"And he didn't even mention that some of the people are refugees from Beregost." Portia shakes her head. "At least the people we found the gem on are legit from the temple and were supposed to be getting the gem to a new place. Though I have to wonder about information flow around here. The keeper told us that and the person that led us here said it was stolen." She shakes her head.

"Of course, the more disconcerting thing is something can sense the book and apparently could sense the gem though the ones sent to get the gem fall in the realm of unintelligent brutes. The ones coming for the book seem far more intelligent and know what they are to acquire."

"This is so disconcerting, but the real bad guys will have to deal with Lathander's light showing the truth of who they are before this is over. Someone is going to get their comeuppance soon." She shakes her fist at no one in particular.

"Portia and Zina's tyrades on the oddness of the conversation amused Pettilaen, but only slightly. "Yeah... Well that's what happens to you when all you do is read books. You forget how to communicate..." He lifts his hands up to his mouth and wiggles his fingers at Zina. "... and you start brain-washing people." Chuckling to himself, he plops back onto his bed. "My mother used to scare us with stories of imaginary creatures who had tentacles for their mouths and hands, and they'd get their tentacles wrapped around your brain and control you forever. And you could only watch from the inside in horror as your body did whatever they wanted it to do. Preeeetty freaky stuff."

He whispers something to Gaia, and she vanishes from sight. "I already called dibs on this bed, so no one be getting any ideas!" he declared, though he had a feeling just saying so would only spark ideas in Zina's head. "We just got done with a hard journey, and I want to sleep in. The rest of you can do whatever, but I'm gonna sleep."

The situation wasn't as odd as they all thought, but Kanon felt it was best to allow them their own thoughts and opinions in this situation. It was a bit weird being back at the Keep, and this time as an actual guest rather than a young scribe working for the honor to stay.

"We can explore a bit, Zina, but if we're caught sneaking around in the wrong places we can get thrown out forever. Even without access to the Lower Candles, there's still plenty to see!" Kanon walks towards the door, "Anyone want to explore a bit? I can show you a place where you can send messages, Master Orst."

Pettilaen shakes his head at Kanon's question. "Nope. I'm enjoying this soft bed faaaarrr more than I thought a bed could be enjoyed. I'm staying right here. It's like they laced it all with magic to make me feel comfy and sleepy."

"You can have your bed, I plan on exploring," Zina stuck her tongue out at the other gnome. "We'll just be extra sneaky Kanon, it'll be fine."

The pint-sized illusionist stood by the door impatiently, ready to get this particular adventure on the road. "You're going to show me everything, starting with the kitchens," she said authoritatively. "It's going to be a long night, and we'll need some coffee. And snacks."

"The kitchen it is!" Kanon leads Zina through numerous common halls until they reach the exit of the main keep. "The common hearth-hall is actually outside the main keep, but we should have no problems getting back inside," Kanon says as he nods to the guard by the door. He leads Zina through a garden path until they reach the hearth-hall, a large building nestled beside the Keep's outer gate.

"The monks call themselves The Avowed, and as we're visitors and guests to the keep we're known as Seekers. I'm actually quite surprised they didn't assign us an escort," he shrugs when a thought occurs to him, "They must be swamped with refugees." As he says this, he opens to the door to the hearth-hall. 

A pleasant warmth and the odor of baking bread envelope Kanon and Zina as they enter into the common hearth hall via the main doors. Only a few souls sit at the long tables intended for guests to take their meals, exhausted scholars taking a late dinner from the look of them, but the kitchen is full and bustling. Even across the long, main hall and through the kitchen doors the noise of dozens of workers can be heard as they hustle to prep enough bread for the following morning.

Through a massive, arched doorway to your right, the common lounge can be seen wherein several elder scholars are seated in a circle around a bald man with an oiled goatee. He seems to be giving some sort of lecture and the scholars, all of whom appear to be relatively high in rank from the elegance of their garb, are soaking it up in rapt silence.

No one takes a specific interest in your arrival, though a couple of the late diners look up briefly to see who's entered before returning to their meal.

