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obtainers of rare antiquities
Cayra in Mechuria
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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.

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"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" says a sapient being, hurtling down from the sky, trying to catch herself with hastily sprouted wings.

She manages to get air under them before she hits the treeline, and soars.

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She is above a river, which winds its way toward something low and dark on the horizon to the east, and off into rolling hills in the west.

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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.

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The sun is low in the sky, afternoon turning into evening. Eventually she encounters the collapsed remains of a wall, curving around several collapsed buildings and with a few more collapsed buildings outside it.

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Huh.

She lands anyway.

"HELLO? ANYBODY HOME?"

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The street she lands on was once cobblestone, but a lot of the stones are now cracked or missing. A parrot, blue and green with large purple patches on its wings, flies up and circles her once, looking at her curiously.

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"Hey bird." She'd been going to put her wings away if she found anybody to talk to but she'll probably fly on again in a minute, hardly seems worth it. Maybe it'll make her seem more interesting to a bird.

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The parrot lands near her and hoots softly.

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Do parrots usually hoot? Well, a parrot's better than nothing for company. She holds out a hand to it; she knew a guy with a cockatiel that would step onto his hand.

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It looks at her hand, then at her, but doesn't seem interested in climbing aboard.

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Will it let her pet it?

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If she moves slowly, yes it will! It's soft.

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How about picking it up?

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It doesn't approve of this behavior! It hops out of her hands and settles a good ways off to eat some berries from a shrub growing out of the street.

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Okay. Not a viable company substitute. She wanders the ruins a little.

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The remains of a couple of towers stand on either side of the river where it flows into the city. One of the buildings near them is relatively large and intact, though most of the roof is still gone and the stone walls are still variously battered, cracked, and scorched.

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Wow.

She goes into the relatively intact building to look around.

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Yeah, a whole lot of stuff has happened to this building and it didn't benefit from most of it. It has a hallway with a few rooms branching off it. Small plants are growing on a lot of the surfaces.

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Any stuff left behind?

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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.

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Might as well.

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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.

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........press?

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Some of the bits on the many ends of the chandelier light up! Several others explode! Bits of glass fall on the floor.

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Goodness.

She departs the building and takes off and continues along the river, looking for a more inhabited city.

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On the other side of this city is a harbor where the river drains into the sea. 

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But does anyone live there.

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Not in the harbor, no. Just ruins, and then ocean as far as she can see.

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Okay. Where are the flowers, she hasn't seen any yet but there should still be some growing wild, anywhere people were living...

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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.

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These are not the right flowers.

Maybe they abandoned their civilization when all their flowers died.

It's been a long day. Cayra looks for somewhere to sleep where she will not be rained on.

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The room with the big chandelier has most of its ceiling still on, and plenty of floor that doesn't have broken glass on it. A couple of small rodents dart into holes in the walls when she enters.

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She doesn't think much of the accommodations. Maybe she should just skip sleep? She debates this internally for a bit, and finally elects to go ahead and lie down, growing a shell around herself so rodents will not trouble her in the night.

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Nothing troubles her. The sun rises. It's a clear day, sometime in early spring, cool but not cold.

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She gets rid of her shell and takes off, flying along the coast.

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A bright red bird larger than her head flies towards her, shrieking.

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She doesn't look it, but she's very fast when she wants to be. She ducks under the bird's path.

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It turns around and comes at her again.

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"What is your problem?" she asks, swatting at it. She's also stronger than she looks; she's not trying to kill the bird but she does mean to knock it off course.

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It is knocked off course; it shrieks again, tries to bite her hand, misses, and then circles for a bit, looking as grumpy as a bird can manage.

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She isn't planning to ransack this bird's nest but she does spiral a little lower in case there's something genuinely interesting it's trying to chase her from.

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It really doesn't want her to go in that half-collapsed tower next to the river.

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Into the tower it is then!

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She has a much harder time evading it in close quarters like that; its beak takes a chunk out of her arm.

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No it doesn't. She's also tougher than she looks, at least when she's expecting mad bird attacks. She ignores it and keeps going.

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The tower contains a nest full of big grey eggs. The shrieking bird is very unhappy about being unable to bite her.

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Yup. Just eggs.

She departs the tower. Anything else around here?

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She's got a lovely view of the ruins. There's an especially big, fancy ruin on the south bank of the river.

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Sure. She will explore the big fancy ruin, looking for any surviving flowers anywhere.

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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.

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Kind of an alarming toad.

She should have done the thing with growing flowers out of her head, she'd be so much less miserable right now.

"Hi?" she says to the toad, not particularly hopefully.

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"Grrrrrnk," says the toad, eyeing her as though evaluating her threat level and/or nutrient content.

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"You don't happen to be a person toad, do you?"

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"Brrrrrk!" It hops toward her, a surprisingly long distance for something that large, and opens its mouth to reveal decidedly un-toadlike teeth.

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"Okay never mind." Out she goes, double time.

