#c2e124

[aeoris4lovers]

matt mercer as essek thelyss & laura bailey as jester lavorre + the last days of judas iscariot

[piratespencil]

Unironically I love Otis. She's weird she's nasty everybody hates him. What's not to love.

[stupidsexygrizzop]

POV you’re laying low at an outpost in Eiselcross

“Essek we frew up”

[leadmeastraylittlefairy]

drives me absolutely insane in episode 124 of campaign 2 when people keep suggesting jester drop the threshold crest

[ariadne-mouse]

fasheerious folly

that is all

[akaishinkirou]

Throughout most of what I've seen of C2 so far I was pretty neutral towards Essek and kind of struggled to understand why he seemed to be such a popular character, even though I very much like his story arc. But now I'm on C2E124 where they finally see Essek again after a long time and I find myself crying with relief and feeling worried because he's nervous and ashamed??????? This war criminal really found a way under my skin eh?

[ashleyinwondrland]

Can’t Artagan go to and from the fey wild still?

They should have asked him to hide the stone there!

[genderless-ghost]

diversity win! the halfling that picked your pocket and tried to kill you multiple times uses all pronouns!

[luolands]

Essek's Powers

EGtW: Essek is a prodigy who displays an unprecedented talent for the manipulation of dunamis energy

c2e57: You follow Essek and as you do, you feel like your pace is quickened. People pass by, other guards, but they blur past like you're unable to necessarily focus. Something is subtly influencing you to make it difficult to really trace the path you take to where you're going. ... Fjord: Do you not feel the same effects? Essek: No. Time is one of my specialties.

Essek, c2e57: Don't deal much in blacksmithing, not my specialty. [His hand rises out of the curtains that is his cloak and his hand passes. These trails of somewhat translucent, gray energy drift off his fingertips for a second and float there before dissipating.]

Essek, c2e57: While we do have periods of worship in which we give ourselves to the sunlight as part of our means of showing our faith, it does impede our day-to-day business. So as part of our craft, we've found a way to keep it at bay, for as long as we'd like.

EGtW: Twelve hours of daylight each day can become painful and physically detrimental to those beings adapted to subterranean life. To mitigate this problem, powerful dunamancers have woven arcane shields to temporarily block out the sun above Rosohna.

c2e61: The rain seems to fall, but you never see it scatter across the Shadowhand. It seems to drift around and he stays dry amongst the storm.

c2e61: Following below, it's hard to see because the cloak almost meets the ground, but looking below: his feet aren't touching the ground. He's just drifting.

Essek, c2e71: It seems you have made your preparations and are ready to leave? Beau: Yes, you may enter and cross into the threshold. Essek: Thank you. [He glides in. You watch the ball bearings actually separating out around his form. Like there is some invisible force that is pushing them outward, and just generating this strange force that keeps them at bay.]

Jester, c2e74: [I pull out a cupcake] It's fresh, I swear! Essek: [Extends his hand and the cupcake lifts out of your hand and drifts over. He sniffs it.] Thank you. [It vanishes beneath the cloak.]

c2e77: At which point, you watch as she begins to lift up off the ground from the chains and you see Essek, his hand out of his cloak, lifting her off the ground. ... You watch as her entire central torso crushes inward, the chains go taut and you hear the metal bend as some of the chains begin to pull and break in places before she is dropped to the ground limply.

c2e91: And he just drifts off, the gate opens on its own (creak, slam) and he heads up to the interior.

c2e91: Essek approaches, waves a hand, and the gate (creaks) opens and lets you guys in.

Essek, c2e91: Allow me to take care of this for you. [He waves his hand for a second and you watch as the chairs, the furniture (scraping) scoots from the edges into the center, forming a little seating area, table scoots in.]

Essek, c2e91: [He goes ahead and lifts a hand towards the hunk of clay] If I could have some help? [You lift it and it's half the weight it was before you grabbed it.]

EGtW, 2nd Lv. Graviturgy Wizard: Adjust Density. As an action, you can magically alter the weight of one object or creature you can see within 30 feet of you. The target's weight is halved or doubled for up to 1 minute or until your concentration ends.

c2e97: He moves his hand this way and one of the crates (scraping) scoots and he sits on it. Jester: Still cool, still fucking cool.

Essek, c2e97: My entire life, I've been propped up to be perhaps worthy of being one to break those boundaries.

Essek, c2e124: [And he rises and begins to head towards the door. The door opens on its own.]

Essek, c2e131: You are led to the familiar exterior of Essek's chambers. And, as you approach, the door (whooshing) opens on its own. ... As you all enter, the door closes behind you as he curls his hand towards him. And, with his other hand, he drifts out, a chair scooches forward and he drifts down into the chair, one leg crossed over the other.