"They probably didn't expect us to start exploring so soon," Zina replied to Kanon, soaking up every inch of this place. She was a colossal nerd at heart, and this was just her cup of tea.

The sight of the goateed man's lecture instantly caught the gnome's eye; she couldn't help but wonder what he was teaching. Distracted from her original goal of coffee, Zina began to walk into the lounge. Perhaps she could learn something new.

Seeing Zina wonder over to the lounge, Kanon heads over to the spread of available foods and grabs a couple cinnamon rolls and coffees. He makes his way back to Zina, hands her a pastry and a coffee, and stands in the doorway to silently listen to the lecture.

The bald man is speaking on a topic called "Multiverse Mobility", a new arcane discipline which, he claims, makes possible inter-planar, inter-dimensional, and even inter-time travel on a level never before realized. A snippet from his lecture:

"Events that have occurred, have occurred, and there's nothing for it. But travel into your future seems possible and there are certain dimensions where your past is its present, making it possible to approximate travel into the past as well. Though, I must admit, I have not mastered any of the incantations save the one that brought me here from Oerth."

Zina and Kanon note the man is dressed strangely, wearing a midnight blue doublet trimmed in crimson and fringed with black lace and a black silk cape embroidered with golden thread. Nowhere in Faerun, at least as far as they are aware, is it stylistically appropriate for a man to be clad so. Even more, his gold hoop earrings and lavish jewelry are conspicuous as being both unusually ornate and costly beyond the riches of most kings. 

As he speaks, his eyes flicker and flash in hues of blue and yellow, almost as if a lightning storm were taking place inside his head. There is something truly strange and fascinating, if a bit disconcerting, about this foreigner. 

Zina was about to open her mouth and let loose a handful of scathing remarks, as Oerth was only a hypothetical location and the whole premise seemed wildly outlandish. But then she realized that the nagging suspicion in the back of her head that she had seen him before had been correct; although his hair and robes had been different, she had seen him in a portrait. 

"Mo-Mordenkainen," she gasped under her breath, in awe of the sheer power she was currently in the presence of. The gnome desperately wanted to pipe up and ask a question, but she was much too afraid to at the moment. She didn't want to make a fool of herself in front of one of the all time greatest practitioners. Instead, she withdrew a notebook from her pouch and began to take some notes.

"That's Mordenkainen," she said to Kanon through a message spell. "I'd recognize him anywhere. Even without the hair from the portrait, he still looks the same."

Kanon beamed at the proclamation. He's had some strange occurrences in his time at keep, but the thought that Mordenkainen, a man that has had his spells recited throughout history were here, he quickly followed suit. He sat down, pulled his scrolls from their case, and took as many notes as he could. His coffee was forgotten about, and only a single bite was taken from his roll. He didn't want to admit to Zina that he thought the man a madman at first, but when she mentioned his portraits he immediately saw the resemblance.

What's more, he didn't recite from a book or pages of lore... he spoke his lore as if a man of The College of the Herald. With his words. Words through knowledge were undying, and books were merely material and mortal. He'd followed his college blindly without justification until this point, but now even the greatest of mages in the realm seemed to prefer to share his knowledge with words! He soaked in as much as he could.

The man speaks at great length about the ongoing research involved with "Multiverse Mobility" and some other impossibly advanced arcano-scientific topics, but much of it is difficult to follow with specificity - as if you were a child in underschool listening to the dissertation of a graduate professor. He mentions that much of the work has been co-researched with his "young apprentice Bigby" at Greenwood Manse, the dwelling place of a great, forgotten deity known simply as "Ed" in an obscure dimension whose name sounds something like "Torr Onto".

Between the depth of the man's words and the ongoing cosmic storm behind his eyes, the whole thing is a bit mesmerizing. You sink so thoroughly into the habit of listening and taking what notes you can that consciousness of your surroundings fades away. That is, until the morning sun streams through the high windows of the hall and the scholars break their vigil to return to their work in the upper candles.

