Supremely unconcerned with his circumstances, Buddy (whose real name was beyond most surface-dwelling tongues) woke to darkness as he always had. An eyeless grimlock, his echolocation revealed the world around him with every sound as he moved about the small room. He’d learned that surface-dwellers took some pride in their appearance, so he pulled his own unruly mane into a rough ponytail to keep it from his face. It looked fine to him, but who was he to know? Box checked and inured to his own body odor, he joined his companion downstairs.
Trixie was the last to get up, though she’d heard Buddy lumbering around the small room for several minutes while she tried (and failed) to will herself back to sleep. Begrudgingly, the tiny fey woman clambered out of bed, gathered her things, (and her emotional support doggo, Pawla) and followed the smell of Buddy down the stairs as well.
While Nelvin explained the ramifications of his own discovery, Trixie swept outside and found similar posters (none of them well-drawn) indicating that a hunt was on for all three of them. Bringing them back inside, she also found their solution in the form of a fourth posting - one that had eluded Nelvin, and that Buddy could only vaguely comprehend:
HEROES NEEDED!
Adventure on the high seas! Visit scenic Chult!
Trade tales with the legendary Volothamp Geddarm, greatest bard on the Sword Coast!
See the legendary beasts of Chult! Taste the finest of tropical fruits!
Visit scenic locales and meet interesting people!
Adventure (and fair compensation) await!
Stabracadabra met with the advertisement’s source, none other than the famous (in certain chagrined circles) bard Volo. The foppish writer explained that his new book release (Volo’s Guide to Monsters) had been funded by several of Nyanzaru’s merchant princes - and that he accordingly would be delivering them signed copies in person. He had a ship and a crew to get him there, but he needed defenders to protect that ship and crew from the myriad dangers of the Sea of Swords. Initially offering 50 gold (as well as a copy of the book itself) by way of compensation to each party member, he adjusted this figure for Trixie and Buddy (to 60 gold) since Buddy wasn’t much of a reader, and since Trixie hated the first edition. Volo also promised to put in a good word with said merchant princes, implying that additional work might lay ahead if the voyage went well. While Volo needed a band of adventurers, our heroes needed a way out of Baldur’s Gate.
24 hours’ time saw Stabracadabra boarding the “Sea Dwarf,” a single-masted sailing ship captained by Hadrian Stone. Hadrian was a gruff, scarred dwarf of about 200 years, with gray showing at his temples and in his beard and one eye hidden behind a patch around a ragged scar.
Before leaving, Nelvin had offered a prayer to the goddess Tymora for good luck, and privately felt some justification for doing so as the voyage started off swimmingly. The sun was warm and the waves calm, with a strong southerly wind speeding the trip. Their ship was visited by an albatross, the plumage of which looked something like the mark of Baravar Cloakshadow, an ally of Tymora and Nelvin’s own god. Nelvin took it as a sign.
Hadrian quickly warmed the heroes when he learned of Trixie’s ability to predict the weather and saw how Nelvin improved morale with nightly performances on the ship. By day, Nelvin worked with some of the crew to learn what he could of their skill with knots. Buddy (for his part) spent much of the voyage simply listening to the sounds of ocean creatures in the water around the ship, particularly the dolphins that made a game of racing one another around the bow. Following the lead of their captain, the crew accepted this strange band of heroes over time.
Tragedy struck a week into their voyage, when the Sea Dwarf was attacked by a pair of raiding merrow during a storm. The storm was predicted - Trixie had brought word of it directly to the captain. Hadrian shrugged it off, blustering offhand that he’d died in a storm once before and had no plans to repeat the mistake. The attack, however, caught the sailors by surprise.
From the seas, two towering ocean creatures - brutish humanoids that resembled some fusion of ogre and merfolk, threw harpoons onto the deck, trying to snare any hapless sailors. Two sailors were claimed by such attacks - Stephen, a deckhand who had especially liked to hear Nelvin’s music, and Stella, one of the ship’s two stalwart marines. Both disappeared into a froth of blood and shark fins shortly after slipping beneath the waves.
Trixie took to the skies to catch and wrangle a loose sail, securing the loose boom of the ship before it could do any serious damage. That done, she dodged and hid amongst the ship’s railings, raining tiny arrows upon the merrow from relative safety. Between shots, she spun magical barbs through the battle below, deflecting attacks and creating openings that her companions could exploit.
Buddy took on the form of a large spider, an underdark native that was beautiful to him, but horrific to the sailors who didn’t expect it. Climbing along the side of the ship, he took to the front of the fight, sinking his fangs deep into the merrow to deliver a paralytic poison when the opportunity presented itself.
Nelvin brought his bardic magics to bear in the battle, calling out encouragement to his companions and inspiring them in the face of vicious opposition. A well-timed sleep spell forced a boarding merrow to slump into the sea and out of the fight, to be sucked into the same swirling vortex that threatened to consume the ship itself. Finally drawing his blade, he stood toe-to-fishtail with the final merrow.
Through the whole fight, Hadrian did his best to keep the ship on course while fighting his own personal battle with a mysterious wasting illness that sought to lay him low. His halfling first mate, Corra, wielded her bow from the mast and rigging, finally dropping to the deck to help drive the last merrow back to the waters below. Volo remained below deck for the duration of the encounter, but halfheartedly called out vague encouragements from his position below, which were appropriately ignored. Eventually the storm and merrow fell behind the Sea Dwarf, which sailed on toward their destination.
Over the following days, the crew (now 2 souls smaller) patched the ship as best they could. Trixie used her fey magic to grow and adjust planks and help them, resulting in greenery-covered patches of hull that not only held water, but drank it. Nelvin learned more knots, finally grasping what Stephen had failed to teach him, and worked on a song to commemorate the battle. Buddy returned below deck, more at home with his own thoughts than the odd stares of the crew above, and “watched” dolphins through the hull.
Hadrian’s sickness grew worse, and Corra took on more of his responsibilities while he spent gradually more time below deck. Whatever plagued the dwarven seaman was beyond any medical knowledge aboard, and as the days passed, Hadrian slipped in and out of consciousness. His scarred face, once a mark of battles long passed, grew gray and necrotic; the scars around his eye oozed pus. His only real hope - some kind of diagnosis - lay in Nyanzaru, the Sea Dwarf’s destination, now less than a week away.
As we look toward that next chapter in the saga of Stabracadabra, we close on Trixie, deep in her familiar weather-predicting incantation. She holds a ball of light in her small hand that shifts through a variety of colors before settling on an opaque pale that holds steady. Thick fog lies ahead, hiding the seas around them and whatever dangers might lurk between their small ship and the safety of distant Nyanzaru.
UP NEXT...
We take a look back in time with Buddy via INTERLUDE I - A CARVED DOLPHIN or skip right to EPISODE II.