"Hey, Ritt," Flux says, pulling up a seat at the counter of Rittenhouse's antique shop. "How's it hanging? Remember the camping trip you didn't go on?"

[I'm not capable of remembering events I wasn't present for,] Rittenhouse says, using a sharper synth tone to emphasise his sarcasm. [So no.]

"Remember the camping trip that you didn't want to go on because soil gets in your joints or whatever--okay, whatever, long story short, we found this thing sitting around under a buncha rocks. Think it's worth anything?" Flux twists the container open and places the trinket on the counter.

"Wait," Yuri says. "Weren't we going to ask him about the language?"

"Oh, right, sorry." Flux flips it over. "It's got some symbols on the bottom, you know what this says? 'Made In Europa' or something?"

[Hmm,] Rittenhouse says, extending his claw to grab the object. His optical reader whirs into action. [The carving itself depicts a mountain range that doesn't turn up in any geological databases. Difficult to date inorganic objects, but the symbols on base are an archaic coordinate system, Early Settler period. If it was found in this sector, it's likely to use this station as the frame of reference.]

Yuri leans in closer at the mention of coordinates. Pilots, so predictable. "Mind pinpointing?"

[Location is an area of PX-34. Do you want the map data?]

"Yeah, that'd be great. Pretty nearby, huh..." Yuri drums her fingers against the counter, probably working out the best route in her head. "There's some circle thing carved on the inner lid of the container too, do you have any idea what that is?"

As Yuri shows Rittenhouse whatever's inside, leading Rittenhouse to nod his head and conduct even more scans on the object, Flux spends her time looking around the shop. As usual, it's cluttered with collectibles and merchandise from old shows. Nothing she'd buy, personally, but somehow Rittenhouse's made enough to pay the rent for three years straight and take over the neighbouring unit. Guess there are more fans of obscure shows in this sector than she thought.

"So the circle thing's a kind of waveform encoding? What sort?" Yuri sounds increasingly interested, and Flux can tell that selling the trinket and its container have become completely out of the question.

[Either sound or image, but this would be the image.] Rittenhouse pulls up a garbled, pixelated hologram. [Unlikely, so let's try sound. Playing...]

The initial screech becomes a more listenable sound as Rittenhouse adjusts the levels--a quiet voice, speaking in what sounds like a corrupted version of Inglese. None of them are fully fluent in the language, but they can all pick out words here and there--"mountains", "sky", "family", and there's one word that keeps coming up, over and over, as the voice keeps talking.

Earth.