2024-03-22: Anomalous Findings
- Log: Anomalous Findings
- Cast: Kaguya, Dean Stark, Rebecca Streisand, Avril Vent Fleur
- Where: Slayheim Saltlands
- Date: March 22, 2024
- Summary: Kaguya investigates an anomalous reading with the rest of the Vanguard. With some effort (and application of shovels) they find something very interesting in the Slayheim Saltlands.
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
Slayheim is a really, really scary place. And depressing. And salty. There's little good about coming here, and most people avoid it for obvious reasons. ...But the Vanguard is not most people.
"All right, need a couple more locations," Kaguya says, leading the group through the salt flats with her sample canisters and her equipment. She's been stabbing observing poles into the ground, essentially stakes with some electronic equipment on them.
So far, at least, they haven't entirely avoided the undead, but have managed to avoid the swarms of them--just a few isolated enemies.
"...I appreciate you guys coming with me," she says. "I know it's boring, and acrid, and depressing, but..."
"It might just mean something good happens if I can get enough data."
The sun shines overhead; white goes on as far as the eye can see, broken up only by dead and broken buildings.
This is not a place for the living.
<Pose Tracker> Dean Stark has posed.
Dean hasn't been to Slayheim before. He's pretty sure he would remember if he had. It... leaves an impression. There are a lot of places in Filgaia that are nigh lifeless, but the saltlands puts them to shame. There's not even a vestige of life here.
Still, as depressing as it is, Dean's emotional resilience is better than most--and Kaguya needed to come here, and above all, Dean is someone for whom 'trying to help others' is character-defining. He might not always succeed--a life lesson that years of driftering have taught him--but he will always *try*.
So as Kaguya stabs in those observing poles, Dean carries them. "No problem!" he reassures her with a smile and a pair of shades he's not just wearing to look cool. (Salt blindness is a thing.) "This is something important!"
...He might not totally get *what* Kaguya's doing, but it's science-y, and it'll help Filgaia, and that's good enough for him.
<Pose Tracker> Rebecca Streisand has posed.
Put all the qualities of a place that Rebecca would never want to visit together and you've got Slayheim. Nevertheless, they're here.
Her braids blow sideways in the salt saturated wind, and she looks over the salt flats with the macabre curiosity of someone who is wondering if this is in fact this ranks up there for most desolate place in the world... she's wearing goggles herself, which are just faintly tinted that she's also not wearing just to look cool. (Salt blindness is a thing.)
Right now she's playing sentry duty, a short ways from the group, just making sure nothing catches them off guard while the science is done.
She doesn't understand what that science is, or what it's for! Just that as Dean points out, it's important to her.
"Definitely all those things." Rebecca confirms, but there's a wryness, like she's not actually upset they're here. "Oh yeah? Care to explain what 'good' might mean in words Dean and I can understand?"
It's not that either of them are 'stupid' it's just they're not really... academically inclined, whereas Rebecca knows Avril probably understands it all.
"Might help to pass the time."
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
Heading to Elru -- and the Veruni control zones there -- is still their goal, but as they had agreed, it's important for them to make sure they have completed everything they need, first. Even knowing what they do of the circumstances that await them, it's entirely possible that they could encounter any number of unforeseen circumstances.
To that end, Kaguya had made a request.
And given on what they're planning on ultimately attempting, it wasn't a terrible request at that -- far from it.
"I had heard tales of Slayheim," Avril says. She, too, wears tinted lenses: salt blindness is a thing, and the glaring sun above the flats is merciless. "Was it not here that Odessa was born? In the aftermath of this disaster, which levelled a nation..." She trails off, her attention turned far and away across the wasteland.
The wind is unkind: it's for that reason that she had braided and bound her hair up. All that the wind can find to play with about her being is the loose jacket she wears to protect from the same. Kaguya had been clear about the risks of Slayheim's landscape, and they had dutifully taken the precautions she had advised.
"I do not believe anyone lives here now."
They wouldn't if they could choose otherwise. They couldn't, if they were here when the Angel Halo had been deployed.
But as Kaguya makes her remarks about the data she's after, prompting Dean and Rebecca wonder after it, Avril turns her head her way. "There was something anomalous in the data you had found, was there not...?" she ways, as if this were another thing they had discussed in depth in private rather than a key point she had plucked from Kaguya's initial proposal.
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
Kaguya is also wearing goggles, of course. She is wearing her breathing mask around her neck; she doesn't need it at the moment, and would rather be able to talk unhindered.
