The bear grease really did keep the lice out of his hair and he didn't need to worry about his black curly locks obscuring his vision anymore. Never would have thought the otherwise disagreeable Kandayan practice to have a practical utility. Seems bugs couldn't stand the concentrated fatty acids in the rendered fat. On the other hand, he had to take special care to sneak up on people from downwind. Maybe a AireFresh spell was in order? He and Delrin where slowly working their way down the riverbank. Vegetation grew right down to the water in some places forces Johny Rotten to break a path by brute force. Branches whipped back and Delrin was forced to duck quickly or acquire more scratches on his face. He wasn't enthusiastic about following the horse, but did concede that the path he broke made the going much easier.

The two forded a small stream that emptied into the river and scanned for signs. So far neither had spotted anything to suggest any danger out of the ordinary. Sid mulled over the bits and pieces of legend, lore and story that he had extracted from the local yokals. Odd that Rengen hadn't mentioned his lost sons. Wasn't sure of what to make of that. Might explain the attitude of that battleaxe he lived with. Try as he might, he had failed to make any headway in charming the drudge. Despite the bear grease and the obligatory kandayan spitting (which she should have been used to anyway), Sid prided himself on being able to charm the socks (or other apparel) off of just about any female of any species of any age (excepting maybe gnomes. But then, he'd hadn't really had a fair chance that time, had he?). Hmmmph. He must be slipping. Maybe if he tapered the beard...? --SPLASH!!

Coughing and sputtering Delrin dragged himself back up onto the embankment. "Oh, sorry, Delrin. Yes, do be careful, the edge is quite steep and slippery here." Delrin glared his thanks. NOW he told him! "By the way, your idea to explore the river is actually quite good. Too bad we'll be limited to thirty minutes a day. But if we meet any success, we can spend as much time as we want this time and come back better prepared the next. Might be a few hazards, of course, but this may be the cash-in we've been looking for. I think we can manage to fix several of Johny's spare horseshoes to the bottom of your boots so that you can walk around on the bottom rather then have to swim. Also, the rope will help anchor you against the current. I think we should search the banks as well. If this was a naval station, they would have put in a sewage and drainage system. Maybe incorporated them into the bridgework. They *might* lead us to places inaccessable to us, or anyone else, from the surface. Could be chambers untouched since the battle. From what the farmer said, there was some pretty serious battle magic released. Would have brought the walls down on top of basements and vaults. Would have made major excavation work necessary to get to them even *if* you knew where to look. Could be an armory or two still down there. Standard naval policy is to separate munition bunkers to prevent them from experiencing a chain explosion. Might be unlooted bodies with their battle gear, magical charms and protections. And money."

Then with a far away look in his eye, "Might even be an intact suit of the powered, hydraulic combat armor that the victors used... Bleeding 'lantern oil', eh? Yes, could be. Could bloody well be..."

Hydildic chainmail? What the heck was that? thought Delrin. Well, he sighed, the Sid knew much more then he did about battle toys. More then he really *wanted* to know, in truth.

"Usually in naval stations, the military builds the sewers and drains for their installations and then allows the locals to tap into them for a fee. Helps defray costs and keeps the sanitation level a bit higher than it might otherwise be. Keeps the sailors healthier. Those tunnels might connect us to the cellars of the wealthier, important town dwellers." Sid continued as they jumped another feeder stream and sighted along it's length. "Say, Delrin, do you suppose you could charm and talk to any otters around here? Maybe beavers, martins...I don't know, otters would probable be the best. Have *them* tell you where any wrecks or underwater openings along the river might be. Make it a game for them. We can reward them with fish or something. A lightening bolt should brings us up enough for a family of them. Once we locate them, we can sterilize the entrance with a lightening bolt before you investigate. No sense letting some weedy denizen take a bite out of you leg. Then you can explore landward."

The man on the horse seemed to be unaware of the discomfort he was causing the other man. D-d-denizens?? Ooo-those sounded nasty, thought the druid, pupils dilating. And underwater?? Yikes!

Sid continued. "Do we have any light spells? That would make it easier to explore the passage." Light spells? Oh, yes, agreed Delrin silently, that would be *ever* so much better.

