Beyond the Pages - Jenna Archselon - 29/07/21
Aug 7, 2021 11:57:00 GMT
Igrainne (RETIRED), Queen Merla, the Sun-Blessed, and 3 more like this
Post by andycd on Aug 7, 2021 11:57:00 GMT
Jenna scratched at the scales under her sleeve absently. She’d never liked them - when they had first started to appear, skin flaking away to reveal hardened red plates, she had still been living in the Three Headed Ettin. Coll had reassured her that all sorts of weird things happen to people who use magic, which wasn’t very reassuring at all. It had been a strange relationship back then - Coll knew that she was in trouble, that she was scared, and so had made sure she was safe and comfortable in the Ettin until she was ready to talk about it, and then had immediately sent for Aurelia.
Years later, she had come to accept that this was part of her heritage - her power - that somewhere in her history she had a trace of red dragon blood. The scales were tough enough to turn away swords, which was useful, and fire hardly touched her at all now. She still hid them though - long sleeves covering up scaly forearms and other patches on her body. But now… now she had wings.
The wings were new, an itch and a twitch of muscles she didn’t recognise in her own back, and then the back of her favourite glider suit had been torn apart as these large, leathery, scaly wings had burst out of her, knocking her out of the air hard enough that her Feather Fall ring had to catch her. She floated down to the ground in a panic, but after a few minutes had begun to comprehend what had happened. She was reaching the peaks of arcane power, Aurelia had told her, and so it seemed her draconic blood was responding in kind, rising to the surface.
It took a few days to adjust to but now… now she had wings.
Jenna loved flying, spending hours in the sky each day, and so it wasn’t surprising to land one day and find she had missed something happening in the fort. Apparently four adventurers were missing and the two who had returned from the group’s excursion into the fort’s library had run out of the fort screaming, parts of their clothes still burning. Coll had heard about some strange activity in the library, but the group he had sent first clearly hadn’t been up for the job. Before he could summon another group, Jenna stopped him - this was her chance to be more than a doorkeeper. But she’d need a team.
Lord Vandree was an obvious choice - a paramount sorcerer, but also edgy as hell, hilarious and an excellent chef. Perhaps only the first of those were important, but Jenna wasn’t going to miss the chance to get Jaezred on side, and sent of a florid letter in her most eloquent tones requesting his presence. Her handwriting may leave much to be desired, but she’d spent enough time with Aurelia to know how to do polite.
Wren sometimes swung by the fort for a drink and a meal, and Jenna always made sure to take time to catch up - they were the same age, and Wren seemed to have a whole master thief / mobile animal sanctuary vibe that Jenna found very impressive. If they needed something investigated, there was no other choice.
Osborin, now there was a bard with style. She’d seen Leocanto play far too many times to appreciate that kind of tacky display, despite his virtuoso performances. Osborin seemed to float around the Dawnlands with the kind of disdain that 19 year old Jenna interpreted as definitely cool. She couldn’t play music at all, so it had always been impressive. Anyway, a quick word was all it took to get that classic ‘if I can be bothered’ response, that Jenna knew meant he wouldn’t let her down.
Looking at her party roster, sketched out on a piece of parchment in her room, she knew something was missing - they needed balance, a different point of view and a healer. They all came in the same small package, and Laurel was a delight to have around, so Jenna reached out to them as well.
Jenna’s elite team assembled in a common room in the Fort, where Lord Jaezred had provided delicious scones (her planning paying off immediately). After a brief discussion they had headed to the library, where Jenna discovered to her frustration that Coll had left the library open. Four people had disappeared here and people were still casually reading in the armchairs. He was a nice man, but his policy to public safety seemed to be ‘they’re adventurers, danger is in the business.’
Splitting up around the small space to explore, Jenna had to call a Tabard over to follow Osborin, who was checking behind the books by throwing them to the floor. Wren found the problem almost immediately though - a humming book with a large yellow topaz stuck through it. On finding it though, she vanished into thin air, the book falling to the ground.
“We’re going in right? That’s what you would all do in a situation like this?” she asked, eagerly. This was turning into a proper adventure at last.
Inside the book turned out to be a fairyland - not the Feywild but a more mundane, storybook land, which was a wild thought to have. Calling out for Wren saw a hand wave out from behind a rock - stealth being Wren’s natural state of being. A gnome approached them in a laughably stereotypical red cap outfit, introducing himself as The Groundskeeper, and explaining that this is a demiplane created by a wizard for his daughter.
