Plecos Circus Season 2: Tides and Consequences

TIME BETWEEN SEASON 1 AND SEASON 2: ~2 MONTH

SEASON 2 RUN TIME: ~3 MONTHS (Voxquest 0.5 begins the season)

On Deadtide: ~1 WEEK

Season 2 began with Plecos Circus becoming real pirates! A training montage began with each party member choosing a part of the crew to train under. Ida’s tutelage came from Cirn, the large half orc who rarely stepped onto deck to learn carpentry. Vox spent much of his time with the oni, Dir’thal, in the crow's nest or by the helm to learn charting and navigation. Arias took residence up with Bernard, who the party had affectionately dubbed ‘Cookie’ and learned a different kind of cooking than he was used to at home. And Lazarus decided to head below deck with Marla Kern and develop their bosun and organizational skills.

During this month or so of seafaring, the half orc leader of this ship, Captain Otis Bhtar, revealed their new endeavor now that Plecos Circus was forced to see this voyage through. She informed the party that a Dead Man’s Tryst has been called by the Coalition of Tattered Sails. The Tryst, to take place on the pirate guarded island Deadtide, was to evaluate the situation plaguing the Coalition: the Calamity’s Plunder. She explained that this rogue vessel had once been a prominent member of the Coalition, flying under no general but their own captain. It laid waste to many naval forces over the centuries, or so the stories say. The Calamity’s Plunder vanished 40 years ago from the seas and had not been seen until about 10 years ago when it started brazenly attacking every vessel it could, including the siege of the Siren’s Bane and murder of its former captain, Thela Oberon. The Plunder’s captain, the elf Athalaer that had handedly murdered the party in the season 1 finale, seemed to be looking for these large stones of divine power, colloquially known as Crystal Eyes. What they were for, Otis was unsure, but she knows they have at least 2, which Ida can attest to. While the Siren’s Bane was coming into Uniper’s seas, the Plunder attacked and took a deep blue one from Otis’ care. The party knows they got another in the temple beneath the volcano.

Plecos Circus, Otis continues, will now be made to testify during the Dead Man’s Tryst at the Roost about what they saw in the temple. Otis will accompany and vouch as a character witness, but they will need to tell the generals what transpired and anything else they might know about its activity. They would be allowed to do what they wish afterward, with the implication they are pirates now and may need to swear fealty to the Coalition. If they do not choose this path, Otis agreed to help them move on.

Throughout the journeys of s1 and some rogue gallivanting in between, Vox also noticed the ruby necklace he had found in the siren’s den was. Odd. Not only could he not take it off or show it without a mad panic overtaking him, he also began having strange dreams. Cold black sludge and airless lungs drag him further into the abyss, but death never found him in these nightmares, just more shadows dragging him further beneath the surf. And voices, so many voices whispering to him in a language he couldn’t quite understand. He started getting cold, and shaky, and soon the whispers found him in the waking hours too.

One of these 1.5 takes place at this time, when the voices become accompanied by visions of two elves interacting on the ship’s deck when neither could. Marla Kern, the quartermaster of the Siren’s Bane, intercepted Vox during one of these episodes, just as the party was docking on J’kira on Fingerbone Isle. Vox tried to hide the gills, dark veins, and Drowner’s Ruby now frozen into and slowly fusing into Vox’s chest from the elf, but she found out enough to push him to find help. Vincent, the Siren’s Bane’s medic, mentioned that on the island, a powerful magic practitioner was said to live in the Ikrean Jungle that would be able to lift the curse that had befallen Vox since adorning the Ruby. Begrudgingly, Vox told Lazarus and Ida and the trio set off into town to find someone who could help. They soon found a halfling named Verin Cestro who agreed to help them venture into the jungle to find the Swamp Tender, the person who had been healing the residents of J’kira for generations, if they could satisfy her demands.