"I was also going to see if I can transfer one of my Invisibility spells onto Krinn. That way she can fly invisibly over the area and look for sunken ridge lines that would not be obvious from the ground but should stick out when viewed from the air. Any collapsed or partially collapsed drain or passage ways should have settle over the years and caused linear dips in the ground above them. Really should be relatively obvious from above," intoned the voice from horseback.

Panting a bit to keep the pace, Delrin asked, "You sure?"

"Certainly. Water collects in the bottom of even slight dips and the grass and plants there grow greener and healthier. Since they would have run in straight lines down to the river, they should be easy to spot. Then we trace them back. Even if they are inaccessible from under the bank, we've enough strong backs to dig down and into them from here on land."

"You mean, Cookie?"

"And the Dorf, er, Dwarf. Knows construction techniques, he says. Valuable knowledge for this kind of work."

"What about, you know, ghosts? Demons? Evil spirits?"

"We don't know there are any. And we'll take Precautions. If we succeed in tapping into *any* tunnel work what-so-ever, I can send in Rosebud. She can see, hear and smell in the dark like nobody's business. She's small, dark, agile and gives *me* lessons in stealth. How many other searchers here would have had a trained cat to search through tiny spaces? She can be better then a Wizard's Eye spell, I tell you. Trust me on that one." As if summoned, a black furry head poked out of a saddle bag and yawned. Delrin reached up and scatched her chin as they walked. He liked cats.

"So you think it's worth a shot?"

"Hell, yes. Krinn puts a strength spell on you and a protection spell. You go down, you search. You come back up. We try again and again. We survey the ground from the air. You talk with your animal friends. You can't talk to *fish* can you?"

"Well, not well. I mean, they're fish. They really don't think that much."

"Too bad. Would have speeded thinks up."

"So you think we should try?"

"Absolutely."

The two reached a spot upstream of the ruins of the bridge, close but outside the city walls. Blackened stone. Slime covered. Delrin glanced askance and began to look doubtful again.

'Besides,' considered the Sid, 'those creatures that bled lantern oil could be golems or androids. And I could *use* a good battle 'droid.'

And then invoked his Anti-ESP spell. Just in case there *were* any unnamable nasties around...

[PS. Dave, Sid will try two rolls vs Hide in Shadows. Don will try Sword x 2.]

Delrin

Delrin felt twinges of claustrophobia as the surface faded from a bright, rippling mirror to a oddly shimmer sky to an ominous, dark mass with no sign of the sun. The water was murky, and he estimated visibility at ten feet. It was hard to tell how deep he was, perhaps thirty to forty feet, when his weighted boots hit bottom, which was deeper than he expected. He had only been about ten feet out over the water on a tree that was leaning over the river when he had jumped in. The banks must be very steep here. He forced himself to take a deep breath... and nothing happened. He fought down panic. Water breathing was a weird thing, and he was not use to it at all.

After a moment, he felt in control again. He tugged on the rope tied to his belt twice, hard, and was reassured at the answering tug in return from the Sid. He began to move down river. The current was strong, but not enough to cause any concern that the rope would not hold. Suddenly, he felt something grab his legs. He would have screamed if he could, pulled his dagger and... looking down, realized it was just some kind of water weed. He took a moment more to collect himself, cut himself free with the dagger, and moved, more cautious of the long stringy underwater vegetation.

He hit a ridge and began to climb it, then noticed a dark and ominous cave just ahead. He wasn't far enough down stream for it to be a sewer or tunnel yet, and he decided to avoid it for the moment, looking up and down current for an alternate path. Upstream, he sensed a faint phosphorescence, a deep green glow that felt unhealthy and unclean to him. Downstream, then.

He moved that way, rounding the ridge. A row of dark openings festooned with waterweed and small darting fishes stretched upstream from him on the backside of the ridge. He was about to retreat, then paused. There was something regular about the openings, so regular as to be unnatural. And they were all a oddly symmetrical shape, a circle.

He suddenly realized he was looking a portholes in a warship that had flipped when it sunk, lying upside down in the muck at the bottom of the river, with one side partially buried. That would make the dark cave on the other side a hole in the hull...

He quickly moved back to where he first encountered the wreck, feeling excited. His first wreck on his first dive was a promising sign. Finding the "cave," he now noted the worm-infested wood that surrounded it and moved in. The inside was dark, and he cast a light spell. Sand, silt, and waterweed greeted him. Where he could see wood beneath his feet, it was the color of dark charcoal. The downstream section of the boat had collapsed flat to the ground, and he moved upstream.

