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> the road home
> The trio start off narrowly escaping yet another failed venture. They keep trying to find wondrous sites in the new world, but they all go south eventually. They even find the fountain of youth, but it turns out to be temporary so after a few hours you just poof back to your original age, making it freaking worthless. Stuff like that.
> Meanwhile, cortez's men continue to expand, and Tulio and Miguel are having a harder and harder time staying out of the way of the spanish army.
> Until, while hiding from some guards, they overhear that there is a ship going back to spain.
> The three concoct a plan: sneak into the spanish army camp and pose as officers/guards long enough to sneak onto the ship and hitch a ride back to spain. So long as they can avoid Cortez or anyone else that knows them personally, they can pull it off.
> the only complication is how they are going to smuggle Chel herself, since she wont blend in, so they have to enact a cover of her being a slave they have taken captive to sell back home, a plan which Chel is poorly suited to pull off because of her headstrong nature drawing attention.
> The plan gets further complicated when T & M discover that the ship heading back to spain is carrying a shipment of gold, turning this "lets sneak back home" plan into a "lets sneak back home AND GET RICH" one midstream.
> the plan has its ups and down, including a sequence where Cortez visits the camp and T and M have to hide in increasingly absurd ways to avoid his attention
> As the situation gets increasingly dire, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Chel from drawing attention. Set it up in a way where bringing Chel with them and getting the gold are looking like mutually exclusive options, forcing drama.
