New Brannon Legacy Blog

As promised, I've restarted the Brannon Legacy anew at a new blog, Revolver.

This blog will no longer be updating.

Chapter 74: Intersection

No matter how long they found themselves stuck on this island, they would at least not starve to death. They did not have to forage far from their camp to discover several kinds of fruits and vegetables growing wild, ready to be harvested.

Other discoveries were more mysterious in nature. This lone, charred electric stove stood by the wreckage of  a sailboat and an old ruined wall.

"Do you think you could fix it?" Jillyan asks.

"I could," Julian laughs, "But we'd need a source of electricity to use it. What I'm wondering is where it came from, and why it's just sitting here."

Jilly shrugs, "We had better move on; nothing here will help us get off this island. Unless you think we can repair that old boat?"

Julian shakes his head, and the couple moves on.

All along the island's shore, they find more wreckage. Broken boats and the ruined remains of the cargo they carried.

Heading further inland reveals a walled garden, but no signs of the people who built the wall.

"How old do you think it is?" Jillyan wonders.

"It's hard to say, but if it's ancient, it's held up really well."

"And if it's recent, where the hell are the people who built it?"

Exploring deeper into the jungles, they discover new mysteries.

"That looks Olmec," Julian muses.

"Olmec? Way out here?" Jillyan asks. They may not exactly where they are, but their flight had only been a few hours out of Shang Simla when the plane crashed, still thousands of miles from anywhere you'd be likely to find a giant Olmec head.

As the sun began to set, they headed back to their camp. All their searching produced no means of escape, just unsolved puzzles, ancient ruins from a distant culture, construction with no clue about the identity or whereabouts of the builders, and the wrecks of ships everywhere.

"Hey, but look on the bright side," Jillyan laughs after they've finished their meal of wild vegetables and fresh caught fish, "MorcuCorp could not possibly find us here. We're free."

"What if MorcuCorp was our only hope of escape?" Julian muses. Though it is more than likely Fergus will believe they are dead, along with the others who were in the crashed plane. But if he didn't believe that, if Fergus wanted to search for his lost cousin, he had all the resources of MorcuCorp to do it, and his own powers as well. And that could truly be their only hope of getting off this island.

"This wouldn't be so bad though, being stuck here forever," Jilly answers, drawing him close for a kiss, "It is a paradise here. And we'd have each other."

The next morning, the couple explores the other side of the island, and Jilly finds some boulders to smash with her powerful axe, which she luckily had in her pocket at the the time of the crash. Beneath the crumbled stones, they find a hidden entrance to an underground bunker.

It is, like everything else on this island, deserted, with no traces of the people who built it. But they find working showers, fresh clothes and food stored inside, as well as first aid kits. 

"Stay still," Jillyan reprimands as Julian winces from the sting of salve she applies to his cuts, "Let me take care of you."

"You'll be a great mother someday," Julian muses.

"We have to get off this island first," Jillyan answers, dispelling any fantasy of living here forever, alone together in paradise.

"These people seem to have set themselves up nicely. I wonder what happened to them?" Jilly muses as they eat salads made from the produce they found in the refrigerators.

"Maybe they are still here, on the island," Julian wonders, "They are all just out hunting or something."

"Oooh, like the Three Bears. And we're Goldilocks, and they'll come home to find us sleeping in their beds?"

"We'd probably better not sleep here," Julian responds, though this would be better shelter if it starts to rain again, "Buy...why would they cover the entrance with boulders before a simple hunting or foraging expedition?" he wonders aloud, "It just doesn't make sense."

"Nothing here has made any sense," Jilly answers, "Why should this be any different? I saw some scuba gear in their storage. I think I'll see what I can find underwater."

Julian nods, distracted by his thoughts, "I'll meet you back at camp in a few hours."

Jillyan didn't really expect to find anything useful underwater, she just wanted a few hours of not thinking about their problem, a temporary escape from having to hide her fear from Julian.

"Hey, why don't you have a fish tail?" is the question Jilly would have asked, if she could speak actual words. Instead, she merely points at the merman's scaly legs in a questioning manner.

He gestures for her to follow, and they head up to the surface where they can speak of things they cannot express with hand gestures.

"I am called Meri," the merman introduces himself, "I am, like you, dragonkin. What brings you to the wandering isle"

"Our plane crashed," Jilly answers.

"You did not come here intentionally?" Meri asks, "You are like the others, then?"

