Almost there... It was a lie of course, she did not believe her own lies but there was a strange sense of comfort in telling herself those magical words all the same. The winds were cold at night, she could feel the chill through the earthen hued layers that ensconced her tiny frame. A hood covered most of her head and shadowed her face, not that she was hiding from a curious gaze this far from civilization but rather she was trying to hide from the nighttime chill. She shivered as her hands cupped the cool earth that sapped away what little heat she still had left. Almost there... she lied to herself again. It was a futile mantra that lacked logic and yet still gave her an inexplicable sense of comfort to say. Her fingertips, raw from days of digging finally hit something hard. She stopped digging, her sore fingers never leaving the site of the mysterious buried find. Would it be another abandoned shield from Godsfall? Another broken blade buried and forgotten for centuries? No, not this time. It was a smooth, flat stone. Fuu, or rather Michi[/] let out a relieved sigh as a thin smile eclipsed her face. Almost there... this time it was not a lie. With a renewed vigor she brushed away the dust and recovered a plate-sized and shaped rounded discus of stone and admired her find as she held it between her hands. "There you are my darling bulwark," she whispered with a quavering victorious voice to the inanimate object as she lifted the stone out of the hole she had dug. The stone had no value or power, but it was all the same significant. She knelt down at the bottom of the hole, her knees felt the crunch of the earth beneath as she continued to scrape and claw with renewed vigor. She found another stone, nearly identical. Her heart hastened because this was the confirmation that she needed as she found one after another and lifted each from the hole.
This was a wall from the doomed city of Babylos. She had been to Babylos in her youth, she was too young then to understand the history that was under her feet.. Babylos was once a bustling trade community, one of several before the maelstrom came. Like most of the others, the raging storm killed the residents as the earth came upon them in a great wave. Their bones buried by nature rather than mourners. At the time she thought she was rather clever in noting the disparity of wealth in Babylos, much like Soons Haven. The fringe of the city, just outside of this wall she was now uncovering was a shanty-city that housed the truly poor and destitute as the walls of this village could not hold their numbers. Their bones would be near the base of the wall, many hollow and needle thin, hardly recognizable as human remains. She remembered the scent of life back then, it was unpleasant and reminded her of animal dung. The livestock was housed outside the city, their need to roam and natural aroma made them unsuitable for the delicate sensibilities of those within. She avoided the outer wall because of that but her mentor did so for other reasons, she called them thieves primarily. She was the most wary of the young, they were wily and desperate. They spent time in 'the ivory tower' at the heart of the city. The tower was destroyed a long time ago and conceivably not far from where she was digging.
She wiped the sweat from her brow with a dirty sleeve that left a trail of filth across her face. The sun would break over the horizon soon and before the earth became unbearably hot she would need to feast on carrion over an open fire and pull a layer of canvas over her sleeping area, likely this hole. She fell back on the hard, cold earth and looked up. The sky was always clearest far from the now agrarian tribes of man, it was beautiful. A pang in her heart caused her to grimace, she often missed the sky in the academic journey to know the stars. Her back ached, the cold ground felt good. Perhaps she could close her eyes just for a little while...
The days would pass, the Oracle curled in a hole to get through the searing hot days. The nights spent laboriously digging the perimeter of the city. Babylos was not what she was searching for, Babylos was a human city built on the ruins of an Ancient City called Baylos. Baylos was once considered to be one of the great original cities in Wind Country, the foundation being something that could be traced back to perhaps a time that predated even Ancients. The city was razed in 7 PP by a group of marauding men after the great city was abandoned by its residents. History has forgotten their fate but Oracles have not. After Godsfall the Ancients scattered but they were hunted down by the Rangers. Their remains contained before they could reform they were given to Journeymen whom bound their essences to various weapons. While eternal and incapable of true death, they concluded that Ancients could be imprisoned indefinately and they were correct in their assessment and their application. These weapons were considered dangerous, too dangerous to be allowed to remain in the hands of the average man so they were entrusted to the Oracles and the Oracles buried them deep beneath the seven great cities of Wind Country.
She never told anyone this, not even the Diamyo.
She was not recovering these lost and forgotten artifacts. She was going to dig past them, deeper than even the Oracle treasure trove to something else that was just as forgotten. She needed something to sell and something to learn from. Baylos was burnt to the ground, the former buildings reduced to rubble. It should have been considered a waste considering the fact that the city was empty but it was not empty. Not really. The first citizens of Baylos were tinkerers, capable of technological achievements that would rival the technology of the modern age without the use of chakra. Slaves were not required in Baylos, they had moved past the need for fleshy servants and created automatons that would service their needs. Similar in size shape, and form to puppets today these creations were autonomous. They burned the city and leveled the structures to trap them inside. Then they built a new city, one that rivaled the previous in splendor upon the bones of the previous.
She needed to find these old bones. She needed to find one intact automaton.
What she found would not be detailed here as she wrapped her prize in a great canvas cloth. It was not entirely what she expected but it would do. Twine confined the covered artifact as she climbed from the depths of the tunnel she dug into the cool midnight desert. With a tug and a heave at the distal end she would drag something heavy that was about half her size from the unknown depths. It was moving. She let out another grunt of exertion and gritted her teeth as it crested over the edge of the tunnel onto the desert floor.
[Topic Left. S Rank. 30 Min]