With Lavin safely on the Aliya with Gurgeh to look after him, we decided it was time to retrieve the statue. Slightly concerned about Lavin's radiation poisoning, Sayah suggested a geiger counter might be a good investment.
Tahir, Lila and Sayah set out together. Alqadi, who had finally been persuaded to get off the spaceship, followed them at a distance to check for observers. He tipped them off to a drone following them. After a rather confusing comms conversation, in which Tahir repeatedly referred to 'it', which Alqadi assumed to mean the drone they'd just been talking about while Tahir actually meant the statue, we came up with a plan.
It was evening, but shops were still open, so the main group went shopping for environmental scanners. While Tahir loudly bought a second hand scanner, and Lila bought a brand new one, Alqadi made his way to the bridge and quietly retrieved the statue. Once he let the others know he was clear, they went looking for the statue themselves, and of course, didn't find it.
We met up back at the Aliya and examined the statue. It was mildly radioactive, but nothing that caused us any concern. It portrayed a monkey, dancing, wearing a hat and holding a mace and an object we couldn't identify but which might be a mask. Sayah compared it with some photos of the item, and spotted that it looked slightly different. The arms weren't in exactly the same place.
It was late, and we all needed sleep. We took some photos of the statue, then put it in a box and left it with cameras pointed at it. Alqadi was somewhat concerned that it might wake up and try to kill us all in our sleep, but when we checked the next morning it hadn't moved.
We contacted Merez and let him know that Lavin had authorised us to sell the statue. We arranged another meeting at the cantina. Once again, Alqadi hung back, leaving the other three to do the negotiations.
Merez's face lit up when he saw the statue. Sayah took the lead. She was asking for a high price, and he was offering a much lower one, but none of the crew wanted to be short changed when the Aliya needed constant maintenance. With the help of Lila's enthusiastic explanation of how the statue had moved, Sayah got a good price for the statue - enough to keep the ship up and running for a while and also provide Lavin with proper medical care after we were gone.
A bunch of syndicate goons watched us from another booth, while Alqadi watched them. Merez didn't seem too concerned about them. It looked like they might be working for him.
We headed back to the ship, and on the way ran into Jinna again, wanting to know if we'd found Lavin. We reassured her that he was fine, but Sayah insisted that we had to make sure he was OK to have visitors before she could see him.
Lila had found something interesting while unwrapping the statue - a tag with a set of coordinates on it, which she suspected to be the dig site on Kua. Perhaps we should pay it a visit?
Lavin was stable, and quite keen to see Jinna. He took the money we offered him, but declined the offer to join us at the dig. Jinna was going to look after him now. With Lavin on his way, we did some pre-mission shopping, then departed the station to head planetside.
A relatively short journey later (perhaps not improved by Sayah's efforts to learn to play the oud) we were approaching the planet. A rather out of the way area, on the opposite side of the planet to the monolith, and with only a few settlements of locals nearby. Sayah ran the ship's sensors over the area we were heading for, and found a Legion encampment with a warning about possible interference in the area. Tahir carefully avoided the Legion and selected a promising looking landing spot in the form of a large flat plateau.
The plateau itself looked a little less natural once we were standing on it. Someone had sculpted this place, possibly some of the First Come. Checking the coordinates again, we realised we were pretty much on top of them, and climbed down to the next level of the plateau, where we found three caves.
The middle cave was blocked by rubble. Alqadi suggested using the ship's guns to blast it out of the way, but Tahir reckoned it would be too tricky to fly, and Sayah insisted that shooting was not the proper way to do archaeology.
The first cave had the excavation team's base camp. Some boxes and other bits and pieces were still lying around, and Alqadi and Sayah started trying to get them open. Alqadi succeeded where Sayah failed, but there was nothing very interesting in the boxes, besides some arrakh that Sayah took an interest in.
What we didn't find was any bodies. The plot thickens...
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