(cool opening noir music)
- Hello, one and all!
Welcome back to another thrilling episode
of "Dimension 20: Mentopolis." (fun, jazzy music)
I am your humble GM, Brennan Lee Mulligan.
With me, as always, are our Prefrontal PIs.
Say hi, Prefrontal PIs. - [Everyone] Hi, Prefrontal PIs!
- I'm going to be able to say it right eventually.
- Here are Unique New Yorkers.
(group laughing)
- But the cacophony, it rubs the edges
off of it all, so it all sounds-
- Especially the part where Freddie doesn't even do it.
- Listen, I know that there's a guy sitting over there.
He's trying to mix the audio.
I'm going to make his life
just a little easier. - Wow, charitable.
You're a good person.
- There's a way we all get through Auld Lang Syne
every New Year, it's just by kind of mumbling.
(all beautifully mumbling their way through Auld Land Syne)
[everyone] ♪ to mind ♪
- Speaking of mind, welcome back to Mentopolis, folks.
Last we left off, our wonderful investigators
had just watched a section of a synaptic highway
crumble and fall, crushing the car underneath
just in time to save the life of Conrad Schintz,
our newsie at the center of a lot of hubbub
in a busy and dangerous town.
That's right, folks, we're back in Mentopolis,
the mind of the big guy, AKA Elias Hodge, a junior scientist
who we have not met and will probably never meet,
because we are him and he is us!
(Siobhan and Trapp making sounds of mock horror)
In our inaugural episode last week, (fun percussion music)
we met Conrad Schintz, the conscience.
We met Anastasia "A" Tension, the attention.
We met Detective Hunch Curio, AKA curiosity.
Imelda Pulse, or impulse.
Danny Fucks, the pleasure center of the brain.
- [Danielle] It never gets old! - Hits every time, baby.
- You did this.
(group laughing)
You did this.
And of course, The Fix, AKA hyperfixation.
All of these people came together
in the limbic system of the brain
down near the red light district
where they met up at Sugah's Speakeasy.
A bunch of events surrounded our arrival,
a murder of one Mr. Norrell Ojiccle
at the Cerebell Pacific Telecommunications Company
and a shattered Synaptic Switchboard
that was found by A. Tension working her beat.
We saw a hiring of one Detective Hunch Curio by Imelda Pulse
to find the kid who had led her
to a sort of mild kleptomaniacal impulse
just to grab a packet of papers, but one that seems
to have way more consequences that anticipated,
all leading to the pleasure center of the brain
as The Fix, a sort of muscle for hire
used by some of the bigwigs here in Mentopolis,
to get rid of anything distracting from the goal at hand.
Strange things are afoot in the city.
A murder, as well as a sudden shattering of a highway.
The cords are down, and some strange thing's afoot
with a packet stolen by a sudden impulse and a key,
a key that can allow some heroes
here in Mentopolis to speak directly to the big guy himself.
We come back now in this moment of sudden chaos.
Conrad, you hit the bricks, and as you do so,
what do any of you do in this moment
as you all sort of surged out of the speakeasy together?
- I feel like Dan Fucks is looking back at his club
and being like, is the roof-
I just got repairs!
I want to check the integrity of my club, please.
- [Brennan] Give me a snoop check.
- [Freddie] Seven plus two, nine. - You look around.
Most of the damage was caused by the horde of cops
that came in here earlier and stole all your shit,
but on a nine snoop,
looking at this very small, kind of dingy building,
you look around and see
all these boarded up spaces around here.
You could have a marquee.
There's that old theater that got boarded up.
So you're just sort of looking
at all the rain and water damage from these places
that used to be full blown pleasure centers in the brain
that are now all boarded up.
- This neighborhood sucks now!
(Brennan laughing)
- There is a smashed car with Conrad in it, right?
I feel like Detective Hunch rushes toward the car
and takes a look inside. - [Brennan] Hell yeah.
Go ahead and give me a snap snoop check.
- A snap snoop? - [Brennan] A snap snoop.
- Okay.
That is an eight plus one for nine.
- You recognize two of the crushed goons within the car
as being enforcers of the Avaricci family.
- It's the Avaricci family. - Oh god.
- Which has been sort of running-
- What was it about their taste? (squelching noise)
- I'd know that taste anywhere.
That's Avaricci for sure, (more squelching)
and it's fresh. - [Brennan] All of you watch this detective
just drinking blood.
(players laughing)
- Yeah, for sure.
(players laughing)
- You want to have a little more?
- I just had be sure. (even more squelching)
Yeah, that's Avaricci. (players laughing)
- Conrad, someone just tried to kill you,
and I think that something's not adding up here.
You are, to your estimation, (typewriter clacking, stamp)
a street urchin vagabond newsie kid.
The idea that a group of adult gangsters
would've been looking to do harm to you is not something
you experience normally, very out of the ordinary.
- I don't usually ask for help, but...
Do any of you know what's happening?
- Can I... approach?
- [Brennan] Yeah, absolutely.
- Trying to be non-threatening, which is difficult for me.
- Conrad (laughing) screams.
(group laughing)
- Probably the right call, honestly.
- Help, help! - Conrad, get behind me!
(Brennan laughing)
- As he screams, I attempt to steal the child.
- [Trapp] I pick up the closest thing to me
and throw it at The Fix.
(players laughing)
- So I try and bat the thing away. (tense battle music)
- [Brennan] Incredible, so go ahead. You give me sharp.
- Okay. - [Brennan] And you give me sturdy
as Hunch throws something at you.
- That is a six. But a not exploding six.
- That's eight.
- Okay, two coming your way.
(players laughing lightly)
- This guy is rich in failure. - Cling cling.
- So you bat it out of the way.
Go ahead and give me a sharp opposed by a sturdy here.
- Sturdy.
(tense music)
- Okay. - Five.
- Eight. - Can I give Moxie to Conrad?
- You can give Moxie to Conrad. - I swear, I'm a good-
a good guy, probably. - Can I dive in front of...
- Yeah, absolutely. If you want to give three Moxie-
- I'm going to burn three Moxie to dive.
- Wait I want to give Moxie to... (group laughing)
I can do this, right? - Yeah, you can abs-
Arms race, full arms race.
- He has so many, don't.
- I can't go against that arsenal.
- After chucking, he bats it away,
and I dive in front of Conrad and be like, leave him alone!
- So Fix, you go with a hand towards Conrad,
and the detective jumps in your path,
and you are blocked for a moment from accessing the child.
In this moment, do you continue to try to barrel past
or overpower the detective, or is there a moment
where this sudden interference changes your tactics?
- It changes my- Now I'm interfacing with him.
And I'm like, sir, I'm trying to help things here.
You do not know what's going on.
I need to protect this child.
- That's right, I don't know what's going on,
and I want to know what's going on!
- Well, I'm not going to tell you what's going on,
and you're not going to make me talk!
- Well, I'm fixing for you to tell me what's going on.
(aggressively saying "Look at you!" back and forth)
- I'm looking at you! - You guy are best friends.
(players laughing)
- Meanwhile, A. Tension is just taking notes.
Look at you, look at you. No, look at you, look at you.
- C- Conrad tries to sneak away again. - [Trapp] Goddammit!
- There's always so much banter.
(group laughing)
- That's great sneaking times.
- [Brennan] Incredible, go ahead and give me a sneak roll.
- Every time I take my eyes off this fucking kid.
- It's a two plus two, four.
Do I add the escape artist every time?
- Yeah, that can be a seven there.
So I think on a seven, you don't manage to get away,
but you kind of duck out in a shadow of the car
under the rubble for a second.
Justin the dog looks up at you and just goes,
protect him from what?
- [Hank] You seem like a very smart dog.
(Brennan barks)
- But I haven't figured it out myself yet,
and I do not want to tell you.
- Oh, well, I'll do anything to stop you.
(players laughing)
- Yeah, this dog and I, we're on the same page.
If you're not going to give me information-
- Everybody here is on the same page,
you idiots! - What? I don't think that's right!
- I'm actually one page ahead.
I've been taking notes while everyone else has been talking.
- You see that Justin looks up and says,
if you don't have a reason for stealing my friend,
wherever he is,
(players laughing lightly)
then I'll bite you over and over again
until either I'm dead or you're dead.
- The Fix raises his hand and says, as far as I can tell,
dogs don't get hurt in this show.
(players laughing)
- You see Justin sort of (barks) laughs
and you see a little, has his name on it, collar,
and you see the first name Justin
and the last name Fication.
So you see something about you saying
that you didn't have a reason for doing what you were doing
has deeply angered (players laughing)
this little rationalization hound
who just goes like,
well, all right, good.
And says, Conrad? You around here?
- Yeah, I'm right here.
Conrad steps out from a trash can
that's the exact same height as him.
(players laughing)
- Justin looks over and says, well,
me and Justin have been together
ever since he adopted me and took me in
outside of Madam Loathing's Home for Wayward Interests.
- That's right, just babies adopting babies.
(players laughing)
- You're best friend. - You're my best friend!
(players laughing)
- It sounds sad when they say it, even though it's so happy.
- You gotta say it like it's the last thing you'll ever say.
- 'Cause it always could be. - It could be!
(players laughing)
- Here's my thing, I kind of just want a couple minutes
where no one's trying to beat the shit or capture this kid,
because it seems like he's important.
- That's right, Conrad. You have explaining to do.
- I'll tell you everything I know, but it's not that much.
- Out with it, then!
- All right, well,
(dramatic piano music)
the big guy makes a lot of,
not so good decisions sometimes and...
I haven't spoken up in a long, long time,
and this is the first time that anyone has done anything
about what I think about things,
and that was you telling him to take that packet.
And now, is this all my fault?
Is all this happening because of me?
- Assuredly so!
- I'm pretty sure it's your fault.
- Oh no!
- Don't worry. Hey, everyone (barking) back off!
(players laughing)
You see Justin sort of steps out a little bit
and looks up at Conrad and says,
Madam Loathing thought Conrad was just another interest,
but Conrad's a lot more than an interest.
Conrad's a...
Conrad's the big guy's conscience, and by all rights,
Conrad should've grown up a long time ago,
should be up there in City Hall, not hiding with me
in the rubble and the rain, selling newspapers to get by.
- I don't mind it.
- Child conscience is underachiever.
- That's an extremely slanted way-
- This is what I'm talking about.
It's never the clear story with Tension here.
- I was paying attention while you were too busy
getting beat up and shot around.
- At least I was doing something.
- You're always doing something!
You have to stop doing things.
Local PI needs to stop doing things. (writing sounds)
- That'll sell papers.
- She really does have it out for you, huh?
- She does! - [Siobhan] I didn't believe it, but-
- You see Justin looks over at Conrad and just goes,
look, Conrad's been wrapping newspapers
in the sort of buried stories for a long time,
the stories that they don't like to run
or they don't think about running.
You're a reporter for that paper.
Don't you think it's funny how much they
run front page stories about things that, you know,
maybe matter today or something that, you know,
it's always something really urgent
and there's something that's got to happen right now.
But big picture, it's like things
get swept under the rug that really matter.
- I've written stories about snot removal.
I've written stories, beautiful stories,
about the ashiness of elbows, and yet one of my best stories
and one of my favorite stories,
was a story that I once wrote about a lovely woman
who worked at the coffee shop next door.
She smiled at us one day. It was nice.
And instead,
on the front page,
Dandruff!
- I think everyone here remembers,
I'm not sure how many people here read the Daily Observer,
but I feel like Dan, you-
- Oh, yeah yeah yeah.
That was like the highlight of the year.
It was like, oh,
we're finally going to get the oxytocin in here!
(Brennan laughing)
Just need one hug!
(Brennan laughing)
We'll be rich!
- We could've been flying high on that hug for a generation.
- That hug would've powered us for a lifetime!
(Freddie and Brennan laughing)
- So I think that listening to that,
the fact that Freddy decided to go with dandruff,
you see even Justin goes like, yeah, that dandruff
was the reason that the big guy didn't say anything.
- And that's when we decided to move to Head and Shoulders.
It was very important.
(players laughing)
And when he stopped wearing black shirts,
coincidentally enough.
(players laughing)
- Justin looks over at you, Conrad, and says,
do you think we should tell them why the...
What we think the problem is with the big guy?
- It sounds like you want to, so.
- I don't want to do it if you don't want to do it.
(players laughing)
I'll bite- I'll kill this guy. - I have to know now, okay?
You tease it out like that, I just have to know.
- I know I'm not supposed to want you to kill everybody,
but part of me wants to know what that would be like.
Anyway- - You get it, kid.
- I'm the only part of this guy that's not kind of human.
(players laughing)
- Okay, I'll tell 'em.
