 01:05:11.540
And then we kill him. Then.

01:05:13.440 --> 01:05:15.020
I told him we would.

01:05:17.410 --> 01:05:19.110
My hope is that I could just.

01:05:20.650 --> 01:05:40.390
Did you see how fast that werewolf moved? You can't move that fast. He will catch you. You're good at hiding, but if he gets a whiff, you can't hide your scent. If I thought you had a chance, I'd help you. But there's no way it's going to work.

01:05:41.060 --> 01:05:43.680
He'd hate the thought of hurting you, too.

01:05:45.820 --> 01:05:49.300
Every monk that he kills, his sanity's ticking down.

01:05:49.420 --> 01:06:08.070
Also, every monk that he kills is somebody that is trying to bring a moratar and overcome our world. I'm sorry, James. These people. Sorry, sister. Is the enemy. They've chosen to be the enemy. And I'm sorry. I wish they wouldn't have.

01:06:08.220 --> 01:06:14.990
But killing the enemy at the expense of his free will, his sanity, honestly.

01:06:15.330 --> 01:06:18.962
When he kills the enemy, normally, it's probably a little bit expensive.

01:06:19.066 --> 01:06:23.610
Yeah, but he does it with a smile, case in point.

01:06:23.730 --> 01:06:26.682
And a little song at the end that doesn't lick.

01:06:26.706 --> 01:06:27.882
That's actually my point.

01:06:27.946 --> 01:06:29.066
Go for the next one.

01:06:29.138 --> 01:06:34.812
But, James, what do you think it'll do for his sanity if he kills us? It'll be worse.

01:06:34.996 --> 01:06:41.388
He might still chan to. Wow. He might still stand to chan now.

01:06:41.404 --> 01:06:43.440
With the way he's rolling that or.

01:06:46.660 --> 01:06:47.020
That.

01:06:47.060 --> 01:06:48.800
Or it might already be too late.

01:06:49.460 --> 01:07:13.680
We don't know that. We don't know that. We cannot. We absolutely cannot control whatever's going on in Olog's giant mind. However, we have other things, and Mel looks pointedly at both James and Emery that we might be able to control. And maybe we should work on those right now. Maybe just a little. Maybe.

01:07:14.580 --> 01:07:17.400
I'll be honest. I don't know how to work on those ones.

01:07:19.580 --> 01:07:24.228
I got a thing. But the last time that I tried to ad lib a thing, it didn't work very well.

01:07:24.364 --> 01:07:26.328
That won't put anybody to sleep.

01:07:26.364 --> 01:07:26.980
Sleep.

01:07:31.680 --> 01:07:40.512
Hey, Florence, just because we're all very keyed up tonight, as I'm sure you've noticed, an observant woman like yourself.

01:07:40.616 --> 01:07:41.592
Do you have any sleepy time?

01:07:41.616 --> 01:07:51.714
T actually, I was thinking, like, does anything in your order? Do you guys do any meditation or calming exercises or things like that?

01:07:51.912 --> 01:07:53.290
Partake in prayer?

01:07:53.630 --> 01:08:08.574
You know what? I think we should work on that. You? Prayer. I'll meditate, and these guys can keep watch. And maybe one of your gods or something will keep us all from dying tonight.

01:08:08.702 --> 01:08:11.966
It's Raphael's will that you are alive in the fifth year.

01:08:12.078 --> 01:08:21.431
Yeah, perfect. So he'll keep us from dying tonight. Do you ever start talking and you have those moments where you can't believe the words coming out of your mouth? Mel's having that moment right now.

01:08:21.495 --> 01:08:22.319
That's most of my conversation.

01:08:22.359 --> 01:08:23.543
I think most of the rest of.

01:08:23.551 --> 01:08:32.459
The party's kind of staring at you like Mel's. Like, they're staring at Mel's. Like, I have to keep talking, even though these words are like, what the fuck am I gonna say next?

01:08:33.079 --> 01:08:39.503
This would be a good time for me to start teaching the boy some of our prayer rituals.

01:08:39.591 --> 01:08:43.365
He has had an extremely trying day, and I don't think this is the time.

01:08:43.487 --> 01:08:44.442
Why don't you teach?

01:08:44.506 --> 01:08:45.154
Very cultivated.

01:08:45.202 --> 01:08:52.390
You know what? Why don't you teach me some of the rituals? Because I can teach both of you. Perfect. That'll work just fine.

01:08:53.930 --> 01:08:54.506
So.

01:08:54.618 --> 01:09:01.790
And Malcolm looks pointedly at Emory, and. James, I explained it to you in your head. Don't look at me like that.

01:09:03.090 --> 01:09:10.030
That doesn't mean she likes this course of action fair. And if she's teaching, then she's not meditating.

01:09:10.779 --> 01:09:16.963
Oh, before you guys start meditating, I think. I think Sister Florence needs to get to the back of the room.

01:09:17.131 --> 01:09:25.147
There's also a bear. When she faces. Turns the other direction. Y'all could hit her in the head with something like. I'm not opposed to that.

01:09:25.243 --> 01:09:28.827
All of the bedrooms are equipped with our prayer mats.

01:09:29.003 --> 01:09:31.371
Perfect. Let's go into the bedroom.

01:09:31.515 --> 01:09:46.662
She goes into one of the bedrooms, and under the mattress, it had looked kind of like a rugged. Which he thought was weird that it's under the bed instead of near the bed, but she pulls it out, and it's about the size of, like, a welcome mattress.

01:09:46.686 --> 01:09:49.246
Honestly, pull the door close behind her.

01:09:49.398 --> 01:09:55.850
Honestly, as soon as her back turns to me, I'm gonna try to, like, hit her with something and knock her unconscious.

01:09:56.350 --> 01:09:56.870
Okay.

01:09:56.910 --> 01:10:03.320
What, like the Hilton? Like, I don't know, their candlesticks are on the. Or something?

01:10:04.460 --> 01:10:05.228
Yeah, there'd be.

01:10:05.284 --> 01:10:07.764
Yeah, I'm gonna try to hit her in the head with a candlestick.

01:10:07.812 --> 01:10:14.640
As soon as her back turns, go ahead and roll. An unarmed attack.

01:10:15.460 --> 01:10:17.120
Suddenly we're playing clue.

01:10:18.500 --> 01:10:22.244
Well, with the candlestick, it'd be an improvised weapon. It'd be a d four plus string.

01:10:22.412 --> 01:10:23.280
Do that.

01:10:24.180 --> 01:10:29.846
Okay, so that's 14, I guess. Do I get a pneumonia?

01:10:30.038 --> 01:10:31.174
Your strength, probably.

01:10:31.262 --> 01:10:35.982
It'll be your. It'll be a normal melee attack. So it'd be strength plus proficiency.

01:10:36.166 --> 01:10:37.270
15 to hit.

01:10:37.350 --> 01:10:39.318
Hits, actually. That would hit.

01:10:39.454 --> 01:10:42.010
And it'd be a d four plus strength for your damage.

01:10:42.550 --> 01:10:46.974
And you could designate two points of non lethal damage.

01:10:47.142 --> 01:10:48.210
I'm gonna say.

01:10:53.840 --> 01:10:57.856
The one person who would be really good at this is currently wolfing out on a monk.

01:10:58.008 --> 01:11:01.460
Hey, Meltz needs to get better quick.

01:11:04.360 --> 01:11:05.900
She doesn't see this coming.

01:11:06.440 --> 01:11:07.220
Yeah.

01:11:08.000 --> 01:11:24.138
And you are able to drop her. You hit her. Right? Right. Either right in the ear, right at the base of the skull where it meets the neck, whatever. And you just. She falls like a sack of freaking potatoes. Just down. She wasn't prepared for that.

01:11:24.274 --> 01:11:24.522
Right.

01:11:24.546 --> 01:11:26.642
There was Elliot. He's gonna. Holy crap.

01:11:26.826 --> 01:11:36.670
Then once that happens, Belle walks out of the room holding a candlestick and then very calmly, closes the door behind her. Okay, now let's get to business.

01:11:52.380 --> 01:14:14.250
Oh, listener. Hello there. I didn't realize you'd be out tonight. There be monsters afoot. One should use caution when wandering through strange lands. Stick with me a moment. Maybe we can keep each other safe. While I have your attention, let me extend an invitation to you. The Grand Junction Comic Con is coming up on September 20 and 21st, and you can meet most of the cast of this tale there. We will be hosting a panel on the 21st at 330 regarding tips and tricks to run and play games. The entry fee is a mere $5 or a masonry county public library card. We will be passing out some treats, as well as sharing advice weve collected over our years of playing tabletop role playing games. If you have enjoyed listening to this dark tale, follow us on social media. We post every day, and odds are, if you enjoy this content, our social media accounts will. Will be very much up your alley. If you want to help support this podcast, please follow us, review us, etcetera, on your podcasting app of choice. If you are a Spotify listener, leave a comment answering the question of the week. I think I hear the beast leaving for now, wed best part ways. Enjoy the rest of the episode. You are now standing over a shredded corpse. The lungs are visible, so I've ripped the chest open. You have. And there is a gaping hole near the box, presumably where the heart. You taste iron, and honestly, something not crazy, far from beef.

01:14:14.870 --> 01:14:15.326
Okay.

01:14:15.358 --> 01:14:15.878
Yeah.

01:14:16.014 --> 01:14:18.542
Very, very, very rare.

01:14:18.686 --> 01:14:19.390
Yeah.

01:14:19.550 --> 01:14:31.700
Steak. It's got a. It's got a hearty chew to it, and it's not. It's not horribly unpleasant. Your beast is enjoying this quite a lot. I need you to make a wisdom saving.

01:14:36.120 --> 01:14:38.220
Wisdom of all things, all right?

01:14:38.760 --> 01:14:40.744
Because you can't think your way out of this.

01:14:40.872 --> 01:14:42.460
That was a good one. We're gonna go 17.

01:14:43.120 --> 01:14:51.310
You see the light catches just right behind you. You see a large window.

01:14:51.770 --> 01:14:52.630
Okay.

01:14:54.810 --> 01:15:13.880
You see that you are on the ground level. You smell more fear. You feel something inside you trying to draw you to the neighboring levels. You gain temperature, temporary control. What do you do?

01:15:15.660 --> 01:15:19.428
Okay, so I see window, which, and.

01:15:19.444 --> 01:15:23.800
This is importantly, leading away from the kiki pool, not into.

01:15:24.180 --> 01:15:25.732
Deeper into the pots.

01:15:25.916 --> 01:15:30.000
This is back in the hallway. A large stained glass. Right?

01:15:30.580 --> 01:15:56.104
Okay. Since old NOC has temporarily, at the moment, regained control and knows that if he gives in to the beast, which means probably feeding and killing more things and ripping out more hearts. He needs to get the fuck out of there, right? Like, I don't know what's in the woods, but I know it's not a shitload of people who are locked in rooms that I can easily break into. I'm gonna take the window and I'm gonna head out.

01:15:56.232 --> 01:16:26.562
Perfect. You leap through the window. You do take some damage. It doesn't tickle. And you take off running for the treeline. As you're getting close to the treeline, you can feel yourself starting to lose control again. You feel the beast starting to take back over. Just as that happens, you see doe see you and book shit into the.

01:16:26.586 --> 01:16:28.952
Woods, as I'm sure it will.

