Fucking Desic (pelican Aaracockra) and he is working with a group of "privateers," including a changeling captain who makes thinnly veiled threats that they will steal the precious metals we are transporting. I disagree, and he gets upset. He tells me he sees right through me and that
I'm far from home. He lets us go with a warning that he won't be so nice next time, and I imply the same.
We get to Tempestura and Narissus greets us at the docks. We see many genasi of different kinds, but they generally stick to their own section. Narissus takes us to see Elder ___ to talk about the problems with the portal gates. He tells us that there were some blackouts beginning a few months ago. They're longer and more frequent now, which is bad because many genasi need to travel to their own elemental plane. The batteries are in the city of Etheria (Air) and we should talk to Elder Lovart.
We ask dock workers to fix our ship.
Travel to Etheria by naiad tube. There are scholarly buildings so Valenna heads in to see if she can find out more. She does. We walk by the portal near the edge of the city. It's relatively hodge-podge. We pass by the workshop of the Technomancers in residence. We are greeted by a very VERY large steampunk warforged that it almost certainly several centuries old and odd to see with the cutting edge technology the mancers usually have. We talk to Bez, a heavily scarred woman who is upset about the recent outages of the gates and even more so that she doesn't really know what's going on. She tells us that it seems that something is stealing the ethereal energy collected in the batteries or that it is leaking out. She doesn't know for sure though because Elder Lovart doesn't allow anyone close to the batteries since he deems them very dangerous. We tell her we're here to help how we can.
We go to Elder Lovart to ask about the batteries. He is a visibly older (and very hot) gentleman with visible scars on his face and is blind, his daughter escorts him as needed. We ask to observe the battery for a time so we can see what's happening. Valenna tells him about the Devourer in an effort to convince him to let us do this. He asks for time to decide.
In the meantime we go to Forge (the fire elemental city). Dirt asks me to buy a cannon for the ship, I try but it's wayyyy too expensive (20,000 g). I get a shield tho, Dirt gets some cheap ass sending stones, and Valenna gets some star navigational tools.
On our way out we witness a portal gate flicker and go out with someone inside. We can't do anything but then we rush to go to see Elder Lovart. He was expecting us and agrees to us observing the batteries.
We observe. A crack appears on the crystal itself and fucking voidspawn crawl out of it, including a ginormous one that still had a face. The big one is the one that reaches in and starts to drain the battery. We fight. We kill two. More appear.