So our big guy, he works for a pharmaceutical company.
We all know that, right?
They're working on some technology
that just, it shouldn't be worked on.
Something about mind reading.
- Oh no.
- You shouldn't be allowed to do that.
(tense, serious music)
- There's a lot of things Conrad started to put together
from the newspapers.
Not any one story, mind you, but Conrad sells them
all day, every day, sees them all the time.
It's just, some of the things that the big guy's bosses
out there, out in the real world,
some of the things they're saying don't add up.
They're asking for bits of research
certain deadlines getting moved up,
things like that that just...
Elias Hodge is not getting the full story,
and that packet,
that's all of the things we've been working on.
And once that goes, then it's out of his hands forever.
Our hands forever.
Our paws forever. I'm a dog.
- Yeah, we know. - Yeah.
Just reminding. I can talk,
and sometimes that scrambles people up.
- Sure, yeah.
- Man, so I should've not had him just take the packet,
but maybe burn the packet and leave town
and change his name, and maybe get bangs.
(players laughing)
- You can do all that?
- Oh, all kinds of things.
- What'd you have him do with the packet?
- I just took it, put it in his bag,
left for the day.
- I'll say at this point that you actually see some sirens
coming up way up above you to that collapsed highway,
so the fuzz has already gotten up to see the damage,
and you hear a bullhorn up there saying,
Mayor Logic has declared a state of emergency!
State of emergency, as the Synaptic Switchboard is down.
We are expecting repairs in short order.
Do not panic. All is well.
The eyes are closed.
No visual information needed until repairs are completed.
- It's freezing and it's dark and it's raining.
Let's go to a coffee shop or something?
This is awful out here. I don't want to be here.
- You are out on the street,
and it's possible for the fuzz to find you here.
- Yeah, I'm up with that.
Get a good cup of mud.
- [Brennan] Flickering- - We have glossaries.
(players laughing)
- Thank you, Carlos, for the glossaries.
Flickering under the warm neon light,
(soft noir music)
you arrive at an old all-night diner.
You see a warm yet older-looking,
very serene soda jerk
behind the counter filling coffee for people,
moving around, serving people.
You see a giant neon Nostalgia's (neon flickering)
flickering as the name of the diner.
As you guys crowd into here
to get out of sight, out of the way-
- I notice that Anastasia is maybe wanting to talk to me,
and I say, you know, I think I need to powder my nose.
Anastasia?
- Yes, I will also go with you to powder your nose.
(Brennan laughing) (typewriter clacking)
- You both step into the restroom of the diner
to powder your nose.
- What do you want from me, huh?
- I want to know, where did you use that key?
- The same place we always use the keys, Anastasia.
Have you forgotten so much?
- I do not use the keys anymore.
I do not think that it is fair that we are able
to have so much power over the big guy.
- Oh sure,
oh sure. - I have stopped using the keys,
but confidentiality,
I noticed at the site of the explosion
that there was a huge, destroyed keyhole.
- Well, that wasn't me. I don't know what to tell you.
- Are you sure?
Because it definitely seems like something you would do.
Which is put a key into a keyhole
and then watch it explode for fun.
- Yes, absolutely, that does sound like me.
(players laughing)
I can't fault you on that. You're correct.
You paid attention to the way that I behave, good for you.
(players snicker)
- I'm going to try to listen at the door.
I think the fact that Tension- - [Hank] That's great.
- Tension and my client have both left for a while.
It's like, this is too,
I gotta hear what's going on here.
- Give me a snoop check,
and I'll say each of you can give me a sneak check,
but we'll take the lower of the two
because you're having a heated conversation.
- Oh boy. - [Danielle] Okay.
- [Hank] Disadvantage. - Disadvantage. There you go.
- I got a five sneak?
(Trapp laughing)
- So I've got a nine plus ♪ two, ♪ so I've got 11.
- [Brennan] 11. So we got a 5 sneak here, and what-
- Now, I rolled a one,
(players laughing)
and I'm going to burn all four of my Moxie.
(players laughing)
- There it is.
So you hear this conversation
about an exploded keyhole.
- Sorry, hold on, that was plus one,
so I'll burn three of the Moxie.
- [Brennan] Gotcha, cool cool cool.
So you hear that entire discussion.
- Cool. - Meanwhile, Dan Fucks, (laughing) Conrad,
Conrad Schintz, and The Fix are just at the booth.
- Fix, what are you having?
- Can I get a chair? I don't fit in the booth.
(players laughing)
- You see that the soda jerk looks over and says,
hey there pal, you like a chair to sit down in?
- Yeah.
- That's all right, mister.
We can get you a chair right now.
What was your favorite chair growing up?
(players laughing)
Your favorite chair?
- I think it was...
I've always been this size, but I used to be younger,
but still this size, so my favorite chair
was the one chair that didn't break.
It was called...
Albert.
- Oh. - I called it Albert.
- You called it Albert.
- Yeah, that's sort of the noise it made when I sat on it.
Albert!
- This beautiful green recliner BarcaLounger chair
thumps in front of you, wooden clawfoot legs.
- Albert!
- You take a seat in it. (creaking in the sound of "albert")
(players laughing)
As the gears kind of swivel it in a little bit.
The guy says, holy shit,
it really says Albert when you sit in it.
I thought that was going to be sort of a whimsical thing,
but it really sounds
much like a person saying Albert. - Like a human voice.
- The Fix's eyes are a little bit misty.
- You see he pats you and says, don't worry.
Here at Nostalgia's, it's always just like it used to be,
and actually ever so slightly better.
- That's a good chair.
I'd like to apologize for trying to steal you.
I do have some explaining to do, but I'm going to
wait until those ladies and that really creepy man
listening at the ladies' room door get back.
(Brennan laughing)
- You see a regular of Daniel Fucks' club
comes up to the door and says,
we're doing some bathroom door listening!
- It's not like that, man.
- Oh, all right. What's your name, pal? (spits)
- Don't touch me! Don't fucking talk to me!
- Come on, take my hand! - I've never done that before.
I take the spitty hand. It's weird, I don't like that.
I don't think I'm going to do that again.
(players laughing)
- So the two of you continue
to have your conversation in the powder room.
- I'm concerned that if you did not use the key...
- Well, I used the key. I just didn't break the keyhole.
- Well then, who has other keys?
- Well, I don't know, but if it's broken,
then maybe they didn't use a key.
Maybe they had to break it to use it.
Did you ever think of that?
That seems like a thing that I would also do.
But again, I did not. I used the proper key.
(curious twinkling music)
- I think here, you also remember
that evidence cart that went away.
There's beginning to be a lot of loose ends,
both back at the crime scene, that evidence cart,
and also the fact that you know that other people
in the family had keys as well, right? - Yeah.
- [Brennan] So. - Do we have...
I don't, I don't think, but do we have an idea
of the kinds of folks who would have keys,
or is it not a known thing.
- Immanuel and Imogen Pulse both,
which are Imelda's mother and father,
would likely both have keys.
But it's possible that there are others.
That's just, the Pulse Family is incredibly
notable and wealthy, but it's possible there's others.
But the main thing you would probably know
is that most of the people who run the city
wouldn't need a key,
because the governmental bodies they are in charge of
are what actually theoretically makes all the decisions.
The keys are like a backdoor, and probably, you would know,
can't be used to do big, complex things.
Imelda couldn't execute a 20 part plan
through impulse, right?
But it's like, I can get you to do one quick thing, right?
So you would know all of that information.
- That was also not the only problem.
There was what appeared to be
many files and packages and things
that were suddenly whisked away from the crime scene.
- Well, I don't know anything about a crime scene,
and I don't know about anything
being whisked away from anywhere.
- You're telling me you don't know anything
about something being whisked away?
- I'm not a whisker! I don't whisk anything!
I've never whisked a thing in my life!
- You have been known to whisk. I've seen you whisk.
- Oh fine, I'll whisk a thing every now and again,
just for fun, but I've never whisked evidence!
- (sigh) That is true, you have never whisked evidence.
- And certainly not in the last couple of days.
Maybe last week, a couple of months ago,
taking a piece of evidence here and there,
but not for any nefarious reasons!
Sometimes you just gotta take a thing, you know what I mean?
I take one of the soaps and put it in my pocket.
(group laughing)
- [Brennan] What's Hunch doing outside the door?
- Hunch is going to scurry back to the table
and take a close seat next to Conrad.
- Cool.
- Kind of lean over to Conrad and sort of be like,
I don't know exactly what's going on yet.
- Why are you so close to me?
(players laughing)
- Because I think there's a lot of people
trying to kill you right now.
- Okay, and are you one of them?
- I am not one of them.
- Okay, well, that's what the other people are saying.
- I can't argue with that logic.
That's pretty tight logic there.
But I will say, I did stop The Fix
from beating the crap out of you,
and I did stop Danny Fucks from beating the crap out of you.
So if it's The Fix or the Fucks-
(players laughing)
- [Alex] All right, well.
- I don't know if that earns your trust,
but I just want to be close to you right now
to make sure nothing else bad happens.
- I guess I appreciate it.
I mean, I'm at a table with all three of you.
I'm just going to see how it plays out, I guess.
- I think the two of you, unless there's more to discuss,
emerge from the bathroom
and join your companions at the table here.
- Im, I believe I heard sneaking.
We should go back to the table.
- I open,
the two of us are like- - You just see a guy out there who says,
don't mind me, I'm just a pervert.
(group laughing)
- It's that guy with the spit on his hand!
(Brennan spitting)
- I'm the thought about just this. Doing this all the time.
(laughing) And then runs off.
- What's his name?
- Some people are larger concepts,
and some of us are real specific!
(players laughing)
He runs away.
- (trailing off) You'll never see me again!
(group laughing)
- That's what he yells every time he flees.
(group laughing)
- I sort of, I kind of like, just sort of like,
kind of put my hands down.
I go, okay. We got a lot of things going on here.
The way I see it, someone,
I know from the taste of the blood,
the Avaricci, definitely out to kill Conrad.
Conrad knows what's going on with this file
that Imelda moved, so we have to assume
Avaricci did not want that file moved,
and that Conrad is going to be helpful there.
We also have to assume that these keys are important.
Now, either they were trying to stop more people
from using the keys,
or they want to use the keys themselves.
In either case, I think anyone who holds a key
is either at risk or is a threat,
and that sounds like something I want to know more about.
- I think at this point, you also, Fix,
remember that when he starts talking
about a file and Conrad- - Yeah.
- You remember, yeah, that you have something similar.
- Now, I know a few of you, and I won't say who.
- It's me. He knows me.
(Freddie laughing)
- I've done some work for some of the people at this table,
and I like my work, and I don't question my work, usually.
But I recently was given a reason to worry
for the first time in my career,
and I was just gonna do as I was told,
but something's not right here.
I know how to do my job,
but the district attorney, Mr. Bition,
he gave me a contract. (tense string music)
Just something I do, I eliminate distraction for this mind.
We could not function as a society without that work.
So I'm proud of it, and I like it.
But he gave me a contract for something to eliminate.
He pulls it out, he puts it on the table,
and it says Conrad... Schintz.
- About damn time!
- Oh no, help! Help!
(Alex screaming "help!" repeatedly while Brennan barks)
(players laughing)
- I pick up the file and I say, this says Conrad Schintz!
(players laughing)
- I do want you all to know that if I wanted to,
I could kill any one of you quite quickly.
Now, all you at once would be a little bit tricky,
but I probably could pull it off.
There is something too weird going on here,
and it's not just that I was told to kill a child,
which I have never been told to do before.
- Never? - No, actually.
- I just wanted to-
- You know, I mostly think y'all are quite fun.
Good folk, children.
- Children. Ah, the innocent babes. Good folk.
- [Hank] Good folk!
- On behalf of children, thank you.
(players laughing)
- I appreciate your appreciation.
(Freddie laughing)
But I have to say, I do not know what to do
when I'm not being told what to do,
so I'm maybe going to be looking to y'all for some of that.
- Conrad, give me a snoop check, difficulty of four.
- Three, but I'll burn a Moxie.
- Hell yeah.
You notice, as The Fix is speaking,
and I think you've probably heard,
you've never seen The Fix before,
but you've heard ghost stories about this guy.
There's a lot of dangerous gangster types
who wander the mind,
and this dude's got arms down to the middle of his shins
and is a hulking trapezoid gorilla
who just wanders around the shadows of Mentopolis
murdering distractions.
But I think that on that snoop check,
you see him sort of stopped in his tracks.
He said, I changed my mind. I thought something was weird.
and I think for the first time in a long time,
as sad or depressed as Conrad often is,
that you recognize
that the thing that stopped
him has something to do with you.