She takes off. She flies on. Someone must live here somewhere, there aren't enough skeletons for it to have been a plague, are there?

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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.

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She likes flying, but she's so lonely.

If she goes up very very high can she see any other landmasses in this alucine?

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This continent is really big. If there's anything on the other side of the sea, it stubbornly remains below the horizon.

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Okay. Are there any... obvious natural barriers that would have prevented the spread of a disease? Big mountain range or a desert she can cross?

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If she flies way up, high enough that her wings can barely catch air, she can see the land becoming increasingly arid to the south and rising into foothills to the west.

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Okay. She'll go southwest.

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Eventually she is above a desert. There are occasional scrubby trees, but not much life otherwise.

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When she's more bored than desperate, she pauses and takes naps, wrapping herself in whatever conveniences are necessary to be comfortable, wishing she had flowers blooming at her temples.

Then she moves on.

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The desert contains cacti, and rocks, and spiny lizards that can stick their tongues out multiple feet to snag bugs out of the air. Farther south it gets wetter and hillier and gradually transitions into rainforest.

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Are there people here?!

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There's a beautiful white unicorn browsing on the riverbank! Its horn glows in the twilight.

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Maybe it's people. She lands near it.

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It looks at her warily, but keeps grazing.

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"Hello."

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It dashes off into the forest at incredible speed. A flock of the same kind of parrot she saw back in the ruined city start hooting in a nearby tree.

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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.

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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.

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- okay, new plan, beeline for the boat.

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It's a small, two-masted ship; the top of the tallest mast has a white flag with a blue border and an abstract green pine tree.

The three people on deck notice her and stare in total shock.

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"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.

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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.

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The tall man says something incomprehensible; he sounds excited and confused. 

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The shorter man says something incomprehensible in a different language. He's rather more hesitant about it, as if it isn't his first language and he's having to reach for vocabulary words.

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"Shit. I don't speak those. Uh - point at things?" She starts pointing at things. Points at herself. "I'm Kimbelcayra Mara Swan. You can call me Cayra."

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The short man points at himself, "Tem Russell", points at the tall man, "Derron Hunter", points at the woman, "Chaenath Greystone". Counts off "one" through "ten" on his fingers. Indicates "men" and "women" and "people".

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She nods along, never needs anything repeated, eventually disappears her wings, starts guessing about more numbers and asking questions like "one man two men?" and so on.

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Tem seems to be having the time of his life! He goes over cardinal directions and "me" and "you" and eventually he manages to convey "Are you from the land to the west? Are there many people in the land to the west?"

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"I'm from another..." She doesn't have the word. "Another thing. I have been there," she points at the continent, "seven days."

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Elaborate miming intended to convey "before" and "after". "Where before there? Before seven days?"

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"Norwaser Alucine."

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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?"

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"...not in this alucine," she says, not sure why he expects a map to help.

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"Alucine is what?"

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"Alucine is where things are."

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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. 

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She obligingly repeats these words.

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"What is alucine?" He says again, pointing at the three circles. "Which of these in the alucine?"

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"Everything is in alucines."

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He's still confused but seems to have decided to move on, because the next thing he says is "There are people not in Pinehedge or Greenhall? Talk about them?"

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"In the alucine I am from there are people. They speak my language."

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"Do you have . . . " little sparkles of light in the air in front of him. "Magic?"

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"Yes." Hasn't he already seen her un-form her wings? She turns her skin blue and then back.

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"Our magic is different. It can't do that. Do you have magic things, or just magic in people?"

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"My magic is for me and for flowers." She mimes holding a flower to one's face. "I can't see any flowers in this alucine. Do you have flowers?"

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"What is 'flowers'?"

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"How do you talk to people who are not on this?" She gestures at the boat.

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"I don't talk to people not on the boat, while I'm on the boat."

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"Why?"

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"I can't. How do you do it with your magic? Can you show me?" He seems very excited by this prospect.

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"No! I don't have flowers."

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He tries to get her to draw what she means by 'flowers'.

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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.

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He's very impressed by this medium, but says, "Pinehedge doesn't have those flowers. Does Mechuria have those flowers?"

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"Mechuria is that?" She points at the ruined continent. "It doesn't have those flowers."

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Ten turns excitedly to the other two. "A different civilization with a third kind of magic!" Then to Cayra "Can you take us back to your people? We can help you look for them."

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"I was trying to find how I got here. It was up. I did not find it today."

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He frowns. "Up? We can't--wings." he points at his back and mimes wings with his hands. "Can you do wings for us?"

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Chaenath is clearly unhappy with that last question.

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"No, only me."

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Tem looks disappointed; the other two look relieved. "We're going to Mechuria to look for magic," he says.

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"There are no flowers."

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"Different magic. Magic things people made."

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"Oh. There is some, I think. I don't know what kind of magic made it."

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"Do you have any of the things with you?"

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"No. I think they are old and do not do good magic now."

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"What do you think, Derron, can I restore some antiques?"

