Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

"Anippe, her mother said undead would be after her..." you feel a sudden pang of guilt at the almost inaudible gasp behind you as a sleepy girl emerges from from the corridor, following Sirim no doubt. "We need to lose our tail."

After dropping the bag of gold in front of the suspicious innkeeper with warning about gossip he'll probably breach before your shadow is even off his threshold, you get to work. First Mina wards against mundane senses, then Pepper with a touch of his nose gives some small arcane protection against blows to both his mistress and the suddenly all too quiet child. She's heard a tale or three about vampires, no doubt.

Lost 200 gp

Looking down at the ring on her left hand a thought comes to mind. I can do that too... maybe even better. Energies twist in unaccustomed ways in your mind, whispering half-understandable pleas to gods long dead. But still you fill them with a shadow of their old power. "There, now it won't be able to sense us for a time."

"What if has living eyes, thralls?" she asks seriously.

"Puppets are easily blinded," Sirim reassures her as he seems to exhale, though he has no breath, and a mist like a translucent dew descends, letting the moonlight glide through your flesh.

"Git in here, it's in another... er, hedge? Field?" Cob offers, opening his arcane bag.

"Another plane, silly," the girl seems happy to be able to correct someone about magic, taking on what one a more of a tutor's tone as she adds: "It's not really a plane though, more of a pocked dimension, that is to a plane what a grain of sand is to a whole wide beach. You ever been to the... oh right, get in." Even though you can't see her getting in you can hear her moving aside vials, trinkets, and spare knives.

"Guess we can add stealing children away in our sack to our list of 'misdeeds'," Mina's tries to humor, and the fact Sirim laughs makes it clear it's some kind of jape the rest of you aren't privy to.

Holding hands in a circle you feel the breath of Elsewhere's currents for three long heartbeats that seem to stretch in the thinking... and then you come to regret their absence as Mina had sent you behind one of the city's glue-makers, turning amble fish bone into useful product and the kind of reek that almost brings one of a mind to the xulgath. Thankfully that is not the last of the spells Mina had studied over the past several days in the city. At her command a cartridge of iron and wood stained back emerges onto the street, met with garbled curses by the pair of drunk sailors holding each other up in an unsteady embrace at the end of the street.


Piling in quickly to escape the smell as much as prying eyes, everyone but Gorok, who had taken on the role of driver, tries to find a comfortable seat.

"Sirim, you can use..." It's still bizarre to think of your body as something apart from yourself, as true as it might be. Sentence unfinished, you center yourself and breathe out the shadow of your soul to an awed gasp from Anippe.

As you float above a the meandering conveyance the sound of Sirim casting one more spell on the girl herself reaches your ears, but you're already fixed upon the road ahead even before you are treated to the unsettling sight of your own body moving to another's will. A long way from not having anyone I'd trust with a rock behind my back.

The thought comes and goes like the swiftly moving streets, Copperdown giving way to Fleet. These streets are peopled even at this late hour by a motley assortment of dung-gatherers, hawkers as unlucky as they are stubborn, and those who are selling things best not shown 'in the light of day'. One wonders just how many of those whose eyes can pierce the so-called-darkness under the moon laugh under their hands at the pretense. At least the carriage, in the style of old Ustalav, is looked upon in less askance here, though one does have to wonder when Gorok gets off the driver's seat to knock one beglamoured hand on the door of the carpenter carrying your order what do they see?

"Bet they think we're the vampires now," Anippe whispers, not quite daring to find it funny.

"Come now child, it's a perfectly respectable conveyance," Sirim says with your voice.

"With a ghost horse," she presses from inside the bag.

Still, no actual vampires find you. Maybe your efforts that had been enough to slip away.

The craftsman had finished his work and he seems quite happy to have both models off his hands if it also means he can see the last of strangers on his pouch. Amusingly, he even seems eager to pay you back some of the extra coin he'd taken from the 'Galtan lady'. You wonder for a moment at the fear that lingers in the city's air and fogs the eyes of her people. Surely 'tis more than just poor fishing...


"Why's that coin got magic on it? Look, that one there shines sorta blue in the deep sight, divination magic."

Sirim then proceeds to teach her several words in Nidalese, which from the tone one would guess are not meant for children's ears. "Someone's looking to track us with the coin, counting on us not questioning good luck. "


"Not opportunistic, from the start," Gorok proclaims. "Thrall?" he tries out the new word with the care of a hunter considering his next quarry. "Tell them take more coin, give some back with spell."