"Others? You mean all the shipwrecks here? The skeletons? The people who built the bunker?" Julian asks, "And what do you mean by 'wandering isle'?"

"This island has no true home, it wanders between worlds. Or maybe it would be more correct to call it an intersection, a place where many worlds meet," Meri answers, "Some say it is broken, unstable. Auberon created it, long, long ago, and even he does not remember what purpose he intended it for, so perhaps it is exactly the way it was always meant to be." Meri shrugs, "The island comes and goes again. Where it appears, it pulls on the world it lands in. And that is how your boats and planes are drawn in to it. It does not stay in one place for very long."

"What happens to the people who land here?" Julian asks, "We've found traces of them...buildings, skeletons..."

Meri shrugs again, "I've seen the wreckage they leave behind, but you are the first people I've met here. I do not know what the island does to the people on it when it moves. Perhaps it takes them with it. Perhaps it leaves them behind."

Julian shudders, "What, just drops them in the middle of the ocean?"

"As I said, I do not know, I only speculate. The seaborn can find the isle easily enough, and we can traverse the oceans of many worlds, but we have little reason to visit it. I have been here only five times in my life, and I am centuries old."

"Can you get us home?" Jillyan asks.

"Which world are you from?" Meri asks.

Julian and Jillyan both sit silent as they ponder that question; they only knew one world, and it had never needed a name to identify it.

"Wouldn't we still be in the same world we came from?" Julian reasons, "I mean, the island landed in our world, right? And hasn't moved again yet."

Meri shakes his head, "The island does not truly exist in the place where it lands. Where you are now, is no place. It is between places. The intersection." He shakes his head again, "There is no land beyond the ocean here. Just the island."

"I don't understand," Julian says, and Jillyan nods in agreement with him.

"It makes no sense," she adds.

Meri opens his hands in a gesture of concurrence, "Magic rarely does. Especially where Auberon is involved. There is a portal here, in a cave beneath the waters. The seaborn use it to travel the oceans of many worlds. But we know where our home is, and can always find it again no matter how far we've wandered. You are lost and do not know your home. You can use the portal, but I cannot say where you will land."

"We live in a place called Isla Paradiso," Jillyan says, "Does that help?"

Meri laughs. "Every world has such an island."

"Well, then, wherever we land, it can't be that bad, right?" she says to Julian, "Maybe if we get lucky, we'll find a place where there is no MorcuCorp. If we don't find home, we can at least be free."

"What about your family?" Julian reminds her.

Jillyan frowns, "I wanted my parents to meet you. And my Dad would have loved having grandkids to play with. But what choice do we have? We can't stay here. So I vote we take our chances on the portal. At least we can find a place where we can live, with people and stuff."

They go back to the bunker to get scuba gear for Julian, and then make the dive to the spot Meri showed them. Outside the cave portal's entrance, Julian stops and turns to Jillyan, gesturing doubt one last time.

Jillyan nods vigorously, meaning to go through with their plan

Julian watches as she enters the cave.

And he has no choice now but to follow her, and hope for the best.

___________________________________________________

I didn't show half of the tombs or other things on the island because I didn't need them for the story. But Treasure Island is very inspired by the TV show Lost. And so, yeah, a bit of Lost like elements creeped into this story.

I wish I could remember who made this world or where I got it to provide a credit and link. Though I would also have to warn potential downloaders that I found a lot of broken triggers and inaccessible objects and ladders and I had to frequently go into build mode to fix things. But, as a fan of Lost, I had a great time with it, nonetheless.

Now, important news for this legacy. I have a big decision to make here, whether or not to continue. Well, I am going to continue with Jillyan and Julian, but here's the thing. I just got so bogged down with the whole MorcuCorp plot, and with all the alternate saves and scripted scenes, I really lost touch with the actual challenge part of the gameplay. What I want is a fresh start, I want to play Jillyan and Julian totally new, like 1st generation, with no money and no skills, and no history. Having this portal spit them out in some completely different world would allow me to do that. But I'm kind of leaning towards starting a new blog and really doing this as a Gen 1 start over. And in that I'm also torn between doing it on blogspot or just doing it on my Simblr.

I have some time to mull this over, since I need to set up a world for them to land in. Probably IP again, but not in the fabulous house I built for them since they will be CAS poor. I will let you all know what I decide either way.

Chapter 73: Uncharted

The rain is still coming down, but finally starting to clear up, when Jillyan spots land.

