Friday, January 31, 2025

You Feel a Little Crispy, Also You Have No Eyebrows - January 31, 2025

- Plain black T with North Face jacket in teal


- Over breakfast after the fight, Soliana asks Niniel and Caleb and Poetry about dreaming because it's new to her. She had some pretty crazy underwater dreams while Trancing last night. Caleb does not dream as a fellow elf, and Niniel says yeah dreams are like that.

- The ship is back underway by the time they all get on deck, but the lookout calls out that there's another ship that's adrift and has no visible people on board.

- Soliana sends Stardust to do a loop, and she sees a perfectly intact ship with the sails reefed and lots of corpses and blood. The corpses look chewed on and partially eaten. A victim of the Sea Hag and her monsters?

- Soliana asks the captain if they can check for survivors. Gringamore agrees.

- They reach the ship and lay boarding planks. 

- Soliana asks Zemma if she will join her in the search for survivors so that Soliana isn't alone. They find a kid named Ethan who was the cabin boy of the Solaris. He throws up on the deck from the smell as soon as he finishes crossing over. He is introduced to the captain and then Soliana brings him to Hargak to get some food because he couldn't get into the provisions, so it's been a few days since he's eaten. 

- Caleb finds the captain's quarters and finds a log that indeed confirms that the ship ran into some fog and that's the last entry. He grabs the manifest and the logs and bring them to Gringamore. The Solaris was leaving Caledonia and heading to Part Carling.

- Niniel checks the cargo hold and finds trade goods, provisions, some weapons, etc. Nothing too crazy. She grabs a barrel of wine and wheels it back towards the Storm Caller. Once she gets her wine, she check a few corpses, but they are so smelly and squidgy and she only finds an ornate and pretty spyglass. She'll get Soliana to clean that.

- They spend most of the day to create shrouds from the sailcloth and other fabric from the hold and they commit the crew of the Solaris to the ocean. Soliana uses both an Unseen Servant and Mage Hand to sew multiple shrouds at a time, so it goes pretty quickly. It's just that everyone except Ethan was killed.

- Gringamore is loath to leave the Solaris to rot, so he plans to ask for a few volunteers to watch the ship so they can maybe sister ship it to Port Carling to earn a salvage return fee when they come back this way. He can't really fit all the stuff from the hold on his much smaller (and faster) ship, so he can't just take the whole cargo. Three sailors do agree to stay behind.

- Finn gets a promotion and Ethan is the new cabin boy on the Storm Caller. 

- During the next 18 days, the party helps Ethan acclimate and cheer him up with illusions and other cantrips to entertain when he gets sad.

- Finally one evening, Captain Gringamore calls the party up to the deck and says he thinks they are getting close because there's purple lightning in the water and there's a strange glow on the horizon.

- They start heading toward the glow and after a few more hours the lookout calls out that there's a fire ahead. Niniel scurries up to the crow's nest and verifies that it looks like a wall or circle of fire is coming straight out of the ocean with no substrate.

- The plan becomes to get nearish the fire, then take a landing craft closer and have Poetry summon Ember and send Ember into the fire to see what can happen.

- Soliana can use her new Shape Water Cantrip to drive the landing craft, but they bring two sailors in case they want to send the landing craft back.

- They get to about 50' or so of the edge of the wall of fire and Niniel hops in to see what's happening under water. There's a thick bunch of the purple lightning under the fire that seems to be fueling the fire. As near the surface as 20' down, the water is hot but not too uncomfortable. She also realizes that while this section of fire is a pretty solid wall there's other bits that flare up as well and it seems like there is an origin point sending out pulses. The wall of fire is about 15' deep but hundreds of feet long.

- While Niniel is doing her dive, Soliana hands the oars to the sailors asking them to stop them drifting into the fire while she ritually casts Detect Magic.

- It's Divination magic again.

- After these investigations are completed, Poetry sends Ember into the wall of fire and Ember is gone for a while. When she comes back she says there's nothing by fire.

- Everyone jumps into the water and the sailors take the landing craft back. Niniel is just good. Poetry Wild Shapes into a dolphin, and Zemma and Caleb hang onto dolphin-Poetry, while Soliana casts Alter Self - Aquatic Adaptions. Caleb has a Potion of Water Breathing as back-up.

- They dive under, surfacing every 60-90 seconds for Caleb as they dodge the fire flares.

- In the process while surfacing to breath, there is a sudden gathering of the purple lightning and a flare of fire and everyone except Caleb manages to dodge, so he takes 8 fire dmg. There's a second instance where Niniel gets burned (also 8 fire dmg).

- After 50-55 minutes of this, they can see a small island shape, and they sprint for it before Soliana's spell runs out.

- Everyone is pretty tired after the hours of intense swimming, so they take a breather and have some rations (Yay Bag of Holding!)

- The island looks very volcanic. The beach is dark, porous igneous rocks, so Soliana takes a small one for her collection.

- Niniel takes a short, casual walk to stretch and sees that the lightning and fire extends in all the directions from the island.

- Once their break is over, they start moving inland. There are a few gullies where it looks like lava might have flowed with some glowing hot material but not flowing.

- There are a few instances of disorienting pulses of magic.

- Finally there's a big pulse and the world spins and then goes black and they find themselves standing at the base of a big hill with dozens of fire beings about Zemma's size running down the hill at them.

- There is a commanding, masculine voice off the side and slightly behind the party that calls, "Hold the line!"


- 600 XP ea for 3,700 XP total ea.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Protect the Boats - August 1, 2025

 - KS Royals (Baseball? What?)   -  22 Redfall 1374 - As they are waiting for the coach to arrive the next morning, Soliana notices the tree...