List of Transcripts

Pre-Show[]

BRENNAN: Hello, and welcome to Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. I'm your humble GM, Brennan Lee Mulligan. It's so wonderful to come back here for another episode of Calamity. Now last week, I didn't talk very much at the top of the show. This week, I'm not going to make the same mistake. I'm going to talk a little bit longer and give Marisha time before I throw to her for some announcements. So... (laughter)

BRENNAN: Marisha, what's your announcements?

MARISHA: Oh my goodness, perfect throw. I had time to prepare.

BRENNAN: I'm getting the hang of it. I'm getting the hang of it.

MARISHA: I am so excited, you guys, to announce--

SAM: (like Marisha) You guys.

MARISHA: A Familiar Problem, which is a new one-page RPG from Darrington Press. Now this is a game of magical familiars on a mission that was created by myself.

ALL: What?

MARISHA: I know. Alongside Honey Heist designer, Grant Howitt. (cheering)

MARISHA: Also, Crash Pandas. He's the best. Love you, Grant. In A Familiar Problem, you'll play as scrappy and stressed-out familiars, really trying to get a grip on the chaotic lives that your adventuring party subjects you to. You try to make a difference any small way that you can with what little abilities that you can. To prove that you're up to adventure, band together and undertake a daring quest of your own. Now you can find the game first at US stores participating in Free RPG Day on June 25th.

SAM: Nice.

LOU: Oh wow.

MARISHA: Internationally on July 23rd, and we'll release it on a big scale later this year.

TRAVIS: Big scale!

MARISHA: Big scale! (cheering)

LOU: Big scale release, guys.

MARISHA: Big scale release.

AABRIA: They call me Big Scale.

MARISHA: So stay tuned, but go to your friendly local game store first and support them and get some free RPGs on Free RPG Day.

SAM: Amazing.

MARISHA: You can learn more at darringtonpress.com. In addition--

SAM: Oh wait, there's more?

TRAVIS: Announcement number two!

MARISHA: Announcement number two. 4-Sided Dive, you guys, it's back. Episode three airs this Tuesday, June 7th at 7:00pm Pacific on Twitch and YouTube. That is the first Tuesday of the month. Come listen to people talk and fuck around.

AABRIA: That's it?

LOU: In the calendar.

MARISHA: It's great, it's in the calendar. Travis, for the merch announcement!

TRAVIS: I got a throw, I got a throw. You guys, it's 2022, which means we have a new Pride shirt. (cheering)

TRAVIS: So come celebrate Pride with our new "It's Love That Makes People" t-shirt. (awwing)

TRAVIS: Isn't that dandy? Oh, I should really hold it up. Laura's going to kick my ass. Look at all the little dice and stuff.

MARISHA: It's so cute.

TRAVIS: A portion of each of these sales go to our charity partners at OutRight Action International, which is a nonprofit aimed at researching, documenting, defending and advancing human rights for LGTBQIA+ people around the world. We love them, we've been working with them for years, and grab your new Pride shirt.

MARISHA: Yay! (cheering)

BRENNAN: Well--

LOU: Great announcements.

BRENNAN: Great. Really good announcements all around. For those of you coming back, this is episode two of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. A vision of an ancient past in the world of Exandria at the ending of the Age of Arcanum and the beginning of something strange and horrifying. For those of you that want to come in and join us, again, this is episode number two. I suppose, a little bit of a recap. Last week we met-- yeah.

ALL: Yeah, yeah.

BRENNAN: Last week, we met our wonderful heroes of Avalir in the Ring of Brass, the somewhat under-the-radar council of those who actually do the moving and shaking of the flying city of Avalir. We move and we shake. We met the Guildmaster of the Golden Scythe, Nydas Okiro.

LOU: That's the name of my character.

BRENNAN: The Keeper of Scrolls, Patia Por'co.

TRAVIS: Por'co!

AABRIA and LOU: Patia!

BRENNAN: First Knight of Avalir, Sir Zerxus Ilerez.

ALL: Zerxus!

BRENNAN: Herald of Avalir, Loquatius Seelie.

SAM: Oh, why hello, thank you.

BRENNAN: Architect Arcane, Laerryn Coramar-Seelie.

AABRIA: You're welcome.

BRENNAN: And Senior Sightwarden, Cerrit "Pinch" Agrupnin.

SAM and AABRIA: Ca-caw!

TRAVIS: Caw! (laughter)

AABRIA: Is he a seagull?

BRENNAN: On the eve of the Replenishment, which is the great holiday, once every seven years after a long seven-year venture, the city of Avalir traveling along Exandria's many leylines, returns back to Cathmoíra, its terrestrial sister city, and re-alights as the peak of the mountain on its ancient base, where once it stood as a full mountain. All of the magic that Avalir has stored up in its Etheric Net. All of the ether that the city has traded for and gathered and bartered for is released into the continent of Domunas, where it creates a flourishing of crops and newfound magic and all sorts of wonders and replenishes the land. We are on the eve of such a Replenishment this very day. However, some strange tidings have come to the city as some artifacts, some debris, some things broken, corroded and dispelled made their way aboard the city from its last port of call.

LOU: You talking 'bout Bola?

BRENNAN: Bolo. (laughter)

LOU: That's pretty rude, dude.

BRENNAN: Pretty rude, pretty rude to call someone debris. If I get called debris... You are debris, my man.

AABRIA: I don't think he's wrong. (laughter)

SAM: (like Bolo) I don't mind.

BRENNAN: "I don't mind. Why you call me this?" (laughter)

BRENNAN: The important thing is this: the detritus of the ritual of Vespin Chloras. Look him up, they did a whole video about the guy and what he did in the history of Exandria! Literally, you can go look it up, it's an amazing video, it rules, it's very cool. Made its way aboard Avalir. Something rotten within the heart of the city has begun to be exposed by our brave heroes. Only time will tell if they have caught it before it is too late. Without further ado, we return to Avalir and Exandria in tonight's episode of Critical Role.

(cheering)

(ominous music) (dramatic music)

Part I[]

BRENNAN: We return to exactly where we left off. There will be no skipping forward. The events of this night are all a little bit too critical, a little bit too close together. Important things happen in the span of a single breath here on the eve of the Replenishment. We return now to a small room off the side of the grand banquet hall in the Palazzo Por'co. Where Cerrit Agrupnin crouches in a room with a dis-animated scarecrow soaked with champagne, a mutilated dead body covered in carved runes and blood, and a cracked mirror in which you now only see your own reflection. Where do we find our intrepid Sightwarden in this moment having just witnessed the screaming visage of Vespin Chloras? I will clarify here in this moment, it is a face you recognize. Easily done at the Hawk's Nest at the Hall of Eyes, back in Cloudstone. Every senior archmage, anyone in any terrestrial city anywhere on Exandria that you have traveled has their image recorded and their arcane mark written down to be recreated at a Sightwarden's discretion with a Minor Illusion. So you, earlier today, when you were going into the room had Vespin Chloras' face animated with illusory magic in front of you to know the man by sight. Although I cannot say that you recognized him well in the mirror, given that most of the skin of his face had been peeled off.

TRAVIS: He threw his hand against the mirror and shattered it, right?

BRENNAN: He dived forward. It could have been his hand or his head or something along those lines that shattered the mirror.

TRAVIS: Then disappeared?

BRENNAN: Yeah, in the moment of its breaking disappeared and you're looking at a mirror again.

TRAVIS: I repressed it since last session.

LOU: I also forgot the scary part, yeah. It was legitimately scary.

TRAVIS: It's a coping tactic.

LOU: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Cerrit will stand there with his hawks still drawn, still at a ready position and say: Now that's not something you see every day.

AABRIA: I forgot. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Perfect.

TRAVIS: I'll scan the room again. I'll holster the hawks, and seeing this mangled face next to the dum-di-dum-dum, the hodmedods. Had to remember what it was. I'll go through it again because I never finished the investigation of the actual--

BRENNAN: Scarecrow.

TRAVIS: Right.

BRENNAN: You conclude your investigation there. You arrive at what you assume, normally in a construct there would be some animating thing, there'd be some glyph or some point of interaction where there would be its heart, its engine, something central to animate the thing. Going to the hodmedod, most of it is just fabric and a little bit of stuffing. There's some sort of-- Just something to pad out the clothing a little bit. Because these are for menial tasks. At its center, there is a glyph with the emblem of the Golden Scythe on it.

SAM: Golden Scythe.

BRENNAN: Yeah, created by the Golden Scythe. I think you would know on your investigation check, actually for this one, give me an arcana check, if you'd be so kind.

TRAVIS: Okay. Yeah, that's the big numbers, kids. Hang on, here we go. 12.

BRENNAN: You have--

MARISHA: Level 14. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Level 14, yay. You, a 12 is enough for you to know that you are disturbed by the lack of animating material within this hodmedod. I mean, you know that the Golden Scythe has had to find some way to put a fleet of constructs out on the market. I mean, these hodmedods are not only created by the Golden Scythe; they are sold. People can buy them. You can get them in different colors. You can customize them to whatever your house crest is. They sell these things. So as a result, you're wondering if there's no proprietary technology within it. But you're looking, it's like opening the hood of a car and looking in and seeing a Toyota emblem and no engine. You're like, "Where's the thing that makes it go? It can't just be the logo." So on a 12, you are mystified but have the feeling that being mystified is not due to you not understanding something, but rather you think that most people that create constructs would not understand. But it's easy enough, Nydas could probably explain it to you. It has the Golden Scythe logo on it.

TRAVIS: Cool, and as I check it, there's nothing that I need to make safe. There's nothing that this thing was carrying in terms of a weapon, an explosive device that I would recognize, nothing that feels like a security breach? Because I'm going to perform this on the corpse behind me as well.

BRENNAN: No security breach here. But I'll say this, I don't think-- even on a 12, I don't think you would be comfortable with the lack of a security breach. Meaning if the engine's not here, it's somewhere.

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah, got it. Anything on the--

LOU: Ooh.

TRAVIS: (laughs) Anything on the body with th-th-the chunks of f-f-flesh missing? Runes in its face.

BRENNAN: Let me ask this. So for this one, you can give me an investigation, but I'm going to tell you straight up that the biggest pressing thing about this is actually probably a medicine check.

BRENNAN: So if you get a super high investigation, I will give you some stuff. If you make a medicine check here, even a lower DC might produce more answers.

TRAVIS: I'll just do a medicine check.

BRENNAN: Go for it.

TRAVIS: Okay.

LOU: Let's go.

TRAVIS: (wheezes)

LUIS: Uh-oh.

TRAVIS: Six.

MARISHA: Call him Dr. Pinch.

BRENNAN: I think that you know enough. On a six, you know enough first aid. You know enough to triage a wound. Hands come down.

TRAVIS: Stop bleeding. (laughter)

LOU: It's the--

TRAVIS: Pressure, yeah.

BRENNAN: So you slit his throat. As you open the wound that you delivered to kill him. On the inside of his throat, it is riddled with growths.

SAM: Growths?

BRENNAN: Growths.

LOU: Growths.

MARISHA: Mm-hmm.

BRENNAN: There are things on the inside of his throat that look a dark pinkish-gray, mottled. You're not a doctor, you would have no words for these, but things of flesh that are not supposed to be here are here. It looks like this being, clearly was powerful enough to cast and hold concentration on an Invisibility spell, but looking at this, there's something inside this man's body that should not be here.

TRAVIS: Uh-oh, uh-oh. Okay, I'm not going to like that. So I will stand up. I'll actually drag the body into the middle of the floor a little bit, even if it's leaving a trail. I'll exit the room and I'm going to search immediately for Zerxus.

BRENNAN: As you are preparing to exit the room, you hear a noise. A sending stone in your back pocket, in one of the secret compartments that you keep, a small sending stone is (beeping).

TRAVIS: I'll retrieve it.

BRENNAN: As you hold it aloft and move it so that it can create noise, you hear a voice say, (child's voice) "This is Talon to Wingspan. Talon to Wingspan." (laughter)

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: "I am in position and I am reporting that Egghead is preparing to break curfew and sneak out of the house to go to a party, and you said that she's not allowed to leave but she's about to leave, and she has no idea that I'm here. She has no idea that I can see her. She's about to do it."

AABRIA: Oh my god. (laughter)

TRAVIS: This is Kir? (laughter)

BRENNAN: This is your son, Kir.

TRAVIS: My son, yeah.

BRENNAN: This is your son, Kir. He's using code names for you, himself, and your daughter that you have never heard before. They change a lot, the code names change a lot depending on what he thinks is cooler that week.

BRENNAN: You are standing in a room with a dead body, listening to your son describe your daughter about to head out to one of what would have to presumably be many parties happening on the eve of the Replenishment.

TRAVIS: Sure. Talon Two, this is Wingspan. Say again, this is Wingspan. Communication's a little shoddy.

LUIS: Wow.

TRAVIS: Did you say Egghead has snuck out?

BRENNAN: "Affirmative, I see her. She snuck downstairs into the kitchen, and she got a bottle, normally reserved for Wingspan and Clear Eye. And-- (laughter) And I saw her take a swig from it. And then she made a face like it was really bad. And then she took another swig from it, and then made a face like it was even worse. I don't know what it's about, but I know she's up to no good."

TRAVIS: This is very good, Talon Two, very good.

AABRIA: No.

TRAVIS: You are in no way to engage with Egghead. She's dealing in dark magic. (laughter)

BRENNAN: "I knew it!"

TRAVIS: Keep an eye, but keep your distance, I'll be-- I look over my shoulder at the gore in the room. I'll be home when I can. I-- I love you very much.

BRENNAN: "Is that-- Oh, I love you, too, Dad, sorry, I thought we were still doing--"

TRAVIS: No, no, Talon Two, Talon Two, keep objective. Keep objective professionalism.

BRENNAN: "Yeah."

TRAVIS: No telling who could be watching.

BRENNAN: "Copy that, Wingspan, and me too. Me too."

TRAVIS: Thanks, son, I'll be home later.

BRENNAN: "Okay. Do you know if Mom's supposed to come home tomorrow, or is she going to miss the whole Replenishment?"

TRAVIS: I don't know. I don't know. I think she's going to try and make it back by tomorrow. Your mom's a very busy scientist, brilliant woman, as you know. But she-- She works at her own pace, but I'm sure if she can be here, she will be.

BRENNAN: "Affirmative. We'll keep an eye to the skies, Pop. Wait, Wingspan. Over, and I'll tail Egghead and make sure that-- No funny business."

TRAVIS: Okay, copy that, Talon Two, don't get, again, too close and stay away from the evil dark magic liquor-- drinks that she's--

BRENNAN: "Don't worry, Dad, I already collected a vial, and I stored it in my evidence locker." (laughter)

TRAVIS: Talon Two, where would this evidence locker be located?

BRENNAN: "The evidence locker is in a secret compartment under my bed. No, it's in a different place, don't worry. Nothing else is under my bed, I have to go. I got to go real quick, but I'll talk to you soon."

TRAVIS: All right, talk to you, too, Talon Two. Over and out.

BRENNAN: "Over and out."

TRAVIS: It's actually just over, but-- (laughter)

TRAVIS: It's out.

AABRIA: Your kid's a snitch.

LOU: And you're a big fan of that. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Yeah, my son's loyal, my son's loyal. I know where his loyalties lie. That was so amazing, oh my god.

LUIS: His kid is way cooler than my kid. (laughter)

BRENNAN: That kid didn't get sucked into any portals. You know what I mean?

TRAVIS: So a sobering moment.

BRENNAN: A sobering moment.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: However, you are back in the room and you are about to leave the door.

TRAVIS: I put the Sending Stone back in my pocket, deep breath, exit the door, look for our First Knight.

BRENNAN: You exit. Patia. Out on the floor, you're still holding court. You see Cerrit walking out towards the front entrance. Actually, I think I'll have both of you joined, but we're going to wrap up what was happening outside as well. Outside the Palazzo, we just had both of you interact with Purvan Suul before his vanishing in some movement of divine magic and vanishing from the city of Avalir. I wanted to give you guys one last shot each at an insight check against Purvan. Just to add some context, he told some pretty heavy stuff to you guys, but I just wanted to see if there's any last--

SAM: Little thing we can glean?

BRENNAN: Yes.

SAM: I got a 24.

LUIS: Got a 16.

SAM: But if I fail, I can add another d4 to it.

BRENNAN: On a 16-- I think you recall the main thing that you recalled before that Zerxus recognized, which is-- The one thing that he was hinting at, he would not say.

LUIS: Yep.

BRENNAN: The words, "Betrayer Gods" never left his lips.

LUIS: I'm absolutely fixating on that.

BRENNAN: I think that on a 16 insight, because that is very-- That dwells within your mind. Why does Zerxus think he didn't say it?

LUIS: Because he's scared. Because he's a coward.

BRENNAN: There is something you recognize in Purvan. That as different as he feels he is from the mages of Avalir, he actually shares in common with them. I think Zerxus feels this way both of some of the archmages of the Septarion and beyond, and also this champion of the gods. Some ability that the mind, the heart, the soul are in control of what is real, and that if you do not speak it, it will not be. But some things are, regardless if you are afraid to name them. On a 24 insight, you've interviewed a lot of people, and Purvan told you a great deal. Knowing the fact that the Prime Deities cannot see what is unfolding is pretty profound in and of itself. But Purvan was also speaking very cryptically. As a master interviewer, someone that's interviewed people a lot of times, I think that your insight into Purvan, right, and if he was holding on to anything else, on a 24 insight, you don't think he was.

SAM: Okay.

BRENNAN: In your experience, people that have actual secrets, people that are being really secretive, deflect. If they have something they don't want you to know, they start talking about something else. People that act cryptic are often concealing not information, but the lack thereof. You think Purvan's carefully chosen words were not protecting dangerous knowledge, but were protecting pride. Something's going on and he didn't know what it was and didn't have the ability to speak to it. That's at least from your experiences as a reporter, that when people are that guarded, it's often because they're in free fall as well.

SAM: Okay. Okay.

BRENNAN: As you enter back into the Palazzo, the four of you converge together.

LUIS: Based on what I just gathered--

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: I know where Nydas went.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: I'm going to come back and meet you here. I'm going to go get him.

SAM: Now?

LUIS: To bring him, yes.

SAM: Shouldn't we get as many of us together as possible first?

LUIS: Right. So I'm going to go bring him.

SAM: Where did he go?

LUIS: I'm going to telepathically conjure Tempus.

SAM: Oh.

BRENNAN: (whooshing) Tempus alights down here. Incredible. As Tempus takes off with you into the air--

LUIS: I'll be back.

SAM: Okay, I mean, all right. (laughter)

BRENNAN: I think I'm actually going to just allow this to come down to a roll of the dice to see, because Nydas was also heading out posthaste.

LUIS: Right.

BRENNAN: So we're going to let this be a roll of the dice and Nydas also headed out a little while ago, prior to--

LUIS: Right.

BRENNAN: The conversation with Purvan.

LUIS: This whole interaction.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: He took off ahead of me.

TRAVIS: He's wearing dress shoes, there's no tread on those.

BRENNAN: We're going to make this a straight up dexterity check, so a dexterity check from Zerxus,

BRENNAN: And a dexterity check from Nydas.

AABRIA: Slipping in those celebration puddles.

SAM: Dex on dex.

LUIS: To see if I can find him?

SAM: Dex versus dex!

BRENNAN: Or rather to see if you can beat him to his destination and intercept him.

LOU: Flat dex?

LUIS: Is it my griffon's dex check? Or movement?

BRENNAN: Oh, this is actually just your-- Or actually, yeah, you can use Tempus. So you can use Tempus' dexterity, if you prefer.

LOU: Flat dex?

BRENNAN: Flat dex, that's it.

TRAVIS: Come on, baby.

LUIS: No.

TRAVIS: You got this.

LOU: I don't want to get caught.

LUIS: You won. (laughter)

AABRIA: Let me see that boy. I got you, you got this.

LOU: This guy. Oh, what did you get?

LUIS: I rolled a one.

LOU: Oh, thank you, god, I rolled a three.

LUIS: Well, I mean, it's a three total with my--

LOU: But mine's a total of seven.

LUIS: Okay, you win.

LOU: Oh, thank god. Yeah, that's what heavy plate'll get you.

LUIS: Hell yeah. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Absolutely perfect.

LOU: My dress shoes. My untreaded dress shoe beat your heavy plate. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Incredible. So, we actually are going to move. So, Nydas, you take off. You're off in Tempus--

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: -- flying as fast as you can. But you get to the Scythe really quickly. I'm actually going to say, on that dexterity check, you just grab a porter. You just, Dimension Door straight to the Scythe.

LOU: Great.

BRENNAN: You walk in. You are back in the central warehouse. There's a bunch of confetti on the floor, there's a couple little bits of popcorn and stuff from food carts that went out. It's like a ghost town in here now because everything is out on this. This is like, put on a show, right?

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: As you do, you land here and see, off in a corner, talking to a couple of different, like stevedores, essentially, there is Alessander, who looks up. As it has become night, you see that he actually has a small little candle lit on the top of his conical hat to light his way. You see, he turns around and says, "Guildmaster, I wasn't expecting you back so soon."

LOU: Alessander, a moment, please.

BRENNAN: "Oh, very well, one minute, my friends. Ah, well, it was incredible. This sphinx improvised an entire monologue of talking about the glory of Avalir. He's only been here for one day. I was very touched, actually."

LOU: Do people know? Did people applaud? I mean, was it like a slow-- Did he do it along the route or did he stop at one point and like--

BRENNAN: "He lost the crowd in the middle, but he--"

LOU: I mean, that's going to happen, you know?

BRENNAN: "But he got to the end and roared really loud."

LOU: Well, there it is.

BRENNAN: "And people just remember the end, you know?"

LOU: Of course.

BRENNAN: "They don't remember the middle."

LOU: Of course. Well, I'm glad it was a success. Alessander, I need four automatons right now.

BRENNAN: "Guildmaster, I truly loathe to be this person."

LOU: Alessander--

BRENNAN: "Impossible. It is the eve of the Replenishment."

LOU: Nothing is impossible.

BRENNAN: "Everything is spoken for, my lord."

LOU: Well, can we allocate? Can we shift four over right now?

BRENNAN: "I can find some off-duty. Well, first of all, the--"

LOU: Yes, yes.

BRENNAN: "Well, would hodmedods do?"

LOU: Do I know if hodmedods would do?

BRENNAN: No, this is quite complicated.

LOU: Ah. (laughs)

SAM: For what?!

LOU: Alessander, I appreciate-- I appreciate the thought, but we need more, we need better. Alessander--

BRENNAN: "Carrowhulks, colossi?" You know that those will not even fit in the--

TRAVIS: Colossi.

LOU: Got it.

BRENNAN: You see-- Give me either arcana or history yourself.

LOU: Great, happily.

BRENNAN: Because there's stuff that Alessander is not going to bring up because he just doesn't have the bravery to bring it up.

LOU: 21 arcana.

BRENNAN: There are automata that you guys are working on that you're building under contract for the city that are prototypes that are not-- That, literally, you're going to use the month on the ground to make active, but they are ready to go right now.

LOU: Yes. Alessander, I've had a thought. Can you requisition, in your special way, four of the prototypes we've been working on for the city? I'll take them this evening and we'll likely have them back on the morrow, if not the following day.

BRENNAN: He looks at you and says, "You want me to go and activate the Taxmen?"

LOU: Yes.

SAM: The Taxman? Cool.

TRAVIS: Come. On. That's a fucking code name.

BRENNAN: You see-- (laughter)

AABRIA: It makes me nervous when you write things down. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You see, he says, "My lord, I can activate them, but these are supposed to be completely mint preserved for trials during the--"

LOU: Of course, of course, of course, of course, Alessander. However--

BRENNAN: "This will be the first time they have been--"

LOU: Yes, Alessander, I understand.

BRENNAN: "All right."

LOU: But you have to understand, we are on the precipice of something truly magnificent. This is-- We will find a way to refurbish them in such a way that no one ever notices, Alessander. It will not be a problem. And if it is, that is on me. I will carry that weight.

BRENNAN: "Guildmaster-- I cannot fathom the weight you already carry. I hope you are all right, my friend, and know what you are doing."

LOU: I know exactly what I'm doing. So please, activate them. I've already dallied enough.

