Dungeons and Daddies - S4 Ep. 9 - Stepmothership - From the Makers of Anthony Burch’s World Championship Russian Roulette

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

blue christian X man catholic or ProtestantThis episode contains Profanity, Violence, and Sexual Content.As Freddie mentions in the outro, Hey There My Lyla has been added to Now Dads What I Call Music, free for download on Patreon.Also HAPPY PRIDE! 🥰 We're proud to celebrate our community and help defend and expand protections for queer people. For the second year in a row we have the Pride Dice and Pride Zine available on our store. The dice and the physical copy of the zine are only available for the month of June! Did you miss the 2025 issue of the Pride Zine? No worries! We're offering a bundle of both the 2025 and 2026 Pride Zines that lets you enjoy two years worth of queer love in the form of fan art.All of the net proceeds from sales of our Pride collection will be donated to Lambda Legal to support the fight for LGBTQ+ people's civil rights.And once again:bookmedaddy.comSupport the show on Patreon!Get merch and more at our website!Follow us on Bluesky @dungeonsanddads!Check out the subreddit!DM is Anthony BurchDale Elliot is Matt Arnold Ralph Estarellas is Will CamposHerb “The Worm” Quiggly is Beth May Ashley Birch is Freddie Wong Theme song is “Conventional Wisdom” by Maxton WallerAnnissa Omran is our Content ProducerAshley Blood is our Community ManagerKortney Terry is our Community CoordinatorEster Ellis is our Lead EditorTravis Reaves and Omar Romolino provide Additional EditingCover art and episode art by Alex Moore (@notanotheralex)Get in contact: https://www.dungeonsanddaddies.com/contactThe story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dungeons and Daddies is a rowdy, horny, violent podcast for grownups. Content warnings can be found in the description. Hold that a little closer to here. Oh, I'm sorry. It's on, right? Hey there, my Lila, what's it like in your fast shuttle? Wait, I guess that I've been in it, too. That would be your rebuttal.

Yeah, it's fast. Just hope your oxygen will last. Put on a podcast. Hey there, my Lila, don't you worry about your grandpa. Think of me out on my next crew slamming down another white claw. Man, they're good. Kind of tastes like water should. They're really good.

Oh, I'm just like years away. Bill, you all right? Oh, okay. Oh, I'm just like years away. Just like years away. Oh, thanks, Bill. Hey there my Lila I know Earth is mostly water

So there's lots of cruises You can take So maybe bring your mother Lily Bee You're gonna love the things you see On Royal Caribbean I only did Royal Caribbean Because it rhymes I honestly wouldn't

I mean they're not bad It's just not the best If you're gonna do one world cruise I would probably choose Regent Do not do Disney Do not let Marin Do not let your mom pick Disney

She's a little Disney kid at heart. Not the best cruise, way too expensive. Oh, honestly, Holland line, they got World Cruise in 2008. I was looking at 320 days, almost the whole year. Welcome to Dungeons and Daddies. This time, this time it's Grandpa's Galaxy's dog. A grand space pop for about four gilfs who take to the stars to rescue their grandkids. And perhaps the entire known universe in the process,

D&D 5E with a little dark matter sprinkled in. My name is Freddie Wong. I play Ashley Burtch, Ashley with an E, birch like the tree. Take me to Birch. I'm Bertianette the Pohsier. What? Take me to church. Have you been getting that one, Anthony?

Yeah, they don't say take me if they just go, Anthony Burch. Oh, that's really good. I'm going to start doing that. I was Freddie Kruger and then he got fingered. And then it's back to. Hey, I was free willie, man. We all had to talk. That's Freddie.

I just want to say congrats on both things that happened to you. Thank you. What was your nickname? Beth Gay. Yeah. Yeah, you walked into that one.

Oh, we're not beating that, Matt. Nope. I read my feelings at first, but then I kind of grew into it. It was fine. That's great. Matt? Hey Arnold.

Oh, hey Arnold. Okay. Sure, sure. Anyway. Or fat. So now an Ananadad It's great. All right.

My name is Freddie Wong. I play Ashley Birch. Born in 64, the youngest boomer. Ashley Burch is a twin galaxy's gadgeteer era. Arcade Pro gamer turn, Twitch streamer. Freddy, does that make him a click, click, click boomer? Click, click, boom.

More like a click. It's what the sound of a quarter going in. Oh, okay. Click. What is the sound of a quarter going in? Meditate on that Zen Co-on while I tell you his fact. Ashley Burch's favorite hamburger composition, 75, 20, 75% lean 25% fat okay okay

hey everybody my name is Matthew Arnold I play Dale Elliott the ex lifeguard Oh my god The triple digit ex lifeguard Ex lifeguard who sex wife hard Yeah that's it That's it Slow down Drake

You got three albums What he's drama three albums Meanwhile Willie Campos Oh yeah Driving the lines in the bars of the fucking century. And he's tweeting at Millie Bobby Brown. Who's now living in his monk life. Grandfather of seven, father of four, widow of one and friend to all.

A little fact about, it's kind of two facts, I guess, of Dale, is that when Zano passed away, he had her ashes put in a little small container. And he's been sprinkling it kind of everywhere he goes, like on his journeys around the world. Wait, like, where? Like everywhere. Okay. Like on the oceans? On the oceans. Any places he's been to?

Because she wasn't going to be able to travel the world with him and he wants her to have gone all the places. And if you ever returns to a place, she'll still be there and everything. Oh, that's very sweet. Yeah. He's lived longer than he thought he would and he's gone to a lot of places. So he's like pretty much right now. So he's got one little like bit left and he's saving it for like what's the best place. Now let me ask you this.

Where does he keep this little bit? How do you not lose it? It's in my pocket. Loose? No, no. It's on a little necklace. Like the last little bit's like a little necklace? He keeps a necklace in my pocket?

Where are you lying there? Are you lying now? I don't want you guys to know because then he'll lose it. If I say where it is, Andy, he will make sure, oh, your pants fall off. And the pocket goes off into outer space. I got bad news for you. Yeah, that door is open. No what?

No what? It's like a cyanide capsule into my tooth. It's welded to it's right to go. That's crazy. So when he dies, if you ever meet Barron-Harkon? And then she goes where he is, too. That's insane. But the second fact is that also Dale is the reason they've really cracked down and putting ashes

around Disneyland. man because he was the first one to get caught. Dude, was he fucking, he was fucking Andy Dufraining that shit, just shaking around his leg. Huge problem there. Hi, everyone. I'm Will Campos. I play Ralph Astorayas, a sci-fi scribe slash wife guy whose wife died. I also had a sad, dead wife fact prep for today.

Which is that Ralph, after his beloved cookie passed, hasn't gone to therapy, hasn't done any grief processing, but he did start... Just like John Wick, bro. Just like John Wick. Fucking awesome. He did start compulsively buying watches. Yes! He became a watch guy,

but he specifically, he's like, I want a watch that is really reliable that won't die on you suddenly. And that's his whole thing is he's buying like G-shocks and fucking super durable casios but like every time he feels sad he's like I'm not sure this watch is going to last. I need to get another watch.

Every month Ralph has his own G-shock, which is his grief shock, that then drops him to buy another watch to paper over it. What's the most expensive watch? I've evolved beyond the G-spot. I know when we hit the G-shock. Hi, my name is Beth Gay. and happy pride.

I think this is coming out in June, so happy pride. I play Herb the Warm Quigley, a young at Hart Barbarian storytelling grandpa who is losing the plot. Fun fact about Herb, Herb has accrued massive debt multiple times in his life, as is characteristic for anybody experiencing a manic episode or a hypomanic episode at times.

But the worst debt he ever got into was actually the result of a water bill because he was experiencing a manic episode and thought that the instructions on the shampoo bottle were a message from the universe and he just kept wash, rinse, repeating. And he was in the shower for days and days. And so the water bill was incredibly expensive that month.

Well, how was the shampoo bill? Like, I feel like you get a run out of shampoo before you... It sounds like he also rubbed his hair out. You actually don't need as much as you think you need. It's like D-Face. So he's very responsible with the shampoo. Yeah, I mean, he used a whole bottle, but it was over the course of days. That's true.

I guess you want to think about it like, I'll have a shampoo bottle. I'll have a fucker last like a long time. Hi, I'm Fat Gay Matt. Today's Epigram is going to be an epigram for last week's episode because last week I did an epigram that is probably more appropriate for this episode. So I'm going to go back in time. Just swap them in your mind mentally. So the epigram for last episode is by a delightful man.

There's never enough time to do all the nothing you will. want. I may know. Is it Dr. Seuss? Close-ish. Is it Shell Silverstein? Close-ish?

Is it Mr. Rogers? You guys are all very, very close. Bill Waterson. Oh. I was going to guess, Ronald McDonald. Yeah, that's what he said when he's trying to sell you burgers.

Ralph's Grail is the McDonald's watch from when he was a kid. Oh, so when we last left you, by a one in 20 chance, you managed to secure the Lux rental spaceship. The Sux and Lux?

Should we start right? where we were. Oh, my God. My goodness. Hey, what's going on in there? You guys okay? It's like tugging a hose. We're fine.

Oh, God. What's going to? Dory, I'm going to need to use the bathroom. Computer. Computer. See, sucking. Computer. It's on.

It's done. It's already happened. Computer. Increased by 50%. No, no, no. No. You hear a little crack and a little, like, dust sprays out of tail's mouth.

He goes, no, not here. Not here. No. Just give me the final. an old frantic face. Oh, God. Computer. Increased RPM.

Everybody rolled constitution not to breathe in the cyanide. You know what? She might have liked it. Wow. All right. You should laugh at this. Seven. I get a lung full of your wife. This is arresting my ability to complete

this task. Okay. So as far as scrap and records are concerned, they hear a lot of and then they hear at least two of you coughing your fucking lungs out as as Dale wife enters your esophagus. I didn't think it would be like this, but I guess in the end, I'm glad you all got to met my wife Zelda.

I just want to say she was around for one of the happiest moments in my life. Oh, no. Earning our mature rating, God, Lord. Ironically. So you got the ship and you are headed off to

presumably, or you're going to find out what the nearest planet with your nearest grandchild is. Yes. So, all right, gentlemen, we've had a relaxing afternoon. We've had a nice break. Put it that way. We never have to speak of it again.

Well, do we know how that happened? Yeah. If anyone would like to roll technology. This is moving on the ship for a while. Technology has nothing to do with it. If any one person rolls technology and you fail, that's going to happen every time you enter the car, no matter of it. Okay, so you can seceded.

So you can turn it on a while. on or off according to your whims. The rental place that said it to like greet new drivers. You want a good first impression when you got your lux money spent. It seems like the next thing we need to do is figure out this is going to be a joy for one of us and painful for the rest of us.

Like what just happened? Yeah, yeah. I think we've been avoiding the subject. We need to figure out who we're going after next. Yeah, yeah. So previously you were relying on Roger Moore to do the calculations for you on that. What's our fun ship computer? So your fun ship computer is probably the same as the one that you initially got,

which is to say that it is customizable. You all want Roger Moore again or maybe something else? Let me spice it up a little bit. I'm just in a loose improvisational mood right now. I don't know what that's from. Let's spice it up. What do you think, Herb?

It's like a pepper. It's like a spicy pepper. Oh, my. Like that, like Peter the spicy pepper. All right, computer, you're Peter the spicy pepper. Hi, aye, aye. I'm Peter the spicy pepper. I, aye, aye. Oh, interesting.

It's great to meet you guys. You look like a pretty cool, cold, cool, cool, hey guys, what's up? I'm Peter the spicy pepper. What do you need? Peter the spicy pepper, we are trying to. This is so fun, by the way. I love this. Look.

Anybody got any milk? That's true. It's Peter the spicy pepper. We need some help. Do you need help having a party in your mouth that also kind of hurts? No. You like sweating from your nose. I like sweating from my nose.

Yeah. We are in the process of locating our grandchildren who are abducted and are on various planets throughout the galaxy. our last ship computer had drawn up a map such that the time dilation between each child would work thusly and I convey the previously established information

and the locations of the planets of the children. In conclusion what we decided is the fairest thing to do would be each time we are to embark on a new leg of our adventure that the child is randomly chosen so that we're all kind of in this together so to Ralph you did a great job

explaining that. So much, Herb. So we need you in your spicy way. to pick a number between one and three, as I guess my long-winded way of that's what we need. Okay, I'll do that. Do we know which one is which? Aha! I said it right that time.

