Elves, dwarves, and humans once walked this land and built on it. For the past eight hundred years, no sapient being has disturbed the ruins.
This is a big alucine. It'll have portals to somewhere she's heard of, she just has to find them - there's no way she's going to be able to locate the exact point in the sky where the one she came through let out, what idiot ostimancer puts a portal in the sky? She flies along the river, east, looking for a town.
This room used to be an office, with a metal fountain pen and chipped ceramic inkwell still lying on the floor. The second room she looks in has a strange ceramic tablet, engraved with a bunch of squares and rectangles. The smaller squares have unrecognizable characters on them; the larger rectangles have those characters strung together into unrecognizable words.
There's more to the building over that way, if she wants to keep exploring.
She finds a room that opens onto the river, containing a set of scales and a brass plate engraved with more of the unfamiliar writing. There's also a large, once-grand chamber with about half of a giant chandelier hanging from what remains of the ceiling and a small pressable-looking panel on the wall.
There are flowers here! They grow on the vines wrapping around the walls, and on the low plants pushing up between the cobblestones, and on the bushes in what used to be rooms. There are large blue ones that smell nice, and medium-sized red ones dripping with pollen, and clusters of little yellow ones that are all closed right now.
On the edge of the ruin is a spacious courtyard, with rings in the walls where horses may once have been tied up. Alternating sections of cracked cobblestone and unpaved dirt suggest a garden, and indeed the overgrown plants here are slightly more flowery than usual. However, the flowers are all local varieties, devoid of any information beyond perhaps "delicious nectar here".
Inside are several rooms; the first one she looks in contains a toad the size of a human.
From the age of the ruins, it might just be that all the skeletons have turned to dust. The coastline has occasional beaches and occasional cliffs, as dictated by the vagaries of geology. There are plants, there are birds, there are occasional scars in the land that might once have been walls or roads.
Heck.
She keeps flying. She explores ruins - it's all ruins - she talks to more and less likely-looking animals, and they're all animals - she looks for flowers, and finds none.
She is getting ready to try crossing the sea by the time a week has passed, but first she retraces her steps, accelerating faster and faster, till she finds the same wrecked city, and starts trying to cover the sky in a responsibly gridded pattern.
Many of the animals, and a suprisingly nonzero number of the plants, try to attack her, but none of them manage to do her serious injury. The ruins contain various interesting objects, but nothing she can interact with usefully.
When she's flying an eastbound leg of the grid above the ruined city, she spots a sail on the ocean, heading her way.
"Hi! I have been SO LONELY, there are no flowers or people alive anywhere on that entire damn continent!"
She presents an odd picture - she's wearing clothes, drapey apricot silk pants and shirt, which, having been grown on her person and then released rather than sewn, are shaped oddly and fit perfectly. She hasn't put her wings away too; those are a buff color on the underside, brown on the back, huge and feathered. There are words in a foreign language written across her skin in tiny print, too small to read from a distance greater than inches, and a map on the back of her hand of what she's explored.
The ship's crew may present an odd picture to her as well. There's a woman with dark skin and pointed ears, a tall muscular blond man, and a shorter, slighter man. They're all wearing clothes that look handmade rather than manufactured, though the shorter man's are noticeably nicer. All of them have the slightly disheveled appearance of people who have been out in the weather, sailing a boat.
He holds up a finger, goes below decks for a minute, and comes up with a piece of parchment and some charcoal. He draws a rough map with a large continent in the west and a small one in the east, and names the large one "Mechuria" and the small one "Pinehedge and Greenhall". Then he hands her the writing materials and says, "Where is Norwaser Alucine?"
Then moves to a new section of parchment and draws three circles. Points at the first one: "Pinehedge, Greenhall, Mechuria, ocean." Points at the second one and then at the sun: "Sun". Points at the third one and the visible half moon: "Moon". Pushes the map and charcoal at her again.
She's not great at drawing but when she gets the idea of what he means she holds out her hands and appears images of two kinds of flowers on her palms, repigmenting the basic shape in quickly and then adding detail. A blue one, a bit like a daffodil, and a green one that looks like some sort of lily.
"Pinehedge used to have one person, but he got lost and nobody could find the new one, so we started having a parliament instead."
He has more questions and so do the other two. Do the Yorib have agriculture? Domesticated animals? What kinds of animals? Do they have marriage and parenting and birthday parties and sowing parties and harvesting parties? Do they have printed books and musical instruments? Do they have a taboo against cannibalism? ("Seriously, Chaenath?" "It's an interspecies universal!") Do they have schools and religions and political arguments?