You look and realize that the first thing that affected him
was your name and face on this portrait
and, you know, there's some power.
This guy wanders around the brain killing distractions.
Imelda can actually speak to the big guy upstairs,
and I think there's a moment on that four snoop check
where you are aware that you were able to interrupt
another cognitive function.
Something about you specifically was able to make
some other thing, that normally the grownups in Mentopolis
are just hustling and bustling and never stoppable
and always just doing what they were always going to do
mindlessly and with no awareness about the consequences
of what they're doing, but something about you
made one of these adult functions stop.
- Whoa.
You're not going to hurt me?
- You know, the tails on a swallowtail butterfly
don't serve any aerodynamic purpose.
(Brennan laughing)
- I feel very threatened all of a sudden.
(players laughing)
- They're there because birds need something to grab onto
when they're trying to kill a butterfly,
and they are designed to capture the attention of a bird.
And that bird will grab onto that tail,
and it will break off. (Brennan barks)
And the butterfly will be free.
That is how I imagine my work sometimes.
Some things have to go.
I do not think that you
are the tail of a swallowtail butterfly.
I think you might be the butterfly.
- I only,
I only caught half of that.
(players laughing)
- You see Justin looks and says,
I'll tell you anything you want to know.
(group laughing)
You see the soda jerk comes back over and serves you guys
any drinks you've ordered up 'til that point.
- It's just syrup. Just pancake syrup. (players laughing)
- You just want a full pint glass of grenadine?
- Yes. No, pancake syrup. No pancakes.
- I'll take a full glass of grenadine.
(Brennan laughing)
- I do love the syrup.
- He says, pancake syrup? So, maple.
You're saying pancake syrup.
Do you mean maple syrup, or do you mean-
- I am unaware of this distinction.
I just want the syrup. The sweet stuff, baby.
Pour it down my threat.
- See, we only serve things here at Nostalgia's
that you have a love of from a long-
Did you-
Is there a me-
You see, weirdly, a memory comes up of Elias Hodge
hiding in a pantry, just guzzling a full thing
of syrup. - Just full on, yeah yeah yeah.
- And just burping and screaming and crying (laughing).
- Cut to him outside running as hard as he can
full sprint in a circle.
Ah, those were the days!
Carefree youth!
- All of you are these synaptic beings
that can kind of light up rooms that you're in.
Dan just lights up, and you see the first image
in the reflection of the diner window (sound of light humming)
of a little kid's hand grabbing a stick,
and the whole diner lights up
with a feeling of, oh, that's a good stick!
- That's a good stick! - I found a good stick!
- Heavy, good weight to it.
(Brennan laughing)
- Deep, profound pleasure. This fucking stick rules!
And (whoosh) the light diminishes once again.
- What are you all having?
- I'll have a cup of coffee grounds.
(players laughing lightly)
- Justin goes, what?
(players laughing)
The soda jerk says, you don't want coffee?
You want the grounds?
- Yeah, just the grounds. Whatever's left.
- That's so thoughtful in a way
that I can't bear to think about.
(players laughing)
Okay, I'm going to go get you real food. How's that sound?
You've inspired me to want to help you.
- Okay, well, I didn't ask for that, but (laughing)
- No, but yeah, I don't want to offend yo-
(stammering)
He walks away, totally confu- (players laughing)
(stammering and laughing)
Con Schintz has left this guy in a state of panic
about what the right thing to do is.
Do I give the kid grounds? And then walks away.
- Oh no, no one else got to order.
- Conrad, you fool! (players laughing)
Look at what you've done!
You impudent child!
- All right, coffee grounds?
But I'll make something better than that.
- I will have a glass of room temperature vodka.
(Alex laughing)
- Jesus Christ. Okay, yes, all right.
- Yeah, can I get the experience
of tasting a root beer float for the first time?
- Ah. Points up at that exact thing written big on the menu.
It's like the first thing. - Yeah.
- Yeah. Yeah, we can do that.
That's exactly right.
- Don't you have anything new?
- (sighs) Look, Ms. Pulse, (Hank laughing)
you come to Nostalgia's all the time!
We only serve things we already liked!
- Well, I don't know!
Maybe you'd be under new management or something!
I'll have, what's the weirdest thing I could mix together?
I'll, I'll get coffee and bacon,
and I'll mix them myself if you don't want to.
- I'm not going to mix them.
What you do at the booth is your own business,
and if you don't like how we do things here,
may I recommend the place next door?
And you see there's a bizarre fusion place
called Novelty across the street.
- Oh, hell yeah!
- No, no! Nostalgia's better!
- But there's all kinds of new stuff over there!
- Oh, to hell with all of you!
(group laughing)
And says, anything for you, sir?
- Just a calzone.
(Brennan and Alex laughing)
- Yeah, we got a calzone for sure. We've had that before.
(players laughing)
It's going to be a little bit of nicotine in there,
because it was that year in college when, you know.
(players laughing)
So you guys all get served your food,
but Conrad is wanted by what we now know
to be the Avaricci family, but also the DA.
So both ends of the legal-criminal spectrum
are attempting to kill Conrad.
- Sure, and these are not people who
generally work together, as far as we know.
- I also, it could be nothing,
just noticing that the phone lines are down,
noticing that the eyes are closed.
Could be just, you know, a bad hangover.
Sometimes that happens,
to close down the phone lines. - Sure.
- Could be, something's pretty wrong with the big man.
I don't know how much time we have to figure this out.
- So, I would like to use my troublemaker stat, which is,
spend a Moxie to locate and receive help within reason
and without making any stat checks from a criminal network.
- Hell yeah. - I want to get a sense of why did the,
what else is going on in the city?
What does the tendrils of the criminal underworld
know is going on here? - Hell yeah.
- Probably just by waving to someone.
The spit in the hand guy. - The pervert.
(players laughing)
- So you see there's a guy sitting on a fire hydrant.
He's taken his shoes off,
he's put his hat on the ground in front of him,
and is just spitting into his hand over and over again.
(spitting) Still good!
(group laughing)
He goes, oh shit! You'll never see me again!
He looks out and says, oh hey there!
Danny Fucks, how's it going? (smooth jazz music)
- Good, good. I wanted to bend your ear a little bit.
- Well!
Don't threaten me with a good time. - Do not touch-
- Yes, yes. Come a little bit closer, whisper in there, yes.
- Ooh, do it (creepily laughing). Do it.
- The hell is going on here? The freeway collapsed.
- Yeah, I saw that.
There's been a couple of road closures around there.
I mean, I've been sort of bebopping and skedaddling
all over this bitty burg here,
but I'll tell you one thing, buster.
These fuzz have been locking down a bunch of the roadways,
the wires are down for a while, and they closed the eyes
right after the road came down.
- Oh, so you're telling me that they,
that the orders came from up top to close the eyes?
- Oh, Mayor Logic, that's for sure. - Hm.
- But I'll tell you something else sort of funny.
It all sort of st-
There was already some trouble this morning.
You know, down at Oblongata Station?
- Yes. - We had some trains come in
from the kidneys, of all places, loaded top to bottom.
I'm not sure if you've seen, a lot of the dopamine spots
around town are offering specials on adrenaline shots.
City's absolutely flooded with it.
It's all I've been drinking all day.
- This explains a lot. Hm.
You all heard that. You guys all hear that?
- Oh yeah, I listen into every conversation.
- Me too.
- You hear that, Conrad, you little shit?
Look at all the shit storm you've caused!
- I don't know what that means! (players laughing)
What are the messages from the kidneys?
- Sounds like maybe we should go to the kidneys
and find out, straight to the source!
- I mean, it sounds to me like there was
a pretty severe fight or flight response that was triggered.
Something, something spooked the big guy pretty bad.
He's closing his eyes? He's flooded with adrenaline?
The freeways are collapsing? This,
something bad has happened to the big guy.
- Out there? - [Trapp] Out there.
- It's all my fault. I'm sorry, you guys.
- That's not going to be enough, Conrad!
- Okay, you're right.
- Back off, Fucks.
(players laughing)
- You like yelling at children a little bit too much.
- I like yelling at this particular child
because he deserves it!
- You guys should know, I kind of like it, too.
(group laughing)
- We have an adversarial relationship.
- Justin goes, that's right. Conrad loves shame.
(players laughing)
- Yeah. (laughing) - We know it-
You're my best friend. - You're my best friend!
(players laughing)
- Now, the way I see it, this is all tied to that file.
Seems like maybe we make that file go away,
maybe a lot of these problems stop.
On the other hand, I'm a little more interested in knowing
what's in the file and why all these people are doing this,
so I don't know, we could maybe, I don't know, Ms. Pulse?
Would you like to destroy the file?
- Well, I mean, if that's what you think is right.
But also, we could maybe...
get him to open it.
Sneak up to the eyes. - Yes.
- See what's going on in there.
- Impulse has gotten us this far.
- That's pretty interesting.
Can I do a snoop check to see..
- You can do any snoop checks you want
to gain other information,
but I think also, Hunch, you're feeling your nose twitching.
You're on the case again.
You can feel things starting to come together.
The information that's coming around
is starting to really have that feeling of, ooh,
this is not happenstance.
I'm onto something here.
So I'll also allow people, if you want to make snoop checks
to get more information, that's great.
You can also make savvy checks if you're interested in,
like you were talking about, okay, can we go to the eyes?
Can we go to something else?
If you want to make a savvy check
to remember resources within Mentopolis
that you could avail yourself to,
that's also totally doable.
- Yeah I will definitely do that.
- I want to do a savvy check to see if I could
convince the DA that I have killed this child
without actually killing this child.
- Oh, okay, I'm going to call that a DC eight savvy check.
- Okay.
Can I get my plus three, because I'm defending a friend?
- (gasps) You have the
protector feature. - [Alex and Danielle] Aww.
(group laughing)
- A gentle giant! (players laughing)
- I love how scary we designed your character to be,
and it so quickly, we're at episode two, became the, aww!
(group laughing)
I swear to god, nothing fans of actual play
love more than a murderer.
(group laughing)
It's like, he's a good murderer!
(group laughing)
- He's our giant killy wubby. - [Brennan] Giant killy wubby!
Yes, you absolutely get the plus three.
- And you said it was eight? - [Brennan] It was eight, yeah.
- Still not great. Ooh I did it!
Nine.
- Hell yes, so I think you are aware that in the past,
because you can sometimes just mist people,
occasionally you can bring trophies,
so you would need some kind of trophy
or something along those lines,
but if you can bring a trophy that the DA would have
some reason to believe genuinely was the kid's,
yeah, you could get away with it for sure.
- Can I ask you a question? - (sad and scared) Okay.
(players laugh)
- Is there anything that I could show someone
to make them think that I killed you?
- But you're not going to actually kill me?
- No.
- Okay. Um...
I have this pair of ice skates.
- Where do you keep them? - In my- In my house.
It's not really a house, but it's where I live, by Sugah's.
- Could I just bring somebody there and say
this was your house, and I swear I killed you?
- I guess so. You're not going to kill me for real?
- I'm not going to kill you.
For real, I'm not going to kill you. I'm a pretty
nice guy. - I do a snoop check to see
if he's really not going to kill.
- You look at The Fix.
You get the sensation of,
The Fix seems to be the attitude of,
when I want to kill people, it's something that happens.
- I think you'll know when The Fix wants to kill you.
- Yeah, he called me a butterfly,
but I didn't pay attention to the whole speech.
(players laughing lightly)
- So yeah, I think you are aware
that that would be proof enough for most people.
- I also kind of want to see what he thinks of that place.
- [Brennan] Yes.
- Maybe he would say something that would be helpful.
- You're trying to bait the DA, Fix?
- I know him pretty well.
- In my experience, the DA is happy
to ignore things that are inconvenient to him.
- That's kind of what I help with.
- There's a lot of other stuff I keep there.
I kind of would like to be able
to still hang onto it, so can I...
I just want to tidy up the place first,
if you're going to go look at it.
(players laughing)
- Yeah, maybe we can go check it out together.
- Okay.
- Detective Hunch is pretty curious
about what exactly is in this file at this point.
(serious, curious music)
Are there memory banks I can access,
or any place where I could get some more info
on what was actually in this file?
- Give me a savvy check.
We'll call it a difficulty of four gives you basic,
and we'll say six gives you advanced.
- I got a seven on my savvy for that.
- Very cool. Okay, awesome.
So I think you would know, too.
There are a couple places of authority
that you would be able to pretty easily access.
The main one is the official memory bank
that is located around Ammon's Horn in the Hippo Campus.
That is the big university location,
and that is the home to
all of the big guy's biographical memories.
