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[Piratecat]

Merchants hurry along slippery stone paths, slapping mosquitos and mopping the streaming sweat off of their faces. The stone mansions echo emptily, inhabited only by servants whose masters have gone somewhere bearable for the summer. The sweating sailors and dock workers sing strange, melodic songs as they unload trading vessels.

This is Eversink in high summer.

The Defenders of Daybreak deserve a break. They’ve had a hard spring and summer, and for a period of several weeks they separate to pursue their own goals. Raevynn is unable to travel, as she’s stuck doing menial jobs at the whim of someone on the Council, but almost everyone else has some freedom. TomTom creates psionic items in a meditation chamber/lab at House Meridian, Nolin checks in with his own bard’s guild and interviews adventurers who have been to the Underdark, Tao seeks out and trains new potential members of the Knights of the Horn. Finally, when the Council is preparing to return to session and the matter of the prison reemerges, the Defenders have their solicitor Daedalus Tellingstone broach the subject in Council, and the brisk negotiations begin. Will Tao end up owning the prison itself… and if so, at what cost?

At a strategy meeting with Tellingstone, he asks, “Are you sure you don’t want any bodyguards?” This question makes Velendo nervous, and he casts a divination. “During the next week, when and where will people try to assassinate or assault us?” In a vision he sees the answer, “Look to the rooftops if you prefer to live.”

Huh.

So they work out a plan. With TomTom and Agar invisible and flying, Nolin will maintain a complicated illusion of all the Defenders around him in two gondolas. Meanwhile, the rest of the Defenders will be covered with a seeming spell, following in two more separate gondolas. Mind linked, they hope to surprise the assassins before they ever have a chance to spring their trap.

A very nervous trip home from Tellingstone’s office revealed no one, and several trips through the canals the next day didn’t reveal any observers either. However, the following morning the group hit pay-dirt. Heading towards Tellingstone’s office once again, TomTom and Agar spot three invisible people on one of the moss-covered old rooftops overlooking the canals, one of whom is casting spells. As the boats approach, TomTom warns the Defenders, and gets into position to blast the people as soon as they reveal themselves.

He never really gets a chance, as he and Agar held their action instead of readying it.

Above the narrow and twisting canal, two of the men point wands at Nolin’s real gondola (along with the illusory gondola next to it, filled with illusory heroes all singing “Row, row, row your boat” in harmony). Hasted, the two men fire their wands at the area twice each, while the older man in the middle unleashes two spells. All six spells are the same, a spell unique to Eversink named Althea’s Hammerblows. Designed to pummel the target area with fists of force, Nolin (and his illusions) take more than 100 points of subdual damage in the surprise round alone. Before TomTom or Agar can even act, the two men with the wands fire them yet again, and Nolin drops unconscious.

Agar responds with chain lightning and TomTom with greater biocurrent, crisping one of the two wand wielders where he stands. The other wand wielder throws himself over the ledge into the canals below, and the wizard – terribly hurt – uses his fly spell to swoop down on Nolin’s gondola and teleport him away. The gondolier lies unconscious in the sinking boat.

Swearing, the rest of the group saves the gondolier and searches for the wand wielder who jumped into the canal. Tao spots him and dives into the water after him. He’s swimming desperately under water, lungs bursting, and his air bursts out of his lungs in huge bubbles as Tao grabs his leg… and reality rips in two, shrieking, as Tao uses her new powers to open a gate to the Beastlands. Tao and the man are swept through, along with a massive amount of canal water. Dripping in the hot sun, Tao asks, “Do you want to knock yourself out?” Boggled and terrified, he doesn’t answer quickly enough, and Tao smacks the flat of her sword against the side of his head. He drops like a bag of potatoes. She then grabs his body, plane shifts to the Prime (arriving far to the north of her target), and teleports without error back to the ambush site. Her attacker, a weak wizard or sorcerer of some type, remains thoroughly unconscious. “Why didn’t you just knock him unconscious while underwater, Tao? Overkill!” TomTom asks. “Shut up!” Tao answers.