BRENNAN: He walks with you into a chamber that leads into a sunken subterranean area and he arrives at-- Warehouse isn't appropriate. You can't see the other end of this room. It stretches into the city for maybe a quarter of a mile. You see fleets of arcane engines, all keyed to emblems. You see-- The arcane equivalent of server banks upon which all of the engines that do not exist in the bodies of these constructs are all kept here in the headquarters of the Golden Scythe and you see Alessander walk up to four of them so new that some tools still rest on an artificer's work bench nearby. (four quick energy sounds) Quickly moving from the chamber of engines, you walk back up to an area of the warehouse completely dark. Alessander-- (snaps) The candle on his hat lights. You see, hulking at about 12 feet tall, massive steel constructs. (thundering footsteps) Step up. They are-- They look brutish and hulking. But you know that the engines that power their cognition, not sentient, but their perception, their reflexes, their instincts, their ability to follow out complex will is top of the line and state of the art. Another testament to your genius. Those blades on their back, sheathed. You know what those can do, too. (energy noises) (Taxman) "Guildmaster. What is thy bidding, sire?"

LOU: What would be the quickest way to the Arcane Heart that doesn't involve me marching four 12-foot automaton through the center of the city?

BRENNAN: You could pull a porter. A porter steps in, and-- Alessander looks up. This porter is like this young, thatch-haired girl. She's got the bellhop uniform on, looks up. See Alessander looks at her as she watches the automatons and creates the gate for you to go down to the Meridian Labyrinth. You see, he looks at you and casts the Message cantrip in reference to this porter. "Should I put the young porter on--"

LOU: Just the usual.

BRENNAN: "Archmage Por'co's list of friends with--"

LOU: Of course.

BRENNAN: "Bad memory, yes."

LOU: She'll see to it. (laughter)

SAM: Y'all are evil. (laughter)

LOU: What are you talking--? What are you talking about?

MARISHA: He don't know. He don't know.

LOU: You don't know.

MARISHA: You don't know.

LOU: You don't get it. You don't understand. You don't understand what we're working on, okay?

SAM: I'm an innocent reporter.

BRENNAN: I'm an innocent reporter, goddamn it.

TRAVIS: In a leopard print shirt!

BRENNAN: Cool. You vanish into the Meridian Labyrinth. Back up-- So, Zerxus, you are flying straight there right now, but we're actually going to jump back to the palazzo real quick with Loquatius, Cerrit, and Patia all together.

SAM: Then he just got on his pegasus, or whatever it is called, and then flew away. (laughter)

SAM: But anyway, this Purvan fellow seemed all sorts of out of sorts, and it seems to me-- Pretty heavy, whatever's going on.

MARISHA: What did you find?

TRAVIS: Is anybody trying to sneak a listen, stay close, act like they're not eavesdropping--

BRENNAN: Do whatever you want to do to find out, give me perception checks.

LOU: Ooh!

TRAVIS: Don't try and sneak up.

LOU: Means maybe.

TRAVIS: 25.

BRENNAN: I would say that anybody trying to sneak up would have to be invisible, but even that wouldn't fucking work. So-- I think that with that 25, you probably move the conversation back to The Ivy Table.

MARISHA: Mm-hmm.

TRAVIS: Okay.

SAM: Yeah, cool.

MARISHA: I turn and I announce to the room: Another round on the Por'cos. (claps)

BRENNAN: You see everyone cheers and laughs and makes merry, "Hey! To the Por'cos." You see the one guy who cheered Avalir before says, "The Por'cos, more like the Party-cos! Yes, yes!" (laughter)

BRENNAN: Throws another down the hatch. Love that guy, great energy.

SAM: So generous of you--

LOU: "Great energy."

SAM: -- to not charge your guests for the round of drinks.

MARISHA: The drunker they are, the less they'll notice.

SAM: Sure, sure. (laughter)

MARISHA: Let's go.

TRAVIS: So we get back to the table, and I'll say: Guard your faces, don't give anything away with your expressions.

SAM: My face turns into your face. (laughter)

MARISHA: That's fucking cool!

TRAVIS: I steel myself. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Right down to the teeth. God, it's uncanny. (laughter)

AABRIA: You have teeth?

TRAVIS: No, I don't have any teeth. (laughter)

BRENNAN: All incisors, big, flat, white teeth all the way around.

TRAVIS: Just big-ass molars in a beak. Breaking all the rules. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I'm afraid the game is afoot. The rats are already inside the fucking--

LOU: (claps)

TRAVIS: I went to go investigate the hodmedod that fell in the room. As I was doing that, I became aware of an invisible force that was behind me. I spun and struck down an individual. He's sealed in the room. He was covered with runes carved into his body, pieces of his flesh missing--

SAM: You killed someone at Patia's party?

TRAVIS: I did. They're no one important, okay? I wouldn't repeat that mistake.

SAM: I'm sure his mother thought that he was important.

MARISHA: Loquatius, it wouldn't be a first.

SAM: It's true.

TRAVIS: As I was doing that, I spun and saw a figure in the mirror. I saw Vespin Chloras, or at least an augmented visage of him, and he turned and looked and said that we would never make the Wildmother's embrace. The mirror shattered and he left. Now, I haven't had any fucking champagne tonight, before you ask. But I think this situation requires a higher level of our attention.

SAM: He said we wouldn't make the Wildmother's embrace, which you interpret to mean--

MARISHA: Landing.

SAM: Landfall.

TRAVIS: Yeah, totally.

SAM: Which is in a few hours.

TRAVIS: Yes.

SAM: So we've got Purvan, works for a god, says bad, bad things are coming from bad, bad gods, soon.

TRAVIS: Mm-hmm.

SAM: This man, Vespin Chloras, says we won't even make it to land. My ex-wife ran off to do something. Well, I see one clear way forward. We have to tell no one of this. Do nothing. I will make the normal announcement as we get closer to the Replenishment and make sure that everyone is happy and secure and feels like everything's normal, and we'll just ignore it for now. You can tell people on your end and work on it or whatever. Do whatever research, investigating you have to do. But for now, we just make sure that everyone stays calm and do nothing.

TRAVIS: Do you agree?

MARISHA: Uh-- (laughter)

MARISHA: To a sense, I do agree that panic never solves any problems. We should maintain a level of control of the population, but-- I don't like this many coincidences.

TRAVIS: It's a decision that we all need to make together. Laerryn left. Zerxus also left.

MARISHA: Laerryn took the bow, correct?

TRAVIS: Yes. And Nydas?

SAM: Nydas is off doing his thing. I don't even know where he went.

TRAVIS: We need to alert--

MARISHA: I think I know what Nydas is up to. If what you say is true, the fate of Avalir could lay in the hands of Laerryn.

BRENNAN: And, as Patia says that, we move deep underneath The Meridian Labyrinth.

SAM: Who are you? (laughter)

SAM: I thought I knew you!

AABRIA: Your loving ex-wife.

BRENNAN: Your loving ex-wife. Deep within the Meridian Labyrinth lies the Heart of Avalir. Once known as the Apparatus Arcane, this crystal engine lifted Avalir by the command of Imyr Por'co into the sky, because at that time it was the only one, but since then, there have been many, many more. The Registry of the Porter's Guild-- In addition to that, there are the Codex of Keys, the Helm of Avalir, the Ley-Rudder, which connects to the Navigator's Guild. However, we are in a room just off of the Ley-Rudder, and we see a quite fascinating new machine. Aabria, I'd actually love if you could describe the engine that now we behold, and the chamber that we see.

SAM: Is it a fuck machine? (laughter)

AABRIA: It started off as a fuck machine.

TRAVIS: It's a swing.

LOU: It's a chair.

AABRIA: It's a big swing.

LOU: We cut a hole in it. (laughter)

AABRIA: Well, I like that. It starts with this big central pendulum that swings back and forth that is generating and holding this massive miasma of ether and arcane energy. There's a circle of batteries that I've requisitioned and built, and each of them glows with a slightly different shade of green, that are feeding into this pendulum, and in the center underneath it is just this massive platform, and there are runes inscribed into it. But it seems like if you look really closely, you know like when you draw on paper and there's papers underneath, and you can see the imprint of other ones, she's been trying lots of different ones to try to figure out the right array to move in a new direction. She's worked really hard on the Arboreal Calix, but she needs to go in a different trajectory and hasn't figured it out yet.

BRENNAN: I love it. I'll say one thing, by the way. I don't think you would've worked very hard on the Arboreal Calix. That is actually a different-- But-- The machine in front of you. So this attaches to the Ley-Rudder, which I think that you've done a tremendous amount of work on in order to make this machine possible. I think also somewhere in this room there is a small token. Not something that is of mechanical significance. A small token of an old friend. A gift given to you long ago. A... locket, a simple orb inscribed with runes, to be filled with something of safe keeping, to remind you that the long years could part you, that friendship would win out in the end. What do you remember of your old friend, Evandrin?

SAM: (gasps)

BRENNAN: As you look at this locket.

SAM: That's his--

AABRIA: Despite the, like, suffusion of warm memories and good feelings that attended him handing me that locket, all she can remember is those last few days before everything broke bad, and the panic of not knowing how to help him, and not knowing how responsible she was as he began to fade. So it's that burst of joy and then the creeping guilt.

BRENNAN: (sighs) The memory of your friend becoming translucent, incorporeal, and fading, such that when the time came to inter, there were no remains. You behold this work in front of you.

AABRIA: I have a question.

BRENNAN: Yes.

AABRIA: Is this what's being dug into? What was formerly the Heart that the-- Okay, cool, cool. Yeah.

BRENNAN: What you now behold is an engine that you have named, and I'll let you say its name.

SAM: Flux Capacitor. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Flux Capacitor. However, as you prepare this here, Dweomer is here with you. Calum is not. Calum is out working on a bunch of Eldritch Battery stuff. There's a lot of work for the Replenishment that needs to happen. But you hear approaching footsteps, some of them quite heavy.

AABRIA: Well, this area that's been dug into and dug out. There are a bunch of the run-down automatons that needed replacing, so the moment I hear footsteps, I'm going to cast Animate Objects on them and set them up as a guard behind me.

TRAVIS: Oh snap.

BRENNAN: These constructs come back into being, momentarily animated simply by the word of command from the city's Architect Arcane. They leap back to action. Literally, I think just you blast ether from a receptacle on your own wrist and give them the momentary life that their initial construction no longer can. And as they stand back up, you see Nydas Okiro approach with automata you have never seen before.

LOU: Your Eminence, I bring exactly what you asked for.

AABRIA: Those are new.

LOU: Yes. So much is being used in the name of the Replenishment that I had to tap into a stock that we were waiting to reveal or start to release into the city upon rising again. But for you, an exception can always be made.

AABRIA: Thank you.

BRENNAN: Dweomer looks to you, on her unflinching, warforged face. "Your Eminence, the automata present within the chamber do not bear the glyph of the Armorer Arcane."

AABRIA: Oh, interesting. Who made these?

BRENNAN: You guys did.

LOU: Oh, we did, of course, the Golden Scythe.

AABRIA: You bypassed entirely.

LOU: Well, I wasn't going to let bureaucracy slow us down.

AABRIA: Incredible. I have several questions about what their purpose is. They're so big. What are the blades on the back for?

LOU: This can all be discussed later. (laughter)

AABRIA: Understood, sure.

LOU: Is it possible? Is it going to happen? Do you have everything you need? You said, well, you were leaving and I couldn't-- Do you actually have all that you require?

AABRIA: I think just with a quick flash, I'm going to drop Rary's Telepathic Bond.

BRENNAN: (gasps)

AABRIA: Yes. If only-- I go and run and grab the papers. Tonight, in the next day, this is my best chance.

LOU: You spoke about that earlier.

AABRIA: So it has to be now. This comes every 120 years. I might be alive to see the next chance of this, but they won't. Evandrin wouldn't have lived to see it. I don't think Quay would've either, so it has to be now, I have to prove that it was worth it.

LOU: And you will.

AABRIA: Yeah.

LOU: You will.

AABRIA: We have a bit of metal. I have a destination. We're going to move the entire city.

LOU: Well it is truly a blessing that you came to me, that you have allowed me to be part of this. It is everything I wanted as the Dragon of Avalir.

AABRIA: I just run up and hug him. Thank you. I haven't had anyone to talk to about this.

BRENNAN: You embrace under the impervious gaze of the four massive constructs surrounding you. Dweomer steps up and grabs the corroded bow and displays it to you.

AABRIA: Okay. There's enough energy. We've siphoned off so much from this last trip. It's got to be worth it.

LOU: It will be.

AABRIA: What do you say?

LOU: Of course.

AABRIA: Okay.

LOU: It would be my honor.

BRENNAN: The Taxmen step in. Dweomer gives them their instructions. They take the bow from you, and you see that one of them gazes down at it, walks over to another engine, puts their hands, doing the work that these automata do. You see its gauntleted steel hand animate apart so that its hand splays open and a raw vent of arcane power (boom) goes into an engine. Dweomer inserts the bow into the top, and it begins to spin as golden light spills out of an opening in the top of the stone dome. (whirring increasing in pitch) (electric crackling) The corrosion peels off the bow.

MARISHA: Cool.

BRENNAN: Pure gold, shining brighter than the sun. You see that one of the Taxmen, (crunch) its chest begins to come apart. Another Taxman just steps up and grasps its shoulders from behind. (crunch) It begins to fuse into its brethren in front of it. (whirs) As the engine speeds up, Dweomer steps over to you and rushes towards the engine in the center of the room, the Astral Leywright.

SAM: What?

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: She begins to interact with glyphs. You see, in a corner, a tiny model of the Ley-Rudder, a just ever so small recreation of the machine in the anterior chamber. Above the engine, you see, (energy noises) light fills the chamber. Dweomer says, "Architect Arcane, we are reading a signature. 0.504. 0.508. 0.512. 0.516. 0.530. 0.548." You see that the Ley-Rudder in your hand (energy noises) surrounds you. Light, energy. One of the three leylines that converges on ancient Toramunda, on Cathmoíra, which you are an hour or two away from being directly over. Leylines are invisible. It's pure energy of Exandria that flows, the veins of magic, the stuff of creation. Nydas, you behold as the spirit itself of the world is rendered visible, and realize you are standing in the blood stream of the cosmos.

TRAVIS: Holy crap.

LOU: (laughs) I think Nydas just has tears falling down his face. It's beautiful! (laughter) It's totally incredible! (laughter)

AABRIA: I'm going to move my Arcane Ward over him in that moment. (laughter)

LOU: (gasps with relief)

BRENNAN: The dream of a cabin boy deck hand taken aboard a pirate ship to look at a flying city, and to say, "One day, I could be at the helm of a great working of magic." You watch the beating heart of your world flow magically through this room. As the bow finishes spinning, a rod of pure gold slides into the light, and the stone dome (door slam) closes. The spinning stops, and the engine pulses, mirroring the heartbeat of your world. Silvery white light with a feeling of warmth. Heartbeat that matches the feeling of being inside the cradle of life. The miniature Ley-Rudder in your hand, the engine of the anterior chamber just outside that the navigators use to pilot the city around Exandria. Small, little gem lights up on its exterior. The new engine that you have created, the Astral Leywright, mirrors that gem.

AABRIA: It's a mediocre mind that tries to replicate what's already been. We're going to go somewhere new now.

LOU: Yes.

AABRIA: All of us.

LOU: Yes.

BRENNAN: As you say that, Laerryn, you feel the miniature model in your hand lift off and begin to travel. It's traveling in the same direction as your city. As it travels, you see two more gems light up on the Leywright and another two, and then four more. The trajectory of the Ley-Rudder, your little miniature train, this nothing more than a toy really, stops moving sideways. It moves up at a diagonal. But what a strange diagonal. As it moves, it becomes translucent (gasps) and fades, vanishing from this plane. You see the gems on the Leywright (electrical pulsing) (beeps) and a signal of recognition. Somewhere beyond this realm, your toy is safe and in one piece.

AABRIA: Yes. (sighs) It was worth it. I go over and grab the locket. It was worth it.

LOU: (laughs) I'm speechless.

AABRIA: (laughs)

LOU: I mean, my role is concluded. You are our pilot now. Whatever you need, if-- When you're ready to share this with everyone-- (laughs) The fact that this is coming with the Replenishment, it's all perfect. It's just perfect.

AABRIA: We can finish the Replenishment as expected.

LOU: Yes.

AABRIA: And during the celebrations, during that month, we'll take care of all the business.

LOU: Of course.

AABRIA: Then we will tell them that the next departure--

LOU: Yes.

AABRIA: -- will not be across Exandria, but to new planes, anywhere we want to go. Everywhere.

LOU: A glorious day, I can see it now. (alarm blares)

AABRIA: Fuck.

MARISHA: Son of a bitch.

AABRIA: Okay, hold on, that's probably fine.

LOU: Okay, that's normal?

AABRIA: Yeah.

LOU: I don't hang out down here, so--

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: Dweomer looks. You just used up about 8% of the city's energy sending that toy extraplanar.

AABRIA: Fuck. Oof.

BRENNAN: As you look at the readings, it's-- This is a nightmare. You look, and Dweomer says, "My lady, something unusual." You look at your energy grid, look at the readout of where everything is going. The Arboreal Calix, which is an ancillary engine of the Ley-Rudder, the actual sending of the toy took about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of energy. It was actually more efficient than you were planning on it being. But something about what you just did, the Arboreal Calix sucked up almost 8% of the city's energy.

AABRIA: Goddamn it. Can I try to figure out what's going on with the Calix, why it's being a piece of shit?

BRENNAN: Give me an arcana check.

AABRIA: Cool. Fuck, that's a bad roll.

SAM: Yeah, but you're arcane and stuff.

AABRIA: Yeah, not enough, 16.

BRENNAN: 16. So first of all, what is Nydas seeing in this moment as you--

LOU: The siren is going. We just had our beautiful envisioning the future moment, and now there's just a big, red light going off. I think Nydas is just like-- Just insight check on Laerryn to know what the vibe--

BRENNAN: Yeah, give me an insight check. If you want to deception, you can.

AABRIA: Of course, I do. Oh, that was almost a natural one. 13.

LOU: Versus me?

AABRIA: Yeah.

LOU: Naw, 18. (laughter)

SAM: No.

TRAVIS: No.

AABRIA: I am in a dead panic now. It was the immediate flip from, this is it, she was about to get emotional and calm, to like, oh no. It's very obvious that she's dealing with something that she doesn't have parameters for. Any digression into anything bad is giving her worst-case scenario vibes--

LOU: Got it.

AABRIA: -- immediately.

BRENNAN: You look at this. Dweomer turns to you, Nydas, actually, and says, "Guildmaster."

LOU: Yes.

BRENNAN: "The issue is not with any of the technology present in the Leywright. There is simply an energy concern within the Etheric Net."

LOU: Mm-hmm.

BRENNAN: You look. So on a 16, I can tell you, even if you-- Honestly, it's fitting that you rolled a 16 because the Arboreal Calix is, of the pieces of technology in this city, one of the ones you hate the most.

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: It is an engine that is part of the Drashari Tithe.

AABRIA: Cool.

BRENNAN: So essentially-- (laughs) I see all these confused faces. Everyone--

LOU: The Drashari Tithe.

SAM: The Drashari Tithe.

BRENNAN: I love that everybody-- Everyone's got secrets, but man, does Laerryn have secrets.

SAM: I don't think I have any secrets! (laughter)

BRENNAN: Sam, I know that's not true. (laughter)

SAM: Yeah, but they're fun secrets. (laughter)

BRENNAN: So-- On a 16, here's what you know. The Replenishment. Avalir travels the leylines of Exandria, trading with cities and civilizations all over the world, collecting gold and resources and magic, especially magic. Ether, raw, magical substance, which is-- Obviously the beings of this world don't use the term "spell slots." But that concept of the magical potential held within beings, magical objects, things like that, that exists in this world, the understanding that raw magical power is there. Avalir has this ability to extract and hold Ether. That's not an accident. Way, way back in history, when Toramunda was a single city, and Imyr Por'co and the mages of old Avalir found that the mountain was filled with brumestone and wanted to take it up, that city, Toramunda, had been founded by the Gau Drashari, an ancient order of druids that tended the holy sites of the history of Toramunda, or actually the mountain itself, Mount Ygora, the ancestral mountain. This was very significant. It was a place where the Dawnfather and the Wildmother defeated two of the greatest primordials of Domunas back during the Schism and sealed them away under the earth and was part of the ending battles of that Schism. It was a place where elemental magic permeated throughout, which the Druids tended to. Some of the earliest Gau Drashari were genasi. Also, that elemental permeation is what attracted a lot of wizards here after Toramunda was founded. When the wizards came and said, "Hey, can we take the top half of this mountain and have a cool flying city?" the original Druids were like, "No. You may not." And the Replenishment was the concession of those wizards. It's not-- In the modern day, modern day being in this ancient prequel series that we're doing, but in the modern day of the Age of Arcanum, the Replenishment is sold by the archmages of Avalir as being a great act of charity. It's not a great act of charity. It was an obligation to the Druids of Toramunda, something that they said they would do to justify taking the top of the mountain. The Replenishment does renew the crops and bring back magic. There were also, in your knowledge, a bunch of important things the Druids wanted to do with that magic. Now, cynical minds might say, that's the Druids' cut for letting the top of the mountain go. But the Druids also said that there were really important things they wanted to do with that magic. So the Drashari Pact, also known as the Pact of Crown and Throne, right? Was the original agreement between the wizards and the Druids. Crown and Throne became Avalir, the City of Crowns, and Cathmoíra, the City of Thrones. It was all about how they would apportion this magic. So. You've been building out the Etheric Net for a long time. 25% of the city's Ether is spoken for from that pact. So you've got 75% to play with. 25% has to go to these things that were part of the original agreements. So the reason you don't know a lot about the Arboreal Calix is that that's your utility spell. You've just always needed to send a certain percentage of stuff there. But when you look at it, you see that that Calix alone is more than 50% of the tithe. That engine is-- This one engine that you know doesn't do anything that you know to be useful takes up a double-digit percentage of your entire city's reserves of magic. As you're looking at the energy structure, you see that it flared up when you did this thing with your Leywright. It sucked up a lot of energy as you did that. The last thing I'll say is--

AABRIA: Fucking Druids.

LUIS: (laughs)

BRENNAN: When you look for-- When you look for a-- How would I put this? As you are looking for an instruction manual, something-- Because you never had to interact with it before. Being an old piece of junk, at least it's reliable. It never needs maintenance. It's just something that sits there, sucking, taking up hard drive space, and sucking up juice, being a piece of machinery that you don't particularly like, but there's no instruction manual. You're looking through your own spell book, your records preserved here in crystal memory within your engines. Everything built by mages comes with incredibly explicit and precise detail about what they were thinking, why they built it, what they wanted it to do. This one says, "This is the amount of energy that you must apportion to the Arboreal Calix during the Replenishment." End of list.

AABRIA: Okay, okay. Do I--

MARISHA: (laughs)

AABRIA: I would like to pinch whatever cable is running to the Calix. Is there any way for me to bottleneck that? I just don't want it to take any more of my precious, precious energy. That might be a bad thing, but I don't know. It's old technology, and it's probably fine.

BRENNAN: (laughs) Give me another arcana check.

AABRIA: Please be better. (sighs)

LOU: Can I give a help action? Will you allow that?

BRENNAN: Yeah, you're proficient in arcana.

AABRIA: Oh, thank god. That was a natural one.

LUIS: Oh!

AABRIA: Okay, 27.

BRENNAN: Incredible.

AABRIA: Thank you so much. You just see that she's fully panicking right now.

LOU: I think I'd just come and lay a gentle hand on your shoulder.

BRENNAN: On a 27 arcana check... Yeah. Yeah, there's stuff you could do here. It's not as simple as pinching a cable. This thing is really tapped into the roots of the city. You also know that the lack of a manual... I'm going to say, on a 27 arcana, you don't get the technical answer that you're looking for, but I'm going to do some quick math.

LOU: Calculator's out.

AABRIA: Ooh!

LOU: Beep, boop.

BRENNAN: Hold on one second. Yeah, this sounds about right. The Arboreal Calix isn't as old as the city. It's 119 years old. 119 years old is when-- is the date of the last Replenishment. It's a Replenishment when the Drashari pact was updated, which was a big deal back in the day. Now, this is stuff that's not going to be in your documents. This is going to be up, honestly, probably, not-- Patia would have more about it in her library, but it's honestly outside of both of your home courts. This is Magisterium stuff. This is magical law, so you would have to find a way, on the eve of the Replenishment, to bust into the Librarium Magisterium to find out how this was updated. But you do see a record that this engine was built 119 years ago, which, I will point out on a 27, some quick math on our master architect's part, is the first Replenishment after the ascension of the Raven Queen.

LOU: (gasps)

AABRIA: Fuck. Okay, we have to go get more...