"I've got you. C'mon, hang in there," she groans, dragging Julian onto the shore of the tiny deserted isle, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.

"We're okay, Julian, baby, we've made it."

Julian makes a small groan, indicating that he'sat least conscious. When theyhit  the water, saving him was Jillyan's first and only concern. Getting him onto dry land where she could see to his injuries. "You're going to be okay, Julian," she insists, all grim determination. Because she'll be damned if she's going to lose him.

She lays him down the wet sand. At first glance, there nothing but the sand and a few palm trees. And miles and miles of ocean. "Wait here, baby, okay?" she whispers, stroking is hair, "I'm going to see if I can find...anything." Something to cover him from the rain, something to eat, fresh water...other survivors, if that's even possible.

As much as she hated getting back into the water, the shore of the nearby peninsula seemed like the best place to start looking for washed up flotsam from the plane, so Jilly swims across to see what she can find.

Someone had spelled out an SOS with rocks on a small rise by the shore. Other survivors? But that doesn't seem likely. If anyone else made it, they wouldn't have found this island so long ahead of here that they'd have time to be gathering rocks. And the camp, with it's burnt out fire, looks like it's been here for awhile.

And the skeletons...whoever these people were, they were here for longer than awhile.

Whoever they were, they are beyond help, and Jillyan doesn't have time to wonder about them. If she wants to have a better chance of survival than they had, she'll have to find some shelter, some food, fresh water.

She's lucky enough to find some luggage washed up from plane, and she's able to cobble together a lean to from some blankets. There was a bottle of water and some field rations in her backpack, which was enough to get Julian sitting up and talking again, at least. It won't last long, Jilly realizes, but at least it will get them through the first night.

 "Are you okay? Is anything broken?" Jilly asks.

"I don't think so," Julian answers, and Jilly sighs audibly with relief. Even if she knew how to set bones, she didn't find any first aid kits.

"But your face," she says, caressing his cheek, "You're all scratched up..."

"Am I still pretty?" Julian asks, forcing a smile.

"Of course you are," Jilly smiles back at him, genuinely happy. "We're going to be okay," she says. She'd been saying it since they hit the water, but it's only now that she knows it to be true in her heart, with no doubt.

Finally able to relax, at least a little, Jilly leans back into his arms.

"I found another camp. Over there," she says, gesturing at the peninsula behind them.

"Other survivors?" Julian asks.

Jillyan shakes her head. "It was old. And...there's bones. They made an SOS sign with rocks. But no one ever found them. And they didn't make it, I guess. I won't let that happen to us, Julian. I will find a way home. I will," she says, trying to make it true just by speaking it aloud.

"I know you will," Julian whispers.

___________________________________

I'm tired of the same old same old of WA tombs. But I've found this awesome adventure world called Treasure Island which I've never played before. It has several tombs that I'm looking forward to exploring with Jilly.

Chapter 72: A Mighty Axe

When she asked about the Axe of Pangu, the Brotherhood of the Fist sent Jillyan to Mei Xi, their expert on magical artifacts.

"The Axe of Pangu, yes, of course I know of it," Mei says with a knowing smile when Jilly tells her about her quest, "It is said that Pangu, the first living being, used it to cleave Yin from Yang, separated the earth from the sky."

"And will it smash boulders?" Jilly asks.

Mei chuckles, "Yes, it will smash boulders."

"Do you know where I should start looking for it?"

"Start looking? It is not lost; the Axe of Pangu resides in the Temple of Heaven."

"Well, can I borrow it?" Jilly asks, "I just need to smash some boulders in France. I'll bring it right back, I promise."

Mei smiles indulgently. "I cannot give you what is not mine to give." Jilly's shoulders droop and her lips curl down into a frown as she starts planning a late night break in to the ancient temple. "You must prove yourself worthy. The way to the axe is clear, but it is not straight. If you are able to get to it, then, you may take it.Here is a key to the great hall of the temple, to get you started."

Jilly smiles. That makes everything so much easier.

"What did she mean, 'the path is clear but not straight'?" Julian asks as the couple descend into the ancient temple.

"Traps, probably," Jilly answers with a resigned sigh, "Stay close behind me. I don't want you running off and getting hurt."

Jillyan inserts the large keystone into the shaped slot, unlocking the temple's inner depths. As she anticipated, they encounter a few traps along the way, but nothing she cannot easily handle.

