Swamped

You take a little time to gather your thoughts. You don't fully understand a lot of this stuff, but you think you can work something out based on the general ideas.

Pubert was transporting a special lodestone. Yvonne had a compass that could track the gateways. You haven't worked out where the Dune Wanderers fit in yet, but leaving that aside... the point that's coming to mind is that it's possible to detect the gateways before they open.

Which suggests there's some, you're not sure what the word you want is. Substance? Yeah, there's something to detect before the gateway even exists. So maybe, whether through magic or some other means, you can move that something, or possibly even create it.

Either way, that suggests that at least some of the gateways you've seen were placed intentionally by the wizard's crew. Which means, if you had a list, you might be able to figure out something about where they were trying to go.

"What do we know about the gateways so far?" you ask. "Where they've opened, and when. I guess we can't get that information about the swamp so easily, but you were keeping track of stuff like that here, right?"

Theodore nods.

"I can't say that our observations were complete, and we didn't realize what the anomalies were until Rider turned up, but we do have a thorough record of what we noticed. I'll fetch it."

He comes back with a rather large chart, and unfurls it.

"This is what we saw."

"I was tracking unusual sightings in the swamp before we voted to attack the Bogknights," Rider says. "I don't know that I could reconstruct an entire map of the swamp, but if I had one as a base I could put down most of my sightings from memory."

"Well, let's see if we can work anything out about these ones first," Theodore says. "We saw a few anomalies months back, then they stopped. Out of the recent ones, this is the first one we recorded, four days ago. We didn't see any activity for around a day afterwards. Seems to be somewhere in the Jawbone Mountains. Was there anything unusual on that day in the swamp?"

You, Long, and Rider all answer at once.

"It rained."

"More specifically," Long continues, "it rained much sooner than we expected. Though, the oddness and the coincidence of timing don't really prove anything in and of themselves."

"Unfortunately, it's not really feasible to go checking the mountains," says Yvonne. "We tried climbing them before, and it's really nasty up there. Fierce winds, kicking up lots of sand. And what few creatures do venture there are extremely dangerous."

"Which means it'd be a good place for someone to hide out," you muse. "If they had some way to manage all that, no one would ever dare go looking for them there."

"Well, even if that's true, we don't have a way to traverse them safely," Yvonne says. "So however interesting a lead it might be, we're not going to be able to check the place out. Unless someone has a clever idea for how we can?"