A tiny warning bell went off in the back of his mind. His first water breathing spell only had about a minute left. He stopped, prepped and cast the second spell; he could imagine trying to cast it while drowning and decided the additional minute was not worth it. He told the spell to give him a nudge when he had five minutes to go instead of one, to give him time to get out of the ship, then moved upstream again. There was a bulkhead with a door half buried in silt. He had to kneel and pull himself through the opening. The room was much better preserved than the section of ship he had just left, and the remains of tables, chairs, and other odds and ends littered the floor... along with three skeletons, two human and one Urakai. Scraps of corroded metal were all that remained of any armor or weapons they had carried, and walking past one caused it to collapse in a puff of white dust in the water as turbulence from his movement hit it. He was about to move on when he noted that in one corner of the room was a box, relatively small but apparently intact. It wasn't very large, perhaps the size of a shoebox, but unlike everything else in the room it was whole.

He picked it up and stuck it in the net bag he had attached to his belt, then looked for anything else. They could investigate the box topside; right now, he needed to grab as much loot as he could before he ran out of air. Another bulkhead faced him, with another doorway. This one had a still functioning door that was closed and latched. As he grew closer, he could see a faint outline around it, an outline of green phosphorescence.

SID

After Delrin hit the water, the Don assisted Cookie and Fuji as they reeled out line . After a moment, Dom frowned and caught the Sid's eye. Sid looked twice and shook his head, puzzled. What? Perignon cocked his head towards the rope coiled on the river bank. The Sid's eyes narrowed.

He'd missed it. His partner hadn't (in truth, Dom seldom did miss much.) Sid imperceptibly nodded back. Thirty five, maybe forty five feet of rope had been peeled out. Odd. According to what they knew, Valen's Point was supposed to be here because it was the farthest upriver that warships could penetrate. Except it was the end of a dry summer and the river should have been at it's lowest ebb of the year. Except there was still more than enough depth here, even at the river's edge, to float a Kethemer Battlewagon. Odd. Given how much more energy efficient water travel was than land, even a couple of miles mattered when transporting men and cargo. Sid squinted upstream. So unless the river shallowed out rather precipitously, Valen's Point should really be miles upstream from here.

An anomaly. Maybe a small one, true, but still it was anomalous in what was proving to be an increasingly anomalous situation.

Suddenly the rope jerked. Ah. Delrin had found something. But here? Already? Sid reassessed the rope. Delrin hadn't gone far. They were still upstream of the town proper. Why would anything be sunk *upriver* of the battle. At least, why would any human ship be sunk upriver of the base?

Sid glared at the water, trying to penetrate it by force of will. He *hated* not knowing the answer to a riddle. He knelt down to the rivers edge and invoked an Amplify Sound spell. Sabrina's Backside! What was going on down there? He thought back to last night...

Sid still was not totally certain about Delrin. He realized that this probably stemmed from the lightening bolt that had nearly fried him outside the Copper Kettle in Salta, but still, the druid was so-o-o naive at times. On the other hand, the trials of the last few months seemed to be opening his eyes to the real ways of the world. He was beginning to realize that every thing wasn't bunny rabbits and chipmunks. That there were weasels and much, much worse out there. Delrin's suggestion regards searching the river demonstrated that he was beginning to pull his weight. That was all the Sid asked of any member of his team. So thinking, Sid realized he couldn't let the man be exposed to risks that were any less carefully assessed before hand than what he was willing to face himself. He and Rosebud had slipped out of camp in the middle of the night. Silent, blurred, and keeping to the Shadows, Sid had invoked his AntiEsp spell and worked his way down the riverbank. Occasionally, he used Rosebud's heightened senses to confirm he hadn't missed anything. His eyes had constantly scanned the water looking for anything out of the ordinary. A ripple, a slime covered fluke, anything.

The only thing he thought he sensed, when using his cat's eyes, was an odd fluorescence deep in the body of the river. Coming from *upstream*. The Sid was familiar with the enthralling lights emitted on occasion by microorganism in the sea. Had enjoyed the magic of their liquid light. But this was different. It invoked thoughts of decay, of illness. And he had never recalled hearing about a similar phenomena occurring in fresh water rivers. He wracked his memory. Something...something? He just couldn't brink it to the surface, if it was there at all.

