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Episode: Season 5 Q&A, including 10-minute teaser for IF MEMORY SERVES

Author: Harley Takagi Kaner and Kevin Vibert
Duration: 01:51:10

Episode Shownotes

Harley and Kevin answer Patreon subscribers' questions LIVE (hence the sub-par audio) with help from Joshua Ilon and Melissa DeJesus.IF MEMORY SERVES will be released starting in October on our new paid platform. Details can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/big-news-from-q-111733218THIRST will begin release summer 2025 on our public podcast feed.For early

and ad-free episodes, production scripts, commentary tracks, blooper reels, livestreams with the creators, and much more, you can find The Penumbra Podcast: SPECIAL EDITION at: https://thepenumbrapodcast.supercast.com (In old episodes, you will often hear us mention Patreon, which was our old platform and is no longer live. Please feel free to ignore!)Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
Hi, this is co-creator Harley Takagi-Kahner. Before this episode starts, you're about to hear some ads.

00:00:06 Speaker_04
If you find that annoying, like I do, I wanted to let you know that you can access early ad-free versions of the episodes over at thepenumberpodcast.supercast.com, as well as a whole bunch of bonus content that we think you'll really enjoy.

00:00:22 Speaker_04
Thank you for supporting independent queer artists, and enjoy the show!

00:00:42 Speaker_03
Hello, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's still playing. Well, it's playing music for us, not for them. Thanks for, uh, thanks for breaking kayfabe there, Kaner. Hi, everybody. Welcome. This is our series finale Q&A. This is the last stop, everyone.

00:01:01 Speaker_03
We are finally here. Juno and Second Citadel are dead, and today we dance upon their graves. We laugh because otherwise we would cry. I'm Kevin Vibert. I laugh because otherwise I'm crying all the time.

00:01:18 Speaker_03
I'm joined here today by whoever would like to go next.

00:01:21 Speaker_04
I'm Harley Takagi Kaner. I laugh because it's so cute.

00:01:27 Speaker_02
I'm Joshua Elon. I laugh because Harley and Kevin pay me to.

00:01:32 Speaker_05
And I'm Melissa DeJesus because I have just such a wonderful laugh. I can't stop laughing.

00:01:37 Speaker_03
Very true. So we are going to jump into our Q&A in just a minute. We have a couple of announcements first. Number one, very, very brief management thing that I will take and then we'll get on to the festivities. So everybody who is here is on Patreon.

00:01:57 Speaker_03
Those of you who are hearing this on the feed after the fact are not. So you may not be aware that we put up a Patreon post a while ago about some foolishness that Patreon's getting up to. And long story short, Patreon is

00:02:11 Speaker_03
has demonstrated that their priorities are all about profit and they really don't care if they screw us over. So as a result, we are moving to a new platform. That's the idea. We can't announce the details just yet.

00:02:25 Speaker_03
We had hoped we'd have that ready for you today. We do not. We will in the very near future.

00:02:30 Speaker_03
The quick and dirty version is we specifically are pretty sure we're pretty locked in on this platform because they are going to make transitioning over for you as painless as possible and we should be able to upload literally all of our Patreon bonuses up there.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
So we've had a couple of people who've been sending us messages asking what's going to happen to all the Patreon bonuses after this show is over. They're still going to be there, just in a new place. So details to come, but we wanted to let you know.

00:03:00 Speaker_03
And then we have an announcement that we've been hyping up for a long time. Do you want to take this, Harlan?

00:03:05 Speaker_04
I do. Before that, we have an announcement that is just logistical, that we have not been hyping up for a long time, which is that there are two dogs around and about, and they might happen. And that'll be that.

00:03:19 Speaker_02
So if you have any questions for the dogs, chat. Too bad.

00:03:23 Speaker_04
There's also a human being who's not one of the four of us sitting in this room, literally sitting in a chair eating popcorn watching us, which I just thought would be fun information for everybody. No, I'm not gonna specify who it is.

00:03:38 Speaker_04
You don't know them. But to move to the announcement that we have been hyping up a lot, we are going to be announcing our next project at the end of the stream.

00:03:55 Speaker_03
Thank you very much, Harley. And with that, we're ready to take questions from you all. And no, we will not be answering any questions about what that is. You will have to wait until you've suffered appropriately. So put your questions in the chat.

00:04:13 Speaker_03
Joshua and Melissa are going to help us pick out some questions for everybody. As promised, I grabbed a few from Patreon for people who couldn't make it, so we will throw those in there as well.

00:04:25 Speaker_03
And this is me vamping, waiting for the questions to come in. If no one asks questions, can we get the announcement? No. If no one asks questions, we sit here in stoic silence for 50 minutes.

00:04:37 Speaker_05
Did Director W ever find out what happened to her little sister?

00:04:44 Speaker_03
So here's the deal. Harley and I were talking about this, not Director W specifically, that would be weird.

00:04:49 Speaker_03
Harley and I were talking about this specifically because we know that a percentage of the questions that are going to come in are ultimately going to be what people might call Word of God questions in terms of, you know, unanswered stuff in the show.

00:05:03 Speaker_03
And my policy on it, and Harley you can add something if yours is a little different, is that the show's over now, the text is out there, it's done, it's outside of us.

00:05:13 Speaker_03
So, you know, we're not gonna pull what certain extremely successful fantasy authors are famous for doing, which is supplying in-world text outside of the fact, because that's, qu'est-ce que c'est, cheating? That sucks. So we're not gonna do it.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
What we will do is if you have questions like this we can tell you what we suspect but I would not be surprised if you and I disagree because some of this is stuff that we've not talked about and so ultimately all we can give you is the perspective of people who have thought about these imaginary people obsessively for eight years.

00:05:52 Speaker_03
Um, so did Sasha ever find out what happened to Annie? Um, I don't think so. What about you?

00:06:02 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, I do think so. Yeah, because I think that Dark Matters can, like, has a way to figure out absolutely anything except when we specifically need them not to be able to.

00:06:17 Speaker_03
I think for me it's that I, I suspect she would have chilled out if she had. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like there's a burning engine in her of the, like... of that emotional turmoil being unanswered. Do you know what I mean?

00:06:35 Speaker_04
Speaking as someone who has not once chilled out ever, I don't think that, like, I think once you're on that train, it goes. Yeah.

00:06:47 Speaker_02
We have any other questions? Yeah. So Cam Chowder is curious that if you could live in either the world of Juno or in the world of the Second Citadel, which would you choose to live in?

00:06:58 Speaker_04
Oh, we should all do this.

00:06:59 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah, for sure. I've got the mic, so I would live in Hyperion City. That seems like a really cool place to be. As Juno? Has Juno? No, probably not. He has a really hard time. I would just be like a guy out there.

00:07:21 Speaker_02
They all seem to have a much better time than Juno did in general. So yeah, no, I think I would live in Hyperion.

00:07:28 Speaker_05
I mean, my answer is very similar and exactly the opposite, which is that I would live in Second Citadel. And I would be like Quan Yi, but like me Quan Yi, like slightly toned down, a little bit less all the time so I could have days off.

00:07:43 Speaker_05
I feel like Quan Yu doesn't take days off.

00:07:48 Speaker_03
If it weren't narratively doomed, I would live in Silver Shore 100% easily. Find a hot monster dude and start a family. I mean, come on, there's nothing better. But given that it is narratively doomed, I would live in the Western Wastes 100%.

00:08:10 Speaker_04
Yeah, I think I would also live somewhere in the world of the Second Citadel. I think there's something about it. I think maybe just because it is in many ways like easier to explore.

00:08:26 Speaker_04
You know, everything in the Juno Steel universe feels like very colonized, you know, like it's been done. So there feel like there are more frontiers in the world of the Second Citadel. Yeah.

00:08:42 Speaker_03
Got anything else?

00:08:44 Speaker_05
I've got another question. Harpy Raven asks, question, what was your favorite heist to create? And I'm picking this question because I god damn love heists.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
Do you have a strong feeling about this yet, Harley?

00:08:57 Speaker_05
What are the heists? So this one lists Train From Nowhere, Zulimna's Gala, you know, environmental planning of heists.

00:09:11 Speaker_03
You know, actually, my favorite was the, I actually don't think we ever gave this place a name. It was the lockbox that the Care Mother Prime was being kept in.

00:09:22 Speaker_03
And I can tell you exactly the reason, and it's because one of my favorite things to do with descriptions of setting is when setting is also characterization, right?

00:09:31 Speaker_03
When setting tells you something about the people who own or make the space, and the, like,

00:09:37 Speaker_03
entire system for that place was kind of built around our backstory that you have these five pharmaceutical megacorporations that are on there on the surface cooperating with each other but they're all prepared at any moment to backstab each other and that's the reason that that's the only reason that Juno and company escape and so building a place around that design principle was so fun I absolutely adored that.

00:10:02 Speaker_04
Well, it was very hard, because I think at some point in the planning, we were like, wait, does this make sense, given who designed it? Does it make sense for it to come out this way? So we had to back up and make sure it made sense along those lines.

00:10:16 Speaker_04
I don't know if this is a heist, but it's definitely infiltration. And I really liked the Dokkana group stuff.

00:10:24 Speaker_03
Asteroid?

00:10:25 Speaker_04
Actually, before that, in 16 Tons. The, like, getting into the, specifically the fun room that we can't remember. Tell me, who remembers the name? Chat, help me. What was the name of that goddamn room with the anti-gravity?

00:10:51 Speaker_04
That's not what it was called, that was just one of the functions. But it's like, this is where all the employees go to hang out and have a good time, and there's no one ever in there because they're all working. Because they have to.

00:11:03 Speaker_04
And that was just a very fun set piece to work with, so I really enjoyed that.

00:11:07 Speaker_02
Here's a question. Is there anything from either of the two stories that you wish you had more time to elaborate on, whether a plot thread or a setting, etc.?

00:11:18 Speaker_03
Yes, actually. And I was talking to you about this a little while ago, which is that

00:11:24 Speaker_03
I think, you're gonna have to let me get through this whole answer, I think if I could today take another stab at the beginning of season five, which I like the beginning of season five, I'm not saying that I don't, but I do think I could do it a lot better.

00:11:40 Speaker_03
And the biggest reason for that is just because, I've talked about this a little bit on Patreon, when season five started, I was scared out of my mind. I was terrified the entire time because

00:11:51 Speaker_03
there was this very real fear that we both had right which is that we've never ended this long a show before so and we have two of them right so we get two chances but ultimately everybody's watching to see if we can land the plane right um and you know i i have anxiety issues and i was really really struggling with the thought of like

00:12:16 Speaker_03
This is two chances, right? But if we land neither plane, we're screwed. That's it. We've sort of demonstrated a pattern that we don't know how to do this. So I was terrified.

00:12:26 Speaker_03
And something that I have noticed about myself for sure is that when I am scared about my own abilities or when it feels very high stakes, I do worse. So the one that really gets me is Juno Steel and the Bird's Eye View.

00:12:41 Speaker_03
I love the plan that we came up with for that, and I wish I could have done a little more with those characters.

00:12:47 Speaker_03
I think their voices are a little lacking based on how much I could pull off, based mostly around the fact that I was very scared of not doing a good job. Which, you know, counterintuitively makes you do a bad job. Right.

00:13:01 Speaker_04
I don't think that's uncommon. I think a lot of people feel that way about most things.

00:13:06 Speaker_04
And as a director, I have realized over the years that a lot of my job is to make the actors, especially if they're newer, just feel more comfortable, because it affects the performance so much. So I think you're not alone.

00:13:23 Speaker_04
I would have liked to do more with Olala's God of Death powers. Yeah, because we didn't really come back to that a ton, and it was cool.

00:13:36 Speaker_03
Do either of you have anything performance-wise that you feel this way about?

