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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jon Potter" data-source="post: 3931937" data-attributes="member: 2323">[PLAIN][Huzair #1] Adrift in Forever[/PLAIN]Huzair could do nothing pinned within the fetid body of the thing. He was surprised that he felt no pain and that he was able to breath. But he couldn't move at all until, with a violent contraction of gelid muscles the thing expelled him. That was a strange sensation as was the sense of falling sideways in a gentle tumble.He knew immediately that he was no longer on the Prime Material Plane as he found himself spinning in a great expanse of clear, silvery sky that seemed to go on forever in every direction. Enormous tube-shaped clouds coiled slowly into the distance, some appearing like thunderheads and others looking like immobile tornadoes of gray wind. Erratic whirlpools of color flickered in midair like spinning coins. There was no gravity nor any solid ground to be seen, and he felt like he could see a very, very long way."Oh, crap," Huzair said, looking around, nervously. His voice was barely above a whisper, but it seemed unnaturally loud in his ears. "What do you think? Astral?""Looks like, boss," Sparky answered. "It matches what you told me about it." Huzair snorted uncomfortably."Trouble is, everything I know about it came from books I last read half a decade ago," the mage admitted. "Shemeska's Planewalker's Guide, The Planar Handbook, Sigil for the Cagestruck..." He stopped counting on his fingers and sighed, shoulders slumping. "I never really expected to have to use the stuff.""Don't worry, boss," Sparky chirped. "You'll sort it out." The wizard reached up and patted the tiny bird on the head with his index finger."I am glad that you have so much confidence in me," he said with a grin. Then he summoned his concentration and began casting a Detect Magic spell. He'd barely begun the incantation when the spell went off, more quickly than he'd ever cast a spell in his life. Mana sizzled through his veins and the spell formed with scarcely any effort on his part. "Cool!" he mused, not that spontaneously Quickened magic did anything to return him to the Prime. It was damned fun, however. His grin widened, but only for a moment before he realized that, apart from his own Handy Haversack floating in weightless beside him, there was no magic nearby.He tried the Ring of Communication next, but it was dead on his finger. The Ring of Blinking worked properly, but apart from temporarily transporting him again and again to a section of the Ethereal Plane that was just as empty as the Astral on which he'd started, it did nothing to change his situation."Crap!" he cursed again, deactivating the Ring and looking around once more at the silvery expanse in which he found himself stranded. His brow furrowed as he struggled to remember what he'd learned about the Astral Plane (which was precious little, it seemed). The Astral was the space between everything else - where you were if you were nowhere else on the Great Wheel. And it touched everyplace else. If you knew how to use it properly."Well, that is all I have for ideas," Huzair admitted to Sparky. He grabbed his Haversack, dressed, and wondered what to do next. The vast expanse of the Astral stretched out in all directions as far as he could see. No particular way seemed more promising than another, and the sheer enormity of the plane momentarily paralyzed the wizard with indecision.As he drifted, staring at the strange, twisting clouds at the extreme limit of his vision, he thought of how he might escape this situation. The most appealing idea of course was a color pool, assuming of course, that he could find one that led back to Orune. Hitching a ride on a planar conduit was another possibility, though it was much riskier than using a portal since he wouldn't know where the conduit led until he'd used it. He might find himself dropped suddenly into Hell or the Negative Material Plane or somewhere else much less pleasant than the Astral Plane. And it might well be a one-way trip.Huzair was no fool, and he had long suspected that reuniting Dridana's heart with her body would entail an excursion to the Astral Plane; it was here after all that dead deities were said to drift - their bodies petrified by the loss of their divine sparks. But he hadn't expected to be making the trip on his own. And he'd certainly assumed that he'd be able to follow Morier's head toward their goal. Oh, he'd have a few snide remarks ready for ol' Whitey when he returned. If he returned.With that rather depressing thought, he opened a potion bottle and downed one of his last two Cure Light Wounds elixirs. In keeping with the way his luck had been running, the potion healed most - but not all - of the injuries he'd sustained while inside whatever the thing that had brought him here was."Figures," he grumbled and tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. He took a preparatory breath and drew his familiar in close. "Come on, Sparky. Sitting around here is not getting us anywhere."He offered a desperate prayer to Dridana - dead though she was - and with a thought, he shot off into the silvery vastness at a startling speed. As he went he swapped the Ring of Blinking for the Ring of Invisibility and disappeared from view.He had no way of telling how long he'd been traveling when he spotted the ship. He felt no tiredness or hunger or thirst in this timeless place, and without any of his normal physical cues, the passage of time had little meaning. He knew that it was long enough for him to get over the thrill of flying at great speed and to become extremely bored with the unchanging void - but it might have been five hours or fifty since he'd begun his flight. He couldn't say; but he could say that he was thrilled to spy the swift-moving craft.He saw the ship at a great distance. It looked like a common sailing ship, such as he'd seen countless times gliding about the harbor in Freeport. It lacked a rudder or mast, however, and sported a pair of batwing-shaped sails mounted on either side of its hull - although these latter seemed more decorative than anything as they didn't belly out with any wind. Six gaunt figures were stationed about the ship, watching keenly in all directions. They were uniformly tall and yellow-skinned, wearing fluted armor and having enormous swords at hand. There was a gaily-striped tent set up at the stern of the vessel - barely large enough for two men to stand side-by-side within, but rising some fifteen feet from the deck.That was all he had time to discern before he realized that the ship was moving a lot faster than he was and at an oblique angle to his own trajectory. Invisibly, Huzair adjusted his flight to put him on an intercept course with the ship. As he went he