An Interlude in Gemini Spire

Queen Olivia sat down at her booth seat with a fresh slice of peach pie and a stein of goat milk.

�Alright.� She set a napkin on her diminutive lap. �As much as I like this phantasmal town, Edwin�s going to blow it up soon, probably, and I�d like to be gone when that happens. We need to hurry up and locate your imp. What do we know so far that could help us find her?�

Miriel leaned back in her seat and looked up towards the ceiling, trying to clear the usual fog from her mind. What did they know? She thought back to the beginning.

It started right after she and Amiri finished the Chompsky investigation. Pepp had entrusted a gnome courier with a short note explaining her whereabouts. Miriel couldn�t remember the exact wording, but it included an apology and a brief description of a dream that had led her on an unplanned pilgrimage to the ruins of her people, a few days walk to the east. When they went back to their temporary dwelling to retrieve Olivia she finally opened up to them about the danger posed by King Edwin and his plan to use her and the Heart of the World to turn the entire Ouroboros Forest into a smoking crater. She suggested they escape as quickly as possible on the chance that he�d figured out how to use the Heart in her absence. But they couldn�t leave without Pep, so they set out to retrieve her.

Along the way Miriel decided to ask the spirits for a hint at Pep�s location. What she received was a grim vision of a small room in a log cabin with a couch, a chair, a fireplace and two infernals in it. One was Pep, and the other was an unknown red-haired woman wearing an apron.

Shortly afterward, the two-and-a-half women were ambushed by a hulking, fleshy abomination that they were able to identify as a chaos spawn: a creature formed when a living host draws forbidden power from the Other Side. Miriel smiled as she remembered plunging the chimeric dagger into her hand and becoming a beautiful snail-stag, helping the (nearly) invincible Amiri take it down. The monster�s body boiled and evaporated away, leaving no trace but their bruises. It was not the last time they�d fight one of these horrors.

On the third day of their journey they arrived at their destination, but where they expected empty ruins they found a thriving little town and a charming restaurant called the Double Horn Diner. Miriel recalled asking her companions if they noticed anything amiss. Olivia used her Truesight ability to see through the illusion at the decaying frames and foundations of a once-pleasant village, and at the still-standing obelisk right at the center. Not only was the current visage entirely magically constructed, but the spire in the middle was being hidden. Something was very wrong, and if Pep had something to do with this, finding her could be a lot more complicated than they had hoped.

The trio decided to file into the diner to see what was up. Inside, they met the woman from Miriel�s vision: Normy, a redheaded infernal, standing behind the counter wearing an apron. She gladly invited them inside and fed them delicious pie and drinks while they asked her questions. Miriel didn�t see the conversation going anywhere and decided to sit down with a nearby group of teenagers. As she did, a thought occurred to her: what year was it in this town? She got an answer that she was unable to parse, but luckily Amiri knew more about foreign date formats than she and was able to translate. The town was about 300 years behind. Or, rather, this magical construct was depicting the town as it was 300 years in the past. They paid their bill and went out to explore more of this enigmatic hamlet.

The next stop was the general store across the street. It was manned by a woman named Faraday Jones who seemed a bit more prickly than Normy. Miriel�s memory of this period was fairly hazy, as she was mostly focused on stopping Olivia from touching everything. She did remember picking up that Faraday had the hots for a man named Redd, who ran the tavern down the way. They decided to stop there next.

Outside Pappy�s Bar, Miriel decided to stop and ask a friendly homeless man named Fimbul about the town gossip. He shared some pipeweed with her and rambled on about petty drama and some sort of cult that had been forming among some townies. Unfortunately, he fell asleep before she could get more information - but not before spouting some kind of bizarre scrambled noise, as if his words were being mixed up as he tried to speak. Whatever the magic was that kept this town tangible, it didn�t seem to like folks talking about it.

