>>6184935>1) Prepare a wide variety of spells to infer your location. >3) Use a Limited Wish to discern your position. The local sun is well and set by the time you rise again. The room assigned to you in the Guest Keep is small but much finer than you feared, with a soft featherbed with fur blankets, a writing desk, fireplace, woven rush mats, and a table and chairs for private dining. A window on one side looks out over a patch of mossy forest enclosed within the castle walls to let in silvery moonlight. It’s even comfortably warm, despite the chill outside or any use of spellcraft you can see.
Once up you set right about right away to the task of preparing your spells for the day, for which you are joined by Anya and Eva that you might divide the day’s tasks more evenly. First order of business, Tongues and Comprehend Languages. Only you and Anya can cast either spell, and with roughly two hours duration per spell for seven people, the burden of facilitating communication is substantial. Unfortunate, but unavoidable; one set’s worth between the two of you should keep you all through the evening meal, at least. Next, transportation: Anya frees up one of yours with a Plane Shift, which the All-Father grants her as a fifth-order spell, while Eva’s Transport via Plants and Wind Walk supplant your Greater Teleportation. One of your three seventh-levels must go to a Transmutation spell, for which you select an Extended Mass Eagle’s Splendor; another goes to your mansion, which will provide your group comfort and safety from interference.
“So…” Eva begins, once housekeeping spells are taken care of, “really, how do we figure this all out? I’ve never been to the outer planes before and to be honest I don’t know how any of this works.”
“I doubt any but the gods themselves do,” you say. “As to how, I can say ‘with difficulty.’ There are tests we can perform to probe the properties of this plane. We can make offerings to seek answers from higher powers. Scrying should work across planes, though not as readily, and while it will tell us nothing of where we are, we can at least continue surveillance of the Nightrunners… I suppose the first step is to rule out as many possibilities as we can, and work from there. In this, it is actually you who are the experts, but would I be correct in saying that this plane is unaligned?”
Anya nods, confirming your suspicion. “Unless something is obscuring my sight.”
“Come to think of it, I’m not feeling anything particularly outsiderish either,” Eva says. “You’d think there’d be something, wouldn’t you?”
The alignment of an outer plane is not constant, no more than sunlight is constant everywhere during the day, and there are reaches of them nearer and further from the inner material planes, but viewed over time and distance any background alignment should become apparent. Yet this place appears as neutral as the inner planes.
