Sorry Lev. Translating what happened to Ayers cannot be pleasant for him.

YES. HIS LOVER APPARENTLY BURNED TO DEATH IN A VOLCANO, WHICH IS A TERRIBLE DEATH ACTUALLY.

He started kind of tearing up as the conversation got to the volcano, and his face is red by the end of it.

Well, they don't need to have any more of this conversation, then. They've already thanked the person.

When they get out, Lev is taking very very deep breaths and trying very hard not to cry. "He was my dissertation advisor," he says in explanation. "Ayers."

"I'm sorry. It's terrible, and you shouldn't have had to find out like this, now."

His lover burned to death in a volcano and he can't stop thinking about all the other people who DESERVE to burn to death in a volcano like SAMSON TRAMMEL and instead the person who burned to death was GEORGE who, admittedly, hurt kind of a lot of people but Lev loved him and that was the important thing here.

Mordred has a deeply uncomfortable amount of detail on what George Ayers was to Lev and elects to not share it. Instead he's just going to keep an eye on Lev, along with all the other things he's keeping an eye on.

Which is kind of a lot of things but hey it means he's not worrying about his brother or the cult or mouths so that's a plus.

Oswald can reach out and grab his hand. He's not used to spontaneously initiating physical contact but it's not like he's never clung sobbing to Lev in public before.

(He does not voice any of his thoughts because he keeps thinking about the preserved bodies of Pompeii.)

Handholding is nice. There is an uncomfortable amount of modeling he has to do here about who can figure out that he and Oswald are-- the thing they are-- but that can wait until after he is not dealing with fact that his lover BURNED TO DEATH IN LAVA.

"Um. Probably we should go to the CMC? Or. It might be nice if I had a minute."

(He says this with the attitude of someone who expects to be yelled at later about it.)

Zoe gets out a canteen and offers him some water.

"Yeah. We have a minute."

Anemone is honestly very proud of him for asking for something!

"Yeah, let's go find a place to sit for a while."

They can find a place to be for a minute; Mordred will look back over his notes from the conversation with Hickering.

It should be noted as always that Oswald's method of holding hands is more like an iron grip than anything else. He believes in solidity and overkill.

In a low voice, a bit away from Lev, Zoe asks, "So um. I still don't remember a lot. Or maybe I missed some things? What exactly... are we hoping to do here, again? If Ayers is dead, I mean. All I remember is that we thought he might know things, but..."

"I think we still want to find out what exactly he came here for, and how it's connected to the cult. I'm honestly not sure whether we don't still want to go to Dallol, just in case there's some sort of evidence of what they were doing. Don't think Lev should come along, though, if we decide that's necessary. Probably isn't anything there anyway, just - I'd feel stupid if there was and we didn't even try looking for it. We should probably check with the CMC first, though."

"Lev's the only one who can speak the language, though."

"I guess that's true? But there probably isn't even anybody at the Dallol dig, if it was destroyed by a volcano eight years ago. I guess it'd probably be hard to identify a ruined dig site by looking."

"Fair. Do you know what we'd be looking for? Anything from any of your books, or from Hickering, about what Ayers would have been digging up? All my books were about. Uh. Stars. And eyes. And poems."

"One of the books - the one about ziggurats of the Aksumite Empire - talked about monoliths and Hickering mentioned them too."

"So we're looking for... a big rock?"

"An obelisk nearly a hundred feet tall, I don't expect we'll miss it."

"Wow, yeah. That seems like it would, uh, stand out."

She flips through her notebook. "According to Ayers's notes, he thought that Acuna had uncovered an ancient site of worship for a deity that he thought might be the same as the focus of the Los Angeles cult. That sounds potentially important enough that we might want to make the trip to Dallol anyway, even if there might be nothing there now."

"Yeah, if we can find anything that didn't get buried in lava that tells us about that cult, that would be good."