drew out a scroll of False Life and activated the spell. Thus fortified, he followed it up with a Quickened Mage Armor a few seconds later and then he was upon them. He hurtled across the ship, over the fluttering tent and alighted on the strut supporting the starboard bat wing as the ship zoomed by. His Slippers of Spider Climbing provided a firm grip and crouched there observing the crew.The creatures on deck were not human - in fact they were of no race he had ever seen before, which was really no surprise given his current location. Four of them were male, but the other two (including the one nearest to Huzair's perch) were clearly female. But apart from the presence of wan breasts there was little to differentiate the two genders as far as the mage could tell.They were uniformly tall and wiry with leathery yellow skin stretched taut over their lithe frames. Their ears were pointed and serrated along the back edge, much like the bat wings that decorated their ship. Their hair was worn long, with both the males and females sporting thick, ropey braids adorned with polished beads and cut gemstones that glittered in the omnipresent silvery light. Both sexes wore jewelry of filigreed armbands and glittering rings of precious stones.They wore armor of a sort Huzair had never seen before although he likened it most closely to his own warcaster's armor - being light and non-restricting while still providing solid protection to the wearer's vital bits. It was worked into baroque, fluted designs that appeared different for each of the figures. If there was any significance to the decorations, it was lost on the wizard. Three of the humanoids carried massive greatswords with intricate hilts sheathed across their backs. Two others had glaives close at hand and the last bore a two-bladed sword that glittered dangerously as he moved. He was engaged in look-out duty like the rest, but something about the man's bearing made Huzair think him the leader, so the wizard payed particular attention to him as he watched and listened.They spoke little, and in a language that Huzair had never heard before. It was full of clucked tongues and glottal stops, reminding the mage a bit of the harsh sound of gobbledy although he heard no words that he recognized in the conversations. And he'd heard plenty of gobbledy in Scurvytown.Disappointed that his eavesdropping had yielded no results, the mage had begun to contemplate moving quietly onto the deck and sneaking a glance into the colorful tent when the flap was thrown back from inside and a giant stepped out. He was tall and thin to the point of looking emaciated as if someone had taken a normal man and stretched him until he was nine feet tall. Not that there was much of the normal man about him. His skin was a brilliant azure and his fingers were long and spidery with at least one extra joint on each finger. He was dressed in opulent robes of purple and crimson and cloth-of-gold that pooled around him on the deck. An elaborate hat adorned with beadwork and hanging wisps of silk covered his blue head and a hundred tiny bangles worn on wrists and neck and ears tinkled incessantly as he glided forward to tower over the figure with the two-bladed sword.The two exchanged words in that strange clucking tongue and the yellow-skinned man pointed off into the distance ahead. The giant nodded his head slowly, smiled genteelly, and turned back toward the tent, his over-long fingers laced together in front of him. Huzair watched the blue-skinned giant retrace his languid path to the tent, but before he could re-enter a second giant stepped out and conferred with the first. The newcomer was dressed similarly to the first and sported a glittering chain of elaborately wrought metal connecting a diamond stud in his left ear to its twin in his left nostril. The two spoke in low tones for a moment before retiring to the tent's interior.It was clear to Huzair that the tent contained an extra-dimensional space of some sort or else the giants were packed in there tighter than kobolds in a warren. His curiosity was piqued, but he resolved himself to sit tight and wait for a while longer.The ship sped onward through the unchanging Astral. The six crewfolk milled about, talking little and remaining generally vigilant at the rail. The female nearest Huzair stood close enough for him to smell the strange, spicy odor that hung about her, but, though she peered repeatedly through his invisible form, she never gave any indication that she'd noticed anything out of the ordinary.At one point there was a brief period of apparent unease among the jaundiced humanoids. The look-out on the opposite rail shouted a warning and pointed to the impossibly large clouds roiling slowly in the distance off to port. The crewman at the bow - the one that Huzair had mentally labeled as the leader - trotted into the tent and a moment later the ship lurched away from the clouds and traveled on the new heading for a while before correcting course.The wizard studied the swirling cloud bank, but could not see the cause of their alarm. Taking advantage of the diversion, he crept off the wing and onto the deck while their attention was elsewhere. There was an open stairwell amidship that led below decks - presumably to the hold or crew quarters, but its position would place him precariously close to several of the crew and therefore in danger of discovery.He chose to play it safe and peek instead into the tent housing the giants. He stuck his head through the open flap and let out an involuntary gasp.As he had suspected, it was larger inside than it was outside, but he hadn't imagined the sheer magnitude of the place. It looked like a tent within, but a tent that could have held five or six of the astral ships without trouble. The walls of the pavilion curved away from the entrance, adorned with lush tapestries in numerous styles. The floor was entirely obscured by scattered rugs and quilted cushions in a riot of colors and designs. A central pole as big around as Huzair was tall supported the fabric ceiling 100 feet overhead. The air was hazy with the stange-smelling smoke emanating from a waterpipe around which lazed three of the giants. Two were the clearly the ones that he had already seen on the ship, and the last looked much the same although he had a cluster of dark tattoos circling his left eye.As Huzair watched he brought the platinum mouthpiece to his lips, inhaled deeply and then exhaled a cloud of vapor languorously into the air above his turbaned head. The giant then held out the mouthpiece toward Huzair and smiled affably."Have you come to join us, traveler?" he asked in heavily-accented common, fixing his left eye intently on the mage, who apparently wasn't as invisible as he thought himself.</blockquote>

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