Hildy Russet

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*The following article contains spoilers for Season 2. Please listen to the season in its entirety or be warned!*

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**[WARNING: This page contains spoilers for the At the Mountains of Dadness sidequest. The "After the Campaign" section contains spoilers for Season 1: Odyssey and Season 2: Quest.]**

> *"Have I got a sensational scoop for you!"*
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Hildy Russet is a PC in the At the Mountains of Dadness sidequest. She is an investigative reporter for the San Dimas Defender. At the start of the campaign, she is working undercover on the set of Father's Own Studios as a makeup girl and using the alias "Sally Stipe". She is the paternal grandmother of Henry Oak. She is played by Will Campos.

## Description

> *"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and all the ships at sea! ... I'm playing Hildy Russet - roving cub reporter for the San Dimas Defender. AKA Sally Stipe, her undercover alias when she's operating as a makeup artist on Blue Planet." - Will's description*
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### Appearance

The cover art of Hildy on the official At The Mountains of Dadness image depicts her with short, wavy, blonde hair. She is 4'11" inches tall and weighs 110 pounds. She always carries her camera with her.

### Personality

Hildy is eager and determined, always doing whatever she can to get the best scoop for her latest story. She often uses her skills with her disguise kit and lockpick to try and get the Blue Planet Crew out of difficult situations. When she's mentioned in Episode 23 of Season 2: Quest, Anthony describes her as a "quick-talking newspaper gal".

## At the Mountains of Dadness

### Chapter 1: Casting Call of Cthulhu

Hildy spends the majority of this episode undercover and uses her alias: Sally Stipe, Makeup Girl. She occasionally breaks away from the rest of the group to either call her editor at the San Dimas Defender, Julian, or to snap a photo of something horrifying.

At the hospital, Hildy yells at the doctor and tries to slap him because he's asking too many questions and not helping Stud. The doctor grabs her wrist and says that he's used to dealing with hysterical women. Hildy leans into this overt sexism; when she wants to sneak away and call Julian to update him on her case, she often claims that she has to deal with "feminine things" so that the men wouldn't question or follow her.

Hildy is temporarily the designated driver of the group. After Stud is blinded, she drives them from the editing suite to the hospital. Because her driving is erratic and she drinks while driving, Robert elects himself to drive instead.

At the end of the episode, the rest of the crew finds out her true identity. The episode ends with her preparing to tell them the truth.

### Chapter 2: Choo Choo, Cthulhu!

In this episode, Hildy uses her makeup kit to make herself, Stud, and Robert look monochromatic to blend in with the other train passengers. She successfully does Robert's makeup, but fails to make herself or Stud look convincingly devoid of color.

After Robert demands to know Hildy's true identity, she breaks her cover and tells the group that she's a reporter for the San Dimas Defender. She wants to publish a story about *The Heart's Greatest Desire*, but acknowledges that their assignment from the studio is to keep the story under wraps.

On the first full day on the train, Hildy calls her editor to ask for some money and a gun. Later that day, she and Meryl sneak into the sleeper car to look for the latest copy of the script of *The Heart's Greatest Desire.* Hildy tries to read the script, but fails her sanity roll. Despite this, she steals the script, and replaces it with a copy of the *Blue Planet* script.

Hildy successfully picks the lock to the sleeper car, which allows the party to hide there.

When the party prepares to isolate and attack the Conductor, Hildy uses her Judo skills to get a hard success against him. She later tries to push something heavy on to the Conductor to crush him, but fails.

Hildy is the last person in the party to jump from the baggage car to the engine car of the train. She manages to snap a picture of the Conductor before slamming the door shut. The Conductor attacks the door, but Hildy successfully holds him back for several turns. She uses a shotgun to try and keep the door closed, but the Conductor eventually breaks through. Hildy uses a distraction from Meryl to successfully leap into the engine car and escape to safety.

### Chapter 3: Nuclear Family

During this episode, Hildy reads the copy of *The Heart's Greatest Desire* that she stole from the train in the previous episode. She reads it aloud to Stud, and both of them gain the ability to cast one spell from the Call of Cthulhu handbook. She takes a large amount of sanity loss from reading the script.

Hildy convinces the train conductor to stop in Arkansas, which allows her to pick up the money and .38 snub nose pistol that Julian sent her. Before the party leaves Little Rock, Hildy casts the spell she learned - Cure Blindness - on Stud.

When the party arrives in Oak Ridge, Hildy successfully disguises them as monochrome people.

Hildy makes her last phone to Julian just outside the fence that surrounds the Oak Ridge research facility.

Hildy comes up with the idea to cut the power in the building; that way, the crew won't be able to finish filming the movie. Hildy and the party hide outside the building, but Hildy critically fails and is instantly captured. She pretends to be knocked out to avoid being injured further.

Hildy, along with Stud and Meryl, are dragged to the third floor of the research facility. There, they see that the final scene in *The Heart's Greatest Desire* is about to be filmed. Hildy judo flips a guard, with assistance from Stud as a distraction.

