She puts her artefact away and looks at him again. "Shadowheart."

That's a title, not a name.

Whatever. They should—

"It seems you yet live. We must away."

Astarion jumps nearly out of his skin when he hears her voice. "Decided to come back for us? I feel so loved."

"It was a dead end. Let's move." And once again she does not wait for them before going towards the other exit.

And her sword has new blood stains it did not have before. The imps don't bleed, so what exactly did she fight in there...?

Well, no matter. She's right, they need to go.

"When we get to the helm, do as I say," the gith says, without looking over her shoulder at them.

"We'll follow your lead, milady."

"Save it."

They make it to the helm in short enough order, and once they do what they see is a battlefield: two mindflayers, half a score of imps, and three cambions.

Thrall, "says" one of the mind flayers who noticed their arrival. Connect the nerves of the transponder. We must escape. Now.

"Do it," the gith hisses to the other two in an undertone. "We will deal with the ghaik after we escape."

Shadowheart nods curtly and moves.

Astarion bows and moves faster and with more agility. He's very used to this.

So since the infernals (who are also under the impression these three are on the mind flayers' side) don't seem to be able to get their hands on Astarion they focus their fire on the gith and Shadowheart.

Thankfully they are both armoured and higher than level one.

So he dodges, sprints, and dashes until he reaches the control console, which is...

...a bunch of tentacles. Of course. He can't say he doesn't respect the consistency in this species's aesthetics, he guesses. But he doesn't know which of these tentacles he's meant to connect so he just kind of grabs two of them at random and pulls them towards each other.

Once again there's that lurching feeling—and then they are no longer in Avernus. Instead they find themselves on the Prime Material, rapidly approaching the ground. Either the damage incurred by the ship or whatever Astarion did (or, perhaps more likely, the combination of both) seems to have entirely destroyed the navigation system and it is inexorably making its way to a very messy crash.

Figures. He supposes that's as good an end to this adventure as any. Took a while longer for him to die than he'd expected but at least he's not going to become a mind flayer.

But before the ship can crash there's an explosion—a system failing, a spell going wrong, a spell going right—a big one, and the wall on this side of the ship was already damaged enough to barely be there so this explosion is enough to finish it off and push Astarion out into the air to fall to his death.

And it's daytime! Jolly good, there are many things trying to kill him.

He closes his eyes and waits, feeling the sun burn him as he rapidly approaches terminal velocity.

But he doesn't die. A second before he hits the ground he suddenly decelerates, stopping upside down a few inches above the ground, and then he finishes falling but from a much less dangerous height.

Also: the sun isn't burning him. It is just... heating him up. The thing he's feeling on his skin is not fire, it is merely the normal heat that normal mortals feel when they are outside in daytime. He is not being consumed by flames.

Wait, what.

What????

What.

He reaches a finger into his mouth and pokes at his fangs. They're still there, still sharp.

He places a hand on his chest. His heart is still unbeating, his skin is still not warm.

He pays attention to his senses. His vision is still just as good, he still hungers for blood.

He is still a vampire.

But it seems that he is now a vampire who can walk in the sun!

Naked, no less!

He sits up and looks around, noticing from the widespread destruction around him that he must've passed out at some point because he failed to witness the final crashing moments of the ship even though it very much did crash over yonder. He pushes himself to his feet, and he's still not burning. He fell off a crashing ship and he didn't become paste.

Yeah, he's got nothing.