RangerWickett
Legend
This week in my game – the Dungeon of Avalon, Nazi vampires, and hailing to the king
First, for those of you who read my storyhour, this post will spoil the climax of that game. Since the storyhour is currently at session twelve and the game this past weekend was something like session forty, maybe you’ll forget that you read this by the time I get to the end in the storyhour, but I wanted to warn folks.
I’d known for a few weeks that my friend Orenthal was coming in from out of town this weekend, and since he used to play in my d20 Modern fantasy campaign, I had been planning ways for his character to return to the group in a dramatic fashion. By remarkable coincidence, in the past few the players had pushed the plot to the point that they were near the climax, so with a bit of sleight of hand I removed two steps I’d been planning before the climax, and just let them get to it this weekend.
You must understand a few things about Orenthal. First, he’s a little crazy, and so he handles situations oddly. His character in my game is Scarpedin Jones, a knight from King Arthur’s round table who became lost in time and arrived in the New Mexico desert in the 1990s with amnesia. He joined a biker gang that was run by a college professor of Old English, who taught him modern English and showed him the marvels of cell phones, motorcycles, and denim pants.
The setting is modern fantasy, where the human world (Terra) and the magical world (Gaia) exist in parallel, but are normally hard to cross between. Every PC and major NPC has to look like a famous person, usually an actor. This came about because of Orenthal. In the first session, Orenthal tells me he’s having a hard time envisioning all the people his character is interacting with. He says:
“I read this sci-fi book where, in the future, police sketch artists don’t ask you to describe what a person looks like. They ask you what actor the person looked like. The mind responds to famous people’s faces, so they remember them better. So what actors do all these people look like?”
The idea was a hit with our group, and became a defining element of the game.
Scarpedin looks like Nicholas Cage. The other PCs resemble Don Cheadle, Billy Baldwin, Cheech Marin, Bruce Willis, and Emily Mortimer. The villains are led by a man who looks like Patrick Stewart. His five main henchmen look like Nicole Kidman, Charlie Murphy (Eddie Murphy’s brother), Jet Li, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Chinese woman from The Transporter.
Still early in the campaign, while the characters are all coming to grips with the existence of magic, Scarpedin is taking it all in stride, as his memories are coming back. In New Orleans, the group learns that they will be facing a vampire, and Orenthal, completely off the top of his head, says:
“Vampires. Yeah, you guys have it easy. Back in the day, me and Arthur and the other knights, we’d fight vampires, but we didn’t have movies to tell us what to do. If we’d known you could just wave a cross at them then stake them in the heart, sh*t, it’d’ve been easy. But no, we just had to keep hacking them to pieces until the sun came up.”
Scarpedin later expresses an interest in getting a light saber, figuring it must be possible with modern technology. He is disappointed that it isn’t. A few months later, after the party has defeated a Nazi werewolf anti-paladin (this was on Gaia, the magic parallel to our world, Terra), Scarpedin claims the Nazi’s swastika-adorned magical longsword, has the party’s technical genius hook it up to portable generator, and runs a lethal electrical current through it, so hot that when he activates it, it melts the sword in five rounds.
During those five rounds, though, he was thrilled.
In addition to swordfighting ability, Scarpedin has gained limited magical powers, which he primarily uses to create high-tech weapons and gear, the use of which he is totally untrained in. In order from earliest to most recent:
Now, to this weekend’s session. The villains have done something to the magic of the world that will kill billions if they aren’t stopped, and the only way to stop them is to get to Avalon and somehow heal the world. The PCs have gone on a quest to get the necessary ‘keys’ to open Avalon – they got special magical powers for one of the party members so he could cross into the pocket dimension of Avalon; they have the Holy Grail which had been hidden under the blast site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb had been tested; and they know where Avalon is since Merlin’s ghost told them after they found his soul trapped in a Sumerian demon bowl on the haunted St. Cuthbert Island in the North Sea.
But they aren’t exactly sure of the specifics of what they need to do to heal the world. Merlin’s ghost says that in the old days, when Arthur was sick and wasting away, England itself began to die as well. The knights found the grail and gave the king a sip of water so that he would recover. The group asks Scarpedin if that’s true, and Scarpedin replies:
“We tried all kind of sh*t back then. You guys today, you got, like, the Greatest Hits collection, so it all makes sense. Drink from the grail, be healed. Sounds really obvious nowadays, but we didn’t know what the hell we were doing back then. None of it made any f***ing sense.”
