Last time, the PCs had fled through the door into the side hallway, trying to escape the 1200 trollocs slavering for their blood. The DM had also awarded experience, meaning they achieve a mighty tenth level! Down this hallway, they see iron grates blocking off a large open space that almost looks like a town square. Falgrim carefully pushes open these grates and they enter, into a square. Its standout feature: a building that looks houselike in the middle of it. Spot checks are called for!

DM: The house-shaped building has what looks to you from here a couple of – they’re bigger than arrow slits but you wouldn’t necessarily call them windows. Your eye catches movement in one of them just as your party moves over the threshold. It was too quick and too faint to get an idea of. Something humanoid in size. Probably.
Sioneva: Are we still mindlinked?
Inferian: Yep.
DM: (bitterly) Yep.
Sioneva: All right, then I will notify all of you that something is moving in there.
DM: No need, because they see what you see!
Inferian: No—
DM: They smell what you smell!
Inferian: No…
DM: Send in your psicrystal then.
Inferian: I hand my psicrystal to Benar and have him move silently forwards.
DM: …Erah?
Inferian: What?
Falgrim: He’s having Benar sneak up to the building.
DM: Wait, you’re handing the crystal to Benar.
Inferian: Yeah, Benar is quieter than the crystal.
DM: So it’s – what’s the – wait—
Falgrim: So he can still see. It’s basically like he’s taking his eyes out and putting them in Benar’s hands.
DM: (groaning) It wasn’t bad enough having the psicrystal. Now the psicrystal has a human attachment. Are you having him simply move silently as he goes in?
Inferian: I didn’t think – is there a way to hide to get there? I don’t think he can successfully hide crossing that terrain right there.
DM: Fair enough… where’s his mini?

As Benar crosses the gap between gate and building, a figure seems to appear out of nowhere. Benar is seized from behind and a blade held to his throat! But this is a familiar figure!

DM: Recognition appears to spark in both of you at once—
Inferian: It’s the halfling again
DM: Oh, you mean the other halfling. That halfling’s dead!
Inferian: THAT’S the JOKE.
DM: He speaks up as he steps back from Benar and says, “My apologies. I hadn’t expected to find… well, you lot least of all in this place. Tai’shar, Shinar.”
Falgrim: “Tai’sharr, Gai’din.”
Inferian: “Don’t worry, it was entirely Benar’s fault for getting caught.”
Falgrim: “Blood and bloody ashes, what’re you doing here?”
DM: “I should ask the same of you, but I think we can bother answer our own questions fairly easily if we take a moment and think.”:
Falgrim: “You hear for the heartstone too?”
Inferian: (frantically gesturing) Damn it, Falgrim!
Falgrim: What? What?!
Inferian: If he wasn’t, now he is!
Falgrim: This is Lann! This is a guy we know! Way back at the beginning?
Inferian: You think he’s trustworthy?
Falgrim: Yeah!
DM: “Fortunate. I don’t know how much longer just the two of us could have made it through this place.”
Inferian: “It’s a testament to your skill that you made it this far.”
DM: It’s a testament to my gai’din’s ability to keep a close eye out and keep us low.”
Inferian: “Oh, so you missed the skeletal dragon.”
DM: “Well, we didn’t enter this place from the same way as you came from.”
Inferian: “Clearly.”
DM: ROLL for initiative!
Inferian: What?! That wasn’t a hostile thing!
DM: You’re taking lip!
Inferian: I’m agreeing!
DM: You’re agreeing – but you can’t even sound – “Yes. Obviously. Of course.”
Inferian: (deeply sarcastic) “It was a testament to your skills.”
DM: “Bothering me with RP again, are you?”
Inferian: “Expecting this voice, eh? Someone cast Regeneration.” (switching to a smooth but totally ludicrous voice) “Then I can resume my natural dulcet tones!”
Falgrim: (mimes punching him in the throat)
Inferian: (normal Inferian voice) “Now you’ve done it.”
Falgrim: “Ah, tha’s better.”
DM: I curse you with Voice of Halfling.
Inferian: “Oh no. I’m a raspy voiced halfling.”
DM: Voice of Kobold!
Inferian: “I’m a raspy-voiced halfling kobold!”
DM: Voice of Cissy!
Inferian: (flipping the DM off)

The Sedai and her Warder had planned to rest for the night, and offer the PCs a place in exchange for watch duty, just in case something sneaks past the wards or they fail.

Inferian: “Now you’ve got several people to help with watch. We have to go back to get them though.”
Falgrim: “I am not taking watch myself.”
Inferian: I didn’t take this class to take watch!”

