The Elven woman shakes her head with a rueful laugh.
Blessing is from Deities.Then she brightens, excited again.
But I’m thrilled that you are coming along and want to experiment! I was planning to leave soon… now is even better. And you have everything with you right there. She floats upright, studying his ship intently, and circles it; her gaze seems strangely unfocussed. She points at a section of the hull toward the stern, and then directly at a few points close to the bow.
Mmmm... There, there is a crack through the crystal structure inside, on the port side, and some deep gouges. And a few spots that have been crushed in a bit on port and starboard near the bow. On the whole, quite good, considering where you sailed. It helped that your ship was igneous, which of course it had to be from the Plane of Fire, because the infusion of Positive Energy adapted it to Mineral. Much like the experiment we were discussing for yourself!She floats out onto the lake of bubbling Magma slag, hot from Radiance but choked with Mineral, and runs her hands slowly along the side of the ship where she pointed out an internal crack. Her hands take on a Rose glow like a sunrise. The glow flows from her hands onto the ship as she paints it thickly with Rose light, and the color sinks into the hull as it fades from sight. Then she goes round the bow of the ship to each one of the gouged spots in turn, and covers them in Rose light as well. She floats up onto the deck, humming a sailor’s tune happily to herself, and touches up the mast, sails, rails, spars, each place cracked or broken. The Rose sinks in, mending them perfectly. Then she makes rubbing motions and soon the whole of the ship dazzles with polish. She floats back to Halfaz.
It’s beautiful!
It is whole, and well. Your trip along the coast of Mineral has covered your hull with Gold, Silver, and Platinum, and even a little Adamantine and quite a lot of Mithril! all swirled together, encrusted with Gemstones. And you sailed so close to the Positive Plane that for the most part they are crushed Iouns and ProtoMetals! See, there, where the bits of crystals are embedded in the metal? Some of those are functional, charged with energy. And since they have already crossed over from Mineral to Radiance, they have already undergone whatever explosive decompression was in them.Halfaz can see the dazzling colors of the Plane reflected and refracted back from the newly crystalline interior of the ship’s deck in swarms of brilliant points, lines, and planes of light. Splashes of gold, silver, platinum, electrum, and Mithril swirl in random patches here and there across the surface of the deck, and completely cover the hull in a thick layer, plated onto it from wash after wash against the shoreline of Mineral melting into Magma, and especially from ploughing down the Magma and Mineral sludge into the pond where the ship rests now. The igneous hull itself has been transformed by the intense Positive Energy exposure natural to the Planes of Radiance and Mineral to an understructure of beautiful crystalline gemstone plates. The rail, the mast, sails and rigging, cabin, roof sheeting, gangways and companionways to below deck, are a wash of the same metallic colors and sheets and columns of gemstone, which the Elf has Magically polished to brilliance. Even the ropes are of braided gold, silver, Mithril. The top and outer edge of the rail is set with flecks of geometric gemstones from scraping against the spires and fingers of Mineral toward the end of the trip, with the pieces mixed together in a thousand colors.
I’m going to take some random rolls to find out what, if anything, has stuck to the ship, such as Ioun Minerals, but I’d like you to generate the seed. Please send a percentile roll, D100.
She casts, and the ship begins to shrink rapidly; she beckons to it and it rises out of the Magma pool to hover in front of them. It is in perfect miniature, now gleaming even brighter.
Shipshape can’t increase the value of a ship; but considering that yours is made of precious metals and gems, it could turn into almost anything! Shrinking down like that, it is probably all ProtoMetal now, since its value was just compressed into a much tinier form.She plucks it up and slips it into his pocket. She also takes up the staff she had been carrying, and pushes it down into one of the many small pouches girdling her belt; its whole length slides in without even a bulge.
Well. She taps her lips with a forefinger in thought.
We could walk the Rainbow Bridge back to the University, pick up Winston if he would like to come along, and then go from there. Halfaz looks where she is pointing and sees an arc of Rainbow soaring up into the distance, from a beginning point not far from the base of the Tower of Blue Flame.
