Mountaintop

*"Regarding that principle, the Buddha often said to the bhikùus, “You should know that the Dharma which I speak is like a raft. The raft is used to cross the sea of suffering — birth and death. Before you have ended birth and death, you use the raft in cultivation. Once you have ended birth and death, you should put the raft aside. If you do not put the raft aside you have an attachment."* - The Diamond Sutra

The 13th episode of Rude Tales of Magic. After a rescue by Danny Timeshare, the party meets with the legendary monk of the elements, Kreedis. The episode guest stars Brennan Lee Mulligan as Kreedis himself.

## Summary

The party investigates the tall mountain that they were planeshifted to in the middle of The Trashlands. As they scale the mountain, a golem made of loose rubble appears and blocks their path. Albee tries to reason with it before she dispatches it with some well-timed strikes. They proceed and find a neon sign ordering them to leave. When Bellow ignores it, the neon tubing moves like a snake to strangle him. Stirfry smashes it with his new magical butcher's knife and tries to eat it, only to find its contents to be radioactive.

They proceed to face a lead golem and a helium elemental, and before the latter can drop them to the ground, they are saved by a talking cloud, Fractus, who sounds like Peter Griffin. It flies them back to the top where they finally meet Kreedis, a short satyr with a broken horn and bloodshot eyes. When Albee tries to bow before him, he furiously berates the team for intruding on his land and defeating his guardians. He points out that there are far more than just four elements (such as helium, lead, mercury, and other periodic elements), something he realized during his enlightenment. He spells out that he was in isolation to avoid people and live with his own thoughts and creations. He is angry with their trespassing and shows a particular distaste for Albee for her hero worship and adoration of the biography, which he didn't write and receives no royalties from. The party stands up for Albee and Kreedis ultimately makes them a deal; if Albee can achieve nirvana before dawn, he will let them leave. If she fails, he will either kill them or force them to stay on his mountain so the world cannot learn where he lives.

Kreedis begins to guide Albee through lessons of letting go and accepting the world as it is. He simultaneously uses his powers to prove himself a decent host to the others, summoning food and entertainment for them at their request. Stirfry gets high (both chemically and literally), de Bonesby reads through his library of tomes, and Bellow and Cordelia enjoy some nachos. Kreedis creates unending, hydra-like nachos, where each one they consume becomes two more, but this invariably becomes an overwhelming mass of nachos that cannot be consumed.

Albee is alternately guided by Kreedis and isolated in meditation as she works through her feelings and her perceptions of the world. She explores ideas such as letting go of her selfish desires, that she cannot change and save everything, and that she can only truly learn from her own experiences, rather than following someone else's path. To explain to Albee why her emotionally-driven, worldly attachments and her idolization of him is detrimental to her quest, Kreedis states, "If you meet Kreedis on the road, you have to kill him."

She ultimately reaches enlightenment enough to become one with the mass of nachos, containing it long enough for Kreedis to bind them in a multidimensional box. Albee experimentally joins her being with Kreedis, seeing the unhappiness and destruction he found in his life. After destroying an entire peninsula in a moment of carelessness, creating the Calamity Archipelago, Kreedis had proceeded to hide himself from the world and wipe out his teachings, trying to ensure that nobody could follow in his footsteps.

Deciding that she has succeeded in his task, Kreedis is delighted. Albee sincerely thanks him before she uses Fist of Unbroken Air to kill him. With his last words, Kreedis replies "Good." The mountain collapses back into the desert and leaving the rest of the party in shock, and Albee with a sense of closure.

 Trivia

* Kreedis' teachings are taken from Zen Buddhism, and his manner of treating his disciple with harshness is also a reference to many Buddhist teacher/student parables, called koans. A koan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen.

* "If you meet Kreedis on the road, you have to kill him." is an altered version of a koan attributed to Zen Master Linji, replacing "The Buddha" with Kreedis.
* After listing some justifying reasons for deBonesby's uncharacteristic defense of Albee from Kreedis' haranguing, Christopher Hastings admitted in Rude Talks of Chatting that it was his husbandly instincts taking hold. "I have all the back-justifications in the world of like, well, that didn't make sense [for the character]... but I was like, "YOU LEAVE MY FUCKING WIFE ALONE, YOU SON OF A BITCH!""
* The two human academics Kreedis conjures for deBonesby are references to Fraiser and Niles Crane.
* This was the last episode recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent quarantine halted traditional production of Rude Tales of Magic. This was followed by the Come At The King campaign and the cast recording over Zoom.

## Link

https://rudetalesofmagic.simplecast.com/episodes/mountaintop-with-special-guest-star-brennan-lee-mulligan