A-ha will be number one. Okay. Herb, your child whose name is, I forget. It's Oliver, and he's my grandchild. Okay, your grandchild. Grandchild. We'll be number two, and then whoever Ashley is here for will be number three.

Timothy. Timothy, right. I can barely keep my own grandchild's name straight. That's why I'm just going to, you're, Everyone's responsible for the name of their own grandkids. Always have been. Yeah. So that'll be the numbers.

Let's go ahead. And I guess just everybody be prepared for, you know, what could be an emotional experience. So you hear the click-clack of the AI crunching numbers for you and then... Generating a number between one and three, huh? Yeah. Click and clack. Yep.

And he goes... Aye, aye. You're headed for the most mui-caliente planet in the solar system. We're on our way to Lesbonica, planet of the sex goddesses. Oh, Timothy! Shall I activate the light drive? Oh, is that where your kid is? Timothy is.

Sorry, grandkid. And I'm going to be honest. A little bit excited to see old Timothy. Why would you have to be honest about that? That seems like a natural kind of thing. Yeah, we're all kind of, you know. I'm also excited to see what Lesbonica is like. Okay.

It seems like that's the thing you're more excited about. Okay. What's his name, Pepper Pete? My name is Peter the Spicey Pepper. You can call me Pepper Pete if you want. What was the planet's name again? Lesbonica, Planet of the Sex Goddess. Is that name accurate or is it like a,

little John situation. I was going to say Greenland, but yeah, it is named for the opposite of what it is. The opposite of sex goddesses. So it's a bunch of straight people that aren't sex goddesses. Yeah, so it's the opposite of us. I don't know where that came from. Vermont heads. I can fucking kill, dude.

Extendable hand with a finger comes out of the dashboard and points at Ralph and then just retracts back into the dashboard. Wow. I can activate the flight whenever you want. No, just the back of the envelope, Matthew, that means when we see Timothy he's going to be how old like 30 or something like that? Do we know how old he's going to be, Anthony?

He will be 10 years older from right now, so he would be 20 years older than when you last saw him. So that he'll be like 33. But he was the young one in the group, right? His Jesus year. Yeah, he's probably in his late 20s, early 30s, I would say. Oh my gosh. Wow, wow.

A formative time. All right, yeah, I mean, we should go. Well, I'm ready. They feel bad bringing this up, but. Momento. Scrap and wreckage. They can't go with us, right? Why not?

Because can they go warp speed? Do they eat their sharks? We'll put them in the cargo. The sucklux happens to have a pretty sizable cargo trunk that you could fit most things in. Wow, wow, we wow. Including two space sharks that seem to be circling this ship. Should I activate defensive?

No, no, no. Can you imagine if we just fucking wasted up right here, dude? Don't even joke about that. They tap on the window. Scrap and wreckage. Yeah, what's up? Yeah, what's up? We're on our way to Lesbonica planning of the sex goddesses,

which sounds like more of a Vermont or main situation. Yeah, it's going to be disappointed. You been? Yeah, we've been. Learn from our mistakes. Do not go. Why not? I mean, it's basically just a bunch of space pirates

fighting over resources and stuff like that. That sounds like to be a lot of wreckage. So is where we are. Yeah, yeah, but we didn't come thinking that we're going to be lesbians. So the wreckage was a nice sort of compilation prize, but when you come in search for lesbians

and you get food, it's just a different kind of happy. If you started a porn video and instead of ordered Chipotle at your house, how would you feel? I feel okay. Conflict it, I suppose. Exactly.

Yeah. Well, do you want to come with us? I know it sounds like you don't want to go. In which case, goodbye, it's been nice to know you. But now that you're prepped for, it's a lot of wreckage, you might be okay. Because right now we're asking, do you want come to Chipotle with us? Let's, hold on. Let me talk to Scrap.

Hey, Scrap. If they're going and it's going to be like 10 years in the future, that means there could be like new scrap and wreckages that we never tasted before. Oh, shit. That's a good point. I guess we could dine on the food of the future. We wouldn't be leaving behind everybody we love. That's not true.

You're the only person I love. Oh, I love you too, buddy. They're tonguing. Oh, that's interesting. I thought they were like brothers. Maybe they are. That's just the noise we make. We're not tonguing each other.

We're not related. You related and you're not. We're not used to each other. It's just the noise we make when we experience love. I love you guys too. The cargo trunk opens up, scrap and wreckage soar in. Oh, spacious. And it closes behind them.

If you want, you can activate the FTL drive. And then you are on your way to, let's Monica. We should do that. I do just need to ask one piece of flavor, though. Yeah. Are they just like a beach shark? Are they sitting in a little chair? It's zero G in the trunk.

You can set it to have G or no G, and they ask for zero G. So I assume you'll fly. Yeah, they're kind of just floating around like a big aquarium. Yeah, that's cute. That's cute. I just wanted it. So first of all, everybody go ahead and give yourselves a long rest. Everybody level yourselves up. Yay!

That's a big level up, everybody. All you D&D heads know, three to four is a major milestone. Level four is when a character's thoughts turn to other characters. No, no, no, no. Let's crunch it a little bit. Let's crunch it up, everybody. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Welcome to crunch time.

This is where we dive deep into the character sheets that we all know and love. This is our sub-podcast between the sheets. Between the, that's good. I like it. I got slow fall and I got good at guns now. My subclass for a monk is going to be way of the warped. Cool. Let's just say my looms can get stretchy.

No. That's crazy. Like a little fun anime character. Oh, no. Oh, no. Fucking hell. Yeah, wait. I got some druid spells, even though I'm not a druid,

because I did like a way of the druid or druid entry level or something. Nice. I got more hit points. I'm taking a feat. I'm a mechanic now. Nice. Great. I looked at a soldering iron for like four minutes, and I was like, I get it.

It gets hot. Nice. I chose the Feet's Spell Sniper. Cool. And I'm using a mage hand cantrip called finger guns. Okay, cool. Pugh, pew, pew. That's cool.

Zap you. So you travel to Lesbonica Planet of the Sex Goddesses. How long does it take? It takes a couple weeks, just like it did, to get to the previous place you were. In the last five seconds before you come out of light speed, you suddenly receive a shitload of messages at once, the most recent of which is dated eight days ago. So one year ago, you get a message that says, Hey, Grandpa, I know by the time you get this, you'll already be like two seconds from seeing me, but I just wanted to temper your expectations.

Lesbonica planted of the sex goddesses as a Greenland situation. They named it that to dissuade people from going to the actual sex planet, which nobody knows the name of or where to find it. Shit! Six months ago. When you show up, I'll be in the big ship orbiting the planet. It should actually be done by the time you get here, so I can show you what I've been working on for the Bureau. Oh, cool.

One month ago. Don't come. Well, too late for that, kiddo. Eight days ago. Actually, I think you could help. When you get here, don't go inside the ship. Wire yourselves into the internal transmitter. And then in parentheses, the internal transmitter is external to the ship,

but it controls transmissions within the ship. It is located here, and there is a diagram of a spaceship attached. You can see that this is the ISB Class 4 R&D cruiser, and a small bump on the ship's hull has been circled. You drop out of light speed. Pepper Pete, scan. Scan. Yep.

That's a ship. And he highlights it on the HUD of the front windshield. And you see that it is a pretty large ship. It's about the size of that face ship that you were in before, maybe a little bit bigger with a bounty hunter was chasing you down in. And it's highlighted. It's exactly the way the diagram said it was going to be, except for the fact that it seems like it's been squished in a little bit.

It looks like something like punched it from the outside. There are these big dent marks in it or something like that. The dent in it is almost like you grabbed an aluminum. and just squeeze it a little bit from the outside and left some permanent dense inside of it. But it's orbiting a planet that is completely black and dead. There's nothing left on that planet. And you can see

the detritus of like mining ships and all that other kind of stuff. Scrapping ragged are fucking chopping. They're already gone. You don't even know where they are there. The hole in the door. Peckerman P engage stealth mode. Yeah, they just burst out of the fucking truck. Pepper P against self mode. Self mode. Okay. Self mode.

We're flying silent. Everyone. Oh, what's that? Achoo! Oh, God, I got this loud sneeze. Herb, you got allergies? No, I just got a loud sneeze, man. It's what happens when you get a wife in your nose. It gets louder, the older I get.

Oh, wait, there's a piece of your wife who just shot out of Herb's nose on the ground. You can still catch it. There you go, man. I'm fine with what happened. I'm not going to undo what it happened. Is this a single derelict ship? Is the only ship in the spaces? How are these signs of life?

Peter the spicy pepper says, I'm not close enough, and the hull is thick enough that I can't tell how many life signs are aboard the ship, but I can tell that the ship is active. How many seas thick is it? Seas? Yes. It's the thing that the kids do where they, instead of spelling it the right way, they spell like T-H-I-C-C to mean that someone usually has like a large, sort of ample backside. Peter the spicy pepper says, yeah, so it looks like, from what I can tell, this Lesbonica was mind-dry, essentially, by what looks to be the ISB.

I see a lot of derelict mining ships and destroyed container ponds and all that kind of stuff. So it seems like if I had to guess, the last time somebody was here other than this ship that we're about to go into or get next to has probably been, you know, a year or two years. That rock has probably been black for a while. Peter, what can we discern about the bulges, internal concave bulges on that ship? They are not supposed to be there. I can tell you that. Well, fucking give me something more than that. There's no...

How much force would be required to create a ship like that? Des considerable. Hall integrity. Scan the hull integrity. A ship would have to be going at considerable speed to make a depth that big, but any ship that could go at that speed, unless it was launched without fuel in it, would explode. So I don't understand why the ship is something like that.

What makes you think it was a ship that impacted in... Because of the size and depth of that. Could be an asteroid or something like that. If so, we would see impact of asteroid particles on the exterior of the ship, but I don't. Asteroid particles like your wife. Oh, pretty funny. Thanks. In fact, I'm not getting any particles on the outside of the ship at all,

which would seem to imply that nothing ran into it. Some sort of force just hit it. Interesting. We must foresee with caution. Is that where you think your grand kid is? Well, I can only go off of the messages that we got. And he's telling me that we got to tap into that. And he sounds like he might be in trouble.

Pepper. Can I just call you pepper? You can call me whatever you want, my man. Okay. I'm spicy, but I'm also cool. Okay. That's a good lifestyle. I like that.

I think he's gaining sentience. Cool wasn't originally part of his. personality matrix. Okay, well, we'll start him later. Kind of think maybe all human should die, but we can table that for a later discussion. We'll do a hard reset after this. I mean, I don't know what I'm asking you. I guess you want to just go in there?

I want to get your kid. No. My grandkid is not expecting me, and we don't know what's going on here. So I say we spend our expecting you. You got four messages that would seem to apply he absolutely was expecting him. He was expecting, but here's the thing that because of the way time dilation works. Ralph, you can chime in on this. Yeah, go ahead.

But the way time dilation. work the way I understand it, he might be waiting for a month. As you can tell from the timestamp on the messages, the last one you received was sent from this location 8-Based. See, if you go into your email and you click show more, then you see here it says the time that the email was sent. They call it a timestamp. So that has nothing to do with relativity.

That just tells you when the message reached your device. So that way, if you message your grandkid and they say like, sorry, I just got this, grandpa, and you can tell that, well, they got it a while ago and it says that they read Ralph, technologically speaking, what does it mean when you send your girlfriend like, hey, can I see the boobies and then it says red? Is that mean she's like read it, but she's not decided yet? I think maybe that means that she's heard the request, but, you know. And then when I keep sending more text messages, it just keeps saying red. And then they change colors.

Yeah. I don't know about the changing colors, but it sounds like she might not want to send you the picture of her breasts. Which is totally her right, and I'll respect that. It sounds like you're not respecting it if you keep asking her after she didn't respond. But be that as it may, back to matter at hand. I'm going to highlight for you the bulge that was specifically called out in the diagram that your grandson sent you. I'm already doing it like fucking Last Skywalker style by holding the diagram up and squinting. Oh my God, it's like we had to be standing right here.

Next to it. This makes total sense. How did he know that we would exit right here? Look, I can overlay it and it's pointing right there. Yeah, so it looks like it's accessible from outside in space. We do have four space suits, if you so wish. Let's send scrap and wreckage there first. They're gone.

