Expedition 23: Sea and Shadow, Brass and Broken Things

### Summary

We explore the Sunken City, and inside a brass tower Calliope recognizes, they find a portal to the Shadowfell. Inside, Calliope sends a message to her brother Basil, who she learns is still alive; she promises to rescue him in the future.

### Detailed Writeup

**Expedition Objective:** Gather information about the Sunken City--its layout, dangers, and potential rewards.

**Expedition Log (part I):** We set out early in the morning with the blessing of Mother Dalxar allowing us to breathe underwater. Renting a cramped rowboat, we row it to the patch of ocean between DyrRoc and FerRoc. Here, we face our first challenge: without an anchor, the sea floor too far away for our supply of rope to reach, how do we prevent the little boat from being carried away across the waves? After a fairly inordinate amount of time spent debating various options, we eventually decide to drag the whole boat down to the sea floor with us and affix it there. Calliope has infused a cloak with the semblance of a manta ray, allowing her to swim swiftly through the water despite her heavy armor, so she leads the way.

As Calliope and Tolyr pile rocks inside the hull of the rowboat to pin it to the seafloor, Marzipan and Uzmir catch sight of the wreck of a much larger ship nearby--a merchant vessel, by the looks of it. The party swims over to investigate. The ship seems to have been mostly scoured clean, with no visible signs of the crew's remains. As Calliope opens the hatch to the hold, we get an unpleasant surprise: three massive eels, coiled up inside the ship, that rise to attack us. It doesn't take long for us to kill one of them and scare the others off. The contents of the hold are fairly disappointing: what looks to have been a large shipment of iron, most of it rusted to uselessness. Uzmir doesn't sense any magical auras anywhere on the wreck. Calliope retrieves three units of the most usable-looking **iron ingots** in Tolyr's meatbag, and we head in the direction of the Sunken City.

We can see two lights glowing through the water from opposite directions in the distance. One, about a mile away from the edge of the ruined city, Tolyr and Marzipan seem to recognize somehow. The other emits from the center of the city itself, a brilliant white light clearly visible despite the many ruined buildings between us and it. We swim in the direction of this central light. As we crest over the edge of the ruined city, we see a massive urban landscape stretching out below us, sunken within an immense crater in the sea floor. The buildings at the edges of the crater tilt inwards--those that haven't long since collapsed under their own weight. Looking closely at the ruined architecture, Tolyr concludes that this city wasn't built underwater, but rather drowned here in some sort of cataclysmic event an age ago.

We make no attempt at stealth as we swim slowly down the main thoroughfare of the once-grand city. Scanning the nearby buildings for magical auras, Uzmir finds a glowing multifacted orb we later realize is a container for a unit of **everglow fluid**. About halfway to the mysterious glowing light at the city center, Tolyr catches sight of something watching us: a reptilian creature with a humanoid torso, dragon-like head, prominent webbed fins, and scaly serpentine tail, holding a wicked-looking harpoon. Calliope calls out a friendly greeting to it, and it responds by chucking its harpoon at her and signaling its friends, lurking in the ruins around us, to attack.

A tense battle ensues, Uzmir taking a beating while Calliope uses her newfound aquatic mobility to rush at the dragon-like merrow. Eventually, most of the party are left behind when two of the merrow try to escape and Calliope gives chase. Unfortunately for them, their attacks are ineffective against her armor, and she easily keeps pace with them with her manta-ray-like wings. Soon both fall and she returns to the others, towing a merrow corpse behind her. We cut off its head and stick it in Tolyr's meatbag for future interrogation. On one of the other bodies, we find a strange magical orb, like a spherical compass, that appears to point towards Uzmir no matter where we hold it. This is a **spellfinder bauble**, which points unerringly towards the nearest creature with an active magical effect on them.

