The party’s time in Ostro
For the first leg of the party’s visit to Ostro, Lucas and Irving were both down with colds from the storm that hit just before they got to town. Serafina, Cynthia, and Elma were left to explore the town on their own. Serafina spends time wearing Mero as a hat so no one is alarmed by the slime’s presence.
The fisherman Gorton, responsible for training Ostro’s fishers and now running a fishing game for visitors in his off time, invites Cynthia and Serafina to take part. Serafina wins the fishing minigame and gets a spear called the Fisherman’s Horizon and some money; Cynthia wins as well using ingenuity and mooching, eventually fishing up a freshwater shark. Her reward is two aqua scarves and more money.
The two of them investigate a map shop and get news from Bihara - that no one had come that way in quite some time, not even to chase a celestial waterfall - and the group learned of two routes to Orologio, across the bay between Bihara and Orologio (passing close to Nuono) or south overland, the long way, through the swampy mouth of the bay.
In the process we learned that Cynthia and Serafina don’t know how to swim. Gorton’s niece Marianne, whose husband Vandekamp is on a boat that sailed north a couple days earlier after a celestial waterfall, is teaching her twins Emelia and Amaya to swim, and teaches Cynthia and Serafina too. This is where we discover that unless she actively controls her buoyancy, Serafina will sink.
Part 2: The Crawling Tower
Mayor Cedric asks the party to help with a small problem - the sailors who headed up north should have been back by now. After being taught to sail by a sailor named Varney who stayed behind, they set off north on a borrowed boat. Along the way they find a beached but repairable boat and resolve to come back for it later.
They find the river blocked by a tower that materialized out of nowhere and crawled into its current position; it is built of greenish stone and has many bony limbs growing out of the bottom of it that seem to be a sort of locomotion. They send signals to the missing sailors - trapped on the other side - to meet them halfway; after finding out about the tower materializing out of nowhere, they send the sailors home in their boat and investigate the tower.
Inside they find a massive sepulchral structure filled with both the still and unstill dead; the skeletons seem to be acting out a mimicry of life inside a city self-contained in the tower. Evading the skeleton fights and also a trap wall, they finally reach the top to encounter a lich-lord and his two underlings. Handily defeating them and then stealing an ominous green orb atop the tower, the whole structure begins rapidly crumbling to dust and dissolves into raw miasma.
Cynthia keeps the orb, which is initially somewhat repulsive to even touch. The party sails back to Ostro as heroes, hauling in the extra boat they saw to be repaired.