Chapter 22: Exploring the Crater

August 8

The group heals each other and gets the group members almost fully healed. After that, Kieron casts some hearing improvement on Ra, and Ra stays on watch while the others sleep. During the night, commotion is heard from outside several times, but nothing else happens.

August 9

In the morning, the group examines the houses. Kieron sits still while the others investigate the houses. No one else finds anything, except Kieron, who while sitting in the corner of a house finds boots under a pile of junk. Inside the boots are four silver coins, which Kieron secretly picks up and puts in her own money pouch while Ra and Neiia are standing right next to her without noticing anything. Jaysek, on the other side of the house, notices Kieron’s actions but only snorts. The boots aren’t magic boots, but according to Neiia, really high quality and durable, but also really ugly and dwarf-sized.

After this, the group goes to explore the crater. Neiia casts flying spells on the whole group and then starts flying toward the crater. They reach the edge of the crater, and at this point, Neiia notices that there’s a negative magic level here, so now those flying spells on Kieron and Ra start to be hard to maintain, so she announces that she’ll end them in just under a minute.

Ra starts flying at full speed downward toward the ground but corrects his direction to horizontal flight at a couple of yards’ height. Kieron follows the same line. They fly near the center and land before the flying spell ends. After that, the group begins to examine the crater. Jaysek finds out that it’s a comet that they have somehow succeeded in guiding here. The comet was apparently quite soft material. Neiia finds signs of mining activity but nothing interesting. Ra goes to the center of the crater and starts digging at that spot. Kieron thinks about it and says there’s no artifact that could do this, and additionally, this probably wasn’t even done with magic items.

Ra continues digging while Jaysek starts thinking about the matter from a magic perspective and spends a couple of hours on it, after which he says that low millions of points of magic energy were used for this ritual. Neiia finds a small piece of that metal and says that apparently there was only a little of this material on the surface of the comet itself. Neiia also comments that those who have been here looking for that metal were here right after the impact, even before the crater had cooled. Kieron also finds a bit of the same metal, and when Jaysek follows the tracks of those first diggers, he finds over ten pounds more of the material. Neiia takes those metals to carry, but she gets a feeling that the material interferes with spellcasting, so she gives the metals to Ra to carry.

At this point, the group says they could follow those tracks. Jaysek goes ahead and starts following a five foot wide burned groove through the rubble. He follows the track for some time before getting into the middle of the rubble and falling into a trap pit. Jaysek says he can’t find those tracks anymore. The others notice that there’s that big burned groove, but Jaysek thinks they didn’t go that way but turned aside. Kieron notices that there’s a footprint that isn’t Ra’s footprint. She lifts Ra’s foot at the same time to show Jaysek that it’s not this shoe. Jaysek tells Kieron to make a footprint next to it, and when that doesn’t look the same either, Jaysek believes. Kieron follows the tracks until they come to the forest edge, where the burned groove ends. There Kieron continues following the tracks and gets through the forest to the other side of the island, on top of a cliff. From here starts a narrow path downward.

Neiia casts a flying spell on Kieron too, and Kieron and Jaysek take things from Ra so that Ra can walk down the lighter path. The path descends to about 50 to 60 feet above water level, at which point it comes to a clearly artificial ledge. The ledge is about a yard wide and thirty or so feet long. The ledge ends directly at a wall. The group descends to the ledge, and Jaysek doesn’t find tracks there but says there’s a secret door sideways at the end. Neiia notices that there’s some kind of magic trap in the secret door itself.