Morgan shudders.

"They've been going a while. The religious people, I mean. A hundred and fifty years at least."

"Yeah? They just as crazy then as they are now? Or has it evolved and become super crazy?"

By now, Yvette's started driving them to town. Or what's left of it, anyway. It looks... pretty dead, and like the windmills haven't moved in ages. Which: they probably haven't.

"Eh, don't know that I'd say the change was up, you know? Sideways crazy. Sometimes more, sometimes less, always weird."

"Bah. Hey, think they left any electronics? When the sandstorm hits, the windmills might get power, it'd be nice to have, like, amenities."

".... I wouldn't hold out hope even if they did. Windmills don't get power from sandstorms unless they're really high end, and the early ones weren't."

"What? Why not? It's like, premium wind time!!"

"I mean, I'm not an expert in wind power, but as I understand it, that's the problem. Dangerous for the windmills themselves to mill without ripping them apart, unless they're strong enough to take it. So to keep the whole thing from being ground to death and getting sand in all of the little crevices and breaking it forever..."

"Turn the whole thing off. Ugh."

"No wonder they've fallen into disuse. I guess that means this part of the desert probably didn't use to have that many sandstorms usually even relatively recently."

"That I couldn't tell you. We did not go over typical sandstorm paths in class, sorry. All I know is that it's changed a lot, over the time we've been here."

"Well, I guess there's no use speculating. We'll just stay here one night then move on."

"At least the buildings will have natural temperature regulation!" she says, brightly.

As usual Zash takes the vanguard, watching for any danger while they explore. Unlike Jeneora Rock, this town doesn't have anything pretending to be surrounding walls, and there isn't an obvious main gate to walk through, so he elects to go in through the closest gap in the buildings he can find.

The immediate impression they'll be able to get from this is that this place has been abandoned for quite a while. Several years, maybe even a couple of decades. But the mismatch between the apparent age of the settlement and the amount of sand that's accumulated does lend credence to Zash's theory that this place doesn't see sandstorms very often; if it did, the entire place would be one big pile of sand. As it is, the buildings are all pretty surrounded by it but the streets are still walkable and the amount of digging they'll need to do to access anywhere won't be too terrible.

"Definitely no locals, then. Shall we be proper explorers, or just pick out a house to hole up in?"

"That sounds like you're asking 'do you want to dig out a house filled with sand sooner or later.' And the answer is later. We can pick the best and biggest house to dig out if we do some wandering."

The side street they're in opens to an enormous central "street" that runs the length of the settlement. The metal arches that were presumably once part of a ship that was salvaged for parts meet in the middle, high above their heads, and the occasional massive windmills are spread along this open area. The buildings themselves are arranged close to where the arches meet the dirt, and it's obvious that they were also built out of salvaged metal from the ship, mismatched iron sheets and pipes meeting at the corners to make walls and doors and ladders.

One thing the buildings have in common, though, are these banners made of some kind of thick fabric that are usually hanging next to the doors and windows. Most of them have frayed to almost-nothing over the years, but a handful are intact enough that they can puzzle together their overall shape and design: a long brown-red rectangle with pairs of straight yellow-gold lines running along the edges, a thick red circle in the center surrounded by a thinner one framing a simplified picture of an eye, and straight lines coming from the circle in a design that's reminiscent of drawings of a sun, three pointing up, three down, one to the left, and one to the right.

At least one of the people in their little entourage will be familiar with this symbol.

"Ughhhhhhhh."

"... Even cloth is offensive if it's religious?"

"Yes. It's a little different from what I'm used to, but I kinda want to use all of these things for fire starter. But probably we should actually salvage the cloth for something. I guess even the scavengers didn't want religious icons or whatever."

"You could wrap your gun in one and give me back my blanket..."

"And here I thought you liked me. No, but I will take all of these down and dump them in a pile so I don't have to look at them. Eugh."

"I think they collectively call themselves the Church of Plants. They see plants as gods or angels or messengers. It's... not very surprising that your cult would be related." He walks over to one of the buildings and looks into it through the window.