Excavation

"Gently, gently. Now the brush, yes, very good," Ms. Razel said, and scurried off on her many, dusty limbs to the next student. Jayna, a hundred meters over, was a bit of a boss, and Ariel was glad they had separate stations for the day.

But that's about where the gladness ended. Ariel smeared an arm over her sweating brow. It was so hot. And brushing granules of sand like a delicate arteest was not what she'd signed up for. Get her away from anything resembling her lacy-limbed sister's snobby hobby--Ariel wanted to discover things, find mesmerizing and grand fossils of how the previous civilization had lived.

Why she was fascinated with ancient life was beyond knowing. Unless it was a direct reaction to living with present life.

Present present life included. This wasn't what she'd planned. She chucked the hard end of her brush against the dirt, just a smidge. Then she bit her lozzel as the fossil she'd been excavating crumbled.

I'm so in trouble.

As she considered whether to burst into tears or sit on her disaster and say the fossil had been a figment of the noonday sun, the dust began to settle into itself, and she blinked as a small, dark crack opened up in the earth. The remains from the fossil trickled downward and disappeared, followed by the surrounding sand, into a place she couldn't see. Keeping five eyes up to appear like nothing had happened (Jayna was acute), she stretched one eyeball low to peer into the darkness.

Nothing. At all.

She reached an arm back for the light strap she'd tossed to the side because it'd kept slipping over her lozzel, and fastened it back to her midhead. Then she pointed the light into the fissure. A warm and brilliant glow made her eye blink, and forgetting secrecy, she stretched the remaining five to take in the scene.

Under the earth were colors. Red and pink and purple and blue and grass green, piles of them in solids and dizzying patterns. She leaned to spread her eyes further in and then the edge of the crack gave way. She gasped as she found herself falling into blackness, her beam lighting only the dust floating above her.

It felt like she fell forever, then she landed with a fwump into softness.

She shook the colors that had settled onto her head and focused her beam on what lay beneath her limbs and in her lap. They really were soft--cushy and strange and shaped like an elbow. Their patterns were amazing down to their very weave, but what could they be? Bandages for broken eye stalks? They were closed on one end and open on the other... maybe they were wart warmers.

Or a primitive flower collection.

Or a mountain of... feathers from a particularly ancient burial ground.

She raised her lightbeam to the scenery around her. Other mountains like the one she'd landed on surrounded hers, fading into the dark. Several were white, others dark, some mixed. And at the near end of the cavern, she saw a plaque on the wall with characters on it that were at once strange and familiar. She squinted all six eyes in order to read it in the dusty light. She'd learned the ancient text's sounds years ago, in one of her dad's scrolls when she was a Little.

LOST SOCKS

LOST. That meant unfindable. SOCKS. These squishy things? Were they a mystery of their time, too?

Above her, she heard a scream.

"Ms. Razel, Ariel's disappeared!"

Trust Jayna to notice before she'd gotten time to see almost anything, but a warmth spread through her--this was her discovery. Socks. She didn't know what that meant, but she liked them. Quickly, before anyone saw, she thrust a handful into her deepest orifice as a memento. Whoever had brought these here, she figured they had enough.

___

This story is dedicated to the box of--no kidding--forty-two lost socks in my dresser drawer. (See that fuzzy teal and orange sock in the pic? That is my lost sock, sniff.) I know that one day, their mates will appear when somebody needs them the most. Apparently I don't, even though I think I do. :) What is your most exasperating lost item?