00:13:42 Speaker_05
Do I ever? I mean, I wish I'd found the voice earlier. I think sometimes you kind of, in, for example, a stage performance, you rehearse it for months and months and months. For a film performance, you get one day. But with something like this,

00:14:00 Speaker_05
You have individual days separated by months and months and months. So, yeah, I feel like the performance evolved a lot from the beginning to the end in ways that were kind of natural and fun.

00:14:11 Speaker_05
But I really wish that early Kwanyee sounded more like late Kwanyee, because late Kwanyee is obviously where I settled.

00:14:20 Speaker_02
Kind of similarly, I re-listened to the whole show. one to infinity uh getting ready for this last episode this final season um including the first cut of murderous mask and We were doing something so completely different then.

00:14:42 Speaker_02
And I certainly was too. You can hear a little bit of it in Prince of Mars, but I'm doing like a Leslie Nielsen Top Gun thing. Like there's a voice being done that isn't the thing that we think of as Juno or Seal now.

00:14:53 Speaker_02
And I would not change that at all because at least me listening through it, I am able to hear us as a group figure out what we're doing and the show itself developing its own personality that we are all part of.

00:15:11 Speaker_02
So no, perfect performance, 10 out of 10, wouldn't change a thing.

00:15:15 Speaker_05
I have another question. Trans Shark asks us, they are making dinner while listening and they need to know who is the best cook from the whole Juno Steel character list.

00:15:26 Speaker_03
Oh, out of the characters. Yeah.

00:15:29 Speaker_02
We know that Juno is a decent cook.

00:15:31 Speaker_03
Decent. Purely middle of the road. I do think, I very, very confidently, firmly think that Nureyev is the worst. Like, is capable of creating meals that are not even palatable, that you like, you would have trouble swallowing. I think it might be Jet.

00:15:58 Speaker_05
I saw that answer in the chat.

00:16:00 Speaker_04
I feel like Buddy probably has a couple of very solid, go-to, well-executed recipes that she can always pull out for a dinner party.

00:16:10 Speaker_03
Buddy does canonically own a bar, which probably sells food. Buddy also canonically doesn't eat.

00:16:18 Speaker_04
Right. So she can't eat it. But there's also people, there's also vegetarians who are chefs and would cook steak or something and they're not going to eat it, but you still have to be able to do it. I absolutely think she could.

00:16:34 Speaker_02
First off, yes, I am sporting a bun, to whoever asked that. Thank you so much. Melissa, this is a question for the two of us. If you could play any other character, which would you choose?

00:16:46 Speaker_05
Ooh, this is a toughie. Well, you went to ask it, so I feel like you should have an answer first. Have you thought about this one?

00:16:53 Speaker_02
I have, and it's Sir Mark. That would be so much fun.

00:16:59 Speaker_05
That surprises me, but I love it. I mean, I'll pick that too, Sir Mark. No, I mean, I think that like Melissa loves doing voices of different genders means like literally no one's off-limits So just let me do the whole thing.

00:17:14 Speaker_02
Like I'll rerecord the whole show just me Melissa will be playing all the parts If I had to choose a character in the Junoverse, I think it would've been Ramses Oh, yeah, and like no one can compare to Matthew who is a god amongst humans But yeah

00:17:32 Speaker_03
I was talking about this with someone recently. Did we ever notice at the time that Ramses and Juno and Damian and Tristan were the same duo, but flipped?

00:17:43 Speaker_02
We commented on it in one of the commentaries once, that we have the same sort of antagonistic relationship just reversed. That was a lot of fun. 7-0 is the best. This is true. Fox, Nelson. Sorry, do you have a question?

00:17:59 Speaker_05
Kind of going off of that, Gwen Schroeder says, gut instinct, what characters from each story would get along the best if they met? So characters who haven't met, but would get along well. Some cute pairings, some cross-universe pairings.

00:18:13 Speaker_03
This is the easiest answer because it's a collision of cinnamon rolls, but if you put Rita and Angelo in the same room, you wouldn't be able to get them to shut up. It would go on for hours.

00:18:30 Speaker_04
That's true. I don't know. I may not make myself incredibly popular with this, but I don't like crossovers between the two, so I don't like that. It just, it makes me feel yucky. I don't know why. So I'm gonna abstain from that question.

00:18:55 Speaker_02
I think Jet and Caroline would get along really, really well. They're both really business first. They'd find a common language and they'd hit it.

00:19:07 Speaker_05
I think really it comes down to like there's certain characters from both series that would get along with absolutely everybody. So like Mick and Angela would be pretty cute together. Oh man, pretty much Jet I feel like could jive with almost anybody.

00:19:23 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:19:24 Speaker_03
I did see someone in the chat ask who in each series would hate each other. And without going to too much depth, I do think it's pretty funny that Juno and Caroline.

00:19:33 Speaker_05
I was just thinking that.

00:19:37 Speaker_03
Juno would spend an entire season trying to destroy Caroline. And I don't know who would win.

00:19:42 Speaker_05
Actually, you know what? A little bit of Kwani Rita would be amazing. It would be so chaotic.

00:19:51 Speaker_03
Someone would die.

00:19:53 Speaker_05
Yeah, but we'd have a great time.

00:19:56 Speaker_03
Somehow someone several miles away that neither had ever met would die.

00:20:00 Speaker_05
Kwani would love it. Rita might be conflicted. Sorry, Rita.

00:20:06 Speaker_03
I do every once in a while want to intersperse these questions from people who could not make it. I want to go through this one very, very briefly because I think it's a funny story.

00:20:16 Speaker_03
Caroline Mercy asked us, how do you feel about the Penumbra podcast being shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society Best Audio Award? Which is, we're very, very excited.

00:20:26 Speaker_03
The reason that we never announced anything about it is because they never contacted us. So we found out from, I think you were Googling.

00:20:39 Speaker_04
seeing if there was anything recent about the penumbra and that came up and I was like, oh, no one told me. This is a very cute question to ask, like, how do you feel about it? Because imagine if we were like, we hate it. No, we're very flattered.

00:20:58 Speaker_03
No, I mean, it's like, you know, no shade to them. I'm sure that they they're extremely busy and stuff falls through the cracks. It's literally just like because we never got official confirmation of it.

00:21:08 Speaker_03
It felt so weird to, like, brag about it because it felt like we were going to do that. And so I was going to contact and be like, it was a mistake.

00:21:16 Speaker_05
We made a different decision.

00:21:19 Speaker_03
Right.

00:21:20 Speaker_05
This is bullying.

00:21:21 Speaker_03
This is middle school.

00:21:22 Speaker_02
Oh, my God. They thought we were serious.

00:21:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, exactly. Terrifying.

00:21:29 Speaker_02
We have anything else from the chat?

00:21:39 Speaker_05
I love questions like this. What character did you not expect to love as much as you ended up loving? And what made you love them so much? This is from True Heroes 58.

00:21:48 Speaker_03
Oh, Vespa. Vespa with a bullet, actually. When we started Season 3, I don't rank my children, but Vespa was my least favorite. And it was just because I didn't know her. I didn't really know anything about her, right?

00:22:04 Speaker_03
And then over the course of writing Shadows on the Ship, She was like, you know, she slowly started like climbing in the ranks until she became one of my favorite voices to write.

00:22:14 Speaker_03
This is a Patreon only thing, but we did do a in-universe short story that's from Vespa's perspective, and I loved writing that. That was so fun, even though almost nobody is ever going to see it.

00:22:30 Speaker_03
And it's just, I don't know, it's like getting in her head, I loved... I mean, one of the things that I always really like to do as a writer that I always find really compelling is when someone's internal voice and external voice are very different, the distance there I always think is kind of fascinating.

00:22:44 Speaker_03
And Vespa has one of my favorite examples of that in the entire series, in general.

00:22:50 Speaker_04
There will never be a Q&A where I don't bring this up, but it's always Jet. Jett Sekuliak, my son, I love him so much.

00:23:00 Speaker_04
And I think if I'm remembering correctly, at some point you were like, let's bring in Jett Sekuliak, who we had just mentioned as like a throwaway name in Train From Nowhere. And I was like, we don't have to do all that.

00:23:16 Speaker_04
Like, we don't need to connect everything. Like, we don't need to follow up on every single name drop we've ever done. This is not necessary. And I loved him so much.

00:23:25 Speaker_02
But what if we did?

00:23:26 Speaker_04
Yeah. I love him so much, Kevin.

00:23:30 Speaker_03
Do either of you have a feeling about this one?

00:23:33 Speaker_05
Well, actually, I was just remembering from my script writing experience, or script editing experiences, I didn't particularly think Lam was going to hit for me. But then something about Stuart is astounding.

00:23:50 Speaker_05
And he has this like unbelievable tenderness that like Lam for me on the page I was like, I get it. You know, he's an interesting guy with a background. But something about Stu's voice like completely brought him to life for me and I got really hooked.

00:24:04 Speaker_03
I do think one of the most impressive things about Stu's performance is that it's very much part of the style of both Juno and Second Citadel, that you have these massively cartoony, over-the-top, capital-V voices.

00:24:16 Speaker_03
So whenever you get someone who talks more or less like a guy, it's a hard sell. It's a hard sell to hang in those scenes. And he's never once been swallowed up by the scene in that way. I've always been really impressed by that.

00:24:31 Speaker_02
I feel like I can't really answer this question because I have such a different relationship to the script than all of you. I kind of only know the characters after they're done. Okay.

00:24:46 Speaker_05
In other news. Do I have any questions? Oh, okay. I always like questions like this. Stummy Horde asks, did you know what the different arcs were going to be like from the start or did you kind of meet the characters more as the show went on?

00:25:03 Speaker_05
So the specific example they give is Nureyev's motivation. Is that something you had in mind for a while? But I think it's a great question kind of generally because it's such a big show. So obviously you didn't know all of it from the beginning.

00:25:14 Speaker_03
Do you want to go first, Harley, or do you want me to?

00:25:17 Speaker_03
So, generally, the way that we've gone, right, is, and we've, I think we've said this, we may have said this in literally every Q&A, but it's because it's been a kind of guiding star for us forever, is that if you raise a mystery, if you raise a question, you have to have an answer ready then.

00:25:34 Speaker_03
And however, at that point, you are allowed to trade up. If you find a better answer later, you can totally swap it out.

00:25:40 Speaker_03
You have to do a lot of kind of internal testing and discussion to make sure that new answer actually works and does not just sound cool. But you are allowed to trade up.

00:25:49 Speaker_03
And part of the reason for that is because I do think there's this misconception creatively that, you know, the most... The kind of superior way to go about a work is to sit down and create a perfect plan all the way and then just enact, right?

00:26:04 Speaker_03
But the flaw with that is that then your plan is only as smart as you were on that day.

00:26:09 Speaker_03
That's it Whereas if you allow yourself to be a little flexible you get to use your kind of peaks of creative of creativity over the years to supplement what you've got and if you think that

00:26:22 Speaker_03
I do think it's a little naive to assume that on any given day you will be as good as you could be over the course of eight years, in sum. Do you know what I mean?

00:26:32 Speaker_03
So the short version is that we have had big things like character beats planned out from the beginning.

00:26:38 Speaker_03
If you want kind of evidence that Slip has been a thing for a very long time, an early version of that character is on Patreon in one of, in an old old post, that is the the early versions of Angel of Brahma, right?

00:26:56 Speaker_03
The character was called Kaven, and then we changed the name because we were doing the Arthurian Knights thing in Second Citadel, and we thought it would be confusing, so we switched it around.

00:27:05 Speaker_03
But that aspect has been in the chamber from the beginning. Episode by episode though, we do kind of, kind of the math that we do is like, okay, we know the character arc, we know that we want Juno to be roughly here at this point.