Rest is obtained, along with much-needed healing and recovery. Lars suddenly swaps prestige classes from Inquisitor to some class that destroys tyranny wherever he sees it; the running joke is that he’s after Inferian’s head. Falgrim and Lann talk for a bit on their shared watch; the Warder reveals that the three boys they’d rescued and sent to live with the halflings had wandered off.

Falgrim: “Oy. That’s not good.”
Inferian: <(bitterly laughing) Heroic rescue, undone by fiat.
DM: It wasn’t like they were taking by evil… no one knows what happened to them.
Inferian: “I wasted my power points. They owe me a new crown.”

Sioneva takes the next watch; they cheerfully debate how to murder Inferian. The DM cheerfully gets malicious ideas from player jokes, but makes a token attempt to reassure them.

DM: It’s pretty safe to give me ideas, because I’m not guaranteed to use them against you.
Calinai: There’s no point giving Inferian ideas, he already has them.
DM: Yeah, he already knows the tine and day of our death, and we just blunder our way towards it.
Inferian: The DM: On the final boss. That’s all it ever says.

On his shift, the DM calls for a Listen check from Benar. He hears a scratching at one of the doors, but nothing else. He plays it safe and does not open the door, though the group grimly anticipates the source being a friendly NPC they were supposed to save. They awake, anticipating a day of relatively safety – the fog, at least, does not come out during the day.

Inferian: “It would also be a good idea to observe what has happened to the entrance the trollocs smashed down to this level.”
Falgrim: “And yer men.”
DM: Actually it was Lars that smashed it…
Inferian: I’m being charitable. “We should go check in with them, it’s not a far distance away.”
DM: Check in with the trollocs?
Falgrim: Yeah! Hey guys, what’s goin’ on?
Inferian: You guys survive all right?

The former trolloc battle room is just a mess of disgusting stains, with no further signs of life. No bodies. They continue on, still intending to check on Inferian’s minions.

Inferian: While we were here, the seal was broken…
Calinai: We didn’t release Bojack.
Inferian: No, when our foe fled, he was fleeing to King Kai’s place.
Calinai: Oh no, the skeletal dragon is training on King Kai’s world!
Inferian: “Artemis, what does your spider sense say about his challenge rating?”

They come into the next room and raid the hell out of the dragon loot! Calinai gets to work IDing it all.

DM: A necklace… of fireballs.
Inferian: Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. Get it away.
Falgrim: What?
Inferian: Those things are lethal. Put that somewhere where it can never be exposed to flame EVER.
Calinai: So that thing’s useless to us? We’re going to sell it?
Inferian: It has its use. Its use is this. You throw it at an enemy, and cast a fireball or fire spell it, causing every gem on it to detonate simultaneously.
DM: Or you could just… use it to regularly cast fireball.
Inferian: Yeah, but if you keep it out and it gets hit by flame, it has a chance to explode as I just described.
Falgrim: Bag of holding it is.l

The DM awards them a crossbow which is very useful and nice… except it’s a repeating crossbow, which no one has proficiency in. They cheerfully dismiss it is as worthless, prompting the DM to bitterly refuse to ever give them items again. They catch up to Inferian’s minions to find their numbers depleted, down to about twenty or so. The PCs are a bit impressed that they did this well, honestly. Sadly, Bob the Bobarian is dead as well!

DM: Well, he regained something of himself before the end. He gave a good accounting of himself.
Calinai: Oh, I misheard you. I thought you said he defecated himself before the end…
DM: He was defecating while calling out the name of the Blade Mage, and vowing revenge on his shoulders. And vowing before taking his vengeance that he would introdufe himself to his victims.
Falgrim: Not once, not twice, but trice!

Calinai: I do like the fact that she saw I had a ward and didn’t mention the fact that I had a ward. No, “Hey, you have a ward, congratulations.”
DM: She didn’t say much of anything to you.
Inferian: Yeah, she’s been mind-controlled and/or replaced by a doppelganger, but we’re not supposed to know that yet.
DM: (indescribable look)
Inferian: (bursting into laughter)
DM: You’re just projecting. That’s my answer from now on. You’re projecting. Projecting! I’ve pronounced it several times since we started, I’m not going to be the a-hole DM.

Calinai and Inferian start arguing over the use of the word ‘score’, with the former insisting that there’s no reason to use ‘score’ when you could just say ‘twenty’, just like ‘fortnight’ is pointless when you could just say ‘two weeks’. Inferian just laughs his ass off. The DM decides not to help!

DM: You find 10,000 dollars worth of gold. I don’t know how many pieces that is.
Calinai: You aren’t like, “we have five millennia worth of gold”. That’s five thousand!

