If you don’t watch the Periscope, you miss from this transcript them grinning ear to ear, giggling, and making googly eyes at each other. It’s very clear that this is a story about the core of who they are, and who they are together. Which gets touchingly hilarious the farther the story gets from most people’s notions of romance. But this isn’t a story about most people, it’s a story about them, and their love and connection shine through so brightly from their eyes and voices.
Notes on the transcription: It’s not a word for word transcript, I was capturing the story and leave out the verbal thought pauses. There are a few names I may have the spelling on, despite trying to look them up. Please let me know if you have corrections.
Runs from 3:56 to 09:36 https://www.periscope.tv/w/1mrGmAQbBQdGy?t=19
Marisha shows off the ring at 1:48.
Tweet picture is here: https://twitter.com/Marisha_Ray/status/790626436432351232
Matt: “People are asking how the proposal- Uh– It’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it as short as possible.
“So, about three years ago, I think, I had a birthday party, me and Marisha both kind of developed and designed with Matt Key and Brittney, and a few of your friends. We made an HP Lovecraft themed kinda murder mystery dinner, with like characters, background story for each person who showed up in costume. And it was weird, and it was fun.
“Anyway, smashcut to a couple months ago, I wrote a sequel story to that, and me and a bunch of friends secretly started building a Lovecraft themed two room escape room in Huntington Beach during the week when I was [air quotes] recording sessions, and so we built an entire kinda 1920s themed escape room with a bunch of really cheap antique furniture that we’d found at thrift stores and stuff and we built set pieces. Laura and Travis helped out, Liam helped out, Taliesin, we all just kind of were going around when Marisha wasn’t paying attention, and building this room. And it had a story that tied into her character from the old HP Lovecraft birthday party.
“An’ so we go there under the pretense, it was October 21st, that we were going with our friends, Key and Brittney, for this escape room they’d invited us to. We get in there, and all of a sudden we get locked apart from Key and Brittney, and so it’s just the two of us in there, and we’re finding puzzles, and we’re getting notes and clues for the story, and then I get locked out of the room by crawling into this crate that we’d already planned. So I’m off outside of the room, and she’s by herself in there, but she can hear me yelling from the next wall over, where me and all the rest of our friends are sitting with a monitor, watching her go through the room, solving puzzles. And I’m shouting at her clues and stuff.
“She starts finding more and more clues that ties her into the story that, like, this crazed doctor that’s been collecting all these relics tried to summon the Arlephotheth through- to bring back the soul of his lost brother. But then the Medium, that was Marisha’s character from the old party that was brought into it, ruined the ritual and killed herself, but the blood of her bloodline still existed in this girl named Marisha, and she started finding pictures of like all of the friends, and then she was supposed to be part of this ritual and pulled into it. And then she finds one half of this dagger, which I found the other half in the other side, and she ends up eventually going through all the puzzles, and gets a screw driver, and can unscrew the grate on the wall on the back.
“When she climbs through this crawlspace it opens into a ritual chamber with a bunch of our friends in full cultists robes with masks, and there’s a ritual alter with a Necronomicon symbol painted on it, covered in candles. And I’m waiting for her there, where I hand her the other half of the blade, and we attach the two parts of the dagger. And the dagger then- I could pull it up real fast, actually. Is kind of our keepsake. So, this is the relic blade that I had made by a friend of ours, which, if you want to pull that part off there, it’s in two pieces. [click] And then, so she found that piece, and I found this piece, and they combine together.”
Marisha: “You wanna turn it on?”
Matt: “Yeah. Other way, other way.”
Marisha: “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.”
Matt: “It’s okay. [click] There we go. And once they were together, [button click] they began to glow.”
Marisha: Hold an angelic note: “Ahhhhh!”
Matt: “And so once she had-“
Marisha: “Fuckin’ rad.”
Matt: “It’s so ridiculous. So once she made the dagger combined, then Travis, dressed in a full tentacle faced mask, with one giant tentacle arm and cultist robes, breaks through behind the alter, smashes it in two, and begins killing off cultists, and there’s a glowing, pulsing, kinda green light in the chest where there was a wound, and so she had rushed forward with the relic blade and slaughter the, uh-“
Marisha (in the most adorable, cutesy tone ever): “Had to stab him in the heart!”
Matt: “In the heart, with the blade.”
Marisha: “Yeah. Which he was concerned that I was gonna stab him with, like, an actual blade. This thing- this thing would still would still hurt.”
Matt: “We had a lot of padding! We made sure to put a lot of padding in there.”
Marisha, giggling: “Yeah.”
Matt: “We had, like, three inches of give, and a kind of fake chest plate, and everything.”
Marisha: “Yeah.”
Matt: “But yeah.”
Marisha: “It was amazing!”
Matt: “So then after she-“
Marisha: “It was ridiculous.”
Matt: “After she defeated the Travis monster, all the cultists collapsed, and then she turned around, and that’s when I proposed to her.”
Marisha: “Yeah.”
Matt: “So it was fun.”
Marisha: “And then, like, everyone was there, and everyone drove down to Huntington Beach.”
Matt: “There was a lot of crying.”
Marisha: “An’ there was a lot of crying, an’.”
Matt: “There was a lot of crying.”
Marisha: “And if you live in Los Angeles, you’ll know, driving down to Huntington Beach means that people must really care about you.”
Matt throws his head back laughing hard.
Marisha: “So,”
Matt: “It’s a valid point.”
Marisha: “That was, like, the first thing that I said, [in a tearfully happy voice] ‘You guys all drove to Huntington Beach? Wus that- fer me?!'”
Matt laughs
Marisha: “Yeah, it was, it was pretty great.”
Matt: “Yeah, so it was, it was dumb.”
Marisha: “Everyone was there. Dustin was there, and Amira was there.”
Matt: “Yeah, a lot of the Critical Role, like, Twitch crew was there to help out, and like,”
Marisha: “Yeah.”
Matt: “Ryan Green,”
Marisha: “Ryan Green.”
Matt: “And a bunch of cool folks. So it was a good time.”
Marisha: “It was awesome. It was crazy, it was like- Oh, and well, Darren Ross helps-“
Matt: “Darren Ross was- We met up with Darren Ross the creator of Super Fight, the games, a friend of ours, it was actually his warehouse space, and he was actually one of the key components to even making this thing happen. He helped design the puzzles, an’ helped us build the whole piece. And yeah. We owe- I owe a lot to a lot of people. A lot of favors that I owe a lot of people after that. So, uh-“
Marisha: “Yeah.”
Matt: “So it was good, it was fun.”
Marisha: “We’ve got to get a mount for this.”
Matt: “Yeah, we’re going to mount the dagger on our wall, somewhere, probably, once we’re starting to get pieces together.”
09:36
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Critical Analysis 