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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 9759262" data-attributes="member: 508">INTERLUDE: TEMPLE INVESTIGATIONSAvoroth pocketed his newly-purchased wand of cure light wounds, paid for with a good portion of his share of the black onyxes they'd unearthed from the lich's secret lair.  (Wilbur had offered up just short of 200 pieces of gold towards the purchase, recognizing the wand would be put to the benefit of the entire team; Avoroth had gratefully accepted, or as gratefully as he ever allowed himself to appear.)  But now, with the prospect of two days back in town to heal up from their recent ordeals, he wanted to go about doing the two things he had planned for when he was back in Elsewhere.One of these was to pore over the slain fire genasi scout Asharen's journal, in an effort to understand the workings of the Elsewhere Compass and see if he could repair it.  (Never one lacking in confidence in his own abilities, Avoroth was sure it was merely a matter of time before he'd divined the mechanism's workings and managed to get it back to working order - perhaps even making an improvement here or there as he repaired it.)  But as important as that was to the Boccobian cleric, he had one other item even higher up on his personal "To Do" list.Nobody knew why the town now known as "Elsewhere" - its original name had been lost to the ages, but it had apparently once just been a normal town somewhere on the Material Plane - plane shifted to a random plane once every year, on the dot, and while Asharen had managed to design and build a device capable of tracking its current location and predicting its future movements, no one had yet discovered just how such a task was performed.  Surely to move a miles-long sphere of matter containing not only an entire town but the fields surrounding it had to take an enormous amount of magical energy; nothing short of a major artifact could possibly provide such mystical energy, to the cleric's thinking.  And where would such an artifact be present?  Since a complete sphere of town, bedrock, and atmosphere was plane shifted each year to a random location, it only made sense that its locomotive power must be placed in the exact center of the sphere.  Having consulted maps of the town, it appeared to Avoroth that the exact center of town was smack-dab in Elsewhere's sole church temple.  And it was to the temple that Avoroth was currently headed.It was said the temple had originally been dedicated to Pelor, God of the Sun, but as the centuries passed and Elsewhere's population became more and more diverse, a single temple dedicated to a single deity was no longer sufficient; with an absolute limit to the amount of space inside the town proper, the temple of Pelor became a nondenominational house of worship, with various factions taking their respective turns in worshipping their deities of choice.Avoroth entered the church - it was currently empty, but it was always open to anyone who would use its services, even if just a place to offer private prayers.  But Avoroth was not there to pray to his god; he was there to see if he could discover the means by which Elsewhere plane shifted, and, if possible (Avoroth was confident it was quite possible, if he only devoted enough of his brilliance on the puzzle), to find a way to "steer" it not to any old random plane but a plane of his choosing.A detect magic showed no magic items currently in the church interior, but that didn't necessarily mean anything; to Avoroth's understanding, powerful relics often generated no magical auras, or at least none detectable by standard divinations.  But he also realized the church was in the exact center of the circle of the town, not necessarily in the center of the sphere; it was possible the mighty engine that sent Elsewhere through the planes was underground.  However, despite a thorough search (which included the casting of a detect secret doors spell), Avoroth found no passageway to a theoretical lower level of the church.  It was possible there was no lower level; he'd have to have Wilbur summon forth an earth elemental to go earth gliding below the church to see if there were any natural caverns below the church where a plane-shifting relic might be hidden.  He hated to have to bring the shadow druid into his musings - Avoroth hated being dependent upon others - but be it as it may, the druid would be able to call forth earth elementals sooner than he himself could do so, so he'd use the underling's abilities for his own best interests.In the meantime, was there anything else he could learn from the temple?  He mused, standing in the middle of the temple, staring at the cloth hanging over the original Pelor shrine.  On a whim, the Boccobian cleric pulled back the cloth to look into Pelor's carved visage, to see what he might learn from the building's antiquity.The carving was not one he had expected; it was laid out very much like the standard holy symbol of Pelor, with its central face and the rays shooting out in all directions.  But there was something different about its facial features...with a start, Avoroth realized this portrayal of Pelor lacked the deity's traditional beard.  And come to think of it, the facial features - although centuries old and thus worn down a bit - were rather feminine in appearance.  Did Pelor have a sister?  A female aspect?  None of this jibed with what Avoroth knew of the Sun God.But then one more feature caught his eye.  The face not only lacked a beard, it also lacked the rays shining forth from the lower half of its face.  And some of those rays looked rather like blades....A half-recalled name came to the forefront of Avoroth's memories: "The Lady of Pain."  Where had he heard of such a deity?  He'd have to go back to his own clerical notes from his early studies in the Boccobian faith.With a frown of puzzlement across his brow, Avoroth let the cloth fall back in place and returned to his own bleak quarters in the town.  There was mystery here, and he intended to solve it. - - - The night of our last session, after Dan and Joe left for their house (Vicki hadn't been feeling well and opted out of the game session; Joe ran her PC as well as her own), I told Logan my suspicions that the engine driving the town and its immediate environs was likely quite literally in "the Middle of Elsewhere," and he took me through a quick one-on-one exploration of my suspicions.  I ended up nowhere solid, which is fine by me, because I really don't want to solve this mystery at 3rd level when there are 17 more levels to go in the campaign, but I do intend for Avoroth to finish out the campaign fully understanding how to "steer" Elsewhere exactly where he wants it to go.</blockquote>

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