Part XII - Lungs and More Damn Fish (we are not Eskimos)
After getting Jon back, mentally and physically, we were off again. Our next move was to get "the shield of air and water." This was to be a scale from Lou (Loo? Lue?) Pin-Chou, the ruler of the Zhang province of the Middle Kingdom. Fabio warned us that the two of them had had previous contact, and weren't on too good of terms (gee, someone doesn't like the elf? How could this be?) We were not to let this guy know that we were associated, which was not a problem, since we didn't like going around telling people that we knew the elf.
We left behind most of the weapons, especially the magic ones, but we did take the bug-out amulet, despite the problems it may have caused (since Louie might detect the elf's taint on it). For this adventure, Charlie stayed behind, so it was me, Jay, Jon, and Gegi. The way in this time was through a picture of a garden, and Chappell told us that he'd check the landing space every morning until we were there. We ended up in the garden, with bushes, trees, flowers, and a temple. After wandering around, we found a talking carp in a river, which did not make me very happy (my immediate response was "Oh, crap"), and started me on a relapse of my fish-guilt syndrome. This one was a much better conversationalist than the last talking fish, and we asked about Lou.
The fish said that he liked offerings like flowers with dew, fruit, and human servants. We figured we'd do the old folk story of offering our service, hanging around until we could get what we wanted, and then running away (very very fast). We got some stuff as an offering, and hung around ourselves. A big lizard, fish, horse thing showed up in the morning, we conveyed the greetings of our king, Prester John, and offered our gifts and services. He took us to the palace (by swallowing us), instructed us in court protocol and presented us to Louie.
He was a real butthead (actually he had a tiger's head - Anal Retentive Dave), but decided that we could serve him, doing the tasks that no one else wanted. We were shown our quarters, and given such fun jobs as scraping algae and catching fish. I got to catch fish (hooray), but I let all the carp go, just in case (I made sure that all the fish I kept didn't talk). We did this for a while, as well as providing entertainment one night (singing, dancing, music, fighting, story-telling.) Lou made moderately amused, but not highly impressed.
Later that night, our friend the talking fish showed up, (Lou's palace was in a lake, and we were sort of swimming around this whole time, but were able to breathe OK) and asked about us catching fish. We claimed that we were just following orders, and that as soon as we could get out of there, we'd stop catching fish. He said he'd help us (mostly just to get rid of us and our fish traps), and went out to look for a scale from Lou. He came back, and said he'd found one. I went out with him and grabbed it. We got our stuff and ran/swam like hell back to the garden, stopping to destroy the fishing equipment, and leave some graffiti.
We got to our spot in the garden, and at dawn, went poof back to the waystation. Charlie wasn't there anymore, but Jon was. Jon was out of it, after Chappell did a little "therapy" with him, as Jon had some kind of problem with shadows that were out to get him after the bat nearly wasted him. We were warned not to discuss anything about New York with Jon, he would know that he'd been there, but wouldn't know that he'd been there (just like us for all the other places we'd been). Charlie showed up a little later, and told us that after we'd gone into the picture, Chappell had taken him to a library that had every book ever written, and apparently, now Charlie could do some kind of trick where he could picture himself in the library and find the book he wanted, and bring that book into the real world. What good that would do, I don't know, but it sounds cool. I gave the scale to Chappell, who found it acceptable (rah), and we all took a break.