As this chapter opens, the party is faced with the problem of helping the Western efforts against Marakeel and the insanity/karfu faction while evading the legions of phase spiders Rakni will undoubtedly be sending their way. The solution: When the going gets tough, the tough head offplane. So it's off to the Cloudlands, a demi-plane strongly associated with Elemental Air that happens to be where Subator gets all those nasty birds for Kharnzeel. Jenx claims to know which gate in the Cloudlands Subator will have to use, so the party plans to head there, stake it out, and capture Subator when he shows up, hopefully cutting off Kharnzeel's avian servant supply, freeing Subator of his bond to Kharnzeel, and finding out lots of information about Kharnzeel's overall plan against the West. And if the party happens to run across Eastern operatives attempting to recruit cloud giants and flying trolls or spiders trying to gather resources for Rakni, they'll just have to stomp on them along the way.
Before heading off into the clouds, the party (sans Beeel's horse Bob, who's staying with the halflings in VH) teleported to C-Ra with the Red Mage to do a little shopping. Silvator seems to be cashing in on the upcoming "War of the Century" (as proclaimed by the banners around his trading post), though Silvator himself is still off in the East. Boutros has declared himself the Guardian of Chthul-Ra, and his private army is "swaggering" around the city; others are beefing up their private forces as well. At the Fighter's Guild, people are talking about the Cuthbert's bad effects on demihumans (I suppose it's not friendly to non-LG ones, really) and recruiting people to help Banzeel (recently declared C-Ra's sister city) fend off the "Western Invasion".
The party then fired up the Cloudship and headed into the wind barrier over the mountains, where they caught a major updraft and were carried into the Cloudlands, complete with popping of ears. (Ganeth, Cambra, and Pepper got blown off the cloud on the way up; the updraft was strong enough to support them, so they might have ended up somewhere in the Cloudlands anyway, but the party manged to recover them before they drifted too far away.)
Contrary to rumor, the Cloudlands aren't literally sitting in the upper atmosphere (though they could be embedded in it somehow): The place has no day/night cycle and no direct sign of the sun, just general diffuse lighting. The air is cold, moist, and misty. Cambra noted that she's too far from her fated mount to sense its location. There does appear to be normal gravity, however.
Jenx seemed to be able to get a rough sense of the party's location by concentrating ("using my innate homing-bird instincts"), and the cloud ship headed off, hopefully to encounter a cloud island before the ship's duration expired. Instead, it encountered a group of hunters: Near-invisible (10% chance to see once in melee) floating creatures with four tentacles (with pinning special effect), beaks (that they didn't get close enough to use), about 10 HD, and an innate electric arc ability (four arcs, roughly d6+10 each). They tend to hunt in packs of about half a dozen and can be detected with See Unseen and Detect Evil (we don't know about DI). The party was happy to note that stoneskins continue to function in the Cloudlands but was less than thrilled with the indiscriminate scope of Jenx's desperation maneuvers.
As the cloud ship sailed on, Cambra got a bit better acquainted with the rest of the party, exploring such issues as the grey elves' spell-swapping...
- Cambra:
- "Does Pepper get mirror images too?"
- Pepper:
- "I just get half xp."
...and the proper labeling of light-fingered adventurers.
- Jenx:
- "I call myself a specialist."
- Silvana:
- "I call myself Silvana, really."
- Ganeth:
- "I call myself in deep shit, generally speaking."
After a bit more flying, Jenx admitted that while he sort of roughly knows where to go, he isn't really all that sure of how to get there, so acquiring a native guide (something like a djinn) might be a good idea. The cloud ship then encountered a half-mile-diameter cloud with a spike sticking out of it; nobody was sure what it was (Jenx thought it might be a cloud giant warship), but it was given a wide berth. Eventually a larger cloud came along, featuring an abandoned-looking city under a half-mile-diameter dome on the bottom and two hills on the top. On closer examination, the dome turned out to be composed of some scale-like material; it had an iris at the top (er, bottom?), but the party decided it would be more prudent to just land on the top side of the island, so that's what they did.
And since the party is stuck there for a week, let's hope it doesn't flip over again.