wet, wet, wet

The only way we have found to return to Raora is by travelling to the plane of the water elementals and exiting from one of their portals on Raora. We believe we can reach theiir plane via the portals at the ruins and Valkor seems confident that he can navigate the plane to find our way, and tells us that there will be air for us to breathe.

I have to say I am dubious but Valkor has shown himself to be reasonably reliable and it seems we have little choice unless we want to wait some months for a ship to visit, which given the strange happenings seems an unwise choice.

As we have been travelling around the island a large, ugly brute of a dog has been following us around and I have befriended him not least because he seems to hate everyone we meet. He is pretty torn up either from being in scraps with other creatures or from abuse, and that makes me feel a kinship for him so I have befriended him and called him Happy. Given some time I am sure I can teach him some useful skills—for the moment I’m just trying to reinforce his hatred and mistrust of everyone since I think that’s the single most useful survival skill he can have.

We made our way back to the ruins and Valkor attempted to cast spells to divine the destinations of each portal which was apparently less successful than he had hoped. He activated one of the portals but could not divine the destination. Stimpy unwisely stepped through and we debated whether we should follow, despite the obvious potential hazard in doing so. While we were trying to decide what to do Stimpy emerged from the portal looking extremely ill. He described what he had seen and Valkor said it sounded like the plane the howlers had come from, though that wasn’t where their tracks had led; leading me to the unpleasant thought that the portals may shift, meaning that should we find the correct portal once, we would not be able to rely on it having the same destination should we want it again.

We found the portal we wanted on our next try, though we had failed to anticipate the problems of negotiating it. There is no fixed concept of gravity and we were just hanging in the air. Stimpy sent himself flying in one direction and then crashed into Valkor when he tried to get back. Valkor asked me to cast my spell to determine the area around us in hopes it would reveal where the portals are but as I suspected it just told me that there were no significant geographical features within range. Valkor suggested we return through the portal and work out a plan.

Happy was relieved to be back on the ground. I share his unease in the alien environment but at least I understand that it can be expected to be strange—I can only imagine what he must make of it.

Valkor insisted that we needed to go back to Red for advice. For apparently intelligent people I can’t fathom this obsession that Red is a useful source of information when he has never told us anything we didn’t already know!

Stimpy agrees with Valkor and for the sake of actually doing something I have conceded, but I have gifted the two of them with planks of wood on which I have carved “visiting Red” and suggested they just repeatedly hit themselves on the forehead with them, since that’s about as much value as speaking to the man himself.

We trekked back to the other end of the island and once more met with Red. On the way I taunted Happy with a little red-haired effigy and was very pleased by the greeting he gave Red when we met. Sometimes I think Happy is smarter than half our group.

I was surprised that Red actually made a contribution this time, reminding us that there was water pouring into the water plane from Raora, so there might be some way to pick that up. I groaned inwardly—it was something we could have, and should have, worked out for ourselves and now the other idiots would put Red on an even higher pedestal.

Back to the ruins again and along the way Kat and Stimpy collected bunches of leaves and twigs to drop into the water on the other side to look for currents in the water that we could hopefully track back to the portal we need.

We also roped ourselves together so that we could move as a group instead of each person having to will themselves around and ending up all over the plane. I also carried Happy; both because I hoped it would help ease his distress and because it would be all but impossible to teach him how to move there.

It took us a while to get the feel for making ourselves move, but eventually we got it more or less under control and Stimpy started dropping some of his little bundles onto the water’s surface and sure enough we could see a current that we could backtrack.

Eventually Valkor said there was a portal up ahead and we could only assume it would take us to Raora. As we approached it water started spraying at us which must have been the water that should have been filling the river on Raora. We moved into it but didn’t have enough momentum and we were forced back coughing and spluttering.

So we mentally created a sort of “running start” and charged at the portal. There was a brief period where we seemed to be underwater, then my sense of which way was up started jumping around all over the place and we fell into a muddy river bed.

It appeared we’d made it as the terrain looked right, but as well as the water elemental there were a group of humans and a group of lizardmen and it wasn’t really clear who was fighting whom.

The humans started to break off their fight and we followed them. The lizardmen also withdrew and the elemental retreated into the river source and safety.

Once we explained how we came to be there (not that I’m sure much of it was understood) we were told that the lizardmen had diverted the river flow we had restored, claiming it for their own and defending it energetically. I wondered how much of their zeal was due to our friend the shaman. The humans had been despatched to find out what had happened to the water, run into the lizardmen, and would now return to town to report.

We decided to wait until the next day and try our luck against the elemental. Valkor said that the elemental may heal from being in the water source, but it might not and given the vigorous fight we had stumbled into it might be sorely wounded and once we were recovered and had suitable magics prepared might just be able to finish it off.

And so the next day we arose and returned to the river. Stimpy had some magical flame ball that he dropped into the river source to flush the elemental out while Kat and I tried to pepper it with arrows. Valkor trapped it with his magical web which made it harder to hit with arrows, but gave us much more time to wear it down.

The frustrating thing about a being of water is that you can’t really tell how badly it’s hurt but all of a sudden it just melted away and we looked at each other in surprise and then relief.

It took us a few minutes to realise that killing the elemental hadn’t restored the river flow. The other portals had closed when we killed their elemental but this one had not and so we will have to find some other way to close it, which I guess will require a trip to Seawell and lots of reading and so on that I’m Valkor will enjoy immensely.

On the other hand I guess it will give me time to teach Happy some tricks. Like “kill”. Good boy!