The rest of the way to the center of the city is comparatively quiet. As we approach, we can see that the brilliant white light is emanating from a glowing dome, perhaps a few hundred feet wide, covering the central city square. It's hard to make out anything inside past the intense glow, but we catch the outlines of a few buildings that seem less dilapidated than those in the rest of the city. Tolyr sends Annie out to investigate the dome more closely, and she narrowly avoids a lethal shock as she discovers that the dome isn't solid but composed of coruscating electrical energy. Calliope (as usual) is more than happy to jump through and investigate what's on the other side, but the others talk her down. Instead, we decide to spend the remainder of our adventuring day looking for some sort of entrance in the dome and combing the ruins nearby as we do.

It doesn't take long to discover that our hope of finding a non-lethal entrance through the dome was in vain--it appears uniformly dangerous all the way around. As we start searching the city for more items of interest, Calliope freezes in shock, staring numbly out into the ruins. The others crowd around and ask what's wrong, and she points towards a simple brass tower nestled into the ruins nearby. "We need to go check that out," she says, her voice quiet, and starts swimming in its direction. The others follow, but before we reach the tower, the ground beneath us begins to crack and steam as if some volcanic eruption is about to explode beneath our feet. We swim for cover atop a nearby ruined structure as a gargantuan crablike creature with balefully glowing red eyes and thick black chitinous plating erupts from the ground and clambers up the ruin's wall towards us. Hesitating only a moment, Marzipan steps out from behind cover and channels the power of the Wildmother towards this unnatural creature. The rest of the party watches as the colossal crab seems to dissolve into nothingness as it is banished from this plane. We trade looks and start swimming as fast as we can towards the brass tower, fearing that the crab will return once the spell expires in 60 seconds. Calliope reaches the tower first, finding a pair of closed doors with an inscription in Common: "Feed me and I shall live, Give me water and I shall die, what am I?" She screams "Fire!" and blasts a fire bolt at the doors as her friends catch up to her and the crab begins to reform in the water behind them. The doors glow orange and slide open, and we're all pulled inside the tower by a sudden torrential rush of water. Behind us, the crab swims in pursuit. As the tower begins to fill with water, we look frantically for a way to close the doors. Uzmir pulls a lever on the wall, and the doors force themselves closed just in time for the crab to slam into them with a deafening crash.

**Expedition Log (part II):** We catch our breath as it quickly becomes apparent that this tower is made of sterner stuff than the crab. Hoping it'll lose interest eventually, we set about exploring the tower. Calliope leads the way, easily directing the others to avoid the tower's traps as it quickly becomes clear that she somehow knows the layout of this tower. Uzmir soon realizes that this is a wizard's tower, though it has been cut off from the ley-line nexus that it must have once used to focus magical energy. In a small bedchamber, Tolyr finds a few items of note in an old chest: matching platinum armbands that ping as magical, along with a clay jar filled with ash and a portrait with the inscription "My beloved Al'darun, may I see him long but not soon." Marzipan notices religious iconography, replete with swirling gears and vast abstract shapes, inscribed around the tower, though he can't identify its source.

At the top of the spiral staircase rising up the tower stands a simple door bearing an inscription in Common that glows with a lurid red light: "Do not enter. Danger within." With a glance at Tolyr, Calliope reaches for the handle, but Tolyr bodily tackles her away from it. He insists that it's too dangerous, that they can come back later when they're more prepared, and Calliope seems to reluctantly heed his words. She tells the party that this tower looks the same as the one in which she lost her legs six years ago in Old Ovats. She feels like whatever's beyond that door is important, and that somehow this might be her last chance to find out what really happened on that day. The others stand firm, however. Seemingly resigned, Calliope suggests that they all go downstairs to the bedroom to rest while they're waiting for the crab to lose interest and move on. She lingers at the back of the group, and once the others have gone ahead, she makes a break for the door and wrenches it open.

The room at the top of the tower is simple and circular, with a single defining feature: a doorway standing in the center of the room, a thin veil of silk hung in front of it behind which murky shapes shift and writhe. Calliope steps towards it. "Stop!" Tolyr calls out from behind her, but as she turns to answer him her foot brushes up against the fluttering veil and she falls back through the threshold. Nothing comes out the other side.

The others panic for a minute while figuring out what to do. They quickly decide to rope themselves together in an attempt to anchor themselves on this side, and follow her through the portal. The rope falls behind them, cleanly severed.

