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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 6007445" data-attributes="member: 726">Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 345Uncharted TerritoryA curious guardsman fishes out his keys and spins them in his hand until he finds the right one.  “You sure you’re okay being left along with him, sir?” Dranko shows a tusky grin.  “Yeah, I’m sure.  You can wait outside in the hall.”The guard unlocks the cell door and then hustles away, leaving Dranko to open it.  The cell is dark, cramped, and smells of rat droppings.  A man in the back, dressed in gray prison rags, saunters forward and looks Dranko up and down.  Perhaps impressed with the half-orc’s Spire Guard uniform, along with his armor and weapons, the prisoner chooses to be cooperative.“So,” says Dranko.  “What are you in here for?”The prisoner answers in a thick, dull voice. “Killed some guy.”“Yeah?  Do you do that a lot?”“No.”Dranko takes a deep breath.  “So, if you had a choice, between being hanged tomorrow, and not being hanged, and allowing someone else’s personality to steer you for a while, what would your choice be?”The prisoner looks confused, but does show he absorbed the first part of Dranko’s question.  “Depends,” he says.  “Do I still get hanged the day after tomorrow?”Dranko tries another approach.  “Well, see, I have a guy, he’s pretty cool, but he doesn’t have a body.  It’s magic stuff.”“Are you offering me a pardon?”  The prisoner looks both perplexed and hopeful.“Your body would be moving around, and your mind would be in there,” says Dranko.  “You just wouldn’t be driving.  Do you understand what I mean?”“No.”“Right,” says Dranko.“Is this a pardon?” the prisoner presses.“No.”“Too bad.”Dranko tries again.  “If you could get a pardon, but never be the one in charge of your body again, would you do that?”“Wait… what?”Dranko sighs.  “Look, have you ever been dominated?”The rest of the Company has been following this exchange over the mind-link.  Someone giggles. The prisoner doesn’t answer; he shifts nervously from one foot to the other, then picks his nose and wipes his finger on his shirt.“We’d give your body a pardon,” blurts Dranko.“My body.  All right. That sounds good, I guess.”“And for your mind, you’d be sleeping.”The prisoner shakes his head.  “I don’t get it.  Don’t I have to be awake to accept my pardon?”“No you’d… hmm.  Do you ever sleepwalk?”“How should I know?  I’m asleep!”“But you’re okay with this?  Better than dying?”The prisoner scratches face.  “Yeah, but what’s this about sleepwalking?”“Imagine you were walking around doing stuff, but didn’t remember it.”“Wait,” says the prisoner.  “Do I not remember it while I’m doing it, or not remember it later?”“Neither.”“But I’m doing it.  No, wait, someone else is doing it?  You know, I still don’t get it. You’re talking crazy.”At this point the others urge Dranko over the mind-link to just get the poor condemned back to the Greenhouse, so Dranko calls for the guard to lock the door again, and then goes to find the local magistrate.  “My name is Dranko Brightshield, Knight of the Spire Guard,” he says, once he’s standing in the magistrate’s office.  “You’ve got a prisoner due to be hanged tomorrow.”“Yes,” nods the magistrate.  “Anton Fish, his name is.  Real piece of work, isn’t he?  He committed murder in the course of a robbery.”“How do you feel about remanding him into my custody?”The magistrate gestures to Dranko’s uniform.  “You have the authority, sir.  Also, you’re a known associate of the Spire Guard – that group that lives on Baker Street, if I recall rightly?  I didn’t realize you had been promoted.  Congratulations.”Dranko bites his tongue, and fills out the paperwork.  A few minutes later two guards bring the prisoner into the magistrate’s office, hands and feet bound in chains.“Anton Fish,” the magistrate intones.  “You are now officially in the custody of the Spire Guard and Dranko Brightshield.  The conditions of your release are that you do whatever this man says, and make no attempt to escape his custody.  If you should violate the terms of your release, you will be returned here and your execution will be expedited and carried out at once.  Do you understand all that?“Expedited?  What does…”“Do what he says, or we’ll kill you after all,” the magistrate clarifies./*/In the backyard of the Greenhouse, Farazil appraises his new body through Flicker’s eyes.“If you’re going to use him as your pony,” Dranko explains, “then if you need to abandon him somewhere, do it where he can’t hurt anyone else.”“Oh, I’ll bring him back,” Farazil promises.  “Unless he gets killed, that is.”  He looks expectantly at Dranko and asks, “Will I be a citizen of Charagan, once I’m legally and officially in the body of this man?”Dranko shakes his head.  “I don’t have the authority to make you a citizen.”“You don’t?”  Farazil sounds skeptical.  “Big wigs like you?  You’re just about the biggest wigs there are!”“No, we’re not,” says Aravis.  “There’s the King.  There are dukes…”Farazil interrupts.  “Well, can you get the Duke to make me a citizen then?”“I promise we’ll work on it,” says Aravis.“Because that’s what I’m really after,” says Farazil.  “Citizenship, and the… the acceptance that comes with it.  I  promise to be a good boy, but you promise to keep working on getting that for me, right?“Yes,” says Aravis, “like I said, we promise.”Farazil reaches out with Flicker’s arm and puts his hand on Anton’s shoulder.  Flicker shudders and blinks his eyes.“What happened?” he asks. “That’s Farazil,” says Grey Wolf, pointing to Anton Fish.“Can I punch him in the nuts?” asks Flicker.“Now, that’s not very nice,” says Farazil with a chuckle.  “I think I treated your body quite well. Consider, I could have jumped you off a bridge or in front of a moving cart any time I wanted!  But it’s better if I stay on your relative good side.”“You’ll never be on my relative good side,” hisses Ernie, “because you dominated my relative!”Farazil ignores the belligerent halflings, and addresses Aravis.  “So, the plan is, I take this body, and go see what I can find out about those inexplicable murders in Sentinel.  I’ll be back when I know something.”“We’ll keep in touch with sendings if anything comes up on our end,” says Dranko.  “Say, do you have any money?”“Gosh, Dranko, I don’t know!” exclaims Farazil.  “Let me check the pockets of this condemned prisoner you found for me.”  He makes a show of turning the pockets of his rags inside out.  “Nope, no money!  What a surprise!”Dranko glowers and hands over a pouch with a hundred gold coins.  “If you come back and we’re not here, find a room in an inn somewhere nearby.”“You mean I can’t stay in the Greenhouse?  It’s nice in there.”“No,” says Ernie flatly.“Just asking!  Well, I’d best get started.  Thank you all… I mean it.  And I won’t let you down, I promise.”And just like that, Farazil takes his leave of the Company./*/Now… the island.  The primary logistical hurdle is an inability to teleport to a location never visited.  All they know is an approximate location, somewhere in the once-uncrossable sea, as shown in Leantha’s book.“This should be no problem,” says Dranko.“Oh?”  Aravis raises an eyebrow.  “And how are you proposing we find our mysterious island?”“Easy,” says Dranko.  “I ask the smartest person I know.”  He gives Aravis a meaningful stare.Aravis sighs.They discuss various plans, and discard most of them.  Sailing a ship around in the ocean would take too long.  Ditto preparing thousands of scrolls of dimension door.  Morningstar casts find the path, but it fails.  (Could that mean the fissure with its Divination Sinks is on the island?)  Then someone remembers that greater plane shift promises a precise landing location, unlike the 5-500 mile perturbation of the lesser version. That sets Aravis to making himself a larger version of Leantha’s drawing. He spends an hour drawing lines and doing math, and figuring a location that’s going to be extremely close to the island, assuming Leantha’s map is to a proper relative scale.  “Got it,” he says at last.  “1600 miles due east from the eastern tip of Charagan, and then 550 miles north from there.  We’ll need a plane shift to get off Abernia, and a greater plane shift to come back.”“And a boat,” adds Kibi.Since no one has greater plane shift prepared, the Company has to wait until the next morning to enact their plan.  Bright and early they plane shift to Yoba’s home plane.  There’s some small chance they’ll end up close enough to Yoba’s actual location for Ernie to pay his love a visit.  “I hope I get lucky,” he says, his wistful tone undermined by the leering snickers of Flicker and Dranko.They land in a forest.  It takes a few minutes for them to find a clearing large enough to unfold Burning Sail; they create the boat in its smaller aspect, propped up against a tree to keep it upright.  They board the vessel, and Ernie casts greater plane shift, aiming for the spot Aravis indicated on their map of Abernia.They appear in the middle of the ocean, as they expected.  Before anyone can glance around to see if an island is visible from the deck, a huge wave sloshes over the side.  Burning Sail is lifted high on a huge swell and rocked to a precarious pitch.  They immediately transform the folding boat to its larger aspect, and drop the anchor to give them some drag, but even the heavier vessel is tossed around casually by the storm in which they’ve appeared.  A powerful wind whips up spray, and combined with a cold, stinging rain, lowers visibility to near zero.  The unseen servants do their best to prevent their ship from capsizing, though it’s not at all clear how long they’ll be able to succeed.As the ship reaches the bottom of a swell, Aravis casts Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, and the Company hurriedly piles into it, even while Dranko is folding the boat back into a small box.  Sopping and panting from the effort, the party is soon sprawled just inside the doorway; the smell of the magical feast wafts over to them.  Outside the door, the storm still rages, but for the moment that is forgotten.  Only Dranko doesn’t immediately tuck into the gourmet repast; instead, he ties one end of a long rope to a stone column in the foyer and the other around his waist.  After using a magic ring to effect water walking, he leaps out the door.Over the mind-link the others can hear his glee.  “I’m surfing the ocean in the middle of a storm, tied to a rope that’s dangling out of a mansion that’s hovering in mid-air.  Do we have the greatest job in the world, or what?”Aravis shakes his head.  “Are we going to scout, or are we going to sit around abusing magic in various ways?”“That second one,” answers Dranko./*/After the meal, Morningstar gets down to the business of finding the island. She drops into Ava Dormo and exits the mansion; outside, the sea is like glass.  The Dreamscape has no weather.  She has fully mastered the ability to divide her consciousness between her conscious and her dreaming minds.  “I can see for miles in every direction.  There’s no sign of the island,” she tells the others.  At Aravis’s suggestion she flies upward, as high as possible before her vision of the ocean floor grows hazy.  From there she starts an out-spiraling search pattern.It takes about ninety minutes for her to spot the island, a tiny speck of land to the north-west.  She flies towards it, and as she draws near she is better able to judge its size.  The little land-mass is quite small, a rough oval two miles along its long axis, half a mile on the short.  Most of the island is occupied by a single, towering mountain.She flies around the island's perimeter, getting the lay of the land.  There’s not much space for any buildings or habitation; the sandy shore runs right up to the foot of the mountain, buffered only by a sparse fringe of scraggly green-brown scrub.  The mountain itself is a steep cone of unforested rock, lacking any trails or pathways.  But there is one relevant detail.  Near the far side of the island, the base of the mountain is a sheer cliff rising up out of the sand.  And in one place, that cliff side is gashed by a fissure at ground level, a ten foot wide crack that opens into either a cave or a tunnel. It looks conspicuously like the picture in Leantha’s book – the one showing a fissure flanked by Divination Sinks.“I think we’re here.”…to be continued…</blockquote>

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