"If it's the vampire we should go back and save..." Mina says, or starts to as she looks down at the girl still inside a bag for her own safety. "Maybe we should just get rid of it."

What do you do about the marked coin?

[] Just get rid of it

[] Go back to the carpenter, see if he's dominated and break the spell

[] Write in

OOC: Enjoy.

27th of Kuthona 4707 A.R. (Absalom Reckoning)

"We do not know if it's the same foe," Gorok tips his head as though listening for a distant horncall through the moonlit streets. "Could be another, could find more trouble."

Sirim nods... with your head. That will never not feel odd, you are beginning to suspect. To seek from dwelling on it you add your own voice with a plan. "Don't throw it away, leave it in the carriage and have it lead whoever's scrying it on a dead rat hunt." You pause. "Well, absent the ghouls."

"Ghouls?" Anippe asks with a sort of fascinated dread. So you explain the habit of the Darkland-ghouls to find and kill dire rats or other common prey beasts then reanimate in their old ranger, the better to draw two-legged hunters away that the ghouls may make of them prey in turn.

"There's whole cities of ghouls under the ground?" she looks down at her feet resting on the floor of the caridge as though expecting an emaciated ghoul arm to come tearing out of it.

"Aye, and that's not the worst of it," you shake your head, thinking of the drow and the horrors of their crafting. Some things aren't for sharing with children. Thankfully, Anippe doesn't have an interest in that. She confesses instead that her her mother had taught her little of the theory of necromancy, the craft of Geb. True, Eshe did not use it herself, but she had spent long years dueling Gebbites openly upon the shifting sands of the Mana Wastes and in secret in the bazaars of Absalom.

Were you to make a guess, and the child is skilled in many things but not keeping her feelings off her face so tis a good one, you'd say Anippe is interested in necromancy mostly as a proxy for her mother's history before she was born. As far as she could remember they had always lived in the self styled 'City at the Center of the World,' the amenities of the city's foreign quarter ensuring that her daughter would be raised in the traditions of distant Nex, until about half a year ago they had been moved in haste here to Augustana where they had been safe from whoever had been chasing them, at least until now. The girl tries to put on a brave face when it comes to her mother's skills as a duelist, but it's hard not to notice the worry shadowing her gaze.

Truth be told you are not sure what to do about it, and for once Sirim's silver tongue seems to have deserted him as well since the most he can do is offer those necromancy lessons she said she lacked once you are in Cheliax. Again all of you array in a circle, this time within the confines of the carriage just as it is turning towards the gate. Mina unrolls one of the precious scrolls you'd acquired in Cassomir, words of power upon it gleaming the color of old gold. Thus she utters with conviction the words of translocation.

This time it is less a wind from Elsewhere and more a storm to match the most vicious you've had the displeasure of encountering upon the face of Golarion, and yet it deposits all of you safely at under the boughs of thick growing cypress... at least you think that's what the tree above you is called.



"Ooh! Is this a swamp?" Annipe asks, in the tone of someone who has never encountered the kinds of things that live in a swamp.

"Yup, swamp stuff's good eating," Cob declares with almost as much good cheer as Gorok and the other iruxi take the lead in heading down what you are informed is a 'game trail,' for all that the only game you can see are sleepy birds perched on the gnarled branches of the Whisperwood.

You let out a breath you had not known you were holding at the sight of the reed shelters and iruxi guards scrambling to get the chief. The wrath of Cheliax had not fallen on Gorok's people while you were half a world away, not even the wrath of Longacre. They seem awed to see you return after all this time, though you are not sure why. Certainly it doesn't extend to Annipe, so it cannot just be the magic you bear.

An entire tribe of iruxi, eggs and all, isn't moved in the span of a few hours. Gorok has some explaining to do to his kin, quite a lot of it in fact. In the meantime, you could do some scouting on the path south towards the sea, speak to Annipe again to learn more about her and her mother, or even find what rest you can. Something tells you there won't be much of that ahead.

What do you do?

[] Scout in shadow form

[] Talk to Annipe, the girl is interested in stories of Nar Voth, not something you've dealt with before

[] Rest while you can, the road stretches out before you long and full of obstacles

[] Write in

OOC: Background dice for Cheliax not shown because you guys would have no way to know that in character.