The bald man stays behind, eyes closed, turning his consciousness inward and levitating several feet into the air with his legs crossed. 

"Holy shite," Zina exhaled, realizing she hadn't even touched her coffee and cinnamon roll. "This place is amazing Kanon!" She exclaimed, tackling him in a hug. Her previous misgivings about him were completely forgotten, he had more than proven himself to the gnome.

"Do you think we'll be able to visit some of the Lower Candles now?" She asked, downing her cold coffee in one go. "I may need another one of these," she said mournfully into the now empty mug. 

Kanon stared intently at the man hovering in place. This is a once in a lifetime experience and he wanted to soak in every detail. He already had pages and pages of notes and he was beginning to think of ways to integrate them into his stories when Zina threw herself at him in a full hug.

"I'm... I'm glad you're enjoying it! We've spent all night in the dining hall, Zina... there's loads more to explore and do! As for the candles, we need proper credentials to enter, and I think they'll be delivered to our quarters very soon!" He smiles, "Lets check on the others and grab another coffee!"

"I can't believe everything that's happening," Zina stuffed six more cinnamon rolls in her bag and poured herself another cup of coffee, not that she looked like she needed the caffeine. "I'm glad we did end up here, just think! If I had insisted we try to find somewhere cooler, we never would have seen him!"

She followed Kanon as he led them through the veritable maze that was Candlekeep. It looked different during the daytime, although Zina was still certain that she would get hopelessly lost if she tried to navigate this place herself.

"We brought breakfast!" The gnome announced their entrance back in the party's chambers in a sing song voice. She tried to throw one of the pastries at Pettilaen's face, but her aim was way off and it hit the wall next to him in a splat of sticky frosting.

Zina's shouting stirs him from his deep slumber, and as he raises his head the cinnamon roll flies by his head, narrowly missing him. "What in the Nine Hells...." he asks groggily. It's clear he was still sound asleep when the two of the barreled into his room. Taking some deep breaths and shaking his head, he finally comes to. Cleaning himself up a bit with magic, he hops out of bed, frowning upon realizing what zipped by his head.

"You wasted a perfectly good cinnamon roll!" Pettilaen complained as he went to grab a cinnamon roll for himself. "These are a precious commodity for us adventurers, given how often it's just bland rations for us, or rations that have been enhanced with simple magic. I tell ya... magical sweetness tends to get old after awhile."

Gathering the basic report of their adventurers, Pettilaen furrows his brow. "Some wizard, named Mordenkainen, thinks it's possible to travel through time and space at once? The guys clearly a loony, eating five too many mushrooms from the Cloakwood forest, or he's into some deep magic that I can't even comprehend..." The thought occurs to him. "Zina. Why didn't you talk to him? It sounds like you had the perfect opportunity to do so."

Portia laughs as the sticky bun splats against the wall and then quietly listens to the conversation while munching on one of the other cinnamon rolls. At some point she hoped she would be able to see Malark for a bit and learn what happened to him in Beregost.

"Because he's the most powerful wizard to ever walk the earth and he's super cool and he invented spells that are so powerful that I can't begin to comprehend," Zina mumbled into her own second cinnamon roll. "And I didn't want to embarrass myself."

Pettilaen laughs at her mentioning being embarrassed. He recalls, "Kind of like how you totally screwed things over with that old geezer-cryptographer back in the Gate, huh? Yeah, I can understand wanting to avoid that too." Flashing a grin at Zina, he finished the rest of his cinnamon roll.

"Man... I could sure use some milk right now to wash all of that down proper. Anywhoozle, what's next? No doubt you two want to go exploring musty tomes in ancient tombs, but I know we're here on business. We need to collect the 'reward' from that Elder Reader guy and his creepy zombie-apprentice, and also find Orst to see what he's planning. And then we're off to Amn! Oh wait... The hobgoblins." While it'd only been a little over three days since their encounter with the kobolds and witnessing the refugees from Beregost, he'd almost forgotten about it all since possessing the gem. Those refugees from Beregost sure did look blue...