Bearing the Scars

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* Introduction

## Bearing the Scars

As the stoats seek safety, a grotesque and terrifying new threat arrives.

### Overall

20
2
212

### Runtime

1:55:39

TRANSCRIPT

## Episode Guide

### Next

The Red Warren
A Second Sun

**Bearing the Scars** is the second episode of season 20 of Dimension 20, Burrow's End.

As the stoats seek safety, a grotesque and terrifying new threat arrives.

## Synopsis

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Our Stupendous Stoats start out in the woods, coming down from the tree where they took refuge from the dust. Oliver and Teedles, who are the only people from the Lukura who survived, join the group. Ava tries to intimidate them, Thorn jokingly asks to give the help action and it works REALLY WELL, making Oliver and Teedles feel betrayed by their friend and leader, Thorn. Thorn realises his mistake and goes to patch things up with Oliver and Teedles. Oliver and Teedles then go off to scout the surrounding area.

Viola lays on hands to heal herself, and the stoats around her see a flash of Blue. The family starts looking for a suitable and safe place to stay. Jayson rolls a 19 perception, and hears a slow thumping. Thorn rolls a 24 investigation/survival, and notices fresh bear tracks, but oddly there are small creature tracks with it (normally small creatures would give a bear a large space and avoid it). The family decides to climb up into the trees, Lila rolls a nat 20, Viola rolls a nat 1. Aabria allows Lila to catch Viola on the nat 20, but it means she will be visible to the bear as it comes into view. Aabria then tells the crew to bring out the map.

It's a bear. That takes up the whole map space.

Thorn and Ava start on the ground. Lila is up the tree holding on to Viola. Jaysohn and Tula are safely up the tree.

The bear lumbers into the clearing. Ava stares at the bear, and a chipmunk pops out, reaches out and grabs her. Aabria tells everyone to roll initiative. Ava rolls a 21, but is beaten by Aabria/the chipmunk's 23, and is dragged inside the bear. (It's at this point that the bear map is opened.) Jaysohn jumps into the bear from the tree and tries to attack some chipmunks but they're too slippery with blood and get away. Ava recklessly attacks some chipmunks with her baculum cane, and starts to see more chipmunks emerging from various organs. Lila asks her mom what to do and obviously Tula tells her to stay where she is, but Lila jumps in after Jaysohn and attacks some chipmunks.

The bear coughs, and everyone inside the bear needs to make strength saving throws. Jaysohn falls prone.

The chipmunks attack Ava with a weird ribbony tongue, Ava stares it down and tells it to "put that tongue back in your mouth".

Tula jumps in after her kids. (So there's Ava in one part of the bear, and Tula + kids in another part, with Thorn and Viola still outside the bear.) Tula tries to tell her kids to get out but of course they won't, so she heads for the bear's heart. Tula does a medicine check and notices that one of the bear's lungs is collapsed, and the bear is severely injured. Tula attacks the heart with divine smite, and Lila sees a flash of blue shoot across her mom. The bear roars in agony and stops moving forward.

Aabria reveals a nest of chipmunks in the bear's liver, with moss that the chipmunk parasites have pulled in to make a cozy nest.

Viola decides to try get inside the bear through its eye. As she cuts in through the eye, she sees a flash of blue behind the bear's eye. There's blue glowing coming from the area of the brain. Viola pushes in further using rabbit hop, and Aabria removes a portion of the bear-map's head to show a glowing blue brain. (Which Erika starts petting.) The bear roars in pain, which alerts the chipmunks. Everyone rolls perception checks, and Aabria tells them that the chipmunks are clearly reacting in a way that shows they're worried if the bear dies, only bad stuff will happen to them, so they're going to fiercely attack whatever is attacking the bear. They go for Tula.

Tula is attacked by chipmunks with weird probiscuses that worm their way inside Tula's ear and nose, and is held in place.

Thorn goes into the bear through one of the holes on the outside, and heads for the spinal cord, using zephyr strike (and some other things). He bites into the base of the neck, doing 19 points of damage, and sees glowing blue cerebral spinal fluid, with a brighter blue pool of something behind it. The bear roars. Viola, Jaysohn, Tula and Lila take 5 points of thunder damage and are deafened. Tula Rebukes the Violent by yelling "knock it off" at the bear, who is now looking very rough even with only half damage from the Rebuke. Thanks to Zephyr Strike, Thorn now has 30ft of movement, but it's difficult terrain. (Siobhan tries to argue that they're TECHNICALLY in a forest which is Thorn's favoured terrain, Aabria respects the rule lawyer hustle by granting Siobhan inspiration but does not consider a spinal cord regular terrain.)