But we could get bogged down easily at the University. Besides, I’m in the middle of an experiment now, with Flame Candy… you would love that! …and I don’t want to interrupt myself. I think it might be better to transit to the Astral, catch a Voidjammer to the Color Pool always near Bral, which will take practically no time at all even without having to adjust your Timeline, and then drop through to the Prime, and Spelljam the rest of the way. Besides, you like to sail, and so do I, and that journey is nearly all by ship. She looks over at Halfaz, quietly blissful, taking it all in.
You would like to go, so, let’s!! Her hair cascades enthusiastic sparks. She takes his hand as she turns a pale silvery color, and then so does Halfaz. In a moment, the rainbow landscape fades, along with the heat. Color returns to the Elf and to Halfaz. Halfaz can see silver lines running every which way into the limitless distance, eventually obscuring vision in a silver haze. There is no ground or sky, or even any strong sense of up or down.
This location gets superior service from the Lines because two cross here, and because it’s a popular stop for travelers from the Inner Planes who can enter the Astral Plane directly. She points into the near distance; Halfaz can see a small group of Efreeti there! She points again, to the other side; Halfaz can see a pair of Dao, dressed in gold leaf adorned with gemstones, attended by six Liths in livery. After a moment, it’s evident that the two groups are studiously ignoring each other.
If they make trouble at a Voidjammer stop, and are reported for it, they will be refused transit. The Lines don’t take kindly to their stops becoming unsafe places to wait, and won’t brook any trouble between passengers.The Elf takes out a device with a round surface set with circles of tiny seagreen winking gems, consults it, and thinks for a moment.
Their schedule isn’t perfect; all kinds of little emergencies come up on their thousand-stop routes… picking up or letting off large groups, attacks by pirates, that sort of thing. But since others are waiting, we haven’t just missed a ship. We won’t have to wait long… which doesn’t mean much on this Plane anyway. Sure enough, in some Time later, how long is hard to tell, a distant object begins to resolve into the shape of a vessel floating against the silvery haze. It very quickly grows in size.
When the ship finally comes along side the waiting passengers, and stops, it is enormous. Estimating distances in this featureless void is challenging, but the Voidjammer has to be at least 1000 feet long stem to stern with a beam of at least 250 feet. A company of uniformed attendants descends, heavily armed and armored, circled around a dozen battle mages. They are quickly followed by a wave of passengers: two dozen Efreeti with their retinue of 50 porters carrying heavy baggage; twice as many Dao with twice as much luggage and bearers, and several dozen other creatures of various races from all over the Inner Planes. The ship waits as they disperse, watched closely by the armored attendants. Then a small group of liveried attendants descend and begin to check in the new passengers. For each passenger, the attendants inquire about destinations, and collect fares in gems which are closely examined, and then evaluated with Magic, before they are accepted. A few individual passengers come up, who had been waiting at a distance away, and several groups paying together are boarded together. The company of Efreeti hustle up early, apparently intending to take priority over the Dao. The Dao do not even approach until the Efreeti and most of the rest of the passengers disappear inside the ship, and then they too are processed into the ship.
Star waits with Halfaz until they are last, and then floats toward the ship, bringing him with her. The lead battle mage pushes past the liveried attendants and shoos them back inside the ship. With no incidents to take their attention, the troops march back inside, waiting just inside the ship’s huge cargo portal.
The battle mage, wearing officer insignia, greets Star warmly; Halfaz hears him give her the title “First Navigator”. Star explains briefly that she and Halfaz will be travelling over three hundred stops down the line, but they won’t be needing cabins, since they will be staying on the Bridge for the most part. The battle mage salutes and leads them inside as the massive portal clangs shut and is securely bolted in place. With smooth acceleration and little sense of movement the huge ship gets underway.
