<em>Medium shot of an elderly gentleman who looks vaguely like Malcolm McDowell, clad in the sort of silk bathrobe made infamous by Hugh Hefner.  He is seated in a luxurious wing-backed chair, smoking a pipe with every sign of gusto and reading a heavy, black, leatherbound tome with a disturbingly eldritch logo on the front cover.  He pauses as if noticing the onlooker, closes the book, smiles pleasantly and takes the pipe in hand.</em><br/><br/>"Good evening, and welcome to the side thread.  As you know, our principal players are involved in a momentous quest of truly epic proportions.  Those are generally filled with blood, thunder, and the mighty clash of titanic armies.  All good, clean entertainment, what?"<br/><br/><em>We pan back slightly and find that just out of view of the original shot, the randy old fellow is flanked by a number of scantily clad women in various degrees of fetish-wear, most of them holding trays with various items on them.  A glass of wine.  A bottle of wine.  A flogger.  Various naughty toys.  A copy of the al-Azif in the original Egyptian.  The Head of Vecna...</em><br/><br/>"However, there are some scenes that have been excised from the main tale for the sake of brevity, and also because some small-minded twerps out there never complain at massive bloodletting yet have a coronary over an accidentally exposed nipple.  Thus, for those scenes, we have this little thread over here...so that connoisseurs of epic heroism may have their blood, their thunder, their scowling soliloquys, and their raunchy full-on orgies without pause."<br/><br/><em>He lifts the pipe as if saluting the viewer.</em><br/><br/>"Let the debauch commence!"<br/><br/>(fade to...)