01:16:28.986 --> 01:16:32.548
Wood. You are goddamn scary.

01:16:32.604 --> 01:16:36.916
Yeah, they don't take well to things charging at top speed at them either.

01:16:37.028 --> 01:16:46.036
Because here's the thing. So all nox is six 5250 pound. Man, most werewolf things that I've ever seen make that son of a bitch bigger. This is a giant fucking werewolf.

01:16:46.108 --> 01:16:46.500
Huge.

01:16:46.580 --> 01:17:08.210
Yeah. You take off, you feel the beast take back over, just as you can see. See the scent line of the. Of the deer. And you give full pursuit of that animal. The rest of you just saw Mel knock the fucking nun out.

01:17:09.670 --> 01:17:10.966
See, I would have done that, but.

01:17:10.998 --> 01:17:13.542
Most of my stuff isn't blunt. I would have killed her.

01:17:13.646 --> 01:17:23.940
Well, that's why I used a candlestick. Okay, so Mel will update Elliot as to what's going on. And I couldn't come up with a good way to actually make her fall asleep, so here we are.

01:17:24.020 --> 01:17:29.612
In the meantime, Emery's gonna take like, a chair or bench or something and wedge it in the door so it.

01:17:29.636 --> 01:17:35.380
Doesn'T open her side. Yeah, we'll say they open into the master room. So you can do that.

01:17:35.540 --> 01:17:41.520
Actually, right before she says, did you at least place her in the. So she's not gonna choke on her?

01:17:42.340 --> 01:17:48.624
Yeah, yeah, I rolled her over. I did. Full, like, you know, college drunk night. Make.

01:17:48.672 --> 01:17:50.088
You knocked her out, then you kicked her.

01:17:50.184 --> 01:17:55.300
No, you roll them over on their side so if they woke up, wake up puking, they don't die.

01:17:56.440 --> 01:18:00.720
Yes, that's the. Yeah, the rescue. The rescue position.

01:18:00.800 --> 01:18:01.904
Yeah. I don't know.

01:18:02.072 --> 01:18:09.568
Anyway, all right. I just want to make sure. Yeah, I know these guys are the enemy, but I don't feel like killing unarmed nuns.

01:18:09.744 --> 01:18:14.016
That's why I just knocked her unconscious. I wasn't trying to get so.

01:18:14.128 --> 01:18:19.100
Okay. Hey. And he knocks on the wall. Okay, she's asleep. Now what you hear.

01:18:21.160 --> 01:18:23.180
You jump to that 35.

01:18:25.920 --> 01:18:29.100
Sorry, I didn't want to explain it again, no, that's fine.

01:18:29.920 --> 01:19:07.944
You hear from inside the painting a click, and then the painting does swing open. And James actually would have the best chance of recognizing this. This has a very vault door look to it, so it opens up, and you can see as it swings out the. The edge that would have been into the quote unquote door frame has got three metal circles that you assume are rods that would have penetrated into the wall, making this door impossible to open without some incredible.

01:19:08.112 --> 01:19:09.540
Yeah, it's like a werewolf.

01:19:10.760 --> 01:20:01.760
And inside of this, you see a small room, very, very scantly decorated. There's like a table and a couple chairs, some candle light. And you see a fair bit away on the other side the room standing as obviously trying to display non threatening behavior as is possible. You see a monk, he has his hood off. He's the first individual seen with their hood off. The man is bald, and every ounce of skin that would have been covered by his hood is just coated in scars.

01:20:02.260 --> 01:20:03.764
Dang. Oh, my God.

01:20:03.852 --> 01:20:15.748
He looks almost like something along the lines of a horrific burn victim, but there's also raised scars as if he's suffered cuts.

01:20:15.884 --> 01:20:18.400
This guy went through that cleansing ritual a lot.

01:20:20.300 --> 01:20:21.064
That's what I was thinking.

01:20:21.092 --> 01:20:21.976
Thinking again.

01:20:22.048 --> 01:21:13.560
He is very. I don't want to say defensive posture, because that indicates he thinks you're going to attack. He's really more just like, submissive posture. Yeah, submissive posturing. Kind of what you would do with a dog. You're not super certain about trying to show that you can trust, you know, not necessarily like, hey, sniff my hand. But, you know, he's got his hands forward, clearly showing that he's unarmed. He's actually allowed his robes sleeves to write up a bit. So you can see there's literally nothing up his sleeve. And the same thing there. His arms are just covered with scar tissue. And he wasn't quite what I had in mind. But we don't do subtle.

01:21:13.600 --> 01:21:16.934
Well, I'm sorry we couldn't come up with a better option.

01:21:17.062 --> 01:21:19.530
I realized that when you yelled at the painting.

01:21:20.710 --> 01:21:23.638
Hi, I'm Elliot Brandybain. Who the hell are you?

01:21:23.734 --> 01:21:36.610
He says, my name's brother Isaac. You see him physically wince when he says that? He's like, no, damn it. My name is Jeff.

01:21:36.910 --> 01:21:38.382
We breaking the programming.

01:21:38.446 --> 01:21:39.410
Hi, Jeff.

01:21:40.270 --> 01:21:46.620
And he is obviously in horrible pain as he gets through that.

01:21:47.280 --> 01:21:49.940
Speaking of pain, did we hear that windowpane break?

01:21:50.680 --> 01:21:50.992
No.

01:21:51.016 --> 01:21:55.104
I'm gonna say no. Okay. I would say that Mel knocking a nun out that none of you saw.

01:21:55.152 --> 01:21:56.500
We were no longer paying.

01:21:57.920 --> 01:21:59.448
You were no longer paying attention.

01:21:59.544 --> 01:22:04.752
Does there look like there's enough room? Is this room large enough for us all to get in here?

01:22:04.776 --> 01:22:05.344
Yeah. Yeah.

01:22:05.432 --> 01:22:11.150
Elliot's gonna go out and say, guys, grab all your stuff and grab everybody and get in here.

01:22:11.490 --> 01:22:12.098
All right?

01:22:12.194 --> 01:22:16.230
Okay. Is there a way out? Except for the way in?

01:22:16.530 --> 01:22:17.610
And I look at Jeff.

01:22:17.690 --> 01:22:18.402
Yeah.

01:22:18.586 --> 01:22:21.434
Okay. He says, yes, let's. Let's put.

01:22:21.482 --> 01:22:22.890
You can actually. You can even see the door.

01:22:22.930 --> 01:22:29.830
Okay. Okay, guys, there's another door in here. Get the room kind of put back together, and let's get in here.

01:22:30.290 --> 01:22:34.284
And then you're Jeff, is it?

01:22:34.372 --> 01:22:35.572
He says his name's Jeff.

01:22:35.676 --> 01:22:39.560
I know. Once we get everything, I just want to have a chat.

01:22:39.900 --> 01:22:41.420
That's good. Let's get our stuff in.

01:22:41.460 --> 01:22:43.280
I'll put down the candy stick.

01:22:43.980 --> 01:22:46.100
A little bit of a timeline here.

01:22:46.180 --> 01:22:46.460
Yeah.

01:22:46.500 --> 01:22:46.996
Yeah.

01:22:47.108 --> 01:22:49.716
We can walk and talk. It's good for you.

01:22:49.828 --> 01:22:55.836
Yep. Emery's running around the room grabbing stuff and chucking it in bags. She doesn't care whose stuff is going into what.

01:22:55.908 --> 01:22:58.540
I feel like we probably didn't really unpack much.

01:22:58.580 --> 01:22:59.072
Yeah.

01:22:59.196 --> 01:23:01.168
We lean off. Yeah, I wasn't planning on staying long.

01:23:01.264 --> 01:23:05.752
Yeah. Don't forget all this bag. He might still need that.

01:23:05.856 --> 01:23:06.208
Yeah.

01:23:06.264 --> 01:23:08.144
God, what the hell does he have in this thing?

01:23:08.232 --> 01:23:10.380
A warhammer and two axes.

01:23:14.560 --> 01:23:15.780
Heavy as fuck.

01:23:16.320 --> 01:23:24.184
So we grab all our stuff out of the room, clear the room, sort of set it mildly to rights, and go, Jeff, are we good? Should we just shut the door?

01:23:24.232 --> 01:23:24.662
Yes.

01:23:24.776 --> 01:23:25.470
All right.

01:23:26.210 --> 01:23:27.870
As soon as you guys are out.

01:23:29.610 --> 01:23:31.470
The DM just punched himself.

01:23:33.210 --> 01:24:06.920
As soon as you guys are into the room, he pulls the painting closed, and you see him kind of just tap randomly on the back, and you hear a click. He gives the. Gives the painting a little bit of a shove, and it doesn't even twitch. He says, uh, for right now, I. I do not want what's happened to me to happen to that boy. I can get you out of here.

01:24:07.620 --> 01:24:08.480
Okay.

01:24:09.180 --> 01:24:10.948
I'm gonna make a quick insight check.

01:24:11.004 --> 01:24:14.300
Before I feel like I would do the same thing.

01:24:14.420 --> 01:24:15.212
Yeah. Like, seven.

01:24:15.276 --> 01:24:28.190
Have you had. Is like. Is this from having to undergoing the cleansing ritual repeatedly, or is this just normal? Just normal for what this group does?

01:24:29.890 --> 01:24:33.190
You believe him? Importantly, 17 believes him.

01:24:34.850 --> 01:24:36.890
Mel believes him because she's gullible.

01:24:37.050 --> 01:24:41.394
19, you believe him slightly more like.

01:24:41.442 --> 01:24:42.390
I'm not even gonna roll.

01:24:42.490 --> 01:24:54.206
Yeah, is. Oh, yeah, my. You can. Yes, this is. I've been through the cleansing, the ordeal of wiffle torment.

01:24:54.318 --> 01:24:55.974
See, I knew it was a bad idea.

01:24:56.062 --> 01:24:58.846
Okay, Jeff, I've been through it. 1212 times.

01:24:58.918 --> 01:24:59.846
Oh, my God.

01:24:59.918 --> 01:25:01.430
Well, thank God it didn't take, huh?

01:25:01.470 --> 01:25:02.838
Okay, Jeff, what do we need to.

01:25:02.854 --> 01:26:10.190
Do at this point? We're gonna move forward through this more, like, skill challenge, where it's going to be five successes to get you out. Four fails is going to get you caught, as we've discussed in the past. But as a refresher, you guys kind of tell me the skills that you're going to use, and we'll set the DC kind of accordingly. He's gonna be a 14. Unless you tell me something real dumb or something kind of genius that'll adjust the DC accordingly. Importantly, he takes the lead, and he is able to open up the door back into the hallway. And you are able. You're starting off with an empty hallway. Everybody has locked themselves in their rooms because there's a monster quite literally loose in the building. To everybody's knowledge, you don't know that he's gone.

01:26:10.810 --> 01:26:13.042
And Elliot wants to make a stealth check.

01:26:13.146 --> 01:26:24.250
Perfect. Just for the sake of being able to keep track of things. Let's roll an initiative order. Elliot can go first. Cause you're probably gonna roll the highest anyway. Nobody can touch yours.

01:26:24.330 --> 01:26:28.004
No, no. Elliot got a 28.

01:26:28.082 --> 01:26:34.660
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm just gonna rate. Jesus.