"Thanks," she says to Dean. She could carry them herself--she's strong enough--but it would be a pain to carry them and apply them. But Rebecca asks a question first, so...
"Basically," Kaguya says, "If I can identify what about the ecosystem is different from the places around it, I might be able to identify what we would need to restore the soil. And anything we can do to reclaim Filgaia from the wastelands is good."
Then a nod to Avril. She also doubts people live here, but--
"There was. Not only was the anomaly with the environment present, but I've confirmed it; there's metal leaching into the salt around here, and more than you'd expect. I'm hoping one of these devices will narrow down the source."
<Pose Tracker> Dean Stark has posed.
Rebecca asks, in her wry way, for Kaguya to explain what she's doing in Geology For Dummies terms. "Yeah! I wanna hear!" Dean enthuses in the way of someone who doesn't grasp that this is probably not as interesting as they're assuming it is. It's at least not a long explanation, and it's easy to understand, and so he nods at the end. It's a funny sight, either way. His shades have thick sides--not quite goggles but close to it, enough to protect his eyes not just from the light but from the winds. His ever-present red scarf, meanwhile, is pulled up over his nose and mouth.
Avril brings up the history of the area, though, and Dean sobers. "That's what I've heard," he says. He turns a slow look across the salty plains. "Seeing it in person... I can kind of understand how they must've felt. That doesn't make all the things they did right, but... this is the kind of place that can make you think you don't have any other choice."
He smile returns as he looks back at Kaguya. (She's definitely strong enough to carry them too, but she's the one who actually knows what she wants to do when it comes to burying them, and it is indeed a pain to have to carry them and apply them both.) "But that's why we're trying to figure out a way to make it better! Right?" Metal leeching int the salt, though... "That sounds weird. Does that mean there's something metal buried around here? Maybe somebody built some pipes through here or something?"
Who would bury pipes in a place like this, though?
<Pose Tracker> Rebecca Streisand has posed.
She listens to Avril talking of Slayheim, about Odessa... and it takes her a moment, she's not certain what to make of it. "So much tied up into this place."
She murmurs, maybe a little disturbed, it's hard to imagine an event that did this, that scarred so many people. "Yeah - I guess I understand it." She tells Dean, "Can't make the leap to thinking any of it was ever justified, though."
She knows Dean doesn't think that either, but she feels she needs to remark on Odessa, in her own cynical way.
Avril speaks on her belief that noone lives here, for that she calls out, "Yeah I'd agree with you. What could survive in this place for long."
Rebecca steps closer just to take a listen, and blinks when... "Restore the soil like...?" She waves a hand outwards, "How? This isn't like some Demetrioi thing right?"
She's wary, as far as she knows Demetrioi isn't here anymore, but- Kaguya is a scientist.
"Is it just to restore the soil or..." She does linger off for a moment, "... part of your research into the VR Factor?"
She's not a scientist but it's a logical association in her head, if you're changing Filgaia's soil, perhaps finding a way to make it accept Veruni.
Rebecca considers the matter of the metal in the ground, "Well if pipes were already here for like, irrigation or the like? Sewage? It makes sense they'd still be here." A beat pause, "I mean it's not like people are living underground or something, right?
...
...
...
Right?
Yeah no that'd be extremely silly.
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"I don't think I had seen it before now, either," Avril says, though there's still that moment of hesitation after she says as much: there is again that vague sense of deja vu, like she's seen something like this before. But then, given what had happened in the last days before the Veruni had fled Filgaia, perhaps...
Perhaps here were many places in the world that were as badly damaged, once. "...The Angel Halo..." she says aloud, crinkling her brow in consternation. "There were once many weapons like that in the world. That is why they were banned in our time. They are our inheritance of the Filgaia that existed. Yet... what was war like in those days?"
And why are there so many people who seek to revive that time?
"Whatever he had said about preventing the end of the world, he showed the willingness to resort to such ends. ...It is true that to see the world we wish to see we must be prepared to be tested, yet..." Aren't there things that people are better off not touching?
She looks over at Rebecca at her remark, just the once.
"Yes," Avril chimes in, glancing over at her friends in turn. "I understand what she means. Ah, no, not at all like Demetrioi. If I am not mistaken...?" she voices, turning her head towards Kaguya. Restoring the ecosystem should be possible, even here, if through far more gradual means than Demetrioi had attempted. Yet one need only look at the landscape about them to realize how daunting a task that would be.
