By the time I’d washed up and Ceylas opened the door to their room Cambrin was settled at the desk tinkering away at something. I moved to peer over his shoulder and saw that he had his goggles on the table and was carefully fitting a pale green lens into a rotating segment so that it could be flipped in front of the original glass.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Ceylas as she pulled me over to sit across from her on her bed. She’d had time to get cleaned up too and had changed into a black dress that swooshed around her calves and spiderwebbed down her back. She’d styled her hair too and run dark liner around her eyes.
“He’s retrofitting his alchemist’s goggles with the lenses from the googles of night we found.”
I raised an eyebrow. “The what?”
“Well,” she said, thinking about how to phrase things, “when we searched that alligator’s lair one of the things we found were a pair of goggles. They enhance darkvision, improving range of sight an additional sixty feet. At least that’s what Cambrin said after staring at the things for ten minutes with his pearl thing.”
“Oh yeah? What else did you two find?”
She handed me a potion of healing and 10 platinum. “That’s your share. We also found this thing,” she said, holding out a dark blue cloak, with silver threading. “Cambrin said it’s an Archivist’s Mantle but that we can’t really use it so he was going to donate it to the Rise.”
“Donate it? Shouldn’t we find out who it belonged to? I mean it’s Palladium Rise colors so it might have belonged to someone who lived or worked here.”
She lifted a shoulder, not much caring. “I told him that it was probably worth a fortune and that we should just sell it.”
I was tempted by that too. It looked really finely made. And if it were magical it could be worth a fair chunk of change. “Was there anything else?”
“Just this puzzle box and this pretty chalice. Cambrin said they don’t do anything special. He wanted to keep the box but said that if you didn’t want the chalice then we could sell it.”
“Sure,” I said, giving barely a glance to the chalice. The bone puzzlebox was intriguing. It had engravings on it and scales from some very large kind of reptile were embossed into the edges.
Ceylas leaned forward. “Dragon scales, cool, huh?”
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I nodded. “Cambrin and I both got potions too,” she added, as she tucked the box and chalice back into the pouch she had in her lap. It looked like the sack we’d pulled coin out of yesterday. The two objects seemed far to big to fit and yet, they slipped inside easily.
“Fancy pouch,” I said, my voice dry as I tried to keep the curiosity out of it.
“Oh! Cambrin made this! Can you believe that?” She pushed her hand into the sack and it disappeared up to her shoulder. “It’s a bag of holding now. That’s something his cool magic can do, just like how he messed with his javelin so that it would always come back to him.”
“Wow! That really is cool,” I said, lifting the pouch to take a closer look. “So it’s magical now?”
“Sort of. He said it was ‘infused’. So the magic isn’t really permanant. He can turn it back into a regular pouch if he wants. And he might need to if he decides he wants to infuse something else because he can only maintain two infusions at a time.”
I handed her back the pouch and she tucked it away in her backpack. Behind us, Cambrin was muttering with some frustration. He must have been having some troubles with the fix.
“Everything okay, Cam?”
He glanced my way but then returned his attention to the goggles. “Just a tight fit, I’ll get it.” He narrowed his focus, clenching the pliers in his hand as he shaped the wire to hold the glass and leverage mechanism in place. With a huff he applied a slight torque to the whole thing (Strength check: 12) and it clicked into place. “There, got it!” He lifted the googles triumphantly.
“Ready for dinner then?” Ceylas asked him. “If we don’t get down soon the best of the duck will be gone.”
“Actually,” I said, turning to her, “we’ve been invited to dinner at the Dragon’s Breath.”
She fixed me with a look. “I’m not paying for a meal when I can get one here for free, Lo’Kryn.”
I shook my head. “Look, I’ll cover you, but I want to meet up with Fenlyn. She was going to talk to me about something.”
Ceylas’s gaze narrowed and her chin lifted slightly. Cambrin seemed completely oblivious to his sister’s mood. “Let me just show you these before we head out. He waved me over to his table then fitted his goggles back over his head. “The goggles?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, those are all sorted. We found a pair of nightvision goggles but I adapted the enchanted lenses so that I could use them in my own goggles. Nothing to that. What I wanted to show you were these.” He shifted two dark rocks, pushing one toward me. There was a strange etching on the surface of both that made them look like a matched pair.
“What are these?”
“They’re called Sending Stones. They’re relatively simple but powerful enchanted items that allows communication over great distance. Ceylas and I can both communicate over short distances but these will allow us to have much better range. We agreed that you should hold one of the two and Ceylas or I will keep the other.”
I lifted the stone, fingering the etching. It was warm to touch and as I rubbed my thumb on the surface is began to light up. “Don’t waste the charge!” Cambrin warned, nudging my wrist. I let my thumb fall away and the light dimmed again. “It only works once per day unless it’s charged by additional spell power.”
“Oh, okay.” I understood most of that, having spent over a year and a half running with a wizard in our campaign back at home. “So I rub the symbol and when it’s lit I can speak into it?”
“Yes, it’s extremely limited but may prove very useful.”