The battle mage leads them up companionway after companionway. Fifteen or sixteen decks later Halfaz realizes it’s very easy to lose count. Star gives Halfaz a running commentary about the areas of the ship as they pass through them, and tells him that the lack of signage is for security. The crew all have memorized their way around, and passengers are expected to keep to their separate areas or the few tightly supervised common areas to avoid incidents. She lets him in on a secret, as the mage locks a metal door and unlocks another, swinging them over to a different stairwell: the crew changes the connections of the corridors according to an intentionally confusing plan that they have practiced, announced randomly by the Captain secretly to the crew at the beginning of each first watch. Any attacking forces from outside the ship, or inside, can’t rely simply on floor plans to find their way around, and often the easiest paths to follow lead to cul-de-sacs that become cages at need.
Life on the Astral Plane can be very rough, and there is no central authority keeping the peace. Each ship is on its own as a floating fortress, though they are in communication and reinforcements will arrive as soon as they can. The Flagship of the Voidjammer Lines is much faster than the rest of the ships; it may be the fastest travelling object on the Plane, and is easily the most heavily armed. Prepared to deal with anything, including a sudden outbreak of the Blood War in its vicinity, it will leave its own route to rush to the aid of any of the dozen other ships in the Lines. The challenges to any attackers and the swift response from the Flagship have been an effective deterrent. The Voidjammer Lines are respected for safe transit across the Plane to any of the thirteen thousand regular stops, almost all at Color Pools to other Planes, and at many points between by special arrangement.
On the Bridge, Star introduces Halfaz to the officers, compares charts with the ship’s Navigator, and trades stories with the Captain. While she is chatting elsewhere, when Halfaz asks about the “First Navigator” title, the ship’s Navigator tells Halfaz that Star was the Flagship Navigator for a long time, hired after she mapped much of the Astral Plane. Usually that position, called First Navigator, is a promotion from one of the other ships, but her expertise was a prize for the Lines, and her name was already on the maps they were using anyway. The Navigator mentions that Star lived part time in Sigil while on leave, as a lot of the crew does, and then tells a few stories about life in Sigil, a mercantile city also called the City of Doors because of all the Portals leading to it. There are even a few that are scheduled Voidjammer stops, though not on the circuit this ship follows; they would have to change ships at a crossover stop. When he hears about Halfaz sailing the Plane of Magma, he asks for story after story, and others on the Bridge come over to listen. Soon Halfaz has quite an audience.
Another officer, the Social Director comes to the Bridge, and she and Star hug. Star introduces her to Halfaz as Jen, a pretty Half-Elven woman who Star says has been her friend since they were little girls. Star and Jen both tell the story that it was Jen who taught Star to handle a sailboat and began her love of sailing, on one of Star’s first forays into a Prime Material world. To Halfaz’s amazement, the lake was made entirely of water. Jen explains that most of her job on the Voidjammer is to make sure the passengers don’t get bored and into trouble, by keeping a rotation of entertainers busy, and food and drink flowing. She recruits entertainers from all over the Planes, since different creatures have very different tastes. Jen asks Star about the music band that Star and some friends took to the Lower Planes, which leads into another story. Then Jen hears about Halfaz telling stories on the Bridge about sailing the Plane of Magma, and with Star’s prompting, gets the story out of him about his journey to northern Radiance where he met Star. Soon Halfaz finds himself on the ship’s entertainment roster, repeating his tale about the far north coast of Mineral to Inner Planar audiences that are amazed, or skeptical, but always entranced, and always astounded when he shows them his miniature bejeweled ship. Some of the rich merchants make him truly astounding offers to buy it from him, even the merchants who don’t believe it is a real ship made tiny, but none of the offers seem worth the priceless object. Besides, Star said they would need it for the last leg of their journey, and he can’t wait to sail it again.
Star does a brisk side business in selling maps, since every passenger is an Astral traveler, and Jen approaches Halfaz with a fat purse for the entertaining he has been doing; he seems to have become part of the crew. Working for his passage is quite familiar to him and he begins to take on other duties similar to the ones he knows from sailing the Plane of Magma; all ships have similarities. Star too seems to have become a natural part of the Bridge officer rotation, and apparently is drawing an Officer’s pay; the three Navigators and their Assistant Navigators never seem to be satisfied with her attention even after endlessly questioning her while poring over scroll after scroll after scroll of maps. All of them want to learn about every feature of the Plane, not just the ones on their route. Perhaps they could become First Navigator some day, who has to be ready to guide the Flagship anywhere an emergency might take it. Other times when she is not on the Bridge, Halfaz learns that Star is also training the Battle Mages in what she calls High Energy Magic.