00:27:17 Speaker_03
What situation can we set up that is going to get Juno there, right? So it's sort of building an individual story as a tool that gets the characters where you want them to be.

00:27:30 Speaker_03
but we, you know, largely have the arc of where they are at any given moment figured out ahead of time. Is that fair to say?

00:27:37 Speaker_04
Yeah, I mean let us keep in mind that when we started we didn't even know this was gonna be a podcast So there's no way that we had almost nine years of material planned out Right that couldn't be But also I'm just yeah I'm very chill with the fact that to a certain extent if you want to have an ongoing show you just plan it as you go and like were there things that we knew we wanted to get to at some point and a way that we a vibe that we wanted for

00:28:07 Speaker_04
the ending and things that we wanted to achieve before we got there, yes, but do we have every aspect of it nailed down? Absolutely not, and good for us.

00:28:18 Speaker_04
Yeah, because we're so much smarter and better than we were when we started, and not just as artists, but as people.

00:28:26 Speaker_04
And you wouldn't think it, because I still say douchey things like that, but we couldn't have dreamed of this stuff in 2015, so I'm really glad that we let a lot of it just develop as it came. I knew that

00:28:41 Speaker_04
I think we knew that we wanted at some point for Nureyev to be kind of the antagonist, right? That was something we knew probably in season one, right? That we wanted to have some segment where that was happening and we had, we were like, oh, we want

00:28:59 Speaker_04
Sasha Wire to be the antagonist. I think we probably knew that once we were, like a couple episodes after Day That Wouldn't Die, when she left, we were like, oh, maybe eventually, we were like, what does happen to her?

00:29:11 Speaker_04
And we were like, oh, what if she went bad? You know, what if she was successful but turned bad? Okay, let's hang on to that, we'll bring her back later, and she'll be a major antagonist of a season.

00:29:23 Speaker_04
And so, you know, we would like put a pin in it and be like, we'll just, we'll come back to that later and we'll get there however we get there. Yeah.

00:29:33 Speaker_02
So Melissa, TrueHeroes58 asks us, what was your favorite character moment of Juno and Kwani, specifically Kwani for you?

00:29:43 Speaker_05
Yeah, there's so many. I mean, The death scene is so good. Like not to, you know, go directly right to it, but it's so good.

00:29:55 Speaker_05
And her whole, I mean, the arc of like being unbelievably powerful and then having, you know, this lovely relationship that changes the way that you see your role in the world and your relationship to

00:30:09 Speaker_05
your capacity for power and then like letting that and letting the love for like Ola and for Caroline change her expectation of what like literally reality was gonna be. It's just so beautiful. Yeah. I mean, I also love Evil Kwanyee.

00:30:27 Speaker_05
I could Evil Kwanyee all day. So like that's fun as hell. But after spending a good chunk of time really evil, having the swing back was really fun. So yeah.

00:30:38 Speaker_02
Just to jump on the back of that, I don't think I've said it to either of you yet, the second set of Elfinale was so good. It was so good. I really, really loved it.

00:30:48 Speaker_02
It made me realize that I did not like the ending of Disney's Robin Hood, because it should have ended like that.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
no just like yeah Mark and Tal riding off doing the same thing like I didn't like the ending of Robin Hood because like he's not Robin Hood anymore but this ends with that anyway so my favorite Juno moment was the second Citadel finale

00:31:12 Speaker_02
So it's I always like the moments that Juno gets to put down the load for a second But those are kind of more story moments than character moments.

00:31:21 Speaker_02
So my gut answer is anytime he's with Mick And we just get to see The Juno who was once like six years old in Old Town and is also 30 whatever But I think the things that I had the most fun doing were whenever Juno

00:31:40 Speaker_02
does an impression of one of his friends. Like he does an array of at some point. He does a buddy. And I've got a head candidate like while everybody else is working on the cart lodge, he's like just sharpening impressions of everybody else.

00:31:54 Speaker_02
So he's like working on his jet. Yeah. So those those are easily my favorites.

00:32:03 Speaker_03
While you guys look for another question, I do want to give Harley credit for that final Juno and Mick scene in the finale in the sense that I brought you a first draft that you threw out rightly because it was kind of another one of the Juno and Mick conversation we've always done, right?

00:32:22 Speaker_04
I was so sick of it.

00:32:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, I know. To your credit and or detriment, you've been sick of it for years at this point. And I like him. I like him. I like to do him. But at that point, I was like, no, you're right. There's no there is no place for wise fool.

00:32:37 Speaker_03
Mick Mercury at this point. This is in your whole thing was we just need to see them being buddies. And that is absolutely right. Which is why. Yes, it was.

00:32:48 Speaker_04
It was absolutely right.

00:32:50 Speaker_06
Don't unplug the cable! Kevin! Kevin, be careful!

00:32:56 Speaker_03
This is why I don't compliment you, as a general rule.

00:33:00 Speaker_04
No one ever should. Yeah, no, because, I mean, especially in the finale, like, there's always going to be a tendency for it to get cheesy, especially for us.

00:33:14 Speaker_04
like that's that's always the direction it goes and like every ending of anything like an episode a season and certainly a series always severe danger of it becoming cheesy and it probably did anyway but like

00:33:29 Speaker_04
There were already so many goodbyes that had to be done, and so many wrap-ups, and so many callbacks, and I was like, we cannot do this. We cannot do this. We cannot do this. Like, this is, we already did this the first time that we met Mick, right?

00:33:43 Speaker_04
Like, he has that lovely conversation with Juno at the end of Day That Wouldn't Die, and I was like, let us not do this again, and you were like, well then what? And I was like, maybe they just have a nice time.

00:33:52 Speaker_04
But then, you wrote one of the funniest scenes I've ever, I've ever listened to.

00:33:58 Speaker_03
Super briefly, because I did say this in the commentary for that episode, but not everybody heard that commentary.

00:34:04 Speaker_03
That scene is taken, not word for word, but idea for idea from an actual conversation I had with my grandmother in which we were both Mick. And I loved getting to show that to everybody at, was it at rehearsal or at recording? It was at rehearsal.

00:34:19 Speaker_03
That was lovely. I never get to do that. Anyway.

00:34:25 Speaker_02
Some people are asking me to say this, so I am going to just say Juno Steele, five years old.

00:34:32 Speaker_05
He's back from season one outtakes. I've seen this question a couple of times in the chat, and I don't know what it means, so I really hope Kevin does. Kevin, why did you use white wedding for Nureyev in the playlist?

00:34:52 Speaker_03
Oh, I do. This was a, um, do you remember? I think it might have been the the voting thing that we did and we sent like personalized, uh, it was something that we did where we sent like personalized gifts to individual people who won like a raffle.

00:35:06 Speaker_06
Right.

00:35:17 Speaker_03
Right. I used White Wedding for two reasons, one of which is going to get me in trouble and the other one's the real one.

00:35:23 Speaker_03
The one that's going to get me in trouble is because I knew it would drive people crazy that I used White Wedding for Peter Nureyev. And the other one is that the recurring line is, is nice day to start again, right?

00:35:36 Speaker_03
Like that's that is the recurring sentiment that is Nureyev is constantly reinventing himself and he refuses to actually stick to any individual identity that he has. So that was my reasoning. Also, Billy Idol's great.

00:35:49 Speaker_02
That's it. Who is everybody's favorite villain in the show, and why is it Tristan the Cold? No, it's just who is everybody's favorite villain in the show.

00:36:05 Speaker_03
I've been going first a lot. I feel like you should take it, Harley, unless you don't have an answer.

00:36:09 Speaker_04
Not all the time. I have a lot of favorites.

00:36:11 Speaker_03
That's the thing.

00:36:14 Speaker_05
Well, I mean, this one is kind of just like a Melissa's thing. Juno's mom. Mostly because I'm obsessed. Okay, and Chad, I'm not joking right now. I'm like freakishly obsessed with Kiki Sanko, the actress who plays Juno's mom.

00:36:30 Speaker_03
She's not joking. Can't confirm.

00:36:32 Speaker_05
A long time. Sometimes I'm at parties and she's there and I like lose my mind. I think Melissa is visibly shaking a little Kiki is amazing just like as a performer as a woman as an actress just like as an athlete like No, I'm sorry

00:36:54 Speaker_03
I can report, not to call you out, that I have literally watched you engage in a conversation with Kiki and lose the ability to speak.

00:37:01 Speaker_05
I get so weird around her. One time, OK, so I'm going to tell just one weird story. So she was in a theater company for a while. And they did this fundraiser where you could purchase different things. And it was like an afternoon with one of the actors.

00:37:15 Speaker_05
And she did like, you could go shopping with Kiki Samco. And I bid the highest. And I won. Shut up. And I won, but then I had to reach out to her to schedule it and I never did because I got too scared. So I still am owed a shopping day with Kiki Sanko.

00:37:34 Speaker_05
Someday I'm going to be there, but not yet. That was like a decade ago. Okay, bye.

00:37:50 Speaker_02
If it's not a cop-out to say Tristan the cold I I loved playing Tristan I thought I loved listening to Tristan I thought Tristan was a really cool type of bad guy that we didn't really get in anywhere else and so that's

00:38:05 Speaker_02
mine but if I had to choose one that wasn't me I'm going to say Ramsey's again because Ramsey's is a real kind of villain like you there have been Ramsey's O'Flaherty's before and there will be Ramsey's O'Flaherty's again. It's just so well done.

00:38:21 Speaker_04
I love Pilot and the Piranha. I love them together, I love them separately, and they definitely both get the chance to shine separately. I think

00:38:37 Speaker_04
Pilot was very funny because we tried to go as over the top as we possibly could and then kept being like, oh wait, the mayor of Fall River or whatever just did this actual thing. We were unable to exaggerate at all and that was great.

00:38:57 Speaker_04
But also, Reyna has such a sexy gravitas about that voice.

00:39:07 Speaker_04
So yeah loved pilot loved playing the piranha also loved handing over the piranha to Marge in the live show she was so so good as the piranha and We we write a lot of Sexy tough women for whatever reason Yeah

00:39:36 Speaker_04
We read a lot of sexy tough women, but it was very so it was very fun to have one who was just horrid horrid I Have I have Two answers.

00:39:49 Speaker_03
I will say the answer number one with the bullet is Ramsey's Ramsey's is in my top three favorite characters I've ever written. I think the other two are probably Juno and Caroline and I could not rank the three for the life of me.

00:40:00 Speaker_03
But also, part of the reason that Ramses is that, and you know this Harley, right?

00:40:03 Speaker_03
I've referenced before in Patreon content that I have a couple of what are sometimes referred to as trunk novels, things that I wrote just to practice that will never see the light of day because they're bad.

00:40:14 Speaker_03
And Ramses was one of two of the only good things of the book that he originated in. So we just took him wholesale.

00:40:26 Speaker_03
Part of the reason I love Ramses so much is because I got two shots at him, and by the second one I felt like I really had him figured out.

00:40:35 Speaker_03
And I also got to use a lifetime of stupid trivia about the Walt Disney Corporation to flesh him out, which I loved.

00:40:43 Speaker_03
And my other answer, which I don't think is more of a personal preference thing than anything else and is a different kind of answer, is I am extremely attached to Galahad in a way, in that I don't care about his internal world, I don't care about him as a character in a sense, but

00:41:01 Speaker_03
I really, really do like the way that he is set up as an inevitable outcome of the society of the Citadel, right? He is a, uh, this bomb was gonna go off eventually and this is just the guy that it went off with. Um, so I think that

00:41:19 Speaker_03
It's less that I like Galahad as a character. Of course, I love Rayna's performance. It's incredible. It's so, so good for just like a pure evil, like real, real nasty, nasty person. But more, I think that Galahad is perfectly slotted into that story.

