4.22.2008

The Arcane College: Part 4 - Curiouser and Curiouser

So...things just get so weird from week to week.
While the party moved on from the tree to find food and the comfort of a room, I stayed behind at the tree and began to meditate on what has happened and what path to take next, when above me, I heard a voice. There was Pick, a halfling we had met in the future, though my character was at first oblivious to that fact (I've begun to roleplay that the different people and places are somewhat static to my character, with all the jumps taking a toll on him mentally.) After having spoken to Pick, and him having given me a small charm in the form of a necklace, I realized, with the help of Ferrell, what year it was and directed him to The Dragon's Cauldron, where I have a contact in a guild I joined.

After venturing into town and learning of a gathering of the council to discuss with us our progress and their concerns about the caves/mines, we all decided to retire and rest so that we could have a good start. Meeting with the council was just as boring as it sounds when Chobrim and I began to argue and everything around us halted but we were able to move freely. A small figure was spotted fleeing the building so we gave chase, pursuing what we saw to be a small creature seemingly made entirely of sand, and could corrode things with a touch. On his trail was a gnome, who could also function normally, and who told us some of the timeslips we were experiencing and directed us in the direction of some items fueled by Time Sand (which the creature seen earlier was constructed of) with which to aid us (the first of which being the amulet I was given by Pick.) He then went on to explain that he is a watcher, and that his job is to correct the timestream so that rifts and anomalies don't appear and threaten the very future, itself.

Armed with the information given us, we immediately made haste to the south where a temple dedicated to time and temporal research is. There, we acquired our second item, a bracer which my character put on and used, subsequently aging myself 100 years, though stopping time for a minute around me. Armed with a dangerous item and an aged elf, we travelled back to whence we came and then made our way to a different town down the road, where sat a museum with what could possibly be another time-related tool. Various shenanigans there, and the expenditure of EVERY coin in my possession netted us a set of dice (a prize I did as a job for the guild) and another use of my bracer netted me 100 more years and an hourglass full of Time Sand, which happened to be attached to a water clock.

Having stolen the hourglass, we made haste to leave the town, and did so on foot, encountering a band of orcs, whom we dispatched, then moved on to our original departure point. There, we called a meeting among ourselves, revealing the steal, and decided that we needed to go to the Temporal temple place again for analysis of our things and what we could do with them. We called forth the head of the temple and as he went to whisk us there, something went wrong. We wound up where we were going, just not when. Research notes put us hundreds of years into the future, where we encountered another Time Sand homunculus, and searching for its owner, found....Pick! In possession of a Watcher's Orb.

As we ended the session, magical identification had uncovered nothing about the orb, and we had pretty much decided to activate it blindly. All the while, some of us were using those old dice we got at the museum to pass the time with a game, oblivious to the fact that we were gambling with more than just the 1 gp wager, as we have in our possession Olidammara's Dice.

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