01:26:36.640 --> 01:26:39.300
He rolled pretty good. He can roll higher.

01:26:40.480 --> 01:26:41.288
Mel.

01:26:41.464 --> 01:26:42.180
Six.

01:26:43.440 --> 01:26:44.792
And on the opposite end of the.

01:26:44.816 --> 01:26:51.416
Spectrum, Mel's juggling Jacob. Jacob's backpack. Her backpack. Like it's a thing.

01:26:51.528 --> 01:26:53.256
Mel's a Sherpa. Right now.

01:26:53.408 --> 01:26:54.016
He's trying to.

01:26:54.048 --> 01:26:55.820
That's weird. Jacob rolled a suit.

01:26:57.220 --> 01:26:58.740
You guys are struggling together.

01:26:58.860 --> 01:27:04.160
Yes. Now put your arm through the other. The other hole.

01:27:06.940 --> 01:27:07.760
Memory.

01:27:08.460 --> 01:27:09.200
Twelve.

01:27:14.060 --> 01:27:16.084
Not on the number, but on where to put. Yeah.

01:27:16.132 --> 01:27:16.720
Space.

01:27:17.100 --> 01:27:24.328
On that note, Elliot rolled a stealth check to sneak out into the hallway without drawing suspicion. How did you do?

01:27:24.384 --> 01:27:26.700
He did a 21.

01:27:27.200 --> 01:27:45.416
All right. You successfully sneak out into the hallway. That is one success. James, you guys are out in the hallway quietly moving.

01:27:45.528 --> 01:27:47.632
What kind of floor is this? Is it like, hardwood floor?

01:27:47.656 --> 01:27:48.676
Is it, like, it's done?

01:27:48.768 --> 01:27:55.240
Okay, nevermind. I was gonna check for squeaky floorboards, but, uh, can I still do an investigation? Check for, like.

01:27:57.380 --> 01:27:58.164
Obstacles.

01:27:58.252 --> 01:28:02.052
Obstacles to, like, make sure there's, like. Like no one's peeking out or anything.

01:28:02.156 --> 01:28:02.800
Sure.

01:28:04.140 --> 01:28:07.360
Yeah. 17.

01:28:07.780 --> 01:28:29.910
You are able to successfully see that about four doors down, there's one door that isn't shut all the way. And so you signal to the rest of the team, show them the door, and you guys are able to slip past without drawing attention. Cool. That is two successes. Emery.

01:28:31.890 --> 01:28:40.996
I was thinking maybe like, a sleight of hand to make sure we keep all our stuff and remove any trace on our way out. We're not leaving any sign that we went through here.

01:28:41.068 --> 01:28:42.920
Okay. Okay.

01:28:46.460 --> 01:28:48.000
Oh, 18.

01:28:48.700 --> 01:28:49.324
All right.

01:28:49.412 --> 01:28:51.920
Is that like an analog pass without a trace spell?

01:28:52.580 --> 01:29:04.972
Kind of, yeah. I'm, like, at the back of the group, just making sure, like, everyone's not, like, no one's dropping anything. If there's dust on the floor, it's getting scuffed. So we can't tell, like, which direction we're going. Stuff like that.

01:29:05.116 --> 01:29:22.366
Perfect. As you're moving, you see that in. I think it was James picked up Olnack's pack and struggling with the weight. You see that the two actions are getting ready to clink into each other. You're able to get up there and help him shift the weight before it.

01:29:22.478 --> 01:29:28.126
Maybe even, like, take one of them off and slip into my own pack. Gotcha. Share the weight a little bit, just.

01:29:28.158 --> 01:29:28.862
In case it matters.

01:29:28.886 --> 01:29:31.312
Which one do you grab a?

01:29:31.326 --> 01:29:32.196
The silvered one.

01:29:32.268 --> 01:29:34.188
Perfect. You have his fireman's axe.

01:29:34.364 --> 01:29:36.564
I don't think I'm good at wielding it, but.

01:29:36.732 --> 01:29:39.540
But you're good at carrying it, Mel.

01:29:39.580 --> 01:29:43.108
You guys are doing pretty well. No pressure.

01:29:43.244 --> 01:29:58.602
Um, I'm really bad at all of the skills we need right now. Any chance I could run as a deception check to try to move in a deceiving way so that if somebody did see us, they might just think.

01:29:58.666 --> 01:30:01.394
That we were branding the kitchen?

01:30:01.522 --> 01:30:13.386
Yeah. Or, like, I don't know, maybe I grabbed one of the robes and threw it on over my clothes to look like maybe it was a couple of amongst people escorting.

01:30:13.498 --> 01:30:14.350
Okay.

01:30:15.090 --> 01:30:21.190
To try to make it look less like, hey, we're running out on here.

01:30:23.100 --> 01:30:23.960
You can.

01:30:25.660 --> 01:30:27.372
Don't mind us. We're off to the market.

01:30:27.476 --> 01:30:31.476
Yeah, pretty much. Oh, that's a 21.

01:30:31.548 --> 01:30:37.640
Yep. All right, you're up to four. Elliot can't use the same skill twice.

01:30:39.180 --> 01:30:44.400
So looking at brother Isaac, I see how very bad a shape he is.

01:30:45.140 --> 01:30:49.170
He introduced himself as brother Isaac and then had a stroke. Okay.

01:30:52.070 --> 01:31:12.610
And I. Elliot notices that he might not have been all that long ago, that he went through the last session, and he would like to make a medicine check to attempt to make Jeff feel a little bit better.

01:31:13.030 --> 01:31:40.850
Sure. Go ahead and roll that. 15 just passes. Yeah. You're able to find. You're able to find some fairly fresh wounds and you're able to. You guys get around a corner out of obvious living quarters. You're not doing this right in front of somebody's room. Sure. You guys have got first aid kits, so you're able to advantage.

01:31:41.470 --> 01:31:48.710
Like, he's limping a little bit. I'm able to kind of tie a brace around. Yeah, kind of help him not limp so much.

01:31:48.790 --> 01:31:55.742
There you go. Perfect. I don't remember how many successes that was.

01:31:55.766 --> 01:31:56.022
Five.

01:31:56.086 --> 01:32:00.622
That was fine. No, I had total five. Okay.

01:32:00.686 --> 01:32:01.650
Five successes.

01:32:02.310 --> 01:32:07.580
You guys just straight across the board, just nobody failed. It's got five successes.

01:32:08.000 --> 01:32:08.760
Yay.

01:32:08.920 --> 01:32:09.728
Go team.

01:32:09.864 --> 01:32:11.820
Mildly less exciting than I thought it would be.

01:32:12.720 --> 01:32:13.848
We finally didn't roll.

01:32:13.904 --> 01:32:17.540
You guys decided to roll well, for once this session.

01:32:17.840 --> 01:33:32.750
So you guys are able to get out of the living quarters. You get down the stairwell. The nice thing is this is all stone, so there isn't any opportunity for a creaky stair. There's no. The worst thing that could happen is you trip and it's just gonna really hurt when you hit. It's very hard. But you guys are able to very carefully, and with Jeff's guidance, able to find your way out to the main front door of the compound. And he is able to start opening the door. Thankfully, as we've stated several times throughout this podcast, they take immaculate care of everything. So despite the size and the weight of this door, it's fairly quiet. It creaks a little. I mean, we're dealing with a big oak and iron bound door. It creaks a little, but it's pretty darn quiet. You guys are safely out the front of of the compound. You guys are successfully outside the front of the compound with Jeff.

01:33:33.490 --> 01:33:35.230
All right, now what? Jeff?

01:33:36.250 --> 01:33:38.270
Are you going with us or are you staying?

01:33:38.890 --> 01:33:40.794
Should you stay? Should you come?

01:33:40.922 --> 01:33:42.590
This is not the time, James.

01:33:44.330 --> 01:33:49.720
I think I. Yellow.

01:33:50.940 --> 01:33:52.628
Can you survive that again?

01:33:52.724 --> 01:33:56.760
Can I do an insight check and see if that's my brother talking or if that's Jeff talking?

01:33:57.300 --> 01:34:00.100
They don't have anyone that can do the cleansing ritual right now.

01:34:00.180 --> 01:34:02.520
That's true. It could get better here.

01:34:09.900 --> 01:34:10.640
Nine.

01:34:11.220 --> 01:34:12.640
You're not sure?

01:34:14.910 --> 01:34:16.166
I mean, your funeral.

01:34:16.318 --> 01:34:23.290
Jeff, if you want to go with us, you can go with us if you decide to stay. We never saw you.

01:34:23.630 --> 01:34:32.886
I appreciate that. I don't know if I will survive if I leave here.

01:34:33.078 --> 01:34:37.090
Can I please remind you real quick that there is a raging werewolf inside that building?

01:34:37.630 --> 01:34:54.320
I'm not saying I'm gonna survive inside of sight either. They're about to. They're about to anoint a new high patron and a high matron. I helped you. I am almost certainly going to be their first, the first recipient of the ordeal for them.

01:34:56.580 --> 01:35:12.854
You will help you if you want. Don't know your circumstances, Jeff, but if you want to, you can. Can come with us, and we're getting out of here.

01:35:13.022 --> 01:35:16.690
I will. Where? Where are you going?

01:35:17.030 --> 01:35:22.054
Uh, we're not gonna tell you, but it'll be a way.

01:35:22.182 --> 01:35:24.446
Settlement or nature?

01:35:24.598 --> 01:35:29.590
Eventually settlement. But in the meantime, nature.

01:35:29.630 --> 01:35:31.500
Until we get to a settlement, for sure.

01:35:32.920 --> 01:35:39.144
If you don't, I will try. Cool. I will try to come with you.

01:35:39.312 --> 01:35:43.272
Okay. We've got horses. We're gonna go get them. Okay.

01:35:43.336 --> 01:35:44.940
At the moment, we have a free one.

01:35:46.240 --> 01:35:48.840
That's true. At the moment, we have a horse without a rope.

01:35:49.000 --> 01:35:50.264
What was that one's name again?

01:35:50.392 --> 01:35:51.336
Yeah. Perk.

01:35:51.488 --> 01:35:52.180
Yeah.

01:35:54.280 --> 01:35:58.790
I appreciate you being willing to help you.

01:35:59.370 --> 01:36:00.546
You helped us.

01:36:00.658 --> 01:36:01.590
Fair trade.

01:36:02.410 --> 01:36:03.370
We should move.

01:36:03.490 --> 01:36:18.010
Yes, we should. So we want to get up to the stables, get the horses, get them saddled, and get down the road. Cause my understanding as the player, there was one road in here and one road out. I don't.

01:36:18.170 --> 01:36:36.560
If the road you took came straight up, snacked through the door. Right. Was there, you would have seen when you were doing your tour, another, the same road, presumably come straight out the other side of this, almost as if this building interrupted there.

01:36:37.180 --> 01:36:40.760
The road. I think we would prefer to go east.

01:36:41.340 --> 01:36:50.350
And we'll say the way you did not come from, it goes up the mountainous, but you would have to cross this mountain to continue east.

01:36:50.470 --> 01:36:51.654
Kind of a pass.

01:36:51.782 --> 01:36:54.942
Okay. We know what's back that way. I think we should continue.

01:36:55.086 --> 01:36:55.930
I agree.