But if you guys want to, like, radio out to them, they can hear you. Scrap, wreckage, come in. Just a second. They're kissing again. I don't think they're brothers. They come back and they say, Hey, what's up? First of all, how's all that new scrap and reggage, eh?

Honestly, not what I expected. What do you mean? What do you mean? It's like an acquired taste. It's like ashy. It doesn't feel like there's a lot of flavor to it. Like whatever's been here has been here for a little while. That's kind of what Dale's wife tasted like, to be honest.

Hell yeah, bro. And he slaps the side of the car as if to high-five it. Bung. So what's up? We could have to talk about Dale's dead wife some more? No, no, no. You see this bulge? Yeah.

Can you go over there and investigate it? Tell me if anything seems off or weird. BRB. Do loo-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l. Seems fine. All right, let's go. You see this bulge? I'm just being silly, man.

I'm just being silly. That is impressive, though. All I can see that bulge was a, it's like a shutter, and then next to the shutter there are two buttons, and one of them said Atmo, and one of them said pilot. Atmo. A pilot, okay. Atmosphere and pilot, he says we need to jack into it somehow.

Yeah, let's go. Yeah, you guys got some spacesuits? Are there guns? I'll put on a space suit. Space suit. Let's get suited up. I guess, yeah, we fly up to the. thing presumably, right?

We want park right next to it. Match speed, match rotation, matchy orbits. We're grabbing our spacesuits. Can everybody roll if they saw something? I did. Okay, everybody rolled perception to Matt's opposed stealth roll. Matt's Gumby roll. 12.

Four. Hey, Matt, you think Luffy sucks his own dick? He's so stretchy. That's the one piece he's looking for. He wouldn't even need to go fucking searching for it. I got a 12. I got 17. Nobody sees.

All you notice is that I did grab the spacesuit, but I wasn't as close as you would think I should be. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. None of us know this. I mean, the quote of someone grabbing their coat. I know with these about eight feet of the spacesuit and somehow I still have, I got my hands. One second, we don't have nobody has spaces. The next second, everyone's holding a space suit.

But Matt's a little further back from everyone. He's still in chair. He's sad. Okay. So these. Why does he have Gumpy powers now? What is the narrative? What's the diagenetic reason for this?

When you go through the warp, when you go through the warp. Yeah, we go through the warp. When you all went through the warp, where are going to be powers. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. When you go through the warp, there is an element of not only time dilation, but also space either compaction or extrusion. It's time and space are related, well. Yeah, but just like scrapping a record. Just like, yeah, fuck it.

And what you've really noticed is Dale, like, is surprised by him. So let me cook here. I'm beginning. I just got pipped by a spider. This is the first act of the story. I'm trying to... You got bit by a spider we didn't see. That's it.

That's it. By sheer coincidence, you got bit by a spider that also does the stuff I talked about with the fucking sky speed. I like the idea that I did get bit by a spider. I think that's the reason. It's like, no, like, we clearly, like, we went through... Where is that spider? I got to find that spider.

We've been zipping around the universe, like, through a bunch of radioactive shit. Like, we just went through a fuck factory that had, like, so many chemicals, like, swirling around there. Who knows? Yeah. You can fucking gumpy now. Dude, you don't know what space. It's the rule book, Will. It's that what it says to the rule book. I'm not grandpa either.

This is all imagination. This all pretend. I'm just following the rules. I leveled up and I said I could do this. So I'm doing it. I'm doing it. I got Gumpy powers. I know you want to be a special radiation.

No. I worked really hard on making Rouse fucking thing make sense. Gumpy, like, doesn't have powers. He in stretch, can he? This is who he is. That's who Dale is now You should fucking But you can't talk about

Gumby You talk about like inspector gadget For a single No it's not Gumby also Is Monkey D. Luffy Who Gumpy is based off of Gummy's based off And I can only go 10 feet

Monkey D. Loophie can go much farther than that I'm limited What are you saying monkey what? Monkey D. Luffy And what is that? Turn back now Beth Turn back You don't

You don't want none of this, Beth. Matt is getting the monkey, D. Luffy. He's a little guy from the pirate ship. He's a little guy. That's a little Lego piece to not stretchy at all. Yeah, but in the show,

in the show and the manga and the anime and all the OVAs, he can stretch really far. Okay, cool. He's because he ate devil fruit. Yeah, explain that, Matt. Go ahead. Explain it to Beth.

There's devil fruits in this world. And when you eat a devil fruit, you get a power, a really crazy power. And he ate the gumcum. And these double fruits, but they give you crazy powers and you never know what you're going to get. There's like the gum gum fruit, which is him. He's stretchy.

There's like the slip, slip fruit. And that makes like really slippery and nobody can catch you. Because every fruit have a double name like that. They all got really fun names. But the tradeoff is the tradeoff is because the tradeoff is that. I'm going to give you the stop, stop fruit in a second. Okay. But the tradeoff is, though, is that then you can't swim anymore because the gods of the sea are mad at you.

So like he's a pirate that can't swim. Okay. But he gets stretched. All right, well, that means you can't swim anymore. No, I didn't eat. He's a lifeguard. I didn't eat. Oh, my God.

I didn't eat a devil fruit. You did say, quote, I'm monkey deluffy, so I don't know what to tell you. You dug your own hole that has no water in it because you can't swim. Why am I getting questioned for my abilities? I'm just following the rule book. I just clicked out the rule book. Everybody rolled to see if we saw you. Well, yeah, because that's what happened to me is from the rule book.

And then I think it's fun. And I'm trying to make it slowly develop with the story. Rather than just be like, oh, I'm level four now. I'm going, I'm trying to, I'm working hard. And I wish my co-collaborators here would help me because I'm trying to make narrative sense of this ability that dark matter gave me, which is I am now stretchy. And I'm just abused because I happen to be enjoying one piece right now. It's a fun coincidence that the thing I get to be is also the thing I'm liking right now. I think that's really fun.

And that's the magic of TTRP sometimes. Oh, Christ alive. I'm stretchy. So the spacewalk is pretty uneventful, scrap and wreckage as scor- Hey, look, a sickle. I have a sickle now.

You do? I was trying to narratively explain that. I'll help you. Well, yes. Ask how it happened and not question it. I appreciate that. A piece of wreckage. that scrap is using to pick his teeth

looks exactly like a sickle and he just sort of discards it and you see that it is a perfect size for you to take as a weapon if you so wish. I do, I do. This fucking podcast has never been tighter.

Holy shit. Oh, no. That's a crazy weapon, herb. Yeah. All right. So Matt is, Matt is Luffy from One Piece. You don't know it. You didn't see it.

You didn't see it happen. None of you saw it yet. Dale's definitely a little bit like, that's weird. That's weird what happened to me right now. I didn't need to step as close to the item. I wanted as I thought I wouldn't need to do it. And I got it. Okay.

So the spacewalk is pretty undramatic, except for you getting vesicle. And you safely land on the hull of the ship. your boots magnetized just a little bit so you can walk along the hole. And you are now at the shutter. You can see the two buttons are indeed marked at Mo and Pilot. So which pilot should we push? What if we press both?

What if we press both at the same time? Make sure to say over when you're done with a communication of the radio. Over. Sorry about that. Over. Over. You don't need to just say over, over. Hey, guys, anybody noticed that Dale's kind of far away from everybody, but he's still in the

What do you mean? I hadn't noticed that over. Well, which button should we press then? I say we press, pilot. This is kind of your operation. And again, try to say over when you say over, so we know you're done talking.

Over. Oh, over. It's too late. You don't need to just say over. Only use the radio if you have something to say other than over, but then end what you're saying by saying over, over. Herb, you got pressed down the button. I see you talking.

I see you talking, isn't it? Over. Yeah, it's pushed to talk, Herb. That's why I ended up going to therapy for the first time. Over. Over. Over. I can't stress enough that you guys doing this wrong.

Over. What are you guys doing? I push the pilot button. So the pilot button causes the shutter to open. You've chosen wrongly. That's his famous line from Indiana Jones in the last crusade. It's you've chosen wrongly. Aw.

Bad move, bro. So you press the pilot button, which causes the shutter to open in dead silence. because it's based. It reveals a rack with what looks to be five pieces of headware. The country of Iraq, my God. The headwork kind of looks like a cross between a VR headset and a colander. And this is just out in the vacuum of space? So this is a room?

They're tethered to the inside of the shuttle, so it looks like they can't float away entirely. But it's very clear looking at them that this is something that you cannot put on while you have a space suit. That must be what the atmosphere button is for. I press the atmosphere button. A metal dome begins to close around you as vents on the hull open up and begin to start

spitting something into the vacuum. of space, maybe air. You want to stay there while the dome closes around you? Do you want to run? What do you want to do? I'm going to stay here. Over.

Okay. So the dome closes shut, scrap and ragups. Goodbye. We'll see you guys. When you're done, I guess. We're going to hang out here and make sure I'm doing this. Stop.

Be on coms. We may need you to eat us out. Over. Over. Over. Over. Stay in. Over.

Stay again. Over. But the transmissions ceased to scrap and ragged. Damn, we're in a Faraday cage. It's not Faraday. It's Thursday. nice that's an advantage for a grandpa s joke with the dome closed your spacesuits read oxygen levels nominal for current occupant nice i'm gonna take this helmet off you die immediately it's fucking crazy yeah no totally breathable yeah just quick idea just general idea i think since i've already helped out my grandkid if there's ever a situation like this where like we got to test something like take off a helmet i'll go first oh it's just like i just i've not saying i want to i'm just saying i got the leads to live for it now.

Dale, I don't think we should do it like that. I agree with Dale. Yeah, yeah. I thought you would. I thought you would actually. I appreciate it. I'm just saying, you know, I just, I would be a shame if we took off a helmet and then you died and you have even, it would be a shame to lose you over.

Oh, I mean, it would be a shame to lose you. I'd be really sad. At least you met Zelda before, before I died. That's true. Over. I'm going to put on the helmet over. Oh, the VR helmet. The VR helmet.

I want to do that too. I guess if I, the helmets are here. Yeah. Herb's going to do it. I'll do it. I put the helmet on as well. Put the helmets on. So as you pull the headset on, you feel sharp pricks all across your scalp.

Do you want to keep pulling it on? Do you want to keep pulling it on? Yeah. As you pull the helmet down, the pain increases for a second. And then suddenly, you especially herb, you feel very, very good. You had gotten used to the typical aches and pains that accompany old age. So you immediately notice when they relent. The pain is gone.

And not only that, but you've gone from zero-g environment into a normal one, which is actually not that disorienting. It just feels like you stepped out of the pool. And your brain feels clearer in a way that it has not in a very long time. For this brief moment, you were very much aware that you did not live through the events of Jurassic Park. Whoa. You were also in a very bright white room. You are surrounded by several humanoid entities for others, each in a bright white jumpsuit, each with a face almost entirely obscured by some sort of dark glass, like a face mask. All are roughly the same build, though their genders and skin color seem to differ. Each of you have a needle inserted into your arm, which is connected to a tube

that disappears into the floor. It looks to be pumping a clear liquid into you. This is like the reverse of the last floor I was on. An image of a man in his early 30s appears at the corner of your vision projected onto the glass that also masks your face. The glass is transparent to you, but looking at your companions there, glass masks appear opaque from the outside. And this person says, It's Tim, you control an Android, rescue me from the black box. Do not reply. There were in a white room and there's basically four robots each being controlled by one of us. There are five androids here altogether. So four of you are in one and there's one inactive on the side.

And there was an extra headset on the outside in the shutter that you saw. And on the wall are five backpacks. There's two that say Marshall, two that say science and one that says engineer. Oh, okay. Wow, look at this. Ralph is just checking out his robot hands, I guess. So they look, you know, human. Like I said, their skin colors are different and their genders would be different.

But as far as you can tell, it looks... My gender is different. Oh! So that's what that feels like. I guess I'll take Marshall. Anthony is shuffling some papers around and is handing out. A printout. Well, Ralph, I know that you're a science guy and you're all about the science,

but I feel like I'm thinking pretty clearly, too, about science and the way the universe and whatnot. So I think I would like to play science if you don't mind. You take it away. Do we all feel the effects? Yeah, I think you all feel that nice. sense of a lack of pain from being in what feels like a younger body. I don't think any of you get as acute of a feeling as herb because presumably none of the

rest of you are bipolar. But otherwise, yeah, you feel all the same stuff. I've moved this gracefully in years. I can't tell if that's because of the lack of pain or these hips I got going on now. This is great. And the hips don't lie. They don't lie, as they say. This joy is probably not stretchy though, huh?

