Welcome to Gaia! ::

The trek through the seemingly endless wastes pressed on, eventually seeing both one of the springs and the ruins of what looked to be an ancient city... All that remained of the houses were their foundations and a few columns here and there, and a curiously placed statue of a man in the middle of the town's square... It stood robed upon a pedestal and held a strange-looking staff up in the air, the masterful craftsmanship of the stone statue marred by what appeared to be the decay of time and the merciless onslaught of the wastes... The fact that it had survived for this long was a miracle in and of itself. Harkel looked over to the town. He addressed the group before heading in.

"Alright. While this doesn't look like much, many of the Shadow People had houses with cellars that had multiple levels, places to keep their objects of business and treasures... You'll have to find the cellar doors around the foundations that are left over. I'm trusting you can see them..." He walked into the ruined town... There was something particularly melancholy about entering an abandoned and dead city... There were no skeletal remains of any people, and the town did look absolutely ancient, down to the crumbling foundations of the homes that used to be here and the collapsing columns, and the curiously cracked statue at its center.

He pointed at Kiyoshi and the Shinobi. "You two, stay out here and let us know if you see anything coming at us." He looked to the others. "The rest of you, you're with me." He approached a house and brushed aside the dust on the floor, revealing a wooden trap door. He slammed his staff on its surface, the door collapsing and revealing a staircase heading downward. He cocked his head down and gestured to the others. "Get in."

Harkel, as soon as he got to the bottom of the stairs, scolded Sefas and smacked him in the back of the head with his staff. "You idiot, such a massive secret wouldn't be in the first level and survive! There'd be secret passages to the lower levels! Now, I suggest you go up with the other two before you try and throw the investigation off track with another of your whimsical insights!" He pointed the staff up the stairs, Sefas muttering angrily, but he obeyed... He was the expert, sad as it was to say. As the alchemist shuffled back up the stairs, Harkel looked to his remaining company, Izual and Neysa. "Alright. You two look for some kind of loose panel or a document that looks like a map."