Yes, that will work fine.
A short while of prep work later, Anaxian spoke again. "It appears my initial calculations were incorrect. This will not take nearly as long as expected. I will need the assistance of my other self though. Once I obtain the scrolls, we will travel with you to a nearby island to begin while you continue on to scout the area we are currently aware of. Drisquar, will you find a suitable location for my work while I set about finding the scrolls I need? A simple cave will suffice."
Port Peril is a city of pirates, and a dozen new ships arrive at harbor each day, the majority of them commanded by high-level bards and skalds. Obtaining the necessary scroll takes nothing more than a few kind words and an exchange of gold.
Any party member who heads out to scout will simply see an expanse of dark ocean (right now, I'm assuming John and Anaxian stay behind).
Anaxian and the party members who stay behind rent a few rooms in an inn for next to nothing, as sleep comfort is no longer a concern for any of them. While a few members of the party head out to scout, Anaxian gathers legends for them to corroborate on their return.
After three days of focus, Anaxian's mind is suddenly swimming with words, the sheer quantity of which compels him to either write them down or recite them for the rest of the group to hear.
The first legend comes quicker than the others, as Anaxian has a stronger tie to it.
With the Red Queen gone, the living priests of Escarra grew weak, and many left the city, while undead servants grew numerous. Jiator brought great creatures beasts from the surface, and butchered them in the name of his art, creating statues and houses out of great bones that moved and shifted on command, visionary in his use of skeletons as art, a hobby that Kharnas and Diamata found irritating. And so, mastering the craft, he wove his finest skeletons into a great ark, mixing elephant and elf with stone and wood, skeletons and tendons and rivets and seals, a great beast of burden that moved like a small city on a thousand tiny legs.
The great barge marched off, towards the surface, to sail to the Arcadian Sea and cross it for lands unknown. With it went nearly all of Escarra's greatest skeletal defenders, never to be seen again.
* * *
The second legend sounds a bit like Elvish, but spoken in a wailing tongue with a dozen different inflections, and rhythmically bounded as though part of a song.
The language is clearly Aquan, but archaic, and spoken with an unfamiliar growling accent.
The language is clearly Aquan, but archaic, and spoken with a sahuagin accent. You make out references to a great battle, and a great sadness
The song is long, and its language peculiar, phrased as some sort of ancient sahuagin warrior's ode.
Once, the shark folk of Fizzling Deeps hunted with impunity. In those days, thousands of years ago, the clan were mighty and fierce, the size of sharks with a bloodlust to match, or so the poets claim. With hooks and harpoons, they dragged great vessels to their depths, feasting on frightened and drowning land-creatures, spilling their blood before the last air could leave their fragile lungs.
And then came the black ship, so large it blotted out the sun, throwing a shadow over the Fizzling Deeps. The bravest warriors rode forth, spearing and slashing, but the ship came apart above them, splitting into monsters and aberrations of coral and bone that fought back, with only the clan's blood darkening the water. Gems and gold bled from the ship, and hunters below gathered the treasure as it spilled forth, but as they retreated the ship with no sailors began to sink, falling into a trench from which no warrior returned alive.
Over the next centuries, the shipwreck would come to haunt the Fizzling Deeps, as warriors did return from the trench as bloated corpses, killing without sense or joy. The Fizzling Deeps were haunted by an unknown enemy, its legions ever raiding and killing. The Great King Devours-Whales was killed, and all his sons, themselves devoured by their father transformed into a hideous ghoul. Three new lines of kings arose, each killed by terrors from the deeps.
And finally, when only one-tenth of the clan remained, the greatest shamans gathered to call out to the gods of deepest darkness, the ones too terrible even to bless war and murder. A cloud overcame the ocean, and when it passed, the shamans were gone—but the deepest trench had been sealed up completely, and no more horrors emerged from it.
But the clan who remained were small, and weak, and timid, not like the heroes of old; and only warriors not-yet born, of true strength and bloodlust, will restore the ancient valor of their ancestors.
* * *
The third legend is patchy; simple strings of words, with a pensive tilt to some of the sentences. It is a language of bubbles and hisses and shrieks, like Aklo spoken by a drowning Mouther, something no human mind could speak without decades of practice, though Anaxian's telepathy is able to communicate the sounds more faithfully than a normal caster could.
This is, without a doubt, the language of Aboleths—you may have seen it written out before, using hybridized Aklo phonology, though it is unlikely you have ever heard anything spoken in quite so rubbery a fashion.
Aboleth have no legends, or songs, or tales. But they have memories, and they have memes—cultural messages passed on across time through repetition, and questioning.
The Aboleth meta-knowledge of the sunken ship you seek comes in fits and patches, but it is primarily of one mind. A Seeker of Things found something unique as it scoured the oceans; a great architect, a creature younger than it, but old enough to remember the Times from before the Starstone fell.
Discussion followed, a dozen voices. The architect was sought, acquired. With its aid, Voshgurvaghol might rise again. Centuries of planning, maps and arguments, but the Deep City's restoration was beginning, would begin soon, had begun.
"Huuh."
Meredian, guised as an elven commoner, skips merrily to the shoreline. Speaking to whomever may be there or just herself if no one came,
"It's roughly that way (points), right? I'll scout any potentially dangerous areas as I can't be killed."
She ducks into an alley and turns invisible, letting her commoner guise fall whenever the spell runs out.
Her feet delicately lift off the ground as her outfit changes to something more flow-y. It'll look cooler when she flies. With a slight mental effort she then speeds across the water occasionally touching it with a hand or toe to send up a small spray.
She flies out to roughly where indicated, as best she can manage, then dives straight down into the water until she finds the bottom.
Some rolls that may or may not be necessary:
Survival for directions
Perception
Perception
Perception
She'll follow directions of anyone else who may be with.
