The Demise of the Delcinia

The morning after Apastron, Quelenna and Cathance were having a nice breakfast together in the back tavern at Freelancers Villa.  There was porridge with honey, and bacon, and they were catching up on various goings-on.  Halfway across the room, they saw Kaikoa and Ondar drinking breakfast beer together.

Damakaios entered, and looked around.  He saw Ondar and Kaikoa, then Quelenna and Cathance, and came over to the latter's table.  "Are the two of you interested in a mission?" he inquired.

"Sure," Quelenna replied, and the hanyou waved the two of them into his office.  Cathance grabbed a last piece of bacon as she climbed down from the chair.  They got to his office and Damakaios shut the door.  As he went to his desk, Quelenna leaned back against the wall next to the door, arms crossed in front of her.

Damakaios' desk had a cylinder of glass the size of a beer stein attached to it, next to the edge on the Pungareyu hanyou's right.  Other than that his office was unchanged, with its rows of matching chairs, and cabinets with many small weapons.  Cathance looked back and forth at Damakaios, then Quelenna, and seated herself so her back wasn't to either of them.

Damakaios leaned back and stroked his goatee.  "I'm not sure what happened," he started, "There was a horrible airship crash yesterday.  The mechanical airship Delcinia crashed into the side of Commerce yesterday, and with your flying mounts, you can investigate."

Damakaios got up from his desk and walked to the map on the wall near the glass cylinder, and pointed to a place on the southwest limb of the skylith.  Quelenna came to look in spite of herself, and Cathance stood up on the chair.  "Take a look, see what there is to see.  Cargo?  Maybe it was sabotaged?"  He sighed.  "Don't worry about survivors."

Cathance:  what kind of crew did it have?
Damakaios:  Mikamwes & Djogeon.  Halflings.
Cathance:  😮
Damakaios:  the captain was a Mikamwes named Hubbard.
Cathance:  where from?
Damakaios:  don't know
Cathance:  should we stop at the port and ask?
Quelenna:  sounds good.

The two Freelancers headed out, buying 12 rations each to keep themselves and their mounts fed.  But they did stop by the dockmaster's office on the Ripa Daneo side of the port on the Rim.

The dockmaster was male Garuda coloured like a red-tailed hawk.  When the two Freelancers asked him if the Delcinia was expected, where it was from, and was it carrying cargo or passengers, he told them, "We were expecting Delcinia, out of Falas Vronti on Thunderer, early this morning.  I do not know its cargo, or who it was landing for."

Cathance thanked him, and the Freelancers took their leave.

Quelenna was on Hau-kea and Cathance was on Jigsaw, and the two of them flew south over the mountains until the ground was less hilly.  Unfortunately, the weather south of the mountains was a little odd; an unexpected mix of fog, rain, and mist.

The Freelancers knew the best way to get where they were going would be to follow the river south and down along the limb of the skylith, but at the end of the day, as the visibility cleared somewhat, they realized they were following the wrong river, and were more towards the center of southern Commerce (as viewed from above) than near the river to their west.

Resigned, they found an okay place to camp, and settled in for the night.  Since Quelenna needed less rest than Cathance, they split the night so Cathance took first watch, for 4 hours, and Quelenna would take second, for 6 hours.

Cathance heard, far off, an eerie scream.  It repeated, and seemed to be moving far away, to the east.  She thought maybe it was a mountain lion.
Quelenna also heard the same sounds.  After listening to them for a while, she realized these were cheshires, but far away.

The next morning, the fog and drizzle appeared to be higher up, leaving them dry but overcast.  The Freelancers packed up and flew west, looking for the river they were to follow.  They found it and followed it south, and then down as they were following the curve of the skylith.

The ground changed with the increasing angle:  the grassland gave way to weird rock protrusions, with trees that had oddly-angled trunks, and underbrush.  After a couple hours, they spotted the stern of a mechanical airship poking out of the rocks.

The Freelancers swooped closer, and saw that the airship apparently penetrated a cave wall.  One of the wings was bent back… it was the port wing, sticking out.  On closer inspection they saw the airship was actually occupying ⅔ of a large cave entrance that was effectively created by the starboard wing.

Cathance circled, and decided it looked stable.  She had Jigsaw land on the observation deck, but she did not dismount.  "Halloooo, does anyone here?" she called, in her penetrating voice, but there was no answer.

