The Call of the Void · Acorn Arts and Entertainment

S2, Chapter 4: Weird Science with Topher Sommers

·29 min·2 clips

A mysterious stone screams and vanishes when set on fire, revealing its otherworldly nature.

Lunch starts ordinary, or close enough. Carson tries to pull Baker into easy joking about dinner, Coronas, Simone, and the version of Baker who shows up around her. Then the room goes bad. Baker hears the loudness building, but Carson cannot pin it down, and the teasing starts to feel less casual. Nobody stops to explain the sound. The scene lets heat, noise, and irritation do the work. Elsewhere, the day keeps grinding along. A tour guide finishes a bleakly funny bit on Victorian wound care, with linen, the town barber, and a needle that looks too much like a fish hook. The punchline has a bite: older medicine could mean an uncovered wound, a dirty tool, bacteria, and a lot of hoping afterward. Then the science gets stranger. Someone turns up with a Tupperware sample from the bayou after Kaminsky's call, and suddenly the cosmic problem may have a chemical side too. The container is the thing. Whatever is inside looks almost like obsidian, though not heavy enough, and it apparently had an awkward gelatin phase before this. The mystery moves through throwaway comments and half-practical questions: missed tours, rearranged ammonium compounds, whether anyone went alone. Even the ad break barges in. The ending slides from local arts copy into direct support requests, a plain reminder that the production runs independently and on donations. The signoff is clipped, which fits. Normal business, dry jokes, ugly medical history, and something strange spreading where nobody can quite see it.

As heard by us

A flirtation gives way to a strange lecture and an unsettling bayou report.

Carson's dinner banter with Simone, still hanging just offstage, gives the opening a loose, almost teasing feel before the room turns louder and stranger. The piece keeps asking what kind of story it wants to be, and that uncertainty works more often than it stumbles.

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Why you'd press play

For a dinner-date vibe that mutates into bayou chemistry and creeping dread.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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