Amentans colonizing places
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With some stretching, yes! Aside from the mysterious sixth one.

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Huh. Would some Dwellin like to see the pictures?

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Sure!

 

There's... Kind of a lot... Of angry theological debate about the sixth figure. And some murders. And a small war.

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...oh dear.

What are the dominant hypotheses?

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The sixth god did something horrible and was deliberately erased. The emperor of this place was pretending to be a god. The Amentans must have faked this somehow.

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Ah.

They will be more circumspect about getting Dwellin consultations on what they find going forward. They keep exploring the tunnels, and eventually have the magic grey and green try opening the additional doors with various poking.

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It turns out the mine tunnels have traps too. Rockfalls, and pockets of carbon dioxide. Not nearly as many as the fortress gauntlet (which terminates in another big door, turns out), but if they're not cautious enough there could be a casualty or two.

The additional doors do not react to poking. Except the one at the end of the fortress, which is very heavy but can be simply pushed open on all-but-frictionless hinges.

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They're wearing hard hats, but somebody does break a few bones in a rockfall and some carbon dioxide gets someone unconscious before their companion drags them out.

They give the big door a shove.

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Just beyond the great gate is a several hundred meter open area with another bus stop, and a wide balcony with a guard rail that overlooks - a huge, perfectly dark cavern.

Once floodlights are set up, they reveal terraces and buildings built across much of the area and a stone city built all along the walls, with the centerpiece being a multi-skyscraper-sized grand pillar in the center with lots of tall arched architecture all along it. Looks like a major section broke off and crushed a few city blocks below at some point.

There's some sort of elevator bank - no cables, broken, or at least inactive - and two wide paths to either side that slowly make their way down to the 'ground' level.

Also, whenever someone with magic passes the threshold, they see the character that the best-guess-translation for is 'wrong/incorrect' flash white in the center of their vision for a few seconds before vanishing.

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Weird and concerning! Maybe just means "this is broken". What's in the buildings?

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Housing, restaurants, back alleys, guard posts, animal pens, workshops, training facilities and arenas, both individual and collective baths, a thorough sewer system. It all looks Dwellin-y, though there are also several large hotels, which modern Dwellin don't really do. Remnants of furniture. Occasional poles or spheres or boxes or - screens? - of magic rock, a few of which flicker or glow to magic-havers. The occasional intact metal object, usually weapons. Places recognizable as Dwellin-style offices, with pomp and seating and meeting rooms but no actual desks. 

Oh, and traps. Alleys and streets that upon inspection seem designed to suddenly become chokepoints. Neighborhoods of apartment buildings that form miniature fortresses around their little courtyard.

Nothing organic except very occasional long-dead Dwellin crushed under this or trapped inside that. One of them scratched the characters for 'abandonment' and 'hopelessness' into the rock walls of their tomb over and over.

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What a weird way to build a city. Is there much sign of how they got food in here - would the animal pens and the areas with soil cover it - how did their sewers work -

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The farm section wouldn't cover it by itself. The animal pens might, but there don't really seem to be correspondingly many butchers. The sewers... Are all lined with magic-rock strips and lead to a central facility in a hidden underlayer of the city that leads to a huge flooded reservoir with side channels that must be pumping stations of some sort. There's a whole buried grid of corridors and support facilities down here, some of it - might be aquaponics? It looks sort of like aquaponics setups. A lot of it is flooded, though.

(The big central spire resists casual entry.)

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Aquaponics might fill the logistics gap. They ask the geologists if there was any obvious reason not to live on the surface around this time - volcanic eruption or something? Ice age?

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There's still a pretty wide range of possible ages but uh, they think the terraforming happened about 15-20 million years ago, maybe. It's sort of hard to be sure.

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Stoneheart manages to email 'May I come back. Stoneheart.' to Kiki Sunatami.

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Kiki replies Sure, you're welcome! Where do you want to be picked up?

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No need.

She comes out of the desert, kicking up sand as she slides along the ground at trainlike speed, two days later. Nods to the perimeter greys and asks if they're having animal trouble before going into camp.

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They're not having to shoot at anything particularly large. Wow, that's a cool method of locomotion.

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Magic! Very convenient. She figured out how to charge hers off a wall outlet and was inspired by electric trains, Amenta is cool too.

She'll head down the tunnel and to the base camp.

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The archaeology team is there, busily analyzing things and discussing things. Purples are making sure to collect all matter out of place to be compressed and dealt with in some minimally disruptive manner.

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It's kind of hard to try to continue. Everything is changing. Ancient things unburied. The whole place is full of meaning.

She hangs out in the temple for a while, frowning at figure #6.

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"Please don't, uh, start a war over it, we're not really sure why that happened.

Did you see the report on the library on the island we found?" It's hard to get total privacy down here.

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"-My response is more 'sulking' than 'outrage'. But it's not like it's terribly hard to start a war among us. Probably for the best that nobody decided it merited war against Amentans. And yes. It must have been built by someone... Very stubborn. Has any Dwellin ever told you what the experience of trying to read or write something lengthy is like?"

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"I don't think so, no."

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