SAM: I need yarn. I need thumb tacks. (laughter)

MARISHA: I know.

AABRIA: We have to go find the Magisters. I need to know where it's taking my energy.

LOU: Your Eminence, it is the eve of the Replenishment, and of course we could make it happen, but is there a chance that this can wait? No? No.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

LOU: Fantastic. I will make phone calls and connections, and we will make things work and happen. I'd like to get out my sending stone.

BRENNAN: Mm-hmm.

LOU: And put a call in. Well, I think, I mean, I feel like we should probably just go find Patia.

AABRIA: Yeah, yeah.

BRENNAN: So you two are going to go find Patia. Who are you leaving here with the Astral Leywright? Which, again, miraculously works. It worked. You know that the thing you have dreamed of is possible.

LOU: Oh, I felt the heartbeat of the cosmos.

BRENNAN: Yes.

MARISHA: I can do you one better. I was about to give her a call.

AABRIA: Yeah!

TRAVIS: She's turned off her fucking radio.

AABRIA: I turned off the CB radio.

MARISHA: You turned off your phone?

AABRIA: You can always hit me up. Send me a text, girl.

TRAVIS: Breaker, breaker one nine.

BRENNAN: Yeah, I think you go each go to your ring of masks and pull each other up at the same time. I want to go to Zerxus really briefly.

LUIS: Uh-huh.

BRENNAN: Who flies to, and then we will bring the party back together, but, Zerxus.

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: You arrive at Excelsior Plaza, where you see the Herald's Tome. It is a revel here. You see that people are partying and laughing, huge major images. You see that there's a bunch of professional bards casting huge illusions and music playing in the square. People are drinking and making merry. Life is good here.

LOU: Life is good.

BRENNAN: You see that there is the headquarters of the Golden Scythe, the vault and everything else.

LUIS: So I am arriving to where?

BRENNAN: To where you think Nydas would be.

LUIS: Uh-huh.

BRENNAN: I'll say you just walk in and see Alessander Kyrus there, who you recognize as one of Nydas' most trusted, and you see, he goes, "Oh, Sir Ilerez, pleasure to see you."

LUIS: Yes, yes, yes, pleasure, pleasure. Where is Nydas? I need to speak to him right away.

BRENNAN: "Oh, he, um. Oh, he, well, he, funny story, he, uh..." (laughter)

BRENNAN: Give me an insight check.

AABRIA: Yeah!

LOU: Real talk, Alessander's persuasion isn't plus 16? (laughter)

LUIS: 20.

AABRIA: What if this is the light that is out there?

LOU: Yeah, exactly! He's got a little candle--

AABRIA: Yeah! He has a little head candle.

TRAVIS: Look over here. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You watch a man whose whole job is keeping account ledgers feel suddenly very frightened, not of you are doing anything, but you know the look people give when they feel like they're about to be in trouble. Yes, and he goes, he goes like, "Well, it's very funny--"

LUIS: I completely encroach in his space, and I put my hand on his shoulder and I give a gentle tap actually.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: I say: My friend, there's no time for this. It's urgent business. The First Knight of Avalir is asking you where's Nydas.

BRENNAN: Give me-- I'll leave it totally up to you. You can give persuasion or intimidation, and the intimidation would not go wrong. It's not like you're intimidating him, like I'm going to hurt you, but it is, there's a pressure from above coming down. So either one of those.

LUIS: I'm... not the kind of person to try to scare somebody. I think it's a persuasion.

BRENNAN: Okay, go for it.

LUIS: 29.

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

MARISHA: Wow. Natty 19.

BRENNAN: He looks at you. You see he goes, "First Knight, the Guildmaster Okiro is with the Architect Arcane within the Meridian Labyrinth."

LUIS: How long ago did he leave here?

BRENNAN: You see--

LOU: The snitches in the city, can nobody keep a damn secret?

BRENNAN: On a 29 persuasion? No, they cannot. (laughter) You see he says, "The Guildmaster is within the Meridian Labyrinth. He has taken a porter there, but the young lady, I believe, has already recused herself to other guild business."

LUIS: Thank you. And I leave.

BRENNAN: You see he says, "First Knight, I should warn you of something."

LUIS: I'm already gone. I'm already jumping back onto--

LOU: Oh, thank god!

BRENNAN: You take, yeah.

LUIS: -- Tempus. I jump back onto Tempus and I go like. I soar up above the city.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: To get a bird's eye view and to try to process some of this stuff that is happening, the stuff with Purvan and trying to find Nydas and I look down at the festivities and all that chaos that I have just seen on the ground, just take a moment away from it and I take a breath. Then I head over there and as I mutter to myself: I hate this place.

BRENNAN and MARISHA: (laugh)

LUIS: I go to where you told me where Nydas was.

MARISHA: How dare you.

TRAVIS: (laughs)

BRENNAN: You fly to the Meridian Labyrinth. The Meridian Labyrinth is... I'm going to ask you for an investigation check, if you'd be so kind.

AABRIA: It's called a labyrinth, not a hallway.

LUIS: I think at this point, too, I know that I'm heading into territory that's above. Yeah. A five.

AABRIA: Oh no!

BRENNAN: So here's the issue, right? Five is not great. Legitimately--

AABRIA: (laughs)

MARISHA: Five is not great.

BRENNAN: Five is not great. but legitimately, here's the thing, you are able to walk through the Meridian Labyrinth. You do not get lost on a five. This would probably repel and entrap you, but you wear the emblem of your station. And the truth is, as much as Laerryn likes to keep secrets, I imagine she also doesn't want the city's biggest warrior to not be able to come protect her very delicate machinery in case shit pops off.

AABRIA: She talks a lot of shit and has given you very detailed maps. Don't come down here. It's dangerous, but also if I'm trouble, please come help.

BRENNAN: So you are joined at the gate that will lead back to Patia's. You find them in an antechamber. I don't think you're near the Heart right now. I think you're probably a good pace out from the Heart. But Nydas and Laerryn, question, which of the automata do you bring, if any? Or do you leave them to safeguard or continue working in the Heart?

AABRIA: I want to leave everything up here.

LOU: If Dweomer is capable of--

AABRIA: Yes.

LOU: Then, of course.

AABRIA: I trust her.

BRENNAN: You turn to leave and see the silvery Aeormaton nod farewell and look up as these four massive steely constructs without any facial movement gaze down at her. She says, "All will be well. My lady, may I offer you my most sincere congratulations in the realization of something that has never been?"

AABRIA: Thank you. We'll be back soon!

BRENNAN: You walk out and you hear the footsteps, the thudding footsteps of Zerxus in full plate and you guys arrive at the gate that will lead back to Patia's.

AABRIA: Hey!

LUIS: Oh!

AABRIA: Hi.

LOU: Brother.

AABRIA: (nervous laugh)

LOU: You came to find us?

LUIS: Yes, I've been looking for you. I couldn't find you.

LOU: Yes.

LUIS: We need to come together. Do I get a sense of any of this?

AABRIA: Yeah, I look like a kid on shrooms.

BRENNAN: Oh, absolutely, be deceptions and an insight, right here. A million percent.

AABRIA: With disadvantage! Oh, it's a natural one. That's fine. (laughter)

TRAVIS: There it is!

MARISHA: I'm not even there and I can feel the shittiness.

TRAVIS: She just screams. Ah!

LUIS: An eight. Insight check?

BRENNAN: Insight.

AABRIA: I'm still clutching Evandrin's locket.

BRENNAN: (gasps)

LOU: Deception?

BRENNAN: Deception.

LOU: 30.

AABRIA: Oh my god! (shouting)

TRAVIS: Let's go! Come on!

BRENNAN: So on an eight, you see poorly concealed tear lines on Laerryn's face. She didn't get them all. She is clutching a locket that you know was given to her by Evandrin, your husband. You know that she and your husband were dear, dear friends prior to his return to Avalir and becoming First Knight prior to you. However, I will say this. As you notice, oh, Laerryn is in a state of deep emotion and probably multiple of them. Before you can get a bead any of them and do your intense First Knight grilling, a fucking juggernaut of a 30 deception check comes wheeling in and I'm going to say, the force of Nydas' personality completely directs the rest of this scene, as Nydas moves in. What does Nydas do as we hear that from Zerxus?

LOU: Zerxus, I'm sure there are many things that we need to come together and speak about. Laerryn and I needed to come down to collect a few items before heading back up to meet everyone. I deeply apologize to the group.

LUIS: No need, no need, no need, I understand, I understand. There's a lot. We all have many responsibilities--

LOU: Yes.

MARISHA: Wow.

LUIS: -- and it's time for us to come together, Laerryn. I approach Laerryn and I just, I catch the little bit that you have missed.

AABRIA: Thanks.

LUIS: Are you all right?

AABRIA: Yeah.

LUIS: Hey, look at me. I'm here for you, no matter what you need.

AABRIA: Thank you. I need to talk to you.

LUIS: Let's get everybody together. There's a lot to talk about and we're running out of time.

BRENNAN: Laerryn. Another First Knight of Avalir in this very chamber once told you: I'm here for you, no matter what you need.

SAM: You asshole.

BRENNAN: You move through the gate and the party assembles at the Palazzo Por'co.

TRAVIS: Nydas has this sunburn of where the light was going through his fingers. (laughter)

TRAVIS: (energy thrumming) "It's glorious!"

MARISHA: Just looking into Chernobyl.

BRENNAN: I think you're the first person to-- I think you're the first person in history to shout that at a magical phenomenon and live. "It's glorious! Oh, I'm totally fine, okay, great. Good, good, good." (laughter)

LOU: Because I did, as you were describing, I was like, "Oh, it doesn't seem it would be that loud," but it's funny because then you realize in all those scenes, it probably isn't that loud. We hear musical score, but for them it's probably just like, "Oh shit, that's bright." (laughter)

LOU: "It's so bright."

BRENNAN: Yeah, exactly.

LOU: Everyone's just yelling because it's like, "Ah, the visual is loud!"

BRENNAN: Yeah, you're shouting over your own soundtrack, exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Incredible. You arrive back. Now, a question to Patia. Do you think you would go to The Ivy Table, or-- The party's still very much going on. I would say, as a time check for all of you, it's probably about 10:00pm right now, right? So you're still not even over Cathmoíra yet, there's time to do stuff. But traveling and doing stuff and talking, this has taken a little bit of time, right. Do you think you'd go to The Ivy Table, or are you adjoining somewhere more private?

MARISHA: Yes, I think at this point, it has escalated and I'd want something even more secret, private, so I-- A question to you as well, DM. When the 8% of energy was sucked to teleport a little toy boat to another dimension.

LOU: Rude, rude.

AABRIA: I don't like the way you said that.

LOU: Very rude!

AABRIA: Accurate. Accurate but offensive.

MARISHA: Did we sense that, was there a little dip in the lights, was there, you know?

TRAVIS: Yeah. (energy surge)

BRENNAN: I would say, everybody here give me either an arcana or perception. High DC, high DC here.

TRAVIS: -- one more than the other.

MARISHA: Arcana or perception. Hang on, what's higher?

TRAVIS: Wham-a-lam-a- ding-dong. Oh, ho, ho, oh! It's a dirty 19.

BRENNAN: Dirty--

TRAVIS: I mean it's a natural 19 for--

AABRIA: Oh shit.

TRAVIS: -- 32.

LUIS: Damn!

AABRIA: God, rogues are wild!

BRENNAN: 32 and then--

MARISHA: 26 for arcana.

BRENNAN: 26.

LUIS: 15.

BRENNAN: 15.

SAM: 14.

BRENNAN: 14. For you, so on a 20--

MARISHA: He can see in ultraviolet. (laughter)

BRENNAN: There is no obvious blip; the lights don't go out or anything like that. However, the Eyes of Avalir undergo a rigorous training to just feel magical auras and presences. A couple of feathers on the back of your neck stand up like you just walked into someone's aura, right? And on a 30-what?

TRAVIS: Two.

BRENNAN: 32. On a 32, this accompanies feelings-- This is the exact feeling you get when the city arrives at the intersection of two or more leylines and switches directions, but you know you're coming up on an intersection, but it's not yet. So it's the feel of a big spell engine kicking up hits you, and you don't know what that could be.

TRAVIS: Another event in a long list of things that are little fucked tonight.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

LOU: Somebody's salty. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I'm just sayin'.

AABRIA: Do you want a cracker?

BRENNAN: (laughs) Do you want a cracker!

LUIS: Oh no!

TRAVIS: Excuse me! Do-- do you have a cracker? (laughter)

SAM: Have we moved into the double ivy room?

MARISHA: As we walk up, I flick my fingers a little bit and trace a little arcane symbol and you see the lights dim a little bit in the foyer, and some colored lights start to fill the room, like dancing spectral fireflies. A wonderful dancing watershow starts happening in the middle from the gardens, once again further to just put on a show, to get people to look over there.

LOU: Yes!

AABRIA: Love it.

LUIS: Nice.

MARISHA: As we slink away once everybody, I can sense that there's no eyes really tracking us.

BRENNAN: Yes, truly you have ensorcelled everybody here. The show is so captivating. You all adjourn to The Ivy Table with everyone totally enamored of the spectacle of the evening. You have safety, security, and silence and are reunited.

MARISHA: Laerryn--

AABRIA: We did it, we did it. The Astral Leywright is up, it's functional, it works. It works!

SAM: What are--

LOU: Truly.

MARISHA: You saw this?

SAM: What's that?

MARISHA: With your own eyes you saw this?

SAM: What's that thing?

LUIS: This is the first I've heard of this.

SAM: What's that thing?

LUIS: Yes, what's--?

AABRIA: Oh, oh god, where to begin?

SAM: Can we move things along, it's 10:00 and the Beverage Ball starts in about half an hour, and it's something that I'd really like to get to. You don't got to the Beverage Ball?

LOU: In my early days, yes.

SAM: Some of the elite mages get together and they surprise each other. They turn-- they bring chalices that have all been enchanted and they can all turn one liquid into another liquid and they trade them and surprise each other with what drink is it going to be, is it going to be mayonnaise, or is it going to--

AABRIA: I'm trying to tell you that I've mastered interplanar travel for our entire city and you're going to talk about a fucking juice bar?

SAM: I can be late. What is this? What is this interplanar travel thing?

AABRIA: Ugh!

LOU: The next great moment in Avalir's history is what it is.

AABRIA: The bow, the bow, that was the last piece. I needed something from another plane. It's attuned and it's attenuated and it works! I just-- there's a problem with the energy, I need to speak to some-- You, you're a Sightwarden, you work for the Magisterium. I need to talk to them. I need to know what-- They changed something. The Arboreal Calix came recently; it's a 120 years old. It's new and it's pulling my energy and I don't--

SAM: Can you just back up, dumb this down for us? When you talk like this, I lose track so easily, Just please, simpler words.

TRAVIS: Can I try and recite to you what it sounds like you said? That you have secretly developed a way for Avalir to travel to another plane?

LOU: The entire city.

TRAVIS: As a city?

AABRIA: Yes.

SAM: Why?

AABRIA: Because it's stupid to waste your time trying to become a god so you can ascend to another plane. If we can just all go there, then there's no gods.

MARISHA: That's the only thing that truly separates us from them.

AABRIA: They're not special.

SAM: What's wrong with this plane? Why can't we just be here?

LOU: Nothing, but why are we limited to this plane?

AABRIA: That!

SAM: This plane's great. Everyone's happy and successful and--

LUIS: Bored. Look at this distraction that they entertain themselves with.

SAM: I think it's lovely. Did you see the fondue?

LUIS: I did, I saw it all.

AABRIA: The promise of Avalir was of exploration and knowledge-gathering and growth and I have dedicated my life, I've sacrificed so much, others have sacrificed so much, so that we could do more and learn more and--

LUIS: What do you expect to find if we were to go there?

MARISHA: Knowledge.

AABRIA: That.

LUIS: Did you know about this?

SAM: What plane?

MARISHA: Yes.

LOU: Any.

AABRIA: All.

SAM: Speaking from experience, other planes aren't that great.

AABRIA: I know you're from the Feywild. But we could--

MARISHA: Imagine the immense amount of resources, knowledge, power, progression. We are simply limited here. The only thing that makes the gods what they are is that they have access to a whole 'nother realm of arcane potential. I have it on good authority that Aeor is working on a weapon, something deeply destructive. I will not allow them to supersede us in any way.

SAM: You knew about this as well?

MARISHA: Yes. Yes, I did.

SAM: And you?

LOU: Of course.

SAM: Am I the only one who didn't know about this?

LUIS: I didn't know about this.

TRAVIS: I didn't know.

AABRIA: Sorry, I didn't mean to keep this from you. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

MARISHA: It's also much more glorious to boast when you've achieved something rather than watching it fail and disappointing others.

LUIS: Be careful not to boast so soon. An achievement like this, once you start to tell people about it, then it's going to make us a target.

MARISHA: Absolutely.

TRAVIS: You have seemed distracted of late, I commend you on escaping my eye.

AABRIA: Thanks. Again, I'm sorry. This is my life's work. And it worked.

TRAVIS: Worked? You mean you know it will work?

AABRIA: No, I have sent an object into another plane, I came here-- There's a problem only with-- The Arboreal Calix takes its Tithe. That stupid bit of energy we owe to the Druids down in Cathmoíra. But it took more and I don't know, I just have this feeling that either it's taking energy for someone or something that we don't know, or I wasn't privy to, which is bullshit, or it's some sort of stopgap to prevent someone else from attempting apotheosis.

MARISHA: The Magisterium is quite loyal to their long-withstanding handshakes for people who are long gone, who shuffled off of this plane. What good is loyalty to a dead person?

AABRIA: That.

TRAVIS: This can't be a coincidence. We need to catch you up.

AABRIA: What, did I miss something?

MARISHA: Too many coincidences.

LUIS: Lots of vagueness.

TRAVIS: I felt something. An arcane pulse. That's not my thing, but Vespin Chloras, the archmage who disappeared in Vasselheim, presented himself to me in a private room through a mirror and said that we would not make it to the Wildmother's embrace.

AABRIA: When? I was gone for 20 fucking minutes.

SAM: You're always gone at the most important times.

TRAVIS: Okay, listen--

AABRIA: Do you want to do this right now?

SAM: This seems like it's--

TRAVIS: My wings reach around Laerryn and just pull--

AABRIA: Let me go! Let me go!

TRAVIS: Not the moment, not the moment.

SAM: All I'm saying is, you're so focused on your own thing, as magnificent and monumental as it might be, but there's something going on in the city right now that actually matters to people and you're just concerned with your invention, again, whether it works or not.

MARISHA: I go over and I pull a goblet off of the shelf behind the little mini bar in this room and I walk over and I say: Here, it makes whatever cocktail you want.

AABRIA: I'm going to kill him.

SAM: Cathmoíra cosmo.

TRAVIS: I understand, perhaps before we do that, though--

AABRIA: I'm going to fully kill him.

TRAVIS: I'm going to need help in connecting the dots.

AABRIA: Yes, yes.

TRAVIS: I'm a bit concerned that this was able to succeed. Congratulations.

AABRIA: Right, thank you.

TRAVIS: But the timing of it mixed with our approach and Vespin making himself known, does that not strike any of you as--

AABRIA: No, that's horrifying, I thought he didn't exist anymore.

LUIS: And the warning that came with Matron of Raven's Champion.

AABRIA: Oh, the guy with the dog?

LUIS: Yeah.

SAM: Purvan.

TRAVIS: It was a wolf.

MARISHA: He was like, "Ooh, bad things are coming, ah! Your naiveté!"

SAM: Not just bad things. Yeah, not just bad things, bad god things.

LUIS: Worse things.

MARISHA: And your dreams, we cannot forget that as well.

TRAVIS: Who else knows of your accomplishment? Who else knows of your secret project?

SAM: Yeah, who else have you told besides me and us?

MARISHA: We truly meant no disrespect.

AABRIA: You are the literal mouthpiece of the city and you can barely keep your dick in your pants. I'm not convinced you were going to keep a world-changing technological achievement fucking secret.

SAM: You have no idea. You have no idea what secrets I've kept for you.

AABRIA: Sure, sure. Be vague and I'll just be a faker-- we have other things to do right now!

BRENNAN: Sam, I'd like a deception check.

SAM: Deception, 32.

TRAVIS: Oh!

MARISHA: Oh my god!

AABRIA: He rolled like a two on the dice.

BRENNAN: Here's what I want now. Hold on one second. Luis.

LUIS: Yes?

BRENNAN: Give me an insight check.

LUIS: Oh god.

MARISHA: "Everyone's got stuff to know stuff."

BRENNAN: Deception check-- this deception check was not necessarily for a lie, but rather just for something else. You, I will say this, too, at The Ivy Table, Cerrit, you see the hallway that leads off to that small chamber where that body was left. As you guys begin to put the pieces of this all together, it's very challenging as there's so much going on in the Replenishment even under the best of circumstances, with the addition of these, you know, Sir Ilerez's dream, with the completion of the Astral Leywright, and the finding that this, against all odds, this Apogee Solstice, this particular convening of the spheres would see the possibility of a shift in the leylines themselves, make the impossible possible for one precious moment. There is the matter of this infernal body in the other room, of Vespin Chloras, the connection with the strange dream, the arrival of Purvan, all of this is leading to something. Then there are other things that haven't yet had a piece of yarn put to them yet. The shuttering of the Hall of Prophecy, strange Milus Phren showing up and asking for a favor that shouldn't have known about it. Now, the Ring of Silver taking an active interest in this case. Avalir is a big city. There's a lot going on that's a problem even without it all being a conspiracy. But there is much at stake here. As the six of you sit at this table, coming into awareness of both of this revelation and then this very disturbing new information, you would have time, as strange as that sounds, the Apogee Solstice will occur tomorrow. Whatever you're going to do needs to happen within the next 24 hours. That's your window of opportunity and again if you miss that, it's important to say, if you miss that window, it doesn't mean it never happens. It just means it goes back from being possible to theoretical.

TRAVIS: Geez, in 24 hours?

BRENNAN: 24 hours. Possible to theoretical.

MARISHA: Brennan.

BRENNAN: Yeah, go for it.

MARISHA: I was going to say, would I know from my history with the library behind me, any more strange instances on when the leylines and the planes are this closely aligned?

BRENNAN: Give me a history check with advantage.

MARISHA: With advantage. I fucking just fucked my knee!

AABRIA: Oh no!

TRAVIS: I thought that's what that sound was.

MARISHA: (groans)

TRAVIS: It's just pure death and rage right now in your head.

MARISHA: Hit the edge of the table. (inhales)

AABRIA: Rage-remember.

MARISHA: 22. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You remember the first time someone explained Apogee Solstices to you. It's a woman that you knew as a child.

MARISHA: (whispers) As a child.

BRENNAN: You don't remember her name anymore because nobody does.

MARISHA: Oh my god!

AABRIA: Let's go.

TRAVIS: You are fucking kidding me. You learned it from her?

MARISHA: That's right. That's right! ♪ We learned it from watching you, Mom ♪ (laughter)

TRAVIS: Mom?

MARISHA and BRENNAN: Mom?

MARISHA: Ssh, no.

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: A beautiful woman with raven hair, who was one of the greatest wizards you ever met, once told you--

MARISHA: Yes.

BRENNAN: -- what was possible on a given Apogee Solstice. The last time these solstices-- There was an Apogee Solstice. There was some shifting of the leylines of Exandria. Leylines, again for those here, I think you would all know this, they move around the meridian of Exandria. They are terrestrial by nature, they're the lifeblood of the magic of the world. To create a-- Even hearing the name of the engine, an Astral Leywright, something that could take something truly of the world and move it to another dimension. But it all comes together when Laerryn's talking about what's possible because at an Apogee Solstice if the leylines are shifting...

LUIS: Anything's possible.

BRENNAN: Anything's possible. The woman who told it to you mentioned it because there was... She said she was working on something that in a few years' time might become possible. Apogee Solstices occur about every 120 years.

MARISHA: 120 years, okay.

LOU: Well, it seems we need to come to a consensus with regard to what is important and what needs to be done, and what of course we can move to when we feel comfortable and have time to do so. The Vespin Chloras situation is, of course, upsetting, but I'm not incredibly sure or clear on what we can do about it.

TRAVIS: Sure. I can see that position. My concern, again, only looking on the outside from the knowledge that you've gleaned, is that the timing of it, this person trying to replicate what the Matron of Ravens was trying to do, and you creating a device that is taking advantage of this Leywright. I would have--

AABRIA: To be clear, I made the Leywright. I'm taking advantage of the--

SAM: The Solstice.

AABRIA: -- Solstice, yes. Thank you.