Of course, when questioned for more detail, Scarpedin can’t really recall any of the other knights, or Arthur himself. In game, this is because of amnesia. Out of game it’s because Orenthal doesn’t know crap about the Arthurian legends, which worked great for me.
After discussion and divination, the PCs decide that healing King Arthur won’t do. The entire world is in danger, and a British King doesn’t have the right mythic resonance with the world as a whole. They still need someone who is like a king, someone whose greatness has faded, whose body is weak, and who needs healing.
One of the PCs asks, “Hey, where does Michael Jackson live nowadays?”
The group flies to Bahrain, under the pretense of offering a business deal from rebel billionaire Sir Richard Branson (of Virgin Records), hoping to convince the King of Pop to come with them and save the world. Meanwhile the villains, who have lots of divination magic and connection to the British military, arrange for a few hundred soldiers to defend Glastonbury Tor, the hill in south England where Avalon is said to be.
While the party listens to Michael talk about how he’s planning a big come-back, and how he wants them to come with him to his indoor jungle playground, the British military sets up snipers, claymore mines, concrete and barbed wire barricades, and machine gun emplacements around the hill, while the villains set up magical defenses using the leyline energy of Glastonbury Tor.
Eventually the group smooth-talks Michael Jackson into coming along with them (along with Shakira, who was visiting, since she also lives in Bahrain), and they fly back to England. Along the way they’re contacted by the villains and told not to go to Avalon, but since when did PCs ever take villainous advice?
With the aid of invisibility, a little teleportation, a lot of charm spells, and all manner of supernatural powers, the group assaults Glastonbury Tor like it’s D-Day. Hating that he is out-gunned, Scarpedin conjures an M1A2 Abrams tank, which he inaccurately and ineffectually uses to fire at machine gun emplacements. Michael Jackson faints from shock, but the group is ultimately victorious.
They head up to the tower at the top of the hill, where the ritual must be performed. The group is injured from the battle (but not much since, y’know, they have the Holy Grail), and though they’re fairly certain that the villains are waiting around invisible to attack them once they’ve gone inside Avalon and been weakened by whatever trials await them, the party decides to go in.
The mage PC performs the ritual, and they shift into a place that is between Terra and Gaia, a pocket plane which contains only the hill, making into something like an island in a sea of mists. There is a large stone in the center of the tower, and in the stone is a sword. Scarpedin immediately steps forward and tries to pull it out.
It of course doesn’t budge.
A few tries later, however, he has a brainwave, and says that he wants to deactivate the sword. He looks for a switch and tries mentally ‘turning off’ the weapon, which works. The blade of metal flares with light and retracts like a lightsaber being turned off. Scarpedin holds the sword hilt and raises it in the air, then reignites Excalibur. It glows with the light of the sun itself, harnessed into the shape of a sword blade.
Scarpedin says:
“Good for killing vampires.”
With that, the entrance to the underground Dungeon of Avalon appears (the design of which was inspired by the video game God of War). The party faces many trials, fights the main villains along the way, and finally get to the entrance of the Chamber of Healing, where the King lies, and where the King must be healed to save the world.
They pass through a sheet of cascading water, and emerge into a circular room, eighty feet in radius, with solid walls. The way back is solid stone. Except for the ten feet nearest the wall, the main floor of the room is a huge circular pool filled with blood, and in the center of the pool is a ten-foot radius stone island with a stone bier upon which lies a shrouded body. The walls are covered in a long cyclical mural depicting life, death, and rebirth, as well as inscriptions of Bible passages, and a dozen levers ring the room.
Bored with exploring, the group’s mage simply teleports them onto the island. A PC tells Michael to sit down, and he starts to move Arthur’s body aside, when King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, King of the Britons, reaches up and grabs the PCs wrist. Another PC tries to smack the king in the face with the Holy Grail, but he grabs her arm as well, then shakes her, flinging the grail from her grasp. It bounces across the island and sinks into the lake of blood.
Only then does the party look around. They see piles of ash scattered about, a few scraps of Nazi uniforms scattered here and there, and blood stains on the shroud that covers King Arthur.
Arthur shoves back the people he grabbed, pulls the shroud aside, and sits up. He’s a vampire, and he looks like Bruce Campbell.
Scarpedin bows to his king. His king laughs and kicks Scarpedin in the face, vampiric strength flinging the knight into the pool of blood after the Holy Grail. He stands and grabs an NPC who is one of the PCs’ love interest. He pulls her close, dominates her with a glance, and says:
“Hail to the King, baby.”