Illia- will join Meridian, likewise confident in her survivability.
Illia trusts her eyes more than her stealth, she'll hang back as far as her vision allows her.
Dris assumes cloud form, and speeds past Meredian ::"Slow poke!":: He teases telepathically as he passes the drow noble.
Upon arriving at the possible location, he scans the area for any signs of threats
As the party touches down in the water, Drisquar arrives first, and around a depth of two hundred feet spots a patrol of what appear to be three sahuagin in the distance. While Illia-'s eyes work the best below the light zone, she opts to stay on the surface as Dris and Meredian easily slip by the patrol. Unfortunately, while Drisquar cuts through water like an arrow, Meredian's flight is slowed; the Drow telekineticist is only able to reach a depth of about 800 feet before needing to come up for air.
Dris, meanwhile, makes it all the way to the depths of the ocean, though his darkvision is the worst of the group; as he glides across the seafloor at blazing speed, he notices a few flagstones that might be the ruins of an underwater village. Investigating, the trail of rubble brings him to a sloping reef, and he nearly swims into another sahuagin, who chases him for a few seconds before losing his trail.
After a few more dives, Dris directs the others to a raised underwater hill, whose coral seems to be home to a band of sahuagin; this close to the surface, the party can make out perhaps a dozen or two huts, though ruins scattered around the area suggest this was once a larger settlement.
You see no sign of undead, or elephant skeletons, though you've been flying for hundreds of miles, and it's likely that you're a bit off from where Anaxian directed you; bringing someone along with the locator spell would make pinpointing the target much easier.
"Perhaps we should grab one of the Sahuagin. I'm sure we could get all the information it knows out of it. "
"Perhaps we should grab one of the Sahuagin. I'm sure we could get all the information it knows out of it. "
"I could just grab one and throw it up in the air. Dris could catch it and zoom back to the shore. Or up a bit to keep it from wanting to be let go. What do you think?"
"I'm going to do it. "
Meredian becomes invisible and flies down near the Sahuagin or in the water if necessary. She looks for an older looking one thinking they're more likely to know things. Thought they're so ugly it's hard to really tell age, but she does her best. Regardless of if it's seen or not she telekinetically kidnaps one and heads straight into the air out of range of any weaponry.
Once the thing is dead she carries it back to the city. Though if he's willing she'll have Dris do the carrying. He's faster anyway.
"I could take its head and be back there now."
"I could take its head and be back there now."
As the creature writhes for breath held up by strands of ether Illia and Meredian have a polite conversation.
"Good point. Why don't you take his head and pop back. We'll catch up."
Looking disdainfully at the creature Mer calmly adds
"You don't have to wait for it to die if you just need the head. "
The creature struggles and squirms in the air, and futilely throws spears until it suffocates with a shrieking noise.
Illia pops back with tele. "Hey, Anaxian, we've got a local."
Meredian sighs as Illia disappears.
"I am jealous of that. " she says to Dris before she begins the long fly back to the city.
[ooc]If they left when you started... it takes you two days to cast legend lore. Dris can fly there in 8 hours; Meredian takes 40, and thus you'll finish the spell before Meredian returns unless she's teleporting back)
"You have excellent timing." The larger dragon rumbled, quickly writing a scrawled manuscript in Draconic with ink on the end of a claw. "The incantation should be finished in a few hours. Please keep quiet until it is done."
The smaller dragon was mentally speaking, broadcasting telepathically in an uncontrolled burst, like a mental shout, speaking in a language that sounded like strange layers of gurgling echoing through water.
"Dris, no need to wait on me. I'll meet you back in the city. "
With that Meredian turns in the air as if to walk away, but vanishes as she moves.
Meredian finds herself seated in a white room laying comfortably on a divan chair (the only thing in the room besides herself). "I should get an inn table or something." she says to herself and sighs.
Pulling a crystal orb from her pocket she begins the half hour incantation to activate the device. Upon completion her astral body floats in the void of the astral plane. She turns and with an act of will pushes her way into the material plane to find herself back in the city. She resumes her elf commoner guise and goes off to find her companions.
"So, Aboleth. Arrrrre?"
A race of starfaring aquatic creatures resembling large fish. They are highly intelligent, able to read minds, and possess an innate memory that passes from one generation to the next. Every new aboleth knows everything that each individual in its heritage line knew.
The little dragon had just emerged from his trance. He remembered little of the strange words he spoke, but he knew what aboleth were.
He began to look over the documents prepared by his counterpart and John.
As a source of ancient knowledge they are unsurpassed.
The larger dragon began to translate allowed in his smooth, rich baritone, reading the manuscripts in order.
"Is everyone protected from mind control?"
"We've got a local for you, in case you want a source of contemporary knowledge." Illia- holds up the head.
"Um.... No.." Illia- responds to the other question.
We will cover that contingency before we leave Port Peril. I know an inexpensive item that will protect vulnerable minds.
We will cover that contingency before we leave Port Peril. I know an inexpensive item that will protect vulnerable minds.
"As long as they die like everybody else, than that's all that matters" Dris says with a grin.
"I have no special protections from mind control other than strength of will."
And the nature of what you are. Anaxian corrected. The standard Aboleth abilities will not work on us. We should still bolster our defenses against things which can effect the unliving just in case, but it is a significantly lower priority than the living minds of our companions.
"My mind is protected from control as well as divination. I'm good to go. If you have any additional ways to gird our mental loins, so to speak, I think it's better to err on the side of caution. Alboleth's are nasty creatures and I'd just as soon not have to restrain one of you."
"Drisquar then. I believe I can create something that will protect him."
"Well then. Lets go. "
I said create. It will take a bit of time. I will start presently. Meridian, I will need to see your wayfinder to examine and duplicate the effects.