LUIS: Right.

AABRIA: I mean--

SAM: I listen. (laughter)

BRENNAN: I also have a small nitpick here for Loquatius and Zerxus. As Cerrit has just said, Vespin recreated the Matron's ritual, you know that's not true. He didn't recreate it.

LUIS: No, yes.

SAM: It's a slightly different ritual.

LUIS: Right.

SAM: But, ritually.

TRAVIS: Yeah, ritually.

LUIS: This is the time for people to make something happen. We cannot be foolish enough to think that you're the only person that had the idea to at this very time take advantage of the magical energies and the thin veil between these realities. Others are doing that as well, and we've been warned about Vespin and what he's done. We know that it has to do with the Betrayers.

TRAVIS: I want to celebrate as much as the two of you, but I also don't want your moment to be spoiled because we have been unawares of interested parties coming in and taking us out from underneath both of you.

LUIS: And they're coming. They tried to take you out.

TRAVIS: They're here.

AABRIA: Okay, okay.

LUIS: So we know that something is amiss, and we know that something is coming for us, and we know that other cities are creating weapons. And I congratulate you for your beautiful achievement, and I share that ambition and that wonder about those planes and that exploration. But I'm put off by this so-called champion of the Matron of Ravens, who has come here to warn us, and couldn't even utter the words of the Betrayers, because he was scared. That is precisely why I kneel to no god, because the second you kneel to one of them, you kneel to them all. Something is here, it wants to threaten us, but we are the Ring of Brass. So gather your wits, gather your courage, gather your strength, and do the job that you know you need to do because this city needs us.

TRAVIS: Zerxus, can I implore you to set a guard outside of this room? Can I show the rest of the Ring of Brass this room--

LUIS: As you say that, Zerxus is continuing this monologue, and you can start to feel-- (laughter) You start to feel his blood boiling, and all of a sudden each one of you starts to feel almost a simmering of your own blood as if it starts to... If passion and rage could be contagious, which I believe it absolutely is, you're starting to feel it invade you and start to simmer and make your blood boil. Then it expands out of you a little bit, and you see this cosmic dust start to swirl around you as you gain 19 temporary hit points. I'd like to use this as my Inspiring Leader, baby! (cheering)

TRAVIS: Take it.

AABRIA: We love Inspiring Leader.

TRAVIS: Take it.

MARISHA: 19?

LUIS: 19.

BRENNAN: 19, that's a lot of temp HP.

MARISHA: Damn. That is crazy.

BRENNAN: That is--

LUIS: Something's upon us.

BRENNAN: -- 114 temp HP amongst six people.

LUIS: If it's coming, I say let it come! You were saying, sir?

LOU: Spoken like a true First Knight.

TRAVIS: I would like-- (laughs) I would like to get your eyes on this room, the body. You have the knowledge of the arcane that I do not. I would like to also go back to my offices at Cloudstone, reexamine Vespin's room, his items, see if there was anything else that we missed and maybe I can bring those items to not just the bow, but perhaps something we didn't pay close enough attention to.

AABRIA: Okay. I'll help you however I can.

TRAVIS: Can I lead them over to the room, and ask for a guard.

BRENNAN: You go to the room. You guys can absolutely just get a guard posted to this room.

LUIS: Oh yeah.

BRENNAN: Patia has people that can be posted up. You guys enter into the room, see this dead body, see the cracked mirror. You may roll arcana, you may roll history, you may roll perception, investigation, whatever you want to roll. The best results will come from a religion check.

LUIS: Great.

AABRIA: Cool.

LOU: A plus three?

MARISHA: Is this all of us?

BRENNAN: All of you. You're all in the room, you can all roll.

TRAVIS: Also, just saying, handled that with just a melee weapon. I didn't need any (magical flutters), you know.

LUIS: I just rolled a natural 20 for my religion check. (cheering)

LOU: First the speech, then the roll.

TRAVIS: Let's go, let's go! Magic fingers, here we go.

LUIS: Pally-daddy! Thanks, Kyle.

BRENNAN: Hold on just a sec here.

LOU: So do the rest of us need to roll anything?

MARISHA: Yeah, I know.

LOU: Or can we just coast on that? Can we just coast on that nat 20?

LUIS: I mean, it's a 25.

TRAVIS: I mean, if you want to do an animal handling check or something.

LOU: Let's ride that! Save the rolls.

AABRIA: I just want to admire the wet work like, ooh, aah, right across the neck.

BRENNAN: A million percent. So--

MARISHA: Oh god, oh god, fire.

MARISHA and LOU: Oh god.

LOU: Oh god, no.

MARISHA: Oh god, no.

TRAVIS: Too tired.

BRENNAN: So, you all enter the room. Everyone starts looking. There's stuff to glean here, you can read some of this Infernal, the mages of this place can find different stuff. Zerxus, orange irises and bloodshot eyes.

MARISHA: (shudders)

BRENNAN: You look into the eyes of a dead man. Runes everywhere, you hear in your mind-- It's not a comforting feeling. Nobody likes to feel like they're dreaming when they're wide awake. "(raspy Infernal speech) Ghor Dranas."

MARISHA: Fucking Ghor Dranas again.

BRENNAN: You see the Infernal on his body and you see the exposed injury. You're a healer.

LUIS: I am.

BRENNAN: You know you have Lay on Hands, You know--

LUIS: Yes.

BRENNAN: You're one of the only people that can cure disease. So you know that if this man was still alive, that his body would be riddled with tumorous growths all throughout. They're coming from the things that he has carved into his flesh, Infernal runes. Clerics have fallen out of vogue here in Avalir. What does it mean to draw power from a deity? It's complicated. What is the clerical version of a wizard's study? We all know that clerics draw their power from their gods, but if the gods want power, why wouldn't they just grant their most powerful spells to any and all of their followers? Why are some clerics stronger than others? It's not arcana, it's not history, it's their wisdom. As clerics grow in a deeper understanding of the facet of reality manifested by their deity, they become more aware and attuned to those forces within the world, and can wield greater magics. There is a limit to what is safe to grant a follower. But now, what if you weren't worried about keeping your followers safe? You look into this man's eyes and a term floods into your mind. It's a term in Infernal. It means puppet. It's a human so devoted to you that it's not even worth magically dominating them or charming them anymore. They just let you into their soul. And the word is K'nauth.

LUIS: K'nauth.

MARISHA: K'nauth.

BRENNAN: It's a word that hasn't been spoken on Exandria since the foundations of this world. The man you are looking at became a cleric of a Betrayer. And he became a cleric of a Betrayer, looking at the speed of these growths, maybe a little over two weeks ago. What would you do if you came back to the world after a long time away and nobody worshiped you, and you needed to make some moves real quick? This is a mortal man that was forced to understand things that he was not ready for, because his master didn't need a servant, he just needed a puppet.

LUIS: Puppet.

AABRIA: Oh my god. Love a Betrayer.

LUIS: Wow. As Zerxus is processing all of this and seeing the wasted person devoted to who he was following, and consumed by that devotion that was taken advantage of, he just kneels and traces the wounds with his finger, and just spends a moment on those tumors, and takes a closer look. Is there anything about that? Nothing is more familiar to me beyond what's been described. I've not seen this like this before.

BRENNAN: This is all unfamiliar.

LUIS: I'm going to point out the runes to those that are of an arcane understanding. I don't know if it's worth copying them down or understanding them better, but this is what I see has happened here, and I explain to them what I saw.

MARISHA: I've already copied them down, and you see--

AABRIA: Ooh, the note taking.

MARISHA: -- thin, yes. Thin wisps of light pour out of the runes, and into the orb that is constantly floating around Patia.

LOU: Very troubling.

MARISHA: Two weeks ago is when Vespin Chloras attempted his ritual, correct?

LOU: Taker?

TRAVIS: Correct.

AABRIA: He succeeded. We need to proceed as though he was successful.

LUIS: He was successful.

MARISHA: He succeeded with what? Bringing...

SAM: To what?

MARISHA: Not ascending?

LUIS: No.

MARISHA: Bringing back--

SAM: Some sort of Betrayer God.

LUIS: Yes.

AABRIA: They were locked away.

SAM: I don't even know what the Betrayer Gods are. Do we have a running tally of these fellows?

BRENNAN: Yes.

LOU: What are they for us? Are they-- they're like--

LUIS: They're Betrayers.

LOU: Yeah, they're just like a from history?

TRAVIS: They're not here.

AABRIA and LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: From history, well, they've been sealed away.

LOU: Okay, great.

BRENNAN: I mean, you live in an age where the Prime Deities walk Exandria openly and their brethren-- I mean, the Schism is your creation myth. Or not creation myth, but the myth following the creation. You know that what happened was... There was a time in which the Prime Deities, in a world of strife and chaos, sought to give divine magic to their children, to mortals, and the Primordials that had existed in the world, the elemental Titans that had existed in the world prior to the arrival of the Deities, who, before the Schism, there was not a distinction between Prime Deity and Betrayer. No betrayal had happened. There were just the gods and the Primordials. The gods fractured when divine magic was granted to mortals. The Primordials rose up to correct that imbalance, and the Betrayers joined the Primordials against the cause of mortals.

TRAVIS: In an effort to rule out the hope that Vespin did not somehow manually manipulate access for a Betrayer God, do we know, in history, are there any instances of one of these gods breaking through into this plane, even if for a short time, before being pushed back?

LUIS: Sent back?

TRAVIS: One, a single, an instance, an incursion?

BRENNAN: I'm going to improvise an important piece of canon right now.

SAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughter)

BRENNAN: No.

TRAVIS: Yeah. Yeah.

AABRIA: (laughs)

TRAVIS: Or so much so that it's rare?

BRENNAN: The Prime Deities were so thorough in sealing the Betrayer Gods away that the Betrayer Gods were not able to grant spells. The Betrayer Gods--

TRAVIS: Yo.

BRENNAN: -- the worship of them was completely fruitless.

TRAVIS: Yeah, nothing. You got nothing, even if you wanted to.

LUIS: There's one more thing I want to do with this body.

BRENNAN: Mm-hmm.

LUIS: I'm going to trace again with my finger the runes.

AABRIA: Don't touch it.

LUIS: As I'm touching it-- (laughter)

MARISHA: Laerryn's like eww!

LUIS: -- I'm going to, on occasion, infuse it with divine energy. I'm going to just spend a point of Lay on Hands on occasion, not to heal the body--

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LUIS: -- but to connect.

TRAVIS: What are you worried about? You're not going to get injured. (laughter)

LUIS: As I trace all of those runes.

BRENNAN: You connect. I don't know what it means for someone to become as lost as this man was, to do what he did, to seek for who he sought for. But you're a man with a lot of questions. I think that you understand what it's like to feel lost. The eyes close, and this body at least knows more rest now than it did in life.

AABRIA: Having a moment. Gross.

LOU: I am of two minds. If we are amongst ourselves to admit that Vespin Chloras succeeded in interacting with a Betrayer God, it seems fitting that we either confirm this possibility by revisiting your reconstructed site, or we seek out some greater understanding of Zerxus' dreams by finding a prophet, or better understanding what is going on with the Hall of Prophecy.

LUIS: Yes.

TRAVIS: I agree.

LOU: I admit I am not wholly ready to give myself over to this idea and would like to better understand what exactly we are potentially dealing with before we start making decisions, from a place of truth.

SAM: Well, just one-- you know I don't have opinions. I just report. But just a theory to toss out, as you were talking and you were talking, it's just a wild theory. It could be possibly totally wrong. But the Betrayer Gods can't come through. They're locked out. Can't, they can't get in here. They're stuck out. Right? So, and we know that this lady became the Matron of Ravens.

LOU: Yes.

MARISHA: Mm-hmm.

SAM: And Vespin did the same thing. So this Betrayer God that Vespin has awoken, or whatever, wouldn't have to make the journey from lands beyond to get here, because Vespin would be the Betrayer God. He would be here already. Doesn't have to go through any gate or anything, because he's gone through this ritual that makes him a god.

LUIS: It's possible.

AABRIA: We would know. We would know if he had ascended, though. We knew when the Matron of Ravens.

SAM: How did we know?

AABRIA: Thought we had a feeling? We were like...

MARISHA: Oh, there's one more!

BRENNAN: In the blink of an eye, anyone who was standing in a temple to the previous god of death watched all of the names of that god be erased from the stone in front of them at the moment of her ascension.

SAM: But there is no knowing of the Betrayer God, so there would be no one who knew if they changed.

LUIS: Except here we have evidence of someone who was drawing upon their power and was receiving it. So the line of that is established here.

BRENNAN: Loquatius, you are the one extraplanar person here. Give me an insight check.

MARISHA: Hmm, hmm.

SAM: On myself? I'm self-insighting?

BRENNAN: No, I think you're insighting the world.

AABRIA: Ooh.

SAM: I fucking love insighting the world. (laughter)

SAM: A 22, but if I fail, I can add a d4.

LOU: (laughs) I love the offer, every time.

MARISHA: He says that every time, yeah. If I fail.

LOU: Here we go.

BRENNAN: You won't fail because you're on a gradient. So roll the d4 for me.

LOU: Get that.

SAM: Okay, 24.

BRENNAN: 24. You're sitting here. You're talking about did this ritual work or not, right?

SAM: Yeah.

BRENNAN: All of your friends, you have powerful friends here in this room who have very specific functions within the city. Right now, for being not human, you're thinking about human nature. You're thinking about the nature of all beings. The gods are impossible to fathom, sure. But if they have wars, if they squabble and bicker with each other, how inhuman can they be? If there is a puppet here, it's indicative of a conspiracy. And a conspiracy exists to accomplish something that has not happened yet. So I think that when you're saying the ritual, something happened, I think on that insight, that powerful insight check, you're pulling on the right thread. Something happened, perhaps something terrible. But the apocalypse, if the apocalypse happened, you'd notice it. Something is at work, but not finished. That is what your opinion is as you try to put the pieces together. Cerrit is right. An infernal cultist came to the palace of the Keeper of Scrolls in Avalir. But that cultist came to do something, which means that something needed to happen.

MARISHA: As he is saying that--

SAM: Charmingly.

MARISHA: Charmingly--

TRAVIS: With a certain allure.

MARISHA: -- a lot snaps into place for Patia as well. How the fuck did this motherfucker get in? (laughter)

LUIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: Is there something I can do to check? How did he-- I'm assuming that I would have so many things set up in terms of, you know, warning signs, breach points--

TRAVIS: Warnings, yeah.

MARISHA: -- Zones of Truth, you name it.

BRENNAN: You have divining stones.

MARISHA: Divining stones.

BRENNAN: You go back through a divining stone effortlessly and look through.

MARISHA: Yeah, looking at my smart home.

BRENNAN: Looking at your smart home.

MARISHA: iPad.

LOU: Just on the Nest.

LUIS: Yes, yes.

MARISHA: On the Nest, yeah.

SAM: Ring cam.

MARISHA: I'm looking at all the Ring cams.

LUIS: Yeah, right?

TRAVIS: (laughs)

BRENNAN: A hodmedod walked down this hallway. It was not in the livery of the Golden Scythe. It walked down. It walked down this hallway and never came back out. It never came back, for the whole party, up to this current moment as you're recording. You do a quick scan of the hallway. There's no hodmedod anywhere. But you see just the corner, from where one of your divining stones can catch it, the hodmedod opening the door to this room.

MARISHA: Right.

BRENNAN: That hodmedod had come as a porter, carrying a gift of Dean Lacrytia Hollow.

MARISHA: Wait, wait, wait, wait.

AABRIA: (laughs)

TRAVIS: The walk sign is on.

MARISHA: Carrying a gift of Dean-- wait.

BRENNAN: So when Lacrytia Hollow showed up, she had a hodmedod with her, carrying a gift. That hodmedod put the gift down, and being a hodmedod that no one would care to follow or look at that much--

LUIS: Kept going.

MARISHA: Went (bip bip bip)

BRENNAN: -- wandered off, walked into this room, and that's the last you see of it. You're in this room, and it's not in here. But there was an invisible cultist in here.

MARISHA: That was the one-- because I caught out the corner of my eye when I was doing my Detect Thoughts, and it went poof.

BRENNAN: No, different one. That one's still disanimated.

MARISHA: Different one? That one disanimated.

BRENNAN: Invisibility is a 2nd-level spell and Disguise Self is a 1st-level spell. That cultist was disguised as a hodmedod and walked in here, and then when he got into the room, cast Invisibility on himself and was waiting for the right moment. But the right moment never came, because he got his throat slit by the Senior Sightwarden.

MARISHA and LUIS: Wow.

AABRIA: We got got by cantrips, baby.

MARISHA: We got got by cantrips! (laughter)

AABRIA: You hate to see it.

TRAVIS: Fundamentals, you guys, fundamentals. (laughter)

SAM: So Dean Hollow, Dean Hollow?

AABRIA: They have good fundamentals.

BRENNAN: Just think about all the shit you've gotten away with--

MARISHA: Dean Hollow.

BRENNAN: -- as 3rd-level characters, you know what I'm saying?

AABRIA: Amen.

TRAVIS: It's under Patia's list.

SAM: Dean Hollow, where is Dean Hollow?

MARISHA: Where is-- so I'm going to go over--

TRAVIS: Necromancy Archmage of the Ring of Silver.

MARISHA: Yes, I'm going to go.

AABRIA: Let's go!

MARISHA: She was the one who brought in, she came with Purvan.

LUIS and LOU: Purvan.

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Or she had invited Purvan, and then openly mocked him in sort of-- in the--

MARISHA: This bitch.

AABRIA: Which is wild--

BRENNAN: And you all applauded.

AABRIA: -- because I appreciated that.

LOU: Because it was pretty dope. Just some solid dunks.

MARISHA: Pretty good cover.

SAM: All right.

MARISHA: All right. I'm going to go over. I'm imagining this room-- I'm adding shit to canon as we go-- has one of those big panorama windows, like CEOs have in their upstairs offices, looking over their warehouse, looking at their worker minions. (laughs) I imagine I have that in the house. I'm looking over, down into the foyer area. Can I see, can I clock Dean?

BRENNAN: You see, there was a woman. Madara Glyph was talking with her all night, but you don't see Lacrytia Hollow anywhere here.

LUIS: Hmm.

SAM: Well, we can go talk to who was talking to her and ask where she went.

TRAVIS: How does our telepathic link work? Any of us can jump in and send a message, or just you can hit any of us?

AABRIA: Oh yeah, I'll bring that shit back up. Rary's Telepathic Bond.

BRENNAN: Cool.

AABRIA: Everyone can talk to everyone, and you can silent--

TRAVIS: Are you the source of that? You're the source of that.

AABRIA: I'm the source of that.

BRENNAN: Over any distance.

AABRIA: Yeah, any distance.

SAM: Any distance!

BRENNAN: It's a good spell.

SAM: Wow.

AABRIA: It's a really good spell.

LUIS: How long is that one? Is that an hour, or is that more than that?

AABRIA: It's an hour, but I can ritually cast it again and again and again.

TRAVIS: Solid.

LUIS: Okay.

TRAVIS: Let's maybe keep that up.

MARISHA: So wait, okay.

AABRIA: I only take it down--

MARISHA: This is above the table Marisha talking to DM. The one that I saw, the hodmedod that went poof, that just--

BRENNAN: That was one of, that was a different one. That was one of Nydas'. So basically, what happened is that one disanimated for reasons you still don't understand. But you heard that one saying Ghor Dranas over and over again. This was a private one of Lacrytia's. Putting that together in your head, you're like, now you don't know if Lacrytia knew or not, but a hodmedod in her employ walked in with a gift, put the gift on the table, walked down a hallway without being ordered to, opened a door, let itself in a room.

LUIS: Where's the gift?

TRAVIS: Yeah.

MARISHA: Where's the gift? What gift did she bring?

AABRIA: Where's the receiving room?

MARISHA: Yeah, where's, is there a big table with gifts?

SAM: Is there a registry?

MARISHA: Like a wedding, yeah, yeah, yeah.

AABRIA: I brought you a Keurig.

LUIS: Well, we need to go see if that gift is an actual gift, or if it's something that's going to go boom.

SAM: I made a donation on your behalf.

MARISHA: Thank you.

AABRIA: (laughs)

SAM: I haven't done it yet, but I'm going to. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I also don't think it's important, but I point out to Nydas the core of the hodmedod that just has that glyph that looks like it's missing.

BRENNAN: You don't put your proprietary technology. You have a technology that keeps their engines in the--

LOU: We keep the engines, the energy is stored at the Scythe and fed out.

TRAVIS: I learn more every day.

MARISHA: How difficult is it, Nydas, to tamper with one of your hodmedods?

BRENNAN: Someone would have to be in the Guild Hall.

LOU: Someone would have to be in the Guild Hall.

SAM: (laughs)

MARISHA: But I mean, once again, just the coincidences, which I hate them.

BRENNAN and AABRIA: (laugh)

MARISHA: We just had this little infiltrator.

TRAVIS: Yes, the Sphinx.

LOU: The Guild Hall is relatively empty. It was not the sphinx, who did majestically during the Parade of Beasts.

TRAVIS: (laughs) Naturally.

LOU: The Guild Hall is relatively empty at this current time. But I was just there before meeting up with Laerryn, and my man Alessander is there and did not mention any sort of tampering or the like.

SAM: Let's go find this gift. Let's go find this Hollow.

LUIS: Yes, great.

SAM: And see what we can see.

LUIS: And go from there.

MARISHA: All right.

BRENNAN: Incredible. There is much that you have all discussed doing. Finding Hollow, finding the gift. You have mentioned the Hall of Prophecies, returning to Cloudstone. There is much to do, and precious little time.

MARISHA: So much to do!

LUIS: I know.

BRENNAN: As all of you stand from your seats at The Ivy Table, outside you hear...

LOU: (whispers) Don't do this. No, don't do this.

BRENNAN: Boom! (groaning)

TRAVIS: Dude, no!

BRENNAN: The fireworks extravaganza's begun.

TRAVIS: Oh my god. (screaming)

TRAVIS: Brennan, you sack of crap!

BRENNAN: (laughs)

AABRIA: Go! (laughter)

BRENNAN: The fireworks extravaganza!

SAM: Hey, I love the fireworks.

BRENNAN: The extravaganza's started.

TRAVIS: Oh!

BRENNAN: And that's where we're going to take our break, folks. We'll come back after the break.

AABRIA: I don't like this. (laughter)

MARISHA: This miniseries is too stressful. I'm canceling it. (laughter)

MARISHA: It's done.

Break[]

What about our museum curator? Hytroga? Yeah. His would be like quintessential boomer Twitter, where it's not quite done right. It's just a picture of him from high school. This is the deepest lore. Were you close with anybody in the Nobodies? All of them. No, I mean like, close. All of them. No, it's. (laughing) You're weird. You're not, though. (laughing) Oh! What the fuck? Yeah, let's see what happens. (glass breaking) What the fuck? This is it, fellas!

LAURA: Hey Critters, Laura Bailey here to guide you through what's new in the Critical Role shop. Oh my gosh, it's so amazing. Could anything be more perfect? Style should never be a dump stat, darling. Look at this. Isn't it fashion? So much fashion happening here. Oh, so comfy cozy. And hey, if you want, you can head over to the Critical Role shop right now. (light music)

Announcer: We now go live to a special address from the president.

ASHLEY: Hey, dweebs. Now, as your president, I've been kinda killing it lately. I gave global warming an atomic wedgie, I balanced the budget by selling my Pog collection, and I saved the Queen of England from that octopus. But my kickassery is far from done. According to this chart that I made, an estimated 35% of you are still a bunch of nasty goobers, but don't worry. I have a plan: Operation Gag Me With A Spoon. It's easy sleazy. According to this study that I wrote, if every citizen subscribed to Critical Role on Twitch, we could reduce maximum goobage by a metric buttload. Twitch is the only place where you'll get a live and moderated chat, and if you subscribe to Critical Role, you instantly get access to all their shows as soon as the live broadcast ends. So while you're ogling these Critical Role dorks with their sick goof 'em ups and their nutty voices, think of me, Gale, the current president of whatever. Now I gotta go make a fresh batch of spitballs but I guess I have some time for your boring questions. You! Reporter: Gale, is it true that if you subscribe to Critical Role through Prime Gaming, you have to resubscribe every month? Uh, yeah. I do it right after my monthly prank call to Pee-on O'Brien. Next question! Reporter: Does Critical Role have exclusive emotes for their subscribers? Uh, doy. Of course they do. I like the hello bees one, 'cause bees are cool. I replaced my whole security detail with a bunch of bees that think I'm their queen. Last question! Reporter: Gale, with all due respect, is Operation Gag Me With a Spoon a real policy, or are you mad goofin'? Am I mad goofin'? What, do you see me scarfing Milk Duds while doodling ding-dongs on the SkyMalt catalog? Listen, I know I'm new to this, and I admit that when I made the wish to be the boss of everything, I did not know the witch that works at Woolworth's was listening. Well, Faustian bargain or not, I am the president now and I have an obligation to lead this country. So to answer your question, no, I am not mad goofin'. Security, take him out! (bees buzzing) (Gale laughing) Later, chudruckers!