Caleb, c2e131: Come on in. Jester: Wait, we're naked! Essek: [The doorway opens, stops. And slowly opens. (he sighs) The door opens the rest of its way on its own. ]

Essek, c2e132: Hold on to that, we have our means of drifting carefully. Or we could try to climb- well, you could try to climb. I'll be fine. Veth: Oh, yeah, you can drift. Essek: I can.

c2e132: Partway in your descent, you have this shadow drift by as Essek just drifts over the edge and just glides down past you, like an elevator, and just looks over at you each as he slowly descends towards the bottom.

c2e134: You see, as he starts putting his hands out in front like this, like he's soft throwing objects forward. You watch as rocks start coming out as he's just plucking them, as he pulls the gravity from them, aiding you as you guys go along.

c2e135: You see Essek puts his hand out and begins to concentrate, his eyes narrowing. As he does, you watch as the smooth, relatively untouched stone base of this glass tube device (stone cracking) begin to crack and crumble. You see it get pulled away and dragged under the ground behind, scattering. The glass breaking, and as opposed to shattering around you, being shunted off to the backside of the wall, scattering on the ground.

c2e135: As it all falls away, he turns his hand up, and as he does, it's like an invisible hand digging into clay and lifting through as it sifts past the fingers. You see the rock lift and then crumble, and then there in the center, you see this diamond-shaped gem, of faint dark purple coloration, that was now released. He lifts it and drifts it over into your hand.

c2e135: You guys all were all prepping and doing this space, as this was happening, Essek, you see him begin to cast something and then condense it into his hand. He hands you this small bead, Veth. This is like a marble. And just goes, "Follow my lead." ... A bolt of black lightning arcs out from it, across the way towards the creature. It's a level four Lightning Bolt.

EGtW, 14th Lv. Chronurgy Wizard: Arcane Abeyance. When you cast a spell using a spell slot of 4th level or lower, you can condense the spell's magic into a mote. The spell is frozen in time at the moment of casting and held within a gray bead for 1 hour.

c2e136: [He's wading through the water and he's like] Don't forget to return the favor! Sam: He can't float on the water? Liam: It's a three-inch spell. Matt: It doesn't quite work like that. It keeps him off of solid ground, but it doesn't put him over fluid surfaces. It's not a levitate type spell.

c2e138: He pulls out a piece of dark chalk and finds a section of the floor, and begins to draw different dunamantic symbols in this patterned array, making you progressively more and more uncomfortable as the designs begin to come together. Some of them are little more intricate for even your understanding, but you begin to pick up the basics of it, using this stone as a focus, not unlike how residuum is used as an amplifier device in a number of other laboratories.

c2e138: There's that brief moment where you see Essek, sweat beginning to form on his forehead as he's concentrating, and as you're focusing your spell energy towards this crystal, you see it begin to glow brighter and brighter and brighter, not unlike the way that the threshold crest was taking on that filament-like brightness, but this itself has a deep, deep purplish hue, and you see it begin to flicker, not unlike the symbol that you were seeing, which makes you extremely uncomfortable.  In a moment, you feel this urge to just rush in and stop it, but as you do, Essek twitches his arms around it and then draws his fingers in two different directions, and you see this small tear in reality, a break in reality, if you will. And with that, you can see, in a brief moment, in this sliver, hundreds of realities just brushing by at an endless speed. He begins to take and fold that tear around, like if the tear in space time became a thread, and wrap it around this stone, and as soon as it begins to close on it, (sizzling, shattering) it shatters... and we're going to go to break.

Essek, c2e140: I spent my entire life studying the intent to not let things like this happen to chance.

Essek, c2e141: I have spent my life in the pursuit of the ability to control one's future, and that path has led me to making many mistakes. And my shift begin to wander the possibility of fixing one's past, and since we found this, I've thought of it often.

EGtW, 14th Lv. Chronurgy Wizard: Convergent Future. You can peer through possible futures and magically pull one of them into events around you, ensuring a particular outcome.

[revvethasmythh]

c2e29 (liveshow):

sam: marisha did you just look at me? is that why you're just suddenly laughing?

marisha, laughing: yeah

c2e124:

laura: *randomly laughing* your mustache!

sam: I love it when a woman I respect laughs at me for no reason

Cinematic Parallels

[nat1nonsense]

C2e124: A Walk to Warmer Welcomes

Or: likely the most anxious Essek has ever been, someone please help this man he is so anxious

[piratespencil]

The bit where Veth gets soooo pissed that Fjord can’t make a snowball last for an hour and then is like FINE I’ll do it MYSELF is a peak Veth and Fjord moment. Fjord has an existential crisis. Everyone else is watching going wtf was that one-sided argument. Perfection.

[criticalsorcery]

I love Artagan

[duu-kiwi]

“Indeed”

[ariadne-mouse]

Thanks to the folks at CritRoleStats and their Wildemount Calendar, I can find out that the time between the Mighty Nein parting ways with Essek after the peace talks (11th of Unndilar) and their reunion in Eiselcross (28th of Brussendar) is just barely over six weeks. 

Six weeks.

Six weeks to go from ‘regret is a new sensation, I am but a humble selfish creature’  to ‘meeting you has shaken me to the core and yes I’ll try to help you  in any way I can’.

Rewinding further, the time between when Essek met the M9 (upon their arrival in the Lucid Bastion) and their farewell at the peace talks is a little under four months.  Summing up: their whole acquaintance spans less than six months. 

Drow are a long-lived race.  Essek is 120 years old.  Let’s look at this in perspective:

Essek is having a very, very long year.

[the-caleb-widogast]

What are we talking about?