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"You ought to manage it, you have enough of them in that museum your parents call a house."

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"Can you show us the old magic things, when we reach land?"

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"I didn't look for a long time."

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"We're going to look until we find things or don't have any more food, and bring back anything we find to Pinehedge."

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"I will go with you," she says.

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"Okay."

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"If she kills us all in our sleep, it's your fault."

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"See, that would be a valid concern, if you ever slept."

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"I'm not going to kill you! There's no one on that whole land, I would be lonely."

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"If she was going to attack us she'd have done it when she had the element of surprise."

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"That and one person can't sail this boat. I'm fine with her tagging along if you are. Marion is going to have a thousand questions, of course."

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"Of course. We can start on them now, at least, we won't reach land for a few more hours.

Tell us more about your alucine. What kinds of people live there? What magic do they have? What do people do?"

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"People have magic kinds from the flowers, if they want them," she says, gesturing with green-flower hand. "People in that alucine call themselves Yorib. They... do... people things?"

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There proceeds to be a lot more miming and drawing while Tem explains concepts like "parliament", "jobs", and "money". He wants to know if the Yorib have any of those or what they have instead if not.

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The other two mostly listen, except when Derron chimes in with "Tem, you know what a job is?" and Tem cracks up.

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"They have jobs and money and I think they have one person, not a parliament, but I was not in Yoribua long."

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"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?

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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.

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Flowers instead of books, wow. Printed books are like this; this one in particular is a book on different kinds of plants and whether you can eat them safely. What are their laws like? What kinds of injuries and diseases do they have treatments for?

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"I think magic can fix most injuries and diseases, if someone is good at it. I don't know very much about the laws of Yoribua because I did not live there, I was just traveling."

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Well, now he wants to hear about all the other places she's been!

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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".

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"I don't know any healing magic. It would have been too many kinds."

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"Too many kinds? You mean you didn't have time?"

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"No, it - your magic that is not in flowers doesn't do this? It doesn't make you a different person?"

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"Not any more than learning about non-magical medicine or wood-carving or singing or plants."

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"Huh. Magic from flowers, if you learn it, you get different. I picked kinds that would make me different in ways I thought would be okay."

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"What kinds of different are you? And what kinds of magic? The wings, and your skin, but is there anything else you haven't showed us?"

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"I can do magic with flowers... when there are any. I should have brought some. I can change myself more if I want. Flowers magic makes me - lonely -" Hand-wobble, not quite the right word, "and myself changing magic makes me more interested in myself."

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"Does doing more magic make you more different, or do all the changes happen the first time you do it?"

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"Not doing, learning."

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Well that's concerning. "But now you can do more with no more changes?"

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"Yes!"

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"What changes can you make to yourself? Could you undo anything you did? Can you make changes to your mind, or just your body?"

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"I can do most things and undo it all and I can do some mind things too."

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"Wow! What mind things?"

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"I remember and think very well! That is how I am fast at your language."

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"You are fast! I speak two and a half languages, so I would know."

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"I speak four! This one is five."

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"Cool!" He wants to hear a few words in each of her languages, and take notes on their grammar. Chaenath wants to learn how people where she's from do transportation of people and goods and messages over long distances.

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She can provide examples, several different translations of "My name is Kimbelcayra and I'm an automancer/antheomancer". "Flowers do messages! Stuff and people have to be moved in boats and things like that."

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Derron wants to know if their boats look like this or if they're different and if so how. And how fast they go, and whether they can go far from land or have to stay near the coast.

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"They're different but I don't have the words for how they are different. I don't know your words for how fast things are but I think slower than this. Some of them can go far from land if the alucine is big enough to have a whole ocean."

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Speed and boat-part vocabulary!

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Another attempt to solicit an explanation of alucines! What sizes do they come in, how do they connect/relate to each other, can a bunch of them collectively constitute a planet or can one of them have lots of planets in it or do both of those happen or neither.

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"Some alucines are smaller than this boat and some have room for one town and some have room for many towns. This might be the biggest alucine I have ever heard of. They connect by portals. I do not understand 'planet'."

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"The planet is the sphere that the continents and oceans are on. Pinehedge and Mechuria and the ocean are all on the planet. The sun and moon aren't on the planet, and it sounds like your alucines that you've been to aren't either."

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"Sphere?"

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Oh right they haven't done shapes yet. Rummage rummage here are variously shaped objects, a sphere is this and a cube is that and flat things can be circles or squares or triangles or whatever.

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"We're on a sphere?!"

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"Yes! You can fly, you see things come up over the horizon, yes?" (He points at the horizon when he uses the word.)

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"That's not the edge of the alucine?"

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He really really wants to visit her homeland and observe what the fuck for himself. "Nope! Keep going that way, eventually you get to Pinehedge. Keep going far enough, you get back to where you started."

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"That's very strange!"

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"Space having edges is very strange! Where do you keep your sun?"

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"Most alucines' lights do not look like this one. This one is - not on the edge of the alucine, you think?"

