Session 12

If nothing else, your current establishment offers you a sweeping view of the fortress port that has been your home for the past month. The settlement is still as it bakes in the noonday sun, save for the livestock which roam the streets and the occasional native servant, bustling too and fro on some unknown business amongst the cramped stone buildings that quilt this sloping hill. You watch with languid eyes, having long since grown sick of this port and this island.

It's been twenty nine days since the soldiers found you, unconscious and suffering from severe exposure. You were brought back to the temple of Waukeen located near the Port Nryanzaru constabulary barracks and spent several days being nursed back to health. On the third day, the captain of the watch came to question you concerning your identity and the nature of your arrival on the island. Thinking that a tale involving a voyage through the Shadowfell on a self-directed floating mansion might not be taken too seriously, you told him how you became shipwrecked in a storm and gave him a simplified version of your travails on the island.

The captain is surprised, not by the nature of your story, which he clearly doesn't believe, even in it's simplified form, but that you all relate to him the same one. He tells you briefly of his sessions with your companions. You realize that up until this point, you had only a vague awareness of the presence of the other survivors of the ship, fading away in your memory until only yourselves remained. The captain's comment brings them snapping back into your memory even as you try and figure out how they left it in the first place.

The others were rescued along with you and apparently told the captain very different stories about what happened on the island. All of them began with a shipwreck (they were as sensible as you in that respect) but each had a different version of what happened afterward, stories filled with fevered nights and sharp shadows, menacing shapes and fearful structures. None of them matched up with each other, much less with your account leaving the captain to fear that the group had been stricken with some form of jungle madness, which would have made you particularly unpopular at the moment for reasons that I'll get into in a moment, though at the time, the priests had examined you thoroughly and had concluded that you had been suffering from nothing more serious then exposure (which was pretty serious, but obviously not contagious).

You, yourselves were mighty perturbed at first, being accused by the captain of being delusional, but the fire was taken out of your indignation as you searched through your pack for the head of the orange giant, only to find no trace of it in your belongings. Without direct proof, it seemed both impossible and pointless to argue with the man, and you let the subject go for the moment.

Having been released from the hospital, you set out into the fortress settlement to flex your considerable wealth for the sake of upgrading your gear and chartering a ship back to the mainland. Accomplishing your first goal was no minor effort. The Port's economy is blessedly simple. Colonists trade furs and ivory and gems for food and magical equipment so that they can go out and acquire more furs, ivory, and gems in what amounts to a happy little cycle. Sadly, most of the local stores were out of stock and not expecting new shipments for a while, for reasons I'll get into in a moment, but you were fortunate enough to find a stingy merchant down at the docks who was suspicious of directly bartering his goods for raw materials and was happy to receive cold hard cash from the party's ample coffers.

The second task (the chartering a ship one) ended in complete failure for reasons I'll get into in the next sentence. The port's parent nation of Amn had declared that the port be put under quarantine after a series of serious outbreaks of Brain Fluke both here and on the continent. Amn's southern fleet sits on the horizon barring all entry and exit from the settlement until local inspectors can demonstrate that the populous is free from infection. This has proven to be a very difficult task, and for the past two months, life has slowed to a standstill as the merchant town waits for it's colonial masters to declare it safe to visit.

And so began your most difficult challenge to date, not at the hands of some monster of some terrible foe, but at the hands of a foreign bureaucracy with it's unrealistic standards and glacial pace. Sleepless nights, plagued by heat, humidity, and insects give way to listless days filled with fruitless arguing and an unhealthy amount of alcohol consumption.

Your companions don't have it any better. Each has gone their separate way, though all of them sill reside inside the port, as trapped as you are. Mary the Maid is staying with Lord Haberdasher and his attendants as the guest of a merchant lord who owns a large town house here, but rarely uses it. The Laranga Brothers are staying at an upscale inn nearby, and Thuroban has wandered off somewhere unknown. You haven't seen him within the walls of the settlement and suspect that he may be in the shanty town outside amongst the poor and wretched.