Nora, Roxxy and Brock rushed outside

A large amount of dust hovered in the air, its source coming from the digsite! The workers panicked, scrambling and shouting things in Mongolian. One of them ran up to Roxxy and they conversed in broken French. Nora only managed to catch snippets; Roxxy asking about what is going on and only getting vague answers. They all followed him, jumping down into the muddy archeological dig. After a few moments, the dust cleared away.

Half the dig collapsed!

Roxxy started yelling angrily at everyone, but got distracted halfway through as she realised what was uncovered; what everyone was looking at. It was a crude chamber, with rotting wooden supports filled with cracked clay pots and tablets. But at the back, against the wall, was an entrance. An entrance to a tunnel carved out of rock; a tunnel that remained unnaturaly dark even as it was exposed to the outdoor light. A tunnel that seemed to howl as a gust of air blew into it.

A tunnel that almost everybody inched away from.

Suddenly, one of the workers shouted something that was incomprehensible to Nora, pointed at the tunnel with his finger, and scrambled as far away from it as possible. That seemed to have shaken quite a few other workers as well, and some of them turned tail. "Hey wait! Come back!" Roxxy shouted after them, but it was too late, most of them were already gone. Only a small handful of workers remained, and only after Roxxie promised to triple their pay.

"Nora, have you ever seen anything like this?" Roxxie asked.

"No, this is quite new to me," she placed her hand on the carved entrance, "my workers never run away from me."

"Hardy-Har."

"But no, I've never seen anything like this. It's as if... it's as if this thing was dug out with modern equipment; but that's... that's not possible! This chamber looks positively ancient!" She looked about, taking care not to step on anything. She warily peered at one of the tablets next to the tunnel entrance. "Ancient Chinese? Look, there's smatterings of Ancient Chinese among that incomprehensible language. This doesn't make any sense. And they look to be roughly a millenium old, maybe even older!"

"Hm. I'm guessing the answers to why probably lie inside, and there's only one way to find out. Brock, lets go."

Nora looked at her in surprise. "You can't be serious! Right now? You have no idea if it's safe to enter or not! Besides, this tunnel looks like it might go on for miles..."

"Psh, never stopped us before. Or you for that matter." Roxxie started to climb out of the hole to prepare her gear. "It's fine with me if you want to stay up here with all these dusty pots, it's no skin off my back, but I'm going where the real good stuff is at!" Nora couldn't help but huff; she was right, she would much rather go exploring down there, even if her instincts were screaming at her not to.

"Fine, I'll come along. Tomorrow. I need the sleep, and you need to bribe some more locals to come along, heh."

"Why would I do that?"

"Well you're not going to be the one carrying everything out, are you?"

Roxxie grimaced and grunted in begrudging surrender.

The rest of the day went by without more incidents, but no one seemed to talk to one another during dinner.