01:36:56.830 --> 01:36:58.790
So what are we planning on doing about Ulnag?

01:36:58.950 --> 01:37:02.246
Ulnok will find us if he becomes human again.

01:37:02.318 --> 01:37:12.286
We're gonna watch out for him tonight. And Elliot's gonna get silver, specifically his silver arrows. And he's gonna have his silver arrows at hand.

01:37:12.398 --> 01:37:12.812
Perfect.

01:37:12.886 --> 01:37:21.104
Which was amazing with that new quiver. When he reached for it, the arrows he pulled out, each one of them were silver. He didn't have. He didn't fumble a bit.

01:37:21.192 --> 01:37:21.860
Yep.

01:37:22.600 --> 01:37:28.720
At which side of the compound is, like, the gardens and stuff? Like the east or the.

01:37:28.880 --> 01:37:43.722
So we had to the. You are currently on the downslope to get to the main entrance. Gardens were on the right side of the compound. South, I suppose.

01:37:43.786 --> 01:37:43.938
Yeah.

01:37:43.954 --> 01:37:52.950
The right to your right would be. If you're looking at the compound, gardens to your right. Horses and whatnots were on the exact opposite.

01:37:53.570 --> 01:37:54.330
Okay.

01:37:54.450 --> 01:37:55.954
And there wasn't much on.

01:37:56.002 --> 01:37:58.362
So we want. We want to head around towards the north.

01:37:58.466 --> 01:37:58.818
Yeah.

01:37:58.874 --> 01:38:00.550
To get to the horses to the east.

01:38:03.170 --> 01:38:03.698
You're on the west.

01:38:03.714 --> 01:38:04.738
We're on the west.

01:38:04.914 --> 01:38:08.482
You said exact opposite side. Of the building is where the horses are.

01:38:08.586 --> 01:38:09.938
Okay, sorry.

01:38:10.074 --> 01:38:11.146
South is gardens.

01:38:11.218 --> 01:38:14.026
I thought you meant on the opposite side of the gardens.

01:38:14.138 --> 01:38:16.026
Oh, sorry. No, opposite side of you.

01:38:16.138 --> 01:38:25.146
Okay, that makes sense. I would still vote going north side just because that would put us in shadows and we can move a little more stealthily.

01:38:25.338 --> 01:38:26.586
Well, it's nighttime now.

01:38:26.658 --> 01:38:28.322
Yes, yes, but it's full moon.

01:38:28.426 --> 01:38:29.650
Yeah, that's a good point.

01:38:29.770 --> 01:38:31.602
Everybody should be on the north side.

01:38:31.626 --> 01:38:32.744
But, yeah, I'm with you.

01:38:32.882 --> 01:39:05.810
So I think when they're like. While we're discussing methods, one thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take my broom, and I'm going to pull Jacob aside and explain. Like. Okay, you've probably read about this. This is an actual magic broomstick. Do not play with it right now. But if anything happens to any of us, get on the broomstick, say the magic word, and I tell him, up, up, up. Okay, look, I didn't. I didn't know what I was getting into.

01:39:06.230 --> 01:39:06.630
Wow.

01:39:06.670 --> 01:39:33.258
I say that a lot. Anyway, if anything happens to any of us, whether it's because of something that happens here in the castle or maybe a monster or anything at all, take this and fly away from you. We'll explain more in the morning, but for right now, just keep a hold of that, and that's last resort at a minimum.

01:39:33.314 --> 01:39:34.650
Fly up in the air.

01:39:34.810 --> 01:39:35.550
Yes.

01:39:36.490 --> 01:39:37.714
Remember, up. Okay.

01:39:37.762 --> 01:39:38.390
Yeah.

01:39:39.170 --> 01:39:44.470
And if you want. And if you're on it and you get up and you want to come down, just say down.

01:39:45.250 --> 01:39:45.802
Okay.

01:39:45.866 --> 01:39:57.052
It's very straightforward. It's easier than learning stick. Jacob, you're so little guy.

01:39:57.076 --> 01:39:58.080
Beat me to it.

01:40:00.900 --> 01:40:09.236
Okay, so you guys are gonna move stealthily or just haul ass? What's your goal? Get the hell out of here or hide?

01:40:09.348 --> 01:40:12.876
I'm thinking everybody's hiding inside from Olmok. I say we just.

01:40:13.028 --> 01:40:14.548
Yeah, yeah.

01:40:14.564 --> 01:40:18.388
He's got enough snake going through the shadows.

01:40:18.444 --> 01:40:21.360
But quickly, we're sneakily hauling ass.

01:40:22.620 --> 01:40:48.370
Then you guys are able to. You make it towards the livestock. You do see, once you come to the other side, right as you're about to clear the corner, you do now. You're leaving the shadows. This area is not in shadow. You see that? One of the pigs is incredibly dead. Guys.

01:40:49.030 --> 01:40:53.678
You guys go get the horses saddled. I want to check this out. I would like to look for tracks.

01:40:53.774 --> 01:40:55.490
Okay, go for it.

01:40:55.910 --> 01:40:59.902
The rest of us will hustle the stable and start throwing saddles on horses.

01:40:59.966 --> 01:41:05.210
I believe this would qualify as your favorite. Drinks. You're now out in the woods.

01:41:06.480 --> 01:41:07.220
14.

01:41:07.600 --> 01:41:15.800
Okay, because you've seen it and you've seen it recently. This is the same print that he saw, right? It's, it's bigger.

01:41:15.840 --> 01:41:19.824
Yeah. And I wanna, I specifically wanna know which direction it goes.

01:41:19.952 --> 01:41:24.960
It goes straight east. It hauled ass through the pig.

01:41:25.120 --> 01:41:26.792
Is it following the rope?

01:41:26.936 --> 01:41:50.994
No, it does. It looks like it took the most direct line to the woods. So it's running in vaguely the same direction as the road. Okay. But you can see just through the clearing of the trees. The road starts to bank north as it gets to a steep point. Again, he looks like he went straight for the tree line.

01:41:51.042 --> 01:41:52.550
Got it. Okay.

01:41:53.130 --> 01:41:57.740
And actually with you investigating, you see the window that he very clearly went through.

01:41:57.850 --> 01:42:23.110
So after everybody gets horses saddled, we'll introduce Jeff. Would you like us to keep calling you Jeff, brother Jeff? What would you prefer, brother Jeff? Jeff. Okay, Jeff, you ride this horse. This is Bert. Bert, this is Jeff. I don't talk to horses. All knock does. He's a good horse. And then I'm gonna go to everybody else. Kind of whispered.

01:42:23.140 --> 01:42:24.554
That was a confusing reaction.

01:42:24.642 --> 01:42:28.570
Yeah, just pat the horse and keep going.

01:42:28.690 --> 01:42:36.170
Ah. Then I'm going to get everybody together. I'm gonna say guys all not got out.

01:42:36.330 --> 01:42:37.818
Either that or there's another werewolf.

01:42:37.914 --> 01:42:39.426
Yeah, no, we're just gonna.

01:42:39.458 --> 01:42:40.362
What's wrong with you?

01:42:40.426 --> 01:42:42.682
That's worst case scenario, James.

01:42:42.826 --> 01:42:44.770
I'm just saying our track record.

01:42:44.850 --> 01:42:50.496
Oh shit. Okay, we gotta go, but we gotta keep our eyes peeled.

01:42:50.688 --> 01:42:52.940
Are we still hauling east?

01:42:53.440 --> 01:42:54.600
Which way do we go?

01:42:54.640 --> 01:42:56.704
Back? We just gotta come back by here again?

01:42:56.792 --> 01:42:57.960
Yeah, I don't know.

01:42:58.000 --> 01:43:01.296
I don't want to go east either, but I don't want to go back.

01:43:01.488 --> 01:43:04.168
Maybe if we move quick enough we can get ahead of him.

01:43:04.344 --> 01:43:11.392
Maybe. And he might. I don't know why he went off into the woods. I've got no idea. But where he's out here.

01:43:11.576 --> 01:43:13.060
Do you think he spotted something?

01:43:14.160 --> 01:43:15.056
I wasn't there to.

01:43:15.088 --> 01:43:20.136
In fact, I wasn't there to visit with him. I don't know what he did, but we gotta get out of here.

01:43:20.168 --> 01:43:20.760
Let's just move.

01:43:20.800 --> 01:43:25.212
Let's just. So if anybody's got anything silver, get it at hand.

01:43:25.276 --> 01:43:25.868
Yeah.

01:43:26.004 --> 01:43:27.880
Is anyone good at an axe?

01:43:30.820 --> 01:43:33.468
I. Can I lift it? I don't know.

01:43:33.564 --> 01:43:34.800
I'll give Ironman.

01:43:35.340 --> 01:43:43.244
It's not, you know what, it's, it can't do any worse than me being basically unarmed right now because my magic makes me queasy.

01:43:43.332 --> 01:43:44.324
So you're strong?

01:43:44.492 --> 01:43:45.700
Yeah. Okay, cool.

01:43:45.740 --> 01:43:48.172
I don't have a weapon for deficiencies to hold this axe.

01:43:48.196 --> 01:43:54.524
So someone else take it. Oh, I will. I'll take the fireman's axe. Why not? What's the worst that can happen?

01:43:54.612 --> 01:43:58.920
Is that the same fireman's axe that you used to attempt to break through a window once upon a time?

01:43:59.220 --> 01:44:03.636
No, that was. I tried to use the cheap little key ring. Punchy knuckle.

01:44:03.668 --> 01:44:06.620
Oh, I meant like through the. Like the door. Oh, is a sledgehammer.

01:44:06.740 --> 01:44:07.236
Sledgehammer.

01:44:07.268 --> 01:44:07.596
Yeah.

01:44:07.668 --> 01:44:08.020
Okay.

01:44:08.060 --> 01:44:09.880
The sledgehammer was more than I did.

01:44:10.340 --> 01:44:17.970
So we're discussing this while we're getting on the road. Luckily, horses could see pretty good in a former night. They could see quite well.

01:44:18.430 --> 01:44:30.770
You guys settled the horses, no problem. You weren't. You were again, not being particularly quiet. So now you are on the horse. What do you. What do you. How do you move? What do you.

01:44:31.150 --> 01:44:32.950
I'm following Elliot still.

01:44:32.990 --> 01:44:34.270
Quietly or quickly?

01:44:34.390 --> 01:44:37.230
Quickly. We've got to make. So we want.

01:44:37.270 --> 01:44:38.640
We're just going to make time.

01:44:38.800 --> 01:44:49.980
We're gonna. We're gonna head out because full moon horse looks and see pretty good in the dark. We're on a road. We're gonna push for speed. We're gonna move at by D and D rules.

01:44:51.280 --> 01:44:51.776
Perfect.

01:44:51.848 --> 01:44:55.488
I feel like Elliott and James would probably be upfront because we can also see pretty decent.

01:44:55.544 --> 01:44:57.208
James, you need to be maybe one in the back.

01:44:57.264 --> 01:44:58.024
I need to be in the back.

01:44:58.072 --> 01:44:58.960
You need to be in the back.

01:44:59.000 --> 01:45:01.580
We need eyes in the back. I do not have goods.

01:45:02.000 --> 01:45:03.430
I can't see shit.

01:45:03.600 --> 01:45:04.710
Stay in the back.