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"No, it isn't. It's another sphere. Some people think it goes in circles around the planet and some people think the planet goes in circles around it, it's hard to be sure since we can't go there. I forget what the reasons on each side are."

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"If the Earth goes around the Sun the math is neater, but you would expect to see the stars move over the course of the year in ways that they don't."

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"This is the biggest alucine. Unless there are more without flowers that are bigger."

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"We've never heard of the connections between places thing, "portals" you called them? We thought this space with the Sun and the Earth and the Moon and things in it was the only space, and for all we know it could go on for ever and ever."

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"Maybe it does! All the alucines with flowers have edges. But this one does have at least one portal. I came through it."

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"Are portals usually on the edges, or in the middle somewhere? What are the edges made of, what happens if you touch one?"

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"Some are on edges but not all. They aren't made of stuff, you just stop at them."

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"What do they look like? Walls? Darkness?"

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"Like what is near them."

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"You mean a reflection?" He illustrates this concept with the shiny back side of the compass.

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"Kind of. Not just like but close."

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"What kind of different?"

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"The sky does not show the ground. If the sky were a reflection it would."

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Yeah he's going to have to see this in person before he can visualize it at all. Back to anthropology! Have they sang representative songs from each other's cultures yet?

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Not yet but she will sing a little for him!

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He'll sing a bit for her too! He sings a drinking song about how it's time to have one drink at every bar in town and then start again from the top.

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Derron joins in too. Then he sings the Pinehedge national anthem, which is much less shouty and shows off his baritone nicely.

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"I don't know all of the words in the songs."

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Is that an invitation to do more vocabulary exchange? Because it sure sounds like it! The three locals are taking notes like they expect to get charged with writing a bilingual dictionary.

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It is an invitation to do that! She wants to learn this language and doesn't object to giving them some of hers.

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Then they can trade vocabulary and clarify grammar until it's time to land the boat! They anchor in a natural harbor at the mouth of the river in the ruined city Cayra first explored.

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"I came in somewhere up there," she says, waving vagely at the sky. "But I have not found the portal again yet."

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"If you or we think of a way we can help you find your way home again, we will. If we can't, we'll help you find your footing in our world."

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"You can't fly so I don't know how you would help."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Magic can throw things; if we threw a lot of sand in the air would it make the portal visible?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe? It could go through the portal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe we could throw a lot of sand, and you could watch from above and see if any disappears."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That might work!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let's try to use as little magic as possible on this, I don't want to run out of mana in potentially hostile terrain. How high up do you think the portal was, and could you find the area of ground right below it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can show you about where I think I was when I came through but I know I have something wrong because I haven't found the portal yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Our mission here is to explore the ruins and look for magic objects, so we can head that way and look for things on the way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Watch," she says, and she flies to her best approximation of where-would-have-generated-the-first-view-of-this-alucine-she-saw.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay." She can do that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then they will grab corners of the sail and fling the sand up out of it! There's no visible effect of the magic they do at the same time, except that the sand goes way higher than is plausible. (None of it disappears.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Disappointing. She keeps a close eye on it, waits for them to cover the whole plausible volume from enough angles to be sure.

Permalink Mark Unread

After a few more rounds they get pessimistic enough about the whole approach not to want to spend any more mana on it. Also they want to explore the ruins for a while before the sun goes down. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Well that's annoying but she fights down the urge to whine about it. She lands and walks around with them.

Permalink Mark Unread

They find a device like a tiny guillotine in a building next to where the docks used to be. It turns out to be chargeable with magic and they're very excited! They theorize that it was used for butchering fish.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How does this magic work?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And learning this doesn't do anything to you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope! You get a bit better at using it effectively with practice, that's all."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I want to learn!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can see it but I don't feel anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Unfortunate but not surprising. Legend says that in ancient times everyone could use magic, but now it's only about one person in twenty."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Maybe I could change that about myself but I don't already know how."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe we'll find out what the difference is, if the legends are true."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe."

Permalink Mark Unread

He goes to check on how the other two expedition members are doing. They appear to have charged up the chopper artifact and are chopping various things with it and measuring how much force it exerts.

Permalink Mark Unread

"They must have used magic for a lot of things if they used it for this thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, what little we know of them implies they had a lot more access to mana than we do. And they seem to have been able to use it more efficiently as well; we can make more cuts with this than we could do directly with the same amount of mana."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe magic things are just more efficient than magic people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Could be!" They take the blade out of its holder and watch the holder chop uselessly up and down without it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know why everyone here died?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sapients?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Vocabulary time! "Elves, humans, and dwarves. The three kinds of people, as opposed to animals or plants." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think we have kinds in the other alucines where there are flowers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You look like a human to me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"As the merchantman said to the barmaid."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That was a reach even for you, Derron."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't get it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Derron decided to deliberately misinterpret what I said as a sexual remark, because he thinks that's amusing. This time he was mistaken."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is the most academic description of 'as the merchantman said to the barmaid' I've ever heard, I love it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay but why a merchantman and a barmaid?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.)

