seeing Red

And so we spoke with the queen of my heart. We told her we were seeking Miranda, and we told her of our encounters with water elementals on Raora. She reacted noticably when we mentioned water elementals but didn’t say anything. I figured she’d tell us what she knew when she was ready, and that was good enough for me. Good enough for the others, too, because they didn’t push her on it.

She said she knew Miranda. She didn’t offer to help us find her, but said she’d pass on a message. If she saw Miranda. And in her own good time. It was so kind of her to help us. Finally, a person I like!

Once we had a method for getting a message to Miranda we could concentrate on other things. We had days before we were due to go back to see what information Red had gathered, so instead we decided to check out the ruins at the other end of the island. A couple of days there, a couple of days back—there was time to look around.

Weird things happen everywhere. We were down near the ruins when we heard an unholy screaming and saw some people running from two ugly spiny creatures bigger than wolves. The things were unbelievably fast and as we watched they easily ran down one of the people and ripped him to shreds.

Despite the size of the things and all the spines it was a reasonably short fight. We came through it quite well except for Glynn who got himself spiked four times. With his blue sharkskin armour and the few odd spines just hanging their limply he looked like a bagpipes.

Just because I was carrying Stimpy’s wand of healing Glynn seemed to think I’d be able to cut those things out of him. I laughed and said I’d be happy to do so as I fingered my cutlass like a fine delicate knife.

I managed to suitably freak him out and he ran off to one of the locals asking if they could help him. One of them offered to do it. I could tell by looking at the dead beasts that the spines would be nasty to remove even with a skilled barber and sure enough Glynn was screaming his lungs out as the first spine was cut free, and then even louder as the second was removed.

I renewed my offer to help and clearly the pain had addled his brain because he took me up. I twisted the spines as I pulled them free but I guess Glynn had pretty much passed his pain threshold because I failed to get the reaction I was after and he even thanked me afterwards. Or maybe he was messing with me.

These horrors had sprung forth from the ruins and we were told by the locals that this was the first time something of this kind had occurred, though there were frequently strange lights or sounds.

We went to investigate the ruins. It was similar to a druidic circle. Except it wasn’t a circle. Some of the standing stones had fallen but the whole area was dripping with magic, or so Valkor said. We could follow the trail the beasts had made back to one particular pair of stones and we searched the area thoroughly, finding an old ring that Valkor also said was magical. He said it was all about inter-planar something-or-other but I tuned out.

There seemed little more to find here so we headed North again to keep our appointment with Red. The trip was uneventful and before long we were scaling the mountain again. We found him and he seemed surprised to see us. We asked him if he had our information and he confessed he didn’t actually know anything about Miranda—he just figured we wouldn’t come back. Damn people.

We told him about the strange beasts at the ruins and he seemed to agree with Valkor that it was whatever-it-was that Valkor said was going on. He said that we weren’t man enough to deal with what was going on; that it was some problem with our plane and if we could return some pouch he thought he’d lost on the first plane of Hell then maybe we were capable of helping to fix things.

We returned to the base of the mountain and set up camp as our note to Miranda had said we would be here if she wanted to meet us. We waited a couple of days and she didn’t show. We did manage to get in a fight with a dire bear and again we fended well for ourselves. I was particularly angry as I cut into it, remembering my poor father who had died because of Percy’s desire to show off.

I only wish I could have sent the dire bear to Percy. Maybe I should ask Valkor if there’s some way we can take advantage of all these portals to do that. That would be so sweet to have two or three dire bears materialise in his private chambers and splatter him all over the walls.

We resolved to go back to the woods to look for Miranda. Clearly the beautiful woman (isn’t that funny—we were so mesmerised we forgot to get her name) hadn’t seen Miranda. Or perhaps Miranda had decided she didn’t want to meet with us.

We went back into the forest and wandered around for a while before we found our former camp site. From there we followed the trail of our glorious friend as she wandered seemingly at random through the forest. It seemed as good a path to follow as any—we had no real idea where Miranda would be, and I figured we might see where she had met with our beautiful friend. She seemed in no hurry as she meandered through the forest and though she only seemed to camp for four or five hours at a time and we weren’t really trying we were gaining on her. As we followed there seemed no indication of her tracks crossing those of any other people and I started to wonder if it was possible that, despite not matching the description we had, our stranger was Miranda.

Before I realised how close we were getting we were in her presence again. And I was right. We spoke to her again and she admitted that she was Miranda. And apparently this whole thing seemed to be related to the ship Bessy referred to in the letter we’d found in the lighthouse on Raora so long ago. We also heard how this related to the lighthouse keeper on Raora. He was on the Bessy when it sunk, lost consciousness and then awoke on Raora. His son, who we rescued from the ghostly apparition of the King’s Eye has been trying to locate Bessy (not that he told us that!) and Miranda believes that Bessy is situated in a planar rift or some such and this is where all the current problems are based.

She wrote us a note to take back to the boy so that this time he might actually tell us what we need to know and we returned to our ship to sail back to Raora.

Or at least that was the plan. When we got back to where the ship should have been moored it was gone. The townspeople said it had been gone for a week or so. No message, no reason why it would have gone. They just assumed we’d left with it. Damn it, I hate people!