Standing Stones and the Underworld
The stone circles of Cornwall are said to be portals to various worlds. Aura Raines was on a specific mission to investigate reports that Hurlers and Pipers there were people who had been turned into stone. Unfortunately she could not help the ones who had been a victim of a serial stone turner, someone who cast their magic and made people into stone for not respecting certain things. Too much time had passed.
Aura observed that on Clarian, “When a traveler breaks local protocol, we simply re-route their navigation array. Here, it seems, they prefer a much more permanent form of archiving. These poor souls didn’t just get their logs deleted; they were permanently locked into the landscape.”
The investigation did not end there. Wielding her Clarian technology alongside a standard Earth GPSr, Aura immediately recognized the stone circles to be a giant geocaching multi-cache or an ancient puzzle. She ran.a thermal and molecular scan on the petrified dancers, searching for a hollow core. She hoped that one of them had managed to upload a print of their consciousness. There might ar least be traces of even a strong emotion, like a ghost leaving its imprint. She realized the dancers were were not prepared to do that.
She thought, “They’ve been stuck in the exact same clearing for centuries. No mileage tracked. No new discoveries. They are the ultimate un-movable trackables.” Despite that, she knew the stones served an important purpose: they encourage people to explore the mysteries of the wild, and look closely at the ground beneath their feet.
