It was the tenth day of the Third Month of Imperial Year 1482, or in a long forgotten reckoning 18,267,195 CE.







Professor Third Class Ktras Tivat-III Rondi of the Imperial Scientific Service (Geology) made her way through the badlands of Flaimarxal. A remote frontier province only recently opened up as the rail lines reached into the Northern Twin Continent's inland, the Daithaxit Empire was keen on exploring the various sites in the Empire both for economic gain and to show the world (specifically the League of Kingdoms) that it remained the leading scientific powerhouse. The site was dry and hot and she'd been grateful that fresh water was always on hand, but it was a good dig sight. She chipped away at the stone, past planks and small items. Many of which had been rusted or decayed into unknowable lumps but some of which were of an interest to the Imperial Academy of Engineers, the Ministry of Industry and the various industrial enterprises they did work with. She eventually found what she was looking for and began to carefully chip away the sandstone around it before extracting a relic of an age long past. It was small and round with no worthwhile incisors and not too dissimilar to those of Monkeys.







Rust Patches had been known of for thousands of years prior and had been vaguely associated with a variety of legends, from the remains wicked People of Iron that were brought low in the Great River Civilization's Epic of Nagmik to being the scraps of the great creator god Hormzi's forge of the Trideist's old holy texts legends. As a Rat of Science, Ktras considered such fairy tales to be distractions, though she did feel that there was a bitter irony to the fate of the monkey folk and the People of Iron in that oldest of written tales. They had raised a mighty civilization of iron and concrete which was laid low. According to plant findings the temperature spiked during their period and the climate shifted. This probably did them in, though there was still the frightening fact that many rust sight deposits showed signs of melting and had a layout that had led some of her colleagues to propose massive explosions equivalent to setting off a battleships' weight in cordite off. This apparently did in the Monkey People and had made her nervous. Her ancestors at the time by all accounts were small creatures the size of pets.







Skulls of the monkey people were common enough, but this was a nice find and if nothing else it could be auctioned off to help fund the expedition. The age of the Monkey People fascinated her ever since her father red her "The Kingdoms of the Iron Monkeys" as a child. She never stopped loving those scientific romance books and had been idly writing one for the past few years, especially since she read of the uncovering of a small figure of the Triangle Rat in a dig site a thousand Zheim away, but her real passion lay in the actual hard evidence of a world when Rats were small things that scampered about in the shadows beneath the flat feet of Monkey-People.