One of the stops on the route is a Color Pool to Acheron; Star tells Halfaz that a lot of traffic comes through because it’s a natural transfer point to go anywhere in the Lower Planes. The ship is scheduled for a very long layover there. She slips off on brief shore leave, bringing Halfaz along because she is meeting with a sailor, she tells him. They come to the Color Pool, a bright red-orange like the color of flame, which almost seems comforting to Halfaz, and pass quickly through the Color Pool ahead of the large crowd getting off the Voidjammer, but then the Evil hits him like a slap across the forehead. They plunge down a steep, rough rocky stair, the center of the steps worn smooth from countless others passing, and as they round a bend in the hillside, a black river is below, churning and steaming. A queue of boats waits for passengers, who are just beginning to trickle through the Color Pool into Acheron; an entire fleet of boatmen has come, dropping off the passengers now boarding the Voidjammer, and picking up the ones leaving the big vessel. Just as Halfaz and Star reach the queue, yet another boat poles to shore and a small party of mixed Yugoloths jumps off and rushes up the rocky hillside stair toward the Color Pool, and the Voidjammer beyond. Star hurries along the queue of boats, pulling Halfaz along with her, and comes to a boat with a bent, hooded figure holding a pole. Even among these ageless creatures, he seems more ancient. She boards with Halfaz and hands the figure two wrapped packets that looks like they have some heft to them, pointing at both herself and Halfaz. The creature nods, takes the packets in a skeletal hand, puts them away under its robe, and silently poles out from the shore. Star and the creature murmur in conversation as the other boats fill; apparently it poled out from shore for privacy. Early in the conversation, Star looks startled, then urgent.
The creature poles back to the shore, and Star pulls Halfaz off quickly, because others are pressing to get into the boat. They race back up the stairs, empty now of passengers who debarked from the Voidjammer, pass back through the Color Pool, and just as the last of the new passengers are processed, Star and Halfaz come back on board, yellow from sulphur. Star tells Halfaz that she met a contact for news, trading him Magic for information, a Charonadaemon boatman who sails the Styx and always meets the Voidjammer traffic. It’s the Styx that flows close by the other side of the Color Pool, the reason this stop is so popular. Halfaz has just sailed the Styx! Even if it was brief, it’ still a story to tell, and adds yet another type of boat to the ones that will be sailed on this trip.
Jen is directing the new passengers boarding at the Acheron Color Pool to their areas, and greets Halfaz and Star coming back onto the ship, to make sure they are well after a trip into Acheron. Jen tells Halfaz that on many other occasions, whenever the Voidjammer stopped at this Color Pool, she had accompanied Star for the brief trip to watch her back in Acheron and is well familiar with the other side. Jen then tells him she has a story that very well captures the nature of Acheron and its very varied inhabitants; she says Acheron has more diverse armies on the move from other Lower Planes than it has natives.
Jen tells Halfaz of meeting Star here once just after Star had left the Lines and was freelancing in Sigil, and had taken up a task with an Arcanaloth named Marle’Crucius, or Marley the Jackal, to rescue the enslaved rowers from a Tanar’ri ship on the Styx. The Arcanaloth are the jackal-faced, Neutral Evil dealmaker barons all across the Lower Planes, and are very actively involved at ingeniously manipulating the Blood War battlefields of Acheron to their own advantage. Instead of holding a barony in the Lower Planes, Marley was living in Sigil as his base of operations. Marley did what he promised and put the operation together. Star and her friends sank the boat and got the slaves from it before anyone touched the Styxwater, and then rushed them up the stair through the Color Pool ahead of the Tanar’ri pursuit. On the Astral side of the Color Pool, they ran into a Blood War skirmish, with the outnumbered Baatezu retreating through the Color Pool back into Acheron, who were very surprised to find they were now sandwiched in, fighting more Tanar’ri coming up the stair inside Acheron. With the Baatezu forced into covering her rear position, Star still had to deal with the Tanar’ri ahead. Even though Jen’s Voidjammer ship was due soon on a scheduled stop, Star had to do something to keep the rescued rowers alive. So Star blew a hole in the Astral Plane around the attackers’ Mage, to suck the attackers through into the Ether Cyclone that formed, and scatter them into the Ethereal Plane.
