He chuckled at the surprised question, giving the younger man a wry smile. "How would you follow a shark beneath the earth? Even with mastered earth magic I can't do what they do. And they're rare creatures, from what I've read. We've probably had more sightings in the past year than the last fifty years combined." And half of them had been by him. "They're far more likely to eat an animal when they surface than a human, it seems like, and when that happens there wouldn't necessarily be people around to see or catalogue it, or at least there hasn't been before." Times, they were a-changing, though. "If you want to start a program for it, though, the Loreseekers would help you record your findings if you needed assistance with it."
Not a boarding house or orphanage, then. Siblings, but not. And no one else went into the special room, even though the next-oldest child had to have been fourteen or fifteen, if Oliver's youthful appearance was anything to go by. "I'll be curious to hear what was in that room, when you remember," he said with a smile, not having any ideas of what to ask next at the moment.
Luckily the cellar door had been found and offered a distraction. It took both of them to open, the door finally pulling loose with a breaking of planks as some of the edges crumbled away, but the broad wing of the door flew up and swung over to fall on broken hinges that had rusted there a hundred years ago. "Or close to it," Jigano admitted as he caught his balance, then unhooked the lantern he always carried at his belt. He lifted it forward and saw stone steps descending, still solid after all those years. He began to walk down them cautiously, the lantern's soft glow illuminating, but not very far. A shift to fox eyes gave him better sight, and he was relieved that nothing seemed to be moving in the darkness below ground. "This is just a guess on my part, but from the pattern of destruction, my guess is that when the barrier went up it created a shockwave - or perhaps the barrier itself expanded swiftly from the Spire's locus - that damaged or shattered many buildings. The stoutest, like the Atheneum and Temple, remained mostly standing, but those that were less sturdy, or made primarily of wood rather than stone, were knocked down. It must have been incredibly chaotic... and the survivors took shelter primarily in those homes and buildings which had survived mostly intact. They had their hands full repairing those, and the population has decreased since then, so there was little need to fix more buildings, at least until the Outlanders started showing up in force to bolster the numbers."
The lantern's steady white glow would reveal several large shapes in the shadows; a large moth-eaten tarp covering what looked like a stack of boxes, a dozen large casks stacked in the corner, and more crates at the lantern's edge.
Not a boarding house or orphanage, then. Siblings, but not. And no one else went into the special room, even though the next-oldest child had to have been fourteen or fifteen, if Oliver's youthful appearance was anything to go by. "I'll be curious to hear what was in that room, when you remember," he said with a smile, not having any ideas of what to ask next at the moment.
Luckily the cellar door had been found and offered a distraction. It took both of them to open, the door finally pulling loose with a breaking of planks as some of the edges crumbled away, but the broad wing of the door flew up and swung over to fall on broken hinges that had rusted there a hundred years ago. "Or close to it," Jigano admitted as he caught his balance, then unhooked the lantern he always carried at his belt. He lifted it forward and saw stone steps descending, still solid after all those years. He began to walk down them cautiously, the lantern's soft glow illuminating, but not very far. A shift to fox eyes gave him better sight, and he was relieved that nothing seemed to be moving in the darkness below ground. "This is just a guess on my part, but from the pattern of destruction, my guess is that when the barrier went up it created a shockwave - or perhaps the barrier itself expanded swiftly from the Spire's locus - that damaged or shattered many buildings. The stoutest, like the Atheneum and Temple, remained mostly standing, but those that were less sturdy, or made primarily of wood rather than stone, were knocked down. It must have been incredibly chaotic... and the survivors took shelter primarily in those homes and buildings which had survived mostly intact. They had their hands full repairing those, and the population has decreased since then, so there was little need to fix more buildings, at least until the Outlanders started showing up in force to bolster the numbers."
The lantern's steady white glow would reveal several large shapes in the shadows; a large moth-eaten tarp covering what looked like a stack of boxes, a dozen large casks stacked in the corner, and more crates at the lantern's edge.