Having scouted the river and having seen no evidence of nocturnal river nasties, he had returned to camp, with a sense of heightened, ill-defined caution...

So. A river deeper than it might be. A ship sunk farther upstream than where it might have been. A bit of glowing wisp in the water with nothing to account for it. Not much really, but all suggesting to the Sid that the stretch of river to the north deserved a bit of careful scrutiny when they had scoured this section clean.

DELRIN

Delrin did a double take; not only was the next door completely in tact, but there was a green glow surrounding it. Delrin was a simple woodsmen, and Prefall magic tended to scare the daylights out of him. Still, this was why he was risking his neck. With this in mind he double checked to make sure the strong box was still with him. There was no doubt the box alone would be valuable; at the very least holding records from the Urakai-human wars. After a brief hesitation, he decided to check the door carefully, but not open it until his next dive. He examined the door as closely as was possible in the murky gloom, if there was a lock, he wanted to know what the key would look like... That done he traced his path back towards the hole in the hull, keeping an eye out for any unnaturally preserved items. Even a magically preserved rope or block and tackle would be worth a tidy sum. As he left the room he double checked the skeletons for small artifacts like a ring or medallion. He emerged from the ships hull, and he stepped back a few feet to scan the entire wreck taking careful note of the sandy eddy down stream from the wreck. As he did so, his spell warned him he had five minutes remaining. Now that he was out of the wreck proper, he was not too concerned about it running low. On a whim he walked down stream and began digging in the sand looking for anything solid.

Five minutes wasn't sufficient to find anything other than a few stones and fresh water clams, and he dropped the stones in his pockets and headed to the surface. The Don noted the change in angle on the rope, and anticipating Delrin's move to the surface, signaled Fuji and Cookie to pull him in. It only took a few moments to get the Druid to dry land.

Delrin emerged dripping with water. He had a strange look of excitement on his face. The group gave him a few minutes to dry himself and remove his we clothes before they started asking questions. As they waited Glorm returned looking somewhat haggard but otherwise untouched. Sid had assured the others that he was fine some time ago, and so they were not particularly worried about their squat friend.

"Well Delrin what did you find" asked Sid?

"The luck of Gaia is with us Sid. I found a large wreck 150 feet upstream from the bridge. Perhaps they sailed on once they realized the Urakai were dropping from the span. Anyway it is sitting in 40 feed of water; the current is mild and the bottom fairly sandy. I located a large hole in the hull and entered. Most of wreck was pretty decayed, a skeleton here and there, but nothing much. Then I located a room towards the aft that was better preserved. There were three skeletons, one Urakai and the others human. The room was barren save for a door which glowed green from some sort of magic. I searched it carefully, but left it for the next dive. The only other thing I found was this" he said pulling out the foot long black box. "A valuable find I would think. I don't know if it contains the ships log, a key to the rear chamber, or something entirely different, but a find regardless..."

Sid accepted the box and started examining it closely. He started to look at the padlock holding the latch to the box closed when Glorm interrupted. "If you don't mind Sid, why don't you let me do the honors. I used to be quite proficient at this sort of thing..." Sid seemed relieved and handed the box to the Dwarf.

Glorm handled the box carefully looking at the strange black surface. Thorin only knew what kind of material it was, but it looked unaged after three hundred years in the drink. He noted the hinges and the lid thickness in particular. The more you knew about the size of a lock the better your chances. After a good 20 minutes of intense scrutiny he handed the box back to Delrin. He went to his pack and pulled out his heavy travel cloak. Glorm's nimble fingers quickly located the false lining and removed the thin black leather case. He turned towards the clerics and spoke. "Now would be a good time for any protection spells you can offer. I wouldn't mind that fire protection ring either, although I don't suppose it will do much good." Krinn volunteered a protection lightning spell, but that was all the clerics could muster. Cookie had offered a bowl of fish soup, but Glorm had politely refused.

"If I be the rest of you, I would move off a distance. Some of these lock boxes have poison gas traps which are particularly nasty."

Having said this, Glorm opened his small wallet and removed a few small pieces of wire. He set to work carefully and deliberately. The only sound in the clearing was the chirp of a blue jay, and the whispering wind... After what seem like ages Glorm closed his eyes and took three deep breaths. On the third one, he held his breath and twisted the lock pick and looked away from the box. There was a clicking sound and everyone waited to see what would happen...