01:45:06.370 --> 01:45:06.930
Garbage.

01:45:06.970 --> 01:45:09.150
Perception same.

01:45:09.490 --> 01:45:11.270
I'm gonna hear you coming up.

01:45:11.850 --> 01:45:20.930
I am not good. Perception. I'm carrying an axe, which I'm not good with. I have Jacob holding a broom on my lap. Like, this is awkward.

01:45:21.050 --> 01:45:21.754
Yep.

01:45:21.922 --> 01:45:25.314
We got Jeff in the middle. I don't know if he's okay on a horse or not.

01:45:25.442 --> 01:45:28.070
He's familiar. He's very clearly.

01:45:28.410 --> 01:45:35.732
I'll put Jeff, Jeff directly behind me, and I'll lead the horse like Jeff. I don't know if you're good at riding a horse. Just hang on and we got to go.

01:45:35.756 --> 01:45:36.500
Bert will follow.

01:45:36.620 --> 01:45:40.996
Yeah, Burt's gonna follow. I'll have the reins. I'll be leading. I'll be leading Burt.

01:45:41.108 --> 01:45:54.674
Perfect. Once we clear into the treeline, once you're very clearly off of the grounds, Mel, I need you to make a Christmas Eve goshenhe.

01:45:54.712 --> 01:45:55.490
Good. Stat.

01:45:58.950 --> 01:45:59.646
21.

01:45:59.718 --> 01:46:06.958
Okay. Old knock. You are tearing through the woods.

01:46:07.054 --> 01:46:13.582
Yep. And apparently I ran directly through a pig and just fucking ripped it to shit. I didn't know I did that.

01:46:13.726 --> 01:46:15.370
This a train through it.

01:46:18.430 --> 01:46:22.860
So you tell me. What are you doing, werewolf out here?

01:46:24.240 --> 01:46:27.432
Chase the female deer. Female deer. Yeah.

01:46:27.536 --> 01:46:29.340
I'm so glad we're all on the same page.

01:46:32.640 --> 01:46:55.658
So what does Polnack ze wolf do? You feel yourself. The immediate rage is starting to calm right now that you're not surrounded by the scent of fear, the intoxicating scent of fear. You feel the rage inside of you. Start. It's still there. It's a. It's more of a simmering pot now instead of a volcano.

01:46:55.794 --> 01:47:06.114
Okay, so it's calmer, but it's still present. Do I still have my faculties? Am I still sure. Kind of ulnok.

01:47:06.162 --> 01:47:23.724
You're. You're kind of Ulnok. You definitely. You feel the bestial for one of less weird descriptions, the bestial urges coursing through you a bit, but you are kind of back in the driver's seat.

01:47:23.852 --> 01:47:29.852
Okay, so I'm not full on hungry wolf. Right, right. But I'm still a hungry wolf.

01:47:29.916 --> 01:47:30.276
Yes.

01:47:30.348 --> 01:47:30.732
Just not.

01:47:30.756 --> 01:47:32.916
You're a hungry, like, a raging, holy.

01:47:32.948 --> 01:47:37.000
Shit, I need to eat something. I'm not a hangry wolf. Does that make sense?

01:47:38.360 --> 01:47:39.860
Not a hangry one.

01:47:40.480 --> 01:47:42.100
You're not you when you're hungry.

01:47:43.240 --> 01:47:53.420
And the snickers ain't gonna cut it right now. Um, so I'm pursuing the deer. Right. Like I saw it. I'm hungry.

01:47:54.760 --> 01:47:55.192
Perfect.

01:47:55.256 --> 01:47:57.380
Go ahead and, uh, be going after the deer.

01:47:57.880 --> 01:48:10.960
Give me a, uh. We'll use your stats. Give me a survival. I think your wisdom is the same. Wisdom?

01:48:11.460 --> 01:48:12.956
Yeah, it's a wisdom. Safe, for sure.

01:48:13.028 --> 01:48:19.620
The wisdom, yes. And with a potential for proficiency. I don't know if you have a proficiency kind of.

01:48:19.660 --> 01:48:20.156
Survival.

01:48:20.268 --> 01:48:21.996
Survival. Sorry. Less.

01:48:22.068 --> 01:48:23.252
Oh, I think he might have.

01:48:23.316 --> 01:48:25.012
I do. So I kind of. It's a wash.

01:48:25.076 --> 01:48:25.372
There you go.

01:48:25.396 --> 01:48:27.812
Because I got a negative one and a plus one, so it's just whatever.

01:48:27.916 --> 01:48:31.806
No, you have a plus two proficiency for proficiency.

01:48:31.878 --> 01:48:33.166
Yeah. So you should have a plus one.

01:48:33.198 --> 01:48:34.014
You should have a plus one.

01:48:34.062 --> 01:48:37.382
I have a plus one. Okay, so total doesn't take my thing.

01:48:37.526 --> 01:48:39.318
In order to calculate.

01:48:39.334 --> 01:48:42.170
It's what? That you have a plus two for proficiency.

01:48:43.470 --> 01:48:44.250
Yeah.

01:48:53.030 --> 01:48:54.090
That's a nine.

01:48:54.470 --> 01:49:02.310
All right. Now that you're back in the driver's seat, you're having a hard time getting used to the wildly enhanced sense.

01:49:03.450 --> 01:49:04.682
It's kind of overwhelming.

01:49:04.786 --> 01:49:24.996
Everything is dialed up. You don't have darkvision normally. Right now you do. Everything is brighter and almost. Almost glaring with how intense it is. Plus, you're hearing so much more.

01:49:25.108 --> 01:49:25.880
Okay.

01:49:26.300 --> 01:50:17.430
So much further than you normally can. You can hear the squirrels in the trees breathing. You can hear down at the edge of your sound. You hear the leather of a strap being cinched. You heard all the way up to the tip top of the mountain. You can hear hooves all over the place. And in the cacophony of sound, you lose track of the one you're chasing. Add to that every plant nearby. This is early spring in the mountains. So there's a lot of flowers, there is a lot of pollen. There is a lot of scent everywhere. So you lose what you're hunting for in this just almost overwhelming barrage of information.

01:50:18.930 --> 01:50:21.750
Can you imagine how loud a werewolf sneeze would be?

01:50:24.850 --> 01:50:26.162
Cause all the pollen, dude.

01:50:26.226 --> 01:50:44.068
Yeah. While you're almost in your. Your conscious mind trying to protect itself from just the barrage.

01:50:44.204 --> 01:50:44.884
Right.

01:50:45.052 --> 01:51:03.306
Sensory overload, yes. You recede back into yourself, and you pick up from where you left off on the story. You were literally sprinting towards the helicopter that was still folded up, waiting to be deployed, right?

01:51:03.388 --> 01:51:11.518
That's right. We were getting the second aircraft ready for launch so we can perform a search and rescue mission if necessary. Boat is turning towards.

01:51:11.694 --> 01:51:12.406
Yeah.

01:51:12.558 --> 01:51:13.370
Okay.

01:51:15.630 --> 01:51:29.200
So, um, we're trying to get the bird out of the hangar. Um, so it's unlike a track which chains down, kind of pulls itself back.

01:51:29.240 --> 01:51:29.820
Right.

01:51:30.360 --> 01:52:20.240
But it's also chained and chocked. I don't know if anybody. Those terms are normal for people, but. Got to pull the chocks and chains. So it's actually chained down because it's a small boat, it moves a lot. So I'm helping getting the chocks and chains pulled. We got to get those undone before we get bird out and then re chock and chain it once it gets out. Even. Even though this is an emergency thing, we need to make sure it's secure before we get people in it to take off. Does that all make sense? Whole crew is doing that. Get the bird out and ready to go in. Pretty typical response time before launch. If you're in a significant hurry, it's probably about five, seven minutes. You can usually. We can usually have a bird up.

01:52:20.410 --> 01:52:21.116
That's not bad.

01:52:21.188 --> 01:52:21.484
Yeah.

01:52:21.532 --> 01:52:34.244
So there's a chance, theoretically, at least in our heads, that we might be able to get somebody out of the water. Um, bird goes out. Um, we get her up and turned.

01:52:34.332 --> 01:52:42.240
Before you ship it. Just because I'm curious. Yeah. Knowing what just happened to the last bird that you sent.

01:52:42.660 --> 01:52:43.332
That's true.

01:52:43.396 --> 01:52:48.400
Do you do anything differently to make sure this one doesn't just meet the same fate? And if so, what.

01:52:51.620 --> 01:53:25.646
Well, this would be a problem, come to think of it, because now I'd be worried about the codes, right? So I would have to go get new codes, okay. Because that's the only thing that makes sense to me. Unless it was a legitimate malfunction in the aircraft itself. I need to go make sure that those codes are good. Those codes failed. So we got to figure something out. I sprint back below deck. That's the term, below deck. And get to the. It's office down there and like, look, aircraft just got shot down.

01:53:25.718 --> 01:53:25.902
Sure.

01:53:25.926 --> 01:53:53.960
You heard, you know, battle cryo battle stations, over. You know, we're responding to this. He re gets my codes pretty quick. You know, it's not a very lightly response. He doesn't really tell me if he found any. He got new codes or any secure or anything like that. He's like, I assure you these are good. I run back up, I get it, get a keyed in and program just to make sure they're new codes and we're good to go. That, unfortunately, is not a process that can be streamlined and speed.

01:53:54.080 --> 01:53:54.384
Right.

01:53:54.432 --> 01:54:16.324
So that's going to make us, our response time a little worse. But it is a necessary step in this particular endeavor because usually they'd already be pre programmed, they'd be ready to go on both air. So we're. I get the cable out and I get that done. That is usually takes about another ten to 15 minutes. So we'll say the bird is up in the air in about 25.

01:54:16.492 --> 01:54:17.200
Right.

01:54:19.020 --> 01:55:17.576
But I key them in the same way. No unusual pings, no weird stuff. Our aircraft is very close to the boat because we think we're close to where the crash site would be. We see debris, we see nobody. Don't know what happened. After a pretty lengthy search, I'm freaking the fuck out because I feel personally responsible. Whether I am or am not is irrelevant to me at this point. And I kind of just fall into myself. Right. Like, I feel responsible. It's kind of like the best thing I can kind of describe it as is, like when you're just overwhelmed with something and you're just kind of. Everything kind of fades, feels like you're under. Like everything sounds like you're underwater, almost like everything's muffled. I can hear a weird ringing, which was probably just my military great tinnitus, but it doesn't matter. That's all I'm really hearing, and I'm freaking out.

01:55:17.648 --> 01:55:19.120
I believe that's called a panic attack.

01:55:19.200 --> 01:57:06.548
Yeah, that's probably what it's called, but I've never had one to that particular extent myself. So I'm trying to describe it. And it's kind of like in same private Ryan after a dude gets blasted with a grenade, right? Like just you're like you're in yourself. You're kind of disoriented. Everything sounds weird and you're hearing this ringing, except for it's not from a concussive blast of a grenade, you know, but they search a pretty significant area, but afraid to get closer, you know, because we just got somebody shot down. So we don't want to get too close to post and let until we figure this out. I'm gonna say whether this is protocol or not, I'm gonna say 2 hours, right? Search for 2 hours in the vicinity of where we think the aircraft went down. That's a pretty long response time, right? Because we think we know where they went down. Whereas like, if it's a man or board drill, you don't know when guy fell out. We just know that it got reported. Somebody noticed, somebody missing. Whatever they look for, as long as they feel is necessary. It's rare that they find a motherfucker, but, you know, we don't find any bodies. We don't really. We find debris of the aircraft. The assumption is that they're underwater. The life jackets and support stuff that they wear don't immediately inflate. So if you've been blasted out of the sky at least as this, to my knowledge, I wasn't a pilot. I don't know for sure, but there's no bonds. There's a crew of four. Done. So pilot, co pilot.

