Two days after his astral projected body had to be carried back to his room at the inn, Iuri Gareldov manages to return to Luma in full aboard the Spelljammer ship Jam Jammer. Upon being reunited with his physical form, he stumbles downstairs, proceeds to drink three pitchers of beer, and some hours later gets up by the fireplace.

"Two days ago," he begins, miraculously not slurring his words horribly, "a portal opened up on Luma's streets. Myself, Myndle, Tai-Lee, Clarion, Moxxly, and Flynn went through to try and help the crew of a Spelljammer overrun by... Sorons or something. Doglike things.

"They had completely overrun the ship, the crew was hiding in berths, and the portal... turned out to be some sort of one-way escape portal. We could only astral project to the other side.

"We cleared the lower decks, but then things started to go wrong when firearms were located among the ship's supplies."

Iuri then launches into a two-minute tirade about the dangers of guns in the hands of adventurers and how he was nearly shot by his own presumed ally.

Finally, when he is satisfied the assembled adventurers are adequately terrified of the dangers poseds by guns, Iuri returns to the main action of the story. "When we got up to the top deck, the Sorons had another Spelljammer and were ramming it into the one we were on. A horde of them spilled out onto the deck. Some decent area spells managed to take out the small ones, but the heavies and the boss were a different story.

"Tai-Lee was amazing. If you get the chance to journey with her, take it. Flynn did everything he could, and it was due to him I didn't get knocked out completely. Clarion... Clarion gave her life just trying to get me back up after the leader of the Sorons knocked me unconscious. And Myndle? Well, she and I go back a ways, and her destructive power, when she uses it, is extremely formidable.

"One by one, everyone in my party went down. I used every trick in the book to stay alive and deal as much damage as I could, reducing the number of enemies until just the boss was left.

"Meanwhile, the apparent captain of the ship we were on ran off to the other Spelljammer and took it, abandoning me to the monster. I thought I had a safe vantage point on top of the mast, but the damn thing Dimension Door'd right in front of me. Every time it attacked, it felt like taking a rock to the head! I managed to get belowdecks, trying to find some hiding place, but it pursued, and the escape portal back to Luma was gone.

"I was wounded so badly, I knew I couldn't take another hit. I summoned every last iota of magic I had and threw it at the thing.

"By some miracle, it went down. The other Spelljammer was far gone at this point, leaving me stranded in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by corpses. It took me hours to clean all the blood." Cleaning up blood isn't typical adventurer behavior, but there you go. "In the process, I discovered something horrible.

"The captain, the one who had run over to the other ship?

"I'm pretty sure I found his body belowdecks, shoved beneath two others."