Driving their damaged vehicle down from the plateau, Contra-Disward towards the banks of the Styx, the Levellers soon spotted what they’d been looking for. At the bottom of a steep incline, run aground on a rocky bank, was a strange ship unlike any the party had ever seen before. Without sails or oarlocks, the galleon instead sported three curved masts – two of them out to the sides – each of which ended in a bronze ring. Its name, painted on the foredeck, was the Mirror’s Edge.

Two mezzoloths guarded the deck, so the party quietly boarded and tried to negotiate with them. The guards claimed to know nothing of “cogboxes” and demanded that the adventurers depart, and a fight quickly broke out. Reya and Hinnerk cut through the fiends while Leofric used blasts of magic to repeatedly fling them overboard. Reinforcements poured out from a cabin below the helm, and party found themselves briefly surrounded but were eventually able to destroy the chitinous monsters.

With help from Hinnerk’s knowledge of sailing, the party explored below decks but still couldn’t find any sign of the component they were looking for. It looked like they weren’t the first people to search the vessel, whose contents had been thoroughly tossed. Could this, perhaps, not be a Modron vessel at all? Moving up through the decks, Tunwéya opened the captain’s cabin… and found himself face to face with an additional mezzoloth… and his master, a jackal-faced arcanoloth!

The arcanoloth had prepared and charged a finger of death spell, and had it trained on his captive, the half-elf captain of the ship. Thinking Tunweya to be a part of her crew, the loth – who introduced himself as Vorcas – demanded that the party reveal the location of the iron flask that contained the elemental that powered the vessel.

This ship, it turns out, had come from a far away world. Its captain, an accomplished wizard experienced with taming water elementals to power her ships, wanted to experiment with forming an elemental of the waters of the Styx for that purpose. Planeshifting her ship to Avernus, she formed the elemental, slaved it to herself and to the ship, and bound it with the rings on the “masts”. But the elemental proved more-powerful than she’d expected and the ship was hard to control and ran aground, breaking a ring and freeing the Stygian elemental which then used its memory-erasing powers to render the crew feebleminded. The last thing the captain – Barriel d’Lyrandar, according to documents found on the ship – been able to do before losing her sanity was to trap the elemental and hide it aboard ship. Now Vorcas wanted to repair the vessel, re-bind the elemental, and sell the ship to the highest bidder.

Vorcas had spent days trying to extract information on operating the ship from Barriel’s shattered mind and from her journals, and had succeeded at everything except the frustrating task of finding the hiding place of the elemental. Negotiating around the finger-of-death-standoff, Leofric kept the yugoloths talking while Pherria searched a location they’d found suspicious earlier. Meanwhile, Reya prepared to ambush Vorcas if necessary.

The elemental’s flask discovered, Vorcas dismissed his deadly spell and the standoff ended. Now there was an uneasy peace aboard deck. Clearly this wasn’t a place where the party could find the component they needed for the dream machine. But maybe Vorcas, or Barriel, or this ship, might provide some benefit in their quest.