Arthur, it seems, lay in his tomb, waiting to be healed for fourteen hundred years, waiting for Scarpedin to find the grail and bring it back to save him. But the Nazis got there first. During World War II they used their sorcery to send a unit of SS Vampire Soldiers into Avalon, in an attempt to abduct the king and thus destroy England. Arthur was turned into a vampire, and in a rage he tore the Nazis to pieces. Now he intends to destroy these intruders, take the Holy Grail, and escape.
Michael Jackson screams, Shakira cowers with him, Don Cheadle teleports the group to safety on the ring at the edge of the room, Bruce Willis peppers vampire King Arthur with flaming bullets, and Billy Baldwin uses kung-fu. The dominated love interest (Milla Jovovich) attacks Bruce Willis, while the King conjures a giant red dragon out of the pool of blood to attack. Cheech Marin magically dominates the dragon and sends it back at Arthur. Arthur shrugs and dismisses it, then turns to blood mist and flows across the lake at the party, where he materializes and starts swinging with a sword left by one of the Nazis. Emily Mortimer starts trying to decipher the writing and carvings on the wall, thinking it is key to defeating the King of England. King Arthur begins hacking the party to pieces.
Scarpedin, who looks like Nicholas Cage, emerges from the lake of blood, tosses the Holy Grail to a companion, then climbs onto shore. For a moment, he and Arthur face each other, and then Scarpedin crosses his arms, holding in one hand the hilt of Excalibur, which he ignites, and in his other hand a remote control.
He says, “Allow me to introduce you to Arthur, king of Camelot.”
He presses a button on the remote control and then magically conjures a multimedia center with a flat-panel screen and a DVD player. Arthur looks at the device in curiosity for a moment, then recoils as First Knight, starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere, begins to play. It is during Sean Connery’s dramatic speech about how Camelot will never die.
The battle continues, Arthur and Scarpedin battling while Bruce Willis struggles to break his girlfriend out of her compulsion and the rest of the party tries to activate the chamber of healing. During the fight, Scarpedin takes his licks, but he keeps changing through different movies, demoralizing the vampire king.
“This is Martin Lawrence in Black Knight. It’s actually a pretty funny movie. And this is what you’ve become. John Carpenter’s Vampires – Los Muertos. It’s the sequel, better than the original. You’ll note how crappy all the vampires are, and how easily they die.”
King Arthur, irritated at the barrage from the TV, sneers and just punches Scarpedin in the face, then knocks Excalibur away. They trade insults and start grappling.
Meanwhile the group has figured out the mechanism, how it is keyed to different passages of the Bible and stories of the Arthurian mythos regarding rebirth. They pull the levers in the right order, and blessed water begins to pour in from channels in the ceiling while the blood in the pool swirls away. The lake is now running water, and if only they can knock Arthur into it, he’ll be destroyed.
In the grapple, Arthur is strangling the breath out of Scarpedin, and Scarpedin reaches out with his arm, his fingers scrabbling on the stone floor to try to grasp Excalibur, but it’s out of reach. Since that won’t work, he reaches instead for the remote control. He grabs it and presses the button to flip to the next movie.
On the screen, Monty Python and the Holy Grail begins to play, right at the beginning of the scene of the musical number with the Knights of the Round table. Arthur is stunned by the silliness of what he sees, and the group together manages to pull him off Scarpedin and shove him into the whirling lake of holy water. King Arthur does his best impression of the T-1000 in molten steel, or Stripe from Gremlins as he gets melted. When the king’s screams die, the group shuts off the mechanism, then teleports back across the lake to the king’s former resting place.
Michael Jackson, a little shaken, looks at the bier and sees that it’s carved with an ancient map of the world. He lies down, then accepts a cupful of water from the Holy Grail. Slowly his features return to those of the original 1980s Michael Jackson, but maybe a little older and wiser. He stands up, spins with a "hoo!", then grabs Shakira and dips her into a kiss.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
First, for those of you who read my storyhour, this post will spoil the climax of that game. Since the storyhour is currently at session twelve and the game this past weekend was something like session forty, maybe you’ll forget that you read this by the time I get to the end in the storyhour, but I wanted to warn folks.
