The Road South, Chapter One

Ships in the Sky
Monday, June 18th, 988 AD

Upsala seems to be in turmoil. The general populace is really worried because King Erik the Victorious isn't around to hold their hands or something. They know there are Giants about the countryside and apparently, about four or five days ago, three ships sailed through the sky before crash landing. One crashed about a mile south of the city on land, another crashed into a swamp, also south of the city, and the third probably didn't crash so much as land in the sea before going under water.

We head south to check out the ship that crash-landed on land and upon seeing it, we realize it's not a sailing ship as we had been lead to believe, but the pyramids from Hudic, which are actually octahedrons. It's lying on one of the faces from the bottom half. There is a door on the bottom half of the flying ship. Reynaldo opens the door and sees that the bottom half is separated from the top half, as well as being bisected. Reynaldo opens the next door across from his own (being careful not to fall into the point below). In the second room in the bottom half there is are handholds on the wall, five levers, a dead body, and a hole leading into the upper half of the octahedron. The levers are in the following positions: the first is slightly down from center, the second is slightly up from center, the third is all the way down, the fourth is almost all the way up, and the fifth is almost all the way down.

Jean-Claude checks the dead body and sees that it has been burned quite badly. He and Reynaldo, both flying, head through the hole leading up and are surprised by five-foot long worms with shaggy heads and electricity coming out of their tails. They down both Reynaldo and Oddvar, but are ultimately all killed.

We go into the upper half, which is its own room except for a corner that is walled off. The main room has a six foot tall black marble column, two chains hanging off the wall, two ratty red cloaks, another dead man, and a dead worm-thing that we didn't kill. The walls of this main room are decorated with reliefs of large Octopuses standing over dinosaurs with two moons in the sky, one of which is shattered. We check this dead guy and realize that he's a Tailed Person. We check out the second guy and confirm our suspicions that he also has a tail.

The smaller room in the upper half had a small amount of water on the floor, and suddenly, Oddvar starts to put everything together. The electric worms (he tells us they're called Volts) powered the ship. They kept them in this room with the water and the constant electrical discharge powered the ship. The levers in the bottom half more than likely control pitch, turning, as well as landing and taking off. The Volts must have escaped either during the crash or maybe even their escape actually caused the crash.

We decide to rest inside the octahedron.

Pyramid Spaceships!
Tuesday, June 19th, 988 AD

In the morning, Edward casts Speak with Dead on one of the Tailed People, but the dead man doesn't speak any languages Edward does. He takes the head of the other Tailed Person so that he can speak to it later, and maybe have better luck.

We decide to power the ship, even if only for a little while, just to see what it does. Spell Immunity is cast on Reynaldo and he locks himself into the smaller room with the water. He casts three Lightning Bolts and for three minutes, the ship lifts up off the ground and the walls become transparent so that we can see out of the ship from inside. The black marble column sprouts an illusion of a planet with some kind of bar running through it. When Conrad touched the illusion, the bar crumbled and then took the world with it. We think the octahedron is a spaceship and our ticket to the moon.

We get out and cross the swamp to the other octahedron. We meet three lamenting women outside of the ship who say their husbands went in to investigate a day ago and haven't come out. Reynaldo Magic Jars and feels three life forces inside, none of them human. He takes over the body of something that he thinks is a Volt, but doesn't feel at all like a one. He feels that he has two appendages, but it's not a tail and a head. He also doesn't see any other life forms, but then again, he can't really see, per se. It's more like within this body, he has some kind of radar sense.

The rest of the party comes in to investigate. This ship is standing upright in the swamp, but the inside rooms are exactly like in the other ship. When they get into the main upper room, they see the three dead bodies of the husbands and many dead Volts, as well as the body that Reynaldo is inhabiting, which is a black, duo-tentacled orb. Suddenly, three smaller tentacled orbs burst out of the three bodies. They wrap themselves around Ivan, Dorn, and Edward, and attempt to inject them with poison. They succeed in poisoning Dorn with their fast-acting poison. Jean-Claude tries to save him by cutting open the wound, pouring oil in, and setting it ablaze. It does nothing but cause Dorn a lot more pain. Ivan gives him a bottle of vodka and Dorn continues to fight, knowing he will probably die before the creatures do. He does fall to his death, and we kill the three creatures before they can poison anybody else. We then start hacking at Reynaldo's large tentacled orb and kill it.

Oddvar and Jean-Claude think these tentacled orbs might be telepathic and acted as the ship's communication systems, though Reynaldo couldn't access said telepathy if it in fact existed. More importantly, the tentacled orb from the first ship is missing, and that's a problem.

Reynaldo then jumps into one of the other creatures he still feels and it turns out to be a manta ray. Manta-Rey (heh heh) sees two other Tailed People at the bottom of the bottom half of the octahedron, in the first room. When he tries to pull them out, the other manta ray attacks him. They fight for awhile but the other manta wins, but Ivan then stabs it, killing it instantly. The two mantas are red and resemble cloaks, making them Cloaks of the Manta, and meaning the other cloaks in the other spaceship are probably spent or destroyed cloaks of the same kind.

We start making plans on how to move these two ships and power them up, as well as defending them from their previous owners, no doubt coming to reclaim them.

End of Chapter One