01:57:06.724 --> 01:57:07.132
Aw.

01:57:07.196 --> 01:57:13.956
And a spotter. Right, like, so crew of four is gone. That aircraft is just blowing the pits, man.

01:57:13.988 --> 01:57:31.318
When you arrive, I mean, the debris field is pretty wide. Helicopter crashes pretty rough. A lot of shit moving at very high speeds in very different directions. Probably a small, I would assume a small patch is on fire. Jet fuel floats and. Yeah, very flammable, actually.

01:57:31.414 --> 01:57:40.542
Not as flammable. Not as flammable as you might think. But from a missile strike, with the temperature that hits, I almost guarantee there would be some sweet fire. Something would be lit.

01:57:40.646 --> 01:57:59.656
It's a pretty rough sight, but with that, you kind of fade back to the panel briefing penalty. You just finished telling this and telling them this information in the manner that would make sense. Naval, right.

01:57:59.808 --> 01:58:01.180
Much more formal.

01:58:01.840 --> 01:58:18.240
The thing that my very civilian ass try to quickly recreate. And so at the time we. What rank had you reached when you were. When the event happened?

01:58:18.320 --> 01:58:19.340
81.

01:58:19.720 --> 01:58:25.714
Sorry. He says the world. Oh, what rank would olnock qualify as right now?

01:58:25.802 --> 01:58:26.410
E eight.

01:58:26.490 --> 01:58:34.110
E eight, which is the word is senior chief. Senior chief. And as I remember, you were saying you were trying hard to become a chief.

01:58:34.450 --> 01:58:50.916
Yes, I wanted to make master chief. That's the e nine. I didn't make it before retirement, and I'm kind of burned out there. A lot of things went south after this incident in my head, not necessarily for navy, but for me, you know.

01:58:51.068 --> 01:59:06.356
So one thing that makes this pill possibly harder to swallow for you in a roundabout way down the road when it comes time. Cause you said in order to reach the rank of chief, you go before a panel of pre existing chiefs.

01:59:06.428 --> 01:59:11.440
Yes. And then it continues from that point on. You go to the board. It's not just your chest.

01:59:12.990 --> 01:59:52.422
You obviously, you did well on your evals, you did well in your testing, so you made it to the right. This incident is actually one of the ones that's brought up in deciding whether you are earning the ring. And your actions in making sure that the secondary aircraft would not be shot down is what is one of the final sighting points that actually earns you the ranks. Instead of letting it be two birds going down in the panicked response, having the werewolf to identify accurately what the fail was and take the steps to prevent it so we didn't lose two.

01:59:52.446 --> 01:59:53.090
Birds.

01:59:54.790 --> 02:00:11.060
Is actually a deciding factor for you in reaching the rake, which I can imagine would have a bit of a bittersweet. You blame yourself for the incident, and it's benefiting your career at the same time.

02:00:11.680 --> 02:00:27.352
And it would have been a particularly odd situation as an at. One typically would not go out on the boat as the lead avionics technician. He would usually be like the lead petty officer. So I'd be like, chief is like your manager on shift, right?

02:00:27.416 --> 02:00:28.020
Right.

02:00:28.400 --> 02:00:36.408
Then your first class petty officer that isn't specifically a lead would be very typically like your assistant.

02:00:36.464 --> 02:00:36.632
Right?

02:00:36.656 --> 02:00:52.576
Like the assistant manager underneath that. That would be what I would normally go out as under that particular set of orders. However, we were short on qualified ATS to be out as a lead. And I had a very young junior, which is why I was programming the codes and not him.

02:00:52.688 --> 02:00:53.192
Gotcha.

02:00:53.256 --> 02:01:10.464
I was teaching him, and we were walking through that process. So it took a little longer to get that first set of codes in. And the first thing my junior learns about putting these codes in is if you put them in wrong, somebody fucking dies. It's a pretty hard thing. I feel pretty shitty about the whole thing.

02:01:10.592 --> 02:01:13.824
Fair, a vital lesson, but taught in.

02:01:13.832 --> 02:01:16.424
A very brutal, rough, hard knocks way. Yeah.

02:01:16.472 --> 02:01:38.010
Yeah. And down the road, the it tech involved, he receives some pretty heavy. What's the word? Consequences.

02:01:38.090 --> 02:01:39.602
Yeah. Disciplinary actionary.

02:01:39.746 --> 02:01:58.410
Disciplinary actions. Yeah. Some very heavy handed. He is relieved of his position immediately. He's immediately relieved. Once they are able to determine that you did indeed, they. Obviously there would be, I would assume, some degree of fail safe to identify that you put in the code you were given.

02:01:59.190 --> 02:02:16.168
There'd be a lengthy process. They didn't expect as much as they could. We would have attempted to have recovered the IFF module from the aircraft debris, whether it was functional or not. That would be something I believe they would try to do fair.

02:02:16.224 --> 02:02:19.168
And I would assume the birds have a black box just like civilian aircraft.

02:02:19.224 --> 02:02:22.464
I think so. I don't know if it's called a black box, but yeah, there's some.

02:02:22.512 --> 02:02:54.018
Something that serves that purpose. And so they take their time with this. This is a serious incident, especially with it being so close to China. Yeah, they take their time and they're very thorough, but they do end up. You don't. You don't necessarily know what happens to the it officer. Right. He's gone. You don't. You personally never see him again. And you know that the guy that replaces him, he's a little slower. To get information up the chain, you assume it's I ain't make the mistake that dude did.

02:02:54.074 --> 02:02:54.562
Fail safe.

02:02:54.586 --> 02:02:55.190
Yeah.

02:02:56.210 --> 02:03:06.520
And you do know that there are some minor, probably don't actually solve the problem kind of change put in place that make your job honestly more difficult.

02:03:07.380 --> 02:03:09.240
That is the military way. Yeah.

02:03:10.500 --> 02:03:40.130
But with that, we're going to flash back to the party. Mel, you rolled a 21 on your charisma saving throw. You don't feel great. You don't feel horrible. As soon as you cross into the treeline, you feel a change. Jeff is doing fucking terrible.

02:03:40.590 --> 02:03:41.358
Hmm.

02:03:41.494 --> 02:03:45.050
You cross the treeline and Jeff immediately doubles over in pain.

02:03:45.750 --> 02:03:46.570
Hmm.

02:03:50.750 --> 02:03:57.460
You're pretty sure you see someone something a little ways down the trail.

02:03:59.320 --> 02:04:00.220
Okay.

02:04:01.080 --> 02:04:30.430
You see them very. You can't see their face really. They're more of a shadow. But, you know, they lock eyes with you. They shake their head in a very disappointed fashion. Have they disappeared? What are you guys doing?

02:04:31.610 --> 02:04:32.906
Hauling ass.

02:04:33.098 --> 02:04:35.150
Hauling ass and checking behind us.

02:04:35.850 --> 02:04:40.946
I think I might try to catch up with Jeff to try to figure out if there's anything we can do to help him.

02:04:41.018 --> 02:05:05.276
So Jeff is behind me. I'm in the front. I can see and I know the horses. So we break off at a trot, a quick trot right out the gate. Once I feel the horses are warmed up a minute or two, we kick it up to a full run, and it's a full gallop down the road in the nighttime, which is terrifying if you've never done it under the best of circumstances.

02:05:05.348 --> 02:05:05.964
Oh, yeah.

02:05:06.092 --> 02:05:09.400
Mel might think her concussion's, like, flaring up.

02:05:10.870 --> 02:05:30.150
Elliot trusts the horses, and Elliot can see, and he knows that we're gonna be okay doing this. So we're just busting full bore and doing this. He can't see behind him. He doesn't know what's going on with Jeff. So he's gonna hit a full run as long as he feels it's safe with the horses.

02:05:30.270 --> 02:05:31.006
Okay.

02:05:31.158 --> 02:05:59.520
And he's gonna push the horse. But the horses have been exercising a lot. They've had couple days of rest. Being in the stable. They're well fed. Elliot knows them good. He's gonna push them as far as he dares, knowing that these horses are good, they're traveled. And then he's gonna go, okay, this is enough. Now I'm gonna have to break down, get him, you know, get there, get him to breathe. And because he knows he. He. The horses will go, but they won't. It can be bad.

02:05:59.600 --> 02:06:08.150
Right? So for someone who doesn't do horses rough, rough estimate, it doesn't have to be any kind of precise. Is that an hour? Is that 30 minutes?

02:06:08.650 --> 02:06:16.186
You're probably looking at about 2025 minutes Max that you can get before. You've got to give them a chance to breathe.

02:06:16.258 --> 02:06:16.730
Okay.

02:06:16.810 --> 02:06:21.818
Which is you don't have to come to a stop. You can just bring them back down to a walk.

02:06:21.994 --> 02:06:27.716
We'll say that's ample time to crest. You make it over, and you're started down.

02:06:27.788 --> 02:06:28.440
Cool.

02:06:29.100 --> 02:06:33.060
When it's. When you make the decision to pump the brakes a little bit.

02:06:33.100 --> 02:06:50.116
And so when. So when I start slowing down, all the other horses are kind of. Kind of catch up. Everybody else will slow down. And at that kind of a run, you can't really. It's hard to talk. It is. It sounds weird, but you've got enough. Between the hoofbeat noise and the wind in your ears, you can't really talk.

02:06:50.228 --> 02:06:51.532
Oh, yeah. Horses are loud.

02:06:51.636 --> 02:06:52.092
Yeah.

02:06:52.196 --> 02:06:54.688
Especially this. This is a hard pack.

02:06:54.864 --> 02:07:07.168
Yeah, it's a lot. So I'll go as far as I can like this call 1520 minutes, and then we'll kick back to a fast walk, and then Elliot's gonna reassess. Okay. How's everybody doing?

02:07:07.264 --> 02:07:08.656
God, my ass is killing me.

02:07:08.728 --> 02:07:17.576
And at that point, Mel's like, Elliot, you've gotta stop. Jeff's gonna go down. And of course, Mel doesn't feel girl great at this point either, but okay.

02:07:17.648 --> 02:07:26.810
You look back, Jeff's holding on. Yeah, but that's the best descriptor. For what? He's not riding this horse. He's clean, hanging on.

02:07:26.850 --> 02:07:44.830
Yeah, he's bundled up, bunched over, hands around. I know the image. So I'm going to drop back. It's not going to work because I'm out of spell slots. I'm going to attempt again to cast cure wounds. I've got nothing. My spell slots are gone. And I'm like, jeff, how you doing, Buddha?

02:07:45.320 --> 02:08:02.180
You slow down and he's able to look up. He's got blood coming out of his nose. His eyes are pretty bloodshot. He's looking pretty rough. It looks like some of the what had been scars, more of like the cut style, are starting to open.