00:41:37 Speaker_03
That story does not function without a Galahad. And I think that he makes it much more interesting. And that's why I like him so much, even though him as a character, he's admittedly flat, but that's kind of the point. You know what I mean?

00:41:53 Speaker_03
I can grab another one if we're... Alright. Let me see. Harley, this question's more for you and me. This is from Crispy Bacon. Did you always plan to have only two stories running concurrently as opposed to rotating cast to shorter one-off stories?

00:42:11 Speaker_03
And if so, at what point was it decided they would both come to an end at the same time? I think we've answered the former, but not the latter.

00:42:17 Speaker_04
I don't remember when we decided.

00:42:25 Speaker_03
There are a couple answers to this.

00:42:28 Speaker_03
One that I've been thinking about a lot is when we first started with the Juno series, we were kind of thinking about it as like, you know, there are stories about detectives that the series goes on essentially forever, right?

00:42:41 Speaker_03
You could write Sherlock Holmes stories forever. And I mean, after Conan Doyle died, people did, right? Like that character can go on forever. You can write Hercule Poirot stories essentially forever, Columbo stories, et cetera.

00:42:53 Speaker_03
But the thing is that as soon as we hit Season 2 and it became clear that the point of this series was Juno's growth, I do think that to an extent, once you introduce growth and change, you also introduce mortality.

00:43:04 Speaker_03
You introduce an end, because you can't grow and change forever. Um, so part of it was that as soon as kind of season two hit and we realized that's the direction that we were going, the clock started ticking.

00:43:17 Speaker_03
Um, and we've also been very aware of the fact that like, you know, to be direct, we started this series with a group of people who a lot of them aren't actors and don't really want to act anymore, right?

00:43:28 Speaker_03
They, they acted when we first met them when we were in college, but it's not the direction that they're going and we do have to let them go at some point because This is not what they want to do. So there's always a time limit in that sense.

00:43:42 Speaker_03
And so we hit a certain point, I think around season three, where that time limit became very, very clear. And we were looking at both series and we were like, could we do, theoretically, do an extra second Citadel season? We could.

00:43:57 Speaker_03
There's an awkward amount of stuff left to say, so I don't know that we could without introducing a brand new thing. And at that point, what are we doing? Why not have a climactic moment for both?

00:44:11 Speaker_04
Well, and I think also just logistically, it would have been weird to continue Second Citadel after Juno was done.

00:44:19 Speaker_04
It would have completely messed up our, like, production pipeline, and would we have then had to come up with another series that would, you know, be interspersed with that one?

00:44:33 Speaker_04
And we were like, forget it, let's just end them both at the same time, and we feel like we have enough material to get us through, whatever it was at that point, two more seasons, but not too much. And you just have to let it go at a certain point.

00:44:48 Speaker_04
You know, we were just talking the other day about how we really respect sitcoms, but I at least, I think it was the same for you, could not

00:45:00 Speaker_04
write it, like would not have the patience to write something where everything just returned to zero at the end of the episode. Right.

00:45:09 Speaker_03
I mean, when we were talking about this, I said to you that I'm fascinated by the design challenge of The Simpsons.

00:45:15 Speaker_03
I think that being a writer on The Simpsons is, at this point, partially because their reputation isn't as great as it once was, that has to be one of the hardest writing jobs in the business, because people are going in expecting not to like it, and you have a set of incredibly restrictive rules in terms of how the story gets told.

00:45:35 Speaker_03
Being able to bring out something that is even remotely entertaining and functional under that model seems incredible to me. At that point, that raises the question, should The Simpsons still exist, which is a valid one.

00:45:47 Speaker_03
But just speaking about the people who write it, I am incredibly impressed and interested in what they do, and I would never want to do it.

00:45:54 Speaker_04
Yeah. I mean, my go-to, naturally, is The Nanny. And this goes out to Kate Jones, because Kate is obsessed with how much I am obsessed with The Nanny, because I bring it up a weird amount. But it's a perfect sitcom. No notes.

00:46:12 Speaker_05
But it's a will they or won't they?

00:46:14 Speaker_04
Isn't that... But then they do, and they just get married. Yeah, they get together and they get married. Yeah, and they all start calling her mom.

00:46:26 Speaker_05
Did they change the name of the show to The Mom?

00:46:29 Speaker_02
No.

00:46:30 Speaker_05
Cool. No.

00:46:32 Speaker_02
So we are to assume she's still salaried.

00:46:36 Speaker_05
Let's talk about unpaid household labor.

00:46:39 Speaker_03
Harley, I do think you're eclipsing Joshua a little bit if you want to scoot over.

00:46:45 Speaker_06
He loves that.

00:46:49 Speaker_05
All right, I've got some other questions. Melissa, what's your Starbucks drink? It's not Starbucks. It's from Clear Flower Bakery. Shout out, Clear Flower.

00:46:57 Speaker_05
One of the best things about getting old, I'm telling you right now, young folks, is you get really into stuff. So literally, Clear Flower is a bakery that I have been to once a year.

00:47:09 Speaker_05
And I just love that thing of going to a place that you're like, this is my thing. But it's way out of my way, and I only do it when I'm coming here.

00:47:17 Speaker_04
Melissa, I do think that this particular group of people knows about getting really into stuff.

00:47:23 Speaker_05
Never apologize. Oh, and the drink is a lavender latte. That's my thing. Ooh, gay drink.

00:47:29 Speaker_04
Oh, gay drink.

00:47:30 Speaker_05
Oh, gay drink. And I love this question from TrueHeroes58. What monster did you love the most? Yeah. Shocking, but I'm gonna go Janus Beast. Like, classic. I love, especially when you get the Gawain scene with the Janus Beast.

00:47:49 Speaker_04
I thought you were going to say what I'm going to say, which was Ama, Mother of Mermaids. Enormous Kiki Samko. Huge. Huge. I love Ama, though. I really do. That's actually one of my very favorite episodes, is Mad Mirage's part two.

00:48:12 Speaker_04
Sound designing it was so delightful. It was really really satisfying to do the whole underwater sequence with like the harp music and then to have this enormous woman

00:48:28 Speaker_04
which was something that I thought was so funny in the first place, but then I was like, okay, I really need to buckle down, because there have been large characters in the past, but I had never actually figured out sound-wise, how do I make someone sound bigger without making them upsettingly loud?

00:48:46 Speaker_04
And that was the first time that I figured it out, and I think she does sound huge, and I love it, I love it.

00:48:53 Speaker_03
You have an answer? The woman is bees. That's hard to beat. Honestly, my favorite is Jack of Shadows. I like Jack of Shadows a lot.

00:49:08 Speaker_03
I am not just saying this to be nice to you, Melissa, but as a one-off, as a one-off, The Devil in the Sunlight is one of my favorite episodes in Second Citadel. Yeah, it's it's contained. It's fun.

00:49:27 Speaker_03
We get to see a side of Quan Yu we've never seen before. I think Jack of Shadows is a perfect one-story arc villain. We get everything about him so fast.

00:49:35 Speaker_03
And then we get the kind of like combination heroic save and heel turn from Caroline simultaneously. I've just I adore that one.

00:49:45 Speaker_04
I know.

00:49:49 Speaker_03
I mean, it's funny that he was so good. I mean, it's not surprising, because he's so good in general.

00:49:52 Speaker_03
But it's funny that he was so good as Lamarck, because before that, pretty much everything that we had him on the show for was just like, can you ham it up a little more? Can you get more ham, please?

00:50:02 Speaker_05
Like it was a pig, of course.

00:50:05 Speaker_03
Right. Porkus.

00:50:06 Speaker_05
And then wasn't he also Senator Faswas? Yes. Whoa, yeah. Genius. Just so good.

00:50:17 Speaker_02
Here's one that we talk about sort of among ourselves a bunch, but I don't know if we've talked about it too much out here. And I guess it's more for Harley and Kevin. How does it feel to be part of so many queer and trans awakenings?

00:50:35 Speaker_02
I'm gonna give you this one.

00:50:37 Speaker_04
Okay. Obviously, it's very flattering. I think that it doesn't... I don't feel very connected to it in a certain way, because I don't know the people who listen to the show.

00:50:57 Speaker_04
So they can tell me that after the fact, and I think that's great, but I don't feel like I did it in the way that I affect people who I meet in my actual life and interact with. Because there's not like a direct.

00:51:15 Speaker_04
There's not a direct line there, and there was no personal interaction so it's it's wonderful, but it also feels like

00:51:24 Speaker_04
Something that happened for them that I wasn't exactly a part of I hope that doesn't feel like I am trying to you know Distance myself or I think it's bad in any way. Obviously, I think it's it's wonderful.

00:51:36 Speaker_04
But um but of course if you have a queer and trans awakening that was always in you right like that's yours and You know just because Something we did maybe sparked that you know, we didn't make that you you are that

00:51:55 Speaker_04
And it's cool to have fleetingly interacted with you secondhand in that way, but we didn't do it.

00:52:05 Speaker_03
I mean, I think that I agree with absolutely everything you said. Part of the reason I handed you the mic was because I knew you'd be able to nail that one in a way that I would struggle around. But to... and to broaden it, right?

00:52:17 Speaker_03
Like sometimes we get people who email us very, very sweetly asking, like, is it okay if I get a tattoo about the Penumbra? Is it okay if I change my name to be relevant to a character from the Penumbra?

00:52:29 Speaker_03
And I don't feel like we need to check ahead of time. I think that we both universally say the answer is yes. Like, do what you want on that front. You do not need to ask our permission.

00:52:39 Speaker_03
Because, like you said, I do think that I'm extremely honored that a thing that we made was there for you in the moment when you figured that out. But that is about you, and you should be proud of yourself for figuring that out, right?

00:52:53 Speaker_03
We may have been the prompt, but you did the work. So it's yours, not ours, in that sense.

00:53:00 Speaker_05
I love that answer, guys. I have had a weird thing with, well, this is kind of Kiki Samko again, sorry.

00:53:06 Speaker_05
No, but specifically that, like, doing theater, a lot of the time you'll have this experience where you'll see people on stage, you'll get to know their mannerisms, the way that they speak, the way they move their body, and you feel very close to them, and then you'll meet them at a party, and you'll be like, oh, hey, Kiki, and they'll be like, sorry, who are you?

00:53:23 Speaker_05
Which like it's it's normal. It's natural, but it's essentially to me feels almost like like Like I'm the mom of the creation and like you're a friend of my kids and I love that.

00:53:34 Speaker_05
I love you I'm so excited that you have a relationship with something that means a lot to me But it means that I kind of don't know you and I don't want to be rude But like we haven't really met but I love that you love my kid Yeah

00:53:49 Speaker_02
I think it can be, I think it is a thing that we have, I personally, in the first, I sort of got offline after a while, but the first three or four seasons of the show, first three seasons beginning of the fourth, I just read everything.

00:54:10 Speaker_02
And it was really overwhelming. And it did not really feel real until we started doing live shows. And we started hearing people actually tell stories to us in person.

00:54:22 Speaker_02
And of all of the powerful things that this show has, all of the things that the show has done and has given, I think that's the one that I'm always going to try to live up to.

00:54:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's big and it's powerful and I'm really proud of all of you for doing it. It's really cool and I'm glad to have been a tiny part of it.

00:54:44 Speaker_02
It is a massive honor, so thank you for, thanks for listening and having it be that big of a part of your life. Do we have another back there or should I grab another? I've seen Joshua for Spider-Man. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist.

00:54:59 Speaker_02
I was certain. I think we do need to take a sec to talk about that. We do? Tell me about it. OK, OK. All right. If anyone from Disney, or Marvel specifically, is watching right now, I do have a reel available.

00:55:16 Speaker_02
I will gladly submit a reading to play either Peter Parker or Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider. That's fine.

