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it is the inevitable tendency of glowfic protagonists with repeatable interworld travel to go peal
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"- Any progress on identifying what they are? Another kind of ship?" 

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"It's not showing up like anything we've seen before. The magic sensors are getting a reading. It's not very big." Headshake. 

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Mhalir glances back at his screen. It'll do, he decides; he saves the coordinates. "Prepare for a jump on this course," he orders the engineer, "but hold off until my go." And to his lieutenant. "Please transmit a message asking them to identify themselves." 

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She has one prepared, and sends it off.

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There is no answer. 

The strange not-ship draws closer. 

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"Nothing. Is the jump ready -"

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Mhalir looks over at the engineer. "Jump when ready, please." 

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The ship jumps.

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"- What?" Urtho twitches on his stool. "Ma'ar. Come here and replay the detection wards for me - they went somewhere..." 

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Ma'ar hurries over. Does this. 

"They're - doing planar manipulation?" he says uncertainly. 

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"I gathered that! Help me figure out where they went..." 

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On the other ship, everyone relaxes. "I guess we can just.... avoid that sector?"


"Or figure out how to negotiate with it...."

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You can't Sending "whoever that is in pursuit" until you can see them but if you get a view of them you can do that.

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<How good a view do you need?> Mhalir asks Carissa, at the same time as he directs the engineer to figure out their current location - the jump was hastily planned enough that there's considerable room for error there - and to re-plan the route back to Golarion. 

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(Elsewhere: "Right, so they went this way -" and the Void-ship twists the planar fabric around it and bubbles itself through the Elemental Plane of Air and suddenly they're in the Void somewhere else... "- and then I think this way...") 

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"- well, fuck. Pursuit's back."

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I'd need to see their bodies not just their ship.

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Mhalir can't think of a way to do that from here - scrying wouldn't work either when they don't know who's there, they can't get a camera in - and he's kind of in a hurry right now.

"Try to open comms with them again," he snaps. 

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"Attempting that!" They're not getting a response.

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Mhalir gives it fifteen seconds of waiting. 

"Jump to normal space," he orders. "Before they get a lock on our location - do it now -"

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"We don't know anything about normal space at this coordinate," the pilot says very unhappily, but does it anyway.

 

It's not immediately deadly or anything. There's a star nearby. (Unstructured jumps usually land near a gravity well). It has some planets.

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Urtho makes a frustrated noise. "Where did they go? ...They - left the Void, I think?" 

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"I think so - the wards think it looked like a Gate signature -" 

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"How did they do that...?" 

The Void-vessel is not designed to leave the Void. It was built there; it can twist its way through other planes, doing the equivalent of an interplanar Gate, but it can't stay there. 

"I want to know what they are!" Urtho says, insistently, with the thirst of a man lost in a desert chasing a mirage of water. 

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"I can't Gate over," Ma'ar says, thoughtfully. "And I don't know how to anchor a scry from here and see where they went. But - Leareth could do it, I bet." 

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