Staff of the Extraplanar Bear

Bilianor Berengloss was not a talented man. Nor was he particularly dedicated or attentive to his studies. His senior project was a flop, and while technically he graduated as a member of the Circle of Anthur-Ro, he was never held in particularly high esteem and the Staff of the Extraplanar Bear is a significant part of the reason why.

Staff

Intended to be an elemental summoning staff, the SEB as two generations of adventurers have now called it suffers from two critical flaws: one of design and one of execution. First, Berengloss' attention apparently wandered while enchanting the staff with points of entry and exit. Rather than doing the hard work of commencing the spell's location incantation with a locus in the Plane of Elemental Air and memorizing the 20 pages of its arcane coordinates, he simply imagined a place with a lot of wind.
Second, rather than doing his homework and memorizing the arcane formula for an air elemental, he simply focused on superlative adjectives. After all, something big in the Plane of Elemental Air would undoubtedly be an elemental, right?
The result was that the staff opened a portal to the windward side of a mountain just north of Aleph on the Portavian River. The staff sought out and retrieved by arcane summons the biggest thing it could find on the other side of a portal: a young female grizzly bear.

Bear

Chaos ensued as the bear tore through half the workshop and the novices were evacuated to a higher floor. Berengloss failed to enchant the spell terminus entirely, having dropped the staff and run for higher ground; with the result that the bear was not transported back to its home when the staff charge expired. Instead, it was teleported to a planar position left undefined.
The bizarre circumstances of the enchantment made the SEB something of a novelty, as it is was never properly attuned to a plane, but instead -- seeking some temporal anchor -- attuned itself to that specific bear. The SEB now has the effect of bearing two charges (sorry) by which the bear can be summoned for just under ten minutes or until dismissed, at which point it will be teleported to a completely random but habitable spot somewhere in the Planescape. 1d2 charges are renewed after every long rest.
Where the bear goes, what it has seen and experienced, is probably now beyond mortal comparison. The bear is undoubtedly and unintentionally the most prolific explorer in the multiverse and still seems, for reasons unknown, to be alive some 171 years after its initial encounter with a staff jutting out of an aurora on a cold Springfall evening. Much of its fur is now grey and it no longer behaves like a mindless animal, though its behaviour can be unpredictable.

The bear spent most of the last century being summoned and fed nearly every day by Curtis Cobblestone, the bardic companion of Hykkil von Hickenbottom and Lord Chaddock. It has more than once cast Druidic spells in the presence of credible witnesses, and in one particularly memorable adventure was referred to with an unpronounceable name by the god Fharlanghn and appeared to have a telepathic conversation with him resulting in the pardoning of the party for their recent misdeeds.
The bear resists and possibly even resents attempts to speak with it or to study it, and has on more than one occasion taken possession of the staff itself and cast it out into a populated area, suggesting its intention to allow its continued use. After convening an ethics panel, the Circle decided to honour the bear's apparent wishes and to make the staff available at an affordable price, provided it is purchased by active adventurers.
The bear's favourite food is salmon.  It does not care for honey.

Item type

Magical