We now begin a thread to hopefully lead you all back home.  I really appreciate participation in this over the next few days so we can move the story forward, and hopefully save your asses!  I will lay down my mojo from time to time, and you will make choices and give input. Breaking character to ask the DM questions or to ask to make checks is totally allowed and encouraged.   Please preface such questions with "Dm" so I know you're talking to me in case it's not obvious.

I am including the beginning of the thread here for convenience, it will also be on the site.  Please do not respond here, go the site.  Please participate!  Please put things your character says in italics or quotes of something so we know the difference.

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You find yourselves all in a rough circle, facing one another, but staring downward at the ground.  Barely recognizable around you are the grey empty streets of some back alley ward in Fanlu...only not as brightly lit.  This is the Ethereal plane, a shadowy, half formed place of vast emptiness, wandering spirits, and other potentially dangerous denizens, some of which you have already met.  Ideas race through your minds.  For a long time you stand there in silence, unable to even speak to one another as the fullness of the situation is pondered...You are like ghosts to the world you once knew, how will you return?  Will you starve to death wandering in this grey endlessness?  Is there some way to make someone on the other side notice you and help?  And then, the strangest thought of all maybe, that things like that thought slayer, and those ghosts, and those terrible spiders...that every day this grey otherworldly realm exists, occupied by things that watch silently from the other side...things which now you may very well have to face.  You are in this world now.  Their world.  You even feel lost, ghost like, a sense of hopelessness licking at the edges of your minds...it's not helping that everything is grey...everything misty or dark.  You can only see about 60ft in any direction before the strangeness of this place distorts your vision to foggy uselessness.

Silently, a dark form glides through your circle...the blurred image of some town person on the other side, on the side you should be on.  He cannot see you, cannot hear you. through your confounded circle he glides oblivious, as the entire world seems oblivious to your existence now.  He walks right through Obadala Saki and on to a warm life some where else.  The monks eyes grow wide in panic as he breaks the heavy silence.

"It is that old forbidden magic that landed us here!  We should have never trusted it.  Such magic leads men to doom.  Now we are like ghosts, lost between life and death..."

and he drops to his knees in a tearful, self sorry prayer, fiercely grabbing at his prayer beads and he mumbles a sobbing sutra

"Silence!"  Jamba's voice booms, even echoing through the misty nether.  

"We are heroes!  Look at how far we have come!  It cannot end like this...In my 39 years I have lived through hell at least 7 times over...by the gods you prey to, and any that will hear me, I will not die in this grey hell!  No more tears.  No more sullen silence.  No more mourning for these ghosts we are.  Everyone think.  Answers!  We need ideas.  Hold nothing back, no matter how absurd, we must try it.  We may have days to work this out...we may have our entire lives in this miserable waste to come up with answers if we don't find one soon enough, so tell all!  In one of our minds there is a way, at least something to try!!?"

The big warrior looks at you all, chin up, and expectant, a warriors spirit evident in his proud eyes.

Begin!