All of the like,
this is where we keep the story of this guy's life.
It's all right here.
So that's a great place to go to access memory, and again,
Mentopolis is a wild place,
because there are these locations
that are associated with this stuff,
but there's always a chance for things to go missing.
Memories go missing.
A lot of the brain's functions are very diffused.
But I think for that type of memory,
the Hippo Campus is a great place to go.
They're a university,
and then if you want to roll a savvy here-
- Oh yeah. - [Brennan] Yeah.
- Let's see, that's a five plus one, so a six.
- Six. That's the advanced information, great.
I think you are enough of a gumshoe
that there's two places for you to go.
So there's the central sort of visual processing centers
that are in the center of the brain
that you know are actually run side by side
with imagination and visual processing,
where everything the big guy is seeing,
they sort of all put together.
That place tends to get really tamped down by the bigwigs.
There's a huge governmental presence there.
There's also a place called De'lux Industrial,
and that is all the way back in Occipital Park
at the back of the brain, and De'lux Industrial
is essentially the first plant where just raw light
comes in from the eyes and hits the brain first
before it goes and gets filtered off and refined
into what's actually going to be in focus
or what I remembered stuff looking like
versus what it actually looked like.
- Whether or not the dress
is blue and black or white and gold.
- De'lux Industrial just constantly has a dress
going from white and gold to blue and black.
- That's the logo that they have out front.
- Is there a place to check for other,
you know we mentioned that we've been getting trains
coming in from the kidneys,
there's been the boost in adrenaline and things like that.
Is there a way to be able to get to the kidneys,
communicate with that, or even stalk the train station
to see if there's any stuff that's coming in
from the kidneys to kind of see if,
since he's kind of doing his curiosity bit,
I wanted to go and check and see if there are any clues
about what's happening physically
that might be able to help us, or at least if nothing else,
we can maybe stop what is clearly happening,
a breakdown in the body.
- Hell yes, that's all at Oblongata Station.
You could head there right away and get down there
and talk to, you know the stationmaster down there.
You'd be able to talk.
Most of you have never left Mentopolis, and honestly,
people from Mentopolis kind of have an attitude
like they never want to leave Mentopolis.
You don't want to actually go to the kidneys.
But there's people at Oblongata Station
that they go to the kidneys, and you can talk to them.
So all of you here, a couple different ideas
have cropped up here in the diner together,
all of which seem potentially quite promising.
How do you want to handle this? What do you do?
This is fully, you know, now it's up to you gumshoes.
- Why don't we all divide and go our own separate ways,
(Trapp laughing)
and all of us come back together at the end?
- Brennan just licked his lips.
Did you see that? Flop sweat. - [Hank] There are six of us.
- Separate the party! Separate the party!
- Party wants to separate! All right!
(players laughing)
Justin looks and says,
I'll stick with Conrad no matter what.
- And I'll stick with you, Justin.
- Even if it's the last- - Don't say it again!
Please don't say it again, it's too sad!
- Even if it's our last day. - [Siobhan] Come on.
- [Brennan And Alex] You're my best friend.
- [Trapp] Goddammit. - [Hank] That's a lot, you guys.
- You see even the pervert outside starts crying
and goes, and I'll never see them again.
(players laughing)
Yeah, how do you guys want to split up?
- It feels like Dan is most concerned with...
physical survival, because without that,
then none of this stuff is going to matter after that.
I think we should go to the station and see what's going on,
get us out of this scrape that we're clearly in.
- All right, let's go to Oblongata Station.
We shall check out the kidneys.
- Hell yeah, you two take off for Oblongata Station.
How about the rest of you?
- I'd like to go visit your home.
- All right. - [Hank] See what you got there.
- Yeah, I'm looking forward to getting to know you better.
- I am impressed by your ability to trust me
(players laughing)
despite my femur-sized arm bones
and my previous attempts to kidnap you.
(players laughing)
- You are who you are, and... let's get on our way.
(players laughing)
- Then you just eat some coffee grounds out of your cup.
- I gotta get a few last bites in.
(players laughing)
- You see that the guy comes over and says,
I can get you a muffin, do you want a muffin?
- Yeah, to hold my coffee grounds?
- What, you want a bread bowl made out of a muffin
to hold coffee grounds that you eat?
- Yes, like a to go cup.
(players laughing near-silently)
- You know that stuff stunts your growth.
(players laughing)
- There's got to be a section of the brain
that's just weird inventions.
Wait, this could work! - A muffin?
- Not every one's a winner.
- Unbelievable.
Yeah, he says, here's a muffin hollowed out.
You can have that. That's great.
- Thank you so much. - You got it.
- Back to the old alma mater?
- Let's check it out. You're the client.
- Justin looks up and says, well, with the phone lines down,
if we find anything out, where should we meet back up?
- Oh.
- Listen, there's one place
whenever I don't know where to go, and that's Sugah's.
(players laughing)
We know Dan controls the joint.
If there's prying eyes, maybe it's a good place to go
where we have a little more control of the place.
- Police aren't going to go there twice in one day.
- That'd be crazy. - That would be crazy.
- There is a fourth location that you are aware of,
which is De'lux Industrial, so you could all go
do a thing- - Oh, I see.
- And then converge.
- [Siobhan] At De'lux Industrial.
- Yeah. - [Hank] Great.
- Sounds classy.
- That's how I'd do it if I was writing a story.
(players laughing)
- If I was writing a s...
Oh, shit!
(players laughing)
So with that, all of you take your leave,
venturing into the streets of Mentopolis.
We are going to move from Nostalgia's Diner,
and I think the first group we'll follow
is Anastasia and Dan
headed down to Oblongata Station. (ominous music)
This is way down by the brainstem,
and you can see huge arches
of a vast marble train station, voice coming over.
Welcome to Oblongata Station. Welcome, welcome.
And you see there's a bunch of nutrients
coming out of the train that are kind of marching
into the brain on a work visa
who are coming in to help out for the time being.
You see that the stationmaster's booth,
there's a sort of octagonal raised tower
that looks over these big marble staircases that come up.
You see that there are a lot of crates
moving off these huge, big locomotives
that you can see says Kidney Express on the side of it,
and big, big crates with that stenotype font on the side
saying adrenaline are all off on the side, and you see
porters moving them up towards the industrial lift.
As you approach, what is it that you do?
- You know this place better than I do.
Who should we be talking to?
- Well, I happen to have an in with the stationmaster.
- Oh, perfect.
- So I believe that we should definitely go up there.
I would suggest maybe keep some of your proclivities
a little more private.
- How dare you? Very well.
(players laughing)
By default. - Absolutely no. Okay.
- By default, anytime someone says something about Dan,
his first response, like a reflex, is how dare you?
Very well.
- So then we head over to the stationmaster's tower office.
- As we walk up, I want to do a quick check.
Any illicit pleasure chemicals moving around here.
- Go ahead and give me, I'll say, snoop four.
- Four on the dot. - You look over.
I think on a four, you see an old nervous system messenger.
You see he's got the postal outfit,
and it's got Nervous System on a big sash,
but he's a much older guy.
You rarely see him.
He normally reports to you, because he comes from,
there's no polite way to say this,
he comes from the genitalia.
He comes from the junk. But you see he's looking over.
This is Wilton.
So, you see Wilton looks over.
- Was that written down? - What's that?
- Was that written down, or did that just-
- That just came to me. - Okay, great.
- You see he looks over and looks up
as you are looking away.
You head over.
Max Medulla, they are the station manager here.
You've known Max for a long time.
They're a very officious type,
but they are always a little bit pompous.
They're happy to answer questions
for the paper most of the time.
You see that Wilton sort of looks down.
Also on a four, I think you see that outside the station,
there are a couple of paddy wagons from the cops,
and I think you look over and are normally expecting to see,
you know, some uniformed officers might have a nightstick.
You see big, padded armor and visored helmets
and these long batons and corrugated steel shields.
You recognize these as shock troopers, shock officers,
but as in psychological shock. - Yeah, right.
- You see shock written in big letters over their chests,
that are standing around these paddy wagons on the outside.
So you notice Wilton,
but Wilton doesn't appear to be arrested or anything.
You see these sort of shock officers
outside of the train station.
Anastasia, you're walking over
to the station manager, right?
- Mm-hm.
- I think I'm going to keep up with Anastasia.
- Cool, cool cool cool.
Max turns around to look at you.
They have their hair in a little bun
sort of tucked under their cap, sort of officious look.
They have pristine white gloves and a little whistle,
and you see behind them, they have these huge switches
that they can pull in states of emergency
to trigger reflexes on the body.
You see there's a reflex switch for one of the hands
and a reflex switch for something else,
absolute crisis stuff that needs to go out into the body.
You see Max looks at you and says, Anastasia!
Been long enough, sweetheart. How's it going?
- Oh, Max, it's been fantastic to see you.
Thank you so much.
I'm so happy that I was able to come down.
I just wanted to give a little visit,
maybe get some of the inside scoop,
a little bit of the know.
I have brought with me my friend, Dan F...
- Dan Fucks! Pleased to meet you!
- Oh.
Dan Fucks.
Okay.
- Yes, I do! Ha ha!
- Hey, pleasure to meet you as well.
You see Max is sort of an authority figure here,
but you're so deep near the brainstem
that people aren't too hoity-toity around here anyway,
so you see that they look at you and just go, all right.
Well, Danny, welcome down here.
Are you here to collect Wilton? He's looking a little lost.
I think he's waiting for his train back to the gonads.
(players laughing)
- We're here on far more important matters.
There's all kinds of hubbub in the city.
Tell them all about it.
We're trying to figure out what's going on.
- Yeah, so she turns over to them and says,
Max, I am hearing some things through the vine.
I'm hearing that you have been getting
a lot of deliveries coming from the kidneys.
- Oh, I mean, nothing more than normal, you know?
Go ahead and give me a snoop. (Trapp laughing)
- Snoop, snoop, snoop!
- I'll roll to set the DC.
The DC here is going to be a five.
- Oh, then I'm halving it.
- A little bead of sweat
collects at the corner of Max's brow
as they attempt to sort of throw you.
Yeah, I mean, business as usual, you know?
(tense music)
Oblongata Station's running like clockwork,
you know what I mean?
You know, we, you know, we got a message from up top.
There's this road. You know what you should be looking into?
These road collapses. What's going on there, you know?
- That's definitely something that I'm interested in.
Thank you so much for, you know,
leading me towards another great story.
I do see that there seems to be
a lot of increased police activity.
- Oh, well, yeah, and Mentopolis's finest,
you know, it's always great because, you know,
a lot of things come in from the nervous system
and, you know, we...
They're always here to help us kind of sort out,
make sure everyone coming in has their paperwork
cleared out- - Max.
Max.
You're not going to do this with me, are you?
- Go ahead and give me a slick check.
We'll call this a DC...
I'll call this a DC seven.
- I have to actually roll for this.
Okay. Come on, baby.
Yes, I rolled a six,
and then I've got a plus two, so that gets me an eight.
- So you see Max looks at you and they go, look, Anastasia.
You know, yeah, the cops are here, (heartbeat pumping)
but, you know, sometimes we need to know if the reason
the hairs are moving on the arm is because it's windy,
or if there's a bug, you know?
So they gotta sort out what from what and...
Look, there's a lot of...
Look, trains have been coming in from the kidneys all day,
but that's not the main story here.
You know, we got crates and crates of adrenaline coming in.
It's going all over the city.
It's replaced every other shipment
of anything else coming in, but...
Those shock troopers came in and uh...
There was a smaller passenger train.
They've taken it off the yard already.
They wouldn't let the doors open until they were in place.
Those cops got on board, and they just went to work,
started clubbing away inside that train.
I don't know who was in there,
but it came from not far away.
It wasn't a long distance locomotive.
Judging by the look of it, I'd say it came from the scalp.
- The scalp?
- If I had to guess. I mean, short distance.
- Max, are you keeping yourself safe?
- I try to keep my nose out of other people's business.
This is all off the record, by the way.
- Max, have I ever?
- Occasionally, yeah, for sure.
- Actually yes, I remember reading,
actually, several articles.
- Have I ever, recently?
- Yeah, I guess not recently, depending on your definition.
But yeah, look, just...
Look, yeah, I don't know what those troopers
are doing waiting outside.
They dragged a bunch of people off the train in handcuffs.
But if you want to take a look at the train,
it got taken off the yard and put into one of the hangars
out past platform nine.
- All right, so I go to shake their hand.
Thank you. Once again, thank you so much.
This has been such a pleasant visit.
It's always great when I get to see you.
Smiling extra big in case
any of the cops or shock troopers see them talking.
