Easter Island was the most deserted place she’d ever been. Donner said there were inhabitants, but arriving in the dark, after taking way too long to figure out what time it was here versus on the farm, made it a silent work of art.
“This is crazy,” she whispered. The sky was purple and navy blue, the stars so bright. No light pollution, like on the farm, yet it was different and the heads stood tall against the painted backdrop.
“It’s something,” even Donner was impressed. “But we can come back anytime. Take out the map and compass.”
Before they left, he revealed to her the underground system as he remembered it. There were landmarks and entrances to find. Once she was down below, the real work would begin. Her backpack, the one from Pink, was mostly empty to save room for found objects. She brought a water bottle and a couple of sandwiches along with a roll of bathroom tissue. As she’d planned before, she wore pants so she wouldn’t have to hop all over the damn world to use the toilet.
“Use the compass to find the magnetic stone,” he instructed, “and then the map will help us find the symbols.” Because the map wasn’t of the entire island, but rather a specific part of it. There was an oval stone somewhere, about 31 inches in diameter, that was magnetic. According to Donner, they would have to use that stone to find the main entrance. Unfortunately, he wasn’t entirely sure how it worked so some trial and error was expected.
“This is creepy,” she whined in her head. “How did they move all these rocks? Look at that!” She ran up to a partial wall. The seams between the stones were so close she couldn’t put a hair between them. “Why in the world would you put them together like that?” Four massive stones and a small one between them, yet they all met perfectly. “How did they even?”
“Why? Because they could. As for how, there are theories. I hold they were using a combination of magic and advanced technology.”
“Geeze.”
“If you look for it, you may find the answer to that question. It’s been supposed by theorists of the fantastical nature that this island either has or once had what they have termed mana. An inherent power. Magic. It is also attributed to the spirits of the dead as a spiritual energy.”
She stopped on the path and looked from side to side, closed her eyes and tried to feel the magic. Like the trail that led her to Arcane Arts, she came across a sparkle, but it was faint and almost indistinguishable from the forces she felt of the people afar off. “If that’s all there is then I doubt they were using magic to do all this,” she said. “It’s old for sure, but it’s super weak. Can you use up magic? Or mana?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Think of the purpose of artifacts in Society, of how they must be replaced. The power they hold is not unending. Though the person making use of the object must have innate power of their own, they aren’t able to do much without the conduit. Wands are used for this, which is why I keep shooting down your ‘let’s sell sticks’ idea. They aren’t normal sticks. They’re layered with pieces of artifacts. Cheap wands will need to be replaced. Expensive ones may last a lifetime. Of course, as I’ve also said before, I know they are not as necessary as Society has shackled itself into believing they are. However, for now, they rely on their sticks and stores of power outside their bodies.”
“If it’s all around us all the time, they should be able to use it,” Luna surmised. “But they don’t think they can.”
“It was a conspiracy and it got out of hand. The powerful wanted to control the weak, and they lost their true knowledge along the way. Now government seats are worth little more than those they claim to represent. They have authority because the fools below them allow it.”
The compass twitched, the needle turning from its original point to another. Disrupted.
“Follow it,” Donner told her. “We should be close.”
Indeed they were and the stone sat, proved magnetic with her compass, and then they were looking for the symbols which would lead them underground.
“Excavations have been done here before,” Donner explained. “But they’ve never found what truly lies below. From my understanding, the research I’ve done with the materials available, there are spells cast to keep explorers away. Unless one is specifically searching for an entrance, and going about it the proper way, they will never find what is hidden.”
“I want to go to Atlantis next,” she told him as she examined the stone.
“Good luck with that. I’ve yet to find a credible account of its resting place. I won’t say it didn’t exist, but I have no idea where it is.”
“Maybe it’s like this entrance,” she said. “Maybe you have to look for it in a certain way.”
“That is possible. If that's the case, it may remain undisturbed until Ink Pen wipes out everything.”
“What a waste. I want to find it more then.” Thirty minutes were spent in the pursuit of a clue, with nothing to show for it, before Luna decided to take a different approach. “Listen,” she told Donner. “If they were using magic back then, maybe we need to use magic to find it now. They wouldn’t want people to stumble across it, right? You said so yourself. You can’t find it by accident.”
“We’ve made no progress so you might as well try.” He was frustrated by it all. “There was no indication of the necessity in my studies, but I will admit information was lacking. Records of Easter Island are mostly supposition at this point. There are ancestral stories passed down, but I saw little of this within them.”
“What were you looking for?” she asked. “You must have meant to come here sometime.”
“I did,” he admitted. “Though I wasn’t sure what I would find. When one is in pursuit of power, one must search it out. This was as good a place as any to look, better by some metrics. Undisturbed for thousands of years.”
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“I’ll try not to mess with too much then,” she promised. “So that when you get your body back you can come and take other stuff.”
He would never thank her for that and even if he was going to, they were interrupted by the greenish glow of previously hidden hieroglyphs. Some of the same symbols on her map. The problem was they didn’t know what they meant, what to do with them, or why they suddenly appeared.
"Maybe I stepped in just the right spot?"
“I don't know. Regardless, they’re supposed to lead to the caverns,” Donner said.