As the trio ventured into the jungle, our good friend Arias realized his IBS attack struck at the worst time. Not really, he was busy getting phone calls. He got a barrage of Sending messages from his sister, Ioana, congratulating him on leaving home and seeing the world! After receiving Vox’s distressing (written) message, Arias decided to follow the crew’s lead and headed into the town. While in the local tavern, he received a message from Celia Ukral that a letter from Graham had arrived at the Iron Concord for him. Magically, she projected herself to Arias and read the letter. Graham wanted to let Arias know he received his letter and things were doing well at home. Inspired by Aria’s journey, he mentioned he was thinking about trying to find Arias in the big bad world. Not really having much time to respond, Arias was swept through a different kind of magic into the company of his companions, and the woman they’d been looking for: the Swamp Tender.

A large and lithe fey, the Swamp Tender was tickled by the party and their various issues, and seeing what was going on with Vox was interesting enough for her aid. A ring of aborted, twisted magic hugged Vox, she told them, and mentioned that she could only lift the curse of the Ruby. The other magic was too arcane in nature for her to decipher, but should they succeed in her quest, she’d give them a lead on that as well.

Up to the task, the party moves through the Jungle until they find the Vrock the Swamp Tender sought. Having been asked to recover the abyssal creature’s spore sacs, the party battled with the Vrock and some abyssal chickens in a cavern beneath a waterfall on the island. Getting some spoils and seeing first hand what the Throdenulate’s strange disk could do when activated (conjuring a portal to… somewhere), the party departed and returned to the Swamp Tender with what she asked. She held up her end of the bargain and removed the curse from Vox, directing the ‘girl’ to a strong arcane user named Cadwallader who was last known to be Deadtide.

It takes a month to travel from J’kira into the Lemidar Sea, the crew searching for an isle with no coordinates. During this time, the Siren’s Bane found itself under attack by a kraken. The creature did significant damage to the hull, but after a well timed spell by Ida, it retreated and nearby, a ship blinked onto the horizon. As the crew go about trying to fix the damage, a dark skinned elven figure covered in vine tattoos and carrying a monkey-like creature none of the party had seen before stepped onto a blank raised between the two ships: Captain Li’ev Tilani. A dialogue immediately starts between the two captains, Tilani (not) apologizing for the attack of her pet, Quenya, on the Bane because she is ‘new’ to the Coalition. While Moon’s End sat parked by the Bane, Vox decided to investigate and got a face full of glass and eyeful through an illusion for his troubles. Stepping out of Otis’ cabin, the illusion on Tilani themself fell, revealing the leader to be an older drow instead of a high elf the Circus first encountered.

Moon’s End was here for an escort, the Siren’s Bane would comply.

As the ship approached a wall of fog, seemingly out of nowhere, a flurry of activity kicked up on the Siren’s Bane. “Either go below deck,” Captain Otis warned the party. “Or tie yourself to something if you think you can handle what’s to come.” She remained firm and untethered, while Quaid, her first mate, and Dir’thal tethered themselves to the wheel and crow’s nest respectively. Plecos Circus took their precautions, but most stayed on the deck. All had hallucinations cutting through the fog, faces they hadn’t seen in years or situations that hadn’t happened at all. Joy wrapped in the despair of soft voices and lost loves sent most of the party into one tizzy or another. Vox nearly jumped out of the crow’s nest, Ida broke down in Otis’ quarters, and Laz nearly freed themself from the mast, screaming the entire time. The entire party succumbed to the mist’s hallucinatory ways. Except for Arias. Who, through the mist and strength of will, got to spy the thousands of eyes watching them all fall apart.

When the Siren’s Bane eventually crept through the mist into the rocky teeth around Deadtide, Quaid was also knocked out at the helm, Otis standing over him with sweat on her brow and knuckles white on the wheel. The Moon’s End assumedly made it, but the General didn’t super care. No time for rest, the party helped the vessel navigate the jagged outcroppings and putrid, yellow rotted waters that acted as Deadtide’s natural defenses before finally being able to make port on Pirate Island.