Benar finally mentions that scratching on the door, and they decide to go investigate it really quick. The door they heard scratching on is impassable, melded with the wall so magnificently they can’t even begin to crack it open. Frowning, they agree to split up with the Sedai and her Warder.

DM: “Since we entered from the northwest, that leaves us the northeast and the southwest.”
Inferian: “What about the stairs?”
DM: “It appears they go downwards.”
Inferian: …natural 1 on my Diplomacy check. “I noticed.”
DM: Were you trying to influence him to go down the stairs?
Inferian: I was trying not to make a sarcastic comment, about him being, “The stairs go down! Doyyyyyyyy.”
DM: He relates to you that he prefers to keep exploring the ground level before descending.
Inferian: “Your words have wisdom.”
DM: (dripping sarcasm) “Why thank you, Lord Dragon. I’ll tell my grandchildren that you gave me such an overwhelming vote of confidence.”

Calinai starts spinning her favorite tale, of how innocent farmers abandon their families in the middle of dinner to join Inferian’s army. The DM contributes with a story of a child starving to death. Inferian, for his part, insists that his spawn works like healing units in a strategy game – they just appear without explanation if you wait a turn. Inferian drops a mindlink onto the NPCs so they can stay in touch for 90 minutes. They ultimately decide to go through the south door of the dragon room, in hopes of coming around to the scratching-door from the other side. Advancing in, they discover an ominous trail of blood leading into a door, apparently recent. For some reason the discussion gets REALLY hung up on Batman for a while.

Calinai: Batman finally takes his Bat-vision away. He looks up. Instead of being hung by his feet, the guy’s hung by his neck. There’s just arms and limbs scattered everywhere. Dented-in heads. Blood gushing. A thousand broken legs… He puts it back on. “Unconscious.” Hung by his feet.
Inferian: “Oracle. Transmit that mind-wipe again.”
Falgrim: “Damn it, Bruce…”

Adjudicating Spot checks, the DM reveals that there’s an arcane symbol. Calinai scrambles for her character sheet.

Calinai: Knowledge(arcana), or (religion) or (history) or (planes) or (nobility) or—
Inferian: Psionic?
DM: (giggling) Yeah, roll (psionic).
Calinai: It’s not psionic.
DM: Your Knowledge(psionics) determines that white people like Wayne Brady because he makes Bryant Gumble look like Malcolm X.

This isn’t a darkfriend symbol or the like, after all those rolls, but it IS dark. Artemis blames Justin Bieber, while Calinai blames Garrosh. Concerned that disrupting the rune will have more immediately bad consequences than good, they bypass at and search at the next door.

Calinai: You heard that Detroit declared bankruptcy, right?
Sioneva: Yeah.
Calinai: Do you realize right now we are steps away from—
DM: Robocop.
Calinai: Thank you!
DM: Back in 1987, they didn’t realize they were making a future documentary.
Inferian: I was reading comments, and someone said they wouldn’t be bankrupt if they hadn’t spent all that money on Robocop…

They end up in a narrow hallway, down which the blood trail leads as if something was dragged. Lars immediately bemoans his choice to Persist Righteous Might and, thus, large size. Hopefully unrelatedly, he contemplates the deep fryer in the kitchen.

Lars: Aw man. Calinai. I’ll give you five dollars right now if you drink the oil from that fryer.
Calinai: What? No. I might as well just stab my heart. It’s oil.
Artemis: Oh my god.
Inferian: At least you wouldn’t have to set an alarm tomorrow.

A silence.

Inferian: Because you’d have no problems getting up oily.
Falgrim: …oh my god! Oh my god.
DM: That really just happened.
Falgrim: Oh, man. Hey, it hurts. That one really hurts.
Inferian: It was like I physically punched Calinai, it was great.
Calinai: Agh, it’s like a punch to the gut… that was horrible.
Falgrim: Oh man, please stop. My brain!
Calinai: It took me a moment because I was like, “What is he talking about?” I couldn’t even THINK of that coming.
Falgrim: I’m thinking like, “You won’t have to set an alarm because you’ll be dead! Ha ha ha.” And then all of a sudden you have to get up oily… I should have known.
Calinai: That was the pun to top all puns, there.
Falgrim: Yeah, that was probably the worst one you’ve uttered… that actually made sense.
Inferian: (laughing) Onward!
Calinai: …I… I don’t think I can. It’s over.
Falgrim: I don’t have the strength any more.

They search the next door, though Inferian notes that’s probably silly since someone was dragged through it at some point. Falgrim opens it with a crowbar, predicting the next room will be drawn completely in red because it’s so covered in blood. Calinai repeatedly calls “The Neverending Story” by the name “The Everlasting Story” to the amusement of all. The next room, in fact, appears to be a campsite, or is at least strewn with the paraphanelia thereof.