The chipmunks attack Lila and Jaysohn, going for Jaysohn first. The chipmunk rolls a nat 1 and slips in the same blood puddle Jaysohn slipped on earlier. Lila gets hit by a claw attack, and then the chipmunk tries to go for her with its mouth proboscis. Lila dodges and grabs onto the ribbon-tongue. Aabria asks for an insight check. Izzy rolls a cocked dice that could be a Nat 20, and Aabria bargains with her: it can count as a Nat 20 if Lila takes 3 more points of damage. Izzy agrees to the deal. Lila wants to know if she can talk sense into the chipmunk. Aabria tells her that these chipmunks have some intelligence, but not language or intellect on the level of the stoats, they can understand the general gist of what is being communicated but they don't understand language itself.

We're at the top of initiative. Jaysohn stands up and goes to punch the chipmunk that slipped and fell, crits on a bonus attack, and kills it. ("reduced a brother into a hashtag" as Aabria puts it) Jaysohn rolls for intimidation, and the other chipmunks roll a nat 1, giving the siblings attacks of opportunity so they kill another chipmunk (not the one Lila is hanging onto by the tongue). They take its face.

Ava tries to bite the spine to try controling the lower half of the bear's body, but rolls a nat 1, then uses her baculum cane to try yanking on the spinal cord, causing the bear to lurch in pain and everyone to make a strength saving throw. Lila fails and takes 12 points of damage, but also does four points of damage to the chipmunk owning the tongue she's holding onto. Everyone else saves. Ava says that maybe the bear would make a good burrow without the chipmunks. Lila is now holding onto a tongue without a chipmunk attached.

Using Rabbit Hop, Lila makes her way up to her mother on the bear's heart, restrained by other proboscises. Lila has six hit points left. She goes to sneak attack the chipmunks and rolls a Nat 20. Aabria is sad, her plans to kill Tula have now been thoroughly thwarted. Lila kills the the chipmunk with 32 damage and takes the proboscis tongue, which hurts Tula a bit while it's being pulled out. Lila has two tongues and a face. Tula turns to her after this wild attack and says "I've only ever seen one stoat do that."

There's one chipmunk left near Lila and Tula. Its incensed, but Tula also sees the heart is now beating super slowly. Tula is out of smites, so Brennan asks for a hail mary: Can he use Lay on Hands to heal the bear? Aabria says the disease is basically this parasitic chipmunk invasion, so lay on hands wouldn't spare the life of the bear.

Tula casts Lay on Hands on the bear, her hands go entirely to blue. (As Tula casts five points of Lay on Hands, the HP bar appears on screen and goes down as if she was experiencing attack damage.) Lila makes an investigation check.

"What you see, as she releases this energy into the heart, is her eyes go blue, and then sort of her arms are covering it, but you see, as though it was, like, a light under a blanket or behind, like, under a lampshade, a flash of blue where her heart is. And the pallor that it casts internally to her feels wrong, fundamentally wrong for the first time. The thing she's doing isn't wrong, but there is something wrong with the magic as it moves through her."

Jaysohn is hungry, and rolls a nat 20 on a wisdom saving throw. He has a wild impulsive thought to take a bite of the heart. "As your mouth, like, sinks into this flesh, like, the flesh goes blue in your hand as your mom's magic pulses through everything, and you feel a connection to the Blue, even behind your eyes."

Jaysohn levels up.

Ava watches Tula Lay on Hands and has a flashback, remembering creatures walking on two legs like bears sometimes do, and the creatures, the bear, the blue, it all feels connected. The Lay on Hands cures/kills the bear, and all the chipmunks drop along with it. "when you think of what an animal is, you feel just a little bit of distance from that idea, not stoat, but animals exploit one another. That's how nature works, and this is just a different, more terrible kind of exploitation, and you in this moment are able to put an end to that cycle"

Thorn has pushed through into the brain and is now with Viola, they see the blue glow starting to dim. Both of them take a bite of the glowing blue brain. They pass out, overwhelmed by the blue.

The rest of the glow fades quickly, and the stoats immediately know that the bear wouldn't make a good long-term home. Tula is crying, Jaysohn and Lila show off their tongue-bouquet to Ava. Jaysohn finds Thorn and Viola in the brain. They come to, and they've both levelled up. The family leaves the bear, the sisters cast their remaining Lay on Hands on each other. Lila hands the face to her aunt in a daze and Viola folds it up while Ava says you can treat it and keep it as a mask. Viola casts sanctuary.

Viola and Tula help Lila debrief what happened. Tula tells her daughter that the big secrets adults have is that they're scared too, and they don't have the answers to what's going on. Ava says she doesn't like the level of honesty that's happening, and the family dynamics start to return to usual, and they take refuge for the night in the shelter of the bear.

END OF EPISODE 2

## Featured Characters

### Mystical Mustelids

* Ava
* Thorn Vale
* Tula
* Viola
* Lila
* Jaysohn

### Returning

* Olliver
* Teedles