As they entered the pub, the threesome was greeted by a band practicing their set on stage. Among them was a woman named Lizzy Saint, deputy of Gemini Spire and wife of Grant Saint, the sheriff. She was getting jazzy on a horn as Amiri pulled out her fiddle and joined them. Miriel sat down on a stool at the bar and had a nice conversation with Redd, concluding in a warning to not be on the street when it rained. When asked why not, Redd slipped into that garbled speech and simply said �I don�t remember.� Grant Saint walked in to meet his wife and Olivia noticed something with her Truesight. The Saints had some sort of �crunchiness� about them, and through magical means Miriel was able to parse that to mean the Saints were more real and grounded, whatever that meant. Amiri walked off the stage, having emerged victorious from a musical competition with Lizzy. Hearing about the danger posed by the rain, she made the decision to go outside and figure out what the danger was for herself.

Amiri found out the hard way as she was suddenly ambushed by two chaos spawn. Miriel and Olivia ran outside to help, but even outnumbered the behemoths were too much to handle. They had a new move to counter Amiri�s platemail armor - a harpoon of bone and ligaments that shot out from their masses and pierced right through it. The party was just able to overcome the creatures, but tragically, Amiri was lost. She was put to rest in the town cemetery with help from Redd, and after some kind words, the decision was made to move on and continue searching for Pep.

Back at the bar, Miriel, Olivia, and Redd were confronted by a new face. An elven woman wearing armor and carrying a massive, ornate battle axe, taller than herself. She explained that she�d been sent by the her people to keep an eye on Pep, as she�d ignored a warning not to cross the river. After hearing that the forest was in danger, Aelune the elf decided to remain with the party and find Pep, before pursing Edwin and preventing him from calling forth the elemental power of the planet itself to possibly end the world. Olivia looked up at Miriel for the first time in a while and noticed she was very injured, and convinced the two to make their way towards the nearest doctor.

The clinic was quite a ways across town and Miriel felt every step with her beaten and battered body. Dr. Frank Medium was very skilled and quickly patched Miriel up while casually chatting about the enormous pressure of being a small-town doctor and knowing that every preventable death was on his shoulders. Miriel remembered being suspicious of him immediately, but wasn�t quite sure why. Maybe it was his pointed tail; a unique feature that she hadn�t spotted on any other infernals. She asked him if he�d seen Pep and his answer confirmed her suspicions. He was the first person in town to answer in the positive and claimed that when he saw her she�d been just about to leave town. On the way out, Miriel and Aelune were stopped by nurse Ridriel Earthshaker, an ourok student studying under Dr. Medium. Hearing that he struggled with common, Miriel remembered that she spoke semi-fluent ourokish and he was able to tell her that Frank had lied. Ridriel had never seen anyone matching Pep�s description and was unsure why Frank would claim they had. Miriel decided she had some more exploring to do before finding a place to stay the night, and they walked towards the center of town, where the spire was being concealed.

Miriel recalled seeing the temple there for the first time, with a striking image above the door of an eye made of knots, flanked on both sides by a sun and moon. The holy symbol of Denizen, god of death, and patron saint of Gemini Spire. Inside they met a priestess who explained the town�s festivals and celebrations involving summoning spirits of the dead and partying with them for a day. She also told them about a ritual that could be performed using a Shard of Ouroboros to send a message to the Other Side, which was of particular interest to Miriel. She asked for this ritual to be performed, but when the Priestess checked for the Shard, it had been stolen, and she quickly rushed out to report the theft. Faced with this dead end, the group decided to stop by a local lodge for the night.

The next day, they decided to explore the lake next to town. They rented a boat and Aelune bought herself a fishing pole, and they set out to find� anything. What they ended up discovering was a school of undead fish, perhaps brought to life by the stolen shard. After defeating them and sailing back empty-handed, they passed Sheriff Saint, who was out in his own boat for a relaxing morning fishing trip. They had a brief discussion regarding a few missing villagers and the stolen shard, but Miriel couldn�t recall much of use.

Finally, after asking back at the Double Horn Diner about any local log cabins, Normy directed them towards one owned by Grant and Lizzy Saint. When they got to the location, all that was left was the foundation, with no trace of the cabin that stood there until recently except for a few unintelligible runes in the dirt.

Miriel finished organizing her thoughts after what must have been a very long and awkward silence, during which Olivia had ordered some pralines. As she opened her mouth to relay the pertinent information, she felt something. Some kind of ripple had just passed through the magics surrounding this town, and her keen druid senses were just able to pick up on the disturbance. Something had shifted, and very soon she would find out exactly what it was.