She'll armor up and bother the spiny thing to see what it has - egg or loot?

Looks like both, when it stands up to shoot spines at her.

In she goes for the loot. She leaves its eggs alone.

It makes a darn good try at biting her, filling her with spines, charging into her, etc, but when she grabs the metal rod from among its eggs and backs away it stays on the nest and doesn't pursue.

Bye spiny thing!

Does this rod do anything?

Not when she's just standing there holding it, but there's a bit on the bottom that could probably be twisted relative to the rest. Right now it's rusty and kind of stuck.

She is very strong!

The rust cracks and comes off in flakes; eventually she gets it about 180 degrees around and then it doesn't seem like it's meant to go anymore. The creaking sound of it turning gets noticeably louder for a few moments before it stops.

She turns it back.

Another moment of especially loud creaking, then quiet creaking.

Well, she'll bring it back with her.

Where else looks promising?

That seems to be about it in terms of buildings intact enough to explore; there are plenty of those parrots around and a fat fuzzy mammal nosing around in the dirt under some bushes, but nothing that promises more loot.

Okay. She consolidates her chosen loot and flies back to the others.

From the air she notices that the main streets of Tisfaat were laid out in the shape of a stick-figure human, but that's the oddest thing she encounters on her way back to Mechuria City. The boat is still where it was, but the explorers aren't on it right at this moment.

"Guys?" she calls.

If she makes a second pass over the city she'll spot them coming out of another ruin south of the river.

Derron waves at her.

"Hi! I found some stuff. I didn't bring it all, it'd have been awkward to carry." She lays out the stuff. "I think this is the only magic one, there were a couple other magic things too though. Also some writing I memorized, and -" She displays the wall art she copied onto her skin.

"That is a really neat trick!" Tem says of her art skin. "I can copy that while you write down the writing you memorized, if that works for you."

"Sure. Where do you want me to put it?"

He hands her some paper and a fountain pen, and starts sketching her wall art with a piece of charcoal. He's a pretty decent sketch artist, though of course he can't do color.

She traces out all the writing.

Once she's done he wants to know where she saw each piece of it and annotates it as such. He confirms that the stuff from that one classroom was algebra, and the other classroom was apparently doing a grammar lesson.

She marks things out on a map and mentions the other magic things she saw, including the sphere of emptiness under the water.

The description of the sphere of emptiness sparks a heated debate between the explorers; Tem and Derron think it was being generated by an artifact on the lake bottom and Chaenath suspects some animal's defense mechanism.