Jade has gone outside. Her home is on an island in the middle of the pacific which has dinosaurs and the ancient ruins of a frog shrine. We learned she is alone there. Her grandfather died some time ago. She has a pet named Becquerel, all we know is Dave referred to them as a devilbeast, and it likes irradiated meat. Jade mentions that she cannot make predictions for Bec. They’re only found when they want to be. Something is stocking Jade but she isn’t aware of that either. Since she is outside she decides to track the airdropped package that landed earlier. She knows its a gift from John which is very late, but just in time. We go now to John, he’s for the first time entered his fathers room. He’s shocked by the lack of clowns or harlequins. It’s all boring business stuff. John freaks the hell out over this realizing his dad is a boring businessman and not a street performer.

John’s father at that time is wreaking havoc in the dark castle. He’s a prisoner, but not a very willing one. He destroys another imp by tossing a very heavy safe at him. A guy who looks suspiciously like Spades Slick is looking at this event from a monitor. This guy goes by Jack Noir. He is an Archagent of the dark kingdom. He has a cubicle of 3 “Fenestrated walls” (Fenestrated meaning windowed). He mentions that some had stolen the 4th wall.

He summons his burliest minion who is totally not Hearts Boxcar to put a larger safe in front of the prisoner cell. He’s interrupted by the monarch, his boss, demanding he wear the hat part of his uniform. Jack really hates the hat, but he obeys. Now Jack sees his burliest minion is getting a beat-down from John dad. He decides he’ll need to handle this guy personally.

John finds there were more presents in his fathers room that he figures are for his birthday. This guy gets tons of presents and cake, yet still destroys the house. What a brat. His new gifts include.

• A control deck
• An array modus
• 10 new cards
• A box of fruit gushers
• and a suit

The control deck allows John to have multiple modus types active simultaneously. The array modus pretty much lets John take out any item. John finds this too boring though. By combining it with his stack modi his inventory is now organised as queuestacks. Hence making his inventory needlessly complicated. He also got some fruit gushers. I bought some of these recently, shocked to see they are still around. Apparently they are also a Betty Croker product, and I still curse the batterwitch. As for the suit, it looks good.

John also steals his fathers shoes. And the gushers into his inventory. He has a mild breakdown over discovering they are a Croker product. That’s pretty much me every time I discover something I like is a Nestle product.

Back to Jade. She’s about to grab the package when she encounters a beast. A creature sparking with both lightning and radiation. Its head, shaped much like a pumpkin we’d seen recently, or a logo on a Jade shirt. The music indicates this in an incredibly dangerous and powerful beast. Attempting to shoot at it has a few interesting effects. It absorbs the first bullet. Melting it on contact. The second bullet causes the best to shrink both itself and Jade. They are so small they ride it to the other side of the island. With the third bullet the creature becomes the universe itself. This sends Jade through the cosmos but landing them both safely nearby. The fourth bullet the creature becomes everywhere at once. We see scenes near Rose, Dave, and John, again teleporting both itself and Jade back to where they started. The fifth bullet Jade shoots behind herself and yells “Fetch”. The creature obeys giving Jade a moment to grab the package. Jade has won her strife!

The creature is of course her pet and best friend Bec. Bec receives the irradiated stake. It’s completely not expressive as it is some sort of god dog. But we can assume it’s happy to have played a game with her. Jade has another nap attack as Bec watches over her.