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==Chapter 1 - A Toreel Wizard in Prince Davion's Court==
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===Faith in a Unusual Lady===
Jumpship Hank Morgan
Deep Periphery?
March 27, 3025?
"You honestly think this is going to work, Captain?" Doug Morrow asked as the timer counted down.
"You got a better idea, Doug?" Captain Patrick Heard replied. "She was pretty convincing, all things considered."
"All things considered, she didn't even know you needed a space suit to go outside until we told her how space works," Doug replied. "We've been running all across this nebula looking for... what? A planar convergence? What the hell does that even mean? Even when she explained it it sounded like gobeldygook. Magic and gods and higher beings..."
"She literally does magic and has a flying talking cat." Patrick said. "She's literally popped in and out of reality in front of us. You could be a bit more open minded, you know. Besides, it's the only lead we've had to getting out of this ****** nebula."
"And if it doesn't work?"
Patrick sighed. "If it doesn't work, we re-evaluate. If we have to, we can settle down back on that planet while we try to work something out. Where is she, anyway? This is like the big moment."
This time Doug sighed. "Where do you think? On the hull, again. Like every other jump. Forget the magic part, that's what makes her nuts. She actually enjoys it."
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===Setting course through the endless hostile void===
Chim looked out across a vast endless night she had never really known until only a short while ago. An endless hostile void, in its own way more hostile, more desolate, more deadly than any of the planes she'd visited, the remarkable suit and the strange metal, fabric, and glass that composed it her only barrier. Strange "technology" more mysterious than her own magics anchoring her to the side of a vast alien construct able to pierce realities without a hint of magical will, based on arcane secrets of "physics" and "science" that sounded as incomprehensible to her as her studies sounded to them. 
It was remarkable what these aliens were able to accomplish without really knowing how. They'd created great skyships... well... no, this was beyond a skyship. Still, it was able to pierce planar barriers, cross through the astral plane to another point incomprehensibly far away on the material plane, but they didn't even know what the astral plane was, or anything about the other higher planes. Nothing about magic, about Gods (beyond some sort of abstract concept or metaphor at least). And their people had spread out to countless worlds, creating their own form of incomprehensible magic while blind to the higher nature of their own universe. But in this case, something had gone wrong. When they'd jumped into this... nebula (Chim was learning all about new kinds concepts like space, stars, nebula, and the like) they realized they couldn't leave. They could visit other worlds (the idea of other worlds even existing was particularly exciting to Chim, but she was disappointed to learn the vast majority of them didn't have life and probably none nearby had any life worth talking to), but they couldn't leave the nebula.
They were fascinating. So of course when they'd come to her kingdom she'd been eager to meet them. When she heard they couldn't return to their own worlds, of course she'd offered to help. And yeah, of course she was actually going to go with them. Who could pass up the chance to see an entire new civilization spread across the stars?
Figuring out how to do that was tricky. If the ship could travel from one point in its home plan to another through the astral, but had traveled here and couldn't go back, then that meant it must no longer be on its home plane. These people must have come from some pocket demi-plane, or even a previously unknown plane separate from the prime material. Something like the plane of shadow or the ethereal (but obviously different to those). Parallel, close enough to the prime material for points to overlap in a convergence and people to occasionally pass through accidentally, but still separate. 
The implications were staggering. Not only in the notion of another plane of existence populated by countless humanoids spread across countless worlds with no understanding of magic, but even in the way it challenged the long held belief of the prime material plane as the central aspect and convergence of creation. Indeed, with this revelation, how could we even know if the prime material is particularly unique or special. Could it be that the world we see around us is itself just another demiplane created by particularly powerful beings. Could there be some other plane of existence that holds true primacy in creation. Could it be that no single plane could claim such a title?
This was the point in her discussion where the ship's crew told her to shut up and asked if she could fix it.
"Well, no," she'd told them. "I don't even understand how your ship works or where in the higher planar framework your plane is. I could spend your lifetimes trying to figure out how to teach it to take you home and not get any closer to doing it."
That... didn't go over well. Fortunately, she had a save. If they had passed through a convergence between planes, then they could do so again. They would simply need to find one. 
The ship's crew seemed skeptical. How do you find something like that? They'd already tried going back the way they came. They'd tried to leave this nebula in every way they thought of short of what they called slowboating (Chim didn't understand why they hadn't tried that only to learn just how unbelievably vast and empty space was). 
Chim had told them to leave it to her. The higher planes were one of her specialties, and she was, after all, Archmage of Vaslen. She'd earned that title, and had the experience, the raw magical knowledge, and extraplanar friends to prove it. It had taken months of research, consulting with Dragons, Aeons, and even some advice from the Goddess of Stars and Travel bought through a generous donation to their temple, but eventually they'd found what they were looking for, and Chim was able to plot where this next convergence would occur. 
Then she found out it wouldn't work. Something about "gravity wells" and "everybody would horribly die." There were a lot more rules on how this ship could travel than she realized. 
It took another year of work before she was able to identify a convergence they could actually use, that would actually still be there by the time the ship could get there.
So they left (most of them, a couple of their crew had put down roots). And Chim went with them, as a representative of Vaslen, to see these new worlds for herself. Accompanied by L'heo, her longtime companion and manservant, and Celia, her royally appointed bodyguard. And Polly, her cat, who right now was probably curled up in the ship's fresh laundry (he'd declared the ship's laundry drying machines the greatest creation he'd ever seen). 