"And there it is. That wasn't so tough," Jilly muses when they find the axe, hanging on a wall in the in the center of a large chamber.

"There's a deep chasm between us and the axe," Julian observes.

"That? I can jump that. Easy," Jilly scoffs.

"Wait," Julian says, stepping in front of her before she can hop the fence guarding the deep black chasm below, "I know it looks easy, but that chasm is dark and we don't know how deep it goes or what lies on the bottom. I don't want you to risk it. There must be another way to get to the other side."

"Okay, we'll look for one," Jilly agrees, "But you know there will be more traps."

"You're good with traps," Julian points out.

"I'm also good at jumping," Jilly answers. Julian frowns and Jilly gives him a comforting kiss on the cheek, "But I don't want to worry you, sweetheart. We'll go the long way."

The way to the axe was indeed clear, but not straight, requiring several trips through twisting corridors and up and down more stairs than Jilly cared to count. And of course, traps along the way.

"It might have been easier if I jumped," Jilly quips as she disarms a fire trap in the walls of a narrow corridor.

All the effort is paid off when Jilly stands before the axe and lifts it from the wall it hangs on.

"Ugh, heavy," she groans as her knees buckle under the weight of it. "Oh!" she gasps as it surges with luminescent power before shrinking itself it down to a convenient pocket size.

"I've read about things like that in old Chinese legends," Julian says, "Weapons and other tools that shrink down to a miniscule size until they are needed."

"It does make it a lot easier transport," Jilly says, "I wasn't looking forward to lugging that giant thing all the way back to France."

Though they are both exhausted from the day's adventure, sleep is not the first thing on their minds when they get back to their bed in the resort in town. 

"You know, I was thinking," Jilly says, propping herself up against his shoulder.

"What about?"

"I can't marry you until you've met my parents. Well, I could, but, my Dad would be really bummed if I just ran off and got married like that."

"And, what if your parents don't approve of our marriage?" Julian asks. 

"Why wouldn't they approve of you?" Jillyan asks, "You're awesome. And you've always been really good to me."

"I lured you into a trap and drugged you," Julian reminds her gently.

"Well, that was for a good reason. I wanted to rescue you, and you found a way to make that happen. And, it's not like my parents are perfect. My Mom ran a crime syndicate, you know."

"I'm a Landgraab," Julian says.

"You won't be for much longer," Jilly says, "I'm going to make you a Brannon."

"It's not that simple," Julian laughs.

"It is," Jillyan insists, and Julian gives up the argument. He was going to have to meet her parents sooner or later anyway. He would have preferred for it to be after he and Jilly were safely wed, but it's fairly obvious that even if Jack and Delaney tried to put some roadblocks on the marriage, Jillyan would run right over them, anyway.

Chapter 71: Eternal Loop

Just a few days after receiving their orders from Fergus. Jillyan and Julian fly of to Champs les Sims, France, and once they arrive, head immediately to the old tomb site marked by a circle of standing stones.

"What are we looking for, exactly?" Jilly asks.

"MorcuCorp and Farrell Brannon both made multiple time travel trips to this village during the medieval era," Julian replies, "The things they did made changes to the time line. And if some theories of quantum physical are correct, they may have created numerous different universes just by altering the course of events in our universe. Normally the different versions of universe would remain separate and discrete from each other, but this particular place is a portal to the fae realm. Fae magic is chaotic and unpredictable in nature, and Fergus is concerned that we may have created a weak spot in the wall between the multiverses here by altering the time lines repeatedly, and that there might be some spill over, or contamination, between the univeres in this spot. So what we are looking for is anything that doesn't belong here. It might be obvious to the eyes, or it might not. Each universe will have it's own signature on the subatomic level, though, and I have a scanner that can read for anomalies."

"That sounds like the comic books Fergus would read," Jilly laughs, "Well, I understand my part at least; breaking and entering. I've always wanted to raid an ancient tomb."

"Have you really?" Julian asks.

Jilly shrugs, "Sure, why not? There are all kinds of cool treasures waiting to be unearthed here."

Jilly turns out to have a knack for finding hidden entrances.

"Well, it is a tomb," she says as she unseals a chamber to find a skeleton lying inside, "Ohh, nice opal he's got. I guess he won't be needing that anymore."

"Wait, don't touch it," Julian stops her before she snags the jewel as he starts scanning, "This is a tomb, but the ancient people did just toss their dead on the ground; they laid them in hollows they'd carve into the walls."