Permalink Mark Unread

Apparently not. "Drunk?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooh, you're about to get an explanation from a world-class expert!"

Permalink Mark Unread

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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that.

Anyway we don't have kinds of people, just - humans if I am a human."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Pinehedge is about half humans and a quarter each elves and dwarves. No dwarves on this expedition, but there are some working in the Archives--that's the organization that sent us here."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What are they like?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shorter, fewer differences between men and women--both have beards, for instance--they get sick less often than elves or humans but can't run as far."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What are elves like?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh." She points her own ears experimentally, pokes at them.

Permalink Mark Unread

Elf ears on a human face and body is pretty amusing. She looks at the artifact again; they've found that a little wooden piece on top is detachable and are messing with that now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cayra keeps the pointy ears for now; they amuse her. She supervises the artifact tinkering.

Permalink Mark Unread

The little wooden piece turns out to be separately chargeable! 

"Hey, Cayra, would you mind holding this and letting it drink your mana for a bit? It won't hurt you, and you can't do anything with your mana anyway since you aren't a caster." 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hm. If I find a way to stop it working can you tell so I know it worked?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I'll be able to tell whether mana is flowing out of you or not. We can stop it just by focusing on wanting it to stop, try that first."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay." She picks up the artifact, lets it do its thing to start to see if that feels like anything.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, looks like you can prevent it, I'm not seeing anything happening."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was trying to let it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's odd. Maybe only casters can charge artifacts after all? It didn't feel like I was casting anything, though. When we get back to Pinehedge we should have a bunch of noncasters try it, you could easily be a weird case for a number of reasons."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That makes sense."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If the force is not on the blade why does the blade move?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Because the blade is attached to the thing the force is on, or at least it was before we took it out." He points at the place on the sliding bit where the blade used to be attached.

Permalink Mark Unread

"And it's a good thing we had the option, because I've checked and this thing treats fingers exactly like every other material."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You checked?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"After taking the blade out, obviously! I like my fingers, I grew them myself!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just wondering. It behaves just the same with no blade in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is the blade sharp by magic? I'm surprised it's still sharp enough to cut."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It is a non-zero amount of rusty, and we found it wrapped up; I think it's just a really well-made piece of metal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. So how sharp it is isn't magically interesting."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"How long a trip is it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A couple weeks on a boat."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I guess that's not too bad."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not! The sea is pretty, and you can fish off the side when you're not doing some maneuver that needs all three people pulling on ropes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll come with you. I could fly it but it would be lonely."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds good! Ever fished before? I recommend it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes but not with a fishing stick! I sometimes swim around and catch fish if I feel like it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds fun! I bet you could do that off the boat if you wanted, since if you fell behind you could catch up by flying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or swimming. I can go very fast."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Now that sounds like something to watch. Are you just super strong, or do you sprout fins like you do wings?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Both. I'm not super strong all the time, just when it seems useful."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds way cooler than having to exercise for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes it is!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hey, exercise is fun! But it really is a pity we can't swap magics. I think we've gotten all we're going to get out of this thing for the moment, let's go explore the city some more."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay!"

Explore explore explore.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cayra, suddenly very scaly, steps in front. They can break their teeth on her if she wants.

Permalink Mark Unread

Derron alsp steps to the front. One or two of them get far enough to break their teeth on Cayra, but the rest fall out of the air as though punched in the head by invisible fists. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"- whoa!" she says. "What was that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You mean me, or the angry bedsprings?" Says Derron, finishing off the last couple snakes. "I must have forgotten to mention--I'm the security for this expedition."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You. They seem to be snakes. I just want to know how you do it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Magic! One of the things it can do is apply bursts of force to things, including snake heads. I've never seen a snake go boing like that, though, they don't do that back home."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I think that might have been magic. I'd need to see it happen again and not as a nasty surprise before I could be sure, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Want me to catch one?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Derron seems to have taken out all the ones here, but if we run into any more it would be very interesting to take one alive."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm going to start dissecting one of the dead ones, see if there's any obvious way they could have flung themselves that high without magic." Chaenath suits action to words.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, next time leave one of whatever attacks us to me and I'll grab it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like a plan! Want to take a look around here while Chaenath is getting her hands dirty, see if there's anything cool in here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure!"

Permalink Mark Unread

They check out the rest of the ruin, finding a handful of little metal bits that have managed to survive the elements. The best finds are a pair of rusty but cleanable pliers Derron digs out of some rubble, and a single emerald earring Cayra finds in the snakes' nest.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pretty." She creates a place to stick it in her ear and puts it on.