The Yorib have agriculture and domesticated animals which she can illustrate the same way she did the flowers. They have marriage and parenting but not birthday parties; they do have agricultural festivals. They do not have printed books because they have flowers, but gosh, what a concept! They have musical instruments. They do not eat each other.
And Chaenath wants to know all the details she can give them about how magic fixes injuries! The kind of magic they have here doesn't fix injuries very well because you can't visualize what needs to happen exactly enough, but it can do things like "hold this broken bone still" and "make this person have more blood than they do right now".
She's high enough that they probably can't fill that area of air with sand just by loading some onto a spare sail canvas and flinging, but low enough that boosting it with some magic should do the trick. They'll have the setup ready in a few minutes; Cayra might want to get well above her best guess at the portal location so she doesn't get a faceful of sand.
"There are two kinds of magic here: personal casting, and artifacts. Personal casting is the one we know about; making artifacts like this is a lost art. How is works is, some people are casters, and they can use mana to do things. Apply forces to objects, make there be more or less of some substance, make things glow or float for a little while, whatever. If you do too much magic you run out of mana and can't do any more for a while; it comes back slowly up to some maximum--it varies by person--and then you don't accumulate any more."
"I'm afraid you can only learn if you're a caster, but I suppose you might be one. Pay careful attention to what I'm about to do, and tell me if you feel anything."
Once she's definitely paying attention, he picks up a bit of broken cobblestone and makes it glow for a few seconds. There are no sensations involved besides the light.
"No. All we know is it happened all at once. Eight hundred years ago, there was a Cataclysm that killed nearly everyone on this continent and most of the people on the other one. Civilization collapsed, and sapients almost went extinct before they could build it back up again. Finding out what caused it is one of the goals of our expedition."
"You know, I'm not sure. Possibly because where there are barmaids and merchants together the merchants are probably drunk and therefore more likely to make sexual remarks." (He's trying to remember if he explained the word "drunk" yet. He probably did, he gets drunk often enough.)
Snrk. "There's a process you can do to some plants, where if you drink the result it makes you temporarily happy, and friendly, and more willing to say or do stuff you might otherwise choose not to, and also have problems walking straight. And if you drink too much of it you fall asleep and wake up with a sore head."
"Like this." She points at herself. "We're in between humans and dwarves in height, have pointy ears," (she moves her hair back to indicate them) " and we don't need as much sleep as the other two kinds but we get sick the most often. And our sight and hearing is a bit sharper but our senses of smell are worse."
"Anyway, we're trying to figure out what rules this thing is following. So far we've got that it accelerates the same amount regardless of where the blade starts or what's under there, so we think the vertical parts are applying the same force every time. And the force is on this wooden frame, not on the blade."
"Probably not, no. What I'd really like is to take it apart and see if there's some kind of internal mechanism, but of course we daren't do that until we're sure we've learned all we can with what we've got, and ideally found a few more artifacts so this isn't the only one. And brought it back to Pinehedge so other researchers can look at it intact."
They head along the south side of the river, checking out any ruin that looks at least vaguely recognizable. Most of them don't have anything interesting.
This one has a pack of angry snakes in it! They coil up on their tails and launch themselves at the explorers like springs.
They find a ruined mansion! There's a gorgeous mosaic in one room displaying two labeled cities and some hills. It's rather abstract and not a good map, but Tem identifies one of the labels as "Mechuria City" ("it's the capital, and it's where we are now") and the one up-river from it as "Tisfaat".
Ruined house! It's actually got some of its second story still on. Inside are eight small bedrooms, in which she finds a lump of amber on a chain and two geodes. There'a also a kitchen, which contains a few rusty knives, a cracked stone countertop, and a big metal box too covered in dust to make out the features on its surface.
It isn't nailed down; she could probably pick it up and bring it with her when she goes back to Mechuria City if she doesn't end up finding too much other stuff. Outside is broad streets and sunlight and more of those purple-winged parrots. This one is eating round yellow fruits off a bush and eyeing her placidly.
Here's a building with chunks of nice mosaics on what's left of the interior walls! Most of them are pictures of people sitting on the floor with their eyes closed, occasionally surrounded by pretty lights or with hopefully-metaphorical extra eyeballs. The last one is a beautiful, intricate fractal pattern that invites one to stare at it.
