One-Shot: Bursting Their Bubble

## Player Characters

* Avalon the Drenched is a mute woman with fair skin and long, flowing pink hair. From an outsider's perspective, that's the weirdest thing about her, but the party knows that when she hits the water, her legs turn into a glittering pink mermaid tail and her voice returns to her! When she's out of the water and thus can't speak, she uses either sign language or her telepathy to talk to people.
* Xan'li the Tainted: There is a human of average height, average appearance, short brown hair caught back in a tiny ponytail, and burning flame-orange eyes. Two stripes of shimmering red run out of their eyes like tear tracks, and from beneath the scarf wrapped around their neck peak out veins of a similar colour. Their clothing is like a monk; tightly wrapped and covering as much of their skin as possible, with leather gloves always covering their hands, no matter what. They appear to have no weapon, save for the massive panther/displacer beast-like creature blacker than shadows and with eyes the same colour as the... human? It's not an animal though, given that it can melt into shadows and reappear elsewhere, but it is always at the human's side. The human introduced themself as Xan'li, and their companion as Zarneth. Xan'li show little emotion and little hostility.
* Aaron the Wild isn't a particularly tall (long?) merman, nor is he the most built. From head to tail he is 5'4". Coming from a tribe of mers that inhabit the coast lines he is used to salinity differences between brackish, fresh, and saltwaters as his pufferfish companion, Niles. Aaron has pale skin spotted with freckles with spots and gradients of blue scales. He wears a special pair of glasses that allow his vision to more easily adapt to surface conditions and he makes sure to bring a wheelchair with him for traveling on land. His short hair touseld hair is brown with streaks of blonde, a common trait amongst his people, his yellow eyes are a bit less common though. He has a shabby goatee he has grown out to keep people mistaking him for a child, he is around his mid-twenties. Aesthetic wise, think nerdy steampunk-esque merman.

## Recap

After being hired as mercenaries (which was odd, since they weren't up for hire yet) to fix an Azural Font that opened up around the town of Temisray Bend, Aaron, Avalon, and Xan'li get sucked up out of the river into a huge sphere of water. Looking around, they realize that this water encompasses the entire town and then some, all the way to the river which appears to be the only way to get in or out. They meet some carnivorous kelp which Aaron talks to and learns is from another plane. Xan'li, meanwhile, is finding the exact point of the Azural Font to this other plane - when they pass through it a couple times, it turns them into a water genasi.

When they head to the town, they're stopped by a pair of guards, one of whom is also a water genasi. They're asked to leave their weapons with the guards before they enter the town. Everyone in town is some sort of aquatic race: there are water genasi, mermaids, and reverse mermaids (top half fish, bottom half human). The adventurers learn that the water arrived and transformed everyone after the world shook. Speaking of, all the water starts to shift and swirl - and then it stops and stills. They mention with more urgency that they need to fix this whole situation and head towards the subtle river exit, but the water moves even faster now. The water even pushes Aaron around when he insults it, as if it's listening to them.

Outside the bubble, they look at the water and see- holy shit, is that a face with eyes the size of houses?! A tendril of water reaches out to touch Avalon but slams her into the ground *hard*. They can see now that the currents of the water aren't just currents - they're the shape of an absolutely massive sea serpent, but one made of sea. The group realizes they're facing off against a leviathan.

Quickly planning to send this monster back to the Plane of Water before it can ingest all the townspeople, they leap into action. Xan'li pushes themselves to halve the size of the leviathan with powerful magic, but it chaotically backfires through their fracture and brings back their worst fears (and boy are those fears rough). Avalon uses her Drenched powers to turn a lot of the water into steam which floats away, further diminishing the size and strength of the leviathan, but the monster is angry now and starts to attack them. Xan'li manages to slow it down long enough to get away but Avalon's attack fails and leaves her to get slammed by the weight of a living tsunami.

While those two distract it, Aaron shifts into a flying fish and leaps up from the river into the now higher-up water of the monster. He swims over to the Azural Font in his merman form and, realizing that nature is magic and magic is nature, he shifts the Balance of the Rift to suck the leviathan back into the Plane of Water. The people of Temisray Bend are left unharmed, if a bit fishy.

## Continuity

This one-shot took place after The World Tremors in WoDaD Session 13 and before One-Shot: Wave Train.

## Trivia

* The carnivorous kelp Aaron talked to spoke in modern gamer speak (more or less). This was very weird for the characters, but strangely in line with the other time a one-shot PC has spoken to plants! See One-Shot: Nature Calls.