==> Aradia: Examine surroundings.
It was really quite a shame, Aradia mused. As she looked down she had a view of the tattered end of her skirt, her shoe encased feet, and beyond that the ground where the destroyed ruins of her hive sat. It was quite a ways down, though her wings kept her aloft with no issue.
But, the point was, it really was quite a shame. Her god clothes had been quite nice!
She hoped that they had merely gotten swallowed up by her fetch modus instead of disappeared completely. She would like to have them back eventually, but she supposed this simple, workable attire was good enough for now.
Aradia looked upward to consider the ruddy sky. It was beginning to lighten off toward the horizons, the prickly edges of mountains jutting into the sky with impudent delight. A cool wind caught at her hair, billowing it about her face and shoulders. A look back down revealed nothing but dusty wasteland for miles beyond the ruins of her hive.
She folded her wings and let herself plummet.
The ground rushed up to meet her, the wind of her passage sending her hair to stream out behind it like a banner. The thrill of the fall ignited in her chest and brought a wide grin to her face. The feeling of flight remained like none other!
The feeling of feeling was really unlike any other, actually.
Aradia brought her feet forward, wings working quickly to slow her descent. A cloud of dust went up, fanned around her by the downsweep of her fluttering wings. She touched down lightly, one foot then the other, and looked up.
The desrepair of her hive had managed to become worse. The vines that clung so stringently to the cracked and broken walls had turned brittle and brown. Dust had piled up against the inner walls at a slight grade, and through it here and there, where it had blown away just a bit, Aradia could see things poking through.
Things that had managed to survive Sollux' power.
She stepped over a low, crumbled part of the wall and into what had once been her home. There was not much left. The blackened, curled edge of a poster stuck out over there, while the shattered edge of an ancient piece of pottery lay mostly exposed in the other direction. A few half melted dice, and the charred, cracked remains of a book occupied another small space.
She stepped forward toward the latter, feeling almost curious to see her life laid out before her like one of her dig sites. A slight crack stopped her, and she stepped back to find a gear in the indent of her footprint.
Aradia crouched down, and picked it up. It was blackened, but she suspected it still useable. Looking ahead, a small trail of springs and similar odds and ends poked out of the dust until she spotted the corner of a music box. She settled on her knees and reached forward to dig it out with her fingers. Perhaps she would see if any of her equipment had survived. She hadn't been too interested when last she'd been at her hive.
Once she'd unearthed enough of the musicbox to get her fingers around it, she pulled it free. The condition was stil relatively good, almost as good as the ones she'd used to alchemize her timeboxes during the game.
She dusted it off, cleaning a few smudges of dirt out of the grooves on the faceplate. Aradia set her claws against the top and attempted to open it. It appeared to be stuck from the dirt in its hinges and caked between in the grooves. That was unfortunate!
Aradia looked up, scanning the barren, dusty piles around her. She could remember her hive in the medium, overgrown with grass and vines amongst which she'd recovered several useful things. Here, with all this dirt covering everything it was more like she were exploring the past, and she had no tools for it!
Still, she hoped she might locate something....
She did not spot anything to help her with her current quandry, but an amber brown curve sticking out of a nearby dirt heap did catch her attention.
The music box was set aside in favor of crawling over to it and sliding her fingers into the loose earth. She caught her fingers against the underside of a familiar curve, and with a smile, tugged upward. It took a bit of doing, but it came loose shortly.
Clutching one curved horn in each hand--so much like her own--Aradia held the skull aloft. It was cracked, blackened in patches and bleached in others. Part of it had even been melted down from the intensity of the blast, but the skull of her lusus was recognizeable anyway. The lower jawas was missing completely.
She me the skulls helplessly toothy grin with one of her own. "You look well considering the circumstances," she said cheerfully.
With a glance back over her shoulder, Aradia shuffled around on her knees and scooted back over to where she'd left the musicbox. The skull joined it, and she shifted around until she was seated comfortable, legs crossed.
Reaching out, she plucked the bits of gears and springs out of the sand, and dropped them into a pile beside the other two objects she'd collected. After a moment she sat back and considered her sylladex.
Perhaps the spirits would be cooperative?
When she activated it, the planchette spun crazily across the board. The sudden sursurration of voices in her head was nearly enough to make in wince. Their clarity was a great deal more than usual as well.
She could hear them arguing over what her result would be.
Aradia reached over and picked up the skull again, content to ignore them in favor of digging bits of root and dirt out of where it had been packed into the eye sockets. When her Sylladex did finally spit something out, it appeared she was in luck!
Once again she set aside the skull to pull the Crosbytop close enough for examination. She was immediately drawn to a memo, of which she took a short time to examine it before reaching for the keys.