Meanwhile, Calliope finds herself in a room similar to the one she just left. It is cold and barren of decoration, but the brass walls and spiral stairs descending from the room are unmistakeable. The portal looms behind her. Scattered around the room are traces of habitation: scraps of cloth, old piles of refuse. Calliope takes a shuddering breath and calls out down the tower "Basil? Are you there?" Her quavering voice gives way to a dead silence. She slowly makes her way down the tower, finding nothing. Here, the windows are clear of kelp, and she can see out into a barren grey wasteland. The front door is propped open with a small iron rod, and leading out into the dusty wasteland are a set of small footprints. Gnome-sized. Calliope follows them out, shaking. "Can you hear me?" she calls. "It's Calliope. I'm here."

The others find her there, kneeling in the grey dust outside the tower. She looks up at them, tears in her eyes. "He's here. My brother. I thought he was dead but he's here somehow... wherever here is." Tolyr looks around at the shadowy wasteland stretching out in all directions and quickly comes to a sobering conclusion: this is the Shadowfell.

While they discuss what to do next, Marzipan spots a massive shadow far above: a bird the size of a house, swooping towards them. He and most of the others take cover up the stairs inside the tower, while Calliope raises her shield to face it head-on on the bottom floor in the hopes that it's intelligent enough to negotiate with. As the massive bird swoops closer, Calliope can see that its flesh has partially rotted away, bone and sinew poking through beneath. Its entire massive weight slams into the tower as its beak bites at the tiny gnome just inside. Calliope just barely manages to block an attack that would have likely swallowed her whole with a desperate shield spell. She retreats to the back of the tower, out of the undead roc's reach, and it quickly gives up and flies away.

As the party regroups, Calliope looks grimly out into the wasteland. "He might still come back here. I have to wait for him... or go out there and find him." Over her protests, Marzipan volunteers to wait there with her. It's looking like the two might be staying behind in the Shadowfell when Marzipan pulls out the flower that Delphi had given him. "Can you use this to talk to him?" Calliope's eyes light up. "I have one of those too! You're right!"

She spends a minute or two thinking of what to say, and then pulls off a petal, pictures her brother, and whispers a 25-word message: "Hi Basil. This is Calliope. I'm here, at the tower. Are you alive? Okay? Can you come back here? It's safe beyond the portal now."

A tense moment passes, and then a voice responds in her ear. "What is this, ... how do you know... no, can't be."

She goes white and pulls off another petal, hissing the words. "Don't be a fucking idiot I'm here to rescue you get over here now I didn't come all this way for you to ignore me."

"If you really are my sister, tell me what you did on my 20th birthday."

She rips off a third petal, her face a rictus of conflicting emotions. "I only have 1 more of these, stop being a prick. And I rigged up a bucket of glue over your bed. It was hilarious."

"I'm one hundred and eighty hours or so away, out in the drunkmire, don't move. There's a roc there, it'll swallow you whole. What do-"

She lets the last petal fall, now whispering desperately. "Only 25 words per message! Can you get back here or not? If not I'm coming to get you. Can wait as long as needed."

"I can, but will take time, weeks by another name. I'm confused, the portal closed behind me? I'm ok, but different, you will recognize me."

Calliope, shaking, looks up at Marzipan and tilts her head towards his flower. He volunteers it wordlessly. She sends one last message, telling him that the portal is working again and asking if she should stay in the tower to wait for him or leave and come back. His reply is still confused but he insists that it's not safe in the tower and that she should leave. He's on his way.

Not wanting to use more of their limited supply of messages, Calliope contents herself with leaving a letter for her brother in the tower, telling him that time passes unpredictably between the two planes so if she's not there when he gets back to the tower he just needs to wait and she'll come through the portal soon, and warning him about the waters outside the tower on the other side of the portal. Then, reluctantly, she leaves with the others.

The crab has abandoned its assault on the tower by now, and they swim back to their rowboat unmolested. By now a fierce storm has risen, and pulling the boat back up to the surface exhausts most of the group. But with a canny eye, Marzipan is able to plug the leaks in the hull and pilot them safely back to Port Vrall through the storm.