Gaming munchies included chocolate brownies, so all is well.
Well, maybe not all, since it turns out Rachel was friends with the health care exec who was shot this week (if you’re reading this in the future, hopefully there’s enough of an Internet you can look it up), and some of her and Jeremy’s kids were near the earthquake and tsunami warning this week (ditto). Too much, 2024! Too much!
Played: Librarians Errant. Back from their dragon-robbing expedition, Reshelving Squad Upsilon picks up the trail of BODASHUS COW from where an actual cow belonging to the Ag Department was eaten. Plotting the incidents on a map indicates the main quad, so they search around there and find feathers leading to a window into the basement of the Student Center. The meeting room is not full of terror turkeys, but is reserved for “SHU” at 8, so the squad stakes it out. At 7:45, the TA who has been with Beasley Knees at all of the Interdimensional Cow incidents, Nick, and a couple of his fellow grad students show up for their meeting of the BOvine De-Apparition Society of Humanoids and Ungulates Standing Collectively in Opposition to Wizards. Lili barely waits for them to explain about Beasely being a menace and the anti-cow energy before joining. Their experimental manifestation of anti-cow energy is suspiciously feathery, and the Humanoids admit that some might have escaped, but surely they’re too small to have done any real harm, pshaw. With confirmation that feathered abominations are stalking the campus, the squad stakes out the Ag Department barn in case the growing monstrosities come back for another snack. They do, but then scarper cross-country to a sewer culvert and vanish beneath Waterdeep, maybe somewhere beneath the university. However, they didn’t get a cow this time, so the next night the squad stakes out the beef barn again, only to be interrupted by an unmissable summoning special effect from the direction of the main campus. The light show ends, leaving the Student Center apparently unharmed, until Lili (who had stayed behind with the SHU) bursts out the front riding a tyrannosaurus! Theropods of various sizes as well as a brontosaurus stampede out and begin attacking the students who have assembled to watch the excitement! Thaïs, realizing that this flood of dinosaurs isn’t going to stop as long as the portal is open, looks for a way into the basement while everyone else fends off the prehistoric onslaught. Beasley Knees shows up with his own summoning tarp to add with the chaos with gorgons and minotaurs as anti-anticow forces, which arguably helps the students, if not the landscaping, and another contingent of Medium-size raptors like the ones seen at the Ag Department starts setting up their own ritual in a corner of the quad. Anywhere else this would be a disaster, but at Waterdeep U… it’s still kind of disastrous. The first batch of smaller dinosaurs are wiped out pretty easily, but the tyrannosaurs and the next wave are more of a problem until Thaïs closes the gate (ending up with half a tyrannosaur all over her, the basement, and everything) and the mystery novoraptors suck the rest of the dinosaurs into their portal. Time for T-rex BBQ!
Rachel was definitely MVP with her extensive collection of dinosaur figurines, Lego and otherwise.
Read: Dandadan vol 9 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That’s an unexpectedly Ranma-esque plot twist! I wonder if it will turn out to be a translation error.
Read: Library System Reset: Rebound (KT Hanna): Librarian is leaning into her fundamentally OP nature, and only going a little mad with power. The conspiracy against the Library keeps being exposed as of greater and greater extent, though.
Written: 200.