Today’s snippet, titled “Teleportation, pt. 2”, is a piece I wrote about my PC in Mark’s Pathfinder Campaign.
      Yes, another multi-part chapter. Chapter Forty was a beast – totaling about four thousand words, which may not seem like that much. Still, when you think that an average novel has about a hundred thousand, that’s 1/25th of a novel. Which maybe doesn’t seem like much either but really, it is. I swear, really.
      Be forewarned, there may be mature themes and naughty language below.
– – – – – – – – – – –
      “…but the tavern is so much more public.”
      “Exactly.” Celeste poked her index finger into her palm pointedly. “Better to end up in a public place than scare the devil out of some poor young woman in her sitting room.”
      “The tavern could be quite dangerous though.”
      “Rhiallis – the young woman’s house could be just as dangerous. And this way – we won’t be guilty of trespassing. A taproom is public space.”
      “All right,” she acquiesced. “That’s that, then.”
      “Clasp hands,” Aimsley said, and cleared her throat. “To the taproom we go.”
      Six days since we liberated Drezen, Rhiallis thought, closing her eyes in anticipation of the sickening lurch. And here we are, practically on holiday traipsing around the countryside.
      The inn had served a hearty supper and ample, sweet mead, but the meal they had provided this morning to break their fasts had been worth the vomit-inducing trip. Eggs, fried in bacon fat, were topped with melty cubes of a sharp local cheese and dotted with sauteed onions, seasonal mushrooms, and garlic so potent she was sure they’d still be smelling her breath days later. There had been fresh, fluffy loaves of bread with salted butter and a paste of ground-nuts she was still drooling over hours later. Her stomach was uncomfortably full as Aimsley began her chant and she grimaced. Why did I eat so much?
      And there it was – the dropping out of physical reality, the fluid slipping through the void, and then a gut-wrenching cramp as her feet hit the floor again. But they did not land – not solidly. It was like the first time she had gone toe-to-toe with that tiefling bitch. Some invisible wall of force repelled them. They seemed to bounce off the reality of the tavern.
      Tasting blood on her lips, Rhiallis realized that it wasn’t an illusion – they had physically rebounded off of something. Swirling through the vortex once more, Rhiallis had the sensation of being scrambled. Like my breakfast, came the thought, but she could not even laugh internally for it was true. Her knees buckled, but they were at her waist and she was looking at the back of them – her head half-way down her back where her ass should be. Elbows for ears, her nose on her shin, all twenty toes and fingers intermingled at the end of a single limb that was half-arm, half-leg and seemed to be jutting from her neck.
      A heartbeat passed and it felt as if she was dying. Worse – as if she was dead, some queer dead abomination.
      Then Aimsley’s voice rang out from their feet and the four of them were hurtled through space-time once more.
      Suddenly, they landed.
      “What the fuck?”
      “I- don’t-”
      “Where are we?”
      They were whole. Rhiallis patted herself hastily to confirm that, even as she and her friends cast their gazes around. It was a taproom, but not like the one Aimlsey had described from her vision of New Stetven. The mood was subdued here, dark and joyless. The patrons of the bar kept talking in their soft, stern voices.
      “Up here a step,” Sadie whispered, sliding up the staircase and into a shadow as naturally as if it were a pool of water. “Quiet.”
      It was too late for stealth.
      “Ladies, yer can’t go up t’stairs if yer ain’t paid fer a room,” called the innkeep. “Ain’t allowed.”
      They hesitated, the three of them exchanging panicked looks.
      Rhiallis glanced out the window. Fog clouded the immediate vicinity, obscuring the features of the street outside and the city around it, but her eyes were drawn instantly to a towering structure in the distance. Black and forbidding, it pierced the skies from its perch atop a hill some miles away. Even now, during the day, purple lightning flashed around its crown – a warning, and a promise.
      Her heart sank to her feet.
      “We have to get out of her,” she whispered. “Now.”
      “What? Why? Where are we?”
      She pointed with her chin, afraid to raise her arms lest the already grumbling patrons take the gesture as an excuse to attack. “That’s the Gallowspire. We’re in Ustalav. We have to go. Now.”
      “I can’t just cast it here-”
      “Aimsley, do it!” Celeste’s order was a growl. She grabbed their hands, squeezing tightly. Aimsley had no choice – despite the increasingly raucous mood of the inn, she called out the incantation she had used before.
      In a whirlwind of vomit-inducing horror, they twirled again through the vortex. Spinning around and around until she could not tell her head from her feet, her heart from her stomach, up from down, Rhiallis was sure that this time would be the death of them. Then beer-stained floorboards appeared beneath her feet and for a split second, she could see the brightly colored taproom Aimsley described to them earlier. There was the purple-booted bard and the laughing pig painted on someone’s shield.
      Then once again, they were repelled forcefully. Somewhere in the distance, she heard someone cry out. She thought it might have been her own voice, but in an instant the thought was gone for they were twisting, being pulled apart. She was fraying at the edges, the very seams of reality close to bursting.
      Iomedae! the prayer came to her mind at the exact same moment they burst back into the material world again.
      And there was the briefest feeling of relief, for all of her parts seemed to be in their proper places, before the shock of icy cold enveloped her. She was falling again and she opened her lips to scream. Water flooded her mouth and panic threatened at the corners of her mind. Without even thinking about it, Rhiallis reached up and touched Terendelluve’s scale.
      A few seconds later, she bobbed to the surface. As far as she could see – black waves lapping peacefully. No land? Where are we? Where’s Sadie? Aimsley? Celeste?
      As she thought their names, she spoke them aloud. The sound of her voice echoed eerily. Aimsley’s blonde head broke the surface with a splash.
      “I gotta get Celeste! Make me breathe water!” Sadie’s voice held no trace of panic, just urgency. She was still dry, running light-foot atop the waves, circling her friends. “Hurry!”
      Somehow, though she too must be freezing and tredding water, Aimsley managed to wave her hands and enchant Sadie, who dove gracefully beneath the surface.
      “What are we going to do?”
      Aimsley managed to shrug, but her attention was focused on the black depths below them. They could see neither Celeste nor Sadie and as seconds turned to minutes, Rhiallis began to fear that they not see either of their friends again.
      Eventually, as the chill from the water began to make her feel logy and apathetic, first Sadie, then Celeste, broke the surface.
      “G-g-g-get us o-o-oout of here,” Sadie said, her teeth chattering.
      Aimsley closed her eyes once more, drawing upon that deep reserve of power they had felt growing since the destruction of the Wardstones.
      When they landed in the grass outside Kenebres, Rhiallis collapsed to her knees, kissed the dusty ground, and promptly regurgitated her lovely breakfast all over Celeste’s bare feet.
      “…I am never doing that again.”
– – – – – – – – – – –

Note: Image is “King Jagiello Statue Central” by (Mulligand) from SXC.hu; edited by me