Freeport Campaign

The group spent the next few days in Freeport drinking, conferring, shopping, and researching a variety of subjects.

Spike, Chow, and several of Will’s assistants pored through the stacks at the Freeport Institute and Scriptorium of Tinel looking for the names and last known whereabouts of various legendary weapons, and canvassed their contacts in town looking for magical items to fill functional gaps in the group’s martial abilities.

Edo sought out legends of powerful shapeshifters in an effort to expand his own similar capabilities beyond his current limitations.

Richard and Will immersed themselves in matters astrological and astronomical. Seafarers and scholars had long since pieced together mostly reliable solutions to the mysteries of latitude, longitude, the tides, eclipses, and various other esoteric matters once considered the exclusive purview of divine whim, but some mysteries still remained. Specifically, Will and Richard wondered about the feasibility of traveling to the moon, for a variety of reasons: because it’s there; to see if anyone had been there before; to test the practical limits of magical theory; to establish a secure base of operations/observation post; etc. The latest data and theories available in Freeport posited that the moon was a spherical physical body revolving around the planet at some great distance, occasionally occluding the sun or being occluded by the planet. There was no indication of any civilizations or life on the body, and no records of anyone having tried to visit the place by magical or mundane means.

With those assumptions in mind, and unsure of what the conditions would be on the surface of the moon (or in the void between the planet and the satellite, in case the equations and assumptions were wrong) Will spent some time creating a necklace of adaptation and ring of sustenance to provide himself air, nutrition, and hydration for the duration of his exploratory excursion. When those preparations were complete, Will studied his spellbooks, committed powerful teleportation spells to memory, and gave his notes a final perusal. At midnight, he and the rest of the party ascended to the observatory atop the Freeport Institute. With a word, Will attempted to teleport himself the 250,000 or so miles to the surface of the moon.

His collected calculations proved almost completely accurate, as he only had to drop about six feet to plant his boots on the dusty surface. He tested the permanent telepathic link he had set up with the rest of the party, which worked instantaneously across the yawning gulf between the two bodies. Awed at the sight of the familiar shapes of the continents arrayed on a mostly blue disk suspended in the black void, he spent a few minutes taking in and describing the view to his comrades, after magically protecting himself against the extreme heat blazing invisibly around him. After placing a flag bearing the symbols of the Freeport Four and Four Gulls Shipping, he spent several more minutes zooming over the ground, getting a feel for the lonely geography of the place.

After about an hour, Will noticed that he had developed a headache, mild nausea, and a rather severe sunburn. Alarmed, he took a final look around, uttered another word into his protective bubble of air, and appeared instantaneously back at the Freeport Institute observatory. He and his friends then headed back to Teach Investigations/Four Gulls Headquarters for some rest, and Richard promised to return in the morning to look after the strange malady the mage seemed to have contracted.

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