Before the Voidjammer pulls away from Acheron, Jen points out the swirling white Color Pool of the Ether Cyclone clearly visible in the distance, a remnant from the battle. As it starts to move, the Voidjammer ship steers well clear of the Ether Cyclone’s terminus.
Star says modestly that it was really the Mage’s own defenses that blew the hole in the Astral Plane. She saw that the Tanar’ri Mage happened to be using a geometrically organized defense to create a surge of Dispel focused on her incoming attacks, so she made a Light Sculpture of a Magical higher dimensional figure that turned in on itself, which Winston said was like a Klein Bottle, and Cast it into the Mage’s defense. The defense surged around the Light Sculpture and met itself, destroying itself with the usual spectacular explosion of Magic Annihilation. Jen and the Voidjammer sailed in right after the explosion, and the garrison on board soon restored the peace at the Acheron Color Pool. Jen herself took the task of getting the enslaved rowers healed and home safe, so Star credits Jen as the heroine of the story.
Telling the tale, Jen and Star both agree that Marley was probably paid by the Baatezu to embarrass the Tanar’ri in front of the Voidjammer Lines at the Acheron stop, hoping to bar them from further Voidjammer use, but the plan backfired because the Baatezu found themselves hemmed into the action… probably because Marley was also probably paid by the Tanar’ri to embarrass the Baatezu. So Marley afterward could argue to both sides that he did what he was contracted to do but their own incompetence failed them, and meanwhile he had chosen to involve Star to ensure that both sides would be blamed by the Voidjammer garrison instead of the agent he himself had hired. The layers of an Arcanaloth’s deviousness were endless… because he could also argue to Star, and did when confronted later in Sigil, that she got what she wanted, which was his financing of a party to successfully rescue the rowers. Star says she has continued to do business with Marley, because though she can’t possibly trust an Arcanaloth, he does always honor his promises, and he is an excellent source of information about happenings in the Lower Planes and has connections everywhere in them. She always gets at least a little more information from Marley than she gives him, a policy he follows because it ensures he is the best informed creature in Sigil about the Lower Planes from all his sources by being at the center of his web.
Jen concludes her tale to Halfaz with the observation that this is what Acheron is like; dealing with its Evil is never all on the surface, or simple.
This turns the conversation back to why Star was concerned about some of the news she received from the Charonadaemon about movements on the Styx. Besides the Blood War related tidbits she will trade to Marley, the boatman told her that a delegation of Illithids was seen crossing Acheron not too long ago, fairly unusual in itself, but worse, that the leader of the delegation was an Alhoun, an Illithidae Undead much like a Lich. Star says she knows this particular creature by his distinctive description and by reputation; he is a General of the Illithid Empire. Even the Charonadaemon found him terrifying. When she questioned the boatman closely, it described the leader as a towering and skeletal Illithid, nearly ten feet tall, with two extra tentacles that were each six feet long. Its skin, rather than the usual unhealthy purple, was a cracked, papery white. Its left arm was long and spidery and ended at the forearm, the hand replaced with a bundle of blunt crystalline rods of varying colors and lengths. The creature’s bulging eyes glowed a dusky, rusty red. It radiated Fear. Star says to Halfaz and Jen that the General’s presence in Acheron guarantees the Illithid are planning something exceptional, but the Charonadaemon had no other information suggesting what it might be. Since many creatures in Acheron sell information, effective secrecy in itself is yet another telling indicator that the plans are exceptional. Star and Jen exchange long glances about this, and Halfaz notices that Star continues to fret and ponder for several rounds of going on and off duty until the efforts of her friend Jen, ever the Social Director for everyone’s entertainment, and the pleasures of sailing the Voidjammer Lines, eventually bring back Star’s usual good cheer.