Permalink Mark Unread

"The head of the Archives is probably going to want that for a museum, but you did find it. Keep it safe, I guess, and you can argue with her about it when the time comes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not terribly attached but maybe she'll pay me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We three are all getting paid for this, you can probably get some money out of joining in somehow. I can't promise anything, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I meant for the earring, I don't need to be paid for following you around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I meant for the earring too, though you've been pretty useful to have around so far. I think we've about cleared out this building; Chaenath, are you done playing with your food?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You joke, but we probably could eat this, it's pretty similar to a species back home. Best to stick with travel rations, though. And yes, I'm about done."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You eat snakes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I am not saying it would taste good. Just that it probably isn't poisonous. It is venomous, though, so if either of you got bit and didn't say anything, now is the time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll be fine. I mean, I would be even if it had gotten its teeth in me but I had scales then."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I assure you, if I had been bitten I would have complained about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good. As the expedition medic, I cannot solve your medical complaints if you don't complain about them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't need medical attention in general but I appreciate it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I figured, yes. I'd love to examine some of what you can do more closely, if you wouldn't mind."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Examine it how?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mostly just ask you to do various things--grow wings, grow scales, whatever--and watch closely. Maybe take a feather to examine more closely, and a scale if you can shed them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We should probably do some more exploring first, though." The party exits the building and starts heading up the ruined street.

Permalink Mark Unread

Explore explore!

Permalink Mark Unread

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".

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, I went to that one when I was looking for people and flowers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nice! What did you find there? Were there still traces of city left?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Traces, yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Great! Depending on how long it takes us to do a thorough search of this city, we might make it up there before we go back to Pinehedge."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you tell me more about what you're looking for and we make sure I can find you again I could go and get stuff out of it and bring it back."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The main thing we're looking for is magical artifacts, which I'm not sure you can identify readily, but really any man-made objects are probably interesting enough that we want them. How long will it take you to get there and back?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not that long if I'm trying to go fast and not look at stuff in between."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I expect we'll spend at least a few more days here, and I doubt there's much left to find in the countryside, so that sounds like a good idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It won't take me days. I'll go loot the place."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome! Let me give you a pen and paper first so you can take notes on where you found things, location is important for this sort of thing." He digs a pen and some paper out of his pack.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure. Why is it important?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, consider these pliers we found. We found an earring and a coil of silver wire in the same building, and between those and the amount of glass-dust in here that suggests that this might have been a jewelry shop. Hypotheses like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. I'll draw a little map."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome!"

Permalink Mark Unread

And she gets up in the air and flies real fast.

Permalink Mark Unread

Wow she's fast. 

Permalink Mark Unread

There's not much in the air with her today, and still less capable of keeping up with her. She's unbothered until the evening, when she sees the river widen temporarily into a lake with an island in the center.

Permalink Mark Unread

She flies a bit low over that island to see if there's anything cool on it.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's where the ruins of Tisfaat should be, and indeed there are some!

Permalink Mark Unread

She circles it, memorizes the layout, lands, sketches the map, and starts hunting.

Permalink Mark Unread

As she gets lower, she sees something weird underwater near the east end of the island.

Permalink Mark Unread

Hmm, okay, swimming mode, she sets her map under a bit of rubble and has a look.

Permalink Mark Unread

It appears to be a spherical region underwater in which there isn't any water, or anything else visible.

Permalink Mark Unread

Poke.

Permalink Mark Unread

Her finger meets some resistance on the way in, and once it's in it hurts. A lot of the blood in her hand is trying to flow into that finger now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh. Well, it's gonna stop that now, and stop hurting; what else does it feel like besides hurty?

Permalink Mark Unread

The inside of the weird sphere feels like suction; the edge is still trying ineffectively to shove her hand back out.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh. Anything in there?

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope! Not even air, as far as she can tell.

Permalink Mark Unread

Weird.

She leaves the water and marks it on her map and goes looking for swag.

Permalink Mark Unread

There's a place that might once have been a set of boat docks, containing four man-sized crabs!

Permalink Mark Unread

Crabs should be less big than that, wow. Any loot in the remains of boats?

Permalink Mark Unread

One of the shipwrecks has several silver coins and a gold one! One side of each coin has a head on it, but it's not super clear whether it's the same head every time. The backs of the silver ones have a bird, and the back of the gold one has a palace.

Permalink Mark Unread

She marks the locations of all these on her map and pockets them, then goes further in to the island.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She takes the jewelry. She pries open the box.

Permalink Mark Unread

Flakes of rust crack off the box until eventually the front panel swings forward and down. Inside are two ceramic plates and a bowl, and fragments of what was probably another bowl.

Also, now that some of the dust has been shaken off, she can tell that there's a button on the side.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she pushes the button!

Permalink Mark Unread

The button doesn't do anything, but the others mentioned these devices needed magical charging.

Permalink Mark Unread

She inspects the dishes for interesting properties of any kind.

Permalink Mark Unread

No two of them match, but they're all relatively pretty, with nice glaze patterns. And relatively undamaged apart from the broken one, probably from having been in a cool dark metal box the whole time.