Quelenna kept circling, looking.  She was trying to see if there was visible cause of the crash, but despite her careful observation, she didn't see any obvious cause.  Neither could she see the starboard wing.  She saw rusty stairs on the airship in the cave, forward of Cathance on the observation deck.  She saw a stern hatch that was closed, and a hatch in the cave, on the bow, that had rust–with a start, she realized it was dried blood.

The afternoon light of the Daystar illuminated the cave, but there were sharp shadows.

Quelenna:  perhaps there are people in the front of the airship
Cathance <retrieved her gem of brightness>:  let's look!
Quelenna:  is what we're here for

They flew in, and examined the bow hatch.  It clearly sported damage from three separate sources:  the crash; forced open from the inside; then pulled back in place and many claw marks.  The hatch was open, now.

"So, something has already been here!" Quelenna exclaimed, and got out her driftglobe.  "Ao," she said, and the globe produced daylight.  She placed it so they had a nice oval of light.

Cathance lit up her gem of brightness, dismounted, and looked in the hatch, to see chewed-on halflings everywhere.  Taken aback, the Mikamwes could barely absorb what she saw; some crashed, some chewed-on.  The smell of decay was overpowering; she didn't really hear the scuttling claws outside.

Quelenna, though, was watching a pale white creature the size of Jigsaw, that kind of looked like a scorpion with no tail.  "Hey Cathance, looks like we found something," she called.  Cathance looked out the bow hatch.

Quelenna dismounted, pulling out her purple mournlode fans, and attacked this creature.  

• Her first slash slit open the carapace neatly but the second slash critfailed and the fan got stuck.
• The monk let go of the stuck fan and struck at the albino creature with a flurry of blows, which missed.
• "We better win this," Quelenna declared, "Because I need that [fan] back."
• She had Hau-kea attack, but Hau-kea critfailed with her beak, causing her to shake her head repeatedly; and (understandably) missed with her claws

The albino scorpion slashed Quelenna and Hau-Kea each with one of its claws.

Cathance looked up to see if there was room to fly up, and there was.

• The halfling called Jigsaw over, and mounted, then flew up.
• Drawing on the tides of chaos, she cast a twice-uplevel'd chromatic orb and sent it at the albino scorpion.  The orb settled on lightning before it struck, wounding the scorpion badly.
• The chaos rebounded and triggered a fireball on Cathance.  To her horror, she could not control it and the explosion almost killed Jigsaw.
• "Jigsaw!" Cathance cried, then lowered her voice, "oh, no, I'm so sorry."

Quelenna attacked the scorpion with her fan, slashing it in the carapace again.

• Since the other fan was stuck in the carapace she sliced a second time with the same fan, and critfailed again, managing to slice herself.
• The monk followed up with flurry of blows, to deal two spinning kicks to the albino creature's head.  It died, the carapace cracking.
• Quelenna retrieved her fan from the cracked carapace.

Jigsaw landed, very unhappy, coat and feathers burned, and Cathance dug out her Restorative Ointment.  She dismounted and carefully applied it to the wings closest to where the fireball had been centered, and it helped some.

Quelenna, watching her, crossed her arms.  "Maybe we should leave," she suggested.  Cathance thought about the mission, and replied, "But, the cargo."

They went inside to look, but really had a bad time.  Cathance, already shocked and sad, was now also distracted by worry about Jigsaw; and Quelenna, far too tall for the inner cabins, was freshly encountering the smell of decay.  They located some crates, covered in… guck, and Quelenna just went back out the bow hatch.

Steeling herself, Cathance used prestidigitation on the crates, and took a look.  She found nothing special:  incense, furs, small expensive items.  There were barrels leaking food & drink as well.  She didn't find anything that looked like contraband or magic.  Pressing her lips together, she grabbed some of the incense and furs that looked undamaged, and left through the bow hatch.

Quelenna, meanwhile, decided to harvest the carapace from the dead scorpion.  Her instincts on it were exactly correct, and she retrieved it with no further damage.  <Narrator voice:  Wendy rolled a nat 20 for survival>

The Daystar was westering, and the two Freelancers decided perhaps encountering more albino scorpions in the dark was a bad idea, so they mounted up and flew back to the river they'd been following, and followed it north until they found a good place to camp.