And here she was now, sitting on the ship's hull looking at the biggest empty she had never before realized existed, wearing a "space suit" that was baggy everywhere but still pinned her ears back uncomfortably. Just a few more seconds...
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===Haunted by Shadowy Figure===
The tones finished sounding and the discontinuity hit as the ship began to jump.
But around Doug, just for a moment, time seemed to stop. The world around him froze, all except for a spot on the deck in front of him which seemed to bend and mold like clay, sliding up and shaping into a figure, its lower half an indistinct mass, the upper body clothed in red robes. There was no head, in its place was a featureless mask fixed to a rod gripped in one hand. 
"Why would you wish to leave?" it asked. "Have we not enjoyed our time together?"
Snakes of clay slid from the lower body of the creature, wrapping around Captain Heard and dragging him to the creature. Around him, Doug could hear the crying and hissing of something like feral housecats stalking around him, around the rest of the crew on the bridge, but he was powerless to act, as though paralyzed.
"You cannot leave," the mysterious stranger said. "What lies beyond is not safe." The bridge seemed to stretch out, pulling the creature away from Doug even as its body engulfed the captain, but its tentacles continued across the deck, getting ever closer, even as the ship stretched further and further around him and invisible claws began to tear into him...
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===Crossing the terrible hungry thresh hold..of hyperspace===
This was not Chim's first time "hull surfing", as the ship's crew called it. The first time the ship had jumped with her aboard, she'd been inside. It had been unpleasant, like a giant giving you a spin to churn up your insides before tossing you. But not particularly informative. She'd decided she'd wanted to actually see the jump, not just ride along. The crew told her she was crazy. And to be honest, some of their reasoning was sound. There was not, in fact, anything to breathe in space, so you couldn't just walk out on the hull. Also there was more about this whole gravity thing. The inconvenience of floating around inside the ship was a lot worse when there was a whole lot of absolutely nothing you might accidentally float off into. 
So yeah, safety precautions. She learned all she needed about those, and the crew was able to put together a space suit that fit her well enough (and scrounge another for Celia, who refused to leave Chim's side but didn't understand why she had to take her armor off first). So it was fine, right?
Oh, no no no, the crew insisted. It wasn't like you'd die, as long as you were securely fastened so you couldn't drift away and get caught outside of something called the "jump field". But you'd see things, feel things. Things that would drive a person mad. Most of the crew sounded like sailors repeating old sea stories they'd heard at dockside taverns. But a couple of them... they sounded like they spoke from experience, even if they didn't want to admit it.
But hell, it wouldn't be the first time Chim had gone mad from whatever revelation, and if necessary L'heo had something in one of his bags to fix it. So she decided to go ahead with her plan.
That jump had been... relatively pleasant actually. Aside from the lurching nausea, of course. There were no nightmarish visions, no terrifying revelations, just a brief view of the silvery empty mists of the astral plane before the ship lurched back into the material. She actually found it quite peaceful, compared to the unpleasant cramped claustrophobia inside the ship, and hanging out on the hull became fairly routine for her. So much so that even her bodyguard or her other companions didn't accompany her anymore. 
She didn't really expect this jump to be anything different. L'heo had his concerns, but that was only about whether there'd still be magic at the other end, so he'd decided to ride out the jump in the ship's cargo bay. Chim was a little bit worried about that as well, but even an entire universe that had flourished without magic would just raise more fascinating questions. 
When the jump hit, she thought she saw only a glimmer of the comforting silvery mists of the astral before it came apart around her, space and time itself dissolving and unfolding into a swirling mass of unreality, she felt herself bent and pulled and twisted in directions she didn't know existed, as the orderly universe, the structured planes she knew so intimately crashed together and came apart in pure, unbridled chaos. The planes, the river of souls, the font of creation, the endless abyss of decay, all were wiped away, all were one, and yet nothing, and yet everything. All existed, flowed into each other and through each other. Thoughts, feelings, impulses, today and tomorrow and yesterday were all here, all one, all encompassing. All of creation lay before her, was her, until there was no difference between all that was and nothing. She could feel this torrent sweeping her away into something at its heart, something terrible and hungry... How could that be, she wondered in a moment of clarity, if she was all things and all things were nothing, what was this other lurking below, waiting, waiting to consume me....
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===Recovering from an unusual Journey===
Doug collapsed when the ship returned to reality, vomiting out all the contents of his stomach and continuing to heave for minutes afterwards. He could feel blood pooling around his face and arms from dozens of scratches. He could feel pain from the bruises left on his body from the tendrils that had snaked across the deck and begun to wrap around him.
The captain, he realized, was simply gone, even before he got the strength to look around the bridge and see the scratched and traumatized faces of the men around him. It took quite a bit longer to realize he was now in charge.
"All stations report status," he ordered shakily as he made his way back to station. Another sign that whatever had happened had been real. He'd been strapped in when the jump had begun. "Check for wounded and get a count of who..." he hesitated, not sure how to describe it. "who we lost."
The console next to his chair displayed a notification indicating a successful jump.
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Chim somehow managed to make her way back into the ship after the jump completed and had pulled her helmet off just in time to vomit again, surrounding her with a cloud of the fowl smelling stuff. Her cat Polly came floating around the corner.
"Hey," the cat said. "These people are all wound up. What happened? They do the jump thing yet?"
Chim didn't really hear him, still in shock from what she'd experienced.
"What in the hells was that?" she heard herself ask. 
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