02:08:03.240 --> 02:08:06.460
Mel looks at him and says, did you have power too?

02:08:07.520 --> 02:08:08.304
Yeah.

02:08:08.472 --> 02:08:13.626
Oh, we have a couple of the healing potions we stole.

02:08:13.778 --> 02:08:22.070
I think so too. Does Mel change any, like, just, like, is there any change there or just a general?

02:08:23.530 --> 02:08:24.538
What do you mean?

02:08:24.634 --> 02:08:27.830
Like, does she get any worse or is it just general?

02:08:28.170 --> 02:09:04.958
It's just a general malaise. Very tired. You feel like, honestly, it wouldn't feel too different from. You've had the flu for like a week. This is the first day you're back. You're just that body fatigue, as if, as if you had like. As if you had a nine volt that had just got disconnected. Your power source feels. Yeah, out of bounds.

02:09:05.094 --> 02:09:11.530
This is more that, guys. This is more than. He escaped. He was like me.

02:09:13.270 --> 02:09:15.238
Did you not read the fine print either?

02:09:15.334 --> 02:09:17.290
Oh, for fuck's sake, James.

02:09:18.550 --> 02:09:21.570
There is no choice.

02:09:24.030 --> 02:09:26.118
Emma, you said we think we have one of those.

02:09:26.174 --> 02:09:29.416
We do. Hang on, I've got them in my pack here, and she'll dig around.

02:09:29.488 --> 02:09:31.592
We'll give him one of the cure rooms portions.

02:09:31.696 --> 02:09:32.704
Hand over a standard.

02:09:32.752 --> 02:09:37.220
I think this is magical. Some elves helped us with this. Try drinking this.

02:09:38.040 --> 02:09:43.248
You're very kind. These. Are you sure? These are hard to come by.

02:09:43.424 --> 02:09:45.216
We haven't needed them so far.

02:09:45.368 --> 02:09:48.980
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. You've helped us, Jeff.

02:09:50.360 --> 02:10:42.120
He drinks it. Try to think. I don't think you guys have seen the healing potion. Actually, he drinks it and you see immediately some of the scar because again, he's still wearing the full robe, so you can really only see at this point. His head. His arms are pretty. Well, it's brisk here in the high country. And, like, it's Cinco de Mayo, it's pretty chilly, so he's not letting it ride up his arms or nothing, but his head's exposed. Keeping a hood on while you're hauling ass on a horse would be damn near impossible. And immediately, you start to see some of his scars stitch back together. The blood stops coming out of his nose. He looks a bit better off. Definitely not cured.

02:10:43.190 --> 02:10:50.574
I feel like James probably wouldn't have seen that because he's probably paying more attention to the rear. That's double checking, checking surroundings.

02:10:50.702 --> 02:10:55.758
So with that. Seeing that a sight, is that. That helped? That help you out, Jeff?

02:10:55.894 --> 02:10:56.902
Yes, thank you.

02:10:56.966 --> 02:11:01.974
Okay, we. We got to keep moving. Yes, we got to keep moving till daylight.

02:11:02.102 --> 02:11:05.750
They will not stop looking through the boy.

02:11:05.910 --> 02:11:11.584
Yeah, I'm not worried about them at the moment. I'm more worried about the huge ass freaking werewolf that's out here right now.

02:11:11.712 --> 02:11:12.240
Fair.

02:11:12.360 --> 02:11:34.180
We'll worry about them after day. So he's gonna. He's gonna tell James. James, you can see in the dark like I can. Yeah, we're just following the road. We don't need to push this hard. Keep a decent pace. I'm gonna go to the back. I like to believe that if we're anywhere, we're ahead, and I want to stay in the back and watch our back trail.

02:11:34.570 --> 02:11:35.430
Okay.

02:11:36.650 --> 02:12:10.180
Once your horse and you can feel them, they're heaving right now, and they probably got a pretty decent sweat. Once that sweat starts to dry up, don't let the horses get cold. We're going to stay at a walk. Once their breathing gets back down, we'll get back to a trot. Well, then we'll go to our normal travel trot, lope walk, trot, rope walk. Keep it that one. We're going to travel all the way to daylight. We can't. We can't stop. So it's gonna be a long night. It's gonna be a long night. I wanna fall. I wanna watch our back trail. Keep your boat ready up here, up front.

02:12:10.260 --> 02:12:11.044
Okay.

02:12:11.212 --> 02:12:13.244
And just keep following the road.

02:12:13.332 --> 02:12:14.860
Just keep following the road.

02:12:14.980 --> 02:12:15.692
All right.

02:12:15.836 --> 02:12:21.964
And so then he's gonna go around. He's gonna get to the back. He's gonna check on everybody, check on the horses as we go.

02:12:22.052 --> 02:12:23.380
Mel, are you doing okay?

02:12:23.500 --> 02:12:37.230
I feel like at the what? Listen to Elliot talk about riding all night. Mel actually goes little green, but no one can tell because it's dark. Like, the thought of being jostled on a horse all night long at that level of fatigue is like, oh, God.

02:12:38.050 --> 02:12:43.810
I actually think to make this mechanically something. I think you have a level of exhaustion.

02:12:43.930 --> 02:12:45.122
I bet I do.

02:12:45.306 --> 02:12:50.698
Do you need. I can take Jacob if that makes it easier for you.

02:12:50.834 --> 02:12:55.510
I think you better rough. I might fall off the before the night is over.

02:12:56.050 --> 02:13:03.338
All right, let's get him moved over if that way I can cast mage armor on a second if I need to, but.

02:13:03.354 --> 02:13:04.050
Yeah, good plan.

02:13:04.090 --> 02:13:10.030
I'll be in the back. I'm gonna be pretty free in case we need to make a running.

02:13:10.890 --> 02:13:11.770
Bullshit.

02:13:11.890 --> 02:13:26.524
Yeah, and I'll tell everybody if we run into trouble, we get attacked. You guys just keep. Keep going. I'm probably the only one in this group that can shoot off a horse backwards. Yeah, I'm probably the only one in this group that can ride a horse backwards and shoot at the same time.

02:13:26.692 --> 02:13:27.800
I can't even.

02:13:28.980 --> 02:13:32.188
Do not. Absolutely not in the middle of the frickin night war.

02:13:32.324 --> 02:13:33.716
Obviously not right now.

02:13:33.788 --> 02:13:35.108
We can work on that later.

02:13:35.204 --> 02:13:37.108
Not trial by werewolf.

02:13:37.204 --> 02:13:38.748
Yeah, you know what I had?

02:13:38.804 --> 02:13:41.860
You can shoot us some fence posts when we get out of here. In the daylight.

02:13:41.980 --> 02:13:51.970
Yeah. Misspent youth. Misspent youth. Anyway, let's keep rolling. I'll be in the back if we run into something, you guys just keep moving. I'll keep them slowed down here in the back.

02:13:53.550 --> 02:14:06.850
Awesome. We'll switch back to old knock, make a. You have a plus four to perception with advantage. Roll a d 20.

02:14:08.390 --> 02:14:10.970
Roll badly. Roll badly.

02:14:11.900 --> 02:14:14.880
Ah. What was that one?

02:14:16.180 --> 02:14:23.160
Those were both actually from, but, uh, my, that's gonna be a 23.

02:14:24.620 --> 02:14:26.520
You should have rolled one from the jail.

02:14:27.620 --> 02:14:37.506
So you hear a lot of movement. It's a fair clip away from you. Yeah, but it's moving in the same general direction as you.

02:14:37.698 --> 02:14:41.490
God damn it. Okay. Yep, I'm picking up where this is going.

02:14:41.650 --> 02:14:52.890
So you again, you're not. You're no longer actively rage. I would almost consider this more of angry curious. I mean, you're out. You're. You're a little angry.

02:14:52.970 --> 02:14:55.986
That's just that it's kind of default setting anyway.

02:14:56.098 --> 02:15:03.410
Yeah. Not unfamiliar, but you start moving in that general direction.

02:15:06.910 --> 02:15:07.510
Okay.

02:15:07.590 --> 02:15:09.530
Horses travel at 60 foot.

02:15:11.110 --> 02:15:13.050
Just so we're clear on that.

02:15:14.510 --> 02:15:18.102
Perfect. Elliot, you are searching behind you.

02:15:18.166 --> 02:15:18.574
Yes.

02:15:18.662 --> 02:15:23.610
Let's have perception, survival.

02:15:26.310 --> 02:15:30.332
I'm gonna be pretty limited. I've only got six. Cause that's all I can see.

02:15:30.436 --> 02:15:31.932
You're in your favorite terrain.

02:15:32.116 --> 02:15:32.892
Straight roll.

02:15:32.956 --> 02:15:33.560
Sure.

02:15:37.780 --> 02:15:40.320
Still not bad. 17.

02:15:40.980 --> 02:16:09.810
Perfect. You are fully confident you see game trails that you're. That are criss crossing this road. You are fully confident there is nothing within your immediate vicinity. But you are with that. We'll let that 1717 ride for a while. And you're just following the road.

02:16:10.150 --> 02:16:11.690
I'm just following the road.

02:16:13.870 --> 02:16:31.782
Perfect. So we're just gonna for a little while. You guys are riding. It's honestly, it's really pretty out here. Here it's cold. There's still some snow up here. You're high enough now. There's some snow. And honestly, the full moon glinting off that snow. It's a near. There's just enough clouds to make the moon look scoopsy.

02:16:31.846 --> 02:16:34.662
Yeah. I mean, everybody's probably got dim light to 20ft.

02:16:34.726 --> 02:16:36.014
Yeah. Yes, exactly.

02:16:36.062 --> 02:16:38.166
Yeah. Full moon on snow. You can see pretty good.

02:16:38.238 --> 02:16:41.650
It's stunning out here. The snow is sparkling and glistening.

02:16:42.190 --> 02:16:47.372
You know, this would be really pretty if we weren't trying to hide from a rage monster that, God turn into a werewolf.

02:16:47.396 --> 02:16:49.960
If we weren't running for our lives, this would be gorgeous.

02:16:50.340 --> 02:16:53.280
Did anybody see an aspen? I want to lick it.

02:16:53.780 --> 02:16:56.556
We don't have the time and a place. Time to place.

02:16:56.628 --> 02:17:01.764
I mean, yes, there are aspens. Maybe this high up there wouldn't be. You'll drop down into aspen.

02:17:01.892 --> 02:17:05.644
If you're feeling queasy. Licking trees is probably not the best course of action.

02:17:05.772 --> 02:17:07.960
I can't think of a better one right now.

02:17:08.820 --> 02:17:12.458
Not throwing up and we'll say you guys are.

02:17:12.524 --> 02:17:15.014
How about we don't talk about it? That only makes it worse.

02:17:15.062 --> 02:17:15.850
There you go.

02:17:17.110 --> 02:18:32.960
You guys are able to follow this trail for a good couple hours, zigzagging your way down the mountain. You know, this is a mountain. This is no hill. So there's some very steep areas. You have to zag north for a good bit because you come across a series of cliffs that would totes kill you. There's a couple of areas where you got to go pretty slow because the roads got mostly washed out. You can see a couple of scars from the last couple years worth of fires. So there's a couple. You open up and do a couple of blackened fields. Not the right word. There's some grass blackened flatbeds where the fire. Yeah, fire cleared everything. But you do you hear occasionally the braying of wolf? It seems to be kind of keeping in your general direction. It doesn't never sound like it's really gaining on you, but you don't. You don't seem to be losing. Sometimes it's a little further away, sometimes it's a little closer.

