This is a HeadGum podcast.

Ah, there you are, traveler.

Come inside, hang up your care. You are a traveler.

Come inside, hang up your coat, put your feet by the fire, and I shall bring you what you so desperately

seek. you so desperately seek, rude tales of magic. Oh, The sun is heavy in the sky. The heat from the dead cracked earth ripples in the dry air.

Jessup short sleeve, a man drenched in sweat and dusted in dirt, crawls across the ground.

He smells like if cigarette butts could get B.O.

Above him, something like a buzzard, but worse, circles lazily. But he can't look up at it. That's where the sun is. He's been lost for days and he knows his time is short, but he has to get to Fort casual to deliver a message, a warning. He's made the perilous journey enough times to know all the landmarks,

but this time something was different.

Wrong.

There was no Mount Fractus to guide him.

How could that be? No time to wonder.

Just as there was no time to chase after his horse when it bucked him off to follow its dream

of dying several hundred miles away from heat stroke and exhaustion.

Jessup can feel his sun-burnt skin cooking in the oven hot sun.

Just a little further. He squints and can almost make out, is that it? Fort casual? Nah, it can't be. Gotta be another mirage. His eyes adjust. Just in time to feel a pain sharper than sunburn on his back.

With what's left of his energy, he looks back to see what's landed on him.

Baby, that's no buzzard.

He screams but it's swallowed up in the dusty vacuum of the trash lands.

The camera pans up mercifully into the sky. We see the title card, rude tales of magic and the pale blue

expanse. Clouds a mile high, the shape of cosmic popcorn painted in pinks and golds rolling off the horizon.

We pan back down to what was once a grove and is now a gulch.

...