The Android is not stretchy, my friend. A little pause on him figuring it out. You know, as long as I'm expanding my horizons here a little bit, I'm going to try something I normally want to try, which is the Marshall role, like Marshall Dillon from Gunsmoke. Hey, that's a good show. For the team comp, I'll be an engineer.

Andy has just handed me a sheet. We all got sheets, and it says mothership character profile. So for this part of the story, you are going to be playing a different RPG system known as Stepmothership. Nice. Knows Mothership, which is a sci-fi horror RPG, made by Tuesday Night Games

and it is of the OSR movement which say Old School Renaissance which is the same is very deadly Yeah of Anthony Birch Fuck off Anthony Burge Russian roulette Yeah that's yeah yes Wait wait this is the same people who are also putting out

Anthony Birch Rush and roulette Not anymore I pretty sure the things out of print Because five people bought it but yes that is the same publisher Have you reached out and been like hey No It's only anecdotal evidence but out of the two games I've played Both are pretty good Great I'm glad

So it's a fucking OSR game, which means that it's very, very deadly. You are going to do a little bit less rolling than you're used to, and things are going to be a lot more based around cool ideas you have rather than like abilities that are on your character sheet. One of the big things about mothership is it encourages you not to actually look at your sheet too much until I tell you to. It's a relatively simple system that we don't need to talk about until you actually have to roll for something,

but just know that you are going to get more stressed as a character and you can quite possibly die. You're also going to notice on the bottom left hand of your character sheet, you each have a randomized amount of equipment. And again, I'll explain what all that stuff means a little bit later. And if we die in the game, we die in real life. That raises a good question. Are there any OSHA regulations taped to the wall of this room that might explain the risks therein of operating a robot body? You do see a sign on the room that says MP storage, no networked tech allowed within.

No networked tech allowed within. I want my droid to pinch itself. Okay. Does Dale feel anything? You feel it through the Android, but you don't feel like it's having an effect on your physical body. It's not a die-in-the-game, die in real life. Okay, yeah, I think of this concern, we're okay.

Okay. I just pinch myself. Try it. It's a weird feeling. It's like, you feel it, but you don't. How much can we, and I slap, you know, not like a slap across his face, but I give him a big flak on the back. Do I feel anything?

Yeah. It hurts, but not Dale hurt. No, no. It hurts enough that you're like, you wouldn't be psyched if Freddie kept doing it. But, like, it was, like, flopping around like a fish, like, you know, when he gets shot by the fucking. You also notice that when you guys are... That was so sick.

That when you guys are talking, it's not coming through radio. It's just voices with like, you know, vocal cords and stuff. Yeah, you can't if you want to. Your grandson, Timothy, said he, we need to rescue him from the black box. So presumably we should explore the ship

and find the black box and rescue your grandson. Sounds like he's in a lot of trouble. So there are three doors leading out of this room, one of which says pods, one of which says cafeteria slash printing, and one of which says black box. box room. There's one to the west, one to the east, and one to the south. We have to go to black box room, right? Yeah, it sounds like the right thing to do, but I'll leave

it up to Ashley. I'm sorry, Ashley, we shouldn't be talking over you. I'm drawing the map. Caveteria printing pods and then black box room. Uh-huh. I think we should look at the pods. We'll leave black box room for later. All right. Because you're saying there's a deadly system. So no fucking around, right? We weren't planning on it. Are we inherently fucking around by not going to the black box immediately? That's a good point. Yeah. Oh, wow. Earb. Smart. Herb is really.

You're on top of it. That's a really loosely held perspective from Freddie on that one. Herb, good idea. Thanks. Let's try and open the black box room. You leave the white room and you head into a hallway that is plunged into darkness. The first thing that you notice, boy, it fucking smells. It smells bad here.

Something seems sour. Something feels off. Your feet stick to the ground a little bit when you move and the lights are flickering on and off because that's scary. You follow the signs that say black box room and you come to a door. You try it. It's locked, and a small green monitor, which is embedded in the wall next to that door, says require admin permissions. We should have figured it wouldn't make it that easy. Let's turn around and get back to the pods.

Real quick, though, I knock on the door. Young man, Timothy, are you in there? Yeah. Oh, we're here with your grandfather. Okay, great, great. Okay, God. You didn't use your comms. Did you?

You didn't message me back on comms? No, of course you didn't. I didn't. Okay, good, good, good. Do not get on to comms. I can't talk for very long. Now, to what extent do I know, is this real or is this like a space illusion?

No way to tell unless you want to try to roll intellect. This is going to be like Koff Kthewu and that you're going to roll 2D10 and you're trying to get under your stat. 1D100, Anthony. Please roll 1D100 or 2D10 for the layman. Got it. Got it. Also, make sure to check on the right side

of your character page, there are skills. If you have a dot in any of those skills that you feel might be relevant to what you are working on, then that will basically make your role better. 89, so no, no way of telling. Plus, I haven't seen this guy in 20 fucking years. Right. Tim, it's your, it's your cramps.

Silence. All right, something's weird. I don't like it. Let's get out here. I don't like this. Okay, okay. Let's get back to the pods. Heads on a swivel.

You head back through the white room, and you head through another hallway, equally spooky, equally stinky, equally sticky. Fuck. My God. And you move into a room that looks almost like a hotel lobby, except the walls are covered in what looked to be almost like capsule beds. The sign says pods, you can presume that these are the pods of which the signs have said. The titular pods.

You can taste the metal in the air before you even feel the slick blood underneath your feet. You initially think that this room is painted an alarming reddish-brown color until you realize that the walls and the floor have been haphazardly coated with an obscene amount of blood. The next taste to hit your tongue is offensive, if not unfamiliar. Voided bowels and bladders. you've read or heard that people empty themselves out at the moment of death, but it's just, it's a much, much stronger spell than you expect it, especially the urine. All these skate pods are intact, though at first glance, you can- The escape pods are intact?

Yes. You can see looking at the signs that they are in the skate pods. They have visual TSA. Here's how you put on your life jacket. Can I look inside one of the skate pods? Do they have like a window? I wouldn't. You can see that some have been broken into and there's nothing inside other than blood.

And you can see that others are totally sealed shut and nobody's gotten into the minute. You do not see that. that any of them have been launched. And no bodies in this room. Well, I think we're ankle-deep in the bodies of the previous occupants of the spaceship, is my guess. All of the escape pods are intact. The people who litter the sticky ground around you are not.

They are all in spacesuits and large chunks of their bodies are missing. So this is a horror show. You can also see that one of the escape pod tubes, it doesn't make sense the way you look at it. It looks like it clipped into the wall. Like, it's just in the wall of the room with no entry or exit or cracks in the wall or anything like that. So like weird geometry stuff is happening. Yeah. Oh, it's like the TNG episode where it falls on the floor.

I've seen this before. Early builds of Star Citizen had clipping issues. We must tread carefully because if there's geometry clipping issues here, we might get teleported and telephragged at any moment. Everyone, stick close to each other. But not too close. Oh, I don't want to clip into you. They'll want clip into each other.

On the wall, you see a monitor. The panel it's connected to having been ripped open and its wires futhed with somehow. The monitor now shows a grainy night vision feed of somewhere on the ship that cycles every few seconds to a different camera view. Okay, so I want to see if I can interpret what the sign on the wall means because I have a specialty in mathematics and art. So math is a plus 10 bonus. So you're going to take your intellect speed and add 10 to it.

53. Roll a D100 and try to get under a 53. 56. Bummer. You can't really tell specifically what they are, but you have the feeling that this is probably nonverbal instructions for how to get in and escape in an escape pod. I want to approach the monitor. Okay.

I'm going to watch it for a little bit. I'm trying to see if I see anyone skulking around. What kind of mental map can I form of the broader ship by watching the feed for, let's say, five minutes. Oh, five minutes. That's good. Five minutes of watching the ship, you see that a lot of these cameras have been taken out, so it's just static. You see a camera that seems to be pointing at a large room with a bunch of tables at it and plates on the tables and things like that. Cafeteria.

And you also see the. Confidence is so good. I know what I know. I see one. You also see a camera that seems to be aimed towards the hallway. You can see sort of through the doorway leading into this room that there are a bunch of beds in there. So it looks like you're basically looking at the hallway that leads to the dorm. Ralph, I don't like being ankle deep in dudes.

After five minutes of waiting, you think you don't see anything initially. But right before it switches from the cafeteria view. It's on the corner of the screen, and it looks kind of like the size of a payphone, but it's got a funnel at the top and some buttons on it that you can't quite make out with the greeniness. You assume it's just, you know, stapled with the wall or not moving or whatever. But then it moves. It moves off screen. And by the time you understand what you saw, it's already moved on to another security camera.

Something moved. Ralph, what was that? What was that, Ralph? It's something that could be, oh, my goodness. It just, it looked like a piece of equipment, basically. Yes. Is there a view of us, a camera of us? Well, I saw a hallway looking in towards the room that we're in right now, but I didn't see us.

But I want to speculate a conjecture. Please. In my research of the insect world. Like my cool characters. Insects. Insects. You learn about cool characters like Sticky Stickerson, the main character that I'm going to introduce in the final novel. Who's a stick bug?

And his whole thing is that he turns into a stick and then predators pass him right by, right? So what if there is some sort of space alien that can turn into the illusion. illusion of space bric-a-brac. You know, your consoles, your cabinets, your computers. But it's not really that thing. It's really a horrible monster. Dale steps away from the cabinet he was standing next to. He's like, it could be a monster.

It could be anything. But wait, two can play that game. Let's cover ourselves in blood so that if it comes near us, we can get on the floor and look like they've already killed us. That's a surprisingly good idea. I thought it was gross, but it's not us. We're a droids. Oh, yeah.

So yeah, that's great. I'm going to strip off because you said there's like severed chunks of spacesuits and stuff like that. Everybody, grab a spacesuit and start disguising yourself. Get nasty, boys. I have a good idea. Roll really quickly. What the fuck?

How chilling. To hear that from your DM? What a chilling phrase. It's like when you're walking through a corridor on a video game and then loading screen. You hear splashing. You hear splashing rhythmically that seems to be getting closer coming from the direction of, there are three paths out of this room. One of them says meat doll storage.

and that's the one you came from. One of them says conference room and one of them says GD. I want to, yeah, drop the floor and move through the viscer. Kind of like one of those bottom feeding fish like in the sand. I just like, yeah, same.

Yeah, I'm trying to hide amongst the strewn corpses. I think from now on we just move on the ground like this. We just slither around in any moment we can freeze and we look like a dead body. Yeah. This is my idea. It's mostly take off of your idea

or you came up with a good idea of getting like this. I'm just saying maybe we move like a dead body. I think, yeah, move like a dead body, which is if dead body's moved. Moved, yeah, all right, yeah. So you hear the sound of the splashing getting closer and louder. Stop. I mean, we stop. I stop, okay.

We all stopped moving. You're so scared. You're like, stop. Stop. Stop. By the way, you can do that when you watch a movie on DVD. Nice. You have a little button that can stop it at any time.

The splashing gets closer, and then you hear a door open automatically. You can tell from the way that you walk through the, doors that they are motion activated. So you hear a door open and the splashing is now in the same hallway that leads to the escape pod room that you are in. But now in our room, okay. It seems to be coming from the tunnel that says conference room and it's getting closer. What do you want to do?

Are there any, you said like cabinet and stuff, is there anything I could go under? Yeah. Tables, cabinets. There's a couch. There are a couple of couches actually. Couch? Yeah, because it's like you might want to have to wait in line to get into a skate pod. You might as well be comfortable.

When they have those little chairs by the valet. They never talk about in an escape pod sequence. You never are like, what if there's a lot of people and there's a line? Where are you going to sit? I'm going to try to play dead. So again, like I've put spacesuit stuff over my robot body and I'm lying in the gore. And I just want to get a good look at this thing. Okay, that was going to be my question.

Who's going to be looking in the direction of where that noise is coming from? This seems like a weirdly specific thing for Anthony to ask. So I do want everyone to know that this probably is going to have some mechanic. This is a bomb is about to go off in our face. I've already bumbled into saying that I was looking at it, but it's not too late for you guys to save yourself. I'm saying I'm looking to. I think I'm looking to,

but I'm thinking about what G.D. could stand for. Okay, let me ask this. The escape pods, is there like a button that you can hit? Yeah. And the moment that the button hits, like just... Yeah. And some of the escape pods were broken into already?

