Now the inside of the box is REALLY HOT.

Oooh! Bit bulky to take with her. She pockets the rose and tries the next place.

The box starts cooling off as soon as she takes her foot off the pedal. Next place: a smaller house than that other one, brick like most of the surviving buildings and with a floorplan that suggests two bedrooms. This one manages to still have a silverware drawer, with two very different sizes of spoon and 3- and 5-tined forks. If they ever had any knives the centuries have consumed them.

Nothing magic, nothing cool, next.

She finds the school! Students had those reusable wax tablets and sticks, and a couple tablets in each classroom are still readable, mostly from having been upside down and/or sheltered under other stuff. There's a  classroom with stuff that might be algebra (hard to tell, since she can't reliably distinguish numbers from letters from mathematical symbols in the language in question). There's a reading classroom with a couple of sentences heavily annotated with symbols and additional words sticking off them. And there's a classroom with no tablets, but a handful of clay balls with chunks taken out of them, as if you started with a sphere and then deleted all the clay in a partially-overlapping sphere. The chalkboard in this room is still on the wall, and some words appear to have been blasted into it like a fire burned whatever was written on it into the surface forever.

She looks at all the writing long enough to memorize it. She picks up a clay sphere to see if it does anything.

The edge of the removed bit was clearly very smooth before wind and rain got at it, but other than that it's pretty boring.

Huh. Okay. Next.

There's a museum! Some of the exhibits were meant to last a while, like these displays of insects and flowers preserved in glass and resin. She finds:

*a dragonfly with 2 wing-lobes near the head and 2 in the back
*a nasty-looking wasp
*a pale gold butterfly
*a praying mantis the size of the palm of her hand
*a 5-petaled blue flower with white lines
*a cluster of little pink florets each no larger than a pea

She takes the butterfly, marks the spot on her map, continues.

There's a town hall with an amphitheater. Something with three evenly-spaced legs and a whole lot of spines has made its nest at the bottom! There's something shiny under it.

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.