"So who's this guy, then?" Jill asks, pointy at the skeleton.

"Possibly just a tomb raider that got lost," Julian says. 

Jilly makes a disapproving snort, "How stupid could he be?" she wonders, "The entrance is right there."

"This may also be the type of anomaly we're looking for," Julian continues, scanning the area thoroughly, "I won't know for sure until I run through the data later." When he's done scanning, Julian turns of the device and heads out to look for more possible anomalies to scan. Jilly quickly pockets the opal before following him into the next chamber.

The next chamber contains some very obvious anomalies; a modern fireplace and a mission style chair are very out of place in a place supposedly not used since it was sealed in the neolithic era.

"Did the cavemen really carve chairs and coffee tables out of stone?" Jilly asks doubtfully as she inspects another set of improbable furniture across from the more obvious interlopers.

"I don't even need a scanner to see that there's some serious contamination here," Julian answers, scanning anyway, "Almost nothing in this room belongs here."

They go from chamber to chamber, Julian scanning and Jilly pillaging the treasures left behind. There were no more immediately obvious anomalies like the out of place fireplace and chair, but Julian scans everything thoroughly.

Not content with the just the treasures she's found on the ground, Jilly pries open an upright stone sarcophagus to see what might have been buried inside.

"Careful, Jill," Julian says, glancing over his shoulders as he collates some of his scanner data onto his laptop, "You might wake up a mummy."

"Really?" she asks, excited at the prospect of battling some ancient reanimated horror.

"No," Julian laughs.

They leave the tomb before nightfall and make camp nearby.

"So, if there is contamination from other universes into this one, how do we fix it?" Jilly asks as they roast their dinner over the campfire.

"That's the question, really," Julian murmurs, deep in thought, "I don't know the answer. Maybe Fergus has some ideas..."

"Our ancestors may have sat on this very spot," Jilly muses, snuggling up beside Julian, gazing up at the sky before they retire into their tent for the night. Julian wraps his arm around her waist, and stays quiet, preferring not to think too much about what his ancestors had done here.

In the morning, they return to the stone circle, hoping to find more hidden entrances to as yet undiscovered parts of the ancient tomb. Before they start exploring, Jilly takes a moment to sketch a building not far from their location.

"That's Chateau de Landgraab," Julian says.

"So, you own it?"

"It belongs to MorcuCorp. So, it's Fergus' now," Julian answers, rubbing his neck as he muses, "It was originally built by Admiral Langraab on the site of the ruins of the medieval castle the family had once lived in here. No one has lived in it now for generations; the Admiral was probably one of the worst Landgraabs, he even kidnapped the daughter of one of the local nectary families to try to steal their distillation secrets. The people here ran him out of town after that. Since then MorcuCorp has turned it into a storehouse."

"Maybe we should check it out."

"We could," Julian answers with a wry smile, "Breaking into that house is a time honored tradition for adventurers. Ewan McDermott, Sage Bowman and even Farrell Brannon all took a crack at it. But I doubt we'd find anything; MorcuCorp tended to use the location as bait, luring people to 'discover' information that MorcuCorp wanted them to find. All the real secrets are kept hidden in the more impenetrable vaults."

"You never know, we could uncover some long lost treasure," Jilly says.

"We can certainly look. The house as it is now never existed in the medieval era, but the castle that used to be here played a large role in the time travel events that caused the contamination, so there could be more evidence of it there, too, as well as in this tomb."

Before they try the chateau, there is still the matter of finding another entrance into unexplored parts of the tomb. After thoroughly searching the are, Jilly stops in front of a single huge boulder.

"It's..tingly," she says.

"How so?"

"I feel, I dunno, kind of tingly when I stand near it. The stones up there do the same thing," she answers, gesturing at the stone circle on the mound above, "I guess it's the magic?"

"You Brannons are sensitive to fae magic," Julian replies, "But that's not one of  the standing stones. It's too big, and it's not been cut like the others."

"Hey, when I went to China with my mother, I was initiated into the Brotherhood of the Fist. They sent me into this old temple to find some old documents...I remember reading about a magical axe that could smash boulders. The guys in the stories used it to smash boulders that were blocking secret entrances..." Jilly says.

"Well, this isn't China, but I suppose that boulder could be blocking a secret entrance."

"It must be," Jilly insists confidently, and then deflates, "But we don't have the magic axe."

