The party returned to the Bosco, and flew to the location of the ghost’s former capitol city, which turned out to be a big expanse of sandy desert with four pillars arranged like the corners of a square. A deep sensor scan indicated that there were more ruins, but all of them were a good 150′ beneath the sand. There was some debate as to whether it was even worth exploring here, since the party already had Ghost art and this seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. Eventually they determined that they could use their weapons from orbit to burn holes through the sand. If modulated correctly, a path down would be vaporized, and the sand around the edges could be formed into a glass strong enough to prevent the passages from filling in. Moreover, once the passages were created, they could use their ability to reverse gravity to suck sand up from the buildings below, allowing them to be explored somewhat normally.
The first building they investigated seemed to have a lot of secured spaces, from what they could tell on the scan. Heavy walls and such. They did indeed find a few notable artifacts there, but unfortunately it turned out to be secured because it was a sort of courthouse, rather than a treasure vault. None the less, the art would be valuable, and the lawbooks would offer a useful insight to the lost civilization, which would increase the value of the art.
From studying these they learned that there was a whole second set of laws for a part of the city called “the pomerium,” which seemed to be of great religious and social significance. It was the bit between the four pillars, which the party moved to excavate next. There they found nothing but old huts, notably more primitive that the buildings outside the pomerium. Over the course of a few days excavations, they gradually deciphered that this was the most ancient part of the city, and that the culture had many deeply religious laws about what could exist there. As the civilization grew in power and technology, they wanted to change, but could not. Their compromise was to maintain the “ancient” city, where people would live and work according to the ancient ways as a sort of devotion to the state religion, while the city outside the pomerium could develop more freely.
On the outskirts of the city the party discovered a titanium refinery, and set their whole team of robots (coordinated by Magnus) to getting the thing running well enough to make some armor plating for The Bosco.
The process of gathering information and materials took about 2 weeks, and the party was able to make a mint selling the stuff. A haul of 930,000 Darics