As the ship’s course travels the maps from scroll to scroll, stop after stop goes by, but the near-Timeless feel of the Plane makes it seem quick in retrospect, and almost too soon for Halfaz in his love for sailing, they come to their stop. It’s not hard to understand how Star sailed the Lines for so long; even though some tasks and tales were repetitive, the variety of passengers kept changing. There were a few skirmishes that the highly trained on-board garrison handled quickly; everyone on the well-drilled crew immediately took up arms, as did Star and Halfaz, but no additional forces were needed, so it just added a little spice of excitement to the trip. The pay for a full tour of duty for a crew member is 2500gp, he learns, and he is on board for just under a third of a tour; between the entertaining, and the other duties he performed he finds himself 750gp richer, a pleasant surprise.
Jen throws a good-bye party for Halfaz and Star. Even though they hadn’t been on board for long compared to the ten or twenty tours of duty many of the crew took between leaves, they still had become part of the life of the ship. The crew gives Halfaz a replica of the Voidjammer to add to his collection of miniatures, they say; most of them don’t believe his own ship is real. Jen gives him a miniature of the Charonadaemon’s boat on the Styx. She tells him that she knows he’ll make good use of it as a story; she always likes to help an entertainer.
After lingering good-byes, Star and Halfaz leave the Voidjammer behind at a deep burnished adamantine Color Pool and prepare to pass through. Halfaz is struck by the size of the ship all over again as it turns away and drifts into the silent silvery void.
Star tells him that they’ll need his ship immediately on the other side, because the Color Pool is near, but not on, the world they are going to, and so they will have to sail there. She says the world moves around a lot!
As they step through she releases the ShipShape spell, and the ship expands back to its normal size, giving them a deck to stand on, in the black void where Halfaz finds himself. Far below he sees what must be the world Star mentioned, but it’s barely larger than the City of Brass! What a curious idea. He had heard tales of round worlds, and couldn’t imagine how that could be, but here was one hanging in a black void right in front of his eyes. It was not very impressive; he had thought worlds would be larger. And navigation in such a little place would hardly be the problem he had imagined that a round world could be.
There was another ship below them, an open-decked affair with what looks like a deep draft and not much of a shape for sailing Magma, very blocky. It appears to be going down to that world too.
Now that his ship is full size again, Halfaz begins to go through his standard routine of checks to ensure all is well, and so he heads down the companionway to the lower storage cabins to inspect the hull and ensure nothing is loose in storage, marveling at the crystal gem plates and columns that his igneous ship has become. Star takes a delicate circlet from a pouch on her belt and puts it into her hair, and then floats over the deck to the bow, gazing down on the little world below. Just as Halfaz descends out of sight, he has a glimpse of her for a moment, and her golden glow seems different; she seems to be leaving a strange pattern of blue-gray afterimages trailing after her, like smoky mist, as the ship begins drifting downward.
As part of the routine checks, Halfaz ducks into the storage cabins, moves aside an access panel, sticks his head below and inspects the inside of the hull. He can see the places where radiating refractive planes suggest were points of impact, right where Star had been pointing from the outside, and where she had painted on the Rose light that Mended the ship. There are no signs of stress or weakness now, though; everything seems solid and tight. Replacing the access panel, he checks the equipment in storage, and all is in place. The tiedowns are now metallic rope, braided strands of Mithril! How lucky to have bought so much rope, that is now made of this! He checks the rope locker, and finds that some of the rope is braided gold and silver but most of it is in fact Mithril, including hundreds and hundreds of coiled feet of various weights of ship cabling.
A big thump comes from the deck above, right about where Star was floating. She must have set something heavy down on the deck. Then he faintly hears her laughing. Then he hears voices, a conversation, but only one of them is hers; the other is deeper. Definitely a male voice. She was laughing, and isn’t calling for help, but still… what is someone else doing on his ship? Did she bring someone else aboard? He goes up the companionway to find out.
CONTINUED ON THE “WITH STAR” THREAD!!
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