Anderson climbed back down the pole they’d erected just outside one of the trading posts in the Wild Lands and scooped Arabella up into a bear hug when he got to the bottom. He planted a kiss squarely on her lips before she pushed him away in mock exasperation.
‘You’re in a good mood,’ she said. ‘Only the Gods know what you’ll be like if we ever actually find anything.’ She raised her eyes and looked hopefully at the receiver dish on top of the pole. ‘Chances we’ll find anything here?’ she asked, knowing full well what Anderson’s answer would be. He was eternally optimistic and never seemed deterred when a site left them empty handed.
‘As good as our chances anywhere,’ he beamed at her.
Both Arabella and Anderson were around thirty years old, but where Arabella was short, carrying a little more weight then she would have liked, with long, dark hair, Anderson was a tall, skinny man with an unkempt ginger mop. He was a relic specialist. In fact, he was now the only remaining relic specialist and nobody really knew how he got away with it. Austin had put a stop to any relic research several years back, and Philip and Christiana hadn’t put up much of a fight to try and stop him. Anderson had devoted his entire life to studying the relic, trying to work out how to send it back and free the world. It wasn’t that he wanted to be a hero, quite the opposite, he never coveted attention for his research, and there were very few people who even knew he existed, which was probably one of the reasons Austin left him alone. Anderson had just always been fascinated by the mystery of the relic and wanted to solve its puzzle. Anyway, he’d never found anything better to do with his life and it meant he was able to travel the world with Arabella, so he wouldn’t change one thing about what he did, even if they very rarely took any steps forward in their research.
They were currently at the spot on exactly the other side of the world from where the relic lay, to see if the energy there was any different to anywhere else. They’d put the receiver up at a number of spots along the way, finding nothing significant at all. His expectation that they would find something here was pretty low, but they had to try.