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Paul DMing; Scott: Smudge (shadar-kai rogue 9 / barbarian 2) and Martin (duergar cleric 11); Dane: Tudo Fleck (dwarf cleric 11), Rob: Vox (half-elf bard 11).
Last time, our heroes raided the beholder ship, got themselves sent to the Negative Plane, called a truce with the beholder to get out of the Negative Plane, then blew up the truce.
The party reboards the beholder ship, sacred flaming away part of the fungal cloud left in floating in the gangway by the gas spore Smudge popped with an arrow last session. Regarding the remaining airborne spores, Vox and Smudge realize their lungs ache. Todo and Martin fix them up with a pair of lesser restoration spells, forestalling fatal eruptions of 'shrooms from all their orifices.
Though the return to the Material Plane restored gravity on the Void Ship, the beholder's ship remains zero-G, forcing the party to move by pulling themselves weightlessly along its curved walls.
Deciding to explore the ship and whittle down any hostile underlings before confronting The Gaze, everyone sneaks down passage D, where they last saw Trevor, the giant snail, headed.
At 07, the party finds a spherical room with a 45' diameter. Three other exits lead out of the room. A third of the room's surface is covered with bank of glowing crystal balls, each depicting a different scene. Some of the images are dim, but the part recognizes:
Each crystal ball is flanked by two buttons: "Listen" and "Talk". Tudo works the buttons to say hello to Acqualicious.
Trevor is here, monitoring the crystal balls, along with two other giant snails, who Trevor introduces as Franklin and Colby. The giant snails, whose relationship with their beholder boss is not purely roses, pass along some intelligence the the adventurers about what they'll find in other parts of the ship, including facilities to clone Shaheduzzaman (a wizard the party previously defeated).
Pulling themselves along the walls in the zero-gravity of passage A, the party bumps into two more big flying sharks.
Tudo flings Vox at one of the sharks ("the friendly looking one"). Vox hold his javelin in front of himself, but barely scratches the shark. The shark responds by chomping a hunk of flesh out of Vox's leg. Vox pushes away from the shark (and away from the rest of the party), then conjures a storm sphere. The shark that bit Vox follows him, while the other shark swims in the opposite direction, toward Tudo, Smudge, and Martin.
After a few exchanges of flashing blades and snapping jaws, Martin tolls the dead to finish off one shark and Vox convinces the other shark to flee with a bolt of lightning from his storm sphere.
After Tudo harvests a few shark fins and serrated, triangular teeth, the party floats past the fishy remains, into spherical room 08.
Another spherical room. A contraption that looks like a mini-fridge with a hotplate on top extends from the wall/floor. Above it floats a three-foot-long crystal, rotating on its axis. Three other crystals of similar size but various pastel colors are mounted to the wall nearby.
Tudo casts his mind back to his arcane studies and recalls that crystals like these are:
Tudo presses the ⏯ button on the hotplate, and a garbled holographic message plays. A human wizard with a shaved head and handlebar mustache says:
"(crackle)...Mordenkainen... (crackle) Respond, Gaze! (crackle)... risk to the known universe is much too high given Vecna's activities ... (crackle) ... promise the snake people anything if the ice gnomes continue ... (crackle and fade out)..."
Hmm. Tudo takes the four crystals.
Vox notices that there's a small black box (about 2x3x0.5 inches) hung from the mini-fridge by bent metal clip is a small black box. The device has three buttons and a Dwarvish logo or maker's mark that reads "PortalMaster" in Dwarvish.
Vox takes the box and presses button three. Everyone's ears pop in response to a sudden pressure change and a brief vortex of gravity waves hurls each adventurer in a different directions. Nobody is injured, but they can't quite figure out what happened.
The party floats down passage F to 04, another spherical room. The walls are chock-a-block with mounted cable reels, nets, and hooks. And one big, machined steel button that Vox immediately presses.
Bomb-bay-style doors open in the floor, showing a raging sea smashing into an unfamiliar coastline. Tudo ties a cable around Smudge and lowers him through the doors to get a better look outside.
Smudge sees a big, ship-size hole in the sky. The hole appears to show the icy expanse of the Void Site in the inner earth. Meanwhile Vox gets bored and presses the two other buttons on the PortalMaster device. Smudge sees two new ship-size portals open, one showing the calm, sunny bay of Apeman City and other a marble temple on a spooky swamp with Spanish-moss-covered trees.