Permalink Mark Unread

She closes the box again and marks the location and moves on.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She notes the parrot but doesn't interact with it. Loot loot loot loot.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She will copy these onto spare patches of skin.

Next?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pedal pedal?

Permalink Mark Unread

Now the inside of the box is REALLY HOT.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nothing magic, nothing cool, next.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh. Okay. Next.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bye spiny thing!

Does this rod do anything?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She is very strong!

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She turns it back.

Permalink Mark Unread

Another moment of especially loud creaking, then quiet creaking.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, she'll bring it back with her.

Where else looks promising?

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Guys?" she calls.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

Derron waves at her.

Permalink Mark Unread

"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.

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

She traces out all the writing.

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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"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.

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

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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."

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"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."

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

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"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.

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Follow follow. "Did I miss anything while I was gone?"

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"We've got one of those bouncing snakes in a crate on the boat now! If you wanted to catch any mice you see that would be great; we fed it this morning but we'd like to stockpile enough to get it back to Pinehedge alive."

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"Sure. Let me know if you spot any."

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"Will do."

The little park has aesthetic species of trees in haphazard locations; one of them is covered in apples.

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Nom.

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The apples are pretty tasty; once she has determined this the others eat some too. There's a shallow stone basin in the middle of the park, lined with worn, cracked tiles in a pleasing pattern and with a single large round tile at the center.

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Is that magic? The middle tile looks pressable.

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When she steps on it, it throws her several feet in the air.

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Whee! She sprouts wings to glide down. "That was probably how the fountain worked!"

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"I bet it was! Looks like you had fun finding out; better you than me."

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"I'm handy. Are we trying to conserve mana?"

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"We should try not to run completely out, but we've got some and we're here to explore. Is there an experiment you want to do?"

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"No, I'm just wondering whether to go ahead and do it if I think of one."

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"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."

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"That makes sense."

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"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."

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"I'm game." Hop.

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Boing!

"Good, good. This is a bit heavy to haul around for the rest of the day; would you mind bringing it back to the ship? Alternately we can just leave it here and grab it on the way back tonight."

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"I can do that." She hauls it.

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When she gets back the others have determined that there's nothing else magic in the park and are making their way toward the palatial ruin Cayra partially explored before meeting them. 

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She can tell them what she found last time!

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They appreciate the warning about the human-sized toad! They start debating whether, if it proves to still be there, they should try to kill it or chase it out of the room or just wait for it to go away and then explore when it leaves. 

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She doesn't have a strong opinion on this subject but pipes up with more details about the toad frequently to feel like she's participating in the conversation.

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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.

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"Is any of it still food?"

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"Oh yes, we still eat plenty of the same kinds of plants now as they did back then. For instance, I could make a pretty tasty stew out of the roots of that one, seasoned with this, this, and a bit of that." She points at the various plants as she speaks.

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"I meant I'd have expected the weeds to take over if they didn't have anyone looking after them, not for the food plants to still be there."

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"Ah, yes. A lot of these are weeds, but some food plants are remarkably hardy. Also the native wildlife are less likely to eat the food plants; that probably helps."

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"They are? Why?"

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"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."

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"Huh. Okay then."

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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.

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Buttons, knobs, dials...?

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The spit doesn't have a crank handle. It does have a place on one of the supports that's marked off with a groove in the metal, like a button that can be touched but not actually pressed in. Nothing happens when she touches it, though.

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She points it out anyway.

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Tem puts a hand on it. "It'll take a charge, at least! Good spotting!" He stands around with his hand on the spit for several minutes, letting it suck mana out of him.

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"Does that feel like anything?"

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"Yeah. I can feel the mana flowing from me into the artifact, and I could make it stop flowing without taking my hand away if I wanted."

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"What does it feel like?"

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"Hmm. Sort of like water flowing over your skin, but inside you."

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"Huh!"

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"Hey, look at this!" Derron has found a totally intact jar with the lid still tightly on it.

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"Need help opening that?"

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"No, I can open it, I'm just amazed it's still sealed!" Once everyone has had a moment to ooh and aah over the hardiness of the jar, he takes the lid off with a small popping sound. It proves to be filled with honey.

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"Gonna eat it or put it in a museum?"

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"I'm thinking a little of the former and mostly the latter. Want a taste?"

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"Sure." Nom.

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Everybody has a bit! It tastes indistinguishable from the stuff you can get brand new in Pinehedge, and slightly different from what Cayra is used to. Then Derron puts the lid back on and packs it up carefully.

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"Pretty tasty."

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"Is this a thing where you come from? I know you mentioned using flowers to communicate, but I don't know if you have bees or what."

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"We have bees, and honey."

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"Speaking of the communication flowers, are they otherwise like regular plants? I mean, do they need sunlight and fertilizer and eventually grow fruits and so forth?"

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"They're like normal flowers if nobody's tending them but people who know enough flower magic can make them do without sunlight and fertilizer and stop them from going to seed until they want flower seeds."

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"Are there a lot of different kinds of communication flowers, or just the one? Does the flower magic have mental consequences too?"