Calinai: I remember this from one of my books. They only come out in the hottest summers. We may be dealing with Predators.
Inferian: This isn’t your campaign!
Calinai: I never had Predators…

Among these supplies, the PCs find several potions. Calinai complains bitterly that she’ll be forced to write down arbitrary potion colors and descriptions, failing to realize that the DM just identified all the potions for them before she ever started talking.

DM: And two, count ‘em, two Elixirs of Love.
Inferian: …that’s weird…
DM: Do it! You know you want to.
Inferian: No one can be trusted with those. Destroy them now.
DM: Lars immediately challenges you to a duel.
Inferian: …for my love?!
DM: No, it’s for who he WANTS to use the elixirs on!
Inferian: Seriously, let’s destroy them now.
DM: Because Inferian’s black heart has no room for such foolishness…
Inferian: That’s right, I never want to feel it touched by something or other, I don’t know.
Lars: Then don’t use them! Give ‘em to somebody else.
Artemis: We should keep them, we never know when we’re going to use them.
Inferian: The problem is, I can’t argue that mind control of such a nature is evil in-character without you all laughing at me.
Calinai: He’s like, “This is wrong! This is wrong!” “Sir, another sandwich.” (miming accepting it) “This is wrong! Servant, I need a chair, just bend over and act like a chair. We can’t be using this, it’ll force people to choose – where’s my sandwich?! WHERE IS MY SANDWICH?!”
Falgrim: Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito? I wish I had those love potions now.

As usual, this dissolves into mocking of Inferian. Calinai proposes a new shirt: on the front, it says “Mommy, Where’s Daddy?” and the back reads “Death to Lord Dragon.”

Calinai: That’ll be our final confrontation. The wives and children of all of these men. Thousands of them. Just waiting for him.
Falgrim: I’m just waiting for us to run into the REAL Dragon Reborn.
Inferian: Hey, I’m already prepared for that.
Falgrim: How so?
Inferian: It’s simple. “Who’re you gonna believe? That guy? Or me?”
DM: Yeah, Professor X over there…
Falgrim: With the hydrocephalic head.
Inferian: The Lord Dragon is a title! And that means that title can be taken and claimed.
DM: Wow.
Calinai: The real Lord Dragon is going to come out, pissed. “Who’s taking my name?!” How do you know he’s the real Lord Dragon? There’s five actual dragons flying around this guy.
DM: Is your character starting to believe in it? Starting to believe in it, or has convinced himself at this point?
Calinai: He’s convinced himself he IS the Lord Dragon.
Falgrim: “All these people can’t be wrong…”
DM: I actually want to know this.
Inferian: At this point, like I said, his entire argument is, “I can MAKE myself the Lord Dragon just by going down this path!” But his one concern still is going to kick Terrania’s ass. If they believe that’s what the Lord Dragon does, then I’m the Lord Dragon.
Lars: That’s assuming everybody else in your party decides to back you up and not go with the actual Dragon. I’m just saying, we might see the actual Dragon, and be like… (gasping look of awe)
DM: Yeah, he’s a level 20 Thrallherd.
Calinai: And we just sit back and watch the battle between these two thrallherds.
Falgrim: It’ll be like that scene in Kingdom Hearts where Donald and Goofy leave Sora.
Inferian: “Aww, I don’t have a Keyblade any more.”
Falgrim: …that was a sad part of that game.
Inferian: (Goofy voice) “Sorry, Lord Dragon. I’ve got to follow the REAL Lord Dragon.”
Calinai: When that came out, I was like, wait a minute. I get to run around with Donald and Goofy for an entire video game? Done. None of the other Final Fantasy characters could have been there. It could have been just Donald and Goofy and I still would’ve bought the game. My two favorite Disney characters. An angry person and a retard.

This having effectively killed the conversation, they turn back to the game. They head in through the next door, only to have an earsplitting scream pierce the air! It emerges from a skull mounted above the door they came through.

Falgrim: Is it out of reach? Can I smack it?
DM: You’d have to do an embarrassing little hop to get up there.
Falgrim: I do have Lunging Strike, lets me attack a square farther.
DM: Make your attack roll. Don’t roll a 1?
Falgrim: Natural 20.
Inferian: It wasn’t all that embarrassing of a hop after all, was it?
Falgrim: It was majestic. No one has ever seen a dwarf jump so high.
Inferian: Anything coming at us from the door behind us?
DM: Funny you should ask…

Although the game is essentially over, the DM takes a picture of the scene so that it can be reconstructed when next they pick up the game. Dessicated humanoids menace our heroes with death and despair!