- You see Max looks around and says,
yeah, always happy to talk
about the station...
janitorial initiative!
- (enthusiastically) I love toilets!
- (enthusiastically) Me too! Gotta shit!
(players laughing)
- All right, come on, Mr. F.
- Sounds like we need to sneak into this rail yard,
- That's what it sounds like. - And get a look at this train.
I'll cause a distraction!
- Hell yeah, if you want to cause a distraction,
that will absolutely way lower
the difficulty of your sneak roll.
- So I'm going to go straight up to Wilton
and just backhand slap him. (slapping sound)
What are you doing here?
How dare you show your face around here
in the brain, Wilton!
- Mister-
- How long have you been waiting here?
- Mr. Fucks, hello!
I came in from the nut sack!
(players laughing)
- I can see that. You're worse for wear.
- I got a package they gave me to deliver
to bring right to you in case we're being fondled!
But maybe, you know, we're at work,
but maybe someone's become very inappropriate!
Maybe we're about to get laid in the office!
It's hard to say!
- I'll take that from you and reprimand you
greatly and loudly, so that everyone looks at us!
(players laughing)
- While this is happening, I start doing that thing
that they do in movies where you press yourself-
- Oh yeah.
- Press yourself up against brick, slowly look around.
I've got my hat down. I'm hiding in the shadows
and just kind of moving side to side,
I guess like the aliens in Alien Invaders
where you can only move side to side.
So I'm doing a little bit of that
and then a little bit of up and then a little bit back
until I'm kind of close enough
so that I can get to the train, in which case
I just start crouching down and staying down low.
- Go ahead, give me a slick check
as you attempt to get everyone's attention away.
- [Trapp] No problem. - That is an eight.
Sorry, yes, that was a nine,
and I'm going to spend two to put it up to an 11.
- Ooh, hell yeah!
So that's going to bring the DC of your sneak check
all the way down to a three, but I will say
it's a snap decision, so I'm going to ask that you roll.
- Okay, except that I have nerves of steel,
so I'm going to spend one Moxie
to treat a snap decision as a planned action.
- Ooh! Nerves of steel,
our fearless reporter Anastasia Tension! (players ooh and wow)
(Danielle laughing)
Hell yeah, so having that gets you to the three?
- That gets me there. - Hell yes.
Anastasia, a shadow to the wall, the attention of this mind
moves throughout Oblongata Station,
and you sneak across the rail yard. (sneaky stealthy music)
Long shadows. Tropes, tropes, tropes.
(all whispering "tropes")
Steam rising from the locomotives. (steam hissing)
It's steamy down here at the brainstem.
- You walk through the steam! Ooh.
(Danielle makes a hissing noise)
- Come out, your wonderful trilby jaunty on your head
as you, lady reporter finds out.
You see the wide open doors of the train car here.
Are you approaching with speed in mind
or with stealth in mind?
- I'm approaching with stealth in mind.
- Okay, go ahead, DC four sneak roll.
- Is this planned or is this-
- [Brennan] I'll say because you have that distraction,
this is planned.
- Okay, then I'm going to halve it.
- Cool, halve it, stay to the shadows.
You manage to sneak past,
and you see the train pulled away,
and you go and look at the serial number on the outside.
Go ahead and give me a savvy check.
We'll call it a DC three savvy.
- I'm gonna halve it. - Hell yeah, great.
This is exactly what you're meant to do.
You are a reporter,
all of this is stuff that is right in your wheelhouse.
You look at the numbers
up on the side of the train coming in.
You do recognize this. This is a nervous system local.
This comes in from the scalp.
These used to come in all the time
when you covered the dandruff story.
(players laughing)
When you were doing feedback on the dandruff story,
you would get quotes from people
coming off this train all the time.
You're like, that's from the fucking scalp!
You go around. Give me a snoop check.
You can halve it, but I'll say that
we'll put two different tiers here.
So there's a difficulty eight,
and there's also a difficulty 12.
The eight is basic, and the 12 is advanced information.
- So the eight I will go ahead and halve.
- [Brennan] Okay, great. - I've got that.
The 12, I do have to roll for.
- Cool, go for it. - Come on, baby!
That is a four.
- No worries.
- Oh, you shouldn't have smiled that big.
Why would you smile that big?
- [Freddie] So happy. - All's well, all's well.
So on that eight, you go see the open doors of the train.
As you look down on that eight snoop check,
you see blood dripping on the stairs of the train.
As you walk in, you see the commotion of incredible violence
from these shock officers that boarded the train, clearly.
As you walk into the back, you hear... (tense, sorrowful music)
(breathing raggedly)
Looking between the seats,
somewhere that must have been missed,
you see, wearing the postal service uniform,
the same one that Wilton is wearing out by the platform,
you see there is a young nervous system messenger, courier,
who looks up at you and goes,
(gasping for breath)
H- Help.
Help me.
And you see that the messenger's face is taut and angular.
There's a serrated surface to their nose.
Their hands are made of broken glass,
and you see this is a pain responder
who just looks up and says, who are you?
- How are you? My name is Stacy Fakename.
(players laughing)
- Hi, Ms. Fakename. I gotta get...
I gotta get...
I gotta get this to the Daily Observer.
I gotta...
I gotta get this... to... the editor.
They need to know.
- Okay, okay, I have an in at the Daily Observer.
I'll take that.
(Freddie and Hank laughing)
- The form in front of you begins to mist,
and as it does, you hold this,
and this dying messenger looks up at you,
having done the one thing they were supposed to do.
You open the message to look at it.
We're in pain.
The back of our head. We're bleeding.
And you feel in your body, as a being made of attention,
suddenly, some part of Elias Hodge's brain
knows he's just sustained a head injury,
and all of a sudden, the collapsed highways.
You immediately know,
it's, it's blunt trauma to the head,
and you can feel from this message, you have a sense that
this is going to start bleeding profusely.
You have a sense of, all this bad stuff is about to happen.
But all that you have right now is this initial report
just from this one thing on the scalp.
Because it's the nervous system,
there's no visual information,
there's no other sensory information attached to it,
but you know that all those shock officers
came in and tried to clear out,
and there must have been a ton of these pain couriers
in here that have just been arrested.
- (sighs) Okay, I look down at the courier.
Hey, are you still with us?
(whoosh, pop)
(Danielle sighs)
- Looking at the message in your hand, is there anything
that you would want to try to investigate from there?
- If we've got a brain injury, and that's doing
the pain receptors and everything like that,
I think I'm going to go back over to Mr. Fucks.
- Yeah, you begin to head back over to Mr. Fucks.
Give me one last savvy check. Call it a DC five.
- One. - Oop!
(ball sliding on a track)
- [Danielle] Hi, buddy.
(ball clanks)
- I think you have a hard time looking at this.
Again, you're attention. You're about finding stuff out.
Looking at this and trying to analyze it,
I think you have a sense of nervousness and dread
because you can't tell how bad this injury is.
Head wounds bleed a lot. It bleeding doesn't tell you much.
It could just be something totally survivable
and superficial, or this could be
like you are in the last moments of Mentopolis,
if this is a huge club
coming over the back of Elias Hodge's head.
As you head back to the platform, you're talking to Wilton.
- Yeah, should we finish up here with Wilton?
- [Brennan] Yeah.
(players laughing)
- I'm still in distraction mode,
so it's like, Wilton, you old, so you've-
This is far less than we agreed upon! You're a con man!
- I'm not a con man.
There's something nuzzling the base of the shaft.
- I look like I go to strike, but I pull Wilton
into a tight embrace and I start whispering in his ear.
How's the family? How's the kids?
- Oh, they're good. They're all fine.
It's sweaty down there, but it's-
- Spermatozoa production going all right?
- Oh, there's so much sperm down there.
There's actually kind of too much. We need to-
We probably should do something.
- Listen, listen, listen, listen.
Just keep it up. It'll happen.
It'll happen one day, you and I both know it.
I love you, brother!
- I love you so much.
Listen, there's something that is digging a little bit in.
It's really heavy, and it's kind of buzzing.
(players laughing)
- This is not what I expected to hear, brother.
- You're my brother. - That's right.
- Can we talk to someone at City Hall and see
if maybe we could make a friend that'll touch the privates?
(players laughing)
- I know the people upstairs are working on that.
It's the thing that was foremost on the mind, I assure you.
- I hear bad news all the time, like we're working!
- Listen, we just have to get through this scrape first.
One day, though, one day it'll happen.
- I think we should quit our job
and just concentrate on fucking.
(players laughing)
- Listen, me too, my friend. Listen, me too, my friend.
But you know how it is up here
in the big city, my hands are tied.
- All those Cortex City hobnobs don't know
what real working folk deal with every day!
- They're out of touch with the common people! You're right!
- We're drowning in cum down there!
(players laughing)
- They're out of touch!
One day, you and I will stage a revolution
the likes of which these people have never seen before!
- The people will rise, and there will be orgasms for all!
- We'll finally achieve eternal happiness!-
Ooh, ooh ooh. My-
- Yeah, you come up. - [Freddie] Hello, hello!
You heard nothing! You heard nothing!
- Sorry, this man's not my brother. He's mean as hell.
- I don't know this person at all.
- Can I please speak with my friend Mr. Fucks here?
- Get out of here, stranger!
- I'm getting back on the train to the balls.
(players laughing)
- What a weirdo. ♪ He's leaving ♪
(To the tune of Midnight Train to Georgia)
♪ Midnight train to the balls ♪
♪ Getting on the midnight train ♪
- [Brennan] Incredible, so Wilton leaves,
and you two are left alone.
- What do you have to say to me?
- Dan, this is possibly worse than we feared.
It sounds as though, according-
I went into the train. Huge mess.
Blood over blood over blood. I wish I had my camera.
- [Freddie] Good lord! - No, I don't. Blood's bad.
There was blood everywhere. - What's happened?
- It appears to be that all of the shock troopers
took over a train that was coming from the scalp
that was all pain receptors.
- What are you saying?
- I'm saying that we are in great pain.
- From what?
- It sounds like blunt force trauma to the head.
- The head? Wilton, get back here!
- What's that?
- There's been some sort of injury down there!
You need to get back down to the balls as fast as you can!
- Wait, someone's hurting the balls?
- No, the head!
- Oh!
Wilton, never mind, get out of here. - Do you mean the head of the pehnis?
- I rarely do.
- Wilton, I believe I'm mistaken.
- Oh, all right.
- I apologize for getting your hopes up.
- If it's not about cock and balls, I don't want to know.
(Freddie hums a jaunty tune)
Wilton heads off.
- Sorry, I misinterpreted what you said.
- It appears that we are suffering through
blunt force trauma, which is why there have been
so many glitches, so many highways, all of the collapses.
I spoke with one of the pain receptors,
and they gave me information to give to the newspaper.
Now, here's what we have to figure out,
is how much time we have- - Yes,
are we still conscious? - Before everything begins shutting down.
We don't know what the extent of this is.
It could be fine, it could be bad.
I have a question for you.
- Yes.
- With your ability to be able to
take in the gratification of others
and use things that people might like.
- Yes.
- I don't have as much of a direct line
into the pain centers to be able to tell
exactly how bad this is and what might be happening.
Aren't there some people who enjoy pain?
Wouldn't you maybe be able to talk to one of them,
who might be able to give us some more information
about what is happening in the head?
- What kind of person are we talking about here?
- Hey, you're all Elias, you know?
(players laughing)
Up to you. I think actually, though, yo-
pain and pleasure,
there's a lot of correlation there.
- You're asking me to speak to my long-lost sister?
(Brennan laughing)
- Yes, now that I know that there is a Ms. Fucks,
I would like to speak with her.
- I think we can do this. I think we can do this, yes.
- She's Fucks, expletive.
It's the fuck you say when you stub your toe.
(players laughing)
- [Freddie] Exactly, exactly, that's what it is.
- Fuck! - The versatility of the word.
- [Brennan] Incredible.
- I will note, though, Wilton gave me a little tip.
Sounds strange, doesn't it?
- Absolutely not, nope.
(players laughing)
- There was something going on downstairs, as well.
In addition to blunt force trauma to the head,
there may be all kinds of other stuff going on.
We may be suffering bodily in numerous different places.
We should take a survey of our entire extremities and see
to what extent we are in pain.
- Absolutely. - [Freddie] Or pleasure, as the case may be.
- As the case may be.
And that is something that we will
hopefully be able to discuss with your sister.
When it comes to the head and when it comes
to the other head, you can discuss that with her alone.
- Are you off, then?
- No, no, I just don't want-
- Where are you in this equation? I'm confused.
- I will be with you.
I like to pay attention,
but I tend to leave that area of the body alone.