"...I would not be against such a thing," she says to Rebecca quietly. "If we could but manage that, there are so many we could save." She turns her head, her attention shifting out towards the salt flats themselves. "...It is strange, is it not? Even in the deserts of Aveh, there is life. Yet here, there is nothing."
There are no birds in the sky. No desert scrub ekeing out an existance at the margins. Even in the depths of the sea, there is life. But here, there is apparently nothing. One who has traveled to both lands might even say that it's a grim mirror of the Frontier on Lunar.
Avril nods. "Yes, and it appeared that wasn't present in other parts of Slayheim," Avril says, folding her hands in front of her. "I wonder if it might..."
Might it be... pipes?
Avril visibly hesitates. "I... do not know. This does not appear to have been settled even before the fall of Slayheim. Yet I cannot be certain."
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
"...yeah. There's a lot of ways to think you don't have any other choice," Kaguya says to Dean. "But you do." She looks to Avril. "People are always willing to come up with new ways to exert their power. I'm sure whoever created the Angel Halo thought it would be used for something noble. ...But then it wasn't. Because you can't accomplish good things through means like that."
She nods then. "Yeah. Some way. ...But I think that might be what it means. I'm not so sure about the pipes, but..."
Avril has that covered. To Rebecca's question though, Kaguya shakes her head.
"No. I've set aside my research into VR factor. I know enough."
"And nah--Avril's right. It's not a Demetrioi thing. It's the old-fashioned, hard way. We bring in topsoil from elsewhere and re-establish the ecosystem. It might be ready in a few human generations. Maybe. If we can do it."
"People couldn't live underground here any more than they do aboveground. It could be pipes, but it's doubtful."
"...But I took some readings at Ruid. On the frontier, at Lunar. if I can see what's similar to there and here, and what's different, maybe..."
Kaguya sets down another stake. "Hmmm."
She reviews her tablet thoughtfully.
"Hey Dean," she says. "Can you get your shovel? If you've got a spare, I'll help."
<Pose Tracker> Dean Stark has posed.
"Me neither. But... I think it's good to understand why other people would," Dean replies to Rebecca. The more you understand about other people, the better you can help them, to his way of thinking. And if you can help them... maybe they'll rethink what they're doing, too. He crooks a smile at Kaguya. She gets it; he knows she does. She knows it so well his smile can't help but fade away as she continues to remark on the matter.
He frowns thoughtfully when Rebecca brings up Demetrioi, but he doesn't think this is about that. For one thing, it's too normal. Avril agrees, too. It *would* be nice to restore the environment, if in not such a radical way that Demetrioi attempted, but...
"Huh. Even if your time?" he wonders at Avril. Back then, the Veruni were in charge--well, they're in charge now too, but there's so few that you could live pretty comfortably barely knowing they existed as long as you were far away from them. Back then, though... It's hard to imagine. Dean doesn't really have a grasp of how long ago 'back then' was, either. One thing's for sure, though:
"If weapons like that were made back then, war must've been *really* bad," Dean opines.
It really is barren here, though. Dean follows Avril's gaze to the flats. Whether it might be pipes leaching metal into the salt, though... Rebecca theorizes with him, but Avril thinks there weren't people here even before Slayheim fell. "You think so?" But even as he asks, he shakes his head. "I think you'd know. So even if it's just a gut feeling, you're probably right. What could it be, then?"
The question about Kaguya's research here tying into the VR Factor is a good one, to Dean's ears, but it sounds like it's unrelated. "Huh," he utters on that matter. He nods slowly as she talks about bringing in topsoil. It makes sense, but... As she says, it'd have to take a long time.
Does Filgaia have that long?
But then Kaguya asks for Shovel Help, and he grins. "Sure! Lemme put these down a sec." He takes a few steps back and carefully sets down the poles; then he gets out not just a shovel but *two* shovels, one of them the Devil Arm, Ace of Spades. That one he keeps for himself. "This one's named Jormungander!" he tells Kaguya matter-of-factly as he hands her the first shovel. It is, by all appearances, a totally ordinary shovel. It does have a rather long, sleek design, though, with a secondary handle partway down the shaft to help with the grip. "Now let's get shoveling!"
The eye on the shaft of Ace of Spades darts around desperately. It's just an eye, though. Don't worry about it.
<Pose Tracker> Rebecca Streisand has posed.
