"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.

"I didn't see an animal. Or an artifact."

This statement does not support either side of the debate more than the other; eventually they all conclude that they don't have enough evidence to conclude anything. Chaenath starts taking notes on the preserved butterfly while Tem examines the metal rod.

Cayra goes through all the things she saw, even things that didn't seem particularly interesting to her at the time in case knowing more matters.

Tem twists the twisty bit of the rod while saying "I wonder what happens if I turn it all the way clockwise--woah, it makes my voice louder!" It does, in fact, make his voice louder, though some of the sound seems to be coming from the rod rather than from his mouth.

"Oh, that explains why the creaking got louder, I thought it was just rustier in places."

"Yeah, it's some kind of--okay that's actually kind of annoying. Try talking into it while I'm holding it and then when you're holding it, I want to see if it goes by proximity or touch." He turns it back on and holds it out to her silently.

"I wonder how much of that mana stuff it still has," she says, taking it midsentence.

Her voice starts being amplified when she starts touching it!

"Yeah, I'm trying to find that out by not letting it charge off me." Tem says after letting go of it. "We can run it down and then charge it back up again."

"Okay. I wonder why the spiny thing took it."

"From your description, probably just because it was shiny. There are tales of various kinds intelligent species passed down through the years, but most of them sound like fiction and none of them sound like what you saw."

"Yeah, it didn't seem that bright. Nothing I tried talking to when I was unbearably lonely seemed smart."

"I definitely want to examine it more closely when we get there, though. You say it had three legs and didn't look like it was missing one, that's very intriguing."

"Can you see how far you can turn this the other way, Cayra? I can't tell if it doesn't come off or it's just rusted on."

"I got it to turn halfway around." She demonstrates.