Session 60: Homecoming
General Summary
Sigvurrd and Nemara steeled their courage and descended into the Beholder's lair. They nimbly dodged some traps and got nicked by others, and kept their eyes about them as they passed through a hallway of statues that seemed to stare at them no matter where they moved.
Eventually, the Beholder showed itself, and combat was engaged, but just as Sigvurd rushed in for the killing blow, the room around them began to shift in a familiar way, overlaid with a different scene.
The stone ceiling faded in and out, overlaid more and more thickly with a cloudy sky. The walls darkened into the blurred shapes of thatched-roof houses with stone walls, and the floor tiles distorted into frozen earth, freckled with frost and rough grasses. And a few yards away, a familiar, slug-like form came into view.
Sruggut realized the delayed Teleport at the same time as the party, but Sigvurrd was quicker to act. Using his druidic powers, he heated all the gaudy jewelery on the naga's body while Nemara fired off blast after radiant blast.
Sruggut fought back with all he had, but after Sigvurrd blinded him, his attempts to dominate nearby villagers came to an end, and he lay defeated on the ground.
Catching their breath, the party looked about themselves and found one thing very clear - they were not in Magepoint.
It was cold here, very cold, and Nemara gratefully accepted a fur cloak from one of the Dwarven villagers. In fact, nearly all the folk around them were dwarves, with impressive beards and tattoos very similar to Sigvurrd's. The combat had caused a commotion, and soon their leader came out, clasping the druid-barian by the arms and calling him clansman.
After some discussion in the much more accommodating chieftain's hall, they discovered the Teleport must have gone wrong. They were far, far north, such that the people here did not even recognize the names of any place the party mentioned. Moreover, they were in the ancestral homeland from which Sigvurrd's Cairn Hill tribes had originally descended, and were welcomed to the village of Ribermott as lost kin of the Roodberg clan.
Nemara did her best to make herself useful, assisting with the weaving and preparing the feast, though there was less of the latter than might be expected.
It was revealed that the village had suffered a plague on their livestock; uncanny green worms had defiled most of their sheep and goat-herds, and the bodies had to be burned, the meat wasted.
Being a Tiefling, Nemara stood out among the Dwarven community, but not as much as might be expected. It seemed there was another group of foreigners in town; an archaeological expedition whom Sigvurrd had met before. When the scholars arrived at the feast, their wizard spotted Nemara and came over to chat.
The wizard, an elven mage named Trislee, empathized with the Teleport failure, and offered the warlock a chocolate. Not knowing the spell herself, though, she was unsure how to reverse it.
In the meantime, Sigvurrd was wandering the village, struck by how familiar it already felt. When he returned to the feast hall, he had made a decision.
Sigvurrd would stay here, he explained to the devastated warlock. He belonged here, and if there were Kyuss worms, then there needed to be someone with experience to help arm the folk here against them. If he returned to the south-lands with the party, who knew how far this epidemic might spread? Besides, Sigvurrd had met Trislee once before, and vouched for her as a worthy replacement.
As this sad tale was being told, a runner interrupted the feast;
A whale had been beached; the beast already departed, and its meat and fat surely a gift from Procan, their god of the sea.
The village dispatched immediately to gather the boon, but found their rivals from the Vosser clan - human settlers whose ancestry in the region was not yet so long as the dwarves, but whose wealth and power far exceeded theirs.
The Vossers claimed to have felled the beast, and therefore be the rightful owners of its bounty. The party's Roodberg hosts indignantly reasserted that their hunter had found the carcass hours before, and the village was just now arriving to harvest it.
Nemara examined the single harpoon in the beast's hide and deemed the Vosser story unlikely. The argument accelerated until the warlock got an idea.
"A gift of Procan, right?" she confirmed with the Roodberg shaman, who nodded with certainty.
Nemara's eyes glowed bright as the night around them darkened. The wind whipped up waves that threatened to heave even the whale's mighty carcass, and her voice echoed like thunder as she boomed that the lord of the sea bequeathed this bounty to the Roodberg Clan, and that colonizing scum should flee if they knew what was good for them.
They did so in great haste, but left several questions in their wake.
What was a whale doing in a lake?
Where the heckin' heck even is the party?
Why are there worms here, and where did they come from?
How on earth will the party get home now?
Report Date
15 Nov 2022
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