Those of my readers who have come to expect action and adventure are like to be disappointed with this particular installment, and yet it is one of the most satisfying to me personally. For I finally returned home.
There was a good deal of discussion about what we were going to do with the ship and the slave traders that owned it. I think Ilyich would have been happy with tying weights to their legs and turfing them overboard, but I don't think that idea would have gone down well with the rest of the party. Personally, I didn't care. I was more interested in the shield guardian amulets. We were going to toss them overboard, but I carefully put one away and attuned to it later. The construct was at the bottom of the sea, so it'll probably take a while to catch up.
In the end we put the slave traders on lifeboats with whatever of their possessions they could carry and some provisions. I assume that they will be back to take revenge on us later.
We turned the ship, newly renamed the Broken Shackle, over to the freed slaves. I hope they are able to make their way in the world, but regardless, they're not our problem any more.
We put to shore aboard the rowboat - again, there was a considerable amount of discussion about where we'd aim for. Sometimes I think Captain Caine should just take charge and make decisions, but he seems to think it important for us to argue about everything. In the end we made landfall some miles to the east of Lushpool.
It was no problem for us to arrive in Lushpool. While there I took the opportunity to visit the local magical library, and added a few entries to my spell book. Buff DeBuff got into some kind of gladiatorial fight. Apparently he did fairly well.
From there we signed on with a caravan which would take us through . Along the way we continued to enquire about the blockade. The most common explanation seems to be that it was set up to prevent spies from entering the country, but it seems to me that spies could just as easily have travelled via Calimport the way we did. If the blockade was indeed put in place to prevent spies, it was doing an extremely poor job.
We crossed the Talath Pass into Halruaa, and I was home. Well, not exactly home, but at least I was in the country where I was born.
We took a riverboat to Halarahh, where things were certainly not as I had left them. For a start, there were Wanted posters up everywhere depicting the girl who had been kidnapped in Waterdeep by the Abjurai. Posters! Where were the Diviners?
Caine and Thertranna seemed very concerned by this - it seemed that Breonna (who was named as Sharani on the posters) had escaped from custody since I had seen her teleported away. Looking deeper, we found that the tower of the Dimensionalists Guild had been destroyed - but in a somewhat unusual way. The upper floors had been destroyed in an explosion, but captured in a time lock of some kind, so that the detritus of the explosion were kept hovering in mid-air like some kind of art project. I found this fascinating, but was a little disturbed that it seemed that Sharani was the source of the explosion.
We also located the prison she had been kept in during the time that we were travelling, and it had been destroyed in the same way. However, the two explosions occurred twelve years apart.
I sought out the Conjurer's Guild while Joan looked for the Diviners. We found out that Sharani was the daughter of the head of the Dimensionalists Guild, Karanor, who died in the explosion, but she showed no particular magical aptitude before the event. The Diviners have been unable to locate her since she broke out of prison, hence the posters.
I'm not entirely sure what we intend to do next. It is clear that my family name at least is well-known to the local authorities as I was forced to make clear my status as a Conjurer and definitely not a Necromancer. I will have to be very careful about how to proceed from here.
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