I’d known for a few weeks that my friend Orenthal was coming in from out of town this weekend, and since he used to play in my d20 Modern fantasy campaign, I had been planning ways for his character to return to the group in a dramatic fashion. By remarkable coincidence, in the past few the players had pushed the plot to the point that they were near the climax, so with a bit of sleight of hand I removed two steps I’d been planning before the climax, and just let them get to it this weekend.
You must understand a few things about Orenthal. First, he’s a little crazy, and so he handles situations oddly. His character in my game is Scarpedin Jones, a knight from King Arthur’s round table who became lost in time and arrived in the New Mexico desert in the 1990s with amnesia. He joined a biker gang that was run by a college professor of Old English, who taught him modern English and showed him the marvels of cell phones, motorcycles, and denim pants.
The setting is modern fantasy, where the human world (Terra) and the magical world (Gaia) exist in parallel, but are normally hard to cross between. Every PC and major NPC has to look like a famous person, usually an actor. This came about because of Orenthal. In the first session, Orenthal tells me he’s having a hard time envisioning all the people his character is interacting with. He says:
“I read this sci-fi book where, in the future, police sketch artists don’t ask you to describe what a person looks like. They ask you what actor the person looked like. The mind responds to famous people’s faces, so they remember them better. So what actors do all these people look like?”
The idea was a hit with our group, and became a defining element of the game.
Scarpedin looks like Nicholas Cage. The other PCs resemble Don Cheadle, Billy Baldwin, Cheech Marin, Bruce Willis, and Emily Mortimer. The villains are led by a man who looks like Patrick Stewart. His five main henchmen look like Nicole Kidman, Charlie Murphy (Eddie Murphy’s brother), Jet Li, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Chinese woman from The Transporter.
Still early in the campaign, while the characters are all coming to grips with the existence of magic, Scarpedin is taking it all in stride, as his memories are coming back. In New Orleans, the group learns that they will be facing a vampire, and Orenthal, completely off the top of his head, says:
“Vampires. Yeah, you guys have it easy. Back in the day, me and Arthur and the other knights, we’d fight vampires, but we didn’t have movies to tell us what to do. If we’d known you could just wave a cross at them then stake them in the heart, sh*t, it’d’ve been easy. But no, we just had to keep hacking them to pieces until the sun came up.”
Scarpedin later expresses an interest in getting a light saber, figuring it must be possible with modern technology. He is disappointed that it isn’t. A few months later, after the party has defeated a Nazi werewolf anti-paladin (this was on Gaia, the magic parallel to our world, Terra), Scarpedin claims the Nazi’s swastika-adorned magical longsword, has the party’s technical genius hook it up to portable generator, and runs a lethal electrical current through it, so hot that when he activates it, it melts the sword in five rounds.
During those five rounds, though, he was thrilled.
In addition to swordfighting ability, Scarpedin has gained limited magical powers, which he primarily uses to create high-tech weapons and gear, the use of which he is totally untrained in. In order from earliest to most recent:
- He bought an illegal uzi and barely managed to hit one vampire in a crowd when spraying bullets wildly.
- He telekinetically stole a chain-gun from a villain during a car chase, which he attempted to use to destroy the enemy car, only to end up missing and snapping the ammo chain. Later he used the mini-gun to destroy a 1976 Cadillac filled with voodoo Rastafarians, and then a month later he opened fire on the Sears Tower in a daring helicopter rescue they called “The Matrix Plan.”
- He magically created a shoulder-held missile launcher to fire at the black helicopter that pursued them through the Chicago skyline. He missed.
- He conjured a motorcyle to drive through the fey forests of England on Gaia when fleeing a vampire carriage.
- Upon realizing his motorcyle’s engine was alerting all the ogres, trolls, and giants to his presence, he opted for a quieter escape vehicle – a Seg-way.
Now, to this weekend’s session. The villains have done something to the magic of the world that will kill billions if they aren’t stopped, and the only way to stop them is to get to Avalon and somehow heal the world. The PCs have gone on a quest to get the necessary ‘keys’ to open Avalon – they got special magical powers for one of the party members so he could cross into the pocket dimension of Avalon; they have the Holy Grail which had been hidden under the blast site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb had been tested; and they know where Avalon is since Merlin’s ghost told them after they found his soul trapped in a Sumerian demon bowl on the haunted St. Cuthbert Island in the North Sea.