They were given time to wander the raucous island, Captain Otis needing to touch base with the other Generals to see what’s been afoot, and Plecos Circus was given free reign over the island. When the Coalition was ready for their testimonies, Otis would collect them and take them up to the Roost, the petrified roc’s nest on the Umbra Top volcano that serves as entrance to the council rooms. They found their way to Scally Wag’s, one of the taverns on Deadtide, and Ida caught the eye of a vibrant aarockra woman named Kitty, the owner of the establishment. After some impressive flirting and dance moves, the two women set up an accord for later during their stay and the party continued exploring. Laz also found a new eye to replace the one Athalaer broke in a secondhand store named Nirali’s Booty, helmed by the titular goliath/tiefling. Eventually, the party found themselves outside the main magic shop on the island: Wally’s Wondrous Wares.

Inside, magical items and contraptions they had never seen littered the space, and all of it paled in comparison to the woman behind the counter. Lavender eyes and talon nails greeted Plecos Circus as Cadwallader, the proprietor and curator of the shop, began a conversation with Vox over sea glass and what the Swamp Tender meant for them. Pushing aside a broken disk she later refers to as warping stones, Cadwallader seemed to have intimate knowledge on what plagued the ‘girl’ and gives Vox a reading, boiling down to ‘Tick tock.’. As the others shopped, she recommended a trade: the party, who had $2 to their name, could get her more of these warping stones from around the island, and each one they brought her would pay for a new item on their list. Including helping Vox find a cure for whatever ailed him.

The party agreed, and a treasure hunt began. The first stone was found at Lustor Falls, deep in the Ullurian Jungle that blankets the island to the north east. Taking Dir’thal, since the oni was bored and knew the area, they set out. Along the way, they stopped at the local mill and found it attacked by three lupine abyssal creatures. Doing battle, they managed to kill two and scare off the third before tucking in for the night in the mill.

Ida’s rest was not peaceful, a strange library and ghostly hands reaching out to her as a gentle voice spoke:

Oh child, what the world has taken from you. . .

What love has taken from you. . .

What I have seen through your eyes, Daughter of Harmonies and Steel-

What you will continue to see, Augur of War and Song.

A voice familiar to her from a dream she experienced with Lazarus months ago. The stone she received then clattered to the floor, dull where it was bright and shining in her mercurial hand moments before in sleep.

Dir’thal sends a message via bird to Grim to inquire about the mill’s inhabitant and the party continues deeper into the jungle. As they stumble upon the waterfall… they realize it is flowing upside down. Everything is backwards. The waterfall flows from the ocean and into the river, unlike its natural course. Even the foliage is swayed by this new direction of gravity. Using rope and ingenuity, the party is able to spy the warping stone stuck into the floor bed of the Falls. As the party got close, however, lashing tentacles and a gaping, jagged maw lashed out as a full grown aboleth emerged from the water, having slipped through the warping stone’s portal and depositing the abyssal creature on Deadtide.

After a fight filled with ingenuity and stakes, Arias intentionally killed his first entity as he finished off the aboleth after it fell Ida. Dir’thal got the wizard the rest of the way up and after collecting and deactivating the disk, the party began making their way back to Wally’s. Along the way, the final abyssal dog was found and dispatched and three new folks entered the cast.

The goblin Big Ollie, a dwarven woman named Kaga Blowhard, and a dwarven man named Bagpipe, members of the Spitfire Armory and tinkerers in their own right, cross paths with the party and have a small dalliance. Vox and Ida agree with Bagpipe and Ollie to some sort of accord for our good pal Frederick. Get that froggie some ball armor. Well, they’ll be working on it. Kaga tells the party they are looking for raw materials for Crothers, the first mate on the Spitfire. They’re working on a new project to submit to the Generals to up their warfare (surprise it’s magic guns).

The groups part ways, Dir’thal immediately going to find Grim and the party heads to Wally’s, one part of their deal finished. The magician grins and gives Vox the sea glass pendant he had been eyeing and sends them along to the next one: beneath the Umbra Top itself. The party decided to take the night for themselves before adventuring out, and after some ribbing, Vox tried to have a moment with Ida:

I want to talk to you about how I've not been feeling well..