00:55:25 Speaker_05
This is such a real answer, y'all. If anyone wants me to play Spider-Man, I believe in the revolution, and I think Disney can be destroyed. I think it's okay.

00:55:37 Speaker_02
How do you guys come up with names?

00:55:38 Speaker_05
They're genuinely so iconic and I feel like I've never seen any other media with such iconic names.

00:55:58 Speaker_03
We have a few methods. I think maybe in... I do think in the past we've been... we've received questions like this and we are... I should... I should cop to it.

00:56:07 Speaker_03
I have been a little dismissive about them because I haven't really thought about how we go about it. But at some point, if enough people like it, we do need to like dig down into... we, I, need to dig down into the process of how it's done.

00:56:20 Speaker_03
So the way that we came up with, I mean, do you want to talk about the way that we came up with the names Juno Steel, Sasha Wire, and Mick Mercury?

00:56:28 Speaker_04
We've talked about that in commentaries before. I mean, we can, but it was like, we were trying to come up with noir stuff, and a lot of that is object based. And so we wanted sci-fi-ish objects, and then we mixed and matched.

00:56:49 Speaker_04
So that's part of... What's happening? You're just mugging. Nice. But the names come from various places, because sometimes one of us will just be like, ooh, this one popped into my head, we need to put that somewhere.

00:57:09 Speaker_03
And you know, so they will come from specific obsessions of ours and just like, I mean something that you and I both do that I think a lot of is the skill that you can teach yourself creatively is to kind of train your brain to start catching things in the world around you and just storing them for later, right?

00:57:27 Speaker_03
Um, the only reason that Sir Absalon is called Sir Absalon is because like 10 years ago, I heard the name Absalon for the first time and I put it in a box and I was like, I'm going to use that someday. That name rips. That is so cool.

00:57:40 Speaker_03
Um, and I mean, I, I, I joked about this on a commentary, but when I listened back to that commentary, I realized that I never said it. Uh, people like store up baby names that they're going to use someday. And I've spent all mine on this show.

00:57:53 Speaker_03
And Sasha was a big one for me when I was growing up. And so I just spent it right out of the gate. It's done.

00:58:01 Speaker_04
We sat on melee since like season one.

00:58:04 Speaker_03
Yes, that's true. And that might have been you.

00:58:06 Speaker_04
Yeah. I think maybe just the word happened in my life and I was like, oh, that would sound awesome as a name. And it has like that very Juniverse feel. So like we put that in our pockets and then never used it until the very end of the show.

00:58:23 Speaker_04
But I really, really like that one. And then sometimes, you know, sometimes there will be a naming convention, like the Kanagawas, who are the Kardashians, right? So we wanted a K last name. But we

00:58:42 Speaker_04
We never wanted our name origins to be from any one specific place. We wanted to spread it out a lot, so that one was Japanese.

00:58:52 Speaker_04
And then we gave the members of the family the same first letter of their name in the way the Kardashians do, but then pulled them from all different places to make that sound very wild.

00:59:05 Speaker_04
You may notice that Min does not match, but that's because she married in. And then for a while, we were having a lot of fun with taking first and last names from different places. Yes. Smashing them together.

00:59:18 Speaker_04
Ramsey's O'Flaherty is a great example of this.

00:59:21 Speaker_03
A lot of the time, like, especially for, you know, a lot of the main character names, you and I will kind of bang out together. It's very rare that one of us will just come up with one on our own and plop it in the other one's lap.

00:59:31 Speaker_03
But for a lot of smaller character names like you or I will just literally like Google names from part of the world that we haven't done in a while. You know what I mean? That is where Captain Khan's name came from.

00:59:46 Speaker_03
That, you know, there have been a bunch of examples like that. That's where some of the names in Coyote the Painted Plains came from. So, you know, it's like, And then beyond that, you develop an ear for it, I think.

01:00:02 Speaker_03
I have had a back pocket theory forever that I can't elaborate on, so it's not useful. But I do think that poetic meter has something to do with it, personally. I think that there is a connection between the two in terms of what sounds good.

01:00:17 Speaker_03
What that connection is, I don't know yet. I will be chasing that dragon and trying to figure that out forever. But that's my theory, anyway.

01:00:29 Speaker_02
My glasses are from... It says Zenni. I think these were like 16 bucks plus the prescription lenses. I have like four pairs of them because I keep breaking them.

01:00:47 Speaker_03
I am pretty sure I'm also wearing Zenni glasses. Are you wearing Zenni glasses?

01:00:51 Speaker_04
No, Warby Parker for me. Which I feel like yeah, so could they give us some more money than Zenny?

01:01:01 Speaker_02
This is a fun question that I want to answer I don't know if anyone else is gonna be have much input on it. What D&D classes would you give your characters slash carte blanche?

01:01:15 Speaker_02
Yes, I have personally thought this through but I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on the matter.

01:01:22 Speaker_03
I have never thought about this before, but I may interject as you give your answer.

01:01:28 Speaker_02
Just going to do the carte blanche crew. Buddy is a bard. Buddy is an eloquence bard. Jet is a barbarian who has multi-classed into artificer. Rita is a wild magic sorcerer.

01:01:43 Speaker_02
Vespa is a fighter, maybe fighter barbarian multi-class because she has the ability to rage there. Nureyev is a rogue. Juno is a ranger and the carp launch is a infernal hell machine. I think that's what it's called. Did you say the ruby? Yeah.

01:02:05 Speaker_02
The ruby, sorry. The ruby is an infernal war machine.

01:02:09 Speaker_03
I agree with all of these except I think that ultimately Rita's class would be something so incredibly complicated and homebrew that nobody else would be able to follow the rules.

01:02:20 Speaker_02
Rita's actually a warhammer thing. We got anything back there or should I pull another one? Here's one. What was the most difficult story arc to write or act? And I certainly know my answer for acting.

01:02:43 Speaker_02
It was absolutely Juno Steele and The Monster's Reflection. Big three-parter, like right in the middle of season two when the show had really started to go off. I was going through some other stuff. That was tough. But we did it.

01:02:56 Speaker_02
I actually, during my first listen of that show, did not listen to those three episodes and only heard them for the first time this most recent listen through. And you know what? They're really good. Because I don't know if you guys know, but Kiki.

01:03:13 Speaker_02
Yeah, really, really good.

01:03:19 Speaker_05
I don't know an answer to this. I'm sorry. Acting's never hard. Just kidding. I'm kidding. It's always hard.

01:03:27 Speaker_03
This is a tough one to answer from a writing perspective because there are ones that we worked really hard on in that, and by one definition, that's difficult, right?

01:03:36 Speaker_03
But there are also ones that I, to be completely honest, lost my mind while we were writing them. So like, you know, sleeper answer, for some reason, one of the hardest episodes to write ever was Juno Steel and the Lesson Learned, which is like not...

01:03:52 Speaker_03
Yeah, which is not like, that's not a complicated one. It's not a difficult one. To be honest, I was just not doing well while we were writing it. So I wrote many, many versions of that one. The proctor wasn't in it to start. It was the mannequin killer.

01:04:06 Speaker_03
You remember that? And it just, it just wasn't working and I was not well. But by another token, one of the hardest quote-unquote episodes to write was Juno Steel and the Long Way Home.

01:04:23 Speaker_03
But that was just because you and I sat down and did an ungodly amount of prep for that episode.

01:04:28 Speaker_03
There were entire design documents about what the hell was going on in Jack Takano's life over the course of it in order for us to figure out and nail down the entire timeline. I think those are up on Patreon.

01:04:42 Speaker_04
I love Lesson Learned, or not Lesson Learned, Long Way Home so much. It's absolutely one of my favorites. I love that there's a podcast. This to me is very funny. Marge is so good in

01:05:01 Speaker_02
I don't think it's quite the same Something tells me

01:05:14 Speaker_04
There's something slightly different happening here. But I also know, you have it on record that you would like... Yes, yes.

01:05:26 Speaker_02
Marge for Venom to my Spider-Man. Let's break some copyright laws. It's time for us to announce the new show, Spider-Man.

01:05:36 Speaker_05
I was so excited, I held the mic to my mouth, which was just open.

01:05:43 Speaker_04
And swallowed it whole. But yeah, I think that was the first episode that Marge was ever in. Long Way Home is amazing. Like, there's just so many different things going on that I think you executed so well.

01:06:00 Speaker_04
It's a really great episode for you too, Joshua. I loved it. Small fry. Yeah, and for me, naturally, a small fry. But you did so much of that just by yourself, I think, and it really slaps. Yeah, that's a great one. What was the question?

01:06:20 Speaker_04
Oh, it was what was hard.

01:06:22 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:06:23 Speaker_04
Moonlit Hermit was really hard. Moonlit Hermon! There's so many, we couldn't figure out how to make it work and I was like, we have to keep the Moonlit Hermit.

01:06:40 Speaker_03
Well, yeah, I mean the thing that we say about it a lot is that in the first draft of Moonlit Hermit, there was no Moonlit Hermit, right?

01:06:44 Speaker_03
That was that was a throwaway detail that I put in another draft that wasn't working and then you read it and you were like, no, this is about this now. All right. And that worked, right? I mean, there is I mean, but but.

01:07:00 Speaker_03
And hopefully this is reassuring to people out there who... I know a lot of our listeners are, you know, creative people themselves and yet kind of stuck in their own projects.

01:07:10 Speaker_03
I do not think that the initial drafts of Moonlit Hermit that didn't make it were failures. And part of the reason that I don't think that is because of titanic amounts of cope.

01:07:20 Speaker_03
But the other reason is that we learned a huge amount about the world of the Second Citadel from writing those. There is a sequence that maybe I will go through my files and see if I can find it now that the series is over.

01:07:32 Speaker_03
But in one of the first drafts, there was a moment that we had to cut because it was just dull from a narrative standpoint, where RM basically stands there and gives an intensive description of how magic works in the second Citadel universe that we then ended up implying and kind of alluding to in other characters' conversations in a way that I think is a much more exciting way to learn that stuff.

01:07:52 Speaker_03
But... We had ideas about how magic worked before then.

01:07:56 Speaker_03
That has been kind of the foundational text for me, for the quote-unquote rules of magic, given the fact that in the Second Citadel universe, one of the main rules of magic is that magic does not like to abide by rules.

01:08:13 Speaker_04
There's so much good stuff in that episode. I'm actually just remembering, because there was one of those moments of Serendipity when you figure something out and because we were puzzling over how are we gonna get these two?

01:08:26 Speaker_04
to fall in love We need them to fall in love post haste and they are not well set up for it Because he just kidnapped her And then we were like a song that's always That's always how it works

01:08:46 Speaker_04
Right, you sing a song together and then you're in love and it's not because it works that way in real life It's because it's how we understand it to work in fiction and it did work and then there's that beautiful part where she says that He's where RM says.

01:09:03 Speaker_04
Oh music is magic and she's like no music is math, but it's both I Love that so much

01:09:16 Speaker_02
I've got one that I can squish into two. So there's two questions that can be squished into one. Cool. What lessons did you learn from working on the penumbra that you think will influence your future work most? That's the first one.

01:09:29 Speaker_02
And the second one is, if you could tell your season one or season two self anything, what would you tell yourselves? Those are good questions. I don't know about lessons learned. She knows the other lessons, right?

01:09:46 Speaker_02
That one I have to sit on, but if I could tell season one me anything... It would be enjoy it.

01:10:01 Speaker_04
I mean, I think I've already been ruminating about this stuff in the last few commentaries, so this is a little bit of a rehashing of it. But not everyone's gonna like it. That's fine. It's normal.

01:10:19 Speaker_04
It's not possible to make something that everyone likes. It's definitely possible to make something that's popular, but it's not possible to make something that everyone likes and the people who don't like it are always going to be louder.

