The lingering feeling that your stature is fluid, at the whim of some external deity who doesn't keep detailed notes, abates.
Your hands drop limply as a second sight floods through you, with every mote of magical essence making your nerves twitch. The entire area is bathed in a faint aura of magical energy, with the crystalline waters of the hot spring shimmering with power. You inhale deeply, the air carrying an edge of salt along with the warm steam, which declogs your sinuses, while your brain searches it's archives for familiar stimulus you've encountered before.
After contemplation for a few moments, you discern that a powerful healing magic resides in this place, imbued into the very ground itself. A puzzle piece of a thought, which had fallen to the ground and gotten stuck under the table leg, slides back into place on the coffee table of your mind. Runara mentioned the death of a dragon and it's residual magical energy being entwined with the Compass Rose, but it's likely other such resting sites exist around the island, and this may be another of them.
((The hot spring waters here are imbued with life-giving energy, and anyone who bathes in the waters for at least 10 minutes can roll one of their hit dice, to recover health equal to the roll + CON modifier. Each character can only benefit from this effect only once per day.)
You gluttonously shove the vibrant colored mushrooms into your mouth, with each bite causing a spectrum of spores to spread across your cheeks like you'd just drunkenly eaten a pineapple covered in glitter while hanging upside down at a house party.
Your stomach begins to gurgle in complaint.
Roll a CON save for me.
Putting on your Serious Goggles™, you get down to work evaluating the area.
As you watch the myriad colorful mushrooms disappear into the face of Moonsprout, you search your knowledge of fungus in your hands. These, with their small yet elongated caps and iridescent sparkles, must be Wind Spores- A rare fungus with unique properties. A creature who inhales the small cloud of spores that the mushroom produces, will not need to breathe air for 1 hour, as the spores provide it oxygen.
((While there were a good few ripe Wind Spores in this area on your arrival, most have now been devoured, but you could spend another action trying to find more Wind Spores that Moonsprout hasn't.))
Your attention passes from the ravenous Halfling and you scan around the area. The steam has cleared slightly with a change in the wind, now revealing the entire area to you. This small pool sits nestled in its own small cove protected from the worse elements of the ocean. Around the entire outer edge of the area glitter many kind of mushrooms, giving a remarkable splash of color against the pale yellow sand and stark basalt cliffs.
The center of the pool is deeper than it first appears, though you cannot tell how deep despite the waters being remarkably clear. As you peer, trying to spot rocks or something to indicate the bottom, you see a shimmer moving just below the surface. You blink deliberately and focus again, and can discern 3 dancing outlines within the hot springs.
As you wonder how many tentacles you could eat at once, you notice the faint shimmering of movement beneath the surface. You pick up that Zesty has noticed too.
You're also here.
The surface of the hot spring begins to bulge and something begins to flit around quickly, like a cat under the bedsheets, though the water-tension does not break as you would expect. Three unnatural lumps careen around the pool until they all rush towards a central point and converge, at which point an eruption of sea foam pushes a break in the steam clouds.
Rushing up from the water and coiling around each other in a fluid dance, three Fume Drakes emerge from the waters to confront those who would disturb their habitat.
Roll for initiative!
((I'm going to try to see how easily I can keep on top of the combat, etc. just using my own maps and stuff. I'm kind of enjoying putting a spin on this to look more like a video game, so... We'll see where it goes. I also threw a grid and scale onto this local-map screen, so we can try to pay a little more attention to positioning and such.
Each square is 5 foot by 5 foot. Diagonally that'll be around 7.5 feet across. We're going to start applying all the movement mechanics, including attacks of opportunity, from here on.
I'd also switched to using an article style for these threads, so the first post will stay at the top of the page. I'm going to try to keep the most recent map and all that stuff up there, so you can check back easily without having to go through page after page to find update.
I'll drop initiative order onto these and show who's up next, too.))