Yes. Ooh, actually, Dale wants to dive into one of those. Okay. Because, like, you know, if you're looking for a dead, like, nobody's going to be hiding and, like, everybody's already dead in there. Yes, this is a pre-killed area. Yeah.

Then I can, like, peek my head out. Same. I'm in the one above you. Nice. Guys. What if the thing? Gamer stack. GER stack. There are a bunch of dead bodies in here.

What are the thing that's coming? GD stands for a grave digger and it's going to come put us in a... Yeah, join us in the... I just don't think you're going to fit a monster truck in here. Drive in here, Herb. Okay, okay, okay. I'm going to dive in. So three of us are an escape pod.

Rouse sees you guys all do that as a shit. I should have done that instead of lying on the floor. Does he have time? If you want to. No, I've made my bed. I'm lying as bed. Okay. You...

see a mass that looks Vick Oh, oh, Manchester, the lights out. How are you going

to read your character sheets? No, we can use our phones. We can use our phones for lights. Turn it off. Oh,

it's so spooky. I can't believe we never did this on Fitchieville. I'm so fucking pissed. You are going to be looking in the direction when something appears.

It doesn't make immediate sense to your brain because it looks like it's moving as both liquid and solid. Solid. You see, You see what looks to be a lot of viscera attached to a body that is not humanoid,

but it is roughly the size of a human, except for the fact that it is covered in shit and piss and blood. And that thing you saw, that device is on its back. It almost looks like a fucking proton pack from Ghostbusters, essentially. Almost like a turtle? Yeah, kind of, almost like a turtle. Everybody who's looking, please give me a fear save. 46 out of for a fear of 29

I fail. Oh, 29. I fail as well. Okay. I rolled 11. My fear is 50, so I passed. I rolled 77 and my fear is 35. As an author, I have my own nightmare factory.

Yeah. Everybody except for Ralph who understands the dark secrets that lie within the bounds of the imagination. A twisted mind of Ralph Esterea. You feel yourselves get really fucking stressed out by this thing that you've seen as its foot clamps down on the ground. Every single time it's foot lands, a little. gush of liquid comes out and the smell of piss gets more and more strong. Ralph's just like, ah, piss monster. Ah, yes.

Ah, yes. So all of you other than Ralph are going to gain a stress. You have a minimum stress and then it's going to increase. Oh, our minimum increases. Yes, yes. No matter what your minimum stress is going to be two, now you have three. And now we are going to do panic checks. So each of you are going to roll a D20 and your goal here is for the D20 to be higher than your current

stress level, which is three. Okay, that's good. Eight, I'm okay. You're okay. For now. Seven, I'm okay. For now. I got four.

Whoa. Okay. So you managed to keep it together enough. For now. For now. For now. To stop from making any noise or freaking out. And soon this creature, it walks in the other direction, opposite the one it came from.

So it's going back into the room that you were in. It's going towards meat doll storage. And when its feet hit the ground, you hear a plank of metal and then the splash of this liquid. and then a plank of metal in the splash of this liquid. So the thing is going to move until it bumps into one of these corpses on the ground, and then it's going to grab it by the arm, let's say it's the top torso of a person, and it's just going to sort of drag it behind itself as it moves into the Meat Doll storm. Take your attention and look at the cameras now.

Oh, yeah, I look at the cameras to see if I can wait for the Meat Doll camera to show up. You see the creature walk a little bit into the hallway, and then it stops seemingly arbitrarily and raises the half corpse, that's in its hand and sort of begins to move it over its shoulder towards the machine on its back. And another hand comes out, grabs the corpse to stabilize it, and then it basically shoves the arm of this corpse into the top funnel of this device that's on its back.

And you hear, the machine starts to vibrate, and it just keeps feeding in this corpse like it's fucking wood shipper, just piece by piece, pushing it as hard as it can. You can hear the bones break in real life from where you are, not even through the body, the fucking camera because the bone break is so loud. You can see, keep doing that for actually a minute or so, squeezing the remains of this body

into this thing. And then the little shoot on the bottom of that machine that's on its back just seems to spill out. It's black ones you can't tell, but it just seems to spill out a lot of this colorless liquid. I think pretending to be a dead body's a bad idea. Yeah. Good to know. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Let's clean up. Okay. Can we move away from that thing? Let's go. Let's go the way that it came. Yeah.

There you go. Okay. Towards the conference room, I believe. Yes, you do. You enter the conference room, and you see diagrams and equations all over what look to be like digital whiteboards. You see chairs. You see a lot of chip bags and empty wrappers. I investigate the chip bags.

Yeah, what kind of flavors we talk about? Brand. Can I need the brand? So the brand is... Space. Make it funny in space. Thank you. Thank you.

That's exactly what it is. Space. Space. Space. It's S-B-A-Y. Yes. Yes. The flavor is...

Cruel rant. Cruel ranch. This is clearly a room in which a lot of brainstorming has happened. Literally. It's got a real writer's room vibe in here. Corpse wise, there is one corpse in here, and it seems to be headless,

and it seems to be holding a data pad in its hands. Admin. I go over to the data pad. You see on the data pad what looks to be two apps you can use. You can either activate something called operating instructions, or you can use something that says,

Hinge. Hinge, yeah. Ooh, I'm going to tap chat. This is the data that you find when you press chat. It is in our Discord. Ralph, what's it say? Oh, here we go. We have a lot of time codes going from 901-09 to 90301. The course of two minutes.

And it seems to be a conversation between T. Brogius and Stewart. I'll read the part of T. Brogius. And if one of you wants to take the part of Stewart, then we can go. through this, okay? Who wants to be Stewart? Oh, I'll be, I'll be Stewart. You got it, okay. I'll read the action line.

Stewart with a D. 0901.09. T. Broseus. Okay, I don't know that we need to read them every time. Stewart Report. 0901-1-0. T. Broseus. P1 override ship report.

You're right, I shouldn't do it all. Steward contact emergency services. On my way. I thought I'd add like kind of an accent. I like the accent. Yeah, humor helps with the nerves. WTF does that mean? It means I'm on my way.

We will get through this. I mean literally what? EMS, like EMS is on its way like you called them? We don't need emergency services. Remember what the administrator said. Stewart open comms. Stuart P1 open comms. Stewart, P1, open comms.

So Stewart's probably dead. Stewart might be leaving him on red. P1 override. Ship report. P1. What's this? P1. Stewart P1 open comms. So P1 also

seems to mean something. He uses the phrase P1 when he's trying to give something orders. What was the other thing on the dataped? Operation instructions. I think Stewart is a robot. I press the operation instructions button. There it is. More information. Operation instructions. Drive activation

droid. The drive activation droid, dad for short, is a hex diamond-plated robot designed to do only one thing. Activate the gravity drive, G.D. by the way, GD. Gravity Drive. And initiate translation.

Well, it wouldn't say like that. Translation. Human interaction will not be necessary. So long as dad is in its charging station when the translation order is given, the steward will take control and perform all necessary operations without risk of compaction and with a 0.001% margin of error. Well, it seems like there's a pretty big compaction on the edge of the ship and there's a moment. It seems like that error might happen. Remote human control is possible through steward AI act.

You were right. Herb. Steward's an AI. He's a robot. Yeah. It looks like somebody's hacked steward. Beneath all that text, you see a diagram that appears to be of a robot that very vaguely kind of looks like the shit and piss and blood-covered thing that you saw.

It's mostly gobbledygook, but you can at least see a part that says manual shutdown and has an arrow pointing to a little button under its chin. Now, is it a button that you need to get like a paperclip? No, no. It's something that's easier to tap. Oh, dear. So it appears that whatever this steward robot is might be the thing that was sculpting. walking around, eating bodies and whatnot.

It seems we might be in a... I think that's the dead. I think the drive activation droid has gone awry. Oh, this technology stuff gives me a headache. You also see, after you finish looking at this pad, maybe look at a little bit more at the diagrams and the drawings on the wall, you see one that appears to be the closest thing to legible, or at least comprehensible that exists on the whiteboards.

But it is in chicken scratch because somebody was brainstorming on this whiteboard, which is why it looks like I made it poorly an MS paint. Nightcrawler. There's a lot of bampf. Bamph. Well, that's the noise that my nightcrawler makes. Did you know the X-Men?

Tim loved the X-Men. Well, he probably drew this. Who else would know who night crawler was? Nightcrawler was the Christian member of the team. Wait, really? Yeah. He's always talking about Jesus and stuff like that. It's really interesting that that's the way he would define nightcrawler.

If there's one thing you know about great-cruism. He knew about Nightcrawler. And Professor X, Wolverine, Cyclops. I think Cyclops might be. Lutheran. I had to check on that though. But Nightcrawler was like a straight up Catholic. A German Catholic. He was a papist, as they used to say. I don't know if that's okay to say papist anymore. He's also a papist. He's also blue. He's a tail. He would go Banff. And I see the word Banff written here. So I'm going to, I'm going to do my best to try to describe what I think is going on.

It was this mean, Ralph. All right. Let me see here. Okay. So there's a picture of the spark. There seems to be four panels in a sort of comic book sequence. This first panel, there's a spaceship, that's us, and something called a gravity drive. And this is all happening in normy density, which I assume is a Gen Z kind of term for normal. And there's a power button. This goes to a second panel wherein we see the same ship, Banffing, and we seem to turn into a quantum particle with a density of infinity plus one. And this panel is called quantum compaction.

So it seems like in panel two, we sort of shrink down to a quantum particle that's heavier than the infinite density of the spark. Then comes quantum translation where we go from being a quantum particle outside of the spark to one inside of the spark. Okay, that makes sense. And then you have restoration wherein after presumably casting your wish upon the spark,

the ship then regains its normal size and normal space through a reversal of the quantum process. It's like when Ant-Man goes up to the butt. I'm not familiar with that one. It's a theoretical ant-man move is to get real small, go inside something. You're saying that the character, Ant-Man, from, I assume one of the comics

goes so small that he goes into someone's asshole or sphincter their weapon and then expands which would of course kill the person that he expanded. But this is, you know, this sort of thing. Sure. Here's what I think is happening. I think their plan was to use some sort of space gizmo called a gravity

drive to shrink this ship down to the size of a little teeny tiny quantum particle impregnate, so to speak, the spark, do whatever it is you do in the spark, and then BAMF, it's like in that X-Men movie when Nightcrawler, I assume, because

the Pope told him to, decides to go into the White House to kill the president. Well, because the Pope wouldn't like a White House, because the Pope lives in the White House. This is faster than light travel, then. It is. If it could work, who knows if they've managed to, but again, this seems like dangerous.

People are treading into spooky stuff here. But I think that's more or less the gist of it. So there are three exits out of this room. There's the way you came, back to the escape pods. There is a way that says cafeteria slash printing. And then there's another way that says admin.

The door that said gravity drive. We saw that in the room for the parts. Yeah, there was a room that said GD. So that's your gravity drive room. We're going to have to go there at some point, I presume. But right now, I remember, fucking Anthony's got so locked in, guys. Fucking drawn maps over here.

I propose we go to this admin room. We need some admin password to be able get into the black box in order to save your grandson. And we probably need to find a way to kill this monster. Yes.

And to do that, it's got a button on its chest that says emergency shutdowns. Or we feed them something. Or does that shut down the monster? Or we just get my grandkiddo here and we get out of here. And then we let someone else deal with this crazy space blood monster, piss monster. That's true. It's just, it seems kind of. We don't have to solve the problem to solve the problem.

Oh, yeah. This might be easier to do all the stuff we need to do with the monster. was gone. Yeah. That's true. That's true. And the chin thing, it does seem relatively straightforward. Like, what if we could get the monster to go into an escape pod?

But it's escape. Actually, it's death. Or maybe there's some manner of explosive on the ship. Wait a minute. I've got an idea. Go for it. Sorry. The first idea that I had about looking like a dead body, obviously that wouldn't turn out great

because the thing gets the dead bodies and puts them in the woodchipper. but if you still had your arms, you could bop him on the chin before he puts you in the wood chipper. And even if we sacrifice ourselves as one person and the rest of us can keep going. Well, then, these aren't our real bodies. They were robots.