Ok...

I think Im in love with Marla

Oh Vox shut the fuck up

It did not go well. But the rest of the night went without issue, Ida even got lucky with Kitty.

On the way to the Umbra Top the next morning, Vox pulls Arias aside and tells him what is going on with ‘him’. Vox is, and has been since Plecos Circus began, a freak magical experiment of two siblings fused together that has been slowly falling apart for months. Moxius, the younger sibling, tried to save his dying sister Valerie from a poison that was taking her life. He did this by finding a magic user in olive robes with thick glasses, who tried to save Val in traditional means, and then somehow landed them in their current formation. The first [season] was revealed to be Mox mostly in control of the body, but after the trauma of dying, Val took over. Alcohol was also revealed to be a trigger between the personality swap, as well as another set of eyes hiding beneath the headwrap Vox always wore. Arias promised not to tell the others until Vox was ready to say something, though the impending destabilization of Vox’s body made that a scary secret to keep.

With half the party now dealing with new secrets, Plecos Circus began venturing below the dormant volcano. As they did so, they didn’t get too far before the ground fell out beneath them. Various tunnels and cave-ins scattered the party in the throne room of a long dead God, death and effigies thick in the air as they looked around the ancient space. It looked similar in age to the temple under Thraz’dul, but while that shrine was destroyed by a flood, this one was clouded with disuse. At least, that’s what they thought until thunderous footsteps and a voice like a thunderstorm crackled to life behind them:

Who dares enter my prison?

And, for the first time in over 600 years, someone came face to face with a Dragon.

Wr’thnyr the Venomous sat decrepit, aged before them. Stuck somewhere between Dragon and spirit, Wr’thnyr explained he has been stuck here since the entity that last resided here caged him in the Champions Boneyard. The dragon noted Lazarus ‘smells like [the god], but not quite’. After a tense conversation, an accord was struck between the party and Wr’thnyr: if the party agrees to bring the dragon news of the outside world, he’ll let them live. Having agreed, the party left to find their true prize, with Ida unwittingly getting a fragment of Wr’thnyr’s consciousness siphoned onto her mercurial blade in the form of a pseudodragon.

The journey towards their goal at first led them past more and more effigies to this death entity, but after some close calls with unknown creatures, the party finally began making their way towards their proper destination, guided by the magical map Cadwallader had given them. After an unfortunate foray with a spiders’ web, Plecos Circus found Kaga, Big Ollie, and Bagpipe also traversing the old passageways beneath the volcano. They told the party how they came down to find their mining operation and found the entrance completely blocked off, forcing them to find an alternate route. Comparing maps concluded that PC and KBOB were all heading in the same direction, and so 4 became 7 for a short time.

Maneuvering traps and natural decay, the group found the site of the mining operation in disrepair. Masses of lava had broken through the central channel of the mountain and spilled over the equipment. In the center, raving and destroying, was a massive fire giant. With a warping stone stuck in her eye.

Similar to the corruption of KirKosho, PC could see ugly veins and black ichor spreading from the metal disk and into the fire giant’s eye, Using the landscape and varying displays of skill, the party was able to not only pull the stone from fire giant’s eye without killing her, they managed to befriend her enough that she ushered them out just as the walls of the chasm began to give out. The party and co successfully got the fuck outta dodge and made their way to Wally’s, who took the disk with a smile. She agreed to give time to find the next and as most of the party bid Wally good night to spend their evening as they are want, Arias did not.

[TIMELINE BEYOND THIS POINT MAY BE EDITED CAUSE BRAIN SOUP RN]

 Arias decided to come back to Wally and amend their deal. He offered up a divine item he’d brought from home, tied to the harvest god Jakylin, to the magic practitioner to try and speed up their deal. Cadwallader smiled, and agreed, swiping Jakylin’s Tears without hesitation.