02:18:34.620 --> 02:18:35.980
Seems like we're keeping pace.

02:18:36.060 --> 02:18:38.800
As long as the horses can keep up, we'll be okay.

02:18:42.340 --> 02:19:18.525
Mel doesn't get to feeling any better throughout this ride. Definitely. You feel that. You feel almost a deep bone fatigue, genuine exhaustion. Like, the closest you've maybe come to this was pulling an all nighter to study the night after a bench. When you realize you went out partying on a Saturday and Sunday, you have a paper due kind of fatigue.

02:19:18.637 --> 02:19:19.689
Fucking fun.

02:19:20.329 --> 02:19:23.241
I've done that. Like, I made that mistake twice. That was really dumb.

02:19:23.305 --> 02:19:25.229
Yeah. Don't recommend that.

02:19:27.609 --> 02:19:39.949
Your brain feels tired. Your body feels tired. You're able to stay on the horse. You're not at any danger of falling off, but you are definitely almost the walking dick.

02:19:41.889 --> 02:19:46.880
I think because Emery's behind both Mel and Jeff, she's kind of keeping an eye eye on them.

02:19:47.220 --> 02:19:49.760
I'm sorry. You always have to babysit Emery.

02:19:52.860 --> 02:20:02.860
I, the player, fall into this role. Emery just happened to be here. We've got two watchful eyes out there. I can't see in the dark. I can see.

02:20:02.900 --> 02:20:05.564
So you're just staring the two in the middle just like.

02:20:05.612 --> 02:20:07.760
And make sure you don't fall off your horses.

02:20:11.430 --> 02:20:12.134
Yep, yep.

02:20:12.182 --> 02:20:15.118
Please tell the front runner if there's a man overboard.

02:20:15.214 --> 02:20:17.210
Yeah, I will. Absolutely.

02:20:25.630 --> 02:20:26.478
Hello.

02:20:26.654 --> 02:20:28.766
Sorry, that was.

02:20:28.838 --> 02:20:29.970
You guys all hear that?

02:20:30.870 --> 02:20:32.110
What was that?

02:20:32.190 --> 02:20:33.690
The bad guy is rebooted.

02:20:34.110 --> 02:20:37.388
That would be if you had a nice patron. The message to us.

02:20:37.534 --> 02:20:38.260
Yeah.

02:20:38.800 --> 02:20:39.952
Instead of the scream.

02:20:40.016 --> 02:20:42.460
That's if you got Bill Gates as your.

02:20:44.480 --> 02:20:55.860
That's a different kind of creepy God of Microsoft. No, I don't want to do an update. I don't want to do an update. I need to cast a spell.

02:20:58.040 --> 02:20:58.632
Oh, my God.

02:20:58.656 --> 02:21:00.200
That'd be funny. Yeah.

02:21:00.240 --> 02:21:06.228
All of your level ups is just system updates. System reboot, iOS updates.

02:21:06.284 --> 02:21:10.132
Basically rebooting now. No, not now. I need you now.

02:21:10.276 --> 02:21:11.380
Fine. What do you mean?

02:21:11.460 --> 02:21:14.760
I didn't see the last is your default.

02:21:19.500 --> 02:21:21.236
Was a warlock. Of course you would.

02:21:21.308 --> 02:21:22.900
Yes, I would.

02:21:23.060 --> 02:21:24.780
So if Internet explains, it would be ask.

02:21:24.820 --> 02:21:37.222
It would be like asking if you want to set like an actual spell as your default, which would be useless because it's always asking about edge. And I don't want to use edge. I use edge to download prompts.

02:21:37.366 --> 02:21:41.454
Edge? Yeah. Everyone uses edge once to download something else.

02:21:41.502 --> 02:21:42.942
Yeah. Yeah. Yes.

02:21:43.126 --> 02:21:43.550
Edit.

02:21:43.590 --> 02:21:44.022
Terrible.

02:21:44.086 --> 02:21:45.010
Oh, my God.

02:21:48.110 --> 02:21:59.300
Sorry. Just a quick momentum. Great. I am sending you something to your phone.

02:22:00.120 --> 02:22:03.224
It'd be like if it was like, do you want to sell the light?

02:22:03.272 --> 02:22:06.656
Can't trip as your right default spell. No.

02:22:06.728 --> 02:22:09.184
And absolutely not.

02:22:09.312 --> 02:22:09.980
Never.

02:22:11.240 --> 02:22:23.682
Bulldog. Okay, I want you to make another perception check. Elliot, you rolled a 17.

02:22:23.826 --> 02:22:24.550
Yes.

02:22:25.690 --> 02:22:39.390
Everyone else you roll. What was it? A 17. Perception. Okay, everyone else roll a quick perception check. Those of you without dark vision, you got a roll at disadvantage because you're.

02:22:39.730 --> 02:22:42.066
Yeah, I just did. That's. Give me a four.

02:22:42.218 --> 02:22:43.474
Cool. That tracks.

02:22:43.562 --> 02:22:44.762
Yeah, that totally tracks.

02:22:44.786 --> 02:22:48.530
14. Okay, 17 tracks.

02:22:48.830 --> 02:22:49.526
16.

02:22:49.678 --> 02:22:53.286
Perfect. That was rolling with advantage and your robo stats.

02:22:53.318 --> 02:22:54.126
Oh, I didn't roll well.

02:22:54.158 --> 02:22:58.918
Advantage and that's a plus four to your perception as the wolf. Well, then it's not.

02:22:59.054 --> 02:23:00.526
That's a 21.

02:23:00.678 --> 02:23:03.174
What happens with a 16? That'd be 20.

02:23:03.262 --> 02:23:10.250
I was using my stats, which is a minus. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so instead of subtracting, you gotta put it back.

02:23:10.640 --> 02:23:13.464
It's still gonna be a 21. Cause that other one was a six.

02:23:13.552 --> 02:23:18.944
I apologize. That's a three. I don't even think my past doing great, guys.

02:23:18.992 --> 02:23:21.048
At this point, try not to murder me here.

02:23:21.064 --> 02:23:25.488
In a minute, you're looking at the back of your horse's neck. And that's about it.

02:23:25.584 --> 02:23:45.950
The three men at the table. Well, the two men at the table, currently not the most. Boyd, you hear something fairly large and move out in front of you.

02:23:46.250 --> 02:23:47.910
Oh, no.

02:23:48.970 --> 02:23:50.510
James, what is that?

02:23:50.970 --> 02:23:54.594
Bullnok is either a really pissed off Buffalo, or I think he found us.

02:23:54.722 --> 02:23:58.630
You smell, for the first time in a bit, some fear.

02:24:03.010 --> 02:24:21.742
Theater of the Mind is Jeremy Arfston as Elliot Randy Bain, Amanda Arfston as Melanie Kelly Me, Mike Purnell as Olnack Vaga Johnson, Michael Downs as James O'Brien, Casey Weingarten as Emery Lee Lee, and Mike Schoch as your dungeon master. We release new episodes every two weeks.

02:24:21.766 --> 02:24:26.286
So our next episode will release on September 29.

02:24:26.478 --> 02:25:02.362
If you want to follow us, our social media and website can be found on our link tree, which can be found in our podcast description. Also on the podcast description, you can find a link to Pinecast, as well as our referral code to get you 40% off of your first four months of a paid membership, as well as our referral link to epidemic sounds, which can get you a one week trial period. To experience their excellent platform, I added words. Whatever. Here we go. The music this week was sourced from epidemic sounds, who we are not sponsored by under the Creative Commons license. The songs today used in order in.

02:25:02.386 --> 02:26:01.290
Obscurity lies the Gate by Christopher Moe de Levson United we stand by Bright Arm Orchestra creeping by Pharrell Wooten to court by Anthony Earls final examination by J. Varton Homestead by Robert Ruth isolation by Pharrell Wooten personality interface by Joseph are you scared yet? By Pharrell Wooten, sphinx by David Celeste. Did you try your best? By Alex Slane, pet sematary by Mike Franklin, dark nature by Polar Nights, abandoned village by Lennon Hutton, no rest for the weary by Anthony Earls, and shunt by prosody. We also used gravel, rubber sole, walking steady loop zero one, and countryside crickets. Wind Night Zero one from the sound effects library.

02:26:05.350 --> 02:26:28.260
The theater of the mind theme intermission and outro were written by Mike Schock. Theater of the mind is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are used in a fictitious manner. So save the emails, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental, for the most part, all the time. Please don't sue us.

02:26:42.610 --> 02:26:43.274
Flowers.

02:26:43.322 --> 02:26:43.950
Yeah.

02:26:45.970 --> 02:26:48.234
Butterfly is weirdly consistent.

02:26:48.322 --> 02:26:50.658
Emery's got, like, Disney princess energy.

02:26:50.714 --> 02:27:00.986
I know. Well, the funniest thing, too, is I would love to see the one where Emery turns into a potted plant. Yeah, because the potted plant, apparently, is mine.

02:27:01.098 --> 02:27:05.050
Well, it's also because it's the funniest one that we knew about, so we just made it a running joke.

02:27:05.090 --> 02:27:15.140
But how funny would it be at this point if Emery turns into a potted plant and we're just looking at her and we're like, yeah, okay, I guess this is the thing. Now pick her up and let's go.

02:27:15.840 --> 02:27:17.860
How long do you think this one will take to wear off?

02:27:18.360 --> 02:27:19.720
Like, a minute, isn't it?

02:27:19.760 --> 02:27:19.976
Yeah.

02:27:20.008 --> 02:27:20.648
Yeah.

02:27:20.824 --> 02:27:21.648
Yeah.

02:27:21.824 --> 02:27:22.600
That would suck.

02:27:22.640 --> 02:27:29.512
While you're carrying her, I feel like combat would end and be like, well, I. Okay, come on.

02:27:29.536 --> 02:27:30.740
Where's Emery?

02:27:31.720 --> 02:27:37.610
Do you remember that plant being involved? That would be kind of scary.

02:27:38.150 --> 02:27:39.942
God, I don't even want to think about that.

02:27:39.966 --> 02:27:40.454
Poor Emery.

02:27:40.502 --> 02:27:45.550
It would probably be like a wild shape thing where if I, as a person, ran out of hit points, I.

02:27:45.630 --> 02:27:52.590
Jumped that to myself normal human self. Or what happened if you conjured a unicorn? How freaked out would all of us be?

02:27:52.750 --> 02:27:53.710
Holy shit.

02:27:53.790 --> 02:27:54.782
Oh, you know what?

02:27:54.846 --> 02:27:56.290
Unicorns are real, too.

02:27:56.990 --> 02:28:01.170
You know what? Of course those are things. See? It's not all bad. Evil magic.

02:28:01.640 --> 02:28:04.840
What about that clockwork thing that you summoned? And then was the.

02:28:04.960 --> 02:28:07.768
Oh, yeah, the little monodrome. Poor thing.

02:28:07.864 --> 02:28:10.912
It would have been really funny if we had ended up in the monodrome dimension.

02:28:10.936 --> 02:28:13.600
I know. That poor little guy. He didn't even last a round.