Veiled Powers, Hidden Purpose
13th of Rova 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)
"Try to snare them, get Pepper...!" you call out to Mina before the strange double echo of master and familiar, acting with matched urgency, flows into your mind. Of course they would have already thought of something like that themselves.
Ceratioidi Reflex Save (DC 16 on 1d20 +4 -> 12 on 1d20): 3 Successes and 3 Failures
Akorian Invoked the Cloak of Darkness +4 AC; +2 Stealth
Even as you weave shadows close and make of them armor, Mina spins webs more solid upon the White Eagle's deck, snaring three of the fish-kin who had been reaching with scaled hands over the sailor's mouths. Before you can move to see what they are doing, the voice of their leader cuts through the din his followers had been making. Though the tongue of the depths is strange to your ear, you know the
glint that shines in his eyes.
A lesson from long ago and far away rings in your ears: "
Master, if a spell of Second Sight can spy all magic, even those of the a skilled illusionist, then why learn spells that do nothing but pierce the veil of invisibility? Surely one must only behold the spell and behold there thine hidden foe is."
"Is that so. Tell me, what shape is thine aura? Does it fit your skin like a glove, or does it diffuse like a star in the night?"
So it is that here and now you can call out a warning before the magician had even finished his incantation:
"Get out of his sight!"
Akorian Spellcraft: 1d20+7 = 26 (Success)
Only one place to hide. Both you and Mina have to make a mad dash for the mainmast. You can practically feel the
winds of fraying magic at your back, a seal of alien magic grasping painfully at the world. An invisible elbow joggles your side.
Ceratioidi Magician Attempts Dispel on Akorian through the Full Cover of the Invisibility: 20 (Failure)
"They are here to take someone, a prisoner, a sacrifice!" Mina thinks at you, a process not helped by the fact that you can hear both the slow drone of the sailors' minds, the barely leashed bloodlust of the raiders behind you, and at the front of the ship, looming like a mountain of alien shape, the one who had tried to strip away your spells
She does not get any farther, for the foe chooses that moment to speak with its own voice, not a spell, not a command, something else, something
worse.
You can feel Mina shake beside you through the wood of the mast. Rather than attempt to keep on the one-sided mind speech through the silver band she turns to whisper in your ear, breath warm and quick on your skin with the exertion, voice catching with the words: "He is calling out the 'World Breaker', saying that they should give themselves up now or the fish people are going to stop trying to take people down and just put a hole in the ship. He has to mean one of us."
With your luck the damn fish probably means you, not that it really matters. He is turning back towards the railing of the raised edge of the ship, as are his trio of guards. The ones Mina's web hadn't snared are trying to get their trapped fellows out.
Something is squirming on the deck beside them, for a moment you think one of the assailants had carried a live fish aboard for some mad reason, but then you realize it is not like any fish you had ever seen, flat and fin-like, yes, but almost translucent and where its eyes should have been nothing but a pair of slits.
A living breathing aid, like something out of a drow flesh-garden, though no drow had made these, you know instinctively. They were trying to drag prisoners down with them... maybe just the one.
Akorian Lore (Azlanti): 1d20+5 (DC 12) = 13 (Success)
Before you can decide if it's worth answering or if all it would do is give you away, three things happen at once: Gorok, Cob, and the quartermaster Menkir burst onto the deck, the latter sporting a pair of cutlasses, some of the sailors already on deck awake to their condition enough that they start hollering in confusion as much as fear, and
something unseen seems to bite or strike the staff-bearing leader of the raiders. He wheels his stubby be-flippered arms in front of him as though he had forgotten how to move about above water.
Akorian Spellcraft (DC 16): 1d20+7 = 12 (Failure)
Ceratioidi Magician Fortitude Save against ???: 1d20+3 = 7 (Failure)
Ceratioidi Magician Takes 1d6+2 = 7 Dexterity Damage -> Now at 3 Dexterity
Behind your friends and Mankir you can hear the stamp of many more feet, voices raised in anger, and weapons jangling against the narrow paths. The raiders have now lost the element of surprise that made them so deadly, but Mina's words still echo ominously in your mind: 'just put a hole in the ship'.
What do you do?
[] Turnabout is fair, try to capture the leader alive
-[] Write in plan
[] Kill or drive off these raiders
-[] Write in plan
[] Write in
OOC: By RAW Kori should not have been able to tell what the spell did since he did not identify it, but when someone with a base DEX of 10 loses 7 DEX I think a particularly unperceptive toddler should be able to tell roughly what happened.
