After a long hiatus in uploads (which is all entirely on Peter for being distracted and an overall lazy shit) we’re back and looking at chapter 16 of The Way The Stars Fall: Rebirth.

This is our second attempt at recording this episode, and our frayed nerves do start to show as this fairly uneventful chapter leads us into talking about gambling for space porn, Hollister’s hypothetical  murder spree and plans to get into Jack’s pants, ideas for other podcasts and musings on what constitutes a face.

This week you’re two bookends find themselves again on the Vortmund with Tona looking at the alien egg.

It hatches, everybody dies and Tona does everything wrong that she possible could.

With that in mind, let me leave you with this direct quote from Tona near the close of the chapter:

‘Oh god, I’m dead, it’s got me, I was stupid; I shouldn’t have opened the door, why did I open the door? Why am I not dead yet?’

Why indeed Tona. Why Indeed…

This week we’re reading Chapter 14 of TWTSF:R and we mostly spend it with the now captain (shudder) of the Vortmand, Tona, as she mines, romances and touches dusty alien eggs.

Featured this week is lots of complaining about Tona being a captain, the universes weird tech abilities, Jack’s light fitting sabotage and an old timey space miner that Peter found far more entertaining than he should.

This week you’re bookends Join Jack and the tranquillity crew in getting far away from any threat of an interesting plot or action scene around the insurrectionist base, Peter again displays his frayed sanity when he talks about spaceship engines for about a quarter of an hour and Tona become a Captain of her own ship.

Wait.

What.

WHAT!

After last week’s throwback, your bookends are finally talking to you from there here and now as they finally get their teeth back into “The Way The Stars Fall: Rebirth”.

It’s good to be back my friends.

Prepare yourselves for steamy love pecks, dreams of a Jack-Insurrectionist duumvirate, complete abandonment of any attempts to describe action sequences and the hasty abortion of this insurrectionist arc before anything had a chance to happen.

This week your two bookends read to you from about two months in the past, in the simpler times of early January 2017 before either had read the Eye of Argon. Life seemed so simple then.

Apologies on how long it took to get this out, for a myriad of reasons, though admittedly a large chunk of them involve Peter being a lazy gobshite.

In the Chapter itself Jack and co reach the insurrectionist base, meet the leader of the insurrection and wander around the base a bit. That’s it really, but we still waffle on about it for an hour…

This week Peter and Louis finally finish the Eye of Argon, reading chapter 7, 7.5 and the missing ending. Where epileptics rage, Grignr gets jealous of a corpse, we learn the meaning of life from looking at the mouth eye of a red emerald blob and Grignr either becomes a King or stays a barbarian (dealer’s choice).

It was a blast, and good old Jim made sure the ending was one we’ll never forget, but it’s probably for the best we’re done. In this episode more than ever it’s becoming clear just how thinly spread our sanity was becoming trying to make sense of this tome.

This week your two bookends read chapter 5 and 6 of the Eye of Argon by Jim Theis, in what frankly ended up as a far too long episode. The chapter is full of shivs, vomit, testicular punishment, Mrifk and epilepsy, to name but a few of the many ingredients.

More than ever, the contents of these chapters make us have to seriously question our 16 year old Jim Theis, but in this case he got around this close examination by making these chapters so long your bookends Peter and Louis lose the will to live long before reaching the chapter summary. Don’t worry, we’ll be finishing the story next week, and we’ll remember all these wrongs perpetrated against us. Probably.

This week your two bookends read chapter 3, 3.5 and 4 of the Eye of Argon by Jim Theis, where Grignr sits in the dark, considering how much less he eats when he does nothing, we get a completely unexplained cutaway to some pimpin shamen (sic) hanging about where we get a glimpse of the titular Eye of Argon, before going back to possibly the longest chapter so far, where Grignr fights with a rat, and nothing else of note occurs. However, to our delight this life or death tussle with a rodent does provide Grignr with his first workable escape plan.

As ever, this description does no justice to the baffling prose employed by the dearly departed Theis.