When the celluloid lying around the set is lit on fire, Hildy fails her sanity roll and succeeds on her intelligence check, being "compelled to get as far away as possible by whatever means available" for ten rounds. She tries to run, but Double J attacks her and successfully hooks her up to the still-rolling camera. She is incapacitated from this point on.

When the Banish Deity portal opens, the camera gets sucked through. As The Doodler awakens, it sends a spark of energy through Hildy's veins. Her eyes open for a moment before she falls through the portal and the facility blinks out of existence.

## After the Campaign

At the end of Chapter 3, it is undetermined whether Hildy survived the events of the campaign. There is no confirmation of what, exactly, happened to her until about halfway through Season 1: Odyssey.

In episode 42 [?] of Season 1: Odyssey, it is revealed that she survived the Oak Ridge lab's transportation to the Forgotten Realms. There, she met an elven man, and the two of them fell in love. They had a son named Barry, and Hildy passed on The Doodler's static to him. Barry would go on to have a son named Henry.

Hildy was never able to get back to Earth. The stories she told Barry of her home world are what inspired Barry to try and create a portal to Earth.

In Episode 23 of Season 2: Quest, Normal Oak looks into The Doodler's mind. When he wants to know what The Doodler fears, it shows him a glimpse of Hildy. In her old age, she is "quietly, insidiously, and subtly gaslit and insulted and abused" by Barry. He takes away her agency, resources, and money. The Doodler feels Hildy's resentment and Barry's selfishness. When Barry leaves, Hildy realizes that she is isolated and surrounded by no one she loves. Hildy dies in Oakvale, completely and utterly alone.

## Grandma Facts

* Chapter 1: Hildy's favorite musician is the crooner Louis Prima. Her favorite song is "Stardust", but she "goes absolutely crazy" for "Long About Midnight". She loves the "early" era of Louis Prima music, and that's what she mostly listens to.
* Chapter 2: Hildy uses an Ensign Autorange 220 camera. An English camera introduced in 1937, It is a 120 film folding rangefinder camera that shoots on 6x6 centimeters. According to Will, "It gets the job done!"
* Chapter 3: Hildy wears a brooch on her lapel that belonged to her grandmother and personal hero, Jeanne Wilcox-Russet. Jeanne was a muckraking investigative journalist who exposed the horrors of the San Dimas meat-packing industry in the 1890s. Jeanne's disgust at the conditions she uncovered at the Happy Hog's Pork Processing Plant inspired her entire family to convert to veganism, a tradition that has survived through five generations of Henry Oak's family. The brooch has a pig with a heart around it to represent Jeanne's love of animals.

## Other Facts

* Hildy is 23 years old at the start of the campaign. This means that she was born in 1916.
* Hildy, like the rest of the party, smokes. (It's 1939. Of course she does.)
* Hildy enjoys judo - and is quite good at it.
* Hildy's father was a police officer; he encouraged her to learn judo.
* Hildy's grandmother is named Jeanne Wilcox-Russet. Will gave this fact in honor of his own grandmother of the same name.
* Hildy is the only person in the party who knows Morse code.
* Hildy used to be a radio operator. She also used to work in a telegraph office. (This is why she knows Morse code.)
* Hildy uses a two-shot Derringer pistol.
* Hildy is vegan.
* Hildy's grandmother and personal hero is named after Will's great-aunt, Jeanne Wilcox. The real-life Jeanne was an editor for Reader's Digest in the 1960s.
* Hildy hates it when movies have a B-plot romance that doesn't add anything to the movie.
* Normal Oak, Hildy's great-great-grandson, wrote a book report on Hildy when he was in the 6th grade.

## Quotes

* "Say, that's a whopper of a handcuff! You've got quite a knack for flinging woo! I hope she doesn't give you the air!"
* "Excuse me, good sir, but does it say in the Hippocratic oath under 'do no harm', 'fucking ask a bunch of bullshit questions before I help someone?'"
* "You know what they do say is that: the script is the most important part of a movie. And the person who writes the script is the most important and most talented person involved in the production of the film." [In this moment, Will is almost certainly using Hildy to highlight his own career as a screenwriter.]
* "Look at the getaway sticks on that cactus! Va-va-voom!"
* "Fuckin' 4'11", 110 pound woman blocking the door, but by all means, you guys run."
* "We're on a wild mission that has dark implications for not just ol' Califor-Ni-A, but the whole U-S-of-A."
* (When handed the list of spells from the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Rulebook) "Aw, *spell* yeah."
* "This actually worked out pretty well. We rode the ol' Knockout Express all the way to the third floor."
* "Meryl. Shoot him again. His soul is still dancing."
* Last words: "Goodbye, everyone. Publish the truth!"

## 1939 Slang

During the recording of this sidequest, Will had a book open beside him: *Dewdroppers, Waldos, and Slackers: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century.* He had it opened to the section on the 1930s. Below is a list of the slang that he used. (Some of this might just be phrases that he made up. We put them on the list anyway.)

* Go eat your eggs
* Keep this under our hats
* Small, rinky-dink world
* Speak your peace to her
* Gabber-blabbing
* Blew his wig
* Put two fingers of bourbon in it
* Holy crackers
* On the beam
* Slip me five, jack
* Jumpin' Jehovah
* We can get forty winks