01:10:30 Speaker_04
And more than that, it is inescapable that some people are going to be incredibly mean. Um, and that just is what it is. Like, I'm not saying it's okay for people to be really mean. It absolutely isn't. Don't.

01:10:45 Speaker_04
But, like, given that I have no control over what people do, people are gonna be really, really mean. And you get a little better at handling it, but it never doesn't hurt. I mean, hopefully, if we continue to, you know, work in a public space, it will

01:11:03 Speaker_04
Continuously get easier, but it's never gonna feel good when people are really really mean But it's it's just going to happen and that is what it is and so all you can come back to over and over again is make something that means something to you and to the people that you Respect and care about and know in your real life.

01:11:23 Speaker_04
You can't chase approval from people. You've never met. That's unrealistic and You should not you should not cave to outside pressure if it doesn't feel authentic to you.

01:11:38 Speaker_04
Because public opinion will change, and culture will change, and the only thing you're gonna be able to hew to forever is, well, this is what felt authentic to me at the time. And if you weren't authentic to yourself, that's gonna feel bad later.

01:11:54 Speaker_04
So I think that has been very important to me.

01:11:57 Speaker_03
Do you have an answer, Melissa?

01:12:01 Speaker_05
Um, yeah, I haven't fully formulated this thought but um, I think I wouldn't really have any advice for my early self getting involved with the penumbra, except for, I mean, kind of what you were saying the enjoy it.

01:12:17 Speaker_05
I feel this unimaginable gratitude for the opportunity to do something creative with my skills and talents and work with people I respect so very, very much who are also putting a lot of energy and effort and thought and creativity and honestly our own emotional journeys into something together.

01:12:41 Speaker_05
It's an opportunity I think almost no one gets. to be in a room with people that you really love and respect and admire and like hanging out and getting dinner with, and see them do the things that they care about and that they love.

01:12:58 Speaker_05
So I mean, I guess that's my only advice for people is if you can find ways to make things with your friends, it is the most transformative experience you can possibly have. It's completely changed me as a person.

01:13:11 Speaker_05
I brag about it to anyone who will listen. I love this show. It's such a boon that I have had this in my life. I think all of my professional and creative and just like emotional journey after this is deeply, deeply affected by The Penumbra.

01:13:35 Speaker_03
I've been stewing on my answer and I'm realizing I need to twist the question a little bit because this is something that I It's not something that I figured out, but I know it's the next thing I'm working on, I guess.

01:13:50 Speaker_03
Something that I've needed to learn to balance that I still haven't completely figured out is that I think I am, by clinical definition... I think I am fine.

01:14:02 Speaker_06
Wow!

01:14:05 Speaker_03
It took you this long? No, I think that, I mean, I know that I'm by literal definition a workaholic. Like, I am addicted to working. I can't stop. And so it's, you know, it has I've had several mental breakdowns over the course of this show. Mentee bees.

01:14:28 Speaker_03
I had to go to the hospital last year, right? Like it's, you know, and those are things I do to myself, right?

01:14:34 Speaker_03
And the really challenging thing about it that I've had to come to terms with is, for example, in the ramp up to writing those finales, I was working, you know, On the weekdays, I was working 8-10 hours every day.

01:14:46 Speaker_03
On the weekends, I was working 4-5 hours every day for a month and a half straight and just never, ever, ever took time off. As soon as that was done, I got incredibly sick for weeks because my body just couldn't handle it anymore.

01:15:03 Speaker_03
But the thing that I need to reckon with is the fact that to a very real extent, those six weeks of destroying myself are some of the happiest I've been in the past year.

01:15:16 Speaker_03
And so I kind of, I need to figure out how to balance this, like in a very practical way.

01:15:20 Speaker_03
So ironically, the thing that I would say to my young self is a thing that I remember saying to you back then, but I don't think I ever really learned how to live, right? Which is,

01:15:34 Speaker_03
which is art assists life not the other way around right you whatever you make whatever work you do that has to be in service of the life that you are living and the connections that you're making with other people and trying to help the people and causes that you care about including yourself right and you cannot let the thing become more important than you right so

01:16:06 Speaker_03
I can grab another from Okay, Joshua this one's for you You mentioned that you listened back through the show leading up to the finale how did that inform the recording of last few episodes gosh, yeah, I

01:16:26 Speaker_02
it's it was a really weird way to do it because there was so much space in between episodes there's so much space in between seasons that each episode existed as an individual moment and not part of a larger narrative.

01:16:47 Speaker_02
And, you know, each two part episode generally did wrap up at the end. There was always a little bit of an element of a larger season and series cliffhanger.

01:16:55 Speaker_02
But, you know, we were telling one story and then we'd stop and then we were telling another story and then we'd stop. By getting all the way through it, I had a much better feel for what the story was about, what the show was about, not just what

01:17:09 Speaker_02
Juno was doing but what the whole of the universe was about And I should say when we were recording I was at season 4 I was like halfway through season 4 when we recorded that last episode and I did not finish the series until Right before part 1 of the last episode came out so I timed it really well but it was

01:17:37 Speaker_02
It made it feel like I was... I mean, it's this weird thing where... I think I've said this before, but... whenever I would listen to an episode right after it was released, all I could really hear was the process. I heard what we all put into it.

01:17:52 Speaker_02
I heard, you know, I remembered lines that had been cut out and I was surprised that they, I like forgot that they weren't in there. I heard the things that Harley had done and I heard like, oh cool, they did this this time.

01:18:03 Speaker_02
They changed my timing up here because Harley is like the second voice actor for every character because they're so, like editing makes a show.

01:18:15 Speaker_04
So there's so much of that. Is that offensive, by the way, like as an actor?

01:18:19 Speaker_04
Like, I mean, you know, too bad I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, but like, but just curious, like if you know that you did something a certain way and then you hear it and it's like completely different from how you delivered it, is that like,

01:18:31 Speaker_04
Hey, why did you do that?

01:18:33 Speaker_02
There were times that I definitely heard a thing that you did and thought, eh, mine was better. Wrong. No one will ever know. But yeah, in listening all the way through having pretty much finished recording the show, I could just

01:18:51 Speaker_02
hear the show I heard the story I got the full line and it made it feel so much better to close off because I actually had a feeling for not the process for the actual thing that we were finishing.

01:19:08 Speaker_02
And so, you know, I'm sure you many of you have heard this story before. The last thing that we recorded in a scene was saying goodbye to the Ruby seven. And the last thing that we recorded in the show altogether was Juno's final monologue.

01:19:22 Speaker_02
And I had not read the final monologue until that day because we did not have a rehearsal version of it. We had all of it up until that last monologue. And it was just like a note in the script that said, I'm going to get to this.

01:19:34 Speaker_02
I just haven't gotten it yet. So There, I think that one, at least part of the recording that made it into the episode was my first time reading that excerpt from The Simple Art of Murder and all of that. And so it was like a nice surprise to me.

01:19:49 Speaker_02
I got to actually see the ending of the show in real time and I got to experience it. So this is a really long answer to a really simple question, but it, it was the right thing to do.

01:19:59 Speaker_02
And it made me appreciate and treasure those few moments so much more.

01:20:03 Speaker_03
Thanks for asking. So Harley, this one's more for you and me. Sorry, y'all. But part of the reason I'm curious about this question is because of what I said before about our feeling and our relationship with word of God questions.

01:20:21 Speaker_03
Because this is a thing that you and I have spoken about obliquely, but we never came to an answer. And there's a reason that we never came to an answer that I think is interesting. Which is, how did Damien and Tristan get the power to do miracles?

01:20:34 Speaker_03
Was it actually Saint Damien, like how Ola saw Ferdinand at the end, or was it the universe doing magic like Kwani, or was it something else? Part of the reason that I think this question is interesting, right, is that...

01:21:03 Speaker_03
is that actually you and I talked a lot about writing religion in this show, partially because neither of us are at all religious, and neither of us were raised religious in any way either.

01:21:15 Speaker_03
You read a lot of stories that had like a strong kind of Christian underpinning to them. I once scared the hell out of my dad when I asked him for the Bible for Christmas,

01:21:28 Speaker_03
And he got me the illustrated beginner's Bible and was just like sitting there and he'd the way The way he tells the story The way he tells the story he was like spent the whole time after he gave it to me going like if if this kid becomes a priest I do actually need to start believing in God like that is that is the thing I

01:21:50 Speaker_03
And he eventually asked me, he just asked me very curiously, like, so what'd you think of it? And apparently my like five-year-old answer was, I don't get it. Seems fine. I just, it's all right. I prefer Dolaire's book of Greek myths.

01:22:06 Speaker_03
But one of the things that we talked about is that like, you know, so to an extent we are reverse engineering religious feeling, right?

01:22:13 Speaker_03
And my understanding is that part of it is faith and part of faith is faith only counts if you don't have direct confirmation or answers. So for me, part of the magic of the magic of the saints is that

01:22:29 Speaker_02
I wanted to do it too.

01:22:30 Speaker_03
It's raining.

01:22:30 Speaker_05
We're just having religious feelings back here.

01:22:33 Speaker_03
The spirit is here.

01:22:34 Speaker_04
They were both raised religious.

01:22:36 Speaker_03
They were.

01:22:36 Speaker_06
So it's not a streak to think that they're like, deeply Catholic. I'm just startled. I'm startled.

01:22:44 Speaker_03
But part of it for me is that if you, even in your fantasy world, you come to a clear, concrete answer of how religious belief works and the power that it gives you works, you have destroyed the concept of faith, right? Does that seem reasonable?

01:22:59 Speaker_03
So that's part of the reason that you and I have never come to a final answer, although I think we do each have gut instincts. There she is.

01:23:09 Speaker_04
She came to say hello. Oh, ow. Oh my gosh, little angel. Okay, thank you for saying hello.

01:23:24 Speaker_03
Would you like to give your answer about how you think it works?

01:23:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, so okay, something that was, I guess, important, especially since we're not religious, is we're not gonna write something where we're like, and religious people are dumb, right? So like, that was off the table.

01:23:40 Speaker_04
And so we weren't just going to have it be like, He's misguided. And none of this is real. Especially because we already have magic. So that would just be rude, honestly. So we knew it wasn't going to be that.

01:23:56 Speaker_04
But also, it's not very interesting to just be like, and that is just all true and real in a way that makes sense. So it wasn't going to be that either. So really, the place that we landed was kind of a mix of ambiguity, of it's within you,

01:24:19 Speaker_04
It is real but in a more abstract way that has to do with the way that the universe is generally magical And so that's why when you hear the Saints, they are always in the voices of the people who are talking to them. Right?

01:24:43 Speaker_04
So when Damien talks to Saint Damien, it's Matthew voicing both. And then when Olalá talks to Ferdinand, it's Marge voicing both. And I don't really know.

01:25:00 Speaker_04
I mean, I guess the most concrete answer is just that the magic of the universe is real, and that certainly contributes to the power of miracles, and we know that the universe likes stories, and so it certainly could imbue someone with

01:25:20 Speaker_04
Miracle type power if that would tell a good story and if the framework for somebody is To attach it to these particular guys Who some version of them existed once then fine?

01:25:37 Speaker_04
That's just what works and in some ways I guess in like a very removed way that maybe is my Some version of my take on religion of like

01:25:51 Speaker_04
Yeah, there were some people who existed who we think of as prophets now, but they were some guys and, like, probably had plenty of misses because nobody has only hits.

01:26:04 Speaker_04
And if they mean a lot to people and if their traditions have been carried down and if, you know, that's a way for

01:26:12 Speaker_04
People to if that's something for people to use as a framework to see the magic of the universe, which is a real thing Then fine, you know just don't like institutionalize it and torture everybody because that sucks So, I think I think maybe that's what we were trying to say Two more questions Someone did ask I

01:26:43 Speaker_02
When did you decide, slash realize, that the RWBY 7 was going to be a full-on character instead of just a car?