The conversation was strange and circular, but Jenna learned 3 important details:
Clearly, the right thing to do was to let the Groundskeeper lead the way to the mountain and discover why the Pagemaster was an angry dragon. But firrrrrrst…
The Candy Well was full of rotten candy, disgusting to even be near.
“On to the mountain then…,” Jenna sighed, and resumed her conversation with Jaezred on the finer nuances of sorcery and the raw power they each wielded.
If they weren’t already prepared for literally the wildest things that imagination could conjure, the fact that the mountain in question was in fact the shell and back of a truly colossal land turtle would have been surprising. That didn’t mean it still wasn’t a truly awe inspiring sight though - this enormous beast moving slowly around a valley. Still sulking from the failed Candy Well trip, Jenna elected to Teleport the entire group over to the door to the Pagemaster’s cave, just barely in sight.
They entered the cave slowly, stopping as they heard the distant sound of whimpering. Proceeding with caution, they arrived in a large cave that turned out to contain nothing save a red dragon, chained in the corner and clearly in distress. The group was concerned of course - where was the Pagemaster? Was this dragon someone they could help? Finally, they nominated Jenna to investigate, as one of the only people who could speak Draconic, and also literally was part red dragon.
“If you turn out to be The Pagemaster,” she murmured, placing a hand on the Groundskeeper’s shoulder, “you and I are going to have words.”
“Oh no, I’m The Groundskeeper,” was the only response she got before she flapped her wings and drifted into the room.
“Hi there,” she said in draconic to the huge creature, who cowered away as she approached, a genuinely alarming reaction for a dragon. They had scales missing from their side and looked severely malnourished.
The dragon’s name was Kaltenzahn, and he had apparently been placed here by his parents thinking this would be a safe place to grow and build a hoard. The Pagemaster, whatever they were, had gotten free of their bindings in the gem in the sky (the sun was the topaz in the book outside, but cracked - that had been weird to see in the sky when they arrived), and then imprisoned Kaltenzahn here. They had also begun consuming the dragon’s scales, apparently trying to make themselves stronger.
A brief discussion amongst the team settled on freeing the dragon of course, and Jenna used a teleportation spell to free Kaltenzahn from his chains.
“Oh, you just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” came a raspy voice from behind them.
As the diminutive adorable form of the Groundskeeper surged and swelled into a monstrous, chimeric form of some great monster half converted into a red dragon, the Pagemaster’s roar echoed around the chamber, drowning out Jenna’s, “I *fucking* knew it. We’re going to have words, it seems.”
The fight was chaotic. Jenna knew her fire magic wouldn’t be effective here, so she focused her sorcery and began converting her spells into different types of energy - lightning initially proved ineffective. The Pagemaster shot back a pair of beams of truly wild energy - born from the being who had absolutely control over the reality of this domain - and… healed her. Chaos doesn’t always mean helpful.
Wren was firing shot after shot into the Pagemaster’s hide, causing him immense pain. Jaezred was hanging back, trying to find clever ways to subdue it - a Web spell just passed straight through the monster though - the power over reality preventing that at least.
The real hero, of course, was Osborin. The thunderous explosions from the bard’s music were particularly effective, and so Jenna began following up with thunder of her own, the cavern ringing out with concussive blasts one after another.
The Pagemaster, frustrated and in pain, leapt into the air and breathed a huge cone of fire over Wren, Osborin and Laurel - who had been keeping the party safe the whole time. Wren came out unscathed, but Osborin was left in a burning heap on the ground. Laurel, of course, had him back on his feet in seconds - a fountain of healing as ever.
Wren got in another incredible shot into the creature’s side, but it was Osborin who had the final, explosive outburst getting back on his feet to detonate the Pagemaster in a wave of music and magic.
The plane naturally began to collapse, and so Jenna gathered them all together and shifted them all back to the front gate of Fort Ettin.
Kaltenzahn was clearly harrowed by the whole experience, and immediately stayed close to Jenna, asking if he could live with her now. If ever there was a question that only had one answer. He also coughed up a weird ball of metal, which was surprising, all the more because it was very clearly on inspection an incredibly resonant material.
Now Jenna’s glider suit is long forgotten. Each morning she takes to the sky under her own power, leathery wings lifting her higher and higher. And now she has a companion on these flights - Kaltenzahn is still getting used to being outside again, but getting stronger every day.
The metal turned out to be a perfect fit for the requirements of a planar tuning fork, but given its properties, she worked on it with Aurelia and devised an orb that can resonate at different frequencies. Still in testing, but it should be able to serve as a tuning fork to *anywhere* as long as she uses it right.