Somewhere in this time, the party received word that the Generals would be ready for them in two days, so time to get their act together. Going back to Wally’s Wares to find another disk, the group was informed that it was no longer necessary, as good boy Arias wanted to save his friend so badly he gave up an incredibly important magical item for him. So now they just needed to choose their destination. Confused and upset, the party then all had a big old conversation in the alley and most was revealed about Vox. Tensions defused and anxiety set, the party agreed to help Vox figure out how to not die.

Now rife with free time, the party did various things around town. Ida was bothered by an ostentatious tiefling named Adler in Kitty’s tavern. Vox and Lazarus went to the bath house in town and bonded a bit over the body issues, culminating in Vox noticing a pink and blue light seeping through the cracks of Laz’s torso.

The day of their Tryst debut arrives and it is a flurry of enough activity. Vox gives letters to Arias and Bernard for other folks in a very tragic moment. As that was happening, Lazarus tried to encourage Marla to think about Vox as not just a dude which confused her. That little cherry led to a rift in the party and some choice words before Plecos Circus finally made their way with Captain Otis up to the Roost. Once in the petrified nest and through into the volcano itself, the party was ushered into a backlit room. Seated around a massive driftwood war table, maps and tankards scattered among them, sat 6 of the most imposing people the party had ever seen. And Captain Otis soon joined them as the 7th General for the Coalition of Tatters Sails.

Admiral Powderkeg Owai, a human woman in her 70s missing 3 fingers and any trepidation in her gaze.

Javar Hershaem, the white dragonborn with every spine painted gold and biceps bigger than most of the attendant’s heads.

Desilva Vess, the oldest elf any of them would have ever met, their silver hair a thin braid dusting the floor.

Hector LeSuun III, a blue tiefling with a manicured mustache and more trouble in his eyes than he’s worth. Which is saying something.

Mercy Notley, a stout, dwarven woman covered in more scar tissue than skin and no regard for what’s left.

Aditya, the Green Devil, a oni mask glaring pools of gold through the eye slits, staring silently as if to blend into the very air.

All these stared at the party and asked for testimony. And the party gave it, to the best of their abilities. Promoted mostly by Powderkeg and Vess, Plecos Circus gave their detailed account on what happened under Thraz’dul and how they managed to survive.

It was about what the Generals expected. Most of the pirate lords were not overly enthused with their responses, but accepted the information all the same. Hector LeSuun, however, made some quips.

We heard there were two Eyes on Thraz’dul when the Plunder showed up. We know they got one, what do you think happened to the other?

Not able to give the answer [the meta implication is it’s inside Laz], the party was to be excused before Aditya, silent throughout the whole engagement, remarked that they simply can’t be let free. They know too much. General Otis stepped in, pushing PC to leave so the generals could discuss what to be done with the party now that they’d arrived and were intending to leave. With their future in the air as to their continued interest in chasing the Calamity’s Plunder, the members of PC made their way back down the volcano to await their judgment. One party member, however, left before they were excused.

Our good pal Vox dipped out early and rushed to Cadwallader, wanting to live or die without hurting more people in the process. As he entered the store, the same obnoxious magenta tiefling was talking to Wally about some deals his father had with the magical being. She simply smiled and entertained the boy, grinning wider as Vox stepped forward.

Cadwallader offered Vox two options: a Cure or Vengeance.

Vox chose to live.

And as the party realized Vox was missing, a massive spiral of golden light shone through Wally’s Wares’ windows as Adler took Vox’s hands and teleported them off Deadtide.

Rushing inside in the cloud of fading magic, the remaining members of Plecos Circus demanded to know where Vox went. Cadwallader replied well enough. He went to find his cure. And then she asked a very important question.

What are you willing to give me to find them?...

We sunsetted into an epilogue of Mox and Val’s letters getting to the folks that mattered to them.

And ended with Marla, confused and worried as she read the words of a stranger and a friend. Only one word came to her mind in the slurry of information and memories. It was a name. The name of a person who could reach the mind of anyone anywhere with a simple incantation.

VINCENT!