01:26:49 Speaker_03
Do you remember the answer to this?

01:26:50 Speaker_02
No.

01:26:51 Speaker_03
Oh, okay. I do. World? Oh.

01:26:53 Speaker_02
Alright, next question! That's a wrap.

01:26:57 Speaker_03
Not in Train From Nowhere is the short answer. You and I had arguments over the course of years because we did think fairly early on that we wanted to bring the RWBY back at some point.

01:27:10 Speaker_03
And you and I argued for years about whether the ruby was some kind of extremely complicated AI, or an alien, or neither. And your point, which is very good, and I do think it's something that people don't

01:27:27 Speaker_03
always think about when they're creating a science fiction universe is that if you introduce the concept of completely sentient AI, or you introduce the concept of, you know, thinking, feeling alien life, you are, that has massive implications on everything in the universe, right?

01:27:43 Speaker_03
So if we were going to do it, we had to make it work. We did know what the ruby was up to by the first episode of season three, and we started seeding it as early as Shadows on the Ship, maybe a little earlier than that.

01:28:02 Speaker_03
Tools of Rust, yes, yes, because in Tools of Rust, the ruby leaves the carte blanche without anybody telling it to. So we were being very intentional about that throughout that season. Do you want to add anything? Okay.

01:28:15 Speaker_05
I have a question from Quintessence. Is there a really fun lore tidbit that you know that didn't make it into the show?

01:28:22 Speaker_05
Any kind of like little backstory thing that we kind of never find a time to talk about, but you feel like it's kind of cemented in your mind as part of the reality of the Penumbra?

01:28:36 Speaker_05
Well, I mean if neither of you are gonna answer, I'll just vamp for a little while. There are other things I can talk about. I have topics.

01:28:48 Speaker_03
Oh, you know what? I do have one. We haven't talked about this in years is why I forgot about it. And we actually, we may have referenced it in one of the Rita minutes. I'm not sure.

01:28:57 Speaker_03
But a thing that you and I have come back to periodically is the fact that Rita is almost certainly originally from Earth. And her mom was almost certainly a terrorist. Like her mom definitely built bombs and used them on probably innocent people.

01:29:17 Speaker_04
I'm pretty sure we know about the bombs from a read-a-minute.

01:29:25 Speaker_04
I don't know if this is true because it was an idea that we tossed around and then didn't do anything with, so it might or might not be true, but there was some version in which she had a sister with the same voice.

01:29:36 Speaker_03
A completely different life. That was an early draft of a read-a-minute. We never ended up doing that. Anything else? Chat loves this.

01:29:46 Speaker_02
Appropriately so.

01:29:48 Speaker_04
But in no version. Is there a last name that we tell you?

01:29:55 Speaker_02
I skip that question every time I saw it, because I know the answer.

01:29:59 Speaker_05
Yeah. I'm not telling you.

01:30:01 Speaker_03
Oh yeah, no, I mean, to twist the knife as much as possible, I feel like I know her last name and I will never tell anybody. You and I have joked about this before. We've had this conversation.

01:30:13 Speaker_04
There's like a placeholder last name for her.

01:30:15 Speaker_03
Right.

01:30:15 Speaker_04
But it's still, that's, even that is not her real.

01:30:18 Speaker_03
Oh sure.

01:30:19 Speaker_04
Jones.

01:30:20 Speaker_03
Jones. Unless there's like a banger question that we really want to get out, I think that's about it.

01:30:28 Speaker_02
There are plenty of great questions, but we are down by time.

01:30:33 Speaker_05
Physical realities and whatnot.

01:30:35 Speaker_03
So, before we move on to our announcement to make this as painful for you as possible, I have gathered a series of vital stats about the show.

01:30:48 Speaker_03
Just for us to brag for a minute, and also because, you know, dealing with the end of this show, I need to keep myself busy somehow. But the fact is that

01:31:01 Speaker_03
With a very small team, we have generated a frankly insane amount of show, and we're not done yet.

01:31:10 Speaker_03
But just to give you a sense of how insane, first off, in terms of music created for the show, specifically music by Ryan, I did not include music that Anjimily gave to us, because I couldn't find all of it.

01:31:24 Speaker_03
um it's only a couple of tracks so it's like five minutes in terms of music that ryan made for us uh ryan has made a total of three hours 34 minutes and 33 seconds of music for the penumbra podcast honestly there's probably some unused stuff too right yeah

01:31:41 Speaker_03
In terms of audio, Harley, would you like to know how much you have done? Yes! Okay.

01:31:47 Speaker_03
If you were to listen to the entire Penumbra podcast from the beginning to the end without sleeping, because you would need to sleep, it's that long, it would take you three days, 23 hours, and two minutes. Almost four whole days.

01:32:04 Speaker_06
Oh my gosh.

01:32:04 Speaker_03
Yep. Then, in terms of the scripts, just the Juno series comes out to 1,852 pages, which is 647,957 words. The second Citadel series is 1,295 pages, which comes out to 453,134 words.

01:32:26 Speaker_03
making the total plus all of the one-shots 3,284 pages and 1,123,947 words. So that's like 11 books. Yeah I mean in about a hundred thousand words a book that is like a well actually it's not it's not 11 it's actually 12.

01:32:40 Speaker_04
12 books?

01:32:41 Speaker_03
Right because there's the you know there's the um The actual book that we wrote, we wrote a few years ago. Oh, that book. Right, the novel, the Juno Steel novel. The Juno Steel novel. Right, which we released and everybody knows about.

01:33:09 Speaker_03
So Travelers, we have a little bit of a surprise for you.

01:33:14 Speaker_03
uh which is uh our very very next project uh is going to be a uh audiobook of the Juno Steel novel which has been written for a few maybe like four or five years now we were writing it during season three during season three right um it is called uh if memory serves a Juno Steel mystery

01:33:38 Speaker_03
It is about Juno's first cases as a private eye. And we have a little snippet of it to play for you right now. Yes, we really do. You didn't know about this?

01:33:50 Speaker_04
Yeah, we get to play it for you.

01:33:53 Speaker_03
After the snippet, we're gonna talk about how we're releasing it, because it's a little different from what we've done in the past. But for now, get comfy, buckle in. This is about 10 minutes, not from the very beginning, but from the first section.

01:34:06 Speaker_04
This is like chapter two.

01:34:07 Speaker_03
Yes, from the first section of If Memory Serves.

01:34:12 Speaker_02
When you're as unpopular as I am, checking your mail is a dangerous proposition. Opening big, bright pink boxes that have clearly been tampered with borders on death wish. I did it anyway. To be fair, I did take the necessary precautions first. Rita!

01:34:30 Speaker_02
I called through the door. I'm gonna need you to step out of the office for a few minutes. We argued about that for a little bit. Why do I gotta leave? To get something. To get what? I'm not sure, but you'll know when you see it.

01:34:40 Speaker_02
Until eventually, I heard the door slam, and I knew I was free to blow myself to pieces in private. But the box didn't explode. Because this isn't a ghost story.

01:34:52 Speaker_02
Except in all the ways that any story about the loose ends people leave behind is a ghost story. When I decided what I was seeing inside the box didn't make any sense, I looked in it again. Then I closed it, opened it, looked again.

01:35:07 Speaker_02
And when that didn't do anything, I decided it was probably time to read the letter that had come with the box. The one that said, read this first in big letters across the envelope. I don't like being told what to do.

01:35:21 Speaker_02
Juno, my cover's been blown and I don't have time to catch you up on everything. I know you don't like being told what to do, but I need you to follow these directions exactly, just like when we were kids. Shut up, think, act.

01:35:34 Speaker_02
The sharp angled handwriting was enough to make my stomach do flips. Those last four words signed the rest of my guts up for gymnastics too.

01:35:42 Speaker_02
I gave the package a once over for any other heart attacks, but there was nothing on that box besides a shipping label from a place called Post Away Limited, and a whole lot of really intense pink.

01:35:55 Speaker_02
Then I called through the door again to make sure Rita was gone, and when I was sure, I took two ice blue tablets out of my filing cabinet. I felt bad hiding my Nemezin in there, because Rita had bought me that filing cabinet.

01:36:06 Speaker_02
along with this office and this entire second chance at life. And I knew she didn't like when I took the pills. She'd been my secretary back in my cop days and dragged me to this PI gig like I was a stray kitten she'd rescued from a storm drain.

01:36:19 Speaker_01
And the one time she caught me tripping down memory lane, she said, Come on, Mr. Steele, that mem-nem-nemnessine stuff is dangerous. It's for sad old people who ain't got nothing to live for. You're sad young people, Buzz!

01:36:32 Speaker_01
We got a business to build, cases to solve! You got plenty to live for, so you can't just stay stuck in the past all the time!

01:36:39 Speaker_02
I should probably mention that she was crying when she said all that. A lot. And I did promise her I'd never take the nemesine again. So... But, come on.

01:36:51 Speaker_02
If you'd lost as much as I had in one week, if you went from the youngest police captain in the history of Mars to washed-up-nobody-with-big-debts-in-a-bigger-pile-of-wedding-invitations-to-shred, then you'd need a little help, too.

01:37:04 Speaker_02
So, I took the nemesine, picked up the letter again, and enjoyed some light reading while I waited for the pass to catch up with me. The contents of this box are vital.

01:37:15 Speaker_02
They took me months of undercover work, completely off the books, but I know I found something really big here. That's why you're getting this box. You cannot bring it to the H.C.P.D. There are definitely cops in on this.

01:37:27 Speaker_02
The people behind it have connections everywhere. I don't know how far, but as soon as I started, I could tell that this went deep. I followed one route, thinking I was investigating a tree. Now, I'm here and I can tell it's a forest. This is huge.

01:37:41 Speaker_02
So this stays in your apartment until I come pick it up. Understood? There's only one box and it's in your hands now. Do not give it to anyone unless they know my name and my sister's name and know to say both.

01:37:56 Speaker_02
The contents of this package are dangerous. Keeping them safe is the most important thing I've asked you to do, Juno. Don't let it out of your sight. Shut up, think, then act. I'll see you soon. Sasha Wire. Don't let it out of your sight, I read out loud.

01:38:16 Speaker_02
I looked back inside the box. It was empty. I looked up from the letter to see my office folding in on itself.

01:38:29 Speaker_02
My crusty carpet and cigarette-colored window dripped away like wet paint, and underneath them lay a different office, brighter and whiter than mine.

01:38:38 Speaker_02
The view outside twisted green smoke into green bushes, and hovering benches and kids in trainee uniforms far below.

01:38:47 Speaker_02
The air traded the stink of dead rats for the stink of flowers, and once my office had been completely replaced by the Hyperion City Police Academy's meeting room, the huge filing cabinet beside me pinched inward, frayed its top into black tin fringes, painted itself in skin and heat and breath, and finally opened its eyes.

01:39:08 Speaker_04
I can't believe I let you talk me into this, Sasha Wire said.

01:39:11 Speaker_02
I had never gotten the knack for controlling which memory the nemesine brings me back to. The present always leaves its thumbprint on what part of the past I get to see.

01:39:21 Speaker_02
Usually that paid off pretty well, because usually I was thinking about the happier life I'd demolished a few months ago, but this memory, this one, I didn't want right now.

01:39:31 Speaker_04
What did you think this would accomplish, exactly?

01:39:33 Speaker_02
Sasha said.

01:39:34 Speaker_04
Sneaking into the flight control tower for target practice? You idiot.

01:39:37 Speaker_02
Come on, you make it sound like I was shooting at a bunch of cop cruisers mid-flight, I said. But I only shot at one. And that was to see how good the range on my blaster was.

