After Feiran agrees to a fee for her sevices, Kyra agrees to alleviate the hopelessly-lost condition of the technologist as she returns to her lodgings to collect her gear and monkey. The rest of you, trusting to Adinal's slightly stunned but knowledgeable guidance, set out for your destination - Kelluna, and the Mad Proxy you hope can tell you something worth learning about your recent acquisition.
Feiran - [sblock] Kyra shows you to your room, taking a shortcut via teleportation circle so you can get to Khorvaire at roughly the same time the others do. All told, it costs 270 gold to retrieve your gear, so edit your character sheet accordingly. [/sblock]
Everyone Else - [sblock] You wend your way through Dromus, navigating by the enormous, magically-lit iron obelisks that mark important (or once-important) areas. The entire time you are careful to keep moving, and to keep to quiet and unassuming side streets. You stop only to eat, cheap morsels from run-down food stalls. The alleys and jumbles of buildings blend together after a while, into an undifferentiated mass of streets no wider than two of you abreast. The upshot is that, shortly after daybreak the next morning, tired and entirely too familiar with the Droman gutters, Adinal leads you up a final street and to your destination. A sudden din of commerce and chatter fills the air as you arrive. [/sblock]
The back alley you are standing in drops off about 10 feet amidst shattered paving stones into the basin of Khorvaire's Square below you, giving you an excellent vantage point from which to survey your objective. The dominant features of the Square are the six portals, each one permanently linking Dromus to one of its mother planes. The fantastic arches are easily thirty feet high and fifty across at the base, with a constant stream of traffic passing both ways. The Kellunan arch is easy to pick out, made of a shining golden metal inlaid with snippets of religious dogma written in a hundred different languages, inlaid into the golden metal in a rich silver-colored metal. The words (those you can understand) exhort pilgrim and merchant alike to obey the will of scores of different proxies, each apparently with radically different beliefs. The surface of the gate is like an undulating wave of green-tinged silver, revealing to the eye snippets of vision from the separate world on the other side. They are many hundreds of feet away from you, but the cluster of magical gates dominates your field of view nevertheless, raised as it is on an enormous dais fifty feet off ground level.
Spread out directly below you is a sight at once familiar and strange. Familiar, because every one of you, with the exception of Adinal, came into the city by this route, and strange because everything is so jumbled up from before that you can no longer even mark with your eye the route you originally took past the brightly-colored merchant's stalls, glowering customs agents, and a sea of people going about their business. Most merchants don't see more of the city than this great bazaar of a marketplace, where rich jewel merchants are crammed chaotically together with shady moneylenders and sweetmeat hawkers and peddles of all other sorts and means. There are literally thousands upon thousands of people jostling for space, attention, or movement in this panoply of mercantilism.
The market takes up much of the Square's ground space, but you also note amidst the hubbub the Grand Orrery, the intricate clockwork-and-magic construct that displays the flow of the planes and the ways of magic in and around the city. A smaller plaza surrounds the device, well-guarded and quieter than the rest of the area, forming an isle of relative tranquility in a sea of bright cloth stalls. Robed mages and scribes study the enormous metallic-bronze orb, gleaning what knowledge they can from its intricate arrangement of bars, pins, and planar symbols.
Focusing more on the Kellunan gate, your ultimate destination, a sense of the difficulty of getting through it arises. Though Kelluna is not as aggressively hostile as the other planes – you aren’t likely to freeze to death as you would in Caeldwyste or contract one of Yesheveran’s many infamous diseases – it is still watched over by several dozen alert guards who carefully vet all travelers, coming or going, to ensure fair (well-taxed) trade. They seem relaxed, at least, not expecting trouble, and certainly not looking for a group of dangerous adventurers. More alarmingly, there are three concentric circles of mosaic runes laid into the tile, radiating out from the base of the portal archway. It's too distant to discern their effects exactly, but sharp eyes discern the occasional meaningful glow flowing up from the large runes and surrounding certain portalgoers. These unfortunates are drawn aside to a sturdy stone building set up behind the six arches, at the base of the dais. Several minutes' observation does not detect any of those escorted into the building emerging from the structure.