Part II[]

LOU: Wesley Snipes tax evasion. (laughter)

BRENNAN: We had to have caught it on camera.

LOU: Right, it was so late.

BRENNAN: It was so late in the game. Folks, we're coming back to Exandria Unlimited: Calamity after the break. We return now to the Palazzo Por'co, where the Ring of Brass stands up from The Ivy Table.

LOU: Trying to play along.

BRENNAN: I loved it, I think it's great. You stand. There is much to do. Many of the cards held by those assembled here are now on the table. The Astral Leywright is functional, and it has one chance and one chance alone to work, and that is today. And! The ritual of the Archmage Vespin Chloras appears to have done something terrible. You stand up from this place. You want to investigate the gift of Dean Hollow, Lacrytia Hollow.

MARISHA: Yes, yes I think me and Laerryn are tagging along.

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: And quick stop at the gift table.

AABRIA: Totally.

BRENNAN: Long, beautifully wrapped gift, very stylish. As is the fashion for necromancers, it's a velvet black box, with a lovely black ribbon on it.

AABRIA: Oh god!

MARISHA: The most goth of presents.

BRENNAN: The most goth of gifts. It's quite long, it's quite elongated. You open it up, and you see there's a small--

MARISHA: Is it trapped? Is it a bomb? Is it anything like that?

BRENNAN: You don't detect any magic on it at all.

MARISHA: No magic, okay.

LOU: But your cousin is dead. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You detect no magic on it whatsoever. You open it up. For this enormous box, you see there's a velvet raised stand that's the whole length of the box. In the center in a depression shaped for it, there's a small vial of a clear liquid. It's quite small, less than a mouthful. There's a note attached to it.

MARISHA: Read it.

BRENNAN: The note says, "When the time comes, this will be the easier way out. "All things end: Lives, stories, even ages."

SAM: Oh.

LOU: What?

AABRIA: Do you read that out loud? Because I am for sure opening other gifts.

MARISHA: I don't read it out loud.

TRAVIS: It's Wite-Out.

MARISHA: I fold it, and I make eye contact with Laerryn. We have enough of a bond, that you just see me look at you.

AABRIA: Necromancers have such a penchant for the dramatic.

MARISHA: So poetic.

AABRIA: We should have a conversation.

MARISHA: Mm-hmm.

BRENNAN: Anyone who wants to, give me a medicine check.

AABRIA: Natural 20.

TRAVIS: Let's go.

MARISHA: Ooh, my girl's got it.

BRENNAN: The reason you did not detect magic is that the faintly sweet, incredibly deadly poison within the vial is non-magical.

AABRIA: We need to have a conversation. I'm going to drop the vial.

SAM: Drop it?

AABRIA: Yeah, so it shatters.

SAM: Oh, okay. Well, what if it's aroma activated?

AABRIA: (laughs) Then we all die here, baby. It smells like Juicy Fruit.

TRAVIS: 50-foot square room, just like (choking). (laughter)

SAM: I was just being dramatic (choking). (laughter)

LUIS: Holy shit.

MARISHA: I immediately turn with the freshly shattered glass behind me, thanks to Laerryn, badass. I scan, do I see Lacrytia Hollow at all? Probably not.

BRENNAN: No roll necessary, you do not see Lacrytia Hollow. You see Madara Glyph, who was speaking to her earlier, which you know is the Valedictine Abjura, your underling at the Abjuration Guild.

SAM: Go shake her down.

MARISHA: I immediately bring my orb in front of me and it widens a little bit, Scrying. I'm looking for that bitch.

AABRIA: Let's go.

TRAVIS: Pow.

BRENNAN: You get your orb and Scry. (pulsing energy) Most people wouldn't recognize what this is, but as someone who has a ring of mind shielding, you know exactly what it is.

MARISHA: She's got mind shielding.

LOU: Okay.

MARISHA: I should've known that. We all have those, don't we?

TRAVIS: You didn't collect the mind shielding rings before the party started?

AABRIA: Everyone's got one.

MARISHA: This one isn't a key party, all right? (laughter)

BRENNAN: Everyone drop your mind shielding rings, it's not fair to protect your mind.

TRAVIS: That's right, man, put it in the fish bowl.

MARISHA: You'll have a better experience if you don't. All right. Yeah, she's currently missing in action.

AABRIA: Do you think Madara has any information?

MARISHA: She's your assistant, you tell me.

AABRIA: I don't pay attention to people dumber than me.

MARISHA: That is incredibly fair. (laughter)

MARISHA: Let's go talk to her.

BRENNAN: Madara is standing there going like, "It's, of course, love, I mean, the last--" and sees both of you walking straight towards her. You see she swallows a full gulp of air into her stomach, just at both of your power and station and goes, "Ah, mm, Keep-- A-a-architect Arcane, hello."

MARISHA: Follow me.

BRENNAN: "Yep." (laughter)

AABRIA: Yeah, you lead, I'm going to be behind her in the most stressful sandwich she's ever been in.

BRENNAN: She follows and says (nervous laugh). You go to a little private corner, "Whatever do I--"

AABRIA: We don't need to make small talk.

BRENNAN: "Yep."

MARISHA: Where is Lacrytia Hollow?

BRENNAN: "Ah, so, I'm sweating."

LUIS: Huh.

MARISHA: I do a little cantrip Gust to cool her down.

TRAVIS: She just dies. (laughter)

BRENNAN: She says, "Lacrytia Hollow? Oh, the Dean was speaking to me. She was speaking to me earlier prior to Sir Ilerez coming over, that she had invited the champion Purvan Suul, to the gathering, which I thought very strange because she then quite grievously made the guest uncomfortable, which is fine, I agree that the age of the gods is over. But I think she wanted to make apologies to him because I saw her whisper to Magister Cormorant, and say that she was going to follow him. And then I saw, well, what did I see?" Give me an arcana check.

LOU: Oh no.

LUIS: Oh, fuck.

AABRIA: I just want to assist you on this.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

LOU: Oh no.

MARISHA: What is she trying to do? What are you doing, bitch?

TRAVIS: You mean what did she forget?

LUIS: Yeah.

SAM: What did she--

LUIS: Have done to her.

MARISHA: 25.

BRENNAN: 25? 25 lets you know that you should be casting Detect Thoughts right now.

MARISHA: Okay, that's, yeah. Detect Thoughts, let's do it.

BRENNAN: As she goes there, leave it to-- Well, it's hard to tell who cast it, but you know it wasn't an enchanter because this Modify Memory was sloppy and it was done very fast. Madara saw Lacrytia cast a spell, and either Lacrytia or somebody else, quickly in the midst of a party, modified her memory to forget it. But you see, she says, "Yes, I think Lacrytia wanted to apologize to the champion Purvan--

MARISHA: I probe deeper, Detect Thoughts. I don't give a fuck right now if she knows.

BRENNAN: On a 25, you burrow deeper into the memory, and you get to a memory that Madara can no longer access. You see Lacrytia go invisible, to follow Purvan out the room. You see Magister Cormorant turn, who was also one of the people speaking. You see Cormorant says, "Oh (laughs), Valedictine, can I speak with you for a moment?" And put a hand on her neck, and begin to tap a somatic component to a Modify Memory spell--

TRAVIS: Wow.

BRENNAN: -- on her neck.

TRAVIS: Wow.

BRENNAN: As she goes in, you look at Madara's eyes looking out, and you see in her memory a bit of magic, some kind of dangerous spell, something crackling, something that you recognize is about to break Invisibility. The Invisibility that Lacrytia cast on herself was low level, the kind of thing that an attack or a spell gets rid of, right? The Invisibility was about to fade because Lacrytia was about to do something deadly. Then you see and hear, "Purvan!" as Loquatius and Zerxus run out. And because they ran out, Lacrytia killed the spell.

MARISHA: Stopped.

TRAVIS: Damn, they were going to take the shot.

SAM: I saved someone's life today.

TRAVIS: Oh my.

LOU: Don't tell him. (laughter)

LOU and AABRIA: Please don't tell him.

LUIS: I was there, too, and I said "Champion," which stopped him.

BRENNAN: Uh-huh.

TRAVIS: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

BRENNAN: Then you watch as Lacrytia, in the memory-- Well, now you're past the memory. But you remember the interaction that Zerxus and Loquatius described, which was their presence in front of Purvan Suul up until the moment that he vanished, because they did not leave his side until he (snaps fingers) teleported away from the city.

TRAVIS: You guys changed canon. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You guys saved the future of Exandria.

LUIS: We are heroes.

AABRIA: No one tell them.

SAM: It's been a great mini campaign. (laughter)

LOU: That's what we played for, right? (laughter)

MARISHA: Oh my god.

BRENNAN: So Madara is standing in front of you and goes, "Um, sorry, I-I-I can't be more helpful, b-b-but then there was a moment, and then Magister Cormorant became quite distracted." Once again in her memories, you see--

MARISHA: Still, yeah.

BRENNAN: You see Madara speaking, and Cormorant literally reacts like someone tapped his shoulder, but you didn't see anyone tap his shoulder. You see that it's like, "And then he left quite abruptly as well, the Magister. I believe he said something about having to attend to some business in his offices, which is strange, as on an evening such as this, a wonderful gathering, a party. But Magister Cormorant is free to do as he wishes. Have I done anything to give offense, or anything?"

AABRIA: Not knowing what you're discovering, you definitely see Laerryn about to rip into her. Because I have no idea; I just think she's incompetent. Well, actually you've been getting drunk at a party, and there's something bigger hap-- What is your whole deal? What is the point of you? Valedictine, you are a representative of the Abjura, and I find, frankly, all of your behavior, tonight specifically to be sloppy.

MARISHA: Go home, Madara.

BRENNAN: "I-I-I am very sorry."

MARISHA: Happy Replenishment.

BRENNAN: She wordlessly turns and walks out of here.

AABRIA: So why did you let her leave, and not take her to the Magisters?

MARISHA: I've got everything I need to know. Magister Cormorant--

AABRIA: Okay, cool.

MARISHA: -- are a part of this. He seems to be in cahoots, as they say, with the Dean. I take the sphere in front of my face in between me and Laerryn, and you see a projection in the sphere of the memory that I pulled from her, her mind, and play it back.

AABRIA: I might have to admit that I was needlessly harsh to a subordinate.

MARISHA: No, her dress was atrocious. Did you see that?

AABRIA: It was bad. Honestly, if you can get a Modify Memory cast on you, what kind of wizard are you, anyway?

MARISHA: She should be more careful.

AABRIA: Truly.

MARISHA: She deserves the night off.

SAM: You guys can make up with her tomorrow, I'm sure. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Give me a perception check with advantage, call it a DC 15.

MARISHA: Oh, oh well.

TRAVIS: Both bad.

MARISHA: Oh, that's bad.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

MARISHA: 12.

BRENNAN: Cool.

AABRIA: Poopy.

MARISHA: Two and five.

BRENNAN: So you have what you have from Madara. The rest of the Ring of Brass, you've looked at the gift, you've talked to Madara. The party moves on, but time is of the essence. It's getting closer to midnight.

MARISHA: I do jump on to our walkie talkies and inform everybody: Magister Cormorant has something to do with this and word on the street is he can be found in his offices.

SAM: I'm right across the lobby from you. I can see: Hi, I'm over here, hi.

MARISHA: Oh wait, you're still here?

SAM: Yeah, I'm still here, haven't gone anywhere.

AABRIA: Weren't you doing something else useful?

SAM: Are you going to go do that? Are you going to go take care of that Cormorant thing?

AABRIA: I would love to go to the Magisterium.

LUIS: I'm tapping into our group chat, through the telepathic bond because you downloaded that into--

MARISHA: Everyone can hear this, yes.

LUIS: Great, so what's our next move? We're about to go--

LOU: We were planning on heading to the Hall of Prophecy to see if we might consult with regard to Zerxus' visions.

AABRIA: Isn't it closed?

LUIS: We're going to see if we can open it.

AABRIA: Okay.

LOU: If not, I had intentions of scrying on one of the prophets or the Oracles I might be familiar with that we might just go to them directly.

AABRIA: Good.

SAM: I was going to go check out my records on--

TRAVIS: Vespin?

SAM: Vespin Chloras, just to see if we could glean any more historical information about him. Are you coming with or you going to go to your place?

TRAVIS: 100% knowledge is the key. I feel like the more we can learn about the man before whatever he did took place, it may serve us well.

SAM: Come up to the Tome, to the Herald's Tome.

BRENNAN: All of you head off, the Hall of Prophecy, the Herald's Tome, the Magisterium. The Ring of Brass on a night where you should've been reveling until sunrise--

LOU: We should be drunk.

MARISHA: We should be drunk.

BRENNAN: Hey, there's only six people in this town who work and you're looking at them. (laughter)

TRAVIS: You have a Xerox machine at the Herald's Tome, right? We can get into some trouble.

SAM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't say that word, Xerox; it's copyrighted, but--

TRAVIS: Oh, oh, okay.

SAM: We have a photocopier.

TRAVIS: Photocopier. (laughter)

MARISHA: Cormorant would be at the Magisterium, or would he be in the library?

BRENNAN: That's where his offices are.

LOU: He said he was going there, right?

BRENNAN: Yeah, he said he was going to his offices.

MARISHA: Speaker of the Fourth.

BRENNAN: Yes, Speaker of the Fourth. Cool. You head off. I'm going to go ahead and say that-- Oh, you know what I'll say here? I'm going to roll one two, three four, five six.

AABRIA: I hope it's us again.

MARISHA: See who we cut to. I know! Back to back!

BRENNAN: Back to back. Incredible. We're going to follow you guys to the Herald's Tome.

TRAVIS: Did you roll a five or a six?

BRENNAN: I rolled a six.

TRAVIS: Damn it. Thought it was a five.

SAM: I have, I would assume, records at the Herald's Tome of any notable figures. We keep records and also recordings, audio and visual, of notable people from around the world in case we need to use them in upcoming stories. But also sometimes we prerecord stories that might not be time sensitive. So with your blessing, Brennan, I bring him to the room where we keep all of these prerecorded crystal shards that have these messages and information on them. Nobody's here though, because everyone's out partying. So I'm trying to make my way and figure out the filing system. I haven't done this in years. Usually I have assistants who do this for me. So I pick up one thing and put it in and it says, it's a recording of me saying: It is with a heavy heart that I must report the death of Eldamir the Wise. (laughter)

SAM: His reign was long and he was a high-- And I take it out. That will be run someday, obviously. (laughter)

LUIS: Oh man.

SAM: Then I stick in something else and it's a prerecorded advertisement. Come to Mulligan's Tavern! The third best ale in Avalir, but the first best for making friends. And I take it out. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You know what, I'll take it. I don't even drink, so that actually works for me.

SAM: I'm looking for anything that I can find on this man.

BRENNAN: As you guys walk in, you, again, have this incredible chamber. It's a circular chamber with all these crystals stored throughout these beautiful-- Everything in here is gold and brass. There are a bunch of little stands that project three dimensional illusory recordings. I mean, this is a whole group of bards that work at the Tome. Illusion magic is second nature, so these amazing recordings. Let me ask this. As you get here, you have so much stuff. I will ask for either history checks or investigation checks. As you walk in, it's also the sort of strange... There's a little bit of a... Being in the Herald's Tome at night, empty cubicles, empty workspaces, and the lights are all off. You're inside.

TRAVIS: I would also just say out of habit I do my normal thing, which is to investigate a space, look for things that may not be there, use the Unerring Eye and check it because it's after hours, but also if we are on a specific trail, who knows who might else be?

BRENNAN: Yeah.

SAM: Certainly. Please look around. I must admit, I have been here on occasion after hours, sometimes accompanied with--

AABRIA: Oh my god. Make it a private chat!

SAM: -- other people.

TRAVIS: Oh, oh! Wow.

AABRIA: God!

SAM: Sorry, sorry, sorry!

TRAVIS: It peaks, somehow, the tone.

MARISHA: Can you mute your microphones, please? Thank you.

SAM: But yeah, so there could be some people wandering about or finding hard surfaces to, you know, lay down on or something.

TRAVIS: Hard surfaces? Just for the room and the space, anything that might be there, visual or non-visual, It's only a nine.

BRENNAN: Cool. You're looking through--

SAM: But I can roll that d4.

BRENNAN: Yeah, roll the d4!

SAM: That's cocked. Oh, it added four! That's a 13.

BRENNAN: 13. You start pulling a lot of stuff. I'm going to say on that investigation check, you grab a bunch. We're going to go with that very high investigation check. So history, you're having a hard time remembering stuff. So with that investigation, you basically pull everything. It's like, "Okay, we can't narrow this down. We got to pull it all. So we're going to be here for a minute, running through it." As you do, you also find something that's not about Vespin Chloras at all. But you find something about the Herald's Tome.

LOU: (gasps)

BRENNAN: But we'll talk about Vespin first.

AABRIA: Oh my god! (laughter)

SAM: I don't even know what's going on.

LOU: The jig is up! We got your number!

SAM: I legitimately don't know what's happening.

BRENNAN: You did a bunch of stuff that I made up and didn't tell you!

SAM: Okay! Okay. (laughter)

LUIS: Oh man.

TRAVIS: You speak Infernal, don't you?

BRENNAN: So here's the thing.

AABRIA: I've been calling him a Betrayer God for years and no one's been listening. (laughter)

TRAVIS: (deeply) Oshkosh. Oshkosh b'gosh.

BRENNAN: So here's the deal. You pull a name right away. The reporter that got the most stuff on Vespin that actually went out and hustled and talked to him. This interview, this series of interviews is eight or nine years old. It's a much younger Vespin. You recognize the reporter's name. Elena Tuvaris.

SAM: Mm-hmm. You find a bunch of interviews. There's some stuff that Vespin actually said that was printed, that actually made it into some of the Herald's Tome. That's the easiest stuff to find. He talked a big game, even back in the day, about the Matron's ritual. He never made reference to himself, but he said it's a matter of time before someone recreates the ritual. He said, "Anything that is achieve--" He said, "It goes against every virtue of this age to believe that something that is achievable by one is not, at least in theory, achievable by all." He went on to say-- Again, arrogance and hubris is a staple of the age. He said that it was his belief that a future ritual would not dethrone a Prime Deity. He said, "After all, why would we wish to remove a force from this world that, while archaic and not necessarily where our vision of the future comes from, are nonetheless largely benevolent? Would it not make more sense to attempt to dethrone and remove something more nefarious from existence?"

AABRIA: Gosh.

BRENNAN: So that's what you printed, because it was of magical interest to the Archmages of Avalir, right? But there's a lot of other stuff that he said and did. You get an actual recording, which is one of the original things that Elena Tuvaris actually recorded, right? You put that in. It's a recording of an interview with a cleric of Vasselheim that is giving a comment about archmages attempting to recreate the Matron's ritual. Of course, this was taken at a gala about nine years ago in Vasselheim. You see that the gala is clearly in Vasselheim. You can see the city outside the window. Behind this cleric who's speaking, there are three people talking: Vespin Chloras, Lacrytia Hollow--

SAM: (gasps)

BRENNAN: -- and Loras of the Weaver's Mask.

TRAVIS: Mother--

LOU: And he was so cool! Cool guys don't do bad things!

AABRIA: (laughs) Oh, she left.

BRENNAN: As this is cropping up here, do any of you have the ability to read lips or at least can make an attempt? Yes.

MARISHA: Yes.

LUIS: Oh yes!

TRAVIS: As long as it's a language that I speak.

BRENNAN: Yes, they're speaking Common, absolutely.

AABRIA: He doesn't have lips, but he can read them?

MARISHA: It's what gives him the advantage.

SAM: I'm going to manipulate the playback of this interview and blow it up and enhance.

BRENNAN: You see the Herald himself goes, "Enhance, enhance, enhance." But again, you are finding a breakthrough that might-- This city is full of every arcane tome in the world, and the thing that might save Exandria is in the back of some B-roll footage of color commentary.

TRAVIS: Type code still on there. (laughter)

SAM: It's like a shot of them pouring champagne flutes or something.

BRENNAN: Yeah, exactly. (laughter)

BRENNAN: You zoom in. Thankfully for the future of Avalir, you see that-- you are catching profiles at an angle of Loras. You notice Loras' mask on the side of his face, and Dean Hollow. So Vespin is with his back against the window, speaking, and you have a full view of his face and are able to gather what he's saying. Reading his lips, you see him talking and he's clearly reacting to something that Loras has just said. You see he's being very cavalier and says, "Well, of course, Loras, that's your opinion, and you're more than entitled to it. I don't take such a limited view of what is possible in an age of wonders. Obviously, if it were impossible, it wouldn't have already happened once. We're talking about how to improve on existing technology. The Matron's breakthrough already opened the door for all of us. Look, you should know why these things are challenging. It's your fault, in a way." You see Loras say something you can't see because you can't get a good eye on his lips. He's like, "Oh, come now. You haven't read the pact? You know what the Gau Drashari are about." You see that he then says-- You see there's a momentary confusion. You see there's a moment of confusion. He says, he looks at both of them and says, "The City of Crowns bears the Tree of Names." He says, "The City of Crowns bears the Tree of Names," and says, "Oh, am I saying something you don't know? Maybe if you took a little less time flying that city and a little bit more time cracking the books you'd know this." He finishes his drink and walks away.

TRAVIS: City of Crowns.

SAM: City of Crowns is the one on the ground, right? Cathmoíra?

AABRIA: No, that's us.

SAM: That's us, we're the Crown.

BRENNAN: The City of Crowns bears--

TRAVIS: The Tree of Names.

MARISHA: The Tree of Names.

LOU: The fuck is the Tree of Names?

TRAVIS: Does that ring any bells in either of our domes?

BRENNAN: If any of you can hit a high DC history check right now.

AABRIA: Come on.

TRAVIS: Pfft, no problem.

SAM: I'm pretty sure... I'm no expert. I think he said Tree of Gnomes, actually.

TRAVIS: Tree of Gnomes?

SAM: Yeah, I think it was Gnomes.

TRAVIS: You look up Gnomes, I'll look up Names.

MARISHA: It was the Keebler elves the whole time.

TRAVIS: Is your history mod--

SAM: My history is not great. It's only four.

TRAVIS: That's better than mine, I'll give you advantage.

LOU: The one in the red hat.

MARISHA: (laughs)

LOU: He had the big cheeks, and I swear to god--

SAM: How about I give you Inspiration?

TRAVIS: You want to give me Inspiration?

SAM: Then I'll also roll.

TRAVIS: Oh! Pfft, yeah!

BRENNAN: Yeah, go for it.

SAM: I will inspire you by telling you it's probably Gnomes. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Is that a d6?

SAM: That's a d10 on top.

TRAVIS: (whoops) Level 14!

AABRIA: Level 14!

TRAVIS: Okay. Okay.

SAM: Not great.

TRAVIS: Natural 20. (cheering)

SAM: Roll the d10, too, just in case!

LUIS: Damn.

TRAVIS: For a-- (wheezing laugh) 31. (cheering) That's an eight plus three.

MARISHA: Breaking that math!

LUIS: Holy crap.

AABRIA: It's good. It's so good.

TRAVIS: Sorry, Brennan!

MARISHA: Brennan's face got sad.

LOU: You have to tell us! (laughter)

LOU: You wanted it to be a fun thing that we went and looked up later.

TRAVIS: Give us the details!

LOU: But now you have to tell us.

AABRIA: You think you're done here. You want to spread it a little bit. That's great, I'm so proud of you.

BRENNAN: Fuck, dude.

TRAVIS: These dice are hefty. Never roll this one again ever.

BRENNAN: As Loquatius Seelie says "Tree of Gnomes" to you...

LOU: In your cheetah fucking suit. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Tree of Names. Tree of Names. You remember in your training, the Eyes of Avalir, the Tree of Names was given as one of the central artifacts of Avalir. Something that the Eyes of Avalir must eternally guard. If its name were ever to be mentioned, that was an immediate indication that something terrible was-- That anyone talking about it is talking about something incredibly, profoundly important to the significance and safety of Avalir. However, that's a very old piece of training for the Eyes of Avalir, which is itself a very old organization. The Tree of Names... I got to honor a nat 20. The Tree of Names doesn't get talked about as much anymore because it was protected 120 years ago by the Arboreal Calix.