So in theory, if he shoves one of us into his little fainty pack on his back, we'll have time while we're getting digested to press the button on his chin. And aren't there two extra... And there's an extra robot. And Stewart was the ship's AI. So here's what happens.

This is, I think, how this was all supposed to work. These guys were going to get into the spark by using this gravity drive to shrink themselves down. In order to have that not kill you, you got to be in the black box, where Timothy is. And then so the idea is all of your human crew going to the black box, and then the AI takes this dad robot and sticks him in when he's in the little chair,

and then he fucking would press the button to shrink the thing down and do the thing. I think you're right. Something went wrong, though. But something went wrong, but what? To your point, Ashley, do we want to do any of this stuff on this comic book you guys are looking at? Or are we just getting your grandkid and leaving? Or do we want to go to the Spark too?

Because your plan, that would be good. If we just get Timmy, right, we just go back and blow up the ship. But if we want to go to the Spark, then we should probably figure out how to... We could use the ship to go to the Spark. More than that, if we control the Spark, we could end the war. Or we could do whatever we want. We could undo everything that's happened. These things are great theoretical things.

However, I will note that the theory has fallen apart in a fairly early part of the execution. Well, we don't know if they were doing anything. All I know is we're sitting here on a ship full of blood and guts. So the rest of the theory here may be a little bit suspect. I'm not saying that Timothy is not a smart kid. He's a real bright kid. I'm just saying maybe some of his assumptions are wrong, given that, well, we're standing in a ship full of blood and viscera.

Like your favorite video game Star Citizen, this ship was promising a lot of big things. You shut your goddamn mouth. You don't know a fucking thing about Star Citizen. It was promising a lot of big things, but look at the human cost. Look at the lives ruined by Star Citizen. Oh, I figured what P1 means. What is P1? Stewart.

Priority One. Open comps. He's talking to doing AI. But also, I mean, I hear you, Ashley, but like sometimes the first time you do something, it doesn't go great. like, you know, just because Apollo 1 blows up doesn't mean you don't do that next time. That's true. But this could be a challenger situation

where then later on, due to systemic... Oh yeah, Big Bird is also on here. Big Bird is also here. Big Bird is also here. Sorry. No, Dale's right. Because, I mean, I remember that the first time

I was with my dear cookie in that way, let's just say, it wasn't, you know... Was you mean sexually? You're on the challenger with cookie? No, we were on the... Well, there's a word that sounds like cookie. That's what we were doing.

But the first time we did it... Fooky. We didn't go. I just didn't go so well. Everybody quiet. I want to hear about Ralph's first time having sex with his wife that he just brought up right now.

I was very nervous. And, you know, it being our wedding night and all that, we, you know, there was a lot of expectation. Oh, Ralph. And, you know, the equipment worked, but let's just say the duration of the equipment's performance was sub-satisfactory.

Shit. That you came from. Oh, God. And that familiar stomp splash. Oh, shit. He appears to be getting close. Here's the thing. Here's the thing, everyone.

We know that the cafeteria links back up to that central hub hallway that we were in originally. We could run this in a loop, but we don't know if there's no way out of admin. So we should go to cafeteria. But we got to get into admin. We've got to open the door. We could do a lap and then come around. Have you ever played the video game Resident Evil 2? This is a Mr. X situation.

You know what you? You run this off. This is your grandkid. You're following whatever you want to do. This is a classic Mr. X situation where we can kite. I think we can. Professor X. Right.

Yes, professor. Sure. Let's go to the cafeteria. He was Jewish, I believe. Yeah. How did he work together with the Catholic guy? What a multi-national,

multi-faith organization, the X-Men was. I heard it was an allegory for, you know, just acceptance of loving each other, you know. I'm just imagining now referring to all the X-Men by the Magneto. By religion. By religion. Yeah. Which was Magneto?

Oh, he's the Jewish one. Which ones were the Jewish ones? And which ones were... Yeah, you're right. It was an allegory for... The Methodist. It was an allegory for Jews. and Catholics, if I remember correctly.

That's what the X-Men was. We go to the cafeteria. You go to the cafeteria. The door out of this conference room opens. Oh, shit, the cafeteria had that weird thing that you saw moving. That's what was him. That's the same thing.

This is one big thing. So the door to the hallway that leads to the cafeteria opens, and then you hear for just a second, the Stomp Splash, stop. And then you continue through on the way to the cafeteria, I'm assuming. Oh, no.

Stomp splash. I'll stop splash knows we're here. You end up. Enter the cafeteria and you see the kitchen section just seems to be like a wall and some machines that are hooked up to something that is in the floor or in the walls. There are wires going to a hole where there should be something. There's like a payphone sized rectangular hole that is roughly the size of that machine that you saw on its back that's missing from the wall in the kitchen. Some sort of food motron. There's a menu next to that hole that says approved meals.

and then it has protein, veg, carbohydrates, and sweets. Each of them has a three letter-dash-three number code associated with it. I'll just go ahead and put it in chat just in case. This is so crunchy. We're getting food codes in here now. But more importantly than that, the first thing certainly that Ashley notices is that in addition to the tables and the chairs, there is an obnoxiously large poster on the wall that,

unfortunately, is very familiar to you. It's an grainy image blown up of you eating shit at the game competition when you were younger. And beneath it is a very large title that says, in all caps, learn from his mistakes. Oh. Hey, Timmy must have been here. And in terms of ways out of this room, there is one that heads to the gym slash showers. There is one that heads to the dorm slash rec room. And there's one that heads back to meat doll storage.

And there is one that heads back to the conference room that you're. Okay. So this is like a central hub. This is pretty much the HUD. If we could fix this and get rid of this guy, this would be a good ship for us. Just saying. Got some big showers and everything.

How would we get to smell out, man? The Carfax on this ship are crazy. So learn from his mistakes. I don't know what that could possibly mean. Well, let's think about it. You were trying to get from one place to another and you went too fast and you tripped. And then it went really bad for you. What are all your mistakes?

Yeah, what other mistakes you made? What other mistakes have you made in your life? That wasn't a mistake. What's the worst thing you ever done? That wasn't a mistake. I just think that old Gordon Kwan might have tied my shoes. So the mistake was not paying attention to my shoelaces. Okay, that could be one.

Any other mistakes, especially ones that Timmy would know about. Yeah. Nope. Okay. None? I've since motive. How do I fucking... Mothership explicitly says that player on player stuff

or anything revolving around charm, you just do. There's no rolling, you just... Okay, no. Try to see if he can figure out by the way he's talking. No? Are you sure? Look at the picture. So the pictures of him tripping?

It is specifically a screen cap of the broadcast the moment that he tripped. I mean, I guess he's just saying, don't trip. It looks like something he probably got from like YouTube or whatever. You know, like wet floor or whatever. Just don't trip. Yeah, yeah. He's just saying, look, look, look, look.

This is a cafeteria. There's a lot of egress and ingress. Everyone, he's just saying watch your step, you know? seem pretty big poster to just say watch your stuff. Sure. Well, clearly. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay. Well, clearly it's a problem. All right. It's a problem here. It's clumsy. Not to interrupt that, but I wonder if the more important thing here is if that dad has this thing on his back, the machine, did it combine with it? You know, is it the approved meals? It suddenly became like somebody programmed it to only eat humans and maybe we could change it to sweets. PEP, P. P.E. 714. Like, if we.

If we could reprogram it, would the robots start going around and grabbing sweets instead? So, yes, you're right, because here's what I think. But we have to be careful because we're also sweet. You know, you're a big old sack of sugar. It strikes me that probably it's using this thing as a sort of our sats power source. All the energy that you get from food, it's translating some out of power. It's robot body. And then it's eating people.

But yes, I think to your point, sweets are bad for you. Carbs are bad for you. Is everything bad for you? I mean, it seems like it these days, but, you know, he might have it set to vegetables or something like that. Is there a food pyramid? Is there a food pyramid on the wall? No. Oh, they don't know what a balanced diet looks like. It seems like the way to program these in would be from the admin room. That's a good idea.

I feel like it would be something you punch on the machine. Like, if assuming this thing was in there and you wanted, you know, a candy bar, you'd press PEP and then it would spit out a candy bar when you fed it something, right? Oh, yeah. I don't know exactly how this works. You don't know how it works. You could be right, Ralph. I think we should input. Herb.

You could be right, Herb. I'm Ashley. I was talking Herb. I think we take what we have here. We input it into our heads. We keep it in the back of our minds. But I didn't like the way that thing paused. Yeah, what was going on with that?

Is there anything else in here? Other than the exits to the other rooms now. Let's each remember a number. There's four of them, right? Protein, veg, carbohydrate, sweets. I'll remember sweets. Sorry you do. PEP 714.

I look at protein. AGC. 880. Vege. A.J.B. 623. Cops. Oh, that one rhymes.

ECA 781. Oh, you know what, though? Herb, you're in the admin room. This is approved codes. They're made unapproved codes. There might be some secret code that'll set it to like poison or something like that. And then we can really fix this thing's wagon. Well, I don't know.

Poison would be a good idea. Clearly somebody's already fucked with it. This is all. It's all theory. It's all theory. Let's go to the admin room. Well, we're not there. We were two rooms away.

Should we go to the gym walkers then? Maybe there's a cool gun in there. I get the sense that this thing is on our tail, aware of our presence here on the ship. So we could trick it maybe. Maybe they'll have to use this move right now. But we hit a door and then we hide in the room. I like it.

Then it thinks it went through the door. When it picked up the bodies, where did it bring it again? To the thing on its back. Yeah, it was just wandering around sort of feeding itself. What if? This is a good movie. Everybody knows Jaws. Like, we got an extra body.

If we find something explosive. I like this. Couldn't like I hold onto it and then it tries to feed itself. All good theory. And a bomb. It could work. All right. I'll look around for a bomb.

In a cafeteria, you don't find one. Dang. Are there cleaning agents in the cafeteria? Is it like a cupboard with stuff? Yeah. Let's say, yeah. Would you say, because my robot has military training, do you think fashioning, improvisation?

explosives out on the field of battle would count as a military training bonus. Let me Google, can you make a bomb out of household items? Oh, careful, Anthony. Just go ahead and send that to the NSA. Go ahead and just do that on the corporate internet, huh? Yeah.

Just right out into the open, right over the clear net, huh? Okay, so it looks like you can do fucked up chemical things, but it doesn't look like a big bottom. That said, there is stuff in here that if you found something else to combine it with, I'll say that you can give it a shot to make a bomb.

All right, well, then I'm going to just grab whatever reliable looking chemical. There's an aerosol can of bleach. Okay, so aerosol bleach. Yeah, that's what they have in the future. That's so dangerous. Yeah. Arisolized bleach. Wow. You're there.

Yeah, sorry. I'm thinking about aerosolized bleach. You cough when you think. Do you hard? You all jump, I assume. When you hear from the conference room hallway that you came from, the twist of metal really, really like. Uh-oh. You hear metal hitting metal,

You hear screeching, you hear scraping. You think you hear the sound of something collapse. And then you hear the splash dump heading away. Wait, I want to peek around the corner and see what maybe was broke or whatever. Oh, no. So I look down the hall. Because it's walking away from us, you said. It is walking away from you.

It was making noise in the conference room, which is on the way back to the admin room, which we want to go to anyway, for various reasons, Dow. Oh, there you go. I think he might have fucked up the way back. That's exactly what he is. Oh, damn it. When you look into the hallway, you see that big strong arms, presumably. grab the fucking roof and just wrenched it downward

and there was jagged metal where there used to be an easy pathway. You could try to get through it. It would be difficult. You'd have to roll for it and stuff. But to get from here to the conference room directly without getting hurt would either require a good role

or you'd have to take the long way around. We still have a gym and the dorm rec room. Okay, we're trying to get to the admin, right? Yeah, but right now he's blocking off paths to the admin. I've made a mental map and a real map of what's going on here. This means that it could circle around from the meatball room, meat doll room direction.

Meatball room. And there's no way out. We're kind of in a little bit of a dead end corner. We should check the rooms around us in case there's other ways around. Quick peek. You lead the way. Let's take a quick peek in the dorm rec room. Okay.

So the dorm rec room you can see connects to the cafeteria and to the showers. And you can see that there are a bunch of capsule bunks here. You can see that they are arranged alphabetically. and they're roughly 30, three per stack, so it wouldn't take long to examine them all, you know, if you wanted to. Don't have time. Just want to take a look at what the layout of this place looks like. Okay, so as far as you can tell, this is effectively a dead end, yes.