Dean speaks on why he feels understanding people like that and what they went through is valuable, and Rebecca, looks off in the distance. "Maybe... it feels like it didn't change much in the end for Odessa."
Can understanding really change anything? She doesn't know herself... there is Kaguya but... that's one person. How many more Veruni would they have to convince?
The Angel Halo... something about it creeps her out. Aren't those things from the Nisan religion? She doesn't say it aloud though, not on that part, instead stating...
"Feels like it'd be a world where... personal strength is worthless. When everything is decided by things like that..."
She just trails off... "Well, Filgaia was probably a lot more populated, back in the day." She finishes, feeling self-conscious about it.
Avril's words, about being prepared to be tested yet. "If it comes down to it, feels like he just accepted that it is that world. The moment you do that, then - it feels like you've lost all ability to change it to something else."
Avril speaks on what Kaguya's doing, that she wouldn't be against such a thing, "Depends on how it's done, I guess - on whether I'd be for or against it. Just - I like to know what we're dealing with."
Kaguya however answers, that it's not a Demetrioi thing, instead raising an eyebrow, "Like- just haul it in?" Rebecca looks at the landscape incredulously, then back at her, "That'd really work? It feels like it'd be ruined the moment it got here?"
It's not that she doesn't believe Kaguya, she's just not really understanding how it could happen. "You know like, all those stories about armies salting the fields and the like - just about as much salt as you can get here."
However, she asks Dean... to bring out, his SHOVEL and Rebecca groans as he speaks of its name, "Why's this one from old stories? Your other one - the creepiest shovel in all the known universe-"
She points at it, the eye, because SHE IS WORRIED ABOUT IT ALWAYS AND FOREVER. "-is a CARD PUN!"
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"Yes," she answers Dean. "I believe so." People are always willing to come up with new ways to exert their power. Avril need look no further than the light within herself to understand that. The other half of her remains silent -- has been silent -- as they wonder over the world that could have created such a thing as the Angel Halo. Once, such a discussion would have left Avril feeling discomfited.
Now, she feels nothing. Is this what it means to make peace with herself?
Minutely, she turns her head towards Rebecca as she muses on the fate of Odessa. Understanding people... if that effort was wasted, then...
And just as minutely, Avril looks away again.
It is no easy matter to convince people, that she knows as intimately as her own heartbeat. It's certainly no easy matter to convince them when what you're trying to impart is so different and difficult from what they would like to believe instead. Perhaps that's why it hasn't happened yet, though they've heard of others who have tried: convincing the Veruni and humanity to walk hand in hand is no mean feat when neither wants to do it.
And she looks at Dean. And she wonders.
"...I think it unlikely," she says to him at last, speaking of a rather different subject altogether. "It might be that there had been a long-lost Slayheim outpost here which even the capital had long forgotten. Yet, I suspect what we have found is something older still. I wonder..." she muses, tilting her head slightly to one side as she considers the options. Perhaps they're right after a fashion after all, and they stand atop the remnants of a Zeboim city. Or, maybe...
Slowly, behind the lenses, she blinks. This is no memory precisely: rather, she recalls the feeling of having stood here before. This time, the sense is stronger: she can just about imagine herself in memory gazing down at the flats--
But would they have been flats in her memory? What would have stood here five thousand years ago? This place was--
And it's gone, an ephemeral flash vanishing over the horizon.
Rousing from her reverie, Avril turns towards her friends and the here and now.
"Environmental remediation," she says after a few moment's silence, returning to the discussion at hand. "I have heard of such things." A long, long time ago, to be certain, but factual information like this has remained whole within Avril's mind. It is just the context that's missing -- and the memories of the events of her own life in the past. "Yes," she answers Rebecca. "With enough time, with the removal of contaminated soil, with assistance of plants and microbes..."
The environment had been degrading then, too, she knows. Had it been worse because of the wars that had used weapons kin to the Angel Halo? Her past self had not opted to attempt the slow route. Had there been no way in which it could have been done? Or, had there been other reasons at play?
She can't remember, and so she cannot know what she had been thinking back then.
"...It might be possible," Avril says as she regardless an expanse as lifeless as the many planets the Veruni had bypassed in search of a land in which they might live.
So long as you try, perhaps nothing is impossible. And yet--
"Dig...?" Avril queries, turning her attention towards Kaguya as if it were a foreign concept. "Oh-- of course..."
Dean was, in fact, prepared for this.
"Jormungander... from where does this hail?"
Probably, a supply store in Port Timney or something, Avril.