01:39:46 Speaker_02
And sure, the ricochet went a little wild, and that bird probably didn't like it, but... She tried to slump back into her seat. But Sasha never was the champion slumper I am. She was too poised and too pointy.

01:39:58 Speaker_02
The best she could manage was to cross her arms and let her oiled crow hair curtain her eyes. Everything with Sasha always felt like a performance, because for the most part, it was.

01:40:10 Speaker_02
She'd grown up with just as much nothing as I had, in the same dirt-poor man-eating district I did. But she always felt like if she acted like a rich kid who knew everything, she might go into a cocoon and become a rich kid who knew everything.

01:40:25 Speaker_04
You idiot, she said again.

01:40:27 Speaker_02
My past self sighed. Look, you agreed to it, I said. Me idiot too, then. And it was for a good reason, I think, I said, my voice squeaking with teenage righteousness. We are the best choices for that stakeout job, and we know it.

01:40:43 Speaker_02
The fact that we don't have our badges yet is like a technicality, right? Nobody can plant a shot like me.

01:40:49 Speaker_04
Huck is going to kill us, Sasha said. Diamond might even kill us. She was always the sweet, innocent one, and now I have to watch her kill us. Wonderful.

01:40:58 Speaker_02
And nobody knows more about every detail of this city than you do, I said. What are we going to do? Just let some old should-be retirees sleep through a drug bust?

01:41:08 Speaker_04
I hear this new thing they're hawking is huge and- We broke the law on a campus for police officers.

01:41:14 Speaker_02
Yeah, well, I bet they've never seen a job proposal like that before, I said. Sasha turned on me then and her eyes tore right into my gut.

01:41:22 Speaker_02
Her glare had talons, and she could use them to rip you to pieces or drag you, kicking and screaming, into the sky with her. I'd have been a half-picked carcass on the ground without her. So when she spoke, I listened.

01:41:37 Speaker_04
Shut up, think, then act.

01:41:39 Speaker_02
She said, like she'd said a thousand other times, like she'd said since the first time my mother threw me out on my ear, and all I wanted to do was storm back and break her goddamn nose.

01:41:50 Speaker_04
We can't be dismissed from this program, all right? This is our last chance, both of us. We can't keep acting like kids goofing around on the street with Mick anymore, and I'm not going to let us mess this up, all right? I'm not.

01:42:03 Speaker_02
Right, I said.

01:42:05 Speaker_04
So we need a plan, something to smooth this over.

01:42:08 Speaker_02
She said. Her eyes clicked back and forth like she could see the plan in front of her, could connect its pieces with her pupils.

01:42:16 Speaker_04
Then she said, if it's one of our instructors, I'll do the talking. If it's someone from the firing range, I don't know. Talk to them about what gun is the sexiest until I come up with something better.

01:42:25 Speaker_02
Is that really what you think we talk about? Her eyes snapped to a stop.

01:42:30 Speaker_04
But if it's Captain Hijikata, that's it. We're finished. Finished with what?

01:42:36 Speaker_02
Then Captain Hijikata came in the door. All long, loose limbs and short, tight hair. And I knew this Nemezin trip was going to be a bad one. There's really no coming back from a trip where you have to see the woman who made you ruin your life.

01:42:52 Speaker_02
No, that's not fair. She didn't make me do anything. I walked into that evidence locker myself. Loss just goes down smoother when you have someone to blame it on.

01:43:04 Speaker_02
I tried not to look at Hijikata, but I remembered her so well that it didn't make a difference. The gold and silver hair, the easy hand gestures, the wide-legged posture that owned whatever room she stood in. She was so easy to trust back then.

01:43:20 Speaker_02
So reassuring.

01:43:23 Speaker_00
Oh.

01:43:23 Speaker_02
Steel, she said.

01:43:25 Speaker_00
Right, I forgot we called you in here. That stunt you pulled in the control tower. Don't do it again, alright?"

01:43:31 Speaker_02
Uh, yes, Captain.

01:43:34 Speaker_00
And Diamond said to call her when you get the chance. Don't leave my little girl waiting.

01:43:39 Speaker_02
Hijikata smiled at me. And it was the kind of smile that made you really aware that human beings have way too many teeth. Back when I relied on her, that smile had been reassuring.

01:43:51 Speaker_02
Like no matter what threat came your way, she could laugh it off and you'd be safe. Then Hijikata looked at Sasha over her shoulder and said, Wire, mind coming with me for a minute?

01:44:02 Speaker_00
Someone wants to see you.

01:44:04 Speaker_02
Sasha nodded, like she'd always known this would happen, because Sasha Wire never showed any sign of being unprepared for any reason.

01:44:14 Speaker_02
It always gave me the impression that she was immortal, eternal, that the day before the apocalypse happened, she'd show up at my door with a canteen and some fake IDs, and we'd be gone before the first explosion started.

01:44:26 Speaker_02
It didn't shake out that way, though. Because here's the other reason receiving a package from Sasha that day turned my blood to slush. This memory was the last time I ever saw her alive. Sasha Wire had been dead for four years.

01:44:44 Speaker_03
So that's your sneak peek of If Memory Serves. You want to talk about how we're releasing it, Harley?

01:44:54 Speaker_04
Yeah, help me out a little bit.

01:44:56 Speaker_04
It's going to be Well, I think we'll have probably moved over to our new Yes, the plan is for us to yes But just so that you know what it's gonna look like we're gonna be releasing it over the course of six months Oh, I see people are having feelings I'm going to ignore all of that.

01:45:18 Speaker_04
All right So we're also one of the dogs is going around in circles, and it's very distracting to me.

01:45:26 Speaker_03
It's dog city over there.

01:45:28 Speaker_04
So we're going to be releasing it over the course of six months. You should think of this as kind of a preview of the book, because it's not going to live on our platform in perpetuity like that. Yes. It's going to be released in chunks.

01:45:42 Speaker_04
It will be up there for the six months, and then probably like another month after that so that you can listen to it in full, et cetera. And then we're going to take it down after that so that we will be able to.

01:45:53 Speaker_04
produce it or just sell it in full later at some point.

01:45:57 Speaker_03
So one way that you can think about this, right, is like, so the new platform that we're moving to does do a monthly charge model, right? So let's say you sign up for the new platform at $2 a month for the six months that we're releasing it.

01:46:10 Speaker_03
At the end, you've paid 12 bucks. You get to walk away with an audio book for 12 bucks, which is a pretty good deal.

01:46:15 Speaker_03
So, or if you want to, you don't want to deal with all the individual files and it sounds like a pain, you can buy the full thing after the fact once we've released it in full, right?

01:46:25 Speaker_03
But this way you will get it kind of in pieces, you'll be able to talk with one another about what's going on in it. I spent a while going through the text of the book trying to find fun places to cut things off.

01:46:40 Speaker_03
And actually all four of us are involved in the creation of this thing, right? You heard Joshua recording it, Melissa's been helping out with a lot of feedback on the text itself, and we have a lot of surprises in there.

01:46:56 Speaker_04
Yes, so we're gonna be releasing two, you could call them episodes, a month. We're gonna pretty much stick to the same schedule that we had for the show. And the episodes are pretty, I think they'll probably be pretty long.

01:47:10 Speaker_04
And so it'll be up on our new platform. Don't worry, you'll find out more about that platform and we'll make it very easy to transition over there. And so we also have,

01:47:23 Speaker_03
one more announcement we do but before two things very briefly before that did you say that it's it's going to be on exclusively paid on that platform so you do need to subscribe to our new platform to get this preview yes unless you want to wait until one day in the future when we exactly sell it exactly

01:47:41 Speaker_03
And we will still keep doing bonuses. Somebody in the chat asked, will we be giving, like, a transcript so you can read along? Absolutely. So that will be available to you.

01:47:49 Speaker_03
But the transcript, like the audiobook itself, will go down soon after the audiobook is complete. So again, you can take it and walk away with it, or if you want to buy the whole thing later, you can buy the whole thing later.

01:48:00 Speaker_03
We have one last surprise, exciting announcement. But we would not be anywhere were it not for our lovely patrons.

01:48:11 Speaker_03
so um addicted to cliffhangers oh 100 it's a i wish i wish for all of you the specific high that comes with for example when you have very exciting news and you start speaking very

01:48:29 Speaker_03
Slowly, we would like to thank everybody who supports us on Patreon, but especially our $30 patrons, such as Orphan Peddler, Sylvia Chu, My Penumbra Hyperfixation is back at 100% power, The Corn Eye and the Lonely Ghost, Zeez here, Jonathan the Wilkes Wilkes,

01:48:44 Speaker_03
Juno Steele and the Costco Hot Dog. Hi, my name is DJ and I love this podcast. Ari Berry and Intrepid Lilac. Andy Bell. The Werners wishing well for Juno's journey, or to Juno's journey. Casey O. Bettina Trevino. Fozzie.

01:48:56 Speaker_03
Aleem Muqtadir, The Emerald Eight, this podcast, ha-ha. Tony the Owlbear. Noray Kira. Jack M. Cohen. Paladin of Gawain, good boy of the Citadel. Girl in the Midnight Sky. Adrian Cadena. Thank you, Prenumber Team, for your amazing work.

01:49:12 Speaker_03
Braylon, hello, quintessence, it's been a while. Hannah and Leah's Adventures in Gender Shenanigans, the Lady Guinevere and the Surprise Name Drop, Sydney Bids a Tearful Goodbye to the Juniverse, guess what, Sydney?

01:49:23 Speaker_03
Jammie, Osipete, Laura, Diana Cause, SCP Chloe, Desert Willow, and the final Rachel Howard.

01:49:30 Speaker_03
Junga Shoku, Skyfire Forever, The Lady Has Claimed Another One, Jay Hall, James Evelyn, Thank You, Juno Steele, Liv Allen, Alice the Time Lord, In Memory of Spiral Opal, Eden the Gay Bookworm, Pride and Thanks, The Penumbra Podcast for getting her a girlfriend.

01:49:46 Speaker_03
Michael David Smith, Nicole Cundiff, and I'll miss you, Mr. Steele, Kiki's Podcast Patronage Service, Amy Thist, Caroline Seidman, Shura, Radius Elna, Rainn and Pippin from The Glenn Dimension, Dr. B, Karen Z.H., Genetic, Cortu, Minchowski, Ash, and Angel Acevedo, for your incredibly generous contributions per episode.

01:50:09 Speaker_03
Thank you. And with that, we have one final announcement. So what happens... I mean, so here's the thing, right? We said that If Memory Serves is going to be released over the course of six months.

01:50:27 Speaker_03
Six months, for those of you playing at home, is not forever. So what happens after If Memory Serves?

01:50:33 Speaker_04
I guess we might as well release a new podcast.

01:50:36 Speaker_03
A brand new story. We are plugging away at it right now. We're not going to tell you much yet. The two things that we're going to tell you are one, it will be, among many other things, a horror story set in a world much closer to our own. And Harley.

01:50:55 Speaker_04
I'm going to say the last thing, but we didn't write this down, but I think it's just to head this off. It's not a continuation of Juno Steel or Second Son of El.

01:51:03 Speaker_03
Yes, yes.

01:51:04 Speaker_04
Something different.

01:51:05 Speaker_03
Brand new.

01:51:06 Speaker_04
And what I will tell you about it is the title. Do you want to know the title? The title is Thirst.

01:51:15 Speaker_03
Thank you for your support, everybody.

01:51:38 Speaker_04
It's Harley again. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're interested in getting early ad-free versions of the show, along with a lot of other bonus content, remember to check out thepenemberpodcast.supercast.com.

01:51:51 Speaker_04
And if you heard anything about Patreon in that episode, ignore it. That was our old platform, and everything has been moved over to the new one. Thank you for considering supporting our work.