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Start: 10th of Tamtir, evening. In the central plaza of the top cloud of the Cloud Giants near the portal to the Heights of the Primordials and its defensive runes, considering ways forward.
The party decided to steal the instrument from Calindra's home - Calliope and Crax Goobadink took Nimbus to the balcony on the tower at the back of the manor and sent the pegasus back to the party. The pair noted the Reverse Gravity trap on the door and dimension doored inside. They found the Vault Tower room, and saw Calindra floating inside the central pool, motionless. They alerted her, her eyes opened, and combat ensued.
Crax Goobadink teleported outside using Stinky and flew around the outside, and Calliope was chased through the house, avoiding her with various spells and illusions. The rest of Bill's Bimbos converged - Tar Runo and Ormund Vanstein took Nimbus to the balcony, Crax Goobadink harried Calindra from the windows, and Aoife Sweeney Arwa Hathspelt and Rohtagels busted in through the front door. During the scuffle, Calliope hid under Calindra's bed and found the defective illusion painting of Oak.
When chased across the hall, he found the Private Study where Nimbreach was stealing a large bag of books. He asked Calliope for help taking all the books, and Calliope snatched the fur-bound spellbook he was unable to take himself. Satisfied with the agreement for help, he drifted through the floor and took the crystal ball focus from the desk and disappeared with his bag of books. For agreeing to aid his theft, Nimbreach showed Calliope that he had been all over this home before, expect for the Tower Vault - he had been unable to investigate there without alerting Calindra. And so, everyone rushed to gather there to find the hidden vault.
In the tower, Nesdin dimension doored inside and successfully dispelled the transmutation trap on the exterior door. Him and Calliope were able to stall Calindra long enough to allow the rest of the party to gather. Crax Goobadink destroyed the water of the pool, revealing a mosaic in the floor with 3 concentric, golden, rotatable rings with Giant glyphs of the alphabet in them. With Ormund Vanstein translating, they recalled the painting of Oak, input OAK, and opened the vault.
Inside was a small storage space with two items: a silvery fractal piece that resembled a necklace display bust with a diamond-shaped indent for the shard solitaire Calindra was wearing, and a beautiful silvery harp with those silvery fractal patterns along the soundboard of the instrument - the Solithar Harp. Nesdin snagged both, and the fight with Calindra continued. Nesdin misty stepped onto Calindra and connected the solitaire chunk with the shard around her neck , and was transported inside the demiplane within the shard. There, he met the real Calindra - she revealed that she had been trapped inside the shard without her spellbook ever since she had experimented with the shard to create a simulacrum (being the Calindra the party was fighting, who was not acting with their summoner's best interests). Nesdin returned her spellbook to her, and the pair plane shifted out of the shard back into Calindra's tower.
With the real Calindra freed, the simulacrum attempted to flee but the party absolutely destroyed her, reducing her to a pile of snow. Calindra thanked the party, and filled them in on her situation (she'd been trapped for months, had no knowledge of goings on since casting simulacrum). After begrudgingly returning the stolen Solithar Harp, she allowed Nesdin to choose his reward for freeing her, which he chose that very harp. He handed it to Calliope, and Crax Goobadink and Nesdin then asked to study with her later to exchange spell formulae, which she agreed to as well. Assessing and cleaning up the damage the simulacrum caused, Calindra started by wiping out the lightning bolt runes placed around the portal to the Heights of the Primordials - she downplayed their actual power and seemed to dismiss it out of hand, despite Nesdin's prior assessment of the runes. Calindra also warned the party of the Heights danger, stating that Taivaal was the most volatile and dangerous of the Primordials, as well as the dangerous Crestfall Coven (the coven of hags Calindra had stolen the solitaire shard from within the Heights with aid from Isdrithir). The group, assessing the increasingly dangerous weather happening all throughout the Isles of Reus. They thanked Calindra for her info and her casting of Fly on a number of them, and flew into the portal.
Inside the Heights of the Primordials, the party witnessed a troubling scene: Taivaal, a skeleton of lightning towering several miles high looking down upon a giant in a tornado pursuing a star dragon who had a confluence of red, blue, and yellow light on its back. A guttural yell in Giant and the right wing of the dragon being torn off indicated that it was Lodd on the dragon's back, killing it.
End: 10th of Tamtir, dusk, in the Heights of the Primordials. They observed Lodd kill a star dragon in front of the giant tornado and Taivaal.