It’s about this point when KidCthulhu reminds me one of Nolin's prestige class abilities: one round after he falls unconscious, the phoenix in Nolin's body lets off a 10-dice fireball that doesn’t affect him. The look on my face must have been something, as everyone started cheering. “We don’t really need to search for Nolin,” TomTom says. “Let’s just look for the smoke and flames.”

-- o --

“Oh,” thinks Nolin, “that hurt. My head hurts, my chest hurts, even my eyes hurt. Where am I?” Still disoriented and woozy, he takes a shuddering breath of air. Is someone cooking some meat? He smells burnt flesh, smoking wood, hot metal. Then he hears the voice of Rides The Sun, the phoenix who shares his soul. You were in danger,” she says in her quiet voice. ”I defended you.”

“Thanks, Rides,” answers Nolin inside his aching head. “Is anyone still standing?”

”No.”

Nolin opens his eyes. He’s lying on a charred table. Around him, the crisp and blackened bodies of a half-dozen men lie flung about a small room. The glass in the window has half-melted, and nothing but the smoke-laden air is moving. Then one of the men twitches a bit and groans, apparently still alive.

From somewhere outside he hears voices, and tries to drag himself onto his feet, staggering as he moves toward the window. The door smashes open ~ and it’s Mara and Malachite, along with the rest of the Defenders. Malachite looks around the small room and clucks his tongue. TomTom slips through the door and starts looting – err, examining the bodies, looking for insignia, items and clues. “Where am I? What happened?”

Velendo enters the room. “You’re in some shack on the grounds of the Eversink prison. You got teleported here by,” and he pauses as he examines the charred corpses for a moment, “him. I think they meant to kidnap all of us. We cast a spell to find you, wind walked over, and here we are.”

Velendo heals Nolin, and the efficient machine that is the Defenders of Daybreak shifts into gear. Half the group examines the bodies. They find one person alive, and several items, including a wand of Althea’s Hammerblows (which is illegal for anyone other than a designated representative of the law to possess). The wizard who teleported Nolin is tattooed and tanned, with a fair assortment of scars. Although it’s hard to tell after his injuries, he seems like he was the adventuring type.

A groundskeeper approaches; he is intercepted by several of the heroes, who grill him unmercifully. The man seems to think that the Defenders (still disguised by a seeming) are the same people who are doing business in the shack, and he wants them out as soon as possible. It turns out that it’s fairly standard practice for the prison groundskeeper to rent out “temporary access” to the shack and several other prison facilities to people who wish to smuggle... ah, import… goods into Eversink without paying the standard tariffs. This practice seems to be tacitly approved by the guards, suggesting that bribes are common.

The groundskeeper runs to get guards at Velendo’s assistance, and he soon explains that they were attacked and then defended themselves. Luckily, he had the foresight to register a complaint and fill out the appropriate paperwork days ago, back when he first did the divination, so with any luck the Defenders won’t be tied up with a lot of red tape when the attack and subsequent death of the attackers is investigated.

Questioning the groundskeeper and the one living man from the hut, the Defenders learn that the person who reserved the space was a weasel-faced man with greasy black hair, lots of tattoos, and pink, almost new skin. This suggests the same people that the Defenders rescued from the trillith’s Library of Screams, and with some thinking they conclude that only one of those victims might fit this description. That would be Brindle; the same psionic assassin who possessed Tao’s dead body, the only person who was able to stay sane while being tortured by the trillith, the man who is wanted by Eversink’s Assassin’s Guild (The children of Lethe) for betrayal.

They track Brindle from the shack to a small boat dock on the back side of the prison’s island. It’s clear that a small boat was launched from here not long ago. Irritated and angry, Velendo casts another discern location, and discovers that Brindle is currently on a ship about to leave Eversink’s harbor. Grinning with anticipated revenge, the group contacts Raevynn via sending, and shifts back into wind walk. Time to show people that you don’t try to kidnap the good guys!

To be continued….

Next: the Defenders attack! The attackers defend! The attackers attack back, the Defenders try to defend, much confusion ensues, and people die! And I'll point out the the only deaths aren't on the part of the bad guys....