LUIS: I knew it!

AABRIA: Yes! Sorry. Cool.

TRAVIS: Damn, really?

SAM: The name "The Tree of Names" was protected or the tree itself was protected by the Arboreal Cortex or whatever.

TRAVIS and AABRIA: Calix.

LUIS: It was built over it or around it?

BRENNAN: Built over and around it.

TRAVIS: (inhales)

MARISHA: Wow.

TRAVIS: That tree is fucking important, if it's not the core of something important.

MARISHA: Oh no.

LUIS: There was a tree in my dream in the palm of the Betrayer God.

SAM: You're right.

LUIS: And as Evandrin approached it, he knelt and the blossoms from the tree caught wind and fell on him. That's what caused him... I think that's what made him sick. At least if there's any truth to the dream that I had, then it has something to do with Evandrin, and that tree has something to do with these Betrayers. There's obviously a connection. We're all seeing that.

AABRIA: Oh, interesting. Are we saying this on the group chat?

LUIS: I'm saying that in the group chat.

SAM: We will when we're done with our investigation, for sure.

BRENNAN: I'm going to say that you do share it on the group chat. As you do-- So this is huge because the thing at the center of the Arboreal Calix, you saw Vespin Chloras talking about with clear knowledge in relation to rituals of ascension and godhood. He was speaking to Loras and Lacrytia Hollow about it in this party in Vasselheim nine years ago.

TRAVIS: But he's saying the City of Crowns, which is Avalir, bears the core of the Arboreal Calix.

BRENNAN: Bears the Tree of Names.

LUIS: Yes, the Tree of Names.

TRAVIS: In the fucking city?

BRENNAN: So that's very critical. Immediately upon hearing it, you go, "Yeah, Arboreal Calix is a wizard name. The Tree of Names, that's something older."

TRAVIS: Oh my god.

BRENNAN: That's something older.

MARISHA: Arboreal, like arbor.

BRENNAN: Arbor, yeah.

AABRIA: He said it to us earlier.

MARISHA: Yes, he did. Yes, he did. It's been there the whole time!

BRENNAN: Oh, it's a fun little Easter egg!

TRAVIS: Ooh.

LOU: Nasty.

TRAVIS: It's real nasty.

LOU: It's real nasty.

TRAVIS: Thank god for that nat 20.

LOU: I swear to god.

TRAVIS: I love the stick. God, I love it. (laughter)

BRENNAN: Now, what I will say is this. Cerrit, as you hear over your telepathic bond, you hear Zerxus talk about the dream, Evandrin, his husband, the previous First Knight, you look. The clue you notice that has nothing to do with the records you pulled is that you see the rest of this file, this gilded box that has rows of gilded placards within it. It's all of the work of Elena Tuvaris, this reporter. At the back of it, you see a compartment labeled Evandrin Alterra, and it is empty.

TRAVIS: Can I-- oof. I'll bring Loquatius' attention to it. This is odd, don't you think?

SAM: What is? The fact that it's empty?

TRAVIS: Yeah. Former First Knight, a man of great import, high esteem.

SAM: Yes.

TRAVIS: All missing? Who has access to these files besides you and--

SAM: Well, Elena, the reporter who gathered this stuff. She doesn't work here anymore.

TRAVIS: Where is she?

SAM: I don't honestly know. I dismissed her a number of years ago, and I haven't heard from her since. I don't even know if she's still in Avalir.

TRAVIS: You wouldn't know where these files could be?

SAM: She could have taken them with her or destroyed them, or they could have been misplaced. I'll give it another look. I don't know.

TRAVIS: On the, "I don't know," does my ring do anything?

BRENNAN: I'm going to need Loquatius to roll a deception check.

MARISHA: Oh my god. (screaming)

SAM: It's a 30.

AABRIA: Oh my god. (laughter)

BRENNAN: So now, what's going to happen is this. That's a 30. It's a 30 deception from Loquatius?

SAM: Yeah.

AABRIA: My god.

LUIS: Fuck.

MARISHA: Your eyebrows are just so enchanting.

LOU: I swear. (laughter)

TRAVIS: Big dog rolls.

LOU: Big dog rolls.

BRENNAN: Not that there's anything untoward happening here, but that is above what the Ring of Honor will detect. So this comes down to the instincts of Cerrit alone.

MARISHA: Wow.

BRENNAN: I'm actually going to ask-- Yeah, I'm going to need you to roll insight, and I'm going to need you to tell me if you get 30 or higher.

MARISHA: Crack a 30?

SAM: 30 insight? He can't.

BRENNAN: What do you need to roll on the die to beat 30?

SAM: He can't do that.

LUIS: Yeah, he can.

MARISHA: Why couldn't he?

AABRIA: He's a rogue.

MARISHA: He's a freaking rogue.

TRAVIS: There's a whole bunch of stuff you can do. I'm just trying to see.

AABRIA: Oh god, he's stacking all his shit.

LOU: Give him Bardic.

MARISHA: Yeah, inspire him--

BRENNAN: Remember, the ring gives you advantage.

TRAVIS: I was just checking it.

BRENNAN: The ring gives you advantage on detecting lies.

TRAVIS: To break a 30, I need a 17 or higher.

MARISHA: You can do it.

LOU: You got two chances.

MARISHA: You can do it.

LOU: Come on.

TRAVIS: Nope. No.

MARISHA: Oh! (disappointed sounds)

TRAVIS: 23.

AABRIA: Oh my god! (laughter)

AABRIA: I'm so stressed out.

MARISHA: Holy shit.

TRAVIS: You bitch! (laughter)

LUIS: You used the wrong die!

LOU: Our secrets were fun. (laughter)

BRENNAN: So, you observe that. You have Loquatius' answer. It's possible a disgruntled reporter cleared this out and obviously--

SAM: You know, she was sloppy in her--

TRAVIS: What was her name again?

SAM: Elena Tuvaris. She was sloppy in her work, and this was yet another example of why she had to be dismissed.

BRENNAN: It would occur to Quay as well that you have lots of crystals on Evandrin Alterra. This is just Elena's file box. So other reporters that reported on Evandrin's stories and his accomplishments, there's plenty of those.

SAM: Yes, so if you want to know other facts about Evandrin, we can go diving. I don't think that's pressing information right now, though.

TRAVIS: I'm sorry, it's been such a late night. You said you think she's still in the city or she's left?

SAM: I don't know where she is, do I?

BRENNAN: I think you-- Would Loquatius have kept up with former employees, do you think?

SAM: If she's still in the biz, I would absolutely know. (chuckling)

BRENNAN: Actually, just give me a history check. I'll let you know.

LOU: "If she's still in the biz."

AABRIA: What's her IMDB?

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughter)

SAM: On IMDB? Sure, I check people out.

BRENNAN: Yeah, just history, yeah.

SAM: 19.

BRENNAN: 19? Yeah, her family's in the city. She's not a reporter anymore. The city is so dominated by the Herald's Tome that if you get fired from there, there's not competition to go to.

SAM: Sure.

BRENNAN: You think that she's working as a clerk or a scribe somewhere in the city.

SAM: Okay. There you go.

TRAVIS: Okay. Maybe I'll follow up with her if everything else runs dry. I'm sure--

SAM: Please do, and please tell me what happened to those files. They belong to us.

TRAVIS: I agree. It's probably nothing.

LOU: Stop.

AABRIA: I'm so stressed out. (laughter)

LOU: You. (laughter) I swear to god.

AABRIA: Let me be very clear, I love this man.

LOU: You know what happened to those files. (laughter)

AABRIA: My ex is a G, and I love this.

BRENNAN: Oh man, this is like irresistible force, immovable object. Fucking incredible. A changeling media personality and an aarakocra detective.

LUIS: Wow.

MARISHA: Incredible.

BRENNAN: All right.

TRAVIS: Wow.

SAM: (sighs)

LOU: Stop. Stop! (laughter) Stop.

AABRIA: He's literally feeling himself. ♪ Feeling myself ♪

LUIS: Oh my god.

AABRIA: ♪ I'm feeling myself ♪ (laughter)

BRENNAN: Incredible.

SAM: We report all that over the airwaves to our friends.

BRENNAN: Mm-hmm.

SAM: What are you guys up to?

BRENNAN: Well, let's find out. We move from here to the... We move from here to the Magisterium. You arrive in the Magisterium. As you arrive, you walk through vast doors leading to grand, sweeping double staircases that go up to a massive parliament, a circular structure of various thrones, the thrones all surrounding the high thrones, the eight thrones. You see there is the seventh throne of Guisaria Lucerid, and there is the Throne of the Fourth, which is Micah Cormorant's throne. It is dark as well here in the Magisterium as you approach. The private offices of the Magisters, again, of which there are 380, it is a massive chamber. The building is an enormous civic complex. Where would you travel as you arrive at the Magisterium, Patia and Laerryn?

AABRIA: Laerryn is caught just a moment with envy and contempt that the Court of Workings is four people in a sweat box--

BRENNAN: (laughs)

AABRIA: -- and there's 380 assholes that get very little done, and this place slaps. And she's mad, and has forgotten temporarily why she's here. What the fuck?

BRENNAN: (laughs)

AABRIA: What the fuck?

MARISHA: Inefficiency is the game. It's all about the pageantry.

AABRIA: Yeah. (sighs) Cormorant. We need to find... We need to talk to him, figure out what's going on.

MARISHA: Yes.

AABRIA: But I also need to find out any information I can on the construction and purpose of the Arboreal Calix. It's siphoning energy, and I don't know why, and I don't like when I don't know things.

MARISHA: Hmm. As I walk, you can just hear Patia's heeled boots that she has on echo through the hall with each clack, with every step. Hmm. The question is, do we just walk right up to his office, the Magister's? Or is there a more strategic approach here?

AABRIA: From what we know from before and what we just heard, he's much more of a threat. So I would-- caution. We should be stealthy. I don't think this is a conversation.

MARISHA: I don't think so, either. (sighs) Do we see any signs of life? Any lanterns lit? Any noise from any holes?

BRENNAN: Not in the chamber. You approach the offices, walking the marble staircase. Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. You see Magister Cormorant's office. The door is closed. It's a door of beautiful, polished, deep red wood with a bright gold knob and a placard that gives the name and station, Magister Micah Cormorant of the Fourth Throne. Door is shut.

MARISHA: Can I see any lights on, any shadows?

BRENNAN: You see no lights on inside.

MARISHA: Nothing?

BRENNAN: Nothing.

AABRIA: I don't trust it.

MARISHA: I don't, either. So I open the door.

LOU: (laughs)

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Now, as you attempt to open the door, the door is locked.

LOU: Okay.

BRENNAN: How authoritative do the assembled wizards feel like being?

AABRIA: I hate restraint.

MARISHA: Do you happen to have a Knock spell handy?

AABRIA: I can do you one better. I Summon Construct. What's the biggest, dumbest statue in here? It's mine now. (laughter)

TRAVIS: I'll have it, thanks. (laughter)

AABRIA: Yeah, thanks.

BRENNAN: A statue of a spell knight behind you in the wall, (groans) "We answer the call of the Architect."

AABRIA: Open the door.

BRENNAN: (blast) The door is blasted off its hinges and scatters--

TRAVIS: Holy shit!

BRENNAN: -- into a darkened office. I'm going to need perception checks from each of you.

MARISHA: Real quick, I just Prestidigitation and turn on all the lanterns.

AABRIA: (laughs) Smart.

BRENNAN: Lights come on.

MARISHA: What did you say, perception?

BRENNAN: Mm-hmm.

MARISHA: Oh god, my perception. I've got good perception, this is balls.

AABRIA: Do the math.

MARISHA: 15 total.

AABRIA: 23.

BRENNAN: Architect Arcane, as your construct smashed the door in, you heard something in here.

LOU: (groans)

LUIS and SAM: (laugh)

AABRIA: Show yourself.

BRENNAN: Roll initiative. (yelling) (clapping) Roll initiative. Roll initiative. Let's go. Let's go. Hold on. Let's do this.

AABRIA: (screams) Oh my god, he's getting the thing!

MARISHA: What is happening? (pounding) (general chaos)

LOU: What the fuck just happened?

MARISHA: Good! That is good.

SAM: (whoops)

AABRIA: I'm glad you did.

MARISHA: Oh my god! (screams)

AABRIA: I'm glad we got a big eye.

TRAVIS: Boop!

MARISHA: Girl!

LOU: This got too exciting way too fast.

AABRIA: Oh my goodness!

BRENNAN: Beautiful, here we go.

AABRIA: Look at the guy!

BRENNAN: Here is the Magister's office.

AABRIA: Oh, it's so cute.

BRENNAN: Here we go. Now, I have to grab a couple more things.

TRAVIS: Look at this. Look at this.

SAM: Is this a Brennan Mulligan map?

BRENNAN: This is a wonderful Matt Mercer map. (exclaiming)

BRENNAN: Matt and me hung out all morning this morning. Matt is a true wizard. I can only say: Matt, thank you so, so much. Also, Rick Perry, I miss you. (laughter)

AABRIA: This was your opportunity to say "Map Mercer," and that's okay.

BRENNAN and MARISHA: Map Mercer!

TRAVIS: Map Mercer.

BRENNAN: Okay.

MARISHA: It's a brand.

LUIS: Wow.

BRENNAN: Okay. It is wizard time. We have the beautiful Patia and Laerryn.

LOU: Oh wow!

AABRIA: Oh, look at us! We're so cute!

MARISHA: Oh my god! I haven't seen our minis yet!

AABRIA: So cute!

MARISHA: Look at you, though--

AABRIA: Oh my god!

MARISHA: -- in your signature purple.

LUIS: Too bad they're about to be destroyed.

MARISHA: Look at us. Together, we look like a blue raspberry Pop-Tart.

AABRIA: Oh my gosh!

MARISHA: Just purple and teal.

AABRIA: Yay!

LOU: Okay, all right, make sure--

AABRIA: Delicious.

LOU: -- they have their construct.

BRENNAN: Yes, yes, yes.

AABRIA: Yeah, where's my big boy?

BRENNAN: Yes, they need it. We're going to get the big boy.

AABRIA: Where's my lovely gentleman? (gasping) (yelling)

BRENNAN: Here's our friend. (boom)

AABRIA: Oh, look at him. He's great!

BRENNAN: Amazing.

MARISHA: Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.

LOU: I hate this. Ow.

BRENNAN: Everyone on the telepathic bond knows--

LUIS: Yes.

BRENNAN: -- what's happening as of now.

LUIS: Yeah, yeah, I'm immediately clocking that. Thank god we're on a griffon.

LOU: Are we just in the sky on a griffon?

LUIS: We are.

LOU: As all this craziness--

MARISHA: (laughs)

AABRIA: I'm loving this!

LOU: Just keep being like, "Should we land?" "No, we have to go."

MARISHA: Okay.

LUIS: Holy crap.

AABRIA: Oh man, Summon Construct is cool.

TRAVIS: Yeah, that was fucking dope.

LOU: That was so cool.

LUIS: Nice job.

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Unbelievable. Oh, I love it. It feels so right in the Age of Arcanum game to roll initiative and throw a map down for two wizards in beautiful evening gowns coming in--

AABRIA: Hi! Go fuck yourself. (laughter)

MARISHA: Champagne flutes--

BRENNAN: Champagne flutes.

MARISHA: -- still in hand, by the way.

AABRIA: We just walked into a room like a farmer and got our asses handed to us.

MARISHA: (laughs) Not yet!

LUIS: Holy moly.

MARISHA: Not yet.

LOU: I'm so anxious.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

LUIS: Combat does that to me, gives me constant anxiety and adrenaline.

LOU: I swear. It is tough being separate. I'm so scared.

LUIS: I know.

LOU: I know you guys are okay. I know you guys are okay.

LUIS: All right, well... (laughter)

LOU: I just wish I was there to give you Bardic or cast Blur or anything.

TRAVIS: Anything, anything.

MARISHA: We don't see anything, though. Do we see anything?

BRENNAN: You don't see anything right now. We're going to grab--

MARISHA: Shit.

AABRIA: This bad boy's made of stone or metal?

BRENNAN: Oh, this bad boy here?

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: Stone.

AABRIA: Stone or metal? Stone, cool.

SAM: Stoner metal.

BRENNAN: You have your stuff there.

MARISHA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: I assume you're holding concentration, correct?

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: Okay, copy that. Concentration, bada-boom.

LOU: ♪ Bada boom ♪

BRENNAN: Amazing.

TRAVIS: Bada bing, bada boom.

BRENNAN: What did we roll for initiative?

AABRIA: (chuckles)

MARISHA: 18.

BRENNAN: 18 for Patia.

SAM: 42.

AABRIA: Five. (laughs)

SAM: Did you say five?

AABRIA: Yeah.

SAM: (laughs) Okay.

MARISHA: Wizard! (laughs)

AABRIA: I'm a wizard!

BRENNAN: 18 for Patia, and then?

AABRIA: Five.

BRENNAN: Five, okay. Your construct is acting--

AABRIA: Goes directly after me.

BRENNAN: Copy that.

SAM: What's in there?

LOU: Exactly.

MARISHA: Yeah.

SAM: I don't see an opponent.

LUIS: Mm-hmm.

MARISHA: I don't know.

SAM: Unless the opponent is their own anxiety.

LOU: Wow, they have to fight themselves.

TRAVIS: "Look inside yourselves!"

MARISHA: The opponent is the Calamity. (laughs)

LUIS: It's a cat that just knocked something over. (laughs)

BRENNAN: First to act is going to be Patia. The door has exploded off. You've walked into Magister Cormorant's office. There are tables, fireplaces. You see some teleportation daises here for porting around the city. There's some papers. There's a chest in the corner. Other documents are around. But you are first to act as Laerryn says, "Show yourself." Nothing has happened yet, but you feel a crackling of arcane energy and Laerryn's certainty that there is someone in this chamber.

MARISHA: Do I sense a spell being cast?

BRENNAN: Yeah. What you can sense is you feel the familiar rush of arcane energy. You feel a surge of something moving in the direction of conflict.

MARISHA: Moving in the direction of conflict.

BRENNAN: But you have the jump on whoever's in here. A construct smashing a door across a room will certainly make whatever force is in here, but you cannot see anything at present.

MARISHA: Okay. Let me look at something.

LOU: Mm. Mm. Mm-mm.

LUIS: (laughs)

MARISHA: I'm going to let DM rule here.

BRENNAN: Yeah, go for it.

MARISHA: Is this a situation where a Counterspell would count?

BRENNAN: I believe Counterspell...

TRAVIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: "You attempt to interrupt a creature in the process of casting a spell..." Do you need to be able to see it? "You attempt to interrupt a creature..." I don't think you need to be able to see it.

AABRIA: (gasps) Shut up. Cool.

MARISHA: DM ruling here.

BRENNAN: I am going to double check that because that's very important. Going to go to the full spell. There is nothing--

AABRIA: I have to go pee now.

TRAVIS: Go. Go.

AABRIA: No, I'm just nervous.

TRAVIS: In your chair, go right now, in your chair.

LOU: "In your chair." (laughs)

AABRIA: In your chair.

MARISHA: (quiet reading)

BRENNAN: I think that you are in the clear. There's nothing-- There is a range of 60 feet, but there is nothing here that says you need line of sight.

MARISHA: So I just sense the direction-- that the energy is coming from--

BRENNAN: Mm-hmm.

MARISHA: -- and crack my wrists. It's like a little mental nuclear blast that pulses outward and shields Laerryn and I.

BRENNAN: Sorry, I have such bad news, and it's coming on behalf of Jeremy Crawford, who lets us know that--

AABRIA: Goddamn it.

BRENNAN: -- Counterspell requires you to see the spellcaster you're countering.

MARISHA: Okay. Copy that. Instead--

TRAVIS: Thanks, Jeremy.

BRENNAN: Thank you, Jeremy.

SAM: Germany is watching us?

AABRIA: Germany is watching us right now.

LUIS: "Germany." (chuckles)

MARISHA: "Requires sight."

BRENNAN: I thought I remembered it. It's not in the script. It's in the portion of the Player's Handbook on Twitter.

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: It's not in the PHB, but yes.

MARISHA: Okay, how about this? Wait, wait, sorry. (reading) Okay, okay. If I can feel the direction that it's coming from, I'm assuming he must be invisible or something like that. This just says, "Choose one creature, object, or magical effect within range." Can I Dispel Magic and try and blast him with Dispel?

LOU: What does Germany think of that?

AABRIA: I love wizards being like, I don't like your magic. I would like it to stop.

MARISHA: Yeah. (laughs)

BRENNAN: Unfortunately, no, choose one creature object or magical effect within range. So, because you cannot detect it.

MARISHA: Okay.

LUIS: Damn.

BRENNAN: What I will say--

MARISHA: Okay.

BRENNAN: Yes.

MARISHA: Go ahead.

BRENNAN: I was going to say, there are ways for you to know where someone is without having to see them.

AABRIA: Oh, I wish the bird was here.

MARISHA: Sure.

SAM: Cologne.

MARISHA: I mean.

TRAVIS: Don't worry.

MARISHA: I could always do yet another Detect Thoughts or Detect Magic.

TRAVIS: Ah, dead hoe's in the corner.

AABRIA: (laughs)

MARISHA: I'll detect magic. How about that?

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: Amazing. As this is happening, what is Patia going through as you are in here. You're reaching down for-- Hold on one second. So. Amazing. You cast Detect Magic. (magical buzzing) I'm going to say because there is a spell specifically called See Invisibility, this is going to give you a direction. Actually, I'll go ahead and ask for a perception check here.

MARISHA: See Invisibility. Oh my god.

AABRIA: Oh no.

MARISHA: My perception checks have been bad. 10.

LUIS: Fuck.

BRENNAN: On a 10 perception check, you cast Detect Magic. You can detect a powerful illusion in the room. You know that something is hidden in here. You immediately get the feeling of it being to your left. It is towards the left side of the room. As you feel in that direction, so, (magical buzzing). you feel something over there that is some kind of illusory presence, but you can't detect the exact square that it's on.

SAM: Okay.

MARISHA: Okay. I just... Patia's brain is moving a thousand miles a minute as I'm trying to clock everything. I turn, and I just shout to Laerryn: West side of the room.

AABRIA: Copy that.

BRENNAN: Laerryn.

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: You act next.

AABRIA: Oh, it doesn't go. Question, and I'm assuming the answer is no. Is there any universe in which our invisible foe is within 10 feet of this big boy?

BRENNAN: This invisible foe is not within 10 feet of this big boy.

AABRIA: Okay, totally fine. Then, this is going to be a "to whom it may concern." I'm going to cast Fireball.

MARISHA: Yes! (laughter) That's what I would've done!

BRENNAN: Hey, you know what? If I have a direction, I know how to get a concentration check.

MARISHA: I know! (laughter)

BRENNAN: Hell yeah, go ahead and roll damage. Or actually, so sorry.

AABRIA: Dex save against a 20.

LUIS: Damn.

BRENNAN: Amazing.

LOU: 20?

AABRIA: Level 14.

BRENNAN: Let me ask a question to you.

TRAVIS: That's ferocious.

BRENNAN: So you go ahead and drop a Fireball. As you drop a Fireball, you get hit with a Counterspell.

MARISHA: Fucks!

TRAVIS: (groans)

BRENNAN: (magical energy)

AABRIA: Of course.

BRENNAN: Your construct can go.

AABRIA: Yeah, okay.

TRAVIS: It's a high enough Counterspell where it just kills the Fireball.

BRENNAN: Well, Fireball is 3rd-level.

TRAVIS: Right.

AABRIA: This was technically upcast to fourth.

BRENNAN: Oh! Was it?

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: I'll go ahead and roll in that case. I'll be very fair minded.

AABRIA: It's fine, don't worry about it.

BRENNAN: No, no, no, no, no! I'll go ahead and roll. We'll leave it up to the dice.

TRAVIS: Make him roll. Make him roll!

LOU and MARISHA: Make him roll.

TRAVIS: While we still can.

BRENNAN: Hell yes. Here we go. Okay, I'm going to roll this in front of the board, actually, because I like that and that feels fun to me.

LOU: That's fun to you?

BRENNAN: It feels fun to me to roll in front of the board.

LOU: It feels fun to you?

BRENNAN and TRAVIS: (laugh)

BRENNAN: Our friend here needs--

AABRIA: Ooh! Look at the little tray!

