Corvayne felt the wind on his face as the boat he was on blasting across open water, bouncing as it hit waves. Behind him spray foamed out. Wick sat near him, wearing a captain's hat and looking at a laminated map. She cupped her hands and shouted at Nyxion over the roar of the engine.

“That inlet!”

Nyxion nodded at her and swung the wheel, curving them to towards the coast.

Corvayne looked back, at the open ocean and the islands they had passed, as well as his other two party members on the boat. Hari and Lady Blood Claw had also agreed to come on the expedition, and seemed content to just watch the scenery fly by. Corvayne didn't know what to expect, but in the week after his encounter in the library the party (which he guessed was between 8 people to somewhere in the mid 20s at this point) had been putting every effort into cashing out whatever they didn't need for their expedition, checking into the locations that Wick remembered, and trying to build a container that Corvayne could use to read the books that Book-Binder had given him. Corvayne did his part by diving into his home's slime dungeon with Hari and her pupil, Caala, as well as Hari's party. He didn't spend much time inside the house Wick and himself owned because he was either in a dungeon, sleeping, or riding the first of three hover-bikes him and Mosh made back and forth between the suburbs and Old Town.

Wick had been busy with the boat they were on, scouting out Nap Bay. There was an abandoned light house and what looked like a long abandoned villa on the island, and the island itself was the right size, but there were no signs of stairs up to a Tower entrance. Wick had been glum about it, so Corvanye's time with her was mostly sleeping in the same room and one night where she pulled herself away from her computer to watch a scary movie in the community center, making it about thirty minutes before she left the room to go sit in the courtyard.

Corvayne told himself he didn't need to worry about Wick, but he worried about her anyway.

Meanwhile, Hari had been putting her energy into getting Caala up to speed as a replacement, and so was all business during the dungeon day, using her spells and skills over and over again in demonstration to the point that half the time she just fell asleep after dinner, fully clothed. Out of the dungeon she'd been working with Seru, both to ID what their group had found, what other people found for a fee, and making videos.

Corvayne told himself he didn't need to worry about Hari, but when she said she was too tired for sex it really worried him.

Lady Blood Claw had also been acting odd. She had asked for training a few times but after the Docks had thrown herself into running dungeons with people out from Old Town and Ko-Ban as a guide. She seemed to have been controlling her better; instead of blabbing what she felt her neutral dark gray tone only changed slightly when she was paying attention, which seemed to be whenever Corvayne was around. Of note was that she twice was brightly colored talking with Ayame at the noodle stand and both times the women got real quiet as he came over, with LBC going gray in a snap. The second time he had asked them what they were talking about.

Ayame and LBC both had told him at the same time he didn't need to worry about it, which was making him sweat with worry when he thought about it.

Nyxion looked driven. Mend and bed rest had fixed the damage he had done to himself, and once he was up and gotten the kinks out of his muscles he had been pushing the group to go investigate the paintings. There was a weird sort of pointedness to him in the last few days. He looked, well, like what Waves-Within had called 'a spear ready to stab'. Others called it the thousand-yard stare. Nyxion looked like he was willing them forward, standing rigid as he guided the craft and scanned the islands and sandbars for the right combination to match the painting that they had found after defeating Spears-Like-Water. It had been set up next to his hospital bed, with Nyxion using his more lucid moments to try to track where it was, scanning the endless coast lines of Cascadia. Not an easy task, as there were inlets within inlets that branched off and curled around, not to mention islands that broke up the coast and inlets into further complicated lines and blobs of water. Corvayne guessed that the nobleman hadn't gotten enough sleep while searching, as he could see a faint rim of bloodshot red in his eyes.

Corvayne told himself he didn't need to worry about Nyxion, so he didn't.

His compass power was getting less direct as they got closer to where it was leading them. He also thought it was weird that it hadn't drained him like finding the chokers. Perhaps because Spears-Like-Water was well known to him? While not difficult to pick up on her, it was like there was something jamming the connection, causing the direction to fluctuate and fail as he felt they were getting closer. Perhaps his power was drawing on something and now they were close, it was all around him having been defused. He hope it meant she wasn't blown up or a rain cloud. That would make it harder to talk to her, for sure.

They pulled out of the ocean and started heading into the waterways, looking for a sort of J shaped sandbar between two ridges with pine trees. Wick had said there was a road on a large Cascade Ridge map near the spot they had in mind, so they hoped that the three methods pointing to the spot would help them find it. In case that didn't work, they had their camping gear, and a few extra gas tanks for the boat.

Wick directed Nyx to curve the boat to follow the shore and head into a different branch of water, now at least two or three layers of land and sea seperated from open ocean. The few deciduous trees mixed in were turning yellow and orange, signs that fall would reach Cascadia City soon.

