(no subject)

[cellio]

October 18 (Wednesday)

"The serpent sleeps before seeking its prey"? What the heck is that supposed to mean? I wonder if hanging out with other magicians is good for one's sanity. On the other hand, the craziest magician I've met so far spends most of his time alone. Hmm. Maybe it's all Nithelin's fault anyway; maybe his presence is making other magicians in Covanion say goofy things.

October 19 (Thursday)

Yesterday Timothy came to me and asked if I could make an item for an associate of his. We agreed on a price, so I'm spending today making a cap of spellcraft. First I embroidered (magically, of course) a nice pattern of stars and lightning bolts and feathers and stuff on the cap. (Feathers don't really belong, but I've got them on my mind at the moment.) I think it's very striking -- a dark blue cap with silver designs on it. I felt craftier just putting it on -- even before I enchanted it.

October 20 (Friday)

Timothy liked the cap. I now have enough money to make something for myself and also to pay Prolix for the other wand that I want him to make for me.

The flying lessons are going reasonably well. Most of the other owls seem to have gotten bored; they're not hanging around any more.

October 21 (Saturday)

We managed to find some helpful information for that research project today, finally. Definitely not Taleyn either. Interesting.

October 24 (Tuesday)

My vest is done. It took two days, but it's done. And very lovely, if I do say so myself. I think I outdid myself on the embroidery! Now I need to get some nice clothes to go with it.

Last night downtown I saw someone who was the spitting image of Prolix, except he was my height. He also had a really goofy grin on his face. How odd. One Prolix is enough for this town, I would think.

November 1 (Sunday)

In Covanion, the temple celebrates with a grand service to all of the gods on the first of each month. Brion never did anything that exciting back home, though maybe that's because he was the only priest. They all seemed to be there this morning.

According to Blake, chamomille tea is not an essential ingredient in healing potions. He had never even heard of such a thing. Aha. I was right.

November 2 (Monday)

Tonight at dinner Colm asked us if we "want to be stupid for money". That is, he knows someone who knows someone who needs to have a job done, and rumor has it that we might be what they're looking for. Colm didn't know any details, but he sent word back that we would be willing to meet with these folks.

November 3 (Tuesday)

We met with Colm's associate's associates. They were being very vague. They want our help with a magic item they have, but they wouldn't tell us what it is or how they got it. It was also clear that they were acting as agents for someone else, and wouldn't tell us who we'd be working on. Prolix drew up a proposed contract for them to take to their employer.

November 4 (Wednesday)

Prolix says he's preliminarily identified our would-be employers. Colm doesn't really know much about them.

November 5 (Thursday)

Colm says that tomorrow we have an appointment at the royal court. We are to look our best, be quiet, and make him look good, and just maybe we'll make some useful contacts. I've never met royalty before; this will be exciting!

I'm going to take Liandra shopping for clothes tomorrow morning. A little jewelry and some bright colors would do so much for her!

Tomorrow evening we are also supposed to meet the people who want to hire us. We still don't know what exactly it's about, but they're willing to pay a fair bit for a service.

November 6 (Friday)

Court was spectacular when it wasn't completely dull. Colm made a flowery speech and introduced us. The baron seemed a little bored; I guess he gets a lot of this. One of his nobles, Lord Marius, was much more interested in us, and he sent a page to summon us to a meeting after court. According to Colm, Lord Marius is a special minister to the duke. He travels widely throughout the duchy.

Lord Marius was a perfect gentleman, very diplomatic and understated. He's heard of some of our exploits, and the problems we've faced are similar to incidents elsewhere in the duchy, so he wanted to know more about the sudden appearances of monsters we've seen. He told us about Stross, which Brion had also mentioned; they were attacked by lizards the size of large dogs. Then around the time we were in Duvik's Pass, the town of Carrick was completely overrun by large termites. About a month ago, Ashminster was overcome by vegetation, of all things. The slime monsters have made their way to Timberthorp, where the townsfolks applied large quantities of rat poison to turn them away. Then recently, in Ravenstone some sort of fever broke out, and some of the people have masacred each other. One person scratched out a crude drawing of a dragon in blood; it was posed sort of like those statues we saw in Shepford and Duvik's Pass. We told Lord Marius about those statues.