TRAVIS: Get outta here!

BRENNAN: Isn't that fun? Our friend here needs an 11 or higher to overcome your Fireball. A 10 fails by one!

TRAVIS: That thing was on a 12--

MARISHA: Oh my god.

TRAVIS: -- but it flopped over.

AABRIA: I saw it rolling on that.

BRENNAN: Go ahead and roll damage.

AABRIA: All right.

LOU: There you go.

AABRIA: Still a dex save from him.

LOU: That's how you've got to make him roll.

TRAVIS: Yeah.

SAM: Jesus.

TRAVIS: Good shit.

AABRIA: Okay, let's play a beautiful game.

SAM: Those are all real good.

AABRIA: These are very good.

LOU: Let's play a beautiful game! Let us play a beautiful game!

MARISHA: (laughs)

AABRIA: Is that correct?

SAM: 41.

AABRIA: Yeah. 41 points of fire damage.

LOU: Ka-cha!

MARISHA: 41 points.

LOU: Good job!

BRENNAN: So this dude's got to make a DC 20 constitution save?

TRAVIS: Yeah, no bigs.

MARISHA: To keep his shit up.

LUIS: Dex.

BRENNAN: Okay.

AABRIA: Let's be fair. He still has to make the dex save to not take half damage.

BRENNAN: Oh, he quite failed the dex save.

AABRIA: Okay, cool.

BRENNAN: Yes.

AABRIA: I was just trying to be nice.

BRENNAN: I hid that one back here on that dex save.

AABRIA: Oh, okay.

BRENNAN: Okay, we're going to roll again. This is a 19 or 20 on the die or he drops concentration.

BRENNAN, MARISHA, and TRAVIS: 14.

BRENNAN: Not going to get the job done. You (explosion) lay down this Fireball, and Magister Micah Cormorant--

TRAVIS: Ooh, he's up in that bitch! (laughter)

BRENNAN: You see he has a bunch of incredible evoker, arcana tech gear. (screams) As you deal, how much? 44, how much?

SAM, AABRIA, and TRAVIS: 41.

BRENNAN: 41?

MARISHA: Wow.

BRENNAN: Hachi machi.

LOU: Hachi machi!

BRENNAN: So, Patia, you walk in, clock the direction and the Architect Arcane-- It's been a minute.

AABRIA: Look, they think I'm just constantly holding concentration on stuff that keeps the city afloat. I get very mad! (laughter) (magical energy)

BRENNAN: A perfect casting of Fireball, such that the summoning of it-- it's so spherical. What a round ball of fire. Technically perfect, as everything Laerryn does is. (whooshing fire) The Magister appears horrifically burned and screaming as Greater Invisibility drops. Your construct may act, unless you have a bonus action.

AABRIA: Oh god, what would a bonus action would be? No, that's fine. I'd feel good with that. I'm just going to have my big boy move forward. Spell attack modifier is a plus 12. All right, as the construct goes up and makes two slam attacks. Plus 12 to hit. 18.

BRENNAN: 18 definitely hits. He's already burned his reaction--

AABRIA: 19.

BRENNAN: -- on the Counterspell.

AABRIA: Cool. 18 and 19. A d8 plus four. What is a d8, oh god, I'm so here for this. Eight. Let's see, 16, plus 26 points of bludgeoning damage.

SAM: Whoa!

LOU: What?

SAM: Whoa!

MARISHA: Yes.

LUIS: Good attack.

LOU: What does he add to--

TRAVIS: Smack!

AABRIA: It's a d8 plus four, plus the spell's level of bludgeoning damage. Yeah, per slam attack, and it does two.

TRAVIS: (laughs)

BRENNAN: Magister Cormorant appears on the verge of casting Chain Lightning, and instead, you burn him half to death, and your construct punches his chest so hard that it breaks all of his ribs.

TRAVIS: Ooh!

BRENNAN: Smashes his heart and organs into the wall behind him, and he is dead.

LUIS and TRAVIS: Oh!

SAM: What?

SAM: That's it?

BRENNAN: That's all she wrote, folks.

MARISHA: Fucking incredible.

TRAVIS: Holy fuck. Patia's like (slams). (whirs)

MARISHA: Yeah, pretty much.

AABRIA: You want to bring him back up to talk to him? I don't have healing magic.

MARISHA: I don't either. Why don't we take him to Zerxus?

TRAVIS: Damn!

SAM: Oh no. Oh no.

BRENNAN: Hey, problems are getting solved quick over here.

AABRIA: That's a very nice map.

SAM: Holy shit, was that the big bad of the whole four episode arc--

AABRIA: We're getting good.

SAM: -- and we just killed it?

AABRIA: We're fine and we did it.

TRAVIS: Did we need to--

MARISHA: I jump over our walkies and I go: Hello, yes, Brass Wing. Brass Ring, we accidentally killed the Magister.

AABRIA: It wasn't an accident.

SAM: Which Magister?

MARISHA: Cormorant.

TRAVIS: Oh!

LOU: Were you able to speak to him?

SAM: Yeah, get meaningful information and intel out of him?

MARISHA: That's what Zerxus is for. Zerxus?

LUIS: Did you kill him, or just knock him unconscious?

MARISHA: No, he's dead.

LUIS: Okay. (laughter) Here we go.

TRAVIS: (laughs)

AABRIA: Look, I can cast Mending on his chest.

MARISHA: I've tried that once. It doesn't work.

AABRIA: It doesn't.

MARISHA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: Hey, some fights are about verisimilitude. This was one shady evoker. Those guys have 66 hit points and an armor class of 15 and--

AABRIA: Oh, an evoker? Anyone can cast Fireball, bitch. (laughter)

AABRIA: You're not special.

TRAVIS: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

BRENNAN: Roll higher than a two on your initiative, and that's really the end of the story. That's really what it comes down to.

MARISHA: Speaker of the Fourth.

TRAVIS: Yeah, Speaker of the Fourth means he was a representative for--

MARISHA: He's like the Speaker of the House almost.

TRAVIS: Okay.

BRENNAN: Yeah. So there's eight different people that represent basically entire magisterial bodies. He represented the fourth such voting body.

TRAVIS: Got it.

BRENNAN: So, Cormorant is dead. However, you're in his office. You're in his chambers. The construct stands guard here, but there's plenty to go over here if you would like.

MARISHA: I still have that Detect Magic up--

AABRIA: Ooh, yeah!

MARISHA: -- technically, so. (magical energy noises)

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: Detect Magic. You scan over. Give me an arcana check with advantage with Detect Magic up.

MARISHA: 29.

BRENNAN: 29. The teleportation daises is in here have been tampered with.

MARISHA: (gasps)

BRENNAN: The seal has been broken on them in terms of their registry with the Porter's Guild.

MARISHA: So he's been doing it rogue off the record?

BRENNAN: Rogue off the record.

MARISHA: Can I see where he's been teleporting to with these? Are they attuned to a certain place?

BRENNAN: You lean down and see that there is a bit of illusory magic, which I won't even make you use a full Dispel Magic. It's effortless for you to dispel it. (magical energy) One of the runes written in Draconic, which is a very classical, easy language to do arcane writing in, is not Draconic. There's an Infernal rune carved hastily into the dais hidden by an illusion. You don't think he's been leaving. You think he's been inviting people in.

SAM and AABRIA: (gasp)

MARISHA: I think we found our leak.

BRENNAN: As you say this, go ahead, if you have any other investigations, if there's any other divination you want to cast, if you want to look at his documents, there's a bunch of stuff in here.

AABRIA: I want to look for files. I'm looking for--

TRAVIS: Letting him into the Magisterium. Yo, of all the places for entering.

AABRIA: It's bad here.

TRAVIS: That's right under our noses.

LUIS: You hear Zerxus go through the comms again and just ask: So how dead is he? Dead?

MARISHA: Um. Third degree burns all over his body at about 80%, and his torso is completely crushed.

LUIS: Got it. Okay, well.

BRENNAN: You have to forgive me. I assumed the construct was not like: All right, let's just ding the guy.

LUIS: Right. Well, I didn't know what killed him. I just know he died.

TRAVIS: I mean, if his mouth is still there, that's kind of all we need, right?

AABRIA: That's right.

LOU: Grab the mouth, please.

TRAVIS: His vital organs are against the wall.

AABRIA: I want to--

BRENNAN: Cast any magic about it you want to cast, and give me any checks you want to give me.

AABRIA: I'm going to make an investigation check. That's going to be an amount. Yeah, okay. 22 to look for any files. I would love to say that I'm looking broadly about, like Vespin-y stuff. I'm looking for my stuff.

BRENNAN: Hell, yeah. Looking through the files here, what you see is that the stuff that Magister-- the late Magister Cormorant was interested in was your stuff. You see he's already pulled history and records all about the Arboreal Calix, all about the Gau Drashari, the Pact of Crown and Throne. All that stuff's in his office already. You can see that there was research going on here. You see a lot of this is about magical law, so it's about the nature of the Pact. You see that there is a scroll pulled from the Librarian Magisterium, not your library. This is the library of magical law.

MARISHA: Okay.

BRENNAN: You find a letter composed on ancient, hundred-year-old birch bark. Maybe even, you know, like... And you see this script is this beautiful, silvery ink on birch bark, and the letter portends of a conversation. You can infer what it must be responding to. In effect, in many more words, the letter says, "Honorable Magister, your assurances are taken in the most generous spirit possible. I do not distrust you, the person, for all people are children of Exandria. But what I distrust is enchantment, the enchantment of a people and of their ways. The wizards of Avalir have proven time and again that they do not see limitation. They do not see the limitation of a city that will be born aloft into the sky, nor do they see risk. I wish that I could trust you. I wish that my order could trust you. I wish that we could, in good faith, tell you of the tree's purpose. Sorrow fills my heart for even if you kept your word, the wizard behind you, if they knew the nature of the tree, I can only imagine would see all that they could do with it and not what they could do for it. I implore you. The endless skies of Exandria are yours. The wonders of your imagination are your only master. Please, simply tend for this tree and do not ask again. We cannot trust you with its secrets. Head Druid of the Gau Drashari, the Temple of Toramunda."

LUIS: Damn.

BRENNAN: You date this letter to probably around the time that the Arboreal Calix was created. You see records here that after the Matron's ascension basically the city landed a year after that. The Druids all came aboard Avalir and said: We need to update. We need to go-- You find records here in this place prior to that. The Tree of Names stood alone in the chamber of the Calix. You see here, other bits of history having to do with Toramunda, having to do with old Mount Ygora, you see there's an ancient piece of ritual about the Emperor Rau'shan, and the Empress Ka'Mort, which are the Primordials that the Dawnfather and the Wildmother defeated at Mount Ygora and sealed away. You see early Druidic prayer scrolls, essentially, to the ancient base of the mountain. All of that is unveiled to you, and it's all here in Cormorant's office.

MARISHA: With what time I have, I Mage Hand out all of these scrolls and you see this similar silvery strand sucking the text out of the scrolls, making a copy as it zips into my sphere. Each one we come across I'm copying and pasting.

TRAVIS: Paper clip shows up and says, "Do you want to--"

MARISHA: "Hey, are you--" Yeah. (laughs) "I see you're trying to steal some scrolls."

AABRIA: I think just the letter on the birch is the only thing that Laerryn would hold onto and she is devastated.

MARISHA: He wasn't worthy enough.

AABRIA: Yeah. He wasn't.

MARISHA: But we are.

AABRIA: Yeah. We have to be.

MARISHA: Our tenacity far exceeds the magisters'.

AABRIA: You're right.

MARISHA: Those who are privileged, those who are given everything, do not know how to fight.

AABRIA: You are, as ever, correct.

BRENNAN: Give me one last either investigation or arcana with advantage.

AABRIA: Two is terrible. Two, twice. So a 12.

MARISHA: Oh no.

BRENNAN: Copy that.

LOU: No! No.

AABRIA: Disgraceful.

BRENNAN: Amazing, cool. We are going to, we are going to depart from the Magisterium. You've found what you came to find. If you wish to have this construct carry Cormorant and wrap up Cormorant's body in a rug and carry it behind you.

AABRIA: You want this corpse?

MARISHA: Hmm. As long as it's useful.

AABRIA: I'm saying it over-- Yeah.

MARISHA: Oh yeah.

LUIS: Are you reaching out to me again?

AABRIA: Yeah.

MARISHA: Yes.

AABRIA: Do I have to do this Professor X?

LUIS: I don't know, I was doing that because you guys were doing that.

MARISHA: Force of habit.

LUIS: Eh, there's nothing I can do for that guy. By the time I get there, he'll be too dead. But we can take him to the Oracles, which is where we're heading. If we get in and we find one, maybe they can raise him.

TRAVIS: Or speak with him?

LUIS: Or speak with him.

AABRIA: Yeah, I'm worried about the optics of walking with a body.

SAM: I am also worried about the optics of walking with a body. Maybe just put them in a closet somewhere

AABRIA: Yeah.

BRENNAN: The construct wraps up the body and goes to hide it somewhere that you'll be able to come later in the evening.

AABRIA: My guy.

BRENNAN: (thudding footsteps) You can feel the palpable joy of a construct. Lots of statues wait hundreds of years and never get woken up by the Architect Arcane. This guy's like, "We did it, baby, yes! It was us! This was our day. Yes, wizard woke me up!"

AABRIA: I'm going to call him Scrabbles.

SAM: Oh nice.

MARISHA: Scrabbles?

BRENNAN: "I've been named." Stone tears. You--

AABRIA: As we leave, I'm just like: Hey, just remember, every Magister sucks. And I'm your only friend. Bye. (laughter)

AABRIA: And I leave.

BRENNAN: We move to the Hall of Prophecy.

AABRIA: Yeah! Let's go.

LUIS: We're flying there.

BRENNAN: Flying there. You guys get there quick.

AABRIA: Ooh, kitty.

BRENNAN: (whooshing) The Hall of the Oracles. An order of clerics dedicated to accessing a connection to the divine without the use of gods. The Oracles of this place long ago found a way of manifesting a connection to the divine, but their lives are challenging. They live partially in hermitage. It requires great preparation for one of the prophets here, and to actually be able to deliver prophecy and divination to people, it takes a lot out of them. You arrive at this colossal marble building. Tempus, your griffon, lands. You move inside. As you walk into the space, you see a familiar friend of yours, Zerxus. A young woman that you know, Sofyra, walk out. You see that the doors close behind her. You see there are a number of Spellguard here. A number of High Archsept Guard here. Sofyra steps out and says, "I saw the approaching light of Tempus. Zerxus, it's good to see you, my friend."

LUIS: As it is good to see you.

BRENNAN: "Guildmaster Okiro!"

LOU: Oracle.

BRENNAN: "It is a pleasure and an honor. It has been some time since last we saw you. I have never taken offense; I've always taken you for a man comfortable writing his own fate."

LOU: Of course, there is, yes, very much so.

BRENNAN: "How can I be of assistance? The Hall has been closed, I'm afraid."

LUIS: It has been.

LOU: We wanted to inquire about the nature of your closing.

BRENNAN: "Ah."

LOU: We've been told that this is rather irregular.

LUIS: Is it not?

BRENNAN: "Yes, quite."

LOU: Can I make an insight check?

BRENNAN: Make an insight check for me, yeah. (laughter)

AABRIA: Let's go.

TRAVIS: Pre-diarrhea.

LOU: I don't like this pausing.

TRAVIS: (upset stomach noises) Excuse me, I just had to--

LOU: Only a 16.

BRENNAN: Well, I'll make a deception check. Oop.

LOU: You have to count that one.

LUIS: Hmm. Troubled, very troubled. Bloodshot eyes. This woman has been crying a lot.

SAM: Oh.

LUIS: Uh-huh.

BRENNAN: "The Guardians of the Archsept have been spoken to. They've been asked by Loras of the Weaver's Mask to not allow any entrance. Has he given you entrance to enter?"

LOU: He has.

BRENNAN: (laughs)

TRAVIS: Yes!

BRENNAN: Give me the deception check, baby. Come on, let's go.

AABRIA: All day, all day.

SAM: That's the extent of the lie?

LOU: That's it.

SAM: "Yeah."

AABRIA: He's the Dragon.

TRAVIS: How did you know?

LOU: Deception?

BRENNAN: Deception.

TRAVIS: Come on, man.

LOU: 26.

AABRIA: Woo hoo!

SAM: Pretty good, pretty good.

BRENNAN: She says "Oh!" Incredible. The Arch-- You see that the warriors behind say, "Guildmaster, is this so? You have been given leave to come here?"

LOU: Of course. It is key to the Replenishment and our aims. We are all in congress around our shared goal. Loras, Zerxus, myself.

BRENNAN: Even you know, Nydas. Listen, man. You've been keeping 10,000 plates spinning.

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: Even you are like, "I'm way out on a limb on this one. I'm way the fuck out here on this one."

TRAVIS: Just the way you like it. (laughter)

SAM: "We have goals. And they're all good goals."

BRENNAN: Said, "He's my best friend. (laughter)

BRENNAN: "He actually said, he said that I'm the best at magic he's ever seen?!"

LOU: That's why he sent me down here. Because he's like, "You got to go check this out, my guy. You're the best. You're the best guy I know."

BRENNAN: So what you see on this incredible deception is effectively, this shouldn't work. All you did. First of all, she said the thing you needed to say to get in and then you repeated it and they go, "Come in," and see even the warriors here, no insight necessary. Zerxus, you look at the warriors here.

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: You monitor every group of warriors here. You know, these guys are the High Sept Guardians. They're powerful eldritch knights, all of them. This is, you know, they're the real deal. They look nervous and unfocused as they stand guard here. Something is not right. You walk in with Sofyra and she says--

LOU: As we're walking in, I do want to communicate to Zerxus about: She seems distraught.

LUIS: I see.

LOU: Her eyes, something.

LUIS: I'm going to, as we start to walk by I'm going to slow down and get closer to her and lean in, and I'm going to tell her: Sofyra, we've known each other for a long time. We studied together many years ago. You can tell me anything. I want you to know that you can rely on me. Is there anything we should know?

BRENNAN: "It's best you come with me." Wide marble passages framed in torchlight. Most places here glow with arcane alchemical light. This is lit by fire. Even in marble, this place is trying to attach to something primal. Disconnected from the ground, they're trying to reach through. Moving through this place you feel almost a sense of the fire flickering. It feels like you're walking underwater, almost, as it dapples the marble walls. There's something here where it echoes and feels full and empty at once, a contradiction. This place is more philosophical, more divine. It's very outside the normal lucid environs of Avalir. Sofyra walks through. "I'm very glad Loras sent you. His instructions were not very clear and there's just very few of us left. Or left--"

LUIS: What has he tasked you with here?

BRENNAN: "To close the Hall. Well, he only took over, he only took over yesterday. He stepped in. He stepped in after Volucia of the Heart's Emblem--"

LOU: Yes, she's stepping down, I've heard?

LUIS: I'm going to put a gentle hand on her shoulder just to reassure her.

BRENNAN: "That's one way of putting it." (gasping)

LUIS: Is she here, or what's left of her?

BRENNAN: "She's left Avalir forever."

AABRIA: Ooh.

LUIS: What caused that?

BRENNAN: She looks over. You see over near one of the teleportation daises that are the inter city, the ones you've been using to get around. You see that there is a scar of soot on the ground in a circle. You see--

MARISHA: What?

TRAVIS: Fucking no way.

AABRIA: Incredible.

BRENNAN: She looks and says, "That's where she-- That's where she broke her staff across her knee and renounced magic forever."

SAM: Whoa.

AABRIA: Whoa.

BRENNAN: "It has been a troubled time here at the Hall of Prophecy."

LUIS: Is there somewhere to sit nearby that I can-- I'm trying to put her more at ease.

LOU: What is the general people in our space?

BRENNAN: It is empty in here. It's the three of you, literally.

LOU: Got it.

BRENNAN: This is a place that would normally be an entry hall for people to come and wait and hear these like oracular visions and you know.

LOU: Yeah.

BRENNAN: She, you go-- I mean, the best you got is these little steps up on this teleportation dais. So she goes and sits aside that and you're looking at this ring of soot where a mage sundered their own arcane focus, potentially.

LUIS: Right.

BRENNAN: Volucia was a member of the Ring of Gold. One of the 14 apprentices. She was Loras' counterpart. She said, "About two weeks ago. About two weeks ago, there's no other way to put it. Oracles started going mad. They started going mad."

LOU: How many?

BRENNAN: "One at first. She's still here. Karwen. She went first and hard. She started speaking false prophecies, babbling. Her oracular vision failed. At first we attempted to heal her ourselves. Healing is what we study here at the Hall of Prophecy. We did our best to reach out to her. Everyone who tried to heal her went mad, too."

LUIS: And what's happened to them? Are they here?

SAM: (as Bolo) Yes.

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: "They're all still here. We've kept them here. About as we were over Gwessar traveling on our way to Domunas, we reached out. We reached out to the Octothurge at first and asked if there was-- We reached out to the Chair of Divination, which is the closest, the school that we interact with the most. They immediately conferred with the Ring of Gold. Volucia came and for the past little over a week was helping us try to understand this. There were still enough of us who felt safe and whole and we were able to perform our tasks. Then a few days ago... a few days ago we thought Karwen might be well enough to come back out and we let her take a walk and she turned to the other Oracles and... Zerxus, it's just me. It's just me."

LUIS: You're the last one?

BRENNAN: "Yes. The rest are being kept safe."

LUIS: Because they've all lost their minds?

BRENNAN: "Safe from themselves."

LOU: What was it exactly that caused Valeria to renounce magic?

BRENNAN: "I don't know. It was an argument she had with her contemporary."

LOU: Loras?

BRENNAN: "Yes. So they were arguing." Give me an insight check.

LOU: You got it.

SAM: Beat me!

LUIS: No. Almost though, it was almost a 20, but a seven.

BRENNAN: She says, "I don't remember. They were speaking to each other. All I remember her saying is, If these gifts harm us, then we should not accept them."

LOU: Can I-- Oh, go ahead.

LUIS: She said that to Loras?

BRENNAN: "Yes."

LUIS: While she was working on what she came here to help you investigate, was she keeping any notes anywhere?

BRENNAN: She was the most able to soothe Karwen, and Karwen is safe right now. She is better than she was when we tried to have her come walk and rejoin us. Volucia worked on creating a circle of runes that we've moved Karwen's bed into. She's able to speak, but on the day she left, before that, I remember we found Karwen in one of the bathing rooms. I can take one of you there. It's probably for the best if you don't both speak with Karwen. We found that it is much more helpful for there to just be one person in the room with her.

LUIS: Let me go. I'll go. I'm going to think to the channel. I'm just going to update everybody on what's happening. And I think that the business that we have here is going to take a little while longer. If you find that you have accomplished your tasks, feel free to come and join us. We could use some arcane eyes on these circles as well.

LOU: I'm going to put my arcane eyes to the soot marks.

BRENNAN: Give me an arcana check.

MARISHA: Come on, Lou!

LOU: Here it is.

AABRIA: Come on! Big roll, big roll!

LOU: This is it, this is it.

MARISHA: Big money.

LOU: Oh! I'll take it. 24.

AABRIA: Oofa.

MARISHA: That's good.

BRENNAN: 24. You see a staff was sundered here. She broke her staff. She broke her arcane focus. It would not have been a magical item, it would've just been a staff that she had been using as her arcane focus. Broke it and removed her ability to perform magic. There's no way emotionally to describe the weight of what you're seeing. Especially for someone who loves magic as much as Nydas, it's probably nauseating to consider.

LOU: How. Yeah.

BRENNAN: Yeah.

TRAVIS: Telepathically, I just send across, is she still alive? Val?

LUIS: We haven't gotten confirmation.

BRENNAN: Volucia left Avalir.

LUIS: Left Avalir. That was what we were told. So she is alive. We think.

MARISHA: Right.

BRENNAN: You think.

MARISHA: What does left mean? No one leaves Avalir. No one leaves Avalir.

AABRIA: Okay. Hold on. We can leave. Just why would you?

MARISHA: Correct. That's what I mean.

SAM: Talking about leaving--

LUIS: So you're going to examine?

LOU: Yeah, I'll stay in the entry chamber, keep an eye out, those sorts of things.

BRENNAN: You see that Sofyra leads you to Karwen's chamber. You see that Sofyra looks and says, "If there's anything else you'd like to look at, I can show you--"

LOU: The bathing chamber, perhaps?

BRENNAN: "Yes, yes, yes, yes."

LOU: Well.

LUIS: He's going to take a bath.

LOU: Yeah, yeah! (laughter)

TRAVIS: Your boy's going to get comfy!

