The Danger Gang swims with the remnants of Troy
Bright and early, the Gang is shaken from their hangovers and set sail to Troy in the Magdeleon.
As the ship passes their island, the sleepless Akoimetoi can be heard singing, as always.
Several hours later, the party finds itself kicking around the dust of where once stood the topless towers of Ilium. Not coincidentally that probably it the most well-hacked site in all of Anatolia.
Nevertheless, the Danger Gang get down to business and scour the area, searching hither and yon for... something. Their efforts are for naught. Karl Shinyhands' interrogation of burrowing mammals is similarly fruitless.
For want of any better options, the Gang spells up for underwater adventuring and dives beneath the waves. They are immediately attacked -- a good sign when looking for something of value.
A woman who seems to be made from the very sea foam directs two enormous serpents against the Danger Gang, who get the worst of it on the first round. Cormac is poisoned and constricted, only to be teleported to safety by Zombres and tended to by Gershom in the following round. The tide soon turns (yok yok), for while the lady seems almost completely magic resistant, her snakes are soon beaten to a pulp and she signals her desire to parley.
She reveals herself to be Thoë, a nereid, and her water serpents the juvenile descendants of the Ketos Troyas, a sea monster defeated by Hercules. Several hundred years earlier she found some nebbishy guy poking around the cave where the monster had laid her eggs. When he started smashing them, she managed to chase him away, and decided it might be a good idea to bring some of the eggs out of dormancy. Thus her friends, an endangered species, were later hatched.
She claims that she has no clue where he went next, but gives them the bag he dropped when he ran off, now tattered and threadbare. It contains a sealed beaker with oil of fire resistance, a prize he didn't much seem to mind abandoning and all the Danger Gang gets for their troubles.
They press Thoë to question some of the longer-lived creatures in the area as to where this man, surely their Isaac, might have gone off to. Nofish seems to know, until some very ancient coral opines that he may have mentioned something about a river.
"Like the Sungarius River, for example?" Gershom drops smugly. "Zombres, you're an idiot. It's right here on this map that Can gave us. Right here. I can't believe you missed it. You should've stayed in shul!" They bicker, but none can deny that the Sungarius River runs right from the Bosporous into Anatolia, giving the Gang another nearby locale to check out.
They bid Thoë and her snakes adieu and rest up in preparation for the trip back east.