One shovel breaks the top crust of salt where Kaguya has indicated. And it will continue to shuffle salt here as Dean and Kaguya dig. The transformation of the land to salt appears extensive: coarse-grained pellets of salt are the only thing they find however deep it appears they dig. At some point it must stop -- it can't be salt all the way down to the planet's surface. But how deep must they go before they reach that point -- or find what it is that might be lurking under the flats?
But they eventually find it. The sensors aren't wrong. They strike something hard and metallic.
And, as a quick probe with a shovel will find, far too large to be easily pried free. In fact, it seems to be extremly large--
And its surface has a pattern to the metal that may be very familiar to Kaguya.
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
Didn't change anything for Odessa. Kaguya watches Rebecca for a moment. "Guess not," she admits. "Understanding's nice... but it's not always enough."
She does get it, though, what Dean says. She gets it too well.
Just like she gets, "Yeah. When you decide the world's a certain way... it becomes that way for you. You can't get off that path unless you want to."
Pause. "That's why the readings," she explains to Rebecca. "I have to see why it is the way it is, first--if I can take care of that, then we can start to heal the land. But we don't know how to start if we don't study it. So I'm studying it."
Avril gets it. Kaguya is not so sure they're aboe a city, but, "That's why it takes so long. ...Most people don't lik waiting for something they won't see in their own lifetimes. It doesn't feel 'worth it'. ...But Filgaia needs to reverse the desertifiation if it's going to survive. And if we reverse any part of it, or even have a chance, it's important to try."
"...Terraforming brute-force isn't the solution. Maybe if we'd been willing to be more patient, we neer would've come back."
Shovels! Kaguya takes one, and looks at the Devil Arm for a moment. "...Heheheheh," she says. "Ace of Spades. That's great." Pause. "Creepy though, yeah. Weird little guy." She doesn't sound that bothered, though. Instea, she acepts the cool shovel, and--
Shovels! Kaguya wonders about the shovel when Avril asks, but msotly she has to just do physical work. "I couldn't use a machine for this," she explains to Rebecca, "Because it might just wreck whatever's under here. We have to do it by hand. Which. Sucks. But it is what it s. We--"
TINK.
"...Huh," Kaguya says, and reaches down, investiating. "This is..."
"Well, it's not pipes," she says. She considers what she's about to unleash. Then she grins.
"Hey, Dean," she says.
"...I have no idea why it's here, but..."
"I think we just found a Golem."
<Pose Tracker> Dean Stark has posed.
It's one person more than there was otherwise.
...but then, that's what separates Dean and Rebecca, isn't it? Dean's an optimist, and Rebecca's a pessimist. Whether one is a more realistic view than the other, we'll leave to the world to decide. ...though when Kaguya says that understanding isn't always enough--even Dean nods in acknowledgement, grimacing.
Filgaia was more populated back in the day... Dean chews on this supposition of Rebecca's. It's an idea that's never quite sunk into his head, but when she puts it like that, it probably *is* true, isn't it? The world used to be healthier, and all those wars hadn't been waged yet. When he thinks of the implications of that... it really is chilling. Especially since Avril agrees with his opinion about the wars of old. Still, when it comes to being tested, and accepting the worst of the world...
"Yeah. You've got to be willing to fight to change the world for the better," Dean says, looking at Rebecca and Avril. "Sitting back and letting other people do things for you without doing anything yourself... It's not like letting your friends help you. That feels no different than giving up to me." Kaguya weighs in on that matter, and he nods to her too. "Yeah. You have to want to change."
But shovels come out!! And Rebecca COMPLAINS. Why does she have to complain about his cool naming sense!! "I can name my shovels what I want! And Jormungander's cool! It's like Fenrir, but not!" Dean shoots back. And, indeed, Rebecca will remember that Fenrir, or more specifically Black Fenrir, was the name of the shovel he had before he got his ARMs from Avril--the shovel that broke when he fought a huge monster--the ARMs that he ended up naming Twin Fenrir.
Really, she ought to be grateful it isn't just Fenrir again.
Dean beams at Avril, though. "I traded for it with a merchant on Lunar age back! Can you believe they were just going to throw it away?! They said they got a new one so they didn't need it anymore! I've had Ace of Spades all this time so I haven't gotten to use it, but now it's Jormungander's time to shine!" He nods fiercely at Kaguya. "I'm entrusting it to you!"