There's not enough going on there
for me to really be concerned about it.
- How dare you?
(players laughing)
- This is literally every complaint you have with the city.
Yeah, if we paid more attention
to what's going on down there!
- Just got back in touch!
- Okay, so you have that information.
So your sister, Donna Fucks,
(players laughing)
she kind of honestly works a little bit more than you,
but she's also similarly around the corner from you
on the other side of the Hippo Campus.
- It's just literally if you just walked
around the building- - It's the other side.
- Yeah yeah yeah.
- You could go talk to her if you wanted to.
She would maybe be able to decipher this,
- Club Spice. - A little bit more.
But you also do have your plan
to meet up with the rest of the gang.
- [Freddie] That's right. - [Danielle] Yes.
- So what would you guys like to do?
- I think we should go back to the others
with this information, see what they have discovered.
- Yes, and then we can bring your sister in.
- Yes. - Cool, you two head off.
We are going to go ahead and join our friends Fix and Conrad
as you head off through the rainy streets of Mentopolis.
As the two of you round the corner,
you arrive at a brick wall with a sort of cave-in
in the side, loose rubble opening up
into a drafty, industrial space,
exposed I-beams and sort of a nest of rubble.
Justin sort of paws along at your side.
Conrad, go ahead and tell us,
what does your sort of dwelling place look like
inside of this abandoned brick building?
- Yeah, so it's this big, cavernous room,
but I've filled it with just newspaper clippings everywhere,
little trinkets, and it's all kind of haphazardly stored
in makeshift filing systems made out of cardboard boxes
or big planks of wood that I've found.
(slow, sad music)
- You enter into this place.
Fix, go ahead and give me, we'll call it a difficulty...
seven savvy check here as you start looking around
at all of the papers that have been filed.
- I'll take a seven.
- (gasps) Hell yeah, just halve it and take it.
You begin to look around at all of the things
that Conrad has gathered here,
and they are all united
in how small and imperceptible
each bit of information in the saved articles is.
The first impulse that crosses you as you start
to look at them is probably, in all honesty, a negative one,
because as you start to look at them, they are distractions.
They are fundamentally distractions.
An overheard conversation
of some coworkers at Gobstopper Industries,
a request to redesign a schematic
on something that was being worked on by Elias
for a purpose that Elias couldn't figure out the meaning of,
and you look at "couldn't figure out the meaning of,"
and you remember that you went and killed a distraction
on the day that article was published.
Who's to say what could have been figured out
if that distraction had maybe been heeded?
As you look at all of this, I think there's a way
in which all of this is very distracting,
and like a lot of material associated with conscience,
it doesn't make you feel good.
The things that crop up that alert you
that maybe something wrong is happening
are, by their very definition, challenging.
They are challenging you,
and there's a negativity that comes with that.
But I think on the other hand, though,
you look at all of this very careful work,
and it's sort of not unlike a hyperfixation.
There's this part of the brain
that's been working very hard to save a group of things.
What's going through The Fix's mind?
- I think that The Fix doesn't
think that the job of the mind is to control itself.
(Brennan sighing and making an explosion sound)
(players laughing)
(Brennan makes that "hlblbblblhblhb" sound)
- This season's good for me in a lot of ways.
You know what I'm saying?
This is actually, I'm realizing now-
- Some deep knowledge here that's being imparted.
(Brennan laughing)
- He's never thought of it like that.
You know, and maybe just doesn't even believe
that it's possible, that ultimately,
he's maybe more aware of the lack of free will
than most people are, than most people in the brain are,
and so he's looking at this and thinking,
why are you trying to change the way that the mind operates?
That's not our job. Our job is to do what our job is.
I think that he's very uncomfortable,
and I think that he, even this act,
which was sort of his idea, he feels very weird about.
- Yeah, it's a deviation from someone
who prizes persistence and reliability,
and I think that fear,
as you come into this place and look around.
You look, and Conrad, Justin sort of wanders over
to the little doggie bed of newspaper, where he lies down,
and you see a pair of ice skates there. (serious piano music)
Like a lot of treasures in this room,
you suddenly sort of realize
these treasures here are very significant.
All of these are memories, and the pair of ice skates,
very old, deep brown leather with rough leather cords,
these sort of scuffed up metal blades on the bottom
that look a little uncomfortable, but they're tied up,
and you can see that they're kids' ice skates.
I think you sense that...
the things that Conrad has here,
by virtue of being not at, for example, the Hippo Campus,
are not elsewhere stored away
in the memory bank or wherever,
that these are repressed, deep down.
There's something about these memories
that's like, they can't just be obliterated,
but that Conrad's been holding onto them.
- So The Fix goes up to those ice skates,
and he sort of runs his thumb across the leather,
and he says quietly, maybe not loud enough
for Conrad to hear, he says, Ichabod.
He's thinking about a little kid in the Hall of Interests
who... isn't there anymore.
- Conrad has entered a kind of zen mode,
and was just making small talk.
So, how long you been fixing?
(raucous group laughter)
- Justin goes, I think The Fix is really
deep in something right now, really.
- I'm not great at reading a situation.
(players laughing)
But I'd watch your fingers, also, if I were you.
(Hank laughing)
- Good call. What have you been doing here?
This is, this is a lot of stuff.
It doesn't feel like you've just been collecting,
it feels like you've been trying to find something out here.
- Well, I just make sure that the stuff doesn't disappear
'cause, you know, we might need
to feel guilty or shame about it later,
so I just want to make sure it's here.
You'll see this clipping says,
didn't hold a door for an old lady.
This one says, cheated on a test in 8th grade.
Yeah, just all kinds of stuff that,
big guy doesn't think about,
but I think about all the time.
(players laughing)
- Justin looks up and says, someone's gotta.
- Someone's gotta.
But yeah, so how long you been fixing for?
(players laughing)
- I guess the whole time.
(players laughing)
- Yeah, nice.
(players laughing)
- So let me pitch you this idea.
If I needed to kill you,
- (resigned) Okay.
(players laughing)
- Now that we're alone.
- Just try to sandpaper the edge off, you know?
Just a little bit of, just something that eases in.
- All right, all right. So, eyes can't be itchy.
The membranes around the eyes
are innervated with itch receptors and pain neurons,
whereas the eyes themselves
only have pain neurons because, of course,
evolution is strongly incentivized to prevent you
from scratching your cornea with your fingernail.
So your eyes are never actually itchy.
People say, my eyes are itchy! But they're not.
- Huh. - They're not actually itchy.
It's just the membranes around your eyes.
Did that make you feel better?
- Y- Yeah! - That's really all I know how to do.
That, and punching.
(players laughing)
- It's kind of like, you know, when you feel upset,
and they tell you to look at what's around you
or drink a glass of water,
and you focus on something else for a second.
- 'Cause I can do that all day.
- Okay!
- Here's what I'm thinking. - Uh-huh.
- So, sometimes when I kill people, they're
still- Sorry. - Yeah.
They're still there, and there's something I can show,
and sometimes they just disappear.
I don't know why.
Different people, different folks, different strokes.
Some people disappear when they die,
and some people, I get a little something I can show.
So in those those situations,
when they're just not there anymore,
I gotta prove that I did my work.
I like to do my best.
Now, this would be a good thing to show
to say I did my work.
I found you, I found where you lived, and you were gone.
You're not here anymore.
Would it be okay for me to bring the DA by here?
Anything you want to take out of here for him not to see?
- Well, I guess kind of everything, but-
(players laughing)
So- So you'd rather he come here
than, like, you just take those skates or something?
- You know, I could do that.
I want to see what he thinks of this.
I want to see how scared he is of what you have built here.
- Okay, and there's no chance that he'll go,
well, surely Conrad's still alive,
and now that I've seen this, I gotta kill him.
(players laughing)
- I think that if there was an amount of dead
he didn't want you, he wouldn't have called me.
- Whoa, you're good at your job, huh?
- (quietly) I like to think so. - [Brennan] Congratulations.
- Hey, you know, that feels nice.
- Oh, good.
Yeah, you know, it's not all sad and dreary down here.
There's a theoretical world where we could make someone
theoretically feel good about themselves.
- Yeah.
- Like, what would we do to make someone,
like, if that lady, he had held the door open for her, then,
- We'd keep that clipping, too!
- Then we'd keep that clipping, too.
- Would you?
Because sometimes I feel like that's not how it works.
That's just me talking. - I don't know.
It's been a while since we've had something like that.
- Yeah, imagine a W that big.
(players laughing)
Holding the door open for somebody.
Golly, that'd be a banner day! (barks)
- Woof is right.
(players laughing)
- You two are best friends.
- I like that you talk to Justin, too.
- Yeah, you're a good dog.
(Brennan howls) (players aww)
- The plan to bring the DA down here, I mean,
there is a lot of stuff down here that, like you're saying,
that's a very polished guy, and the idea of bringing him
down to a place this intense, you haven't really
found a spot in Mentopolis like this before.
I think that strikes you as a very worthwhile,
for lack of a better word, ambition.
Justin looks over at you and says, well, Conrad,
we can get one of the blankets and tie it around me
like a little sled and fill it up with all of our stuff
if we want to try to find another spot.
I don't know where we'd go.
- Sure, but we've had that feeling before,
and we found somewhere to go, so we'll find somewhere else.
- Yeah, we'll find somewhere else.
- I probably know of a couple of spots.
- Yeah, go ahead, let's call it a DC four savvy.
- Four. Five.
- There are some, you know, motels, flophouses,
places for people that are just coming into the mind
for a very short period of time, and then there's your...
I'm trying to think of where The Fix actually lives.
- (laughing) I hadn't thought about it.
- I'm trying to think of The Fix's apartment.
- I don't know that I sleep.
- He just wanders the streets.
- Muttering to himself about animal facts.
- A completely unadorned single room apartment
with just a closet that you walk into and stand in the dark.
(players laughing)
- It's got a bar, and I just hang off of it.
- Yeah, just hang off of the bar.
- White noise coming out of the walls.
We don't know where it's coming from.
(players laughing)
- You walk into a fucking noise canceling headphone.
(group laughing)
But yeah, you know a couple places
that Conrad can stay, for sure.
What do you think you would do?
Do you think you would send Conrad
on his way here and go get the DA right now?
Or do you think that you would, having come here
and gotten the skates or seeing it for yourself,
knowing where it is, do you think you would try
to both rejoin up with your other allies?
- I don't...
- All good, there's no-
- Conrad's also debating whether or not to tell The Fix
the story behind the skates.
- You have the ability
to turn these memories on, if you want to.
You can bring them to life, kind of.
You can share the story of them yourself.
- Okay.
- You can turn the memories on, but truly,
whatever you want to do, whatever you think Conrad would do.
- Hey, Fix. Sorry, The Fix. (serious music)
(Freddie and Hank snicker)
- Either's fine.
- Really? Or, surely you have a preference.
- I like The Fix.
- Okay. The Fix, sorry.
Do you know why we keep those skates?
- No. - [Alex] Do you want to know?
- Yeah.
- Those are kind of...
Those skates really hurt the big guy
the last time he ever listened to me, so.
I guess that's kind of vague, um...
(players laughing)
Just, when the big guy was a kid,
he stood up for his little sister,
and then this big bully... cut him up real bad
with those skates, and that's why they live here with me.
And he doesn't really remember that, but I do.
So that's why I don't deserve to be listened to,
and I just kind of try to make my way in the city.
- I think it's time to unlearn that lesson.
- (thoroughly impacted) Okay.
(players laughing)
- We've talked about balls so much in this season,
and I almost... wept.
I almost just started fully crying (players laughing)
when you said it's time to unlearn that lesson.
That's right! Okay, we cut back to Wilton in the balls!
(group laughing)
- Keep those coming!
(group laughing)
- Incredible. You have these here.
Conrad has shared that,
story of the origin of the ice skates.
They're not doing anything right now.
They're not glowing, they're not doing anything,
but you just know that those things are powerful.
It's a powerful memory hanging
in this little abandoned place.
You guys take off and head out of here,
and even as Conrad shares that memory,
you know, memories are things
that sort of belong to the entire city, in a weird way.
But this is one so deep down that it's like,
you know,
how much of the rest of the brain has this been hidden from
and how much has just Conrad been carrying this?
And you take off and head towards Occipital Park
at the back of the brain.
We cut to the Hippo Campus, (big, upbeat brass horn music)
right at the edge
of the red light district, big college town energy.
You see that a lot of old marquees and flophouses
and little shops and restaurants and suddenly, boom!
Big, ivy-covered walls and a bunch of students
that all have these sort of, again, art deco, varsity,
their letter jackets and sort of pomaded hair
and everything like that, are sort of running around.