“But you don’t know how?”
Silence.
“Good. That’s perfect. Well,” she cracked her knuckles, “I’ll find out.”
“Don’t you dare force your way in!”
“I won’t! I told you I’ll leave it mostly alone! Stupid.”
“Don’t insult me, Luna, you have a history of doing things you shouldn’t be doing.”
“Hardly. I’m six! What kind of history can I even have?”
“Oh don’t get me started-”
Ignoring the rest of his complaints she found the thread of the lime gleam and followed it. It didn’t go far, rather extended around the area in a circle and then connected back to the magnetic rock. She walked the path to its end and reached beneath the stone. She felt nothing and looked instead, to find similar symbols, glimmering like the others but these led nowhere else.
“We don’t speak this language, huh?”
“No, and I doubt anyone does anymore. Considering it can’t be accessed at all without magic, it’s undoubtedly lost to time.”
“That’s okay, I can force it.”
"I told you not to!"
Which meant feeling where it connected, finding out where it was going, and breaking the phantasmal barrier separating her, the physical, from the metaphysical. What they hid wasn’t simply underground, it was behind a partition of dense enchantments. No matter where people of the future dug, whether they were from next week or the next century, they wouldn’t find what she found.
And she wasn’t much impressed with any of it.
“They did all that for pots and shit?”
Literal pots and shit. And other stuff, but still.
“They must have had some purpose.” Donner, though trying to maintain respect for those of the ancient past, was also skeptical. Putting aside her disregard for his instructions he continued, “I doubt this is what they are truly hiding.”
She nodded. That had to be the case. It better be the case. If it wasn’t, this whole place was destined for the bottom of the ocean.
“Even if it isn’t,” he continued. “The pottery can be used as artifacts.”
“Great,” she said. “That’s great. Except no it’s not. There’s no way that’ll sell for much! It’s too fragile.”
“All artifacts are worth something,” he insisted, “and this would require buyers to return for more.”
“I don’t want to sell pots!”
“It’s not up to you, Luna. You sell what you find.” He was getting loud. “Keep looking!”
So she did and thanked everything that hadn’t yet been eaten by Ink Pen she found, at the base of black rock wall, another faint trail that disappeared through a crack.
She could feel things on the other side.
“Are ghosts real?”
“They can be.”
“Uhh… can they do anything?”
“Not generally.”
“But they can sometimes?”
“It depends on the strength of their attachment and I doubt there are true spirits here. You might be sensing the past. Look,” he directed her attention to a crystalline outcropping. “Quartz. Limestone. These minerals act as recorders. If something of great significance happened here, something that caused emotions to run high, it may have been recorded.”
“Yeah, I hope that’s what it is because the people over there are not happy campers.”
She felt panic, sadness, pain, and fear.
“I expect there was an accident,” Donner surmised. “The magic did not last long enough for all to escape or perhaps they were unwillingly forced to remain. That was a common practice among ancient cultures. Buried alive so that in death they would continue to protect the treasures.”
“What if that’s what they’re doing? What if they are actual ghosts who both protect and attack? What if they have lightsabers?”
“Whatever it is, they cannot defeat you in the long run so it doesn’t matter. Do you want treasure or not?”
She did, so she broke the real wall and a rush of cold air blew her hair, filled her lungs, and made her pass out straight to the bridge between life and death.
“I told you!” she shouted, pointing at Donner, which she knew was rude but he got her killed so she didn’t care. “I told you! They were real ghosts and they murdered me!”
“And you’ll return like nothing happened and they will be gone. That was doubtless the extent of their power. A final, dying curse. Nothing of those ancient ones will remain now. And yet,” his eyes gleamed, “we’ve seen power as it once was. Even in death they managed to endure. A residual spirit, hardly more than a memory I’m sure, that did the job it was meant to do. Society has nothing in comparison.”
“Oh, well, I’m so glad ya got ta see that,” she spoke in her worst midwestern accent. “Fer gosh sakes, I jus had ta die. If only I’da known it was that easy.”
“Luna, stop it.”
She did, not because he deserved it, but because she wanted to see what all the fuss was for.
It was totally worth it.
“Holy shit!” she exclaimed upon returning to the land of the living. “It’s gold! It’s real, actual golden treasure!”
Even Donner was shocked. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
“No wonder they hid it behind pots and poop. But, finders keepers, and the losers don’t even know they lost it, so it’s fine and I don’t feel bad at all.” The question was what to do with it. She didn’t have a good place to hide it at the farm.
“The bank,” Donner said. “This will all go into your vault. Your number was 744. They explained this to you at the time and I knew you weren’t paying attention.”
“I got bored!”
“State your name, 'Dweorg Bank', and vault number. Everything of value that you have a legitimate claim to will instantly transport to your property.”
“Wait, that was its name? That’s not very original.”
“They are a practical race and there are no other dweorg run banking institutions this side of magical society so there is no issue.”
“I want to look at everything first.”
“Don’t waste time, you have no idea what could go wrong. Better men than you have tarried and lost what they thought they’d won.”
“You’re talking about yourself aren’t you?”
He did not deign to answer.