For the girl who woke up 20 years older one day and lost her family, Jenna could seldom keep a smile off of her face. Flying with a dragon every morning before bending the planes to your will in a beautiful fort full of incredible people in the countryside - life couldn’t get much better than this. She needed to find out where Osborin was playing next though...
Years later, she had come to accept that this was part of her heritage - her power - that somewhere in her history she had a trace of red dragon blood. The scales were tough enough to turn away swords, which was useful, and fire hardly touched her at all now. She still hid them though - long sleeves covering up scaly forearms and other patches on her body. But now… now she had wings.
The wings were new, an itch and a twitch of muscles she didn’t recognise in her own back, and then the back of her favourite glider suit had been torn apart as these large, leathery, scaly wings had burst out of her, knocking her out of the air hard enough that her Feather Fall ring had to catch her. She floated down to the ground in a panic, but after a few minutes had begun to comprehend what had happened. She was reaching the peaks of arcane power, Aurelia had told her, and so it seemed her draconic blood was responding in kind, rising to the surface.
It took a few days to adjust to but now… now she had wings.
Jenna loved flying, spending hours in the sky each day, and so it wasn’t surprising to land one day and find she had missed something happening in the fort. Apparently four adventurers were missing and the two who had returned from the group’s excursion into the fort’s library had run out of the fort screaming, parts of their clothes still burning. Coll had heard about some strange activity in the library, but the group he had sent first clearly hadn’t been up for the job. Before he could summon another group, Jenna stopped him - this was her chance to be more than a doorkeeper. But she’d need a team.
Lord Vandree was an obvious choice - a paramount sorcerer, but also edgy as hell, hilarious and an excellent chef. Perhaps only the first of those were important, but Jenna wasn’t going to miss the chance to get Jaezred on side, and sent of a florid letter in her most eloquent tones requesting his presence. Her handwriting may leave much to be desired, but she’d spent enough time with Aurelia to know how to do polite.
Wren sometimes swung by the fort for a drink and a meal, and Jenna always made sure to take time to catch up - they were the same age, and Wren seemed to have a whole master thief / mobile animal sanctuary vibe that Jenna found very impressive. If they needed something investigated, there was no other choice.
Osborin, now there was a bard with style. She’d seen Leocanto play far too many times to appreciate that kind of tacky display, despite his virtuoso performances. Osborin seemed to float around the Dawnlands with the kind of disdain that 19 year old Jenna interpreted as definitely cool. She couldn’t play music at all, so it had always been impressive. Anyway, a quick word was all it took to get that classic ‘if I can be bothered’ response, that Jenna knew meant he wouldn’t let her down.
Looking at her party roster, sketched out on a piece of parchment in her room, she knew something was missing - they needed balance, a different point of view and a healer. They all came in the same small package, and Laurel was a delight to have around, so Jenna reached out to them as well.
Jenna’s elite team assembled in a common room in the Fort, where Lord Jaezred had provided delicious scones (her planning paying off immediately). After a brief discussion they had headed to the library, where Jenna discovered to her frustration that Coll had left the library open. Four people had disappeared here and people were still casually reading in the armchairs. He was a nice man, but his policy to public safety seemed to be ‘they’re adventurers, danger is in the business.’
Splitting up around the small space to explore, Jenna had to call a Tabard over to follow Osborin, who was checking behind the books by throwing them to the floor. Wren found the problem almost immediately though - a humming book with a large yellow topaz stuck through it. On finding it though, she vanished into thin air, the book falling to the ground.
“We’re going in right? That’s what you would all do in a situation like this?” she asked, eagerly. This was turning into a proper adventure at last.
Inside the book turned out to be a fairyland - not the Feywild but a more mundane, storybook land, which was a wild thought to have. Calling out for Wren saw a hand wave out from behind a rock - stealth being Wren’s natural state of being. A gnome approached them in a laughably stereotypical red cap outfit, introducing himself as The Groundskeeper, and explaining that this is a demiplane created by a wizard for his daughter.
The conversation was strange and circular, but Jenna learned 3 important details:
- The last party had come screaming from a distant mountain, burning and yelling about a dragon
- The Pagemaster lives on that mountain
- There is a Candy Well nearby
Clearly, the right thing to do was to let the Groundskeeper lead the way to the mountain and discover why the Pagemaster was an angry dragon. But firrrrrrst…
The Candy Well was full of rotten candy, disgusting to even be near.
“On to the mountain then…,” Jenna sighed, and resumed her conversation with Jaezred on the finer nuances of sorcery and the raw power they each wielded.
