The Aeronaut Club was finally willing to let the Arngeir fly. Dorsha and Helga were eager to put her to work mining elemental air, but the club was dragging its feet and making excuses as usual. When Helga approached me about crewing the maiden voyage, something I immediately agreed to, they made her bring liability waivers. As if someone could get in an airship without understanding that they could fall off.
Crewing the ship was apparently an issue: Sandrin, Icarus, Vlolkir and I were apparently the only ones willing, even if Icarus was sure he could bring a friend along, the rest of the Aereonaut Club apparently preferred to keep playing at being an orchestra. Helga and Dorsha themselves had been prohibited from joining the voyage, something that I worried may trigger Helga's gahad at any moment.
To remedy the situation the Broken Spear moot was asked to provide a training crew, which they graciously did. To this day I still wonder what exactly we had to offer in exchange. Two days later the Arngeir had a crew and was ready to take to the skies, but we could not leave until some puffed up official wasted everyone's time with platitudes. If Throal was actually serious about retaking the skies, why was the ship crewed almost entirely by a moot?
Finally we took off, with that silly band making a show of themselves on the side. The Broken Spears were clearly used to flying an airship and helped us get used to our duties. Sandrin was the acting captain for this voyage, Icarus' friend Reys Poriv, a windling Shaman I had not met before, navigated, Icarus was at the helm, and Vlolkir and I coordinated the rowers. I say coordinated, but they all knew their job and often our best contribution was to just put our backs into it.
Helga had provided us with what she called Last Grasp charms that should help in case we were about to fall overboard. The Broken Spears had the much simpler and possibly more effective solution of tying themselves to the ship with lines that had been infused with elemental earth for added strength.
Our destination was to be a node near what was called the Howling Cliffs, where the winds flow upwards and are allegedly strong enough to float a troll. To answer the question immediately, no, we did not test this.
We made good speed over the mountains, until two Thunderbirds decided they would like lunch. Luckily Sandrin and Icarus spotted them before they reached us, so we were somewhat ready. That day I learnt that fighting birds from an airship is really aggravating as they kept swooping in and then retreating outside my reach. Sandrin's throwing sword definitely came in handy and we eventually took the birds down without too much damage to anyone. We all took some feathers as a memento and Vlolkir insisted on keeping the thighs for eating, they did look delicious.
The next obstacle on the way was a bank of stormclouds. I think Reys lost his bearings for a while there and at some points it felt like I was just rowing by myself but we made it through unscathed.
A few hours later we arrived at the cliffs, anchored near the node, and the Broken Spear Elementalist began to harvest a kernel as proof that we had indeed reached our destination. While we waited for the ritual to complete, the howling of the wind seemed to intensify and a couple of creatures that looked like distant cousins to Shadowmants attacked us, but Vlolkir spotted them in time. Just as we were dealing with those, a bunch of wispy looking Ice Fliers also attacked, severely injuring Icarus before being crushed.
After the kernel was extracted, we moved the ship to a safer location nearby and rested for the night. During their watch Sandrin and Vlolkir noticed some kind of beacon in the distance so the next morning we set out to investigate.
The source of the beacon looked like some kind of floating island, but soon it seems to be obscured by some kind of cloud. As we got closer, the cloud turned out to be a writhing mass of Stormwraiths, some of which started making their way towards us. Sandrin decided to try and get to the island, hoping we could find some defensive positions there so we redoubled our efforts on speed.
Before we could get much closer, some tainted wyvern popped out of the cloud of Stormwraiths and Sandrin made the decision to turn back as the Arngeir was not equipped for such a fight. Vlolkir was not happy with this choice but accepted it and lent his considerable strength at the oar once again.
The flight back to Throal was otherwise uneventful.Statistics:Posted by sigfriedmcwild — Mon Jul 06, 2020 8:15 pm
]]>