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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 9533857" data-attributes="member: 6999616">At the end of the last session, we had got the Duke & Duchess of Windsor aboard our Empire "C" flying boat and left Lisbon at about 7pm local time. Our assignment is to get them to the Bahamas, where the Duke has been appointed governor. An Empire boat does not have the range for a direct Atlantic crossing, by a long way, so we're planning to head south and cross the Atlantic via Ascension Island, although that's several hops away. We were within range of England, but had orders not to take the Duke there. However, the enemy probably don't know that, so we departed Lisbon on a course for Cornwall, and turned south once we were thirty miles offshore. Then the compasses started drifting in inconsistent ways: the two magnetic ones in opposite directions, and the gyrocompass differently again. The star sights we'd taken before the turn weren't consistent with the magical location ritual we'd done just afterwards, After some confusion, we settled on using the Absolute Direction advantages two of the characters enjoy, plus the light of a waxing gibbous moon, and working our way down the coast of Morocco. Another magical location said we were a hundred miles north of Munich, which wasn't possible unless we'd been teleported - we couldn't have flown there in the time, and teleportation would have been a much bigger trick than messing with compasses - and we could see the sea below us. We reached the Canaries about 02:00, landed safely with our own lights, and moored for the night. The Duke & Duchess had slept through all the worrying, aided by our steward's "special" hot chocolate. Then it was just a question of getting them to a hotel in the morning, taking 24 hours to rest, refuel and do maintenance, and buying a new statuette in the Catholic gift shop. Ah, yes, the statuette. When the navigation had been got under control, our steward had carefully searched the Duke & Duchess' luggage and found a statuette of Our Lady of Lourdes, which really didn't seem in character for the Duchess. It was magical and reading its history revealed that someone had done a ritual on it some weeks ago, that had something to do with location. It had been given to the Duchess by a Frenchwoman, possibly the maid she'd had to leave behind in France. We knew it didn't prevent locating the Duke & Duchess magically, because we'd done that ourselves, and they didn't seem to have got lost on their journey through France and Spain, but that was a lot easier than the navigation we'd been doing. Since we really don't want it on board while we're looking for Ascension Island, and dropping it into the harbour in Las Palmas seemed like an unfriendly act to a neutral country, the plan is to drop it into deep water off the coast of West Africa on the next leg of the flight.</blockquote>

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