If they weren’t already prepared for literally the wildest things that imagination could conjure, the fact that the mountain in question was in fact the shell and back of a truly colossal land turtle would have been surprising. That didn’t mean it still wasn’t a truly awe inspiring sight though - this enormous beast moving slowly around a valley. Still sulking from the failed Candy Well trip, Jenna elected to Teleport the entire group over to the door to the Pagemaster’s cave, just barely in sight.
They entered the cave slowly, stopping as they heard the distant sound of whimpering. Proceeding with caution, they arrived in a large cave that turned out to contain nothing save a red dragon, chained in the corner and clearly in distress. The group was concerned of course - where was the Pagemaster? Was this dragon someone they could help? Finally, they nominated Jenna to investigate, as one of the only people who could speak Draconic, and also literally was part red dragon.
“If you turn out to be The Pagemaster,” she murmured, placing a hand on the Groundskeeper’s shoulder, “you and I are going to have words.”
“Oh no, I’m The Groundskeeper,” was the only response she got before she flapped her wings and drifted into the room.
“Hi there,” she said in draconic to the huge creature, who cowered away as she approached, a genuinely alarming reaction for a dragon. They had scales missing from their side and looked severely malnourished.
The dragon’s name was Kaltenzahn, and he had apparently been placed here by his parents thinking this would be a safe place to grow and build a hoard. The Pagemaster, whatever they were, had gotten free of their bindings in the gem in the sky (the sun was the topaz in the book outside, but cracked - that had been weird to see in the sky when they arrived), and then imprisoned Kaltenzahn here. They had also begun consuming the dragon’s scales, apparently trying to make themselves stronger.
A brief discussion amongst the team settled on freeing the dragon of course, and Jenna used a teleportation spell to free Kaltenzahn from his chains.
“Oh, you just couldn’t leave it alone, could you?” came a raspy voice from behind them.
As the diminutive adorable form of the Groundskeeper surged and swelled into a monstrous, chimeric form of some great monster half converted into a red dragon, the Pagemaster’s roar echoed around the chamber, drowning out Jenna’s, “I *fucking* knew it. We’re going to have words, it seems.”
The fight was chaotic. Jenna knew her fire magic wouldn’t be effective here, so she focused her sorcery and began converting her spells into different types of energy - lightning initially proved ineffective. The Pagemaster shot back a pair of beams of truly wild energy - born from the being who had absolutely control over the reality of this domain - and… healed her. Chaos doesn’t always mean helpful.
Wren was firing shot after shot into the Pagemaster’s hide, causing him immense pain. Jaezred was hanging back, trying to find clever ways to subdue it - a Web spell just passed straight through the monster though - the power over reality preventing that at least.
The real hero, of course, was Osborin. The thunderous explosions from the bard’s music were particularly effective, and so Jenna began following up with thunder of her own, the cavern ringing out with concussive blasts one after another.
The Pagemaster, frustrated and in pain, leapt into the air and breathed a huge cone of fire over Wren, Osborin and Laurel - who had been keeping the party safe the whole time. Wren came out unscathed, but Osborin was left in a burning heap on the ground. Laurel, of course, had him back on his feet in seconds - a fountain of healing as ever.
Wren got in another incredible shot into the creature’s side, but it was Osborin who had the final, explosive outburst getting back on his feet to detonate the Pagemaster in a wave of music and magic.
The plane naturally began to collapse, and so Jenna gathered them all together and shifted them all back to the front gate of Fort Ettin.
Kaltenzahn was clearly harrowed by the whole experience, and immediately stayed close to Jenna, asking if he could live with her now. If ever there was a question that only had one answer. He also coughed up a weird ball of metal, which was surprising, all the more because it was very clearly on inspection an incredibly resonant material.
Now Jenna’s glider suit is long forgotten. Each morning she takes to the sky under her own power, leathery wings lifting her higher and higher. And now she has a companion on these flights - Kaltenzahn is still getting used to being outside again, but getting stronger every day.
The metal turned out to be a perfect fit for the requirements of a planar tuning fork, but given its properties, she worked on it with Aurelia and devised an orb that can resonate at different frequencies. Still in testing, but it should be able to serve as a tuning fork to *anywhere* as long as she uses it right.
For the girl who woke up 20 years older one day and lost her family, Jenna could seldom keep a smile off of her face. Flying with a dragon every morning before bending the planes to your will in a beautiful fort full of incredible people in the countryside - life couldn’t get much better than this. She needed to find out where Osborin was playing next though...