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"There's blue ones for stuff you say and green ones for stuff you know, and yes, learning flower magic is like any other kind of magic."

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"Stuff you say versus stuff you know? I'm afraid I don't know what you're saying."

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"...like you learn magic on green flowers but talk to people on blue ones."

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"You mean the flowers aren't written explanations of the magic, it just . . . goes into your head directly?"

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"The green ones are a little bit like that but the blue ones are writing and pictures."

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"How big are these flowers, if they can fit decent-sized pictures? I haven't seen flowers bigger than this before." She holds up two fingers about four inches apart.

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"- they aren't that big. You get close to the flower and use it to see the writing, you don't see the writing on the flower, the seeing is in your head."

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"That sounds . . . bizzare. What's that like?"

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"It's like I said, I don't know what else to explain!"

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"Well, can you see the contents of the flowers and the environment around you at the same time, or are they on top of each other, or does the flower information replace what your eyes are seeing entirely?"

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"It depends how you do it. Everybody learns enough flower magic to change that."

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"Fascinating. What are the mental effects of flower magic in particular?"

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"Wanting to be around people more."

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"Huh. Does anybody know why each kind of magic has the effect it has?"

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"No, I don't think so."

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"List a few more? Maybe there's a pattern." Tem calls from where he's still letting the spit pull his mana.

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"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."

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"All of those sound like the side effect is at least vaguely related to the magic, except halomancers. Huh."

He decides he's charged the spit enough and touches the not-a-button; it starts turning, slowly and steadily against its coating of rust.

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"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."

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"Yeah, there's definitely a pattern, but it's very . . . metaphor-laden?" 

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Tem hits the unbutton again and the spit stops shrieking.

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"I guess you could say that. Lithomancers are defensive, wards and stuff - they're really calm - cleromancers are lucky and they like taking risks -"

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"Yeah, definitely a pattern. Unfortunately we're a bit limited on how we can investigate it, both practically and ethically."

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"Yeah, without flowers - I mean, I guess I could try to teach someone automancy by talking? -"

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"That would definitely be scientifically interesting, but I'm not going to be the test subject, especially out here."

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"I'd be interested. Just enough to see if it works shouldn't cause much of the mental effect, right?"

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"It's enough to notice if you're paying attention."

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"I can already notice whether I'm paying attention." jokes Tem. "But seriously, a little bit is fine. I want to know if I can learn your magic!"

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"How about we wait on rewriting your personality until we aren't about to have to spend two weeks on a small boat together?"

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"Yeah, I'm with Derron on this one. There are plenty of things to explore here without adding 'poorly understood mind-affecting magic' to the list."

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"Later," she giggles.

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"Pfff. Fine. Let's go see what's in the rest of this palace."

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Derron nods and heads up the stairs opposite where they came in; the other two start following.

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Cayra follows along.

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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.

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"Pretty!"

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"Yeah, wow, this is amazing." Tem grabs his paper and charcoal and starts drawing a copy; he has an excellent sense of proportion and shading but plays a bit fast and loose with details like "how many abstract-mountain-peak icons are there in this section".

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"Are you trying to be exact?"

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"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."

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"Okay."

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"I think I'll try to get some colored inks into the cargo allowance on our next trip out; I keep wanting them."

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"Did you have very limited space? Too limited for ink?"

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"Yeah. Well, we started out with a fair amount of space and then used most of it on food and drinking water."

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"I guess that makes sense. I travel light but you guys aren't automancers."

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"Yeah. And you're faster, we need to spend two weeks on a boat each way."

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"Yeah, that too."

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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.

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Twiiiiist?

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Hot box! It's an oven. Also it feels like the dial will come off in her hand if she's not careful.

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She's careful. She summons the others to check it out.

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Tem can read the numbers on the dial; presumably they're temperatures. And yup, turning it changes the amount of heat they can feel emanating from the box.

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Nifty.

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"This is another one we can't bring back with us. Now that we have several artifacts we can bring back, it might be worth trying to take this one apart."

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"Is it going to be - made of interesting stuff, not just a box?"

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"I don't know! We have no idea how artifacts were made; if we take it apart we might find some clue to its construction and from there to how it was enchanted."

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"Cool. Do you need help?"

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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.

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"Ooooh. Do those patterns mean anything to you?"

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"Not unless you count a mystery worth solving!"

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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.

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Cayra doesn't need to sleep but she might as well.

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The expedition all sleep on the boat; they can rig up a spare hammock for Cayra if she likes. In the morning they debate the merits of heading back to Pinehedge with what they've got, versus trying to push their supplies go to Tisfaat and back.

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"I've already been there for you," she points out.

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"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."

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"And we've already learned things the folks back home will find very exciting," says Tem, waving his notes on the colored mana channels in the oven. "Let's get this stuff to the Archives so they can start working on it, then go explore the rest of the continent."

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"It's all the same to me, where you guys usually live is new for me."

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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.