Go Hippos! And they start running.
You see big hippo mascots on a bunch of pennants.
I'll see you at the big game later, won't I, Tony?
You sure will! We love the brain!
They head off.
As you both enter this area, you do notice
that there are some students wandering
up in some of the upper hallways through the windows,
playing football inside of one of the university hallways,
and I think as you walk in, you would just notice
that you don't see any faculty around.
- Can I see if it looks like anyone's tailing us?
- Go ahead and give me a snoop check, call that an eight.
- Eight, okay.
No, I don't do it. That is a five.
(ball sliding on a track x2)
But I'll take that Moxie!
(ball clanking x2)
- You look around.
You don't observe anyone tailing you.
- Who knows if I saw them?
- Who knows if you saw them or not?
But you walk into the campus.
You see that a couple students run around.
There's some heading to the big game.
You see a few cheerleaders run by,
and one of them turns around, and you see that she says,
(gasps) oh my goodness, are you Imelda Pulse?
- No. - Oh, wrong. Okay.
She runs off. Heads off. (players laughing)
- Nice.
- You guys head into the Hippo Campus.
Are you heading to any place in particular?
You can head straight to the memory bank if you want,
but it's totally up to you.
- I feel like I want to know more about...
- Sure, the memory seems as good as anything to me.
- Now, this is going to take some pretty slick work,
so I think I know- - Let me talk.
- You should be doing
the talking here. - Yes, I think maybe you
shouldn't be talking. - I think so.
And I start striding forward.
(players laughing)
- [Brennan] Incredible. - Just blow the doors open.
(Siobhan laughing)
- Boom, you walk into the memory bank, (retro-futuristic music)
this beautiful, decorated,
there's tall, rolling ladders, huge steps.
You see all this information everywhere, and you see
there's only two librarians working in here right now.
You see there is a very officious and happy, helpful,
prim woman, pencil skirt, little white collar,
and this absolutely enormous guy
who's sort of got a little bit bald and comb-over,
but just big, musclebound guy
who's putting big stacks of books up on the shelves.
The young woman looks at you and says,
hello and welcome to the Ammon's Horn Memorial Memory Bank.
I'm so delighted to have you come in. Are you students?
- (confidently) Yeah.
(players laughing) - Give me a slick check.
DC eight.
(Trapp giggling gleefully to himself)
- All right! - Got to explode twice.
(Siobhan laughing)
(Siobhan laughing even harder)
What'd you get, Trapp? - That's a one.
- [Hank] It's going to be hard to get there.
- You see the big guy turns around and goes,
what'd you say?
- I throw my hood back and I say,
aren't we all students of something?
- Yeah!
- You see that Millie goes, huh!
I guess in an incredibly broad sense, yes!
(Freddie laughing)
Ollie, the big guy, Ollie, turns to look at you and goes...
- Sorry, do I get any Moxie
for massively failing that roll?
- Oh, for sure. Thank you for reminding me.
Let's get the man his Moxie. (ball sliding on a track x2)
- I gotta succeed later.
- You see the guy looks at you and says,
you said you're a student.
What's your class schedule?
(curious noir music)
- My class schedule?
Well, you know, every morning,
I attend Basic Neurological Functions,
and then after that, it's Reflexes 101.
And then, you know, I'm dabbling in the arts.
- Go ahead and give me a DC 20 slick check.
(players laughing)
You only have to explode five times in a row.
- Hey, we're going to do it.
Explode! - [Brennan] Okay, one. Four more to go.
- Okay, okay! - [Freddie] Come on!
- [Siobhan] Come on, you can do it.
- That's a one. So that's five.
- You only need to spend 15 Moxie.
(players laughing)
- [Hank] It's good, though. Just keep lying to people.
(players laughing)
- Ollie goes,
are you out of your mind?
We defunded the arts years ago!
(group laughing)
- This is a science mind.
- You see Millie says, I am so sorry, sir. We're STEM only.
And Ollie cocks a fist back
and is going to attempt to punch you out of the library.
(players laughing)
- Okay, everybody calm down.
(Alex laughing)
Can I do some kind of slick check to,
- Give me a slick check. - [Siobhan] Calm everybody the fuck down?
- It will be a DC 13 slick check.
- Great, so would you say that under these circumstances,
that these are either authority figures
or view me as an authority figure?
- I will say that under the circumstances,
you can view these as authority figures,
but I will say this is a snap decision.
- Okay. - So you get the plus three,
but you do have to roll. - Great.
So that's a 13 plus 5, so it's an 18.
- You see Ollie, fist goes back and stops and says,
excuse me, what'd you say your name was?
- (trembling) Stacy.
(players laughing)
Fakename.
(players laughing)
- Stacy, how could I forget? Such a beautiful young woman.
Why don't you come right with me, Ms. Fakename?
You see that he says,
we have so many wonderful art books to show you!
Millie looks and says, all right, Ollie.
And looks over and says, hello, ma'am.
How can I help you?
You're a student here at the Hippo Campus?
- I'm not a student, but I'm hoping that you can help me.
I'm just a poor lady in distress.
I was wondering if you could perhaps point me
in the way of some information
that I'm looking for in the memory banks.
I don't really know how to use them.
I'm just a silly little girl.
- That's wildly self-depricating.
- Oh, well, I mean, I'm a silly little woman.
(players laughing)
- A notch up! Okay, yes, of course!
You see she says, well, I'd be more than happy to help you.
What sort of memories are you looking for?
Is there anything that I can try to find?
- Oh, anything that you have
on files and what might be inside them.
- Files and what might be inside them.
I'll do the very best I can.
I'll try to find a memory related to files.
Go ahead, I'm actually going to ask you here
for a slick check,
and we'll just say five, 10, 15, 20
as our ascending order
of how good the memory is that you find.
- Okay, great.
That is a 21.
- Oh my god. (players ooh)
You see she goes back, and coming down
with this enormous tome that you see has an emblem
of the packet itself, and you see the big title
that says, Gobstopper Psychometer Project.
And underneath, it says,
like all the memories in here, by Elias Hodge.
You see that Millie walks up to you and says,
now this is one of our most pristine,
first edition memories, which is so, so exciting.
It's relatively new.
Please be extraordinarily careful with it.
Try to guard it with your life as well as you can.
We will expect it back by Wednesday,
and when you return it, add something fun.
(players laughing)
- Okay. - That's so good.
- I love adding fun things.
- Of course, we demand that every memory that come back
just have something cute and fun kind of added.
- Maybe I'll change a couple of colors. How about that?
- That would be great! - Great!
- Of course, any colors.
You know, I think there's something in here
about the packet being a sort of deeper manila.
Maybe we sort of go, it was beige!
- It was beige! - [Brennan] It was a light beige.
- I absolutely swear to god, it was beige.
- I swear to god!
We try to have fun here at the memory bank, we really do.
(players laughing)
- So good. Mwah.
- She hands this enormous, deeply important memory
over to you, and you see, because it is brand new,
you look at some of the other older memory books
and they are dog-eared, bitten to hell,
tons of drawings and shit in the margins of them.
So you have this really important memory in front of you.
Off in the corner, you see as soon as they get around,
Ollie leans over and goes, look here, Wisenheimer.
I'm about to butter your necktie unless you start talking.
Are you a student here or ain'tcha?
- I. Am. A student!
(players laughing)
- Stacy! - [Hank] Just playing for Moxie.
- He pounds you with a 14 sharp check.
Go ahead and give me sturdy.
- Sure.
(players laughing)
Let's see. That's, uh...
seven. You said 14? - [Brennan] 14.
- Hold on, how much Moxie do I have? (players laughing)
- [Siobhan] Spend all of your Moxie
on not getting knocked out.
- Eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
(players laughing)
- So this guy fucking clobbers you
and fully spins your head around, Daffy Duck style.
Woo!
What the hell?
- Yeah, it's one of the things I've been studying here.
- How are you not dead? - What?
- I punched your head all the way around your shoulders.
- Yeah, I've just been studying up on, you know,
resilience in times of trouble.
It's a new major that they got here.
You know, how to really stand up
when things get tough out there.
(sounds of confused terror)
- I don't want nothing to do with you.
You're haunted. You're frickin' haunted!
I hate this! I hate this!
Turns around and just flees the scene.
You find yourself- (Trapp mimics neck cracking)
Sort of realign your head on your shoulders.
As Ollie flees, is there anything
that you are investigating or looking for in the library
now that you're kind of in the stacks, unoccupied?
- Can I look for, I guess, new arrivals?
I'm interested in what the latest memories were.
- Go ahead and give me a snoop check.
We'll call it a difficulty of six.
- Cool, I got no more Moxie. (laughing)
(Trapp makes a sound of disappointment) - Can I give him a couple Moxie on that?
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Plus one, so that's a five. So I just need one more.
- Okay, great, so I'll give you one Moxie.
- Okay, so you grab the Moxie there.
You start looking at new arrivals,
and you see one of the newest memories to come in
that you can kind of flip through in your head,
you see that the narrative sort of starts,
I walked boldly into Mr. Henry's office
knowing that this was finally my opportunity
to demand some answers and voice the concerns
that I had long been having, and in this moment,
I turned around as I was joined
by two of my compatriots at the company.
And that's the memory. - It goes black after that!
(players laughing)
What could this mean? That's weird.
- That's the freshest memory of the docket that you find.
- Okay, cool, I'm curious of the moment
that Imelda says she influenced him, when he moved the file.
- In the memory, if you go to one a little bit earlier,
you can see he ducked into a side room,
an unoccupied office.
It looks like, in other words, you're beginning to find
things of Elias being a little sneaky, doing some stuff.
This impulse to grab this thing kind of committed him
to a path that he was not ready to travel down,
and there is an office about 12 floors down
from Mr. Henry's office that he took his packet open
of all his research and spread it out to review it.
And you see in his memory,
finding exactly what I had suspected,
I turned around to head to Mr. Henry's office posthaste.
So you find that,
and you have this massive book with you as well.
- I go back towards Imelda. Pretty good detective work!
Pretty slick on my part, if I do say so myself.
- This book is big.
(players laughing)
Do we want to read it here? Do we want to take it with us?
I don't know if I want to read all of this.
- Can I just look around again
to see if there are any other prying eyes around here?
- [Brennan] Give me one last snoop check.
Call it a difficulty of six.
- That is a one,
but I will take two Moxie, thank you very much.
(ball sliding on a track and clanking x2)
Thank you.
- So, you have the book with you here.
It could take a long time to read it, so it's possible
that maybe this is something that you could get into later.
- Sure, yeah. Well, we have it 'til Wednesday.
And Wednesday is forever away, as far as I'm concerned.
Let's just steal it!
(players laughing)
- Yeah, all right.
I mean, I'm really curious about what's in this thing, so.
- Great, let's get out of here
and go to the De'lux Industrial place in Occipital Park.
- You all head off to Occipital Park.
Occipital Park, all the way in the back of the brain.
This is an industrial neighborhood, (techy music)
lots of warehouses and factories and working class places.
A lot of people commute in here.
It's a very industrial place,
and as it's getting later and later at night,
it's almost a little bit of a ghost town around here.
You see a few folks, machinists,
coming out of a motor control area.
You see a bunch of people that are just here
to coordinate balance and kinesthetic sense
walking out like, (sighs) long day of keeping
whoever this motherfucker is from falling down.
And then heading off to public transportation.
As you head towards the area of Occipital Park,
which is a bunch of visual areas,
you see the big lights of De'lux Industrial.
You can see it's De'lux, D-E apostrophe L-U-X.
- Oh god, all right. Okay.
(Brennan makes a sound of satisfaction with his punnery)
- As you all sort of convene and look here,
the place is closed.
Obviously the eyes are closed,
so you know that's not too unusual, but normally,
there are some people around that can reopen the eyes.
There's machinery in here.
Looks very quiet, very dark in there.
What would you all like to do?
You see these other figures coming out of the mist
and joining back together here in this place.
- Just before we do anything,
I do a real quick catch-up on everyone.
- [Hank] Share all the information. - Download, download.
- [Trapp] Download, download, download.
- I don't know if we share the ice skate story.
That seems a little heavy. Not necessary at the moment.
- Yeah, the ice skates- - That was just for The Fix.
- Those are cool ice skates. You going skating later?
- We saw some skates.
(players laughing)
- I think this calls for some pretty slick detective work,
so I think we all know who's the man for the job here.
- Me!
(Brennan laughing)
- How do you want to approach
the closed industrial space of De'lux?
- I start walking towards it.
(tense action music)
I go over to, I assume, just a regular lock.
- [Brennan] Mm-hm.
A regular lock situation.