And there's showers into another room. Does the showers turn on? Yeah, they do. Are the showers connected to the gym? Yes. Imagine the gym and the showers is one room. Ah, okay. Guys, if there's one thing robots and electronics don't like, it's water.

What if we just wait? It is covered in viscera. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's true. That's true. The viscer is pretty wet. And then a quick peek in the gym. It looks pretty normal except for the fact that one of the shower heads seems to have been wrenched from the wall and it sits on the floor. Oh, damn. Somebody was jerking off. There's porcelain dust on it. Its head is bent. There are cracks in the porcelain near the water drainage vent in the center of the shower.

Almost as if somebody was trying to pry it up with that showerhead. And there are more corpses in here. There's no blood because presumably it would have, you know, the water drainage vent. Oh, I'm a big strong robot, right? You can give it a try. I want to try to pry it up. Yeah. Let's see if we can get in there. Somebody else had an idea.

Might be a bad idea. Maybe they loosen the lid for us. Go ahead and give me a strength check. You're going to roll a D-100 and try to get under your strength. Unless there is a skill that seems like it would help you, in which case you add. I would say athletics would count. I have it. I just roll it.

Oh, I got five, though. You got five. Yeah. My strength is 37. You grab onto the water grate and you wrench back as hard as you can. And with a great deal of difficulty. like a lot. You feel pain all up and down your lower back

as you're doing this. Even as a robot, so you know it hurt. You can see the knuckles turning white with effort. You managed to wrench the grate up a little bit and kind of loosen it. But as that happens, an insanely loud scraping noise comes from the grate

that echoes through the porcelain of the shower room that you're in. Full of a took. So we've got a little bit pride open. You got it a little bit pride open. It would take one more good check to wrench it all the way. I did a good check.

You did? Yeah. Okay, great. All right, yeah, I got a 32 of my strength is 41. Oh, fantastic. Okay, so... Two good checks, baby. It manages to totally open.

You now have easy access to the roughly man-sized, uh, water tubes that lead to and from. Water tubes. Tubs. Vents are so last year. Now it's all about water tubes. A lot of time in vents and water tubes. Now we have a water tube that presumably goes through.

Oh, so this is great. This is another way around the ship. We don't know where it goes yet, but this is good. I'm going in. Be very quiet because this thing seems to be more like punch through walls and stuff. The last thing we want is to be stuck in a little water tube and it hears us and it just punches straight down. I don't know if going into the water tube is exactly the smartest thing. I just.

Boys. A distant memory from some other maybe times, maybe sometime in the 50s, but crawling in things doesn't seem to end well. Here's what I propose. Like Herb said earlier, we have an extra body. One of us can sacrifice. Here's what I think. I'll go get the things attention. and I'll lead it on a zany goose chase.

And while it's following me, you guys go to admin, you get the code, and you get Timmy out. No, Ralph, we need your brain, man. It should be me. Okay. I think one person runs an end run around on the monster and sort of zips and zoops him,

and the rest of us go solve the problem. Despite the fact that this is always a bad idea in a horror movie, I think in our situation actually does make sense. We're not actually going to die. And to Herb's point, which maybe will prove that you're not, the one to go, but I think it's clear that Ralph and

Ashah are the two smarter ones. That's true. Either of us could go. I agree. But you got a pretty smart idea there, so I think that does point to me being the dumb one. I do feel crystal clear in you, man. I feel like I could see both the future in the past, so to speak. But since it was your idea, I think you should do it. But yeah, I like Herb doing

it. Ralph, we need your brain. And then if you're a big brain, you and Ashley decide that you could sacrifice somebody else, I'm here for it. We don't have to sacrifice anything. I didn't know that. You guys know that. It sounds like a plan. Herb, you're okay to do this? I'm okay. All right.

Herb, you make sure it's zany. Here's my... You go out there and you'd be as zany as you can be. You know I'm the zaniest guy out there. Here's my thought. In the dorms. The dorms, the cafeteria, and the gym showers form essentially a little closed... That's pretty much the order that I met Zelda.

Wow. Interesting order. Now, that sounds like an interesting first time. Yeah, that's or another tale. If we get through this, I'll tell you all about it. We ate, we had sex, and we cleaned up. Not much of a story. Sorry.

So we can post up in the gym, and if Herb is in like the dorm room, the cafeteria in between us, and making noise, the monster can pass through the cafeteria to the dorm room, and then we can go from the gym and around. Does that make sense? Sounds like a plan. Okay. So what are you going to do right now? So we're going to go hide out in the gym. I'm going to go to the dorm. Okay, so the dorm, as I mentioned,

you can see a bunch of capsule beds lining the walls. You see pictures of kids in some of them. It looks like these are customized by the person who sleeps in them, like their little corners. And they are alphabetically arranged. I guess I'll look for Timmy's. So you find T. Birch's capsule pretty easily. It is filled with sleep babes.

Sleep babes. It's filled with sleep aids like a lot. a CPAP machine, an eye mask, and a leg pillow, and a small bound notebook. A notebook? Hey, I'll read aloud from this notebook, and then maybe the monster. I mean, the robot will hear me. I hope my friends are doing well. So on the inside cover of the notebook, there is a Post-it note that says this.

And then the notebook itself, it only has, like, a couple of entries in it. The first two are just looked to be, like, math problems, like he was just figuring some math out. And then the most recent one is this entry. Post-it note. One page has the word compliment, which is crossed out with what looks to be a date next to it. Then the word insult also crossed out with what looks to be a date exactly six months after that. And then the word allegory, not crossed out, probably because it applies to X-Men, with a date exactly six months after that.

And then it says, Need to get better at writing in this. Routine and ritual supposed to help with mental health. I am grateful for Dana, my admin position, daily night crawl of progress. However small, not being grandpa. Oh, gosh.

I haven't heard that. New Matfab food codes. even though... And even though it's crossed out. Well... Unity of purpose amongst staff. Gosh, this guy's crazier than I ain't. So you guys are going to wait until the monster comes to you, essentially.

You hear a door open from the direction of the meat doll storage hallway. You hear the stomp slash get closer and closer, and it stops before the door to the cafeteria opens. And you hear, again, That squeal of metal. That horrible wrenching of steel against steel. And then you hear the stomp splash resume. You hear the door into the cafeteria open up. And then it starts stomping towards the bedroom slash dorms.

Um, guys, I think the password is allegory. I think that's the password for the admin. Oh, that, I think, oh, God, it's a password. Okay. The door to the dorm opens. Herb, you see it. Oh, man. It is standing in front of the door.

Just looking at you is not right. You can't see a discernible face. The smell is intense, urine more than anything. It's there. You have eyes on it. What would you like to do? The way that mothership turns work is that they are simultaneous. So whatever you want to do and whatever I want to do will happen at the same time.

Remember, Beth, you're next to the showers room and there is a hole that we wrench through. Yeah, but then he'd be after all of us. Well, he'd be after you because we're going to try and speaking. But I get the sense. that he may have broken the door the way out too. What to do, what to do, what to do. Okay, so it's just going to reach towards you. Okay.

Get out of there! I'm going to throw the CPAP machine at it. Okay. Uh, go ahead and give me a combat roll. 15. Oh, not bad. So you throw the CPAP machine at it, and it hits the viscera and the shit and the piss,

and it just gets stuck in there, and it doesn't seem to phase the creature at all, but at the very least distracted it for a second, and so it can't grab at you in that moment. But it is now going to grab at you again. What do you do now? It is standing between you and the door. I assume the floor is slippery from blood and guts,

and so I'm going to try to slide below him. Okay. Give me a speed check. Eight. Jesus Christ. A little slippery guy. So you managed to slide almost rancor-like between its legs. As you do so, though,

you get a huge whiff and a huge sight of what's going on with this fucking thing, and it's awful. So you're going to give me a fear save. Okay. Or actually, maybe a sanity save. Deal's choice. I'll go with, you sure, a fear. I did not save.

So you're going to gain another stress. Okay. And you're going to roll D20 again and try not to get four, three, two, or one. I got a nine. Ooh, close. So you've run past it. Are you headed towards the cafeteria or the gym? The gym.

The creature turns around and is in pursuit behind you. It is managing to keep pace despite the fact that it's flip steps or slowed before. You hear like servos wearing and it's getting faster and faster and faster and faster. Is she leaning it towards us? Is that a problem? Yes. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's fine.

I'm really sorry. As we hear, as we hear the approaching footsteps of Herb, we're like, okay, hey, real quick, flag on the play. I think the way's out, I've been crushed. We heard the crushing. We got to get to the grate. Let's go to the grate. Herb is going to look for a barbell without weights, hoping that whoever's worked out there recently has rewracked their weights. I'm going to try to hit the guy in the chin.

Give me a combat. I guess simultaneously. It's going to grab towards you as well. Simultaneously, are we slithering? Oh. I got a four. Jesus Christ. That's just one shot this monster.

Fuck, I thought it was a scary game. You hit... I would simply kill Mr. X. So you hit the monster and you scrape off a big chunk of the hardened viscera and stuff from around its chin. And now you can see the metal beneath it. And you can see a button that is half covered. by viscera. So you successfully have revealed it at the very least. He also

reached for you. So you successfully did your thing. He's going to now try to do his thing. Honey, I've done my thing. Now let's see if we can successfully do your thing. Let's see if your thing is pinnacle. I mean, you should roll for that. He grabs you, Herb. The barbell's still in your hand. And he basically starts moving you

towards the wood chipper type thing on his back. I'm going to run. I'm going to position the barbell so that it sticks long ways. so that I can't go any further into the wood chipper. Give me a strength check. Five. I'm rolling so well. Oh, shit. Holy shit.

Okay, cool. So, yeah, you managed to stop it for a second. You can't push you in the way that that is. I feel like once her hit the button or reveal the button and then started getting sucked in or whatever, Robot Dale or whatever is going to run and try to just, again, sacrifice. It's not his actual body. He just wants to dive in to punch the button. Lame that uppercut.

Upper cut. So you can. Give me a... Are you sure you? You can do that? Give me a speed roll to get up to him. Okay. That's a joke.

You brainiacs find something to hit him if this doesn't work. I say as I'm running. Aim for the chin. I got a 43 on speed. 69. Nice. Do I get bonus points? Yeah.

You run up to him, but it seems to sense you coming. Nice. Because you're 69ing. And it quickly whips around so its back is facing you. So now you can actually see her. He's facing. Yeah. And then you see the creature take its hand and put its own hand into the chipper in the back.

And you go, and a wave of yellow liquid comes out of the bottom of this thing and goes at your feet. And the sudden introduction of all this liquid causes you to slip and fall on your ass. Oh, that's fun. I'm going to try to do the same thing. Now the piss is out there. So give me a body save. The piss is out there. Give me a body save to not slip on the piss.

Girl look at that body. Girl piss at that body. Girl piss on that body. Oh, I got an 81. You slip and fall on your ass and you failed so badly that you start hurtling towards the creature. Oh, oh no. It takes Herb and it's going to throw Herb out of its hand at the wall as hard as it possibly can. That'll do it.

So the way that health works in this game is that there's health and then there's wounds. Every time you lose all of your health, you get a wound. When you have no wounds left, you are dead. dead. And excess damage does bleed over into the next set of wounds. So you are going to take 25 damage. Ooh. Damn.

I do 14 minus 25. You have three health left on your second. Life? Yeah. Life basically. So it throws you with that hand. And with the other hand, it's going to reach down and grab route. And it's going to try to do the exact same thing.

Is you going to throw me? No, forcing you head first into the wood chipper, essentially. Okay. Better. Is anybody going to try to do something about it? Yeah. Can we? Do I have that aerosol can?

