Previous: Unexpected Allies
Sessions 29 & 30: Plane Hopping
After two days, the group met at Korikash's home in the south end of the city. Korikash told everyone to hold hands and he activated a magical ruby. After a flash the group found themselves in complete darkness. Korikash reassured them that everything was fine and told them to stay still. After some shuffling, the group felt the wooden floor lurch under their feet, it was moving up! The darkness gradually lightened, until the group recognized that they were underwater rapidly approaching the surface. As they approached the surface, the group saw that the entire ship was enveloped in an invisible barrier. The water rolled off the bubble as they broke the surface. They were on their way.
After a long, uneventful trip north to the area of the starfall the travelers knew they were approaching their destination because of the strange, green glow below the surface. They stopped the ship above the area glowing the brightest. Corwynne, Allister, Chiranjeev, Hatch, and Telinathor donned their rings of water breathing and swam down into the glowing, green water. About 50 feet down, the group saw the heart of the glow. Corwynne reached forward to touch the green globe, but Telinathor stopped her. He motioned for everyone to swim back to the surface.
Once on the surface, Telinathor informed everyone that the glowing orb in the water was a portal. They had no way of knowing where the portal leads, but it might be a good idea to investigate. Allister, Corwynne, Chiranjeev, and Hatch volunteered to enter the portal and, hopefully, close it.
The group made their way to the portal and entered it.
After a brief period of disorientation, the characters arrived in a creek bed on the edge of a huge forest. Although it was early morning when they left, it was dusk beyond the portal. The trees in the forest were enormous and almost unnaturally healthy. The group found remnants of a couple of different types of metal that obviously came from the . The group spent a couple of hours collecting the metal.
While they were collecting the metal, the group was attacked by two enormous tigers. At twelve feet long and weighing a couple thousand pounds the tigers weren't regular tigers, they were dire tigers. The group defeated the dire tigers with minimal damage.
After they completed collecting the metal they realized that, although they had spent a couple of hours collecting the metal, the sun was still sitting low in the sky when it should have set at least an hour earlier. This idiosyncratic trait was just the clue that Corwynne needed to figure out where the group was. She informed the group that they were on the plane of Brux in the Beastlands. They also figured out the the metal they had been collecting was actually three types of special metal: meteoric iron, adamantine, and starmilk. Each of these metals lend special properties to items created with them. It was a valuable find.
After resting in the extradimensional space created by Corwynne's rope trick spell, the group began wandering, hoping to find a resident of Brux that could point the group in the right direction to get back home.
They skirmished with some arrowhawks before they met a centaur named Dmitri who offered to guide them to the Grove of Telule on the plane of Krigala.
Krigala is also in the Beastlands, but Krigala is a land of eternal day. The Grove of Telule is a sacred grove frequented by the goddess Telule herself. Dmitri told the group that if there was anyone that could help them it would be the faithful of Telule.
After a long journey, the group reached the Grove of Telule. Once there, Dmitri told the group to wait while he went to speak with Ahndor, a proxy of Telule. While they were waiting, the group was awed by the various sylvan creatures wandering through the grove, as well as the sheer scale of the grove itself. Most of the trees were more than two hundred feet tall and probably twenty feet thick. Seen throughout the grove were unicorns, centaurs, bariaurs, pixies, and even a satyr.
After about an hour, Dmitri returned from his meeting with Ahndor. He told them that Ahndor was eager to speak with them. Dmitri led them into a chamber built directly in the side of one of the great trees. When they entered into the great room the room was much larger than it actually should have been. At the far end of the great room was Ahndor. Ahndor looked like a large unicorn with a long, white beard and enormous, white, feathery wings.
After a long conversation with Ahndor, he offered to return the group to their home plane, but they had to agree to perform a quest on Telule's behalf. The group agreed and Ahndor explained that in the Upper Zath forest on the northern border of Tekat there was a unicorn named Mylenia. Mylenia was recently captured and is being used for some nefarious purpose. Telule would like Mylenia to be released from her prison.
The group agreed to the quest and Ahndor told them that before they go, Telule wanted him to give them gifts to aid them on their quest. He called a name that none of the group recognized and a small, hairy man walked out of the adjacent room carrying a small chest. The man sat the chest before Ahndor, opened it, and reached inside, removing the various pieces of a shining suit of armor. Ahndor announced that the suit of mithral full plate is Allister's gift from Telule. He repeated the same ritual with a pair of magical rings of Corwynne, a magical amulet for Chiranjeev, and a pair of magical gloves for Hatch.
The following morning, Ahndor opened a portal allowing the group to return to Korikash's ship. The group told Korikash that they needed to get to Alranda and he offered to take them. They offered to pay him for the ship rides, but he declined to take any money from them.
The group got to Alranda and started their journey to the north of Tekat the following day.
They traveled for a couple of months, fighting a group of hill giants and a mated pair of bulettes. The group approached the city of Locas on the shores of the Drakken Sea. They were about three quarters of the way to the Upper Zath.