I pull out a hairpin, kind of snap it in half,
and start using it as a lock pick.
- This is going to be a difficulty eight sneak.
- That's five, and then six, seven,
and I'm going to use a Moxie.
(sound of lock clicking)
- The lock opens up. The door swings wide.
All of you enter De'lux Industrial.
Moving through the space, I'm going to ask everyone here
for a snoop, difficulty of 12.
- Go ahead and- - One plus two, three.
- Three as well.
- I got, oh, I exploded. - I also exploded.
- Yes! - [Hank] We have some exploding.
- Should I roll it again?
- [Brennan] Mm-hm, roll it again and add it.
- [Danielle] Nice. - That is a 22.
(players ooh)
- Oh my god. - [Alex] That's a 15.
- What's that? - 15.
- Nice. I got a 19. - [Brennan] 19, okay, so-
- That side of the table, - That side of the table did really well.
We don't need to know how we did.
- So, walking into this space, as all of you enter-
- I'm sorry, not that it really matters, 23.
- Incredible, incredible. You exploded, right?
- I exploded. I rolled a 12 and a 10.
I forgot I had the plus one. - Gotcha, cool cool cool.
So, figures move from the shadows quickly.
Anastasia and Hunch, you are first to act,
and you have only this split second to react
as figures descend on your group
as you have walked out into a wider chamber
that has this massive metal iris,
literally that oculus style big collapsing iris
where you open the eyes up.
- I try to trip one of them, at least.
- Okay, go ahead and give me sharp.
It's snap decision. Difficulty is going to be five.
- That is a three, and I'll use two Moxie for five.
- Hell yeah, so all of you watch Hunch leap into action
and just kick the legs out from under one of these goons.
- Sorry, I keep forgetting my pluses.
That was three, I already have a plus two on my sharp,
so that's five naturally.
I don't even have to use the Moxie.
- Oh, amazing, so you just succeed. Hell yeah.
Hunch, hey, listen, you're a big chunk of meat
who mostly just gets his ass kicked,
but you've been at it enough to know
that you can kick the legs out from someone jumping at you.
Bam, one of the goons hits the floor. Anastasia.
- So Anastasia, I am going to take off my trilby
and I'm going to throw it on the ground,
almost like the banana peel in Mario Kart.
- [Freddie] Oh, yes!
- So that hopefully one of them slips and falls.
- Incredible, go ahead and give me a sneak roll
and we'll call that a difficulty of six.
- [Danielle] Sneak? - Snap decision.
- I'm going to go ahead and use my nerves of steel,
spend one Moxie to treat a snap decision
as a planned action and halve it.
- Oh, baby!
So, completely unfazed by the sudden danger,
you throw your trilby.
You see another goon slips and goes, ugh! Wool!
So naturally oily and slippery!
(players laughing)
Two goons hit the deck.
The other two are going to get to act
before everybody else goes,
and they are going to come for Conrad.
- Oh boy. (action music)
- Conrad, I am going to need a sturdy, difficulty of five,
and I will need a sneak, difficulty of eight.
- Okay. Sturdy, three, but I'll use two Moxie.
- I can use one for two. I have loyalty.
- Oh, thank you. (players aww)
- Incredible.
Okay, so one of them,
you just burn one, and that counts for two.
- Oh wow, that's so nice. - So you get a plus two.
(group laughing)
You see The Fix actually, you are going to dodge,
and this guy's going to grab you and bowl you to the ground,
and you see The Fix, with this wild wingspan,
just clock the guy's arm out of the air and swat him away.
I'm going to need that sneak check, difficulty of eight.
- 14 plus two, 16.
- By the time that second arm comes,
after The Fix knocks the first guy out,
the second guy jumps for you, and you just flatten
as fast and quick as possible, just down.
Justin goes... (barking furiously)
Now the rest of you can go.
We'll go in order of highest sneak,
so I think Conrad, you're going to be first to act.
- Okay, I rush to go to Justin.
I don't know what else to do in this situation.
- Yeah, for sure.
Do you want to hide behind Justin, or do you want-
- No, I hug him.
(players laughing) - Aww.
- [Brennan] Oh, you go to protect Justin!
- I just hug him.
- Okay, you go and just hug Justin.
Just take a Moxie. That's very sweet.
That's just a very incredibly sweet thing. Incredible.
Over at this side of the table,
who's got the higher sneak here?
- I have d12 on a sneak.
- I have a 10. - Four.
- [Brennan] Okay, so Dan Fucks, you're up.
- I think Dan is going to see stuff going on.
He's going to clock that they're going for Conrad,
and then is going to say,
that little shit ran out over that way!
(Brennan and Alex laughing)
- Okay, this is going to be, I'm going to say, slick 15.
- Slick 15.
- Don't you have a hiding thing, too?
- I do. - 18.
- [Brennan] 18! - [Danielle] 18! Let's go!
- [Brennan] One of these goons-
- Senses my animosity, the truth within-
- The truth that you hate.
- All good acting comes from a place of truth.
- He says, he called him a little shit!
(players laughing)
You see he goes,
(western action music)
I'll remember that you did a favor for ol' Johnny Gullible.
(group laughing)
He fucking tears out of here. (speeding sound)
Imelda.
- There's three of them left? - Three of them left.
Two of them are on the ground,
but one of them is still going for Conrad.
- Hm, I'm going to go to one of the ones on the ground
and say, let me help you up,
and I just palm them some money.
(players laughing)
- If you just want to-
- I'm going to use one of my Moxies
to buy to ease a bad situation with cash.
- Uh-huh, hell yeah.
You use a Moxie. You hand it.
The guy on the floor looks up,
takes the money, and goes, hey.
I only do this bullshit for money, so problem solved.
Gets up and just slowly walks out on his way. New life!
(group laughing)
Incredible. Fix, that's going to be you.
There's one guy still up going after Conrad
and another guy on the ground.
- There's a guy still up? That's too bad.
(players laughing)
Is the guy going for Conrad
within reach of my very long arms?
- About half this enormous room
is within reach of your very long arms, absolutely.
- Can I try to grab him?
- Yes, you absolutely can. - Okay.
- He's going to roll sturdy. He rolls a four.
You're going to roll sharp against this.
- It is going to be a 12.
- [Brennan] A 12. You beat it by more than 5.
- 15, maybe.
- 15. - Yeah.
- Oh yeah, protector. This is absolutely a 15.
You grab this dude, no contest. Boom.
What do you do with him once you grab him?
- In his ear, I say,
I don't know if we've met before, but I'm The Fix.
Did you know that more than half the bones in your body
are in your hands and feet? - [Siobhan] Oh no!
- [Freddie] The most threatening thing I've ever heard.
- Legitimately, your fun facts are fucking nightmarish.
(group laughing)
- Imagine if someone said that to you.
- As he's holding you. - In a fight!
- You see the guy just goes, fucking kill me, man.
Just kill me, man. Fucking kill me, dude.
- Why are you trying to hurt us?
- I suck, man. Kill me.
Kill me, dude. I'm bad. I'm a bad- (players laughing)
- I need you to answer the question.
- I don't know, dude!
- Remind him of the fact again.
(players laughing)
- Whenever somebody says,
I'm going to break every bone in your body,
I think, that's ridiculous.
It'd be way too much work.
But I could break half the bones in your body.
- [Freddie] For not a lot of work. - No, no, man! No way!
He starts snapping his own fingers (bone snapping sounds)
(players laughing)
and passes out into unconsciousness,
which is the second person
The Fix has absolutely defeated in combat
through just talking to them. (players laughing)
Fuck this, dude! Fuck this!
(players laughing)
And you are left, and we go back
to Hunch and Anastasia, who acted first.
There's just one guy left on the ground.
- I grab him by the collar and say, who sent you here?
- Go ahead and give me a slick check.
- I say, if it helps, half the bones in your body
are in your hands and feet!
(players laughing)
- Give me a slick check. We'll call it difficulty of six.
- Okay!
Here's a go!
(players laughing)
Three. Nope, unless anyone can give me a Moxie.
- I can give you two. - I'll give you a Moxie.
- I can give you one, which is sage motivator.
You can spend a Moxie to help a friend,
even if I'm not present, but you need to remember
a pep talk that I gave you for that plus one.
- I only need one.
I can burn two to get to five, so I just need one more.
- I'll burn my one there for the pep talk.
Harp, flashback. (harp flashback sound)
- [Brennan] Flashback to a time that Dan Fucks
talked to Hunch and said something
about intimidating people.
- Yeah, let's see it. - [Trapp] I like how my memory-
- It's all you. No, it's all you.
- I remember you said, when you're intimidating someone,
the most important thing
is to touch down to their very soul,
the thing that they fear the most,
because that's the thing that will make a man crumble,
the thing that they think no one else can see.
Try to find that before you find anything else.
(Brennan makes harp flashback mouth sounds)
- The guy looks at you and he says, what?
Half your what is what?
- It was a thing I heard, but... (players laughing)
I try to look at him and I try to see if I can get a vibe,
if he's a memory, or what he is,
and see if I can try to get a sense of him
and use his identity against him, basically.
- Looking into his eyes, you recognize this guy.
You saw him in a mugshot one time.
You know his name is Simon Praise.
- I grab him by collar. Listen.
Nobody loves you. Nobody has ever loved you.
Everything you've ever heard has been shallow talk.
- No, no, no!
You're watching Hunch talk to this guy,
and he is withering and emaciating.
No, I'm a good, special boy! I'm good at science!
- No, no one has ever been sincere
about any kind thing they ever said to you.
(slurping withering sound) Tell us who sent you here!
- Who else?
Don Avaricci.
(starts dying)
- I wipe a finger on his face and go, yeah, that checks out.
- Freak! You freaky freak, ew!
And dies.
(players laughing)
- Damn, Hunch, you're hardcore!
(players laughing)
That's why you're my favorite customer, my man.
- Thanks, man. That praise really makes me feel good.
(group laughing)
- Out from the door, you hear Johnny Gullible go, ha ha ha!
I'm not finding him!
(group laughing)
The goons defeated, all of you look up
at the giant metal oculus in front of you
and see a massive lever to the side,
a reflexive way to bypass the conscious mind
and reflexively open the eyes
and at least restore raw vision to Mentopolis
of the world of the big guy, Elias Hodge.
- I think our work here is done.
(players laughing)
- I want to see! I want to see what's going on!
- I go and throw the switch.
- Of course, curiosity.
- Just jumping in. Let's fucking see! - [Brennan] Reflexively.
Let's fucking see, and again, you've been running around
dealing with memories and neurotransmitters,
receptors and sensory stuff.
This is going to be raw feed. (building string music)
This is before it even gets to the visual processing center.
You're going to get the raw feed of exactly what's happening
in the outside world, which is sort of interesting,
of course, because the outside world, you know,
you all move at the speed of thought, so the outside world
is like, ooh, what are we going to be seeing?
Hopefully we're not just walking in a hallway
or something like that.
Then we'll have to wait forever to get to where we're going.
You throw the switch, and light fills the room,
and you behold what the big guy beholds.
(glass shattering)
(all screaming and being shocked)
- Oh no! - [Siobhan] It's so bad!
- [Danielle] We've been defenestrated!
- Oh, dear Dr. Hodge has been defenestrated!
And that's all for this episode of "Dimension 20: Mentopolis!"
Tune in next week as we take a little tumble out the window.
See you then.
I angry.
- Yeah, you think?
(players laughing)
Sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!
- Stand up for yourself! - (terrified) Okay!
- Oh my god.
We gotta get Elias to touch his balls.
(players laughing)
- What? - Hear me out, okay?
- I slap (slap) him across the face.
Curio, you're mad! You're nuts!
- Hit him again.
(players laughing) (slapping sound)
- Hey there, fellas.
Youse palookas come in here to throw some fists around?
- Yeah, that's right.
- I don't think you can take a real fight.
- I think I can steal a fight.
I think I can take all the fights.
I could take the fights and put them in a bank
and get interest on the fights
so I develop more fights over time.
- Compounding interest even, yes.
- The only thing that's gonna get com-pounded is your skull!
We have reason to believe that your cousin
may be involved with some ne'er-do-wells and ruffians
down from the temporal lobe.
- I haven't speaken to or heard from Imelda Pulse in years.
Me and my family are... estranged.
(Brennan gasps)
- You know what's going on in this city right now?
- Do you?
- I know something's going on in this city.
- You really want to know what's happening?
I'll tell you.
We get to feel good when I say we get to feel good!
And we don't get to feel good
unless we do what we said we're going to do!
That's how it works!
So, we're going to do things a little bit differently.
(scary reverberating sound)
Hello, Fix.
(cheerful jazz music)