Cast:
- Arnie: Arnie Niekamp
- Chunt: Adal Rifai
- Usidore: Matt Young
- Durp the Dragon: John Roderick
- Mysterious Man: Tim Sniffen
About 5 years ago Arnie fell through a dimensional portal behind a Burger King in Chicago into the magical, fantastical land of Foon. Luckily he still gets a WiFi signal that he uses to upload a podcast, chronicling their quest to defeat the dark lord, but there has been an earthquake and everyone in Foon is trapped in small little sections of land and they are now recording the podcast remotely via he magic of Roon.
In this episode, John is playing Durp, a terrifying and persnickety dragon. His appearance starts around minute 12:00 into the episode. A dragon minds its own business and expects others to mind their business. Arnie has never seen anybody who was as unimpressed by Usidore as Durp is. Durp has been known for millennia as Durp the Magnificent because all the more magnificent dragons had passed to the other side and he is now the last dragon of Foon.
Arnie used to know a dragon. He lives next door to doctor Agon, but any patients he saw never came back out of his cave. That is how this conversation started, some stone that was in the pocket of this dumbass John ate earlier this morning. It was the 3rd best adventurer in Foon and the 14th best-tasting adventurer in Foon.
John doesn’t have any self-interest in helping Usidore defeating evil. Good feelings and niceness are emotions that Durp has very carefully laid waste to in the great fields of his own heart. He used the fire of his scorn to eliminate all selflessness because he was hurt many years ago and he needed to cauterize the weeds growing there from the many sorrowful winters of his youth and his loves, those long sorrowful winters. Durp is 100.000 years old.
A lot of dragons are consumed with greed and have a desire to accumulate wealth, but that was never Durp’s thing, he was much more socially attuned. Hoarding wealth is a misguided dragon-strategy to stave off doubt and fear. Durp has always been interested in the dragon past and he has hoarded mostly vintage dragon stuff. He liked the age of elves and the great wars and he has a lot of war memorabilia, a lot of mithril garments that he ripped off of dead elvenfolk, and all of the shinbones of all of the dwarves he has eaten.
Durp was a pretty sporty and stylish young dragon. You can adorn your many scales with all kinds of crustaceans and the skulls of your enemies. Durp also cuts a fine figure and the lady dragons knew he was an up-and-comer and maybe that was his undoing. He was a feminist, taught by his mother dragon to let the lady dragon make the first move and he often waited at the side of the volcano cauldron, sporting his most elegant cloak of peacock skulls and maintained an aloof demeanor because he had read all the great novels, and waited for somebody to choose him, but no-one ever did, so at one point he decided to live alone forever.
Durp is very happy, he doesn’t need all the things that lesser dragons seem to need like company or friends or hugs or touch, but Durp gets plenty of touch from the adventurers that pummel his nose as he gobbles them down to their boots. He feels those punches as sweet caresses.
Durp has left his poetry behind a little bit and is now working on a monograph about the history of carts. He admires carts of many shapes and sizes. There are so many elegant designs and Durp especially likes big carts and has collected many of them as he has eaten their drivers. Durp also has a model village where he has some carts in and he has built a trail around his property that he can walk. They are not miniature to humans because they are life-sized and they contain real carts. Durp uses them to act out certain scenes from his own life and from history.
He is acting out what he has seen in his experience with other creatures. At first they seem happy and then there seems to be a disagreement where one of them underperform and then they are mad and storm off and Durp kills them all with fire and steals their cart. With the Nasgul Durp stole their Nascarts, it was one of his favorite sports.
Whenever Durp flies over a village and sees people betray each other he is obligated by the laws of the Panacarta to destroy the village whether everyone was happy or not, but he did feel a certain common cause with the sadness of men and elves. Dwarves seem emotionally stunted. That feeling of common cause gave him pause and made him reflect on his own life and what has happened to him as a young dragon, but as with men and elves and other living creatures he is condemned to aloneness and sorrow and his collections.
Durp doesn’t fly out into the world to connect with real creatures because it is too much risk, too hard, and too dangerous. Dangers for dragons are: Weather, volcanos, heart hurt, famine, and indigestion. As you get older it gets harder to pee, which becomes a major problem for the much older dragons. Heart hurt is the thing that killed more dragons than any other and Durp is not willing to put himself out there again after what happened to him. Usidore suggests to get Durp a sex doll, but they are illegal in his jurisdiction and he doesn’t want to get his Willy Wonkered. It is sad that dragons die of heart break, but the Godesses have to place some weakness in all creatures, otherwise Durp would be a God.
John’s Amazon Echo went off as he was talking and said: ”Sorry, I don’t know that!” Usidore thinks that if Durp would stop destroying villages, maybe adventurers would stop trying to slay him. Durp underlines that dragons are not just some big domestic dog that guards your petty villages and are happy. For many years Durp lived on Soylent alone, the wonderful people Soylent of Foon, but once he had eaten them all he needed to go back to eating adventurers.
One time Durp went on a perfect date with the leader of the most brilliant band of girl dragons. They knew each other for a long time, Durp liked her a lot, but he had never said anything. She was pretty cool, Durp was cool, and one time they were together with a bunch of other dragons, and Durp fel bold and asked her out. She said: ”Yes!” and at the end of the night he tried to entwine tails with her as was the custom, and she did, but she wasn’t that into it, so Durp withdrew his tail and she liked him a lot, but for his own self-preservation Durp had to self-isolate and couldn’t feel hose feelings ever again. She and all the rest flew off beyond the sea.
It was extremely annoying for Derp that they had him remember all these sad memories and Usidor has coveted his carts. Arnie says they take this feedback seriously, but he still wants people to put that on Apple Podcasts and Durp asked his talking stone, his Alexa, what that was, but she just said: ”I am not sure!” Arnie asked Durp to ask the talking stone about Hello From the Magic Tavern and it does read the blurb from Wikipedia, but Arnie and Usidor deny that what the computer said is true and they are not a fictualized version of Kneecamp.
This conversation was more conversation than Durp has ever had in 450 years, except for with these magic stones, and it has been nice to have some people to show his carts to, but he doesn’t want it to happen again anyway.