SAM: I'll be in the hot tub.

LOU: Just fully watch this woman have an emotional breakdown and be like: This is too much. (laughter)

LUIS: There's been a lot happening in the last couple of hours.

LOU: Yeah, exactly. Let's throw some Epsom salt in here. I swear, this is too much! (chuckling) I've had enough.

BRENNAN: She takes you to the bathing chambers. Give me an investigation check.

LOU: Something I'm not good at.

BRENNAN: Yeah, she takes you to Karwen's chamber.

LUIS: Yes.

LOU: Oh! Thank god. A dirty 20.

AABRIA: Yay!

BRENNAN: Ooh! A dirty 20 is great! You walk in as Sofyra is talking, and you see that she starts saying, "We brought Karwen here. She was in good spirits. She was even able to laugh a little. We told her that she had been delivering false prophecies and she laughed and said, 'Well, I suppose I'm as bad an oracle as I was a weaver's apprentice.' And we laughed and you know, she..." You look and see the mirrors over the washing basins. There's a big crack in one.

LOU: Of course.

AABRIA: So good.

BRENNAN: We're going to go to the chamber with Karwen.

LUIS: As we start walking, I ask her: What sorts of prophecies was she speaking about? Do you recall any names, anything at all?

BRENNAN: "It was written down, everything she said was written down. So I can go pull that."

LUIS: I would like to look at that, please.

BRENNAN: "I'll go grab it at once." Then she goes off with you to go look at the bathing chamber. You go into the room with Karwen. You walk in and you see a... circle of white runes, gathered around a small and humble bed, a wash basin, a small chest of clothes, that have all been collected in a bizarre, a room compressed and all of the furniture that would be up against the walls, instead compressed into the center of a circle. You see sleeping in the bed is a young woman, dark skin, curly, dark hair, sleep. She looks restful. Give me an insight check.

LUIS: Mm. Come on, baby. Ooh! 24.

TRAVIS: Don't you say that!

AABRIA: (laughs)

TRAVIS: Yeah. (laughter)

BRENNAN: For whatever it's worth to you, you were expecting to see someone ravaged by some affliction.

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: You see a strong, healthy-looking woman deep in rest.

LUIS: Hmm. I'm going to (chuckles) I'm going to get closer. I want to get a closer look and I want to see what is... Just investigate anything that's underneath it. I mean, did they make a magic circle or something?

BRENNAN: Yeah. It's a magic circle around the bed. Yeah. You walk up--

LUIS: Is it pulsing or anything?

BRENNAN: You walk in to look under the bed, nothing is pulsing. You see there's an object under the bed, though, centered under the bed.

LUIS: Uh-huh.

BRENNAN: It's a small hand mirror.

AABRIA: Vibe check. (pigeon coo) Vibe check.

SAM: It's just a mirror, guys. It's fine.

TRAVIS: (pigeon coo)

TRAVIS and LOU: (pigeon cooing)

AABRIA: (muttering) Divine Sense. These vibes are rancid.

LUIS: I want to get a good look at... I'm going to walk around.

TRAVIS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LUIS: Take a good look from every angle, look around to see if there's any other mirrors, because I know mirrors are a thing now in this place.

LOU: 'Tis true.

LUIS: If I don't notice anything out of the ordinary, then I'm going to go to her whatever side... If she's sleeping on her side, I'm going to go towards to the side of the bed that her face is facing. So, it could be turned to me. If I don't notice anything from that little walk around, I'm going to very gently call her name.

BRENNAN: You do notice something on your walk around.

LUIS: Okay.

AABRIA: Oh god.

BRENNAN: As you are moving through the space here.

SAM: What's happening?

BRENNAN: You walk around the corner of the bed, as you get beside the--

LUIS: Can I activate something?

BRENNAN: Yeah, go for it.

LUIS: Divine Sense.

AABRIA: Yeah, dog! Sorry. I'm so nervous. (nervous noises)

LUIS: This time, so I reach out instinctively and I have tucked inside of my armor, I pull out a stone, a necklace, and there's two. One is a Name Stone, it's essentially like a dog collar. It's given to the First Knights. I have one that's mine, and I have another one that's Evandrin's that I kept with me. I pull them both out and I hold them in my hands just because out of impulse. And I activate Divine Sense from that.

BRENNAN: The edge of the chamber on the far wall, you walk around the headboard of the bed, again, everything is compressed into this magical circle. You look at the edge of the room, illusory or not, this place has a lot of association with water. A lot of water feeling in this place. You see there is a wall that has a stream of water pouring down it, very slight, making almost no noise, almost like those slate fountains that just have a sheet of water coming down them. You look into it, you activate your Divine Sense. You've never detected anything fiendish before, or at least maybe you thought you did, but it was nothing compared to this. It was nothing compared to this. In the reflection of the bed, in the wall of water coming down the dark stone, lights reflecting, Karwen is not in the bed. You see a horned figure in red, bleeding and dying in the bed. "(groans)" The last time you saw this figure it was the size of a mountain. "(groans)"

LUIS: Does it look at me?

BRENNAN: It doesn't appear able to, it looks like it is dying. Grievously injured.

LUIS: I'm approaching.

BRENNAN: Do you approach the wall, or do you approach Karwen in the bed?

LUIS: Well, so the-- My Divine Sense didn't ping the bed. I'm just seeing this be revealed, it pinged the wall.

BRENNAN: Oh, yes. Karwen has a slight celestial presence just due to being an oracle. The fiendish presence in the reflection overpowers everything.

LUIS: Mm. Fuck!

TRAVIS: Bro. (laughter)

LUIS: I'm going to face that water where that ping came from. Show yourself.

BRENNAN: "I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't."

LUIS: Show yourself.

MARISHA: Come on, pally.

BRENNAN: "I'm trying."

LUIS: Is that coming from the wall or coming from--

BRENNAN: That's coming from the wall. It's coming from the reflection.

LUIS: Hmm.

BRENNAN: "I am--"

LUIS: I approach it.

BRENNAN: "Zerxus."

LUIS: You know me.

BRENNAN: "I know you well. You saved me."

LUIS: I'm walking towards that.

BRENNAN: Yeah. You have reached the wall.

LUIS: I put my hand on it.

BRENNAN: Does Zerxus want to go through?

AABRIA: (yells)

LUIS: He goes through. (gasping)

BRENNAN: You are in another time, another realm.

AABRIA: This is why you don't leave your buddy. This is why we have buddies.

LOU: Everyone was insistent that Karwen is better with one.

SAM: He's taking a bath. He's scrubbing his back.

MARISHA: Wow.

LOU: Sofyra, please come help. I can't get the bottom of my feet.

MARISHA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: You see, you walk through, silver mist, a bed soaked with blood. You smell the smell of blood, but you see a wheezing, rasping, devil.

LUIS: Same one?

BRENNAN: Same one. Now your size. Now the size of a man. "(pained groans) It's all right, I can't really die. I'm not in danger right now, it just hurts. That's all."

LUIS: What's happened to you?

BRENNAN: "Well, you came in before the Dawnfather could destroy it."

LUIS: So that was real?

BRENNAN: "It's all been real. It's all been real."

LUIS: I get closer. You know me, then who are you?

AABRIA: Yes.

BRENNAN: "Betrayer, sinner, most unclean. I am the Lord of the Hells. And--"

LUIS: I don't believe in the gods.

BRENNAN: "Lately, I don't much either."

LUIS: Give me your hand.

BRENNAN: He puts a blood soaked hand in your hand, it feels weak, it feels--

LUIS: I heal him. I cast Cure Wounds on him.

BRENNAN: (gasps, sighs)

LUIS: Shall I roll it, or does it matter?

BRENNAN: It removes him from the dying condition. It removes him from making death saves.

LUIS: The Lord of Hells.

BRENNAN: "The Lord of Hells."

LUIS: The name they gave you, or the name you gave yourself?

BRENNAN: "When you get to the table and there's not much left but scraps, you take what you're given."

LUIS: Why are you here?

BRENNAN: "I don't know. I don't know. I left where I was, and now I'm here."

LUIS: I'm looking, I'm scanning his entire body, his face, I'm looking for...

BRENNAN: Yeah. Let me know what you want to do. If you want to give me an insight check, you can. If you're just doing Divine Sense, he is registering as fiendish--

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: -- to you.

LUIS: I'm looking for the traces of what he's endured on his face, you know? I'm expecting broken, and I feel like I'm just seeing hurt and bewildered.

BRENNAN: He seems hurt and bewildered. You know people well enough. Not everyone shows you how broken they are when they're first meeting you.

LUIS: Right. I take his hand again, and I look him in the eyes and I say: What have they done to you? I want to know everything.

BRENNAN: You look, and for the first time, now that he is no longer writhing in pain, this man is beautiful. He bears, in passing, almost a resemblance, if it can be said, to Evandrin.

MARISHA: Oh, why'd you do that? I knew you were going to say that.

LOU: Don't do that.

AABRIA: I got to go.

MARISHA: What does that mean?

TRAVIS: Don't do that.

LUIS: I can't help, but... His name just falls out of my mouth. Evandrin?

MARISHA: What the fuck?

BRENNAN: "I don't look the same to everybody."

SAM: Oh, oh.

AABRIA: Oh.

BRENNAN: "Before it all went wrong, they said I was the most beautiful of them all."

LUIS: You were.

BRENNAN: "But as well you know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so I sometimes look like the most beautiful face that mortals have seen."

TRAVIS: Oh my god.

SAM: Why doesn't he look like me?

AABRIA: (laughs)

BRENNAN: He looks at you and says, "Evandrin, that's the name you just said."

LUIS: Yeah.

BRENNAN: "That was your love, yes?"

LUIS: It was. Why do you remind me of him?

BRENNAN: "Only you could answer that. I never know who I'm going to look like to people."

LUIS: (exhales)

AABRIA: (groans)

LUIS: Is this a trick? Are you playing with me?

BRENNAN: "People often think I'm tricking them, and I never have anything to say to that. What can you say to someone when they think that you're always going to trick them? I promise... No. I don't know Evandrin, but he must have been a very good man because he's not in my realm."

LUIS: (sighs)

TRAVIS: Okay.

LUIS: Let's get you cleaned up.

BRENNAN: (crying)

LUIS: What?

BRENNAN: "I have known only darkness for so long, and even before that, no one has shown me kindness."

LUIS: That's going to change, and that's a damn shame. This is your home. Don't you forget that. You belong here.

BRENNAN: He sits up in the bed. There are bed clothes here, there's fabric. If you wish to dress his wounds and clean him up, you can.

LUIS: Yeah. I will do so with the utmost care.

BRENNAN: You do so with the utmost care. As you do so, he smiles. He says, "Well, while you're cleaning up a god of darkness and fire, is there anything I can do to repay the favor? This is not Exandria yet. I'm not where I was, but I'm not home yet."

LUIS: You're in between. You are coming, is that it? Someone has done something. Someone has broken you out of wherever you once were.

BRENNAN: "The door opened. Yes, that's true."

LUIS: You walked through it?

BRENNAN: "Oh, the door opened more explosively than I can say. It opened and we all tumbled out. It was not a kind place behind that door, and the, for lack of a better word, pressure behind it, was enormous. It was a place made to teach us a lesson."

LUIS: It was your punishment. Do you remember what you've done and why they sent you there?

BRENNAN: "We came to a young world. We came to a world of raw elemental wonder, of chaos and exultant passion, of energy vaster and more potent than anything we had beheld in the cosmos. We came here and we began to shape what we could, what we dreamed. But the Primordials were here when we arrived. It was their world first. We arrived and we began to shape. We offered our creations. I saw--"

LUIS: Will you do something for me, please?

BRENNAN: "Yes."

LUIS: Will you kneel with me?

BRENNAN: "I will."

LUIS: I want to hear everything.

BRENNAN: He kneels with you.

LUIS: I cast Ceremony.

BRENNAN: You cast Ceremony with him.

SAM: Marriage?

AABRIA: (laughs)

LUIS: Atonement.

SAM: Ah.

BRENNAN: You begin to cast Atonement. As you begin to cast it, you see he looks, and I believe the casting time of Ceremony is--

LUIS: Is an hour.

BRENNAN: Is an hour. You begin to cast Atonement. As you cast this spell, you focus in. He kneels with you and he says, "We started to make our creations, and I did as I thought I must. I was a celestial. I was a celestial of light. They were creating truth and love and honor. They were creating courage and mortal beings. They were creating choices, and... Many of the gods spoke first. Many of the gods spoke first and long, and it was a long time before I spoke. Much had already been said, and I thought to help. I had seen the gifts of love and courage and truth and honor and sacrifice, and I said, These are the greatest gifts we could create, and we must make them matter. I said, these will matter because in their absence, we will know deceit. In their absence, we will know betrayal. In the absence of love, there will be viciousness. I thought I was expanding on a creation. I thought I was making something that would make the earlier work more... More. Then years passed and time passed, and the gifts I had made, mortals called them evil and said that they were wicked, said that they were wrong, and I said, well, yes, but that is the point, is it not? They hated me and none said prayers to my name, and I turned to my kin and my brethren and I said, ‘Does this strike you as fair?’ None of them spoke. None of them said a word in my defense. All were happy to watch as my gifts were not seen for what I intended them to be. Then, the others decided to grant even more. Many of us were already hated. Many of us already were seen as something worse, something abominable, but those stories, those things that shaped that, they were aided or egged on or pushed forward by the others. In that time of pain and sorrow, they then stepped forward and gave more gifts, they gave magic. The primordials, they were giving the ability to shape reality to the things that they had used their ability to shape reality to shape. We had already lent on the hospitality of the primordials enough. We had lent on it enough! We stepped in and said, the game has gone on too far. The Primordials rose up against them, and the Prime Deities, as they called themselves, stepped in to fight them, to double down on their overreach. Our promises were to the primordials and we were called Betrayers!"

LUIS: I lay my hand on his chest. Easy.

BRENNAN: "I have been burning for so long."

LUIS: They used you. They did. And I'm sorry for that. I can help you. You say you know me? When the time comes and you step from this void into our world, don't you forget me. Don't you forget the kindness that we're capable of, because we are your children, too. We are made of the same stuff, that what you initially created. We come from the same thing. If you remember the stories as well as you seem to, then you know that at some point, you turned your pain on us. They used you, and then you used us to get back at them. I have a son that's not of my blood, but that is my son. I met Evandrin when he was just an infant, and I held that boy in my arms and I fell in love with him and I am his father, but he is not of my blood. In that same way, we are your children. Please remember that. Don't take your pain out on us. Spare us, and I will help you. I will help you confront those that did this to you.

BRENNAN: "I don't give my word lightly. You have my word on this, Zerxus Ilerez. Not for all the ages of the world will I forget you. You are not... I see faults in people. I know what they have done wrong. Do you want to know your fault, Zerxus? You are very trusting. You say that I am being used. You, my friend, are being used."

LUIS: By you.

BRENNAN: "I am the father of lies. You are being lied to, and not by any god."

LUIS: I turn around and look back through the portal that I walked through.

BRENNAN: As you begin to go back through the portal--

LUIS: I'm not moving just yet. I just turned.

BRENNAN: You turn to look. You see out there-- You look back out through the portal, you see your body is on the ground next to the bed and your eyes have rolled back in your head. You're having a vision. You recognize like, oh, when I walked towards the water that was me ejecting from my body. You realize, oh, I am an oracle. I am fully one of the people of this hall like this. This is me, right? You see-- You look out into the room and you see the Lord of the Hells goes, "Is that it out there? That's the world?"

LUIS: Yes, it is.

BRENNAN: "Where-- what part of Exandria are we in? Maybe it's all changed since the last time I was there. I don't know."

LUIS: I won't lie to you. It's called Avalir.

BRENNAN: "Avalir. Avalir flying over Domunas, yes?"

LUIS: Yes.

BRENNAN: "Is Domunas still beautiful?"

LUIS: Parts of it, yes. Aspects of it.

BRENNAN: "I always said we were supposed to take credit for it all equally. "Domunas was my favorite. But I was-- I always said on the face of Exandria, Domunas was the smile. It truly is. It is, there is nothing like it."

LUIS: I have to leave you. I'm going back.

BRENNAN: "What became of Evandrin?"

LUIS: I don't quite know. Some sort of illness that was beyond my reach took him. The vision I had with you showed him walking towards a tree.

BRENNAN: "There are some less than kind workings of magic on some trees of old."

LUIS: He was spitting up something that became intangible. He-- I felt him sort of fading. When I picked him up, desperately trying to find some sort of a cure that was nowhere to be found. It wasn't from anything from this world that I could understand. Nobody could help. Why was he in the dream?

BRENNAN: "Connection. His spirit was somehow near. I don't know how to describe it. Did you ever try after his passing to bring him back?"

LUIS: I tried to stop it from happening and I never found him really when he passed. But I did everything I could to stop it.

BRENNAN: "Great and many are the powers of mortals to stop poisons, diseases, affliction, and curses."

LUIS: I know. Nobody would help. I know that city had some way of bringing him back. How could they not?

BRENNAN: "There are few you can trust, very few. I don't know much. I have been away for quite some time, but of my domain, I am certain. I am the father of lies, and there are many lies in the city you call home."

LUIS: I don't call this city home.

BRENNAN: The Lord of the Hells feels the impact of that. He looks at you. "You have done me a great service and you have given me your trust. But I understand that mortals will always have a part of their soul that recoils from me. It is the nature of the gifts I gave them."

LUIS: Then you made me wrong.

BRENNAN: He puts a hand on your shoulder and interrupts your casting of Atonement. Instead, casts a spell on you and puts a Protection from Evil and Good on you. "That will protect you from myself, from celestials, from fey."

LUIS: Thank you.

BRENNAN: You see, he...

TRAVIS: You had this coming.

BRENNAN: You see--

LOU: Why'd you lie?

LUIS: To take a bath.

BRENNAN: I just want to... You see that he says, "Time for that will come later. You have work in Exandria in the mortal realm. I am trapped in a space in between something. There's a poison. There is a poison in your city, and I think you know the shape of it."

LUIS: I give him a nod, as a... just innately just start to feel like my time here is up. I start to step away from him and I walk towards the portal and as I start to step through it, I turn around and I say to him: Come find me. And I go through.

BRENNAN: You walk through. You leave. You come back into your body on the floor with the tight muscles of someone who has been like spasming in a state of religious ecstasy.

LUIS: (groans)

BRENNAN: Stand up. Out in the chamber, because you've been occupied for a moment. Sofyra approaches you, "Guildmaster Nydas. This was the first."

BRENNAN and LUIS: (laugh)

LUIS: This is fun.

BRENNAN: This is fun. (laughter)

BRENNAN: The Promise of the Premise. You see that you-- comes over and says, "This was the first prophecy that Karwen gave around two weeks ago. We wrote it down. This was the first prophecy that was a false prophecy. That we knew that she had gone mad." (laughter)

BRENNAN: Do you have a telecommunications device next to you?

SAM: Oh!

BRENNAN: I'm going to send this to you because I want you to read this.

LOU: You want me to read it?

BRENNAN: I want you.

LOU: Aloud?

BRENNAN: Aloud.

TRAVIS: Let's go.

AABRIA: I love it.

LUIS: Do I have a sense of how much time has passed?

BRENNAN: As you awaken up a bit, you've been here for a minute.

LUIS: Okay.

LOU: Okay.

MARISHA: I feel like I need a cigarette and I don't smoke.

BRENNAN: So Karwen, Sofyra places this and says, this was the first prophecy that let us know that she was mad and her prophecies have become false."

LOU: CVS Pharmacy, "Lou, remember to text 'Okay,' to update your preferences." (laughter)

LOU: Is this it?

BRENNAN: Yes.

LOU: This is the one I just got.

MARISHA: Get your booster shots.

BRENNAN: Get your booster shots. (laughter)

BRENNAN: No, it should be there.

LOU: Oh, I got it.

BRENNAN: You got it. Good, good, good.

SAM: Reply to the council. (laughter)

LOU: "The stars are leaving us. Our hands cannot reach the limbs of the tree, can no longer scribe the name of our deliverance. We will soon be as broken as our promises. Avalir shall fall. All shall fall. And from our folly will the hands that forge the world banish themselves from the broken things they have made." This was deemed false.

BRENNAN: "Yes."

LOU: In that?

BRENNAN: "Oh, we spoke to a member of the Octothurge and we delivered it and said, this is the prophecy and the Guildmaster of the Guild of Divination decreed that it was false. Because it obviously can't be true."

MARISHA: (whispers) It can't be true.

LOU: Obviously.

BRENNAN: "That was the right decision, wasn't it? Something went wrong. They all went mad."

LOU: Yes, I think it is best that we continue to consider that false.

BRENNAN: "Continue to..."

LOU: That is false. I misspoke.

BRENNAN: "Guildmaster, is everything all right?"

LOU: Yes, of course. I'm sure as soon as Zerxus leaves, we'll be on our way. Everything that Loras wanted us to take care of, seems to have been handled.

BRENNAN: Zerxus begins to march up the corridor and you see Nydas here. It is. Now, as you are all wrapping up your business, it's about one o'clock in the morning. As you're leaving the Magisterium, you get a ping on your ring of masks from Akami Rowe, the Helmswoman of Avalir.

AABRIA: Hold on. I fire it up and look off.

BRENNAN: Akami. "Architect Arcane!"

AABRIA: Hi.

BRENNAN: "Great news. We are in position over Cathmoíra. All is well. We are now at the intersection of all three leylines. As of this moment, descent has begun, hurray, descent."

AABRIA: (weak laugh) Nothing of note to report?

BRENNAN: "No, I don't think there's anything of note to report. At this point, the entire process is automated. We've begun the protocol. So the brumestone enchantment is working. The Ley-Rudder-- I went to go disactivate the Ley-Rudder because we don't need it anymore, but there's a block that had your signature on it? So the Ley-Rudder is still active."

AABRIA: Go ahead and leave that active. Don't worry about it. It's pulling a minutia, a negligible amount of power. We're fine. This is good, thank you.

BRENNAN: "All right, well, I'm going to stay here just in case. Obviously, the whole rest of the process is automated, but just in case anything-- (chokes)"

AABRIA: No.

BRENNAN: Mask goes neutral.

MARISHA: What the fuck?

AABRIA: Okay, a bad thing. We have to go to the helm now. Now, now. Uh. Now!

MARISHA: All right, can I port us?

BRENNAN: You guys can assemble porters. Do you communicate that over the telepathic bond?

LOU: This man talked to a god.

BRENNAN: You don't know yet that this man talk to a god.

LOU: Well then, in that case, the helm is the most important thing. (laughter)

BRENNAN: That gets communicated over the telepathic bond.

AABRIA: The helmswoman was just attacked. We had-- meet now.

BRENNAN: So all of you hear this and begin to sprint towards the helm, which is off in Dawnsledge. You head to the neighborhood of Dawnsledge. As you begin to convene on that, flying, teleporting, moving in as fast as possible. You begin to move through the streets. You begin to approach the helm. You see the building up ahead of you. All of you convene again here in this moment. You hear far off in Excelsior Plaza still, but now the fireworks extravaganza is dying down. You see that you still hear revelry and applause, and you can see-- you feel the hum of now three leylines converging in one and the city is descending. You can feel, you actually see now clouds on the horizon like slowly rising up as the city begins to descend. You walk through this neighborhood. As you are walking, you hear a voice, speak out, "Ah, the Ring of Brass," and Lacrytia Hallow looks at you, says--

MARISHA: Looks at us? She's in front of us?

BRENNAN: (ominously) Not just her. You look around the rooftops around you. I'm going to need everyone here to roll initiative.

LUIS: Oh my. (exclaiming) (laughter)

BRENNAN: And that's all for this episode-- (cheering)

BRENNAN: -- of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. Tune in next week.

MARISHA: No! (cheering)

BRENNAN: And we'll see.

LOU: We're going to kill this woman.

TRAVIS: What did you do? What did you do?

MARISHA: What is happening?

LUIS: I don't know.

AABRIA: I spent the whole time going like, oh no, maybe I blew what-- You did it! (laughter)

AABRIA: You did it!

SAM: Amazing.

BRENNAN: We can all take turns causing the apocalypse together.

MARISHA: We all had a hand in this crucifixion.

TRAVIS: Now, remember, is it Thursday yet?

BRENNAN: Is it Thursday yet? It's-- give some-- this is-- It's Thursday now, but now it's your-- It's going to be the next Thursday is the next show. And we want to know if it's Thursday yet! Fuck! (laughter)

LOU: Was that on tape?

AABRIA: Perfect.