Corvayne closed his eyes, trying to use his compass powers again. He thought of Spears-Like-Water glaring at him, then how warm it felt to reach into her and pull out the curse. He shook his head. He wasn't here for weird thrills. His long time patrol partner, hate his guts or not, had asked him for help. The thought made his compass pull together and he walked next to Nyxion and pointed at a small branch off the waterway.

“Can we get up there?”

Nyxion nodded and they guided the boat off the waterway into a much smaller river. The larger pines were nearly touching over the boat, and Corvayne was worried they'd hit rocks or get beached on the sandy banks, but the boat made it as they came out into what looked like the south part of another complicated inlet. Miles of water, reflecting the clouds and bit of sun shining through. He pointed ahead, with Wick checking the map and following his gesture.

“Oh yeah, Take us over there! It looks like there was a town near that hill.”

Nyxion hit the gas and Corvayne had to tap him to get the man to blink and slow down as they came near the sandy shore. Corvayne had hoped they'd drive right up and find the spot and whatever it was that the painting was telling them to find.

Instead it was an hour and a half of coasting in and out of bays and looking at hills and trees before Corvayne caught a hint of something on a bluff. Directing Nyxion to take the boat over to a nearby sandbar, Corvayne hopped off the boat into sucking wet sand and trudged across the shallows to get a better look.

It was hidden by the hill and trees, but now that he was looking for a castle he the hill for what it was. He turned back to the boat and motioned them to bring it around to a better spot to land. Surveying it from the water, the ruins looked remarkably close to the castle-dungeon on the third floor where he had fought the undead guards and dragon.

He closed his eyes and checked the signal, feeling hints that Spears was near, under him. Walking around the shore, he spotted what the map had been telling them to look for. A rock down on a J shaped sandbar, with a steel door built into it.

It was a moment of work to pry it open, the lock and latch to the door no match for [Sundering Strike]. There was a valve hatch in the floor which took him and Nyxion working together to break whatever gunk held it in place. Compared to the drab interior of the tiny rock room, the ladder down was burnished steel in excellent condition. It was dark, but there was pinkish light coming from below and he steadily climbed down, Nyxion right above him.

He smelled the overwhelming fruit and sugar scent before he came down out of the ceiling into a steel room with pinkish red jelly flowing out of the ceiling by the walls. It was about thirty feet cubed, with grates at the sides to allow the jelly to flow in the same direction as the exit of the room.

“Well, I guess this is what the Tower was copying huh?” Corvayne said as Nyxion came into the room.

Hari slid down the ladder next but looked at the chamber and shook her head. “Gross!”

Corvayne pulled a glow stick and lead the way into a steel passage. The floor of the passage was a grate above the jelly flow, with the ceiling also dripping jam along the walls and sometimes in globs right on him. He tried to use his shadow hands to block it, but the slime dripped right through, leaving holes in the shadow stuff. He slowed his pace and tried his compass. The substance seemed to scatter his senses, telling him Spears was in all directions.

“Careful, this stuff is at least anti-magical.” Corvayne said as he moved into a cylinder shaped room where aside from steel to keep the slime out of passages, the walls were just flowing strawberry. Under him was a spiral staircase that lead to four other exits. Below that was pool of slime, churing a little as it flowed. Above was jam flowing over a glass cap with a light shining down, causing the light in the room to fluctuate weird dark pinks and reds.

Wick took out a jar and took a sample from the slime on the wall. “Never know when we'll need a thing of slime.”

Lady Blood Claw had some fall on her skin, and Corvayne saw that it left a crazy rainbow trail where it touched her. She looked like she was annoyed by the sludge.

Corvayne could still feel the compass pointing under him and lead them down the lowest passage he could find, the hallway gently undulating like a snake frozen mid slither. In places the floor grate stopped and was replaced by steel blocks of metal rising from the goo, something like stepping stones surrounded by jam. Corvayne checked each step in the slime for traps, but neither the stone nor the shin deep river of jam held any surprises.

The passage started to move downhill after a gentle bend, fifteen minutes of walking downwards, then placed them into a massive room. Steel girders supported rows of giant jars, each person-sized tube capped with machines and filled with jam suspending objects in them. The array of jars in the room was huge, long ahead and to one side that Corvayne could only guess how many rows there were, extending off into the pink hued distance. Three floors of metal grated walkways started above him, and looking down he saw three floors and a point where the stairs dipped into the glowing pink jam, with even more jars submerged near where the lake of jelly was under them.

Wick gasped as she ran over and looked into a jar, then ran back, hugging Corvayne. “Corvayne! You fucker, you did it! You found me a real secret alien base! With OOZE!”