#dashis

also, just as a note. genies in my world are beings made out of elemental magic + something i am abstractly referring to as Story Magic. mechanically, this means the ifrit, marid, dao and djinn are big ol' elemental bards, lol. narratively, each genie society has specific values and traditions when it comes to stories, which you can read more about here.

so the party traveled north and went into the ocean to find the marid (story value: listening to stories), who were NOT thrilled to meet the party. they had a tense encounter where they had to tell stories based on marid tradition. the trick was for the PCs to tell the marid sad stories, but they only learned that through the minigame i designed (which you can read more about here). the spell component they needed was the marid's tears (salt in liquid sync!), which calcified into pearls.

then they went to see the djinn (story value: story making), who were located on a massive cloud trapped within a cylindrical sandstorm. the storm was unnatural, caused by a djinni that had lost themself in storymaking (something that can happen to djinn if they're not careful). after proving themselves to be protagonist material, the party reenacted the story that the djinni was trapped in, in order to snap them out of it. the spell component was the djinni's sweat (a yielding! a burden’s drink!), which calcified into fulgurite (a kind of rock that forms when sand is struck by lightning, look it up, it looks cool!).

finally, the party went to see the dao (story value: recording stories). at this point, the players had correctly deduced that they needed the dao's blood (an iron link; plus: blood, sweat and tears) but the problem was the dao do NOT share their blood with anyone. dao blood has immutable properties when combined with material plane stuff, and making earthly things permanent goes against the dao's creed.

i should have mentioned before now that different kinds of genasi have unique relationships with each genie community, and the earth genasi had ostracized themselves. they wanted to be more dao, but the dao wanted them to be patient etc etc etc. one of the genasi wanted to do a risky spell to become a dao, which backfired and he kind of lost himself. so one PC, saube, underwent a daoist carving/tattoo ritual to connect herself to the earth, where she was able to use the genasi's blood as part of the tattoo and also take some back to halkifell. this all sounds complicated when summarized like this lmao, but just trust me that it was beautiful and special and now saube is literally connected to the land of halkifell, where her gf lives and where she will live, eventually.