"We aren't going to be able to move this boulder without one," Julian laughs, "I don't think the locals would appreciate us hauling a lot of heavy equipment up here and disturbing their national monuments."

After spending another hour searching for any other way into the tomb that won't require a magic axe, the couple gives up and starts walking to the Landgraab chateau. At the midpoint between the tomb and the Landgraab house, Jilly stops to excavate a pile of relics half-buried beneath the ground.

While she's busy digging, Julian decides to take some readings of the area. Though the fluctuations are not as strong as they are in the tomb itself, the time contamination does seem to have spread this far. Or maybe there's a line of energy bridging from the Landgraab house to the tomb, a cord of magic tying the Brannons to the Landgraabs, the past to the present, binding them all together in an eternal loop.

"Eeew, trash," Jilly mutters as she tosses the broken remains of an old nectar bottle aside.

Maybe he's being overly romantic about eternal bonds, Julian decides, and keeps his musings on the deeper connection between his line and hers to himself.

"I can't believing they put the disabling mechanism for the traps out in the open like this," Jilly says as she thrusts her arm into the very easily discovered hole and pulls on the trigger.

"As I said, this house was used mostly as a lure. The traps would only keep out tourists and other hapless visitors; any adventuring type could break in with ease."

"And that doesn't make them suspicious?" Jillyan asks doubtfully.

Once they are inside, Jillyan takes a deep breath and then gasps with laughter. "You Landgraabs do love beige, don't you?"

The beige ends once they get further into the house, and seeing the horrible mix of colors and patterns in the study upstairs, Jilly makes a laughing Julian swear that he'll never try to have a say in the decorating of their home.

"Color blindness runs in the family," Julian explains.

While Jill starts poking through old chests, looking for some long forgotten treasure, Julian takes some readings with his scanner. "There are definite fluctuations registering here," he notes, saving all his data for later more thorough investigation.

"Well, you were right," Jilly mutters, "This place is picked clean. Nothing here but some sad hunks of plain quartz."

While they were browsing in the market later that afternoon, they overheard a conversation about a nearby house that had just come up for sale. The sellers, a couple going through a bitter divorce, were keen to sell as quickly as possible, and Jill and Julian decided to take advantage of the sudden opportunity and made an offer.

"So did we get everything Fergus wanted?" Jill asks as they dine on the lasagna they brought home from the cantina next door to their new vacation home.

Julian nods, "I don't think there's any more useful data to find in that tomb, at least not without the magic axe to get us past that boulder. If there even is an entrance buried beneath it..."

"Oh, there is," Jilly assures him, "I can feel it. We should get the axe and come back here."

"Do you know where the axe is?

Jill shrugs, "Not exactly. Well, not even a clue, really. But we can ask the guys at the Brotherhood of the Fist, since I'm kind of a member. And I am kind of itching to get into a competition at the academy. I can't spar by myself. We still have a few days on our visa here, though," Jill continues, "What should we do tomorrow?"

"Whatever we want. It's a vacation."

"Camping was fun, but it's nice having a bed to sleep in," Jilly sighs as she snuggles into Julian's embrace.

"I hope you weren't planning on sleeping just yet," Julian answers, making her giggle.

After breakfast the next morning, the couple decide to do some windsurfing in the river.

But even while they are just trying to have some fun, an ancient ruins on a tiny island in the river beckons, and Jill and Julian point their boards towards its shore.

"What do you think it is? Or, was, anyway?" Jilly asks

"I don't know," Julian answers, pulling out his scanner, "But I'm getting the same kinds of fluctuations in the readings that I got at the tomb. The whole structure might a spill over from another universe."

"Oooh, look, I've never scene a butterfly like this one," Jilly enthuses as the sparkling, pink winged creature lights on her outstretched hand.

"He wants to come home with us," Jill says.

"Did it actually speak to you?" Julian asks, his eyes on his scanner.

"No, silly," Jilly laughs, "But I can feel it. He likes me."

The couple climb to what is left of the second story of the crumbling structure.

"There may be other sites like this scattered around the village," Julian says.

"We're leaving tomorrow," Jill says, "I think after we report to Fergus, we should go to Shang Simla to find that axe, and then come back here."

_________________________________________________

For those who haven't dabbled in the Science skill, Julian's scanner is part of a science skill interaction, 'Analyze'. It requires a rock/gem/metal, insect, fish or harvestable to analyze, which luckily there are a lot of in tombs and adventure locations.