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Chapter 8 by TheUnfathomable TheUnfathomable

Well, let's see what it is shall we?

A Scavenger Scarab

Carefully picking up the little beetle made of sand, you try and figure out how exactly you open its Character Sheet. Just prompting for it seems to only open your own, so there must be another way. You spend the next few minutes in trial and error, only finding a somewhat limited version in the end.

Level 1 Sandstone Scarab
Monster, Construct/Ancient
Feats
Packer - Can gather up any material into a collection that maintains its shape, even if the material is a liquid or powder.
Hauler - Can carry up to 10x its own weight.
Insect Wings - Has the ability to fly at twice its normal speed as long as it is not carrying objects. It moves at its normal speed while carrying something. This flight can be in any direction, though they fly at 3/4 speed sideways, and 1/2 speed backwards.

Hmm, it was useful. And you suppose a hauler is what you need right now. You try to tell it to start gathering the sand, but after a moment of it doing nothing, you remember that you can't speak. Annoyed at your circumstances once again, you project in your mind what you want from it, hoping it may trigger like the Character Menu.

At last, the sandstone carapace that is its back opened up and it began to fly over to the large pile of sand. As it hovered over and then slowly landed upon the great mound of sand, its begins to crawl around before making a strange spinning motion with its legs. Slowly sand began to bunch up below it, until it formed the sand into a great ball, larger than it and around the size of your head. The scarab then rolled the ball like a dung beetle over to your feet, before flying back and starting again.

You watch it in awe for a couple of seconds. This thing really has an amazing build for this, you mentally apologize for doubting it due to its size. You then snap yourself out of it and examine the ball of sand. As you look at it closely, a pop-up appears.

Sand (x10)
Silicon dioxide
A gathering of minute particles of glass-like material. It is commonly found in beaches or deserts. The fact that you are reading this, means you are probably not having a day at the beach.

You glared as you finished the floating text. Did Sucram, the god of knowledge, have to call you out like that? You are already well aware of you lack of options, his stressing of that was not necessary. Regardless, if the Scarab was capable of getting you 10 sand every ball, you were going to have plenty to spare.

You reach out your hand and grabbed the ball of sand, only for it to instantly vanish. Looking around for it, you find another pop-up has graced your vision.

Sand (x10) moved to storage

Well, that was convenient. At least you wouldn't have to worry about a place to store all of this sand. And woe be the day you would worry about your sand being stolen, whatever would you do?

Jokes aside, you very much lacked anything to do that wasn't just watching the Scarab at work. Even that got boring, so you switched to surfing through the menus, investigating everything that was new.

Strangely, the construction menu is incredibly limited. You have some decorations and traps you could place in specific spots, but you didn't have the ability to free build rooms or other such things. The strange map that appears when you try to build reveals the size of the room you are in, and that it ends in a single door. Whenever you tried to look at one of the many tabs that weren't to build decorations or traps, the same message would appear.

Option not available until sufficient Tomb Restoration.

You metaphorically slow blinked at this message. Most of the features of your unique dungeon, required you to either clear out sand from rooms or rebuild broken statues. This, was going to be your (un)life... You gaze upwards, offering your middle finger to any gods or beings of higher fate that would care to look.

With your eternal damnation to cleaning a series of stone hallways dealt with, you got back to the tasks at hand. Finding yourself in fitting need of an activity, you decide to personally clean off the sand from the walls in order to access the murals.

It takes you at least an hour to fully clear off all of the murals you have already seen. By this time, you are quite convinced you have the highest stockpile of sand of anyone in the world. Someone would have to have some form of disorder to do anything that required this much sand, or at least absolutely nothing to do.

You examine your work, finding that while they are all mostly repaired, they are still all of the same scenes that you remember. Satisfied with this, you decide to start trying to clear the second image of the new wall, curious as to the story of the white lizardman.

As you clean, you ponder theories as to what you or this place may be. Katash is not a name you remember being in an event before, and neither is Caluo. That means that they are either minor, or older enough to already have been well dead by the time you were created. Which... made sense you realize, as you came to be in a structure that was their tomb.

So, you most certainly didn't know of their lives firsthand, and your information otherwise was severely lacking. Therefore, you best hope was educated guesses. It seems that the black Lizardfolk had some form of authority, whether they were royalty or simply of high standing due to abilities. Yet, they were opposed to the white Lizardfolk, who they turned the rest against. You could not yet tell why aside from the stereotypical battle of light and dark being represented in shades of whites and blacks.

Regardless of the reason, it seems the important part had to do with the child of the black Lizardfolk. Perhaps this child was either Katash or Caluo? You have no guess yet, but your money is on one of them. By extension of this guess, you could predict that perhaps the other mural depicted the other of the two.

But that raises a rather large question. This is the Tomb of Katash *and* Caluo by the title, yet both their events and their murals seem to pit them against each other. It begs the question, if they were seemingly blood rivals or something of the sort, for what reason were they buried here together? Why were these murals crafted, portraying different stories right across from each other?

Your questions continued unanswered as you excavated more murals from the thick piles of sand.

Does something interrupt your house cleaning?

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