As he begins to dig, Avril muses about what they might have found--that she thinks it older than some kind of outpost. "Hmm... I'm sure you're right. I wonder what it could be?" But that's what the digging is for: to find out. And as Dean and Kaguya dig deeper and deeper (and as Dean lets the others discuss the particulars of terraforming), they find something big and metal. Kaguya grins; Dean wipes his brow, then meets her goggled eyes as she imparts her news.
Behind his own thick shades, his eyes sparkle as he GASPS.
"KEEP DIGGING!!!" he hollers, enthusiasm and effort redoubling as he himself does exactly that.
...They did bring enough water to avoid dehydration, right?
<Pose Tracker> Rebecca Streisand has posed.
Sometimes it's as simple as picking and choosing where to expend one's effort. Rebecca knows what side she's on. Or perhaps she's simply afraid of the scope of trying to be responsible for everyone.
A look at Avril out of the corner of her eye, she knows what side she's on, at least - but...
There's a sigh, as she fidgets over her bandana. In this moment it's Kaguya who agrees with her most of all.
Instead she focuses on Kaguya, "I guess I just don't get what the readings will tell you?" Rebecca points out a hand, as if to say-
'BEHOLD! SALT!'
Yet Avril speaks of environmental remediation, and it's... "Huh. So it's more like 'healing' rather than 'changing'?" As she tries to wrap her head around Demetrioi's 'terraforming' versus this concept. "It sounds real - involved." Time and effort? The fact that it's so above her head?
Yes.
"But - it's nice to imagine even a place like this could heal."
Rebecca makes a frustrated noise, "Yeah Dean - I remember. I still don't get how you double jumped on one."
Literally bullshit, Rebecca had to have her limiters released to truly do that, and looks alarmed as Kaguya takes it up, as if worried it has a curse that steals life force or something.
Dean excitedly explains where it came from as she notes, "And most people stick to one naming scheme for their weapons-!" Part of her wonders if it was from old Metal Demon fables that humans took over and made their own.
And then Kaguya-
"No."
-says-
"Oh no."
-the magic-
"Not here-!"
-word.
"Anything but that!"
Rebecca gives Avril a pleading look, "Can't we just use your override? It'll take days to get that thing out of here!"
A beat.
"He'll get salt blindness digging like that with his Golem Obsession!"
It's unclear if Rebecca actually knows what Salt Blindness even is.
<Pose Tracker> Avril Vent Fleur has posed.
"...Yes," Avril says to Rebecca, after a moment's consideration of her words. "Yes, that's precisely it."
But not all wounds can be healed. She does not say that aloud.
Rather instead, in the moment, she watches as Kaguya and Dean dig, peering into the trench they're creating. Not a city: she doesn't expect to find one. But if not a city, then what? The spike suggested a large spread of metal through this area. It was diffuse, dilute, but still indicated that there was a source... some distance below their feet.
What it...?
Her breath catches in her throat when she catches the first sighting of what's beneath them. "Surely..."
There's no mistaking it. "Kaguya, this must be a--"
It's a Golem.
And these are the magic words to activate Dean. "Oh-- but excavating it will--"
The override, Rebecca begs of her as Dean digs with furious intent. Use the override!
Avril, without hesitation brings it out and clicks the button and...
...
...Nothing happens.
Dean is still digging.
"Is it... it should not be broken!" Avril cries out, regarding her mysterious artifact afresh. It certainly doesn't look any different from the last time she used it, and yet--
"Ah! Dean! Perhaps we ought to find people to help?" she calls down to Dean as he continues to dig away.
Whether or not her suggestion falls on deaf ears remains to be seen.
Help us, Kaguya, you're our only hope...!
<Pose Tracker> Kaguya has posed.
Kaguya digs. And digs. And digs. Wth Dean! But after a little while, she finds... this is a lot of digging. And it's really boring.
"...Hey, Dean," Kaguya says, and glances at Avril and Rebecca sneakily.
"...Wouldn't it..."
Cough. "Wouldn't it be more fun to dig this up with a bunch of friends?"
<Pose Tracker> Dean Stark has posed.
At last, Dean finally pauses in his strenuous digging. He looks at Kaguya and Avril with sparkling eyes.
"You're SO RIGHT. Everyone should get to see how awesome this Golem is!!"
He knows nothing about the Golem beneath their feet--if it's intact, or anything--but that doesn't matter. They've managed to convince him!!
Looks like he avoids salt blindness this time, Rebecca... Isn't that a relief?