512: Two Scoops of Danger

Synopsis

Simeon lies asleep as the fight in the ritual room begins. Timeon traded his handgun for the case and begins dialing in its combination, and Constance Venus slips away behind the same shimmering, smoky veil she arrived through. Dom draws his 1911 and badly wounds the mustached henchman with two shots. Billy uses Command of the Wizard on the bearded henchman. The spell works, but the henchman moves away from the crack, and a giant scorpion the size of a big hog skitters in through it. Dom drops his gun in fright. The scorpion seizes Ezra in a claw, breaking his left arm and pinning him to the floor, and Ezra shoots it at point-blank range. The wounded henchman slashes Billy with a dagger like Garibald John Daly's and leaves a numbing sting, and Timeon blocks the bearded man's club with an uppercut elbow to the throat.

Woken by the gunfire, Simeon rises with blackened eyes and casts the Smiting Blast of the Foul One. The blast tears the scorpion off Ezra and splits it in two against a stone pillar. Timeon gets the case open and scoops the bearded henchman inside, and gray hands pull him down out of sight. When the mustached henchman dodges Dom's flying punch, Billy commands him to "get in the case," and he walks straight in. The group has finally pulled off a double scoop. Simeon sucks the poison out of Billy's wound, and Ezra's broken arm is bandaged to his side.

Among the scorched papers, the group finds a charred spell page, the "Unbinding of Remembrance," also called "The Scorpion's Shadow" or "The Hollowing of Names." The ritual uses a black mirror consecrated to Scorpius and a token of the caster to sever a target's memory of the caster, and the stronger the bond between them, the more the mind is changed. Too much force could fracture the target's mind completely. The margins are covered in notes in Fiona's handwriting. In them, she wonders whether she could widen the spell to keep everyone safe at a cost of "dozens, hundreds," and whether she could recast it around herself, cutting herself out of "the world's network of recognition." She warns that such a spell "would behave like a contagion," with her as the infection point. The group theorizes that the spell went wrong. It may explain the hollowing of Dom's memories and Hannah Baker's lost mind, and perhaps the "star crazies" too, who would all be people who knew Fiona. That would mean only people who never knew her could safely find her, and Constance has been following the group to reach her. Dom feels the answer sitting just at the edge of his awareness, "as if she's in the next room, or nowhere at all." Carrying Ezra and the Order's half-burned handbook, the group leaves the basement for the hospital.

Funny Moments

• Timeon trades his handgun for the case, and the case is named Satchel Universe after a Patreon supporter.
• The table argues over how big a "normal-sized briefcase" is, eventually settling on "something that could effectively scoop a Dominic Druncard."
• Ezra tries to persuade the Keeper that the scorpion would go for the bleeding henchman instead. The Keeper rules, "I rolled a shut the heck up."
• "Shibaddee!" Simeon's spell is compared to Eleven from Stranger Things, and afterward he blows on his fist: "I can't stand your bugs."
• "Not to be outdone by Simeon, I'll do a magic trick. Abracadabra."
• "Get in the case." "Come to papa." The double scoop finally happens, and the table declares it has found a way to scoop the Dead Light.
• "Remember when we killed Mary and we had this big moral dilemma?" "Yeah, we're way past that."

Notable Quotes

• "Let the scorpion close its claw. What once was known is now unmade." —the Unbinding of Remembrance
• "Instead of cutting their remembrance of me, I cut myself out of the world's network of recognition." —Fiona's margin notes
• "A spell scaled to all who know me would behave like a contagion, not an act of will." —Fiona's margin notes