You do. Is there anything I can do to blow up the monster with an aerosol can? Are there sensors that would be disrupted? If you throw the aerosol can into the chipper thing, I bet you would. It was pressurized, right? I shake it up as hard as I can, and I throw it into the wood chipper. Okay, great. Give me a speed roll to see if you can aim it properly.

into the thingy. Now, I have military training. Yeah, that counts. You're good at throwing things. So what do I add plus 10? Plus 10. 72. So you throw the aerosol can. It's like when you're trying to shoot a three and it just hits the rim and goes around the whole thing and you're like, is it going to tip in? Is it going to tip out? And then it tips out and falls onto the ground and starts to roll away. That's getting a lot closer than most of the three pointers I throw. So I appreciate it. It's going to go ahead and take you and it's going to shove your head into the wood shipper. Oh, no. And from your perspective, you're scared, obviously, and then it just goes dark

and you feel as the helmet that you have detaches from your head, the needles retract, and you're just back at the internal comms hub, essentially. And you see your other companions are, basically their eyes have rolled back into their heads a little bit, and they're still hooked in. From everybody else's perspective,

they see blood shoot out upwards from this fucking wood shipper as Ralph's Meatpuppet's body is entirely fed into the wood chipper, blood shoots upward, his shoots downward, and now it is going to start walking towards you. With like from the knee down, Ralph's legs still sticking out of the top of the thing, like Fargo style.

Is there a seated calf machine in this gym? Yes. Okay, Herb's going to go sit on the seated calf machine and then unlock it from the thing so that it's ready to go. Okay. Asch is going to see all this and head towards the drain and try and like skimmy through the drain. Okay. get into the drain pretty easily, I would say.

Why does this feel familiar? Is there anything on the floor? Because I slipped on the floor, right? Yes. Dumbels and other stuff laying around or whatever. Yeah, those big throwy balls, kettlebells. Ooh, I want to grab a kettlebell and try to uppercut. 17. Okay. Strength? Combat. Combat. Oh, 22 is my combat. Okay. I hit the chin with that kettlebell. Nice call of that. Kettlebell. It's like the craziest version of brass knuckles. I guess. Huge brass uncles. It's like brass hands. grass hands. You manage to successfully slam the kettlebell into its chin,

and you do a fair amount of damage to the underside of its chin, and you push in that manual override button a little bit, and it, oh, all the way. That manual override button goes up all the way. You only go a little, you halfway. You hit the HB of the override button. You clicked it successfully, and the creature stops, and its jaw unhinges,

and you see that deep within, like, what a robot's, you know, dull it would be, hypothetically. There is a red lever. Oh, there's a lever in there? Yeah. But it's still moving. It's a buck wild safety system. When you...

No, Will, I will say, most fire alarm stuff, you have to break glass and then pull the alarm. Yeah, but you're like, it's turned into a monster and the safety mechanism is put your hand in the monster's mouth. That's a fair point. I love it. Okay. Is the monster coming close to me?

I think now it's dealing with the fact that a kettlebell just hit it in the chin. So it's probably facing Dale unless you want to try to get its attention. Hey, come over here. I want to show you something cool. Okay, so it's going to turn away from Dale, which is good because it manages to get its lever out of range of Dale, and it's going to basically rush at you. A lot of people use the standing calf machine because it works the, what is it, the gluteus or whatever, but not people neglect the soleus, which is the inside of the calf, which is a better trained by doing the seated calf machine. The way the machine, the machine,

works is you lift up with your calves and this bar in front of it raises up and goes down because you put the weights on the bar. So I'm going to raise up and try to aim and his mouth to push the lever down. I see what I've been doing wrong. It's supposed to be rolling for the creatures as well so they can defend themselves. So you're going to try to basically smash it between the bar and the weights? Yes. So are there any weights attached to the bar right now because otherwise that's a pretty light bar? It's actually heavier than you'd think. Is it really? Was it 20? I don't No. Either way. Give me a strength. Because it's just a lever, you know. Oh yeah, it's not hard. You do it pretty easily. All right. Let me roll. Okay. Go ahead and roll combat. See if you can. Dude, I've never been on a run like this. I got 11. Okay. Now that I know I'm supposed to have it make checks, it is going to roll its combat stat, and its combat stat is 75. Wow. So it just needs to get under 75, and I got a 93. So you managed to spear it through the neck,

and it's just stuck there with its head, like, facing you, its mouth open, and the lever is right there. I guess I'll just pull the lever. Okay. You see the creature basically struggle for a second, and then its body goes slack, and it seems to be completely dead. Twos beauty that killed the beast. And then you hear a beeping noise.

Uh-oh. You hear a voice that you don't. Recognize it sounds kind of human. Actually, it sounds kind of like the voice that Beth did when she was reading the chat saying restarting sequence. Restarting. Nine. Oh, shit. Code.

At this distance, you can see that the machine on its back, you can type in numbers or letters. We type a veg. A.J.B. 623. So the machine beeps. It's got a little dot matrix monitor. And it shows a little symbol of a carrot. And it goes, producing carrots. please add biomatter.

Oh, it's kind of want to eat us to make carrots. No. It's never what goes into it. It's what comes out of it. Well, change you to sweets real fast just in case. 714. Nine. Okay.

Right allegory, though. You thought that was a password. I don't think it is for this thing. I think it's for a different thing. I run to the admin room. Oh, yeah. I kick it. I kick it in his knees.

so it tips over. I mean, it's already doubled over because it got speared by then. Yeah, that's just go. Yeah, let's follow up. Let's put weights on it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We put a lot of weights on it. Okay. Just want to spend some time just stacking it. And then we'll run. Yeah, you guys run. Okay, so it gets down to two by the time you've put a couple of weights on it, let's say.

Remember, I'm still crawling through the lights. Oh, yeah. Where does Ashley wind up? Actually, you know what? Tell me if there's something that you can roll that sort of equates to knowing where you are roughly in the ship, despite the fact there are no signs. Industrial equipment.

Yeah, I feel like that makes sense. Go ahead and use that and roll your intellect. 12. So you pretty well suss out where you are on the ship, and you also suss out where the water lines go to. So you can see that there's one that obviously goes to the gym and the dorms. There's one that goes to the cafeteria, and there's one that goes to an area that's just adjacent to admin.

Oh, I'm going to go there. From where you are with your industrial knowledge, you're underneath a toilet that is currently still in the ground. I guess I'll try and bust up through it. Toilets. Give me a strength check. This is my biggest fear. Three out of 39.

So with one punch, you fucking launch this thing out of the goddamn floor. The porcelain cracks beneath your feet. Bloodstreams on your arm and you have access now to the onsuit bathroom connected to the admin office. Oh, that's nice. That's what we're going. Yeah, so you guys meet up with them, essentially. But they have to roll to get under the broken. No, we're running just to the admin normally.

Freddie is right. The creature, the creature. broken off fucked up both of the exits. You can either try to go

through the shardy fucked up exits or... I would go through that. Dale wouldn't know where

actually win anybody wants to go through has to give me a body save. Okay. I'm gonna wait because I feel like

Ashley can just tell us whatever he sees in there and then we can go over to the black box ourselves as once we know

the information. I fail my body save. I got a 22 out of 30. I wanted to fail to make you happy. You got a 22 out of 30?

I got 22 on my role on my body is 30. Okay. So you succeeded. And Beth, you're going to take 3D10 of damage. Oh, my God. That's half my hold.

So meanwhile, Ralph's new body, the last one, manages to get to the admin as well. And both everybody's now in the admin room and this thing. I'm dead. You're dead? Yeah. A shard of jagged metal that you don't see as you're trying to fly through with your back to the wall, just like pulling in your gut, making it as slim as you can. It's fine.

You're halfway through. You're doing good. I'll keep going. Oh, no. This thing's got my intestine, man. There's a piece of jagged steams. that is jutting out that you managed to nick with your stomach. And you don't notice it that well because of the body connection, the mind-body connection you have.

So the last thing you'd want a herb to do would be to keep like going through. Yes. Okay, so they was like, oh, let me just help pull you out. You're all stuck, I start pulling. Oh, no, my intestines got left behind me. Oh, no. Whoa. Yeah, you basically disembowl Herb's meat puppet and you see that within there are intestines, a stomach.

And, you know, it seems to be a human anatomy. Herb. It sucks, man. It goes totally black. And Herb, you are unceremoniously kicked back to your bipolar body. That is also old and achy. Ralph, Herb is dead. Yeah, I saw that from this end.

It looked pretty bad. Okay, so the second you enter the admin room, which I'm going to assume simultaneously, Dale and Ashley, I made it. I lost Herb. That's all right. We're survivors. We're survivors, Dale. Ralph's waiting for us to get some information.

So I'm just going to let you do your thing. I'm here if you need help. I've opened my Peepers and I look around. around. He said that loud. Inside the admin room, everything is pristine. Every paper is in its place. Every book placed alphabetically. And a single terminal sits at a desk.

There's also a big file cabinet behind the desk. And there is a dormant steward bot docking station in the other corner of the room with a dormant steward bot inside of it. There are also plaques all around the room with a very clear theme. First place, most efficient R&D Department of the Quarter, Tim Birch, fastest completion of quantum physics. Dr. Tim Birch. Best chili cook-off recipe, Tim Birch. Oh. I go up to the computer and I hit like a non-important key, like control or alt a couple times. Screensaver turns off. Wake it up. Ah, it was the pipes. Love the pipes. Ironically. Oh, flashback. What's it say? Admin, log in, password, please.

Oh, allegory. Aligory. Herb, I take off my hell of it. Herb, we're using your password. Okay, wait. Allegory. You got to hear this joke, man. You got to hear this joke that the scribe just told me. Do you want to hear a shock joke? Yeah. I don't know. It really bites. I put my helmet back on. I type in allegory. X, no. X. Oh my God. X. The X-Men. Yeah, the X-Men. Catholics and Jews. Catholics and Jews. Catholic and Jews. Catholic C, Catholics and Jews. Capital Catholics and Persand Jews. X-Dashman. X-Dash-Men. X-Men. X-Men. Password except.

One of those worked. And then a robot from the corner leaves its dock and grabs you by the throat. So much for listening on the Patreon right now. Tomodachi Life, the Nintendo sensation that's sweeping the nation. Part two. Here's a little clip. Give me the, you know what I'm saying? Make Matt do it.

Make Matt do it, Matt. I know the one. It's crazy because Matt hasn't even highlighted it. Yeah, Matt's such a good. Cowardy one and click on it. No. Two up. How many microaggressions can we do on Freddie in one run?

Join us on Friender St Island. What will this colorful cast of characters get up to next? Will Famalian find true love? What does the delicacy known as basketball taste like? This is nonsense if you're listening to this. It's on the Patreon. Also on the Patreon. Now Dad's what I call music.

Featuring all the musical intros from the show. So today's episode is in there already. You can listen right now free on the Patreon. Happy Pride Month, year two. Pride collection available on the website. We've brought back the highly requested Pride Dice available for the month of June only. And then back into the Dice Vault. We also have year two of the Pride Zine available for physical purchase and digital download.

If you miss the 2025 Pride Zee, you also have the opportunity to bundle it with this year's Zine. Really great collection of fan art in there. And net proceeds from the Zine and Dice go towards Lambda Legal. supporting the civil rights of LGBTQ plus people. Finally, bookmeaddy.com. Dungeons and Daddies is Matt Arnold, is Dale Elliott, Anthony Birch is our DM. Will Campos is Ralph Estereus.

Beth May is Herb, The Worm, Quigley and Myself, Freddie Wong, is Ashley Burch. Our theme song is conventional wisdom by Max and Waller. Anisa Omran is our content producer. Ashley Blood is our community manager. Courtney Terry is our community coordinator. Esther Ellis is our lead editor, Travis Reeves, and Omar Romolino provide additional editing.

Cover art and episode art by Alex Moore. Thank you to our elite patrons, Doug Herring, Jennifer Shade, and Elizabeth Edrington. And shout out to our other Patreon supporters, folks like Tom L, Brin, Alexander Seedorf, Madison, I believe you have my stapler, Zach Collister, Mitchell Gallerno, Virgil Pooha, Cory Gamgam, Anthony F, Carly Engel, Skyler, if you're like the Hamilton one, Shuler, if you're more German, Corey Schutz, Valerie Shud's, Valerie Rose, Randy Colbert, Emily Gorman, Kellan Reese, Yuri Marino, and Misail Duran.

Support the show directly on Patreon at patreon.com slash Dungeons and Dad. Merchant more at Dungeons and Dys.com. Next episode, June 16th, we'll see you that. Could you imagine if Hertz rental car was like, if you were part of the five-star presidential package, they put your name on the thing, you get down the escalators from the rental car place, they got your name,

oh, it's already waiting for me in the special lot over here. You got into your fucking Ford Focus and then a fucking suction tube game and just ripped you one. Wait, wait, I feel like I should start a rental car company just called Roe's. head rental. It's really good.