But they aren’t exactly sure of the specifics of what they need to do to heal the world. Merlin’s ghost says that in the old days, when Arthur was sick and wasting away, England itself began to die as well. The knights found the grail and gave the king a sip of water so that he would recover. The group asks Scarpedin if that’s true, and Scarpedin replies:
“We tried all kind of sh*t back then. You guys today, you got, like, the Greatest Hits collection, so it all makes sense. Drink from the grail, be healed. Sounds really obvious nowadays, but we didn’t know what the hell we were doing back then. None of it made any f***ing sense.”
Of course, when questioned for more detail, Scarpedin can’t really recall any of the other knights, or Arthur himself. In game, this is because of amnesia. Out of game it’s because Orenthal doesn’t know crap about the Arthurian legends, which worked great for me.
After discussion and divination, the PCs decide that healing King Arthur won’t do. The entire world is in danger, and a British King doesn’t have the right mythic resonance with the world as a whole. They still need someone who is like a king, someone whose greatness has faded, whose body is weak, and who needs healing.
One of the PCs asks, “Hey, where does Michael Jackson live nowadays?”
The group flies to Bahrain, under the pretense of offering a business deal from rebel billionaire Sir Richard Branson (of Virgin Records), hoping to convince the King of Pop to come with them and save the world. Meanwhile the villains, who have lots of divination magic and connection to the British military, arrange for a few hundred soldiers to defend Glastonbury Tor, the hill in south England where Avalon is said to be.
While the party listens to Michael talk about how he’s planning a big come-back, and how he wants them to come with him to his indoor jungle playground, the British military sets up snipers, claymore mines, concrete and barbed wire barricades, and machine gun emplacements around the hill, while the villains set up magical defenses using the leyline energy of Glastonbury Tor.
Eventually the group smooth-talks Michael Jackson into coming along with them (along with Shakira, who was visiting, since she also lives in Bahrain), and they fly back to England. Along the way they’re contacted by the villains and told not to go to Avalon, but since when did PCs ever take villainous advice?
With the aid of invisibility, a little teleportation, a lot of charm spells, and all manner of supernatural powers, the group assaults Glastonbury Tor like it’s D-Day. Hating that he is out-gunned, Scarpedin conjures an M1A2 Abrams tank, which he inaccurately and ineffectually uses to fire at machine gun emplacements. Michael Jackson faints from shock, but the group is ultimately victorious.
They head up to the tower at the top of the hill, where the ritual must be performed. The group is injured from the battle (but not much since, y’know, they have the Holy Grail), and though they’re fairly certain that the villains are waiting around invisible to attack them once they’ve gone inside Avalon and been weakened by whatever trials await them, the party decides to go in.
The mage PC performs the ritual, and they shift into a place that is between Terra and Gaia, a pocket plane which contains only the hill, making into something like an island in a sea of mists. There is a large stone in the center of the tower, and in the stone is a sword. Scarpedin immediately steps forward and tries to pull it out.
It of course doesn’t budge.
A few tries later, however, he has a brainwave, and says that he wants to deactivate the sword. He looks for a switch and tries mentally ‘turning off’ the weapon, which works. The blade of metal flares with light and retracts like a lightsaber being turned off. Scarpedin holds the sword hilt and raises it in the air, then reignites Excalibur. It glows with the light of the sun itself, harnessed into the shape of a sword blade.
Scarpedin says:
“Good for killing vampires.”
With that, the entrance to the underground Dungeon of Avalon appears (the design of which was inspired by the video game God of War). The party faces many trials, fights the main villains along the way, and finally get to the entrance of the Chamber of Healing, where the King lies, and where the King must be healed to save the world.
They pass through a sheet of cascading water, and emerge into a circular room, eighty feet in radius, with solid walls. The way back is solid stone. Except for the ten feet nearest the wall, the main floor of the room is a huge circular pool filled with blood, and in the center of the pool is a ten-foot radius stone island with a stone bier upon which lies a shrouded body. The walls are covered in a long cyclical mural depicting life, death, and rebirth, as well as inscriptions of Bible passages, and a dozen levers ring the room.
Bored with exploring, the group’s mage simply teleports them onto the island. A PC tells Michael to sit down, and he starts to move Arthur’s body aside, when King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, King of the Britons, reaches up and grabs the PCs wrist. Another PC tries to smack the king in the face with the Holy Grail, but he grabs her arm as well, then shakes her, flinging the grail from her grasp. It bounces across the island and sinks into the lake of blood.
Only then does the party look around. They see piles of ash scattered about, a few scraps of Nazi uniforms scattered here and there, and blood stains on the shroud that covers King Arthur.