So things are even stranger than I thought, and it's not just that Shepford is isolated. Lord Marius said the duchy isn't like this; maybe there'd be an incident involving monsters every year or two, but not at the rate that's happening now. And now there's a report of a new cave along a trade route to Dranikan, and he'd like our help.

Dranikan is to the north and east from here. (It's not in our duchy, which may be why I've never heard of it.) They were invaded by bugbears not long ago; the invasion failed, but Duke Lareth is missing. Right before he disappeared from the battlements he shouted that he's "safe", but even if he's safe he's absent now. So his son Melan is going to be crowned soon. Lord Marius would like us to go there and offer assistance to these people, and see what else we can learn about the bugbears and how it might tie in to local occurrences.

Lord Marius will outfit us with horses and winter gear, so we agreed to help.

November 6, late

I hope those demon-spawn idiots get what they really deserve someday.

Tonight after dinner we went to the Summerville estate to identify that magic object. It's a huge thing carved out of marble; it would take several Turoks to carry it. The two people there said they just want to know what it is, and all they'd gotten so far was a command word. It seems to require a magician to activate; they said they can't.

The command word (really phrase) they had was "up to Yithzura". We analyzed it and determined that it's in the school of transmutation. I said that sounds like transportation (not that I've ever heard of Yithzura), and we should be careful.

First we touched it (all holding hands) and said "down from Yithzura", but nothing happened. We decided to split up (in case it vaporizes us or something, but I didn't say that). Prolix and Turok held hands and touched it, and Prolix said the words, and they disappeared. We tried talking to them but heard nothing, and we couldn't find any traces of them in the room. Eventually, the rest of us decided to follow, on the theory that we should all be together. We should have shaken down our employers for hazard pay first, but I don't tend to think like that.

So we followed, and found ourselves still in the room but in an altered state. There was someone else there too, a mage named Gerome, who was shouting "don't do it!" as we came through. Turns out these people hired him before they hired us, but they didn't tell us about him. Treacherous rogues -- may Gruumsh take them and eat them for breakfast.

Gerome said we were on the "ethereal plane". It's like another parallel world that shares space with ours. It's very peculiar -- they can't see us but we can see and hear them, and on this plane we can walk through their walls and stuff. I guess this is where ghosts come from. The question, though, was how to get back. Gerome didn't know, and he'd been there for four days. And "down from Yithzura" had no effect.

We started by wandering around the house. We heard one of them say "darn, that's another failure", confirming that they knew much more than they shared. We looked around to see what else we could learn, but didn't see much that was helpful. (We did see some nice, valuable items, but you expect that from rich treacherous minions of evil, I suppose.)

We decided to try to make our way to the temple, on the theory that if anyone on the home plane could detect our presence they could. We found that we weren't alone on this plane, though; we were attacked by strange, hideous monsters that seemed to be able to shift between this plane and home.

This gave us an idea. We subdued some of these, hoping to "ride" them back to the home plane, but this didn't work. They did somtimes shift back and forth, and this clearly made an interesting spectacle on the streets of Covanion, but we were not able to get back.

We wrote brief notes and attached them to our captives, in the hopes that if they went to the home plane the notes would be seen. We made it to the temple (after more attacks), and one of those notes did get the attention of one of the priests. He and a bunch of others huddled to figure out what to do about it. I couldn't really tell what they were doing, but eventually they started burning incense and chanting and suddenly we were back. Whew! We thanked them profusely and made a donation on the spot. (We gave them half our fee.) We also told them about how we had come to be in that position. (Yes, the Summerville people had insisted on secrecy, but they knowingly sent us into danger. I see telling the priests about it as similar to telling them about how I got sick so they can heal me. It's necessary information sometimes, or so Brion always said.)

Once we were pretty sure that we weren't going to be yanked back to that weird place, we left the temple and headed straight for the Summerville estate. We demanded the rest of our money and pay for Gerome, and we told them that their gadget had nearly killed us. Let them chew on that for a while. I think Gerome can be counted on to spread a warning throughout the Collegium to stay clear of Summerville.

You know, if I were making devices that could transport people between two places, I'd make sure there was an item on each end from which you could get to the other. If we couldn't interact with that object from the ethereal plane, there should have been a "mate" to it there that we could use to get back. What kind of crackpot makes one-way items?

I wonder how long it will take Lord Marius to have those horses and supplies ready.