The next building has nothing in it except a lot of angry bees, but the one after that looks to have been a glassworks! Most recognizable among the wreckage are the shattered remains of a glass tree, and a miraculously intact small glass rose. There's also a metal box that appears to be hooked up to a foot pedal.
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.
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.
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
"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.
"If that's as far as you can get it too then it probably just doesn't go farther than that. It's a good find; I'm looking forward to getting it to the lab."
Chaenath seems to be done taking notes on the butterfly and the chunk of amber; the group moves on toward a particularly verdant area that may once have been a small park.
"It would be nice if you told us beforehand so there could be multiple pairs of eyes on whatever you did, but I don't think anybody is going to say no to science. If something runs out of mana and we're all low, we can always put off more experiments on that one thing for a day or two."
"In the meantime, I want to take this with us. I'm going to go sneak up on it." He gently levers the tile out of the divot it's sitting in without touching the top enough to set it off, then puts it back down outside the basin. "Say, would you like to step on it again? I want to make sure it doesn't need the rest of the fountain to work. We can always drop something on it if you'd rather not."
Toad details are appreciated to the extent that they're relevant. Eventually they decide that they'll only fight the toad if it's territorial enough to attack first.
When they get to the ruined palace, the first place they stop is the courtyard full of plants. Chaenath has been taking samples of all the plants they find on the way, and after doing the same here she concludes that this used to be the kitchen garden.
"I don't know. It's been noticed in Pinehedge, though; animals that were first brought over from this continent are more interested in plants brought over likewise than in the native ones. I suppose it might not go the other direction; I haven't seen enough animals eating here to be sure."
Onward into the building! They find some stairs that go down to a relatively intact basement level. There's a pair of massive fireplaces along one wall, one with the rusty remains of a spit in it, a couple knives, and ceramic jars ranging from plain to pretty and from intact to shattered.
"Medeomancers are healers and they - forget - what people are. They're weird. Ostimancers do portals and they need to travel all the time, to new places, they can't settle down. Halomancers do stuff with - like - getting salt out of water and things - and they don't like to be around people, they're the opposite of antheomancers that way, but you can't cancel it out if you learn both, you just have both problems and they make it harder to solve each other. Tropomancers are good at tending plants and animals, and they get - friendly, too trusting."
"Pyromancers do fire and they lose emotional regulation, it's illegal to learn any pyromancy most places, and most other places you're only allowed to know a tiny bit. Aeromancers do air and they're afraid of being in enclosed spaces. Geomancers do stone and earth and they're bad at dealing with it when things change. Hydromancers do water, and they're distractable."
They emerge into the remains of a hallway; a little way along that hallway is an arch leading to a gorgeous throne room. The throne is a beautiful dark wood that might be familiar from Cayra's brief trip to the southern rainforest, inlaid with silver. The floor is an elaborate mosaic showing the whole continent, with rivers and mountains and desert and forests all picked out in chips of colored stone.
"On the geography represented, yes; on the artistic style, yes except the difference in medium makes it hard; on copying every tiny detail, no. I want it as an example of ancient art and as geographical information for future expeditions, not as a substitute for the real thing."
Eventually Tem finishes his sketch and they move on from the throne room. The rest of the palace yields only a handful of desk-drawer knobs and damaged pens.
The next building they check used to be a bakery. Tem identifies the metal plaques scattered about as reading "Breads", "Cakes", "Cookies", and "Delight of the Week". There's also a metal box with a dial on it.
He pulls the dial out, sets it down on one of the larger, flatter pieces of rubble, and examines the resulting gap between the top and front panels of the oven. "I don't expect to, but you're welcome to lend a hand."
Derron and Chaenath watch excitedly as Tem pries the top panel up. It isn't just a box! There are channels cut into the metal, lined with blue and red paint.
Copious amounts of poking, prodding, notetaking, and mana-flow-observing ensue. Eventually they determine that the channels guide mana and give it some sort of extra property that mana in people and animals doesn't have. By the time they're done, it's high time everyone got some sleep.
"Yes, it would just be a question of bringing back some of the other objects you mentioned and four pairs of eyes catching things one pair might have missed. I'm not sure it's worth it; we'd have to follow the river for water instead of going as the crow--or the Cayra--flies."
Eventually they decide that the wonders of Tisfaat can wait for a second run. It helps that they know where it is, and can put the boat at the closest workable point on the coast and head overland instead of following the river. They set off back for Pinehedge with their wealth of notes.