Arthur shoves back the people he grabbed, pulls the shroud aside, and sits up. He’s a vampire, and he looks like Bruce Campbell.
Scarpedin bows to his king. His king laughs and kicks Scarpedin in the face, vampiric strength flinging the knight into the pool of blood after the Holy Grail. He stands and grabs an NPC who is one of the PCs’ love interest. He pulls her close, dominates her with a glance, and says:
“Hail to the King, baby.”
Arthur, it seems, lay in his tomb, waiting to be healed for fourteen hundred years, waiting for Scarpedin to find the grail and bring it back to save him. But the Nazis got there first. During World War II they used their sorcery to send a unit of SS Vampire Soldiers into Avalon, in an attempt to abduct the king and thus destroy England. Arthur was turned into a vampire, and in a rage he tore the Nazis to pieces. Now he intends to destroy these intruders, take the Holy Grail, and escape.
Michael Jackson screams, Shakira cowers with him, Don Cheadle teleports the group to safety on the ring at the edge of the room, Bruce Willis peppers vampire King Arthur with flaming bullets, and Billy Baldwin uses kung-fu. The dominated love interest (Milla Jovovich) attacks Bruce Willis, while the King conjures a giant red dragon out of the pool of blood to attack. Cheech Marin magically dominates the dragon and sends it back at Arthur. Arthur shrugs and dismisses it, then turns to blood mist and flows across the lake at the party, where he materializes and starts swinging with a sword left by one of the Nazis. Emily Mortimer starts trying to decipher the writing and carvings on the wall, thinking it is key to defeating the King of England. King Arthur begins hacking the party to pieces.
Scarpedin, who looks like Nicholas Cage, emerges from the lake of blood, tosses the Holy Grail to a companion, then climbs onto shore. For a moment, he and Arthur face each other, and then Scarpedin crosses his arms, holding in one hand the hilt of Excalibur, which he ignites, and in his other hand a remote control.
He says, “Allow me to introduce you to Arthur, king of Camelot.”
He presses a button on the remote control and then magically conjures a multimedia center with a flat-panel screen and a DVD player. Arthur looks at the device in curiosity for a moment, then recoils as First Knight, starring Sean Connery and Richard Gere, begins to play. It is during Sean Connery’s dramatic speech about how Camelot will never die.
The battle continues, Arthur and Scarpedin battling while Bruce Willis struggles to break his girlfriend out of her compulsion and the rest of the party tries to activate the chamber of healing. During the fight, Scarpedin takes his licks, but he keeps changing through different movies, demoralizing the vampire king.
“This is Martin Lawrence in Black Knight. It’s actually a pretty funny movie. And this is what you’ve become. John Carpenter’s Vampires – Los Muertos. It’s the sequel, better than the original. You’ll note how crappy all the vampires are, and how easily they die.”
King Arthur, irritated at the barrage from the TV, sneers and just punches Scarpedin in the face, then knocks Excalibur away. They trade insults and start grappling.
Meanwhile the group has figured out the mechanism, how it is keyed to different passages of the Bible and stories of the Arthurian mythos regarding rebirth. They pull the levers in the right order, and blessed water begins to pour in from channels in the ceiling while the blood in the pool swirls away. The lake is now running water, and if only they can knock Arthur into it, he’ll be destroyed.
In the grapple, Arthur is strangling the breath out of Scarpedin, and Scarpedin reaches out with his arm, his fingers scrabbling on the stone floor to try to grasp Excalibur, but it’s out of reach. Since that won’t work, he reaches instead for the remote control. He grabs it and presses the button to flip to the next movie.
On the screen, Monty Python and the Holy Grail begins to play, right at the beginning of the scene of the musical number with the Knights of the Round table. Arthur is stunned by the silliness of what he sees, and the group together manages to pull him off Scarpedin and shove him into the whirling lake of holy water. King Arthur does his best impression of the T-1000 in molten steel, or Stripe from Gremlins as he gets melted. When the king’s screams die, the group shuts off the mechanism, then teleports back across the lake to the king’s former resting place.
Michael Jackson, a little shaken, looks at the bier and sees that it’s carved with an ancient map of the world. He lies down, then accepts a cupful of water from the Holy Grail. Slowly his features return to those of the original 1980s Michael Jackson, but maybe a little older and wiser. He stands up, spins with a "hoo!", then grabs Shakira and dips her into a kiss.
The King is dead. Long live the King.
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