Marco started his explanation slowly, intending to hold back some of the more sensitive details of the adventure. Soon, he decided that didn't matter. Activating Captain's Cry just to be sure, he verified the village wasn't under any kind of spell that made it seem something it wasn't before dumping as much information on the older logger as he could handle.

When Youff pressed, Marco told him everything about the illusion temple. He described the black stone, the enemies, and every single thing they had learned about Quill's class. He told him about Quill's fields of terror, the areas where his big orbs of magic power held sway. Then, truly hoping the man would have advice, he began talking about how his own powers had been shifting, growing from what small defeats he had been able to bring to Quill's power.

It took longer to tell him than it took the village to make and eat lunch. The entire time, Youff sat there, absorbing it all, maintaining his silence even after Marco ran out of things to tell and finally turned to his own meal.

It was Youff who broke the silence. “You said Quill has pylons. Structures that let him spread his control over whole regions, or something of that nature. Is that right?”

"That's what the system has been telling us, yes."

“Are you sure my island doesn’t have one?”

Marco hesitated. He couldn't really say that it was likely the island did. Outside of the temple, they hadn't seen even a hint of Quill's power in the village. Even if Quill was holding something back for later, Marco was sure he would actually need an amplifier to get his powers to work in the first place for this island. After all, he had the temple.

The flip side was that without knowing for sure, it would be foolish to assume he had any idea of how Quill's mind worked. He had tried to imagine himself in Quill's place, doing the same things Quill was doing. It was impossible for him to understand the motivations that could get a person to that point. Not just hard, but impossible. All he had were words like greed or power-hungry and they fell far short of a real picture. There might be a pylon here Quill had just refused to use. The man was a mystery, and mysterious people moved in mysterious ways.

“I don’t know. I’ve never looked for one here,” Marco said.

“Then you’ll check?” Yousif asked. "It would make me feel a whole lot better, I'll tell you that."

Marco met his eyes and, in that moment, understood it wasn’t a request, exactly. It also wasn't an order. It was more like Youff was appealing to a fundamental law, one that Marco only later realized was decency.

“Yes. I’ll check.”

“Good.”

Youff nodded once, satisfied. Marco sat back and finally finished his lunch, finishing just before it went truly cold.

—

By the time the plates were gathered and washed clean by the townsfolk on mess duty, Marco had already discussed things with Elisa, and the crew had already settled on a course of action. Marco pushed his chair back, stood, and stretched before gesturing for the others to follow. “Let’s take a walk. If there’s anything strange here, we’ll find it. I should be able to tell if there's something nearby, but just in case, I want all our eyes on this problem.”

The town was a compact knot of mismatched streets, the result of buildings put up without much of a plan over a couple of generations. Roofs of slate and patched wood leaned under the constant push of salty wind, and narrow alleys cut between warehouses that smelled of dried fish and tar. The main square was little more than dirt, benches, and a well scattered around a small stage for what Marco assumed were town-wide announcements.

There wasn't much to search there, but Marco and his crew looked anyways, peering down the well, under the stage, and walking every inch of it to make sure nothing was buried.

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After circling the square a few times, they cut down a lane that opened toward the docks. The smell of salt and fish in the air intensified, but the docks themselves were more or less deserted. This was a town that focused on crafting, not sailing. They had free rein as they searched, which made the process of confirming nothing was there fast.

Marco slowed as they moved from the docks through the rest of the town, letting the crew fan out a bit.

“There's a better chance we find things around the outskirts,” he said. “Everything we've checked so far is old. It would have been the first stuff the settlers built. Look harder at anything that's newer.”

The outskirts of the town were built up, just not in the same way as the core of town. First, there was a row of houses that had been built around the edges once the settlers appeared to understand they'd be here permanently. Marco could almost see the town’s development over time, starting from these houses. The center of the town’s activity happened here because this was where everyone lived. Having satisfied the town's need for housing for the most part, everything outside of that row was built in a much more spaced-out way, comprised of various kinds of mills, warehouses, workspaces, and processing facilities Marco had not the first clue about the purpose of.

Beyond that, oddly, were more houses, mostly abandoned. It was those that gave him his first feeling of unease. Erring on the side of caution, he sent Aethe to get Youff, waiting a good distance away from the houses until he arrived.

"Yes?" Youff looked at Marco as he arrived, apparently confused. "You don't seem to have found anything."

"Maybe, maybe not." Marco pointed at the scattered, broken-down houses beyond the active area of the village. "What's the story with those?"

"Oh, those. We call them the outsider houses. Really, we should figure out a nice name." Youff slicked back his hair with his offhand and took a moment gathering words. "Most of us who live here have been here for generations. I think you gathered that."

"I did."

"Well, that's not true of everyone. Ships are in and out of here pretty often, maybe once a month or more. People sometimes leave, although not often. More often than that, people move in," Youff said.

"From the ships? Why?"

"Happens more than you might think, really. A man or a woman has been a ship's carpenter their whole career, sees the elephant, and thinks they want a change. They settle down. Not all of them want to live so close to everyone, so they tend to build a little ways away. Then, sooner or later, they move on," Youff explained.

"All of them?" Elisa knitted her brow. "Out of how many?"

"During my lifetime? One or two a year, like clockwork. They all get tired of it and leave eventually. It's just the normal way of things."

"I… that's not true, I don't think," Marco said. "Gulf Isle was similar in some ways. People used to move to my island every couple of years. Some of them had reasons like you are describing. Not all of them stayed forever but some of them did."

"I'm sure your island was pretty nice. We don't have as much to offer here."

"The math still doesn't work out. It doesn’t make sense that no one at all stayed. The law of large numbers must mean that someone was weird enough that they decided to stick around after a year or two." Elisa looked up at the houses. "Is anyone going to be mad at us if we tear those down?"

"Those?" Youff laughed. "Go ahead. Just don't set our village on fire and you'll be fine."

They approached cautiously. Marco was sure that made them look like weirdos, but it was hard to care. Everything about the way that Quill approached fighting told him that he couldn't let his guard down until he put his enemy down. That was just how things were going to be for now, regardless of how it looked to outsiders.

Riv took the lead on knocking down buildings, shoving at rotten beams and bracing his shoulder against leaning walls until one by one they creaked, groaned, and toppled down. Elisa and the team followed behind, poking through the rubble and nudging aside broken timbers in search of anything unnatural. One by one, they burned the piles, verifying they had nothing left but normal stone and ash before moving on to the next doomed vacancy.

“Too quiet,” Aethe eventually broke the silence after the third or fourth house met its doom. “The birds aren’t even nesting here. Think something drove them off?”

"Maybe. But if so, where?" Elisa said. "We've knocked down almost everything out here. It's not like we've found anything. Marco, has your sense changed?"

"No," Marco said. "Not during any of this moving around. I wonder if it only gets so strong."

Marco crouched beside one of the collapsed walls, pressing his palm against the ground. He opened himself to the faint whisper of his temple-sense, searching for threads of anything that might show him what was going on. For a moment he felt nothing, then there was the faintest pull.

“There’s something here,” he stated. “It’s not strong, but I feel it. Can you dig here, Riv? If Quill had a choice of where he planted the thing, maybe he’d hide it where it wouldn’t be stumbled on.”

They pried up loose, mostly burned boards until the soil was clear, and Riv got to work digging one hole, then the next. The work stretched on through the afternoon, through pit after dug pit, with no results at all.

Youff spoke with the occasional villager who came to gawk, assuring them it was sanctioned destruction, something that was going on with his full blessing and knowledge. His word seemed enough; nobody interfered.

And then, finally, they hit pay dirt.